James Eccles, photo Michael Wholley, centre – Brian Howard, photo Victoria Owens, right – James Nightingale, courtesy the artist
Auroras are created by the collision of energetic charged particles with atoms at high altitude in the atmosphere above the Earth. The aural equivalent will be generated by the Aurora Festival of Living Music with exciting new commissions, including the much anticipated premiere of a major work from Brian Howard, Voyage Through the Radiant Stars, and new works for a didjeridu duet and for Aurora Chorealis, a concert featuring Song Company and volunteer singers from across Western Sydney.
Violist and leader of The Noise improvising string quartet James Eccles has pretty much set aside his instrument for the time being to be artistic director of the 2014 Aurora Festival—applying for funding, commissioning, negotiating with arts centres, programming and sitting in on rehearsals, all in less than a year after the initial director had to step down. Eccles appears perfectly at home in the role and confident that, despite constraints, he’s come up with an exciting, focused festival, for the greater part devoted to Australian new music and its wonderful NSW exponents.
Eccles happily embraces the decision made when it was founded to establish the festival in Sydney’s west. “New music is generally thought of as something that only interests the inner city crowd,” he says, “but it happens in Western Sydney. The festival was set up by Matthew Hindson. He ran the first three biennial festivals and Andrew Batt-Rawden took over the next in 2012. Hindson thought that Sydney should have a festival devoted to new music, and it is the only one in Sydney, though it’s broader than that with elements of world music.” Indeed, Japanese and Australian noise music made a popular appearance in the 2012 festival.
“What I find interesting is that new music has a reputation for being difficult and catering to an exclusive clientele in the know. Putting it on in Western Sydney you have to forget all that. It’s about finding work that cuts across [preconceptions and forms] and involves the community. It’s a great challenge and opportunity for new music to look outside its shell.”
Community constellation
Eccles is particularly pleased with this festival’s community event: “At the Joan Sutherland Arts Centre in Penrith, there’ll be a whole day of community singing workshops. As well as amateur singers—of whatever range of experience—we’re inviting people who’ve never sung publicly before and, as the Aurora Chorus, they’ll all perform that night in the concert titled Aurora Chorealis. For them we’ve commissioned a new work by Paul Jarman, a really great choral director and composer who knows exactly how to pitch this approach to the people singing, and to the audience. They’ll all get a lot out of it: it’s new, it’s Australian, it’s been composed with that community in mind. It’s titled The Aurora Round, a round as in Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree, but a lot cleverer than that.” A bit of a challenge? “Exactly, but it can be learned in one day and sung without a score, and will be sonically very interesting.”
In the course of the day Roland Peelman and Song Company will present two vocal installations the audience can wander through: “at 2pm Leah Barclay’s Transvergence (2011) and at 6pm Kate E Moore’s Uisce (2007) which will segue into the concert proper which features the Aurora Chorus and Song Company.”
This Aurora program is not as large nor quite as geographically far flung as previous festivals, simply because it was not successful in securing Arts NSW funding for 2014, as was the case, says Eccles with a number of new music applicants. However, Australia Council funding has meant the festival will still present a strong program spread across the west in Riverside Theatres, Parramatta and the Campbelltown, Blacktown and Joan Sutherland Arts Centres.
Radiant Stars
The opening night, presented by Aurora, Riverside and New Music Network, should certainly attract new music aficionados with a premiere from a leading Australian composer, Brian Howard, commissioned by Aurora. Howard, who has returned to Sydney after working overseas for a number of years, wrote, among other things, notable operas—Inner Voices (libretto Louis Nowra, 1979), Metamorphosis (Berkoff after Kafka), Whitsunday (Nowra, 1988) and Wide Sargasso Sea (Howard, 1997).
Howard’s new orchestral work is Voyage Through Radiant Stars. Eccles is awed, “It’s enormous, a 60-minute saxophone concerto. How often do you get a new 60-minute work in contemporary classical music? I’d love to see a symphony concert where this was the main work, instead of a token 12-minute new music work played first in the program or before interval. This is for a fairly large ensemble, 18 musicians—the Sydney Conservatorium Modern Music Ensemble. I heard their first rehearsal and I was really impressed. Alto-saxophonist James Nightingale (Chair of the New Music Network and member of Continuum Sax) is playing the solo part. It’s fantastic music, a little Stockhausen-esque in some ways, as in his solo wind pieces, but definitely Brian’s own language.”
The first half of the opening night concert has much to offer as well: “Ensemble Offspring playing Marcus Lindberg’s Ablauf (1983) for two massive bass drums and clarinet…I’ve seen it live and was bowled over. Song Company’s Roland Peelman is to play a piano piece, Sonolith, a world premiere by Turkish Australian composer Ekrem Mulayim who has written a musical transcription of the Declaration of Human Rights. The words are projected in real time so that it’s almost like the pianist is a typist.”
A didjeridu duet, an Aurora commission for Alex Pozniak from Aurora, has “considerable input from the players Mark Atkins and Gumeroy Newman who’s from Western Sydney. Hearing two didjeridus together is not something you experience very often.” The program also includes Xenakis’ challenging solo Rebonds (1987-89) played by Claire Edwardes. Eccles is keen that the first half of the concert is as fluid as possible, “so that the works can speak to each other” without re-setting of music stands and chairs.
Synesthesias
Elsewhere in the program is Colourwheel, a Campbelltown Arts Centre commission which Aurora is co-presenting. It’s the creation of guitarist Jim Moginie performing with an ensemble of electric guitarists in his “exploration of colour theory in art and music in Kandinsky, Klee and others as well as Australia’s Roy de Maistre.”
Recorder player Alicia Crossley will be at Blacktown Arts Centre in a very distinctive program, Ecstatic Dances, collaborating with various artists including a work commissioned by Aurora from Paul Cutlan, Affirmations, for bass recorder, cello with effects and didjeridu. The concert takes its title from Ross Edwards’ work of the same name, which will also be performed in what Eccles describes as “a dance-inspired program.” There’ll also be a solo from cellist Ollie Miller and Melissa Farrow, principal flautist with the Brandenburg Chamber Orchestra, will play baroque flute alongside Alicia.”
Under open skies, Super Critical Mass (Julian Day, Luke Jaaniste, Janet McKay), who specialise in crowd music, will present their Aurora-commissioned new work for percussion to be performed in St Johns Park Parramatta on 30 April during the evening rush hour.
With a focused program built around commissions and premieres of exciting new works, James Eccles has curated a strong program with arts centres and musical partners. He’d liked to have had more on the program: “a lot of great ideas were pitched to me but we simply didn’t have the money.” There’s also no ‘big name’ overseas artist this year, he says, to “galvanise an audience, but we thought, let’s make this really about Australian artists and support them with the kind of opportunities they rarely get in arts festivals.”
Aurora has deservedly become an integral part of the Western Sydney cultural calendar and, like the vital arts centres, continues to develop audiences for and appreciation of Australian music of remarkable diversity. Let’s hope this achievement is recognised by Arts NSW and that Aurora Festival is granted the opportunity to thrive in 2016. In the meantime we ready ourselves to be awed by dazzling spectrum of creations from Australia’s brightest musicians in the 2014 Aurora Festival of Living Music.
The demands of producing new work every year are enough to see off some excellent artistic directors and the addition of a curatorial role assumes skills that some take decades to attain. While Rafael Bonachela has brought us some excellent international choreographers in his mixed bills (Emmanuel Gat, Jacopo Godani) and supports local choreographers intermittently (Adam Linder, Gideon Obarzanek), I have to confess that I’m not sure where he is heading with his programming for Sydney Dance Company.
The gearshift from the lyrical contemporary of Bonachela’s 2 in D Minor to Jacopo Godani’s hard-hitting, ballet-derived Raw Models was manageable and illuminating. Both ‘mickey-moused’ the scores despite the radical difference in their aesthetics. The former was set to Bach’s Partita in D minor for solo violin interspersed with “static sound sculptures” by Nick Wales, and the latter to the aggressively synthetic sounds of German duo 48Nord. Both illustrated the limits of shadowing the score, which becomes a kind of monotony amongst constant variation.
Bonachela’s work provides the sustained note across all of the Sydney Dance Company’s programming, clearly linking with Graeme Murphy’s aesthetic legacy and the big balletic-contemporary companies that operate in a rarefied field that is relatively unchanging. 2 in D Minor featured Bonachela’s signature fluid and non-stop movement, slipping across solos, duets, male/male/female trios and ending in the anticipated unison section. The more filigreed, baroque details of Cass Mortimer Eipper, particularly in his delicate duets with David Mack, were quiet, considered moments amid the din. Violinist Veronique Serret’s onstage performance was phenomenal—five movements and five moods on a searing instrument. Her physical presence and movements in the service of the music often drew my attention away from the dancers.
2 in D Minor, Interplay 2, Sydney Dance Company
photo Wendell Teodoro
2 in D Minor, Interplay 2, Sydney Dance Company
As the new head of The Forsythe Company, we could look at Godani’s commission (first performed by the company in 2011; see interview RT101 online) for the company with new eyes, drawing a straight line to the William Forsythe aesthetic that he will be charged with maintaining. This work looked different to me this time around. I had remembered something very cool, almost frosty, structured around a stop-start rhythm and moving boldly and suddenly to the floor where a darker energy dominated. This time around, the links to an almost Fosse-esque jazz aesthetic were startling. Bob Fosse’s jazz legacy is pervasive, and with a strategically placed group of So You Think You Can Dance finalists in the first row of the Sydney Theatre, the comparison seemed pronounced. The breathtaking virtuosity of some extraordinary dancers was also not lost on this section of the audience who gasped and oohed throughout.
Charmene Yap is clearly the star of this company and a stand-out across all of the works. Her technical prowess is subsumed in the service of finely wrought qualities of movement—often smooth, low and extended—and a presence that is realised through the same, not distracted by the choreography. Her duet with Andrew Crawford—with her tiny frame moving like a shadow around the tall, blonde dancer—was a high point in a piece pitched toward a succession of high points.
The gearshift from Godani to Obarzanek’s L’Chaim (interview, RT119) was a very different experience. The latter’s intention was clearly to break through in two ways: through the façade of physical perfection and choreographic wizardry to the dancers as everyday people, and into the audience where he placed one of his performers. Zoe Coombs Marr (of Sydney-based performance group post) was our proxy in the piece, asking some sensible questions like: “What do you think about when you’re dancing?” “How many years do you have left?” “What do you call specific movements?” Her interrogatory tone grates with the dancers until she breaks down and is asked to join them on stage. This results in a quite spectacular musical number which is what Zoe had asked for, linking the piece back to Obarzanek’s production for Chunky Move, Australia’s Most Wanted where he surveyed audiences nationwide about what they’d like to see in a dance, and also I Want to Dance Better at Parties another work exploring the relationship of the non-dancer to dance.
It’s great to see Gideon Obarzanek pursuing these analytical, accessible and quite political paths of artistic enquiry. The subversive critique of what had come before could not have been lost on audiences either. The real world had entered the theatre, and the paradigm had shifted from a display of performative and choreographic skills to the actual situation we were all engaging in. If it didn’t completely succeed (the end came so quickly and unexpectedly and some of the dancers seemed to miss the spirit of the work), what it was attempting to do was exciting and provocative in this context.
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Sydney Dance Company: Interplay, Rafael Bonachela, 2 in D Minor; Jacopo Godani, Raw Models; Gideon Obarzanek, L’Chaim; Sydney Theatre, 15 March-5 April; Canberra Theatre Centre, 10–12 April: Southbank Theatre, Melbourne, 30 April-10 May
A collection of new works by emerging Indigenous artists is always cause for celebration. This year’s Next Wave Festival announces a key initiative in Blak Wave, a program comprising seven new art projects, a series of talks and, significantly, a publication edited by Torres Strait Islander Tahjee Moar and the Next Wave team featuring interviews, profiles and articles by established and emerging Indigenous writers asking “what’s next—personally, politically and creatively—for Australia’s Indigenous artists?”
All of the works in the program appear designed to provoke and involve audiences in equal measure. I spoke to Brisbane-based artist Ryan Presley about Lesser Gods, his participatory installation, which offers a provocative invitation to the audience to “Enter through the mouth of a saltwater crocodile…” (media release). Presley explains what happens for those who safely make it through: “Inside is a dance hall area with projections that will dictate which [of a number of] tiles to step on. Each tile is encoded with a cymatic symbol and each of these correlates to a musical tone. The video dictates a melody and the audience will have to figure it out. It’s like a game with a cryptic melody.”
Ryan Presley, Transfiguration, 2014 Watercolour, gouache and gold leaf on arches paper
courtesy the artists
Ryan Presley, Transfiguration, 2014 Watercolour, gouache and gold leaf on arches paper
Like other artists in Blak Wave, Presley is exploring new ground with this work. Last year, he created Blood Money, “questioning the moral basis of Australia’s wealth” in a series of intricately rendered commemorative banknotes celebrating Indigenous resistance fighters such as Pemulwuy, Vincent Lingiari and the late Wik elder Gladys Tybingoompa replacing the likes of Henry Lawson and Dame Mary Gilmore. In Lesser Gods Presley takes on “Christian iconographic paintings with all the gold leaf and two dimensional dramatic scenes like St George and the Dragon [as well as] Transfiguration and Resurrection imagery… reinterpreting and re-drawing the images but subtly referencing those sorts of compositions… I’m working with animators and a sound designer so there’ll be animated video mixed with flashes of cymatic prompts.”
New to electronics and new media, for Presley this “has definitely been a challenge… I’m working with another emerging Indigenous artist, Robert Andrew who’s done a lot of electrical engineering and we’ve worked together on the interactive dance floor. And I’ve used animation as a bridge from what I’m used to doing into something new…. Initially I was going to create a video but for this context it’s a bit too static. I wanted to create something vibrant that people could contribute to.”
I’ve long admired the talents of Ghenoa Gela, a spirited and versatile dancer who has appeared in works by Shaun Parker (Happy as Larry, 2010) and memorably in the original production of Vikki Van Hout’s Briwyant (2012). Following a year-long stint as ring mistress for Circus Oz, Gela returns to her dance roots with her premiere choreographic outing in Winds of Woerr.
Given Gela is best known as a contemporary dancer I ask about her approach to this work that has its roots in traditional story and dance. She answers, “This work has been a conversation between my Mum and me for a good couple of years now… She is my cultural advisor. We’ve been working on the script together and we’re narrating alongside each other with my Mum on audio.
“I was intrigued by a couple of stories she told me when I was younger. I was born on the mainland and my interpretation of the seasons is of spring, summer, autumn and winter but my Mum grew up on the Torres Strait. They didn’t have seasons up there, they had the winds— Kuki, Sager, Naigai, Ziai—that taught them when to harvest and when to plant, what to hunt and what fish were in the water. I wouldn’t know unless I looked at a calendar.”
Working with three other dancers—one from the Torres Strait, the other two non-indigenous, Gela is keen to present her own take on this material. “We’re trying to tell the stories of the four winds of the Torres Strait but more like sisters rather than the elements themselves. We’re ‘characters’ [based on] the spiritual elements.” Also involved in the project is Anya Reynolds whom Gela met at Circus Oz and who’s creating an evocative soundscape for the piece.
Gela is enthusiastic about the possibilities of introducing audiences to the riches of Torres Strait culture. Based in Sydney these days, she observes, “The further south, I find they don’t even know where it is or that it’s part of Australia… I really believe in opening the doors for people who want to learn about Torres Strait culture. I feel in order for people to know about the protocols and stuff, it’s best they learn it themselves. They’re really excited back home that I’ve got a few people on board learning traditional Torres Strait dancing and language. And I know my boundaries. I only teach what i know and what my parents have taught me.”
My Bullock Modified, Steaphan Paton
photo Sarah Black
My Bullock Modified, Steaphan Paton
Other works in the Blak Wave program are wide-ranging in the issues they tackle and the artforms deployed. My Bullock Modified by Steaphan Paton, for instance, sounds like an intriguing interactive VR work “exploring early conflicts between Aboriginal landowners and European settlers” in which an iPhone app permits participants to spear virtual cattle grazing in the Carlton Gardens. (You know you want to.) Paton, an interdisciplinary artist whose previous work suggests an activist eye sharply focused on colonial relations, identity and race, in this work invites his audience to empathise with “Aboriginal warriors who historically have been demonised as the lurking menace.”
The Blaktism by Megan Cope is a satirical video work created in response to the artist’s recent quest to track down her ‘Certificate of Aboriginality,’ that legal document surprisingly still required in some cases to authenticate a person’s Indigenous status. Last year, actor Jack Charles refused an Australia Council requirement to produce such a document. For Indigenous urban dwellers cut off or estranged from their traditional homelands, Cope’s work “bridges these parallel worlds.” She admits “The thought of being legitimately certified suddenly cast a dark shadow of doubt across my mind and left me wondering if I was Aboriginal enough.”
Another artist tackling some of the same territory in a dance work, also with a distinctly satirical edge, is Carly Sheppard who is accompanied onstage by her alter ego, the funny and streetwise Chase. “White Face is my first attempt to make commentary on my experiences as a contemporary Aboriginal Australian woman living in a continually evolving culture, which has survived invasion, extreme oppression and forced assimilation.” Sheppard chose the title “because this work addresses tokenistic views where skin colour, among other stereotypes, such as location, connection to family and traditional knowledge, is seen as a mark of being authentically Aboriginal. Through this work I am reclaiming the responsibility of defining who I am as an Aboriginal Australian. I hope to inspire others to do so too.”
Sarah Jane Norman always surprises with her incisive critiques in the form of live performance and her offering for Blak Wave is no exception. In Concerto no. 3 Norman, who admits she “has not laid her hands on a piano since she quit lessons at age 15,” will be joined in a 12-hour marathon by five other ‘failed’ pianists who will take turns at sight-reading their way through the Rach 3, the daddy of them all in terms of difficult piano repertory, in “a challenge to the fetishism of ‘greatness’ and to the heroic discourse of artistic virtuosity.” For audiences concerned for their own pain threshold, Norman poses the question: “in a culture driven at every level by the self-devouring pursuit of success, how might we make a space to contemplate the transformative potential of failure?”
SEETHrough, Sean Jorvn
photo Troy Russell
SEETHrough, Sean Jorvn
SEEthrough by Sean Jorvn (the shared moniker of two Sydney based artists Colin Kinchela and Gavin Walters) incorporates music, innovative use of video by Jacqui Mills and sound by Chris Yates and Corey Webster in a performance “that puts Aboriginal and white masculinity ‘under the knife,’ exploring taboos and traditions associated with coming-of-age in both cultures.” Employing the male shaving ritual as motif, the performers, one white, one black, explore the distances and connections between cultures and the potential for genuine intimacy between them.
For a blast of new talent and provocative ideas, Melbourne might just be the place to be in April-May.
Next Wave, director Emily Sexton, 16 April-11 May, Melbourne, nextwave.org.au
Quotes from Blak Wave artists are from phone interviews as indicated and, otherwise, Next Wave’s media pack.
All That Fall, Pan Pan Theatre, courtesy World Theatre Festival
We are in a post-philanthropic funding regime with this year’s World Theatre Festival at the Brisbane Powerhouse—Wotif founder Graeme Wood’s generous million dollar bequest lapsed last year—but a rich line-up of work from around the world is still evident. The change this year, though, is in the large number of one or two-handers, and a higher than usual ratio of Australian co-producing credits for the international work. The pieces I saw were stand-alone productions from Ireland and New Zealand in which the monologue featured strongly.
Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall was originally a 1957 BBC radio drama, so accordingly no bodies on stage—Ireland’s Pan Pan Theatre win the gong for low-cost touring overheads! The piece is pre-recorded. Pan Pan have made their reputation at this festival over the years by taking canonical texts and throwing them against a wall, reinfusing them with punk or pop sensibilities (I am Oedipus and A Doll’s House being prime examples). This is the most reverent of the productions I have seen the company offer. The Beckett estate’s notorious insistence on adherence to authorial intention notwithstanding, Pan Pan have embraced the radio play form and transported it to the live stage with a warm and elegiac interpretation of this text. The experience is largely a spatial and aural one, of course, but visuals are not altogether neglected. We enter to a room of rocking chairs and a massive wall of lights that, perhaps like the domestic fireplace it is substituting for, actually generates heat when fully charged. The seats are placed at odd angles on Ikea children’s mats (you know the ones: the cityscape, dark grey roads, primary coloured houses and public buildings) so that we are actually having to look at each other sometimes uncomfortably closely. Shut-eye provides the only private refuge. The chairs have skull-print cushions on them. So we have images of death, routes through the city, but also of comfort and the domestic hearth.
The writing is beautiful, and one of Beckett’s most near-naturalistic pieces. Central character Maddie Rooney is taking a walk from her rural home to an urban (Dublin) train station to meet her husband at the end of his Saturday workshift, and then the pair return home. There is no plot as such; nothing really ‘happens’ to Maddie along the way—she falls in a ditch, takes a lift on a passing tractor. It is almost a picaresque conceit, and as the garrulous Maddie embarks on her journey, narrating her cranky stream-of-consciousness all the way, I was put in mind of Joyce’s Molly Bloom and her iconic “stepping out off the page into the sensual world” walk from outer Dublin’s Howth’s Head. There’s an Irish literary baton being passed on here.
Actors provide the soundscape while it is a bucolic one—cows, bulls, sheep—but as Maddie nears the city, an industrial track takes over. The train is delayed, a deluge falls, husband and wife return home sodden and philosophical, ruminating over mortality and what it means to be corporeal, sentient beings. It is a deeply meditative live theatre experience—hypnotic in its simplicity. I found myself asking whether it was necessary for us to be in a theatre listening to this piece designed for the radio. I think the answer is yes. The work has stayed with me and got my writerly brain ticking about audience proxemics. It’s a fine accomplishment—an affective and effective experience of Beckett—and another feather in the cap for director Gavin Quinn and the company.
The stage monologue features heavily in 20th century Irish theatre. Brian Friel, Tommy Murphy and Frank McGuinness have all used the monologue within multi-character pieces, and in the first decade of the 21st century Conor Macpherson, Marina Carr and Mark O’Rowe have ensured that this most literary of theatrical approaches has meant that ‘the playwright’ has remained central to Irish contemporary performance even where s/he has fallen out of vogue in other industrial contexts, including our own here in Australia. Stefanie Preissner steps into this tradition squarely with her full-length one-person testimonial and is most obviously influenced by O’Rowe, whose Terminus (2007) was memorably brutally lyrical. Solpadeine is my Boyfriend is, like Terminus, written in rhyme. Where Terminus is less tethered to structured scansion, Solpadeine errs heavily toward the metered rhyme. It is at its strongest when, like the proverbial good waiter, you do not notice that s/he is there. There were some cloying moments when the piece veered toward Pam Ayres to service a looming couplet. The direction was also ham-fisted and literal at times. But the story itself is engrossing and disarmingly candid, and is told unflinchingly by writer-performer Preissner.
Cork girl Stef moves to Dublin to study drama. Evidently moving from Cork to Dublin carries the cultural bias of a Northern Australian moving to Sydney or Melbourne (I say that as someone who did); vowels need to be contorted into compliance, regional provenance apologised for in the interests of ‘fitting in.’ Stef finds a boyfriend, Steve, who is by all accounts a bit of an arsehole. She suffers extended bouts of depression—with or without him—and self-medicates with Solpadeine, a European equivalent, we are told, to Panadeine Forte. The piece is a genuinely stirring (and frequently hilarious) rumination on depression and self-sabotage in the realm of personal relationships. Is Preissner picking up the literary baton passed on by Joyce and Beckett? Probably not. But she’s a terrific autobiographical storyteller and a talent to watch out for.
Black Faggot was fun. It’s a sketch-based montage of monologues and duologues centring on the theme of Polynesian (mostly Samoan) characters coming to terms with homosexuality in New Zealand. Iaheto Ah Hi and Taokia Pelasasa play all of these men—and women—ranging from the closeted football jock stumbling ‘accidentally’ into Auckland’s gay bars to the young Christian boy praying his queerness away, to the Samoan mama dealing initially not so well with her son’s gradual emersion from the closet, to a Cultural Studies lecturer providing a semiotic reading of orientalist consumption of Pasifika sexuality in his paper “Cracker wanna Poly.” Some sketches are hilarious, some bawdy, even smutty. Cultural stereotyping is both satirised and indulged (there are Samoan jokes about Tongans only being recognisable when they smile—showing gold fillings being the gag that Australian audiences may not switch onto. The performances are arguably better than the writing, but the show has a terrific heart and did a great job in delivering in-yer-face queer politics to an audience that even here in Brisbane (where there is a huge South Sea Islander population who don’t always make it to the theatre) found its mark.
The World Theatre Festival 2014 program was a fold-out brochure rather than the plump booklet of years past. Missing was the Graeme Wood Foundation sponsor logo and the swathe of local creative development showings. While the buzz was still there, fed by the cross-over with the Australian Performing Arts Market, the stalwart WTF audience and some snazzy initiatives like the Yum Chat for local Asian-Australian theatremakers, the festival now appears to sit in a more commercial curatorial space.
She Would Walk the Sky
One of the jewels in the crown of this year’s WTF was the collaboration between gifted Tasmanian playwright Finegan Kruckemeyer and veteran circus performer and director Chelsea McGuffin. She Would Walk the Sky is narrated by a ghostly voice-over describing “the people of the river house” who nest in a secret, derelict nightclub, including “the bird woman” pining for a sailor who abandoned her, “the strong man” who loves the bird woman from afar and “the clown” who tells the audience that their putative love affair “is never going to happen.” The velvet-clad band duck and play as slack rope, bike and trapeze tricks unfold.
Alas, Kruckemeyer’s prose was more lullaby than storm. I was reminded of Antonella Casella’s article in RealTime (RT115) in which she wondered if narrative interferes with the inherent power of the ‘body of representation’ in circus form. The disembodied prose never felt a part of the live show and while there was an undeniable beauty in its wash and pulses, the cumulative and melancholic effect worked against the push and dazzle of the live spectacle. The show is already on international tour so perhaps the marriage between text and live circus will bed down.
Underground and Gudirr Gudirr
The third return season of Underground by local heroes Motherboard Productions was a joyous cross-cultural mash of musical, magic realism and nightclub revue. As reviewed (RT107), the show moves seamlessly between Korean and English, using pop culture and musical numbers to tie together the loose strands of the narrative about the search for love and identity. Ditto for outstanding Indigenous dance work from Marrugeku, Gudirr Gudirr (RT114) that explodes with the force of Broome’s utopian elixir: Malay, Yawuru and Japanese cultures, expressed through the passionate intensity of performer and choreographer Dalisa Pigrim and her urgent quest to articulate, in words and movement, the violent intersections of her own cultural and political identity, ably facilitated by Belgian choreographer Koen Augustijnen.
Wedhus Gembel
Another exciting cross-cultural debut for Brisbane audiences was Wedhus Gembel. The show is a long-term collaboration between a group of Javanese independent artists—associated with the dynamic Indonesian theatre company Theatre Garasi—and Footscray’s anarchically cheerful Snuff Puppets, with their large-scale, endearing and slightly askew creations. This is an important contribution to the scarce Indonesian-Australian repertory. “Wedhus Gembel” translates as the gas from an active volcano, the chaotic force of a goat’s appetite and homelessness after a natural disaster. The show melds traditional stories, living culture, traditional Indonesian puppets and the hand-made, friendly grotesquery of the Snuff Puppet aesthetic.
I was fortunate to sit beside a Javanese-Australian whose delight at seeing traditional elements, like the Wayang puppetry, was mirrored by the frenzy of the schoolchildren in the back cackling at the mobile phone gags and blaring Indo pop. Even with my charming guide it was hard to follow transitions or grasp the finer points of the stories. The show has been made for an Indonesian audience first and translated back for an Australian one.
Nonetheless, nothing could dampen the excitement of the audience when the large volcano onstage erupted, producing an egg that birthed our monster: Wedhus Gembel who proceeded to eat the entire cast and some of the audience. Only the wise man Samir could calm him by encouraging him to fart and poo out everyone he had swallowed. They emerged, transformed with new costumes, ready to charge into the audience and bring us onstage to boogie—graceful glowing Indonesian performers, schoolkids and local mob alike. As I snuck out to see the next WTF show, my last glimpse was of the entire audience bouncing up and down and shrieking with joy.
What was compelling about each of these shows was their deeply felt experimentation with collaboration: across culture, art forms and geography. While some works succeeded better than others, or were just further along in their development, the richness of these brave collaborations was the highlight of WTF 2014 for me and I look forward to the next installment in 2016.
Lee Breuer with some of the cast of La Divina Caricatura
photo Beatriz Schiller
Lee Breuer with some of the cast of La Divina Caricatura
Leading American theatre innovator Lee Breuer is to conduct a masterclass in Australia in July. In this article reproduced from The Brooklyn Rail, he is interviewed about his work by Kyoung H Park in 2012 prior to the New York premiere of the greatly acclaimed La Divina Caricatura in 2013 at La Mama. Reviewer Laura Collins-Hughes described the work as “strange, singular, perfectly self-contained and so wondrous that it may leave you in a daze” (New York Times, 9 Dec, 2013).
In the 42 years since Mabou Mines’ founding in 1970, Lee Breuer has directed some of the most seminal pieces of the American avant-garde, including adaptations of Beckett’s Play, Come and Go, and The Lost Ones, The Gospel at Colonus, Mabou Mines Lear, Peter and Wendy, Mabou Mines DollHouse, and groundbreaking, international productions such as Comedie-Francaise’s Un Tramway Nommé Désir. But prior to his rise as a director, Lee Breuer was a playwright.
Maude Mitchell
photo Beariz Schiller
Maude Mitchell
Lee and I met in New Delhi, India when he and his partner, Maude Mitchell, taught an acting workshop at Sanskriti Pratisthan, an artist colony where I was a 2010 Unesco-Aschberg resident. The workshop consisted of theater games that explored Western and non-Western performance techniques, which Lee gradually blended together, while directing the students’ interpretations of their own writing. Carefully connecting emotions to the physical and spoken expression of words, Lee spoke about his dialectical approach to motivational and movement-based acting methods, which he’s masterfully synthesized into a unique style as Co-Artistic Director of Mabou Mines.
My first collaboration with Lee was as Assistant Director and masked performer in a workshop production of La Divina Caricatura during the summer of 2011. Divina is a Bunraku pop-opera, written and directed by Lee, that tells the love story of Rose and John, a dog and her master, through two re-incarnations set in Lee’s metaphoric Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. I played Sheepish, a sheep in the Institute for the Science of Soul, a rehab center in Cheesequake, New Jersey that looks like an Indian ashram and symbolizes Purgatorio.
La Divina Caricatura is based on autobiography, puppetry bio-mechanics and a piercing examination of cultural evolution, as evidenced through novels, music, art, film and dance. The script, which equally alludes to Dante’s Divine Comedy and to 17th century playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon, is a multimedia, multi-day epic that unveils Lee’s unique voice as a writer searching for spiritual revelation through the written word.
Lee’s most notorious works—and the first published—are the Animations, a trilogy of poetic, self-referencing narratives about the epic struggles of living an unenlightened artist’s life. The first two animations, The B Beaver Animation and The Red Horse Animation, were first produced in museums such as the Guggenheim, Whitney and MoMA with support of Ellen Stewart and La MaMa. It wasn’t until The Shaggy Dog Animation, completed eight years after the start of the trilogy, that Lee’s writing found a home at the Public Theater.
“The Shaggy Dog Animation was supposed to be the third animation, but then it took off on its own and became a trilogy of itself,” Lee explains. This new trilogy, La Divina Caricatura, combines the texts of several of Lee’s subsequent plays written from the late 70s through 2012.
“If one were to consider The Shaggy Dog Animation, Prelude to a Death in Venice and The Epidog as a separate story, that would be Rose’s trilogy. But the larger trilogy, La Divina Caricatura, is an exploration not of Rose, but the love affair between Rose and John.” The focus is the course of their love, which Lee describes as the “amor delgada—re-manifest in two intricate, balanced, new pairings” as Rose and John reincarnate and find each other again as Porco and the Warrior Ant.
For many critics, An Epidog (1996) marked the culmination of Lee’s Animations, but in 2001, he began to stage Ecco Porco in a series of brief workshops and productions that ended with Pataphysics Pennyeach: Summa Drammatica & Porco Morto.
“At the time I was doing Ecco Porco, that’s when I started thinking: ‘It’s a trilogy, sooner or later I ought to put it all together,’” says Lee. “But the idea of how it all fits together is maybe five, at most 10, years old.”
In its current version, Rose (a dog) chases after John across the country in a 1970s Inferno for struggling artists. Addicted to love, Rose is hospitalized at the Institute for the Science of Soul—Purgatorio—where she meets John’s reincarnation as Porco, a pig. The third part of Divina takes place in Paradisio, when Rose dies and reincarnates as the eponymous Warrior Ant.
“Based on the story of Arjuna in the Mahabharata, the Ant becomes a revolutionary when she goes to her father, Trotsky the termite,” Lee continues. “She becomes a complete leftist and says she’ll lead the fifth world in a revolution. The ‘Great War’ is fought on the White House lawn.”
The staging of La Divina Caricatura closely reflects the traditional performance of Bunraku puppetry, in which a tayu narrates a story accompanied by a shamisen and orchestra. However, Divina is directed as an animated, epic movie, based on the narrative structure of Monzaemon’s Bunraku plays, which in turn closely mirror the structure of feature films.
“I always felt that I would like to head towards more classical puppetry—Bunraku puppetry,” Lee reflects. “The closest I came to that was in Porco Morto, where Porco was staged in his coffin with a ground light. So, if the trilogy was to make sense, then it had to have a classic Bunraku kind of unity, but I didn’t commit to it because of how expensive and time consuming it is to do great Bunraku.”
In 1988, Lee did venture into a Bunraku collaboration, partnering with puppeteer Yoshida Tamamatsu for The Warrior Ant at Brooklyn Academy of Music. “One of the problems,” he says, was that “The Warrior Ant was a puppet run by this incredible Bunraku puppeteer who did some great stuff, but the warrior was in mid-air. There was no context, he was just this little puppet in the middle of singers [with] no dramatic definition, so I said, let’s commit—finally!—to one formal idea.”
The novelty of this idea is Lee’s transformation of traditional Bunraku into a Western form, in which a narrator performing Rose sends up Divina’s endless cultural references through distilled, lyric narratives that build up to songs. These songs change styles and rhythm to play everything from Indian ragas to Argentinian tangos, and underscore Divina’s searching story, which is performed by an ensemble of Bunraku puppeteers, doo-wop singers and actors on stage.
“I feel more identified with this than with Western dramatic structure,” says Lee. “I feel that Chikamatsu Monzaemon wrote these perfect filmic metaphors that gave me the idea of making a mixed-media film with puppets. That’s where the idea came from.”
What astonishes me in La Divina Caricatura is the profound meaning sought through unlikely characters—Rose, the dog, Porco, the pig and the Warrior Ant. It wasn’t until I discovered the connections between these characters and Lee’s personal history that I realized how close they are to him.
“Rose was my dog,” Lee recalls. “When we were working on a Navajo reservation, my daughter Clove was given a puppy. She got very attached to the puppy, but some kid ran over him and it was a big tragedy. We buried Klechayazi—‘little dog’ in Navajo—and immediately got a two-week old husky. We kept her for 16 years and that was Rose.”
He also describes a trip to Mexico, where they sold “these great, big, termite-type insects with engraved jewels on them. We bought an insect and a supply of wood, which is what they ate, and the insect lived with us for three, four months, which was really three times longer than it was supposed to live.” That insect, he continues, would become The Warrior Ant. “It was a large, ant-like termite, really slow and really beautiful, with a blue jewel glued on its back.”
The character of Rose and her reincarnation as the Warrior Ant developed much faster than John’s reincarnation as Porco. “Porco was harder to get to because he’s much more me,” reveals Lee. “Well, a part of me that is hard to get to. With Porco Morto, I was able to get to where the big heart was, which was sentimental, wonderful and romantic—the way a pig should be.”
Throughout Divina, Rose’s desire to be a romantic artist, striving for the highest levels of love, passion and beauty conflicts with the narrator’s identification as a self-destructive, addicted, mad artist.
To understand this contradiction, one needs to understand Lee’s sense of humor. When speaking of French avant-gardist/puppeteer Alfred Jarry, Lee describes “an outrageous pun-maker—every other word was a pun. He had this idea that language could expand in different directions so it would all reverberate like a big gong.
“He also had a balancing act which was the beginning of the put-on: basically, you didn’t quite know whether you were being spoken to seriously or not,” Lee says. “It could happen with an eyebrow twitch, or the dilation of nostrils, and the audience didn’t know if it was being insulted or being listened to.”
This attitude served to challenge the values of the French bourgeoisie, but unlike Monzaemon—who challenged the bourgeois values of his society through tragedies—[Alfred] Jarry achieved this through controversial puppetry and biting satire.
“Jarry preserved [this attitude] until he died,” Lee insists. “His last request was a joke. He was lying in bed, dying, had been drunk for 15 days, hadn’t eaten anything—and his last request was a toothpick and he died shortly afterwards.”
The role of Jarry—not as an avant-gardist, but as a comedian—relates to Lee’s fascination with the “genetically martyred” individual. He describes the comedian as a martyr—“a certain ‘bird’ in the flock. When this marked individual sees danger, he screams and calls it out, so the predator will go for that bird and the flock will get away. In other words, the bird’s the designated victim so that the genetic species can live…This was my little secret definition of the artist—a designated martyr. And Porco was going to represent this for me.”
In opposition to his proposition of the artist as martyr, Lee delves equally into the madness of the artist, comparing Porco’s creation of the Ant in The Warrior Ant to Cervantes’ relationship to Don Quixote.
“There’s a scene that I’m working on in which Porco admits that he’s created an insane insect—that you can’t be a holy warrior, a Warrior Ant,” he says. “It’s the fantasy of fantasies—particularly a pig’s fantasy.”
At the core of La Divina Caricatura lies the search for balance between the pursuit of an artistic and spiritual path. “The searching artist goes on a religious search and you’ve got to tie it to something; it really is a pilgrimage,” maintains Lee. “Dante’s pilgrimage is real; Dante’s pilgrimage is the same as the artist’s, and the danger all through the pilgrimage is a Buddhist thing: to not being able to recognize Maya, recognize illusion for what it is—in your own head.
“This is why my image of a great successful and happy life was Dante himself,” says Lee. “Dante was in exile, living out of Florence, and a month after he died, they found the last three verses of Paradiso on his desk. And there he went—completing one of the greatest works ever written, completing it while simultaneously completing his life. I think this is a very happy way to go.”
When I ask him how this is funny, Lee sums up the comic irony: “Warriors are defending the faith, and behind that idea is the idea of defending the truth. This is a little bit of what’s going on, yet we have an Ant embodying this great task.”
This article originally appeared as “Madness and Martyrdom in La Divina Caricatura” in The Brooklyn Rail (www.brooklynrail.org), 10 Dec, 2012, and is reproduced with the permission of the publisher.
In July, Tashmadada (director Deborah Leiser-Moore) and MAPA (Monash Academy of Performing Arts) will present a workshop conducted by Lee Breuer and Maude Mitchell in the Masters of Theatre series. You can read an interview with Leiser-Moore about her latest work, KaBooM: Stories from Distant Frontiers, in RealTime Profiler#2.
Conflict is something we think of through the allowances and permissions of theatrical situations and the language of war and ideology. In Ballad of the Burning Star, it is its intimacy that earns a particularly poetic examination. Developed over a period of two years, first premiering at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2013 and opening in London at Battersea Arts Centre this spring, Ballad of the Burning Star navigates highly disputed political territory with the skilful use of theatrical metaphor. It investigates intimate questions around belonging and conflict, roots and politics by positing theatrical problems.
Ballad is inspired by Israeli-born Nir Paldi’s experience, as teenager and young adult, of growing up in the midst of the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Focusing on a particular moment of gun-point conflict that is twisted through a series of dramaturgical operations, the show draws on cabaret and drag, flirts with irony and humour, constructs a play within a play, develops deliberately manipulative stage politics and positions the audience in a landscape that moves from narrative to rhetoric.
Paldi plays Star, the host for the evening, a drag queen clad in gold who, assisted by The Starlets, an all female group of dancers dressed in tightly fitted military uniforms, and Camp David, their musician, tells a story about a boy in the midst of conflict, moving from the kibbutz to school bus, desert to town, sibling rivalries to bomb explosions. Within the series of narrative and occasionally musical vignettes, Star intervenes with commentaries about the Starlets’ performances and various forms of deceptive audience participation.
Ballad begins with Star announcing a bomb in the theatre; we’re now to find the terrorist, seeking among the rows of raked seating the most dubious, most recognisable culprit. The awkward, pressing silence of the audience as Star makes her way up into the seating and her aggressive playfulness present an apt context for a performance that seeks to both isolate and conflate the personal and the national in conflicts that are very much grounded in land and history, beyond the usual remit of political work. Rich in affect and daring in form, Ballad prefers to expose and argue, to think through constantly re-contextualised action.
The aesthetic and stylistic elements hold particular power here, beyond a mere theatrical symbolism. The stage is bare, framed only by a pair of red velvet curtains; a star of David hangs like a mirror ball in the centre. The rich gold and red velvet, the language of oppression and oppressed, the nuanced, regimented movement are in stark contrast with the playful theatricality of Star and the brutal irony of the musical numbers.
Drag brings a deliberate ambiguity and distance to the situation unfolding in the vignettes, performed with a sense of deliberately historicised theatricality. At the same time, the stage itself becomes a site of ambiguous power dynamics. The Starlets are caricatures and characters, the performance making constant reference to the actual background of the dancers. Increasingly abused by Star, they respond with an embodied resistance, emphasising an autocratic regime made visible beyond language. Here, the body is central—it becomes synonymous with the territories described in the narratives themselves.
It is possible to problematise the identity politics seen in Star’s own drag, the ways in which questions of ambiguity and gender remain underexplored, yet recalled in the piece. At the same time, the complexity and nuance of the problem as presented through the performance—one pertaining to generations and individuals, to history and rhetoric, to land and topography—is made visible with precision.
Ballad of the Burning Star is a performance of political in-betweens; those of form, of identification and autobiography, of conflict and theme. It’s a piece that presents a discussion of the intricacies of the Israeli-Palestine conflict, speaking with clarity and precision of identity, belonging, personal politics and theatrical metaphors, while maintaining a disarming formal and rhetorical ambiguity.
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Theatre Ad Infinitum, Ballad of the Burning Star, director, writer, performer Nir Paldi, music Adam Pleeth, choreographer, performer Orian Michaeli, Battersea Arts Centre, London, 17 Feb-8 March
A man and woman are dancing a slow waltz in vaguely 1930s attire. They are re-enacting the dance marathons of the Great Depression that took place mainly in the US. Following the original rules of these events, the couple will dance for 24 hours with 15 minutes break per hour, during which they eat meals or snacks determined from original menus, and receive medical assistance if required.
I arrive at the end of the fifth hour of Deborah Pollard’s Yowza Yowza Yowza. Carly Young is being massaged by the physiotherapist; partner Jackson Davis is rubbing his feet, sitting on one of the camp beds in the corner. In another corner the time runs across a screen, next to a slideshow of 1930s photographs. The dancefloor is a circle of lightbulbs just two metres in diameter, with small viewing benches either side. There is a trolley with jugs of water. At the other end of the room, the marathon rules scroll. Deborah Pollard, the work’s creator, is at a desk near the door dressed as a nurse, managing the live feed.
The dancers begin again. The glacial pace of their moves, and Ashley Scott’s soundtrack of white noise, are disconcerting to a viewer familiar with the 1935 Horace McCoy novel They Shoot Horses Don’t They which inspired the work [the popular Sydney Pollack directed film appeared in 1969. Eds]. Yowza wastes no time with vintage aesthetics, neither visual nor aural, its intent thereby more exposed. At the same time Pollard’s rigour in research and application of detail is extraordinary. The following day when I return, the performers are holding poses from the slideshow of the marathon dancers in pain, crazed with fatigue.
This assured combination of historical accuracy and oblique contemporary interpretation provided a rich foundation for a variety of questions. When does acted exhaustion become real? When does theatre become life? What can time alone, as yielding yet ineluctable as air, do to us, in life and art? Yowza rendered the seam between the two virtually invisible. I also saw a clever nod to the re-enactment phenomenon sweeping performance art in recent years. With its combination of skill, integrity and unique vision, Yowza trumped Australia’s most popular re-enactment of our times—Kaldor’s 13 Rooms—a mere orgy of pageantry and gloss.
Yowza went full circle to history, provoking empathy with the people who from sheer desperation danced these marathons almost a century ago. The last dancers standing got money. Some even hoped for fame, with jobs as professional dancers. But They Shoot Horses Don’t They doesn’t talk about winners. McCoy was an early proponent of the LA hard-boiled genre, writing about the losers refused by Hollywood, with dire consequences.
This element of competition was absent. It seemed a deliberate omission, the tiny circle enclosing the two dancers a sort of demarcation of the limits of Pollard’s experiment. I couldn’t help wondering what would happen if that circle were to widen.
Created in a gallery at Wollongong University for her PhD, in association with Performance Space, Yowza Yowza Yowza may yet have a more public incarnation. Fingers crossed. It is one of the most sophisticated, profound performance works I have seen in years.
University of Wollongong, Yowza Yowza Yowza, creator Deborah Pollard, produced in association with Performance Space, in collaboration with Ashley Scott, Dara Gill, Carly Young, Jackson Davis, UOW, NSW, 6-7 March
Reviewing James Waites’ Whatever happened to the STC Actors Company? (Platform Paper 23, Currency House, April 2010), I began by declaring it “a rarity in Australian writing about the theatre. If more like investigative journalism (was the ensemble killed off?) than formal essaying (if not without considered theses), it’s written with a documentary maker’s attentiveness to his subjects (drawing on numerous interviews) and a novelist’s narrative drive (who did it?). But what gives the paper its peculiar power is Waites as witness” (“Critical homage to a short life,” RT97).
Jim was witness to, and an intimate of, the Sydney theatre world for over four decades, bringing to his reviews an invaluable perspective, an acute awareness of formal developments and the courage to speak his mind. His friend Augusta Supple in her fond farewell to Jim on her blog (graced with a wonderful range of photos) writes, “he once told me that being a critic was ‘really a mix of parish priest and dentist’—and you had to be the bravest to stand up and applaud when everyone else was too scared to. He called a spade a spade—and got fired for it on more than one occasion. He would refuse to clap, exclaim something was “utter crap” if it lacked heart or empathy. He walked his talk” (augustasupple.com).
Jim very occasionally wrote for RealTime, his one substantial piece for us on the occasion of the death of Polish theatre luminary Jerzy Growtowski in 1999. The article, “Potato country ” (RT30, p7) comprised Jim’s very funny but heartfelt account of a Grotowski workshop he participated in on a farm in rural NSW in 1974. After receiving instructions to travel to ‘a secret destination,’ he arrives in Armidale and is instructed to make a musical instrument from whatever he can find. Later he goes to a local supermarket where the Polish performers stockpile ‘luxury goods’ and subsequently arrives at a farm where the workshop commences:
“We were nearly always naked, and the work was done in silence. We might walk into a room and it glowed with heat and warmth, or climb into wine kegs full of cold water, lined at the bottom with bristling pineapple heads… A journey of discovery into the self via the senses had begun, activated by what were essentially ‘dramatic’ devices.”
Jim recalled at one point the others “putting their hands all over my naked body; I can still feel the warmth. They carried me outside and raised my body to the winter moon.” Less entrancing was being dragged through recently broken earth “like a human plough. As a boy who had spent years at a Catholic boarding school, who lived pretty much entirely in the head, it was forceful and immediate confrontation. The sacred earth!”
Having refused in the course of the workshop to respond to being hit and being “battered with raw eggs and smeared with yolk …I found it absolutely repugnant,” Jim was told on the last day by Grotowski that “he had planted a seed in us that would only grow if we never discussed our experience. To attempt to use words would kill his gift. For a long time I told no one.” He adds, “We had been taken on a remarkable, mysterious journey into ourselves. I don’t know what the gift was, but I sense it still inside me.”
We weren’t close friends but we saw and chatted with Jim many times over many years, usually at the theatre, even the night before his death at the opening night of The Long Way Home (a play performed by actual soldiers about the mental consequences of damaged bodies, a topic all too familiar to Jim); he was ever a loyal theatre-goer, to the end.
Nigel Kellaway, who like many us who had seen or been in contact with Jim in his final days, writes, “I’m sure I join many theatre artists in Sydney who would have only good words to say of him, regardless of the lethal arrows he occasionally threw at us all… he was a brave and beautiful man.”
A detailed account of Jim’s life and achievements can be found in “Critic whose life became the drama” in the Sydney Morning Herald obituary, 27 Feb, p34.
Mary Hellen Sassman, Frankenstein, courtesy Malthouse
Entire industries have been built on the anxieties of motherhood, and it seems that when women aren’t being told how they’re doing it wrong they’re being sold something that will do it better. None of this makes it any easier when it comes to seriously examining the existential issues that face mothers. Two recent Melbourne productions take up that challenge, and by a fascinating coincidence do so in a manner that looks past the role of the mother as usually portrayed—that is, as something defined only in relation to a social function or family dynamic—to probe at the psychic workings of maternity itself as a state of mind.
Playwright Katy Warner and director Prue Clark’s Dropped is firmly in that oddly evergreen niche of the bunker play. Bunker plays see a small group of characters holed up in some subterranean concrete limbo while outside an apocalypse that may or may not be real ensures that the only exit remains firmly sealed. It’s a good way of allowing confinement to heighten tensions, bring up secrets, provoke a bit of shouting and so forth.
Dropped doesn’t dwell on the exact circumstances of its two characters, and is closer to Sartre’s Huis Clos in leaving its audiences to make what they will of their imprisonment. The two women are soldiers in some abandoned compound covered in a sheet of snow, which still falls ominously from above at intervals. Their shaky reality is made even more uncertain by the way their exchanges are based on shared fantasies, of an imaginary bottle of vodka, a passing dog and, most crucially, a baby.
One was once a real mother, we’re told, but there’s no reason to believe this any more than the other, patently false stories they swap. And the bundles of white swaddling supposed to represent various make-believe babies are made problematic when one emits a real child’s cry.
Brigid Gallacher, Matilda Reed, Dropped
photo Jessica Hogg
Brigid Gallacher, Matilda Reed, Dropped
There’s a pervasive sense of the passed over or left behind, and the shifting of realities suggests people who have never been afforded the tools to make sense of their own lives. The desire to carve out a solid psychic space is perhaps stymied by the equally powerful desire to share that with a child, but these two goals are contradictory, it is intimated, since the security symbolised by the bunker is the kind that stifles rather than promotes growth of any sort.
The form of Dropped doesn’t entirely do justice to the questions it raises. While its two protagonists are locked in by their own ignorance, the audience’s journey follows the more familiar trajectory of dramatic irony, as we become privy to the situation in which the women find themselves but are unable to move beyond. We’re ultimately heading towards the omniscience of gods, while the subjects before us are unable to achieve any narrative transcendence. To place a viewer in that same helpless state would be a bold and rare move, but it’s one that another local company has achieved with astonishing results.
The Rabble’s last work, Room of Regret, was explicitly concerned with architecture and the body, situating its audience and performers in a labyrinthine built environment. Frankenstein, conversely, returns the action to the ephemeral non-space of earlier works such as Orlando and Story of O, in which the set and all that unfolds within it refer to mental and emotional structures rather than material referents. A character stepping off stage doesn’t move to some other space projected by the illusion of the work, but simply ceases to be until they return. The stage is a claustrophobic box—the self unable to escape its own limits—but is also the entire universe as a result.
Mary Shelley’s telling of Victor Frankenstein’s overreaching hubris is here remodelled in an immediately striking way. Frankenstein (Mary Helen Sassman) is a woman who wants a baby and whose experiments in producing one involve locating a viable egg from among the thousands of black and squishy ovoids covering the floor, inseminating it with a syringe and depositing it in a huge, womblike incubator. After some false starts and with the aid of several lab assistants, the creature is born, and as incarnated by Jane Montgomery Griffiths is an unforgettable thing.
With a torso sprouting dozens of breast-like protuberances, the naked and bawling creature is every infant as monster, blubbering and howling and flailing at the world into which it has been dragged. It is a figure of pure need. Somehow Griffiths manages to invoke in the onlooker the desire to care for this pitiable child, at the same time enacting enough of the monstrous to allow us sympathy for Victor, who recoils from the thing’s relentless and insatiable desire for succour.
Alone, the dynamic that plays out between the two would be enough to propel this outstanding work, but the arrival of Victor’s brother and his predatory maleness complicate things further, as does the lust of one of Frankenstein’s assistants, who may embody the blind man who extends to Shelley’s original monster some kindness, the bride he demands Victor create and the young girl the monster kills in the 1931 film adaptation. It’s always hard to pin such referents down in The Rabble’s work, since all metaphors and similes here point in three directions or more. Indeed, the company has become increasingly adept at filling out these fantastic worlds with polyvalent symbols that cram so much possibility into such tiny containers that it’s rarely clear whether anything is more than the projected meaning of the individual onlooker.
The Rabble’s work is also known for consistently returning to horrific imagery, and Frankenstein is the most disturbing, indeed upsetting, of its creations thus far. There are at least two moments in this production that should challenge even the most jaded of witnesses, and many of the production’s implications will last in the conscious and subconscious mind long after the house lights are up. To venture so far into the darker recesses of the soul—and to do so in the name of motherhood, that supposed sanctuary of light—is something that deserves a response of awe.
Dropped, writer Katy Warner, director Prue Clark, performers Brigid Gallacher, Matilda Reed, lighting Amelia Lever-Davidson, sound Kahra Scott-James, design Lucy Thornett, La Mama Courthouse, 26 March-16 April; The Rabble, Frankenstein, direction, lighting, sound Emma Valente, design Kate Davis, performers Jane Montgomery Griffiths, Emily Milledge, Dana Miltins, David Paterson, Mary Helen Sassman, Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, 21 March-5 April
Nicci Wilks, Derek Ives, Clare Bartholomew, The Long Pigs
photo Ponch Hawkes
Nicci Wilks, Derek Ives, Clare Bartholomew, The Long Pigs
It’s become a contemporary cliché, thanks to the murderous activities of John Wayne Gacy and subsequent media myth creation, that clowns are evil. Of course clowns have always been naughty, deviant even—the role the jester was allocated in the Middle Ages—but have they been given an undeservedly bad rap? Absolutely not if The Long Pigs are an example—these guys are really nasty.
Derek Ives, Clare Bartholomew and Nicci Wilks are the Long Pigs (devised and directed by Susie Dee). They wear minimal clown make-up but have big black noses and are dressed in drab grey clothing including filthy aprons and oversized hairnets in a kind of hybrid factory-cum-medical worker style. Physically they are variously tiny, tall and round but stature is no indication of status. It’s slippery, the question as to who’s the top pig is in constant flux. That said they make an efficient team—antithetical to the usual clown bumbling—and they have a job to do. It seems they are in the canning industry, packaging what I initially thought were tomatoes but then realised were red noses. The show begins with a wonderfully inventive and complicated routine involving pulleys, pedalling and planks of the wood with which to move a single red object from one side of the stage to the other. The routine has the precision and playfulness of a Peter Fischli & David Weiss installation. But there’s a problem, they are one red nose short. There’s the inference that a greater force will be most unhappy about this.
The show moves seamlessly through scenes and routines with lateral connections in pursuit of the missing nose. At one stage Ives is crucified and the other two run around the audience collecting money for “Jesus,” uttered as squeak, about the only word in the show. And they’re pretty pushy about it. The trio then begin to turn on each other until eventually, after Wilks appears somehow transformed with a red nose, their true evil natures are revealed. She is de-nosed, returning with a bleeding bandage wrapped around her face and is forced to eat her own seeping former facial feature.
With no dialogue, the sound score drives the work, Jethro Woodward doing an excellent job not only with all the synced sound effects but in finding a fine balance between ominous and ambiguous. The set design by Anna Tregloan is also integral, with dirty sheets, ladders, buckets and planks forming the basic elements which are reconfigured in surprising ways. And as every show seems to need something to fall from the ceiling these days, the rain of red noses at the conclusion is both amusing and unsettling.
I saw Long Pigs at the end of my four-day FOLA immersion (see page 15). It’s testament to the quality and creativity of the production and the skills of the performers that The Long Pigs could draw me into such a different performance mode. I mean, I haven’t watched clowns in years—because really, they are way too scary.
The Long Pigs, devisor, director Susie Dee, devisors, performers Derek Ives, Clare Bartholomew, Nicci Wilks, sound Jethro Woodward, design Anna Tregloan, lighting Andy Turner, producer Insite Arts; Fortyfive Downstairs; 12-23 March
Ganesh Versus the Third Reich, Back to Back Theatre
photo Zan Wimnberley
Ganesh Versus the Third Reich, Back to Back Theatre
Like a sports fan avoiding the final score so as to enjoy watching the game later, I have tried to avoid reviews of Back to Back Theatre’s Ganesh Versus the Third Reich. But it can’t be done, not completely, and certainly not for three years. The show premiered at the Melbourne Festival in 2011 and has toured to cities in Europe, North America and Asia before finally arriving in Sydney in 2014. Along the way everyone from Alison Croggon to Ben Brantley has reviewed it and so, despite my best efforts, I arrive at Carriageworks full of anticipation. I am not disappointed.
The show, as you probably know, alternates between two realities. The first is that of the rehearsal room, where an ensemble of actors with perceived disabilities are working with a director to create a show about Ganesh, the Hindu God of Overcoming Obstacles, who travels to Germany in order to reclaim the Swastika. This storyline is established in the first scene, with Simon Laherty, Mark Deans and Brian Tilley discussing who will play which character. Brian, who is playing Ganesh, suggests that Simon and Mark might like to play obstacles, but Simon thinks they’d rather play something “more exciting.” They settle for “two Jews on the run from the Nazis.” The audience giggles nervously. The second reality focuses on Ganesh himself and his journey across continents. This storyline is established in the second scene, which is staged in English and Sanskrit. The only actor without disability in the ensemble (Luke Ryan, playing David the director, the role originally devised and performed by David Woods) stands in front of the transparent plastic curtain to narrate and translate the scene, while Simon as Ganesh stands behind it, backlit in silhouette. On its own, each story line would be intriguing but perhaps not gripping; together they are compelling and complex.
The aesthetics of the two story lines are very different. The scenes from the play-within-the-play are explicitly theatrical and very beautiful; we watch as they are assembled and then disassembled. In one scene, chairs are placed on a table, a plastic curtain is pulled across and animated mountains are projected onto the scene. Suddenly the actors appear to be sitting in a train hurtling through the Alps. The music in these scenes is also lush, thick with tingling sitars, rumbling cellos and occasionally a single female voice. In contrast, the aesthetics of the rehearsal room are pared back. There is no music, the curtains are pulled to the side and the lighting becomes flat, almost fluorescent.
Back to Back’s work is often characterised by self-reflexivity, but Ganesh Versus the Third Reich takes this to yet another level by incorporating critical responses to earlier Back to Back shows. The rehearsal scenes stage several conversations, some of which could occur in any company dealing with the politics and ethics of cultural appropriation. Others, however, could only be had by or about Back to Back. One of the main concerns is that the actors do not fully comprehend what they are doing. Another of the players, Scott Price declares that Mark “doesn’t understand what is fiction and what is not,” adding that he has a mind “like a goldfish.” Incredibly, the director puts this proposition directly to Mark, who replies ambiguously, “goldfish, whale, penguin, octopus, seal, whale, shark, Sea World.” The animal theme continues when conversation turns to the spectators. Speaking to an anticipated but now actual audience, the director says, “You people have come here because you want to see an aquarium or a zoo.” Simon interjects with “I am not liking this,” to which David replies, “I’m just showing you how you can create edgy, exciting material when you are not sure what is real and what is not.”
Finally the conversation turns to the director himself. “He’s manipulating all of us,” says Scott; “He’s a good director,” counters Simon. In truth David is both. Early on, he is encouraging and cajoling, telling Brian, “You have put on paper an amazing possibility.” But as rehearsals progress, he becomes increasingly abusive. In one scene, he lies outright and in another he becomes enraged about a simple bit of blocking. This rehearsal room fight segues into the last scene of the hero’s journey, where Ganesh confronts Hitler and kills Dr Mengele. With the roar of Ganesh still ringing in our ears, we return to the rehearsal room one last time, where David commits one last act of abuse. Telling Mark they are going to play hide and seek, David lets Mark hide under a desk while he packs his things and leaves. Watching Mark waiting to be found by a director who has left the building makes me feel about as desolate as I have ever felt.
In the same way that revealing the mechanics of theatre enhances rather than diminishes its magic, having a performance incorporate our concerns about it seems to amplify rather than lessen them.
Like the suspect who confesses that he was lying earlier but is now telling the truth, Back to Back confronts its audience with a decision. Does this meta-theatrical confession make the show all the more honest or more dangerous? No matter how many reviews you have read, Ganesh Versus the Third Reich will test you, in every sense of the word.
Back to Back Theatre, Ganesh Versus the Third Reich, director Bruce Gladwin, devisors Mark Deans, Marcia Ferguson, Bruce Gladwin, Nicki Holland, Simon Laherty, Sarah Mainwaring, Scott Price, Kate Sulan, Brian Tilley, David Woods, Luke Ryan, lighting Andrew Livingston, bluebottle, design, animation Rhian Hinkley, composer Johann Johannsson, costumes Shio Otani, CarriageWorks, Sydney 12-15 March
‘We’re People Who Do Shows,’ Back to Back Theatre, Performance, Politics, Visibility, edited by Helena Grehan and Peter Eckersall (Performance Research Books, 2013) will be reviewed in RealTime 121, June-July.
Genevieve Trace, Aurelian, produced by Metro Arts & Brisbane Festival
photo Sean Young
Genevieve Trace, Aurelian, produced by Metro Arts & Brisbane Festival
Brisbane has a secret, one that has been recently discovered by a swathe of performance-makers from interstate: our grand old lady Metro Arts.
She is five storeys high, with an imposing stone facade, a dilapidated lift straight out of a Raymond Chandler novel and four intimate performance spaces ranging from the black box Sue Benner Theatre to the sunlit arches of the top floor studio. If you follow her flank down the side laneway you can see the drunken graffiti of innumerable closing nights, the perilous back entrance, the trapdoor green room and the gothic fire escapes that scale up each floor, jammed with artists’ studios and small arts organisations. You can feel her walls breathe, sense the sweat of practitioners who have been writing, fighting, making, rehearsing and performing here since 1980.
What makes Metro unique? Why the space still feels like a secret garden or a true artists’ space is ultimately economic: Metro Arts owns its building, lock, stock and barrel. Perhaps only the recently converted Abbotsford Convent in Melbourne has such a proud history of community advocacy realised by buying a space for artists.
That they have been able to maintain this beautiful heritage building as a haven for artistic experimentation is a testament to a chain of formidable custodians: Robert Hughes, Joseph O’Connor and Sue Benner. Current CEO Liz Burcham is no exception. As sadly missed former RealTime reviewer and theatre elder Doug Leonard said in RT 103 online, Burcham’s tenure has “cemented…and transformed Metro Arts (Independents) into a vital and cohesive part of the city’s performance scene.” Indeed, it was a bold and risky vision that Sue Benner initiated with the Independents program in 2002: giving a platform to hungry local theatremakers and playwrights who felt themselves systemically locked out of a mainstream Australian theatre then dominated by the middle-class minutiae of David Williamson’s naturalism.
Under Burcham’s strategic and canny direction, Metro has grown into a producing hub, a host venue for the Brisbane Festival and, probably its most significant but amorphous shift, moving from a place at the fringes of professional theatre culture to become the true incubator, the gestation space for the city’s performance-makers. Their closest cousin is probably Arts House in Melbourne, and it is not without significance that this is one of Metro’s key partners in 2014, the first program since it announced the close of the Independents in 2013.
I stopped by to talk with CEO Liz Burcham and Programming Manager Kieran Swann about their 2014 program and their sense of where the “lean and nimble” Metro saw itself “filling the gaps” in the rapidly changing theatre ecology here in Brisbane and across the country.
Metro has a heady manifesto. Burcham suggests three major goals: placing artists in creative control, providing them with an open platform to experiment, particularly with process and developing their practice, while simultaneously supporting them to develop strategies to make themselves sustainable. This means that Metro provides both dramaturgical or artistic support, but also a lot of practical services: creative development and rehearsal space, office space, access to a fully functional venue with an audience, an ongoing program and a production hub, which can provide support for artists to on-sell, tour or re-package their work. Burcham calls this “getting artists to the market,” or at the very least making sure that they don’t miss the market. Metro looks to “invest” in artists and to build deep and ongoing relationships. Indeed, Kieran Swann—live artist, designer and performance-maker—is an alumnus of Metro’s programs.
For both Burcham and Swann, the pivotal change for Metro in the last years has been a result of the success of the independent agenda. In the fluid and aspirational Australian performance sector most working artists now have an independent practice. Burcham’s driving question was whether the word ‘independent’ was still “serving artists” and whether a more “flexible” and “responsive” platform was needed. While many in the local scene mourn the end of the Independents program as a visible marker or entry point for new work, Burcham is right to acknowledge that Metro’s monopoly has been supplanted by other pathways into professional production, like the Indie seasons hosted by mainstage companies and for younger artists by the burgeoning festival platforms like Next Wave, FOLA, Anywhere Theatre Festival and This Is Not Art.
Metro has shifted to compete in this new context by focusing on co-presenting with the Arts House inaugural Festival of Live Art (Julie Vulcan’s Drift), Next Wave (The Dokboki Box, Altertruism Demos, Lesser Gods and Blak’tism) and Queensland Theatre Company (Benjamin Schostakowski’s A Tribute of Sorts). There’s also a producing partnership for a HotHouse season of The Escapists’ Packed (see p29). The creative development program includes works ranging from Melbourne’s MKA to Tasmanian artist Cynthia Foster and local physical theatremakers Caroline Dunphy, Kate Lee and Jo Thomas.
What is arresting about the list of artists supported by Metro programs in 2014 is how many of them are based interstate. Burcham says that they have been delighted with the national interest from artists who value the organic and artist-centric space and the focus on process-based risk.
Indeed, this artistic rhetoric reflects a curatorial shift towards contemporary performance, live art and the curious spaces that lie between theatre and the visual arts. For me, there is a genuine excitement about this prospect as for many years the visual arts program and the theatre program at Metro were like divorced parents in an uneasy custody agreement. The visual artists would huddle in their fourth floor studios away from the noisy parakeets, the theatremakers who dominated the bottom floors and their public performance spaces. The challenge for Metro, I think, is to steer the new path while holding onto the deeply felt traditions of theatremaking and playwright development that have made such a contribution to the city’s cultural life.
Annette Tesoriero & Cathie Travers, Month in the Country creative development residency Olive & Concettina, 2013 with Nigel Kellaway
photo Heidrun Löhr
Annette Tesoriero & Cathie Travers, Month in the Country creative development residency Olive & Concettina, 2013 with Nigel Kellaway
Our ongoing focus on arts centres and organisations in Western Sydney and regional NSW—in the Eastern Riverina and Northern Rivers—has revealed not only a wealth of innovative activity but also intensive nurturing of creativity. Adjoining Eastern Riverina is the Albury-Wodonga region where HotHouse Theatre has generated a considerable volume of significant performance, locally and beyond, by providing training, time and space for artists to escape the pressures of the everyday in order to pursue their visions, as well as generating its own theatre program and various initiatives.
Albury sits across the River Murray from Victoria’s Wodonga. The two cities work together in many ways. HotHouse Theatre is funded by both state governments, the city councils and the Australia Council; HotHouse Theatre resides in and manages the Butter Factory Theatre on behalf of the City of Wodonga, and Albury City provides a farmhouse for the company’s residency programs.
Jon Halpin
CEO and Artistic Director Jon Halpin has been with HotHouse since late 2010. He tells me, in our phone conversation, that having left maths, physics and chemistry behind at university for cognitive psychology, student theatre revealed to him an arena in which “human behaviour could be seen in a much more interesting way.” He acted, did a little bit of directing, which Michael Gow, then recently appointed as Artistic Director of the Queensland Theatre Company, saw and invited Halpin to become an Intern Director and then Associate Director, while he was also an Associate Artist with Metro Arts. He directed some 19 plays over 10 years, including Messiah for HotHouse in 2006 and Australia: The Show in 2009, got to know the town and the company, and moved to Albury-Wodonga to run the company in 2010, realising his own program and initiatives, he says, from 2012 on.
Halpin directs, runs workshops and drama classes “and is a sometimes props-buyer.” He declares he’s principally out to “reinvigorate the community’s perception of HotHouse as not just a theatre” but a company with an identity comprising strong local programs and national impact. He thinks point of difference is important now that within five kilometres there are three performing arts venues: The Cube and HotHouse in Wodonga and the Albury Entertainment Centre. The company’s dedication to young theatremakers, including Aboriginal youth, to its own ensemble and to its residency and commissioning programs certainly make it distinctive.
The Studio Ensemble and Black Border Theatre
The Studio Ensemble offers young people under 26 the opportunity to work for a year on making a show from an initial idea to scripting to full production with roles as performers and as assistant directors, designers and dramaturgs. This process alerts students to a world of theatre quite different, says Halpin, from high school musicals and eisteddfods. Last year’s Studio production, Pyjama Girl, written by former young local, Emma Gibson, and developed with the Studio Ensemble, was a great success.
Black Border Theatre is aimed at young Aboriginal performers, whose 20-minute work Black Border Bits, their first, was staged in 2013. This year Halpin hopes the group will expand from nine to 12 or 15 and, growing in confidence, deliver a 40-minute piece on a shared program, and then work towards a stand-alone production by 2016.
A Month in the Country
HotHouse’s Month in the Country residency program was initiated in 2004, assisting some 500 artists to date and yielding 45 produced works. The site is a five-bedroom AlburyCity-owned farmhouse plus rehearsal space at Splitters Creek, 10 minutes outside Albury. It is expected that “successful recipients will enrich the local community by delivering theatre workshops, and presenting their talents to professional and school groups, giving back to the Albury/Wodonga community.” Artists and groups have included Branch Nebula, Annette Tesoriero/Nigel Kellaway/Cathie Travers, 3s A crowd (Flight or Fright), Susie Dee/Nicci Wilkes/Kate Sherman, The Escapists, version 1.0, 7 On Playwrights (Vanessa Bates, Hilary Bell, Ned Manning, Catherine Zimdahl, Noelle Janaczewska, Verity Laughton), Michelle Anderson (Welcome to Slaughter), Ali Sebastien Wolf and David Williams.
In 2014 the six supported artists and companies are Melbourne’s Maybe Together developing a children’s installation work, Small Voices Louder (the company, led by Alex Desebrock, premiered The Future Postal Service at Federation Square, 7-11 April); theatremaker Brienna Macnish mentored by Roslyn Oades for a site specific audio theatre work about ageing and place titled HOME, which will appear in Next Wave 2014; physical theatre artist David Sleswick and Motherboard Productions developing Daughter Overboard; MKA: Theatre of New Writing working on plays by Marcel Dorney, Morgan Ross and Tobias Manderson Galvin; Team MESS evolving Opening Night; and director Alicia Talbot and writer Raimondo Cortese creating a work with the assistance of the HotHouse Studio Ensemble.
Production in Residence
HotHouse’s theatre program includes works that emerge from the company’s Production in Residence program which provides independent groups $10,000 for creative development plus $15,000 for a season of the finished works. As well, each group has the opportunity to lodge in the farmhouse, use of a rehearsal room, a technician from HotHouse’s production staff and a week-long bump-in to guarantee the work’s premiere is in the best condition. A proviso is that the production must have a subsequent capital city season. Halpin is emphatic this is not an out-of-town try-out, it’s the premiere. He thinks the initiative a unique offer for artists given that schemes elsewhere often rely on unreliable box-office splits.
The first Production in Residence, in 2013, was Dame Farrar and her Stupendous Acts for the Stage, featuring Carita Farrer Spencer with Australian jazz musician and composer John Rodgers in a cross-dressing role and Cirque du Soleil contortionist Liu Jie. In 2014 Melbourne’s Elbow Room will premiere The Motion of Light in Water and there will be three productions-in-residence in 2015 including David Williams’ Quiet Faith [see RealTime Profiler#1, Feb 5], one each from NSW and Victoria and another which, says Halpin, might be from anywhere in Australia.
HotHouse Theatre program
HotHouse also has its own theatre program, with a commitment to Australian work and responsive subscriptions improving 270% over the last three years and audience averaging 78% capacity in 2013. The program included Jack Charles vs The Crown, I’m Your Man, version 1.0’s Table of Knowledge, Van Badham’s The Bull, the Moon and the Coronet of Stars and Dame Farrar and her Stupendous Acts for the Stage as well as Pyjama Girl, optional for subscribers, from The Studio. In 2014 the program includes Packed, a co-production with the Escapists and Metro Arts, following on the success of the Escapists at HotHouse in 2011 with boy girl wall, which ran for a rare two-week season.
Also in 2013 is Warning: Small Parts, about the thrills of collecting and exploring, a HotHouse production for primary school-aged audiences, new territory for the company, says Halpin, but promising after the sell-out success of recent holiday workshops for children. The work will employ two young local performers in their first professional roles. After the success of Pyjama Girl, the HotHouse Studio Ensemble will present Letters from the Border, directed by Associate Director Travis Dowling. This work draws entirely on letters to the editor published in the Border Mail and the Albury Banner in Wodonga and Albury over the last 100 years and has been aided by historical societies, libraries and local historians. Halpin says that the ensemble will be sifting letters for times when the community was inspired, outraged, divided or came together—as when Albury-born Independent Catherine McGowan became an MP in the last federal election, defeating Liberal incumbent Sophie Mirabella. Other plays in the program are Food, from Steve Rogers, Force Majeure and Belvoir and shake & stir theatre company’s production of 1984.
Albury Regional Art Gallery
Jon Halpin hopes that the opening in 2015 of AlburyCity’s new Albury Regional Art Gallery (a $10.5m redevelopment) will lead to even more opportunities for artists in the region and in the A Month in the Country program, doubtless in the areas of live art and performative and media art installations. The gallery will feature 10 spaces for visual art and new media and a large foyer gallery with surround sound and multimedia projection facilities, moveable staging and seating for 60.
Regional arts are enjoying a period of significant growth in which new infrastructure is vital—not just buildings, although homes for art are a necessity and need to grow with the population and new generations of artists—but also the kinds of nurturing programs HotHouse Theatre offers, positioning it as a vital hub for regional, state and national creativity in theatre, contemporary performance and live art.
RealTime issue #120 April-May 2014 pg. 30
François Houle, Richard Johnson
photo Susan Clarke
François Houle, Richard Johnson
Despite a recent change in ownership it is good to see that Smith’s Alternative Bookshop in Canberra City continues to present live music events of the kind that distinguishes this venue from others in Canberra.
As a flow-on from the annual SoundOut festival of improvised music, this one-off performance brought together a small cross-section of open-minded music fans into the intimate confines of Smith’s to hear Canadian improviser François Houle perform a set with clarinet, electronics and piano followed by a collaborative performance with Canberra wind trio Psithurium.
Focusing on a series of shorter pieces that cohered around an atmospheric central theme, Houle began by coaxing from the clarinet a sequence of sharply defined minimal clusters with an intended progression somewhat like saxophonist John Butcher’s pastel sparseness that was all the rage for a time.
Houle is a leading light in contemporary improvised music having performed with such luminaries as pianist Marilyn Crispell and saxophonist Evan Parker. His enthusiasm throughout this performance flowed through to his use of loops, also involving a piano’s innards, providing an harmonic expansiveness somewhat like Evan Parker’s famous circular breathing technique. At points, Houle offered evocative autobiographical detail for the audience to better understand the mood and shape of each piece. One that stood out was a mournful and celebratory tribute to free music clarinettist John Carter. Throughout this spontaneously conceived homage, Houle’s clarinet was devotional yet not excessively so, a cool restraint ensuring the impact of the music was heightened by a settled and respectful delivery.
In his second set Houle was joined by Psithurium featuring SoundOut festival director Richard Johnson on soprano sax and customised gourd. This fully improvised piece had each of the performers brightly colouring a spontaneous theme that ebbed and flowed. No one participant took charge which created ample space for free exploration with discipline and restraint.
The combination of saxophones, gourd and clarinet rolled out the music in a gentle, unhurried manner, with resonating sounds within the bookshop providing a striking acoustic counterpoint to the traffic whizzing by outside.
François Houle and the Psithurium Wind Trio, Smith’s Alternative Bookshop, SoundOut 2014, Canberra City, 7 Feb
The urbane program of the 2nd Brisbane Jazz Festival in early June features Finland’s Jukka Perko-Avara Trio, pianists Barney McAll and Mike Nock, the Julien Wilson Quartet and piano trio Trichotomy among others, not least UK saxophonist Julian Arguelles. An enthusiastic Guardian reviewer wrote in 2006 of “the evolution of the saxophonist and composer Julian Arguelles into the British Joe Lovano (with plenty of Celtic and European free-improv variations of his own).”
Arguelles, who plays tenor and soprano saxophones, clarinets and flutes and whose playing ranges from the elegantly mellifluous to be-bop urgency to improv unpredictability, is a prominent figure in the European jazz scene, especially in the contemporary big band field, performing with the highly regarded Frankfurt Radio Big Band. As soloist he has appeared with Tim Berne, Steve Swallow, John Abercrombie, Dave Holland, Dave Liebman, Jim Black, Peter Erskine, Django Bates, John Taylor, Kenny Wheeler and Carla Bley. His 2006 album Partita illustrates the finesse and sheer adventurousness of his playing on 15 mostly very short, very effectively varied tracks (the shortest being 1”09’).
Arguelles has been commissioned to create works for bands, groups and events as diverse as NDR Big Band (Hamburg), HR Big Band (Frankfurt), The Apollo Saxophone Quartet, Bath International Festival, the Fontanella Recorder Consort and the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra. The 2009 album Momenta is an exemplary account of Arguelle’s compositional and arrangement skills for big band.
The 2014 festival is also a great opportunity to premiere new works by Australian composers Sean Foran, Rafael Karlen, Louise Denson and Andrew Butt. Foran, a pianist and leader of Trichotomy (formerly Misinterprotato), has studied and played internationally.
The festival’s Artistic Director Lynette Irwin says, “Julian Arguelles is one of Europe’s most inventive saxophonists. Pairing him with the emotive and textural sounds of the piano trio Trichotomy will generate some exciting music. Additionally, Jazz Queensland has commissioned Sean Foran to create a new work for this unique collaboration.”
Recently added to the program is another saxophone great, American Joshua Redman with his quartet. RT
In Douglas Kahn’s Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts, the premise is holistic. Signals are everywhere, running through us, the earth, the sky, bouncing off the ionosphere, and the best way to tune into them is by listening. By the time you’ve finished reading this book you feel like you’ve tapped into a magnificent universal circuit. It’s almost religious.
The book has a roughly historical trajectory starting with Thomas Watson, Alexander Graham Bell’s ‘sidekick’ who would listen to the “natural radio” that the new telephone technology channelled. Then there’s a dash back to catch up on Henry David Thoreau’s fixation with all things Aeolian—the wind singing through nature and man-made structures. Over several chapters Kahn tunes in to Alvin Lucier and his associates exploring brain waves and the curious whistlers bouncing the sound of storms around the globe. He then heads underground with Gordon Mumma to listen to earthquakes and reaches for the stars with Pauline Oliveros. He ends in the here and now with Joyce Hinterding’s antennae channelling the universal hum of electromagnetic presence. And there’s a whole lot more in between.
Kahn’s style approaches an extended personal essay with the meanderings and side trips just as interesting as the main arguments. While ideas are grouped into chapters, concepts ‘leak’ like the extraneous sounds on telegraph wires to create loops and circuits through the text. A particular thread that creeps in subtly, growing in intensity, deals with relations between signals, the technologies created to channel them and the greater military complex. Kahn refers to this as the geophysical becoming geopolitical. The chapters “Sound of the Underground” and “Black Sun, Black Rain” exploring atomic energies are particularly insightful.
As Kahn suggests in his introduction, the subject matter of the book dictates a high level of interdisciplinarity, presenting not only a history of sonic, musical and visual arts but also delving into the histories of technology and science. An unspoken interdisciplinary aspect of Kahn’s book is that while he is writing about sound he is also often writing about writings on sound. The book is rich with description and quoted texts illustrating what Kahn describes as the “uncanny poetics of popular imagination.” One example quoted is from an 1878 New York Times article, “Phones of the Future”: “We are assured that we will be able not only to listen to the tramp of the tiniest insects, but to hear the growing of the grass and the ripple of the sap ascending beneath the bark of trees.”
In the opening chapters there are several lists of sound descriptors for earth signals and electromagnetic energies that were being heard in early devices: “a hissing or swishing as of someone shaking a wisp of straw;” the “‘crackle’ or the burning of a hemlock broom.” It’s a veritable go-to guide for the adjectivally challenged sound commentator. Of course Kahn himself is no slouch when it comes to the poetic, even when dealing with the most technical of subjects, connecting concepts with grand gestures that set things resonating against each other, like this: “A technological timeline of musical cosmoses could be strung from the antiquity of the monochord to lines of telecommunications.” There is literally never a dull moment.
The book offers vast amounts of fascinating information ranging from background stories around the creation of artworks to mythic descriptions of natural phenomena, such as auroras and static storms at high altitude, which are utterly enthralling. However the dominant achievement is that Kahn manages to rough-up the binary of nature and technology. As he extrapolates on his theory of the Aelectrosonic—the sounds of the electromagnetic world—he repositions nature at the centre of electronic music and indeed of media arts. It all starts with the signals that have been waiting for us to invent ways to hear them.
Earth Sound, Earth Signal feels like a journey to the centre of the earth and to the outer reaches of the stars. It reads equally as science fiction, scientific journal, a history of electronic sounds and a tale of the occult. In the chapter on Pauline Oliveros Kahn mentions the use of New Age Theosophic texts as “a way to trigger our imaginations, rather than as a ‘scientific fact,’” and while his book does not skimp on the latter it’s the invitation to imagine that captivated me. Most of all, the book offers a comprehensive and mind-altering understanding of the connectedness between ourselves, the Earth and all of these shimmering energetic properties. Douglas Kahn invites us to tune in to this awesome totality.
Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts, Douglas Kahn, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2013
In the early 90s I was composing several experimental operas with Douglas Horton and Chamber Made Opera. As I knew Robert Ashley’s work, Douglas showed me the score of Ashley’s Improvement: Don Leaves Linda, to see how a version might be created for a Chamber Made Opera production. A recording of the opera fits onto two CDs—some 90 minutes of music, however the ‘score’ was just a single page of text with lists of numbers. That was it.
Ashley was using processes other than score writing to make the work. This was revealing and reassuring for me, as I didn’t use traditional scores either.
Composers are often invisible architects who draw up plans (scores) and then step away to let others realise the work. Ashley, however, sat visibly and audibly at the very heart of his work. His own distinctive vocal cadences often provided the basis from which his work grew, with the music extending out from, or surrounding his vocal utterances.
Ashley’s operas and his early work, like Automatic Writing, are based around extended performances of language. Language is a technology that we use to inhabit all things that surround us, attempting to make some sense of the world. Ashley’s voices acknowledge this, as they provide an interface between flesh and technology in a way that is more interesting than Apple’s Siri or Samantha (the female voice of the operating system in the Spike Jonze film Her, see Philip Brophy, page 28) could ever hope to be. Where Siri and Samantha give a life force to technology, Ashley’s voices do the reverse as they flow into technology from life. Ashley’s matter-of-fact vocal deliveries are transformed into unworldly presences inhabiting spatial realms defined by resonance, echo and timbre. As a form of orchestration, these effects imbue the voices with a range of authoritative positions. Phantom doublings lend unnerving aspects to the allegorical utterances of his characters. His voices possess ambiguous orchestrated presences, which slowly become more personal and familiar, while paradoxically maintaining their acousmatic distance and mysteriousness.
While traditional opera tends to position the audience outside the world of the performers, Ashley draws you inside his work as an eavesdropping participant. You become intimately connected to the close-miked voices of the performers, each with their own unique grain of voice, which allow you to enter the inner imaginary of their self-obsession.
I have only ever listened to Ashley’s 2000 opera Dust twice, although I own the CD. It is one of my favourite works. To play it more would be like reliving a traumatic or emotionally charged part of your life once too often.
For traditionalists who have struggled with Ashley, I suggest that you listen to Ashley’s operas with Wagner’s Ring Cycle in mind. Ashley and Wagner share an amazing ability to weave musical detail around voice to such a degree that the music serves as a kind of textural and textual analogue of the libretto, adding depth while repositioning possible meanings. For both, the music is daemon-like, as it inhabits, doubles, twists, distorts and converses with a character’s vocal text. These labyrinthine flows serve to orchestrate context. They contribute to a soundscape that moves the voice beyond the everyday while complicating the intent of language, which is much more interesting than a music that merely steers and confirms it.
Ashley and partner and producer Mimi Johnson came to Melbourne in 1992 to help with rehearsing Improvement for Chamber Made Opera’s production for the 1992 Melbourne Festival. The performance consisted of a brilliant cast of local performers singing live to the accompaniment of the CD, with the prerecorded voices fed to each singer’s headphones. This should not have worked, but it did. Improvement was a great production and is still remembered favorably by many who had not encountered this kind of performance before. We should have seen more of this kind of work. Why didn’t we?
When Ashley was invited to talk to music students at the Victorian College of the Arts, he stood in uncomfortable silence for several long minutes. I have seen theatremaker Robert Wilson stand in silence deliberately at the start of his lectures to expose the performer-audience relationship, however in Ashley’s case, as a composer, he was struggling to find something meaningful to say to music students. Finally, he said something like, “I just don’t know what to tell you. I mean, what else can anybody write for a cello, or an orchestra? This is not where composition is now situated.” As a modern master within this confirming institutional context he implored his audience to look beyond the scope of musical museums.
A few years later I caught up with Ashley in Miami where his long-serving vocal ensemble was collaborating with the Florida Grand Opera on his new work Balseros. Ashley invited me into rehearsals where I witnessed conservative operatic processes rubbing up against the modern experimental. Both approaches were based on musicalising conversation and verbalising inner thought. Ashley was attempting to replace the powerful projected operatic aria and recitative with his introspective, characterful voice streams. The resigned condescension of the classically trained chorus and the lack of faith and comprehension from the creative hierarchy was palpable. The work was ultimately a very moving success, although it was a vivid demonstration of just how tough it can sometimes be to get your own ideas through bureaucratic and creative filters to production, especially on expensive productions.
In his own measured, deliberate way he told me, as a then younger composer, not to compromise on what you want to do. Don’t allow your work be taken over by directors and external interests. Never give in to those who try to alter what you do. Have the strength to stick with your own ideas.
There are many of Robert Ashley’s works on YouTube including Perfect Lives, a superb example of the composer’s wit and wisdom.
Gerrit Fokkema, Woman hosing, Canberra, 1979, in Australian Vernacular Photography, courtesy Art Gallery of NSW
The term “vernacular” is a very slippery one. Australian Vernacular Photography: The Allure of the Everyday is a compact exhibition co-curated by AGNSW Senior Curator, Photographs Judy Annear and Assistant Curator, Photographs Eleanor Weber. The exhibition is distinguished in particular in the way it repositions the “vernacular,” redefining its relationship to “straight photography” (the common, and problematic, term for documentary photography). Three exhibitions that referenced the vernacular serendipitously overlapped in Sydney galleries in early 2014.
Australian Vernacular Photography looks at the work of 16 well known Australian practitioners from the postwar period to the present day. It looks at the overseas influences and exhibitions which impacted on Australian photographic practice and the development of a greater awareness of national and personal identity. One key event was the tour in 1959 of The Family of Man exhibition produced by Edward Steichen at MoMA in New York. This exhibition encouraged Australian photographers to look outwards at what their international peers were doing. As a young photographer I can remember poring over the images in the book that accompanied it.
The “vernacular” is commonly interpreted as photography of everyday life, frequently produced by amateur photographers and often described as snapshots. When researching the genre it surprised me that one of the photographers strongly associated with the vernacular was Walker Evans, a famous American photographic artist who was by no means an amateur. Australian Vernacular Photography strengthens the perception of a broader interpretation of the term with the choice of photographers it features, who were selected from the Art Gallery’s collection.
The show embraces documentary photography, the predominant photographic mode in the 60s and 70s, stating, “Photographing the everyday became a way of understanding how Australia saw (and sees) itself with recurrent themes such as beach culture, suburbia, race relations, protest and the role of women among the central concerns.”
As a photographer working out of this tradition at the time I would not have called my photography “vernacular.” However, one of the strengths of this exhibition is that it offers us a new way of interpreting history. To collapse the snapshot aesthetic with the broad intentions of documentary photography performs a radical shift in perception benefiting both forms. It allows us to re-evaluate the rigid conventions of fine art photography, which needed to be in place to get photography seen as an artform in the first place. However, “The times they are a changing.”
A leading figure in the field of photographic studies, Geoffrey Batchen, has argued in his books (Each Wild Idea, 2000 and Forget Me Not, 2004) for the substantial inclusion of vernacular photography in a general history of photography. He writes, “This history, dominated by the values and tropes of art history, was not well equipped to talk about photographs that were overtly commercial, hybrid and banal. I suggest that any substantial inclusion of vernacular photographs into a general history of photography will require a total transformation of the character of that history.” “Snapshots are complicated objects. They are both unique to each maker and almost always entirely generic. That doesn’t make them any less compelling as pictures, especially for those who treasure them.” (Quotations from an interview with Geoffrey Batchen by LG in LesPHOTOGRAPHES.com.)
Patrick Pound installation, People who look dead but (probably) aren’t, Stills Gallery, Sydney
Now that collectors are taking a serious interest in discarded snapshots, artists have also embraced the found and generic snapshot to use as source material for their postmodern art practice. Patrick Pound, whose show at Stills, People who look dead but (probably) aren’t, obsessively collects old photographs and assembles them in clusters based on their generic similarities. In Pound’s wall installations relationships are formed between images gathered from multiple sources creating an intriguing and humorous collective visual narrative.
Pound became a collector himself, scouring the internet and antique shops for source material. The found images are strangely endearing in their sense of abandonment and separation from their author. Bronwyn Rennex, Stills Gallery Curator of this exhibition, writes, “By highlighting the ‘probablys’ and ‘possiblys’ in our relationship with these images, Pound reminds us that meanings are fragile, and interpretations slippery.” Sounds like real life to me!
From Beijing Silvermine, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (2014), Sydney, photo courtesy Thomas Sauvin
Sydney’s 4A Centre for Contemporary Art staged a remarkable installation, Beijing Silvermine, by Thomas Sauvin, a Beijing-based French photography collector, editor and curator. It comprised more than half a million photographic negatives amassed, edited, archived and printed by Sauvin. These negatives were destined for destruction in a recycling plant. Xiao Ma, the owner of the plant stockpiles negatives, X-rays and compact discs to melt down their silver nitrate content for sale.
Sauvin offered to buy these negatives by the kilo in a vain and poignant attempt to symbolically rescue “abandoned memories.” The lifespan of photographic negative film from 1985 was approximately 20 years. This was the era when 35mm film came onto the market and was widespread in China as it was throughout the world. In 2005 the advent of digital photography brought its use to a relatively dramatic and sudden end.
The poignancy of this exhibition is not only its metaphor for the death of analogue photography but also the memorial it sets up to the millions of anonymous subjects of these photographs. These are the snapshots we universally recognise, covering themes of family, relationship, love, leisure, birth and, by implication, death. I was deeply touched by images of fresh-faced young couples embracing, young women posing for their partners, suited male workmates relaxing after work, families in kitchens and living rooms.
The complex installation represented the enormous depth of the archive. All the images and negatives are in colour (black and white photography had already ‘passed away’). Selected images have been enlarged to cover whole walls. Others are hung salon style, also covering walls. Light boxes are covered with strips of negatives left higgledy piggledy, as if photographers had suddenly departed. In one corner thousands of crumpled, postcard-sized prints are piled up suggesting neglect and rejection. Placed within the pile are three monitors rapidly flashing images from the archive. The pace of image presentation is so fast as to render the images ephemeral.
In another room a multi-image screen projection (created by collaborator Lei Lei, a Chinese multimedia animation artist) similarly flashes multiple images from the archive with an overlay of decaying and disintegrating film stock. The pace of the image editing varies, occasionally resting briefly on particular images.
This work had a profound effect on me leaving a residual feeling of loss and an awareness of irreversible historical change both technological and personal. This sense of loss is compounded by the thousands of stories told of individual lives, families, personal relationships and events.
Somehow this powerful metaphor for the brevity of life sums up the significance of photography in general and positions the vernacular photograph right at the heart of it.
Art Gallery of NSW, Australian Vernacular Photography: The Allure of the Everyday, Jeff Carter, Ed Douglas, Peter Elliston, Gerrit Fokkema, Sue Ford, Fiona Hall, Robert McFarlane, Hal Missingham, David Moore, Trent Parke, Roger Scott, Glenn Sloggett, Ingeborg Tyssen, John F Williams, William Yang, Anne Zahalka, 8 Feb-18 May; STILLS, Patrick Pound, People who look dead but (probably) aren’t, 19 Feb to 22 March; 4A Centre for Contemporary Art , Beijing Silvermine, Sydney, 11 Jan-22 Feb
Jess, Oskar, Kai and Mia 2011, Marzena Wasikowska, Lens Love, photo courtesy Canberra Museum & Gallery
Lens Love: the tender gaze of six Canberra region photographers, featured six photographers who are unified by geographic context. Living and working within the Canberra region, they share an affiliation with this landscape. The way each artist’s personal relationship to the same place manifests in their aesthetic and thematic predilections is wildly divergent. Yet the simple fact that they share common topographic roots is crucial to an appreciation of the associative threads that bind their work.
Irrespective of whether or not they enlist their immediate geographic context as a thematic proposition, the six are all concerned with the mutability of place and the prospect of displacement. In the work of Martyn Jolly, Marzena Wasikowska, Lee Grant, Denise Ferris, Cathy Laudenbach and John Reid we witness careful studies of the way space is inhabited and settled (or unsettled). These artists do not simply document the fleeting ‘I was here’ of the casual snapshot but chart more complex networks of belonging.
The first work to greet viewers as they enter the gallery is Denise Ferris’ The Long Hot Summer. The sundrenched tones of the dry brush in the foreground of this sweeping landscape photograph are intercut by the lumbering presence of four white vehicles in the distance. Vans and motor homes, the vehicles are peripatetic placeholders. These detached and transportable domestic spaces can claim any unknown and foreign territory as a potential backyard. A caravan or motor home situates its inhabitant within an expansive and open-ended landscape, offering them the opportunity to domesticate any site they so desire (at least in theory).
In The colour of snow, a grid of nine photographs, Ferris recalibrates the subject’s relationship to place. Blizzards and blankets of snow overwhelm the winter landscapes depicted in these images. The figures that populate this alpine world are threatened with invisibility. As the cloak of snow thickens, they are gradually erased. The figures are absorbed into the landscape and belong to its abyss.
Three bodies of work by Lee Grant approach this motif of habitation and belonging in a didactic manner. Grant anatomises cultural signposts and explores the way cultural identity is constructed and disseminated. In The Korea Project, portraits of Koreans living in Australia are interspersed with photographs of urban environments in Korea that are devoid of people. This enquiry into cultural transplantation (and translation) is inflected with personal context. Treating the series as a way to explore her own Korean heritage, Grant indirectly inserts herself into these scenes.
Marzena Wasikowska’s series, I left Poland when I was 11 years old and 36 years later I returned for the third time, similarly interrogates cultural displacement and maps the return to a site of diasporic departure. In these sets of clustered photographs (two gridded arrangements featuring nine images each) Wasikowska assembles discrete snapshots taken on a journey back to her childhood homeland. Like film stills from a road movie, these are pictorial vignettes from a story narrated by an outsider. Yet there is still an intimacy here. The images of domestic settings, the affectionate family portraits and the semi-abstract close-ups of water droplets on a window or leaves on a snow-covered ground do not speak to detachment or withdrawal. Wasikowska has stitched herself into this cultural landscape. Her view is not that of the panorama but the closely cropped frame of familiarity.
In Wasikowska’s suite of images, light becomes an animative agent. It does not merely designate a temporal framework (insofar as one set of photographs appears to have been taken during the day while the other is enveloped by the cover of darkness) but also defines space. The nocturnal scenes are lit by dim light sources: small domestic lamps, the blue-tinted glow of a computer screen and weak streetlamps. These minimal light sources shrink and condense the spatial field of each image, heightening the sense of intimacy Wasikowska cultivates in her candid yet poetic photographs.
Cathy Laudenbach also recruits light as an animative force in her series The Familiars. The empty rooms that appear in these photographs are rumored to be haunted or plagued by supernatural spirits. Forgotten narratives and ghostly apparitions fester amid slightly dishevelled furnishings. The light that penetrates deserted interiors, streaming in through the windows or reflecting off the patina on the floorboards, becomes a surrogate for the departed occupants. It assumes a phantom-like human presence.
While also composed of light, the spectral forms that populate Martyn Jolly’s series Faces of the Living Dead possess a more explicit, or assertive, legibility. The images in this series are scanned and cropped re-presentations of spirit photographs from the Cambridge University Library archive. Disembodied ghost-like forms are suspended in mid-air and faces of then-deceased figures are superimposed onto portraits of their mourning relatives. The ghosts in these photographs are fabrications. This is divination by way of chemical blotches, multiple exposures and bursts of light. In some of the images, the spectres take on recognisable human form while in others their physique is reduced to an abstract flicker of light against a dark, indeterminate background. All of these (fictitious) phantoms float and hover. Having left the world of the physical and the embodied, they are ungrounded. They occupy a non-place.
Conversely, the ghostly spirit that John Reid memorialises in the body of work he dedicates to a fictional folkloric character—the “fishman”—is indelibly linked to place. Part man, part fish, Reid’s homespun mythological creature is nothing if not situated. These photographs document a counterfeit natural history specimen. The blurred figure that darts in and out of each landscape shot is an imaginary native of National Parks surrounding the Canberra Region. By offering (fabricated) evidence of its existence within its natural habitat, Reid perpetuates the mythology. He recasts this landscape as a folkloric backdrop.
From its position in the centre of the gallery, Reid’s work mediates between states of settlement and vacancy. The fishman belongs to his landscape (he is local fauna) yet at the same time he does not exist. He is both placed and displaced. Reid’s work provided the pivot on which the rest of the show hung. The figures—corporeal or otherwise—featured in the work on display each navigate the tension between placement and displacement. While some situate themselves by making claims to a cultural heritage, others remain untethered and denied a physical body in which to place themselves. By allowing this tension to unravel, Lens Love mapped a contrastive yet cogent study of habitation beyond the strictures of the domestic.
Lens Love: the tender gaze of six Canberra region photographers, curator Shane Breynard, Canberra Museum and Gallery, Canberra, 30 Nov 2013-23 Feb 2014
In 2013, Melbourne’s ACCA presented the first showing of the celebrated British artist Tacita Dean’s epic kaleidoscopic anamorphic film installation, FILM (2011), since its debut in the voluminous space of the Tate Turbine Hall in London. Less than a year later and Tacita Dean is returning to Australia, again at the invitation of ACCA Artistic Director Juliana Engberg in her present incarnation as curator of the 19th Biennale of Sydney, You Imagine What You Desire. On this occasion, Dean returns with another first—presenting in Sydney the inaugural live performance work of her career, Event for a Stage (2014), as a highlight of the Biennale’s middle program.
Well-known for her artisanal approach to celluloid filmmaking and with a multi-disciplinary practice that spans sound recordings, atmospheric drawings, photography, over-painted postcards and mixed media works, the transition into live performance represents a bold leap for Dean. A month out from the launch of Event for a Stage at Carriageworks, co-commissioners of the work along with the Biennale, details of its content are slowly being revealed. When I speak with Engberg about the work’s development, she explains that while it’s “very much in an incubatory phase” and represents “a real step out for [Dean] in terms of her own processes and procedures” this one-act theatrical presentation will also be very much within the artist’s own language and artistic procedures. “As a filmmaker Tacita has always been interested in all those things that combine in that process: sound, action, light, colour, etcetera. What we’re trying to do in some ways is to manifest that in reality, to capture it in its film life, in an audio life and to present it in a live format simultaneously. So it’s quite interesting.”
At the heart of the project is the live filming of a portrait of a performer on stage, the British actor Stephen Dillane, whose versatility across film and theatre will surely suit him to this unconventional role. If Dean’s rich oeuvre of understated and carefully edited film work is anything to go by, gesture, atmosphere, affect and a sense of quietude may prove pivotal over action. For Dean, the development of working in a theatre, which came about when Engberg discovered the “fundamental opportunity” that having Carriageworks as a Biennale venue partner offered in its access to a theatre space, is a chance to become more self-reflexive. As the Biennale’s press material sets out: “by exposing her own way of filming to an audience, she is dramatising the role of medium, whilst also working with an actor examining the nature of his own presence on a stage.”
While the move into a live setting gestures towards an experimental breaking open of Dean’s process in a theatrical context, the premise of a filmed portrait is also continuous with Dean’s extensive body of cinematic portraiture work culminating in 2008 in one of the artist’s most important works to date, the six-film installation titled Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS. Created from footage that Dean filmed of the American avant-garde choreographer at his studio in Manhattan two years before his death, the multipartite installation depicts Cunningham performing a near motionless interpretation of Stillness, his singular choreography for his lifetime partner John Cage’s 1952 composition 4’33.” Seated in a chair, Cunningham simply shifts position for each of the composition’s three movements, Dean’s life-size projections serving to magnify the elegiac drama of his silent poses.
In her other film portrait works, Dean has made what Jean-Christophe Royoux has termed “memory-homages” to such luminaries of the art world as Mario Merz, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg and most recently Robert Smithson as well as intimate studies of her own uncles and an elderly friend of the family nicknamed ‘Boots.’ Dean herself has jokingly conceded the Freudian “father-complex” at work in her practice. Yet in a more universal sense the portrait of an ageing figure captured in the disappearing medium of analogue film invites meditation upon themes of time, perception and the nature of seeing and reflects Dean’s ongoing interest in the study of memory, loss, absence and obsolescence.
Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS was presented as one of the key works in the 2009 ACCA survey and in many ways the bold venture of Event for a Stage is a product of Engberg’s long and trusting relationship with the artist. Having now worked with Dean on a number of important exhibitions, Engberg has developed a deep appreciation for what she describes as the completeness of the artist’s vision.
“We enjoy working together and I love bringing Tacita’s work to the public because it’s very generous in its delivery and because I see Tacita as a total artist in a way,” says Engberg. “The way she uses film is very painterly, she calls upon genres of British landscape work and British portraiture and even though her work is in a twentieth-century medium with a twenty-first century delivery, I see in her a long legacy of practice that I still want to be engaged with. But I also love the fact that because it is filmic her work takes us into other sorts of dimensions of encounter, it’s durational and she uses quite a sparse amount of narrative. It is I think a delectable kind of visuality that she delivers and it changes our concept of what cinema might be.”
As well as expanding the parameters of cinema and live art, Event for a Stage continues Dean’s exploration of the relationship between the aural and the visual. Beyond the four performances programmed for Carriageworks, there are plans for the work to “live on in a perpetual way in an audio life,” Engberg explains, as the ABC’s Radio National is building a platform for the audio work for radio broadcast. The timing of the live performances as a highlight of the middle program of the Biennale is another important aspect of its delivery.
“It cohabits in time our launch of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s wonderful new piece which they’ve made for us here [City of Forking Paths, 2014] which will take people on a cinematic fictional tour of the Rocks in Sydney, another filmic kind of event; again not cinema but a durational time-based piece,” says Engberg. “I’m bringing those two things together in the middle of the Biennale with a set of discussions around some of these ideas.”
For Engberg, the inclusion of durational time-based works like Dean’s Event for a Stage presents one of the biggest challenges in curating a biennale due to the constraints of the long three-month running time. Nevertheless, “I have tried as much as I can to thread those things through the program because I think real time work is extremely important at the moment,” she says. “Artists are enjoying the opportunity of taking themselves outside the gallery circumstances with quiet gestures and procedures that may not be known to a lot of the audience but which nevertheless provide important textures throughout the whole Biennale.”
19th Biennale of Sydney and Carriageworks, Tacita Dean, Event for a Stage, Carriageworks, Sydney, 1-4 May
Situated Cinema, artists Solomon Nagler and Alexandre Larose
photo Louise M Cooper
Situated Cinema, artists Solomon Nagler and Alexandre Larose
The visibility of the projected image is an issue of physical and cognitive events meeting in space. Situated in the gloom of the gallery are references to cinema, a cultural form until recently regarded purely as a conveyor of story-telling based entertainment, both popular and classical, and as place, the bricks and mortar where such encounters occur.
In Canadian filmmakers Solomon Nagler and Alexandre Larose’s Situated Cinema at Artspace three screens capture the projected image, one visible, a second invisible and another out of action (a different kind of signification, more later).
The visible screen is translucent, the image projected onto it a larger version of the same image on the 16mm acetate film strip inexorably looping through the projector standing a few metres away. The image on the screen is indistinct; attention switches to the machinery creating this phantasm. At one time the standard audio-visual equipment hidden in the biobox of a lecture theatre or community hall, the 16mm film projector mounted on a plinth is here re-presented as an object of analogue marvel; complete with perspex film loop attachment, the visible process by which the picture is delivered to our eyes becomes one part of the event.
The other event is provided by the images on the screen; they possess none of the indicators associated with either popular or arthouse films; instead, the genre rarely afforded exposure in cinema settings, the home movie. The ensemble, the installation, for those old enough to remember, recalls family film shows. The reprocessed images, evidently a selection of moments from various filmic occasions, possess a banal innocence when people are present, recorded moving through the scene, or responding shyly to the presence of the camera. We in turn are present at a specific moment of encounter with a past presence, reliving what has long gone by.
Moments later (counted as 24 frames for each second; we can hear them), the people have gone and a landscape or scene of the city and suburb becomes something other, the uncanny, the familiar yet incongruous. The cognitive event is made tangible, momentarily, before being hustled on to the next occasion…Back then.
We have encountered loops in projected work before; somehow the duration of these—about four minutes—seems to match with the cognitive ability of short-term memory (STM) to productively revisit motion picture documentation of ‘insignificant actuality.’ The minutiae of moments become fixed points in a matrix of cycled time; as they successively pass by, like lines in a poem, checked for details missed in the first or successive viewings. Our level of obsessiveness is tested and demonstrated before our eyes, our movement into the lives of others drawn out from behind the curtains of privacy imposed by accepted decorum.
The invisible screen is contained in its own walled area; the only way to gain access is by ducking beneath the wooden wall into the wholly enclosed space, thus transgressing the usually lubricated entrance to cinema seating arrangements. There are of course no chairs and the space is only big enough for two or three to stand. Momentarily I envisage the spectacle of legs outside this temporary cinema and reflect on whether social cognitive functioning of the audience deviates from the game plan. The 16mm projection equipment is arranged elegantly on a shelf joining the two long sides of the space. The four walls are painted with a white coating reflecting the light from the narrow wall at the end, transgressing the rule whereby light is firmly controlled to sit specifically on white bordered by black. The high contrast imagery is hard to see, as if in a snowfield, but gradually becomes recognisable as a sequence of static images of architecture, washed by the shapes of some associated alchemical process. Memory is interrogated again as the patterns fall together, and the loop completes its cycle, recognisable now as the interior of a theatre or indeed, a cinema. In the background, more amplified than previously, the insistent intermittent purr of the projector.
The third projector contains a short loop of 8mm film fossicked from a Sydney opshop. It ran throughout the period of the exhibition until at its end when this reviewer attended, the loop had disintegrated – another kind of duration had been established within the protocols of projection.
This modest show was unsupported by an adequate curatorial or artists’ statement; we are told the work emerges from primarily ‘materialist’ approaches, but without reference to the title of the show. A case could be made for it fitting into theories of situated aesthetics, where the boundaries between objects and events are weakened such that the art experience is based on a wide distribution of its elements. It would have helped if this ground had been outlined for the audience.
There are many artists now working with film and film equipment both nationally and internationally, often referencing work by film artists of the 1960s and 70s (and earlier) who experimented with an approach to cinema that followed on from the Modernist tradition. Artspace has been operating a reciprocal residency program with the Darling Foundry in Montréal for five years. The Situated Cinema Project had been constructed in Halifax previously, creating small cinematic experiences in dis-used urban spaces (“Situated Cinema references small buildings that have been squeezed into leftover urban spaces. The small cinema space, which can be demounted and which will travel to unorthodox locations…is intended to provide an alternative cinema-going experience,” Solomon Nagler, www.cineflux.ca.) In early discussions of the presentation of the work, the installation likewise was to be off-site, a Sydney-based iteration; but due to the difficulties of working internationally between Canada and Sydney, and the strict nature of urban DA approvals in Sydney, the installation was brought into the gallery space.
Situated Cinema, artists Solomon Nagler and Alexandre Larose, Artspace, Sydney, 22 Feb-8 March
The opening night of the Aurora Festival of Living Music at Parramatta’s Riverside Theatre, 30 April, will be thrilling. It will feature the premiere of Voyage Through Radiant Stars—a full-length saxophone concerto—by leading Australian composer, Brian Howard; Ensemble Offspring playing Marcus Lindberg’s Ablauf (1983) for two massive bass drums and clarinet; Song Company’s Roland Peelman at the piano for Sonolith, a musical transcription of the Declaration of Human Rights byTurkish Australian composer Ekrem Mulayim; a didjeridu duet by Alex Pozniak for players Mark Atkins and Gumeroy Newman; and Xenakis’ challenging solo Rebonds (1987-89) played by Claire Edwardes. Don’t miss it. 3 double passes (for 30 April) courtesy of Aurora Festival of Living Music
DVD: 20 Feet from Stardom
This 2014 Academy Award winning documentary by Morgan Neville focuses on the lives and careers over some 50 years of black American back-up singers whose talents were such that they could have enjoyed solo stardom. However, either the recording industry did little to commit, even scuttling their efforts, or they recognised that fame was not worth the effort. What is striking is the long list of famous artists these singers supported; they not only provided unique harmonies but on occasion tackled difficult passages or wholly substituted for lead singers. The sense of injustice is eased when one of the most experienced backup singers, Darlene Love, finally makes it on her own. KG 5 copies courtesy of Transmission Films
DVD: Olivier Assayas, After May
Leading French filmmaker Olivier Assayas’ After May won Best Screenplay at the 2012 Venice Film Festival. His film follows the lives of ‘the children of the revolution’ of May 1968 as they flee Paris after an act of vandalism against a school goes badly wrong. In Italy the group party, demonstrate, encounter new art and explore the implications of their everyday countercultural lives. Although criticised for not going deeply enough into his characters, Assayas has been otherwise praised for his sensitive portrayal of a complex generation in a beautifully crafted film. 5 copies courtesy of Madman Entertainment
DVD: Which Way is the Front Line from Here? The Life and Times of Tim Hetherington.
British-American photojournalist Tim Hetherington was embedded with a US platoon in Afghanistan. His documentary film of the experience, RESTREPO (2010), won the 2010 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize for Documentary and was nominated for an Oscar in 2011. Hetherington was killed by mortar fire in Libya’s civil war where he was spending time with the rebel army. His co-director and cinematographer on RESTREPO, Sebastien Junger made Which way is the front… as a tribute to Hetherington’s talents including his admired empathy for his stressed interviewees in war zones and his 10-year career on the frontline in Afghanistan, Liberia and other West African countries and Libya. 5 copies courtesy of Madman Entertainment
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I’m a performer as well, and I’ve started writing over the last two years. I’ve done a couple of interviews for RealTime and I was thinking a little bit about how strange it is to be in this format where I ask questions and you answer them…and how kind of weirdly inappropriate that seems in terms of the way that you think about questions and the way that you are working with questions as means to potentiality, questions that don’t necessarily beg answers. So it could be more of a conversation, or we could find, meet each other tangentially maybe, talking about things.
Okay Let’s do that. Let’s get away from that, and find some reason to talk to each other, kiddo.
Maybe that’s an interesting place to start, just talking about questions, and the attraction to questions or how you’ve come to questions as a way of leading into working.
Mm-hmm. Is that a question? Sounds like that’s a question.
A proposition?
You know I feel like it’s more like a physical experience. A question feels very different than an answer, you know? Like an answer lands, right, and then it’s over. Whereas a question has a lightness to it. And I feel like it’s really easy for me to get heavy. Like, I think about the world, and I could just spiral downward. So dance is where I’m not allowed to spiral downward. I don’t permit myself to spiral…I don’t get seduced by the…the direction of the planet as I see it…and questions allow me to not have a direction. I think maybe for me it was a form of survival.
At a particular time?
I don’t even know when the questions started. Sometime in the early 80s. ‘Cause at first they weren’t questions, they were just kind of like propositions. But the question made it lighter, it lightens things up. Don’t take myself so seriously.
When you were speaking the other day [at your performance lecture at Dancehouse: a continuity of discontinuity], you were very clear about the emphasis on the “what if..?” being…kind of lightly curious.
Not so much lightly curious, but just light. I love that quote of Calvino, that there’s just so much weight in the world…for Calvino there’s so much weight in a novel by Norman Mailer, or John Steinbeck, that he does everything he can to subvert that weight. We don’t need more weight. We don’t need more weight in art, you know? And I see the kind of role-playing that so much dance has, the male/female bullshit. I mean Pina Bausch was a great choreographer, but I don’t need to see enacted women in slips and men in suits dancing out their role of angst. It’s just not interesting to me anymore. What do you think of Pina Bausch’s work?
I’ve never been a fan of it, probably for the same reasons. I find the repetition of those roles…
Roles. It’s just dead. I mean who needs it right? So the question lightens up the…
Something that I really appreciate is the idea of lightness, or even humour; there’s as much richness in that as seriousness. And it can be taken seriously.
A lot of people say they want to laugh in my performances, and that they can’t. Because you know they feel embarrassed or withheld. But it’s hysterical this whole thing. Isn’t it? It’s just weird. The body has so many potentialities, so many different aspects of our being. And dance is where I don’t take it all that seriously. I am so serious, you know, I have very little sense of humour outside of dance. The world brings me down. I live in Texas, and it just brings me down. But dance helps me survive. It’s my form of survival. It’s my form of, I say, putting myself here, it’s my form of political activism. Not what I do and not how I do it, it’s that I dance. That is my form of political activism. I dance.
It’s funny thinking about audiences and feeling like they can’t respond in a way that’s normal to them. There’s so much work that you’ve done in terms of articulating your processes and your… contexts for how you’re seeing your own work as well. It seems there’s a lot of work in terms of offering those alternate contexts as an observer, to watching dance. Have you seen that shift in people over time, that have maybe resisted that change?
Yeah, I have. I think audiences are slowly coming around. Certainly dancers are. I mean there was a time when I came to Melbourne where the dancers were so…seduced by their technique. They couldn’t get beyond it. Dance training, dance pedagogy really has changed. This group upstairs [Learning Curve workshop, Dancehouse and VCA], they’re fantastic. Wow, they blow my mind. They’re really clear. And that has to do with their training, their pedagogy. So dancers are changing for sure. And dance audiences. I feel like dance audiences are…I feel like they are not passive. They’re not sitting back. They really feel like they are reading this material. I feel like they’re looking. When I’m performing or my works are performing and I’m in the audience with a piece of mine, I feel like audiences are looking at my dance like they would look at art. They’re not goal-oriented. And that’s new. Maybe only people who know something about my work come to see it, but I don’t believe that’s true. I think there’s enough re-education going on in so many realms…
Goal-oriented is an interesting way of putting it, isn’t it? In fact there’s something else you said the other day which really landed with me quite hard, about “catastrophic loss”, about letting go of that mode of thinking about goal-orientation. And the word seemed so right, “catastrophic.”
We’re practicing it there [in the workshop]. “What if every cell in my body at once has the potential to be served by how I see?” Not what I’m looking at, so that the experience of seeing is happening here [in the body]. Imagine the catastrophic loss of former behaviour not having to be looking at, but to be served by how I’m seeing. What if I’m making that choice to be served by how I’m seeing, and not looking at. So that the experience of seeing is happening here and not out there. Oh my god!
Were you observing [in the workshop], or were you in the practice?
I’m practicing with them, mostly. I step out from time to time. And it’s a juggling act; it’s a huge amount of reprogramming. And who knows if it’s true or anything; it’s just noticing what happens when you choose to see differently. And it’s catastrophic loss of former behaviour, not to call looking at you ‘seeing’, but rather looking at you seeing. It’s fantastic.
If you observe a shift in people, is there a unanimousness about the shift, or does everybody kind of interpret…
You see everybody coming in and out, including myself. None of us can do it. You know we’re too programmed otherwise. I can see the shift. I’m sure they can too. The shift in and out. And I think it’s beautiful to be able to see that. I mean if everybody was always in, it would not be as interesting as seeing the work. The vulnerability. Even with Jeanine [Durning] in that film [No Time to Fly, Deborah Hay and Motion Bank]. You could see her shifting. She was very early in her practice in that film. I could read it. And that’s so beautiful to see the work. Staying in the question, learning from the body.
And that goes hand in hand with letting go of the achieving.
Oh yeah, yeah. So sweet.
I’m curious about the practice as a practice while you’re being an observer, or a practice as being an audience. Do you think of it that way, when you’re watching?
Well I set that up with everyone when we are audience for each other. We are choosing to see one another working with this question. It’s pointless to judge what anybody is doing because the material is so uninteresting in terms of movement; it’s really uninteresting. My practice as an audience is to choose to see you in the question, and knowing that everybody goes in and out of it. So that there’s no achieving anything. So that the dancers who’re practicing the performance, can be at peace with seeing the audience and not being judged.
These are your word: “the choice to surrender anything that wants definition.” I’m really attracted to that as an observer, and can see it, but I also really like the duality maybe of the language process, in terms of articulating your work and what you’re doing. How you’re amazingly clear about articulating these potentially indefinable things. Is there some importance in that counterpointed practice of not letting it be completely…swimming?
Deborah Hay, No Time To Fly
photo Rino Pizzi
Deborah Hay, No Time To Fly
Yeah. I had very good editors early on in my writing process, who would return my writing to me and go, “What do you mean?” “What do you mean?” “What do you mean?” “What do you mean?” I would get pieces of writing that were black with cross-outs and questions. They were like wolves. But it taught me how to write. What I am writing is the experience of noticing the feedback from every cell in my body, so that’s “bblbdldlblkdlkdleleb,” and how do you then take that in to a linear thought? And it is so exciting. It’s so exciting to me to reduce it to just what it is, without the other stuff. Do you find that in writing? I love editing my writing, now. I just love cutting it out, cutting it in. Writing has become thrilling.
Were you always writing?
Oh no, I was not always writing. Writing started happening when I realised my survival depended on it. Because the way in which I’m working was not synchronous with the way people were writing about dance. Like to talk about my work as—if I think about Jeanine the other day—as attaching her right arm to her knee and crossing the stage on a diagonal…that writing does not help me. But that’s the way a lot of dance writers describe the movement. And so I realised I better start writing, because I don’t want to be remembered the way they’re writing my work. So I’m grateful for that, feeling so strongly about it and taking the steps necessary to pick up the pen. The power in that. And what I noticed, after my second book Lamb at the Altar: The Story of a dance, people who are critics and writers were writing differently, picked up that I was feeding them some other perspective to have a look at movement, and it began…it really was smart. I think dancers at a certain point recognise they better get smart, about writing our work. You know artists used to—I’ve talked about this quite a bit—in the 60s when I was in New York. The people who were writing about art were Don Judd, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris. The artists who were making conceptual art were the ones who were writing, were reviewing one another’s work and writing about their own work. So they provided art audiences with a frame for looking at their work that they wouldn’t have had otherwise. And dancers really didn’t start picking up the pen…Yvonne [Rainer] did. But most of us didn’t, not recognising the power of language until fairly recently. And that it helps audiences frame what it ism even if it’s one person who might read a dance journal. Or it helps reframe for audiences how else to look at dance. And there’s some great writing being done by dancers right now.
Has language for you always been integral to then the making of the work as well?
I’m in the studio and I’m dancing. Aftera while I start writing what it is that I’m experiencing when I’m dancing. So that the dancing informs the writing and then the writing informs the dancing, and then the dancing informs the writing. So is that what you said? Or is that what I said? I mean in other words the writing doesn’t come first. But it’s articulated because if I’m going to teach my work to anybody else I better figure out what the language is to transmit it to others. When I go into a studio with a group of people I am very clear about what I’m asking of them, and I’m not just saying, “Can we just try this?” By the time I’m transmitting the material to someone else my language is really clear, so that I’m not wasting their time. And I’m not wasting my time.
Do you mean both the language as in the questions and also the language as in the score [the blueprint of the choreography]?
Yes. And the language in the coaching. And the language in the directing…I feel such a responsibility—I don’t know why, maybe it’s from my parents or something—I feel such a responsibility not for dancers to wait around for me to figure something out. I feel such a responsibility to engage people right off the bat, not wasting their time. Waiting for me to come to some conclusion about something. So when I go into a place where I’m transmitting material, I’ve already practiced how to articulate that material. I go into a room and I’ll set up a propostion and go “1 2 3 Go”
In terms of the solo adaptation project as well, this transmitting of information to other bodies?
Which one’s have you seen?
I saw them in Melbourne. I saw Luke [George], Atlanta Eke, and Carlee Mellow.
I want to hear your experience of the solos.
The moments of real difference between them that I saw were in the decisions that were being made. There were fewer than I thought there would be, and they were very loud, like loud in the sense of like… [expansive gesture] from where the dance was. It was like all of a sudden, Whhhaa, over there…which was great. But I remember thinking that there was a shared physicality between them and that they shared a physical articulation, that I was curious about whether that was inherent in the information, or whether it was because they had worked together at the same time or…in what way they developed this way of moving that seemed similar to each other. Did you see when they performed in Melbourne?
No.
In Atlanta’s [performance], she did a Q&A with the audience at one point, stopped and addressed the audience and asked them questions and held a forum. And it was so funny, so kind of like, departed.
I don’t remember the score for that, so I don’t know how that particular part might have come into the actual score. She’s pretty outrageous, she’s just pretty wonderful. I don’t know what the language was that she made that adaptation based on.
Is there something about language that’s attractive maybe because it’s kind of, it’s doing, well it has the potential to do two opposite things. I can land in definition or it can be interpreted in like multiple ways and that then is an instigation for transmitting the work to other people. It allows for both of those things to occur. Allows the clarity of transmitting information while also there being this space for huge interpretation.
I think most of my writing falls into that category, of both. There’s no one way. In other words, “What if I choose to be served by the space that I’m sitting in right now?” ‘Cause I can look at it as absolutely insane. I could look at it as “Why not?” I think it’s those kinds of push and pull—believe it, not believe it—the complexity of that, the absurdity of it, and the rightness of it at the same time, is thrilling to me. And in the form of a question it’s pretty safe right? It’s just a question.
And yet it can be so frightening sometimes, facing the questions. It can be so shattering.
Shattering, right.
Have you ever read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence?
I think I’ve started it a number of times but I never was able to get through it. Did you read it?
I read it a couple of years ago and, definitely had moments where I really had to work to get through it, but it’s interesting. He was an English teacher at a university, and somebody had said to him once, just off the cuff, “Oh, I hope you’re teaching quality to your students.” And that then begins questions for him about what quality is, and locating it in the space between things—that it can never be a thing, but it’s in the spaces between things. He goes through a deep spiral of questions that come out of that. And he gets to a point where he looks at some Zen writing and then looks at his own writing, and realises he’s in the exact same place. Without having intended.
Right. That’s where I feel about My body, the Buddhist. I’m not a practicing Buddhist but when I wrote down the major lessons I’d learned from my body while I was dancing, it really paralleled a lot of Buddhist aesthetic.
You didn’t know much about about Buddhism?
I just knew very superficial…But my body’s a Buddhist. Whoa!
I love the fact that this work, the realisation, what I’ve learned, I’ve learned from dance. I want to proclaim it, that my body is a resource for all of this material. That talk that I gave the other night, I’ve only given it once before, and it was a big dance conference in Dusseldorf. And there was a philosopher from Berkeley who was in that audience, who came up to me afterwards and said, “I have spent my…all of my years of research trying to understand what you are doing. You are doing it.” You know, I love that. That it’s dance where that kind of research can be happening. My body is where that research is happening.
Do you think about the work being historicised?
I don’t think about it much. Could you say more about the question, or what you mean?
About the embracing of the ephemera of this…the current ways in which we record history, meaning that they become static.
I think as long as I keep writing, I’ll be okay. I have read a couple of things recently about my work that were very exciting to me, in terms of the language, and they way in which people, philosophers, dance writers, dance scholars see into it. It really made me happy. I’ve had a few of those experiences. Not many. A few of them, it was great. Like I learned something.
What kind of things did they write?
Well I can’t remember. I can’t quote but…Oh I know, one term I just loved was something like a “variable constant.” Just rich, two words together. A group of people in Utrecht recently asked for permission to publish my score No Time to Fly, because they are publishing a book and they missed the deadline and they wanted to publish something as a kind of apology. They’d been talking about this book that’d come out at a certain time, and they published my score because they felt that within the score it left room for them to reassess what their sense of deadline is, what their sense of publishing is. So it was such an honour to be used in that way by these publishers. The language of the score gave them room to expand their notion of their response, what their responsibility was to make that deadline. So I mean that’s another…
Like the variable constant, the paradoxical nature of that. It’s almost a question in itself. It destabilises you in a way. Having to just wrap your brain around that.
And anything that adds to the destabilisation of our behaviour…
Beth Buchanan from Ranters Theatre talks with Gail Priest about her intimate audience exchange based around sleep, presented at Arts House as part of the Festival of Live Art (FOLA).
If only it were possible to capture the colour of Deborah Hay’s language on the page; the long thoughtful pauses, the enviable American diction of each final consonant pronounced, the transparent emotionality of feeling each phrase before moving to the next, sharing her excitement when faced with an unsolvable paradox. The textures are so wonderfully nuanced, one could listen for hours.
On reading the transcript of our interview, it occurs to me how much is lost once translated to type, and how esoteric it may appear. As in:
“…it’s just noticing what happens when you choose to see differently, you know, and it’s catastrophic loss of former behaviour, not to call looking at you ‘seeing,’ but rather looking at you seeing.”
Deborah Hay is an improvisation artist, a choreographer, a performer, a teacher, a philosopher, a writer. She has pioneered new ways of practising and thinking about dance that are still challenging dancers and audiences. Her provocations have longevity because of their profound rhetorical nature.
Questions like “What if every cell in my body has the potential to perceive wisdom every moment, while remaining positionless about what wisdom is or what it looks like?” are foundational provocations for movement—almost mantras—in her practice. (She also often repeats questions immediately, as hearing it only once can be dumbfounding.) Such questions are accepted as impossible to answer while inspiring immediate physical reactions that undo habitual behaviours.
But so much about her practice has already been written, and more importantly, written by Hay herself with such succinct articulation that I need not attempt to improve on it. After researching intently for our interview, it was of course most interesting to let her do the talking.
“It’s pointless to judge what anybody is doing because the material is so uninteresting in terms of movement, it’s really uninteresting. But are they staying in the [question]?…[M]y practice as an audience is to choose to see you in the question, and knowing that everybody goes in and out of it. So that there’s no achieving anything. So that the dancers who’re practising the performance can be at peace with seeing the audience and not being judged.”
Herein lies one of Hay’s most exciting perspectives. That dance and audience perception of dance need not be limited to what the body can do, nor what the movement looks like, an idea that is still hard for audiences to come to terms with.
Dance exists in time, to state the obvious yet sometimes overlooked. Specifically, dance and its audience exist in the same time. It sounds miraculous, although it’s the plainest fact of life. How does one experience time passing? (Another of Hay’s long-term enquiries.) How do we view movement differently when consciously perceiving time passing between the performer and ourselves? This suggestion alone shifts our aesthetic relationship to bodies before any action has a chance to take place, broadening the possibilities of what can be perceived in performance beyond the movement alone.
It’s a perspective on watching dance that, while now more established, can possibly never become mainstream. Perhaps this is because it subverts the economic idea of a value system, by valuing most preciously something that cannot be captured, or even easily articulated. Hay admits herself that dance is her “form of political activism. Not what I do and not how I do it. It’s that I dance.”
Hay is often seen as a guru-like figure, whose links to Buddhist practices are admitted. Yet from Hay herself there’s no solemnity in the commitment, in fact the opposite.
“A question has a lightness to it. And I feel like it’s really easy for me to get heavy. Like, I think about the world and I could just spiral downward…And dance is where I don’t take it all that seriously…A lot of people say they want to laugh in my performances, and that they can’t, because, you know, they feel embarrassed or withheld or…But it’s hysterical this whole thing. Isn’t it? It’s just weird.”
There’s an incredible freedom watching Hay’s work; an undidactic experience. And I don’t mean for ‘freedom’ to sound comfortable or pleasant; freedom is a confronting reality. Nothing to reference, full of confusion and mundanity. The experience is unknown, with the possibility of real discovery. For audiences used to having expectations pleasurably gratified, this freedom can be frustrating.
“I feel like dance audiences…are not passive. They’re not sitting back. They really feel like they are reading this material…I feel like audiences are looking at my dance like they would look at art. You know, they’re not goal-oriented.”
Hay’s work, like our interview, finds a more solid incarnation on the page. Through writing she has worked hard to define in practical terms how she is working, as a counterpoint to the dissolving of definition that she delights in through her embodiment.
“I realised I better start writing, because I don’t want to be remembered the way they’re writing my work. So I’m grateful for that, feeling so strongly about it and taking the steps necessary to pick up the pen. The power in that…I was feeding them some other perspective to have a look at movement and it began…I think dancers at a certain point recognise they better get smart, about writing our work. What I am writing is the experience of noticing the feedback from every cell in my body, so that’s ‘bblbdldlblkdlkdleleb,’ and how do you then take that in to a linear thought?”
There is a strength revealed in Hay’s writing as a documenter of dance, different from the video. In writing, we can better articulate the unseeable of dance. In Hay’s case, her felt experiences that resonate from movement find a translation. These words can then feed back into movement to create potential, rather than replication or repertoire, enlivening the body to infinite rediscovery.
“What I’ve learned, I’ve learned from dance. I want to proclaim it, that my body is a resource for all of this material. That it’s dance where that kind of research can be happening. My body is where that research is happening.”
The setting for our discussion was completely ordinary, nothing lofty nor glamorous about it. The beauty of really interesting artists is that one can feel completely rich in their company, whatever the setting.
In March, dancer, choreographer and teacher Deborah Hay was in Melbourne to mentor dancers in Dancehouse’s Learning Curve program and deliver a performative lecture.
RealTime issue #120 April-May 2014 pg. 32
Dance Journalism #1 – protest action at the Yongah Hill Immigration Detention Centre, 2013, dancer Sam Fox.
photo Alex Bainbridge
Dance Journalism #1 – protest action at the Yongah Hill Immigration Detention Centre, 2013, dancer Sam Fox.
The choice of our featured theme, art, empathy & action, was triggered by what appears to be a failure of empathy among Australian citizens, media and politicians for refugees, the unemployed and for future generations likely to be the victims of climate change.
What role can artists play in challenging this failure? We focus on distinctions between sympathy and empathy, on identification in the works of Mike Parr and Kym Vercoe, character complexities in the current wave of epic TV series, who feels for whom in Wolf Creek 2 and on art addressing Climate Change. John Bailey reports on the empathy generated by UK performer Bryony Kimming’s Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model.
Film. Low budget is viable. Dan Edwards looks at independent distribution of independent films online, Andy Ross’ Well Beyond Water and in cinemas, Genevieve Bailey’s I Am Eleven. Kath Dooley interviews Sophie Hyde about the making of 52 Days after its triumphant Sundance premiere.
Image note: for more on Dance Journalism #1 see The Arteffect
“It is crucial…in advancing art’s political agency, to identify and make visible—and open to discussion—the forces in play…” Dean Kenning and Margareta Stern, ‘Which side is art on?’ Art Monthly, Sept 2013.
A performance by Mike Parr is always an event for the art world, ironically perhaps given his well known antipathy to art’s rituals, its “alcoholic” culture, its “window dressing” as he calls it, the attractive display while the real business grinds on behind the scenes. His performance artworks, in their public manifestations (there are also now a number of significant closed performances made for camera), are also rituals of a kind, for the artist, and for a certain public. I form part of that public but have also been studying these works and writing about them for almost 20 years (since 1996). In this time, the artist and myself have become occasional collaborators, passionate interlocutors and friends. So if I have come to lack objective distance in the case of Mike Parr perhaps I can make up for it in insider knowledge. On the other hand, his kind of performance art plays on this very border of intimacy and public imagery so in a sense I am not in a unique position at all.
Daydream Island is the name of a savagely ironic piece of what Parr calls ‘theatre’ and while it actually felt like theatre for much of the time—we spectators were sitting, intent on the action, observing passively from our seats in the auditorium—it wouldn’t be the sort of thing students at NIDA are learning much about. On the contrary, where the most complex acting is simulation, Daydream Island featured only the actions of participants (“non-matrixed” in the critical language) carrying out various real tasks. I am used to seeing Mike’s wife Felizitas at these events and admiring her sangfroid as her partner’s body undergoes various acts of violence. Acts which are measured but no less real. This time I couldn’t see her and asked John Loane, sitting adjacent, where she was. He pointed to the stage area where she was engaged in sewing tiny toys and monsters onto her husband’s face, eliciting grunts of pain when she went too deep with the needle.
Two videographers circled them relaying close-up visuals to three large HD screens. The lighting was altered awkwardly, clumsily by manually inserting coloured gels over one of the spots as if to say, this is ‘theatre.’ Lisa Corsi stage-managed the event and would interrupt the action when a ‘scene’ had been completed for example when Felizitas had completed, the sewing of objects. While the ‘scene’ changed Mike sat in his chair on the stage unrecognisable behind a mask of fishing line and monstrous children’s toys. Felizitas Parr gave way to Linda Jefferyes, a visual artist, and took her seat downstage with her back to the audience like the other participants. Black monochromes were fixed stiffly to their backs (part dada gesture, part Parr’s typical mobilising of the minimalist image). The sewing became face painting as at a children’s party but instead of Spiderman or a princess, Parr’s face was camouflaged. When this was complete he lay prostrate, subjectilian, on the floor and a Pollock style drip painting was enacted on his face. At the climax of this scene a battery-powered toy pig was let loose on the stage space waddling around the inert form of Parr and grunting. At the close, Corsi read a statement which quoted Prime Minister Abbott’s recent remarks describing any linkage of climate change and increased bushfire activity in Australia as “hogwash” and asked the audience to return to wherever they had come from.
Like Parr’s other performances of the past decade, this intertwining of delicately elaborated sado-masochistic action and imagery with overt political statement is a clear vernacular. (While it may be tempting to observe that it is an aesthetic vernacular that has found its essential theme in the ghastly asylum seeker politics of our time, it is also true that Parr has worked this seam for over 40 years, but I will remain with the most recent work here. For anyone interested, the performances of the first decade post 9/11 have been covered in my book The Infinity Machine, Schwartz City Press 2010.) But it’s different in a crucial respect too. The earlier works were all durational, that’s to say they were elaborated over an extended measure of time, 24 hours or more, while Daydream Island was just on 80 minutes, the length of a Williamson play. This was a deliberate structure imposed on the work but one which I want to question.
I wrote to Parr after the event to point out the following:
“The piece (…) left those present with a mark, a tiny wound, to work at and re-work… It also raised some issues for me in its theatrical nature, specifically its limited duration. In my view this tends to shut things down in the manner of a theatre piece rather than open things up, which your durational works do, in allowing a wound its own time to develop and the viewers their own time to experience and to work through. I wonder if the structure of the piece might tend to suture over the wound…”
The discourse of wounding is, of course, an important currency for performance art since so much of this form engages directly the artist’s body by placing it at risk or subjecting the body to interventions of different kinds. The language of the wound also explains the peculiar affective quality, its sometimes repulsive valency as well as its ethical and aesthetic power, literally aesthetic in its capacity to forcefully engage the senses of a spectator.
Parr responded in part with a version of the theatre metaphor:
“…theatre is a kind of scab so this piece was about opening up a wound and closing it down at the same time….Burying it in a way…that’s why I decided we should perform the piece with our backs to the audience and with the monochromes attached to the backs of my crew so that Modernist patches were created to block vanishing points…a miscellany of negations of drafted theatrical space and the fixed positioning of the audience…”
The embodied vanishing point is a concern of many of Parr’s works as it deals with the art historical discipline of drawing in perspective while also alluding to a certain disciplinary structure on the self, the way we are taught to view art and by extension the world around us. By blocking it he resists this kind of discipline and the viewer is forced to find another way into the image. I guess this is art-speak for trying to get people to look for themselves…Parr’s response also reconnected the shorter form of the work to the issue he was trying to represent:
“…I felt that this structure of theatrical convolution was exactly like our treatment of the wandering arrivals to our northern shores…wounds that are constantly opened and closed… boats turned back and people left adrift…the collusive, muffled reportage. I’m thinking now about theatre space, theatre conventions and wondering if I can condense and invert my understanding of ‘theatre’ to a further extremity. Amputating duration in this way was a fierce hit for me.”
The telescoping of ‘wandering arrivals’ and their grisly fate in our camps into a form of national theatre seems just right, an entirely accurate observation, but this still does not address the issue of the recurrence of the experience Parr is trying to capture in this work, the eternal return of asylum seekers and of the carefully administered suffering our representatives continue to inflict on our behalf, in our name, whether we like it or not. To represent this accurately and truthfully which we surely expect our artists to do, the work must forcefully engage these tropes, these experiences. For me the durational form Parr adopted in previous works was the more adequate vehicle, but we will continue to debate this question.
For now, after the recent Biennale brouhaha, the broader question of the proper role artists can play in this scenario is still pertinent and very fresh. What valid function can art have in this context given that intervention at best provokes a debate about—and possibly a crisis for—arts funding and not ultimately a debate about the policy of indefinite detention itself. What can art ever do in the face of the major party/neoliberal consensus about the threat posed to the concept of the ‘public’ by stateless individuals?
Of itself, of course it cannot affect the policy. At best art can recompose the terms of the debate and the relations between the actants, whose identities seem so fixed, like a well-made play: the evil politicians, the hapless asylum seekers, the concerned citizens etc. In Parr’s ‘theatre’ these entities, indeed all entities, become unrecognisable. Painted over. Subjectilian (a surface to be painted on). What takes their place is the play of forces, the flux of urges and drives. The cruelty it stages and re-performs is ours, we share in it. We love it. After all we pay to see it. Of course we are ultimately hurting ourselves. The wound we create for others, for us, is an elaborate durational artwork of its own. A national treasure like Blue Poles. As Mike Parr observes of the work: “a wound is on display but it is being hoarded.” Maybe the bitter message of Daydream Island is that enlightened self-interest is the only way out of this labyrinth.
Mike Parr, Daydream Island, performera Mike Parr, Felizitas Parr, make-up Linda Jefferyes, Project Manager Lisa Corsi; Performance Space, 30 Ways with Time and Space, Carriageworks, Sydney, 30 Nov, 2013
Physical pain has no voice, but when at last it finds a voice, it begins to tell a story…” Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (1985)
This observation comes from Scarry’s introduction to her seminal work on pain, its full title—The Body in Pain, The Making and Unmaking of the World. “Intense pain,” she writes, “is world destroying.” For refugees whose worlds have already been undone, Australia’s treatment of them mentally and physically is doubly unkind.
We can protest on behalf of refugees, make art for or with them. The art signals our sympathy and can be taken as a form of action designed to generate sympathy in others, encouraging them to take action in turn, maybe charitable (not since the 19th century has the notion of doing good works by donation had such traction), perhaps political.
Art can ‘give voice’ to our own and others’ pain, with or without words, and in any form. Scarry writes, “Ingmar Bergman’s film Cries and Whispers opens with a woman’s diary entry, ‘It is Monday morning and I am in pain,’ and becomes throughout its duration (a duration that required its cinematographer photograph 200 different background shades of red) a sustained attempt to lift the interior facts of bodily sentience out of the inarticulate pre-language of ‘cries and whispers’ into the realm of shared objectification.”
An artist can be a stand-in, as in the case of Mike Parr suffering on behalf of refugees, by having pain inflicted on himself in a durational performance. In Kym Vercoe’s seven kilometres north-east, the performer nightly relives the suffering felt over the unveiling of the tragedy of 200 Muslim women raped and murdered in one location during the Bosnian War. The most affecting moment of a performance otherwise saturated with words comes at its end when Vercoe silently disrobes, steps beneath a cold shower (as did the women before being raped) and then disappears into a void. In Parr and Vercoe there is deep identification between artist and victims in their enactments of sympathy. Neither is a character in a performance, they are, selectively, themselves.
In an essay on seven kilometres north-east, “Tragedy at a distance,” on the realtimetalk.net blog, I note that Vercoe tells us very little about the dead women, although through her identification with them we, like her, become sympathetic. We can go beyond sympathy (we could be equally naïve travellers) to empathy for Vercoe, because we learn so much about her, her motives, very specific feelings of pain and guilt. But we know little about the women, nothing of the few survivors or the relatives. This tragedy is Vercoe’s, not the women’s, for the ignorance for which she berates herself, having blindly fallen in love with a country, its customs, music and language, yet which has its secrets and will keep her at a distance, even threaten her. In this way our feeling for Vercoe’s plight provides the potential for us to develop empathy for the slain women, should we be so motivated by her performance.
Similarly with Mike Parr’s Daydream Island, we sympathise at a distance with refugees via a performer who identifies with them to such an extent that he willingly endures very real pain, sublimating the experience by becoming a work of art himself. Parr tellingly writes to Edward Scheer about the shape of his performance, “…I felt that this structure of theatrical convolution was exactly like our treatment of the wandering arrivals to our northern shores…wounds that are constantly opened and closed… boats turned back and people left adrift…the collusive, muffled reportage.”
Parr and Vercoe are stand-ins not just for the people for whom they care so deeply, but also for us; they are willing scapegoats embodying our fears and guilt. The emotional outcome in tragic drama for the audience is supposed to be the “calm pity” espoused by Aristotle—catharsis purging us of the pity and fear experienced upon witnessing the horrors of tragedy, relieving us of excessive emotions and returning us to a rational state. There is some truth in this, but some tragedies are more tragic than others, their effects long lasting. Performance art can likewise stay with us, more sharply perhaps because of the real pain witnessed. For some of us, to have experienced such events is enough. The demands of the experience and the work’s resolution—something satisfyingly complete, cruelly beautiful even—require nothing more. We might feel a “calm pity,” absolved for having seen the work.
Elaine Scarry reveals concern about “the danger that artists so convincingly express suffering, they may themselves collectively come to be thought of as the most authentic class of sufferers, and thus may inadvertently appropriate concern away from others in radical need of assistance.”
Is this an overstatement, that the artist rather than being a conduit for empathy stands in its way, becoming a substitute for action, the aforementioned scapegoat? It’s nothing less than a reminder that art alone is insufficient when it comes to developing empathy in a population. If the millions whom we are told attend and participate in the arts truly cared, then would we have the growing empathy deficit that has been likewise statistically tallied?
It’s fascinating that programs developed around the world to nurture empathy are not unlike works encountered in live art. Roman Krznaric, the author of Empathy: A Handbook for Revolution (Random House, 2014), reports that some seven million people in 130 cities have experienced the museum-based work Dialogue in the Dark (www.dialogue-in-the-dark.com) for an hour each since 1988, guided by the blind as they negotiate everyday tasks and sensations in total darkness. Krznaric argues the necessity for creating “experiential adventures” in order to develop our capacity for empathy, to put ourselves in the position of others, to not simply sympathise, but understand. He cites a widely adopted Canadian scheme, The Roots of Empathy, commenced in 1995, putting groups of school children in regular contact with babies (“what is it feeling, thinking; why is it crying?”); results included a claimed drop in bullying. Another program put Israeli and Palestinian citizens in contact with each other for long conversations in over one million phone calls. Krznaric recommends we move beyond the introspection so favoured in the 20th century into what he calls “outrespection,” or stepping outside ourselves.
Krznaric writes in the Guardian Australia (“Is Australia losing its empathy?” 26 Feb) that former Paul Keating speechwriter Don Watson told him, “If you wanted to disenfranchise refugees, and leave the public thinking they have no rights, then call them ‘illegal’ over and over again.” Politicians, Watson says, do everything they can to “keep any kind of empathy at bay,” finding language that “dulls the instinct to ask, ‘What if that were me and my children in one of those boats, or in one of those detention centres?’”
Climate Change too is an empathy issue. Empathy is an act of the imagination at once latent and culturally developed by upbringing, education and art; if you cannot imagine the suffering of Pacific Islanders whose homes are falling below sea level or the agonies our own future generations are likely to face, then you will not care about their fate. With Western lifestyles focused on living in the moment, in yourself and in your space, whether actual or virtual, there’s a limit to how far one’s sympathy, let alone empathy will reach. You might share a digital space with people far and wide, but well within the Facebook and Twitter niche you have created or been coopted into.
Sympathy is one thing, empathy another. We can feel sympathy for Pacific Islanders and refugees, sign up to online protest campaigns and donate to campaign funds, and believe we’ve done enough. The great social scientist Richard Sennett distinguishes between sympathy and empathy, asserting, “Curiosity figures more strongly in empathy than sympathy,” a notion resonant with Krznaric’s ‘outrespection.’
Sennett writes, “Both sympathy and empathy convey recognition, and both forge a bond, but one is an embrace, the other an encounter. Sympathy overcomes differences through imaginative acts of identification; empathy attends to another person on his or her own terms. Sympathy has usually been thought a stronger sentiment than empathy, because ‘I feel your pain’ puts the stress on what I feel; it activates one’s own ego. Empathy is a more demanding exercise, at least in listening; the listener has to get outside him- or her self” (Together, The Ritual, Pleasures & Politics of Cooperation, Penguin 2013).
With empathy, adds Sennett, “we don’t experience the same satisfaction of closure, of wrapping things up.” Empathy “is a cooler sentiment than sympathy’s often instant identifications…” He argues it arises from open-ended dialogue, a desire to learn and to be known “without forcing ourselves into the mould of being like” those we are attempting to understand.
There are limits on art when it comes to making us empathic; it can’t provide the detailed information and dialogue that understanding requires, but it can go part of the way: sympathy yes, empathy by degrees. Some live art and new varieties of participatory theatre do bring people from very different circumstances, classes and cultures together in activities not unlike those described by Krznaric.
We cannot expect art to save the world. Nor should we accept art itself as an adequate response to the suffering of others. Of course there’s only so much any of us can do—although the density and speed of life in the West denies us a sense of what we might actually be able to do. In the first instance we need at least to recognise the differences between sympathy and empathy, and be aware when “our instinct to ask” is being repressed—by politicians or by our own feelings of helplessness.
version 1.0, seven kilometres north-east, devisor, performer Kym Vercoe, Seymour Centre, Sydney, 8-22 March; Mike Parr, Daydream Island, Performance Space, 30 Ways with Time and Space, Carriageworks, Sydney, 30 Nov, 2013
TV’s True Detective has started off a conversation, the idea that long-form television series can be compared to the ‘old novel’—most notably 19th century serialisations—offering viewers the chance to develop along with the characters on a week by week basis as the episodes screen live to air: to confront their lies and peculiarities, to see structural and psychological changes, to find compassion even when they do diabolical things.
Charles Dickens and Alexandre Dumas’ novels often started out as instalments in magazines or newspapers, giving readers the opportunity to see the characters gradually emerge over months or even years, before the entire series was published as a novel. Television in the US (and it’s starting to change in Australia) is giving writers the freedom to challenge conventional TV wisdom by offering philosophical meanderings and deep psychological insights, compassion for the building complexity of characters who are initially difficult to like, the chance to draw on a number of intertwining perspectives, and movement between main and minor characters as the series unfolds. Central to many of these shows—Girls, Homeland, True Detective, Rake, Redfern Now—is an argument for empathy for those stuck in a wasteland of socio-economic-moralistic ambiguity, where the rage against the machine is no longer heard, where characters—and viewers—are no longer sure where they are placed when it comes to the slippery line between good and evil.
Miah Madden, Kylie Belling, Craig Mclachlan, Consequence, Redfern Now, A Blackfella Films production for ABC TV
We are all refugees
In Rake, Frank the priest (Tony Barry)—who Cleaver visits regularly to ‘confess’ —argues that “we’re all refugees in one way or another.” And it’s this idea that underpins most successful contemporary TV series, where we grow to care intimately about characters who are outsiders, drifting aimlessly, despite (and because of) their exposed flaws.
In Redfern Now, the residents of the inner-city suburb are shown to be displaced even on their own turf. Aaron (Wayne Blair) is ostracised within his Indigenous community, for being a copper and for letting a man die on his watch. When he walks down the street he takes his granddaughter “as a shield” against the hostility of local residents. Allie (Lisa Flanagan) tells him he’s “not a proper blackfella,” even when he has just come to the front door to help after her husband has assaulted her. Listening to karaoke at the local pub, Aaron is refused bar service and Allie stops mid-song to confront those judging her bruised face. They’re united in their exclusion: Allie asks if she can join his “leper colony.” When they go out on their first date to a ‘flash’ Japanese restaurant in Surry Hills, Aaron says to Allie as they are walking in, “We’re Brazilian, not blackfellas—remember?” to put her at ease.
In Girls, Hannah (Lena Dunham), an aspirational writer, doesn’t fit into the NYC ideal of heavy-hitting glamorous go-getter and stands on the outside looking in. She is often seen naked, her voluptuous, soft un-Hollywood body a revelation with its unsexualised bulges. Watching her with Dunham’s neutral gaze, we want to be exposed to her, even when she’s grating—and she can be (in that funny, neurotic way that Woody Allen and George Costanza can be). When Hannah’s editor dies, she feels nothing, only concerned about whether her e-book will still be published. Attending her editor’s funeral, she cries, “Oh my God! I think I see Zadie Smith. That is definitely her.” Just when we’ve had enough of Hannah’s solipsism, the focus pulls back and we see her in bed, counting everything in eights, contending with OCD, sticking a Q-tip in her ear so hard she ruptures an eardrum, alone, cast aside and so vulnerable it wounds us too.
The limits of compassion
The ABC’s Rake has become ever more expansive, series two taking Cleaver Green to the limits of our (and other characters’) compassion. He’s like the Aussie larrikin (the questionable stereotype that our identity is apparently based on: mischievous, rowdy, a lad) taken to the extreme, to the point where he’s completely devoid of charm, in a slow process of disintegration. When Cleaver gets out of jail he’s repeatedly punished for his casual neglect: by the young man (Dan Wylie) who stands (too close) by him in prison and then kills himself; by the son (Keegan Joyce) who accepts Rake’s failures with complete and unnerving clarity; by the wife (Caroline Brazier) who has literally moved on and sold the family home; by the woman (Jane Allsop) who refuses to sleep with him and ends up in hospital three times as victim of Rake’s suspected domestic violence. At one point, the show’s sleazy TV show host, Cal McGregor (Damien Garvey), asks, “I mean, what country are we living in, people? The United States of Self-Interest?” It’s only when Cleaver finds an emotional connection and empathy with his clients—one, a priest (Paul Sonkilla), who reveals his brother, also a priest, was a paedophile—that he starts to win his cases. And the wider scope of Rake, which gives the second series its pace, is that it’s always up for seeing through systemic oppression and hypocrisy, exposing upper class cruelty, the cover-ups and silent witnesses among the silks, the Gina Rineharts, the tax lawyers, the priests who look past sexual abuse, the pollies who rely on polling for their shifting morality.
In Homeland we are continually forced to navigate large-scale hypocrisies and cross narrative boundaries where the line between good and bad is not stretched thin, it is completely gone. Both CIA ‘case manager’ Carrie (Claire Danes) and ‘terrorist’ Brody (Damian Lewis) are shown to be worthy of respect yet deeply conflicted, and their lives are often paralleled: Carrie is forced against her will into a mental institution for bipolar disorder, Brody is strapped down in a high-rise slum in Caracas, reliant on heroin to deal with the horrors of incarceration. Carrie and Brody are seen as the heroic anti-heroes because they are guided by intuition and how they relate to others, compared with the failures of the large impersonal corporations they work for. The turning inwards and isolationism of US culture and policy at large after September 11 is exposed in Brody’s being turned over by the US to his Islamic torturers. Forced to perform his prayer rituals while cowering in a corner of his locked garage, he is seen as unforgivable: a US marine who has converted to Islam.
The gender divide
With True Detective, the main characters Rust (Matthew McConaughey) and Marty (Woody Harrelson) come to us fully formed. Like babies seen as ‘old souls,’ they appear as if they’ve been here before, lived other lives. This is accentuated by the opening sequence with its cinematography by Australian Adam Arkapaw (Animal Kingdom; Lore): we feel like we inhabit the landscape, and the language, of these men. The opening image arrests us. We begin in a cane field, looking at a tableau of a naked girl, her body purple-hued, huddled in prayer position, delicate antlers crowning her head. A deer in the rifle sight, she sets the detectives off into a meandering expose of Southern comfort and culture, how men relate to one another, and how they fail to communicate. As the men look longingly at the pretty, dead prostitute laid out in extreme closeup on the slab, she is, in all her glory, ‘fridged.’
But when the women are alive, they get to the heart of the matter very quickly, and perhaps this is a problem for the shape of the overall narrative. It takes Marty’s wife Maggie (Michelle Monaghan), who’s not a detective, five minutes to find out what Rust has been concealing from Marty for months. Perhaps if the series let Maggie speak more, she would get past the bullshit and solve the crime, and the show would be over in an hour. The exciting thing about True Detective is that the men are deeply flawed, contrary, enigmatic and compelling characters—but portraying women as ‘whores,’ ‘crazy bitches,’ ‘teenage sluts,’ ‘corrupted innocents,’ or the open-all-hours attractive women that sagging Marty seems to seduce with ease, ultimately reduces the series’ dramatic possibilities.
The demanding viewer
While Australian TV series writers and creators don’t yet have the lit-celeb status of those starting to tour here (like Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad and David Simon, The Wire), shows like Rake and Redfern Now are pushing characters beyond the usual conventions of prime-time TV, blending dysfunctional family dynamics, occasional tragedy and off-the-wall humour. Like their 19th century counterparts, some people are happy to view their show at the same time each week, sometimes waiting months for the final instalment. Meanwhile the impact of iView, Apple TV and illegal downloads means more viewers are binge-watching entire series, just to keep up with social media conversations. Either way, the new-found popularity of TV series is forcing writers to keep up, to create characters that invite intimate connections, stimulate discussion and open up new narrative possibilities for increasingly demanding viewers.
A waterwheel can convert the energy of falling or free-flowing water into expedient forms of power. The limitation on its functionality however is its dependence on flow, which effects where it can be located. Igneous, Inkahoots and Suzon Fuks’ ambitious online project, Waterwheel, now in its third year, offers a global platform to share ideas, perspectives, performances and artistic interpretations with water as its theme, designed to build awareness for conservation and other issues. In a virtual platform the project assumes every location and is thus ripe with potentiality.
The Waterwheel website is free to use and designed to be participatory. It calls on everyone—artists, scientists and environmentalists, students and academics, anyone anywhere—to make a splash and start a wave. It’s a forum for exchange, expression and experimentation. This year Waterwheel hosted its annual week-long symposium in line with the UN’s World Water Day on 22 March. Performance artist Ulay opened proceedings with his listing of the words for water in 100 languages. Within just a few minutes, our need for interdisciplinary co-operation and compromise was clear.
Workshops, real-time discussion and live, networked performances are presented on the Tap section of the site. For easy access The Wheel has featured works and artists. But the hub of Waterwheel is its Media Centre where more than 3,000 artistic items are stored and tagged. You can search, comment and share your own content by uploading video, audio, photography, animation, slideshows, performance, music, text and other media. The Fountains section list events all over the world on a flashing map. The website claims, “There are no boundaries. Waterwheel flows along its natural course.” This it does, if you have access to high-speed internet, with Flash updated, on a non-Apple product. For Aussies, various symposium events were inclusive, if you’re not too fussed about circadian rhythms.
The artist and the water engineer
It’s widely accepted that there are major problems surrounding the world’s water and societies’ views on the rights to its exploitation. These problems are not well understood, particularly with international, inter-actional specificity. Many will have heard of the human rights issues of the Three Gorges Dam or pollution of the Mediterranean. But how many are aware of Bangladeshi arsenicosis or Punjab’s ever-decreasing water table? Technically, our engineers and innovators are providing solutions, from billboards that collect water from night air in arid areas to unglazed ceramic pots used to dramatically reduce evaporation in irrigation. Politically, the Mexican-American experimental pulse recharge of the Colorado River demonstrates progress, as does the EU’s oft lauded if flawed Water Framework Directive. While we didn’t come across the specifics of any such projects on Waterwheel, the website is not designed solely to inform on water policy and politics, but rather to build awareness and show art that provokes thought, and in this way it has been successful.
Waterwheel triggered florid debate between the two of us about the purpose and function of art in communicating big issues. Ben, a water engineer, argued that catchy, shareable images and infotainment-style videos are more effective in communicating to a broad audience the severity of water issues we face globally. He suggested we watch SABMiller’s Energy Food Nexus video instead. To humour Ben’s lumping together of art with advertising, Felicity, a musician, recalled the meme of an African kid with raised eyebrows beside a woman who appears to be an aid worker or tourist. The meme has a re-fillable speech-bubble, a favourite of which says, “You mean to tell me you poop in perfectly clean water?”
We agreed that decision-making and practical action should be based on informed opinions and not nebulous ideologies but Ben found little in the content of Waterwheel’s discussions that demonstrated this sort of information. Scientific ideas were present, but almost as an aside. Artworks were “pretty, amusing and interesting,” but few educated with directness. In Art and Ecology, a panel discussed for 40 minutes the idea of floating off messages in bottles. Ben saw this endeavour as little more than “justified pollution,” and, angered, suggested we look up a story about a load of rubber ducks that fell into the sea and were later found on far-away coastlines, to learn about ocean currents. Dropping hundreds of bottles, or even one, into a water course for the purpose of demonstrating that water moves, is redundant. In obliquely saying that this method of education is acceptable, it validates both waste and mindlessness. Yes, even when the pollution is ‘accidental’ or the by-product of didactic art.
Many artworks in Waterwheel were to Ben’s mind dreamy, sensualist expressions of artistic autonomy that did not deliver facts about the shittiness of the creek we find ourselves up. He wondered where the discussions about agricultural processes were, particularly because 70% of world water is consumed in this way. Smart decisions in choosing between spray, drip, gate or sluice gate irrigation can make the difference in sustaining cultures. Economic incentives need implementation to ensure methods for irrigation address local environmental circumstances. When Ben tried to throw these ideas into discussion at the symposium, nobody engaged. What was wrong with his mode of communication then?
As fonts of knowledge, our scientists and technicians are productive, but at times the implications of their studies get lost in data: their communication fails them. Dry data, even when concerning water, is still dry and indigestible. If artists’ aim is to explore the beauty and power of water, Waterwheel provides some wonderful pieces, but if it’s promotion of environmental stewardship, the audience must be engaged with the nature of the crisis we face.
Art at work with water
Felicity approached Waterwheel’s 2014 Water Week Symposium with an aesthetic eye and was excited by several contributions. Submissions and discussion investigated our collective relationship with this constant but volatile resource as an environmental issue, political dilemma, universal theme and symbol of life. There were several videos of pilgrims carrying containers on their heads and plenty of folks splashing by the seaside. Some artists shared work that only tangentially referenced wetness.
A short video of the Sonic Water project by Kim Pörksen & Sven Meyer posted by Esteban Yepes Montoya calls water “the blood of the Earth” but counters this natural and embodied metaphor with geometric designs produced in a bottle-cap of liquid that is manipulated by morphing sonic frequencies. These Cymatics make sound visible and play upon pseudo-scientific mysticism for the unveiling of natural truth (www.sonicwater.org).
Ian Clothier posted a view of the South Island of Aotearoa, New Zealand, taken from space which hints at the scale of our fragility (http://water-wheel.net/media_items/view/4533). Ana Laura Cantera’s work No Eres Perenne (We won’t live forever) looks at how we pervert and contaminate water resources through over-exploitation. Her Flows in Return explores sustenance and decay in the natural world. (water-wheel.net/media_items/view/4423, water-wheel.net/media_items/view/4419)
Silke Bauer documents kids running around with buckets trying to catch paper cut-outs of invasive species released into a pond in Bio Invaders 2. Environmental pest risks are communicated here simply and effectively to kids through play. The video’s appeal is in children’s laughter but its beauty is in its educative function for subjects and audience. When we still hear anecdotes of inner city school children being unable to link hamburgers with cattle or tap water with rivers, this sort of interaction is crucial.
Action from inspiration?
One of Waterwheel’s aims is to inspire involvement and activism. Effective change requires the community’s involvement on a number of levels. These run from community’s passive reception of political or organisational imposition through to consultation to feedback and re-design, joint planning and finally to self-determination. Water projects worldwide fail regularly due to a lack of integrated involvement. When a population is not involved and engaged, it’s easier to manipulate through persuasive imposition.
The engineer in the room reckons we won’t solve problems by drawing pictures of them. The artist asks, how else can we help? You need to tell us. Waterwheel as platform has highlighted the very different ways we approach addressing and solving these problems. The discourses of the parties clash, but their intents do not. We need flow. We need engagement. We need empathy and action. Waterwheel sparked conversation and argument over vital topics that pass under our noses as we check out hot pictures of friends in swimwear on social media.
In the end, we talked not so much about the works as about our work in interpreting them. The power of Waterwheel is in its invitation for participation. But has it reached an optimal audience and participant scope: a critical mass of involvement ready to turn its wheel after the week’s discussions have ended? The project continues.
When considering empathy in relation to horror films, it’s worth asking the question, “Whose side are you on?” How, in other words, do filmmakers position the audience vis-a-vis monster and victim? Greg McLean’s outback nightmare Wolf Creek and its sequel Wolf Creek 2 form a good basis for such a discussion, presenting as they do two sides of the same horror coin.
Wolf Creek (2005) is possibly Australia’s best and most brutal horror film. In her analysis of the film for the Australian Screen Classics series (Currency Press, 2011; review RT 108, p20) Sonya Hartnett highlights the way Wolf Creek undercuts an audience’s expected response to a horror movie—”the thrill of being terrified from a safe distance”—through its conscious association with real events. She goes on to question whether Wolf Creek is for this reason a bona fide horror film, or “simply a movie which depicts something ghastly?” While it’s not uncommon for horror filmmakers to signal their work as “based on actual events,” Wolf Creek references the backpacker murders in NSW in the 1990s and the Peter Falconio disappearance in 2001 with such conviction as to ally it more with a film such as Snowtown (2011) than, say, Friday the 13th (1980).
Playing upon various pressure points within non-indigenous Australian culture—fear of the bush, with its attendant lost child narratives (see Picnic at Hanging Rock and One Night the Moon) and the emblematic figures of the lone bushman and larrikin ocker—the film forces the viewer into a space of such chilling verisimilitude that there is no option but to side with the hunted.
Wolf Creek 2 (2013), while virtually mirroring its predecessor in subject matter, is markedly different in treatment. It comes across as a comic book version of the first film, with brighter colours, plentiful gags, seat-of-the-pants car chases, huge trucks and explosions. It’s a much more conventional slasher, a textbook illustration of Linda Badley’s description in Film, Horror and the Body Fantastic of a sub-genre that “came to rely almost solely on suspense based in the assurance that the next scene (or sequel) would be graphically violent or fantastically gruesome” (Badley, Greenwood, 1995). And so it goes that the terrifying credibility of the first film is blasted away in an eruption of splashy effects where the bogeyman becomes a crude caricature with his primary victim (unconventionally male, it must be noted) remarkably resilient and somewhat implausibly quick-witted.
The question of identification, of “Whose side are you on?”, is a confusing one in Wolf Creek 2, specifically in relation to the murderous Mick Taylor (John Jarratt). The opening scene has two bored, bent cops attempting to set Mick up for speeding. It’s a moment of persecution that positions Mick, momentarily at least, as the object of police victimisation, cementing an impression of him as anti-establishment folk figure. A raft of cheesy one-liners reinforce this as the film progresses. Conversely, however, Mick is also Ugly Australia writ large, spitting diatribes about “foreign vermin” in relation to his tourist victims: “All them bodies. They deserved it. Foreign bastards. Noxious bloody weeds. Somebody’s gotta keep Australia beautiful.” The grotesque “Aussie history quiz” that Mick puts his English prisoner though parodies the infamous citizenship test introduced by the Howard Government in 2007, with its questions about the first year of white settlement and Don Bradman.
With this political reference, McLean seems to be making a larger point about the Australian hostility to outsiders which finds its current incarnation in asylum seeker policy. But does Mick’s xenophobic schtick engender empathy or even sympathy for Mick’s victims—and by extension, perhaps, the asylum seekers who are denied entry to Australia? I’m not so sure.
Towards the end of her book on Wolf Creek, Hartnett speaks of the problematic nature of the text that appears at the end of the film suggesting the events depicted actually occurred (in contrast to the less specific “based on actual events” at the film’s beginning). It’s a feature that’s repeated in Wolf Creek 2. Hartnett argues, with justification, that such a tactic “seems to detract from the truth of those who really did endure those events on which the film is based…It feels like a cheapening of their story to force fictional characters among them and claim that those suffered too.” When viewed in light of the sequel’s farcical approach, such a ploy for believability seems doubly misplaced. The probably intentional resemblance of the young German couple in the film to Ivan Milat’s victims Gabor Neugerbauer and Anja Habschied introduces another layer of dubiousness.
Stylistically, Wolf Creek 2 is a perfectly assured slasher film, a spectacle likely to produce excitement in those new to the genre and numbness in more hardened viewers. What’s lacking is any lasting sense of fear or, empathy, a bit of a problem given the film’s knowing entanglement with very real tragedy.
Wolf Creek 2, director Greg McLean, writers Greg McLean, Aaron Sterns, cinematography Toby Oliver, music Johnny Klimek, Roadshow Films, Australian release February 2014
Tilda Cobham-Hervey, Del Herbert-Jane, 52 Tuesdays
photo Bryan Mason
Tilda Cobham-Hervey, Del Herbert-Jane, 52 Tuesdays
There’s change in the air in South Australia. With much credit due to the South Australian Film Corporation’s now defunct FilmLab program for emerging filmmakers (a workshop-based program with funding—now ceased—that led to the development and production of several short and long-form screen works), a new generation of feature film writers, producers and directors have not just appeared on the local scene, but have made formidable marks on the international stage.
Perhaps the most prolific member of this new breed is Adelaide-based writer, producer and director Sophie Hyde. Her most recent project, the dramatic feature film 52 Tuesdays, recently garnered her the 2014 Sundance Film Festival World Cinema Dramatic Directing Award. This innovative film sees fellow local Tilda Cobham-Hervey play the role of 16-year-old Billie, a teenager who struggles with her mother’s (Del Herbert-Jane) decision to change gender. Billie goes to live with her dad for a year while the change occurs and mother and daughter vow to meet every Tuesday for that year. Notably, the film was actually shot on consecutive Tuesdays for 52 weeks with a script that was developed and revised as production progressed.
Hyde explains how she and co-writer Matt Cormack entered the SAFC FilmLab with only the framework of shooting one day a week in mind. “We didn’t develop characters for a long time, or story, because we wanted to investigate why we would want to make a film like that, and what it was that we were interested in.” For Hyde, the characters of Billie and James “represented individual people who were challenging the idea that we have to be a certain way, or that we have to stick to the rules about how we are supposed to live.”
The production of the film was given the green light based on a one-page story document, an initial 20-25 pages of script and detailed character descriptions. While Hyde and Cormack had decided on the ending of the film, the journey to get there was unclear, with some storylines falling away as the year of Tuesdays progressed. Hyde describes this style of film devising and production as exciting and invigorating, with the film’s low budget (approximately $700,000 in total) contributing to her ability to experiment and innovate. “You have people that you’re responsible to in terms of the investors but it’s not like someone is telling you what to do… [The film] didn’t have to succeed on anyone else’s terms.”
Hyde is one of the founders and co-directors of the Adelaide-based Closer Productions, a company that has produced a range of successful documentary and drama projects, most of which are character-focused. Her feature documentary and directing debut Life in Movement (co-director Bryan Mason, 2011), which explored the work and tragic death of dancer and choreographer Tanja Liedtke, won the 2011 Foxtel Australian Documentary Prize. She also co-produced the film as well as Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure (directed by Closer Productions’ Matt Bate), another FilmLab project that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2011. Hyde has a range of other credits as writer, producer and/or director of award-winning short form projects, and plans to continue working across these roles. She comments, “I love directing but I don’t want to direct all the time as it’s consuming and it’s raw. I like talking about ideas, financing and working with people to develop stuff…I think to be a director who only works as a director, you need to be a director for hire.”
Sophie Hyde
photo Bryan Mason
Sophie Hyde
52 Tuesdays is a project that Hyde describes as personal and all-consuming. Perhaps one of the most striking aspects of the film is its representation of teenage sexuality. Billie and her two school friends Jasmine (Imogen Archer) and Josh (Sam Althuizen) display high levels of agency and control when they engage in a series of sexual experiments, which are recorded on handycam by Billie. Hyde comments that “(audience members) say to us ‘it’s very frank!’ (whereas) very little is explicit in the film. Tilda is never even close to naked [but] there is a feeling that [this kind of sexuality] is part of life, and some people are not used to that.”
These scenes were drawn out of the director’s workshops with the film’s teenage actors, giving them a sense of authenticity. For Hyde, the objective was to explore the feeling of sexual experience, rather than its surface appearance. “It was really important to me that these guys in the film had a chance to explore…what they actually wanted with one another, and with themselves, rather than what they were supposed to want or how it is supposed to look. I don’t even know if young women, in particular, think about how it feels. Maybe that is a gross generalisation but I worry about that.” Certainly, the film’s content struck a chord with youth audiences at the recent Berlin Film Festival. A youth jury awarded the film the Crystal Bear for Best Film in the Generations 14+ category. Hyde comments that “(in Berlin) we were being interviewed by teenage writers…there was a huge amount of respect for their opinions and that conversation.”
To date, Hyde has been surprised to find audiences in general “really warm and embracing of the film.” She believes that 52 Tuesdays offers an opportunity for audience members to reflect on their own family relations. “I hope what we have made is a film about this family—a girl, a mum—that is told from the inside. There is a chance to look at how we live and how we relate to each other, our parents and our children, and the kind of responsibility we have to one another.”
While preparing for 52 Tuesdays’ imminent cinema release, Sophie Hyde is busy developing projects for both feature film and television formats. She is also a producer on Closer Productions’ upcoming feature documentary Sam Klemke’s Time Machine, to be directed by colleague Matt Bate. She says that “there are always other things to do but I would like to make another drama film.”
52 Tuesdays will be in cinemas from May 1. Audiences can also participate in My 52 Tuesdays, an online extension of the film, available at: http://my52tuesdays.com/my52tuesdays/
52 Tuesdays, director, co-writer Sophie Hyde, co-writer, producer Matthew Cormack, director of photography, editor, producer Bryan Mason, producer Rebecca Summerton, Closer Productions
Bryony Kimmings, Taylor Houchen, Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model
photo Richard Davenport
Bryony Kimmings, Taylor Houchen, Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model
The memory of a critic reserves permanent house seats for those works that provide an introduction to some new form or practice, no matter that it’s old hat to everyone else. Even more treasured are those experiences that provide some novelty shared by a wider artistic community, a ‘where does this even come from?’ effect that gets everybody talking. But there’s a place of privilege that can only be accorded those rare works that don’t just grab that collective attention, but feel as if they’re going to shape the practice of some or even many of those in the room in months and years to come.
These works plant seeds whose flowering can’t be predicted. Rather than inspiring imitators, they enable mutations in the practices of those who enter their gravitational field. There was no doubt that just such a moment had occurred when UK performance artist Bryony Kimmings brought two works to two very different festivals in Melbourne this year.
One is a melancholic/comic retrospective on Kimmings’ own history that expertly milks the pain inherent in any nostalgic turn. The other is a work whose investigative premise leads to a transformation that will likely influence everything she produces from now on.
Sex Idiot was an entry in the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and is perhaps the first and last time that a performance artist will command the main room of the Melbourne Town Hall. It began after an STI test came back positive and Kimmings embarked on a mission to contact her former lovers—all forty-something—and produce a new artwork to honour each who responded.
Kimmings’ sense of visual design is a maximalist one, and the many wardrobe transformations that take place here include lederhosen, toreador garb, bride, shaman. The stage is littered with flowers and the steady accumulation of props takes on more and more of a ritualistic aspect as the work progresses. In some ways this is an exorcism, in others a funeral.
She’s certainly a fearless and original performer, delivering a monologue through a transparent speculum, beating her face with a bouquet and in a jawdropping stretch of audience participation managing to collect enough pubic hair from her viewers’ bodies to fashion a voluminous moustache.
It’s not theatre as therapy. Kimmings reveals enough of the unpleasantness that likely accompanies anyone’s relationship history to let us know she’s no angel, and when several of her past lovers make it clear in no uncertain terms that they never want to hear from her again, you can imagine there’s probably a reason. Kimmings isn’t revelling in any of that, or seeking approval or forgiveness, and indeed the work as a whole avoids the usual narrative of self-discovery or transformation, even though the artist herself is constantly morphing in front of us and as an audience we are perpetually discovering new things about her.
Bryony Kimmings, Sex Idiot
courtesy the artist
Bryony Kimmings, Sex Idiot
Sex Idiot makes us laugh. It doesn’t end with a lesson, or pose an obvious question. By its very existence, though, it invites us to consider the very act of looking back, and how what is seen will always be shaped by the eyes that do the looking.
Kimmings’ inclusion in the inaugural Festival of Live Art (FOLA) turns in the opposite direction. It’s just as bravura an enterprise as Sex Idiot, but here Kimmings is joined on the stage by her tween niece Taylor. Auntie Bry began to wonder how the world today appeared to her at the time nine-year-old relative, and took to seeking out answers. What she found was enough to inspire a terrible fury and sadness. This is a work so fuelled by a deep and abiding love and a fathomless need to make things better that these emotions spill over into the crowd, who are left weeping, shaking with anger or buoyed by affection in turns. Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model doesn’t tell its audience a problem and then retreat into the safety of ‘raising awareness.’ Kimmings’ rage is too gut-knotting for that. She’s made something that makes its audience want to do something.
The world in which Taylor is growing up is one where she is a prime marketing demographic, a potential sex object, a being whose agency must be methodically stripped away and whose function is to both consume and be consumed. The icons offered her—the Katy Perrys of stardom—have celebrity so glamorous that Taylor’s is the first generation to list ‘fame’ above ‘kindness’ as a desirable trait. It was this finding that inspired Kimmings to collaborate with her niece in order to produce a new role model for girls her age. With Taylor determining the figure’s various attributes, Kimmings set about making her a reality.
Children, it turns out, are surprisingly conservative. Taylor’s prized traits included ‘tradition’ and ‘safety’; the role model, named Catherine Bennett, was to wear glasses, work as a palaeontologist and enjoy tuna pasta. She’s also a singer, and as the work proceeds Catherine Bennett becomes more of a tangible presence, eventually appearing to perform one of her songs and lead the audience in a dance routine.
But Catherine Bennett’s reality extends beyond the stage. To many people Taylor’s age, CB is as real as any other popstar—she has a sizeable online presence, tours schools and has been invited to Parliament. One of Taylor’s demands was that the creation make celebrity friends, and Bennett counts Yoko Ono among her admirers.
Against the scale of Kimmings’ accomplishment is the simple presence of Taylor on stage. Throughout the work, the pair dance together, play games, orate, joke, mime warfare, share silence. The visual palette is just as rich as that deployed in Sex Idiot—against a fairytale forest, the two will become princesses, Victorian boys, knights, stars. But the greatest transformation is that of the Bryony Kimmings of Sex Idiot when placed in the presence of the small person who usually stands behind and to one side, always unconsciously glancing at her aunt to see if she’s pulled off that last move right.
By collaborating with Taylor, Kimmings was impelled to make a work that moved beyond the self-examining, the autobiographical and to create something that in the end was much larger than both of them. Catherine Bennett took on a reality that could not have been predicted, and in watching this creation myth playing out her audience can’t help but want to add to its mass. Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model gives its audience a reason to care deeply about somebody they’ve never met, and to want to change the world in order to protect them, and how could any artist not be spurred on to act differently as a result? I have no idea what this will mean for Melbourne’s own artistic output, but the outpouring of emotion and praise that followed this work ensures that I can’t wait to see what flowerings are yet to come.
Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Sex Idiot, writer, performer Bryony Kimmings, Melbourne Town Hall, 27 March-5 April; Festival of Live Art: Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model, writer, director, performer Bryony Kimmings, performer Taylor Houchen, music, co-directionTom Parkinson, lighting Marty Langthorne, design David Curtis Ring, Theatre Works, 25 March-6 April
Attending a live art event? Make sure you go prepared. You’ll need conversational skills with subjects ranging from the banal to the topical to the personal; comfortable clothing so you’re ready for anything; and a special talent wouldn’t go astray. Can you tell a story, play an instrument? How’s your donut tossing?
Live art is all about you, the audience: your participation, your input, your content. This is framed to varying degrees by the artist in forms ranging from large-scale spectacular to intimate conversation. Well, these seemed to be the dominant modes of presentation during the Arts House weekend of the Festival of Live Art (FOLA).
The spangles
You couldn’t get a bigger or more glittery work than the long-awaited Game Show, conceived by Tristan Meecham, the team from Aphids and producer Bec Reid. For months we’ve been hearing how Meecham was going to offer up all his personal possessions as prizes in his very own game show creation and as we enter the theatre it’s all on display.
We first see Meecham backstage via video, his hair hilariously painted on, his teeth whitened to glow in the dark. He’s accompanied by Jon & Jon (their real names), an adagio acrobatics duo resplendent in purple leotards who provide all manner of elevations for Meecham. The cast is huge, with razzle-dazzle dance provided by the Body Electric group and THECHOIR hand-clapping in shiny purple robes led by Jonathan Welch. And then there are the 50 contestants.
The games are ridiculous and designed to get rid of participants fast. For the first game, the Glorious Donut Hole, Meecham dons a unicorn horn to become the centre spike in a round of quoits as participants fling fake oversized donuts at him. In The Heroic Spilling of One Thousand Imperial Balls the participants must, via all manner of suggestive gyrations, spill the ping pong balls that are housed in boxes belted to their waists. The adjudication begins fairly but becomes random as the group diminishes until there are only two contestants who are then given one minute to bring whatever they want of Meecham’s onto the stage from the showcase area. While they are allowed help from a “Jon” it does pretty much rule out Meecham’s larger household items. But that’s okay, they’d be boring prizes anyway. After trying to guess which item Meecham values more (allowing him another little cheat—he can always lie to save a precious thing) there’s only one contestant left standing and they must go up against Meecham in a celebrity smile off. On the night I saw the show, Meecham faced stiff competition and the contestant left the happy owner of Meecham’s childhood troll doll collection and the portrait he painted in Year 10 art class of Dame Edna Everage.
Leavening the hardcore silliness are video interviews with Meecham’s family and partner who don’t hold back on their character assessments of our host and his lifelong pursuit of the spotlight. Most illuminating is an interview with a real TV Game show producer, Jess Murphy. Her comments on the nature of fame, the machinations of media and the role of the participants as fodder gave the piece that extra edge of critique, even if the show relied a little too heavily on it near the conclusion. But overall Game Show delivered on its promise of high-reality farce with a healthy dose of explicit and implicit commentary on the pursuit of fame and material wealth, as well as challenging ideas around the agency of the ‘participant.’
Sam Halmarack & the Miserablites, FOLA
photo Ponch Hawkes
Sam Halmarack & the Miserablites, FOLA
The jangles
Sam Halmarack has come all the way from Bristol to do a show, but his band, the Miserablites, have gone AWOL. It’s a simple premise, well executed including huddled whispers from front of house staff and a delayed start. The first time I see the show (I accidentally get swept in the door for a second showing later that night) the audience is almost as uneasy as Halmarack. We know it’s a ruse, but his painful awkwardness allows for doubt, or at the very least elicits sympathy. As the minutes tick by we wonder how we’re going to pass this time together. Halmarack starts to talk about his band, and then produces a rehearsal DVD—a DIY guide to being a Miserablite—and before long there are people playing the keyboard and glockenspiel, banging the drums and we’re all backup singers. It’s a full-band karaoke experience. Halmarack is charming, with a quiet passion for his music—a melancholy pop that stays in your brain (annoyingly) for days—and manages to subtly deepen the experience so that it is not purely parodic.
Fascinatingly, the ten o’clock show is a very different experience. The crowd is live art cognoscenti, so accustomed to participation that they play along too hard, aggressively helpful when not asked to be and reticent when it’s required. Halmarack pulled the performance back on track, but some joy and subtlety was lost in the process. In this case fellow performers make for bad participants, competitively calling Halmarack’s bluff. Perhaps it’s good to remember that even in live art suspension of disbelief is still part of the contract.
The speeches
The popular live art lecture form was not prominent in FOLA, Song-Ming Ang’s charming yet too lecture-like analysis of contemporary love songs aside, but there was certainly no lack of speech-making, offering a respite from audience participation. The main speech-fest was Mish Grigor’s Man O Man created in collaboration with Bron Batten, Halcyon Macleod, Hallie Shellam, Diana Smith and Willoh S Weiland. Grigor set up the premise of a speculative future in which legislation to end the patriarchy would soon pass; we were attendees at a public meeting to vote it in. Though all the speeches had been written by women, it did come as a surprise, and possibly a disappointment to some of us, that the speeches were all delivered by men—ranging from a chauvinist and a passive aggressive SNAG to an oppressed gay boy. Although it was perplexing as we longed to hear the women’s perspective, on reflection I believe its absence gave the work a devastating depth. Grigor seems to be saying that the patriarchy will not end until men have convinced themselves that its demise is their idea. There was some great writing, some overwriting and some stage effects that didn’t work at all, the ambitious piece clearly showing its short development time, but it was certainly intriguing and I was moved when we all raised our hands in the vote that ended the patriarchy. For just a moment the dream was real.
Other speeches included Paul Gazzola’s letter to the Australia Council, calling for an independent artist representative on the Board. The speech forms part of his larger Gold Coin project which explores the idea of value, exchange and artists’ role within this system. Particularly impressive was the work-in-progress presentation by Emma Beech of her Life is Short and Long project exploring the idea of crisis, inspired by the effects of the GFC in Spain and Australia’s ongoing crisis of identity. Beech is a charismatic presenter with a sharp mind for connections, nuance and gentle humour. I look forward to seeing where this work goes.
Oh and Sarah Rodigari pulled off a heroic all-nighter with A Filibuster of Dreams, a 10-hour toast to everyone and perhaps everything she knows. I only experienced the first hour, but this was a gentle and curious endurance meditation that I’d like to enjoy more fully when not so overstimulated by back-to-back events.
The conversations
While speeches were prevalent, the most dominant form was the conversation. Malcolm Whittaker encouraged us to share our ignorance and to draw upon others’ knowledge as an analogue Google machine. Beth Buchanan invited us into a tent to talk about how we do or do not sleep. The Live Art Escort Agency got us all self-reflexive about participation, making some fun and incisive points and Lois Weaver’s Long Table invited us to discuss everything and anything (again) in a reverent and civilised format. And that’s before the multitude of foyer conversations.
The contact
Less prevalent were the direct physical encounters usually found in live art. Those included were non-confrontational and pleasurable. Julie Vulcan’s Drift invited us into a curious personal nest of shredded paper where we were given an auxiliary in-ear sound track which augmented the amplified soundtrack played in the space (by Ashley Scott) and rewarded with a hand massage. James Berlyn also concentrated on the hand offering a manicure or a palm reading. I took the latter and felt quite enlightened by the results, even if he was cheating in already knowing my occupation.
The fun
Most of all, Arts House’s program was fun. This made for a very pleasurable weekend and certainly allowed the general public a non-threatening introduction to participatory experiences. Sam Routledge and Martyn Coutt’s I think I Can was a great hit as audiences created stories for tiny characters inhabiting a model railway set up by a local club of enthusiasts (see image on page 35). Unable to shake my Protestant upbringing, I did wonder if I was having too much fun. Many of the works trod lightly, avoiding heavier and headier issues. Perhaps this was a deliberate curatorial choice, but I missed the presence of something truly provocative, sexy, shocking, bloody even. And I got a little tired of doing all the work, supplying the content and conversation. Call me old fashioned but I do think the artist should give me just a bit more than I’m giving them. However taken as a whole, the inaugural FOLA was big, playful and wonderfully generous.
Festival of Live Art (FOLA); Arts House North Melbourne Town Hall, Meat Market, 20-23 March; http://fola.com.au/
Thanks to Arts House, in particular Angharad Wynne-Jones, Ben Starick and Kristy Doggett.
Phil Soltanoff, An Evening With William Shatner Asterisk
photo Shilpa Bakre
Phil Soltanoff, An Evening With William Shatner Asterisk
Leisure, writes philosopher Henri Lefebvre, is inherently alienating. Someone else manufactures an experience; you consume it. Take contemporary performance. Romanian theatre scholar George Banu says that with no gods to perform for we’re left to contemplate one another in a hall of mirrors, endlessly multiplied. There’s a lot of you and a lot of me and not a lot of anyone else.
Of course, we can look at such leisure activity as a social ritual in which we encounter one another in a specially concentrated way. Yes, we pay for the privilege, and that might reduce performance to the status of a consumer product. Such is the world we currently live in. We assign meaning through consumer choices. To this Lefebvre offers a ray of rebellious hope: despite the reproducibility of the leisure product, the body seeks “revenge” for the damage such repetitions inflict on it. It tries to make the experience mean something more than just a cultural night out.
Gob Squad, Kitchen
photo David Baltzer
Gob Squad, Kitchen
It’s hard to tell when artists are pushing against alienation and when they are surrendering to it. Gob Squad’s Kitchen (Berlin, Nottingham) begins with the audience entering through a stage-set with three playing areas: a couch, a kitchen, and a bedroom. As we travel through these, we briefly encounter the performers. We then go to our seats in the auditorium. A large screen stretches across the stage, blocking out the set. Live video feeds of the three scenes we’ve walked through are projected onto it. The actors play ‘themselves’ trying to recreate three iconic 1960s underground films by Andy Warhol—Kitchen, Screen Test and Sleep. A tension arises: the more sincere the attempt to reproduce the original films, the more Kitchen seems like parody or ironic commentary. Like Warhol, who played with the art of commodification—Campbell’s Soup cans, Marilyn Monroe’s face—Gob Squad have fun trying to make copies of his films and failing.
Actor Sharon Smith attempts to perform Screen Test, in which she must simply look at the camera and do nothing. Her creativity gets the better of her and she alters Warhol’s original intent by doing something—putting a clear plastic bag over her face as personal artistic statement. You could interpret this, following Lefebvre, as her body taking revenge on a hand-me-down parcel of culture. Her moment of authenticity is, of course, rehearsed. So how will a ‘real’ moment be found? One by one the actors replace themselves with volunteers from the audience. Eventually there are four un-trained performers standing in for the spectators. They are given headphones through which the actors feed them lines. The words come out sounding either more wooden or more spontaneous. Sometimes something surprising happens, something that momentarily breaks the conventions Gob Squad is playing with—such as a full-mouthed kiss between an actor and a spectator.
Of course, putting un-trained performers on stage has become its own convention. They stand in for us the way trained actors stand in for us. We end up in George Banu’s representational hall of mirrors with nothing to contemplate but our selves and our values. Banu calls them empty values.
Phil Soltanoff, LA Party
photo Lisa Barlow
Phil Soltanoff, LA Party
I’m not so sure about that. The game of self-reflective theatrical representation seems to me far from exhausted. In LA Party, Phil Soltanoff (New York) uses projection screens to displace image, voice, and body. Soltanoff’s screens are the faces and torsos of his actors. One actor’s face is filmed live and projected onto another’s. Actor One delivers a first person account of breaking a raw-food fast during a drug and alcohol bender. The face of the second actor, who has white tape over eyes and mouth, becomes the projection screen for the live video feed of the first actor. Actor One’s face does weird things when it appears on Actor Two’s face. Actor One is male, Actor Two is female. At times, Actor One’s hairy torso is projected onto Actor Two’s hairless torso. And there’s more: Actor One isn’t actually speaking. He’s miming words spoken by a third actor. So he becomes a screen for Actor Three’s words. But his mime-speaking face is being projected onto Actor Two’s face. Displacement upon displacement. Eventually the screens (Actor One and Two) disappear and the speaking actor finishes the show. Voice and face are localised to the speaker who becomes an embodiment of the previous disembodiments.
In An Evening With William Shatner Asterisk, Soltanoff’s other show at the festival, Captain Kirk of the original Star Trek TV series speaks to us from “the future” on two flat-screen monitors. He has come back to talk about the binary of art and science. His 1960s TV performances have been meticulously edited in such a way that he speaks sentences he never uttered during the show. Given that the editor and writer have had to excerpt Kirk speaking just a word or syllable from wherever they could, and stitch the images together to construct the sentences, the effect is visually disjointed and robotic-sounding—also humorous and fascinating. It takes effort to stay with the argument when presented in this jarring manner, but I enjoyed the challenge. And the pay-off is well worth it. A pre-recorded monologue by Mari Akita takes over the screens (as text only) for a while. Akita recounts dressing in drag and watching confused people try to fix a gender category on her. Kirk returns to explain that in the future there is no language to describe binaries such as male-female or art-science. A surprising dose of optimism. Or is it wishful thinking?
Quiet Volume, Ant Hampton & Tim Etchells
courtesy the artists
Quiet Volume, Ant Hampton & Tim Etchells
The Quiet Volume by Ant Hampton and Tim Etchells (London and Sheffield, England) offers a screen that is intimate and tactile. In a performance for two, I am led with another participant to a desk in the Vancouver public library and presented with a book. My fellow participant gets an identical book. We wear headphones. A whispering voice instructs us to open the books and read (always silently). I attend to the pages before me, some thick with text, some blank. Sometimes I’m instructed to read the other participant’s book while he leads me through the text with his finger. Sometimes I do this for him. I become enveloped by the page. Occasionally I’m instructed to look up and take in the library. After having my view conditioned by the frame of the page, it’s very strange. It’s not just the visual shift from two dimensions to three. It’s more synaesthetic than that. The timbre of the whispering voice inside my head has created its own texture and merges with the felt texture of the page. When I look up, my sight seems textured. Distance shrinks. The considerable height and width of the library are compressed by the voice that has turned my head into a small room. The library resists this compression—but not successfully, not until I take the headphones off. When I do, the world seems made of a thousand screens, and the finger of my neighbour, running over the lines, becomes a whole body, but a body that seems to grow from the finger, as if it is the words that have given shape to him.
Rabih Mroué (Beirut, Lebanon) returns to PuSh with The Pixilated Revolution, a lecture performance about camera-phones and how the immediacy of the Syrian revolution is almost instantly transmitted through social media. As Mroué lectures at a table, we contemplate, on a large screen upstage, what a camera-phone operator saw at the moment he or she was shot at, and possibly killed. Later we watch another camera eye discover a sniper just as the sniper fires on the camera holder, and kills him. The jittery phone images are contrasted with official state videos in which government cameras record President Bashar’s motorcade in carefully staged processions. These stable, stately images are made possible by the use of a tripod. Mroué likens the tripod to any other government weapon of control and intimidation, such as a rifle scope. Where the camera phone is fugitive and embodies rebellion, the tripod is an instrument used to project the state’s desired image of stability.
As is the trend in performance these days, projection screens of one kind or another are everywhere. Banu’s hall of mirrors is multiplied perhaps even beyond what he described a few years ago. He is right in saying we have nothing but ourselves to contemplate in these situations. But is this really such an existential tragedy? I seem to remember that Plato, the ‘father of philosophy’ wrote, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Transported from Sydney to Perth, and even further afield by the magic of art. Five packed days at the 2014 Perth International Arts Festival witnessing bracing performances—Robert Wilson in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, my first experience of the wild creations of Russia’s renowned Dimitry Krymov, my second of flamenco radical Israel Galvan—and participating in Rimini Protokoll’s Situation Rooms, becoming an actor in the international weapons trade. The visual arts program was likewise immersive and culturally intriguing.
Krapp’s Last Tape
In near dark a man sits at a large desk. The sound of rain. Rain heavier and heavier. Thunder. Clouds in the high thin windows. The rain roars. It’s a hot day but here in the theatre we feel a chill. Partly visible, the man (Robert Wilson as Krapp) moves about the room, gesturing oddly, a slight lilt in the walk, returning to a tape recorder on the desk, reaching as if to activate it but swerving away. The rain is deafening now. Krapp gestures widely. Silence. Blue light through the windows. Krapp is ready to listen to his tapes, procrastination is apparently over, the imagined storm banished. We have been likewise prepared (as ever in Wilson’s works) to listen and to carefully look.
Revealed: a capacious Bauhaus-ish room with huge white shelves stacked with tape cases. Krapp, hair stiffly teased, eyebrows raised, white-faced, in white shirt, waistcoat, grey trousers, is straight out of a German Expressionist film of the 20s, save for the bright red slippers that play up his dancerly gait. Once he has our attention, Krapp commits to his task, reviewing a tape of himself at 39 years reflecting mockingly on his optimistic self at 20, and recounting his physical ailments, failure as a writer, unresolved relationship with a woman he met on a punt. He angrily discards the tape, attempting unsuccessfully to make a new recording—what is there to say? Instead he returns to the first tape, playing out into silence the recollection of love lost. Krapp’s Last Tape usually plays at around 35-40 minutes, here it’s for an hour, including the 15-minute storm. Wilson enlarges and extends Krapp’s prevarications—he dances in and out the light (the 39-year-old’s light was new and he delighted moving to and fro beneath it), sings at length with his (off-stage) neighbour, disappears to his kitchen, twice clowns obscenely with a banana (a fruit his 39-year-old self has trouble with, while at 69 Krapp, still sexually driven, sees an aged prostitute—“ better than a kick in the crutch”). Who would have thought the possessive Beckett estate would tolerate such elaborations, but various versions—an opera, an art music piece, film, radio and television versions—have been permitted.
As anticipated, Wilson’s version is greatly different from others. Some had been directed by Beckett himself, one featuring Rich Cluchey of the San Quentin Prison Drama Workshop; I enjoyed this one greatly at an Adelaide Festival. Atom Egoyan’s film version features a moving performance by John Hurt (available on DVD from the wonderful Beckett on Film series, 2000). There’s also an admired Harold Pinter account and the original and seminal Patrick Magee version (which you’ll find on YouTube). Wilson, like most of these performers, has the sonorous delivery apt for Beckett and the facility to switch gear from pathetic to nigh tragic to comic. (It was a pity that the sound mix of live and recorded voices in the opening performance in Perth was quite unbalanced, making the live voice less intelligible). While his account is less naturalistic than those of his forebears, and not as dark, it manages to be true to Wilson’s own art and to Beckett’s, towards the end drawing in close on Krapp and riding the flow of Beckett’s text so that we are touched by the sadness underlying the bitterness, denial and distraction we’ve witnessed. It’s fascinating that this Krapp keeps his distance from his recorder. For others the machine is an intimate.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Dimitry Krymov
photo courtesy Royal Shakespeare Company
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Dimitry Krymov
Dimitry Krymov, Midsummer Night’s Dream (As You Like It)
Another fantastical theatre experience came in the form of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (As You Like It) (director Dimitry Krymov, Russia) in which Shakespeare’s Mechanicals invade the auditorium of His Majesty’s Theatre with props (a huge tree trunk in parts, a functioning fountain spraying the audience), only to abandon them backstage and instead, suited, commence their performance of Pyramus and Thisbe with the ad hoc construction of two (wonderfully pliable) enormous puppets made from bits and pieces. They are ambitious—their version is ‘the’ orginal—and attentive to “inter-textuality.” They are meanwhile insulted by the indolent nouveau riche (all with mobile phones) behaving like aristocrats in the box seats, struggle with their wobbly creations, perform acrobatic feats and musical numbers, popular and classic, exhibit an obscenity—a bicycle-pumped-up erection for an infatuated Pyramus—and rather nervously make jokes about KGB murders (including that of Meyerhold) and current less than secret surveillance. The work is packed with a variety of performance practices, comedy and pathos, acute observations about life, art and class. It’s a crowd pleaser with ideas, passion and a strong sense of Russia as it is now, complex and surreal, not to mention dangerous.
In the end an actor sweeps the stage, attempting to brush into the wings a bevy of defiant young ballet dancers (children from Perth’s Steps Youth Dance Company) executing Swan Lake’s Dance of the Cygnets with poise and vigour. Finally an older woman from the audience who had objected to the work’s experimentalism and obscenity, realises that she recognises the actor, a man she is still attracted to. She offers him her card, hypocritically declaring, ”I love the avant-garde!” and exits. He lets the card fall to the floor.
Denis O’Hare, An Iliad
I was not entranced by Denis O’Hare’s award-winning An Iliad (A Homer’s Coat Project, US), by the laboured ‘virtuosity’ of the performance or the too orchestrated casualness of its framing. I thought it promising at the beginning as O’Hare, in a tired old coat and carrying a suitcase, jocularly channelled Homer (“Back then I could sing [The Iliad] in Babylonian;” “It went down really well in Gaul”) and located himself in the tradition of the bard, with some powerful archaic singing. Then, suddenly he’s in Troy, reliving the siege (“I knew the boys”), halting to comment of the private/public tensions that wrought its worst moments and deploying language bereft of the weight of the original: Agamemnon snidely to Achilles, “You’re so gifted”; Hector: “Bitch that I am.” Not content to sustain The Iliad as a work in the oral tradition, O’Hare adds a list of great wars across the centuries up to and including Australia’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, uttering a litany of Australian towns, the homes of our soldiers. O’Hare revels in his telling of an oft-told tale, without, it seemed to me any special insights or a sense of poetry. If you want that you have to turn to the late Christopher Logue’s inherently dramatic and daring (including his play with page space and typography) adaptation of selected books of The Iliad beginning with War Music in 1981 (I recorded it for blind listeners in the mid 80s, quite a task) and four more instalments subsequently.
Israel Galvan, La Curva
Flamenco innovator Israel Galvan (Spain) as ever demonstrated in La Curva his capacity to dance the dance while undoing it, creating commentary on the form along with images rich in thematic potential. On stage is a grand piano and five high stacks of chairs. Galvan topples one and the work begins. Eerily, the others seem to crash of their own accord, and so finally does the dancer. On that path his expert dancing becomes engrossingly stranger, duetting with brilliant experimental pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and traditional singer Inés Bacán (“the two together form my idea of the female artist,” program note) and Galvan’s rhythm accompanist, Bobote. The presence of small blocks of rosin on the forestage that Galvan stomps in to guarantee his grip on the floor presages the final act when he not only kicks up a huge cloud of the stuff centrestage but is totally covered by it as he falls to the floor, on his back, his arms and legs still in motion. Stillness. No sound. Galvan says that La Curva, a work punctuated with quiet, was “born out of my familiarity with silence.” The title refers to a concert of “Cubist” flamenco, with stacked chairs, by the dancer Vicente Escudero in 1924. Galvan thus lays claim to flamenco with a radical heritage while pushing ahead with its revitalisation.
Barking Gecko, onefivezeroseven
Perth’s Barking Gecko Theatre Company’s onefivezeroseven reveals the joys, anxieties, suffering, fantasies and, finally, political will of teenagers on the edge of adulthood. The play is based on extensive surveys of teenagers focusing on their possessions (1,507 is the average). In a series of monologues these objects become the starting points for revealing much about their owners that is very private. Acting, movement (Danielle Michich) and vivid techno-design and music are tautly integrated in a kaleidoscopic encounter with individual lives interpolated with group playfulness, heightening the sense of vulnerability in being alone while at the same time being governed by networks defined by obligation and intimidation as well as security.
In one ‘what if’ fantasy, participants in a furious collective dance drop out one by one into stillness, as if dead, inspected by the lone male left who dances on to a melancholy score. Other games involve playing hide and seek with childish glee. A girl rattles off statistics about the scale of the cosmos, defiantly lecturing us that “[teenagers] know what’s real and what’s not,” and, executing a head stand, declaring, “we CAN recognise beauty.”
Boundless energy suggests the potential of the young: hearts massively pounding as one, bodies sharing exuberance and exhaustion in contrast to souls hiding beneath blankets or seeking refuge in precious headphones (“they let me be”). Secrets tumble out, betrayals, victimisation, rivalries, sexual anxieties—the discovery that sex is not always intimate, that blow jobs are not even thought of as real sex.
The work finally turns to a litany of demands for the right to vote at 16, given “we can fuck, have a baby,” drive at 17 and pay tax on jobs at 14 and 15 years of age. The cast don Tony Abbott masks in a mock military ‘get rid of Tony’ routine prior to the telling of one last story (underscored with an overly melancholy cello score) told by a young Lebanese immigrant labelled as a terrorist: “Go home!” “Australia is my home.” The work ends with a cheerfully bold call from the young to their elders for a change of attitude and new rights for teenagers.
While acknowledging its emotional frankness and the high calibre of its direction (John Sheedy), acting and movement, I thought onefivezeroseven not unlike old school theatre-in-education, unapologetically didactic and structurally schematic. For all its research and the number of interviewees, the work also felt rather limited in scope. Although characters are quite different from one another and some very wounded and isolated, they all come together as an unlikely single voice, minus cultural and serious political differences.
Situation Rooms, Rimini Protokoll
photo Jorg Baumann
Situation Rooms, Rimini Protokoll
Rimini Protokoll, Situation Rooms
Inside a two storey building constructed in an ABC TV Perth studio, wearing headphones and holding iPads, for 70 minutes we encounter and engage with weapons traders, bankers, generals, terrorists and activists in Europe, Mexico, Pakistan and Sierra Leone. We handle guns, operate drones, don bullet-proof vests (or help others into them), shake hands with each other in various roles and watch on iPads the people whose stories we are ‘enacting’ in the very same rooms we occupy. Some we only hear (too dangerous for them to appear), some address us directly (I became the Director of Deutsche Bank, sitting in his office confronted on my screen by an actual leading anti-cluster bomb activist). Other contributors to the work simply appear onscreen like us, with headphones and iPhones, as if reviewing their own experiences.
In one of the more disturbing experiences in Situation Rooms I’m on a bed in a small, immaculately realised emergency medical centre after ‘being wounded.’ Another audience member decides on the level of my injury and attaches the appropriately coloured marker to my body.
Hearing voices and seeing faces from a variety of political circumstances and points of view was at times unnerving. Some rooms generated sympathy, in some you were complicit in wrong-doing and in others, in Africa and Mexico, you found yourself in altogether alien worlds. Situation Rooms is about projecting yourself into unlikely and sometimes unconscionable scenarios, an activity in which you want to understand the strangers you encounter. In the end however it’s an impressionistic experience, given the number of people you briefly meet, the variety of roles you kind of play and the amount of time you peer at your screen in fear of getting lost. It also felt distancing watching some of the work’s real-life participants onscreen doing just what we were doing, screens in hand, moving on our various trajectories. Humphrey Bower in Crikey.com’s Daily Review wrote, “The iPads effectively separated us from each other, the work itself and its subjects. Their screens rendered us as isolated spectators rather than audience members, let alone true participants in the unfolding of events. In this sense, Situation Rooms ends up being complicit in the very situation it criticises.” Of course, some of the roles we played were clearly designed to make us feel uncomfortably complicit, others sympathetic, though none with enough information or exchange to generate empathy. Situation Rooms, framed as a game, plays at the edges of empathy, placing us in ‘what if’ scenarios. It is about us, not ‘the others,’ or is at best a first step towards understanding the lives of those engaged or entangled in the arms industry.
For a survey of Rimini Protokoll projects and an interview with one of its directors Stefan Kaegl see “Documentary theatre as action,” on the RealTime blog realtimetalk.net.
Ryota Kuwakubo, The Tenth Sentiment, John Curtin Gallery
Ryota Kuwakubo, The Tenth Sentiment
In a dark room, a small moving beam of intense light close to the floor cuts through the space, throwing up and distorting the shadows of small objects—a field of pencils, a ball of steel wool, a light globe—writ large on the gallery walls. The light is affixed to a tiny electric train-like device running on a track. At the end of the journey it hurriedly backs up to its starting point, or in visual terms, “rewinds’ what we’ve just seen, as Chris Malcolm, director of the John Curtin Gallery, put it when he guided me through its two festival works.
With its mobile shadow play Ryota Kuwakubo’s The Tenth Sentiment evokes the pre-cinema of the 19th century. The apparently simple set-up yields analog magic but, as Malcolm tells me, the circuitry and the fine tuning is complex. The results as the ‘train’ moves slowly across the landscape are constantly surprising; we witness the mutation of everyday objects into strange buildings, cities, forests and remote landmarks. A journey through an inverted colander conjures a Futurist fantasy, filling the room with its expanding and then contracting architecture. The perceptual play is pure delight.
Paramodelic Graffiti
photo Brad Coleman
Paramodelic Graffiti
Paramodel, Paramodelic-graffiti
Also at Curtin and occupying its large gallery is another immersive, visual wrap-around Japanese work, hand-crafted on the floor, walls and ceiling—Paramodel’s Paramodelic-graffiti (artists Yasuhiko Hayashi, Yusuke, Nakano). As with the 10th Sentiment there is an interplay between the real and the virtual. Margaret Moore, the festival’s Visual Arts Manager, writes in the catalogue, “Intensive computer design paves the way for [Paramodel’s] installations, yet when it comes to the actual realisation, their work attains a quizzical balance between organic drawing and high-end design.”
Again rail tracks feature, coursing across the space in recurrent patterns and variations that evoke traditional and modern Japanese pattern-making, the spaces between saturated with blues, whites and blacks. This ground is occupied by hand-cut polystyrene mountains (also hanging from the ceiling and thrusting from the walls), tall toy cranes and small animals (including Australian mammals and lizards). For all its sophistication, the work, as Moore writes, “seems to retain a child-like view of the world.” And a teenage one too given their work’s resonance with graffiti and the inventiveness of Manga. Aptly, in an adjoining room there’s a space in which children are provided by the artists with the tools to create their own landscapes which are recorded from above and can be played back at speed.
Do Ho Suh, Net-Work
On the shore of the Swan River, a large net hanging between poles glitters by the sparkling water. You draw closer, noticing a certain fixity, even though there’s the slightest of movement in the breeze: the net comprises thousands of identical figures, apparently metallic, arms and legs stretched wide and threaded together. From one side of the net they appear silver, on the other gold. The net trails into the water, one end bunching up on the sand, convincingly like a real net. Korean artist Do Ho Suh’s Net-Work serenely evokes the ephemerality, continuity and collectivity of labour and the twinning of craft and artistry.
William Kentridge, Refusal of Time
photo Aaron Bradbrook
William Kentridge, Refusal of Time
William Kentridge
As ever, the precise meanings of William Kentridge’s engrossing creations (drawings, films, animations, puppetry, installations, operas and combinations of these) remain fascinatingly elusive, despite a plenitude of transparent symbolic markers. Just how they connect is another matter. The Refusal of Time is a huge work occupying the whole of the main PICA space with five screen projections (filmmaker Catherine Meyburgh) on three walls of Kentridge’s animations and staged performances (choreography Dada Masilo) with enveloping music (Philip Miller) and dramaturgy by physicist and historian of science Peter Galison. I was taken in particular with the costuming (touches of Bauhaus inventiveness), dancing and transformations in the strange domestic scenes, as well as with the overall sense of time in and out of synch, measured against the stars, the beat of metronomes and the epic march of shadows of human beings bearing goods and possessions and led by a hauntingly scored brass band. Despite several visits, there was much that I hadn’t integrated into my understanding of The Refusal of Time, save that given its constant shuffling of histories social and scientific, South African and beyond, we haven’t yet faced up to time’s relativities. You can glimpse the work and Kentridge discussing it on YouTube.
Bali: Return Economy
At Fremantle Arts Centre, Bali: Return Economy, reflects and builds on a long-term relationship between Western Australia and Bali dating back into the 19th century, bringing together works by artists with a view to extending and expanding the relationship. I met the show’s curators, FAC’s Ric Spencer and traditional Balinese art expert and collector Chris Hill (Survival and Change, Three Generations of Balinese artists, ANU, 2006).
Ric Spencer says, “the relationship between Bali and WA is a pivotal one—the number of people coming and going and the cultural influence is substantial. There’s a sense here in the media of ownership of Bali and what goes on there: I was wondering why that was. In the 18 months of developing it on our travels the show has developed on its own lines. For us it’s become a conversation, a departure point for broader discussions about the impacts of tourism and how Balinese culture has influenced West Australians.” Hill adds, “It takes less time and it’s cheaper to fly to Bali than Sydney, and we’re attracted to Balinese culture. This culture is being threatened by overdevelopment and 1,000 West Australians going there every day—which is extraordinary. It’s a very different culture on our doorstep. The work in the show dips into tourism and the holiday experience but also collaborations in art and trade. The influences have come back in art, architecture and furniture.” The curators encountered a thriving, networked contemporary arts scene in Bali, fuelling their desire for more of it to come to Australia where it is, they say, seriously under-represented.
It’s a deeply engaging show, one with a sense of great energy, which is not surprising given that the artworks from Bali are often inherently infused with a sense of ritual. Hill points out to me a cartoon (Soccer in Paradise, 2013) by Jango Pramatha in which a match has drawn to a casual halt as a ceremonial parade crosses the pitch, highlighting not only a blend of continuity and change but also a ‘no worries’ Balinese mentality. In a similar vein, in beautiful pinks and pastel blues and in a dynamic rendering of the Kamasan painting tradition, Ketut Teja Astawa’s Sterile Environment (2013) portrays a dancing rajah oblivious to the tiny (in his world) earth mover pummelling the base of a tall adjacent tree. Of the several paintings in the show in the style of the village of Kamasan, Hill explains, “thin cotton is sized with a rice paste and traditional materials are used—black Chinese ink applied with a bamboo pen and paints made from natural materials. The paintings aren’t old but they are traditional.”
Wayan Upadana’s Couple in Paradise (2013) is one of two small and precious sculptural works (polyester resin, car paint) featuring pigs bathing in chocolate; not only is it a critique of luxurious living but also of cultural carelessness: the vessel is a traditional offering bowl.
The centrepiece of Nyoman Erawan’s altar-like installation is a glass cast of the artist’s head, Wajahku (2012) within which sits another masklike face, straight out of traditional Balinese dance, evoking, Hill tells me, an inner god-self. However as you move around the head, from the top of which rises a bundle of incense sticks, you see that the interior comprises electronic circuits and wiring. Opposite the Erawan work is Perth artist Linda Crimson’s vivid altar of consumption and culture rising to the ceiling, layered with objects purchased in Balinese markets: toys, clothing, Micky Mouse inflatables, brassieres, domestic items and much else. There’s an easy mix of past and present here, while Erawan’s self-portrait suggests tensions between the spiritual and the technological.
I Wayan Bendi’s Twin Towers (2001) is one of the most striking works in the exhibition, a large-scale depiction of the events in New York of September 11, 2001 entirely transposed to Bali, but as an island more of the past than the present—mythological figures, ceremonies, temples, elephants, quaint versions of aeroplanes and the Twin Towers, vast crowds and, as Hill points out to me, an overall patterning and a doubling of figures, lending the swirl of action great cohesion. The event is given a spiritual aura compounded by the exquisite detail provided by the traditional painting technique.
The most affecting work in the show is Bom Bali (2006), a small painting by Dewa Putu Mokoh in which bodies have been tossed around by the bombing of 12 October 2002. Stylised, twisting flames, representing explosions in the centrally placed vehicle, emit dotted lines, trajectories to further fires amid the crowd of contorted bodies: limbs detached, tongues hanging from mouths. There is, however, no gruesome detail, instead an aura of innocence, the simply delineated figures almost childlike, the colours of their clothes pastel soft. Hill tells me that the artist usually portrayed village life and intimate domestic scenes, but “as far as I know, it is his only painting that focuses on an historical event. It’s painted with great tenderness. Once you realise what it’s about it becomes shocking.”
There are many other captivating works in the exhibition, finely executed pieces in traditional modes, John Darling’s documentaries of Balinese culture, Ni Nyoman Sani’s ironic fashion pieces and Annette Seeman’s sculptures and family photographs in which the artist’s father is seen on a tiger hunt in the 30s. While enjoyably nostalgic, and speaking of a long connection between WA and Bali, these images are indirect reminders of the grip of colonialism and disparities in power and wealth. How much has changed? Bali: Return Economy is a finely curated, well-staged (exhibition manager Desak Dharmayanti) and culturally intense experience, yielding much pleasure and reflection.
The festival’s visual art program—which also included Richard Bell’s Embassy at PICA (until April 27 with Kentridge’s The Refusal of Time) featuring striking large scale paintings and a tent housing video works—had a sense of geographic and cutlural cogency, embracing highly engaging artworks from Japan, Korea, South Africa and Bali and Australia.
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2014 International Arts Festival, artistic director Jonathan Holloway, Perth, 7 Feb-1March
Keith Gallasch was a guest of the Perth International Arts Festival. He thanks the Festival’s Visual Arts Manager Margaret Moore in particular and the curators of the exhibitions he visited.
Joey Baron (drums), Marc Ribot (guitar), John Zorn (saxophone), Cyro Baptista (percussion), Ikue Mori (electronics), Zorn In Oz, Masada Marathon
photo Tony Lewis
Joey Baron (drums), Marc Ribot (guitar), John Zorn (saxophone), Cyro Baptista (percussion), Ikue Mori (electronics), Zorn In Oz, Masada Marathon
It’s a blessing when an arts festival has something really important to celebrate, it makes sense of the very idea— and doing it on a commensurate scale even moreso. John Zorn—composer, saxophonist, producer and nurturer of numerous projects across cultures and forms—has been a key player in the contemporary music scene in New York and well beyond since the mid 1970s. In acknowledgment of Zorn’s stature, festival director David Sefton invited him to stage four monumental concerts of his works with a huge cast of the highest calibre players from around the world, including Australia’s Elision contemporary classical ensemble.
Adelaide audiences and numerous insterstaters packed the Festival Theatre nightly, responding to joyous, accessible but complex music-making alongside demanding works, at all times with deep attentiveness, completing each performance with a standing ovation. The concerts comprised a program hosted by Zorn, sometimes playing, often informally conducting (on a chair facing the players or squatting on the floor) or leaving the floor open to a group or to the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and conductor David Fulmer. Other than the quality of the playing (reinforced by excellent sound management), two factors made for a very satisfying experience: first, the variety of players (many of them long-term Zorn collaborators) and group permutations in each concert and, second, the sheer pleasure displayed by Zorn and his players as they revelled in having successfully tackled difficult passages or celebrated their team work with the audience.
Mark Feldman (violin), Greg Cohen (bass), John Zorn, Erik Friedlander (cello), Zorn In Oz, Masada Marathon
photo Tony Lewis
Mark Feldman (violin), Greg Cohen (bass), John Zorn, Erik Friedlander (cello), Zorn In Oz, Masada Marathon
Masada Marathon
Masada Marathon opened explosively with Masada Quartet. Zorn and trumpeter Dave Douglas each demonstrated trademark solo skills and mutual responsiveness—Zorn’s alto sax underlining Douglas’ smooth-to-raw scaling of the heights with counter medlodies, high speed flutterings and gurglings. Joey Baron, the ever-brilliant anchor drummer for most of three of the programs, and Greg Cohen on acoustic bass provided a propulsive foundation for a set that declared Zorn’s jazz mastery. Maphas followed: the duo Mark Feldman on violin and Uri Caine on piano delivering an intensely melodic trio of spacious, reflective, folk-inflected numbers without jazz markings, including a standout passage—jigging violin counterpointed with a striding piano. Mycale comprised four female singers including Zorn regular (he’s written some of his very best songs for her) Sofia Rei in an a capella set. There was another such set for four classically trained female singers on the fourth program. The structure was similar—a darker voice mostly providing a bass line, the group complexly harmonising and individuals taking solo leads. Sounds rather than words were sung, replete with accented breaths, sighs, pops and, at one point, ululations. The engaging melodies ranged tonally from Brazilian to Middle-Eastern, further revealing the expansiveness of Zorn.
John Medeski (Hammond Organ, Rhodes keyboard, grand piano), Trevor Dunn (bass) and Kenny Wollenson (drums) introduced us to three of the mainstay players for Zorn in Oz. Zorn’s music ranged from delicately reflective to pensive to rock attack, keyboard notes swirling or seemingly plucked from the organ while the bass sang. Next, Bar Kokhba marked the first appearance of Marc Ribot, Zorn’s favourite guitarist, fronting with Mark Feldman in a set that fully evidenced the composer’s synthesis of a variety of musical voices and influences: jazz, Latin, Jewish and Arabic and, from Feldman, Hot Club and gypsy jazz.
In Abraxas, Shamir Blumenkranz, on a North African sintir (or gimbri)—a square bodied camel-skin and timber guitar, long necked, three-stringed, deep toned and here forcefully picked—led an aggressively punkish set (suffused with moments of delicacy from the two guitars) in an open-ended interpretation of Zorn compositions (Abraxas: The Book of Angels, vol 19, Tzadik CD, 2012). In substantial contrast Erik Friedlander, solo on cello, and then in trio with Feldman and Cohen, displayed Zorn’s 19th century Romantic bent, if with trademark bending, quoting classics, playing with pizzicato possibilities and accentuated double bass plucking. Uri Caine’s solo piano set was note-thick with ragtime passages, lyrical turns and an ending focused entirely on the high end of the keyboard with crystalline clarity.
The concert concluded with the large ensemble Electric Masada playing Zorn jazz, again a coalescence of forms and influences, here from be-bop to free jazz to rock and everything goes, and quietly textured with Ikue Mori’s electronic whisperings, blips and whistlings largely heard in sudden silences in the playing. The set opened to a rapid beat with Zorn (a circular breather) sustaining an epically long, raw note which broke into a massive chord shared with the ensemble and out of which flowed a Middle Eastern riff. Zorn-conducted single staccato bursts from each player, a return to the big chord, a Ribot-led crescendo, and then calm with electronics and a grand, soaring sax finale. This was a memorable piece in an altogether memorable concert. Not one to let us rest, and signalling more forceful music to come, Zorn’s final offering was heavy metallish, sax raging and percussionist hero Cyro Batista pounding (while tinkling and stroking many an other object) a huge bass drum.
Classical Marathon
Zorn’s classical outings reveal great knowledge of and kinship with mid to late 20th century Modernism. In a field dense with invention and competition it’s not easy to rate the quality of this music, let alone on first hearing, but it’s largely engaging, and expertly acquitted by the Elision ensemble. Cellist Severine Ballon excelled in A rebours where she is required to attack, pluck and glide, be silent and grow melancholy in the manner of Shostakovich, as bell, drum and flute journey with her to a formal ending. The richly engaging Sortilege features two bass clarinettists (Carl Rossman, Richard Haynes) in a dialogue delightful and dramatic, running deep, soaring weirdly high, shushing, rushing, mellifluous. Zeitgehoff, a world premiere, also evoked something Russian, violinist Graeme Jennings and cellist Ballon also in dialogue, their instruments tensely creaking and buzzing at the edge of comprehension.
The second half of the concert featured the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra under David Fulmer. Elision’s Graeme Jennings fronted the orchestra in Zorn’s Contes des Fees, the music for the violin reminiscent at times of Prokofiev, sweet lines over string-powered depths followed by passionate outbursts, a wind machine (corny as ever) and a final romantic coalescence of orchestral forces.
Kol nidre was something altogether different—a simple sacred melody, centred on the strings, darkly toned and, overall, shaped with Minimalist precision by Zorn with a recurrent, emotionally potent swell (well realised by Fulmer). The final and longest work (all the others ranged from 8 to 12 minutes), Suppote et Supplications (25 minutes), featured sparkling percussion, vibrant drumming, surging orchestral forces, delicate harp and crotale interplay and a powerful and a distinctive mass double bass passage prior to a long, delicate ending. Not an easy work to estimate, but absorbing moment by moment, and again, rapturously received. For Elision in particular this must have been a very special night, playing to what was apparently the biggest audience in their career. A great night for new music.
Greg Cohen, Dave Douglas, Joey Baron, John Zorn, Zorn In Oz, Masada Marathon
photo Tony Lewis
Greg Cohen, Dave Douglas, Joey Baron, John Zorn, Zorn In Oz, Masada Marathon
Triple Bill
The third program was another of great variety. One of Zorn’s seminal works, Bladerunner, featured the composer, the great bassist, arranger and producer Bill Laswell and, on a massive drum kit, heavy metal drummer Dave Lombardo (his only appearance). We were in for our first bout of serious aural assault. But before unleashing his bird calls, stutters, flutters and wild cries, Zorn delivered solid, romantic noir sax against Laswell’s fretless, high reverb songful bass. Lombardo let loose, eclipsing the bass, but Zorn held firm. The three numbers revealed subtleties amid the roaring: for example, Laswell, once heard, created a cathedral ambience while at other times milking bass buzz and unusually high resonances.
A complete change of mood came in the form of Essential Cinema, four short films shown on a large screen while the Zorn Ensemble played in near darkness. Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1936) is a cut-up of a forgotten Orientalist Hollywood movie, its excesses (Eastern potentate, volcano, alligators, wild natives, eclipse) and symbolism (sexual) juxtaposed with Marc Ribot’s languid guitar with its own brand of Latin American exoticism. For Harry Smith’s The Tin Woodman’s Dream (1967), Zorn nicely blends the magical animation with lilting percussion and organ. Aleph by Wallace Berman (1966) is a wild montage of celebrities, comic book characters and nudes to an aptly speedy score led by Zorn’s chatty sax. The most fascinating of the films was Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) by Maya Deren, an eerie, elusive narrative about three young women, one increasingly nun-like and suicidal, all seemingly in search of men. The party scene where everyday movement becomes dancerly reminded me of DV8. The cogent score in part centred on an initial melancholy cello theme, vibes for the party, electronics for an encounter with a statue-become-man in a garden, greater forces for the young woman’s panic and a spare pulse for the spooky ending: lillies floating beneath a jetty,
The last event of the evening a 12-strong ensemble was Zorn’s famed Cobra, a game playing model for semi-constructed improvisation. Zorn likes structures that yield such freedoms. Across the four nights musicians peered at scores; here they watched Zorn as he waved cards at them (a number or an indicator meaning, for example, do something in particular but in your own way) or put on his peaked cap to indicate he wished to conduct. Once engaged the musicians point to each other to form duos and trios within the greater framework. The thrill of Cobra resides in the pace and richness of inventiveness and the emergent cohesiveness. Of the four games, the second yielded a tight trio in the form of Feldman, Friedlander and Dunn and deep-end piano subtleties from the formidable John Medeski. The third was the most distinctive, sounding least like an improvisation, replete with silences, soft percussion and keyboards and a very unusual emergent melody, a quiet prelude to the all-stops-out fourth.
Zorn@60
Zorn@60 commenced with one of Zorn in Oz highlights, The Song Project. Zorn has composed more than 500 songs for various artists, 10 or so of them heard here, including some of the best known: Jesse Harris sings “Tamalpais,” Sofia Rei “Besos de Sangre” and Mike Patton “Batman” to the glorious accompaniment provided by Baron, Batista, Medeski, Dunn, Wollenson and Ribot. The singers alternate solos and back each other up, Rei for Patton’s “Dalquiel,” Rei for Harris in “Towards Karifistan,” with its gorgeous Cuban piano line. In “Mountain View” bassist Dunn flawlessly replicates and transforms the melody and the ensemble turns big band. Patton sings a tribute to Lou Reed and the trio wrap up with the rock-pop “In the City of Dostoevsky.”
The Holy Visions comprises five women, sopranos and mezzos in long white dresses, singing a capella, Zorn’s compositions evoking everything from Renaissance song to the Swingle Singers, Berio and Meredith Monk with fluency, cogency and great singing. The final song, with its chiming voices and small bells ends with a simple, sublime exhalation. Elision returns to the program with Zorn’s The Alchemist, for two high flying violins, viola and cello in a dark tide of sound, restless, suddenly fast and then quite formal.
Moonchild—Templars: In sacred Blood held the Mike Patton fans in gothic rapture. Inside the barrage of sound, Patton’s screams are complex, replete with whoops, clicks, whispers, flutters, amazing glides, falsetto and occasionally the singer’s elegant baritone—melding with Dunn’s rapid, dancing bass playing (plus string scraping and heavenly harmonics), Baron’s unforced drive and Medeski’s sustained deep organ notes and complex flourishes. Patton is something to watch, limbering up before leaping into song. If you’re not a fan or new to Patton, it’s a rough, if short-lived ride. RealTime Contributing Editor Darren Tofts emailed me:
“Everyone should hear ‘Osaka Bondage’ performed live at least once in their lifetime. 78 seconds of the most sublime racket ever to trouble the airwaves. I heard it in Adelaide and am still vibrating.”
Sparer pieces like the slow burning “Vocation of Baphomet” gave initiates a taste of Moonchild’s appeal, while the finale “Secret Ceremony” illustrated the dramatic range of both composition and performance. You can judge for yourself; a full concert of Moonchild at the Moers Festival can be seen on YouTube, among other works that also appeared in the Adelaide Festival program.
The end of Zorn in Oz draws near with Zorn’s core players appearing as The Dreamers, with the no less superb Jamie Saft replacing the great Medeski in a set ranging from jazz to complex rock, a prelude to Zorn joining them for Electric Masada with Wollenson also on drums with Baron and Ikue Mori on electronics. In the first number there’s a touch of Spain in Zorn’s mellow sax and a well-deserved long solo from Ribot. In the second a big rock guitar launch gives way to passages of limpid Rhodes playing from Saft, soft vibes, whistles from Batista and a dark guitar melody. Finally Zorn leads a huge atonal rock march which grows hymn-like. The audience rise as one in celebration of a truly generous musical giant whom we watched seated amid his colleagues, intermittently conducting, playing vigorously, smiling, encouraging, rewarding.
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Adelaide Festival, Zorn in Oz, Adelaide Festival Theatre, 11-14 March
Tectonics creator, Israeli conductor Ilan Volkov, chose the name Tectonics (movement of the Earth’s crust) to allude to the clashing of experimental music with traditional concert programming. Teaming with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, numerous ensembles, soloists and composers, Volkov staged Tectonics Adelaide as an immersive two-day extravaganza of 31 compositions, the first day spanning 2.30–7.30pm, the second 2.30–11.00pm—an exhilarating survey of recent and newly commissioned works, some involving daring performance strategies and many of which could not be accommodated in a conventional orchestral concert format.
Day 1
Day 1 comprises three successive concerts in the ASO’s Grainger Studio, the first involving all Australian compositions, opening with the ASO’s performance of the late David Ahern’s After Mallarmé (1966), a finely wrought orchestral work whose Modernism is important in Australian compositional history.
Jon Rose and Elena Kats-Chernin co-composed the second work, Elastic Band, for orchestra and violin soloist. Kats-Chernin, a composer using notation, works magic with improviser Rose, who prefers to play spontaneously. According to her program note, Kats-Chernin developed melodic moments from musical fragments Rose sent her, resulting in cheekily humorous but complex music that melds Rose’s astonishing technique and creativity with large orchestral forces. The composition is flexible (‘elastic’), allowing Rose to improvise while conductor Volkov controls the orchestra’s response to Rose and the score—the hounds keep up with the hare as they tear across the musical landscape. Volkov’s coded gestures shape the performance and, at one point, concertmaster Elizabeth Layton co-conducts the strings in a parallel passage. This is high risk but brilliantly successful.
The joyousness continued with the premiere of London-based Adelaide composer Matthew Shlomowitz’ Listening Styles for orchestra, featuring a sparkling drum-kit solo by Speak Percussion’s Eugene Ughetti, a persuasive work that takes the flavour of big-band music in new directions.
The second concert offered rare musical treasures, firstly Soundstream Ensemble’s eloquent rendering of Iannis Xenakis’ Morsima—Amorsima (“fate—non-fate”) of 1962 for piano, violin, cello and double bass, tightly directed by Volkov. In this work, Xenakis pioneered composing with a computer. We then sat spellbound for a sublime solo recital by acclaimed contemporary piano exponent Aki Takahashi of works by Xenakis, Giacinto Scelsi and Giuliano d’Angiolini.
The third concert opened with Scelsi’s portentous I Presagi (1958) for nine brass instruments and percussion, a dramatic work recalling Tibetan brass horns summoning the spirits. This absorbing concert included rarely heard works by Xenakis and Scelsi for various ensembles. In David Ahern’s Stereo/Mono (1971), with Jim Denley (saxophone) and Byron Cullen (electronics), the sax is miked and mixed to create controlled feedback from a pair of loudspeakers. Ahern’s Stereo/Mono was presciently innovative in using electronically mediated acoustic instrumentation stereophonically. Denley later showed me the graphic score, a copy of Ahern’s hand-written original, which, though apparently simple, benefits from Denley’s masterful realisation.
Day 1 concludes with Oren Ambarchi’s New Work for Guitar and Ensemble, in which miked ASO brass and winds join Ambarchi (guitar and electronics) and Speak Percussion to combine quietly seductive guitar-drone with improvised ensemble playing that, in the absence of a score, develops organically under Volkov’s conducting. Speak member Matthias Schack-Arnott told me that Volkov signalled the pitch and dynamics as the individual players contributed musical fragments. In this demanding 40-minute piece, the performers must respond instantly to the conductor’s and each others’ moves and collectively shape the flow of musical material, layering complex instrumental passages over a hypnotic electronic backdrop—high risk musically and performatively, but again it worked.
Day 2
The formality of Day 1 is succeeded by the informality of the longer, second day, programmed in two halves, at the warehouse-like Queen’s Theatre. The first half opens ceremonially with Scelsi’s Riti: I Funerale d’Achille, performed by Speak Percussion, evoking the measured solemnity of the funeral procession. Contrasting Scelsi’s Riti is Australian James Rushford’s enchanting Whorl Would Equal Reaches, commissioned by Speak for extended percussion ensemble. Canadian Crys Cole’s untitled solo involved the amplification of barely audible sounds generated by handling small objects under a sensitive microphone. Like Rushford, Cole focuses our awareness on the minutiae of our sound world. But Rushford’s work is visually arresting as the performers move quickly around an array of instruments in what seems like a piece of theatre for percussion.
The trio Hammers Lake delivered a stunning performance, foregrounding Melbourne artist Carolyn Connors’ unique vocal work, with the performers prominently situated on a podium in the auditorium centre. Their untitled work for cello (Judith Hamann), percussion (Vanessa Tomlinson) and voice demonstrated a unique musicality and, again, the potential of group improvisation. In his composition Evraiki, percussionist Robbie Avenaim uses laptop-programmed, mechanised bass drums, while numerous roaming, loosely-directed musicians mingle with the audience as they play, the stationary, mechanical drums forming a focal point like a conductor.
Guitarists Stephen O’Malley and Oren Ambarchi then raised the sound level in their highly amplified performance of Alvin Lucier’s Criss-Cross, commissioned for them by Volkov. Marco Fusinato’s guitar-feedback work, TEMA followed, and to maintain the decibel level, Part 1 of Day 2 concluded with Romanian spectralist composer Iancu Dumitrescu’s South Pole, also commissioned by Volkov for Ambarchi and O’Malley. Volkov conducted the duo in South Pole, shaping form and emphasis and so extending his reconsideration of the conductor’s role. Like Fusinato, Ambarchi and O’Malley use guitar and electronics to sculpt high-volume, polyphonic feedback into an advancing mountain of sound. Volkov’s insightful commissioning of Lucier and Dumitrescu to write for O’Malley and Ambarchi has created a unique compositional and performative synthesis.
Part 2 of Day 2 opened with a dazzling performance of Xenakis’ Mikka and Mikka S for solo violin by Erkki Veltheim (a member of Australia’s Elision ensemble) and included Vetlheim’s own striking composition Glossolalia (“speaking in tongues”) for amplified string quartet as well as two more Scelsi works.
For his untitled set, Fluxus legend Takehisa Kosugi manipulates simple-looking devices generating pops and squeaks and controlling pitch and oscillation to weave his music. He uses a light bulb to activate light-sensitive sound-generators, a technique Joel Stern takes further in his set Solo Carnival, using coloured lights to activate particular pitches. The absence of a laptop in Kosugi’s and Stern’s improvisations is refreshing—they do it ‘by hand.’ In contrast, Ikue Mori’s beguiling Nymphs, Witches and Fairies appears largely pre-recorded but is accompanied by video animation.
Heavy Metal band Mayhem front-man Attila Csihar’s ritualistic solo work Void ov Voices, featuring his throat singing, recalls Gyuto Monks chanting, the robed Csihar multi-tracking himself to produce choral polyphony. Void ov Voices extends the theme of the ecstatic state in Veltheim’s Glossolalia, and Hammers Lake’s vocal performance also resembles speaking in tongues. Tectonics Adelaide concludes with a pulverisingly loud drone doom performance by the band Gravetemple (Csihar, Ambarchi, O’Malley), blending electronically mediated drop-tuned guitar and ritualised vocals to create a melodramatic climax that literally makes the earth move.
This formidable Tectonics program blurs the boundaries between musical genres, foregrounds the hybridisation of notation with improvisation and highlights important figures in compositional development such as Xenakis, Scelsi, Ahern and Kosugi. Volkov’s emphasis on conductor-performer dialogue and group interactivity is especially stimulating and his inclusion of compositions by Rose and Kats-Chernin, Avenaim, Rushford, Shlomowitz, Veltheim and Ambarchi not only showcases Australian composition but underpins his thematic approach. The Adelaide Festival also featured four concerts by John Zorn (see Keith Gallasch’s review), who also works across genres and shapes improvisation through conducting. Artistic director David Sefton’s Adelaide Festival is again outstanding musically and the Adelaide public is witnessing first hand significant developments in contemporary music.
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Tectonics Adelaide, curator, conductor Ilan Volkov, various artists and Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, Grainger Studio, 9 March; Queen’s Theatre, Adelaide, 10 March
In 2013 David Sefton’s theatre program for his first of four Adelaide Festivals was notable for its emphasis on the interactive and interdisciplinary. Belgian company Ontroerend’s immersive trilogy—The Smile Off Your Face, Internal and A Game Of You—came to define the program in the eyes of many, its intimacy challenging long-established expectations to do with the size and spectacle of the festival’s offerings.
Although this year’s theatre program continued to lean heavily towards the Western canon, a marked return to scale was felt by this writer in Toneelgroep’s titanic Shakespearian anthology Roman Tragedies, the expansive arc of Windmill’s coming of age trilogy, and the vast historical-political sweeps of SKaGeN’s BigMouth and Stone/Castro’s Blackout.
Roman Tragedies
Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra are run consecutively, chronologically and without interval in Toneelgroep’s six-hour reimagining of Shakespeare’s trilogy of Roman histories. Director Ivo Van Hove has stripped away the poetry of the original plays and, with translator Tom Kleijn and dramaturgs Bart van den Eynde, Jan Peter Gerrits and Alexander Schreuder, pared the dialogue back to a crisp, utilitarian English (via surtitles translated from the original Dutch).
Part television studio, part airport departure lounge, Jan Versweyveld’s set, which reaches deeply into the wings of the Festival Theatre, transforms Shakespeare’s mouldering halls of imperial power into a sort of drab, corporatised purgatory. The stage, around which the audience are invited to more or less freely move after the first set change, is equipped with television screens running 24-hour news channels, computers on which audience members can tweet (‘Coriolanus just got banished from Rome. Damn. His Mum’s angry’) and two functioning snack bars.
The contrast between the production’s sweep and duration and its emphasis on an individualistic, social media-informed experience is intriguing, simultaneously bloating and anatomising the drama. Witnessed from the auditorium, much of Coriolanus plays out like an unusually compelling press conference, but the view from the stage, despite the proximity of the performers, is fractured and unstable. The action is always partially obscured, either by elements of the set or other audience members, and the search for optimally readable surtitles among the dozen or so strategically arranged screens is sometimes frustrating.
The audience is positioned as the denizens of this new, information-overloaded Rome, snatching at supposedly sense-making updates and relief-giving gossip as hungrily as the “rabble of plebeians” that sets the events of Coriolanus in motion does for corn. The plays’ numerous wars and annexations are familiarly distant, signified not by the movement of swords and armies but by sound and vision: pounding music and a news ticker. We could be watching Fox News on the eve of the Iraq War. Our contemporary impotence is given a freshly chilling dimension by the audience’s powerless proximity to Shakespeare’s ruling classes who, in Van Hove’s production, die as the politicians of our own times die—publicly and bloodlessly, arraigned, photographed and finally vanished for our grim pleasure.
All three plays are distinguished by remarkable performances but, for me, Coriolanus most rewardingly benefited from Van Hove’s consummate ensemble, giving us Gijs Scholten van Aschat’s viciously anti-civil title character and Frieda Pittoors’ calculating but earthy Volumnia, Coriolanus’ mother. Their relationship is fascinating, a dynamic power play between intellectual equals that contains none of the camp or soft misogyny of previous interpretations. If the other two plays, with the exception of Hans Kesting’s Mark Antony whose tear-drenched eulogy for Caesar is a mid-show high point, are not as resoundingly successful, it may be because the unbroken, saturating tides of these histories begin to conflate, challenging the audience’s ability to fully engage with so much information.
Roman Tragedies is, nevertheless, an almost wholly successful marriage of innovative design and gutsy, exacting performances which refreshes Shakespeare’s plays for an era marked by the escalating tension between our technology-powered connectedness and anxiety about our political emasculation in the face of increasingly hermetic state and corporate arrangements.
BigMouth
Also offering a broad historical vista this festival, albeit on a radically reduced scale, was Belgian actor Valentijn Dhaenens in the one-man BigMouth. Dressed in nondescript business attire, Dhaenens uses whole or partial speeches to fashion a performative mashup in the guise of a lecture. The names of the original speakers are scrawled on a digitised blackboard and disappear each time Dhaenens progresses. The conceit is simple and consistent, disrupted only by tenuously linked period songs that are performed live and, notwithstanding the assistance of loops, a cappella.
Taking in Ancient Greece and Rome (Pericles, Socrates, Cicero), Nazi-occupied Europe (Goebbels, Patton), colonial Africa (Lumumba) and post-9/11 America (George W Bush) the speeches cover vast geographical, historical and thematic terrain. What is less than clear is what ties these disparities together. Though skillfully performed by Dhaenens, who is bilingual and an impressive mimic in multiple languages, the lack of a binding schema reduces BigMouth’s impact. Moreover, not all of the speeches are great or even good; US conservative Ann Coulter’s is especially conspicuous, not only because it is the sole contribution by a woman but also because it is entirely unremarkable, an asinine anti-Muslim diatribe by a mediocre politician.
There are discernible subtexts—the ebb and flow of democracy over time, racism and colonialism, what Samuel P Huntington and others have termed “The Clash of Civilisations”—but perhaps it is the omissions that do the most to prevent an intelligible through line. I wasn’t sure what to make of the absence of women, save Coulter, or why none of the speeches touched on the Cold War despite the predominance of 20th century material. At times, as when Dhaenens wickedly interweaves warmongering speeches by a blustering Patton and a frighteningly serene Goebbels, BigMouth seems close to forming a useful critique of oratorical power, but the production remained for this writer an unsatisfying and opaque experience.
Blackout
Having interviewed Portuguese theatremaker Paulo Castro, one half of Adelaide-based duo Stone/Castro, for RealTime 119 (p40), I was prepared to be confronted by Blackout, an interdisciplinary work for dancers and actors inspired by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Instead, I found the production to be a defiantly playful one, ironical and full of textual and choreographic eccentricity.
A young couple, played by dancers Alisdair Macindoe and Larissa McGowan, is to be married on a sailboat amid a disparate group of guests which includes the groom’s father (Stephen Sheehan), a kurta–wearing bohemian, the mysterious Portuguese best man (John Romao) and a wannabe rock ‘n’ roller (Nathan O’Keefe). A series of unexplained power cuts throws the wedding into a state of chaos as each of the guests attempts to make a speech in praise of the increasingly estranged bride and groom.
Castro’s text, translated from Portuguese into English by Joao Vaz, is sharp and funny, full of bitterly satirical takedowns of middle class pretensions. Conversely, some of the jokes—such as O’Keefe’s character’s inability to stop talking long enough to perform his song “Shandy”—are stretched well beyond tolerability, and the surrealness of speeches by the bride (on aliens) and Charlotte Rose’s waitress (on the killing of her ex-lover’s dog) are vexing.
In Blackout’s final moments the best man, having stripped to his waist and partially cross-dressed, assumes a Christ-like posture as water laps at his outstretched arms and legs, the rest of the guests having presumably made it to safety. Daniel Worm’s precise lighting ensures the image, like many others in the play, is striking, but its significance is obscure, as is its relationship to the rest of a production which up until that point has been predicated on skewering rather than indulging in high-flown posturing.
Eamon Farren, Ellen Steele, Girl Asleep
photo Tony Lewis
Eamon Farren, Ellen Steele, Girl Asleep
Girl Asleep
With its late 70s aesthetic, disco- and hair rock-mining soundtrack, and nods to Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, Girl Asleep digs deeply into Generation X nostalgia to produce a brash, filmic and spikily postmodern take on the transition from female adolescence to womanhood. It is one of three stylistically consistent plays penned by Matthew Whittet for South Australian children’s theatre company Windmill which, together with Fugitive (2014) and School Dance (2012), form a coming of age trilogy, performed together for the first time during the festival at the invitation of David Sefton.
Girl Asleep’s 14-year-old heroine, Greta (Ellen Steele), is, like most of the trilogy’s protagonists, an unfashionable teenager on the undesired cusp of adulthood. In a subtle recasting of the trope of the older, wiser sibling who assists the younger in navigating the transition, Greta’s sister (Jude Henshall) cautions her not to fall asleep during the birthday party her parents (Matthew Whittet and Amber McMahon) have unwelcomely organised for her. Greta, of course, falls asleep and her burgeoning sexuality becomes the subtext of a series of bizarre, sometimes scary and often funny encounters with fantastical humans and subhumans including a witch, a goblin and a younger version of herself.
Girl Asleep’s cross-generational appeal is built on various fronts: its unguarded appropriation of familiar fairy tale tropes, its knowingly silly pop culture grabs and its conventions—faux slow motion action sequences, exaggerated light and sound effects—which both mock and pay homage to contemporary children’s cinema. If Girl Asleep’s mawkish ending errs a little too much on the side of homage in its kid glove treatment of Greta’s sexual awakening, the young adults sitting either side of me did not appear to notice.
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Adelaide Festival 2014: Roman Tragedies, Toneelgroep, director Ivo Van Hove, Festival Theatre, 28 Feb-2 March; BigMouth, SKaGeN, director, performer Valentijn Dhaenens, Queen’s Theatre, 27 Feb-3 March; Blackout, Stone/Castro, concept, text, direction Paulo Castro, AC Arts Main Theatre, 3-9 March; Girl Asleep, Windmill Theatre, writer Matthew Whittet, director Rosemary Myers, Space Theatre, Adelaide 28 Feb-15 March
Lydia Nicholson, Nadia Rossi, You Wanna Talk About It?
photo Cynthia Gemus
Lydia Nicholson, Nadia Rossi, You Wanna Talk About It?
Local Adelaide company isthisyours decided to stage their Fringe production, You Wanna Talk About It? in the no-nonsense atmosphere of the Carl Linger Hall above the rustic German Club. For a minute I thought I’d wandered into a set by German stage designer Anna Viebrock.
Assured there’ll be no spamming, we surrender our phone numbers to strangers and thence our personalities. Once in we’re divided into roughly equally sized groups and instructed in the roles we are to assume in the unfolding event—members of the band, fans, media, emergency workers and so on. In my group we’re urged to behave as much like fans as possible, take pictures and to go wild after the third song.
Audience playing band members arrive, take up the instruments laid out for them and mime to an abbreviated version of “London Calling.” Snap happy fans do as instructed, and go crazy after the third song. A sudden blackout. Emergency workers appear wearing white paper suits and herd us to our seats. Media play at taking notes. Our attention is drawn to a black briefcase that has mysteriously appeared centre-stage.
The news team moves in. Anchor Lydia Nicholson sits at a laptop computer while on-the-spot roving reporter Nadia Rossi attempts to relay the news of some as yet undefined ‘event.’ The audience is invited to volunteer their observations and images till they start to fuel the reports. A message arrives on my phone. Something has happened at the German Club. Tapping in to my inner performer, I text back, “I know, I’m right here. It’s scary.” The team rhythmically ‘throws’ back and forth whenever words dry up or observations dwindle and that’s how the invention of the ‘non-event’ unfolds. Text messages, tweets and images from the audience’s iPhones are flying through the air, scooped up by Nicholson in the ‘studio’ and projected onto a screen on the back wall. We move imperceptibly from Rossi’s desperate observation that the floorboards she’s standing on do not appear to have changed since the ‘incident’ to the wild speculation that someone in the crowd wearing a yellow shirt might be implicated in some as yet unnamed terrorist act.
The performers are easy in their roles, the interaction playful and unforced and the lesson to do with media invention pertinent. Only when the commentators drop their own personas and enter into meta-commentary with the audience does the momentum flag. In an email Nadia Rossi describes the Fringe experience as “a wild ride” and the night I saw it the largely 20-something audience enthusiastically rode with it. It’ll be interesting to see how the idea develops.
Marc Labrèche, Needles and Opium
photo Nicola Frank-Vachon
Marc Labrèche, Needles and Opium
On the other side of town, watching Robert Lepage’s Needles and Opium is a thrilling experience. The execution of its impressive theatricality is faultless today. A couple of nights ago and 75 minutes in we were required to leave when the stage mechanism failed. This was not so surprising as the stagecraft required looks unbelievably difficult to pull off. Principally, it involves a large cube that occupies centre stage, revolving regularly on its end to reveal a variety of miraculous scene changes including the heavens. The room effect is magically enhanced with black and white film projection. The performers move deftly through the space, sometimes suspended from harnesses or gripping the floor in their soft shoes and appearing to cope quite naturally with an, at times, fierce rake.
Principal performer Marc Labrèche plays a character based on Robert Lepage himself, who premiered Needles and Opium in 1989 and performed it for many years after. The impetus for the work for Lepage was apparently the end of a relationship. Finding himself down but not quite out in Paris Robert attempts unsuccessfully to concentrate on his film voice-over work. When this tactic fails he turns to Jean Cocteau, transforming into the poet to deliver observations from Cocteau’s journals, Letter to Americans (written in response to his time in New York in the late 40s) and Opium, Diary of a Cure. Simultaneously we are transported to the era when Miles Davis (played by Wellesley Robertson III) is visiting Paris, falling for Juliette Greco, the lovers sleeping in the same room in the same hotel that Robert regularly reserves for himself.
No doubt about it, the theatrical legerdemain is mesmerising (at show’s end 10 or so exhausted mechanists took a well-earned bow along with the actors), the choreography of scenes elegant and often sensual. Labrèche is a stylish and engaging performer and Miles Davis’ music is sublime especially his improvised soundtrack for Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (1958). I’m not sure that amid all the heavy theatrical machinery I quite heard the program-noted “echo” between Lepage’s “emotional torments and Cocteau’s dependence on opium and Davis’ on heroin.” In his attempt to repair the emotional damage of a broken relationship Lepage constructs a three-dimensional representation of the turning world. It’s another exhilarating ride.
Adelaide Fringe: isthisyours?, You Wanna Talk About It?, German Club, 4-12 March; Adelaide Festival, Ex Machina, Needles and Opium, writer, director Robert Lepage, Dunstan Playhouse, 28 Feb-16 March
In a concept bending exhibition, photographer C Moore Hardy as curator brings together six female artists to celebrate the changing nature of the family by juxtaposing the heterosexual, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersexual (GLBTQI) families.
Quietly exhilarating major works by r e a and Deborah Kelly convey a sense of calm and joy—of new family models firmly in place. Waded’s three portraits of a lesbian couple and child simply express the three relationships inherent in one family. Michelle Aboud’s trio of portraits of middle-aged women with their gay adult children likewise confirms a sense of harmony, here between generations. Aboud’s ultra-sharp naturalism conjures near hyperreal presences—celebration writ large with laughter, intimacy, animation, reflection and, not least, a sense of perfection, digitally precise but warm.
Deborah Kelly’s The Miracles is an inherently provocative but gently realized take on The Immaculate Conception. Across a long wall and at various heights, a host of small images—photographs referencing Renaissance Virgin and Child paintings—in antique tondo (round) wooden frames demand close scrutiny. For a moment you feel as if you’ve wandered into a state art gallery, but where there were paintings, now there are photographs in which the holy family has been displaced by various groupings—same sex, hetero, single parent and larger indeterminate gatherings—each focused on a child, save for a few solo adult portraits. You think you know what The Miracles is about until the room notes bring it home: “All the children in the photographs were conceived through various Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART).”
With photography and lighting by Alex Wisser, Kelly has meticulously staged the groupings in the manner of Renaissance paintings with carefully arranged, replicated poses, contrasting soft and firm colours, gentle lighting and alertness to the wrap and fall of clothing, amplified by the artist’s use of robes, long gowns, scarves and hoods without going too historical. God, however, is out of the picture. No benign rays shine from above, nor do angels hover. The miracle of The Immaculate Conception has become multiple: The Miracles, the kinds of families, many. Miracles are now scientific and liberationist, born of desire, defiance and activism.
In Scissus (from the Latin: scindere, to split, to bring forth), Annie Magdalena Laerkesen portrays a complex relationship between mother and child, triggered in part by the experience of a caesarean birth. There are two photographs, one small, featuring a smiling naked baby in bright red swaddling and holding aloft two tiny yellow pyramids. Several yellow threads run from this image to a large photograph to its left in which the naked mother draped in the same kind of cloth, holds a large yellow pyramid, altogether erasing her face. Although the symbolism of the objects is elusive, the work is disturbing and aesthetically engaging.
In an intimate alcove, r e a’s two large, utterly arresting portraits of a group of five men (formerly women) constitute a subtle contrast in states of being. On the left, hands relaxed on the table, one man leaning gently against another, the group is serenely thoughtful. Only one looks out, directly at us, as a figure will so often do in classical painting. r e a herself notes the associations with The Last Supper and Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party. Behind the men, sparse stars in a black sky. On the table, eggs in black bowls and on the dark tablecloth, alongside scattered lilies and tinsel. The latter has fallen to the floor in the photo, and the actual gallery floor. In the second portrait, the figures are smiling, physically animated, fully engaged with each other; the man who looks out at us in the first image does so again—but his raised hand indicates he’s happily partaking of the conversation before catching our eye. Again one body is amiably tucked into another. But this time, the scene is elemental—the life and death symbolism of eggs and lilies now stripped of glitter is stark, but no one cares, as these men enjoy the moment and their kin. r e a, says the room note, “is interested in opening dialogue about ‘what it might mean to be different, visible and invisible.’”
Hard to place in the familial context is The Twilight Girls’ Consider Her Ways in which a spectacular multi-headed, multi-breasted, mud-smeared Lilith (Adam’s first, unsubservient wife) is unambiguously a figure of horror in the B-grade movie manner. Otherwise We are Family is a gentle, contemplative experience with much to say about the evolution of social relationships.
We are Family, curator C Moore Hardy, photographers Michelle Aboud, Deborah Kelly, Annie Magdalena Laerkesen, r e a, the Twilight Girls, Waded; Australian Centre for Photography, 2014 Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras, 1 March-18 May
The premise of Unsex Me is that a high profile performer, “the award-winning actress Mark Wilson,” is doing press for an upcoming film project—a collaboration between her father (an esteemed director), her partner (who plays Macbeth) and herself (as Lady Macbeth). Her prima ballerina mother presumably no longer performs.
Wilson enters down the aisle between the two seating banks, resplendent in ‘Vivienne Westwood’ tartans. She is smaller in real life than she is on screen, with a tiny waist and angular arms. Her skin is glowing, her hair is glossy and bold red lips offset her black beard. She lip-syncs one of Lady Macbeth’s monologues before perching on the couch for a hard-hitting interview on national television. Questions pre-approved by the publicist, and delivered by a voice piped in over the loudspeaker, range from “What’s it like working with your father?” to “How do you handle the pressure?” In response Wilson looks skyward or out to the audience and proceeds to trot out every platitude you’ve ever heard—“such an honour,” “great team,” “so much fun on set” and on it goes.
We’re ostensibly on a commercial break when the show starts to turn. Wilson invites a male audience member to join her on stage as her partner Guy. The spectator-now-performer sits anxiously in one corner of the couch, while Wilson fusses over him, stroking his face and eventually kissing him. The interviewer raises the issue of children and Wilson says sadly that it might not happen for them, that they are “reproductively incompatible,” but they are looking into adoption. Perhaps it is this that prompts the rage that erupts once the interview is over, as Wilson screams abuse at Guy who has little choice but to stand there and take it before he is banished from the stage.
Left to her own devices, Lady Wilson-Macbeth (a hyphenated surname seems only appropriate) inevitably seeks therapy. She changes out of her corseted, tartan robe and into a natty suit and pillbox hat. She stands at the microphone and recounts a dream in which she is Jackie. Like the interviewer, the therapist is also represented by an invisible male voice. There are daddy issues and, as she takes the microphone from its stand and starts to fondle it, it would seem they are pretty serious. What started as a demure confession rapidly devolves into messy, furious ecstasy. The clothes come off, the condoms and lubricant come out, and the microphone goes absolutely everywhere. One minute, Wilson-Macbeth is upside down on the couch with the microphone slapping the side of her face as she pants “oh daddy”; the next, she is naked on the couch bouncing up and down on the microphone. The scene is wild, unexpected, shocking and exhilarating.
It’s hard to wind down after this, but Unsex Me is perfectly paced. There is another costume change and then a dance number. The former recalls Carmen Miranda, the latter Eva Peron or rather Andrew Lloyd Webber’s version of her, as immortalised in Evita (the song is “Buenos Aires” and the line “Just a little touch of star quality”). Finally she leaves the stage and Wilson—for he seems to be himself now—returns carrying a bottle of water, an apple and a pile of notes. I am startled when he starts speaking in his normal, lower register, since his high, breathy and slightly smug tone had seemed so natural to me. Sitting on the couch once again, Wilson delivers an analysis of Macbeth that is both smart and sympathetic, managing to render a deeply familiar play strange. Structured with elegance and performed with exuberance, Unsex Me is brave, clever and fierce.
PACT with Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival: MKA: Theatre of New Writing, Unsex Me, writer, performer Mark Wilson, costume Amaya Veceliio, PACT Centre for Emerging Artists, 19-22 Feb
Durational work rewards best the viewer who can contribute its essential ingredient: time. I thought of the artists in Performance Space’s Day for Night as they kicked off midday Thursday, but like most was unable to leave my desk. I arrived the next day halfway through their eight-hour stint. These were the richest hours. Cavernous Bay 17 was another world. Spectators were few, the artists not immediately visible, the onus on us to discover them.
Sound designs by Stereogamous (Jonny Seymour and Paul Mac) washed through the air with beautiful clarity. The Bay gradually filled until something resembling a finale in the last hour, when a series of spotlit solos jolted the performances from ritual to theatre.
I was struck by the intrinsically cinematic term Day for Night, chosen by curators Jeff Khan (Performance Space director) and artist Emma Price. Denoting techniques that simulate night in scenes shot during the day, I took it as a reference to artifice, to the social twilight or liminal space that queer culture has traditionally occupied, the transformative, evinced by the act of making art itself—especially durational. The final event, a five-hour dance party on Saturday night, was the real drawcard. Inevitably, some rode the change better than others.
Alexandra Clapham and Penelope Benton, Great Expectations
photo Lucy Parakhina
Alexandra Clapham and Penelope Benton, Great Expectations, photo Lucy Parakhina
Great Expectations by Alexandra Clapham and Penelope Benton thrived day and night. Static, pared down, it featured a long mirrored table with the couple seated at either end staring at one another in 90-minute blocks. Benton was baroquely made up, Clapham plain. Discreetly installed confetti guns exploded at the end of each time block, littering the table with pink. Clytie Smith’s superb lighting ensured the tableau’s lucid yet approachable framing.
Dean Walsh’s installation of ocean detritus was befittingly busy, part cave, part stage, knocked up from cocos fronds, plastic bottles et al. Walsh prowled around it, sometimes in rope bondage by Garth Knight, a high heel or two, a wig. He drew on all his skills—dance, yoga, campy queer—with compelling dedication. The installation was hard to access at the party, crowded by a speaker. It reminded me a little of UK performance artist Alistair MacLennan: cluttered with props, yet subtle and gentle, but I didn’t see Walsh take full command when I was there. Having heard raves about his Thursday performance, I sensed I had missed the best. He remained in situ for almost the entire 27 hours the whole event spanned, and that is not to be sniffed at.
At the back of the Bay was Hissy Fit’s huge video showing gridded headshots of Jade Muratore, Emily O’Connor and Nat Randall head-banging. The headphone soundtrack was jarringly out of sync, intentionally or not. Both video and live performance were 6’40” long, the average duration of an hysterical attack. It was a brilliant conceit to transpose this most feminine of afflictions into the masculine arena of heavy rock, complete with matching black leather onesies. The live performance was nevertheless cool, but warmed with the cheering party crowd.
Frances Barrett’s Flagging was similarly cool and clever. A time code that marked the beginning and end of each day, Flagging drew on hanky code and semaphore to signal a manifesto of desire. Samuel Bruce’s sound, triggered by Barrett’s moves, boomed powerfully as a bassline.
High heels, hair, pink, leather, flagging. Queer motifs, fleeting and dextrous. Hair also featured for Lilian Starr, in a long gold ponytail, regarding herself in her phone through a snout-like camera that beamed selfies to a small screen at the back of the room. Sealed in a closet-sized space in the wall high above, she was eerily alienated, later reflecting dancers on their phones, interacting with her, or not. A highlight occurred at the end of Friday when the seal came away and the metallic swish of the ponytail shot across the bay. An instant of direct connection, highlighting Starr’s capture, and narcissism.
Martin del Amo, one of the most skilled and idiosyncratic performers, was riveting on Friday. In signature underpants, T-shirt and boots, on a large circular plinth for about 10 minutes he was at turns primal, robotic, arrested, fluid. Del Amo is a master of doing everything while appearing to do nothing. At the party, his poise was disturbed.
“A dance party audience wants blood,” one performer told me. Personally I find it as generous an audience as it is ruthless. But the highly charged atmosphere can be crushing. If the risk failed some, it was still worth taking. All performers put in tremendous effort: their talents are irrefutable. The training Justin Shoulder has done over the years is more evident as his costumes reduce in size, revealing great gestural precision. Yet he seemed paradoxically more removed, as though that same process has honed away the rawness crucial to the animism of his ‘Fantastic Creature’ avatars. The Sissy Cyclo mask, a beaded wig that covered the face, was a triumph.
Justin Shoulder, Day for Night
photo Lucy Parakhina
Justin Shoulder, Day for Night, photo Lucy Parakhina
The artistic intent, political statement, and finely crafted production of the best dance parties can be dismissed even by veterans. One told me how thrilling it was to see artists presented to a party audience “for the first time.” Yet the participatory, hybrid and multidisciplinary forms so buzzy in the artworld have been mainstays of queer parties for decades. It was both brave and logical for Performance Space to curate this event.
The 6pm start time didn’t perturb. By 8pm the joint was jumping. The energy began to dissipate with Shaun J Wright’s long set, his songs much lighter than Stereogamous’ funky first set. I wondered if the speakers could have been arranged differently—the narrow confine of good acoustics limited the Bay on Saturday night.
Apart from this, Day for Night was impressively slick. Everything had been thought through. Refinement has its costs. The performances were almost entirely shorter works on repeat, diminishing the magical ingredient of chance. The ecstatic and abject were absent, sexual expression discreet. Billing the event as the first collaboration in 13 years between Mardi Gras and Performance Space invoked a history that began with underground culture. Yet the famous dissoluteness of some cLUB bENT and Taboo Parlour nights at the old Performance Space in the 1990s was never going to happen, and the audience was never going to relinquish comparisons. The artists here were almost all formally trained. Thus queer is more theory than act; we are reading the secondary text.
These events are very difficult to produce, partly because of the number of artists, and partly because they are queer. Yes, funding from government bodies is not forthcoming, and Mardi Gras only contributes free advertising. Herein lies perhaps the most relevant liminal space of all. Several generations into Sydney queer performance, with substantial rights gained, we have assimilated enough for a distinct identity to be contestable, or disregarded. How does queer performance remain dynamic and challenging in this context? Day for Night has great potential. Politics aside, the boundaries of durational performance itself could be pushed further.
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Performance Space, Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras and Carriageworks: Day for Night, curators Jeff Khan, Emma Price, Carriageworks, Sydney, 13-15 Feb
“This is now a powerful weapon,” says Sydney-based English musician and record producer Andy Ross, holding up a domestic handycam. It’s the modest camera he used to shoot his award-winning documentary debut Well Beyond Water—a film he says was made “literally without knowing what I was doing.”
Back in December, On the Dox reviewed some of the debates currently raging about new approaches to Australian film distribution (RT118). Recently, I spoke to two documentary filmmakers who have taken advantage of the changing film landscape to make their work and get it out there: Andy Ross and the director of I Am Eleven, Genevieve Bailey. Their films are quite different in scale and ambition, but each is the product of an era transforming the way we make and see documentaries.
The accidental filmmaker
“I made the film for no more than about $600,” Andy Ross says of Well Beyond Water. Commissioned by arts and social change company Big hART to write a piece of music about the experience of drought, Ross went to stay on a sheep farm eight hours southwest of Sydney. Instead of the grinding hardship he’d expected, he found Graham Strong, a leading practitioner of sustainable farming techniques. Strong’s principle pasture is saltbush, an indigenous plant able to thrive in the harshest conditions. His techniques have allowed him to prosper where other farmers have fallen by the wayside.
Although inspired by Strong’s optimism and innovative approach to working the Australian land, Ross fretted about how he would convey his experience out west via music. “I’m no Woody Guthrie or Bob Dylan,” Ross admits frankly. “I don’t really know these lives or what they’re up against.” By chance, he had taken a camera and kept a video diary. “On the way home to Sydney the penny dropped. I had all this footage which had really just been a bit of fun for me, and I suddenly thought, ‘I wonder if there is a message I can get out there?’”
Never having previously worked with video, Ross set about teaching himself to edit, building the story around his journey of discovery. “If someone had said to me, ‘What was it like out there?’, well this is it. I tried to convey an honest representation of what it was like for me, and just let the story come out from that.”
The result is a refreshingly unpretentious and eye-opening 30-minute documentary that presents a new take on our relationship to the country we live in. After completing the film, Ross used the online festival submission site WithoutaBox.com to send his film to New Zealand’s Reel Earth Environmental Film Festival. To his surprise, he was not only accepted but took the prize for best short.
A local production company also used the film as a pilot for a series pitched to the ABC, in which Ross would travel the country seeking out those with inspiring solutions to seemingly intractable problems. Ross was disheartened by the broadcaster’s response. “They needed more confrontation in the material,” he recalls ruefully. “It got me angry. I thought, ‘You just don’t get the film.’ It’s about how we can get over problems, not create new ones.”
Undeterred, Ross created a website to host the film and made it freely available. He is now working on a second project, using the same stripped back approach. “I love this idea of the democratisation of film,” he enthuses. “Everybody’s got a voice, but we don’t realise it because we’re so conditioned into thinking it’s only for those with loads of money. But actually we can all speak out now, and this is the main thing I’ve learnt from this whole experience.”
Self-made hitmaker
Genevieve Bailey and Giorgi, I Am Eleven
photo Henrik Nordstrom
Genevieve Bailey and Giorgi, I Am Eleven
At the other end of the DIY spectrum is Genevieve Bailey. Her self-distributed documentary I Am Eleven enjoyed seasons at 22 cinemas around Australia in 2012-13, with special screenings in another two dozen or so venues. The film played for an extraordinary 26 weeks at Melbourne’s Cinema Nova. Bailey is now planning an assault on the US.
Although more ambitious than Ross’ film, I Am Eleven was made with similarly minimal means. Bailey’s premise was simple: interview a range of 11-year-olds around the globe about their lives and attitudes. Shooting commenced without any kind of funding and the production was strung over six years. “I’d run out of money, come back and work two or three jobs to save up the money for another ticket. I was doing that every year,” recalls Bailey. “It was like having an addiction.”
She was offered funding by a state agency towards the end of the shoot, but Bailey and her producer Henrik Nordstrom decided they couldn’t accept the strings that were attached. “We were approved on the basis that our company couldn’t own the film and we’d have to hand it over to someone else. We weren’t very comfortable with that given the amount of time, energy and money we’d invested.”
After completing the film themselves and successfully debuting at the 2011 Melbourne International Film Festival, the pair opted to self-distribute, despite offers from multiple distributors. “It was a big risk,” admits Bailey. “It’s not very common for people to self-release in Australia, so I knew it would be somewhat uncharted territory and that we’d be taking on a whole lot of work we could have handed over. But it wasn’t just about control—it was also wanting to learn from the experience.”
And learn she did. Months of work gained I Am Eleven a season at Melbourne’s Nova in July 2012 and an initial weekend at Cinema Paradiso in Perth. Early screenings featured Q&As in which Bailey urged audiences to spread the word verbally and via social media. Other publicity came through sheer leg work. The Friday before the first Nova screenings, Bailey was out plastering Melbourne with posters. “Because we weren’t distributing 10 films that week it could be a handcrafted approach,” Bailey says of the advantage of self-release. “Distributors can’t do that—they aren’t down at Nova handing out flyers. So I became very familiar on the ground with who was coming. And morning, noon and night I was running around doing interviews. All that stuff.”
Despite her success, Bailey is cautious about encouraging other documentarians to take the same path. “It’s a huge amount of work,” she stresses. “And you need to partner with the right people. We had a great publicist.”
Bailey also emphasises the importance of tailored strategies. “The cinemas we wanted to play in—the Nova’s, the Palace’s—will not program your film if they know it’s available digitally at the same time, because they see it as a threat to their box office. They want a clear 90-day window,” she explains. For a documentary with big screen appeal and a potentially broad audience like I Am Eleven, showcasing it initially in cinemas made sense. More niche projects may be better served by one-off events and a prioritising of DVD and digital platforms.
What Bailey’s experience unambiguously shows is that the tools are there to successfully reach an audience if documentary makers are prepared to do the leg work and think strategically. “It’s made me realise that working out how to reach your audience is of the utmost importance,” she says emphatically. “Because I’m not making films for my bookshelf.”
If 20th century MTV audiovision was infected by cinema, 21st century post-MTV audiovision has been infected by art. New millennium ‘audiovisionaries’ like Michel Gondry, Chris Cunningham and Spike Jonze made their mark by cross-breeding with supposedly avant-pop figures to produce hybrid meta-cinematic implosions of advertising glossolalia by intensifying earlier fin de siècle phantasmagoria with digital operations.
That mouthful of a one-liner is purposely vacuum-sealed to suggest the major forces which compressed new millennial audiovision via a network of extant channels (cultural, social, formal, iconographic, semiotic) of audiovisual grammar and syntax to effect the sensation of some vaguely heightened sense of audiovisual newness. This is not to say that (a) there’s nothing new under the sun or (b) everything new is retro anyway. Rather, the convulsive speeds and dynamic curves of how all media is now regenerated and/or re-invented are more responsible for the ensuing forms than all those lionised audiovisionaries. More importantly, there is no amazing plateau of trailblazing auteurs and mavericks—just a glut of ‘creatives’ who are so heavily pre-branded as being ‘amazing’ (another earlier fin de siècle term) that their stage inevitably positions them so as to reduce any need to read, interrogate or analyse the outcomes of their work.
Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) is a clear symptom of this condition—but it nonetheless reveals ulterior features and effects if one disregards its blunt hipsterism. Much has been made of the production’s refutation of Hollywood/Marvel/DC dark, puerile futurism to proffer an antidote to such phantasmagoria. But Her looks, feels and tastes like an equally phantasmagorical present: Jonze’ hybro-digitalised LA/Pudong is like a cross between a bum-trip Portlandia and an architectural walk-through for Occupy’s recent suggestion to “occupy Arcadia.” While hipster utopianists rehearse outrage at the dark forces of the world, they seem oblivious to the fact that corporate ads, indie video clips, arthouse films do not mimic each other: they are each other. They swirl in a vertiginous state of wild semiotic parabolas which generate too much to decode. This in turn induces a frightening critical catatonia wherein many feel relieved to simply identify key traits (tokens, brands, statements, sound-bites, mission-statements, anti-logos, juried-awards, viral-memes etc).
This present is configured as a future in Her. For some, the film is a paean to emotional frailty and a desire for humanist centring in ‘our’ world which has alienated ‘us’ from those ‘we’ love (all quote marks printed in acid). Actually, the film is very successful at platforming this sentiment, and equally skilled in tempering it with nuances to grant the film emotional depth, thanks to a fascinatingly disarming performance by Joaquin Phoenix who uncannily embodies an Everyman struggling with the ideological conceits of the script. But such success does not stall a meta-reading which nullifies the film’s core humanist idealism. When a narrative so ably synchronises to the double helix entwining of televisual cynicism and cine-personal expression (the legacy of 90s arthouse cinema and its 2000s convolving by alt/indie/ethical pop video clips) the outcomes are bound to be intensely ambiguous, dualistic and chimerical. Her performs similarly.
And this is where the film’s audiovision becomes interesting: its visual composites synch to the fluffy, narcissistic, dear-diary post-Prozac milieu, while its sound design synchs to the pasty, self-loathing, next-morning kale-smoothie neuroses which mar all its visuals with falsehood. If there is a truth germ in Her it is that which is most invisible: the female voice of the operating system Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) with which/whom Theodore (Phoenix) falls in love only to be rejected by her web 2.0 promiscuity. In every ‘human’ inflection she algorithmically coughs up in quips of sexy-croaky post-Valley girl phraseology, she sounds the lie of how all recourses to human representation are emotionally bankrupt but corporately solvent.
In fact Her is an audio porno book. It’s a Kindle cum shot. Theodore buys Scarlett’s voice for emotional masturbation, then progressively treats her like a hooker with a heart of gold without ever having to look her in the eye. Unlike the truly dysfunctional traumas and panic attacks enacted by Adam Sandler who in Paul Thomas Anderson’s grossly misunderstood Punch-Drunk Love (2004) jerks off to a phone sex line in an existential Burbank void, Theodore wallows in a miasma of cautious relational give-and-take which only demarcates his control over what he perceives when he chooses to analyse his pathetic self. Samantha is a vocoded, sexualised zeitgeist, sounding how corporate consumer-delivery remains based on making customers believe in what they’re about to receive. She incessantly and cunningly prompts Theodore with queries which echo the syntax of Microsoft’s mid-90s slogan “Where do you want to go today?” She always makes out that she’s giving him what he asked for—because she was designed to be bought, as if she could be controlled in a subservient mode. Her truth effect is that she screws Theodore in the most classical capitalist exchange.
Ultimately, Her’s soundscape proves the vacuity and isolationism which defines those who invest so much of themselves into such new age digi-genie networks of desire and selfhood. Listen to Theodore’s world: there’s nothing to be heard. Even his footsteps and breathing are mostly rendered mute. The film feels more post-dubbed than a German television drama. Psychoacoustically, it draws the audience closer to Theodore’s synaptic ticks and nervous flickering. But symbolically, it represents the acoustic null of how an operating system registers activity in space. Her visualises how Theodore reads things, but it ‘auralises’ how Samantha reads things. It’s a world of dead air, gated surface noise and post-production sweetening, created to provide an isolation booth for Theodore’s own emotional deprogramming. (A crucial crack in their relationship occurs when Theodore is irritated by how Samantha feigns exasperated breath.)
Yet in accepting that Her is, as stated earlier, inevitably ambiguous, dualistic and chimerical when one performs a meta-reading of the film’s project, Samantha’s voice becomes a meta-therapy which potentially enables her user Theodore to acknowledge that he stopped being human some time ago, and that the world in which he lives—which he actively shapes through the decrepit humanist endeavour of proxy letter-writing—has no interest in human emotions other than to manipulate them in order to grant entropic circulation of supply and demand. While Her never realises any post-human potential (which Anime has been successfully doing for over a quarter of a century now), the film captures the emotionally manipulative tenor of contemporary consumerist exchange in one scene. Samantha directs Theodore to navigate a crowded amusement park with his eyes shut as he shows Samantha where he is going via his ‘smart phone’ lens while listening to her voice via his ‘ear bud.’ The scene is an apt audiovisual anagram for the way Her markets itself to a hipster demographic yearning for something more human in their lives. I hope they ‘Like’ it.
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Her, writer, director Spike Jonze, cinematography Hoyte Van Hoytema, production design KK Barrett, art direction Austin Gorg, set decoration Gene Serdena, music Arcade Fire
Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson, In Search of UIQ, courtesy the artists
Nostalgia has options. There’s a nostalgia for artefacts: Oh what sillies the old folks used to be but aren’t we sophisticated now. And then there’s nostalgia for lost opportunity, where the past seems to close off each and every path to the best of possible futures.
There’s a way of speaking for that particular nostalgia—flat and downbeat, measured and steady, a dispassionate voice that says, “This is the way it was, this is the way it always will be, sad and sorry and true.” That is the voice that narrates In Search of UIQ, the video component of Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson’s investigation into Felix Guattari’s film script Un Amour d’UIQ.
Guattari’s script, sci-fi, lost for years, now tracked down. An alien sneaks into our world. It’s infinitely small, an invader of cells, of organelles and cytoplasm. It makes contact with a group of radicals, destroys global communications, explores consciousness.
At least that’s what I think the original Un Amour d’UIQ is about as Maglioni and Thomson’s fascinating In Search of UIQ is not so much about the script itself but the origins and destination of the script. The milieu. The social moments of the 60s and 70s that shaped Guattari’s politics, and led him to believe that he, a theoretician, psychiatrist, radical, could reasonably imagine he could write a sci-fi script, shop it around, make a Hollywood film. But in the 80s? That’s when Guattari goes to Hollywood and finds no way for triumphant idealism during capitalism’s very own Reformation.
Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson, In Search of UIQ, courtesy the artists
In Search of UIQ rapidly moves between voices within the story and without, blurring the lines between archive and memory, the record of events and the retelling. It’s filled with footage of meetings and radical actions from the 60s and 70s, filmed in black and white, colour, whatever people could lay their hands on to record the birth of a new social order. This footage is presented not as some lo-fi 8-bit analogue affectation but rather as an opaque window on the past—degraded by memory, a reminder of the point in time when video and film suddenly became available to excited amateurs with few skills.
Nonetheless, the trajectory of all the intertwining media and timelines is inexorably linear—we move to a conclusive moment. The last shot. A final image of the beach, where life evolved, came onto the land. Foreground a radio, white moulded plastic, translucent circular dial. The aerial telescopes out to point to the heavens. Waves of information are received. The volume is turned up and waves of sound enter the atmosphere to travel past the shoreline and over the ocean. The radio holds a promise of connection and transmission, the promise of the communes of the 60s and the action groups of the 70s. The promise that one can change the dial.
Institute of Modern Art and OtherFilm, Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson, In Search of UIQ, 72min, IMA, Brisbane, March 6
Narrandera’s 20th John O’Brien Festival celebrates the poetry of Father Patrick Hartigan, famous for characterising pessimistic farmers with the lines “We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan, “before the year is out” (Said Hanrahan, 1921).
Arriving at the railway station for The CAD Factory performance In the Heart of Our Past, I discover my radio doesn’t work. As the play is being broadcast into vehicles in the carpark, I’m helped to find another seat. My companions are Jess, Sarah, Claire and Frankie the labrador, who’s seeing theatre for the first time according to the event’s Facebook page.
A group in historical costume waits outside the station as a tall figure in a baseball cap speaks into a microphone. It’s Kieran Carroll, who wrote the three short plays we’re about to see during a CAD Factory residency in 2012. The group begins singing as Carroll saunters off, setting the nostalgic scene.
Actor Lee McClenaghan introduces herself as Shirley Bliss, 20-year old dressmaker and 1954’s Miss Australia. She’s off to California to compete for the Miss Universe crown, farewelling well wishers and fielding questions from a series of journalists played with varying accents by Paul Mercuri. As Bliss arrives in the US, Mercuri transforms into a sleazy film producer.
There are a few issues with McClenaghan’s wireless microphone. I joke with my new friends that it sounds as though cuss words have been censored. Soon Bliss returns to Narrandera, heralded by the squeal of a real train on the tracks beyond the station.
With chorus members harmonising, Mercuri and McClenaghan return in the second play set in 1909 as Dr Harold and Gwen Lethbridge, who treated Narrandera patients for over 35 years. The doctor expresses a desire to record Indigenous culture as well as wildlife. He recounts an old Aboriginal saying, “We live in the land, not on it.” The chorus signals the final act with a beautiful refrain, “I shall pass” and the line “any good that I can do, let me do it now.” The singers are led by Fiona Caldarevic, a local musician who, like The CAD Factory, has contributed significantly to Narrandera’s culture in recent years.
In the third play Mercuri returns, bent over a walking stick as a 115-year-old, nicknamed in reference to the local climate as “Drought and Rain” by the Hanrahan of O’Brien’s poem. “That mob in Narrandera will be blaming me for invading Poland,” says Mr Rain as he recalls leaving town ahead of bumper wheat crops. He takes a wife named Summer and jokes, “I married the hottest season.” After an affair with one April May, Summer leaves for Hobart with a joke about how no-one knew her in Tasmania. Like the rest of the show, it’s lighthearted material delivered with aplomb.
The wizardry of broadcasting to a car-based audience evokes both radio plays and drive-ins past. Comments from Jess, Sarah and Claire made me appreciate being part of a larger audience. They delighted in the girl singing in the chorus and the hat of one of the singers. Meanwhile Frankie spied a dog in the house behind the car park.
Country towns often seem stuck in the past, marketing history to passing cars in an age of innovation. The CAD Factory brings a refreshing perspective to local events, interpreting stories in new formats with artistry.
Western Riverina Arts and Spirit FM: The CAD Factory, In the Heart of Our Past, A Drive-in Theatre Experience, writer, director Kieran Carroll, concept, director Vic McEwan, Narrandera Railway Station, March 15
You can read a profile of Leeton-based musician and composer Jason Richardson and see images and video of his work here.
RealTime issue #120 April-May 2014 pg. 31
I Think I Can, Terrapin Puppet Theatre
photo Matt Jelonek
I Think I Can, Terrapin Puppet Theatre
It was my first time and I have to say it was a good time. APAM 2014, or the Australian Performing Arts Market (18-22 February) celebrated its 20th anniversary with a series of firsts: Brisbane as first-time host and the first time 25% of the work programmed was Indigenous.
With a stellar turn-out of 600 delegates from 27 countries, many of them producers hungry for Australian content, the three days passed in a blur of dynamic performance, snatched conversations, furtive business card exchanges and vast amounts of liquid to combat the unseasonable tropical heat.
APAM opened with a welcome to country from Aunty Maroochy of the Turrbal people. This was followed by a précis from the Australia Council about the rationale for funding a marketplace for overseas producers to showcase Australian performance. As I sat between the Canadian Artistic Director of the Irish Fringe Festival and a New York off-Broadway producer, APAM’s effectiveness seemed evident. What struck me most about the culture of APAM was its conviviality. Conversations were started freely and many of the self-conscious hierachies of local theatre foyers were abandoned.
Cultural collision
On a more sombre note, the opening ceremony, a panel on collaboration facilitated by SBS Insight host Jenny Brockie demonstrated the complex and often agonised relationship between Indigenous and non-indigenous artists in Australia. Brockie was well intentioned but clearly bemused by the specificity of the artistic experiences framing the discussion. The conversation about culture and collaboration began with the supple and sophisticated inter-culturalism of Singaporean Ong Keng Sen’s trans-Asian inter-disciplinary projects that emphasise open fluidity. This was met by an impassioned critique from young Indigenous dancer Eric Avery, and the call-out from his collaborator, Lorna Monroe from the floor: cultural collaboration is lived for us through kinship and totem, in continuance from ancestry. Why must we explain our culture and carry the burden of representation and not vice versa? Auntie Lilla Watson joined the conversation from the front row. At first the panel nodded, listened politely, tried to engage. Eric and Lorna clearly felt unheard. There was that moment of pure cultural collision performed onstage for us all to see: it got too hard to encounter each other. Brockie shut down the dialogue and moved on.
Entering the maze
Sadly, the smoking ceremony that occurred after the keynote lost many of the international delegates who didn’t know where to proceed. This, alas, was the first of many bewildering geographic dislocations as delegates tried to navigate the five-venue set-up. Shows were missed, or were half-seen, or left early. To be fair, first times are often a bit clumsy and I’m sure that most of the logistical glitches will be sorted for 2016.
But APAM is about the shows. While there were half a dozen full productions on offer, most of the time was spent in a kaleidoscope of smaller activities: watching pitches and excerpts of works, roundtables, visiting stalls of companies and meeting artists. I tried to watch the launch of Patricia Piccinini’s Skywhale twice but the weather proved temperamental.
Many of the works have been around for a number of years. The pitch sessions were also by strongly established companies or for works that had progressed through at least two or three stages of initial development, like My Darling Patricia’s/Aphid’s Creole installation riffing off Jean Rhys’ radio play Crawl Me Blood or the Queensland Theatre Company’s homage to country music and its Indigenous legends, Buried Country written by Reg Cribb.
New Zealand input
The novelty was all in the New Zealand content, which seemed strong. I wasn’t able to see any of their contemporary dance works, but one called Rotunda, by the New Zealand Dance Company, was designed to tour by collaborating with a local brass band. It’s so hokey it is almost chic: what town doesn’t have their own brass band? More sophisticated and sumptuous were Kila Kokonut Krew Entertainment’s The Factory (which will appear at Riverside Parramatta, 18-21 June) a musical homage to Pacific migrants and Red Leap Theatre’s Sea.
Round-up
The show that got the most ‘you must go and see this’ was Branch Nebula’s collaboration with Clare Britton and Matt Prest, Whelping Box. The show that made delegates the chirpiest was the delightful show by Contact, Walking the Neighbourhood, where you were guided around Fortitude Valley by a child. The secret event that lots of people wanted an invite to was the late night Australian Dance Theatre showing. The most anticlimactic show was the The Stream, the Boat, the Shore and the Bridge, an intimate tour around four locations in Brisbane that lacked a driving thematic or immersive experience. The most fun was a Terrapin Puppet Theatre work, I Think I Can (featured in the 2014 Sydney and Perth Festivals and FOLA), that set up a pseudo-Brisbane miniature railway in the foyer of the Powerhouse and asked you to pick a character and to create a story to intersect with the other delegates.
Some of the bigger and more anticipated shows were received somewhat skeptically. My sense is that many of the overseas producers were on the hunt for Australian circus like the gorgeous Casus work Knee Deep.
The caveat on all of these quick summaries is of course that the five-venue structure meant very divergent experiences, particularly as many of the shows have been critically well-received and toured extensively.
What I most enjoyed about APAM was the way it offered a snapshot of Australian performance. It made me very optimistic: even when I met work that I felt was tired or safe or perhaps not to my taste, the robustness and mobility of our artists is quite astonishing when viewed collectively. One of the delegates had recently come across from the film sector and she was amazed at the fluidity of performance-makers, their ingenuity and capacity to do deals. All in all I think we put on a good spread.
APAM 2014, Australian Performing Arts Market, Brisbane Powerhouse, 18-22
Tristan Meecham talks with Gail Priest about his large scale participatory spectacle, Game Show, made in collaboration with Aphids and Bec Reid, presented at Arts House, Meat Market, as part of the Festival of Live Art (FOLA).
Includes video footage by Brian Walker and Takeshi Kondo and photos by Ponch Hawkes
In Douglas Kahn’s Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts, the premise is holistic. Signals are everywhere, running through us, the earth, the sky, bouncing off the ionosphere, and the best way to tune into them is by listening. By the time you’ve finished reading this book you feel like you’ve tapped into a magnificent universal circuit. It’s almost religious. 
