Fresh from her success directing the opera double bill His Music Burns for the Sydney Chamber Opera in the 2014 Sydney Festival (see review), a radiantly cheerful Sarah Giles tells me she started young. At 15, with some fellow students she “directed a ludicrously ambitious production of Kafka’s The Trial, the Berkoff version. I fell in love with theatre.” With other successes, Marius von Mayenburg’s The Ugly One at Griffin and a much extended season of Mrs Warren’s Profession at the STC, where she has mostly directed, Giles is making her mark in Sydney theatre
She also cites key influences including Penelope Nunn at the South Yarra Ballet School—“an eclectic group of kids came out of there including dancer Alisdair Macindoe, actress Chloe Armstrong and my brother who’s now in fashion.” Giles went to Melbourne University, did an arts degree “and got involved with Union House Theatre and Susie Dee, a brilliant woman who continues to be an extraordinary inspiration for a lot of people.” She directed shows at university and then independent productions: “I acted in a show with White Whale Theatre with David Mence—brilliant, brilliant mind. He wrote a zombie schlock horror sequel to Macbeth that sounds bizarre but was fun and we took it to Edinburgh. I got back from that in 2007 and I’d decided I didn’t want to act, I wanted to direct. I think that was about control.
“I did some shows at La Mama and assistant directing with Peter Evans at the MTC. He was so generous with his time and with his insights. He was a real mentor and he’s developed into a friend over the years. So that was my first experience in a professional company and after that I auditioned for the NIDA Directors Course, got in and moved up here. This was in 2008 and I did the course with Egil Kipste who used to be the casting director at STC and had worked with Disney as well as with German director Peter Stein. We had the most wonderful chaotic year.”
At NIDA Giles directed Martin Crimp’s Fewer Emergencies and, for her graduation piece, The Bald Soprano: “I had fallen in love with the Absurdists when I saw a production of The Chairs with Paul Blackwell, Julie Forsythe and Marg Downie when I was 16 years old. It just seared into my brain. I was so proud of my Bald Soprano. I’ve never seen an audience laugh so hard. I’ve always loved comedies and been drawn to them. That really sealed my deal with comedy.”
After working with Red Stitch in Melbourne and for Griffin Independent a few years back she directed Matt Cameron’s Ruby Moon (2011) and in the same year Money Shots, both with STC’s Next Stage, and Mariage Blanc (2012), which she describes as, “a wonderfully inventive, completely mad Polish play by Tadeusz Rosewicz.” It was adapted by Giles and Melissa Bubnic, “a very funny writer from Melbourne who now lives in London. Then I directed Mrs Warren’s Profession in 2013.
“The common thread for me is exploring ideas through comedy. It’s not comedy for comedy’s sake. Comedy is one of the most powerful forms with which to explore almost anything.”
Giles’ comic sensibility was vividly evident in her direction of the first stage version of Gyorgy Kurtag’s …pas a pas … nulle part in His Music Burns (see p16). With the baritone Mitchell Riley (in a finely tuned performance at once funny, sad and despairing) and conductor Jack Symonds, Giles focused on “trying to get as close to the text as possible,” aided by how closely text and music work together in Kurtag’s score. She was also aware that the work “could be really heavy-handed and bleak.” I tell Giles that the production amplified that sense of being in the theatre, moments of boredom, of reflection, horror, terror. She concurs, “It’s like an illness. You’re trapped. You can’t get up and leave.” But we also laugh at the protagonist, and at ourselves.
I ask what attracts her to the plays of Marius von Mayenburg. His Eldorado was produced at Malthouse in 2006 and Moving Target in 2008, both directed by Benedict Andrews. “I spend a lot of time reading comedies and the minute I laugh out loud I know a play’s good. I read The Ugly One when I was at NIDA and it was the first play I’d ever read where I felt like someone had really hooked into a way of delivering a message to an audience not simply through what is said but how it’s said and the form in which it’s said. In Ionesco form and content all function together, but this was some of the first contemporary writing I’d read that was very funny and with a very bleak, very dry, very truthful sense of humour. A bit like Todd Solondz’ film Happiness. Another writer I’m in love with is David Gieselmann who wrote Mr Kolpert and The Pigeons.
“The other thing that drew me to The Ugly One was that I understood exactly what it was speaking about: the impossibility of being an individual within society. People sometimes think it’s a play about beauty and what we look like. That’s just the vehicle.
“I met Marius when he was visiting Sydney. We had a beer and he mentioned a play he’d written called Perplex. He sent me the English version. The first read was quite a fuzzy experience but it got more and more clear as I read it. I laughed out loud. It’s more cerebral but has more heart than The Ugly One. It’s a profound play. It moves me to tears. There’s a very beautiful ending. The thing I love about it is that it’s essentially about reality and what better form to explore that than through the theatre? [It’s roots are in] plays like Stoppard’s The Real Thing, to a certain extent The Maids and to a massive extent Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. The premise is simply that none of us lives in a shared reality. My memory of this interview will be very different from yours. It’s something we don’t often think about and it’s evident in the disconnect [of being involved in] stupid things like Facebook and phones. People are not even in reality.”
Perplex is an extreme reality test for performers and audience. The press release from the Schaubühne (where the play was first produced directed by von Mayenburg before many productions across Europe) describes it as “like slipping on a metaphysical banana peel: …A couple, Eva and Robert, come home after a holiday. The plants look mysteriously different and a letter informs them of the disconnection of their electricity supply. Enter Judith and Sebastian, friends of the couple, who were meant to have taken care of things in their absence. However, they turn out to be the rightful occupants and throw Eva and Robert unceremoniously out of their home. A short while later they both return, but this time, after a change of outfit, they are an au-pair and the son of the second couple” (http://www.schaubuehne.de). But there is worse to come, and far more surreal. Giles is particularly taken by the existential power of the ending, where one of the characters asks, “Who cast me?” In von Mayenburg’s plays there’s a dramaturgical self-awareness in which the line between theatre and reality is a blur.
But strange as Perplex becomes, I ask Giles, does it need a surreal staging? She is adamant, “To pack a punch, you don’t want to blow the proverbial load of the play by having the people looking as if they’re bonkers from the word go. It’s about setting up an established reality for the audience to hook into and then allowing that to shift. They’re not going to walk in and see a deeply abstract avant-garde set from Renée Mulder, who’s resident here at the STC. We’ve worked together a lot.”
Expecting that Giles would be moving onto other productions after Perplex, I was surprised to hear that she’s entering a period of discovery with the help of the Mike Walsh and the Gloria Payten & Gloria Dawn Foundation Fellowships which will take her to Berlin’s Theatretreffen festival, Brussell’s KunstenFestivalDesArts and New York: “I’m just desperate to see a lot of theatre. Works of international significance do travel to festivals here but not often enough. We have one major opera company in the country. It’s not enough and many shows are not affordable. The only way to do it is to travel.”
Giles is also looking forward “to developing projects that I’ve been meaning to get to for a long time but I’ve not given myself time to do. I left NIDA five or six years ago and I’ve pretty much been working consistently. And it’s a lovely moment to pause for a second and just reassess. Without wanting to sound too serious, it feels like there might be a slight shift in my career. The little foray into opera was just so enlightening and there are so many I’d like to direct. It’s just got me. And I’m really interested in looking at other forms. I’ve got some mad ideas.”
Sydney Theatre Company, Perplex, writer Marius von Mayenburg, director Sarah Giles, 31 March-3 May
If dancing is a state of unstable flux in which there is no fixed identity, then reflections on the experience of dancing through documentary film are one way to narrativise the feeling of what happens in/through dancing, as well as to capture dancers’ moving identities in the environments they inhabit.
In Virtuosi we hear/see eight exceptional performers—Mark Baldwin, Craig Bary, Lisa Densem, Raewyn Hill, Sarah-Jayne Howard, Jeremy Nelson, Ross McCormack and Claire O’Neil—articulate their responses to Sue Healey’s provocation, “Why Dance?” If, as she explains, “the core of the movement experience is movement and being moved,” how do environment, familial habitat and childhood memories of place inform the movers we become? Virtuosi is a feature length documentary that addresses this question through a series of portraits of New Zealand-born dancers and choreographers who left home to pursue their vocations around the world.
Each of the artists has achieved extraordinary things in the world of contemporary dance. Through this film audiences are invited to witness their corporeal signatures up close, and contemplate the fluidity of their moving identities as these have been forged in the precarious conditions of a globalised contemporary dance field.
The eight portraits in Virtuosi follow an itinerary that journeys to Berlin, London, New York, Sydney, Melbourne and Townsville. In tracking between places and subjects, interiors and exteriors, each becomes a form of poetic enquiry into the motivations, genealogies, influences and places that shape a dancer’s identity.
Sarah-Jayne Howard, Virtuosi, Sue Healey
Exit to connect
Economic hardship (Sarah-Jayne Howard), displacement and alienation (Raewyn Hill), loneliness (Ross McCormack) and the risks of failure (Claire O-Neil) form a complex backstory to these portraits, one which can undeniably be extrapolated to other dancers from other countries. But what coheres and sticks is the poignancy of leaving a relatively small country for one that is much bigger or at least more populous in the pursuit of that elusive quality of dancing. These dancers and choreographers have built careers and fulfilled vocations in cities with populations the size of New Zealand. Underlining their determination, passion, drive and verve is a perception of necessity.
Getting on a plane and travelling to the other side of the world, or across the Tasman, can feel like fulfilling a familiar destiny (overseas remains de rigueur for many young people in New Zealand) but it can also be a way to feel connected to global trends in dance. I was struck by Mark Baldwin’s account of discovering Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage in a book in the library of the University of Auckland’s Elam Art School. Cunningham never visited New Zealand and his influence is surprisingly negligible given its impact elsewhere. It is as though New Zealand’s isolation left the resident dance community out of certain waves of postmodern influence which have proved so radical to shifts in dance practice in London, Melbourne, New York, Brussels and Berlin. Yet without drawing on the cliché of moving from hicksville to metropolis as yet another species of export commodity (Sarah-Jayne Howard does mention New Zealanders “leaping like lambs”), the film subtly exposes the complex cultural, physical and historical nuances of New Zealand’s bi-culturalism and how these ‘elsewheres’ benefit from the exchange.
Sources
Jeremy Nelson’s choreographic tactic of drawing influence from both the Scottish reels of his childhood and Maori whakairo carving patterns, suggests how a particularly New Zealand view of the world might conversely influence what happens in New York and Copenhagen through a feeling for the forms we inherit in a country that is founded on a treaty that recognises two different world views, M?ori and Pakeha. Similarly Mark Baldwin’s “strange memories” of Polynesian dancers in disciplined rows being like the rows of chorus dancers in a ballet speak of how imaginations nurtured in the Pacific might look back at the world, with its imperial legacies, differently.
The interview with Mark Baldwin, director of Rambert Dance Company, is further distinguished by his emphasis on the influence of composers and visual artists on his practice. New Zealand composers Gareth Farr and Jack Body are mentioned as feeding his imagination and we see Baldwin singing the notes of a score he is reading as he accounts for the importance of musical structures in what he makes. The film itself evidences the strength of what is for many choreographers a primary relationship with music in being framed by the jazz piano compositions of ex-pat New Zealander, Mike Nock.
Shot in a studio theatre environment, Ross McCormack’s mercurial dancing shape-shifts from haka to tui to hysterical male to bogan. His fluid metamorphoses signal a state of being that is unsettled, perturbed even, but peculiarly of this place of the long white cloud. I was reminded of the volatility of the physical geography we inhabit, the frequency of ruptures, quake swarms and geysers, how New Zealand in its relatively young geography breeds a geo-aesthetics that is spatially generous, bold, excessive even.
This is the beauty of Sue Healey’s film: if New Zealand artists are forced to become cultural exiles by virtue of their country’s remoteness and smallness, they also go on to contribute to the globalised dance and performance community in significant ways, bringing the smell of grass, the shape of the koru, the sounding of the tui, the energy of a volatile landscape with them.
Different ways of being
Lisa Densem seems to offer a counterpoint to this with her quiet, idiosyncratic, unexpected moves, her plays with reflections through windows and the mirroring of distant hands. Speaking English with a German accent, her adaptation to Berlin and a Germanic perspective is noted in how she perceives the New Zealand way of life on her return: “I had become really German.” In considering what it is to be virtuosic, the central thematic of the film, she proposes the virtuosity of improvisation, as that place where one is awake to the present and can try out different ways of being. Escaping the perceived excesses of a dominant hyperphysical style of modernist New Zealand choreography in the 90s she found in the European dance milieu a less desperate, less adrenalin-fuelled way of being a dancer. She was drawn to a quiet listening, a simpler physicality not driven by the emotions. Densem is but one example of how the film’s octagonal geometry opens multiple perspectives on New Zealand identity as it is reconfigured, translated and cross-contaminated in the adaptive process of moving elsewhere.
Place and the attuned body
The film also works through the portraiture of place as Healey homes in on the habitats, domestic and urban, of her subjects. Through tactile encounters with exteriors, the film reorders the dancers’ cities as places for sensorial interaction with surfaces, civic memorials, fountains, alleyways and perilous edges (fire escapes and beaches). Their homes, some provisional, others their workplaces, become scenographic sites for improvised play with memento mori, souvenirs and personal objects of attachment.
Healey gives these dance artists a voice and a place in the world that speaks to a globally mobilised milieu but that is also sensitive to the micro movements and attunements of bodies that respond to and challenge the environments they inhabit while carrying traces, resonances of the places they have left. The sense of the torso and spine, the use of gravity and weight and its corollary weightlessness; the corporeal signature of each dancer/choreographer can be read as a particular instantiation of their history and physical background. For M?ori the past is never behind, it is before us and we step into it. I had the sense of these performers carrying embodied memories in their bones like touchstones.
Returning to the source
Virtuosi is a film about Sue Healey refracted through eight portraits of dancers of her generation who, like her, left their home country. Cultural exile was a feature of Healey’s generation of dance artists, myself included. More recently this traffic has slowed due to the costs of long-haul travel (economically and environmentally) as well as a growth in opportunities to study dance and work in the dance field in Aotearoa (there are at least five contemporary dance companies in New Zealand including the newly launched New Zealand Dance Company). Among Virtuosi’s subjects there is much evidence of an increasing trend of return journeys: Craig Bary performed in the NZDC inaugural season; Bary and Sarah-Jayne Howard were in Douglas Wright’s Rapt; Claire O’Neil is now living in Auckland and studying for her Masters in Dance Studies; Lisa Densem recently choreographed We have been there with Footnote Dance Company in Wellington; Jeremy Nelson choreographed Six for Touch Compass in Auckland; and Raewyn Hill’s Mass was recently performed by Dancenorth in Wellington’s Downstage Theatre. All are healthy indicators of a flow of knowledge and exchange between New Zealand’s diasporic dance community and the local dance ecology.
If, as Laurence Louppe explains it, contemporary dance involves “becoming a body that is not given in advance,” Virtuosi is a film that goes some way towards understanding what that becoming involves, the pleasures and the perils of its reach and the poetry of its articulation.
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Virtuosi, director, Sue Healey, photography Jud Overton, composer Mike Nock, 76 minutes, 2013
See Sue Healey’s full profile as part of realtimedance
Bjorn Stewart, Jack Charles, Matthew Cooper, Coranderrk, Belvoir & ILBIJERRI Theatre Company
photo Patrick Boland
Bjorn Stewart, Jack Charles, Matthew Cooper, Coranderrk, Belvoir & ILBIJERRI Theatre Company
Documentary theatre—commonly a re-imagining of an era or event using documents, verbatim material and images, an unfolding story and an ensemble of performers often playing multiple roles—has long settled into a standard model. Facticity is its essence while its creativity resides in the dynamics of its editing and the magic of its staging. In the hands of version 1.0 at their best the deployment of contemporary performance strategies has deviated from conventional narrative, making facts, especially in the political sphere, insistently ‘strange’ and all the more evidently lies.
In Belvoir and ILBIJERRI’s Coranderrk and the Queensland Theatre Company and Sydney Festival’s Black Diggers the standard model is still fully operational and, from time to time, emotionally and politically very effective. However, our familiarity with the approach has a distancing effect, and not the one that Brecht had in mind. As a friend said, “Black Diggers was weighed down by its form,” but added, “though it got to me in the end.”
Sydney Theatre Company and the Australian Defence Force’s The Long Way Home, despite eschewing the verbatim theatre model, still inclines to it structurally, least convincingly in a series of short scenes parodying military promotional talks without connection to the work’s theme. But writer Daniel Keene has drawn on his soldier performers’ (and others’) words and lives to provide naturalistic dialogue, more complex characters and longer scenes than one might expect from documentary theatre. Although still short, these at least break the predictable rhythms of the standard model.
In Coranderrk, writer Andrea James has added passages of her own writing to an edited version of the original script by she wrote with Giordano Nanni—which drew directly on the Minutes of Evidence of the 1881 Coranderrk Inquiry. Tom Wright has created dialogue for Black Diggers rich with words once written or recalled: “I thought you fellows could see in the dark?” “I grew up in bloody Erskineville!” These sit side by side with the set pieces you’d expect in this kind of work, like the recurrent speaking aloud of letters—being written or received—and other vignette variations that work cumulatively but are often not long enough to provide emotional depth or complexity.
These three productions have important stories to tell. Two of these have been pretty much forgotten. Coranderrk was an Aboriginal community in 19th century Victoria that for a period was commercially and culturally successful. It was undone by white envy, prejudice and ultimately legislation, Black Diggers portrays the plight of Aboriginal soldiers who fought for the Empire in World War I, side by side with whites, but afterwards once again faced discrimination. The Long Way Home stages the post-traumatic suffering of Australian soldiers who have served in East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan. We hear about this from time to time in the media but here we have a substantial representation of it.
Coranderrk and Black Diggers stick pretty much to the time frame they’re exploring. Connections with our own time are not made, except implicitly—that white Australians need to know these stories in order to understand their relationship with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. With its costuming, Black Diggers is produced as historical re-creation, 1880-1930s with an ominous set that looks like an enormous World War II bunker, on the walls of which the cast repeatedly paint, and paint over and over, names and battlefield locations.
Coranderrk is likewise limited to its period but has discarded the period costuming of its original production for casual modern dress and added occasional contemporary gestures and references, making it wittier and more assertive. But neither production made a palpable connection with Aboriginal Australia now. Should they, or would that make their didactism too overt?
Catch-up theatre
The ABC television series Redfern Now is firmly focused on the present lives of urban Aboriginals, but such imaginings are not often seen on stage. In RealBlak (RealTime 111,], guest editor and Melbourne-based playwright Jane Harrison interviewed David Milroy, a writer and director with Yirra Yaakin Theatre in Perth, who spoke of the limitations of “catch up theatre” from the 70s—because “we’d been written out of history”—and the autobiographical solo performances (of the 1990s-2000s). “They are very valid,” said Milroy, “but, personally, I don’t do non-fiction shows any more. I am more interested in the craft of fiction…Aboriginal culture isn’t exclusively about ‘catch-up theatre’—having to educate audiences about our history and what really went on in this country. We have so much more to give.”
On seeing Coranderrk—which I enjoyed particularly for those moments when it broke from documentary theatre’s didacticism and opened up to imaginative possibilities—I couldn’t help but feel that an opportunity had been missed, even if had to be a point bluntly made, about the current recolonisation of Aboriginal Australia.
With the advent of The Intervention, ever-expanding mining exploration, limited Indigenous land rights in respect to minerals (outside the Northern Territory) and state policies of “mainstreaming” and “normalisation” (one size individualism and globalisation fits all), it has been argued that the invasion of 1788 has never stopped. “The now dominant view is that Aboriginal culture is the problem…A mythical framework has been developed to offset the naturalised fact of inequality” (Jon Altman & Sean Kerins, People on Country, Vital Landscapes, Vital Futures, The Federation Press, 2012). What happened in Coranderrk is happening still. Land across Australia that was once deemed worthless is now regarded as invaluable for mining, gas, biodiversity and carbon offset.
Coranderrk, Belvoir & ILBIJERRI Theatre Company
photo Patrick Boland
Coranderrk, Belvoir & ILBIJERRI Theatre Company
Ilbijerri and Belvoir, Coranderrk
Its tone at once documentary and poetic, this re-worked production of 2013’s Coranderrk is now textually and visually more tightly focused on and around the Aboriginal elder William Barak. Jack Charles, as Barak, impressively attired in a full-length possum fur cape lined with a cloth reproduction of one of the great man’s paintings (which maintained his people’s culture and were collected by Melbournians) brings the requisite gravitas to his role, quietly intoning the new writing by Andrea James created for this version of Coranderrk, for example:
“With a slow and ancient song, Barak asks permission. His wiry brown fingers clasp the stone axe handle. He chips away at the river bank and slowly and surely…Chip chip chip…the ochre gives way. That piece of beauty now rests in his hand. The soft yellow hue. He spits on the ochre and smears it on his forehead. His song almost finished now, he puts the stone axe back in his belt. Wraps the ochre in his handkerchief and places it into his deep and warm pocket.”
The simple, barely there set comprises a large screen and light stands evoking now and then a Victorian photographic studio and consequently a sense of the era in which Barak lived and of his community. The cast poses in front of projected images of the people whose lives they are portraying—harvesting hops, attired for cricket and school as well as in suits and frocks. It’s an eerily effective device.
The text is taken from a document of the period, delivered by the performers with conversational ease, moments of anger, pain and humour (taking selfies). It reveals white prejudices about race and caste, anxiety over Aboriginal literacy (“then natives will read newspapers!”) and envy of 1st prize agricultural show awards won by Coranderrk and, not least, the growing value of the farming property. The community, made up of members from various clans had claimed and been granted 2,300 acres of land in 1863, subsequently expanding to 4,850 acres and doing very good business selling wheat, vegetables and hops to Melbourne. Coranderrk (a word for the Christmas Bush of the region) at its peak in the 1870s had a schoolhouse, butcher and bakery.
The production briskly tells the story of productive black-white collaboration thwarted by their second manager, a Reverend Strickland under whom residents suffered food, blanket and fuel shortages, received no pay and were subject to whippings. The Coranderrk community fought back vigorously, wrote to journalists, parliamentarians and supporters (like the influential Mrs Ann Bon, who later commissioned a statue of Barak), went on strike and in the winter of 1886, led by Barak and another elder, walked 60km to Melbourne with a petition. As a result, a Royal Commission was held in 1877 and a Parliamentary Inquiry in 1881, in which Aboriginals unprecedentedly appeared as witnesses, but never after. The Aboriginal Protection Board was compelled to properly maintain the reserve.
Tragically, this largely forgotten victory was short-lived. In 1886 the Aboriginal Protection Board, with an Act of Parliament, banished anyone considered half-caste under the age of 35 from Coranderrk, thus radically reducing the work force, diminishing the reserve’s productivity and guaranteeing its decline, as well as breaking up families—portrayed in one of the show’s most bitter and poignant moments.
Black Diggers, Queensland Theatre Company
photo Branco Gaica
Black Diggers, Queensland Theatre Company
QTC and Sydney Festival, Black Diggers
Written by Tom Wright, researched by David Williams and directed by Wesley Enoch, Black Diggers reveals a great deal about the Aboriginal men who enlisted in the Australian army during WWI despite white objections. They served with courage, dignity and camaraderie, felt deeply the separation from family and country and, unlike their white counterparts, were not rewarded plots of land let alone pensions and the vote. The racism that mostly disappeared on the battlefield returned after the war.
Black Diggers features a strong all-male cast in a range of recurring roles depicting a variety of personalities. Its historical scope covers some 50 years, commencing with the full blood/half caste issue critically encountered in Coranderrk and concluding just pre-WWII with Aboriginal soldiers clinging to memories of the war (“Curse war…bless it”) before worse times ensued (depression, alcoholism, poverty); one says of a piece of shell casing: “I held that bit of truth in my hand.” The sense of betrayal by white society is wrenching: no reward or compensation, racist slurs, RSL rejection and jobs lost. At the end the Aboriginal Advancement League is doing its important work in the late 30s while the broken body of a former soldier lies to the side of the stage. Finally an ANZAC Day ceremony (which one Aboriginal soldier has described as the loneliest day of the year) is staged with an actual soldier playing The Last Post. I was astonished that a ceremony representing a major abuse of trust, one that for so long rejected acknowledgement of Aboriginal “defence of our country,” should complete the work, and without an ounce of irony. Perhaps it honoured the soldiers who, despite profound disappointment and bitterness, still stood by their loyalty to Australia. (The play also makes clear that white soldiers for their reward were often given land with poor soil guaranteeing failure, if pushing Aboriginals further off their own land.)
In this kind of work, building a sustained performance is a challenge. Hunter Page-Lochard perhaps fares best playing a young boy whose eagerness to go to war despite his mother’s pleas gets him there. The psychological damage returns him home mute. There are numerous dark moments: what to do for the soul of a dead mate—cut some hair to take home: “That’ll have to do. It’s our fate.” A German doctor working at the science of race measures the physiognomy of a captured Aboriginal soldier. The power of Black Diggers builds through the cumulative power of such scenes and the horrors and occasional joys they entail. We come away certainly better informed and sometimes moved. As with Coranderrk I wondered about now, about Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islanders in our armed forces which are so often beset with bullying and sexism. And racism?
Craig Hancock and Tim Loch, The Long Way Home, Sydney Theatre Company and the Australian Defence Force
photo Lisa Tomasetti
Craig Hancock and Tim Loch, The Long Way Home, Sydney Theatre Company and the Australian Defence Force
STC and ADF: The Long Way Home
The Long Way Home’s evocation of life on the front line, the violence and mind-warping tedium is frightening—explosions, intense flashes of light, picking up the wounded, vast discomforting starry desert nights. The growing emotional gap between wives and their depressed soldier husbands threatens violence and suicide. Past and present—childhood, enlistment, war and aftermath—are woven into portraits of suffering. These are actual soldiers playing variations on themselves with the support of a team of professional actors. Often what is revealed in a scene or on film with them addressing us directly confirms what we learn of them from their program notes, the damage done to minds and bodies, the isolation of recuperation, feelings of guilt or uselessness: “I am my job.” These filmed statements, interpolated into the production once we have become familiar with the faces, lend an air of documentary veracity to the close-to-reality fictions played out between the men on stage.
The stage is constantly populated with heavily armed soldiers on the stage horizon or moving about in cautious lines, always on duty, whether in actuality or as ghosts in the mind of one soldier (Tim Loch) whom they haunt while he seeks refuge in obsessively cleaning his home. A key figure in the play he eventually has the courage to address (“I know you blokes are not fuckin’ real”) and banish them, not that they ever quite disappear, seeks help and is finally reconciled with his wife. He’s the most detailed of the characters. Another soldier (Craig Hancock), even more remote from his wife and suicidal, becomes the first’s friend, easing the way to repaired selves and marriages for both. I did feel that having two not dissimilar couples (although the acting is finely discrete) weakened the play, but it did suggest collective hope. Nor does the play go near the kind of therapy the soldiers receive—it’s just a relief that they’re motivated to get some. The wives’ roles are slender and again similar. I assume there are those who take stronger roles in the recoveries of their partners. Female soldiers (Emma Palmer and Sarah Webster) performed strongly in the production and suffered major wounds and taxing recoveries but we don’t learn just how they made it through. Of course not every story can be told in detail, but the play’s neat symmetries and resolution feel a little too comfortable.
Countering the pervasive sense of on-going trauma there’s plenty of humour—stoic, ironic, bitter. James Whitney’s stumbling attempts to become a stand-up comedian at the Black Dog let loose his guilt about a war-time incident. Another, in a very funny, ‘fuck!’ filled monologue in the Afghanistan desert at night worries that boredom is destroying his mind; another (James Duncan) hallucinates a refrigerator standing in the distance: “Where would they plug it in?” His understanding mate (a perpetually droll Will Bailey) leads him away.
Other comic scenes, like the afore-mentioned public liaison talks, don’t fit the work and should be removed. The enlistment scenes, which reveal three out of four applicants for the army are drongos, are also taxing even if we follow them into the army. Not all the scenes with the children, well acted as they are, connect either, especially a late and too laboured one centred on a dead crow. Of course, as the production is already making its way around the country, revision is unlikely but a 90 minute interval free production would make more sense, and impact.
Very effectively framing the play is a wounded, brain-damaged man whose doctor coldly offers little hope. His muttered words—from the opening of The Odyssey about not being able to save one’s companions—appear line by line on the screen but are not understood by his friends. They are completed at the play’s end when the soldier (Gary Wilson) leaves his bed, walks downstage and speaks to us confidently if with difficulty. The Long Way Home is a fine collaboration between the STC, ADF, Daniel Keene and director Stephen Rayne, one that speaks of a great need, of the kind brought to our attention by Black Diggers, to understand and look after those of whom we ask so much. Of the soldier performers, Tim Loch, Craig Hancock and James Whitney gave performances that suggested total belief in what they were doing on a large stage before a huge audience, with skill and courage. They have given much again, for their comrades.
Belvoir and ILBIJERRI Theatre Company, Coranderrk, writers Andrea James, Giordano Nanni, concept Giordano Nanni, director Isaac Drandic, Belvoir Upstairs, 7 Dec, 2013-3 Jan 2014; Sydney Festival, Black Diggers, writer Tom Wright, director Wesley Enoch, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, Jan 18-26; Sydney Theatre Company and the Australian Defence Force, The Long Way Home, writer Daniel Keene, director Stephen Rayne
Julian Louis recalls attending a lecture at NIDA delivered by Lyndon Terracini, founder of Northern Rivers Performing Arts (NORPA). “He was talking about creating theatre around the culture of place. I remember writing in my notebook, ‘I should call this guy for a job one day.’” Several years later Louis, by then a successful freelance theatre artist, was invited to apply not for just any job, but Terracini’s, taking over as NORPA’s artistic director in 2007.
Based in Lismore, NORPA has a three-fold role in the region. It presents an annual curated program of touring shows; creates its own work through the Generator program and is also the venue manager of Lismore City Hall. Previously NORPA was in charge of both the current venue, an old dance hall, and the Star Court Theatre, an old cinema, but under Louis’ reign the decision was made to concentrate on one space. In 2012 the owners of Lismore City Hall, the Lismore City Council, secured a $5m development grant from Regional Development Australia, enabling significant renovations to the city hall which re-opened as a shiny, new full equipped 496-seat theatre in 2013, just in time to celebrate NORPA’s 20th birthday.
Passing through
In terms of its curated program, NORPA tries to strike a balance between what’s described on their website as “risky productions” and “sure-fire entertainment.” Highlights from the 2014 program, just announced, include Lisa Wilson’s ambitious dance piece Lake (see RT111); Force Majeure/Belvoir’s production Food directed by Kate Champion and its writer Steve Rodgers (RT109) and Bell Shakespeare’s Henry 4 . For kids there’s Wulamanayumi and the Seven Pemanui by Blak Lines, directed by Eamon Flack—a Tiwi take on Snow White—and the season finishes off with a family favourite, Circus Oz.
Home grown
Through its Generator program NORPA aims to present one full production a year as part of its main season, with multiple projects at various stages of development bubbling away on the back burner. With the move to the new venue Louis says he felt the need to “amp up” new work creation to ensure balance: “there’s a demand and a real hunger for it.”
Louis steers the Generator program towards site-specificity and multidisciplinarity with projects that connect to the region through a combination of ideas and the people creating it. The program has completed four quite diverse works to date including a circus performance in a private home, Open House; a multimedia dance work, Beautiful Bones; and a community-based project with homeless people, culminating in an evening of installation and performance at the local soup kitchen in the Winsome Hotel. There’s also been the sell-out hit Railway Wonderland, directed by Louis, a site-specific performance on the disused railway station exploring stories of the town (see RT109, p29). Louis will continue to develop this work in 2014 with a view to touring.
Also in 2014 the second-stage development of a collaboration between Louis and the Animal Farm Collective (creators of Food Chain, see RT101) will take place. Cock Fight is a dance theatre work looking at male identity, aging and power play in an office environment. Commencing development in 2014 is Bundjalung Nghari: The Gathering, a collaboration between Louis and leading Indigenous artists, most of whom originally hail from the Northern Rivers: David Page, Frances Rings, Rhoda Roberts, Djon Mundine and Melissa Lucashenko. Louis says, “I’m interested in the multi-artform process so that we don’t end up having a dominant style in the work. There are so many stories [from the area] it’s overwhelming, [but] I think the right story will present itself.”
Phoebe Rose, Lydian Dunbar, My Radio Heart,
video still Sam James, photo Donatella Parisini
Phoebe Rose, Lydian Dunbar, My Radio Heart,
My Radio Heart
The major Generator presentation for 2014 is My Radio Heart, a collaboration with the local music group Tralala Blip which includes performers with and without disabilities. Louis approached Rosie Dennis to direct the show after seeing her large-scale community live art project Minto Live (2011, RT101) for Campbelltown Arts Centre. In My Radio Heart the audience will be immersed in the audiovisual world of the performers—a virtual reality game space in which the characters are on a quest to find something that’s missing—love, family, connection. The performance is driven by the band’s beautiful brand of sweet pop electronica.
Via email I asked Rosie Dennis about the process: “We’ve worked predominantly with local artists to realise a reasonably experimental work, in the sense that there is no real narrative, which leaves the ‘art’ open to interpretation. I started working on My Radio Heart when I was a freelance artist. Part-way through the development I was appointed Artistic Director of Urban Theatre Projects. While it hasn’t changed our creative process, it has meant that we’re able to do a season in Bankstown immediately following the Lismore premiere. I think this is a really interesting model, making/creating/devising work (whatever you want to call it) in the regions and then ‘exporting’ it to the city, or in our case Western Sydney. So often it’s the reverse, work made in our major capitals and toured to the regions.”
My Radio Heart, in both its development model, community engagement, and its performance style exemplifies Julian Louis’ mission for NORPA: to produce shows “that [are] about activating the whole space and putting people in close proximity to the story. I think that’s really the hallmark of the works that are most successful for us.”
NORPA & Urban Theatre Projects: My Radio Heart, directed by Rosie Dennis, featuring Tralala Blip, 27-29 March, Lismore City Hall; 9-12 April, Bankstown Arts Centre; www.norpa.org.au
Australian Bureau of Worthiness, I Met Hindley Street
courtesy the artists
Australian Bureau of Worthiness, I Met Hindley Street
Two works appearing in Adelaide late last year sought to expose the city’s underbelly. They could not have been more contrasting—one coolly investigative in form and poor in aesthetic, the other richly fictive and classically ambitious—but both productions gave Adelaide audiences a rare opportunity to witness their home city reflected uncompromisingly back at them through scenarios peopled with outsiders, fringe dwellers and the morally ambiguous.
Australian Bureau of Worthiness, I Met Hindley Street
Like Sydney’s King’s Cross, or Melbourne’s St Kilda, Hindley Street is a uniquely evocative name among locals, redolent of nocturnal squalor, urban decay and the thriving, undeclared markets of the night: sex and drugs. No other Adelaide street provokes as much fear or scorn or giddiness. It is these feelings which the Australian Bureau of Worthiness tap into in the latest in their now long-running I Met… series of localised explorations, each one an ad hoc fusion of performance, documentary and visual art.
The series’ Hindley Street iteration saw the ABW team–performer Emma Beech, visual artist James Dodd and writer and director Tessa Leong—hole up for three weeks in a disused Bank Street basement, just off of Hindley Street and formerly home to an Indian restaurant. Some of the gaudy, amateurish murals are still there, faded flashes of the Taj Mahal’s white domes still visible amid the crumbling brickwork. The space is warehouse-like, the industrial atmosphere heightened by the sound of water or sewerage flowing through pipes overhead. In places, the walls are bedecked with sketches, handwritten notes, interview transcripts, business cards: the result of the ABW team’s interactions with the tourists, locals, shopkeepers, barflies, blue- and white-collar workers who populate the street above.
There is a traverse stage in the centre of the space. As the performance begins, an overall-clad Dodd pushes a broom languorously around the stage as though clearing away the vomit and the cigarette butts and, maybe, blood from the night before. Beech has described her core practice as “stand-up documentary” and it is hard not to think of this description as she takes to the stage, microphone and cue cards in hand. There are no punch lines, but Beech embodies her interview subjects fully and sympathetically in the manner of the best stage comics, and we laugh anyway because this is not a comedy predicated on jokes but on unsettling the familiar; the ubiquitous toupéed hustler in the ice-cream white suit, the Crazy Horse Revue’s unavoidable neon plumage. Dodd’s unpolished sketches, thrown onto the walls of the space by an old-fashioned overhead projector, achieve a similar effect, although their uncontextualised appearances occasionally jar.
Immersive and freewheeling, but constrained by Tessa Leong’s focused direction, I Met Hindley Street discreetly succeeds in making one of Adelaide’s most familiar—and contested—public spaces strange again.
Maggie Stone, State Theatre Company of South Australia
photo Matt Nettheim
Maggie Stone, State Theatre Company of South Australia
STCSA, Maggie Stone
Caleb Lewis’ new play, a commission by the State Theatre Company of South Australia, also asks its audience to think about the city in which it is taking place. According to Lewis the play emerged partly out of the playwright’s frustration with a seeming monopoly of new Australian plays set in the nation’s bigger cities: Brisbane and Perth, Melbourne and Sydney. As with Peter Goldsworthy’s Adelaide-set short stories, however, it is easy to mistake the thrill of recognition (a suburb or street name, or that of a local personality or business) for a bona fide investigation of place. Maggie Stone could, in fact, be set in any Australian city. Lewis’ themes are universal in scope: debt, both monetary and social; the nature of altruism; local and global charity and its consequences; immigration and multiculturalism; morality and self-interest.
Maggie Stone (Kris McQuade) is a loans officer. In the kind of politically incorrect parlance of which she would approve, the rough, tough Stone has been “left on the shelf.” She is not young anymore, lives alone and eats, smokes and drinks too much. She is permanently lugubrious, but some days are worse than others, and on one such day a recent immigrant from Sudan, Prosper Deng (Shedrick Yarkpai), walks into her office seeking a loan for a car so he can work. Stone turns him down and An Inspector Calls-like whirlpool of social irresponsibility drags Deng’s family deeply into debt, and into the clutches of improbably-named loan shark Leo Hermes (Mark Saturno).
Events unfold rapidly in short scenes—some elusively wordless, others seemingly redundant—giving the play a televisual feel which is at odds with the Aristotelian embellishments Lewis introduces much too late. Hermes’ gruesome slaying (by knife—Lewis’ ‘Chekhov’s gun’) is presumably intended to provide the requisite catharsis, but the mark is missed because the bloodletting—and Hermes’ final, overwrought speech in which he thunders the old fatalist cliché about blood having to be paid for with blood—feels under-supported by the play’s brevity and narrow dramatic focus.
Director Geordie Brookman can’t quite reconcile these differences in scale, although all of the cast—notwithstanding occasional slides into broadness—give strongly persuasive performances. Particularly impressive are McQuade, agreeably disagreeable in a part written for her, and Yarkpai who, in his first professional production, brings gravity and a keen sense of youth’s desolating ennui respectively to his roles as Prosper and Prosper’s son Benny. Victoria Lamb’s set, a labyrinth of oversized latticework and spookily reflective panels, allows for unfussy transitions between the many scenes. Its indeterminate depths and multiple sliding doors quietly gesture towards the inscrutable physical and corporate architectures of the West’s financial institutions.
If Maggie Stone is this system’s human analogue within Lewis’ play—hard, obdurate and accountable to no one—then she also shares its fallibility. Lewis mentions in his program note that greed brought about the Global Financial Crisis and it is greed which has literally hardened Maggie Stone’s heart to the point of ruin. It is, of course, the playwright’s job to expose the human within the inhuman, and Stone is ultimately shown to be the sentimentalist we like to imagine all sociopaths are underneath. Maggie Stone is not as trite as that sounds, but the play’s uneven form, and its imprecise connections between the bigger stories of the global movements of capital and people, diminishes its impact.
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Australian Bureau of Worthiness, I Met Hindley Street, devisers, performers Emma Beech, Tessa Leong, James Dodd, 27 Bank Street, Adelaide, 22-6 Nov; State Theatre Company of South Australia, Maggie Stone, writer Caleb Lewis, director Geordie Brookman, Space Theatre, Adelaide, 8-30 Nov, 2013.
In an open class demonstration, 20 performers walk carefully crossing lines of string stretched across the floor. Their bare toes curl and reach to find the string’s edge, bodies sway and wobble as core muscles try to hold gravity’s centre, eyes are either closed or zoned into a faraway elsewhere.
Each body presences itself differently. Indeed, the line of string, almost hard to discern for the spectator, seems to draw out of these balancing bodies those other lines of tension that Bodyweather practice so delicately focalises between sensation and imagination, perception and performance. For masters of the form, I imagine, a simple tread of this line might enable a complete retreat from oneself from view. What kind of force would be left, then, walking the line?
The demonstration follows a five-day Image Dance Think Tank masterclass led by Tess de Quincey and Frank van de Ven, hosted by the Sydney University Department of Performance Studies for both seasoned and new Bodyweather practitioners as well as for academic participant-observers. The culmination of a week’s introspection and investigation results in a rich public elaboration of some areas of critical urgency for the practice as well as for broader threads of enquiry into the role of performance in tuning us into those environments we more ordinarily omit from perceptual view. The program’s initiator, Chair of the Department Amanda Card, builds upon an earlier exchange between De Quincey Co and the Department held in 2001. It is in this way well served by the latter’s commitment to methods of rehearsal observation, which swiftly emerge here to unpick what surrounds the studied internality that Bodyweather practice so forcefully presents.
De Quincey and van de Ven explain that the legacy of their training with Min Tanaka’s MAI-JUKU performance group in Japan (1984-1991) involves the remarkable storage, in body-memory (as well as in journal descriptions) of original image-sets. Conceived as either ‘omnicentral’ (divided) or ‘full body’ images, participants have been revisiting images such as “Moonshadow” or “Penis Arms” 36 years later in a practice that, as Lecturer in Architecture Andrew Macklin comments, is fundamentally “translated” in that it is both “culturally other” and “locally specific.” The question of the body as translator is underpinned by Bodyweather imaging practices as well as by the Muscle and Bone training regimes that support it, which are understood by de Quincey as “agronomous:” the body is a mechanism for tilling the earth. This minimalist aesthetic, which seems to open out an interpretive practice for the body on an almost cellular level, Macklin explains, is deeply resonant of the Shibui approach to textural subtlety that informs a Japanese sensibility of beauty.
Walking the line, participants are asked to pass through a smoke curtain. How might a body make itself disappear in the smoke it imagines/images around it? For one participant, walking through the curtain requires a softening of the body into the sensory image of smoke. Mechanically, this means an extension of the body into space such that it will “stop wobbling” at the same time as “boundaries of the flesh [must] become smoke-like” so as to “touch” the imagined curtain edge. Questions of the image-sensing and image-making capacities of the body become central to the dialogue that follows. De Quincey explains that the logic of a body as an environment enables us to conceive it as being in compositional dialogue with another environment (indeed, the principle here might be that we are all always in such processes of dialogue even as they are disguised from bodily view). The goal here is to avoid mimetic representation and to instead feel the sensation of an image which may be received via any modal viewpoint. “It is the image doing me, not the other way around” observes one participant.
Provocations then arise around the ideokinetic frisson that happens when a body meets an image, as in the performance-enhancing techniques of athlete training (Stuart Grant), or what the spectator is exactly given to sense when watching a process of performing-sensing-feeling (Justine Shih Pearson). This last question interestingly resonates against the final phase of the showing, which involves performers Linda Luke and Peter Fraser in solos and de Quincey and van de Ven in a duo, performing pre-choreographed works. Here, the viewing lens shifts from rehearsal observation to performance analysis, and the terms of reference become more oblique. For one thing, the comical duo between de Quincey and van de Ven seems to move much of what was discussed of the body’s image-sensorium into a kind of lazzi around becoming dogs (de Quincey’s two pets were present for the duration of the workshop). The ethos of becoming environments, one which, as Macklin noted, promised to offer an everyday aesthetics of sensitivity and empathy, hovered strangely at the edge of the ever-strong demand for meaning-making in the theatre.
Image Dance Think Tank, An international collaboration between De Quincey Co and the Department of Performance Studies, Sydney University, led by Tess de Quincey and Frank van de Ven, Rex Cramphorn Studio, University of Sydney 4-9 Nov, 2013
Image Note: Directed by Tess de Quincey, Inner Garden was a performance installation in the grounds of Callan Park, Sydney, 6-8 Feb, 2014. Drawing on the site’s history as a former psychiatric asylum, 10 performers and visual artists created works embedded in this charged environment, exploring a number of what de Quincey calls “obsessions.” Performed at dusk to the otherworldly music of Kraig Grady, Robbie Avenaim and Jim Denley, it was a rich, multilayered and magical experience.
Gail Priest
Bryony Geeves, Sara Pensalfini, She’s Not Performing
photo Carlie Devine
Bryony Geeves, Sara Pensalfini, She’s Not Performing
Supported by the Tasmanian Theatre Company’s Associate Artists’ Program, this is the second incarnation of Alison Mann’s She’s Not Performing. The first was an acclaimed 2010 production at La Mama in Melbourne, directed by Kelly Somes. I understand that production made more of the visual symbolism of the piece. This apparently simpler production is directed by Belinda Bradley, with the playwright producing, and brings together a strong ensemble.
Margarite (Sara Pensalfini) is a troubled woman with a younger lover, Iain (Campbell McKenzie). A chance encounter pushes her from a precarious stability into turmoil. On a night out, watching a stripper performing she notices that the young woman bears a striking physical similarity to herself. She begins to suspect that this girl, Annie (Bryony Geeves), is the daughter she gave up for adoption as a teenager. Iain struggles to understand her sudden emotional intensity so Margarite turns to an old friend, Hamish (Joe Clements), for support. But that relationship too becomes fraught as Margarite’s obsession grows. Once the idea that she may be Annie’s mother has taken root, it consumes her—her confused sexual identity, the traumas of the past and her tendencies towards self-harm converging.
The play’s strength is its unusual, skilful blend of realism and stylised forms of expression. The dialogue is often naturalistic and restrained, but a scene can transform into a dream, such as Margarite recalling the pain of childbirth, with the fully-grown Annie emerging from between her legs. Another scene transforms Annie the stripper into Margarite the schoolgirl in Hamish’s mind, so that we are in his world for a time, seeing Margarite’s situation through his eyes. Such shifts in perspective and tone are difficult to achieve in theatre and not often attempted. There’s a sense of controlled experimentation to She’s Not Performing, a blending of cinematic and genre influences which helps to elevate it to something more than an ‘issues’ play or a melodrama.
Crucially, there are electric moments of revelation and catharsis—particularly during the climactic scene in which Margarite finally faces the depth of her emotions and uses them as a weapon against the bewildered Iain. Sara Pensalfini’s performance here lifts off to become something extraordinary, raw and teetering on madness yet utterly grounded in human experience.
There’s no doubt this production suffers from budget constraints. Margarite’s oppressive, hallucinatory world warrants a bolder, more cohesive aesthetic, particularly in regard to costuming. But aspects of director Belinda Bradley’s staging hit the mark, making the best out of limited resources. The childbirth scene uses simple physical techniques to evoke a familiar yet unexpected scenario that highlights the story’s most compelling aspect, its sense of transgression. Margarite has watched her ‘daughter’ perform semi-naked, after all, and Annie herself is possibly developing an attraction for Margarite, regarding her as a client at first but then as a friend. Where is this all going?
There’s an understated remark from Joe Orton’s Loot that I’m fond of: “It’s a Freudian nightmare.” So too is She’s Not Performing, not only in the sense that it touches on taboos and dark sexuality, but in the even more complex sense of its attempt to define the nature of parenthood. What makes a woman a mother? Who, or what, is she without the child she’s borne? Is the loss of a daughter a pain that can never be redeemed, or the loss of a mother? Perhaps something fundamental is forever damaged when that bond is betrayed.
Orton’s characters put up a front of respectability but betray themselves with unconsciously hilarious and shocking utterances. She’s Not Performing, although coming from a different theatrical tradition, shares that kind of ruthless clarity. Margarite is more in the vein of Blanche Dubois or Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf?—all too aware of the danger she finds herself in, and of the knowledge that her connection with ‘normalcy’ is hanging by a thread. At any moment she might be compelled to sever that thread completely and fly off into some frightening new place from which there is no return. In Margarite’s case it’s the legacy of past injustices, which somehow she must live with. This is a powerful work that exposes audiences to difficult truths.
She’s Not Performing, writer Alison Mann, director Belinda Bradley, Theatre Royal Backspace, Hobart, 27-29 Nov, 2013
The inaugural year of The Gold Coast Arts Centre’s intrepid Independent Season closed with the debut of Victoria Carless’ The Grand, produced by Gold Coast independent company, White Rabbit, led by director Lisa Smith.
Carless grew up in Cairns and won the Queensland Theatre Company George Landen Dann Award for her pro-refugee drama The Rainbow Dark in 2006. The Grand is a fascinating collaboration: regionally affiliated practitioners making a work about their respective tourist towns and the faded glamour and eerie nostalgia of an empty beachside resort.
The piece opens with a tremulous young woman (Tammy Weller) in a headscarf knocking on the imposing art deco double doors of The Grand Hotel. The door is answered by the imposing owner (Anna Mowry), who rejects the woman’s entreaties for work: it is the off-season, times are hard and guests are scarce. The young woman persists, wheedling her way inside, saying her mother worked there in its heyday. The doors are flung open and the older woman ushers her new protégé inside the foyer of the once luxurious hotel.
The first part of the play is driven by the instruction of the young woman in the mysterious ways of The Grand, empty save one unseen guest and crumbling under the onslaught of nesting birds and dwindling supplies. Slowly we understand that there will be no guests. The brave gallantry of the two women is expressed through their dogged focus on the daily rituals of hospitality: washing the bed linen stained with blood, mixing cocktails with flamingo swizzle sticks, scrubbing the floors clean of bird shit and reverentially opening the guest book to scrutinise the non-existent bookings.
Carless has a beautiful turn of phrase and a distinctive theatrical voice, unhurried and mesmerising as she builds the relationship between the two women. Are they half-sisters? Is this an elaborate game between them or merely the fantasy of one woman dying slowly in a poisoned world?
Alas, the looping games do not build in intensity but simply repeat themselves without deconstruction or game-play, or the sly wit of an absurdist non-sequitur. The gentle beauty of the language never deepens into complexity or ambiguity and so the piece feels oddly a-thematic, without the promised insight into the hollowness of the pleasure-town or the consequence of environmental violation. The gothic cupboards never open. The mystery guest/ghost never appears. The blood-stained sheets do not presage a violent act. The poison weakens but does not kill and the status quo between the two women barely changes.
The play feels like a clock slowly losing time and one that finishes for no other reason than that the mechanism needs to be rewound. Indeed, the climax of the piece is a re-enactment of the opening scene but with the older woman playing the stranger, relying on repetition again rather than progression or interrogation to resolve the piece. It isn’t that there needs to be an answer to the gentle ominousness of the gothic tropes but more a feeling that there is a corker of a play here yet to be dug out.
Gold Coast Arts Centre Independent Theatre Season: White Rabbit Theatre Company, The Grand, writer Victoria Carless, director Lisa Smith, Space Theatre, Gold Coast, 14-23 Nov, 2013
Anthony Weir, Michael Cutrupi, The Violent Outburst That Drew Me To You
photo Heidrun Löhr
Anthony Weir, Michael Cutrupi, The Violent Outburst That Drew Me To You
“He’s a little shit,” offers a 15-year-old audience member from Mount Druitt, in a succinct evaluation of the protagonist in the premiere production of The Violent Outburst That Drew Me To You. Writer Finegan Kruckemeyer beckons us to follow the journey of teenager Connor and his scattershot mind, joyously carried through by Michael Cutrupi with an explosive and determined energy that instantly endears him to the audience.
The first act kicks off at an unrelenting pace. Connor’s series of tantrums is cast as an overt symphony of pained interactions with a shape-shifting ensemble of cowed enablers and frustrated guardians, played by Kate Worsley, Emily Ayoub, Anthony Weir and Branden Christine with versatile buoyancy to match. In this lighter, but no less potent companion to Kruckemeyer’s Tough Beauty (RT117), director Kate Gaul’s dextrous assemblage of Connor’s outbursts invites us to the edge of his obliterating everything in his midst.
The boy’s reactions are authentic and lovingly crafted with a lyrical sprinkling of profanity. His sense of alienation and confusion viewing abstract artworks in the gallery while on a school excursion has a strange legitimacy when one considers the radicalising role of modern art in American ideological warfare.
The backyard theatre set mainly involves a wooden frame that functions as both shadow puppetry screen and partition for many an exchange, including annoying one of his mechanic Uncle Mal’s potential customers and, subsequently, landing some hard blows on his best mate. It is this that tests his parents’ patience and stretches our sympathy for him.
A bold scene sees Connor performing an extended and repetitive aria of the F-word, desperately trying to block out the sound of Stephen Fry’s voice, but also transforming the language in the ears of the young audience. Watching them squirm, settle and then hear profane language morph into poetic sound was more entertaining than concerning.
Scenes like these notably benefit from Daryl Wallis’ musical dramaturgy, lending Gaul and company a number of playful elements early in the production, for example Connor’s unseen classmate heckling in a rude bassoon baritone and his parents nagging in song. These are not merely clever devices, but point to Connor’s eventual coping strategy—to completely tune out.
Indeed, Kruckemeyer grants Connor and the audience of exasperated babysitters a well-deserved reprieve when his parents isolate him in his grandfather’s bush cabin. This Duke of Edinburgh Award challenge of sorts forces Connor to evaluate his behaviour. On the verge of delirious boredom, he crosses paths with Siena, a similarly troubled girl—played simultaneously by Ayoub, Christine and Worsley—who is more comfortable with the natural surroundings. Perhaps an apparition of dramatic convenience, this tomboy Artemis (Greek goddess, protector of young girls) both calms and links Connor to his hormonal awakening.
Directing his writing at a youth audience, Kruckemeyer has issued yet another unapologetic challenge to audiences to engage in a deeper understanding of the adolescent experience, that cuts across parental handwringing and legislative buck-passing over the perceived rise in unprovoked youth brutality on our streets.
True West Theatre, The Violent Outburst That Drew Me To You, writer Finegan Kruckemeyer, producer, director Kate Gaul, composer Daryl Wallis; Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, 21-30 Nov 2013; Griffin Independent, 18 June-12 July, 2014
It’s a rare hot day as I wade through the long grass on Hobart’s Queen’s Domain. The venue I’m ushered towards, the Victoria Gunpowder Magazine, is a place many Tasmanians have never seen, hidden as it is behind various sports grounds. Built in 1850 to house a mass of volatile weaponry—at its peak storing 1,000 barrels of gunpowder—the fortress-like edifice now appears neglected, surrounded by barbed wire fencing and accessed only on irregular tours by collectors of military memorabilia.
Inside this cold, virtual ruin, The Green Room, a site-specific production by solo-performer Jane Longhurst and sound artist Dylan Sheridan, is staged. This collaborative work is an outcome of the 2013 HyPe initiative, supported by Salamanca Arts Centre to encourage the creation of innovative, contemporary hybrid performance in Tasmania.
The fortress-like nature of the space seems more apparent on this day as the hot midday sun fades from view, the door is slammed shut and we are left in darkness. The marked difference in temperature somehow seems imperative, as this is an immersive work in which the audience is intimately connected to performer and to the space itself.
As we enter the room, Longhurst is already at work, sweeping the floor, stirring up dust. This sweeping—a recurring motif—is one of the ways the performer engages with the space, as tension builds around her choreography of physical gestures and interactions with a series of found objects such as rope and old gunpowder drums. In one suggestive sequence, a piece of rope falls to the floor which Longhurst then ties between two timber posts and swings on for a very long time, the rocking motion marked by the clocking sound of her boots against the floorboards. That I am disturbed by this—perhaps something to do with Longhurst’s proximity to the audience—says much about the potential of site-specific works to perturb common associations with a place.
The waiting game played with the audience is not only a test of endurance but also a sharp reminder of the site’s failed ideological function as a place awaiting a war that never came. This is alluded to in the work’s title, a Green Room being a space that accommodates performers when they’re not performing.
This preoccupation with the interstitial appears a central concern throughout the work, particularly in Sheridan’s exceptional use of atmospheric lighting and sound. With light glowing from the cracks between floorboards and hidden in crevices in the walls and a haunting soundscape ranging from a dull throbbing to metal scraping sounds—all of which were derived from field recordings at the site—the place takes on the guise of a character that taunts Longhurst. A point of brilliance is the performer’s response to a sound under the floor: floorboards are lifted, revealing a gentle, diffused light. This attention to the in-between and the duration of the interval creates a strange, resonant atmosphere where energy appears to seep through the very cracks of the building achieving a new and altogether more intriguing illumination of a hidden place and its stories.
As the work ended where it started—with sweeping—I was left with the impression that I was merely an interloper in a scene that would continue for the remainder of the day. The movement challenged and piqued its audience. With the room hazy from dust stirred, we emerged sneezing, stimulated by the textures of this strangely haunting place—and intoxicated by its smell and taste.
The Green Room, creator Jane Longhurst, Dylan Sheridan, performer Jane Longhurst, sound and lighting design Dylan Sheridan; Victoria Gunpowder Magazine, Hobart, 22 Nov-1 Dec, 2013
Strange things can happen while we’re waiting, beneath the spell of the cosmic joke, as Beckett showed us 60 years ago with Waiting for Godot. In the Waiting Room, Born in a Taxi’s reworking of their 2008 show, we are made to wait again in amusement and confusion, and for what, we don’t know.
The colossal Newport Substation, with its elaborate stairs and passageways, allows for plenty of play and delay from the moment of arrival. We all meet in the foyer and are issued a ‘waiting room’ number; the group is then split into three and ushered by separate routes—via devious detours—to the site of performance: a small room upstairs in the building’s rear. There is no defined performance space, only rows of chairs where we sit and watch the performers enter to sit in our midst one by one. We stare at them, and at each other. They stare at us. Until this air of addled anticipation gives rise to mischief of another kind.
In many ways, The Waiting Room is a study in the subtlety of non-verbal cues. The performers don’t speak, but compete and cavort with each other, trying to persuade us by gesture to physically join in the game. They play a forceful version of musical chairs, for example, but some of us are more willing than others to give up our seats. To what extent will we participate, or resist?
As audience, we rely on the custom of being led by our performers. We don’t hope to usurp them, perhaps only to join them at times. That’s why invitations to participate must be clear. The tricky, commendably radical, but not quite successful aspect of The Waiting Room is that the performers suggest an abandonment of traditional roles—a chance to get swept up in dancing, music, conga lines and the like—but there are no clear invitations. It is rather an experiment in generating atmosphere, and with a few exceptions (perhaps these people attended the previous show?) we remain suspended, disoriented and waiting for stronger cues.
Is this deliberate discomfort? The hint is there in a gentle, jocular way. As with Godot, the absence of narrative gives rise to malaise, which becomes the fuel for play and fanciful tangents. And as with Godot, social neurosis is exposed: hierarchy-complexes, tendencies toward calculation and competition, our reliance on permission and authority (be it God, Godot, the law or Big Brother). From time to time, a voice from the speakers prompts us, at one point inviting responses to major life questions: “If you’ve ever experienced the death of someone you love, lie down on the ground…If you are a critic or judgmental person, stand in the corner,” and so on.
This painful and playful candour does not divide us in the end, but rather unifies us through physical games, which shows that something is working well here. However chaotic The Waiting Room sometimes feels, its treatment of life’s anxieties is no mere abstraction to ponder at home. It is an immediate experience, set lightheartedly in a communal context: a limited window of time spent in transparent, bonhomous social unease.
Born in a Taxi, The Waiting Room, performers Penny Baron, Carolyn Hanna, Kate Hunter, Andrew Gray, Deborah Batton, Nick Papas; The Substation, Melbourne, 28 Nov-1 Dec, 2013
Death, paranoia and catastrophe define the 10-year-old body of work of Australian/Portuguese performance duo Stone/Castro. It is no accident the company formed two years after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Jo Stone, a Flinders University Drama Centre graduate, was in New York the day extremists toppled the great symbol of American economic power, the World Trade Centre.
Early in our interview Paulo Castro, Stone’s long-time collaborator and partner, confirms this darkly: “When the planes hit, Jo told me, people were looking up into the sky for more of them. Ghosts, sleepwalkers, somnambulists full of dust…”
The company’s latest production, Blackout, has as its point of departure not the specific events of that day, but the feelings of collapse and dislocation which suffuse the minutes, hours and days following cataclysmic events. Says Castro, “Blackout is about the state of loss of control, and about the cycle of building and destroying, destroying and building, that is the world in which we live; September 11, East Timor, the revolution in my own country…”
The revolution to which Castro refers is the 1974 military coup in Lisbon during which no shots were fired. The Estado Novo, Western Europe’s longest surviving authoritarian regime, collapsed, as peaceful protestors stuffed the gun barrels of soldiers’ rifles with cravos (red carnations). The post-revolution years were marked by democratising change and the dissolution of Portugal’s colonial empire, but Castro tells me the spirit of the revolution—of 25 April—penetrated deeply into the generation that grew up in its shadow. “We were all Pussy Riots,” says Castro of this time. “The theatre we were making in bunkers in Portugal in the 1990s was very political, anarchic and left-wing. It was a visceral and experimental world.”
Blackout, Castro tells me, will be less didactic: “It is a response to, not a play about 9/11. It will not be polemical in the way some of my earlier work was. We want to let people think.” Castro, by way of explanation, cites the work of German visual artist Gerhard Richter, whose 2005 painting, titled September, depicts the planes crashing into the World Trade Centre. Immediately searching online I find the painting is surprisingly small, but otherwise entirely characteristic of Richter’s work: photorealistic, but heavily distorted by the artist’s trademark ‘blur,’ an effect achieved by aggressively wiping a brush or sponge across the wet paintwork. Critic Robert Storr called September ‘anti-ideological,’ an attempt to decodify the imagery of 9/11 by disrupting the overfamiliar filmed and photographed representations of the towers’ collapse. It strikes me that Castro’s intentions with Blackout are analogous.
“More abstract that concrete, Blackout takes place on a metaphorical boat,” says Castro, “on which there is a catastrophic power failure. A wedding party is interrupted and suddenly the guests are exposed as frauds, people who all along had been pretending to be someone or something they were not.” Castro cites Lars von Trier’s 2011 apocalyptic drama Melancholia as an influence. That film, like Blackout, features a wedding that is disrupted by a catastrophic event, the narrative function of which is to interrogate extremities of human psychology rather than to anatomise disaster.
I ask Castro about the form Blackout will take, and he describes an approach that is fluid, multidisciplinary and improvisational: “We play within an extremely open space. In rehearsal with a combination of Australian and Portuguese dancers and actors we might attempt five versions of the same scene. Our work is a marriage of everything—choreography, theatre, visual image and soundscape.”
Aesthetically, according to the production’s press release, Blackout will use “blurriness and timewarp” in order to “take naturalistic scenes into a place that shifts between focus and distortion.” I pore over this sentence as Castro speaks, the connection between these words and Richter’s paintings clarifying. But before I’m able to raise the point, Castro obliquely confirms it: “Each moment is not exactly what you are seeing. As in a catastrophe, time seems to slow down and speed up in unexpected ways.” Neuroscientists, I discover later, refer to the phenomenon as ‘mind time,’ a cognitive reality generated by perhaps the most emblematic emotion of the post-9/11 era, fear.
The project is as provocative as any Stone/Castro has devised but Castro, in bringing our conversation to a close, says: “I’m not worried. I’ve worked in Sydney and Melbourne before, but Adelaide is a little bit special. It is a city thirsty for surprises.”
In addition to Jo Stone, the multinational cast includes Australian-based performers Vincent Crowley, Alisdair Macindoe, Nathan O’Keefe, Larissa McGowan and Stephen Sheehan, and from Portugal John Romao. Blackout’s key creatives include Portuguese lighting designer Daniel Worm and South Australian-based designers Sascha Budimski (sound) and Morag Cook (set and costumes).
2014 Adelaide Festival, Stone/Castro, Blackout, AC Arts Main Theatre, Adelaide, 3-9 March
Bryony Kimmings and Taylor, Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model, photo courtesy the artist
One of the biggest challenges facing the organisers of the upcoming Festival of Live Art (FOLA) in Melbourne is defining the damned thing. Many of the artists in the festival don’t even use the term to describe their work, and those who do can’t seem to agree on what it really stands for. In other areas this might be a worrying matter, but when it comes to live art it suggests a festival which will be constantly questioning its own limits. It’s pretty exciting stuff.
“We began the whole process by getting a whole bunch of artists in a room and having a discussion about what live art is,” says Arts House Creative Producer Angharad Wynne-Jones. “And no one could agree. We tried to at least set some parameters about what it isn’t, and I think at one point we went well, it’s not a three-act play, and then even that was disputed.”
FOLA will be presented by Arts House, St Kilda’s Theatre Works and Footscray Community Arts Centre, the first time the three organisations have worked together. Given live art’s relative outsider status in Australia, it’s unlikely that such a festival could have been produced by one venue alone. The term was coined in the UK in the mid-1980s and the rise there of many bodies such as the Live Art Development Agency (LADA) has meant that a large community of art-makers has come together under the same banner. In Australia the scene is far more fragmented, isolated, but perhaps also more diverse as a result.
“It feels to me like the Australian artists engaged in that kind of practice have got a relationship with (UK live art) history and certainly they collaborate and connect internationally all the time, but they’re working in a broader context,” says Wynne-Jones. “There are connections into Asia that change the way we might think about live art, and within Indigenous Australia, things we might think about ritual and relationships to the body that are quite different to the UK context.”
FOLA works appearing at Arts House include Tristan Meecham’s large-scale Game Show, in which contestants vie for a prize pool consisting of every possession the artist owns; Sam Routledge and Martyn Coutts’ interactive drama set in a miniature railway and township; and Amy Spiers and Catherine Ryan’s Nothing to See Here, wherein Arts House patrons around the North Melbourne Town Hall and Meat Market will be dispersed, willingly or otherwise with “techniques police use to break up protests” (FOLA program).
The emergence of the festival was a serendipitous one for Theatre Works. Creative producer Daniel Clarke had already brought on live art practitioner Dan Koop to help develop a program named Encounters which would explore the possibilities of one-on-one and micro-audience performance. When talks about FOLA commenced, that program naturally wove itself into the larger festival. The Theatre Works season will include a work by choreographer Nat Cursio held in her own living room —there are only 10 tickets available for the entire season. Other works see audiences of one sharing a bed with cabaret artist Yana Alana, or investigating intimacy in the age of Skype with Melanie Jame Wolf, or else subjecting themselves to experiences of very real terror in Kelly Alexander, Jodie Ahrens and Melanie Hamilton’s Fright.
Fright stands out among the overall FOLA program, since much live art in Australia takes a generous, expansive or collaborative approach to audience-artist relations. Not that it’s all hugs and flowers, but it’s rare to find a work that delves into physically threatening territory.
“I did the development and I found it pretty full on,” says Clarke. “I was terrified at some moments, like physically afraid.” “It plays on a physical sense of fear,” says Koop, “an emotional sense of fear, a social sense of fear. In that same way that something that’s uncomfortable in a conversation can make you blush and laugh. It wasn’t all shrieking and pulling my hair out, there was awkwardness as fear as well. And self-exploration as fear, self-knowledge as fear.”
Theatre Works will also present performance artist Bryony Kimmings’ Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model, in which Kimmings and her nine-year-old niece Taylor develop a better icon for the contemporary tween. “There’s also a large part of Bryony’s work that doesn’t happen on the stage,” says Clarke. “This character that is the role model, Catherine Bennett, now goes out to schools and runs assemblies with tweens. She’s made pop songs, there’s a doco about her. The show is one part of this art project and it’s just sort of snowballing.” It’s an example of the way British live art occupies a broader space than the moment of presentation.
Melbourne-based performance maker and teacher Leisa Shelton is presenting an archive of Live Art Development Agency video during the festival as well as a work that seeks to “map” our memories of pivotal moments in Australian live art. Both Arts House-based investigations are attempts to rethink the idea of documentation in relation to a mode of art-making that is deeply concerned with the live moment.
Footscray Community Arts Centre’s CEO Jade Lillie is taking an equally interrogative approach to the festival. The venue is one grounded in community and socially engaged practices, and for some time she questioned how live art could contribute to these.
“For us it’s a playful way to look at what live art is in a community-engaged context,” she says. “We’re interested in questions like ‘who does a Festival of Live Art speak to?’ Sometimes my feeling is that live art practice often speaks to itself, or audiences that reflect the artist. I’m not particularly interested in that in our context.”
FCAC will host a forum addressing such questions as well as a masterclass with Lenine Bourke. Performance poet Alia Gabres will be recreating her grandmother’s traditional Eritrean coffee ceremony and both sharing and creating new stories live, and Triage Live Art Collective’s Strange Passions will see strangers swapping their own tales while rendered anonymous by masks.
Beth Buchanan, I Know That I Am Not Dead
photo Andrew Sully
Beth Buchanan, I Know That I Am Not Dead
Appearing at Arts House will be post’s Mish Grigor, Paul Gazzola (artist, curator Temporary Democracies, RT117), James Berlyn (see RT118), Malcolm Whittaker, Emma Beech (RT115), Nicola Gunn with Triage Live Art Collective, Julie Vulcan (RT116), Jason Maling, Sarah Rodigari (ex-Panther), and Lois Weaver, independent artist for 25 years and lecturer in Contemporary Performance at Queen Mary University of London. Weaver is currently Artistic Director of the Air Project, an Arts Council of England-funded initiative that nurtures and sustains established Live Art practitioners and emerging artists in the UK.
Bryony Kimmings’ Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model will play at Theatre Works 25 March -6 April. EDs
Arts House, Theatre Works, Footscray Community Arts Centre, Festival of Live Art, 14-30 March
The full festival program is online at fola.com.au.
I’m sitting, uncertain to begin with, wearing headphones; listening to fragments of conversations with no definite source. It takes a while—quite a while—to figure out who’s where; and often—usually—I can only locate one performer at a time. The other three are elusive, hidden amid the packed food court at Highpoint Shopping Centre in Melbourne’s inner west. It’s a Saturday afternoon before Christmas: the tiled hall overflows with fidgety kids, tired adults, stacks of shopping bags and pre-made food packs. The headphones mute the reverberating sound cloud of voices that floats between the punters and the atrium ceiling.
Over time, I relax into a humming, lulling soundscape, punctuated by random narratives and stray sentences: “Everybody’s checking each other out,” a voice says. But who, where? I just see shoppers forking up plates of stir-fry, playing with straws and phones. And then: a guy in a red t-shirt, moving reeeal slowly with a Macca’s bag and a Coke. He sits down nearby, his gestures continuing in exaggerated slow motion. The sounds of the paper bag, the crisp ‘tsss’ of snapped-open can are up-close in my ears. I can’t tell what’s ‘live’ or what’s recorded and performed in synch with the soundscape. There’s a disjunct, or perhaps an overlap, or even both: a jarring between what’s ‘out there’—the character, his movements, sounds—and what’s ‘in my head,’ pushed in there via the soundscape.
As PUBLIC unfolds, a second performer appears, strolling through the crowd—her headset mic is the giveaway. She talks about girls getting engaged; a guy on a late shift. The dance track “I Feel Love” is beating in my ears, anthemic and heady.
Another voiceover begins a meandering tale about an online encounter with a ‘chatbot.’ “You can meet him in a public room or you can tap someone and meet in a private room,” says the voice. Am I present here, or am I ‘lurking?’ Am I in a public or a private space; participant or voyeur?
Rachael Dyson-McGregor, Nicola Gunn, Tom Davies, Diana Nguyen, PUBLIC
photo Tamara Kirby
Rachael Dyson-McGregor, Nicola Gunn, Tom Davies, Diana Nguyen, PUBLIC
PUBLIC extends Tamara Saulwick’s interest in ordinary speech and stories—as in Pindrop (see RT111) or her work in development, Endings. In PUBLIC, the scripted, performed text is just one element in the complex interplay of performer, ‘source’ and site. Whereas in Pindrop the stories themselves took thematic precedence, here the interest seems to lie as much, or more, in the shifting and often confounding merger between what’s staged and what’s already present in the space. Throughout PUBLIC I’m increasingly seduced by the way Saulwick, with sound designer Luke Smiles, elevates the rhythms of banal exchange to the level of music or poetry. I listen for the shifting timbres; the voices are melodic lines over an orchestral backing of eye- and ear-scapes.
As further narratives unfold and performers wander in and out of view, a feeling of real/unrealness grows. Who are all these ‘real’ people around me? Across the way, a woman playfully throws a screwed-up serviette at her child; a cleaner stagily pulls out a walkie-talkie amid the tables and speaks on it; a pair of elderly ladies on a bench seat look with interest around the court.
Hundreds of unpaid extras, in effect, flesh out an ambience that’s further illuminated when as audience we find ourselves eavesdropping on the four performers, who now sit together at a table, playing Truth or Dare. They confess fears and secrets. Behind them, two under-ten boys with mullets and blingy neck chains lick dripping icecreams and bemusedly look on.
Nicola Gunn
video still Tamara Saulwick
Nicola Gunn
Site-specific performance, verbatim theatre and live art are all forms that increasingly draw our attention to ordinary life, shedding surprising light on familiar sites and activities. PUBLIC combines aspects of all three forms, intriguingly complicating and augmenting the food court space. At the same time—and despite some escalating performer actions that become gorgeously surreal—the work strikes me as almost ‘representational’—‘depicting’ the space, if you will, in larger-than-life tones, with the added resonant effect of my own presence in the picture. The work’s climax elevates, resounds, seeming to drift up into the cavernous ceiling to merge with the blue sky and fluffy clouds beyond the glass roof.
With the show over and my headphones returned, I sit back down in the food court and just watch, senses awakened to the sheer volume of people—seats occupied, vacated and immediately occupied again. Weirdly, as I prepare to leave, a man walks past me—really slowly—crumpling a Maccas’ bag…and he’s moving just slowly enough that I find myself expecting that crumpling sound, amplified and close-up to my ears.
Big West: PUBLIC, concept, direction Tamara Saulwick, sound design Luke Smiles, dramaturgy Martyn Coutts, system design Nick Roux, Highpoint Shopping Centre food court, Melbourne, 22 Nov –1 Dec 2013
Patrice Smith’s Verge narrows focus to a corner space where three ‘concentrated states’ strike the walls of consciousness, tipping decision towards vertigo or, when read in succession, leading the viewer on a trajectory of disintegrating control through teetering balance, withdrawal and aggressive release.
Patrice Smith, in her relatively short career, has exhibited a fascination with transforming psychological behaviour into impressionistic embodied emotion. She could be seen to follow in the lineage of Mary Wigman’s Hexentanz or Martha Graham’s Lamentations, except that the interconnecting metaphorical threads arise less from direct expressionistic foundations than from the erratic patterning of neural pathways. Her compositional eye enables movement to build on abstracted bodily gestures and rhythms, physicalising hesitation, anxiety and violence without recourse to causal or narrative through-lines. Action rests and races on the verge of unwanted emergence.
However, the individuality of Smith’s three collaborating performers, Bernadette Lewis, Jacqui Claus and Laura Boynes, does imbue or mark distinctive ‘stories’ onto the work’s devolution, as does the unacknowledged presence of the shuddering and implacable corner of aluminium walls, the fourth player in this interrogation of consciousness. These act as visual barriers barring relief from the dissembling sense of control and, more expressively, as the sounding board against which the accumulating rage of three bodies is thrown. The silvered presence sends reverberations into and out of the dancers’ pressurised momentum.
Lewis initiates the states with a nonchalant downward focus on her feet and toes, playing with equilibrium. The action is concentrated and skilled in spite of its pedestrian slant. In the background, her fellow performers shift in response to a normal gravitational pull. Calmness pervades, edged only with an indistinct threat of imbalance. As Lewis’ experimentation gathers speed and complexity, Claus moves to the foreground, her figure replete with tension. With an awkward throw back of her head, which is repeated too often to be comfortable, Claus conveys an impression of retraction, of a stifled fear to move forward in the slow, long lines so suited to her extended physicality. Then the taut atmosphere snaps as Boynes runs at Claus and hits the wall. A fast-paced dissolution of balance, somewhere between violence and madness, whirls and smashes in the corner. Though remote from a romantic frame, Boynes’ distraught and unstoppable running and stumbling through the nether realms of consciousness reminded me of Giselle. Maybe dance is the domain of madness, that place where sanity is breached? The three, cornered women of Verge disappear over the edge of chaos into darkness.
Ahilan Ratnamohan, SDS1
photo Ashley de Prazer
Ahilan Ratnamohan, SDS1
Soccer, the particular football at the centre of attention in Ahilan Ratnamohan’s SDS1, has long been praised for the grace, élan and dexterity of its players criss-crossing stadiums and dancing after the sacred ball. The game’s tasks and stratagems resemble choreography and no-one would dare deny that the trappings of football are not infused with potent gracefulness and elaborate drama.
A rudimentary single blue light illuminates a lone figure in the stadium, transposed in performance mode as a studio space with a single row of spectators seated around the perimeters. Two feet clad in orange trainers manoeuvre a matching orange ball, half-pivoting on its spherical colour. Though somewhat obscure in the low light, there is a suggestion that we are to be carried into a familiar yet divergent tale of a man and his extension into the world through a ball. Structurally, however, the work fractures into a stop-start pattern. Ratnamohan leaves the ball aside, box-dances in taut weight-shifts with his shoes emitting shrieking skids for no discernible reason.
Under an additional orange glow, the still darkened figure preoccupies himself with a random selection of soccer clichés: taping his ankles and binding his body, trotting the floor in circles of post-game adulation and pushing effort towards a forced condition of exhaustion. He coerces the audience to pass his body like a trophy around the field and inexplicably, for me, ‘head-butts’ with one of them. Near the performance’s end, full lights offer a clear image of the man, now returning to a gentler dance with the ball that resonates more with my memories of watching soccer. Handing over his sweaty shirt signals the moment of salutation to the crowd and his exit with his bag of balls.
In spite of my hesitations and disappointment with the lack of finesse and verve of a footballer’s consummate physicality, the non-contemporary dance audience seemed content with the patchwork of accustomed images of sport in performance and disinclined to demand any further meaning, beauty or drama of this man’s dance with a ball.
Verge, choreographer Patrice Smith, music, lighting Joe Lui, design Fiona Bruce, Lauren Ross, The Blue Room, 12-30 Nov; SDS1, choreographer and performer Ahilan Ratnamohan, PICA Performance Space, Perth, 27-30 Nov, 2013
Walking in single file through the inner passage of a dam is not where an audience for a music performance would usually find itself. Emerging from the other end onto the far shore of Lake Guy, deep in Victoria’s High Plains, was just as unexpected. Outside we were greeted by the drone of a hurdy-gurdy calling across the water and the spectacle of countless stars reflecting on the lake’s surface.
A bank of lights flashed intermittently further along the water’s edge, signalling a response to the music coming from the opposite shore. When the music ended the audience cheered and flashed their torches in the hope that John Billan, the artist responsible, would receive these signals of appreciation across the lake. A mobile phone call was made to Billan to request an encore, to which he complied and another five minute burst of haunting hurdy-gurdy wavered across the water. The sound was thrown across the lake by a ‘sound mirror,’ a large metal bowl standing on its side with a speaker in front of it.
This distinctive experience was part of Bogong ELECTRIC, an exhibition and performance program based around the Bogong Centre for Sound Culture. The Centre was established in the Bogong Alpine Village by sound artists Philip Samartzis and Madelynne Cornish to support cultural and artistic “initiatives investigating the history and ecology of the Australian Alps.” Following Bogong AIR in 2011 (RT102), this is the second festival associated with the Centre.
The village is an idyllic cluster of cabins fanned out on the side of the mountain alongside Victoria’s largest hydroelectric system, whose infrastructure includes a dam and several underground power stations. Rarely does such a pristine natural environment co-exist so closely with man-made industrial might. It’s hard to think of a more ideal setting for a posse of local and international sound artists to explore this juxtaposition across the festival’s four-day program through a variety of site-specific practices. Bogong’s relative remoteness also has its downside: over four hours’ drive from Melbourne, attendees were mostly the artists themselves and their partners, students of Samartzis or Billan, or others with some role in the festival, plus a few hardy punters.
Geoff Robinson installation, image courtesy of the artist and Bogong Electric
The program was made up of a variety of performance and installation pieces situated around the village and hydroelectric infrastructure. The installations ranged from the familiar video/speaker set-up (Madelynne Cornish, Synchronator, Geoff Robinson), to unique works that required active participation from audiences enabled by the use of headphones. Christophe Charles’ piece was listened to while canoeing on the lake, and Lizzie Pogson’s work was similarly experienced walking through the innards of the dam, her narrative guiding the listener along the walkway. Klaus Filip’s simple yet delightful work invited participants to move through a series of suspended lights while wearing cordless headphones receiving transmissions from each light, ranging from electrostatic to music. Listeners often set the small suspended lights swinging to wondrous sonic and visual effect. The performances were often site-specific in nature as well, taking place outdoors, night and day, and even in the AGL Information Centre adjacent to the power station.
Themes of water, electricity and industrial sound (often sourced from field recordings made on location) recurred through installations and performances, but it was the artists who ventured a slightly different take from the obvious who were most successful. Billan’s piece was the outstanding work of the festival, largely because it went beyond these themes and explored the idea of signalling by both light and sound, using the lake and surrounding environs as a grand mise en scène that enhanced the evocative nature of the piece. Michael Vorfeld’s Light Bulb Music performance was also a (ahem) highlight. The Berlin-based artist’s multi-layered rhythms and textures created by an array of amplified light bulbs must have been close to top of the festival curators’ wish list when they settled on the event’s electricity theme. Vorfeld performed his piece lakeside in the evening, his blinking and buzzing coloured lightbulbs the only light source other than the stars. This was ‘electronic music’ at its most elemental.
The common criticism that sound art works are too long with little variation could be applied to most of the festival’s performances. Even Vorfeld was guilty of this to an extent; only John Billan’s sound mirror performance avoided this trap. The fact that he received an encore is a lesson for sound art performers. Yet there’s also no doubting that the more successful works of Bogong ELECTRIC lived up to sound art’s site specific aims of articulating both the space and environment. With its meeting of natural features and monolithic electrical infrastructure, Bogong itself was the star.
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Bogong ELECTRIC 2013, curators Philip Samartzis, Madelynne Cornish, Bogong Village, 1 Nov-1 Dec
Opening last year at Sydney’s Reginald Theatre on a fittingly threatening night, the Australian premiere of Carrie the Musical emphasised humanity over horror spectacle.
Adapted from Stephen King’s seminal first novel about a teenage outcast with psychokinetic abilities, the musical began its life as an ostentatious Broadway flop in 1988. It has since been revised by original composer Michael Gore, lyricist Dean Pitchford and writer Lawrence D Cohen into a more intimate production which enjoyed a successful 2012 off-Broadway run before being realised for Australian audiences by Sydney independent music theatre company Squabbalogic.
Though taking a few wardrobe cues from Brian de Palma’s emblematic film version, Carrie the Musical is closer in tone to King’s novel, where the supernatural is undeniably present, but the main themes are repression, adolescent angst and cruelty. As befits the medium, this musical production has more light-hearted moments than both book and film, while retaining the story’s dark underpinnings. Thematically, as well as in its wise-cracking repartée and 50s-inflected song and dance numbers, this Carrie occupies the same essential territory as Hairspray and Grease, other narratives of teen outsiders striving to achieve romantic and social success on their own terms. With its small cast and orchestra tucked into the cosy confines of the Reginald, the intimate scale of Squabbalogic’s production was essential in making the audience feel an active part of this affecting performance.
The darkened set was a striking foil for Carrie’s romantic soaring ballads and the bright, often comedic group numbers. A derelict assemblage of charred chairs, wooden scaffolding and tattered fabric surrounding the semi-circular stage served to signify not only the heroine’s ultimate destructive act, but also represented the sackcloth and ashes ambience of Carrie’s home as well as the underlying rottenness of the school hierarchy.
The show begins with an interrogation. Isolated by a spotlight, wholesome Sue Snell has questions fired at her out of the darkness about the events of the fateful prom night of which she is the sole survivor. This scene will recur, forming a simple dramatic framing device for the flashbacks relating Carrie’s coming-of-age. Harnessing a powerful, clear voice to a fragile physicality, Hilary Cole brings a great deal of sympathetic intensity to the title role. As her nemesis, arrogant rich kid Chris Hargensen, Prudence Holloway injects the production’s one true note of evil, while Adèle Parkinson and Rob Johnson are likeable but not cloying as Sue and Tommy—the popular couple with a conscience.
It was somewhat disappointing to see Carrie’s relationship with her mother (Margi de Ferranti) considerably softened here. Perhaps in an attempt to avoid panto-style evil, Mama is a more sympathetic character than the sadistic religious fanatic in book and film, but this tends to diminish a key element in Carrie’s struggle. One of the film’s most effective moments is of course when Carrie stands crowned as prom queen, radiant with newly discovered beauty and social success—just before the spectacular drenching in pig’s blood. This scene will hang over any reworking of Carrie. The moment seemed rather rushed in this production, though its aftermath was visually arresting: Carrie’s devastating fury accentuated by livid red light and strobe flashes.
This tale of humiliation, paranormal ability, crushed hopes and mass murder would appear a challenging one to bring to the musical stage, yet director Jay James-Moody’s production had a surprising playfulness while never trivialising its central character’s very personal experience. It was great fun.
Squabbalogic, Carrie the Musical, director Jay James-Moody, composer Michael Gore, lyricist Dean Pitchford, writer Lawrence D Cohen, scenic designer Sean Minahan, lighting Mikey Rice, musical director Mark Chamberlain, choreographer Shondelle Pratt; Reginald Theatre, Seymour Centre, 13-30 Nov 2013
It’s hard to decide whether this collaboration between Andrée Greenwell, Jordie Albiston and Abe Pogos is a fantastical chimera or clambering Frankenstein’s monster. It’s certainly a thing of many parts that don’t always hang together, yet are often terrifically powerful in their own right.
It employs devices from a huge range of forms—documentary theatre, music theatre, mixed media, concert and installation—to relate the story of the last woman hanged in Australia. The combination of styles means that the narrative itself can slip from compelling investigative account to allusive poetry to the tawdry tackiness of TV’s Underbelly, even combining all three in the same instant. The video work, especially, which frequently re-enacts the unfolding drama, is surprisingly literal when juxtaposed with the richness of the score.
We certainly learn a lot. Jean Lee’s life from childhood to that final fatal fall is given a good canvassing, and the verse biography by Jordie Albiston from which the libretto is adapted (by both Albiston and Pogos) is a surprising combination of faithful biography and canny lyricism. Lee’s misadventures saw her falling into a world of prostitution and blackmail that culminated in the murder of an elderly bookmaker in the company of several other low-rent crims. The presentation of her downfall alternates between clinical coolness, moving pathos and garish fascination.
Greenwell’s compositions are an evocative almanac of genres, ranging from torch song to Eastern European-style jazz to Tin Pan Alley numbers. Hugo Race, Jeff Duff and Simon Maiden provide three very distinct and contrasting voices, with Race especially delivering the kind of dark and dirty textures that serve this bleak territory well. Max Sharam’s vocals are a fine fit as Lee’s resurrected stage self but the performer occasionally dropped lines during the Melbourne season, making it at times difficult to sense what the work should really be like in finished form.
It’s also difficult to know what the work’s makers themselves make of Jean Lee, who was executed in 1951. By almost entirely refraining from judgment of its central figure they limit the pity we might feel for Lee, or the horror at the murder of a maybe-but-maybe-not innocent. This may be deliberate, but the intent behind the work’s overall ambiguity is itself obscure. It may be that the concert setting is itself a potent alienation device, in the Brechtian sense, and the work never aims at the kind of realism that might dupe us into putting too much faith in the veracity of the tale’s telling.
But that distancing effect does allow us the space to relish what is a sophisticated and very enjoyable song cycle, several excellent performances and some writing of much merit. If any of it occurs at the expense of Jean Lee, at least there doesn’t seem to be anyone left who would care to defend her.
The Hanging Of Jean Lee, composer, image director Andrée Greenwell, libretto Jordie Albiston, Abe Pogos, audio Michael Hewes, lighting Neil Simpson’ Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, December 7-8
At La Mama Theatre the audience competes for room with the modest set of Margaret Cameron’s one-woman play Opera for a Small Mammal. We crowd around the edge of the oversized tree-trunk cross-section serving as a stage. Extra seats are squeezed around a plush armchair and a toy piano with such tall legs that it can be played while standing.
Some, like myself, are familiar with Cameron’s work from her collaborations with David Young for Chamber Made Opera; others may have seen her first solo show, Things Calypso wanted to Say! in this same theatre in 1987. A woman dressed as a mouse enters “incognito” in dark shades and a scarf to announce that Regina Josefine del Mouse, the Mouse Queen whose dominion is “the lowercase letters of art,” will “issue a decree on the artistic nature of Matter.” We, “the Mouse People who live in the dark behind the scenes,” are all ears.
What follows may be understood through the literal translation of ‘opera’ as ‘works,’ each of the six scenes of Opera for a Small Mammal being a poem unto itself. Excerpts from Purcell’s The Fairy Queen break up the scenes in which Cameron sniffs, tastes and gorges her way through four centuries of theatre, philosophy, literature and music. The overall effect is a ‘philosophical theatre’ in the sense of the philosophical fiction of Umberto Eco or the philosophical autobiography of American writer and director Chris Kraus. Quotations lifted from Michel Foucault, Gertrude Stein and Hélène Cixous are cited with a footnote, that is, a receptionist’s bell on the floor that is struck with the foot. Alongside del Mouse’s voracious appetite for words are the retiring appetites of a bucolic character from an AA Milne story: a cup of tea, a good sit and a spot of sugar. What may sound like Wind in the Willows for theory nerds is a powerful meditation on the vulnerabilities and passions of the creative animal.
Margaret Cameron, Opera for a Small Mammal
photo Daisy Noyes
Margaret Cameron, Opera for a Small Mammal
Together, the six scenes describe an arc that will resonate at different points with different small mammals in the audience. A light-hearted encounter with the big Other (an elephant, to be precise) leads to a whimsical meditation on the libidinal economy of thought. Then almost without warning the audience is plunged into a free-fall of the soul, past grief and humiliation to land among the ruins of discarded identities. The sense of suffering at this point, as Cameron lies crushed under a weak white spotlight, is unbearable, her horror a cold hand on everyone’s heart.
From the depths of despair, del Mouse makes peace with the consolations of self-fashioning, of “piping” with her tiny, squeaky voice, of “lettering” and of “daubing.” These acts are explained at the toy piano under a single held note, as though music too were a type of writing through which we may “Proceed into a distance We Understand.” Del Mouse’s intellectual appetites have returned, but in a new light born of suffering.
And del Mouse’s appetites come back in force as she strikes out into “the Orchard of the World” to pick the fruit for “Words and Jam.” She carries a basket of books and lemons, gorging upon them as she goes. But what follows this celebration of the fruit of life is a solemn ceremony. Del Mouse, carrying a giant wooden phallus and a basket of electronic candles, defiantly gives her decree before finally leaving the audience holding flickering candles. Too often do we live in bad faith and “abnegate Our Throne” at the word-sniffing, -tasting and -piping head of our bodies. We “cry Victim to inheritance/ Rather than Heir and heiress to the Question of the Dimensionality of Our Being.” Though we may be humiliated by mortality, such abdication is the one true death.
Chamber Made Opera, Opera for a Small Mammal, writer, performer Margaret Cameron, director David Young, sound design, operation Jethro Woodward; La Mama, Melbourne, 4 Dec, 2013
Over the past decade, percussionist Eugene Ughetti and his ensemble, Speak Percussion, have commissioned a startling catalogue of works by emerging and established Australian composers. As part of an MCA/Freedman Fellowship for Classical Music, Ughetti has brought these works together as a living portrait of Australian solo percussion music.
Ughetti’s portrait is virtuosic and post-experimental, which is to say that non-traditional percussion instruments and compositional techniques (with ‘traditional’ incorporating institutionalised techniques of the 20th century avant-garde like serial and spectral procedures) are incorporated seamlessly into unified compositions that are as rewarding to hear as they are challenging to play.
Alex Garsden’s Macrograph is a case in point. The variety of dinosaur sounds Ughetti conjures from a bowed cardboard box requires a mastery of diverse ricochet effects along the bow and extreme sensitivity to bow pressure and speed. These animal recitatives are held together by a background of irregularly chiming steel bowls containing vibrators that are turned on and off at switches as different tones are required. Despite the eclectic combination of instruments, the piece is a perfectly contained series of five episodes escalating in intensity, followed by a coda on pitch-pipes, styrofoam and a metal sheet.
James Rushford’s Twin Resistance requires an extensive battery of bells and crotales, including a series of chimes activated by mop-bucket pedals. The piece’s restricted tone colour provides an opportunity to focus on Rushford’s rhythmic world, a continuous tissue that defies repetition and meter.
While Garsden and Rushford’s pieces show Ughetti supporting a new generation of composers, the concert also highlights his relationships with established composers. Liza Lim’s ‘postcard piece,’ Love Letter, requires the performer to write a love letter and then translate the characters of the letter into musical material. Ughetti’s wife Rochelle must have felt very lucky listening to his beguiling daf drum solo. Throughout the letter’s eight sections (could they be sentences?), the drum is rapidly shaken, swayed, struck all over and caressed with hands, knees, loofah pads and a superball until the final gesture: three Xs traced on the drum skin with the fingertips.
Thomas Meadowcroft’s Plain Moving Landfill from 2003, the earliest work on the program, provided a contrast of pace. Two soporific foot bellows huff and puff into melodicas, generating a snoring, swelling drone. Meanwhile, Ughetti massages a bass drum with soft mallets, brushes and a plastic water bottle.
The concert ended with Anthony Pateras’ Hypnagogics “for microsounds and tape,” which draws in part on the psychoacoustic experiments of the composer Alvin Lucier. Thanks to Ughetti, listeners have had multiple opportunities to hear this work over the past eight years and explore its psychoacoustic properties in different settings. Throughout, Ughetti plays short bursts on rows of shot glasses, small ceramic teacups, miniature skin drums and crotales—the ‘microsounds’—which interact with tones from the tape part to create binaural beats, or tones that seem spatially and timbrally disconnected from the performer’s actions. In this performance I did not hear the ear-tickling binaural beats that I have before, but tones that seemed to fill the room with a shimmering aura.
After such a rich series of short performances, I can’t help asking where the neat edges of the works commissioned by Ughetti come from. What does it say about the funding and commissioning process in Australia that the radical sounds of the past 50 years are being packaged into neat dramatic arcs and discrete variations? Are composers writing for CDs and impatient audiences? Is there a genuine sense that the ideas explored therein need no more than 10 minutes to unfold? Ughetti’s portrait of Australian solo percussion music may also shed a light on the audiences and institutions surrounding it.
Eugene Ughetti, Australian Percussion Solos, Melbourne Recital Centre, 14 Dec, 2013
photo Rémi Chauvin, courtesy MONA Museum of Old and New Art
Slave Pianos/Punkasila
On the opening night of MOFO concerts at the MAC Precinct, young families, middle-aged couples and 20-something hipsters (never seen so many beards) lounge on pink bean bags gently nodding to the mannered drawl of Mick Harvey doing Serge Gainsborough covers.
Then we all troop to the Back Space to see Melbourne’s conceptual art group Slave Pianos collaborating with Indonesian art band Punkasila. Following this, Sun Ra Arkestra is wheeled out of cryogenesis to recall what free jazz used to sound like and the night is topped off with Astronautilus, a Florida rapper who’s on a career high because he didn’t expect a crowd this big and the view from the top of Mt Wellington blew his “freakin’ mind!”
Eclectic seems barely adequate to describe Brian Ritchie’s curatorial approach. While we’re told this happens overseas all the time, it really is unique for Australia, and I suspect it particularly works because it’s in Hobart. Present this combination of acts in a city that’s comparatively spoiled for choice and audiences might just be a bit too picky, waiting for the sideshow to see only the act they know and already love.
Schizosonics
It’s not just that the overall combination of acts is eclectic, some of the performances are seriously varied within themselves. Take the Slave Pianos/Punkasila collaboration. It opens with Australia’s most renowned pianist Michael Kieran Harvey performing a virtuosic haute-classical solo for around 10 minutes. Punkasila, in silver suits, stand around waiting, offering an occasional guitar buzz or a drum skiffle. Harvey finishes and they launch into 20 minutes of playful punk rock over which Indonesian singer Rachel Saraswati ululates. Projected above is an animation of the comic The Lepidopters in which it seems moth creatures from outer space come to earth and somehow everyone gets all sexy. While the Kieran Harvey solo sits oddly at the beginning, the symbolic weight of the Western canon and its imperialistic overtones is powerful. Somehow, by the end, it all seems to make its own kind of sense.
Similarly, mandolin player Chris Thile presented an almost bi-polar set of classical hits for the mandolin (played with astounding virtuosity but alarming facial expressions) mixed with hillbilly folk and a Fiona Apple cover for good measure. Driving the point home, his opening “song” consisted of a cycle of a few bars of each style in what was one of the most awkward, musically unsatisfying and yet somehow compelling openings I’ve experienced.
The Ada Project, Conrad Shawcross, (slow exposure exposing light tracing)
photo Rémi Chauvin, courtesy MONA Museum of Old and New Art
The Ada Project, Conrad Shawcross, (slow exposure exposing light tracing)
The A is for ART
This year’s major MOFO installation was by sculptor Conrad Shawcross. The ADA Project comprises a large re-purposed manufacturing robot with one articulated arm-like pointer, topped with a light globe. Shawcross has created robot “dances,” the light trajectory tracing figures visible only through long exposure photographs (light drawings). Along with curator Ken Farmer, he then commissioned four musical works inspired by the light figure and movement: a post Reichian-rock piece by Beatrice Dillon and Rupert Clervaux (UK); an acid-house pop paean by Tamara & Milo (UK); an operatic lament from Mira Calix (UK) performed by Teresa Duddy (Aus); and some sophisticated glitchy vocal electronica from Holly Herndon (US, the only piece not performed live). The music varied in its connection to the robot, some pieces clearly matching speed, direction changes, angularity, others working more thematically responding to the namesake of the work, Ada Lovelace, 19th century originator (with Charles Babbage) of the Difference Engine. It’s an impressive work of scale and Shawcross and Farmer have created a strong and neat curatorial package but it’s also slightly other than what you expect it to be. The amazing geometries of the light drawings in the photographs are not visible in real-time with the human eye. Instead there is a gap, not an uninteresting one, between what we are told we are seeing and the kinetic action we experience which encourages a more engaged listening.
Tyondai Braxton’s HIVE is billed as an “architectural installation,” which it may have been in its first instalment at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, but here it’s a concert—performers before us, seated on elegant custom- built pods made of lattice material which pulse and glow in gorgeous colours. The multi-movement composition is testament to the power of the click-track as three percussionists perform intricate synchronous rhythmic sequences while Braxton and another laptop conspirator wrap grand swathes of texture, tones and noise around it all. It’s a slick combination of electronics and acoustic percussion, perhaps more so as Braxton avoids the large gestures of big instruments prefering the more delicate palette of woodblocks and smaller drums. This creates a focus and specificity to the action and sound without sacrificing energy and drive.
Robin Fox, RGB Laser
photo Rémi Chauvin, courtesy MONA Museum of Old and New Art
Robin Fox, RGB Laser
No MOFO is complete without a spectacle by Robin Fox who has performed at every festival so far. This year was particularly special as he was premiering his RGB Laser show. Fox’s green laser magic has awed crowds around the world in its own right and as part of Chunky Move’s Mortal Engine. It’s hard to imagine it getting any better but here the Fox has excelled himself. In a realtimetv video interview he explains that these new lasers (purchased courtesy of his Creative Australia Fellowship) have caused him to reverse his process. He used to drive the lasers with the music, now he creates the images first; these are then translated into sounds: fat, dirty, grunty, spitty and throbbing. Fox believes that the visuals make this noise-fest palatable to those less inclined to listen. While the audience is assaulted by noise they are also completely immersed in intersecting beams and cones of coloured light creating a psychedelic fantasia that enthrals.
But wait, there’s more
Outside of the MAC festival precinct was a series of concerts by the Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Australian Art Orchestra and the Tasmanian Symphony; a four hour mesmeric improv marathon by MURAL (Norway/Australia) with interactive visuals from Kjell Bjørgeengen at the beautifully dark and brooding Theatre Royal; and a subtle, ambient multiplayer installation by Melanie Herbert at CAT; and morning meditation gigs at the Baha’i Centre. A series of activities focused on the ecology of the River Derwent in the Heavy Metals Project at MONA proper. Other MONA exhibitions included the haunting Red Queen; a solo show by Hubert Duprat and his jewellery-making caddis flies; and the dark descent into madness that was photographer Roger Ballen’s mixed-media room installation Asylum, offering quiet, seeping terror. Oh and FAUX-MO, the after hours club that even sported a spaceship but filled with way too many teensters for this punter.
MOFO does of course also include relatively commercial acts (though always on the alternative end of the spectrum) like Matmos, The Orb and John Grant. While not everything satisfies there’s enough of ‘your’ thing to keep you hanging around, curious for the next instalment. This festival marked the end of the original matching funding agreement between MONA’s David Walsh and the state government. It was also the first time that interstate visitors hit 50% of the total audiences. Here’s hoping that the quality of the event and its audience impact is enough to renew funding arrangements so that this remarkable festival can continue to realise its bold and unique vision.
Emmanuel Angelikas, BUKA, Ketut and his prize cock, Ubud, 2005, courtesy the artist
Australia does not honour its artists sufficiently. For decades there has been an undeclared rejection of artists who do not fit neatly into a code or style. Emmanuel Angelikas is one of these. I congratulate the ACP on including him in their program and on their continued initiative to acknowledge photographers with a long-term exhibition history who have not received the attention they deserve.
Angelikas’ Buka was programmed by Kon Giourotis during his brief directorship of the ACP. However, the theatrical staging of Buka reflects the inheritance of its previous director Alasdair Foster. To walk into the dramatic atmosphere of the large exhibition space was to delight in an abundance of riches. The darkness embraced me and I was immediately entranced by the large photographic transfer onto bricks of an image of hands holding a Hindu ceremonial cloth called a poleng and a small votive representation of Christ on the cross. Next to this were quotations that combined to set the scene, including:
“The servants of the Beneficent God are they who walk on the earth in humbleness, and when the ignorant address them they say: Peace.” Koran 25.63
As a photographic artist Emmanuel Angelikas is an unusual mix of humility and defiance. Buka is a departure from his signature approach, which employs square black and white format, featuring portraiture and environment to explore individual personality (www.emmanuelangelikas.com.au).
Environmental portraiture in photography is typified by the work of Diane Arbus who was hugely influential in the mid-1970s. In Australia photographers such as Jon Lewis and Max Pam are well known examplars of this style. Pam and Angelikas were ‘partners in crime’, working on many shows together while supporting each other as practitioners.
Pam was the senior in this relationship that began when the artists met at art school in 1984. One subject they had in common was the eroticised Asian female. Since the 80s the stereotyping of the female body as erotic has been regarded as ideologically unsound which meant this work was regarded as problematic in some circles. Pam and Angelikas attracted the reputation of being ‘bad boys.’ The attraction to the Asian female body continues in Buka and some viewers might be uncomfortable with it but I don’t want to focus on this issue.
If we look at the history of Angelikas’ practice since the 1970s we discover a rich record of urban Sydney Greek culture. Born in Marrickville in 1963, where he still lives, he has responded to this archetypical yet unique multicultural Sydney suburb where sophisticated urbanity combines with traditional Greek culture. Perhaps Angelikas’ most iconic and memorable image is of a young Greek man sitting on a chair on the roof of a Marrickville house with a plane traversing the sky above him. This image, titled Person who would rather not be in Marrickville and made in 1985, perfectly captures the controversy raging at the time about the imposition of air traffic on urban Sydney.
In the last 10 years Angelikas has had delicate health but accepted an invitation to Bali to document Balinese instruments in musical performances. As Max Pam says in his catalogue essay, “He loved the Balinese from the get go, and they loved him right back.” This led to many trips there between 2004 and 2011. He was introduced to the royal family and formed a fruitful friendship with Arya, a man who was a member of the royal staff. Bali provided Angelikas with the opportunity to heal. It also yielded an invaluable purpose, providing something that Marrickville did not although he was continuing to photograph there.
Seduced by the vibrancy of Balinese culture, in Buka Angelikas steps away from past practice and shoots colour. It is hard to put into words the magic of the environment created in this evocative exhibition. The staging and pools of lighting emphasize this by creating the atmosphere of a shrine, mirroring the importance of worship in Hindu culture and religion. For those who, like myself, have been to Bali there is no need for persuasion. For those who have not I can only hope they’re tempted to visit.
In the portraits, which make up the majority of the images, there is an intimacy, an openness that testifies to a special exchange between the Balinese people and the Australian photographer. Angelikas says this intimacy is revealed in the one to one photographs, looking into the eyes of his subjects. His special access to the royal family adds stylishness and a sense of occasion to other images.
There are hundreds of photographs constellated in clusters and single images of different sizes showing beautiful Balinese people of all ages, in traditional clothing, among verdant vegetation, in stone temples, under colourful sunset skies, groupings of young men wrapped in sarongs posing intently for the camera. In a grid of photos devoted to cock fighting a large central image features a man in a gateway proudly holding his black rooster for the camera. Circling the grid is a line of sharp spears that are attached to the ankle of the birds when they fight to the death.
The exhibition as immersive installation is its greatest strength. A wonderful component is the transfer of photographs onto the surface of traditional Balinese textures such as wood, bricks, silk, mother of pearl and bamboo. Angelikas did this with the help of artisans and technicians in both Bali and Australia. An image of a large orange and white carp in water is printed onto tiles and laid at an angle on the floor in the main room of the gallery. There is an image of shadow puppets on silk, a beautiful naked girl on mother of pearl and a man on snakeskin with a serpent curled around his neck. Individual images are framed with an ornate Balinese wooden frame (an image of what may be a royal couple with their children) or lined with traditional red and gold fabric (four young men naked to the waist in batik sarongs). Angelikas says of these masterful material transfers that “the photographs have been turned into objects, however at the end of the day they are still photographs.”
These elements bring us closer to an experience of being in Bali, a place and culture that has been historically over-romanticized, glamourised, terrorised and exploited. However it is a resilient and rich culture deserving of portrayal especially from the perspective of an Australian photographer. As I write this response to Buka in the warm weather of a Sydney summer I think I need a coconut and lychee cocktail and a gado gado. Then again, maybe I’ll go to Marrickville for a baklava and Turkish coffee. Congratulations Emmanuel Angelikas and may you be healed by Bali.
Emmanuel Angelikas, BUKA, curator Tony Nolan, assistant curators Claire Monneraye, Belinda Hungerford, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, 31 Aug-17 Nov, 2013
Dream Zone, digital compilation from screen, Karen Casey
courtesy the artist and Anna Pappas Gallery
Dream Zone, digital compilation from screen, Karen Casey
“Technology-based art has well and truly cemented itself in the cultural milieu,” writes hybrid artist Karen Casey. Aboriginal artists working with media technologies today create works that present a marriage of tradition and technology, a collusion of past and future in terms of techniques and aesthetic appearance. This was made clear back in 1984, when the first remote Aboriginal television broadcast came out of Yuendumu, 300km north-west of Alice Springs.
In the background of this broadcast was a painting by Andrew Japaljarri Spencer. Titled Satellite Dreaming (1984), it has a central planetary sphere out of which pathways branch to other spheres. It represents the desire for access to communications and broadcast technology, and specifically television, for remote communities. It is a visual picturing of how old media works, with a centralised hub that broadcasts content outward and it is seen on the very medium it pictures, yet it is created using ochre and paint, in dot style with symbolic iconography.
Jumping forward 30 years to another celestially-themed image, a lithographic print by Karen Casey becomes the content for a projection artwork created using technology at vast removes from analogue television. The print is titled Nebula, the current artwork, Dream Zone. Nebula became the visual data fed into a program for creating imagery using Casey’s brain waves. Dream Zone communicates different intentions from those of the Warlpiri in Yuendumu with their television broadcasts, yet it shares the same spirit in its desire to connect with others, in the quest for shared experience.
In 2004 Casey approached the Brain Sciences Institute at Swinburne University with the vision of getting data from her brain to use for the creation of artwork. At the same time she met her now key collaborator Harry Sokol. Since then Casey has created a series of works under the umbrella title of Global Mind Project, looking “at the idea, the possibility, the probability of the interconnected mind beyond the individual.” While originally from a painting and printmaking background, Casey maintains that in moving into media arts her ideas have remained consistent, but as she writes “digital technology has completely expanded my creative repertoire and given me the means to produce interactive and generative spaces and experiences that I was previously not able to realise.”
Dream Zone is a three-channel projection featuring an array of morphing, hexagonal-shaped mandalic forms. Like a soft breath the forms gently pulse in and out, all the while undulating in a seemingly infinitely complex and varied pattern to a background of ethereal music. Despite visual complexity the pattern is minimal, fading to black at times and leaving the viewer immersed in darkness for brief moments, until crystalline forms pierce through like star formations drawn from mysterious faraway galaxies. The colour palette ranges from inky blacks to icy blues and whites and, together with the forms, it appears as much at home among the minutiae of tropical waters as it does meandering through the cosmos.
Karen Casey, Dream Zone, 2012, Generative video installation, National New Media Art Award, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. 2012
photo Ben Wickes
Karen Casey, Dream Zone, 2012, Generative video installation, National New Media Art Award, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. 2012
The Dreaming is so fundamental to Indigenous cosmology and art that I had to ask if this understanding had relevance for Dream Zone. Casey conceded to some relationship in that she proposes the possibility of “an association between an individual’s experience, or dreaming if you like, and that of others within the wider community.” More directly however, Casey’s use of the term ‘dream’ refers neurologically to theta brainwaves. “Theta waves are at the lower end of the frequency spectrum and when predominant they can be associated with dream states, creative improvisation and inspirational thought processes.” When viewed within the broader context of Aboriginal Dreaming Casey believes there is a relationship to theta mind-states. She writes, “It is in those instances when you totally lose yourself in the moment that you can transcend the temporal experience and access a kind of timeless continuum.” Indigenous temporality is ambiguous, ever-present and repeatable, as against historical time, which is linear, unrepeatable and future orientated. Sitting and watching Dream Zone is like being momentarily transported to a state of atemporality, beyond the task-driven noise of the everyday.
Neurologically, if the experience of art creates a pleasurable zing in the brain, it is triggered by a synergy of sensual relations between you and a given thing/object. Dream Zone is created via feedback with Casey’s own brain. She meditated on the morphing hexagon kaleidoscope while her brain waves were recorded and fed back into the program—she created the electroencephalographic feed for the work while she experienced it live. Ideally, the resulting imagery would stimulate a theta state in the viewer, “I anticipate viewers will experience a deeply meditative or trance-like state.” It is very enjoyable and relaxing to be in the presence of this work: staring into it does effect perception and takes you somewhere else. It is also quietly spiritual, on the topic of which Casey states, “…anything that can engender a feeling of connection with the world or make you feel like there is no difference between self and other sets the stage for what I think of as spiritual—there’s an empathy that comes out of that space but also a sense that the whole thing is dependent on consciousness. The consciousness I’m referring to is the interconnected totality of existence rather than simply an autonomous product of our physical being.”
Where else will this project be taken? How far will Casey push the question of the power of the collective mind and how much will she push the capabilities of the technology with her collaborator Sokol? The software developed by Sokol has a mind-boggling amount of aesthetic potential and there is certainly scope for the project to have more conceptual punch. Casey works from an “holistic perspective on life—of creativity, connection and community” and although Dream Zone trades heavily on the experiential, her background features strong projects with a social focus. By her own account Casey envisages an online scenario “where you can actually log in and have a neural conversation with someone else or a group of people.” However elusive it might be, the artistic potential of telepathy is a logical culmination of this exploration of the art of mind.
Dream Zone, generative video installation, artist Karen Casey, technical collaborator, software interface designer Harry Sokol, sound recording, compilation Tim Cole, media compositor, systems designer James Power; Fremantle Arts Centre, 23 Nov, 2013- 19 Jan, 2014
Expedition # 25, 2009, archival print from The Glacier Studies series—part of Singaporean artist Robert Zhau’s faux-scientific documentation of his expedition to the North Pole.
“Yellow Vest Syndrome” first caught my attention among Jasmin Stephens’ recent curatorial projects. A Western Australian phenomenon, Yellow Vest Syndrome sums up being able to do whatever the f… you want as long as you are wearing the requisite gear: the yellow vest, symbol of Big Mining, engineering, maintenance and whatever else is necessary to the smooth operations of the extractive industries.
Apparently WA locals have such respect for the yellow vest they leave its wearers unchallenged—as first tested by Melbourne artist George Egerton-Warburton, practising grafitti otherwise naked, on a main highway, in the bright light of day. Nobody stopped. Nobody questioned the yellow vest. WA is one of the big mining states, home of Gina Rinehart and Andrew Forrest. It’s where Gina’s employees were given standardised placards and paid to protest Rudd’s proposed mining tax increases. The Yellow Vest and its Syndrome are very much a part of the mining ecology—so naturalised in the landscape they’re taken for granted.
This earlier project, Yellow Vest Syndrome: recent West Australian art (Fremantle Arts Centre, 2009), was already, in part, a response to the notion of non-natural hybrid ecologies, the point being that originary or natural worlds and their so-called pure ecologies, reflective of a state of non-human intervention, are at best either extremely rare or a mythic ideal. Novel Ecologies Cross Arts Projects in Sydney’s Kings Cross takes as its starting point the idea that the actions of the human species are radically transforming notions of ecology. If ecology is an interrelated system of networks and webs of relationships among living things and elements on the planet (we tend to think of grass, sky, water and the animals on it as a living system), most of the world’s natural systems are now so compromised by the human presence that few ‘natural’ or ‘original’ ecosystems remain. Rather, we now inhabit a world of emerged and emergent, hybrid ecologies.
The recurrent theme of this exhibition is “ecosystemic thinking.” Perdita Phillips, artist-in-residence at Cross Art Projects, researched Sydney’s largely unknown fairy penguin colony at Manly, a population currently inhabiting a hybrid or breached ecology. Her work, penguin anticipatory archive, reveals a war zone as the penguins combat owners of expensive yachts. Ugly newspaper reports, sympathetic to bashed penguins, argue on the penguins’ side against the rich yachties’ perceived right to do what they want, flaunting their big money as they pollute and trample on the penguins’ habitat rights. Who would have thought? The penguins’ plight resonates as an allegory of local ecologies (farms, nature reserves, national parks) under the threat of big mining (Yellow Vest). How many Sydneysiders are aware of the fairy penguins and local ecology under threat?
Perdita Phillips, , .–. / .- / .- (penguin anticipatory archive), 2013, mixed media, drawings and digital prints (work in progress)
courtesy the artist
Perdita Phillips, , .–. / .- / .- (penguin anticipatory archive), 2013, mixed media, drawings and digital prints (work in progress)
Viewers explore loose leaves in the archive box—poetic metaphysical meditations and drawings, photographs of penguins and Manly locations, harbour maps, representations of water and tides, scientific reports and descriptions of penguin life, newspaper clippings of shocking disturbances and maltreatment. To one side sits a pile of neatly stacked handkerchiefs which visitors are invited to take in exchange for signing a pledge to reflect on the penguins’ plight, opting to agree to one or more of the following:
“In exchange for a handkerchief I will: 1. ask “what does a penguin want?” and do something practical about it; 2, volunteer 3 days a year for a hands-on outdoor environmental project; 3. swap permanently from using tissues to using handkerchiefs; 4. other.”
This part of the work is titled “doing so that (tie a knot in it, the world is a handkerchief, a pile of promises).” The handkerchief gifts are embroidered in ‘penguin speech,’ an artistic envisioning of how penguins might negotiate this bargain—if they could.
In this respect Novel Ecologies shifts the emphasis from an anthropocentric worldview to one closer to Timothy Morton’s object-orientated ontology—non-human species and things. Philosophically, the shift can be traced to the reflections of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty: “thing-being” (Heidegger) and the reversal of the gaze such that ‘things’ are looking back at us (Merleau-Ponty). On behalf of the penguins you are invited to shift your role from viewer-archivist to humble addressee and contract, through acceptance of the gift, to reflect on their plight. Relational aesthetics and its contract of gifting or exchange—Bourriaud’s famous remark: the artwork is a handshake—extends that contract to the world of non-human beings. It’s a cannily inclusive strategy within ecosystemic thinking.
Rounding out the show, the faked photographs of Robert Zhao Renhui/ The Institute of Critical Zoologists reflect on the hybrid state of so-called ecologies of the wild. George Egerton-Warburton’s video of pristine beach ecology is disrupted when a headset booming aggressive urban rap is donned. In the unlikely medium of fantastical fine charcoal drawings, Tori Benz puts the microscope on the rampant microbe ecologies inhabiting the surface and interior of the pregnant human form.
My first experience of a live performance by the UK’s The Hilliard Ensemble was a thrill: the singing felt and looked simply natural—lucid, warmly un-churchy, devoid of over articulation and forced projection in the responsive acoustic of the University of Sydney’s Great Hall.
I quickly became engrossed in the program’s blend of drama and reflection and the sacred and the secular, and a sense of discovery, not least the 13th century Viderunt Omnes by Perotin (rich in swelling wordless chanting, a contrasting jaunty performance of the text and a return to the mesmeric opening sounds), a set of traditional Armenian sacred songs (arranged by Komitas) seemingly in the Orthodox tradition but deeply infused with a distinctively local character (which is heard also as an influence in Marcus Whle’s score for Shaun Parker and Company’s dance work Am I), and three new folk-inspired songs by Hosokawa, which the ensemble only received on arrival in Australia. Linked by a humming motif, the songs slip organically between Western and Japanese modes with supple vocal glides, warbles and melodic twists out of folk, Bunraku and Kabuki traditions.
While the madrigals and liturgical pieces were predictably fine, revealing a great variety of forms and innovations, I was taken by the inherent theatricality of several of the works. Estonian Veljo Tormis’ Kullervo’s Message is a vigorously sung narrative taken from Finland’s Kalevala epic, hauntingly anchored with the repeated whispering of the hero’s name. Arvo Part’s And One of the Pharisees… and Most Holy Mother of God have a surprisingly intense theatricality when performed live. The latter is stunningly spare, solely repeating the phrase “Most Holy Mother of God, Save Us” 17 times with engrossing harmonic richness and subtle rhythmic variations making the prayer dramatically felt.
The concert’s encore was the very funny entr’acte about ‘nobodies’ (based on a Kafka story, Excursion to the Mountain) from a Heiner Goebbels’ music theatre work titled I went to the house but did not enter, in which the ensemble had become actor-singers in 2007—and clearly quite proudly so, if now apparently amused at getting through the piece. Sadly, this concert was one of the ensemble’s last—a founding member had been part of the group for 40 years, the others 20, making profound connections between musical traditions old and new, lustrously sung.
The Piper, My darling Patricia
photo Jamie Williams
The Piper, My darling Patricia
My Darling Patricia, The Piper
The common notion of tragedy is about lives cut short, especially those of children. The traditional tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin entails the disappearance of all the children of a town, but the ambiguities provided by the variety of endings we have inherited make the tale more mysterious than tragic, if nonetheless inherently alarming.
My Darling Patricia’s The Piper, the first of two festival productions about the Pied Piper (the second was Sydney Camber Opera’s Into the Little Hill), presented an ambitious version of the tale apparently inspired by the Ted Hughes’ account. Although enthusiastically received by reviewers and audiences, I thought it over written and the narrative unnecessarily complicated. I was sometimes as nonplussed as the children of various ages around me.
Before the show proper commences, head-phoned child and adult volunteers respond to movement instructions familiarising themselves with the performing space. Once underway, they become the townspeople of Hamelin and the children are later lead away by the Piper. The story is told by an off-stage narrator (a reassuring velvet voiced Clare Grant) while large-scale projected animations by Sam James establish a sense of place (a heavily industrialised city, bug life close-ups of nature and surrounding conifer forests, although the narration slips in eucalypts as well). Unattractive white mobile ramps vary the stage space while deft puppeteering (later shared with the volunteer performers) provides humour in the form of the dextrous rats plaguing the city.
The Piper arrives: a glorious, autumnally golden bear—a she bear, says the narrator. First up, the non-speaking bear-cum-Piper amusingly mimes being a multi-instrumentalist, but that’s gotten quickly out of the way. Her talent is as a dancer: Ghenoa Gela moves with a delightful bear-like sway on hind feet. So what is going to seduce the children of Hamelin? The bear doesn’t pipe so is it the dancing? It’s a palpable gap and left me wondering. Could the pre-show ‘induction’ have included a simple dance step for the children, so when the bear dances them away it can be done with conviction in what should be a delightful but equally chilling moment. After all the Bear appears to seduce the rats in a dance with lengths of blue silk. In the meantime, the narrator has bewilderingly announced, If I hear right, that she is the otherwise non-speaking Bear/Piper.
The most bracing moments in The Piper include the Bear’s drowning of the rats, aided by the volunteers waving the blue silk cloth of the roaring river, and then her raging against the Mayor’s cheating her of her reward. She stands up high against a cloud swirling storm, gesturing angrily: nature intent on vengeance. After that, the children are taken away, eventually returning, partying with the bear, although the narrator is not so sure about their fate: maybe, she says, the children are “battling cane toads and other pests” with the bear. But what we see is of course more reassuring. There are many endings to the old tale: good (relocation to start a new life), bad (the Piper as plague) and ugly (the Piper as paedophile). This version is a muddle, lacking My Darling Patricia’s usual clarity of purpose and integrated design magic. The participatory goal and the appeal of the bear suggest that a more lucid Piper has potential.
Ensemble Offspring with Lee Ranaldo and Mike Patton, Sydney Festival 2014
photo Chris Frape
Ensemble Offspring with Lee Ranaldo and Mike Patton, Sydney Festival 2014
Lee Renaldo, Mike Patton, Ensemble Offspring
In this double bill, Ensemble Offspring became a potent chamber orchestra, conducted with vigour and precision by Roland Peelman. Mike Patton, welcomed by a screaming audience, delivered his account of Berio’s Laborintus II with basso spoken and screamed texts with loudhailer and considerable verve, accompanied by the Song Company, its female member providing some of this fierce composition’s most beautiful, melancholy sounds in Part I, while the Ensemble Offspring orchestra excelled, especially in the quickfire transition to a demented big band uproar. Unfortunately there were no surtitles and a predictable rag bag of video images (forests, data map, speeding cars, experimental film scribbling) in Part II added nothing. But the interplay between the words of Dante, Sanguineti, Eliot, Pound and the Bible—as sound—with the acoustic instrumentation and electronic score was exhilarating and, in the end, gently seductive.
Also on the program was Lee Ranaldo’s Hurricane Transcriptions, a response to Hurricane Sandy (in its wake he had limited supplies and no electricity for a week). Although not intended as a literal recounting of being hit by a hurricane, the work nonetheless emerged from sharp cello snaps, whisperings and a deepening pulse into a subsequent musical storm in two waves, variously replete with electric guitar bowing and then chiming against frantic strings, siren moans and a hammered metal sheet. Unfortunately, the several songs that Renaldo wove into the work, while passable as stand-alones, sounded naïve, the accompaniment suddenly conventional and at odds with the rest of the composition’s ambient fascination. Nonetheless this moody, sometimes quite disturbing work made its mark in what was a standout festival concert.
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2014 Sydney Festival: The Hilliard Ensemble: A Hilliard Songbook, The Great Hall, University of Sydney, 15 Jan 15; My Darling Patricia, The Piper, Carriageworks, 9-19 Jan; Hurricane Transcriptions/Laborintus II, Lee Ranaldo, Mike Patton, Ensemble Offspring, Song Company, City Recital Hall, 16 Jan
Indigenous writer-director Ivan Sen’s award winning Beneath Clouds (2002) and Toomelah (2011) are followed by yet another distinctive feature film. “With its small-town setting, cowboy cops and a good guy in pursuit of justice, Mystery Road has more than a hint of the Western…Visually, it’s as clearly delineated as a graphic novel, displaying a predilection for close-ups and figures silhouetted against sunset landscapes…Sen has employed the framework of the whodunnit to create a striking piece of cinema whose stylisation enhances rather than overshadows this story about a misfit cop probing a town with a rotten, racist core” (Katerina Sakkas, RT116) 5 copies courtesy of Transmission Films
DVD: Sarah Polley, Stories We Tell
Canadian filmmaker Sarah Polley turns to documentary to examine the mysteries of her late actor mother’s life, using her father’s home movie footage and recreations in the same style that sync beautifully. Polley had always looked different from other family members, but beyond a bit of joking (characteristic of this clan) the truth does not come out until the director begins interviewing likely suspects and discovering their sometimes odd perspectives on the matter. Most engaging are her ‘interrogations’ of her father and his documented version of events. This is fine, un-melodramatic autobiographical filmmaking. KG 5 copies courtesy of Madman Entertainment
CD: The Necks, Open
“Open [is] a sparse work of bare percussion, tinkling chimes and gentle pianistic gesture…arranged in reference to a recording made by [drummer Tony] Buck of a Monochord, a droning stringed instrument tuned to one open pair of notes. “I’m not sure at what point we decided to start with the monochord,” says [pianist Chris] Abrahams. “We walked into the studio and the only thing we thought of was that we wanted to make something sparse…We didn’t want it to build too much, we wanted it to flow through a number of different scenes rather than a teleological build up of crescendos—that was the main brief” (Oliver Downes, interview with Chris Abrahams). 5 copies courtesy of The Necks
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In Namakili, the first part of a double bill titled New Blak Territory, a lone woman in an Aboriginal design dress speaks in language. English words dot the dialogue and I struggle to understand what is being said. Immediately we are challenged by the boundaries between culture and race in Australia. Our orator provides an English translation and we discover her identity, her traditional country and her family roots.
We have begun a journey through the life of Namakili, “also known as Lynette.” Lynette Hubbard plays herself as the central character, her easy rapport quickly engaging the audience with emotional honesty, offering an intimate portrayal of the life of a Desert woman torn between two worlds.
The theme of black versus white is dominant: mixed race, cultures, heritage. In a hospital waiting room, Lynette is waiting for an appointment to see the doctor. Lupus (named in Latin after the wolf, she explains) is destroying healthy cells and affecting her kidneys. She muses that perhaps this is black waging a battle against white within her own body.
With dog howls, references to Tennant Creek artist Dion Beasley’s illustrations for the children’s book Too Many Cheeky Dogs and a fight between Lynette and her sister depicted as two dogs in battle, Lupus is never far from this story.
Peppered with humour, Lynette’s story-telling never shies away from the challenges and harsher realities of life. When confronted by another patient—“You’re not one of those tan people who think you’re black are you?…You’re either Aboriginal or you’re not!”—the dialogue shifts to Shylock’s “I am a Jew…” from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice before moving back into language, but accompanied by traditional Greek music, highlighting Lynette’s Greek heritage. The aggression, confusion, and tinge of tragedy in this scene is lightened by Lynette’s final quip to her fellow patient, “So you wanna be friends on Facebook?”
Namikili is unavoidably Northern Territorian in nature. The story touches on contemporary politics when one old patient jokes about installing pokies in hospital waiting rooms. “It’d fund the whole hospital system. (Northern Territory politician) Dave Tollner would do it.” Much of the strength of this work is in the close relationship the audience shares with the subject matter.
The performance is sporadically interrupted by a mobile phone, with Lynette having to explain to her family that she’s on stage at the moment and can’t talk. The phone rings one last time, and happy her work on stage is done she replies, “The show? I reckon it’s going alright.” Turning to the audience, she asks, “Whadda you reckon?” “Yes!” replies the audience before breaking into a final chorus of laughter and cheers.
In I Am Man, tufts of spear grass break through the floor of the theatre’s entrance, which leads into a primeval forest, the air thick with powdery white dust. Muted lighting reveals a mystical scene of slender poles growing haphazardly, some with tribal markings, others with metal pins protruding. The night-time clicks and rattles of frogs, crickets and other unknown creatures interject in this dark world.
Slowly a shadowy, grey creature emerges from the grass, wiping and blowing at the ground. He carefully takes straps from his clothing, marks his territory, then binds his hands with deliberate concentration. A twisting plume of dust appears from above and as the dancer is drawn closer he places his hands into the gentle flow of white powder. Sudden darkness falls.
A spotlight defines the naked torso of a man coated in white powder high at the rear of the stage. The dancer’s muscles ripple across his back as he rises from crouching. The sustained music with a sporadic bass drum beat and singers, Celtic in style, adds religious feeling to the birth of this creature.
Throughout there is a sense of discomfort. The choreography is lyrical yet abounds in jagged movements. The soundtrack’s deep beating pulse surges through me, while interruptions in the form of electric buzzing, clangs, a piercing whine and disembodied voices disturb and unsettle. At close quarters the two dancers are unsure of each other, tentative, frightened, drawn together by a curious uncertainty.
Breath and blowing are centrally thematic in I Am Man. Both dancers (Guy Simon, Darren Edwards) experiment with their breath, blowing into their hands, exhaling with force, discovering breath in their bodies. When the white creature collapses, his dark companion uses his breath to guide the other dancer’s movements, blowing him back to his refuge on the ledge above the stage.
The white powder provides both paint and canvas. The dancers create patterns in the heavy residue on the ground and smear the powder on their bodies. After a cleansing shower, the white creature writhes his wet body along the powder-coated wall leaving a faint image picked out by a spotlight’s beam.
In a final, distant duet with the white creature on his ledge and the dark one below at centre stage, the dancers mimic each other. The intensity of the choreography is expressed in considered, detailed movements; strength and agility are evident but the movement is also subtle and refined. A lyrical piano solo completes the mood of elegance in this duet.
As the light fades on the white dancer, the focus falls on the original shadowy figure as he delicately traces patterns, repeating them with his hands, head, body and feet. Audience members prop themselves forward in their seats, leaning in to the intimacy of the movement. The light dims, the dancer disappears, and we are left with the sound of a creature scuttering around somewhere in the dark. All too quickly this beautiful and reflective work has drawn to a close.
If Namakili and I Am Man are the beginnings of the New Blak in Northern Territory theatre, this is a trend I look forward to following. Perhaps they’ll be best enjoyed in their home setting and, like the iconic features of our local landscape, provide ample reason for audiences to travel to the Territory to experience them before we contemplate their national future.
New Blak Territory, a double bill of new Indigenous theatre, Namikili, writer, performer Lynette Hubbard, writer, director Stephen L Helper; I Am Man, creator, director Ben Graetz, performers Guy Simon, Darren Edwards, Brown's Mart Theatre, 19-30 Nov 2013.
To turn the body inside out and reveal its systems one by one is the purpose of the science of anatomy. AORTA, the final work of 2013 by choreographer Stephanie Lake, also seeks to show the world beneath our skin, but as kinetic poetry. It is an ambitious vision, deepening the truth that dance reflects to us a felt sense of the body, and integrating design elements to produce a multi-layered work of abstract grace.
In a string of changing atmospheres, AORTA sees dancers Josh Mu, James Pham and James Batchelor swell and ripple like blood in the veins, vibrate like nerves, mutter and quibble in a cerebral section, then leap and scream with a primal pulse, and sometimes unite their hands and fingers to produce a thatch of wriggling villi. Their ensemble work depicts complex relationships and often microscopic (here magnified) chain reactions: sometimes soft and cascading, sometimes mechanical and angular. This vocabulary seems drawn from both experience and scientific knowledge: the spasm of a muscle we recognise at a glance, but the firing of a neural pathway is quite another thing, far more elusive.
Lake’s intricate visual poetry is a strength and her dancers are in consummate form to deliver a steady and mesmerising stream of it (Phan in particular undulating without a sound, like quicksilver escaping). Enriching this is a soundscape from Robin Fox of mostly electronic but sometimes organic textures (with trickling water and slippery, ultrasonic moments). Integral, too, is projection design by Rhian Hinkley: on three backdrop screens laser-like images wax and wane—sizzling asterisks and streaming particles, fractals that spread themselves like bonded molecules, interiors opened out.
Conjuring that which is beyond our sight, and yet resides within our deepest biology, AORTA is a complex and beautiful work that, like all living things, amounts to more than the sum of its interconnected parts.
Eleanor Bauer, Big Girls do Big Things
photo AIan Douglas
Eleanor Bauer, Big Girls do Big Things
From beneath the skin to behind the façade, Big Girls do Big Things is concerned with sub-surface complexities of another kind. This solo work toured by Belgian-based, US dancer/choreographer Eleanor Bauer, is a performance about the demands of performance, and the identity crisis that comes with chameleonic prowess. While this might suggest solipsism in less practised hands, Bauer has the sharp-edged presence and humour to make it both soulful and entertaining.
For a start, her props are perfect—an alluring scene set before she enters. An A-frame ladder towers in the corner and a gargantuan polar bear costume is splayed on the floor, all bathed in Arctic light as strains of Sibelius hint at sublime horizons. The polar bear is an icon—solitary, rare, remote, a figure we imagine vanishing into fields of ice. But it is also large. Larger than life. And much larger than Eleanor Bauer, as we discover when she climbs inside it and begins to dance. The costume gathers, collapses and comically contorts as she manipulates it from within, flashing its cavernous eyes and dragging its empty limbs. How to inhabit this prodigious persona?
A string of solutions is tried: the baggy bear becomes a rapper with a swagger and a menacing growl. Then the suit is shed and draped like a stole as Bauer strikes out in a high-heeled catwalk prance. But these efforts are frosted with comical dissatisfaction, and the problem remains one of scale. So she heads for the ladder to make more mischief with metaphor. As she ascends it, her rendition of Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” advances by ever-stretching octaves and corresponding ladder steps from a low contralto toward an agonised squeak at the pinnacle. “It’s lonely at the top,” she quips.
Teetering there, she delivers a vertiginous speech, a kaleidoscope of pop-cultural stereotypes spiralling in oversized satire and discarded one by one. It is all wildly entertaining; but more than that, what makes all this work, apart from its fun and elegant metaphors, is Bauer’s ability to exploit the tension of her own presence on stage. Through cracks in the dazzling surface we glimpse an existential plight, revealed in long, edgy pauses and genuine moments of risk.
And so, when Bauer inverts and discards the polar bear at last, what remains is one performer in black, exposed and with nowhere to hide. She takes refuge in her discipline then, performing a barefoot ballet to Sibelius with simple devotion and rigour, transcending the fuss of excess in the end. Then she retreats to the curtains behind her, to be swallowed up by their blackness once again.
Chunky Move, AORTA, choreographer Stephanie Lake, score, lighting Robin Fox, costumes Shio Otani, projection design Rhian Hinkley, Chunky Move Studios, Melbourne, 22-30 Nov; Big Girls do Big Things, Eleanor Bauer, Dancehouse, Melbourne, 29-30 Nov, 2013
Smitha Cariappa, Lying on the floor, floured performance
photo Yeehwan Yeoh
Smitha Cariappa, Lying on the floor, floured performance
The word ‘seam’ makes me think of a repetitive action, stitching threads by hand crisscrossing a line, or by machine sewing up and down, in and out, most often along a linear trail. At this time of the year it makes me think of another action, of bowling a cricket ball along a prescribed path with the end direction being unpredictable. The objective of a seam suggests bringing together, lapping over and abutting different materials, sometimes creating a crack or fissure.
In November 2013 choreographic research and development centre Critical Path, in partnership with the Centre for Contemporary Design Practices and the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, University of Technology, Sydney, produced SEAM13. Since 2009 this partnership has facilitated four symposia, each SEAM containing an open invitation to artist practitioners, academics and the public, with an inherent orientation toward interdisciplinary exchange.
The body has been central to the multiple themes of the SEAM series, spawning conversations and convergences within and outside dance and movement alongside numerous other practices including architecture and interactive technologies. Convenors of previous SEAM symposia, Margie Medlin (Director of Critical Path) and Benedict Anderson (Director of CCDP, UTS), were joined for SEAM13 by live art practitioner Paul Gazzola, Critical Path’s inaugural Associate Artist (2012-13). They proposed the topical themes of Authorship, Curation and Audience.
SEAM13 opened at Critical Path’s harbourside home in The Drill Hall at Rushcutters Bay with three engaging keynotes. Artist David Capra, known for his public dance and banner waving works, set the tone for the weekend with a curious, often hilarious chat, accompanied and at times upstaged by his dog Teena. Former professional dancer Deborah Ascher Barnstone, currently a Professor of Architecture, delivered a thoughtful meditation on forgery in the capital A Art world. The incitement of the evening for me came from intermedia artist David Pledger. His provocation on the role and responsibility artists have in the curation of society bordered with the Convenor’s Statement which located arts production ideals of the 70s and 80s as shifting towards increasing “institutionalised authorship” [the usurpation of artists by producers and managers described by Pledger in his Currency House Platform Paper No 37, “Re-Valuing the Artist in The New World Order,” 2013. Eds]
Continuing through the weekend with a dense and diverse program of performative lectures, academic papers, conversations and performances, SEAM13 generated an atmosphere in which people from different disciplines and with varied interests created many junctions. For me, this triggered reflection on how dance and choreographic practices have changed radically over the past decade, especially in relation to other art practices and how they engage with dance, where dance turns into and folds together with other art forms and how such moves are initiated.
This turning and folding was apparent during the in-between of the symposium: talking when climbing the stairs from one session to another with a ‘trans-disciplinary artist researcher,’ queuing for the site-specific installation that was the delicious catering, or debating the role of audiences with colleagues who ‘fabricate interventions’ and ‘work across boundaries.’ After engaging in a conversation with an architect, an academic and a ‘keen researcher of the emergent and the unforeseen,’ a furrow appeared for me.
At many times during the three-day SEAM13 symposium, The Carpenters’ strange 70s song “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft…” came into my head. I was in a room bubbling with multi-disciplinary, cross-disciplinary, interdisciplinary, trans-disciplinary, inter-media practitioners. Working within, between, across and at the intersections and junctions were participants who identified as performing artists, architects, philosophers, producers, curators, academics, researchers, teachers, performative creative practitioners, experimental artists… and among them a few who identified as “dancer and choreographer.”
Dance has always been considered inherently interdisciplinary, so the notion of choreographic ideas and concepts translating to other disciplines is not new. Choreographic ideas threaded through SEAM13 presentations, mostly implicitly, but when explicitly referenced seemed slightly out of place. The two-week-long workshops that bookended the symposium provided local dance artists with explicit practical experience. Workshop facilitators Mette Edvardsen and Kate McIntosh both make performance work within a European context. Each artist comes from a traditional dance training background, although their current interests are often independent of the body, albeit still drawing on and expanding dance and choreographic principles. In conversation with some of the dance artist participants it seems that both workshops provided an opportunity to experiment with engaging individual movement and dance practices within a broader disciplinary conversation.
The focus for SEAM13, as expressed in the convenors’ statement, was “to give a platform for independent artists to formulate their autonomy and direction.” Interestingly, the majority of participants had some sort of affiliation with academic institutions while independent artists, specifically from the dance sector that Critical Path supports, were under-represented. Why this was so is not entirely clear as SEAM provides a forum for communication around expanded notions of dance and choreography, and the potential for complex interactions and processes to occur about the radically changed discipline of dance is great.
This underrepresentation of dance-in-dance is also apparent in the wider context. The Carriageworks, Dance House and Keir Foundation biennial Keir Choreographic Award dedicated to the commissioning of new choreographic work and promoting innovation in contemporary dance has recently been announced. It is timely and welcomed by most in the Australian dance sector, despite the debate around the ‘competition’ context. An interesting aspect of this new award in relation to “promoting innovation in contemporary dance” lies in the call for entrants: “professional artists with an established practice in other art forms are invited to propose a new choreographic idea.” Once again there is a crack where it appears that the gap between choreographic ideas and choreographic craft has widened.
Full of extraordinary diversity, albeit somehow strangely similar, SEAM13 provoked thoughts about the discomfort that comes when the border between forms is dissolved and the dilemmas that have to be faced by the discrete discipline of dance in this new world order of interdisciplinarity. Situated somewhere between brave and indulgent, SEAM was an audacious project exposing an opening which revealed a disconnect between dance and other disciplines outside the performing arts.
SEAM2013 Symposium and Workshop Series, Critical Path, Sydney, Nov 15-17, 2013
André de Ridder (conductor) and Liza Lim (composer), Tongue of the Invisible rehearsal
photo Klaus Rudolf
André de Ridder (conductor) and Liza Lim (composer), Tongue of the Invisible rehearsal
Today we are likely to hear the word “peregrination” as meaning “a meandering journey.” In 12th century Anglo-Norman and Middle French the word referred to one’s earthly journey towards heaven, a pilgrimage where the path, and perhaps even the destination, is uncertain. Liza Lim’s Garden of Earthly Desire and Tongue of the Invisible are musical peregrinations, in this earlier sense, through artworks that themselves depict winding paths through sensual landscapes in search of the spiritual.
Melbourne-based contemporary music ensemble Six Degrees will perform Garden of Earthly Desire at the upcoming Metropolis New Music Festival. “I’ve known the members of Six Degrees for many years,” Lim, in the UK, explained in a phone interview. “Many have played my music before in ensembles including the Atticus String Quartet and the ELISION Ensemble.”
Garden of Earthly Desire is an extended work for chamber ensemble based on the 15th century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. “It was written in 1988 and was the first big piece I wrote for the ELISION Ensemble. The Bosch was a jumping-off point for all of us. It’s very rich in its imagery…It’s made up of these incredibly detailed figures. As a viewer you start to create stories in the different figures. How did something get there? What’s the relationship between the parts of this strange, hybrid, animal-human?”
Everyone will be familiar with the paradox that travelling is really about finding places to sit down. Perhaps this is why “peregrination” also referred to a “resting place” or a “temporary habitation.” Lim’s response to the Bosch painting is full of such resting places where the audience encounters immaculately detailed and otherworldly figures before being hurried off to the next scene.
Though almost 25 years separate the pieces, Lim sees connections between Garden of Earthly Desire and Tongue of the Invisible, which is based on poems by the 14th century Sufi poet Hafiz. “Both are about intersecting pathways, creation of meaning as you journey through a landscape—a garden, say. A garden of images and ideas and emotions.”
In Tongue of the Invisible, recently recorded by Ensemble musicFabrik for the Wergo label, this sense of journeying is written into the libretto. “Jonathan Holmes chose the ghazals [a poetic form] and developed a grid-like structure where every square has a line of the poem instead of following the narrative form. Wherever you turn you can trace a number of different pathways through this grid. Wherever you turn is the poem, is this world of bewilderment and yearning. That was a huge influence on what I did musically as well.”
The result is a musical world where bewildering fury gives way to ecstasy, as in the first movement “At dawn I heard the tongue of the invisible.” A teeming wall of sound punctuated by swooping trills from the woodwind plunges into silence before tingling, shivering cimbalom and muted brass underscore a ravaged cry from baritone Omar Ebrahim. Other movements explore the tender pathos and patient yearning of Hafiz’s poetry, such as “Between the pages of the world (II),” where Ebrahim mourns the short lifespan of the rose that is then “pressed/ Between the pages of the world.” To sing Hafiz must be a daunting task considering the depth of the Qawwali tradition, but Ebrahim traverses Hafiz’s emotional world of rapture and longing with sensitivity and stamina throughout the almost hour-long work.
Hafiz’s poetic peregrinations may be considered a type of translation between worlds, of finding the term in one world for an object in another through a complex and paradoxical weave of meanings. “The Hafiz is a work that reflects on translation between one language to another, but more than that, between ways of being and ways of experiencing. What I really love about the poetry is how elusive it is. It seems immediate. There are these really earthy, sensuous images, but at the same time you can’t quite grab hold of it. It’s very complex and indefinable. He talks about drunkenness and wildness and in the next line something about being gathered up by divine love. You’re shifting registers of feeling and meaning all the time. As soon as you think you’ve got somewhere it’s subverted by the poetry.”
We might think of Lim’s compositions as a second level of peregrination between the artistic sources and the musical. But as in Hafiz’s poetry, the ecstatic is sought through contrasts and surprises. A remarkable element of Liza Lim’s music is the imaginative and unique ways it conjures feelings or scenes without the use of literal transcription or imitation. “I don’t think of my music as a transcription of anything, really. I’m not trying to map nature or a specific situation or emotion. For me, everything is much more elusive, more ambiguous. Yes, I’m inspired by many things that may be literary or from another art form. It could be anything that provides inspiration. I think through the medium of music these impulses start to speak a more abstract, musical language. Maybe there’s something about musical thinking by itself that goes beyond transcription. It’s about transformation.”
Part of the translation from the works to the music is achieved by the performers themselves, through the inclusion of different levels of improvisation. Says Lim, “I find that very interesting and it’s something that I tried to work with in the structure of the music and the setup of the ensemble in the way it combined improvisation and more directed things. It was about creating experiences for the group, for a community of musicians within the context of a performance.”
Liza Lim does not so much set words to music as use them to construct a journey whose truth is to be found between the musical lines, through a process of immanent peregrination. “I’ve always sought to write something that was quite physically immediate in the sense of performance, of gesture, of theatre and also in the sense of the mystic, for me. They are part of a continuum or of a whole picture.”
Australian composer Liza Lim is Professor of Composition at the University of Huddersfield, UK. Alex Ross, music writer for The New Yorker, listed Tongue of the Invisible as one of the CDs of 2013.
Sarah Rodigari, Filibuster of Dreams, presented at Arts House, part of the Festival of Live Art (FOLA), 13-30 March
photo Jessica Olivieri
Sarah Rodigari, Filibuster of Dreams, presented at Arts House, part of the Festival of Live Art (FOLA), 13-30 March
In “The trouble with tragedy,” 2014 Sydney Festival productions inspire Keith Gallasch to ponder contemporary meanings and forms of tragedy and their antitheses.
We pay tribute to Performance Space’s 30 years with Caroline Wake’s feature report on 10 glorious days of performance, conversation and celebration, including Mike Parr’s Daydream Island, a deeply disturbing performance in response to the plight of asylum seekers.
Our second feature, West, focuses on Riverside Parramatta and Campbelltown Arts Centre, their 2014 programs, challenges and ambitions, and Virginia Baxter reports on FUNPARK in which the Bidwill community asserted their dignity through art.
Live art, its practitioners and aficionados get right royal treatment with the advent of the first biennial Festival of Live Art (FOLA) led by Melbourne’s Arts House. John Bailey previews.
A sad farewell to James Waites, 1955-2014. About to go to print, we heard of Jim’s death. Jim was a brave and dedicated reviewer, blogger and a fond colleague. An obituary will appear in RT120.
RealTime issue #119 Feb-March 2014 pg. 4
30 Ways with Time & Space. Row 1 – Nadeena Dixon, photo Heidrun Löhr (HL); Clare Britton, Matt Prest and Leslie Britton Prest (HL). Row 2 – Victoria Spence (HL); Rakini Devi, photo Bec Dean; Dean Walsh (HL)
Row 3 – Hossein Ghaemi & collaborators, photo Nic Dorward; Vicky Van Hout & Thomas E Kelly, photo Lucy Parakhina; row 4 – Sandra Carluccio (HL); Simone O’Brien, (HL)
30 Ways with Time & Space. Row 1 – Nadeena Dixon, photo Heidrun Löhr (HL); Clare Britton, Matt Prest and Leslie Britton Prest (HL). Row 2 – Victoria Spence (HL); Rakini Devi, photo Bec Dean; Dean Walsh (HL)
Performance Space is an unwieldy entity: part site, part community, part sensibility and increasingly, a part of history. Its 30th birthday party was bound to be epic and indeed it was: You’re history! was a two-week program that included so many artists and events, it was possible to camp at Carriageworks for the duration and still miss something.
The festival combined three main programs: 30 Ways With Time and Space, a series of performances by artists who have been involved with Performance Space over the years; the Directors’ Cuts, in which former artistic directors were given an hour or so to do as they wished; and a series of new works by Tess de Quincey, Nigel Kellaway, Rosalind Crisp and Brown Council. On a typical night, one might arrive at 6.30pm to see a short performance in the foyer before moving into Bay 20 for a Director’s Cut and then exiting to find another short work underway. Once that had finished, you could see whichever new performance was on or wander into Bay 19 to watch Brown Council’s video artwork. The result was that Carriageworks was occupied and animated by Performance Space and its patrons for the entire two weeks.
Opening Night
On the opening night, Aunty Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor sang a welcome to country before co-directors Bec Dean and Jeff Khan gave their speeches while artist Sandra Carluccio launched tiny balsa planes—on which were written fragments from the archive—from the atrium. Jon Rose and Lucas Abela played a loud and aggressive set that successfully drowned out most conversations, an appropriately uncompromising gesture from an organisation that prefers to challenge rather than comfort its audience. Branch Nebula then took over the foyer to stage a live multiplayer game.
30 Ways with Time & Space
In the 30 Ways program, established artists tended to oscillate between reminiscence and re-enactment, sometimes within the same performance. While slipping in and out of old costumes and performances, Victoria Spence reflected on a vivid life, climaxing in an apocalyptic poem alternating between despair and ironic acceptance:
“We are culturing everything—ourselves, our veggies, our kids, unashamedly/ embracing our bacterial and microbial co-existence./ Culture is literally in our guts and we taste great.”
The audience helped Simone O’Brien dress and undress while she reminisced about infamously and spectacularly pissing from a trapeze in a mid-90s performance. For a moment it looked as if she might christen Carriageworks’ floor but she refrained. To the strains of “Fascination” Clare Grant and Chris Ryan, of Sydney Front fame, performed in trademark slips while they recalled touring Europe with pockets full of Thai baht. Two other Sydney Front members in the audience, John Baylis and Nigel Kellaway, laughed so hard they nearly spilled their wine. Another much loved ensemble, Frumpus, also dug out their favourite costumes, dancing in daggy red tracksuits before switching to demure embroidery in virginal white dresses, uttering snippets of dialogue from The Exorcist and finally morphing into the disappearing girls of Picnic at Hanging Rock.
In contrast, younger artists tended to riff on themes of inheritance. Matt Prest and Clare Britton are roughly the same age as the Performance Space, meaning that they—like me—were in primary school when the Sydney Front were performing. Together with their son Leslie, they hopped into a bubble and narrated their lives from 1983, allocating each year a minute, a memory and a song.
Post (Mish Grigor, Zoe Coombes Marr, Natalie Rose) staged another of their performances of wilful ignorance, allocating themselves two minutes to select a play from the canon, two minutes to prepare some notes on a theme from a well-worn list and two minutes to link them to the plot for the audience. The results were hilarious as the performers segued from Handke’s Kaspar to Casper the movie to the actor Devon Sawa. On another night, Applespiel staged a pantomime about how they saved Performance Space and thus rescued Sydney from eternal remounts of The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.
Themes of inheritance also arose in some of the Indigenous performances in the program. Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor appeared with her daughter Nadeena Dixon to give an account of growing up with the great activist Chicka Dixon (1928-2010) as father and grandfather. Vicki Van Hout and Thomas E Kelly duetted precisely in an hilarious dance of increasing discombobulation which definitely warrants a reprise. Other artists did not confine themselves to the half-hour time slot—Ryuchi Fujimara and Kate Sherman danced 30 duets over two days, always appearing when least expected in a variety of sites around the building.
The standout performance was perhaps Mike Parr’s Daydream Island, which took up where his performances of the early 2000s left off, returning to the subject of asylum seekers. Instead of being presented in the gallery, it was staged in a theatre with a seating bank, and instead of taking several hours, it took roughly one.
In front of a large screen upstage is a small table and a chair. Further downstage are five stools, where Parr’s assistants sit. Parr, wearing a lurid Hawaiian shirt, enters to the strains of “I Still Call Australia Home.” He sits on the chair with his back to the audience, however we still see his face, his assistant feeding the image live to the screen. A female assistant rises from her stool, goes to the table and wipes Parr’s eyebrow with iodine. She inserts a needle and thread and starts stitching. So far, so grimly familiar. But then she ties something to Parr’s face—a tiny plastic pig. The image immediately recalls the strange moment when the country was outraged about the export of live animals but silent about the outsourcing of its detention centres. Any such reading is undercut by the assortment of figurines that continues to be stitched to the artist’s cheek, neck and nose—there are animals but also superheroes.
The performance shifts when the stitching finishes and the face painting begins. Initially it is not clear what the assistant is painting—the face just looks like a lumpy mass. But it slowly resembles a Picasso and we are left to contemplate the paradox of being ‘defaced’ by portraiture. From here, Parr is helped from his chair and placed prone on the floor. His face is obliterated again, this time with Pollock paint drips. Suddenly his face becomes a tropical island and the shirt makes hideous sense. In the final moments of the performance, a plush pig toy wobbles past on wind-up wheels, nudging Parr’s sleeve on the way. One of the assistants announces that all this has been hogwash, that the dumb theatre has now come to an end, and that we can all go back to where we came from. Nearly everyone in the theatre exhales and heads for the bathroom or the bar.
Box of Birds, Tess de Quincey
photo Heidrun Löhr
Box of Birds, Tess de Quincey
New works: Box of Birds
The first week belonged to Tess de Quincey’s Box of Birds, starting in the foyer, with projections of white text (“Existence not true…”) sweeping across the grey floor. Slowly, spectators notice two figures, one on each side of the foyer, high above the audience on steel beams. They wear heavy grey felt blankets which hide their faces and restrict their movements, but perhaps also offer protection should they fall. This prospect of harm is slightly sinister, given the program states that the images are based on Anne Ferran’s photographic trilogy about female psychiatric patients in the 1940s. Soon we are enticed into Carriageworks’ corridors. Once again, we don’t always know where to look: peeking around a corner I discover a performer above me on a ladder, now noticeably birdlike in its movement. There are others. I’m no ornithologist but I think I see an ibis at one point, with a sweeping wing, and a lyrebird at another, with its long, fanned tail. In the confines of the back blocks of Carriageworks, we hear the words of Nietzsche embedded in Vic McEwan’s overarching soundwork with its cosmic and industrial resonances, birdcalls and woodwind warblings.
Back in the foyer, the felt birds are hoisted onto the beams again, scratching, teetering and nesting before coming to rest. Tess de Quincey has worked the spaces of Carriageworks perhaps more than any other artist, to the point where it’s impossible for me to observe parts of the building without sensing her performing presence. This immersive and evocative work added yet another layer to that palimpsest.
David Buckley, Nigel Kellaway, Brief Synopsis, the opera Project
photo Heidrun Löhr
David Buckley, Nigel Kellaway, Brief Synopsis, the opera Project
Brief Synopsis
The second week saw the premiere of The opera Project’s Brief Synopsis: a beautiful naked woman “of a certain age” brutally stabs a young man to death. Staged in Bay 17, the space looks as beautiful and as spare as I have seen it: the seating banks placed on an angle while the back doors are open so that we see through to the workshop. There is almost no set to speak of, only a few tables and chairs placed to the right. The performance begins with a long pause, before a car appears upstage. Several people with musical instruments get out, only to get back in. We suddenly become aware of a woman (Katia Molino), who has been sitting in the audience. She stands and walks upstage wearing a pair of high-heeled shoes and nothing else. The musicians enter again and this time they and their musical instruments stay, producing a richly textured score, oscillating between melancholy and subdued anger.
We proceed through a series of scenes that may or may not be in chronological order in which accusations are uttered at café tables between a former couple, Molino and Nigel Kellaway (the central figure and nouveau roman narrator whose nihilism and bitterness override his capacity to love). A young man (David Buckley, an impressive presence) is seduced and cruelly rejected by both. There are set pieces, as the actors and musicians stride invisible corridors, Kellaway, in black suit and silver heels, reciting arch lines about time’s inconstancy (texts borrowed from Heiner Müller, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Yourcenar among others). There are costume changes as Molino hands her young lover a new shirt, only to reveal that it is even bloodier than the one it replaces. There are also beautiful projected noir-ish images, including webs and night roads, by Heidrun Löhr, aptly symbolic if serving too often as mere backdrops to the action. Despite the variety of material, Brief Synopsis leaves me cold, though I suspect this is precisely the point.
New Works: danse (3) sans spectacle
Staged in the same space later in the week, Rosalind Crisp’s danse (3) sans spectacle was even more stripped back and yet had a degree of warmth at its heart. We enter a dark and silent space and seat ourselves on low, grey foam blocks placed in a rough semi-circle around the three dancers. Dressed in grey hooded tracksuits and bathed in a pale yellow light, they proceed to dance—sometimes by themselves, sometimes in tandem, but rarely if ever as a trio. Even when the three are moving at the same time, one always seems to be pursuing a different logic or phrase. The phrases themselves rarely come to completion. When you expect an arm to fully extend, it folds back in on itself; when you anticipate a rolling foot to bring a knee with it, you find the knee has been diverted elsewhere. There is no music, only breath and the occasional scrape of a foot. Our attention is held solely by the dancers’ concentration, apparent isolation and occasional collaboration. The piece finishes with a lone figure, dancing far from the circle. It’s as if having done away with every other habit of dance, Crisp can now do away with the audience.
New Works: This is Barbara Cleveland
The youngest artists in this part of the program are Brown Council and, like their counterparts in 30 Ways, they appear focused on history and legacy. Their video work, This is Barbara Cleveland, is about a mythic performance artist from 1970s Sydney. The work combines footage of the four Brown Councillors speaking about the neglected artist with apparently ‘authentic’ archival footage of Cleveland herself nude, blindfolded, smeared with blood or on a ladder. There’s every trope we’ve inherited from the performance art of the 1960s and 70s, re-enacted by four different bodies who start to merge into a single mythic star. The concept is clever, the images well composed and the point well made—all performance art and artists disappear, but some disappear more often than others.
Julie-Anne Long, Directors’ Cut: Fiona Winning
photo Lucy Parakhina
Julie-Anne Long, Directors’ Cut: Fiona Winning
The Directors’ Cuts
The Directors’ Cuts proceed in reverse chronological order. First up is Daniel Brine (2008-11, and now UK-based), who did not attend in person but put in a brief appearance at the beginning of his video 30 x 30: Thirty One-Minute Manifestos for the Next Thirty Years. Some manifestos were irreverent (post), others were more earnest (My Darling Patricia), some were immersed in pop culture (Georgie Meagher) and others wanted to unplug altogether (Alison Murphy-Oates). I was won over by Field Theory’s vision of a post-ironic, futuristic, DIY aesthetic.
The following evening Fiona Winning (1999-2008) delivers a performance lecture titled Nostalgia, Chance, Accident. There are cocktails as we enter and the stage floor is covered with posters from the period in which she was director. In a typically generous gesture, Winning narrates her time at Performance Space through the artists and people she worked with, some of whom also give brief and witty speeches (Richard Manner and Brian Fuata) or performances (Martin del Amo and Julie-Anne Long). From time to time, Arts NSW’s Kim Spinks—seated in the audience—and Winning re-enact phone calls in which they drolly discuss the relative advantages of moving Performance Space to possible premises in Paddington, Newtown and eventually Redfern. The evening finishes with a standing ovation for the longest-serving director in Performance Space’s history and overseer of the challenging shift to Carriageworks.
While the planned petting zoo of Angharad Wynne-Jones’ (1994-97) Parliament of Animals did not materialise, there were plenty of dogs. On stage with pet-free Wynne-Jones and media artist r e a were Harvey with dancer Dean Walsh, Charlie with performer Jeff Stein, and Flame and Trotsky with Tess de Quincey. De Quincey talks about the difference between dancing the environment and being danced by it while r e a speaks about the significance of kangaroos to her practice and her grief at their culling. Walsh demonstrates his scuba diving practice, relating it to his ecological concerns, while Stein talks about vet bills and philosopher Giorgio Agamben. During all this, Harvey wanders back and forth, pees on the floor, distracts Charlie and bothers Trotsky and Flame, who are kept on short leash. The canine chaos is precisely the counterpoint that the conversation needs.
Barbara Campbell, Directors’ Cut: Sarah Miller
photo Lucy Parakhina
Barbara Campbell, Directors’ Cut: Sarah Miller
Like Winning, Sarah Miller (1989-93) also foregrounds the artists with whom she collaborated. She has invited a number of them to imagine a past performance or speculate on a future one. Several young men deliver texts on behalf of Malcolm Whittaker (Team MESS) while another emerging artist, Nathan Harrison (Applespiel), conjures a false memory of Canberra’s Splinters Theatre performance he didn’t see. We see Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter in an SBS Carpet Burns’ short video by Kriv Stenders of Open City’s The Museum of Accidents (1991) with Christa Hughes, Tony MacGregor and the works of a host of Sydney visual artists. A highlight of this session is John Baylis’ reading from his performance diary. The event he reports sounds plausible at first but slowly reveals itself to be a fiction combining almost every legend you’ve ever heard about Performance Space—a tiny audience, a shy but magnetic performer, a lighting operator asleep at the desk, 12 bridal dresses dropping from the ceiling, an invitation to the audience to put them on, a collapsing roof, a flood of rain and a cannibalistic climax. Baylis stays after the show to ask the artists if they’d like to tour the work. “Yes,” they said, “but not through space, through time.” To which he says, “I think I can help.”
The evening concludes with artist and curator Brenda L Croft speaking about the Boomalli Cooperative and its relationship with Performance Space and Sarah Miller, an important reminder that the organisation did not always soley occupy 199 Cleveland St.
Some of the Directors’ Cuts were more low-key. Zane Trow (1997-99), spoke briefly, paid tribute to Performance Space board members and delivered an hour of his sound art. Unfortunately Noëlle Janaczweska (1987-89) could not attend; instead John Baylis engaged in an informative and amusing conversation with Christopher Allen, an early Performance Space administrator working with founding director Mike Mullins. This was followed by excerpts from Clare Grant’s DVD account of the vision and works of The Sydney Front (available from Artfilms). Barbara Campbell stood in for Allan Vizents (1986-87) who passed away during his tenure as director. With Campbell, Derek Kreckler, Annette Tesoriero, Jim Denley, Sherre de Lys and Amanda Stewart performed an engaging, neatly staged selection of Vizents’ witty performance texts which satirically and sonically unpick commercial, bureaucratic and everyday idioms. In total contrast Nick Tsoutas (1984-85) threw a party, a celebration of what is to come—if trepidatious about the Abbott government—complete with live Rembetika music, octopus, ouzo and dancing.
Mike Mullins (1980-85) delivered a lecture in which he reminded us that Performance Space was “born in rebellion,” recounted battles won and lost over “new form” in the mid 80s, decried the rise of creative producers and pointed to the advantages Melbourne’s Arts House has over Performance Space because it has its own home. He declared that while Performance Space is not about a particular space it ultimately needs a designated one.
Screenings
There were also two screenings. To see the video documentation of Post-Arrivalists’ infamous 1994 performance Lock Up (in which they locked in and abandoned their audience), at first I have my head measured and shortly after my wrist cable-tied to a chair and a paper bag placed over my head. Though the footage was screened, it was impossible to see even when the paper bag was removed, thanks to the music, smoke and tasks set for the audience. In this way the group privileges the event over its evidence, the provocation over its representation.
By contrast, director and editor Karen Pearlman and producer Richard James Allen’s Physical TV documentary, …the dancer from the dance, for me lacked self-reflexivity and risked self-absorption, but much of the audience seemed to love it. The film centres on interviews with dancers about their motivations, some insightful, some not, some with all too brief glimpses of their work. Interspersed with these is footage of Pearlman and Allen across the years dancing with their children: a celebration of the family’s affection for the artform and for each other.
Television Behaviour Studies, Pia van Gelder, Tele Visions
photo Lucy Parakhina
Television Behaviour Studies, Pia van Gelder, Tele Visions
Tele Visions
You’re History! coincided with the Tele Visions festival, staged to mark the end of analogue television. On the opening night, Lara Thoms takes over one of Carriageworks Tracks together with 86-year-old Joy Hruby, who has been broadcasting her community TV show Joy’s World from her Matraville garage for more than 20 years. We are cast as the live studio audience to Joy’s last ever analogue broadcast. Thoms has done little more than place a different frame around Joy’s work—albeit an elaborate and resource-intensive one that involves a green screen deployed throughout Tele Visions—but it is done with great care and generosity and Hruby clearly enjoys the limelight. Elsewhere, Kate Blackmore and Frances Barrett were watching every single episode of The Simpsons back to back. I don’t get to see them in person but I log on to the website one morning to watch the live stream. The web cam seems to be installed just above the television, so I can hear the program but not see it. Instead I watch Blackmore napping on the couch and Barrett softly chortling. It feels intimate and intrusive, even though I have been invited.
Ending and beginning
The entire glorious event comes to a close on a Sunday night, with Dean Walsh, Stereogamous and Paul Capsis in the final 30 Ways performances. It’s been two weeks and 30 years, and time has begun to bend, stretch and recede. Just two weeks after You’re History! an email from Bec Dean lands in my inbox, advising Performance Space members that she is leaving her position as co-director to begin a doctorate. While Dean remains a curator at large, Jeff Khan is now sole director of Performance Space, which makes the memory of this festival that much more poignant. It was the end of an era and we didn’t even know it. Isn’t that always the way?
Michael Dagostino, Made in Australia exhibition by Jamil Yamani
courtesy CAC
Michael Dagostino, Made in Australia exhibition by Jamil Yamani
A very happy Michael Dagostino, Director of Campbelltown Arts Centre, enthuses about the first annual program he feels is really indicative of his vision, constructed, he tells me, with “the new life and energy” brought to the arts centre by Jenn Blake, Head of Program and Production, “who has invigorated the performance program, alongside Visual Arts curator Megan Monte who is setting a really interesting direction around emerging practices. Also, we’ve boosted our residency program quite dramatically.”
Former director Lisa Havilah put Campbelltown Arts Centre on the map, ambitiously engaging the Centre with the local community and state, national and international artists. Dagostino has sustained Havilah’s vision of a vibrant, across-the-arts, inclusive contemporary arts centre (as she has since achieved with Carriageworks) with a commitment to nurturing long-term development of new work, and is now clearly making it his own.
Making work with artists
Michael Dagostino was, he says with a smile, “once upon a time a practising artist but I was always organising exhibitions, either my own or curating shows for friends or writing proposals to galleries. So I slowly transitioned across.” At Casula Powerhouse, another major arts centre in Sydney’s west, he installed shows, became head of exhibitions and did some curating. For Parramatta City Council he established the Parramatta Artists Studios and a small gallery as part of the Creative Cities push. “The biggest thing I took from that experience was being able to assist and to create work with artists. That’s really important for me. I’ve always placed artists at the centre of programs.”
Being the centre
Responding to a not uncommon question about where outer city and regional arts centres see themselves situated, Dagostino thinks it over before responding: “At Campbelltown I guess we perceive ourselves as being on the edge. So we want to offer artists something that they really can’t get anywhere else, especially assisting them to produce new works in the early stages through residencies. We are on a geographical edge but we are creating our own centre. There’s a big perception about Western Sydney that everything is far away but I’ve lived there all my life and I’ve never been far away from anything, because it’s all centred around where I live.”
With a background in visual arts, at CAC Dagostino has had to deal with dance, performance, live art, music: “It’s been a really steep learning curve. It still is. I get out and experience as much as I possibly can across all disciplines and meet as many people as possible. The biggest culture shock was the very different histories and languages that operate. My biggest challenge is linking people from, say, the dance world to the visual arts world, seeing where the differences are—because there are so many similarities— and trying to break them down. But we’re never about creating one homogenous art genre, one big, grey mass of art.”
Investing long-term
At the core of the CAC vision is investment in artists’ projects, taking many from the early stages through realisation, often taking two to three years, especially for performance: “The long gestation period needs to be considered and we actually invest in that time.”
In 2014 CAC is establishing a partnership with Zodiak Center for New Dance in Helsinki, “putting Australian artists in an international platform and exposing them to other contemporary works. We wanted to put artists together just to see what the results were in the first stage and in the next, hopefully profiling them in international platforms or a major Australian festival.”
Dagostino is particularly keen for CAC to engage with young people in the region: “When I first came to the centre, I didn’t see many young people…mid-teens to 23-24. They weren’t using the arts centre, not engaging with the work. So we’ve put together an exhibition framework, The List, curated by Megan Monte, that asks artists to engage with young people, their issues, their politics, with what’s happening at the moment, to get them to ‘own’ Campbelltown Arts Centre. We’ve engaged 12 artists including Shaun Gladwell. He created a work during C*town Bling (2005) when the Centre first opened and he wants to look at the skateboarding park in that work, how it’s changed, how some kids might still be skating there and talking to them.”
Other artists include Marvin Gaye, previously Spartacus Chetwynd, a London-based visual art/performance artist shortlisted for the 2012 Turner Prize: “Her work is kind of mad and very participatory. The last work she created was a sort of manic mediaeval play. Australian artists Abdul Abdullah and his brother Abdul-Rahman will be working with young local boxers to create a video work that also involves a performance. They’re both amateur boxers as well as being visual artists. Abdul’s work is very much about cultural stereotypes in Australia— the perception of violence in boxing and young male culture.”
Activist artist Zannie Begg will work with young people at Reiby Detention Centre. Abdul will work with kids at the local training centre in Minto. We actually want them participating where they’re most comfortable and then, slowly [bring them to the Centre]… It’s a long-term strategy.”
On the streets where you live
Also staged where people live is the second phase of Temporary Democracies, a live art event set in empty homes in a suburban street undergoing renewal and population change (RT117, p32): “It was a fascinating experience in 2013 for local residents who may not have come into contact with artists and contemporary art. It breaks down barriers. There’s been a lot of support from the local Men’s Shed, building a food van with Robert Guth for Temporary Democracies last year, and now they’ve come on board for another project. In March this year we have a major partnership with the MCA and C3West, the men are assisting on building an amazing sculpture which deals with the retrieval of cars from the Georges River.”
Making music
CAC has long committed itself to contemporary classical music. Dagostino is now adding diversity with Indigenous country musician Roger Knox: “In the first week of his residency he’ll be mentoring young musicians from the emerging Aboriginal country music scene in Western Sydney. In the second week, he’ll be working on his new album. We’re setting up our theatre in a way that is really conducive to recording so people can come in and record a part or a whole new album. Artists work extremely hard for short periods of time to create new work. So we’re really excited to be able to offer these opportunities.” As well, musician and composer Simon Barker will be working with a number of musicians from different cultures on a CAC commissioned new work as part of the Sacred Music Festival. The music commission is annual.”
Dancing partners
As well as the Finnish collaboration mentioned earlier, CAC has invited Daniel Kok (Singapore) and Luke George to remount works by each—an opportunity to see George’s About Face which premiered in Melbourne (see RTonline) “and also one of Daniel’s pole-dancing works—he’s re-positioning pole dancing as a contemporary dance form. And then we’ll commission them to make a new work together for 2015.”
CAC also runs a program with NAISDA “working with local kids to create pathways. We’re investing quite a lot in it this year, taking some of them to NAISDA for a week to see what it’s like to be a student. We’re hoping they’ll eventually create a whole range of new dances that are Campbelltown based.”
The 2014 dance program segues nicely into 2015: “Much of the CAC dance program is focused on the relationship between dance and music, culminating in a major festival for next year called I Can Hear Dancing, which was initiated by the Centre’s former dance curator, Emma Saunders.”
Chiara Guidi, Jeff Stein will produce Jack and the Beanstalk
photo Heidrun Löhr
Chiara Guidi, Jeff Stein will produce Jack and the Beanstalk
Performance
In the CAC performance program, a major collaboration between Chiara Guidi of Societas Raffaello Sanzio and Jeff Stein will produce Jack and the Beanstalk for children, a co-production with Insite Arts set to premiere at Campbelltown in June. Theatre Kantanka’s Club Singularity enacts the bizarre meeting of a group of people who have strong issues about society and travelling in space: “The Macarthur UFO Society were doing the annual exhibition of their telescopes in the Backspace when Kantanka were here and they just started talking.”
Indigenous performance poet Romaine Moreton is at the centre of 1 Billion Beats, “a performance and installation about the colonial gaze on Aboriginal culture and people, turning it on its head, re-owning the gaze, and asking really tough questions. The next stage of development is in March and we’re hoping to get it up by the start of 2015.”
TV Moore
A major exhibition, Rum Jungle, will feature the works of video artist TV Moore on multiple screens: “His work has such immense power. He’s fascinated with contemporary culture and the way it produces ‘events.’ It’s a major survey show using the whole gallery, featuring existing works and new commissions. Some are in-your-face, others are very quiet: they’re the ones that I keep replaying, that keep me up at night, keep me thinking.”
Robert Love, director of the endlessly busy Riverside Parramatta, is passionate, argumentative and often very funny about the arts in Western Sydney (he has a great stock of telling anecdotes). Given that the greater part of Sydney lies in the west and a third of the NSW population lives there, it grieves him that save for his venue, with its own limitations, no art centres or companies of substantial scale are located there. Instead, for audiences in the west, there’s the “lunacy of travelling great distances to the city. No option.” But he has plans.
Love, like Campbelltown Arts Centre director Michael Dagostino, lives in Sydney’s west. He insists, “Until you begin to live there, walk up the street, talk to people, see what’s going on, you can’t respond to the stories that are there.”
Of Western Sydney’s very productive arts centres, including his own, Love says, “we do have people making a significant impact but it should be at a different level.” Compared with the State Government’s total investment in Sydney proper, Love declares that the $3m funding of the west, reckoned to be 1%, is altogether inadequate. Local government is a significant investor, but private donations are rare when there is little of scale to attract them. Love’s background in the arts is extensive lending considerable weight to the ideas he has for Parramatta and the west.
Love majored in drama at UNSW, founded and worked with Toe Truck, a leading theatre in education company, from 1976 to 1980, working in part with theatre innovator Nigel Triffit, creating works with lightweight aluminium sets (“we learnt a lot about pop-rivetting”) and getting run out of a country town unappreciative of a show about teenagers, sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. The local headmaster provided the petrol for the brisk exit. From the 80s to the late 1990s Love administered the Seymour Centre and Nimrod Theatre simultaneously for a volatile two-year period, was General Manager of the State Theatre Company of South Australia and then Sydney Theatre Company.
Love says that his first connection with Parramatta came when he managed the STC’s touring program before becoming General Manager, “in the days when there was an actual commitment to expand audiences in Western Sydney, which we did for three years with an intensive program by reducing our Sydney one.”
Appearances & realities
A mere glance at the Riverside Theatre’s 2014 program, with a couple of David Williamson plays, several Shakespeares and a Russian ballet company might suggest that the Centre plays it safe. “I resisted doing things like Annie for a long time, but an audience of 10,000! Eight thousand saw Hairspray last year.” While the co-production of Annie will draw audiences to Riverside, appearances are deceptive. Love is firmly committed to encouraging and supporting contemporary dance, a disability arts program, filmmakers, community groups, physical theatre and emerging theatre companies. The result is considerable diversity which, says Love, reflects the communities of Parramatta: “When someone asks me, who our audience is, I say, audiences.”
Working models
Riverside Theatres operates as producer, co-producer, production supporter and enabler, host and venue for hire, as well as running workshops, seminars, exhibitions and partnering festivals. As Love says, “We do lots of things. As for producing, we used to do more, but it’s very costly for us, but this year we’re 100% producing Alana Valentine’s Parramatta Girls, which premiered at Belvoir in 2007”—but never played in the city of the story’s origins. It has a strong cast, including Christine Anu and Annie Byron.
For three years Riverside Theatres has operated the True West Theatre Company (see Teik-Kim Pok’s review of Finegan Kruckemeyer’s The Violent Outburst That Drew Me To You, page 38) with the support of Arts NSW funding which was not granted for 2014. Love is unhappy: “There is no strategic sense or continuity. It’s funding the dots, not funding the lines, or thinking about legacy and where it goes.” Riverside also lends support to companies like the much applauded Sport for Jove which commenced its career performing in the Blue Mountains and Sydney’s west.
On the screen
Love has a screening program which he’s eager to develop. Not only does it show the UK’s National Theatre streamed productions but also supports local filmmakers. Writer, actor and co-director George Basha and fellow director David Field’s new feature film Convict (2013; their first was The Combination, 2009) couldn’t get a cinema release so Love arranged a two-week season attended by over 2,000 people. Love is impressed by the film: “It’s low budget but they’ve never made Parramatta Gaol look more interesting. The lighting is terrific, it’s shot beautifully and there are some great faces [provided by local auditions]. We want to provide artists with opportunities.” He said of this audience that it was clear by the way they came into the foyer they’d never been in an arts centre.
Disability & creativity
Riverside also invests in disability arts with their Beyond the Square program, “which started before me but we shifted it from visual arts more towards performance, movement and music. We received a bit more funding from Arts NSW in the last three years allowing us to appoint a full-time creative director, Alison Richardson, and employ an actor with a disability, Gerard O’Dwyer (Tropfest, Best Male Actor, 2009 in Be My Brother).”
S, CIRCA
photo Darcy Grant
S, CIRCA
2014 program
The 2014 Riverside program is a big, diverse mix of mainstream and innovative productions, which include a new work from Kim Carpenter’s Theatre of Image, Monkey: Journey to the West, “featuring Blue Mountains musicians and the local parkour group 9lives,” directed by John Bell and on its way to the Opera House in 2015. There’s a big NZ musical, The Factory (and a big Pacific audience for it, says Love) about the Samoan migrant experience; Parramatta Girls; physical theatre companies CIRCA and Stalker (with the visually striking Encoded); It’s Dark Outside (virtuosic puppetry from WA in an affecting play about dementia); Tectonic Theatre in The Laramie Project; Steve Rodger’s Food (an engaging romantic comedy about food and multiculturalism) from Belvoir and Force Majeure; Deckchair’s The Magic Hour, featuring Ursula Yovich with some very Grimm tales; and a concert from contemporary music paragons Ensemble Offspring.
Then, says Love, there are all the hirers of the venue, which include the Sydney Music Festival, a celebration of South Asian music which will sell out 12 concerts in the large theatre. There’s also the very well-attended productions of the Bangladeshi theatre group Natuki, who commission plays, collaborating with non-Bangladeshi writers and performers.
Dancing with FORM
FORM is a vital organisation for dance and not only for Western Sydney, programming dance works and workshops. Love tells me, “It came to us from Ausdance, we ran it and then it incorporated to stand on its own. We continue to host the company, provide office space and computers and assist with theatre space.” Love says that while the audiences are not big yet the work is important.” FORM’s Dance Bites program for 2014 includes Samantha Chester’s Safety in Numbers, Perth choreographer Sue Peacock’s Reflect, Flatline’s Sketch, Trio for three (Matt Cornell, Josh Thomson and Miranda Wheen) and Tess De Quincey & Co artist Linda Luke in her solo work Still Point Turning with composer Vic McEwan.
The future in the making
Love’s goal is “to get a resident performing arts company of scale and significance and the financial capacity to be here for at least three to five years to service Parramatta, Western Sydney and regional NSW. We’re getting some traction on it. We don’t want to run it. We will support it. It needs to respond to the diversity of the region, must do educational work, be self-sufficient and have an element of populism, otherwise it will die. I think that can be done.”
Love’s other goal involves rebuilding the Riverside Theatres “with a master plan to take it up one or two storeys, with view of the river and a better relationship with the park, so that it becomes a community hub.” He sees the current building as being like a railway station “where you wait on the platform to go on a trip,” but “the journey should start when you see the building and you see yourself in it.” This has to be “if the council believes Parramatta is a global city.”
New money, new hope
James Packer’s $60m art gift (his much debated “thank you” to Sydney for the chance to build the Barangaroo casino resort) gives $30m of it to Western Sydney over 10 years. The Daily Telegraph modestly claimed: “Mr Packer’s $30 million allocation to western Sydney comes after The Daily Telegraph’s Fair Go for The West campaign found that only one per cent of the state’s arts budget is allocated to western Sydney” (Nov 12, 2013). The funds will provide, says Love, “great opportunities, not just a splash for cash.”
Love argues that the NSW Government “should then double its grants to Western Sydney to $6m annually to match the Packer funds—it would make an enormous difference. Resurrect a university performing arts school [Love regards the closure of the University of Western Sydney performing arts degrees as a tragedy for local career development] and you start up a healthy arts ecosystem. I keep telling governments it’s easy; you can only win.”
Reanne Shephard, The Social Revolutionaries, Mt Druitt Press Conference, FUNPARK
photo Heidrun Löhr
Reanne Shephard, The Social Revolutionaries, Mt Druitt Press Conference, FUNPARK
I may not have paid such attention to the item on ABC News on Friday night (Feb 7) featuring NSW Community Services Minister Pru Goward had it not been for the fact that we’d recently visited the suburb that was the subject of the grim report in which the solution to perceived problems of welfare dependency involved the threat to deprive people of their homes.
Bidwill was the location for FUNPARK, one of Sydney Festival’s projects in Western Sydney. Creative Director Karen Therese, herself a sometime local, brought together a team of city and Western Sydney artists with Indigenous and other elders to celebrate what is, contrary to reports, a vibrant local community.
Entering the car park of the mostly disused Bidwill Park Shopping Plaza we choose from a menu of events. At one end of this arena a queue is forming for Harley Davidson Wild Trike rides. Meanwhile, groups of young Indigenous boys and girls cautiously follow the directions of a senior dancer from Bangarra. Bunny Hoopster leading her team of Hoopaholics segues into an explosive dance display from Lucky and Afro Contemporary followed by a choreographic parkour portrait of the area from Team9Lives.
Team9Lives, FUNPARK
photo Heidrun Löhr
Team9Lives, FUNPARK
FUNPARK is the latest in a series of creative ventures in Western Sydney that provoke communities to elaborate on their lives, in turn introducing the wider community to the particular pleasures and anxieties of living there. Recent works such as Rosie Dennis’ Driven to New Pastures (2011; RT101) deal directly with the sense of displacement in relocation as the NSW Government enacts its plans to overhaul the public housing estate. Other works such as Campbelltown Art Centre’s Temporary Democracies (2013; RT117) built on this, inviting artists to work with locals to mark the dislocating sense of being forced to up stakes and move from a nurturing local community to an unfamiliar, more fragmented one.
In a large tent erected in the centre of the car park Darug elders gathered to discuss the history of the area, deeply concerned about education, one recalling when he was a boy there was a shed for Aboriginal kids alongside the school and separate tanks for drinking water.
In the local church hall, seven fired-up local teenagers presented the Mt Druitt Press Conference (directors Karen Therese, Katia Molino). Calling themselves The Social Revolutionaries, these young people—confident, socially engaged and talented—have grown up dealing with prejudices about Bidwill and therefore themselves. Seated at a long table and speaking in turn about their lives they seamlessly shift gear into beautiful singing, rousing speechmaking, re-enactments (singing with mum while housecleaning), dancing (a girl demonstrates a style from her South American heritage, the movement pausing moment to moment as her male partner speaks of his life) and role-playing (how to deal with a dance floor rejection when the girl learns you’re from Bidwill). Far from downhearted, the Social Revolutionaries demand equitable treatment, “a revolution” even. Caught in Sydney’s blind-spot they deplore being “surrounded by ignorance.”
Natalie Rose & Shaun Millwood, Girls Light Up, FUNPARK
photo Heidrun Löhr
Natalie Rose & Shaun Millwood, Girls Light Up, FUNPARK
As well as its revolutionary and celebratory aspects, FUNPARK took some lateral turns to highlight specific local issues. In Cuppa Tea with Therese, a number of us visited a long-term local resident in her neat Housing NSW bungalow and heard about her years of community involvement in the area and her concerns for the future. I imagine Therese rolling her eyes at these latest media reports with their focus on littered streets and upended shopping trolleys to characterise her home suburb. Local Indigenous elders who are already run off their feet are no doubt preparing for another onslaught. The sense of a media beat-up is reminiscent of the so-called ‘Bidwill Riot’ of 1981, reprised in Girls Light Up, a raucous ‘rock opera’ led by post’s Natalie Rose and a team of collaborators from the community. The Bidwill Riot in reality involved a fight over a boy between a couple of girls that somehow attracted the attention of the media and police who eventually turned it into a full-scale TV catastrophe.
Minister John Dacey, The Occult of Bidwill, FUNPARK
photo Heidrun Löhr
Minister John Dacey, The Occult of Bidwill, FUNPARK
I also took the tour enticingly titled “The Occult of Bidwill” led by Minister John Dacey from the Uniting Church. This turned out to be a journey of discovery into the many ‘hidden’ instances of misguided bureaucracy that have gradually seen the local supermarket rendered an empty shell. Owned by the Department of Housing who decided in 1997 to dispose of it as “non core,” the building has been the subject of multiple reports and worthy proposals for remodelling, none of which has ever materialised. And so it sits, ghostly, inhabited by one lonely kebab shop, while locals go without a convenient local shopping centre. Hardy souls venture into the bottle shop across the car park to pick up their bread and milk.
Finally we gather in the evening on the banks of the nearby underpass to watch a video (Darrin Baker, Vic McEwan, Philip Jopson) projected onto a screen over the entrance. We hear from people who may represent some of the targets of Minister Goward’s report—people, for various reasons, reliant on the social welfare system who are nevertheless productive and positive about their role in this place that Karen Therese suggests is “without a voice.”
Understandably, many locals see the government as the architects of dysfunction when it comes to some of the recurring issues in this area. Projects like FUNPARK go some way towards restoring the community’s faith in itself, giving it the strength to fight the easy stereotyping to imagine all manner of possibilities.
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Sydney Festival, Karen Therese and the Community of Bidwill, FUNPARK, creative producer Karen Therese; creative team included Boris Bagatini, post, The Social Revolutionaries (Daisy Montalvo, Scott Johnathon, Cianter, Rvee Dela Cruz, Jithin Matthew, Reanne Shephard, Andrew Llamas & BJ Barnes), Bangarra Dance Theatre, Blacktown Art Centre, Clytie Smith, Bunny Hoopstar, Nick Rathbone Hogan, Team9Lives, David Capra, Jodie Whalen, Applespiel, Province, Darrin Baker, Katia Molino, Therese Wilson and many members of the Bidwill community. Bidwill Shopping Centre Plaza, 18-19 Jan
“The trouble with tragedy is the fuss it makes
About life and death and other tupenny aches”
Samuel Beckett
post, Oedipus Schmoedipus
For several Sydney reviewers post’s Oedipus Schmoedipus was their worst night in the theatre, or already the worst production of 2014. This wasn’t the majority view but the show did generate a modicum of public discussion. For me it raised issues about the changing relationship between theatre, contemporary performance and live art. Affectively, the show moved me from giggling at sense-making nonsense to sadly reflecting on the vulnerability we shared with each courageous volunteer performer.
In recent years the STC, Malthouse, Belvoir, Le Boite and MTC (the latter two featuring well-received seasons of independent works in 2014) have begun to address the changes that theatre is going through as the notion of what constitutes performance broadens. Some of that mainstream embrace was prompted by the encouragement of special funding from the Australia Council for large companies to take on emerging artists and companies several years ago. In the meantime contemporary performance has been expanding into live art, game-playing theatre, one-on-one and participatory performances and combinations thereof. Sydney Festival featured My Darling Patricia’s The Piper and post’s Oedipus Schmoedipus, both of which invited the public to perform in their productions.
Post’s participants, a different bunch of 25 people each night over many nights, were trained up early on the day of performance for three hours on where to move, costume choices and how to follow their cues from video monitors hanging above the audience. The participants performed admirably, hamming it up, singing, dancing, ‘dying,’ looked happy and generally from those we spoke to loved the experience, although they had to miss seeing the controversial, bloodletting opening in which Mish Grigor and Zoe Coombes Marr, in white, murder each other or suicide over and over, invoking the blood-letting legacy of thousands of years of male writing. One reviewer labelled the volunteer participants “meat puppets.” However, My Darling Partricia’s The Piper was not condemned for similarly manipulating its volunteers—children and accompanying adults responding to instructions coming through earphones.
While not as taut as Who’s the Best (STC, RT104) or mind-bendingly delirious as Everything I Know About the Global Financial Crisis in One Hour (Belvoir Downstairs, RT101)—the strings of word association were variable in quality and overlong—Oedipus Schmoedipus was a delight. The quiet charisma of the two performers, the relentless silly searching (“What is death?”: Every cliché imaginable!) and a growing sense of poignancy as we grew to know the faces and bodies of the volunteers made the work a memorable exemplar of the incursion of new practices into the mainstream.
The Shadow King
photo Prudence Upton
The Shadow King
Malthouse, The Shadow King
The Tragedy of King Lear is not short on laughs either; Malthouse’s version of Shakespeare’s play is full of them, but with the same ironic, mocking and often bitter intent, if here self-deprecating as well, portraying an Aboriginal community turned against itself.
The Shadow King (creators Michael Kantor, Tom E Lewis) is a melodramatic transposition of Shakespeare’s pre-mediaeval setting to an Indigenous community fighting over the exploitation of mineral wealth on Aboriginal land. These are modern people but their lives are still imbued, if in varying degrees, with spiritual attachment to the land. One of them, the embittered bastard Edmund (Jimi Bana), is bereft of these feelings and intent on destroying the culture that stands in the way of acquiring the land for himself—using his charm, sex and violence. When he plays demanding, panicky little boy to his mother, you’re not sure if his cunning or insecurity is on show.
In this scenario, the character Kent has been replaced by Edmund’s mother (Frances Djulibing), a clever move which recognises the role of female elders in Indigenous life. When Edmund, with Goneril [Jada Alberts] and Regan [Natasha Wanganeen] capture Lear and the mother, they discard her dilly bag, the reticule of sacred objects and knowledge. Appropriately it lies on red sand of the forestage next to Lear’s abandoned crown.
Despite the simplifying of Shakespeare’s plot and the intricacies of his characterisations, this version manages to retain a lot of its weight, partly because we know it so well, partly because The Shadow King fascinatingly blends Shakespeare’s poetry with Aboriginal English and the cadences of un-surtitled Aboriginal languages, conveying some of the otherness of the classic and making modern sense of Shakespeare’s essential wordplay. The adaptation also deftly contextualises the transposition: Goneril’s husband is in gaol, there is violence in town and a young girl murdered—for which Edmund frames Edgar. The latter appears disguised in full ceremonial attire, although its veracity cannot be guaranteed: a delirious Lear utters, “He’s the real thing!”
This production is cartoony, melodramatic, showbizzy (replete with songs) and forcefully projected (resulting in degrees of unintelligibility despite the head mikes). Tom E Lewis as Lear first appears in white suit, black cowboy shirt and golden crown, playing straight to the audience like a club entertainer, charming, volatile, his anger really felt, the cracks in his composure rapidly widening, his movements increasingly manic.
The daunting set (Paul Jackson, Michael Kantor, David Miller), swivelling slowly and rumbling towards us on tracks, suggests the base of an enormous mining crane. With the lowering of a metal wall-cum-screen to its top, film projections evoke humble homes and backyards, the night-time bush road on which the mad Lear is pursued by headlights, the vast landscapes of disputed land and the massive cliff on which Edmund and Edgar’s mother thinks she is standing, expecting to step to her death.
Rarriwuy Hick is a strong Cordelia, too briefly seen. Drag performer Kamahi Djordon King (See RT113) is a fine youthful Fool, delivering old and new witticisms and insults with verve as well as transforming himself into hilarious versions of Regan and Goneril in the mock trial which Lear conducts. Lewis is wonderfully affecting when, with flowers in his hair, he recognises his failings. Frances Djulibing’s Mother with her quiet physical presence and low-key delivery offers a telling counterpoint to Lear’s mania. And she sings sublimely. As does Djakpurra Munyarryun whose haunting voice comes to the fore in the production’s moving climax.
Although Shadow King is Lear condensed, ramped up and located very specifically in 21st century Australia (going further than most transpositions of classics) it retains its primal power while firmly reminding us that Aboriginal Australians are indeed “Shadow Kings,” at risk of having their land taken from them by their own kin or an ever encroaching mining industry and opportunistic politicians. “Tragedy” in Shadow King is personal, familial and above all cultural.
Mitchell Riley, His Music Burns, Sydney Chamber Opera
photo Louis Dillon-Savage
Mitchell Riley, His Music Burns, Sydney Chamber Opera
Sydney Chamber Opera, His Music Burns
“Tragedy” these days is so broad a notion that its meaning has become much diminished, simply focusing on the loss of life and of potential: the younger the victims the more tragic. The notion has also had to cope with 20th century Existentialisms: either all life is tragic (no God, no afterlife, we’re all cut short) or is not at all tragic—face up to that and you’ll live authentically.
The Sydney Chamber Opera double bill of Gyorgy Kurtag’s …pas a pas – nulle part (1993-98) and George Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill was one of the most satisfying events in the 2014 Sydney Festival. Before witnessing the cruelty in Benjamin’s take on the Pied Piper we were faced with existential anxieties and their wickedly funny repudiations of the kind only Samuel Beckett can conjure and Kurtag make musical.
Simply but highly effectively staged (designer Katren Wood) with rows of empty seats, Sarah Giles’ direction of the Kurtag places us face to face with a lone, tall, angular young man seated in an auditorium. Here, in 29 brief scenes in which he endures a great range of emotions, he sings poems penned by Samuel Beckett in 1937-39 and others translated by the writer. Giles has wrought a thoroughly convincing performance from baritone Mitchell Riley as he stares, grimaces, falls asleep, ponders, gives up and bounces back with comic verve and sung lines that wax lyrical, angst and leap into falsetto. He’s partnered by percussion and strings, the percussion played solo (Timothy Brigden) on a wide array of instruments providing the other principal voice in the work with its own reveries and shocking alarums underlining or counterpointing the singing. Moments of tedium alternate with despair in the face of death which can only be laughed about—which is apparently why Beckett wrote his poems, for the coping.
By setting the work in an auditorium that mirrors ours, turning the work’s silences into blackouts and having the text in super-sized surtitles, Giles adds another layer of anxiety, about the value or not of art. What does the young man make of us and our performance—our watching him? Does our own visit to the theatre likewise include moments of not being there, of nodding off (“sleep till death/ healeth/ come ease/ this life disease”) and being jolted awake by tragedy and “the fuss it makes.”
For Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill the setting is the same, but long shafts of lighting (Matt Cox) transform it into sequential spaces in which the two singers, one as the Pied Piper (Ellen Winhall) and the other as the Mayor (Emily Edmonds) narrate their story—in a style distinctively the librettist’s, English playwright Martin Crimp—as an eerie dialogue. Again art and death meet: the Piper declares his power: “With music I can make death stop.” Of course the opposite is also true, “his music burns.” The Mayor, for his treachery must lose his own child, who will become but an apparition on the hill where the Piper has taken him. Moreover, the Crimp-Benjamin version of the tale suggests that the ‘rats’ are a rejected and doomed human minority: a mysterious tale for children becomes allegorical for adults and a tragedy of another kind. As the interplay between singers proceeds this world is transformed by betrayal and loss, the chairs rearranged, stacked, put away, the world/the theatre closed.
The singing by Winhall and Edmonds is extraordinary, the demands of range, key shifts and dramatic needs well met and theatrically right. The physiognomy of Winhall’s Piper transforms eerily as the lighting re-sculpts her and her voice, ever lucid, climbs higher and higher, or growls in a warning lower register. The Mayor’s devious air of reasonableness and then her dawning panic is firmly realised by Edmonds. As ever, Jack Symonds conducts with exactitude and passion, has coached his singers brilliantly and collaborated finely with Sarah Giles. If ever a production warranted a return season, this is it. The large audiences were rapt.
Am I, Shaun Parker & Dancers
photo Prudence Upton
Am I, Shaun Parker & Dancers
Shaun Parker & Dancers, Am I
I enjoyed Shaun Parker’s Am I—the taut, often gestural ensemble choreography, the singular use of light and the boldness of tackling very big ideas neatly laid out for us. But the ideas were worrying, the show’s text adapted from Rick Hanson and Richard Mendius’ Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love and Wisdom (2009) with additional material from Am I’s dramaturg Veronica Neave. If the book’s title suggests a scientific confirmation of the good things about life, the show does not.
The absence of question mark in the title is odd, but the work consistently states that the answer is already a given. We are stardust: we come from nothing on our way to nothingness with little consolation in between. The performance, in which our creation, evolution and passing is narrated and danced, is initially contemplative—our host, Indian guest artist Shantala Shivalingappa, introduces us to the nothingness of our origins and sings sublimely, evoking Eastern cultures’ meditative inclinations.
But the greater part of Am I is not at all contemplative. It is beautiful to witness: on a large wall tightly ordered light bulbs flicker, pulse and pattern, momentarily blinding us with the Big Bang (as the narrator utters: “nothing prepares to become something”), evoking the sun and the stars, framing our evolution and abandoning us to the fading light of entropy (designer Damien Cooper). The highly structured dancing, much of it focused on hands and arms, traces our manual capacity to make and invent. Four dancers in black form a tight cluster; the wall behind glows benignly. A furious dance of arms and hands rapidly forms abstract and then more literal shapes: fingers, like tiny humans, walk along arms; the wings of a large bird take flight; hands form an intricate, living totemic column. Such magical mimcry is a consolation of art. It celebrates observation, skill and especially cooperation.
But Parker is not going to let us off the existential hook: cooperation, although in ample evidence in Am I’s very creation, is not finally worthy of celebration. The dancers now wield metre-long chrome rods, limb-extending tools that engender new cooperative creations, this time tautly geometric. These however become murderous weapons, not least in the hands of a dominant, twirling warrior figure (Julian Wong), despite the narrator’s claim that our reptilian brain functions for survival more by “avoidance than approach.” In this world sexual coupling is a passionless, comical imposition, love is the product of a brain chemical, God has many names including Tweeting, without which “men are truly lost.” Josh Mu’s raw solo supplication to a non-existent God is a highlight, contrasting with the tight regimentation of the body elsewhere.
The final group dance is watched by the narrator from one side and by the warrior (like a Neitzschean Overman, challenged but never defeated) on the other as if the pair represent Knowledge and Power observing the raw dance of humans to African-like percussion in a reminder of our origins. The movement is harmonious if furious, upbeat if unsmiling and visibly exhausting—the dance of those living only in the moment? In her final declaration, the narrator offers us a passive view of ourselves, “I am nothing but a listener, everybody is one,” while a melancholy violin sings, atypically Western in the score and oddly sentimental given the hard lesson Am I is teaching us. There is no smiling Buddha in Am I.
By the end and despite its physical and visual magic, I felt Am I short on mystery and openness: a closed book in which culture is mechanical and deterministic. The emotional upside to the work is the music by Nick Wales, performed by the composer with a small group of artists atop the box that contains Am I’s lighting cosmos. Ranging stylistically and with considerable interplay from Armenian to Indian and other forms, the music offers transcendence, connoting passion, contemplation, pain and joy. We don’t know the meaning of the words sung or the sounds played, only that a creative mind has offered a spirited counterpoint to Parker’s dark view of human evolution in an unresponsive universe. Tragedy has no place in Am I, nor in Beckett. But Beckett laughs.
Dido & Aeneas, Sasha Waltz and Company
photo Jamie Williams
Dido & Aeneas, Sasha Waltz and Company
Other productions
I watched Sasha Waltz and Company’s Dido and Aeneas with interest rather than excitement, admired the fluent movement in the relatively brief if magical underwater scene, relished the singing, thought the orchestra excellent if sounding a shade mellow and enjoyed moments of the dancing with its clear inheritance from Pina Bausch, both in limpid solo turns and deft crowd management but lacking Bausch’s incisive dramatic sensibility and her capacity to generate spare, enduring images. My Darling Patricia’s The Piper overflowed with unregulated invention, making for an overly complex rendering of a simple tale. Ghenoa Gela’s performance as the Bear/Piper, the work’s puppetry and its audience participation made the production attractive but not as strong as it should be.
The Sydney Festival serves many audiences and programs many productions. Of the other shows I saw I particularly enjoyed the superb Hilliard Ensemble, Mike Patton with Ensemble Offspring in a magnificent performance of Berio’s Laborintus II and Tyondai Braxton’s immersive The Hive (see Gail Priest’s report on MONA FOMA). Marrugeku’s Gudirr Gudirr was an inevitable success after its winning appearance in 2013’s Dance Massive (RT114). FUNPARK by Karen Therese and the Bidwill Community in Sydney’s West revealed a maligned community’s capacity to assert its dignity through art. Overall I had a good festival experience, a thoughtful one with welcome moments of transcendence.
Hans Op de Beeck, Parade, 2012 courtesy the artist and of Ron Mandos Gallery, Amsterdam/Rotterdam
I give you no build-up—and certainly no crescendo—when I state upfront that the musically oriented ‘film art’ works in the Crescendo exhibition at ACCA do not contribute to the intersecting fields of musicology, music history or the politics of music. They certainly merge cinema, theatre, music and opera—but in ways so blunt as to short-circuit any imaginative consideration by artist or audience as to what music can specifically bring to such expanded/meta-media works.
Focusing on three of the exhibition’s ‘moving image’ videos which lean heavily on musical incorporation—and which have played extensively overseas, attracting a trail of dumb criticism by visual art reviewers attempting to discuss the works’ use of music—I aim to explicate what these works belie through their fawning and flaunting of musical sensation, music history and musical attitude.
Forensically, one can audit and diagnose the works in Crescendo as accurate reflections of the curatorial templates which sow the contextual fields for these works to thrive. Hans Op de Beeck’s Parade (2012) looks like a trailer from SBS World Movies celebrating diversity and community. A ‘parade’ of people from all walks of life move in controlled groups from left to right across a huge stage housed in some 19th century theatre. It’s full of cute deus ex machina reveals, with digitally composited layers and changing background scrims (the look of old theatre craft meets the pull-down menu of digital cine-fx), and it coyly plays with ‘the viewer’ by situating you in one of the onscreen plush red chairs. Parade espouses this limp politics of aesthetics (of both traditional and virtual art making), causing the momentum of its parading folk to feel smarmy, forced and fatuous.
The music for Parade is an equally limp brass-band composition that daintily skips along, lip-curled, embracing its po-mo light pomposity. Its repetitive ditty harmonises with the clinical precision by which the ‘demographic’ caricatures perambulate across the stage like flaneurs trapped in a new ad campaign for, well…anything. Parade is symptomatic of a fine art anthropology which generates ‘drag documentaries’ which lay claim to representing the socio-cultural breadth of people who comprise everyday life. Old people on mobile phones; a playful youth scout group; a troupe of airline flight attendants; a toughie with a pit-bull; a happy toddler. But in this sanitised domain of a mock public park, we get an antiseptic, market-researched depiction more closely aligned to those faceless people depicted ‘inhabiting’ the urban-planned spaces of architects’ concept billboards for new developments. It’s frightening.
:
Julian Rosefeldt, My home is a dark and cloud-hung land, 2011; courtesy the artist & Arndt Berlin
Julian Rosefeldt’s My home is a dark and cloud-hung land (2011) scares in a different way. The title refers to a famous German poem (I’m told in the film); the film unfolds as a textual investigation (always flatulent and grandiose) of the power of the forest in the German imagination. Again, the film told me that. In fact, anything in the film, I’m told about. By an introductory narrator; by a painfully upper-middle class couple who quote German poetry; and by a bombastic arsenal of Steadicam tracking shots across extended theatrical set-ups and gathered ‘creative’ personnel, emblematic of the ‘inventive’ mise en scène which is now de rigueur for any trumped-up contemporary opera production included in international arts festivals worldwide. (There’s even a scene with a guy onstage wielding a chainsaw in front of opera literati.)
My home—like the bulk of the works in Crescendo—speaks to an unbearably turgid Germanic mind-set, the kind that arguably still controls the political rhetoric of European art biennales, which compresses Schopenhauer and Beuys (they’re really not that different) into a supposedly meaningful rumination on art, beauty, life and politics. Not surprisingly, My home originates from an exhibition about the German imaginary (How German Is It? Judisches Museum, Berlin, 2011), so everything in the work reeks of that discursive domain: its ironic, deconstructive view of nature (expensively filmed in sumptuous clichés so it’s neither ironic nor deconstructive); its radicalised embrace of artifice (rendered conservative by employing tropes identical to the most mundane music videos and beer advertisements); its pan-mythological sweep of cultural iconography referencing the German forest (flattened by the staging and direction which is on par with reading a Wikipedia entry on the topic). And there’s opera, to be sure. Bad, crappy, faux-Romantic, not-even-camp, time-warped, unmemorable. I felt like I’d taken Mogadon and was watching Ken Russell’s Mahler (1974). In a bad way.
Guido van der Werve’s Nummer veertien: Home (2012)
courtesy the artist
Guido van der Werve’s Nummer veertien: Home (2012)
More expensive production values are discreetly touted in Guido van der Werve’s Nummer veertien: Home (2012). It’s another textual poem (like just about all film art of the last decade) that blithely goes about its cinematic business as if film history had not already investigated the terrain half a century ago. The premise of Home is simple: an introductory title tells the sob story of Henri Chopin’s heart being in Warsaw while his body is in Paris. Cue mournful narrative of displaced cultural identity and selfhood following the tragic separations caused during wartime. Throw in references to Alexander the Great, and stir gently to suggest how Europe’s historical despotism has created its modern diasporas. Top with a ‘performance art triathlon’ by van de Werve who moves from Warsaw to Paris through elliptical and ‘surreal’ sequences to ferry a cup of earth from Chopin’s home in Warsaw back to his grave at Père Lachaise in Paris. I felt like I was either reading van de Werve’s submission to produce the work or his acquittal on receiving a grant. The cinematic or video-specific experience seemed incidental by comparison.
The original score (often performed live onscreen in extended takes) is more engaging than the scores for either Parade or My home, but over 54 minutes it remains stubbornly monotonal, creating an emotional flat-line which neither deepens the triathlon performance nor textually relates to the complex chromatic nature of Chopin’s eclectic compositions which site him between arch Romanticism and a sprouting Modernism. The result is a series of chamber choir passages which signpost the narrative structure without either deep parallelism or audiovisual counter-point. While I suspect Home is check-boxing Straub/Huillet’s rigorous The Chronicles of Anna Magdelena Bach (1961) and Chantal Ackerman’s haunting D’est (1991), its unremitting elegiac tone nullified the project’s purported aims, swamping it with forlorn humanist sighing.
Frankly, Home, My home and Parade sound like the work of deaf artists, proving that while contemporary visual artists are treated as privileged soothsayers whose worldview is automatically revelatory, their audiovisual sensibilities are often on a par with the most prosaic and predictable of intelligentsia aesthetes. In their artsy posturing and tasteful soundtracks, these key works in Crescendo betray the influence of the ‘pseudo-cinema’ which has affected video art since the 90s: the transposing of cinematic form (or more properly, its tropes, allusions and stylistics) into the increasingly high production values of ‘film art.’ But maybe these artists don’t care about cinema anyway (or music, for that matter); and maybe I’m applying an inappropriate critical perspective on these exemplars of ‘film art’ instead of listening to the authorial voice of their core creative figure, the ‘artist.’
Then again, maybe I’m tired of contemporary artists being accorded greater skills, perception, aptitude and poetic verve than the producers and practitioners of mass-produced industrially dictated, chaotically collaborative entertainment forms like cinema. The voguish channelling of ‘film art’ into internationalist contemporary art exhibition evidences the diminishing perceptiveness of current museographic institutions who claim contemporaneity without evaluating the tiresome slightness of so much ‘video/film art’ second-guessing curatorial zeitgeistism. How mean-spirited of me to watch and listen to these works with the presumption that they might be informed of the legacy of ‘open-text’ audiovisuality in landmark music-and-politics films like Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex (1967), Godard’s Sympathy For The Devil (1968), and Straub/Huillet’s Othon (1970).
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ACCA, Crescendo, curator Juliana Engberg, artists Dorothy Cross, Rodney Graham, Markus Kahre, Hans Op de Beeck, Julian Rosefeldt, Ana Torfs, Guido van der Werve, ACCA, Melbourne, 20 Dec, 2013-14 March
“Overburden” is what miners call the stuff that is on top of the coal they want to get at. In Norie Neumark and Maria Miranda’s exhibition CoalFace at the Library Artspace, Overburden is the title of a photograph of a lush Gippsland paddock bordered by towering power lines. The melancholic rage that settles over this word/image mismatch is the key signature for the show that had its beginnings in a month-long residency in Beijing in 2012.
The artists’ anxiety over air quality, registered daily on a phone app, resulted in a video showing them on a Beijing street in tight close-up, heads wrapped in fur-lined hoods, faces covered in alarming black filtration masks. Only their eyes are visible and warmly expressive—puzzled, curious, friendly, sometimes fierce—in their invitation to engage and to wonder about the dense smog around them. Back in Australia, they set out in pursuit of Gippsland’s brown coal industry and CoalFace details their increasing fascination with the material itself.
Brown coal is beautiful stuff. It is rich, dark, velvety, crumbly and delicious-looking. Video performances show traces of the artists’ process: meditating on the material, its ancient, elemental ‘is-ness,’ the fact of it and its allure, as well as the troubling consequences of digging it out of the ground to power our cities. A pile of coal on the floor of the gallery next to a miniature yellow dump truck is much larger than the toy and the poignant disruption of scale points obliquely to the monstrous scope of open-cut mining operations in Gippsland. One video—showing the artists sitting like gods or giant children, pushing the toy truck back and forth between them—also plays with scale in an arresting way. The actual yellow trucks carry 300 tonnes each and Paul Cleary (author of Mine-field The Dark Side of Australia’s Resources Rush, Black Inc 2012) calculates that current plans for the Queensland Adani mine will extract 60 million tonnes a year, equivalent to 200,000 yellow trucks which, if lined up bumper to bumper would stretch 3,000 kilometres.
CoalFace, Norie Neumark and Maria Miranda
courtesy the artists
CoalFace, Norie Neumark and Maria Miranda
Elsewhere a plinth displays several lumps of brown coal alongside a cutting of a juicy green plant in water that stands in for the prehistoric lepidodendron forests of which the coal is composed. Neumark called this the “petting zoo,” encouraging visitors at the opening to handle the coal and make marks on the gallery wall. Coal’s mark-making capacities are also to the fore in the piece that brings Loy Yang Power Station in South-Eastern Australia and Beijing closest together in After Tan Ping, a series of folded paper hangings on each of which a single line is painted in one stroke from top to bottom, using ink made from the coal. The ancient Chinese painting style and the ancient Australian mineral resource collide: a gesture and a core sample; an aesthetic response to a beguiling material and an urgent environmental question.
CoalFace is quietly powerful in its address to the damage caused by the mining, export and use of brown coal, but there is something more complex and tender at its core. It made me feel my human relationship to the earth—the “rich dirt” as Neumark calls it. I came away thinking, almost dreaming, of the dense, dripping temperate rainforests of Gippsland; their slow processes of laying down change; their lush indifference to small-scale, individual humans. Perhaps it is in re-igniting this love (I can’t think of a better word) that CoalFace makes its strongest appeal against the depredations we collective humans are wreaking on our only home/our own/only body.
It is now possible to know almost everything about our existence via information gleaned from the objects we’ve touched, websites visited and purchases we’ve made. Our presence is constantly being recorded via a network of private and governmental security cameras and we aid this digital monitoring by using GPS-equipped devices and posting social media updates. Given the implications of these aspects of contemporary living it’s utterly amazing that we don’t throw our devices off the nearest bridge and lock ourselves away in a padded Faraday Cage.
But we don’t. Rather we tend to compartmentalise (Facebook good, video surveillance—ah, whatever) and keep functioning regardless of the digital panopticon. Trace Recordings, curated by Chris Gaul and Holly Williams at UTS Gallery, highlights these invasive forces but tempers the potential for panic attacks by providing playful methods of subversion.
The work that clearly encapsulates the extent to which our identities are exposed is US-based artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s Stranger Visions (2012). From discarded chewing gum, cigarette butts and stray strands of hair, Dewey-Hagborg extracts DNA samples creating a possible genetic profile. With this information she generates a 3D print of the litterer’s face. The masks hover on the wall above snapshots of the samples and their locations. These disembodied people are strangely familiar yet not quite specific enough to be anyone in particular, the ambivalence almost triggering a slide into that old ‘uncanny valley.’ Small cards provide genetic information—racial type, gender, eye-colour, nose size. Dewey-Hagborg also includes a potted history of the ancestry type—when a racial strand emerged from chaos and the potential genetic health issues it might face. These accompanying facts offer an interesting sense of the big picture—the hand of fate adding an even greater sense of vulnerability to these ‘strangers.’
The curators are particularly interested in how contemporary surveillance techniques relate to portraiture and have included two other works focusing on the face. Memory (2013) by Shinseungback Kimyonghun (Korea) is a framed digital tablet which uses facial recognition software to record the visage of everyone who stares at it. These faces are then combined over time to create a universal human. Subtle for an interactive piece (you just have to trust your face is in there melding with thousands of others), the tastefully misty portrait is an everyman/woman also with a hint of that uncanny slippery slope.
New York-based artist Adam Harvey’s CV Dazzle (2013) aims for anonymity through hyper-individuality. Harvey offers workshops in face painting designed to confuse facial recognition programs. By creating unexpected and idiosyncratic geometric patterns on key points of your face, the software is supposedly unable to get a fix. Harvey proposes that by making yourself more obvious in the analogue world you might be able to avoid detection in the digital.
Denis Beaubois, installation view
photo David Lawrey, courtesy the artist
Denis Beaubois, installation view
Two other pieces were impressive for their conceptual poetry. Denis Beaubois showed two works from 2000 in which surveillance technology is configured, using mirrors, so that it is forced to interrogate its own image. It’s a closed-loop of paranoia or narcissism or maybe both. Matt Richardson’s Descriptive Camera (2012) captures an image and sends it off to the internet ether where anonymous human subjects write text descriptions of the scene. These are sent back to the device which prints the information on a hacked receipt printer. In such a visually focused reality this anti-pictorial outcome and the complex mix of digital and analogue (human) processing is as amusing as it is poignant.
Trace Recordings is an exhibition of significant scale featuring 10 artists who tease out multiple complexities of the state of surveillance. However, rather than leaving feeling twitchy, I was excited about the intelligence of these artworks and the future subversions that will arise in resistance. Or maybe I’m not so worried because I’ve just pre-ordered my Philip K Dick Scramble Suit on eBay.
While Trace Recordings worries at the all-permeating forces of technological surveillance, Joyce Hinterding revels in the equally ubiquitous, yet natural force of electromagnetic energy. In her exhibition at Breenspace she presented elegant, large-scale spiral diagrams made from ink and conductive graphite. When amplified by small tabs of circuitry they can channel the hum of the Earth.
Several of these works are displayed as ‘unplugged’ wall pieces (the Arts Santa Monica, 2011 and Heide Museum, 2010 series) accompanied by two large table-top designs, SoundWave: Induction drawings 1 & 2 (2012), that are sonically active. By tracing the designs with your hand, or even just hovering above the surface, your body and the force become connected and the ever-present deep hum shifts pitch, buzzes, spits and crackles. It’s a completely meditative work, playable like an instrument, encouraging a kind of Tai Chi dance of the fingers.
Contrasting with the bold graphite spirals are five other works on paper, The Diffusion Reactors series (2013), using an electrostatic carbon and oil mix to create delicate organic swirls and constellations. These are mute but audio potential is implied by the circuitry, inviting you to imagine the magical sound of these alluring landscapes.
After experiencing Hinterding’s beautifully crafted audio paintings I’ve decided to hold off on the Faraday Cage for a while so I can enjoy the Earth’s electromagnetic song a little longer.
In December last year, Bamboozled took out the top prize at Sydney’s Tropfest. There was a very brief moment of celebration. And then came the accusation: this film is homophobic. Or should that be transphobic? Nobody seemed quite sure. But social media went off as accusers and defenders started to spit out their definitive responses.
One disgruntled writer published her threat to “think twice about tuning into Tropfest next year.” Her reason: “The jokes [in Bamboozled] are derived from the shock that a man slept with another man.” Another writer—who identified as a friend of the film’s director Matthew Hardie—argued that the backlash was unfair because Hardie and others involved in the film “are good, kind, decent human beings.”
The ensuing argument was incredibly boring. Bad film or good film? Either Hardie was guilty of homophobia/transphobia, or he wasn’t. Now, which side will you choose to be on…?
Observing this argument (and while fighting off the temptation to get involved), I wondered how everyone who had to have their say seemed to have missed (or ignored) the debate about positive and negative representation in media texts. In the midst of trying to discredit or praise a film and its director, why was there no mention of this?
This issue has been widely explored in Media Studies and other cultural disciplines for many decades. Here, we find an abundance of discussions about what constitutes positive or negative in terms of representations of disability, age, class, race, gender as well as sex and sexuality. And one of the simplest conclusions to have come out of all this is that a single media text always has multiple meanings. The historical and cultural location of the text and its audience always affect the reading. It is, therefore, impossible to claim that any media text offers definitely a positive or a negative representation.
The argument about Bamboozled failed to pick up or explore this. Those who participated in this argument showed they were capable of having opinions about a film, but they did not show any ability to analyse the historical and cultural specificity of that film.
Instead, the debate ran its course as an overly simplified two-sided rant. Bamboozled had to be homophobic because it made fun of a man who had sex with another man. Or, it had to be a great movie because it was made by Hardie who has many gay friends—look here’s a picture of Hardie in a gay nightclub so this must prove he and his film can’t be homophobic!
In seeking to defend or attack Hardie and his film, the social media mafia also failed to identify that this was not the first time we have addressed the question of whether a text represents non-heterosexuality in a positive or negative way. They quite simply forgot—or failed to know—the queer history on which they were commenting.
The popular television show Queer Eye for The Straight Guy (debut 2003), for example, was considered by many to be influential in finally opening up homosexuality to a wider public audience. I recall at the time of its popularity how so many of my undergraduate students would cite this show as paving the way for gay liberation. Decades of struggles had somehow disappeared with the emergence of this one television show. But whether the men in this show offered ‘positive representations’ of homosexuality was questioned. Some argued that the flamboyant personalities of the more dominant characters in fact reinforced the stereotype that all gay men are effeminate.
The character of Jack in the series Will and Grace has been analysed in the same way. Will might be considered the ‘normal’ gay man, but Jack seems to represent the stereotypical gay man. Does this mean that one is positive and the other is negative? No. It means that Will is able to be seen as a positive representation of homosexuality in a culture where being ‘normal’ is good.
Jon Inman’s character Mr Humphries in the 1970s British sitcom Are You Being Served? was one of the first ongoing representations of homosexuality on television. But would such a character be considered as funny or as acceptable today within a gay culture where the ‘straight-acting’ gay man is preferred over the ‘queen’?
Queer as Folk (2000-2005)—another seminal contemporary gay television show—had a bit of everything. There were drugs, gay parenting, promiscuity, love, underage sex, lesbians, queens and even a few straights. The UK version was so popular that it was later turned into an American show that lasted for five seasons. But this show was also seen by some as further alienating gay people from the mainstream because of its daring approach.
Equally, representations of transpeople have been the subject of much debate. Some argue that the characters in Tootsie (1982) and TransAmerica (2005) made issues of gender and sexuality more visible and to a much wider audience. Others see these films as creating humour or fantasy when the real lives of transpeople often include intense medical scrutiny and daily discrimination.
Such debates can never define a character as a positive or negative representation of homosexuality or transgender. But the representations—and the responses to them—can give us some idea about how we understand homosexuality and transgender today, and how we might expect non-heterosexuals to behave.
So, is Bamboozled a homophobic or transphobic film? This is quite simply the wrong question to ask. And it’s impossible to answer definitively—no matter how much we rant in our social networks. Instead, we could discuss the representations of sexuality as they appeared in this film with reference to cultural and historical contexts.
We could consider how this film plays around with the importance of sexual identity in early 21st century cultures. We could consider, as Hardie has insisted we should, how the film responds to the media’s treatment of homosexuality as something to snigger at. We could explore how the film draws on an emerging discourse of trans-rights or trans-acceptance. We might think about how this media text differs in its representation of sexuality from similar representations we might find in reality shows like Big Brother. We might even raise questions about who has the right to speak for homosexuals and transpeople.
But fighting to destroy or save the reputation of a single film or its director is just tedious. It’s a playground battle which indicates to me that the fighters—both the accusers and the defenders—are not interested in locating media texts in culture. They’re only interested on being seen to be on the side of the ‘good.’
Gideon Obarzanek and Sydney Dance Company dancers in rehearsal
photo Peter Grieg
Gideon Obarzanek and Sydney Dance Company dancers in rehearsal
The Sydney Dance Company’s forthcoming triple bill, Interplay, features new works by artistic director Rafael Bonachela, former Frankfurt Ballet soloist and collaborator with William Forsythe, Jacopo Godani (interview RT101) and ex-Chunky Move artistic director Gideon Obarzanek. Obarzanek’s piece is L-Chaim!, the Jewish toast ‘to life,’ involving the entire company of dancers and one actor who will be mostly present as a voice, but will eventually appear on stage with the dancers. When I spoke to Obarzanek he was about to go into rehearsals with the company with two weeks already under his belt from last year.
“The general gist of L-Chaim! is that the dancers are attempting to make a contemporary dance piece. ‘The god of theatre’ or ‘Wizard of Oz’ (played by the actor) interrupts, interrogating them about themselves and what they are doing—the meaning of the dance. And in doing so, this outsider inadvertently undermines it making it difficult for the dancers to perform.
“On the surface, the outsider seems quite nice, but is a bit nasty and depressed. In the end the outsider is asked to descend and dance in what becomes a big musical number, celebrating aspects of life that are difficult to intellectualise, things that you have to participate in to fully understand.”
Obarzanek’s interrogation of the modus operandi of contemporary dance has manifest in many forms throughout his career, from surveying audiences about what they like and making a work ‘to order’ (Australia’s Most Wanted, 2003), to an autobiographical piece that questions the choreographer-dancer relationship and possible measures of its successful outcomes (Faker, 2010). Obarzanek adds Two-Faced Bastard (2008, which I haven’t seen). He points out that this theme in his work has perhaps become stronger since leaving the directorship of Chunky Move in 2012 and making fewer dance works. He states point blank that “the premise is: trying to find meaning in a large, abstract contemporary dance work and in doing so, destroying it.”
The central voice of dissent in the work is clearly a proxy for Obarzanek, but then, as he points out, so too is it for dancers who defend the art form. The work should ideally pull in two directions, testing the accepted foundations of the art form to the point of complete destruction, while asserting the legitimacy and potency of dance that counters the critique with a convincing dance piece. A tricky thing to pull off. For starters, can a work assert the integrity of an artistic discipline by employing others (particularly theatre) to achieve this?
And the task is even trickier in the context of the Sydney Dance Company which has survived a very challenging environment for dance in Australia for 45 years by generally adhering to expectations around dance, such as a certain level of vigorous physicality and a strong relationship with music. Obarzanek suggests that the company owes its longevity to the successful harnessing of audiences from ballet and other traditional performance sectors. This is not a company that brings innovative forms of dance to the international scene, but has satisfied a local audience for a long time. As Obarzanek states, “Context is everything,” and a work such as L-Chaim! might well appear subversive in this environment.
“The beautiful and talented virtuosic dancers of the company are forced in this work to explain themselves—their actions and interests—and it’s quite strange to hear them talk. They have made very clear decisions about who they want to dance with and why, and I’m asking them to think about why they made these choices, what’s interesting about it for them and for the audience. For the most part, the dancers are interested in doing new things. But there might be a fine line between what’s interesting and what’s annoying for them in this process!”
So a question to contemplate as Sydney Dance Company celebrates 45 years might be—what is interesting for Australian dance audiences? Obarzanek is hopeful that the Australian Ballet, which has also commissioned him recently, will take the lead from the Paris Opera Ballet and Netherlands National Ballet and other important ballet companies internationally who commission radical choreographers such as Jerome Bel and Jan Fabre. Obarzanek says, “in Australia the ballet company is much more conservative in that sense.” And he also has high hopes that Rafael Bonachela “continues to program diverse works over time which will influence audience expectations.”
Obarzanek is working with dramaturg David Woods (who runs UK company Ridiculousness and works with Back To Back in Australia) who will perform as ‘the voice’ in Melbourne and Canberra with Zoe Coombs Marr of the post performance group taking his place in the premiere season in Sydney. Obarzanek has a keen eye for quality artistic collaborators and the importance of a perspective from outside the art form is clear in this case.
But he insists that dance is central. “When I was with Chunky Move I was drifting outside of dance because I was questioning whether dance was my thing. For me right now, my interest in dance is in returning very much to a physical world. I’ve recently returned from Las Vegas working with six showgirls in the middle of the night in a fancy club. It was dance—“5, 6, 7, 8”—and I really liked it. It was challenging, satisfying and exciting. And in this piece, as much as we are having a go at dance and prodding the dancers, they still triumph. You have to admire the strength in them and what they do, which is really wonderful. As much as I challenge dance, it turns around and stands up for itself enough for me to want to do it again. I never beat it. It’s never defeated. At least, not by me anyway.”
Sydney Dance Company, Interplay, choreography by Rafael Bonachela, Jacopo Godani, Gideon Obarzanek, Sydney Theatre, 15 March-5 April; Canberra Theatre Centre, 10–12 April: Southbank Theatre, Melbourne, 30 April-10 May
See our full profile on Gideon Obarzanek at realtimedance
Daniel Riley, Beau Dean Riley Smith, Macq, Dance Clan 3, Bangarra
photo Greg Barrett
Daniel Riley, Beau Dean Riley Smith, Macq, Dance Clan 3, Bangarra
Dance Clan 3, presented in the Bangarra studio at Pier 4, featured works by four female artists from the company: Tara Gower’s Nala, Jasmin Sheppard’s Macq, Deborah Brown’s Dive and Yolande Brown’s Imprint. Artistic Director Stephen Page has to be commended for continuing to support the choreographic development of Bangarra artists—and female at that—in a way unsurpassed by their counterpart Sydney Dance Company but perhaps matched nationally by Gideon Obarzanek, Lucy Guerin and Kate Champion.
Comprising three dance works (and the film Dive) it seems odd that the casts in Dance Clan 3 are all so large. While it’s true that there are few opportunities to work this way in Australian dance productions due to funding restrictions, I enjoyed the smaller group work within the pieces more. Managing a large ensemble is a very specific skill that artists have little opportunity to develop here and is a big ask of first-time choreographers. Artists like Bonachela, Tankard and Healey have gained experience through a commitment to this particular format and ample opportunities.
Dance theatre is the preferred mode at Bangarra, which Page is upfront about, referring in his program notes to the company’s “theatrical story-telling.” These women have stories to tell about the trauma of genocide, the fight for land rights and the struggles involved in negotiating the social and financial changes brought about by “imposed progress” (Gower). So much of the content of these works is historical as opposed to the work of peers such as Vicki van Hout who deal very much with the contemporary Indigenous condition.
This produced some resemblances that startled me: a scene in Sheppard’s Macq represents the power struggle between the Indigenous population and Governor Macquarie (with a voice-over quoting from the latter’s diary), one dancer representing an Indigenous man and the other the Governor, stalking each other on and around a long table. The resonance with German choreographer Kurt Joos’ Green Table of 1932—an anti-war statement made just prior to Hitler’s rise to power—was there in Sheppard’s archetypes and political content writ large.
Gower’s Nala was full of characters and relationships, past bleeding into present and traditional crossing over with the modern. Beginning with a scene in a cinema and covering much territory, this piece seemed to focus more on choreographic novelty as opposed to important stories.
The movement language never strayed too far from Stephen Page’s: the signature floor work (pulling forward on the belly with strong arms with legs curling up and behind with flexed feet); jumps that hit the air in striking shapes; and partner work that entwined and unravelled with slippery precision. Composing large groups of dancers through patterning and breaking into smaller group work was also evident.
This made me wonder about the breadth of exposure these accomplished choreographers are experiencing. Given the long history of Africanist fusions with French contemporary dance and the multiplicity of traditional forms now blending with each other as well as with Western modalities, the storytelling tradition so important to these artists could be fed by such intercultural innovations at the level of movement invention. The qualities and techniques of the various indigenous traditions are so distinct and sophisticated, there will be many new ways to draw out what the forms have to offer contemporary dance.
This potential was in evidence in some innovations when the demands of storytelling allowed space for the movement to become the medium. Gower’s Nala threaded some traditional yet playful percussive sequences successfully in her narrative, and Sheppard’s section Bodies in the Trees (referring to Macquarie’s directive to hang the Indigenous dead in the trees as a warning to others) featured a moving cascade of male bodies passed down on a simple set of steps.
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Bangarra Dance Theatre, Clan 3, artistic director Stephen Page, choreographers Deborah Brown, Yolande Brown, Tara Gower, Jasmin Sheppard, music David Page, set design Jacob Nash, costumes Jennifer Irwin, lighting Matt Cox, Bangarra Studio Theatre, Pier 4, Sydney, 20 Nov-1 Dec, 2013
RealTime issue #119 Feb-March 2014 pg. 26
Jianna Georgiou, Salt, Restless Dance Theatre
photo Chris Herzfeld
Jianna Georgiou, Salt, Restless Dance Theatre
There is a moment of great theatrical and human boldness in this performance. After performer Dana Nance (who has shortened arms) tells of the first three years of her life spent in an orphanage, the persecution and exclusion of this situation is dramatised. Then she ‘dreams’ of being able to command others with arm and hand gestures.
In the enactment of this dream long arms appear, provided by another performer standing behind her. She clearly longs for these arms, not so as to be the same as others, but to have the physical ability to determine the presence of others in a way taken for granted by most of us. When she ‘wakes’ she finds a different way of insisting on her needs—using her voice.
Salt speaks of self-worth. Director Rob Tannion has assembled scenes, movement, sound and visual design elements in response to the notion of “being worth your salt” (see interview RT118, p8). We see before us the decaying wall of a cottage (salt damage), the door stuck open with a drift of salt piled high next to it. Salt is taken from the pile and weighed. The performers let it run through their fingers. They balance each other on a see-saw. A slatted bed frame comforts and imprisons. There is discussion of salt’s uses, pleasures and value. Each performer, except one, is the star of a dramatised story from their own life where they were left feeling worthless. We see their fight to regain self-worth.
This piece marks a departure from the movement and large ensemble-based work of this mixed ability company. Often in the past a visual image and/or dominant sound design has unified the action on stage. The establishment of a performance troupe has shifted the style of the company’s work. With this move into the terrain of dramatic and autobiographical performance, my focus as an audience member was on the individual performers as people and actors, rather than on the physical metaphors being created or on the unifying image.
In this show, Felicity Doolette (with no visible disability) most often played the oppressor in the dramatised action and didn’t star in her own story of loss of self-worth. She also played the ‘hostess’ at times. Back to Back has established an interesting politics of performance and disability by having company members with visibly different abilities play both persecutor and persecuted. It unsettles the viewing contract and any simple construction of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and of what we have, or don’t have, in common with anyone. Salt presented a wonderful challenge for the performers which they met with great verve, but it did re-create that old divide between performer and audience, of them and us.
Salt has a fecund starting point and a lot of ideas are presented but a clear, strong line hasn’t been taken with the material to realise the promise and power of the starting idea (the link between salt and worth) and to engage us in new ways with the question of self-worth. I look forward to the piece developing.
Restless Dance, Salt, director Rob Tannion, performers Felicity Doolette, Jianna Georgiou, Lorcan Hopper, Dana Nance, design Meg Wilson, design adviser Gaelle Mellis, lighting Geoff Cobham, sound DJ Trip, Odeon Theatre, Adelaide, 17-25 Jan
ASIO surveillance photo, Frank Hardy, George St Sydney
courtesy Australian National Archive
ASIO surveillance photo, Frank Hardy, George St Sydney
An intelligence agency out of control. Australian artists defending totalitarian regimes. Volunteer spies led on for decades and then left in the cold. Haydn Keenan’s four-part documentary Persons of Interest offers a wealth of cautionary tales whichever way you look at it. Glib confidence or conspiratorial fears are rarely far from the frame when the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) is discussed in public, so Keenan is to be commended for putting together a complex portrait. Unfortunately some of the reactions to his series during its broadcast on SBS last month highlight a distinct lack of critical nuance in our contemporary culture.
Keenan’s premise is simple enough—hand four aging radicals their declassified ASIO files and garner their reactions. Then tease out the files to tell the story of post-war dissent in Australia and governmental efforts to contain perceived political threats. Three of the episodes focus on Communists: Roger Milliss and his deceased father Bruce, former Monash Labor Club Maoist Michael Hyde and the Australian writer Frank Hardy. The fourth subject is the inimitable Gary Foley, a central figure in the Indigenous land rights movement of the late 1960s and early 70s.
The files reveal a depth of surveillance that is at times almost comical. Foley sneaking off for a dirty weekend with a leftist in the early 70s is cited as evidence of a Black Power-Communist Party plot. Frank Hardy’s drunken night out with Soviet poet Yevtushenko and a former Bond girl—complete with a drunken unsuccessful pass by the Russian writer—is described in breathless detail. Every car trip across town by certain persons of interest is recorded in minute detail.
Then there’s the footage. Keenan was spared any reliance on historical re-enactments by the availability of hundreds of hours of ASIO surveillance films in the national archives. We see May Day parades of the 1950s, anti-Vietnam War protests of the late 1960s and Communist Party congresses across the decades. At times the footage is almost Warhol-esque in its unrelenting gaze. There are countless hours of footage of the entrance to the Australian Communist Party’s Sydney headquarters, the street remaining fixed as fashions, cars and faces transform with the passing years. Unfortunately the demands of broadcast television prevented any lingering on this footage and the mute history it contains. I kept imagining another kind of film, or video installation, compiled from this material that dwelt on the sheer fascinating banality of the surveillance images.
We certainly saw enough footage to convey the breadth and depth of surveillance carried out by ASIO in the post-war era, and much of the press coverage that greeted Persons of Interest focused on this disquieting aspect of the series’ revelations. In contrast, Gerard Henderson in The Australian saw fit to leap to ASIO’s defence, extolling the agency’s work against those who “want to overturn the state” (“Totalitarian slurs ignore the truth of ASIO activities,” January 11, 2014). Henderson correctly points out that the Soviets were running a spy ring in 1950s Australia and prominent figures involved in the Labor Party were covert members of the Communist Party—all of which the series details. But Persons of Interest also shows how an intelligence organisation operating without external oversight, under a Menzies Government intent on milking fears about Communism to maximum political advantage, became a deeply paranoid, highly politicised and extremely invasive spying machine. While some of those under surveillance expressed a desire to carry out violent political actions, the files also clearly demonstrate that ASIO was incapable of distinguishing subversive threat from legitimate political dissent or even cultural curiosity. Prominent film critic David Stratton, for example, earned a file in 1969 after visiting the Soviet Embassy to obtain a visa to attend a film festival.
Mrs Petrov at the Beach with an ASIO officer
courtesy Australian National Archive
Mrs Petrov at the Beach with an ASIO officer
Stratton’s case was not atypical. ASIO opened files on literally hundreds of thousands of Australians in the post-war era, especially in the arts. Everyone from novelist Christopher Koch to actor Peter Finch appears in the archives. Merely knowing a person of interest was enough to earn a file, creating an ever expanding net of surveillance. The result? A pretty fundamental misreading of what was happening in Australian society from the 1950s to 70s and a colossal waste of time, effort and taxpayer-funded resources. It’s ironic that Henderson is offended that Persons of Interest received public funding when the millions ASIO mis-spent spying on prominent writers, painters, actors, politicians, judges and unionists who have contributed immensely to Australian public life doesn’t seem to bother him at all.
There is another cautionary tale here though, which has received less attention in the more liberal press. As the stories in Persons of Interest show, much of Australia’s hard left in the post-war era was beholden to Moscow, with creative figures like Frank Hardy defending the indefensible with the invasion of Hungary, the suppression of the Prague Spring and Stalin’s mass slaughter of Soviet citizens. When the Communist movement ruptured in the wake of the Sino-Soviet split of the late 1950s, figures like Bruce Milliss passionately defended Mao’s even more murderous regime. We see Bruce’s son Roger bitterly denouncing the “filth” on his ASIO file regarding his personal life, yet neither he nor his wife appears to reflect upon the work they did for the Soviets, which extended to propagandising for the regime in Moscow while working for Soviet media. They are rightly appalled by the extent to which ASIO pried into and recorded their private lives, but why do they appear so forgiving of regimes that were far, far worse in their crimes?
The most striking lesson offered by Persons of Interest—and the one least discussed in the press—is the danger of blind faith in any doctrine, regime or organisation, whether it’s ASIO or the Communist Party of Australia. All these organisations are essentially bureaucracies and all bureaucracies have a natural propensity to become self-justifying and self-perpetuating. They also render many of those within these organisations blind to anything that does not conform to their worldview. Australian Communists refused to see what was unfolding in the Eastern Bloc and Mao’s China, just as ASIO interpreted every post-war social movement as evidence of a global Communist plot.
ASIO files remain classified for 20 years (until recently it was 30), so Persons of Interest could not touch on the agency’s contemporary activities. Suffice it to say ASIO’s budget is now at record levels and its legal powers far greater than they were in the post-war decades. Anyone can now be secretly arrested for a week without charge with no right to silence. If Australia has avoided the worst forms of political repression it’s not because the likes of ASIO have protected our interests, as Gerard Henderson would have us believe. It’s because some in our legal, political and cultural professions have had the courage to watch the watchers, and help keep their powers and paranoia in check. Organisations like ASIO are arguably necessary even in a democracy. What’s less in doubt is that publicly funded documentaries like Persons of Interest are essential.
Persons of Interest, four-part series, director Haydn Keenan, producer Gai Steele, Smart Street Films, SBS ONE, 7-28 January 2014.
Lloyd Swanton, Tony Buck, Chris Abrahams, The Necks
photo Camille Walsh Photography
Lloyd Swanton, Tony Buck, Chris Abrahams, The Necks
Over a 25-year career of music making, The Necks have become renowned for live performances that leave audiences mesmerised and dazed. Although their simple, repetitive aesthetic seems to straddle the minimalism of Steve Reich and the lush musical narratives of groups such as The Cinematic Orchestra, as well as the rhythmic explorations of free jazz, the long-form improvisations that account for the majority of the trio’s work, while often quite tonal, tend to engage with a distinct set of preoccupations: the unfolding expressive possibilities of timbre and texture over extended stretches of time.
The group’s formation in the late 80s came about partly in reaction to what pianist Chris Abrahams describes as the “modern jazz style [where] there’s a melody and everyone takes a solo and you’d impress the audience with your chops.” Although all three musicians have continued to pursue other musical interests, whether with jazz luminaries The catholics (bassist Lloyd Swanton), avant-industrial outfit Peril (drummer Tony Buck) or Abrahams’ solo and session work and collaborations with Melanie Oxley, The Necks, which has only ever existed part-time, has provided its three members with a contrasting vehicle to create a collective music in which “there was no leader, no ego…[rather] the three of us making a sound world together, [with] no piano solos, drum solos and not dazzling people with how great we were as individual musicians.”
From these principles has arisen a form of improvisation in which each member submits to the flow of music as it is created, listening intently to the others to allow the particular trajectory being sculpted to emerge. Abrahams’ idea of an ‘off-night’ is “when I’m [consciously] thinking of where the music should go…I’m not saying that our way is better, but the main thing [is] to let the music itself inform us as to what direction it’s going, as it’s being played. To enable the performer to also be an interactive listener, to use [our] interpretation [of the music] to continue the piece wherever it does go—and for that direction to be a result of the interaction between the three of us, the acoustic quality of the space, the acoustic qualities of the instruments, the PA and the context [in which] we find ourselves.”
This intense attention that the music seems to demand sometimes provokes “feelings of annoyance and frustration and anger” in first-time listeners, according to Abrahams, before they “relinquish [their] preconceptions as they realise that we mean to be doing what we’re doing. [People] tend to simplify things, likeness is thought of as being the same. And we [the band] tend to do this as well, hear the music as repeating the same thing; but of course we can’t be doing that because we’re not machines. Every small difference that we make is amplified by the power of three… I’ll be playing and hearing that a certain note on the piano is bouncing off the wall in a weird way. I won’t analyse it like that, I’ll just hear that suddenly the piano is sounding strange and that’s what I’ll go towards, the piece will go in the direction of that. The repetitious line of what we do, which I think enables listeners to get mesmerised, allows us to move the whole thing almost surreptitiously—I know there’s a movement towards something and that’s what makes it compelling.”
The Necks
photo John Tapia Urquiza
The Necks
This quality is readily apparent on their most recent recorded offering, Open, a sparse work of bare percussion, tinkling chimes and gentle pianistic gesture. Recorded over a 10-day period at Sydney’s 301 Studios, the material gathered in that time came to be arranged in reference to a recording made by Tony Buck of a monochord, a droning stringed instrument tuned to one open pair of notes. “I’m not sure at what point we decided to start with the monochord,” says Abrahams. “We walked into the studio and the only thing we thought of was that we wanted to make something sparse…We didn’t want it to build too much, we wanted it to flow through a number of different scenes rather than a teleological build-up of crescendos—that was the main brief.”
Open does indeed swell and contract over the course of its 68 minutes, providing in vivid terms what Abrahams calls an “abstract narrative.” The sitar-like rippling of the monochord is answered with harmonically static, yet richly expressive arpeggiated sevenths and pentatonic figures in the piano. At times the texture thins to a trickle, Buck dancing around a snare pattern that more implies than articulates a beat and Lloyd Swanton engaging in rhythmic dialogue with precisely placed single-note thrums. Then it expands into a rushing tributary, Buck building thick, shimmering fields of cymbal and gong over the sustained oscillations of Abrahams’ Hammond, before calming once more, the recurring motif of the monochord providing a foil and unifying device for the piece as a whole.
Although distinct from their live practice, in that motifs are rehearsed, over-dubbed and arranged in the mixing process, the recording is redolent with a fascination for the tactile possibilities of sound. “I think The Necks’ [music] is very physical,” says Abrahams. “The name comes into play there. The neck is almost this characterless functional thing—I’ve never alluded to what the name means and I don’t mean to suggest that that’s why we came up with it, but when you look back over the 25 years at the way the group has progressed, [you see] how like the music many things about the group are. The way we’ve gone about the ‘career,’ how we’ve had no organisation except to play concerts and how we’ve never really pushed things. We didn’t have a gameplan, we’ve never had a manager, we’ve never looked for more than what the next tour is going to be. That’s partly why the band is still together; everything is 33 and a third percent each, the compositions, the income from the gigs—we’ve just allowed things to happen as our pieces do.”
The Necks, Melbourne: 17-19 Feb, Corner Hotel; Newcastle: 20 Feb, Lizottes; Canberra: 22 Feb, Street Theatre; Sydney: 3 Mar, Sydney Opera House; www.thenecks.com
In 2010 I completed an honours degree in drama at Flinders University. By that time I had abandoned plans to train as an actor, my creative energies increasingly directed towards writing.
I’m interested in the complete writer, the wordsmith who, like Camus, is able to turn their hand to a multiplicity of forms. I’ve penned short stories, plays, polemics, reviews, and a handful of dazzlingly unsuccessful poems. Everything I write seems to be an attempt to understand something of the nature of human suffering, but always humour seems to find a way in. This is probably significant.
Earlier in 2013, I completed a three-month emerging writer’s residency at the SA Writers’ Centre, during which I completed the first draft of my new play Dark Moon. As I write this, in November 2013, my first full-length play, the absurdist The Lake, is in production by the award-winning Adelaide independent theatre company five.point.one.
I am currently working on several projects including a performance piece that will draw on the archived letters and correspondence of the SA Writers' Centre, and a play based loosely on a short story by French Resistance writer Vercors.
Expose
I always begin a review with this thought in my mind: art would exist without criticism, but criticism would not exist without art. There’s no use denying it. Critics should never write out of a desire to belittle or to diminish, but simply because they believe art is too important to ever let it get away with not being as fulfilled and fulfilling as it can be. In other words, criticism ought to always be closer to a kind of love than a kind of loathing. Plain speaking, rigour, and unfettered engagement are the keys. Critics should never sit on their hands, only their egos.
Recent articles
Sons & mothers, from two angles
Benjamin Brooker: No Strings Attached Theatre of Disability, Sons & Mothers
RealTime issue #118 Dec-Jan 2013 p5
A painful proximity to truth
Benjamin Brooker: Flying Penguin, STCSA: Angela Betzien, The Dark Room
RealTime issue #118 Dec-Jan 2013 p36
My first role as a performer was when I was eight. I was cast as the dog in a school production of The Woman who Swallowed a Fly. My audition consisted of me sitting on my haunches, waggling my imaginary tail and lolling my tongue deliriously. This, I felt, was the essence of what it meant to be a dog. From this intuitive approach to performance, I completed my BA in Drama Studies at Edith Cowan University and have participated in the performing arts community of Perth as a performer and contributed to its supporting networks in my various roles with several funding bodies, producers and peak bodies for screenwriters, performing artists and playwrights.
I work at Edith Cowan University Library (Mount Lawley campus) and at Stages WA, which is dedicated to the development of playwrights and their works by providing resources, programs and workshops for emerging and established playwrights for their professional development. I am currently undertaking post-graduate study in Information Science and Archives to develop my knowledge and skills in the cultural heritage sector; exploring the ideas of cultural memories and societal constructions of identity, and forming a nexus between the ephemera of performance and the permanence of the archive.
Expose
My writing about performance was another intuitive leap, where I felt I had an inside understanding of the creative process supported by my training in analysis of dramatic form from my studies. Perth’s independent theatre sector is going through an exciting period of growth and I find writing about performance to be an introspective and satisfying avenue to activate critical discussion amongst artists and audience alike.
The best thing about writing about performance is that it forces me to stay with the work for a much longer period than just the time of the show itself. It allows me to explore the concepts and cultural influences of a work, ruminate on the writer’s or director’s vision, as well as analyse my personal responses to the work. At the forefront of my writing, I am always conscious of the artists involved. It is a record of their efforts; it is a time-piece which will exist once the performance is over. Whilst not all work will please my sensibilities, I always aim to be respectful in my criticisms.
Recent articles
Intimate transformations
Astrid Francis: Proximity Festival 2013
RealTime issue #118 Dec-Jan 2013 p41
The schooled audience
Astrid Francis: James Berlyn, Crash Course
RealTime issue #118 Dec-Jan 2013 p40
The Chinese Year of the Wooden Horse (so the internet tells me) promises high-energy adventure, off-beat travels and production over procrastination. To get the year galloping I asked emerging and established arts experimenters what they’re up to and what we can look forward to in 2014. Their responses reveal an astonishing diversity of ideas, methodologies, technologies, venues, sites, destinations, resources and bold new ways of engaging with audiences. I’m grateful to these adventurous artists for finding time and the words to share their idiosyncratic visions and plans with us. 2014—see how it runs!
Gail Priest, Editor, RealTime Profiler
I am currently interested in endurance-based practices and have been researching the limitations of the body through performance experiments. I am interested in the relationship between performing bodies and how perception can shift and change. Currently I am engaged in various projects that involve non-dancers—a bodybuilder, a football team—in an attempt to find a physical language that is not burdened by the associations and expectations that usually emerge when considering ‘dance.’
In 2014 I will perform an endurance based solo, SWEAT, for Melbourne NOW at the NGV [National Gallery of Victoria] on February 16. I’ll also present my new work, MAXIMUM—a duet between a dancer and bodybuilder—at Arts House for Next Wave Festival in May, which will then tour to Avignon, France.
I am also developing various new projects that stretch into the realm of live art. At the initial stages is a collaboration with Luke George and Rebecca Jensen looking at how to tap into the collective unconscious and create a performance that is a holistic experience for both performer and audience. I am also working on a new piece with Jensen and Sarah Aiken exploring possibility through extreme limitation—the work will occur entirely in traverse. Further to these projects, I have begun experimenting with sound in my choreographic practice. I will collaborate with a sound foley artist to begin work on a cinematic dance experience inspired by Dario Argento’s horror films. www.natalieabbott.net
Lawrence English, Keith Armstrong, Night Rage
photo Alex Wisser
Lawrence English, Keith Armstrong, Night Rage
Keith Armstrong
This year I’m working with composer, media artist and curator Lawrence English and collaborators developing a series of Seasonal Media Art works—dynamic installations and site-specific interventions that are directed and choreographed by environmental cycles. By recording, reading and reinterpreting both long and short-term environmental cycles at each site, along with related cultural layers, seasonal artworks become progressively tailored to and reflective of their location. This is then expressed through dynamic, generative audiovisual and kinetic outcomes.
These works build upon the prototype, Night Rage, shown at ISEA 2013 in the ANAT Synapse retrospective at the Sydney Powerhouse (see Keith Gallasch’s review). The new works will draw upon biological and environmental research data, particularly nocturnal activity, night field recording and phonography and real time 3D sound manipulation. It will also use visual/illusionary approaches that employ custom robotics and light-controlled objects and forms to create powerful, responsive and experiential works drawing attention to the ultimate outcome of reduced biodiversity—an ‘extinction of human experience.’
Starting at the Queensland Museum, the series will then appear at Kickarts Cairns (Feb 2014), thingworld: International Triennial of New Media Art, National Museum of China, (June-July), Siteworks, NSW (Sept) and Bundaberg Gallery in early 2015. www.embodiedmedia.com
Narelle Benjamin, IOU 2012
photo Heidrun Löhr
Narelle Benjamin, IOU 2012
Narelle Benjamin
I’ve just received the Australia Council Dance Fellowship for 2014-2015 which allows me the amazing opportunity to develop as an artist, study and to continue my long held commitment to teaching.
The main activity during my fellowship will involve taking advantage of the extremely rare opportunity to work alongside Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (Morocco/Belgium), one of the most influential international choreographers. The second strand is my immersion in somatic studies, which while collaborative in nature (working with highly respected practitioners in their respective fields), will perhaps entail a more private or internal processing of new information and knowledge. The third strand involves the delivery of workshops as part of a professional relationship with institutions such as Australian Dance Theatre, WAAPA, Macquarie University, Strut Dance, The Chrissie Parrott Studio in Perth, the new Sydney Dance Company pre-professional course and the VCA.
During 2014 I will also be choreographing a solo for Expressions Dance Company and in August 2014 Performance Space will present my new work, a duet made for Kristina Chan and Sara Black. www.artfulmanagement.com.au
Kate Blackmore, Frances Barrett, Lucy Phelan, Diana Smith and Kelly Doley, You’re History at Performance Space, Nov 2013; 2) This is Barbara Cleveland , 2013, Brown Council, production still
courtesy the artists
Kate Blackmore, Frances Barrett, Lucy Phelan, Diana Smith and Kelly Doley, You’re History at Performance Space, Nov 2013; 2) This is Barbara Cleveland , 2013, Brown Council, production still
Brown Council
This year we’ll be working on a number of new collaborative and solo projects. In February we will be part of Trace: Performance and its Documents at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane curated by Bree Richards, in which we’ll present our latest work, This Is Barbara Cleveland, a filmic tribute to the life and work of the mythic Australian performance artist Barbara Cleveland, with original score by Lucy Phelan (see interview in RT117). In February we are part of Video at Sullivan+Strumpf; in March we will be curating MCA’s Art Bar and in May we will be part of Subject to Ruin at Casula Power House. By June we will be back at the MCA presenting a new work as part of the MCA’s Bella Commission in conjunction with the National Centre for Creative Learning. For this project, we will be creating an interactive work in the MCA’s Bella Room specifically designed to engage young people—who have special needs—with contemporary art.
Also this year we are each focusing on solo projects. Diana is busy completing her PhD on Feminist Performance Art in Australia at COFA, UNSW while working on Performance Perspectives, a new archive of video interviews on Australian Performance Art. Kate is working with Campbelltown youth as part of a commission at Campbelltown Art Centre. Kelly is presenting new work at Level and Boxcopy in Brisbane, and Frances is making a new endurance performance at Performance Space as part of the Mardi Gras program Day for Night. Kate, Kelly and Frances will also present new works for SafARI in March. http://browncouncil.com/
Sarah Kriegler, Tamara Saulwick, Tim Stitz, Christie Stott, Erkki Veltheim, Chamber Made Opera
photo Daisy Noyes
Sarah Kriegler, Tamara Saulwick, Tim Stitz, Christie Stott, Erkki Veltheim, Chamber Made Opera
Chamber Made Opera
In 2014 Chamber Made Opera will continue to operate at the very edge of opera with its new artistic team headed by Creative Director Tim Stitz working with Artistic Associates Erkki Veltheim (music), Tamara Saulwick (performance), Christie Stott (digital) and Sarah Kriegler (The Venny).
There will be exciting new works developed by each of these Associate Artists, with inspiration ranging from the essays of Susan Sontag to the work of graffiti artist Banksy. Works will occur in and around grand arts venues and other exciting ‘chambers,’ continuing to take up the operatic and the epic while simultaneously focusing on intimacy and non-traditional modes of performance. The company is being commissioned by the Limerick City of Culture Festival to make a new work in Ireland and Sarah Kriegler’s new piece will lurk under the stage of one of the Melbourne’s best known theatres.
The company will also produce a stand-alone digital artwork in conjunction with every new live work created, a companion piece if you like. All works will link to a central aim: to create, develop and present contemporary chamber opera that challenges and inspires audiences, nationally and internationally. New CHAMBER Music. Intimately MADE Performance. Epic and virtual OPERA. www.chambermadeopera.com
Vanessa Tomlinson, Erik Griswold, Clocked Out
courtesy the artists
Vanessa Tomlinson, Erik Griswold, Clocked Out
Clocked Out
In 2014 Clocked Out [Erik Griswold, Vanessa Tomlinson] continues to weave our way through diverse practices, activating new and unconventional ways of listening, accessing and participating in experimental music, sound and multimedia. This year we put an equal emphasis on creating new work, finding new contexts for old work and collaboration.
Clocked Out Duo will record and tour our latest piece, Time Crystals, which explores symmetries between phenomena of quantum physics, sound and musical patterns (see review in RT113). Later in the year we will develop a new piece titled Dingo Kisses which uses toy instruments and inspiration from our recent trip through the Australian outback.
Percussion group Early Warning System—an ongoing collaboration with Michael Askill—continues to explore relationships between percussion and environment. In June we perform new and recent compositions by Kate Neal, Anthony Pateras, Askill, Tomlinson, Griswold, alongside George Crumb’s Songs. In August, we will present an interpretation of Michael Gordon’s Timber using reclaimed Australian hardwoods.
In September and November Vanessa returns to solo percussion with a massive new program called Eight Hits premiering new works by Natasha Anderson, Rosemary Joy, Cat Hope, Kate Neal, Griswold, Peter Knight and herself.
Filling out the picture for 2014 are collaborations with the New York-Montreal Quartet (who will premiere Griswold’s Julian Assange statement “Mendax Redax”); poet and sound artist Klare Lanson (Wandering Cloud, see review in RT118); author Rodney Hall and artist Glen Henderson (producing Fairweather, a poetic homage to artist Ian Fairweather). www.clockedout.org
1) Recovery, photo Pete Brundle; 2) Nat Cursio
Nat Cursio
In 2014 I have this peculiar feeling that I am only just starting to be an artist, odd given the many years that I have been busy with dance. One of the things that attracts me to working with bodies in a small, unadorned and often low-tech manner, is the light tread that the work exerts on our natural resources. Dance is such an elemental form and I love that it takes us away from conventional logic.
In March I present The Middle Room, a “ceremonial playdate,” at my home for one visitor at a time, a commission from Theatre Works for the inaugural Festival of Live Art. I’ll continue developing a screen piece, a commission for Carriageworks’ 24 Frames Per Second in collaboration with media artist Daniel Crooks and a treasure of movement practice, Don Asker. The Substation will house me for a second year as choreographer-in-residence for the rebooting of Recovery, a slow-cooker of a project about grief and resilience with collaborators Shannon Bott and Simon Ellis. I’m also privileged to be working on separate projects with three exceptional performance makers, Roslyn Oades, Nicola Gunn and Fiona Bryant. www.natcursio.com
Tim Darbysire, Asialink Residency 2013
courtesy the artist
Tim Darbysire, Asialink Residency 2013
Tim Darbyshire
In 2014 I will be developing several projects across different contexts. I’m in the middle of developing a new performance project Stampede the Stampede, a volatile work extending the choreographic form through mechanical and theatrical apparatuses connected to the body.
I’m planning to travel further abroad to present More or Less Concrete and connect with new audiences (see video interview from Dance Massive 2013 and reviews by Keith Gallasch and Carl Nilsson-Polias). I will be spending time on residencies in Europe, researching, collaborating and developing new work and networks through an IETM residency program I was very fortunate to receive.
As a performer and collaborator I will be working with Matthew Day on some of his new projects/research, which both extend and depart from his solo-based Trilogy series into explorations of duet forms. I will also be involved in an exchange project between Australian and Finnish choreographers, a collaboration between Campbelltown Arts Centre and Zodiak Centre for New Dance in Helsinki.
I will be driven by movements, sounds, lights, colours, machines, objects, tones, voices, bodies, collisions, spaces, languages, relationships… timdarbyshire.blogspot.com.au
Martin del Amo, Little Black Dress Suite, 2013
photo Heidrun Löhr
Martin del Amo, Little Black Dress Suite, 2013
Martin del Amo
I am currently rehearsing for Performance Space’s Mardi Gras event Day for Night (Carriageworks 13 -15 February). I very much enjoy being in the studio again and working on a new solo. It’s been a while… During the last few years, I have mainly been focussing on choreographing works for others so I’m very excited to be reconnecting with my solo practice. There will be more of it this year, I suspect, with a couple of residency spaces lined up and a few ideas for future projects in the pipeline.
Later this month, Julie-Anne Long and I are going to Perth to present Benched as part of Fringe World 2014. The piece was commissioned by Performance Space for their Microparks series and premiered at last year’s Sydney Festival (see review in RT113). It’s set in a park, on and around a bench and involves us having a picnic with audiences in between performances. We can’t wait to see how this is going to be received by Perth audiences. In addition to performing more, my other priority will be to look into opportunities to remount and tour works I have created in the last few years. I am also very excited to be mentoring young dance artist Natalie Abbott through the JUMP mentoring scheme. martindelamo.com
Nadeena Dixon & Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor, The Fox and The Freedom Fighters (development)
courtesy the artist
Nadeena Dixon & Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor, The Fox and The Freedom Fighters (development)
Nadeena Dixon & Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor
The vision and compelling need to tell this story, The Fox and The Freedom Fighters, has come from us, daughter and grand-daughter of Chicka Dixon. We felt it vitally important to document and develop the work of our father and grandfather’s story, as a form of reclamation and revitalisation of contemporary Indigenous culture. This is a story that must be told, a story that belongs to all Australians, both black and white. The Fox and The Freedom Fighters, to be presented at Performance Space in November, will be told by four generations of the Dixon family, through our eyes and experience with him.
Chicka was a charismatic and engaging storyteller, with a wicked sense of humour. He told us all to speak up for what we believe in. Several years have gone by since his passing and now we, as the family, are empowered to share this chronicle so that current and future generations of Indigenous people learn the ‘untold’ story—how a skinny young black fella from Wallaga Lake Mission went on to become a leader of an army of underground resistance fighters who changed the Australian social and political landscape. This includes voting rights for Aboriginal people in the 1967 referendum.
Our aim is to research and document Australia’s political history through Chicka Dixon’s journey. We want to share this history so it can educate and inform all Australians, both Aboriginal and mainstream, encouraging us to pursue leadership goals, empowering us to believe in what is possible. The family sees its role as harnessing this story to impart his legacy to our children and grandchildren and to the community at large. The time for this work is now because the oral history of the time is still alive. The mission is for our young people to have this history at their fingertips and in their memories. We want everybody to know about their place in the history of the resistance and expression of Aboriginal people. The Fox and the Freedom Fighters is an innovative and highly important work the outcome of which will be a significant Indigenous theatre work. It is a vital next step towards the development of contemporary story telling. foxandthefreedomfighters.com
1) Djuki Mala, photo Wayne Quilliam; 2) photos Ben Healy
Djuki Mala Company (the Chookie Dancers)
Djuki Mala (previously known as the Chookie Dancers) are used to camping it up in the traditional sense, being lads from Elcho Island, but camping it up at the Opera House as part of La Soiree is a different (sequined) experience all together. But they are loving the tight confines of the sexy ensemble season.
After the five weeks it’s back to Elcho to develop their next show. No longer at the mercy of underfunded projects or struggling shows, the Djuki Mala Company is thriving, doing more commercial tours and drawing a new but no less enthusiastic audience. Their new show directed and produced by Joshua Bond sits midway between a retrospective and an autobiographical narrative and will feature works from the Djuki Mala ‘canon,’ such as Zorba and Bollywood numbers but also new numbers and new styles.
Refreshing the mix is guest choreographer Nikki Ashby. Nikki brings to Djuki Mala a wealth of knowledge—traditional and hip hop genres from the 70s and 80s that is—locking, popping, new jack swing and many more, as well as deep knowledge of contemporary Indigenous dance, a genre all to itself. Despite all these new-fangled influences, Djuki Mala boys are still driven by a strong sense of their own community life on Elcho. And their work is very clearly a response to the world around them. Their humour and irreverence yet deep groundedness is a given. www.thechookydancers.com
Carolina Palacios, Ashley Dyer, Karol Jarek, Studio Matejka, Brezinka, Poland, July 2013
Ashley Dyer
For the first half of the year my major focus will be on a new series of works called Tremor. I’ll work with a large team of collaborators, mainly in isolation and one on one, and begin playing with how vibration might be used as a material to create objects, installations and performances. We hope to poetically and technically reveal the most compelling, beautiful and unsettling aural, visual and haptic aspects of vibration. We’ll play with all kinds of ideas and existing objects: speakers, bass shakers, tactile transducers, sex toys, shake tables, massage chairs, vibration exercise equipment, earthquakes, liquefaction and trampolines to name a few. By the end of the year, I think that we would’ve created and/or prototyped a series of works that may exist by themselves or come together in a final performance.
As I’m beginning and undertaking a number of new projects, collaborations and practice exchanges this year, it feels very busy. In brief, I’ll be working with great people: James Brennan, Amy Spiers and Catherine Ryan, Deweydell, Studio Matjeka, Ingrid Hedin Vahlberg, Martin del Amo and Tony Osborne in places as diverse as Melbourne, Fairfield, Wroclaw and Göteborg. https://vimeo.com/70168912
I’ve Got A Bone For You, Atlanta Eke
courtesy the artist
I’ve Got A Bone For You, Atlanta Eke
Atlanta Eke
I have a voice to speak for myself and I have things to say. Perhaps the irony is that when working in the medium of dance, as a dancer, it is almost totally impossible to express my ideas with any amount of specificity. This is a challenge that excites me as I prefer that audiences who see my work leave the theatre with more questions than when they entered.
Right now I am working on multiple projects. In February is the Melbourne premiere of I’ve Got A Bone For You (first presented at Mona Foma Hobart 2014 as part of Faux Mo). This is a performance concerned with the complexity of the cowgirl. It is a western romance grappling with the devastation of production, celebrating the joyousness of community and questioning the social forces that define symbolic identities (Melbourne Now, NGV Ian Potter Centre, Indigenous Art Gallery, 15 February 12pm).
In March I will be performing a very special one-off performance of a new work titled VOLUME at the Kings ARI Flash Night series Melbourne (3 March). The performance installation has been made in collaboration with up and coming architect Tim Birnie.
2014 also brings the development of a new solo titled I CON, a performance interrelating the themes of Death and Illusion and asking the question, “What Is Contemporary?” In Comrades of Time Boris Groys writes, “Contemporary Art deserves its name insofar as it manifests its own contemporaneity.” The first developmental phase is The Death of The Artist and will be supported by Arts House North Melbourne through CultureLab and Lucy Guerin Inc. Studio Residency program. This will involve developing methods of impersonation—artists who have died, artists that in dying have become iconic.
I wish to use death as a metaphor for transformation; the process of impersonating something from the past produces the possibility of finding something new for the future. The resulting movement material can oscillate from the original iconic dances to new transformative by-products, perhaps an allegory of how the present is continuously corrupted by the past and future. http://atlantamaryeke.wordpress.com/
Ensemble Offspring with Lee Ranaldo and Mike Patton, Sydney Festival 2014
photo Chris Frape
Ensemble Offspring with Lee Ranaldo and Mike Patton, Sydney Festival 2014
Ensemble Offspring
Ensemble Offspring is presenting an ambitious program of events in 2014. Opening with Berio’s Laborintus II and ending with our very own Secret Noise, this year’s program explores the otherworldly corners of the classical music tradition. Featuring multiple premieres and international work seldom heard in Australia, 2014 is characterised by collaboration with other music genres (installation and improvised music) and other artforms (dance and video).
We’ve already begun the year on a high following our Sydney Festival performance with iconic rock figures Lee Ranaldo and Mike Patton. Next we’ll hit the road in March with a quirky and engaging touring program, Three and Under. In May we decorate a Surry Hills park in a performance-installation as part of Performance Space’s Micro Parks.
June brings avant-garde entertainment and beers with our relaxed Sizzle at the Petersham Bowlo. July and August include some heavy-hitting chamber music in Xenakis’ Plekto followed by the world premiere of Ghan Tracks, a multimedia exploration of Australia’s iconic railway created by music maverick Jon Rose. In October we begin spawning offspring with the culmination of our inaugural Hatched academy program and in November, we present The Secret Noise, the premiere of Damien Ricketson’s surreal production about music and secrecy. http://ensembleoffspring.com/
Caitlin Franzmann
2014 is going to be a year of travel and experimentation. March-April I’ll be participating in the second iteration of the Instrument Builders Project, in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, an ongoing collaborative program between Australian and Indonesian artists and musicians, curated by Kristie Monfries and Joel Stern. In addition to exploring different approaches to instrument building in a shared workshop, I’m looking forward to the experience of collaborating in such an experimental and organic format. (See Malcolm Smith’s report on IBP1.)
With the support of Asialink and Arts Queensland, I will also be undertaking a three-month residency at Torna Gallery in Kadikoy, Turkey. Torna is a small contemporary art space run by Merve Kaptan that encourages possibilities of exhibiting in a non-white cube space. In collaboration with Merve, I’ll be experimenting and producing work to be exhibited primarily in public spaces and engaging in the critical discourse occurring in Turkey around art merging into the everyday and life flowing into art.
For me, collaboration and discussion create an important space to be less self-focused and to develop my understanding of situations and ideas. I hope to discover new forms of cross-cultural collaborations during my time in these two cities while extending my ongoing engagement with somatic experience, urbanism and social interaction. www.caitlinfranzmann.com
At the time of writing I’m sitting in my residency room in central Tokyo, listening to a radio documentary about the aftermath of the Fukashima earthquake, tsunami and nuclear power station breakdown. The word that the Japanese use to describe the three-fold disaster was ‘souteigai,’ meaning ‘beyond imagination.’ Events like these destabilise our worldview, challenging the permanence we take for granted and reminding us of the fragility of our own existence.
Impermanence is often a key element in my work and affecting a solubility of matter, time and space is always at play at the edges of what I do. My activities in 2014 are structured around experiences of just that. The year is starting for me in Japan, with a research residency at Tokyo Wonder Site. From here I travel to the US where I’ll be based in New York City at the ISCP (International Studio & Curatorial Program) for several months. The complex social and philosophical heritages that continue to play out in these locations will no doubt influence my work and thinking over this period, and I suspect it will also reinforce the need to create work that takes the audience beyond this direct experience of human activity.
During 2014 keep an eye out for performative and durational projects I have planned for Brisbane, New York, Newcastle and online; installation-based works in Melbourne and Sydney; works about space and the universe exhibited here and there; and pop-up projects from wherever else they might find me. (See Urszula Dawkin’s review of Universal Truths). The Eclipse Machine (pictured) will be exhibited as part of the Free Range, curated by Anna Pappas, at Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne, 7 Feb – 12 March. www.michaelagleave.com
1) Sam Haren; 2) I, Animal directed by Sam Haren & Dan Koerner, photo Jackson Gallagher
Sam Haren
2014 will be an interesting year for me and collaborator Dan Koerner as we commence one of the Australia Council’s new Digital Theatre Initiatives, a partnership between our company Sandpit and Country Arts SA. As part of the initiative, Fleur Elise Noble and Rosemary Myers, post and Sandpit will all create new work exploring emerging digital technologies and their potential place in performance making into the future.
I am also developing a solo visual performance work with Dan called Mark: a synthesis of VJ-ing, object manipulation and performance. Mark is a playful dissection of a 1992 Calvin Klein advertising campaign objectifying then-rapper Marky Mark. The project examines the cultural shift in our sense of masculinity that occurred as the male body started being objectified in our mainstream media and consumer culture in the same way women had been for decades.
We are also collaborating with Larissa McGowan on creating a new dance work, Owning the Moment, that will allow audiences to digitally acquire sections of the work, which in turn will then be removed from the live show. We’re really excited to see how this project might work! http://www.wearesandpit.com
Stages, Simone Hine and Clare Rae
courtesy the artists
Stages, Simone Hine and Clare Rae
Simone Hine & Clare Rae
Stages is a collaborative project by Simone Hine and Clare Rae. We follow in the tradition of feminist art practice, using our own bodies to examine broader ideas related to the conditions of feminine representation. This is coupled with an interest in the relationship between stillness and motion as it relates to the medium of photography and moving images. Clare performs actions that when photographed rely on the medium’s ability to suspend motion. She also creates moving images from still photographs, drawing to consciousness the hidden photographic base of any moving image. Likewise, Simone makes video and performance installations that replicate constructed photographs as well as videos that create a tension between stillness and motion by juxtaposing scenes of action with stationary scenes.
For this project, we will each make a new work in response to a particular site that is devoid of furnishings. Using the same room as a set for both of our work, Clare will produce a series of photographs and Simone a multi-channel video. We will bring our own aesthetic and line of questioning to the chosen space, creating a dialogue between different ways of seeing, understanding and representing the female body. The convergences mark a shared history of art, while the divergences mark our individual responses to the room. This project will be presented at Boxcopy in April 2014, as part of the Queensland Festival of Photography. www.clarerae.comwww.simonehine.com
Cat Hope performing in Kosice, Slovakia
photo Boris Vaitovidz
Cat Hope performing in Kosice, Slovakia
Cat Hope
2014 will be a composing year! I am very lucky to be the 2014 Peggy Glanville Hicks resident in Paddington, Sydney where I will be writing music for great musicians such as percussionist Vanessa Tomlinson, pianist Zubin Kanga, Icelandic ensemble Slatur and the Chicago Modern Orchestra as well as concocting a new noise opera concept with Jack Sargeant and an installation work at PICA. There’s some recording and mixing on the horizon too, including an album with Alan Lamb and Lisa MacKinney. For my Churchill Fellowship I will look into the way digital graphic notation is made and used around the world, and will end the year with some composing time at Civitavella, Italy. I am also excited about a collaboration with visual artist Kate McMillan, Moments of Disappearance, showing at Carriageworks in November. The Decibel ensemble is still bubbling away, with an east coast tour planned and recording works including the piece we commissioned from Alvin Curran last year. I love making, listening to, thinking about and performing music, so I’m in my element. (See our video interview with Cat from 2012) www.cathope.com
Back to Back Theatre,Ganesh Versus the Third Reich
courtesy the company
Back to Back Theatre,Ganesh Versus the Third Reich
IETM Asian Satellite
The International Network for Contemporary Performing Arts (IETM) and Australia Council will present the first ever IETM Satellite gathering in Australia taking place during Next Wave in partnership with Arts Centre Melbourne (Asian Performing Arts Program). The three-day meeting will bring together 50 Australian artists, producers and presenters for showcases, discussions and networking opportunities with leading performing arts producers and presenters from Europe and Asia. Australian organisations and companies include Campbelltown Arts Centre, Australian Dance Theatre, Chamber Made Opera, Terrapin Puppet Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse, Boho, Darwin Festival and Back to Back Theatre. Following the gathering will also be a lab bringing together emerging innovative artists from Asia and Australia. IETM Melbourne runs 12-14 May and there’ll also be a “caravan” IETM event in Sydney, 15-16 May. ietm.org/melbourne
George Poonkhin Khut
photo Julia Pendrill-Charles
George Poonkhin Khut
George Poonkhin Khut
2014 sees the start of a significant new stage for my practice with my appointment as a full-time academic at the College of Fine Arts (COFA, UNSW). In this position I’ll be extending my research into arts-in-health, participatory and interactive art, and interaction design through new research partnerships, post-graduate supervision and teaching work. As part of this role I’ll be looking to develop new projects with other researchers to explore how art and design can enhance health care experiences.
The BrightHearts research project with Dr Angie Morrow at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead continues with a feasibility study led by Dr Rachel Skinner and Cristyn Davies to evaluate the effectiveness of an app as a tool for managing pain and anxiety with high school students undergoing HPV vaccinations in South Australia and Western Australia. (See George’s report for RT117’s Art & Wellness feature). In my capacity as co-director of Sensorium Health—the business I’ve set up with interaction-designer and entrepreneur Jason McDermott—we’ll be launching a new creative app for Bluetooth fitness heart rate sensors, and launching Kickstarter campaign to develop our own wearable pulse sensor.
I’m also looking forward to continuing my collaboration with composer James Peter Brown exploring experiences of subjectivity, embodiment and selfhood with our brainwave controlled interactive sound and vibration project that we prototyped last year with the ThetaLab project (ISEA 2013; see Urszula Dawkins review). georgekhut.com
1) A Small Prometheus, photo Jeff Busby; 2) Stephanie Lake, photo Robin Fox
Stephanie Lake
My year kicks off with Richard Strauss’ Elektra for Sydney Dance Company and Sydney Symphony Orchestra. I was commissioned by SDC to create the choreography for this epic opera that will be performed at the Sydney Opera House in February. With over a hundred orchestral musicians, singers from the Sydney Philharmonia and eight of the fantastic Sydney Dance Company dancers performing on an elevated stage, it’s work on a grand scale. Using texture, specificity of detail and dissonance we explore the shifting tension between recklessness and delicacy. The dancers don’t play characters but embody the emotional content of the score.
In 2014 I will also embark on the development of a new work titled The Experiment, working with four dancers and in collaboration with audiovisual artist Robin Fox. Initially inspired by the Milgram experiments—controversial psychological experiments from the 1960s—I’ll be working with ideas of obedience and personal responsibility in a piece that positions the audience as decision makers in the outcome of the work they are witnessing. It continues my fascination with movement invention and the interplay of formality and the gritty, chaotic, sinuousness that dance can describe. I plan to present the finished work in 2015.
There is international touring of my recent works, DUAL (see reviews by Varia Karipoff and Keith Gallasch http://www.realtimearts.net/feature/Dance_Massive_2013/11007) and A Small Prometheus (review by Philippa Rothfield), with some great opportunities to take these works to UK and European audiences. And I’ve had the enormous good fortune to be awarded a Sidney Myer Fellowship for the next two years, which will help support future plans and hopefully allow for some interesting tangents. stephanielake.com.au
1) Skeleton, photo Chris Herzfeld; 2) Larissa McGowan
Larissa McGowan
I recently completed the national and international season of my first full-length independent work Skeleton which was presented at the 2013 Adelaide Festival, Dance Massive and Dublin Dance Festival. Skeleton is large-scale dance work exploring the skeletal form set within an explosive vision of pop-cultural icons. (See interview and reviews by Keith Gallasch and Carl Nilsson-Polias)
In 2014 I am in a creative development stage with two smaller-scale works which continue my collaborations with Sam Haren and Steve Mayhew, integrating the dramaturgical process we have established and inviting new collaborators into our process to prompt new ideas.
Owning the Moment is a work for four dancers made in collaboration with Sam and Dan Koerner from Sandpit and composer and sound designer Brendan Woithe. The work proposes that the audience acquire, own and then permanently remove “a moment “ from the work.
Mortal Condition (for two dancers) explores the persona of secondary female characters within the fantasy world of cartoons, movies and video games. Steve is working on this project with DJ Trip and dancer Kialea Nadine Williams. Right now I am working as a dancer/performer on Stone/Castro’s show Blackout being presented in association with the Adelaide Festival 2014 [see Ben Brooker’s interview with Paul Castro in RealTime 119]. www.insitearts.com.au
In 2014 I am working towards the preview of a major new work, Robot Opera, a series of outdoor public performances with autonomous robots, sound and light. The process involves collaborations with electrical engineers and programmers and a residency with performance company Branch Nebula focused on robotic choreography coming up in 2014 at Performance Space. The first full-scale performance will be in 2015.
In June, I am excited to be exhibiting The Acconci Robot at thingWorld: International Triennial of New Media Art, National Art Museum of China. There will be an amazing number of interesting works there. Then in August, I will have my first major survey show, Autonomous Improvisation, which includes new site-specific work for the Ian Potter Centre, National Gallery of Victoria. Other works to be included at this stage are The Hosts (see Dan MacKinlay’s review), Black Casino, Composition for padded room and The Balance of your bank account is reflected in your face (http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue108/10642). During that time, I’ll also have a concurrent show at John Buckley gallery in Prahran.
In September the work Fish and Chips, created with Michael Candy for Campbelltown Art Centre and ISEA2013 (see video and Darren Toft’s review) will feature at the Bondi Pavilion Gallery for the Festival of the Winds. The work was made at Clovelly and involved surrounding fauna, so I hope it will resonate with local audiences. www.marynowsky.net
Nancy Mauro-Flude
Nancy Mauro-Flude
2014 is the year of the Horse so it makes sense to go ‘germane’—I’m seriously tying up loose ends.
I want to engender intimate salon type settings that nurture cultural and political conversations and invite participation from a vast range of people whose practices foster radical, embodied and implicated approaches that push the boundaries of their specific genres beyond tokenism. A starting point for this premise is my participation in transmediale: afterglow in Berlin. I am in the flesh involved in ARThackDAY and performing and exhibiting a new work. (I am even more excited because the last time I presented there in 2011, was via a hospital video stream as I’d recently given birth).
The projects I’m developing are a paradoxical combination of satire and transcendentalism (perhaps otherwise known as pataphysical). In our scramble to be ‘beneficial’ in an expanded milieu, we delimit the set of our potential actions and even more so we constantly cast a utilitarian role to ubiquitous calculating machines.
On the one hand, I am driven by the demystification of technology, and on the other, the ‘mystification’ that lies in and through the performance of the machinic assemblage. This tension between ongoing extremes is my continual drive. sister0.org
Tristan Meecham, Game Show
courtesy the artist
Tristan Meecham, Game Show
Tristan Meecham
I am a performance artist who works with the grand and the ridiculous. I am passionate about connecting community, audience and artists together in events that transcend the everyday. I am an Artistic Associate of Aphids, a company that creates Contemporary Art Projects.
In 2014, my collaborators Aphids, Bec Reid and Insite Arts will continue work on The Coming Out Trilogy, three large-scale spectacles that include Fun Run (2010 Next Wave Festival, 2011 Darwin Festival, 2013 Opening Sydney Festival), Game Show (2014 Festival of Live Art; Arts House) and Miss Universe (2014 APAM).
Game Show premieres at Arts House in March as part of the Festival of Live Art. Each night, 50 contestants with no performance experience will compete live on stage for the chance to take home a grand showcase of prizes: the host’s very own possessions! So if you are competitive, love to win and always wanted to be in a live game show, this is your big chance! We are looking for contestants of all ages, from all walks of life. No performance experience necessary, just a desire to play and win! Register your interest: please click here and/or email gameshownow@gmail.com for more information.
Following on from Game Show I will commence work on the grand conclusion of the Miss Universe trilogy, pitching the performance spectacle this year at APAM. In Miss Universe, I hope to battle the one and only Grace Jones to determine who will be crowned the ultimate performer, the loser never allowed to perform again! Think Mardi Gras, beauty pageants, wrestling and cannibalism! In June, I will travel to the UK as part of the British Council’s Realise Your Dream program to meet with Art Heroes and stalk people with connections to Ms Jones! The Coming Out Trilogy website will launch in March www.thecomingouttrilogy.com
1) Hello, Goodbye & Happy Birthday, Roslyn Oades, photo photo Andrew Curtis; 2) Roslyn Oades, photo Patrick Boland
Roslyn Oades
Over the last 12 months I’ve been developing a new audio-scripted performance called, Hello, Goodbye & Happy Birthday. Juxtaposing the perspectives of final year high school students and nursing home residents this project offers audiences a rare opportunity to eavesdrop on the candid conversations of those grappling with how to say goodbye to life; and where to begin. The show’s been programmed by Malthouse and Melbourne Festival for an October 2014 premiere, so it’s my main focus. I have hundreds of hours of audio to listen through and then craft into a succinct, hour-long script. Simultaneously I’m attempting to be invited to as many 18th, 80th, 90th and 100th birthdays as possible. So if anyone reading this is attending a ‘special’ birthday soon please let me know!
My current artistic crush is documentary filmmaker Fredrick Wiseman, whom I only discovered a couple of years ago despite the fact he’s been making films since 1967. I admire the way Wiseman resists traditional narrative devices—voice over, interview or surtitles—in his docos, leaving viewers to witness and process complex ethical dilemmas for themselves. He’s also a master at identifying rhythms and incidental poetry in unlikely places. I often ask myself, what would Fredrick Wiseman do? www.roslynoades.com
starrs & cmielewski
The future is unmanned. According to media reports, 2013 was the year of the unmanned airborne vehicle or drone. The increasing normalisation of drone surveillance and warfare has caught the attention of the general public. During an artist residency at Bundanon we worked with dancer Alison Plevey to explore aspects of the human relationship with drones, mounting a camera on a quadcopter to record site responsive performances in the natural environment. In the resulting videos a young woman exhibits a range of different emotions, including curiosity, agitation, engagement and resignation in response to the persistently intrusive drone. This work is one aspect of a larger project, Augmented Terrain, supported by a Creative Australia grant to develop an immersive video installation that re-imagines the relationship between nature and culture. We are working towards a show at Performance Space Carriageworks later in 2014. josephinestarrs.com
Joel Stern
courtesy the artist
Joel Stern
Joel Stern
2014 is going to be a very big year for me personally with some major curatorial projects in addition to lots of artistic activity. OtherFilm (b. 2004) is the curatorial agency I direct with Danni Zuvela and Sally Golding focusing on artists’ moving image, experimental film, expanded cinema etc and the place of this in the broader field of contemporary art. We’re working towards two major projects this year. The first, Experimental Universe, taking place at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art (6 & 13 Feb), comprises new films, performances and music by contemporary Australian artists responding to Yoko Ono’s rarely visited instructional works, Six Film Scripts (1964) and Imaginary Film Series (1968). Fast forwarding to May, OtherFilm will present its 5th festival in Brisbane, featuring site-specific commissions by Australian and international artists responding to the theme Institutional Capture.
Rewinding to March, I’ll be in Jogjakarta, Indonesia with my colleague Kristi Monfries to direct the second iteration of the Instrument Builders Project (IBP), an international collaborative program between Australian and Indonesian artists and musicians, in which the artists conceptualise, build, perform and exhibit new ‘instrument-based’ works together over a period of four weeks. (See Malcolm Smith’s report on IBP1.) I’m also thrilled to say that the IBP will have its first Australia-based incarnation in November over one month at the NGV Studio in Melbourne, featuring a number of amazing Indonesian artists visiting Australia for the first time. Finally, and perhaps most excitingly, Danni Zuvela and I have been appointed artistic directors of the venerable ‘sound art’ organisation Liquid Architecture, tasked with curating the 2014 festival and driving LA forward into a brave new world. We’re honoured to have this excellent opportunity (and responsibility) and will deliver our first festival, The Ear is a Brain, in September and October. Viva 2014! otherfilm.org/
1) Lara Thoms and Joy Hruby, Wake#2, part of Televisions Festival 2013, photo Lucy Parakhina 2) Film still, Screen Monument, Lara Thoms & Kate Blackmore, part of Ultimate Vision – Monuments to Us
Lara Thoms
In 2014 I will continue making work with others, thinking about public art, participation and context responsive practice. First up, as part of Aphids I will be working on the live spectacle Gamewhow for the Festival of Live Art (FOLA) in March in Melbourne, where the audience will compete for a prize package of all of host Tristan Meecham’s possessions. The work includes hundreds of dancers, singers and all of his belongings on display; so it is set to be a big show.
As part of Field Theory I am co-curating Site As Set, a three-year program of site-specific performance in Melbourne. The first year of this program sees four of my favourite artists—Malcolm Whittaker, Bron Batton, Zoe Meagher, Jason Maling—create new public works, as well as my own project which will be a response to the strange world of trade expos. Later in the year I will begin a project looking at people’s obsessive personal collections. I am excited that this year the MCA will also launch a publication about my recent work, Ultimate Vision—Monuments To Us, with writing from Toby Chapman & Anne Loxley and Georgie Meagher. (See our video interview with Thoms in 2012 See our video interview with Thoms in 2012) http://www.mca.com.au/artists-and-works/external-projects/c3west/ultimate-vision-monuments-us/
Eugene Ughetti
courtesy the artist
Eugene Ughetti
Eugene Ughetti
I can think of no rewarding and stimulating professional activity than being engaged in a creative process. Through my work I am in search of ineffable experiences that have deep and meaningful impact on our lives. My next project, Toy Consciousness, is a full-length performance-installation using thousands of mass-produced Chinese children’s toys combined with recordings of machinery in operating theatres at the Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne.
Toys are associated with the innocence of children’s play, yet their mass-production in the Third World leads to contaminated waters, pollution and inevitably disease. In Toy Consciousness, the use of toys as a means of escapism and play acts as a metaphor for the wide spread ignorance of underlying suffering in society. The children’s hospital, with its machines for curing illness and toys for distracting sick children, becomes the setting for a story created to be understood intuitively by children and adults alike.
I will create a musical composition for three percussionists using children’s toys to underpin the entire work. Field recordings made at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital will be edited and sculpted into quadraphonic audio montage that paints the picture of a man-made environment inhabited by sickness. This sound world is gradually recontextualised by the use of toys, transforming into a space of play and freedom. Three virtuosic Speak Percussionists will apply the rigor of their classical training and unorthodox playing styles to extract a myriad of musical and textural sounds from the toys. (See video interview with Eugene from 2011) speakpercussion.com
Malcolm Whittaker, Jumping the Shark
photo James Brown
Malcolm Whittaker, Jumping the Shark
Malcolm Whittaker
I am a young man from Sydney who works as an interdisciplinary artist, writer, researcher and performer. I do this in solo pursuits, as a member of performance collective Team MESS and in other collaborations with artists and non-artists. I have a number of new projects in the works for development and presentation across 2014, as well as the re-staging of some existing projects.
Ignoramus Anonymous is a performed-support-group for the ignorant (ie anyone and everyone) that I have developed through a residency with the State Library of NSW. It continues to be presented in the form of monthly meetings at the State Library and Waverley Council Library throughout the year and will also be presented at the Festival of Live Art at Arts House in March. Also in March I have an exhibition of a new durational video-performance work at Gaffa Gallery in Sydney.
In May I will be working with residents of inner-city Sydney who have recently lost their pet dogs to devise a commemorative walk as a performance in which the stories of these departed best friends are shared with an audience. This is for the Performance Space Micro Parks season. A version of the work will also be presented by Field Theory in Melbourne later in the year.
In July at Campbelltown Arts Centre, I am presenting Jumping the Shark Fantastic, an investigation and performative demonstration of the “best theatre show ever.” Then Team MESS embark on a regional tour of South Australia with our participatory television crime-drama BINGO Unit (see Keith Gallasch’s review). Following this, we will be developing a new work at Hothouse Theatre in Albury and Arts House in Melbourne. malcolmwhittaker.com
David Williams, Open Your Mouth and Let Words Fall Out
Jennifer Greer Holmes and Heath Britton
David Williams, Open Your Mouth and Let Words Fall Out
David Williams
As with all of my work over the past decade, I am driven to make evocative and accessible performance experiences that open spaces for public conversations about important public issues. Quiet Faith is a new documentary performance that explores the close entanglement of religious faith and civic life in contemporary Australia.
Groups such as the Australian Christian Lobby loudly insist that all public policy be developed in accordance with conservative interpretations of Christianity, and have been actively recruiting and supporting political candidates sympathetic to these values. But the conservative social values of those claiming to speak in the name of faith are not necessarily shared by all of the faithful. How might these softly spoken voices of the religious and reasonable find a place within public discourse?
By opening up a serious conversation with the religious, Quiet Faith aims to find new ways of developing a shared and respectful understanding of critical public issues. The performance text is constructed from a series of recorded interviews with persons of ‘quiet faith,’ defined as those whose faith does not require them to proselytise or attempt to convert others. The performance gently charts the life experiences and public political visions of quiet believers, intercut with songs of faith selected by project contributors, each sung a capella during the performance.
Written and directed by myself, Quiet Faith also has a fantastic team of collaborators, and will feature an evocative 8-channel surround soundscape from Bob Scott, stage design by Jonathon Oxlade and a physical performance language overseen by choreographer Roz Hervey. This will be an immersive performance experience, with audiences and performers sharing a physical journey that invites active engagement, close listening and contemplation—a surprising and heartfelt journey through a rarely heard branch of the body politic. Quiet Faith will be presented at Vitalstatistix in Port Adelaide in October. http://issuu.com/vitalstatistixtheatrecompany/docs/vsx_program2014_issuu
Lake, Lisa Wilson, Timothy Ohl
photo Fen Lan Chuang
Lake, Lisa Wilson, Timothy Ohl
Lisa Wilson
My body of work moves across genres and includes pieces for theatre and opera companies, large-scale installations, multi-media performances, company commissions and full-length independent works. I aim to create distinctive and original performance which layers striking visual design, powerful yet intricate physicality and a sense of the human condition.
Lake is my latest full-length work, co-presented with the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, which will tour nationally in 2014 as a Road Work tour through Performing Lines. Lake literally floods the entire performance area to create a visually stunning and highly engaging dance theatre work. A seamless fusion of choreography, visual design, video projection, and original score Lake explores our fascination with and fear of water, a medium that can be at turns breathtakingly beautiful and a force of indiscriminate destruction. (See Kathryn Kelly’s review).
Wireless, my next work, recently received Australia Council funding for a second stage development in late 2014. It’s is a new inter-media dance theatre work about trust, privacy and control and will be made in collaboration with composer Paul Charlier, layering dance, music, design and on-stage interactive technology. The work is being developed with the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts through Fresh Ground. www.lisawilson.com.au
A sampling of Australia’s most eclectic music festival featuring interviews with Conrad Shawcross & Ken Farmer (The ADA Project), Robin Rox (RGB Laser) and Russell Haswell (noisemaker).
MONA FOMA, curated by Brian Ritchie Hobart, Tasmanian, 15-19 January, 2014
Martin del Amo, Sasha Waltz, Nadia Cusimano in conversation at the Goethe Institut
photo Wesley Nel
Martin del Amo, Sasha Waltz, Nadia Cusimano in conversation at the Goethe Institut
While German choreographer Sasha Waltz was in Sydney presenting her epic ballet/opera Dido & Aeneas she participated in a public conversation with Nadia Cusimano, facilitated by Martin del Amo. The event was co-presented by Critical Path, the Goethe Institut and Sydney Festival and they have kindly let us reproduce it here.
You can also listen to the introduction by Goethe Institut’s director Arpad Sölter here; and questions from the floor here.
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courtesy the artist
Derek Kreckler, Untitled video
Kim Machan had to be even more resilient than her usual indefatigable self when she was informed late in 2013 that MAAP-Media Art Asia Pacific, the organisation of which she is director, was not to receive triennial funding from the Queensland Government for 2014-16. I spoke with Machan about managing this crisis and about her latest international exhibition, LandSeaSky.
MAAP was one of a number of companies (especially in youth arts) inexplicably denied funding. Deeply upset, but committed to exhibitions to be mounted in Korea and China and then Australia across 2014, Machan had no choice but to push ahead.
Ironically, says Machan, the Arts Queensland rejection came a few months after MAAP was announced the winner in the Visual Art category of the inaugural federal government Australian Arts in Asia Awards and the only winner from Queensland. The award was for MAAP’s Light from Light exhibition which focused on ideas around the properties of light, touring five major libraries and art museums in Shanghai, Beijing, Hangzhou and Brisbane 2010-12. For the show, Melbourne artists Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley created a solar-powered geodesic dome, installed as a temporary public artwork at each library site.
Machan tells me she has had to drop 2014 programming at her MAAP SPACE gallery in Brisbane (it will be available for artist use in the short-term), lose her sole staff member and cease operating Mediabank, a generous equipment-lending scheme—some of that equipment will now go to Korea for use in the Seoul leg of MAAP’s LandSeaSky touring exhibition.
A major exhibition, LandSeaSky—Revisiting Spatiality in Video Art will feature some 20 international contemporary artists at the Artsonje Center in Seoul, OCT-Contemporary Art Terminal, Shanghai and MAAP SPACE and Griffith University Art Gallery in Brisbane. Machan writes that in the exhibition “some of the world’s sharpest contemporary artists use the horizon line to explore some of the most fundamental and complex themes in both art and our perception of the world” (website).
Central to the exhibition, says Machan, is the influence of Dutch conceptual artist Jan Dibbets’ Perspective Corrections (1968) which, she writes in her program notes, “transformed the way we think about photography as an art medium…He produced many short films in the Horizon series from 1970 and 1971 and continued his investigations in his 2007 photographic series Land And Sea Horizons. As a starting point, these works use a very common understanding of landscape—a straight line across a page to signify the change of land to sky or sea to sky—and go on to transform this representation into an extended investigation of spatial effects and perspectives. It is this premise, an investigation into the commonality and simplicity of the horizon motif, that is the launch point of the LandSeaSky exhibition” (website).1970s video artworks by Dibbets will be juxtaposed with new works made by other artists for the exhibition.
Kim Machan
For Machan the staging of the exhibition in three very different locations has been a fascinating challenge. In Korea Dibbets’ works will be on show at a major museum, the Artsonje Center. The other works, she says, will appear in five art museums and commercial galleries in walking distance from Artsonje, all in the Samcheong-dong district. In China, LandSeaSky will be shown on one floor of the OCT-OCAT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shanghai, the museum supplying all the necessary equipment. In Brisbane the show will be staged at Griffith University Art Gallery and MAAP SPACE.
Of the 20 artists, five are Australian: Paul Bai, Lauren Brincat, Barbara Campbell, Derek Kreckler and Craig Walsh. The others are Jan Dibbets (Netherlands), Wang Gongxin (China), Zhu Jia (China), Yeondoo Jung (South Korea), Giovanni Ozzola (Italy), Joao Vasco Paiva (Portugal/Hong Kong), Wang Peng (China), Kimsooja (South Korea), Sim Cheol Woong (South Korea) and Heimo Zobernig (Austria). Supporters of the exhibition include the Australia Council, the Australia-Korea Foundation, Queensland University of Technology and the QUT Confucius Institute.
Previous works by some of these artists suggest their preoccupations are a perfect fit for the exhibition’s theme: Paul Bai’s video installations Other Side of the Horizon (2010), Heaven (2010), Horizon 1 (2008) and The Sky is the Limit (2008), and Joao Vasco Paiva’s transformation of ocean waves or ‘negative spaces’—eg the sky between buildings—into data that becomes music and visual abstractions. Extant works which also match the theme are in the exhibition: Lauren Brincat’s performative video This Time Tomorrow, Tempelhof (2011) and Giovanni Ozzola’s Garage—Sometimes You Can See Much More in which a rattling roller door opens onto an ocean view (2009-11).
Images of Derek Kreckler’s new work for the exhibition suggest a fascinatingly active lo-tech installation with much perceptual play. He writes: “Untitled video plays with the spaces between the screen and its surrounding environment. The screen is made of paper strips hung vertically…The projected video shows waves rolling toward an unseen shoreline, toward the viewer. The video is looped and consists of four consecutive scenes each moving closer to the surface of the water.” An oscillating electric fan blows the paper strips about, casting image fragments and silhouettes which “echo the projection on the gallery wall behind the screen.”
I had the pleasure of attending a preview, with a small audience, of Barbara Campbell’s close, close. Her 1001 Nights Cast (2005-08; RT86), a durational online engagement with hundreds of participants who volunteered stories in response to the artist’s prompts, was her first work using digital means.
For LandSeaSky, Campbell has created an interactive video work, “following the journey of migratory shorebirds on the East-Asian-Australasian flyway,” from Siberia to “feeding and resting sites on the Korean Peninsula and China’s east coast.” Our lives relate to bird migration in significant ways often little or not at all understood. Campbell wonders “How close can we come to another species…when it disappears from our horizon?” This subtext to the work was partly inspired by a recent residency in China.
Filming and sound for the work is by Gary Warner and the responsive programming by John Tonkin, whose immersive Experiments in Proximity, at Breenspace, June-July 2013, surprised viewers who discovered that as they moved towards or sideways to a screen its video imagery seemed to be in their control, that the point of view was theirs, whether following a swimmer underwater or two men conversing in a supermarket (see RT105).
In the preview of close, close, viewers wander into a narrow, darkened space to face a distant wall onto which is projected, in a wide, very narrow strip, a landscape. The strip is either still or moves slowly up or down variously revealing flowing water, sand and thin foliage, the tops of passing boats and open sky. On the sand, and taking flight, are large numbers of ‘waders’: Bar-tailed Godwits, Sandpipers of various kinds and Red-necked Stints. Filmed recently in Moreton Bay, these shorebirds of the East Asian-Australasian Flyway will migrate north in late March-April.
The selective point of view—tautly framed images of slices of a living coast-scape—is entrancingly contemplative. Then you realise it’s your movement, or that of others around you, forward or back, that is making the selection and its seamless shifts between different horizons. The shifts in the soundtrack, using a discretely recorded water track and the sound of a bamboo whistle used to attract birds for banding in China, add other dimensions to the notion of horizon—aural and ecological.
These glimpses of LandSeaSky’s horizons suggest it will be an expansive exhibition at once thoughtful and playful. In the time between the announcement of MAAP’s funding bad news and now, Kim Machan seems buoyant, ready to go, to once again bring together Australian, Asian and fellow international artists in a major exhibition.
LANDSEASKY: Seoul: Artsonje Center, Lee Hwaik Gallery, One & J. Gallery, Opsis Art Gallery, IHN Gallery, Skape Gallery, Seoul, 21 Feb-23 March; Shanghai: OCT–OCAT Contemporary Art Terminal, 20 April – 20 July; Brisbane, Griffith University Art Gallery, MAAP SPACE, 18 Sept–23 Nov, 2014
