Artist Kate McMillan discusses her work The Moment of Disappearance, an immersive landscape of sound and video that traces legacies of the Enlightenment to their colonial manifestation in Australia.
Presented by Performance Space, Sydney, Thursday 6 – Saturday 29 November 2014.
Renowned Torres Strait Islander artist Ken Thaiday talks with Keith Gallasch about his major exhibition, which showcases a range of his works, traversing dance, installation and kinetic sculpture.
Presented by Carriageworks and Performance Space, Friday 3 Oct – Sunday 23 November 2014.
Angus Cerini was supposed to have an audition the day before we spoke recently, but turned down the part after realising who he was being asked to play. “I always get asked to audition for thugs and it’s just not me,” he says. “Don’t send me for drug dealer parts. It’s not what I’m good at… I did ballet for 10 years and I’m in my body. Give me shit that’s big because I’m a performer. There’s no point trying for these silly roles because other actors can do that and they’re good at it and we’re going to waste everyone’s time.”
It’s not hard to see why casting agents would make such errors. For the better part of two decades Cerini’s theatrical practice has presented viscerally confronting takes on masculinity, abuse and the relationships between violence and power. To reduce to the status of ‘thug’ any of the characters he has so scarily embodied is itself a bit harsh, but he knows he’s not going to be offered a romantic lead on the strength of his stage output, either.
For those who have followed Cerini throughout his career, it’s tempting to see it as the sort of continuous oeuvre quite rare in Australian theatre, in which the same questions and concerns run through every work, and each of his tortured torturers offers another aspect of a kind of ur-male that can never be fully represented.
“I reckon everything I’ve done has really been a meditation,” he agrees. “I feel like I’ve always been looking at why men do this, why this happens. There’s this really bad person, this young man. It’s been more about philosophy. And also about worship or prayer or somewhere to have power. Much bigger, in my own mind, than just putting on a show.”
Cerini’s monstrous young male was most recently incarnated in the form of the bomber-jacketed entity at the centre of Resplendence, a bundle of nerves at first attempting to punch the universe but eventually battered down by existence itself; earlier, he found a fascinating voice in the two-hander Wretch (2009), and can be traced back to the cryptic figures of Saving Henry (2003), Detest (2007) and Puppy Love (2006).
I’m surprised when Cerini even traces a thread back to a work in which we both performed close to 20 years ago, a university production of Clive Barker’s The History of the Devil. No prizes for guessing who Cerini played. “I was a bit mad at the time but I sort of summoned the fucking devil. Every night before the show I’d shave my head and I’d draw the pentagram on the mirror and fucking ask that fucker to fill me. We all started in the auditorium and at the very first show I was sitting there in a chair in that St Martin’s Theatre and I felt a fucking presence in the back right corner of that theatre, like a big massive bloaty fat flabby thing, and I turned around and there was this energy.”
His performance was certainly memorable, and much more committed than the usual uni theatre outing. “Anyway, after the show had finished I was back at Mum’s house in Vermont and I was out the back telling the devil to fuck off, like that’s enough,” he continues. “And no shit, this massive storm of crows, probably a hundred of them turned up. The backyard was full of crows. Yeah, I was a little bit mad.”
Cerini knows that the story is over-the-top, but the places he wants audiences to go require that bold leap into darkness. I don’t know that he ever did completely rid himself of the devil, since every one of his subsequent works has the quality of an exorcism. “Yeah,” he says. “Let’s go in there together but let’s go as dark as we can, let’s bring the fucking evil out, then once we’ve brought it to life let’s fucking put it to death. Let’s sic the fucking animal on it. Then what happens if the devil kills the animal that you’ve got to protect you? What have you got left? It’s going to the darkest places in order to work out how to defeat them.”
His efforts in recent years have drawn much recognition. Wretch earned him the Patrick White Playwrights Award, Save for Crying won two Green Room Awards and an RE Ross Trust Award, and most recently his script The Bleeding Tree won the Griffin Award. It’s testament to the quality of Angus Cherini’s practice that such a physical, embodied performer can also sculpt language that carries as much energy on the page. “It’s interesting because I reckon Wretch and Save for Crying and probably Resplendence, the later stuff, I don’t think you can approach them as an actor. You have to approach them almost as spoken word or poetry. Rather than working out what you’re trying to say… We need to just say it and let the lines speak. It’s about the bigger journey.”
Selected articles
Intuiting change
John Bailey: Angus Cerini, This Thousand Years I Shall Not Weep
RealTime issue #71 Feb-March 2006 pg. 29
poplectic apocalypto Tony Reck: Angus Cerini, Chapters from the Pandemic
RealTime issue #81 Oct-Nov 2007 pg. 38
Julian Day is an artist, composer, writer and broadcaster based in Sydney, though compiling this profile involved chasing him as he presented work around the world. Beside his busy schedule as a visual artist, Day performs as An Infinity Room, co-directs participatory performances under the name Super Critical Mass and is perhaps best known to Australian audiences as the regular host of ABC Classic FM’s New Music Up Late.
Day’s installations explore the interaction of architecture and sound using simple and visually striking sculptures. In Lovers, which I recently saw at the Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music, four wood-veneer Casio keyboards are pinned to the floor and ceiling with metal poles. The poles hold down keys across the entire range of the keyboards, sending chords of layered sevenths and ninths humming through the space. The gently beating harmonic rainbow shimmers and shifts as you move about the space, a sonic sculpture in itself. It is also a clever sculptural representation of an inversion, with the pole pressing the highest note on one keyboard also pressing the lowest note on its twin. Day finds enduring fascination in this form, which he has developed in over a dozen iterations. As he explained via email, the sculptures produce “a spatial interplay between the static physical objects, their continually expanding drones and the spectator’s compliance within this field. The constantly emanating sound activates the so-called ‘negative space’ of the room, occupying the site with subtle yet persistent energy—what critic and essayist Steven Connor designates “spatiofugal and spatiopetal space.”
Beyond formal experiment, the installations explore a variety of themes and poetic connotations. The history of the materials forms a layer of meaning unto itself. When Day first began using 1970s/80s electronic keyboards in the installations, it was as a statement about cheap consumer electronics and the “fetishization of musical objects,” in particular when there is a steep price tag attached. The original intention was to work with a “museum of unloved objects,” the sort that are usually sold cheaply or given away in garage sales. Now, his vintage Casio keyboards are collectors’ items, implying “an additional museological arc” to the installation.
Other motivations are more personal. Day hears the installation as “a conceptual endgame: twins forced into constant relationship through separation, mute objects brought into life through puncture, sound as a perpetual death cry.” The installations also provide a way of coming to terms with personal failure and “the many seemingly lost years I spent trying to learn the piano, all the while at an insurmountable professional disadvantage of starting at the unbearably late age of 12 and only obtaining a piano at 15 (finally I didn’t have to beg neighbours or recede into music shops on weekends). Here I am finally occupying spaces and situations as if I’d become a professional pianist but with the dumbest means possible.”
Lovers is another example of Day’s career-long interest (stretching back to early minimalist installations with his collaborator Luke Jaaniste) in “making the invisible visible.” Day borrows the maxim from Alvin Lucier, with whom he has studied. This interest comes to the fore in perhaps the most developed version of Lovers, entitled Requiem, exhibited at the Chatswood Concourse in Sydney. “The Chatswood work was an iteration of Requiem in which I very discreetly positioned two pairs of matching small synthesizers within the entranceway to a busy arts centre. One pair of brown keyboards was positioned between two parallel brown window frames and one pair of white keyboards was positioned between two parallel white walls between a staircase and a wall. In both instances the instruments were either somewhat camouflaged or completely out of sight unless you craned your neck to look. The sound floated through the space but was quite soft and so hovered around the bass noise floor. Combined with the constant footfall, opening of doors and speech the sound field was almost more felt or unconsciously registered than fully heard. Nonetheless, as the two pairs of keyboards used slightly different chords you could still distinguish different affects as you moved throughout the space and you could differentiate where the two keyboards were, almost like a treasure hunt for the ears.”
Julian Day is still making the invisible visible in his most recent works, including a series of installations at the Stederlijk Museum, Amsterdam. In this series, Day “[brings] hidden phenomena to surface—a slowly descending glissando sine tone suddenly triggering a lone snare drum in the middle of a room, for example, or the strange beating patterns (like an invisible dissonant being) when an instrumental septet play against an undifferentiated held electronic tone.”
photo courtesy Australian Experimental Art Foundation
“135th Meridian-East” installation view
The 135th meridian of longitude bisects the Australian continent and can be seen metaphorically as a connecting thread running through the Northern Territory and South Australia. In fact, from 1863 to 1911, the Northern Territory and South Australia formed a single colonial entity.
André Lawrence, the recipient of the 2014 Australian Experimental Art Foundation’s Emerging Curator Fellowship, has assembled a major exhibition of artwork by 14 NT and SA artists in which he addresses the art of Central Australia and the relationships between its many communities. He states in the exhibition catalogue, “135th Meridian—East is a proposition for an ongoing relatedness across Country that remains rich in zones of contact, exchange and history… As sites of discovery and experience, the conversations evoked in this project highlight these ecologies within a geographical area so rich in culture and history it defies delineation.”
At the exhibition opening, local Kaurna people welcomed all communities and particularly artists from the Indigenous communities of the north. The ceremony acknowledged the breadth and length of the region bordering the meridian, and the exhibition itself welcomed viewers to the unique cultures of the region. Before the large audience and including the playing of the Yidaki, this welcoming was a powerful performance promoting mutual recognition and respect the length of the country.
Born in the Territory, Lawrence lived in France from age eight to 20, and on his return to Australia studied art at Charles Darwin University and the University of SA. He lives in Adelaide but frequently visits NT and maintains close relationships with communities there. Influenced by his father’s political engagement and involvement with Indigenous communities, Lawrence sees himself primarily as an artist but came to curating through his concern for cross-cultural collaboration.
He has been a tour guide, taking tourists along the 2,800km Stuart Highway, connecting Adelaide and Darwin, that runs almost parallel with the meridian and which acts as a cultural spine. The exhibition itself unfolds as a journey and the first work viewers encounter is a ceiling-high drawing of an Adelaide CBD streetscape by Adelaide artist Thom Buchanan. The final work is a montage of videos of Indigenous ceremonies assembled by Wukun Wanambi, and viewers encounter a range of artworks along the way. 135th Meridian-East is thus a journey not just from south to north but from an emblematic site of modern western culture to traditional culture.
There is an extraordinary range of approaches to art in this survey exhibition. Ali Gumillya Baker’s video Ahoy! Nungas re-enacting white patriots re-enacting their murderous invasion of the Lucky Country (Part 1) addresses the issue of Indigenous sovereignty [see Bound and Unbound, for more on Baker’s work]. Dutch-born Maarten Daudeij’s work explores the Flinders Ranges and Northern SA, using rusty, barbed fencing wire to form lettering that spells out “Not my will but thy will.” Sue Kneebone’s compelling installation Hearing loss (Volume III) comprises a 19th century desk connected by a telegraph wire to an original pine telegraph pole; on the desk sits a candelabrum of kangaroo skulls, her work highlighting early colonisation through the establishment of the telegraph and the destruction of wildlife through farming. “Lots of works play on the gap between the colonial and the post-colonial,” says Lawrence. James Tylor’s Postcards from the Frontier (An Anthropological Study) comprises a series of photos recording aspects of the region to critique the anthropological viewpoint.
Naturally, many of the Indigenous artists’ works are about place and post-colonial ideas of place. Pungkai’s painting Longa Longa Time, I bin Mine My Business, Now Everyone Cummin Mine My Business depicts a desert landscape with tyre marks over it; attached to it are plastic toys representing road works, mining camps and other commercial interventions. Another James Tylor work, A Nautical Journey of Country, is a wall-mounted assemblage of sticks and shells forming a rough map showing the regions in which he has lived, from western Victoria through SA, NT and the Kimberley, with the Stuart Highway shown. Tylor is of Aboriginal, Maori and English origin and the form and materials of this work refer to Polynesian seafaring charts. Sera Water’s Fritz and the rose garden is like an aerial view of a garden—made from woven felt, calico, string and cotton; hung like a painting, it refers to the rose garden her immigrant German grandfather maintained in the arid area of SA where he settled. And the husband and wife team of Lena Yarinkura and Bob Burrumul show two Wyarra Spirits, traditional totemic figures representing bush spirits.
In explaining why the exhibition was set out as a journey, Lawrence states, “I wanted people to feel immersed in the landscape—they can see the horizon but must negotiate obstacles and landmarks to get there.” Importantly, the final work is Wukun Wanambi’s montage of videos, from the archives of the Mulka Project at Yirrkala. The Mulka Project is a media production house and library which collects material depicting Yolgnu culture with the intention of reinvigorating its traditions while acknowledging Yolngu law and governance, a project in which Yolgnu people are retaking ownership of their culture and its dissemination.
Lawrence says he is encouraged when people from diverse backgrounds come together and connect, and prior to mounting this exhibition he had been wanting to bring NT artists to Adelaide to recreate or reveal their cultural interconnections. In 2013, he curated an exhibition at Adelaide’s Nexus Multicultural Arts Centre in which he explored cultural hybridity. He has previously shown the work of NT artist Frank Gohier at the AEAF and has shown SA artists in a corresponding space at the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art (formerly 24 Hour Art) in Darwin. For example, James Dodd is based in SA but works extensively in the Territory and has developed a strong appreciation of it. Dodd contributed three paintings to 135th Meridian—East: two show abandoned cars in the desert, symbolising the country’s impenetrability to modern machinery. The third shows a police van in the desert, acknowledging the tension between law enforcement and the central Australian population—there is graffiti over the surface of this painting as if the painting, an emblem of western culture and authority, has itself been vandalised.
Lawrence is interested in how artists respond to locale and to circumstances, and worked with the selected artists, many of whom created new pieces for this exhibition. His detailed exhibition catalogue provides a sensitive, nuanced and critical view of the country and of the significance of the works. In it, he orders each work thematically under its own heading: Binary Landscapes (Buchanan), Sovereign Voice (Baker), Familial Histories (Waters), The Highway (Dodd), Pushing North (Kneebone), Spaces of Contention (Pungkai) and Culture Alive (the Mulka Project). Significantly, he does not privilege any particular culture or community over another, but honours the presence of all, providing a forum for dialogue between communities.
135th Meridian East, Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, 5 Sept-4 Oct, 2014
Making art is more than a job and it’s more than a life-style choice—for many, it’s an all-encompassing way of being. This can make living with an artist a difficult feat, unless both are of like constitution. So it’s not surprising that in the art world there are many couples who share both their lives and their art.
RealTime is run by such a couple, Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter, who, before their foray into publishing, also produced a large number of contemporary performances as Open City, often drawing on personal experiences and their relationship or, as Apartners, working as consultants for other artists.
Of course it’s not all smooth sailing—one’s partner is often one’s harshest critic, but perhaps this is a key to the conceptual rigor often illustrated in the creative manifestations of couples. To get to the bottom of this, in Profiler 6 and 7, we asked a number of art couples about their collaborative practices. We thank them for their generosity and their honesty. Gail Priest, Online Producer
Clare: Matt has supported my practice in so many ways—with humour, intelligence and kindness. So many projects I have worked on were made possible by Matt caring for our little boy and having the generosity, at the end of a long day, to still be interested.
We have made a lot of work together but it still feels like we are only just starting. Every now and then I see him out of the corner of my eye and it really makes me laugh. We had a pretty crappy winter—the wheels were just falling off.. Our car stopped working and it was the one we brought our son home from hospital in. Matt did this work at Alaska Projects. He was dancing with our broken Corolla and our crappy heater in front of a seating bank full of sceptics (he won them over as the performance went on, but this was early days) and he was just—I don’t know—brave and honest. It was so beautiful – the view I had of him. I have no idea where this is all going.
I want to see what Matt’s going to do, what I’m going to do and what we are going to do together. We have a residency next year at the Watermill Centre (Robert Wilson’s performance laboratory in New York) where we are going to work on separate projects side by side—I can’t wait to see what comes out of that.
Matt Prest, Whelping Box Film Shoot
photo Clare Britton
Matt Prest, Whelping Box Film Shoot
Matt: Our life and work crosses over in a sort of haphazard, unplanned way. It’s like we do one thing and then another thing that balances the first one out. Our son Les has started to be a bit involved with our work. And he has started to involve us in his. For his school Halloween thing he began designing a costume in January and employed the services of Clare to help make it happen. As it neared completion, Les came forward with a new business proposition, Les and Clare Industries, and he immediately began to talk money (a promising sign for struggling artist parents). A few days later he came back suggesting 80% of profits go to the Siberian Tigers.
Clare makes beautiful things. This feeds our life together and with our son. She seems to be constantly working her butt off and is always in demand for her skill and talent. This year Clare has been studying visual arts and I’m excited to see her follow her ideas and intuition and see where that takes her and us. We are still growing up together, learning more about ourselves and each other. It feels like we’re both very much at the beginning of things.
Ingrid Weisfelt and Vincent Crowley in Malmö, Adelaide Festival 2012
photo Rachel Roberts
Ingrid Weisfelt and Vincent Crowley in Malmö, Adelaide Festival 2012
Vincent Crowley & Ingrid Weisfelt (Torque Show)
Vincent: Ing and I met while we were dancing with Meryl Tankard’s Australian Dance Theatre. We were colleagues for a year before we became partners.
I think that basically we work together because we’d like to be the other person creatively. We value the skills and talents that the other possesses more than our own. I guess that makes us creatively complementary in a slightly envious way. We also share a long history of performing, making and watching shows that shapes and influences the types of performances we are interested in making ourselves.
We’ve worked together as dancers in other people’s work (in multiple companies and projects), as performers in each other’s and as collaborators creating work together. Each of these configurations has its own dynamic and its own up side and not so upside. By far the easiest working relationship is when we dance together, in our own work or someone else’s. There seems to be a pleasure and ease and lack of complication in this physical conversation that we struggle to achieve in our other creative endeavours together.
We’ve found through trial and error that when we’re creating our own work things seem to work better if one or other of us takes the overall responsibility for the work. Two heads are better than one in our case as long as there’s one head that gets the final say in unsolvable arguments, points of contention and matters of taste.
We don’t work exclusively with each other either. We each have projects that involve other artists. Partly this is because we’re independent artists and we work where we can, but I also think these projects are important to help us maintain our sense of individual identity which in turn allows us to bring new ideas and fresh perspectives to our work together.
We also have the extra complication of adding a third non-partner to our partner-art collaboration. Ross Ganf is the other member of Torque Show. He gets to be the odd man in. He brings another set of skills, talents and energy to the creative process. I suppose this three-way unit dilutes the pure partner-art-ness of much of Ing and my collaborative work. This third voice in the Torque Show creative conversation does make negotiating the difference between our personal and professional relationship much clearer and straightforward. The three-headed relationship we have at work is a different beast to the two-headed one we have at home. There might be times when Ross feels like this is not the case and he’s stuck at home with us. But that would be a different article: “Partner plus one.”
Torque Show’s next work, Madame, will be premiering in April next year as part of the State Theatre Company of South Australia’s 2015 Season.
Sonia Leber and David Chesworth with Olga Kalashnikova
photo courtesy the artists
Sonia Leber and David Chesworth with Olga Kalashnikova
Sonia Leber and David Chesworth
Right now we are working on a video project in Melbourne’s western suburb of St Albans, where Maltese immigrants maintain the tradition of Spirtu Pront (or “quick wit”), a singing style that developed in a peculiar way on the Mediterranean island of Malta. Part singing, part public argument, part entertainment and part public psychotherapy, these finely executed song duels emanate from working class bars on the island. Our project presents an anachronistic form where ritualised argument can be a positive social force, providing a public platform for the resolution of conflict.
Many of our works emerge from specific sites or social situations, often involving real world participants and different types of performers. These settings introduce varying degrees of unpredictability into the practice, as we try to negotiate our way towards making an artwork without controlling all the variables.
When we are outside the studio we are often in unfamiliar territory, filming in a particular location or cajoling all types of people to participate in a project. It’s a good thing that our projects are so outwardly social, as our work as a collaborative duo pretty much dominates our lives. We are good travellers and our practice really benefits from the challenge of research-based residencies. Last year we spent three months working intensively in a rarely-visited Russian city for our project Zaum Tractor, where we relied most heavily on each other’s personal resources.
Back home, most of our work revolves around researching and planning, perhaps editing sound and video, and we recognise that we both need long periods of solo focused work each day. We have separate studio spaces at each end of the house, keep in touch via WIFI messages and typically meet up for an hour in the middle of each day for more detailed discussion. We often take a walk to discuss things or visit each other’s spaces; all of our moments of personal contact are opportunities to discuss various aspects of the work-in-progress.
Our projects are built up over time through research, discussion, recording and editing, often in short bursts and often in different sequential order. We like to think that we are ‘makers’ who collaborate as much as possible, and together we try to cover all the skill-sets so we don’t need to pay outside crew. It’s a great thing to have flexibly and confidence in the dialoguing process, it generally serves to lift the spirits rather than create conflict.
Sonia Leber and David Chesworth, Zaum Tractor, 2013, 2 channel HD video (Video still)
photo courtesy the artists and Fehily Contemporary
Sonia Leber and David Chesworth, Zaum Tractor, 2013, 2 channel HD video (Video still)
See part 1 of Partner Art in RT Profiler #6, 17 September 2014
RealTime issue #123 Oct-Nov 2014 pg. online
THE PRODUCTION OF JOANNA MURRAY-SMITH’S PLAY NIGHTFALL DIRECTED BY JENNY KEMP PREMIERED AT PLAYBOX IN NOVEMBER 1999 AND WAS SIX WEEKS INTO ITS SEASON AT SYDNEY THEATRE COMPANY IN MAY 2000 WHEN I SPOKE TO IAN SCOTT AND MARGARET CAMERON WHO PLAYED THE CENTRAL ROLES.
Nightfall concerns Edward and Emily Kingsley an upper middle-class couple whose daughter Cora has mysteriously left home with no explanation. She’s been missing for a number of years when the Kingsley’s are visited by Kate Saskell (Victoria Longley) a go-between who has come to prepare the way for Cora’s possible return. I asked Ian Scott and Margaret Cameron to elaborate on the construction of their remarkable performances in this production.
Margaret: The approach to the play for me was a matter of the whole body physically listening. The listening body is like an animal: you can get caught, suspended; you’re hunting the sense and the emotional sense. Jenny Kemp is a very good director for me in that she loves to see that. If you get stranded halfway, held in space, Jenny’s in a state of delight because it’s dangerous. She credits the invisible world. She understands it as present.
Joanna’s text is like a score. There’s ‘beat, pause and silence.’ And there’s ‘dot, dot, dot and dash.’ And they are absolutely accurate, except she’s prepared to shift them around if, after trying everything, they can’t be spoken.
Ian: The words dry up but something else keeps going and I’ve realised there’s a whole world there in those dots. You can be observing someone, or your face carries the thought. More than other plays I’ve done, I think this sort of writing can produce some wonderful performances where there are no words.
Margaret: That’s going on all the time in these characters. Emily goes into a place where she can’t talk. It’s as if the play’s a grid and there are references all the time to things that can’t be said.
Ian: If you took a negative of all those pauses and put them on paper, you’d have another map, another text through the play. There are a lot of things that Ed says, like, “What is it you’re…Just say what it is you’re insinuating…Where did this all…I can’t…” He can’t actually use words because they fix it and he can’t have that happen.
That inability to speak is expressed physically. For instance, I became aware of all the little muscles along the side of Ian’s jaw. Also Dale Ferguson’s design locks you into a small square surrounded by the outside dark. How do you respond to the physical confines of the space?
Ian: You think of it as a technical thing—that you can’t occupy a place and stay there—because the emotions of the unfolding will project you into different places. Jenny was very conscious that it has to arrive naturally. So then you realise other things are important: that you can’t use your back to the audience; that you can be in a position where you’re uncomfortable.
Margaret: You know that your whole body is being read, wherever it is. You are completely visible. There’s also the wonderful exaggeration of the in and the out. Because Cora may be out there in the garden; it feels like an amphitheatre and you’re able to have double faces. You present one face inside the living room and then you turn to the audience and go, “What is she talking about?” So the audience is in the place of reading the inner feelings of the characters when they’re looking out.
Are these elements written into the script?
Margaret: They’re in the design, I think, and the direction.
Ian: I think of moments of stillness and the moment in the play when Kate starts telling us that Cora has been depressed. She’s revealing bits and pieces of information and the room goes almost deathly still.
Margaret: Every single night, the whole theatre goes…
Ian: And we’re still too because…
Margaret: …silent.
Ian: Receiving that information and being victims of Kate’s knowledge produces a kind of paralysis. When that breaks we say things like, “Let’s get this thing back on the road” and we all have trigger points. One of Ed’s is to get up and tell a story and rebel against the visitor. The stories become physical escapes. Sometimes those things follow in a predictable fashion but there are unusual moments like when Emily hits Ed. It is written in very detailed fashion but there is something else there that takes over despite the way it’s written. It’s a particular form of physical moment.
Margaret: The play starts right on an edge but then it’s actually something that needs to be held and contained and contained and contained. You can’t break out of its parameters or it loses resonance. It doesn’t hold. And formally speaking, you have to hold and hold and hold. You never really go for the dramatic moment. You just hold form. Then, right at the very end, it breaks. Emily is trapped behind the couch and she does this elision. Her line is, “I, I felt less than nothing. I can tell you I wanted to vanish.” The audience might think that she’s answering the question, “What was it that Cora remembered?” but she’s not. She’s eliding under emotional pressure into just talking. Structurally, if it dips emotionally too strongly anywhere else, you lose that break. And it’s a very subtle breaking point. So the drama leaks, it leaks out of the structure if you don’t play it muscularly.
Are your performances fixed, do they vary much?
Ian: It’s one of the tightest shows I’ve ever done.
Margaret: But the personal physicality I find shifts around depending on how the emotional graph of that particular evening goes.
Can you describe this emotion graph?
Margaret: It begins and that’s all I know really. And I know I must have a particular cocktail ready—Emily’s cocktail. Her emotional/physical world is adrenalin, huge expectation and capping and locking a terrible fear that things might not be all right. It’s a paradox she starts with, an expectation equaled by massive fear. And they’re balancing each other. That’s her place. And she keeps working towards the belief that Cora will come in that door at any moment. She’s sincerely trying to help Kate. And the pressure will shift me around emotionally so that if on a particular evening there might be a point reached in the graph, which is a little bit unexpected or the intensity is less than last night, what happens is that it goes somewhere underneath. It’ll curve around and sort of push you in another sequence. So you’re playing the essentials every night but where they occur is moveable and very volatile.
It’s quite frightening to perform. At certain pitches in the thing when you’re going along, like when Ed suggests to me what this woman is actually thinking, Emily’s response is silence and then, “But that is…but…look Miss Saskell, look, I understand that you are…” She goes somewhere else. “You are concerned for Cora,” She goes walking into the unknown all the time. “But if this is, if Cora said, if that is true…” And I find it hard. You’ve got all this uh-uh-uh stuff going on all the time. You’re swallowing like that all the time. You’re swallowing the language and at a certain point, you’ll have a spot where it just goes Pchew! And you’ll get a chance to respond.
Ian: In the end, it all comes out.
Margaret: There’s a lot of ‘burping’ going on. LAUGHS
Ian: The moment when you hit Ed, and from your point of view, there’s a release, but also for the audience a sense of relief that… That a sentence has been completed.
Margaret: There’s been a break.
It’s a very powerful moment.
Margaret: It’s also impotent. She only enacts it. It’s not the actual break. The pain becomes visible but it’s not resolved. Then begins the lie. Is she telling the truth or is she just trying to get Cora back? In the first scene Emily says, “Imagine ripping down the walls.” I’m going pitter patter on Ed’s chest and then I turn and the whole house tilts and I see the walls of the suburban house gone and I’m just floating in orbit. From then on, for me the play becomes very abstract. I’m actually working in an amphitheatre then, not in a living room set. Right out. Right out. At the very end of the play I try to use this. I empty my mind as if to say to the audience: my mind is the theatre; it is a space for your imagination. Whatever you can imagine is here. I am empty now, so what do you see? Whatever you see is possible. This transaction really to me is what the play is about.
How does Elizabeth Drake’s score affect your performances?
Ian: I say, “You know, I had a dream last night that I had been living in a world without sound.” I use it to quiet Emily but when I think of the way the sound is used in the production, I think of that story, “I wondered for a moment if this was death—to be somehow conscious but without feeling. Then the noise started, Earth music.” The pulsing of the sound throughout the play is a bit like the mind seesawing, the inner things that need to come out and the outer world sort of changing places until finally one wins.
Margaret: It creates a fantastic ‘listening.’ It actually enables the play to go a bit abstract towards the end I think. It pulls the walls of the living room down to way outside the theatre because it amplifies the listening, and the silence. It is possible then to become very intimate vocally at certain points. You can really do things in a kinesthetic way.
Ian: I think it tunes the audience.
Margaret: You can touch people almost because the voice does. It goes into the body. Because it shifts around the listening air, you’re able to touch that. And it is also possible to locate the audience towards the end of the play. Sometimes I have this feeling, as Emily, coming up front saying all that stuff. I see people after that breaking point with the hitting, I see someone sitting forward like this and I think, ‘Do you need me to say this? I will say this for you.’ There’s a transference that goes on. It’s possible to be very plain with this text. Just to say it. And I’ve found that from the very beginning. Just to read it. Just-to-say-it.
Do these qualities make Nightfall an effective piece of writing for performance for you?
Margaret: I do think it is well written and there’s Jenny Kemp’s angle on the play, her a priori position that the unconscious is territory. It is a landscape and it involves travel and it has treachery and it dips and there is an underworld. It’s almost like this play meeting that idea and not much more has to be done. When you’re with a person, a certain transmission goes on. So there has been a transmission of Jenny Kemp’s consciousness, mine and Ian’s and Victoria’s. We participate. I love the fact that the characters are intelligent, that they see themselves but that they’re also poised on this little pivot where the drama has to take place and the stakes are high. To fall off is to drown in a whole lot of feeling. And I’m fascinated by the capacity to play that little pivot and to observe and just keep observing it.
Ian: Kate has this line, “This is normal, don’t you realize?” It reminds you that in the everyday, people say such things. Wonderful films like American Beauty and Happiness uncover things that were always regarded as the things you didn’t talk about. They deal with ideas with such openness and they’re having the success they deserve. This is a play that takes those ideas and deals with them in a similar way. We have to find new ways to look at manners or morality and social convention. There’s something really strong there. At the end of the millennium, these works point us towards new ways of thinking and working, a new kind of art, which actually bypasses the blockbuster.
Finally, can you describe what it feels like to walk around all day with a play inside you?
Ian: It’s a kind of burden that’s carried. There are some plays that leave you completely exhausted but refreshed.
Margaret: You can’t really rest because you have to begin again the next night. There’s a certain amount of emotional courage we all bring to it. It’s not as though in your resting you can retreat into a kind of inertia. You actually…I can feel in me just a little bit of a gulp going on all day. It has to be considered again this evening. And it really is ‘considered again’ because there are unknowns.
Ian: It’s a constant kind of grappling with this thing and trying to find the way to be true to yourself, to know when to get angry, when to give in to sleep, when to get up and do something else.
Margaret: It’s a physical task—athletic. You look at someone who’s training and they do this gigantic run—their stomach is gone when they get to that line. Sometimes I’ve come offstage and looked at my body and it’s hollowed out from holding it, for this tiny voice to come out.
Ian: You try to use all the actors’ training but you can’t be stress-free when you’re going into these sorts of territories. I suppose what you do is try to minimise the damage and to be as aware as you can. Particular parts of the body are affected. When I come offstage, my back! I think it’s standing behind the sofa when Emily’s confessing.
Margaret: I usually come off panting. I feel sick at the thought of doing it again tonight.
Ian: So, we’re both on wheatgrass and guarana. No 17 from the Kings Cross Juice Shop.
BOTH BREAK INTO LAUGHTER.
Margaret Cameron, Opera for a Small Mammal
photo Daisy Noyes
Margaret Cameron, Opera for a Small Mammal
Unforgettable—whether when we first saw her in 1986 at Performance Space in Ulrike Meinhof Sings, directed by Nico Lathouris, or on the mainstage in Jenny Kemp’s productions of Call of the Wild (1989) and Joanna Murray-Smith’s Nightfall at the Sydney Theatre Company in 2000 or, above all, in her own Things Calypso Wanted to Say (1990) and Knowledge and Melancholy: An Autobiographical Fiction in 2004 at Performance Space. We wish we’d seen her later performances and more of her acclaimed directing, which we first glimpsed in Aphid’s 2003 puppet-play trilogy A Quarreling Pair and last witnessed in Chamber Made Opera’s Minotaur The Island, for which she also provided the text for David Young’s composition, in the Aurora Music Festival in 2012 in Sydney’s west. Acting, directing, writing or just being, Margaret was a dynamic presence, at once authoritative and intimate. Her idiosyncratic weighting of words, the lateral lilt of her sentences and that distinctive tone, all at one with her art, will long be recalled and treasured. – Keith & Virginia
Virginia Baxter’s un-archived 2000 interview, “The other side of Nightfall,” with Margaret and fellow actor Ian Scott, also appears in this edition of Profiler. It’s a wonderfully incisive account of the nature and complexity of acting in general and in response to a particular text, Joanna Murray-Smith’s Nightfall, and Jenny Kemp’s direction.
The text of Margaret Cameron’s Things Calypso Wanted To Say is included in the Currency Press volume Performing the Unnameable (1999).
Bernadette Ashley (centre),
Mime Kings, El día de los Muertos celebrations, Movimiento, Townsville, 2014
Biography
'Career' is a label too suggestive of a deliberate trajectory to be applied to the way my professional life has unfurled. My working life is actually inseparable from my life in a wholistic sense: a series of strands of experiences variously nurtured, neglected, dormant, reawakened, chosen, accidental, imposed, laughable, naïve and wonderful.
I started as a cadet journalist on a newspaper in country Victoria, and I now direct Movimiento, my own world dance studio in tropical Townsville. Those colourful strands have finally woven together into a multi-disciplinary existence of dance, choreography, teaching, performance, design and occasional reviewing of dance and new media arts.
As well as supporting music, dance, art and cultural diversity via my venue, I've been a weekly galleries columnist for the Townsville Bulletin, a judge for ScreenGrab, a creative culture sessional teacher at James Cook University and have served on the boards of several arts organisations.
A month spent in Cuba last year indulging my obsession in Afro-Cuban dance and music, while brushing up against murky Santería and quirky Caribbean Socialismo, has sharpened my aspiration to become fluent in Spanish for future journeys into Latin America, the better to get to the heart of things.
Exposé
'Better to get to the heart of things' could also serve as an explanation for why I write. I sporadically keep a journal to elucidate meaning and direction from my somewhat chaotic existence; similarly, I see reviewing as a way to describe and distil the relevance of events and objects, but for an audience external to the action.
My experience as a practitioner of visual arts and dance gives me an appreciation of the layers of conceptual development, artistic decisions and technical concerns which occur before I see a finished work. This structural curiosity rarely detracts from my enjoyment (or otherwise) of a work I am seeing. Scrawling notes in the half-light of a live performance sometimes draws me in deeper and creates an urgency to suck every iota of nuance from an exceptional work.
I began writing for RealTime in 2007, having just finished a BVA and a study tour of some major European art events. I have a great deal of respect for RealTime's unique role in arts reviewing in Australia and the tenacity of its instigators in retaining that position through years of arts climate change.
Selected articles
movement is rewarded Bernadette Ashley: Bonemap, Cove
RealTime issue #97 June-July 2010 pg. 24
I am an Indigenous independent choreographer with Wiradjuri, Dutch, Scottish and Afghan heritage. I trained at NAISDA Dance College and the Martha Graham School in New York. It was my extra curricular studies that influenced my approach to performance making, living on the fringes of the punk scene, as a part- time squatter in the infamous Woolloomooloo Gunnery in the 80s, while still in high school, with various interdisciplinary acts travelling to play in one of its many spaces, and then working for Tish and Snooky’s Manic Panic (a punk and hair dye store in the East Village, run by the first back up vocalists for Blondie, later forming their own band The Sick F#cks).
Expose
I am interested in the unexpected and realise the great achievement, in making the smallest of inroads, toward charting new territory.
I have shamelessly used my obsession with dance as a vehicle for exploring other creative disciplines including dabbling in the creation of simple interactive installations, writing monologues and simple non-linear narratives. I try to embed my work with practical activities that affirm my identity, for example, creating a song cycle in Wiradjuri to promote speaking and hearing local language, creating a large dot painting made from playing cards, encouraging the cast and crew to participate in preparing the dance ground, and a wall of tall grass utilising traditional basket weaving and other techniques live onstage to represent the inherent interdisciplinary nature of Australian indigenous cultures.
I am inspired by the human imagination and those who wield it deftly. To grasp a sense of the ridiculous and recognise the need to make time for play; to watch it and be involved is important. To be given the opportunity to access, articulate and share the pleasure derived from cultural expression is a bonus.
Selected articles
brilliance, shimmer & shine Keith Gallasch: Vicki Van Hout, briwyant
RealTime issue #103 June-July 2011 pg. 32
THE PRODUCTION OF JOANNA MURRAY-SMITH’S PLAY NIGHTFALL DIRECTED BY JENNY KEMP PREMIERED AT PLAYBOX IN NOVEMBER 1999 AND WAS SIX WEEKS INTO ITS SEASON AT SYDNEY THEATRE COMPANY IN MAY 2000 WHEN I SPOKE TO IAN SCOTT AND MARGARET CAMERON WHO PLAYED THE CENTRAL ROLES. 
