I am in Berlin on a six-month study visit, as a part of my master’s degree in urban design. My first time in Berlin was in January 2010, the coldest winter ever recorded in Europe. The temperature was -15°C, every walking surface was iced over (and people fell all the time!), the sun set shortly after lunch, and one drank alcohol purely for warmth. Despite this comprehensive state of emergency, I thought it was the greatest city I had ever visited.
poor but sexy
Berlin is the newest, the youngest, the leftest and the most welfare-dependent of all of Europe’s grand old capital cities. Here the 20th century was one of disruptions. A whole third of the city was razed to the ground in WWII; then the Wall formed a wide, empty death strip through the historical centre, and many gaps are only now getting filled in.
West Berlin, an enclave of capitalism in the middle of the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR), saw an exodus of businesses and the middle class. In their stead, students and radicals moved in, not least because citizens of West Berlin were exempt from military service. It is often said that West Berlin was as socialist as the East: its failing industry was hugely subsidised, its mindset radically left, and a large percentage of its population living on social welfare.
Berlin: 1) city centre, 2) apartment building, 3) underground on a Wednesday at 1:10am; 4) Berlin from above
photos Jana Perkovic
Berlin: 1) city centre, 2) apartment building, 3) underground on a Wednesday at 1:10am; 4) Berlin from above
What young expats moving to Berlin for low rents and the hip factor don’t understand is the radical left legacy this has left on the city. Every big-ticket redevelopment plan has been attacked as a flagship of gentrification, an attempt to capitalise on Berlin’s “poor but sexy” chic. The creative class is decidedly unwelcome here. Still, Berlin is changing, its enormous cachet now drawing in Canadian hipsters, American DJs, Australian graphic designers, just as it once brought in anarchists and squatters.
All this makes Berlin a strange city. Not only is it indisputably uncool to have money here, the whole city has been structured for the needs of the unemployed. Op shop chic is the norm. Flea markets abound. Everyone has enormous amounts of time. Nobody looks at the brand of your bike. Anything before 3am does not count as ‘going out’ proper. While there is now glamour in Berlin, from the chichi shops clustered throughout Mitte, to the renovated Potsdamer Platz, there is none of that old, settled money one finds inhabiting the centres of Paris, Vienna or London. Berlin still feels like a new city, a young city, a place that might have turned its population twice over in an average lifetime.
Hebbel am Ufer (Hau), Berlin
photo Jana Perkovic
Hebbel am Ufer (Hau), Berlin
for culture…
Berlin is home to over 50 theatres, 700 galleries, seven symphony orchestras, three opera houses and hundreds of small artistic initiatives. Attendance is heavily subsidised: opera tickets start at 10 euros, and state theatres charge five to seven euros for student tickets. German theatres have repertory seasons: instead of a series of continuous four-week seasons, each month’s program consists of a large number of in-house and visiting productions, with a few performances each, scattered throughout the month. This makes it possible to see a different performance every night.
Whether you concentrate on the text-focused ‘English’ Schaubühne (home to Thomas Ostermeier and Benedict Andrews) or the shrine to radical Regietheater, the Volksbühne (home to Frank Castorf, Rene Pollesche and the late Christoph Schlingensief), is to some extent a question of group belonging. A few of Barrie Kosky’s productions are still in repertory at Die Komische Oper, although he will stop directing when he becomes its Intendant (Artistic Director) in 2013.
Once a year, Theatertreffen brings to Berlin the ‘best’ 10 German-language mainstage productions, selected by a jury of critics, while Tanz im August is the city’s biggest dance event. The large and uncurated Month of Performance Art takes place in May.
The most interesting performance spaces are recently established, without a fixed ensemble, functioning as production houses not unlike their Australian counterparts. Hebbel am Ufer (HAU), an amalgamation of three Kreuzberg theatres, programs everything from Rimini Protokoll to Peaches. Sophiensäle is an important space for independent performance. It sometimes seems that every house (apartment block) in Berlin is running an art event in its hinterhof (backyard). It is worth your while to go with ad hoc recommendations. Performer Stammtisch is a relatively good source of information about tiny events flying under the radar.
for refreshment…
Food in Germany will inevitably disappoint the discerning Australian palate, and let’s not even talk about the coffee. Going out here is a ‘beer&döner’ experience. Approach mid-market restaurants with caution. However, street food in Berlin is of a much higher standard than in Australia, and you are much less likely to be disappointed with a three euro meal, than with a 30 euro one.
Kreuzberg and the nearby, trending Neukölln are brimming with unpretentious little bars, with secret dancing rooms, mismatched furniture and cheap beer. Try to get to a ping pong evening at Dr Pong (Eberswalder Straße 21, Prenzlauer Berg) or Balkan Tripps (Glogauer Straße 21 Kreuzberg) where you rent a racquet and the whole bar plays together. Clash (Gneisenaustraße 2A, inside the hof), the centre of Berlin’s alternative scene since the 1980s, is still going surprisingly strong.
Just outside, at Mehringdamm U-Bahn, are two of Berlin’s iconic fast food joints, both worth a 2am visit: Curry 36 for its renowned currywurst (Berlin’s autocthonous street food), and Mustafa’s for the best döner in town. Note: most of these places allow smoking inside, so leave your underage friends and good clothes at home.
Clubbing in Berlin is an intense activity, wrapping up only around breakfast time. After 3am, try to get into Berghain, repeatedly voted the best club in the world, with velvety acoustics, strict no-photography rule, mythos of unprecedented debauchery inside and a cruel and arbitrary door policy.
Teufelsberg, Berlin
photo Jana Perkovic
Teufelsberg, Berlin
other recommendations…
There are many one-of-a-kind places in Berlin. One of my favourites is Teufelsberg (the rubble mountain), on the far west of the city. Buried underneath is Albert Speer’s Nazi military-technical college (it was too big to demolish), but perched atop is the US listening station, monitoring USSR radio traffic. The tower is now abandoned, like Sleeping Beauty’s castle, and hosts picnics, parties and kite flying.
If it is dreadfully cold, I cannot recommend saunas enough. More Australians need to be familiarised with the civilised custom of relaxing nude in large groups. For the hip experience, visit Badeschiff, a floating bar/café/pool/sauna on the Spree.
Mauerpark Flohmarkt, a Sunday flea market in the park where the Wall used to separate Prenzlauer Berg from Wedding, is now a tourist affair par excellence—a place where poor Berlin fashion designers peddle tote bags to visiting Italians. But the communal, open-air karaoke that takes place here in the warm months is truly a thing of joy. Worth visiting, if only to ponder why it is that, in Australia, such an event would be shut down in five minutes, on health & safety grounds.
Jana Perkovic is a Melbourne-based writer and urbanist. She works at Melbourne School of Design as researcher and tutor, and in various capacities as theatre critic. She is currently completing a Master of Urban Design degree at the University of Melbourne. She is a regular writer for RealTime.
love in a cold climate
jana perkovic: 2011 melbourne international arts festival
RealTime issue #106 Dec-Jan 2011 pg. 4
the mysteries of curation
jana perkovic: arts house, works from season 2
RealTime issue #105 Oct-Nov 2011 pg. 36
revelling in the now
jana perkovic: the little con, dancehouse
RealTime issue #104 Aug-Sept 2011 pg. web
Involuntary, One Point 618
photo Chris Herzfeld
Involuntary, One Point 618
CHOREOGRAPHER AND DIRECTOR KATRINA LAZAROFF’S FIRST WORK WITH THE INDEPENDENT DANCE COMPANY ONE POINT 618, POMONA ROAD, PREMIERED AT THE ADELAIDE FESTIVAL CENTRE IN 2010 AND WAS NOMINATED FOR OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN CONTEMPORARY DANCE AT THE 2011 AUSTRALIAN DANCE AWARDS (SEE RT97)
One Point 618’s latest work, Involuntary, began development almost as soon as Pomona Road had closed, and will again be premiering with the support of the Adelaide Festival Centre. With Involuntary, Lazaroff wants to take a humorous look at the unconscious motions we go through in our lives, and in particular, how technology influences them.
“The idea for Involuntary came from [observing] my mother-in-law watching football. She was jolting around…unconscious of her own movement, because she was so involved,” says Lazaroff. “That sort of involuntary action and [its] sporadic nature really interested me. I thought there is something comic in this: it’s unconscious but [has] a driven focus.”
Involuntary, One Point 618
photo Chris Herzfeld
Involuntary, One Point 618
Also observing spontaneous movement in her then 14-week-old daughter, Lazaroff began to draw parallels between this unconscious physical movement and other “unconscious behaviour in society.” Lazaroff says: “We often go along with things without much thought, because it’s required of us…I think with the evolution of technology and [its] systemisations…we don’t really have time to question very much…We make choices as we go, unsure of the implications.” Lazaroff says Involuntary “has become a satire…a humorous look at how at times we follow blindly.”
A concern throughout the development process was making a dance theatre work about technology in a world where it is rapidly evolving. “Because technology keeps advancing so fast, people keep bringing new ideas to me and I keep getting new ideas, [but] I’ve tried to steer away from [actually using] technology.” Lazaroff says that during development “we focused a lot on technological sound and vision, but to me that was already out of date: it had been seen 10 or 15 years ago in works by Chunky Move and other companies.”
The result has been a toning down of the work’s ‘cyber’ elements by video designer Nic Mollison and sound designer Sascha Budimski. “It’s more about the influence of systems and procedures, programs and information technology rather than trying to represent technology on stage. I’ve tried to strip it back and get a bit more human with it.”
Involuntary, One Point 618
photo Chris Herzfeld
Involuntary, One Point 618
Originally from Adelaide, most of Lazaroff has spent most of her dance career in Perth, working with Buzz Dance Theatre and small independent companies. She is excited by the opportunity of having a second work presented by the Adelaide Festival Centre on this scale as she sees it as contributing to potential national understanding and recognition of her work. “Sometimes making work in Adelaide and Perth is quite isolating. The eastern states are a bit disconnected from the artists who work in these places.” After Adelaide, Involuntary will be presented at the National Regional Arts Conference in Goolwa (SA) in October, and after that Lazaroff hopes to take it interstate.
While the Involuntary incorporates ideas about technology, systemisation and unconscious actions, for Katrina Lazaroff the work is primarily “a culmination of all of my passions and thoughts and feelings. Not just the technical side of being a dancer, creator or choreographer, but bringing together the whole picture of how I think, how I feel as an artist…It brings together all the hard work I do everywhere else in order to survive…the joy but also the hardship of making a work.”
One Point 618 & Adelaide Festival Centre, Involuntary, director choreographer Katrina Lazaroff, performers Ninian Donald, Timothy Rodgers, Veronica Shum, Jessica Statton, video, lighting Nic Mollison, sound design Sascha Budimski, set design Nic Mollison, Richard Seidel, Katrina Lazaroff, consultants Catherine Fitzgerald, Richard Seidel, Roz Hervey, Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, May 1-5; http://www.adelaidefestivalcentre.com.au
Leonard Bernstein’s Mass, 2012 International Arts Adelaide Festival
photo Tony Lewis
Leonard Bernstein’s Mass, 2012 International Arts Adelaide Festival
FOUR ADELAIDE FESTIVAL CONCERTS SPANNED AN EXTRAORDINARY RANGE OF APPROACHES TO MUSIC AND, ESPECIALLY, THE USE OF SPACE. WHILE LEONARD BERNSTEIN’S MASS USES THE AUDITORIUM IN THE TRADITIONAL MANNER, THE ZEPHYR QUARTET PERFORMANCE INTRUDES INTO THE AUDIENCE, RICHARD CHEW INCARCERATES HIS AUDIENCE AND PAUL GRABOWSKY, ANTONY PATERAS AND THE AUSTRALIAN ART ORCHESTRA IMMERSE THEIRS.
leonard bernstein’s mass
In 1971, legendary US conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein responded to Jackie Kennedy’s commission to write a work celebrating the opening of the Kennedy Centre and marking a decade since the President’s assassination, with Mass. It’s a unique composition that acknowledges the Kennedys’ Catholicism, reveals Bernstein’s interest in both theological and political issues and addresses the ultimate question of faith in an absurd world.
Leonard Bernsteins’ Mass, 2012 International Arts Adelaide Festival
photo Tony Lewis
Leonard Bernsteins’ Mass, 2012 International Arts Adelaide Festival
Mass combines music theatre and dance with a traditional Catholic mass and the social and philosophical issues Bernstein raised remain relevant 40 years after the controversial work’s premiere. Set in the street and presenting the Catholic mass as concept, rite and musical form for consideration rather than for participation, Mass critiques organised religion and the Vietnam War and includes readings from letters by imprisoned draft evaders. Blending orchestra, rock band, singers, dancers, actors and multiple choirs, including children, into a cross-media mix, it implicitly proposes a cross-community bridge and captures the 1960s Zeitgeist. Its experimental nature—at the time, rock and classical music were engaged in a cold war that epitomised the conflict between establishment and counterculture—defies musical categorisation, as it links particular musical styles to specific characters or elements of the plot.
Mass is an interesting choice as an Adelaide Festival flagship, combining large-scale performance, experimentation (not uniformly well received at the time) and a recapitulation of issues relating to faith, the Catholic Church and political protest. The performance by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, soloists and choirs under Kristian Järvi was excellent and Jubilant Sykes was outstanding in the pivotal role of the Celebrant who experiences his own crisis of faith precipitated by his parishioners’ alienation, before a child’s strength of belief finally triggers a Kierkegaardian leap of faith amongst the crowd.
richard chew’s instructions for an imaginary man
Instructions for an Imaginary Man
courtesy the artists
Instructions for an Imaginary Man
In 1943, Polish writer and resistance member Jerzy Ficowski wrote, “It was exactly eleven/ steps from wall to wall/ in the Pawiak prison/ from to from to/ wall wall wall wall/ and eleven and back again.” Adelaide composer Richard Chew’s Instructions for an Imaginary Man muses on the experience of prison, and questions the nature and impact of imprisonment and its relationship to structures of power and control.
Instructions for an Imaginary Man takes place in the long-disused Old Adelaide Gaol, in a corridor accessing rows of cells, with a scrim separating the audience from the performance area that represents a cell, and with the musicians positioned behind a second scrim at the far end of the corridor. Videos of cell interiors and an actor-prisoner are projected onto the scrims as the performance progresses. The same actor mimes imprisonment, depicting the loneliness and mental breakdown associated with confinement, forcing the audience to remember the gaol’s former uses. Chew set the poetry of Verlaine, Behan, Rilke and others, including political prisoners and former hostages, to his own music, which is for soprano and baritone accompanied by piano, strings and clarinet. Fine performances and clever design make this a strong work. Staging theatrical and musical events in disused prisons is not new, but in this case is highly evocative
australian art orchestra’s miles davis, prince of darkness
Australian Art Orchestra
courtesy the artists
Australian Art Orchestra
Musically, the Australian Art Orchestra’s concert Miles Davis, Prince of Darkness, was the festival standout. A tribute to jazz trumpeter Davis (1926-1991), the AAO concert runs chronologically: the first half commences with selections from Birth of the Cool (1948-9) progressing to Gil Evans’ arrangement for Davis of the second movement of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez (1961) in which Davis’ trumpet took the guitar role; followed by festival director and AAO leader Paul Grabowsky’s arrangement of Davis’ Black Comedy (1968). Trumpeter Phillip Slater is wonderful in the Concierto. Superbly arranged, these performances render the quintessential Davis style through the AAO’s distinctive sound and approach.
But it was the second half of this concert that really got things moving with Anthony Pateras’ high energy Ontetradecagon. Knowing that Davis’ late work, particularly his On the Corner album (1972) was influenced by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pateras pays homage to the experimentalism of both Davis and Stockhausen by exploring the conjunction of jazz improvisation and experimental music. AAO members were located in six groups around the auditorium—on stage, on either side, at the back and on the balcony—with Pateras strategically positioning himself in the centre aisle facing the stage. Pateras uses a Revox B77 to replay fragments of On the Corner and process elements of the live performance, while the AAO play from Pateras’ score which is orchestrated from On the Corner pitch elements and structured to allow improvisation. The spatialisation immerses the listener—I felt as if I were inside Davis’ and Stockhausen’s minds simultaneously. Paradoxically, the absence of a driving jazz rhythm brings out the ethereal feel of Davis’, as well as Stockhausen’s music. Ontetradecagon extends the language of both composers into multiple, layered ensemble playing, and in the program notes, Pateras acknowledges Varèse, Xenakis and Luigi Nono in the concept.
Australian Art Orchestra
photo Tobias Titz
Australian Art Orchestra
As David Toop notes in Ocean of Sound (Serpent’s Tail, London, 1995), record producer Teo Macero mixed Miles Davis’ late albums from long recordings of live takes, and a different mix would have produced a different result, the composition in effect emerging from the mixing. Remixing Davis is thus not only appropriate but anticipated, with Pateras now the producer. At various moments, both trumpeter Scott Tinkler and Pateras appear to be conducting, and the scattered AAO ensembles cohere into a tightly unified whole. Pateras adroitly adds sound samples from the onstage trio of Erkki Veltheim (electric violin), Vanessa Tomlinson (percussion) and Tinkler. Tinkler’s dazzling trumpet solo quotes characteristic Davis motifs, though Ontetradecagon is more about Davis’ musical exploration and development than his own trumpet playing. It’s especially about saturating the audience in challenging sound.
The final piece in the AAO concert was a fabulous reworking of Davis’ Black Satin by AAO bassist Philip Rex, who for this piece performed at a laptop. Black Satin is also from the 1972 On the Corner sessions, and this rendition updates Black Satin’s eclectic, danceable drum ’n’ bass flavour to incorporate today’s electronics and club style. A mirror ball above our heads completes the ambience! This AAO concert was a knockout, and Grabowsky’s program essay is insightful, reinterpreting Miles Davis’ work to confirm and extend its innovations.
zephyr string quartet’s MICROMacro
Jo Kerlogue, MICROMacro, Zephyr Quartet
photo Belinda Humphris
Jo Kerlogue, MICROMacro, Zephyr Quartet
In the Adelaide Fringe, at a pub noted as a folk and blues venue, Adelaide’s Zephyr string quartet gave us MICROMacro, in which they performed their own compositions while artist Jo Kerlogue painted on the freshly paper-covered walls and floor and even a table in the auditorium. Zephyr and Kerlogue look for synthesis between notated music and spontaneous art—an emerging trend combining music with visual art as performance, a form of visual improv where the artists’ creative flow is nakedly exposed. Periodically, the musicians would change position in front of audience tables, though the sound source, the PA, remained fixed, creating a feeling of disembodiment and teasing the listener’s sense of how vision and sound combine.
shifting musical spaces
There are four different concepts of theatre at work in these festival works. Chew’s choice of location especially charges his work and provides its foundation. Musical languages are combined and redeveloped and there are contrasting approaches to improvisation. Of the same era as Bernstein’s Mass, Miles Davis’ On the Corner is taken in new directions by Grabowsky, Pateras and Rex. Chew and Bernstein critically address social issues, particularly political imprisonment, and the power of their works derives partly from the essential nature of human speech. While Zephyr shows how visual art might respond to music, Pateras addresses the raw power of sound through its sonic references, timbres, textures and performance, and the music of Bernstein and Chew seeks out the soul. These performances collectively show how music engages the mind, heart and body simultaneously.
2012 Adelaide International Arts Festival: MASS, Leonard Bernstein, Adelaide Symphony Orchestra conductor Kristjan Järvi, director Andy Packer, chorus director Carl Crossin, scenic designer Geoff Cobham, lighting designer Mark Pennington, featuring Jubilant Sykes, Absolute Trio, Adelaide Festival Chorus and Children’s Choir, State Opera of South Australia in association with Adelaide Festival Centre, March 10; Instructions for an Imaginary Man, composer, Richard Chew, mezzo soprano Cheryl Pickering, baritone Nigel Cliffe, actor Graeme Rose, pianist Richard Chew, violins Jacqui Carias and Laura Evans, viola Teagan Short, cello Jillian Visser, clarinets Alexander Loakin, producer Cheryl Pickering for Various People, designer Bec Francis, lighting, projection Nic Mollison, Old Adelaide Gaol, March 9; Australian Art Orchestra, Miles Davis, Prince of Darkness, led by Paul Grabowsky, composer Anthony Pateras, arrangements Eugene Ball, Paul Grabowsky, Philip Rex, Adelaide Town Hall, March 15 http://www.adelaidefestival.com.au/
LIFE IN MOVEMENT IS A DOCUMENTARY DIRECTED BY BRYAN MASON AND SOPHIE HYDE ABOUT THE SHORT LIFE AND TRAGIC DEATH IN A ROAD ACCIDENT OF CHOREOGRAPHER/DANCER TANJA LIEDTKE, ON THE EVE OF TAKING UP THE DIRECTORSHIP OF SYDNEY DANCE COMPANY (OBITUARY, RT81).
Let’s get the accident out of the way, as the film does. In one of the filmmakers’ clever moves they place news coverage of Liedtke’s death up front, within the first few minutes, telling us that yes, it is a film about this event, but also signalling that it is not their story’s eventual revelation or end.
The tragedy of an exceptional and promising life cut short is clear, and this aspect of the documentary has been widely reviewed in the mainstream media in response to the film’s award-winning run through last year’s film festivals and subsequent cinema release. (Eleven official selections and awards are listed on the film’s website, including Sydney Film Festival’s Australian Documentary Prize and both jury and audience awards at Cinedans.) But beyond this narrative journey about the life and creative impulse of Liedtke herself, Life in Movement paints a portrait as much about a close group of friends and collaborators coming to terms with their loss.
Tanja Liedtke, Silhouette Falling (archival), Life in Movement Life
photo Solon Ulbrich
Tanja Liedtke, Silhouette Falling (archival), Life in Movement Life
Filmically, editor Bryan Mason deftly stitches together footage from a range of different sources, skipping back and forth in time and across formats and aspect ratios. There is material shot by him in rehearsal and performance of Liedtke’s two full-length dance works, Twelfth Floor and Construct, in anticipation of their individual premieres (Mason had been contracted by Liedtke to film both productions) and in remounted international tours after Liedtke’s death. There is an abundance of interviews with partner Solon Ulbrich, dancers Kristina Chan, Paul White, Anton, Amelia McQueen, Julian Crotti and Joshua Tyler; choreographers Garry Stewart and Lloyd Newson; and with close friends and family. And amazingly, there is a treasure trove of video material from Liedtke herself—old grainy snippets of her childhood antics at boarding school and, later, recordings of experimentation in hotel rooms or alone in the studio in early development of ideas that would find their way into Twelfth Floor and Construct.
These small sketches, gems of ideas torn from an artist’s undifferentiated ream of creative research collected along the way towards realising a final work, are a boon for the film. They allow for Liedtke to be strongly inserted into the film in a very intimate way, as she talks to camera and reaches for the record button. Mason and Hyde have, in the end, invited us to witness a vivisection of the creative process.
Tanja Liedtke, self portrait, Life in Movement
The film’s most interesting achievement is the way in which it understands the dramaturgy of Liedtke’s works, tracing particular scenes and choreographic moments back through the archive of video documentation. It is remarkable that Liedtke was such an avid user of video and thereby provided such an archive; but equally remarkable is the way in which the filmmakers select and use that material, re-deploying the dramaturgy to tell their own story. The final scene from Construct, in which Kristina Chan is enclosed and stilled within a tower of timber two-by-fours (used playfully throughout the work in varying configurations), is cut into a long sequence in which collaborators and family members talk about Liedtke’s high standards, her unreachable expectations for herself and her fears of failure. We accumulate an understanding of real life events through artistic ones and vice versa: the objects, the materials and tools for play and creativity can also be the structures that contain and confine us.
One of my favourite memories of watching Liedtke perform remains a tiny fragment of an idea she created with Chan at one of Australian Dance Theatre’s informal Ignition series for emerging choreographers back in 2002. In a program of short works purportedly re-imagining something in relation to the Nutcracker tradition, their collaboration stood out for its conceptual clarity: in an exploration of passage through space, Liedtke described tight corridors and diminishing gateways through exacting articulations of her long form. She did so little, and yet the air around her vibrated with excitement. I tried to Google the work in order to name it here, but surprisingly turned up nothing (returning to the old-fashioned archive of a review I wrote at the time to check the date). This is partly what Life in Movement or any biography attempts to ameliorate I suppose: despite the seemingly inerasable and inescapable technologies of the internet, of video documentation or even the print archive capturing whatever we do, such archives are in fact highly unstable. Our activities and our lives may yet dissolve into vague memory and forgetting.
This is of course what academic Peggy Phelan and others have notably claimed for performance as well, its ontology of disappearance and ephemerality. But Life in Movement demonstrates that ephemera and material remnants of an artwork and a life do remain—in the bodies of the dancers who worked with Liedtke (what Diana Taylor calls the “repertoire”), in the memories of those who witnessed the life and the art, and in this case, in an extensive image archive too.
Seeing the film I am reminded of Tanja Liedtke’s ability as a dancer and choreographer to put us in touch with both the cruelty and brilliance of humanity through the extremity of human form and human emotion in her performances. This is an intelligently crafted film that re-activates such memories, both collecting and also adding to the archive of Liedtke’s life and work in the public domain.
Life in Movement, director, cinematographer, editor, co-producer Bryan Mason, producer, co-director Sophie Hyde; Closer Productions; http://lifeinmovementfilm.com; in cinema release from April 12
reviews of tanja liedtke’s work
words for escape
francesca rendle-short: tanja liedtke, tweflth floor
RealTime issue #60 April-May 2004 pg. 44
It’s a common error to assume that innovative arts action only happens in big cities. Particularly in the area of experimental music and sound art there’s a vibrant history of festivals and activities based in regional Australia. In NSW there’s been the Unsound Festival in Wagga Wagga (RT76), Rolling Stock Festival (RT101) and Wired Lab in Cootamundra (e-dition Nov 22, 2011); and more recently activities at Cad Factory Narrandera. In QLD there’s been See Hear Now in Townsville (RT81; RT97) and in regional Victoria the undue noise collective.
Gently steered by Jacques Soddell (who also runs the Cajid CD label), the undue noise collective has been in operation since 2002, primarily in Bendigo but also working with Punctum to produce events in Castlemaine, including a touring leg of Liquid Architecture. Over this time the collective has presented more than 70 concerts successfully creating a community of artists and audiences in the region of Central Victoria.
To celebrate their 10 years of existence the collective is presenting Sonic Decadence, four concerts over two days at their regular venue, The Old Fire Station, featuring 24 local and intrastate artists covering a range of exploratory styles. Potential highlights could be Dr Aardvarks Table O Gadgets, a rare appearance by Warren Burt playing musical toys such as iPhones, Android Tablets and KAOS Pad, and The Runny Tadpole, a new group based in Bendigo playing Theremin, Kaossilator, home made instruments, drums and effects. Also from Bendigo is Justin Bull, improvising guitarist playing solo and reuniting with Soft Black Stars, a free improv group who performed at the very first undue noise. Taking the trip from Melbourne will be guitarist Tim Catlin, sax player Rosalind Hall and guitarist David Brown. And of course the festival wouldn’t be complete without an appearance by the microbiologist turned field recording sound adventurer, Jacques Soddell himself. Certainly worth a roadtrip!
Undue Noise presents Sonic Decadence, Old Fire Station, Bendigo, April 28, 2 & 8pm; April 29 2 & 8 pm; http://undue.cajid.com/blog/?p=331
Victoria Hunt, Copper Promises: Hinemihi Haka (2012)
photo Heidrun Löhr
Victoria Hunt, Copper Promises: Hinemihi Haka (2012)
Overlapping with Local Positioning Systems, the Performance Space program presented with the Museum of Contemporary Art, comes their first season for 2012 at Carriageworks, Dimension Crossing.
Inhabiting the foyer is Robyn Backen’s Whisper Pitch. It’s a curved brick structure, a building within a building, that draws on the artist’s investigations into architectural acoustics and parabolic forms to explore the idea of a whispering wall—a place for secret communications amidst the reverberant hubbub. (Until May 19)
Audiences access Michaela Gleave’s Our Frozen Moment through a makeshift cloakroom at the back of Bay 19 where they are invited to don raincoats and gumboots. (In Sydney’s current weather they probably arrived wearing them!) In the centre of the gallery space is a kind of stage, on which the visitor may frolic in the light misty rain. Flashes of light illuminate the droplets like tiny stars, dancing ever so briefly before your eyes—a new micro-universe. (Until May 19)
The performance program opened with Yumi Umiumare’s EnTranced (April 19-21). Well titled, the work was totally entrancing, as Umiumare, a mistress of transformation, danced through a series of surreal in-between worlds (see review in RT109).
Following this is the long awaited Copper Promises: Hinemihi by Victoria Hunt. Over the last few years Hunt has been on a very personal odyssey to explore her Maori heritage. In many ways her journey parallels that of the Hinemihi, an ancestral ceremonial space that was bought from its traditional people and transferred to England—but for her people the Hinemihi is more than a structure, it is the female ancestor herself. Hunt, a mesmerising performer trained in BodyWeather, has been assisted by her extended family and guest artists (James Brown, Densil Cabrere, Annemaree Dalziel, Hedge, Horomona Horo, Clytie Smith, Chris Wilson and Fiona Winning) to create this performance (also to be reviewed in RT109). May 4 8pm, May 5 6pm, May 8-12 8pm, post show artist talk May 11
The final show of the season comes from Blood Policy in collaboration with Aphids. Computer Boy is an exploration of the effect that the virtual world is having on younger generations and is created within a 3D virtual environment (based on gaming technologies such as Grand Theft Auto) and also involves puppetry (a kind of Pinocchio with a 12-inch LCD head) and machinima animation. Made by Bryony Anderson, Martyn Coutts, Sam Routledge and Willoh S Weiland with music by DJ TR!P, it looks intriguing. Game on! May 23-26, 8pm, May 26 2pm
Performance Space fans might want to become members. For $100 you get access to nine shows for free as well as discounted tickets for a friend and off-site shows. http://www.performancespace.com.au/2010/membership/
In RT94 the late Douglas Leonard praised Sunny Drake’s Otherwise, stating “this was not navel-gazing but a richly creative engagement with a world where power and sexual or cultural identity are linked.” Drake’s new one-person show, X, currently showing in Brisbane’s Metro Arts as part of their Independents season, looks likely to be a similarly challenging performance.
X enters the world of best friends Caitlin and Jamie and two hand puppets, Naked and Fancy, who together explore addiction from a “lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender/intersexed/questioning” (LGBTIQ) perspective. Following the Brisbane season, Drake will be taking the show to the USA National Queer Arts Festival in San Francisco. Sunny Drake, X, Independents 2012, Sue Benner Theatre, Metro Arts, Brisbane, co-presented w Sunny Drake & Contact Inc; until April 28; www.metroarts.com.au/
buru, us tour, marrugeku
Buru, Marrugeku, Broome 2010
photo Rod Hartvigsen
Buru, Marrugeku, Broome 2010
Also currently touring North America is Marrugeku’s latest dance theatre work, Buru, which premiered in Broome in 2010 and toured the Kimberley in 2011. Buru explores the six seasons as described by the traditional landowners of the area, the Yawuru people, using the stories of Janyju (Red Lizard story as told by Karajarri elder and Yawuru language specialist Doris Edgar) and Walmanyjun (Greedy Turtle Story as told by Yawuru/Jabirr Jabirr elder Cissy Djiagween). The piece is conceived and choreographed by Dalisa Pigram and co-directed with Rachael Swain and includes younger and more mature Indigenous performers utilising hip-hop, stilt dance and storytelling accompanied by the music of Marrugeku Mongrel Band with guest songwriter Stephen Pigram. Buru has already been performed at the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts, Phoenix, Arizona (April 14) and will be playing as part of the Manitoba Theatre for Young People, Winnipeg, Canada (April 24-27). The nine young Indigenous performers will also take part in cultural exchange workshops and activities with local indigenous theatre makers. Marrugeku, Buru tour; www.marrugeku.com.au/
tyger tyger: west space
West Space’s curatorial initiatives continue to impress. As well as the 2011/2012 project Today Your Love which sees artists inhabit the gallery with an emphasis on process and experimentation over product, there is also the Tyger Tyger project curated by Phip Murray. Tyger Tyger aims to broaden the focus of Westspace beyond emerging artists and thus Murray has invited a number of established guests to team up with an emerging artist of their choice. Coming up next is a collaboration between Lyndal Walker and Danielle Hakim titled Re-make/Re-model looking at the role of the model, both animate and inanimate, in life and art. Also part of the Tyger Tyger project is the collaboration between composer and sound artist David Chesworth and sculptor/installation artist Katie Lee. Together they will present All Who Occupy This Great Space, a sound installation and sculptural environment which will also be the site of two performances by experimental vocalists Alice Hui-Sheng Chang and Carolyn Connors. Lyndal Walker and Danielle Hakim, Re-make/Re-model; David Chesworth and Katie Lee, All Who Occupy This Space, West Space, April 20-May12; performances April 28, 3pm, May 10, 6.30pm. http://westspace.org.au
making the green one red (virtual macbeth), andrew burrell, kerreen ely-harper
Making the Green One Red (Virtual Macbeth), Andrew Burrell, Kerreen Ely-Harper
Director Kerreen Ely-Harper started the Virtual Macbeth project in 2007 (with Dr Angela Thomas and multimedia artist and producer Kate Richards) as an online world in Second Life. The project has now been further developed, with Sydney-based hybrid media artist Andrew Burrell, to become Making the Green one Red (Virtual Macbeth), focusing on the live and virtual performance possibilities of the concept. The work will be exhibited as a performative installation at QUT’s The Block where visitors can interact with the world, becoming “audience, actor and narrator, allowing them to self-determine their own path within the physical and virtual world the witches have created.” Audiences can also experience part of the work in the virtual environment at http://miscellanea.com/virtual_macbeth. Making the green one red (Virtual Macbeth), The Block, QUT Creative Industries Precinct, April 24-May 5; http://www.ciprecinct.qut.edu.au; http://miscellanea.com/virtual_macbeth/
moduluxxx—modular synthesis mini-festival serial space
And one for the knob twiddlers. Pia Van Gelder, überlord of Dorkbot and musician/curator Alex White are presenting a two-day mini festival celebrating the joy of the modular synthesiser. They tell us it’s a “style of synthesiser design where the architecture is left open. Each element, whether it be a sound generator, filter, controller, modulator or effect can be reconfigured in an infinite variety of arrangements…You might never finish a song or track again” (press release). There’ll be performances by geek favourites Robin Fox, David Burraston, Hair Hochman, Nadir (Ben Byrne and Alex White) and Pia van Gelder, a special Dorkbot share-meeting where you learn to “Synthesise a Synthesiser” and, perhaps most curious of all, a Synthesiser Petting Zoo where you can touch these little magic boxes yourself. Moduluxxx, April 27-28, Serial Space, http://serialspace.org/; https://sites.google.com/site/moduluxxx/
opportunities
For Brisbane-based emerging artist Metro Arts and Chan Hampe Galleries (Singapore) have joined up to offer a Brisbane-Singapore exchange program. Four artists and two curators or writers will spend three weeks in both Singapore and Brisbane resulting in a major exhibition which will take place as part of the 2012 Asia Pacific Triennial. Applications close April 30; http://www.metroarts.com.au/
Artspace, Sydney is calling for proposals for its 2013 Studio Residency program. Both residential and workspace-only studios are available, generally for periods between two and six months at subsidised rates. Applications close June 15; http://www.artspace.org.au/residency_guidelines.php
Screen Space in Melbourne is a purpose-built gallery focusing on works which take an innovative approach to screen-based media. They are currently seeking proposals from artists and curators for both the Main Gallery and Small Screen exhibition spaces for 2013. Applications close May 25; http://www.screenspace.com/proposals.html
PACT Centre for Emerging Artists will be holding auditions for their PACT Ensemble 2012 Program which provides training and creative development for artists aged 18-30. The 2012 program will include training with movement tutor Sam Chester, voice tutor Drew Fairly and culminates in the development of a final work under the direction of Cat Jones and Julie Vulcan. Registrations close April 30 and auditions will be held May 14; http://www.pact.net.au/
Kathleen Mitchell Award for Young Writers is a biennial award for authors under the age of 29 years who have published their first novel. Kathleen Mitchell’s aim was “the advancement, improvement and betterment of Australian literature, to improve the educational style of the authors, and to provide them with additional amounts and thus enable them to improve their literary efforts” (website). The value of the award is $15,000. Applications close April 27; http://www.trust.com.au/philanthropy/awards/kathleen_mitchell.asp
Wade Marynowsky has amused and bemused gallery viewers over the last few years with his distinctive take on interactivity and robotics. Dan MacKinlay wrote of his 2009 work, The Hosts–A Masquerade of Improvising Automatons: “There is a kind of inversion of the panopticon here. I know I am watched, but I do not know truly by what. Is it another of Wade Marynowsky’s telepresence hoaxes, or some automated trickery, or perhaps something more unnaturally intelligent? Is the moment at hand when we reprise our ancient animism, catching ourselves being polite to our appliances just in case there is an intelligent mind of any sort peering back at us that we might offend?” (online exlcusive RT93)
Marynowsky has a new solo show, Universal Remote, opening at UTS Gallery comprising media art pieces along with some more ‘traditional’ sculptural and photographic works. The universal remote of the title is in fact a series of oversized replicas (almost two metres tall) of remote control devices carved out of Canadian rock maple and Australian camphor laurel. Marynowsky was inspired by the totem poles he saw when undertaking an artist-residency in Canada. He rather cheekily states, “Remote controls are the talking sticks of my generation; at my parents home the person ‘in control’ of the remote holds the power to speak…or choose what we all watch” (press release).
Wade Marynowsky, The balance of your bank account is reflected in your face 2012, installation view.
courtesy the artist
Wade Marynowsky, The balance of your bank account is reflected in your face 2012, installation view.
Similarly playful is another sculptural piece, The balance of your bank account is reflected in your face. Here the outline of an ATM is etched into a large mirror in which you become the ghost in the machine.
Entry to the exhibition is via a sound installation titled One room, one button: composition for padded room. Marynowsky says, “It consists of eight white padded panels and an oversized chaise lounge [sic], embedded with 704 arcade buttons. The installation explores the insanity of the ever growing ‘smart revolution,’ in particular the smart home” (email correspondence). Perhaps Wade Marynowsky shares Dan Mackinlay’s anxiety about machine intelligence.
Wade Marynowsky, Universal Remote, UTS Gallery, April 24-June 1, artist talk with MCA curator Anna Davis, May 22, 5.30pm; www.utsgallery.uts.edu.au/gallery
Three months. Seven million people. 7,417 legit skyscrapers. All on an island half the size of Canberra.
It’s the ‘Asian Century’ and I was on a mission to see, hear, taste and wrestle with all that lies on the doorstep to the great People’s Republic. Wintertime is festival season in Hong Kong. The weather is bearable and the constant smog finally clears to reveal the chaotic, frustrating, completely intoxicating mix of east meets west. For the culture vulture there is Detour, an annual design festival, Hong Kong Arts Festival (www.hk.artsfestival.org/) and nearby Macau Fringe. For more traditional festivities it’s Chinese New Year—fireworks, banquets, lucky money. 2012 is the Year of the Dragon.
At first Hong Kong can be a lonely place: 20-somethings taking a gamble on the stock market, heaving ex-pat bars and distant locals. But with a smattering of Cantonese and a good (very good) map, this city can feel like home, just better.
The West Kowloon Cultural District offers Cantonese Opera in a proscenium arch theatre entirely constructed from bamboo. The first program of The West Kowloon Cultural District Authority will be become an Asian cultural juggernaut under the direction of Aussie Michael Lynch.
At the Hong Kong Fringe Club you can see everything from Cantonese stand-up to contemporary dance via slow food workshops in this collection of spaces in an old cold storage building in Central District. Tip: the rooftop bar/cafe serves a vegetarian buffet lunch daily. One of the only cafés with a genuine view of the sky!
Asia Art Archive offers a treasure-trove of publications documenting the vast landscape of contemporary art in Asia. You can easily spend a few hours trawling the shelves here. They host monthly artist talks where I managed to hear Yang Fudong talking about his epic No Snow on the Broken Bridge, 2006. (See RT103). They also produce the Backroom Conversations Program at the annual ART HK Art Fair (May 17-20, 2012).
Street art, Hong Kong
photo Bec Allen
Street art, Hong Kong
Clockenflap Music and Arts Festival is HK’s first big outdoor music festival. See international acts alongside indie Asian songsters and K-Pop (Korean pop). Includes a film program presented by the British Council and will take place December 2012, Kowloon Waterfront Promenade.
Artist Studio Visits are abundant. Check out the Fo Tan Estate (http://www.fotanian.com/), a collection of studios hidden amongst a maze of industrial buildings. The collective hosts regular open access weekends when over 200 studios are on view. Closer to town is Cattle Depot: home to Frog King and Queen, HK Pavilion Venice Biennale 2011) and Videotage among others.
Sound Pocket is a small organisation specialising in sonic practices and study. Housed in a loft space inside a nondescript factory building on the edge of Victoria Harbour, it’s a gem of serenity and aural contemplation. With regular artist talks and listening parties it’s like sitting in someone’s loungeroom.
Bowrington Rd Market, Hong Kong
photo Bec Allen
Bowrington Rd Market, Hong Kong
for refreshment…
Cooked Food Centre, top floor of the Bowrington Road Market, Wan Chai, open 6am to 2am. This is a temple to fast food Cantonese style; the duck curry stall offering is delicious.
Fancy a queue? Then line up at the world’s cheapest Michelin starred restaurant for delectable parcels of goodness in the form of steamed dumplings (Tim Ho Wan, 8 Kwong Wa St, Mongkok). Look for the green sign next to the firearms shop.
Other end of the scale is the 30th floor Aqua Spirit Bar. Sit back and watch the nightly laser show across the harbour whilst sipping their signature cocktails (1 Peking Rd, Tsim Sha Tsui).
for sleeping…
Short term studio rental is the best value for money in a town that measures in square feet not metres…be prepared for ‘compact.’
other highlights…
Surprisingly Hong Kong Island has some amazing hiking tracks. The best by far is the Dragon’s Back across the top of the ridge, leading you to Shek O Beach for the best Thai feast in town.
There are also hundreds of islands off the coast of Hong Kong. My pick is Po Toi, a 30 minute boat ride from Stanley Market. With stunning views and cliffs it’s barely inhabited save for a restaurant serving the absolute best seafood.
For a truly surreal experience get your James Bond on by taking a turbo ferry to Macau. High rollers, poker, dancing girls and a faux Venice. Playing indefinitely is Franco Dragone’s House of Dancing Water—must be seen to be believed.
Finally, grab a bowl of noodles, sit back and watch the hustle of Hong Kong Island pass you by from the top deck of an old wooden tram. They trundle from one end of the island to another, at one point going right through a street market!
For more on Hong Kong in RealTime see Melinda Rackham’s survey of HK media arts in RT107
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Bec Allen is the Producer with Kate Champion’s company Force Majeure, Sydney.She is a graduate of NIDA and has been working in producing, stage and company management for the past 10 years for companies including Belvoir, Sydney Theatre Company, Bangarra Dance Theatre, Bell Shakespeare, Performing Lines, Sydney Opera House, Sydney Festival, Edinburgh Festival Fringe and most recently as Creative Producer for Darwin Festival (2009/10).
MELBOURNE-BASED KATE DENBOROUGH AND GERARD VAN DYCK’S PHYSICAL THEATRE COMPANY, KAGE, CELEBRATES ITS 15TH BIRTHDAY THIS YEAR, AND THE COMPANY SEEMS TO EMANATE ALL OF THE POSITIVE QUALITIES OF ITS TEENAGED YEARS WITH NONE OF THE ACCOMPANYING NEGATIVES.
Other collaborations lurching towards such an age can be overtaken by insecurities and restlessness, a wondering if things might be better elsewhere. But Denborough and Van Dyck—despite international acclaim and a series of high profile commissions across Australia—seem as curious and eager to encounter the new as they were 15 years ago.
“We still feel our best work is ahead of us,” says Denborough. “That’s still our driving impetus. We’ve still got lots of ideas and things we want to do.”
“I feel like we’re just starting now,” says Van Dyck. It’s an odd statement from such a successful creative partnership spanning more than a decade, but perhaps it’s because KAGE isn’t a brand merely churning out variations on a theme or style. The company’s brief has never been easily categorised—’physical theatre’ or ‘visual theatre’ have been bandied about, but each new work appears as if cut from a fresh cloth. There are consistencies across productions, but the differences seem to make these fade into the background.
“Our resilience and perseverance and willingness to do what we want to do and not subscribe to other people’s expectations is the only reason we’ve survived, really,” says Denborough. “If we’d worried what other people think of us too much we would have crumbled. There are enormous expectations and demands to be black and white. It’s not so much an unwillingness to be put in a pigeonhole and more a willingness to be expansive. We’ve always tried to put a positive spin on it, for our own sanity I suppose.”
The pair met while studying dance at VCA and discovered a range of affinities from the outset. “We really loved each other’s sense of drama within the movement,” says Van Dyck. “Dance as a storytelling device rather than an abstract artform. And on top of that, a sense of humour. That’s where our working relationship began, with those elements. The first handful of works we made…I wouldn’t say they were comedy but there was silliness or absurdity. Then we moved into things that were perhaps more humane or more serious. But when it comes to me and Kate working in a room together or just hanging out, none of that’s changed. All of that is still really there. Which is probably testament to why we’re still here.”
“We looked around us and wanted to create something that we didn’t see happening,” says Denborough, an impetus that still seems to drive KAGE. “Both of us were drawn to collaboration. Even at lunchtime we’d hang out with the musos, some of the visual arts production students. We already had an eclectic eye because we didn’t just hang out in the dance studio and want to dance. Right from the start, I think that’s been a key aspect in our aesthetic.”
While collaboration is a crucial tenet in contemporary performance, the company pays more than lip service to the idea and the results are another reason each KAGE production carries with it a distinct sense of vitality and reinvention. Denborough and Van Dyck have drawn on the talents of circus performers, children, bodybuilders, opera singers, poets and cartoonists, among many others. And each has not been merely a resource to be mined, but a pivotal contributor to the breathing essence of a work.
Denborough is pragmatic about this method. “In terms of performers, it’s really interesting finding dancers who’ve come from different backgrounds. Or who are not necessarily trained dancers but are amazing physical movers. Because there can be quite a sense of sameness when you see a lot of dancers who have had very similar training from one institution. The style and the methodology of the teaching can mean things can tend to look very similar. But when you get bodies who have had really different physical experiences and you work with them over a period of time, the possibilities become much more exciting.”
sundowner
Sundowner, KAGE
photo Jeff Busby
Sundowner, KAGE
This interest in collaboration has also seen KAGE subtly move from an earlier character of abstract visual theatre towards a more grounded, socially engaged process. A case in point is Sundowner, which premiered at the Castlemaine State Festival last year and which will be staged in Geelong and Melbourne in 2012. The work explores experiences of dementia, particularly early onset dementia, and the process by which it was developed is illustrative of the company’s methodology.
Denborough conducted a series of interviews with carers, documenting their stories, and these oral encounters formed the launching point for a forum involving artists, the carers and a group of people with younger onset dementia. The discussions which resulted produced a field from which the work could draw, rather than a simple testimony which would be adapted to the stage verbatim.
“For instance there’s one woman who told us a beautiful story about her dad,” says Denborough. “He’d tell her that every morning he would meet this guy and have these fantastic chats. It turned out that it was actually him looking at himself in the mirror but he thought it was a stranger who happened to be meeting him in the bathroom every morning. Lots and lots of the stories we heard we started filtering into the show, but we really did it over a long period of time.”
team of life
Another work KAGE will be developing in 2012 is Team of Life, a piece that uses sporting metaphors to connect with young people who have experienced disadvantage. “[Working with] Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids and their love of AFL, and young refugees and soccer,” says Denborough, “it’s based on a writing methodology called the Team of Life…So if your family has been massacred and you’ve got no-one, it’s about how you might begin to rebuild your ‘team’ through this metaphor from sport, which a lot of these young boys and girls have a fantastic passion for.”
flesh and bone
And then there’s Flesh and Bone, another work in progress that upends any sense of an obvious trajectory for the company. Eschewing the large sets and sprawling casts of recent works, it’s an intimate work which sees Denborough and Van Dyck sharing the stage—alone—for the first time in almost a decade. In 2001 the pair decided to demarcate their roles, Denborough as director and Van Dyck as performer. Flesh and Bone might be an appropriate 15th birthday present, then, both a return and a step in a new direction.
“That’s one of the reasons that we wanted to do it,” says Van Dyck. “We like to reinvent things, we don’t like to get too stuck in the ways things are done. Maybe here we’re going back to methods that we’ve worked with before, but we certainly haven’t for almost 10 years and it’s about time.”
SITTING IN THE DARK WE EXPERIENCE THE SOUNDS AND VIBRATIONS OF THE AZAN, OR CALL TO PRAYER, SUNG BY THREE MUEZZINS FROM SEPARATE CORNERS OF THE AUDITORIUM. EVENTUALLY EACH SINGER IS REVEALED BY A SPOTLIGHT. THROUGH A MÉLANGE OF INTERMINGLING MELODIES, RHYTHMS AND TEMPI, ABDELMOTY ABDELSAMIA, HUSSEIN GOUD AND MANSOUR ABDELSALAM EVOKE FOR US THE SOUNDSCAPE OF CAIRO.
This is the opening of Radio Muezzin (RT107, p3), a documentary performance directed by Stefan Kaegi of Berlin-based Rimini Protokoll. Since 2000, directors Kaegi, Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel have worked in a wide range of collaborative partnerships, producing diverse and acclaimed forms of socially-engaged performance. Through Radio Muezzin, and the upcoming production in May of 100% Melbourne, Australian audiences are able to experience first hand Rimini’s unique version of Reality Theatre. This currently prominent mode of performance engages with the ‘facts’ of social reality, particularly through representing contemporary people. The representations may involve a scripted text based on interviews and documents and/or the literal appearance of the people themselves in real-life sites. What is distinctive about Rimini’s version of Reality Theatre is their replacement of professional actors with people who are specialists in other fields of life. Working with these “experts of the everyday,” Rimini open up live encounters between people unfamiliar with each other within a globalised world.
While the local adaptations of the 100% series offer insights into the seemingly familiar aspects of one’s own city, Radio Muezzin (2008–) allows a glimpse of an Egypt inaccessible to many, one inhabited by four muezzins and a radio engineer, Sayed Abdellatif. Through carefully orchestrated autobiographical stories, the presentation of religious rituals, still images, video footage and soundscape, we gain diverse insights, mainly into the lives of the less visible members of Egypt’s institutionalised Islamic faith. These ‘good souls’ of the mosque introduce us to their daily responsibilities, including housekeeping tasks, and their religious roles as teachers of the Qur’an and callers of the azan.
During the production the audience are made aware that the visibility of these muezzins is likely to be diminished even further, for, as Sayed informs us, the azan in Cairo “will no longer be called from thousands of voices but will be broadcast via radio.” As in other works by Rimini, the homogenising nature of such centralisation processes is a key concern. So too is the related issue of censorship—the withholding of information and the making absent and silencing of citizens that can accompany such centralisation. The theme of silencing is later sounded again when Mohamed Ali, a young socially empowered muezzin who only appears in a highly mediated way (via footage, sound recording and a performer who reads out his text), announces: “[t]o avoid the different voices and times the Ministry [for Religious Affairs] has decided that only one man is to call people to each prayer.” He also declares himself to be one of the 30 trained voices selected to perform this role. These brief and dispersed comments from the engineer and muezzin leave much to the imagination. For example, the reasons for the changes, date of their completion and the economic consequences are never fully fleshed out. Will the men stand to lose their jobs, or ‘only’ their public prayer voice?
As is typical of Rimini’s work, Radio Muezzin rarely presents its political and cultural concerns in a didactic manner. In part this approach stems from sensitivity to the political context and to the personal needs and safety of the experts. In the last section of the performance the production overtly acknowledges the impact of regulatory forces that limited what could be said and shown. During the blind muezzin Hussein Gouda’s rendition of a religious song, statements—presumably from the Ministry—roll silently in Arabic (accompanied by English surtitles) across the streetscape footage on the upstage screen, telling us some of what the authorities saw fit to ban: “On the screens there should be no donkeys or dogs. And also no garbage or actors. Muezzins cannot play dominoes on stage…What can’t be said in the presence of one’s mother, sister, daughter or wife one should not say in front of any woman.”
The muezzin’s function as a role model for the Egyptian citizenry and ambassador for Islamic faith is perhaps one reason why the protagonists’ political opinions and differences are only partially revealed. For example, we learn that Mohamed Ali left the show after coming into conflict with the other muezzins, but the details of the dispute are never divulged. The partial concealment here is one of the ways Rimini work to ensure that the act of making an unfamiliar person visible does not slip into the terrain of dangerous or exploitative spectacle.
Rimini’s interest in ensuring voice and visibility is memorably embodied in one of the final images of the show where the live experts (and the performer who sometimes reads the missing muezzin’s text) stand silently facing the audience alongside a large loudspeaker. Out of the ‘mouth’ of this technology we hear a recording of Mohamed Ali calling the azan, while in the background is footage of Muslim men praying with their backs to us in a street. On one level the episode can be received as a protest against forms of centralisation that make some humans (including women) partially redundant or invisible. Yet, the radio system also disseminates a powerful and beautiful voice, and, in combination with the recording and film technologies, provides broad access to a significant mode of singing and religious ritual.
In a manner typical of Rimini Protokoll’s theatre, this image from the concluding section never congeals into a simple assertion about human relations with technology. For us, both the image and the show presented the possibility of a careful intertwining of humans with machines, as modelled by Sayed the engineer, and by the elderly muezzin Abdelmoty, who while working as an electrician managed electricity’s positive and negative force. Such an interaction is also pursued by Rimini through a dialogue between the experts’ (live and mediated) bodies; the technologies of their environments featured in the show—such as the rotating fans, vacuum cleaners, clocks that tell the prayer times and the green fluorescent lighting of Cairo’s mosques; and the audio-visual technologies that help create Rimini’s stage worlds.
The non-didactic images and information gaps within Radio Muezzin also invite spectators to actively develop their own meanings. Rather than a dramaturgy based around conflict and its resolution, Rimini Protokoll frequently uses a segment-oriented structure where autobiographical commentaries offer only partial access to the performers’ actions, choices and statements and where on-stage dialogue is replaced by the juxtaposition of statements given in direct address to the audience. For example, the muezzins’ views of recent political change in Egypt are dispersed throughout the piece as snippets rather than being presented in a sustained exchange of differing opinions. While this dramaturgy of fragmentary information prompted us to engage in ongoing meaning-making, on occasion the holey fabric left us too uncertain about the nature of what was at stake for the muezzins, for Rimini Protokoll and for Egypt.
100% melbourne
100% Köln, Rimini Protokoll
photo courtesy Rimini Protokoll
100% Köln, Rimini Protokoll
The individual human being is also put in the spotlight in Rimini’s 100% city series. Like previous shows in Berlin, Karlsruhe, Vancouver (RT102), Vienna and Cologne, 100% Melbourne will seek to give the individual a voice and a face which otherwise tends to disappear behind the statistical pie charts and graphs that are used to depict the masses for, say, political cost-benefit analyses. Rimini only chooses the first person, who then initiates a personalised statistical chain reaction by selecting an acquaintance in accordance with criteria drawn from the local statistics office. The acquaintance in turn proposes one further person, and so on, until the cast of 100 creates a mosaic of a city according to gender, age, ethnicity and suburb.
Having representatives of individual suburbs on stage, each performance can address local interests and concerns that are also shared—often enthusiastically—by their audience. After an initial self-introduction, these issues are introduced via survey-type questions, to which the individuals on stage respond by arranging themselves in groups or holding up signs. While this presentation is a clear display of individual and collective opinions, potential reasons for or tensions between the individual responses shown on stage generally have remained unexplored. For example, in 100% Köln the experts’ majority vote in favour of the recently completed mosque in their city sits without explanation alongside their lack of a majority for a public call to prayer. In the case of 100% Melbourne it will be interesting to see what issues Rimini Protokoll will leave quietly resonating in the air.
100% Melbourne by Rimini Protokoll, with the support of the Goethe-Institut and Arts Victoria, will be presented at the Melbourne Town Hall, May 4-6, 2012. In conjunction with this event, on May 5 the Goethe-Institut Melbourne will host a panel discussion, “100% Rimini Protokoll: Cutting-edge Documentary Theatre that puts ‘Real Melbournians’ on the Stage.” For further information about the company’s work see: www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/en/
Rimini Protokoll, Radio Muezzin, Seymour Centre, Everest Theatre, Sydney Festival, January 16-21; 100% Melbourne, Melbourne Town Hall, May 4-6
MATTHEW WHITTET WON THE PHILIP PARSONS YOUNG PLAYWRIGHTS AWARD IN 2010 WITH HIS PROPOSED PLAY, OLD MAN. NOW IT’S ABOUT TO PREMIERE IN BELVOIR’S DOWNSTAIRS THEATRE WITH A STELLAR CAST WORKING A VERY INTIMATE SPACE—AN APT ONE FOR A WORK WITH A DEEP SENSE OF INTERIORITY AND PASSAGES OF STREAM-OF-CONSCIOUSNESS DELIRIUM.
The Sydney-based actor has written five full-length plays: 12 (short-listed for the Patrick White Award in 2006 and workshopped at the Australian National Playwrights Conference), Warren, Silver (performed by Whittet as part of the 2009 B Sharp Season at Belvoir and at the National Theatre of Iceland in Reykjavik) and two commissioned works, Fugitive for Windmill Theatre and Harbinger for Brink Productions—both staged in Adelaide in 2010.
In Old Man, Daniel, a father of two young children, is subject to a profound experience of loss—his family appears to have deserted him. Or has he abandoned them? He cruelly rejects his mother’s help and, panicking, wanders the same streets as his anxious children. Underlying this deep-seated separation anxiety is his father’s desertion when he was a child. The first part of the play is addressed directly to the audience, amplifying a range of emotional crises.
I had the pleasure of reading the draft of Old Man that will go into rehearsal, where doubtless it will go through a number of changes, says Whittet, whom I met in the Belvoir offices to discuss the play.
One of the things that struck me straight off is that you’ve written a kind of dissociative play; a substantial part of it is not linear in any conventional sense. What was it that drew you to the form—the nature of the subject that you’re dealing with?
This is basically laying my cards on the table. LAUGHS. I performed in a show at Sydney Theatre Company a couple years ago, Anthony Neilson’s The Wonderful World of Dissocia, which I found a really fascinating form to work with… [but] the second half tended to explain and close doors on the magical first half. In the end it was a slightly reductive experience. So, although I really loved the structure, I kept thinking surely there must be a way of playing with this kind of form but finding a way where you open more doors in the second half that have been hinted at in the first but lead you on a completely different path.
So when you see the second part, you think back over the first—forced to consider what might have happened? It’s disorienting and sometimes quite spooky, even on the page.
It works on echoes and on memories but with more of a theatrical language to do with what’s happening to these bodies in space and what’s happening inside these people, less than necessarily the story of what has happened.
What drew you to write a play about a son and his missing father?
I have a five-year old and I really wanted to explore the idea of fatherhood and what it is. I was really curious to visit the experience of what it means to people I know who don’t have fathers or haven’t grown up with their fathers. How then do you learn to be a father? Where does that come from? It’s something that’s passed down, I think, the same way that motherhood is, in the same way anything is. I had big chats with a few friends when I was considering what this piece was and how I’d attack it before I’d even started writing. A friend said, you’re a father; you’ve got to put yourself on the line; you have to explore something of your own experience.
Exploring your own anxieties?
Yes. What I wanted to explore in the first half was my notion of the what-if, my notion of what would happen if I woke up one day and my family—whom I love and have no problems with; none of that anxiety exists—has gone. It’s about digging into, I guess, the possibility of loss, which always exists, that could be there at any moment. It’s quite challenging as a young father to try to imagine what it would be like to be without your family. It’s horrible. Hopefully that sort of feeling has gone into the play.
It’s a feeling scattered through a prism, isn’t it—all the characters at some point feel abandoned, to the extent that you wonder, is this one man’s nightmare or something larger?
In my heart I think it’s not as small as one person’s experience. What I want to do in the first half is to very much enter into an inner state for a whole lot of people. The audience sit with intense levels of intimacy with performers who basically speak directly to them for the first half of the production. There’s nothing new about that performance style, but when you play with its simplicity it actually does become quite confronting.
It reduces the opportunities for conventional staging.
Absolutely, and I’m really interested in how that affects their relationship to the text and to the audience. In the end the binary I was really interested in started with the closeness of the first half, that absolute access so that it is about touch and smell and it is all actually very, very concrete. There’s very little abstracted notion of anything except for the fact that these people are trying to grapple with a story they can’t quite get their hands on, that they can’t touch and they can’t understand. All they know is that things are missing.
I’m really interested in how that access, that closeness in the first half then leads to the second half in which all access is completely closed, where a fourth wall goes up. But, hopefully, you still have a connection with Daniel and what he experienced in the first half as it goes into the second. It’s kind of like putting a magnifying glass on an anxiety and burning it for a moment. You’re faced with how do you deal with day-to-day with horrors and fears—these enormous things. Without giving anything away, the play opens out into ‘the narrative’ of the piece, which I think, despite the strangeness, the hard-to-pin-downness of the first half, actually lands cleanly on something.
Though not with that terrible word ‘closure’ in mind. It still leaves you with plenty to ponder.
I hope so.
Daniel’s not necessarily a strong character. He doesn’t come across as a strong father. As you say, how do you learn to be a father if you haven’t had one. It’s like he doesn’t quite know the rules.
It feels to me like an honest response to the way a lot of people deal with being parents. My own family has structure but, being in the arts, our routines are not set in stone. Hopefully Old Man paints a picture of a simple, honest, modern response to what it is to be a parent.
These are not really complex people. The state they’re in is complex but they’re not complex people.
It’s dealing with the day-to-day and I think it’s the complexity of their thought that brings out the complexity to the piece. Outside of that, hopefully what it does is to create a lot of situations and characters that then become incredibly recognisable.
There’s a line, in a very moving scene in the second half of the play, where Daniel says, referring to and politely underplaying the impact of the absence of his father, “No blame, I just had a gap.” But it’s a very big gap, an emotional chasm in fact, and it’s hard to imagine that Daniel will fully survive it. He’s also worried that if he doesn’t become a proper father, one who will be remembered, that nothing will change generation to generation. I wondered if there is an element of fatalism in Daniel or is that something he’ll overcome?
I took a very, very long time—relative to the time it took to write the play—to find the last line of the play. I think it lands on something, which for me becomes the heart of the question of what is going on for this man.
With these characters I wanted them to explore particular moments very cleanly. In the second half of the play, what I’m trying to do, in a very delicate way, is to speak of a moment in time. It becomes not about an answer to an issue, or a way in which someone makes things right, but just to explore that simple, simple moment of someone meeting someone for the first time in their life and just how you can’t make such a moment heroic. You can barely speak. It’s a complicated and incredibly delicate meeting of people and I think that’s what I was interested in exploring; whatever these characters go on and do after the end of this play is in another world.
How long has the writing of the play taken you?
I write rather quickly. I won the Philip Parsons Award in 2010 and started writing in February last year.
Was the director Anthea Williams involved in the play’s evolution?
Anthea was involved from very early on as dramaturg and she fought to direct it, which is fabulous—to have someone who’s so committed to the play. It’s the sort of piece that will be very much about sitting with great actors—Ben Winspear, Alison Bell, Gillian Jones, Peter Carroll—a metre or so from your face. We’ve been doing auditions for the two roles for kids, which is really exciting. There are some phenomenal kids out there. It’s intimidating! You’re 12 and you can do that? I couldn’t do that at 12!
Do you feel the Downstairs Theatre will work well for the play?
I think that was one of [artistic director] Ralph Myer’s first responses when he heard it read—and Anthea and [associate director] Eamon Flack as well. The first thing they thought: this is the sort of experience that would be really special downstairs because of its intimacy.
Belvoir, Matthew Whittet, Old Man, Downstairs Theatre, Belvoir Street Theatre, Sydney, June 7-July 1
JACK AND THE BEANSTALK: A MUSICAL FAIRYTALE IS THE SECOND STAGE OF CHIARA GUIDI’S DEVELOPMENT OF THEATRE FOR CHILDREN AT CAMPBELLTOWN ARTS CENTRE. AS CO-FOUNDER, WITH ROMEO CASTELLUCCI, OF HIGH PROFILE ITALIAN THEATRE COMPANY SOCÌETAS RAFFAELLO SANZIO, GUIDI SPOKE AT THE CENTRE IN 2010 OF HER AIMS TO CONSTRUCT A “CHILDHOOD OF THEATRE” WHICH INCORPORATED THE GENIUS OF YOUTH IN A “REVERSE PEDAGOGY.”
Children can see through the senses, she explained, and thereby have access to imagination before reality impinges (RT100, p32). Listening to Guidi speak in 2010, and watching her work in a process-driven masterclass of unfolding surprises, I was struck by her intense harnessing of the life of childhood to inform a theatre of self-conscious story-ing: objects uncannily entered the space only to depart moments later; characters were suddenly bigger or smaller or absent; there was darkness and fear, but jokes and laughter too. In this workshop, children were narrative subjects, participants and teachers, leading adult performance makers on a journey into the ‘forgottenness’ of creativity.
Jack and the Beanstalk shifts Guidi’s collaboration with Campbelltown Arts Centre to a more traditional phase. This time, adults make a work for children to watch. The darkness of her 2010 workshop has been maintained, as have its fear associations, but the open participatory space has been drawn into a more static, seated set-up. We enter to an empty stage flanked by musicians, the mood already tense. The performers begin percussive spatterings of cymbal, drum and high-pitched, atonal “Jacks.” The sound is anarchic and urgent, if in a slightly aged, experimental way. Jack (Sam Routledge) is the object of our concern with the frenzied noise around him making for an ominous start to a story that most in the audience know well. Jack trades a cow for magic beans; the beans grow a giant stalk which he climbs, enabling him to steal gold, a gold-laying goose and a harp from an ogre who guards them in the sky. Jack thrice faces his fears and is rewarded by claiming the wares as his own and shafting the ogre into to the heavens for good by cutting down the stalk.
As with many fairytales, the pathos of Jack and the Beanstalk is underwritten by a number of narrative discomforts which fail to historically translate: Jack is a protagonist whose stealing we applaud and he repeatedly steals without warrant (it seems). He is greedy and devious (it seems) and yet we are on his side. None of this particularly matters, except that it becomes a blind spot the work-in-progress does not seem interested in tackling. Beyond animating a context in which children can safely live out fear, the work doesn’t really explain why Jack does what he does. Why this story of greedy heroics? Why here? Why now?
What is clear is that the tale has been used to foreground a dramaturgy of imagination. In this, terror and dread are summoned by way of narrative suggestion; little happens visually in the space but the sonic environment is full. The performers’ actions are presentational; they work ball games, task-based actions and text across a stage which refuses to visualise the gruesome ogre or his heavens. Instead, we hear the doomful clanking of his tableware and imagine the children he’s yearning to munch. The narrator (Katia Molino) does a good job of enticing us into this world of fear. Volunteers are selected to accompany Jack to the ogre’s house behind the curtains and some are visibly scared, raising their hands only to turn back. I asked one young boy after the show what the ogre’s house was like: “Great,” he said, “I got to help them with their sound effects, banging plates and cups and things.”
Guidi and her Australian collaborators had a challenging, mere two weeks in which to get to know each other to develop this showing. As a work-in-progress, the theatrical tension sustained between visible and invisible, material and imagined is meaningfully crafted. There were moments when theatre got carried away with its own imagination, rupturing the diffusely non-representational space —including the entry of a glorious golden egg-laying goose, in life-sized puppet form, animated to flex and preen and nestle at the foot of the stage to be caressed at the close of the work.
Guidi’s enmeshment of the invisible world of the story with the aural world of the musicians marks the work’s clear departure from typical children’s theatre, replete as it usually is with playful colour and scenography. What remains to unfold, however, is to imagine into imagination which is what Chiara Guidi has so passionately called for. The final work will premiere at Campbelltown Arts Centre in 2013. For this, I’m counting on seeing a theatre for children which is other to itself altogether. This is no small ask, but having observed this project from the outset, it lingers as a tantalising promise nonetheless.
Jack and the Beanstalk: A Musical Fairytale, director Chiara Guidi, facilitator Jeff Stein, performers Drew Fairly, Christa Hughes, Katia Molino, Sam Routledge, Annette Tesoriero, musicians Robbie Avenaim, Jim Denley, Veren Grigorov, Paul Prestipino, Laura Tanata, design and puppetry Scott Wright, lighting Clytie Smith, producer Annemarie Dalziel; Campelltown Arts Centre NSW, Feb 17-19
I ARRIVE ON TIME AT ARTS HOUSE ONLY TO DISCOVER THAT THIS PERFORMANCE IS AT THE WAREHOUSE. ONCE INSIDE, I FIND I’M LATE FOR AN AUDIENCE WITH THREE CLOWNS. THE CLOWNS ARE CRUDE, MUCH LIKE THE EQUIPMENT THAT AN USHER HAS ATTACHED TO MY HEAD. YES, THESE DEBAUCHED ESCAPEES FROM A MISFIT’S CIRCUS EXIST NOWHERE ELSE BUT AS PROJECTIONS ON-SCREEN INSIDE A LOW-TECH, VIRTUAL REALITY HEADPIECE.
We’re sitting inside a Jaguar, travelling at night along an obtuse road. A recorded voice demands that I accept an envelope containing a mysterious letter. Made complicit by this acceptance, the clowns and I engage in our road-trip while the recorded voice directs me toward performing certain tasks. Beyond the fabulated interior of the Jaguar, an actual person sits beside me. Disconcerted because my sight has been co-opted by a virtual scenario, I can nullify this performance by not participating. But who can resist the temptation to be jocular with three dickheads wearing face-paint and speaking Spanish while sharing vodka from a filthy bottle? When the recorded voice demands that I look at my virtual hands, I realise they are covered in blood. Of course, my actual hands are clean. But as a man traversing life’s treadmill I have become the fourth clown, and therefore, the biggest dickhead of all.
We’re joined by a fifth clown, but not before a lone jogger is exterminated in a random act of violence. The recorded voice demands I stare out the passenger window. I see in my reflection not a clown but a handsome, yet slightly haunted male face. He stares at me, as I do at my unidentifiable self. Prompted to forget my present location, I nevertheless remember that I have not left The Warehouse. But when illusion is applied metaphorically, as a performance strategy within a technological context, it is difficult not to make conclusions. Actual human presence, once made cyberspatial, is also a revision of human presence. This revision is an amplification, or an augmentation, of what human presence might become once flesh and blood are replaced by mathematical equation. But this low-tech show is economically diminished because its creators wish to make a point. Faustian pacts with utopian technologies are deceitful, if not dangerous. When my road-trip ends and is replaced by a vision of my unidentifiable self standing in an open field (complete with wind on face, a sprinkle of rain and the scent of lavender), the conceptual framework for this show leaps from the technological into the philosophical.
Science, the same discipline that promotes the illusion of cyberspace, never allows us to forget that human presence, as perceived, is itself an illusion. Standing before me, as a play of light upon my optic nerve, my unidentifiable self hands me the talon of a bird that, presumably, has fallen from the sky. Then, like me, he vaporises, and my screen is black. Who are we but atomisations of energy passing through the labyrinth of Quantum Theory? Once outside The Warehouse, a person resembling myself disappears toward the end of the street. Somewhere, a clown flutters an eyelid, and I am gone.
Il Pixel Rosso (UK): And the Birds Fell from the Sky, writer-directors Simon Wilkinson, Sylvia Mercuriali, performers Xelis Del Toro, Sylvia Mercuriali, Simon Wilkinson, Matt Rudkin, Avis Cockbill, Sharon Honour Mission, Lucy Joy, Joe Kenney, Ulysses Black, Lewis Reid, Crystal Dave Reid, cinematographers Joe Murray, Simon Wilkinson, art director, script development Matt Rudkin, audio-visual editors Sylvia Mercuriali, Simon Wilkinson, supported by Brisbane Powerhouse, presented by Arts House, Melbourne, Feb 29-March 18
IN THE LATE 1990S, PERFORMANCE STUDIES WAS DOMINATED BY DEBATES ABOUT ABSENCE, DISAPPEARANCE AND DISPLACEMENT. PERHAPS THE MOST FAMOUS TEXT TO EMERGE FROM THIS PERIOD WAS PEGGY PHELAN’S UNMARKED: THE POLITICS OF PERFORMANCE (1993), IN WHICH SHE PROPOSED THAT:
“[P]erformance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: Once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology. Performance’s being…becomes itself through disappearance.”
Then suddenly, the conversation changed and we found ourselves talking not of absence, but of presence, repetition and remains. For a scholar who had only just oriented herself in the field, the switch seemed to come out of nowhere but on reflection it had been building for some time. Early indications were evident in Philip Auslander’s Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (1999), in which he argued against the ontological and instead insisted on the historical and ideological nature of the live. The shift could also be seen in Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003), in which she argued that while performance may escape the archive (text, document, history), it nevertheless endures in the repertoire (speech, gesture, memory). Shortly after this, came an abundance of books on the actor’s presence, including Joseph Roach’s It (2007) and Jane Goodall’s Stage Presence (2008). Since then, the trend has accelerated, with the arrival of Rebecca Schneider’s Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (2011) and now Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield’s edited volume Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History (2012).
theories and histories
This is a weighty book, in both senses of the word, and can be seen as a simultaneous compilation and consolidation of two decades worth of thinking and talking about Peggy Phelan’s formulations. Indeed, almost every essay in Perform, Repeat, Record refers to her. The book is divided into three sections, the first titled Theories and Histories. It consists of 13 essays which deal with three overlapping themes: disappearance and documentation; the economy of reproduction and reception; and the globalisation of performance as both form and field. In the opening essay, Auslander examines the photographs of Chris Burden’s Shoot (1971) and Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void (1960) to argue that “the crucial relationship is not the one between the document and the performance but the one between the document and its audience.” If the document produces pleasure, pain and thought in its interlocutor, then it is not simply an index of a past event but can be seen as a performance in and of itself. To put it otherwise, as Christopher Bedford does in his analysis of Shoot and its aftermath, performance can no longer be defined by, or confined to, its originary event. Instead, it “splinters, mutates, and multiplies over time in the hands of various critical constituencies in a variety of media, to yield a body of critical work that extends the primary act of the performance into the indefinite future of reproduction.” For this reason, he describes performance as having a “viral ontology.”
The language of the viral is also implicit in Mechtild Widrich’s account of the “repeated outbreaks” of VALIE EXPORT’s Genital Panic (1969). Widrich argues that this performance comes into being not through its live enactment (which may or may not have occurred) but through the artist’s descriptions of it as well as later photographs, posters and reenactments. The epidemic also finds its way into Mónica Mayer’s essay, when she states that “performance art is such a lethal virus that it has even infected the ways in which we register it.” But the broader thrust of her essay concerns the hitherto obscured history of performance art in Mexico, from the 1920s to today. In a similar move, Eleonora Fabião examines the work of Afro-Brazilian artist Arthur Bispo do Rosario, firstly to retrieve a history of South American performance but secondly to propose a theory of performance that focuses on its precarity rather than its ephemerality. She writes: “If ‘ephemerality’ denotes disappearance and absence (thus, predicating at a certain moment, something was fully given to view), ‘precariousness’ denotes the incompleteness of every apparition as its corporeal, moving, constitutive condition.” Likewise, Meiling Cheng considers Chinese performance in order to argue that “documentation reviews, repeats, records, relearns, and re-imagines a partially memorialized past to generate a present tense re-encounter with pieces from the past and to facilitate future generations’ reliving of these semi-processed pasts in their present moments. What we call ‘live,’ then, points to a perceiver’s present-tense intertwinement with the fleeting sense of being alive.”
In this way, Widrich, Fabião and Cheng reflect Schneider who, in an iteration of her 2001 article “Performance Remains,” argues against the archival logic that perceives performance as disappearance and proposes instead that performance persists “differently, via itself as repetition—like a copy or perhaps more like a ritual—like an echo in the ears of a confidence keeper, an audience member, a witness.” Jane Blocker treats the issue of repetition in more detail in her analysis of the work of Bruce Nauman and Steve McQueen, as does Andre Lepecki who discusses his reenactment of Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (RT83, p17). Here, instead of positioning the document as score for, or record of a performance—as is so often the case—Lepecki sees Kaprow’s scribbled papers as “nothing other than a necessary and unavoidable rehearsal.” Hannah Higgins deals with another iconic figure, George Maciunas, not so much to recuperate his reputation or work but rather to displace it and to bring other Fluxus members to the fore. Her analysis of the politics of reception sits nicely alongside Sven Lütticken’s chapter, which argues that “performance art has never been a real threat to the spectacle” or indeed to capitalism. Instead, it has become complicit in the economy of experience and when documentation is banned, as in the case of German-British artist Tino Sehgal, it merely serves to add to the event’s aura and expense.
documents
In the second section we move from theories about documents to documents themselves. The section collates 20 documents by artists as diverse as Franko B, Nao Bustamante, Tim Etchells, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Orlan, Rabih Mroué, Santiago Sierra and Faith Wilding, among others. Some of these documents focus on a particular performance, as in the case of Sierra, who provides four pictures of Polyurethane Sprayed on the Backs of 10 Workers (2004), but leaves the brief commentary to Jones. Others consider a performance and its double, as in the case of Wilding who places the text of her iconic Waiting (1972) alongside photographs of its reenactment Waiting-With (2007). Still others take a chronological approach, as in the case of Gómez-Peña who rehearses a timeline of his life in art. Local readers will be interested in Lucas Ihlein’s account of his and Louise Curham’s recreation of Anthony McCall’s Long Film for Ambient Light at Artspace and in gallery director Blair French’s account of Aftermath (2007), which investigated the intersection of performance and installation and included works by Arahmiani, Guy Benfield, Franz Ehmann, Anne Graham, Tony Schwensen and André Stitt (all discussed and documented here; also see RT79, p8).
dialogues
In the final section there are 11 interviews and performance lectures, with Jones and Heathfield participating in three apiece. The former interviews Carolee Schneeman, Marina Abramovic and Shezad Dawood about a range of issues, but in each instance the conversation comes back to the vexed issue of copyright. For Schneemann, the issue is that she cannot access some documentation of her work as it is being withheld by the documenter. For Abramovic, the issue is not simply about documentation but also the performance and, specifically, the performer. In performing other artists’ work, she seeks not simply to reactivate the past but to model an ethical relationship to it: “to show how we should really address these pieces…in re-enacting other artists’ works you have to ask permission, you have to do your own interpretations…there has to be a kind of seriousness to it.” For his part, Dawood attempts to sidestep the issue by incorporating photography into the performance itself, so that the two become indistinguishable.
Heathfield’s interview of Teching Hsieh (RT90, p52) focuses on his One Year Performance series. Of these, Hsieh says (echoing Auslander, Bedford and Widrich), “an audience’s presence is not vital. As long as audiences know my concept and the real action I did, they can use their own experiences and imagination to feel these artworks…[In fact, sometimes] being present physically may not be helpful.” Heathfield also interviews artist Janine Antoni, whose practice is at once “object-centred, site-specific, and process work.” While these two interviews are fairly formal, Heathfield’s encounter with Tim Etchells and photographer Hugo Glendinning [who has been investigating the nature of performance photography with Forced Entertainment. Eds] is more casual, but still contains some poignant thoughts on the “professionalization of presence” and the persistence of distance.
Other interesting interviews include Joanna Scanlan and Tilda Swinton’s conversation about agency and authorship in Swinton and Cordelia Parker’s performance-installation The Maybe (1995) and Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s discussion of their restagings of iconic rock gigs and the possibility of “re-witnessing…something that’s already mythologized, unwitnessed except perhaps by a lucky few.” Perhaps they could restage the work of Goat Island, the now-retired company of Lin Hixon and Matthew Goulish, but if not, we will always have their lyrical lecture performed here on the page as poem, script and image. Philosopher Jean Luc-Nancy performs a similarly poetic pas de deux with Mathilde Monnier, in which they discuss the role of repetition and medium in dance and the (im)possiblility of (im)mediation.
The breadth and depth of Perform, Repeat, Record are astonishing and the range of artists, scholars and insights invigorating. The book has been years in the making, hardly surprising when you consider the work involved in producing, sourcing and selecting all of this material, not to mention some of the writing (Jones and Heathfield’s introductions are excellent). While I initially read the book as a riff on presence and persistence, when I reread it I found this phrase from Heathfield: “Perhaps we should no longer speak of presence and absence, since there is neither one nor the other, but the tireless movement between: the continuous flux of bodies with other bodies. No more talk then of a unitary or self-coincident body. No integrities, but instead intensities of exchange and flow.” The achievement of Perform, Repeat, Record, then, is not that it recuperates presence but rather that it starts to destabilise the presence-absence polarity that has structured performance studies for the past two decades. It does so, not in order to plot a third way, but rather to facilitate the intense exchange and flow of ideas. It leaves me overwhelmed.
Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield, eds, Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History; Intellect, Bristol and Chicago, in collaboration with the Live Art Development Agency, 2012, 656 pages; www.intellectbooks.co.uk
SOMETIME IN THE 1950S PIANIST CECIL TAYLOR WROTE THE DECEPTIVELY SIMPLE PHRASE, “FORM IS POSSIBILITY,” WHICH ON REFLECTION MEANT THAT ARTISTS WITH ENQUIRING MINDS AND SENSIBILITIES SHOULD USE THEIR ARTISTRY TO DISCOVER NEW MUSICAL FORMS.
To break from convention and the comfortably familiar is never easy but the rewards often justify the effort. The quest to discover new forms was enthusiastically undertaken by the 16 local and international artists who performed at SoundOut 2012, a festival of improvised music that took place on the last weekend of January within the leafy, low-key environs of Theatre 3 nestled behind the School of Art on the Australian National University campus. Organiser Richard Johnson overcame what can only be described as baffling funding difficulties from those who should know better to program a world class line-up of performers from Canada, France and Japan, playing with like-minded home grown artists who mostly operate in the realm of electro-acoustic improvisation.
Featured instruments at the festival included saxophones, guitars, prepared piano, flute and percussion augmented by seemingly haphazard assemblages of electronics that littered a stage, at times looking like the aftermath of a computer technology fair. The electronics were mostly made up of exposed components used to explore tonality and pitch with barely a melody to be heard. The aim was to engender new ways of listening and engaging with music particularly when electronics and acoustic instruments melded and overlapped. On occasion the electronics became part of the physicality of the performance: Canadian guitarist Eric Normand coaxed feedback from an electric bass while hammering on an assortment of small electronic devices with an increasing intensity to match the fierce overtones in the music.
In contrast, a festival-goer wandering into Theatre 3 early on Saturday afternoon would have been greeted by trance-inducing ambient drones coming from Julian Day’s uncomplicated keyboard with which he created a dreamy minimalism that sent the listener on an introspective and altogether pleasant journey that might otherwise have been brought on by the likes of Steve Reich or Brian Eno (see RT106, p39). Then there was the Zen-like discipline with which Japanese artist Toshimaru Nakamura conjured micro-tonal sound shapes from a no-input mixing board that alternatively blended with Sabine Vogel’s (Germany) flute and Jim Denley’s hissing and chattering wind instruments to create a serene solemnity.
Richard Johnson, Andrew Fedorovitch, Rishin Singh, Laura Altman, Sam Pettigrew
photo James Brown
Richard Johnson, Andrew Fedorovitch, Rishin Singh, Laura Altman, Sam Pettigrew
Until Saturday evening all performances had taken place in the theatre but, in the democratic tradition that defines improvised music, a last minute collective decision was made that Richard Johnson and Andrew Fedorovitch on saxophone with Rishin Singh on trombone, Sam Pettigrew on bass and Laura Altman on clarinet would play in the theatre courtyard. As dusk came on, the audience, fellow performers and assembled instrumentalists eagerly gathered outside. The ensuing 50-minute performance, which involved gentle breathing in its creation of insect-like harmonies, transformed a pleasant natural environment into a harmonious space of free creativity where at one point trombonist Singh spontaneously rustled some leaves in response to the tactile call and response entreaties from Richard Johnson’s impressive looking and sounding baritone saxophone. In this way the music melded with the environment and the organic surround sound was a joy to behold.
This was a shining example of spontaneous field performance, but let’s contrast it with the superb Saturday afternoon theatre set from electric guitarist Ryan Kernoa (France) in combination with bassist Eric Normand (Canada) and Canberra musician Michael Norris on electronics. Normand does a lot more than merely strum his instrument in time, which one has often come to expect from a bass player. If I can be so bold as to make the comparison, Normand does for improvised music what Joy Division bassist Peter Hook did for post-punk—redefining the role of the bass so that it becomes a lead instrument allowing for harmonic interplay beyond simply laying foundations. Normand attached all sorts of devices to his instrument. He banged and stroked it in equal measure to set a scene that involved controlled feedback, theatre in the form of physical contortions in response to the sound, and a highly disciplined approach to noise-making. This was enhanced to the nth degree by the mouth-watering atonality of guitarist Ryan Kernoa who altogether dispensed with melody to explore bristling electrified string configurations which at times reminded me of Thurston Moore at his finest. When Michael Norris’ flailing tonal pitches on electronics were added to the mix the ensuing sound from the three performers was a welcome reminder that improvised music hasn’t forgotten noise.
Of the 18 performances in the festival the latter two stood out for me amidst so much activity involving all sorts of instrumental blends.
SoundOut 2012 was a special event. The mechanics of each performance, including the nightly collective improvisations, produced a beautiful harmony of artistic intent and sense-stimulating sound-making. This highlighted a dedication to the open and democratic craft of improvised music from the performers who invited audience members to experience the joys of supple creativity. Improvised music is about fulfilling the potential of uninhibited self-expression within a setting that encourages genuine engagement and there was plenty of this on offer at SoundOut 2012. It seemed that true freedom was within reach.
SoundOut 2012, artistic director Richard Johnson, Theatre 3, Australian National University, Canberra, Jan 27-28; http://soundout2012.blogspot.com.au/
Jon Rose & Hollis Taylor, play a fence in the Strzelecki
AT THE TURA 2012 PROGRAM LAUNCH IN PERTH ON MARCH 21, JON ROSE WAS ANNOUNCED AS THE WINNER OF THE AUSTRALIA COUNCIL’S PRESTIGIOUS DON BANKS AWARD.
UK born, Rose arrived in Australia in 1976 at the age of 25 and, somehow finding this country’s idiosyncrasies to his liking, exploded into a plethora of activities, which continue to this day. As well as being a consummate violinist and versatile improviser, he has made a multitude of instruments and has also created many radio works. Most recently he has been exploring interactive music making experiences in works such as Pursuit, using musical bicycles (see RT90; RT96), an interactive netball game, Team Music! (RT96); and the multi-user festival hit The Ball project (RT102).
Rose has also embraced the Australian landscape, evidenced in his Great Fences of Australia project undertaken with his partner, violinist Hollis Taylor, which saw the couple travelling across the outback playing and recording the sounds of Australia’s many fences. This journey is beautifully documented in a book by Taylor called Post Impressions (see RT82). Another epic adventure was the Ad Lib Project, an extensive archive of weird and wonderful music-making activities from around the nation, housed on the ABC’s website. It perhaps best illustrates Rose’s conflicted love for this country and its curious history which he enticingly articulated in his 2008 Peggy Glanville-Hicks address (RT83) and which he discusses in the following conversation with equally respected musician and improviser Jim Denley.
instrument builder
Jim Denley In preparing to talk with you today, I actually went back and listened to some of your early 1980s work, like Devils and Angels [Fringe Benefit Records 1984], where you use multi-stringed instruments. If I compare it to say Derek Bailey’s solo guitar playing in the 70s it seems like what you were doing is a logical extension—this search for a kind of multiplicity through complexity and velocity.
Jon Rose A multiplicity of events—that’s a good way of describing it. First of all there was a 19-string violin which was stolen in London. Then there was the 19-string half cello to replace that, which has incidentally also been stolen…Those instruments were specifically about multiplicity, using also amplification to project certain things, so you had a stereo image and could place things within that image.
But there were other instruments…I had ideas about certain areas of experimentation and I built the instrument to try to figure out what to do with it. So there was one violin with a very long neck and 16 strings set up in a way that they were never intended to be played individually, but played as a mass. There was an instrument that was played by the wind—an Aeolian violin. There was a tromba marina [a medieval triangular bowed string instrument] that was attached to my boat which I had at the time, which used water to change the focal length of the resonating chamber. There was a megaphone violin that had an FM radio microphone in it. So it’s not true to say that it was always about finding multiplicity. Some things were about trying to get a sound happening which was not the normal sound made through applying a bow to a string—the usual hold, slip, hold, slip, sawtooth wave form.
Jon Rose playing the Tromba Mariner, 1979
…In the second half of the 70s I was in this strange country and I just got on with what I thought was appropriate. There were not that many people to play with and those that were available had a certain area they wanted to go in that wasn’t so interesting to me, I was basically left to my own devices…I enjoyed that space. I think if I’d stayed in Europe I wouldn’t have done that somehow. I would have been busy in bands or in groups. And I also had the advantage of very quickly being able to get commercial work to live off. Playing in a country and western band or in Club Marconi two or three nights a week…You could be a professional musician and the rest of the time free to do whatever you wanted to.
JD In thinking about those times, as a young musician from the ‘Gong’ [Wollongong], you were kind of a mentor to me and other musicians. You just sidestepped the local inanity and if you couldn’t get a gig in Sydney, you didn’t worry about it…You presented an international agenda and a multimedia agenda. If you couldn’t operate in one sphere, you’d operate in another.
JR Well in the 70s…you could go almost anywhere except the Opera House and play a concert, because people said, ‘Sure.’ The first improvised concerts took place at the Institute of Contemporary Art—a gallery run by a couple of architects which [sound artist] Rik Rue helped set up. And they were just delighted to have people come in and do stuff. The same as Stephen Mori Gallery later. It was open. The thing that I got from Sydney was that I finally formulated what I was going to do with my life…which was this artform around the violin or strings in general.
the dominant body
JD There’s something almost paradoxical in much 21st century and late 20th century music: it’s almost as if music has been running away from the human body. I was talking to Stephen Adams, the composer and ABC broadcaster, recently and for him you represent a kind of humanist approach to phraseology and gesture. It seems to me, when you work with technology, the body dominates the technology.
JR That’s very well put. Otherwise I’m not interested. I’m not interested in pressing return and playing a file. Although that’s not to say it can’t be useful. That technology doesn’t give me much as a musical instrument, whereas if I apply it—like in The Ball project for example—[I can] use technology to try and re-engage the populace at large in the business of making music. The last time I did The Ball Project, it was in front of 400 people [at MONA FOMA 2011]. I said they shouldn’t kick it because they might hurt their feet but really they could do what they wanted with it, and they just started to make music. You couldn’t sit those 400 people down and get them to listen to a playback file of electronic music, they wouldn’t have it. But they got it immediately—they could make this stuff.
Jon Rose playing Palimpolin, with the K-Bow at Galapagos Club, New York, 2010
photo Jill Steinberg
Jon Rose playing Palimpolin, with the K-Bow at Galapagos Club, New York, 2010
All my interest in that technology comes from the bow anyway. That’s the first thing I tried to do was to make the bow interactive so that it would do other things…Now I’m working with a small company in California who’ve got real resources and can make things much better than I could…But all that interest in the technology comes through the violin. If I hadn’t been born when I was I would have been doing “what can a violin do with a horse and cart?”…I’d be looking at the context for what to do with this instrument. Because the context in which it’s usually stuck is always out of date.
historical landscapes
JD It seemed to me that you embraced Australia. And reading through Hollis Taylor’s book, Post Impressions, she documents a love—especially of the outback. What is it about Australia that makes it such a fertile place to work?
JR Culturally this is a perverse place, and it’s a uniquely perverse place. Colonialism happened all over the world but Australia is extremely distant and it’s a big place with a small population which has made people confused, psychologically really unsure of themselves, desperate to grasp at things from other places, overseas and so on. And you have this culture that is permanently in denial, even to this day.
… If you look for the history of music, particularly in the 19th century, here it’s just got these extraordinary stories. You couldn’t make them up. The first Aboriginal string Orchestra in the 1860s, founded by [Benedictine Monk] Rosendo Salvador in New Norcia in Western Australia; you meet people like Rosina Boston who plays the gum leaf. Everywhere I look, there’s some extraordinary stuff…Jamaica has come up with three genres of music: Ska, Reggae and Calypso, it’s also a colonial place. But in Australia, nobody came up with a genre. And you start looking at why…If you’re going to be a musician and live in Australia, you have to deal with the place at some level.
JD Is that why, later this year you’re going to take a bunch of young musicians out to the far west of New South Wales?
JR This is the plan… I’ve been doing this stuff (with Hollis too) pretty solidly since I got back and started living in Sydney again in 2002. Any skill or knowledge we have should be handed on…we’re the only people who have worked extensively in that part of the world, as far as I know, in what you might call…what do you call it these days…I hate the word ‘sound art’—new music, experimental music, exploratory music?
exodus australis
JD As the Ad Lib website proposes, there’s a lot of interesting stuff that’s happened here and is happening…We’re saying this is an exciting place, Australia, it’s got a great history. And yet, you’ve gone off with a DAAD scholarship to Berlin and lived in Europe again and then returned. I see generation after generation of young musicians relocating, usually to Europe. Are we always going to be parochial? To make a mark do you have to relocate?
JR Up to 1981, which was the first time I played at Moers (New Jazz Festival), I assumed that no one ever got paid for this. I thought that’s extraordinary. So after that there came more opportunities and I thought, well I’ll divide my time. Pretty much every year I lived in Berlin I did come back, mainly because there was the option of the ABC [radio] which was amazing. I could make programs and do some concerts and whatever. But it became clear to survive doing this work you have to be international. But where my passion lies is here.
Also it depends what kind of a musician you are…I have a broad output and so that makes me different really from say a classic improviser. That’s a little part of what I want, but it’s not the whole picture.
changing contexts
JD But that collaborative improvising musician which you clearly are, a lot of people might not know about that Jon Rose. With the Don Banks Award you’re presented as a composer.
JR It’s a word I hate. But eventually you give up trying to correct people. What is it? I don’t know any more because now everyone uses the word ‘improvisation’ all over the place…
…Collaboration is one thing, and with different groups—working with communities on one thing and seeing what can come out of that; working with classical musicians is another. But basically it’s the context change that interests me in a primary sort of way. Anything can sound extraordinary if you change the context. So one of the pieces I did out at Wogarno station [for Tura New Music’s Outback series] was with a front-end hoe—a digging machine basically. Just an amazing collaboration which I thoroughly enjoyed. It wasn’t because it was warped or off-centre. I really enjoyed it. It made me want to play.
I think I need to be in situations where I really want to play like it’s my last concert, that’s really important to me. And I tend to avoid situations where that’s not the case, where it’s going to be a routine….That’s not possible for me. I guess it is for some musicians and I guess that’s really important for music that there are people who will do that—keep the Mozart churning out.
…I really want to use the Don Banks to point or put a very small spotlight on the other people and other organisations that do whatever we want to call this music, this ‘other music.’ People who have worked in What Is Music?, Robbie Avenaim, The Make It Up Club, the NOW now, people like yourself Jim, Tos Mahoney in WA, Lawrence English and lately MONA FOMA, there’s a list…The funding is a joke, but somehow the stuff keeps going. And the wonderful thing about it is that it points back to a time when to be living in Australia made you look to your own resources. It was the ultimate do-it-yourself boot camp in a way and has been for most of its history.
The Australia Council’s Don Banks Award is valued at $60,000 and is offered annually by the Council’s Music Board honouring an artist of high distinction and over 50 years of age who has made an outstanding and sustained contribution to Australia music.
APPOINTED IN 2009 TO THE ARTISTIC DIRECTORSHIP OF MELBOURNE’S CHAMBER MADE OPERA, DAVID YOUNG (FORMERLY ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF APHIDS) HAD, HE SAYS, “A BRIEF TO RE-ENERGISE CMO AND TO TAKE IT IN A COMPLETELY NEW DIRECTION. SO WE’VE FOCUSED ON WHAT I THINK I CAN DO BEST WHICH IS TO MAKE NEW WORK THAT CROSSES THE BOUNDARIES OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC, PERFORMANCE, THEATRE AND VISUAL ARTS, BRINGING ALL THESE TOGETHER, WHICH IS WHAT OPERA HAS ALWAYS DONE.”
Young also knew he had to do it “on a scale that was manageable for the company while retaining the level of quality—the pristine nature of the productions—that CMO had always been associated with. But I knew I wasn’t ever going to be able to do that on a huge mainstage and at a huge cost, not on the budget I had. Hence it wasn’t rocket science for me to look to where chamber music had started—in the home, in the living room. This gave us advantages: not just manageable scale, but it also allowed us to take risks we couldn’t with a big commission. And I’ve been able to give the artists completely free rein. It was incredible that Daniel Schlusser made a work [Ophelia Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, 2011] that he wouldn’t have made in a theatre—living room opera pushed him into a completely new space.”
CMO now has a considerable number of works in repertoire, “seven to eight within two years,” waiting to manifest in other living rooms or translate to theatres or galleries. “It depends on the particular work,” says Young, “Some are very site specific. The Box [2012, see RT109] was realised in a beautiful Robin Boyd-designed house, known as The Iris, on the Yarra Bend, a spectacular setting. It’s a very unassuming building actually, but you really feel like you’re in a tree house. The location is a big part of the experience, responding to the natural environment, the sounds, the house itself. But would The Box work without this house? Over 20 years I’ve translocated shows from one place or one city to another. Some work translates directly; you change nothing. Others have to be re-configured totally—that’s pretty much the case with the living room operas unless you can find a similar house or build one in a theatre. Malthouse is turning the Beckett Theatre into a living room for our co-production with Rawcus, Another Lament (RT101), featuring Ida Duelund Hansen, a wonderful Danish double bass player and singer. It premiered in 2011 in a home in suburban Armidale. We’re having a number of a very active conversations about placing our works.”
CMO is also involved in community engagement: “I have a very broad view of living rooms, as I have of opera,” Young quips. “The ‘Venny’ is an amazing adventure playground in Kensington located very close to a lot of public housing populated with people from very diverse backgrounds, culturally and economically. I thought it would be good for an extreme performance company to work with this community and give them access to contemporary performance. It’s very much a pilot. It will culminate in April with an opera performance involving the children and our musicians. We hope it will be of long term benefit for the community, for the playground and an opportunity for further work with us.”
Hellen Sky, Minotaur, Chamber Made Opera
photo Daisy Noyes
Hellen Sky, Minotaur, Chamber Made Opera
Young always sees his work in an international perspective: “It’s really essential that Australian art engages with the rest of the world. It’s so easy, particularly in Melbourne, to think that the whole world is here because we’re so far away and because we have at least one of everything, of each kind of venue and company. It’s so important to work with artists from other places—as a reality check, to get a sense of what else is happening and understand where we fit in.” Chamber Made is engaging in an exchange program with LOD Music Theatre in Ghent. “It’s a contemporary chamber opera and music theatre company. It’s one of the companies most aesthetically aligned with us and also in scale. So we’ve committed to a two-year partnership which will begin with an exchange residency. First, artists will come from LOD and then Australians will go to Ghent in June. Our hope is that this will lead to a co-production which will premiere in Belgium in December 2013 and then play in Australia and, possibly, tour in Europe.”
It’s already a busy year for CMO with Fritz Hauser (Switzerland) having performed his solo gong work, Schraffur, at the Melbourne Recital Centre in March; the premiere of The Box (with Aphids, Fritz Hauser, Boa Baumann, Speak Percussion and Deborah Kayser) also in March; Minotaur (2011) travelling to the Aurora music festival in Western Sydney in May (see p14); and Another Lament at Malthouse in June as part of the XS Opera Festival.
What about the rest of the year? “Even busier,” the indefatigable Young declares. “There are the Nova Workshops with Opera Victoria: four works in two showings in December, one by Mary Finsterer which she has been working on for 10 years. The relationship with Victorian Opera has been wonderfully collegial and mutually supportive. We’re also running our second librettist workshop. There’s a real gap; very few places professionally develop librettists. It’s a kind of boot camp and one of the most successful things that came out of last year’s workshop was a ‘speed dating’ session between librettists and composers, 20 of each. We’re doing that again.” It’s clear that Young sees CMO as playing a nurturing role, whether in the development of new opportunities for composers through the living room and in-repertoire model, in community engagement and in skill development and partnering. Later in 2012, the Minotaur Trilogy will premiere and CMO will develop a new multimedia work.
It’s with a sense of jubilation and relief that Young declares, “The Box has been a breakthrough. It sold out a week before opening and I feel we now really know what we’re doing.” David Young’s idiosyncratic approach to art-making—multidisciplinary collaborations, site specificity, inventive sponsorship and commissioning models, the nurturing of new work and an international perspective—has reinvigorated and reinvented Chamber Made Opera and is breathing much-needed new life into Australian music theatre.
LIKE MUCH OF THE EXPLORATORY MUSIC IT FACILITATES, THE NOW NOW FESTIVAL IS CONSTANTLY EVOLVING. BASED IN SYDNEY’S INNER WEST FOR THE SECOND YEAR, AFTER TRAVERSING THE INNER CITY AND BLUE MOUNTAINS SINCE 2002, THE 2012 FESTIVAL TYPIFIED THIS MOMENTUM WITH ONE OF THE MOST DENSE AND DIVERSE PROGRAMS YET. FEATURING TWO PUBLICATIONS, TWO SOUND WALKS, OVER 100 ARTISTS, ONE GROUP EXHIBITION AND SEVEN NIGHTS OF MUSIC OVER FOUR VENUES THERE WAS AN ABUNDANCE OF SOUND-BASED ART AND MUSIC TO ABSORB. I’LL FOCUS ON THE JANUARY 19 AND 21 PERFORMANCES.
With a sizeable crowd already ensconced in velvet armchairs or on cushioned crates at the Red Rattler Theatre, Melbourne duo 12 Dog Cycle began the evening with a low volcanic hum emanating from Nigel Brown’s dissected accordion. Amplified with contact microphones, the subterranean drone was punctuated by the scratch of electric toothbrush bristles against the exposed bass reed blocks accompanied by the shrill shrieks, gurgles and sudden silences of vocalist Alice Hui-Sheng Chang. With the uncanny ability to make her voice sound like more than one, her piercing bursts of sound roamed the warehouse rafters like a swarm of insects.
The ominous tone took a turn towards farce when Wollongong’s Gooble Gobble launched beards-first into the third set of the evening, presaged by “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” from one of the circuit bent toys littering the stage. Guitarists Gary Butler and Jariss Shead played everything, including the kitchen sink, with chaotic energy, partially reined in by the poise of laptop musician Nathan Penzer. While the resultant noise-fest would have benefited from distillation, the performance was endearingly enthusiastic, culminating in Butler fiercely grating styrofoam on his guitar strings and showering the stage in ‘snow.’
As well as being a showcase, the NOW Now Festival functions as a conference, bringing musicians together from around the world to network through events and curated groupings of performers. One such duo was the creative and ambitious pairing of turntablist Jordan Dorjee and stand-up comedian Nick Sun. Such a potentially awkward union requires excellent skills in improvisation, and though the set did feature some nice moments of spontaneity—“You want a joke? This whole situation is a joke”—there was, if slight, an overall lack of synergy. Nevertheless, it was bravely attempted and essentially one of the most experimental pieces of the festival.
On January 21, with the Red Rattler bathed in a dim blue glow, French musicians Christine Abdelnour and Ryan Kernoa began with a slow build-up of cicada-like trills that morphed into a low flapping pulse. Abdelnour’s guttural squeaks and skids from the saxophone complemented Kernoa’s icy guitar tones and waves of feedback, smoothly balancing the challenging and the pleasurable. Together they explored many terrains of sound, flowing in and out of melody and dissonance, calm and crescendo, weaving a misty sonic journey that held the audience entranced with its ethereal allure.
Next up was a trio featuring acclaimed Japanese no input mixer player Toshimaru Nakamura. With a sound at once immense and subdued, Nakamura came forth with a series of powerful, evenly spaced thumps, heralding the onset of Sam Pettigrew’s long notes on double-bass and Dale Gorfinkel’s randomised clicks and rattles. Gorfinkel’s adapted vibraphone and trumpet contraption are intriguing tactile playgrounds, as illustrated when a small boy approached mid-set to peer into the bell. Both Gorfinkel and Nakamura harness the haphazard tendencies of their instruments with masterly finesse. Pettigrew, pockets overflowing with implements, never gives the impression of overuse, instead employing each tool to timely advantage. The set peaked in a cataclysmic upsurge highlighted by Nakamura’s static spits, Pettigrew’s textured drones and the harmonic ring of mallet on vibe keys.
At the end of six sets it was somewhat taxing to drag drooping eyelids to the assembly of people awaiting the departure of Anthony Magen’s hour-long sound walk, but I’m glad I did. With a mind brimming with music it was a welcome relief to walk in silence through Marrickville. The only injunction being not to communicate, thoughts were free to roam, alighting on various heightened sensations without stress or force. Instead of a solemn procession there was a sense of playful youngsters cheekily provoking the curiousity of passersby, with some participants darting off to contemplate a vent or jump through a hole in some brickwork. The route itself was thoughtful and extensive with three stages most clearly defined by their soundtracks. After the isolated growls of passing cars inherent to the industrial precinct, the second part of the walk flowed into Sydenham Railway Station where our silent collective went virtually unnoticed amid beeps, automated voices and the occasional disengaged passenger. On the other side, wind and breath intertwined while clover heads thwacked against feet as we crossed Tillman Park and made our final stop-off under a large moonlit tree. When Magen stood up to declare the sound walk over we began to make our way back, our elated chatter contrasting with the rich magic of silent listening.
One of the aspects I love about experimental music events is the sense of communion with a crowd of people without the need for physical or verbal communication, a sensation epitomised by the sound walk and present in everything the NOW Now does. Inclusiveness and warmth is felt in all facets of the organisation; through the idiosyncratic MCs, quirky flyer design and camaraderie between all involved. As co-founder Clayton Thomas puts it, the mission is to “break down cliques” and that shared experience is what makes the NOW Now such a beloved and quintessential initiative in the Australian music scene.
The 2012 NOW Now Festival, curators Laura Altman, Sam Pettigrew, Rishin Singh, venues Stone Gallery, Hardware Gallery, the Red Rattler, Jarvie Park, Sydney, Jan 12–22
THE PERCUSSION ENSEMBLE MOUNTED THE STAGE TO DEAFENING APPLAUSE. THEY HAD TRAVELLED THOUSANDS OF MILES ONLY A WEEK BEFORE TO FIERCELY REHEARSE THE MOST CHALLENGING CONTEMPORARY REPERTOIRE FROM AROUND AUSTRALIA AND THE WORLD. THEIR BACKS ACHED AND THEIR HANDS WERE RAW FROM THE ORGANISED MAYHEM THEY REFUSED TO BLUFF. THE HALL FELL INTO AWED SILENCE. THE ENSEMBLE PAUSED, BREATHING IN UNISON.
This was not exactly the concert I attended, but rather the impression I got watching the six interstate percussion students that comprise Nomad Percussion perform their debut concert at the ANU’s School of Music. The room was small, but the courageous atmosphere surrounding their performance of such large-scale works as Anthony Pateras’ Refractions and Iannis Xenakis’ Persephassa on a week’s rehearsal was unforgettable.
When the members of Nomad Percussion met at National Music Camp it became evident that they should share their expertise and networks by forming an interstate percussion ensemble. In doing so they would build on the strengths of an already active Australian percussion scene, crossing the largely geographical but to some extent taste-driven divide between the repertoires of Synergy Percussion in Sydney and Speak Percussion in Melbourne. The welcome diversity of works on their debut program attested to the success of this formula. Last Waltz by Synergy artistic director Timothy Constable presented that group’s driving tom toms, snare drums and bongos. This tour de force contrasted well with Melbourne-based composer Mark Pollard’s minimalist reverie for vibraphone, The Heavenly Muzak Machine, the third movement of which features an undulating hymn played only with the fingertips.
In terms of scale, the highlights of the performance were the sextets Refractions and Persephassa, both pieces performed by Speak Percussion at the 2011 MONA FOMA (RT 102, p5). Steve Fitzgerald conducted Pateras’ Refractions, drawing from his experience performing the piece with Speak the previous year. The opening sextuplets where six timbres are rapidly passed between the performers were tightly executed with the relatively dead performance space lending a precision to quiet sounds and those with a fast attack. As such, the standout moments of the performance were not those of dynamic climax but the combination of wood rattles with crumpled paper and wood claps with kick drums and cymbal rolls. The intimate space also lent drama to the ear-tickling tones produced by Anna Ng’s expertly rubbed shot glasses.
While the grand spatialisation of Xenakis’ Persephassa suffered from the nigh on claustrophobic conditions, the physical energy and command of conductor William Jackson transported the audience to a hall eight times the size. Here the ensemble exhibited its greatest sense of musical intention, sustaining a uniformity of dynamics and timbres in the sounds passed around the room while deftly managing global dynamic and rhythmic changes. This strength of vision never waivered as the lengthy piece drew on the performers’ energy reserves, nor when they were called upon to blow whistles while playing.
It is thrilling to see Australia’s tradition of percussion moving from generation X to Y, especially with Nomad Percussion’s interstate vision and experience. I would like to see more concerts with this level of daring. Where is the Australian New Music String Quartet? The Oceanic Wind Ensemble for the Performance of Contemporary Music? The Intercontinental Students’ Electroacoustic Orchestra?
Nomad Percussion, A National Percussion Project, debut concert, ANU School of Music, Canberra, Feb 18
See RealTime 107 (p42) for Greg Hooper’s review of the debut of another percussion ensemble, Early Warning System. Eds.
The Lady from the Sea, Abhinaya Theatre Company & Topology
photo Kevin Stallan
The Lady from the Sea, Abhinaya Theatre Company & Topology
THE LADY FROM THE SEA PRESENTS IBSEN’S PLAY AS A COLLABORATION BETWEEN BRISBANE’S TOPOLOGY AND THE ABHINAYA THEATRE COMPANY FROM KERALA (INDIA, ON THE LEFT HAND SIDE NEAR THE BOTTOM) AND TOOK ABOUT NINE MONTHS TO PUT TOGETHER, AMIDST OTHER WORK AND THE WHOLE PROBLEM OF EAST/WEST TIMEZONE DIFFERENCES. THERE’S A LOT OF TALK ABOUT COLLAB POST NET, BUT TIMEZONE STILL GETS IN THE WAY—IT’S A VERTICAL SLICE OF THE WORLD THAT’S THE EASIEST TO LINK UP. NORTH-SOUTH DIALOGUE FOR THE WIN.
The stage is a two and a bit level stack: Topology high up on the top, then below them the stage proper and surtitles in between. It’s the beach/under the ocean, the water clear, the sound of waves. Sand on the stage. Behind the stage the projection screens. Women float along, remora attached, translucent pale blue.
Rich conch drone from the bass and composer Robert Davidson’s first piece begins, exquisitely lyrical, an exceptional work. On stage, a woman struggles in argument with a disembodied, low male voice(over), soft and convincing in a language I don’t know. Doesn’t matter, tone carries all, and I seldom use the translation.
There are also three blokes on stage wearing fully head-covering flesh-coloured helmets that have a single eye. Now, generally, “fleshy helmet with single eye” induces risible penis references but these guys act as a form of mute chorus that seems to work. I feel as though I should be finding it more kitsch than I do.
The pace is slow—I think how a pulp thriller writer like Matthew Riley writes life as a rapid-fire series of short sharp episodes, zero character, zero description, the story transmitted through causal linkage of concrete actions. The Lady from the Sea presents the other view of life story, sloughed of events, immaterial. Life as Idea in Duration, rather than events jammed next to each other, strung out in a line, the more the better.
Two characters and “the voice.” The woman is emotional, distraught, histrionic. She is tempted by the voice, which seems to represent a type of counterfactual life. If only I’d done that and not the other then I wouldn’t be stuck with this, the now, the actual. She is distressed by her marriage to the actual man, the man on stage, who is not emotional, or not that you’d notice. Their marriage is breaking down, the glory days gone. The woman feels trapped by her own decision to marry and he just can’t say anything right, nothing that can make up for lost time, the dream life, the ‘if only then were now, choices would be changed, now would be better.’ She blames him for her decision. He should have been above the social, seen that she was trapped inside it. She wants to be apart, individual. He doesn’t disagree so much as can’t see the point. Unable to engage.
And underneath and throughout, the music. Like slow waves. Direct. True.
Abhinaya Theatre Company and Topology, The Lady from The Sea, in Malayalam with English surtitles, after Henrik Ibsen, composer Robert Davidson, director Jyothish M G; Brisbane Powerhouse, Feb 24-26
THE COUNT TAKES AN AXE TO THE DOOR OF THE COUNTESS’ CLOSET, THINKING SHE HAS A LOVER HIDDEN THERE. LATER, AFTER A HUNT, HE DRAGS A DEAD STAG INTO HER ROOM. FIGARO, OVERCOME BY JEALOUSY, PLACES THE BARREL OF A SHOTGUN IN HIS MOUTH. THESE MOMENTS OF AGGRESSION, WHETHER TURNED OUTWARDS OR AGAINST THE SELF, ARE SHOCKING, HIGHLIGHTING THE MALE TYRANNY AND MISTRUST CENTRAL TO MOZART’S THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO. THEY ARE INTEGRAL TO BENEDICT ANDREWS’ SUPERB PRODUCTION FOR OPERA AUSTRALIA.
Although we can laugh it off in due course, comedy is built on the fact of danger. The precariousness of virginity, marriage, property, status, indeed life in The Marriage of Figaro needs to be felt—it is in the music, and is on the stage. This opera is breathtakingly driven by threat and risk-taking, evasion and subterfuge, lies and delusions. Yes, entrapment and escape in Figaro are richly comic and inventively realised as such by Andrews and his adroit cast, but as with the opera’s rare moments of soulful interiority and loving embrace, the comedy needs to turn dark to reveal its deep seriousness. But Andrews, ever faithful to the work, does not dwell there. Although the impact of the shattering of the closet door reverberates for some time, the stag in the boudoir quickly becomes a comic prop in the ensuing farce to reveal who’s been duped. There is little time to linger or reflect.
Peter Conrad writes of Figaro, “If the work’s dramatic concern is living space, the musical counterpart to that is breathing space…Figaro is breathlessly overworked…[It] scrambles to keep up with the restless rearrangements of society and human relationships. The excitement of Figaro is the uniquely theatrical one of watching people thinking on their feet…” (A Song of Love and Death, The Meaning of Opera (Graywolf Press, 1996). Andrews sustains that breathlessness dramatically, even making it literal—and musical—in the character of Bartolo (Conal Coad), wheezing, grabbing for his oxygen mask, the gas cylinder attached to his walking frame.
Elvira Fatykhova, Michael Lewis, ‘The Marriage of Figaro
Elvira Fatykhova, Michael Lewis, ‘The Marriage of Figaro
As for living space, Andrews and his collaborators have located the opera in a large home in a gated community of our own time. Identically dressed servants and a pair of security guards, who frequently frame the action, serve the Count (Michael Lewis) and Countess (Elvira Fatykhova). During the overture, a sense of busyness and sociability is palpable as staff arrive for work and change into their uniforms. Before long, a frantic Upstairs Downstairs interplay between social castes is in motion.
For an opera that plays on a lack of privacy, on social congestion that yields invasion and farce, that interplay is, oddly enough, heightened by the spaciousness of Ralph Myers’ design. His stark white, modernist, open spaces convey the potential for vulnerability—where can one escape? Hide? From this Andrews extracts opportunities for comic invention and makes the most of the space for enlivened movement using, for example, a clothes rack on wheels, rows of overcoats, a cleaner’s trolley, plastic chairs. True to the opera’s inclination to farce, there are doors either side to small ante-rooms with which to engender constant suspense and surprise. With a bit of theatre magic at one point, the Count leaps out of a washing machine, one of the few objects in the room. With deliberately limited means Andrews, Myers and costume designer Alice Babidge dextrously make the most of what’s at hand or worn by the performers.
The Countess’ softly curtained room, with bed and vase of (tellingly deployed) flowers, looks like an immaculate Thomas Demand creation (RT107, p44), stripped of superfluous furnishing and decoration—until the Count shatters the closet door; and, later, he drags in the stag. Like the axe, the stag seems chillingly real in the rarefied world of an austere mansion removed from any reality beyond its immediate inhabitants. The contrast between the room’s potential for serenity and refuge, textured by the warm light through its wide window and the sudden invasions by violence and mortality yields indelible images as if from the Surrealist imagination.
Joshua Bloom & Taryn Fiebig, The Marriage of Figaro
Joshua Bloom & Taryn Fiebig, The Marriage of Figaro
The characterisations are vivid, broadly comic but textured with the minutiae of complex emotional states. Ensemble playing is constantly responsive and the large scenes finely orchestrated—not least the Lucy Guerin-choreographed wedding dance, communal, gestural and neatly articulated with its kicks and dips at the waist, strangely familiar and alien at once, part of the other-world, beyond most us, of the Count and his 21st century contemporaries.
In the end, the performers demount the wedding paraphernalia, opening out the space not into a garden but a relatively unbordered night sky, a space of possibilities, especially of forgiveness and renewal as signalled in the shower of confetti that falls through the blue and lighting designer Nick Schlieper’s contrasting of stark interiors with this cosmic outside. As David Cairns reminds us in Mozart and His Operas (Penguin, 2007), one of a number of radical elements of the opera in its own time was that the Count must beg for forgiveness in public, just like his servant Figaro. The sudden vulnerability of power is explicit here in this vast space.
The production has everything you’d expect from this opera: the evident emotional and physical affection between Figaro (Joshua Bloom, nicely played as not too much of a charmer and with just the right touch of machismo that turns dark) and Susanna (Taryn Fiebig, a lively, determined, easy presence); the Countess’ despair; Marcellina’s (Jacqueline Dark) moral turnabout; the attraction felt by the Countess and Susanna for Cherubino (played perfectly by Ann Yun, replacing an indisposed Dominica Matthews); the emerging alliance of Susanna and the Countess, at once cunning and emotionally shared; the funny-sad revelation of Figaro’s origins; and a wickedly funny and abrasive gardener (Clifford Plumpton). The orchestra was in fine form, conducted by Anthony Legge, the libretto was delivered in Jeremy Sams’ witty translation, and the overall singing was lucid to the point of little need to attend the surtitles.
It was one of ‘those’ nights when I saw Figaro—conductor Simon Hewett and soprano Dominica Matthews were indisposed, and a technical fault brought down the fire curtain during the much-praised, opening gambit in which the rooms of the house, and the characters, are revealed successively and cinematically left to right. We didn’t get to see it. Despite this, and couple of subsequent curtain-falls, the production was an impressive one, faithful, coherent, funny and sad. As we exited, after passionate applause, on one side of me someone said, “That’s it. That’s the last time. We’ve tried our hardest.” On the other, “I’d heard bad things about what it was going to be like.I’m so glad I came”
This was a superb production, capturing at once the opera’s humour and its heart-felt seriousness, its laughter and pain, and grace, by deploying a conversational, quite realistic, closely observed dramatic tone within a deeply symbolic setting, where the impossible becomes possible and cruelty is forgiven. Andrews’ production is the perfect expression of David Cairns’ observation that “Figaro is both reality and ideal—anitheses too deeply interfused to be separated.”
Opera Australia, The Marriage of Figaro, composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, libretto Lorenzo da Ponte, English translation Jeremy Sams, conductor Anthony Legge, director Benedict Andrews, designer Ralph Myers, costumes Alice Babidge, lighting Nick Schlieper, choreographer Lucy Guerin, Opera Theatre, Sydney Opera House, Feb 6-March 24
PLAY-READINGS ARE OFTEN WRITTEN OFF AS INFERIOR THEATRE EXPERIENCES, MERE SKETCHES HINTING AT THE TRUE SHAPE OF SOME FUTURE OPUS. IT’S NOT SUCH A STRETCH TO REVERSE THE EQUATION, THOUGH: AN ACCOMPLISHED READING COULD BE SEEN AS (TEXT-BASED) THEATRE STRIPPED TO ITS ESSENCE, THE PURITY OF LINE, THE SENSE OF SOMETHING UNFINISHED, THE GAPS AND SPACES SUGGESTING AN ABSTRACTION WHICH IS OFTEN THE GOAL OF OTHER ART FORMS.
A play-reading by necessity demands its audience construct theatres of the imagination, filling out these voids with colour, detail and meaning. It’s not unusual to view a full production after catching a reading and wonder why the final incarnation seems so strangely thin in comparison.
Music theatre comes up against an obstacle in this regard. It’s one thing to layer your own fantasies of set and lighting and casting and direction onto a heard text. It’s another to have to complete a half-rendered score in your own mind, unless you’re an accomplished composer yourself. This puts Arts Centre Melbourne’s annual Carnegie 18 series in a curious position. The staged readings of new music theatre aren’t just professional development showings—they’re open to the public with a ticket price attached. But neither are they simply pared-back versions of full productions. They’re abbreviated 40-50 minute presentations of works that are still in various stages of formation, and one of the most important elements of the series is that audiences are invited to offer feedback as to where a show needs serious work.
dreamsong
The three pieces that made up this year’s Carnegie 18 differed starkly in intent, style and probable outcome. The most developed of the trio, for instance, would be well suited (eventually) to the music theatre category in a comedy festival. DreamSong is a broad swipe at Evangelical Christianity – a US television preacher finds that the millions of dollars his song-and-dance showmanship have raised for his church have been all but squandered, and decides to manufacture a miracle to put the books back in the black. He grooms a young boy-band style poser to play the role of Jesus v2.0, but the reluctant arrival of the real Messiah on the scene threatens to topple his house of (credit) cards.
It’s farcical stuff—Jesus goes by the awful moniker of Chris T, though playing the Son of God as an over-the-top Woody Allen is worth a few good laughs. The score tends toward rock opera style, which suits the brash and sometimes outrageous plotting and characterisation. It’s not the most layered or sophisticated of musicals, but neither does it take itself too seriously.
cautionary tales for children
Meanwhile, there’s a seriousness to Arena Theatre’s Cautionary Tales for Children which is commendable—not towards its subject matter, but towards its young audience. It was fascinating to watch 6 and 7-year-olds polled as to whether certain elements were too scary for their age group, and which bits they wanted to see more of. Not that the crowd were silent during the showing, of course. The rambunctious outing cleverly adapts Hilaire Belloc’s dark and ironic moral fables of the early 20th century through the conceit of a time-travelling troupe journeying from the past to redeem some of history’s most wicked children—ie the viewers. Various catastrophes and deaths are played out through song (composed and performed on piano by Mark Jones) and, inevitably, each instructional tune fails to provide salvation for the terrible onlookers. It’s fine fun, and given Arena’s resources will likely be honed to a much tighter production in the near future.
the new black
The New Black was perhaps the most ambitious of the three new works, and was clearly still in the development stage. Story-wise it hops around: initially it appears a tongue-in-cheek dig at corporate hypocrisy and racism before shifting into a more emotive exploration of the conflicts experienced by young Indigenous Australians who turn their backs on their communities. The entire second half was more or less omitted, with promises that suggested a kind of road movie to Canberra, adding an extra element to the mix. I’m not sure if the script itself has been completed yet; if so, it could benefit from some dramaturgical sharpening.
But The New Black also offered the most lively and dynamic score of the three, its young musical director Hue Blanes displaying his confidence in working across a range of styles from gospel and soul to the more familiar soaring ballads of commercial music theatre. It was unfortunate—to this onlooker at least—that during the feedback session afterwards no less than two audience members asked why the music didn’t include more Indigenous Australian instrumentation; a didgeridoo, say? Kudos to Blanes for pointing out that the instrumentation is his and he is, you know, an Indigenous Australian himself. But again, when audiences are asked to fill out the curves of a work-in-progress, there’s no way of controlling what they’ll come up with.
Arts Centre Melbourne, Carnegie 18 New Music Theatre Program, The New Black, based on an idea by Leeroy Bilney, director Stephen Lloyd Helper, musical director Hue Blanes, Fairfax Theatre, Feb 1-4; Arena Theatre, Cautionary Tales for Childen, based on the verses by Hilaire Belloc, adapted by Claudia O’Doherty, composer Mark Jones, director Chris Kohn, designer Jonathon Oxlade, Fairfax Theatre, Feb 4-7; DreamSong, book & lyrics by Hugo Chiarella, music Robert Tripolino, director Michael Gurr, musical direction, arrangements Andrew Patterson, Fairfax Theatre, Feb 4-7; Arts Centre Melbourne
The work chosen to go to full production from the 2011 Carnegie 18, Contact!, is about to premier at the Arts Centre Melbourne (see RT102, p36). Written by Angus Grant and directed by Cameron Menzies, Contact! focuses on Australia’s most popular women’s sport, netball, exploring the highs and lows of the Hyatt Park Rangers under-21 team. After the premiere season in Melbourne, Contact! will also be touring regionally throughout Victoria. Contact!, Fairfax Studio, The Arts Centre Melbourne, April 11-14, 17-21, 24-28, 7pm, April 13-15, 21-22, 28-29, 2pm; www.artscentremelbourne.com.au
I AM AT BATTAMBANG AIRPORT IN NORTH-WESTERN CAMBODIA AS THE SETTING SUN GLOWS RED BEHIND A HAZE OF DUST AND SMOKE. SINCE THE ROADS TO THE NATION’S CAPITAL, PHNOM PENH, HAVE BEEN IMPROVED THE AIRFIELD HAS BECOME A HANGOUT FOR THE CITY’S YOUTH.
I am learning to ride a motorbike but don’t get far down the runway before meeting Bo Rithy. He is one of the artists enjoying the Battambang artistic renaissance promoted by recent articles in the Cambodia Daily and the New York Times (Travel, Dec 18, 2011). But where does this scene come from and what are its most pressing challenges today?
With expanding international horizons Battambang’s artists are searching for the contemporary surrounded by, but cut off from, the past. Without direct access to the mannerisms of contemporary art there is a question as to exactly what being contemporary means.
A New York Times’ article in December last year advertised Battambang’s historic palimpsest of pagodas, colonial villas and 1960s Cambodian architecture. It also hailed two new artist-run initiatives, Sammaki and Make Maek, as building on the ancient artistic legacy of the town stretching back to Angkorean times. But at the basic level of skills it is not easy for Khmer artists to turn towards the past. With the suppression of traditional culture and killing of artists by the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979, this history provides contemporary artists with little more than a backdrop or narrative against which to work, one that has been appropriated by French colonial, Khmer Rouge and contemporary governments alike.
“There isn’t any link between contemporary artists and older artists, but I want there to be a link between these two generations,” Theanly Chov, manager of Sammaki art space explains. The scission in Cambodia’s cultural history has recently been addressed by organisations such as Cambodian Living Arts through their efforts to reconnect living masters of traditional arts with young students, but this model has been most successful in reviving the performing arts.
Interestingly, I was often given the names of musicians when I asked people about their favourite Khmer artists. The New York Times article also cited a principally musical lineage of artists from Battambang, notably the 1960s singer Ros Sereysothea. I think this is less an affectation on the writer’s part than an indication of the importance of music in Cambodia, in particular the 1960s golden age of Cambodian pop that commands a nostalgic fascination to this day. But where are the artists?
There are two notable artists from Battambang who survived the Khmer Rouge regime and one of them holds the key to the Battambang art scene. Vann Nath survived in Phnom Penh’s S-21 camp by painting portraits of Pol Pot and later recorded scenes from S-21 in horrifying canvases. His name is now synonymous with a Phnom Penh-based artistic reappraisal of the Khmer Rouge period. Srey Bandol learnt to paint during the Khmer Rouge period in refugee camps on the Thai border and has taught in Battambang at the French-Cambodian art school Phare Ponleu Selpak (the Shining Light of Art) since 1994. The establishment of Phare has given hundreds of students a solid grounding in drawing and painting skills, leaving them hungry for “new techniques” when they graduate.
Artwalk, Make Maek Gallery
photo Justin Lorenzon
Artwalk, Make Maek Gallery
The focus of Phare’s visual arts program was evident at Battambang’s first art walk in February. Lights were hoisted into the air, colourful banners were posted outside shop fronts and tables were set up in the streets. Sammaki and Make Maek showed large collections of paintings and hosted performances from Phare’s circus school. Houses, shops and cafés on the main strip also set up easels to exhibit paintings by local artists.
“It is not hard to be an artist after school, but it is hard to find new techniques,” Rithy told me in his studio at Sammaki during the art walk. I often heard “new techniques” repeated with grail-like zeal. Artists do not always have computer skills, so there is not a widespread culture of looking online for new ideas. The exchange of ideas in Battambang happens face to face, with travel providing eye-opening opportunities for local artists. Robit Pen, a current student at Phare, has recently returned from an exchange in Nantes, in France. There he refined his technical skills and learned about art of the 20th century. Now he wants to make contemporary art, citing Pollock and Picasso as influences. Rithy has just returned from Japan where he was struck by the contrast between its bustling metropolises and cities seemingly abandoned after the tsunami. “Now I am busy thinking about Japan and art,” Rithy explains, “From now on I want to make big art, installations.” Rithy is part of the “second generation” of Phare graduates working in the wake of his older colleagues, the first wave from 2002, who set up the first artist-run spaces in Battambang and have been searching for new techniques for a decade now.
When artists do find a new way of making art they can meet with some resistance from the wider community. Long Loeurn, part of the first generation of Phare graduates, produces high definition photographs of paint dripping down blocks of ice. He performed his art at a pagoda in Phnom Penh during the Water Festival, when two to three million people descended on the city. Suspicious about what he was doing, police tried to stop him until the owners of the local Java café and gallery intervened. Elsewhere his mixing of colours has brought him under suspicion of witchcraft.
Without a tradition of artist-run initiatives in Battambang the organisation of Sammaki and Make Maek has not been easy. Katie Hallaran, one of the ex-pats who helps out at Sammaki, reports it is difficult to get artists to mind or clean the space and critical discussion of the artists’ own works is almost non-existent. Task sharing and finding time for open discussions are problems faced by any artist-run initiative, all the more so when you are building it yourself. There is no shortage of energy though. Mao Soviet, founder of Make Maek gallery, puts it well when he says, “I want Battambang to be the centre of art in Cambodia.” Battambang has an artistic history, but it is up to this generation to build an artistic tradition.
The art walk cited here was held in Battambang, Cambodia, February 3.
For more arts travels see the new online feature: RealTime Traveller
It’s not difficult to describe the Green Ban Art Walks. They were a series of walks through Kings Cross and Woolloomooloo on five successive Saturday afternoons in August 2011. Celebrating 40 years since the first Builders Labourers Federation (BLF) bans, which saved much of the area from high-rise, the walks were sponsored by Performance Space and moved from Cross Art Projects down to Big Fag Press in Woolloomooloo.
Each walk began with a talk by a prominent urban activist of the time, while other former activists spoke at buildings, monuments and plaques along the way. In other words it resembled the architectural tourist walk so common around the world, except that many of the speakers had played a crucial part in the historical events that were being discussed. But where is the art part?
There was the obvious conventional historical connection. Victoria Street in particular has a long bohemian history with many artists living there since the late 19th century. In 1973 the hard edge painter Joe Szabo, for instance, lived in the most contested area of the street and organised an exhibition in support of the Green Ban. Other artists were active in the various resident action groups—the weaver Margaret Grafton was secretary of the Darlinghurst group and painter Vicki Varvaressos was an active member; the Victoria Street group’s Mick Fowler was a part-time jazz musician while conceptualist Dave Morrissey, cartoonist Jenny Coopes, author Sasha Soldatow and myself were all active there; Brenda Humble and Toby Zoates were involved at various times in Woolloomooloo.
In the late 1970s a Margel Hinder sculpture became a centrepiece of the Woolloomooloo public housing redevelopment while Michiel Dolk and Merilyn Fairskye led a group of painters, most of whom had lived in the area, in creating a series of murals on the railway pylons through the centre of Woolloomooloo.
The walks themselves were organised by artists, starting at Jo Holder’s Cross Art Projects gallery where prints by Fiona Macdonald based on local Green Ban imagery were part of the display, and terminating in Woolloomooloo at Big Fag Press where artists and walk co-ordinators Diego Bonetti, Lucas Ihlein, Mickie Quick and Pat Armstrong continue the tradition of artist involvement in the Woolloomooloo community.
All of this and more was discussed on the walk, yet somehow that just scratched the surface. It was clear that from its inception the walk itself was to be seen as art—after all it was being sponsored by Performance Space so surely there would be an element of performance in it?
If you regard art making as the process of generating meaning then the walks fitted the bill, almost too well. However, there is a sense in which a walk with meaning is a good walk ruined. We feel we should be able to merely observe and enjoy the scene without interpretation, or at least that’s what an “art for art’s sake” worldview would suggest.
Green Bans Art Walk
photo Alex Wisser
Green Bans Art Walk
But this was not the aimless ramble of the flâneur, not the process of creating a personal map and mythology through exploration, nor was it the purposeful utilitarian walk to get from Point A to Point B. These walks were the process of imposing memory on an urban space, an almost ritualistic march through spaces loaded with historical meanings, even though they may seem to be comparatively esoteric in the eternal sunshine of our present real estate bubble.
And although walks in recent times have developed into an artistic genre of their own— mythogeography—since time immemorial they have been associated with memory, with monuments and the memorialisation of past events and people. The walk along the River Avon from Woodhenge to Stonehenge with the ashes of the year’s dead seems to have been the real reason for Stonehenge, and religious piety was manifested in the Way of St James, the great medieval Christian pilgrimage across most of Europe to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, or the Islamic Hajj that still brings millions to Mecca each year for the ritualistic circumambulation of the Ka’ba. In Australia it could probably be argued the song lines of Aboriginal migration routes memorialise the Dreamtime ancestors, while Anzac Day and May Day marches memorialise different types of political and social struggles.
It seems entirely appropriate that the Green Bans should be celebrated in walks, after all, marches and street demonstrations were so much a part of their process. The Green Ban and resident action group movements were a challenge to the idea that cities are owned by developers, rather than being a form of commons owned by the entire range of inhabitants. The struggle that followed, often an extremely violent struggle, aimed to defend not just the physical fabric and architectural heritage of Sydney but also to ensure a more equitable sharing of the city by all its inhabitants. Walking through Victoria Street, the scene of some of the most violent confrontations, and then down across Woolloomooloo, an area saved for public housing, demonstrated the movement’s range of successes and failures and also the way the movement itself accommodated a wide spectrum of social and class interests.
But finally, inherent in all this is a different understanding of the term “art.” At the time of the Green Bans only the most radical could conceive of art as anything other than individually created paintings and sculptures in galleries. In the 40 years since, our understanding has moved on and we can easily accept these walks as a form of cultural activity equally as legitimate as any painting, even though they are ephemeral events rather than objects, involve galleries only peripherally and are collaborative to the point where there are contributions by dozens of individuals—I have only named a small number of them here.
Yet I think there is another change occurring. Implicit in the art walks is not just the claim that the walks are art, but also that the events they memorialise were art—or at least an important and innovative form of cultural activity. Recognising that a series of events that are conventionally seen as political activism can be also be seen as art, implies that the official art world does not own culture any more than developers own the city.
In fact our culture´s constant process of innovation and adaptation is the work of all of us whether we call ourselves artists or not. It is only by cultural innovation that anyone can earn the title “artist,” and the BLF members’ cultural innovation in defence of a liveable city made them artists, probably the best artists of their era and greater than any of the shallow decorators we see celebrated in art museums.
At this point in human history, the cultural memes we have created, like consumerism and corporate capitalism, are beginning quite literally to destroy us, and probably much other life on the planet. This is exactly what the media tries to obscure with unrelenting propaganda, insisting that we live the best of all possible lives in the best of all possible systems, that any suggestion otherwise is crazy or treacherous. In the face of such propaganda, issues like cultural innovation are suddenly issues of survival. But there can only be change when there is an understanding that there has been change, that things were different in the past and can therefore be different in the future.
If you ignore the official cultural gatekeepers, it becomes clear that much of the time the most influential cultural players, the “artists,” are unrecognisable, anonymous even, and acting in groups, like the BLF members. If we understand that, then we also open a path to future action—they took control of the city once and we can do it again, and we can take control of other things like the media and the museums. By walking through areas they saved, recognising what they did and documenting and celebrating it, we enact a memorial to them but we also enact a memorial to ourselves because it is our city, this is part of the process of re-occupying it. Every last anonymous one of us can fight back against the destructive values of consumption, greed and narcissism that are constantly impressed upon us by the media and the profiteers bent on private control and ownership of what should be a shared world.
If events like the walks can help to keep alive the residents’ and builders labourers’ example of innovation and activism, then we also keep alive the possibility that we too could adapt our cultural memes into less toxic ones. We could help save civilisation simply by remembering that perhaps it can be saved because others also tried to.
“Ici est tombé pour la libération…” This text was commonly found on eye-level white plaques throughout Paris in memory of Resistance members killed there during the final days of the liberation of the city in the Second World War.
Green Bans Art Walk was a WALK project, part of Performance Space’s 2011 season of walks, promenades, marches and strolls in and around Sydney and beyond.
Performance Space, Big Fag Press, Cross Art Projects, First Draft Depot: Green Bans Art Walk, Sydney, Aug 6-27, 2011
LOVE, REPRESENTATION AND POPULAR CULTURE ENTERED INTO A KNOTTY MÉNAGE À TROIS IN PROJECT 12: THIS IS NOT A LOVE SONG AT ANNA PAPPAS GALLERY IN MELBOURNE. EXPLORING WHAT LOVE IS AND ISN’T, FROM THE IMPASSIONED TO THE ETHEREAL AND THE ILLUSIVE, 15 ARTISTS FROM AUSTRALIA AND ABROAD WERE BROUGHT TOGETHER BY CURATORS ANNA PAPPAS AND LAURA CASTAGNINI AND GIVEN LICENCE TO DEPICT, UNPICK AND REMAKE THE NOTION OF LOVE IN A RANGE OF MANIFESTATIONS.
While the work of artists like Sue Dodd and Salote Tawale touched darkly and disturbingly on the twisted desire of celebrity culture, others approached love with open-hearted curiosity and candour. Malcolm Whittaker’s extension of his A Lover’s Discourse project, titled Personal Classifieds 2012—What Would You Love Someone to Love About You?, takes the form of four documentary photos of subjects sourced through personals columns. To each he asked the question of the work’s title and with each photo their response is printed on a side panel. Audacious in its simplicity, the work is realist, voyeuristic and as straightforward as the kids’ toys on the carpet in one photo, or the tidy kitchen bench in another.
Heidi Holmes also takes a straightforward premise, creating an elegant ‘lover’s discourse’ from the list of names of the people she and her husband had sex with before they met one another. The two-column list (one for him and one for her) is accompanied by a recording, on headphones, of the conversation during which the list was written. At face value The List is humorous and light, and at the same time dignified by the clean white frame and gallery setting. But between the lines—lines like “I was not really keen but sorta keen” and names like “Chris…pregnancy scare” is a powerful sense of honesty and the nitty-gritty of sex coexisting—a ‘love’ infinitely more complex than what we think of when we think about love.
Romantic love is also the subject of Tony Garifalakis’ Anonymous. As clean and elegant as Holmes’ work, Anonymous consists of 15 bullets in a neat perspex display case, each engraved with a single capital letter to form the sentence “WILL YOU MARRY ME?” If physically beautiful objects, their soft-glowing gold and bronze colouring and perfection of form disturb. Phallic but also feminine, the coppery tips like unsheathed lipsticks. Though the obvious reading is a dark and conflicted one, the bullets look less like ammunition than carefully polished brightwork, to the extent that one wonders whether perhaps they deliver something other than destruction.
In the work of Garifalakis and Danae Valenza alike, the contradictory qualities of metal—its hardness and malleability, its seeming permanence and corrodability—become metaphors that evade easy interpretation. Valenza’s It’s Just a Matter of Deciding Where to Begin creates a synaesthetic relationship between three objects around the phrase of the work’s title. On the gallery wall, the text is engraved in reverse on a small brass plate while a music box plays the same phrase, translated into Braille on the metal scroll of the instrument. A ‘blind composition’ on paper—a series of painted dots suggesting Morse code, tickertape symbols or, of course, Braille—completes a trio that balances tactility and curiosity, evoking a sensuality that ultimately cannot be contained by its constituent media.
Zoe Scoglio with interaction designer Chris Heywood, Inter-radiessence
courtesy the artist
Zoe Scoglio with interaction designer Chris Heywood, Inter-radiessence
From Lucas Grogan’s enormous needlepoint Private Island and Darren Sylvester’s large-scale Lightjet prints to the intimacy of Meredith Turnbull and Ross Coulter’s almost ephemeral white stoneware in Love Wedge, the works in Project 12: This is Not A Love Song embody states of being from cynicism or nostalgia to spirituality and intimacy. Most arcane is the relational world created by Zoe Scoglio and Cait Foran in Inter-radiessence. On a plinth, under slightly twitching mauve light, a tiny landscape is created from small rocks, crystals, pieces of coloured plasticine and two small vials, one containing an eerie turquoise liquid. Two hand prints are marked out: a pair of viewers each places a hand on the outline, and then closes the circuit by placing their other hands together, over a blue dot.
Sound and light play differently for each new connection: in one, trembling shards of shadow or light grow out of fingertips and all the other objects, like crystals, creating a sense of identification with the ostensibly inanimate props. In other ‘incarnations,’ kaleidoscopic bands of colour or clouds of rainbow ‘dust’ appear—in one, tendrils of smoke seem to curl from the fingertips—all suggesting unseen energies brought to light. To a changing soundtrack of chirpy, thunderous or eerie tones, the work is both playful and finely wrought, and a fitting completion to the gamut of approaches to the theme.
Project 12: This Is Not a Love Song, artists Marco Paulo Rollo, Salote Tawale, Ben Coonley, Darren Sylvester, Heidi Holmes, Malcolm Whittaker, Zoe Scoglio and Cait Foran, Tony Garifalakis, Danae Valenza, Sue Dodd, Lucas Grogan, Irene Hanenbergh, Meredith Turnbull and Ross Coulter; Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne, Feb 7-March 10
Pipilotti Rist: I Packed the Postcard in My Suitcase, 2011
photo Andrew Curtis
Pipilotti Rist: I Packed the Postcard in My Suitcase, 2011
IN THE LARGE CENTRE ROOM AT ACCA, ENORMOUS AMOEBIC BLUE BLOBS ARE CAREFULLY PAINTED ONTO AVOCADO WALLS, THEIR RANDOM BUT FAMILIAR SHAPES REPEATED ON TWO LARGE SCREENS WHICH FACE DIRECTLY DOWN FROM THE CEILING. VISITORS TO THE GALLERY ARE PASSIVELY DIRECTED TO LIE DOWN AND LOOK UP, SPRAWLED OVER THE HUMAN-SHAPED BLOBS CREATED BY ISLANDS OF TIERED CARPET, EACH SUCCESSIVE LAYER SMALLER THAN THE LAST SO THAT THE WHOLE SEEMS LIKE A SERIES OF TOPOGRAPHIC LINES.
It’s an elaborate and carefully constructed decor, reminiscent of some 70s pleasure-pad, the random shapes and textured pile evoking psychedelic dreams. But the ‘art’ is on the screens above: from below we look up at a video which looks down from above, the camera stalking a woman as she walks, climbs trees, drops her bundle of small red balls—are they fruit, are they artifice? The colour is lush, almost unreal, and things keep changing. Surfaces break and swim under swathes of hair or kelp. We surrender, passive and pacified, to an endlessly morphing series of images, elements and colours, as mesmerising and as mutable as the Northern Lights, and in many ways as inscrutable.
Gravity Be My Friend (2007) is one of several works in I Packed the Postcard in My Suitcase, the first major Australian survey of Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist’s work. The opening line of Juliana Engberg’s catalogue essay sums up the almost naïve flavour that infuses Rist’s work: “Welcome to the wonderful worlds of Pipilotti Rist.” Engberg describes “fantasy worlds born of the poetic psyche” which are “gorgeous and generous,” “ecstatic,” and “restorative.” In other words, Rist’s is a world where pleasure is privileged: while the technology and Rist’s virtuosic video composition are crucial, the purpose seems ultimately to be revelry ahead of revelation.
Rist herself speaks of “freeing the image,” “mixing it with your body, with the rooms.” Describing the gallery as “a collective living room where people meet,” she creates in it “a manual for the people to do it themselves.” “I hope,” she says, “[that] people will go home and put their flat screens on the ceiling.”
There’s an unfamiliar and perhaps refreshing artlessness in the statement. More familiar and perhaps more satisfying than the admittedly joyous hallucinations of Gravity Be My Friend are the two works first seen on entering the exhibition: one, a framed painting of a tourist view of Venice, overlaid with video; the other the polished surface of a dining table on which rich projections play.
Pipilotti Rist: I Packed the Postcard in My Suitcase, 2011
photo Andrew Curtis
Pipilotti Rist: I Packed the Postcard in My Suitcase, 2011
Small Laguna (2011) begins with the taken-for-granted ‘frozen’ memory of a place—a framed oil painting of Venice—and overlays it with Rist’s eternally fluid images and colours. A cluster of cherry blossom competes with a raw red sausage; a naked, dancing woman in what seems a stark hospital room gives way to tunnels of mysterious fibre, or lush, veined lips, or wisps of smoke. The images are applied to the ‘canvas’ with the precision of a brush—it’s as though Rist determines to take the trope of a flattened and singular memory and confound it with myriad ‘real’ memories: the constant stream of visual images experienced by everyone, all the time, whose viscerality and plenitude are erased by default in every representation we manage to make.
At the dining table, with its sparse setting of dishes and wine glasses, the moving pool of light morphs from kaleidoscopic patterns to birthday candles to what seem like petals of blue gas flame. Under dim ambient light there’s a sense of the table itself beginning to move and play also; the colours catch in the glasses and seem to animate them. Upside Down Table (2011) is unsettling: a familiar domestic setting, but one where the lush play of mind-images points to a rift between the imaginative and the grounded. Rather than immersing the viewer, it shines uncanny light on the limits of freedom to a soundtrack that seems to echo conversations, muzak and the objects that form the video’s constant play.
If the sequence of the exhibition leads initially from an uncanny overlap of material and immaterial to the supine and sublime immersion of Gravity…, the immersion is completed in the third room, where drifts of voile fabric capture vignettes of pastoral scenes, graphics like smoke rings and curious breezes. Free to wander in the midst of Rist’s visuals, the visitor is, theoretically, completely within the saturated mindscape of Administrating Eternity (2011); at the same time, the tactility and the necessity to return to the body, to walk, to touch, are preparation for the final room in Rist’s series of spaces.
Entitled I Couldn’t Agree with You More (1999), this last room zooms both in and out, strangely stark: one wall of the space is taken up by a screen on which a woman walks around a supermarket, the camera solipsistically turned on herself and the shelves disorientingly slipping by, filled with products to replace the now-expected cornucopia of luscious and colourful images. Superimposed on the woman’s forehead is a vignetted film in miniature—a series of men and women, like forest-creatures, who seem to enact a clumsy, primal love-chase around her mind. Created well before the other works in the exhibition, this piece seems a seed: a suggestion of the stories within stories formed by the interplay of memory, imagination and banal reality which balloon to ecstatic proportions in the more recent work.
Unlike much contemporary video work, I Packed the Postcard in My Suitcase seems for the most part to sidestep interpretation and intellectuality in favour of unapologetic hedonism. I’m reminded of Linda Dement’s statement that her aim is “to give form to the unbearable.” Pipilotti Rist’s work seems to take an opposing but complementary trajectory, intent on going beyond words to a poetic realm and giving deliberate form to the pleasurable. But it is the slightly unsettling works—the almost-trembling dining table and the weird interior/exterior of the supermarket scene—that have deepest resonance. There is a sense that these are the places where we are allowed to think rather than simply feel. Not captive in the television-like, psychedelic lure of Gravity Be My Friend, the real wonder in these first and last seen works lies in the fragments we cannot quite absorb and must participate in to apprehend; and their suggestion both that imagination is uncontainable and that it inevitably affects and changes what’s around it.
Pipilotti Rist, I Packed the Postcard in My Suitcase, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne, Dec 21, 2011-March 4, 2012
After ‘Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue, 1999-2000
jeff wall
A retrospective of the works of inventive Canadian photo-based artist and writer Jeff Wall is cause for celebration. An initiative of the Art Gallery of WA (in association with the National Gallery of Victoria) this first Australian survey of Wall’s work brings together 26 of his luminous and largely life-sized images. Jeff Wall will also be in situ for a time, in conversation with AGWA’s Chief Curator Gary Dufour at 2pm on Sunday May 27. “For Wall, the event depicted, formal composition and poetics are always important and in combination create works that extend photography as a medium and test the limits of ‘near’ documentary and conjectures built on memories. All of Jeff Wall’s photographs create distinctive imaginative new pictorial realities” (AGWA media release). Jeff Wall Photographs, AGWA, May 26-September 10; transferring to NGV in November and to Sydney’s MCA in 2013
skater
Esther Godoy, Fitzroy, Melbourne, Australia 2010
photo Nikki Toole
Esther Godoy, Fitzroy, Melbourne, Australia 2010
Skater: at The National Portrait Gallery in Canberra offers a more intimate selection of images by Melbourne photographer Nikki Toole who for the last three years has been collecting images of skateboarders around the world. She observes, “Many skaters speak of a solitary mind space while skating; of entering into another state of consciousness. To make these portraits I asked the skaters to place themselves within this meditative space.” This exhibition is a partnership between the National Portrait Gallery and Geelong Gallery. Skater: Portraits by Nikki Toole, National Portrait Gallery until May 2 and at Geelong Gallery? June 30-September 9
IS THERE ANY AUSTRALIAN CHOREOGRAPHER WITH A PHYSICAL GRAMMAR AS DISTINCTIVE AS ANTONY HAMILTON?
Not that he’s the most original shapemaker or that he hasn’t absorbed the influences of many of his peers and mentors. But there’s no-one quite like Hamilton, for both better and worse. He’s pursued a particular method of pop-and-lock staccato, freeze-and-reverse repetition and an organic/mechanic blurring so rigorously and for so long that not only has it become a signature, it’s become one that no-one else can forge. It always makes for compelling viewing when he’s demonstrating the results of his investigations, but when he choreographs on others they can never quite match the man himself.
Thankfully in Hamilton’s collaboration with Melanie Lane, the double bill Clouds Over Berlin, he seems to have melded minds with someone developing an art equally as striking. In Hamilton’s Black Project 1, Lane is still at times a nanosecond away from matching his stop-start brilliance, but in her own Tilted Fawn she delivers an experience quite unlike the various threads that have been woven through Australian choreography of the last decade.
There’s a mythic quality to the work which reveals itself coyly, and it’s as cool and inhuman as true myths always end up being. The audience sits in the round, bordering a space populated only by a few dozen cardboard bricks the size of shoeboxes. Lane methodically shifts and stacks and shuffles these, her movements concise and efficient enough to allow the inert objects as much presence as her own body. But gradually the onlookers become positioned as insubstantial gods watching the accelerated architectonics of human activity, each new structural formation engendering new associations. Stonehenge, a highrise ghetto, a walled estate, the Twin Towers? Sounds begin to emerge from the tiny edifices: music, whispers, conflict. The referents are never made explicit but it’s hard not to fashion your own interpretation of each configuration presented, and the cold, closed nature of these depictions subtly shifts its audience into a position of meditative spectatorship that allows us to forget our own corporeality.
Melanie Lane, Tilted Fawn
photo Maik Reichert
Melanie Lane, Tilted Fawn
Then Lane returns as a violent, excessive vision of that vanquished bodily reality, clad in a pale and featureless skinsuit with elongated hooves that cause her to stagger across the space. The wildness of her motion extends so extremely in all dimensions that it’s almost overpowering, and the constant collapse of each ankle isn’t just resonant with the image of the tottering newborn fawn but conjures a whole species of flailing, howling, confused beings up till now sublimated by the fairy village of urban planning.
Life remains absent from Black Project 1, however. Hamilton and Lane appear as gleaming black wraiths making their way across a post-urban wasteland. It’s a vision that gestures to the choreographer’s earlier interests—aerosol art, digital tech, breakdance—while stripping away any literal referents. The dance itself may be Hamilton’s most developed and sustained exploration of his own practice; certainly, its realisation occurs in a set and lighting state that is as immediately impactful as any I can recall. It’s less curious, perhaps even less generous than Lane’s effort, but in tandem the pair make for a bewitching penumbral experience both stirring and unsettling.
Read another review of Tilted Fawn at Perth’s Fringe World on page 7.
Clouds over Berlin: Tilted Fawn, choreography, concept, performer Melanie Lane, sound composition, installation Chris Clark, artistic collaboration Morgan Belenguer, dramaturgy Bart van der Eynde, costume, props Melanie Lane, lighting design Max Stelzl; Black Project 1, choreography, concept, design Antony Hamilton, peformers Antony Hamilton, Melanie Lane, video projection Olaf Meyer, music Robert Henke, Vainio and Fennesz, costumes Antony Hamilton; Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, March 7-11
RealTime issue #108 April-May 2012 pg. 25
Nikki Jones and audience
member, Ush and Them, Proximity
Micro Festival of One-on-One Art
photo Ashley de Prazer
Nikki Jones and audience
member, Ush and Them, Proximity
Micro Festival of One-on-One Art
There’s a lot of walking in RealTime 108. Good exercise for mind and body. Matthew Lorenzon goes on an art walk in Battambang, Cambodia, exploring the city’s artistic re-emergence. Next Wave director Emily Sexton talks about the communality of sharing with fellow walkers one’s responses to a range of selected festival works on day-long guided walks. At the end of an intense NOW Now concert, Romy Caen goes on a programmed hour-long night walk in silence, alerted to the sound world of Sydney’s Marrickville. Ian Millis writes about a Green Bans walk through Sydney’s Woolloomooloo, meeting people who were there in the 70s and recalling the fusion of art and activism that saved significant parts of the city from development. Millis argues for the walk as art: ephemeral, collaborative, memorial, political. From there, it’s a mere step into a virtual world of public transport, and public violence, realised in Van Sowerwine and Isobel Knowles’ latest interactive creation, It’s a jungle in here, where fellow travellers might irritate or turn nasty and you choose how to respond. Elsewhere, a sometimes amused, sometimes perturbed Laetitia Wilson reports you can find yourself seriously on your own, up close and very personal with an artist in a one-on-one live art work. One of which was Ush and Them with Nikki Jones (pictured above) corralling a bemused viewer in her work about ushers and guides. As this edition of RealTime extensively reports, together, alone, engaged with the actual or the virtual, the art experience is exponentially expanding.
PULSE-QUICKENING NOT ONLY COURSED THROUGH SPECTATORS AT THIS YEAR’S PERTH INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL BUT WAS EMBEDDED, WITH VARYING DEGREES OF FIRMNESS, INTO A RANGE OF ITS ARTISTIC INTERROGATIONS. BODIES TECHNICALLY FORMED BY DANCE AND CIRCUS TACKLED THE COMPLEXITIES OF POLYPHONIC EXPRESSION WITH AN UNUSUAL SENSE OF INTENT, WHETHER DIRECTLY AS IN LUCINDA CHILDS’ DANCE AND GRUPO CORPO’S PARABELO AND ONQOTO, OR WITH DISCRETE INDIRECTNESS IN THE WORKS OF THE WA BALLET’S QUARRY SEASON, THE VOCAL CUSHIONING OF HOW LIKE AN ANGEL’S EARTHBOUND TRAJECTORIES AND IN THE PLAYFUL ZENITH OF CROSS-CUTTING DIALOGUES, JAMES THIÉRÉE’S RAOUL. RHYTHM AS A SINGULAR IDEA IS BLOWN ASUNDER BY PRODUCTIONS THAT DISSECT TIME IN THE BEDROCK OF THEIR MAKING/CREATION.
lucinda childs
Childs’ Dance exemplifies the perspective. Indeed, this reconstruction of a 30-year-old minimalist work folds the past into the present with intriguing resonances. Essentially Dance is about mathematical computations concentrated within the restricted phrasal vocabulary of Philip Glass’ score and Childs’ choreography. Though irrevocably wedded, dancers and musicians follow the democratic dictates of the 70s and maintain their autonomy, promoting their own identity through calculated skipping, over and in each other’s patterns. Today however, designer Sol LeWitt’s contribution dominates. In the artist talk with Michael Whaites, Childs explained that LeWitt consolidated Dance’s concept because he considered the dance and music intrinsically so strong that design would prove to be unnecessary except if provided by the dancers themselves. Therein materialised the filmic design projected on a downstage scrim where the dancers partner themselves. LeWitt’s solution has survived, now transformed into a dialogue of the vital being-ness of current performers with their forbears, a powerful encounter of dancers across time.
Silent manoeuvres of the filmic eye tip horizontal perspectives into overhead sight or split screen-dancers onto opposite sides of the stage to transpose the minute shifts of sound and movement into a complex mapping exercise. Sepia-tinged screen-dancers criss-cross space like phantoms, the loose swing of their limbs relieved of the weight of flesh. Against their live counterparts with musculatures which scavenge space in directed pathways, these apparitions float free of bodily endurance. That is except for Childs whose image from across time stands huge in its determination, a will which is, ironically, not to be manipulated.
west australian ballet
Jayne Smeulder, David Mack, Serenade, Ballet at the Quarry, WA Ballet
photo Jon Green
Jayne Smeulder, David Mack, Serenade, Ballet at the Quarry, WA Ballet
Down in the Quarry, WA Ballet artistic director Ivan Cavallari’s Strings 32 aligned violin bowing with vibrating energies of dancers and their elastic appendages to provide a feasible premise to celebrate the compulsion of refined action. Muscularity infiltrated the atmospheric expanse of the Quarry but did little to interconnect the violinist with the starry environment. On the other hand, Balanchine’s early tribute to American classicism, Serenade, flowed blue into the night entirely in sync with Tchaikovsky’s haunting tones. Under repetiteur Eve Lawson’s astute direction, the dancers embodied the legendary choreographer’s musical sensitivity and movement abstraction with a credible confidence. While veiled beneath the airy costuming and feminine foregrounding, Serenade bears a structural affinity with the Childs/Glass lineage. Balanchine may not have imbibed the democratic mania of his adopted homeland but, choreographically speaking, he led the introspection of form that was to follow.
The remaining two works, Reed Luplau’s The Sixth Borough and Terence Kohler’s Rhetoric, though replete with the tempi of city life and online role-playing games of their respective themes, blanched into predictability and obscurity. All the verve and seduction of sexy bodies in impressive whips and curves simply could not retrieve the works’ formless descent. Only the lone night star of Serenade endured, shimmering past into present, double-ghosting Sol LeWitt’s sepia memories.
grupo corpo
Rhythm pulsed through swaying and twitching joints over a throw away classical technique to make Grupo Corpo’s Parabelo & Onqotô an experience of the now. Patterns skittered back and forth through that pervasive ethnic mix that is the Brazilian actuality. Batuadas, the percussive signatures of identity for the myriad mixtures of peoples, ricocheted through the sound and movement of Rodrigo Pederneiras’ Parabelo, not to illuminate fragmentation but to reiterate unity. Bodies caught and threw notes, weight and attitudes of difference and commonality about in conjunctions which finally conveyed order rather than chaos. Touches of formality (Childs) and virtuosity (WAB) appear but the sassy sexuality of these dancers slipped over the sophistication and viral disintegration of the worldly wise. Even the sparse interjection of duets and solo movements never eroded the group’s momentum. Grupo Corpo’s world is warm and conservative, playing with the heart beat’s literal need; at variance perhaps with aesthetic fulfilment?
In the Brazilians’ reception a line was drawn between the general public’s appetite for the exotic and dance aficionados’ reservations. Sensual syncopation is undoubtedly a structural element which Pederneiras plumbs for all manner of thematic concerns but its literal application, plus unitards, diminutive masculine movement and commercial aura failed to please dancers. Being biased towards all things South American, I found such concerns puzzling. In Onqotô, a female body was slapped around by a male who for the most part lay supine on the floor. In the image, I saw an extraordinary reverence for the masterful skills of a soccer icon like Pele in conflict with the literal reading which pointed to a harsh sexual relationship. A further overlay, or so the program notes suggested, yoked this clash metaphorically with the creation of the universe. This sequence, both uncomfortable and thrilling, was pitched against a female homosexual duo which could, with cultural encoding, be a statement about the complex workings of machismo, both within and beyond the soccer environment. Such a reading may be impossible without some familiarity with the culture in question.
circa & i faglioni
The ‘angels’ of How Like an Angel hit the earth repeatedly with the bruising flesh-thud of indisputable human propensity. Was the intention to reframe Milton’s tale of the fall from paradise, to accentuate the negative transformations of fantastical flight and tussle of divine wills? Intoxicating sacral tones reverberated within the acoustic bounce of Winthrop Hall, circulating an impressive arena-like configuration of audience and rectangular strip of performance space. The sound coiled around a sculptural figure partnering a long pole as if in a philosophical or sublime debate. This promising start plummeted when his fellow athletes appeared.
How Like an Angel, a commissioned work of circus, choir and cathedral for Britain’s Olympic Festival glanced awkwardly over the idea’s potential. Setting and aural evocativeness tumbled due to what seemed an under-rehearsed and unformed realisation of what might have been. The promised play in paradise lost crept in once or twice, as when a scantily clad female climbed up black silks. It was a simple and unexpected image, posed as if the performer was on a trajectory to heaven. The drama of this image evaporated as quickly as it surfaced. Performance rhythm did briefly return after the painful thud to earth of a suicidal man who, unlike St Michael’s defeat in his challenge to a jealous God, fell inexplicably from the high-rise apparatus onto a pile of thick mats. The culminating pole act signalled how it is that human skill may accomplish angelic mystery or, in philosophical terms, the god-breath. Here, circus skills prevailed: timing and sheer audacity on that vertical pole exemplified what a physical idea might achieve.
james thiérée
James Thiérée, Raoul
photo courtesy PIAF
James Thiérée, Raoul
Final festival reflection must come from he who utters little but speaks volumes in sound, design and movement. Performance is a strange territory, given to multifarious prejudices, trends and desires. Structures can be brilliant by way of purity of intent, bodies can be devilishly attractive in their astounding defiance of the norm and, then, there is this other place and possibility, wherein exposure transports ordinary people into something which is ungraspable. James Thiérée’s Raoul, ostensibly a solo performance, achieves exactly this objective. Thiérée employs skills across disciplines to convey an insignificant human in an inexplicable world, sharing ideas about the who-what-how of what human being-ness might mean. Thiérée’s arrogant and absurd little man talks with fixtures of external decadence and imagination. In his presence, polyphony transcends genre and clamour turns symphonic. Fluttering hands, leftover movements from an argument with sound walls, dance into the astounding complexity of simplicity.
Perth International Arts Festival: Lucinda Childs Dance Company, Dance, choreography Lucinda Childs, music Philip Glass, film Sol LeWitt, Heath Ledger Theatre, Feb 22-25; West Australian Ballet: At the Quarry, Feb 10-March 3; Grupo Corpo, Parabela and Onqotô His Majesty’s Theatre, March 1-4; Circa and I Fagiolini, How Like an Angel, director Yaron Lifschitz, musical direction Robert Hollingworth, Winthrop Hall, UWA, Feb 29-March 3; La Compagnie du Hanneton, Raoul, designer, director, performer James Thiérée, Regal Theatre, Feb 18-26
U-Ram Choe, Urbanus Female, 2006, installation view, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
GAMBLING ON A SMALLER VISUAL ARTS PROGRAM BUT WITH HIGHLY COMMENDED NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS IN THE PERTH INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL HAS CERTAINLY PAID OFF THIS YEAR WITH RECORD BREAKING ATTENDANCES AT SOUTH KOREAN ARTIST U-RAM CHOE’S SOLO EXHIBITION. CHOE’S DELICATE AND HIGHLY TECHNICAL KINETIC SCULPTURES WERE ELEGANTLY INSTALLED AMIDST DARKNESS, HOVERING UNDER ILLUMINATED LIGHT WITHIN THE CORNERS AND CORRIDORS OF THE JOHN CURTIN ART GALLERY.
Featuring nine machinic organisms accompanied by plaques that describe their behaviours, habitats and adaptive responses, the exhibition forms Choe’s premonition of how machine life will evolve in a future technocratic society. It is a world populated by these life forms (or anima-machines) that have adapted faster than humans and thrive in urban environments. They have been ornately designed to resemble natural flora and fauna but have adapted by acquiring light steel skins for protection and factory motors instead of organs. They graze on residual urban energy, airborne viruses and unclaimed data and live in harmony with their environment. Choe invites his audience to study this realm, the behaviours of these specimens, to become accustomed to their nature and understand that these creatures are an harmonic synthesis of technological systems and the natural order.
Each of the eight machine organisms is a delicate hybrid of mechanical engineering and nature. Each form, movement and behaviour has been designed specifically for these organisms to not only exist but also thrive in their machinic environments. Instead of proposing a threat to humanity they harmoniously perpetuate the life and energy cycles of machinery.
U-Ram Choe, Nox Pennatus, 2005, installation view, John Curtin Gallery
Some works are in constant repetitive motion, while others wait to sense human presence before performing their gestures. Each work has been intricately designed and fastidiously engineered to not only mimic the complexity of the natural order but to demonstrate a capacity for the visceral elegance in machinic movement. The skeletal creations are fitted with perforated steel skins to expose the entire operation of hundreds of custom-made steel ligaments, joints, frames, CPU and LED motors. The connection of each component meeting and moving with the next forms an orchestration that reveals mechanical bodies to be as detailed as our own in motion.
The centerpiece of the exhibition, Urbanus Female (scientific name: Anmopista Volaticus floris Uram) (2006) is a flower-like anima-machine that Choe has created as a nocturnal feeder of urban energy. In the gallery it lies dormant, suspended from the ceiling until it senses human presence, which cues the work to perform its anthesis [the period during which a flower becomes fully open and functional. Ed]. With each turn, the flower—its stamen a twisting and beaming metal halide lamp—opens and closes slightly before unfolding entirely, expanding three metres in diameter and reaching forward to the viewer.
U-Ram Choe, Una Lumina, 2005, installation view, John Curtin Gallery
Choe has designed the interaction between his Urbanus Female and those in its company as an elusive form of communication. Its gestures require our patience, its grand unfolding taking place at its own rate. Choe’s great trick reminds us that we are in the gallery to study, rather than command the behaviour of these rare specimens for our entertainment. We are in their space, in their world as their audience.
Around a corner stands Ultima Mudfox (2002), hovering with its fins waving in perpetual motion but otherwise still for us to examine its delicate skeletal structure. After reading their accompanying narrative we find that these creatures “free themselves, one after another, from the factory that created them, clone themselves in a base camp beneath the city, where electromagnetic waves are abundant” (Choe, U-Ram, Exhibition Catalogue, 2012). The artist clearly pursues the issue of sustainability between humans and machines. When set into motion and given life, anima-machines live, breed, consume and expire alongside humanity, feeding off computer viruses and unclaimed data and converting them into resources. Choe envisions a world where these creatures subsist within the cycles of human life and production as independent and complementary beings.
U-Ram Choe, Jet Hiatus, 2005, installation view, John Curtin Gallery
It is common for kinetic artists to explore technology’s capacity to either assail or assist humanity. At times these tropes can perpetuate a reductive dichotomy between nature and technology. Choe successfully avoids this binary association by presenting his works as fantastical beings that thrive in the technocratic society from which they are born. U-Ram Choe firmly believes that the evolutionary capacity of machines is far more advanced than our own and that we can therefore learn from our technological creations. His art is an invitation to study their advanced behaviour and adaptive responses, approaching these anima-machines as our future companions and providers.
2012 Perth Festival, U-Ram Choe, John Curtin Art Gallery, Perth, Feb 3-March 4
A DIVERSE AUDIENCE FILLED THE BURSWOOD THEATRE FOR ENNIO MORRICONE’S PERTH INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL APPEARANCE. OLD AND YOUNG, CLASSICAL ENTHUSIASTS, FILM BUFFS AND HIPSTERS WERE ALL DRAWN TO SEE THE 84-YEAR-OLD FILM MUSIC LEGEND. MORRICONE’S MUSIC SEEMS TO FIND SOME POINT OF REFERENCE WITH A GREAT NUMBER OF PEOPLE. HIS WORK WITH SERGIO LEONE ON FILMS SUCH AS THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (1966) SPAWNED NEW TROPES FOR FILM COMPOSITION AND HIS SCORES HAVE CYCLED ENDLESSLY THROUGH POP CULTURAL HOMAGE AND PARODY.
Morricone’s sound world is truly huge. Appearing for the first time in Australia, he conducted a 100-piece youth orchestra and a 100-strong choir, as well as a few rock instruments and a (less than perfect) guest appearance by soprano Susanna Rigacci.
The entire performance was amplified, sparking much post-concert debate. In a purely classical context, amplification can ruin the intimacy of a performance by rendering it hyperreal, but Morricone’s music isn’t essentially classical, it is film music. Its currency is evocation and broad gesture. In my view, the amplification aided both these elements, adding a sheen of fantasy to the performance. The sound was detached from its context within the hall, allowing it to evoke the kind of imaginary landscapes in which Clint Eastwood triumphs as the archetype of butch Americana.
This raises the question of how one evaluates a performance of Morricone’s music. It makes no sense to talk about it in the same way one would a performance of a work by Beethoven. It is film music, and perhaps should be assessed as such, but is presented here without the dressings of image or narrative. There are rock elements too, not only in the electric guitar and drum set but in the exaggerated movement, memorable themes and mass appeal (three encores, no less). Again, however, there is no rock theatricality.
Rather, Morricone’s music seems to both include and transcend these streams. It has become part of the collective unconscious. Even for people who have never seen any of his films, the music is instantly familiar and evocative. Some of its tropes are, or have become, clichéd. It brings to mind John Adams’ summation of culture: “when we communicate, we point to symbols we have in common. If people want to make a point, they reach for a reference.” This is the good and the bad of Morricone’s music—where there were no reference points, he created them, but now, with his music so established, it is difficult to hear it afresh. Despite all this—the cheesiness, the clichés, the endless pop-cultural echoes—something about Ennio Morricone’s music is magic. Widescreen nostalgia for a place that never really existed.
Perth International Arts Festival: An Evening With the Maestro, Ennio Morricone, Susanna Rigacci, West Australian Youth Orchestra, The Perth Festival Morricone Chorus, Nanni Civitenga, Massimo D’Angostino, Ludovico Fulci, Leandro Piccioni, Rocco Zifarelli; Burswood Theatre; Febuary 26, 2012
CONSIDER THE AMERICAN DREAM. FREEDOM. OPPORTUNITY. EXCESS. NOW, CONSIDER AMERICAN MUSIC, SPECIFICALLY CLASSICAL. MUSIC IS OFTEN INDICATIVE OF THE PLACE WHERE IT WAS WRITTEN AND ACCORDINGLY, THE CLASSICAL CANON OF THE AMERICAS HAS A FAR DIFFERENT CHARACTER FROM THAT OF EUROPE. IN THE AMERICAS, CLASSICAL MUSIC IS AN IMPORT. WITHOUT THE SAME WEIGHT OF TRADITION, AMERICAN COMPOSERS ARE FREER TO PULL IN A VARIETY OF INFLUENCES FROM JAZZ, ROCK AND OTHER NATIVE MUSICS.
As part of the Perth International Arts Festival, Soft Soft Loud presented contemporary chamber music by composers from USA, Mexico and Argentina. In every piece, there was a sense of music’s role as a cultural signifier.
Take, for example, Argentinian Osvaldo Golijov’s voice and ensemble piece Ayre, which uses religious melodies to explore music’s ability to simultaneously evoke and transcend culture. “With a little bend, a melody goes from Jewish to Arab to Christian,” says Golijov. The piece had some beautiful softer melodies but its inclusion of (admittedly, tongue in cheek) rock sections and drum machines came off as heavy-handed. Rapid stylistic shifts also featured in American Andy Akiho’s Hamba iro (for steel pan, drum kit, string quintet and harp) but the changes were far smoother. The piece pulled itself, serpent-like, through waves of cool jazz, brooding classicism and energetic Caribbean.
Woven through the program were movements from George Crumb’s beautiful Eine Kleine Mitternacht Musik (Ruminations on ‘Round Midnight’ by Thelonious Monk) for solo piano. The American Crumb’s music is the most European sounding of the program, transporting the original Thelonious Monk tune from New World cool to Old World sadness. As a pianist, Monk revelled in music’s stray threads, those moments when the tune falls away into some angular, atonal gesture. In Crumb’s variations, the situation is reversed so that atonality is the norm and the original theme is the interruption—a fond memory or a hopeful rumour of a tune.
The night’s highlight was Steve Reich’s response to the Twin Tower attacks, WTC 9/11, for tape and string quartet. The story goes that on the day of the attacks, a panicked Reich rang his son in New York. After a few minutes, all New York’s phones cut out suddenly, leaving a blaring alarm on the phone line. The piece opens with this alarm, its unrelenting F’s picked up and augmented by the violins to gradually create a chilling cluster chord. Like Reich’s 1988 Different Trains (which dealt with the Holocaust), WTC 9/11 uses fragments of cut-up speech which are mimicked and accompanied by live strings. It’s a detached, almost documentarian approach to dealing with horror which manages to be affecting without feeling manipulative.
Reich’s influence was clear in Mexican Javier Alvarez’s string quartet Metro Nativitas (from 1999, the oldest piece on an impressively contemporary program). The piece uses Reichian minimalist forms but with dense, atonal harmonies and rhythms taken from South American folk dance. The result was an absorbingly static dissonance with a sudden, sheer finish. Another Reich piece, his Pulitzer winning Double Sextet closed the concert. Reich is perhaps the most purely American of any composer. His sound is a grab-bag of tropes from classical, jazz and rock all pulled together by the music’s relentless forward motion, its dogged insistence on growth. It is music that doesn’t sound like anywhere else. Freedom, opportunity and occasional excess.
Perth International Arts Festival: Soft Soft Loud—The Americas; Artistic director Matthew Hoy, Fremantle Arts Centre, Feb 12, 2012
How To Have A 3 Minute Shower (2012) Jen Jamieson, Proximity Micro Festival of One-on-One Art
photo Ashley de Prazer
How To Have A 3 Minute Shower (2012) Jen Jamieson, Proximity Micro Festival of One-on-One Art
THE UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL FORMAT OF THE ONE-ON-ONE PERFORMANCE IS FAMILIAR FROM THE SEX SHOPS IN THE STREETS OF NORTHBRIDGE, BUT WHEN TAKEN INTO THE CONTEXT OF LIVE ART, BECOMES SOMETHING ENTIRELY DIFFERENT. IT COMES WITH ITS OWN DEGREES OF INTIMACY, AWKWARDNESS, PLAYFULNESS AND, INDEED, PRIVATE DANCERS AND STRIP SHOWS.
Proximity, staged as part of Fringe World at the Blue Room theatre in Perth, is Australia’s first live art micro-festival comprising12 one-on-one performances, each lasting about 12 minutes, featuring twelve artists with a unique take on the concept of proximity. Artists drawn from dance, theatre, live and visual arts presented works curated by James Berlyn, produced by Sarah Rowbottam and provoked by Kelli McCluskey (PVI Collective).
The idea of proximity can be interpreted and communicated in numerous ways. The pieces ranged from offering convivial, occasionally banal, encounters to abrupt challenges to personal inhibitions. The entirety of the sensorium became involved. Like a puzzle, the program began with a map, detailing the location and order of the pieces and, like clockwork, announcements were made to indicate their beginning or end. In the face of potential confusion the event was managed and timed to precision. If it were a game it would be full of mysterious choices, challenges hiding behind closed doors, hairy monsters, quirky stories and shadowy portals into alternate worlds. Once in the swing of it, I eagerly followed the path from one encounter to the next, as a solo adventurer facing the unexpected with a wee bit of trepidation—did I really want my own private hoofer? Did I really want to fondle a beard?
My personalised map began with Ush and Them by Nikki Jones, a conversational, wandering piece acknowledging the oft-neglected role of the usher. It was undeniably tongue-in-cheek with Jones taking a toilet break and leading me straight to the lighting room in lieu of any show. The majority of the performances were anchored to a similar kind of conversational interactivity resulting in social, relational, inter-subjective and often instructive experiences. Participants were simultaneously drawn into the world of the performers and invited to reflect on their own circumstances. The success of each performance was largely reliant on the individual personalities, communicative and performative abilities of the artists, which made for a spectrum of experiences, from raw to refined.
Sarah Nelson, Mobile Moments, Series 2 (2012), Micro Festival of One-on-One Art
photo Ashley de Prazer
Sarah Nelson, Mobile Moments, Series 2 (2012), Micro Festival of One-on-One Art
An existential element came to the fore in two of the strongest pieces, Sarah Nelson’s Mobile Moments and James Berlyn’s Sweetlife. Although very different, these two pieces invited consideration of personal views and morality respectively. Berlyn’s beautifully crafted game placed the audience member in a staged context: delightfully pink, strategically lit, with the sound of ticking timers and the temptation of lolly bags in the background. At one point the participant’s body became a game piece, pulse and iris movements were measured to determine whether or not a sweet life/just desserts were deserved. Moral qualms gave way to thoughtful musings in Mobile Moments, a gentle roving journey through the cultural centre. As passengers on a trike, participants were filmed responding to specific questions around personal likes, dislikes and life decisions. This piece was both subtle in its articulation and incredibly resolved in extending to an aesthetically engaging after-life in a series of video portraits screened in the cultural centre in the weeks to follow.
More practical concerns were addressed by Renae Coles in The Union. Situated in the Blue Room offices, Coles put on a bureaucratic face and saturated the participant with officious banter, providing a unionist official type service for those with a miniscule axe to grind. In a characteristic twist toward the ridiculous, Coles morphed these mini-complaints into a punk song, made all the more ludicrous by the thrashing head movements and belted lyrics emanating from the neatly dressed performer. Practicality was also at the heart of Jennifer Jamison’s How to Have a Three Minute Shower, an instructive realisation of the local water corporation’s billboard advertising. Jamison talked participants through her shower routine while taking one herself and then inviting us to freshen up too, all the while discussing the intricacies of showering and emphasising environmental conscientiousness by accumulating water in buckets.
This kind of close interaction and focused conversation did not dominate every encounter; some performers invited no response, as in the whimsical bedtime story told by Russya Conner. Others embraced silence, with intent or incidentally. Janette McGinty used it to effect in Hydrosis, a theatrical narrative in a tight filing cabinet where silence was harnessed to heighten tension at the moment of confrontation with the physical proximity of McGinty’s armpits. Silence was less an intentional tool in Helen Russo’s Fragmentation 1.2. Participants were guided to shine a torch on Russo’s semi-naked body as she writhed from entrapment within an old school desk. The only sound was the shuffling of her body; the only light was from the torch.
The relation between dancer and solo viewer can so easily become voyeuristic and silence can generate a heightened sense of awkwardness, correlating with the experience of finding yourself alone with a stranger. This was thankfully bypassed in Claudia Alessi’s Your Private Hoofer which allowed the participant to select music and costume: a minor gesture toward interactive exchange which relieved the prospective unease of a personalised dance.
Similarly, in Flush, a game of strip poker with Janet Carter, it was easy to become absorbed by game-play, not to mention diversionary tactics—it was remarkable how little time it took to find oneself facing the removal of underwear. Fortunately Carter was self-admittedly an unskilled player. Even the dirty talk in Glory Hole Beard, by Jackson Eaton, launched into the realm of the absurd rather than the awkward. In this well-rehearsed piece, a very large beard, too much beard in fact, proudly thrust itself forth toward the participant through a hole in a toilet door. Did I want to touch it? No! But I did, compelled less by choice than obligation.
Sarah Rowbottom & participant, Slow Food Sunday (2012), Proximity Micro Festival of One-on-One Art
photo Ashley de Prazer
Sarah Rowbottom & participant, Slow Food Sunday (2012), Proximity Micro Festival of One-on-One Art
Finally, with a nod in the direction of relational art of the 1990s, Sarah Rowbottam’s Slowfood Sunday provided the chance to get back to the basics of the everyday in its mindfulness about consuming local produce. Thankfully there were more than two people to enjoy the meal. When sitting at the dinner table sharing wholesome food and talk of the day, one key point became apparent; there is something very special about being an audience of one, but there is also something poignantly lonely about it. In all the investigations of proximity, however physically close and conversationally intimate, the audience/performer divide remained. Against this background the dinner was a salvaging moment and potent reminder that gratifying proximity comes in such simple moments of everyday communal ritual.
2012 Fringe World: Proximity Micro Festival of One-on-One Art, curators James Berlyn, Sarah Rowbottam, provocateur Kelli McCluskey, presented by Blue Room & Proximity Festival; Blue Room Theatre, Perth, Jan 29, Feb 5, Feb 12, Feb 19
TWO INDEPENDENT PERFORMANCE WORKS GROUNDED IN DANCE FORMED A COMPELLING CHAMBER OF ECHOES IN FRINGE WORLD FESTIVAL’S DEBUT PROGRAM. ALTHOUGH COINCIDENTAL, STANDING BIRD AND TILTED FAWN’S DOUBLING IN PICA’S EARLY-AND-LATE-NIGHT SERIES INVITED REWARDING COMPARISONS ON THE NATURE OF THEATRE.
Both works centred on lone dancers and their interactions with diverse technologies that operated simultaneously as companion performers and scenographic environments. Standing Bird announced itself as a performance while Tilted Fawn chose installation as its frame but both pervaded spatial axes travelling memory, geographically determined by an Australian landscape in Standing Bird and played out in sonic terrains in Tilted Fawn.
Director Sally Richardson has long pursued sagas of women and wilderness in dance theatre modes, so Standing Bird is like a riven nugget isolated from that endeavour. In this manifestation, Jacqui Claus takes on the quasi-archetypal woman, her sinuous extent pushing against the calculated restriction of a central platform set. Alcoholic self-violation initiates the woman’s lost balance which is caught under a controlling light. The voyeuristic twist of this technical decision punctured the narrative skin, especially since the woman wielding the light was none other than the director herself. Perhaps the intention was to lay bare the workings of the production but its execution exposed power relations which left a bitter edge to the performance.
Imprisonment pervaded the radiant bride’s endless tulle and worked against typical Australian impulses of escape through the Australian coordinates of flight, sea and sand. Filmic projections of drowning on the bridal tulle—now transformed into a shroud—threw an unintentional shadow, its darkness redolent of the performer resisting victimisation. Otherwise, sand, like liberty, fell through fingers and toes, leaving Claus in a mirrored throwback of displacement, set up again by Richardson moving around the set—shackling this life of nudity and collapse.
From this baited position, the bird shudders and stands defiant, the dorsal extensions of her movement resonating with the rippling arms of Pavlova’s Dying Swan. But the angular struggle of emergence is given over once more to the creator who controls the light. Standing, this bird cannot fly.
Melanie Lane, Tilted Fawn
photo Maik Reichert
Melanie Lane, Tilted Fawn
Melanie Lane and Chris Clark’s Tilted Fawn from Berlin carries its light and shade with sophistication. The dancer slowly shifts a few dozen cardboard bricks around the space, its concentrated execution enabling spectators to become attuned to the moving sound. Each brick bears a sonic voice within its taupe volume forming, under Lane’s meticulous listening and arranging, mesmerising miniature cityscapes that contribute thickness in the orchestrated space. There is a withheld dramaturgy in the pace which scatters in plaintive cries from the tiny structures when Lane leaves the stage. It is a potent moment when structures mutate into lost memories craving the substance of their being, like children grieving departing mothers.
Lane’s danced return—in fawn unitard stretched over platform footwear—introduces another sort of memory connection via Marie Chouinard and then back to Nijinsky’s Faun. Dance
lineage seems to situate this intervention, illustrating layers of recall which involve intertextuality as well as intimacy. The interlude is brief and soon the mother returns to her sonic strays. She tends her sonic memories with ever-increasing care until, no longer contained within the bricolage of individualised points of reference, they become an immovable force of sound. Her exhaustion in the final moments brings installation firmly into performance. The bricks have left home, have tilted strains of memory over into another space, the curious space of imagining.
For another response to Tilted Fawn see page 25.
2012 Fringe World: Standing Bird, director, concept Sally Richardson, performer Jacqui Claus, sound Kinsley Reeves, dramaturgy Humphrey Bower, lighting: Mike Nanning, costume Fiona Bruce; Tilted Fawn, choreographer, concept, performer Melanie Lane, sound composition, installation Chris Clark, artistic collaborator Morgan Belenguer, dramaturg Bart van der Eynde, costumes, props Melanie Lane, lighting Max Steizl; PICA Performance Space, Perth Feb 7-12
WESTERN AUSTRALIA IS INCREDIBLY LARGE AND QUITE EXTRAORDINARILY FLAT. OCCUPYING ALMOST HALF THE AUSTRALIAN CONTINENT, IT IS PRIMARILY DESERT AND MOSTLY UNINHABITED, WITH A POPULATION OF AROUND 2.3 MILLION. 73% OF WHOM LIVE IN PERTH, LEAVING A MERE 621,000 PEOPLE DISPERSED ACROSS 2,532,400 SQUARE KILOMETRES.
The ecology is fragile and geological features are often dwarfed by the immensity of space and sky. It is spectacular, rather than picturesque, excepting the scenic and temperate southwest corner. It’s not surprising that questions of space, place and identity are often at the forefront of artistic concern here. The downside of this preoccupation is the potential for a dreary form of parochialism. The upside is clearly visible in a project like IASKA’s inaugural Spaced exhibition, which draws on 21 Artist in Residence programs undertaken over a two-year period by artists and collectives, both Australian and from overseas.
the quality of engagement
Embedded in the curatorial ambition of the overall project is the desire to move beyond the privileging of artists parachuted into communities who make art out of the experience of ‘being there.’ Instead each project emerges from a negotiated and carefully managed partnership with groups and individuals from towns and communities spaced out (sic) across the state: from the Dampier Peninsula to Esperance, from the Abrolhos Islands to Leonora, from the mining town of Roebourne in the Pilbara to the coastal towns of Albany, Mandurah and Denmark and the very different wheat belt towns of Northam/Bakers Hill, Moora, Mukinbudin, Kellerberrin, Narrogin and Lake Grace.
Consequently Spaced is not only concerned with exhibiting art and its documentation, it also seeks to represent something of the quality of the engagements undertaken and the relationships developed in remote locations and small country towns over at least 10 weeks, and developed through what IASKA director Marco Marcon describes as a “decentred organisational structure.” The exhibition represents these relationships through an extended series of filmed interviews, encompassing the views of both artists and community members shown on wall-mounted LED screens in the hallway of the Fremantle Art Centre.
Inevitably, the exhibition represented only the tip of the residential iceberg. Of course this is true of most exhibitions. Whether socially engaged or not, few artworks speak to the experience of their coming into being. In this project the desire to foreground the experiences of not only the artists but also community members, led to a rich and complex, often paradoxical and occasionally confronting, series of artworks, conversations and engagements that will surely resonate long after the individual projects have ended.
Spaced also encompassed a weekend symposium, which sought to tease out some of the ideas, paradoxes and conundrums around ‘socially engaged practice,’ and to reflect on the processes of interaction between artists and communities. Whilst participating artists and community members spoke on panels about the experience of their respective residencies, five keynote speakers, including David Cross (NZ), Margo Handwerker (US), Ian Hunter (UK), Zara Stanhope and Ian Tully (VIC), punctuated the proceedings with reflections and provocations on thematically connected practices from other parts of the country and the world. It is ironic to consider that despite the plethora of residencies, exhibitions and artists’ projects taking place in remote and rural communities, and small towns globally, the idea that contemporary art practices are solely the provenance of first world, metropolitan centres such as New York, London and Tokyo, remains remarkably tenacious.
On the ground in WA, however, artists and collectives took up residence in small communities in strange locations. Even for local artists who might be expected to have an understanding of country and the complexity of issues confronting, for instance, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians, such projects can be as challenging as they are extraordinary. Sohan Ariel Hayes spent two months in Roebourne in the Pilbara, infamous for the tragic bashing death in custody of 16-year-old John Pat in 1983. It was clear from the outset that if a residency was to go ahead in this place, then much more would be expected than just another white fellah dropping by and building his career on the suffering of Aboriginal people.
birndi wirndi—worlds apart
Hayes worked closely with Michael Woodley, a filmmaker and CEO of the Juluwarlu Aboriginal Corporation, not only to create a meaningful art work but also running skills development workshops in editing and filmmaking. Ultimately they created a powerful and evocative projection project called Birndi Wirndi—Worlds Apart which projected images of Yindjibarndi people from Juluwarlu’s extensive digital archive, as well as footage from the two-part documentary, Exile and The Kingdom, which tells the story of the last 150 years from an Aboriginal perspective. In Roebourne, the work was projected onto the façade of the old Victoria Hotel which closed in 2003 at the request of the local Aboriginal community, given the catastrophic impact of the 1960s mining boom and alcohol. Hayes describes this project as an act of cleansing, an invocation, a summoning, and whilst the gallery-based work probably doesn’t carry the punch of the site specific original, for those of us who couldn’t be there, it remains a beautiful, powerful and poignant work.
locus deperditus
For another West Australian artist, Kate McMillan, the town of Leonora about 830 miles east of Perth, described in tourism-speak as the “historical heartland of the Goldfields,” was a transformative experience, allowing her to finally experience herself as Australian. For McMillan, this residency initially represented an opportunity to work with asylum seekers in the detention centre, however that impulse was transformed by the experience of witnessing first hand the impact of youth suicide, following the death of a teenage boy. The disparity between resources available to detained children and those for ‘free’ Aboriginal children saw McMillan adding the roles of advocate and networker to that of artist. She undertook developmental community arts projects, including drawing workshops at the Refugee Centre and cultural projects at the local Indigenous Youth Centre, persuading BHP to provide $20K per annum towards an ongoing program of artists’ workshops. McMillan also established a deep relationship with local historian, Jill Heather, whose work in recent decades has been to record the history and whereabouts of lonely 19th century graves across three surrounding shires, and it is the photographic documentation of those graves that represent McMillan’s residency in the exhibition.
ornitarium
M12, Ornitarium
photo courtesy the artists
M12, Ornitarium
Not every project was so inherently confronting. Colorado-based collective M12 created the Ornitarium, an architectural sculpture situated at the Wetlands Education Centre—operated by Green Skills—in the softer climes of Denmark in the state’s southwest. The artists describe the project as being “inspired by ‘local knowledge’…specifically knowledge related to birds that populate the region’s wetlands areas, regional timber types and building methods. The work is designed and built as a bird hide and as a social space [for humans]…” The guest watcher can be in their own custom built nest inside the hide but camouflaged from the bird life on the other side. In the gallery they created an installation curated in partnership with master taxidermist Michael Buzza that included objects collected by Denmark locals, Basil Schur and Tina Smith.
headspace, levelled ground, in transit
Julia Davis created the haunting, site-specific work Headspace, casting her own head from salt harvested from Lake Brown. Over time, the head dissolved back into the lake. She developed another project called Levelled Ground, shown at the Mukinbudin Railway Station that visually represented digital information in a gold-leaf wall schematic, from recorded interviews with local people no longer able to live on their farms. At the Fremantle Art Centre she showed an interactive video work, In Transit, which documented the friendly but characteristically laconic gestures of acknowledgement made by local people as they pass by each other in cars and trucks.
the way you move me
David Chesworth and Sonia Leber’s beautiful and joyous video installation, The Way You Move Me, filmed in Moora, a wheatbelt town about 177 kms north of Perth, took its inspiration in part from Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power. The experience is mesmerising, sometimes funny—there are sheep after all—and occasionally poignant. Handsome cattle lumber down the green hill chasing a small tractor, jostling for precedence, or cluster closely, gazing deeply into the camera lens. Sheep move constantly in and around each other, whether up close in pens or trotting down a country road, juxtaposed against paddocks of unbelievable greenness or the eye-bending golden fields of canola. Moments of intensity, changing rhythms and gaits, are interspersed with personal, almost transcendent moments of interspecies connection.
to the other end
In the gallery, the photographic documentation and blood-stained prayer rug that comprises To the Other End by Dutch artists Wouter Osterholt and Elke Uitentuis forms a savagely ironic juxtaposition to Chesworth and Leber’s bucolic video work. To the Other End follows the journey of live sheep exported from the small wheatbelt town of Lake Grace, 345 kilometres southeast of Perth, to the small island country of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf. It examines the use of sheep for both wool and for meat. Helped by local farmers and craftspeople, the artists learned how to shear a sheep and card and spin the wool, from which they wove a black and white copy of a Baluchi funeral carpet. After a year of knotting they completed the carpet and took it with them to Bahrain during the feast of sacrifice.
In Bahrain, they found an Australian sheep from Lake Grace and a local family to organise the ritual killing of the sheep on the prayer carpet during the feast. The meat was distributed to the poor. Photographic documentation included a portrait of the slaughtered sheep hanging on the wall of a small cell-like room, with the prayer rug saturated and stiff with black blood.
crayvox
Nigel Helyer spent an enviable two months travelling around the turquoise waters of the Abrolhos Islands, home of the rock lobster or crayfish, and described as the world’s first sustainable fishery site. Helyer’s interest in the future viability and sustainability of our marine economies is represented through sound and object with a beautifully constructed wooden boat, CrayVox, that resonates with the sounds and stories of fishing communities in both the Abrolhos Islands and in the restaurants and seafood importers of South-East Asia.
narrogin banksia tower
Polish artist, Jakub Szczesny and curator Kaja Pawelek, developed the concept of an 18-metre tower inspired by Australia’s banksia flower. Proposed as an interactive and functional artwork with a hairy surface responsive to passing cars and visitors, a model of the tower, animations and a prototype forms the basis of a proposal to the Shire of Narrogin to undertake its realisation. The project forms the basis of a forthcoming documentary by Polish artist and filmmaker, Matylda Salajewska for Europe’s Canal+ television.
Sadly, space precludes me from writing about every project in this inaugural biennale, but I wish to acknowledge the calibre of art works and projects developed by Australian artists Bennet Miller, Mimi Tong, Makeshift’s Tessa Zettel and Karl Khoe, Michelle Slarke and Roderick Sprigg, as well as Indonesian artist Ritchie Ned Hansel’s Abandoned Trolley Project, Japanese artist Takahiko Suzuki’s Global Store Project and French artists Marion Laval Jeantet and Benoit Mangin’s collaboration with SymbioticA.
emerging spaces for action
Spaced: art out of place, raises many vital questions about the role of art and artists, living sustainably, and the relationship of city to country. Most of us inhabit the cities and suburban margins and never really have to negotiate the complex relations that exist between species—whether domesticated or wild, indigenous or introduced, or to think about lack of meaningful infrastructure or cultural opportunities. It’s a cliché to say that we rely on country for life—for our food and water, for both physical and spiritual sustenance—and yet the divide between town and country remains a deeply felt schism in our everyday. Ian Hunter, in his provocative but stimulating paper, “Art and Agriculture–cultivating new metaphors for sustainability,” persuasively argued rural and non-metropolitan areas as new critical sites from which to think through relational, durational and ecological art and aesthetics—an emerging space of radical action. Less polemically, but equally passionate, Ian Tully talked of his more embryonic project, ACRE—Australia’s Creative Rural Economy, a project bringing together artists, arts workers and farmers in regional Victoria since 2009.
Spaced raises more questions than it could possibly hope to answer, but its ambition, generosity of spirit and willingness to experiment, and to generate what Marvin Carlson has described as “productive disagreement with itself” (1996), offered a radically different kind of biennial experience, one that actively solicited meaningful forms of ‘social engagement,’ while also allowing us to reflect on the wonder, the beauty and the terror of life on this planet we all share.
IASKA, Spaced: art out of place, inaugural biennial event of socially engaged art, exhibition Fremantle Art Centre, Perth International Arts Festival, Feb 4-March 11; spaced symposium, Feb 4, 5; www.iaska.com.au
Artists and residencies: Nigel Helyer, Abrolhos Islands; Mimi Tong, Albany; Philip Samartzis, Dampier Peninsula; M12 Collective (Richard Saxton, Kirsten Stolz and David Wyrick), Denmark; Makeshift (Tessa Zettel and Karl Khoe), Esperance; Ritchie Ned Hansel, Fremantle; Roderick Sprigg, Jakarta, Indonesia; Takahiko Suzuki, Kellerberrin; Wouter Osterholt and Elke Uitentuis, Lake Grace, and Michelle Slarke; Kate McMillan, Leonora; Art Oriente objet (Marion Laval Jeantet and Benoit Mangin), Mandurah; David Chesworth and Sonya Leber, Moora; Julia Davis, Mukinbudin; Jakub Szeczesny and Kajar Pawetek, Narrogin; Bennett Miller Northam/Bakers Hill ; Sohan Ariel Hayes and Michael Woodley, Roebourne
HAVING LIVED IN TASMANIA FOR 10 VERY FORMATIVE YEARS, IT WAS A JOY TO RETURN TO THE ISLAND TO EXPERIENCE THE TRANSFORMATION THAT MONA (MUSEUM OF OLD AND NEW ART) AND ITS FOMA MUSIC FESTIVAL ARE WREAKING ON HOBART. MONA HAS SURPASSED THE HARROWING PORT ARTHUR AS THE PRIMARY TOURIST DRAWCARD IN THE STATE. THIS IS A SEISMIC SHIFT IN TASMANIAN CULTURE AND MARKS A PSYCHIC BORDER.
With the economy perpetually moribund, the state government has had no choice but to respond, spending $30 million on a long overdue upgrade of the Tasmanian Museum and Gallery, for which the first exhibition will be a combined effort with MONA. Tasmanians have certainly responded. It is deeply satisfying to see people from all walks of life happily queuing up, eager for the next MONA experience, the likes of which would only recently have been condemned in many quarters.
Everyone’s favourite Brechtian Goth-Punk, Amanda Fucking Palmer, truly made this edition of the festival her own. The Dresden Dolls’ reunion performance on the second Friday night won many converts with its vitality, the virtuosity of drummer Brian Viglione a revelation (think Terry Bozzio during his Frank Zappa years), but that was just the start. With The Death Grips sadly cancelled, Palmer and Viglione backed up the next night with a MOFO superband, joining Bad Seed Mick Harvey, PJ Harvey producer John Parrish and MONA FOMA producer and former Violent Femmes bassist Brian Ritchie to play the songs of the much-loved Violent Femmes debut album to a rapturous reception. The climax was a two-hour flat out Dresden Dolls set in the wee small hours of the final Sunday morning in the laneway of the Faux MO festival club, patrons hanging off fences and fire escapes and totally dizzy with disbelief that it was actually happening.
Wim Delvoye’s major exhibition at MONA is, according to its website, “provoking heated debate about the ethical integrity of his work” among staff. It features skins of the artist’s tattooed pigs and of “living artwork” Tattooed Tim. This comment seems surprising given MONA owner David Walsh’s well-known devotion to transgressive art, until you become aware of his vegetarianism; then the gesture becomes an admirable statement of commitment to the personal quest underlying the whole venture. This exhibition is the largest of Delvoye’s work ever assembled, with multiple Cloaca machines in addition to the one permanently installed at MONA, and numerous other works such as a life-size truck and wooden cement mixer carved in his meticulous and delicate filigree, plus playful distortions of Disney imagery that surely have that notoriously litigious franchise plotting a slow and painful retribution. Like MONA overall, the show overwhelms (most of) the senses: so much so that it ultimately creates a deficit of touch. There is so much work here about the body, yet bringing bodies and objects into contact is almost always forbidden in art museums, even a place like this.
In delicate contrast to Delvoye’s appropriation of Disney was the complete rejection of that corporate colonisation of our subconscious by the group Armiina, from Iceland. Originally an offshoot of Sigur Rós, they produced charming, winsome soundtracks to 1920s shadow-play films of classic fairytales by Lotte Reiniger, themselves a revelation. This was one of many intimate gems that were dotted about MONA FOMA. Another was Sonia Leber and David Chesworth’s sound installation Shape Shifter, which is simply one of the best explorations of interior resonances I have experienced.
I’m kicking myself at missing Michaela Davies’ While Rome Burns, featuring a string quartet powered by electro-muscular stimulation (there’s a great snippet on YouTube at http://youtu.be/6jTKfCCmT10) and not getting in early enough for a seat for Ed Kuepper. The only major disappointment, however, was oppressively stuffy (verging on unsafe) conditions for the PJ Harvey gig, which would have been far better suited to a seated auditorium.
The highlight of MONA FOMA in the week I attended was The Barbarians, a major new work by IHOS Opera commissioned for the festival. IHOS and its director Constantine Koukias are clearly revelling in their position as premier local artists for FOMA. Who wouldn’t? Brian Ritchie even supplied the poem that forms its libretto, “Welcome the Barbarians” (1904) by Constantine Cavafy. It explores the simultaneous fear of, and desire for, the other/unknown/invader, a fundamental strand in the vast expanse of Greek cultural history, overlaid with millennia of invasions, sometimes successfully resisted but many times resulting in cultural fusion.
The Barbarians is a landmark for the company, the third in the series of deeply personal major works that began with Days and Nights with Christ (Sydney Festival, 1992) and To Traverse Water (Melbourne International Arts Festival, 1995). That it has been so long in coming is a reflection of the personal journey of Koukias and his efforts to establish and maintain for 21 years a contemporary opera company. That he has managed to make work that is both cutting-edge and accessible in Hobart is all the more notable. Koukias achieves this balance through a musical language based in Byzantine Church chant, part of the root-stock of all Western music.
Scintillating visual and sound design are hallmarks, as are the sonorities of languages other than English, but what truly makes IHOS unique is the central role of movement in unfolding the text. This production saw the welcome return to IHOS of Melbourne-based Christos Linou as choreographer and dancer. His tour de force performance, naked for the entire show, was juxtaposed with the lush orchestration and polished singers and orchestra. The whole is bounded by sounds that genuinely create fear in the listener. Little wonder David Walsh attended twice and was reportedly raving in the festival club about this beautiful, transgressive masterpiece. This can only bode well for the future of IHOS and for contemporary music and performance in Tasmania.
SOMETHING REMARKABLE HAPPENED AT THIS YEAR’S PUSH FESTIVAL. FESTIVAL DIRECTOR NORMAN ARMOUR DIED AND CAME BACK TO LIFE. HE SUFFERED A CARDIAC ARREST PART WAY THROUGH A CONCERT BY MARY MARGARET O’HARA AND PEGGY LEE. THANKFULLY, SOMEONE WAS ON HAND TO ADMINISTER CPR AND RESTART THE HEART—TEMPORARILY. ARMOUR’S PULSE AGAIN DISAPPEARED, BUT PARAMEDICS ARRIVED, APPLIED THE DEFIBRILLATOR AND THE PULSE WAS BACK. EN ROUTE TO THE HOSPITAL THE HEART WENT SILENT AGAIN. ONE MORE CHARGE OF ELECTRIC CURRENT TO THE CHEST WALL DID THE TRICK, AND ARMOUR WAS TRULY BACK AMONG THE LIVING.
Meanwhile, at the theatre, O’Hara sang “Body’s in Trouble” from her album Miss America, providing the perfect theme for a shocked audience seeking communal solace. There were those in the crowd who were friends of the fallen director, those who were simply concerned about the welfare of a fellow human being, and I suppose there were those who were unmoved. Spectators make their own meaning, even of such life-and-death theatrics. Did I say “theatrics?”
Actually, Armour’s unintentional performance was anti-theatrical—absolutely authentic, more in line with the kind of authenticity 1960s performance artists risked when they did things like deliberately get shot and slice themselves open with razor blades. Those artists are now distant progenitors of the typical hybrid performances featured at festivals like PuSh. A half-century later, 1960s notions of body-based authenticity have become just another set of aesthetic conventions, a style of performance if you will, no more and no less valid than any other. On the other hand, having a heart attack fulfills the requirements of the ‘real’ while providing the kind of high drama anti-theatricalists of the 60s viewed with disdain. Armour’s ‘performance’ collapses the argument. He becomes an appropriate symbol for a festival that welcomes traditional aesthetic opponents under the same umbrella.
andrea božić
It’s a coincidence that Andrea Božić’s contemporary dance piece After Trio A (Amsterdam) was on the program this year. Božić takes Yvonne Rainer’s iconic 1960s anti-theatrical dance solo Trio A and turns it into spectacle. The original work exemplifies principles articulated in Rainer’s 1965 tract, No Manifesto, in which the choreographer proclaims, “No to seduction of the spectator by the wiles of the performer.” The Trio A (1966) solo is non-seductive, non-narrative, and non-dramatic. There is no climax. Every part of the dance is given equal value. In theory it’s a performance stripped of pretence and artificiality. It must have felt urgent in its non-urgency back in the days when Rainer was part of a larger trend that included performance artists putting themselves through durational performances of great physical and mental rigour in order to stake a claim to authenticity while rejecting the illusionism of theatre. Chris Burden, famous for filming himself getting shot in the arm, once said, “Bad art is theatre.”
But it’s all theatre to the spectator. What constitutes too much or too little spectacle or virtuosity is always a matter of degree. In A Manifesto Reconsidered (2008) Rainer adjusts her original declaration: seduction, she writes, is “Unavoidable,” and virtuosity is “Acceptable in limited quantities.” Božić’s After Trio A, as well as her own playful tract, After No Manifesto, revises and partly refutes Rainer’s assertions. Two dancers (Claire French and Anne Cooper) learn Rainer’s original score while watching it on a monitor for the first time. They are able to approximate what they see due to their dance training. In 1966 Rainer was able to give every part of the original solo even weight due to virtuosic control of her own body. In 2012 Božić achieves in-the-moment authenticity by giving skilled performers a task they can’t rehearse.
In After No Manifesto Božić responds to Rainer’s caution against virtuosity with “Yes to imagination.” In an era in which we acknowledge that we are always performing versions of ourselves, there’s really no such thing as inauthentic performance, only authentic disguise. The ‘true’ you is a relative concept. The bare materiality of 1960s performance art—“I’m not pretending to be shot, I’ve really been shot”—has given over to “I’m really pretending to be shot.” Full circle.
chelfitsch
Hot Pepper, Chelfitsch
photo Toru Yokota
Hot Pepper, Chelfitsch
And yet the 1960s resistance to the cheaper sentiments of commercial theatre remains a guiding principle for much of the work at PuSh, as does the mistrust of dramatic peaks and valleys. The typical show tends to be kept within a narrow dynamic range (not too high, not too low), and performers tend to avoid over-expressing. This is certainly true of the mesmerising Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and Farewell Speech by Chelfitsch (Tokyo), in which choreographed movement based on everyday gesture is stretched to the edges of plausibility, but vocal and facial expression is restricted by office etiquette.
rabih mroué
Rabih Mroué, Looking for a Missing Employee
photo Houssam Mchaiemch
Rabih Mroué, Looking for a Missing Employee
Rabih Mroué (Beirut), writer and director of Looking for a Missing Employee, adopts a Colombo-like faux naiveté while sifting through news documents that point to government collusion in the murder of a Finance Ministry worker. “Never trust a photocopy,” he says coyly while rifling through his own copies of articles from Lebanese dailies. Mroué renders even himself a copy by performing from behind the audience where a video camera projects his live image to a screen onstage. With such displacements, and with sly wit, Mroué gestures toward the guilty but never commits the aesthetic crime of shouting “Murderers!”
peter reder
Seduction of the spectator through understated personal charm is also a feature of Guided Tour by Peter Reder (London, England). This mock tour of the Vancouver Art Gallery has a thematic thread related to Walter Benjamin’s concept of “the angel of history”—a figure unable to repair the disasters of the past because it is being pushed relentlessly into the future by the fierce winds of paradise. Reder connects this concept to nostalgic constructions of our individual pasts. He provides a slideshow of family picnics at the beach, which might be from his childhood but—due to the generic quality of the images—could just as easily be from someone else’s. Like the angel of history, you can only reconstruct the past in your mind. In the meantime disasters will pile up. The success of this show ultimately depends on the rapport Reder establishes, through deft irony, with the small group of patrons he guides through the building. There are no startling revelations. Discoveries are kept in proportion. High drama is rejected in favour of intimate personal contact.
teatro linea de sombra
Amarillo, Teatro Linea de Sombra
photo Roberto Blenda
Amarillo, Teatro Linea de Sombra
Amarillo by Teatro Linea de Sombra (Mexico City) constructs the “probable” journey of a Mexican migrant worker who attempts a crossing into the USA. It begins with the packing of a desert survival kit that includes lemons for dehydration and painkillers for dealing with an 80-kilometre trek in 50 degree heat. It ends with death by drowning in a sea of sand. An upstage wall stands for the barrier between South and North. It is leaped at, climbed and pounded in vain by a man who will ultimately disappear. It also serves as a projection screen for the many surveillance quality cameras that shoot the action from above. Objects accumulate on the floor of the stage, and by the end we are looking through columns of sand, pouring down from above, at a projection of jugs full of blue water lit up by flashlights, as if a well-ordered and sentient constellation is trying to make sense of the dead man lying half-buried on the desert floor.
mario pensotti
El Pasado, Mario Pensotti
photo Matias Sendon
El Pasado, Mario Pensotti
The action in El pasado es un animal grotesco by Mario Pensotti (Buenos Aires) keeps pace with the revolving stage on which interweaving stories of a number of 20-something urban Argentinians take place. The revolve itself is a beautiful plywood-clad thing, with rollers visible, and with scenic furniture stripped down to the bare living essentials. The characters that inhabit it are young and can’t afford to complete the furnishings—they are unfinished projects. Each is, in her or his own way, struggling to find a place in a globalised society in which individuals tend to be atomised worker/consumer units and personal connections are hard to sustain. Most of what happens to the characters seems accidental. As an actor exits a scene passing to the back of the revolve, she enters into and narrates another coming into view. The true narrative engine of the evening is the revolve, which is divided into quarters and is in almost continual motion throughout the performance. As a result the stories have a sense of forward momentum even though they unfold rather slowly. Like Benjamin’s angel, the characters can never go back, but neither are they propelled by a storm. Rather, they are continually nudged forward. Gentle as the push may be, the imperative of linear time is no less inexorable.
neworld/vancouver moving theatre
You might expect Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot (Neworld/Vancouver Moving Theatre, Vancouver) to provide an old-school dramatic spike to those hungry for emotional punch. Seven years ago director James Fagan Tait (who also writes the adaptation) gave us the apotheosis of Crime and Punishment. The Idiot is a different kind of novel, slightly Chekhovian in the way character pretensions are consistently deflated. Tait’s Idiot is alternately ironic, sincere and down-to-earth, if a little liberal with the ‘F’ bombs. As with Crime we have the large, ethnically diverse cast made up of trained and un-trained actors, the spare staging, the beautiful group tableaux in which performers deliberately look like here-and-now Vancouverites in there-and-then attire, and the same quiet, unforced delivery that makes the spectator lean forward to catch every word. In keeping with much of the festival, performer expressivity is constrained. Even when Rogozhin (Andrew McNee) suffers a remorseful vocal utterance after murdering his lover Nastassia (Cherise Clarke), the momentary rupture is limited to a single, measured cry.
yes to seduction
There were a few shows at the festival that embraced melodrama, mid-20th century realism, or plain old kitsch. For me, these productions simply affirmed the value of the dominant aesthetic of the festival: don’t spoon-feed the audience. Of course, one can get over-cautious. In her 1965 manifesto Yvonne Rainer stridently demands, “No to moving and being moved.” Seriously? I want my money back. In 2008 she grudgingly acknowledges that “moving and being moved” is “unavoidable.” How terribly pinched. Andrea Božić counters, “Yes to transparency,” “Yes to enthusiasm,” “Yes to staying here.” I confess I go to performances hoping to be seduced. If you’ll indulge the allusion, seduction is acceptable as long as it occurs between mature, consenting spectators. The structure of the theatrical event provides the necessary “safe word.”
art, actually
And then there’s the fact of Norman Armour’s cardiac arrest. John Cage would have appreciated the circumstances: a chance “operation” occurring within the aesthetic frame of the festival. Parameters are established, and then what happens within them is “art.” Or is the heart attack too great a disturbance? Is it too real for art? Is it the aesthetic ‘body’ of the festival that is “in trouble,” as Mary Margaret O’Hara sings in her song? Probably not. Michael Boucher, the man who saved Armour, described the festival director’s collapse as “almost” comical. Ah, so it wasn’t tragedy, it was slapstick. Like the characters in The Idiot, we are rather impotent creatures. Our sufferings are real, but what does it all add up to? With Božić we must say, “Yes to confusion of the spectator”—ourselves. How can we authentically say otherwise? At the same time, in our relief at the survival of a fellow spectator, we can also say with Božić—and with Norman Armour—“Yes to staying here.” For as long as we can bear it.
2012 PuSh International Festival of Performing Arts, Vancouver, Jan 17-Feb 4; http://pushfestival.ca
SINCE ITS INCEPTION IN 2006 UNDER THE DIRECTION OF ITS FOUNDER, COMPOSER MATTHEW HINDSON, THE AURORA FESTIVAL OF CONTEMPORARY ART MUSIC HAS BECOME A KEY PART OF THE BURGEONING ARTS WORLD OF WESTERN SYDNEY, WHERE IT HAS BEEN PRINCIPALLY PRESENTED IN THE REGION’S FLOURISHING ARTS CENTRES.
Hindson directed three festivals 2006-10, the third playing host to the International Society of Contemporary Music (ISCM) World Music Day yielding an enormous program rich in diversity and invention.
In 2010, composer, arts manager, teacher and co-founder and co-director of Chronology Arts (RT97, p40), Andrew Batt-Rawden, was appointed director of the 2012 Aurora Festival. I spoke with him about his program and its evolution, asking how it felt to be an artistic director. “You get an opportunity to release your creative vision into the world, which is a lot of fun,” he declares with a laugh. “It’s very exciting, also very daunting and there’s a lot of work involved.”
As for the creation of the program, a committee was involved. The 27-year old admits “As a first time festival director, I was keen to surround myself with people I like and whose opinions and musical tastes I trust. We all researched projects and put them on the table. Only a couple of times did I think, no, not that event. It was a collaborative effort.”
I asked how conscious Batt-Rawden was in his programming of keeping in step with the diversity of forms of contemporary art music that take it beyond the traditional concert medium. He replies, “The last thing I wanted to do was to create a festival that didn’t reflect the culture of contemporary art music.” Consequently there are events like Super Critical Mass, a performative installation featuring 60 local musicians and an audience on the move; Pocket Gamelan, an opportunity for the public to play mobile phones that have become musical instruments; and AMPED, a performance for and with young people at the arts centre where they hang out on Thursday nights.
george lentz, zane banks
Zane Banks
Of course, there are concerts in Aurora but some of the contents might surprise: “I wanted to have a diverse range of events including some emphasis on electronics and noise,” says Batt-Rawden. He also notes the prominence of the electric guitar in the program was quite unintended. “It was organic. Originally we wanted to get Oren Ambarchi involved.” Then Zane Banks was added to the program, to play the Australian premiere of Sydney composer Georges Lentz’s Ingwe (from Mysterium, part of a large-scale cycle of works, Caeli errant…). Banks, who plays both contemporary classical and avant-garde rock and is the artistic director of Ensemble Ampere (an electric guitar outfit), premiered the 60-minute solo work in Luxembourg in 2007 and then recorded it for the Naxos label. As an admirer of what I’ve heard of Lentz’s Caeli errant… and an aficionado of the diverse capacities of the electric guitar, I’m very much looking forward to Ingwe (May 12, Campbelltown Arts Centre).
It’s fascinating to read on his website how Lentz came to write Ingwe: “One evening at the Royal Hotel, a pub in Brewarrina, northern NSW, a man sat alone tuning his electric guitar for that night’s rock gig. I was working on a piece for solo cello at the time but knew immediately that I should write something for the guitar instead—the loneliness and desolation of the place (and indeed my own loneliness) seemed to be encapsulated in that man’s sound…(www.georgeslentz.com/ingwe.html).
oren ambarchi & merzbow
Oren Ambarchi, Judith Wright Centre, 2010
photo Brian Spencer
Oren Ambarchi, Judith Wright Centre, 2010
Oren Ambarchi’s superb electric guitar skills are widely admired—he has performed with a formidable list of adventurous fellow artists including Fennesz, Otomo Yoshihide, Keiji Haino, John Zorn, Jim O’Rourke, Keith Rowe, Dave Grohl and Phil Niblock. On March 1 this year he premiered John Cage Portrait, a work for electric guitar and orchestra, with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra at the Tectonics Music Festival. For his solo performance on May 8 at the Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre Ambarchi says he will be playing guitar and “some pretty antiquated effect pedals… it’s usually something quite simple that’s explored over 30-40 minutes—a motif or idea slowly unfolds over time. Hopefully it’s something where both myself and the listener lose ourselves.”
The inclusion of Ambarchi in Aurora is indicative of the increasing overlap between contemporary classical and experimental musics, an inclusiveness in this festival which extends to Tokyo guest, noisician Merzbow (Masami Akita) on his second visit to Australia to present an improvised performance of extreme noise using a combination of laptop and analog equipment at Riverside Theatre, May 11. In a second appearance at Campbelltown Arts Centre on May 13, he’ll duet with Oren Ambarchi for the closing night of the festival. Ambarchi, as part of Sunn 0))), has played with Merzbow previously in Tokyo, an experience he describes as “really special…I’ve always considered Masami’s music to be psychedelic, in the true sense of the word. Psychedelic, in the sense of losing yourself in the sound. I get a feeling of momentum, when his stuff is really working. So I’m hoping the collaboration will go down that road.”
Batt-Rawden feels that “noise is a pretty important part of contemporary music. It’s a good investment to bring Merzbow from Japan.” As well as his prodigious musical output, sound installations and collaborations with Sonic Youth, Mike Patton and others, Merzbow’s work includes musical protests against whaling.
synergy, clocks and clouds
Terumi Narushima, Kraig Grady, Clocks and Clouds
On Aurora’s percussion front, at Casula Powerhouse on May 5, Synergy will interpret works by Amanda Cole, Marcus Whale, Alex Pozniak and James Rushford, the outcome of the group’s first Emerging Composer Initiative, a much-needed opportunity for composers to meet the very particular challenges of writing for percussion. Also at Casula Powerhouse on the same night, the performer-composers of Clocks and Clouds, Kraig Grady and Terumi Narushima, will doubtless feature the transcendent sounds of their distinctive, retuned vibraphone and pump organ and other instruments constructed by Grady.
marshall mcguire
Another instrument rarely privileged with solo outings is the harp. Anyone who loves virtuoso Marshall McGuire’s Rough Magic (1999) and The Twentieth Century Harp (2002) CDs—paired as a double CD, charM, by ABC Classics in 2007—will not want to miss his concert of 21st century compositions on May 6 at St Finbar’s in the Blue Mountains, an invaluable and rare opportunity to hear what’s happening with that magical instrument in our own time.
chamber made opera
At the Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, May 9-11, Melbourne’s Chamber Made Opera (see p36) will present Minotaur The Island which premiered on Bruny Island in Tasmania’s Ten Days on the Island festival last year. The work is an imagining of the lost 1608 Monteverdi opera L’Arianna: “We see the conception of Pasiphae, King Minos’ mail order bride, who has become obsessed with the bull of heaven. She gives birth to the monstrous Minotaur, part bull, part human. The Minotaur grows and becomes ferocious, needing to devour men for sustenance, and as a consequence is locked away, in a gigantic labyrinth (press release).
chronology arts & dirty feet; daniel blinkhorn
Chronology Arts and Dirty Feet dance company unite to present Vitality, a series designed to bring together composers and choreographers. The first in the series is Quest, in which choreographer Martin del Amo and composer Alex Pozniak “explore a young girl’s ‘blind’ discovery of sound and movement.” It will be presented May 12 at Campbelltown Arts Centre on the same bill as sound artist and composer Daniel Blinkhorn’s performance drawing on his field trip to Antarctica.
greg schiemer
The ever-inventive composer and electronic instrument builder, Greg Schiemer has created Pocket Gamelan for Mobile Phones (Campbelltown Arts Centre, May 13). Batt-Rawden says it was “an opportunity that came up and was not to be missed! [Schiemer] has networked a set of mobiles, programming them with music software and showing non-musicians how to use them—like swinging them around your head! It’s quite spectacular and the implications for using everyday technology instrumentally and collaboratively are amazing. It creates musical ensembles and is available to everyone.” The work, which premiered at London’s Tate Gallery in April 2011 combines electronics and voices, using Schiemer’s Mandala App (see image page 14).
luke jaaniste & julian day
Further audience engagement outside the concert sphere will be found at Blacktown Arts Centre where Luke Jaaniste and Julian Day invite their audience to amble room to room to encounter 60 musicians performing Super Critical Mass for the festival’s opening on May 4. This performative installation should offer a truly distinctive aural and spatial experience—”like wandering through a soundscape,” says Batt-Rawden. “I’m not allowed to tell you the instrumentation because it’s going to be a surprise.”
chronology arts
Chronology Arts has conducted a couple of workshops with “the young people who hang outside the Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre in Penrith on Thursday nights,” says Batt-Rawden, “any number from 50 to 200 playing games, basketball, dancing sporadically in a non-threatening, almost festive atmosphere and very receptive to what will engage them. For AMPED we’ll be there May 10 with interactive electronics, microphones, keyboard, guitars [Zane Banks’ guitar quartet] and a Max/MSP program to create a duet between electronics and human input—and let the kids have a go. Chronology will do a concert and hope to coax some of the kids to perform.”
alicia crossley
Also at the Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre, recorder player Alicia Crossley will be conducting a program aimed to get school children involved in music, a project, says Batt-Rawden, that centre hopes will have a longer life.
open access
I ask Batt-Rawden if it’s important that works like AMPED, Super Critical Mass and Pocket Gamelan provide a very accessible experience of contemporary art music. “Yes, we wanted to break down a number of barriers to contemporary music. Another of these is distance, which is why we’re doing the festival in Western Sydney. Pricing is addressed, including some free performances, like Super Critical Mass. And then there’s understanding, hoping people will be open to something possibly quite alien. You need an open mind to enjoy it—there is no fixed way to experience music. Open yourself to it and you will get something from it.”
Aurora Music Festival, Western Sydney, May 4-13
Industry forum, “Sustainable Music Business Models,” chair John Davis, CEO Australian Music Centre, Campbelltown Arts Centre, May 12 www.aurorafestival.com.au
Nathan Beard, Casey Ayres, Abdul Abdullah, Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere
photo Tada Hengsapkul assisted by Lee Anantwat
Nathan Beard, Casey Ayres, Abdul Abdullah, Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere
THE GREATER ASIA CO-PROSPERITY SPHERE IS A TRIO OF ARTISTS AIMING TO REPRESENT ALL ASIAN NATIONS. THEY DRESS IN GOLD SILK SUITS, GO ON ELEPHANT-RIDING HOLIDAYS IN THAILAND AND ARE AMBITIOUSLY TAKING ON A DISCUSSION ABOUT THE JOYS AND ODDITIES OF MARRYING ASIAN AND AUSTRALIAN CULTURE.
Family history is something many of us only discover at funerals. Unbeknownst to us, Great Aunt Mabel was a glamorous socialite who seduced prominent thespians, or Poppa John had crossed the border into Austria as a fugitive. For Australians, discovering notoriety or exoticism in the bloodline seems a kind of jackpot. We speak with bright-eyed pride of convict ancestry or our genealogical fractions of Romany gypsy or European royalty, despite the manifestation of this rare link in our lives being minor.
Perth artists Casey Ayres, Nathan Beard and Abdul Abdullah have begun the excavation of their familial heritage early, making sure to fully absorb every ounce of romance, humour and melodrama into their ostentatiously titled collaboration, The Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The three early career Perth artists were drawn together by their shared backgrounds: each has an Asian mother and a white Australian father, and was brought up in a Western Australian household that maintained traditions from both cultures. This meant the co-existence of primetime sitcoms with Buddhist ritual, pork buns beside fairy bread at birthday parties, and at all times a heightened awareness of the way Asian culture had been translated by their parents into everyday Australian life.
Nathan Beard’s father met his mother on holiday in Thailand in the late 1970s, during a break in his job as a federal policeman. After their move to Australia and the birth of their son, Beard’s mother ensured her traditional Thai cooking and a strong dedication to Buddhism “tethered” the boy to Thai culture. “I’d always sympathised more with my mother’s side of the family. I think as I got older and started to realise the cultural alienation that she took upon herself, divorcing herself from her heritage, I started to feel sorry about it. So I wanted to investigate that further.” Beard has been working on ‘quasi-collaborative’ pieces with his non-artist mother for years, contracting her to paint family portraits or asking her to model for his photographic recreations of classical paintings.
Casey Ayres’ mother is Malay-Chinese and his late father the son of English immigrants. He guesses this makes him a second generation Australian, though his laid-back attitude, penchant for backyard barbecuing and laddish accent suggest he’s got more than his share of the Antipodean in him. Ayres’ examination of his roots began only recently: “When the project came up, I really knew nothing about my cultural heritage whatsoever, so I thought this was a good way of exploring it. Also the food! Any place that makes so much good food, I want to know more about.” A skilled machinist with both camera and car, Ayres’ practice usually involves the photographic glorification of his beloved Ford Escort.
Clearly fascinated by the complexity of his background, Abdul Abdullah details his family biography as though he’s memorised it: “My mother is Malay, my father is Australian, I am seventh generation Australian, descendant from convicts despatched here in 1815 for stealing two stamps and a watch chain.” Abdul’s father converted to Islam and his parents moved to Australia to make their home in the early 1970s. As an Archibald finalist and 2011 winner of the Blake Prize for Human Justice, Abdul’s thriving painting practice has opened up discussion about what it means to be a Muslim Australian.
Nathan Beard, Casey Ayres, Abdul Abdullah, Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere
photo Tada Hengsapkul assisted by Lee Anantwat
Nathan Beard, Casey Ayres, Abdul Abdullah, Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere
Thrown together by otherness, Beard, Ayres and Abdullah have formed a kind of artistic solidarity. Not only do they have Asian mothers in common, but each has experienced parental suspicion or confusion about their art practices, particularly when it came to researching family history. Collaboration seemed natural.
The trio consider themselves emblematic of an Asian-Australian nexus. At first this led to casual experiments into culture jamming, in particular forming a hypothetical boy-band called Beige. The name had an unexpectedly decisive effect on the way the artists worked together. Beige, being the colour of non-specificity, allowed them to consider their very varied heritage under a single category—as Asian-Australian heritage in general. It gave them permission to hybridise their autobiographies, research themselves, each other, the West, the East and all Asian nations with equal attention, attachment and entitlement.
It was at this point that Abdullah, Ayres and Beard became The Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Named after an anachronistic proposal penned by Japanese Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe in the 1940s, the artists used their collaboration to pool their experiences with Asian culture. What formed was a kind of ambassadorial unit, documenting an often humorous “glance at all of Asia,” as Abdullah puts it. The Sphere made research trips to Singapore, a once imperialised multicultural hub, and Thailand, a country with unusually strong mercantile ties with the West.
The GACPS project, which will be exhibited at the 2012 Next Wave festival, and is supported by Next Wave’s Kick Start program, will take the form of a comprehensive, experiential and highly multi-media installation: a pan-Asian embassy. Built in Melbourne, the embassy will be filled with an array of Asian decorative objects manufactured by the artists, representing the whole spectrum from traditional to kitsch. Think brush-painted banners, red lanterns, Maneki Neko waving cats and gold thrones as well as a full program of dance, music, craft and cooking activities.
The artists have merged themselves into the project as gaudily dressed yet sombre dignitaries, for an embassy certainly requires the presence of ambassadors. They will don a uniform they call the “Plada suit,” a bright gold silken two-piece topped with a gilded Thai headdress, perhaps as incongruous to Australian life as Imperial safari outfits were to jungle outposts in the 30s, or an Indonesian batik shirt on John Howard. In costume, the trio must perform their ambassadorial duties, explains Beard: “Importantly, what we’re going to be doing is facilitating an engagement with the space for audiences, trying to get people to think beyond the immediate experience and open up a dialogue. How were they raised with ideas of multiculturalism in an Australian context?”
A kind of pastiche of a World’s Fair pavilion, the embassy will provide gallery patrons with an experience that is equal parts sincerity and humour. The GACPS ambassadors have practised developing humorous access points between themselves and an audience. Recently, they’ve appeared in full costume at karaoke bars, for studio talks at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts and attempted to correspond with some of Australia’s most prominent Asian-Australians such as Penny Wong, Lee Lin Chin and Shaun Tan. This willingness to point out and then embody the absurd dissimilarities that exist between all cultures has quickly endeared the artists to their audiences. Ayres attributes this to their willingness to demonstrate “a sense of communal humiliation.”
While the object of the embassy never approaches social activism, it certainly exists within a climate of what Abdullah calls “increased multiculturalism” and cultural sensitivity. Perhaps it is fair to say that Australia’s complex historical relationship with Asia, the strength and diversity of Asian culture here and also the laconic Aussie sense of humour have created the perfect environment for The GACPS collaboration to thrive.
If everything about this project is loud—gold veneer, manifestos, cultural clashes and comical performance—it is still autobiography that has allowed the artists to foreground the issues of nationality, family and borrowed culture. This is a personal project for each artist. They have reclaimed a place for themselves between two cultures that would once have been described as marginal, other or “neither here nor there.” In this territory they have made themselves educators, cultural liaison officers, translators and ambassadors to both Australia and Asia, helping us to comprehend and relish a world in which language, art, music, food and tradition may all be so easily borrowed and just as easily misunderstood. The collaboration “reflects upon that innate sense of confusion that arises when you’re stepping in between two cultures. We want to open up an earnest exploration to allow people to figure out, bearing in mind all these differences, how they negotiate their own sense of identity, their own sense of cultural confusion.”
The embassy of the Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere will be installed in the Ian Potter Centre by Federation Square in May 2012 during the Next Wave Festival: The Space Between Us Wants To Sing.
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR EMILY SEXTON SEES NEXT WAVE 2012 AS “A SOCIALLY AND POLITICALLY ENGAGED FESTIVAL. WE WANTED TO CREATE AN EXPERIENTIAL DYNAMIC IN THE WAY YOU SEE ART.”
To this end, the festival invites you to start each day with a couple of hours at the Breakfast Club at the Wheeler Centre for Writing, Books and Ideas over coffee and the provocations of visiting international curators. Then you can spend the rest of the day exploring a variety of shows, installations and events across the city. Create your own trajectory or take up the festival’s offer of a choice of nine different day passes, each with a guide and each from breakfast to late night. That means sharing the experience with a group of fellow audience members for a day: “That’s where the cut and thrust is to be had,” says Sexton, “in the dialogue you have before and after experiencing an artwork and we wanted to make that as easy as possible.” She makes the point that the festival presents multidisciplinary works but wants to create a multidisciplinary context—hence this sharing: “It’s about our own practice as a festival.”
Consequently, Next Wave 2012 has an emphasis on “people coming together around everyday experiences expanded into intense versions: breakfasts, a wedding, markets, walks—all exploded into a contemporary art context. Next Wave is not like mainstream arts festivals that make certain promises. It’s about people exploring things and taking risks, so you have to create an environment that is about risk as well. I thought a lot about great music festivals: you go for the headliner but it’s the unknowns that everyone talks about afterwards. So we wanted to give people the opportunity to be surprised.”
Sexton emphasises the role of collaboration underpinning Next Wave: “Artists have made their work in collaboration with an amazing diversity of people in and around the arts. Elizabeth Dunn, for example, has created a beautiful project called Flyway in collaboration with birders for the last two years. Driving the great Australasian migration flyway up the east coast of Australia from Melbourne to her home in Queensland, she stayed along the way at migratory hotspots where birders live who generously opened up to her. Dunn made the journey into a metaphor, layering it over Melbourne to create a migratory walking tour from Carlton to Dockland mirroring her own journey.” Video monitors showing birds and locations will be encountered on the walk, the sightings aided by small binoculars for each walker. The sonic element will be provided by Brisbane sound artist Lawrence English.
In No Show’s Shotgun Wedding, gay artists Mark Pritchard and Bridget Balodis, who have been attending weddings and talking with priests for their research, will create an apparently very realistic wedding experience. The audience are the guests, eating, dancing and engaging with all the activities that come with, says Sexton, “one of the strongest of social rituals, one where many people fall back on tradition.” She describes this theatre work as insightful and very funny.
Next Wave 2012 features artists from across the country: “We really see it as a national festival—how many strange hotels have I been sleeping in over the last 18 months while searching for the artists who are the bravest and most curious in their practice.” As for artists beyond Australia, Sexton in her first year as director is focusing on making connections. Consequently, “Next Wave has created a residency program for emerging international festival directors and curators—people who are starting up things in different ways in the UK, Beijing, Korea, Indonesia and New York. Some we know well, some of it’s a bit of blind date, but we’re looking forward to a deep conversation with long term results.”
As for Next Wave 2012’s political dimension, Sexton describes the last two years as “a very strange time, with more and more people taking to the streets, but not always being able to articulate why they want change. I think that’s where art comes in so strongly because it uses the unconscious to help articulate our feelings. And not didactically. It’s all about discussion.” She cites Dan Koops’ The Stream/The Boat/The Shore/The Bridge, in which you’ll find yourself on a boat negotiating the Yarra, games and adventures while “thinking about our use of resources from a problem solving perspective.” Sarah-Jane Norman’s work, Bone Library (at the Melbourne City Library), about the loss of hundreds of Aboriginal languages, in which she carves their names on animal bones, is described by Sexton as “very mournful about what is dying around us that we can and can’t see.”
Skye Gellmann, Blindscape
photo Dom Bonnice
Skye Gellmann, Blindscape
Sexton says that she and her team started thinking about Next Wave 2012 in terms of generosity and urgency. “Urgency prompts us to make political work, while generosity is more complex—artists giving away parts of themselves and their ideas, often without reward.” Next Wave, with its mix of free and modestly priced ticketed events and the space it offers young artists to meet and challenge an audience bespeaks the political power of generosity. Sexton pays tribute to another kind of largesse, the advice received “from Next Wave alumni like Martyn Coutts, Willow S Wieland and Lara Thoms,” who in their own work in previous Next Waves, says Sexton, so effectively articulated cross-art practice which is, she emphasises, now no longer seen in terms of a clash of forms but as innate to contemporary practice.
Reading the Next Wave media kit I was struck by the sheer inventiveness, on paper, of many of the works soon to be realised. They include, from over 40 works, Team Mess’ Bingo Unit, participatory filmmaking and a backlot tour; Robin Hungerford’s Shamanic Organic Contemporary Cuisine cooking show; Talon Salon, an intimate audio theatre show and nail treatment in one, presented in an actual nail salon; The Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a mock embassy (see p15); Fresh Produce, works presented in the Queen Victoria Market; Skye Gellman’s Blindscape, physical theatre experienced through iPhone and other intimacies; Creo Nova’s “proximity controlled xylophones, megaphone whirlwinds, singing plants and deep-sea gurglers”; and Tiffany Singh’s Drums between the Bells, one thousand strands of bells hanging from an elm tree in Melbourne’s City Square.
Zoe Meagher’s Goodbye, CSIRAC, in the Melbourne Museum, is a sound and performance work about Australia’s first computer “and its forgotten female operators”; Kel Mocilnik and Alison Currie go In the Pursuit of Repetition (fame and squalour) in a dance, visual and performance work for the duration of the festival beneath Federation Square; in Physical Fractals dancer Natalie Abbott and collaborator Rebecca Jensen “will produce intense sound effects by hurling microphones into the space and generating feedback from squeaky amplifiers”; in Exchange, Justin Shoulder will perform with Dewey Dell (Italy), an offshoot of Societàs Raffaello Sanzio; in The Warmth of the Curve, Michelle Sakaris explores cross-cultural walking practices; in Wheyface by Daniel ‘Room 328’ Santangeli, three post-apocalyptic curators “erroneously piece together the history of humankind”; and in Wintering, dancer Aimee Smith draws on her experience of the Arctic Circle to ask what it means “to live in a changing and disintegrating world?” And that’s a mere handful of works from a packed program that promises intense engagement, risk and dialogue.
book cover The Shadowcatchers, A History of Cinematography in Australia
THE BOOK WILL BE BEAUTIFUL. IT’S COFFEE TABLE BOOK SIZE, AND IT’S FILLED WITH OVER 380 PHOTOGRAPHS OF AUSTRALIAN CINEMATOGRAPHERS WORKING ON FILM SETS FROM ALMOST THE BIRTH OF CINEMA TO THE PRESENT.
There’s a rich and detailed text, covering the history of film production in Australia but told very much from the cinematographers’ perspective, and there are fascinating and often very funny biographical sketches of many of those who have worked behind the camera throughout that history.
It’s The Shadowcatchers: a Photographic History of Australian Cinematography, and when it is finally published next month it will be the culmination of an eight-year labour of love by the Australian Cinematographers’ Society and, in particular, ACS members Calvin Gardiner and Martha Ansara.
In the very comfortable ACS clubrooms in North Sydney I talked to Gardiner and Ansara about how the book came about. (These are clubrooms which are well used by the very involved ACS members; there’s a terrific library, excellent screening facilities where they view one another’s work and an extensive and fascinating collection of donated cameras and other film equipment.)
It’s well known that Australian film crews are hugely respected in the industry, both locally and overseas, cinematographers particularly so. (There are five Australian Academy Award-winning cinematographers: Dean Semler, Andrew Lesnie, Russell Boyd, John Seale and Dion Beebe.) In fact, as I say to them, the one person who has been absolutely essential to the making of a film since filmmaking began has been the one behind the camera.
Calvin Gardiner (“a superb cinematographer,” says Ansara) who was inducted into the ACS Hall of Fame in 2009, is a committee member of both the NSW and Federal Executive and was elected as NSW President in 2008. His father, Jack Gardiner, was also ACS Federal and State President.
lunatics, obsessives & individualists
Terry Gibson (driver), David Eggby (DOP), Mad Max (1979)
courtesy David Eggby
Terry Gibson (driver), David Eggby (DOP), Mad Max (1979)
Gardiner says, “that’s what the book is really about; the cinematographers—their lunacy, their obsessiveness, their individuality. It’s about the people; what they do, how they feel, what they do to get the job done. It tries to find out, but doesn’t quite answer the question, why do they have such high standards? It used to be a fairly carefree, larrikin, fuck you mate, I’ll do it my way attitude that prevailed,” he explained, “and it’s still there, but underneath, more concealed.” “Perhaps it is, as John Seale says, ‘something they put in the beer’,” adds Ansara.
While she says that Gardiner really instigated the book, they both put the idea to the ACS Committee, back in 2004. “The original idea was to have it ready for the 50th anniversary of the ACS, which was founded in 1958; but it was much harder, and took much longer, than we expected,” she explained.
from oral origins
Ansara had interviewed many cinematographers while recording their oral histories and this was a great starting point for the project. One of the first women in Australia to work as a cinematographer, she later became a director and producer of prize-winning social documentaries, also teaching film production and writing historical and critical articles on film for a range of publications. She was the founding convener of the Film & Broadcast Industries Oral History Group, and has contributed nearly 100 oral histories to the National Film & Sound Archive.
How did that start? I asked. “In 1977, when I was a cinematography student at AFTRS, we were required to write a paper, and I wanted to write one that would teach me something about the close-knit group of cinematographers who seemed to dominate everything in those days and who, it seemed then, would never accept a woman into their ranks,” she explained. “At that time, there was so little written information (still largely the case) that I had no other choice but to ask the older cinematographers to tell me their histories. Among them was Bill Trerise, who started in film as a spool boy at the Lyceum before the First World War. It was he who said, ‘They used to call us the Shadowcatchers,’ and so that’s what I called my very naive paper—and now this book.
Damian Parer, cinematographer
“It turns out, however, that any woman who demonstrates real ability and love of cinematography is accepted despite the prejudice. And today, the men who run the ACS, brought up as they have been in the fiercely masculinist culture of Australian cinematography, make that extra effort to respect and promote the work of women cinematographers. And I respect them all the more for doing so because they act out of a consciousness which doesn’t come naturally and in some ways goes against their upbringing. In the book, there is quite a lot about this upbringing—the apprenticeship in attitudes as well as skills—which, until relatively recently, was how young teenage boys became cameramen,” she says.
integral to the industry
Although she’d done the oral histories and talked to people who told her about how things really were, Ansara said that once she began the research she discovered just how integral to the industry the cinematographers were. “They shot the film, they directed, they had very little film so they’d shoot so that everything they brought back to the editor was useful. Up to the 60s,” she said, “the industry was actually driven by cameraman-directors, who not only made the films but formed companies. Most of the filmmaking was in reality workplace, corporate or industrial documentaries, commercials, filmmaking that lent itself to such small-scale operations.”
“In fact,” added Gardiner, “the production of commercials actually underpinned and supported local production until it was lost through the free trade changes, when people who didn’t understand its importance didn’t fight for its retention—although it was probably doomed, anyway. In the book we highlight the role of commercials and their importance in the wider industry—you really get to hone your storytelling skills when you have to tell a story in 15, 30, or 60 seconds!”
the making of shadowcatchers
“Producing the book,” Ansara said, “was like making a film. First we gathered our material—the interviews, my background research and over 4,000 pictures. Then we did an edit, choosing the photos we would use and organising them, and then we ‘added sound’—the text. It’s just like a film, except that it doesn’t move.”
And how did they get the photos? “We put out appeal after appeal to the members; we asked for great photos that were good in themselves and said something about the art of cinematography—and we got thousands,” said Gardiner. “Martha also researched the picture archives of the NFSA and Film Australia and found some great images, and we got some from the War Memorial. And still pictures kept coming in. We literally looked at over 4,000 photos to find the 380 that are in the book, what we hope are really good pictures that satisfy the criteria we’d established.”
“And getting the captions right! You’d sometimes have to practically dig someone out of their grave to get the correct details,” said Ansara, who only recently discovered a vital piece of information for a caption when chatting to someone at the Railway Film Festival at Eveleigh. “Luckily,’ she added, “some ACS members are amateur historians with stupendous memories.”
Much time was spent in checking captions, facts, redoing scans because they weren’t good enough. There was the drama of changing printers and the search for a better black. As Ansara explained, “cinematographers love their black! But really we knew we had to take a great deal of care, as this is a once in a lifetime production for the ACS, and it has to be as close to perfection as possible.”
the risk-takers
“While we all love looking at the pictures,” Ansara thinks that “really the book is about the human side of cinematography, about the relationships, about how people get to see all those amazing places in Australia. Because that’s what they get from shooting films—they go down coal mines and inside really strange houses and into the lonely outback. And tales of danger, and even death, just don’t deter them a bit. We have some pictures showing the incredibly dangerous situations they’ll get into, just to take a shot. They laugh at danger, do things you’d never do in normal life to get a picture. The obsession is to get the best picture possible, however possible.”
As Gardiner observed, “cinematographers are like a bikie gang in their relationships—the tight knit male group, the nicknames. But gradually women and people of non-English speaking background appear in the mix. There’s a background of collectivity, of independence, and of real pride in the work.”
Martha Ansara, The Shadowcatchers, A History of Cinematography in Australia, Australian Cinematographers Society, 2012, 288p, soft cover $66, hardbound limited edition signed by Academy Award-winning Australian cinematographers, $250; May launch date to be announced.
“IT’S REALLY IMPORTANT FOR AN INITIATIVE LIKE THIS TO HAVE A CLEAR IDEOLOGY,” REFLECTS STEPHEN CLEARY, KEY CONSULTANT FOR THE SOUTH AUSTRALIAN FILM CORPORATION’S AMBITIOUS FILMLAB PROGRAM. FILMLAB WAS LAUNCHED IN 2009 WITH THE AIM OF FUNDING EIGHT FEATURE FILMS BY NEW DIRECTING TALENT AT BUDGET LEVELS OF $350,000 EACH, A FIGURE AROUND FOUR PERCENT OF THE 2010 AVERAGE FOR FILMS MADE WITHIN THE COUNTRY, ACCORDING TO SCREEN AUSTRALIA.
The quest to find a distinct identity for each film, and to encourage each director to find their unique authorial voice, has been at the heart of an endeavour that has actively tried to invert the usual approach of public financiers. Cleary, former head of development at British Screen and devotee of Aristotle, starts with the broad principle: “FilmLab asks, ‘What type of filmmaker do you want to be?’”
The projects selected in the two rounds of FilmLab are starting to mature, mainly sitting at the latter stages of development or on the cusp of production. One has already seen the light of day and had very notable success: Matt Bate’s pop-grunge documentary Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure (RT107, p23) which premiered at Sundance in 2011 and has had multiple territory sales and national award recognition. As the seven slower-brewing fictional pieces will start to roll out in 2012 now seems a useful juncture to have a look at what the alternative approaches championed by FilmLab are, how they are playing out and how the scheme can contribute to a wider debate about how feature films are developed and financed in Australia.
taking the pressure off
The first philosophical underpinning Cleary outlines is to create an environment of non-competitiveness and to relieve pressure on the selected filmmakers as much as possible. Instead of an intensive, bureaucracy-heavy selection process requiring final script and full production package, FilmLab asks for one-page ideas and little else. Filmmakers are not pinned down to one particular project but are encouraged to explore a range of ideas during a four-week intensive “creative laboratory” and then receive a small allocation of development funding to grow their eventual film.
This creates the unusual situation where filmmakers find themselves guaranteed production funds before they have a script or even a firm idea of what they will make. Similarly, teams are not required to have or seek extra market finance attachments. “I’m always interested in questioning the assumptions of public funding development, to turn things over, to find better ways of doing things,” explains Cleary. “The assumption in the public system is that it should mimic the private market.” To his mind public funding systems in places such as Australia and the United Kingdom act as proxy private financiers, looking for film “packages,” or triggering their funds with the attachment of market investors, and as a result harvesting a competitive, first-past-the-post culture. “For low budget films, there’s no reason why this should be so. Let’s not make filmmakers think they have to go through some gateway.”
FilmLab flips this with its financial certainty at the earliest possible stage. “This leaves what happens with the money up to the filmmaker rather than the financier, and puts the power back in the hands of filmmakers.” With the usual financing pressures alleviated, creative freedom should flourish.
low budget strength
The second ideological form of FilmLab deals with the place of low budget films in the current cultural landscape, and primarily seeks to answer the question: how can a film be a stronger work because of, rather than despite, its low budget? For fake found-footage films such as Paranormal Activity (2007), the low budget is key to the authenticity of the film’s concept, but there must be other ways to answer this question for sophisticated and rapacious audiences. “We didn’t want to dictate an answer but to create a debate for the filmmakers to engage in,” says Cleary. “One of the most interesting things about FilmLab is that there are a lot of different filmmakers wrestling with that question and coming up with different solutions…some have gone radical and innovative in their approach and others are trying to make a film that looks like it has higher production value and is made in a more conventional way.”
identity, not branding
Cleary cites FilmLab 2009 project 52 Tuesdays (director Sophie Hyde) as an example of a radical methodological approach, with the filmmakers shooting for one day a week for a year the framework of one character undergoing a change in gender identity. The frame of the story is fictionalised but the character’s transformation is real. In this way the process of the dramatised work with ambient documentary elements becomes a marketing tool for festivals that often have selectors interested in how different craft practices impact on the artistic outcomes of cinema. Other projects such as the horror film Inner Demon (Ursula Dabrowsky) and the thriller Touch (Christopher Houghton) are looking to operate within the framework of a genre: “In low budget genre, the question becomes, is the filmmaker good enough in a generic sense to thrill or excite to the extent that budget becomes a non-issue?” Cleary believes that the lower the budget, the more important clear hooks and selling points become for a film. This doesn’t necessarily mean gimmickry, but creating a distinct identity for a film that is easily processed and understood. “I’m not talking about brand, as that’s something you put on top; identity is getting to the heart of who you are, what you want to do and therefore what kind of films you want to make…I also think there is a correlation with the bravery you show as a filmmaker and the distinction of identity that your film will have.”
theory into practice
FilmLab’s theories were put into practice in the intensive four-week laboratory. Teams were tasked with a mixture of practical filmmaking exercises as well as activities in other artistic disciplines. “The idea was to get people into unfamiliar territory, to have fun doing things you hadn’t thought of, to experiment and explore things from new angles.” So alongside shooting and cutting film sequences or truncated versions of their story ideas, teams also painted, sculpted and even sang in a choir. This happened alongside more traditional script development and project initiation to get both sides of the brain spinning into action.
The practical filmmaking elements of the development lab to test ideas and hone aesthetics and tone are rare in Australia. “Public funding development is usually a literary process,” says Cleary, “an understandable necessity of the assessment process as funders need to get through a pile of ideas.” As a result the visual storytelling of the artform itself, and directors, or at least the directorial process, can get backgrounded during the development stages. “The director goes from having a minor role in development to the primary role in production,” which can end in a disjointed, unbalanced process. The FilmLab process is one attempt to redress this balance.
Cleary stresses that FilmLab is not the answer to all the problems of development in the public funding sector, but is merely part of a dialogue as the industry undergoes significant change. “Low budget filmmaking is not going to go away…and I think possibly in the end [filmmaking practice] is not going to be in the hands of public funders at all, as the methodologies and processes of filmmaking become much more democratic. I think [FilmLab] is contributing to the debate, rather than leading it.” In the end he sees FilmLab as part of a longer game and snap judgments on its impact can’t be made on the films it generates. “Ultimately, the marker of success of FilmLab will be where all the directors will be in four years’ time.”
A WOMAN IN A BLONDE WIG WALKS INTO A CIRCLE OF LIGHTS AND CAMERAS. SHE STANDS, A RABBIT IN THE HEADLIGHTS, ISOLATED AND AT SOME DISTANCE FROM THE SHADOWY DOCUMENTARY FILM CREW WHO FOCUS ON HER. A DIRECTOR/INTERVIEWER SITS AT THE EDGE OF THE CIRCLE, HIS IDENTITY OBSCURED FROM THE VIEWER. IT’S A THEATRICAL BEGINNING TO BLACK & WHITE & SEX, THE DIRECTORIAL DEBUT OF PRODUCER JOHN WINTER (RABBIT-PROOF FENCE, DOING TIME FOR PATSY CLINE), AN AMBITIOUS EXPLORATION OF THE NATURE OF SEX WORK, SEX, WOMEN AND MEN.
Winter examines these themes through a dialogue between two characters: Angie, a sex worker (a role shared by Katherine Hicks, Anya Beyersdorf, Valerie Bader, Roxane Wilson, Michelle Vergara Moore, Dina Panozzo, Saskia Burmeister and Maia Thomas) and her nameless, faceless interviewer (Matthew Holmes). Initially, the mood between these two is tense, as Angie bats back the director’s simplistic questions in a way that confronts him and sets in motion the film’s aim of demonstrating that there’s nothing black and white about sex work (and, by extension, sex itself).
The director is clearly meant to represent us, specifically a middle class liberal audience with certain well-meaning preconceptions about prostitution. Angie’s job, of course, is to confound this audience’s expectations, playing provocateur to the interviewer’s devil’s advocate. It makes for an attention grabbing, if rather hectoring first act. It’s when the discussion progresses to more general matters sexual, with some grandiose statements about the nature of men and women, that things become problematic.
The director now seems to stand for a certain kind of emasculated manhood, while Angie becomes a spokeswoman for earthy female sexuality: “Women are pleasure and pain,” she declares, effectively pulling women into a world of sensation that cannot be understood by their drily cerebral male counterparts. It’s a hazy viewpoint that sits awkwardly with an earlier statement that she has a science degree (a revelation greeted by the interviewer with sniggering surprise).
Angie is mercurial, prone to evading the truth with elliptical statements. As a character she rather brings to mind the lyrics of that Billy Joel standard, “…she only reveals what she wants you to see/ She hides like a child but she’s always a woman to me.” The interviewer compares her with a butterfly: “You’re here, you’re there, you’re everywhere,” and later on a chameleon—“I never know who I’m going to get.”
There’s an element of fantasy to Angie perhaps in keeping with her line of work, which is, after all, about fulfilling fantasy, if only one as basic as the client believing she’s “getting off on it.” Winter creates a mystique around his many-faced “unattainable” call girl, even while seeming to want to demystify her chosen career. He fights stereotypes (the “hooker with a heart of gold”; the victimised prostitute) with other stereotypes (the majority of Angie’s personae).
On the whole, Black & White & Sex is best viewed as a symbolic exercise, with the various Angies representing different sexual archetypes—mature woman, dominatrix, ingenue, earth goddess—though these tend to blend into one another. In this way, we can accept the incident where Angie-as-dominatrix forces the interviewer to strip naked and masturbate as the ice breaker it’s meant to be, as opposed to a rather nasty piece of sexual humiliation. Like Fellini’s 8 1/2 (1963), to which it bears a formal resemblance, the film is less an attempt at realism than a free-form exploration of its director’s attitudes and thoughts; a weighing-up of experience and opinions couched within the film-within-a-film format. It’s not a mockumentary, though it might appear to be at first glance.
At times, the film’s lack of realism deprives it of a rawness that would seem more in keeping with the subject matter: there’s a theatrical wordiness to these characters and their exchanges that makes them less believable as people than as mouthpieces for various arguments. This is ultimately a film about talking about sex. The character of the interviewer suffers particularly as a result of this treatment, making it difficult to share his revelatory journey. Nonetheless, Winter and his actresses are successful in their creation of a feisty, multi-faceted uber-whore. It’s in the larger questions about women, men and sex that the film’s purpose becomes lost.
Black & White & Sex premiered at the 2011 Sydney Film Festival, appeared in the Brisbane and Rotterdam International Film Festivals. Australian theatrical release March 22.
Black & White & Sex, director John Winter, cinematographer Nicola Daley, editor Adrian Rostirolla, music Caitlin Yeo, sound: Tony Vaccher, John Dennison, Craig Butters, costume designer, Yvonne Moxham, producers Melissa Beauford, John Winter, 2011
THE LATEST IN CURRENCY PRESS AND THE NATIONAL FILM AND SOUND ARCHIVE’S AUSTRALIAN SCREEN CLASSICS, A SERIES OF COMPACT VOLUMES AIMING TO “MATCH SOME OF OUR BEST-LOVED FILMS WITH SOME OF OUR MOST DISTINGUISHED WRITERS AND THINKERS,” SEES WRITER FOR YOUNG ADULTS SONYA HARTNETT DELVE INTO DIRECTOR GREG MCLEAN’S BRUTAL WOLF CREEK (2005).
Her opening chapter, which details a pivotal childhood moment, is a powerful evocation of squalor and highlights an ugly aspect of the Australian psyche that, though usually hidden, is always ready to bare its teeth. Thus Hartnett demonstrates her own affinity with Wolf Creek’s darkness, as well as positioning the film as quintessentially Australian: “two-bit antipodean horror,” as she puts it.
This deeply felt beginning raises expectations for her analysis of the film, and in many respects we’re not disappointed. Hartnett’s elegantly measured prose matches Wolf Creek’s own controlled pacing and considered atmosphere, and she brings a poetic sensibility to material that some might think of as anything but. The vast meteorite crater at Wolf Creek is “a great wound from which a scab has been gouged.” As the film’s young travellers ride closer to their fate, “the road sign they pass is blacked-out, for they have ceased to exist in the known world.”
Throughout her narration of the film’s plot (more on this narration later), Hartnett sets the scene culturally and geographically. Italicised factual inserts about the Falconio disappearance and the Backpacker murders place the film’s events alongside their real-life counterparts in a way that creates a feeling of dread in the pit of the reader’s stomach. We are never in any doubt that Australia is a dangerous land, both in fact and in fiction. Paralleling the film’s deliberate weaving of imagined and actual events, Hartnett draws upon both cultural and historic examples in discussing the traditional white Australian fear of the bush that coalesces in the enduring theme of the lost child. These observations, though not original, are pertinent to the material.
“Home isn’t homely when it can’t be trusted,” Hartnett writes, effectively making Australia the embodiment of Freud’s unheimlich—the uncanny—and, as such, a natural backdrop for horror. This idea of a menacing, predatory land is extended to encompass its human monsters, men such as Bradley Murdoch and Ivan Milat, on whom Wolf Creek’s Mick Taylor is modelled—men described here as “dust devils.”
In some of her most insightful passages, Hartnett alerts the viewer/reader to the disruption of typical horror narrative that makes Wolf Creek such a singular and unsettling experience. In the beginning, “the world being depicted is a replica of the real world, peopled with unremarkable characters, messy in its casualness, riddled with holes.” As in Hartnett’s novels, the writer is awake to Wolf Creek’s depiction of the indiscriminate nature of death.
If there’s a flaw in her approach, it comes perhaps in her decision to retell the film’s entire narrative chronologically and (if you’ll forgive the phrase) blow by blow. It’s understandable that a storyteller seeks to examine a film by telling its story, but frustrating for those readers already familiar with the film who are in search of something more theoretically meaty. The final chapter provides more in the way of straightforward criticism, with Hartnett dwelling lyrically on Wolf Creek’s subtlety and complex handling of character while simultaneously addressing its lapses in judgement. The moral ambiguities inherent in a film which takes real-life tragedy as its starting point are tackled here, as they must be, and through reference to her own work, Hartnett mounts a convincing, if qualified defence.
It is rare to come across a considered, empathetic account of a horror film, horror being a genre that usually provokes responses ranging from the flippant or asinine to the dismissive. Hartnett refers to Wolf Creek as “less a horror film than a film in which horrifying things happen.” While appreciating the distinction, for some of us this just makes Wolf Creek a particularly fine horror film. Interestingly, there is no mention of a couple of Wolf Creek’s cinematic forbears: Wake in Fright (the subject of Tina Kaufman’s book in the same series), an example of “two-bit antipodean horror” if ever there was one, and Picnic At Hanging Rock, which Wolf Creek deliberately references (though you could say Hartnett indirectly refers to the latter in her discussion of the lost child).
This is a personal reading, a storyteller’s account. The historical facts referred to will be familiar to an Australian audience, fascinating to those not from this country. What both will gain is an appreciation of the sophistication of a film that is more frequently spoken of in terms of its crude brutality.
Sonya Hartnett, Wolf Creek, Australian Screen Classics, Currency Press and the National Film and Sound Archive, Sydney, 2011
SHIFTING BETWEEN THE MEAN STREETS OF CAMBODIAN BEACH SHANTY TOWN SIHANOUKVILLE AND THE LEAFY EASTERN SUBURBS OF SYDNEY, WISH YOU WERE HERE IS A STYLISH THRILLER PRODUCED BY THE BLUE TONGUE FILMS TEAM (WHICH INCLUDES NASH AND JOEL EDGERTON) AND WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY KEIRAN DARCY-SMITH, WHOSE 1998 SHORT FILM BLOODLOCK WAS NOMINATED FOR AN AFI AWARD.
Dave (Joel Edgerton) and his wife Alice (Felicity Price in an elegantly measured performance) visit Cambodia with her sister Steph (Teresa Palmer) and boyfriend Jeremy (Antony Starr). After a wild night dancing under the moon and taking e’s, Jeremy disappears from the beach. As the days unfold, he fails to return. He’s listed as a missing person; it turns out none of the others really knew him. When the three return to Sydney, the film’s delicate structure gradually reveals the secrets they have been hiding from one another since that night.
Darcy-Smith and Felicity Price are a husband and wife team—and also the film’s screenwriters—and the writing and performances are particularly strong in the scenes where the couple’s family life (they have two small children) gradually unravels. The conversations around the dinner table capture the random, humorous, often surprising nature of dialogue with toddlers. And the conflict that erupts is convincing: a pregnant Alice drinks a bottle of wine as Dave loses his temper, accusing her of trying to kill their baby. The children watch as the couple’s relationship slowly disintegrates under the strain of Jeremy’s disappearance and Dave’s increasing paranoia.
What’s curious about the film is that there’s no great sense of loss at Jeremy’s disappearance—or even a real feeling that he’s missing; the tension doesn’t quite build from the beginning. Perhaps this is because the film so quickly shifts location from Cambodia to Sydney. We’re not there for those long days when minutes becomes hours; when time slows the way it does when you’re waiting for someone who doesn’t arrive, who never returns. Even the scenes with Jeremy’s parents, struggling to accommodate the news that he’s gone, are stilted—perhaps reflecting that all the characters in the end remain strangers to one another, while Jeremy can only be a mysterious figure, unknowable, untraceable.
Watching Edgerton in the central role I’m reminded of his similarly edgy performance in The Waiting City (director Claire McCarthy, 2009), an Australian film where the sense of waiting (in a foreign place, India) is palpable. In both films, there also seems to be another story waiting in the wings (from an Indian or Cambodian perspective) that’s just out of reach, tantalising: here, it’s the tale of the Vietnamese mafia, the brothel owner who parades a small girl for the Australian men who drink at his bar.
I’ve walked along the Sihanoukville beach at night, skinnydipping in the shadows. The shanty bars right on the ocean’s fringe give a wild-west frontier feel to the place. I caught a tuk-tuk ride at 3am back to my hotel, a friendly local only too happy to drop me off for a few American dollars. Even then I got the feeling that if you wanted to disappear, this would be the place to do it.
Wish You Were Here, director Kieran Darcy-Smith, writers Kieran Darcy-Smith, Felicity Price, producer Angie Felder, cinematographer Jules O’Loughlin, editor Jason Ballantine, production design Alex Holmes, costumes Joanna Park, music Tim Rogers; distribution Hopscotch Films, release April 25
“WHERE ARE THE BOB CONNOLLYS, THE TOM ZUBRYCKIS, THE DENIS O’ROURKES OF THIS GENERATION?” THIS WAS A QUESTION THAT EMERGING DIRECTOR/PRODUCER JENNIFER PEEDOM DEEMED “ALARMING,” WHEN SPEAKING ON THE “DEFINING DOCUMENTARY” PANEL AT THE 2012 AUSTRALIAN INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY CONFERENCE.
Minutes earlier, despairing veteran director Bob Connolly had taken aim at what he considered the elephant in the room: “that increasing non-person (at the conference), the auteur.” Asked to comment on a legal stoush between production company Essential Media and Screen Australia, one driven by questions concerning eligibility for producer offset funds for documentary, Connolly expressed his dismay that such discussions concerning documentary form were driven by financial rather than artistic imperatives. Peedom went on to describe her forced existence as ‘gun for hire,’ rather than independent filmmaker, evidence of what Connolly described as a shift away from independent voices in favour of agencies and broadcasters contracting with corporate entities.
“Defining Documentary” was one of several panel discussions running alongside keynote addresses in which a variety of national and international speakers discussed the current climate of documentary production and distribution. Connolly was not alone in foregrounding the challenges for independent and emerging filmmakers. Julia Overton (Jotz Productions), recipient of this year’s Stanley Hawes Award for outstanding contribution to the documentary sector in Australia, acknowledged a lack of mentoring and support for young locals, a situation she sees linked to the 2008 merging of the nation’s former ‘big three’ agencies into Screen Australia. Acknowledging the current difficulties associated with producing one-off documentaries, Overton stressed the need for producers to widen their search for funding, commenting that at the end of the day, “it’s all about storytelling.”
f4: first factual film festival
Now in its second year, the First Factual Film Festival (F4), a documentary screening program running in conjunction with AIDC, has expanded to include public screenings as part of the Adelaide Festival of the Arts. Billed as an “unrivalled professional development opportunity for Australia’s emerging documentary filmmaking talent,” the festival showcases first films from talented Australians alongside the work of more experienced international conference guests.
From four finalists (chosen from 70 entries), the F4 Award for Outstanding New Documentary Talent was this year awarded to 26-year-old South Australian filmmaker Paul Gallasch for Killing Anna. In this 29-minute film, Gallasch as protagonist tracks his heartbreak and despair following the break-up with his first long term girlfriend, Anna. Constructing a bizarre fantasy as a way to understand his loss, Gallasch decides to stage a funeral service for Anna, pretending that she has died in a tragic accident. The film covers the lead up to this event through interviews with friends, family and strangers, and then the aftermath. Ultimately disappointed with his funeral service undertakings, Gallasch questions the social acceptance of grief associated with relationship breakdowns, remarking that ultimately, the only people who care are the two parties involved in the split.
Seemingly living in a rundown Brooklyn NY neighbourhood at the time, Gallasch’s method involved carrying the camera with him for four months, during which time he was a student at the New York Film Academy. Drawing on the work of Werner Herzog, Killing Anna combines a range of storytelling devices including narration, direct address to camera, interviews and recreations, perhaps reflecting Gallasch’s progression as a filmmaker. The incorporation of footage of his editing processes means that as well as being about loss, the piece questions the process of film construction itself. In a search for authenticity Gallasch wrote more than 8,000 words of narration on the subject of grief: “I wrote the film trying to rationalise the loss and then realised I couldn’t.” What he has managed to do is articulate a grieving process that defies logical explanation in an exceptional and surprising manner. On behalf of the F4 jury, Claire Jager praised the film’s “original and bold premise” and “the playfulness of the filmmaker’s shifting relationship to the camera and the audience.”
David Tucker’s My Thai Bride, a 52-minute documentary that received a special commendation from the F4 jury, also tracks a relationship breakdown. The story centres on Ted, a 46-year old salesman from Wales, who when visiting Thailand on business, meets and falls in love with Tip, a bargirl. The two decide to marry and despite a happy beginning, things soon turn sour. As both Ted’s money and Tip’s affections dwindle, he realises that the marriage was a mistake, and eventually returns to the UK destitute. Tip remains in the village house they built together, having gained some financial security as a result of the experience. Although giving more screen time to Ted, Tucker presents both protagonists without taking sides, creating a sense that a cultural misunderstanding is at the heart of the problem. Although Ted has lost his fortune at the end of the story, one is left to ponder who is worse off in the long term considering the poverty in Tip’s village.
It is impossible to consider Tucker’s engaging work without making comparisons with Denis O’Rourke’s landmark 1991 film The Good Woman of Bangkok, which also interrogated the sex trade in Thailand. My Thai Bride differs, however, in its focus on the emotional journey of the male at the heart of the story, revealing that, in Tucker’s words, “sex tourists have feelings too.” In a Q&A session Tucker described Ted’s eagerness to set the record straight, commenting that there are a lot of western guys like Ted but there is no solidarity between them as their situation is humiliating. I was surprised to learn that much of the film was shot in retrospect, with Tucker, then living in Thailand, only meeting the couple as they were splitting up in 2006. The filmmaker recreates their initial meeting, drawing upon a collection of still photographs and narration. On the filmmaker’s return to Australia, Michael Cordell came on board as executive producer and a successful Screen Australia investment meant funds to undertake additional photography and finish the film. The result is a powerful work that sheds new light on a complex issue.
It is interesting to note that both Tucker’s and Gallasch’s outstanding films were conceived of, developed and largely undertaken without any government funding, a situation that is clearly not unusual for first time documentary makers; here it certainly does seem to be all about storytelling. Debates undertaken at AIDC 2012 raise some worrying questions as to just where these Australian filmmakers might go next.
AIDC, Australian International Documentary Conference, 2012, Stamford Grand Hotel, Glenelg, Feb 27-March 1; F4 2012, Mercury Cinema, Adelaide, March 2-4
Isobel Knowles & Van Sowerwine, It’s a jungle in here
courtesy the artists
Isobel Knowles & Van Sowerwine, It’s a jungle in here
TRAVELLING BY PUBLIC TRANSPORT IS NOT AN EXPERIENCE WE TYPICALLY ASSOCIATE WITH COMFORT. AT ITS BEST CONVENIENT, AND AT ITS WORST FRIGHTENING, THIS DAILY RITUAL SEES HORDES OF URBAN COMMUTERS SILENTLY SLALOM THEIR WAY THROUGH MOMENTS OF PHYSICAL PROXIMITY AND PSYCHICAL DETACHMENT, HOPING FOR A CLEAR RUN.
It’s a jungle in here (2011), created by longtime collaborators Isobel Knowles and Van Sowerwine, uses the familiar experience of a suburban train journey to explore ideas of empowerment, complicity and individual and collective responsibility in public space. Drawing on the artists’ own personal experiences on public transport, as well as those of their friends, It’s a jungle in here is an equally enchanting but more conceptually rigorous follow-up to the duo’s You Were in My Dream (2010), winner of the coveted Premier of Queensland’s National New Media Art Award. Their latest interactive animation debuted at Screen Space for the 2011 Melbourne International Arts Festival.
A stop-motion animation made from paper puppets and a diorama, It’s a jungle in here harnesses similar technology to that employed in You Were in My Dream. Approaching the installation in pairs, participants unwittingly become involved in an ambiguous psychodrama, casting themselves in the role of either attacker or victim, depending on the seat they choose. The attacker is provided with a console button to advance the action, while the victim can yell into a microphone to derail the attack. A live video feed maps each of the users’ faces onto a different animated character, blatantly implicating them in the conflict.
Isobel Knowles & Van Sowerwine, It’s a jungle in here, installation view
courtesy the artists
Isobel Knowles & Van Sowerwine, It’s a jungle in here, installation view
The animation is housed within a wooden peepshow cabinet: a handcrafted ‘wonder box’ with just enough old-world charm to lure participants in and encourage play. At the same time however, the structure also gestures towards less innocent, contemporary live-action exchanges. More than just encouraging an active subjectivity, the peepshow box establishes the voyeuristic mode of spectatorship necessary for the work’s unsettling narrative thrust. Both users are immediately forced into a very physical mode of looking, manoeuvering their faces into peepholes, craning necks to absorb the scene from different angles, and focusing and refocusing to register the animation’s intricate detail. It’s a jungle in here thus forces an awareness of the very act of spectatorship, and the power, complicity and responsibility it demands.
Isobel Knowles & Van Sowerwine, It’s a jungle in here
courtesy the artists
Isobel Knowles & Van Sowerwine, It’s a jungle in here
In the first vignette, a male character fiddles loudly with his mobile phone, which raises the ire of a fellow passenger. Before long, a fistfight ensues. When the victim-player remains silent or quiet, the on-screen attacker suddenly morphs into a grizzly bear, bloodily mauling the man on the carriage floor. When the player uses the microphone to signal distress, their avatar suddenly transforms into a turtle, retracting into a hardened shell to protect itself against the predator.
Other confrontations enacted in the animation include a lecherous man forcing physical contact with a female passenger, and a gaggle of boisterous schoolgirls shooting spitballs and bubblegum. In the second scenario, the harasser’s hands become snakes that slither into the woman’s blouse. In the final scene, the schoolgirls metamorphose into carnivorous black crows, filling the cramped carriage with a murderous flapping. Significantly, throughout each altercation the surrounding travellers all cower silently, immobilised in their seats.
Isobel Knowles & Van Sowerwine, It’s a jungle in here
courtesy the artists
Isobel Knowles & Van Sowerwine, It’s a jungle in here
More than providing the focus for a meditation on the precarious relationship between humanity and animality, civilisation and chaos, the animal characters imbue the work with a seductive and fanciful beauty. It’s a jungle in here manipulates the participants’ allegiances and expectations at every turn, diluting the meaning and power of their violent actions through its sweet, picture-book aesthetic and whimsical calls to fantasy. By turns beautiful, dreamy, creepy and brutal, the work turns the ‘space of exception’ occupied by videogames and online social spaces in on itself, and in so doing, reveals how deeply those conventions are ingrained in the spectator psyche. In this way, It’s a jungle in here is startlingly effective in articulating an ethics of participation, both within the virtual world and outside it.
Isobel Knowles & Van Sowerwine, It’s a jungle in here, coding, interface electronics Matthew Gingold, carpentry, engineering Don Russell, sound Finn Robertson, additional coding Oliver Marriot; Screen Space, Melbourne, Oct 13-29 2011
AFTER AN EXHAUSTIVE REVIEW PROCESS, WHICH INVOLVED SEVERAL ROUNDS OF CONSULTATIONS, AN ISSUES PAPER AND A DISCUSSION PAPER AND HUNDREDS OF SUBMISSIONS TO BOTH, THE AUSTRALIAN LAW REFORM COMMISSION HAS SEEN ITS FINAL REPORT ON THE ENQUIRY INTO AUSTRALIA’S CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM, THE FIRST FOR 20 YEARS, TABLED IN FEDERAL PARLIAMENT LAST MONTH.
While the ALRC’s recommendations do not automatically become law, and while the government will probably take several other reviews (including the important Convergence Review) into account when it decides whether and when to take action on classification, the ALRC has certainly made some brave and eminently sensible recommendations which would dramatically haul an outmoded and cumbersome system into the digital age.
“Australia needs a new classification scheme that applies consistent rules to media content on all platforms—in cinemas, on television, on DVDs and on the internet,” said Professor Terry Flew, Commissioner in charge of the ALRC review, “but the scheme also needs to be flexible, so it can adapt to new technologies and the challenges of media convergence.”
The report, Classification—Content Regulation and Convergent Media, contains 57 recommendations which would see the current complex array of classification guidelines for films, TV programs, computer games, publications and online content replaced by a streamlined, single classification system, run by the Commonwealth Government. There would be a common set of markings and criteria, using the same categories and guidelines, for all content, whether it is viewed on television, at the cinema, on DVD or online. A much greater role for industry in both the classification of content and in the development of co-regulatory codes is also proposed, informed by the fact that self-regulation has worked well for television for some years. Measures would also be introduced to remove the need to reclassify films and TV programs when they are re-released on DVD. While film festivals would remain exempt from classification, they would still be required to exclude people under 18 from unclassified films.
Recognising that media convergence, digital delivery and online distribution have irrevocably altered the landscape, as has the exponential increase in available content, the ALRC commenced the enquiry taking into account a number of issues. They range from the rapid pace of technological change in media available to, and consumed by, the Australian community, and the needs of the community in this evolving technological environment, to ways to improve available classification information and enhance public understanding of regulated content. This would be balanced by the need to minimise the regulatory burden and by the desirability of a strong content and distribution industry in Australia. Most important, of course, were the impact of media on children and their increased exposure to a wider variety of media, from television, music and advertising to films and computer games.
The ALRC also identified guiding principles in the provision of an effective framework for the classification and regulation of media content. They are: that Australians should be able to read, hear, see and participate in media of their choice; that communications and media services available to Australians should broadly reflect community standards, while recognising a diversity of views, cultures and ideas in the community; that children should be protected from material likely to harm or disturb them; that consumers should be provided with information about media content in a timely and clear manner, and with a responsive and effective means of addressing any concerns; that the classification regulatory framework should be responsive to technological change and adaptive to new technologies, platforms and services, should not impede competition and innovation, and not disadvantage Australian media content and service providers in international markets; that classification regulation should be kept to the minimum needed to achieve a clear public purpose; and that classification regulation should be focused upon content rather than platform or means of delivery.
Out of all this came the key features in the report: platform-neutral regulation with one set of laws across all media platforms; clear identification of what must be classified (feature films, television programs, and computer games likely to be MA 15+ or higher, made and distributed on a commercial basis, and likely to have a significant Australian audience); a shift in regulatory focus to restricting access to adult content, by imposing new obligations on content providers to take reasonable steps to restrict access to adult content and to promote cyber-safety; and co-regulation and industry classification, subject to regulatory oversight There is also Classification Board benchmarking, with a clear role for the Board in making independent classification decisions that reflect community standards, and the important proposal for a federal government scheme to replace the current co-operative scheme (between federal, state and territory governments) with enforcement coming under Commonwealth law, and a single regulator with primary responsibility for over-seeing the new scheme.
“Classification criteria should also be reviewed periodically, to ensure they reflect community standards,” said Professor Flew. “One category that may no longer align with community standards is “Refused Classification” or RC. The scope of this category should be narrowed, and the ALRC suggests changes for government to consider.”
ALRC President, Professor Rosalind Croucher has pointed out that Australians value classification information about films, computer games and television programs, and that “the new scheme will continue to deliver this important advice. The ALRC has recommended a balanced approach, recognising that it is not practically possible in a digital age to classify everything. An effective scheme of content regulation must address this context…(while expecting) content providers to take reasonable steps to restrict access to adult content, so that children are better protected from material that might harm or disturb them.”
While the submissions received during the enquiry offered a huge range of opinions, ranging from no need for classification at all, and the impossibility of classifying or containing internet content, to the need for more control and more stringent regulation, the ALRC has come up with substantial recommendations which, if adopted, will provide a sensible, flexible and more streamlined framework for the classification and regulation of media content. We now must wait and see what actually eventuates.
There’s definitely a prince involved, Gideon Obarzanek
photo Jeff Busby
There’s definitely a prince involved, Gideon Obarzanek
INFINITY KICKS OFF THE AUSTRALIAN BALLET’S GOLDEN JUBILEE CELEBRATIONS WITH A TRIPLE BILL ENCAPSULATING OUR COUNTRY’S CONTEMPORARY DANCE CULTURE. FROM ABSTRACT BALLET TO PULLING THE FEATHERS FROM SWAN LAKE TO A COLLABORATION WITH BANGARRA DANCE THEATRE, INFINITY EMBRACES POSTMODERN DECONSTRUCTION AND ENDS ON A SOULFUL HIGH NOTE. THE THREE PIECES ARE VASTLY DIFFERENT BOTH VISUALLY AND THEMATICALLY, YET STRIVE TO SHARE A UNIQUELY AUSTRALIAN POINT OF VIEW OF BALLET.
Graeme Murphy’s The Narrative of Nothing shuns conventional storylines and is inspired by the score, Brett Dean’s sometimes extraordinary and, some might say difficult or even discordant, Fire Music. Murphy handpicked his favourite dancers, some of whom caught his eye in his production of Romeo & Juliet. His choreography explores the human impulse to create stories from abstract work; in lieu of an actual narrative, we thread together our own. Boxes of stage lights, almost unisex costumes and Dean’s score give the performance a kind of dystopian feel. Dancer Adam Bull stands beneath a single globe that sways in an expanding circle; lit from above, he’s a perfect, anonymous figure: a living, breathing Oscar statue. Where the score clangs like construction workers on a skyscraper, the dancers are all speed and strength, either angular and hard or fluid, like molten steel. In this science-fiction world (my ballet date thought Space Odyssey, whereas I leant towards Metropolis) there are flashes of competitiveness or struggle, an unsupported head-hold of Lana Jones in a pas de deux and male-only groupings that occasionally threaten to spill into affray. Though it can be a daunting task to sustain audience interest in non-narrative performance, Murphy overcomes this with original, exciting choreography.
In There’s definitely a prince involved, Gideon Obarzanek deconstructs Swan Lake. Underscoring it with dialogue, initially as a dig at our lack of knowledge of the (seemingly ridiculous) plot of the world’s best known ballet, he too questions the role of narrative in ballet. The dialogue is less effective when it deals with the Swan’s theme of idealised romantic love via dancers’ confessions. In revisiting and pulling apart the choreography of Swan Lake (1877; but most versions derive from the1895 version), we see how potent the source is as cultural fodder (Black Swan, anyone?) and as arguably the pinnacle of narrative ballet. Obarzanek isn’t wringing the Swan’s neck but rather asking the audience to reconsider what ballet is. There were laughs at the image of a prince bringing a swan home as a date, and how irrelevant plot digressions allow the dancers to display their technical prowess in brilliant sautes. In a tribute to the dance of the cygnets, the splendour of the original is highlighted by stellar performances. Madeline Estoe is magnetic as a deconstructed Odette.
There are several complex ideas here. The fussy, satin court costumes are at odds with designer Alexi Freeman’s incredibly free-flowing, tasselled and almost naked costumes, which dancers use to full effect. This demonstrates a disjuncture between classic and contemporary ballet—the reliance on narrative, the heavy weight of the past, particularly on borrowed European notions. Freed of these, dance can be stripped bare to pure movement. Amid all these questions, Obarzanek shows us he can pull together a satisfying ballet.
The closing work, Waramuk—in the dark of night, marks the third collaboration between Bangarra Dance Theatre and The Australian Ballet, and is a fitting close to Infinity with its melancholy beauty and visual romance. Choreographer Stephen Page has been reinvigorating traditional storytelling for two decades with Bangarra, yet here ballet is the beneficiary of a new breath of life. The stories of the Yolngu of Arnhem Land speak of the link between spirituality and the land: in this ballet, the creation stories centre on the moon and constellations, myths which may be millennia old but are largely unknown to most audiences.
Rich in symbolism—a rope connects the sky and earth, or the spirit world and reality—and, informed by a dance language that borrows from Indigenous movement, Waramuk confidently avoids stereotypes. As the Evening Star, Vivenne Wong is heart-achingly graceful in bridging two genres of dance, while Elma Kris brings strength and emotion to her role as a Mother Earth figure. David Page’s haunting score of recorded voice and orchestral music, combined with the shimmering, shifting backdrops by Jacob Nash, transfix us. There were definitely goosebumps involved.
Infinity plays at the Sydney Opera House, April 5-25
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Australian Ballet, Infinity, The Narrative of Nothing, choreography Graeme Murphy, creative associate Janet Vernon, composer Brett Dean, stage and lighting design Damien Cooper, costumes Jennifer Irwin, sound Bob Scott; There’s definitely a prince involved, choreography Gideon Obarzanek after Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, music Stefan Gregory after Piotr Illyich Tchaikovsky, costumes Alexi Freeman with Caroline Dickinson, stage concept Benjamin Cisterne, Gideon Obarzanek, lighting Benjamin Cisterne, original sets Hugh Colman; Waramuk—In the Dark Night, choreography Stephen Page, music David Page, costumes Jennifer Irwin, set design Jacob Nash, lighting Padraig O Suilleabhain, sound design Bob Scott; Orchestra Victoria; Arts Centre, State Theatre, Melbourne, Feb 26-March 6
Ros Warby (image 3 – with Ria Soemardjo), The Tower Suites
photo Calista Lyon
Ros Warby (image 3 – with Ria Soemardjo), The Tower Suites
THREE BODIES ENTER THE SPACE. MY EYE IS DRAWN TO THE CORPOREAL BEARING OF EACH PERFORMER, TO THE WAYS IN WHICH EACH BODY BECOMES PERFORMATIVE.
Ria Soemardjo sings. Her whole body becomes voice. There is a kind of simplicity to her physicality that makes space for the sound to emerge as pure affect. It is different with Helen Mountfort. There is something baroque about the whole thing, the curlicues of the cello, the space between the musician and her instrument, the compositional nature of the music. In Ros Warby’s case, the body is a staging ground for many different kinds of event. It begins discombobulated, a body in bits and pieces becoming organised. Ironically, it takes a great deal of skill to allow the body to unravel so as to stage its own organisation, rather like giving birth to oneself. But then, Warby is not shy of a challenge. Her focus, in its protean forms, keeps this intricate work together.
Tower Suites is collaborative. Its multiplicity of elements—cello, voice, film and dance—guide our perceptions. The elements each come to the fore and recede. The film lends weight to our seeing. That is after all its domain. At first, I was unsure whether to privilege Warby’s dancing, how to incorporate the other onstage bodies that don’t dance yet orient themselves to their own domain of art-making. But the processional nature of the first set of images, people in ritual dress moving along, allowed me to unite the group rather than consider each one severally. By the end, we all grasp the relationships that undergird Tower Suites.
Yet, this isn’t about relations between the women. Warby makes the work through a very specific choreography which draws upon a range of artistic qualities, sounds, images and affects. These are all different events, activities which draw in the soulful singing of Soemardjo, duet with Mountfort’s compositions and utilise a palimpsest of images (Margie Medlin), mixing history with colour shots of Warby’s own dancing.
Warby threads time by building fine movement that travels across space. The pull of a curtain entangling her legs evokes all the elegance of deco drapery in silhouette. She has a kind of commedia del arte character, a bittersweet condensation of human foibles. A repeated falling echoes the filmic citation of collapsing buildings, creating a certain kind of abstraction against the very historical imagery.
For Ros Warby, dancing is not enough. Her choreography seeks to incorporate more than itself. It swallows up Warby’s face, incorporating sound, voice and image. As a result, there is a richness to Tower Suites, which is emotional, sensory and personal.
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Tower Suites, created by Ros Warby in collaboration with Helen Mountfort, Margie Medlin, and Ria Soemardjo; choreography, performance Ros Warby, light, projection, set design Margie Medlin, composition, cello Helen Mountfort, voice Ria Soemardjo, cinematography Ben Speth; Arts House, North Melbourne, February 22-26
In this frank and entertaining interview Jon Rose talks with fellow musician and improviser Jim Denley about his early instruments, his relationship to the Australian landscape and what really makes him play. www.jonroseweb.com
making instruments, ears, audiences
gail priest surveys the issues and events of the REV Festival
RealTime issue #49 June-July 2002 online exlusive
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The New iPad (one only)
The very latest iPad offers heightened text and visual pleasure and a host of features: 16GB, Wi-Fi (Ultrafast Wireless*), 5-mega pixel iSight Camera, HD video recording, dual-core A5X chip, Retina Display—four times more pixels than iPad 2, razor-sharp text, richer colours;10 hours battery life, Dictation and iCloud. (*NB: Not 3G or 4G model)
Bill Cunningham New York, DVD
courtesy Madman Entertainment
Richard Press’ utterly fascinating feature-length documentary follows 80-year old Bill Cunningham on his bicycle as he photographs what people are wearing on the street for his much-loved New York Times page, cajoles layout artists and attends opening nights. Famous friends, including Anna Wintour, talk about Bill and we visit his home in the Carnegie Concert Hall building where fellow artists of his generation reside. Press’ film is a wonderful celebration of a truly idiosyncratic artist and self-made cultural anthropologist.
Based on Christos Tsiolkas’ best-selling novel, the ABC TV series has enjoyed similar success with its carefully paced, meticulously detailed and emotionally charged account of the book. Each episode focuses on a central character while sustaining the overall unfolding drama of families, relatives and friends wracked by an incident in which a man slaps someone else’s child. It’s rare to see such rich emotional engagement in Australian television drama—the work of leading actors, directors and producers loyal to the book but making it a superb stand-alone series.
In this frank and entertaining interview Jon Rose talks with fellow musician and improviser Jim Denley about his early instruments, his relationship to the Australian landscape and what really makes him play. www.jonroseweb.com
Offering 19 feature films, forums and an exhibition, the Human Rights Arts & Film Festival has no shortage of challenging and thought provoking highlights. The opening night film, Under African Skies, is a documentary by US director Joe Berlinger looking at Paul Simon’s controversial decision to break the sanctions against South Africa to make his greatest selling album, Gracelands. Equally controversial is Beer is Cheaper Than Therapy by Dutch director Simone de Vries, exploring the lives of US soldiers returned from active duty and living in Fort Hood, where the suicide rate is twice the national average.
The Australian feature by Sean Gilligan, Fantome Island, tells the story of Joe Eggmolesse who, at the age of seven, was removed from his family and sent to a leprosarium on an island off the Queensland Coast. The film sees Eggmolesse return to the site and through archive footage exposes the systematic racist treatment and destructive policy of eugenics that was in place at the time (see Danni Zuvela’s review in RT106).
Planet of Snail
Other films deal with issues of child boxing in Thailand, developing a professional surfing event in Papua New Guinea, the integration of Roma children in to Romanian schools and the plight of the low lying Maldives. There are also stories with happier outcomes such as Planet of Snail from South Korean director Seung-jun Yi, a love story between Soon-Ho and Young-Chan who has been deaf and blind since childhood. The couple communicate and explore the world through touch. There’s also Prime Time Soap, a feature which takes the form of a Brazilian telenovela where political activism and disco meet. And then there’s Wrinkles by Spanish director Ingacio Ferreras, an animation based on the comic Paco Roca, depicting the not so benign adventures of two men in a nursing home.
For the Melbourne leg of the festival, there is a series of free forums, including one on the power of art to educate and agitate and the dangers this sometimes brings to the artist; a discussion on the ethics of travel from a humanitarian and ecological perspective; and another on the role of street art as tool for activism. Many of the screenings include a discussion session.
There is also an exhibition titled Echoes Of Others, Illuminating the Gaps Amid Translation which explores how technology and global communication (which is not shared by all) effects human rights issues. While the majority of the action happens in Melbourne, small selections of films will tour Canberra, Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane, Alice Springs, Byron Bay and Perth over the next two months. The Human Rights Arts and Film Festival, director Matthew Benetti, The Forum Theatre, ACMI and Abbotsford Convent, May 15- 27; see website for national tour dates, www.hraff.org.au
the seizure, the hayloft project
Christopher Brown, The Seizure, The Hayloft Project
photo Lachlan Woods
Christopher Brown, The Seizure, The Hayloft Project
Following their successful Sydney Festival season of the quite staggering Thyestes, The Hayloft Project has been in the studio preparing their next work, The Seizure. Continuing their preoccupation with the classics, director and writer Benedict Hardie has adapted Sophocles’ Philoctetes, the story of the Greek archer who is left for 10 years, presumably to die of a hideous wound, on the island of Lemnos while the Greeks continue on their voyage to sack Troy. However, with the inevitable Ancient Greek twist, it’s revealed that the war cannot be won without Philoctetes’ bow and arrow so he is returned to the war to play his part in the victory. Just how much of this storyline and its convolutions survive the adaptation is yet to be revealed. The company says the work is “an unsentimental interrogation of trauma, the costs of war and the pursuit of justice” (website). The cast features Christopher Brown, HaiHa Le, Brian Lipson and Naomi Rukavina who have all been developing their archery skills for the performance. An intriguing trailer for the piece can be found here. The Hayloft Project, The Seizure, Studio 246, Brunswick, May 3 – 19, http://www.hayloftproject.com
boo australia, tim welfare
The King Pins, Polyphonic Ring Cycle (2009), courtesy the artists; Lauren Brincat, Drum Roll (2006), courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney; Anna Davis & Jason Gee, Biohead (2008), courtesy the artists
Curator and media artist Tim Welfare gets around the globe. Back in 2006 he curated The Middle Eastern Video Project for Dlux Media Arts’ D>Art.06 drawing on the years he had spent in Beirut, Lebanon (see RT72 and RT73, and our RT Traveller on Beirut). Recently he’s been living in Santiago, Chile and has been invited by the Centro Cultural Matucana 100 Arts Centre to curate an exhibition of Australian video art. Welfare was bemused by the fascination Chileans seem to have with Australia and how curiously Australia is represented: “Old images of Australians with kangaroos as pets now sit alongside documentary images from 70s exploitation films, long retired musicians (or [those who] should have retired) and street fashion that shouts out words of the ugly and patriotic Australia” (catalogue essay). Welfare wanted to redress this “Brand Australia” by showing a collection of video works that explore, often playfully and irreverently, the many voices that actually make up Australia. In particular he focuses on working methods that emulate the ways Australian culture has developed. He writes, “We took our cue from others. We take. Pinch. Emulate. Plunder. Quote. Appropriate. Remix.” The exhibition features work by some of the heavyweights of Australian video art: Ian Andrews, Emile Zile, The Kingpins, Anna Davis + Jason Gee, Philip Brophy, Denis Beaubois, Alex Kershaw, Lauren Brincat and Tony Schwensen. Boo Australia, curator Tim Welfare, Galería Concreta, Centro Cultural Matucana 100, Santiago, Chile, April 24-May 27 2012; http://www.m100.cl/
guerrilla girls, vca
Guerilla Girls; b&w poster – Guerrilla Girls Proclaim Internet Too Pale, Too Male!, 1995; colour – Free Women of Zurich, 2011
Guerilla Girls; b&w poster – Guerrilla Girls Proclaim Internet Too Pale, Too Male!, 1995; colour – Free Women of Zurich, 2011
When I ‘got’ the internet back in 1995, one of the first sites I went looking for was the Guerilla Girls, such was their fame and sense of intrigue at the time. The art activist group was attracting attention and ire for their no-back down feminist agenda and cutting wit, producing sticker, poster and billboard campaigns bearing messages about women’s rights and gender and racial inequality, particularly in the art world. Still going strong, their posters are now slickly photoshopped but their messages are still relevant, as their 2011 Free Women of Zurich poster attests. Two of the Guerilla Girls, Frida Kahlo and Kathe Kollwitz, are currently in Australia to run workshops and seminars with students from the Victorian College of the Arts. There will also be a talk that is open to the public. GP Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, Guerrilla Girls, Public Talk, May 16, 6pm, Federation Hall, Grant Street, Southbank; http://www.vcam.unimelb.edu.au/events?id=356, http://www.guerrillagirls.com/ (Update: Tickets to this event have SOLD OUT. You could chance your luck on the door and arrive by 5.45pm to place your name on a waiting list, as uncollected tickets will be released at 5.55pm)
a hoax, la boite
Commencing its premier season at La Boite in Brisbane is a new play by Rick Viede, The Hoax (to be reviewed in RT109). The play won last year’s Griffin Award for outstanding new Australian writing, a competition open to both established and emerging playwrights. The play will also have a season at Griffin, Sydney in July. The Hoax tells the story of a young Indigenous girl who receives public acclaim for a novel based on her life, however it’s later revealed to be a fiction written by a white, male social worker, with devastating consequences. Viede’s story is a not uncommon one, paralleling the Helen Demidenko/Darville debacle of the 90s in Australia, more recently American bestselling writer James Frey’s faking of his memoir, A Million Little Pieces (fully revealed when the author was challenged by Oprah Winfrey) and another American, Laura Albert, with her invention of the addicted, transgender prostitute JT LeRoy. Viede writes “When you scratch the surface of these kinds of hoaxes, they’re really complicated studies of psychosis, desire, ambition, lack of self-esteem” (press release). A Hoax, writer Ricky Viede, director Lee Lewis, La Boite, Brisbane, May 5- 26; http://www.laboite.com.au; Griffin Theatre, Sydney, July 20-Sept 1; http://www.griffintheatre.com.au/
cue function, hellosquare
Established in 2004, Canberra-based record label hellosQuare offers an impressive catalogue of 49 CD and CD-R releases ranging from label founder Shoeb Ahmad’s own output both solo and with his duo Spartak (see earbash) to Perth new music ensemble Decibel (see earbash) and Melbourne improv outfit Candelsnuffer. The hellosQuare team will be in residence at Canberra Contemporary Artspace over the next few weeks, where they will not only be presenting concerts by Spartak, Ollie Brown (Icarus), Shopgirl, Deafcat and Merewomen, but also an exhibition of visual works complementing the ethos and aesthetics of the label featuring Luke Penders, Elena Papanikolakis, Dylan Martorell, Helani Laisk, Robbie Karmel and Kate Ahmad. CUE FUNKTION, hellosQuare exhibition and residency, Canberra Contemporary Arts Space, May 10-20; http://www.hellosquarerecordings.com/; http://www.ccas.com.au/
IN THE LATE 1990S, PERFORMANCE STUDIES WAS DOMINATED BY DEBATES ABOUT ABSENCE, DISAPPEARANCE AND DISPLACEMENT. PERHAPS THE MOST FAMOUS TEXT TO EMERGE FROM THIS PERIOD WAS PEGGY PHELAN’S UNMARKED: THE POLITICS OF PERFORMANCE (1993), IN WHICH SHE PROPOSED THAT: 
AFTER AN EXHAUSTIVE REVIEW PROCESS, WHICH INVOLVED SEVERAL ROUNDS OF CONSULTATIONS, AN ISSUES PAPER AND A DISCUSSION PAPER AND HUNDREDS OF SUBMISSIONS TO BOTH, THE AUSTRALIAN LAW REFORM COMMISSION HAS SEEN ITS FINAL REPORT ON THE ENQUIRY INTO AUSTRALIA’S CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM, THE FIRST FOR 20 YEARS, TABLED IN FEDERAL PARLIAMENT LAST MONTH.
The very latest iPad offers heightened text and visual pleasure and a host of features: 16GB, Wi-Fi (Ultrafast Wireless*), 5-mega pixel iSight Camera, HD video recording, dual-core A5X chip, Retina Display—four times more pixels than iPad 2, razor-sharp text, richer colours;10 hours battery life, Dictation and iCloud. (*NB: Not 3G or 4G model)
