Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

January 2016

Tehran Taxi opens with a dash-cam documentary shot of a busy intersection as the traffic streams by. It’s the kind of everyday street scene news images never show. Yet this impersonal, fly-on-the-dashboard perspective is quickly disrupted as the car stops and picks up a passenger—a man later described as an actor. Or is he? There’s a constant slippage here between constructed drama and the material real of the streets of Tehran—a slippage at the heart of Jafar Panahi’s cinema.

After he climbs on board, we hear the passenger off-camera ask the driver about the contraption on the dashboard. A hand turns the lens around, and the image is reframed on the passenger and another woman behind him, on the back seat. “It’s a kind of anti-theft device,” we hear the driver explain, with a line that becomes highly ironic by the end of the film.

The two travellers quickly become embroiled in a heated debate about a recent execution, a conversation typical of the incredibly lifelike exchanges that characterise Panahi’s dramas. For a moment this feels like ‘reality’ filmmaking, caught on the fly. Then they both alight, and any pretence of po-faced documentary realism collapses when a third, previously unseen passenger declares, “Mr Panahi, I knew it was you! I recognised you straight away!” He asks coyly, “Those guys were actors, right? Their dialogue was just like the one in your movie, Crimson Gold!” This may be a real cab moving through the streets of Tehran, but it’s one driven by Iran’s most famous dissident filmmaker. Inside he stages a series of in-jokes and miniature dramas seared by the world glimpsed through the windows.

still from Tehran Taxi

Tehran Taxi is the third instalment in Panahi’s “cinema of confinement”—a cycle of inventive and self-reflexive features shot following the director’s arrest in 2009 and his subsequent 20-year ban from filmmaking and overseas travel (see RT 107). Beginning with 2011’s This is Not a Film, Panahi has used small video cameras to both document and dramatise his attempts to keep working while living under these strictures. The results have been smuggled out of Iran and screened globally, even as he remains persona non grata at home.

Judging by the new film, the restrictions on Panahi’s daily existence have loosened somewhat since This is Not a Film, which was shot under conditions of virtual house arrest. In a nod to the classic Ten (1990) by his former mentor Abbas Kiarostami, Tehran Taxi is shot entirely from inside the eponymous vehicle, a conceit made possible by the miniaturised cameras of the digital age. Despite the constant driving across 82 minutes in which we never leave the cab, this is not a road movie. There is no destination and the journey itself is immaterial—most of the film is spent circling utterly nondescript streets. This car is certainly not a symbol of freedom.

Instead, Panahi utilises the taxi as an interface between public and private space—a mobile interior in which the filmmaker can construct his work as he moves through a public realm from which he is officially excluded. It’s an apt metaphor for the position of Iran’s opposition as they contest the regime’s control of public zones, and the policing of private lives, from concealed positions of muted resistance.

These contestations are reflected in the dialogues that play out in Panahi’s cab, to often-humorous effect. The passenger who ‘recognises’ the director, for example, is a peddler of pirate DVDs, plying his trade among Tehran cinephiles starved of foreign fare. He recognises Panahi because he once sold him some banned American movies. Blithely using the famous director’s presence to help unload some extra discs onto a starstruck client, the affable rogue takes offence when Panahi makes fun of his dubious business practices. “Without me,” he reminds the filmmaker, “No more Woody Allen, Mr Panahi!” In Iran, piracy has a political as well as economic dimension.

still from Tehran Taxi

In a more pointed interaction towards the end of the film, Panahi chats with his young niece, who has been asked to make a short film by her teacher. The film must be “screenable” the girl insists, meaning it cannot touch upon a long list of subjects she reads out for her uncle. “All filmmakers know this,” she says of the rules. “And you don’t?” she asks incredulously. Tehran Taxi has, of course, by this time touched on nearly all of the prohibitions.

Later the niece captures some newlyweds shooting a wedding video. The groom accidentally drops some money that is scooped up by a young garbage collector, rendering the niece’s footage “unscreenable” because of a supposedly morally dubious act. Calling the boy over to the cab, she offers to pay the lad to return the money so she can conclude her film with an uplifting coda and redeem it in the eyes of the censors.

The sequence is anything but subtle—never an ambiguous filmmaker, years of intermittent detention have no doubt shortened Panahi’s impatience with allusion. It’s a sly warning that we should never take the truth of what’s rendered on screen at face value, but more seriously the scene marks out what is at stake in Panahi’s clandestine filmmaking. The niece’s handicam is the most obvious example of the numerous image-making technologies seen throughout Tehran Taxi, from Panahi’s dash-cam to an iPad to the surveillance cameras glimpsed on every street corner. In an age where cameras are ubiquitous, the battle over what the image is used for and whose power it serves is acute. At one point, for example, an activist friend tells Panahi about the authorities’ attempts to film the mother of a political prisoner denying her daughter’s hunger strike, so they can use the footage to deflect international criticism of the regime. But digital technologies mean the image can no longer be contained and controlled, and dissidents like Panahi keep shooting, despite the state’s censure. On the other hand, surveillance is everywhere—we cannot escape the gaze of the authorities, even as we record and transmit their abuses. The digital image’s liberating and repressive potential are two sides of the same coin.

This dialectical treatment of the image as both vehicle of protest and means of repression, conveyor of lies and recorder of reality, is synthesised in Tehran Taxi’s startling last shot when we return to the dash-cam as the director and his niece walk away from the vehicle. Two helmeted figures arrive on a motorbike. One watches the now-distant director as the other jogs to the car. The man passes off-screen, a window is smashed, the image tilts wildly, and the screen goes blank. The watchers have been caught by Panahi’s own surveillance device, even as the device records its own seizure. This masterful shot is both a fictionalised record and quite real statement. The camera is seized but the footage escapes. The toss of the digital coin, it seems, is still being decided.

still from Tehran Taxi

Tehran Taxi, writer, director, producer Jafar Panahi, other crew anonymous; Iran, 2015; Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, 27 Dec 2015–24 Jan 2016. Distribution: Madman Films. Now in limited release in cinemas.

RealTime issue #131 Feb-March 2016, web

Promoted as “the world’s largest Disobedient Action Adventure Game” by its organisers, the unorthodox theatre collective Laboratory for Insurrectionary Imagination (Labforii), Climate Games was staged 30 November-12 December 2015 to coincide with the United Nations COP21 Climate Summit in Paris.

The crisis of planetary climate change is often discussed as an irreconcilable conflict between ‘extractivist’ capitalism and Earth systems that support life. According to many environmental activists this is effectively a “war against nature.” As a corollary Climate Games launched a platform for creative disobedience bringing together activists, artists and others under the slogan “We are nature defending itself.” Climate Games was developed over a series of hackathons in Europe, scaling up an initiative of the Dutch collective GroenFront! (Earth First!). Informed by game theory, the Games encouraged teams of activists and artists to engage in actions, interventions and other forms of non-violent creative disobedience to disrupt, out and sabotage fossil fuel polluters or those profiting from such industries.

Mapping the Mesh

Via the Climate Games online platform, teams were able to register, share information and resources. Gameplay was not exclusive to Paris and rather occurred in an interconnected online/offline gamespace known as the Mesh, with its “austerity-dictating politicians, fossil fuel corporations, industry lobbyists, peddlers of false solutions and greenwashers” (Climate Games 2015). Gamers were encouraged to mark manifestations of the Mesh on an interactive map of the global gaming field, building a collective database of corporate headquarters, lobby groups, embassies, offices and other potential targets for actions and interventions. Players were also encouraged to monitor the movements of Team Blue, upholders of order across the Mesh who were out to spoil the Games.

Awards

Over 220 teams had registered by the time the Games were scheduled to begin, marking targets in Europe, the United States, South America, India and Australia. After carrying out their actions, teams were required to upload documentation and nominate themselves (and their peers) for awards such as The Hive Mind Award, The Electronic Disobedience Medal and The Future Now Prize. Winners were announced during an award ceremony held on the outskirts of Paris and streamed online on 13 December at the conclusion of the Games and COP21, presenting a platform for ‘artivists’ to connect, peer-review and innovate.

Undoubtedly, the terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday 13 November by ISIS cells shifted the tenor of the COP21 negotiations and other related activities. The state-of-emergency announced in its wake banned gatherings of more than two people in a public space with a political message, effectively outlawing many civic gatherings and marches being planned around the climate summit. Not to be deterred, gamers were committed to pressing ahead in Paris—the quintessential Situationist city—insisting that the real emergency is the climate and that anthropogenic climate change is also violence.

Brandalists vs JCDecaux

While Team Blue were accused of cheating by declaring a state-of-emergency, UK-based Brandalism pre-empted the ‘official’ start of Climate Games by mounting a “subvertising” campaign on the weekend before the summit. Brandalism took to the streets of Paris targeting bus shelters and billboards managed by JCDecaux, one of the world’s largest outdoor advertising firms and an official sponsor of COP21. Acting to reclaim public space from corporations promoting unsustainable consumerism, Brandalism replaced advertisements with posters designed by 82 artists sourced via an open-call, many of them spoofs of COP21 sponsors such as Air France, Dow Chemicals and Mobil deemed to be fossil fuel polluters.

Donning hi-vis vests screen-printed with JCDecaux’s logo and equipped with customised allen keys, a team of 70 Brandalists breached the multinational’s secured hoardings and were in some instances aided by their employees. They struck 600 JCDecaux sites around Paris, including those outside the heavily-policed conference centre in Le Bourget. Winner of The Big Splash Cup, Brandalism’s action garnered an enormous amount of media attention and support. By the end of the first week of COP21 all the posters had been removed without comment from police or JCDecaux.

EZLN wins the I Pissed Myself Cup

Borrowing the EZLN acronym of Mexico’s Zapatista uprising, Ensemble Zoologique de Libération de la Nature were Climate Games darlings, receiving the I Pissed Myself Cup after videos of their absurdist interventions went viral. The collective, “a convergence of animals, vegetables and natural elements,” mounted a suite of disruptions code-named Operation Vivaldi. Dressed, among other things, as a rabbit, a snail, a sheep, a jellyfish, a carrot, a banana, a mushroom, various berries and a bee, the ensemble initially struck in Belgium where they stormed the showroom of a Volkswagen dealership and a branch of the BNP Paribas Bank, a known supporter of big coal. The group announced their arrival in Paris by flashmobbing the International Chamber of Commerce, which they claim belongs to a coterie of ‘climate criminals’ lobbying governments to put free trade before ecological concerns. In their videos EZLN frolic, poster and ‘pollute’ these climate-controlled corporate interiors with astounding amounts of ‘green waste,’ scattering leaves, banana skins and wool, accompanied by recordings of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. The collective concluded each action by announcing the Climate Games slogan with a signature move. The choreography struck me as being similar to a technique described at an activist training session should one ever need to break through a police line.

A sociable choreography of disobedience

The second week of COP21 was notable for the influx of activists from around the world, arriving in anticipation of the December 12, D12 day of action. Daily activist training and ‘speed-dating’ sessions organised by Coalition Climat 21 helped strangers ‘buddy-up’ and ultimately took thousands of potential demonstrators through exercises concerned with spatial awareness and quick consensus decision-making, advised them on what to do if sprayed with tear gas and about what to say—or rather not say—if arrested. Despite the real consequences of defying the state-of-emergency laws, it was difficult not to become swept up in this sociable choreography of disobedience.

Art ‘oil’ spill

Big Oil Out of Culture was an intervention with which I had some minor involvement, described by its organisers as a “coming-out party” for an international coalition including Art Not Oil (UK), BP or not BP? (UK), G.U.L.F. (US), Liberate Tate (UK), Not An Alternative (US), Occupy Museums (US), Platform London (UK), Science Unstained (UK), Shell Out Sounds (UK), UK Tar Sands Network (UKTSN), Stopp Oljesponssing av Norsk Kulturliv (Norway), The Natural History Museum (US) and other groups acting to ‘liberate’ museums and cultural institutions from corporate bondage.

Its organisers had already discussed an emerging global movement targeting cultural institutions with divestment strategies during the Peoples’ Climate Summit, a popular and accessible alternative to the UN negotiations, and at the independent artspace Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers. In Paris, the team set its sights on the prestigious Louvre museum, urging the cultural institution “to stop sponsoring climate chaos” by dropping its oil giant sponsors, Total and Eni.

On the day of the event, a glorious blue morning, heavily-armed police secured the barricades on the forecourt of the Louvre, turning away anyone who looked like they might be participating in the well-publicised intervention. By midday, a significant crowd of supporters intermingled with tourists, but it was only after a group of Climate Guardian Angels approached the barriers and distracted authorities that a number of performers were able to assemble in front of the museum’s iconic glass pyramid entrance. Opening black umbrellas painted with letters that spelled out FOSSIL FREE CULTURE, the performers moved to choreography devised by composer Chris Garrard, shuffling and singing a sombre melody: “Total and Eni, au revoir, allez allez allez / Oil money out of the Louvre, move, move, move.” A red line that could not be crossed was laid on the ground in front of the group, a meme-like symbol taken up in Paris representing the minimal necessities for a just and liveable planet. During the Louvre intervention, #redlines signalled solidarity with endangered indigenous communities whose concerns were at the time being erased from consecutive drafts of the Paris Agreement.

Fossil Free Culture (2015)

photo Sumugan Sivanesan

Fossil Free Culture (2015)

Once the performance was underway, the heavily armed ‘armadillo’ police were hesitant to intervene; the routine played out several times and was joined by the Guardian Angels who had travelled from Melbourne.

Climate Guardian Angels (Paris, 2015)

photo Sumugan Sivanesan

Climate Guardian Angels (Paris, 2015)

Before being eventually escorted out, the organisers held a short assembly powered by ‘a people’s microphone’ [the Occupy Wall St technique of a message being repeated through a crowd] to announce that, unbeknown to many who had participated, inside the Louvre a smaller affiliated group had poured an ‘oil spill’ on the museum’s marble floor. Singing the same melody as those at the entrance, these performers marked the museum’s lobby with oily footprints. The insiders, including author and Liberate Tate co-founder Mel Evans, were arrested and taken to a police station on the outskirts of Paris. They were released several hours later without charge after it became apparent that the spill was actually of molasses.

Inflatable activism

The community project Tools for Action has earned a reputation for its inflatable objects which in recent years have been used in demonstrations around the world. The group’s infamous inflatable barricades, inspired by the design innovation of the 1871 Paris Commune, are considered something of an icon, featuring in the exhibition Disobedient Objects (2014) produced by the Victoria and Albert Museum London and showing at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum until February 14 . Artúr van Balen, one of the pioneers of this emergent form of “inflatable activism,” describes the barricades as a “secret weapon of tactical frivolity” useful for tossing at authorities to engage them in “decision dilemma.” Should they ‘arrest’ the cube or puncture its slippery surface? (cited in Duarte 2014).

Fitted together and fastened with velcro, the inflatables become a ‘walking wall,’ providing cover for demonstrators and useful in a blockade. Tools for Action ran a series of skills share studios in Le Jardin d’Alice, a hangar-like maker space and artists’ hub in the suburb of Montreuil. Here teams produced a number of barricade kits, all marked with #redlines, that were packed into bags and shipped around the world for simultaneous actions on December 12.

A spectacle of mourning

Initially planned as a day of large-scale civil disobedience, D12 let activists have the ‘last word’ after the announcement of the Paris Agreement. Demonstrators both inside and outside Le Bourget were intending to blockade the conference, forming red lines that negotiators would have to physically break through in order to leave. Given the state-of-emergency this plan was discarded over the course of Climate Games and re-invented as a large-scale spectacle of mourning, extending the grief afforded to the victims of the Paris terror attacks to the frontline communities struggling against climate injustice and to all victims of climate violence. Relocated to central Paris, its co-ordinates were kept secret until the afternoon before, as it would occur in defiance of legal restrictions.

On the morning of December 12, over 10,000 people assembled along a two kilometre stretch of the Avenue de la Grande Armée in front of the Arc de Triomphe and pointing towards Paris’ CBD at La Défense. The ceremony commenced at noon with two minutes of silence. A flurry of airhorns signalled the next phase of the manifestation, as a samba band began to play and performers rippled through the crowd. I was part of ‘Sound Swarm’, a kind of slow moving soundscape of animal calls, field recordings and atmospherics narrowcast through a phalanx of hacked radios and loud speakers and co-ordinated by the musician Filastine. A 105-metre banner unfurled down the street, a long #redline that read, “We won’t stop here. It’s up to us to keep fossil fuels in the ground.” Journalists and filmmakers recorded vox pops and filed reports along the sidelines.

‘D12 Paris, #redlines’

credit: 350.org

‘D12 Paris, #redlines’

The inflatable barricades, in ‘walking wall’ formation pushed towards the police lines that contained the demonstration. More #redlines continued to unfurl along the ground on which mourners laid red flowers and when we left, over two hours later, a snaking #redline made its way through the streets towards the Eiffel Tower. Before the crowd dispersed a volley of inflatable barricades sailed over our heads, from the rear to the front of the demonstration and back again, tossed around in spontaneous waves—a playful reminder of the Situationist International’s “beach beneath the streets.”
Sumugan Sivanesan is an artist and writer working between Sydney, Bangkok and Berlin. He is currently researching urban eco-politics in the Anthropocene as a DAAD fellow at the University of Potsdam, Department of Cultural Studies.

Miss Universal, Chunky Move

photo Pippa Samaya

Miss Universal, Chunky Move

There’s barely a beginning—like a story that dives in mid-sentence, without capitalisation or punctuation. We gather in the large studio at Chunky Move headquarters. There’s a wet bar at one end and the audience stand scattered around the space in small groups, chatting and sipping. To one side of the room sits Daniel Jenatsch with a laptop, an electric cello and a 200-year-old harp, creating a lilting, plink-plonk melody, like Renaissance elevator music.

Soon, heads are turning. We realise that the four dancers—Annabelle Balharry, Chloe Chignell, Angela Goh and choreographer Atlanta Eke, all with bleached blonde wigs and wearing mustard yellow wetsuits—are already among us, unannounced, weaving through the crowd.

They wrestle in silent pairs, sprawling between and occasionally through the audient clumps. Their holds are firm but without violence, more like balletic lifts, as if each dancer were simultaneously trying to raise the other. While this is happening, the retractable seating bank is lowered. We gaze up from the stage area, watching as the dancers, like a roiling mess of spitfires, tumble together down from the back row, knocking flat the folding seats.

And it all unfolds in a drenching—the entire studio—sodium yellow wash of light: the aureate world of an indwelling solar deity.

Reaching the bottom of the seats, the four continue chugging their way around the space. This wrestling practice has been developed over many months, and you can see time spent in the figural variety and neat way the bodies fold together. New shapes, curling patterns and spreading geometries appear and disappear, ebbing and flowing into embryonic yellow.

It’s a landscape choreography. The body, in that inhuman light, disappears into an emergent prospect. The wetsuits discipline the dancers’ movements, further adding to the effect of mutual resemblance. Individual identities blend; the human figure is abstracted. Limbs, torsos and expressionless faces settle into a shifting composition of surface features.

This is a recurring theme in Atlanta Eke’s work: the human disappearing into a swelling material abstraction. It’s a gesture we find in Volume (2013), for instance, performed at Melbourne Now, and in Fountain (2014), her first commission for Chunky Move and part of the It Cannot Be Stopped program. In both pieces she uses large glass vessels to distort body parts. Then there’s Nuseum (2013), another gallery piece, in which Eke performs in a large silvery bag. And always there’s her interest in elaborate and imaginative—and often very witty—costuming to contour the body and generate unusual lines and rhythms.

Yet it’s not just the dancers. The audience, too, displaced, is drawn into the landscape. Or at least this appears to be the ambition. There’s an inclusive sort of vibe about Miss Universal. Apart from Jenatsch’s musical accompaniment, there are also exhibited sculptures by Claire Lambe, a brief rap session in the middle about love and metaphysics, and a scene involving an oxy welder and a shower of sparks. Different territories, worlds, spaces—gallery, studio, bar, theatre, workshop—brought together in a universal choreographic terrain.

Miss Universal, Chunky Move

photo Pippa Samaya

Miss Universal, Chunky Move

Later, the dancers climb into harnesses and, supported by a carousel-like system of ropes, continue grappling in the air. Now they struggle not only with each other but with gravity and the tension of the ropes. It’s perhaps the most immediately engaging moment of the performance, even if somewhat short. As the bodies hurtle toward each other, cling, slip and return separately to earth, we glimpse something near to the original pleasure of dance: the thrill of the leap.

In the last section, the women enter the space costumed as what look like Justin Bieber clones with glowing hula-hoops, envoys from a parallel art world in which Bieberism marks a point of cultural epiphany. Now the process, whatever we call it, is complete. The egg has hatched. Lighting designer Matthew Adey swaps yellow saturation for eerie blues and lots of gloom. In the show’s final moment, as if to emphasise the achievement, the dancers hoist a spherical lunar lamp—like a full stop. Then blackout.

There is a tendency with work of this scale—so difficult to summarise—to simply nod and smile in dazed acquiescence. But there are lulls, too, unwieldy transitions and passages that seem less original than others. Is this necessarily a problem? Is the work so open that it can even accommodate deficiency? Even make it interesting?

Chunky Move’s Next Move commissions for young choreographers have been very successful in the recent past. Both Stephanie Lake’s AORTA (2013) and Byron Perry and Antony Hamilton’s I Like This (2008) have toured internationally and Hamilton’s Keep Everything (2012) has also had a successful second life. Hopefully, Miss Universal will have a future beyond 2015, but I’m not so sure.

It feels like a one-off event, a chance assemblage of ideas, images, influences and collaborators, held together for a brief run, barely, miraculously, then falling away, a relationship already figured by the ropes and harnesses. In any case, it is a wondrous artefact: particular in its moment, but universal in its ambiguity.

Miss Universal, Chunky Move

photo Pippa Samaya

Miss Universal, Chunky Move

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Chunky Move Next Move commission: Miss Universal, Concept, Direction & Choreography: Atlanta Eke, performers Annabelle Balharry, Chloe Chignell, Atlanta Eke, Angela Goh, sculptor Claire Lambe, lighting Matthew Adey–House of Vnholy, Atlanta Eke, composer, musician Daniel Jenatsch, electronic design and microcontroller firmware Morgan McWaters, costumes Atlanta Eke, Chunky Move Studios, Melbourne 3-12 Dec 2015

How to describe Mofo—a festival of curiosities exploring the unexpected, the shocking and the daring? This year’s festival of music and art, curated by Violent Femmes bassist Brian Ritchie, left behind its old acronym MONA FOMA for Mofo as well as its location on Hobart’s sparkling waterfront and headed home to Hobart’s famed Museum of Old and New Art, now Mona, affectionately known as founder David Walsh’s “adult playground.”

The festival is anything but formulaic and this year the theme was percussion: anything that could be hit, struck and rock’n’rolled had its place in the jam-packed program. Several stages were spread across the grounds of the museum (inside and out) with performances taking place even inside the goods elevator. It was a true “Weekend at Walshy’s” with all the glitter, excitement and madness that festivalgoers have come to expect from this annual offering.

Claire Edwardes, Bree van Reyk, Ensemble Offspring

photo courtesy the artists and Mofo 2016/MONA, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania.

Claire Edwardes, Bree van Reyk, Ensemble Offspring

Ensemble Offspring

Standing side-by-side, wearing white blindfolds, percussionists Claire Edwardes and Bree Van Reyk tackled the latter’s aptly titled Duet with Blindfold. The physicality of the performance was impressive as the duo launched effortlessly from woodblock to snare drum to tom drum, blindly navigating a plethora of instruments. Beneath Sidney Nolan’s epic Snake, Ensemble Offspring’s percussionists embarked on a program of absolute synchronicity. Ricocheting in the spacious gallery, the motoric woodblock claps of Steve Reich’s 1970 classic Music for Pieces of Wood became hypnotic as the established patterns shifted through their complex rhythmic discourse. Another of Van Reyk’s compositions, A Series of Breaths, provided a meditative reprieve, filling the air with ethereal vibraphone harmonics. Next, Edwardes tackled Xenakis’ Rebonds A/B, striking the drums with military precision and explosiveness. The gallery echoed with rapid gunfire, recalling the composer’s wartime experience. Concluding with Ligeti’s Continuum, Edwardes and Van Reyk controlled the vortex of perpetually propelled sound to wrap up a program that showcased these two powerhouse percussionists to perfection.

Wildbirds & Peacedrums (SWE)

Wildbirds & Peacedrums

Throbbing bass ebbs beneath a punching rock-ready drum beat. Vocal samples drift and drop, tambourine patterns emerge and disperse and a Björk-ish voice draws you in with pop magnetism. This vibrant mix of pop rock, electronic and jazz was the sound of Swedish duo Wildbirds & Peacedrums. At the core of the performance the elements were simple: vocals and percussion. Between them, drummer Andreas Werliin and vocalist Mariam Wallentin created a distinctively compelling sound using acoustic drums, oriental cymbals, drum machines and synth pads. Wallentin’s vocal prowess was evident as she shifted effortlessly between melodic throat singing and Patti Smith-style beat-song poetics, simultaneously controlling synth pads with her feet. The sultry vocals of “Gold Digger” overlaid wailing pre-recorded samples and Werliin’s polyrhythmic drum patterns, creating an expansive soundscape that seemed beyond the capabilities of just two performers.

Wildbirds & Peacedrums (SWE)

Their performance was electric, and in keeping with curator Ritchie’s notion of a festival filled with things to be hit, Wallentin and Werliin explored the rhythmic textures of not only percussion but also the voice, repeating spoken words, syllables and phrases to capture the earthy nature of the primal beat. “Ghosts & Pains” was a mixed bag of experimental percussion and half-sung, half-sighed vocals that took the audience on a timbral auditory adventure. Tumbling through thrilling rhythmic patterns and catchy melodies, Wildbirds & Peacedrums captivated the audience with their powerful collision of rhythm and voice.

Michael Bettine

photo MONA/Rémi Chauvin, image courtesy MONA, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania

Michael Bettine

Waves of metallic wash reverberate through Mona’s Barrel Room, a cold, dimly lit cement bunker lined with looming shelves of wooden barrels. It’s a non-traditional performance space that percussionist Michael Bettine filled with ebbing soundwaves from a small orchestra of gongs and bells. Explaining that we all vibrate with energy and that the gongs can affect our bodies on a deep, internal level with their resonating vibrations, he began slowly, stroking two gongs with felted mallets to produce a soft, airy tone. He then began to strike more frequently, moving between several gongs to create a wash of thrumming pulses. Expansive, metallic roars filled the air as Bettine used rubber-headed mallets to slowly ‘paint’ circles on the gongs. The striking of multiple gongs in succession created a rocking wave of harmonic dissonance. The sound was continuous in this mostly improvised performance, with no route or destination, no tension or release. The barrels were left behind as the room evolved into a space of meditative percussive textures, inviting the audience to listen, absorb and reflect without processing any pre-determined melodic structure. Bettine also used the mallets themselves as instruments, sometimes resting the end of a mallet on a gong face before striking the gong with another mallet, creating a buzzing rattle. The largest dark silver gong shuddered ominously when struck, emitting a series of thrumming pulses. Bettine played the room as much as the instruments, exploring the beating tones of vibrations that when combined sounded like a train rumbling underground. Creating a shifting wall of sound that washed over the audience, Bettine offered us a distinctive exploration into the craft of percussion.

HERMESensemble, The Lodger

photo Rémi Chauvin, courtesy MONA

HERMESensemble, The Lodger

Music at one with visual art

Over the course of the festival, the music became one with the art as performers roamed throughout the museum, themselves three-dimensional creative expressions. Belgian-based HERMESensemble gave a new twist to the traditional museum tour, splitting into groups and wandering through the 14-metre underground Void issuing wailing clarinet phrases, haunting soprano siren calls and clattering flute motifs. Dancers appeared like dark shadows, the music flowing through their movements. The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra Chorus sang of JS Bach’s blindness in the pitch darkness of the Barrel Room and then later appeared clad in white and navy bodysuits on the Escher-esque iron staircase. Finnish singer Mirel Wagner mesmerised audiences with her haunting ballads. “Hold your own”—the closing words from London-based rapper Kate Tempest—reminded festivalgoers to let go of societal expectations. Mofo 2016 did exactly that by taking 40,000 attendees on a freeform quest for sound, art and the unexpected.

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Mofo 2016, Museum of Old and New Art [Mona] & various Hobart locations, Jan 13–18

Delia Bartle is a Hobart-based keyboardist and writer and the Australian Youth Orchestra’s 2015 Music Presentation Fellow.

There’s a subtle moment early on in The Object Lesson when the performance collapses in on itself. It proves to be just one of many magical moments in Geoff Sobelle’s intriguing work.

We’re invited into Sydney’s Town Hall, normally a tidily formal space but on this occasion looking more like domestic purging guru Marie Kondo’s worst nightmare. Cardboard cartons of every size are stacked almost ceiling high. Most appear to be loosely sealed and labelled; others spill their contents—golf clubs, broken toys, all sorts of clothing. Balanced on the boxes is a haphazard collection of vintage lamps. Turns out much of the clutter has been provided by St Vincent de Paul aided by audience members who are also invited to bring with them something they wish to discard. The email instructions state:

“Consider something that you have that you might want to get rid of. It might be big. It might be small. It might be clutter. Or it might have a tight grip on you. It doesn’t matter. Anything will do. But consider it… What might it be like to pack this thing up and let it go–never to be seen again?”

Somebody has left a box of bow ties (“The ties that bind.”); another a tin of corned beef from some Pacific Island (“not game to try this”).

That little moment of collapse I mentioned occurs after Geoff Sobelle has set up the first of a number of small performance zones among the clutter. The audience seated on upturned boxes moves whenever prompted by Sobelle to make room. Laps double as holding stations for variously shaped containers as he deftly unpacks carpet, standard lamp, leather armchair, table and antique phonograph and telephone, all the while addressing us in a strangely distracted monologue. There’s a lot of funny business with the phonograph, which appears to play without a record and, as will become a feature of the performance, lights unconnected with any obvious power source flick on and off at the performer’s will as if he is internally powered. Only when he relaxes into the chair, picks up the telephone and begins a conversation do we hear the reason for the pauses in the opening monologue. He’s captured it all on a portable recorder and now enters into a conversation with himself as if he were consulting his therapist. Sobelle is co-Artistic Director of Rainpan 43, a renegade absurdist outfit specialising in such “sublimely ridiculous” states of being. “Yep,” he says, seeking counsel: “I’m back in that place again.”

No logical sequence of events ensues, nor is there any clear lesson in The Object Lesson. Rather, Sobelle weaves his light-footed magic in a series of small episodes designed to amuse, intrigue, to charm and to hold us in thrall. And except for a couple of longueurs—which give you time to take in the several designers’ wild archival incursion into the city’s civic order—he pulls it off. At one point he’s Chaplin and then Groucho as he invites a woman in the audience to participate in his fantasy, conjuring a meal for her while tap-dancing on the table and slicing lettuce with the blade of his ice skates. (I’d like to see Heston Blumenthal better that one!)

Like all magicians, Geoff Sobelle saves the most puzzling and memorable trick for last. Moving to a wall of drawers labelled as in a library or museum, he pulls out one clearly empty box and over the next 15 minutes (or it might have been longer; I lost all track of time) he extracts the residue of ages from birth to death, the trash of a lifetime of objects received, bought, collected, acquired, loved, loathed, lost, found and unaccounted for. All of it impossibly materialises from this one small box, littering the floor between performer and audience. He finishes with a seemingly endless and increasingly scary tangle of electrical wires mixed with organic matter, finally unearthing chunks of concrete that might be the foundations of the Town Hall itself.

The item I took to the performance was a small lapel pin celebrating the town of Bendigo.

“Pick it up and put it in your hands. Feel the weight of this thing. Is it lighter or heavier than you’d imagined? Is there anything about it that you haven’t seen before? Or is it just the same? Where did it come from? Can you imagine the other hands that held it? That made it? That changed it?”

As I deposit the small box among the others I think of the elderly proprietor of the Bluebird Fruit & Vegetable Shop who presented the pin to me unprompted as a memento of my first visit to that town along with a free bag of apples. The object comes nowhere near to matching the weight of this man’s kind gesture but just as it’s hard to have a relaxed conversation with someone you once shared a house with, without the house, now that this tiny object is gone it occurs to me I may have some trouble holding on to the memory. Reflecting on Geoff Sobelle’s Object Lesson, I’m reassured my memory is safe.

The Object Lesson, creator, performer Geoff Sobelle, director David Neumann, scenic installation design Steven Dufala, integrated archive design Jamie Boyle, sound design Nick Kourtides; Sydney Town Hall January 7-22, Sydney Festival.

I’m reeling with exhilaration and exhaustion, still immersed in much of a far, far better than usual Sydney Festival right to its last days. Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker’s FASE, with the choreographer performing, yet again proved itself a 20th century classic while her Vortex Temporum revealed a gripping, further evolution of her engagement with remarkable music (score by Gerard Grisey), here performed live with a thrilling pairing of individual dancers and instrumentalists. Sydney Chamber Opera’s Passion, by Marcel Dusapin, was another festival great (see below), an intense psychological journey into a dark place. The same company’s O Mensch, again from Dusapin, a solo about Nietschke in crisis played by the superb Sydney singer-actor Mitchell Riley was also a winner. Belgium’s Anima Eterna on period instruments reinvigorated my relationship with Beethoven’s 5th and 6th symphonies now rendered curiously modern.

Meow Meow reached new heights and production values with her spectacular Little Mermaid. I liked Woyzeck, not everyone did, so here I dip into the swirl of opinions. Virginia and I ranked the weird and wonderful The Object Lesson highly (see her review), as we did This Is How We Die, a visceral spoken word, anxiety-ridden fantasy by Canadian Christopher Brett Bailey (see Teik Kim Pok’s response). Another very frank expression of life’s complexities came from Norwegian singer-cum-performance artist Jenny Hval with a just as idiosyncratic accompanying dancer. Stephanie Lake’s dance work Double Blind had much to offer about social control if seeming thematically limited (see below).

Next week Angus McPherson will review the contemporary music event Exit Ceremonies and I’ll address FASE and Vortex Temporum; the wonderful local production In Between 2, about family history and two young men growing into maturity and art as Asian Australians; O Mensch; the very strange Japanese-Peruvian +51 Aviacion, San Borja; and two problematic productions, The Events and Cut the Sky. By then my own overall impressions of the festival will, I hope, have taken shape. In the meantime I’ve felt thrilled and challenged, work by work.

Sydney Chamber Opera, Passion

If you’d ever experienced the coming apart of a relationship without ever understanding precisely why it unravelled, why certain words were never spoken, those uttered were misunderstood and how couples become either invisible—or too visible—to each other, then leading French composer Pascal Dusapin’s chamber opera Passion would have made a lot of sense to you. It did to me, even though his approach is rarely literal. But with its superabundance of feeling it was never abstract.

True to its title, Passion is emotionally intense and embracingly lyrical (no hard-edged, angular modernism here). Before a dimly lit instrumental ensemble and chorus, a pair of lovers (Wiard Witholt and Elise Caluwaerts), physically oblivious to each other and their emotional ties weakened, wander a desolate landscape of low, erect shards of broken glass on the forestage.

Modest compared with other Sydney Chamber Opera productions, the design of this production (imported by SCO and the Sydney Festival, but with local conductor, musicians and chorus) provides a tight focus on the singers as they circle, evade and finally draw close, at the very moment they are irredeemably separated. Emphatic sighs, raw cries, snatched breaths and gasps, clapping, the soprano’s octave leaps and the baritone’s falsetto intensify the sense of passion—his love for her and her desire for death.

Dusapin’s inspiration is in part Monteverdi’s Orfeo et Euridice (most palpable in a delicately spare solo harpsichord passage (Zubin Kanga) but the separation of these lovers is of a different kind, of lives grown apart, with one sinking into profound depression. Both experience the absence of the Sun (symbolic of their love and what their lives might have been). Feeling neither understood nor cared for by her lover—“To you I am only an apparition”— she is in the throes of a death wish. He can’t grasp why nor can she offer any reason, save for the gnomic “Don’t you know? There, everything meets its opposite.” Nevertheless he is tempted to venture with her into an underworld powerfully realised by the work’s surround sound electronic score.

The libretto by Dusapin and Rita de Letteriis is elliptical, cyclically repetitive, sparely imagistic, heightening the music’s sense of nightmarish reverie. Shakuhachi-imbued flute (Jane Duncan) and a harp and harpsichord accompanied oud solo (James Wannnan) intensify the sense of sheer otherness that pervades this work—the outer reaches to which passion takes lovers, happy or not—the man can only guess at what possesses his beloved, “the beast that makes you scream, that allows no one to approach it.”

The singers’ powerful vocal and dramatic performances are entirely at one, the enigmatic chorus of six (The Others) underlines and complicates our feelings for the protagonists and the instrumental ensemble, conducted by Jack Symonds, realises Dusapin’s score (available on YouTube) with subtlety and seductive fluency.

Pierre Audi’s “mis-en-space” (which is how his direction is credited) is essentially a series of tableaux, but within these are varying degrees of movement and highly nuanced performances. I now yearn to see the work on the larger scale realised by Dusapin and the Sasha Waltz dance company in Paris in 2010 with the remarkable Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan, who dances in the production, and baritone Georg Nigl. I suspect, or at least hope, it might make more sense of the role of The Others and of the stage directions (in the program provided to the audience) for the final moments of the work: “The heavens open up…” and “By now, all that can be seen is a mouth singing.” This SCO co-production, made in Australia from imported ingredients, proved an engrossing introduction to a significant work from a composer little known here.

Thalia Theater Hamburg, Woyzeck

Among reviewers and friends I seem to be one of the few to enjoy Jette Steckel’s music theatre production of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck (1837) as adapted by Robert Wilson, Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan (2000). The set design irritated many: it was “all metaphor,” “too cumbersome,” “slowed the pace,” “too obvious.” It comprised a vast mobile net in which the characters found themselves trapped or in a place to unleash their passions and cruelties and from which they would from time to time ‘escape’ to the forestage. Steckel consistently worked Florian Lösche’s net, strategising the various ways the characters engaged with it—feet falling though the grid or walking smoothly when drunk (Andres), bouncing with joy or sheer frustration (Marie) or, in the final scene, the murdered Marie is lowered through it by Woyzeck into the liquid depths where he will join her. I thought the net a pretty good metaphor, as did Thea Breizek, Professor for Spatial Theory, University of Technology Sydney, in The Conversation: “[It] reminds us that the social safety net we have come to be accustomed to since the welfare reforms of the late 19th century only carries some, and inevitably lets others fall. Quite literally, there’s no use hanging on. Lösche’s net may seem a simple, single message by director Jette Steckel, yet it is a highly effective one, demanding of the actors a highly physical language of climbing, hanging on and falling.”

The safety net fits nicely too with Tom Waits’ circusy music and the overall intense physicality of the production, as in the violent encounter between Woyzeck and the Drum Major played out over a thumped large bass drum. One complainant thought the production’s overall movement poorly choreographed. Not that I saw. I was specifically impressed with certain scenes, such as one with the Doctor’s strange, staccato dance, a kind of malfunctioning similar to the Captain’s repeatedly shooting himself in the foot, underlining the weaknesses of those in power.

There were objections that Marie, the increasingly estranged wife of Woyzeck, was portrayed as the trigger for rather than victim of domestic violence, or, alternatively, was treated with unusual sympathy. She certainly feels bad, expressing anger at herself in song and pressing herself violently into the net. A particular oddity was the appearance of the Drum Major—scruffy, in a long coat and lacking any obvious appeal, military or otherwise, with which to attract a Marie desperate to improve her lot. A misstep?

In a similar vein, a recurrent complaint was about the absence of ‘character development.’ Well, it’s not that kind of play, although it still requires a certain consistency. A precursor to 20th century expressionist drama, it’s a series of 37 fragments—cut, pasted and deleted according to the interpretations of generations of directors—and without an ending (Woyzeck’s drowning a suspected possibility). The bluntness, the unexpected and the disjunctions in Woyzeck constitute its power. For example, when Marie changes tack or as we witness Woyzeck himself transform episodically from naïve philosopher with political insights—how can the poor afford morality without money; “everything under the sun is work…we sweat in our sleep”—to become prophet of a fiery apocalypse and revealing the dark emptiness beneath our lives. Juxtaposed hard up against his vision are the cynics, who can afford to be so: the Captain, the Doctor and the Drum Major who all humiliate and abuse him. None of this is subtle, but it is powerful and as much precursor to Brecht as to Expressionism.

As for the music, some enjoyed it but felt a disjuncture between English lyrics and German dialogue. Others found the music to be aptly in the Weill-Dessau tradition, a good fit with the production’s Brechtian impulses. I had to agree with those who thought some songs too heavily rendered in the guttural Waits manner (they’re ofter in the composer’s own versions on the Blood Money CD). However, among more lucid responses, Julian Greis as Karl, an idiot, delivered “Starving in the belly of a whale” with a beautiful, slightly off-centre delicacy. The orchestration, conducted by Laurenz Wannenmacher, added new complexity to the Waits-Brennan songs.

Performances were strong and characterful. I especially liked Felix Knopp’s Woyzeck, strong, intense, bewildered and crazed.

One reviewer concluded about the production, “It all felt a little like school and no matter the work’s artistic integrity and heft, I doubt much of the audience connected deeply with it… The work wasn’t made for Australian audiences, and it shows.”

I’d never want a work of art made for me in that sense, let alone in terms of national culture. I want art to make me. As for calibre of Thalia’s production, Woyzeck is one of those plays that many of us have an ideal version of in our heads, even if we’ve yet to see it.

Meow Meow’s The Little Mermaid

Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid is a nasty piece of work, cruel to the bitter end. The mermaid sacrifices her tail for legs with which to dance and for a soul so she can marry a prince. The bargain? Legs, yes, but with both the pain of dancing on knives and the loss of her tongue. She loses the prince to a girl whom he thinks saved him from drowning in a storm (it was the mermaid). She can save herself by killing the prince, but love wins out. Instead she drowns herself and, as foam and bubbles, rises to a higher realm where she might gain a soul should she do good deeds for humans for 300 years (sentence later reduced by the writer, after complaints, to a year off for each good deed, or more days for bad). What a deal. Borders are not made to be crossed, little girls.

Of course I wasn’t expecting Meow Meow in her own The Little Mermaid to wallow in the tale’s murky shallows; hers is another kind of miserabilism, a jolly self-parodic one for the lovelorn or the would-be-loved whose narcissism inhibits romantic coupling. But the tale is there, as well as I can recall. There’s a storm, a transformation—first Meow Meow becomes the mermaid but wrong way up, tail on head. We help her get it off. Then, after a search (Meow Meow brave as ever crowd-surfing over the heads of her enabling audience) her prince appears, a desirable Aussie technician who interrupts the show and whose legs are spotlit and admired as he rises into the rig. She saves him, but sex is hilariously impossible with a tail and he shoots through (“I’m more of a leg man”) to another job. Subsequently, with a fearsome scream, our heroine gains legs, a glittering high heeled ‘slipper’ a la Cinderella on one foot, the other en pointe, plus crutch. The technician reappears as a grossly fantastical prince replete with sea-shell codpiece. She rejects him, preferring “a rock god or a ballet dancer.” Now the tale seems less mermaid and more Meow Meow as she learns, “I made my own fantasy reject me.” SPOILER ALERT Neither mermaid nor Meow Meow gets her man, but like her avatar, the artist nevertheless has her moment of transcendence with bubbles (the foam of the original tale) spectacularly filling the Spiegeltent. Even though her erstwhile techie prince exits in the end, she declares the show a “happy” one.

It’s also an action packed show with a spectacular set—a huge rising mirrored disk that becomes the sea at various depths)—and a superb band. The songs sounded pretty good, finely sung with the artist’s usual great range, though they’re largely less than familiar; a CD/download would be welcome, soon as.

Meow Meow was in superior form, the beloved familiar schtick upgraded with greater production values, strong direction (Michael Kantor) and a quite rewardingly complex tale. The techie is played by the very fine Chris Ryan, a perfect foil for Meow Meow, not only in their comic exchanges, but also for the intensity of their final encounter when it’s the techie’s prompting that pushes her into self-awareness. She might not have gained a prince, but she’s learned she’s adept at destroying relationships even before they get underway. At least she won’t be banished for 300 years awaiting soulhood; she is doing humankind too much good in the meantime. What tale next to hang her neuroses on?

Stephanie Lake, Double Blind

A man (Alisdair McIndoe) and a woman (Alana Everett), each trailing a long cable, face each other. Mere movement generates static, a touch to the cheek a buzz. At first the pair are tentatively intimate, sometimes funny (she cups his ‘breasts,’ each yielding a cute sonic zing), but with a potential for testing limits of more forceful proximity. The limit is reached. They collapse but then recommence, this time with probes in hand with which to stroke and jab, yielding more powerful sounds and physical effects.

Stephanie Lake’s Double Blind is about the consequences of experiments in which power is exercised with ignorance, diminishing caution and increasing abandon. Shocks, falls and immobilisations multiply across the performance as limits are reached with no sign of concern or mutual support. These ‘experimental’ results are at once banal, funny and frightening, recalling not only Stanley Milgram’s behaviourist research of the 60s, with the apparent application of escalating electric shocks to subjects by volunteers willingly following directions, but also a plethora of technological and ideological contemporary developments that are reducing our sense of ourselves as possessed of voluntary capacities. As Double Blind progresses, collapse is preceded by twitches, wobbles and spasms, with increasing signs of involuntarism.

The cables emanate from a platform on which sits composer Robin Fox like a master experimenter, neutrally monitoring progress and tweaking volume and electrical charges.

The dancers variously become the conductors and subjects of these experiments (neither party informed of the precise nature of the experiment—hence ‘double blind’). One briefly becomes the choreographer, since Lake includes choreographers among her dangerous experimenters. Consequently there’s an oscillation between scenes palpably about science and technological effects and those which are dance-centred, but still resonate with the former. For example, Everett and McIndoe’s second encounter climaxes when Everett ‘hits’ McIndoe—a gunshot knock with the probe that fells him; it’s comic, but a shock nonetheless. In the next scene, Amber Haines and Kyle Page join Everett and McIndoe to perform an increasingly elaborate baroque-cum-folk dance—Riverdance-like footwork and neat gesturing—that transforms into rapid turns and jumps with a driven quality suggesting something more than volition at work. This is the first of a series of scenes in which dancers are pushed into feverish, often mechanistic movement that nonetheless and quite ironically reveals sheer skill in its realisation. Here it’s propelled by an emphatic beat, textured with cooler sonic drips and then sharp clapping which turns disturbingly asynchronous, stops and starts again in counterpoint to the tight choreography.

Seated on the floor, McIndoe, in another ‘dance’ scene, comes under the sway of Amber Haines standing over him, as if manipulated first by her movement and then by touch until there’s a strange merger in which her forearm appears to become part of his head; all the while radio-like signals sustain a sense of laboratory but also of an older magic, of psychic control, played out here in an eerie, dim blue-ish light. The outcome is rise, fall, rise and finally collapse for McIndoe.

Double Blind takes a more literal turn with the playing of recordings of mid-20th century behavioural scientists describing experiments in which animals compete for food and sated ones become less competitive. While analysing behaviour these scientists were also proposing ways to manipulate it (which they did, egregiously, with chimpanzees and later children). Lake’s choreography, with the return of the spooky clapping motif, responds laterally to behaviourism’s cause-and-effect mentality with the foursome engaged in chains of action and reaction, mechanistic but sometimes beautiful and funny (nose to nose triggers), but showing signs of wobbliness and finishing with blunt impact and, again, collapse.

In another scene, McIndoe turns the sonic probe from the work’s opening on the other three in a dance of increasingly brutal impacts in synch with violent sounds. His dangerous loss of control is followed by Haines and Page duetting in a seriously complex tangling of bodies, recalling McIndoe and Haines’ earlier encounter. It’s another ‘dance experiment,’ fascinating in itself but hard to meaningfully accommodate at this point of the work’s thematic progress. More to the point is Everett, who, substituting for the choreographer, quietly instructs McIndoe in a series of complex movements. She then sets a metronome at increasing speeds until his performance becomes almost impossibly fast and the choreography no longer itself. McIndoe accomplishes the task, just. A bell signals the stages of this experiment while a clacking sound suggests a weaver’s shuttle (as antique as the metronome), recalling the earlier clapping and reminding us of the long gestation of technologies that act as prostheses and, ultimately, our replacements.

In a variation on the earlier cause-and-effect dance the four gather in movement which first appears unusually sinuous, cyclic and organic—bodies rippling in synch and arms snaking in line; but spasmodic movements suggest imminent entropy. In another return to the opening scene, the women wheel on an electrical system and attach the probes to various parts of the men’s bodies, increasingly disabling them. Oddly, in the opening performance, no sounds issued forth from these contacts, the impact being entirely visual. A technical problem or were the correlative amplifications of impacts no longer felt necessary?

In a final gathering in hazy light and amid the sounds of a big pulsing bass drum, static, water sounds, ship’s bell and distant voices—a curiously literal evocation—each dancer, feet forward and in parallel, moves with the others semi-robotically until clustering, their arms rave waving, as if trapped by both science and culture. Alone, Amber Haines, deprived of group togetherness, lyrically expresses isolation in movement riddled with spasms as the grid suspended above her kicks into life, a machine that casts large spotlight pools that rapidly circle the stage, oblivious to the artist.

Double Blind is an almost unremittingly grim evocation of the evils of mindless manipulation in the name of science—and of art. Stephanie Lake demands of her dancers high speed, sharply articulated virtuosity in a scenario with nil room for reflection with which to counter the entropy she envisages for our species. She’s created a work in which art is part of the problem—if sometimes, as with the metronome scene, portrayed ironically, but elsewhere with cruel intensity.

Lake has us dancing fast to our ethical and social extinction—a reminder that, analogously, our universe is also accelerating to its end. For all its taut, dextrously realised choreography and finely integrated complementary score (Robin Fox), Double Blind’s alternations between science and dance ‘experiments’ feel too schematic, becoming episodic and the overall sense of entropy predictable. I’ll remember its moments of dark beauty and many of sheer skill (McIndoe’s above all) that suggest the work has more to offer than protesting a condition evolving from the mid 20th century. Just what its manifestations are now, the exacting freneticism of some modern dance aside, is left to the audience.

With its involuntary and mechanistic behaviours Double Blind makes an interesting companion piece for Garry Stewart’s Devolution (2006) and Be Your Self (2012; video interview), both for ADT. Human ‘de-evolution’ is realised in the form of feral humans, some of whom have become whip-tailed cyborgs, while in Be Your Self involuntary behaviour consumes its humans before they appear to make a return to nature.

Sydney Festival & Sydney Chamber Opera, The Passion, composer, librettist Pascal Dusapin, librettist Rita de Letteriis, mis-en-space Pierre Audi, conductor Jack Symonds; City Recital Hall, Sydney 14-15 Jan

Sydney Festival, Thalia Theater Hamburg, Woyzeck, writer Georg Büchner, adaptation Tom Waits, Kathleen Brennan, Robert Wilson, director Jette Steckel, design Florain Lösche; Carriageworks, 7-12 Jan

Malthouse & Sydney Festival, Meow Meow’s The Little Mermaid, creator, performer Meow Meow with Chris Ryan and The Siren Effect Orchestra, director, Michael Kantor, design Anna Cordingley, lighting Paul Jackson, musical direction Jethro Woodward, comedy direction Cal McCrystal; Magic Mirrors Spiegeltent, 7-23 Jan

Sydney Festival, Double Blind, choreographer Stephanie Lake, composer Robin Fox, lighting Bosco Shaw, costumes Harriet Oxley; Carriageworks, Sydney, 9-24 Jan

High anxiety and simmering anger. That’s what many Australian artists have been feeling in a holiday season of enforced rest and little to celebrate after careers have been disrupted by an Australia Council funding round that went missing in 2015 and dismally low success rates in grants announced at year’s end.

Some of us over the break read the draft A Charter for the Arts. Put together by a group of concerned artists, it’s an attempt to assert in one document the rights of Australian artists and audiences. It’s a hard call in a country where there’s little federal political interest in having A Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities [Victoria has its own], let alone A Charter for the Arts. But it could become a great advocacy document, as its creators intend, so that every time there’s a rupture in the relationship between government and the arts, artists don’t have to re-assert their rights (with the appropriate supporting material) over and over again. Read it now and put in your two bob’s worth—if you have that much left in your budget—by 31 January.

Duplication

Despite media coverage, protests, a petition and an astonishing number of submissions, Arts Minister Mitch Fifield pre-empted the Senate Inquiry into his predecessor’s National Program for Excellence in the Arts [NPEA] with the announcement of its retention. He re-branded it as Catalyst—replacing the nebulous ‘excellence’ criteria with a title that suggests innovation, something that the Australia Council has already long favoured in its support for the small to medium arts sector. This further reminded us that Catalyst is to be an ideologically corrected duplication of the Council. The Fifield argument that there should be more than one federal arts funding body totally ignores the current diversity of funding options in the federal/state/local government model and across-the-board arts support from other federal government departments. That’s already complex. Artists will doubtless feel compelled to apply for grants to both the Australia Council and Catalyst. More work. It’s depressing.

On with the culture wars

Just as depressing has been the dissenting report from Government Members of the Committee (see Raymond Gill, “Senate Arts Inquiry: 20 extraordinary, self-serving statements you need to read from the Government,” Daily Review, Dec 4, 2015. Subsequent quotations are from that article.) Insulting and predictable ‘culture wars’ posturing resurrects old criticisms of the Australia Council (entirely ignoring the positive 2012 review of the Council by merchant banker Angus James and corporate communications expert Gabrielle Trainor). It claim that artists are self-interested (“the evidence provided to the inquiry came, almost without exception, from artists and arts organisations who have a vested interest in attacking the government’s budgetary efficiencies”), that they have an “unhealthy sense of entitlement,” and had written submissions not of their own making—“many peak groups…actively encouraged and assisted with the wording of letters of concern to the inquiry.” And why not? It’s a democracy with a right to unite.

Art’s heavy lifting

It was emphasised that “[t]he arts sector could not be said to have been asked to perform any ‘heavy lifting’” to meet the demands of an austerity budget. This latter nonsense conveniently ‘forgot’ the $28.2m already slashed from the Australia Council in the 2014 Abbott government budget.

Austerity fiction

More to the point, if austerity budgeting is the issue, why didn’t the $105 million seized from the Australia Council in 2015 go into general revenue? Instead it’s being kept by Minister Fifield who will doubtless fashion policies to determine how the money will be spent and which his assessment panels will duly abide by. It appears that writers are the ultimate victims of the austerity purge—the $6m appropriated for Senator George Brandis’ still-born Book Council has gone into general revenue!

Arts power grab

One way or another this will be ministerial vanity funding, direct interference into art-making in Australia and a strike at the heart of the separation of powers—of the state from art, as well as from religion and the judiciary. The implicit removal of the ‘arm’s length’ principle in Catalyst and the serious financial weakening of an independent statutory authority, the Australia Council for the Arts, are profoundly worrying. They amount to nothing less than an assault on democracy and the relative freedom of the arts.

The evidence is contained in the dissenting Senate Arts Inquiry report, “Government Senators are disturbed, but not surprised, that the majority consider that funding directions made in the public interest by duly-appointed ministers of a lawfully-elected representative government could constitute ‘interference.’

“The Catalyst program, as a facet of the Department of Communications and the Arts, will be conducted with far greater oversight by government and the parliament. Catalyst will make funding decisions in alignment with the guidelines approved by the minister, an elected parliamentarian whose role is to guide departmental operations in a manner that reflects the wishes of the taxpayer. For a portion of arts funding to be deployed within such a framework is a good step towards ensuring that, across the spectrum, arts funding fosters innovation, provides cultural development, supports industry and reflects the wishes of the Australian people.”

Who’s calling the shots?

How will the wishes of taxpayers be gathered, analysed and understood? Will Australia Council research be duplicated or will Fifield “guide departmental operations” to get the ideological outcomes he wants? And who is making policy in the Ministry for the Arts? Is it ‘senior arts policy advisor’ Michael Napthali whose hostility to artists outside the major arts organisations was reported by musician Claire Edwardes in 2015 when Napthali was working for George Brandis? Napthali’s been moved from the arts Ministry into the Prime Minister’s Office as arts advisor, not a good sign for those who’d hoped for an enlightened response to the arts from our new leader instead of the carry-on of the culture wars.

It is tempting to note that two offerings in Sydney Festival’s About an Hour series almost emerge from the same swamp of righteous outrage and hurtle towards us, pleading to our better human selves through the realms of pulp and science fiction. Seeing rock music monologist Christopher Brett Bailey explore his anxieties and durational performance troupe Forced Entertainment engage with futurist predictions certainly made for a night at the apocalypse cabaret that was simultaneously droll and invigorating.

This is how we die

We sit in front of Canadian Bailey’s public radio facility—desk, microphone and a stack of notes. Without warning, he accelerates into a multitude of millennial think-piece sound-bites on hipster identity—“it’s the other white people you cross the street to avoid”—his vocal range stretching from pop-yodel to George Thorogood growl.

When he does catch his breath, his protagonist-self in a budding youth romance, he takes us on a road trip into Tarantino’s America, describing encounters of cartoonish violence. The first of two decapitations we are asked to picture is of his girlfriend’s swastika-shaped father (after an accident he insisted the surgeon shape him thus) whose head is mutilated by a car with an anti-fascist bumper sticker that crashes through his house and is driven, to wry effect, by a latter-day Thelma and Louise.

As Bailey attempts to control his unreliable narrator-self he finds verbal zen only when he steps aside from his persona’s wildly indulgent fantasising, landing on and repeating a single utterance, ‘jism’, again and again, at first playing it for smutty laughs and then slipping into a delicate exercise of semantic satiation, a mantra that empties the word of meaning.

The final movement of this monologue points to Bailey’s broader intent when he bows out of his surrealist tornado-chasing odyssey into the darkness. This ending was hinted at the beginning when audience members were supplied with earplugs. An electric quartet (two violinists, bassist and Bailey on guitar) overwhelms us with a hypnotic, overpowering rock coda that seems fitting in the wake of David Bowie’s recent passing. (Quite appropriately, Ziggy Stardust is referenced in one of the protagonist’s encounters involving an iPod, a gas station and a violent and subsequently decapitated priest). I opt not to use the earplugs provided and oblige the bass-and-string heavy light show (car headlights blinding us) to bring me to a symphorophiliac (vehicular disaster sexual fetishist) climax and guide me out of this Homeric near-death experience.

Cathy Naden, Jerry Killick, Forced Entertainment, Tomorrow’s Parties, Sydney Festival

Tomorrow’s Parties

Forced Entertainment’s Tomorrow’s Parties is less fast cars and hard liquor rock and more like a backyard tea party hosted by the William S Burroughs Appreciation Society. Colourful festoon lights suggest a suburban outdoor setting which springs to life without much introductory fanfare. Cathy Naden and Jerry Killick perch on a wooden palette and quietly commence an 80-minute speculative marathon. Instead of a meat raffle, they each offer up well-worn arguments on what the future might hold. Many centre on how to solve or embrace the population crisis. A great number of their predictions invest in cyborgian fetishism and other technologically-aided fantasies. Medieval nostalgia is introduced as we yearn for simpler times. Vegetarianism and cannibalism are placed on two ends of the same dietary spectrum.

A moment which plunges the audience into deep silence occurs when Killick prises apart the taboo of socially acceptable suicide. A jaw-dropping piece of Sophist ‘choreography,’ it is handled with such charm and frightening logic, that it’s hard to imagine another performer making it their own.

As a double act, Naden and Killick take on playful oppositional stances (light versus heavy, humanistic versus misanthropic, compassionate versus punitive, utopic versus dystopic, laissez faire versus over-regulation). But they morph quickly into two well-meaning if loquacious party guests who dominate the proceedings and lightly reveal their prejudices. Polite sociological musings are lightly written off with counter-musings, transforming each proposition into a another depressing historical platitude.

Premise-wise, Tomorrow’s Parties stretches beyond the creative writing workshop provocation “Complete this sentence: ‘In the future,…’” Everything that was offered we may have thought of before but perhaps been fearful of taking to its logical conclusion.

While Christopher Brett Bailey put all his anxieties on display, the writing here simply invites us to tango with each of our own fears. As yet another Forced Entertainment list-driven durational work, Tomorrow’s Parties is a disarmingly simple presentation, and a deeply humanising one. I might even try the exercise at my next family gathering—it could result in vibrant political discussion but with much less antagonism.

Sydney Festival, About an Hour: This Is How We Die, writer, performer Christopher Brett Bailey, dramaturg Anne Reiger, sound design George Percy; Forced Entertainment, Tomorrow’s Parties, director Tim Etchells, design Richard Lowdon, lighting Francis Stevenson; Carriageworks, Sydney, 20-24 Jan

I was privileged to attend the Dana Waranara Convergence. This timely and vital gathering aimed to bring together Indigenous choreographers/dancers and invited presenters and producers from around Australia (with several representatives from around the globe); to exchange conversations and ideas that will support an active, robust and diverse Indigenous dance sector.

Along with a series of hotbed discussion panels, the highlight of the convergence was the pecha kucha pitches and quick dance presentations that gave a national snapshot of the cultural influences and connections to country that drive exciting myriad Indigenous dance ideas that have or will come to fruition.

What I learnt from this moving and humbling experience is that overwhelmingly Indigenous dance is an extension of our ongoing cultural practice. It is deeply personal and utterly entwined with connection to people and country. Trying to remove an Indigenous choreographer from their dance creation is impossible. It can’t be done. Indigenous choreographers create dance, not to make themselves look good or smart or marketable. Our very survival is dependent on dance. It is through dance that our stories and culture are transmitted, like a yarn, through space, on the ground and in the air. It vibrates forever.

The passion and will to dance and move is irresistible and, despite the dearth of spaces to learn and present our craft in this country, Indigenous people are integrally driven to dance and create that which has been danced and created for years.

Many Indigenous dance works fail to find the big stages, the big venues, the big festivals, but the passion and drive to create is strong. The will to dance finds the rooms, stages and stomping grounds where we can light the fire and share.

What can presenters and producers do to provide a pathway for this passionate and driven cultural and creative transmission? How can the regional art centres (many of whom once banned Aboriginal people from their venues) create a safe place for Indigenous dance and performance?

How can Indigenous choreographers compete with the national and international big shots? What are the sensitivities around marketing Indigenous dance works that have such overwhelming responsibilities to people and place? How do you balance the needs of the audience with our cultural responsibilities?

Despite these deep and seemingly divisive questions, what was most refreshing about Dana Waranara was that presenters and choreographers truly mucked in with one another. We sat as one. We sought to understand each other deeply. We listened. This wasn’t a market. We came to a deeper understanding of each other’s responsibilities—the power of space and the privilege that comes with that; and the power and responsibility of cultural transmission and how this intersects with “art.”

I saw a dancer struggle with the beautiful complexity of dancing his kinship system. I watched a woman carry the weight of a branch and generations of her culture on her shoulders. I saw tragic loss and bountiful hope. I saw mothers and fathers dance for their children. I saw a man literally dance in his dangerous and proud blood. I saw every dancer’s country—time and time again.

Some Indigenous dance works are ready to go, looking for a stage or coming to a stage near you, others are germinating and will require careful resourcing and investment.

Hopefully conversations and connections were made at Dana Waranara that will continue to water the deeply personal ideas that were delicately and passionately shared. Whatever happens, I know deep in my heart, that Indigenous dancers will always dance—either on the nation’s stages or without. They must. They will.

BlakDance & Performing Lines Dana Waranara, An Indigenous-led convergence bringing together choreographers & presenters, Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, Brisbane, 8-10 Dec 2015, www.blakdance.org.au

In early December 2015 I travelled from Sydney to the Judith Wright Centre in Fortitude Valley in Brisbane to attend a gathering, the likes of which had not been seen since 2005. I was on my way to the Dana Waranara convergence of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander dance, a national summit organised by BlackDance in partnership with Performing Lines Australia.

Previous such meetings, like the National Indigenous Dance Forum in 2005, the dance forums at the Cairns Indigenous Arts Festival and Darung Muru, the NSW Aboriginal Dance Forum in 2011, sought to bring together a largely independent dance sector to share knowledge of practice, build connections and identify strengths, challenges and opportunities across the first peoples dance sector. Dana Waranara achieved all of this, but also served another very special purpose by gathering a cohort of national and international presenters and dance practitioners from New Zealand, Canada and North America to discuss the challenges and opportunities for touring Indigenous dance in Australia and overseas. As I work primarily in theatre, my interest in attending Dana Waranara was to listen to and record these conversations, to understand more about touring Indigenous work and to develop a greater appreciation of the role of dance as cultural practice.

BlakDance is Australia’s peak body for Indigenous dance. Located in Brisbane, the organisation is governed by an Indigenous Board and managed by Executive Producer Merindah Donnelly and General Manager Jane Fuller. Neither works for BlakDance full time, nor do they live in Brisbane permanently. This is an agency with no stable base and run from company laptops. Jane works part-time from her home on the NSW Far North Coast and Merindah produces from anywhere in Australia or the world at any time. Both manage BlakDance very well in this way, although I am sure it has its challenges. To my knowledge BlakDance is the only Indigenous peak arts body of its kind in Australia.

Providing compelling arguments to fully fund such companies in Australia’s current arts funding environment has become increasingly difficult as many non-indigenous companies can and do support Indigenous work. Although it may also be the case that non-indigenous agencies also struggle financially there does seem to be less funding provided to the Indigenous performing arts sector overall. Co-producing has become an economic necessity for many organisations and for Dana Waranara BlakDance partnered with Performing Lines, Australia’s leading performing arts producer and touring agency. Performing Lines currently manages BlakLines, a national performing arts touring initiative that develops opportunities for presenters and audiences to connect with contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander performing artists in dance and theatre. This is a particularly well-suited partnership for both organisations with their similar aims to further opportunities for the Indigenous performing arts sectors.

The first morning of the Dana Waranara convergence was all about connections—not just industry associations but family links discussed over coffee in the Judith Wright Centre foyer and outside on the Brunswick Street footpath. After the morning link-ups the fourth level meeting room beckoned, a reconfigured rehearsal space with tables and chairs set facing a small raised stage in cabaret style. Two lounges sat on the rostrum in anticipation of the many informal panels that became a key feature of the four-day event. Aunty Maroochy Barambah performed the welcome to country. With ochre on her face and wearing a possum skin cloak she glided through the room speaking in her Turrbul tongue. After officiating Aunty then voiced her concerns to the gathering that the Turrbul people were on the verge of extinction. This, she explained, was the perception of many settlers to the Brisbane area. Standing proud she commented on the resilience and indomitable spirit of her clan in the face of such opinion. Looking around the room Aunty then honoured the conference Elders, acknowledging the founders of modern Indigenous dance in Australia, like Carol Johnson who sat quietly at the back of the room, Michael Leslie the founding member of NAISDA Dance College, Francis Rings from Bangarra Dance Theatre and BlakDance founder Marilyn Miller.

In the room was a Who’s Who of Indigenous dance in Australia. I identified many of the NSW dancers that I have worked with, watched and supported over the years in my previous role as Senior Aboriginal Cultural Development Officer at Arts NSW. These included Vicky Van Hout, Eric Avery, Jo Clancy and the Johnson sisters, Rayma and Kerry. There were also innumerable dancers in attendance whom I had heard about but never met, such as Gary Lang from the Northern Territory and Jacob Boehme from Melbourne. In addition were the invited international guests: dance performers Emily Johnson from Alaska, Jack Gray from New Zealand and Michelle Olson from Canada. All the dancers represented the resilience of an independent Indigenous dance sector which is largely misunderstood and underrepresented nationally and internationally.

After introductions the international dancers and the Australian delegates— Collette Brennan from the Australia Council; Monica Stevens, Chair of BlakDance; Lydia Miller, Executive Director Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Board; and Karilyn Brown from Performing Lines—met to discuss the issues and challenges of touring work in their local contexts. Led by Collette, the forum focused on the possibility of identifying “stepping stones” for meaningful artistic and cultural exchange between Australia, New Zealand, Canada and America. Informed by the recent release of the Australia Council for the Arts International Arts Activity Report (August 2015) and the Building Audiences: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts report (August 2015) the conversation began.

Also in the room was Judy Harquail from Canada Presents and New York independent producer Meredith Boggia who both spoke at length about the limitations of presenting Indigenous work in their respective countries, especially in regard to presenter education and audience understanding of what constitutes Indigenous performance. Judy spoke to her work in Canada—the development of an open, independent producers network for touring Indigenous work. On how to educate presenters and audiences she noted that when it came to marketing indigenous dance the best methodology for articulating works to non-indigenous presenters was to ask the practitioners about their practice. She added that when describing a work, she recommended “a focus on the experience of a work and not the purpose.” The practitioners on the other hand mostly spoke to their individual practices, all voicing similar approaches. These included being led by a connection to place, having an authoritative process and establishing how to share work with different audiences.

Dancer Emily Johnson spoke about her body-based dance/installation/theatre practice which is often influenced by her Yup’ik heritage. Her most recent work, Shore, is a multi-day performance installation in four parts examining the place of dance in the world and how dance can connect people in the present. Shore invokes ‘a sense of ground’ through listening, experiencing and eating, engaging with community through curated readings, a performance that moves from outdoors onto a stage and into a feast. Emily’s practice extends the notion of dance as individual practice to one that examines the idea of a collective body in shared time and place. She spoke about her practice as maintaining a sense of responsibility. When producing a work, her cultural and or artistic process was not always evident to an audience, even though she was in constant conversation about her indigeneity. Similarly Jack Grey, who hails from the Ngati Porou, Ngapuhi, Te Rwawa and Ngati Kahungunu tribes of Aotearoa, articulated his practice as embracing a sense of responsibility and guardianship. He spoke about his performance, Mitimiti, as a reflection on an embodied way of knowing that comes from a sense of place and of the authenticity and sense of responsibility with which to be present. Michelle Olson described her practice as drawing from a sense of responsibility inherent in the practice of embodying place and histories.

Although there seemed to be some differences between how practitioners described and positioned their work and how presenters grappled with mediating those practices to audiences, there was some tangible ground for moving forward. All of the delegates at the regional, national and international focus meeting agreed on the need for more research on best practice for touring Indigenous work, to investigate an Indigenous-led model for touring and to build a body of writing around Indigenous dance and performance with a focus on developing a language around protocols for touring. Further, that a network of international opportunities for artists was a good place to start to get practitioners and their work noticed. Key to this discussion was developing international professional development opportunities such as residencies and presentations for Indigenous dance practitioners.

The Dana Waranara four-day convergence presented many possibilities for the future of touring Indigenous dance locally, nationally and internationally. Building relationships between practitioners, presenters, producers and audiences is key to making these possibilities tangible. Developing opportunities for cultural and artistic exchange between participating countries facilitates knowledge of markets for First Peoples’ performing arts, as well as assisting in building platforms for local makers to experience international marketplaces and for practitioners, producers and presenters to share information, practice, protocols, resources and skills. This is a future worth working towards, but it is a prospect that will necessitate a commitment from all parties. Myself, I look forward to it.

Excelsior, L-R Benjamin Creek, Benjamin Maza, Joshua Thaiday, Leonard Hunter Donahue

Dana Waranara: “Come over here! Bring your [dancing] feet” (Dharug language, Richard Green)

I have been listening to recordings of the Dana Waranara Convergence, held late last year at Brisbane’s Judith Wright Centre. I am very fortunate to be afforded the luxury of adequate time and distance to revisit this crucial event with fresh ears because I was not an outsider able to assess the experience from an objective perspective. Instead I was participating with all the passion and personal investment that makes one prone to bias. Initially my personal professional ambition and an impatience for a more substantial presence for Indigenous dance on the Western mainstage as a whole, caused me to momentarily lose sight of the rare opportunity this event afforded us.

With the advantage of hindsight I was able to reflect on fundamental differences between the National Dance Forum (NDF) held in Melbourne earlier in the year and Dana Waranara. The NDF proved to be a very academic appraisal of the state of dance, with a primary focus on where and how works are seeded and developed and the means by which we engage with them and the methodology for critical discourse. The BlakDance summit and subsequent Dana Waranara Convergence, however, examined dance as the pursuit of a way of being in the world, and arts practices as an intrinsic extension of a life practice.

Like most of the invited artists, from all points of the continent, I got up at the crack of dawn to catch the almost ‘red eye’ to Brisbane. I greeted and was greeted in turn by my extended dance family, some of us actual countrymen, but most of us sharing a familiarity reserved for blood kin because we are each (and in some cases self-appointed) cultural custodians. We act as each other’s sounding boards and gatekeepers, policing protocols, working out how to work ‘right way,’ in accordance with the knowledge passed down by those who came before us and to ensure that same knowledge is available for those who follow.

It’s day two and Uncle Des Sandy takes the floor. He is a local man, a Goori. After acknowledging the land in which we are meeting, he proceeds to name the clans of the neighbouring countries and those of the outlying terrains. He continues, methodically spiralling outwards, calling language groups with the precision of Fibonacci. From there he invites each and every one of us to share our ancestral origins, to establish our geographical place in relation to our transplanted selves and to each other. This is important.

Monica Stevens, Chair of BlakDance, delivers her second opening address in two days. She differentiates the forthcoming Dana Waranara proceedings from those of the previous day. The BlakDance Summit’s purpose was to identify opportunities for growth and the current challenges hindering the prosperity of the Indigenous dance sector, with which to make a compelling case for a Blakdance forum in 2016. The main objective of Dana Waranarana was to initiate network relationships between presenters, producers and artists by providing a space to unpack what it means to be an Indigenous dance artist in a national and international context and to find ways in which partnerships might be forged.

Monica’s oratory was impassioned and articulate; she talked business while never losing connection with her heritage, peppering her speech with personal anecdotes and accompanying photos referencing her homelands, thus integrating her cutural knowledge. She was both awe-inspiring and self-effacing with a ready wit and sense of humour that was to inform the event. Monica’s candour demonstrated how she meant for us move forward when time is of the essence, both urgent and immediate and yet simultaneously timeless; time honoured, timely.

Executive Producer Merindah Donnelly gave a chronological account of BlakDance to date, tracing its history from the initial Creating Pathways forum held in Canberra 10 years prior, before it morphed into the Treading the Pathways initiative, aimed at targeting specific mid-career artists in order to expand the Indigenous choreographic landscape. Then it was re-branded as an advocacy body, BlakDance, under the leadership of Marilyn Miller, and then finally arrived at the present. Merindah then invited Gundangarra dancer/choreographer Ian Colless to supply an historical overview of Indigenous dance.

Ian outlined a contemporary dance history and its key players, some of whom were in the room. This resulted in a gentle prompting by the pioneers when details grew fuzzy or were erroneous. As many alumni of NAISDA (the institution which grew out of the initial Redfern Black Theatre workshops) were present, we were already privy to much of the information Ian had compiled, but Carole Johnson, founder of NAISDA Dance College and Bangarra Dance Theatre, added rare insight into her motivation for initially working in the Aboriginal community. Carole originally had no intention of remaining in Australia after her tour as performer with outspoken Colombian-American Human Rights protester and choreographer Eleo Pomare. But she was alerted to the injustices experienced by Aboriginal people through the televised footage of the 1972 Aboriginal Tent Embassy, where she would later perform. She decided to stay on after learning that Aboriginal people weren’t legally considered a people. For Carole this was reminiscent of the counting of slaves as three-fifths of a person for tax purposes between the northern and southern states of America in an early version of its constitution.

Carole recalled the initial urgency of Aboriginal people in communicating to her their appalling living conditions and then the satisfaction she felt when, after the change in government, those same Aboriginal communities began to describe with pride the benefits of the newly formed medical centres and other social services. She spoke more specifically about the impact of her contribution to dance, recalling a conversation with Steve Mann where he stated, “We knew we had dance covered because we had the Torres Strait Islander tradition and Aboriginal dance [is] coming back and now the urban people [have] a way of dancing that [is] meaningful as well.”

The most difficult task at hand at Dana Waranara seemed to be the negotiation between community practice/cultural ideals and the commercial/ professional performing arts arena. Surely—with such an expansive representation of the sector in attendance, including representatives from the peak funding body (the Australia Council for the Arts), local, interstate and international presenters from festivals and venues, training and research institutes, along with national and international producers and performance makers—strong headway could be made toward creating strategies for higher visibility and a unanimous desire for a prolific presence of Australian Indigenous ‘product.’

But that’s just it. Australian Indigenous dance is not merely a product; it cannot and should not be reduced solely to a commodity. Indigenous dance is primarily a demonstrative communication of relationships with ancestors, with the environment and with community.

Newly appointed Sydney Festival Director Wesley Enoch led a panel addressing “rigour.” The panel comprised Francis Rings, current choreographer-in-residence at Bangarra Dance Theatre, Alaskan Yu’pik and First Nations performance maker Emily Johnson and myself, a NSW independent. Wesley asserted that if we choose to present in the black box theatre, we are in direct competition with the mainstream Western art and must be aware of established conventions. Emily identified her rigorous approach as an assertion of her cultural agenda within and exceeding the boundaries defined by the Western format. By partnering with her current producer—New York-based Meredith Boggia (also in attendance)—she creates her own performance experiences, including feasting rituals and community landcare initiatives.

As a provocation, I vehemently maintained that I don’t consider my audience at all. This, of course, is not true. In hindsight, what I meant was that in creating work I have a cultural imperative and all other considerations are secondary. I negotiate my performative/artistic delivery based on my prospective audience. This is no easy task. The Dana Waranara Convergence provided an opportunity for presenters and producers to gain insight into this complex performative plurality whereby an art product is also evidence of fundamental anthropological function. Maori artist Jack Gray proposed presenting venues see themselves as hosts, thereby engaging with their ‘talent’ in a way that encompasses more than the economic, encouraging reciprocity in lieu of standard power dynamics.

Dana Waranara was an event punching above its weight on so many levels. It practically aimed to tackle life, the universe and everything in between….and very nearly pulled it off. There was so much said that the word count for this article couldn’t possibly accommodate. Dana Waranara needs to be a recurring event.
Jacob Boheme, Penny Miles, Michelle Olsen, Merindah Donnelly, Dana Waranara

Jacob Boheme, Penny Miles, Michelle Olsen, Merindah Donnelly, Dana Waranara

It’s just over a month since the Dana Waranara Indigenous-led dance conference. I’m sitting in a hotel room on 7th Avenue in New York, and there’s a faint smell of smoked salmon permeating my room. It’s an intense minus three outside and BOM says it’s 40 plus in Melbourne.

I’m lucky/privileged to be in New York, seeing shows at three experimental arts festivals that happen at this time each year, and attending a couple of conferences. All are rich and wonderful experiences, offering a chance to catch up with colleagues and dear friends from across the globe and exchange confidences, passions and map out the challenges ahead.

On my first day here Catherine Jones (Arts House General Manager) and I share a large American brunch with contemporary artist Emily Johnson, originally from Alaska, of Yup’ik descent, now a New Yorker, and Meredith Boggia, her producer. We continue the conversation that began at Dana Waranara, to bring her work, Shore, to Melbourne to be part of newly appointed artistic director Jacob Boehme’s Melbourne Indigenous Arts Festival in May 2017 and to develop a second work for 2019. Jacob, also part of Dana Waranara, and I had an excitable exchange the day before I left for New York where we quickly established our joint keen interest in bringing Emily to Australia to make work and a shared sense of how her work could generate a whole set of connections and methodologies in the Melbourne context that could be incredibly valuable for blakfellas and gubbas alike.

Both projects are complex, deeply embedded in different communities—in Emily’s culture, in her expanded choreographic practice and in her deep desire to connect with the Indigenous artists and communities in Australia. It’ll take a lot to make it a reality. Around the table, over eggs-over-easy and a side of delicious brussells sprouts with peanut sauce (who’d have thought that could work?), we all make long term commitments of time and resources… it’s clear this will happen and we will all do whatever it takes. It’s an easy conversation that moves from logistics to methodology, to the delights of naming artists, communities and elders we know and imagine will connect deeply with this project, and the things we think we need to be wary of.

Where does this kind of clarity and trust come from? In my experience it usually takes years to get this point with an artist or a friend, but for me Dana Waranara opened a door into a way of thinking about how I, as a presenter/producer could move into a place of real experimental collaboration with Indigenous artists in Australia and around the globe, by shifting my presenting methodologies and moving towards and co-creating a place of possibility that doesn’t look like anything I already know or have seen, rather than waiting for it to appear fully formed out of the blue, out of some misguided (lazy?) sense that it was not my place to partner.

Over the four days of Dana Waranara I learnt more about Indigenous arts practices, ancient and new, contemporary politics, the deep resilience, courage, brilliance, humour and tragedy that was shared by all the artists, who proudly, angrily, tenderly and generously shared stories of their histories, their land, their people. I learnt that many of these artists who were making such diverse, rigorous, deeply researched work, were making it in personal and family circumstances that were so challenging that I was left breathless and in awe of their commitment to their practice as artists and to their culture.

Emily Johnson was one of three international artists, all of whom were welcomed and embraced by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island artists and presenters. Together we were strengthened in finding shared experiences of and responses to the colonisation of land, to the trauma of continued and continual discrimination, and the strategies for fighting back, for being proud, for feeling love. It was this connection that seemed particularly powerful to me: seeing ourselves and our situation from another, but similar perspective is an incredibly valuable insight, a place of comparison that is energising politically, emotionally and spiritually.

And connecting. So when I fly 20 hours in a metal tube across the planet, I am filled with deep gratitude that, when I land, I am gifted some smoked salmon—prepared by Emily and her family—caught in the rivers, smoked in the fires of Alaska. A precious morsel, that holds nutrition in every way.

So that’s some of what Dana Waranara gave to me… a gift made possible by a great leader in the making, Merindah Donnelly, who forged a hugely critical cultural space for those few days, which having been a part of will never leave me… and I believe has irrevocably changed us all.

In The Loop, artists and readers recommend great websites. First up is adventurous circus performer—on the streets, in the dark and with iPhones—Skye Gellmann, who writes,

“I like the Sideshow Circus Magazine because it deconstructs circus arts in an informed way. They have interviews and reviews, and also initiate other projects. These stimulate discussion about circus’s future and also its potential as an art form. All up, it’s a really great read, laid out well, and presents some of the most exciting circus being created now.” Skye Gellmann

An important documentary film that attracted unnecessary controversy when NSW Education Minister banned schools from screening it, later backed up by Premier Mike Baird with the comment, “I think tolerance is a good thing. But I think there should be some parameters around it.” The public backlash resulted in wide acceptance of the film. Director Maya Newell focuses on the experiences of children with gay parents in a film that has relevance for all families.

3 copies thanks to our friends at Madman Entertainment

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January 2016

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A sociable choreography of disobedience

Art ‘oil’ spill

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A spectacle of mourning

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Wildbirds & Peacedrums

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Stephanie Lake, Double Blind

Duplication

On with the culture wars

Art’s heavy lifting

Austerity fiction

Arts power grab

Who’s calling the shots?

This is how we die

Tomorrow’s Parties

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