Visceral is one of the first words to spring to mind when experiencing the works of Dani Marti, peering into layers and layers of necklaces, circular mounds of twisted reflectors, fecund protrusions of scourers and densely woven rope. The show really hits home, however, with the video works that are uncompromising in their almost abject viscerality.
Currently showing at Fremantle Arts Centre is a solo exhibition by Marti titled Black Sun, the first time his work has been seen here in such depth and diversity. The title refers to both the literal and metaphorical layers of darkness within the works, which hold you with their physical materiality and psychological resonance.
The exhibition includes a number of works from the series Mother. Here Marti has collected thousands of necklaces and painstakingly woven them into dense tapestries. The traditional feminine craft practices of weaving and macramé he was taught as a boy in Spain come to fruition here, reclaimed as contemporary art. The necklaces are intentionally selected as personal and intimate objects, having been worn so close to the skin. The works have stories and memories embedded in them. Together they also constitute a kind of memorial portraiture of women, acknowledging their history and a mother—Marti’s own. In the same room, on the floor, a television monitor displays a video work titled Llorana in which Marti’s mother is recorded listening to a piece of music, immersed in it to the point of tears, releasing her anxiety about her impending death.
Already with this abstract series of bead works and the related video, there is a sense of the intimate, of tangled flesh and personal relationships. Marti’s broader practice revolves around questions of identity, the self and the many possible threads of experience, struggle and existence. The relationship with his mother is a central theme, as are relationships in general. Marti is fascinated by their formation, their various idiosyncrasies and the disclosure of moments of intimacy.
Notes for Bob (video still), Dani Marti, Black Sun
photo courtesy the artist and Fremantle Arts Centre
Notes for Bob (video still), Dani Marti, Black Sun
In a project titled Notes for Bob [a work developed during an Australia Council residency in New York in 2012; Eds], Marti sought out a gay, blind man for the purpose of exploring intimacy and acknowledging sexuality despite disability. He met Bob, who became sexually aroused by a close embrace when sitting on Marti’s lap and guiding the artist to sing specific notes. The resulting video is physically confrontational and potentially ethically troubling—do we have the right to gaze upon such vulnerability? Deeply sensitive in the way it is filmed, it is technically, cinematically exquisite and in its quasi-documentary style Bob appears as the one in control with Marti submissive to his demands.
This project extends to another room occupied by a series of yellow and white polyester and nylon abstract works. Here a sound element is added, where the notes that so appealed to Bob are sung by 21 gay male volunteers, aged 17-72, in New York. As part of his engagement with Bob, Marti made this recording and gave it to him, gifting him the experience of ongoing stimulation and connection with the gay community.
It is this kind of complex, interwoven, fetishistic narrative of personal entanglements that drives many of Marti’s works, making them both brutal and aesthetically striking. He effectively communicates a sense of closeness to his subjects, to the point of claustrophobia. For the Black Sun exhibition a new work was commissioned. Titled Prelude 1, it is a large, bulging circle of customised corner cube reflectors [three-sided glass prisms; EDs] and glass beads. It conveys the layers of darkness, layers of shimmering black that are alluded to in the idea of a black sun. Its clash of beauty and ugliness makes it both attractive—because of its dark pearly allure—yet repulsive, given its writhing, medusa-like materiality.
The obsessiveness in Black Sun gets under your skin, forcing a confrontation with the very real presence of bodies in the world. The works traverse multiple paths of meaning from the maternal relationship to the darker realms of various sexual encounters. Marti refers to his practice as Baroque Minimalism. The word Baroque originates from the Portuguese term ‘barroco’ or Spanish ‘barrueco,’ both of which translate as misshapen or imperfect pearl. This image of a pearl, all shiny and opulent, as distorted and flawed, is a fitting point of entry for considering Dani Marti’s works. They exhibit all the drama, exuberance and tension of the Baroque within the tight frame of Minimalism—outrageous excess contained.
Pleasure Chest, detail, Dani Marti, Black Sun
photo courtesy the artist and Fremantle Arts Centre
Pleasure Chest, detail, Dani Marti, Black Sun
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Dani Marti, Black Sun, Fremantle Arts Centre, 7 Feb-28 March
On her acerbic, off-the-cuff podcast, I Seem Fun, comedian Jen Kirkman regularly riffs on the modern annoyance of being forced to engage in customer service small talk so gratuitous it becomes ridiculous, involving both participants in a meaningless charade of sincerity. Kirkman would surely sympathise with the protagonist of Anomalisa, Michael Stone, a motivational speaker specialising in customer relations who, despite his occupation, reacts to every customer service platitude with terseness and a growing sense of alienation.
The erosion of authenticity in relationships is at the fore of Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson’s Kafkaesque fable for our corporatised age. The painstaking craftsmanship of stop-motion animation, so often used to depict fairy tales, proves the perfect medium for heightening the dreamlike subjectivity Kaufman so favours: that sensation of the unreal coexisting with the real. The world of Anomalisa is warm-hued and fuzzy-edged as Michael is propelled through the soft, anonymous surrounds of plane, airport, taxi and hotel—those contemporary limbos in which the film’s action occurs.
All the characters have sturdy figures and clearly segmented faces, like masks—a not insignificant fact as the film progresses. Despite this, Michael’s face, with its frequently furrowed brow, has a realistic and moving expressiveness, contrasting with the crash test dummy-like blandness of every other visage he encounters. As he exits the airport, listening to Delibes’ opera Lakmé through headphones (sung not by sopranos but by an undistinguished male voice) the realisation dawns that there’s something very strange going on in Michael’s world—yet something strangely familiar.
It’s a world—here represented by an animated Cincinnati—characterised by the rote phrases that mediate commercial interactions everywhere: the safety instructions on the plane, the commonplace courtesies of the hotel staff. Everything relates to marketing: for the taxi driver, the Flower Duet from Lakmé is a British Airways ad and nothing more. The ubiquity of all this corporatese is soporific, stultifying; ultimately horrifying. Parts of Anomalisa are particularly reminiscent of that scene in Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovitch (scripted by Kaufman) where the eponymous actor steps through the portal into his own head, only to flee moments later from the hideous proliferation of selves that confront him.
Making of Anomalisa, Paramount Pictures
Crashing through the uniformity comes Lisa, a character whose spontaneity and individuality seems to embody what Michael has been missing until this moment. Her anomalous appearance, contrasted with the film’s cultivation of oppressive sameness, has the impact of a miracle. In a continuation of the film’s commercial refrain, however, she’s also in a sense Michael’s client, an employee of a snack food company here to see him present his talk on customer service. Might Lisa represent an escape for Michael from the banality that torments him?
For almost its entirety, Anomalisa is a journey inside one person’s head (echoes of Malkovitch again) that leaves us pondering universal questions. How genuine are our relationships? Can love really set us free, or are we ultimately prisoners of our own minds? “I’ve been running for a long time,” Michael says. As underlined by the perpetuated triteness in the title of his book, How may I help you help them?, there’s a strong suggestion Michael Stone will never outrun this hell of his own making.
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Anomalisa, directors Charlie Kaufman, Duke Johnson, writer Charlie Kaufman, cinematography Joe Passarelli, art direction John Joyce, editing Garret Elkins, score Carter Burwell, distributor Paramount, 2015
Dance in Francophone countries has held its own interests for a while, separate from the lineages we are more familiar with in Australia (butoh, American postmodern and the German Tanztheater). It is characterised, I would naively generalise, by a movement away from the body and towards philosophy, concept. Through the efforts of the formerly Paris-based Artistic Director of Melbourne’s Dancehouse, Angela Conquet, we have been exposed to important French choreographers—recently Xavier Le Roy and Boris Charmatz (who will deliver the keynote address for the 2016 Biennale of Sydney). Still, immersing oneself in Francophone dance is always like attempting to converse in a slightly foreign language, with the realisation that dictionary knowledge sometimes falls short in a real conversation.
Kevin Trappeniers, Asymptote
Théâtre de L’L is one of Brussels’ most important independent venues for dance, with an emphasis on research and exploration (as well as posting performances online as a small part of their annual program). It was in this generous context that I saw young artist Kevin Trappeniers’ Asymptote, a product of long research into dance (or rather, in his words, “wordless performance”) as an exercise in creating a multisensory landscape on stage.
Asymptote, in mathematics, is a line to which a curve approaches ever closer, without ever touching, and the dance I saw used lighting, bodies, sound and space to create a number of such slow movements towards and away from unity and clarity. A body resting in front of a mirror, in almost total darkness, splits apart into two dancers. It is extraordinary to note, later on, that the bodies which appeared identical are not even of the same sex, let alone physically alike.
From this moment of closeness, the male and the female dancer start to diverge. Unison movement splits into dissenting limbs. The scenes morph at snail’s pace, but the tension is intoxicating. By the end of the work, an hour later, the man is walking into a wall of bright light, the woman standing apart. The landscape of a medieval purgatory, an in-between place hard to represent because hard to imagine, has been transformed into a harshly contoured industrial hell.
Asymptote, Kevin Trappeniers
photo copyright Kevin Trappeniers
Asymptote, Kevin Trappeniers
Asymptote is the work of a young maker, but one who knows how to control his weaknesses. The stage landscape of Asymptote is held together less by choreographic mastery of body, or conceptual mastery of themes, than by the rigid chiaroscuro of the lighting, which imposes an extremely strict control on what the audience sees and perceives. The barren, purgatory-like landscape of a stage is revealed, as the light rises, to be no more than a heap of magnetic tape—and yet, as long as the light controls our perception, it is more ominous than anything I have seen.
Indeed, ‘control’ is the key word in trying to explain the qualities of this work, which offers very little playfulness. There is an unmistakable visual reference to northern European religious art, of the Matthias Grünewald sort: limbs are chiselled out of darkness, classical poses abound. And just as in medieval representations of crucifixion, a macabre selective lighting is used to camouflage a technical ignorance of the material represented. Where another purely visual painter of stage, like Philippe Duquesne, may use the same ingredients of space, flesh, objects, and silence, to build and dismantle entire worlds of associations without losing a light touch, Trappeniers must hold us in a choke to achieve the same effect.
Simon Renaud, Justin Gionet, Solitudes Duos
Daniel Léveillé, Solitudes Duos
Montreal-based Daniel Léveillé is at the other end of his career: he has had an independent choreographic practice since before Trappeniers was born, and his Solitudes Duos showed precisely the playfulness and confident fluidity that is lacking in Asymptote, a playfulness that comes from mastery of material. (This is not to say that Trappeniers should be compared to Léveillé: rather, that watching dance works in a sequence makes one ponder the artistic qualities that come at different stages of an artist’s creative practice.)
Solitudes Duos builds on Léveillé’s multi-award winning Solitudes Solo, a work which marked a change of direction for the choreographer after a decade of intense exploration of nudity in performance. As in the Solos, the dancers are dressed only in briefs: it is a gesture, however minimal, that shifts focus from the muscular expression of the individual body and towards the interaction of two bodies between each other and with the music.
It takes a while to understand what Solitudes Duos is about, as pairs of dancers—two men, two women, man and woman—appear in six parts, composed carefully to six musical pieces, starting with Bach and ending with The Beatles. Each duet brings two bodies into a relationship that seems not illustrated, but decided, by the music: synchronicity and distance in Baroque gives rise to tight interlocking and the embraces of rock’n’roll. It is as if the historical era, via its musical production, enables or limits the intimacy and interaction between two bodies. There is creeping, crawling, enmeshment, slow descent into each others’ arms, frenzied seated hugs; there is politesse, formality, first love, throes of passion, power struggles. It seems like every possibility of the duet form is explored in these six choreographies, but all the technical virtuosity accumulates without offering a theme until the very end.
The movement becomes increasingly athletic and tricky: dancers jumping onto and spinning each other; complex interlockings; until eventually, and not without humour, the man is suspending a woman, her belly balancing on his shoulder, every limb spread, to the incessant repeating riffs of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”, John Lennon’s passionate ode to Yoko Ono, one of the greatest songs about the weight of desire on one’s soul.
In a lesser choreographer’s hands, this would be the apex of glib, but Solitudes Duos comes together, spectacularly and masterfully, in that culminating moment, showing the rawness of two bodies held together by invisible threads of emotion, desire and intent.
It is as if all of humanity is nakedly displayed on stage, regardless of how clothed Léveillé’s dancers are. The philosophical musing on sociability and desire, so French to my eyes, re-acknowledges the body as fact: limiting and enabling. Employing the same precision with which his dancers catch each other mid-tricky-flight, Daniel Léveillé lets the conceptual threads of the choreography come apart, and the work ‘works.’ It may take decades of practice for Kevin Trappeniers to develop the same lightness of touch.
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Asymptote, concept, direction Kevin Trappeniers, performers Manon Avermaete, Kevin Trappeniers, L’L – Brussels Dance!, Brussels 23–25 Sept, 2015; Asymptote will be performed at Arts Centre De Werf in Bruges (BE) on October 12, 2016.
Solitudes duos, choreography Daniel Léveillé, performers Mathieu Campeau, Ellen Furey, Esther Gaudette, Justin Gionet, Brianna Lombardo, Emmanuel Proulx, Simon Renaud, Faits d’hiver festival, Théâtre de la Cité internationale, Paris 25-26 Jan
In Refuse The Hour, visual artist William Kentridge and composer Philip Miller transform their installation The Refusal Of Time into an abstract, operatic work of the German muzik theater tradition. Kentridge himself appears, delivering rambling monologues on how we experience time in the wake of the invention of photography (1839), cinematography (1894), relativistic science (1905), telegraphy (1830s), railway travel (1820s), the international standardisation of time (1840+) and other developments in the history of Modernism.
The piece is an energetic, scattershot chamber work, overflowing with action. As a small cabaret ensemble plays, dancer Dada Masilo turns, flips and rotates in surprising loops about her ever supple hips, Ann Masina moves from singing Bizet to delivering a resonant defence of the right of locals to set midday according to their own local conditions (“Give us back our sun!” she exhorts at different registers), while Joanna Dudley performs vocal flights of fancy, sprechstimme and near-concrete poetry (at one point she reconfigures Masina’s text into assonant nonsense combinations). Actor Thato Motlhaolwa and the musicians often also move centrestage to join in.
Kentridge’s trademark films of charcoal-drawn animations, stuttering black and white filmic fantasies and ripped fragments of books, maps and text in motion, also appear, most of these adapted from the earlier installation. The stage features an assortment of antique-looking contraptions and noise-makers, notably a mechanised drumkit suspended from the ceiling, and numerous megaphones through which the singers holler and which also have speakers lodged in them. Singing, Dudley holds one of these at her waist; after a small delay, a distorted, processed version of the same is emitted. Techniques like the use of an acoustically amplified violin (a stroh, or horn violin) such as were employed in 1900s recording studios render the production of sound very much a spatial and theatrical event.
Refuse the Hour
photo John Hodgkiss
Refuse the Hour
The mixed cast performs in a way which neither obfuscates racial and ethnic origins, nor focuses on them. Masilo’s dance synthesises African elements into a multidirectional fluidity and African percussion contributes to songs and interludes. Apart from noting that the enforcement of clock-based time was central to colonialism, Kentridge elides his status as a post-Apartheid artist emerging from South Africa’s fraught history. The presence of a weighty, charismatic, cerebral white man who speaks for humanity as he stands beside a slight, mute, black, female dancing body does nevertheless rankle.
The history within which Kentridge places his work is, however, ultimately European and global far more than it is regional or specific. Indeed, he makes obsessive reference to those Euro-American artists who responded to international Modernism and its effects. His videos have long recalled the work of early filmmakers such as Georges Méliès, here represented by a sequence set in a Faustian astronomer’s laboratory. Kentridge’s illustrations are straight out of German Expressionism and woodblock prints of 1880-1935. The overall mode of Refuse the Hour is Dada or Futurist cabaret, with its blend of performance art, projections, faux-lecture, sculptural elements, vaudevillian action, and sense of play. Dudley is fitted out as a “New Woman” of the 1920s, complete with page-girl haircut and a simple, angular, blue dress. Masilo’s costume is adorned with red and black Russian script in Constructivist style, though no reference to Russia or revolutionary Socialism occurs. In one attractive tableau, Masilo places her arms and legs into the megaphones and is rotated by Kentridge on a small round platform, literally embodying Bauhaus dramaturg Oskar Schlemmer’s figure The Abstract from his Triadic Ballet (1912-32).
Refuse the Hour
photo John Hodgkiss
Refuse the Hour
Moreover, in a film Masilo appears as Loïe Fuller in the latter’s signature Serpentine Dance (an 1894 imitation of which was famously filmed for Edison), complete with batons under her dress to manipulate the fabric in swirls about her. Although much of Miller’s score has a delicate, fractured gestural quality punctuated by brass flourishes, several sections felt like Berthold Brecht and Kurt Weil’s Threepenny Opera (1928), with their wheezing, corrupted music-hall feel.
William Kentridge’s genius is to popularise historic Modernist avant-gardism via his immersive installations, but I wonder what he adds? Relativity has inspired everyone from Marinetti to Robert Wilson and Phillip Glass, and as far as relativistic multimedia opera goes, the familiarity of Refuse the Hour’s language lacks the wondrous sense of mystery which the recent revival tour of Einstein on the Beach maintained. While the sculptural formalism of performance art means that logical associations can be loose, Refuse the Hour seems dramaturgically dissolute. Its thematic links function at a level of high generality, and the alternation of monologue with explosive action produces a remarkably predictable rhythm. Refuse the Hour is immensely enjoyable, but I question the critical positioning of Kentridge as an equal among those whose work he so effectively sews together.
Perth International Arts Festival 2016, Refuse the Hour, by William Kentridge, composer Philip Miller, dancer Dada Masilo, video design Catherine Meyburgh; Perth Concert Hall, 12-14 Feb
In recent years contemporary performance has seen a renewed interest in tactile perception. Theorists talk of lingering in the texture of what you see. Artists create new ways to experience time and the materiality of a performance space. Sound designers speak of hearing with your whole body. The shows that affected me most at this year’s PuSh Festival had these qualities of lingering, of spatial tactility and deep listening.
Le Temps scellé (France)
Textural repetition structures the choreography of Le Temps scellé by Compagnie Nacera Belaza (France). A figure, a woman, ethereal in the dim light, spins gently over and over again. It’s a quiet turning that promises nothing but self-involved action. She never stops, so I can’t get a fix on her, only on the motion. The near darkness gives her a grainy quality, as in an under-exposed video. Looping samples of recorded vocals (gospel?) and North African drumming swirl through a number of speakers placed around the room, contributing to the subtle sense of vertigo. Sometimes I feel I can see a second ghostly figure at the very edge of available light. This turns out to be more than an apparition. She seems to be the twin of the first woman—the same braided hair, fluent body and loose fitting clothes—and joins her. Together they spiral through the space. I enter a slightly altered state. Eventually the dance subsides, but the turning continues within me for some time.
Eternal (USA)
Eternal by Daniel Fish (USA) offers repetition of a starker kind. We watch two video screens hung next to each other. On the left: the face and upper body of a woman in a red sleeveless top against a white wall. On the right: a man in a pale striped shirt. Although they’ve been recorded in the same room they seem confined to their respective frames, unable to cross over to each other. The impression of isolation is reinforced by Fish’s decision to have the actors’ eyelines turned slightly out, away from each other, rather than the traditional manner of having them look in toward each other. This creates room for audience inclusion—not literally, but I do feel like I’m getting between two people who keep missing each other. For two hours the actors cycle through the same five-minute scene, taken from the end of the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004): “I’m not perfect,” “I can’t see anything I don’t like about you,” “But you will.” While attempting variations of rhythm and tone, the actors endure the delights and tortures of repetition. I ride waves of interest and boredom.
Repetition gives way to analysis: as the woman and man play out a middle-aged mating ritual I suspect their behaviour is simply the by-product of our evolutionary machinery. I then ponder their socio-economic backgrounds. Who are these two white, seemingly middle-class New Yorkers, and why should I suffer them? Sometimes the actors’ faces twist or crumple into the weirdest shapes. The woman cries and gets mascara on her cheeks. The man’s grey stubble seems to grow longer. Analysis gives way to self consciousness: how am I supposed to behave in the face of this? How much longer can I stand it? Then it’s over. It’s been frustrating and intriguing. After 23 repetitions of the same scene I feel a sense of accomplishment. (Watch an excerpt posted by the artist.)
Adriano and Raimondo Cortese, Intimacy
photo Paulo Pacheco
Adriano and Raimondo Cortese, Intimacy
Intimacy (Australia)
Intimacy by Ranters Theatre (Australia) begins with one man gently asking another about his life. “So you’re a history teacher. Do you like history?” “Not so much the teaching of it anymore.” After a number of exchanges the two men turn to the audience. They seem to be listening as much as looking. We look back, perhaps mulling over the questions and reflecting on our own lives. Or maybe we’re just observing the two men more intently. There’s something in the way they’ve opened the space that invites closeness. This reflects Ranters’ practice of developing a show through a process of deep improvisation. It depends on the level of ‘nakedness’ each performer brings to the exercise. The resulting nuance of interpersonal exchange in Intimacy leads to surprise after surprise: confessions of self-harm, of paranoid deceit and quiet suffering.
The very notion of personal revelation is, however, put in doubt. The performers don’t tell their own stories but stories others have shared with them. In the talkback, director-performer Adriano Cortese says, “It’s really about us.” What does it mean when an actor reveals himself through someone else’s story: “this is me, this isn’t me”? Not being able to know for sure is as it should be. To make someone else fit what is familiar to you is to confine them to your own projections. Anyway, how well can you really know someone? Maybe you can only know the feeling of them.
Riding on a Cloud (Lebanon)
Rabih Mroué (Lebanon) returns to PuSh, this time with his brother Yasser, in Riding on a Cloud. Yasser’s is a story of surviving a sniper attack during the Lebanese civil war. A bullet in the brain has left him partially paralysed and unable to recognise things or people in pictures, including himself. Yasser reclaims his past and takes control of his present by making videos that reflect the way he now sees images—less defined, washes of colour rather than precise figures, transformations of light. There’s usually no inherent story to the videos. Instead they provide a variety of textures: ways of seeing, but also of feeling the world.
Yasser, however, finds it hard to escape a personal narrative that turns on the before-and-after of the sniper event. Director Rabih Mroué challenges this narrative: as a reading of history, personal or societal, it’s too narrowly causal. It ignores too much. On the one hand we watch Yasser on stage fatalistically playing the contents of a stack of about 20 DVDs, one leading to the next—each one a video he’s made since recovering from the attack. On the other hand we are told that Yasser’s story is banal, unimportant, one of many such stories. The sniper’s action can’t be the singular cause of his current situation. It was part of a complex network of actions. And the effects on Yasser’s life are part of a broad spectrum of consequences. It was never a certainty he would live or die, suffer from aphasia, make art videos, marry the woman he married or perform Riding on a Cloud.
Charles Demers, Leftovers
photo Tim Matheson
Charles Demers, Leftovers
Leftovers (Canada)
Unlike the works described above, Leftovers by Neworld Theatre (Canada) isn’t concerned with texture, space or theatrical form. It is, however, a sharp critique of capitalism by avowed socialist, former communist and stand-up comedian Charles Demers. With satirical wit and self-deprecating charm, Demers reminds us of a time when concepts like universal health care, the welfare state and old age pensions weren’t shorthand for weakness of character. In one incisive passage he describes how pension cheques and the Medicare system allowed his family to survive the ordeal of his mother’s struggle with cancer. Point well made.
But while Leftovers is an entertaining and intelligent critique of capitalism, it isn’t a great critique of bourgeois theatre. In the latter part of the show Demers and director Marcus Youssef fall into the trap of collapsing the political into the domestic. Sentimentality becomes the dominant note when Demers seeks hope for the future in the birth of his daughter. Family videos, snapshots and a quavering voice unnecessarily soften his previously cutting political rhetoric. Having said that, I loved seeing Neworld return to a theatre of aggressive political satire. It’s what they do best.
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PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, Vancouver, 19 Jan-7 Feb
Hear Keith Gallasch test his responses to the Sydney Theatre Company’s Arcadia and The Leaps’ Perch, playing at Belvoir for the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras.
Sydney Theatre Company, Arcadia, writer Tom Stoppard, director Richard Cottrell, performers Blazey Best, Ryan Corr, Honey Debelle, Andrea Demetriades, Jonathan Elsom, Georgia Flood, Julian Garner, Glenn Hazeldine, Josh McConville, Will McDonald, Michael Sheasby, Justin Smith, set designer Michael Scott-Mitchell, costumes Julie Lynch, lighting Damien Cooper, composer & sound design Steve Francis; Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, 9 Feb-2 April
Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras & The Leaps: Perch, writers Brian Carbee, Sarah Carradine, director Sarah Carradine, performer Brian Carbee, design Julie Nelson. lighting Tara Ridley, sound design Lachlan Bostock; Belvoir Downstairs, 9-21 Feb
Top image credit: Georgia Flood in Sydney Theatre Company’s Arcadia, photo Heidrun Löhr
Erin Pike, That’swhatshesaid
photo Tim Summers
Erin Pike, That’swhatshesaid
Over 300 years of hard-won rights (read AC Grayling’s Towards the Light or Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights, both 2007) are being eroded every year by neoliberal governments in the name of endless growth, lower taxes, heightened security and deregulation, the latter creating a new kind of ramped up ‘free market’ which erodes the likes of copyright and an artist’s right to be properly remunerated. Copyright (established in the form of England’s Copyright Act of 1709) entails many complications (hence intellectual property lawyers). Here are two stories about rights and complications that we came upon recently.
The first appears to involve a standard problem: the licensee might not have secured the right licence. But the resolution was odd. Publisher Samuel French, the licenser of performing rights for the Harold Pinter estate, informed The Wooster Group that the rights to perform a preview of the writer’s first play, The Room [1957], in New York did not extend to Los Angeles where the work was due to be premiered. This was then modified: perform it, but ‘it must not be reviewed’—an artistic and marketing challenge for The Wooster Group and a restraint on the freedom of the press.
The second story, which also involves Samuel French, is stranger. The publisher and Dramatist Play Services [DPT] sent a ‘cease and desist’ letter to Gay City, producer of That’swhatshesaid. Playwright Courtney Meaker has taken text and stage directions from the most successful plays of 2014-15, all but two by men, and ‘cut and pasted’ them into a critique of current male writing about women and the challenges for actresses who take on the roles. (Accounts of the performance suggest that Jen Pike is an artist to watch out for.)
Gay City’s attorney Jeff Nelson has mounted a fascinating fair use case, stating in particular that the use of the writers’ plays is “transformative,” that Meaker is not copying or appropriating them.
Australian artists have done battle with the Samuel Beckett estate, as have their international peers, and Belvoir with the Arthur Miller estate over director Simon Stone’s changing the end of Death of a Salesman. It’s not inconceivable that sooner or later we might have a case like Samuel French and DPT versus the makers of That’swhatshesaid, given an increasing number of theatrical works no longer comprise just storytelling, but make rhetorical, often political statements that draw on the public, governmental, theatrical and literary record. Appropriation grows more complex. RT
RealTime issue #131 Feb-March 2016
Dancing with Death
photo Hideto Maezawa
Dancing with Death
However stylised, folk dance inevitably follows a basic walking pattern. The foot may flex, stomp or hover but, as choreographer Russell Dumas used to say, dancing is so often a matter of left-right, left-right. Pichet Klunchun’s Dancing with Death (see video) is no exception. Large figures move through the audience to rhythmic, melodic Thai music. They wear masks and sport garish, psychedelic outfits woven from bright nylon threads. But they walk just like us…bipedally. The Gods have come to Earth. They are playful and plentiful. Swaying from left to right, they tread lightly on the land of men and women.
The music gives way to high pitched sound, an amplified tinnitus that ruptures the folksiness. The figures retreat. We enter an abstract space and time, able now to focus on the solitary shape that dominates the space.
A twisted ellipse rises and falls, creating a perpetual, deformed, oval pathway for the dancers who enter one by one and slowly walk in a daisy chain of continuous action. The work becomes durational, quietly existential. While everyone treads the same path (of existence), there is room for individual expression: a woman skips joyfully, a man lunges, another arches backwards. There is thus a play between the personal and the impersonal.
When the dancers come together they exert a palpable force, the force of common humanity. After a while, a handful of the dancers swoops along the sloped pathway, slowly turning at its peak to swoop down again. This is where the technical challenges of the piece become apparent. These dancers are classically trained. Their daily practice is conducted on flat ground, whereas this set design calls for the ability to manage its changing gradient. The dancers struggle with this: we see the tension in their faces, heads and necks and in certain mannerisms—defensive habits.
Pichet Klunchun, Dancing with Death
photo Hideto Maezawa
Pichet Klunchun, Dancing with Death
Pichet Klunchun displays none of this. His body is at one with the rise and fall of the oval pathway. There is no mannerism, nothing personal, just consummate skill. His gestures—the continuous rolling of hands and arms—offer an experience of pure duration. In a work that addresses life and death, this is key. We the audience need to feel the spaciousness of time, the universality of matter. Klunchun is at once godlike in his dancing yet human in the need to compose himself, to achieve what he wants to achieve. He is mortal like us.
There is another way of looking at the dancers’ difficulties with this piece, beyond the criticism that the work is not yet settled in highly skilled bodies, and that is that these dancers are in the midst of life, encountering that which lies beyond the known. If the work is not a theatrical representation of life in the face of death, but rather a lived enunciation of it, then perhaps we can accept their struggle. They are like us and we are like them.
Dancing with Death is situated in the spiritual everyday. It boasts liminal figures: gods and the godlike. The work ends with the return of the folkloric gods. Yes we die but that’s not all. Existence is fringed with the incorporeal, a beyond that appears in our peripheral vision. This is something we may feel but cannot know for sure.
Dancing with Death was commissioned by Esplanade—Theatres on the Bay (Singapore) and co-produced by Performing Arts Meeting in Yokohama 2016 Executive Committee, Arts Centre Melbourne and Adelaide Festival Centre OzAsia Festival.
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Pichet Klunchun Dance Company, Dancing with Death, choreography Pichet Klunchun; Kanagawa Arts Theatre, Yokohama, Japan, 7 Feb
Mickey Mahar, Miguel Gutierrez, Age & Beauty Part 1
photo Ian Douglas
Mickey Mahar, Miguel Gutierrez, Age & Beauty Part 1
There’s that tired analogy: the dancer is the paint to the choreographer’s canvas. Sigh. For a medium that is activated by the people who perform it, it seems that dancers are often relegated to compositional elements—the choreographer just splashing and dabbing them into shape—rather than artists in their own right. Once, in a group conversation, a prominent Melbourne arts writer was surprised to learn that dancers sometimes even “contribute to the choreography.” Suppressing that same exasperated sigh, we all politely informed her that this happens all the time.
I spoke with Miguel Gutierrez, an artist who cringes at the limited titles of choreographer or dancer, although he reputedly claims both. He was about to present a trilogy of works, collectively titled Age & Beauty, at New York Live Arts. “I just get so bored of the fact that we can’t accept interdisciplinarity now without making a big stink about it. So many choreographers are also writers or are also painters.”
Having been friends with Miguel for several years, I feel compelled to refer to him by his first name. In arts writing, this familiarity is sometimes frowned upon. I have found it impossible to divorce intimacy from dance and criticism, and prefer it that way. Miguel also has foregrounded intimacy and personal relationships throughout his body of work, and Age & Beauty has focused that interest.
“I feel like it’s always, in a way, how I start. From thinking about who the people should be, and how they are in the work, that’s always where it goes. And then I think—in the writing of some fucking grant [application]—I was talking about how this assembly of people is sort of like my idea of a future notion of a dance company, or something…knowing that the cast would be this kind of motley crew of folks [and] that I wanted to foreground the idea that ‘Here is a group of dancers. This is the dance. These are the dancers.’”
We dancers refer to the “body,” as if there is one essential body universally possessed, rather than distinct people with different histories, character and autonomy. A dancer’s moment of execution is exactly the thing we observe; their own artistry revealed. Why then should it seem strange to centre conversation around a dance work on the dancer who danced it?
In Part 1 of Age & Beauty—Mid-Career Artist/Suicide Note or &:-/, there is Mickey Mahar—a 20-something, translucently white, avian male, his aloofness disguising sexual hunger. With no warning he is four feet in the air, unsure of how he will find the floor again, his limbs cartoonishly long. Mickey makes for a deliberately strange coupling with Miguel.
“I also think of the old adage, that the quickest way to see the difference between two people is to make them do the same thing. Right? So I love how it highlights this insane difference between Mickey and me. A place that Mickey and I really meet is in our shared interest in this hyper-specificity. You know, like anal let’s-go-for-it kind of dancing, because he was trained as an Irish step dancer. And he’s incredible—he’s like champion calibre.”
Boulé’s reputation precedes her. Her work is performance and when she is at work you marvel at it. It’s hard to detect a trace of self-consciousness because she’s so attentive to the job of performing. In Part 2 she performs the entirety of her role from Miguel’s Last Meadow (2009), including her now-famous James Dean impersonation, all in hyper fast motion. It’s a race between her and the work. Inexplicably, she never falters, arriving in precarious place after place with utmost assurance at lightning speed. How does she arrange herself for a half-second and imprint the wholeness of that moment in your mind, and do this every second?
“It’s become almost alarming to me when I see dancers who don’t seem to have any kind of self-consciousness around that. Everyone’s between 25 and 35, often they’re all white, certain kind of body, and even a practice that feels uniformly shared. It just seems kind of strange, that that’s just an inherited idea.
“At some point it became interesting for me to really look to theatre and to film as a kind of inspiration for how casting is thought of, where you’re getting these specific, different people to fulfil different visual representations. Because, of course, visual representation is a part of (Ha! ‘a part of!!’)—an enormous part of the experience when you’re an audience member.
“But I feel like we’re just entering this moment where it’s impossible to not think about who we place on stage. It just feels so major to me. Especially in this moment of discussion of representational politics in this country with the Black Lives Matter movement and especially in queer politics—the emergence of transgender discourse becoming really the frontline. It just feels like as far as I’m concerned we’re forever shifted. And dance can choose to stay behind or move with it, you know? Or even advance it, I’m not sure yet.”
This article has been distilled by Rennie McDougall from a conversation with Miguel Gutierrez which appeared on Culturebot.
Read Jana Perkovic’s vivid account of DEEP AEROBICS, in which “Gutierrez employs every weapon in the arsenal of immersive performance to create a collective dance experience…that soon [has] us rather un-self-consciously dancing, touching walls, rolling on the floor, fondling each other and undressing to a serious level of nudity as the space heats up.”
Paris, France. The Palais de Tokyo—an ostentatious ground zero for Contemporary Art. You enter a darkened circular room, about five metres in diameter. No seats, so you plonk yourself down on the black carpet. A loud sub-harmonic drone will continue for 45 minutes while you move your head around to watch a 360º computer animation, continually evolving from left to right, projected from a metre off the floor rising up to a low ceiling. The animation is in six sections, each being a dramatic data-scape of global activity.
Time and again, the screen rolls out a wire-frame-style global map in what looks like the standard Gall Stereographic design. Reams of data stream across the inverted screenic cylinder in which you are interred. The point conjectured continually is that the fluxive state of the world’s territories is defined not by geography or even borders, but by the movement between those zones by migrants and refugees, be they welcomed, employed, displaced, terrorised, interred, settled or expelled. Their shifting presence is charted by a suite of markers manifesting their transient occupancy in those six sections: (i) Population Shifts: Cities; (ii) Remittances: Sending Money Home; (iii) Political Refugees and Forced Migration; (iv) Natural Catastrophes; (v) Rising Seas, Sinking Cities; (vi) Speechless and Deforestation.
Titled EXIT and based on quotes from Paul Virilio’s Stop Eject (2010), it’s a prestigious immersive data visualisation of the frightening momentum of transmigratory changes in ‘the world.’ The result is a mix of futurologist trend-casting, statistical white paper reporting to agitate government policy, theoretical discoursing on the rootless identity resulting from such flux and indeterminacy, and a good dose of Cold War-era spookery for those who get scared at just the mention of the word ‘future.’ Each of the animation’s six sections has been precisely mapped and motioned in accordance with data which has been statistically recorded, encoded, analysed, translated and extrapolated into the near future, utilising a variety of motion effects which literally remap a panoramic image of the global map.
The production itself is formidable, wrangling not only the data but the crew assembled for its materialisation: philosophical ‘urbanist’ Paul Virilio, artists/architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, architect-artist Laura Kurgan and statistician-artist Mark Hansen, plus additional input from even more scientists and geographers. EXIT’s six parts build upon the first four, initially exhibited as Stop Eject in 2008 at the Fondation Cartier in Paris. With its big concepts writ large, EXIT ultimately smacks of grandstanding, intimidation and the type of passive-aggressive address to which so much politically committed art succumbs despite its often laudable concerns. Reviewing the installation within a contemporary art space—and considering that so many of its producers insist on hyphenating their role with the word ‘artist’—warrants an assessment of what art is occurring here if any, and why it can or cannot be detected.
Feeling like a child seated in the dark at a high school hi-tech geoscience presentation, I am not at all impressed by the avalanches, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions of numbingly symbolic data which drive EXIT’s data simulation. Firstly, it plays the cheap trick that contemporary art continues to fall for due to its infatuation with being contemporary above all else: verifiable statistics are presented to determine outcomes in form, tone and visualisation, as if nothing is being ‘interpreted.’ The implication detourned through Foucault is that ‘the artist is dead’ and is now merely the conduit for passing along data researched from the world. This reality effect rarely escapes its own semiotic limitations. In EXIT’s dour anti-aesthetic visualisation, we get throbbing red for patches of burning forests (plus the sound of crackling); wavy numerical data for cities’ rising sea levels (plus the sound of glooping); national flags being eaten into for their currency being propped up by external exchanges (plus the sound of crumbling); and so on. It’s not much different from watching the news on TV.
Secondly, EXIT attempts a harshly ahistorical revision of centuries of artistic interpretation born of egocentric drive, by concocting an artsy take on McLuhan’s notions of mediation to present data ‘inartistically’ in order to let the facts speak for themselves. Its evocation of rollercoaster New York Stock Exchange data porn is as vulgar and delusional as U2 concert video banks. Plus its solitary bass drone is the work’s most tacky manipulation, using the same spook-fx of PlayStation shoot-em-ups, Hollywood dystopian sci-fi and ominous theatre sound design for international arts festivals. Here, symbolically, it bluntly declares the absence of music in the work to be the reality of our dehumanising world. Peddling ‘hard’ statistics in an art context—while claiming to be creating art like some newborn Duchamp—borders on insulting in the way the art hides behind statistics for fear of being rejected on purely personal, emotional, persuasive and anxious grounds.
The salient issue here is EXIT’s data visualisation implicitly escaping visual linguistics and semiotics. Undoubtedly, the hyper-vector fx-atomisation meta-algorithmic software for digital effects of today achieves its reality effect not via artist manipulation of renderable veneers, but by sheer complexity of pixel actioning and motioning which can be programmed to behave according to physical properties, modulations and simulations. However, this face-off between computer simulation and data visualisation unexpectedly echoes 19th century debates. Back then, the arguments were over Academic art (think Bouguereau, Cabanel, Makart, Gerôme) which strove to perfectly render and replicate the ideal essence of form, and Realist art (think Goya, Courbet, Millet, Corinth) which opposed art looking at its own techniques and surfaces rather than acknowledging the outside world and forging a way to depict its actuality. Paris is full of amazing museum collections which include both these politicised arguments in image-making. Hindsight allows one to be less fierce with judgement: Academic art is full of allusions to critical textuality and medium-based problematics, while Realist art can be utterly pompous and deluded in its grasp of the real.
Hindsight is absent in EXIT: it has its eyes fixed so firmly on a frightful future its persuasive data-visualisation borders on a digital recoding of Stalinist social realism. Paul Virilio is undoubtedly eloquent with his long-standing notions of speed being a material which shapes contemporary life, and is now angsting (just like Courbet et al) over how he can best represent the world outside as it flashes by. But like politicians painting landscapes on Sunday afternoons, EXIT is as audiovisually engaging as an Excel spreadsheet. Before entering the darkened 19th century panopticon-cum-zoetrope theatre to be regaled by the statistical apparitions of EXIT, one views a short vertical flat-screen film of Virilio (dressed, like all male intellectuals, as if they’re going fly-fishing somewhere in nature) walking along a cobble-stone boardwalk next to some idyllic Mediterranean seascape, waxing lyrical about crises, citizens, nomads, sedentaires, geopolitics and ultracities. As I listened to his ambling feet on pavement stones next to lapping waves, a phrase from another era came to mind: “Sous les paves, la plage!” (“Under the stones, the beach!”) Rethinking May ‘68 here with EXIT, I wondered how much he and the EXIT team thought about the very ground under their feet.
EXIT, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France, 25 Nov 2015-10 Jan 2016
EXIT was timed to correspond with COP21, the United Nations Conference on Climate Change. See also Sumugan Sivanesan’s vivid report on the Paris Climate Games and Minneapolis-based Northern Lights’ survey of exhibitions, installations and video works in ARTCOP21.
Pitting art against science rarely does favours to either, but when the science is of the mad variety and the art follows its own rigorous surrealist logic? That’s a fight that may be worth betting on. Or, at least, that’s what I was thinking throughout a recent show at La Mama which was by turns baffling and welcoming, generous and alienating. POINT 8 SIX is a work that is deliberately broken, and it challenges its viewer to reconstruct something from the pieces. There’s a sense that that assemblage will take as many different forms as there are audience members.
I’ve followed writer Tim Wotherspoon’s work for several years, over which he has demonstrated a sustained interest in the tactility of language, the way words can be played against one another like billiard balls and whether meaning or nonsense can result from accidental collisions and unexpected associations. Here he has produced an intriguing premise that puts that kind of experimentation into context, though it takes some time to get to.
Wotherspoon himself plays a crazed scientist in 2142 (I think) who has been tasked with sending operatives back in time to eliminate two genius sisters responsible for some kind of revolution that seems to extend to the breakdown of reality itself. We’re dumped right in the thick of this, with bizarre fragmentary dialogue, characters in time loops, alternate realities overlapping and metatheatrical devices juggled in at whim. That nothing makes a lick of sense for so long is very much mitigated by the fact that much of it is still entertaining—director Kirsten von Bibra maintains a shaggy-dog-story mood through which all of this seems to be going somewhere, if we only stick with it. Everyone overplays their roles with scenery-chewing glee, most notably Adam Cass as the idiot American would-be hero sent into the past again and again, eventually suffering “temporal spread” and scattering all over the spacetime continuum.
Tim Wotherspoon, Point Eight 6, La Mama Theatre
photo Kris Chainey
Tim Wotherspoon, Point Eight 6, La Mama Theatre
Early in the work the audience is addressed as ‘the system’ and positioned as a network of computers, and it’s possible that the strangeness of what we’re witnessing is just about what an intelligent machine would make of the messiness of human interaction. In the fallout is an East German army captain from 1971 who comes into possession of some David Bowie records from the future, and while this thread seems more indulgent than the rest—Wotherspoon admits he was listening to Bowie’s Berlin trilogy throughout the writing process—it’s also concrete enough to allow the observer some anchor amid all the narrative fractals.
The shredding of spacetime along with some serious damage to the sanity of the players gives Wotherspoon ample reason to mess around with language. Someone “talks like a bowl of Alsatians” while another complains, “You two sound like my ears.” There’s much delight behind this linguistic play, and a final opening out of the theatre itself sent an equally cheery ripple through the audience. It’s rare to find a theatremaker who trusts the crowd enough to throw them so far from the shore of sense, but reassuring that those behind this production are up to the task of reeling us back in.
Ella Caldwell, Matt Dyktynski, Village Bike, Red Stitch Theatre
photo Jodie Hutchinson
Ella Caldwell, Matt Dyktynski, Village Bike, Red Stitch Theatre
Red Stitch’s The Village Bike is another production with a great deal of faith in its audience. The work, by UK playwright Penelope Skinner, shifts from hilarious to confronting and back again without warning, and cunningly merges British sex farce with dark psychological drama.
The central figure is Becky, a young pregnant woman who has recently moved to a rural village with her husband. She’s one of the more fascinatingly ambiguous characters in recent memory, and one bound to incite powerful responses. A third of the way in I heard a voice behind me mutter, “I don’t think I like her at all…” and half an hour later followed up with an angry, “Now I’ve just about had enough of her!”
Becky’s pregnancy has coincided with a sudden blooming of sexual desire but partner John spurns her advances, preferring to bury himself in parenting books. She turns to porn for relief but soon takes up with a local Lothario and begins an increasingly destructive affair that includes rape fantasies, a young girl forced by necessity into prostitution and a kind of emotional abuse of a local tradesman.
Skinner seems to be consciously playing with the discord between various narratives of female sexual liberation—from Lady Chatterley’s Lover to bodice rippers—and the dangers of blurring fantasies and reality. The work is aware of the long, long tradition of women punished for expressing desire, but it doesn’t soften its conclusion with any type of redemption, either. It comes dangerously close to a morality tale, in fact, though where fault lies is left painfully open to debate.
If Becky’s choices both challenge the viewer while begging our empathy, husband John is a kind of caring villain of the sort I’ve not seen on a stage before. His attempts to provide for Becky eventually amount to controlling behaviour, and while he insists that caring is all that he does it comes across as patting a dog to death. That his partner may have any sort of interior life doesn’t seem to factor into his thinking, and neither does the possibility that she may know her body better than his books do.
The play was first read by the company some years ago and its difficulties—both thematically and in the large stage it demands—meant that it was shelved. But it lingered in company members’ minds enough that they had to present it, in the end, and the work will no doubt stay with its audiences, for better or worse or, more likely, a little of both.
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POINT 8 SIX, writer Tim Wotherspoon, director Kirsten von Bibra, lighting Kris Chainey; La Mama, 10-21 Feb; The Village Bike, writer Penelope Skinner, director Ngaire Dawn Fair, design Sophie Woodward, lighting Clare Springett, music & sound Ian Moorhead; Red Stitch Actors Theatre, Melbourne, 2 Feb-5 March
In a logical but equally lateral extension of the modus operandi favoured by photographer-performer William Yang, In Between Two features two artists, life stories, projected photographs and live music. Where Yang has often been accompanied by a musician, here the performers are both musicians and accompany each other. Having two artists allows for both solo turns and dialogue, all framed conversationally and at a trot, contrasting with Yang’s engagingly deliberate rhythms which are also attuned to the way he paces his slide projectors. The overall design (Eugyeene Teh) is more palpably an installation with its angled screens and, in the distance, a long trail of vines, descending as if from branches far above and about to spread onto the stage. It’s evocative of Darwin and the Philippines which both figure strongly in In Between Two. Yang and Annette Shun Wah are the show’s dramaturgs, doubtless aiding the performers in whittling their complex tales into shape. The director, who has enabled these relaxed and confident performers, is Suzanne Chaundy. Visual designer Jean Poole seamlessly melds photographs, film and video.
The performers are Chinese-Australian spoken word and hip hop artist Joel Ma aka Joelistics and Filipino-Dutch-Australian guitarist, producer and songwriter James Mangohig. Both are well-known in the music world but will be new to most theatre-goers with whom they generously share their family histories, having first swapped them with each other as they became friends.
James Mangohig with father and grandmother, In Between Two
photo Prudence Upton
James Mangohig with father and grandmother, In Between Two
Mangohig’s Filipino father and Dutch-Australian mother, who were initially Christian pen pals (he would send her his sermons), married and lived in Darwin where Mangohig played with the rock band in his preacher father’s church until doubt set in and he left for surfing and the hard-drinking life of a musician. There followed two marriages, eventual professional success and reconnection not only with his father (“Tatu became less judgmental”) but with his Filipino heritage through the beloved Lola (Tagalog for grandmother), who visited Australia and whose farm he recurrently visited and helped sustain.
Joel Ma’s beautiful, energetic Chinese grandmother came to Australia from Hong Kong when she was 17, had several children and co-founded Sydney’s legendary Chequers nightclub in Sydney in the 1930s (there are wonderful photographs and film footage). She entered into a ménage à trois with her husband (a drinker and gambler) and a business associate in the 40s and years later watched her business fail as the Vietnam War broke trade relations with Australian markets. Ma’s admiration for his grandmother suggests a deeply felt emotional and creative kinship.
Ma’s parents were inveterate travellers, his father in love with music, his mother politically engaged, inheritances immediately evident in the opening number in which he raps about dope, jobs, racism, ghosts and, aptly for the musical form, “a galloping mind” to Mangohig’s supple bass accompaniment. Later he speaks about his sense of being defined as an outsider in the era of Hanson, Howard and the Cronulla Riot and how hip hop spoke to him and many others as a way to express themselves (as he did with the band TZU).
Joel and James speak of themselves as each other’s therapists. They’re good for us too, expanding our sense of what it means to be Asian-Australian, to achieve a sense of cultural heritage, to escape the strict dictates of religion and family but also to reconcile and be able to turn life into art with music and wit. The sooner In Between Two is restaged and widely so, the better.
Yudai Kamisato, Wataru Omura, Mari Kodama, +51 Aviacón San Borja, Okazaki Art Theatre
photo Prudence Upton
Yudai Kamisato, Wataru Omura, Mari Kodama, +51 Aviacón San Borja, Okazaki Art Theatre
+51 Aviación, San Borja
“We can’t overthrow the government through theater. Youth is wasted and society just ignores their passion. And above all, it’s a complete lie that there is truth on the Internet.”
These words are spoken by a disaffected theatre director in Okazaki Art Theatre’s +51 Aviación, San Borja. It’s one of the festival outliers, an oddly engaging, highly lateral work about cultural displacement. The show received little critical attention, a pity. Let me recall the ‘story’ that +51 Aviación, San Borja tells because the mode of performance is at once informal, complex and often not at all literal.
On a wide stage with a carpet striped with bright colours and surtitles on the walls behind, the performers wander in and out of frame with bags and suitcases, a few domestic props and a portable radio that mutters away for most of the show, as if the story is just… happening. A young theatre director (Yudai Kamisato) of Japanese heritage returns from Japan to the country of his birth, Peru, after 20 years absence. In Japan he’d failed to establish a sense of connection with his ancestors, his predecessors before his family left for Peru in the 1920s (as many had since 1898 hoping to make money as labourers and return home).
Attempting to make sense of his predicament, Kamisato creates a kind of avatar, the radical leftist Japanese theatre director Seki Sano (1905-1996), a political exile who went to Europe and Russia, worked with Meyerhold, was purged by Stalin as “a dangerous Japanese” in 1938, visited the US and went on to found contemporary theatre in Mexico. Having felt empty at the gravesite of his father’s predecessors in Okinawa, Kamisato fantasises conversations with Sano (a masked Wataru Omura) and a hostile theatre critic, preparing himself in effect for his return to Peru. But politically he’s no Seki, having no understanding, for example, of the island ownership disputes between China and Japan he hears about in Okinawa.
Yudai Kamisato, Wataru Omura, Mari Kodama, +51 Aviacón San Borja, Okazaki Art Theatre
photo Prudence Upton
Yudai Kamisato, Wataru Omura, Mari Kodama, +51 Aviacón San Borja, Okazaki Art Theatre
Once he’s home in Peru, Mari Kodama takes over the elliptical narration, leaving Seki Sano behind (we never learn what he did to justify being labelled “Father of Mexican Theatre”). Living with his grandmother in Lima (the play’s title is her address and country phone code), Kamisato commences the difficult process of re-assimilation. He finds an immigrant culture obsessed with Japanese food and watching NHK TV. The city’s streets and plumbing are poor, but there is a centre, established by the entrepreneur Ryoichi Jinnai in Lima—and in other countries with Japanese immigrant populations—which busses in the elderly for day care, a fine thing but another example of cultural dependency unlike Seki Sano’s break with Japan.
Things get whacky when the unsettled Kamisato is shoved in the street by a sociopathic religious zealot and nearly taken into a cult. More to the point, in the final scene, while attending the opening night of a theatre production and surrounded by Lima’s well-to-do in the foyer, Kamisato asks himself, as Seki Sano would have, “where are the people on the street?” Then he has to admit, “I’m not the people on the street,” perhaps realising he’s no Sano. Perhaps, having understood his condition by making +51 Aviación, San Borja, Kamisato—if he is in fact performing as himself—will be able to newly address the challenge of making political theatre.
The performance is casual, played directly to the audience and often as if improvised (a neck pillow of the kind used by passengers on planes on buses is grabbed from a pile of items to frame Seki Sano’s masked head, giving him the appearance of an Aztec god). But it’s also injected with moments of stylisation—Kamisato strikes emphatic Kabuki poses, his voice turning aptly guttural. Elsewhere there’s a discombobulated angularity and the voice slips registers. Omura’s Seki Sano is puppet-like, manipulated by the other performers—a gesture towards Bunraku. Those familiar with traditional and contemporary Japanese theatre would have detected further cultural signals in this fascinating work. It made an intriguing companion piece to In Between Two.
Mitchell Riley, O Mensch! Sydney Chamber Opera
photo Lisa Tomasetti
Mitchell Riley, O Mensch! Sydney Chamber Opera
O Mensch!
A grand piano sits to our left. Centre-stage, a casually attired, lone male figure stands on a short, steep set of steps. A cube of the same width and breadth hangs immediately above, emitting pastel hues which increase in intensity and frequency as the man’s feverish night-time imagination dwells on the delights and power of nature and on the social world that limits him in love, literature and more. As he compulsively returns to his querulous mantra, “For such an ambition, is this Earth not too small?” he tests the spatial limits of his confinement, discards clothing and courses emotionally from guttural utterance to falsetto flights to finally intoning gently against a steadily pulsed, repeated piano note—failure? resignation? He leaves his ‘cage,’ joins the pianist and delicately taps out the work’s last few high notes.
The work’s title—and its sung poems—come from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus sprach Zarathustra: “Human! Hark! What is the deep midnight saying?” The man, Nietzsche, is revealed in all his passion, vulnerability and arrogance in Pascal Dusapin’s fluent, finely graded and richly varied vocal score with its spare piano accompaniment (Jack Symonds) and baritone Mitchell Riley’s superbly integrated singing and acting—directed by Sarah Giles who partnered Riley for the gripping SCO production of the György Kurtág Beckett cycle…pas à pas-nulle part... . Riley’s restrained, subtly detailed naturalism engenders a believable young Nietzsche, allowing the moments of pain and anger to gain full expressive weight and sustaining a challenging 70-minute performance.
Mitchell Riley, O Mensch! Sydney Chamber Opera
photo Lisa Tomasetti
Mitchell Riley, O Mensch! Sydney Chamber Opera
There’s no production design credit for O Mensch! Presumably it was a collaborative effort, leaving much of the responsibility for making a spare set theatrically effective to lighting designer Katie Sfetkidis whose otherwise simple forward and shadow-casting side lighting allowed the LED colouring from the cube above to mirror Nietzsche’s volatility. Simply produced, O Mensch! is a work of huge emotional scale and another success for Sydney Chamber Opera.
Not forgetting Beethoven
In the top rank of festival highlights is another small outfit, the Belgian orchestra (or “period band” as such ensembles are often called) Anima Eterna’s complete Beethoven Symphonies, played on original instruments. I caught the 5th and 6th as a double bill in the intimate City Recital Centre, the ideal venue for a small orchestra, and the 9th in the vast Sydney Opera House Concert Hall where the woodwinds and sometimes the small Brandenburg Choir felt underpowered, certainly for those of us at the back of the first level of the dress circle. Nonetheless there was much to wonder at: a captivating scherzo realised in all its surging, swirling glory and an engrossing adagio with a slightly quickened pace that did justice to the capacities of the period instruments. The finale, with its expressive soloists, was forceful but, up the back in the reverberant Concert Hall, felt less than cogent.
As reviewers of the Anima Eterna Beethoven CD recordings have noted, there’s a revealing compactness in conductor Jos van Immerseel’s responses to the symphonies. This was most keenly in evidence in the performances of the 5th and 6th in the City Recital Hall; recurrent dynamic shifts from lyrical calm to tense pondering or passionate outburst were acutely marked and felt without being laboured in the 5th. Similarly Beethoven’s pervasive ‘minimalist’ repetitions in the 6th were mesmeric, heightening the sense of being immersed in the natural world which he portrays with such love. Even the relatively small-scale storm movement seemed more apt than the near-melodramatic turbulence unleashed by some modern orchestras. This compactness and its correlative lucidity allowed the period instruments to speak with clarity and character.
I felt blessed listening to the 5th and 6th, as if hovering, suspended between late Mozart and Wagner. It might be a fiction that we were hearing what Beethoven’s audiences heard, but it’s a happy fiction where the orchestra sounded sufficiently alien to make me re-think my relationship with the symphonies and the 6th above all.
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Sydney Festival: Performance 4a, In Between Two, writers, composers, performers, Joelistics, James Mangohig, producer Annette Shun Wah, 21-24 Jan; Okazaki Art Theatre, +51 Aviación, San Borja, 21-24 Jan; Sydney Chamber Opera, O Mensch!, composer Pascal Dusapin, performer Mitchell Riley, director Sarah Giles; Carriageworks, Sydney, 22-24 Jan; Anima Eterna, Beethoven 5th & 6th Symphonies, City Recital Hall, 23 Jan; 9th Symphony, Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, 25 Jan
Internationally exhibited Spanish-Australian artist Dani Marti, trained in Catalan tapestry techniques, is a master of knots and maker of densely woven relief works. In this video, he talks about his solo show Black Sun, now at Fremantle Arts Centre for the 2016 Perth International Arts Festival.
Marti’s complex, large format entwinings of industrial, domestic and personal materials—including, for example, fibres, rubber, wire, rope, necklaces, and, in one glittering work, steel scourers—generates immersive viewing. His films are contrastingly documentary in style, but as rich in intimate detail.
Barcelona-born Marti divides his time between Sydney and Glasgow, working in video, installation and public art. His website declares that his “unorthodox woven and filmic works [address] notions of portraiture and sexuality in Modernism, Minimalism and geometric abstraction.” Marti’s frank and often sexually explicit films are labelled portraits, but so too his seemingly abstract works. Just how “abstract” are they? They are deeply personal for the artist, a form of self-portraiture. John Morgan Falconer writes,
“[Marti’s] The Pleasure Chest (2007) tangles necklaces and Rosary beads into a design with the all-over infinitude of a Jackson Pollock and the rich materiality of a Piero Manzoni. Meanwhile, as a filmmaker, Marti delivers catharsis by drawing us into his subjects’ lives of desire: Time is the fire in which we burn (2009), for example, telegraphs the confessions of John, a male prostitute.”
Look out for Laetitia Wilson’s review of Black Sun in our 24 February E-dition.
Dani Marti, Shield – Study for a Portrait – Take 1, 2015, stainless steel braided hose, polyester, nylon, rubber and leather on aluminium frame.
Image courtesy of the Artist; GAGPROJECTS | Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide; ARC ONE GALLERY, Melbourne; and Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney
Dani Marti, Shield – Study for a Portrait – Take 1, 2015, stainless steel braided hose, polyester, nylon, rubber and leather on aluminium frame.
2016 Perth International Arts Festival, Dani Marti, Black Sun, Fremantle Arts Centre, 7 Feb-28 March
RealTime issue #131 Feb-March 2016 pg. web
This six-part TV series makes a significant contribution to the family comedy/drama genre focusing on the lives of the fractious and funny Asian-Australian Family Law as they navigate the parents’ potential divorce. Featuring a strong cast and scenes that range from satirical to self-deprecating to deeply emotional this is an unusual and entertaining hybrid.
Email us at giveaways [at] realtimearts.net with your name, postal address and phone number. Include 'Giveaways' and the name of the item in the subject line.
RealTime issue #131 Feb-March 2016 pg. web
Have you seen this change.org video from 2015 about children on Nauru? If not, watch it now; it’s a rare occasion when we get to see incarcerated refugees, especially the young, for who they really are—not the criminals nor the terrorists they are treated as.
If you have seen it, watch it again to remind you to immediately add your voice to the growing revolt against the Turnbull government’s decision to return 267 asylum seekers—whether en masse or secretively ‘case by case’—to the Nauru concentration camp, for that’s what it is, whatever the lies about the refugees’ ‘freedom’ to wander the island.
We attend so many industry events these days—conferences, seminars, showcases and even summits—but I’ve never been invited to a ‘convergence’ before, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect from Dana Waranara. Now, weeks after the event, I can say that it has had a significant impact on me. It’s not yet totally clear to me how that impact will manifest itself in my work, but I’ll try and explain why I think this gathering will end up having a deep and lasting significance. For now, the best word I can come up with for the impact is to say that I have, in the best possible way, been disturbed by it. To quote the movie of the moment, “I feel a disturbance in the force”. More on that later.
As the Dana Waranara program unfolded I started to feel quite privileged to have been invited into that space (as a presenter, non-artist and whitefella). This was driven home in a session honouring the pioneers of black dance in Australia. To hear from artists such as Carole Johnson, Roslyn Watson, Michael Leslie and Monica Stevens about the beginnings of this movement in the 1970s, was an historic and humbling highlight of day one. I had some knowledge of this history, but much of it was new to me. I don’t think the significant, ground-breaking contribution of these artists is understood as widely in our industry as it should be, so sitting there hearing their extraordinary stories felt a little like the sharing of a secret history, that one day will be recognised by more and more people.
Although this gathering was not a showcase or performing arts market type event, for me as a presenter it was a great opportunity to gain an overview of the artists, choreographers and companies working in this field, giving me a greater context, and certainly inspiring me. To be surrounded by this extraordinary group of artists was quite humbling. Some are well known and recognised in our industry, others are early in their careers, filled with the infectious energy, enthusiasm and invincibility of youth. But I have to say that I was most inspired by some of the brilliant, more mature artists who’ve continued to nurture their practice over many years, creating beautiful, meaningful work away from the glare of larger festivals or venues (which in the industry we sometimes mistake for success). To hear from them about their work was quite special. That an artist such as Gary Lang is producing work of the calibre of Mokuy in the Northern Territory, that (to my knowledge) has not been seen elsewhere in the country, is exciting but highlights the need for us to find ways for such work to be seen more widely.
In this mix of inspiring artists were also a few handpicked international voices, most significantly First Nations artists from the US, Canada and NZ. I was particularly struck by the wisdom and maturity of Maori choreographer Jack Gray. The gentleness and warmth with which he shared his significant experience as an artist highlighted for me how the Australian black dance movement, unique though it is, is strengthened by its international links. This is not only true of the important link with other First Nations artists and communities, but also of the very significant contribution evidently made to the movement by African American artists such as Carole Johnson who was in attendance, but also others who were mentioned, like Ronnie Arnold and Aku Kadogo.
All of this sounds quite inspiring and energising, and it was (as well as being pretty intense, overwhelming and exhausting!). So, why do I say that I have been disturbed by it? Because my experience at Dana Waranara has further strengthened in me a belief that our current models of presenting are not serving us well. They do not easily allow for the type of truly impactful community and artist encounters that we need to be facilitating or inviting into our venues. Outmoded conventions, physical infrastructure and business models are barriers to venues being all that we could be for our communities. This of course, not only relates to the challenges of presenting contemporary Indigenous dance, but represents a wider challenge for presenters.
I’m writing this in New York, having just attended two other industry events here which have served to reinforce this welcome disturbance in my thinking. I don’t yet know what new models we might reach for, but I think I know some of the questions that I (we?) might need to address to start the process, and Dana Waranara has been a big part of firing me up to try and find some ways forward. For me, in my job, some of these questions would include:
What mechanisms might allow us to give up “expert curation” and allow our community greater power in programming our venues? Could we successfully hand over the programming reins to a wider, more diverse and representative group in our community? How?
What different financial models would allow us to transcend the transactional nature of the relationship between artist and audience? Can we really expect to facilitate meaningful shared experiences between artists and audiences while we use a model that reduces the art to a product that presenters buy from producers and then re-sell to audiences? What might new financial models look like? Collective community fundraising/investing? Giving free access to events and asking the audience to contribute something afterwards?
How could we remove or replace the conventions of theatregoing to allow a more inclusive experience? What could we do to break down the barriers between audience and artist, and between audience members, and create the conditions for more authentic, shared human experiences?
There are lots more questions like these. Dana Waranara certainly didn’t provide any easy answers, but it did highlight the incredible work that Indigenous artists are doing around the country, and the need for us to find new ways to support, promote and connect that work with our audiences. It has inspired me to try and do this. BlakDance and Performing Lines should be thanked for initiating this important and historical convergence.
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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
RealTime has followed the emergence of Marrugeku’s Cut The Sky with an interview with choreographer Dalisa Pigram and poet Edwin Lee Mulligan, who both perform in the work, a glowing response to a first-run performance in Broome (the company’s cultural hub) and a review—with strong reservations about the work’s scope—of the Perth International Arts Festival premiere. Cut the Sky has otherwise received laudatory reviews.
I’ve admired some, if not all, of Marrugeku’s past creations, especially Burning Daylight, a more lucid and cogent work than Cut The Sky. The performance I saw of the new work in the Sydney Festival was beset with several technical challenges: a performer appeared in an aerial harness but did not fly, words yelled in a huge storm (set in the future according to the program notes) were drowned out by effects and a protest scene made no sense when a character with a loud hailer could not be heard. These problems were doubtless incidental. Putting them aside, Cut the Sky is still a less than coherent work—a series of often elusive, unrevealingly juxtaposed episodes. Intention grows clearer (indeed crudely literal when dancer Miranda Wheen has to recite ‘information’ while dancing), but comes too late, so awash is this production with unintegrated components—a jumble of contents, images, styles and musical forms recalling earlier contemporary performance.
There’s also a lack of clarity about who’s who and specifically about the Dungkabah or Poison Woman (the coal gas buried in the earth) and her relationship to singer Ngaire Pigram’s rock diva and Dancer Dalisa Pigram. There are slight moments—two black characters share disapproving glances when Wheen ‘co-opts’ the Aboriginal flag during a protest and scales the set’s gas pipe with it—amid epic visions of global climate change and the Kimberley’s political past.
Cut the Sky, Marrugeku Theatre
photo Jon Green
Cut the Sky, Marrugeku Theatre
Dalisa Pigram (choreographer with Serge Aimé Coulibaly) appears at one point to be inhabited by Poison Woman, recalling the originality of her dancing in her own Gudirr Gudirr; otherwise the choreography looks conventionally ‘contemporary.’ There are momentary pleasures: Edwin Lee Mulligan speaking his poetry, a cleverly realised marionette-like kangaroo-man and the sheer scale of the Kimberley landscape (cinematography Sam James) projected on the huge upstage screen, the camera sweeping forward and then disorientingly backwards.
The grand sweep of issues, images, history, ideas and forms in Cut The Sky leaves in its wake impressions, generalisations and, in the end, a sense of unwarranted optimism as longed-for rain finally falls. There’s no denying the talents of the performers and other artists involved in Cut The Sky, nor its momentary strengths. But the work’s “shifting of time and cause and effect” (program notes) disadvantages the cogency of its account of the destructive coalescence of mining and climate change in its impact on Indigenous culture and country and the Earth. If the need for clarity requires a somewhat more literal approach, without surrendering the work’s evident magic, so be it.
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Sydney Festival, Marrugeku, Cut The Sky, director Rachael Swain, designer Stephen Curtis, musical director Matthew Fargher; Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, 14-17 Jan
Catherine McClements and choir members, The Events, Sydney Festival, 2016
photo Jamie Williams
Catherine McClements and choir members, The Events, Sydney Festival, 2016
SPOILER ALERT: THIS PRODUCTION WILL BE PLAYING IN THEATRES AROUND AUSTRALIA THIS YEAR.
The Events, by UK playwright David Greig, may well have been lauded in the UK for its moral acuity and compassion, but I was angered by its loaded scenario and an absence of thematic thoroughness in its approach to post-traumatic stress disorder.
A young man (Jonny Carr) possessed by extreme right wing fantasies slaughters members of a church choir. The vicar (Catherine McClements) tries to rescue her remaining “choir of vulnerable people” by putting them back to work, but as her own post-traumatic stress disorder takes over she tests her relationship with her partner and ventures on a quest to understand the killer. She speaks with a provocative journalist, with a friend of the young man (“We were both unpopular…You see how bad people are”), a politician (opposed to “state-funded multiculturalism”) and the boy’s father. She discovers the boy’s mother died when he was 15 and that he’s gay. His intemperate father accepts it, he tells her, having yelled at the loner, “Get out and get yourself a boyfriend!” (Carr also plays all the characters the vicar seeks out.)
Curiously, for someone who felt that her soul left her when she and a friend were threatened with the last bullet in the killer’s gun and asked by him to choose which of them should be shot. Instead of her church, she turns to guru-led therapies for herself and her choir, which they reject: “We just want to forget.” Her greatest desire is to understand the killer, despite the advice of her partner and her psychologist; so she campaigns to be allowed to speak with him, becoming in the press “the forgiveness lady.” She doesn’t want to think he’s a psychopath: “It’s something else…beyond reason.” Was it his fault? Is there such a thing as evil? Is he ‘empathy impaired’? Her partner sees this quest as masochism.
Greig’s scatter-gun approach is loaded with complications—the priest is lesbian, the mass killer gay and, pivotally in a late ‘reveal,’ he tells the vicar he took in a girl who had just been assaulted outside his home by three Arab males. And played a computer game with her. This man? With his attitude to women?
What is interesting about The Events is the priest’s decline, not least into kinds of violence: a kiss with her partner turns into a struggle; she unconsciously shoplifts; she imagines herself as a nurse smothering the killer when he was a baby; fantasises herself and her partner finding and adopting a lost boy (“He’s happy; he’s dead”); she almost kills herself; and in her encounter with the killer in prison is infuriated with his inability to account for his motivation and smashes his coffee cup to the floor. What kind of catharsis for her is this, if any? If the ‘message’ is that there is no answer, the vicar certainly doesn’t countenance it. Anyway, the visit seems enough to return her happily to her multicultural choir, her “one big crazy tribe,” as she calls them. We, however, recall the killer’s elaborately realised dream of a return to tribalism, to “buy back our souls.” Has the vicar found her soul again? The final joyous song seems as ironic as it is feelgood. At least Greig makes that point.
Jonny Carr, Catherine McClements and choir members, The Events, Sydney Festival, 2016
photo Jamie Williams
Jonny Carr, Catherine McClements and choir members, The Events, Sydney Festival, 2016
This highly portable work is plainly staged with its two actors and choir (mostly a different one each night). Catherine McClements subtly grades the sorry trajectory of the vicar’s moral confusion, growing isolation and potential self-destructiveness. The choir, admirably coached and conducted by Luke Byrne from the piano, not only sing with verve but deliver lines individually and collectively join in a witty Q & A with the characters. It’s a dramatically effective device, providing both a sense of community and vulnerability, although the choir ultimately plays no role in the vicar’s salvation; but she can at least return to it.
Carr is a solid presence and best as the killer (that’s where the writing shines), but all his characters speak without vocal differentiation (as in UK and US productions), the audience often only aware of who’s speaking once clues are picked up from the conversation. Save for moments of anger there’s a flattening of overall affect and limited opportunities for nuance. At best it emphasises that we are party only to the vicar’s increasing delirium as her post-traumatic stress disorder unravels her—until an unlikely recovery. Will she now simply forget ‘the events’?
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Belvoir, Malthouse, STCSA, The Events, writer David Greig, director Claire Watson, set & lighting Geoff Cobham, musical director Luke Byrne; Granville Town Hall, Sydney, 13-17 Jan
Cerita Anak (Child’s Story) Project, Polyglot Theatre, Papermoon Puppet Theatre
photo Indra Wicaksono
Cerita Anak (Child’s Story) Project, Polyglot Theatre, Papermoon Puppet Theatre
How many times have you heard it said that a conference was okay but the real work was going on in between-sessions socialising? In sociology the distinction has long been made between overt (or manifest) and latent functions. The latter is often unintended let alone understood or quantified. These days arts festivals and conferences strive to exploit this latency with ever more supplementary and central events that mimic informal social exchange—the ‘extra curricular’ activities, as 2016 Australian Performing Arts Market Program Manager Dave Sleswick puts it. I spoke by phone with Sleswick about his task and the innovations he and APAM are bringing to it.
Describe your role for me.
As Program Producer I assist with the management of the overall program, with all of the Showcases, but I also curate the Exchange, a program of ‘extracurricular’ activities, I guess. This involves all of the keynotes and panel sessions.
There’ve been a lot of changes in the Australian arts over the last 18 months and what we’re trying to do is to put the art and the ideas front and centre, to make this APAM really about generating new relationships and new dialogues and showing the rest of the world that the Australian art scene is very strong and vibrant with a lot to offer.
What forms do these events take?
The primary focus is around networking and building relationships. There are encounters where we provide opportunities for artists, producers and presenters to meet one-on-one. There are small group networks where people are able to throw ideas back and forth. Those groups are generally based around a specific country or art-form or a particular idea or socially relevant topic. For example a roundtable might be about touring in a particular country.
Which countries are in focus this year? New Zealand is our right hand in this endeavour. [Beyond that relationship] we have a particular focus on South Korea and on Canada. These relationships have stemmed from our engagement at different levels of government and with stakeholders but also the long-term partnership that Australia has built with South Korea over the last 10-15 years. Korea’s proving to be one of our biggest partners. Our relationship with Canada this year is also very strong, as the Australia Council has been paying particular attention to working with international First Nations people both in terms of presenters and artists.
In APAM 2016 we have a massive delegation of First Nations New Zealander, Maori and Pasifika artists and presenters as well as a huge North American First Nations delegation. That conversation with Canada around their First Nations people has provided a catalyst for our growing relationship with Canadian artists and with the Canada Council for the Arts as well.
You mentioned “socially relevant topics.”
Something that I have been putting a huge focus on in this market is socially engaged art practices and works that push the boundaries of what art or performance is and sometimes bridge the line between art and activism. As a part of that conversation I’ve engaged three artists-in-residence. One is from Sydney, one from Brisbane and one from Toronto. All of their practices are about engaging with communities, tackling socially relevant issues, working in the public sphere. One of the key ideas in having these artists as part of the program is to interrogate institutions and their role when talking about dealing with politically and socially engaged work that maybe sits outside of venues. How do you maintain integrity between programs? What are the kinds of things that venues and presenters need to do before programming this kind of work or before engaging with artists who aim to instigate social change?
That venues issue figured prominently in discussion at the recent Dana Waranara Convergence in Brisbane. How will your artists-in-residence be involved in the Exchange program?
They’ll be present at APAM the whole time, give keynote addresses and appear on a variety of panels. There are two key events as part of the Artist in Residence program. Sydney-based artist Lenine Bourke works with children and young people and so we’ve invited a delegation of children to the market—something we haven’t done at APAM before. We should have about 15 eight- to 12-year-olds as young delegates and their job within the market is to see work that is designed for them. One of Australia’s largest exports is theatre for young audiences—we’re right up there with the rest of the world in terms of making it but when you’re in a marketplace like APAM it’s usually all adults.
So children will then talk to adults about what they felt about the works?
Yes, and it’s also about [them] coming into this place where everything is being taken very seriously and being a high-pressured environment for a lot of artists. We think that having a delegation of young people present and active in the market will be such a joy. It’s going to make delegates stop for a second and view what they’re doing through the eyes of very young people with the world in front of them. These are the kind of things we’re trying to put in place to keep the art present.
Who are the three artists-in-residence?
Lenine Bourke, as mentioned, Toronto’s Darren O’Donnell, Director of Mammalian Diving Reflex (the company that brought us Haircuts by Children in 2008 and All The Sex I’ve Ever Had, 2016, both for the Sydney Festival) and Nathan Stoneham, a Brisbane-based artist who works a lot with queer audiences and young people. He also works with South Korean artists and people from other cultures. The three of them have spent time mentoring and being mentored by each other. They [comprise] another overarching framework to the Exchange program. I really want delegates to think about legacy and the idea that decisions we make here at this market are what we’re going to leave behind. So I thought that these three artists-in-residence who are all socially engaged and involved in community, who have all had some level of mentoring and are all at different stages of their careers [could deliver] really neat way of threading these major curatorial ideas together.
Who will deliver the keynote addresses this year?
Four arts leaders, hosted by Wesley Enoch. One of the speakers is Darren O’Donnell from Toronto and the others are Indigenous writer-performer Nakkiah Lui from Sydney, writer-curator Willoh S Weiland from Aphids in Melbourne and we have Kee Hong Low, a curator and policy planner from West Kowloon Cultural Province in Hong Kong. They’ll all have the same provocation [about legacy] and all will come at it from very different backgrounds and perspectives. It should make an interesting and, I hope, fiery start to the whole market.
It sounds like a great program, moving away from simply selling shows to providing big contexts and ideas.
People are coming here to buy and sell but my big question is what is it we’re selling and what are we buying? Is it just ‘product’ or are we buying ideas or visions for the future? Are we investing in creating relationships that are going to last for the next 15 years? What are [presenters, producers] actually doing here besides just trying to organise tours?
I see you’ve made room for a few heightened social events.
Yes, there’s a bit of partying. To be honest, the organisers of this event have been to many markets and we know that often the best way to do things is by making friends in social situations, so we try to create environments where that kind of thing can happen.
Let’s talk about a couple of intriguing works on the program, like Cerita Anak (Child’s Story).
It’s going to be presented as a pitch at APAM. It’s by Polyglot Theatre from Melbourne and Papermoon Puppet Theatre Company from Indonesia. They’re doing a co-production of a work that’s in development—an interactive and intimate performance for young people that’s based on stories from Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Australia. This is a great example of some of the work that’s coming through APAM and the kind of work that Australians are producing at the moment as part of this trend towards cross-cultural collaboration.
What’s involved in the pitching sessions?
Artists and companies are given the opportunity to talk for seven minutes before taking questions. They can use audiovisual elements as well. The pitches give the delegates a chance to get quick, sharp shots of new ideas, the next projects that are happening. They’re for works that don’t exist yet. There are 15 all up, divided into three groups of five. The first group is for works that have a premiere date planned—the idea is happening, they’ve done a few creative developments, the work hasn’t happened but they’ve got a solid first plan. The next grouping is that the artists have perhaps done a creative development, the idea is flowing but they have no presentation plan yet. In the third group nothing has happened yet and what they’re delivering is a brand spanking new idea and they’re looking for co-commissioning partners or initial presentation for it.
This is based on the assumption these days that investors might step in early rather than waiting to see a finished product. This notion has taken a long time to take hold.
We’re finding that even though money is tight there are many presenters out there who really want to be part of conceiving and part of the initial stages of a work. It’s an exciting development and it moves away from that idea of simply buying and selling product into investing in relationships, new ideas and long-term processes.
The Stance, Liesel Zinc and company
photo Fenlan Chuang
The Stance, Liesel Zinc and company
The other show you’ve mentioned is Liesel Zink’s The Stance. What’s important about this work for you?
We’re really excited as a Brisbane host of APAM to be able to showcase Brisbane artists. The Stance is great because it’s positioned in public space so we’re able to not only offer delegates the chance to see a beautiful durational work but also get to see it in the context of the city. The work will be presented in the Southbank Forecourt just outside QPAC, which overlooks the Brisbane River. It’s a highly politically engaged work and Liesel has done a lot of research into the idea of occupying public space and the politics around it, what protest means and its history. This is an important work that is pushing form—each of the delegates will receive headphones and will listen to a live soundscape in real time featuring lots of grabs from real life protests. The sound designer Mike Wilmett has also composed music to accompany the work. Liesel will present it with nine dancers. Originally it ran for nine hours but but I think for APAM she’s doing five hours. She’s creating it with Australian dancers but eventually what she wants to do is to tour the work to other countries in the region, potentially with [a mix of local and Australian dancers] to explore what protest and occupying public space means in different parts of the world. It’s an ongoing exploration.
That could be delicate.
It could be a delicate in many places in the world!
What has been the international response to the market? We have a really strong contingent of international delegates this year. They’re coming from everywhere and it’s been quite a shock, the players who’ve emerged as wanting to be part of the event. I think it puts a really strong light on the quality, scope and diversity of work that’s coming out of Australia. We’re very excited to have the world at our doorstep here and we intend to make the most of it.
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2016 APAM, Australian Performing Arts Market, Powerhouse Brisbane, 22-26 Feb
An enormous blast rings out in Verbruggen Hall. Organ, strings and percussion fire off a shattering chord: a short roar that repeats again and again, becoming a deliberate march of inexorable force. Trumpet is added to the multi-layered blasts, which don’t give any sign of stopping. As the onslaught continues, it triggers shifts in perception. Shapes and patterns are audible in the dense cacophony. Pitches and tones seem to echo and resonate longer in the sonic afterglow of each explosion; they stretch and contract, creating the illusion that the pulse is moving faster and slower.
Exit Ceremonies, presented by the Australian Art Orchestra and Ensemble Offspring as part of the 2016 Sydney Festival, harnesses the ritualistic power of the organ in premieres by Australian composers Austin Buckett and Simon James Phillips. Buckett’s Aisles is built of episodes, diverse periods of repetitious textures that develop from the formidable beating of the opening figure. The introductory section is brought to a close by Sonya Holowell’s clear soprano. The explosions abruptly cease, replaced by her chant “On a soun-ding bo-dy,” one syllable per beat on a single note.
She’s cut off by a powerful, seething wall of noise. As the shock subsides and the ear adjusts, repeating patterns become audible in the writhing. Rumbling percussion and trumpet ornaments settle the music (in the listener’s ear) into a short repeating cell, which evolves periodically at a signal from Claire Edwardes, who leads from the bass drum. Episodes of disorienting loudness alternate with quieter reprieves. White noise bursts out of speakers, the experience akin to sensory deprivation, and subsonic throbbing shudders through the audience. An unsettling organ cadenza bends and stutters, the notes drooping like the abandoned drone of a bagpipe. Buckett’s complex deluge of noise and extreme volume is confronting but also fascinating, an immersive experiential adventure.
Peter Knight, Sonya Holowell, Exit Ceremonies
photo Jamie Williams courtesy Sydney Festival, 2016
Peter Knight, Sonya Holowell, Exit Ceremonies
Turntablist Martin Ng stands alone at the beginning of Simon James Phillips’ Flaw decorating silence with sparse beeps and slides, twists and whorls of electronic scratching interspersed with pauses. The other musicians solemnly assemble on stage. Layers build imperceptibly from the silence. A soft hum permeates the air, quiet static or rain comes through speakers surrounding the audience. Edwardes drags her fingers across the skin of the bass drum while bows slide quietly against strings. Peter Knight blows air through his trumpet into a microphone, adding wind to the rain. Ng intrudes periodically with brief, chaotic solos. A sustained organ note emerges from the fog. Holowell intones pure prayer-like syllables. Flaw builds agonisingly slowly, pitches accumulating until the organ’s low register can be felt physically and the bass drum is a continuous booming roll. Phillips presides over all, exalted above the ensemble at the organ’s console. At the high water mark, Ng’s turntable cracks and bellows like thunder, full of aggression even as the storm begins to recede. The crescendo is reversed, fading into dripping electronics and Sonya Holowell’s breath through the microphone.
Exit Ceremonies was a hypnotic exploration of sound, time and perception. The changing patterns of Buckett’s Aisles drew the audience into a spellbinding maelstrom of sonic discovery. Although the turntable seemed superfluous at times, Phillips’ meditative Flaw traced a compelling rise and fall, blurring the passage of time.
Exit Ceremonies will be performed on 6 February in Melbourne Town Hall with a newly commissioned work, Swings, by leading American composer Alvin Lucier.
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Sydney Festival, Exit Ceremonies, The Australian Art Orchestra and Ensemble Offspring, Verbrugghen Hall, 23 Jan
The composer and conductor Pierre Boulez died on 5 January at the age of 90. His 90th birthday was celebrated with a flurry of box-sets and articles stressing the two sides of this influential but divisive figure. On the one hand, there is the enfant terrible who entered Messiaen’s analysis class after the Second World War and, in Messiaen’s words, “quickly became angry at the entire world.” Boulez the avant-garde iconoclast urged his readers to “burn down the opera houses” and famously claimed that those who did not feel the necessity of the Second Vienese School were “USELESS.” At the same time he scolded the school’s founder Arnold Schoenberg for not following the consequences of his own dodecaphonic technique far enough.
On the other hand, Boulez is remembered as the generous teacher and conductor who fostered into being some of Paris’ iconic musical institutions into being including Ircam (the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music), the Cité de la Musique, and the Philharmonie de Paris. As a conductor he is remembered for the analytical clarity of his direction and his transparent orchestral balance. His recordings reveal the detail of Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, or Berlioz’s scores in the belief that hearing more of the score’s information will elicit a stronger emotional response in the listener.
Boulez the militant iconoclast and Boulez the avuncular mélophile. Ironically, Boulez did not want to be remembered as any sort of ‘character’ at all. He was highly secretive about his private life and boasted that he would “be the first composer without a biography.” If Boulez’s 90th birthday offered ample opportunity to reflect on his life’s work, perhaps his death is a good time to consider what he leaves to the future. Boulez is perhaps best remembered as a symbol of the musical 20th century, his death drawing to a close a period of unprecedented experimentation that we ignore at our peril.
Boulez led the most distinctive musical coup of the twentieth century. In his piano pieces, Structures, he extended the principles of Schoenberg’s dodecaphonic music to all parameters of musical sound including pitch, duration, dynamics and timbre. This style is now referred to as “total serialism” and it enjoyed a short but intense vogue at the Darmstadt Summer Music Courses during the 1950s. Its principles were adopted and then expanded upon by some of the century’s most distinctive composers, including Karlheinz Stockhausen, Bruno Maderna, Luigi Nono, Luciano Berio and Henri Pousseur. When writing up the balance sheet of the 20th century, it is important to note that total serialism in its strict form was used in only a handful of pieces by the “Darmstadt school.” Its institutionalisation in conservatoriums and schools of music throughout the 1960s and ‘70s has given it a greater and more maligned profile than it deserves. The story of post-war European modernism is one of diverging paths between Boulez and his generation.
Though Boulez declared himself during the 1960s “300% Marxist-Leninist,” he avoided politicising his music (at least with a big ‘P’). Not so Nono, whose involvement in the Italian anti-fascist resistance resonated throughout his music, in particular theatrical and vocal works such as Il canto sospeso, Diario polacco; Composizione no. 2, and Intolleranza 1960.
Though Boulez founded one of the world’s most important institutions for electroacoustic music, Ircam, Stockhausen is best remembered for his early extension of serial organisation to unprecedented areas of timbral and temporal organisation at the Studio for Electronic Music of the West German Radio.
Where then was Boulez while Nono protested and Stockhausen experimented with wave oscillators? He was conducting and founding institutions, as well as composing sporadically. He was ensuring that new generations of composers could experiment as he did. Boulez was the avant-garde’s animus and his death draws the long, musical 20th century to a close. For that he will be remembered.
Early on in Todd Haynes’ Carol (2015) the two protagonists catch sight of each other across the Christmas toy display in a 1950s department store. From this interlocking of gazes—the first of many—between diffident young store clerk Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara) and sophisticated matron Carol (Cate Blanchett), an intrigue develops apace; the younger woman pulled along in the other’s slipstream with such rapidity (“I always say yes to everything,” Therese says much later on) that we have no choice but to accept their burning attraction as a fait accompli.
While Haynes has stressed his intention for Carol to be purely a love story rather than an ‘issues-based’ film, all the obstacles to Therese and Carol’s love are external ones springing from attitudes at a time when male homosexuality was criminalised and lesbians were considered mentally ill. Carol becomes hostage to her resentful soon-to-be ex-husband who threatens to withhold access to her daughter should she continue her involvements with women.
The relationship between Carol and Therese itself is not internally conflicted, however. It is one of unadulterated passion, a little stiffly negotiated initially given the formality of the period, but always moving towards a destination of high romance. Carol and Therese are unequivocally in love, so why does their relationship feel so null? It’s not for lack of commitment on the actors’ part.
Blanchett’s every gesture (the raising of the hand to the hair, the arch sideways glance), her every low-cadenced utterance is weighed and considered in a mannered performance that recalls her role in Blue Jasmine (2013), as another woman attempting to shrug off her past, with that film’s theatrical echoes of A Streetcar Named Desire. It’s a style of acting that draws attention away from the couple’s interactions and towards its own evocation of 50s femininity.
Mara’s Therèse is terse, curious and wide-eyed, not yet quite at ease with herself, in contrast to the experienced Carol. The uneven dynamic between the two at times causes Blanchett’s character to seem faintly predatory; something I assume was unintentional. But beyond these performative quirks, a more fundamental issue arises, something that’s crucial to films depicting love—how do filmmakers and actors go about conveying chemistry between characters?
Blue is the Warmest Colour
In this aspect it seems pertinent to compare Carol to another rare mainstream lesbian love story with similar themes of self-discovery. The chemistry between Adèle and Emma in Blue is the Warmest Colour (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013) comes across as vivid and heady. This might be because Blue is the Warmest Colour takes more time building up a sense of Adèle’s nature and circumstances so that when she first encounters Emma we can understand what has led her to fall for that character. Or maybe it’s due to the point-of-view cinematography that immerses us in Adèle’s world. Then again, as in life, perhaps chemistry is a simple matter of chance.
Carol is in almost every respect polished, considered cinema, its re-creation of the human dramas playing out in a stultifying era eloquent—but where is its beating heart?
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Carol, director Todd Haynes, writer Phyllis Nagy from the novel by Patricia Highsmith, cinematography Edward Lachman, score Carter Burwell, 2015
It’s a truism, but one worth repeating: not all literary forms are possible in all eras. Today, the manifesto is an impossible form. Of course, people do still write manifestos, just as people do still write mock epics in heroic couplets, but almost without exception these are failures.
Yes, the age of the magnificent screed has passed. And yet the great manifestos of yesteryear continue to fascinate, even if only as dazzling curiosities rather than roadmaps to revolution. We can still thrill to the wild surmise, the oracular speculation, of a Marinetti or a Malevich, a Picabia or a Breton, to the urgency and ecstasy, without believing that what art needs today is a new generation of polemicists.
German-born installation and video artist Julian Rosefeldt certainly seems free of any revolutionary pretentions. His new 13-channel work, Manifesto (2015), jointly commissioned by a half dozen institutions and festivals from Australia and Germany, takes a contemplative, somewhat ironic view of the art of the artist’s manifesto.
The work features none other than Cate Blanchett performing a series of brief composite manifestos in everyday contemporary situations. The texts have been patched together by Rosefeldt mostly but not exclusively from writings by artists associated with the avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde—the Dadaists, Futurists, Situationalists, Suprematists, Surrealists and all the rest.
And so we have Blanchett as a primary school teacher and a choreographer, a newscaster and a eulogist at a funeral, a homeless man and a puppeteer. The idea, as explained by Rosefeldt, is to see how, if at all, these manifestos resonate with life in the 21st century.
On one screen, we find Blanchett playing a tattooed punk rocker in a crowded backstage band room. As the camera pans across tables littered with empty beer bottles and packets of crisps, she gives a hedonistic twist to the maxims of Vicente Huidobro and Manuel Maples Arce, exponents of Creacionismo and Stridentism respectively.
“Man is not a systematically balanced clockwork mechanism,” she sneers, while roadies in the background snort lines of coke.
On another screen, she plays an American financial analyst or trader in the employ of an enormous – and necessarily sinister—multinational corporation. Is there a connection between the Futurists who worshipped the glories of speed and today’s globalised financial markets? The possibilities tantalise.
On some screens the conjunction of text and scenario creates a charming and very watchable absurdity. On other screens the associations seem less productive. In at least one instance, where Blanchett plays a crane operator at an incinerator plant, a Müllbunker, the effect is unexpectedly poignant. Here Rosefeldt’s text is taken from a medley of architectural manifestos, including the wonderfully dithyrambic Daybreak by Bruno Taut, written in 1921, an example of manifesto writing at its most uplifting:
“How day will eventually break—who knows? But we can feel the morning. We are no longer moonstruck wanderers roaming dreamily in the pale light of history.”
Cate Blanchett, Julian Rosefeldt: Manifesto
image courtesy ACMI
Cate Blanchett, Julian Rosefeldt: Manifesto
And architecture is a favourite subject right through Manifesto. Although Blanchett adopts accents from America and the United Kingdom, on almost every screen there’s some fond tribute to a recognisable feature of Berlin’s built environment.
Manifesto was shot on a relatively tight budget over 12 days around Berlin in the winter of 2014. Given this difficult schedule, Blanchett has done remarkably well to transform these generic character types into sympathetic individuals. And she really seems to savour and enjoy the texts themselves, which, after all, were written for the mouth and for the ear.
But she is never unrecognisable. Even costumed as the homeless man, wandering the ruins of an abandoned fertiliser factory in East Germany with a beard and prosthetic nose, face smeared in ash, even there she is Cate Blanchett. And to be surrounded by this face, to see it territorialising every surface, creeping in its variations, is a fairly disconcerting experience.
The ACMI exhibition also features three other Rosefeldt works, including his miniature masterpiece Stunned Man (Trilogy of Failure, Part 2) (2004), a two-channel video installation in which a man simultaneously destroys and rebuilds his apartment. It’s a marvel of detail and craft.
And so is Manifesto. Every scene is meticulously composed. The camera lingers on crowded surfaces, trails slowly over bench tops and piles of interesting rubble. As you settle into the space, secret patterns emerge, verbal coincidences, parallel ideas, repeating visual themes.
As the primary school teacher, Blanchett implores her young pupils to remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: it doesn’t matter where you take if from, it’s where you take it to. The question, then, is where does Manifesto take its manifestos?
In spite of its technical strengths, its cinematic lustre, its cleverly coordinated sound design, the work is a bit sterile or academic. Or perhaps factitious is a better word: there are moments of joy and melancholy and eeriness, but you can hear the fluttering of an empty sleeve. Manifesto feels more like an intellectual exercise than an homage: like 13 moves in a glass bead game.
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Julian Rosefeldt: Manifesto, multi-screen film installation, writer, director Julian Rosefeldt, performer Cate Blanchett; commissioned by ACMI in partnership with the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Hamburger Bahnhof-Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin and Sprengel Museum, Hannover; ACMI, Melbourne, to 13 March
photo Jamie Williams courtesy Sydney Festival, 2016
Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Tale Dolven, Fase
“[Music] frames my basic nature…[it provides] order in the highest degree of chaos.” Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker
American composer Steve Reich, born 1936, was a decade older than the late French composer Gerard Grisey (1946-1998), but the work of both flowered in the mid to late 1960s, Reich as co-founder of Minimalism and Grisey of Spectralism. Although they worked in very different idioms, each radically expanded the sonic range of contemporary music and challenged it structurally. One of the most exciting ways to experience their music is to see it performed to by the great Belgian dancer and choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and her company Rosas.
FASE
Minimalist in conception, with its repetitions and cyclical movements, De Keersmaeker’s exquisitely patterned FASE (which premiered in Brussels in 1982) was inspired by Reich’s pioneering ‘phasing’ which had unleashed astonishing complexity from the apparently most simple of means.
In Reich’s Piano Phase for two pianos (1967), danced to in the first part of FASE, a short phrase is repeated and then counterpointed with a new, rhythmically very close one played at a slightly different pace. This generates a new sound out of the synthesis, which in turn becomes a kind of unison open to the arrival of another complicating rhythm. In the ‘phase moment’ the dancers (De Keersmaeker and Tale Dolven) turn on the spot, dresses swirling, arms extending almost to finger touch until one goes with the new beat, putting the two ever so slightly out of synch, fingers unaligned until the second dancer catches up. It’s magical because you are uncertain when and how it happened. What’s more, the phasing is heightened first by the ‘twinning’ of the dancers—similarly attired in simple frocks, white socks and exercise shoes and hair tied back tight—and second by the angled lighting which produces a third shadow on the wall behind, a phasing, double shadow—a new dancer. Music and dance are perfectly partnered.
The climactic phasing is framed by a walking pattern, left and right in a line, arms swinging out horizontally and forearms gently folding into torsos and then backs. This is transposed mid- and then downstage, in new lines of light and in tune with the music’s growing complexity and urgency. Fists form as arms are raised and forearms lock hard against the body, shoes skid and there are gasps of effort and release. Then the pair moves back to the second line, then the first where they and their shadows find sheer un-phased unison.
Seeing minimalism danced—whether by Lucinda Childs to Phillip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach (Melbourne Festival, 1992) or Molissa Fenley and Dancers to Andrew Davis’s Hemispheres (Adelaide Festival, 1984)—is a very special pleasure, at its best in De Keersmaeker’s Piano Phase. The other parts of FASE are also wonderful. Come Out (1996) is one of the phased tape loops out of which sprang Reich’s brand of Minimalism. As in Piano, the dancers’ centre of gravity remains at the same height throughout. Here, in shirts and trousers, they are seated on stools in a rectangle of light beneath two orange lampshades. They gradually if quite sharply rotate 360 degrees, more palpably in and out of synch this time with an array of identical gestures—arm raised up from waist level, hand behind head, head turning sharply back and an almost lunge that suggests a potential gravitational shift. The music of Come Out —the transformation of a fragment of speech into an astonishingly layered, reverberant and rhythmically complex soundscape—provides the work’s momentum but also an eerie context.
De Keersmaeker performs to Violin Phase (1967) alone, working to the points of a circle and its centre. In a dress again, arms swinging, she walks circling in one direction and eventually the other. As the music re-shapes itself, she introduces a near skip to her tread, moves to the centre, skirt swirling, arms raised high and completes and repeats an unusual calculatedly awkward turn, a knee raised, leg kicking out, body momentarily angling down, but the centre of gravity constant as ever. However at points of the circle she bends, touches the floor, as if playing a game, spins furiously, flicking up her dress, baring her underwear and moving with the joy and ease of a young woman (there’s a fine version shot in a park).
The final part of FASE has De Keersmaeker and Dolven, once again in shirts and trousers, dancing in profile to the rapid phasing of Reich’s Clapping Music (1972). Leisurely stances, soft shoulder lifting and casual single arm swings wonderfully suggest abstracted tap dancing. After FASE I head home to listen to Steve Reich anew, the excitement of many years ago reignited and FASE, an undoubted 20th century classic, vividly inscribed in my memory.
Vortex Temporum, Ann Teresa de Keersmaeker
photo Herman Sorgeloos, courtesy Sydney Festival, 2016
Vortex Temporum, Ann Teresa de Keersmaeker
Vortex Temporum
In 2012, thanks to Carriageworks, we witnessed two large-scale works by De Keersmaeker, Cesena and En Atendant (read the RealTime review), demanding but deeply rewarding performances that evoked a sense of continuity between the Middle Ages and now and which were imbued with a sense of community and especially ritual—focused in Cesena on the Sun—in which the circle is all defining. De Keersmaeker returns to the circle in Vortex Temporum with its many overlapping circles inscribed on the floor (just as one had been for Violin Phase). More accessible than its two predecessors, if more musically demanding (strange notes, harmonics, overtones), this 2013 work made sense of the music in the matching of individual or grouped dancers with particular musical instruments or clusters. Watching the dance was at times like reading a score. The pianist would pounce (yes) on the keys and the ‘piano’ dancer would, with his idiosyncratically squared-off bouncing movements, jerk in response and go off on his own trajectory.
Primacy is initially given to Grisey’s music, to the instrumental ensemble, Belgium’s Ictus, who performed the opening movement of Vortex Temporum minus scores, minus conductor, minus dancers, the pianist’s aggressive playing (‘out of which’ might flow delicate string and wind flutterings) providing the initial sense of heightened, raw theatricality that is to ensue. The musicians exit, replaced by dancers standing in their stead, heads down, sinking into a half turn, leaning back and then breaking into units of individual and collective expression before uniting with the now standing, and playing, musicians. All glide like planets around the huge stage, the grand piano ‘joining in,’ pushed, while being played, by the conductor—who has just appeared—in wide circles until positioning it upstage where the musicians gather, an ensemble once again on the edge of a turning cosmos with its discordant music of the spheres.
Often, as in Cesena, the dancers move backwards, only sometimes glancing behind but relying mostly on heightened proprioception and a predetermined trajectory. This suggests not only a kind of freedom but also that the performers belong to a more determined order. However, amid the repeated circlings as the work moves towards its conclusion, individual dancers break into their own patterns and cross lines. For example, one dancer develops a limping run, falls and spins, strikes a shoulder stand and falls back to a viola glide (the score is rich in evocative glissandi). There are mass movements, a frolic with everyone running and then a strange gathering at the end, dancers in a small cluster, heads down, some bodies bending and reaching as if, having at last paused, they’ve found something elemental in the earth beneath their orbiting. However intangible the ending, the work’s overall sense of unanimity amid incredible diversity and potential chaos is very powerful.
In Vortex Temporum, as in other recent De Keersmaeker creations, there’s ample casual movement—walking in and out of the dance— alongside formal expression. This perfectly suits the dramatic unpredictability of Gerard Grisey’s score with its bursts of energy, just as the individual performances and circlings align with its tonal complexities.
Although FASE was created at the beginning of De Keersmaeker’s career and Vortex Temporum very recently, they reveal great kinship, not only with each other but with all of this remarkable choreographer’s creations. The works are rooted in walking—which becomes magical. As De Keersmaeker has asserted (RealTime 111), “our walking is our dancing. With walking we organise space and time. Walking is the basic architecture of movement.” And her works pay homage to composers with superb bodily and spatial realisations of their scores. Festival director Lieven Bertels honoured De Keersmaeker, Steve Reich, Gerard Grisey and audiences with these superb Sydney Festival pairings.
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Sydney Festival, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker & Rosas, FASE, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, 9-11 Jan; Vortex Temporum, Carriageworks, Sydney, 15-16 Jan
ADT promotional image, Chris Herzfeld Camlight Productions
(L) Scott Ewen, (R) Kimball Wong
Fruitful collaborations often seem to emerge from an almost organic symbiosis, each party bringing their abilities to bear for mutual benefit through a constant process of creative negotiation, experimentation and feedback. Such is certainly the case for Sydney-based composer Brendan Woithe and Garry Stewart, Artistic Director of the Australian Dance Theatre (ADT), the pair set to premiere two new works in March: The Beginning of Nature at WOMADelaide and Habitus for the Adelaide Festival.
Woithe is a versatile compositional gun-for-hire, as likely to produce soundscapes and composition for advertisements, short films, television, computer games, public installations and events such as the State of Origin as he is to complete commissions for the likes of the Australian String Quartet, Adelaide’s Zephyr Quartet and ADT. Indeed, he’s been particularly active over recent years producing music for ADT’s Multiverse and Be Your Self (2010), as well as collaborating with Stewart on the short films Collision Course (2014) and Mood Machine (2015).
Brendan Woithe
photo courtesy the artist
Brendan Woithe
Chatting over coffee at KLANG Studios, the production company he runs in Sydney, Woithe is effusive in his praise for Stewart and the dancers he leads. “ADT is different to any other company in Australia, I think it goes further in its physicality. The talent and the type of people they attract down there is simply phenomenal…the types of moves are different from what you’d expect and that informs the kinds of pieces that they do.”
This partly results from Stewart’s “extremely conceptual” way of working. For Habitus (in which ADT’s performers will literally enact Frank Zappa’s dismissive quip about music journalism that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” They’ll do the latter. Woithe recalls, “Garry asked me to go and see the new Frank Gehry building in Sydney, take some photographs and write a piece based on that structure, that space. I really enjoyed it. It forced me to think about particular concepts Garry is trying to express and [come] up with hopefully interesting musical expressions within an aesthetic [frame]. And we do talk about the aesthetic in the process…In the past it’s been quite monumental and abrasive and very electronic and minimal, although we’re slowly moving into a less abrasive kind of world.”
The Beginning of Nature could perhaps be seen as the first fruits of this change in direction, Woithe suggesting that future work will delve into the softer lyricism of composers such as Tim Hecker, Clint Mansell and Dustin O’Halloran. In over 40 minutes of lush electro-acoustic explorations, this work delves into the patterns that repeat across the micro- and macrocosms of the natural world, asking “Where does [nature] start? What is our place in it? And, are we a part of it because of the fact that we know that we’re a part of it?” Nine dancers will respond to the Zephyr Quartet’s realisation of Woithe’s score, with the composer himself electronically manipulating their performance in real time, while singers Shauntai Batzke and Vonda Last perform lines written in the Kaurna language of the First People of the Adelaide plains.
Top to bottom – Matte Roffe, Scott Ewen, Thomas Fonua, Michael Ramsay
photo Chris Herzfeld Camlight Productions
Top to bottom – Matte Roffe, Scott Ewen, Thomas Fonua, Michael Ramsay
Very minimal in terms of harmonic development, yet richly evocative in its textural and tonal evolution, the work consists of relatively static, striated rhythmic textures that gradually evolve as particular elements–dynamics, articulation, speed, harmonic pattern or rhythm—effect one another in layers of gently unfurling and overlapping loops. At times unsettling, at others broadly ecstatic, as constellations of harmony emerge and dissipate, Woithe’s morphing textures inescapably suggest the thrum of life and the inexorable cycles of mating, death and rebirth that constitute the natural world.
“Most things that will be heard come from manipulations of the stringed instruments in real time,” he explains, “so there’s a palette [that] I stretch as far as I can…It’s a bit scary given the very small amount of rehearsal time we have, but also exciting, as at no point in the entire show do you hear the sound of ‘the string quartet’ without something happening to it. The sound is entirely manipulated.…In many ways, the tonal outcomes of the piece are just as important as the harmonic and rhythmic elements, as all three are interrelated—they modulate each other at different times. [The music] is a dynamic system built of feedback loops. It feeds into itself all the time, which makes it unpredictable [with a] degree of ‘what’s going to happen at this point?’”
This dynamism perhaps lies at the heart of the work and indeed the creative partnership and process that has produced it, with Woithe often travelling to Adelaide to work with Stewart and the dancers in the studio, the music being literally written as the choreography has been developed. “It’s amazing,” says Woithe, “you get this incredible backwards-and-forwards and immediate reactions to things. [We] can try something out on the floor with the dancers, see if it’s working and, if not, [Garry] is able to feedback very quickly about what exactly is or isn’t working, rather than composing in isolation where you’re just preparing a bunch of music beforehand and hoping it works. We get much more done more quickly.”
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WOMADelaide 2016, ADT, The Beginning of Nature; Botanic Park, Adelaide, 12, 14 March
For several minutes, two dancers simply look at each other and breathe. Their loose white jersey pants and tops ripple with the effects of prior exertion. Then one starts to draw in breath and the ‘vacuum’ created draws the other forward until they are temporarily stuck, lips to arm; then released with a rush of air like a valve under pressure. The pair continues connecting like this across bodies until they are frozen, lip to lip. They embrace. We are caught with them in a moment of silent passion.
The program notes for Dancenorth’s Syncing Feeling at Mofo 2016 in Hobart describe the intent behind this work as an exploration of the kinds of neurological connections possible between people, stating that science now confirms the truth of centuries-old knowledge—there is little that separates us beyond skin. Often such notes feel as though they are many translations away from the work presented, but in this case the thought invested in the concept is tangible in the work.
Against an evolving soundscape of industrial, found and recorded sound, performers Kyle Page and Amber Haines open the work with a series of choreographed vignettes that fade in and out of view within a darkened, smoky stage. Using fabric or simply their bodies, they interconnect or interlock with movements that appear to mimic neurological activity—ripples, twitches, flickers, kinks—travelling through their torsos. At times the separation between their bodies is ambiguous or indiscernible. An illusion is created as one climbs the other’s shoulders under the fabric, as though a cloaked human form were stretching unnaturally towards the ceiling. In another, Page lifts Haines so that she appears to swim, just above the floor, her body rippling like fluid. The effect of touch seems to stimulate or smooth the other. While much of the work focuses just on the duo, dressed simply in white within a black space, there is also a magical interlude using moving light behind perforated fabric, once again simulating patterns of firing neurons. At each point the soundscape, which runs from drone to static to gamelan, feels closely connected with the movement as though music and dance have been developed in parallel.
While all components of this work are stripped back, the staging, sound, light and movement establish an atmosphere that is visually rich and intimate. It is unsurprising to find that Page and Haines are a couple and have shared a number of residencies for developing their work. The unique movement language, the refinement of the visual composition and the flow of the work suggest considerable time working together. Their riffing on ways to interact with each other choreographically supports the premise that indeed little separates us but skin, with the line between the dancers often difficult to identify. There is even a sense that the boundary between the dancers and the rest of the world is in question, as they establish fast repetitive movements that appear to turn limbs to a liquid blur.
South Australian director Justin Kurzel (Snowtown, 2011) continues to address the nature of evil in this striking rendition of Shakespeare’s Macbeth featuring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard. In a crowded field of Macbeth films from Welles to Kurosawa, Polanski, Australia’s Geoffrey Wright (with Sam Worthington) and many other adapters, Kurzel brings a distinctive focus on action and violence not seen since Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, along with the requisite psychological intensity felt as criminals are undone by their crimes.
Email us at giveaways [at] realtimearts.net with your name, postal address and phone number. Include 'Giveaway' and the name of the item in the subject line.
Northern Lights.mn is a non-profit organisation whose mission is “to transform our sense of what’s possible in public space. Northern Spark is one night, but Northern Lights.mn shines through the year with projects such as Creative City Challenge for the Minneapolis Convention Center, Art(ists) on the Verge, The Giant Sing-A-Long at the Minnesota State Fair, and permanent interactive public art for Saint Paul’s Union Depot.
“In January we bring you…President+Artistic Director Steve Dietz’s thoughts about his visit to ARTCOP21 in Paris in December, including a review of the artworks he saw there.”
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In 2007 RealTime co-hosted a forum in which Steve Dietz, then Director of Zero One Biennial Festival In San Jose, California was interviewed by Keith Gallasch.
RealTime issue #131 Feb-March 2016 pg. web
Joshua Santospirito & Craig San Roque, The Long Weekend in Alice Springs
photo MONA/Rémi Chauvin
Joshua Santospirito & Craig San Roque, The Long Weekend in Alice Springs
In its 2016 incarnation, Mofo remains a slippery and amorphous festival. The maverick energy that defined it has not so much diminished as relaxed somewhat, but there’s still that subversive element that hopes to make people think a little while having a fine time among the artworks.
The Long Weekend in Alice Springs
Joshua Santospirito’s graphic novel The Long Weekend in Alice Springs has been something of a phenomenon since its modest arrival in 2013. Santospirito’s adaptation of a meandering, meditative essay by Craig San Roque, an Alice Springs psychologist, has gone on to win multiple awards and is now in its third printing. The live reading of the text by its author was accompanied by Santospirito’s delicate and understated improvised guitar that also provided a soundtrack for the projected drawings. Given much of what makes graphic novels successful is the intimacy of holding the printed book which seems to speak solely to the reader, it was surprising how well this very different iteration succeeded and indeed filled the large space of the Odeon concert hall. It was great to see Santospirito’s images so large, but the real surprise was the reading by San Roque, his presence managing to command attention from a slightly rowdy opening night crowd. For those familiar with the graphic novel, it was a minor revelation, underlining the book’s powerful commentary on the challenges endured by Aboriginal people living in Central Australia.
No More Public Space, Only Public Order performance, Mofo 2016
photo Craig Opie
No More Public Space, Only Public Order performance, Mofo 2016
No More Public Space, Only Public Order (water cannon)
Some of the most radical aspects of Mofo 2016 were to be found in spaces outside this year’s festival hub, Mona. No More Public Space, Only Public Order (water cannon), a performance work and sculptural installation by Amy Spiers and Catherine Ryan, appeared on the Salamanca Lawns on a Sunday morning. Motivated by the introduction of anti-protest laws by the Tasmanian Government, the work celebrates the arrival of a newly purchased water cannon in a pantomime of the low-rent fascism that has emerged from middle-management and over-regulation.
Wearing a high-visibility orange security vest and deftly wielding traffic cone and megaphone, artist Ryan appeared to relish her polite-but-firm marshalling role and held the attention of a crowd who barely noticed as actual police vehicles slunk quietly into place. The water cannon was wheeled in, accompanied by German Shepherd dogs and shrill bagpipe music, and a demonstration ensued. Life sized silhouettes of ‘protestors’ were erected and sprayed with water by now numerous ‘security forces’ with their sunglasses, peaked caps and orange armbands. It was a bit silly and clearly intended as such, but things took a nasty turn when a group of ‘guards’ quite violently beat a fake protester to the ground and tore him up.
Looking like a giant Dalek made of safety materials (road cones and fencing) the cannon was uncovered and hurriedly wheeled about the lawn by the ‘security forces’ who had dropped all pretence of politeness and were simply screaming “MOVE!” at the audience. The work was by no means subtle, but its point well made. The water cannon now resides in Kelly’s Garden and may be seen in all its camp glory until 24 February.
We’re listening and we can’t sleep, Josh Foley, Gillian Marsden & Ashley Bird, mixed media, interactive drawing
photo Jan Dallas, courtesy Contemporary Art Tasmania
We’re listening and we can’t sleep, Josh Foley, Gillian Marsden & Ashley Bird, mixed media, interactive drawing
Exhaust
Contemporary Art Tasmania’s Mofo contribution, the overwhelming exhibition Exhaust, curated by Erin Sickler, was an awful lot of art to take in. Sickler, a curator and writer from Upstate New York, gathered 15 artists and attempted to examine what it’s like to “work, survive and thrive on a planet in crisis” (from the Exhaust website). This could mean just about anything and, given the extraordinary breadth of content in the exhibition, probably did. The result is a collection of works that, as a whole, imitated the overload of first world life. There was more to be gleaned from dispensing with the curatorial premise (such as it was) and considering the merits of individual works.
Sickler assembled artists whose engagement with contemporary art is certainly forward thinking. We’re listening and we can’t sleep—Josh Foley, Ashley Bird and Gillian Marsden’s mixture of torn paper forms and direct scribbling onto a gallery wall—was bathed in a glowing UV light had an urgent DIY energy. Ariana Reines’ beautiful throne, La Pieta, was covered in books, feathers and objects that conjured primitive folk ritual and domestic occult practices. James Newitt’s Conundrum seemed like a map of a mind in decay: terrible thoughts—”a profound and seemingly endless state of depression”—and actions—“self-admission to an institution”—were mapped with pencil on a wall. Among the standout works were Dirk De Bruyn’s Swayers—a lush projection-based work that married analogue and digital forms, such as treated film and found images all tinted with bright colours—and Sally Rees’ archly conceptual Rowan Reynolds Project. Rees had long admired the work of the fellow Tasmanian artist Reynolds and discovered that though she had not been visible in the local exhibiting world she was in fact still working. This project spoke volumes about how we view art and artistic success and was very poignant in the context of Exhaust.
Will Guthrie
photo MONA/Rémi Chauvin
Will Guthrie
Oren Ambarchi & Will Guthrie
“Pulverising” and “bestial” may seem hyperbolic choices for describing the collaborative energy generated by Oren Ambarchi and Will Guthrie. But it was truly monstrous. Guthrie’s drumming assault is always astounding, but here he unleashed a wave of ecstatic noise that forced Ambarchi to meet him with a bludgeoning tactic that ripped the air into brittle shards. They made a wall of noise and punched through it in grand style, their sound a true demolition of form. ‘Brutal,’ as young folk say today, but all the more transcendant for it.
Kate Tempest (UK)
photo MONA/Rémi Chauvin
Kate Tempest (UK)
Kate Tempest
UK artist Kate Tempest is lauded for her performance poetry, but for Mofo she was accompanied by a drummer and a keyboard player, clearly making a transition from her roots to a more populist form. Tempest has been called a hip hop artist, but this is not quite what we experience; her language has a more primal rhythm—not quite as ordered as hip hop in the strictest sense. It’s not that important though, because above all she is astonishingly passionate without being angry (although moments of righteous rage emerge) and she’s hopeful without being naive. She’s seductive, non-standard and even daggy in presentation—there is nothing of the star about her as a performer. Instead you glimpse a real live human being, a magnetic, singular artist who has a way with words and the drive of an activist, directly and indirectly addressing class warfare in many of her pieces.
Amanda Shone, Viewpoint
photo Lucy Parakhina
Amanda Shone, Viewpoint
Viewpoint
There was a lot more to Mofo 2016, but one more thing warrants mentioning: Amanda Shone’s Viewpoint. A six-metre-high umpire’s chair that allowed one a moment above the wandering throng, soundtracked with Matt Warren’s pleasant headphone work of soft scrapes and dark but gentle tones that hovered somewhere between tide and traffic noise. Viewpoint provided an exquisite still-point that reminded anyone who sat in it where they were: on the river, below the hills of Tasmania.
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Mofo 2016, Mona and various venues, Hobart, 13-18 Jan
Sue Dodd, Airhole Screentests, Everything is Nothing Wendy (Pop)
2013, single channel HD video with stereo sound, 12:26 min
Busy, voluble and visually hot, Campbelltown Arts Centre’s engrossing Video oediV is alive with colour and intense performativity. Even the aesthetically sublime Lux (2014) by Silvana and Gabriella Mangano projected onto two large screens pairs its moodily impressionistic colouration of clouds and trees—and a sometimes racking earthquake score —with black and white footage of a darting woman holding a mirror which at times obscures her face, dazzlingly reflects light and becomes a screen for inserted images. Elsewhere performing bodies are ever more prominent.
Nicole Monks, in another engaging work for two large screens, Finding Grannie Laurie (2009), realises a more contemplative performativity with an intense stillness in juxtaposed landscapes—one forested, the other open, dusty, ochre-red—in which she morphs symbolically, identifying with her grandmother (mother of a child of the Lost Generations) as hip modern clothing ultimately surrenders to kindred nakedness.
A different kind of morphing is realised in Sue Dodd’s Wendy Airhole (2013) video series. It’s the artist’s take on the creation of celebrities à la Andy Warhol, in which Dodd appears in various popular culture music guises from country to hip-hop with personae and songs of her own making. The power of this work resides above all in the large black and white video portraits (meant to recall Warhol screen tests it seems) of Dodd’s characters and the attention we can dedicate to these ‘same but different’ manifestations of performers revelling in their ironic art. It’s quite the opposite in Angela Tiatia’s Woman’s Movement where a blonde-wigged trio of faceless ‘sexy’ women dance vigorously, if mechanically, with exercise balls and red bananas until exhaustion begins to set in.
Like Dodd, Brazilian artist Berna Reale too appears in her videos, but as one of the frightening agents of social inequality and political threat. Though emphatically didactic, the work’s fantastical images are complex and memorable. In Cantando na Chuva (Singing in the rain; 2014) a bulky figure in gold suit and gold gas mask wobbles along a red carpet across a vast field of garbage to the sound of Gene Kelly’s “Singin’ in the rain,” while indifferent scavengers go about their daily work in the distance. There is no rain. In Soledade (2013), a woman relentlessly drives a golden chariot pulled by a team of pigs through the dusty street of a poor village. While these two works are grimly funny, Palomo (see an excerpt, 2012) is intimidating. A security force figure dressed entirely in black and wearing a protective wire grid that looks like a muzzle, rides a bright red horse through near empty city streets as if ready to crush any protest with the force of a horseman of the apocalypse. The heightened clatter of the hooves on the road is additionally unnerving. Each work is finely shot: Soledade with action movie verve and Palomo with austere arthouse calculation.
Another work that mixes message and mystery is the aptly titled Opaque (Germany, 2014) in which Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz in a wreck of a building announce that having been “underground for five years” they are making a film to combat colour barriers and racism. Roughly shot, Opaque ‘documents’ the process. Glittering backdrops are pulled back and forth, there are speeches (some from notes) and finally the lighting of colour smoke bombs, pink and blue, that merge into a swirling purple cloud that fills building and screen, reflecting the gender indeterminancy of the characters and the dissolving of boundaries. Calculatedly naïve, its performances raw and filming rough, Opaque is irritating but still demands attention for its sheer strangeness—and its refusal to adopt the screen and performance values of the likes of Monks, Dodd and Reale.
The exhibition’s vivid performativity is loudly announced by the song at the centre of the first work encountered on entering the exhibition, Rosie Deacon’s Bit Fat in Da Back Kangaroo Rap (2016). In an expertly realised ‘video clip’ (Sam James), kangaroo-like figures (Deacon and companions) dance with abandon. Around the large screen are mannequins dressed in the dancers’ costumes and other creations (tea towels etc), revealing Deacon’s astonishing weaving together of Australian tourist kitsch, frequently endowing it with comic detail, like a silken koala in a kangaroo pouch. Though making a political point about the denaturing of Australian fauna, Big Fat in Da Back Kangaroo Rap above all revels in pushing kitsch into camp excess but with the meticulous attention to detail rarely afforded toy koalas and kangaroos.
Among other works are further varieties of performance: Thai-Australian artist Kawita Vatanajyankur performs a series of surrealised domestic labours (see Virginia Baxter’s response); Hissy Fit (Sydney) go verité at great length with nebulous car trip chatter (you look on from deckchairs); New Yorker Anne Hirsch appears in provocative short works, some personal, some satirical, including Semiotics of the Camwhore, playing on a tiny screen in a corner of the gallery; and Soda_Jerk (Australia, currently based in New York) pay tribute to the pioneering work of VNS Matrix (I can’t comment, one screen was not functioning and the sound, even with earphones, had to compete with “Kangaroo rap,” as did Gillian Wearing’s 2 into 1, an estimation by its subjects of the relationship between a mother and sons—the only males to appear in the exhibition).
Video oediV is a distinctive exhibition of Australian and international artists, all of them female, revealing an expanding range of performative possibilities in video art. These were inherent in the beginnings of the medium in the 1960s alongside ‘painterly,’ photographic or filmmaking approaches less preoccupied with the body or the makers themselves.
I didn’t sight a written curator’s statement for Video oediV. It might have explained the show’s the title, but it suggests a mirror image, recalling arts writer Rosalind Krauss’ much debated accusation in 1976 (“Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October, Vol. 1, Spring, 1976) that video artists were self-obsessed. Most of the artists in Video oediV are mirrored variously as themselves, extensions of themselves or adopted personae; the intriguing results for the most part seem exploratory rather than narcissistic, finding or inventing liberating ways of being.
See Video oediV before it closes on 20 March; you’ll be delighted and intrigued.
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Campbelltown Arts Centre, Video oediV, curator Megan Monte, 16 Jan-20 March
Two hours disappear quickly in BUNNY, a bondage-performance event in which desire hums beneath explorations of trust, consent, collective responsibility, spectatorship, sexuality and power.
We find Luke George and Daniel Kok in the middle of a wide aquamarine floor, various objects positioned around them—vacuum cleaner, fire extinguisher, pot plant. All the objects are decoratively bound in brightly coloured rope. George ties more ropes in intricate knots around Kok’s body and attaches them to a ring that dangles overhead. He slings Kok over so that he is floating, horizontal, and guides him into a gentle spin. Then flicking his deliciously long macraméd hair to the other side of his head, he says to us, “Let’s keep him spinning.”
In an instant we are participants. We have agency and responsibility. After taking turns at venturing into the space to give Kok’s spinning form a push, audience members are enlisted to help untie him, then tie George up and allow themselves too to be tied in increasingly enveloping binds.
Luke George is soft-spoken, casual. “You can go tighter,” he says mildly to the person tying his hands behind his back. He gives streamlined directions (“Lean back,” “Don’t stop”) and praises the participants he has involved. I notice my own desire welling up in these interactions—George gazing into the face of the man whose hands work fast at the knots, fingers slipping snug between rope and thigh to make adjustments.
Luke George, BUNNY, Campbelltown Arts Centre
Daniel Kok has a different energy: he does not utter a word throughout the performance. He slowly works his way around the floor, engaging intently with the bound objects, one at a time. He activates the objects (literally sets off the fire extinguisher), but not only that: it feels like he is ‘happening’ to them, as if each object must endure some sort of imposed, transformative embrace.
There are gear-changes throughout the piece: spurts of music, intoxicating waacking and voguing dance styles and periods of quiet. We travel for a long time, but it’s a good amount of time to settle into the dynamic the work develops.
Eventually, Kok approaches a human. He ties an audience member into a particularly trying bind, eases her into the space and holds her in close embrace before smacking her once, twice, on the buttocks. A collective gasp sounds from the audience. Was she prepared for that? Kok goes on to silently empty her handbag, lining the contents up in single file on the floor and doling out her cash to random audience members. By now the woman is laughing. Many of us are laughing. This is a clear breach of privacy and yet, because of the sense of trust and mutual care that Kok and George have developed in the space, it’s okay. I have the sense that the woman feels safe.
BUNNY is a momentary explosion of questions. It is a temporary community. I leave abuzz with an emergent sense of my own place in those questions; with a new sense of my own desire.
Daniel Kok and participant, BUNNY, Campbelltown Arts Centre
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See also Garth Knight’s Nemeton, a Japanese influenced bondage work, in which the artist also invited audience members to be bound. It featured in Performance Space’s Liveworks in 2015.
Campbelltown Arts Centre, BUNNY, artists Daniel Kok (Singapore) and Luke George (Australia), lighting design Matthew Adey, House of Vnholy, dramaturgy Tang Fu Kuen, producers Tang Fu Kuen, Alison Halit; Campbelltown Arts Centre, NSW, 22-23 Jan
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This six-part TV series makes a significant contribution to the family comedy/drama genre focusing on the lives of the fractious and funny Asian-Australian Family Law as they navigate the parents’ potential divorce. Featuring a strong cast and scenes that range from satirical to self-deprecating to deeply emotional this is an unusual and entertaining hybrid.
South Australian director Justin Kurzel (Snowtown, 2011) continues to address the nature of evil in this striking rendition of Shakespeare’s Macbeth featuring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard. In a crowded field of Macbeth films from Welles to Kurosawa, Polanski, Australia’s Geoffrey Wright (with Sam Worthington) and many other adapters, Kurzel brings a distinctive focus on action and violence not seen since Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, along with the requisite psychological intensity felt as criminals are undone by their crimes.
