Actors ‘take a bow’ for the playwright by holding scripts aloft
photo Shane Reid
Actors ‘take a bow’ for the playwright by holding scripts aloft
The 8th National Play Festival, held this year for the first time in Adelaide, showcased six new Australian plays in full readings and four by emerging South Australian playwrights in excerpts. Two distinct themes emerged over the festival’s four days of readings, industry forums and artist talks: diversity, both on and off the page, and the dual nature of Adelaide’s arts ecology: on the one hand, porous, vibrant and nationally-focused, and on the other, provincial and underdeveloped, too often focused on the past, namely the transformative premiership of arts advocate Don Dunstan, than on the future. As expected, Joanna Murray-Smith’s keynote address, “A Lover’s War,” touched on Senator Brandis’ evisceration of the Australia Council’s budget, albeit with less sturm und drang than might have been hoped.
The phrase that shadowed the festival, to be taken up in an email exchange I had with Playwriting Australia Artistic Director Tim Roseman and others following it, was “the long game,” the title given to a panel discussion featuring local theatre-makers and critics about the vitality of South Australia’s creative microclimate. The fact that the discussion became mired in the state’s history—Dunstan again, like the Ghost of Christmas Past haunting the Festival Centre whose establishment he oversaw—was an indication of just how much more of the game remains to be played while we continue to pore over old scorecards, and while, crucially, the absence of a second-tier company in Adelaide capable of developing and programming work year-round remains. I was, however, buoyed by critic Murray Bramwell’s list, too long to reproduce here, of the number of new works by South Australian artists produced in this state in the last two years. I took the list as a sign that the deficiencies in South Australia’s arts funding and infrastructure are not matched by a lack of drive in our creatives.
Connecting to a national conversation, and following on from passionate, and occasionally heated, conversations at previous Australian Theatre Forums around the cultural homogeneity of our plays and playwrights, the launch of a Diversity Pledge by the Equity Diversity Committee at the festival was broadly welcomed. In part, the Pledge reads: “We all have a role to play in creating stories that reflect the diversity of the world in which we live. To that end, and in addition to striving for more diversity in my writing, I pledge to include a statement, where appropriate, alongside the character descriptions in my work to encourage diverse casting.”
I put it to Roseman that, while laudable, the Pledge risks picking the low-hanging fruit only, as playwrights, though they generally retain the right to veto casting decisions, may still not feel that they can confidently tell diversely populated stories in the knowledge that producers will cast their plays appropriately or demonstrate cultural sensitivity where required. “It’s a long game,” Roseman responded. “At Playwriting Australia we’re talking about a 20-year program to change the shape of the Australian theatre landscape. More needs to be done at every level of the theatre world: drama schools need to be targeting talented actors from every possible background; theatres need to be developing work by writers from a far wider range of experiences and putting those plays on for the public to watch; agents need to be promoting their clients for a much bigger range of projects; and artistic directors need to actively hunt for new stories to tell and new perspectives for their telling.”
These stories and perspectives were reassuringly evident across the festival’s main program. Most significantly, an all-female cast and crew conducted the reading of Asian-Australian playwright Michelle Lee’s Rice, which wove an encounter between a second generation Indian and first generation Chinese person into an impressively sinuous essay on globalisation and the politics of class. The presentation of Albert Belz’s delightful Astroman, which turned out to be the festival’s undisputed crowd-pleaser, featured a large cast of Indigenous performers in the telling of Belz’s story about the coming of age of Jiembra Djalu, a computer games whiz-kid in 1980s rural Victoria. Although something about the tenor of the play struck me as cinematic rather than theatrical, it was impossible to resist the energy it was able to generate even in the sharply attenuated form of a script reading.
Of the remaining plays in the main program—Ben Ellis’ epic portrayal of the rise and fall of a Murdoch-like dynasty, Keith; Phillip Kavanagh’s almost symphonic meditation on information overload, Deluge; Maxine Mellor’s dark road drama The Silver Alps and Luke Mullins and Lachlan Philpotts’ gleefully paranoiac monodrama about identity and show business, Lake Disappointment—none gave me much reason to doubt Roseman’s claim that new Australian work that conforms to a traditional dramaturgy is in rude health. He told me, “The days of the writer delivering 74 pages to a theatre and then rocking up for the first day of rehearsals are decreasing. But nearly every piece of work you see on a stage will have been inspired by work a playwright did at some point, whether it’s a new play by Andrew Bovell or a radical re-imagining of Sophocles or Aphra Behn. Playwrights are, I think, eager to be involved in new ways of making work and sharing their ideas and imaginations in other ways of creating theatre. Some work will be writer-led, other times it will be led by a different part of the engine. The vital thing to remember is that writers bring expertise to all of these forms.”
Along with Homegrown, the part of the program that showcased excerpts of new works by emerging South Australian playwrights Elena Carapetis, Sophia Simmons, Emily Steel and myself, these plays—in their generosity, inquisitiveness and, yes, diversity—were a reminder of what is at stake in the current political environment. Its relationship to the arts, under Senator Brandis, has increasingly come to be defined, in sharp contrast, by miserliness and inapprehension. I bristled to hear yet more justifications for what artists do in Murray-Smith’s address, but we’ve all been forced onto the back foot by Brandis’ cuts. In the absence of any powerful cri de coeur from the big theatre companies—for which Murray-Smith rightly lambasted them—solidarity and stoicism must fill the void. There was plenty of both on display at the festival but, in the end, art must speak for itself. And so, in these fine plays, it did.
Playwriting Australia, The National Play Festival 2015, Adelaide Festival Centre, 22-25 July.
Contrasting concepts of dance were portrayed in Double Bill, with recorded spoken text, instrumental music, electronics and video framing one work and movement generating sound in the other, if in an intriguing relationship with it.
Personwhowatchestoomuchtelevision
Personwhowatchestoomuchtelevision, which premiered in the 2015 Adelaide Fringe Festival, is a collaborative work for four dancers—Mieke Kriegesvelt, Tyson Olsen, Ellen Worley and Greta Wyatt, who jointly developed the choreography—and composer Dan Thorpe. This intense 30-minute work is a setting of the texts of Adelaide poet Rhys Nixon. Thorpe developed the score with the Maple String Quartet and pre-recorded himself reading Nixon’s bleak portrayal of life. The carefully orchestrated sound, with Thorpe performing on guitar and electronics, provides a densely woven backdrop to the voiceover, the dance and an accompanying video to create complex and absorbing dance theatre.
The performance commences with the four dancers standing entranced in front of a TV on a trolley. They then burst into frantic movement as if they’re puppets controlled by unseen forces. Apart from the TV trolley and a couch, the stage is bare. The video, also by Thorpe, appears later, showing a shopper slowly navigating a supermarket, followed by a scene in which the solitary figure walks aimlessly in the street. The video combines superimposed and blurred imagery as if to show how TV programs and reality can coalesce into an incoherent composite.
The choreography is well paced and executed, dramatising the text and responding to the sound. In one stark sequence, two dancers curled up on the TV trolley’s shelves begin to writhe within and around the trolley and develop an erotic duet, like seductive serpents emerging from the TV itself. Another dancer walks across stage doubled over with her head in a rubbish bin that she pushes along the floor. This is expressive and dramatic, dance and text portraying a range of emotional and psychological states—the boredom, anger, aimlessness, isolation and loss of perspective induced by addictive TV-watching and the desire for escape from an unresponsive world. In the final passage, the dancers gaze at a glowing white TV screen in the darkness, like doomed moths hypnotised by light. Personwhowatchestoomuchtelevision is fine work, powerful and probing.
If/Then
If/Then
In her If/Then, composer, musician and sound engineer Iran Sanadzadeh has revived the work of Australian dancer Philippa Cullen, who, in the early 1970s, began experimenting with theremins to produce sound through dance movement, and later developed a pressure-sensitive dance floor to trigger sound. Some of the equipment left behind by Cullen, who died tragically at age 25 in 1975, is housed at the University of Adelaide’s Elder Conservatorium and, for her Honours project in Sonic Arts at the University, Sanadzadeh is exploring Cullen’s ideas, devising her own movement-sensitive floor panels using updated electronics.
If/Then is an improvised work for four (or so) performers, including the composer herself, who sit, lie or stand on the movement-sensitive panels, their presence and action triggering shifts in pitch in a theremin-like drone that runs throughout the performance. With contemporary technology, a wider range of sounds beyond those of the theremin could presumably be generated, but Sanadzadeh has reproduced the sonic character of Cullen’s early equipment.
The performers resemble a group of friends relaxing casually while sipping drinks. Their movement mimics natural human interaction—the effect is like watching theatre minus the dialogue. The eerie theremin sound becomes even spookier—slight movements might abruptly trigger dramatic shifts in pitch, while more extended movements might or might not cause any major change in the sound. We thus witness a play that seems emotionally detached from the sound.
Although little seems to happen in If/Then, the theatrical concept is subtle and engaging. More energetic movement might induce a greater range of sound, but the movement remains restrained. While Cullen intended the dancers to make music, the performers in If/Then seem not so much to be playing an instrument with movement as allowing themselves to be observed electronically by the equipment and to trigger responses in the electronics to see what happens. In the meantime, watching people doing nothing reminds us that supposedly casual human interaction is actually a social contrivance.
Philippa Cullen in performance, Ewing Gallery, 1974
There are other aleatoric elements in Sanadzadeh’s script. Evidently there is flexibility about who performs and how many join in, and during the performance, she signals to the mixer off-stage (Thorpe) to make changes to the mix, which, she told me afterwards, he might or might not obey. I attended both evenings—the second rendition of If/Then lasted somewhat longer than the first, suggesting flexible duration, and it turned out rather differently.
Sanadzadeh’s If/Then is thus about exploring a range of possible actions with indeterminate outcomes, suggesting the influence of John Cage. And as well as demonstrating and extending Cullen’s original idea of reversing the relationship between movement and sound, Sanadzadeh’s concept also inevitably speaks of the new era of electronic surveillance and prosthetic technology.
The performance venue, stately, two storeyed Victorian with columned entrance, could have been a Masonic Hall in the past. Entering the darkened theatre to see Set, Sarah Aiken’s new work, evokes a sense of secret initiation ceremony. In the murky light, an enormous fabric cut-out hand inches out of the performance space. Aiken then appears in the centre of the room, crouched. With careful manipulation, her body slowly spins clockwise while in a sideways sitting position, the precision akin to a mechanical timepiece.
A mechanism on the floor releases four long cardboard tubes that roll towards Aiken who lies still. Gracefully, feeling in near dark, the dancer takes the cardboard tubes, balancing them, spinning them slowly like cogs over her while still supine. At first toying with them, she then slides them over her limbs, so they become extensions of her body. The effect exaggerates the movements of her limbs—legs and arms wide, the tubes crossing over her body smoothly. Here the body is both manipulated and manipulating. It’s a tightly orchestrated game; is she controlled by the weight and size of her newly acquired alien limbs or is she wielding the power?
With mid-air splits, the seemingly innocuous cardboard tubes underscore the flexibility and velvetiness of the dancer’s movement. Aiken manages to ‘own’ the foreign parts, subjugating them and preventing them from upsetting her balance. She then takes the tubes and uses the liminal spaces of the theatre to continue the game of balance and control. In the dimly lit space, the tubes explore skirting boards, Aiken propping up a hip, a shoulder, her forehead on the tubes, the tubes resting on a wall, finding the most literal kind of connection to the space. Her body becomes a sculptural object as she holds these positions, resting on four impossible points. This part of the performance was beautifully wrought, an exercise in simplicity and innovation.
Sarah Aiken, Set
photo Gregory Lorenzutti
Sarah Aiken, Set
The performance then becomes rather more ambitious and less well defined. Aiken tips props out of tubes as another fabric hand slides off a ceiling rail to form a background for projection. As the objects are revealed by being lit from above, video game-like sounds play. Cute. There’s an elephant toy, a large faux diamond, a handful of seashells, a running shoe…These are reflected in the hand but as oversized versions. While the artist explores the space, her image is projected among these large objects in real time so she looks Lilliputian, disappearing at one point behind a sneaker.
The closing spectacle entertains but there’s a sense of disjuncture with the initial scenes. Taking up the tube arms once again in near darkness, Aiken ‘initiates’ an audience member who slides her arms into the tubes and joins in the dancing on stage. Three other dancers also join in, each gathering in an audience member. To much laughter Nick Cave’s “Into my arms” plays as dancers and ‘initiated’ join in a large circle where the tubes are formed into triangles and pyramids, adding a touch of symbolic weight to this dance ritual.
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Dancehouse, Set, concept, performance, choreography, Sarah Aiken: set/object design Daniel Arnott, creative collaborator, sound design performance, AV set design, lighting Amelia Lever-Davidson, Dancehouse, Melbourne, 22-26 July
Jenni Sanderson, Janine Sutter, Antonietta Vanzella, Maria Vlastuin, Last Light, Tracks Dance
photo Peter Eve
Jenni Sanderson, Janine Sutter, Antonietta Vanzella, Maria Vlastuin, Last Light, Tracks Dance
2015 introduced a new Artistic Director with a strong history in Asian and Australian Indigenous performing arts to Darwin Festival. Andrew Ross’ first festival program provided a taste of what may become the festival’s signature style. His close relationship with Indonesia saw several artists from our near neighbour featured alongside new Australian works and collaborative commissions. Northern Territory artists also took centre stage as the festival looks to strengthen its connections with the local community. The following works exemplify these strands of the program.
Cry Jailolo
In Cry Jailolo, choreographer Eko Supriyanto marries a sparse design with driving rhythms and the passion of a group of young men to evoke the beauty of the ocean’s natural patterns—taking us “underwater and into the lives of the local (Maluku Island) population [as] an expression of hope and optimism” (festival program guide).
With the stage free of adornment, underwater light is conjured as the dancers move in and out of direct beams—sometimes as though in a ray of sunlight, then plunging into shadowy, blue-green dimness. At times the vibrant red of a costume provides a flash of colour lifted from the palette of a tropical reef.
The movement is constant, ceasing only at two climactic moments in the work, once when everything stops—silence, stillness, the body of dancers staring—and later when all the dancers fall to the ground. This relentless drive of rhythm and movement was for some in the audience monotonous, while the impact on the dancers’ bodies for others was mesmerising.
Cultural tradition is never far away with the choreography referencing local dance. The music too picks up on the mystical and exotic, a reminder of the ancient and spiritual.
Cry Jailolo is a poignant reminder of the precariousness of a community dependent upon the natural environment for survival. “The tropical paradise of Jailolo in eastern Indonesia’s North Maluku islands is a tourist brochure dream—white sand, clear water and some of the world’s best diving. But life is changing for tourists and locals as the region is ravaged by environmental degradation” (program).
Cry Jailolo was created by Eko Supriyanto in collaboration with his dancers over a two-year period. The work is a direct response to the changes in the local environment and a vehicle to share the Jailolo community’s plight with the world. The commitment of this company of proud men to tell their story was highly deserving of the standing ovation that erupted as at its conclusion.
Kelly Beneforti, Leanne Eltagonde, Last Light, Tracks Dance
photo Peter Eve
Kelly Beneforti, Leanne Eltagonde, Last Light, Tracks Dance
Tracks Dance, Last Light
Darwin-based Tracks is known for work that speaks of people and place. Last Light is no exception. The dancers are young and old, of varying ability and from different backgrounds. Myilly Point, the harbour and the setting sun are all iconic of Darwin. As a result this contemplative work is less about artistic prowess and more about community and location. So much so that many in the audience were drawn to snapping photos on their phones, evoking the feel of a tourist attraction.
Last Light is focused upon “a quintessential Darwin experience—the ending of the day, outside watching the sun go down” (Directors’ program note), with the sun actually providing most of the light for the performance. Calming classical music plays in the headset I am handed as I arrive. As we draw closer to the show’s start a voice in the headset gently counts down to the setting of the sun and I have time to enjoy the view. As it fades, lights in the palms of dancers flicker and shine and the final setting is lit simply by strands of fairy lights woven into hoops like neon branches of cherry blossom.
Last Light is guided by nature, starting slightly later each night so it will time with the sunset and adjusting the staging to align with the sun’s path. Birds duck and weave above the performers; the sound of busy bee eaters catching their prey in the cool of dusk is echoed by the overlay of birdcalls on the music track. With Last Light Tracks has created a work celebrating the theatre of nature, creating space for the audience to pause and reflect.
Ubiet
photo Mat McHugh
Ubiet
Ubiet with Topology, Food of Love
Food of Love was programmed as part of Between Two Oceans, a series of intimate concerts in Brown’s Mart Theatre. Draped in black and red with a traditional Indonesian ikat scarf across her shoulder, singer and ethnomusicologist Ubiet, accompanied by the composer Dian HP on piano, traversed the landscape of love in Komposisi Delapan Cinta (Eight Loves composition). Her voice seeming a little restrained, Ubiet sang in Bahasa, pausing between songs to introduce the music. Local musicians and members of the Brisbane contemporary music ensemble Topology were honoured in being invited to participate but the arrangements felt underdone, adding little to voice and piano.
In preparation for this concert, Australian composer and Director of Topology, Robert Davidson travelled to Yogyakarta to collaborate with Ubiet. The result was the final two pieces based on the works of West Australian poet Randolph Stow. Here scores are loosely influenced by traditional Javanese gamelan music, and inspired by a trip to the ancient Javanese temple of Borobudur.
As the musicians played Davidson’s compositions I realised this was what I had been hoping for. The music came to life and Ubiet unleashed the full flexibility of her voice, effortlessly negotiating a chant steeped in tradition. The instrumental arrangements were intricate, breathing colour and light into the music. This felt like a true melding of expertise, shared interests and musical prowess—rich, deep and diverse. In the program note, Director Andrew Ross writes, “It is my hope that Robert and Ubiet will continue to collaborate.” I hope so too.
Darwin Festival, Ekosdance Company, Cry Jailolo, choreographer Eko Supriyanto, Darwin Entertainment Centre, 7-8 Aug; Tracks Dance, Last Light, concept, direction David McMicken, Tim Newth, Myilly Point Park, Darwin 7-10, 13-18 Aug; The Food of Love, performers Ubiet, Dian HP, Topology, Veronique Serret, Brown’s Mart Theatre, Darwin, 9 Aug
Black, white, queer and Indigenous-queer, minimalist and outrageously maximalist productions afforded Nicola Fearn an impressive view of Australian Theatre varietals in the 2015 Darwin Festival with companies sourced from Brisbane (Dead Puppet Society collaborating with new music ensemble Topology) and Melbourne (Red Stitch, Malthouse and Little Ones Theatre).
Dead Puppet Society, Argus
Brisbane-based Dead Puppet Society developed Argus with South Africa’s Handspring Theatre to premiere at the Brisbane Powerhouse in 2013. It came to the Darwin Festival this year as a well run-in production. Argus is a small-scale puppet show without puppets. The company’s previous production, The Harbinger, played the 2014 Darwin Festival and featured a giant puppet called Old Man. With Argus, the other extreme is explored with a tiny puppet comprising the hands of four puppeteers. He has no physical form and can dissolve and reform instantly as the team of puppeteers moves like clockwork. The hero embarks on an adventure to find a lost friend. Household objects such as water bottles, plant pots, torches and kitchen utensils combine with hands to form the characters on the journey, playing on a giant rotating wheel that provides various landscapes.
If sometimes concretised adult brains failed to understand the new environments the hero found himself in then the explanations from a loudly-spoken five year old in the front row provided insight. The still plastic minds of the young audiences have no trouble understanding and go willingly on the journey. Argus does not play down to its young audience although the constant squawks from the puppeteers voicing the puppet are reminiscent of children’s TV and could be re-thought.
John Babbage’s score, performed by Topology, is a sophisticated accompaniment with four multi-instrumentalists playing varying musical genres on double bass, guitar, violin, piano and saxophone.
Direction is careful and precise with attention paid to creating arcs of emotional highs and lows and swiftly changing scenes. Lighting designer Jason Glenwright creates a moody world with musicians lit in pools of blue and well-defined lighting on the play-board. It is a solid and inventive production but ultimately just misses out on creating a true sense of wonderment.
Malthouse Theatre, Blak Cabaret
Blak Cabaret marries flamboyant drag comedy with poignant and sensitive protest songs about pain, loss and anger. It’s an unusual juxtaposition of forms that is sometimes unwieldy and jolting but the strength of each ultimately pulls the audience in.
Kamahi Djordan King plays towering black Queen Constantina Bush who arrives with hip-hopping servant Nikki to declare Australia terra nullius and proceeds to invert 200 years of white/black history. Queen Constantina is grandly costumed to reflect each era as she talks about the White Protection scheme, the basics card, White Australian of the Year and apologises to the stolen white generation; “We’ve said sorry so now get over it.” You laugh despite yourself. She is rude, crude and politically savvy.
It’s not a new idea to flip black and white worlds and histories—the 1986 satirical film Babakiueria did the same as did the BIG hART stage production Hipbone Sticking Out in 2014. But it works; it’s funny, sticking pins into white Australia as well as being powerfully moving in its exposition of Aboriginal experience.
Interspersed music adds emotional weight and resonance as each of the four musicians on stage are icons of the Aboriginal music world. Bart Willoughby formed No Fixed Address in 1978 and has been performing and teaching worldwide ever since. He played the well-known ‘Stupid System’ and ‘We Have Survived’. Kutcha Edwards (Black Arm band) sings in the Mutti Mutti language and reminds us that the languages being sung on stage are only three of 400 Indigenous languages. Emma Donovan owns the stage as she sings, as does Deline Briscoe. This is musical royalty that counterpoints modern-day Aboriginal experience with Queen Constantina Bush’s delicious satirising of Australia’s recent racial history.
Red Stitch Actors Theatre, Dead Centre/Sea Wall
Dead Centre and Sea Wall, staged by Melbourne’s Red Stitch, are companion monologues written by two playwrights from different continents, both of whom are award winning and at the top of their game. While Dangerous Liaisons glories in excess in the Playhouse next door, these monologues in the Studio provide the antithesis; beautifully stripped back storytelling relying on the word and the actor.
In Australian writer Tom Holloway’s Dead Centre we meet Helen (Rosie Lockhart), at first a chatty, smiling woman telling us how she found herself in Australia after watching a Fosters advert on the telly. She has a gently self-mocking manner which is gradually peppered with devastating revelations. Holloway holds back on explaining the reasons for Helen’s journey and breakdown so the audience is immersed, waiting for clues as if it’s a thriller. You can hear a pin drop as Helen talks about fleeing to the Red Centre and how the solace she sought from a strange landscape instead dismembers her. Lockhart’s flawless performance is supported by minimalist projections and soundscape that echo the sense of mystery and foreboding.
UK playwright Tom Stephens’ Sea Wall divulges more of the story, this time from Alex (Ben Prendergast), the husband Helen has abandoned. Again warmth and chatty ease hooks us in as Alex describes his perfect life and loving family, including the slightly eccentric military father-in-law who ends up broken at the foot of Dover’s white cliffs looking for God. Domestic bliss moves into the realm of horror as Alex’s story, combined with projections of a slow-moving, swelling sea, remind us that a perfect life can be annihilated in an instant. We fall in love with the vulnerable Alex as Prendergast deftly and intricately weaves his characterisation. These two monologues—the writing, the acting and the restrained direction from Julian Meyrick with powerfully affecting projections and soundscape—are superb.
Dead Puppet Society, Argus
photo Elise Derwin
Dead Puppet Society, Argus
Little Ones Theatre, Dangerous Liaisons
Following Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ controversial novel of 1782, Christopher Hampton’s 1988 stage adaptation and the cult teen film Cruel Intentions (1998), Melbourne’s Little Ones Theatre takes on this classic story of sex, betrayal and debauchery, bringing to it their signature queer, erotically charged, high camp style.
Eugyeene Teh’s design of sumptuous golden drapes hanging in Rococo folds, gold-painted floor and furniture and lavishly pink-costumed actors in white face and rouge sets the tone immediately—excess and gay abandon in equal measures. It’s performed in a grand profusion of styles thrown together with heightened, almost puppet-like movement, oddly false English accents, Chaka Khan played on a harpsichord and deliberately crude vignettes with semi-naked actors in sexually provocative moves and poses. Choreographed by Kurt Phelan, the actors glide about the stage striking heightened poses as they deliver text in the manner of pantomime.
The cast is mostly female—the one male looks strangely out of place with his hairy-faced genuine maleness. Underpinning the playful excess is a strong text that examines gender imbalance, morals (or lack of them) and deceit, the wit and satire of the original text complemented by the opulence and gender-bending nudity of the production.
The first act is long and the emotional superficiality of the pantomime style palls despite the interspersed mad and manic moments of burlesque. The second act allows the actors to drop into a more realistic emotional state and so engages with the text and audience on a deeper level.
This Dangerous Liaisons is fun, a gloriously costumed and lit extravaganza by a company that is happy to slap around its willing audience.
2015 Darwin Festival: Dead Puppet Society, Argus, director, designer David Morton, Studio,Fri 7-8 August; Malthouse, Blak Cabaret, concept, creative producer Jason Tamiru, text Nakkiah Lui, The Lighthouse, 11-14 Aug; Red Stitch Actors Theatre, Dead Centre/Sea Wall, writers Tom Holloway, Simon Stephens, director Julian Meyrick, Studio, 22, 23 Aug; Little Ones Theatre, Dangerous Liaisons, writer Christopher Hampton, writer Stephen Nicolazzo, Playhouse, Darwin Entertainment Centre, 14, 15 Aug
It’s been more than 10 years now since Peter Sellars first locked horns with Toni Morrison over the merits of Othello. To the American director, Shakespeare’s tragedy was best forgotten, having far outlived its usefulness, if indeed it ever had any. To Morrison, Nobel- and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, the play was as suffused with Shakespeare’s singular insight and humanity as any of his mature works. The disagreement resolved into an informal accord: Sellars would create a new staging of Othello while Morrison would open a performative dialogue with Shakespeare’s play that would interrogate those aspects—the muting of the non-white and female characters and the perceived racist/orientalist overtones—that have long troubled the play’s critics.
In 2009, Sellars’ Othello opened at New York City’s Public Theatre with John Ortiz as the title character, Jessica Chastain as Desdemona and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Iago. With its futuristic aesthetic, long running time of four hours and self-conscious references to Obama, the production’s critical reception ranged, for the most part, from indifferent to hostile. In contrast, Desdemona—scripted by Morrison and directed by Sellars—was warmly received on its premiere in May 2011 at the Akzent Theatre in Vienna. It subsequently toured to London, New York, Berkeley and other cities, and is being presented at this year’s Melbourne and Sydney Festivals.
I spoke with Sellars on the phone from Los Angeles, his hometown, where he was in rehearsals for FLEXN, a new dance work featuring Flex, a form pioneered by young African Americans in Brooklyn, and part of this year’s Brisbane Festival program. When I called, he told me he was in a good mood and I decided not to potentially jeopardise this by telling him I was calling from Adelaide where, infamously, his artistic directorship of the 2001 Festival of Arts ended prematurely in controversy. I began, instead, by asking him to return to that initial conversation he had with Morrison about Othello.
“I’ve always disliked that play,” he began forthrightly, “because clearly Shakespeare didn’t have any black friends! The previous play Shakespeare wrote was Hamlet and, boy, do you know what that character’s thinking. He has soliloquy after soliloquy. Othello, by contrast, is with white people the whole play and is alone for 10 lines where he gets to say something that maybe he himself is thinking and not performing for others around him. So, that absence of a kind of inner space, an inner life is one of the first things I noticed. The other thing that was on my mind is, where is Africa in relation to Shakespeare’s England, and in relation to us now? And this has been a long discussion my whole life. And Toni challenged me. She said: “Are you kidding? That is simply one of the greatest plays ever written.”
Morrison, Sellars explained to me, connected her high regard for the play to her love of language and her fascination with how Othello’s adversaries use language to manipulate, deceive and, ultimately, destroy. Sellars, with all the zeal of a recent convert, put it to me this way: “They use language to convince you to betray everything that you love. That is, in the play Othello, they don’t kill what you love—they get you to kill what you love.”
Morrison had been present at many of the rehearsals for Othello, but it wasn’t until Sellars’ work on the production was complete that the pair’s continuing discourse began to crystallise into a second, even more lateral response to the play as conventionally imagined. Sellars explained: “I said to Toni, I think there still needs to be an answer to, and a dialogue with, Shakespeare. In the 21st century, we have a different set of relations and a different set of possibilities.” Both Morrison and Sellars came to feel that [their production of] Desdemona should take as its starting point the black characters and historical and personal narratives that, in effect, amount to an absent referent in Shakespeare’s play.
“We found this amazing sentence,” Sellars told me, “that comes just before Desdemona sings the famous Willow Song. She says to Amelia: ‘I can’t get this really sad music out of my head. It’s the song my mother’s maid, Barbary, sang when she died of a broken heart.’ And so, in one line of Shakespeare, you get three things: you get that violence doesn’t just rely on strangulation but that you can die of a broken heart; that her mother had a maid, that Desdemona’s parents didn’t really raise her, they were out fundraising every night for her father’s senatorial career; and you get that the maid was named Barbary.”
Desdemona
photo Mark Alan
Desdemona
Barbary, as Sellars explains, was code for Africa in England at the beginning of the 17th century. “So,” he continued, “for Shakespeare in 1604 to use the name Barbary is to say to everyone, there is another African character in the play of Othello. And, of course, we learn from Othello right at the beginning of Act I that he and Desdemona fell in love when he started telling her stories. When we realise in Act IV that this brilliant, courageous white girl who picked this black guy as soon as he walked in the room was actually raised by a black woman on African songs and African stories, you get that when Othello told her these stories she knew them—and of course they fell in love. And so there’s this giant missing African link in this play. And so, with Toni, we said, let’s set about filling in this missing link.”
The key to this process was Sellars’ invitation to Malian musician Roki Traoré to play the part of Barbary and to create the songs that Desdemona heard when she was growing up. In contrast to received notions of what constitutes African music, Traoré’s songs, played live on stage with the aid of vocalists Fatim Kouyaté and Marie Dembelé and musicians Mamah Diabaté and Toumani Kouyaté, are not percussive and rhythmical but lyrical and meditative—“the equivalent of late Beethoven sonatas,” Sellars effused. In this conception, he believes, Shakespeare’s Africa—a strange, abstract image—is reinstated as a living dimension populated with “real human beings and real history. So you have, parallel to Toni’s writing, a genuinely African mode of storytelling [Traoré is trained in the griot oral tradition] that suddenly opens up completely new perspectives and a new emotional domain. And Africa is no longer ventriloquised—it is speaking and singing in its own voice. And meanwhile,” he continued, “I invited Toni to make the missing links between Barbary and Desdemona [played by Tina Benko]. And, of course, leave it to Toni to come back and say, ‘what’s missing from history is the women’s version of everything.’ So Toni has you meet all of the women in Shakespeare’s Othello in a world where they no longer have to be afraid, they no longer have to hide.”
Among Morrison’s innovations were, first, writing the single, passion-filled night Desdemona and Othello share that, in Shakespeare’s play, we only ever hear about and, second, rekindling their relationship in an afterworld following their deaths. “One of the most surprising things about the evening,” Sellars told me, “is watching Desdemona get things wrong, over and over again. And so it’s interesting because it’s not just an expected feminist reading. Toni is willing to show the limitations of Desdemona’s self-regarding, liberal white enlightenment. As she puts it, rather shockingly at one point, Desdemona’s trying to get credit for marrying a black man and Amelia says, ‘but he murdered you, right?’” At this, Sellars gave a wicked, wholehearted laugh. “So Toni really does change it up and she challenges the established narratives on all sides. And that’s part of her genius—that she takes you into the place that great art takes you, where there are no simple certainties and everything is presented with these inner dynamics, just surprising you over and over again.”
Desdemona, Melbourne International Arts Festival, Southbank Theatre, 16-19 Oct; Sydney Festival, Roslyn Packer Theatre, 23-25 Oct
Shari Sebbens, Airlie Dodds, Paula Arundell, The Bleeding Tree, Griffin Theatre
photo Brett Boardman
Shari Sebbens, Airlie Dodds, Paula Arundell, The Bleeding Tree, Griffin Theatre
Although Angus Cerini’s The Bleeding Tree and Andrew Upton’s The Present (after Chekhov’s Platonov) each has something important to say about families, relationships and violence (of various kinds), their gripping productions also excited questions about design, language, context and consistency of vision at a time when a multitude of influences weigh on theatre, often resulting in a cut-and-paste aesthetic, a legacy of undigested postmodernism. The works shared a tremendous sense of immediacy, of engaging with the flux of the moment, the turbulent confluence of past and future.
The Bleeding Tree
Renee Mulder’s design for director Lee Lewis’ premiere of Angus Cerini’s The Bleeding Tree yields one of those sets which is sculpturally interesting in itself, even before it’s animated by actors. From upstage in The Stables a series of slanted wedges fans out, dipping sharply to the floor in an evocation of the vertiginous ridges of an abstracted, unaccommodating landscape. But the harsh impression is softened by the surface with its floral patterning of a kind found on the frocks and wallpaper of bygone generations, now faded and inexpressive. The same backward glance is ‘heard’ pre-show in Doris Day singing, “Everybody loves a lover” until interrupted by a shattering blast, its long reverberation felt throughout a sustained total blackout plunging us into a traumatised present.
As the dark lifts, a mother and two daughters living out the aftershock of having killed their violent husband and father ride waves of disbelief, victorious delight, defiant re-enactment, guilt and fear of being caught. Their emotional and moral uneasiness is heightened by having to navigate the steep landscape, temporarily alleviated by standing or sitting in tableaux-like clusters as episodes unfold. These sharply focus our attention on the play’s stream of urgent, short-breathed utterances—a casual stichomythia, a form found in Ancient Greek and Roman drama entailing the alternating delivery between characters of single lines, often of similar length and rhyming or half-rhyming. Cerini uses the device to great effect, his language rooted in the idiomatic English of uneducated speakers who are nonetheless capable of insight and the poetry the form encourages. It also allows for different kinds of telling with quick alternations between first person responses (singular or plural: “Shakes still taking us, every little bit comes up choking us”), collective narration (the present tense account of the killing) and third person observations (the girls watch a sympathetic neighbour, Mr Jones, pretend that he can’t see the dead man’s foot: “He just kicked it.” “Looks back around face gone changed.” “A snarl and a sneer as clear as the day”). In the same vein, the words of visiting neighbours and a postman-cum-policeman are spoken by the women while the lugging and hanging of the body, not mimed, is intensely felt in voices and bodies.
The storytelling framework resonates with thriller, fairy tale, fable, folksong, liturgy (“The father lord our master.” “His pecked at cadaver.” “Blessed be thy name.” ”You dead useless lump, dead as the dead hereafter.”) and gothic goulishness (“Say all ashes to ashes and dust to dust, but holy hell never mentioned no rats but. Oh that’s a delicious bloody prize for the beatings and the show. Eaten from the inside out a marvellous bloody show”). The play’s storyline too, though moment by moment suspensefully unpredictable, resolves to a satisfying fable-like conclusion.
While saying much about domestic violence and about communities that tolerate it as long as ‘it’s not their business,’ The Bleeding Tree envisages a small rural community which comes onside with sympathy, apple pie and money—if only when the perpetrator has been killed—but also with the most unexpected advice for the women, at once comic, vicious and idiosyncratically moral. While hardly a model of law abidance it nonetheless poetically celebrates both the possibility of community unanimity against domestic violence and the resilience of its survivors, here in a mix of vengefulness and a sense of regeneration from the mother: ”Boil up his bones. Gonna make stock from his bones. I’m gonna make me a rose garden, the best he never seen….That dead hole in his head can stare back at me in every blossom…”
Paula Arundell as the mother and Shari Sebbens and Airlie Dodds are a perfect ensemble, totally mastering and subtly voicing Cerini’s challenging ‘score,’ realising its poetry, black humour and emotional depths. Lee Lewis’ direction underpins these with semi-tableaux staging on Mulder’s admirable set and with a momentum that matches the panicky, tense stichomythia but also allows for moments of interiority for the mother, when the rhythm slows.
The sisters observe their mother addressing her dead husband: “Gone mad as can be.” “Nah I reckon just having a well-earned dreaming reverie.” The Bleeding Tree is a wonderfully haunting dream play of the very darkest feel-good variety.
Richard Roxburgh, Jacqueline McKenzie, Marshall Napier, Eamon Farren, Brandon McClelland, Martin Jacobs and Cate Blanchett in Sydney Theatre Company’s The Present
Richard Roxburgh, Jacqueline McKenzie, Marshall Napier, Eamon Farren, Brandon McClelland, Martin Jacobs and Cate Blanchett in Sydney Theatre Company’s The Present
The Present
Alice Babidge’s set design for The Present (Andrew Upton’s adaptation of Chekhov’s sprawling first play Platonov, directed by John Crowley) is of a characterless modern dacha without traditional open timber-work, architectural decoration or garden in flower, just a few blades of grass. Nor do set or lighting suggest summer heat. It’s as if beauty and warmth have been expunged. This is the Russia of the 1990s, the era of ‘wild west capitalism’— prior to the current state capitalism—when fortunes were made as government industries were sold off to the new private sector (often opportunistic old guard communists) or simply appropriated by means unfair and foul. Given that the property has been inherited by Anna (Cate Blanchett), whose late husband was an old communist general, and that she’s likely to lose it, it’s odd that the design doesn’t evoke a sense of belonging and history; rather the house, inside and out, looks like the kind that might reflect the taste of the new oligarchs. There are other oddities: the pronounced upper class Anglo accents of the powerful men courting Anna and the deployment of songs by the Clash and Joy Division. In my younger years, productions of Chekhov often suggested nothing less than dysfunctional English afternoon tea parties. Not so here, but still British enough to irritate. The Present gives us post-Perestroika Russia—a collapsing Soviet empire nicely matching the crumbling Tsarist state that is the world of Chekhov’s plays—but with the most casual consistency.
Fortunately, Upton’s adaptation, the performances and John Crowley’s direction add up to an engrossing Chekhovian experience with all, and more, of the anticipated ennui, sexual tensions, frustrated ambitions, thwarted idealism, wry humour and potential for violence. Upton’s language, adroitly witty, bitter, blunt and thoughtful by rapid turns, is idiomatic (“He fucked you too? A trifecta!”) largely without being specifically Australian. There are marvels of distillation and restructuring, most strikingly the series of encounters in late night mist between the drunken Mikhail (Richard Roxburgh) after a disastrous birthday party for Ana’s 40th. The victims of his womanising and disloyalties manifest like punishing ghosts, but Mikhail persists in enacting cruelties and delivering the kind of idealistic advice he is unable to apply to himself. An emotionally demanding sequence has the naïve Sergei (Chris Ryan), enraged by the seduction of his wife, confront Mikhail but then exit and re-enter, like a rejected dog, desperate for the intimacy he is losing, bewildered and longing for touch: “You have killed me.” Mikhail is unaccommodating.
This scene is one of many that justifies the titling of the play. It’s obvious that dwelling on the past and being anxious about the future (or feeling that there is none worth envisaging) are central to the frustrations of the present in Chekhov. Here, it has a heightened specificity in Mikhail, a man who utterly believes whatever he is doing or saying in the moment. His celebration of his friendships, his admission that his marriage is the great anchor of his life, the conviction with which he urges others to action and the brutal frankness of his cruelties are all utterly believable—but in the present only. Richard Roxburgh, realises each of these moments with utter conviction—charming, seductive, ruthless and, above all, helplessly living in the moment. But frequently there are telling signs of uncertainty, in false starts and hesitancies with which Roxburgh colours Mikhail.
Cate Blanchett brings a different kind of spontaneity to the role of Ana, in love with Mikhail but recognising, despite its relentless push and pull, the impossibility of acting on it. Trapped between the old guard and the new and appalled at “what we have become” she unleashes her pent up anger at the guests gathered around the birthday meal, firing a shotgun and threatening to blow up the building with Semtex. It fails. “Made in Russia!” she wails, but she’s put the batteries in back to front. The build to violence has Ana calculatedly watching the others, slowly reaching into the top of her dress, pulling out her bra and waving it to gain the attention she next seeks with gun and bomb. The action is superbly comic and chillingly suspenseful—Ana’s wicked sense of humour, deep pain and raw anger felt simultaneously, with all the complexity that Blanchett so often realises on stage.
There are other fine performances (including Chris Ryan’s Sergei, Susan Prior’s Sasha—Mikhail’s suffering but finally defiant wife—and Jacqueline Mackenzie’s Sophia—the maddening doctor whose love proves fatal for Mikhail). There have been many adaptations of Platonov and there’ll be more given the free hand its sprawling and often unfocused five hours (cut to three here) offer directors and writers the opportunity to each make their own Chekhov. Andrew Upton now has a very fine one of his own. Next stop, Ivanov at Belvoir. Another early Chekhov ever ripe for adaptation.
Griffin Theatre Company, The Bleeding Tree, writer Angus Cerini, director Lee Lewis, Stables Theatre, 31 July-5 Sept; Sydney Theatre Company, the Present, writer Andrew Upton, after Anton Chekhov’s Platonov, Sydney Theatre, 4 Aug-19 Sept
Describing a performance as ‘hypnotic’ usually opens up a space of ambiguity that isn’t necessarily helpful to anyone, and not just because one person’s ‘hypnotic’ is another’s ‘boring as hell.’ The descriptor covers a range of experiences that can be dissimilar in intent and effect—the dazzling bewitchment of a purely sensory spectacle that fully engages perception is not the same as the work that lulls a viewer into an inward-looking meditative state, and different again is the repetitive or durational work that inspires each observer to meander off down mental avenues all their own. Two recent Melbourne performances illustrate the point, each with mesmeric effects but quite unlike one another in that respect.
Reckless Sleepers with Nat Cursio Co, A String Section
A String Section is a very curious work by Leen Dewilde of Belgium/UK company Reckless Sleepers and has enjoyed a number of one-off performances around the world, typically in collaboration with a local outfit. In Melbourne this came in the form of Nat Cursio Co, with both Cursio and Dewilde appearing in the production alongside other Australian dancers. It’s not quite dance per se, though the point is arguable, but it quickly becomes very apparent why physical performers are required for the piece.
The five dancers–all women—are seated on wooden chairs. Each is dressed in an elegant black dress and high heels and wears lipstick. Their attitude is one of gracious patience as the audience settles itself. In short, they look like a string section. The one thing out of place is the bows they have brought with them—generously-sized carpentry saws. The instruments they’ll be playing are the legs of the chairs themselves.
Dewilde’s concept is as simple as it is clever: from what is essentially a visual pun flowers a work whose danger I struggle to compare with much else. The women perch on their chairs in increasingly contorted poses as they hack away at the legs supporting them. When a chair leg becomes another inch shorter, the entire frame tips in a new direction, and all the while the visible threat of the saw blade is flying around among the performers’ limbs. As with a classical string section, of course, all faces remain largely expressionless besides the odd demure smile, and the blankness of affect is in stark contrast to the peril of the sharp edge dragging across a wooden limb a few hair-breadths away from a real, exposed calf.
Not much is really happening and it is entirely enthralling. The danger is somewhat heightened as legs grow shorter, seat angles more precarious and footholds (in heels!) ever less sure, but this isn’t the kind of escalating peril of circus. It’s more about the immediacy of live art, in this case observing each performer adapting their attack moment to moment as the thing supporting them disintegrates into sawdust, and attempting to maintain a particular composure almost absurd in the face of the action it accompanies, and which quickly becomes visibly tiring.
To describe this work as hypnotic isn’t enough—the state it induces is one of intense engagement with its presentness, in both a temporal and spatial sense. It is the feeling of a breath held for 50 minutes, all in the audience leaning forward, alert to every movement. It was only afterwards that I even began to consider the humorous associations behind the work—its deployment of classical music iconography—because the performance itself didn’t invite the distance required to mentally wander in those directions.
I saw the second one hit
photo Jeff Busby
I saw the second one hit
St Martin’s, I Saw the Second One Hit
St Martin’s I Saw the Second One Hit depends on such associations but is more surprising for it, given how its several central themes might lend themselves to more direct and mimetic exploration. It’s performed by two teenage twins who grew up in the wake of 9/11 and mines the experiences of people who have never known a world not affected by that event, but whose own understanding of it is obfuscated by adults who try to shield them from the full impact (the very fact that many young people have never heard of the World Trade Centre attacks is astonishing enough).
But director Clare Watson here takes a deeply lyrical approach to all of this. From the description I’ve provided, you wouldn’t expect the work to contain a good 10 minutes or so of callisthenics, some awkward wrestling and a lengthy discussion of the Higgs boson. There are literal references to the theatre of security that has emerged in the wake of 9/11—of the moment George W Bush was informed of the news, of water bottles confiscated at airports, of the Sydney siege and planned Anzac Day attacks—but most of the production urges audiences to find their own meaning in what is presented.
It’s worth taking up the challenge. The piece’s most rewarding sequence is in fact the long callisthenics routine, especially when glimmering metallic clubs are introduced and the girls twirl them so rapidly that they appear like the spinning cogs of some ethereal mechanism. The very martial discipline demanded of callisthenics hints at youth in military training, of individual expression filed down to a series of identical movements, but at the same time an unconscious glance from one performer towards her sister, or the slight tremble of a smile or hastily caught breath are reminders of their very humanness.
Centring the work around a pair of identical twins is a brilliant conceit. Obvious allusions to the Twin Towers aside, it allows their relationship to mirror that of Australia and the US, and to Watson’s credit she allows the many resonances here to play out subtly, largely leaving the deeper implications to the audience. Through word and gesture the twins evoke a powerful sense of both mutual dependence and a desire to each distinguish their own identity. They fight and they finish each other’s thoughts. They’re fascinated by the story of Romulus and Remus—another allusion that provokes parallels to the fall of the Towers and the twins’ own rivalries—but words are used sparingly here.
The subdued lighting, reflective flooring and sparkling tinsel backdrop do a lot to set the mesmerising tone, and the undramatic performances only add to this, but this mounting to a sustained hypnotic effect is not that of A String Section. It’s one that has the mind working at all angles, drawing lines between concepts and teasing out possible significances. The danger here is not physical but conceptual—any particular audience member just might not get it. That’s usually a risk worth taking.
Reckless Sleepers with Nat Cursio Co/Malthouse Theatre, A String Section, concept, choreography by Leen Dewilde, director Mole Wetherell, Malthouse, July 18; St Martins/Malthouse Theatre, I Saw the Second One Hit, concept, direction Clare Watson, performers Juliette Hemphil, Madeleine Hemphil, Malthouse, Melbourne, Sept 3-12
The 27th edition of Tanz im August, the second year under the artistic direction of Finn Virve Sutinen, started with an announcement of a significant budget increase to its main presenter, performance house Hebbel am Ufer. Good news for Berlin’s independent performance community, often left at the doors of the venerable theatre houses. HAU (as it is usually abbreviated) is the biggest, most respected and most internationally connected performance space for independent performance in Berlin, if not in Germany.
Likewise, Tanz im August this year placed particular emphasis on new works by emerging Berlin-based artists. The other main lines of inquiry were the intersection of performing and visual arts, and dance in Asia—and it is a pleasure to report that the festival was particularly strong on the last theme.
Tao Ye’s TAO Dance Theatre
Asian dance in Europe is often programmed blandly: blockbuster shows in oriental flavours taken out of their contemporary context. Nothing like that with Chinese choreographer Tao Ye’s TAO Dance Theatre, whose double bill 6 & 7 was one of the most interesting dance works I have seen in a long time. Contemporary and modern dance have not had much success in China, where local traditions predominate, and Tao Ye’s career has been built directly on international, rather than local, stages. Ye trained in classical Chinese and ethnic dances at Chong-qing Dance School and started his career at the Shanghai Army Song & Dance Ensemble, before founding his own company at the age of 22.
6 and 7 are abstract pieces in a longer series, with the titles referencing the number of dancers they involve. Perhaps because he has developed outside of a ‘scene,’ Ye’s work is unlike anything I have ever seen, and his concerns, although minimalist, are hard to adequately describe. Both 6 and 7 are primarily exercises in minimal, repetitive, synchronous movement, located mostly in the upper body, with very little lifting of feet. The movement is so asexual and un-figurative that it leaves almost no reference points for description: there is skirt-pulling, twisting shoulders, bending, rocking, tilting heads. The choreographies retain an anonymity: there is no thematic description, no profiling of individual dancers; focus is shifted away from faces or individual bodies towards group movement and individual body parts.
Ye’s interest, however, is neither in referencing quotidian gestures nor in the inner, spiritual experience of dance. Rather, it appears to be sculptural. The interest is in composition, massing, the rhythm of shifting weight, tension between body and negative space. The hypnotic rhythm and abstract, anonymous movement vocabulary combine to give the impression of an avant garde minimalist take on the aesthetic of mass games—those athletic displays that opened sports events and other public manifestations across the socialist world.
Rosemary Butcher, Pause and Loss, 1976
photo Chris Swartz
Rosemary Butcher, Pause and Loss, 1976
Rosemary Butcher, SCAN
A retrospective of the work of Rosemary Butcher offered an insight into a choreographer who brought an American postmodern aesthetic into British dance. Butcher’s SCAN has four bodies, two male and two female, moving inside a tight grid of light. The choreography is that of constant, low-level pressure applied to bodies in intervals just short enough that the bodies cannot fully recover to regain equilibrium. Like the incessant rub of a megalopolis, a bureaucracy or systemic violence, the bodies are stretched, lifted, pushed down, contorted; they lie down and rise, walk on their hands, forward, backwards.
The grid of light slices through, like an MRI, producing a striking visual effect of dismemberment. Butcher herself has admitted that in another life she may have preferred being a visual artist, and the strong focus on the visual experience in SCAN threatens to overwhelm the choreographic. The work loses energy in the final part, which features a film projected onto the square performance space. While the film zooms in on body parts of dancers in rehearsal, the audience is left rising on their tippy toes, frustrated, trying to see the film over each other’s shoulders.
Isabel Lewis, Occasion III
It was, finally, a great privilege to attend one of Isabel Lewis’ events titled Occasions. Organised in various cities since 2013, most recently at the Frieze Art Fair in London and Kunsthalle Basel, Occasions are gently structured events at the intersection of performance, philosophy salon and party. In a carpeted performance space, with scattered seating, lush plants, masterful canapés and unlimited drinks, Lewis takes on the combined role of dancer, DJ, lecturer, party host, story-teller and interlocutor. For her, the format is an attempt to reconcile her various practices as performer, choreographer, theorist and DJ, and much of the event is a discussion of the artificial separation of mind and body and practices that bring them back in balance.
I did not intend to stay the entire four hours of the Occasion, and it surprised me how addictively lulling it was. Lewis starts with a complex musing on happiness and its Greek equivalent eudaimonia, which translates fully as “life lived in accordance with virtue.” Challenging us to name the great virtues in Christianity, Lewis brings the body into discussion, relating her Berlin clubbing experiences with the more spiritually aligning practice of gardening. Often, she breaks the monologue to have conversations with audience members, the length of the event allowing these not to be tokenistic participation but dialogues of genuine exploration. At other times, Lewis plays music, or dances, or encourages us to dance, or drags around a little scent machine, describing the components of the scents she has assembled (the most droll being, undoubtedly, the scent of the notoriously excessive Berlin club Berghain, which for Lewis is emblematic of a physical experience that locks out the mind).
We are allowed to walk in and out of the performance space, Occasion happening just as much among the smokers on the steps of the building outside. As the evening unfolds and de-formalises, friendships are forged, people lie down among the plants, make out, converse. The caterers lie down too. At one point, Lewis dances among us, coming excessively close between our resting bodies while a small child follows her through the space, imitating her sensual dancing with both joy and confusion. The spirit of the event, restful and sensuous, resembles a kiki—a relaxed social gathering, often after clubbing, developed in African-American and Latino gay subcultures—a reference I cannot imagine was lost on Lewis.
Contemporary American choreography-without-choreography, like the work of Isabel Lewis or Miguel Gutierrez (Deep Aerobics, RT 128), functions well at dance festivals like these because it provides a generous space to contemplate the meaning of the event. It is easy to get lost among the performing bodies. Occasion III grounded not only its audience, but the entire Tanz im August.
Tanz im August: TAO Dance Theatre, 6 & 7, choreography Tao Ye, Haus der Berliner Festspiele, 26-27 Aug; SCAN, choreography Rosemary Butcher, HAU1, 2-3 Sept; Occasion III, host Isabel Lewis, HAU1, 4 Sept; Tanz im August, Hebbel am Ufer and other locations, Berlin, 13 Aug-4 Sept
There’s a long history in which adult imaginations conjure fictional teenage societies defined by competition and conflict. From Lord of the Flies to The Hunger Games, these are worlds in which larger structural tensions and hierarchies are displaced onto young individuals, who are themselves nonetheless rendered categorically distinct from the adult world (there’s no place for coming-of-age narratives in these fictions). It’s a relief to hear that Adena Jacobs’ second foray into teenage experience avoids this cliché.
Her first was 2013’s On the Bodily Education of Young Girls, a near-silent work of careful and particular gestures that fed on the restrained energy of youth forced into a state of self-discipline. Her latest is The Bacchae, entirely performed by 12 female performers aged 13 to 18 and eight musicians also in their teens.
“In both works we’ve tried to avoid the idea of a group of girls turning on each other,” says Jacobs, “partly because in my experience that’s not actually true. It’s a cliche. It’s much more interesting to see these figures wrestling with invisible forces, higher forces or unseen presences.”
The director says that both works are concerned with the ways that groups structure themselves and the “rituals they enact for invisible purposes.” Inspiration for The Bacchae directly emerged from the experience of creating Bodily Education. “That work was really restrained. It was about innocence and it was about our gaze upon these young girls. In rehearsal when we were dealing with this very detailed, delicate choreography we’d stop rehearsing and suddenly the room would burst into some kind of chaotic frenzy.”
Jacobs and co-creator Aaron Orzechs knew that this very energy would lend itself to an unpacking of Euripides’ play. Via a long improvisational process with the ensemble, the two have engaged with both the core themes and poetics of the original while remaining alert to how the cast’s “vision of order and chaos, patriarchal law and female subversion is entirely different.”
The drama of Euripides’ play centres on the violent god Dionysus and the authoritarian king Pentheus, with the women in its landscape fundamentally falling into two camps—the devoted followers of the former and the mad women on the mountain, who are unseen but reported upon. Jacobs’ reimagining distributes character across the ensemble while maintaining the problematic dynamics of the source.
“If we think about Pentheus as the first voyeur in theatre history and about that critical moment in the play where he dresses in his mother’s clothes and goes to the mountain to spy on the women, the provocation of that idea [in relation to] teenage girls feels fascinating and kind of dangerous” she says. “The idea of playing out the dualisms of the hunter and the hunted, god and mortal, man and woman through teenage girls felt incredibly challenging.”
One of the resonant notes the teens pinpointed early in development was the sexualisation and subsequent punishment of women. “I thought a version of this play where they are forced to be looked at in an erotic way but then are shamed for it was really interesting. That for me is one of the more striking and sad things that they’ve said. These girls have grown up in a world of iPhones and technologies which mean that they are plugged into a system that they can’t escape from, and they’re incredibly self-aware of it. They know that that’s the world they live in.”
This work, however, is far from a didactic treatise on gender politics. Text has been stripped back to a minimum and much of the work is music-led. “It plays out more like a hallucination or dreamscape…kind of like a post-traumatic memory of the myth via visual imagery.”
Euripides’ play was long considered one of the more confronting in the Greek canon, its bloodiness affording it some controversy (though equally making it one of the more popular texts in the modern age). Jacobs says that this darker edge needn’t be blunted when working with teenagers. “One of the main lessons that came out of Bodily Education is trusting that a group of young people can deal with any content as long as there’s a frame around it. As long as they’ve got agency, as long as they’re bringing themselves to it, the palette is very wide.”
Allowing them that agency, and providing a space in which the young creators may forge their own response to the text rather than accepting one imposed upon them, has been key to the work’s unfolding. “It does feel like they’ve got a world unto themselves,” says Jacobs. “They’re in it together, which I think is really great. Both times I’ve worked with St Martins I’ve been really interested in allowing [young performers] to build their own rules and allowing them to trick and surprise us.”
Melbourne International Art Festival: The Bacchae, St Martins and Fraught Outfit, Theatre Works, 8-24 Oct
Brendon O’Connor, Tony Yap, Dionysus Molecule, photo Windu Kuntoro
Dionysus Molecule is an enactive, immersive, ritual work. While aesthetically informed by Tony Yap’s distinctive mixture of Malay shamanism and Butoh, its rituals also hail from contemporary performance. Yap’s early experience with theatre maker Renato Cuocolo locates his aesthetic firmly in the camp of those who want performance to be striking or powerful, rather than representational or conceptual. The figure of Artaud oversees this Dionysian realm.
We are ushered into a rectangular room, presided over by a witness (Robert Meldrum) seated on a high chair. Its pitted walls are alive with lines of light, mobile projections that form rivulets of light. The room is become flesh. It throbs darkly. Intoning TS Eliot, Meldrum refers to the endeavour and its associated risks: the liveness of performance, even ritual performance, is always and inherently open to failure.
How then to judge its success? This is not a work that demands contemplation, a view from afar. Insofar as it envelops the spectator in its action, it aims to provoke an intensity of experience. Yap articulates the power of shamanism for a Western theatrical audience largely ignorant of its traditions and distant from its cultural origins. Yet, we are very close to its invocation. We see the sweat dripping profusely from Yap’s bare torso, try to decode his opaque look, his faraway gaze. His visions are not our own but we piggyback on their intensity.
This is a ritual evocation, a duet between two men: Yap and Brendan O’Connor. If not about their masculinity, it stages a series of relations between men. They are the atoms of this complex molecule, intertwined but also quite different in terms of their embodiment. Yap is thoroughly inside his own experience, his eyeballs almost turned inwards. His cries make raw sounds, his skin is exposed and wet. O’Connor is more contained, though equally focused, his movement more animal, perhaps totemistic. Yap is possessed, overtaken by the dance. There is a sense in which he opens himself up to that which finds expression through him. I did not feel this with O’Connor, whose shape making seems to draw on a different kind of (kin)aesthetic. While the two performers sometimes interact, they tend to perform alongside one another. There is no common choreography, no one choreographer, rather a joint engagement in this performative venture.
The collaborators of Dionysus Molecule are all skilled in their own right. The world they have created transforms the everyday into a theatre of the night, a sensorium of time passing. The challenge (and risk) of the work lies in its intertwining of distinct traditions and styles. The mark of its success could be measured through the impact of its impulses and intensities. Would Dionysus have been pleased? I like to think so.
Dionysus Molecule, performers Brendan O’Connor, Tony Yap, visual media artist, sound collaboration Khaled Sabsabi, creative collaborator, performer Rob Meldrum, musician, sound artist Tim Humphrey, Abbotsford Convent, Melbourne, 26-30 Aug
Every drone has a human operator. Even self-directed drones on autopilot rely on the human behind the software to give them purpose. Someone is always calling the shots. And it’s this necessary human element which is at issue in A Drone Opera, an exciting high-tech, high-art spectacle created by director Matthew Sleeth and composer Susan Frykberg.
We begin in darkness and in silence. Then there are voices: a resonant, chant-like music for soprano, countertenor and baritone. The singers remain hidden among the shadows. The atmosphere is almost like that in a church. Then, fiat lux, a cluster of blue laser light radiating from the back of the stage suddenly fills the large pavilion. And with that, the voices are joined by the unsettling and insistent buzz of a quadcopter drone.
The machine tends to obscure the human; but there’s no mistaking which comes first. This is an opera about our relationship with technology, and from the beginning menace is the keynote in the dramatisation of the relationship.
As we enter the performance space, we are ushered into great cages made of black mesh. These are for our safety, of course, to protect us from rotor related mischance, and yet, inevitably, we feel shut in. Drones armed with night-vision digital video cameras scrutinise us from every angle, transmitting a glitchy black-and-white feed directly onto a large screen at the back of the stage. We are made witness to our own captivity.
There is no narrative as such, but disquieting effects feature in almost every scene and mark a kind of progress. There are allusions to hubris and calamity. “Surely the sky is open,” sings soprano Judith Dodsworth as smoke hisses around her legs. The echo is from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the myth of Daedalus and Icarus. Father and son make a set of wings to carry them to safety. One is saved by the technology; the other, who flies too near to the sun, perishes by it.
At the same time, the technology does stir our curiosity, even our desire. The drones have all been custom made by Sleeth and his collaborators. These flash new toys are quick and nimble and have plenty of personality. The operators, even while they’re edging around the stage, keeping to the dark corners, all look as if they’re having a ball. So, yes, we feel the menace but also the allure. And maybe the great achievement of A Drone Opera is to hold these two feelings together, without contradiction, without letting one dominate, everything suspended in ritual and play.
Here, Frykberg’s vocal compositions are crucial. The drones themselves, as you would expect, feature as musical instruments, each with its own pitch, loudness and timbre. And we’re invited to hear their music not as a simple tone held beneath other elements of the score, but as an ostinato motif. In one scene, two drones dance a brisk aerial duet while the singers off-stage shape soft but rhythmical figures. Is this a passacaglia, perhaps? Is the ostinato of the drones a bass lament, a supercharged complaint, played so fast that we don’t consciously register its tragic aspect, as if desolation were sped up to a point where it could not be heard or felt. There is that sense of something sacred at work, cowled and shrouded by speed, hidden but present.
In another scene, in almost total darkness, the audience is slowly eyed off by a small drone with a searchlight. Is this the darkness of martial dystopia? We’re in our cages, after all—we might be huddled or cowering—and the drone is so close that we can feel the air pushed down from the propellers. But is this surveillance necessarily sinister? It could be a rescue drone looking for survivors in the rubble of some natural disaster. In the end, the drone becomes something even more innocuous: a robotic spotlight, picking out a lone singer on the stage, in the process creating a haunting and perceptibly human image.
Still, the context is inevitably war. The drone is military by its nature. Even an apparently harmless plaything built by a civilian hobbyist is only temporarily demilitarised. There’s always the potential to reassert its first function. This back and forth, this rapid negotiation between military and non-military connections, bewilders and delights and disturbs. The show exploits our weakness for fun gadgets and spectacular imagery but pushes us to admit that this weakness feeds back into—what?—a new telemilitary-industrial complex?
Robin Fox’s laser light designs are astonishing; they carve the space with detonations of red, blue and green, so psychedelic you gasp. He manufactures sculptures out of light, conjuring fantastical shapes from the haze of smoke, so that the gloom and grey are shot through with pure colour.
But lasers, like drones, are a crossover technology. They emerged from the labs of a defence contractor in the early 1960s; and today no stadium rock show can do without them. Yet recent footage of Boeing’s new portable laser cannon shooting drones out of the sky in New Mexico makes it clear that our distinction between war and play is mostly illusory—at least where technology is concerned.
Perhaps the most arresting coup de théâtre of this consistently startling show puts us—performers and audience in one heap—inside a vast cone of red light, with an obvious signification. War is always a thing of blood, however remote the control, and here we are right inside the killing vein. The three vocalists stare out into the audience as they sing words taken from a defence department training video: instructions for the acquisition of a possible new target.
All art today rides with the spectre of what Paul Virilio calls the state of total war. Matthew Sleeth is just making this context explicit, with a lot of dramatic magic and machinery, some of it luminous, some of it black. But he might have insisted a bit more clearly that art keep its human connection with the world. Perhaps that is what’s missing from the finale, where the drones and drones alone command the stage, hovering and swooping and blowing scraps of paper across the cold Meat Market cobblestones, suggesting visions of extinction and waste.
Perhaps the sombre feeling of absence is deliberate. But without the human element there is the risk that this drone opera, with its church music atmospherics, its sense of occluded and sacred rituals, looks just a bit techno-fundamentalist. So there is something ambivalent about A Drone Opera, as if the artists themselves, in telling the story of how we’ve fallen for the ghost in the killing machine, might themselves have been seduced.
Still, this is an opera, of all things, that shows us what we are: in the sights or behind the remote control. But in either case we’re at the interface between technology and art, between two types of creativity: scientific invention and its aesthetic inflection.
Arts House and Experimenta Media Arts, A Drone Opera, director Matthew Sleeth, opera composer Susan Frykberg, producer, dramaturg Kate Richards, performers Judith Dodsworth, Hamish Gould, Paul Hughes, Jennifer Hector, laser set designer Robin Fox, sound designer Phil Samartzis, lighting Bosco Shaw; Meat Market, Melbourne, 1-13 Sept
A brass and electronics fanfare by Thomas Reiner heralded the third Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music from atop the former mining tower in Bendigo’s central park (above). Just down the hill another fanfare by Igor Stravinsky welcomed the audience to the Ulumbarra Theatre. The festival’s opening concert was a fitting contribution to the ANZAC centenary: Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth’s absurd, disjointed and critical live score to one of the first ever anti-war films, Maudite soit la guerre (War is Hell; 1914).
BIFEM continues to inspire audiences with some of the most exciting international ensembles and new Australian works. This year BIFEM welcomed the provocative Paris-based group Soundinitiative, as well as the Finnish ensemble Defunensemble. As always, BIFEM’s warhorses, the Argonaut Ensemble, casually pulled off performances of contemporary masterworks and new commissions. The Amplified Elephants, Inventi Ensemble and a host of solo performers provided exquisite music from each mid-morning to early the next. The festival is thriving along with the regional city’s cultural scene. As well as with the usual haunts of the Old Fire Station and the Capital Theatre, this year’s festival inhabited the new Ulumbarra Theatre, which is stunningly built into and over the old Bendigo gaol.
Soundinitiative, The Exhausted
Soundinitiative presented the world première of Austrian composer Bernhard Lang’s The Exhausted, a piece of musical theatre based entirely upon Gilles Deleuze’s essay on Samuel Beckett. At a time when composers often make tenuous connections between their music and the texts upon which they are based, it was thrilling to follow Lang’s complete immersion in Deleuze’s text. Not that you had to know Deleuze’s essay to enjoy the piece. Lang shifts mercurially between musical styles depending on the needs of the text. The ensemble itself is constantly engaging. From their staggered, repeated stage entrances to the piece’s concluding bedlam, the ensemble was carefully choreographed by Benjamin Vandewalle. Performance conventions were unwound and remixed before our eyes, just as Beckett would play on sequences of everyday gestures and objects. Half speaking and half singing, mezzo-soprano Fabienne Séveillac transfixed the audience while standing, sitting, walking and hanging upside down from a table.
Defunensemble, All Finnish
Defunensemble offered to perform Australian music when they cold-called festival director David Chisholm, but Chisholm thought that “a postcard from Helsinki was too good a proposition for local audiences.” Clad in sea-green and black clothing printed with intricate marine designs, there was something magical about Defunensemble’s stage presence. Flautist Hanna Kinnunen’s reverberant flute solo Ruoikkohuhuilu by Juhani Nuorvala confirmed the enchanted atmosphere. Australian new music audiences know little of Finnish music beyond Kaija Saariaho whose music is both so peculiar and yet so immediately comprehensible. Human-sized but uncomfortable, it is like a stranger’s clothing. There was something similarly person-sized and walking-paced about the pieces by Nuorvala, Ville Raasakka, Perttu Haapanen, Niilo Tarnanen and Sami Klemola. From Raasakka’s prickling attacks on harp, flute, and cello to Haapanen’s duet for creaking cello and amplified typewriter, there were never more than two or three things going on at once. Each piece was highly segmented and narrative, but they told no particular story, nor engaged in any particular formal game. They were something completely different and a complete pleasure to hear.
Argonaut Ensemble, Sur Incises
The loose association of performers known as the Argonaut Ensemble stunned the audience with a performance of Pierre Boulez’s nonet Sur Incises. A buzz of anticipation surrounded the work’s first Australian performance in 15 years [the Australian premiere was conducted by Roland Peelman at the Sydney Opera House in August 2000. Eds]. Composed for three each of piano, harp and percussion, the piece is an idiosyncratic exploration of attacks and resonances, a sort of alter-spectralism that extends the piano’s sonority around the concert hall through the harps and percussion. Conductor Eric Dudley’s gestures were precise and fluid, especially where indeterminate attacks notated in the score resulted in splatters of sound like thrown paint.
From 32 to 43, the Argonaut String Quartet’s concert 4x4x4 included four quartets by four different composers. The string quartet is the heirloom orchid of the new music world: outlandish, antiquated, but greatly admired if you happen to find one. This concert was an audience favourite, which is promising as the quartet plans to break the Argonaut tradition of only playing in Bendigo. The concert was a rare opportunity for Australian audiences to hear a quartet by Christophe Bertrand, a promising young French composer who tragically committed suicide in 2010. As Angus McPherson describes in his review (p40) of the concert, eight audience members were able to listen to perceptive audio responses by artists aged between eight and twelve from St Martins Youth Arts Centre. New Zealand composer Dylan Lardelli’s sophisticated and intensely polyphonic Mapping, an Inlay wrapped the audience in a murmur of gliding microtones.
Trial by Fire Station
The solo recitals at the Old Fire Station have become a BIFEM institution. Reeling from Soundinitiative’s performances, the audience tumbled into the tiny black box to celebrate a single performer’s unique contribution to music in Australia. This year clarinettist Aviva Endean, violist Phoebe Green and prepared-pianists Erik Griswold and James Hullick each had their hour to shine.
Endean’s performances gravitate away from her principle instrument the clarinet to encompass percussion, performance art and ritual. Endean’s late-night performance at the Old Fire Station included her participatory work No Face like Yours in which the audience wears earplugs and “plays” them, following directions given by Endean in a video. From this warm and fuzzy beginning, the concert quickly descended into darkness. Endean left the audience with Wojtek Blecharz’s Counter-Earth, a profound reminder of the civil war that continues to displace millions of people and destroy Syria’s cultural heritage.
The contemporary master of feathered silence, Pierluigi Billone, contributed long, focussed works to both Endean and Green’s recitals. Endean explored the resonant properties of two brass bowls in Mani Gonxha. Green conjured a remarkable range of wispy and grating tones from her viola in Iti Ke Mi. Billone finds new instrumental sounds in an age that has rubbed and tapped every part of one instrument to every part of another (a technique that Richard Toop describes as “instrumental promiscuity”). What I don’t understand is the length of Billone’s pieces. I awaited the epiphany after the 20th minute of bowl-scraping, but found only the same sounds that I had heard so far.
Loud and clear
Perhaps it was in reaction to this trend in whispering earnestness that several concerts ended with explosions of joyous virtuosity. Soundinitiative concluded their Made in France program with Raphaël Cendo’s self-professed “saturationist” piece Faction. Defunensemble closed their All Finnish concert with Feed by the ensemble’s guitarist Sami Klemola. His Marshall stack presaged the unrestrained energy of the piece, though his guitar textures never strayed into outright distortion. The whole piece is a dry, tight cacophony. Endean chose a different tactic, opening instead of closing her concert with the woozy squealing of Ablauf.
The fortissimo tour de force of the festival was without a doubt Alexander Schubert’s Superimpose Cycle for jazz quartet (actually for seven players), which was performed to an audience packed behind the curtain of the Capital Theatre. The ensemble raced with breakneck speed through Schubert’s multi-stylistic escapade, stopping, starting, tooting and crashing under the red light and smoke effects. Myles Mumford triggered static bursts and effects from his laptop beside the audience. The climactic, final episode featured Soundinitiative’s Winnie Huang on amplified violin. Huang thrashed her way through the ecstatic violin part, a spectacle made all the more enjoyable by the unintentional half-beat lag introduced by Mumford’s processing. Everyone agreed that this should be written into the score.
Talking (and writing) about music
There was sadly less audience interaction this year. BIFEM have persisted in their policy of not printing programs, but with several programs changes between the festival brochure and the performance those express-post letters to the waste paper basket proved necessary in the end. Last year, some performers worked around this limitation by introducing works themselves. Several concerts were also broadcast on ABC Classic FM’s New Music Up Late. New Music Up Late has since been axed and the absence of Julian Day’s mellifluous voice was duly noted.
If there was less talking during the concerts, there was certainly more afterwards with the addition of a well-attended festival club at the Schaller Studio. This year also included a Music Reviewers’ Workshop run by Keith Gallasch, Virginia Baxter and myself from RealTime/Partial Durations. We led five talented writers—Delia Bartle, Angus McPherson, Charles MacInnes, Simon Eales and Jaslyn Robertson—through the marathon process of reviewing a packed festival program, providing passers-by the spectacle of eight frazzled critics tapping away furiously in a room of the Capital Theatre.
BIFEM’s dedication to presenting some of the finest and most challenging contemporary music to Australian audiences has paid off. BIFEM’s audience continues to grow at an alarming rate. But like Mount Everest, the increase in popularity risks stranding inexperienced climbers without food and water. Next year I will bring a survival pack: sandwiches, muesli bars and water for gorging on between shows; an LED light for reading the brochure during stage changes; and a pair of gloves for those icy walks to the festival club.
BIFEM: Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music, Director David Chisholm, Bendigo, 4-6 Sept
From the initial notes of Saturday’s Inventi Ensemble concert, I was struck by the excellent quality of sound produced—the tonal integrity of the acoustic instruments was consistently the central focus and the electronic material was expertly integrated. The Stratagem Studio at Bendigo’s Ulumbarra Theatre was the ideal space for sonic and visual close-ups of the flute’s inner workings, the struggles of the Roma people near Berlin, Gauguin in Tahiti and the lives of bees. Listeners were invited into an abundant world of imagery—part projected, part imagined.
In Passages (1979) by Jean-Claude Risset, Melissa Doecke’s solo flute interacts with a quaint episodic array of late 1970s electro-acoustics. By switching between the standard flute, its head joint alone, and the piccolo, Risset uses sound to creatively outline the workings of the harmonic series in music. His pioneering research into sound synthesis is apparent as we are reminded that perception of pitch is a response to changing frequencies. The samples were unpretentious, and each event occupied its own tonal area with certainty. The music travelled through changing air streams, touched on a hard-surfaced interlude, before bouncing off more disparate tonal language which was in turn stilled by vocal light at tunnel’s end.
Urban Gypsies (2005) by Johannes Kretz for oboe, electronics and film (by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, 1932) documents and musically narrates the lives of a group of Roma people living on the fringe of the city. Ben Opie’s mournfully pleading oboe conjures faces and words that become more forceful as images of grass and dirt give way to concrete and traffic. Disputes play out as trams and cars vie for prominence while the cries and honks of the oboe are the heart-wrenching anguish of animals being haggled over. People’s futures and pasts are also traded as the well-heeled are offered palm readings to the sound of vinyl cracklings and the oboe’s key clicks. As dice hit a beer stained card table, a tussle ensues which a plaintive child observes, perched upon a fence. A barrel of booze is rolled towards a celebration where women let down their hair and children horse around in dress-ups. The band is at full tilt and the couplings are blurred by fiddles, trills and multiphonics. With Hitler’s rise to power just a year away, I can’t help wondering what fate awaited these poor people.
Forty years earlier, Paul Gauguin made his first journey to Tahiti where, along with some of his most famous paintings, he produced a woodcut and travelogue both with the title Noa Noa. Kaija Saariaho’s 1992 work of the same name has become a standard work for flute and electronics, borrowing material from Gauguin’s text. Stage whispers are skilfully combined with quarter-tone recitations, air sounds and multiphonics. Doecke has throughly absorbed the composer’s stance on extended techniques and they are brought to life as the natural extensions of fragrant breath and song. This piece is an excellent example of how sound alone can create a rich and beautiful world of imagery.
The final work in the program, Melody Eötvös’ House of The Beehives (2015) was commissioned by lawyer and human rights activist Julian Burnside. A sequestered life in Italo Calvino’s short story of the same title is portrayed with flute, oboe, fixed-media and video. With its many blackouts and white flashes, saturated tree-scapes, and close-ups of flowers, the film was a little too reliant on effects, while the music swayed between evoking Celtic chants and upbeat hocketing. The combination left my imagination little room to roam—would simpler footage and greater exploration of the harmonic and textural vocabulary create a more poetic end result?
Inventi Ensemble’s Urban Gypsies illuminated many opportunities for multi-disciplinary artists wishing to combine images with sound. Which should take precedence, and how do they interlace to form a clear artistic statement? Perhaps works that are semi-improvised, or composed re-imaginings of obscure or abstract stories, have a greater chance for audience receptivity. They, like readers, are willing to fill in the gaps, imagine the backstories and even glance away to see where else they might be transported.
Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music, Inventi Ensemble, Urban Gypsies, Stratagem Studio, Ulumbarra Theatre, 5 Sept
“Splits between real and faked instruments; a hyperactive zapping through styles and stereotypes” is how Hamburg composer Alexander Schubert describes his 2011 Superimpose Cycle for Jazz Quartet and Electronics. This whimsical idea was energetically realised in the work’s Australian premiere by the Argonaut Ensemble, comprising a hybrid instrumentation of piano, saxophone, violin, double bass, electric guitar, drums and electronics. Both the audience and musicians were seated on the dimly lit stage of Bendigo’s Capital Theatre, immersed in a hazy space that became home to disfigured saxophone solos, hammered piano notes and wailing guitar glissandi.
Schubert creates a dense and unpredictable cross-genre sensation by mixing traditional composition elements with the impulsive spontaneity of jazz and electronics. The musicians in Superimpose Cycle were guided by in-ear click tracks—quite a contrast to typical jazz gigs where performers are often reliant on eye contact and gesture to achieve cohesiveness. Even though the individualised click tracks created the appearance of a detached ensemble, the seven musicians maintained a palpable sense of joyous unity. Saxophonist Joshua Hyde and pianist Emil Holmström thundered vigorously through demanding passages of repeated notes, with minimal signalling and absolute synchronicity.
In the second movement, “Night of the Living Dead,” Anita Hustas explored the timbral possibilities of amplified double bass by alternating quick pizzicato stabs with weighty bowed tones, her smooth glissandos juxtaposed with electronics that bubbled with tension. Drummer Phil Collins joined in with a laidback jazz rhythm before launching into the complex patterns that propelled the work.
“Infinite Jest” exploded with a frenzy of crashing electronic waves that were initially a little confronting. As the floor rumbled with shuddering pulses, this density soon enveloped the audience in a cocoon of sonic experimentalism. Roaring and gnarly chords were driven to the forefront of this wall of sound by electric guitarist Kobe Van Cauwenberghe.
The evolving interplay between the live acoustic instruments and processed electronics was particularly intriguing. In the earlier movements, stuttering sound samples were interspersed with instrumental figures in a back-and-forth manner, like the musical equivalent of a tennis match. This divide became gradually less distinctive as the electronics instead distorted the real-time performance with reverb and effects.
Schubert wrote a series of computer processors to align with the timing sequence of the click track, so that new sound effects are implemented and withdrawn as the musicians reach certain points in the score. Heavily amplified violin featured in “Sugar, Maths and Whips” with audible bow changes of a gritty, textural quality. Violinist Winnie Huang coped exceptionally with an unintentional technology glitch as the violin’s notes echoed in the sound system after a second of delay. Electronic musician Myles Mumford was on stage to control the running of the pre-programmed processors, and he explained afterwards that the unexpected delay was due to a processor adding latency where there should have been none. Although this was a computer error, it also became a functional musical feature that unknowingly embodied Schubert’s philosophy of there being little distinction between scripted sounds and indeterminate happenings.
To superimpose is to place one thing over another so that both items are still evident and identifiable. The Argonaut Ensemble achieved this by balancing myriad diverse sounds and textures as though they were coloured panes in a kaleidoscope. Beautiful textural patterns constantly rotated to create shifting overlaps of colour and sound in a thrilling performance of vibrant musicality.
Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music, The Argonaut Ensemble, Superimpose Cycle, Alexander Schubert; The Capital, Bendigo, 6 Sep
Celebrating 15 years of the Brisbane-based organisation Room40, founder Lawrence English decided to throw the main birthday party at Carriageworks in Sydney in the form of the Open Frame Festival. Lucky for us, as opportunities to see an impressive selection of international experimental electronic artists are all too rare in this town, where the venues (and/or event producers) are too big, too small or indifferent to the work.
Instead of the raked seating usual for performance and classical concerts, Bay 20 of Carriageworks is in hybrid configuration—part casual floor-sitting or lying down (which English requests us to do), part church congregation with two banks of padded benches for worshipping before a screen. Experimental music really does work better like this—the audience more relaxed and the sound from the eight speakers embracing us more evenly than in a sharp incline.
Night 1
The spatialised speaker rig is given its most thorough workout in the opening piece commissioned from Jim O’Rourke. O’Rourke, who doesn’t leave his home in Japan, has sent through his composition which is diffused (spatialised) live by English. The palette is familiar, what we’ve come to expect from the early 21st century digital version of music concrete—creaks, crackles, scrapes, pings—sounds abstracted from their source with attention to listening for layering and texture as key to the experience. What is particularly engaging in this complex composition is the sense of structure, featuring several clear chapters; a range of dynamic shifts (not simply crescendos or dramatic loud to soft changes); and the play of sounds in space. At one point it seems the entire spectrum is full, flooded with bleeps and chirps and whizzes to a point of near saturation; at another we hear the dull thud of bass, as though from a party many miles in the distance; and at another we tingle at the tiny crackle and digital whispers playing out behind us. While the sounds and textures themselves are perhaps what we are accustomed to, this piece is very much about their meticulous and affecting deployment.
Japanese audiovisual artist Makino Takashi does leave home and is present to perform his piece Space Noise. Drawing on his work with telecine in the film industry, he projects a 16mm film over the top of digital video. The audience is given cardboard glasses with one darkened lens. Known as Pulfich 3-D this creates a very subtle and fascinating shift in depth perception triggered by lateral movement. Each of the images at first seems like some kind of intense film grain with splotches in blacks, greys, reds and yellows. Sometimes they look like worms or rhizomic roots, always in motion across the screen—a kind of a digital Jackson Pollock. Nearing the end, shadows seem to lurk beneath the static and eventually an actual image emerges—glistening sunlight on crashing waves—seemingly not beneath but between the layers of static. Takashi accompanies this with a continuous chunk of scratchy static and grain, already intense at the beginning, increasing incrementally with a remarkable level of control over the duration. While the visuality of the work may initially seem to dominate, this multitextured gravel and static composition creates a perfect agglutination of sound and image.
The following act continues the analogue projection fetish in the form of four 8mm projectors wrangled by Louise Curham with Chris Abrahams on piano. Projected onto the already characterful Bay 20 wall, Curham’s mix of images drawn from found footage and hand-treated film stutter, blur and burn creating a composition that seems to be all about texture, surface and the shift from abstraction to figuration and back again. As the projectors start to whir, Abrahams plays a repeated note, synching in with the microrhythms of the machines. Soon the resonances collect and there are gentle feedback tones. Under these Abrahams starts his signature ostinatos that take on a momentum of their own, forming chordal swathes. In a first-time collaboration, these artists create a cohesive atmosphere while still pursuing individual trajectories.
New York-based William Basinski concluded the first evening of Open Frame playing a set of minimal loops with maximal resonances. To loping piano fragments he applies delays and reverb to massage out ringing tones, resonances and ghost pulses, generating an hypnotic universe. After lulling us for some 20 minutes the aura is ruptured by an angular, awkward orchestral loop launching in and out of a slow fade. It feels like an error, but I’m assured it is intentional—perhaps Basinski likes to both giveth and taketh away.
Night 2
The second evening introduces another duo commission, this one by percussionist Robbie Avenaim and composer Austin Buckett. Avenaim employs his Semi Automated Robotic Percussion System (SARPS), which uses an array of unattended drums—bass, snares and toms—played by robotic armatures. The piece begins with a single, regular beat, played on all the instruments for a long time—enough for us to really appreciate and dissect the nature of the sound, the attack, sustain, decay and release. Gradually a hum begins to build off the back of each beat—I suspect it’s feedback crafted by Buckett. Then an eruption of superfast drumming, all the machines as one, and a huge drone emerges, continuing when the instruments stop. This is a remarkable chest cavity-vibrating tone—a hot bath that when it ends yields the sensation of emerging from something truly viscous. It was one of those visceral sound moments that will stay with me for some time.
You can read my response to Lawrence English’s performance at the Unsound Festival in March in RealTime126, p11. Here it seems a little over-extended, the last 10 minutes not quite creating the intensity of the previous version, but when it gets big it’s awesome, particularly when English plays the Wilderness of Mirrors material.
The final piece is Hypnosis Display, a 70-minute film by Paul Clipson with live soundtrack by Liz Harris (aka Grouper). Clipson uses mostly black and white 16mm film creating beautiful double exposures and overlays that play with form, composition and narrative via juxtaposition and association. Images— oceans, skyscrapers, forests, road markings, eyes, keyholes—and meanings slide over each other, ending in a late night Bokeh [the aesthetic of the blur. Eds] nightmare of slow exposure light streams and flames. Beneath this is a constant industrial rumble, wrapping around the drenched and dreamy fragments of Harris’ looped voice and melancholy melodies. Played from a series of cassette tapes everything has a low-mid muffled quality and there is no direct diegetic sound, rather the scape exists on a parallel plane just implying the original sonic space. This creates an understated yet no less evocative soundscape for this haunting mediation on entropy.
Room40’s birthday bash didn’t so much go off with a bang, but rather with a contemplative but no less intense grate, grind and hum. Very well attended (where did all these experimental music fans come from?), the festival celebrated not only 15 years of Room40 but also reflected a certain maturation of this particular area of non-beat based electronic music and audiovision that we, for want of better term, call experimental. Perhaps we should start calling it textural music?
Room40 and Carriageworks, Open Frame, Carriageworks, Sydney, 30-31 July
Trio Noreum Machi stages contemporary music that draws on South Korean shamanic rituals and the Sori vocal tradition as well as performative drumming including that pioneered by group SamulNori. For Noreum Machi director Kim Juhong, Earth Cry, their recent collaboration with Synergy Percussion, is both a presentation of existing Korean culture and the reflection of that tradition as interpreted in collaboration with Australian percussionists. It is this refraction, born of study and conversation, which interests both groups who are aware of the strange cultural territory they enter when staging cross-cultural projects.
Earth Cry is as much about showing the process of collaboration as about presenting fully-fledged ideas and existing pieces. Synergy director Timothy Constable explained, “There’s an ideal that polishing it is not desirable. It’s about being true to process. Let it come out, immediate and raw.”
The program’s title alludes to a celebration of the natural world—like the direction of the wind, the velocity of water and the magic in everyday objects—but also tips its hat to Australian composer and longtime Synergy supporter Peter Sculthorpe who passed away in August 2014. Opening the show was Tree Rain/After Earth Cry, arranged by Synergy and Noreum Machi to include a curious combination of the iconic rhythm Chilche (meaning seven beats) and a melody from Sculthorpe’s seminal work Earth Cry which was inspired by an Aboriginal melody from Arnhem Land. This showcased many of the instruments, musical idioms and playing styles that would reappear throughout their performance. The groups’ bold yet sensitive juxtapositions continued notably with a duet between Constable on marimba and Kim Juhong playing janggu (Korean two-skinned hourglass drum, often struck with a bamboo slapping stick on one skin and a softer-mallet on the other surface) in a stunning rendition of the Sarabande from Violin Partita 2 by JS Bach.
Most visually exciting were two performances spotlighting Noreum Machi. The first was a ‘small drum farming-festival dance’ in which Lee Howon danced with a Sogo drum. Attached to his Sangmo headdress was a short rod connected to a long white ribbon that slinked across the floor as he entered. When the drumming became more vigorous he darted his head in figure eight movements that thrust the ribbon through the air in lovely circular shapes—a bit like a fire-twirler. There were times when these neck movements appeared dangerously close to inducing concussion. Impressively the movements enhanced a sense of musical climax that built in accompanying drummers’ parts. Another fantastic climax came in a trio for janggu with flashy overhand drumming techniques—the drummers’ arms blurring in the light as they rapidly struck opposite drum-skins with the left hand.
Behind the drummers were three big screens displaying videos that Samuel James filmed in the Australian bush. James had not been a part of the two-year musical collaboration that lead to Earth Cry so his pairing of images with Korean shamanism was largely instinctive and based on his understanding that “shamanic music is meant to alter the state of mind through complex rhythms” (Sam James, shimmerpixel.blogspot.com.au). His imagery contributed to a mesmerising feel for “the natural that creeps through the constructed”—just as did the passion of the performers through their complicated percussion. Watery film behind the overhand piece featured waves that seemed to follow alternative rules of physics and complemented Korean rhythmic subdivisions unfamiliar to Western ears.
Constable said when he found Korean drumming, he thought it “would sustain my personal percussion practice for the decade. It had the key to the things I wanted to develop.” Synergy first travelled to learn from Noreum Machi in Korea in 2011 and have made many study-trips since. See Synergy’s YouTube channel for video of them experiencing shamanic rituals that last several days, usually without sleep. Constable said of Noreum Machi, “They have inquisitiveness about other styles but are shy about assuming they’d be able to play our stuff. But they already tour internationally, have studio space in Korea to host us and are willing to enter a dialogue. Tonight’s audience saw Synergy playing Korean music but really we are meeting in the middle with Noreum Machi in a space of post-traditional reverence.”
Presented by The Korean Cultural Centre in association with Synergy and TaikOz Ltd, this program was described by Constable as “our confusing little nebula of virtuosic and complex percussion music” acknowledging the ability for such fusion to come across as niche and at the same time as a form of cultural tourism. Each performer demonstrated exceptional skill and devotion to this pursuit and exuded joy in collaboration. It was a captivating show that successfully made unfamiliar instruments, rhythms and musical languages accessible, inviting further interest in Korean arts.
Noreum Machi and Synergy Percussion Earth Cry; City Recital Hall, Sydney, 20 Aug
In a long overdue acknowledgement of the work of Joyce Hinterding and David Haines, the MCA has exhibited a significant retrospective of their work. Keith Gallasch recorded my observations (and a few of his own comments) about the meanings of the works and how they function as we walked through the gallery.
Scavengers
The first I saw of Joyce Hinterding’s work was a series of things she built—or ‘drew’ is more correct—called The Oscillators (Sound in Space, MCA, 1995). These were circuit diagrams rendered in carbon. They oscillate because they are electrically conductive, like carbon in a battery. They aren’t ‘scavengers’, which we’ll get to later. The Oscillators aren’t part of this exhibition, which is a pity. But there is a similar series of carbon drawings, which are either square spirals (Large Ulam VLF Loop [or Large Square Logarithmic VLF Loop], 2011) or dragon curves (Aura Curves or the Wunderlich Curves). In the latter the curve turns through multiple right angles and does a looping thing, big loops of different shapes, and because they’re electrically conductive and in these spiral forms, they actually ‘scavenge’ the power out of the air from all the electro-magnetic signals that are beaming through the place. Essentially they are antennae that do much the same as a TV antenna but without the filtering needed to receive a particular station.
If you touch one of the spirals, while wearing the headphones, a tone comes and goes. It won’t really change frequency because that’s to do with the actual length of the spiral. The Large Square Logarithmic VLF Loop is drawn on the wall with liquid carbon that, given the sharpness of the edge, might have been screen-printed onto it. These are the scavengers—there’s actually no power going to them. The device at the end of the wire attached to the centre of the drawing with its shield attached to the outer end of the spiral simply amplifies the sound enough for you to be able to hear it.
These two pictures are Diffusion Reactors (2013). I think what’s happening here is that the gold spiral—gold leaf printed onto the paper, the rest of the image being carbon—has been wet and ink placed on it so a current comes from it, drawn from the world and distributed. The name partly relates to Alan Turing’s work on reaction diffusion. After WWII when Turing had finished building his Bombe, his original machine for deciphering the code used by the Enigma, he moved into morphogenesis and how biological forms function. He developed the maths to build a reaction diffusion circuit. I assume Hinterding knows about this. These pictures are of that nature but they’re much more random. Reaction diffusion spreads out and each particle affects the next particle and that affects the next particle and you get this kind of slow growth out. And if it’s wet, that means the current carries across the paper.
One of these beautiful images looks like a Hokusai wave painting.
In a sense, it is the logarithmic spiral that Hokusai drew into his wave.
We also have two tables, on which are again, energy scavengers (Induction Drawings 1 and 2, 2012). Each is a very long antenna drawn in carbon, which is a conductor of electrons. The drawn lines loop back and forth. You can touch them and hear changes in the sound. They are what Hinterding calls “energy scavengers.” There’s power going to the mixer but there’s none coming up from the AC power. It’s just the audio signal coming back down and being amplified for the headphones.
In the middle of the main room, a big spiral antenna (Aeriology, 1995/2015) is a very, very long piece of insulated copper wire woven around two columns. It uses the same kind of material that insulates the copper wire in a standard transformer for use in motors and in electronics. So this is an antenna and again, the length of it determines the frequency response or the wavelength. It’s over three metres long, so with the large number of windings it has a very low frequency response. The signal is also shown on an oscilloscope. You don’t want to touch the wire because, depending on how much charge is built up, it might discharge into you.
Again, a quite beautiful work with its red aura as the light shines on the copper.
It’s really lovely, aesthetically let alone technically.
Video energies
Here are two of David Haines’ early video works. Together they are called The Seventeenth Century (2002). In one he’s taken a video image of a Sydney coastal suburban landscape and lit buildings separately by compositing white light onto them. There are actual lights but they’re the steady ones—and the aeroplane, of course, which is kind of nice to see. Everything will suddenly light up, like this whole block of flats and then suddenly close down again.
It looks very real.
That’s what Haines was trying to play with.
The image on the right hand monitor looks like a very deep ocean-bed sulphur source, although it’s actually digitally rendered smoke in water. The deep ocean smokers which they remind me of release extraordinary amounts of gold and other heavy metals. You can clearly see the considerable energy because it’s generating light.
High tension
Over here on this screen (Encounter with the Halo Field, 2009/2015) is a video of four fluorescent tubes held by two people, one in each hand, standing beneath a high-tension cable running across the Blue Mountains. If you hold a fluorescent tube near one of these things it will light up, drawing the electrons that power it from the ambient electron-laden atmosphere (the electro-magnetic field) produced by the wires, which carry something more than 120,000 volts. The title refers to the ‘halo’ around the electrical lines.
The image is very dark. Sometimes you’re seeing someone’s hand in close-up, silhouetted, but then the fluoro lights up with the twilight sky behind. It’s beautiful, but also like a take on the Star Wars lightsaber.
Earth Star, 2008
courtesy MCA
Earth Star, 2008
Orgone energy
In front of us now is an “orgone cannon,” (The Black Ray, Cloud Buster Number Three: Orgone Energy Cloud Engineering Device, 2011-12), which is a complete departure from the scavenging works. But it’s not, when I think about it. The energy scavenger is standard—I mean there’s good science going on there, but this is Reichian. Wilhem Reich was the radical German Freudian psychologist who was jailed in America for being far too out there. He claimed that there is orgone energy in the natural world, a kind of magnetic energy only not magnetic, but more psychic.
The Orgone Box could allegedly collect sexual energy.
Probably orgone and orgasm have a very close relationship; it’s where the ‘orgone’ comes from.
This work here is a “Cloud Buster” which creates orgone energy—by some mechanism inside it—and then blasts it out through those long tubes into the atmosphere and is said to be able to remove or move clouds and thunderstorms. That’s one of the reasons that Reich was jailed by the FDA because he wouldn’t stop making claims for devices that they considered to be completely spurious. These artists have actually operated their Cloud Busters; how effective they were I don’t know.
This wall-mounted “photograph,” Triboluminescent Godhead 1 (2010), basically looks like a thunderhead cloud, I think, but is again computer-generated. It is similar to the smoker in The Seventeenth Century and has beautiful 3D depth and colouring.
And the Cloud Buster is pointed at it across the room.
Hidden forces unleashed
In this video, House II, The Great Artesian Basin, Pennsylvania USA, 2003, you see an American house, of the kind in the wealthy eastern US. Bursting out of the doorways and the windows is a flood of water of the most extraordinary proportions, as if, says Haines, the Great Artesian Basin had erupted out of one house. It reminds me very much of the work of Bill Viola who is so interested in water and fire and energies. This is quite an extraordinary digitally constructed work. Haines is such a good computer graphics maker as in the Levitation Grounds, 2000, which we can’t see now because it’s only available on certain days, and The Blinds and the Shutters, 2001, both of which which were shown in the Anne Landa Award exhibition, 2000-2001. In the Levitation Grounds a severed tree limb floats in space in a country landscape. Then in the Blinds and the Shutters, a house has exploded, not in the sense that a building is shattered and thrown about, but in the sense that some kind of massive internal pressure build-up has picked up all the furniture and thrown it out of the building where it floats gently across the space between the house and the ‘camera.’
Electrifying nature
This batch of pictures here (The Wollemi Kirlians, 2014) are Kirlian photographs of natural objects—leaves and flowers and small pieces of detritus from the Wollemi forest which have been placed on colour photo paper and highly electrically charged. The artists have put a very high voltage, very low current electrical signal into the objects, making them glow through corona discharge. You can see the power leaking.
Solar energy
If you look at the sun directly, you really can’t see anything other than extremely bright light. In these large ‘hydrogen alpha pictures’ (Earth Star, 2008) Haines has masked the body of the sun with the lens of a hydrogen alpha telescope, taking out all the light except its circumference where you can see the solar activity or corona: the “hydrogen alpha frequency” including solar flares that knock out the GPS every now and then and damage television signals. They’re lovely images. Very nice pieces of solar portraiture, you might say.
In a side chamber, there is another Earth Star (2008-10), here a large-screen video projection of the sun presented as installation. The video is a similar hydrogen alpha portrait of the sun but as a time-lapse recording with yellow and white flares coming and going. In front of the screen are two VLF antennas on long tables. It’s the same idea as the work wound between the two columns, Aeriology.
A very long piece of insulated transformer wire is wrapped very tightly around a 15cm tube, forming an induction loop which is also self-powering. In a standard AC power transformer there are two coils, one around the other, but they don’t touch so that the 240 volts that’s coming in is inducted out of the transformer at a much lower voltage—12 volts for example—so that we can use it sensibly rather than getting killed by it if we touch it. Here there’s no connection between the two coils but there’s a field around them. Inside a transformer that field is tightly constrained. Usually a metal box is fitted around it so that it doesn’t bleed all over the room and make noise, but these coils are essentially intended to be open to whatever electromagnetic stuff is going on in the space. That hiss that you can hear is actually the output from the induction loops and the particular frequency, of course, is dependent on the length of the wire. The lower sound is probably coming into the room from other sources.
It’s amazing. The sun here looks like a big orange turning very slowly.
It’s been shot over a long period and sped up. You can see that wonderful flare at the bottom and a curved one as well—hydrogen alpha lines.
Large Ulam VLF Loop (graphite)
courtesy MCA
Large Ulam VLF Loop (graphite)
Aroma power
On a bench to the left side of this space are two refrigerators, which contain components of perfumes, Ozone I: Ionisation and Ozone II: Terrestrial. These are not finished perfumes but the actual component aromas from pine needles to strawberries. You can’t sample them, but every morning the staff here dip strips into one of the bottles and place them in beakers for you to smell.
If Hinterding is interested in what’s in the air in terms of electrical energy, Haines is taken with what’s in the air in terms of aroma.
That’s right. In terms of smells and molecules.
At another level, they’re also electrically charged.
Just to add to the complexity.
Interference and avalanche
In another adjoining room is Purple Rain (2004) which is making a loud, low frequency hum. Above are four UHF TV antennae in the ceiling receiving random TV signals—or they may even be tuned signals because there’s a bunch of TV monitors, screens to the wall—television has been banished! But in front of us on a large screen is a mountain range and on each of four peaks a snowcap. We’re seeing a massive computer-generated avalanche coming down from the central snowcap. It’s like House 2 except with snow and it’s interrupted randomly by whatever else is coming in from the television sets, which is just downright noise. A band of purple noise is the purple rain of the work’s title. The sound is just the 50 Hz hum coming in. That’s the main content of electro-magnetic spectrum in any built up environment: 50Hz hum from the power lines. The aerials are picking up the power lines.
Archived energies
Back in the main gallery is a kind of research cabinet with everything an enthusiastic teenage scientist would love to have—certainly this one would’ve. It’s got the Reich book, books on UFOs, lots of stuff on Tesla, cathode ray tubes, integrated circuits, mineral crystals and electrical things that Hinterding would have built early on. It suggests the research background that informs her work.
In a second cabinet, among various items relating to Haines’ work with aromas, are beer glasses painted inside with a carbon-based conductive substance called aquadag, used inside cathode ray tubes. The neck of the CRT—that thin bit that sticks out the back—has a set of pins and a cathode or electron generator in it that generates a stream of electrons. The aquadag is set to the positive side so that the beam of electrons heads straight out into the middle of the screen and then is conducted back through the aquadag. Each glass has been pierced with an electrode, the nipple that you can see, and wires would have run from one glass to the next to the next. There was a very large number of these in the 1991 Perspecta in the Bond Store in Walsh Bay. They are an old type of battery (Leyden Jars), storing current and using that to drive an oscillator of sorts. This was when Hinterding’s work first became evident.
Imagined world, player energy
Moving to this large cinema/gallery space, you can see on a 3D (photo)graphic of a simulated mountain range (The Noumenon Ranges, 2013), its features variously designated as Spinoza’s Abyss, The Barren Grounds, Aristotle’s Basin, The Schrodinger Field and The Walls of Indeterminism.
To the front of the space is a huge screen showing a sulphurated mountainous landscape (Geology, 2015). Our point of view of it shifts dramatically as one of the visitors plays with it by standing on one spot and moving their body. Haines has re-programed a video game engine and used something like a radar projector to sense movement so we can see the landscape aerially or on the flat. This simulated landscape is a 3D graphic projected in high definition onto the gallery wall. We feel almost in the landscape, exploring it while it shifts and whirls according the player’s movements.
The significance of Haines and Hinterding
The curation of this exhibition by Anna Davis with Kelly McDonald has been thorough and dug almost to the roots of the work. It does an excellent job of covering the range of ideas Haines and Hinterding have canvassed and the period over which they have worked. The catalogue provides an excellent photographic coverage of the works in the exhibition with important contributions by Davis and Douglas Kahn to the discussion around the ideas the artists work with.
The primary importance of Haines and Hinterding is that they’re the only people in Australia—they’re not unique to the world but they’re certainly pretty unique to Australia—who are playing with these kinds of ideas and making something aesthetic from them. They do a lot of work to confirm that their ideas are functional, so in that sense they’re experimentalists; but they’re not just experimentalists. They’ve produced an extraordinary set of objects and they play with an extraordinarily diverse set of ideas, but they do the history work. Tesla was an experimentalist and he produced astonishing and frighteningly dangerous things but he also came up with AC power.
I think what Haines and Hinterding have done is to focus our attention on things which are not immaterial but are hidden forces that we don’t normally think about. We happily use a TV antenna but most of us don’t know anything about why, what it is or how it works. They’ve drawn on all this stuff in ways that produce quite extraordinary results. They’re educating us about something but it’s not didactic.
Derek Kreckler, a name that crackles like fire for an artist who has a fascination with water and often gets wet in the pursuit of his work. Wet Dream is the title of a 1978 work; in a series of slides the artist falls fully suited into the ocean. Here he lies, partially submerged within a moment of abandonment, the water streaming over and around his body. There is an element of chance here, of the accident, the flight of fancy, while at the same time the work is highly constructed and follows a predetermined process leading to its realisation. This is alluded to in its title—by definition the wet dream is about the accident and the following process of clean up. Derek Kreckler: Accident and Process, then, is the fitting title of a solo survey exhibition curated by Hannah Mathews at PICA that commemorates a career spanning five decades.
An oeuvre focused on experimental, conceptual and post-minimalist arts practice across a diversity of media, it is propelled by a perceptive vision engaged in issues across art history, the environment and Indigenous and non-indigenous politics. Kreckler reconstructs historical events, manipulates fact and fiction and pushes the ways images are read and understood. His artwork is pursued with a wry sensibility, an emphasis on performance and fearless propulsion toward ever-new waters.
Antidote (2005) is a six screen video installation that takes as its subject a waterfall shot from different perspectives, at varying scales, with the footage changing between speeds. It is a seemingly banal record of sound and vision at Quinninup Falls in Western Australia and although it demands to be experienced as larger projections than the space at PICA allows for, it nonetheless yields a remarkable sensorial impact. The paradoxically coalescing and dissonant sound and partial imagery build up to affect the viewer more like an abstract noise pattern than a record of the natural world. Then, out of nowhere comes a mysterious whispering voice, like a magical, auditory apparition, pulling the work away from abstraction into somewhere altogether stranger.
Littoral, 2014
Derek Kreckler
Littoral, 2014
In a more recent work, Littoral (2014), the ocean breathes its awesome swell into the gallery space. A black and white projection is doubled by the image falling both on strips of hand-cut Olefin paper and on the background wall. A fan oscillates behind the paper and causes the strips to be flung outwards in sequence. There is something utterly captivating about the combination of the seascape in all its beauty and the very tangible movement and lightness of the paper. The video shifts from a steady image, closer to the shoreline, to a tumbling capture of the shifting horizon, waves at close range, crashing with nauseating proximity. The word ‘littoral’ refers to the intertidal zone of the sea, where the waves break. Other than being a very literal video representation, the shimmering border of paper acts as that point of breakage and movement between the viewer and the projection. The video is never experienced on a surface that is not broken up; the shifting edge of the paper effectively makes manifest the intertidal.
Clearly, Kreckler has devoted time to careful observation and study of the ocean’s behaviour; he has engaged water playfully, immersed himself in the stuff and confronted the threat of being swept away by woolly waters. In Big Wave Hunting (2011) a series of photographs marks a time of being in proximity to the sea. Kreckler himself is pictured with a camera in hand on rocks at a risky precipice of crashing waves. In some images he stands crouched and dwarfed by the foamy spray, in others he is partially or completely obscured; others picture the muggy horizon of the coal industry from the vantage point of Austinmer in New South Wales, where Kreckler lives, as well as ocean and horizon as their sublime selves. The archetypal images of the ocean recall romanticist visions from art history and the entire project stems from a photograph by George Mortimer, also titled Big Wave Hunting (c.1903). In it Mortimer has a rope around his waist theoretically acting as a lifeline as he positions himself on precarious rocks, capturing the surf with his camera ingeniously waterproofed in a wooden box. It is a compelling image of a process that teases the potential for accident, which Kreckler expands into a larger and more layered body of work.
Accident and Process, 2012
Derek Kreckler
Accident and Process, 2012
How a scene is constructed and in turn understood is important to Kreckler. In a series of photographs titled Accident and Process (2012) he creates images of both found and manipulated subject matter: images that are planned and highly controlled yet still about chance and the accident. They are scenes that lead the viewer into speculative narratives. A car is pictured at the moment it has nose-dived into a footpath from a road above; a woman topples wine glasses in a gallery against a backdrop of historical paintings; and a man appears crushed by the fallen limb of a tree. The images look seamless, however digitally pieced together they are; they are artificial but do not look contrived. A seemingly irrelevant figure might be added to or removed from the scene for the sake of making a more interesting, more balanced composition, but otherwise there is nothing that breaks the continuity of subject or picture. They are about the vulnerability of the real, tied to a lineage of pre-digital photographic fakery. In the end it does not matter whether they are real or fake, the medium is simply another means for expressing ideas.
This exhibition even feels like a dot-to-dot between water/ocean themed works with the other works existing like fragments of conversation caught in passing (juicy fragments nonetheless). “Never turn your back on the sea,” said Mortimer, one of Kreckler’s inspirers, and it seems unlikely that this artist’s practice will ever turn away from this enduring subject. Overall, the exhibition offers a remarkable insight into a practice that has come into its own and rigorously and persistently recharged itself into multifarious modes of expression.
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Derek Kreckler, Accident and Process, PICA, Perth, 29 Aug-18 Oct
2016-17 Tour Dates: 2016: Bunbury Regional Art Gallery, WA, March; Geraldton Regional Art Gallery WA, April; SASA Gallery, University South Australia, July; Horsham Regional Art Gallery, VIC Sept; 2017: Contemporary Art Tasmania & Plimsoll Gallery TAS, Jan; Bathurst Regional Art Gallery NSW, March; Maitland Regional Art Gallery NSW, June; Wollongong City Gallery NSW, Sept 2017
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From RealTime and Wakefield Press, a groundbreaking new book for lovers of Australian contemporary dance, focused on innovative choreographers, concentrating on a work by each with an accessible interview and an insightful essay by a leading dance writer. Edited by Erin Brannigan and Virginia Baxter.
Building on Lawrence Wright’s book Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, prolific documentarian Alex Gibney delves exhaustively into the history and machinations of one of the most successful and secretive religions of the last 60 years, from the life of its idiosyncratic founder L Ron Hubbard to its calculated deployment of Hollywood celebrities.
Effectively overlaying personal testimonies from eight former members of the Church of Scientology, with archival footage, this by turns disturbing, astonishing and darkly funny documentary is a chilling reminder of the dangers of blind faith.
Writer-director Alex Gibney, whose impressively comprehensive and musically sensitive biography of Frank Sinatra has recently screened on SBS, is the maker of We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks (2013), Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God (2012) which is about sexual abuse of four young deaf men by clergy the American Catholic Church; Taxi to the Dark Side (2007) about the killing of an Afghan taxi driver beaten to death by American soldiers while being held in extrajudicial detention; and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) about corporate corruption. Taxi to the Dark won the won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
5 copies courtesy of Madman Entertainment
RealTime issue #129 Oct-Nov 2015 pg. web
Cut Piece (1964) performed by Yoko Ono in New Works of Yoko Ono, Carnegie Recital Hall, New York, March 21, 1965
Photograph by Minoru Niizuma. Courtesy Lenono Photo Archive, New York
Cut Piece (1964) performed by Yoko Ono in New Works of Yoko Ono, Carnegie Recital Hall, New York, March 21, 1965
The relationship between performance and the gallery has come under renewed scrutiny lately, however it has a long and complex history. Of course, further complications ensue when this history itself is returned to the gallery in the form of an exhibition. On a recent trip to Boston and New York, I saw three such exhibitions.
Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-71
In New York, the Museum of Modern Art is staging a retrospective of Yoko Ono’s work. The date span covers the first decade of her now 55-year career, starting with Painting to Be Stepped On (1960-61) and finishing with her unofficial exhibition at MoMA in 1971. That year, she advertised a “one woman show” titled Museum of Modern (F)Art but when visitors arrived there was nothing more than a sign stating that Ono had released some flies on the museum grounds and the audience could now follow them throughout the city. If the former introduces her aesthetics of interaction and instruction, then the latter demonstrates her flair for the ephemeral, the playful and the critical. In the intervening years, Ono also honed her performance and experimental film practices and, of course, met John Lennon.
Each aspect of her practice survives slightly differently in the exhibition format. Obviously any institutional critique is diminished but this is counterbalanced by the instructions, which retain both their clarity and beauty. The exhibition augments the aura of the original Grapefruit (1964) instructions by installing the typed yellow cards on a white wall. I appreciate their elegant analogue aesthetic, in the same way that I enjoy the simplicity of putting my feet on the Painting to Be Stepped On. Elsewhere, however, the interactive elements suffer, paradoxically, from the presence of too many people.
On the day I visit, there is a line for Bag Piece (1964), which consists of a black bag on a low white platform. One at a time, visitors hop into the bag and stretch, crawl or roll—in privacy but in plain view. Visitors also have to wait to climb Ono’s new work, To See the Sky, a black spiral staircase that heads towards the heavens, which happen to open up on the day I’m there. I tilt my head back to admire the storm through the skylight before heading back down. In contrast, Ono’s famous Ceiling Painting or Yes Painting is there but audiences are not allowed to climb the ladder, merely to admire it. Does it still say “Yes”? I can’t tell you.
We are allowed to play with a copy of the White Chess Set (1966) in the Sculpture Garden, but only for three hours a day, four days a week and my visit doesn’t coincide. Speaking of sculptures, Apple (1966), which consists of an apple on a plexiglass plinth, and Half-A-Room (1967), a series of domestic objects sheared in half, are the low point of the exhibition and lack the complexity of some of Ono’s other work. Last but not least, it is a pleasure to be able to see films like Film No. 4 (1966-67) and film documentation of performance like Cut Piece (1964), in a higher resolution and larger format than the versions circulating on the web.
Yoko Ono interacting with people activating Bag Piece (1964), a participatory work in Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971, on view at MoMA, 17 May-7 Sep 2015
Yoko Ono interacting with people activating Bag Piece (1964), a participatory work in Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971, on view at MoMA, 17 May-7 Sep 2015
I leave the exhibition having enjoyed the ephemera—the Grapefruit cards, the Fluxus correspondence, the performance documents—but feeling as if I have somehow missed the more interactive and playful aspects of Ono’s practice. Perhaps it is because Sydney just had a Yoko Ono exhibition or perhaps it is because the institution of MoMA and the spectacle of the summer blockbuster have overwhelmed the delicate practice that is performance: either way, I feel as if both Ono and I have been shortchanged.
Joan Jonas: Selected films and videos, 1972-2005
Born just three years after Ono, in 1936, Joan Jonas is this year’s US representative at the Venice Biennale. To coincide with this, the MIT List Visual Arts Center organised a small retrospective of her earlier video works. The first work you see is Good Night Good Morning (1976, 12 min), for which she recorded herself greeting the camera at the beginning and end of each day for three weeks. Clad in pyjamas, silky robes and on one occasion just a sheet, Jonas performs both intimacy and duty. Indeed, it’s almost like a miniature, feminised and feminist version of Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance 1980-1981 (Time Clock Piece).
To the left of this work is Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy (1972, 17 min), a work full of masks and mirrors, halves and doubles, water, hammers and fractures. In it Jonas assembles and disassembles her double, Organic Honey, by donning and doffing a waxy doll-faced mask and an elaborate headdress and then performing a series of inscrutable rituals. She stands in front of a fan, a jar of water, and several different mirrors of different shapes and sizes (polygon, circular, triangular). Each prop destabilises the image in a different way: the fan wafts her hair upwards, the water throws a wobbling glow onto her face, and the mirrors refract her face into the centre of the frame and reflect her gaze back at the viewer.
In another ritual, her elegant hand traces a series of objects including a doll, a roll of electrical tape, a spoon, a doorstop and a hammer. In the next frame, she appears to bang two hammers together until a crack in the image reveals that one is a reflection of the other. Towards the end, Organic Honey laughs, but without any facial cues to accompany it, this hilarity is creepy. It finishes with Jonas’ bare face: illuminated and then extinguished in full and then in halves before the image blacks out. Even though it’s over 40 years old now, this strange, seductive work feels completely contemporary.
Joan Jonas, Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll, ACE Gallery, LA, 1972
photo Roberta Neiman
Joan Jonas, Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll, ACE Gallery, LA, 1972
Inside the main room, one screen shows a series of four works: Songdelay (1973, 19 min); Mirage (1976, 31 min); Double Lunar Dogs (1984, 24 min); and Volcano Saga (1989, 28 min). The first and fourth of these provide some fresh air after the rather interior pieces that induct the viewer into the exhibition. In Songdelay, several performers (it is hard to tell how many, but there are 15 in the credits including Steve Paxton and Gordon Matta-Clark) enact simple choreography in several locations (again, it is hard to tell how many). Standing in an abandoned lot, they bang wooden blocks together, occasionally interrupted by the low horn of a boat that then glides by on the river behind them. The image and sound are out of sync, probably because sound always arrives slightly behind the image it accompanies or possibly because of the editing. It’s a clever deconstruction of liveness, which is premised on the synchronous, spatiotemporal co-presence of performer and spectator. But where does presence end and distance begin? When the audience stands even a short distance away, optics and acoustics no longer coincide and the performance becomes—even before it is recorded and remediated—asynchronous. There is a politics to this, as revealed in another scene where the men in the foreground talk about taking a vow of silence while ignoring two women in the background who are yelling at each other “listen to me” and “come here.” Only those who are already seen and heard can contemplate the pleasure of withdrawing from the economies of visibility and audibility.
The last video is Lines in the Sand (2002-2005, 48 min), a recording of the performance Jonas made for Documenta 11 in 2002. Taken together, these videos remind me of the inherent theatricality of Jonas’ artistic practice. While many of her contemporaries were proclaiming the singularity of performance—its inability to be repeated—Jonas routinely returned to her pieces, remounting and remediating them even before the latter term existed. Perhaps this is why I am less troubled when she returns to early work as opposed to say, Marina Abramovic, who always rejected theatre’s repetitions.
Mark Rothko’s Harvard Murals
Beyond being in Boston, there would seem to be little connection between the Jonas exhibition at MIT and the Rothko one at Harvard. From a different generation, working in a different medium and market, Mark Rothko poses a different curatorial problem. If the task for the Jonas curator is to familiarise an audience with an artist whose work is not as famous as it deserves to be, then the task for the Rothko curator is to defamiliarise an artist whose work is instantly recognisable. Nevertheless, I find an unexpected connection between the two exhibitions via theatre.
The Rothko exhibition centres around five murals, commissioned by Harvard in 1961 and installed in the dining room of its Holyoke Center in 1964. Rothko did 22 sketches and 10 murals, six of which were brought to Harvard. In the end, only five were installed—a triptych on one wall and two standalone pieces—so the sixth went to his children who rolled it up and placed it in storage. It’s an important detail, because by 1979 the sunlight in the dining room had so badly degraded the red pigments in Panels One to Five that they had to be removed. Now, 36 years later, the paintings have been “restored” to their former glory through a new, non-invasive method of digital projection.
Unable to touch the paint, the conservation team determined what the paintings looked like in 1964 by looking at old photographs (which also had to be restored) as well as taking colour measurements from the uninstalled Panel Six. This gave them what they call a “target image.” They then photographed the panels in their current state and set about developing a “compensation image” through a series of algorithms. The final compensation image has over two million pixels and is then projected onto the original panels, rendering them in all their sublime, saturated glory. It’s the first in a series of moments throughout the exhibition that strike me as theatrical: for all its technical accomplishments, it’s an almost old-fashioned use of theatrical lighting. In addition, there is the exhibition room itself, which replicates the dimensions of the original dining room. On the far wall, as you enter, is the triptych; behind you, are the other two panels. Both of these walls are painted an olive-mustard colour, as the original ones were. To the left and the right, the walls are left white to signify where the windows would be. Once again, this strikes me as theatrical, which is to say it’s almost a set.
Of course, it is impossible to appreciate just how much work this set and these projections are doing without a point of comparison, a problem the exhibition solves in two ways. Spatially, it has the audience enter through a room where Panel Six hangs alongside several studies; these are set against a white wall rather the yellow we see next-door, meaning that the reds are nowhere near as sumptuous. Temporally, the moment of comparison manifests at 4pm each day, when the projectors are turned off. On the afternoon I attend, at least 40 people come from around the gallery to witness this moment. The head of security introduces himself, explains the order in which the projections will be extinguished and then, pulling his smartphone from his pocket, proceeds. Yet again, I think of theatre, specifically the tradition of the “reveal,” and appropriately enough the audience gasps. When the projections disappear the paintings are vastly different: the lush, infinitely varied pinks, cherries, maroons, and blood-blacks lose their depth and range and become dull, flat and even.
If Yoko Ono confirms the suspicion that performance can never be properly documented or remediated, and Joan Jonas adds an important caveat by suggesting that it can, especially when the performance itself is already mediatised, then the Mark Rothko installation goes even further. When strategies of lighting, sets, live bodies and reveals combine with highly sophisticated media technologies, the result is more performance-like than even exhibitions that are explicitly devoted to it. Yet again, the relations between gallery, theatre and performance have been recalibrated for me.
Exhibitions: Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-71, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 17 May-7 Sept; Joan Jonas: Selected Films and Videos, 1972-2005, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Boston, 7 April-5 July; Mark Rothko’s Harvard Murals, the Fogg Museum, 16 Nov 2014-26 July 2015
RealTime 129 features ‘liveness’ and its burgeoning manifestations in experimental art practices. It’s an exciting time to be testing the limits of art and finding audiences that keenly embrace direct engagement as participants, co-makers and experimenters.
At the very same time, many artists, groups and organisations are facing death by government. Despite his art ministerial demise, George Brandis’ vanity funding project, the National Program for Excellence in the Arts, lives on in the hands of Mitch Fifield (also Minister for Communications, a market-driven portfolio if ever there was one and with Brandis’ copyright domain added to his brief).
To date, Fifield is committed to the NPEA, but says he’ll change the guidelines (perhaps money for individual artists?), while repeating the Brandis mantra that no money has been taken away from the arts. This reveals the same level of insensitivity to the lives of artists—and their audiences—as his predecessor.
Fifield says he will listen to the outcomes of the Senate Inquiry into the effects of the Brandis heist, but will he act on them when he’s already clinging to NPEA as if it’s now a slightly damaged toy of his own that just needs new wheels? Besides, there are no Liberals involved in the inquiry, so he can brand the recommendations as a Labor-Greens-cross-bench plot.
Such is the impact of the Brandis heist that many artists have already lost continuity of practice and opportunities to show their work let alone negotiate tours. So dire is the situation that Artspeak called the Meeting of Cultural Ministers (MCM) in Mildura on 2 October “to implement a plan for transitional funding to alleviate the potentially destructive impact of recent cuts to the Australia Council’s budget.”
Minister Fifield, instead of tweaking the NPEA guidelines, take serious note of the 2,200 submissions from artists and arts organisations to the Senate Inquiry. Be responsive, be responsible and return the $105m to be used for NPEA and the $6m taken out of Literature to the Australia Council. Allow Australian artists to get on with their creativity and, inseparably, their lives.
RealTime issue #129 Oct-Nov 2015 pg. 2
Tania El Khoury, Gardens Speak
Once upon a time avant garde art-making was driven by a need to provoke, shock and outrage, to liberate minds from seriously oppressive socio-political norms. The subsequent neoliberalisation of nearly every aspect of our lives and postmodernism’s rarification of art have muted such challenges. On the other hand postmodernism instigated, or reflected, an opening out of the arts to hybridity, popular culture and all kinds of cross-disciplinarity. There are outrages still when governments blow intermittently censorious, but for all the horrors of our age, art seems gentler these days, inclusive and, with the growing preoccupation with liveness, more about liberating bodies and consciousness—through participation, various kinds of interactivity, game playing and sensory enhancement—than taking on politics directly, although of course there are exceptions.
Helen Cole, founder and director of Bristol’s In Between Time festival of live art, who will run a masterclass for Proximity, provides a vivid account of her live art experiences. These include Gardens Speak (pictured above) by Tania El Khoury, in which the audience ‘unearths’ voices, digging deep into emotions about the war dead in Syria.
Liveness: questions
I asked people working in the arts about the current surge in liveness—live art, one-on-one performance, participatory events, real time live/digital interactivity and resurgent performance art (nowadays also delegated and mediatised). Is liveness a response to an increasing demand for authentic art-making and audience experience as an antidote to an inherent sense of isolation in the digital era? Is it a desire for both artist and audience to engage more intimately? Is it yet another drive by artists to expand their fields of practice and escape categorisation? Is liveness being rapidly commodified as another neoliberal venture with the artist as contractor? The option for respondents was to answer any of these questions or to make a statement of their own about liveness.
Theron Schmidt: it’s in the -ness
Anyone who defends the value of performance will invariably point to its ‘liveness’ as its defining, and unique, characteristic. I do it too: it’s what I tell myself makes it worthwhile to trek out on long journeys in the evening when I might rather stay home, because I want to ‘be there.’ But it seems to me what matters about ‘liveness’ is not the ‘live’ but the ‘-ness.’ The ‘live’ is everywhere, undifferentiated, all around us; only in performance do we find the ‘-ness,’ the frame around our being-together that marks it as wilful, constructed, considered. This ‘-ness’ is next to the ‘live,’ and it is the condition of being next-to, near-to, in proximity to, that gives performance its energy. This is what makes it intimate: it is an excited state, vibrating just next to the everyday, if only for a moment.
Malcolm Whittaker: from futility to joy
The turn to liveness is the latest in a rich history of futile endeavours by artists to ‘go beyond representation.’ We know it can’t be done, yet we continue the chase all the same. However unattainable such a goal might be, the effort to achieve it with ‘liveness’ is still to be applauded. An interest in liveness offers innovation within dominant aesthetics. It privileges context as much as content (often more so), and with this we have the closing of critical and authoritative distance and the opening of a space of co-habitation with the possibility of emancipation. With the rise of liveness comes a shift in how artistic virtuosity and mastery is read and understood, and work becomes charged with contemporary vitality, vulnerability and joy.
Ben Brooker: a perpetual re-thinking of the live
At a recent symposium on liveness, I was struck by how much of the discussion was shot through with 20-year-old, pre-digital age theory—Auslander, Phelan, names that have hardened into a sort of shorthand for debating the ontology of the live. Peggy Phelan herself knows the limits of the discourse she did as much as anybody to create, these days choosing to distance herself from much of her key work from the 1990s. I think there’s a clue for us here. Even as the social atomisation of the neoliberal, tech-saturated era makes us yearn for unmediated experience, the distinctive qualities of such experience seem to elude us—contestable, contingent and at the mercy of late capitalism’s co-opting, corrupting zeal. Liveness is always in retreat, and the more we attempt to bed it down, the further it seems to slip out of our grasp. This, I think, is Phelan’s frustration—that what constitutes the live must be continuously rethought as the practices of individual artists and companies are transformed in remarkable ways by new technologies, ways that fundamentally challenge traditional conceptions of liveness as the physical co-presence of audient and performer. This is a frustration for me, which is compounded by the relentless commodification of the live—but mitigated by the exhilarating new possibilities for performance that keep arising, defying easy categorisation and plugging into our deep human need to feel something.
Fiona McGregor: exploitable intimacy, commodified liveness
The surge in liveness: I think it’s good, even when it’s bad, as long as artist, audience and critical voices are heard over the din of publicity and spin.
A demand for authenticity? In affluent societies such as ours, the thirst for performance in recent years has largely been driven by saturation with material things. Performance may offer a more raw and immediate experience in its use of the body and deployment of more senses than just sight and sound as characterise two-dimensional art. This thirst is also faddish, like any other impelled by what seems to be new. Because even experience can be a commodity, and even a passing moment preserved to be re-packaged as yet another thing. Depends how it’s done, like any art.
A desire for more intimate engagement? Yes, often. But I think we need to question if we are exploiting intimacy—perhaps another longed-for state in an urban, fast-paced context. Its novelty can startle us into a sort of obeisance to the form, because intimacy—especially one-on-one—is highly codified for good reasons. It’s often taboo in certain contexts, for example staring into a stranger’s eyes isn’t something done in everyday life. I for one wouldn’t like to be eyeballed all the time! Of course this act alone will confront—does that make for a good artwork? These are questions for myself and my own work as much as for anyone else. Is that confrontation a short-cut to a state, perhaps heightened or raw, that seems therefore precious and deep, but could actually be gratuitous?
Liveness as a business? I don’t think any performance artist can run a ‘profitable business’ unless diversifying into educational, photomedia and object based work. Kaldor, Biesnbach and Obrist have turned a fat dollar with live art but they exploited much in the process—workers, bodies, public funds that could have done better elsewhere. To that extent there is safe performance art, and challenging, and the latter will always be harder to make, and harder to find.
Barbara Campbell: aliveness is the issue
Conceptually, I’m more interested in aliveness than liveness as a generative project of meaning making. Aliveness is what extends every human animal in the greater political realm. As political beings, our coming into the world is immediately registered by the state. Also on the way out. Beyond death, our having been alive is presumed to leave a legacy. During our life we’re encouraged at every turn to make our being alive count, to ourselves and others, other humans and other animals. We must prove ourselves worthy of being alive. Sometimes, proof of life is necessary. Political prisoners, the disappeared, missing persons, illegal aliens, Ariel Sharon [when in a coma. Eds], Fidel Castro, in their indeterminate states of aliveness, hold us all in suspense.
Angharad Wynne-Jones: in the petri dish of liveness
The Festival of Live Art is now affectionately known in its second iteration as FOLA, because it’s shorter, more ambiguous, and therefore better able to encompass the phenomenal breadth of liveness in the practice of live art. In FOLA 2016, Footscray Community Arts Centre and TheatreWorks will be presenting a heap of new works from across the country and around the world, many of which could be claimed by different artforms, their lineages merged, converged and reformed. At Arts House we are excited to be premiering four new works that have no performers in them…except each other as audience members and the intervention of an app or device. It seems only natural that as we create life in petri dishes so our experience of liveness is now mediated and sometimes incorporated into the digital. We only have ourselves to fear, right?
The drought is about to break, impatience and irritability soon to be quelled as Performance Space’s looming storm of experimental creativity, Liveworks, brings promise of relief and excitement, flooding expectation with a mass of negative (wicked, outrageous and, of course, subversive) cultural ions, invigorating the spirit and inducing aliveness.
For Performance Space regulars it’s been a long wait. The organisation decided to compact much of its 2015 program into an October-November festival. Having devised the program with his staff, Performance Space Artistic Director Jeff Khan is now a man with a mission, eager to sell the season, deftly summing it up when we meet: “There are 10 major works that we’re presenting across all of the gallery and theatre spaces at Carriageworks. There’s also a free performance program in which there are three major commissions, one per week: by Leon Cmielewski and Josephine Starrs in the first; Garth Knight in the second week; and a collaboration between Force Majeure and Ghenoa Gela in the third. Alongside those three major works there’s a whole series of free performance interventions in the public and external spaces of the building that will take place once or twice each, popping up and surprising audiences throughout the festival.”
I ask Khan if live art will be at the forefront of the festival. His response is firm: “I find myself less and less interested in the genre of ‘live art’ as a label. We’re thinking about the festival in the broader framework of experimental practice to provide a context for the kind of works we are presenting which have affinities with live art, visual arts, dance, theatre and other practices. Thinking of ourselves as an experimental arts festival frees us up.”
I wonder why Khan has retained the Liveworks title of former Performance Space festivals. He says, “it looks back to the first initiated by Fiona Winning in 2008 and continued by Daniel Brine in 2010. It very much shares the philosophy initiated by Fiona of creating a really immersive experience for audiences. But we’ve greatly expanded it both in terms of the number and scale of works and its duration, activating the entire Carriageworks building as a creative site. This is the Liveworks of the future. Rather than presenting isolated seasons of, say, a dance production that runs a week, we’re really encouraging audiences to dive in.”
Khan is particularly keen on foregrounding the conversation an intensive festival can generate: “There’s a strong public program that runs through the core of the festival. That’s always a priority for me, to be able to expand on the works, not just to see a show but for audiences to be offered the chance to drill deeper and for artists to present their ideas on different platforms. So Track 12 will be entirely dedicated to public programs throughout the festival. Tulleah Pearce has done a great job of shaping a meaty program with a whole bunch of perspectives: festival artists in conversation about their practice; workshops and masterclasses; and some new initiatives. I’m very excited about Live Works Meditations where you meet with an expert in the artist’s practice for an hour to be guided through discussions or activities or exercises related to what you’re about to see.” Afterwards, participants “gather for half an hour to discuss and, over a glass of wine if you like, reflect on what you’ve seen.”
Jonathan Jones, Guguma Guriin/Black Stump
We move on to discuss the works in the festival program. A new work by Wiradjuri artist Jonathan Jones, says Khan, is inspired by research in his country “around the expression ‘beyond the Black Stump,’ that notion of a marker between colonial and Indigenous territories. He’s been collecting stumps from Wiradjuri land around Narrandera in southern NSW, which are going to be sculpturally treated and installed in a constellation in the gallery alongside a series of pared back, minimal works that refer to the landscape and borders between colonial and Indigenous cultures and the knowledges that those landscapes contain, the different layers of knowledge from colonial times to Indigenous pre-colonial times.”
Wade Marynowksy, Robot Opera
Lee Wilson and Mirabelle Wouters of performance company Branch Nebula are providing dramaturgical input to Wade Marynowsky’s Robot Opera with a score by Julian Knowles. Past audiences have been entranced by the artists’ frocked robots swirling about and making gnomic utterances but now they’re part of a live performance, each with “a distinct voice,” says Khan, “with the capacity to merge and shift in timbre and form but also to harmonise with each other. The soundscape has little in common with traditional opera; the operatic element is in the epic scale. There are tightly choreographed sections and then moments that dissolve into an interactive experience where the robots follow, respond and speak to the audience.”
Triumphs & Other Alternatives, Muscle Mouth
photo courtesy the artists
Triumphs & Other Alternatives, Muscle Mouth
Going international: Muscle Mouth, Eisa Jocson
While discussing overseas guests in the festival, Khan says, “One of our ambitions for Liveworks over the coming years is to grow it from a national experimental arts festival into an international festival with an Asia-Pacific focus, bringing the kind of experimental practice that’s so strong here in Australia into conversation with the experimental practice happening throughout the Asia-Pacific regions. This year we’re bringing New Zealand dance company Muscle Mouth with the Australian premiere of Triumphs and Other Alternatives, which premiered in New Zealand earlier this year. We also have Eisa Jocson from the Philippines who has toured Europe and Asia.” Of Muscle Mouth’s dance theatre, Khan promises “virtuosic and really high octane, physical work. There’s a sense of flesh being sculpted out of the physical form but also out of Ross McCormack’s choreography. These works will kickstart a dialogue and showcase works from Asia-Pacific artists who are very mobile globally but, ironically, little or not previously seen in Australia.”
Victoria Hunt, Tangi Wai…The Cry of Water
Sydney-based Victoria Hunt will present Tangi Wai…The Cry of Water, her second full-length work following the Performance Space premiere of the solo Copper Promises in 2012. The new work features 10 dancers, “a big leap for Victoria,” says Khan, “including most notably a collaboration with Kristina Chan who is undoubtedly one of the finest and most skilled contemporary dancers in Australia. As an inter-disciplinary work it’s extraordinary. Fausto Brusamolino who works with NZ’s Mau is the lighting designer, collaborating with video artist Boris Bagattini to create mist curtains—with droplets falling at varying levels of density—and the illusion of a sparkling field of stars. Add to this the rigour of Victoria’s cultural research into her Maori heritage and ideas around female authority and the thresholds between life and death.”
Nicola Gunn, Piece for Person & Ghetto Blaster
“Nicola Gunn’s new work, Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster,” says Khan, “is part of the trilogy of solo works that she’s made about trying to be a better person and the tension between individual subject and big global issues—in this case world peace. This work is part of a Mobile States tour, premiering with us and then touring nationally.”
Vicki Van Hout, Thomas Kelly, 30 Ways with Time and Space, Performance Space, 2013
photo Lucy Parakhina
Vicki Van Hout, Thomas Kelly, 30 Ways with Time and Space, Performance Space, 2013
Vicki Van Hout, Les Festivités Lubrifier
Khan is excited about Vicki Van Hout’s Les Festivités Lubrifier (The Lubricated Festivities), “developed from a rough sketch she created hot on the heels of her Cité residency in Paris and performed in collaboration with a talented young Indigenous dancer she is mentoring, Thomas Kelly. It really mirrors their hilarious, antagonistic, collaborative and mutually supportive relationship, all of which comes out in this duet. And it showcases a different side of Vicki from that seen in Briwyant and Long Grass. It’s so funny, and so light but has all of the cultural politics that Vicki navigates.”
Cmielewski and Starrs, Dancing with Drones
Leon Cmielewski and Josephine Starrs’ Dancing with Drones is a duet between a dancer (Alison Plevey) and a drone developed in a residency at UNSW hosted by Performance Space. There’ll be, says Khan, “large-scale projection of footage shot from the drone’s perspective in the artists’ continuing investigation of the new technologies we have for apprehending the landscape.”
Blood Consciousness, Garth Knight
photo courtesy the artist
Blood Consciousness, Garth Knight
Garth Knight, Nemeton
A photographer who specialises in Japanese rope bondage techniques, Garth Knight is building a large-scale cumulative rope installation in the foyer, “growing like an organism over the course of the of the festival,” explains Khan, “so that it gradually consumes more of the Carriageworks architecture—with objects and bodies suspended in it. The process is very sculptural and performative so we thought it would be interesting to translate it into a live performance context.”
Ghenoa Gela, Mura Buai (Everyone, Everyone)
“We’ve invited Torres Strait Islander dancer and choreographer Ghenoa Gela, in collaboration with Force Majeure, to present an expanded version of Game of Seven, a durational improvised performance based on Viewpoints techniques focused on the body in space. We’ve asked her to re-imagine that structure incorporating her TSI movement vocabulary. The result will be Mura Buai (Everyone, Everyone), three hours per night in the final week of the festival with a great ensemble of nine dancers, Indigenous and non-indigenous. Other free performances will feature Zin Collective, Lauren Brincat and Bree van Reyk, Colin Kinchela and Latai Taumoepeau.”
Hissy Fit, I might blow up someday
The storm at the centre of the Liveworks program will manifest as Hissy Fit. Khan is proud that “they formed through a Stephen Cummins Bequest residency at Performance Space and the material that they generated was so strong that we curated them into the first Day for Night in 2014. They’re all super strong, brave performers and as you might imagine from the subject matter, female hysteria, the work will be very intense, very physical—the three of them as mediums for hysterical performance. It’s gonna be wild!” [See our interview with Hissy Fit]
Liveworks is ready to energise us with radicalised hysteria, the unleashed psychic energies of inherited cultures, the uncanny presences of drones and robots, the transformative sculpting of black stumps, rope and bodies and the dance into otherness of the mosh pit, the macho man, pole dancer and the dancethon Mura Buai. Embrace the storm!
Performance Space, Liveworks, Festival Of Experimental Art, Carriageworks, Sydney, 22 Oct-7 Nov
Hissy Fit, Episode, Day for Night, Performance Space (2014)
photo Lucy Parakhina
Hissy Fit, Episode, Day for Night, Performance Space (2014)
“It’s an exciting trend that contemporary art in Sydney is now performance art,” says Nat Randall of self-proclaimed queer, sexy art group Hissy Fit. “Five years ago that shift was not evident in gallery spaces. It’s an amazing platform for us as people making small, weird, queer performance art.”
That approach has seen the Sydney collective, also comprising COFA graduates Emily O’Connor and Jade Muratore, draw heavily on the aesthetics of queer club performance and punk rock heroines to make works that are closer to glittery rock concerts than gallery-bound art. Following appearances at Sydney Contemporary, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Vivid Sydney, Tiny Stadiums, Mardi Gras and You Are Here festivals, their newest work for Performance Space’s Liveworks Experimental Art Festival takes the symbolic motif of headbanging and aligns it with subversive queer, feminist politics. Working with lighting designer Toby Knyvett, dramaturg Emma Price of The Kingpins and choreographer Lizzie Thompson, they call their upcoming work a “gig” combining video and sound—albeit in a performance art context. Leather-clad and shoulder-padded, the trio aims to induce mass hysteria where beery audiences can move beyond the ways gender norms have affected them.
Given the group’s central concern—the ways in which women are allowed, or rather not allowed, to take up space in public—issues of space and movement are in the vanguard of their artistic decision-making. Hissy Fit is less about putting forth a new singular vision of the female body and the feminine and more about creating spaces for women to move outside the straight-line of the norm—to open up small spaces of freedom in a gender-delineated society.
“We were all thinking back to spaces,” says Nat of their time in residence at Carriageworks developing the Liveworks performance, “where we feel we can be freer in our bodies and angry and violent. We’ve spoken a lot about spaces where women can do that and spaces where men can. My personal history is very sports-oriented. On a sports field I could be quite violent. Boys have the capacity to be that from a young age. We tried to identify different legitimate arenas where women also had the capacity to be quite violent and where it was okay.” Their logic is that if those arenas can be carried into the art world, new spaces can be created in which a trigger is pulled and gender norms can change for a moment in time.
For that reason, a previous iteration of their new work I Might Blow Up Someday saw the creation of a death-pit, which Nat describes as “the front of a mosh-pit, a human cyclone with people just rolling in. It could only happen if the audience participated. People got fucking wild. Emily got a black eye because [the artist] Nell hit her in the eye. It was exactly what we wanted. We create this soundscape, we create the lights, we create a seething environment. And then we just want to bust it, and make people reactive, whether in anger or movement or celebration. We just want them to go through a particular journey with us.”
For Hissy Fit, playfulness needn’t contradict politics. Despite the zeitgeist nature of pop-culture discussions about gender and sexuality, the group’s interventions are worlds away from the reductionist slogans of ‘girl power’ that often characterise what might be better called consumer feminism today. “Feminism is in vogue,” says Nat. “We’re very aware of that. It’s been co-opted into marketing frameworks. But we have serious feminist politics that transcend clickbait feminism. We all have a queer understanding of our bodies and we are drawing from 90s heroines in a punk-rock aesthetic when these women were really angry.”
Emily continues: “Our kinds of performance groups are few and far between in the art world. Kingpins and Brown Council were really the only two Australian performance collectives that looked at gender. Kingpins were looking at gender binaries, dressing up as drag kings, and now Hissy Fit is looking at the fluidity of gender and breaking down binaries. Nat and I were having a conversation about why women aren’t angry anymore: why does the next generation have a really chill, relaxed feminist vibe? We are paying tribute to feminisms that have passed, women who we respect, with our own queer politics.”
In their words and in their art actions, Hissy Fit’s references are to heroines from eras when it was tougher to declare oneself a feminist—or just be a woman in public. Chrissy Amphlett, Wendy O. Williams and Peaches and the bands Vixen and Girl School all perform what Jade calls “all sorts of hysterical gestures in punk-rock visual language. It’s about looking to popular culture as a site of interrogation.” Framing the art collective as a band seems a natural way to relate to this site.
Hissy Fit, I Might Blow Up Some Day development
courtesy of the artists
Hissy Fit, I Might Blow Up Some Day development
So does the idea of creating live spaces for participatory audiences to connect directly to queer and feminist politics. A dynamic relationship with the audience, says Jade, is crucial to “the idea of contagion and mass hysteria. Music has a really innate ability to create that: people start moving along to a beat and they get swept away.”
“The audience is as important as our actions in creating the work and creating a gig feel,” says Nat. “We want to be able to drip off the stage and come into the crowd—that’s the sort of off-stage shift we want to occur. We’re sort of trapped, at the moment, onstage. To truly lose control has to come from the audience. That’s what we’re grappling with: creating a work that is about being out of control but being in such a theatrical space. How can we not shock but surprise audiences?”
Beyond the Liveworks performance “our broader enquiry is into deviant, volatile bodies,” says Nat. “The headbanging is just one element of looking at hysteria. That smashing together of popular culture and queer feminist theory—that’s the accessible frame that we want to work in. I can talk to my mum about this work, and I can also talk to a lecturer about it, and have a different engagement. I don’t know if my mum likes our work, but I can talk about it with her, and her experiences.”
“That will always be our inquiry,” says Jade, “the deviant, queer, othered body, how does it operate in the world and what does it do?”
The question is how to engage with the concerns of a wide audience from the edge of the mainstream, staying part of the wider cultural conversation while maintaining political effectiveness. That could be the essential question for Hissy Fit, and for contemporary artists wishing to make change today.
Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art, Hissy Fit, I Might Blow Up Someday, Carriageworks, Sydney, 22-25 Oct
In an unlikely underground bar on the outskirts of Geneva, as part of the 2014 Antigel Festival, contemporary Filipina dancer and artist Eisa Jocson delivered Macho Dancer, a solo performance based on her study of male macho dancers, a distinct breed of performers who haunt Manila’s gay bar scene. Trained as a visual artist and with a background in ballet, Jocson investigates representations of the body. I sat down with the artist to discuss her views on exposing gender biases, the politics of seduction and what constitutes Filipino identity.
In your solo Death of the Pole Dancer, first performed at Odin Teatret’s 2011 Transit Festival in Berlin, you portray a sensual female dancer, moving vertically up, down and around the pole, with almost mechanical precision. In Macho Dancer, however, you completely transform your body movements into those of a man. How did you learn to dance like this?
For Macho Dancer, I often visited a bar called Adonis close to my house. This club became my macho school where I asked macho dancers to become my mentors. In the beginning, when I invited them to teach me in my house, they would bring a back-up person with them. They did not really trust my request and indeed, it is strange for a young woman to ask for macho dancing lessons. I would also study YouTube videos and recordings of my macho lessons at home. I copied the movements and practised every day, recording myself on video and reviewing what needed to be improved.
Your rendition is incredibly accurate; the audience sees a young man dancing on stage with cowboy boots and shorts. How did you achieve that degree of control in your facial expressions and body movements?
I went to the gym! That made a huge difference in how I approached macho dancing. I became aware of my muscles and how to engage them in movement. I learned a whole new body language—posture, stance, walk, gestures, gaze, ways of gyration and undulation—all through the physical quality of my body and my muscles.
How did this develop into the Macho Dancer theme?
It was only when a foreigner friend pointed out that he had never seen this kind of macho dancing before in clubs outside of the Philippines that I started to take an interest in macho dancing. I became more and more fascinated by the physical quality and vocabulary of this type of performance and started researching how it all began.
Macho dancing is performed by young men for both male and female clients. It is an economically motivated language of seduction that employs notions of masculinity as body capital. The language is a display of the glorified and objectified male body as well as a performance of vulnerability and sensitivity. The music used in macho dancing is mostly power ballads, sung by artists such as Mariah Carey or Celine Dion, as well as rock like Metallica and Scorpions.
These love songs from the 80s and 90s are heard everywhere in Manila, when riding jeepneys or on the radio. What is this fascination with nostalgic music?
Yes, this music is pervasive in Metro Manila. I find that the movements of these dancers are really dictated by this type of music—they physicalise a kind of limbo state that is neither here nor there. Their bodies move through thick nostalgia, seemingly in slow motion and stretched over time.
At one point in your performance, the music and smoke machines turn off and we just see and hear your body physically pounding the stage as you throw yourself onto your knees and gyrate. It’s very different from pole dancing, isn’t it?
It’s quite the opposite. Pole dancing is vertically oriented and works with the illusion of lightness and grace, while macho dancing is horizontally oriented and works on the illusion of weight and volume. It’s more compact.
You have also created sketches of your Macho Dancer work, which were presented at your recent show at the Jorge B Vargas Museum in Metro Manila. Can you tell us more about these?
The sketches were made for the “Philippine Macho Academy” exhibition and are a first draft. They are straightforward and didactic, and help illustrate and break down the physical principles of macho dancing. The process of deconstructing the movement vocabulary by text and illustration helped me to clarify and define the physical principles in macho dancing that I experienced.
The Philippine Macho Academy is a fictive structure or institution that serves as a classroom where the principles of macho dancing are fleshed out and conveyed. The exhibition is a documentation of my research and an articulation of the vocabulary of macho dance movement. It comprises artifacts, texts, drawings, video, installation and performance. I offered introductory workshops every Friday of the exhibition at the museum. Approximately six to eight people showed up each time.
You have worked with other dancers in the past; any upcoming collaborations? What themes will you be working on next?
Currently, I’m researching the japayuki phenomenon in Japan, where exported Filipino entertainers perform in what are known as “salarymen clubs.” I’m thinking about naming this piece The Hostess and it would become part of a trilogy, after Death of the Pole Dancer and Macho Dancer. [The completed work is now titled Host; the trilogy is part of the Performance Space Liveworks program. Eds] All of my work converges around this theme of the Filipino body and its labour capital in both the local and global entertainment industry.
Alongside performances of her trilogy Death of the Pole Dancer + Macho Dancer + Host for Liveworks, Eisa Jocson will conduct a choreographic workshop and be interviewed as part of the In Conversation series.
Performance Space, Liveworks, Eisa Jocson, Death of the Pole Dancer + Macho Dancer, 4, 5 Nov, 9pm; Host 6, 7 Nov, 9pm; Carriageworks, Sydney
Life is full of the most fundamental of encounters—the one-on-one experiences that shape us in the interplay between our estimation of self and our reckoning of how we are perceived by one another (and then the others). It’s a life-long loop of re-calibration unless our egos lock down in self-defence. When we gaze through the fourth wall of performance we principally see ourselves as observers, but art can address, seduce, implicate or chastise us even as we sit among hundreds of others. The affects can be deeply personal, even visceral, when a work tellingly ‘hits a nerve,’ ‘packs a punch’ or ‘goes for the jugular’ or you find yourself ‘moved to tears’ or ‘laugh yourself sick.’ One-on-one performance can trigger the same but its intimacy, its openness to any discipline or craft or subject and its freedom from established formulae means that it can surprise and enlighten in the most unexpected ways, as Helen Cole—a leading UK live art producer and Artistic Director/CEO of the renowned In Between Time festival of live art and contemporary performance in Bristol—told RealTime.
Cole is the special guest of the 2015 Proximity Festival in Perth, conducting a three-day masterclass titled For You Or With You, Not To You Or At You and a one-day workshop, Dear City, Together We Will Imagine. We asked her about the experiences and ideas she’d be drawing on and bringing to Proximity for the masterclass. We also asked if live art had changed over the time she’s engaged with it.
Helen Cole: masterclass
Some time ago in a one-to-one performance I was asked to write a letter to my future self. I was told this letter would be sent back to me in 5 years time. I pitched myself forward and imagined where I would be. I imagined what I could give and what I should expect in return. I couldn’t do it, didn’t want to pin myself down. As Joe Strummer of The Clash said, “The future is unwritten.” I sent myself a blank page.
The masterclass is a blank page that will evolve in the face of the people who sign up. It is a collaboration between myself, PVI Collective and Proximity Festival. Responding to the context of Proximity Festival, we will use the rules and terrain of the one-to-one.
Over the years, many of my seminal performance experiences have involved just two people: myself and the artist. The performances happen numerous times, repeated with different people, but each performance is unique. I’ve been offered freshly baked bread laced with the artist’s blood, gently cut a small incision in the skin on the back of another with a sharp surgical blade, I have had my feet washed, my nails decorated with iconic women’s faces, my hand placed on another’s heart. I have been sung to so closely that I have seen right down the artist’s throat. I have been shackled and hooded. I have danced with a bear. I have been lost in darkness and had stories whispered to me. I have been adorned with incredible jewellery, danced with a stranger, been fed strawberries and pearls and sent up a tree alone in a forest to see the world through its canopy. I have been lulled asleep in a bed at the foot of an immense statue of Queen Victoria. I have been immersed in a rain curtain, enveloped by sound in an anechoic chamber, watched a man run out of breath. I have been made to feel lonely, fearful, tested, overwhelmed, maternal, claustrophobic, delighted, safe, uncertain, tearful and in love.
Like any one-on-one performance, the masterclass is open and alert to the possibilities that its participants offer. It will explore intimacy, participatory exchanges, networked performance, digital platforms, public space, game-play. We will develop manifestos getting to the essence of why we do what we do. We will exercise agency and require courage and trust. We will explore ideas together and test assumptions without compromise. By the time we emerge we will have affected each other.
Live art’s power to change
I passionately believe in live art’s power to change. I have seen it happen so many times. In a woman bricked up behind a wall, a long string of autopsy threads, a blanket made from human hair, a gun repeatedly pointed at the audience, a fake moon, a line of women pissing down a wall, a library of bones, a fog bridge, a glass kiss.
Live art’s history and continuing evolution embraces the edges, and these edges keep on shifting. It is live art’s job to seek out and interrogate the margins of form, contexts and body; to go beyond category and containment; to be fearless in the face of unknowns. In doing so, live art is mobile and responsive in the face of new realities.
In 2015, our world is uncertain, in transit, in crisis, in pain. At In Between Time, we cannot ignore this truth and neither can the artists with whom we work. The world is screaming and we are screaming too.
As an international producer I am privileged: I travel, I meet artists and I see work. I am constantly thrown into the new. This is my job. But what do I do with this privilege? How do I use my power to rewrite, contest, decolonise? How do I blow apart my own privilege and open up spaces for others to come through?
Tania El Khoury, Gardens Speak
At Fierce Festival in Birmingham in 2014, I am dressed in white overalls and I am lying in the dark on cold earth. I have been searching for the name of a man I don’t know, a man I will never know, written in Arabic on a grave stone. I have found him and I dig with my hands. I dig until I uncover a speaker and I lie with my ear to the ground. I am told the story of this man and how he died. An ordinary life violently ended during the Syrian uprising against the Assad regime. In Syria, his home, he has no marked grave, as funerals are targets for further bombing, killing mourners, described as activists, because of the loved ones they have lost. So people are forced to bury their friends and family members secretly in their own gardens. No public naming, no marking, no place to mourn. Through this incredible work, Gardens Speak by the Lebanese artist Tania El Khoury, thousands of miles away from his home, this man has a voice. He has a grave. I am lying at it. His story is known to me. He was a grocer who was killed by shrapnel on the way to his shop one morning. He left a wife and small children still in hope for a better future. Through the work of El Khoury and his family this future gets just a small step closer. He is heard.
El Khoury’s work reminds me that Live Art can never ignore the context in which it finds itself. Live Art creates the conditions for shared knowledge and understanding, the combustion for new ideas. Art reminds us of this all the time. Live art at its best rubs our noses in it. Screaming right in our faces, it beautifully, seductively pierces our armour to remind us that, for this moment, we have agency, we can do something. We are truly, urgently present.
In 2015, Live art remains the space in which artists can be most angry, most beautiful in their deviance. It is the space in which we learn and tell the truth.
2015 Proximity Festival program
Featured artists in this year’s program are Chloe Flockart (WA), Monopolly (body part investment strategy consultation); Malcolm Whittaker (NSW), Once of Twice Daily (“a sensory gallery experience leaving you with a fresh aftertaste”); Mish Grigor (NSW), Sex Talk (from a family’s frank discussions); Jackson Eaton (VIC), Current Mood (self as selfie in the gallery); Tom Blake (WA), Micronational (build a State of You); Phillip Adams (VIC), After (A surreal encounter with the other with invited nudity); Mei Saraswati (WA), Meditations on Water (connect sonically with Perth’s wetlands); Caroline Garcia (NSW); Beings-unlike-us (“guided rituals from tribal Filipino spirituality”); Leon Ewing (WA), Raised by Brutalism (sonically “embrace the cold hard edges of architectural heritage”); Emily Parsons-Lord (NSW), You will always be wanted by me (“explore our connection to celestial astronomy”); Brett Smith (WA), When you’re here, I’m nowhere (“solo sound and light journey into the unknown”); and Jo Bannon (UK), Dead Line (“Take a moment to contemplate your mortality”).
Promotional image, Proximity Festival 2015
photo Matt Sav
Promotional image, Proximity Festival 2015
About Proximity Festival
Perth’s artist-led Proximity Festival was co-founded in 2011 by James Berlyn, Sarah Rowbottam and Kelli McCluskey to “provide critical peer support, encouraging artists from all disciplines to experiment with new modes of practice in the creation of participatory art” (website). One of Proximity’s goals is for each festival to occupy a venue and exploit its spaces—the Blue Room Theatre in 2012, Fremantle Arts Centre in 2014 and, for 2015, the Art Gallery of Western Australia. RealTime asked Robert Cook, curator of International Contemporary Art, to tell us why the gallery decided to partner the Proximity Festival and how ‘liveness’ fits the gallery ethos.
Robert Cook: Proximity, performance & AGWA
At the end of last year the Gallery released a document called the Essence of AGWA. It basically captured, in a very pared-down form, the aspirations of the institution, its board and its staff. A key aspect that came out of the discussions that lay behind it was a strong desire from all to connect, more fully and more authentically with the arts community around us. We understand that this is best done step by step, so that connections are engrained. In light of this, one strategy we enacted was the establishment of a WA Focus space that rotates four times a year. This responds directly to local practice and will continue to expand to include alternative visions and approaches to thinking about art and what it constitutes.
In terms of local projects that have been pushing boundaries (in this latter sense), a key initiative in our community is Proximity Festival. I was a member of the curatorium for the 2014 Festival held at Fremantle Arts Centre. This experience added to my respect for what they had achieved in the first two festivals. In particular, I was super impressed with how they approached their curation in relation to not just program development, but their care for artist development and individual performance outcomes. There was an amazing spirit behind the whole production and, anecdotally, I knew that artists involved were really happy with the project, but not just happy, happy in a critical sense, in that it pushed their practices in positive new ways. It expanded what was possible for them. That’s a perfect, sustainable approach. At the same time, our Director, Stefano Carboni had been looking with some considerable urgency actually, at getting performance into our program. Proximity was a neat fit.
In relation to the concept of ‘liveness,’ it is a simple fact that all galleries want liveliness in their buildings. We all yearn for buoyancy of engagement of real time activity, for art to be part of people’s living, in dialogue with their reflection (of course the split is not as straight as this implies). But beyond that, and this was Stefano’s main driver, it is an acknowledgement of the fact that the performative is a hugely significant part of contemporary visual culture and that we need to expand our approaches to properly present this work, and importantly to find ways for it to synthesise with the gallery’s other material.
This is a long term project and of course in saying this, the inclusion of Proximity is just a step. It’s been very useful though. Immersing ourselves in it, is helping us institutionally to open up to its challenges; it’s a terrific learning and growth opportunity. We’ve also initiated a permanent space for presenting moving image works. I should also say that, naturally, the gallery has some history with performance, for instance Edge of Desire: recent art from India (curated by Chaitanya Sambrani; 2004-5), featured performance works by Shilpa Gupta and NS Harsha.
Anyway, I think the key for us is that we want to find ways to open up to the reality of practice, that we see this as a long-term project, and that it is about growth for us; meaningful institutional change occurs gradually. This might frustrate some, but I think they’ll be surprised at where we get to over the next five years.
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Proximity Festival 2015, curators Sarah Rowbottam, Kelli McCluskey, co-presented by the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth Cultural Centre, 28 Oct-8 Nov
Nalina Wait, Martin del Amo, Raghav Handa, On View
photo Heidrun Löhr
Nalina Wait, Martin del Amo, Raghav Handa, On View
The commonest expression shared among the subjects of portraiture—in painting, photography and film—is in fact an absence of expression, a neutrality which allows artists and viewers to search for meaning in the gaze, the wrinkled brow, a downturned lip, a scar, the tilt of the head. How often do we prejudge before even hearing a word uttered by a new acquaintance or fall in love across a crowded room? The Archibald Prize, sports cards, the family photo album and the selfie all confirm our passion for reading faces. In much of classical ballet and modern dance the expressive body does the talking, while the face is silent.
In On View, a modular work that can be exhibited as installation, screen works or live multi-media performance, filmmaker and choreographer Sue Healey provokes fascinating questions about the nature of portraiture as well as its relationship with dance. The large-scale performative version feels in some respects open-ended, a series of overlapping portraits, in others as though making a statement, which might be read in the work’s overall structure.
Shona Erskine, On View
photo Heidrun Lohr
Shona Erskine, On View
A pre-show set of intriguing installations introduces us to the dancers in enigmatic poses and actions not clearly related to what follows, if certainly a prelude to the mutability we’re about to witness. Once inside the performing space we observe a series of ‘portraits’ in which each dancer appears live and on film shown on five suspended screens. Sometimes the association is literal, sometimes lateral, as is the order of appearance—perhaps first the image, then the performer, the latter emerging from the shadows as if coming into focus, performing idiosyncratically and eventually fading out. A dancer as image might dart, prance or stumble from screen to screen while asynchronously realising the same movement on the floor. A live feed from a camera wielded by one dancer multiplies a second into various selves including one screened on his own body—self on self.
Between the realising of these individual portraits the dancers form small groups or gather as a whole. Initially their movements are disparate, panicky and uncohesive as if not knowing ‘where to put themselves.’ As more portraits form and fade, the performers connect more confidently in tight geometrical patterns. Later they embrace in various configurations, as in the live camera portrait-making, and finally there’s a sense of ritual (a striking golden cape shared between dancers), transcendence and commonality underlined by a booming score replete with high choral voices. Perhaps On View adds up to nothing more than a reverential celebration of our being at once discrete individuals and members of an ideally harmonious species, and perhaps that’s more than enough.
What saves On View from overstatement is the specificity of its portraits, even where there is redundancy (the juxtaposition of similar movements live and onscreen is not always meaningful) and over-elaboration (our having to constantly choose which aspect of the portrait to take in).
Nalina Wait breaks the neutral expression rule with eye-to-eye seductiveness as she parades in long wig and high heels past the audience (like a performer from Pina Bausch’s Kontakthof daring a smile). Later she indulges in before-the-camera face-pulling. Unwigged and high-heels removed, she dances sinuously like the fish swimming in the film behind her. But a massive soundtrack crunching presages the disintegration of her self-possession into staccato stumbling across stage and screens, utter vulnerability revealed. So it is that each dancer appears in different personae, settings and sounds. On film Raghav Handa comfortably handles and rides a horse; on stage his Indian-influenced dance requires the same kind of low centre-of-gravity virtuosity. Martin Del Amo’s trademark ambulatory dance is likewise earthed, gaining new intensity with slow, tight turnings.
Benjamin Hancock, On View, photo Heidrun Löhr
Benjamin Hancock opts for relative stillness, his body unfolding slowly with exquisite, angular yogic poise, seen in parallel with a praying mantis on film balanced on the performer’s skin. This dancer’s capacity for transformation here and elsewhere in On View is remarkable. Nature appears again with Del Amo seated on a stone plinth in a cemetery, an owl perched next to him and another bird swooping down aggressively; it was one of those ‘did I see that?’ moments which added to the work’s escalating sense of strangeness. Shona Erskine dances with her usual supple refinement becoming amusingly erotic when she sensually embraces a fox fur in a series of poses.
As with any portraiture the connection between subject and image is tenuously suggestive. Yes, for example, Handa does ride horses; no, Erskine is not a fox fur fetishist (the prop prompted interest when found in the development phase of the work; so we were told in a Q&A). Healey seemed to have been interested in finding places and things with which each dancer might feel some affinity, whether deep or circumstantial, and which might be revealing. Of all the portraits, the one of Nalina Wait seemed the most literally and effectively suggestive; but was it ‘one’ portrait or two, or merely two games? When a camera multiplies images of Del Amo and projects them onto him, are we seeing contemporary narcissism laid bare or a reflective personality?
Benjamin Hancock, On View
photo Heidrun Lohr
Benjamin Hancock, On View
Healey’s fine 2013 feature documentary Virtuosi, with its accounts of eight leading New Zealand dance artists in words and movement, revealed the filmmaker’s precise grasp of the portraiture idiom. On View is a very different take on it—a busy, impressionistic live work mixed with expressive cinematography (Judd Overton) and rich in detail with which we aggregate imagined personalities for its impressive performers. It challenges its audience to muse on the meanings, values, strengths and limits of portraiture while enjoying idiosyncratic performances that collectively perhaps add up to something quite singular.
Branch Nebula, Artwork
On a very large screen in Carriageworks’ vast principal performance space, we see a row of unidentified, seated people receiving instructions from a man with a clipboard, including a reminder to fill out Taxation Office forms to ensure their payment for the work they are about to do. In what follows, these people are casual workers. In the spirit of the production, my work is to list what they did: one labours with bucket and mop, one with a tea trolley and one bashes a cushion with a cricket bat. The tedium of these tasks is underlined by extended duration, the amplified rattle of tea cups and the mopper’s brief escape into dance. An older man simply stands before us as one of the camera crew circles him close-up such that we read the face in intense detail projected onscreen. In the far distance a girl bounces a ball off a wall. Someone wheels a clothes trolley. A chair is thrown. A camera is aimed at the audience which is puzzled, bemused, giggling, indifferent. The ‘workers’ walk towards the audience blank-faced. The tea trolley man slowly devours a whole packet of potato crisps. The workers cover their heads with blankets. A flood of table tennis balls is released. We hear a call centre conversation and from time to time catch repeated speech fragments: “going to the beach … the very last day of his life…we all deserve respect …we’re all human…a portion of soul.” There’s dancing and at the end some smiling. Members of the audience join the workers, sharing in the labour of collecting the table tennis balls.
Extreme lighting states, a heavily dramatic sound score, simultaneous performances, live video feed and the venue’s extreme depth of field lend the actions a strangeness that heightens the banality of the unskilled labour portrayed by these non-actors, who, aptly, are minimally instructed, but not rehearsed, when they arrive shortly before the show. At the same time, as a work made with unskilled performers, Artwork is one of many to be found in live art and the likes of post’s Oedipus Schmoedipus. But Artwork is the sparest and most basic of these, a kind of instant theatre—here are all the effects, just add people. As far as we know, Artwork is not about these people: there’s little information about the ‘auditioning’ process. Are some the exploited workers they represent? All they can do is perform like the exploited, for the most part with a minimum of visible confidence. The company cannot claim that the performers are empowered, but if they are, we’ll never know. Next to Branch Nebula’s conceptually stronger, provocative creations of many years, Artwork is a slender conceit that awaits embodiment.
Performance Space: On View, Live Portraits, film Sue Healey, choreographer Sue Healey in collaboration with performers Martin del Amo, Shona Erskine, Benjamin Hancock, Raghav Handa, Nalina Wait, director of photography Judd Overton, music Darrin Verhagen, Justin Ashworth, lighting Karen Norris; Carriageworks, 17-25 July; Carriageworks: Branch Nebula, Artwork, collaborating artists Sean Bacon, Phil Downing, Teik Kim Pok, Matt Prest, Lee Wilson, Mirabelle Wouters, dramaturg John Baylis; Carriageworks, Sydney. 5-8 Aug
ANTI is a small but mighty contemporary art festival in the Finnish city of Kuopio, set in a region dominated by lakes, pines and the people’s enthusiasm for outdoor activities. Though ANTI has gained international renown as an annual event of live and public art, its organisers have signalled a shift in their model to be more responsive: the festival will “not depend on a particular date, but will appear unexpectedly in places where it is demanded.” For September 2015, ANTI created a partnership with the Kuopio Marathon, producing a festival themed around endurance and running. Live art strategies of community engagement and site specificity stretched their legs, while developments were explored in the crossovers between running and art.
The “ordinary people” of Kuopio were called upon for Fields of Glory, working with local choreographer Jarkko Partanen to make a nearly two-hour epic in the city’s main stadium. Twenty or so pastel-outfitted men and women occupied the field with a sense of strangeness that was compounded by a rather Lynchian sound design and our ‘on high’ perspective from the stands. The performers often seemed just like shapes with Partanen working to create formations to activate the vast space. Unlike sport, which has recognisable rules, the actions of these people followed an ever-shifting logic. They teamed up to carry someone over the high-jump bar and all cheered, ran to the long-jump pit and belly flopped, their shrieks and exclamations ringing out almost musically. After a series of absurd parades, the show moved more into contemporary dance territory with the detectable influence of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s ambulatory choreographies. It is testament to Partanen’s clear visions that he created such impressive ensemble and movement-based images with non-professional performers.
The Kuopio remount of Fun Run from Australia’s All the Queens Men is worth mentioning for its nuanced local participation. In the generally sombre cobble-stoned market square, performer Tristan Meecham ran a marathon on a treadmill surrounded by plenty of pop spectacle and local ‘talents’ performing to rouse the crowds. Over four hours a narrative emerged around local heroes. To the war cry “Kuopio, this is your story,” Meecham, like the master of a mixed martial arts academy, time and again let his young students ‘take him to the ground’ with their astonishing dedication to special interest activities like historical re-enactment sword fighting or pole dancing,
In town on Fun Run’s production team, Melbourne-based Aphids director Willoh S Weiland shared in a little glory herself, picking up the substantial ANTI International Prize for Live Art, now in its second year. Accepting the €30,000 award, which recognised her body of work and commitment to innovative and collaborative forms and funds her to create a new work for ANTI in 2016, Weiland remarked that this is “an important time for the visibility of experimental art practice” and gave thanks for this support for “art-making that explores socially-engaged, queer, feminist, radical and difficult perspectives.” On Facebook, she wrote, “These are dark times for the support of the arts in Australia and I hope this award will give real cause for thought to the Minister for the Arts George Brandis. Evidence of the fact that the art being made in Australia by independent artists and small companies is internationally important. Mr Brandis, what is your vision for experimental art practice in Australia? … How will you support the partnership based collaborative model that makes interdisciplinary practice unique?”
Further testament to the calibre of the award is last year’s winner Heather Cassils. Returning to the festival in 2015 and linking in with the theme of endurance, Cassils’ performance work often broaches extremities of human form. The video Hard Times, screened inside a gym where we were offered a free workout, and shown examples of body sculpting, with Cassils in the form of a female body builder. Standing on a podium, oiled, tanned and flexing in a pink bikini, she is made monstrous with B-grade horror gouged-out eyes. The video ran three times while I begrudgingly exerted myself on the rowing machine, marvelling at Cassils’ efforts, as much in life as in art, to present a transgender physique achieved without hormones or surgery. The artist tells of a mother who wrote seeking a more ‘natural’ way for her transgender teenager to assume a masculine form. Cassils replied questioning the naturalness of daily training and extreme dietary vigilance. Nonetheless, this is a professed lifelong commitment for Cassils, working every day to construct a sense of identity.
Another video by the artist, Inextinguishable Fire, was screened on a building wall. Again dealing in artifice, Cassils performs a full-body burn stunt for 14 seconds. The image struck me as Biblical, although the performer appeared impossibly calm for a person on fire. For Cassils the work is about “indexing” in the sense of ‘pointing to,’ here to trauma while recognising the impossibility of representing it. Thus a Hollywood backdrop is revealed as the camera pans out and there is the final intervention with fire extinguishers. This theme returns in a new performance commissioned as part of the 2014 prize, The Powers that Be (210 kilometres), referencing the proximity of Kuopio to Russia where LGBT people suffer from blatant oppression and violence. Inside a multi-storey carpark at night, we are led to an area marked out by the headlights of three cars where we witness Cassils performing a fight with an imaginary opponent. At times I believe I am watching a gender queer person being brutally beaten. Sometimes Cassils seems the aggressor. It is dirty and spontaneous. Again there is intense physical discipline that suggests real bodily experience inside the performance, the artist absorbing imaginary blows with skilful stage fighting techniques. [Read about Cassils’ Becoming an Image at the 2013 SPILL Festival in RT115]
Dialogue is important to ANTI. Heather Cassils was markedly present throughout the festival, talking about the work and inviting an LGBTQIA activist with links to Russia to talk in a ‘meet the artist’ session. There were also Pecha Kucha nights and a half-day symposium, a revelation from which was RUN! RUN! RUN! International Body for Research, an art and sociology collaboration. There was much to muse on—running as a cultural form and the bio-mechanical disposition of humans to run long distances. The festival’s co-artistic director Greg Whelan even suggested running is the very performance of humanness. The most compelling example came from a piece by Vicki Weitz, Running Beyond Language. In the latest in her series of running works Weitz ran for 26.2 hours up and down a street in Kuopio. We were invited to join her and many rallied to see her through, or to try running for themselves. Ultimately it was the artist who endured, if nothing else a testament to the possibility of simply keeping going.
ANTI Festival of Contemporary Art, Artistic Directors Johanna Tuukkanen, Greg Whelan, various locations, Kuopio, Finland, 1-6 Sept
From the squeaky clean to the neglected and the vertical to the convivial, Field Theory’s Site is Set encompassed locations as diverse as a skyscraper stairwell, a suburban dance competition, a Brunswick lounge room and Melbourne’s Calder Park Raceway. At the latter two sites, works by Mish Grigor and Zoe Scoglio, respectively, provided very different experiences (big/small, chilly/cosy) and teased out more subtle relationships between the monumental and the intimate.
Zoe Scoglio, MASS
The program notes for MASS list Order of Service: from Gathering and Entry Procession through The Hearing (a sermon?) to Ascent and Descent (literally, of Calder Park Raceway’s banked earthen wall), Sacrament and finally, Dismissal and Exit Procession. Held at 5pm on a full-moon Sunday, MASS is a ‘mass’ in the ritual sense, but also in scale, with 60 carloads of us, a large mass of people.
Like a congregation directed to stand, sit, or kneel we follow instructions, narrowcast through our car radios or given non-verbally by marshals with glowing batons. We assemble, we wait. A slowly pulsing soundtrack both soothes and builds tension. Eventually we proceed along a rough road to a desolate backblock, bounded by highway, fences and the Raceway embankment. It takes us a full half hour to park our cars in a perfect circle, guided carefully, one-by-one, into place. Time slows.
We leave our vehicles and are given headphones; the soundscape builds and ripens, including diegetic as well as musical elements. Is the jet engine recorded or can I hear that plane descending towards Tullamarine? We walk up the human-made escarpment and view weed-infested plastic seating banks on one side; city skyline, crumbling earth and power pylons on the other. The sun sets and the moon rises, hidden behind clouds.
We’ve been indoctrinated by a monologue about our anthropogenic impact: we are “earth-shapers, earth-eaters.” We contemplate the impact of our “metal shells, fleshy inside, shiny outside, fossil-fuelled.” A ‘mass,’ as a form, doesn’t raise questions. Rituals and ceremonies spell things out—in a sense, MASS is a ‘spell.’ Several cars, like metallic angler fish, ‘swim’ what we know is an ancient sea-bed below, their headlights like lures searching the dusk. One breaks out of formation, its movement regressing into a lawless, solitary burnout frenzy. Later we circle this car together, walking faster and faster, like pilgrims at Mecca. Swinging censers exhale clouds not of frankincense, but the scent of burning rubber. As MASS ends, we’re reminded of our collective intimacy: we are connected, geological objects whose mutual gravitational pull will now begin to weaken.
The Talk
photo Bryony Jackson
The Talk
Mish Grigor, The Talk
In the Brunswick lounge room where The Talk happens, the earth could self-destruct but we wouldn’t notice—the family would doubtless remain intact to the cataclysmic end. The Talk asks: what happens when we discuss sex with the family we grew up in? Running a gamut of topics—parents’ and siblings’ sex lives, a brother’s coming out, a devastating disclosure—Grigor evokes emotions and reactions from hilarity to awkwardness, skirting the borders of taboo. We are not passive observers: plying us with warm champagne, Grigor ‘casts’ around half the audience as her immediate family, then co-opts them to read out scenes with her. The un-actorly delivery—right down to fake laughter and uncomfortable pauses—adds amusement and pathos in equal measure.
Grigor doesn’t hold back on explicit detail. And she tells us it’s all true: that The Talk is based on real conversations with her family, that they’ve all signed off on the script and that she faked the script in order to get them to sign off. Do we believe her? The question of ‘ethics’ drifts around The Talk like the black-and-white cat that occasionally wanders in, ignoring laughs and angst alike.
For there is angst. The Talk is troubling in multiple, subtle ways. We see how family members exist both in solidarity and irrevocable separation—perhaps in endless competition. We watch Grigor hijack her brother’s revelations, drawing attention to her own sexual misadventures—ostensibly to deflect intrusive focus on his sexuality, and upping the ante with graphic, gratuitous descriptions of her own.
There are some monumental performance moments in The Talk—moments where Grigor does much more than press buttons and mess with our heads (which she does so well): channelling a protective instinct and distress for her brother and drawing us into her persona’s disbelief, confusion, hysteria and anger. But are we exploring empathy or sibling rivalry? Is The Talk about differentiating ourselves from our families, our love for them, both or neither?
The wide and the close cross paths in these works. I felt acquaintance, confidentiality, within the ritual of MASS; and in The Talk, the inevitable distance between our private worlds and our families. Both works took significant risks—with emotions, with logistics and with emotional logistics—and with each I sensed there is space yet for the work to grow. Hopefully MASS and The Talk will both enjoy opportunities for refinement and consolidation through further development and presentation following this season.
As part of its Site is Set season, MASS and The Talk were produced by Melbourne-based Field Theory, “a collective of artists committed to making and supporting art projects that cross disciplines, shift contexts and seek new strategies for intervening in the public sphere” (fieldtheory.com.au). Curated by Jason Maling, Lara Thoms, Martyn Coutts and Jackson Castiglione, the program also included works by Matt Prest and Castiglione.
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Field Theory, Site is Set: Zoe Scoglio, MASS, artist, director Zoe Scoglio, sound Marco Cher-Gibard, lighting Katie Sfetkidis, dramaturgy Jason Maling, Martyn Coutts; Calder Park Raceway, 30 Aug; The Talk, devisor, performer Mish Grigor; a lounge room in Brunswick, Melbourne, 9–12 Sept
Louise Devenish, Electroacoustic Music for One Percussionist
photo Nik Babic
Louise Devenish, Electroacoustic Music for One Percussionist
Perth percussionist Louise Devenish teamed up with local sound engineer-extraordinaire Stuart James to deliver a program of new electroacoustic percussion works, including three premieres, in the cozily retro setting of Mt Lawley’s Astor Lounge. Over time Devenish has established herself as one of the key figures in Perth’s new music scene, and it was a great pleasure to see her execute her very own concert. The program was concise and varied, offering an exploration into both the ambient and percussive capabilities of a blended electronic-acoustic sound.
The concert opened with Warren Burt’s Chromophone. The way in which this piece came together is fascinating. The composer had mixed his original sound material by improvising in real time to create an electronic track, over which Devenish then improvised her own exploratory textural material. A definite connection between both elements could be felt; it is, as Devenish puts it, a “beautiful way of making music with someone” (program note).
Andrián Pertout’s Esposiciones for glockenspiel and tape delves into possible divisions of the octave and an array of polyrhythms. What is satisfying is that one need not necessarily understand anything about the work’s highly complexist structure to find it enjoyable. As the divisions of the octave grow smaller, we encounter harmonies that feel familiar—a few pentatonics, hints of the blues—as well as chords that feel wholly unfamiliar. The piece feels almost improvisatory, casually wandering through harmonic structures and subdivisions of pulse. The fact that Devenish could pull this off while actually navigating an incredibly virtuosic mix of layered polyrhythms is further testament to her skill as a percussionist.
Lindsay Vickery’s InterXection (a relatively ancient piece, 13 years old!) dealt with the idea of magnification, exploring the various sonic effects that can be produced when focusing in on and processing barely audible sounds from a drum kit. The outcome was powerful; a simple drum roll would elicit an earthy shriek from the electronics, and it was fascinating to hear the shifts in timbre between different instruments. James Hullick’s K(LING) utilised a video score with randomised blocks of score interspersed with instructions. Devenish performed gestural, pointillistic figures as snippets of news media faded in and out of the foreground.
Stuart James’ own work, Kinabuhi/Kamatayon, dealt with the beautifully shimmering sound world of an assortment of small gamelan gongs complemented by a hushed but ever-present electronic ambience. The piece was at times quite rhythmic, melting between time scales as the extensive ring of sound hung hauntingly in the air. This time Devenish coaxed an array of voices from a gamelan with a combination of scraping, tapping and beating, while James’ masterful electronic manipulation provided the perfect enhancement. For the most part it was subtle and subdued, but always felt very responsive to the gamelan, almost alive. Of the works on this program, this had the most heart.
Electroacoustic Music for One Percussionist, Louise Devenish, Stuart James, Astor Lounge, Perth, 16 Sept
Mummy of Panechates, Son of Hatres, (Egypt 1st – 3rd centuries AD)
photo Lizzie Muller
Mummy of Panechates, Son of Hatres, (Egypt 1st – 3rd centuries AD)
Something that has always irritated me is placing media art works together on the basis that they all plug into an electrical wall socket or are made with a computer. Such a curatorial mode removes media art from the world at large. In addition, events like ISEA (International Symposium of Electronic Art) play to the notion of art and technology as affirmative action belonging to a special fraternity of artists, scientists, curators and academics, but rarely question the default method of displaying media art. Other approaches are clearly needed. Anything that removes these works from the media art exhibition ghetto or the technological trade show/expo vibe that so often accompanies them is a good thing.
One way forward was evident at The Vancouver Art Museum in the exhibition Lively Objects curated by Caroline Langill (OCAD University, Toronto) and Lizzie Muller UNSW Art & Design, Sydney). It was part of this year’s ISEA series of exhibitions but you wouldn’t have known it. Lively Objects clearly embraced ISEA’s ‘disruption’ theme placing works in relation to a network of other physical objects and artefacts and displaying them throughout the permanent collection of the museum. The exhibition deployed the notion of distributed agency and presented new ways of considering objecthood in relation to the digital.
The media arts works spread throughout the museum activated strange and uncanny readings of the collection of objects, figurines, dioramas, display cases and machines, now read too as having agency, hidden lives and meanings beyond their ‘mummified’ stasis. Lively Objects explored that hazy zone of in-between states, of things half seen and encountered and of non-technological objects imbued with a form of animism. Here technology reached into the past to bring the dead back to life.
This ‘lively object’ relationship was seen in Simone Jones and Lance Winns’ End of Empire, an oversized robotic projection machine which projects slices of a video inspired by Andy Warhol’s 1964 film Empire, about the Empire State Building. The device never allows us to see the building in its entirety, but only in fragments. As the machine returns from its slow vertical pan to its original position we are left with the disappearance of the iconic building from the skyline. While Warhol’s Empire was an expression of the building as a celebrity, an icon of American capitalism, End of the Empire provides the inverse: the collapse and erasure of the American empire. Positioned next to this work was a mummified Egyptian child in a display case. The weird cognitive dissonance generated between the robotics of End of Empire and this mummified child, yielded a profound and wonderfully disturbing pathos.
End of Empire, Simone Jones and Lance Winn
photo Lizzie Muller
End of Empire, Simone Jones and Lance Winn
Looking like a 19th century instrument, Steve Daniels’ Device for the Elimination of Wonder rolls back and forth along two parallel cables that span the length of a room, taking an assortment of measurements by lowering a mechanical plumb bob and representing this measurement as a grey scale image on a page. The device disrupts the museum collection with a useless process, but also draws attention to the static museum artefacts it seeks to measure. The flickering electronic surface of Norman White’s Splish Splash One, produced as far back as 1974, suggests art and its relationship to technology is not simply born of the computer and animates the museum space with a sense of historical relativity.
Germaine Kohs’ Topographic Table at first appeared like a standard display piece from the museum collection—a table with a topographic, textured surface representing the mountain range north of Vancouver. The table however shook in response to local information concerning seismic activity via its internet connected electronics, resulting in the work suggesting a liveness beyond its initial static appearance.
Lively Objects explores notions of post-disciplinarity in which the connections between objects break down, producing new kinds of relationships and aesthetic resonances. The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, famed for a being “a museum about museums,” plays a similar game by framing natural history objects (including deliberately questionable ones) with technological devices. Like Lively Objects it sees technology and ‘media’ not as limited to digital ones and zeros but as activating a kind of animism which permeates the physical world.
Museum of Vancouver, Lively Objects, 16 Aug-12 Oct; ISEA2015: Disruption, Vancouver 14-19 Aug
Emma Hall (and goat) in Sarah Rodigari’s Reach Out Touch Faith (2014) which will be performed by Josephine Were in Near and Far
image courtesy PADA
Emma Hall (and goat) in Sarah Rodigari’s Reach Out Touch Faith (2014) which will be performed by Josephine Were in Near and Far
A new contemporary arts organisation in Adelaide, Performance & Art Development Agency (PADA), is about to stage its first event, Near and Far. Its founders, Emma Webb and Steve Mayhew aim to develop “new artworks, initiatives, networks and public programs with multidisciplinary artists locally and across Australia”(website). I asked Mayhew about the motivation for forming PADA, whether or not Adelaide has the experimental artists to sustain it and if there is a critical context that will adequately respond to and support it.
Mayhew explains that he and Webb “had often worked with each other in our various guises and came together mid last year and said let’s make this ‘official.’ Back in the mid 2000s we’d combined on CCD programs and have since been collaborating between our organisations,” Vitalstatistix, where Webb is Creative Director and Country Arts SA, where Mayhew is Creative Producer. Both organisations are located in Port Adelaide. Mayhew worked with Webb on Vitalstatistix’ first Adhocracy (a national gathering that develops new experimental and interdisciplinary projects) and “when touring a work regionally for Country Arts I consider how our city-based audiences can also benefit from seeing it.”
I ask how important for the founding of PADA were Mayhew’s experience of programming the 2012 National Regional Arts Conference, Kumuwuki (RT110, p12; RT112, p12), renowned for its focus on live art, and Webb’s curating of Adhocracy. “They were major catalysts,” he replies, “turning points for both of us to look to each other for support, knowing that we weren’t working alone. We said, ‘let’s consolidate what we can do through PADA.’”
What is it, I ask, about experimental work that excites Webb and Mayhew? “I think Emma agrees we get charged up on ideas from artists and how they articulate them in a ‘live’ sense. I love feeling like I’m one of very few people spoken to, touched and related to in a performance. The fewer the audience, the better for me. I don’t want to sit in a crowd of 10,000. I want to be in an audience of one to 200. That immediacy is really special; I’m fascinated how artists manifest it and I love working with artists to manifest it. For me, it’s about not being lost in the crowd.”
The organisation’s website states that PADA aims “to contribute to the contemporary arts culture and ecology in South Australia.” I ask Mayhew if there are the experimental artists to work with PADA and grow that ecosytem. “That’s what we want to explore. I think they’re there, but we’ve to find them. They’ll come from all kinds of disciplines. For example, local live art performer Josie Were is performing Sarah Rodigari’s Reach Out Touch Faith II in Near and Far. Were and some other women are taking live art by the horns and really wrestling with it. There are some local government cultural officers who have been using live art approaches to engage communities about how to better activate ‘dead’ public spaces. They’ve employed people like Josie and others from Adhocracy in suburban Adelaide (eg Linger Longer, a public art performance for Unley City Council in which the artist tucked people into a bed so they could “dream about what was possible in our public spaces” and hear others’ dreams recounted. Eds). Hats off to them for using live art—the unexpected is a beautiful thing to happen upon,” says Mayhew.
I ask if Mayhew and Webb still have their day jobs. Mayhew laughs: “If you want something to happen, you just have to do it. We’re working more hours to do it. It’s rewarding.” PADA gained the support of Arts SA for its first 12 months—“we put a compelling argument”—and has applied for funding for 2016. “It’s going to be year by year, nimble and simple. If PADA gets bigger, great, but that’s not going to happen now. And if either of us leaves, that’s it.”
The Near and Far program includes Sarah Rodigari’s Reach Out… lecture performance with a goat, to be performed by Were who will receive the script three days before the performance with Rodigari present to delegate the work. Jason Sweeney, a long-time Adelaide pioneer of provocative performance, installation, music and sound works, is, says Mayhew, “one of the most resilient artists I know and always with a singularity of purpose. He’s presenting the third part of his Silence series. Fifteen people at a time for a very meditative experience.”
While Iceland’s Kviss Búmm Bang will not be onsite, they have provided instructions for their audience to engage with mobile phones and answering and machines to create the participatory work 101.IS TO 5000.AU. The group of three women were recommended by Sam Haren, co-director of the Adelaide based creative studio Sandpit, after a recent visit to Iceland. Mayhew took the advice and on his own visit participated in the group’s six-hour work, Hospice, at the Reykavik Locale Festival. In pyjamas and groups of 12 or three or alone, the audience is led through an empty theatre where they are encouraged to contemplate mortality. Mayhew said the opening was 1984-ish with the audience having to repeat life-affirming phrases. Later, “We talked quite emotionally with palliative care workers about how we care for each other in the last days, ate mushroom soup and sat in a waiting room completing a totally white jigsaw puzzle. There were plenty of moments for reflection. We were each given a book to write in, for our eyes only. Finally, we were led to the top of the theatre’s fly-tower, guided to a black hole in the floor and told to fall backwards into nothing…and that we’d be okay.”
On the subject of a responsive critical culture PADA is adopting an interesting strategy. Local reviewer Jane Howard “goes to places in criticism that few people in Australia are prepared to,” Says Mayhew. “In her online project Simple Art Transfer Protocol, she’ll write broadly about the works in Near and Far to a critic in each of Sydney, New York and London while they talk about what’s happening in their cities. Each night there’ll be an online summation of the resulting conversation, placing works, cities and critics in context with each other. The conversations provoked by our program might influence our programming in the future.”
Also providing context in the Near and Far program is Artists in Conversation with Jason Sweeney and Sarah-Jane Norman hosted by Jeff Kahn (Performance Space, Sydney); Sarah Rodigari and Dan Koerner in conversation with Angharad Wynne-Jones (Artistic Director, Arts House, Melbourne); and a conversation about having conversations about art—with Jane Howard discussing her Simple Art Transfer Protocol.
With the formation of PADA and the staging of its premiere festival, Near and Far, with the passion of its producers for collaboration and multidisciplinary practices, Adelaide audiences and artists can look forward to considerable expansion of local experimentalism and increased opportunities for national and international networking.
PADA, Near and Far, Queens Theatre, Playhouse Lane, Adelaide, 5-11pm, 16-20 Oct, 1-5pm 18 Oct; pay what you want. Book at Eventbrite.
Some years ago a professor of surgery at a teaching hospital, for whom I was doing some data collection, remarked, “Students these days. They’re only concerned about their part time jobs. No one marches anymore.” I did not challenge the good doctor (after all, I had my job to consider). I reflected however, that unlike his generation, students today do not go to university for free.
Liesel Zink and collaborators have perhaps also noted this apparent lack of public demonstration but have addressed it a little differently, protesting through performance in a very public way. The result is The Stance, a durational work taking place over a day in Brisbane’s King George Square. The Stance meshes live dance and sound and was the opening act for the Slipstream Festival of Time Based Art, presented by Metro Arts in August.
When I first attended the work at midday the square was throbbing with the lunchtime rush. Oddly, nobody raised an eyebrow at the young bodies in street attire evoking figures in propaganda posters; all that was missing was the sickle. Later these figures were forcibly dragged away by others, appearing from the crowd like plainclothes police. Later again there was a stoush, a stylised struggle between two protesters, perhaps on different sides of an unnamed ideology. No one observing broke any of this up. Baudrillard’s notion of “war porn” came to mind—the idea that we are so now accustomed to seeing images of war virtually. In their proliferation these images become a parody of real violence and no longer shock (Baudrillard, 2005).
Telling was the audience’s engagement with the work; people crossed the square texting, eating and running errands in their lunch hour, oblivious to the strident demonstration going on around them. At the registration tent, two women were turned away, presumably because they didn’t want to hand over their drivers’ licenses, the collateral required to borrow a pair of headphones to participate. By this stage, someone from the ensemble had been ‘shot’ and the body was dragged away.
I didn’t experience the political fervour that the professor of surgery had so missed from his student days. Yet The Stance still appeared to subtly infiltrate the madding crowd. There was a moment in the work where time stood still, and this, the most moving image, was also the simplest. The young bodies lay face down in the square, eerily inert. The moment was ghosted with memories of the images of the students in Tiananmen Square after the tanks rolled in. They were reproduced around the world in 1989 and made the West stop mid pork bun. Perhaps we roll over too many important moments these days, simply because we have to get back to work.
Walking, Gregory Stauffer
photo courtesy Slipstream Festival
Walking, Gregory Stauffer
Also concerned with time and part of Slipstream was Gregory Stauffer’s Walking. To begin, in the dark, Stauffer heralded us to a primal forest with his drum. Here he spoke sweetly of the animals he encountered, of the deer and the snake, and it was agreed that they would have a picnic together, despite the fact that they would all ultimately die some day.
Stauffer then walked for the large part of an hour—and to watch him was fascinating. The articulation of his limbs, the infinite variations and possibilities of the human form in executing this everyday activity was incredibly engaging. For me, his walking read as an evolution of humankind; initially he was early man struggling out of the muck, then he struck a patch of bindii eyes and now he was on the catwalk; look at him go!
It wasn’t all fun and games though and things got downright difficult at a point. He was literally on his knees from exhaustion and we silently barracked for him to get up, to keep on walking, no matter how difficult the journey seemed. He eyeballed the audience intermittently to ensure we were fully appreciative of his efforts. We grew to love him, even when he’d worked himself into a lather of sweat and had to take all his gear off. He seemed as surprised as we were by his nakedness.
At that point, he exited stage right, giving the audience a moment of reprieve. Unable to resist our adoration, however, he returned for the final part of his journey. This time he was a Pan-like wood sprite in a rainbow caftan dancing in a glade and playing the recorder via his nostrils. Our neo-shaman had a glow stick round his ankle; the little drummer boy was all grown up. In any case we rejoiced that he had finally found his feet. All it took was a little time.
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Metro Arts, Slipstream, Festival of Time-based Art, The Stance, choreographer Liesel Zink, sound artist Mike Wilmett, producer Leah Shelton, dramaturg Martyn Coutts, King George Square, 13 Aug; Walking, creator, performer, Gregory Stauffer, Metro Arts. Brisbane, 13-15 Aug
While waiting in the foyer for this performance to begin, audience members were handed a card with a mobile number on it and invited to SMS a cat photo for later use in the show. This is probably the first audience participation request I’ve ever embraced. But it wasn’t all warm fuzzy feelings about felines, as the performers (all of whom, I assume, haven’t known life without the internet) unpacked the increasingly precarious distinction between our on and off-line selves.
Our modern sense of self has, of course, never been free of technological mediation, nor has live theatre. Though new dramaturgical questions about bodies in space are raised by our digital present day, considering how often we are also partially absent. At one point the performers make confessions in a kind of social media hall of shame: someone wants to get red stop lights while driving so she can check Facebook, someone else goes to the bathroom when out with friends just to check his messages.
Though this was ostensibly ‘youth arts’ the mea culpa was likely felt by every audience member no matter what age: these are shared affects. As one performer searched frantically for a lost mobile phone I writhed, remembering the mis en abyme that similar moments have generated in me. When the phone was found, the screens behind the stage were suddenly flooded with message notifications and there was an audible Pavlovian sigh from the audience. It may seem wrong to use a dog metaphor, in a show about cats, but one punter did SMS a photo of his dog as a joke, which later came up on the promised cat photo feed. At that point I’m not sure if anyone else cared about my cat, but seeing Calliope (she is a foster cat, I didn’t name her) make a cameo was, I admit, personally gratifying and I poked my companion in excitement. Indeed, while a lot of this show felt a bit too obvious to me, there’s no denying that it was also operating on a subliminal level and our complicity was assured.
Physical and gestural engagement with social media is also something that live performance can bring to the dissection of social media mores. The performativity of the ‘selfie’ is balletic, and was contrasted with moments of unselfconscious and unbridled dancing. There is also the obligatory, but increasingly rare, performer who isn’t on Facebook. Overall the show doesn’t seek to demonise social media as much as look at the effects it has on the individual (using a UCLA Loneliness scale from the 1970s).
At one point the performers quote from a media article saying social media is more addictive than drugs and alcohol. No One Cares About Your Cat wasn’t about society’s external moral panics, but more about the users of social media themselves, and I’m struck by how apt the word ‘users’ now seems.
No-one Cares About Your Cat, Tantrum Theatre
photo Claire Albrecht
No-one Cares About Your Cat, Tantrum Theatre
The eponymous cat of the show’s title is Spot Marion, a popular agony aunt fake Facebook profile that was set up by a Hunter woman after her cat died. The idea of random people from all over the world asking a cat for advice on-line evoked the purr-fect pathos and Spot Marion later made an appearance, with a performer wearing a striking cardboard mask designed by Fold Theory. This was a show that was largely narrated in Facebook status-update style, as the performers responded to statements from the loneliness scale such as “People are around me but not with me.” Incorporating live feeds and mobile phone usage (including the audience shining their torches) as part of the performance No One Cares About Your Cat was an atmospheric and haunting work about loneliness in the era of social media.
Paper Cut with Tantrum Youth Arts Theatre Makers, No One Cares About Your Cat, dramaturg David Williams, commissioned by Tantrum Youth Arts, Civic Playhouse, Newcastle, 16-19 Sept, ATYP, The Wharf, Sydney 30 Sept-3 Oct; Crack theatre Festival, Crack House, Newcastle 4 Oct
Classical music isn’t dead: it’s just riddled with the corpses of its former self. Not rotting ones, but made-up, dressed-up, done-up ones. Classical music is marketed by coroners, morticians and grave-diggers. This results in a deluge of memorial portraiture: dead bodies posed to appear alive. You know the images: from young ensembles all dressed in 80s Soho black to ecstatic youthful faces caught mid-flight while Adobe After Effects particle plug-ins trail their body into succulent sweeps of confetti, flowers or strawberries. The marketing machines of classical music think this is humanist, sensual, alive. It’s not. It’s dehumanising, fetid, dead. Indeed, classical music’s self-visualisation is far more necrotic than hi-image Nu/Death Metal bands from California caked in shopping mall Halloween face paint.
Classical music has ended up being the one-stop-shop for assessing how image is employed to extend music’s life beyond its use-by date. Most other forms of music accept their death or revivals graciously (despite the current vogue of 90s bands reforming/re-performing their first ‘classic’ album for curated festivals). Conversely, classical music—assuming that its historical legacy exempts it from all industrial manipulation—is the only form of music that believes its own hype: that if it were not to exist, civilisation as we know it would cave in to the music industry’s ruthless neo-liberal dominance.
While one might begrudgingly accept how classical music markets itself globally in an attempt to justify state spending on promotion for state-funded orchestras and operas, there’s an implied acceptance of how classical music needs to exist beyond marketplace pressures. It’s a weak stance when viewed from either contemporary critical trenches or neo-liberal capitalist citadels. Now while it’s ridiculously easy to attack classical music—and thereby negate out-of-hand its canon, its myriad histories, its experimental markers, its interiorised complexity, its phenomenal allure—it takes greater precision to separate its musicological lineage from its contemporary and transitional logistics in presentation. In other words, attacks on classical music can be deserved when levelled not at its argument to ensure its livelihood (surely all musical forms have that right), but at the mediarised methods it employs to fabricate how unthreatened its livelihood could be at this present moment.
2Cellos’ video clip for their version of AC/DC’s Thunderstruck (2014) is a good place to aim a few fortississimo punches. They’re a Croatian-born UK-trained Sony-signed YouTube-hyped Wikipedia-biog-ed management-controlled cello duo in their late-20s. With all the panache of the most boring marketing firm in the universe thinking they’ve come up with a stunningly original idea, 2Cellos appear on a Viennese stage of the Baroque era, appropriately attired and musically correct. They commence playing a mashup of Bach and Vivaldi finger exercises which devolves into the infamous Thunderstruck double-beat fretwork of Angus Young’s signature one-hand presto-paradiddling. One cello carries this like a busker with a loop pedal; then they each overlay both Thunderstruck’s coal-miner wordless chant and power chord patterning. Old farts in the audience have their brocaded collars ruffled as they attempt to stop their young children from being aroused by this devilish music (duh); the piece finishes with a stunned audience à la Mel Brooks’ Broadway bomb in Springtime For Hitler (1968) (double duh). The subtle message: young guys playing classical music aren’t as stuffy/nerdy/pretentious/whatever as you thought they were.
The ‘subtlety’ commenced two years earlier, in a video for their cover of AC/DC’s Highway To Hell (2012), with 2Cellos stumbling into New Jersey’s famous Guitar Centre where Steve Vai is doing an in-store signing. The cellists head for the back room and start playing cellos loudly through amps; the ‘kids’ leave Vai and start ‘rocking out’ to the cellists. Then 2Cellos welcome Vai to overlay his branded guitar falsetto atop their pummelling acoustic-rasping cello chords. The video features an audience of about 50 culled from rent-a-youth. Once the track gets really rocking, it devolves into that icky trope of male producers directing young dumb women to unconvincingly shimmy and slink around as if they’re ready to fuck because the music is getting them hot. Of course it isn’t—these women look more like they’re ordering soy lattes than ‘getting hot’—but that’s the wet-dream of marketing executives who likely suffer erectile dysfunction.
In 2Cellos’ video for their cover of Avicii’s oompah-rave-folk-anthem Wake Me Up (2015), their life literally flashes before our eyes as they appear as rambunctious kids, groovy studs at tacky Geordie Shore clubs and an old peoples’ home replete with a Benny Hill-style nurse. Throughout, their pithy faux-folksy gypsy cello thumping and bowing gets people hot and excited (especially those bimbo clubbers). Wow. Classical music is both sexy and timeless—like a baroque Viagra.
Should I be offended by yet another cynical exploitation of youth’s collective vitality, social inhibition and libidinous expression? Not really, because that’s what all advertising and marketing has been doing since Baby Boomer executives televisually fondled their inner boy in the 80s, creating multiple waves thereafter to relive their lost youth through modes of puppeteering teens and imagineering tweens. This imaging of classical music, then, is just as cynically focused not merely on how to update an outdated musical culture, but on how to represent it according to the current codes of youth exploitation. The narratives of the 2Cellos videos thus perform retrograde ejaculation: the erotic ebullience of both the music and its image is imperceptible. Their riot isn’t going on, there is no revolution to be televised and no-one is seeing the future of rock ‘n’ roll. (Please, 2Cellos, don’t do a video rebooting Young Einstein.)
People say I’m cynical, but could anything be more cynical than these flagrant and flamboyant admissions of audiovisual self-cancellation? Like the invisible cum shot of retrograde ejaculation, they exemplify the desperation of today’s image climate, wherein images can boldly lie without any worry that their truth value will be exposed as fatuous. Does any serious aficionado of classical music really care about 2Cellos? And does anyone watching their YouTube clips on iPhones on public transport really care about classical music? And if no-one is at all interested in the simulated synergism of their marketing, why does it exist within the mediasphere?
Weirdly, music might win out in the end. 2Cellos’ Thunderstruck unwittingly (I presume, though one never knows) uncovers one of the amazing facets of AC/DC’s song writing. I term it AC/DC’s “modularity of cadence.” The brothers Young sculpt riffs and power chord sequences hewn from the western diatonic cadence: that monumental musical shifting from C major to G major and back again. It’s the ‘da-dah!’ of harmonic resolution instituted in the Baroque era; the musical equivalent of a gilded picture frame, a proclamation’s bold lettering, a tower’s turret—anything that states its obvious power by stating that obviously it has power without needing to state it. Thunderstruck’s middle section of final halted power chords forms a symphonic coda of cadences which—in true Baroque logic—define AC/DC as rock that simultaneously empties itself of everything and builds itself into a monument to that exquisite emptiness. In AC/DC’s aging sonorum, it’s dead but alive: the polar opposite of classical music as delivered by the blooming likes of 2Cellos.
On the Dox always supports long-form Australian documentaries, but as I’ve outlined in articles since 2012, they are becoming increasingly thin on the ground. Two recent Australian features that have managed to emerge show us ways of looking at the world that are quite different from the neo-liberal outlook to which our governments, broadcasters and public institutions seem so utterly beholden. We are constantly told that nothing is of value unless it can be economically quantified. Another Country and Reindeer in My Saami Heart beg to differ.
From David to us
Molly Reynold’s Another Country is refreshingly straightforward in its approach, although it is perhaps a misnomer to call it a “Molly Reynolds film.” It is, in fact, the latest instalment of an ongoing collaboration between Reynolds, her personal and artistic partner Rolf de Heer, and the legendary Australian actor David Gulpilil, a trio who have been working together since Ten Canoes (Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigirr) in 2006. Since then they have made Charlie’s Country (Rolf de Heer, 2013) and the experimental Still Our Country: Reflections on a Culture (Molly Reynolds, 2014). All of these explore the culture and stories of the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land—Gulpilil’s home and the place he returns to when he is not being a movie star.
Another Country is built around Gulpilil’s voiceover, unequivocally constructed as first-person, direct address from the actor to non-indigenous Australia. It’s a statement of facts that is never hectoring, a call for comprehension that is never sentimental or mawkish. In simple and clear terms, Gulpilil explains with humour and grace the issues plaguing his people, in terms even non-indigenous people should understand.
He starts by explaining the origins of his hometown, Ramingining. “This town is all wrong,” he states matter-of-factly, noting that the remote settlement—400 kilometres from the next nearest township—was created by white authorities when various Indigenous groups were forcibly herded off their lands. Cut off from their traditional country, their food supply and way of life, the townspeople were left with no jobs, no prospects and no money—other than the welfare white authorities have seen fit to dole out.
Alongside Gulpilil’s voiceover plays a series of beautifully shot scenes and vignettes of life in the town. Some are literally illustrative, others elliptically counterpoint his comments. A long, surreal re-enactment of Christ’s crucifixion during a monsoonal downpour, for example, illustrates how Yolngu life has been irrevocably changed by invasion as well as revealing the durability of local culture which adapts external belief systems to local conditions.
Gulpilil brings to his narration the same warmth evident in his iconic screen roles in Storm Boy (Henri Safran, 1976), Crocodile Dundee (Peter Faiman, 1986) and Charlie’s Country, inviting the audience to see things from his perspective, rather than provoking them to feel guilty. He argues that the beginnings of a solution to the many problems he outlines is really very straightforward. “You have to try and understand us,” he says. “Listen to our history. Listen to us. Listen to what we say. Listen to who we are.” Such simple advice, so difficult it seems for us to put into practice.
Reindeer in My Saami Heart
Sweden’s Stolen Generations
Reindeer in My Saami Heart also focuses on an Indigenous culture, this time in the far north of Europe. Sydney-based documentarian Janet Merewether first encountered the Saami people—traditionally nomadic reindeer herders in the Arctic Circle—through a series of black and white photographs sent by an Australian friend living in Sweden. The aging images by an unknown photographer depict Saami children placed in boarding schools by the Swedish authorities following the Second World War. Shortly after the images were taken, the wider Saami community was forced into townships, making the children in the images the last generation who knew something of their traditional nomadic way of life.
Reindeer in My Saami Heart is largely built around the voice of Inghilda Tapio, a poet and prose writer who was among the children Merewether first encountered in the old photographs. Through interviews, Tapio, who is now a youthful looking grandmother, recalls her childhood with her nomadic family, and the intense pain of separation when she was placed in a boarding school. Like other Saami children, she received a compulsory education in Swedish, which for her was a foreign tongue. Tapio eventually attended university, and became an advocate for Saami culture and language through her writing.
The film contains many passages of Tapio’s evocative poetry in both English and Saami, although some of its effect is inevitably lost in translation. Through her writings and reminiscences, we are introduced to a way of life structured around the extremities of the Arctic seasons, which oscillate between summers of riotous green and winters under thick blankets of snow. Like Indigenous Australians, the Saami traditionally worked with their land rather than imposing themselves upon it, living in large, fluid family groups that provided systems of mutual support and tight social networks.
The parallels with the clash of cultures between Indigenous and non-indigenous people that occurred in Australia, and the assimilationist policies in both places, are striking. The Swedish authorities appear to have been less extreme, with Saami school students at least reunited with their families during holidays. Nonetheless, young Saami children were subjected to compulsory placement in boarding schools for prolonged periods, Indigenous languages and practices were discouraged, and Indigenous people were forcibly removed from lands that were then put to various industrial uses, including mining and hydro-electric power generation.
Despite these parallels, little is made of them in the film itself. Merewether notes in publicity materials that Australia’s long tradition of feature documentaries on global issues—from Dennis O’Rourke’s work in New Guinea, the South Pacific and Afghanistan, to David Bradbury’s films about revolutions in Latin America, to Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson’s Highlands trilogy—is in danger of becoming extinct due to a lack of interest from contemporary broadcasters and funding bodies. In some ways, Reindeer in My Saami Heart sits in this lineage, but there is also an important difference. For filmmakers such as O’Rourke, it was always clear what their personal stake in their subject was—and by extension, why the subject should matter to other Australians. O’Rourke’s South Pacific films, for example, were about the horrendous impact of European colonialism and its ongoing legacies in the region—events in which Australia was and is deeply implicated. In contrast, Reindeer in My Saami Heart misses several opportunities to explore what Saami experiences might mean to us back here in Australia.
Merewether places herself in the documentary, explaining in voiceover how she first encountered the photographs that brought her to Sweden, but we never get a sense of why these images initially attracted her and how they perhaps relate to repressed feelings about Australia’s assimilationist history. The similarities in the Saami and Aboriginal stories also illustrate the varied ways in which Europe has imposed a certain way of life upon people across the planet, placing our own colonial history in a wider context.
Merewether is to be commended for producing a rich and engaging work that took 12 long years of periodic shooting to make. Her comments about television’s lack of interest in contemporary stand-alone documentaries, however, are substantiated by her struggle to find a local broadcaster.
Do Australians still have the desire—and the stomach—as they did in the outward looking 1970s-90s, to be confronted with documentaries that challenge our sense of our place in the world? Or are we happy with celebrity host-driven travel programs that simply skim over the surface, reducing the world’s complexity to questions of culinary difference?”
Another Country, director Molly Reynolds, writers Rolf de Heer, David Gulpilil, Molly Reynolds, producers Rolf de Heer, Peter Djigirr, Molly Reynolds; Vertigo Productions; 2015; Melbourne International Film Festival, 30 July–16 August 2015; Reindeer in My Saami Heart; writer, director, producer Janet Merewether; Screen Culture, Australia, 2015; http://reindeerinmysaamiheart.com
“We have just witnessed a major event in the history of cinema,” declared a friend as we emerged from an epic six-hour viewing of Miguel Gomes’ Arabian Nights (Mil e uma Noites) parts one, two and three. These kinds of on-the-spot hyperbolic judgements are always risky—anyone recall Pauline Kael’s declaration that Last Tango in Paris would be argued about “for as long as there are movies”? Yet my friend’s comment does say something about the impact Gomes’ trilogy had on many viewers at the Melbourne International Film Festival this year, conveying the sense that we had, at the very least, witnessed something special.
Arabian Nights pulls off the difficult feat of feeling timeless and yet definitively of its time. It is a work people will likely watch decades hence to glean what it was like to live through 2014–15 in a Europe enduring the harshest economic conditions since the Second World War, in a world facing a deeply uncertain future.
So what is Arabian Nights actually like? Comprising three feature-length films, each one highly episodic, it’s a work difficult to sum up in a few lines. It begins with a documentary that mixes observations about austerity-era striking Portuguese ship builders, a plague of introduced wasps and the director’s reflections on the impossibility of the task he has set himself. “You can’t make a militant film which forgets its militancy and soon escapes from reality,” he muses, before the film does exactly that, in a hilarious dramatised tale of a meeting between bland EU bureaucrats and Portugal’s leaders.
The bureaucrats demand ever greater austerity. The Portuguese say they have nothing left to cut. Eventually they all adjourn for a horse ride, on which they encounter a wizard who brandishes a cream capable of invigorating their long-dormant sex organs. Liberated from impotency and frustration, the group forget about their harsh measures and re-enter negotiations with a breathless new lease on life. Ambitious as Arabian Nights is, it is never without humour—later in the first feature, we see a cock put on trial for disturbing his neighbours with constant crowing.
Documentary and drama are interwoven throughout the trilogy, which loosely takes the structure of One Thousand and One Nights, in which a young woman, Scheherazade, weaves tales on a nightly basis for her bloodthirsty husband, King Shahryar, in order to stave off her own execution. As this premise suggests, for all the humour in these films there is an underlying anger and bitterness about the absurdity of Europe’s situation, as the continent lurches from one crisis to another with recurrent band-aid solutions.
Part two continues the stylistic mix, opening with the story of an aging but sexually rapacious outlaw living in the hills, quietly defiant of society’s mores. The next episode concerns a trial in an outdoor amphitheatre, in which life’s basic absurdity undermines any attempt to apply rational justice. Part two ends with a long Bressonian story of quiet desperation in high-rise apartment blocks on the outskirts of Lisbon.
Part three opens with Scheherazade attempting to escape her storytelling obligations, indulging in song, dance and a playful non-affair with a beautiful but stupid man on a sun-drenched, rocky island. From high fantasy we slip into a seemingly endless documentary about bird trappers. The subculture constitutes an intriguing community of men who train chaffinches to sing in order to engage in deadly serious competitions at a waste-ground beside a busy airport.
Arabian Nights Trilogy
Gomes gently leads us to believe the trappers’ story will culminate in one last, big picture statement about Europe’s situation, particularly during a diversionary tale about a Chinese girl having an affair with a policeman caught up in the ship builders’ strike introduced in the first feature. But the girl’s story soon expires, and we return once again to the utterly prosaic lives of the bird-trappers. Gomes defies expectations to the end.
There may be no sweeping conclusion here, but the implication is that life goes on, despite austerity, despite neo-liberal delusions, despite the apparent end of an age of prosperity. Europe, Gomes suggests, was never really contained in the high sounding rhetoric of Brussels and its self-serving bureaucratic machine. Europe exists, and has always existed, in the small-scale cultures that fall beneath the official radar, in local customs that play out in disused spaces, in ways of life that soldier on despite everything and in everyday stories that resist easy readings.
Much like the trappers’ passion for the songs they coax from their birds, Gomes has forged a film full of life, joyfulness and passion from the ruins of Portugal’s devastating experience of austerity. Across six hours of screen time, he weaves a rich tapestry that is part ancient epic, part Márquez-style magic realism, part Bulgakov-like absurdist satire, part Chris Marker-esque self-reflection and part… Miguel Gomes. And much else besides. Above all, the trilogy is a defiant harking back to a post-war era in which Europe led the world in producing challenging, provocative cinema.
Arabian Nights demands time and, at times, patience. A major event in the history of cinema? That’s a judgement best left to the future. Without doubt, though, Arabian Nights is a trio of films for our era, and a reconfirmation of the big screen’s enduring artistic importance.
Arabian Nights: Volume 1, The Restless One; Volume 2, The Desolate One; Volume 3, The Enchanted One; director Miguel Gomes, writers Miguel Gomes, Mariana Ricardo, Telmo Churro; Portugal, France, Germany, Switzerland; 2015; Melbourne International Film Festival, 30 July–16 Aug
Created by brothers Antony and Julian Hamilton, RUTH, the first work in Campbelltown Arts Centre’s I Can Hear Dancing season is a journey into a baffling timber structure in which light and sound pull us forwards from room to room. Moving deeper into the structure, we also move deeper into the heart of an intimate relationship where power is asserted, surrendered and shared between two otherworldly individuals.
The world beyond the brightly lit Art Centre foyer is cool and dark, and smells of freshly cut timber. A long, wooden grid forms the back wall of a dimly lit laneway in which something is already happening: a linen-clad figure, clean hair combed back from her face, is setting out small black witches’ hats on the floor. She works with mesmeric focus in step with the music, electronic-harmonic sound spiking in volume each time she places a hat. I watch her for some time before the masked figure at the far end of the lane registers in my peripheral vision.
My stomach drops. How did it get there, this dark shape, coasting low to the ground as if it had always been here? Ragged dark hair, a rigid mask covering a face—the skin red from the neck up into the scalp—and red-rimmed eyes, transparent-blue. It glides along the corridor, back to the floor, collecting witches’ hats in the sweep of its outstretched arms until it meets the hat-placer.
We follow the pair deeper into the fragrant structure, the less-than-twenty of us grouping in clumps and trickles. There’s a crate the size of a shipping container into which light falls fast from different angles, throwing gold stripes across walls and onto our sweatered chests. There are rooms we cannot enter, through whose frame-like windows we can only peer. Deep inside is a room with a back end like a cut diamond, low ceilings sloping to meet the floor. A ladder feeds up through an opening in the roof—a ladder into the sky.
But long before we arrive in this blonde-coloured heart of darkness (or love), a particular relationship between the two beings has started to emerge: the unmasked one appears to be in control. She conducts tests, seeing what happens if she throws her masked mate different stimuli or sets him different challenges. Tasks intensify and evaporate at her will—game on, game over.
The masked one is obliging, often disoriented, evoking the vulnerability of a blinkered horse. The unmasked one, too, feels non- or super-human at times: it’s in the way her body pivots around her eyes: swiftly and precisely, unfolding, scuttling, levitating—but without ever disengaging from her object of study.
He is given over to her, but not all the time, and this is what is interesting—intermittently all of this power play slips from view and we see two people working together to explore the physics of their clothed bodies in relation to each other and to the floor. They hinge over each other, interlock in inventive ways, pull each other in swooping arcs across the floorboards. There’s a buoyancy in the movement. Also, sometimes, a pronounced sexual tension, sometimes tender release. The shifting soundscape reinforces all of this, often approximating the muscular tone, rhythm or emotional nuance of the dance—now churning steady like a train beneath the performance, now splashing out in high and dissonant clangs, now humming like a beehive in the top of a tree.
RUTH, photo Heidrun Löhr
We emerge from a painful intensity in the relationship—the strange, somewhat sadistic games have become almost too much—to find ourselves alone with the bare-faced one. Relief. Alone like this, something opens in her and we glimpse her vulnerability, equal in measure to that of her mate. She pulls angles through space, a slender piece of wood balanced across both hands, meeting piano chords with surety.
Piano blooms into staggering synth harmony and I recognise our location: we are back at the beginning, in the laneway. Her friend emerges tall from the dark, arms raised in a terrible V over his head. She moves towards him, now lower, now softer, and I imagine her saying, ‘This is obviously all because I love you.’
They curl and unfurl in a long and lonely landscape. Low light pulls shadows out of black hats, boulders in a plain. And from a folded up place on the floor the masked one rises, carrying his now exhausted companion on his back. He casts a last glance over his shoulder—furtive?—before bearing her, sleeping, into the timber structure.
I Can Hear Dancing: RUTH, choreography Antony Hamilton, sound design Julian Hamilton, performers Melanie Lane, James Andrews, design Justin Green, lighting Benjamin Cisterne; Campbelltown Arts Centre, 24 July-26 Sept
