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Next of Kin, Restless Dance Theatre
photo Chris Herzfeld
Next of Kin, Restless Dance Theatre
restless relatives
Restless Dance Theatre is typically described as a youth dance company that works with dancers of mixed abilities (see our reviews of Bedroom Dancing and Safe From Harm). However, in their latest show Next of Kin, they will be working with dancers of mixed ages as well. Next of Kin has an intergenerational cast of six to 60 year olds (some of whom are related in real life) and, according to the press release, “focuses on the family unit and its complex effect on kin relationships, personal decisions and individual responsibilities.” The show features a set designed by award-wining designer Gaelle Mellis and music by Zephyr Quartet’s Hilary Kleinig. The show also marks the directorial debut for Philip Channells, the company’s new artistic director. Restless Dance Theatre, Next of Kin, The Opera Studio, State Opera of South Australia, 216 Marion Road, Netley SA 5037, Nov 12-20; http://restlessdance.org/
physical music
Ensemble Offspring, who describe themselves as “champions of innovative new music” (previously reviewed in RT99 and RT92), are collaborating with one of Sydney’s most engaging performers, Katia Molino, and director Carlos Gomes of Theatre Kantaka, in a one-off event that is “as much physical as it is musical” (press release). The show, called Sounds Absurd promises to investigate “the visual spectacle surrounding the live performance of music” and will include “dancing hands, body slaps and musical instruments in nooses and upside-down cellos in drag” (press release). The evening will feature the music of Mauricio Kagel, a world premiere from Australian composer Moya Henderson, along with works by Thierry de Mey, Vinko Globokar, Matthew Shlomowitz, Stephen Stanfield and Jude Weirmeir. Ensemble Offspring, Sounds Absurd, CarriageWorks, Nov 30; www.carriageworks.com.au
musing and commuting
If you’re in Melbourne this month and, more specifically, passing through Southern Cross Station, keep an eye out for a studio, tea station and lounge. Set up by the artist collective one step at a time like this (formerly bettybooke), this installation is part of a project called Southern Crossings. Commuters will be invited to visit the group of artists at the station and contribute their stories about who they are, what they are doing and where they are going. Drawing on elements of their previous project en route (praised by Jana Perkovic in RT94), these stories will then be integrated into Southern Crossings, an audio journey on iPod which guides audience members through the station. “[I]ndividuals have an opportunity to see and experience the railway station beyond its everyday use—to think about people and places—and to engage with an iconic landmark from a different and more personal perspective” (press release). one step at a time like this, Southern Crossings, Southern Cross Station, stories collected Oct 25-Nov 16, showings Nov 18-Nov 28; www.onestepatatimelikethis.com/
Suspended Motion
photo Pilar Mata Dupont
Suspended Motion
skaters in suspense
Over in Perth a similarly interdisciplinary project is underway at the Breadbox Gallery. Suspended Motion, features five artists—Ben Baretto, Cameron Campbell, Jason Hansma, James Hensby, and Tom Muller. Working with a team of builders and “skateboarding creatives,” including professional skateboarder Morgan Campbell, the artists will take over the Bakery to create sculptural installations, video and images where skateboarding will be used as a creative medium. You can see the video trailer here and read Darren Jorgenson’s review in our November 22 online edition. Suspended Motion, curator James Hensby, the Bakery, Breadbox Gallery, Oct 23-Nov 4; www.nowbaking.com.au
Dawn Albinger, No Door On Her Mouth – A Lyrical Amputation
photo Lisa Businovski
Dawn Albinger, No Door On Her Mouth – A Lyrical Amputation
shut your trap
Perth is also the place where writer/performer Dawn Albinger will be premiering her intimate new solo No Door On Her Mouth – A Lyrical Amputation. Using her signature tragic-comic style, she deploys fragmented narrative, poetic text and subtle humour to dislodge dominant readings of ‘romance,’ ‘femininity’ and ‘desire.’ Invoking choking divas, handless maidens and flightless women, the performance (with dramaturgy by Margaret Cameron and video art by Samuel James) offers “a philosophical answer, and performative response, to Irigaray’s question of how to say ‘I love you’ without it meaning ‘I wonder if I am loved’” (press release). Albinger’s Heroin(e) was reviewed in RT88) and this show will be reviewed in RealTime 100. Dawn Albinger, No Door On Her Mouth – A Lyrical Amputation, Blue Room Theatre, Oct 26-No 13; www.blueroom.org.au
light up, light up
Paris doesn’t immediately spring to mind when thinking of Brisbane, but Brisbane is in fact becoming a city of lights if not the city of lights. More specifically, it is currently hosting the Light from Light exhibition, which is showing simultaneously at the State Library of Queensland and the Shanghai Library in China. Visitors in each location come face to face with artworks that Australian and Chinese artists have embedded in collection spaces and public areas. In addition, they are also able to experience the same artworks in each other’s locations via webcam. The 20 light-inspired and light-generating artworks include neon art objects, light sculpture, images generated by solar telescopes and illuminated texts. Collectively they explore “the properties and metaphors of light, and the notion of libraries as sites of enlightenment” (website). The artists include Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley, Eugene Carchesio, David Haines and Joyce Hinterding, Lin Tianmiao, Archie Moore, Pak Sheung Chuen, Josef Strau, Wang Gong Xin, and Zhang Peili. Light from Light is an initiative of MAAP – Multimedia Art Asia Pacific. Light from Light, State Library of Queensland and Shanghai Library, from Oct 1; http://maap.org.au/
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. web
© RealTime ; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Bloodbath, Bump Projects and the Sydney Roller Derby League
photo Jonathon Delacour
Bloodbath, Bump Projects and the Sydney Roller Derby League
TEAMS OF GIRLS ROLLER-SKATE AROUND A TRACK BENEATH THE LIGHTING RIG. THEY’RE DRESSED IN LITTLE SHORTS, RIPPED FISHNETS AND CROP TOPS, THEIR TATTS, DYED HAIR AND MAKE-UP CREATING A MISH-MASH OF EVERY CONCEIVABLE SUBCULTURE—PUNK, GOTH, ROCKABILLY, METAL. THEY’RE ALSO PADDED, HELMETED AND GUARDED TO THE GILLS. THEY SKATE FAST AND HARD; THEY’RE AGGRESSIVE SHOW-WOMEN, EGGING US ON WITH SUDDEN RUSHES OFFTRACK, KNEE-SKIDDING FLAMBOYANTLY TO STOP JUST METRES BEFORE THE ‘SUICIDE SEATING.’ THEY’RE LIKE THE TOUGHEST CHICKS YOU EVER CAME ACROSS IN SUBURBIA WHO YOU WANTED TO HANG WITH OR ELSE WERE SCARED OF. AND THE REAL GAME HASN’T EVEN BEGUN.
Roller Derby is an American sports entertainment currently enjoying a global revival, with roots going back through various forms of contact sport and competitive skating to Depression era games that gave poor women an outlet. Contemporary derby is mostly female and driven by a DIY ethos. Sydney’s Hordern Pavilion is routinely booked out by a crowd that ranges from westie families to inner-city dykes. Australians seem born to it— feral, ironic, in your face, and underneath the piss-take, bloody serious about their sport.
It’s the perfect theatre for Bump Projects, a formidable team of some of the best new media artists in the country—Linda Dement, Francesca da Rimini, Kate Richards, Nancy Mauro-Flude and Sarah Waterson—who in collaboration with Sydney Roller Derby League presented Bloodbath, a mediation of bodies through technology. The artists created a system to collect data from sensors placed on the skaters’ helmets, and in tonight’s game used this data to trigger works screened above the stage.
Bloodbath, Bump Projects and the Sydney Roller Derby League
photo Jonathon Delacour
Bloodbath, Bump Projects and the Sydney Roller Derby League
This was where the first problem lay. The smallish screens lined up side by side above the stage made for somewhat static viewing. The context is gladiatorial, in the round, but the screens stilled the gaze and crowded one another somewhat. Bigger and placed at intervals around the track, they would have integrated better with the action, a friendly bout between The Pistola Cholas and The Smackdown Sallies. (Yes, the team names, in keeping with the overall style, are facetious, OTT kitsch. Don’t get me started on the players’ names.) A quick look at the website indicates Bump themselves may have preferred a more spacious screen arrangement.
In this way the diversity of the works would also have been better appreciated. Dement’s, for me the most successful, was a bruise whose slow formation seemed a radical contrast to the mayhem of the track. But this clear articulation of trauma was apposite, the bruise healing to neutral skin, finishing with a lightly drawn flower or triggered by a collision to form another bruise immediately. Adjacent to Dement, Mauro-Flude’s text feeds were unfortunately barely legible to us in the bleachers opposite. The idea is interesting though: quotes from skaters, audience and artists, fed across the screen in a status update frenzy.
Kate Richards’ work, like Dement’s, seemed to survive the technical hitches best, her material being archives of old games. The alternately gliding or stertorous movements of the footage, colours becoming more intense with increased impact, complemented and grounded the event. As popular as the game is now, few of us have context for it, and this work went some way to providing it.
Bloodbath, Bump Projects and the Sydney Roller Derby League
photo Jonathon Delacour
Bloodbath, Bump Projects and the Sydney Roller Derby League
Da Rimini’s rich amalgam of medieval imagery, poetic fragments and mythical references felt too allusory for the context, but it has stayed with me. Waterson’s pink guitar, activated by the ramming blockers to play chords from Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock’n’Roll,” couldn’t be heard until towards the end and the visual was so subtle the whole thing didn’t appear to be working for much of the night.
Due to the many technical problems beyond the artists’ control, I felt I was attending a scratch version of Bloodbath, so my criticisms are reluctant. What could emerge from this project is incredibly exciting. If the works were to be fully integrated, they could become intrinsic. Roller Derby has a quasi-futuristic feel, partly because it’s women out there engaging in the sanctioned violence that draws us to sport. At the same time it’s the most ancient form of theatre, something that Francesca da Rimini is pointing to. The medium and method are attuned to the game, it’s just a question of the artists being given all they need for their works to be fully realised.
The second match of the night, Sydney’s Assassins vs Canberra’s Vice City Rollers, was a corker. Sydney led for much of the first half, then Canberra surged and it was neck and neck until a three point win by Sydney scored in the very last minute.
Bump Projects and the Sydney Roller Derby League, Bloodbath, artists Linda Dement, Nancy Mauro-Flude, Kate Richards, Francesca da Rimini, Sarah Waterson, producers Linda Dement, Kate Richards, original concept Linda Dement, technical development Mr Snow, House of Laudanum; Hordern Pavilion, Oct 9; http://bumpp.net/
This article was first published online, Oct 25, 2010.
RealTime issue #100 Dec-Jan 2010 pg. 22
© Fiona McGregor; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
I HAVE NEVER SEEN THE MACDONNELL RANGES BUT TONIGHT THEY APPEAR BEFORE ME AS IF BY MAGIC. UPSTAGE, THE TWO BACK WALLS OF BELVOIR’S CORNER STAGE HAVE BEEN PAINTED BLACK AND COVERED WITH AN ENORMOUS WHITE CHALK MURAL DEPICTING THE RANGES AND THE GHOST GUMS THAT SURROUND THEM. WE ARE IN WESTERN ARANDA COUNTRY, THE HOME OF BOTH ALBERT AND KEVIN NAMATJIRA. THE FORMER IS THE FAMOUS WATERCOLOURIST WHO IS THE SUBJECT OF TONIGHT’S PERFORMANCE; THE LATTER IS HIS GRANDSON, AND AN ARTIST IN HIS OWN RIGHT, WHO IS ACTUALLY PRESENT, WORKING AWAY ON THE TEMPORARY WALL PAINTING FOR THE DURATION OF THE SHOW.
In front of these ghostly mountains, in the middle of the stage, is a large structure made of laminated wood that looks simultaneously like a deconstructed piano, an amorphous piece of public art and a section of undulating sandstone. Downstage is Trevor Jamieson, perched on a stool as the artist Robert Hannaford paints his portrait. The portrait looks well advanced but earlier production photos (see right) indicate that Hannaford started with a blank canvas, and like Kevin Namatjira, has been slowly adding to it each night.
Jamieson begins by introducing himself and his collaborators before sliding off his stool and telling the two seemingly unrelated stories of Albert Namatjira and Rex Battarbee. Namatjira was born as Elea but christened Albert by the Lutherans at Hermannsberg, where he stayed until he was in his early teens, at which point he returned to Arrernte country with his parents. Then at 18 he met and married his wife Rubina. Co-directors Scott Rankin and Wayne Blair throw the switch to vaudeville for this episode, with Jamieson as Albert and Derek Lynch as Rubina shimmying around the stage to Barry White’s “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love.”
Derek Lynch, Namatjira, photo Brett Boardman
This first story is intercut with a second: that of Rex Battarbee, a whitefella who grew up in Warrnambool until he enlisted to fight in the First World War. While away he saw England and France before being seriously injured and returning home. Towards the end of the act, Namatjira and Battarbee meet and become friends, with Albert showing Rex his country, and Rex showing Albert his watercolours.
In the second act, the story gains momentum, just as Namatjira’s life did, and we move briskly through his many successes: his first exhibition (1938); his entry into the Who’s Who (1944); the award of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation medal (1953); his meeting with the Queen herself (1954); and his attainment of citizenship (1957, a full 10 years before the referendum). However, success is bittersweet. Having money means that he has to support an extended family that numbers nearly 600 and having citizenship means that he has access to alcohol, which he is expected to share. When a woman dies on his property, it is he who is prosecuted because he is the only ‘citizen’ present. Namatjira is sentenced to six months hard labour, but after a public outcry is permitted to serve out the sentence at Papunya, where he eventually suffers a heart attack in 1959. The play finishes with his burial, and as we watch the man who has played him and the man who is descended from him stand in silence, it is as if we are witness to a second burial—the ghost of Namatjira is laid to rest in front of the ghostly mountains his grandson has conjured.
Trevor Jamieson, Namatjira, photo Brett Boardman
Beyond the impressive set (Genevieve Dugard), the principal pleasure of Namatjira is in watching Jamieson’s charismatic performance, as he slips between stories and characters, comedy and tragedy. Derek Lynch’s many sashaying women (black, white and a Queen to boot) are also enjoyable and Genevieve Lacey’s soundscape all-enveloping. The only false note in the evening comes after the curtain call when a stage manager reveals a small screen and we watch footage of the Big hART team working in the community. Presumably this is meant to reassure the audience about the nature of their engagement but it reads as both an odd sort of ‘reveal’ (and now, here are the real people) and as a pre-emptive strike against possible criticisms—one the production does not need since it is clear from both the program and the production itself that there has been not only consultation but also collaboration.
In a sense this collaboration echoes that of Namatjira and Battarbee, who apparently used to sit around in the evenings, talking about art, language and the world; two highly, if unconventionally, educated men, both of them globalised subjects before the word ‘globalisation’ even existed. This companionable image could serve as an analogy for the performance itself, for Namatjira is a convivial and thought-provoking night of stories, conversations and reflections.
–
Big hART and Company B Belvoir, Namatjira, writer Scott Rankin, co-directors Scott Rankin and Wayne Blair, creative producer Sophia Marinos, community producers Sia Cox, Pru Gell, performers Trevor Jamieson, Derek Lynch, artists Robert Hannaford, Kevin Namatjira, Evert Ploeg, Elton Wirri, musicians Nicole Forsyth, Genevieve Lacey, set designer Genevieve Dugard, costume designer Tess Schofield, composer and music director Genevieve Lacey, lighting designer Nigel Levings, sound designer Jim Atkins; Belvoir Street Theatre, Sept 25-Nov 7; www.namatjira.bighart.org/
Namatjira will tour to Melbourne, Dandenong, Geelong, Canberra and Illawarra from August 12 to September 30 2011. There are also plans for a national regional tour in 2012.
This article was first published online, Oct 12, 2010.
RealTime issue #100 Dec-Jan 2010 pg. 33
© Caroline Wake; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
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Top image credit: Trevor Jamieson, Robert Hannaford, Namatjira, photo Brett Boardman
Richard Hilliar, Hybrid Dream
photo Grant Stewart
Richard Hilliar, Hybrid Dream
IN HYBRID DREAM, ECLECTIVE PRODUCTIONS, A GROUP OF ARTISTS WHO HAVE LARGELY EMERGED FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW ENGLAND, ARMIDALE (NSW), CREATE A KIND OF DELIRIUM BY SEATING THE AUDIENCE IN THE CENTRE OF THE SPACE AND ENCIRCLING IT WITH PROJECTED IMAGES, SOUND AND PERFORMANCE IN A WORK ABOUT DREAM AND RELATED STATES.
Further unease is generated when single characters appear to be embodied by two performers at opposite sides of the space or two speakers at microphones face each other, intoning texts. The ensemble gathers, walks unexpectedly backwards in a circle, finally falling. Performers watch themselves projected onto screens around the space, the images slice up horizontally—nothing is stable. A man chalks “Nowhere” on a black wall. There are bursts of panic: we hear of someone stuck on the edge of a well: “I have no arms!” One performer chats to us about sleep: “Your imagination is at its strongest when you’re not even aware of it.” We hear of a woman who recalls an accident where she was badly hurt, but her serene version doesn’t include the screams that others heard. A performer watches a projected image of herself, shrieks and runs from it.
Projections in various degrees of close-up reveal a tasteful striptease act with feathers, danced to a woozy, gliding trumpet. Little flesh is revealed—it’s a classic tease—but meanwhile, in the dark on the mezzanine above us, the audience gradually becomes aware of a woman (the same one?) removing her clothes without any artistry until naked.
Hybrid Dream was an intriguing if sometimes infuriating experience: images were unnecessarily sustained, the work’s structure was opaque, some acting was over-the-top and performance and movement skills were uneven. However, the work’s stark evocation of dream states and parallel universes was generated with bracing fervour by a committed ensemble supported by a seriously sombre score ably delivered by a trio of musicians and a sound artist. It’ll be interesting to see where Eclective Productions take us next.
Eclective Productions, Hybrid Dream, creators, designers, directors Rachel Chant, Alanna Proud, performers Imogen Dodwell, Jonny Dutaillis, Lizzie Gibney, Richard Hilliar, Ben Horsley, Rhia Parker, Alanna Proud, Tristan Randall, Joanne Villacruz, sound designer Joseph Dutaillis, new media Grant Stewart, lighting Jamie Exworth; PACT Theatre, Sydney, Aug 11-15; www.eclectiveproductions.com
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. web
© Keith Gallasch; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Groote Eylandt Dancers, Mahbilil Festival
photo Dominic O’Brien
Groote Eylandt Dancers, Mahbilil Festival
IT’S THE GOLDEN HOUR BY THE SHORES OF LAKE JABIRU, 300KM FROM DARWIN, AT KAKADU IN THE NORTHERN TERRITORY. AS THE MAHBILIL FESTIVAL SEGUES FROM AN AFTERNOON OF DODGEM CARS AND EXHIBITIONS INTO AN EVENING PROGRAM OF LIVE MUSIC AND DANCE, A GENTLE BREEZE ARRIVES. THIS IS THE ‘MAHBILIL’ FROM WHICH THIS LOCAL COMMUNITY FESTIVAL GETS ITS NAME, AND FITTINGLY, AS IT HITS THE GRASSY GREEN SHORES OF THE TOWN’S MANMADE LAKE, SO DO THE CROWDS.
The local miners and their families, the Bininj and Mirrar people who are the traditional custodians of Kakadu, the park rangers and outback tour operators who have been manning stalls throughout the hot afternoon, all gather before the Mahbilil Festival stage to enjoy the entertainment and to party on into the night.
In this, his third festival, producer Andrish Saint-Claire has managed to combine a smorgasbord of arts and activities where there is indeed something for everyone. From dodgem cars and waterslides to demonstrations of traditional Indigenous arts and crafts and Magpie Goose cooking competitions, variety is the order of the day.
The festival began at midday, as a family afternoon of stalls, fun rides and a showcase of performances and exhibitions by local children from all the workshops produced by the Kakadu Youth Centre through the Jabiru Area School. The atmosphere is reminiscent of the local markets for which Darwin is renowned—friendly, familiar, laid back. This is the time to sample buffalo stew and barbecued magpie goose cooked up by tour operators Andy Ralph and his wife Jen from the Kakadu Culture Camp; to chat with Kakadu rangers about killer crocs (if one ever bites your leg, punch it in the eye); and to sit with the local Bininj women as they weave their baskets out of pandanus painstakingly plucked from the bush and stripped, split and boiled up in ochre dyes over the camp fire. A casual attitude belies the deft artistry of these traditional women—and they have a canny knack, too, of always managing to find the coolest spot, anywhere, to spread out their tarp and pass the afternoon.
Goose Lagoon, Mahbilil Festival
photo Dominic O’Brien
Goose Lagoon, Mahbilil Festival
Dance was a feature of this year’s Mahbilil Festival, and again, the program was diverse. Balinese dance group Tunas Mekar, based in Darwin, brought a touch of Asia to a captivated bush audience and excerpts from Gary Lang’s Darwin Festival hit Goose Lagoon added a contemporary flavour to the program. The Bunggul—the traditional Indigenous performances that are part of any Top End Festival on Country—was led by the Groote Eylandt Dancers and Band. Displaying a great capacity for invention, these Groote Eylandt songmen were backed up by a rock’n’roll outfit with electric guitar, which added a foot-tapping beat to their mesmerising droning tones. They were definitely a crowd favourite, followed closely by the contemporary New Zealand ‘Maori Poi’ dance, which was taught and led by a local Maori teacher at the Jabiru Area School and performed with luminous ‘pois.’
Adding further spice to the multicultural mix was a Congolese dance troupe that appeared later in the program: such a confluence of cultures and influences has never been seen in Jabiru.
Techy Masero, Connor Fox and collaborators, Mahbilil Festival
photo Dominic O’Brien
Techy Masero, Connor Fox and collaborators, Mahbilil Festival
For all of this action and activity, the artistic highlight of the Mahbilil Festival was not by the lake but on it: a stunning installation of three giant traditional Indigenous figures, surrounded by giant floating lotus flowers, that stood sentry over the proceedings. Created by Darwin artist Techy Masero and a group of Territory artists who regularly work in Jabiru, the sculptures represented yawk yawks—the half-human half-fish mythological creatures, which, according to Indigenous cosmology, inhabit waterholes around the Top End.
Further artistic innovation was to be seen in the giant ‘turtle’ installation that formed part of the children’s parade. The turtle was both a canvas for a sequence of beautiful media projections and an interactive ‘set’ for the children of Jabiru, who emerged from the turtle’s mouth at twilight.
Mahbilil came to a close at midnight, with the rocking sounds of the Sunrize Band from Maningrida. The promise of something for everyone was met: this was an event that one could wander into and around at leisure, dipping into events and activities here and there, or, alternatively, settling onto a picnic blanket to watch the parade pass by—clowns, puppeteers and stilt walkers weaving their way through the crowd.
Staging any event in a remote area is a challenge, to say the least. And in Jabiru, which is a mining town, a regional hub, a gateway to a national park, there are entirely different ‘types’ if you like, living lives that never intersect. Yet with Mahbilil, Saint-Claire—a Darwin-based arts worker with extensive experience in remote Northern Territory communities—and his team have succeeded in bringing the community together for 12 hours by the shores of their manmade lake.
This is the strength of community arts. This is why, in this age of instant entertainment and constant distraction, they survive. Indeed Festivals on Country in the remote Northern Territory are thriving: they’re a live, visceral, dusty counterpoint to cyberspace, and combine contemporary culture with traditions and customs stretching back thousands of years.
As a relatively young venture, Mahbilil is still finding its way. It is certainly a festival to watch. The strong arts component—particularly the twilight art installations—set it apart from other regional festivals and has great potential to develop even further. With the strong support of the people, artists and sponsors, the festival looks set to become a feature of the Top End’s already flourishing Dry Season Calendar.
Mahbilil Festival, Jabiru Lake, Jabiru, Northern Territory, Sept 11
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. web
© Jane Hampson; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Tamara Saulwick, Pin Drop
photo Ponch Hawkes
Tamara Saulwick, Pin Drop
THE NORTH MELBOURNE TOWN HALL IS A STATELY EXAMPLE OF CLASSICAL VICTORIAN ERA ARCHITECTURE. IT MAKES SENSE THEN THAT PERFORMER TAMARA SAULWICK SHOULD COMMAND ATTENTION CENTRESTAGE WHILE INTERACTING WITH THE RECORDED VOICE OF AN ELDERLY WOMAN—ONE WHO MAY HAVE ONCE HUNG HER SHAWL ACROSS A BALUSTRADE WHILE DANCING WITH HER BEAU IN THE BUILDING’S GRAND HALL. BUT MORE LIKE THE OLD MOB-CONNECTED VICTORIA MARKET, STILL CONSORTING JUST AROUND THE CORNER, SAULWICK, INSTEAD, HAS FEAR ON HER MIND.
While listening to the elderly woman’s croaky recollections, Saulwick simultaneously relates a tale directly to the audience. Both stories are characterised by a general sense of disquiet. But it remains difficult to ascertain exactly the detail of each, as a circumlocutory speaker system situated above, behind and to the left and right of the audience, dislocates the content of both narratives. When the two tales collide, however, Saulwick’s live delivery splinters the elderly woman’s sonic representation, and the latter’s recorded voice undergoes a sonorous transformation. Tremolo, reverb and other software manipulations reduce the elderly woman’s voice to a singular chant or a sound resembling a repeated monotone emanating from a large gathering.
Meanwhile, Saulwick rises from her chair and advances upstage, situating herself behind a teak display case resting on a stand. As the recorded chant becomes incremental and fills the theatre, the artist tilts her display case up and forward, gradually revealing its contents: a pair of chrome plated scissors, a large plastic syringe, a roll of cellophane tape and a collection of automotive ties secured in a bundle among other objects. Simultaneously, the infiltration of sound that has vibrated throughout the inner ear coalesces into a recognisable phrase, “I did not scream.” The aural, visual, and verbal interplay comprising Pindrop integrates, relaying this and subsequent information precisely to the audience. We have witnessed a descent from the relative security of the actual world into the murk of the unconscious. But whether this descent has occurred within the mind of an unseen elderly woman or is, instead, a journey into the imagined experience of performer Tamara Saulwick, remains unclear.
Several distinctive female voices soon populate the theatre. One tells of the terror associated with receiving an obscene phone call. Another reflects upon its psychological implications—maintaining that fear is a natural human reaction, one that protects individuals in threatening situations. Fragmented and transient, these discharges of strategically placed sound are then subsumed by a coherent, recorded narrative. An apprehensive, upwardly mobile female voice speaks of hearing a suspicious noise in a bedroom of her Darlinghurst apartment. Investigating its source, she opens a wardrobe and out springs an assailant who thrusts her onto a bed where she endures a terrifying moment without end, in which her sense of personal safety is ruptured. The resulting violation then becomes a transitional moment for the performance. Saulwick, wearing a nondescript blue dress and knee high boots, absorbs the prolapse of light and sound, then regurgitates the same recorded tale, but now, as a real time narrative that engages while it disorients.
Interpreted as a commentary upon the mediated exchange, and the ancient tradition of oral storytelling, Pindrop skirts that interminable question: who, or what, is an author? But in spite of Saulwick’s alluring stage presence, some evocative imagery, a sophisticated lighting and sound design, and a movement vocabulary that speculates on the relationship between animate beings and inanimate objects, this fundamental question remains unanswered. Consequently, when the narrative shifts in location yet again, it does not generate empathy. Quite simply, amidst the 12 voices that proliferate throughout, I remain in doubt as to who is actually speaking.
Saulwick’s skill at self-directing in a tech-heavy performance is commendable. But I suspect she neglects some of the basic tenets of dramatic form. Who owns and undertakes the journey in Pindrop, and how does a performer locate within herself the experience of extreme fear, then express it theatrically? A very stylish and ambitious performance, these questions answered will assist in Pindrop’s potential being realised.
Pindrop, creator-performer Tamara Saulwick, sound design Peter Knight, movement Michelle Heaven, lighting design & production Ben Cobham & Frog Peck, costume design Harriet Oxley, Arts House, Future Tense, North Melbourne Town Hall, Aug 25-29.
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 43
© Tony Reck; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Racing Hearts/Hummingbird, Tasdance
photo Jen Brown
Racing Hearts/Hummingbird, Tasdance
WIPING THE FACE. TEARING IMAGINARY MATTER FROM THE MOUTH. SHAKING IT OFF. RAW SOUNDS OF BODIES AND BREATH FILLING AN OTHERWISE EMPTY STAGE. TEXT BUILDING AND DISSIPATING ON A SCREEN. WASHES OF COLOUR. THESE ARE IMPRESSIONS OF RACING HEART/HUMMINGBIRD BY CHRISSIE PARROTT—THE FIRST OF TWO WORKS IN TASDANCE’S NEW PROGRAM, HEART MATTERS. IT COULDN’T BE ANY MORE DIFFERENT THAN ITS COMPANION PIECE, FORTY MILES—A RIVER OF DREAMS, CHOREOGRAPHED BY GRAEME MURPHY, WHICH VEERS TOWARD REPRESENTATION RATHER THAN ABSTRACTION IN CONTENT.
Heart Matters is the latest in a long series of works from Tasdance built around guest choreographers, although the show really began with director Annie Greig’s dream to collaborate with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, which in turn brought two composers into the frame. Constantine Koukias developed a score for Parrott while Carl Vine arranged his fifth quartet for Murphy. As the program’s title indicates, the shows are linked under a thematic banner relating to those things in life that move the heart.
Parrott’s Racing Heart/Hummingbird focuses on emotional and physical responses to writings on love, be they pithy, passionate texts or long, sultry passages. This text is the literal backdrop to the dance, with evocative phrases such as “my wrists are aching as you pulse through my veins,” appearing and disappearing as if typed onto a glowing screen at the rear of the stage. Thanks to Joe Mercurio’s deft lighting design, it appears as though the dancers are washed with the light of the screen while the text and colour also rinse across Leon Krasenstein’s costumes—graduated reds, blues and greens layered with phrases from the show.
The choreographic language of Racing Heart evolves from a suite of tender movements between dancers, signifying the beginnings of a love affair and tends toward ever more spasmodic and violent gestures as the work builds and love stumbles. Parrott has focused much energy in the dancers’ hands, with repeated flicking, slapping and shaking gestures characterising the choreography. Koukias’ oscillating oboe and strings create a tense space that enhances the growing agitation of the dancers while, underlying the live score, a soundscape comprises elements such as whispered readings, bells ringing, a heartbeat and a life support monitor.
While still dwelling on matters that touch the heart, Graeme Murphy’s Forty Miles—a river of dreams concentrates on feelings evoked by the landscape between his Northern Tamar River home and the city of Launceston. Veering away from Parrott’s empty stage and abstracted language, Murphy’s work stamps itself as a representational and symbolic work from the opening moments. His stage is a vast landscape in miniature. A silken river divides mountains from a forest created by the dancers bearing quivering, bare clusters of branches. Their costumes—also by Krasenstein—rendered in delicate shades of grey suggest that they are part of the fabric of this natural scene.
This work is unashamedly classical in structure, choreographic language and score telling a simple story of growing love between lead female (Floeur Alder) and lead male (Joel Corpuz). Such are the shape of arms, lines of movement and arrangements of the company that I keep expecting the dancers to transition into pointe work at any moment. Looked at more closely however, the detail is contemporary and compelling, with swift, smooth and technically complicated lifts, holds and interactions between the lead dancers reminding me of Murphy’s wealth of choreographic experience. The composition for strings by Vine melds with the fluidity of Murphy’s choreography, though it leads the mood at the end of the work with a lively—if a little out of character—sequence performed by the whole company.
I really want to be able to say that Heart Matters was a dazzling experience. I was so excited to see the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra tuning up under the lip of the stage and the thought of live, contemporary composition paired with seasoned choreography was very appealing. But unfortunately my heart didn’t soar. And that does matter, particularly as contemporary dance relies on emotional connection. I’ve given some thought to why I feel this way and I think that perhaps the main players underestimated the weight that such universal subject matter brings to a work. To make a show about love or the heart, one must innovate in a way that allows it to rise above all of the other ghosts of dances past. While there were beautiful glimmers of difference throughout each of the works—particularly in the duets between Alder and Corpuz in Forty Miles—unfortunately Parrott’s evolution from the flush of new love to betrayal and loss, followed by Murphy’s rendering of the beauties of nature, did not strike enough new notes to dispel those ghosts.
Tasdance, Heart Matters: Forty Miles—a river of dreams, choreography Graeme Murphy, composition Carl Vine; Racing Hearts/Hummingbird, choreography Chrissie Parrott, composition Constantine Koukias, animation Jonathan Mustard; dancers Floeur Alder, Sofie Burgoyne, Joel Corpuz, Trisha Dunn, Sarah Fiddaman, Malcolm McMillan, Jason Northam; costume & set design Leon Krasenstein, lighting Joe Mercurio; Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, conductor Kenneth Young; Theatre Royal, Hobart, July 23, 24
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 33
© Judith Abell; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Zoe Ellerton-Ashley, Brad Williams, Dying City
photo Tim Williamson
Zoe Ellerton-Ashley, Brad Williams, Dying City
ONE OF THE AXIOMS BY WHICH WE SITUATE A WORK OF ART IN RELATION TO OUR WORLD IS ITS ATTITUDE TOWARD DEATH. THIS ISN’T RESTRICTED TO GENRE—A COMEDY THAT NEVER EXPLICITLY ADDRESSES MORTALITY CAN STILL CONVEY A MORE ‘SERIOUS’ UNDERSTANDING OF DEATH THAN A DRAMA WHICH MAKES IT AN OVERT SUBJECT. BUT, PERHAPS UNCONSCIOUSLY, THIS ATTITUDE IS A FRAME THROUGH WHICH WE DEFINE FOR OURSELVES WHAT IT IS WE ARE APPROACHING.
Two independent productions which recently played Melbourne put this notion into relief. Do Not Go Gentle… was the first full production of a remarkable play by Patricia Cornelius which had been circulating for half a decade. It was a risky work, perhaps too dangerous for the mainstage, which was eventually mounted by a solid cadre of theatre professionals working outside the usual channels (and special commendation should go to venue and producing partner fortyfivedownstairs, who provided much support for the premier production).
Part of the threat of Do Not Go Gentle… is the presence of death in its very fibre. It features a roster of characters who are almost all in their 80s, and the nearing horizon of finality cannot but be recognised in every moment. At the same time, the work itself is less interested in death per se than in grieving at life—at lives wasted or unrealised. It takes a brave writer to create thoroughly original characters in their twilight years whose sadness is not evoked by referring to their impending passing but through a distressing depiction of the regret than can take hold—that age needn’t beget wisdom or understanding or even acceptance.
Christopher Shinn’s Dying City takes a less nuanced position, as may be apparent from its title. Death is again a constant here but figures as presence rather than absence. A woman entombed in her New York apartment after the suicide of her husband in Iraq is visited by his identical twin brother; in between their exchanges we are provided flashbacks to her life with the dead man. It’s one of theatre’s most enduring dynamics— establishing a fictional death in order to magically reverse it. In Shinn’s play, however, this attempt at producing pathos through reference to death is partially undermined by the perpetual presence of the dead figure or his simulacrum. Even when his widow is alone, the other’s arrival seems imminent.
The shortcomings of Shinn’s text were more than compensated for by the two performances—Zoe Ellerton-Ashley proved once again that she is a formidable addition to Melbourne’s stages and Brad Williams simply astonishing in his ability to play the brothers (I wasn’t the only attendee to wonder if real twins had been cast). It’s one of those rare occasions when a production was worth catching purely on the strength of its actors—and, certainly, I’ll be looking for more from this pair.
Do Not Go Gentle…, writer Patricia Cornelius, director Julian Meyrick, performers Paul English, Jan Friedl, Rhys McConnochie, Terry Norris, Anne Phelan, Pamela Rabe, Malcolm Robertson, design Marg Howell, music & sound design Irine Vela, lighting Richard Vabre, fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne, Aug 6-29
Dying City, writer Christopher Shinn, director Matt Scholten, performers Zoe Ellerton-Ashley and Brad Williams, designer Kat Chan, lighting Tom Willis, music Ben Keene, Hoy Polloy, MIPAC, Brunswick,August 6-21
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 42
© John Bailey; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Jo Stone, Paolo Castro, Superheroes
photo by RODEO
Jo Stone, Paolo Castro, Superheroes
THE CHARACTERS OF STONE/CASTRO’S SUPERHEROES ARE RESIDENTS IN A REST HOME—A KIND OF REHABILITATION FACILITY FOR THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS. THE WALLS OF THE FACILITY ARE PAINTED AN INSTITUTIONAL SHADE OF GREEN. THE LIGHTING IS SUPPLIED BY BRIGHT FLUORESCENT STRIPS. THE RESIDENTS ARE SHIELDED FROM THE OUTSIDE BY A SUITE OF VENETIAN BLINDS HUNG AGAINST PLATE GLASS. BY THE SET’S IMPLICATION, THE AUDIENCE IS ALSO ON THE INSIDE. WE ARE RESTING TOO. THROUGH THE WINDOWS LIES THE WORLD BEYOND—AT WAR.
Occasional nationalisms drift through this work like warped memories from another time and place. A male nurse plays air guitar as if protesting Jimi Hendrix’s mind-bending rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” But the pride of upright posturing is long dispersed. The residents hang their heads and turn their backs on us. They slouch disconsolately on plastic chairs, and fall short of distracting each other with their paranoid suspicions, their rants of boredom and mistrust. Mail from the world outside is delivered to the home, but the prospect of a missive fails to arouse. At least the parcel is not a bomb. One resident is reading Graeme Alford’s Never Give Up, but he too struggles to retrieve much motivation from the prose. The other residents want toast—to eat. They are adamant about that.
In the midst of their exhaustion, Superman (Paolo Castro) arrives from China, a dress-up super hero flying into the scene on an electric wheelchair. Temporarily energised, two other residents also dress in Superman costumes. But, despite their capers, we somehow know that none of them will save the day. Spiderman makes a cameo appearance, and Wonder Woman’s gestures of transformation are briefly referenced. These superheroes are really just distractions, serving to divert attention from the tedium but failing to relieve the trauma.
Beyond the comforts of the rest home, the war is raging on. The residents sing “God Save Our Queen” with flagging enthusiasm. They aimlessly fold sheets of paper into aeroplanes, and just as lamely send them flying—across the room and outside to a lone soldier in the desert amidst potted palms. Computer game-style animated graphics of armoured tanks and shells exploding are splattered on the back wall, accompanied by earth-rumbling sound effects. Like the residents of the rest home, we watch the violence at a distance from behind the panes of glass.
The residents are mostly men—actors Julian Crotti, Nick Bennet and Hew Parham perform with dancers Lewis Rankin and Nigel Major-Henderson. Only one resident is a woman, played by actor and director Jo Stone. She is pregnant, visibly so. But she doesn’t want to bring her son into this world—at least not while Superman is inside sleeping as the explosions of the war reverberate outside. That this lonely woman, dressed in yellow, already intuitively knows her baby’s gender is a tacit signal of the work’s religiosity.
More explicit on this aspect is the mother’s cradling of the dying soldier, an enactment of the Pietà. No tears of lamentation in this production, but the loss of religion—or rather, the loss of coherence in religious belief—is keenly felt. Stone writes in the program of her doubts and fears: “Our ideals define the landscape of the world our children will inherit, and I fear our ideals are so brutally disconnected from each other that the future landscape seems to me very bleak.”
Another key to the anxieties animated in this work is a speech in which a resident confesses to his shame that his penis is a source of laughter for other men in the showers. It is a speech of protest against the impotence of war: his struggle to assert his masculinity through stand-up tricks amidst the exhaustion of the rest home. In the end, he fails. There is a lot of smoke, but there isn’t any fire. The residents’ commitment to the regime of the rest home is secured with the conformity of an exercise routine.
Superheroes is reflective, contemplative theatre. Its violent prospects are displaced. The work is scripted by Paolo Castro, who in performance also provides an energetic anchor for the ensemble. The meanings of the words resonate on stage with images and actions, but the intensity of their expression isn’t always handled evenly by the cast. Some have worked before with Stone and Castro, and this production suggests the promise of an ensemble practice.
Stone/Castro & Adelaide Festival Centre inSPACE Program, Superheroes, director Jo Stone, writer, dramaturg Paulo Castro, performers Julian Crotti, Nick Bennett, Lewis Rankin, Jo Stone, Paulo Castro, Hew Parham, set design Wendy Todd, lighting Kerry Ireland, video Nic Mollison, sound Sascha Budimski, Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Theatre, July 2-24
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 42
© Jonathan Bollen; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Malcolm Whittaker and Laura Caesar, Starfuckers
photo Lucy Parakhina
Malcolm Whittaker and Laura Caesar, Starfuckers
FOLLOWING IN THE TRADITION OF FAMOUS ARTIST COUPLES SUCH AS MARINA ABRAMOVIC AND ULAY, PERFORMANCE MAKER MALCOLM WHITTAKER AND HIS PARTNER LAURA CAESAR, BILLED AS A “PRIMARY SCHOOL TEACHER AND ARTS AND CRAFTS ENTHUSIAST,” DEVELOPED AND PERFORMED THE DURATIONAL PERFORMANCE STARFUCKERS. WHITTAKER AND CAESAR’S SUBURBAN NARRATIVE LANDSCAPES OFFER A SIGNIFICANTLY MORE INTIMATE IF LOWER-KEY PERFORMANCE TO ABRAMOVIC AND ULAY’S BREAK-UP EVENT, GREAT WALL WALK (1989).
One at a time, our partners in love and art step up to a microphone and read out a story. Some are diary entries written during the making of the project, and some are personal relationship memories. Each of these stories has been printed out and inserted into a magazine—Woman’s Weekly, Who, New Idea—torn out after they have been read and put immediately through a shredder. At the other end of the room, the detritus of these pedestrian love stories with their glossy celebrity underlay is transformed into papier-mache, moulded into figurines and baked in a small oven. Wearing aprons, the performers take turns to read, share and deliver the shreddings to be glue-soaked and flour-covered, shaped, baked and finally displayed in an ever-multiplying tableau across a long red-covered table. The small studio seems overly warm, filled with the crisp smell of baking paper, and over the hours a small army of tiny figures—effigies of the performers themselves?—gradually populates the long central table, filling up the space previously occupied by language alone.
Over the three hours of the performance, these accumulations form a strangely unsentimental love-crafting, the product of an idiosyncratic confessional cottage industry. Against the saccharine celebrity romance sagas of the gossip magazines, Caesar and Whittaker insert their more prosaic relationship perspectives, and do so in a gently self-deprecating way. As they note: “We hope we are interesting enough, beautiful enough, enough of enough.”
Whittaker first met Caesar when she took pity on him while he was tied to a tree at a scout camp, the victim of some gleefully cruel practical joke. It was clearly destiny, of a kind. An image of George Clooney’s face is shredded after Caesar details her perspective on a night in which the couple stayed at the apartment of a meth-smoking stranger “with crazy eyes.” In Whittaker’s version of events, everything was fine, no one was ever in danger and sleeping on the floor of a stranger whom the couple only met that evening was a perfectly normal thing to do. In Caesar’s story, she doesn’t sleep a wink, remaining alert and highly alarmed. Whittaker was tired, so he slept, and everything ended up alright, and so from his perspective there never was any problem.
Rarely do the lovers offer the same perspective on any given event, and the process of this diarising itself inflects the relationship. “I worry that my art practice is interfering with my personal life,” states Whittaker, observing ruefully that perhaps their almost non-existent sex life at the time of writing was due to the fact that Caesar doesn’t wish sexual intercourse to appear in their journal. At another moment, Caesar reads an entry in which she informs Whittaker that her current course of antibiotics makes her contraceptive pill ineffective, meaning that there won’t be any sex unless he buys “something else.” But he won’t. They both know and accept that he is just too cheap.
Our lovers tell their audience of perceived petty grievances, anxieties and affections. All of the stories provoke moments of recognition—I’ve been to these places before, though (I tell myself hopefully) not with quite Whittaker’s often-uncomfortable level of too-honest hubris. The diary entries and other writings detail uncertainties, mild confusions, potential infidelities and a great many misunderstandings. Despite these regular romantic imperfections, our lovers map out their past and gently imagine a shared future, even if its exact terms might always remain a point of contention.
Starfuckers is a product of Merrigong Theatre Company’s new Independent Producers Program, a welcome initiative recognising the growing number of significantly promising contemporary performance makers currently emerging through the University of Wollongong’s performing arts course, of which Whittaker is a graduate. I hope that this program continues to offer opportunities to facilitate such deeply engaging experiments as Starfuckers.
Starfuckers, creators, performers Laura Caesar, Malcolm Whittaker, Merrigong Theatre Company Independent Producers Program, Bob Peet Studio, Illawarra Performing Arts Centre, July 23-24
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 40
Dean Johnson, Dreams of a Forgotten City
photo Justine Potter
Dean Johnson, Dreams of a Forgotten City
IF NEWCASTLE IS A SORT OF FORGOTTEN CITY—LARGE BUT NOT THAT LARGE, NOT A STATE CAPITAL, AND A SAFE LABOR SEAT SO RARELY THE RECIPIENT OF EITHER STATE OR FEDERAL BRIBES—THEN FORT SCRATCHLEY IS A SORT OF FORGOTTEN CITY WITHIN A FORGOTTEN CITY. BUILT IN 1892 ON A HEADLAND THE AWABAKAL PEOPLE CALL TAHLBIHN, THE FORT’S MOST FAMOUS MOMENT CAME IN 1942, WHEN ITS GUNNERS REPELLED A JAPANESE SUBMARINE THAT ATTACKED NEWCASTLE. SIXTY-EIGHT YEARS LATER IT IS THE SCENE OF SCHOOL EXCURSIONS, THE OCCASIONAL WEDDING AND, TONIGHT, TANTRUM THEATRE’S LATEST PRODUCTION.
Dreams of a Forgotten City proceeds in three parts. To begin with we are split into seven groups of seven, each group and its guide starting at a different point within the walking tour. Our group starts by stumbling upon a young man slumped in a doorway. He asks if we have the time—his watch has broken and as his monologue proceeds it becomes clear that his heart has too, waiting for a sweetheart who might not be coming back. There is another lone man in the marshalling yard, shouting commands and marching. For a moment he reads as a soldier, surrounded by a company of ghosts, then it seems as if he himself is the ghost, then as he continues his increasingly demented march, it is as if we the audience are the ghosts—privy to some sort of secret ritual.
There are plenty of secrets in this space; indeed there are plenty of secret spaces. Standing around the barracks we watch through the windows as a performer enters a room, dances and then seems to disappear. I get a huge fright when he sneaks up behind me and an even bigger one when I realise that there is another group of spectators standing behind him, watching me watching. Later, we find ourselves in their position, enjoying a moment of meta-spectatorship. Further up the hill, a girl in purple taffeta tells us “it seems that we have met before, and laughed before and loved before.” She repeats her actions and movements but in silence; she too seems to be waiting for someone.
The second section starts in the marshalling yard, where we are ordered to split into slightly larger groups. Highlights of this section include a scene on a wooden bridge, under which a small girl and boy are hiding. The performers post messages on scraps of paper between the planks, which spectators read aloud. It is a series of love letters, but alas love is not to be as a woman walks out from under the bridge and away from her childhood sweetheart. (There are perhaps too many whimsical lovers in the piece, as if this were the only type of history to emerge from war.)
In part three, we reassemble in the yard, forming in different groups again (it is starting to feel strangely like school). One of the most satisfying moments of the performance comes when we watch the man who was marching alone woo the girl in purple taffeta. The song “Where or when” in the background includes the lines she was rehearsing earlier and as it ends he presents her with his fob watch. Finally we reconvene in the yard, with the audience around the edge and the performers on a small hill on the other side. One performer sings “We’ll Meet Again” before they walk across the yard to thank us as the evening ends.
There are some lovely moments in Dreams of a Forgotten City, especially as the scenes start to overlap and connect, but there is too much waiting in between. Of course, some waiting is inevitable in a site-specific performance that involves huge logistics. However, the work loses momentum and the audience patience as they stand in the cold wind, waiting—yet again—for the group in front to finish viewing a particular section. Nevertheless, there are some strong performances and the cast of nine feels like a cast of thousands, effectively portraying soldiers, lovers, fathers, mothers and ghosts.
Dreams of a Forgotten City is Tantrum’s latest site-specific work (see my review of The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other, RT95, pg10) and the company continues to investigate the intersection of place, space, story and performance. Dreams allows us to rediscover Fort Scratchley—to peer through its windows, nestle in its nooks and crannies and re-imagine its many histories. Most satisfyingly of all, the performance itself is now a part of this history—a dream within a dream about a city within a city.
Tantrum Theatre, Dreams of a Forgotten City, director Brendan O’Connell, dramaturg Rachel Jackett, performers Florence Barrett, Liam Bird, Dean Blackford, Mitchell Bourke, Ben Freeman, Dean Johnson, Kate Neilson, Jasmine Skye Payne, Stephanie Priest; Fort Scratchley, Newcastle, Aug 18-21
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 39
© Caroline Wake; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
(please give: it a moment), detail of installation at Wallwork Studios
2010 courtesy of the artists
(please give: it a moment), detail of installation at Wallwork Studios
NOW IN ITS SIXTH YEAR, THE ON EDGE FESTIVAL IN CAIRNS IS INSTRUMENTAL IN INTRODUCING NEW WORKS TO NEW AUDIENCES IN FAR NOTHERN QUEENSLAND. THIS YEAR’S PROGRAM, CURATED BY NICHOLAS MILLS, INCLUDED SOUND ART (LIQUID ARCHITECTURE), VIDEO ART (CAO FEI) AND DANCE ON SCREEN (REELDANCE) AS WELL AS PERFORMANCE WORKS. THREE OF THE PERFORMANCE HIGHLIGHTS WERE ELIZABETH DUNN AND JESSIE HALL’S (PLEASE GIVE: IT A MOMENT), POST’S SHAMELESSLY GLITZY WORK AND NICHOLAS MILLS’ OWN 2WHYTE. FOR ME, EACH OF THESE WORKS HAD A REFLECTIVE QUALITY AND MINED THE INNER WORLD OF THE SUBJECT FOR MATERIAL.
(please give: it a moment)
Wallwork Studios has been transformed into an interactive obstacle course. As I enter, I am handed a conical mask with hand-drawn features, suggestive of a shy creature that spends a lot of time in the dark. Wearing this makes me feel as though maybe I too will find a bolthole in which to hide. This is (please give: it a moment), where each audience member becomes the work’s subject via their physical engagement with it. Created by Cairns artists Elizabeth Dunn and Jessie Hall, it is fresh from the Next Wave festival in Melbourne.
Other masked creatures inhabit the space. We are guided past fabric mounds and along the way encounter a larger crafted hillock where a life-sized figure made from wool curls like a cat in repose. We move on to a table where we are invited to partake of a conversation conducted entirely via pen and paper. Tea is offered, along with written advice and the messages then affixed to the studio wall—as a sort of ‘moodboard’ of the soul. It’s tea and sympathy and the writing is on the wall.
We are then gently coerced into a cubby constructed of translucent paper, with moving images projected on the back wall. These are landscapes, seemingly shot at twilight from the window of a moving vehicle. By now, I am overtaken by the persona of the mask; I become a kind of hybrid creature that scratches at the door of both human and animal worlds, and it seems that I am viewing these images through new eyes. They offer up a whole new world of opportunities, should I find the courage to step over the threshold of my hidey-hole and venture into the beyond.
(please give: it a moment) is a refreshing take on the interactive installation form, where participants experience a nuanced and subtle trip through the psyche, like animals being coaxed from a subterranean burrow.
shamelessly glitzy work
This offering from Sydney’s Post has had rapturous receptions in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, so it was a sweet treat to see it in Cairns. The piece itself, however, was not without some deliciously tart satire. To open, three sparkly, spangled magicians tease us for an extended time at the microphone with inhalations, lip smacking and inane smiles. What follows is a series of faux magic routines where the performers build up our expectations for the big showstopper to reveal…well that the performer is wearing a patchwork jumper identical to the one she has just removed. The performer gestures “Ta-da!” all the while looking at us knowingly.
As the show progresses, there is a meditation on the rave scene replete with glitter in the laser lights and an account of an incident outside a nightclub where a woman, a self-described melange of Bonne Bell, Maybelline and feminine hygiene spray, considers an offer from a potential suitor. She tells us, “Guys in Barinas have yelled at me before, but this was different.” There are ruminations on contemporary security policies too, where nameless organisations reminiscent of George Orwell’s Thought Police encroach on civil liberties. The performers describe a quasi Big Brother state where the control of one’s mind and fast food choices—“I’ve got the fish burger in my hand, but I really wanted a chicken burger”—rate as equallyserious social concern.
The centrepiece of the show is a vignette where the performers bounce for over 10 minutes to techno music while one boozily bawls “C’mon ladies!” This slowly turns into a wet t-shirt competition and then something more sinister where blood pours from mouths of the ‘contestants.’ This act is chilling in its evocation of sexual objectification and abuse, reinforcing the idea of performance as a political act that can both challenge and reassert structures of power.
The writing is a revelation in a formal sense; all that is said in the first half of the show is repeated in the reverse order in the second. As well, the characters constantly allude to the audience’s presence through eye contact and gesture. This staginess, or self-conscious awareness of what Peggy Phelan calls performance’s “maniacally charged present” (Unmarked, Routledge, 1993), is echoed in the performers’ oft-repeated line: “I definitely feel something.” I felt something too, Post, and even if you were being ironic you were generous enough to let us in on the joke.
2Whyte
2Whyte was held on the last weekend of the festival and is best described as a work in progress. It has an interesting premise, with Nicholas Mills bringing together two established dancers with the same surname but from very different disciplines. Raymond D Blanco is a prominent Indigenous dancer, choreographer and director who has been at the forefront of Indigenous dance and its development, while Raphael Blanco is a 76 year old Cuban dancer and teacher and reportedly one of the first Cuban immigrants to arrive in Australia. Together they bop, boogie and cha cha cha their way through the show, finding common ground through dance.
As the houselights dim we are shown projected text, first about the history of Cuba and then Australia and the Torres Strait. The source cited is Wikipedia and I’m not sure if the team are being ironic or simply relaxed in respect to their research. Next there is a demonstration of Cuban dance moves, projected documentary-style footage and live onstage interviews with the dancers, interspersed with examples from Raymond’s repertoire. His evident joy in performing to Silver Convention’s Lady Bump (presumably a favourite from his formative years) is so infectious that we find ourselves bopping along in our chairs.
One audience member described this work as “docu-dance” and it shone when we were able to glimpse the dancers’ psyches. Each grappled in their own way with the notion of being categorised as an ‘older dancer’ and the significance of this for their careers resonated with the sympathetic audience. Perhaps the work would benefit from a little more finessing and teasing out further synergies, however, the performers held us with their charm and zeal.
Like the individual performances within it, the On Edge festival offers fascinating insights into the interior worlds of artists and audiences alike. The festival makes a valuable contribution to the far northern landscape and its arts community with its celebration of contemporary performance and media works from all over Australia and the world.
2010 On Edge Festival: (please give: it a moment), creators Elizabeth Dunn and Jessie Hall, Wallwork Studios, July 4-7; post, Shamelessly Glitzy Work, created and performed by Mish Grigor, Natalie Rose and Zoe Coombs Marr, COCA Theatre, July 8-9; 2Whyte, director and media Nicholas Mills, performers Raymond D. Blanco and Raphael Blanco, COCA Theatre July 15-17; www.onedgeart.com/
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 38
© Victoria Carless; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
The Trial
photo Jeff Busby
The Trial
‘KAFKA’ IS ONE OF THEATRE’S OWN NEUROSES; A SCENE COMPULSIVELY RETURNED TO BUT WHOSE PLAYING OUT NEVER ACHIEVES RESOLUTION. THE AUTHOR’S WORK IS FAMOUSLY UNFINISHED IN VARIOUS SENSES, FROM THE POSTHUMOUSLY PUBLISHED NOVELS ASSEMBLED FROM MANUSCRIPTS TO THE OPEN-ENDED MEANINGS SUGGESTED BY THE WORKS THEMSELVES. BUT THERE’S ANOTHER UNFINISHEDNESS TO KAFKA—TO GET THEM RIGHT IS TO GET THEM WRONG, AND VICE VERSA. KAFKA CAN’T TRULY BE TRANSLATED TO THE STAGE, WHICH IS WHY SO MANY ENDLESSLY ATTEMPT TO DO JUST THAT.
Nabokov’s assertion that “one cannot read a book: one can only reread it” is apposite here. Were a production of The Trial to really nail it, the potency of the novel would be nullified. Perhaps the enduring appeal of Kafka’s writing stems not from its status as a glorious achievement, but as a kind of wound—the theatrical adaptations that most intrigue are those that pick at the scab rather than cauterising the wound.
Which is a roundabout way of approaching Matthew Lutton’s take on The Trial, which certainly seemed to pluck at the sutures rather than applying any salve. It wasn’t a satisfying work, but in thinking about that I increasingly wondered what such a thing would look like. Kafka’s literary worlds are anxious, paranoid ones tiptoeing the blade’s edge between self and other and frequently losing their footing. They are endless, circular, self-annihilating and uneven. They shouldn’t make for a particularly fine night at the theatre.
In some ways The Trial felt like the work of a young director approaching a canonical text: it appeared a surface rendering lacking a thorough engagement with its source while struggling to produce its own, original vision against the grain of the original. The thickly ironic comedy became farce; the sinister sexuality mere posturing; the infinite narrowing of Josef K’s agency was diminished by the set which confined him from the outset.
Most disappointing, for me, was the intrusion of more contemporary surrealist imagery onto a work that could only crudely be aligned with the modalities of surrealism. The films of David Lynch were an obvious reference, from the curtain design to a soundtrack song taken from one of Lynch’s own films. These were problematic allusions, since Lynch’s aesthetic is of a different paradigm to Kafka’s—like confusing Jung and Freud or Camus and Sartre.
But Lutton, while relatively young, isn’t a young director—his resume is both deep and reckonable and to dismiss his work here as that of a neophyte is an easy way of avoiding having to really become involved with it. If some of his directorial choices seemed superficial, it’s worth considering the dialogue between depth and surface that continues to characterise much of the work of his peers and mentors.
It’s a cliché to state that theatre is a collaborative medium. I think it’s usually true to say, however, that no one agent can bring low a superlative work of theatre, just as no star can make a mediocre work shine. In reality, it’s rare that any production doesn’t canvas a spectrum of success, and that’s not even factoring in the interpretative diversity of its audience.
Ewen Leslie’s K suffers from a common disregard for the specificity of the character. Too often Kafka’s protagonists are figured as beleaguered Everymen when each possesses a particular voice, often hysterically rendered. Josef K isn’t merely an icon of the average soul dumped in an absurd situation, but is marked by a comic indignation lacking in Leslie’s accounting.
So too do the rest of the cast veer toward caricature rather than complexity. There’s little evocation of the terrifying strangeness behind the face of a neighbour, since all are figured as sideshow clowns from the get-go. The only element of this production which really achieves a rich and unsettling density is the superb sound design and composition (by Kelly Ryall and Ash Gibson Greig, respectively). Half-heard voices and other aural pinpricks floated around partial melodies, suggesting a troubling presence that could never finally be located.
I think that any niggling complaints about this rendering should be balanced, however, by the broader view. Nabokov’s point, in his call for rereading, is that narrative is a time-based thing, and that we can never perceive it as a whole. When we are at the end, we can no longer understand the beginning as beginning. After each pass, we rewrite what came before, and the lasting works of art are those that find some niggling grounds for appeal each time we threaten to deliver a final judgement. This is why a definitive rendition of The Trial would be self-defeating, why this production still maintains a certain necessity. It’s a cruel process, as Josef K’s bleak scenario suggests, but the alternative—for the character or the text—is arguably worse.
Malthouse Theatre & Sydney Theatre Company, The Trial, adaptation Louise Fox from the novel by Franz Kafka, director Matthew Lutton, performers John Gaden, Peter Houghton, Rita Kalnejais, Ewen Leslie, Belinda McClory, Hamish Michael, Igor Sas, set design Claude Marcos, costumes by Alice Babidge, lighting Paul Jackson, composer Ash Gibson Greig, sound design Kelly Ryall; Merlyn Theatre, CUB Malthouse Aug 13 – Sept 4.
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 37
© John Bailey; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
pvi workshopping resist: the right to revolution, CIA Studios
photo Sarah Rowbottam
pvi workshopping resist: the right to revolution, CIA Studios
WALKING AROUND THE RE-PURPOSED CORRIDORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL BUILDING IN NEWCASTLE STREET, YOU GET THE FEELING SOMETHING IS HAPPENING ALMOST BY STEALTH IN PERTH. FROM OUTSIDE, THE BUILDING IS BARELY MARKED; I FIND MY WAY TO A REAR DOOR AND AM LED INTO A SPACIOUS LABYRINTH OF CORRIDORS, OFFICES AND STUDIOS WHERE, HERE AND THERE, RESIDENTS ARE AT WORK. THE CHALK DUST COULD ALMOST STILL BE HANGING IN THE AIR—BUT THE ROOMS ECHO WITH THE SOUNDS OF CONSTRUCTION, EXPERIMENT AND COLLABORATION.
Kelli McCluskey and Steve Bull are co-founders of cia studios, Perth’s burgeoning Centre for Interdisciplinary Arts. They are also core members of tactical media arts group, pvi collective, creator of works including transumer (Sydney Biennale, 2010) and resist—the right to revolution (Awesome Festival, WA, 2009).
R&D is at the core of cia’s brief, with residencies, creative labs, workshops and “mixer nights” enabling interdisciplinary practitioners to develop work and collaborate with others. McCluskey emphasises cia’s focus on the process of making rather than “end product.” What cia does particularly well is provide a fertile environment in which practitioners are directly “informed, invigorated and challenged” rather than working in isolation.
Far from being a glossy government initiative, cia emerged in 2008 via a “window of opportunity.” As founders of pvi collective, Bull and McCluskey knew there was a need to house a growing community of interdisciplinary practitioners and catalyse what was happening in the sector. When WA’s Department of Culture and the Arts provided pvi with a new peppercorn-rent studio space for a year, the collective capitalised on the opportunity that the space provided—developing a two-year business case for cia studios as a co-located entity and requesting seed funding.
“To our complete amazement the department agreed,” says McCluskey, “and provided us with start-up funds as well as key strategic advice…Essentially what they were saying was, start small, find our feet with it and establish support from within the community.”
Having previously served as WAAPA’s production and lighting department, the old school building comes blessed with three-phase power, a sound recording studio and capacious rooms, including mezzanine spaces that allow discreet audience viewing. Long term resident company Hydra Poesis utilises a range of spaces for various projects: in the past year it has produced a durational performance installation, Trademark Manoeuvres #1 with collaborator Aimee Smith (also a cia resident), the performance work Personal Political Physical Challenge (PICA, 2010, see article), a short film for Next Wave and major R&D for its WATDI-funded hybrid work, Prompter Live Studio (RT97).
Hydra Poesis director Sam Fox says cia allows “multiple things on the boil” without the “logistical nightmare” of finding rehearsal, meeting and storage space. The collaborative and peer relationships that develop within cia—“our work connects through a criticality and political consciousness”—are also a reason to hang around. Fox would like to see funding for more intensive collaboration between current and incoming residents, “where we exchange practice, set each other experiments and really capitalise on the connections that are here but limited by time and resources.”
Project manager Kate Neylon outlines cia’s model for “research/practice interrogators,” something cia would like to implement for all residencies. “We would allocate resources towards securing a senior practitioner to work with resident artists, via key Skype sessions, providing input, guidance and provocations that would stimulate that process and expand professional networks internationally.”
“[pvi has] had a few pilot runs of this with ourselves as guinea pigs, first as research interrogators for an emerging artist test lab at cia with Meredith Godley and also with Matt Adams from Blast Theory (UK) working with us on developing our current project, transumer. Hydra Poesis have also used the model to bring out a member of the renowned UK performance group Pacitti company, Dicky Eaton, to work with them on Prompter Live Studio.”
Under the name ololo, “three like-minded friends” share cia’s studio 5 with local cyberpunk Jerrem Lynch, a driving force behind their work with interactive technologies. ololo has been researching hardware and software based systems for performance and installation works, including multi-touch surfaces. “It’s been the first time we have had freedom to explore ideas that were too big to fit on our kitchen tables,” says ololo’s Steve Berrick. Other residents include performer Aimee Smith, currently heading north to participate in The Arctic Circle international creative residency, and performance and image maker Jen Jamieson.
And then there’s pvi collective, now creating a companion to transumer with the working title, the coming insurrection. Like transumer, it aims to ‘fuck it up’, creating on-site interventions to suggest what an “anti-consumerist uprising” might look like. Bull, McCluskey and Neylon cite practical, strategic and catalytic ways that pvi’s interdependency with cia works for them as a group. Bull: “we are able to activate the space from within.” Neylon: “we get space for our practice” (and a small but consistent source of operational income for pvi). McCluskey: “It’s allowed the company to grow in ways that we never expected…it’s inspired, driven and motivated us to keep on truckin’”.
Current challenges for cia include, says Neylon, gaining some studio ‘down time’ and dealing with the organisation’s reliance on funding cycles while trying to sustain an ongoing program. Nevertheless, the next 12 months will include expanded activities including management of a live art season at PICA (hopefully with concurrent residencies at cia by some of those artists) and an expansion of artist talks, work-in-progress showings and collaborations. If funding is secured, says Bull, cia will bring UK performance company Reckless Sleepers to Perth for a creative lab late in 2011.
Bull is ambitious about where cia could go in the longer term: “If all goes to plan—and we are aware a lot could fuck up on the way—we hope cia will become for live and interdisciplinary arts what Perth-based SymbioticA has become for the bio-arts sector internationally. SymbioticA is the place to go for applied research into the life sciences and attracts artists from all over the world to partake of a range of practice-based opportunities. The interdisciplinary sector needs this sort of initiative to spearhead experimentation and look to define an area of practice that’s constantly slippery to pin down.”
In early October, cia studios will be calling for applications for residencies March 7, 2011-February 28, 2012.
cia studios, 480 Newcastle Street, West Perth, ciastudios.com.au
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 36
© Urszula Dawkins; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Victoria Hunt, Dancing the Dead, LiveWorks
photo Manuel Vason
Victoria Hunt, Dancing the Dead, LiveWorks
PERFORMANCE SPACE, SYDNEY’S HOME TO INNOVATIVE PERFORMANCE AND VISUAL AND MEDIA ARTS, IS PRESENTING ITS SECOND LIVEWORKS FESTIVAL IN NOVEMBER. THE FIRST WAS HELD IN 2008 [RT88] REVEALING A POTENTIAL THAT MIGHT NOW BE MORE FULLY REALISED AS THE EVENT TAKES OVER THE WHOLE OF CARRIAGEWORKS.
The festival will, says Performance Space publicity, “animate” the venue’s massive foyer and “confound the performance spaces.” The success of the 2008 LiveWorks suggests that the 2010 version is bound to be a great live-in, four-day, value-for-money experience, a chance to engage with a series of challenging works.
Artistic director Daniel Brine tells me that hiring the whole building was prompted in part by Nightshifters, an exhibition of works from eight leading video and media artists and part of Performance Space’s Live Live season as well as LiveWorks. Using all the CarriageWorks foyers, Nightshifters will address our sense of time and space by engaging magically with the twilight hour, as curator Bec Dean explains to Ella Mudie on page 51.
LiveWorks is promoted as “a fast and furious festival of new ideas” with over 20 artists and groups presenting experimental theatre, performance, live art, dance and installation alongside talks, debates, screenings and hands-on activities. Brine says that Performance Space put out a call for works from which they’ve programmed a mix of established and emerging innovators, including “artists we might not have otherwise encountered. It’s exciting but risky and could be hit or miss,” he says, “but that’s part of the festival experience.”
Brine also says that he and his team were keen “to encourage artists to think of other formats, to have a showing of ideas.” Consequently there are a number of performative lectures of various kinds running alongside performances, experiential one-on-one works, talks and installations. Brine wants each audience member to “make their own experience,” selecting from shows that run on the hour from 2pm each day. But he hopes too that they’ll take breaks, meet artists and each other. He emphasises too that LiveWorks is a level playing field festival, no big star international acts—“it’s about discovering the works for yourself.”
The big line-up of artists includes performance art provocateurs Brown Council who’ll restage A Comedy [RT98], an exercise in testing the limits of comedy, as well as appearing in Portrait of Brown Council by Brown Council, a session investigating the relationship between performance and work—“developing ideas for future work, debating the success of previous work and fielding questions from the audience.” The discursive Malcolm Whittaker [p40] performs A Lover’s Discourse—“a participatory art/love project in which strangers in Bristol and Sydney have conversed in handwritten love letters…It’s about our ever-evolving world and how the earth can alternately feel too big, too small and sometimes… just right.”
Nicola Gunn’s “psychological detective story,” At the Sans Hotel [RT96], entranced our Melbourne reviewer, John Bailey, with its enigmatic unfolding and its “brilliantly likeable performer.” With minimal but effective theatrical means, Tayla Rubins will perform Of The Causes of Wonderful Things (also shown in the Brisbane Festival’s Under the Radar program), investigating “what happens when something too dark to accept arrives on your doorstep. When five children disappear in a small town, the world of the dead begins to impact on the world of the living”. In The Vorticist, Jason Maling, continues his mysterious consultations which will be revealed only if you arrange a date: www.thevorticist.com.
Victoria Hunt (often seen with De Quincey Co) and former Performance Space artistic director Fiona Winning present Dancing the Dead: A Performed Conversation, probing Hunt’s Maori Heritage. Roarawar Feartata (Benjamin Cittadini, Brigid Jackson, Craig Peade and Georgie Read) will tackle notions of public space and performative identity in an engagement with outer Sydney suburb, the often-maligned Mt Druitt, in I Luv Amanda Crowe 4Eva. Georgie Read also appears in Paper People—“frivolous play with the particularity and peculiarity of some of the habits that make up human activity.”
The Berlin-based but frequently nomadic and likewise very lateral Paul Gazzola offers If I Go Like You, “simultaneously an installation, performance and social gathering…an opportunity [for audiences] to transform their persona through the exchange of clothing.” In another intriguing LiveWorks event, Sydney dancer, choreographer and dance curator at Campbelltown Arts Centre, Julie-Anne Long, presents The Invisibility Project, Now You See Her, which “follows a series of performance parties presented in private homes where the guests are both the audiences and participants…[T]his public intervention addresses the invisibility of middle-aged women in our society.” Long’s notable collaborators include choreographer Narelle Benjamin, Clare Britton (My Darling Patricia), artist activist Deborah Kelly and video artist Kate Murphy.
Curiously, Fondue Set member Jane Mckernan’s latest work, Opening and Closing Ceremony, is a solo performance “inspired by mass group physical displays of communist Czechoslovakia, the history of gymnastics as a nationalist form, the Brisbane Commonwealth Games opening, and a family celebrating the Bicentenary in 1988”. McKernan wonders “where the individual body intersects with notions of family, community and nation.” Another idiosyncratic performance-maker, Karen Therese, presents The Comfort Zone: A Performance Lecture, combining “humour and humiliation to examine the meaning and impact of our need to feel comfortable”. In another performative lecture, The Last Remaining Relative, Jiva Parthipan tackles the privilege of travel. Now that he’s been granted Australian residency after leaving the UK, Parthipan, says Brine, “completes his story with this performance”.
inda Luke, 3 Day Habitation, LiveWorks
photo Mayu Kanamori
inda Luke, 3 Day Habitation, LiveWorks
Dancer Linda Luke (who also performs with De Quincey Co) and composer Vic McEwan present Thirteen: A 3-Day Habitation, “a series of performance installations reflecting upon teenage homelessness and exploring our relationship to home, borders and displacement”.
If version1.0 have adapted forms like the parliamentary enquiry, press conference and TV interview in order to cast light on actual events, in This Is It, Team MESS (Dara Gill, Sime Knezevic, Frank Mainoo, Natalie Randall and Malcolm Whittaker) will “use the format of the film press conference to construct a completely speculative event.” Spin doctor heaven? In Thrashing Without Looking, from Melbourne, Martyn Coutts, Tristan Meecham, Lara Thoms and Aphids artistic director Willoh S Weiland will fit you with video goggles for “a ride through the dirty gems of dance mania and metaworld.”
Choreographer-filmmaker Sue Healey’s [see Archive Highlight] Performance Lecture, Variant, looks at “diversity and variation within the human form,” as part of her Curiosities series: “Each artist brings a different frame of reference to the body—physical ‘disability’, physical dexterity and extreme variations in practice”.
For an intense one-on-one experience, extensively exhibited UK installation artist David Cross invites you to enter “an inflatable fun house…an artwork designed to test our fears of dark, tight spaces and our limits of trust.” Also in CarriageWorks’ largest theatre, LiveWorks will complete its reign of disorientation with NightTime Spotlight: Ladies and Gentlemen we are Floating in Space, with a multitude of inventive artists and a single spotlight “exploring suspended states, be they political, metaphorical or beyond our understanding.”
A new initiative from Performance Space and Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), P4 (Pilot), “addresses the experience and influence of live art in Australia and beyond.” This could generate interesting discussion given that the term live art has gained limited traction in Australia and there have been few attempts to locate it theoretically or even descriptively in the Australian performance landscape. But it is being taken up slowly as a label, as in Next Wave, by artists who see themselves as working outside the parameters of performance art on the one hand and contemporary performance on the other.
As a key part of P4, UK artists FrenchMottershead will bring a work to Sydney and Perth that “invites people to question their relationship to the public realm.” They ask people in the street to re-enact stories appearing in newspapers. They then rewrite the stories, publish them as newspapers and issue them in the streets. The process exemplifies P4 as “a series of live art projects framed by four simple creative parameters: practice, publish, participate and perform.” The other participating artists from P4 in Sydney are David Wills (conducting a mass games night), Lily Hibberd (whose work will be realised though she won’t be on hand) and Jason Sweeney (by remote communication). Artists working in Perth on P4 are Barbara Campbell, Makeshift (Karl Khoe, Tessa Zettel) and Hiromi Tango.
There’ll be plenty to choose from in LiveWorks with season or day passes (no tickets on sale for individual sessions) and you’ll doubtless soon accrue a sense of not just the trends in but also the immediacy and experiential intensity of contemporary performance, dance, live art and video installation. Daniel Brine’s invitation to LiveWorks is to “come and build your own festival and be in it for the ride.”
LiveWorks Festival, Performance Space, CarriageWorks, Sydney, Nov 11-14, www.performancespace.com.au; bookings www.ticketmaster.com.au
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 36
© Keith Gallasch; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Anthony Steel with Adelaide Festival poster 1984
courtesy Wakefield Press
Anthony Steel with Adelaide Festival poster 1984
ANTHONY STEEL’S “ANECDOTAL MEMOIR,” PAINFUL IN DAILY DOSES, IS ANYTHING BUT TORTUOUS. SWERVING ENTERTAININGLY BETWEEN ESSAY, DIARY, AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND HISTORY, VIVIDLY EVOKING EVENTS, PERSONALITIES AND PRODUCTIONS, THE MEMOIR RECOUNTS THE INCIDENTAL MAKING OF AN ARTS FESTIVAL DIRECTOR, FROM CHILDHOOD TO THE 60S IN THE UK AND THE SUBSEQUENT REALISATION OF A DISTINCTIVE CAREER IN AUSTRALIA IN THE 70S, REACHING ITS PROUD APOTHEOSIS FOR STEEL IN THE ADELAIDE FESTIVAL OF 1986 AND THE BRISBANE BIENNIAL INTERNATIONAL MUSIC FESTIVAL IN 1993.
Painful in Daily Doses is a cosmopolitan, picaresque romp of a book replete with the requisite ingredients: food, drink, sex, a life on the road and in the air, heroes and villains, epic travel, dead-ends, sackings and successes—fate largely dealing the man a very good hand. And it’s often funny. Above all it celebrates the art that Steel has resolutely and passionately championed, broadening and deepening Australian engagement through bold programming, commissioning and sheer force of personality. But what kind of personality is revealed in this memoir?
Steel was the first director of the Adelaide Festival Centre (a product of the Dunstan Enlightenment), subsequently artistic director of five Adelaide Festivals in their golden age, director of the first Brisbane Biennial International Music Festival and other events as well as playing an advisory or instigatory role for other important festivals (and not a few that never manifested), setting up his own business, Anthony Steel & Associates, and sitting on Boards of the Australia Council for the Arts.
The book’s title comes from Bruce Macklin, Chair of the Adelaide Festival Board at the time of Steel’s departure in 1978: “When asked what it had been like working with me he replied, ‘Like a shot in the arm; stimulating, but painful in daily doses.’” The book’s voice is animated, opinionated and frank, mildly confessional and, at times, dismissive (a barely introduced figure can be declared ‘a crashing bore’ and is gone in a sentence; productions are dealt fatal judgements in a few words). But the overall tone is benignly authoritative rather than authoritarian—before he came to Australia Steel had to suffer autocratic bosses who not only treated him like a glorified office boy but, he admits, could scare him. He would be different. In a stint in his family’s erstwhile steel manufacturing business he had learned to delegate to much better informed employees.
Other kinds of authority figures would later beleaguer Steel: politicians, board members, sponsors, critics and the vocal wowsers Adelaide has long given undue attention, but Steel himself comes across as a team-player, developing camaraderie in the new Adelaide Festival Centre and reliant, across the decades, on the skills and enduring loyalty of employees and associates like Marguerite Pepper, Rob Brookman and others. There are moments, for example in the late 70s when he’s going through a rough patch (work, drink, a belated sexual revolution) when he is surprised to hear that he might not have had the loyalty of his Festival Centre lieutenants, but these are exceptions.
Ian North, Anthony Steel, 2007
Doubtless Steel’s opinions and strength of purpose could and did irk on a daily basis: his one-line putdowns when defending his festivals, contemporary art, artists and colleagues against recurrent charges of elitism, or waste or obscenity (what’s new?) could keep parochial journalists and other complainants busy for weeks. In an ABC TV interview he declared, “Of course the festival is not for the people in the same way a cricket match is not for me.” At one point a short-lived ‘festival action group’ demanded a festival comprising a ball, a mardi gras and a full racing week. Much to his relief, Steel was once banned by Adelaide journalists from being interviewed for a month. He aptly calls himself “a proseletysing modernist”—his festivals were evidence of that and we revelled across two decades in first Australian appearances by John Cage, Phillip Glass, Molissa Fenley, Merce Cunnigham Dance Company, The Wooster Group, Billie Whitelaw doing Beckett, Spalding Gray, the Rustaveli Theatre Company, Cricot 2, the Shostakovich Quartet, Tenkei Gekijo, the Bread and Puppet Theatre, Jan Fabre, music of 20th century American and Australian composers including commissions, a string of modern operas and music theatre works and much more.
Relative to the terseness of Steel’s opinions, Painful in Daily Doses is positively garrulous, not a trait I’d associate with the man, who has always struck me as somewhat shy. He writes, “Every considerable drinker has his or her sound reason (at least in their own eyes) for the habit. Mine was my painful shyness in the company of all but those whom I know very well.” Elsewhere he turns to a few drinks for the “dutch courage” with which to face the Sydney Festival Board, is non compos on several important occasions in the 70s and is obliged in Georgia by the wonderful Rustaveli Theatre Company to consume large amounts of alcohol, a form of negotiation sometimes endemic to his job. What’s interesting is not the alcohol, so much as evidence of an intrinsically shy personality who might blurt out an opinion, deeply felt but, on occasion, quite untimely and inadvertantly suggesting a dominating personality. Curiously, on first meeting Don Dunstan he is non-plussed by the man’s inability to make small talk. Like many an artist, Steel appears to be of the introvert-extrovert mix, but in Painful in Daily Doses he’s very much at ease and we feel like he knows us all very well.
Part of the book’s charm is manifest in Steel’s openness to life and chance. He mentions several times that his career moves were unpremeditated. In his account of his evolution into famed festival director, he often seems to have been in the right place at the right time and destined to mix with seriously talented artists. His family loved music. His sisters and their spouses were professional musicians. As a child he played clarinet with Dame Myra Hess at the piano, as school choir leader he chatted with composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, at Oxford he sang in a choir conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham and in concert versions of Mozart operas conducted by young Colin Davis. He never stops singing, in university and rural choral groups, in the London Philharmonia under Klemperer and Guilini, at the opening of the Adelaide Festival Centre—Steel sees Prime Minister Whitlam to his seat and “duck[s] back to join the tenors in the chorus” for Beethoven’s Choral Symphony. If unhappy with his bosses at the London Mozart Players and the London Symphony Orchestra (doubtless learning that autocrats can be their own worst enemies) he met great artists and learned much, especially as “right-hand man” to Daniel Barenboim who was curating the adventurous Southbank Summer Music program in the late 60s, just before Steel was lured to Adelaide.
If these experiences and his love for music served him well, so did another love—of language. Steel learnt to speak Russian during a stint in national service in the Cold War 50s. It proved an invaluable asset for the future festival director, alongside his French and an ear for dialects and inventive obscenities. There’s a rich vein of linguistic observation in the book. Steel recounts that when he moved to Adelaide in 1971, ASIO attempted to enlist him to monitor entrepreneur Michael Edgley’s dealings with Russian artists: “I showed them the door.”
What is fascinating is how Steel, on a quite unpredictable journey, rapidly expands his practice from assistant manager in London music organisations to artistic director of a new arts centre and then a major festival in Adelaide, fuelled by his love of music and the remarkable flourishing of the arts he’d witnessed in 60s London, and making the most of connections he’d made in the UK and beyond. Steel’s accounts of the opening of the centre, of its internal politics, his remarkable 70s festivals (a blessing for us young Adelaideans), his stepping in to take over Elijah Moshinsky’s “unnaffordable” 1984 festival, and the triumph that was the 1986 festival are all vividly conveyed, warts and all.
What follows is a search for work around the world, the wrong job with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra (alleviated by a Ford Mustang, soul food and Zubin Mehta’s concerts in black churches), back to Australia, The International Theatre Season, the National Australian Theatre Festival in Canberra, the World Expo 88 On Stage, the 5th Festival of Pacific Arts (the diary account of a dash around the South Pacific is worth reading in itself), the Brisbane Biennial International Music Festival, where his love of music could fully flower, and the Sydney Festival. Sadly too many of these innovative festivals were cut off before their potential could be realised—some of the cultural gaps remain. As Steel writes of the National Theatre Festival, “it fell by the wayside with the typically Australian malady of political cowardice and underfunding.”
For those of us who lived through the period of the book, it’s a wonderful reminder of the riches and intricacies of the development of the arts and particularly of festivals in this country. For emerging festival directors it’s a superb manual on how to handle, or (instructively) not, boards of management, the occasional outrageous demands of artists (see the wickedly funny account of Tadeusz Kantor’s visit), censorious sponsors, uninformed critics and the growing “fundamentalism of the bottom line” (Steel quoting the prophetic Donald Horne). It’s also an enjoyable piece of travel writing: Steel makes it clear that works have to be seen before they’re programmed or disaster ensures (and it did), and this took him, and often Brookman and Pepper, around the world. There’s also a strong chapter on arts politics which among other things unhappily reminds us that “Australian political parties do not properly value the arts as a vital part of a country’s liberal democracy.”
Painful in Daily Doses is, in the end, nothing less than an autobiography, if a loosely constructed one, hence ‘memoir,’ conversational, hence ‘anecdotal,’ and unapologetically without an index (a pity) and at times only broadly chronological as Steel loops back and forth at will like a dinner table raconteur riding on a wave of associations. Many will relish the book as the welcome rarity it is, a substantial slice of cultural history in a country loath to document its artistic life, especially in the performing arts. Above all it celebrates the creative life of an idiosyncratic personality, brave, sometimes necessarily foolhardy: “In the mad, risky game of running festivals, there is always that constant tension between two virtually irreconcilable goals”—excellent work that “provides an experience out of the ordinary” and a balanced budget. Despite modest losses on his two best festivals, Steel resolutely believes that “the director’s foremost duty is to the program.” And this belief, acted on, has been well and truly to our benefit.
Anthony Steel, Painful in Daily Doses: An Anecdotal Memoir, Wakefield Press, 2010, ISBN 978 1 86245 875 6
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 34
© Keith Gallasch; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Human Interest Story, Lucy Guerin Inc
photo Jeff Busby
Human Interest Story, Lucy Guerin Inc
A GROUP OF RELAXED YOUNG PERFORMERS WATCH A LARGE TV SCREEN, CASUALLY OBSESSED BY WHAT THEY SEE AND HEAR AS JOSTLING NEWS STORIES OSCILLATE BETWEEN, ON THE ONE HAND, THE DAILY HORRORS OF WAR, MASS STARVATION, INTERCEPTED ASYLUM SEEKERS AND, ON THE OTHER, ‘HUMAN INTEREST’ STORIES, BUT WITHOUT DISTINCTION—THE NEWS AS ENTERTAINMENT. IT’S ALL HUMAN INTEREST, AND YOU CAN CHATTER ABOUT IT AND, HERE, DANCE TO IT.
The rhythms of news broadcasting appear to infect these people, knocking them slightly off-kilter and stimulating excited physical responses: sign language-like gesturing and tightly patterned, exquisite dance moves in twos and threes with unusual manipulations. But the sense of mutual pleasure is interrupted: one of their number (Stephanie Lake) wanders to one side: “Steph, what are you doing?” “Just doing a bit of a dancing.” Unlike the others, her dance is loosely lyrical, introspective, less highly articulated. A motif takes shape as Lake peels away again and again—her head in an everyday reverie…children to look after, food…It’s a motif of attempted separation that will return darkly when the work moves to its conclusion. As the news worsens (the massive fires in Russia) and simultaneously grows sillier (Anton Enus from SBS World News Australia plays himself in a pre-recorded episode), the group dance as one, eyes on the screen, its pull evident in the almost involuntary drag of arms that lead.
As our eyes adjust we see upstage an army tank, the only substantial design element, an ominous full-scale presence. As a series of increasingly grim images unfold, the sense of imminent war or crushed resistance grows—not that the dancers pay any attention to the tank or confront or dance on it, although I expect them to at any moment. They inhabit, save for Lake’s sidestepping, an apparent closed circuit. Sunny coloured costumes are replaced by black and white outfits.
However, while Lake’s ‘dissidence’—“just dancing”—is tolerated, a sole male (Alisdair Macindoe) is soon assaulted by his fellows in a darkening, dimly lit world. Slowly and neatly, they lay out rows of newspaper pages and then stuff them into the man’s clothing until he his swollen and bulging like the Elephant Man, disabled, an object to be played with, spun on the spot, high, low and crouching, faster and faster…knocked down, left to empty himself of news. As in Guerin’s Structure and Sadness (2009) the power of dance as installation is felt—design as integral, neither mere backdrop nor frame.
Human Interest Story, Lucy Guerin Inc
photo Jeff Busby
Human Interest Story, Lucy Guerin Inc
If the paper man episode amplifies the sense of news as not merely absorbed and embodied but also brutally inculcated, then another episode takes the earlier notion of news danced to and meaninglessly ‘interpreted’ a step further. Again, as if taking its cue from performance art, this episode is painfully durational: a woman (Harriet Ritchie) dances in a strict diagonal of low, yellowish light, any movement she makes along it, staccato leaps and spins, always resolving in a thumping, bouncing on the spot with no apparent counter-release to ease the appalling jolts. We no longer hear the noise of news; it’s as if the damage has already been done and here are the self-harming symptoms.
A group of dancers forms upstage, tangled, gesticulating, travelling forward in a rush, on the edge of violence, but returning and repeating the same action compulsively. One of them is Lake. As earlier, she breaks from the pattern. She combs her hair. She rejoins the group. The action resumes. Lake breaks away, this time leaving the auditorium—we hear her asked, “How’s the show going.” She returns, but this time is locked into the pattern—no escape. Meanwhile another group, on a parallel line, appears to “just dance.”
If this motif of ‘just dancing’ looks like a temporary reprieve from the horrors and the absurdities of the news, or even a kind of freedom, the show’s final image is not reassuring. The dancers cluster tightly in golden light upstage, the tank looming behind. Some gesture rhetorically, like politicians, one plays air guitar, others look up as if in awe, but there is nothing transcendent in the image, no-one breaking from the crowd or differentiated from it. No dancing.
It’s difficult to do justice to Human Interest Story from one viewing, to describe the significant role of Jethro Woodward’s gritty score or to be sure that one’s reading of this theme-driven but viscerally realised work is adequate, although the unexpectedly blunt ending appears to mesh with Guerin’s apparent pessimism. Although the early representations of the flattening of affect by the news seem protracted, Human Interest Story moves dynamically from everyday states in which we can recognise ourselves into a deeply disturbing, ever-darkening embodiment, both literal and metaphorical, of the traps set us by the contradictions of the news media. Lucy Guerin, as ever, has created a work at once cerebral and emotional, a dream turned memorable nightmare. It’s apt that Human Interest Story is part of Company B Belvoir’s mainstage program for 2011 in Sydney. That’s great news.
Lucy Guerin Inc, Human Interest Story, choreographer Lucy Guerin, performers Stephanie Lake, Alisdair Macindoe, Talitha Maslin, Harriet Ritchie, Stuart Shugg, Jessica Wong, set design Gideon Obarzanek, realising designer Anna Cordingley, costumes Paula Levis, lighting Paul Jackson, composer, sound designer Jethro Woodward; A Malthouse Theatre, Lucy Guerin Inc & Perth International Arts Festival Commission; Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, July 23–Aug 1
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 32
© Keith Gallasch; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Madeleine
photo Ponch Hawkes
Madeleine
I’VE EXPERIENCED JENNY KEMP’S WORKS AS MORE AKIN TO CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE THAN CONVENTIONAL THEATRE IN THAT THEY DON’T CONFORM TO THE CONSTRAINTS OF PLAYWRITING (WHICH CAN AND DO GENERATE GREAT DIVERSITY OF FORM), INSTEAD THEY REALISE AND EXPLORE, WITH GREAT ACUITY AND INTENSITY, STATES OF BEING THAT DISSOLVE TIME AND PLACE WHILE MULTIPLYING AND OVERLAYING PERSONALITIES. IT’S PERHAPS NOT SURPRISING THEN THAT KEMP HAS MOVED ON TO ENGAGING WITH SPECIFIC PATHOLOGIES—BI-POLARITY IN KITTEN AND SCHIZOPHRENIA IN HER LATEST WORK, MADELEINE, FOR MELBOURNE’S ARTS HOUSE AT THE NORTH MELBOURNE TOWN HALL.
madeleine
Of all of Kemp’s creations (save Kitten which I didn’t see; I’m told the extreme state it generated was apparently overwhelming for some), Madeleine is the one that appears to come closest to conventional play making. It unfolds a linear narrative that moves resolutely to a climax, its characters are briskly delineated and their motivations transparent. The dialogue is spare and direct, and largely stripped of Kemp’s usual poetry except at certain key moments of schizophrenic revelation. But, no less than her previous works, Madeleine compels us to enter an unfamiliar state of consciousness. This is achieved with a lean, fable like narrative, stark shifts between two worlds (the real and a schizophrenic’s fantasy), the distressful overlapping of these, a breathtaking central performance and, not least, Kemp and her designers’ scenographic virtuosity.
Kemp, Ben Cobham and Bluebottle create an immersive, light-sculpted, closed circuit of a world governed by a young woman’s fragile state of mind. It’s like looking into a black hole (no-one does black better than Bluebottle). From this emerges a square of light not quite of a standard colour, eerily misty on the edges. Here the woman encounters her family as themselves and then, gliding out of the dark in golden crowns, as a tyrannical royal family. In this, her otherworld, she also hears the voice of a Minister who relentlessly, if unemotionally, tests and instructs her. Before long he speaks to her while she’s with her family, throwing real world conversation even further out of kilter.
The sense of immersion is heightened by 19 year-old Madeleine’s construction of her consuming reality, fusing childhood and adolescent images that draw on fairy tales (a pin prick, a royal family), Through the Looking Glass (“Off with her head!”), mental arithmetic tests (built around the 28 days of the menstrual cycle) and the alphabet (she is planting a real world garden based on the first letters of plant names). But it is religion that makes her world cohere—the Pope, the Bible, the drive to become a Bride of Christ and to create a second Garden of Eden. The fragility of this construction is threatened all too easily—the birthday gift of a purple cardigan cannot be accepted (only the Pope can wear purple) and panic ensues when her father removes blackberry bushes to improve the garden, thus eliminating B.
What is frightening is the insistent way in which Madeleines takes up elements of her family life and weaves it into her fantasy—why is her mother’s name, Madelaine, the same as hers; why does she have her grandmother’s hands—and not her own; how did her two year-old twin drown, is her mother a murderer; why was she born backwards; is her sister Charley the real princess and she an imposter? Unanswered, these questions leave her “just black inside.” Either there is no way they can logically be answered or the subject is off-limits. Denial, in fact, is central to the psychodrama: both parents refuse to acknowledge the seriousness of Madeleine’s condition, the mother ignoring it in favour of her business ambitions, the religious father sheltering his daughter, inadvertently reinforcing the fantasy. The sister, Charley, returned home after three years, has no way of breaking through her sister’s resistance or long-induced parent-child patterns of repression. Only Madeleine moves through and beyond these binds, with terrible consequences, completing herself, re-named with a G as Magdalene, in her Garden of Eden.
Jenny Kemp’s Madeleine is an undidactic attempt to help us understand a mental state, a version of schizophrenia (not a condition reducible to any universal). She achieves this by revealing the inexorable logic of the girl’s fantasising and its result when brutally, but innocently, applied to the real world. Visually the work correspondingly verges on the claustrophobic as we watch Madeleine quiver in the near dark, orgasming to become a Bride of Christ, or later writhing and shuddering, screaming with fear. Nikki Shiels’ Madeleine rapidly alternates between oblivious innocence, tunnel vision determination, hard logic, delirium, panic and fear, all encased in child-like vulnerability and, after all her tests and suffering, certainty. It’s a remarkable performance from an actor in her early 20s.
As the other family members, Ian Scott (father/king), Margaret Mills (mother/queen) and Natasha Herbert (sister/princess) capture the denial and helplessness that is their characters’ sorry lot. Kemp’s warning is that Madeleine’s fantasy world cannot be undone while the family’s world is just another such closed circuit. At the end of the front row, his back to us, Richard Murphet, quietly intones the insistent words of the Minister, his placement implicating the audience as fellow administrators of Madeleine’s world, which is not to forget that the Minister is ‘really’ only ever the agent for Madeleine’s unconscious ventriloquism. The totality of conception and the potent imagery of its realisation make Jenny Kemp’s account of the power of a deeply thwarted and flawed imagination chillingly memorable. It should be seen more widely.
August: Osage County, The Steppenwolf Theatre Company
photo Grant Sparkes-Carroll
August: Osage County, The Steppenwolf Theatre Company
august: osage county
Back in Sydney, another family drama, inevitably familiar, such is family life, but with more hours and words and characters to express every possible aspect of the social form compared with Kemp’s focus on a single if complex state of being. The Steppenwolf Theatre Company from Chicago performed the Tony Award-winning, much travelled August: Osage County (written by company member Tracy Letts) with enormous ease, verve and conviction on a set—a rural family home—you could live in. In terms of performance alone, it was a rivetting experience to see an American ensemble at full stretch, and to admire the sheer dexterity of Letts’ writing. (The plot is too elaborate to spell out here: you can read a precis on Wikipedia.) The surprise was that the play is so funny, especially coming hard on the heels of the STC production of A Long Day’s Journey into Night with which it, and a host of American family dramas, shares a number of characteristics. Ingredients include a central, problematic mother figure, a family reunion to trigger the drama, madness, drugs, an unravelling marriage or two, an almost real time unfolding of events (preferably overnight), a ‘buried child’ or variation on same, and other secrets usually uncovered by the play’s end. The prevailing mood is dark and many home truths are spoken. This replaying of the family in crisis has almost become ritual in its predictability. What Letts does is pretty well include most tropes and add a few more—sexual abuse of a minor, incest and, in an outsider role, a Native American.
It’s the humour, from the mother’s acid wit to her daughters’ constant quipping and the conscious and unconscious comedy of other characters that makes the play different from its predecessors. When it’s undercut or suddenly emptied out it’s as if a safety net has been taken away. But the downside of the writer’s comic impulse is that the play too often, especially in the second act, mutates into something like a sporting match, the audience taking sides, applauding the best jibes and wildly cheering the trouncing of the mother.
The laughter does fade, however, towards the play’s end, when the addicted mother rejects any assistance (she is unwilling to ask for it), her elder daughter leaves and the Native American helper stays on in the now otherwise empty house—having declared she’s only doing the job for herself. It’s a grim account of contemporary America—drugged, divorced, secretive, divided; only a couple of characters seem likely to achieve happiness. But it’s a good old-fashioned play full of sharp-edged wit with contemporary touches and audiences around the world are mightily cheered by it. Competing critics have argued for and against it as either a great play or a grand entertainment, none denying the writer’s skill or the excellence of the performances. With a large cast and several hours of stage time, Letts manages to balance brisk, sometimes furious pace, akin to sitcom, with passages of sustained emotional engagement reminiscent of O’Neill and Williams. It’s an uneasy mix, satisfying but not, and maybe it’s a metaphor for modern America without going near anything directly political, despite the academics and literati among its characters and the largely symbolic role of the Native American.
our town
I was mindful of the dark ending of August: Osage County when I saw Iain Sinclair’s production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town for the Sydney Theatre Company, faithfully presented on an empty stage, our imaginations worked with words and a mountain of sometimes taxing mime. The lightness and folksiness of the first two acts are unnervingly inverted by the writer into something almost Strindbergian—hopes undone, a failed marriage, lives mourned, a sense of the vastness of the universe making the everyday almost nothing as the dead wait “for the eternal part to come out clear.”
Emily Webb’s painful discovery that she cannot turn back time is the high point of Maeve Dermody’s fine account of the character. Darren Gilshenan as the Stage Manager narrates engagingly, though when the audience laughed at the early line, “Nice town, y’know what I mean?”, which he delivered without irony, my partner recalled Spalding Gray’s account in Monster in a Box (1991) his savagely criticised performance of the same role. He was astonished to be charged with being “snide, flip and condescending.” One critic wrote, “This just goes to prove avant garde actors can’t act.” The rest of his account of what proved to be an enjoyable season is well worth reading. The tragically depressive Gray (subject of a forthcoming feature documentary by Stephen Soderbergh) found the play uplifting. I’m still assimilating its strange vision, but am very pleased to have finally encountered it on stage.
Madeleine, writer, director Jenny Kemp, performers Margaret Mills, Natasha Herbert, Nikki Sheils, Ian Scott, Richard Murphet, dramaturg Richard Murphet, set, lighting design, Bluebottle, Ben Cobham, ArtsHouse & Black Sequin Productions; ArtsHouse, North Melbourne Town Hall, Aug 3-8; Sydney Theatre Company: Steppenwolf Theatre Company, August: Osage County, writer Tracy Letts, director Ann D Shapiro, Sydney Theatre, opened Aug 17; Sydney Theatre Company, Our Town, writer Thornton Wilder, director Iain Sinclair, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, opened Sept 18
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 46
© Keith Gallasch; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Kookaburra
photo Yurrick (bonehead)
Kookaburra
WHEN JAY ‘JP’ PARRINO COVERED MEN AT WORK’S “DOWN UNDER” ON AUSTRALIA’S GOT TALENT IN LATE 2009, ONE COULD WITNESS CULTURE IMPLODING IN MANY WONDERFUL WAYS. EMPLOYING LIVE SAMPLING TECHNIQUES, HE BUILT UP LAYERS OF ACOUSTIC GUITAR TO CREATE A POVERA DIGITAL IS TYPICAL OF THE CONTEMPORARY BUSKER. WHILE JP’S DEVICES WERE PERCEIVED AS A NOVELTY BY THE SHOW’S AUDIENCE AND JUDGES, HE EMPLOYED THEM AS MEAGRE USER-FRIENDLY TOOLS, NOT AS FLASHY INSTRUMENTS. HIS MODUS OPERANDI WAS TO LITERALLY BUILD A BACKING FOR HIS VOICE AND ACOUSTIC GUITAR ACCOMPANIMENT.
Performing against and with live looping was instigated by Alvin Lucier in the 60s, developed by Robert Fripp in the 70s, spectacularised by the Young Gods in the 80s, matrixed by Jeff Mills in the 90s and deployed with virtuosity by Battles in the 00s. It’s safe to say that live looping is now a given vernacular in the technological production of music. Occurring within a mainstream context like Talent, JP’s use of the process demonstrates well how musical culture is now shaped. He simultaneously deconstructed ‘the song’ (voiced by Men At Work) and aurally constructed ‘a song’ (voiced by JP). The song this man made through his work clearly connected to both live and televisual audiences by virtue of how deftly he collapsed what was his and what was not. In an era wherein media has moved from saturation to atomisation (from the congealment of large forms to the unleashing of fine particles), performances like JP’s populist yet radicalised rendering of “Down Under” demonstrate how musical texts now implode without losing their identity.
In shows like Talent, the surrendering of the performer to his/her performance marks the event as a social communion for those within earshot. As a desultory figure unconverted to the show’s jingoistic narrative, I try to maintain distance from its Red Rooster-like moniker, its flag-waving set design, its pathetically professional panel, its bug-eyed audience, its predictable swells of applause. Yet I cannot deny the power of song, of singing and of an audience enthralled by a singer’s self-surrendering performance. True to the diacritics of folk culture, JP’s version sets up a dialogue with the original Men At Work version, and the two are empowered by a textual link where the songs speak to each other as much as they speak to me as an auditor of their voices and voicings.
Now, those with refined Rock sensibilities have long made sardonic quips about the numerous competitive TV shows based on Pop musical performance (the global franchises of Idol, Talent etc). But might not the predominance of these spectacles of amateur gumption, innocent drive and hysterical dreaming reveal the role song plays in popular culture? Songs are a particularly dialectal form of expression and intercommunication. The simple musicalisation of argot—of whittling a melody out of a popular epigram—is a form of linguistic sonography born of a living, breathing culture. Words are always at a fork in the linguistic road: they can turn one way to be weighted by their written inscription (the rationalist law of the text) or turn the other way and be airborne by their melodic transformation (the transcendent charm of the song). Say something enough times and it will eventually be sung.
mean larrikins
If there is one demographic watching and listening to Australia’s Got Talent on Channel 7, there must be another one watching Spicks And Specks on ABC. And if the former is defined by the supposedly insidious machinations of the Pop industry’s controlling of audiences incapable of articulating their relation to song other than mere consumption, then the other must be inversely defined. Despite being largely ignorant of the fact that the ABC stole the format for their 2005 show from UK Channel 4’s 1996 show Never Mind the Buzzcocks, the Spicks audience is congratulated on their upwardly mobile shift toward knowing when they are being manipulated and when they are not. The format of the show smacks of puerile academicism—uncomfortably echoing the panels first televised in Channel 7’s It’s Academic in the late 60s. Comedians, of course, are used to distract audiences from such irksome fare, but watching wannabe-cool comedians and grinning presenters fall over each other trying to prove their wit constitutes a far more embarrassing performance than the most inept of Talent’s hopefuls.
There are scant fragments in the televisual stream of Spicks that do not stray from the high-versus-low culture ossification which unwisely emboldens the intelligentsia. The trivia format suits the trivialisation of Pop music in general, while the show’s incorporation of local and select overseas touring musicians fluffs up its notion of ‘real/true/roots/indie/non-mainstream/Rock’ musical culture. It’s a show suited to parents who remember their tertiary education via playlists garnered from JJJ. Like everything on ABC TV, the ideological compaction and congestion of its slanted views, adopted poses and supported truisms make it an insult to bother applying any semiotic reading of its monophonic voice.
But a late 2007 “Children’s Music Edition” episode on the show became unintentionally infamous when one question innocently proposed a melodic connection between the 1934 Girl Guides campfire sing-along “Kookaburra” composed by Marion Sinclair, and fragments of the flute interlude in Men At Work’s international number one song from 1981, “Down Under.” Less than two years later in mid-2009, the purported owner of the copyright of Kookaburra—Larrikin Music Publishing—claimed copyright infringement of said property and moved to sue the owners of “Down Under”’s copyright—EMI Music Publishing Australia and co-composers Colin Hay and Ronald Strykert.
A lot of press has since danced a predictable waltz around this case: freedom of speech; money-grabbing lawyers; pop music always ripping-off; denial of technical harmonic quotation; ethical averment of fair usage etc. The intersection of the arts and legality exacts such a tiresome charade of grandiose ethics. This case is not about money, music and ethics. It’s about the forced divide between pop culture and folk culture (in shows like Spicks). It’s about how the two are implosions of the other, how they live off the other, and how their mechanisms are now more than ever shared (as in shows like Talent). And it’s about how the intelligentsia slathers ethical-mongering, political-correctness and proscriptive-nationalism on such a public incursion of national identity crisis (as in the Larrikin vs EMI case), rather than provide contextual, critical insight into the deeper issues which shape these cultural ground swells.
thieving magpies
Like the atomisation which now defines ‘war’ as an asynchronous concatenation of disparate events and locations with no holistic sense of convergence or interconnection, ‘cultural wars’ no longer require metaphors based on Great Wars, where notions of frontlines and avant gardes romantically heroicise how individuals contribute to the shaping of culture. This is ultimately a good thing, for culture—from its conservative models of anthropology to its radicalising models of neurology—is best interpreted as noise of the crowd rather than scripture of an author.
“Down Under”’s para-conscious quipping and cribbing of “Kookaburra” can be viewed semiologically (though not ‘legally’) as a therapeutic retort to having suffered the indoctrination of “Kookaburra” in primary schools, where kids were forced to listen to such songs broadcast on ABC radio through PA systems fixed atop the blackboard in a scenario straight out of George Orwell’s paranoid mind. Am I alone in detesting “Kookaburra” and every single faux-folksy, pseudo-pioneer, colonial-jumbuck, banjo-jangling ditty which the ABC ideologically served up as part ‘children’s music’ and part soft enforcement of a default-leftist, neo-Maoist, pro-Folk, anti-Pop statement of Australiana? Both “Kookaburra” and the Larrikin copyright claim recall an epoch of reclaiming iconography for a dangerously jingoist, post-convict liberation, with Blinky Bill, the Easter Bilby, Cuddlepie and the Southern Cross rebutting overseas imperialism. (Ironically, it was the populist “Down Under”—through its appropriation by Australia II upon winning the America’s Cup in 1983—and not any folksy tune that sung the praise of Australia internationally.)
When Larrikin sued Men At Work, they impressionistically painted their case like the Eureka Stockade, with true blue Australian Folk music battling the corporate ogre EMI. Larrikin—personified by the APRA-lauded aegis of self-appointed Australian folk historian Warren Fahey—has long wheelbarrowed a divisive and separatist notion of Australian Folk music, often intoned as if a local hero is struggling to gain respect for the unsung songsters of white rural colonial history. Yet if Larrikin adopted a modern, diffusive notion of Folk dissemination, they would realise that their battle was long won once Qantas Airlines forced its boarded patrons to suffer a broadcast playlist of semi-acoustic, pub-rockish, sunburnt country Aussie spirit fodder (remarkably similar to the ‘live’ sounds on Spicks). The risible iconography that attempts to monopolise the Australian voice as one big rural campfire round is as ideologically loaded as chants on Cronulla Beach. When Qantas and their corporate brethren of image marketeers broadly assume the cultural validity of such ‘music of the land,’ it suggests that what Larrikin would claim to be Folk is now the most pervasive form of nationalistic Pop.
The word “kookaburra” comes from the Wiradjuri “guuguuburra.” The voice of the kookaburra underwent indigenous and colonial linguistic translations before the Girl Guides claimed kinship with its song via the colonising practice of western diatonic harmony. While Larrikin attempts to grandstand a mean-spirited sense of folk culture by suing Men At Work as the Girl Guides Association celebrate their centenary, lyrebirds mimic car alarms, bell birds interface with mobile phones, bowerbirds collect plastic bottle tops. And magpies continue their chattering in the magpie culture of music wherein all is borrowed, all is robbed, and all is sung.
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 45
© Philip Brophy; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
New Music Network members, top; Erik Griswold
NEW MUSIC HAS BECOME AN ELEMENTAL PART OF THE CULTURAL YEAR IN SYDNEY FOR ME. THERE WERE SOULLESS TIMES WHEN THIS WAS NOT THE CASE BUT NOW THERE’S A STEADY STREAM OF QUALITY CONCERTS FROM ESTABLISHED AND EMERGING INNOVATORS GUIDED, PROMOTED AND SUPPORTED BY THE SYDNEY-BASED NEW MUSIC NETWORK. WHAT’S MORE, THE NETWORK REACHES ACROSS THE COUNTRY AND I CAN BE CHALLENGED AND THRILLED BY THE LIKES OF CLOCKED OUT FROM BRISBANE AND APHIDS AND SPEAK PERCUSSION FROM MELBOURNE.
The seemingly tireless Network Manager, Philippa Horn, is at the front desk of many of the network’s concerts, welcoming audiences, selling tickets, serving wine. The organisation’s amiable president, James Nightingale, who performs with Continuum Sax and produces the Concert Series with member input, is often present as well. I spoke with Horn and Nightingale recently about New Music Network, its history and its strategies for promoting new music—a truly challenging but, it seems from their joint enthusiasm, rewarding task.
New Music Network started in 1995 as a Sydney based organisation, says Nightingale, at the prompting of new music stalwarts Daryl Buckley and John Davis, who convened the initial meeting at the Australian Music Centre with founding members austraLYSIS, Contemporary Singers, Coruscations, Elektra String Quartet, ELISION, Machine for Making Sense, The Song Company, Spring Ensemble, Sydney Alpha Ensemble, Sydney Metropolitan Opera, The Seymour Group, Synergy Percussion, SIMA and Voiceworks. Initially, says Horn, “the meetings were about sharing mailing lists and cross-promoting each other’s activities.” Nightingale adds that the focus was “to lobby the cause of contemporary music, to find economies through collaborative ventures and to build audiences.”
The subsequent years weren’t easy ones in terms of continuity and funding, but in 1999, the NSW government provided support for administration, plus an event, the Peggy Glanville-Hicks Address with a performance. This would later form the beginnings of the concert series envisaged by Marshall McGuire and Roland Peelman. More substantial funding was granted by the NSW Government in 2003 and the main concert series commenced, quickly joined by the mini series. In 2008 the Music Board of the Australia Council also became a significant supporter. Now the Network has some 30 members and an annual national program of activities including the New Music Concert Series, the New Music Mini Series and the Glanville-Hicks Address.
members of Speak Percussion
courtesy New Music Network
members of Speak Percussion
The organisation’s initial focus was in and around Sydney, says Nightingale, “but it gradually expanded, not only in number but in the range of organisations joining.” These include diverse contemporary classical groups like Ensemble Offspring, austraLYSIS with its electronic creations and the experimental sounds of Machine for Making Sense. SIMA, the Sydney Improvised Music Association, is also a member—“they have a similar brief to ours, so we support each other as best we can. They’re important for promoting our mini-series. The network is very inclusive.” Horn mentions that Adelaide’s Soundstream [see article] and Perth’s TURA, producer of the annual Totally Huge festival, have recently joined, giving the network even greater national scope.
“When we decided to go across the border,” says Nightingale, “it was with a combination of desires.” These included expanding the network but also hoping that they could help groups perform in their own cities as well as in other states. Horn is proud that “this is the first year we’ve presented concerts from our main members in both Melbourne and Brisbane, and we have a Mini Series Concert in each city.”
Horn and Nightingale feel that the signs are good, that the organisation is seriously realising its goals. Partly this is because of the aforementioned inclusivity—they cite the membership of Melbourne sound installation artists Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey [RT98] who jointly act as Secretary to the network’s Executive Committee. Horn sees cross-media membership as important for the organisation, along with new platforms and venues, like Campbelltown Arts Centre, west of Sydney “with their extremely strong focus on new music.” The centre is now a member of New Music Network—a significant development, says Horn, excited by the potential impact of new regional arts centres for new music.
Wondering how member groups are supported by the network, I’m told concerts are promoted through an e-newsletter to 1,700 recipients nationally, groups are profiled on the network’s website, advice is given about timetabling of concerts to avoid competing dates, there’s a fine brochure and some financial support. However, Nightingale is emphatic that “the intangible benefits of being in the network are often the ones which are the most difficult to promote and yet are the most rewarding. For example, we try in our concert series to promote artistic collaboration between our members. We don’t have money to make that happen, but it does.” The soprano duo Halcyon has recently been collaborating with australYSIS and Song Company with Ensemble Offspring, who will appear with Machine for Making Sense in a performance in Sydney Harbour National Park on November 7.
“The other intangible is the mentoring that goes on for the up and coming groups from those who have been in the scene much longer. Roland Peelman, artistic director of Song Company is the most obvious example with his openness to all the groups he collaborates with—including Ensemble Offspring and Continuum Sax. Being in a concert series that includes Synergy and Song Company, Continuum Sax gains a lot from just seeing how they operate and just how difficult it can be even if they have a couple of staff members. How much work that goes on in the sector is underestimated. Continuum Sax has no administrator, but we are helped by New Music Network.”
Melbourne composer, former Aphids director, current director of Chamber Made Opera and Vice-President of New Music Network is David Young, another valued role model, says Nightingale: “He’s always full of good advice and has shown what can be achieved through multi-artform collaboration. Aphids’ work is not just about music, but it’s really intelligent when it is and that’s something all of us admire and aspire to.”
I wonder about the role of the network in supporting emerging artists. Horn says that “those who participate in the mini-series are so grateful to get an opportunity to perform. We get about 50-60 applications for the series each year from which we can only choose five.”
What do groups generally need? Nightingale explains that it varies from group to group: “Song Company needs very little from us; we benefit from them, and from Synergy too. Other groups we can support in the Concert Series with a substantial fee to pay for their performers. The Mini Series artists receive a token fee.” Horn adds, “And we look after the venues for them as well as promotion and some paid advertising.” Nightingale explains that “with our artistic oversight, the relationship with the ABC’s Australian Music Unit at Classic FM is very strong. They’re extremely supportive of what we do. Being involved in the mini-series opens doors for people. It’s hard to quantify those sort of connections, but that’s what a network is, a set of constantly dynamic, constantly changing relations. The Halcyon and austraLYSIS concert was broadcast and the artists interviewed as part of it.”
It’s surprising that such an effective organisation is administered by Horn a mere two days a week (I bet that doesn’t include front of house duties); she works the rest of the week for the Australian Music Centre. Her role entails scheduling, booking venues, getting marketing and promotion up for the concert series, delivering the e-news and updating the website, calling for applications, preparing budgets and getting grant applications in on schedule.
I ask Horn and Nightingale if their roles are more than labours of love. Nightingale asserts that “the network is something that will have long lasting consequences. I feel that the new music scene in Sydney has really thrived since the concert series started. For a lot of groups it provides a focus around which they can arrange other things and take advantage of the schedule. When you see the younger groups like Chronology Arts [RT97] and Kammer Ensemble with their wealth of activity and the young composers coming out of the Conservatorium; it wasn’t like that a while ago.”
As for audience development, Horn says that every angle is explored, including sharing mailing lists and doubling audiences with collaborative shows. She’s been inspired by partaking of ISCM festivals in Europe (she played a pivotal role in the wonderful Sydney ISCM World New Music Days earlier this year; RT96). “It broadened my horizons to see lots of small presenting organisations similar to us and so many networks, but very well funded, as in Belgium. But here it’s only us.”
Asked if the network is involved in commissioning new works, Nightingale explains that it would not want to compete with its member groups: “Our contribution is making sure that the performances happen. Back in the 1980s and 90s works commissioned were often not performed or if they were they never came around again. It was unsatisfactory on every level and not a good use of the money and dreadful for the artists. The relationships between composers and performers are now evolving in a very positive way—more new work means a lot more performer input and works are developed more collaboratively.”
With its growing membership across Australia, its concert series and the support it offers groups, its encouragement to collaborate and its openness to new platforms, New Music Network has proven itself an invaluable and sustaining part of new music culture. Nightingale says, “Sometimes people think we’re classical and composer based but we bring other models onto the page and when the edges get messy, that’s when it’s most interesting.” I can vouch for that.
New Music Network: 2010 Concerts: Clocked Out, After the Kingfisher’s Wing, composer Erik Griswold, Ian Hangar Recital Hall, Qld Conservatorium, Oct 6, 6.30pm; Machine for Making Sense & Ensemble Offspring, West Head Project V at Middle Head, Sydney Harbour National Park, Nov 7, 4pm; Double Duos, Recital Hall East, Sydney Conservatorium, Nov 21,5pm; Halcyon with austraLYSIS, Music Workshop, Sydney Conservatorium, Dec 15, 7.30pm; www.newmusicnetwork.com.au
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 46
© Keith Gallasch; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Australian Percussion Gathering, Brisbane, 2010
STEVEN SCHICK, ONE OF THE DISTINGUISHED GUESTS AT THE AUSTRALIAN PERCUSSION GATHERING HELD RECENTLY IN BRISBANE, GAVE AN INTIMATE RENDITION OF KURT SCHWITTERS’ 1924 URSONATE WITHIN A MASTER CLASS TITLED “NO STICKS: USE OF THE VOICE, THEATRE AND BODY IN PERCUSSION.” HIS RENDITION OF THE DADAIST, ECHOLALIA-INFUSED PIECE—WRITTEN AS “A WEAPON AGAINST LOGIC”—WAS PERSONAL, INTIMATE AND EXTREMELY MOVING, IN A WAY I HAVE NEVER EXPERIENCED.
Previously, I’ve heard its nonsense lines (“Fümms bö wö tää zää Uu”) delivered with a sense of comic attack or even aggressive ejaculation, but Schick soft-shuffled the floor in a thoughtful perambulation, the piece’s sound clusters driving a necessity to speak. Why does he speak? Why should we listen? These are questions Schick asks of every performance he gives. Here is a master musician plumbing a lifetime of emotions, experiences and ethical considerations, giving immense respect to his audience.
Schick’s Ursonate affirmed the voice (and lips, tongue and glottis) as an instrument equal to any of a percussionist’s tools, only perhaps more bared. Many of the Gathering’s master classes talked less of technique (“technique is merely the means,” insisted Sylvio Gualda) than of playing from your bones. Discussions centred on refining choices to do with aesthetics, timbrel groupings and the building of textures. Not every teacher said so baldly that you have to ‘play from yourself’ as did Phil Treloar, but with many it was implied—the Gathering’s strong emphasis on collaborative improvisation provided a context where, across the spectrum of ages and experience, people could plumb themselves.
Barry Quinn, The Gathering
photo courtesy of Qld Conservatorium, Griffith University
Barry Quinn, The Gathering
Schick emphasised percussion’s humble, tribal origins: the contact of skin-to-skin, hand to drum membrane. He even quietly threw the challenge to younger students to consider the shamanic origins of performance, a player perhaps passing through membranes to other or hidden worlds. This provocation matched the tone of the conference as a whole, which was remarkably uncompetitive and non-aggressive. The discipline’s earliest mentor in Australia, Barry Quinn, was honoured on the final night. A player of international repute, Quinn would apparently teach anyone who could throw a stick at a wall and catch it on the rebound. He has influenced three generations of practitioners who continue his method of encouragement and positive mentoring to this day.
But as Artaud wrote, “Being has teeth,” and ‘Being’ can be both encouraging and fierce. There was nothing quite like witnessing Sylvio Gualda (for whom Yannis Xenakis wrote his exacting percussion solos) demonstrate “not ffff [quadruple forte] but energy“ with barely a flick of his wrists. It was like the Concorde’s sonic boom at 10 paces within two seconds. Whilst Japan’s Kuniko Kato plays Xenakis taiko-like, a knife forcing silence out of sonic space, a contained Gualda holds this split-second ignition in his ribs.
Solo percussion in music of the classical tradition is a recent phenomenon, developing from the late 1920s works of Edgar Varese through John Cage to the contemporary environmentalist John Luther Adams. It was an honour to be in the room with master artists for whom many of the pieces performed were actually written. Especially moving was Schick’s bow to Sylvio Gualda as his tribal elder in the wings. This honouring of lineage was characteristic throughout the event.
It’s also an honour, always, to hear works made as we listen. Darryl Pratt and Phil Treloar exemplified this in their improvised duo, marimbas playing both sweet and dry, wiry and full of dew—a gracious marriage, despite the 20 year gap since their last playing together. Perhaps experience teaches skills of giving in.
But for Schick, repeating a work holds the same challenge—to make every time like the first. Here he performed Xenakis’ Psappha for the 250th time. ‘Fresh’ is not the word so much as volatile as gunpowder-in-waiting. Schick kicks the side drum like a tempestuous goat, obsessive, fixated and seething within the Sapphic cells of rhythmic measure that generate the piece. His master class gave techniques—layerings, placing, personal challenges—to keep one fresh and able to surprise oneself in performance.
In an evening concert, Varese’s monster masterpiece, Ionisation (1929-31) was performed twice, under two different conductors, providing another example of how to reignite an old flame. It highlighted the impact of interpretation, with huge differences of timbre and tone. But there were also quieter intimacies. Speak Percussion’s Eugene Ughetti performed a solo by choreographer Deborah Hay in a delicate, wiry, hiccupping and side-stepping dialogue between feet and floor, skin and space. He awaits the companions who never quite fall onstage from the wings. This was so poignant a performance that, although comic, no one laughed. Ughetti’s body dances like an amoeba yet we never lose sight of the fine musical choices with which he recites and drums the hand gong.
In Driftwood, Ughetti gently dismantled and recomposed a marimba like a father playing ‘toss’ with his child. He and Matthias Schack-Arnott kissed bows with their lips. This threshold of the lips was also, more explosively, explored by Schick in Touché by Globokar. Based on Brecht’s play Life of Galileo, the piece is a bravura, agon-like dialogue between voices of faith and fear, the yoked vocal consonants and paired glocks always threatening to break partnership with each other.
Among the students, Defying Gravity partnered in as sinuous and athletic a dance with marimba as if it had a skirt and legs (oh that keyboard girl!) and Ba Da Boom rumbled suitcases and tossed coins in the space. High school kids performed with aplomb. Rebecca Lloyd-Jones, Matthew Horsley, Cameron Kennedy and Robert Oetomo made outstanding contributions and were awarded special prizes.
Brisbane group Clocked Out continued their exploration of unusual sound and visual objects, and miniature toys. It was a pleasure to hear how Erik Griswold’s aesthetic has matured over the past decade. To end the conference, the full coterie of students, teachers and guests performed in the concrete circle of the SunCorp Plaza playing Michael Askill’s 1000 Gongs (how many moods can a gong make?—one thousand), a sequence of 14 improvisations which incorporated a massive two-metre diameter tam-tam, song, movement, spoken word, trumpets and water gongs in a two-hour ritual traversing words and tonalities from Marc Bolan to Yogi Bhajan, Messiaen to Stockhausen. Many of the general public who wandered in to the performance stayed the distance.
The final day saw a trip to the Sunshine Coast hinterland, to the Cooroora Institute run by Tamsin Kerr, Ross Annels and their daughter Anika, for a day of listening and playing in the rainforest. The primary tool here was communication between ear, heart and land. Convenor Vanessa Tomlinson wondered how everyone would respond.
A young woman suddenly starts walking on all fours, boots on her hands (becoming animal); a senior percussionist rustles a tree (becoming mantis); two young men rumble a dying branch to its sonic death. Drums become insects and call to invisible partners across the mountainside. A song is improvised beside a Bunyip’s waterhole. Jan Baker-Finch rustles her body like leaves, moving, being moved by the winds of other improvisers. We finish the day with mulled wine by the fire.
The Gathering, convenor Vanessa Tomlinson with Michael Askill and Tom O’Grady, Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University, Aug 26-30
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 47
© Zsuzsanna Soboslay; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Nicolas Collins in his basement workshop, Chicago, Il (USA) 2006
photo Marty Perez
Nicolas Collins in his basement workshop, Chicago, Il (USA) 2006
THE HISTORY OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC IS AS MUCH A HISTORY OF INVENTIVE ELECTRONIC DEVICES AND EXPERIMENTAL INSTRUMENTATION AS IT IS OF MUSICAL FORM AND STRUCTURE. FREQUENTLY, THE TWO ARE INSEPARABLE—THE METHOD IS THE MUSIC. AMERICAN ARTIST NICOLAS COLLINS DESCRIBES HIMSELF AS A HARDWARE HACKER, AND HE HAS LONG BEEN AN INNOVATOR BOTH MUSICALLY AND TECHNOLOGICALLY, MAKING A POINT OF REJIGGING ELECTRONIC GADGETRY TO CREATE HIS MAGICAL MUSIC AND REDEFINING MUSIC ITSELF.
Collins began experimenting with electronic equipment in the early 1970s, and, when the desk-top computer appeared, began writing computer programs that would emulate or extend the sound-generating strategies he had developed. He studied with Alvin Lucier and has evidently absorbed John Cage’s interest in experimentation as well as his curiosity and playfulness. Collins’ seminal device consisted of a found circuit-board attached to a battery and a loudspeaker, and activated with electrodes or a damp fingertip to produce buzzes and squeals with which to make music.
Collins likes the idea, literally, of a hands-on approach, where the player can touch the circuit board to generate sound, experimenting with degrees of deliberative action in the process of music-making. He is also concerned to explore the disruption of pre-programmed output to create alternative sonic output and thus a new instrument. Instruments that require performer intervention to defy inbuilt automation reveal the profound difference between analogue variability and digital predictability and reveal analogue as so much more seductive. Another early work featured a toy train running along a straight track and touching a tautly stretched wire connected to a contact mike so as to generate a sound as it moved. Such ‘folk’ instruments are easily accessible to the layperson.
I attended Collins’ talk and then his concert, since an understanding of how his gadgets work and how much human intervention is involved is essential to full appreciation. The concert comprised four works that epitomise his philosophy: Salvage (Guiyu Blues) (2008), performed with a team of players armed with found circuit boards; Pea Soup II (1973/2002); The Talking Cure (2002); and In Memoriam Michel Waisvisz (2008). Some of his devices automate randomness and the output can also be affected by extraneous influences uncontrolled by the composer/performer—the gently mesmerising Pea Soup involves running a signal from an auditorium mike through laptop-mounted phase shifters and filters that modify or delete particular tones in response to accumulating feedback. The sound thus stabilises itself around an automatically self-edited set of tones that sonically characterise the room’s acoustics and respond to ambient sound such as audience noises. At moments, a cellist and a saxophonist add further monotonal material to the mix. Talking Cure is a piece for spoken word, the rise, fall and texture of Collins’ voice triggering piano tones to produce a sound pattern that parallels his speech. These works are an oblique extension of Lucier’s I am Sitting in a Room (1969), in which speech is recorded, played back and re-recorded with the ongoing speech to disrupt verbal intelligibility and respond to the space. In Talking Cure, Collins is translating speech into music and simultaneously generating both verbal and musical meaning. We’re reminded that voice tones are as important as content in conveying the meaning of the spoken word.
In Memoriam Michel Waisvisz involves a small metal box inside which is a tiny circuit board, a 9v battery and a birthday cake candle burning brightly. The flickering of the candle stimulates a light sensor connected to an oscillator, emitting a howling scream whose pitch and intensity are determined by the flicker. For extra effect, a realtime image of the apparatus is projected onto a screen in the auditorium in vivid close-up. There is a post-industrial sculptural beauty about some of Collins’ devices, and there are other works in which he has coupled his sonic gadget with visual effects, for example, using LEDs salvaged from computer games to create new imagery that defeats the narrative of the games and denies player participation.
Collins’ aesthetic lies in balancing human intervention with the automation of sound so as to create an attractive and stimulating musical work. It also arises from the beauty of Chaos theory—the sonic result will be different every time. A composition will not be intended to produce a fixed set of notes, timbres or effects, but will be broadly indeterminate within the range of possibilities inherent in the design of the device and its usage. Indeterminacy is extended through the improvised nature of performance. The aggregated, automated interventions of these musical robots, such as multiple tone editing and phase shifting in response to ambient stimuli, take the form of electromechanical daydreaming—this is a kind of primitive, undirected thought, telling in its implications.
Collins also transcribes his sound works for acoustic ensembles, capturing the timbres, textures and structures of the original in the ensemble’s score while introducing new forms of intervention to create engaging and unpredictable chamber works that have an intense and unique musicality.
This body of work is about accessibility, vernacular materials and participation, questioning the idea of the genius artist/composer. Virtuosity here involves combining the radical and telling disruption of everyday hardware, programmed self-editing and adroit randomisation. Collins’ work is ironic in its postmodern subversion of technology, reminding us of the extent to which new technologies, whose capacities we do not fully understand but which we take for granted, permeate and control our lives. He has recolonised the circuit-board, demystifying and challenging automation and disposability. And he investigates how sound functions and what speech is, addressing the processes of reception, recognition and comprehension of sound and word. The issue of originality and authenticity is another important theme, as he plunders machinery and programs, samples radio transmissions and borrows performative concepts to create new syntheses. The result is conceptually demanding and perversely entertaining, with a powerful current of humour running throughout.
Collins is an articulate and engaging writer and speaker, and his texts, full of joyful anecdotes, form an absorbing personal history of electronic musical experimentation and groundbreaking innovation. Importantly, though, he is a musician, not a techno-geek, and this is seriously interesting music. On his website, you can find recordings, videos and detailed explanations of how the instruments and works were developed. You can download a piece of his software to make your own version of one of his works and there are scores for other works. His book Handmade Electronic Music is on his page and includes instructions on how to solder components and how to make contact mikes and oscillators. You are strongly encouraged to try this at home.
Nicolas Collins, “Collaborations in Sound/Intersections of Science and Art,” University of South Australia, June 11; Works of a Slightly Misused Technology, with cello Jack Ward , saxophone Derek Pascoe, and salvage Seb Tomczak, Christian Haines and the Adelaide Hacking Philharmonic, RiAUS, The Science Exchange, Adelaide, June 12; presented by Elder Conservatorium of Music, University of Adelaide with the Royal Institution of Australia (RiAUS) and the Australian Experimental Art Foundation (AEAF); www.nicolascollins.com.
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 48
© Chris Reid; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
ames Nightingale, Martin Kay, Christina Leonard, Jarrod Whitbourne
photo courtesy New Music Network
ames Nightingale, Martin Kay, Christina Leonard, Jarrod Whitbourne
TWO RECENT CONCERTS IN SYDNEY WERE ILLUSTRATIVE OF THE GROWING RICHES TO BE ENJOYED IN THE CITY’S NEW MUSIC SCENE, FEATURING UNUSUAL INSTRUMENTAL EXPLORATIONS AND A MULTITUDE OF WORKS BY AUSTRALIAN COMPOSERS FROM THE EARLY 80S TO THE PRESENT AND EMBRACING POETRY, MYTH, PHILOSOPHY AND THE AUSTRALIAN LANDSCAPE.
continuum sax & match percussion
Gyorgy Ligeti’s Six Bagatelles (1923-2006) for saxophone quartet is a miracle of invention, revealing the rich, fluent capacities of the instrument in chorus and the virtuosity of the Continuum Sax ensemble. From sublime gallops and Eastern European folk dance riffs to serene high flights over deep burbling waters that recall Ravel to a final cartoony brass band chase, Six Bagatelles (originally from a piano work, then adapted for wind quartet) is driven with rapid, supple gear changes in volume, timbre and mood that make for exhilarating listening.
Margery Smith says in her program note that her Lost Blues for saxophone quartet and percussion duo (2010) was inspired by “the very dirty, cranky blues music of Tom Waits.” You can hear it, particularly in the unusual instrumental and rhythmic juxtapositions—sax, drums, marimba—more experimental than Waits and erupting in one passage into a gliding and warbling eccentric big band sound, followed by a moment of loud high passion and then a brisk resolve.
Mary Finsterer, composer of IONIA for saxophone quartet and percussion (2010), writes that the work is inspired by the sixth century Ionian school of philosophy—“Everything flows, nothing stands still” and a passion for bringing opposites into balance. Of the composition’s structure, Finsterer mentions in particular “small permutating cycles of clearly identifiable material repeating within larger cycles.” These are contrastingly realised across emphatic changes of mood and pace: a lyrical solo saxophone opening passage, a sudden tom-tom-triggered dance, deep staccato saxophones against pulsing marimbas and a sustained episode that builds cumulatively into something curiously like Lully gone wild. On first listening, IONIA suggests a work worth return visits.
Chun Ting Pang’s In Different Spaces for percussion duo (2010) juxtaposes marimba, tom-toms, suspended cymbal and woodblocks in a beautifully textured, evocative exploration of the five elements in Chinese philosophy including “condensation of water on a metal plate” and “wind which helps spread the fire in wood.” The work is highly articulated, sometimes demandingly fast but frequently ethereal. Matthew Hindson’s Song of Life (2007) for solo violin is a short tribute to Father Arthur Bridge, a significant contributor to the commissioning of new works. Natsuko Yoshimoto’s playing was at once precise and passionate for a work that variously evoked 19th century melodiousness, folk music evident in glissandi and brusque stroking, and 20th century angularity, but which resolved into satisfying unsentimental unity.
Brian Howard’s Last Blues for solo violin, saxophone quartet and percussion duo (2008) is a formidable, bracing and beautiful work, and one difficult to do justice to from a first hearing. Conductor Roland Peelman writes in his program note, “From the faintest violin harmonic to the grittiest saxophone texture, Last Blues unfolds not as a sultry dance or as a sad and sentimental song, but as a force of nature where all elements inextricably lead to one single purpose.” The combination of saxophone, violin and percussion is an unusual one (Howard quipped in a pre-performance interview, “sometimes it’s easier to get a weird piece performed”) but very effective, yielding a delicious otherness most felt in the work’s three time-stilling ‘cadenzas.’ If the blues are to be felt anywhere amidst the growl of saxophones, the bowing of vibraphones, the nervous, rapid rattle of percussion and the sudden emotional surges by the ensemble en masse, it is in the violin part, again, exquisitely realised by Natsuko Yoshimoto. Indeed Lost Blues stays with you like the recollection of a concerto, the instrument’s range is widely exploited, and when it sings and the tenor saxophone then soars with it and beyond, the work’s sense of interiority, of aloneness, but also of fragile togetherness is most felt.
halcyon: where the heart is
While not a program of the scale and potency of Extreme Nature (RT93) which featured big, challenging works by Australians Elliott Gyger and Nicolas Vines, Halcyon’s Where The Heart Is, is a program featuring six more Australian works, all fascinating and revealing a rich variety of practice.
Ross Edwards’ Maninya (1981), inspired by the natural environment, comprises hypnotic if rhythmically complex series of apparently meaningless syllables sung by Jenny Duck Chong to Geoffrey Gartner’s talkative cello in passages that evoke lullaby and reverie and closing with a cello jig.
Elliott Gyger’s Petit Testament, like From the Hungry Waiting Country (2006 and soon to be released on CD) in the Extreme Nature program, responds to Australian poetry, here in the form of the last of the Ern Malley hoax poems. Once again Gyger provides Duck Chong and Alison Morgan the opportunity to “highlight one of our particular skills—the illusion of singing ‘as one’ and masquerading as one another” (program note). As Gyger writes, “My setting re-enacts James McAuley’s and Harold Stewart’s dazzling feat of ventriloquism (two real poets masquerading as one fictional poet) in employing two voices to project a single musical lie, slipping unpredictably between unison, heterophony and interior dialogue.” The sopranos dexterously managed the overlaps, sharply articulated modulations and shared sentences while the Stuart & Sons piano (played admirably by Sally Whitwell) provided a resonant other voice, alternately dramatic and ironic, lyrical or ‘going to pieces.’ Gyger aptly evokes both fraudulent excess and the odd beauty of the poem.
One of two highlights of the concert was Andrew Schultz’s To the Evening Star (2009; Best Song Cycle, Paul Lowin Awards), a reflection, writes the composer, on the inner creative life, responding to poems by Yeats, Hopkins, Longfellow, WH Davis and Blake. Yeats dreams lyrically of rural escape while the busy piano suggests both the “bee-loud glade” and “the roadway…the pavements gray.” For Hopkins’ Pied Beauty, Schultz and singer, Alison Morgan, hit the syllables hard and rapidly, evoking excitement at the density of natural riches. Longfellow’s anxiety about a creative life only half fulfilled is rendered emotionally, a soaring complaint, the piano thundering in empathy, while Davies’ Money, O! contrastively celebrates being poor but happy in a vigorous folksy, music theatre idiom. Finally, Blake’s To the Evening Star is a gloriously sung prayer for divine protection framed by piano scoring that seems to embrace the whole of the world, the playing constantly pushing out to the bottom and top-most notes simultaneously until at rest.
Ann Boyd’s Cycle of Love (1981) is in the form of three sung ancient Korean poems and two instrumental interludes (Gartner’s cello and Sally Walker’s flute in exquisite dialogue). For all the meditative Korean and Japanese influences, the compositions are lively, even dramatic and certainly heartfelt in their longing.
The final work, folk singer and musicologist Ruth Lee Martin’s Wimmera Song Cycle (2010), a setting of Kevin Hart’s Wimmera Songs, surprised me with its transparent structure, its deceptively musical theatre character and ease (apt for the uncomplicated syntax of the poet’s finely crafted image-making). Sopranos, cellist, pianist and flautist combined in various permutations to evoke the spread and detail of the land, through moments of delicate observation, pain (“the other silence that fits your head inside a vice”) and the potential for transcendence—“Think like a cloud / Go where the clouds go.”
New Music Network: Continuum Sax and Match Percussion, violin Natsuko Yoshimoto, conductor Roland Peelman, percussion Alison Pratt, Daryl Pratt, soprano saxophone Christina Leonard, alto saxophone James Nightingale, tenor saxophone Martin Kay, baritone saxophone Jarrod Whitbourne; Eugene Goossens Hall, ABC Centre, Sydney, Aug 24; Halcyon, Where the Heart Is…celebrating homegrown music, CarriageWorks, Sydney, Sept 13
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 49
© Keith Gallasch; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
John Addison, Soundstream 2010
photo Cindy Taylor
John Addison, Soundstream 2010
THERE HAVE BEEN INNUMERABLE DEVELOPMENTS AND DEFINING MOMENTS IN THE EVOLUTION OF COMPOSITION AND PERFORMANCE THROUGH THE 20TH AND INTO THE 21ST CENTURIES. SOUNDSTREAM NEW MUSIC FESTIVALS SHOWCASE RARE AND SIGNIFICANT CONTEMPORARY CHAMBER WORKS FROM THIS ERA, AND THE FOUR CONCERTS OF THE MUCH ANTICIPATED 2010 FESTIVAL PRESENTED SOME RADICAL AND DEMANDING WORK, OFTEN ENLIGHTENING, SOMETIMES INTENSE AND SOMETIMES LIGHT-HEARTED. IN MANY, THE EMPHASIS WAS ON TIMBRE AND HARMONICS, TEACHING US TO FORGET TIME AND FOCUS ON THE SOUND IN THE MOMENT—TO REALLY EXPERIENCE MUSIC.
the visionaries
The first concert, The Visionaries, opened with distinguished Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin’s Hommage à Chopin (1983) for four pianos, played superbly by Anna Goldsworthy, Jonathon Heng, Deborah Ng and Gabriella Smart. The inclusion of this work celebrated the 200th anniversary of Chopin’s birth and acted as a gateway to the festival. Proceeding from fragments of Chopin’s introspective Prelude in C minor No. 28 Op.20, this is a thickly layered and extroverted work of multi-voiced variations on Chopin themes that blends the romantic with the modernist sublime and group pianism with solo virtuosity.
This diverse concert included Adelaide composer Andrew Wiering’s Vortex (2006) for six percussionists, a powerful orchestration of percussive forces ably led by Wiering on timpani; Sydney-based Katia Tiutiunnik’s To the Enemy (2005), a striking setting of a contemporary poem by Eva Salzman for soprano (Sidonie Henbest) and two percussionists (Wiering and Nick Parnell); and Smart’s seductive performance of the third movement of Canadian composer Howard Bashaw’s structurally complex Minimalisms II (2005).
Pianists joined percussionists for The Visionaries concert centrepiece, the 1953 revision of George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique. The logistically challenging 1924 original was intended to accompany a Dadaist film and was scored for 16 player pianos, sirens, aeroplane propellers, electric bells and extensive percussion as well as conventional pianos. This version, for just four pianists (Smart, Goldsworthy, Ng and Heng) and six percussionists (the Vortex Ensemble), with the siren and propeller sounds rendered through a sampler (John Addison), shifts the focus from visual or electromechanical spectacle to the musicality of the composition. With its multiple competing lines of sound, forceful rhythms and dynamics and urgent pace, Antheil’s high-energy work dramatically evokes modern industrial society. Under the direction of Roland Peelman, this performance electrified the eager audience.
ensemble offspring: the spectralists
On Friday, Ensemble Offspring gave us The Spectralists, a concert on the theme of Spectralist composition in which the analysis of the timbral or harmonic spectrum of a sound is used as the basis for composition or musical language. Spectral composition gained prominence in the 1970s especially through Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail, and the concert opened with Murail’s Thirteen Colours of the Setting Sun (1978), a classic of the genre. Scored here for flute, clarinet, piano, violin and cello, it explores the harmonics surrounding a single high-pitched note and takes the emerging tones in new directions. With reduced rhythmic emphasis, the result is cosmically dreamy, nakedly revealing the timbral character of the instruments. By contrast, Gérard Grisey’s absorbing Talea (1986) alternates loud attack with quiet passages in swirling patterns that evolve as they are repeated.
This concert also premiered Australian violinist James Cuddeford’s enchanting KOAN I (2010), in two movements for flute, clarinet, violin and cello, a musical representation of an insoluble riddle, seeking philosophical resolution musically and ending questioningly. Also revealing the influence of Eastern philosophy were works by Giacinto Scelsi and Claude Vivier. Scelsi’s exquisite Ko-Lho (1966) for flute and clarinet is a meditative exploration of the sonic blend that emerges from the two instruments as they dwell on one pitch. Sounding at times like a single instrument, they produce densely woven microtones and overtones, requiring virtuosic playing to generate the required colouring. Similarly, Vivier’s Pièce pour Violon et Clarinette (1975) involves a simple melodic line played by both instruments and repeated with digressions to create a distinctive timbral compound. Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho extends these ideas in her Cendres (“ashes”; 1998), which blends the contrasting characteristics of the flute, cello and piano into a complex sonic tableau. The appeal of such work lies in the blend of melodic linearity and harmonic density, and you listen to each sound as an evolving entity. Ensemble Offspring was outstanding, combining sustained control of tone colour with excellent ensemble playing, and this knockout concert was an education in the genre.
brian ritchie trio: the rebels
In the Brian Ritchie Trio’s early Saturday night concert, The Rebels—former Violent Femmes bassist and shakuhachi master Ritchie, pianist Tom Vincent and bassist Leigh Barker—gave us their hybrid musical form that draws on the ethereal, meditative grace of the shakuhachi and the syncopated rhythms of jazz. The highlights were a new rendition of John Cage’s Ryoanji and scintillating re-workings of pieces by John Coltrane and Free Jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler. The result was hypnotic, balanced towards one or other musical tradition to suit the work.
john addison, the larrikins
Late Saturday night, John Addison presented The Larrikins, a technically demanding concert for solo cello, opening with Sydney composer Alex Pozniak’s Mercurial (2009), a gestural work of huge dynamics and writhing, neck-length glissandi that requires both tactility and theatrical athleticism of the performer. Addison, a star of last year’s Soundstream Festival, collaborates with composers, and a workshop he gave generated Pozniak’s work as well as Luke Altmann’s Somniloquy (2010), which brilliantly evokes the troubled sleepwalker, and Kat McGuffie’s wryly engaging The Tune is Out There (2010). The latter begins with a parody of the opening of Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, segues into fragments of Fly Me to the Moon, the Jaws theme, Dvorak’s 9th Symphony and Stairway to Heaven, and ends with a Deep Purple riff with the cello held horizontally and strummed. In an ABC radio interview, Addison suggested that so-called extended playing techniques “are just techniques.” Composers now draw on a broader range of these, so it’s actually composition that’s being extended. An eloquent and captivating performer, his approach is refreshing the cello aesthetic.
Addison continued with New York composer Toby Twining’s slow, mournful 9/11 Blues (2001), whose shrill harmonics suggest electric guitar feedback, and Brisbane-based Stephen Stanfield’s emotional and introverted A Lenient Me (2010). He concluded with a gem, Tatata (1998), for tape and cello by Dutch composer Jacob ter Veldhuis (aka Jacob TV), which includes the morphed recording of an old soldier singing “ta ta ta” rhythmically repeated over the cello line, and ending with the voice of Apollinaire sampled from an old phono disc.
Soundstream Festivals greatly support local composition and Gabriella Smart’s informed artistic direction is expanding our musical awareness. The ABC’s comprehensive coverage of these vital festivals is a welcome development.
Soundstream Adelaide New Music Festival 2010: Anna Goldsworthy, Jonathon Heng, Deborah Ng, Gabriella Smart; Vortex Ensemble; Sidonie Henbest; Ensemble Offspring, conductor Roland Peelman; Brian Ritchie Trio; John Addison; artistic director Gabriella Smart; ABC Studio 520, Adelaide, Aug 26–28
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 50
© Chris Reid; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
From Yia Yia’s song, Kate Murphy (with Basil Hogios), 2010, Digital video still, Multi-channel HD video and sound installation
Courtesy Kate Murphy and BREENSPACE, Sydney
From Yia Yia’s song, Kate Murphy (with Basil Hogios), 2010, Digital video still, Multi-channel HD video and sound installation
“ONE OF THE ASPECTS OF COMING INTO THE SPACE FOR THE FIRST TIME THAT’S REALLY EXCITING FOR ARTISTS IS ITS SCALE AND ITS DEPTH OF HISTORY AND THE WAY THINGS RESONATE IN THIS ENVIRONMENT.” PERFORMANCE SPACE ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR AND CURATOR BEC DEAN IS TALKING ABOUT CARRIAGEWORKS, THE VAST AND LABYRINTHINE POST-INDUSTRIAL BUILDING THAT HAS BEEN THE LONG RUNNING ORGANISATION’S RECENT HOME SINCE 2007.
By now this admittedly atypical exhibition space is a familiar one among the Sydney arts community. But as I sit down with Dean to hear more about their upcoming visual arts program, Nightshifters, it’s clear the company’s commitment to finding new ways to engage audiences with the space remains strong.
An exhibition of moving image works from eight of Australia’s leading video and media artists to take place over 10 days in November during the Live Live season including the four days of the LiveWorks Festival (p35), Nightshifters may just prove Performance Space’s most ambitious installation on the site to date. For the first time, the exhibition will be geared around evening viewing, capturing “the idea of the night shift, the changeover of stewardship and the replacement of one set of realities with another,” as Dean describes it. “Sometimes I feel privileged to wander around this building in the dark when everything is closed down and I guess I wanted to share that with audiences.”
For Dean, this means not only extending viewing hours but also getting visitors out beyond the usual spatial confines as well as offering artists an opportunity to create new site-specific works. “I was interested not so much in that wallpaper technique of video on architecture but actually having the artists engage with all facets of the site,” she says. As such, artists are responding to “the environment of the former Eveleigh Railyards, its histories and its manifestation in the present,” according to the program’s media release. However, Dean is quick to point out the site-specificity of the program isn’t intended to produce literal responses.
insect life
“I haven’t been didactic or prescriptive about that at all, it’s not a heritage project. So some artists have consciously made an engagement with the site’s history while other artists have worked with the transformation of the site as it is today. Angelica Mesiti, for example, has developed a project that has really engaged with how nature has taken over quite a large part of the Eveleigh Railyards, and so she is looking at making a work that is kind of like an epidiascope. She’s researching a way of attracting insects and bringing them into a real time, light and shadow-based work rather than a pre-edited video. So she is consciously working in a different way to the practice that she is becoming well-known for and taking a chance on an experiment, which is very exciting for me.”
Mesiti, who also works as a member of collaborative art group The Kingpins, is set to join a cast of artists who variously blur the boundaries between performance and the visual arts. Cinematographer Cordelia Beresford, video artist Sam James (p54) and the now Australian-based Belgian artist Alexis Destoop, for example, each bring with them strong histories of engaging with dance and experimental performance in their work. Kate Murphy will be collaborating with composer, music producer and sound designer Basil Hogios on Yia Yia’s song, which will contain multiple audio channels and is intended to be unsynchronised so that it can be experienced as a different score each time. A floor-based multi-screen projection by Eugenia Raskopoulos will poetically intertwine culture, history and language while John Tonkin and Dominic Redfern are set to imaginatively respond to architectural features spanning narrow passageways and mechanical drive shafts.
in the cracks
And where some, like Mesiti, are casting a glance well beyond the CarriageWorks interior others will transform close-range observations of the site into performative translations. “Sam James has done a lot of work with us over the years as a videographer, so it is really great to be working with him as an artist in his own right,” says Dean. “He has really focused in on these tiny spaces, the imperfections in the material of the space, the intersection of cracks in the concrete with train tracks and other parts of the environment that have that layered age to them. He is working on a multi-channel work and none of the images will be more than 45cm wide, so audiences will have to seek them out in this huge space. Collaborating with Georgie Read, who is a performer and has worked with Sam on many occasions, he will be bringing a figurative dimension into these tiny spaces and apertures.”
nightworkers
With a growing number of arts venues across Sydney now being housed in post-industrial conversions, it is easy to become cynical about the apparent fetishisation of these spaces. Yet this neglects the significant mediating role architecture has to play in our culture, especially when built structures are among the few tangible remnants of a past that still demands to be grappled with. One of the first artists Dean approached for this program was Cordelia Beresford, who will be exhibiting a work filmed at Cockatoo Island, a site that shares some affinity with the CarriageWorks space. Titled Night Shift, the film follows a security guard on the island portrayed by Indigenous performer Djakapurra Munyarryun. The synopsis sets out the action: “in the dead of the night he does his rituals. He listens and observes the space; aware of its history, seeking a conversation with what remains.”
reawakenings
This impulse to connect with the past arguably becomes easily submerged in everyday life and requires reawakening. And while daylight brings with it a rush forward to greet the future, evening offers pause to reflect. The spaces around us can become vehicles for such reflection, provoking an awareness of evolutions and accretions over time, something Dean has experienced first hand from her own observations of the Eveleigh site. “Since I was successful in finding the funding for this project, a lot has changed onsite. More spaces have been bulldozed or fenced-off.” Dean feels that Nightshifters is an opportunity “to try to engage with the place before it is changed irrevocably.”
Nightshifters, curator Bec Dean, artists Cordelia Beresford, Alexis Destoop, Sam James, Kate Murphy, Angelica Mesiti, Eugenia Raskopoulos, Dominic Redfern, John Tonkin; Performance Space, CarriageWorks, Sydney, Nov 4-14
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 51
© Ella Mudie; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Alison and Bridget Currie, Three Ways to Hold
photo courtesy the artists
Alison and Bridget Currie, Three Ways to Hold
THERE’S A FLUCTUATION BETWEEN CARE AND NOT QUITE CARE THAT FLOWS THROUGH THE PERFORMANCES OF THREE WAYS TO HOLD THAT IS INITIALLY DISCONCERTING. AN ATTENTION TO DETAIL—COLOUR COORDINATED SNEAKER LACES, AN OVER CAREFUL FUSSINESS IN THE LAYING OUT OF CANVAS DROP SHEETS THAT COVER THE GALLERY FLOOR—COUPLES WITH A DELIBERATE CARELESSNESS AS SHEETS ARE BUNDLED AND DROPPED, LEFT WHERE THEY LIE.
The impatient shuffling of the audience out of the way in Fold and the performer’s pernickety attention to the arrangement of objects as they’re bundled into a giant sack in Collect—as if it really matters how things are done—is seriocomic, an absurd rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic activity. Yet it’s the vacillation between these moments and states of attention that draws the audience’s notice to the things that really do matter in the work.
Three ways to hold creates and demands a certain type of attentiveness over the arc of its four performances. As each performance slides between attentive states and moments, so it asks for a dual kind of attention and noticing, a specific type of refined observation as it brings intangible processes under our consideration. Each performance is named after an action—Fold, Lift, Prop and Collect—and as each becomes a performative enquiry these concerns are played out in the interaction of volume, mass, weight and space and their transformation through the performers’ actions.
In creating a closed system where the base materials are introduced in the first performance and remain in the space til the last, the possibility of novelty is removed and our attention concentrated on these formal processes of activation, recombination and change in an evolving space of forces and relations.
This concern with the activation of space and transformation of forms is one pursued by both artists in their discrete practices as visual artist and dancer. Here, these individual preoccupations are brought together and refined in a piece that deftly conducts a subtle and intelligent dissection of intangible states and an exercise in extending our awareness.
Appearing sometimes coolly cerebral, at others, Three ways to hold reveals a gentle sense of the absurd. In pastel costumes complete with knee and elbow pads, the performers Alison and Bridget Currie become super heroes or terrestrial trapeze artists underscoring a sly humour and the sense of effort brought to bear in the constant reshaping of their small enclosed world.
Fold is an exercise in expansion and contraction of volume serendipitously aided by the size of the first night crowd. Barely able to be seen at first, the performers dart outside and back in carrying slabs, blocks and wedges of polystyrene. Taking canvas sheets from laundry trugs the performers almost impatiently shake these out and lay them on the floor, adjusting them with that fussy carefulness. Edges are butted together and folds smoothed out as the space is covered with the canvas’s enlarging surface. In a neat reciprocity of action as the canvas expands, the crowd contracts—forces in motion. Almost as soon as the floor is covered, the performers turn to transforming the flat canvas into compact stacks of folded cloth. Gathered and pleated, fabric rolled between fingers to bring corners into alignment, the sheets are folded. Switching between this over-carefulness and almost carelessness we are made aware of the intent and effect of each action as each dense slab of stuff hits the floor.
The four performances create a durational arc over as many weeks. Objects are left where they fall at the end of each performance, suspended in a state of flux so that time is stretched out, so that attention is slowed to a state where notice can be taken of the invisible forces at play.
In Lift, the heaps of folded cloth form a vestigial history of Fold. It begins with the performers urgently making constructions out of polystyrene blocks, running and lifting each block above their heads in a comic show of strength and ending with a frantic game of tag across the space, palms slapping the walls. As Alison dances and feints boxer-like around the space, Bridget shakes out each cloth, giving it a weightlifter’s clean and jerk before placing it around Alison’s neck like the proverbial boxer’s towel. There’s comical huffing as this continues, yet as the heap accumulates the weight is palpable and it becomes a question of resistance and endurance rather than force. Finally, Alison, with real effort, throws off the sheets so they lie disordered again on the gallery floor.
This play of force is directed inwards and slowed almost to inaction over the seven hours of Prop with the artists developing intense attention to the effect of every action as one performer takes responsibility for the other in the literal and constantly modified act of propping. Prop becomes an intense meditation on cause, effect and responsibility.
It’s into the remnants of Prop, the blocks and wedges of foam and heaped sheets that the audience for Collect gathers. There’s no seeming diminution of the audience and it appears that attention can be sustained over this arching space of time. Bridget and Alison collect up all the wedges, blocks and slabs, bundle away the sheets and stack them into their ever expanding bag. One holds the bag open while the other arranges and rearranges things, compacting them, fitting them together. As it grows weightier, they drag their sack around the space, lifting, folding, fitting.
Tying off the neck of this amorphous robbers’ swag neatly shuts down the performance and this careful system that has been created and investigated over time. Our attention has been sustained and now lingers on a system of things folded, lifted, transformed and put away.
Alison Currie’s show 42a, “an interactive space where the audience itself affects the display and presentation, purely by where they stand, where they move to and what they do,” has toured to Sydney and Brisbane and will be at Melbourne’s Fortyfive Downstairs October 12-23
Three ways to hold (fold, lift, prop and collect), created and performed by Alison Currie and Bridget Currie, costume design Gemma Stocks, SASA Gallery, Adelaide, Aug 11-Sept 3.
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 52
© Jemima Kemp; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Modes of Misunderstanding, 2010, video still, Samuel James
image courtesy the artists
Modes of Misunderstanding, 2010, video still, Samuel James
IT IS AXIOMATIC THAT ARTWORKS VIEWED BY CRITICS UNDERGO CERTAIN TRANSMUTATIONS IN THEIR RECALL. IN THAT SENSE WE ARE NEVER REVIEWING ART, ONLY OUR MEMORIES OF ART. THEIR TRANSMUTATIONS WILL BE SHOT THROUGH WITH OUR OWN IDIOSYNCRATIC EXPERIENCES, KNOWLEDGE, OBSESSIONS AND DESIRES. BUT BEYOND NEURO-CHEMISTRY, BEYOND SUBJECTIVITY, THERE IS A KIND OF INTEGRITY WHICH MUST GO BACK TO THE WORK ITSELF. MOST SIMPLY, WE CAN SAY, I TRUST THIS. OR NOT.
In Samuel James’ Modes of Misunderstanding I & II, two large projections on the wall alternate between a farmer striding across a dry paddock towards the camera and a group of performers staggering through the bush in a state of amused disorientation. The farmer, initially a distant dot on a vast expanse of cracked earth, approaching with the inevitability of weather, recalls tropes as various as Bill Viola’s shimmering quasi-Biblical figures and Australian news reports of drought. It’s such a familiar image, in fact, that I disregard it at first. The bush, a section of coastal dune forest at Bundeena, is lush and intimate, the trees perhaps small paperbarks. While one performer touches a tree inquisitively, another falls about laughing. They are lost, but they’re having fun. Beside these, doubled as well— reflection upon reflection—are small videos filmed on rock shelves across which the comedy of the lost souls trails also. With the faintest reproductive interference, the place resembles a lunar landscape.
Belgian choreographer Hans van den Broeck, who directed these group performances, wanted to do a piece that showed these people relating to the landscape. James’ take is that as middle-class whites who live in the city, the notion of them having a connection to the bush is risible: indeed, van den Broeck’s wish can seem like a typical naïve foreigner’s bucolic fantasy about Australia. In this sense the farmer and his arid paddock are endgame. But James’ wit and ingenuity offer a more open view, in spite of himself: there is a connection of sorts taking place here: fumbling, uncertain, insistent. In whatever fashion, these people are a part of this place.
In the next room is Amygdala: Fear Conditioning, the centrepiece in a way, conceptually if nothing else, because the amygdala is the structure in our brain that processes emotion and anxiety, and it is the expression of this process that underpins all James’ work here. Fear also is noted as the driving force behind the performances. Some of us will remember the originals from which archival footage was reanimated and projected onto screens of different sizes suspended throughout the room. Often the performers are completely disembodied: Brian Fuata’s face stares out from a tree trunk; Julie Vulcan’s from somewhere else. A face in a cow, opening, closing, who is it? Martin del Amo’s body judders in freeze frame, then continues its spiralling leap, and I remember Under Attack (not the live performance: a video of). Sometimes the soundtrack synchs perfectly with the images, as in a vignette of Rosie Dennis, which imparts a strong sense of claustrophobia. Here, as elsewhere, as deconstructed as the footage is, it retains the spirit of the performance. Indeed, the strength of these video works as a whole is the maintenance of their connection to their primary human resource: all technical wizardry is in service to this.
808.838/grandfather paradox, Ms&Mr
image courtesy the artists
808.838/grandfather paradox, Ms&Mr
The same can be said of Ms & Mr’s 808.838 / grandfather paradox, where the dialogue between this collaborative couple binds the work with warmth and humour. The title relates to time travel, wherein the conundrum of going back in time to delete a life or an event, thereby changing your own present so that you cannot do this, remains unsolvable.
Mr’s late grandfather shimmers on a screen facing the entrance. Bearded and naked from the waist up, in advanced middle age, he seems to be standing in water. The image is static, but alive. In diptych is a baby’s face—Mr—in close up, looking towards the grandfather. This old super 8 footage is played with: eyedrops are administered to the baby, whose expression hovers between fear and wonder. And Mr, the artist as he is now, leans down over his grandfather, and pumping his chest, attempts to resuscitate him.
Other elements balance the installation: a rocket shaped screen and one in the shape of a baby in a nappy, on which are projected a litany of images endless and chaotic. From the ceiling hangs a long copper cable—or is it a placenta?—that droops down into a thick coil on the ground. The world, a blank white globe, also receives projections. The space as a whole, as in James’ Amygdala, is used to its full potential in showing how these elements play off one another. Grandfather paradox is an eerie, mesmerising work, deeply personal, with the amniotically ambivalent feel of being trapped, or held, in time/technology/space, or simply in relation to another.
My only qualm was that James’ Amygdala was installed in such a way that did not invite the audience right in. Hovering at the doorway gave one a good, but limited view. On opening night, however, we stepped right inside the work, encouraged no doubt by the size of the crowd pressing into the room. (“Notice how much more fun opening night is”, someone remarked to me, “when it’s full of performance artists?”) The installation from the inside was enriched, apposite: silhouettes of punters’ heads animated some screens. The projections, changing as you walked through them, refracted yet again (perhaps due to the layout of the room, and unavoidable).
Unfortunately I am reviewing this show after it has closed, so if you didn’t go you won’t get to see it. All you will have to go by is the divergent memories of those who did see it. Trust me, Amygdala—Fear Conditioning, Modes of Misunderstanding I & II, and 808.838 / grandfather paradox added up to one of the richest, most stimulating experiences I have had at Artspace in years.
Samuel James, Amygdala—Fear Conditioning, Modes of Misunderstanding I & II; Ms & Mr, 808.838 / grandfather paradox; Artspace, Sydney, Aug 13-Sept 10
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 54
© Fiona McGregor; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Mindbox, Humatic, SEAM 2010
photo Jürgen Lösel
Mindbox, Humatic, SEAM 2010
seamlessly: action & image
SEAM explores the very latest in technological engagement with performance and the ways that the relationships between art, science and audience are being reconfigured, yielding innovation and “breaking down established distinctions between performer and audience, and between rehearsal and performance” (Press release). Comprising workshops, exhibits and a symposium, SEAM is a collaboration between Margie Medlin, director of Sydney’s Critical Path, Garth Paine of the University of Western Sydney’s VIPRE Lab (Virtual Interactive Performance Research Environment) and UTS.
SEAM 2010—Agency and Action, a public symposium at the Seymour Centre, will include a keynote address from Stelarc, the exhibition of his Articulated Head and other interactive installations. The impressive roster of presenters includes Ruth Gibson (UK), Frederic Bevilacqua (IRCAM, France), Volker Kulchmeister (Germany), Christian Ziegler (Germany), Simon Biggs (UK) and Sue Hawksley (UK), collectively representing some of the more important developments in the contemporary integration of technology and performance in their work with leading artists.
The organisers write that they wish to provide “a resource-rich, stimulating environment for local dancers, choreographers and media artists to interact with local and international leaders in the field of interactive technologies and allied arts disciplines. We want dancers and choreographers to take away with them a raft of new tools, new knowledge, philosophical and performance frameworks, contacts and possible future partnerships in the creation of new or more profound directions within their contemporary choreographic practice.” SEAM 2010—Action & Agency; Public Symposium, Seymour Centre, Oct 15, 16; for workshops and exhibitions see http://seam2010.blogspot.com/p/about-seam2010.html
glow fires again
Chunky Move’s Glow (RT78) has had a long, successful life touring the world, illuminating the possibilities of bringing together dance and interactive media: it now makes a welcome return to Sydney as part of SEAM 2010. This deeply engaging, visceral short work was the first of two Chunky Move collaborations with German interactive video artist Frieder Weiss [RT84]; the second was the full-length work Mortal Engine.
In Glow the audience peer deep down into the dark at a still form that suddenly convulses into life, scattering about it brimming light, staccato geometries and threatening shadows. What makes Glow, a disturbing evocation of evolution and emergence, doubly exciting is that the light is triggered and controlled by the dancer’s movements making light and movement eerily seamless. Chunky Move, Glow, Seymour Centre, Oct 13-16, http://sydney.edu.au/seymour/season/glow.shtml
dream realised: maricor & maricar
Among the the British Council’s five Realise Your Dream scholarship winners this year are Sydney-based designers Maricor and Maricar Malano, twin sisters who have worked for the agency Mathematics, “producing video clips for bands including Architecture in Helsinki for whom they hand-sewed scores of embroidered characters which were later animated” (press release). In the UK they hope to engage with Partizan Lab and Studio AKA and do short technical courses at Central St Martin’s College. As well as introductions, the scholarship provides air travel and $8,000 spending money. Other winners include Melbourne-based theatre maker Samara Hersch, Adelaide theatre director Geordie Brookman and Alice Gage, founding editor of Ampersand Magazine. www.britishcouncil.org
unbelievable yet true
Not In A Million Years is the title of the much anticipated new work from Sydney’s Force Majeure about “almost unbelievable—yet true—stories of people who have survived, endured and created extraordinary experiences during their life time.” Created by the company’s artistic leaders Kate Champion, Roz Hervey and Geoff Cobham, the work will be performed by Vincent Crowley, Sarah Jayne Howard, Elizabeth Ryan and Joshua Tyler. The stories have been plucked from around the world: a man wakes from a coma in Buffalo, USA; a NSW paraglider rides above a storm higher than Everest; in Mexico, “an unlikely athlete sets the greatest track and field record of all time”; and in Scotland a woman’s life is ruined by a lottery win. As ever with Force Majeure it will be through movement and innovative design that these stories will be powerfully realised. Force Majeure, Not In A Million Years, CarriageWorks, Sydney, Nov 17-27, carriageworks.com.au
bold, black, brilliant
That’s the title of the Ilbijerri Theatre Company’s retrospective exhibition, which is currently on display at the Bunjilika Aboriginal Cultural Centre at Melbourne Museum. The exhibition marks the 20th anniversary of Ilbijerri, which was created by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists in Melbourne in response to seeing non-indigenous theatre companies telling Indigenous stories. From the breakthrough production of Jane Harrison’s Stolen, commissioned in 1992, to the upcoming world premiere of Jack Charles v The Crown (a collaboration between the actor and the playwright John Romeril) at the Melbourne International Arts Festival, the company has toured nationally and internationally, finding resonance and critical acclaim with Indigenous and non-indigenous audiences alike.
The retrospective gives visitors a behind-the-scenes look at life in the theatre company through objects including sets, props and photography from Ilbijerri productions. It’s being displayed alongside From Little Things Big Things Grow, an exhibition about Aboriginal activism in Australia between 1920 and 1970.
20 Years: Bold. Black. Brilliant., curator Ben McKeown,?Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre, Melbourne Museum, July 9-Oct 31; http://museumvictoria.com.au/melbournemuseum/
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 55
© RealTime ; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Rennie McDougall, Jorijn Vriesendorp, Mix Tape
photo Heidrun Löhr
Rennie McDougall, Jorijn Vriesendorp, Mix Tape
AFTER BYRON PERRY, ANTONY HAMILTON AND MICHELLE HEAVEN, STEPHANIE LAKE IS THE FOURTH YOUNG DANCER TO PRESENT A FULL-LENGTH CHOREOGRAPHY UNDER THE AUSPICES OF CHUNKY MOVE IN THEIR NEXT MOVE SERIES. A SPECTACULAR DANCER, LAKE TOO IS AN ARTIST WHO HAS CLOSELY COLLABORATED WITH GIDEON OBARZANEK AND LUCY GUERIN, HAVING OVER THE YEARS CONTRIBUTED TO MANY OF THEIR MOST ACCLAIMED WORKS.
Lake’s previous short works have been charming and soulful miniatures exploring banality: displays of physical affection, emotional reverberations of pop music, everyday language—all important ingredients of Mix Tape, which purports to be a study of love. This is unheroic, unremarkable love, built out of banal language and humdrum gestures (such as, indeed, making a mix tape). Lake builds the work out of three distinct elements: audio recordings of interviews about love, pop songs (spanning Bob Dylan and Joanna Newsom, Caribou and Fleetwood Mac), and the bodies of four dancers (invariably young, slim and petite). The stage is domestic, but minimal: a bookshelf filled with tapes and music players, including an old reel-to-reel, and suitcases full of clothes. The effect is resolutely homey, verging on agoraphobic. It is not merely the setting that is domestic: the performers linger on stage, lying down and changing costume, inhabiting it as their private space.
The movement energetically illustrates some of the conflicting emotions brought up in the accompanying recorded interviews and songs: two couples interlock in intimate embraces, planting small kisses in hidden spots, while at other times bodies are helplessly flung about or confront each other in violent fights. Lake shows great ability to create beauty out of everyday motifs (in particular, she uses the vocabulary of domestic affection to great effect), but the choreography is greatly indebted to Guerin: from tiny but swift hand and facial gestures, through loose and less articulate movements of the torso, down to strong reliance on domestic gadgets as catalysts of choreography, mirroring duets and the predominance of 45-degree spatial relationships. The semi-documentary nature of the work displays the influence of Obarzanek’s methodology, but without his editing discipline.
Most troubling, however, I found the choice of performers. Is it possible to illustrate the possibilities of physical affection on such a narrow range of bodies? The voices in songs and interviews were greatly more varied. I longed to see the complex emotions they expressed developed by wiser, older bodies whose lived experience would allow them to express some of the subtle complexity of long-haul love. The second problem is numerical. Two couples can represent neither the universal exceptionality of a single couple, nor the diversity of a multitude—at best, they seem to represent a parochial range of, say, ‘me and my friends’.
The merely illustrative nature of the choreography rarely pulls the interviews and the songs into focus: as a result, spoken word seems to hold more meaning than it necessarily ought. The individual introspective revelations are skimmed through, and yet the work never builds into a sociological study either. It rambles, rather, remaining charming but fragmentary, its shape never rising above a sort of list of different things we might say about love. It is difficult subject matter, on which everything has been said many times over—including within dance. The dangers of falling into glibness and pure cliché are enormous, and Mix Tape only occasionally avoids these. While Lake’s approach, equally open to sentimentality and to sociology, is intriguing, it requires greater structure and critical distance to succeed.
Chunky Move, Next Move: Mix Tape, direction, choreography Stephanie Lake, performers Sara Black, Rennie McDougall, Timothy Ohl, Jorijn Vriesendorp, lighting design Benjamin Cisterne, Blubottle, sound design Luke Smiles–motion laboratories, costume design Harriet Oxley; Chunky Move Studios, Sept 2-11
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 31
© Jana Perkovic; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Wasana Dixon, Indigenous & Social Circus Skills Workshop
photo Simone O’Brien
Wasana Dixon, Indigenous & Social Circus Skills Workshop
While we think of visual art, music and now film as forms in which Aboriginal artists have had great success (if not always enjoying the benefits), theatre and dance have been more problematic. We admire Bangarra Dance Theatre, but it’s the only professional contemporary Aboriginal dance company in the country. In theatre, Perth’s Yirra Yaakin has survived a difficult period with a proud 15-year record, but Brisbane’s Kooemba Jdarra now appears only intermittently. Ilbijerri continues to produce significant work, presenting Jack Charles v The Crown with the Melbourne International Arts Festival and staging an exhibition of its 20 years at the Melbourne Museum (see in the loop). But are there sufficient opportunities for Aboriginal performers, established and emerging? Last year there was heated debate over Wesley Enoch’s proposal for a national Indigenous theatre as a means for coherently developing Aboriginal theatre. Since then he has been appointed Artistic Director of the Queensland Theatre Company, but how much Aboriginal work will he feel he can program? Training is another key issue. The Aboriginal Centre for the Performing Arts in Brisbane (RT98) and the NAISDA Dance College in Karlong (NSW) provide important opportunities, but in physical theatre and circus, if you can’t get into the National Institute of Circus Arts (NICA, Melbourne) and live in remote parts of Australia, what can you do? Simone O’Brien’s report on Heads Up at CarriageWorks reveals a considered and serious attempt to galvanise Indigenous and social circus artists, projects and companies across the country into a supportive network, not only to build careers but also a sense of community, dignity and purpose. Also significant is the need for dialogue between Aboriginal artists: Performance Space’s Indigelab (Oct 28-Nov 5) offers just that. Led by Wesley Enoch, it is designed for “Indigenous artists…keen to develop and extend languages to talk about their practice and in particular issues of cultural identity in relation to interdisciplinary practice.” Other opportunities include cross-cultural collaborations evident in Marrugeku’s considerable body of work and the Elcho Island-Nigel Jamieson collaboration, Ngurrumilmarrmiriyu (Wrong Skin). The major theatre companies also have a role to play: in the 2011 Sydney Theatre Company season, Bangarra’s Stephen Page and director Wayne Blair have united to create Bloodland to be performed in Yolgnu and pidgin, with traditional and contemporary movement and with well-known Aboriginal performers and Yolgnu people.The value of opportunities to come together, to share, to train, to talk, cannot be underestimated.
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 1
© Keith Gallasch; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Indigenous and Social Circus Skills Workshop
photo Simone O’Brien
Indigenous and Social Circus Skills Workshop
OVER 50 INDIGENOUS AND COMMUNITY CIRCUS ARTISTS FROM ALL OVER AUSTRALIA GATHERED AT CARRIAGEWORKS, SYDNEY IN JULY TO ATTEND HEADS UP 2010, THE FIRST NATIONAL INDIGENOUS AND SOCIAL CIRCUS CONFERENCE AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROJECT. PHYSICAL THEATRE PERFORMER, WRITER AND DIRECTOR SIMONE O’BRIEN WAS ONE OF THE ORGANISING COMMITTEE. REALTIME ASKED HER TO REPORT ON THIS SIGNIFICANT EVENT FOR INDIGENOUS PERFORMERS.
An exciting array of circus and physical theatre artists was brought together for the first time by Heads Up 2010, united by their passion for gutsy, raw and determined circus and physical theatre. Over the week, rising stars and established luminaries gathered to learn skills, develop material and create a showcase performance, Flying, which opened the weekend conference.
The depth of raw talent and finely tuned skills among these emerging and established circus artists was as huge as the geographical divide and the distances travelled to overcome it. Artists participating included Blackrobat from Koranda in far northern Queensland, who are one of Australia’s longest running Indigenous acrobatic troupes; two of the young Chooky Dancers from Elcho Island; Broome’s Sandfly Circus; Lismore’s Creative People’s Collective; Slippry Sirkus from Wauchope, NSW; Circus Monoxide, Wollongong; senior students from Airds High, NSW; Aerialize, Sydney; the Flying Fruit Fly Circus; Vulcana Women’s Circus, Brisbane; Westside Circus, Melbourne; Circus Ruccis, Melbourne; and Slipstream Circus from Ulverston, Tasmania. There were independent artists such as Louise Moriarty who has run many projects in Broken Hill, some in partnership with Cirque du Monde and the National Institute of Circus Arts (NICA); Jill Watkins from Gunnedah, NSW; Ira Seidenstein, Mikayla Anderson, Natano Fa’anana and Donna Carstens from Brisbane; Felicity Horsley from Melbourne and Nellie Simpson and Michael Smith from Perth.
Many of these artists also spoke at the weekend conference attesting to the incredible benefits of social circus programs. They gave moving accounts of their personal and professional experiences in making profound differences to young people’s lives. One stand out example is the story of Michael Smith and Nellie Simpson.
Larissa Deak and David Clarkson, Indigenous & Social Skills Workshop
photo Simone O’Brien
Larissa Deak and David Clarkson, Indigenous & Social Skills Workshop
talent in the long-term
Michael Smith is a rising Indigenous dance and circus star from Western Australia, currently studying second year dance at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA). He was 10 when he met Nellie Simpson, a circus artist at a pilot community circus project in Hilton, a suburb of Perth largely populated by Indigenous people and older generations of war veterans. Michael became an immediate circus enthusiast and, as the project grew, he became an instrumental link between Nellie and the community, travelling in the van with her as she collected kids to take to the project, providing helpful information about people’s whereabouts and family situations.
Nelllie Simpson’s holistic approach to her work was a source of inspiration for Michael as he felt that he was engaged in something more than just a project, that he was part of a philosophy. Many of the artists at the conference agreed on the importance of long term and holistic approaches in effecting real change; as Nellie put it, “Change happens slowly and over time.” Inevitably, questions about sustainability arise when looking at long-term strategic development and ongoing support for the sector in Australia.
stop the circus leaving town
From a bunch of circus vagabonds turning up to an outback town or housing estate to teach a bunch of bored kids to the high profile ventures of Cirque du Monde (an international social circus initiative between Cirque du Soleil and Jeunesse du Monde, a youth focused NGO) questions about the usefulness of short-term projects arise. What happens once the circus leaves town? As a young Brewarrina participant summed it up for the departing artist: “Thanks for fuckin nothin”, a kind of thanks-for-showing-us-what-we-haven’t-got. For some of these young people, the future can appear worse.
The sector has seen tremendous growth over the past decade as many Indigenous and non-indigenous communities have embraced social circus as an effective model for community engagement. Paul Woodhead, a high school teacher and founder of Circus West in Dubbo, noted that there were 60–80 schools in Western NSW alone that had circus programs and that he had worked with 5,000 students over 20 years in youth circus programs, and 350 of them had performed publicly.
Aunty Malu aka Marlene Cummins (Redfern Women’s Traditional Dance Group), Indigenous & Social Skills Workshop
photo Simone O’Brien
Aunty Malu aka Marlene Cummins (Redfern Women’s Traditional Dance Group), Indigenous & Social Skills Workshop
liberated by circus
Donna Carstens, an Indigenous circus artist from Brisbane, now living in Sydney, discussed her project, Behind Closed Bars, which taught circus skills to young people whose mothers were in detention. Donna delivered the project with Sisters Inside, an organisation set up to support women in detention and their children. With the massive overrepresentation of Indigenous people in detention, most of the children involved in the project were Indigenous. Donna worked with the kids to create a circus show, which would then be videoed and sent to their mothers. It would take another two years before the video was seen in prisons.
The Behind Closed Bars initiative won a National Crime Prevention Award because from 60 participants only one went back to juvenile justice while others went on to do TAFE courses. One of the most moving stories came from a young girl who said that before she started the project she felt she had nothing to live for as her mum was in gaol and that she didn’t go to school and had been sniffing glue and petrol. Since doing the circus project she had found something she absolutely loved doing and couldn’t wait for the next class so she could climb on the trapeze. She had found something to be proud of and which she could show her mum when she got out.
Donna’s own story of circus helping her to escape the juvenile justice system was echoed by Noel Tovey. Noel opened the conference speaking about his experiences as an Indigenous artist who was on the street at 11, in gaol at 17 and dancing at Sadler’s Wells in London at 24. He cites the arts as his saviour, stating that if not for the performing arts he would not be here today as it strengthens and promotes Indigenous culture on a personal, spiritual and social level.
Alisha White, Indigenous & Social Circus Skills Workshop
photo Simone O’Brien
Alisha White, Indigenous & Social Circus Skills Workshop
the circus opportunity
Wendy Holland, an Indigenous academic and Associate Professor at University of Western Sydney, spoke at the opening of the conference with a paper entitled “Re-imagining Aboriginality to the Circus Space.” This fascinating talk traced Wendy’s family connections to Aboriginal circus performers travelling Australia in the late 19th century, her great grandparents being respected performers in the Fitzgerald Brother’s Circus. Wendy spoke of the opportunities the performing arts offered her ancestor Harry Kadellar in south-western Queensland in 1888, where he was ‘taken’ as a child into the circus. This gave him the opportunity to train as an equestrian acrobat from age five onwards and a better chance at survival (two years after he was taken from his family, his mother died of strychnine poisoning).
The circus was a place where Harry could celebrate and capitalise on his difference, providing him with income, travel and a diverse and ‘exotic’ family in which he could find his niche. Today social circus offers Indigenous and marginalised young people similar opportunities to rise above their circumstances through skills development, determination and talent to create a better life, however without adequate industry and government support, this may prove to be true for only a handful of artists.
the national view
One of the aims of Heads Up was to bring all the relevant stakeholders together to gain a national perspective on developments in the sector. Audiences heard from Marrugeku, Circus Oz, Legs on the Wall, Redfern Community Centre, Moogahlin Arts, National Institute of Circus Arts, Orana Arts, the Brewarrina Youth Circus, the Chooky Dancers, the Australian Circus and Physical Theatre Association and many of the artists mentioned above. This presented a unique opportunity to discuss the issues affecting the national development of the sector, such as on-going access to resources, training facilities and further career pathways and employment options and ways to identify strategic and sector wide approaches to address these issues.
flying
The other reason for the event was to bring together a unique set of highly talented artists and give them access to professional skills development and performance opportunities. The resulting showcase performance was an exciting blend of traditional dance, gender bending, short films, acrobatics and hip hop, dance and circus and an all-in group dance led by the Chooky Dancers. Raw talent flew beside highly trained technique, aerial routines were imbued with traditional dance. It was a fruitful skill share and rich cross fertilisation between Indigenous and social circus artists from all over Australia who had not had the means to work together before. It was an amazing week of workshops, performances, histories and testimonies that reflected the resilience of Indigenous cultures and closed the gap, bringing the sector together.
the future
Kate Reid from the Brewarrina Youth Circus was the main instigator of Heads Up. Her hopes for the future include “more inclusion of Indigenous artists and leaders across the board in the national circus industry…in order to develop realistic training options, artistic and managerial positions for Indigenous artists and leaders to help foster the development of the Indigenous circus arts sector from within existing organisations and in assisting new groups, programs, training centres and artists as they emerge.”
Heads Up 2010 organising committee: Kate Reid (Brewarrina Youth Circus), Josh Bond (Chooky Dancers), Lily Shearer (Redfern Community Centre and Moogahlin Arts), Simone O’Brien (Legs on the Wall). Major sponsors included CarriageWorks, Legs on the Wall, Redfern Community Centre, the Australian Recreational Centre for Aerial Arts and the Brewarrina Youth Circus. Financial assistance for this Project was provided by Arts NSW and the Federal Government through the Department of Health and Aging and the Indigenous Sport and Recreation Program.
Heads Up 2010, Indigenous and Social Circus Conference, CarriageWorks, Sydney, July 12-18
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 2-3
© Simone O’Brien; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Waangenga Blanco, Leonard Mickelo, Angel, RILEY, of earth and sky, Bangarra Dance Theatre
photo Andy Solo
Waangenga Blanco, Leonard Mickelo, Angel, RILEY, of earth and sky, Bangarra Dance Theatre
SOFT WHITE CLOUDS DRIFT ACROSS BLUE SKY. OUT OF THE DARK BELOW, ON THEIR BACKS, CRAWLING BUT TORSO AND FACE UP, CREATURES SLIDE INTO DIM LIGHT. THEY WALK, BUT BEND THEIR KNEES TO THE GROUND, ARMS RIGHT-ANGLING OUT. LIKE STRANGE, EMERGENT ANIMALS THEY FORM BENEATH THE IMAGE OF A BOOMERANG AND TWIST, TURN AND ARCH, PERHAPS AT ONE WITH ITS SHAPE AND IMAGINED FLIGHT. THEY STAND, THE BOOMERANG FADES. ANOTHER CREATURE SCUTTLES THROUGH THE DARK AND A LOCUST FORMS BEFORE US, AGAIN ICONICALLY SUSPENDED IN CLEAR SKY.
In Bangarra Dance Theatre’s new season, Of Earth & Sky, the company is introducing a promising new Indigenous choreographer, Daniel Riley McKinley (24 years old, four years with the company) who has chosen as the subject and inspiration for his first major work the Cloud Series by the late Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi photographer and filmmaker Michael Riley (RT76; RT77). McKinley has selected six of the 10 images—feather, locust, bible, boomerang, broken wing, angel—objects suspended mysteriously in blue skies, and which for him relate most directly to Aboriginal culture. Omitted, for example, is Riley’s jersey cow, an almost comically displaced figure but equally indicative of ruinous environmental and cultural invasion.
Each image is projected onto a large screen behind the dancers and one by one is graphically realised and interpreted. Beneath the locust, dancers’ arms become wings as they cluster in groups and then en masse, to a buzzing electronic score and a riffing, insistent piano. The choreography manages to express not only a locust swarm, but also the gestures of those protecting themselves from it in a series of alternations. The plague escalates into a highly organised frenzy of sound and movement—straight lines and rapid circles, a fear-inducing army. Just as suddenly it stops. Something else scuttles across the stage.
A Bible, worn leather cover, hovers and a curiously abstract ritual of oppression ensues, hauntingly embodied by Elma Kris and soon multiplied in a row of other women on a diagonal across the stage, gold crosses emblazoned on—or ‘branded on’—their backs. They kneel, hands pushed up behind their backs, as if bound, and their heads drop to the earth. They rise, walk, go down on their knees as an eerie, distant female choir is heard buried deep in the music. They stand, elbows above their heads, hands behind their heads, palm to palm, like a distorted image of prayer or tortured angel wings, passing before us across the front of the stage and into the dark. The psychological pain induced by an alien religion that converts by bondage is palpable in the sheer otherness of the strange patterns that McKinley makes.
The Bible is replaced by a fragmented view of a graveyard sculpture. In this powerful episode two men with whitened bodies appear, one borne elegantly on the other’s shoulder, his body in a gentle arc, two bodies as one: is this the Angel? As the carried body extends further out, it’s as if gravity is being defeated. The bodies twist and roles are reversed, carried becomes carrier in a sequence of sinuous moves, as if on air, in this the most ambiguous of McKinley’s episodes. It’s as if he’s asking, are there angels, divine helpers, and can they be as beautiful and strange as this—and Waangenga Blanco and Leonard Mickelo can answer this for him.
In a mysterious return to the Bible, men in short skirts, the same gold crosses extending the length of their backs, dancing wide-stanced, like Pacific Islanders perhaps, execute obscure tasks, move angularly and fluently dance in a circle of blue light, almost warrior-like in contrast to the equivalent female episode—an image here of some kind of accommodation? McKinley writes in his program note: “The men represent the other side of the religious experience as an exaggerated religious presence.”
The screen turns white. A woman (Jasmin Sheppard) swathed in feathers crawls across the floor to a low cello growl, her body wracked, struggling to rise in a painfully exquisite pattern of elaborate moves that seem to engage every part of the body in the effort as Michael Riley’s Broken Wing image appears on the screen.
Riley’s Feather replaces Broken Wing and the whole ensemble dance: the patterning is formal, the movement light and elegant, no longer saturated with symbolism, animism or literal image-making. As they leave, the dancers gently drop feathers to the floor. McKinley writes that “in Wiradjuri culture, a feather can represent the marking of a journey had…I feel that Riley is my feather, it has connected me to Michael…”
McKinley’s work is sometimes more abstract than the company’s has been, but also at times quite literal, if always about the embodiment of land, animal and spirit and what puts these at risk. There is inventiveness and welcome unpredictability in the choreography, if not always convincingly sustained, and a theatrical assuredness if not always on top of its symbolism. But Riley represents a strong beginning for McKinley’s work with Bangarra and a welcome new vision.
If McKinley’s Riley is the sky of the program’s title, Of Sky & Earth, Frances Rings’ Artefact is its earth from the very first image, titled Museum (see cover image). It’s as if something very alive and alien has sprung from the soil in the form of a large possum cloak that writhes, revealing multiple arms and human legs (Daniel Riley McKinley and Travis de Vries). It’s an astonishing image that gives more than literal life to the idea that this encased museum object once sheltered many people, even across generations; it suggests a spiritual relationship between artefact and wearer and, as Rings writes in her program note, the maker. Artefact is a work of restoration in more than the museum sense of the term.
The next image also astonishes: a pale, out-sized, huge curved bark, such as might be used to carry food, a coolamun, gradually appearing upstage. It will rock, be climbed, turned over, inhabited and appear to float. From it people dance out to forage, the women harvesting with their string bags, the men to grind stones in dances that hover engagingly between representations of making and extended explorations of movement.
In Bodies, the work’s most literal episode, heritage is denigrated by 19th and early 20th century Western attempts to ‘scientifically’ prove that Aboriginal people are an inferior species—the missing link to the Stone Age. If Bodies labours its point with projected images and mechanical movements of measurement to show how Aboriginal people were themselves made museum artefacts, we are soon returned to the magic of objects and their making.
A wary, wide-eyed woman dances sensually in a flowing head-dress and grass skirt and, in Weaving, a huge golden skein of woven pandanus leaves—of women’s making presumably—envelops the men while the women’s dance has been itself a kind of weaving. Then, as often with Bangarra, Artefact concludes communally, if ambiguously. I was left with a rewarding sense of Rings’ restoration of life and spirit to artefacts, their making and makers, realised with Jacob Nash’s design, especially the giant coolamun for its poise and balance, and Gabriela Tylesova’s costumes that so aptly expressed their making.
With its focus on contemporary images and the ancient heritage of artefacts and their embodiment in and through dance, Bangarra’s Of Earth & Sky is an engrossing and thoughtful artistic exploration of a living culture.
Bangarra Dance Theatre, Of Earth & Sky: Riley, choreographer Daniel Riley McKinley, Artefact, choreographer Frances Rings, design Jacob Nash, costumes Gabriela Tylesova, composer David Page, lighting Damien Cooper, artistic director Stephen Page; Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, July 23-Aug 28
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 4
© Keith Gallasch; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Ngurrumilmarrmiriyu (Wrong Skin), Chooky Dancers
photo Matt Nettheim, image courtesy Performing Lines
Ngurrumilmarrmiriyu (Wrong Skin), Chooky Dancers
WHETHER IN THE CREATIONS OF BANGARRA DANCE THEATRE OR MARRUGEKU OR HERE IN THE CHOOKY DANCERS’ NGURRUMILMARRMIRIYU (WRONG SKIN) AT THE SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE SPRING DANCE FESTIVAL, THERE’S A RECURRENT, RESTLESS, CHURNING DIALECTIC AT WORK, SEEKING TO BRING THE PAST INTO A DYNAMIC RELATIONSHIP WITH THE PRESENT—IN ARTISTIC ACTS OF RESTORATION, CONTRIBUTIONS TO SELF-UNDERSTANDING AND POSSIBLE RECONCILIATION BETWEEN INDIGENOUS AND WESTERN CULTURES.
While Bangarra is an independent Indigenous company that works with white collaborators on set and lighting design, Marrugeku and the Chooky Dancers’ Wrong Skin (and, interestingly, the film Ten Canoes) structurally replicate the cultural dynamic of Aboriginal and non-aboriginal collaboration—an evolved, shared black and white artistic direction of Marrugeku and with Wrong Skin a collaboration between Elcho Island people (the island is off north-eastern Arnhemland), writer-director Nigel Jamieson and other white collaborators.
After seeing Wrong Skin at this year’s Adelaide Festival, Carl Nilsson-Polias wrote in “Dialectical entanglements” (RT97) that he admired it as “a brilliant populist work.” However he felt that although the use of “the complex Yolngu moiety laws as the basis for a forbidden-love story, with overt references to West Side Story along the way [gives Jamieson] a straightforward narrative hook on which to hang various dance sequences and video montages of life on Elcho Island…it also imposes a stifling rhythm on proceedings and created a strange tension: are the performers co-creators or merely the subjects of the work? Occasionally, it even reveals the technical shortcomings of the dancers when they are required to step out of their own style.”
Wrong Skin is a hugely enjoyable creation, at its best in its dancing, its sense of humour and dexterous multimedia realisation. But there is no denying that the work’s embracing buoyancy evaporates towards the end as the love tragedy is acted out conventionally (which is not to say that the actors are inadequate). It seems a curious modus operandi given the radicalism of the Chooky Dancers’ cultural collaging that underpins much of the work alongside the multimedia layering of live performance and film. Another form of telling might have been more apt, and more palpably belonging to the performer co-creators.
These concerns aside, Wrong Skin succeeded on other fronts. The dancing ranged from the Chooky Dancers’ famous YouTube take on Zorba’s Dance to Bollywood and Hollywood inflected routines (developed with choreographer Gavin Robbins). These were performed on red earth rising in clouds and with more detail, speed, articulation and overall shaping than I’d anticipated—there’s much more than energy and charisma at work here.
The Chooky Dancers’ performance gained unexpected additional complexity when the large screen behind the performers revealed footage of the Elcho Island community, especially children, dancing furiously. Here is culture where pop, Bollywood and Hollywood and more exotic musics (Turkish, Arabic) are a part of everyday life. Suddenly we knew that the Chooky Dancers were not a one-off, a bunch of young men with a show to get on, but of their culture, absorbing and integrating forms that they like. The dark side is, of course, modernisation that plays havoc with kinship constraints.
There were other surprises, even shocks. In particular, we witnessed on film the funeral ceremony of an elder—his body in an open casket, a huge community gathering and, in its midst, a woman hurling herself repeatedly to the ground in grief. There was no way to avoid feeling like an intruder, especially since we are used to Aboriginal constraints on naming the dead, seeing images of or hearing them in the media, let alone witnessing something like this. But the Elcho Island community collaborated on Wrong Skin and one of the show’s island producers, Margaret Garawirrtya, told a post-show reception that the man, her husband, had been a key instigator of Wrong Skin and that the show was presented in “the memory of Frank, ‘the father of music’ in north-eastern Arnhem Land.”
Moments like these, alongside images of poverty and objections to the ‘Intervention’ were juxtaposed with happier representations of home and community and a playful embrace of the modern in routines with portable DVD screens and supermarket trolleys given low-budget Busby Berkeley treatment. The mobile phone in the plot proves a more problematic indicator of cultural stress when it comes to the issue of keeping people apart in the name of tradition.
The great strength of Wrong Skin is that it draws on the Chooky Dancers’ joyous integration of tradition and modernity, multiplying it with a range of media and performative means, revealing both its enormous creative potential but also delineating its impediments and pointing to what might be lost. Wrong Skin’s ending—a death, love thwarted, a community divided—suggests that the Chooky Dancers’ synthesis of tradition and the new is but one celebratory part of something much more difficult to resolve.
Ngurrumilmarrmiriyu (Wrong Skin), writer, director, designer Nigel Jamieson in association with the company, associate director, movement Gavin Robbins, associate director, community and cultural liaison Joshua Bond, costumes Mathew McCall, film & video design Scott Anderson, video production Mic Gruchy, lighting Trudy Dalgleish, composition, sound design David Page, Basil Hogios; ?performers Djakapurra Munyarrun, Djali Donald Ganambarr, Frances Djulibing, Rarriwuy Hick, Anthony Djamangi, Lionel Dhulmanawuy, Anthony Djamangi; Chooky Dancers: Aaron Djimilkinya, Daren Matan, Nathan Guymangura, Gerald Dhamarrandji, Wakara Gondarra; Spring Dance, Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, Sept 2-12
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 6
© Keith Gallasch; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
WeTube LIVE, Stompin’ Youth, Junction Arts Festival 2010
photo Mark Webster
WeTube LIVE, Stompin’ Youth, Junction Arts Festival 2010
I’M STANDING IN THE MIDDLE OF AN ANALOGUE VERSION OF A DIGITAL EXPERIENCE. TO MY LEFT, RIGHT, FRONT AND BEHIND PERFORMERS DANCE, YELL, SCREAM, PLAY GUITAR, TALK AND GESTICULATE WILDLY. EACH IS WORKING WITHIN ONE OF A HUNDRED NOTIONAL STAGES MARKED OUT BY WHITE SQUARES ON THE FLOOR. A GIANT ‘DIGITAL’ CLOCK CLICKS OVER AT THE REAR OF THE HALL. I AM FREE TO WALK THROUGH THIS THREE-DIMENSIONAL RECREATION OF YOUTUBE AND IT IS DELICIOUSLY CHAOTIC.
WeTubeLIVE is part of the Junction Festival held as an adjunct to the Regional Arts conference of the same name, drawing over 500 delegates from all around Australia to meet and discuss a wide range of issues relating to arts practice. Launceston is a small centre in the North of Tasmania and rarely hosts events that register themselves all over the city with installations, performances, temporary live venues, projects and roving interactive performers, plus an injection of enthusiastic, creative strangers. I regularly heard locals ask with amazement, “Am I really in Launceston?”
WeTubeLIVE is a festival highlight. Devised and directed by Ben Speth with Stompin Youth, the work is simple but powerful. Each of the performers was asked to select a favourite YouTube clip and reenact or reinterpret it in any way they wished within their ‘screen,’ their square. All of the performers are teenagers, making the subject material incredibly pertinent. While a core of the group simply dance energetically on the spot in a range of styles from classical to street, the remainder do anything from play guitar in a bear suit to climbing inside a quilt cover and performing a soliloquy. And there is a lot of screaming, angst-ridden noise and strong gesticulation peppering the grid.
When the audience is set free, WeTube is already ‘playing’ and we walk among the players. Within a minute, the audience fills the grid and it becomes difficult to tell the difference between the two groups. Refresh points happen every 10 minutes, with all of the players stopping with eyes closed, leaving their squares to chat or curl on the floor. It’s really interesting to see how the audience behaves, chatting casually within the chaos, then falling silent as the players stop. As time wanders on, the audience also loses and refreshes its attention span, the players start to exhaust themselves and a strong aroma of teenage sweat builds within the grid. At the end of an hour, as we leave, WeTube continues.
This is a work of its time. All of the detail is perfect. The selection of YouTube clips by the players, their personal sound systems and the distinct performance spaces become a reflection of the cult of the individual and the seam of vanity now epitomised by Facebook. And yet, underneath it all, WeTube reveals a desire to build communities in whatever way possible, through numbers of friends, conversations within comment threads or just through laughing at the same clip. As in YouTube, the interface and the outcome are democratic. Not only are there no lead players, WeTube is open to anyone and there is little difference between audience and performers—making the ‘we’ appended to ‘Tube’ in the title more meaningful.
Carcophany is another show that connects with our moment in time while linking to an aspect of local Launceston culture. It has three variations over two days, but the performance I catch is in the ground level of a multi-storey carpark after dark. The show is built around sound emerging from 12 cars parked around the edges of the concrete space like a monstrous stereo. Each car forms one channel in the composition and is parked with its rear to the audience with doors, boots and hatches open so that the sound washes out across hard surfaces. The guitar-based soundscape that emerges and builds is an immersive experience that I would liken to sitting front and centre at a Dirty Three concert (which is a pretty lovely thing to do).
Composed by Mathew Timmis, Carcophony is intended to explore a global obsession with cars, but also keys into the Launceston blockie culture. Cars, with stereos booming, matching each other around the one-way circuit of the CBD, or doing blockies, is a well-known Launceston phenomenon. So it was quite fabulous that an artist grabbed that culture and transformed it into a symphony.
Connecting with these works ‘of their time’, Hobart-based IHOS Opera’s Borders picks up on contemporary fears and political concerns. In a deliberately tight, claustrophobic space, in traverse arrangement, the audience is introduced to a short, but visceral work about being on a journey involving considerable uncertainty, the pain of waiting and the anxiety of limbo. The players are a young man caught on this purgatorial journey, an operatic and decidedly bureaucratic angel and a seemingly benevolent panda. The young man is a hostage to his situation, which might be the razor wire enclosure of a refugee processing centre or the concrete walls of a hostage cell. The angel, depicted on large screens behind each half of the audience, sings the rules to him as he begins to lose the plot, while the panda cautions patience, speaking in English and Mandarin. Having been ordered into randomly numbered seats, facing each other within a smoke filled room, we are trapped with this man, waiting our turn to lose faith. At one point a wind machine blows loose plastic bags through the space; at another we are all ‘de-contaminated,’ recalling pre-landing aeroplane cabin spray. It is an intense and slightly esoteric experience, but if the aim is to communicate the texture of fear known to refugees and hostages, then it is successful. I leave feeling windblown, stomach churning.
Inclining much more to delight than fear, Toronto-based Mammalian Diving Reflex (MDR) present a work that has been staged across the world. Haircuts by Children is exactly that, a performance within a local salon—in this case Studio Hair and Beauty—where local children become hairdressers. The work is part of Social Acupuncture, explained at the conference by producer Natalie de Vito as performance that makes small incisions into the urban fabric that are a little uncomfortable, but inevitably lead to people feeling better. While initially dubious about the participation rate in Launceston, I discover a delightful chaos of mini hairdressers in the salon. Each child has been trained over a number of weeks by local hairdressers in order to prepare them for their part. There is a lot of excitement and giggly chatter, but I see that some precision work is happening as a young boy carefully sprays colour onto a woman’s hair, his young assistant holding a shield protecting her eyes. Tricky shaved patterns, spray dots and many tiny pigtails emerge in the city as a result.
Also dishing out delight was PANE staged in Retrovision’s shop window. In this show by MADE, devised by Glen Murray and Nicole Robson, seven women pitched as 50s housewives, dance in white gloves in front of an overscaled photographic backdrop of a 1950s kitchen and loungeroom. MADE is a group of ‘veteran’ dancers who were probably all born a few years shy of this decade, so the staging has an amusing underlying irony. Their slow mime-style dance with expressive, cheeky faces and touches of irreverent humour is a hit with the gathered audience, particularly a vibrant three year-old who dances throughout the performance, bows as we applaud and then joins the dancers in the window space. As we all stand around on the street, rugged up in winter clothes in the growing dark, gazing into the windows of an electrical store, there is a wistful connection with the days when this was the only way most could watch television and those kitchen canisters in your kitchen weren’t yet retro.
I’ve only explored five of Junction’s shows here, but I hope I’ve communicated the rich experience there for the taking in Launceston over five days in August. Works that really hit the mark for me were those that tended to break or stretch the rules and to reach out a hand, figuratively or otherwise, to the audience. I’d forgotten how much fun and how energizing it is to be in a city awash with events, the scale of Launceston making it possible to dash between conference and festival without driving or running a marathon.
Junction Arts Festival, part of the Regional Arts National Australia Conference, Launceston, Aug 26-29, www.junction2010.com.au
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 8
© Judith Abell; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Life Streaming
photo Maarten van Haaff
Life Streaming
WHATEVER TERM YOU PREFER (AND I PREFER ‘RELATIONAL’, AS THIS IS PRIMARILY A THEATRE OF SOCIAL AND SPATIAL RELATIONS), THIS FORM DOMINATED THE LONDON SUMMER OF 2010. BATTERSEA ARTS CENTRE (BAC) PRESENTED AN ENTIRE FESTIVAL OF ONE-ON-ONE WORKS, WITH OVER THIRTY ONE-MAN-(OR WOMAN)-SHOWS CRAMMED INTO THE OLD BATTERSEA TOWN HALL IN SOUTH LONDON. THE MORE CENTRALLY LOCATED LIFT (LONDON INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF THEATRE) DEDICATED THE LION’S SHARE OF ITS PROGRAM TO EVENTS THAT COULD JUST AS EASILY HAVE BEEN TERMED MASS GAMING, COLLECTIVE SKYPING OR SCAVENGER HUNTS.
At the Barbican, during the same period, You Me Bum Bum Train entered history as their fastest-selling show ever: part theatre, part Thank God You’re Here, it turned each audience member into the protagonist, made to improvise their way through a series of dramatic situations in front of the supporting cast of 200. With so much emphasis on you, the spectator, forgive me if the rest of this article privileges the second-person singular.
one-on-one festival
An immersive event in its own right, One-On-One Festival was possibly its own greatest achievement. The least one could sign up for was a marvellously organised afternoon of mingling through a building crammed with secret one-man wonders, appointment card in hand. The atmosphere was surprisingly welcoming, even festive: performers and spectators crossing paths in the same courtyard and café, recommendations exchanged, friendships commenced, queues spontaneously forming outside the rooms with hidden gems on the strength of on-the-spot word of mouth. Repeatedly diving into a 2-or-3-minute intensely collaborative performance, being in turns swung and shaken, kissed and sung to, frightened or intellectually challenged, by the end of the day one had no personal boundaries left to speak of.
Despite being cumulatively great, One-On-One also demonstrated how quickly an emergent genre can settle on a limited range of solutions. One kind seemed tailored to break through fears of intimacy: Abigail Conway’s On Dancefloors invites you to dance; Emma Benson sings a song with you in Me You Now. Most radically, Adrian Howells gives you a bath in The Pleasure of Being: Washing, Feeding, Holding, while Ansuman Biswas’s more open-ended 2 FREE offers the possibility of engaging with a naked, blindfolded man. However trivial they may sound conceptually, these were some of the most powerful performances in the festival, spoken about in hushed, almost spiritual tones. You found yourself entering these rooms with the same mixture of compulsion and terror with which you might climb into a roller-coaster (and they certainly act as a kind of psycho-social one, including the lag with which you process the experience afterwards). But if theatre is ever genuinely life-changing, it is in the strangely liberating afterglow that follows consensual nudity.
Another, quieter type of performance centred on material reality, and the tactile dimension of the experience generated, not so much inter-personal intimacy as greater understanding of how the world works. Barnaby Stone’s A Little Bit of a Beautiful Thing is a story of a wooden beam, a finely polished slice of which you will receive at the end. In Ray Lee’s Electric, your body becomes a conductor. Another focused on creating a first-person narrative, employing cascades of clever sensory illusions: for the 10 minutes of Just For a Moment, by Three Blind Mice, you have a drink at a pub, lie on the beach, dance Macarena in the world’s most terrible discotheque, witness a fight and have to be walked out of the pub at the end of the night, despite being blindfolded in a single room. Stan’s Café use mirrors, projection, costumes and clever framing to generate a 240-second film noir before your very eyes, with you as the chief villain, in It’s Your Film. While these works were longer, more carefully shaped and satisfied some of that need for dramatic spectacle that drives people into theatres on perfectly lovely summer days, their beauty again seemed to derive chiefly from the promise of intimacy, of being made-to-measure and the soporific pleasures of being touched, rather than from well-executed tricks.
The most accomplished works brought together the cerebral and the felt, offering an encounter while questioning its limitations. Sarah Johns’ Below plays with your perceptions: dragged into a dark room, her performance catches you before you can make sense of where you are. Facing a mirror and a singing girl, your focus shifts abruptly from one detail to another, resulting in a series of mesmerising, well-defined impressions, as if in a film. And of course, towering above the rest, is Ontroerend Goed’s trilogy of brief, but flawless works that boldly question the gullibility of the audience.
As Peggy Phelan writes, theatre has always been a meeting place, always offering the promise of a communion, an exchange—even across the proscenium arch. The relationship between audience and performer is, in her words, “the always already unequal encounter [that] nonetheless summons the hope of reciprocity and equality” (Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, Routledge, 1993). Relational performance is the inevitable end-product of this quest. Yet in it, intimacy emerges not only as a tool and a goal, but as a major concern: can we have it, how, by what means and why do we desire it in the first place? A number of works at BAC traded on the false promise of quick intimacy, and most fell short: after all, the obvious difficulties of building a rapport with the actor in five tightly scripted minutes cannot be overcome just by holding hands. Ontroerend Goed’s Smile Off Your Face, Internal and A Game of You capitalise on this disingenuousness. Internal, in particular, set up as a speed-dating session followed by a sweetly cruel group debrief, builds the illusion of a budding attraction only to break your heart (comparing notes with other viewers is soul-crushing). Yet, for all its oversharing, Internal provides a dose of needed realism in a universe made of caresses. It stands as a reminder that there is no such thing as conveyor-belt romance, no intimacy on a mass scale, and that audiences often give their hearts away too easily.
Best Before, Rimini Protokoll
courtesy the artists
Best Before, Rimini Protokoll
lift 2010
The polar opposite of the high-concept One-On-One, LIFT 2010 was a festival with an identity crisis. Rubbing shoulders were weekend events for kids, formalist community theatre and the occasional think piece. Yet here, too, the most interesting works were from the relational family.
Rimini Protokoll’s Best Before (RT96, p2) is a computer game for the whole audience. Represented by a globular multi-coloured blip, for two hours you live as a proud citizen of Bestland, making personal choices (tertiary education? children? buy a house? own a gun? try heroin?) and participating in collective decision-making (legalise drugs or guns? form an army? welcome immigrants? equal capabilities or a diverse population?). As the game progresses, you reap the fruits of some decisions and suffer the limitations of others, while your range of choices progressively narrows as you age. It is a game of consequences, but also of chance—some blips are randomly wiped out by epidemics and war while, ultimately, the whole population dies of old age. I found the end unexpectedly poignant, realising that there was no final payoff for all my prudent life choices (I had grown old with a big family and plenty of real estate). I suspect the experience varies according to your age and life experience, but also audience demographics.
Bookmarking the game is Rimini Protokoll’s trademark presence of non-performers, or rather ‘reality experts’—in this case, the game designer, a game tester, a lobbyist and a traffic flagger whom the other three would have passed by on their way to work. Their guidance and stories serve both to contextualise gaming in the real world, to relate Bestland to the political choices that Vancouver has faced, and to reconnect our personal choices to non-virtual consequences. The tension between the two aspects of Best Before, which never quite connect, is a productive one, even though I found the four Canadians’ lives infinitely more intriguing than my avatar’s cyber-shenanigans.
The real treat of the festival was Dries Verhoeven’s Life Streaming. The concept is minimal: in a makeshift internet café, each audience member conducts their own video chat with a young person in Sri Lanka. In the interstices of the poetic, but tightly orchestrated structure, filled with pre-prepared text and film and guiding us through such topics as the tsunami, loss and grief, my interlocutor and I manage to insert a real conversation about life, healthcare, the scent of the sea and lying in bed with total strangers. The work keeps the question of its own intent open, incorporating sensorial stimuli to create an exuberant experience not unlike a perfect holiday in South-East Asia, while at the same time allowing for an unusual degree of self-propelling interaction. Consequently, you come away with a real connection to a human being—if you so wish. Like Ontroerend Goed’s trilogy, Life Streaming raises big questions about art, reality and intimacy, but lets you choose your own answers.
to shop or not?
Elinor Fuchs argues that relational theatre is the last step in theatre’s commodification: after the ice-cream in the interval, now we can get ice-cream during the performance. Indeed she terms it “shopping theatre” (The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater After Modernism, Indiana University Press, 1996) as it can so closely resemble a walk through a department store. It allows us to buy a reproduction of an experience that could not be bought otherwise. The physical set up, finally, is remarkably similar to a brothel—the room, the queue, the illusion of unique relationship.
However, I am not sure I entirely agree. At its worst, relational theatre combines the direst aspects of amusement parks and popular psychology, perhaps. But at its best, it incorporates the most conceptually interesting aspects of drama therapy, while allowing us to see our own experience through a critical prism. It highlights the qualities of everyday life, in all its mundane materiality, without distortion, in ways naturalistic theatre has consistently failed to achieve. Finally, the illusion of intimacy, of giving, which has existed for as long as theatre, can now be scrutinised in genuinely interesting ways. Relational theatre allows the exploration of the encounter between the artist and the spectator, an encounter that may be obviously staged, but is also more frank about its limitations. Once there are really only the two of you, the artifice becomes first disappointing, then bearable and finally, perhaps, genuinely empowering.
One-On-One Festival, Battersea Arts Centre (BAC), July 6-18, London; LIFT 2010: Rimini Protokoll, Best Before, created by Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi, dramaturg Tim Carlson, game design Brady Marks, video design Candelario Andrade, set design Andreas Kahre, sound design Stegan Smulovitz, with Duff Armour, Brady Marks, Ellen Schultz, Bob Williams/Arjan Dhupia, June 30-July 3, Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA); Life Streaming, director Dries Verhoeven, dramaturg Nienke Scholts, technical production Joffrey Kranen, Silk BV, National Theatre, June 23-July 4, LIFT Festival, London, June 23-July 13
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 10
© Jana Perkovic; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
{$slideshow} MORE AND MORE, AND PERHAPS IN RESPONSE TO THE GLUT OF PERFORMANCE IN FRINGE FESTIVALS, A SMALLER, MORE FOCUSED AND, MOST IMPORTANTLY, CURATED KIND OF FESTIVAL OF INDEPENDENT WORK IS EMERGING. IN AUSTRALIA WE HAVE SYDNEY’S IMPERIAL PANDA AND TINY STADIUMS FESTIVALS, AS WELL AS MELBOURNE’S DANCE MASSIVE, WHICH IS, AS ITS NAME SUGGESTS, SLIGHTLY LARGER. THE FOREST FRINGE MICROFESTIVAL TOOK PLACE AT LONDON’S BATTERSEA ARTS CENTRE FOR THE FIRST TIME THIS YEAR, A TWO-NIGHT LINE-UP OF WORKS-IN-PROGRESS, ONE-ON-ONE PERFORMANCE PIECES AND SITE-SPECIFIC INSTALLATIONS.
In theory, if not always necessarily in practice, such festivals offer the audience a certain concentration of quality, as well as the reassurance that sometimes comes with a curatorial seal of approval. Everything has been programmed for a reason. Russian roulette, which navigating a fringe festival program sometimes feels like, it is not.
Presented by Collective:unconscious and Brooklyn’s East River Commedia at Manhattan’s Performance Space 122, the Undergroundzero Festival of Theater Artists, now in its fourth year, is very much a quality-controlled fringe festival, one of many that take place in New York City during the summer months as a prelude to the city’s official fringe festival in the autumn. Curated by East River Commedia’s Artistic Director, Paul Bargetto, this year’s three-week festival comprised some 20 works from the United States and abroad, including Australia, and impressively redressed the usual imbalance between quantity and quality.
It was also impressive in its scope. Curation is often an act of creation, with the festival programmer a kind of auteur, stamping their imprint on their festival and indulging their own formal and thematic concerns. Bargetto is an exception to this rule: his festival revealed little about what sort of work he favours or what sort of stories and themes float his boat. With a line-up of performance styles as varied and distinctive as any fringe festival’s, only with several hundred fewer works with which to achieve such variety, his festival saw high brush up against low, opera against burlesque, contemporary dance against musical comedy and adaptation against improvisation.
Of this last dichotomy, Dangerous Ground Productions’ From Dawn till Night (The Earth is Uninhabitable like the Moon) and Anna Brenner’s Are We Here Yet? served as representative examples. Using live video and an open-plan set to collapse time and space (not a particularly original approach, but nonetheless visually arresting), the former was a multimedia adaptation of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s In a Year of Thirteen Moons, while the latter was based on a series of improvisations that followed the four-strong cast’s observation of people in Riverside Park on the Upper West Side. Both productions comprised a series of one-on-one interactions unfolding in abstract space: in the former, the transvestite and the straight man he loved, his distant mother, his sympathetic best friend; in the latter, the old man and the social worker, the political candidate and the virile younger man, the book club president and the washed-up author. But the ends sought by each production could not have been more different.
While Brenner aimed to explore the interconnectedness of people—Are We Here Yet? was essentially a four-hander in the vein of Patrick Marber’s Closer or Jane Bodie’s Fourplay, only with a theoretical bent explicitly stated in the text that occasionally took precedence over character or story—From Dawn till Night’s Romanian-born director-designer Doris Mirescu was interested in the utter isolation of individuals, even, indeed especially, from themselves.
Isolation and alienation, of course, were the great themes of Andy Warhol, who once famously claimed, among many other things, that he never felt the need to be close to anybody after he purchased his first television set. Like so many of his public statements, this one was at once caustic, ironic, truthful and sad: humorous because shameless, disconcerting because familiar. Combining elements of Warhol’s biography, philosophy and aphoristic wit, Theater Bielefeld’s Forever Art attempted to capture these contradictions, which so characterised the artist and his work. To the extent that the production—not a one-man show, but close—was successful, it was due to John Wesley Zielmann.
The actor channelled Warhol as though he were a cadaverous mad scientist poised between explosion and implosion and liable to go one way or the other at any given moment. The uncanny physical resemblance of Zielmann to Warhol was compromised a little by his voice—the production was in German with shoddily typed surtitles that could have done with a proof-reader—but the actor’s evocation of the artist’s constituent strangeness and sadness was stunning. In the production’s most memorable and terrible scene, Zielmann engaged in a contemporary dance number that saw him convulsively slamming his fists against his chest and his body against the floor, almost as though he were performing an exorcism on himself.
A much lighter, if occasionally foul-mouthed kind of musical number was offered by Blue Dress Reduction, easily the funniest and most immediately charming production at the festival. Written and performed by Eliza Bent, Jasmin Hoo and Elizabeth Stevenson, the low-budget musical comedy was the sort of piece you tend to find by accident at fringe festivals or in the smaller, less well-attended venues of a comedy festival, another example of how curation can often help to separate wheat and chaff for an audience. Blue Dress Reduction told the story of the three writers’ real-life visit to England to be bridesmaids at their best friend’s wedding, with culture shock and the usual unplanned mishaps of travel helping to turn the event into an unmitigated disaster.
In addition to the musical numbers, with their delightful, slightly unpolished air, the piece was notable for its unscripted sequences, where the house lights came up a little and the three women spoke candidly to each other about the trip, and its parodic characterisation of those who occupy the other side of the pond. Eliza Bent, whose She of the Voice premiered at last year’s festival, was particularly impressive as the hoity-toity mother-of-the-groom, and one senses that it was she who was the creative force behind the project. In any case, she is one to watch, with all the makings of a great comedienne.
The festival’s most affecting work also told the story of three friends, though only one of them was ever onstage, and instead of singing musical numbers he chanted for his football team: Ireland, during the November 2009 World Cup qualifying match that saw Frenchmen Thierry Henry’s hand make sure the paddies wouldn’t be going to South Africa in 2010. Named for an Irish number that is traditionally sung at the end of a gathering of friends, Dermot Bolger’s The Parting Glass, produced by Dublin’s Axis Ballymun in association with New York’s terraNOVA Collective, was a fascinating monologue about emigration and the meaning of home, as well as family, loss and friendship. A sequel to Bolger’s 1990 play, In High Germany, which saw the three aforementioned friends move away from Ireland, The Parting Glass dramatised the decision of one of them—played brilliantly by Ray Yeates, with genuine warmth and feeling—to return.
The results were often funny, often moving, and also very often political. The piece was highly critical of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger years, insisting that far fewer benefited from the country’s economic boom than perhaps could or should have, and was similarly unimpressed by the post-boom period, to which Yeates’ central character returns. But its polemic was held close to its chest, wherein beat a lot of heart. And it was this heart, more than any economic or political critique, that made the piece the intense experience that it ultimately was.
But perhaps the festival’s most striking work was Fabiana Iacozilli’s Aspettando Nil, a feminist take on Waiting for Godot that actually felt more like a cross between The Glass Menagerie and Abbott and Costello. Elisa Bongiovanni and Giada Parlanti played chain-smoking mother and daughter, respectively, preparing themselves, like Tennessee Williams’ Amanda and Laura Wingfield, for a gentleman caller to arrive—which he would do, mother told daughter, when the two of them were “ready.” And so they readied themselves for the man—for any man, really—excitedly dressing and putting on make-up, prettifying themselves in a series of slapstick sequences and talking about what sort of responsibilities the daughter would have towards her new beau.
Like The Parting Glass, Aspettando Nil was at once both humorous and moving, as well as fiercely political. Unlike The Parting Glass, it was also formally inventive, using Waiting for Godot as a launch pad for its own satirical exploration of gender roles, insisting, as its title suggests, that a woman who waits for a man is waiting for nil, for nothing. The meaning of Beckett’s play, of course, is somewhat more ambiguous, open to interpretation where Aspettando Nil is rather explicit. But one can certainly understand why Iacozilli thought it appropriate to her ends. After all, Beckett’s is the play in which, famously, nil happens twice.
Collective:Unconscious & East River Commedia, Undergroundzero Festival of Theater Artists, PS122, New York, July 7-26; www.ps122.org/performances/undergroundzero_festival.html
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 12
© Matthew Clayfield; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Opening Night, Toneelgroep Amsterdam/NTGent
photo Jan Versweyveld
Opening Night, Toneelgroep Amsterdam/NTGent
BY BRINGING A JOHN CASSAVETES FILM TO THE STAGE, ONE WOULD SUSPECT THAT DIRECTOR IVO VAN HOVE WANTS TO START A CONVERSATION ABOUT THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN CINEMA AND THEATRE. INDEED, THE FACT THAT THE FILM OPENING NIGHT IS SET IN A THEATRE APPEARS TO CONFIRM THIS SUSPICION. AND BY INCLUDING A RAFT OF SCREENS AND CAMERAS IN THE PRODUCTION, VAN HOVE APPEARS TO BE MAKING SOME STRONG OPENING REMARKS. BUT IN TRUTH, HE HAS NEVER SEEN THE FILM HE IS STAGING AND THINKS OF THE CAMERAS AS THEATRICAL, RATHER THAN CINEMATIC DEVICES.
Now 52, van Hove was 19 years old when Opening Night was released. He might have missed that film but, growing up in Antwerp, he had made a habit of visiting the local art house cinemas and devouring Cassavetes’ earlier works, along with those of Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Pier Paulo Pasolini and Luchino Visconti.
As a teenager, the emotional and psychological terrain of Cassavetes’ films was alien to van Hove, but the intimacy and rawness of the work were evident and infectious. When he returned to the films in his 30s, he felt their full impact and set about bringing them into the theatre. Adapting films for the stage has been brilliantly lampooned by the likes of Wes Anderson (Rushmore, 1998), however, van Hove is not strictly interested in staging films—he is interested in staging screenplays. The difference is more than academic because by removing the desire to mimic or deconstruct the visual and aural language of cinema, van Hove can simply concentrate his efforts on realising the text with the same set of skills and theatrical inventiveness he brings to any play.
Film titles—Scenes from a Marriage, Teorema, Rocco and his Brothers—leap out from van Hove’s directorial résumé. He sees these screenplays as an exciting frontier because staging them for the first time is effectively to premiere them. Instead of being the thousandth director to tackle The Cherry Orchard he can be the first to tackle Cries and Whispers on stage. And he looks at Antonioni and Bergman not in terms of the aesthetic markers that characterise their cinema but in terms of their thematic uniqueness—who does death better than Bergman, who examines love in modern society like Antonioni?
And Cassavetes? Open, actor-oriented screenplays dealing with adult relationships in all their sensuality, vicissitude, violence and, most importantly, artifice. In 1997, van Hove presented a staging of Faces in the Netherlands, which, in a brilliant perversion of cabaret seating, had the audience lying shoeless in beds as the actors performed around and almost on top of them. He wanted next to tackle Husbands but Cassavetes’ wife Gena Rowlands politely withheld the rights because of the very personal subject matter. Instead, van Hove came to read Opening Night and found in it a story equally compelling. The film centres on a famous actress, Myrtle Gordon (played by Rowlands), who is struggling through the rehearsals of a new play, which also stars her ex-husband (played by Cassavetes). Gordon’s internal conflicts burst to the surface when an adoring young fan dies in a car accident (a dramatic catalyst quoted by Pedro Almodovar in All About My Mother, 1999). Cassavetes’ screenplay avoids pinning down exactly what is at the heart of Gordon’s psychological turmoil and instead revels in its complexity and unresolvedness. It could simply be viewed as a portrait of an aging actress driven to despair by the death of her younger self (the fan), but van Hove sees it also as a family tragedy. Either way, in its examination of inner lives curtailed by social mores and niceties, it continues John Cassavetes’ obsession with the difference between people’s private and public faces—the masks and artifice of adult life.
The first words van Hove wrote in his copy of Opening Night were “Neil Young.” Music always plays a vital role in van Hove’s theatre, whether it is Steve Reich’s minimalism in his latest production in New York, The Little Foxes, or six hours of live percussion in his compendium of Shakespeare’s Roman tragedies. Indeed, van Hove is happy to label his work “music-theatre” just to emphasise how much more music is than wallpaper to him. In this case, Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” provides what van Hove refers to as “an extra layer of humanity” with its “good-sentimental” tone.
Alongside that song, Marc Meulemans’ sound score for the stage production is a constant companion that sometimes underscores moments of choreographed movement. These interludes of physical expression are some of the most apparent theatrical extrapolations on the source material. Van Hove is fascinated by the way in which psychological subtexts can be explored or made manifest by physical motion and he emphasises that his actors are always very physically engaged with the text they are speaking. He cites the French opera, theatre and film director Patrice Chéreau as a key influence on the way in which he directs bodies in space. But the physical dynamics at work also reveal the creatively symbiotic relationships between van Hove and his Belgian contemporaries: Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker, Alain Platel and Jan Fabre.
But what of the cameras? By giving the theatre the capacity for a close-up, they enlarge and expand the emotions on stage. Hence van Hove thinks of them and the video screens as a contemporary extension of some of the oldest theatrical devices we know of—Greek masks. In this sense, one could argue that the video aspects of van Hove’s Opening Night reaffirm Cassavetes’ obsession with the many masks that people wear. Yet van Hove shies away from such thematic neatness and points instead to practicality and circumstance as the reasons for video’s inclusion. On the one hand, he wanted to reduce and simplify the many locations of the film but, on the other hand, to maintain the sense of the text being set in a theatre. He and his designer Jan Versweyveld created a theatre on the stage, complete with paying audience. Thus, the set is a rangy agglomeration of public and private spaces, some of which simply cannot be seen from the main auditorium without the aid of cameras.
Of course, even this reductive explanation reveals that the cameras give the audience access to spaces, both physical and psychological, that would otherwise remain hidden or private. In fact, the best analogy for van Hove’s use of video in Opening Night is the fly-on-the-wall documentary crew that lucks out by happening on a crisis. As people attempt to maintain appearances and gloss over problems, the cameras reach behind the delusions and obfuscations.
The constricted, magnifying gaze of the camera with this power to unravel and reveal can be intoxicating, but van Hove maintains that the screens do not diminish the importance of the actors being physically present (the fundamental differentiator of theatre). To ensure this, he frustrates the audience by never giving them everything in one medium or the other. In other words, it is impossible to receive and follow every moment of Opening Night by watching the screens or the stage in isolation. It is only in their combination that the narrative unfolds, that the characters reveal themselves and that we see both sides of the mask.
Melbourne International Arts Festival, Toneelgroep Amsterdam/NTGent, Opening Night, by John Cassavetes, directed by Ivo van Hove; Playhouse, Arts Centre, Oct 20-23; http://www.melbournefestival.com.au/program
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 15
© Carl Nilsson-Polias; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Pandit Chitresh Das, Samuel Smith, Kathak Tap
courtesy Parramasala Festival
Pandit Chitresh Das, Samuel Smith, Kathak Tap
PARRAMASALA IS AN IMPORTANT NEW FESTIVAL SOON TO PREMIERE IN WESTERN SYDNEY, CELEBRATING SOUTH ASIAN CULTURE, ANCIENT AND MODERN, AND FREQUENTLY AS SYNTHESES OF THESE IN COLLABORATIONS BETWEEN TRADITIONAL AND CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS, INDIAN, WESTERN AND FROM THE INDIAN DIASPORA. WHILE ADELAIDE’S OZASIA, NOW IN ITS FOURTH INCARNATION, HAS PLAYED A UNIQUE ROLE IN CONNECTING AUSTRALIA BROADLY WITH THE REGION, PARRAMASALA IN 2010 OFFERS A MORE CULTURALLY INTENSIVE FOCUS—INDIAN MUSIC, DANCE, FILM, RITUAL AND CELEBRATION, STAND-UP COMEDY AND CRICKET.
Artistic director Philip Rolfe, a former Executive Director at the Sydney Opera House where he played a key role in expanding the House’s programming of contemporary practices, tells me that over the next two years the range of work covered in Parramasala will expand “to include Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Himalayan countries and the influence of these in the broader region ,but also their global impact on contemporary arts. Choosing South Asian work from Europe and the US is part of what we’ll do into the future. But it’s also about the impact these have had in Australia. We’re attempting to construct a festival that is very contemporary and very much about collaboration between different artists, cultures and countries.”
Why this focus on South Indian culture? Rolfe explains, “The event is clearly in a community that will be supportive. Parramatta is a kind of epicentre of Sydney, New South Wales’ and probably Australia’s South Asian cultures—a massive population.” An impressive example was provided by the response to the AR Rhaman concert in Parramatta Park in 2009: “The NSW Government took up an invitation from Rhaman to do a free concert. He wanted to do it in Parramatta around the issue of what was happening to Indian students in Australia next to the positives of collaboration and multiculturalism, as opposed to the one-sided view coming across in the media. Unbelievably, 60-70,000 people turned out.” Rolfe is hoping for 15-20,000 to see the hugely popular Bollywood soundtrack singer Kailash Kher and his band Kailasa in The Crescent—“a natural, enhanced amphitheatre in Parramatta Park beside the river; it’s Sydney’s best outdoor venue.” The event is free.
The Crescent will also be the venue for Throw of A Dice, a screening of the silent movie epic, says Rolfe, “shot in 1929 in India by a mad German, like Cecil B de Mille! The British Film Institute restored it: it’s in pristine condition.” The film will have spectacular aural accompaniment from UK-based composer Nitin Sawhney at a grand piano and with his band and orchestra. The beautifully filmed German-Indian co-production was directed by Franz Osten, based on an episode from the Mahabharata and, according to the festival brochure, “was shot on location in the breathtaking mountains, forests and palaces of Rajasthan with over 10,000 extras, 1,000 horses and 50 elephants.” The showing is another free event.
In Parramatta, the annual Hindu Festival of Lights is celebrated at the Deepavali Fair at Parramatta Stadium. Rolfe recalls, “I went to Deepavali last year and was blown away by how well it was organised by the Hindu Council and put together with volunteers. The Council were really eager to be part of Parramasala. Their interest is to open up Deepavalli to non-Indians.” As well as stalls and performances, the fair includes the burning of a 45-foot high effigy with pyrotechnic effects and, at the end of the day, spectacular fireworks.
Tradition is given its due in Parramasala, says Rolfe: “Ideally, the way we want to set the festival up is that each time there is one beautiful, pristine traditional event. This year it’s The Desert Wedding.” This program features music for marriage, birth and life performed by the hereditary caste musicians of Rajasthan, people originally supported by wealthy patrons to preserve the history and ceremonies of wealthy families. Rolfe says that the groups—the Manganyars, the Langas and Kamad, performers of the ancient Teratali dance—come straight to the festival from their villages in Rajasthan and are the best in their regions.
anandavalli
The great Australian-based, traditional dancer Anandavalli (of the former Lingalayam Dance Academy, Sydney and later the all female Lingalayam Dance Company in Canberra) comes out of stage retirement to dance solo to the accompaniment of musicians Anil Srinivasan, a western trained classical pianist, and his regular collaborator Sikkil Gurucharan, a vocalist in the ancient southern Indian Carnatic tradition.
kathak tap
This blend of ancient and modern is evident in a number of shows, most unusually in Kathak Tap, where Kathak dancer Pandit Chitresh Das (India/USA) and tap dancer Samuel Smith (USA) each perform separately with their own musicians, then swap musicians (Kathak dancing to a jazz trio and Smith tapping to tabla, sitar and saranji) before finally dancing together in demonstrations of contrasting yet sympathetic footwork.
the chennai tapes
In a purely musical meeting, the Australian Art Orchestra continues its long-term dialogue with classical Carnatic music in The Chennai Tapes (Into the Fire), a collaboration dating back to 1996 between superb jazz musicians and Guru Kaaraikkudi Manir’s Sruthi Laya Ensemble from Chennai. On CD the dynamic weave of such different musical traditions is by turns lyrical and visceral, and always gripping—it should be even moreso on stage.
guru of chai
Rolfe has eagerly programmed Guru of Chai, “a performance by one of my favourite small companies from the region, New Zealand’s Indian Ink Theatre Company with Jacob Rajan and Justin Lewis. They have been working now for 20 years, and make everything themselves. It’s a bravura comic performance by Jacob, very accessible and deserving wider exposure in Australia.” Supported by a musician and employing shadow play, Rajan transforms himself into a host of characters in a tale about a poor tea seller and an abandoned girl who is a remarkable singer, a young policeman in love and a “disreputable poet.”
masala nights, cricket and more
Philip Rolfe has cleverly devised Parramasala as an instantly live-in festival. Parramatta’s Church Street will be transformed from late afternoons into a street market with food, things to buy, projections and performances by Erth, Dva and Polyglot. The free, large scale performances in Parramatta will attract big crowds and cricket fans will turn out for the first Parramasala Trophy match which has the support of Cricket NSW (whose Chair, Dr Harry Harinath is also one of the festival’s patrons) and Parramatta Cricket Club. There are stand-up comics, Indian film screenings in partnership with Popcorn Taxi, artist talks, Nitin Sawhney DJ-ing at the Roxy and, in a shop window on Church Street, the cutting edge British-Indian arts organisation Motiroti, based in East London, is screening 60 x 60 seconds—60 one-minute films from India, Pakistan and the UK about relations between these countries.
asia-australia: improving connection
I recall Rolfe complaining to me a couple of years ago about how mainstream arts organisations and festival programmers had failed to engage with Asia. Clearly he’s correcting that with Parramasala. We discussed how “Australia Council policy was set in place in the early 90s where half the international funding was to be directed into Asian collaborative projects. There was a lot of incredibly interesting activity in terms of individual artists, developmental work and on the edge arts organisations but the mainstream never engaged. Where it made its mark was in the visual arts and Asialink residences and in the thinking that created the Brisbane Asia Pacific Triennial. The arts festivals around Australia generally show interest but when it comes down it to they tend to choose shows that suit Western appetites.”
There are some heartening signs: the Brisbane Powerhouse engagement with Indonesian performance [RT81, p11] in 2009 and dance in the 2010 Brisbane Festival and Rosie Hinde’s programming of the Kenneth Myer Asian Theatre Series at Melbourne’s Arts Centre. With OzAsia and now Parramasala and the Asia Pacific Triennial, alongside Asialink’s enduring work and smaller ventures, the Asian-Australian connection looks set to strengthen. Rolfe is clearly enjoying the venture: “What gives me a kick is to start something from scratch and try to do it really properly and then leave it good hands after three years.”
culture & distance
If Parramasala works, and it surely will, the cultural divide between South Asia and Australia will be reduced, between continents and within Australian communities. But there are other distances to challenge. Rolfe would like people from outside of Sydney, and within, “to come to Parramasala and ideally stay overnight—see a couple of shows and stay next day for another one. There’s no shortage of hotels, and there’s great food, some of the best I’ve come across in Sydney—and half the price. People think it’s too difficult to get here but the trains are in fact very efficient, it’s not that very far, and when you’re here you can walk everywhere.” There’s no excuse; cross the divide.
Parramasala, Australian Festival of South Asian Arts, Parramatta, Nov 4-8, http://parramasala.com
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 14
© Keith Gallasch; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
From You Were in my Dreams, Van Sowerwine and Isobel Knowles
image courtesy the artists
From You Were in my Dreams, Van Sowerwine and Isobel Knowles
HOVERING AND HUMMING IN THE AIR ABOVE THE GALLERY OF MODERN ART’S MEDIA GALLERY FOYER, THEIR ACRYLIC SKELETONS VEINED WITH AUDIO ELECTRONIC WIRING, ARE FOUR DELICATE, TRANSLUCENT SCULPTURES. AS THEY GENTLY SWAY AND WEAVE IN INVISIBLE CURRENTS, THE UNMISTAKABLE ELECTRONIC WARBLE OF A THEREMIN RESONATES FITFULLY THROUGHOUT THE SPACE. ARTIST NIGEL HELYER’S INTRICATE VOXÆTHER_01-04 SERIES DERIVES THE RADIATING FORMS OF SOUND WAVES, AND FROM THE RADIOLARIAN, THE ENDLESSLY ELABORATE PROTOZOA FAMOUSLY CLASSIFIED BY THE 19TH CENTURY NATURALIST ERNST HAECKEL.
As the visitor enters the gallery, the incidental reflections generated by light passing through the sheer planes of the sculpture create glancing angular teal and silver shapes on the foyer wall, recalling both screen-glow and the eerie bioluminescence of the deep sea. Combining the precision of laser-cut perspex with the unpredictable extraterrestrial vocals of the theremin—originally called the aetherophone—Helyer’s thoughtful hybrids connect the history of gestural interface devices with the drive to open ourselves to the invisible in our world.
These framing sculptures effectively highlight the exhibition’s prioritisation of the scope of meanings for that vexed term, new media. The National New Media Arts Award encompasses Helyer’s high tech sculptures, plus remixed documentary and video art, machinima, robotics and interactive animation. For all its heterogeneity, what emerges in the shortlist is the achievement of an exceptional synthesis between traditional approaches to media art with cutting edge technologies.
Found footage practitioners Soda_Jerk’s work exemplifies the richness and intelligence of contemporary recombinatory video practice. Their Astro Black: A History of Hip-Hop reworks the 1974 intergalactic free-jazz docu-fantasy, Space is the Place, with a sophisticated suite of samples from the annals of hip hop heritage. While for some, any tampering with Sun Ra’s Afrofuturist masterpiece could constitute sacrilege, what might sway even some of the more ardent purists here is the work’s emphasis on the film’s ongoing power as a hip-hop ur-text. The inviting 4-channel projection, insightful juxtapositions and witty use of the turntablist form drawing out the extensive stylistic legacy of the film—on artists including DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy—is all the argument needed for the critical potency of the contemporary remix artwork.
Also using high definition video, but with a different approach, Lynette Wallworth’s immersive installation, Still:Waiting2, depicts a twilight scene of stern red river gums in the Flinders Ranges. The presence of the audience contributes to the revelation of this 2006 work, causing the dramatic arrival and decamping of unruly flocks of white corellas. Sequestered behind a filmy pale veil, the installation courts the viewer’s attention through its slow unfolding, which Wallworth explains in a reflective wall text on the origins and intentions of the piece. Duration is at the heart of its aesthetic, as waiting for the work to exert its sudden payoff—the wild explosion of screeching, careening bodies across the sky—is exquisite. That the exuberant electronic soundtrack from the neighbouring installation can override much of the quiet waiting part of the experience of Wallworth’s work is indicative of the ongoing challenge represented by the sonic components of media art works.
The sound bleed is from Chris Howlett’s Metropolis: Part I-III, a machinima work that recuts footage from the SimCity Societies game with sounds hacked from the game’s engine bites, to reconfigure the authoritarian and capitalist operations of that virtual 3D environment. Like Philip Brophy’s work in the show, 10 Flaming Youths, which uses images sourced from youth marketing sites that combust as they near us at the front of the screen, Howlett’s work raises key questions about the complex relations between these digital surfaces: both works are evidently antagonistic towards, and curiously symbiotic with, the commercial applications of the technologies their work critically engages.
In You Were In My Dreams, Van Sowerwine returns to her theme of the lost child, explored in works such as the award-winning stop-motion animation, Clara (2004). Only, this time, in a collaboration with Isobel Knowles, there’s a twist: the child is ‘lost’ to the dream-world. This installation, the winner of the 2010 Queensland Premier’s New Media Arts Award and specially reconstructed for the exhibition, involves the viewer in a journey through a mythical jungle landscape that begins with the figure of the sleeping child. As the participant peers into the viewing device, a live video feed capturing facial expressions in real time translates their face into the diegesis, so that the spectator becomes the dreamer, integrated into the world of the animation. (A similar urge to directly address the participant animates Wade Marynowsky’s entertaining entry, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeois Robot, a frilled and spangled cousin of the Dalek who approached and, by many accounts, unnerved visitors to the exhibition).
Clever lighting and attention to resolution details mean that the experience of You Were In My Dreams is uncanny but not entirely unflattering; here, the identification with the protagonist, such an article of film theory, is literalised. Spectators, jovially cheering their friends’ jungle antics (“Pat the monkey!! Grab that vine!!”), reveal that the critical effect of this exceptional artwork is to draw the form of animation into a deeper conversation with the practices of social media and first-person gaming culture. Ironically, the work’s presentation in a wooden viewing box recalls the myriad pre-cinematic projected and animated ‘devices of wonder’, while the textured two-dimensional cut-outs reference Russia’s Soyuzmultfilm and Iran’s IIDCYA, Harry Smith’s No. 12 or Heaven and Earth Magic (1962), and the meticulous silhouette puppetry of Lotte Reineger. As labour-intensive and perhaps atavistic as Sowerwine’s creative urges inevitably are, this work manages to elegantly transcend nostalgia by drawing sustenance from the fertile traditions of stop and shadow animation to provide an entrancingly distinctive context for digital interactivity, and so to propose new homes to long for and dream of.
As with Howlett’s reconfiguring of the stuff of games, regarding them less as finished entities and more as a set of design tools for experiment, and Wallworth’s viewer-triggered ecology, Sowerwine and Knowles treat the work as an open and ongoing process. If, as many now argue, new media art succeeds when it subverts uni-dimensional media institutional distinctions between producers and consumers, the works in this exhibition confirm the engaging creative potential of this emergent multi-dimensionality. The National New Media Art Awards offer some compelling evidence of the increasing aesthetic sophistication of Australian media art practice, highlighting the ways artists working with new media technologies are using the past, to inform not just the present, but also the future.
Van Sowerwine and Isobel Knowles were awarded $75,000 and You Were in My Dreams becomes part of the Queensland Art Gallery Collection. The judges highly commended Wade Marynowsky’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeois Robot 2. Queensland artist Claire Robertson was awarded the $25,000 Premier of Queensland’s New Media Scholarship.
Premiere of Queensland’s National New Media Arts Awards 2010 Exhibition, Philip Brophy (VIC), Nigel Helyer (NSW), Chris Howlett (QLD), Isobel Knowles and Van Sowerwine (VIC), Wade Marynowsky (NSW), Soda_Jerk (NSW), Lynette Wallworth (NSW), Gallery of Modern Art, Aug 28-Nov 7, Brisbane
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 15
© Danni Zuvela; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Trash Humpers
ONE OF DAVID LYNCH’S GREAT QUIPS AROUND THE TIME HE MADE INLAND EMPIRE IS THAT THE PROBLEM WITH HIGH DEFINITION VIDEO IS THAT IT LEAVES NO MYSTERY FOR THE VIEWER, YOU ARE ALLOWED TO SEE EVERYTHING—NO FUZZINESS, NO BLURRY EDGES OR STRANGE VISUAL ARTEFACTING. LYNCH EQUATES LOW DEFINITION VIDEO WITH THE FILMS OF THE 1930S WHEN THE EMULSION WASN’T SO GREAT, PROVIDING LESS INFORMATION ON THE SCREEN, ALLOWING THE MIND TO GO DREAMING.
Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers is a film of mystery in many ways of which I’m sure Lynch would approve. A feature length film shot in glorious VHS, full of bad tracking and noise glitches, it recalls the bizarrely nostalgic aesthetic of 80s domestic video, offering a refreshingy beaten-up and wonderfully degraded audio visual experience—something that the crystal clear and all too perfect high definition world of contemporary video misses.
Korine has spoken about what attracted him to shooting the film on VHS: “There was a strange beauty in the analog. You almost have to squint to see things through the grain and the mist. There’s something sinister about it.” Now numerous films from Blair Witch to Paranormal Activity have attempted to exploit these ‘sinister qualities.’ Domestic video functions as a recorder of real events unfolding before us, adding to the overall verisimilitude and scariness of film, but none has done it so succinctly or perversely as Korine with Trash Humpers.
The theme of Korine’s latest delve into the depraved depths of white trash involves another kind of beating up and beating off—geriatrics (actually Korine and co in old people masks and orthopaedic shoes) going about humping trash and generally fucking shit up. The film, exactly like the title suggests, depicts old folk humping trash—in fact trees, mailboxes, and anything else that doesn’t move. Korine’s treatment of this material appears in general like an improvised shoot and run approach. The camera follows its manic-decrepit characters through abandoned streets and parking lots as they hump, smash up property, murder, commit home invasion and along the way meet an assortment of other weirdo characters, including conjoined twins and a guitar strumming sex obsessed cretin.
Lynch’s sense of low definition video’s ‘mystery’ also extends to the premise of the film itself: just what are we watching? If HD video shows us everything of the world, the VHS of Trash Humpers reveals the unseen, the unknown, the hidden—old people who come out at night to connect with the world around them in ways not normally seen. Far from shock value, one of the characters in Trash Humpers offers us what could be described as one of the more poignant moments in this bizarre film as he discusses how these people are free, free to do whatever, unlike the rest of society trapped by rules and conventions.
Trash Humpers’ freak show characters recite nursery rhyme fragments and chant repetitive nonsense as they go about their depravity, recalling the wonderfully disturbing onscreen personas of artist Paul McCarthy. In McCarthy’s Painter (1995) the artist intones phrases in a demented, high-pitched voice, and in Family Tyranny (1987, with Mike Kelley) he repeats over and over remedial phrases to disarming effect. McCarthy too has long explored the use of mutant masks in various performances, providing him, like the grandpas and grandmas in Trash Humpers, a certain crazed freedom to play out all manner of debased activities.
Trash Humpers adds up to a surreal, creepy and wonderfully perverse experience. Like a good horror movie, the film’s abrasive and nutball images stay with one for days afterwards. Apparently it was Korine’s intention to make a film that might be unearthed in a thrift store on an old VHS tape, a fuzzy analogue artefact from another time and place. He even flirted with the idea of leaving copies of the video on the sidewalk, for unsuspecting viewers to find.
The end result is a recombinant mix of nasty home video, jackass inspired pranks with a sexual bent, performance based video art and horror, all seemingly improvised into a macabre, vaudeville horror show. Trash Humpers celebrates destruction, vandalism and perverse freedom. It’s the perfect antidote to the worthy and important art house fare of the Melbourne International Film Festival and its grating byline this year: “it’s a matter of taste”.
Harmony Korine is an American director whose films include Gummo, Julien Donkey Boy and Mister Lonely. Trash Humpers won the DOX Award at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival and screened in the 2010 Melbourne and Sydney Underground Film Festivals (MUFF and SUFF).
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 16
© Ian Haig; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Entanglement Theory
courtesy Physical TV
Entanglement Theory
RICHARD JAMES ALLEN AND KAREN PEARLMAN (PHYSICAL TV) AND COLLABORATORS HAVE INVESTED MUCH IN THEIR 10-MINUTE FILM, ENTANGLEMENT THEORY, MELDING PHYSICAL AND VIRTUAL PERFORMANCE, CONNECTING A DANCING MAN (ALLEN) AND HIS SECOND LIFE AVATAR ACROSS IMPONDERABLE TIME-SPACE DISTANCES. SPEAKING WITH ALLEN AND PEARLMAN REVEALS JUST HOW MUCH THINKING AND WORK HAS GONE INTO THE FILM AND WHAT THEY HOPE THEIR ALREADY GLOBAL AUDIENCES ARE EXPERIENCING.
Borrowing directly from Quantum Physics’ Entanglement Theory, dancer and avatar in the film are like bound particles—however far apart, a change in one results immediately in a change in the other. In the film, the characters’ discrete worlds are parallel ones until, in the end, their realities overlap—as Allen dances on a timber bridge over a pond, transparent figures glide about him and, finally, now spirit-like himself, he enters the Second Life city of his avatar and they dance high amidst its buildings.
Allen is attracted to Entanglement Theory’s resonances with Vedic philosophy and with a dualism that perpetually resolves into the oneness of together-apart. This is not made literal in the film; there’s no explanatory content. You simply enjoy a fantasy that might translate into something more than a man who dances through intimate, inner city streets (while his avatar inhabits a hard, Second Life cityscape), falls asleep in a humble room (his doppelganger lounges in luxury before a blazing log fire), dozes on a park bench and then dances with his other as their worlds overlap. But Allen hopes you might feel a more heightened form of enjoyment.
Thinking, meditation and yoga are the usual means of apprehending or entering transcendent states but, says Allen, in the film they’re to be found in dance and dream. As well as defying gravity, dance can be ecstatically transcendent or subtly contemplative (Allen, like a Hollywood musical character dances past pedestrians, breaking with the everyday), while sleep opens the door to the avatar’s world. For Allen, the state to aspire to is Turiya, which in Hindu philosophy is beyond waking consciousness, dreaming and deep sleep, and beyond time and space. He and Pearlman have therefore structured the film around waking, sleeping, dreaming and Turiya.
Research for the film began with Pearlman and Allen working with Gary Hayes (“a Second Life genius,” says Allen) of MUVEDesign at Critical Path in January 2009 mixing real and Second Life through improvisation and developing “intermedia choreographic ideas.” Some of the outcomes were performed live with screen projections in Do Avatars Dream of Human Sleep? and then work began on Entanglement Theory.
Both makers are now intrigued by how enthusiastically their film has been taken up by audiences and programmers, including ABC TV, and suspect that viewers intuitively pick up on its deeper resonances. With almost 20 screenings this year, Allen says that the take-up is the fastest they’ve had for one of their films. Entanglement Theory has been shown in dance film and other festivals in São Paulo, Ghent, Michigan, Bergamo, Helsinki, Fort Worth, Tulsa, Trieste, Naples, Oklahoma, Johannesburg and at the Dungog Film Festival (NSW). It will screen at EDIT 2010 International Dance Film Festival in Budapest in October and at the Inshadow International Festival of Video, Performance and Technologies in Lisbon in December.
When the film appeared in the Animation Event of the Dance on Camera Festival in New York in January this year the New York Times reviewer wrote of the program: “It’s striking here that almost all of these shorts combine cartoons with live-action photography. In the best of these, Entanglement Theory…this mixture gives a new vitality to the dream states that preoccupy so many of the current crop of Dance on Camera filmmakers” (NYT, Jan 30).
While there’s a long history of mixing live dance with animation (peaking in 50s MGM musicals and revived in the digital era), Physical TV’s exploration of the possibilities of working with Second Life animation reveals the increasing range of technical means available for creative use by (and within the reach of) artists. While the Second Life aesthetic will never be to everyone’s taste and avatars cannot as yet move as subtly as their human counterparts, there are in Entanglement Theory moments of supple elegance and in the overall oscillation between worlds a fluidity of movement and editing that makes for a seductive reverie. See for yourself when it screens on ABC TV.
Entanglement Theory will be shown on ABC2, October 31 at 8.20pm and ABC 1 on November 7 at 4.20pm.
Entanglement Theory, choreographer, director Richard James Allen, Second Life artist, animateur, machinimatographer Gary Hayes, editor, dramaturg/writer Karen Pearlman, supervising sound editor Andrew Plain, composer Fiona Hill, producer Physical TV.
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 16
© RealTime ; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Zhao Tao in I Wish I Knew (Hai shang chuan qu)
THERE IS A SPECTRE HAUNTING JIA ZHANGKE’S RECENT WORK:THE SPECTRE OF TIME, OF MEMORIES BEING DISPLACED AND HISTORY ERASED. FROM THE CITIES DISMANTLED TO MAKE WAY FOR THE THREE GORGES DAM IN HIS FILM, STILL LIFE, THROUGH THE UNSPOKEN DISAPPOINTMENTS HANGING OVER THE FORMER COLLEGE STUDENTS OF CRY ME A RIVER, TO THE DISCOMFORTING QUESTIONING OF WHAT IS REAL IN A COUNTRY WHERE THE PAST IS CONSTANTLY REWRITTEN IN 24 CITY, JIA’S FOCUS HAS SHIFTED FROM HIS EARLY PORTRAITS OF ECONOMIC FRINGE DWELLERS TO A PROBING OF CHINA’S FRACTURED HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS.
But whereas Still Life and 24 City implicitly asked where a nation’s emotional, ethical and philosophical centre lies when so much of its heritage has been destroyed, Jia’s new documentary I Wish I Knew attempts to answer this question by reclaiming history from the ground up.
Through 18 interviews, Jia delves into the history of Shanghai, which as a colonial creation and centre of nationalist sentiment, hotbed of vice and incubator of radical politics has long embodied the conflicting forces that have shaped modern China. Home to the most cosmopolitan aspects of China’s Republican culture of the 1930s and 40s, the city was also a stronghold of radical leftism during the Cultural Revolution. Nowadays China’s largest city stands as a symbol of the country’s traumatic colonised past and growing 21st century might. Within each of these broad historical brushstrokes are a million small stories of heroism, betrayal, idealism and exploitation. I Wish I Knew takes a cross-section of these tales, related in talking head interviews, and weaves them into a broad historical net cast over the city as it undergoes a makeover in the lead-up to the 2010 Expo.
The contested nature of Shanghai’s past is highlighted not only through personal remembrances from various political and historical perspectives, but also through the filmmaker’s reflection on the ways in which the city’s life has been represented on screen. Shanghai has long been the centre of China’s film industry, and even when Hong Kong dominated Asian cinema, its industry was nurtured by Shanghai refugees who had fled the mainland in the wake of the Communist takeover.
The cinematic allusions begin when we see the daughter of an executed Communist Party activist watching young actors marching down a fake Shanghai street on a film set. The woman tells the story of her father’s execution by Guomindang forces shortly before her birth, an event recorded by a Hong Kong journalist in a series of black and white photos. “I only know my father through these images,” she says tearfully of the shots of her father’s last moments. She goes on to recall her mother’s subsequent breakdown as she ran alongside Communist troops when they entered the city in 1949, searching for her dead husband among the ranks of the living.
From the woman’s tale we segue into the 1959 propaganda film, To Liberate Shanghai (director Wang Bing), featuring deliriously happy crowds greeting Communist soldiers as their officer declares in close-up, “The liberation of Shanghai marks the complete smashing of imperialist forces in China!”
From this cartoon triumphalism the film moves to the quiet memories of Wang Toon, director of the 1966 Taiwanese film Red Persimmon, based on his childhood experience of fleeing Shanghai as the Communists closed in on the city.
Jia follows this diasporic thread across the Formosa Strait, interviewing elderly Shanghai residents stranded in Taipei since 1949, as well as the famed Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien about his 1998 feature Flowers of Shanghai. Later Jia’s camera wanders to Hong Kong, via a clip from Wong Kar Wai’s Days of Being Wild, starring Rebecca Pan as an aging Shanghai refugee. Jia talks to the actress, herself the daughter of a Shanghaiese woman who fled to Hong Kong in 1949, about the struggles of Shanghaiese in the British colony during the 1950s and 60s.
Memories of the Maoist era are evoked through an interview with one of Mao’s “model workers,” who played herself in Huang Baomei, a 1958 film by legendary third generation director Xie Jin. After happily recalling her brief time as a star of the screen, Huang revisits the Shanghai workshop where she spent her entire working life, now an abandoned derelict shell.
Moving to the present, we see the Shanghai Expo site under construction, the workers labouring under banners urging them to “Stage a Great Expo for the Glory of the Nation.” This nationalistic sloganeering is subtly undercut by a young worker breakdancing beside a boom box, an echo of the roller-skating girl seen gracefully gliding around a rooftop in 24 City, and a mark of Jia’s ongoing interest in moments of spontaneous creative expression.
Between all these remembrances and scenes of Shanghai’s contemporary reconstruction, Jia’s artistic and life partner Zhao Tao wanders the city’s streets, dressed in white—the Chinese colour of mourning—looking for something she apparently never finds. Her silent figure speaks not only of the pain hidden from Shanghai’s glittering neon lights, but also the stories that still cannot be told—or perhaps are already lost.
I Wish I Knew resists simply positing an alternative narrative to what appears in mainland Chinese history books, or validating the version of Shanghai’s past told in Taiwan. Instead, the film redefines the very notion of history in China by refusing all singular, linear accounts of Shanghai’s development. For millennia succeeding dynasties rewrote or simply wiped clean what went before in China in order to shore up their own power, a tradition the Communists have pursued with violent determination. In contrast, Jia’s film gives voice to the vanquished as well as the victors, marking out history as an ever-evolving, always disputed discourse comprising a multitude of competing voices.
There are personal truths in all these tales, even as none of them can individually capture the sprawling complexity that is Shanghai’s past. Most importantly, in assembling this mosaic of human memories and fading filmic images, Jia has forged a poignant memorial to the millions of men, woman and children who have lived, loved, and suffered in China’s most crowded and contentious metropolis.
Zhao Tao, I Wish I Knew (Hai shang chuan qi), writer/director Jia Zhangke; producers Wang Tianyun, Yu Likwai, Meg Jin, Lin Ye, Xiong Yong; People’s Republic of China; 2010.
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 17
© Dan Edwards; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Mother Fish
KHOA DO’S NEW FEATURE FILM MOTHER FISH BEGINS WITH A BLACK SCREEN, THE SOUND OF RUNNING WATER AND THE OFFICIOUS TONES OF KEVIN RUDD. THE THEN PRIME MINISTER IS ANSWERING MALCOLM FARR, POLITICAL REPORTER FOR THE DAILY TELEGRAPH AND OCCASIONAL COMMENTATOR ON THE ABC TV’S INSIDERS, WHO IS ASKING ABOUT THE “12 BOATS AND 700 PEOPLE” THAT HAVE RECENTLY ARRIVED AT CHRISTMAS ISLAND AND THE POSSIBILITY OF REINTRODUCING MAINLAND DETENTION CENTRES.
The reply is vintage Rudd (“there’s a purpose-built facility there for that purpose”) but it fades into the background as the sound of water grows louder and the camera focuses on a pair of hands washing and chopping vegetables. We hear a voiceover in Vietnamese, spoken in the second-person: “What are you cooking today? You only ever eat greens…You always put too much sugar…I’ll wait for you in the car. Don’t forget to turn the TV off.” The volume on Rudd’s voice increases again and we hear him saying “boats [have] been coming to this country, Malcolm, as you know, since the 1970s.”
From here, we follow the woman (Hien Nguyen) as she drives to work—a small factory with several sewing machines and multiple racks of identical clothing (trendy red checked shirts and long purple skirts). The female voice accompanies her throughout the day and when everyone finally departs in the evening, the woman stays to retrieve a toy monkey that she, or rather the voice, has taken a liking to. The monkey clearly triggers something in her as the present falls away, the past intrudes, and the voice pleads with her to stop.
In an instant the factory transforms into a small boat, with a sewing machine standing in for a motor, a bobbin for a pull cord, and a skirt for a sail of sorts. This rather Brechtian approach, reminiscent of Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003), is not without its risks but for the most part it works. In this way, Mother Fish effects an unusual reversal: having previously made a rather filmic piece of theatre (RT86) director Khoa Do has now produced a rather theatrical film.
In the absence of actual ocean, the film evokes its presence through camera movement (constantly pitching up and down, as if on a heaving sea) and sound effects (water slopping against the side of the boat, the low drone of the motor). Similarly, the set transforms over the course of the film from a steel-toned workshop—all grey, gold and silver with the occasional shot of red thanks to the bobbins of thread—into a rusted, blasted and scorched shell of itself, barely recognisable under a layer of mud.
On board the “mother fish” are the two sisters Kim (Kathy Nguyen) and Hanh (Sheena Pham), their uncle (Hieu Phan) and a young man Chau (Vico Thai). Sailing out of the harbour, the sisters argue about what they have been allowed to bring and what their mother might have packed for them. However the argument comes to an abrupt end when they hear the sound of a patrol boat and shots being fired. Once out on the ocean, the journey alternates between boredom and terror. During the dull patches they remember the past (dad’s exploits, mum’s food) and rehearse the future (“you’ll never have to cook again because everything comes in a can: chicken in a can; cow in a can; fish in a can”). However these moments are few and far between as the mother fish and her crew endure horror upon horror: first the boat is attacked by pirates, who rape one sister while another watches helplessly; then they are forced to forfeit a precious necklace to bribe an official to tow them into a refugee camp where they are then pushed back out to sea; later Chau jumps ship never to be seen again while Hanh teeters on the brink of death.
Mother Fish
These scenes have the potential to be voyeuristic on the one hand or sentimental on the other, but remarkably they are neither. Instead, this film sails straight and true thanks to the immense restraint of both its actors and director. For their part, the actors play the scenes with absolute control: emotion is evoked through little more than a turn of the head, a glimmer of a tear, or a gentle glance of affection. What little dialogue there is, is spoken with sensitivity and nuance and Thai’s reading of the line “I’m sorry, I’m sorry” hints at his character’s pain and regret as well as compassion. This emotional and verbal reticence is complemented by Do’s visual restraint. For example, when filming the rape scene, gauze drops down over the lens as if to screen it out. Similarly, when characters are at their most vulnerable and distressed often all we see is a cheekbone, a veil of hair or a hunched shoulder.
In the final scenes, we see the younger Kim washing onto the shore and touching the feet of her older self. Once again the camera hovers over the older Kim’s shoulder as we follow her home. She attempts to cook a meal but unable to eat she instead goes for what we think is a walk in the park. However, when the camera finally tilts down it becomes apparent that she has walked into a pond and is plunging into the water. Several silent seconds later (the soundtrack is effectively minimalist), her younger sister and her younger self burst from the water, gasping and reaching for one another. In one of the final images of the film, a small hand reaches for a larger, older one and we hear (once again in Vietnamese), “Sister, is that you?”, to which Hanh replies, “I’m here.”
The film finishes with the astounding statistic that between 1975 and 1996, over 1,500,000 people fled Vietnam. Of those, only 900,000 made land meaning that 600,000 were lost at sea, a catastrophe on a par with 1,700 SIEV Xs. Of the survivors, approximately 137,000 came to Australia. It is now 35 years since this migration started, yet it is only in the past 10 or so years that these stories have started to emerge into the mainstream. Think for instance of exhibitions such as the Casula Powerhouse’s Viet Nam Voices (1997), Viet Nam Voices: Australians and the Viet Nam War (2001-03) and Nam Bang! (2009) [http://realtimearts.net/article/issue90/9390] as well as Nam Le’s book The Boat (2008). Perhaps the first generation was so busy surviving that it is only now, as the second generation makes its mark on the world and starts to have children of their own, that these stories can be told.
Intriguingly, Khoa Do is also planning to tell stories with and about other refugee communities. Mother Fish is the first in a planned “refugee trilogy” with the second film, Falling for Sahara, already in post-production and the third in the early stages of development. Mother Fish suggests the trilogy has the potential to become an Australian film classic.
Mother Fish, writer, producer, director Khoa Do, executive producer Matthew Riley, performers Kathy Nguyen, Sheena Pham, Hieu Phan, Vico Thai, Hien Nguyen; Australia, Titan View
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 18
© Caroline Wake; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
The Time That Remains
DECREPIT WHEELS ON A RUSTY BICYCLE CARRYING FOLDED CARTONS CRISSCROSS THE GROTESQUELY PEOPLED STREETS OF THE ‘DESERT KINGDOM’ OF DUBAI—A FAR CRY FROM THE OPULENT ARTIFICIAL LUSTRE THAT ENVELOPS ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS OF THE OIL RICH EMIRATE. TO THE SUBDUED BACKGROUND MUSIC OF MANDOLINS, THIS IS THE OPENING SCENE OF THE FIRST FEATURE LENGTH FILM PRODUCED BY AN EMIRATI, ALI MOSTAFA, TITLED CITY OF LIFE. IT OFFICIALLY LAUNCHED THE NATIONAL 2010 ARAB FILM FESTIVAL (AFF) IN SYDNEY.
Through a series of intersecting plotlines and stunning visual hyperbole reminiscent of Hollywood blockbusters, Ali manages to recount a postmodern narrative about a cosmopolitan Dubai that houses the fragile dreams of its itinerant populace.
With the same overarching artistic zeal of the past few years, the festivals’ co-directors, Mouna Zaylah and Fadia Abood, endeavoured to present a multifaceted selection of films that in their words “showcase stories from diverse Arabic-speaking cultures to broad Australian audiences that reflect the complexity and diversity of Arab communities and experiences.”
Touring nationally to five major cities, the AFF has generated its own scene, making its presence known by collaborating with local communities and reaching out to newer audiences with record attendances throughout. In a sense, AFF offered a cultural antidote to the increasingly virulent Islamophobia gripping the current state of western political discourse—be it over items of clothing or over building permits near sacrosanct, politicised sites. As the directors point out, AFF provides a sovereign domain of imagination that “addresses the (mis)representations of Arab culture through film…by presenting alternative representations of Arab cultures, subjects and narratives; and by supporting the development and presentation of new screen-based work by Arab-Australians.” Films screened this year transgressed the traditional political boundaries of the Arab world and also spoke with the diasporic intonations and regional polyphonies of a vibrant language that were wonderfully exhibited in the homemade Arab-Australian archival footage sent in by local participants.
scheherazade, tell me a story
In Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story, audiences were confronted with a brutal admixture of gender and class in modern Egypt and how women in their various social positionings are caught within the entangling webs of cultural modernity and religious piety. Yousry Nasrallah, a protégé of the masterful director Youssef Chahine, skillfully continues the avant-garde revival of current Egyptian cinema with mass appeal by conflating social taboos regarding sexuality and domestic violence. The deliberately subversive strain indicated by the title uses the narrative device of a late night Oprah-esque talk show host who exposes the moral decay of her own society by broadcasting testimonies of Egyptian women navigating the perilous paths of misogyny in their search for love in their personal relationships. At times comedic and in other parts kitschy in its forced acting style, Nasrallah’s film manages to reveal the sensuous aspects of corruption in the private and public spheres of Egyptian life. Perhaps the most gruesome scene—a forced abortion for an educated middle class woman seduced by a professional con artist—underscores how violence manifests itself within contemporary Arab societies in the most mundane yet graphic ways.
kickoff
Other films such as Kickoff or 12 Angry Lebanese are slower paced with their more palpable narratives, wrenching in their intimate depictions and intense in their visual qualities. Kickoff is a well crafted film that uses the cinematographic hues of sepia tones strategically to convey the bleak realities of internally displaced Kurdish Iraqi refugees in a soccer stadium in the city of Kirkuk. The fortified complex of the stadium with its worn out pitch, houses goats, nets, mattresses, burning rubbish drums and humans. These people co-exist within a tense serenity where lives are conducted in a circularity mimicking the Olympic track that engulfs their everyday transactions, economic or otherwise.
The main character, Asu, is tragically killed when leaving the insular space of the stadium to enter the genocidal geography of the city in order to buy a fake trophy for a soccer competition he stages with support from the competing ethnic groups of Arabs, Kurds and Turks. The stadium in Giorgio Agamben’s term is classed a “state of exception”, standing as a microcosmic edifice of juridico-temporal confusion in the midst of the anarchy of occupation or a larger “state of exception” that is now Iraq. Safety and sovereignty ironically reside in the disfigured zone of a no man’s land. The director, Shawkat Korki, brings an aesthetic sensibility tempered by slow moving shots and close ups to reveal the scarring effects of an occupation through the aridity and barrenness of the stadium and the authentic feelings of his characters.
12 Angry Lebanese
12 angry lebanese
12 Angry Lebanese, a documentary by comic actor and drama therapy teacher Zeina Daccache, moves into similar territory by leaving the viewer in a suspended state of irreconcilability. On the one hand, the film tracks the transformational psychological journeys of men trapped in Beirut’s most notorious prison, Roumieh, through their staging of an elaborate adaptation of the famous American play 12 Angry Men. Yet, the men still remain physically entrapped.
The autobiographical testimonies of the prisoners to the camera interspersed throughout are painfully moving in their exploration of what Lebanese Australian anthropologist Ghassan Hage terms a “de-phallicised masculinity.” They are disparagingly honest, ironic and extremely self-reflexive in their laying bare of narratives not tainted by juries or judges. It is interesting to juxtapose 12 Angry Lebanese with Scheherazade, Tell me a Story as both films use the confessional mode of storytelling to convey the complex reality of being a man or a woman in the contemporary Arab world with the literary quality of the first person narrative.
Over 15 months, the prison doors were opened to a committed director and the enthusiasm of those incarcerated to liberate themselves from the internecine, intergenerational violence and conflict manifest in their melancholic recounting of filial memories. Their narratives, and bodies, sit uncomfortably before cameramen following their every move. The prisoners are subjected to another panoptic gaze but eventually become accustomed to the cameras, performing not just for shows where an audience is let into prison for the first time but also for the camera. They invite it to share in their honest journeys of self-discovery where shame can have an ethical energy not to be found in the quotidian spaces of metropolitan Beirut.
the time that remains
The closing film of the Sydney screening, The Time That Remains, captures the absurdist brilliance of Elia Suleiman and his mesmerising screen aura as director and actor. Inspired by the diaries of his father and private letters of his mother, Suleiman’s film is essentially a palimpsest voyage through the lost memories and forgotten landscapes of Palestine from 1948 to the stalled intractability of this conflict today. The searing tragicomic thread is hauntingly meditative, an almost elegiac Mahmoud Darwish poem that becomes transposed onto the screen with its meandering plots and its incongruous hilarities. Suleiman’s repetition of certain scenes in a Groundhog Day fashion alludes to the draining affects of occupation. This repetition reads like an introspective love letter that does not have a recipient and is almost guaranteed never to be read. As with all the films screened this year, The Time That Remains allowed the audience to experience a landscape overlaid with cultural and individual narratives of loss and love on multiple levels and to ultimately enter the emotional and physical subjectivities of a world immediately beyond their own.
Arab Film Festival, July 1-31; http://arabfilmfestival.com.au/
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 21
© Farid Farid; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Alexander Proshkin, The Miracle
DEFINING A FILM IN REFERENCE TO ITS NATIONALITY (A FRENCH FILM, AN AUSTRALIAN FILM, A RUSSIAN FILM) IS AN INCREASINGLY TENUOUS BUSINESS THESE DAYS. IN AN AGE OF GLOBALISATION, IT WOULD SEEM THE BOUNDARIES OF A NATION STATE ARE NO LONGER IMPERVIOUS ENOUGH TO ALLOW FOR THE INCUBATION AND GROWTH OF A DISTINCTIVELY NATIONAL CINEMA. CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN CINEMA REFLECTS THESE CHANGING ECONOMIC AND CULTURAL CONDITIONS MORE ACUTELY THAN MOST OTHER NATIONAL CINEMAS.
For so long culturally isolated and protected by the Iron Curtain, the Russian film industry has, since the fall of the Soviet Union, been forced to undergo a quick and radical transformation. Most significantly, Russian cinema has had to contend directly with Hollywood, the international monster that other national film industries have been struggling with or against for over 90 years. The goal has been simple: to survive in a monopolised marketplace without losing a distinctively national voice. After a shaky start in the 1990s, a definably ‘new’ Russian cinema emerged in the new century, a cinema that, for better or worse, has asserted itself as a producer of popular, economically viable films that participate in the populist aesthetics of Hollywood while also drawing on Russia’s prized and ofaten traumatic cultural heritage.
The career of Russian director Alexander Proshkin (b1940) in many ways reads like a biography of this transformation. Beginning his career in Soviet television in the 1960s and 1970s, Proshkin asserted his reputation as a director of quality television drama before achieving box office and critical success for his 1988 feature Cold Summer of 1953. That film—a dark, violent and dramatic thriller set in the early days following Stalin’s death—was in many ways a pioneering work that offered a model for what Russian cinema could become in the post-Soviet era. Integrating historical and politically contentious subject matter within a generic scenario lifted from a Hollywood western, Cold Summer of 1953 demonstrated the possibility of a culturally respectable, serious, yet also populist and exciting cinema.
Proshkin’s latest feature The Miracle, which played at this year’s Russian Resurrection Film Festival, is also an entertaining film of serious ambition. Like Cold Summer of 1953, The Miracle is set in the early Soviet ‘thaw’ of the mid-1950s, a period when Nikita Khrushchev initiated a relaxation of the paranoid grip of Stalinism. Proshkin was in his mid-teens at the time, and must have experienced the cultural atmosphere as a powerful liberation. “The time is significant,” he explains, “because 1956 is the year which marked a turning point in our history. Khrushchev’s address at the 20th Congress [of the Communist Party] marked the arrival of the new post-Stalinism period. With one foot, we were still in the past, while with the other we were in an uncertain future.”
Presented as a film based on historical events, The Miracle’s narrative offers a fictionalisation of the characteristically Russian cultural myth, or true event, known as the “Standing of Zoia.” Said to have taken place in Kuibyshev (now Samara) in January of 1956, the story goes that while dancing with an icon of St. Nicholas, 21-year-old Zoia Karnaukhova froze solid in her living room for 128 days, only thawing at the arrival of Easter. In a culture very accommodating to superstition, news of the “miracle” was frantically suppressed by the Soviet government, and circulated only by word of mouth. Proshkin explains:
“In Russia, such information is often referred to as ‘bush radio,’ where one person tells one person and he tells another etc. Our scriptwriter, Yuri Arabov, was told about this incident by his grandmother, when he was nine years old. To the wider community, this information was kept confidential til about the end of the 1980s.”
With names altered and dramatic twists thrown in (Kuibyshev becomes Grechansk, Zoia becomes Tatiana and Khrushchev himself gets involved through a deus ex machina) The Miracle manages to engage with the complex problems of Russia’s Soviet past without losing the narrative momentum of contemporary popular cinema, a balancing act that, in Proshkin’s view, Russian filmmakers can no longer afford to neglect. Just like everywhere else, he explains, Russian filmmakers are now answerable to the dictates of the mass audience: “The filmmaker’s role—or existence—has changed in our nation… Before there was an ideological influence, now it’s a commercial one.”
Despite being unambiguously popular in its presentation, there are considerable dimensions of depth in The Miracle. As an allegory, the film would seem to present a metaphor of a society, frozen by Stalin’s terror, coming back to life. For Proshkin, however, the film’s narrative has less specific connotations:
“It is an attempt to explain the mentality of Russia, which in essence has not changed over time. Waiting for so-called ‘miracles’ has been embedded into the national character and we often put things down to simply being miracles.”
Proshkin’s interest in the “mentality” of Russia, and especially in the profound incompatibility between Russian social life and systematic centralisation, echoes throughout much of the director’s work. Open to the possibility of the miracle, but not certain of it, his is what might be called an agnostic attitude, significantly distanced from the more fervent religious cinema of contemporary Russian directors like Andrei Zviagintsev and Pavel Lunguin (whose epic Tsar also featured at this year’s festival). Asked whether he considered his film to belong to the growing ‘religious’ genre of Russian cinema, Proshkin replies:
“For me it was always a mystery: how could a nation, which existed for 1000 years with the Christian-orthodox faith, suddenly condemn its pastors, destroy its churches and reject its religion? Religious belief, which was nurtured for 1000 years, cannot just disappear in one particular moment. It simply moved into the subconscious… Spiritual movies represent the character of our culture and its peculiarity.”
This concern with the Russian subconscious leads me to pursue another subject. If anything can be said to have persistently pricked at the conscience of Russian filmmakers for the past 50 years, it would be that most traumatic chapter of the country’s Stalinist nightmare, the Second World War. At this year’s festival, a retrospective of World War II dramas made in the post-war era—The Cranes are Flying (Kalatazov, 1957), Ivan’s Childhood (Tarkovsky, 1962), Trial on the Road (German, 1971) and The Ascent (Shepitko, 1977)—offered a captivating and sobering glimpse of the war’s centrality in the Russian memory. These are some of the finest films of their time. And yet still today, narratives set during the war continue to be made, as untold stories come to light. One such film is Vera Glagoleva’s One War, perhaps the finest new feature at this year’s festival. Other films explore an adjacent period: Stanislav Mitin’s lyrical gem Backdoor is set in 1949 and Nikolay Dostal’s award winning Peter on His Way to Heaven takes place in 1953.
For Proshkin, there’s a specific rationale in Russian cinema’s preoccupation with the trauma of Soviet history. Raking over the past is, it would seem, a way of processing the unacceptable, making sense of the incomprehensible:
“It’s not a matter of history. It is just that that period influenced the formulation of the mentality. Until we actually rid ourselves of the past which has been infused into our blood, we will never find the road to the future.”
2010 Russian Resurrection Film Festival, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Canberra, Aug 19-Sept 19; www.russianresurrection.com
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 22
© Tom Redwood; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Metropia
IN ITS 13TH YEAR, PERTH’S REVELATION FILM FESTIVAL HAS COME A LONG WAY FROM ITS EARLY DAYS IN THE BASEMENT OF THE GREENWICH CLUB. WELCOMING BACK ITS LOYAL FILM-LOVING FANATICS, REV TURNED THE HEADS OF A WHOLE NEW GROUP OF FILMGOERS WITH A 40% BIGGER AUDIENCE THAN THE PREVIOUS YEAR. SETTING OUT TO BRING WEST AUSTRALIANS A SELECTION OF FILMS THAT CONTAIN A LITTLE SOMETHING PROGRAM DIRECTOR JACK SARGEANT LIKES TO CALL ‘ATTITUDE’, REV SHOWCASED FEATURES, DOCUMENTARIES, SHORTS, ANIMATED FLICKS AND 30 NATIONAL PREMIERES ALL PACKED INTO A SNUG 10-DAY PROGRAM.
With subjects such as an outlaw American comic, through to a pint-sized 13-year-old paparazzo, by far some of the most intriguing films on this year’s program are documentaries. Reporter follows the work of Pulitzer Prize winning journalist of the New York Times Nicholas Kristof as he endeavours to raise awareness of developing world tragedies. Battling shrinking news organisations and newspaper readership as well as humankind’s numbing to mass tragedy, Kristof sets off into the Congo alongside two young American bloggers, seeking out the most tragic stories for his readers. Directed by Eric Daniel Metzgar the film captures the courage and determination of journalists like Kristof, who face those who act with impunity and translate stories of incredible injustice for their readers in the hope of change. With the 20 million Pakistanis displaced by recent floods, Reporter reminds us of a world outside our own that desperately needs our compassion.
Music fans had plenty to inspire them with rockumentaries—The Night of the Triffids, When You’re Strange and Wheedles Groove—which drew huge crowds. The Family Jams took its audience on tour with a unique look at life on the road. The film opens in summer 2004, with an introduction to director Kevin Barker’s family at his grandmother’s 100th birthday celebration in Hawaii. Crossing the ocean Barker sets out to capture a different type of family, that of Joanna Newsom, Devendra Banhart and Vetiver, three San Francisco-based musicians about to make it big on a tour Antony Hegarty believes is a “significant moment for culture.” Hampered by a car accident, an awkward father-son reunion and personal tragedy, the travelling group manages to pull together, sharing experiences of writing, performing and their deep connections to music. The Family Jams offers viewers an incredibly honest look into the world of those with a love and a talent for music, and the family-like bonds that can form over a tune.
A highlight of the Late Shows, The House of the Devil captured the true spirit of the fright flick. Set in the 1980s, Director Ti West’s 16mm film follows Samantha, a cash-poor student desperate to move out of her college dorm. Finding her dream lodging, Samantha takes an out-of-town babysitting job to pay her security deposit, only to realise her employers are not exactly kosher. With a genuine selection of 80s sets, costumes, cinematography and lingo, The House of the Devil’s slow-building tension plays true to such horror classics as Rosemary’s Baby and When A Stranger Calls.
One of the many premieres at Revelation this year was popular animated feature Metropia, directed by Egyptian-Swedish animator and producer Tarik Saleh. Set in Europe in 2024, Metropia depicts a bleak world where natural resources are depleted and global financial markets have collapsed, leaving people to labour in their ruin. Underground tunnels connect most of Europe, yet conspiracy theorist Roger feels something’s amiss. Battling inner voices he sets out alongside a mysteriously familiar stranger to uncover a bizarre scheme. Voiced by Vincent Gallo and Juliette Lewis, the film echoes the building isolation and paranoia of today’s world. With incredible attention to detail and use of photomontage Metropia appeals to animation enthusiasts as well as those not yet fans of the genre.
Continuing with the dystopian theme, One Hundred Mornings took its audience to a not-so-distant post-apocalyptic world. Setting out to create a film that captures the director’s worst fears, Conor Horgan’s feature explores the consequences of a societal breakdown and the conflicts that arise between “groundless optimism and pessimistic realism.” Following an unknown catastrophic event, two couples occupy a cabin hidden away within an Irish mountain village, fighting off hungry wanderers, corrupt police, infidelity and boredom. Drawing on the chaotic social unrest of post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, Horgan sets building animosity and silent conflicts against minimal dialogue and beautiful cinematography—a nod to the director’s formal training in photography. One Hundred Mornings depicts an uncomfortable reality we all face should our fragile existence take a turn for the worse.
No doubt a crucial training ground for WA talent, Get Your Shorts On! showcased a number of short films from Western Australian filmmakers. Among the impressive line-up, the Corrie Jones-directed film Water follows the struggles of eight year-old Toby, wanting a normal life that his mentally-disabled father cannot provide. Set in a seaside community, Water quietly exposes some of the untold difficulties families and carers of the disabled face, delivering an emotional punch usually hard to capture in short-length cinema.
Denise Groves’ short doco, My Nan & the Yandi, tells the story of how a small piece of metal, the ‘yandi’, saw the filmmaker’s grandmother and hundreds of Aboriginal people through the decade-long Pilbara strike of 1946. In separating tantalite, tin and gold from the soil, the yandi offered an alternative income for jobless families fighting for wages instead of just rations. Filmed in Western Australia’s Marble Bar, Groves’ delightful short captures the resourcefulness and resilience of the Roy Hill Njarparlies, as told by ‘Nan’ herself.
A Special Event highlight in the 2010 program, the Best of Domefest, sampled a number of international films created over the last seven years for the 180-degrees ‘fulldome’ environment. Traditionally an Albuquerque (US) festival, Domefest screened here at the Horizon Planetarium, featuring snippets of large-format film that journeyed beyond the typical space-themed content to include immersive art and storytelling works that explore the surround experience. Australian Network for Art and Technology’s Program Manager of Art Science, Vicki Sowry, opened the event, presenting a number of exciting ideas for the format including a fulldome horror flick—sure to leave audiences with nowhere to turn short of closing their eyes. The night’s schedule included a number of trippy audio-visual pieces, some leaving the audience slightly woozy. Two Black Hole excerpts unravelled some of the fascinating mysteries of the space phenomenon but left viewers wanting a little more, while Seeds of Spring ditched space altogether, following a time-lapse of a quirky, bearded farmer planting and raising a crop from greenhouse to field.
Emerging in the 1990s, fulldome video technology has come far, offering a wonderful opportunity for filmmakers to engage audiences in a whole new way—an approach the festival truly champions.
Revelation eschews big budget blockbusters and celebrities that most people mistake for cinema, instead applauding innovation. From low-budget Mumblecore experiments and off-beat documentaries through to the RevCon conferences on cinema and screen culture, the festival’s films are no mere time-kills; they take you places. One of Australia’s most idiosyncratic film festivals, Revelation rebelliously celebrates the true spirit of cinema. Some of the best films in this year’s line-up were not first choices, so my tip for future audiences is, challenge yourself.
Revelation Perth International Film Festival, director Jack Sargeant, Perth, July 8-18
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 23
© Claudia Cukrov; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Solar Equation, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
photo Marcel Aucar
Solar Equation, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
“EVERY CULTURE HAS A UNIQUE SET OF SOLAR MYTHOLOGIES AND THIS PROJECT SEEKS TO BE A PLATFORM FOR BOTH THE EXPRESSION OF TRADITIONAL SYMBOLISM AND THE EMERGENCE OF NEW STORIES.” — RAFAEL LOZANO-HEMMER
Commissioned for Federation Square’s Light in Winter Festival, which celebrates the cultural, communal and physical qualities of light, Solar Equation offers us an opportunity to engage in a new way with the most powerful light in our lives. This scale-model of the sun brings together both the personal and social aspects of spiritual beliefs and practices the sun has inspired throughout time.
As the life-source of our planet, the sun’s majesty and mystery make it challenging to represent. Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project (2003) in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall successfully illuminated an interior space to recreate the effect of the sun’s presence in our lives. With Solar Equation, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer has brought the sun closer so that we might see the complex behaviours occurring on its surface. In doing so, he has created a work that establishes an entirely different relationship between us and the sun. Experiencing this first iteration of the work, I was struck initially by how tame the sun appeared at this scale in the Melbourne sky. Viewed from a distance, the appearance of this burning sphere against the night sky was however impressive and brought to mind any number of apocalyptic visions. But up close I was also moved by the questions the work raises about the role science plays in our relationship with nature.
The sun in Solar Equation is created by five projections onto a 14 metre diameter balloon. It’s the largest spherical balloon in the world yet is still 100 million times smaller than the actual sun. At 18 metres above the ground in the middle of Federation Square and at relatively human scale, not only is the size of the sun reduced. For millennia, the astronomical wonder of the sun has been looked upon from Earth with awe, worshipped and feared; scaled down, visible only to a small number of people in one city far down in the Southern Hemisphere, this sun suddenly appears manageable and, therefore, controllable.
Seemingly inverting this notion of control, the visual content of the work is produced by a series of dynamic equations that are uncontrollable. The use of generative visual simulation to create emergent behaviour patterns implies that the visual imagery in the work shows us what the sun’s surface actually looks like. Yet this representation is heavily mediated and relies on a belief that mathematical equations are able to faithfully replicate natural phenomena. The work’s fusion of science and nature—of science as nature—is what, for me, makes Solar Equation an intriguing and inspiring artwork. It presents a visual representation of the latest solar observations by NASA and the European Space Agency to give us a close up, dynamic view of our sun and in doing so reduces this powerful mass of nuclear explosions to something constructed, interpreted and contained by humans.
While the violence of the sun’s nuclear fusion appears as beautiful, mesmerising visual patterns in the work, the representation of such immense power in this way questions how far science can or will go in the desire to tame nature. The possibility, then, of interacting with the work (through an iPhone app) further enhances this problematic human-nature relationship. By selecting various options that apply, for example, particle effects or perlin noise, you can ‘disturb’ the turbulence, flares and sunspots on the surface. The sense of engagement is quite immediate; watching the different effects each equation has on the imagery creates a more personal connection that makes this sun seem alive.
Yet this sense of control and the idea that you might be able to affect the behaviour of the sun (even in this scale model version) harks back to those apocalyptic visions to remind us that our own capacity to influence our environment should perhaps also be approached with a degree of awe and fear. In this way, Solar Equation achieves the artist’s desire to evoke both past and future solar stories: it reminds us of the wonder of being confronted with natural phenomena we may never understand, while simultaneously questioning whether our present and future attempts towards such understanding might dispel the sense of magic that so ignited our collective imagination in the first place.
Scott McQuire’s interviews with Rafael Lozano-Hemmer about Solar Equation appeared in RT97, and in RT89.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Solar Equation, The Light in Winter, Federation Square, Melbourne, June 4-July 4
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 24
© Emma McRae; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Mokuy, Nawurapu Wunungmurra
courtesy the artist and Museum & Art Gallery of NT
Mokuy, Nawurapu Wunungmurra
THE 27TH TELSTRA NATIONAL ABORIGINAL AND TORRES STRAIT ISLANDER ART AWARDS (NATSIAA) HAVE BEEN ANNOUNCED. THERE IS ADDITIONAL EXCITEMENT THIS YEAR AS A NEW PRIZE CATEGORY HAS BEEN INTRODUCED IN RECOGNITION OF THE GROWING NUMBER OF INDIGENOUS ARTISTS WHO ARE EMBRACING NEW MEDIA AS PART OF THEIR ARTISTIC PRACTICE.
Previously, such works fell into the Wandjuk Marika 3D Memorial Award category where, for example, Nyapanyapa Yunupingu won in 2008 with her bark painting and video installation Incident at Mutpi, 1975 (RT87, p10).
The inaugural Telstra New Media Prize has been awarded to Nawurapu Wunungmurra for his work Mokuy.
Mokuy (spirit) is an elegant sound sculpture with video projection that evokes images and sounds of the coming together of spirits associated with sacred yams, “Morning Star feathers,” scrub fowl and doves at the sacred ground called Balambala: “The Yirritja mokuy come in on the birds djilawurr (scrub fowl) and bugutj-bugutj (banded fruit dove). The Dhuwa mokuy, they come in from rangi side (saltwater)” (Quoted material from awards website). RT
The 27th Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin. www.nt.gov.au/nreta/museums/exhibitions/natsiaa/
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 24
© RealTime ; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
10 Transforming Youths, Philip Brophy, Signal Arts Studio
photo Lynton Crabb for About 3 Minutes Productions
10 Transforming Youths, Philip Brophy, Signal Arts Studio
MELBOURNE IS SPOILT FOR CHOICE WHEN IT COMES TO ARTS AND CULTURAL INFRASTRUCTURE. IT SEEMS BARELY A YEAR GOES BY WITHOUT THE INAUGURATION OF A NEW COMPANY OR THE OPENING OF A NEW VENUE. THE MELBOURNE RECITAL CENTRE, THE MTC THEATRE, THE WHEELER CENTRE AND VICTORIAN OPERA ALL SPRING TO MIND AS RECENT ADDITIONS TO THE CITY’S CULTURAL CAPITAL.
Another element that characterises the ever-evolving cultural landscape of the city is a penchant for converting its unique architecture and old buildings into new environments for creative expression. The City of Melbourne has lead this approach, with public art programs such as its well-established Laneway Commissions and versatile spaces such as ArtPlay on Birrarung Marr, a studio space for primarily school-aged children, and Arts House at the Meat Market.
The newest addition to this family is Signal—the ‘big sibling’ of ArtPlay—a multipurpose art studio for young people aged 13 to 20, which opened in February 2010. Located behind Flinders Street Station on the north bank of the Yarra River, the heritage-listed building was a decommissioned train signal box, gutted by fire in 2002. It has since been re-fitted with a downstairs performance space, an upstairs studio area, multimedia facilities and dedicated exhibition spaces such as the outdoor plaza area and projective windows on the building’s upper level.
The establishment of any art space dedicated to young artists is welcome news, but as a flagship youth venue in the City of Melbourne’s evolving arts program, it is interesting to consider what unique and new opportunities Signal will add. After all, the majority of art galleries, companies and organisations have dedicated education and engagement programs to target students and youth participants. Councillor Jennifer Kanis, Chair of the People and Creative City portfolio, says that Signal will offer “the opportunity for young people to develop as cultural citizens by engaging in a range of creative programs…It is our intention to provide the opportunity for young people to develop skills or just engage in a creative experience” (email Sept 6).
It is with this sentiment in mind that Signal has started its journey, not by focusing programs specifically around educational outcomes or vocational training as many youth arts programs do, but instead by encouraging broad and varied creative expression. It is a welcome approach, which acknowledges the value of developing young people who are culturally engaged and creatively stimulated, regardless of whether they want to become professional artists or makers.
Being unattached to an established arts organisation, Signal should be less restricted by art form or formal educational standards. Initially, its programming has been markedly diverse and its creative remit wide. With regular programming on Friday evenings and Sunday afternoons, facilitated by local artists, Signal covers a wide range of activities and art forms. Workshops are repeated over the course of a few months. This means that participants can, in one week, create their own animations, new media and sound artworks, or learn about printmaking, zine writing and craft techniques, and then continue in the following weeks with hip hop performances from Cultural Infusion, dance workshops with Jason Coleman’s Ministry of Dance, graffiti workshops with street artists Ghostpatrol and Acorn, or performances in the Signal Art Orchestra.
Already, Signal is building connections with established youth-focused organisations and initiatives, such as SYN FM, Express Media, St Martin’s Youth Art Centre and FReeZA. In this sense, Signal seems to be positioning itself as a central hub of youth creativity, a singular venue in its own right as well as a springboard into other pursuits and opportunities.
Despite not promoting itself as an ‘artist training’ facility, Signal is offering opportunities for its participants to gain industry experience. Through its Signal Curators program, young people will have the chance to visit and learn from other local arts organisations over a seven-month period. The intent is not just to develop knowledge of professional practice, but for participants to return to help curate and deliver the ongoing series of programs at the venue.
This type of program shows foresight, because one of the problems that youth organisations can encounter is what to do with participants once they reach the ‘upper age limit.’ Rather than automatically losing participants when they become ‘too old,’ it is very important for new youth organisations to identify ways to retain and re-engage these members in different yet rewarding ways. So far, Kanis writes that feedback in the program has been positive, with participants “pleased they have the opportunity to be engaged with a range of Melbourne’s arts organisations and experience how they work.”
Of course, some organisations, artist-run initiatives and collectives thrive on being ‘homeless.’ However, to promote youth engagement it is particularly important to provide a stable and dedicated space. Young artists benefit from having a space that is not only welcoming and comfortable, but one that is solely dedicated to their pursuits, which they can inhabit and make their own. Many creative youth projects are obliged to use existing spaces and venues, sharing with other community groups and having to ‘pack up the hall’, to make room for the next night’s activities.
Too often the arts—particularly in the context of local government—are bundled together with ‘leisure’ and ‘lifestyle’ activities. The value of a venue like Signal is that it reinforces for young people the idea that art and culture are vital forms of self-expression, and can be more than a pastime or hobby, if they want.
Signal’s programs of workshops are run by practising artists, while another aspect of artist engagement is achieved through its strand of high-profile, site-specific commissions. The inaugural recipient was Philip Brophy with his piece 10 Transforming Youths, a graphic animation that explores the physical and aesthetic processing of ageing and transformation, reflecting society’s cultural and commercial obsession with youth. Ten young figures—all resembling contemporary visual phenomena like internet avatars, anime characters and advertising graphics—gradually track across Signal’s external screens until they each morph into older, decrepit and sometimes grotesque versions of their stereotypically youthful alter egos.
These Signal commissions fulfil at least two important functions. They allow young participants to experience outstanding creative practice in the same setting in which they themselves are creating artworks. Secondly, the program has been an important way to inaugurate the space and raise its profile within the broader arts community. Signal has also presented curated programs for the 2009 and 2010 Melbourne International Arts Festivals, an important gesture that recognises youth art as being not at the periphery of established arts practice but rather an important contributor and participant in the broader dialogues within Melbourne’s art community. It will be interesting to see if Signal can establish its voice in the dense Melbourne artscape.
Signal, Flinders Walk, Northbank, Melbourne (behind Flinders St Station towards Sandridge Bridge); signal@melbourne.vic.gov.au
http://.www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/Signal/Pages/Signal.aspx
http://www.philipbrophy.com/projects/10transyouths/background.html
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 25
© Kate Warren; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Victimless Leather, Ionat Zurr
courtesy the artist
Victimless Leather, Ionat Zurr
WA’S SYMBIOTICA—A KEY INTERNATIONAL CENTRE FOR THE BIOLOGICAL ARTS—IS NOW AROUND 10 YEARS OLD, TUCKED AWAY AND THRIVING IN UPSTAIRS LABS AND OFFICES BEHIND THE LEAVES AND SANDSTONE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA (UWA). IT RUNS A RANGE OF ACTIVITIES THAT STRETCH ART/BIOSCIENCE ENGAGEMENT TO ITS VISCERAL EDGES. ITS AUGUST SYMPOSIUM, BODY/ART/BIOETHICS, FOCUSED ON THE BODY—THE HUMAN-ANIMAL ‘FLESH-MACHINE’—WHILE ALLOWING SPACE FOR A BROAD RANGE OF TOPICS OF INTEREST TO INTERDISCIPLINARY BIO-ARTISTS.
In the absence, for personal reasons, of the first programmed speaker, biopolitics researcher Catherine Waldby, “renowned Australian writer” Elizabeth Costello instead moved to the first session, delivering a strident address against the human abuse of animals drawn word for word from the JM Coetzee novel that bears her name. Tired from travel like her fictitious namesake, Costello referenced the Jewish Holocaust to evoke the horrors of what is done to animals in laboratories—and, by implication, perhaps in art too.
Whatever the purpose or extent of the hoax (how many took Ms Costello for the real thing?), these ideas, while in many ways ‘old school,’ created an undercurrent that flowed beneath much of the day’s subsequent discussion. If Costello’s didactic tone was easily dismissed, the arguments themselves seemed to resonate at some of the symposium’s most ethically uncomfortable moments.
UWA’s Darren Jorgensen suggested that the ephemerality and even failure of bio-arts as a category doomed it, like all avant garde movements. Orlan’s idea of the living Harlequin Coat, he said, finished up as an installation; while Stelarc’s ‘third ear’ never hears. Jorgensen compared bio-arts to the 1970s ‘earthworks’ movement, which featured direct human intervention into the landscape. “Bio-art, like earthworks,” he said, “presumes to occupy and simulate the place of nature itself:” its subject is “ a new cosmological order.” Ultimately, the earthworks movement suggests an ethics of “being in a conscious relationship with a system,” rather than presuming that nature still exists as a discrete, non-human category.
SymbioticA’s Academic Coordinator and Co-Founder of the Tissue Culture and Art Project, Ionat Zurr, focused on the ethical discomfort of working in bio-arts. Growing a semi-living ‘stitchless jacket’ from immortal skin cell lines (Tissue Culture and Art Project, Victimless Leather, 2004) entails walking a somewhat visceral ethical borderline. Scientists and the military routinely “cross the line,” Zurr said, while few but the religious and artists ask questions. By creating “semi-living sculptures and/or objects of partial life,” Zurr aims to prompt thought about the meaning of such life. “As long as I’m uneasy about what I’m doing,” she said, “I’m in the right place.”
In “Interspecies Collaborations,” US artist Kathy High explored intimate relations between artists and animals through her own work and that of other artists. Focusing on recognisable and familiar animals, High introduced a literally ‘warm and fuzzy’ theme centred on relationship, and (citing theorist Donna Haraway) the importance of interdependence based on response and respect.
High’s presentation included discussion of two artists whose works lie at apparent extremes. In Adam Zaretsky’s Transgenic Pheasant Embryology Art lab, students manipulate pheasant embryos through a ‘window’ in the eggshell in order to create mutant living forms. Watching this tampering with a life form that US law doesn’t count as an ‘animal’ is subliminally disturbing, even if Zaretsky’s workshop aims to prompt ethical discussion. By contrast, former SymbioticA resident Kira O’Reilly collaborates with animals using a potent combination of critical engagement and empathy. The UK artist has both co-cultured the skin cells of newly-dead pigs with her own to create hybrid, living skin and devised confronting, tender durational performances including Falling asleep with a pig (which is just what it says) and inthewrongplaceness (2005) in which she cradled a slaughtered pig for several hours.
History sheds light on contemporary ethical practice: Ethan Blue, a US historian currently at UWA discussed the photographs of early 20th century prison doctor LL Stanley, who recorded his ostensibly ‘corrective’ experimental surgeries on prisoners with “different bodies.” For Blue, Stanley’s photos “amplify the terror and participate in the crime.” Blue believes Stanley was “just trying to see what would happen,” and the subtext is clear, if confounding: every scientist and artist sets their own boundaries (and often with ethics committees as compulsory arbiters), but how clear can the line ever be?
Bio-arts may face the same threat that not-for-profit researchers grapple with as life processes are increasingly commercialised, according to keynote speaker Luigi Palombi. An expert in biotechnology patents based at the Australian National University (ANU), Palombi provided a passionate and erudite explanation of the way entrepreneurs like Craig Venter are attempting to license gene sequences as though they are not discoveries but ‘inventions.’ Adding to earlier discussion around the commercial cloning and sale of human cell lines (often without patients’ consent), Palombi’s spectre of magnates like Venter profiting from ‘ownership’ of human products offered bio-artists rich territories for critical interrogation.
As the day drew to a close, two of SymbioticA’s current interdisciplinary researchers, Tarsh Bates (NZ) and David Khang (Canada), each asked, “How do we construct bodies when making art—who’s exploited, and how do we make political, ethical, poetic art?” Bates focused her attention on “what kind of world we desire,” explored through the lens of reproductive technology and complicated by race, geography, education and wealth. Khang, an artist and dentist, has produced visceral works juxtaposing extracted human teeth—markers of human mortality—with the poetic extremes of ox-tongues and butterflies. His gallery-based performances, such as How to Feed a Piano, employ symbolic language to confound cultural categories, including race.
In closing the symposium, SymbioticA Director Oron Catts pointed to the variety of critiques of biotechnology and bio-arts presented. Not only do the practices of art and science need to be ‘unpacked,’ he said, so too does the history of art itself and “the ethics of the hype” around scientific discovery and so-called ‘revolutionising’ research such as the Human Genome Project.
Catts stressed the acute need for bio-artists to provoke ethical consideration, from artists’ own informed and participatory perspective. Bio-art, he said, is sometimes judged by its ambiguity to be “flaky,” but this ambiguity is its strength: art sits in a privileged place where disturbances and disruptions provide powerful engagements with ethical issues but where problems need not be solved.
Body/Art/Bioethics symposium; SymbioticA —Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts, University of Western Australia, Aug 6
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 27
© Urszula Dawkins; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
NOW IN ITS 17TH YEAR, THE FILMMAKING SUMMER SCHOOL IS PART OF THE PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT PROGRAM OF SCREEN STUDIES, UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE, OFFERING INTENSIVE TEACHING IN ALL ASPECTS OF PRACTICAL FILM PRODUCTION. IT’S THE IDEAL TIME OF YEAR TO ACQUIRE SKILLS BUT ALSO GET A PERSPECTIVE ON AN INDUSTRY THAT LOOKS LIKE IT’S FINALLY GETTING ON ITS FEET AFTER SOME HARD YEARS. YOU CAN EVEN LEARN HOW TO ROLL WITH THE BLOWS DELIVERED BY CRITICS.
The teachers are leading Australian film industry practitioners. For the 2011 school they include screenwriter Mac Gudgeon (Good Guys, Bad Guys, Last Ride), composer Cezary Skubiszewski (Two Hands, Bootmen, Bran Nue Dae, Blessed), sound designer Craig Carter (Romeo & Juliet, Babe, Rabbit Proof Fence, Kenny, Home Song Stories), director Nadia Tass and cinematographer David Parker (Malcolm, The Big Steal, Amy, Matching Jack), producer Sue Maslin (Japanese Story, Hunt Angels), production designer Jo Ford (My Brother Jack, Road From Coorain, Kidnapped, Last Ride) and a host of others.
Areas taught cover screenwriting, cinematography, producing and production management, directing actors, production and sound design, editing, digital effects, film music, screen language, film business and legalities, marketing and distribution and documentary filmmaking.
There will be lectures on genre films and Wendy Haslem will interview critic and film festival director Paul Harris in a session titled “The Critics and your Film.”
Courses included “From Script to Screen”, “Cinematography Intensive” taught by Ellery Ryan (Angel Baby, Dead Letter Office, Van Diemen’s Land, I Love You Too) and “Digital Cinematography” with the latest in HD technology to hand. And you can live-in at the university if you wish. RT
Filmmaking Summer School 2011, Trinity College, University of Melbourne, Jan 5-25, summerfilmschool@me.com; http://www.summerfilmschool.com
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 27
© RealTime ; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Kristy Ayre, Timothy Harvey, Luke George, NowNowNow
photo Jeff Busby
Kristy Ayre, Timothy Harvey, Luke George, NowNowNow
“SUBLIME IS THE NAME GIVEN TO WHAT IS ABSOLUTELY GREAT. BUT TO BE GREAT AND TO BE A MAGNITUDE ARE ENTIRELY DIFFERENT CONCEPTS…” IMMANUEL KANT, THE CRITIQUE OF JUDGEMENT
The sublime teeters between the dizzying heights of abstraction and the ground of the earth, between nature and art, mathematics and the ineffable. According to Kant, the mathematically sublime is beyond calculation, beyond quantifiable measurement. And yet, Grace Walpole entices her audience with the sublime qualities of π, a household ratio that would appear to be eminently measurable. Or is it?
We know that the circumference of a circle is the square of its radius times π. No matter what size the circle, this formula holds. Walpole rolls an everyday circle, a dinner plate, along her leg, extolling the sheer reliability of its numerical calculation. Surely nothing could be more concrete? Yet a precise articulation of π requires a mathematics of infinite numbers, belongs to the irrational number system and smacks of transcendence: π goes on forever.
Walpole plays between these two mathematical spheres, between the concrete body as that earliest of measures and the filigree of pure maths, between the sensible and the Platonic worlds. She spins a plate, she swings a rope, twists a string. Interspersed between these bodily musings, Walpole offers her audience a discourse on the mathematics of each gesture. She stands in front of us in order to lecture, exhibiting a mixture of delight and awe in face of the mathematically sublime.
But the body is not merely a means of measurement. Throughout Mathematical Models of the Sublime Walpole repeatedly turns to the work of entomologist Justin O Schmidt, who personally rated and described a bevy of horribly painful insect stings. Walpole locates this weird attempt to quantify pain within her own clinical experience as a doctor. While Schmidt can numerically contrast “caustic and burning” (paper wasp) with “bold and unrelenting” (red harvester ant), it’s not so easy to find a common measure of pain that holds between bodies. One patient’s agony could be another’s discomfort.
All in all, Mathematical Models of the Sublime is a kind of researched whimsy, a conversation held between two sisters (Grace and Helen), an investigation turned into art. The body plays a role in this meditation, not merely as an aesthetic medium but because the thinking embedded in the work addresses matters corporeal: How do mathematics invoke the body? Can we quantify pain in the body? Could we unravel three dimensional string theory? There is something very nice about two sisters together making art. In another epoch they may have written a series of letters to each other, staged experiments in their own home or addressed an audience of amateur scientists. There is a sense of conversations had in this work, of the drawing room as well as the drawing board, of common pursuit being opened out for a wider audience. While the work engages the cutting edge of mathematical thought, it also suggests the 19th century salon. Grace Walpole’s manner of address is quaintly direct, slightly mannered. My own feeling is that the text and its delivery could have been more textured, more aestheticized in line with the rest of the performance. Mathematical Models of the Sublime was nevertheless gently infectious, a mindful and gracious exploration of things great and small.
Luke George’s NowNowNow was different, action-based rather than discursive. Its aim was to stage an event where all three performers sustained an ‘in the moment’ focus for the entirety of the performance. According to Buddhist monk, Chögyam Trungpa: “Speaking generally what happens is that, once we have actually opened, ‘flashed’, in the second moment we realize that we are open and the idea of evaluation suddenly appears. ‘Wow, fantastic, I have to catch that, I have to capture and keep it…’ so we try to hold onto the experience and the problems start there…” (Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism).
The difficulty of staying in the moment is that there are so many of the damn things. One moment slips into another. However achieved—and there are several ways to skin a cat—remaining ‘in’ any given activity is easier said than done. For a start, nothing stays the same. There’s a lot to keep up with in this world of becoming-performance. Plus, the body-in-movement is streets ahead of the mind-that-keeps-track. My foot finds the floor. The moment of their meeting is achieved in the passage towards another step. Three performers jump, then jump again. It would seem that repetition takes over. But then again, isn’t each jump a particular jump, a unique meeting between foot and floor, launch and landing? Maybe jumping is the iconic kinaesthetic moment: in motion, negotiating multiple forces, the pull of gravity, the body’s memory, the body in this moment.
And what of the audience? Is the audience inside or outside this experience? The white, felt flooring laid for NowNowNow made the space a kind of pure interiority. Audience members took off their shoes and were folded into this springy space. Unfortunately, this feeling was not supported by the rows of seating, oriented down towards the spectacle.
Sometimes NowNowNow bristled with presence, a moment held aloft for all to see, sometimes it was almost autistic in preoccupation, head down, doggedly following some score. So the question arises: what kind of moment are we talking about? Playing X-Box is a completely captivating experience but lacking in interest for non-players, whereas a shared moment between all three performers, in that second before it evaporates, well that’s exciting, because we can all identify and participate in that moment.
While Mathematical Models of the Sublime invited gentle contemplation, NowNowNow took off, a bird flying into plate glass time and again. Somewhat episodic, its attempt at the humanly impossible was an attempt to scale the sublime. Would it be “absolutely great” to be in the moment, moment after moment? Or would we be like Sisyphus having pushed the boulder uphill, taking in the view just before it bloody well rolls down again? Sometimes, just sometimes, a performance is infectious. To be in the moment is to die a little death, to let go of the evaluator. For the moment, that’s all there is. Isn’t it awesome?
Mathematical Models of the Sublime, concept, development Grace and Helen Walpole, animateur, performer Grace Walpole, writer, designer Helen Walpole, composer David Corbet; Dancehouse, Melbourne, July 14-18; NowNowNow, choreographer Luke George, performers: Kristy Ayre, Timothy Harvey, Luke George, design Bluebottle, dramaturg Martyn Coutts; Dancehouse, Melbourne, July 29-Aug 1
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 30
© Philipa Rothfield; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Heath Barrett, Rachel Ogle, Martin Hansen, Personal Political Physical Challenge, Hydra Poesis
photo Traianos Pakioufakis
Heath Barrett, Rachel Ogle, Martin Hansen, Personal Political Physical Challenge, Hydra Poesis
THE OPENING SCENE OF THIS INTRIGUING NEW WORK BY PERTH COMPANY HYDRA POESIS RESEMBLES A REHEARSAL FOR A SERIES OF DOOMED COME-BACKS. A MAN STUMBLES BLINDLY ACROSS THE STAGE IN AN ENORMOUS KARL MARX HEADPIECE. ANOTHER SPORTS THE WIG AND TIGHTS OF A FRENCH ARISTOCRAT, WHILE A WOMAN WHO LOOKS A LOT LIKE JANE FONDA DOES HER BEST TO WORK IT ALL OUT IN A SCOOP-NECKED, CLAMMY NYLON LEOTARD AND KNITTED LEGGINGS. THEIR ENCOUNTERS ARE CLUMSY; THEIR BRIEF ENSEMBLES DO NOT ENDURE.
The roller-door lifts on a young middle-class suburban couple. Their malcontent is narrated by a tyrannical MC: “Happiness has become boring,” she spouts on behalf of the woman. “Pleasure is boring…Food is boring…Our lifestyle is not a life…I want to be something more;” she wants “drama and resistance.” In a garage filled with props from the local Bunnings, the performers borrow from worn-out manuals of terror. Scenes of Maoist self-criticism are followed by basement interrogations. Ethical double binds leave the couple on different sides of the fence. Their union under threat, they join forces in a parody of enslaved labour, moving bags of cement about the garage in repetitive and meaningless acts of physical endurance.
In Personal Political Physical Challenge director Sam Fox and his talented collaborators offer a comic vision of an (a)political present desperately repeating the stereotypes of a political past—the first time as tragedy, then as farce. The audience is offered an abridged history of ambiguous truth-status that goes something like this: in the 1970s Jane Fonda abandoned Vietnam and found(ed) aerobics. With the failure of Marxism and the Fall of the Wall in 1989, we dispensed with the Brotherhood and the Internationale (performed nostalgically or humorously—the modality is ambiguous—by Martin Hansen), acquired a home loan and set to work on our privatised spaces of house and body. Cut to 2010. If a higher cause is needed, there is Live Art, there is ballet and Pilates and contemporary dance to stand in for physical capital. In the absence of hard work, girls and boys, we can work hard.
There are moments of poignancy and clarity in this provocative work. The choreography is tenuous, desperate, the unions fragile. The movement feels open-ended and exploratory, as befits a small budget, limited rehearsal time and good ideas. The composition by Stina Thomas drives us towards the very intensity of yearning that lies at the core of the performance. With self-realisation and belonging no longer possible through identification with the Workers and other Grand Narratives, how do we register intensity and ecstasy? Where is that ‘something more’ to be found?
Beyoncé’s “Halo” is playing. Martin Hansen is naked but for a set of placards stacked around his neck. Rachel Ogle is dancing next to him. He flips the cards and delivers her a series of hand-written directives. To the tune of a perfect Hegelian hit, Rachel Ogle closes her eyes and attempts transcendence. It is a schizophrenic little narrative that Hansen engenders, brilliantly capturing the absurdity of the individual subject’s contemporary predicament. Over-interpolated and under-resourced, Rachael Ogle does her best to follow the provocations. Privatised loungeroom subjectivity (“Dance Like Nobody is Watching”) is followed by unbearable public scrutiny (“But They Are—The Whole World is Watching”), which leads to self-aggrandising and terrifying globalised responsibility (“And The World is on your Shoulders”). In the flip of a board there remains global holocaust (“And the World is on Fire”), and personal humiliation (“And You are Naked”).
While the movement, sound and choreography articulate this yearning through intensity and repetition, the spoken text is less rigorously conceived. Rich undecidability sometimes gives way to confusion. As set out in the director’s notes, ambiguity in the performance mirrors a contemporary absence of political direction. We lack in Australia “clear benchmarks of political belief.” So we find ourselves in late 2010, at the end of Politics and Meaning, performing rigorous workouts which stand in for the absence of work (in the Marxist sense). At the risk of being horribly literal (Stalinist?), I wonder what is lost and gained in exploring that void (if it exists) through old truisms of terror borrowed from the bogies of Marxism and Maoism—albeit in an ambiguously comic turn? A strange choice for a set of artists well under 40, I thought. The rich discourse of resistance may have lost its centre, and there were plenty of people all over the world who were pretty happy about that. But if you ask me, there is no shortage of things to get worked up about closer to home. On the ground and in the sky.
Hydra Poesis in association with PICA, Personal Political Physical Challenge, director Sam Fox, choreographic collaboration Martin Hansen, Rachel Ogle, Sam Fox and dancers, performers Rachel Ogle, Martin Hansen, Bianca Martin, Heath Barrett, Kathryn Puie, composer Stina Thomas PICA Performance Space, July 16-20
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 31
© Josephine Wilson; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
bakchai
photo Danny Willems
bakchai
IT’S USEFUL TO THINK ABOUT THE BODY AS A SITE OF CULTURAL INSCRIPTION. ARTISTS EXPLOIT RECOGNIZABLE SYMBOLS TO EFFICIENTLY COMMUNICATE AN IDEA TO AN AUDIENCE. A THIN, BROWN-HAIRED PERFORMER WEARING NOTHING BUT A CLOTH AROUND HIS GROIN AND A CROWN OF THORNS BECOMES SHORTHAND FOR ‘JESUS’. BUT IF, AS IN THE FAMOUS EXAMPLE OF P.#06 BY SOCIETAS RAFFAELLO SANZIO, THREE CARS FALL OUT OF THE SKY BEHIND JESUS, AND JESUS GETS INTO ONE, AND IF THE BACK END (AND ONLY THE BACK END) OF A HORSE PROTRUDES FROM A DOOR IN THE STAGE-LEFT WALL, THE STAGE SYMBOLS BECOME VERY HARD TO READ. PUT TOGETHER LIKE THIS, WHAT CAN THEY MEAN?
Contrary to script-centric theories of performance that treat stage elements as texts to be deciphered by spectator-readers, many theatre artists insist on the unreadable material presence of the performer—they foreground the body in such a way that the spectator is invited to confront a performer-body as a thing-in-itself, a body you encounter with your own body. At this year’s Het Theaterfestival, a showcase of cutting-edge Flemish and Dutch theatre that takes place in Belgium, more than a few of the shows exploited the body versus word dichotomy.
bakchai
In Bakchai, a free adaptation of Euripides’ The Bacchae, performer-creator Jan Decorte (De Roovers, Belgium) stretches the tension between the readable and unreadable to the breaking point. His stroke of genius is casting Benny Claessens as the god Dionysus. We’re first introduced to Claessens as a marble-white leg that sticks out from behind two rough pieces of plywood tacked up at centrestage. The leg is huge and clearly belongs to an obese individual. Downstage three other performers, including Decorte, play the other central characters from Euripides’ tragedy. The large, unmoving leg might be the limb of a giant. With fearful anticipation I await the appearance of a massive god-body that will devastate the playing field.
Eventually Claessens emerges—naked and with hair dyed gold. He looks like an oversized cherub. At first he has his back to us. Across his shoulder blades is written, in gothic characters, the word ‘body’. This textual signifier is pointing out the thing it signifies, but by nature of being attached to the thing it signifies can’t be separated from it. The body represents itself; so it doesn’t really represent at all, it just is itself. Signifier and sign collapse into one. Of course, Decorte didn’t have to spell it out for us. There’s no denying the body-ness of Claessens’ body.
From the ancient Greek perspective Dionysus comes from exotic, decadent Asia. The sheer mass of Claessens makes the point: there’s too much of him, how did he get to be so big? Surely this is a product of the excess of the East. But the actor isn’t Asian. He’s about as white as they come. So the racial categories are destabilized. Transforming the eastern ‘darkie’ into a western ‘whitie’ highlights the hypocrisy of the western view (ancient or modern) of the Asian as ‘other’ and uncivilized. But even these cultural symbols lose their relevance in the continuing encounter between the spectators and the overpowering presence of the performer. It’s not just his size and nakedness; Claessens is the ultimate tease. He makes a show of being embarrassed by his nudity while playfully manipulating our voyeuristic impulses; he adopts a subordinate role but works it so expertly there’s no doubt about who’s in control of the encounter. With his coy, cherubic teasing, Claessens might be the ultimate child-god in a universe that defies adult rationality. It seems Decorte uses Euripides play to create a childlike game in which the life and death passions of the non-Dionysian characters are made to look ridiculously adult. What’s the queen got up her bum? Why can’t everyone just relax and get some perspective? At least Benny Claessens is having fun. We’re having fun watching him do his thing.
unfold
A number of years ago you might have seen something like Oleanna by David Mamet or a Shakespeare at this festival but they’ve been rare during the four-year directorship of Don Verboven who’s overseen a deliberate shift towards performance that doesn’t privilege the written word. This has provoked accusations of elitism. Turning away from more conventional forms has been seen as a bar to accessibility. The question for an adventurous programmer like Verboven (and the three-member juries that make the selections each year) becomes, “How far can you stretch an audience, and when do you know if you’ve gone too far?” There’s no obvious answer.
Unfold by kabinet K (Belgium) was so far removed from traditional models of theatre and dance that it was unclassifiable. Yet it was one of the most loved shows at the festival. It begins with a young girl standing with her back to us before a gauze curtain that stretches across the stage. She contemplates a column of postcards, letters, and old photographs hanging on the fabric. Behind the gauze another child appears at a microphone reciting a poem in Flemish. Then the first child exits and reappears at a sewing machine behind the gauze. It looks like she’s stitching the postcards into a strip of the same fabric. Not being a speaker of Flemish, I don’t know what the child at the microphone is saying, but about a minute into the poem laughter just sort of falls out of the audience. There’s something very genuine and relaxed about this collective response. Together, the voice of the child, the scenographic elements and the audience’s waterfall of laughter conspire to open me up to the performance event. I don’t know why I’m so full of delight and easy anticipation, but I immediately feel that with kabinet K I’m in good hands.
Images continue to appear and disappear behind the gauze: an adult male carries one of the children across the space, another man performs a brief duet with a third child; eventually the gauze is pulled away and the two men and three children create a tableau. Are they a family of sorts? One of the men picks up an electric guitar and sings a ballad, while the girl returns to the sewing machine. We enjoy a guitar and sewing machine duet. The individuals break off into tasks such as drawing a picture of a house with windows that float away from it or making a tent from a large piece of white cloth on the floor.
One of the highlights is watching the children perform a contemporary dance trio. The technique and choreography are such that the children’s bodies aren’t distorted in the way they are in ballet and some other dance techniques. The movement seems very natural to them, unforced and yet performed by the children with aesthetic focus. It’s the most enjoyable contemporary dance I’ve seen in a while.
There’s a tender balance between the two men and three children: the impression is of a functioning group that has the creative tools and understanding to deal with what comes, including crisis—although there is no crisis presented. Unfold engages us without the necessity of dramatic conflict or even of the angst or cynicism common to so many contemporary dance performances. Children and adults move, invent and sing. To me it feels pre- rather than post-dramatic. It’s as if the children haven’t yet internalized the forms of traditional dramatic structure. Is Unfold about something? The program notes say, “It’s about not being able to understand, and still being happy.”
iraqi ghosts
Maybe not understanding requires a certain kind of spectator—not an elite patron, but one who doesn’t need textual or verbal logic to have a significant performance experience. Brilliantly crafted dialogue, or even brilliantly excerpted text, can prompt a transcendent experience for a spectator. But of course words can get in the way. “Too many words,” was a frequently uttered criticism of Iraqi ghosts (Irakese geesten) by Mokhallad Rasem (Belgium). Part fable, part autobiography, Iraqi ghosts is a wild anti-war rant by five artists, three of whom are survivors of the recent invasion of Iraq. The scenes are presented in Arabic, Flemish and English. Too often they are followed by unnecessary verbal commentary. Occasionally this works in the artists’ favour: a dinner scene, in which non-stop verbiage in Arabic is punctuated by the mutilation of several melons and other parts of the meal, takes an everyday ritual to the heights of hysteria.
For me, Iraqi ghosts was most engaging when the talking stopped completely: in what felt like the eerie silence after a bombing, disoriented figures—actors with large masks over their heads—wandered the stage, dazedly trying to help one another up. The masks had grotesque and mournful expressions
They were bald and elderly, as if the trauma of war had fast-forwarded the aging process. For the first time I shifted from watching someone’s loss to feeling it. Maybe this is the genius of the piece: to bombard us with words so that in their aftermath we sit in horrified silence.
springville
If this edition of the festival needed an answer to the accusation of elitism, Springville by Miet Warlop (Belgium) was it. Instead of a text-driven story, Warlop presents a wordless landscape—by which I mean a large cardboard house on a bare stage. For the duration of the show, Buster Keaton-like antics are performed by a dining room table with human legs, a box that acts like a pet, a man with a double-length torso and the house itself, which gets up, cracks in half to reveal a smaller styrofoam house within. It’s a delightful hour of controlled chaos. As fellow writer Alexander Schackenburg put it, “It’s about nothing, and you miss nothing.” Springville is the best of early cartoon animation brought into the 3D world of the stage.
Het Theaterfestival, Antwerp, Belgium, Aug 26-Sept 4; www.theaterfestival.be
Vancouver-based writer, actor and director Alex Lazaridis Ferguson is part of an international theatre journalism exchange. He and two European journalists are investigating the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival (Canada), PAZZ (Germany) and Het Theaterfestival (Belgium). Articles by the writers are appearing in Urban Mag (Belgium), RealTime (Australia), Plank Magazine (Vancouver) and a forthcoming website dedicated to the project called Performulations (Germany).
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg.
© Alex Ferguson; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Sweat, Branch Nebula
photo James Brown
Sweat, Branch Nebula
FOLLOWING THE SUCCESS OF PARADISE CITY (see review), WHICH TOURED AROUND AUSTRALIA AND TRAVELLED TO SOUTH AMERICA, SYDNEY-BASED BRANCH NEBULA’S LATEST WORK IS SWEAT, A SHOW ABOUT WORK FEATURING PARKOUR, B-BOYING, FOOTBALL, NOISE ART AND DANCE. I SPOKE WITH THE COMPANY’S DIRECTORS LEE WILSON AND MIRABELLE WOUTERS ABOUT THE SHOW FOCUSING ON JUST HOW IT WAS ENGAGING WITH ITS COMPLEX SUBJECT.
One of the challenges in creating a show about work is how to represent it. Although keen not to give too much away Wilson and Wouters seem to be aiming for a balance between representing work practices performatively and at the same time showing Sweat itself to be a form of work. Potential audiences are advised that there will be no seating and Wilson mentions that sound equipment and lights will also be on the move in the space, “but we wouldn’t want it to be read as a show about setting up a theatre show.”
What’s significant for the directors is that they’re looking at a contemporary notion of work and not in the usually anticipated factory or industrial setting: “We’re concerned particularly with low paid and services industry work that we often see around us, and at the way we engage with these services on a day-to-day basis.” Wilson explains that he’s interested “in the intimacy we can share with someone who’s providing a service for us but at the same time we have no knowledge of them—who they are or where they come from. Through the course of the show we’re interested to bridge that gap.” As for the work itself, “We try to evoke images and associations for the audience without trying to be too specific about particular forms. You might see images of cleaning, for example, but we’re more interested in issues of power and status for the low-paid worker.”
When researching and developing Sweat, Wilson says that the company “played with the idea of integrating the artists’ skills into the physical language of work but found that resulted in a ‘Cinderella’ effect. For example, mopping a floor and then transcending that into a complex choreography may be very beautiful but it just doesn’t seem very realistic. What we’ve tried to do is to have the skills entering into Sweat almost in opposition to the work—as a way of conveying something personal about the performers. It’s a way of connecting with the performers on a human level.” At the same time, says Wilson, “We’re looking at the way self-esteem is eroded by being constantly in service for very low pay and how that can affect workers psychologically.”
Wilson says “in this show our interest is not about relationships between the performers, but between performers and audience. That’s a real challenge for us. We’re very good at creating relationships between different forms, how football and B-boying might have a conversation and so on. But for Sweat, we’re supporting the artists to pursue their own practice and develop their material but also prodding and provoking them to extend that material choreographically.”
As the show’s designer, Wouters is focused on the impact for an audience entering a space without a set as such and with the staging shaped by the movement of performers and equipment. Not only is the work therefore inevitably site-specific but costumes are also important: “There’s the work wear—overalls for grunt-work—and then there’s the service work clothing—pastel colours and whites. The costumes are working really powerfully. The moment the performers put them on, they become something else.
It has to do with the invisibility of the people doing these tasks, like the cleaning that happens around you. It’s like it needs to be invisible, as if we don’t want to notice the people doing it.”
The sound for Sweat is by Hirofumi Uchino. As with the other artists in the show, Wilson says, “We’ve tried not to work with him as a sound designer, but as an artist and a noise musician. But the show is different from a noise gig where you go for an extreme experience—some of what Hiro can do feels like it’s changing your DNA. But he has enjoyed the challenge of working outside that framework. What he does with noise will reflect on the psychological aspects of continuous, monotonous or uncomfortable or dangerous or dirty work. I find that the noise in combination with the material we’re doing really does give a psychological weight to the work and has the power to shift you viscerally.”
Wilson spoke of the company’s ambitions for Sweat: “We’re certainly hoping to reach different audiences and experiment with how audiences react to it. I think it will be a unique experience because there are quite a lot of ingredients coming together, whether it’s intimate choreography performed around you or larger scale technical aspects. There are text-based elements and noise. Then there’s the combination of forms—parkour, B-boying football and dance. It’s a pretty amazing mix of stuff. At the same time I think it’s a challenging work. We haven’t set out to make a necessarily ‘pleasing’ show.” But, adds Wouters, “Although the whole set-up for the piece might be out of the ordinary and not something audiences will necessarily be used to, the actual material is quite accessible—it’s something that’s quite close to everybody’s day-to-day life.”
With an appropriately young, ethnically diverse and talented cast—a Sri Lankan soccer player (Ahilan Ratnamohan), a Colombian performance maker (Claudia Escobar), a Filipino/Spanish contemporary dancer (Marnie Palomares), a Vietnamese parkour/martial artist (David Vo), a Bboy (Erwin Fennis) and a Japanese noisician (Hirofumi Uchino)—and Branch Nebula’s trademark inventiveness, Sweat promises to be a significant comment on and a new immersive look at work.
Branch Nebula, Sweat, co-creators Mirabelle Wouters, Lee Wilson, producer Performing Lines; Performance Space, CarriageWorks, Oct 19-30, www.branchnebula.com; tickets www.ticketmaster.com.au
See the RT Studio entry of Sweat in development
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg.
© Keith Gallasch; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Sylphides
photo Alain Monot, courtesy Montpellier Danse
Sylphides
ANNIVERSARIES ARE A TIME TO LOOK BACK. SOME SIFTING THROUGH THE PAST, ALBEIT IN AN EFFORT TO CLEAR A PATH FOR THE FUTURE IS INEVITABLE. THE 30TH EDITION OF MONTPELLIER DANSE FOUND THE FESTIVAL IN PENSIVE MOOD; CELEBRATING A BRIGHT FUTURE IN THE PROGRAMMING OF FRESH NEW WORK, BUT ALSO RUMINATING, IN WORKS WITH DARKER SUBJECT MATTER, ON DEATH AND THE LEGACY OF DANCE ITSELF, IN AN INDUSTRY THAT HAS LOST MANY BRIGHT STARS SUCH AS PINA BAUSCH AND MERCE CUNNINGHAM IN RECENT TIMES.
bengolea & chaignaud
In the vein of young and fresh came several works by Cecilia Bengolea and François Chaignaud, a French duo currently enjoying a meteoric rise in France. Their first work, Sylphides, inhabited the darker end of things; body bags in fact. Opening on a stage strewn with three large inflatable pillows, it wasn’t long before these seemingly inanimate objects were deflated to reveal the contours of human bodies claustrophobically encased, as if smeared in tar. It was just possible to make out tiny mouthpieces protruding from each body, which allowed a small but vital flow of oxygen. Save for this, the dancers were blinded, pinned down by swathes of fabric, and doubtless restricted in hearing too. Despite these impediments, the prone bodies began seeking out one another, navigating by touch. Sinuous squirms gave way to a slow progression to standing, and finally, to extravagant pogo stick bounces throughout the space.
The success of this work arose from the improbable situation in which the dancers found themselves, and the sinister connotations of bodies helplessly trapped within a physical form. Smothered in bags resembling the receptacles into which many of us will be zipped at the end of our lives, Sylphides shrank things, both literally and metaphorically, to a matter of life and death. Watching the Pompeii-esque tableau unfurl, it was difficult not to fixate on the potential for catastrophe, if a dancer were to faint and drop their mouthpiece. It was hard not to scan for zips (there were none), and exit strategies, and in all this, notions surrounding the entrapment and limitations of the human (and dancing) body hovered. Death, it seemed, was never far away but rebirth too, especially at the work’s end when slowly, gingerly, bags were prised open to reveal a man and two women, quite alive and staring impishly out into the auditorium.
Similarly conceptually captivating, but somewhat limited in realisation was Castor et Pollux, also by Bengolea and Chaignaud. Inspired by twin godheads in Greek and Roman mythology, Castor et Pollux occupied not the stage of Montpellier’s plush Opéra Comédie, but the vast tract of space in the flies above it. Naked from the waist up and smeared in garish body paint, Bengolea and Chaignaud hung 50 feet in the air, knotted together in a sensual clinch. Movements were languid, with bodies fusing to create indefinable shapes. Initially exciting, with dizzying perspective afforded through the staging, Castor et Pollux veered unceremoniously towards the camp and mawkish. The initially ominous score became saturated with squawks and shrieks, relegating the climactic low swooping of the dancers to the category of cheap thrill. Visually arresting, this work seemed to exhaust itself and appeared overly burdened by the mythological depth which its title conjured.
william forsythe: installations
In an entirely different aesthetic vein was a series of videos by renowned choreographer William Forsythe which populated the white gallery space of the Pavillon Populaire. Through visual trickery, and intimate video depictions of Forsythe dancing and interacting with objects, the installations questioned the placement and legacies of choreography. Where in conceptual space does choreography exist for instance—at the moment of execution through movement, or previously? And what remains of choreography once enacted? In pondering the transience of the art of choreography, Forsythe’s installations became tinged with a mildly morbid air, with similarities between the nature of choreography and of human mortality itself all too evident.
One video saw Forsythe enacting a virtuosic solo in black and white. Camera angles varied, closing in on the moving body, severing limbs out of shot, then panning back to reveal the precision of the feet, or the attack and arrest of the torso. This was dancer-as-vessel of the choreography: there was wholeness to the image, a sense of the moving body as the endpoint of a choreographic train of thought. Travelling to the next screen however, one was greeted with a small monitor bearing a recognisable image of Forsythe’s face. To the saccharine lyrics of “Dancing” from the musical Hello Dolly, the mug-shot of Forsythe was severed; fading into sections which disappeared into a haze, only to slowly reform. There was a mesmeric quality to this, with comment gently provided by the incessant lyrics questioning “Now that we’re dancing who cares if we ever stop…”
In a later video, Forsythe abandoned the traditional dance canon to bind himself meticulously in heavy black rope. Two camera angles allowed differing viewpoints of the scene as he entrapped first his torso and then, more disturbingly, his neck, head and face, with imagery becoming increasingly violent. Yells, either for help or of defiance suddenly punctured the space, before the process was laboriously undone; ropes unwinding to release their captive. Albeit in a more confrontational manner, this sequence pursued the line of questioning which the preceding videos began. It attempted to open up the spaces before and after choreography, to question whether it is possible to dislocate the body from the act of choreography, and whether the idea of choreography can in fact exist in and of itself. By pushing his body to physical extremes it seemed Forsythe was testing not only physical capability but the life expectancy of the choreographic act.
Raimund Hoghe, Astrid Bas, Emmanuel Eggermont, Si je meurs, laisser le balcon ouvert
photo Rosa-Frank.com
Raimund Hoghe, Astrid Bas, Emmanuel Eggermont, Si je meurs, laisser le balcon ouvert
raimund hoghe
From musing on life and death in Sylphides, to the intangible traces of choreography and existence in Forsythe’s installations, came Si je meurs, laissez les balcons ouvert (If I die leave the balcony open), by Raimund Hoghe. Conceived originally as an homage to the late Montpellier choreographer Dominique Bagouet, Si je meurs was an exercise in learning to say farewell, in a world in which, according to Hoghe, “we have the lost the way to say goodbye”.
Often in Hoghe’s work, emotion hovers in the ether, abstracted through an oblique layering of music and deadpan gesture. Here however, it exploded outwards in contorted facial expressions and frenetic choreography. Movement was carved by gestures of defiance rather than wistful doodling, with dancers whirling about the stage in angry or mock-comic froth. A moment halfway through the piece found Hoghe coaching dancer Ornella Balestra in the art of expressing grief. Demonstrating with hands placed on his ribcage, aggressively pushing for more, more, more, Hoghe was eliciting not demure sniffles but vast, wracking sobs and gulps of air from the unfortunate Balestra.
Tracing a progression of loss and grief, the work operated at times on the cusp of frenzy: that wired, angry edge of bodies grappling with insurmountable emotion, seeking oblivion and balm. It seemed an homage not to Bagouet but to grief itself; and to the many ghosts in the dance world. Journeying from funereal tristesse and pious ceremony to the kitsch and wistfully romantic, Si je meurs finally found a bittersweet resting place. During the last moments of the work, the backdrop doors were thrown open to the night, flooding the space with twilight sounds of crickets and the pall of a lone street lamp. One dancer, Emmanuel Eggermont, remained in the fading light. Ever moving, ever dancing, he offered an indelible trace of humanity, and of choreography.
Montpellier Danse.10, Cecilia Bengolea & François Chaignaud, Sylphides, Studio Bagouet, June 30-July 1; Bengolea & Chaignaud, Castor et Pollux, Opéra Comédie, June 27-28; William Forsythe, Installations, Pavillon Populaire, June 22-July 2; Raimund Hoghe and company, Si je meurs, laissez les balcons ouvert, Théâtre de Grammont, June 3-July 1; Montpellier Danse.10, June 18-July 7
RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 29
© Mary Kate Connolly; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
