Sarah Jayne Howard, Not in a Million Years, Force Majeure
photo Lisa Tomasetti
Sarah Jayne Howard, Not in a Million Years, Force Majeure
AS A LEGAL TERM, FORCE MAJEURE IS ALL ABOUT FREEING THE PARTIES TO A CONTRACT FROM LIABILITY SHOULD EXTRAORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES INTERVENE. AS A COMPANY, FORCE MAJEURE HAS EXPLORED THE EFFECTS OF SUCH EXTRAORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES BEFORE IN ALREADY ELSEWHERE AND NOW AGAIN IN NOT IN A MILLION YEARS. THEIR FASCINATION WITH THE EXTRAORDINARY IS HARDLY SURPRISING, BUT A TROUBLING QUESTION EMERGES: DOES THE EXTRAORDINARY SUBJECT MATTER FREE THE PARTIES OF THIS CONTRACT (CREATORS AND AUDIENCE) FROM THEIR LIABILITIES? DOES ORDINARY WORK EMERGE FROM EXTRAORDINARY SUBJECTS?
Geoff Cobham’s set for Not In A Million Years is a polystyrene playpen. One part Antarctica, one part Motoi Yamamoto salt sculpture, one part FedEx, the flakes of polystyrene give body to the impossible infinity of the world’s events. Somewhere in that spongy mess is the flake that will win the lottery, break the record for long jump or simply bungee. It is the bungee jumping flake that we meet first. A man rises from the front of the audience and begins reciting a story of how he prepared to deny every survival instinct in order to freefall for those few seconds before the elastic kicked in. The style of address is forced, even a little declamatory, as though we need to be convinced of the drama when it should be able to speak for itself.
However, for the rest of the show, the situation reverses and the fact of the events speaking for themselves is precisely the hurdle that Not In A Million Years struggles with most. Projected text tells us of one extraordinary event after another: a flight attendant who falls thousands of metres and lands unscathed in soft snow; miners who survive for weeks trapped a kilometre underground; a Lotto jackpot winner who becomes a fat, single recluse; a tightrope walker who hangs out between the tops of the WTC towers for the best part of an hour; a man who remains in a coma for a decade, then wakes, then dies shortly afterwards. In the face of all this extraordinariness, why embellish with dance?
Elizabeth Ryan and Vincent Crowley, Not in a Million Years, Force Majeure
photo Heidrun Löhr
Elizabeth Ryan and Vincent Crowley, Not in a Million Years, Force Majeure
The answer in Not In A Million Years is to not dance (much). Instead, the piece becomes a presentational turnstile of theatrical vignettes. We are given the facts and then taken into imaginary recreations of the events and their protagonists—the internal monologues of the coma patient and his wife, the banter between the miners, the exertion of the athlete training for a jump. Rightly, the feats of survival and the misfortune of the fortunate do not need embellishment, but is this way to learn of them?
Director Kate Champion and her collaborators have not unearthed these stories from detailed investigation, nor made verbatim transcripts. They found most of them online and the provenance is telling in two ways. Googling the stories can be more fascinating than the show itself because, as one watches the actual event on YouTube, reads the background, listens to recounts, understands the fallout, senses the ripples it sent into society, one can disappear into ever-broadening branches of research. Second, the treatment given to the stories presented in the show is so cursory and unembodied that it fails to connect to the audience on an emotional or empathic level.
Much of this failure is due to the paucity of theatrical rigour. The writing, the dramaturgy, the use of space and the acting are all below par. The text and voices are unable to find either the believability of naturalism or the transformative power of the epic. The monologues are occasionally shunted into a corner and given a wash of emotion, or they remain underdeveloped suggestions of a character. The rhythm of the piece as a whole remains steadfastly ponderous. Sometimes even the choreography fails to enliven the stories with anything more than cliché—the interminable waiting of the coma sufferer’s wife is shown by her pacing, longing shown in her hugging herself.
The vast array of films that tap into stories like these make it clear that they are not inherently above or below excellent representation—think of Herzog’s Wings of Hope, or the unabashed joy of James Marsh’s Man on Wire, or the tortured purity of Steve McQueen’s Hunger. Unfortunately, Not In A Million Years seems to have been seduced by the extraordinary to its own very ordinary detriment.
Dance Massive: Force Majeure, Not in a Million Years, director Kate Champion, performers Vincent Crowley, Sarah Jayne Howard, Elizabeth Ryan, Joshua Tyler, assistant director Roz Hervey, designer Geoff Cobham, composer, sound designer Max Lyandvert, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, March 26, 27; www.dancemassive.com.au
Hanseueli Tischhauser, No one will tell us…
photo Patrick Berger
Hanseueli Tischhauser, No one will tell us…
FOR A FESTIVAL FOCUSED ON THE DANCING BODY, DANCE MASSIVE PROVIDED SURPRISING SATISFACTIONS FOR THE EAR. WHILE CUNNINGHAM AND CAGE, ALONG WITH RAINER AND FELLOW 60S AVANT-GARDISTS, FOUGHT AGAINST OR SOUGHT BEYOND AN ESSENTIALLY EXPRESSIONIST RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MUSIC AND DANCE, THE LURE OF THE EMOTIONALLY CHARGED UNION OF SOUND AND MOVEMENT IS HARD TO RESIST. MOST WORKS IN DANCE MASSIVE OFFERED SOUNDTRACKS THAT, IN CONCERT WITH LIGHT AND DESIGN, PROVIDED THE EMOTIONAL WEIGHT AND ATMOSPHERIC TENOR OF THE WORLDS INHABITED BY THE DANCERS. HOWEVER A VARIETY OF METHODOLOGIES WERE DEPLOYED, IMPLICITLY INTERROGATING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SOUND, MOVEMENT AND MEANING MAKING.
live on stage
Of course a direct and intense way to integrate music with dance is for the sound to be produced live, a tactic several of the works exploited. Its most breathtaking realisation was found in No one will tell us… Here the guitarist, Swiss musician Hansueili Tischhauser, literally played with the dancers, Rosalind Crisp and Andrew Morrish, prowling the stage, adopting and responding to their gestures, all the while musically shaping the tone of the improvisation. With effortless precision he used looping and effects pedals to create a range of atmospheres from elaborate carnival capers to sparse and haunting John Fahey-like meditations, to joyous propulsive blues grooves. Here Tischhauser’s presence, as well as his sound, was an equal performative force in the trio, and in the performance I experienced, everyone was on fire.
Amplification, BalletLab
photo Jeff Busby
Amplification, BalletLab
Composer/turntablist Lynton Carr’s presence was similarly strong in BalletLab’s Amplification. Placed prominently on stage, Carr was lit for the entire performance, allowing us to witness his dexterity as he manipulated a vast range of vinyl into a cohesive soundtrack. Most often, and in keeping with the thematic of the work, it is a harsh and brutal score, the very gesture of ‘scratching’ implying force and abrasiveness, creating abrupt snatches of sound sampled from sources as disparate as Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” to Nico & the Velvet Undergound’s “All Tomorrow’s Parties.” At its most lyrical we entered the world of illbient—loping bass beats and dreamy atmospheres; we are literally caught in the loop. Phillip Adams’ choreography exploits the energetic properties and often the cultural associations of the sound without in essence directly dancing to it (a ‘balletic’ “Rite of Spring” scene excepted). Amplification was first performed in 1999 when the presence of a live DJ would have been quite new. While some in the audience thought the turntablist sound dated or nostalgic (maybe I’m out of touch but isn’t mixing vinyl still a pretty current phenomenon?), the virtuosity of its execution and the dynamism that it injected into the work were exceptional.
Noisician Hirofumi Uchino was firmly embedded in the structure of Branch Nebula’s Sweat as a worker and artist. Ten minutes into the show, as an example of the work’s focus on labour, his entire sound system was rolled in and set up from scratch, part of an evolving transition from the ‘real’ to ‘theatrical’ space. For an artist whose genre is most often associated with aggression and extreme volume, Uchino and directors Lee Wilson and Mirabelle Wouters exercised surprising restraint. Many moments of silence emphasised the power imbalance of the audience-performer dynamic. When we did get sounds, they were dark, verging on threatening without being melodramatic, occasionally funky with beats made from digital detritus, and on the whole avoided any figurative palette. Uchino’s disorienting static scattering around the room from a parabolic transmitter was particularly unsettling over the infamous dinner party scene. My one quibble is that in a show that allows each worker/performer to display their particular skill, there was no moment focused specifically on Uchino’s prowess.
Music for Imagined Dances, Madeleine Flynn & Tim Humphrey
photo Dean Petersen
Music for Imagined Dances, Madeleine Flynn & Tim Humphrey
imagined soundtracks, imagined dances
The first sonic statement in The weight of the thing left its mark, directed by Shaun McLeod, was the delicate song of a currawong, heard at such a distance as to seem recorded. We turn to the musicians Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey, seated at a table at the edge of the space, and they smile. They cannot take credit for this quite magical moment in a piece that is all about being in the moment. What they do create is based on the same materials wielded by the performers: common cutlery and kitchen utensils. Flynn scrapes forks over surfaces, strikes a metal mixing bowl and decants dry grains between cups, all closely miked and processed by Humphrey to pull out the ring and the sing of the object. It is just sparse enough, just varied enough to make a delicate environment for play for the dancers whose bodies search through improvisational sequences. Out of place is the moment in which a wheat bag is cut, the grains pouring onto a corrugated iron sheet—the scale of the gesture indicating a significance that has little correspondence (either in a unifying or antagonistic way) with the onstage action.
Flynn and Humphrey also have an installation at Dancehouse titled Music For Imagined Dances, which is essentially a listening room that plays a random 25-minute selection of music (see RealTime interview). With a dynamic design by Nik Pijanti that places moving lights behind pin-holed sound attenuation material, the space is infused with shifting colours and patterns making an elegant, contemplative environment. However the range of pieces—from tracks composed by contemporary Australian composers (some for real dances, some imagined) through to iconic dance compositions by Stravinsky, Cage and Feldman, through to tracks by M.I.A, Nirvana and Radiohead—seems too broad. Music For Imagined Dances declares that all music can be danced to in your mind, which is of course true, but doesn’t some music conjure a stronger imaginative kinetic response? For me the material lacks the focus to engage us more deeply with its lovely proposition.
Matthew Day, Thousands
photo Jac Price
Matthew Day, Thousands
inhabiting the music
For Matthew Day’s Thousands, composer James Brown takes his place behind the audience, but his presence is by no means diminished. Offering a unified, almost monotonous sonic palette Brown concentrates on the visceral effect of the music, his hyper-panning of sub-frequency growl unsettling our very organs and giving us a real physical empathy with Day’s muscular tremors as he incrementally moves through a slow rotation over the course of 45 minutes. Even as Donna Summer’s disco classic “I Feel Love” surprisingly emerges from the rumble, Day still does not dance to the music, rather it gives him something against which to fight harder—music as obstacle to dance.
Curated in a double bill with Matthew Day was Deanne Butterworth’s Dual Repérage in Threes with sound by Michael Munson. Here, the relationship with the music is most intriguing at the beginning where Munson creates a spacious environment for Butterworth to inhabit rather than dance to, using cavernous chords with strong attacks and long delays. As the piece progresses, more rhythms emerge, offering Butterworth more drive to draw from. She slips between dancing to and living with the sound, the latter mode allowing for more nuance.
In Michelle Heaven’s Disagreeable Object, Bill McDonald’s soundscape also provides more environment than accompaniment. Interestingly, in a video interview with RealTime, Heaven mentions how the piece was initially created without music, working only with the rhythms of the movement. McDonald has respected this by creating a sense of nostalgia by using scratchy gramophone records and adding ominous tones that hover just below the action, maintaining the arch gothic ambience of the work. In addition the team has worked to highlight particular diegetic effects, miking the sounds of crunching, swallowing, snuffling. Heaven also vocalises the sounds of objects—a tap turning, the squeak of tea trolley wheels—creating a cartoon effect that adds extra quirkiness to this ingenious little gem of a work.
dancing partners
A particular sonic pleasure was the collaboration between Robin Fox and Oren Ambarchi for Chunky Move’s Connected. Each an undisputed master of Australian experimental music, together they created an epic score of tension-filled spaciousness between a series of ever increasing crescendos—Ambarchi providing lurching drones of fulsome harmonies, Fox delivering hard edge statics, underrumbles and tingly spatter. Structurally the role of the music here is what we have come to expect. It propels the dance, holding the energies in check and then releasing them, unabashedly manipulating our response through a series of smaller climaxes to the final one.
Robin Fox also provided the sound for Antony Hamilton’s Drift which was played drive-in style through the stereo of the vehicle in which you also viewed the work. Fox’s material, rich in bass, is somewhat challenged in this listening environment (although some audience members might have had a pumping car stereo system that could cope). A highlight is the inclusion of material from a collaboration with improvising bassist Clayton Thomas, with percussive, rubbery plunking and complex rhythmic interplay that sits uneasily but interestingly over the street-inflected dance. But the tone of Drift as a whole was perplexing—was that extended primal drum sequence with accompanying flailing dance in earnest? The irony was hard to read, disconnected as we were from the action in our metal capsules.
Luke George, Kristy Ayre, Timothy Harvey, NOW NOW NOW
photo Jeff Busby
Luke George, Kristy Ayre, Timothy Harvey, NOW NOW NOW
less is more
Huey Benjamin has created vast amounts of intricate and detailed digital material for the score of In Glass by Narelle Benjamin, much of it very beautiful, but constantly shifting, moving on. I longed for fewer layers, more space, more moments of repetition and pattern making, more dynamics (the soundtrack is compressed to the limit) in order to grasp the many territories and ideas that both Benjamins are working with. It felt as if there needed to be more trust in the dance itself, freeing the music from its parallel role of exposition and allowing it to bring more oblique lyrical space to the work.
Livia Ruzic’s sound design for Trevor Patrick’s I Could Pretend The Sky Is Water seemed subtle in comparison with the music-drenched works in Dance Massive but it was no less effective. In a heavily text-driven work, with Patrick’s recorded voice-over alternating between an older and younger self and full of poetic remembrances and curious philosophising on the nature of choreography and art-making, Ruzic’s spare additions of water droplets, fire crackle and subtle tonal washes were subliminal and dreamlike. She offered unobtrusive, egoless support absolutely vital to the ambience and momentum of the piece.
Finally, to the sparest sound design of all, found in Luke George’s NOW NOW NOW, where in fact, at some point in the creative proceedings the choreographer chose to do away with a sound designer altogether (see RealTime interview). The majority of sound was made by the performers themselves, either through rhythmic chanting of ‘ow’ words or in their laboured breathing after an extended sequence of high kicks, or disconnected phrases mimicked from a silent TV screen. The only recorded sound was a piece of non-descript pop music played from an iPod that triggered a pivoting jazz-dance sequence. Meanwhile, uncomfortable silences brought us back, time and time again, to our awkward present. But, of course, as John Cage counselled, there is no silence and, on the night I attended, traffic noise, sirens and a large blow fly kept us very much aware of ourselves, and the dancers, in the here and now.
future fusions
While the majority of experimental music and sound practice in Australia operates in isolation—without a body, without performative or overt gestural distraction—it is exciting to see more cross-over and cross-disciplinary exploration developing, evidenced by much of the work in Dance Massive. With the recent Australia Council Music-Dance initiative which is encouraging a bi-partisin approach to funding dance with music, or music with dance, hopefully the dance sector will become even more adventurous in its level of sonic experimentation (and vice versa) with the conversation between music, dance and performance becoming even richer, more complex, and more daring.
My schedule prevented me from seeing Happy as Larry (composers Nick Wales, Bree Van Reyk ), Not in a Million Years (Max Lyandavert), Sunstruck (Livia Ruzic), Becky Jodi and John (Hahn Rowe) or Dance Marathon (Ciara Adams, Richard Windeyer).
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Dance Massive 2011, Arts House, Dancehouse, Malthouse, Melbourne, March 15-27; www.dancemassive.com
AS FELLOW REVIEWER CARL NILSSON-POLIAS HAS SUGGESTED (see review), AANTONY HAMILTON’S DRIVE-IN DANCE WORK DRIFT APPEARS TO DERIVE FROM THE HEAVY METAL COMIC BOOK OEUVRE. A TRIO OF APPARENTLY HUMAN FIGURES IN VAGUELY FUTURISTIC OUTFITS OCCUPIES A STARK POST-INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPE. WITH GREAT EFFORT, AMIDST VERY REAL DUST-CHURNING WIND AND INTERMITTENT RAIN, THEY TRAVERSE A SMALL STRETCH OF EARTH, BREAK INTO VIGOROUS, ALMOST RITUALISTIC DANCING, AND THEN ENCOUNTER A BARE-BREASTED, SHAMANISTIC WOMAN WHO CONDUCTS HER OWN RITUAL BEFORE BEING BRUTALLY ABDUCTED BY THE TRIO. SHE FINALLY SINKS INTO THE EMBRACE OF THE LEADER AND THE QUARTET JOURNEYS ON.
With those ingredients (strange humans, wasteland, ritual, sex and a dash of violence) it’s not at all difficult to imagine a Heavy Metal version of Drift—particularly in the style born of the magazine’s origins in the French adult sci-fi/fantasy magazine Metal Hurlant and its visually sophisticated team of influential comic book artists, like Moebius. Much of the content of Heavy Metal (first published in 1997) still comes out of Europe and from the same artists. Hamilton duly exploits the sweep of the freeway overhead, echoing the clean lines of Moebius and his ilk and amplifying the sense of wasteland isolation with light (dim, yellowish) and sound (cosmic storms crackling out of the car radio). In our vehicles we quickly forget the nearby buildings, development sites and passing cargo ships of Docklands.
Squatting in the dust before us, huddled together like a single being, the trio appears to be near immobilised, locked into a staccato pulse from which they can’t escape. One (Alisdair Mcindoe) is costumed in dirty white, his size and the sheen of his flesh and matching clothing suggesting leadership and a degree of sci-fi-ish elegance while his companions (Melanie Lane, Jess wong) are short, dressed in grey and hooded, a kind of faceless Ninja-Jawa cross (Jawa, the scavengers in Star Wars). The trio break free, rise up, travel briefly, loosening up as they go, and then dance. Gone is their initial zombie-ish spasming—they gesture, thrust and swivel with Thriller verve, upper arms at times wide, hands dangling, to a beat that creaks like strained metal.
They’re a nervy bunch. As if sensing another presence they stop, move together, dance slo-mo to the off-beat of a treated double bass, plucked and slapped. A monkish chant and the ringing of small cymbals confirm the sense of ritual, but the deep growl becomes a roar and then a scream—the trio hide. A tall woman (Lily Paskas) with long black hair, black tattoos on her throat and lower back, bare-breasted, enters with a long, leaf-less tree branch. She slowly turns, twirling with increasing speed, holding the branch before her, behind and at arms length in an act of considerable endurance, faster and faster to the cruel sound of crashing static, staggering sideways but without falling. Now still, she attempts to plant the branch, pushing it into the shallow earth, finally sliding down its length, exhausted and letting it drop. Her ritual has presumably failed to generate growth. Amidst thunderclaps she is picked up by the two Ninja-Jawas in an elaborate, violent dance of containment that their leader then joins, the arms and legs of all flailing and tangling with Eurocrash speed and precision. The woman’s body is hoisted above shoulders, tossed and meshed with her oppressors until she sensuously melds into the body of the leader. Now a foursome, the group exits slowly, holding the woman, doubtless a trophy, high against one of the freeway pillars. Perhaps regeneration is now possible in this primitive proto-society.
On reflection, Drift could have been pretty exciting as a pop culture-art hybrid. However, the drive-in scenario kept us at a sizeable distance from the work, which only came close to us as the trio dragged the woman along the line of cars. Otherwise, Hamilton made little effective use of the epic potential of his site, especially its depth of field. Had his characters appeared around us, at our windows, behind our cars; had the female shaman arrived from the extreme distance; had the drive-in framing been subverted in some way; with these and more we might have experienced some of anticipated thrills and chills. Instead, Drift felt genteel, too adoring of its sources of inspiration and short on the irony that could have further reduced our sense of distance. Only when the assault on the woman commenced did the work generate discomfort—for the apparent misogyny not atypical of Heavy Metal. It was then that I wished for the other side of the magazine’s coin: for the woman to turn on the men with vengeful brutality. But that would have been another story.
Perhaps when the work appears for Campbelltown Arts Centre later this year, Hamilton, a recognised innovator, will have had time to better exploit his site, to generate a greater cinematic and comic book sense of perspective—a 3D world, not a distant, contained 2D-ish movie screen model. The trio dancing and the quartet struggle are exciting, the costuming is effective and the sound sometimes immersive (if struggling through car speakers). As narrative Drift is thin, but a more radical approach to its staging could make a big difference.
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Dance Massive, Arts House: Drift, creator, director Antony Hamilton, performers Alisdair Macindoe, Jess Wong, Lily Paskas, Melanie Lane, sound designer Robin Fox, additional music Robin Fox, Clayton Thomas, costume designer Paula Levis, video artist Kit Webster; Docklands, Melbourne, March 24-27; www.dancemassive.com.au
Dance Marathon, Dance Massive
photo Ponch Hawkes
Dance Marathon, Dance Massive
DANCE MARATHON IS ONE OF THE MOST COMPLEX, MOST SOPHISTICATED AND YET MOST DELIRIOUSLY ENJOYABLE PERFORMANCE WORKS I HAVE EXPERIENCED IN A LONG WHILE, AND THE CIRCUMSTANCES IN WHICH THIS REVIEW HAS COME ABOUT WILL ALLOW ONLY THE MOST SUPERFICIAL SCRATCHING OF ITS SURFACE. THE NEED TO PRODUCE A WRITTEN RESPONSE TO A PERFORMANCE WORK BY THE FOLLOWING MORNING BECOMES A GREAT IMPEDIMENT TO ANALYSIS IF SUCH WORK REQUIRES YOU TO DANCE ALMOST NON-STOP FROM 8PM UNTIL MUCH PAST MIDNIGHT. BETWEEN MY RAW EXPERIENCE AND THE REFLECTION ON IT THERE HAS BEEN TIME ONLY FOR SOME VERY DEEP SLEEP.
Dance Marathon, staged by Canadian interdisciplinary theatre collective bluemouth inc, functions on at least two levels, which have not entirely come together in my mind. The first is referential. It is staged as a version of the dance marathons popular in the USA in the 1920s and the 1930s. Starting off as Charleston-era one-person (largely female) showcases, the willingness of young dancers to compete in endurance dancing, seeking quick fame, prompted presenters to organise increasingly more elaborate marathons, weaving variety acts and celebrity appearances through the event, introducing complex rules of elimination, theatricalising personal dramas of the contestants and attracting large audiences. Short breaks were introduced for the dancers, allowing the overall length of the marathon to stretch to days, weeks, months. During the Depression era, dance marathons became the bread and circuses of the time, reflecting the large amounts of free time the unemployed citizens of America now had—but also offering that intriguing combination of promises: faint traces of fame and glory, cash and prizes, on the one hand, and work, food and shelter for a short while, on the other.
We may not know any of this, however, and still experience Dance Marathon as a satisfactory reference to a popular form, because the similarity with contemporary reality television is so stark. We enter; we queue to register; we fill out a form waiving health risks; we get a number; we complete a small dance card with personal trivia that will become crucial for the unfolding of the show; we talk to each other in mass anticipation. Our Mistress of Ceremonies introduces the rules: feet moving at all times, no knees touching the floor. We are randomly coupled and, I may add, this is all very exciting: we do dance, with great abandon, the way I rarely see Melburnians dance. There is no audience, although we are being filmed. Do we notice or care? No. As we have heard from reality TV participants, nobody does.
The evening includes dance lessons, games, elimination rounds, celebrity guests, skills showcases (Bron Batten does a mean tap dance), prizes. The logic of elimination is entirely congruent with both reality TV and the pedagogical rules of making all children feel included in a game: very few eliminations in the first three quarters, and a large cull before the semi-finals (bringing the numbers down from 65 to 6); contestants are eliminated on mainly irrelevant grounds, with great attention to preserving the diversity of faces; and the overall winner is decided in a micro-cart race. It is the most inclusive format that an elimination game could possibly assume. Just like those real people on TV sets, smiling under a cloud of swirling confetti, so are we feeling extremely gratified to be participating in something as lovely as Dance Marathon.
However, as a first-hand immersive experience Dance Marathon is the complete opposite of its own references: it is rewarding, pleasurable, even empowering. In a town of reluctant dancers, it was quite marvellous to see people with no clear dance skills throw themselves around next to highly trained professionals, the former unselfconscious, the latter unselfconsciously corny. Moments of provided entertainment quickly became something to participate in, rather than just watch—in a way similar to Jerome Bel’s The Show Must Go On, the emphasis on the silly imbued the audience with great freedom to act. A reading of a sad poem prompted waves of expressive dance. Every so often, in the middle of a dance number, a choreographed formation would emerge, and we would move aside to observe better these bluemouth inc dancers whom we thought were here just to play. Overall, Dance Marathon worked like a truly wonderful party, in which the organised entertainment blended in perfectly with the fun we were able to have all by ourselves.
Dance Matathon, bluemouth inc
photo Gordon Hawkins
Dance Matathon, bluemouth inc
The question worth posing is, why? This close to the experience, the answer can be only vaguely attempted. Dance Marathon foregrounded the elements of game with rules and challenges that stripped away a whole layer of agency from the participant, paradoxically liberating us from having to make choices, thus making us also safe from ridicule or awkwardness. Freud elaborates on the transition from children’s games to adults’ jokes, the latter being essentially more self-protective and tendentious. A joke protects its own pleasure before the intellect. A game, on the other hand, is pure pleasure codified—the purpose is not winning, but following the rules. Once inside the girdle of the rules, we are probably as free as we can ever be. It makes one wonder about the extent to which the emergence of immersive theatre—essentially games for adults—responds to some deep need we have today for simple pleasures.
On the other hand, it was very rewarding to see a huge mix of people—from the dedicated contemporary dance audience to people coming straight from swing classes, to those just having a Saturday night out—utterly enjoying, and understanding, an event that questions the theatrical form to this degree. It reminds one of the fact that dance, of all the ‘highbrow’ art forms, has the strongest connection to the street and to play—a point not made often enough. As Deleuze said somewhere, we do not have a body, we are a body. In other words, our body is not an object we put into practice, but the entity through which we experience the world. This is why Dance Marathon, however satisfying on the level of reference to bread and circuses, exists primarily as an extraordinary party, allowing us to dance with strangers, be blindfolded and drawn into complex choreographies, and even attempt a mass (unskilled) rendition of the dance sequence in Jean Luc Godard’s Bande à part (1964), as Anna Karina, Claude Brasseur and Sami Frey progressively accelerate on screen—and all with great pleasure.
A perfect end to Dance Massive.
Dance Marathon appears as part of 10 Days on the Island, Launceston, April 1-3, http://tendaysontheisland.org. The dance scene in Bande à part can be found on YouTube.
Dance Massive: bluemouth Inc, Dance Marathon, performers, creators Clara Adams, Stephen O’Connell, Clayton Dean Smith, Cass Bugge, Lucy Simic, Cameron Davis, musicians Steve Charles, Peter Lubulwa, Eugene Ball, Carlo Barbaro. Arts House, Meat Market, Melbourne, March 26; www.dancemassive.com.au
ANTONY HAMILTON’S PREVIOUS FULL-LENGTH WORKS HAVE BEEN UNIFIED BY A PREDILECTION FOR THE ADOLESCENT OR NAÏVE. IN THE EXCELLENT BLAZEBLUE ONELINE (SEE RT85), IT WAS THE PLAYFUL MARK MAKING OF GRAFFITI MIXED WITH CARDBOARD BOX TRANSFORMERS. IN I LIKE THIS, HAMILTON, TOGETHER WITH BYRON PERRY, ENDED A PIECE ABOUT DANCE CREATION WITH A BEAUTIFUL IMAGE OF THEMSELVES AS PRELAPSARIAN BOYS UNDER A DOONA—FASCINATED BY THE MAGIC OF LIGHT, THE POSSIBILITY OF IMAGINATION. IN DRIFT, THE THEME CONTINUES WITH WHAT FEELS LIKE A PASTICHE OF HEAVY METAL COMIC BOOK TROPES.
On the other hand, the clearest point of difference between Drift and Hamilton’s earlier work is that this one eschews the theatre and takes place under a highway. Whether it is the epic scale of Peter Brook’s Mahabharata in a disused quarry, or the intimate celebration of the Flinders Street—Elizabeth Street intersection by The League of Resonance, site-based works call on their environs and their architecture for framing, for meaning, for reflection. Hence, it seems utterly appropriate that a work set underneath a highway should also be a drive-in show, where we park side-by-side and tune in to the soundtrack’s frequency. In fact, there is a giddy thrill in being given a map and a radio frequency instead of a ticket.
And so, in the gravel and dust beneath the CityLink overpass, down past the Xanadu tent, beside the film studios, in the shadow of the crippled remains of the Southern Star Observation Wheel, across Railway Canal from the city of shipping containers, in front of a row of cars, Antony Hamilton and friends create a post-apocalyptic vision. In that sense, this is a work that responds to its space. The Docklands, and the Wheel in particular, are the perfect location for an examination of the end of history, the folly of civilisation and the browbeaten individual.
Drift has already begun when we arrive. Three dancers are crouching and fretting their way across the ground in single file. They are led by a man in a dust-coloured hoodie who is shadowed at every step and bounce by a pair of ninjas. Yes, they are almost certainly ninjas. A soundtrack of noise, hum and beeps on our radio begins to divulge string instruments, percussion, an incoherent voice or scream. Above us, the tops of concrete pillars flicker with an enigmatic light.
Alisdair Macindoe, Drift, Antony Hamilton
photo Byron Perry
Alisdair Macindoe, Drift, Antony Hamilton
We are watching from some distance, through the inherent frame of a windscreen with the necessary intermediary of glass at a landscape-cum-set that is vast in reach and scale. Yet, the dance itself is small and precise, with the physical strobe of jerking motions that Hamilton has incorporated so frequently in his work. Therein lies a problem. There is already a detachment in sitting behind glass, in being in the familiar space of one’s car and there is a distance between audience and the barely-lit dancers. One senses that Hamilton wants to play with this detachment in the sense of its consequent voyeurism—we have stumbled upon a strange world in a place we have no call to visit normally. Given that there is no follow-through either on the notion of gaze, or on our presence, this feels like a conceptual cul-de-sac. Instead, these distancing factors compound to obscure and detract from the choreography. Or rather, the choreography does not fully meet the demands of the location. In this sense, Drift does not respond to its space but merely uses it as a backdrop.
Nevertheless, there are glimpses of what might have been. After the ninjas have left, a woman emerges in nothing more than boots, undies and bejewelled bracelets swinging a large tree branch in desperate circles. The image is strikingly strange and drew some confused looks from a group of young men who happened to wander past. But the image that stands out is when the woman, trying to plant the lifeless branch in the barren ground, holds onto its bulk to stop herself from falling. A spotlight falls on her and the wind blows her hair dramatically to one side. The image of nakedness, lifelessness and futility is framed perfectly by the massive concrete pillars and suddenly the work responds to its epic setting with an image of epic decay.
Drift finishes with a disappearing act. The topless woman, the ninjas and their leading man have clashed but eventually come to terms and, together, hugging the contours of concrete, they escape from view and we are ushered to start our engines and depart. As we drive off, talk turns to deserts and princesses, shamans and evil warlords, Conan the Barbarian and the 70s. The adolescent pop culture of the drive-in lives on.
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Dance Massive, Arts House: Drift, creator, director Antony Hamilton, performers Alisdair Macindoe, Jess Wong, Lily Paskas, Melanie Lane, sound designer Robin Fox, additional music Robin Fox Clayton Thomas, costume designer Paula Levis, video artist Kit Webster; Docklands, Melbourne, March 24-27
Gideon Obarzanek, Faker
photo Heidrun Löhr, courtesy Sydney Opera House
Gideon Obarzanek, Faker
BEFORE WE COMMENCE, A POLITE REMINDER ON THE NATURE OF THE REAL IN THE THEATRE. ALTHOUGH EVERY ART FORM THAT SPEAKS OF THE WORLD IS TO SOME EXTENT MADE OF THE WORLD (THE TIMBER FRAME THAT STRETCHES THE CANVAS, AND SO FORTH), IN THEATRE THE SIGN AND THE THING ARE PARTICULARLY TIGHTLY ENMESHED. WHILE THE TYPED WORD ‘CHAIR’ STANDS FOR AN ACTUAL CHAIR, IT IS PRECISELY NOT A MATERIAL CHAIR. ON STAGE, IN CONTRAST, A THING IS ALWAYS BOTH A SIGN FOR A THING, AND THE THING ITSELF: A CHAIR ON STAGE IS A CHAIR THAT STANDS FOR A CHAIR.
Faker addresses us, the audience, as an autobiographical, even confessional work, but it is impossible to discuss it as such—once it enters stage space and stage time, ‘Gideon Obarzanek’ stands for Gideon Obarzanek, performing a sitting that stands for sitting, at a desk standing for a desk. It would be dramaturgically and critically naive to review ad hominem: this review can only talk about a staged character, ‘Gideon Obarzanek,’ not the person off-stage; and about the stage letter he receives from a theatrical pupil. The question of the percentage of ‘reality’ involved is, in this case, at the very least dumb, and at the very worst unethical.
The dramatic structure has ‘Obarzanek’ alternating between two activities: first, he reads out a letter sent to him by a young dancer, clearly smitten by ‘Obarzanek,’ who initiates a collaboration, hoping that he will “bring out the fabulous” in her, and then finds herself feeling progressively more vulnerable, let down, and growing increasingly more disappointed, hostile. The voice of the letter sounds clear notes of adoration, insecurity, need to be liked and desire to please, and although it is said to belong to a woman, it could easily belong to a young man. Asked to perform something she has not done before (“this task was designed in a way that I could only fail”), her insecurity starts coalescing into a perception of betrayal: “I stood there, humiliated.”
Between the paragraphs, ‘Obarzanek’ dances. Or rather, performs his pupil’s dancing: some excruciatingly clumsy moves with bad singing, something-she-has-never-done-before, a randomly arranged ‘conceptual’ sequence, and the solo he choreographed for her, the only one she liked: it required skill, she writes, and it belonged to her. The dancing is uproariously bad—we are certainly invited to laugh. Whether we are laughing at the dancer or at ‘Obarzanek’ is a very good question. Something-she-has-never-done-before is a case to consider: ‘Obarzanek’ sets an alarm, forcing himself into a long series of unprepared, unrehearsed, silly-looking movements. At this point it seems like he may be pushing himself through the humiliation he imposed onto the young dancer, tasting her powerlessness by having to endure until the alarm releases him. A few minutes later, the alarm goes off again, and ‘Obarzanek’ needs to interrupt the performance for a second to turn it off. He makes a quick, embarrassed joke to the audience, explaining the error with a short nervousness that is quite at odds with the precise, even angry focus with which the rest of the work is delivered. This incident reveals that there is no vulnerability to ‘Obarzanek’s’ performance. Rather, a sort of resentful fatigue, visible in the corners of his mouth and the detached raising of his eyebrows as he continues to narrate.
The two characters are full of resentment, with bitter accusations on one side and a strong defensiveness on the other. The hostility between them is high and charged with sexual tension—the dancer accuses the choreographer of choreographing on her another one of his “ongoing sensual-woman solos”. Every teacher-student relationship is intrinsically erotic, and dirty laundry flies in all directions. The dancer calls ‘Obarzanek’ “one of those pervy directors”; he exposes her weaknesses, of artistry and character, to a staggering extent. The rapport between a famous, older, male choreographer and a young, inexperienced female and clearly adoring dancer is one of enormous inequality, let’s make it clear, and the choreographer takes no precautions to protect his pupil, neither in the rehearsal process nor in the performance.
What intrigues is the differences between their voices. The female dancer is capable of softness, a conspiratorial intimacy: she apologises, she deliberates, she explains herself, she thanks him. The male choreographer shows no such concern: to her accusations of not living up to her expectations of him, to his status, all he offers is an admission that he, too, doubts himself. There is no empathy with the young dancer’s vulnerability, and no willingness to respond. Obarzanek as ‘Obarzanek’ performs wounded masculine pride to perfection. While the dancer admits to lying, to having nightmares, to doubting herself, to feeling humiliated, ‘Obarzanek’ never appears to hear the charges levied at him. What he admits, instead, is recognising the doubt in the dancer’s demeanour—a doubt he has grown to notice, and ostensibly fear, but not to address. A wide gulf separates his control of the stage from the vulnerability of, for example, Jerome Bel allowing Pichet Klunchun [in Pichet Klunchun and Myself] to question him on stage, in person, named.
Faker is not a dialogue. ‘Obarzanek’ appropriates his accuser’s voice, turning a critique of himself into a long monologue. The irony is unmistakeable: if he had great power over the dancer’s body as her choreographer, as the re-interpreter of his own choreography for her he colonises her completely; she remains on stage only in faint traces. It is almost as if he is taking away from her the only thing she took from him gladly: her solo. A solo which, performed against a Baroque chorale and churchlike lighting, seems to make a heavy-handed point about ‘Obarzanek’s’ qualities as a choreographer and dancer, a coup de grace in a fight that was unequal from the start.
If this is self-critique, it is one with in-built clemency.
Becky Hilton, Jodi Melnick, John Jasperse, Becky, Jodi and John
Vladimir: He didn’t say for sure he’d come.
Estragon: And if he doesn’t come?
Vladimir: We’ll come back tomorrow.
Estragon: And the day after tomorrow.
Vladimir: Possibly
Estragon: And so on.
Vladimir: The point is—
Estragon: Until he comes.
[Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot]
Becky, Jodi and John, from New York’s John Jasperse Company, is a Trojan horse, a masquerade, a depth beneath the façade. It is also what it seems, funny, witty, casual, undulating, perambulating, a play of surfaces. Beneath the mask of hilarity lies a serious piece. Or is it the other way round?
Film titles roll down, looking a bit like Episode 20 of StarWars telling us about the work. Let’s begin with an existential conundrum: this piece is about life. It was conceived by the artists in 2006, but that was some time ago and life has changed. What’s more, someone’s not here. But that’s okay, because we’ve called her on Skype. So here we have it, an absent presence, time out of joint, framed by the group, by the collective ‘we.’ That collective framing remains throughout, warming us with its camaraderie.
Becky, Jodi and John emerge; quirky limbs peek over the wallpaper frieze, their timing eccentric. Chrysa also appears on a monitor manifesting the same wallpaper. Domesticity abounds. She speaks into her webcam, her face looming against what appears to be her bedroom. Chrysa can’t be here, she had too much on to participate in this project. Well, she certainly made up for it, raising questions throughout, inserting propositions, even teleporting her stuffed animal for a disco solo later on.
“The trouble with us,” Chrysa opines, “is that we are too articulate.” There is no lack of articulation here. Jodi Melnick’s early solo is nothing if not articulate. Strong, clear events resound in the body, kinetic initiatives pass through her torso or pelvis, bouncing around like billiard balls, fine dancing without the aid of excess muscularity. There is an intense delicacy about her dancing.
Becky and John offer their own duet behind Jodi. They begin by rubbing their knees, looking like a Greek chorus of washerwomen but then the rubbing becomes something else, a dance forming a tangent with the everyday. There are many everyday moments; emails are read out, the threesome have a break and open up for audience questions. But these elements are completely integrated into the work. So they are no longer everyday.
The spectre of time hovers, endings loom. Becky reads an email from Jodi cataloguing all the problems that have developed in her body. Becky tells us why she stopped dancing. John refers to a critical response to his work which suggests he should perhaps stop making art, as if the time for art has come to an end.
Chrysa Parkinson (on monitor), Becky Hilton, John Jasperse, Jodi Melnick
Physically, the duets, trios and solos are a pleasure to watch. Bodies engage through touching, pushing, softening, leaning, falling. Their touch is considered. John stands naked in front of Jodi. Her proximity to his nakedness raises questions; how will she touch him, where will she touch him? She meets his skin time and again. Heads roll of their own accord while a torso propels itself across space, a snifter of Cunningham. But these bodies are soft. They soften around a pushing hand, then plump up again. Jodi falls on the group, a percussive moment of choreography becoming humour. There is a casual feel about this dancing and spoken text, aided and abetted by Hahn Rowe’s music which is quirky and whimsical, relaxed, inviting laughter.
No-one takes themselves too seriously, but neither are these conversations just played for laughs. Anxieties about the body surface in Jodi’s conversation. There is a marked tension between her catalogue of infirmities and this capable, dancing body. Becky narrates a story about her son’s superhero fantasies. She returns dressed in a makeshift outfit in imitation of that worn by her then eight-year old child. Her breasts are bare, green tights are pulled up high and a footy flag (the Western Bulldogs) is tied around her neck. But for her breasts, she could be that child. There is an air of vulnerability about her nakedness, a sort of Bill Henson turning away from the gaze.
John recounts a colleague’s critical comments about experimentalism in his work. These are read out by Jodi. By way of response, John appears naked, holding a huge pile of pretend bricks. Unstable, they collapse, falling to the ground, the last one revealing his genitals. Is this a riposte, an experiment or a compulsion to return to the source of irritation?
The audience is at some point invited to ask questions, which are in turn deflected and treated obliquely. There is a distorted skull in Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533), a disguised reference to mortality that appears only through a change in perspective. Are these deflections an anamorphosis, distorted reflections on mortality? Chrysa misses her friends. Chrysa isn’t here. Chrysa’s elephant dances under the disco mirror ball. Maybe all this hilarity is a carrier, death’s Trojan horse. There is this scene I recall in a film about Congo’s ill-fated president, Patrice Lumumba (Lumumba, director Raoul Peck, 2000). Lumumba and his best friend lie tied and beaten up, waiting for the inevitable. They tell stories, reminding each other of earlier times. The two of them piss themselves laughing. Then they die. I’m sure they would have danced too, if they could.
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Dance Massive: John Jasperse Company, Becky, Jodi and John, creators, performers Becky Hilton, John Jasperse, Jodi Melnick, Chrysa Parkinson (online), choreographer, director John Jasperse, music Hahn Rowe, lobby video Ben Speth, Dancehouse, Melbourne, March 24-April 3; www.dancemassive.com.au
THE INCOMPARABLE TREVOR PATRICK’S I COULD PRETEND THE SKY IS WATER IS AN UTTERLY MAGICAL, IMMERSIVE 33-MINUTE PERFORMANCE-CUM-INSTALLATION THAT EXPLORES RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN PLACE AND MEMORY AND, WITH WICKED WIT, NEGOTIATES THE DISASTER THAT CAN BEFALL ANY PERFORMANCE, NOT LEAST DANCE.
We’re loath to give too much away. We can say it involves a clever stage design (Efterpi Soropos) comprising three large surfaces that act as screens. The projected videos by Rhian Hinkley, with evocative detail, transform these into ceiling, wall and floor and, later, the sea. Trevor Patrick is somewhere in here, first glimpsed as a ghostly presence on the wall—perhaps just a video image, a Bill Viola-ish spectre, an ectoplasmic return of the repressed. But we do have his voice, an older Patrick croaking out a series of 13 remembrances, each deliciously precise and framed by seductive, sometimes disturbing ambient sounds drawn from nature (Livia Ruzic), commencing with the mere drip, drip of water but soon growing into something more turbulent.
As with all things in I Could Pretend The Sky Is Water, the recollections float freely—the memory of a childhood ride in a rocking boat could have been on a swaying train. And as ever with Patrick, the writing is rich in detail and inherent poetry, suffused with droll humour. The particularity of place is striking in these remembrances—the idiosyncratic names of Australian towns seem odder than ever—although the reliability of recall is again tested: did such an event happen in this town or that one? Memory floats, suspended between possibilities.
The droll pace of Patrick’s speech mirrors the Australian voice of older generations. Or will we all sound like this some day? Inducing a dreamy forgetfulness, it relishes the crisp consonants of words like “Tumbarumba,” the fruity tongue rolls for names like “Gloria.” Sentences are rarely tied off briskly but rather extended with gross relish in words like “a-r-s-e” or the endless possibility of “Anyway…”
Suspension is the text’s insistent motif—on a chair, on a plank, in a boat, atop the artist’s father’s shoulders. Deft shifts in point of view are especially amusing—an old council chair remembers supporting an aunt’s “fat arse,” a carpet recalls the uneven weight of furniture and feet. The impressionistic image of Patrick on the wall sees him suspended and slowly rotating, his movement of strangely elongated hands and feet heavy, as if under water. Indeed, water increasingly invades his, and our, environment. Hinkley’s video art masterfully generates this transformation with images of great beauty, entailing subtle superimpositions and fragmentations: the ceiling rose is awash, the carpet colours spread into new patterns.
Patrick is subsequently revealed to be a human-animal hybrid in an exquisite stretch lace costume (by Peter Allan) that, in the shifting textures of Soropos’ lighting, evokes at different times soft, delicate flesh or a richly delineated scaly armour. The creature’s movement becomes more fluid, more dancerly but with not a little irony in the ensuing dialogue between Patrick and his older self. The text suggests not just the discovery of a pre-historic living fossil—suspended between species at a particular evolutionary moment—but also the performance itself as potential disaster (“eight of the audience are still unaccounted for”). This refers inherently to the riskiness of this performance but also to the challenges for all performers, not least choreographers (the crisis entails throwing out choreographic sections and other anxieties: “the longer a dance goes on the less likely its survival”).
There is no sense in which the work is confessional, beyond expressing with metaphoric intensity the stress of creation and performance for that very singular, strange species, the artist in the struggle for survival. There is a brief reference to Patrick as bow-legged and pigeon-toed when a child. Someone in his family assumes this will “right itself if attention is not drawn to it” and that “the blackboard will calm his restive legs.” But much of the imagery captures the look and feel of the past in terms of names, places, events (the Queen’s 1954 visit—“Nothing to see”), objects and lateral associations—crooked teeth and a lop-sided car grille.
I Could Pretend The Sky Is Water celebrates the survival of the artist with a great deal of beautifully clothed irony and hints of hard won optimism (“the audience never give up hope until the last of the choreography”), although the final image is as disturbing as it is beautiful. Similarly the grace of Patrick’s movement belies the physical endurance entailed in being suspended for the entire performance.
This marvellous act of suspension is supported by highly integrated video, stage, lighting and costume design and reinforced with the sustaining power of remembrance embodied in words in a work that anticipates a future reflective self while facing the creative crises of the present. In little more than half an hour, Trevor Patrick marvellously suspends himself, time and our disbelief with a scenario at once deeply familiar (the dance of memory) and utterly strange (the artist as beautiful alien).
Dance Massive: I Could Pretend The Sky Is Water, words & movement Trevor Patrick, costume Peter Allan, set & visual design Efterpi Soropos, set & design realisation Bluebottle, film production Rhian Hinkley, soundscape Livia Ruzic; Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, March 23-26; www.dancemassive.com.au
Interview with choreographer Trevor Patrick about I Could Pretend the Sky is Water. Interviewed by Keith Gallasch for RealTime @ Dance Massive 2011, Melbourne, Australia.
For more RealTime coverage of Dance Massive go to
http://www.realtimearts.net/feature_contents/Dance_Massive_2011
Amplification, BalletLab
photo Jeff Busby
Amplification, BalletLab
IIN THE PERFORMING ARTS, MEMORY CAN BE SHORT. FASHIONS ARE FORGOTTEN, MISSTEPS ARE GLOSSED OVER, WHEELS ARE REINVENTED. IT IS THE BLESSING AND CURSE OF PRODUCING EPHEMERA. SO, WHEN A CHOREOGRAPHER UPSETS THE USUAL CYCLE OF MEMORY LAPSE BY RETURNING TO AN OLD WORK, WHAT IS THE RESULT? HOW DOES AN AUDIENCE PRIMED FOR IMMEDIACY RESPOND TO ARCHIVAL DISTANCE? WHAT DO WE SEE AND WHAT DO WE MISS?
Amplification is the work that launched BalletLab and Phillip Adams. Its premiere dates back to the far reaches of 1999. The same year, sanctions against Libya were dropped, something called Napster started and The Matrix opened. So, in some respects, Amplification is ancient history. Yet, here it is again, resurrected.
It is impossible to watch Amplification with eyes a decade younger—to see it now is to see it with the knowledge of what has come since. The problems this gives rise to are clear: the groundbreaking may now seem derivative, the accessible may now seem obscure and the noteworthy may now disappear into a fog of familiarity. However, the rewards are nevertheless there. Amplification holds its own if only because, while some of the style might seem dated, the expressive language remains distinct. Adams’ direction and choreography, in its metaphorical leaps and snowballing dramaturgy is unlike anything else at Dance Massive so far.
Amplification, BalletLab
photo Jeff Busby
Amplification, BalletLab
It is possible to draw a worthwhile comparison here with German choreographer Sasha Waltz. Premiering only a few months later than Amplification, Waltz’s seminal Körper (seen recently at the 2009 Melbourne International Arts Festival, RT94) has informed not only a decade of contemporary dance but also marked a fundamental moment of artistic expression for Waltz herself. In the subsequent years, Waltz has produced two other works—S and noBody—in response to Körper, making a trilogy of sorts that reflects her development as an artist as much as it does the development of the themes. Similarly, just over a year ago, Adams produced a response to Amplification called Miracle (RT 93). And this year he produced a third instalment, Above.
Amplification, BalletLab
photo Jeff Busby
Amplification, BalletLab
The most enticing conclusion to be drawn from this is that Amplification is an incomplete work. One that provokes questions rather than providing answers; one that leaves you wanting more; one that Phillip Adams has not finished exploring. This also suggests an excellent reason for a remount—for the audience to revisit a work with knowledge of its progeny.
Indeed, as someone who came to Miracle before Amplification, it is only possible to view the older work refracted through the lens of the newer. On the one hand, the distillation and evolution of Adams’ choreography in Miracle becomes evident—for instance, his increased trust in the dancers as embodiments rather than functionaries of his expression. On the other hand, cross-referenced understandings can be reached—for example, the common motif of the saffron cloth makes an overlong ritualistic swaddling of a corpse in Amplification ring with the memory of Miracle’s extraordinary final image of levitation.
Perhaps unsurprisingly for a choreographer, the locus for Adams’ artistic interest tends to be the body itself. But rather than the encyclopaedic vein of Waltz’s investigation in Körper, Adams is particularly focused on the extremities that the body can conquer, endure or suffer, which leads inevitably to the final extremity—mortality (like live performance, the body too is ephemeral).
Amplification, BalletLab
photo Jeff Busby
Amplification, BalletLab
In Miracle, the body was a site for internal hysteria, a hindrance to be denied, a vessel to be exited. In Amplification, the violence enacted on the body comes from outside. The partnering work is fast and violent, bodies flung with disregard, Lynton Carr’s soundtrack an oppressive ceiling edging downwards. The space is never fully devoid of menace—the silhouetted torture scene is reminiscent of the disturbingly sterile violence of Romeo Castellucci’s Tragedia Endogonidia: BR.#04 Brussels (RT 76), yet there are moments that almost break into the absurd—threatening toy cars roll towards the dancers, one scene mimics the tropes of horror films, another alludes to the symphorophilia of JG Ballard’s Crash.
In the end, the clearest point of contrast between Miracle and Amplification comes not in their exploration of the living body but in their vision of the afterlife. Miracle ended with a transcendent sleight of hand, a weightlessly impossible vision of the body in harmony with space. In Amplification, the body retains its mass. The afterlife here is one grounded in the body’s inescapability and so, one by one, the naked bodies of the dancers form a soft eternal landscape.
I ENCOUNTERED SHAUN PARKER’S HAPPY AS LARRY WITH A VIVID FEAR OF REPEATING A RECENT EXPERIENCE OF SEEING A PERFORMANCE ON HAPPINESS DEVISED BY SOME THEATRE UNDERGRADUATES. AFTER AN HOUR OF WATCHING THEM FROLIC AND TUMBLE, GIGGLE AND DANCE, I BELIEVE THE ENTIRE AUDIENCE WISHED THEM DEAD. NOTHING CAN BE QUITE SO IRRITATING AS WATCHING A PERSON IN A PROLONGED STATE OF BEING DEEPLY HAPPY. WE DO NOT IDENTIFY, QUITE THE CONTRARY: WE FEEL EXCLUDED, DISRESPECTED, IGNORED. WE MAKE COMPARISONS TO ARYAN PROPAGANDA. WE FEEL ENVY.
Not without reason have the classic theatrical forms focused on showing us great tragedies, or ridiculing deeply flawed characters. That’s something to identify with easily: suffering and smugness. Herein lies the paradox of mimesis: another’s happiness is not transferable by identification, does not become my happiness. Show me a happy person on stage, I am likely to see only a self-satisfied bastard.
Happy as Larry shows us people in prolonged states of happiness for no less than 75 minutes, with no narrative arc or character development to introduce variety, and no recourse to the spoken word. However, within this field of monotony it focuses on the varieties of experience and personality, loudly proclaiming its employment of the Enneagram’s nine personality types to create an interesting range of joyful experiences.
We watch very different people enjoy very different activities: a ballerina delights in perfectly executing a classical figure; two young men copy each other’s movements flawlessly, their happiness being both shared and competitive; three women dance, laughing, lightly and not overly concerned with precision; a roller-skater learns to control his wheels. Adam Gardnir’s elegant set, a rotating blackboard slab, keeps the meter of the show, sweeping dancers upstage and bringing new scenes on. While most activities are representations of a simple, even childlike delight in bodily coordination, synchronised movement or skill, some are complex and intriguing. A narcissistic seducer, compulsively revealing his tattoo, dances despite Dean Cross’s chalked suggestion: “Don’t just do something. Stand there.” Miranda Wheen, on the other hand, appears on the scene only as a mediator of other performers’ journeys: she tries to contain the seducer’s movements, or picks up and steadies the roller-skater. Her satisfaction is palpable, and yet there remains a niggling trace of disappointment as the stage is never hers, her fulfilment never self-generated.
Ghenoa Gela, Happy as Larry, Shaun Parker & Company
photo Prudence Upton
Ghenoa Gela, Happy as Larry, Shaun Parker & Company
It is this democratisation of what could otherwise easily be a fascist insistence on unity of experience that guides Happy as Larry safely out of dangerous waters or sparking a riot in the audience. The rotation of interacting, interfering characters opens up a space for identification. While Parker spends too long hitting a single emotional note, thus provoking some boredom, he also repeatedly manages to bring us back by creating a fresh image of a kind of joy we have previously not considered—such as Cross’ deep, rich euphoria expressed through forceful sliding across the stage, leaving powerful and inarticulate daubs of chalk on the board, a possible representation of artistic creation. Moments of such recognition are powerful if infrequent, and it does make one wonder about how little time we spend thinking about what makes us happy, and how much worrying about what worries us.
The choreography and the technique are beautiful, and this is to a large extent a dance to enjoy for the variety of dancing bodies and styles. However, the dramaturgy is held together more by the rotating slab and the excellent soundtrack (available on iTunes, no less!) than by any sound sense of purpose. What backbone there is is provided by a recurring attempt to illustrate the fleetingness of happiness—from trying to draw a square around a balletic swirl to the ever-growing ridiculous chalk diagrams of Marnie Palomares’ limbs. Like Luke George’s excellent NOW NOW NOW (see p16), Happy as Larry allows the pursuits of the present moment to resolve in absurdity. Now is only ever now, and the detritus of these moments is not happiness itself, any more than the collection of props in a gallery could ever be a decent substitute for Marina Abramovic.
After many false endings, the final scene turns unexpectedly bleak: the choreography resolves into unison repetition of movements one could expect from football hooligans—raised fists, chest banging, machine-gun mime. This is repetition for its own sake, dark and not at all joyful, the very image of the death drive. Is this what happens when we try to retrieve irrecuperable happiness? There is not enough solid dramaturgy to know for sure. One by one the dancers leave the stage, leaving Dean Cross entangled in the balloons, themselves detritus from the beginning of the show which, I forgot to mention, involved a sequence of very simple stage trickery. Light switches drawn on the blackboard ‘operated’ stage lights and a flock of balloons was summoned with a snap of fingers. Happiness seemed a very simple thing at that time.
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Dance Massive: Shaun Parker, Happy as Larry, director/choreographer Shaun Parker, dramaturg Veronica Neave, musical director Nick Wales, composers Nick Wales, Bree van Reyk, production design Adam Gardnir, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, March 22, 23; www.dancemassive.com.au
DEANNE BUTTERWORTH AND MATTHEW DAY’S DANCEHOUSE DOUBLE BILL IS AN APT PAIRING, EACH PERFORMER EXUDING A PALPABLE SENSE OF COMPULSIVE PURPOSE WITH INTENSIVELY FOCUSED BODY-WORK IN SPACES TIGHTLY FRAMED BY LIGHT, SHADOW AND ENVELOPING SOUND. THERE IS NOTHING LITERAL TO HANG ON TO HERE—ONCE AGAIN IN DANCE MASSIVE WE ARE ALL VERY MUCH IN THE MOMENT.
dual repérage in threes
Butterworth’s Dual Repérage in Threes works the length of the venue’s upstairs Studio. To our far right, the choreographer-dancer appears abruptly, in a flurry of extensions, silhouetted in front of a human scale rectangle of bright, softly coloured light. Butterworth’s relationship to this light source is pivotal: she constantly moves away from it to the centre of her stage, sometimes further, only to return to it, sometimes moving backwards into its acute frame. The dancer is not miming push and pull, but the magnetism is evident—sometimes in a mere walk, sometimes as if she’s danced by an unseen force. As if to amplify the work’s anxious, moth-to-a-flame vibrancy, a hand-held torch lightly tracks Butterworth, casting a flickering shadow on the long wall as she moves into the dark.
Michael Munson’s score resonates with the dance; initially short, deep chords and high piano twangs suggest the solidity of acoustic sources, providing a palpable physical sonic pattern against which the dancer’s restive body moves regardless.
As Dual Repérage in Threes evolves, Butterworth’s choreography takes shape, cumulatively building on a calculatedly limited set of movements with occasional, strikingly different images (sculpted posturing, balletic tip-toeing, feet ‘stuttering,’ rapid pelvic thrusts) breaking the routine. The dancing’s not minimalist as in, say, some Molissa Fenley works, but the recurrence and recombination of motifs can be hypnotic or, at times, hard to hold together. Arms lead the body in wide turns, swing over shoulders singly and then together, back and forth at speed; hands spin rapidly over each other; and, in a dominant image, the dancer’s upper body is constantly pulled down towards the floor, centrestage, hands reaching, half-cupped as if something sighted is beyond grasp—the strange potency of this gesture is heightened by the addition of a percussive element to the sound score.
Deanne Butterworth, Dual Repérage in Threes
photo Rohan Young
Deanne Butterworth, Dual Repérage in Threes
The work is played out in two sections—there is a ‘private’ third that only Butterworth experiences or we can imagine, as she suggests in her opaque program notes. As the first ‘act’ progresses, the pull of the light is amplified when it turns slowly, softly orange, Butterworth travelling elegantly sideways, then walking serenely towards it. On arrival, she oscillates between bursts of energy and calm, drifts back to the centre, again as if seeing…what? Sweet organ-like tones fill the space. Black-out. Butterworth stands over a flickering fluorescent light as she commences her second ‘act,’ in which the rectangle of light is a vivid orange, and the images into which she recurrently locks are more intense, more urgent while others—like squared-off poses, moments of rare stability—are added. A thin line of lilac light illuminates the space where wall and floor meet, drawing a crawling Butterworth away from her principal light source, perhaps into some kind of release. In a moment that seems to break even further from the work’s patterning, Butterworth is no longer compelled to bend low; instead she clenches a fist and reaches out directly to us. It’s a powerful almost implicating moment, if again an abstract one.
In the work’s climactic moments, Butterworth returns to the light, a deep musical pulse underlining a frightening escalation of the work’s key motifs—arms and hands spinning, body pulled down and forward over and over. I’m not sure precisely what I witnessed in Dual Repérage in Threes, but Deanne Butterworth’s adroit coding of her choreography (inflected with years of dance know—how, superb balance and rapid gear-shifting) and the work’s near obsessive—compulsive realisation made for a compelling experience.
Matthew Day, Thousands
photo Jac Price
Matthew Day, Thousands
thousands
After I’d seen Thousands during the 2010 Sydney Fringe Festival, I wrote: “We’re seated mere feet away from Matthew Day, alert to the increasing tension in his body as he balances horizontally, close to the harsh floor on a mere two points of contact, suspended for a brief eternity before unfolding into a rotating, standing series of subtle transformations for…I don’t know how long. Time is erased as Day seamlessly mutates into slow-mo, non-literal evocations suggestive of body-builder, dance clubber (bizarrely headless as he faces away from us, head dipped), martial artist, butoh dancer, sportsman… as well as suggesting the body young and then strangely aged. The precision, control and focus are breathtaking. This is not dance in the usual sense, but it takes all the skill, strength and creativity of a talented dancer-choreographer to realise this acutely delineated state of being.” (See RT100)
A second viewing of Thousands confirmed for me the work’s peculiar, tension-driven power. Day maintains his performance constantly on the pivot of transition, always moving in minimal increments, such that the tension required not to topple or speed up creates a bodily vibration that is at times exhausting to watch but which provides the work with its pulse. This time I was hyper-alert to the meticulous shifts in movement: an arm leads out left, the direction Day is facing, but the palm of the hand faces us while the rest of the body slowly but with determination turns to the right.
Matthew Day,Thousands
photo Gareth Hart & Next Wave Festival
Matthew Day,Thousands
As part of Dance Massive, Thousands was performed at one end of the Dancehouse Studio against a white wall and on a polished timber floor. In terms of space and focus this created a very different ambience from the Sydney performance at PACT. There, Day’s black outfit was in sync with dark floor and walls. Here, the sheen of surfaces and the scatter of shadows reduced a little the work’s sense of sheer singularity. (In the second part of his trilogy, Cannibal, Day, in white clothes and hair, works a large white space in which shadows play an essential role: see RealTime 102, April-May.) Nonetheless, lighting designer Travis Hodgson (who also lit Cannibal), using strong down-lighting, manages to fix our attention while floorlights create shadows to amplify momentary, chance associations with, among others, sporting heroism, Soviet Realism, Rodin and Buddha.
James Brown’s monumental score also generates associations. Its enormous pulsing rumble feels like we’re sitting atop a giant machine, then stuck in a tunnel facing an oncoming train, then the target of hovering helicopters. But Brown’s composition is never literal, its long throbbing, humming lines magnifing the sense of body tension, although not in calculated sync with Day’s staccato internal beat, until the disco passage where music and body become one, Brown making even more of the flying bass lines than usual in that idiom. Of course, Day never deviates from his own pulse, making for some of the most restrained club dancing of all time.
Rosalind Crisp’s No one will tell us…, Luke George’s NOW NOW NOW and Deanne Butterworth’s Dual Repérage in Threes, in their very different ways deliriously engage with the notion of the moment. So does Matthew Day’s Thousands, not with improvisation or an open structure as its foundation, but with the ‘high-wire’ on-the-floor skill of maintaining balance and precision at the slowest of motion in the strangest of dances.
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Dance Massive: Double Bill: Dual Repérage in Threes, choreographer, performer Deanne Butterworth, sound design Michael Munson, lighting Rose Connors Dance; Thousands, choreographer, performer Matthew Day, sound James Brown, lighting Travis Hodgson, dramaturgy Martin del Amo, Rebecca Pollard, Yana Taylor; Studio, Dancehouse, Melbourne, March 22, 23; www.dancemassive.com.au
ITALIAN CHOREOGRAPHER JACOPO GODANI IS CURRENTLY IN SYDNEY TO CHOREOGRAPH A NEW WORK, RAW MODELS, FOR THE SYDNEY DANCE COMPANY. THE PIECE FORMS ONE HALF OF A DOUBLE BILL, SHARED FREQUENCIES, THE OTHER HALF BEING RAFAEL BONACHELA’S LANDFORMS. ERIN BRANNIGAN SPOKE WITH GODANI IN THE MIDST OF HIS PREPARATIONS.
I’m very interested in the overall approach you take to the choreography, the lighting and the design, your authorship over the entire work. You studied Fine Arts and Dance. Were you doing these at the same time?
I was in Italy and, yes, I did start dancing on a very quiet level in the last two years of my studies in Fine Art, but then I finally managed to go to the Maurice Béjart School and I could slow down with the fine arts to dedicate more time to dance. I started [dance] really late so I had to work all day, every day.
It was straight out of that that you set up your own company in 1990?
A couple of years later. I went to work with a small contemporary dance group in Paris for one year and then eight months back in Belgium with a new group that was a bit post-Béjart. And in that group I asked if I could do a work, which went well and we went on tour with it. And then a director of a theatre in Brussels saw it and offered me a residency…
That was an exciting time in Brussels with artists like De Keersmaeker, Vandekeybus and Alain Platel emerging and experimenting in collective environments.
It was fantastic…Money for culture, support and, most of all, curiosity. They were not creating a market or an economy. I don’t think they were making money but, culturally I mean, they were one of the most important movements in Europe in those years.
The Rosas School (P.A.R.T.S) that came out of that moment—where an artist was able to set up a training institution—was very idealistic and follows De Keersmaeker’s particular vision. For that to happen now, here…
Impossible. I work with a lot of companies in Europe. A lot of people ask me, “Why don’t you have your own company?” I would love to but right now with the frequency of work I have and the intensity…I do everything myself—lights, costumes, staging and choreography. And I am participating in the creation of the music and sometimes I do video design as well. When you’re a professional artist, you know how to deal with many fields. You don’t need 20 years company formation for everything you do. But right now, if I were to think about which country to set up a base to ask for an amount of money to carry on a philosophy with a group of dancers, I wouldn’t know where to do that.
So you don’t have any of the responsibility of having to raise funds or be responsible for a company of dancers. And the benefit outweighs the fact that you’re starting afresh with virtually a new company each time? Or are you invited into companies where you know what you’re dealing with to a certain extent?
I’m invited into companies regularly but you know how it is, dancers come and go all the time, especially in big companies. And dancers have other experiences and forget about what they have gone through with you. So you have to restart anyway. In that way, it’s a bit frustrating.
I don’t know how many of the dancers can tell you having worked with Jacopo has been an important experience or not. I think within the context of the limited time we have together, I challenge them a lot really. It’s quite an interesting ‘weapon’ to work with, dance, first of all because of the openness there is to receiving information. The dancer is really one of the most dedicated interpreters in the art world. In this way you can influence—in a very positive way—people’s way of seeing things. And this doesn’t only involve ideas. It involves mental mechanics. Because of the bodily involvement I think this goes much deeper, much further than just simply experiencing something that opens your mind.
Jacopo Godani (R) rehearsing with SDC Dancers
photo Peter Greig
Jacopo Godani (R) rehearsing with SDC Dancers
This idea that there’s a much closer link between thinking and the body, this is something you must have found in working with William Forsythe who really requires dancers who are very engaged and independent. How was that time?
It was absolutely amazing. I still dream about it and I left in 2000 so it’s 11 years now.
You were with him for ten years.
When you find a company like his, you don’t go somewhere else! It was the best of the best. There was everything there from avant-garde classical dancing to, the next day, singing in a parody of a musical and then, next day [undertaking] research into wearing sneakers and developing improvisational skills. It was incredible what Bill achieved. Utopian probably. He managed to have a group of 40 people in an opera house where basically there was only space for big stuff and ‘entertaining’ things. But his genius was to be able to make big shows with avant-garde ideas at the same time.
And his dancers … intelligent, definitely, but also very spontaneous because Bill had no parameters. That’s where I learned somehow that we could be free.
At that time the common logic was to shape yourself in circles and lines and angles and go from one to the other, as the step requires. Bill was revolutionary because he made people move like animals, like human beings. Nobody moved like human beings at that time, no matter what contemporary dance style you were looking at. It was about ‘artificialising’ yourself. Bill started to use the body and make it look like a body even though it was dancing classical [ballet]. It was amazing when you saw that.
I was looking at the small video clips online from your works Anomaly 1 (2008) and Spazio-Tempo (2010). There are really quick shifts between still, sculptural moments and really frenetic work.
When you choreograph you can easily be absorbed by looking into mechanics and shapes. And then you let yourself go and you think, “Wow it’s gorgeous!” And I’m so tired of myself. I don’t want to fall into this trap. So now I’m trying to create a type of musicality that is not logical to the brain. I want to get out of a traditional way of seeing beauty and lyricism. I’m sick and tired of doing something like “Lift her and she curls and…Gorgeous!” The dance has to be made because there is an intellectual, physical, mental challenge to produce something creative from dancers’ bodies.
The approach [the dancers] have towards what we are asking is really important. For me there is no creative effort or engagement in [simply] reproducing something correctly. I put [the dancers] in front of the mirror and say, “Do it, look, what do you think? I’m not teaching you this. This is your job. You have to be able to take care of it yourself.”
Let’s talk about Raw Models, your work for Sydney Dance Company. What’s this new work and how does it fit into what you’ve been doing lately?
It fits because I have managed to find a way of moving on even though I’m guest choreographing. I just go from company to company bringing the ‘baggage’ of what I do before. [For instance], I do a small piece of 20 minutes and then I redo it to 45 minutes or something like that. I have four or five weeks here, which is a bit limited unfortunately, so I use the tools that I have access to.
Rafael Bonachela is one of the most important people I’ve met in many years. He’s very alive. We have a very similar energy. We’re very curious. We also like all that there is around the basic artistic production—the networking, the promotional point of view, the contact, speaking to people, interviews—all these things. A lot of artists I find very reluctant about this side of things.
So apart from the music as a starting point [a commissioned score by German duo 48nord], what is this choreographic ‘baggage’ that you’re bringing from your last gig?
I want to create a certain allure around this piece, which is not pretty, lyrical and pleasing. I like the fleshiness and the aggressiveness of humankind and the nature of us as animals. So I’m trying to develop a sort of physicality that is very rough and very eloquent at the same time, by assembling bits of information of all kinds. I’m not trying to make a collage of styles because that’s crap as a concept. I’m trying to develop a piece that has a sort of alien, animalistic universe.
The research that I do choreographically is also structural. I’m also trying to think about light and height at the same time. It’s about the perception of volume. It’s about how to light the space in order to expand it and shrink it and bring it forward and back, [to highlight] all that is involved in a three-dimensional stage space…trying to find a type of light that helps people perceive this.
Sydney Dance Company, Shared Frequencies: Raw Models, choreographer
Jacopo Godani, composers 48nord; Landforms, choreographer Rafael Bonachela, composer Ezio Bosso; lighting designer Mark Dyson, sound designer Adam Luston; Sydney Theatre, March 29-April 16; www.sydneydancecompany.com
Interview with choreographer Luke George about Now Now Now. Interviewed by Keith Gallasch for RealTime @ Dance Massive 2011, Melbourne, Australia.
For more RealTime coverage of Dance Massive go to
http://www.realtimearts.net/feature_contents/Dance_Massive_2011
Claudia Escobar, Sweat, Branch Nebula
photo Heidrun Löhr
Claudia Escobar, Sweat, Branch Nebula
BRANCH NEBULA’S SWEAT WITTILY AND FORCEFULLY DISORIENTS OUR SENSE OF WHAT IT MEANS TO BE AN AUDIENCE. IT THEREBY COMPELS US TO REFLECT ON OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH MIGRANT SERVICE INDUSTRY WORKERS. THE PERFORMERS, FROM A VARIETY OF CULTURAL BACKGROUNDS, INVITE US INTO THE EMPTY MAIN HALL OF NORTH MELBOURNE TOWN HALL. WE CROWD IN, RECEIVE INSTRUCTIONS AS TO HOW WE SHOULD BEHAVE—AUDIENCE WORK—AS WE WITNESS THE PERFORMERS AT WORK, CONSTRUCTING A PERFORMANCE—WHILE THEY, IN TURN, WORK US.
Some performers demonstrate their mundane tasks (enacted both literally or danced abstractly) as they move amongst us and the dangers of infection are recited. One man approaches us with a stack of white dinner plates, spreads them at our feet and re-stacks them with clattering musical verve. He joins other workers setting out a long table for a banquet at the other end of the hall and, from a distance, expertly spins the plates to a waiting fellow worker who briskly sets them. Other banal tasks, like handling glasses are made artful—rolled in small arcs—or spoons picked up, rattled like a tambourine; work made art, defeating boredom.
As one, the performer-workers rapidly build the space that we are to inhabit with them—we are within their design. The emptiness is filled with a chunky sound system, speakers and a variety of light sources, all wheeled on briskly, pushing through the audience. Intense pockets of light and the visceral rumble and fine higher textures of Hirofumi Uchino’s live sound compositions permeate the space, edging the idea of work into displays of very different skills: dance, sound, song, martial arts and football—activities that appear to express the workers’ after-work actual being. These are imbued with an air of fantasy, of release, of brief moments of interplay, mutuality and even threat—how far can you go when you aim a football kick at a fellow performer standing perfectly still against a wall? This turns into a perverse kind of dance with the female ‘target’—legs and body arched—transmuted into a human goal. At work, perhaps one can dream. Or not—a woman cleans the floor obsessively with her hair. Another worker inhabits a garbage bag. Another is dragged about. The workplace is a mire of desire and nightmare.
The action of Sweat is spread around the space, pulling us to it, or we’re directed to make a choice, to fix on one of four performances. The work will soon focus on the banquet table and we’ll crowd around it. That defiant ritual over, the performers open out the space, filling it with unregulated energy before exiting.
the audience inside
Much contemporary performance and dance, and some cutting edge theatre, is preoccupied with disorienting audiences, and with a sense of purpose that is not merely experiential. Unusual seating configurations and moving audiences about during performances are a familiar part of the repertoire and subject to repetition and clever reinvention. What has grown more recently is a greater desire to place audiences inside the work. This parallels and borrows from visual art installations, interactive media arts, the return of 3D film and the proliferation of Live Art creations that heighten some senses by depriving us of others. In the latter case, the senses themselves are often the subject of the work.
However, this heightening of audience subjectivity relies in the first instance much more on spatial arrangements than on pervasive sound design (a fusion of cinema and sound art), innovations in lighting and the immersive attractions of the screen (nowadays such a frequent component of live performance). That said, this is a two-way process: Melbourne’s Ben Cobham and Bluebottle design with light; multiple-channel sound design places audiences inside virtual worlds; and screens can challenge our sense of perspective and conjure illusory spaces. Even so, light, sound and projections have to be housed and framed before they can trigger the desired experience.
making room for the senses
Increasingly design for the performing arts has to accommodate these experiential potentials. In Narelle Benjamin’s In Glass, within a darkened space mirrors doubling as screens for video projections are also transparent or, when not, can be used for shadow play. The two dancers are constantly multiplied, merged and disappeared, paralleling the mutating state of their relationship and the mirroring inherent in the choreography. It’s the simple (but doubtless complexly negotiated) positioning of the mirror-screens that frames the action, and holds the images. and the lighting of the dancers cannot afford to mess with the projections and reflections of this reverie into which we peer. There’s a lot of peering these days.
For Michelle Heaven’s Disagreeable Object, Ben Cobham and Bluebottle have constructed a transportable, small, narrow black box that can provide the tight sight lines needed to pull off surprising visual effects that in matching the performers’ movement realise the silent movie-cum-gothic horror ethos of the work while adding a more contemporary, eerie and finally spectacular depth of field. Cobham and collaborators, not least in their work with Helen Herbertson, are always adroit at disturbing our field of vision, flattening dimensions and creating evanescent fields of colour (like the floor washes on which Jenny Kemp’s Madeleine seemed to nightmarishly float).
interior designs
For a work as delightfully unstable as Luke George’s exercise in immediacy, NOW NOW NOW, there was also a great sense of fixity about Benjamin Cisterne’s impressive design—interior design no less, for a starkly stylish home, or a fashion store (a sense compounded by the eccentrically costumed opening display and odd posturing and strutting). We leave our shoes in the foyer and enter a space entirely walled with black drapes; floor and seating are uniformly covered in white felt; and the ceiling is adorned with four large panels of textured, white Japanese paper covered lights hanging over us and the performance space. We are well lit as the performers. We are one. We are at home: the tension between certainty and potential chaos kept in fine check. Real life on another plane.
Harriet Ritchie, Stephanie Lake, Marnie Palomares, Alisdair Macindoe, Joseph Simon, Connected, Chunky Move
photo Jeff Busby
Harriet Ritchie, Stephanie Lake, Marnie Palomares, Alisdair Macindoe, Joseph Simon, Connected, Chunky Move
immersions and installations
Dancers occupy, shape and generate space. In Chunky Move’s Glow and Mortal Engine this was made more palpable—Frieder Weiss’ interactive video projections allowed the dancers to literally illustrate the spaces they made. They broke up grid lines, churned out curves and left behind impressions of their presence. A move could trigger a rush of insect-like animations that filled the floor-screen space and was suggestive of the power that radiates out from the dancing body.
In Glow the audience, seated in a rectangular frame, looked steeply down on the solo dancer as she moved against the floor-screen. The effect was, not surprisingly, both vertiginous and immersive, with connotations of laboratory or museum. In Mortal Engine, performed in traditional theatre spaces, the floor-screen was wide, accommodating more dancers, but tilted even to the vertical, so that again we felt we were looking into a highly active specimen case, as its dancer-creatures crawled over its edges and crawled, glided and tumbled across the surface. In both works the effort to disorient the audience is inherent.
In Chunky Move’s latest work, Connected, choreographer Gideon Obarzanek pursues some of the cause and effect patterning of Glow and Mortal Engine but with physical materials rather than virtual ones. Instead of the digital sculpting of images by computer artist and dancers, here it’s the interplay between dancers and a huge kinetic sculpture made of paper, string and timber that is central to the work. The stage space is conventional, but the scale of Reuben Margolin’s kinetic sculpture, already lit as we enter, makes the work unavoidable. As I wrote in my review, “If we weren’t seated we could be in an art gallery.” That tension, between theatre and gallery, is played out, even made literal, in the course of Connected. It’s a reminder too of the influence of the visual art installation in a wide range of performance works and dance, strikingly in Lucy Guerin’s Structure and Sadness.
use me
As dance and contemporary performance continue their long, hybridising engagement with other artforms, the elements that create aural and physical space (projections, sound, light, interactives, animatronics, architectural and design sensibilities) loom large. Apparently inanimate or virtual (if always artist creations) they assume stage lives and realities of their own (recall the music and light entractes in Mortal Engine), ones which we increasingly inhabit with the performers, walking through the fourth wall to join them, or imagining we do due to a trick of light or sound. Sometimes it’s so simple. Of Rosalind Crisp’s No one will tell us…I wrote about “the exploitation of the theatre’s spaces via the distribution of movement and the excellent lighting [with] a life of its own. At times the guitarist is foregrounded, Crisp in the dim distance, insisting on another perspective on the dance; at others the light establishes a space, as if to say, use me.”
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Dance Massive: Branch Nebula, Sweat, co-creators: Lee Wilson, Mirabelle Wouters, performers, devisors, choreographers Claudia Escobar, Erwin Fenis, Ali Kadhim, Ahilan Ratnamohan, Angela Goh, noisician/live sound Hirofumi Uchino, dramaturg John Baylis; Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, March 18,19; www.dancemassive.com.au
Topology members must the happiest people—this is fun music that lifts your spirits. But it’s music with real depth. Difference Engine is a CD for entertainment and contemplation. Though newly released, the works in this compilation date from 1997–2003 and presumably the ensemble has thoroughly road-tested them—the superb playing evinces the musicians’ total familiarity with and immersion in the material.
All but one of the four works was written by ensemble members, the other being by Lynette Lancini, whose four-movement Centaur (2000) opens the disc. Three of the movements are named after gemstones and one after a flower, and the titles are intended to reflect their character. Obsidian opens with a rapid motoric theme that dramatically slows before returning to a stabbing pace. Jasper starts dreamily, with a steady piano ostinato threading through, blending lovely violin, viola, bowed bass, piano and sax lines that build in earnestness. The brief but evocative Heliotrope (the purple flower of mourning) begins with suitably mournful strings and sax over a steady bass, jumps to an up-tempo, angular fugue-like passage and then just as abruptly slows again, concluding with a soulful piano finale. Sapphire, the longest and most involving movement, opens with a jaunty folk-like riff on strings threaded with sweet soprano sax. Slowing to a gentle stroll, it develops increasing textural complexity and builds to an evocative crescendo. This 23-minute suite traverses much compositional and emotional territory —great writing that bears repeated listening.
Saxophonist John Babbage’s 2003 work φX174 (named, we are told, after the first-ever completely mapped genome of any organism) starts with offbeat, rhythmic strings and piano from which a lovely slow violin line develops, shifts to a rapid motoric form and then returns to a gentle stepping pace. The CD liner notes suggest the musical material is a representation of the DNA code, but it sounds fresh and energetic rather than overly calculated.
Bassist Robert Davidson’s 1997 Exterior (in two movements) is an excerpt from his much longer Four Places, and the ensemble includes Ron Colbers guesting on djembe, adding a very different feel to the music. The driving offbeat opening is followed by a mellifluous sax solo that segues into a hypnotic viola solo supported by bowed bass before returning to the opening theme. The work alternates forceful, rhythmic movement with wistful introspection as it unfolds. My favourite on this CD, Exterior evidently involves much improvisation, but feels carefully structured. Bernard Hoey is superb on viola.
The final work, Babbage’s 2001 Difference Engine, is in three movements: the first is arrhythmic and dissonant, the second begins brightly then slows, and the short third movement opens slowly and quizzically and concludes with a few brief piano figures that hauntingly die away under the pedal. The title refers to the calculating machine designed two centuries ago by the (unrelated) mathematician Charles Babbage—another musical metaphor for a scientific milestone, though you wouldn’t guess it without the liner notes. The work sounds expressionistic and is evidently based on the space between notes as measured in distance rather than time, yielding a series of “differences.'
These compositions sound as if they have grown out of experiments that have resolved themselves into a style. If this music had its roots in minimalism, it has evolved into something far more complex—a repetitive motif might be overlayed with a long, seductive melody; there are sudden shifts in tempo and dynamics, leading instruments swap roles, and there are multiple competing lines and tempi. Conlon Nancarrow and Frank Zappa leap to mind. The power in these compositions lies in their interweaving, polyphonic lines that create enchanting textures, and their bouncy energy. The style shifts though jazz syncopations, rock and other forms, and the mood alternates forceful statement with gentle crooning. Any mathematical dryness is offset by the rich tone colour and developmental peaks that tease the attention. Free of gimmicks, this music is lush, infectious, upbeat and accessible, yielding tunes that pop into your mind all day, but it’s also seriously demanding and rewarding, a difficult balance but well achieved. There is scope for solo virtuosity, but mostly this music requires and enables brilliant ensemble playing, which Topology delivers effortlessly.
This long-established five-piece has made its name through finding new musical territory that draws many flavours into a unique mix. Given their previous forays into everything from classical chamber works to pop, comedy and funk, Difference Engine seems very straight but it’s a superbly crafted and very satisfying CD.
Chris Reid
Kristy Ayre, Luke George, Timothy Harvey, audience participant, NOW NOW NOW
photo Jeff Busby
Kristy Ayre, Luke George, Timothy Harvey, audience participant, NOW NOW NOW
HERE AT DANCE MASSIVE, IMPROVISATION IS VERY MUCH ON THE AGENDA AND RESPONSES—LIKE THE QUALITY OF IMPROVISATORY PERFORMANCES OVER A SEASON—ARE WILDLY DIVERGENT. LINES ARE BEING DRAWN. WE’VE NOW SEEN THREE WORKS THAT DEAL WITH THE PROCESS IN DIFFERENT WAYS. IN NO ONE WILL TELL US…, ROSALIND CRISP IN COLLABORATION WITH HANSUELI TISCHHAUSER AND ANDREW MORRISH SHOWS US A BODY SO FINELY TUNED TO SENSATION AND ITS OWN HISTORY THAT ITS MOVEMENT IS LIKE MUSIC, LEAVING US TO VENTURE OUR OWN READINGS. THE FOUR PERFORMERS IN SHAUN MCLEOD’S THE WEIGHT OF THE THING LEFT ITS MARK INTRIGUINGLY PRACTICE ‘PURE’ IMPROVISATION WHILE NEGOTIATING PARTIALLY CHOREOGRAPHED PATHWAYS.
In Luke George’s NOW NOW NOW, we are invited to enter the moment as three improvising performers attempt to pin it down.
White. We remove our shoes to walk the soft, white felted corridor. The fabric extends into the theatre, even to our seats. Above us light is filtered through white Japanese paper. On all sides the white room is bounded by black.
The scene invites concentration. The purity of the setting also highlights the physical presence of the three performers—Luke George, Kristy Ayre and Timothy Harvey.
Costume. In the case of Luke George, this involves a change from his childlike mismatch (yellow shorts, a plastic breast plate, a string of beads dangling a small turtle, and an Indian feather headdress) to track pants and top. The others also change into primary colours until eventually all are in the uniform attire of your average dance ensemble. Not that this is your average dance ensemble.
Warm-up. Lined up, they shout a list of OW words to clear their heads: “Now, cow, vow, bow, chow…” The bland listing becomes warbling chorale.
Research. They move lazily to one corner to gaze at a silent video invisible to the audience. From time to time they pick up on particular movements and mirror them, sometimes together, sometimes apart. We fill in the gaps with imagined dancing. One moment I see a line of men in tails and top hats. They’re gone. Later the trio will utter disjointed phrases seemingly read from the monitor, including:
“I feel I’ve had some funny episodes.”
“I will absolutely indulge that.”
“The most amazing dancer of all time.”
These words and others are repeated and redistributed until they almost become a weirdly naturalistic conversation.
I note we must be 15 minutes in and still in full light.
Luke George, Kristy Ayre, Timothy Harvey, NOW NOW NOW
photo Jeff Busby
Luke George, Kristy Ayre, Timothy Harvey, NOW NOW NOW
Effort. The dancers perform a feat of endurance, jumping and kicking until the sweat streams. They move through awkward, frenetic and apparently unmotivated movements. This is some other kind of dance. I stop taking notes.
Long, utter, emptying blackout.
Interaction. Timothy Harvey approaches an audience member, offers her a set of headphones and an iPod relaying her instructions. She enters the space and for the next five minutes or so becomes a fascinating part of the action, performing small gestures, uttering words, snippets of song—a line from “Singin’ in the Rain.” The others pay her no special attention. She is simply there, part of the scene. Eventually she announces: “A special event!” then leaves. Nothing much happens. Perfect.
Another list. Shouted snatches of sentences. Indolent action followed by wild eruptions suggesting anger or pain, all inflected and articulated with dance moves, all short-lived till someone says, “Enough!”
Sequence in wigs. Synchronised dancing to disco music distracts momentarily from the otherwise engrossing unfamiliarity of the work.
Funny moments. Who said existentialism needed to be angst-ridden? The three appear to be suddenly aware of their surroundings, finding everything surprising or scary.
“Drapes! Drapes!” shouts one as if suddenly shocked by the curtains that frame the space. “Black!” yells another. Luke George is startled to find himself eyeballing the audience. “Downstage!” he gasps “Downstage!” as if crying for help. “Retreating, retreating,” he signals. The others take refuge in geometry, shouting “Triangle!” until George registers and finds safety again in the dancerly threesome.
They stare at us, until the moment when Kristy Ayre says “thank you.”
Applause. Something like an hour has passed.
Watching NOW NOW NOW feels like something new, though not altogether. In the improvisation stakes, it’s about the impetus, the ‘energy’ and whether the impulse hits home, rebounding in a form such that a large enough proportion of the audience can share or interpret it. What is that elusive thing we feel we know when we see it? In NOW NOW NOW, the sense of the live presence is palpable if using a meta-theatre aesthetic for its seduction. In its careful choice of expressive means, there seems more than a hint of possibility. Will it lead to what Helen Herbertson has hoped for, “a kind of re-flowering of really specific, detailed physical language” (quoted in Erin Brannigan’s Platform Paper, Moving Across Disciplines, Currency House, 2011)? On a path shared with Rosalind Crisp’s very different No one will tell us…, NOW NOW NOW takes some big steps in the right direction.
See also realtime’s video interview with Luke George.
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NOW NOW NOW, choreographer Luke George, performers Kristy Ayre, Timothy Harvey, Luke George, design, production Benjamin Cisterne, dramaturg Martyn Coutts, Music Glass Candy. NOW NOW NOW was originally commissioned by Lucy Guerin Inc; www.dancemassive.com.au
In the last In the Loop, we mentioned the exhibition Afterglow: Performance Art and Photography, which got us thinking—we haven’t featured photography in a while. So this week’s In the Loop highlights what’s happening in the world of contemporary photographic practices.
Jon Rhodes,
Hobart, Tasmania, 1972-75
from the album Australia
1 of 53 gelatin silver photographs, 11.9 x 17.7 cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales. Purchased 1980
Jon Rhodes
Jon Rhodes,
Hobart, Tasmania, 1972-75
from the album Australia
1 of 53 gelatin silver photographs, 11.9 x 17.7 cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales. Purchased 1980
place, space and the image
The Art Gallery of New South Wales has just opened its exhibition Photography & Place: Australian Landscape Photography 1970s Until Now. The show presents the work of 18 artists, including Jon Rhodes and a few RealTime regulars such as Rosemary Laing (RT58 and RT85), Simryn Gill (RT42), Ricky Maynard (2009) and the much-missed Michael Riley (featured in RT50 and reviewed in RT76 and RT77).Their work, according to the press release, “encompasses ideas of place in relation to historical residue, ethnicity, the interface between people and nature, the sublime, as well as the road and the journey in Australian landscape mythologies.” There is also an accompanying film program, featuring classics such as Wake in Fright (1971), Roadgames (1981), Broken Highway (1993) and Beneath Clouds (2002, see RT48), as well as a symposium—the first in a new annual series dedicated to photography. Photography & Place: Australian Landscape Photography 1970s Until Now, AGNSW, March 16-May 29; www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au
two kinds of tours
Elsewhere in Sydney, the MCA has just extended the touring exhibition Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life 1990–2005. If you haven’t already seen it, the show brings together almost 200 iconic images of famous public figures together with personal photographs of Leibovitz’s family and close friends. The images are arranged chronologically, rather than thematically, allowing for a “unified narrative of the artist’s private life [to emerge] against the backdrop of her public image” (press release). The MCA is also co-presenting, with Hurstville City Council, Angelica Mesiti’s The Begin-Again: A Contemporary Art Tour At Night as part of C3West (RT84). Presented over two nights, the work is billed as a “showcase of local stories” and features four large-scaled video installations and a live performance in Hurstville’s laneways and shopping centre (press release). Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life 1990–2005, until April 26; The Begin-Again: A Contemporary Art Tour at Night, April 1-2; www.mca.com.au
Miss Alesandra, 2010 digital print
photo Jacqueline Mitelman
Miss Alesandra, 2010 digital print
national photographic portrait prize 2011
Community involvement is also a key part of the annual National Photographic Portrait Prize, which anyone can enter. The finalists are currently on display at the National Portrait Gallery, with their images depicting birth (see Dean McCartney’s highly commended image of his minutes-old son), death (see Donna Gibbons’ image of her father on his death bed), and almost everything in between (childhood, adolescence, parenthood etc). The winning image is Jacquline Mitelman’s portrait of Suzi Alesandra, whom Mitelman has been photographing for over 25 years. Strangely enough, Alesandra bears more than a passing resemblance to that great theorist of photography Susan Sontag as photographed by Leibovitz. The exhibition will be in Canberra until April 26 before it goes on tour to Bunbury, Geraldton, Fremantle and the Yarra Ranges; there’s also an online gallery. National Photographic Portrait Prize, National Portrait Gallery Canberra, February 25-April 26; www.portrait.gov.au
The trees r talkin I, iPhonegraphy
photo Syliva Dardha
The trees r talkin I, iPhonegraphy
iphoneography
Last year the NPG curated Present Tense: An Imagined Grammar of Portraiture in the Digital Age (RT98), but surprisingly there was no mention of iPhoneography, a practice which is becoming increasingly popular. There are now thousands of photography apps for the iPhone, hundreds of blogs dedicated to the subject and more than a few exhibitions too. In Spain last year La Panera Art Centre curated iPhoneografia and in the US, the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art is about to open Pixels: The Art of iPhone Photography. Locally, the West Gippsland Arts Centre is showing Wats On Ur iPhone?, which provides an insight into the “creative world of tiny technology” and features images captured and edited on artist Sylvia Dardha’s iPhone (press release). Wats On Ur iPhone? West Gippsland Arts Centre, March 14-28; www.wgac.org.au
Imogen Cunningham
Subway New York 1956
gelatin silver print
Collection of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film
1956, 2010 The Imogen Cunningham Trust
Imogen Cunningham
Subway New York 1956
gelatin silver print
Collection of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film
the american century
Not to be outdone, another regional gallery is exhibiting American Dreams: 20th Century Photography from George Eastman House. The House, where the founder of Kodak once lived, holds over 400,000 images, of which 80 have loaned to the Bendigo Art Gallery. The images include original works by Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Capa, Imogen Cunningham, Walker Evans, Nan Goldin, Dorothea Lange, Man Ray, Cindy Sherman and Alfred Stieglitz, among others. Taken individually, the images are remarkable for their artistry; taken together, they also provide an extraordinary visual history of life in 20th century America. American Dreams: 20th Century Photography from George Eastman House, Bendigo Art Gallery, April 16-July 10; www.bendigoartgallery.com.au
untitled
There are, of course, many other exhibitions on. Fotofreo is having its year off, but the Perth Centre for Photography is currently showing the work of Olivia Martin-McGuire and Mark Penhale. Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary Photography is showing Pat Foster and Jen Berean’s Spencer is Drunk and Ian Haig’s experimental video Chronicles of the New Human Organism. The Australian Centre for Photography is exhibiting Crossroads: Contemporary Russian Photography as well as the work of Ray Cook and Sean O’Carroll. And for the voyeur in us all, the Justice & Police Museum is showing Collision: Misadventures by Motor Car, featuring police photographs of traffic accidents from the early 1920s to the mid-1960s. Olivia Martin-McGuire, The Sleepers, Mark Penhale, Shadows, Perth Centre for Photography, March 18-April 10, www.pcp.org.au; Pat Foster and Jen Berean, Spencer Is Drunk: Progressive Studies, Ian Haig, Chronicles of the New Human Organism, Centre for Contemporary Photography, April 15-June 4, www.ccp.org.au; Crossroads: Contemporary Russian Photography, March 18-April 30, Ray Cook: Money Up Front and No Kissing, Sean O’Carroll, Interspection, both March 18-April 17, the Australian Centre for Photography, www.acp.org.au; Collision: Misadventures By Motor Car, Justice & Police Museum, March 19-Dec 31, www.hht.net.au
IN A PROGRAMMING COUP FOR THE 2011 FESTIVAL OF GERMAN FILM, THE GOETHE-INSTITUTE AUSTRALIA, SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE AND HOPSCOTCH FILMS HAVE SECURED THE AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE SCREENING OF WIM WENDERS' PINA, A 3-D FEATURE-LENGTH FILM TRIBUTE TO THE DANCE THEATRE REVOLUTIONARY, PINA BAUSCH, WHO DIED IN 2009. THE FILM'S WORLD PREMIERE WAS AT THIS YEAR'S BERLIN BERLINALE.
After being trained by Kurt Joos at the multidisciplinary Folkwang Hochschule and subsequently performing with major international choreographers, in 1973 Bausch was appointed, by Joos, as head of the Wuppertal Ballet, which she renamed Tanztheater Wuppertal, initiating both the revolutionary dance theatre phenomenon and the company she led until her death. The term tanztheater had originated with Rudolf Laban in the 1920s to express a desire to escape from the technicalities of dance into a greater range of expression: it was Bausch who fulfilled this vision, extending the possibilities of dance and embracing performative means outside of it.
Wim Wenders, Pina
For many of us whose first encounter with Bausch's mysterious works was at the 1982 Adelaide Festival, the profound experience of Kontakthof, Blue Beard and 1980 remains indelibly felt in body and mind—our recall confirmed by photographer William Yang's acutely empathetic documentation and the host of video material now found in online tributes. Wim Wenders, on September 4, 2009 at a memorial service for Bausch aptly said of her, “She showed us [a] way to overcome our fears and to not feel imprisoned in our bodies any more.”
Bausch's works often made enormous demands on dancers and audiences alike. They were performances informed by dance but not always danced, painfully compulsive in their repetitiveness and in their sustained images of cruelty, panic and passion. The unreal worlds they conjured seemed astonishingly real and increasing familiar as each Bausch reverie endured into timelessness and we grew to know the faces, bodies and moods of people who seemed to become more than performers.
Bausch's best works were nothing less than sublime—fearfully beautiful, intensely visceral, lyrical, alarmingly unpredictable, turning from anger and cruelty to compassion and communality with an inherent strangeness that eschewed sentimentality and story-telling comforts.
But Bausch wasn't alone in the 1970s and 80s as a radical artist: like her compatriots Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders (born 1945, Bausch 1940) and Botho Strauss—and in other ways, the hyper-story-teller Rainer Werner Fassbinder—she conjured strange worlds that didn't reflect so much as wilfully distort our own, giving them back to us anew.
Wim Wenders, Pina
Wim Wenders is now best known as a documentary filmmaker but his early feature films, like The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty (1971, with co-writer Peter Handke), Alice in the Cities (1973), Kings of the Road (1976), The American Friend (1977), The State of Things (1982) and Wings of Desire (1987) are, like Bausch's works, the immersive creations of a laterally-minded, utterly distinctive and innovative artist.
Wenders was working with Bausch on the film when she died. Shot in the streets of the industrial city of Wuppertal (where Bausch worked and lived for 35 years) with members of her company, the film also includes especially recorded performances of some of the choreographer’s best known works: Café Müller, Le Sacre Du Printemps, Vollmond and Kontakthof.
Wim Wenders' website includes a Pina trailer and a 24-minute interview with the filmmaker. You'll find even more about the film and Pina Bausch at the pina-film website.
The one-off festival screening in 3D in the presence of director Wim Wenders (with Q&A) shows only in Sydney. Doubtless a cinema season will follow—but when? Catch it now, even if you've never seen a Pina Bausch work.
Interview with choreographer/performers Michelle Heaven & Brian Lucas about Disagreeble Object. Interviewed by Keith Gallasch for RealTime @ Dance Massive 2011, Melbourne, Australia.
For more RealTime coverage of Dance Massive go to
http://www.realtimearts.net/feature_contents/Dance_Massive_2011
Interview with Madeleine Flynn & Tim Humphrey about the sound installation Music for Imagined Dances, with lighting by Niklas Pijanti & production by Jesse Stevens. Interviewed by Keith Gallasch for RealTime @ Dance Massive 2011, Melbourne, Australia.
For more RealTime coverage of Dance Massive go to
http://www.realtimearts.net/feature_contents/Dance_Massive_2011
Interview with choreographer Rosalind Crisp about No One Will Tell Us…, in collaboration with performer Andrew Morrish and musician Hansueli Tischhauser. Interviewed by Keith Gallasch for RealTime @ Dance Massive 2011, Melbourne, Australia.
For more RealTime coverage of Dance Massive go to
http://www.realtimearts.net/feature_contents/Dance_Massive_2011
Interview with Chunky Move director/choreographer Gideon Obarzanek about his latest work Connected, in collaboration with visual artist Reuben Margolin. Interviewed by Keith Gallasch for RealTime @ Dance Massive 2011, Melbourne, Australia.
For more RealTime coverage of Dance Massive go to http://www.realtimearts.net/feature_contents/Dance_Massive_2011
Michelle Heaven, Brian Lucas, Disagreeable Object
photo Ponch Hawkes
Michelle Heaven, Brian Lucas, Disagreeable Object
MICHELLE HEAVEN’S DISAGREEABLE OBJECT IS IMMEDIATELY REMINISCENT OF ONE OF THE ENIGMATIC SCENARIOS OF GOTHIC NEW YORK ARTIST AND BALLETOMANE EDWARD GOREY (SEE THE GILDED BAT, THE CURIOUS SOFA). AT TURNS WHIMSICAL AND STRANGE, THE PIECE ALSO HAS THE FASCINATION OF A MINIATURE SPECTACLE IN WHICH THE AUDIENCE’S VISION IS UTTERLY PRIMARY.
The action takes place in a narrow space constructed within the Meat Market venue. Inside this small room, tightly packed into a bank of seats, we peer into the gloom, gradually making out a small woman (Michelle Heaven) seated on a tiny chair and eating noisily from a metal dish. She leaves to be replaced on the same chair by a very tall man (Brian Lucas). Both are white faced and wearing black—she bustled, he in tails. Both bear the signs of evil intent in permanently devious expressions. Occasionally, as he falls prey to her poisonous intentions, the deadpan mask of Lucas stretches to a ghastly grimace. They make a striking couple.
For all their Edwardian elegance, there’s something decidedly feral about these two who might be the mad servants living below the stairs. The act of eating is central and happens in greedy grabs. She also appears part mad scientist (what is she dispensing from that tap on the wall we wonder?) threatening at every turn to destroy this claustrophobically symbiotic relationship. He has perfected the art of escape and almost wins out when in one funny and deftly choreographed sequence she attempts to force him to eat an outsized poisoned pea. From here, things escalate in every way!
Michelle Heaven, Disagreeable Object
photo Ben Cobham
Michelle Heaven, Disagreeable Object
The choreography is precise, perfectly tailored to meet the needs of this gothic little tale, which traverses what might be days or decades in just 33 minutes. There are a lot of enigmatic entrances and exits. Occasionally, the pair breaks into odd little angular dance sequences, though ever contained and always returning to their devious personae. Heaven wheels her squeaky mobile serving tray/laboratory trolley in and out, concocting her evil potions in swift little moves. At other times she appears in surprising suspension in the gloomy distance. From here she seems to angle and float as if possessed by some other force. Ben Cobham’s design and lighting plays cleverly with perspective and shadow to elegantly enhance the gothic ambience of the work in surprising ways. At times you wonder if you’re seeing straight. Similarly Bill McDonald’s score reminds us of the manifestations of this genre in melodrama and silent movie.
A disarming and diverting miniature, concluding with a very grand flourish, Disagreeable Object is nonetheless ambitious in scope. Dramaturgically tight, choreographically inventive, imaginative in design and performed by two consummate artists, I for one am grateful for its release from the Dance Massive crypt allowing more of us to experience its particular pleasures (though peas will never be the same). May it continue to see the light.
Elsewhere in the Meat Market, in another semi-retro experience, we don 3D cellophane glasses and enter a darkened booth to experience UK artist Billie Cowie’s Revery Alone, as part of his Stereoscopic showings. On a floor screen, a dancer uncurls from her prone position and reaches upward towards us. The work’s simple trickery still fascinates as we catch the fleeting realism of that elusive entity—the dancer’s gaze.
Disagreeable Object, choreographer, performer Michelle Heaven, collaborator, performer Brian Lucas, collaborator, designer Ben Cobham, composer Bill McDonald, costume design Louise McCarthy, production and operation Bluebottle, Frog Peck, James Russell, Arts House, Meat Market, March 16-19; Billy Cowie, Revery Alone, Stereoscopic, Meat Market, Melbourne, March 16-19; www.dancemassive.com.au
BRANCH NEBULA’S SWEAT IS CONCERNED WITH TURNING OUR ATTENTION TO THE INVISIBLE MEMBERS OF SOCIETY—THE ONES WHO PULL BACK OUR CHAIRS, SWEEP UP OUR DEAD SKIN, WIPE AWAY OUR SKIDMARKS AND COLLECT OUR CAFETERIA TRAYS. COINCIDENTALLY, CHUNKY MOVE’S CONNECTED TOUCHES ON SIMILAR GROUND WITH ITS DIP INTO THE WORLD OF SECURITY GUARDS, BUT SWEAT TACKLES THE BRIEF FAR MORE DIRECTLY AND PROVOCATIVELY.
Nevertheless, it starts by turning our attention to our own behaviour. On entering the well-lit vastness of the North Melbourne Town Hall, there is nothing to look at but ourselves as we mingle and coalesce in atolls of strangers and acquaintances. It is the foyer writ large, a continuation of the antespace and yet, Sweat has actually begun. From the gathering comes the sound of a welcome. A young woman, dressed in black with a tray and an apron, steps forward to suggest that we really could have made a better entrée—too noisy, too slow and now we are running late. But punctuality is less important than quality so we are asked to leave and re-enter properly. It is a disempowering experience, like any scolding, which is followed on our second entrance by a pronouncement of the social contract we are entering into.
We are expected to stand and move as instructed, to do so autonomously when required, to empathise with the performers, to view them objectively on occasion, to applaud them at the end until we are told we can stop clapping and to be upbeat about the show afterwards, indeed, to focus on three central messages: [1] that we saw ordinary people doing extraordinary things; [2] that the piece challenged accepted forms but always remained accessible; [3] that it is a work of great importance to the future of Australia.
Claudia Escobar, Sweat, Branch Nebula
photo Heidrun Löhr
Claudia Escobar, Sweat, Branch Nebula
The sheer tongue-in-cheek gall of these clichéd pronouncements produces knowing titters in the audience, delivered as they are with the host-like air of a waiter explaining the evening’s specials. But the tone shifts markedly as our host walks from one audience member to another and asks them first to dress her in the accessories of a cleaner and then to remove her other clothes. At last, semi-naked in rubber gloves and hairnet, she kindly asks a man to force her to the ground. He complies. The shoe of disempowerment is now firmly on the other foot and we have all been implicated.
This simple point of departure is reminiscent of the recent work of performance artists like Georgie Read, who play a consciously mercurial game of push-pull with the audience’s affection. Throughout Sweat, the performers invite our attention and the visibility it affords with flirtatious glances, sweetness and displays of skill. But they can just as quickly disappear into the resentful distance, punish us or deride our presence. This dynamic with the audience enacts the same power hierarchies that are being represented, where the performers are ordered to clean the floor with their hair, threatened with violence and abused in Spanish, all in the course of a few minutes.
Sweat constantly shifts in its use of space, employing an ingenious collection of mobile light sources to carve out discrete landscapes. And the audience, as instructed, moves about to stay in contact with what is happening. As an aesthetic policy it is interesting—forcing us to engage with different angles, different architectures, rejigging our perspective. On the other hand, the meaning-making of it is sometimes less evident or necessary. When we are asked to choose a corner to stand in and, thereby, a performer to favour, the act of choosing is a potentially loaded act. What are our criteria? Why do we choose a man and not a woman? Why do we look around to see what we are missing? Yet, the subsequent scene feels redundant in its reformulation of previous content and the movement of the performers from corner to corner negates the weight of our choice and elides the kind of interrogation it could provoke.
Ahil Ratnamohan, Sweat, Branch Nebula
photo Heidrun Löhr
Ahil Ratnamohan, Sweat, Branch Nebula
However, this is a quibble with one short moment in the middle of Sweat. In its final set piece it regains most of the traction with which it began. A group of audience members is invited to sit at table where the performers, dressed as sweatshop workers, politely serve them wine, spaghetti, tomato soup, peas, pineapple, frankfurts—the kicker being that these items are ladled very carefully into completely inappropriate places. The end result is part Grand Bouffe, part Abstract Expressionism. The smiling ceremonial quality of the rebellion is so disarming and so cleverly worked in with our own understandings of theatre etiquette that the audience victims are left laughing rather than humiliated. The humour relies also on our empathy with the performers who, in becoming so clearly and endearingly visible, make mockery of the established codes of service and their concordant entitlements and disenfranchisements. The performers leave the space with gusto, with an animalistic exuberance. At last, they have been seen.
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Dance Massive: Branch Nebula, Sweat, co-creators Lee Wilson, Mirabelle Wouters, performers, devisors, choreographers Claudia Escobar, Erwin Fenis, Ali Kadhim, Ahilan Ratnamohan, Angela Goh, noisician/live sound Hirofumi Uchino, dramaturg John Baylis, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, March 18,19; www.dancemassive.com.au
Paul Romano, Luke Hickmott, The weight of the thing left its mark, Shaun McLeod
photo Heidi Romano
Paul Romano, Luke Hickmott, The weight of the thing left its mark, Shaun McLeod
DIM LIGHT GRADUALLY REVEALS THREE PEOPLE MID-STAGE SEATED AT A SIMPLE WOODEN TABLE, A LARGE PILE OF CUTLERY GLEAMING ALONG ITS LENGTH. ONE OF THE THREE SLUMPS FORWARD ONTO THE TABLE. ANOTHER HOVERS CLOSE BY. A NAKED LIGHT BULB SWINGS. AT THE OTHER END OF THE SPACE A WHEAT SACK IS SUSPENDED FROM A ROPE. THIS PORTENTOUS SCENARIO LURES US WILLINGLY IN TO THE WEIGHT OF THE THING LEFT ITS MARK, A WORK CONCEIVED BY SHAUN MCLEOD TO “WALK THE LINE BETWEEN CHOREOGRAPHY AND ‘PURE’ IMPROVISATION,” REVEALING “(THE) PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPACT INHERENT IN NEGOTIATIONS THAT TAKE PLACE BETWEEN PEOPLE” (PROGRAM NOTE).
A cacophony of metallic sounds ensues as the cutlery is variously manipulated both onstage and enhanced by sound artists, Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey seated in the shadow of the dangling sack at the other end of the space.
As the wielding of knives and forks moves from tentative to provocative, one woman (Olivia Millard) is driven to leave the suffocating tension of the table. Adrift from the rest, in a discombobulated dance that leads nowhere, she appears purposeful but ineffectual as if performing half-remembered moves, inhabiting a broken body not her own.
Sometimes I think dance is all about the variously faltering and fluid manifestations of evolution’s trace memory. But enough of the weighty projection…
Light shifts and, with it, attention. I lose myself for a time in the ethereal ambience of the sound. Like the onstage performers, Madeleine Flynn explores the myriad possibilities of cutlery. Her close-miked clinks, clanks, scrapes and drops are processed by Tim Humphrey into resonant frequencies, textural and tonal swathes of sound, subtle feedback and fleeting musical phrases.
Sophia Cowen, Luke Hickmott, Olivia Millard, Paul Romano, The weight of the thing left its mark
photo Heidi Romano
Sophia Cowen, Luke Hickmott, Olivia Millard, Paul Romano, The weight of the thing left its mark
Back in the room, the performers (family members, conflicted committee, coven?) eventually assemble in a line across the stage wielding knives, forks and spoons in a series of manoeuvres, some more suggestive than others—such are the risks of improvisation. The tight focus of the opening begins to fall away in unfocussed display. Cutlery is deployed in a variety of unlikely conjunctions then flung to the floor. But for all their materiality, their multiplication in volume and enhancement in sound, the symbolic power of these objects begins to diminish. At one oddly anticlimactic point Flynn slashes the wheat bag open, releasing the grain. Its moment is lost.
As meaning floats, signifiers drift by. The men threaten, then submit to, even carry one another while the women play small games of attraction/repulsion. The bodies are uniformly loose, unevenly weighted and without apparent purpose. Curiously, at times performers opt out of the action, then return (if only this were possible in real life). Gradually the mind conjures from these flailing figures something other than human nature—some other species negotiating space and decision-making, occasionally submitting to domination by one of the pack (another improvisational pitfall). Then again I might have been watching too much David Attenborough.
None of the movement really hits its mark it seems until a couple of larger tools—a spade and a pitchfork—appear in the hands of the performers. This upping of the ante offers an opportunity for some stronger reactions from the ensemble, though again, males dominate somewhat. For the first time we hear spoken observations or instructions from one of the women (Sophia Cowen) on the relationship between the object and the body holding it: “It’s heavier in the left hand,” she says and refers us to the “torso” of the fork. Finally, the young man (Luke Hickmott) who had stood apart from those gathered at the table at the outset breaks loose again. He holds the spade like a musical instrument, then aloft, then suddenly feels its weight and falls. It leads him into a perilous spin and back to the table. In this physical movement I begin to feel something of the metaphorical weight at the centre of this work.
The weight… is most certainly a thoughtful work with many ambient pleasures but, later the same night, watching the pervasive invention and sheer choreographic distinctiveness of Rosalind Crisp’s equally improvisatory No one will tell us…, I understood what was missing.
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Dance Massive: The weight of the thing left its mark, director, choreographer Shaun McLeod, performer-choreographers Olivia Millard, Paul Romano, Sophia Cowen, Luke Hickmott, sound Madeleine Flynn, Tim Humphrey, lighting Gwen Holmberg-Gilchrist, Upstairs Studio, Dancehouse, Melbourne, March 16, www.dancemassive.com.au
See also an interview with musician/composers Madeleine Flynn & Tim Humphrey about their installation Music for Imagined Dances also part of Dance Massive 2011.
Rosalind Crisp, Hansueli Tischhauser, No one will tell us…
photo Patrick Berger
Rosalind Crisp, Hansueli Tischhauser, No one will tell us…
ROSALIND CRISP’S NO ONE WILL TELL US… IS A VERY STRANGE EXPERIENCE, ONE ALMOST BEYOND DEFINITION AND NOT EASY TO DESCRIBE. AND EVEN IF I DID, THE VERSION OF THE WORK THAT SEDUCED ME WOULD NOT BE THE ONE YOU’D SEE IN ANOTHER PERFORMANCE UNDER THE SAME TITLE.
Rosalind Crisp has been living creatively by a strict improvisational code, central to her long-term project, danse (see realtimedance for details and video excerpts) and best described in words from her website:
“Rosalind’s work is about the body. The body is the subject. The compositional causality of her movement is unpredictable. There is no assumption about what will follow what. Through practice, the dancer is held awake by the imperative of taking or noticing each successive decision as it is made” (www.omeodance.com).
Within the proscenium arch of Dancehouse’s Sylvia Staehli Theatre, Crisp in red silk shirt, slacks and bare feet wanders the stage with movements that epitomise her mission: there are no straight lines or smooth curves, no predictable dance moves. She is stiff legged, leaning back, head directed away from where her feet take her, one leg suddenly moving off with its own momentum, the body in tow, the dancer’s gaze now to the ceiling, now into the wings. There’s also a quick dip at the waist, like a bow, as if to acknowledge us.
I have to resort to analogy. It’s as if Crisp is a child, or autistic, deeply distracted, attentive everywhere but on calculated movement. And because her body is in tight vertical alignment she also appears clown-like, an accident waiting to happen. So when Crisp is propelled aimlessly off-stage, as if lost, the audience giggles, and laughs when she descends the stairs and darts back onstage, as if panicked. (It’s interesting that in a post-show RealTime video interview, Crisp said that before the performance she’d thought about the previous night, how she felt she’d been too close to the other performers and too fast. Tonight she thought she would explore her body’s surfaces and this slowed her in a way she enjoyed.)
Hansueli Tischhauser, Rosalind Crisp, No-one will tell us…
photo Patrick Berger
Hansueli Tischhauser, Rosalind Crisp, No-one will tell us…
Beyond analogy, Crisp’s movement is astonishing in its sheer otherness, the beauty of its constant disconnects and the way it adds up without any overt patterning. Yet it is deeply informed by the history of dance and Crisp’s body of work—an inherent dancerliness is evinced in sudden, precise extensions, fluent turns and spins, deep swoops, elegant articulation of limbs and hands, but with the commas and conjunctions eliminated, the standard syntax of dance erased. It’s magical. It’s years since I’ve seen Crisp perform. I admired her vision then. Now I witness its embodiment more acutely and affectingly realised. But that’s just the beginning.
In the video interview, a smiling Crisp identified No one will tell us… as the “bad cousin” or “dark side” of the danse project. It’s the outcome of inviting some other virtuosi to perform with her: improviser Andrew Morrish and guitarist Hansueli Tischhauser. The latter stands on the floor below the stage with his guitar and a range of foot pedals that allow him, among other things, to lay down long rhythmic pulsings against which he can improvise moods or melodies, working with Crisp, or pushing her in new directions once she’s joined him on the floor. He conjures up a driving march and suddenly Crisp opens out, big steps, arms flung wide. Tischhauser is no mere accompanist: sometimes he’s comically the archetypal rock guitarist, sometimes he’s physically in sync with Crisp, duplicating aspects of her movement.
Andrew Morrish comes and goes, a kind of host, silver-suited, mercurial, finding space between guitar phrases to inform us that he has no narrative to offer, no explanation for the show (“I’m like you”), but happily riffs on the tale of a pair of children who always play and never speak (“they’re not like us— children,” “they have appetites, we have preferences”). He’ll return to this later (“This is not a love story”). And he’ll do his own idiosyncratic solo dancing prior to a collective performativity invades the trio. There’s an odd aptness to Morrish’s chosen theme, countering the innocence of Crisp’s first appearance and the subsequent playfulness between her and the guitarist. The children in Morrish’s spare tale eventually run away rather than be forced to speak, are caught and “pretend to be normal”: “They were surviving.”
As No one will tell us… unfolds Crisp appears to transform, struggling as if from a chrysalis into a new being, looser, faster, lyrical—but in no ordinary sense and as unpredictable as ever. Big moves, strides, surges, elicit sharp breaths and gasps from the dancer are buried in the guitar’s roar but fully felt in the silence that follows, the body revealing its own rather than the music’s momentum. The later dancing is larger, sensual and finally riotously funny without ever losing Crisp’s determined and beautifully realised purpose.
No one will tell us… is, however, unusually theatrical for a Rosalind Crisp work. Partly it’s a given with the mix of talents, with Crisp’s search for another way to address her danse project vision; but it’s also inherent in the exploitation of the theatre’s spaces via the distribution of movement and the excellent lighting that also has a life of its own. At times the guitarist is foregrounded, Crisp in the dim distance, insisting on another perspective on the dance; at others the light establishes a space, as if to say, use me. The theatricality is also embedded in the consistent good-humour of the performances, doubtless a variable, but strongly felt on this night, lending the work a particular coherence while not undercutting the seriousness of the larger flights of dance and music.
No one will tell us (the artists) what to do, (the audience) what it means, (anyone) what it is. Well, it’s dance, dance theatre even, like never before.
Dance Massive: No one will tell us… choreographer, performer Rosalind Crisp, Andrew Morrish live music Hansueli Tischhauser, lighting, technical director Marco Wehrspann; Dancehouse, Melbourne, March 15-17; www.dancemassive.com.au
CHUNKY MOVE’S RECENT WORK HAS BEEN CHARACTERISED BY DANCERS SURROUNDED BY THE DIGITAL. IN MORTAL ENGINE AND GLOW, GIDEON OBARZANEK PAIRED THE LYRICISM AND VULNERABILITY OF THE HUMAN FORM WITH THE SPECTRAL BLING OF INTERACTIVE VIDEO GRAPHICS. CONNECTED IS A LO-FI THIRD CHAPTER. WHERE THE EARLIER PIECES EXTRAPOLATED ON THE HUMAN FORM WITH PROJECTED PIXELS AND LASERS, CONNECTED DOES SO WITH STRINGS AND WOOD IN THE FORM OF A GIANT KINETIC SCULPTURE BY REUBEN MARGOLIN.
Entering the space, the first thing we experience is the dominating presence of this sculpture, resembling an incomplete loom of dangling warp. Two dancers enter and, as one tumbles across the floor to the fuzzy glitches and scratches of Oren Ambarchi’s score, the other begins carefully completing the sculpture, clicking magnetised shards of paper to connect the suspended threads into a grid of diamonds. The tumbling dancer soon becomes two, then three, then four, rolling and undulating across the floor but the deployment of numbers cannot conceal the niggling sense that we are being merely diverted while the main course is prepared.
When the grid is completed, the sculpture becomes a latent contraption of elegant beauty. And when the dancers’ bodies are then hooked up to the other ends of the threads, the image is made all the more wondrous. Like a diagram of light rays, the strings emerge from the human subjects, refract through a wooden lattice, bounce across the ceiling and drop down into the reflected image of the grid. In that moment, the connection of human to mechanical becomes both abstracted and essentialised.
The physical connection itself is not inherently revealing nor even interesting. When a person rides a bicycle, they are connected to a mechanical contraption of exceptional elegance and their vertical force translated into horizontal displacement, but this relationship reveals nothing more than the strength of their quadriceps. The bicycle does not express. On the other hand, Margolin’s sculpture, in the frisson between its mathematical rigidity and kinetic fluidity creates the potential for a mechanical poetry. As the dancers shift their bodies forward and back, their movement is translated into the undulation and contortion of the grid. It becomes an infinitely variable abstract canvas for our associations—a bird’s wings, an enveloping cloak, an open ocean.
As such, the sculpture augments the expressive potential of the dancers by extending the reach of their neurons into new fibres (one imagines the ineluctable fun the dancers must have had in rehearsal, exploring the potential for expression and variation, like babies still conquering gross motor skills). When the sculpture is attached to an intimate duet between a man and a woman, the reflected shudders and waving of the grid seem to describe an elusive mathematical representation of love. When the duet evolves into sexual thrusting from the man, the grid responds with some unimpressed crinkling—a neat bathetic joke.
The grid as a reflection of the human form also makes manifest the very scientific thought that created it. It is an expression of the rational mind, a reminder that what we invent is inevitably in our own image, no matter how apparently disembodied. The programming of Connected in parallel with Narelle Benjamin’s In Glass, brings this aspect into clearer focus. Where In Glass treats reflection as a shady psychological force, Connected celebrates the altogether different shadiness of the scientific and mathematic by making it symbiotic with the corporeal.
Stephanie Lake, Harriet Ritchie, Joseph Simons, Connected, Chunky Move
photo Jeff Busby
Stephanie Lake, Harriet Ritchie, Joseph Simons, Connected, Chunky Move
However, just as this celebration begins, it grinds to a halt. The eponymous connectedness is dispelled when its potential is only beginning to be realised and, instead, the sculpture is unplugged from its human drivers and plugged into a wall socket. As an automaton it becomes even more mathematical and pure, losing none of its beauty, but the dancers become irrelevant (cast your mind to the poetic force of Heiner Muller’s Stifters Dinge). To his credit, Obarzanek acknowledges this irrelevance with a surprising shift into semi-verbatim theatre that transports us very literally into the inner life of art museum security guards. There is perhaps a vein of social critique here, or for that matter an opportunity to emphasise the intricate beauty of what we have seen with the banality of this episode, but it feels instead that the promise of the first half is left underutilised and that Obarzanek concludes by dancing around rather than with the concepts he provokes.
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Dance Massive: Chunky Move, Connected, director, choreographer Gideon Obarzanek, sculpture Reuben Margolin, performers Stephanie Lake, Alisdair Macindoe, Harriet Ritchie, Marnie Palomares, Joseph Simons, composers Oren Ambarchi, Robin Fox, lighting Benjamin Cisterne, costumes Anna Cordingley; Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse, Melbourne, March 15-20; www.dancemassive.com.au
Connected will appear at Sydney Theatre, May 10-14; chunkymove.com
PLENITUDE IS A GOOD WORD TO DESCRIBE NARELLE BENJAMIN’S IN GLASS—NOT IN THE SENSE OF ABUNDANCE, PERHAPS NOT, BUT CERTAINLY IN THE SENSE OF AMASSING, OF MULTIPLIED SAMENESS. THE GORGEOUS, PRECISE BODIES OF KRISTINA CHAN AND PAUL WHITE ARE QUITE ABLE TO COMMAND THE STAGE IN SINGULAR, BUT IN GLASS MULTIPLIES THEM THROUGH GENTLY ANGLED MIRRORS, FILM AND INTERPLAY OF LIGHT AND SHADOW—MAKING AS MANY AS SIX OF THE SAME DANCING COUPLE AT ONCE.
They mirror each other, too, sometimes in perfect synchronicity, sometimes with a calculated lag; then they split into duets with a recognisable male-female dynamic. This shifting between synchronicity and sensual dialogue evokes intriguing parallels with psychoanalytical thought, as the two dancers seem to achieve a completion of sorts in paralleling each other’s movements: through learning to imitate and respond to each other they seem to grow conscious of themselves, each other, the world, their relationship. Without going too deeply into Lacanian psychoanalysis, the notion of the mirror stage, in which reflection of one’s self allows self-conscience to emerge, is a notion dear to all performance—recurring in theories of performativity from Judith Butler among others. For a while there, the multitude of reflecting Chans and Whites exists without leader or follower: a perfect tribe of dancers, an image of primordial unity. There is some logic to this interpretation: the mirror stage is but a moment in our lives, and irretrievable—and Chan and White spend the later, larger part of In Glass out of sync, seeking each other. If the mirror starts as a vehicle for happy unison of the many, it soon turns into a visual maze, a passage through a glass, darkly.
Much of the dramaturgical responsibility in In Glass rests on Samuel James’ visual design, which adds a layer of video to the already complex reflecting images. Through the projections, the mirrors shatter, dancers’ limbs multiply into insectoid, almost abstract arabesques and a forest landscape engulfs Chan’s and White’s bodies as they slip behind glass. Chan, a comparatively small woman, repeatedly wanders off into the forest, as bare-footed and lost as that child in McCubbin’s painting. When she reappears on stage, she is prostrate, asleep, as if she had been spirited away without any agency of her own. In these moments In Glass appears to tell a story of star-crossed lovers, or even (to remain psychoanalytical) of that impossible thing we seek in everyone we fall in love with—the faint memory of our pre-conscious unity with the world. The repetition of loss, search and encounter echoes itself in slight inflections, as reclamation of lost ground, which never turns out to be quite the same.
Benjamin’s choreography reaches its apex with the introduction of two smaller, oval mirrors, which allow the dancers to multiply only some of their body parts, and merge into fabulous beasts. Paul White becomes a three-headed Narcissus (or Cerberus), licking and kissing his own reflection. The moment is exquisite: as the light from the mirrors scans through the audience, occasionally blinding us, we are brought into the same space as White, now as sublime as a psychotic monster. Kristina Chan’s transformation into a many-limbed Hindu deity is equally captivating: White stands behind her with the mirrors, multiplying her arms. Both dancers reflect and multiply in the larger mirrors behind them, forming a gigantic pastiche of human matter, not unlike an organic Rorschach blot. In these moments, what has so far been their internal quest grows larger, universal, archetypal. The performers could be gods or animals.
However, such moments of confronting strangeness are too rare. For the most part, In Glass insists on a certain mellow beauty which, however satisfying on a purely aesthetic level, keeps its tone too even, too centred, to build a genuinely satisfactory dramatic arc. The beauty of individual scenes is undeniable; the purpose or intent of the entire endeavour much harder to ascertain—video and choreography become sequential eye candy, creating the pleasant effect of dance wallpaper.
I am reminded of early 20th-century dance, its insistence on harmony and pure expression of the body, and, even more, of Gertrude Stein’s ‘landscape plays.’ All of Stein’s principles—the interest in reaching the unconscious, the continuous dramatic present, the play that one can contemplate as one would a park or a landscape, the seeming homogeneity of content which, actually, goes through subtle variations and loops—are present in In Glass. Stein eliminated the dramatic narrative on purpose, proclaiming that it always made her terribly nervous. In Glass comes with no such manifesto, but it does seem to be trying to create a landscape of its own sort. And it succeeds: even if we are not sure what it was saying, we do believe we have heard it say something.
The greatest part of the experience of any dance work is retrospective, the memory of a body at a constant vanishing point. As such, it is hard in a review that follows so closely after the event to say with certainty what this experience was. Perhaps that three-headed Narcissus will crystallise into an indelible image in a week’s time? It is too early to tell.
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2011 Dance Massive: In Glass, choreographer Narelle Benjamin, dancers Kristina Chan, Paul White, composer Huey Benjamin, visual design Samuel James, costumes Tess Schofield, lighting Karen Norris, Beckett Theatre, Malthouse, Melbourne, March 15-20; www.dancemassive.com.au
Harriet Ritchie, Stephanie Lake, Marnie Palomares, Alisdair Macindoe, Joseph Simon, Connected, Chunky Move
photo Jeff Busby
Harriet Ritchie, Stephanie Lake, Marnie Palomares, Alisdair Macindoe, Joseph Simon, Connected, Chunky Move
GGIDEON OBARZANEK’S CONNECTED COMMENCES WITH CONTEMPLATION AND A BLOW. IF WE WEREN’T SEATED, WE COULD BE IN AN ART GALLERY, GAZING UP AT A HUGE SCULPTURE THRUSTING TOWARDS THE CEILING OF THE MERLYN THEATRE. IT’S A MACHINE OF SOME KIND. WE PONDER ITS PECULIAR TIMBER AND STRING BEAUTY. WE ITCH TO SEE IT ACTIVATED. ONE PERFORMER APPEARS TO BE COMPLETING IT—MAKING CONNECTIONS. ANOTHER TWO PERFORMERS STAND SIDE BY SIDE; A BURST OF SOUND AND ONE IS FLUNG SIDEWAYS ACROSS THE STAGE. CONNECTIONS ARE MADE: DEVICE-BODY, SOUND-BODY, GALLERY-THEATRE, ART-WORK. THESE WILL MERGE AND ACCUMULATE IN A GROWING WEB OF ASSOCIATIONS.
A circular component of the sculpture suggests a spinning wheel and the adjacent threaded frame a loom, from which dozens of strings rise tautly to a tilted rectangular grid high above us. From there, these myriad lines descend to waist height where they are intricately linked by one or, later, more performers into another grid. This is quiet work, construction; not dance, but patterned labour.
Simultaneously, intriguing human connections are being formed—ricochets from that initial sonic blow or waves coursing from one dancing body to the next. These are forceful and unstable; appearing to spring almost involuntarily from one part of a dancer’s anatomy and rippling out into the whole and beyond into other bodies. In one passage the movement is near slow motion, evincing a kind of brutality underlined by the propulsive power of the music; in another, bodies jerk with staccato suddenness. Duos and trios appear enmeshed in the fine lines of unseen forces, like puppets on strings for all their dynamic attentiveness to each other’s transformations, evoking the imponderables of cause and effect or Chaos Theory’s maximisation of small impulses into major moves. (Sculptor Reuben Margolin reveals his fascination with waves in an interview with John Bailey and Gideon Obarzanek, in a video interview with Keith Gallasch, reflects on causality in Connections). The dancing is fascinating; I yearn to experience again its shock waves and deregulated fluency.
Work on the sculpture is complete—fine white, identical, magnetised paper shards link all the strings. The new grid is neatly horizontal. Four dancers are harnessed to the strings that emanate from the ‘loom’ and are hooked to the backs of costumes. With the pushing that pulls, the performers collectively lean forward and with great effort and concentration slowly hoist the grid high and then lower it, the mass of strings quivering with each exertion and machine stress. But it’s not mass effort that reveals the sculpture’s beauty or its subtleties. That labour is allocated to one dancer (Alisdair Macindoe) by another (Marnie Palomares) affixing all the connecting lines to his body, so that when he leans into his work he momentarily appears like a participant in an ancient Indian ritual or a performance artist whose skin has been pierced with hooks to which some great physical and spiritual burden applies. Here, astonishingly, when Palomares makes slight adjustments to Macindoe’s bearing—the angling of a shoulder, the turn of the head—it’s these that have the greatest effect on the sculpture, re-shaping the suspended grid into a floating mound or deep hollow, rippling with dancerly fluency. It’s as if, in his near stillness and beyond mere mechanics, the dancer’s spirit has passed into the art machine—such is the nature of puppetry. if here a radical inversion of the usual scale of the art.
When Palomares stands beneath the lowering grid, she faces up until it reaches her lips for a kiss between human and machine and secondarily its operator in an oddly romantic moment (Macindoe’s attention is not on Palomares but on the work effort—though he does vibrate reciprocally). However oblique the connection between the two the kiss suggests the intrinsic humanity in artistic creation—this sculpture is no mere object.
But in a sudden and surprising shift of focus, the dancer is unharnessed, the sculpture’s wheel is electrically activated and the artwork makes its own moves. It becomes, in effect, a stand-alone installation guarded by the dancers as a team of suited gallery attendants. We’re in an art gallery: but it’s not about the art. Live voices and voice-overs provide brief verbatim accounts of how people from diverse backgrounds are employed by security companies to become guards in galleries. The art there seems incidental to them, while their sense of isolation and the menial nature of their labour (“You don’t make anything; you just look at people”) is felt in neatly patterned group movement as well as words. However, there’s something in the air. The dancing sculpture and the sublimely soaring music re-shapes and undresses these sad souls, stripping them down to shirts, forming them into exquisite living mandalas, opening and closing like flowers, and finally resting beneath the descending grid with which they become one.
Stephanie Lake, Harriet Ritchie, Joseph Simons, Connected, Chunky Move
photo Jeff Busby
Stephanie Lake, Harriet Ritchie, Joseph Simons, Connected, Chunky Move
This osmotic liberation might seem corny from a distance, merely metaphorical, let alone likely in this instance, but in the moment it had an enveloping romantic logic, resonating with the surprisingly generative disjunctions in the scale of cause and effect witnessed earlier.
Connected is an engrossing creation, intensely and rewardingly collaborative, passionately danced to exacting choreography (in the first section some of Gideon Obarzanek’s best), superbly lit (Benjamin Cisterne makes the sculpture appear self-illuminating) and thrillingly scored (I can’t find the words to do justice to the haunting, compulsive compositions of Robin Fox and Oren Ambachi). Reuben Margolin’s kinetic sculpture alone is reason enough to see Connected. But that’s just the first wave of this labour of love and the work that is art.
Interview with Chunky Move director/choreographer Gideon Obarzanek about his latest work Connected, in collaboration with visual artist Reuben Margolin. Interviewed by Keith Gallasch for RealTime @ Dance Massive 2011, Melbourne, Australia.
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Dance Massive: Chunky Move, Connected, director, choreographer Gideon Obarzanek, sculpture Reuben Margolin, performers Stephanie Lake, Alisdair Macindoe, Harriet Ritchie, Marnie Palomares, Joseph Simons, composers Oren Ambarchi, Robin Fox, lighting Benjamin Cisterne, costumes Anna Cordingley; Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse, Melbourne, March 15-20; www.dancemassive.com.au
Connected will appear at Sydney Theatre, May 10-14; chunkymove.com
THE SHEER PLENITUDE OF NARELLE BENJAMIN’S IN GLASS IS ALMOST OVERWHELMING—THE CONSTANT FLOW OF HIGHLY ARTICULATED DANCE, AN INSISTENT SOUND SCORE AND A MULTIPLICITY OF IMAGES, REFLECTED ON AND OFTEN SIMULTANEOUSLY PROJECTED ONTO THE THREE MIRROR SCREENS THAT FRAME THE PERFORMERS. I SENSE THAT SOME KIND OF ELLIPTICAL NARRATIVE IS ALSO UNFOLDING IN THIS SEMI-DARK WORLD THAT TRANSMUTES BETWEEN REVERIE AND NIGHTMARE BUT, AS WITH DREAMING, I CAN’T BE SURE. THE FOLLOWING MORNING, I WAKE TO THE SUSPICION THAT I’VE WITNESSED A GHOST STORY.
The associative nature of In Glass, where everything is half-seen through refracted light (epitomised by the recurrent image of broken glass) demands interpretation if at the same time appearing to refuse it. The work is imbued with a sense of loss, of being lost, of separation anxiety. It commences with a shadowy male figure searching with a torch and finding the body of a woman—asleep, resting, dead? Later, in a projected image, we see her run through a forest to the point of collapse and utter stillness. Later again, she will wield the torch in his absence. Back in the first scene, the female dancer appeared onscreen behind the broken glass, as if peering down at her partner’s searching: some kind of regenerative cycle, of souls together and apart, seems to be functioning.
The pattern appears to be: separation, discovery, merging, separation and re-discovery, with the everyday banality of search by torchlight offset by the mythic imagery of a tree that sprouts (the performers’) limbs, perhaps evoking the Hindu goddess Kali, at once creative and destructive. A similarly transcendant quality is found in passages that meticulously evoke Eastern temple dancing, reinforced by Huey Benjamin’s chiming score, here at its best when most delicate. The acute angularity of this deeply earthed movement and the escaping flights of finger dancing are ravishing. As so often in In Glass, the dancers are completely in synch, side by side or mirroring each other, enforcing a sense of oneness that will be lost and reclaimed over and over.
In less calculatedly transcendant passages, the moments of merging entail a range of dynamics, from swirling gyrations, one body in tow of the other in exacting floor work, to intense back-arched parallel prostrations suggestive of mutual passion and stress. At other moments, the dancers lean forehead to forehead, slide together neck across neck and glide to the floor, or elsewhere slump with alarming suddenness as if the effect of emerging is too much. At other times there is a sensual entwining, as if in sleep.
Because Paul White and Kristina Chan are dancers of inordinate finesse and skill, and because Narelle Benjamin has shaped for them a rich dance language, In Glass, moment by moment, is often deeply engaging. But that plenitude of invention becomes exacting—images race by, too fast often to find anchor in our psyches. Yes, the cycles of the work are evident as are the broader patterns of the choreography, but potentially engaging motifs are either lost or under-developed.
The notion inherent in In Glass, of having to deal with reality through refracted images of self and other, indeed “through a glass darkly,” reaches its apotheosis when White introduces two oval-shaped mirrors. He frames himself (mirrors either side of his head) with grinning mock narcissism, licking his image. He then angles the mirrors over a seated, cross-legged Chan (now costumed in gold) so that her articulation of arms and fingers transforms her into a multi-limbed goddess. However, Chan’s own reeling solo engagement with a mirror image is far less aetherial: a screen projection reveals an aged, slumped female body. It’s an unusually literal, indeed banal moment, one for which White has no obvious equivalent. When he stands alone, arms stretched out, sinuously aquiver, it’s not clear what state of being he has entered. Towards the end, when the central screen breaks in two and is angled against itself, the sense of mirroring intensifies yet again, but totally as illusion—Chan disappears. The relationship is and never was—life as ghost story.
But whose story? Although we share the points of view of both performers and each seems equally watcher and watched, there is an increasing sense that the work is focused on the man’s loss of the woman (her limp body on stage and in the forest, her transformative golden attire, her limbs dancing like Kali, the man’s greater effort in drawing him to her).
Narrative uncertainties aside, the constant multiplication of the performers’ selves on the transparent mirror-screens heightens the sense of uneasy dream. Samuel James’ images compound it: fractured glass, the dancers in various perspectives (an astonishing one, as if seen from overhead, has them sucked into a deep void), the deep green forest, a ghost tree, the sparkle of ocean waves stripped into vertical lines, two beautiful circles of fragmented light moving one counter clockwise to the other, like the dancers, together but apart. Karen Norris’ lighting adroitly sustains our view of the dancing without diluting the screen imagery, although contending with the too small performing space in the Beckett Theatre.
Although In Glass sometimes eluded me with its irritating plenitude of invention, it proved nonetheless memorable—if in the way that one struggles to recall certain dreams. The dancing is wonderful, the screen work embracing and Benjamin’s somewhat Jungian metaphysics intriguing.
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2011 Dance Massive: In Glass, choreographer Narelle Benjamin, dancers Kristina Chan, Paul White, composer Huey Benjamin, visual design Samuel James, costumes Tess Schofield, lighting Karen Norris, Beckett Theatre, Malthouse, Melbourne, March 15-20; www.dancemassive.com.au
Trevor Patrick, Sunstruck
photo Heidrun Löhr
Trevor Patrick, Sunstruck
WHAT A DIFFERENCE CONTEXT MAKES! IN 2008, SUNSTRUCK FELT LIKE A WORK ABOUT THE DROUGHT— THE THICK, ENDLESS, DUSTY THING EVERYWHERE AROUND US ON THIS OLD ROCK OF A COUNTRY. THIS RAINY BUT APOCALYPTIC YEAR, I HEAR SOMEONE ASK IN THE FOYER, PRE-SHOW: “THIS IS NOT ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE, IS IT?” I SENSE FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES FOR AN IMMINENT WAVE OF THEATRE AND DANCE, LEAVING US AWASH WITH DRAWING ROOM DRAMAS IN WHICH THE AID-WORKER DAUGHTER INTRODUCES HER BOYFRIEND, A SURVIVOR FROM A SUBMERGED ATOLL, TO HER CLIMATE SCIENTIST FATHER…BUT SUNSTRUCK IS NONE OF THESE.
One of the great benefits of Dance Massive is that it brings some important dance works that may not have received the attention they deserved to a receptive and curious audience. Having been among the relatively few who saw Sunstruck at the 2008 Melbourne International Arts Festival, it is very rewarding to now see it delight a whole new audience.
Nick Sommerville, Sunstruck
photo Heidrun Löhr
Nick Sommerville, Sunstruck
At the time, I compared it with the paintings of Russell Drysdale, to Camus’ protagonist who kills an Arab, blinded by the sun. The simple geometry of these works was concordant with the simple geometry of Sunstruck: the single source of light, the single circle of chairs for the audience, the black of the two male performers’ clothing. The series of gestures, interlocking (yet seemingly independent) movements that the two performers engage in—the youthfully strong, mannish Nick Sommerville and the older, fluid, catlike Trevor Patrick—build to create a universe of silent masculinity, in which one can only self-express whilst blinded by the sun. At the same time, the heat, the absence of rain, as much as it delivers them into ecstatic abandonment, also appears to strike them down. Or is this just a beginning of something new?
Nick Sommerville and Trevor Patrick, Sunstruck
photo Heidrun Löhr
Nick Sommerville and Trevor Patrick, Sunstruck
In 2008, I saw a personal journey in Sunstruck, a sort of dictionary or compendium of particularly masculine Australian body language—there was great restraint, silent grief, competitiveness, care and extraordinary liberation of body and emotion which, unsurprisingly, ended in weeping. A great deal of the choreography, indeed, is very close in form to mime—staring at strong light, combing hair, smoking a cigarette. However, this time I saw what Helen Herbertson talks about in her director’s notes—a death, a childbirth, the ecstasy of existence, the heavy load of being alive. It was a journey of a tribe rather than of the individual.
Trevor Patrick, Sunstruck
photo Heidrun Löhr
Trevor Patrick, Sunstruck
But it is hard to describe Sunstruck, because it is not technically ‘about’ anything—it is an experience, rather than a work of representation. The crucial aspects of the work, though, are also the easiest to overlook: the great dark space, greetings from the artists, receiving a warm drink, sitting in a close circle. The atmosphere it creates—of quiet meditation, but a communal one, not unlike sitting around a campfire—is the container for the experience. If after the show has ended we all remain seated in our chairs, quietly enjoying the tangible community we now are, that would be why. We have seen different things in Sunstruck, but we have all shared a cup of the same tea.
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Dance Massive: Sunstruck, concept collaboration Helen Herbertson, Ben Cobham, devisor, director Herbertson, design, light Cobham, performers Trevor Patrick, Nick Sommerville, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, March 14-16; www.dancemassive.com.au
Stephanie Lake, Harriet Ritchie, Joseph Simons, Connected, Chunky Move
photo Jeff Busby
Stephanie Lake, Harriet Ritchie, Joseph Simons, Connected, Chunky Move
NOT SO MANY YEARS AGO, REUBEN MARGOLIN MET A MAN IN SWITZERLAND OBSESSED WITH JIGSAW PUZZLES. THE MAN LIVES IN A MANSION WHERE MORE THAN A DOZEN ROOMS ARE FILLED WITH THE THINGS. THOUSANDS OF PUZZLES—OF DIFFERENT TIME PERIODS AND GENRES, SOME SELF-MADE. HE TOLD MARGOLIN THAT IN HIS VIEW, EVERYTHING IS A JIGSAW PUZZLE. EVERYTHING FITS WITH SOMETHING ELSE. NO, SAID MARGOLIN. EVERYTHING IS A WAVE.
At that point, says Margolin, “it occurred to me that whatever you’re really into, you start to see that everywhere. So the more I’ve gotten into waves, the more I see patterns everywhere.”
Waves are Margolin’s world. From his studio in Emeryville, California, the 40-year-old creates intricate kinetic sculptures that employ thousands of moving parts to embody the waves that occur across the natural realm. He visited Melbourne recently to deliver the sculpture he’s devised for Chunky Move’s Connected, a work which will see dancers harnessed into one of the artist’s complex moving wave-machines.
It’s hard to spend much time in Margolin’s company without finding yourself subtly affected by this notion of waves. “Anything that cycles can be expressed as a wave, and everything cycles. Everything goes around and around. The best way to describe something that cycles is a wave.”
He points to a door and calls it a wave. I have no idea what he means. “It opens and shuts, it opens and shuts,” he says. “But it opens and shuts more in the daytime and less at night. If you plotted that, the best way to understand that door opening and shutting is as a wave-form.”
Marnie Palomares, Gideon Obarzanek, Connected in rehearsal
photo Jeff Busby
Marnie Palomares, Gideon Obarzanek, Connected in rehearsal
The path that has led Margolin to where he is today would seem anything but wave-like: he enjoyed the challenges of geometry in high school and began studying maths at college. In his second year he switched majors to geology (“because I wanted to go camping”). The following year he changed focus again, to anthropology; finally, deciding he wanted to be a poet, he graduated in English. Not long after, he studied classical painting in Italy and Russia.
And yet, Margolin says, he was always making kinetic art. At eight he would craft little duck puppets and marionettes and try to sell them at craft fairs. “I’ve always liked making things. I keep coming back to the fact that I like cutting a piece of wood with a handsaw. That’s about as good as it gets. There’s nothing more grounding than having a two-by-four on a sawhorse and just cutting. It’s great.”
While still pursuing a possible career in painting, Margolin became obsessed with a caterpillar. The unique undulations of the creature fascinated him, and he wondered how they could be reproduced. He ended up spending five months devising a small mechanical sculpture inspired by the caterpillar; he’s now made three different versions, but says that he still hasn’t quite nailed it. “I think I will. Maybe I’m still working on it. Maybe every sculpture still has a little bit of caterpillar in it.”
Josh Mu, Marnie Palomares, Connected
photo Reuben Margolin
Josh Mu, Marnie Palomares, Connected
Margolin met Chunky Move’s Gideon Obarzanek at a PopTech conference in Maine in 2009. Impressed by the choreographer’s presentation of previous works exploring the intersection of technology and dance, the sculptor approached him and suggested a collaboration. “I was actually thinking of a very small weekend adventure with some strings and sticks but Gideon kept pushing it and we kept working together and it grew to be a much more ambitious, world-touring production.”
Connected is a departure from Chunky Move’s more recent high-tech projects due to the mechanical materiality of its sculptural centrepiece. Margolin’s wire-and-string creations don’t engage with the ethereal invisibility of electronics. Apart from the occasional motor, the forces that produce his waves are simple physics.
“I’m just sort of low-tech. It’s what I’m good at. Making small bits. It’s just fun to do. I feel like more and more as a culture we’re moving towards things that are digital. If you can do something not digital that is beautiful and elegant, to me that’s just super interesting.”
It’s important that the operative mechanisms of Margolin’s sculptures are on full display, too: “One thing that’s always been important for me is not to put a box around it. And not even to have a big plane that blocks your vision of how it works. Making it as transparent as possible. So it’s all there. You can see exactly how it’s working. But it’s complicated enough and there are enough parts that it becomes something else, hopefully.”
With much digital art—including Chunky Move’s acclaimed Glow and Mortal Engine—a sense of wonder is produced by the mystery behind the technologies creating what we see. Margolin’s sculptures operate differently. There’s no mystery. We can see everything. And yet the sheer number of moving components is what exceeds our capacity to understand what we’re being offered. “Nature is just so wonderfully fluid. You see waves that are perfectly formed and variable and magnificent in water and wind and flames and trees. Everywhere. The only way to kind of go in that direction is to throw a lot of little parts at it.”
Margolin’s exploration of waves has also resulted, perhaps organically, in a broader philosophical view of the patterns of life. “I think that having studied the wave I have a little bit more tolerance than most people that there’s going to be some good times and there’s going to be some bad times. There’s going to be times when I have no money and times when I have money. Times where I’m really happy with what I’m doing and times where I’m not.
“Because these things that I study, waves, are everywhere, and they also have their ups and downs, that is going to happen with mood, with relationships, with politics. I feel more tolerant when things aren’t going well; that’s okay, I’m down, but I’ll probably go back up. And later, hey, I’m up here, but will probably go back down again.”
And yet, surely, the counterpoint to the wave is the interruption, the shock that breaks any cycle? Margolin demurs: “If you had what you’re calling a large shock or rupture, what if you had another one the next day? And another the next day? You’re looking at one peak or one valley, and you just need to relate that to all those peaks and valleys of that amplitude, that scale, and there’s another wave that’s in there. I’m not sure that there are these giant, discontinuous events, or whether they only look discontinuous because you’re not far enough away to see them as a larger pattern.”
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Dance Massive, Chunky Move, Connected, Malthouse, Melbourne, March 15-20; www.dancemassive.com.au
Kerrie Poliness, Blue Wall Drawing #1 2007/11
Work in progress, Monday 10 to Friday 15 January 2011
photo courtesy of the artist and gallery
Kerrie Poliness, Blue Wall Drawing #1 2007/11
Work in progress, Monday 10 to Friday 15 January 2011
LANGUAGE IS NOW LITTERED WITH WORDS WHOSE STATUS AS NOUN OR VERB APPEARS CONFLATED. TO ‘TEXT,’ TO ‘MESSAGE,’ TO ‘EMAIL,’ TO ‘GOOGLE’ AND EVEN TO ‘FACEBOOK’ ANOTHER PERSON DESCRIBE ACTIVITIES THAT MOST OF US PERFORM EVERY DAY. THE SAME COULD BE SAID OF THE WORD ‘NETWORK,’ WHICH LENDS ITS SEMANTIC LOAD TO BOTH THINGS IN THE WORLD AND ACTIVITIES THAT WE ENGAGE IN WITH SEEMINGLY INCREASING FREQUENCY. HOWEVER, AS THE WORKS IN THE MONASH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART’S LATEST EXHIBITION DEMONSTRATE, DESPITE THE EFFICACY WITH WHICH THE WORD PERMEATES SOCIAL DISCOURSE, NETWORK IS A COMPLEX, SLIPPERY TERM. AS A DESCRIPTOR, ITS USE IS SO WIDESPREAD THAT IT ACTS TO EMPTY OUT MEANING RATHER THAN CREATE IT. ‘WHAT IS IT?,’ ‘OH, IT’S A NETWORK.’ BUT WHAT EXACTLY DOES THIS MEAN?
What is often obscured in the use of the word ‘network’ is the important role played by the work in the network. It is the work that activates the net and creates a sense of dynamic tension—of being caught up in a net and working to making sense of one’s place in the structure of it. Of making connections or resisting connections or playing against those connections. And there is no connection without activity. The net will catch nothing if there is nothing against which it can work. It is this dynamic property that makes the network difficult to visualise. Its translation to the visual most often ends up as a form of aesthetic cartography, like a family tree or a data map. The rhizomatic territorialising energy of the network gets lost in what Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter describe in their catalogue essay as the “ever-present Will to Visualise.” It is against this drive that the exhibits in Networks Cells and Silos have to operate. Some manage it more effectively than others.
Kerrie Poliness’ Blue Wall Drawing #1 dominates the back wall of the exhibition space and could easily be dismissed as an attempt to map the geometries of networked space. However, understanding how the work has been constructed reveals an engagement with the conundrum of invisibility of the work in networks that is far more interesting than the finished work itself. The artist works by establishing a series of laws or principles that serve as a guide to a team of agents who construct the drawing through collaboration. To the gallery visitor, this work is invisible, having taken place in advance of the viewer’s engagement with the drawing. In this sense, the work as a whole only becomes available to the viewer who is willing to do some work, to activate a connection that is off screen, so to speak, and become in turn a collaborator in the network of agents involved in the construction of the work.
Mikala Dwyer, Outfield 2009
Installation view, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
photo courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Mikala Dwyer, Outfield 2009
Installation view, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Similarly, Mikala Dwyer’s Outfield forces the viewer into an active relation with the work by bringing together a strange array of objects whose own relations to each other are only made obvious by their placement in a circle, the metaphoric symbol of unity. The totemic qualities of many of the objects suggest ancient rites and cosmological significance while simultaneously resisting categorisation, forcing the viewer to draw on their own connective strategies to generate meanings.
Heath Bunting, The Status Project: A1072 Able to provide a natural person date of birth 2010
photo courtesy of the artist and gallery
Heath Bunting, The Status Project: A1072 Able to provide a natural person date of birth 2010
Other works play with and disrupt the drive towards data mapping which characterises the aesthetic visualisation of networks. Heath Bunting’s Status Project 2006-2011 is the visual realisation of an ongoing project aimed at charting the relations between characteristics of “natural” and “artificial persons” and their characteristics to produce “maps of influence.” These complex maps chart such webs of data as religion, political identification and ability to provide a current postal address to produce maps like ‘A terrorist 2010.’ Their complexity reveals the absurdity produced by the abstraction of data from actual lived lives, tapping into the empty zones of audit culture that dominate modern bureaucratic life. Printmaker Justin Trendall’s ‘Darlinghurst 1’ weaves together a textured space of actual sites and their semiotic traces into a map that looks uncannily like embroidery while Sandra Selig’s contribution, titled heart of the air you can hear, protrudes from a corner of the gallery like gossamer macramé, a wistful reminder of the fragile temporality of the networked connection.
Tjaduwa Woods, Ilkurlka 2010
photo courtesy of the artist and gallery
Tjaduwa Woods, Ilkurlka 2010
In all, 20 artists are represented in the exhibition and their inclusion is itself a commentary on the nature of networks. The variety of mediums used, from the screen based work of Natalie Bookchin’s Mass Ornament to the paintings Ilkurlka and Kamanti by Indigenous artist Tjadawu Woods, demonstrates the promiscuity of the network’s effect on artistic consciousness. The inclusion of older works from the MUMA collection, such as John Dunkley-Smith’s Perspectives for conscious alterations in everyday life #5 (1990) and Roger Kemp’s Metamorphosis (1973) attests to its longevity. Curator Geraldine Barlow’s choices help us to draw unexpected insights from unlikely juxtapositions both within the individual works and from their eclectic correspondences with each other. The exhibition is also reflective of what Director Max Delany has described as MUMA’s curatorial focus, “the unfinished business of modernity and historical reconstruction, as well as the direct experience and creation of our contemporary condition, in all its complexity.”
This theme plays itself out in the architectural design of the museum itself. Occupying the ground floor of a curved 1960s era educational building, the museum is a combination of existing structures and new purpose built gallery spaces. One of the more intriguing aspects of the design is the exposed support structures between the gallery spaces, giving the visitor the sense of ongoing construction, like being behind the scenes on a film set where one is unsure where the real action is taking place. Rather than acting as a distraction to the works, the spaces between galleries work like interstitials on television, keeping up the sense of flow and contributing to the dynamism of the exhibition. The slightly curved walls and the rectangular spaces also make the visitor attentive to appearances, or rather the appearance of appearances.
Outside the museum, Callum Morton’s Silverscreen 2010 is wedged between the museum and the Art and Design building, its scaffold-like properties also reinforcing the sense of ongoing construction. This monumentally scaled steel edifice functions as both a visual connection between the two buildings and a passageway through them, leading from the bustle of adjacent Dandenong Road to the serenity of the internal sculpture garden. Its similarity to the rear side of a drive-in screen or a billboard forces us to ask—is it art or is it commerce?—a question no doubt familiar to the occupants of both buildings.
The co-location of MUMA with the Faculty of Art and Design makes a great deal of sense and on my visit the gallery was filled with small groups of newly minted art students, sprawled on the floor in front of works, talking animatedly about their relative merits. They too gave an air of construction to the scene, themselves works in progress, making new connections with the works and with each other. The networks that they will inhabit, create, resist and deploy will undoubtedly inform them and their practice as they develop their own creative sensibilities, the expression of which may well find its way onto the walls of MUMA some day in the future.
Networks (Cells & Silos), curator Geraldine Barlow, Monash University Museum of Art, Caulfield Campus, Feb 1-April 16; www.monash.edu.au/muma
This article was originally published online March 7, 2011
BELVOIR’S THE WILD DUCK, WRITTEN BY SIMON STONE WITH CHRIS RYAN “AFTER HENRIK IBSEN” AND DIRECTED BY STONE, IS A POWERFULLY ENGAGING WORK, TAUTLY SCRIPTED, SUPERBLY ACTED AND COMPLEMENTED BY AN AUSTERE DESIGN THAT EVOKES A ZOOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION IN WHICH WE WATCH HUMANS CAGED BY OBLIGATIONS AND TABOOS LITERALISED AS A LARGE GLASS BOX FURNISHED WITH NOUGHT BUT CARPET AND, ABOVE, A DIGITAL READOUT OF THE DAY OF THE WEEK AND TIME.
Although Stone uses the title of Ibsen’s 1884 play, his is quite another Wild Duck. He cleverly fast-forwards the plot to the present, pares back much of the original, invents new scenes and thins out the melodramatics (replacing them with some of his own, not least musically). In some ways Stone gets to the essence of the original but, finally, cannot retain its gravitas or its cathartic power. His play is moving, but that’s another matter, and even then is undercut by a lamentable final scene in which, some time after the death of their daughter, the grieving parents meet but fail to regain their relationship. Ibsen with apt bluntness, reminiscent of Puccini, didn’t bother with such a coda.
Stone sticks broadly to the plot of the original while reducing its sociological density. There’s a narrower range of characters and social types, and less emphasis on status, work and the debate about moral idealism. Ibsen’s family fears poverty—the photography business is not faring well; the need to keep working is part of the stage action. In Stone’s version, the pressure is mildly present but doesn’t become a key issue—surprising in today’s volatile economy. But Stone is not Ibsen—the psychological drama is more important for him than the social forces that frame it and which are so essential to Ibsen. It’s a big difference.
The stripping back similarly reduces the complexity of the original characters. Hjalmar, the husband, is played by Ewen Leslie with a restless, nervous energy, repeatedly bouncing a tennis ball, rolling on the floor, physically playful with his daughter, easy-going. The fond family scenes with overlapping dialogue establish an idyllic state. However, unlike his forbear there is little of the self-aggrandisement, self-pity and moments of irritability that anticipate Hjalmar’s subsequent inability to handle the revelation that his wife Gina (Anita Hegh) was once the lover of Werle (John Gaden), the local works owner and merchant, that his daughter (Eloise Mignon) is Werle’s, not his own, and that Werle had subsidised the set-up of the photography business and the salary of Hjlamar’s ruined father, Ekdal (Anthony Phelan).
Leslie’s fine performance and Stone’s writing compensate to a degree, but Hjalmar’s weakness simply becomes a given when the crisis hits. More problematic is the characterisation of Werle’s disaffected son, the meddling moralist Gregers (Toby Schmitz) who suspects his father drove his mother to suicide and betrayed Ekdal. He soon discovers the truth about Werle and Gina and sets out on a relentless crusade to liberate Hjlamar and family from a life of lies. Schmitz’s Gregers is icily remote, with a physical rectitude contrasting with Hjalmar’s casual bearing. His best scene, one of Stone’s inventing, is with Leslie, when Gregers opens up, revealing his failings in love. Later he simply doesn’t have the weight of Ibsen’s creation. In two scenes in the original he attempts to persuade Hedvig to kill her wild duck as a sacrifice to appease her alienated father. In these moments Gregers’ insensitivity and, worse, moral irresponsibility, are frighteningly evident. But his force is not sustained in the Stone version.
Eloise Mignon, Anthony Phelan, The Wild Duck
photo Heidrun Lohr
Eloise Mignon, Anthony Phelan, The Wild Duck
A significant reason for this is Stone’s updating of Hedvig—she’s more intelligent, bold, ambitious and already knows that she is going blind (a condition inherited from Werle). A modern child on the edge of adolescence, Hedvig decides of her own volition to kill the duck with her grandfather’s gun—she doesn’t need Gregers’ rhetoric as a prompt. Mignon is an excellent Hedvig but a more complex exchange with Gregers would have allowed a greater sense of someone on the borderline between child and adult—the decision to kill the duck comes too easily. (In the original she takes up Gregers’ proposal at first, but repudiates it, if momentarily, at their second meeting.) The outcome is a reduction of Gregers’ role as rigorous engineer of destruction in this human laboratory. In the original he’s subsequently deeply shocked, such is his naivety, when the family falls apart instead of building a new life based on truth. A foil (Doctor Relling in Ibsen) or some other challenge to Gregers’ moral fundamentalism would have been welcome in Stone’s version.
The character closest to the original is Ekdal, a former military man, forester and businessman who went to jail for illicit property dealings, shaming himself and his family. Emotionally damaged, sometimes barely present and haltingly articulate, at other times alert and observant, Ekdal has created a refuge in Hjalmar’s attic where he houses (and shoots) rabbits and birds. In a very funny, if foreboding scene, he teaches Hedvig how to load and fire the gun with which she will inadvertantly kill herself. Stone has invested Ekdal with characterful language (“I’m as full as a fat girl’s sock”), insights (“Not much of the forest left—it’ll have its revenge”—words almost straight from Ibsen), amusing recollections (playing The Tempest’s Miranda in school) and anger over Hjalmar’s behaviour (“Everyone’s got a story like this. It’s as old as the hills.”). Anthony Phelan’s performance as Ekdal is one of the best seen in Sydney in recent years—richly expressive and detailed, drifting in and out of himself, deeply present, fondly cradling the wounded duck, naturally pacing his delivery between its quacks, the actor’s characteristic gravelly rasp enhanced by intimate radio-miking.
John Gaden as the pragmatic Werle—accepting his imminent blindness but eager to move on into a new marriage, to smooth relations with his son and those he feels obliged to assist—is quietly effective; the scene in which he and Ekdal meet, both men disoriented, is particularly touching, age taking them beyond bitterness or blame. Anita Hegh plays Gina with the requisite ease in the beginning, then denial and finally shock at Hjalmar’s bitter response to her long-ago failings. As with Hjalmar and Gregers, Gina’s role is reduced in this version, even more severely, in terms of class, language and coping with her overly sensitive and ineffectual husband. However Hegh conveys the visceral effect of abandonment in her absolute collapse and later in a brutal tussle with Hjalmar. Her determination not to return the marriage does allow a rare show of strength.
While, for the most part, I was swept along by the tide of Stone’s brisk, vivid scripting, deft characterisations and the production’s potent sense of immediacy (the glass walls and radio-miking were only initially distancing), in the end I felt half satisfied, moved but not, admiring but critical, impressed but not awed. On its own terms, Stone’s The Wild Duck works well and has won praise from reviewers for revitalising the original, but the writer-director has set himself a formidable challenge—to remake rather than interpret a classic play. It’s ambitious—the outcome must be tested against the original.
I’m not suggesting that Stone reproduce more of the original play than he’s already done. I was struck by his inventiveness—new scenes, a modern Hedvig, a degree of topicality. But I wanted him to go further, to be more ambitious, give his characters more complexity and dynamism, achieve a greater sense of our lives now—to match Ibsen. Why else would you create a variation on a great play?
Belvoir’s The Wild Duck confirms Stone’s directorial and writing strengths, abetted by fine actors (with outstanding performances from Phelan and Eloise Mignon), Ralph Myers’ complexly simple set and Niklas Pajanti’s stark lighting. But, inspired by, adapting and updating Ibsen, Stone has not matched the strengths of the original play in his short, compact variation. His play’s embracing immediacy cannot, in the end, disguise its inclination to melodrama and a certain thinness of conception. That said, it’s a production to be seen and debated: the rewards are many.
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Belvoir, The Wild Duck, writer Simon Stone with Chris Ryan after Henrik Ibsen, director Simon Stone, performers John Gaden, Anita Hegh, Ewen Leslie, Eloise Mignon, Anthony Phelan, Toby Schmitz, designer Ralph Myers, costumes Tess Schofield, lighting Niklas Pajanti, music & sound design Stefan Gregory; Belvoir St Upstairs Theatre, Feb 12-March 27
This article was originally published online March 7, 2011
photo Susannah Wimberley, courtesy of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
Cinema Alley 2011
THE MATERIAL OF FILM AND VIDEO IS LIGHT, SO WE USUALLY CREATE DARKENED ROOMS IN WHICH TO EXPERIENCE ITS ART. 4A’S CINEMA ALLEY HOWEVER MAKES USE OF THE NIGHT, ERECTING A LARGE OUTDOOR SCREEN IN SYDNEY’S PARKER STREET FOR ONE EVENING EACH CHINESE NEW YEAR FESTIVAL. NOW IN ITS THIRD YEAR, THE EVENT TRANSFORMS THIS CHINATOWN BACKSTREET INTO AN OPEN-AIR CINEMA AND SCREENS A SELECTION OF CHINESE VIDEO ART CURATED BY 4A DIRECTOR, AARON SEETO.
4A’s own laneway project, Cinema Alley is also a result of the gallery’s focus on community engagement, extending outdoors from the gallery and, this year, including screenings from their 2010 Animation Project with the local community.
A major work in this year’s program was Jun Yang’s A Short-Story on Forgetting and Remembering (2007), made in the short film (or even short story) tradition of a first person narrator. Unable to sleep, the main character wanders the streets of Taipei at night, reflecting on a city built for an alternative history of China. “Everything here seems to be temporary, or at least built on something temporary.” CCTV images suggest a life recorded in pixels. Neon signs flicker, both confident and illusory, stuck in an endless performance of modernity. The film ends with the background sounds of Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner providing a popular reference point for this sense of mass amnesia and never-ending quest for the new.
A less conventional exploration of memory, Factory (2003), by Taiwanese Chen Chieh-jen complicates the experience of time through experiments with pace, absence and repetition. Shot largely in a disused textile factory, the film intercuts images of old equipment and abandoned rooms with footage of the female former workers, back at their machines now seven years after the factory’s closure—the ghosts of a labour market after the tide of global capital has moved on. The interweaving of archival footage of factory workers produced by the Taiwanese government in the 1960s adds to this folding of time, of different eras experienced simultaneously in the apprehension of places and objects.
Ou Ning and Cao Fei’s accelerated montage, San Yuan Li (2003), records the encroachment of Guangzhou’s urbanisation on a once rural village. The result of collaboration between 12 artists, all of whom collected footage, the film is an example of the documentary urge currently shaping much contemporary Chinese art and film—the drive towards archival projects amid so much change and destruction. The 45-minute San Yuan Li appeared in Cinema Alley in a shortened version (produced by Ou Ning) along with a brief explanation of the project. Shot largely from below, looking up between buildings to slits of sky, this rapid juxtaposition of the rural and urban conveys a sense of the unnatural in the speed of China’s urban development.
Yuan Goang-Ming’s Floating (2000) was the simplest of the films screened, a short work about disorientation in which the camera is fixed on a repeatedly capsizing boat. We spin with the camera and, like an IMAX film or a ride at an amusement park, the film confuses our bearings. Wang Qingsong’s Skyscraper (2008) was screened for the third time in less than four months in Sydney—previously in Arena at Hazelhurst Gallery (RT100, p44) and Eye of the Dream at Customs House—but its final scene worked especially well in this context. The fireworks that burst into a celebration of China’s faith in modernisation looked particularly familiar (and just as ironic) in the Sydney night sky.
Ultimately, these accidental reverberations stole the show: the neon of Taipei amid that of Sydney, the urban canyons of outer Guangzhou viewed from one within Chinatown. The move from the gallery and out into the open extended the work not only to new audiences but also to new ways of viewing. The focus of this year’s program on cities, histories and transformation made for a particularly rich array of resonances, stitching Sydney into the experience of the films and the films within the experience of Sydney. This nesting of different local spaces drew out the connections between them, suggesting their formation within shared global processes. Time and space were compressed and, for an evening, the soundtracks of urban Asia added to the white noise of Sydney.
4A Cinema Alley 2011, curator Aaron Seeto, artists Ou Ning and Cao Fei, Jun Yang, Chen Chieh-jen, Wang Qingsong, Yuan Goang-Ming, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, Feb 11; www.4a.com.au
This article was originally published online March 7, 2011
Zoe Coombs Marr, And That Was The Summer That Changed My Life
photo courtesy of the artist and Imperial Panda
Zoe Coombs Marr, And That Was The Summer That Changed My Life
panda strikes again
Since their sell-out events in 2008 and 2009 (RT90), we have been eagerly awaiting news of the next Imperial Panda festival. This year it’s bigger and better than ever, thanks to funding from Arts NSW and the City of Sydney and the indefatigable team of Rosie Fisher, Mish Grigor, Zoe Coombs Marr and Eddie Sharp. The action started on the weekend with the premiere of Gareth Davies (of Black Lung) and Charlie Garber’s (of Pig Island) show Masterclass, but there are two more solid weeks of performances, exhibitions, events, talks, drinking and dancing to go.
Other new shows include What Is Soil Erosion? by Claudia O’Doherty, also of Pig Island (RT85), and Rhubarb Rhubarb’s Some Film Museums I Have Known. Suitcase Royale will also be premiering their Test Flight #1 and one member, Miles O’Neil, will be stepping out on his own in World Around Us. New to Sydney, but not entirely new, is Coombs Marr’s show And That Was The Summer That Changed My Life (RT98).
Brown Council are presenting A Comedy again (RT98; RT100). One Brownie, Frances Barrett, is also curating Man Up: A Night of Male Impersonation. Elsewhere Tim Webster and Sarah Rodigari are presenting In Periscope (RT98) and overseeing a weekend of activities at Firstdraft Gallery. If that doesn’t persuade you to come on down, then surely the promise of a Cab Sav party will! Imperial Panda, various venues, Sydney, March 4-20; www.theimperialpanda.com
When the Pictures Came, Terrapin Puppet Theatre and the Children’s Art Theatre of China Welfare Institute
photo courtesy of the artists and Come Out Festival
When the Pictures Came, Terrapin Puppet Theatre and the Children’s Art Theatre of China Welfare Institute
come on, come out
A little more sedate perhaps, this year’s Come Out Festival is billed as an event for children, young people and families. Some shows are for schools only (such as the Living Library), but there is a range of other events that will appeal to innovative arts seekers. If you have a dinosaur enthusiast at your house, or even if you don’t, you might enjoy Erth’s amazingly life-scale puppet show Dinosaur Petting Zoo (RT84). Other highlights include Restless Dance Theatre’s new work Take Me There, which Jonathan Bollen will review in our May 9 e-dition. There’s also the Border Project’s collaboration with Windmill Theatre, Escape from Peligro Island, which is billed as “choose-your-own-adventure theatre” an audience interactive format the Project has been honing for a while (see RT84).
In another interesting collaboration, Tasmania’s Terrapin Puppet Theatre have been working with the Children’s Art Theatre of China Welfare Institute to create When the Pictures Came. The play blends “the animations of award-winning film maker Zeng Yigang with black-light puppetry and live performance.” Cross-cultural exchange is also evident in Wulamanayuwi and the Seven Pamanui, a new Aboriginal play that brings together European fairytales with the Palaneri or Dreaming characters and stories of the Tiwi Islands. Come Out Festival, Adelaide, March 25-April 1; www.comeout.on.net
Re-enchantment: An Immersive Journey into the Hidden Meanings of Fairy Tales
photo courtesy of the ABC
Re-enchantment: An Immersive Journey into the Hidden Meanings of Fairy Tales
multiplatform media magic
Fairytales also feature in the ABC’s newly launched Re-enchantment, which will be available almost everywhere. Billed as an “immersive journey into the hidden meanings of fairy tales,” Re-enchantment is an “interactive multi-platform documentary project exploring why fairy stories continue to enchant, entertain, fascinate and horrify contemporary adult audiences” (press release). Featuring Bluebeard, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, Rapunzel and Red Riding Hood, Re-enchantment doesn’t so much strip away the mystery and magic of these tales, but rather shows “how threading together various interpretations and versions of a story from the perspectives of psychology, social history and popular culture, [can] deepen our connection to and fascination with the richness of fairy tales” (website).
The project was launched last week at the Adelaide Film Festival and also in a session on transmedia documentary at the Australian International Documentary Conference. You can already encounter it online (www.abc.net.au/tv/re-enchantment) and from tomorrow you see it on ABC1 and ABC2, which will be screening 10 x three-minute interstitials. Or you can listen to oral retellings of different interpretations of the stories on Radio National. There is also a two-day symposium, Fairy Tales Re-Imagined: From Werewolf to Forbidden Room, at ACMI in mid-March before the premiere in Sydney on March 24. For more information go to the website and keep an eye out for Kirsten Krauth’s review in RT102. Re-enchantment: An Immersive Journey into the Hidden Meanings of Fairy Tales, www.abc.net.au/tv/re-enchantment; Fairytales Re-Imagined: From Werewolf to Forbidden Room, ACMI, March 10-11, www.acmi.net.au/fairy-tales-reimagined.aspx
Jill Orr, Lunch with the birds 1979
ink-jet print
photo Elizabeth Campbell, Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Now the Monash Gallery of Art is presenting Afterglow: Performance Art and Photography, the first major exhibition to focus on the Australian relationship. The artists include Gordon Bennett, Juan Davila, Cherine Fahd, Bert Flugelman, Hayden Fowler, Tim Johnson, Ash Keating, Ben Morieson, Jill Orr, Mike Parr, Robert Rooney, Linda Sproul, Slave Pianos, Stelarc, David M Thomas, Peter Tyndall and Justene Williams. In addition, the gallery is presenting a series of talks. Curator Stephen Zagala, Mike Parr and Anne Marsh will have already discussed whether “photography kills performance art” but you can still catch Stelarc’s presentation, “Circulating Flesh: The Cadaver, the Comatose and the Chimera” on March 19 and then Zagala on the theme “Performing Identity” on March 23. Bookings essential. Afterglow: Performance Art and Photography, curator Stephen Zagala, Monash Gallery of Art, Wheelers Hill, Victoria, Jan 28-April 3; www.mga.org.au
photo courtesy of the artist and MONA, Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania
Brook Andrew, The Cell
AS THE SUN SETS BEHIND THE MOUNTAINS OVERLOOKING SULLIVAN’S COVE, A GREY BALL, FOUR METRES IN DIAMETER, BOUNCES INTO THE AIR. ITS AERIAL EXCURSION IS FOLLOWED WITH LAUGHTER AND SHOUTS BY A CROWD OF ADULTS AND CHILDREN CLAMBERING FOR A CHANCE TO CHANGE THE GLOBE’S ERRANT PATH. THE SCENE WOULD NOT BE OUT OF PLACE IN A TELECOMMUNICATIONS ADVERTISEMENT, EXCEPT FOR THE STATIC, FEEDBACK, CAREENING SINE WAVES AND EXPLOSIONS BLASTING FROM A NEARBY STAGE IN RESPONSE TO THE BALL’S MOVEMENTS. JON ROSE’S INTERACTIVE BALL PROJECT EPITOMISES MONA FOMA. AS ROSE PUT IT, “PEOPLE HAVING FUN MAKING EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC.”
Providing a playful environment in which people can enjoy contemporary music is essential to MONA FOMA curator Brian Ritchie who seeks to share the visceral excitement he felt upon hearing Edgar Varèse’s groundbreaking 1931 percussion piece Ionisation at age 10. “It was the first piece of contemporary classical music I heard,” Ritchie recalls. “It absolutely blew my mind.” With the rhythmic pounding of Ionisation providing one of the quieter moments of Speak Percussion’s opening program, Ritchie’s curatorial rationale was put to the test.
Speak Percussion, MONA FOMA
photo Sean Fennessy, courtesy of MONA, Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania
Speak Percussion, MONA FOMA
speak percussion
Entering Princes Wharf Shed No.1 at Sullivan’s Cove through the airy seaside courtyard, wandering to the main stage past the Interactive Ball Project, Indigenous artist Brook Andrew’s inflatable art work The Cell, the irresistible aroma of catering by MONA chefs, and a row of table-tennis tables, it was hard not to feel enchanted and receptive. “You have to make the environment comfortable, so people don’t feel excluded, like they’re on the outside,” Ritchie explains. Approaching Speak Percussion’s setup on the main stage, it became evident that Ritchie was not using a figure of speech. Six batteries of gongs, bongos, toms, bass drums, cymbals and assorted non-traditional percussion instruments encircled an audience lazing expectantly on pink, purple and black beanbags. Percussion ensembles have a long history of playing “in the round,” or spaced around the audience, but rarely include some of the best festival food and an artistic jumping castle so close at hand.
Moving around the space or perched contemplatively on their beanbags, the rapt audience sat through the epic four-hour program (spread over two days) with the informality of a rock festival and the hush of a concert hall. This is just as well, as Speak Percussion’s sound engineers did not compromise the performance’s amplification for a potentially rowdy audience. As a result, the gently undulating marimbas and distant-sounding gongs of Liza Lim’s City of Falling Angels invited close listening, drawing the audience into what Speak Percussion’s Artistic Director Eugene Ughetti describes as Lim’s “hyper-emotional” musical language. The world premiere of Flesh and Ghost, Anthony Pateras’ study in crescendi, explored the space between gently clattering glass and roaring cymbals. The shocking assault of Xenakis’ Persephassa was as physical as it was aural. Xenakis’ ear-splittingly loud bongo rhythms darted around the space, wrapping the audience in a pointy, threatening cocoon that, thanks to the otherwise welcoming atmosphere, scared away only a few children.
Fifteen performers, 450 instruments (which almost missed the ferry), and eight Tasmanian, Australian and world premieres later, Ritchie was willing to declare the “huge risk” of Speak Percussion’s program a success. “The audience were carried by it, they didn’t baulk. We purport to be something: edgy, presenting new music, and sometimes you have to deliver.”
glocal collaborations
Though Sullivan’s Cove was settled in 1804 to defend against foreign exploration, at MONA FOMA the precinct functions as a launch pad for the discovery of local and international musical traditions. In particular, collaborations between Asian vocalists and Australian instrumentalists provided two of the most exciting contributions to the festival’s timbral palate in performances by Chiri and Cambodian Space Project.
Chiri’s Bae Il Dong perfected the Korean Pansori vocal style by singing at a waterfall for seven years. Ranging from swallowed, rumbling bass tones through an explosive, fraying tenor range to a howling falsetto, Bae Il Dong’s vocal skill was complemented by Simon Barker’s Pansori-inspired drumming and Scott Tinkler’s trumpet improvisation.
Cambodian Space Project’s Srey Thy honed her voice through five years of singing in Phnom Penh karaoke bars. With an Australian backing band she finally brings the bold tone and gorgeous prolonged nasal stops (“m,” “n” and “ng”) of Khmer singing to Australian audiences. Srey Thy’s expert execution of Khmer rock and roll classics and original songs paid a worthy homage to 1960s and 70s Khmer rock and roll pioneered by the singers Pan Ron and Sinn Sisamouth.
Drawn in by the playground of Princes Wharf Shed No.1, the audience was then encouraged to strike out across Hobart to the city’s many historically fascinating festival venues. Walking or, if you are lucky, riding one of Arts Tasmania’s free Vanmoof Artbikes past the heavy 1820s stone buildings of Salamanca Place, c1900 Federation houses and modernist Government buildings, you’re left to ponder the importance of place to art production. Again, contributions from Asian performers and artists provided the festival’s most striking engagements with context.
Hong Kong New Music Ensemble’s hypnotic Sound Cloud (Gong III) installation and performance filled the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery’s Bond Store with dozens of Arduino-powered blinking lights and piezo buzzers. As the 1826 warehouse was originally used for storing tobacco and spirits, it was fitting that composer Samson Young used the space to evoke Chinese miners’ experiences of smoking opium in the late 19th century Tasmanian tin fields. As piezo note clusters gently undulated, the slowly blinking lights signalled flute, violin, clarinet and sheng performers to play sequences of pre-determined notes, their vibrato melding with the gentle harmonic beating of the piezo sound cloud. Encouraged to wander through the space, the audience made the most of the profoundly differentiated sound experiences of the furthest corners of the dim, dusty, low-roofed warehouse. Even humming along on its own, without performers, the installation was eerily hypnotic. One boy, perhaps channelling the claustrophobia and very real dangers of 1870s mine shafts, exclaimed “it’s death-defying in there,” adding that he “even saw a ghost.”
Chiharu Shiota, Biel Klavier
photo courtesy the artist
Chiharu Shiota, Biel Klavier
Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota’s In Silence presents a desecrated piano within the desecrated, heritage listed brick church that is the inner-city gallery Detached. Black wool is woven around the charred remains of the piano and high up into the vault above it. Shiota’s installation springs from a childhood memory of seeing a burnt-out piano in the remains of a neighbour’s house fire, a sight that has made her feel “overcome with silence” ever since. While the sight of the silenced piano carved a sacred, silent space in Shiota’s imagination, her woollen desecration of the church, no matter how still and picturesque, shows memory’s power, as an active, disruptive noise, to silence the present.
shards of glass
In contrast to Shiota’s burning stillness, Tasmania’s saxophone quartet 22SQ complemented the silent geometricity of Hobart’s Baha’i Centre with their exquisite control of dynamics and rhythm in works by Philip Glass. The SSQ2 performance was followed by Brian Ritchie’s interview with the composer. Like many of his 60s contemporaries, Glass looked away from institutionalised art music and towards Hindu and Buddhist philosophies to find new ways of composing and listening. In the interview it was evident that his earlier interest in the musical implications of those philosophies had passed over to their pedagogical traditions. Glass regaled the audience for half an hour on the importance of gurus in education and the importance of learning counterpoint. When a woman asked “Why do I love your music?”, Glass abruptly responded “What do you care?” In a way, he had already given her the answer, but it might not have been the one she was looking for. Far from a thesis on the importance of repetition to the human psyche his answer was (in my paraphrase): “Because I studied under Nadia Boulanger and Ravi Shankar, and because I studied counterpoint for two to three hours a day for three years.” While Glass took comfort in yarns about Shankar and India, those who sought comfort in Glass would have been disappointed, both in interview and performance.
If, as Brian Ritchie told Gail Priest (RT100), “music is the comfort food of the arts,” then the audience was out to gorge itself on Glass’ performance of his own solo piano works at Federation Hall. His expressive rubato (speeding up and slowing down) was a welcome departure from others’ metronomic interpretations of his works, though his faltering polyrhythms and fudged passages often snapped listeners out of their contemplative reveries. Observing that “not much has changed” since its composition, Glass concluded with a moving performance of the anti-war poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” accompanying a recording of the poem read by its author Allen Ginsberg. Indicative of Glass’ performance as a whole, “Wichita Vortex Sutra” did not strike me so much as a rousing call for peace as a dejected ode to the past.
inspiring exploration
Back at Princes Wharf the paroxysms of art-joy continued. Fabio Bonelli (aka Musica Da Cucina) painted a musical image of his two aunts living in Sondrio—a town in Italy that doesn’t see the sun for several months a year—using funnels, cups of water, silver forks and a clarinet. Pateras/Baxter/Brown barraged the audience with their prepared instrument sagas. Owen Pallett deftly manipulated violin loops to create clever, Mozartian, episodic pop miniatures. Amanda Palmer sang about her map of Tasmania. South Australia’s The New Pollutants performed a chilling live score to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis with vocalist Astrid Pill and cellist Zoë Barry. Neil Gaiman read a story with live accompaniment by FourPlay, and audiences queued for hours to see BalletLab’s trio of dance works. By inspiring the audience’s exploration of new musical experiences, not demanding it, MONA FOMA hit its mark.
MONA FOMA – Museum of Old and New Art Festival of Music and Art, curator Brian Ritchie, MONA, Hobart, Jan 14-20; www.mona.net.au
This article was originally published online March 7, 2011
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