Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

September 2012

Images 1 & 2 Museum of Old an New Art (MONA); image 3 view through the tunnel to the Roundhouse (MONA)

photos 1 & 2 Leigh Carmichael; image 3 Sean Fennessey; courtesy of MONA Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania

Images 1 & 2 Museum of Old an New Art (MONA); image 3 view through the tunnel to the Roundhouse (MONA)

synaesthesia, mona

David Walsh’s MONA has never been conventional. After a giddy free-entry-for-all honeymoon, there’s now a two-tiered system whereby if you’re a Tasmanian entry is free, while interstate and international visitors pay a $20 admission fee (given Walsh’s current tax battle with the ATO this seems rather reasonable). However the next project up at MONA requires quite a significant investment—$605—but, we are told, it’s well worth it.

Over the first weekend of November the gallery will be closed to the public while 400 exclusive ticket holders experience Synaesthesia. Walsh has long had a fascination with this sensory fusion and he and his team have put together a program of concerts, commissions and feasts exploring the concept from every angle. Performances will take place all round the gallery featuring Kate Miller-Heidke, Michael Kieran Harvey, Peter Hill, Meow Meow, Brian Ritchie, Allison Bell, ANAM, Danny Healy, Ken Young, Marc Hannaford and others. In collaboration with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra and Chorus there will also be concerts of works by Messiaen, Ligeti and Mussorgsky. The gallery will be artfully lit by John Rayment (designer of the Opera Australia’s La Traviata on Sydney Harbour) and all meals will be created by MONA’s inhouse chefs. Prepare for sensory overload.
Synaethesia, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania, Nov 3-4, 2012, http://mona.net.au/what’s-on/events.aspx

crack theatre festival, this is not art

Skye Gellman, Naomi Francis, Mothlight

courtesy the artist

Skye Gellman, Naomi Francis, Mothlight

All eras must eventually come to an end and it seems that with the move to independence by Sound Summit a few years back and now Electrofringe in 2012, the terrifying hydra that was This Is Not Art (TINA) in Newcastle has been scaled down into a more tameable three-headed beast. (Sound Summit still takes place in Newcastle over the same weekend, but Electrofringe has shifted to an annual program of events in different places). The National Young Writers’ Festival and Critical Animals have staunchly held their ground and, over the last three years, the Crack Theatre Festival has rapidly grown in scale and ambition. The fourth installment, led by co-artistic directors Gareth Hart and Jane Grimley, will present 50 events over four days.

This is Kansas City, Sandra Carluccio

courtesy the artist

This is Kansas City, Sandra Carluccio

From the plentiful program it’s hard to spot the highlights, but given previous reviews of Skye Gellman’s work (see RT100; & RT97), Mothlight, an acrobatic piece made with Naomi Francis and set in a car park, certainly looks promising. As does This is Kansas City by Sandra Carluccio, who has recently been training with international mixed-media companies Il Pixel Rosso, PIPS-LAB and Gob Squad. She will conduct an MP3-led journey, creating an interactive work within Newcastle’s cityscape “to unravel the story of a criminal known only as The Monster.” Then there’s a large-scale theatre/circus community project, Home (facilitated by Katic Mackie) in which Hunter Valley residents reflect on their environment, Also local, Tantrum Theatre will present The Past is a Foreign Country with theatre-maker Tamara Gazzard. It’s a verbatim work exploring “notions of truth and authenticity in history and memory” (press release). Investigating the complex territory of the atomisation of our existence, We Were Shadows Looking On looks intriguing. The creative team comprises a permaculturist (Adam Kennedy), a civil engineer who specialises in high voltage energy transmission and sewerage networks (Tom Morris) and a bunch of cross-disciplinary artists and musicians (Blake Kendall, Cleo Mees, Saha Jones, Tim Kent & Dave Rodriguez). In addition to the many performances, there is also a series of masterclasses including Strategies for creating Post Dramatic Theatre with Chris Ryan and Creating From/Through/With The Body with Brian Lucas, as well as panel discussions on blogging as criticism, fair representation and difference in the industry and even some self-producing tips.
Crack Theatre Festival, part of This Is Not Art, Sept 27- 30, 2012, http://cracktheatrefestival.com/

south australian film corporation, 40 year anniversary

From Sunday Too Far Away, South Australian Film Corporation

courtesy SAFC

From Sunday Too Far Away, South Australian Film Corporation

As the first screen agency to be established in this country, the South Australian Film Corporation has, over the last 40years, played an amazing role in nurturing not only the state’s film industry but also Australian screen culture as a whole. As part of their celebrations they will be presenting From a Sunday Too Far Away, an exhibition of behind the scenes photographs, posters, films and other ephemera from classics such as Sunday Too Far Away, Breaker Morant and Storm Boy. Concentrating on films from 1972-1994 (with a smaller selection of more recent projects) the materials for the exhibition have been drawn from the SAFC’s archive which was thoroughly catalogued last year and divided up between the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra and South Australia’s State Records. Other events to mark the anniversary include a showreel featuring excerpts from over 60 films; a 40-piece swap card collection; and a 50,000 word monograph penned by frequent RealTime contributor, Mike Walsh.
From a Sunday Too Far Away, Flinders University Art Museum & City Gallery, State Library of South Australia North Terrace, Adelaide, Oct 20-2 Dec 2; http://www.safilm.com.au/Content.aspx?p=207

the other film festival

The Punk Syndrome (Kovasikajuttu), The Other Film Festival

Not to be confused with OtherFilm (run by Joel Stern, Danni Zuvela and Sally Golding, concentrating on expanded cinema and taking place in Nov-Dec 2012 in Brisbane), The Other Film Festival, directed by Rick Randall and produced by Arts Access Victoria, celebrates “international cinema dedicated to the richness of the lived experience of disability” (website). It’s a biannual festival taking place this year at Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall where it will present five days of feature films, documentaries, shorts and panel discussions. Highlights include the documentary Warrior Champions (Craig Renaud, US/China, 2009), which follows the journey of four returned US service men and women who try to overcome the trauma of their physical injuries by attempting to join the US Paralympic team. Another documentary The Punk Syndrome (Kovasikajuttu) by J Kärkkäinen, JP Passai (Finland, 2012) focuses on two men with intellectual disabilities as they form a punk band which develops cult status across the country. Another highlight is Aphasia, a drama based on the real life experiences of Carl McIntyre, a filmmaker and actor who suffered a major stroke resulting in aphasia—the inability, to varying degrees, to be able to read, write or speak. In the film, made by his close friend Jim Gloster, McIntyre re-enacts his experiences. He has recovered some speech and now tours with his film, discussing his experiences following screenings.

Warrior Champions, The Other Film Festival

Among the shorts are several Australian offerings including Back to Back’s Democratic Set (10mins, 2012, see previous coverage); Beautiful by Genevieve Clay (13mins, 2010) about two people with intellectual disabilities at a swimming pool; and 3.15 to Brunswick by Gemma Falk (3mins, 2012) a romantic moment between two people waiting for a train that never arrives. There’s also a range of talks including Sex, Love and Intimacy—“a robust, inclusive and long overdue public conversation” about issues of intimate and romantic connection facing people with disabilities (program). Priding itself on total accessibility—the festival “is both the message and the messenger”—all activities offer subtitles, Auslan sign language interpreters, audio description, assisted listening and viewing devices, wheelchair access and even water bowls for thirsty guide and companion dogs. There’s also a festival club for late night carousing including entertainment by Rose Ertler’s The Thoughtful Song Society who create melodies to order.
The Other Film Festival, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall Sept 19-23, 2012, http://otherfilmfestival.com/program/

primavera, claire healy & sean cordeiro, mca

Benjamin Forster, Discourse, 2010

photo TJ Phillipson, courtesy and © the artist

Benjamin Forster, Discourse, 2010

When the expanded MCA was under construction, last year’s Primavera strategically offered an extroverted approach to artmaking, taking to the streets with a range of installations, interventions and live art experiences. This year Primavera returns to the gallery with a sense of introspection, presenting works from seven artists below the age of 35 who, according to exhibition curator Anna Davies, are “looking inside, into imaginary territories, spiritual landscapes and private interior realms” (press release). Katie Mitchell’s work, My life in Nuts (2012), consists of 11,109 unshelled peanuts the artist has arranged into a pile to represent the number of days she’s been alive. Anastasia Klose will inhabit the gallery for the length of the exhibition (during opening hours), re-enacting two months of unemployment—watching TV, dancing to video clips and eating junk food. Meanwhile Benjamin Foster will attempt to teach a computer to draw in a human way in Drawing Machine (Output = Plotter) (2008–2012). Another of his works, Discourse (2010), has computers simulating a conversation between Karl Marx and Adam Smith, the resulting printouts spooling into piles on the floor.

Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro, Deceased Estate, 2004, lambda print, collection of Newcastle Art Gallery

courtesy the artists and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney, © the artists, photo Christian Schnur

Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro, Deceased Estate, 2004, lambda print, collection of Newcastle Art Gallery

Running simultaneously will be a survey exhibition (also curated by Davis) featuring 18 works by Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro. Over the last eight years this artist couple has consistently produced work of impressive scale and endless ingenuity, literally reconfiguring ideas of home, place and space. In one of their earlier works, Cordial Home Project (2003), they bought an old house, painstakingly dismantled and re-constructed it in altered form in the gallery. Their 2011 work Par Avion had the couple cutting up a Cessna 172 into 70 pieces and sending it through the mail to the exhibition venue where it is reconfigured. Par Avion is clearly a precursor to their latest work, Stasis (2012), commissioned for this exhibition, in which a light aircraft will be suspended via metal scaffolding, positioned on the forecourt pointing in a collision course towards the gallery.
MCA: Primavera 2012, curator Anna Davis, artists Dion Beasley, Benjamin Forster, Anastasia Klose, Todd McMillan, Kate Mitchell, Teho Ropeyan, Justine Varga; Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro exhibition; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Oct 24-Dec 2, 2012; http://www.mca.com.au/

marco fusinato, institute of modern art

Marco Fusinato, Aetheric Plexus, 2009

courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery

Marco Fusinato, Aetheric Plexus, 2009

September-October sees a rash of interesting activities at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane. There are still a few weeks left to experience Marco Fusinato’s The Color of the Sky Has Melted. Working across a range of media the centerpiece of this exhibition is Aetheric Plexus (2009), a scaffolding construction that, when triggered by a movement, blasts the viewer with 13,000 watts of blinding white light and 105 decibels of noise. An antidote is offered in the form of the silent works of Mass Black Implosions (2007) in which Fusinato graphically interferes with scores by avant garde masters, suggesting the creation of new compositions. From another angle comes Double Infinitives (2009) in which Fusinato upsizes newspaper images of rioters to a massive scale, freezing the perpetrators in the act of violence. (See Sally Anne McIntyre’s account of the work in Sound Full.) Alas, Fusinato’s five-hour guitar noise onslaught has already taken place on September 13, but on October 4 you can catch a screening of his personal collection of riot films accompanied by 1980s Japanese noise. Curated by Charlotte Day, the exhibition is produced in collaboration with Artspace, Sydney where it will be presented Nov 1-Dec 9, with a durational sound performance November 3, 11am-5pm.

Also coming up at IMA is a lecture by renowned US photographer Geoffrey Crewdson (in association with Queensland Art Gallery), as well as Carolee Schneeman’s Meat Joy, a remarkable experimental performance video documenting cultural upheaval in the 1960s.
Marco Fusinato The Color of the Sky Has Melted, Aug 11- Oct 6; Geoffrey Crewdson lecture Oct 13; Carolee Schneemann: Meat Joy & Peter Cripps: Endless Space Oct 13 – Nov 24, www.ima.org.au/; www.marcofusinato.com/

RealTime issue #110 Aug-Sept 2012 pg. web

107 Projects Redfern

photo Catherine McElhone

107 Projects Redfern

107 projects

With the recent closures of FraserStudios and Serial Space—key alternate rehearsal, performance and exhibition venues in inner city Sydney—it looked like dark days ahead but it seems the gap will be quickly filled by two recent artist-run collaborative ventures. 107 Projects in Redfern officially opened its doors September 8 after a few months of low-key operations. This new ‘House of Art and Culture’ is run by the team responsible for the much loved 107 space (spooky yes?), in Hibernian House on Elizabeth Street, known variously as Knot Gallery, Token Imagination and the frequency lab (see my first encounter with the space in RT48). This new venture, sanctioned by the City of Sydney, is a converted car park that offers artist studios and rehearsal spaces for hire. One gallery space is up and running with a second to be completed shortly. Soundproofing is also underway so that 107 can effectively host music and performance events and festivals in the near future.
107 Projects, 107 Redfern St, Redfern, Sydney; check the website for upcoming events. The team is happy to receive proposals for studio residencies, workshops, performances and events: http://www.107projects.org/ or email enquiries@107projects.org

the arts platform

The Arts Platform is another new space that has recently opened in Sydney’s Surry Hills. Run by a team of volunteers headed by board director Sama Ky Balson and associate director Kirk Page (see review of their work on last year’s Lucky by IPAN), the Arts Platform not only offers rehearsal and presentation space but also a range of workshops in writing, movement, physical conditioning and filmmaking as well as providing industry forums. Arts Platform is calling for proposals for a range of residencies ranging from 10 to 40 hours of studio access.
The Arts Platform, 268A Devonshire St, Surry Hills, Sydney; performing arts and writers applications due Sept 21, visual arts, arts & culture applications due Sept 28. See website for more information http://www.theartsplatform.com/build/services/residencies/

kickstart, next wave

While we’re still digesting the 2012 installment of Next Wave (see articles in RT109), the team, once again headed by Emily Sexton, is looking forward to the next extravaganza. The 2014 theme has recently been announced—New Grand Narrative—exploring how the many methods with which we filter of our world via media and technology are affecting the way we understand the ‘big picture’ and the big stories. With the festival due just under two years, the call for Kickstart applications is now open. The program offers money, time and space for emerging artists to create significant projects with an emphasis on developing skills for sustainable careers in the arts. Projects can take any form but experimentation, collaboration and innovative approaches to site, community and audience engagement define the territory. And, of course, relevance to the 2014 theme. The Next Wave team is currently touring the country conducting information sessions. Check out the website for dates.
Next Wave, Kickstart applications close Nov 2; http://nextwave.org.au/kickstart/

new music network mini series

The New Music Network, dedicated to the promotion and presentation of new music within Australia, is calling for proposals for the 2013 New Music Mini Series. Established in 2005 to highlight the “next generation” of artists, the Mini Series curators seek proposals from artists and ensembles “starting out in their performing careers and/or creating new projects” (press release). Concerts must take place within Australia and genres can include electronic, improvised and composed new music. An additional project in collaboration with Campbelltown Arts Centre is focusing on new music projects associated with Australian birdsong.
Applications are due Nov 30, 2012, for more information see http://www.newmusicnetwork.com.au/Concerts/miniseriesinfo.html

RealTime issue #110 Aug-Sept 2012 pg. web

Stephen Whittington with a daruma illustration, Japan

courtesy the artist

Stephen Whittington with a daruma illustration, Japan

ADELAIDE PERFORMER, COMPOSER, LECTURER, CRITIC AND DIRECTOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE’S ELECTRONIC MUSIC UNIT (EMU), STEPHEN WHITTINGTON MARKED JOHN CAGE’S 100TH BIRTHDAY WITH A MAGNIFICENT TRIBUTE CONCERT THAT COMMENCED AT NOON WITH WHITTINGTON’S EIGHT-HOUR PERFORMANCE OF CAGE’S ASLSP (AS SLOW AS POSSIBLE) ON THE UNIVERSITY’S ELDER HALL ORGAN.

Herculean musical performances are not unexpected with Whittington. Most prominent publicly as a performer, he has given some landmark recitals and is internationally renowned for his renditions of the work of Morton Feldman and of Erik Satie’s Vexations.

Whittington’s performance work is broadly of two kinds: firstly, solo performances of significant and often impossibly demanding works, especially of extended pieces such as Vexations; and secondly his multi-dimensional presentations of the work and ideas of some ground-breaking artists and composers, such as Stan Brakhage, John Cage and, again, Satie. The recent John Cage Day embodied both kinds of event, with Whittington centrestage as performer and artistic director.

Whittington’s solo performances typically take the audience, and himself, on a journey. These are about the act of performance as well as about the composer-composition. Often, both performer and audience enter what Whittington suggests is “a certain mental space—you become attuned to a certain state to experience something unusual.” The mental state the audience enters can provide a unique kind of awareness, a possible outcome of which is the reconsideration of the nature of awareness itself, especially musical awareness.

Whittington is also a composer and considers that provides essential insights into the performance of another composer’s work: “Playing like a composer is having a sense of the form and the ideas in the work rather than aiming for technical perfection.” Not that his playing lacks technical perfection—he is a pianist of the highest order, a remarkable achievement given the competing pressures of other work. Im sportantly, his playing reveals the quintessential musicality within the composition. For me, his 1999 performance of Feldman’s For Bunita Marcus (RT32, Aug-Sept, 1999) was a musical epiphany.

Christopher Roberts, Stephen Whittington, John Cage Day

photo Justin Phelps

Christopher Roberts, Stephen Whittington, John Cage Day

Whittington’s showcase events are more than concerts. Multimedia presentations, such as his The Music of Light, which explored the work of experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage (2011, RT102), Mad Dogs and Surrealists (2003) and Interior Voice: Music and Rodin (2006), provide incisive and original analyses of the works of significant composers, artists and artistic movements. In these he is “composer-curator,” as well as performer, in that the design of the event constitutes a unique work greater than the sum of its components. He particularly wants to bring to audiences important but often little-known music.

He considers that his composition, performance, criticism and teaching are all aspects of the same thing: “There is no clear separation between them. In the West, we tend to specialise these days, but, traditionally, they all go together.” He has recently returned from two months in Kyoto where he explored Japanese gardens to inspire new musical composition. Funded by the Bank of Tokyo through Arts SA, the trip involved immersion in Japanese culture, including time spent in temples, in order to think about composition in relation to other artistic forms.

Stephen Whittington, ringing the bell at Miidera Buddhist temple, Japan

courtesy the artist

Stephen Whittington, ringing the bell at Miidera Buddhist temple, Japan

His long-standing interest in Asian cultures is reflected for example in his 1999 composition Tangled Hair for voice, flute and piano, four exquisite song settings of poems by Japanese women from the seventh to the 19th centuries. Or there is his string quartet, From a Thatched Hut (2010), an exploration of the Chinese tradition of the poet-scholar. “I’m interested in Chinese poetry and its connection with nature, and the reduction of expression to simple means. Some things look simple but are the result of complex processes and thought.”

At EMU, Whittington teaches composition, performance and the use of electronic media. He feels that composition has become a form of research in which theory is used to justify the content. “I’m not comfortable with this, as it denies the natural process of composition, whereby theory informs but doesn’t dictate the outcome.” Through EMU, Whittington is encouraging consideration of the relationship between sonic and visual material, for example through making animations. “Computers lend themselves to this, as images can be turned into sound using software. EMU is taking advantage of new technology and exploring what is possible artistically. Students are partly concerned with job prospects but they also like to experiment, for example with site-specific work or with performance techniques or interactivity.” In his 2011 concert Psychedelic Rays of Sound (the title borrowed from Damien Hirst), EMU staff (including himself) and students presented compositions responding to the Saatchi exhibition then showing at the Art Gallery of South Australia, using an eclectic array of devices and audio-visual approaches. Importantly at EMU, there is emphasis on the reconsideration and renewal of musical traditions. Cage’s legacy is clearly crucial, and Whittington repeats Cage’s declaration that music will wither and die without renewal.

I was able to listen to ASLSP only for an hour, but still became immersed in the endlessly prolonged tones and vibrant timbres of the cathedral-sized Elder Hall organ, losing all sense of time. Whittington feels eight hours is the right length for a performance of ASLSP, both for himself as performer and for the composition, even though it can be performed over a much shorter or longer period.

Meredith Lane (electronics), Margit Bruenner (drawing), Christopher Roberts (bass), Al Thumm (electronics), Kate Macfarlane (voice), Peter Handsworth (clarinet), Melanie Walters (flutes), Daniel Thorpe (chess), Jesse Budel (cake-making), John Cage Day

photo Justin Phelps

ASLSP was followed by a performance of Cage’s Musicircus, which the composer instructed could be performed by any number of musicians and be of indeterminate duration. Whittington determined that it should last an hour. It comprised Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra, here performed on flute, clarinet, double bass and piano; Aria 2 and Aria 2B from Song Books, performed wonderfully by soprano Kate MacFarlane; Theatre Pieces/Solos for Electronics, including EMU student Al Thumm’s brilliant electronics, a performer playing chess by himself and another baking a cake with birthday candles; Suite for Toy Piano (Whittington on celeste); Cheap Imitation (Whittington, piano); 0’00” (amplified drawing, remixed); Williams Mix (tape); and a recording of Cage’s lectures I-IV. This theatrical mélange, though much guided by chance and loaded with humour and experimentation, resolved itself into a surprisingly coherent and musical whole, neatly drawing together many of Cage’s ideas.

Musicircus was then followed by Whittington’s performance of the piano version of Cage’s The Seasons (1947), a nine-movement ballet score. To conclude the day appropriately, all the Musicircus performers returned for a rendition of 4’33”, during which Elder Hall was unusually quiet, the audience sitting in reverential silence.

Whittington observes that audiences today are attending concerts of work previously considered difficult or inaccessible. These audiences are young, not always from a classical background but perhaps from an experimental rock background and have no musical prejudices. Crucially important in such audience development has been the educative role of consummate musicians such as Stephen Whittington.

John Cage Day, concept, organ, piano, celeste Stephen Whittington, double bass Christopher Roberts, clarinet Peter Handsworth, flute Melanie Walters, soprano Kate McFarlane, electronics Iran Sanadzadeh, electronics Al Thumm, chess board Daniel Thorpe, food preparation Jesse Budel, drawing Margit Bruenner, electronics Meredith Lane, Elder Hall, University of Adelaide, 5 September 5, 2012

This article originally appeared in RT’s online e-dition Sept 18

RealTime issue #111 Oct-Nov 2012 pg. 47

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker

photo Herman Sorgeloos

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker

AFTER THE FIRST PERFORMANCE OF CESENA BY BELGIUM’S ROSAS AND GRAINDELAVOIX AT CARRIAGEWORKS, ANNE TERESA DE KEERSMAEKER, CO-CREATOR OF THE WORK (WITH MUSIC DIRECTOR BJORN SCHMELZER) SPOKE ELOQUENTLY ABOUT HER WORK WITH DANCE WRITER AND ACADEMIC ERIN BRANNIGAN AND ANSWERED QUESTIONS FROM THE AUDIENCE. THE FOLLOWING REPORT IS TAKEN FROM HURRIED HANDWRITTEN NOTES.

Not one to be rushed, De Keersmaeker’s thoughtful pauses and moments of animation complemented En Atendant and Cesena, the intensely contemplative and grandly passionate works we’d had the great privilege to witness in a mere week in the only venue in Sydney that could accommodate such creations. En Atendant evokes the transition from twilight to night, while Cesena emerges from near darkness to sunrise.

De Keersmaeker first responded to Brannigan’s question about the origins of the work, including its 2011 Avignon Festival premiere, at considerable length (in fact answering all the other questions Brannigan had in store).

Emphasising, as she did repeatedly, that music is integral to her practice, De Keersmaeker spoke of her attraction to Ars Subtilior, a late 14th century compositional form associated with Avignon. She described the music as “highly complex, contrapuntal, mathematical,” “with different time layers” but also “the highest emotional intensity.”

For the choreographer, Ars Subtilior evokes the end of the Dark Ages and the transition into the light of the Renaissance. At the same time it captures the agonies of the late Mediaeval Period—plague spread by fleas in clothing and on rats, the depredations of the One Hundred Years War and a deteriorating and corrupt Roman Catholic Church, epitomised by the split in the Holy Roman Empire between competing papacies in Avignon and Rome. De Keersmaeker sees Ars Subtilior as “music emerging out of chaos,” light out of the dark.

When asked to create a new work for the festival in Avignon, the choreographer hesitated. Acknowledging the festival’s greatness she nonetheless described it as a circus. She was told, “You’ll never have silence” for a contemplative work. Later in the talk she would explain how she addressed this challenge.

En Atendant, Rosas, Cloître des Célestins, Avignon, France

photo © Herman Sorgeloos

En Atendant, Rosas, Cloître des Célestins, Avignon, France

The key impulse for the creation of the En Atendant and Cesena diptych—which is how De Keersmaeker labelled these works performed on separate nights—was revealed to be the choreographer’s preoccupation with “the very nature of how movement is generated in the body.” She described breathing as “the most ecological, intimate movement,” manifest as well in sounds, speech, screaming and lamentation. Secondly she addressed the verticality of the spine: “our walking is our dancing. With walking we organise space and time,” she said, tapping her feet. “Walking is the basic architecture of movement.”

The mention of architecture appeared to trigger a reflection on her relationship with visual artist Anne Veronica Janssens, whom she described as mostly working with light, severely and elegantly, with a kind of minimalism, which the choreographer emphasised should not be associated with American minimalism or Arte Povera. De Keersmaeker had worked with Janssens previously using the music of Bach and Webern, and danced, and, surprisingly, told us she sang in a performance of Mahler’s Song of the Earth.

De Keersmaeker had long been struck by the transformation that occurs when a work rehearsed at great length in daylight is taken into a dark theatre with artificial light at night: “it changes the architecture, the dynamic of what is happening.” She decided she wanted “to work with natural daylight; to make a piece for sunrise.” Consequently, Cesena was premiered at 4.30am at the Avignon Festival, outdoors at the Palace of the Popes.

What informs her work, said the choreographer, “is a passion for abstract beauty—maths, geometry. But I’m very emotional and intuitive.” Smiling, she added, “Although I have a reputation for being very severe, I can be gentle.”

She addressed this in terms of her strong association with music: “Music frames my basic nature…[it provides] order in the highest degree of chaos.” However, “I skipped the 19th century…except for Mahler and early Schonberg—romantic music on the edge of change.”

Brannigan asked De Keersmaeker where the new diptych stood in the choreographer’s body of work. After a long silence, she answered hesitantly that her early work, in which she danced and taught herself how to choreograph, had an “economy of means, extreme repetition” and was minimalist. In her latest work she sensed “a new minimalism.”

Brannigan enquired if ‘community’ was significant in De Keersmaeker’s work to which the choreographer answered that it was: “it’s beautiful and political…a community of people and [each] person in all their complexity.” She declared, “dance makes me love people. These works were made with these people.”

Responding to audience questions about the music in the diptych, she said that Bjorn Schmelzer had chosen the pieces but without any thematic rigidity. Opposing the “holy boxing and sterilising” of music from the past, she said “our bodies are more contemporary than anything else. We visit this old music with our bodies and the grain of the voice gives it a completeness.”

Carlos Garbin (left centre) and Marie Goudot (right centre), Cesena, Rosas at Palais des Papes in Avignon, France

photo © Anne Van Aerschot

Carlos Garbin (left centre) and Marie Goudot (right centre), Cesena, Rosas at Palais des Papes in Avignon, France

One of the most powerful elements of Cesena is that the companies of dancers and singers merge into one, sometimes significantly blurring their roles and amplifying the sense of community. A few dancers, said De Keersmaeker, could not sing, unless, as in the case of a Serbian dancer, it connected with their cultural background. Matej Kejzar performed a fragment of a Serbian epic poem dealing with loss, an angrily delivered lament, sung with raw passion. On the other side of the stage the rest of the company gathered in a circle, accompanying him contrapuntally with melancholy serenity. For De Keersmaker, the song recalls the grieving over the three-day massacre of the citizens of Cesena in northern Italy ordered by the Pope during the schism within the empire, and more recently the Serbian-Bosnian war.

De Keersmaeker made the point that Schmelzer did not aim for polished performances, nor did she. “My approach to movement is architectural.” She saw herself as realising a “materialised energy…a natural and complex richness” rooted in informal movement. As Alex Ferguson reported from the Festival TransAmériques 2012, Montreal:

“The greatest vocal challenges are left to the singers, and the most difficult movement solos are left to the dancers; but for the most part the bodies all sing and move—to very high standard. Walking, turning, rolling and singing with collective intent, the performers form a community of initiates with a holy mission: to awaken the sun—or its proxy, electric light. They succeed.” (RT110):

For Cesena, designer Janssens created a large white circle—a thin but dense chalk-like line that is gradually scuffed and spread, either gently or forcefully for the duration of the performance. The performers move inside and out of it, across it (running or intersecting it with long lines or in halting group marches). Asked how the performers, sometimes each in their own circular trajectory within a larger mass, could move with ease, De Keersmaeker described the circle as containing “circles within circles,” with each performer having visualised their own pattern, “knowing the time when they should switch or rotate,” “following a performer on the edge of the circle,” hearing that person’s name called, “using their peripheral vision…and knowing what can go wrong.” (I spoke to a dancer after seeing En Atendant. He told me that the concentration required in that work, with its own acute patterning, was more demanding than the physical expenditure.)

In En Atendant there is a thin, straight line of what looks like soil (designer Michel Francois, also a Belgian artist), just in front of the audience. Like the circle in Cesena it’s a line also frequently breached and blurred. To the right, a trio of musicians sit on a bench—a singer and two instrumentalists. The dramaturgy is quite formal compared with Cesena, “the movement rooted in the music.” In Cesena, De Keersmaeker wanted “only the body,” operating inside and out of “that most complete of forms, the circle.” The result: dancers who sing and singers who dance, one community, celebrating light, the body—at once “most ancient and contemporary”—and, “most individual of all, the voice.” For De Keersmaker, the sharing of music and movement is central to Cesena, such that she and her performers created “simple movements while doing complex singing.”

Another motivation for the creation of Cesena’s sole focus on the body, said De Keersmaeker, was a response to “the technicalised world post-WWII,” not least the dominance by speed that came with it and the technologies that negate the body.

To hear De Keersmaeker speak after seeing En Atendant and Cesena was deeply satisfying. The breadth and depth of her vision, the scale and intensity of her collaborative creations and their gravitas are inspiring. With Rosas, she last visited Australia in 2000 for Robyn Archer’s Adelaide Festival of that year, presenting the monumental I Said I, two and a half hours of superb dancing, brilliantly integrated text delivered by the dancers and music provided by a piano trio and a DJ and saxophonist. Not since the trio of Pina Bausch Tanztheater Wuppertal works in the 1982 Jim Sharman Adelaide Festival had a work so swept us up with its delicious intricacies, momentum, passion and intelligence. And now in 2012, new works by De Keersmaeker are embedded deep in our bodies and psyches. She leaves us feeling we have danced the dance, and sung it, with Rosas and graindelavoix.

–

Carriageworks & the 18th Biennale of Sydney: Rosas, En Atendant, Sept 11, 12; Rosas and graindelvoix, Cesena, Sept 14. 15; Carriageworks, Sydney; artist talk, Sept 14

Footage of Cesena in Avignon can be viewed on vimeo

This article originally appeared in RT’s online e-dition Sept 18

RealTime issue #111 Oct-Nov 2012 pg. web

Munich’s Rathaus (Old Town Hall) with the twin bell towers of the Frauenkirche in the distance

reason for travelling

he/she

Munich—the capital of the Free State of Bayern (Bavaria), the most southern state of Germany—like all major German cities, was bombed flat in the mid 1940s for various reasons that I’m sure you are all aware of. With this in mind one can’t help being struck by how beautiful Munich is. Munich is a babe in the most non-gendered sense of the word (purely because I don’t know the gender of Munich yet). He/She is an elegant androgynous creature, not afraid of its past, its future or the over-use of primary colours when dressing. Topping Monocle’s World’s Most Liveable Cities Index in 2007 and 2010, Munich blends culture, lifestyle and green spaces to make a city with an exciting, chic and surprisingly relaxed vibe.

kunst

Munich is the major cultural centre of the southern half of Germany, so although its population is only a little over a million it punches well above its weight when it comes to the arts. The annual dance symposium TANZWERKSTATT Europa concluded on my arrival culminating in a massive dance piece created out of all the workshops and classes that made up the festival.

When it comes to theatre, the Munich Kammerspiele is unsurpassable. Premiering a mix of new writing and warped renditions of modern and ancient classics it is arguably the best large theatre in Germany outside Berlin and is celebrating its centenary this year. Make a beeline for its doors when in town.

As for galleries one cannot ignore the brilliant Haus der Kunst, a neo-classical pile commissioned by Adolf Hitler to be home to the masterpieces of the Third Reich. Keenly aware of its past, it is now the centre of political and socially aware art, film and conversation in Munich. It also has an excellent bar and several high-end night clubs buried in its flanks.

The indie scene is dominated by two venues on opposite sides of the city. In the north, Schwere Reiter features all the performance art, movement and agit-prop wonderment you can handle. And in the south is the urbane and weird i-camp—a lovely theatre space, housing theatre, dance, touring companies and anything else that takes their fancy. Last winter they decided to open up the large barn doors at the rear of the theatre, letting in the bitter cold, turning the stage into a natural ice rink. All shows for that month were then staged on ice skates or sleds regardless of the content or context. It’s that kind of place.

halbes oder die maß (a half or a litre)

Munich wouldn’t be Munich without its beer garden culture. Beer gardens are almost impossible to avoid so my recommendation is to embrace them with all your heart. My favourites are buried in the thickly wooded eastern bank of the Isar River, such as the trendy Muffat Halle Beergarden complete with its own adjoining nightclub and live music venue.

A short walk through the trees will then deliver you to the Hofbraukeller beer garden. Surrounded by pretty chestnut trees it will supply you with all your kitsch thigh slapping needs as well as excellent food and cocktails for those who aren’t into taking their beer by the litre.

Once the gardens close for the night the best option is the ridiculously huge KultFabrik, a vast 25-club complex, open all hours. Take the U-bahn and run wild.

for sleeping

If staying in a hotel (albeit a cheap one) is an option for you, I can highly recommend the hotels of the new chain Motel One. Usually with good locations, They’re well priced, very clean and offer great breakfast options. Good for large groups if you’re planning a tour of Germany any time soon.

ausfahrt (exit)

As I was leaving the city a WWII bomb was uncovered at a construction site in the salubrious inner city district of Schwabing. Authorities had little choice but to evacuate the area and detonate the bomb. Even though it was a highly controlled blast the damage was still immense. The debate following, rather than being historical or philosophical, was instead about the minute intricacies of state compensation and insurance law. Munich is a city that lives in the moment. (Watch the explosion here https://vimeo.com/48399328.)

links

Glyn Roberts is a Melbourne-based playwright, producer and dramaturg. He is one of the founding members of MKA: Theatre of New Writing. His play, Triangle, was recently shortlisted for the 2012 Patrick White Award. http://www.mka.org.au/

ethical ventriloquism
john bailey: recent melbourne performance
RealTime issue #107 Feb-March 2012 p34-35

just whose theatre?
john bailey: melbourne performance
RealTime issue #104 Aug-Sept 2011 pg. 16

Soundcapsule is a bi-monthly online feature offering free downloads of music by artists we’ve recently covered in RealTime.

ensemble offspring, professor bad trip lesson 3 by fausto romitelli

Ensemble Offspring is a new music group performing works ranging from the 20th century masters to new commissions. They formed 15 years ago, originally under the name Spring Ensemble, the resident company for Roger Woodward’s Sydney Spring Festival. The group is led by percussionist Claire Edwardes and composer Damien Ricketson and has a core of regular musicians presenting an ambitious and plentiful program each year. They are well known for their eclectic approach to programming often collaborating across artforms, for example with contemporary performance group Theatre Kantanka (Sounds Absurd, 2010 and Bargain Garden, 2011), glass artist Elaine Miles (Fractured Again, 2010), scratch cinema expert and filmmaker Louise Curham (Waiting to turn into puzzles, 2008), video artists Andrew Wholly (Fractured Again) and Sean Bacon (Professor Bad Trip, 2011), and a host of specialist musicians including Halcyon vocal ensemble, improviser Jim Denley, experimental guitarist Oren Ambarchi, and electronica/noise artist Pimmon.

The track provided here is from their 2011 concert, Professor Bad Trip, highlighting the work of Italian composer Fausto Romitelli. Romitelli was inspired by the comic artist Gianluca Lerici aka Professor Bad Trip and poet Henri Michaux who both explored the effects of drug-induced hallucinations through their work (see our review in RT104).

contagious matter, infectious stuff
caroline wake: theatre kantanka with ensemble offspring, bargain garden
RealTime issue #107 Feb-March 2012 pg. 36

tripping joy time
felicity clark: ensemble offspring, professor bad trip
RealTime issue #104 Aug-Sept 2011 pg. 47

composed spontaneity
greg hooper: stockhausen: a message from sirius
RealTime issue #91 June-July 2009 pg. 50

thembi soddell, artefact performance (excerpt, 2009)

Thembi Soddell is a Melbourne based sound artist and electroacoustic composer working across recording, installation and live performance often collaborating with cellist Anthea Caddy. She is renowned for working with dramatic dynamics that have a disturbingly visceral effect on the listener. Gail Priest described her performance at High Reflections in RT103: “Soddell, hidden from view, created an amazingly evocative soundscape of unspecified but terrifying dread coming towards us slowly from a distance. An intensifying rumble augmented by half-human, half-animal shrieks reaches its zenith and then sucks back down, vacuum-like, to a ringing almost-silence, only to begin again. With a fine balance between augmented field recording and machine noise Soddell perfectly controls this exhilarating journey into her unconscious—or is it our own?”

Her installation Window (2008) has recently been presented as part of Sound Full in Dunedin, described by Sally Ann McIntyre as “somewhat paradoxically leav[ing] its closeted participants in a state of heightened vulnerability and bodily awareness.” (Sept 5 e-dition)

the sound already present
sally ann mcintyre: sound full, dunedin public art gallery
RealTime issue #110 Aug-Sept 2012 pg. web

part 1: sydney scenes & sounds
gail priest: silent hour, ladyz in noyz, high reflections
RealTime issue #103 June-July 2011 pg. 40

lawrence english, coprinus comatus

Lawrence English is a Brisbane-based composer, media artist and curator. He is perhaps best known for his label and mulitarts organisation Room40 which has released CDs by a remarkable number of artists, both local and international. He has also presented a vast number of concerts, series and festivals in Brisbane such as MONO, Syncretism and the Open Frame festival. English is also the Brisbane-based director of Liquid Architecture and for the 2012 incarnation, he joined with Philip Samartzis to curate the whole festival focusing on the Antarctic. Of his performance with his trio Monolith (with Werner Dafeldeker and video artist Scott Morrison) Greg Hooper wrote in RT110: “Floes crackle, ice drips, trickles plop and burble. Thin overlays of surface water, wind blown ripples, soft unbreaking waves. Fade out. …One of the best Liquid Architectures I’ve been to (but do I always think that?) and, with Monolith, an exceptional performance that deserves much greater exposure.”

English also recently collaborated with Scott Morrison on a reworking of John Cage’s film for solo light One11, as part of Clocked Out’s The Cage in Us celebrations at the Judith Wright Centre. Drawing on this material and extending it further, English has release a new album through the Line imprint, For / Not for Cage, from which this track has been taken.

selected articles

antarctic reveries
greg hooper: liquid architecture 13, brisbane
RealTime issue #110 Aug-Sept 2012 pg. 18

listening anew to john cage
greg hooper, the cage in us, presented by clocked out
RealTime issue #109 June-July 2012 pg. 35

extra bonus track: eugene carchesio, circle music 4

Room40 have also allowed us to giveaway a track from fellow Brisbane-based composer Eugene Carchesio. While perhaps better known as a visual artist, creating complex geometric works, Carchesio has always been active as an underground musician appearing in bands such as The Deadnotes, The Lost Domain and working under pseudo-names such as DNE. Room 40 is releasing his back catalogue over the next year and currently has on offer a free taster from which this track has been selected.

Ensemble Offspring are currently in the middle of a regional tour of NSW with their Music to Infinity program. See website for details: http://ensembleoffspring.com/

You can download a full track, recorded live, at the Professor Bad Trip concert, 2011 as part of soundcapsule #5.

contagious matter, infectious stuff
caroline wake: theatre kantanka with ensemble offspring, bargain garden
RealTime issue #107 Feb-March 2012 pg. 36

tripping joy time
felicity clark: ensemble offspring, professor bad trip
RealTime issue #104 Aug-Sept 2011 pg. 47

composed spontaneity
greg hooper: stockhausen: a message from sirius
RealTime issue #91 June-July 2009 pg. 50

into the overtones
keith gallasch at ensemble offspring’s whirlwind of time
RealTime issue #75 Oct-Nov 2006 pg. 56

beauty of a greater logic
robert lloyd: ensemble offspring play glass
RealTime issue #63 Oct-Nov 2004 pg. 50

bastards do dad proud
keith gallasch: ensemble offspring, partch’s bastards
RealTime issue #55 June-July 2003 pg. 32

welcome saariaho
keith gallasch: ensemble offspring, a portrait of kaija saariaho
RealTime issue #50 Aug-Sept 2002 pg. 9

IN THE US, YOU CAN NOW VIEW METROPOLITAN OPERA PERFORMANCES LIVE VIA STREAMING AT MORE THAN 900 CINEMAS ACROSS AMERICA AND CANADA. IN THE UK, GLYNDEBOURNE OPERA COMPANY AND THE NATIONAL THEATRE ARE ALSO BROADCASTING PERFORMANCES FOR CINEMA CONSUMPTION AS WELL AS DISTRIBUTING THEIR OWN DVD RELEASES. THIS STREAMING HAS ALSO SUCCESSFULLY EXTENDED TO A LIMITED NUMBER OF AUSTRALIAN CINEMAS.

To coincide with the cultural Olympiad, The Arts Council of England has launched The Space (http://thespace.org/), an online arts and culture streaming portal and HDTV channel which will operate until October 2012, offering content from 53 selected arts organisations. UK Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt is so interested in the broadcast of live performance that he recently went so far as to suggest that all major arts organisations, should, as part of their funding arrangements, be forced to provide broadcast content (Artshub). But how are these works being received? The same Artshub article reports that the National Theatre audience surveys show that viewers in cinemas felt “more emotionally engaged” than if they had been in the theatre. It seems we are evolving into a species increasingly reliant on ‘mediation’ in order to deliver a sense of ourselves.

So with all this digital broadcasting action perhaps it’s not so surprising that UK company Random Dance has decided to release their 2008 work Entity as an iTunes digital download. What might be surprising to some is that, perhaps due to the success of Wim Wenders’ Pina on Blue Ray and DVD, Hopscotch Films have decided to be the distributor, releasing Entity along with two other dance works, Alexei Ratmansky’s ballet, Don Quichot and Mike Figgis’ The Co(te)lette Film. This marks a significant shift for performance and dance into the digital age and mainstream consciousness.

I missed Entity when it appeared as part of the 2011 Sydney Festival, however this documentation version aptly captures the sense of live performance. Filmed with eight cameras under the direction of Dennis Caïozzi at the Biennale de la Danse, Lyon in 2008, the majority of shots are complete sequences providing the perspective of an audience member, with occasional close-ups, a few well-distributed extreme close-ups and extreme wide shots for extra detail. Shooting angles change for the purpose of capturing scenes from best vantage rather than to create fancy edits. This is about the dancing, not using the dance as a basis for filmic experimentation.

The work itself is frenetic, angular and off-centre. Bodies are led by the sternum: movements starting with over-extensions and arching backs. Flexed hands and feet follow: detail is in the digits, splayed fingers, curled toes. The piece falls into two parts, the first scored by Joby Talbot performed by a string quartet (Quatuor Debussy, revealed in the curtain call to have performed live), that offers a relentlessly strident quality predominantly driving the energy of dance, the choreography only occasionally working in opposition. The high-anxiety of the score is partially relieved in the second half when Jon Hopkins (Cold Play and Massive Attack collaborator) takes over. Using selections from his album, Insides, more sonic and to some extent choreographic variation develops. A particularly nice shift is the impressive duet to the track “Vessel,” at once awkward and sinuous—undulating bodies appearing to do full-torso licking actions, limbs grasped and tugged as if with desperate need.

What does not survive well in this documentation is Ravi Deepres’ video design featured in the second half of the work projected onto large articulated screens. In a review of the work at the Sydney Festival Keith Gallasch was critical of this element: “The relationship between dancers and projections was nil, the raising and lowering of screens insignificant—a prime example of ‘background new media’” (RT101). This view is supported by the documenters choosing to focus on the dancers in preference to extreme wide shots that would incorporate the accompanying screens; nor do they include separate details of the video work.

However, on the whole, this filmed performance gives a tangible sense of the piece as live performance (replete with footsteps, panting, and I’m not so sure but maybe even some audience murmuring). With ticket prices increasing for performance (particularly major international and festival works) there may very well be a market, particularly in education, for works such as these. (See RT106 for an interview with Krysta Doczy whose company Contemporary Arts Media offers DVDs and a streaming service to the education sector of Australian and international performance). And the more accessible the distribution networks the better.

Wayne McGregor | Random Dance: Entity, concept, direction & choreography: Wayne McGregor, music Joby Talbot & Jon Hopkins, set & costume design Patrick Burnier, lighting design Lucy Carter, video design Ravi Deepres; digital version produced by ARTE France, director Dennis Caïozzi, distribution Hopscotch Films. Available iTunes; http://www.hopscotchfilms.com.au/catalogue/page-e/entity-digital-catalogue/

JUST IN: The Globe Theatre in London in association with Arts Alliance Media have announced that they will be screening documentation of live performances of Much Ado About Nothing, All’s Well that Ends Well and Doctor Faustus in cinemas across Australia, New Zealand, USA and UK from September. See website for details http://onscreen.shakespearesglobe.com/

Also Parramatta Riverside’s Made to Move program and Shamill Films will be featuring the screening of documented works from the Nederlands Dans Theater on Sept 9. See website for details http://www.riversideparramatta.com.au/performance.asp?pID=1924

ROMANTIC COMEDIES MUST CLEAVE TO CERTAIN BASIC PRINCIPLES. BOY (USUALLY) MEETS GIRL. BOY AND GIRL TAKE A WHILE TO WORK OUT THEY BELONG TOGETHER. AFTER OVERCOMING VARIOUS ENTERTAINING OBSTACLES, THEY UNITE. WITH THE HAPPY ENDING A GIVEN, IT'S WHAT HAPPENS IN THE LEAD-UP TO REUNION THAT'S CRUCIALLY IMPORTANT. THIS GENRE IS HUGELY DEPENDENT UPON THE CHARACTERISATION OF ITS LEADS: THEY ARE, AFTER ALL, THE REASON WE KEEP WATCHING AND (PARADOXICALLY, GIVEN THE OUTCOME IS CLEAR) HOPING.

Snagging awards at a bundle of American film festivals, and voted most popular Australian film at the 2010 Melbourne International Film Festival, Amanda Jane's debut feature The Wedding Party applies the rom-com template to middle Australia. The film divides its attention between the heterosexual relationships in three generations of one family, with the focus on 30-ish son Steve (Josh Lawson).

Hitherto something of a no-hoper, Steve is enduring a period of separation instigated by girlfriend Jacqui (Kestie Morassi) as a warning to shape up. In order to pay back the home loan on the house he and Jacqui are attempting to buy, he enters into a covert agreement with an attractive young Russian woman, Anna (Isabel Lucas). She will pay him $25,000 in return for a marriage of convenience and the resultant Australian citizenship. The implausibility of this scenario is one of The Wedding Party's major stumbling blocks. Wealthy and trained as a nurse, Anna could surely apply for citizenship on her own merits. Perhaps there are reasons she can't, but they aren't elaborated, leaving us to compare Anna's situation with the much more common arranged marriage route taken by Eastern European women looking for a better life.

Orbiting this unlikely state of affairs are Steve's relatives, including father Roger (Steve Bisley)—the obligatory older Ocker—sister Lisa (Nadine Garner), brother Colin (Geoff Paine) and their respective partners. With its many liaisons, The Wedding Party takes its cue from Richard Curtis' rom-com on steroids Love Actually, and suffers in a similar way from trying to keep too many balls in the air. Flitting from relationship to relationship, Jane's film simply doesn't allow enough time to develop its primary couple. Steve is arguably the film's least interesting character, remaining essentially unchanged as events unfold. He's always loved Jacqui, and this doesn't change; he merely makes a much bigger and riskier decision than previously, which somehow distracts Jacqui at film's end from seeing that he's just as hopeless as before. It might have helped had we seen how he lived with Jacqui before she kicked him out.

More dramatically promising are the relationships Steve's brother and sister are involved in, the former dabbling in S&M-tinged infidelity, the latter suffering from painful sexual intercourse (something that's parlayed rather flippantly into comedy). These grittier situations are not satisfactorily resolved, however: wrapped up with a trite narration provided by Steve's teenage niece (“the most interesting times of life are when things don't make much sense at all,” she chirps with faux profundity), they feel trivialised, all the hard work put into them by the actors gone to waste. They also sit rather awkwardly within the rom-com conventions followed in the primary plot (though it must be said Richard Curtis' Four Weddings and a Funeral managed to convey pathos and tragedy without relinquishing its credentials as a romantic comedy).

It's worth comparing The Wedding Party to Russian Doll (dir. Stavros Kazantzidis, 2001), an Australian romantic comedy that revolves around a similar deception and marriage of convenience, minus the Russian bride's affluence. Russian Doll, however, differs from Jane's film in allowing its leading couple time to evolve in relation to each other; to become fully formed characters with some depth beneath their comedic personality quirks. It was perhaps a mistake for The Wedding Party to separate its romantic leads for almost the entire film.

What The Wedding Party offers is a comedy of unthreatening familiarity. Despite good performances, particularly from Garner and Essie Davis as Colin's wronged wife, its characters are on the whole amiable but not distinctive. They possess no wit. You get the impression the filmmakers, while aiming for a raucously quirky veneer, don't want to alienate their audience by introducing anything too original, or, dare one say it, intelligent. Perhaps this is over-harsh. The romantic comedy is admittedly a light genre with no onus to be deep and meaningful, but more consideration of narrative and character might have elevated The Wedding Party from a string of gags to something that, in the manner of superior romantic comedy, lingers fondly in the memory.

The Wedding Party, director Amanda Jane, writers Amanda Jane, Christine Bartlett, cinematography Katie Milwright, editors Amanda Jane, Kylie Robertson, sound designer Craig Conway, Screen Australia and Brave Films, 2010; www.theweddingpartyfilm.com

While this year’s OzAsia in Adelaide will present work from all around the region, there is a predominantly Indian flavour to the festivities. Kicking off the event is Fearless Nadia, a film and music project by the renowned Australian drummer Ben Walsh. Fearless Nadia revisits the story of Mary Evans, the stuntwoman from Perth who, in the 1930s became an Indian superstar. The performance includes a restored version of her most famous film, Diamond Queen (1940), accompanied by a newly composed score by Walsh who will be joined by guest musicians and dancers from India including tabla maestro Aneesh Pradhan (Sept 14-15).

Also from India is the Aditi Mangaldas Dance Company presenting a double-bill. The first work, Uncharted Seas, presents Kathak dance, one of the eight traditional Indian forms, known for its intricate footwork accompanied by ankle bells and with an emphasis on storytelling. The second half of the bill is titled Timeless, which takes Kathak and contemporises it to create a new choreographic language (Sept 28-29).

Indian culture is particularly celebrated in the music program with concerts by Kailash Kher (billed as a mega-star) and his eight piece band Kailasa which combines “spiritual Sufi chants, Rajasthani Gypsy rhythms and Punjabi dance fused with electric guitar and modern beats” (website, Sept 29). Australian saxophonist Sandy Evans and bass player Brett Hirst will collaborate with Indian musicians—singer and sitar player Sarangan Sriranganathan and tabla player Bobby Singh—to create a fusion of jazz and traditional Indian styles (Sept 22).

Aside from the Indian focus there’s also a range of performances from other Asian countries. Returning to the festival after a successful season with Hamlet in 2010 will be Korea’s Yohangza Theatre Company presenting the Ibsen classic Peer Gynt (Sept 19-21). In Cambodia Sun Rising, in which children from the Sunrise Children’s Village (set up by Geraldine Cox for orphaned and disadvantaged children) tell the history of Cambodia, interwoven with their own experiences and accompanied by traditional dance from the Royal Court of Angkor Wat (Sept 27-28).

Further music highlights include the Martial Arts Trilogy, a concert of cinema music by Tan Dun, composer for films such as Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (Sept 22-23). Tan Dun has also been involved in mentoring young composers—Tristan Coelho, Melody Eotvos, Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh, Christopher Larkin, Lachlan Skipworth and Timothy Tate—whose works will feature in an evening of short works titled Crouching Tigers (Sept 23).

The visual arts program is also impressive. Ramta Drig, an artist collective including Indian poet and painter Amit Kalla, columnist for the Hindustan Times Himanshu Vyas and local artist Daniel Connell will be in residence in the Festival Centre’s Artspace Gallery creating an installation drawing on the “wisdom, wit, narratives and struggles of Indian migrants” (press release). At the Anne & Gordan Samstag Museum of Art (UniSA) is Beyond the Self: Contemporary Portraiture from Asia, which presents works across a range of media by artists from Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines produced by the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra (Aug 3-Sept 30, see in the loop quick picks for more on NPG).

At the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia (CACSA), The Needle on the Gauge, curated by Ranjit Hoskote, will feature seven Indian artists “working with avatars, the extension of photographic images, documentary projects, performance-based work, posters and blogs to depict India’s crises and afflictions” (press release; Sept 5-Oct 21). And at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Teeth of the Rice Plant features political art from Indonesia and China (June 8-Dec 2).

Of course no OzAsia Festival is complete without films, food, forums and an outdoor spectacle—this year’s closing event is a Moon Lantern Festival taking place under the full moon in Elder Park (Sept 30).

Titled Speak to Me, Experimenta’s fifth biennial of media art seeks to explore how technology and its ubiquity is effecting the way we meaningfully communicate. Curator Abigail Moncrieff says: “As technology continues to shape and infiltrate our lives in the 21st century, we have to consider how this influences our relationships, daily actions and the way we engage with our space and each other” (press release).

Experimenta has commissioned five new works from local and international artists. In an ongoing investigation into robotics and the uncanny, Wade Marynowsky (Aus) has created The Acconci Robot. Inspired by Vito Acconci’s 1969 performance Follow Piece, in which the artist randomly chose and followed a passerby until they went into a private space, Marynowsky’s robot takes the form of a wardrobe that follows gallery visitors around when they are not looking, stopping as soon as it is spotted. (See Dan MacKinlay’s review of Marynowsky’s previous work, The Hosts.)

Modern Vanitas by Katie Turnbull (Aus) uses a juxtaposition of old and new technologies. Starting with still life, her work draws on the symbologies of life, death and time common to baroque vanitas art but combines these with images of globalisation, digital technology and communications. The work takes the form of a proto-cinematic mechanism, a variation on the zoetrope.

Jess MacNeil (Aus/UK) is creating a three-screen immersive work filmed in Paris outside the Hotel de Ville, in which ice skaters play a game of sparrowhawk (a variation of tag). However MacNeil has removed the skaters from the image leaving only their shadows. The skaters only become visible when they make physical contact. Also screen-based is Milieu by Christopher Fulham (Aus), a 58-minute single-channel work filmed in one take in an urban location. Through post-production manipulations the work seeks to challenge viewers’ level of attention and awareness, drawing them “into the inner lives of those depicted on screen” (press release).

For the big screen at Federation Square, Young?Hae Chang Heavy Industries will be presenting a new work made specifically for Speak to Me, in their trademark style of noir text animation and cool jazz (see review of ALL FALL DOWN at MAAP04). At ACMI Ian Burns (Aus/US, in his commissioned work anywhere and here, will create assemblages of screens and domestic and hardware items to explore consumerism and the physical construction of cinema images.

Other international highlights include 10 minutes of freedom 2 by Sylvie Blocher (France) in which the artist has filmed young people from one of the poorest cities in France discussing what they think is “unspeakable.” (See a review of Biocher’s work at Sydney’s MCA in 2010.) There’s also an interactive work by Scenocosme (France), Lights Contacts, in which “viewers position themselves under a light filled dome. By touching a metallic ball and each other, their bodies are transformed into a human instrument that transmits light and sound” (press release). Shih Chieh Huang (Taiwan) will create a robotic ecosystem from cannibalised domestic electronics and everyday items in Slide to Unlock 2012, while Ryoko Aoki and Zon Ito (Japan) will present a manga animation across eight screens in which the illustrations form “chains or links…that endlessly transform into another” (press release).

There will also be a keynote speech presented by artificial intelligence expert Hiroshi Ishiguro (see Alex Crosby’s review of his Geminoid project in RT93). The main exhibition will take place for the first time at the RMIT Gallery along with installations across a range of other venues in Melbourne. Speak To Me will then tour nationally in 2013-2014.

Experimenta: Speak to Me, various venues across Melbourne, Sept 14-Nov 17, 2012; http://www.experimenta.org

tarrawarra biennial 2012: sonic spheres

While it is one of the newer biennials on the Australian scene, the 2012 TarraWarra Biennial is certainly fast claiming its place. Sonic Spheres is the third biennial to take place at the TarraWarra Museum of Art (located on the vineyard of the same name in the Yarra Valley) and is curated by the museum’s new director Victoria Lynn. It brings together 21 pieces that concern themselves with music, sound and the voice. Consequently the exhibition includes a number of Australia’s leading sound artists, such as David Haines & Joyce Hinterding, Marco Fusinato (see Sound Full article), Robyn Backen (see RT109, Ross Manning (RT96), Eugene Carchesio (RT102), Lauren Brincat and John Nixon.

However Lynne says: “I was most interested in thinking about sound visually and introducing different ideas about how we might think sonically within a museum” (interview with Dylan Rainforth, Artguide). Consequently there are also artists who are not so clearly identified with sound but who have a particular piece in which the combination of sound and voice is a significant player. For example Angelica Mesiti’s Some Dance to Remember, Some Dance to Forget (2012) features a vision impaired Arabic musician in Paris performing a rendition of the Eagles song “Hotel California” on the piano accordion. Christian Thompson’s Dhagunyilangu—Brother, 2012 continues his series of video pieces in which European opera singers perform in the Bidjara language (see RT97 for a review of the first work in this series, Gamu Mambu—Blood Song, 2010).

Lynn is also interested in finding different ways of connecting the work of Aboriginal artists with contemporary audiences and has included paintings by Yukultji Napangati, Ray James Tjangala and Johnny Yungut Tjupurrula. Each piece is painted to a verse from a traditional Aboriginal song cycle, but the resulting pictures offer quite different visual interpretations (Artguide</a).

under_scored, random overtones

Billed as a micro-festival, UNDER_SCORED consists of three days of talks, workshops and performances by an impressive collection of exploratory musicians and composers, with an unusual emphasis on the flute (though perhaps not so surprising as the person behind the event, Janet Mackay, is a flautist). The first evening offers a talk and showcase concert by Netherlands-based duo Shackle—Anne La Berge on flute, Robert Van Heumen on laptop—who have developed a “digital cueing system which operates as a sometimes visible third member. Both prodding and reactive…” (press release). Another renowned flautist Kathleen Gallagher will present a concert with Mackay and electronic musician Lawrence English, as well teaching a workshop on improvisation. Also known for their massed flute performances (along with other single instrument orchestras) Super Critical Mass will also perform and conduct a workshop (see Aurora 2012 coverage and Liquid Architecture 2010). Other artists include Anna McMichael (violin), Robert Davidson (Double Bass/composer) and Benjamin Marks (trombone).
UNDER_SCORED, The Shed, Macarthur Avenue, Hamilton, Brisbane, Sept 14-16; http://www.randomovertones.com/under_scored.html

iD digital portrait award, national portrait gallery

Laura Moore has been announced as the winner of the inaugural iD Digital Portrait Award established by the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. Created to extend the traditional notion of portraiture through engagement with digital and screen media, the award is open to artists aged 18-30. Moore’s Animation 1, from the series Hereinbefore (2012), shows the artist as a schoolgirl in traditional school portrait pose. Over the 57-second animation made from still images, the girl begins to weep, fighting back sobs. Moore says of Animation 1, “As an autobiographical work, it is my reflection on the child I was and tells of the compassion I feel for the journey she will take” (website). Moore will receive $10,000 and a four-week residency at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA). The four other finalists were Aaron James McGarry, Nina Mulhall, Clare Thackway and Bridget Walker. Their works are currently showing at the National Portrait Gallery and can also be viewed online.
iD Digital Portraiture Award, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, until October 28 2012; http://www.portrait.gov.au/site/id-welcome.php

13 voids, aeaf

If you’re after a bit of conceptual minimalism then AEAF has just the thing with Mark Themann exhibiting 13 Voids. For 13 days the gallery will be left empty; however, in the foyer will be a music stand which holds a text, new each day, exploring philosophical scenarios of the remaining void. “The texts reference void as potentiality, which acknowledges that (paradoxically) the void is fertile and there is no such thing as ‘nothing’” (press release). To compliment this nothingness, Riley O’Keeffe, who recently presented his work Nothing-Object Forever at CACSA (see Chris Reid’s review in e-dition July 17) has turned curator and has asked Katie Barber to respond to his concept of the “liminal state of the object’s transformation into art” (press release). Her work, Purpose-made Nothing-object, will be on display in the odradekaeaf window space.
AEAF, Adelaide, Aug 29 – Sept 9, http://aeaf.org.au/</a>

ccp declares: on the nature of things

With an intriguing mix of established and emerging photographic and video artists, Kyla McFarlane has curated On the nature of things for Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP). The exhibition is described as a “declarative” project—”the first in an occasional series of statement exhibitions for CCP that will take a position on developments in contemporary practice from across the country” (website). Contemplation of things and thingness can sometimes induce existential anxiety or, alternatively, a sense of phenomenological harmony, of being at one with things. Encouragingly, McFarlane is inspired by Lucretius’ De rerum natura (on the nature of things; first century BC), a positive take on life, hostile to the interference of the gods and superstition, and unafraid of death.

Perhaps then the works in this exhibition will not simply turn our attention to the pleasures to be found in things, but alert us to the pleasurable ways in which we regard objects when they are transformed by media—”photographs and videos featuring our relationship to objects both precious and banal…carefully hand-printed photographs…photographs as performance documentation, as well as a photo-sculptural response to a collection of gelatin silver, glass plate photographic negatives of antique sculptures.” But the image then is no mere reminder of a thing, or a hint of its essence, but has become a thing in itself. What then will this CCP Declaration tell us about the state of contemporary image-making? See Scott Wark’s review of On the nature of things in RealTime 111.
CCP Declares: On the nature of things, curator Kyla McFarlane, artists Jane Brown, Ross Coulter, Yavuz Erkan, Andrew Hazewinkel, Amy Marjoram, Nasim Nasr, David Nixon, Jacky Redgate; CCP, Melbourne, Aug 8-Sept 16, www.ccp.org.au

opportunities
the right foot project, dirty feet

Independent dance company Dirty Feet have announced a contemporary dance workshop for people with and without a disability aged 12-26. The two-day workshop will be run by Sarah-Vyne Vassallo exploring both movement and collaborative devising skills and will conclude with a public showing of the work that emerges.
The Right Foot Project, Dirty Feet, Redfern Town Hall, Sydney, Sept 22 & 29. Workshops are free but registration is essential: contact sarah@dirtyfeet.com.au

Carlos Garbin (left centre) and Marie Goudot (right centre), Cesena, Rosas at Palais des Papes in Avignon, France

4 double passes to Rosas’ Cesena, September 15

This giveaway represents a rare opportunity to witness the work of one of the world’s most acclaimed dance companies.

In association with the 18th Biennale of Sydney: all our relations, Carriageworks is presenting the Australian premiere of two new works by renowned Belgian contemporary dance ensemble, Rosas, directed by the legendary choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker.

Rosas’ performances in Robyn Archer’s 2000 Adelaide Festival (see RT36) proved to be the greatest contemporary dance experience for many since Pina Bausch’s appearance with three works in the same festival as long ago as 1982.

In 2000, Rosas presented De Keersmaeker’s Fase, Drumming and I Said I, replete with superb dancers, live music and spoken word (in the two and a half hour I Said I, the text Peter Handke’s Self-Accusation). Theatrically, musically and, of course, choreographically these were consummate performances, deeply rooted in but transcending modern dance tradition.

In Sydney Rosas will present two complementary productions—Cesena and En Atendant. In Cesena (see Alex Ferguson’s review of the recent Montreal performance) De Keersmaeker has collaborated with musical director Björn Schmelzer and his graindelavoix music ensemble who perform live. In a cast of 19, the dancers sing and the singers dance while Janssen’s set and lighting “provides a sculpture of passing time and hints at the constant transformation of the world around us” (press release).

If Cesena celebrates the new day, Rosas’ other production En Atendant evokes the transition from twilight into night with eight dancers, three musicians and one singer presenting De Keersmaeker’s continuing exploration of the interplay of music and dance, staged in a design by visual artist Michel François. The work is shaped musically by Ars Subtilior, “a form of 14th century polyphony based on dissonance and contrast, developed in the aftermath of plague and religious conflict in Europe and cleverly used here to reflect the chaos of our own time” (press release). De Keersmaeker is never less than adventurous and insightful in her engagement with music.

4 double passes courtesy of Carriageworks to Cesna September 15
Email onlinegiveaways@realtimearts.net with your name, address and contact number.

Rosas, En Atendant, Sept 11, 12, 8pm; Cesena, Sept 14, 15, 8pm; Carriageworks, Sydney, www.carriageworks.com.au; post show talk with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker Sept 14 for performance ticketholders.

KATIE MITCHELL’S ELEGANT TREATMENT OF STRINDBERG’S MISS JULIE INTERVENES IN THE TEXT IN ONLY TWO, EASILY SUMMARISABLE WAYS: IT PLACES KRISTIN, THE SERVANT WIFE, AT THE CENTRE OF THE NARRATIVE, AND IT REDUCES THE STAGE TO MATERIAL FOR A FILM.

Theatre audiences have by now seen hundreds of cameras on stage, following actors, projecting detail onto large screens, adding fleshy detail to the clean, distant clockwork of well-rehearsed theatre. If theatre is so often employed as metaphor, it is because the well-oiled automatism of stage business so naturally projects a deathly, telescopic inevitability. The reason the camera is there—was there, before it became a cliche—was perhaps to simultaneously remind us of the mortality of everyone and everything on stage, and to aestheticise it further, beyond touch. The intimacy of zoom and the alienation of the screen. If theatre is a metaphor for society, then video certainly stands for exploitation.

Katie Mitchell’s video-heavy Fräulein Julie revolves around all these meanings, but to a nobler purpose. In a perfect copy of a 19th century house, dressed in era-appropriate costumes, followed by five cameras and an army of technicians, the actors perform not so much theatre as a live film, in meticulously recorded fragments, which only come together into a meaningful whole on the large central screen. Sound is recorded on stage, but separately: a cellist for the music, a table crammed with quotidian objects is a simple sound desk for incidental sounds, recording booths side-stage for voice. A simple meat-preparing scene splices live footage of two actors performing simultaneously in different corners of the set: one for the face, another for the hands; the clattering of pots comes from the sound desk—and so it continues for 85 minutes. The stage is an unrelenting symphony of small gestures, a dizzying machine.

The film, contrastingly, is slow and atmospheric, with diffuse lighting and mellow music. It could easily be Bergman, or Sally Potter—or a BBC costume drama. Only a few lines of Strindberg’s original dialogue remain, in the corners of our attention. We overhear Jean and Julie’s aggressive flirtation together with Kristin, as she walks in and out of the kitchen, doing her chores, helping Jean, becoming aware, then slowly overcome by anxiety.

The weakest in the erotic triangle, economically and socially disadvantaged, mute and inexpressive, Kristin remains a silent observer throughout the play—but Mitchell generously makes room for her subjectivity. Kristin’s interior monologue—fragments of Inger Christensen’s incantatory poetry—drowns out Strindberg’s battle of the sexes. Kristin’s inner world is brittle but wild, un-intellectual but given to great poetic beauty. Without resorting to excess (hysteria, violence, death), Mitchell sympathetically portrays the powerlessness of a servant woman within patriarchy. The combination of on-stage fret and on-screen disquietude, of relentless physical work and mute anxiety, builds into an immensely compelling portrait of a human being crushed by societal forces. Kristin is oppressed through her work, her marriage, her sex, her lack of education, her inability to react or even critically analyse the events. The tension is not just between theatre and cinema as forms—but between the social and the psychological landscape of the work.

Mitchell’s interpretation is almost too easily analysable: faithful to Strindberg’s attention to socio-economic detail, offering a feminist-Marxist critique via the tried-and-tested assortment of distanciating tools. But the predictability of a thoroughly coherent dramaturgy is countered by the mesmerising, sensuous polyphony of a work unfolding, like a madrigal, on two planes simultaneously: one social realist, another experimental. The overall effect is delicate and masterful, political and poetic, formalist but passionate. A treat.

Fräulein Julie, after August Strindberg, adaptation Katie Mitchell, direction Katie Mitchell, Leo Warner, translation, performers Jule Böwe, Luise Wolfram, Tilman Strauß, dramaturgy Maja Zade; Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, Berlin, in repertoire.

ARGUING AGAINST THE CRITICAL CO-OPTION OF SOUND AS A SUB-GENRE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, SOUND FULL: SOUND IN CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND ART AT THE DUNEDIN PUBLIC ART GALLERY STRATEGICALLY STEERS AWAY FROM FRAMING THE WORKS OF ITS 16 CONSTITUENT ARTISTS WITHIN GEOGRAPHICALLY BOUNDED OR GENRE-SPECIFIC DISCURSIVE MODALITIES.

Rather, the exhibition’s co-curators, Caleb Kelly and Aaron Kreisler, postulate a more laterally constructive approach to placement of the sonic—an intention to listen to “the sound already present in contemporary arts.”

Visual cues within Michael Graeve’s Multiple Monochromes (2012) clarify the invisible and vice-versa. Consisting of a series of flat planes of colour, painted in situ with brushstrokes going beyond the panel and onto the wall, seven are left hanging where they were painted, five lined up on the floor in relation to the gaps left behind by their removal. The painterly vertical and horizontal dynamic, in which the revelation of the white wall is a kind of ‘visual silence’ framed by the colour traces of the re-situated works, is accompanied in the space by various sonic coordinates: vintage domestic speakers emitting occasional static tones, powdery hisses, deep physical hums. Positive and negative space is made manifest in both painting and sonic media, with the binary dynamics of on/off being subtly undercut by the display of process and composition within the room. Negative visual space would ideally be weighted here by its sonic analogue—the presence of silence with a similar compositional force as a dynamic counterpart to the tones. But, sadly, the positioning of Graeve’s work next to more constant soundtracks doesn’t quite allow for the level of attention the work intrinsically invites.

Conversely, in Between Worlds (2011) Philip Dadson portrays the juncture between audio and visual elements as meniscus or membrane—a relation which implies permeability as much as reflectivity. This work is playful in its destabilisation of the video-eye as central focal point, a literal upending of the centre of seeing toward a roaming, hand-held aesthetic of embodiment. This travelogue inverts sensory hierarchies, its overhead directional speaker rendering vision mobile and sound restfully grounding. Elsewhere, Dadson’s Rock Records (12rpm, White Island, 2011), a series of exquisite depictions of the material traces of seismic events, reveals geological time as a series of silent, hand-rubbed soundings. Also exploring the sync of sight and sound, Robin Fox’s Volta (2005), a digital oscilloscope MAX/MSP translation, is an endlessly watchable generative revelation, the projected waveforms’ weaving and evolving describing mathematical space.

The various materials (ferrous rocks, a small monitor, mirror-altered books) of Torben Tilly and Robin Watkins’ companion works Fig 2: On Seeing Through Obstacles, Across Space and Round Corners (2008) and Fig. 5: An Experiment with Time (2010-2012), inhabit a hypnagogic, quantum netherworld between the manifest and the dematerialised, with all the filmic inversion of Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet (1930) and the philosophical articulation of the intertwining of substance and thought in embodiment that Merleau Ponty has called “the flesh of the world” (la chair du monde). The voice of well known New Zealand actor Grant Tilly (1937-2012) reading a text on time, fragmented and inverted by audio editing, ghosts the room with stutter and loop like some hybrid of Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room (1969) and the voiceover from a John Wyndham radio serial dimly remembered from a 1970s childhood. It hovers on the edge of audibility, like a transmission returning from deep space, which paradoxically, due to its emanation from two extremely directional ‘audio spotlight’ speakers, also crystallises an evocation of an intensely radiophonic intimacy, seeming to appear directly from the walls.

Vicky Browne’s similarly, if more gently psychedelic paean to the human fantasy of ecological harmony, The Sound of Plants and Music (2012), sets fragile craft-technological construction alongside utopian ideas of interspecies communication. Feeling like a participant in the early experiments of Indian radio pioneer and psychobotany enthusiast Jagadish Chandra Bose, I read aloud to four potted ferns from Malcom Lambert’s Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Georgian Reform to the Reformation conveniently left in my chair’s pocket. Both microphone and speaker are clad in sticks, like the kinds of ‘blinds’ used by audio and visual nature recordists to sneak up on their subjects.

On the other end of the interactive, David Haines and Joyce Hinterding’s Monocline, Black Boxes (2011-2012) casts the solitary user into a real time gaming space where nothing much happens, its landscape of white, abstract, interlocking spheres and associated sounds turning to the gravitational pull of bodily interaction in a work that inhabits a seemingly contradictory phenomenological space: both highly kinaesthetic and disembodied.

Thembi Soddell’s Window (2008) posits sensory cancellation as an invitation for deeper engagement, with the sculptural interjection of a body-sized private space into one of the more expansively public, spectatorial areas of the gallery. This blacked out listening booth, containing a multi-channel sonic composition of intensely delineated and precise dynamics, somewhat paradoxically leaves its closeted participants in a state of heightened vulnerability and bodily awareness.

Kusum Normoyle’s performative intervention on the same mezzanine, directly above the audience on opening night, was a short-lived and spectacular burst of voiced staccato that made full use of the architecture’s sonic properties. Normoyle’s video piece, Volitional Bus (2010), installed on the noisy threshold between street and gallery, startles passers-by with its intermittent flurries of equally ferocious glossolalia. It includes documentation of two earlier performances, the artist interjecting her improvisational poetics of vocal aggression and investigations of the amplifier as instrument, into urban metropolis and breathtaking eco-touristic spectacle (see realtime studio for more Normoyle).

On the adjacent wall of the same foyer space Marco Fusinato’s Reproduction of Double Infinitive 2 (2012) stretches the scale of its original work’s appropriated photo-journalistic image to breaking point. Up close, swarms of dots connote the relationship of noise to signal. From the relatively coherent visual perspective of the ground floor, it’s a work extremely appositely sited; a brick frozen in mid-throw gestures provocatively toward the seemingly anodyne public space beyond. A provocation around the billboard-scaled image as capitalistic circuit and the public square as zone of political rather than consumptive articulation, this work seemingly hoists the implied collision of its depicted moment of violent revolutionary dissent—one ever-deferred, if not silenced, by its representation as a still photograph—toward the actual architectural features of the gallery’s windows.

In its staging of these artistic strategies around the use of sound not as representative overview, but as an indexical constellation of sensibilities and formal solutions emerging from a variety of contexts, Sound Full is an invitation to experience cross-medium physical and conceptual interactions— projects elucidating the spatial and material relation of sound to everything from virtual environments to painting—while not being a show specifically about translation. The resulting curatorial (and sometimes actual) dissonance between pieces can make for a somewhat uneven initial impression, but the works reward return, their intimate singularities, combining with others I have no space to mention here, opening out into a series of intriguing, poetic and productively interlocking relations.

Sound Full: Sound in Contemporary Australian and New Zealand Art, curators Aaron Kreisler, Caleb Kelly, artists Vicky Browne, Philip Dadson, Robin Fox, Marco Fusinato, Michael Graeve, Brent Grayburn, David Haines & Joyce Hinterding, Eugene Hansen, Jenny Gilliam and Dr Kron, Michael Morley, Kusum Normoyle, Thembi Soddell, Torben Tilly & Robin Watkins, Dunedin Public Art Gallery July 7-Nov 11; http://dunedin.art.museum/exhibitions.asp

September 2012

synaesthesia, mona

crack theatre festival, this is not art

south australian film corporation, 40 year anniversary

the other film festival

primavera, claire healy & sean cordeiro, mca

marco fusinato, institute of modern art

107 projects

the arts platform

kickstart, next wave

new music network mini series

reason for travelling

he/she

kunst

halbes oder die maß (a half or a litre)

for sleeping

ausfahrt (exit)

links

related articles

ensemble offspring, professor bad trip lesson 3 by fausto romitelli

related articles

thembi soddell, artefact performance (excerpt, 2009)

related articles

lawrence english, coprinus comatus

selected articles

extra bonus track: eugene carchesio, circle music 4

related articles

tarrawarra biennial 2012: sonic spheres

under_scored, random overtones

iD digital portrait award, national portrait gallery

13 voids, aeaf

milk crate theatre: fearless

ccp declares: on the nature of things

opportunities
the right foot project, dirty feet

4 double passes to Rosas’ Cesena, September 15

realtime

Find

September 2012

synaesthesia, mona

crack theatre festival, this is not art

south australian film corporation, 40 year anniversary

the other film festival

primavera, claire healy & sean cordeiro, mca

marco fusinato, institute of modern art

107 projects

the arts platform

kickstart, next wave

new music network mini series

reason for travelling

he/she

kunst

halbes oder die maß (a half or a litre)

for sleeping

ausfahrt (exit)

links

related articles

ensemble offspring, professor bad trip lesson 3 by fausto romitelli

related articles

thembi soddell, artefact performance (excerpt, 2009)

related articles

lawrence english, coprinus comatus

selected articles

extra bonus track: eugene carchesio, circle music 4

related articles

tarrawarra biennial 2012: sonic spheres

under_scored, random overtones

iD digital portrait award, national portrait gallery

13 voids, aeaf

milk crate theatre: fearless

ccp declares: on the nature of things

opportunities the right foot project, dirty feet

4 double passes to Rosas’ Cesena, September 15

realtime

opportunities
the right foot project, dirty feet