Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

March 2016

Australian String Quartet, Alleged Dances, Adelaide Festival 2016

photo Shane Reid

Australian String Quartet, Alleged Dances, Adelaide Festival 2016

The evolution of the string quartet is continuing, as performers and composers rejuvenate and extend the musical forms associated with it, using augmented instrumentation and innovative presentation. In two great concerts, the Australian String Quartet worked with a percussionist and Zephyr Quartet with visual artists and sound effects.

The Australian String Quartet, Alleged Dances

The Adelaide-based ASQ is a standard-bearer for excellence in playing and for bringing us the best of the traditional quartet repertoire. The ASQ’s performances of the Beethoven B flat major quartet (Op. 18, no 6), the opening work on this program, and Schumann’s A minor quartet (Op. 41 no1), the closing work, were delightful. This was the first time the Australian String Quartet had performed with its two new violinists, Dale Barltrop (first violin) and Francesca Hiew (second). The Quartet musicians are of the highest calibre and their understanding of ensemble playing is excellent.

In between the Beethoven (a musical revolutionary in his day) and the Schumann, percussionist Claire Edwardes joined the ASQ for the premiere of Matthew Hindson’s fine new String Quartet No 4 for quartet and vibraphone, a magical work. The bell-like tones of the vibraphone contrast with the strings and while there is the potential for the vibraphone to dominate the sound, Hindson nicely balances the instrumental forces and brings each instrument to the fore. The first of the two movements is a bright, celebratory fanfare, written on the occasion of the birth of the composer’s daughter, and it proceeds at an allegro rhythm through a series of crescendi. The slower second movement is dreamily elegiac, even wistful, a lovely piece of writing for any combination of instruments, let alone one as challenging as this. The violin solo is built on a delightful melodic line, the interplay of the contrasting sounds creates a miasma of sonic light and colour and the mood gently invites thoughtful introspection.

The mood became light-hearted with the ASQ’s performance of Claire Edwardes’ arrangement of three excerpts—Habanera, Rag the Bone and Judah to Ocean— from US composer John Adams’ 1994 work John’s Book of Alleged Dances. Each of these has a strong dance rhythm but, as the steps had not been invented, they remain “alleged” dances. Adams scored the dances for a quartet using a pre-recorded tape of a prepared piano, but in her wonderful new arrangement, Edwardes has transcribed the taped piano element for percussion instruments that retain the playfulness and the sonic character of the original. The close understanding between the five performers that results from this transformation of Adams’ work makes for lively and enchanting music.

Zephyr Quartet, Exquisite Corpse with animations by Jo Kerlogue and Luku Kukuku, Adelaide Festival 2016

photo Luku Kukuku

Zephyr Quartet, Exquisite Corpse with animations by Jo Kerlogue and Luku Kukuku, Adelaide Festival 2016

Zephyr Quartet, Exquisite Corpse

In 2015, Zephyr Quartet won both Arts SA’s award for innovation and the corresponding Adelaide Critics Circle award, acknowledging their extraordinary concert Music for Strings and iThings. Zephyr has a long history of collaborating with artists in a variety of media and they have an unlimited supply of new ideas. This program, Exquisite Corpse, is inspired by the parlour game created by the Surrealists in which several people contribute to an accumulating artwork. Zephyr has adapted the game by engaging a diverse group of contemporary composers—Zoë Barry and Jed Palmer, Zephyr violinist Belinda Gehlert, Jarrad Payne, Andrea Keller, Jherek Bischoff, Adam Page, Robert Davidson, Kate Moore, Erik Griswold, Jason Sweeney and JG Thirlwell—to contribute elements to the composition of a single work for string quartet. The result is a unique piece of music lasting an hour in total. Each composer’s contribution, of several minutes, builds on the previous contributions. As you listen you try to guess who the composers might be.

The work is supplemented by a video installation. The quartet sits behind what looks like a giant octopus with tentacles spreading across the stage. As the audience enters, the octopus emits smoke and, as the performance progresses, its tentacles glow with coloured lights and there are video projections on its body and on a screen behind the players. As the music unfolds we see a succession of cartoon drawings of bizarre, surrealistic, but very cute creatures. The delightful animations by artists Jo Kerlogue and Luku Kukuku evolve in tandem with the music. To emphasise the surrealist character of the composition, the players are closely miked and the amplified sound mixed to create subtle effects such as echoes, looping and distortion, underscoring the fantasy imagery.

There is some fine writing in Exquisite Corpse’s 11 continuous movements. The music is generally tonal and melodic, nicely voiced for a quartet, and many passages display a strong jazz influence. There being no single composer, no overarching character or theme emerges, but the result is a lot of fun and the graphics are superb. Exquisite Corpse should be made into a movie.

Zephyr’s artistic direction prioritises new ideas and collaboration, and they have again produced an experimental work that should inspire further development. In assembling what is in effect a collective of composers, artists and performers for this concert, their approach is a significant departure from the traditional role and functioning of a string quartet. Once Zephyr has realised an idea, however, they typically move onto the next; it would be interesting to see them further refine this kind of work.

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Adelaide Festival, The Australian String Quartet, Alleged Dances, Adelaide Town Hall, 29 Feb; Zephyr Quartet, Exquisite Corpse, The Space, Adelaide Festival Centre, 7 March

RealTime issue #131 Feb-March 2016, web

Tectonics, Adelaide Festival 2016

photo Tony Lewis

Tectonics, Adelaide Festival 2016

Ilan Volkov is an adventurous and internationally admired conductor. He is also creator and artistic director of Tectonics, a unique two-day immersion in the clashing of musical genres that is intended to catalyse new musical forms and directions. Tectonics Adelaide 2016 is the 14th Tectonics event held worldwide, and the second to be held in an Adelaide Festival.

For his 2016 program, Volkov focused on “new orchestral, chamber, electronic and improvised music and its contrasts” and the spatial and acoustic properties of the Adelaide Town Hall, where it was staged. It was also a visual experience, with some composers using video in their work.

By commissioning new kinds of work for Tectonics, Volkov expands music’s frontiers. He invites each city’s resident orchestra to experiment with improvisation and graphic scores, to work with ensembles and performers not typically associated with orchestras and, with guest performers, to use the formal space of the concert hall flexibly and experimentally.

Day 1

The 21 members of Sydney’s Splinter Orchestra mingled with the crowd, spending 70 minutes slowly, gently, sometimes imperceptibly making all kinds of sounds and exploring the acoustic properties of the Town Hall’s gracious entrance, with its marble staircase and ornate high ceilings, in a work appropriately entitled Air Hockey. We heard Splinter’s typically modified, improvised and symbolically suggestive instruments, such as a length of hose-pipe, a sax with a drink bottle stuffed into its bell and an electric guitar scraped against the stairs. A vocalist ascended the stairway performing slow-motion mime gestures. Ambient sound became part of the mix, as some performers moved onto the external balcony overlooking Adelaide’s main thoroughfare, their sounds competing with traffic noise. By the work’s end, everyone had drifted into the auditorium, our sonic, visual and architectural awareness refreshed.

The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra under Volkov then performed Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh’s In Talentum of Light. The stage had been extended well into the auditorium to accommodate the vast instrumentation required for the ASO’s performances, and for Hsieh’s work, there were additional players in the balcony and numerous percussionists located around the space, so that the sound came from all directions. A powerful work, it ends with the orchestra members playing wine glasses to produce a high-pitched shimmering sound. Composition with glass objects is an ongoing interest of the composer.

In Berlin-based Australian composer Cathy Milliken’s selection of exquisite songs for mezzo soprano and orchestra, Jessica Aszodi was an engaging soloist. The work sets texts ranging from Sophocles to Hollywood movie scripts. US composer Jim O’Rourke’s Come Back Soon for orchestra was a lighter work with a metronomic rhythm that exemplified a recurring theme permeating this year’s programming, that of time. The remaining works of the evening were all lengthy and unstructured, inducing us to surrender temporal awareness.

In 2014, Volkov conducted the orchestra in two quasi-improvisations with soloists, one with Jon Rose (violin) and the other with Oren Ambarchi (guitar/electronics). This time Volkov brought improvising jazz trio The Necks together with the ASO and also added Speak Percussion, creating an experimental composite of three ensembles, each with a unique musical sensibility. Necks bassist Lloyd Swanton led the untitled set with a quiet, deliciously seductive bass riff on which The Necks’ other members and Speak began to build. With his back to these musicians, Volkov conducted the orchestra using hand gestures and printed signs, with the ASO members playing from graphic scores. The music slowly evolved as the players introduced motifs taken up and developed by other players—at one point, a riff that the flautist had developed was taken up by Chris Abrahams on the piano. For 40 minutes they made magic, with Speak wonderfully enlarging on Tony Buck’s imaginative percussion and the orchestra expanding the depth, colour and sonority of what was essentially Necks-style music.

Tectonics, Adelaide Festival 2016

photo Tony Lewis

Tectonics, Adelaide Festival 2016

Reinforcing the musical potential of a large, improvising ensemble, Splinter then delivered a gorgeous set entitled Microphony, instinctively blending timbres, pitches and textures. They performed off-stage and in the dark, focusing our awareness on the sound heard in stereo over the PA. Splinter’s apparently anarchic playfulness belies the ensemble’s highly sophisticated sense of musical form and a performative approach that generates a unique aesthetic. To play like this, the musicians must first perfect the art of listening—to each other. The Necks and Splinter Orchestra have both proven that leaderless democracies can work if everyone listens appreciatively and co-operates.

The evening closed with legendary US minimalist composer Phill Niblock’s dramatic work Vlada, performed by Eyvind Kang on viola with electronics. The sound gradually built polyphonically until it reached the proportions of a cathedral organ with all stops out, saturating us with harmonics and microtones.

Day 2

David Shea’s The Trading Routes, for guzheng (Mindy Meng Wang), percussion (Speak), and keyboard, electronics and video (Shea), is inspired by stories of the Silk Road, with Shea’s video showing images of Buddha statues, ancient wall-paintings from caves along the Road and movie clips unfolding like a stream of consciousness. Together with his overtone singing, the sounds of the guzheng, ringing Tibetan bowls and the percussive whisper of poured rice, Shea’s composition suggests a deeply personal encounter with cultural history.

TQF4M1 was the title of a 25-minute set by five Splinter Orchestra members and TQM4F1 that of a set by five other Splinter members. With their absence of formal development, these enchanting improvisations again dissolved time. Some quirky instrumental elements included Jim Denley placing a ping pong ball on a tube pushed into his sax, the ball floating on his breath as he played.

US soprano Jessika Kenney’s wordless, vocal solo ONSDV (the acronym was not explained in the program), accompanied by her own video work, was for me the highlight of this Tectonics program. As her looped video shows an idyllic garden scene, the 25-minute work opens with Kenney singing sustained notes on a single pitch before descending from the stage and slowly moving around the auditorium. As she moves, we notice subtle shifts in the sound caused by her changing location. Her voice becomes emotional, sometimes distressed, sometimes squealing or rasping, and there are microtonal changes in pitch. A taped voiceover in another language emerges part-way through, as if a speech has inadvertently intruded into the mix. The work concludes with the sound of Kenney breathing heavily. The eternally repeating video may be a metaphor for life on Earth while her subtly changing voice suggests the fortunes of an individual life within it.

Tectonics, Adelaide Festival 2016

photo Tony Lewis

Tectonics, Adelaide Festival 2016

French bassoonist Dafne Vincente-Sandoval performed a second, untitled, Niblock work, similar to the composer’s earlier piece, with a single monotonal line growing into an overwhelming polyphony. Niblock’s captivating video of flowers in close-up accompanied it, the camera entering the flowers to reveal their fragile structure in micro-detail, perhaps a metaphor for the exploration of sound itself.

Speak Percussion then enthralled us with a quiet but intense 40-minute work, The Moon in a Moonless Sky (Two), by Austrian composer Klaus Lang. The four members of Speak, again sonically exploring the space, played instruments at nine points around the auditorium.

The Arcadia Quintet (flute, horn, oboe, clarinet and bassoon), which is rapidly making a name for itself in Australia, gave us the world premiere of Eyvind Kang’s Divertimenti, a vibrant work commissioned for them. Arcadia was then joined by Speak and Jessika Kenney for Kang’s The Mathematical Sciences Are Not the True Sciences, also commissioned for Tectonics—a 30-minute setting of texts by controversial Renaissance philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Proceeding with mathematical precision, including one section in which four percussionists robotically play maracas, this work of Kang’s is more cerebral than his voluptuous Divertimenti.

In the final sessions of the evening Papaphilia (Fjorn Butler) pumped up the volume with her Disciplined Monad, for electronics, to which many in the audience danced, followed by a brooding work for laptop by Nik Kamvissis and a long improvisation entitled A New Hedge for guitars and electronics by Oren Ambarchi and Tetuzi Akiyama.

The range of music in a Tectonics program will not be to everyone’s taste—during the 12 hours of performance, audience members come and go—but the curation is artistically adventurous and offers sustained exploration of musical ideas. David Sefton has programmed some wonderful new music during his time as Adelaide Festival Artistic Director and is to be congratulated on bringing Ilan Volkov and Tectonics to Australia.

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Tectonics, conductor, artistic director, Ilan Volkov, Adelaide Town Hall, 4-5 March

RealTime issue #131 Feb-March 2016, web

Autoharp, Tim Bruniges, Drones

photo Galerie pompom

Autoharp, Tim Bruniges, Drones

Chippendale is a suburb in an amplified state of renovation. Closing Galerie pompom’s door behind me on the Abercrombie Street assault of construction and heavy traffic offers an overwhelming sense of relief. It’s cool in here—white and uncluttered—and there’s a pleasing harmonic hum at Goldilocks-just-right volume. This is the sound of the first of three works that make up Tim Bruniges’ exhibition, Drones.

This extended tone-cluster is emanating from an autoharp propped on a small shelf to the right of the entrance. (An autoharp is not a harp but a zither-like instrument designed so that certain strings will be damped to produce chords.) Bruniges has placed electromagnets over the strings (as with an EBow) to keep them continuously vibrating, creating a potentially endless chord. This first sonic zone is like an aural-cleanser—the sonic equivalent of a tall glass of cool water.

You don’t really need to stay with this work, rather it stays with you as you move through the gallery, its harmonic concentrations shifting subtly according to the mysteries of architectural acoustics. I think of it as a ‘cool’ sound (in terms of temperature, not fashion) because of the way it underpins Bruniges’ second piece, a video work titled Horses.

Horses, Tim Bruniges, Drones

photo courtesy Galerie pompom

Horses, Tim Bruniges, Drones

On a large wide-screen monitor is a beautiful herd of tawny horses amid an equally stunning icy landscape of bluish-greys and white. It’s a breathtaking image but after a moment you notice something that can’t quite be called a movement, more a smearing in time. With an ultra-smooth blurring effect—perhaps closest to the movement of ink in water, or the swirl of smoke—a tail swishes, a mane is tossed and the central animal breaks away from the herd, but there is no clear sense of a beginning or end to the action, just a constant state of edgeless shifting. It’s reminiscent of Daniel Crooks’ confounding and mesmeric shifting of bodies and images through time (see the interview with Crooks), however Bruniges has his own unique technique. You might expect the figurative nature of the image to push against the homogenic thickness required to create a sense of the “dronal,” yet Bruniges has indeed created a successful visual equivalent.

After a few minutes contemplation, you begin to realise that the gallery is actually getting quite noisy. At the far end, the loading bay roller door is open, letting in a not insignificant swathe of real world noise—a garbage truck, impact drilling, shouts from the multiple surrounding construction sites. Facing the opening is a small bench which allows you to sit between two treble speakers with a sub woofer. Suspended above, a microphone connects with a discrete, yet aesthetically pleasing, triode vacuum tube amplifier and audio workstation.

Wall, Tim Bruniges, Drones

photo Galerie pompom

Wall, Tim Bruniges, Drones

Sitting on the bench you try to discern what’s going on. What is outside and what is inside and how is Bruniges combining the two? Admittedly this is not an unfamiliar conceit, but as in Horses, Bruniges distinguishes himself with the quality of the execution. Here it’s all about subtlety—finding the perfect mix of real world and processed sounds. There’s a low rumbling hum coming from the sub—perhaps a pitch-shifted sum of the autoharp and external noises, or maybe even well controlled spatial feedback—but it’s just on the edge of hearing, blending with the external world’s dull roar. It’s the higher frequencies that make occasional cameos, ringing out with a light application of reverb and some sculpted EQ-—the voice of the gallery attendant, the ping of a bottle cap being kicked as someone walks down the lane—rising out of the mix for fleeting moments that just grab your attention and then are gone again.

The open door not only lets in sound but also affords a theatrically framed view of the brick wall on the other side of the narrow lane. The work is titled Wall and this is clearly one reason why, but Bruniges’ sonic treatment also makes a wall of sound. Not in an ‘epic noise’ sense but rather via a fascinating flattening effect, the background and foreground brought into the one sonic plane. Actually, it’s perhaps not so much a wall of sound; rather the processing forms a screen or scrim, through which real world sounds are sieved to create a sense of flatness or uniformity.

Drones are generally associated with extended time frames and a certain thickness or density, yet each of Tim Bruniges’ works offers a surprising succinctness, lightness and clarity in their articulation of the concept. However, the real strength of the exhibition lies in the ways in which the three pieces literally resonate, bringing together internal and external sites in an all-encompassing cross-sensory drone that induces a state of nuanced awareness of both time and space.

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Tim Bruniges, Drones, Galerie pompom, Sydney, 2 March-3 April

Sydney based visual artist and musician Tim Bruniges works across installation, sound and video, centring on notions of perception, the fallibility of memory and our relationship with time. Often taking the form of site-specific installations, the works attempt to create immersive spaces that allow for a disruption of expected experience. He holds a Master of Fine Arts from COFA, University of New South Wales and a Bachelor of Arts (Mus) with distinction from the University of Western Sydney. He has exhibited works nationally and in the USA, Germany, France, Iceland and Russia and recently has been based in New York following completion of the Greene St Studio artist residency in 2013 awarded by the Australia Council for the Arts (from his website).

RealTime issue #131 Feb-March 2016, web

Daniel Crooks has kindly provided RealTime with excerpts from Phantom Ride. Enjoy them as a prelude to reading the artist’s account of the inspiration for and the making of the work. The Editors.

The video work of Daniel Crooks presents folds and tears in reality—rifts in the fourth dimension and slippages beyond. His latest work, Phantom Ride, the result of the second biennial Ian Potter Moving Image Commission, is now showing at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) and while I haven’t seen it in situ, the preview video suggests Crooks is getting even closer to manifesting a multiversal time machine. But rather than stepping into a Tardis, Crooks’ chosen method of time-travel is by train.

Trainspotting

In the earliest days of cinema, there were non-narrative films called ‘phantom rides’ in which the camera was placed on the front or back of a moving vehicle (generally a train) showing views of the world silently gliding past, a stunning revelation for the audience of the day. Speaking to me by phone, Crooks cites perhaps the earliest version of these, the Lumière Brothers’ Leaving Jerusalem by Railway (1896), as a direct inspiration. However in his version of a phantom ride, Crooks has filmed railway tracks heading towards the horizon, mainly in rural locations but with some urban cameos, and then embedded them inside each other like Babushka dolls, so that the viewer passes through a seemingly infinite set of nested landscapes.

Trains have featured in Crooks’ practice from the very beginning. About Train No 1 (2002), he says, “I was commuting three and a half hours two days a week on the train, spending hours looking out the window. And then the experiments started to take form. Looking back it’s not such a coincidence given the train’s illustrious history in relation to the cinema and to our modern idea of time. [Standard time or railway time was established in 1840 in England to allow timetabling accuracy for the growing national rail system.] I think there’s something about the linearity and predictability… about seeing that line heading into the future and that line receding in the past. Then there’s that great echo of train tracks in film, the physical material of film.”

Time travel

Phantom Ride is a two-channel work projected onto a double-sided screen—one side offers a forward journey and the other a view travelling backwards. Crooks tells me that there’s a moment in the middle when the camera/point-of-view mounts a revolving train-turntable and the direction of each screen is reversed.

“You have one side looking into the future, the other side looking into the past and then the screen itself is this moment of now—a very thin meniscus where the present exists. I really love the idea that even the train lines themselves converge into the centre of the screen [in] classic one point perspective. It’s almost like the future and past converge into the centre of the screen as well. The light rays passing through [make a] lens—a time lens. That has some really nice echoes in terms of hourglasses, light cone diagrams, causal event diagrams. I love the idea of these cones emanating from a plane and the plane is always called ‘now’.”

The volume of video

Most of Crooks’ previous works have a marked horizontal orientation, either the camera or the figure shifting sideways. However in 2013’s An Embroidery of Voids there is a shift in technique as the camera travels down the alleyways of Melbourne, the point-of-view essentially moving forward into the screen.

A Garden of Parallel Paths (2012) offers the transitional moment in this approach. Here the camera pans horizontally but reveals a series of vertical views down the laneways. The other key difference in these later three works is a transparency and clarity of image. The time-space shifting happens with the physical movement of camera and editing rather than the additional extruded artefacts that are a signature of his earlier studies.

Crooks explains, “I’m still working with the other technique as well…it all comes from the same place. [The Garden of Parallel Paths presented] the laneways as slices that have been removed from the city, negative slices. So instead of me slicing a section out of the video frame, someone had already taken a slice out of the city. Applying that same strategy [I wondered if it might be] possible to link a series of slices together into a new whole. I’ve always been interested in the ‘multiple worlds’ interpretation—that there are parallel universes spiralling off from every possible causal event. It was a way to start talking about that a little bit more explicitly. And then works beget more questions for more works [to answer them]…So that’s where I found myself with these more recent ones. It’s less about trying to explore a physical time—looking at time from the side—and trying to look at how you can connect these discontinuous spaces into a single whole.

“I also think it’s trying to push more into that third dimension. It’s funny with the older works, a lot of the construction is done in a 3D [software] environment and I’m often thinking of the volume of a video as a three dimensional object—how we actually navigate that. So I guess that 3D thinking has started to permeate the practice a little more.”

Daniel Crooks

photo Steffen Pedersen

Daniel Crooks

Commission consequences

What has always made Daniel Crooks’ work stand out from the pack, especially considering the turn-of-the-21st century fondness for lo-fi performance video, has been his high production standards. Crooks bemoans the bed he’s made for himself: “They’re very simple propositions but to get the audience to this point where they can appreciate that simple proposition you need to get the video up to a level where they’re not being distracted by weird, anomalous mistakes that we’re so good at detecting. It’s also a problem when we’re installing these works. They’re almost stress tests for playback systems. I’m always taking them to museums and galleries and putting them up and it’s obviously not playing back at the right frame rate or there’s some sort of problem in the system that would normally be invisible. I think 99% of works played in that situation would look fine, but with mine, because the movements are so smooth, you notice it straight away.”

While the works have been successful so far using technology that Crooks says he’s “homebrewed,” the Ian Potter Moving Image Commission meant that he was able to approach a motion control engineer to assist in the design of a computerised dolly system to ensure a precision in the speed of the tracking shots. Most importantly the commission allowed him to create a work of far larger scale than he could have if self-funded (in particular moving up to two channels) and to work with what he quite simply terms “realistic” production methods. Of course the commission is also a partnership with the Australian Centre for the Moving Image who provide a significant exhibition opportunity and inclusion in the ACMI permanent collection.

Future-past projections

With Phantom Rides up and running (until May 29) Crooks is now onto the next thing. Coming up at the end of March at the Wellington City Gallery, New Zealand, is the exhibition Bullet Time, featuring Crooks and fellow New Zealander Steve Carr. Their work will be placed in relation to pieces by moving image pioneers Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) and Harold Edgerton (1903–90), a prospect he’s very excited by, although it’s Muybridge’s peer Étienne-Jules Marey who is Crooks’ real hero.

“Some of the images that he was making and some of my first experiments in the late 90s are freakishly similar and I had not even heard of Marey at that point…Marey was trying to break down motion—to stop the world and to see the little moments that are in it—and how those come back together to create motion. Whereas I was coming from an absolutely diametrically opposed situation of trying to break [filmed] motion down to recreate it and make [new] motion. And at the opposite ends of the circle we meet up.”

As with all things Daniel Crooks, past and present, time and space, constitute a looped and folded moment.

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Ian Potter Moving Image Commission: Phantom Ride, Daniel Crooks, presented by Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), 16 Feb-29 May 2016

Bullet Time, Wellington City Gallery, New Zealand, 25 March-10 July 2016

Daniel Crooks and Natalie Cursio’s at least for a while anyway was one of the highlights of Carriageworks’ 24 Frames Per Second in 2015.

Applications for the next Ian Potter Moving Image Commission will be due mid 2016.

RealTime issue #131 Feb-March 2016, web

My ‘coup de foudre’ re the performance scene at the Gold Coast at the moment is well documented (“Cultural Resurgence at Gold Coast”), so it was with great anticipation that I sailed down there recently to The Walls Gallery on Mountain View Road at Miami Beach to see a new showing, Now and Then, by Brisbane-based performance art ‘it-girls’ Clark Beaumont (Sarah Clark and Nicole Beaumont).

The Walls is a reclaimed industrial space: intimate but with soaring verticals and surprising angles that make it a rich site for artists to play within. Clark Beaumont’s eerily mesmerising trilogy of installations is sensitively curated by Danni Zuvela (also co-artistic director of Liquid Architecture) and The Walls founder and Artistic Director Rebecca Ross. Kudos needs to be granted this dynamic team for showcasing the small but distinctive Gold Coast contemporary art scene. There was a buzz at the warmly hosted opening night and a sense of (at long last) cultural dialogue between Brisbane and the Gold Coast with QAG curators and luminaries mingling with the stalwart community of local artists and eccentrics drawn to the edgy energy of The Walls’ agenda.

Clark Beaumont, Coexisting, 2013, performed by the artists and commissioned by Kaldor Public Art Projects for 13 Rooms, 2013

Drinking and gossiping in the driveway outside, we were able to step into the curtained hothouse (literally) of video pieces developed by the wunderkind female duo, to be engulfed by the cinematic aesthetic that dominates their video practice. The work that has put them on the map is their live performance art, most famously Coexisting at Kaldor Public Art Projects’ 13 Rooms in Sydney in 2013, where they co-inhabited a white plinth comfortable only for one body. The coltish elegance and fierce complicity of the two young women was arresting, inviting an oddly dispassionate gaze despite their relative youth and grace. This is the power of their collaborative force: they make us consider them through the prism of their friendship and cultural preoccupations rather than our own.

Their video work seems to engage with a different DNA from their live art practice. It is a satirical and filmic discourse, with moments of snort-inducing, playful irony and cinematic deconstruction. Their first installation for The Walls was a revived work, Stay Up (2015), a circular screen about the size of a large television set showing looping film of a close-up of one artist’s mouth holding a fixed smile. It is the smile that film actors are taught to develop—unnaturally wide, that shows both teeth and gums—horse-trading to signify health and status, but achingly uncomfortable to sustain.

On a second circular screen, a short filmic sequence, Now and Then (2016), is underscored by ominous horror movie motifs, a recurring strategy Clark Beaumont employed in The Descent (2015) and prior video works. This time our view is a wide aerial shot of the two women floating gently but inexorably towards each other in a glinting, twilit pool. For The Walls they placed this screen above us, framed exquisitely between two timber beams that descend from the corrugated iron roof. This Hitchcockian sleight created a lush vertigo as we looked up at the screen to look down on these pale, floating bodies in their simple one-piece swimsuits. The two bodies collided ever so gently and docked within the curves of each other’s necks, merging into one splayed geometric floating body, a Kali-Hydra that eventually dis-entangled itself as the two bodies floated away. It was an eerie and disquieting work because of its restraint, another hallmark of Clark Beaumont’s collaboration. You kept waiting for the horror/shark/blood, but all you got was the dread.

The final installation was nestled behind black curtains under the stairs that descend into the gallery. In a tight mid-shot the two performers, clad in gold lamé jumpsuits, roll between the walls of a carpeted corridor. Our view is dominated by their feet, their legs and the colliding flesh of their buttocks as they roll, grunt and recover from journeys across the floor between the wooden walls with their faded paint. Again, the soundscape cued the work and I laughed out loud with the pleasure aroused by the camp jumpsuits and clownish grunting. I felt that my journey through this small space had been oh so carefully constructed to offer a rich spectrum of associations and discomforts generated by a playful, narrative-drenched live art aesthetic from members of a rising generation of Australian performance artists.

Participants from the Shoalhaven region in New South Wales have committed their stories, bodies and feelings for the land to collaborate with two artists to create on screen fantastical visions of their reality.

Hyperreal Tales emerged from a Bundanon artist residency in 2011 when Philip Channells ran dance workshops for the Shoalhaven community. The Bundanon Trust’s desire to connect with local health services opened up an opportunity to work with disability service providers. For three years, director-choreographer Channells and filmmaker Sam James have worked with 19 story tellers and artists to create a five-screen video installation featuring 12 interconnected stories and performances realised in natural and virtual settings.

In this video, courtesy of the Bundanon Trust, Philip Channells describes the evolution of this ambitious collaborative work and participants appear in excerpts from Sam James’ video creations.

Howl

It’s the rebellious spirit of Allen Ginsberg, his savage indignation tending toward obscenity, that Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Thoms and Willoh S Weiland seek to honour in Howl, the latest Aphids Arts House spectacular.

As part of the Festival of Live Art, the trio has created a colourful march-past event at the North Melbourne Meat Market, complete with banners, floats and costumes, celebrating 15 more-or-less transgressive artworks from across the last 150 years, each in its way a kind of Howl-like protest.

The opening is stunning. Elizabeth Dunn, veiled in a gold lamé cape but naked from the waist down, accompanied by Mozart’s sombre but exalted Requiem, paces out the full 70-odd metres from the far end of the pavilion, slowly advancing through ragged drifts of theatrical smoke and eerie orange light. Then, standing before us, she raises her arms in a gesture of victory and sprawls supine on the bonnet of a sporty Mazda convertible, pelvis tilted, genitals displayed. Thus, Courbet’s L’Origine du monde.

There follow renditions of Duchamp’s Fountain, Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, Critical Art Ensemble’s Seized, Paul Yore’s Everything is Fucked and more. Mozart continues to thunder and pulse. There are golf carts and Segways, papier-mâché and tinsel, more nudity and plenty of knowing winks.

While Howl is impressive enough in its ambition—there are only three performers, but a small army of stage assistants helping them negotiate the enormous Meat Market space—it doesn’t really invite a carnival-like response from the audience. There’s no barracking, no tickertape, no flag-waving and no dancing in the bleachers, only the usual art world attitude of polite scrutiny: the right to create a personal art historical canon is accepted without question, and the parade moves on.

There might be lots of reasons for the coolness of the audience’s response, but I think it’s mostly because of Mozart. Why play the Requiem Mass in D minor the whole way through? It’s too solemn, too darkly hostile to the kitsch transformations of a community parade. Although it does give the opening scene a thrilling sense of monumentality, the irony soon becomes oppressive. The parade even starts to feel like a danse macabre, as if Howl were in fact a moralising comment on the vanity of artists such as Ai Weiwei, Andres Serrano, Marco Evaristti and the rest, as if their outrages were only so many ultimately inconsequential follies—which is presumably not what Aphids meant. But who knows—it might have pleased Ginsberg.

Hotel Obscura

Like Howl, Triage Live Art Collective’s Hotel Obscura is an ambitious large-scale work, but one which eschews spectacle, instead folding a series of small one-on-one encounters into a much larger immersive, site-specific performance event. It begins with an audio walking tour that leads us from the Lindrum Hotel on Flinders Street to a secret location, which turns out to be another hotel, the Sofitel Melbourne on Collins Street.

At the Sofitel we discover that an entire floor has been reserved for the performance—a tantalising extravagance. After a brief meeting with a sort of concierge who explains the event program, each participant is given a white bathrobe and an individually tailored itinerary.

I was sent first to the elevator lobby where a tall man in a cheap masquerade mask offered a rough-and-ready tutorial on the ins-and-outs of the Grindr smartphone app, giving full emphasis to the myriad hook-up possibilities in a large, luxury hotel. Next, I experienced a relaxing sound and light installation under the covers of a hotel bed. Finally, in another room, I was audience to a brief interactive play-ette about a man whose wife had abandoned him. These were only three of 15 possible one-on-one adventures designed by local and European collaborators. In the final part of the experience, participants retired to something called the Vinyl Lounge, where they could meet and talk with other participants.

What is most satisfying about Hotel Obscura is not the experience of any one or other room in particular but the rhythm and composition of the experience as a whole. There are no lulls, no blips. And nowhere does the confected mystery of the piece fade or falter. The work carries you smoothly in its shadowy dream across half the city and up 48 floors.

I suspect this is the advantage of having a dramaturg-director like Katerina Kokkinos-Kennedy, with her extensive background in the theatre, as project leader. It’s particularly noticeable in the attention to small details: from the way in which our various guides are costumed to the drinks served at the final debrief. Whisky and elderflower cordial, of course.

Give Me a Reason to Live

For me, the festival highlight was Glasgow dancer and choreographer Claire Cunningham’s Give Me a Reason to Live, a brief but focused solo at the North Melbourne Town Hall. The work begins with Cunningham (who was born with osteoporosis and arthrogryposis) in the upstage left corner of the performance space, facing the wall, lit only by a thin strip of yellowish light, struggling with her crutches through a variety of exaggerated poses, gradually working her way backward, through the darkness, toward centre-stage.

Visually and aurally, the work is incredibly beautiful. At one point, using her crutches to hoist herself off the ground, Cunningham, originally a classically trained singer, breaks into the second verse of Bach’s cantata Christ lag in Todes Banden, showing off a fine soprano voice. The text of the verse is from an Easter hymn by Martin Luther in which he stresses the correlation between sin and suffering, a belief which led some in the Middle Ages to associate physical disability with sinfulness.

In another passage, with her hips supported by the handles of her crutches, she gradually raises her feet toward the ceiling, resting her palms on the floor. From the audience, watching her feet gently swaying, it looks almost as if she is falling from a great height, like the crippled god Hephaestus who was thrown from heaven and who fell from morn to noon, from noon to dewy eve. Or perhaps she is Icarus in the painting by Bruegel, the figure from whose pale white legs, Auden tells us, everyone turns away.

The Bruegel connection points to that intense quality I find so deeply moving about this relatively short work. According to Cunningham, the choreography was inspired by images of crippled beggars in the sketches and paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and his followers, the shapes of the dance’s first movement. But what is it Auden says about the old masters? That they were never wrong about suffering. That they knew how easy it is to turn away when someone else is suffering.

There’s a key section in the middle of the performance where Cunningham lays down her crutches and simply stands before the audience. This lasts for almost eight minutes, the tremors in her legs accumulating and intensifying until she is forced to reach again for her crutches. Standing unaided is something that Cunningham can’t do, at least not for any great length of time. The attempt is brave, but, even so, for us, in the audience, is it what Auden would call an important failure? Does it provoke empathy? And should it, is that what dance, or painting, is for?

Give Me a Reason to Live is a performance without sentimentality; its great strength is its simplicity of composition and its air of self-sufficiency. If we empathise with Claire Cunningham, she insists that we do it without pity. Again, this is like those paintings of the old masters: those moments of delicacy and tenderness, images of infinite compassion, but entirely without weakness.

Arts House, Festival of Live Art, Howl, Meat Market, 3-6 March; Hotel Obscura, Sofitel Melbourne, 3-5 March; Give Me A Reason to Live, North Melbourne Town Hall, 9-11 March

From 21st-century social technologies to a photographer travelling on foot across Germany, Melbourne’s second biennial Festival of Live Art (FOLA) included a number of stage-based and installation works, complementing its expanding program of interactive experiences, unusual transactions and provocative encounters.

On stage, Per Aspera’s Skype Duet (USA/Germany) at Footscray Community Arts Centre and Volker Gerling’s Portraits in Motion (Germany) at Theatre Works sat interestingly, if not always unambiguously, within the ‘live art’ context. At the same time, local works—Aseel Tayah’s you are not a boy (Footscray) and Amelia Ducker and St Martins Youth Arts Centre’s Genius (Theatre Works)—fused installation/performance art and conversation/guided walk, respectively. Embedded in all four works, consciously or not, were questions regarding the degree to which audiences help ‘make’ the work, and of where the borders lie between participation, encounter and performance.

Skype Duet

In Skype Duet, Berlin-based US ex-pat, Brina Stinehelfer, sits at a desk onstage playing with her laptop. She scrolls through websites titled “How to make friends” and types in searches like “interact with new people online,” interspersed with half-hearted visits to chat sites and loneliness forums, or nostalgic trawling through Facebook photos. Her browsing is fed to a large screen for the audience’s benefit, including a webcam close-up of Stinehelfer’s face. We register every shift in her bemused, amused or forlorn expression, intimately projected. Over time, it’s significant that the screen tends to hold our focus, not Stinehelfer’s live presence.

The performance evolves into a patchwork of dropped and successful Skype calls, in particular to her friend, performer Arlene Chico-Lugo, in a New York cafe. But having connected, Arlene seems distracted by buddies showing up, a waiter she fancies or the beep of incoming SMSs. While Stinehelfer’s pained expression sometimes feels overdone, the sense of simultaneous connection and alienation online is deeply familiar. Especially telling is the practised hyper-naturalness of Arlene, each time she brushes Brina off. The digital world is stuffed with cloying sentiment, and it’s writ large here: the sing-song ‘I’m-so-sorrys,’ the whiny ‘I-love-yous,’ clingy ‘wish-you-were-heres’ and big, distracted webcam smiles.

Woven into—or, actually, creating—Skype Duet’s narrative is the audience’s escalating involvement in the work, and in Arlene and Brina’s conversation. ‘Technical difficulties’ at one point force Stinehelfer to leave her desk and enter the audience, awkwardly starting conversations with strangers. Back online, an audience member is introduced via Skype to Arlene, then Arlene introduces them to a cafe patron, and soon the exchange is purely stranger-to-stranger. The work opens out to include more strangers, until an eccentric lover of ballroom dancing in New York is ‘virtually’ waltzing with an audience member at our end.

While my later online viewing of a Berlin/New York performance of Skype Duet revealed that much of the apparently spontaneous action is scripted (certainly some of the New York ‘strangers’ are actors), the conceit reinforces rather than falsifies the work’s premise: how many of our own online connections are genuine, actually, and how much are they performed? As the audience, we embrace the flattering illusion that we’re creating the work with Stinehelfer and, indeed, by the end we are all enthusiastically waltzing with the strangers in the room, IRL. But what is largely a construction that deflates on close examination is perhaps Skype Duet’s achievement, successfully transposing Stinehelfer’s experience of the social internet’s false promises into our own bodies, even as we enjoy the real connection she injects into the piece.

Portraits in Motion

Conversely, Volker Gerling’s Portraits in Motion seems not to be ‘participatory’ at all: it is a ‘moving slide-show’ of sorts, in which Gerling uses live video to project his Daumenkinos (“thumb-cinemas,” or photographic flipbooks) while he gives a friendly lecture about his techniques and “travelling exhibition.” A photographic “journeyman” for part of each year, Gerling has captured images of strangers encountered during more than 3,500 kms of walks through the villages and towns of Germany. Travelling sometimes for months at a time, he takes no money with him, exhibiting his flipbooks from a tray strapped to his body and accepting donations from visitors to this mobile gallery. Each ‘photo’ he takes comprises 36 frames captured over a 12-second exposure; in flipbook form these become the flickering, intimate, time-based ghosts of his encounters.

Portraits in Motion is like the flipside of Stinehelfer’s Skype Duet. In Gerling’s work, it seems that the audience has no part in the process; superficially, it is simply photography. But Portraits in Motion unfolds as Gerling’s document of an extensive live art project, in which he re-invigorates the role of the travelling artisan, spontaneously engaging audiences from big cities and tiny hamlets alike, creating and entertaining as he goes. Time flexes as Gerling’s thumb sets the ‘playback’ pace of each book he shows us: it stretches, slows down, is reversed or paused. Most interestingly, the flipbooks reveal the live art collaboration at the heart of all portrait photography. His subjects —from happy nuclear families to retired farmers to shy teenagers to curious villagers—are illuminated as co-creators. Their consent, engagement, energy and intimacy with the photographer are all vividly apparent in the moving images.

you are not a boy

Young Palestinian-Australian artist Aseel Tayah’s you are not a boy is a gallery-based installation work, and as such its inclusion under the rubric of live art could again be queried. However, a weekend performance given by Tayah drew her audience literally into the fabric of the work, implicating onlookers in ways that were both political and intimate: it was both a one-off gift to the senses and a compelling call to action.

Tayah, appearing on the gallery’s outdoor balcony in a luxurious, floor-length gown, sings a haunting Arabic lullaby (I later learn it is about a girl-child listening to people tell her what to do). She pauses at intervals to recount stories as she walks amid the gathered audience—stories of women mutilated, verbally abused, chastised or prohibited from speaking out, and told every time that it is “because you are not a boy.” On her skirt are pinned squares of fluttering fabric on which the Arabic word for “taboo” is inscribed. As she sings, she removes them one by one and pins them to the clothes of audience members. In an entreaty that is both gentle and firm, she asks us to think about the things our cultures suppress, saying, “When you see these things in future, will you be silent or will you choose to speak?”

Tayah’s work is economical, minimalist even. Her installation is simply an illuminated column of translucent fabric inscribed with the Arabic for “you are not a boy” and a set of mirrors painted with the same words, with an invitation to share self-portraits on social media in support of speaking out. In the performance—graceful, gracious and ritualistic—the audience is pinpointed, literally, as the place where taboo might reside. Through the slightest of means, and the seductive, sensory entanglement of stunning song and pointed monologue, Aseel Tayah creates a fleeting yet memorable relationship between us all, uniting the fabric of our respective worlds.

Genius

Genius, by Amelia Ducker and St Martins Youth Arts Centre, introduces audiences to six young ‘geniuses’, all on the autism spectrum, who’ve each set up shop in purpose-built circular booths and alcoves within the polished grandeur of St Kilda Town Hall. Over an hour or so, small groups of visitors enjoy short, informative sessions in the Life Advice Boutique with Katrina Chong, the Museum of Endangered Animals with Ted Hargreaves, Will’s Art Factory with Will Hager, and The Lingual Lab with Christian Tsoutsouvas. We then come together to witness Julian Jarman revive Gough Whitlam, press-conference style, answering questions from the floor in impressive detail; and a talk from Max Beale in his Kingdom of Crowns, where he displays his comprehensive knowledge of (not to mention personal correspondence with) the royals of the world. Finally, we enter the Hall of Fame, where we view portraits of famous people on the autism spectrum, and mingle and chat with the young performers.

On one level Genius is a community engagement; an opportunity for us to meet one another. On another, it’s the performers’ gift to us: they put themselves on display, sharing their knowledge and inviting us into the minutiae of their interests. It’s a well-crafted live art experience, somewhat formulaic, perhaps—but here, formula doesn’t imply laziness. For these young people, the predictability of the format supports the possibility of our interaction; we are asked to enter their worlds on their terms, not ours. But beyond the notion of a ‘visit’ or interaction, Genius held a meta-layer for me: as a theatre work it created space to place myself in the performers’ shoes, to remember my own childhood and the gradual erosion of my unique, personal obsessions in the face of social expectations. Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has regularly been framed in terms of lack of social awareness, but feeling this notion upended, I found myself considering an adult world in which there might be less ‘small talk’ and social generality, and more listening to the specificity of others’ interests, as we had done in this space.

What qualifies a work as live art is bound to remain arguable—and perhaps that’s as it must be for such a dynamic, evolving artform. From Skype Duet’s apparent-but-constructed spontaneity to Genius’ invitation and immersion, all four works reviewed here reinforced the breadth of the form by steering away from centre—often doing ‘more with less,’ largely avoiding the temptations of novelty and excess, and, not least, successfully negotiating ‘immersion’ without drowning.

Festival of Live Art: Per Aspera, Skype Duet, creators-performers Brina Stinehelfer, Arlene Chico-Lugo, Footscray Community Arts Centre, 10–12 March; Portraits in Motion, creator-performer Volker Gerling, Theatre Works, St Kilda, 1–6 March; you are not a boy, creator-performer Aseel Tayah, Footscray Community Arts Centre, 2 March – 2 April, performance 6 March; Genius, Amelia Ducker & St Martins, concept, director Amelia Ducker, Theatre Works at St Kilda Town Hall, 12–13 March

Australian Dance Theatre, Habitus & The Beginning of Nature

Australian Dance Theatre Artistic Director Garry Stewart has stated that the exploration of humanity’s relationship to the natural world will form the basis of a number of works by the company over the next few years. The first fruits of this focus, Habitus and The Beginning of Nature, received their premieres at this year’s Adelaide Festival and WOMADelaide respectively. They could hardly have come at a more apposite moment, recent reports indicating that civilisation is heading towards disastrous, human-induced climate change even more rapidly than previously thought, with 2016 set to break global temperature records for the third successive year.

In Habitus, our conflicted relationship to the excesses of the materialist economy is highlighted by Stewart and Larissa McGowan’s richly humorous choreography in which the movement of bodies through space is shaped by a cornucopia of consumer goods: books, sofas, ironing boards and the like. These familiar items are rendered comical, uncanny like the decontextualised objects of surrealist art. They are also malignant: a key moment sees one of the performers crushed beneath a sofa, fighting for life. They draw out, both by their suffocating corporeality and sheer proximity, extreme physical responses from the dancers, such as heavy, urgent breathing and violent retching. “The sad thing is,” Thomas Fonua tells us in one of the work’s spoken word sections, “all this shit—chairs, tables, sofas, whatever—is ultimately going to end up as landfill.”

But the work also foregrounds our inseparability from “all this shit.” Echoing economist Victor Lebow’s claim that “our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life,” the dancers’ bodies become integrated with, and extended by, the objects of our consumer desires, stacks of books, for example, becoming monstrous stilts. Performers Zoe Dunwoodie and Michael Ramsay, meanwhile, swap “sofa memories” of disarming, sometimes unsettling intimacy (“this is where I lie when I listen to Miles Davis/ this is where I cried when I learned my father had died”). Brendan Woithe’s sound design is correspondingly split between ironic rhapsodising (the deployment, for instance, of baroque music during a Regency-like passage in which the dancers lovingly balance books on their heads) and banal metronomics (the incessant ticking of clocks and dripping of water).

Stewart notes in the program that “an undercurrent to our consumerist excesses is the thought that some day ‘all of this’ will be reclaimed by nature.” The work’s finale, bringing to mind King Lear’s “blasted heath,” sees an apocalyptic storm reconfigure the stage’s detritus as a kind of midden, the accumulated, un-biodegradable domestic waste of multiple generations stacked high. Human figures—worshippers, scavengers, ghosts?—circle it cautiously. “Where are we?” one of them asks, “what is this place?” It is, I suppose, a kind of monument to human folly, a 21st century equivalent of the “martyred village” of Oradour-sur-Glane that Charles de Gaulle ordered be conserved as a permanent reminder of Nazi barbarism. “As I exhale my last breath,” Fonua says in a final monologue, “none of this will disintegrate with me, but will persist and persist and persist, stretching for an eternity well beyond the traces of this brief existence.”

ADT’s The Beginning of Nature, premiered at WOMADelaide, might be Habitus’ ‘origins’ story or, perhaps, a more fleshed-out account of its vision of a post-apocalyptic world repossessed by nature. Arguably it is both, the work seeing Garry Stewart’s familiar choreographic vocabulary supplemented with rhythms and shapes drawn from the endlessly returning cycles of the biosphere: “day and night, the seasons, tidal patterns, migration, hibernation, sleep and waking, weather patterns, the binary of growth and decay, and the various systems of the body” [program]. Its object world is populated by the natural rather than the anthropogenic: rocks and trees transported through the space with the assiduousness of ritual and revered as in pre-Christian religion. The work is underpinned by images of birth, death and rebirth, situating divinity in nature and suggesting the sacred feminine as the originating principle of all life.

Brendan Woithe’s score (read an interview with the composer), an immense, shuddering wall of tonal sound generated by the composer in real time by stretching and looping the live orchestrations of the Zephyr Quartet, reinforces Stewart’s interest in feedback systems. In one part it resets every few seconds with a deep growl like a giant turntable starting up with the needle already in place. Two vocalists, Shauntai Batzke and Vonda Last, sing in the recently revived language of the Kaurna People, the traditional owners of the Adelaide Plains (Tarndanya). The simple vocal lines and bell-like voices recall the ‘holy minimalism’ of 20th century composers Henryk Górecki and John Tavener, even if the decision to incorporate Kaurna language into Woithe’s score remained, for me, confounding.

Like Habitus, The Beginning of Nature is an unsubtle, though less didactic, work that questions humanity’s place in the natural order. To my mind, Habitus is the more successful of the two, its nuanced twinning of humour with accessible dramaturgy the more adroit vehicle for exploring our increasingly vexed relationship to the ecological systems that simultaneously sustain and are most threatened by us. I wondered if, conversely, The Beginning of Nature’s retreat into Rousseauian longing for an imagined golden age didn’t in fact signal a kind of defeatism, a (gentle) refusal to confront the global environmental crisis on anything but the most fabulist of terms.

The Holy Body Tattoo, monumental

Staying with Rousseau, it might be said that monumental, performed by Vancouver’s The Holy Body Tattoo, portrays humanity’s corrupting transcendence of nature, the endpoint of cultural and material progress in which human relations are no longer defined by ‘natural’ desires but by fear, jealousy, egocentrism.

Suggesting the public/private interface of the modern office, nine dancers in drab business attire occupy individual grey plinths. Their movements—hard and fast, full of obsessive tics—physicalise the anxieties of urban culture and the struggle to resist the corporate machine’s erasure of selfhood. Repeated gestures that resemble trichotillomania (the compulsive tearing out of one’s own hair) and the stance of boxers (fists held vertically in front of the face) indicate a tormented, internalised back-and-forth of self-loathing and self-preservation. The dancers tend to topple from rather than dismount their plinths, at which attempts to forge human connections are thwarted by frightening, mob-like group dynamics driven by the rising urge of each of the workers to competitively assert themselves. In this cut-throat atmosphere, embraces end up asphyxiating and violent shunning constantly undermines a shared sense of belonging. The plinths, when lit from internal LED strips, double as a cityscape in miniature, combining with William Morrison’s time-lapsed video projections of wind farms and multi-lane highways to lend the production a neo-futurist feel.

The work, however, does not for the most part share neo-futurism’s essential optimism. Noam Gagnon and Dana Gingras’ combined choreography and direction reflects a bleak view of contemporary urban life, evident in the doom-laden score—performed live by eight-piece Canadian post-rock collective Godspeed You! Black Emperor—and conceptual artist Jenny Holzer’s barbed text: “Obviously you strike out against people within range. It’s cathartic to affect someone when you’re angry. Alternatively, choose enemies impossibly far away so you never have to fight,” (Living, 1980-82). This is projected onto a scrim like a subverted PowerPoint presentation on corporate etiquette.

A final voiceover plunges us into the post-apocalyptic, its evocation of an “empty city flickering in the dark” a grim reckoning of our urban alienation. Bodies fill the stage (advice is offered on how best to walk around them), the band’s metal-inflected bombast trailing into an extended diminuendo of ringing drums and guitar feedback. Does this cataclysm anticipate the expunging of a decadent, disaffected elite, and a return to a less venal social contract, the kind Rousseau thought fatally lacking in the modern state? I was left wondering.

Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Nelken (Carnations)

Seven years after her death, Pina Bausch’s legacy remains immense, her work while Director of Dance for the Wuppertal theatres (later Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch) from 1973 onwards significantly expanding the expressive range of contemporary dance through conventions drawn primarily from theatre. Nelken (Carnations) dates back to 1982, by coincidence the same year Bausch’s company brought a trilogy of pieces— Kontakthof, Bluebeard, and 1980—to the Adelaide Festival in the company’s first Australian visit. The work’s depiction of arbitrary authoritarianism, embodied in the figure of a suited man continually demanding to see the passports of members of the public, must have held a visceral resonance for its initial audiences in a divided Germany. Contemporary parallels abound, however, most notably in the ongoing European refugee crisis.

The abuse of power is the theme that connects Nelken’s lightly absurdist flow of images, each taking place in the incongruous setting of designer Peter Pabst’s vast field of calf-high pink carnations (an allusion, perhaps, to 1974’s virtually bloodless “Carnation Revolution” during which Portuguese citizens, celebrating the overthrow of an authoritarian regime, placed the flower in the rifle muzzles of soldiers). Andrey Berezin’s immigration official, almost a comic figure at first in his punctiliousness, becomes a model of petty domination, forcing one of the dancers to degradingly impersonate a succession of animals to his satisfaction; a Grandma’s Footsteps-style game sees the participants coolly reverse the leader’s oppressive enforcement of the rules; four men with live dogs (what else but German Shepherds?) frighteningly encircle the stage, carnations bowing under boot and paw alike.

The audience’s collusion in these oppressions is made explicit by the sustained employment of house lights and a weirdly exhilarating sequence in which (in a critique that has, admittedly, been dimmed by three decades of post-modernism) an increasingly frustrated Fernando Suels Mendoza exhausts his repertoire of classical ballet positions in a desperate attempt to gratify us. Bausch, anticipating Neil Postman’s famous articulation of the twin poles of tyranny in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), gives us both Orwell’s prison—subjugation by state control (Big Brother)—and Huxley’s burlesque—pacification by amusement (the centrifugal bumblepuppy). How else to account for the scene in which four stuntmen execute a spectacular fall in unison from a scaffold tower, or in which a vintage automated fortune teller is wheeled on while performers rub freshly sliced onions into their faces? As one of the dancers says, “When there’s trouble in the air, I just look away.”

Adelaide Festival of Arts 2016, Habitus, concept, direction Garry Stewart, choreography Garry Stewart, Larissa McGowan, composer Brendan Woithe, Space Theatre, 26 Feb-5 March; The Beginning of Nature, concept, direction Garry Stewart, choreography Garry Stewart & ADT dancers, composer Brendan Woithe, WOMADelaide, 12-14 March; monumental, concept, direction Noam Gagnon, Dana Gingras, music Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Festival Theatre, 4-5 March; Nelken (Carnations), director, choreographer Pina Bausch, set designer Peter Pabst, Festival Theatre, 9-12 March

Empathy, a key theme in the 2016 Perth International Arts Festival, is strongly in evidence in three works that challenge notions of cultural difference and disability and encourage us to pay attention to extraordinary lives.

Common Wealth, No Guts, No Heart, No Glory

From the City of Bradford, West Yorkshire, comes Common Wealth Theatre Company challenging global Islamophobia with an honest, intimate account of the lives of young Muslim women in Britain and the challenges and rewards of boxing for them in this context.

In Perth’s Queen Street Gym, with monologues, pronouncements, one-sided dialogues and protests, the performers deliver truths about the conflict between adolescence and family cultural expectations like punches in a boxing match. They declaim between blows to a punching bag, while standing on a bench before lockers, pacing under stairs or huddled on a stool behind a workout space. We hear a fighter’s internal monologue when she’s winning a bout. There are short sprints, bursts of rope skipping and more thudding whacks to punching bags. There are individual set pieces, group movement through the crowded room and choreographed ensemble work in the ring.

Each character is fighting her own demons: the claustrophobia of belonging to a small community, pressure to excel at school, anger at events in Gaza and the seeming inevitability of an early marriage to a chosen husband. A recurring theme emphasises a common desire to be “good”—good daughters, good citizens and good people. Each performer brings her story to her boxing, controlling her strength and fitness with a fierce, energetic joy. This direct expression of emotion, physical reaction and proud stories fills the gym.

Claire Cunningham, Give Me a Reason to Live

Provoking the audience to reconsider the notion of ‘ability,’ Glasgow’s Claire Cunningham stages a living memorial to the victims of the Nazi Aktion T4 euthanasia program, in which people with disabilities were murdered, as well as supporting the victims of ongoing “welfare reform” budget cuts in the UK. As in her first work in this 2016 festival, Guide Gods, so in this starkly beautiful dance piece Cunningham explores a traditional religious view of disability, motivated by the suggestion that in the work of 16th century artists such as Hieronymus Bosch cripples might represent repositories of sin.

As Cunningham moves around the space, tiny patches of light in Karsten Tinapp’s minimalist lighting design mark points for exploration of a series of movements in which she pushes her body to work with her crutches to perform amazing feats of agility, speed, strength and endurance. She holds us captivated as she steadily lowers herself towards the floor, using the crutches as a lever for her shoulder muscles, her pace slowing the closer she comes to the end point. She holds poses familiar from artistic depictions of crucifixion, her crutches a stage prop as well as physical support.

Time pauses as Cunningham exploits the starkness of silence. Leaving her crutches on the floor, she stands, her eyes holding each of us in turn, her breathing becoming laboured. Her face tautens with strain, her legs wobble and she pushes her limbs to their unsupported limit until dropping back to her crutches, her muscular upper body swinging her about the stage in liberation and relief. Pushing herself to the limits of her capacity, Cunningham poses against the black back wall and sings beautifully Verse 2 of Bach’s Cantata BWV 4, stirring every emotion and reminding us that there is no human who can defeat death.

The artist’s danced engagement with her crutches, her amazing feats of strength and the work’s movement from wretched moaning in a dark corner to a triumphant, defiant “Hallelujah!” from Bach at the close, create an intensely moving experience. Differently ‘accessible’ compared with her Guide Gods, Give Me a Reason to Live speaks directly through movement, imagery and sound, to old notions of sin and deformity, defying moral judgement made of those who do not meet conventional physical expectations.

The Empathy Museum, Walk a Mile in My Shoes

A more literal plea for empathy and understanding is realised by The Empathy Museum (read the RealTime interview with London-based director Claire Patey) which immerses participants in fascinating life stories, sending us each on a mile-long journey through another’s experience.

Arriving at an oversized shoebox in the Stirling Gardens, each participant’s shoes are exchanged for another pair of the same size with a matching digital recording on an MP3 player. Walking while listening to the recording takes the audience member about a mile, with signs posted around the garden to advise when to turn back or to take time to sit and listen in the cool green surrounds.

Each recording is of a carefully structured first-person narrative created from an interview, complete with sound effects to set the scene. Stories include moments from the life of Margaret Watroba, a Polish-born Australian who survived an avalanche at Everest Base Camp during the earthquake in Nepal in 2015; reflections of Dianne Lawrence, the mother of two sons, one born male and one transgender; memories of John Gilmore, an ex-POW held by the Japanese; and insights from Dalwinder Singh, a Sikh taxi driver. The stories come without warning, based on your shoe size.

Each story establishes basic facts before examining points of particular interest. Gilmore was a keen runner when he was in school—his recollections of school sports days seamlessly lead to his Army enlistment. His understated description of Changi, the Japanese prisoner of war camp – “it wasn’t very nice”—is breathtaking. Similarly, Watroba’s story begins with her childhood interest in hiking, before discussing the extent of the constraints on her life in Communist Poland, her difficult defection and pursuit of her childhood dreams. Singh and Lawrence, however, tell stories about empathy, supporting others around them in order to understand themselves. Each tale is captivating in its own way, simply told and clearly recorded.

This year’s focus on empathy by PIAF’s Artistic Director Wendy Martin is stimulating, a refreshing antidote to a world steadily becoming more focused on the needs and desires of the individual.

2016 Perth International Arts Festival: Common Wealth Theatre Co, No Guts, No Heart, No Glory, writer Aisha Zia, director Evie Manning, Queen St Gym, 23-28 Feb; Claire Cunningham, Give Me a Reason to Live, PICA, 2-5 March; The Empathy Museum, Walk a Mile in My Shoes, curators Clare Patey and Kitty Ross in collaboration with Roman Krznaric, Stirling Gardens, Perth, 18 Feb-6 March

Apocrifu

In Apocrifu, director/choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui performs alongside ballet-trained dancer Yasuyuki Shuto, former circus performer Dimitri Jourde and a near life-sized, visibly manipulated puppet. The framing is starkly modernist, a wide staircase running upwards at the left, echoing the ‘divine’ off-stage spaces alluded to by Gordon Craig. A loft runs across the upper horizontal, within which the Corsican men’s choir A Filetta clusters, composer-conductor Jean Claude Acquaviva’s gestures evoking the rising, spiritual urgency of this work’s slow burn. Amid the bare supports and struts below lie books. We begin with Cherkaoui dropping onto the stage a line of tomes and stepping out.

The profusion of bound volumes and a brief, rapid-fire monologue by Cherkaoui signals the theme as the relationship between the words of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Their common roots and subsequent conflicts were seeded from now little-known apocryphal texts. Reciting an online speech by evangelist Jay Smith, Cherkaoui resembles a multi-limbed Hindu deity. His fellow performers’ arms snake out to punctuate his conclusions or flip through scripture as he observes that the same characters appear in all three creeds, and that subsequent scribes have incorporated their exegetical commentary.

Smith’s claim is that the Qur’an is a “corrupted” version of an earlier Hebrew text which evangelists like himself now interpret. Lise Uytterhoeven points out that it is surprisingly Orientalist for Cherkaoui (who is after all of Moroccan-Flemish descent) to construct the Qur’an as a secondary, derivative and “corrupted” text. Cherkaoui’s interest however is not the restoration of the undiluted messianic truth which Smith is seeking. Cherkaoui quotes from the Qur’an that “He who takes the blood of one, takes the blood of all, and he who saves the blood of one, saves the blood of all.” Cherkaoui’s thematic contention is that these dimly perceived origins should lead us to consult texts with care and to recognise our shared holy lives.

Choreographically, Apocrifu is defined by the curve. Performers remain low, folding, gliding and collapsing into the ground before rising arcs bring them back to crouching and spin them before heading down again. Shuto’s ballet solo provides a counterpoint, but here too suppleness and circularity dominate. One is tempted to see echoes of the curve of the brush or pen here. Cherkaoui borrows from the films Kwaidan (Masaki Kobayashi, 1964) and The Pillow Book (Peter Greenaway, 1996) to stage a section in which one dancer disrobes to be manipulated, twisted and turned while kanji are inscribed across his skin.

Apocrifu is above all measured and meditative. Concepts are played out at length in a dreamy fashion. Its lessons are light not firm, and hence distinct from Jay Smith’s speech. The puppet metaphor, with Cherkaoui himself also becoming a puppet, poses questions of volition and control. Are our acts already imprinted within these books, and is this good or bad? The at times muezzin-like ambience of Corsican folk singing epitomises Apocrifu’s ambience, not least in the way that any melodramatic potential is held at bay. Ecstasy, joy and pain are alluded to, but do not emerge.

Pindorama

Brazilian choreographer/director Lia Rodrigues’ Pindorama, by contrast, is an intense, often harrowing experience. Performers strip, pour water over themselves, before moving onto a massive central ribbon of clear plastic. The remaining performers take the ends and undulate the sheet, first in gentle ripples, then in great angry waves. The sound of sheeting tearing the air dominates. A lone woman, and later a collective of dancers, enter this maelstrom. Water-filled condoms are rolled out, and initially the crouching figures massage and split these in fluid explosions. The anguished arched backs of performers on all fours are replaced by recurrent rolling, collapse and signs of failure. The central figure repeatedly falls, and in the subsequent group, bodies pathetically gesture towards each other. Even the reassuring clasp of one to another is not allowed. There is a spastic lack of cohesion and direction as they turn hopelessly into the waves and towards or over each other. A spray of mist reaches the audience, seated or standing at the margins. Empathy seems cruelly vexed. The values of Artaud and his imperious theatre of bodily necessity and non-human action are very present.

While Rodrigues cites Brazilian practices and performance art as influences, one might relate her practice to the Living Theatre or butoh. Certainly, the piece is close to such work. Once themes of physical struggle and failure are established, they are staged for a protracted period, as physical sculpture or durational performance. Rodrigues’ program notes explain that Pindorama’s watery allusions were originally conceived as elemental, evoking a fraught but positive relationship to landscape. Pindorama is an indigenous title for Brazil, “land of the palms.” However, since Pindorama’s 2013 European premiere, the vision of citizens standing by as migrants drown has become a frequent interpretation.

In Pindorama’s final act, the plastic is removed and the space carefully mined with condoms before the performers crawl amid us. Rodrigues, like butoh pioneer Tatsumi Hijikata, is obsessed with the architecture of the back. We observe the slippery, slithering crawl of the figures while deep grooves form and disappear along their spines. The depersonalisation of the dancer as flesh, face obscured, evoked for me Goya’s Disasters of War series: bodily fragments of a cataclysm both human and cosmic. After crushing the condoms, dancers come together and slowly exit from one corner. Figures roll and turn, their eyes facing downward or parallel to the floor (but rarely upward). A soundtrack of deep breathing replaces that of plastic thrumming.

Pindorama’s dramaturgy is experiential. Interpretative gambits are built into it, but it does not ‘speak.’ Its focus is the pathos and sensuality of flesh and water, with all that might flow from them.

Perth International Arts Festival 2016, Compagnie Les Ballets C de la B with A Filetta, Apocrifu, choreographer, director, performer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui; Heath Ledger Theatre, Feb 25-27; Pindorama, creator Lia Rodrigues; State Theatre Centre, Perth, 2-6 Mar

In the 1960s artists stopped making objects for galleries and arranged events in alleyways, houses and parks. Instead of artworks and exhibitions, there were environments and happenings. It didn’t take long for the gallery to hook artists back into the system with two catchy concepts. These were the curator and the installation, which would happily accommodate the new, expanded ambitions of artists to create experiences rather than artworks. The visual arts have been all the poorer since the 1960s, as artists aspire to secure a place in exhibition programs, rather than to change the world.

This was not so for one night in Perth recently, as the artists of Rumblestrip, a post-apocalyptic amalgamation of brutalist vehicles, ethereal projections and strange objects, created a total outdoor environment, a crowded happening that was also something of a poke in the eye for Perth’s flashy new city developments. With the surrealism of Mulholland Drive and the kitsch of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, the survivalism of Waterworld and the ridiculousness of Wolf Creek 2, Rumblestrip was an immersion in everything that is both dangerous and wrong about Australia: its obsession with vehicles, its love of a loud, drunken party, its long night drives through the bush.

It makes little sense to distinguish here between one artwork and another, the hotted-up Hilux hybridised with a Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Tube Man from the endless sunset projected onto the side of a nearby building. For the one-night event was more than each of its elements, echoing with the maddening sounds of engines revving, car doors creaking and mechanical tapping. There was a lot of aluminium foil and a few tarpaulins, a towering wooden scaffold and survivalist trolleys of appetising green plants. There was a swamp and a rogue pushmobile that inspired road rage in its drivers.

Rumblestrip simulated a chaos that has long been missing in the hyper-organised events that Perth usually hosts for its law-abiding public. The recent audio-visual spectacle that opened the Perth Festival was nauseatingly sentimental about suburban life. Called Home, it had one foot firmly in the 1960s, and recreated a fantasy of Perth as a sleepy, beach-going country town. Rumblestrip was a dystopian answer to Home, capturing instead the city’s current predicament, dominated by roads and endless development. Time in today’s city is no longer spent on the beach or in the backyard, but with a foot on the accelerator navigating the sprawl.

The hundreds who turned up to Rumblestrip proved that there is an appetite in Australia for conceptual fun, for a visual arts scene that is also a party, and for a party that is also an artwork. Audience members were able to recognise their own hallucinations in the specular glow of in-vehicle installations and the amorphous shapes that dotted the space. Rumblestrip touched the raw nerve of automobility, the flash of anger and thrust of acceleration that comes after being cut off, or nearly run down.

Rumblestrip, concept Neil Aldum, Erin Coates, Simone Johnston, featured artworks by Erin Coates, Shaun Gladwell, Loren Holmes, Stuart James, Simone Johnston, Jack Sargeant, Snapcat; Northbridge, Perth, 5 March

Miranda July has many biographies. The strands of her work are so varied—threading through conceptual art, fiction and filmmaking—that it might be most accurate to say that she primarily makes ideas. The notion that an artist can be and do many things, unwedded to a single field, ran unstated and strong through July’s talk, Lost Child!, in the recent All About Women talks at Sydney Opera House.

In a one-hour multimedia presentation involving PowerPoint, readings from her books and clips of her previous work, July created something that encompassed autobiography, a live artwork and a stand-up comedy gig. Her career started out in the 1990s with a group of women doing things for themselves in New York and Los Angeles, printing zines, making punk music and working out their lives and their feminist politics in public. Her first play, Lifers, based on her correspondence with a prisoner, “wasn’t as good as I hoped it would be, but I decided I would make things and share them for the rest of my life”—as good a definition as any of an artist.

July then moved on to make performance art that she calls a type of live cinema, “always thinking of performance in the context of movies.” She showed a clip of an early live performance in which she used the light of a data projector to frame herself at some moments and project live feeds from film sets at others. The effect was inventive, weird and really impactful, fusing video art and avant-garde theatre in a one-woman show. Her DIY aesthetic, use of lo-fi technologies and total transparency of process called to mind the later cinematic work of Michel Gondry.

During this tour of her artist’s CV, July inserted slides of her failed ‘real’ jobs—retail assistant, stripper—revealing the messiness of an artist’s life, the patchwork of jobs that pay for an artistic practice and “the struggle to do what I wanted to do, which was to be free.” With statements like these, July engaged in a kind of self-mythologising of her life as an artist. Like the rest of her work, the talk was simultaneously exhibitionist and self-effacing.

I have never been able to discern whether Miranda July critiques or indulges narcissism. Since seeing Lost Child! I think she does both. Her work certainly speaks to the insecurities of just being a person today, the identities and images we self-consciously construct in public and online (she is a genius at Instagram), and the difference between living a life and inhabiting a persona. Think of her project, Are You the Favourite Person of Anybody? and how its title enunciates a type of solipsism contemplated almost two decades ago in Peter Weir’s film The Truman Show (1998). Perversely, it’s in their most narcissistic moments that July’s works really resonate, in all their needy, cringe-y truth. July knows shame, humiliation and vulnerability, and treats them compassionately. She understands that we’re all just little pixels trying to make ourselves heard. Think of how she used the digital space to connect people who don’t know each other. Her Somebody app arranged for strangers to personally deliver text messages between friends. It brought to mind the internet’s potential for community rather than the more usual loneliness of the silent, iPhone-lit bus commute. It did this by instigating performances by everyday people in everyday contexts, and making a reason for asking people to participate—basically, to communicate. The mandate was accessibility, said July, so “that people would automatically share” the work and pieces of themselves.

After moving into film (Me and You and Everyone We Know, 2005), July found herself becoming “known and bordered” as an artist, “so I didn’t make another movie for a while. I have to have different heights.” July’s artistic activities enunciate her core themes differently, but Lost Child! made me think that her greatest artistic act is the creation of the public persona of Miranda July. It’s probably appropriate that the Q&A following the presentation became a public group therapy session: how to deal with self-doubt and the paralysis of shame? How to be a new mother and an artist at the same time? Across every discipline, all her works are linked by a democratic ideal and a desire to articulate instantly recognisable intimate thoughts. Participating in this type of public programming of celebrity artists doing long TED-style talks to the general public merely marks for Miranda July the next logical component in a boundless body of creative work.

The Look of Silence is the second of Oppenheimer’s disturbing films investigating the mentality of those who perpetrated the 1965 mass slaughter of Indonesian citizens. While testing their eyes, an optometrist quizzes the people responsible for killing his brother.

“The one certain lesson contained in both The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence is that without the restraint of law, power of any political stripe inevitably drifts towards slaughter. Power will always be able to justify itself, but once the line of arbitrary violence is crossed and endorsed, no amount of contrition will bring back the dead. Just ask Reza Berati” (Dan Edwards, RT 128, 2015).

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A large-scale screen fills the rear of the stage; a small one sits to the right. There are several plinths and a table, each holding large glass laboratory bottles, and a rusted corrugated iron trough of the kind used to water cattle. We are in an intimate space, where the story of a life will unfold against huge images from films that have in part shaped it.

When Romaine Moreton, a Goenpul Jagara woman of Stradbroke Island and Bundjulung of northern New South Wales, turns poet in One Billion Beats, I’m totally captivated by her deep, rich voice, her poems’ memorable images and forthright pronouncements, their end rhymes, internal rhymes, assonance and the extended, incantatory vowels of the Beats, the emphatic pulse of hip-hop and the poet’s increasing inclination to rise above speech and soar towards song as the performance goes on. Yorta Yorta Dja Dja Wurrung woman Lou Bennett’s spare, characterful scoring underlines the poetry’s inherent beat while layering it with sounds from nature and inflecting it with a variety of musical forms.

There are many other beats in this work, those of the hearts of the generations from whom Moreton is descended and whose lives she resurrects in her vivid autobiographical storytelling which alternates with her recitations. Her life has been complex from the earliest years on a farm to separation from her mother at age six, absorption into a caring network of kin, school challenges, the relentless pressure of racism and, later, enlightening if sometimes alarming research. Moreton is no lost soul. At one with her family and her culture, she thanks her mother for letting go of her, opening the child to a wider urban world of aunts and uncles.

It was her schooling that revealed to Moreton that she was different. She and other Aboriginal children were separated out, labelled ‘dirty’ and forced to shower. As well the headmaster’s sarcasm towards his black students about their competency “ensured we inherited his racism, the trick of it,” says Moreton. It’s this cultural “trick” of racism that Moreton, the scholar, goes on to explore in her maturity. She clearly owns her personal history, but yearns to see it in a larger context, to explain the persistent oppression of Australia’s Aboriginal peoples. She turns to popular culture: feature films made over the last 100 years in which Aboriginal people are for the most part consistently stereotyped and marginalised by white filmmakers, but which include the complexly ambiguous Jedda (Charles Chauvel, 1955) and Indigenous filmmaker Warwick Thornton’s Samson and Delilah (2009). As we watch Delilah lovingly wash Samson in a cattle trough, Moreton gently ladles water hand to hand from her own that sits onstage, an image resonant with that film’s sense of care and possible liberation. The trough also evokes water as a commodity historically competed for by Indigenous people and white men’s cattle (their presence overwhelming in the stampede excerpt from Baz Luhrmann’s Australia [2009]).

Moreton conducted her film research over three months in 2009 at the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra, where a particular encounter added another layer of telling and image-making to One Billion Beats. The building was formerly the Australian Institute of Anatomy and reputedly haunted. In a chilling episode Moreton recounts experiencing, while in-residence, a vision of Sir Colin Mackenzie, the one-time director of the institute and collector of Australian native animals which he dissected and preserved in jars of formalin. She sees him coming at her with a scalpel (Bennett’s sound design includes the shrill sharpening of a knife). “I feel the pain and wake,” says Moreton. Heightening her sense of being a mere specimen (Aboriginal remains were also part of the collection), Moreton appears onscreen, a drawing of a measuring device hovering about her head. In the 19th century, scientists were determined to define race types, criminals and the insane via the pseudoscience of craniology, also known as phrenology, as Moreton discovered at the Royal College of Surgeons in London, also in 2009. Donning a white lab coat, she takes on a key player and founder of the notion of ‘cranial capacity,’ Samuel George Morton (1799-1851), by delivering a mock demonstration of his theory.

In One Billion Beats’ film excerpts Indigenous people are for the most part simply displayed as cultural specimens, bereft of social status or narrative power. In institutional studies, they are merely scientific specimens, to be collected, defined and otherwise rejected. Towards the end of the performance, the stage darkens and the plinths become screens on which appear Indigenous people, ghost-like, but affirming the reality of the lives Moreton has invoked. They, and Moreton are, of course, not the specimens she fears they have become; they are the billion beats of tightly knit generations, past and present. Hence, Truganini, so-called ‘last of the Tasmanians,’ looks calmly out at us from the screen as Moreton says of the racist culture she has revealed to us, “ideological warfare more difficult still” than “the bullets we dodged.” But with pride, against slow, sombre strings, she iterates the chorus to her final poem, “We are here and we are many and we shall surprise you by our will.”

It’s interesting to note that while making a case against the discriminatory legacies of popular culture and science, Moreton distances herself and her people from short-term politics. An 80-year-old aunt tells her firmly that “skin,” not political movements, defines Aboriginality and that she was Aboriginal long before the invention of the Aboriginal flag. Moreton’s is therefore the long view, both of generations and of the history of discrimination. One Billion Beats is most certainly a performance with a message about enduring ideological manipulation, but being rooted in the specifics of experience and delivered with an idiosyncratic voice it is a message to especially value.

Co-directors Romaine Moreton and Alana Valentine’s lucid staging of One Billion Beats has Moreton moving in simple patterns about the stage (designed by Moreton and Sean Bacon), engaging effectively, episode by episode, with screen images, the trough, her ‘laboratory’ and her audience. Lou Bennett’s evocative sounds, Hugh Hamilton’s intimate lighting and Sean Bacon’s video design (of the film excerpts but also of the landscapes of a childhood including a haunting, misty valley of eucalypts) gently texture and enrich the performance. As co-writers, Moreton and Valentine have judiciously balanced the delivery of poems and stories, the writing in the latter as lucid as their staging, although the volume of information and keeping track of who’s who in the young Moreton’s expanding world is occasionally daunting.

Long after I experienced it, One Billion Beats continues to resound with the beating of hearts, poems and music, its engaging performer sharing with us her distinctive life, deep feelings and her intellectual challenge to racism.

One Billion Beats, writer-directors Romaine Moreton, Alana Valentine, music, sound Lou Bennett, video design Sean Bacon, set Moreton, Bacon, lighting Hugh Hamilton, producer Campbelltown Arts Centre, associate producer Vicki Gordon; Campbelltown Arts Centre, 26, 27 Feb, 4, 5 March

Welcome to the Festival of Live Art at the North Melbourne Town Hall, where tablet computers and mobile devices are as numerous and conspicuous as on any peak-hour public transport commute. And why not, when so many of our day-to-day exchanges—from the most impersonal to the most intimate – are mediated by hand-held digital technologies? There’s no avoiding it: art inevitably reflects the culture of its time, not only in its content but in its expression.

Vanitas

And so we have Vanitas, written and performed by Robert Walton and Jason Maling, a very well put-together, mostly involving audio adventure for smartphones. It’s part art history lesson, part procedural drama, a story about impermanence, incompletion, imperfection and flowers. In the first three episodes, listeners are introduced to the curious tale of an abandoned flower shop around the corner from the Town Hall. The mystery recalls Adam Beckman’s very popular This American Life story “The House on Loon Lake,” with the difference that here you can actually visit the shop while listening.

To further extend the basic podcast format, participants also receive emails, text messages and robocalls between episodes. And it’s all very intriguing, up to a point, but also a little unsettling. With its somewhat arch mingling of fact, fiction and philosophical reflection, you’re never quite sure where you stand with Vanitas, never quite sure how much of it is documentary and how much fabulation.

Are We The One?

There’s intrigue, too, in Are We the One?, devised by Keith Armstrong and David Finnigan, a work that outwardly resembles an elaborate blind date. Two participants, unknown to each other and stationed in different rooms, are invited to create unique walking experiences for one another in and around the Town Hall using a custom-built smartphone app. During this gentle perambulation, personal information is exchanged via the app until, finally, at the end of the route, you have the option of stooping into the flesh and actually meeting in person.

Alter

Then, swapping smartphones for tablets, there’s Alter, a participatory installation piece for 16 iPads. Performance maker Tamara Saulwick and composer Peter Knight have created a meditative, slightly muted audiovisual experience in which audience members place softly glowing tablets in various positions around a large darkened room, creating an ethereal surround-sound symphony of faint murmurs, rustling crepitations and soothing hiss. It’s a subtle work, so subtle that it might at first appear slight, but one that, in that pale, strangely comforting light, does create a real, if fleeting, sense of shared intimacy.

The Naked Self

Sharing and intimacy is also the theme of Tanya Dickson and Michele Lee’s The Naked Self. In the first part of the work, armed with tablet and headphones, audience members listen to recordings of other participants telling stories and confessing details about their bodies. The archive through which these small acts of self-exposure are accessed is very easy to use and it all looks incredibly slick. Indeed, the overall design of the work is so simple and streamlined that full participation seems somehow inevitable, almost as if there were no way to opt out. And so it is that, in the second part of the work, you find yourself naked in a soundproofed cubicle, staring into a mirror, composing your own audio self-portrait.

How you feel about The Naked Self will probably depend on how you feel about the current culture of over-sharing more generally, and about the way in which new technologies variously encourage or contour narcissistic and voyeuristic impulses. But while some participants will no doubt find it a bit discomforting, it would be wrong to call the work transgressive or deliberately confrontational. It is in fact only a canny re-staging of the way in which social media is already used, particularly on hand-held devices. What else is the bathroom mirror selfie if not a confession of the naked self?

Programmed to Reproduce

Casey Jenkins’ Programmed to Reproduce is a sort of sequel to Cast Off My Womb, the 2013 durational performance piece in which Jenkins knitted a continuous scarf from yarn lodged in her vagina. The new work again involves vaginal knitting, this time in the construction of a large womb-like installation. As she knits, a monitor on the opposite side of the room plays a looped recording of Jenkins reading in a calm monotone a lengthy compilation of abusive comments posted online about the original work. It’s a simple set-up, but effective. The contrast between the bullying, conformist litany and Jenkins’ quiet but persistent industry is unexpectedly moving—perhaps even inspirational.

The relationship between Cast Off My Womb and Programmed to Reproduce points to an important though rarely acknowledged formal difference between performance art and live art. Where performance art typically involves a degree of provocation or shock, whether pushing boundaries or confusing expectations, live art tends to be more exploratory or contemplative, mapping patterns of social interaction or looking at ways to register or illustrate contemporary values and beliefs as performance. So, while both art forms are interdisciplinary and deal with problems around presence and participation, live art tends to be more research oriented, and not necessarily an artist’s primary creative practice.

Sex and Death

Contemplation is certainly the dominant mood of Samara Hersch’s Sex and Death, a playful work about the way we think about—or don’t think about—ageing. The first part involves a one-on-one interview with someone older and perhaps wiser at a nearby pub, where stories are swapped and life’s mystery is wondered at over a beer and a stack of cue cards. In the second part, audience members are offered the chance to get in on the current fad for recreating old childhood photographs: a fun way of emphasising not only the ways in which the body changes over time, but also the unexpected ways in which it stays the same.

Erotic Dance

But, of course, live art is only a category of convenience, and there is always leakage and contamination and overlap. Luke George’s Erotic Dance, for instance, appears to be a conventional dance piece, with a seated audience facing the front of the performance space, attentive but essentially passive. Sound designer Nick Roux poses languidly centrestage, propped on one elbow, his back to the audience, surrounded by effects pedals. As if to highlight just how traditional this set-up is, he lies before a long mirror, looking obliquely back at the audience, like the Venus of Velázquez.

As the ambient hum of an electric guitar lying to one side begins to swell and churn, George at last emerges from the front row of the audience, stumbling forward, as if drawn into the painting. Gradually shedding his clothes, he pushes his body through brief phrases and trance-like loops, moving faster and faster as the noise intensifies.

George cites Susan Sontag’s call for an arts criticism that is also a kind of erotics as the inspiration for this work. The question seems to be whether a purely sensual way of experiencing art can be translated into dance. Perhaps, then, his orgiastic plunge into a throbbing wall of distortion, his body convulsed between two amplifiers, is meant as a response to Velázquez?, or a representation of how he feels about Velázquez?

But what of the audience, witnesses to this sensual homage? In terms of the work’s eroticism, once again we are in the position of voyeurs. And it is interesting that, after an evening spent negotiating various digital hand-held devices, it is easy, perhaps too easy, to imagine that what is happening on stage is actually playing out behind a glass screen.

i might blow up someday

Fittingly, then, the last show on the North Melbourne Town Hall program in week one of the festival is i might blow up someday by Sydney’s Hissy Fit (Jade Muratore, Emily O’Connor and Nat Randall), an art punk performance concert combining glam rock theatrics and mosh pit anarchy. It’s an earnest attempt to smash the screen, reconstructing and redeploying the idea of female hysteria to disrupt voyeuristic habits of spectatorship and involve the audience in a sweaty free-for-all.

The attempt is only partially successful. Most audience members remain impassive, unwilling to join in the mayhem. But even where it fails, i might blow up someday seems like a sort of victory: finally, something that is unacceptable, something that can be refused, something that is more than just a reflection of the everyday and the banal. Something that is also a demand, however unappealing.

Festival of Live Art 2016, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, Week 1, 1-12 March

The case for holding an event like the Australian Performing Arts Market (APAM) becomes clear when you consider that nowadays more than one in three Australian artists are engaged in international work (International Arts Activity Report, Australia Council for the Arts, 2015).

In gauche terms, APAM is a place where people buy and sell art. Unlike at Sotheby’s Australia, however, the bids are silent and there are costumes; it’s just a bit more fun. This year, running alongside the pitches and presentations, was The Exchange program, a series of panel sessions and less formally curated “encounter” opportunities, aimed at encouraging “new relationships and new dialogues” among delegates.

One of the event’s hosts, Kris Stewart, Brisbane Powerhouse Artistic Director, who dubbed APAM the “Air-conditioned Performing Arts Market” (an apt descriptor considering the event was held in Queensland’s high summer), confirmed that the conference is a pretty big deal these days; the opening keynote was attended by 650 guests from 30 nations. Hosted by Wesley Enoch, four artists and cultural leaders were invited to offer provocations to the gathered buyers and sellers of art.

The keynoters

Willoh S Weiland, Artistic Director of Melbourne’s Aphids, the first of the keynote speakers, was particular about setting some terms for the assembled players, those gathered to participate in this week-long “glittering swamp of culture.” For Weiland, the notion of a marketplace implies openness and transparency, although she acknowledged the potentially different experiences of the buyer and seller in this context. Presenters were likened to “smiley, bright-eyed Christians let loose on a speed date,” while artists were described as “pale with the existential trauma of talking about their art.” Weiland wrapped up with the sage advice that presenting partners, once in a relationship with artists, should honour their commitments: “Don’t be a jerk, call when you say you will.”

Darren O’Donnell, Artistic Director of Canada’s Mammalian Diving Reflex, the highly successful performance collective who brought Haircuts by Children to Australia and All the sex I’ve ever had to the 2016 Sydney Festival, works with non-professional performers. Comparing himself with mainstream artists, he described himself ironically as “a community loser,” and proud of it. According to O’Donnell participatory performance is the future. Likening his practice to “social acupuncture,” O’Donnell makes a case for recruiting non-performers while maintaining rigour throughout the creative process through curatorial considerations and the development of an agreed performance ‘script.’ O’Donnell sees this type of work as a rich contrast to the “hermetically walled-off works” regularly programmed.

Nakkiah Lui, writer, performer, activist and recent appointee to Queensland Theatre Company’s new National Artistic Team was the third keynote. Lui, a Gamillaroi and Torres Strait Islander woman, appealed for increased “complexity” of offerings across the performance landscape, as distinct from oft-referred to “diversity.” For Lui, complexity requires a different way of approaching things. “The notion of diversity doesn’t challenge the dominant culture” but instead reinforces it. For Lui, the stories we present and the ways in which we share them should always be “one step ahead of accepted community values.” Only then might we be able to see what is truly possible.

Kee Hong Low, the final presenter and current Head of Artistic Development for Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District Authority picked up the thread through each speaker’s provocations. Persuasive in his quiet insistence that we all carry prejudice within, his challenge to us was to consider that art is not found in big revolutions or grand gestures, but in our everyday engagement with others.

To illustrate his message, the artist gave an example of a recent work, initially installed in a cultural institution as an epitaph in stone challenging passersby to say hello and start a conversation. Later these same words were projected onto some of Hong Kong’s tallest corporate buildings, lighting up the night skyline, an unmissable example of art and activism. Kee Hong Low finished by encouraging each of those attending to take up the challenge of speaking to someone completely new to them at this year’s APAM and to consider the broader impacts of these transactions over the conference and beyond.

Zoom In: On…

A second stream to the Exchange program at APAM was the Zoom In: On…series, including sessions around Theatre for Young Audiences and Circus and Physical Theatre in Australia. The former was a breakfast gathering for theatre makers of works for children.

Much of the conversation centred on content, that is, making works for young people straddling the artistic and popular divide. For many delegates this begged the question, how do you get audiences to come to works other than adaptions of well-known picture books? Peppa Pig, that snub-nosed juggernaut of children’s television, it was widely agreed, “is a scourge.”

Another concern was the perception that children’s theatre tickets should be priced lower than those for works targeted at adults, an issue “systemic across the industry.” This disparity is odd, given that children’s theatre does not cost any less to make. And it is often the venue that bears the brunt of the shortfall, making it more difficult for presenters to take risks on new and original works.

As expected, given the format (a bunch of adults talking about what children should go and see), the question of relevance invariably came up: so what do the kids think? Perhaps Willie White, the Artistic Director of Dublin Theatre Festival summed it up best when he observed that the theatre maker should always consider “Who is the child you have in mind for this work?” An excellent provocation to munch on over your Coco Pops before moving onto the grown-up business of buying and selling art.

At the Circus and Physical Theatre in Australia session hosted by Yohann Floch, from the Fresh Arts Coalition Europe, participants were asked to respond in groups to two key questions: What is success for your organisation? And, what is success for your sector?

Throughout the impassioned discussion, a number of sector issues were perceived as current barriers to success. For instance it was felt by some in the room that ‘physical theatre,’ as a genre and a term, has had its day. Also cited as a concern was the rise of “circus missionaries.” As means to generate extra income, companies are taking circus training overseas, particularly to developing countries. As a result, circus is being introduced to places where there are already rich performative traditions linked to local cultures. The offer of skills exchanges was held up as a more desirable model.

The prevailing view from international APAM delegates was that Australia is a world leader in contemporary circus presentation and touring. Some exciting factors were identified as desirable: getting networks more connected globally to assist with touring opportunities; pursuing further dialogue with government regarding an appropriate funding model; establishing a dedicated circus festival (in the vein of events like Dance Massive); improving on the “tights and lights” model—still a cost-effective way to get circus touring locally; and shifting class perceptions around circus—getting shows out of tents and onto mainstages.

Yohann Floch summarised the morning’s work by affirming that ‘group-think’ had yielded some great innovations. He then threw down a new challenge: who would be responsible for putting these into action, an idea is only as successful as its execution.

First Nations’ Perspectives

Speaking of action, apparently the first thing panelists did at the First Nations’ Perspectives session was reorganise the chairs. Moving them from a straight line on the stage to a curve, ensured that the speakers and host Lydia Miller of the Australia Council for the Arts were able to interact throughout the ensuing conversation, which was based around Australia’s relationship to indigenous art and culture as seen through and with international eyes.

For each of the panelists “framing new cultural narratives in the 21st century” presents a number of challenges. Ryan Cunningham of Canada’s Native Earth spoke of the need for artists and presenters to avoid producing the museum-like diorama pieces of the past: works where a culture is “preserved as though behind glass.” For Santee Smith, of Canada’s Kaha:wi Dance Theatre, to move “beyond the fractures” and “decolonise art,” artists, cultural organisations and governments must employ a “re-” approach. For Smith, “A reconsideration, a reframing and a reconstruction (rather than deconstruction)” will ensure a move towards new and relevant cultural narratives and works.

Rachael Maza of Australia’s own pioneering ILBIJERRI Theatre Company expresses the view that “art for its own sake is a waste of money.” Instead for Maza, art at its best is always driven by provocateurs, “those wooden spoons of society.”

One of the next challenges, the panelists agreed, was the claiming of performance spaces. Black box theatres “have a code, with ways of operating within them.” The question for these artists then was “how can we turn these spaces into ours?”

Hone Kouka, of New Zealand’s Tawata Productions, acknowledged by the other panelists as a leader in creating opportunities for First Nation performance works, noted the changes to APAM programming over the last 15 years, with a significant increase in First Nation delegates attending. “I’m loving the shift,” he said.

Me too, and judging by the bright smiles and thrum of conversation in the foyer spaces, artists, producers and presenters were taking Kee Hong Low’s advice and making friends, as well as deals, at this year’s APAM.

APAM, Australian Performing Arts Market, Exchange Program, Brisbane Powerhouse and other venues, 22-26 Feb

In divergent ways, two works by local independent companies at the Adelaide Festival, Stone/Castro’s The Country and Tiny Bricks’ Deluge, both probed, with discomforting results, the difficulties of communication and meaning-making in an information-saturated world. That both took place away from the Festival’s CBD hub in desolate, warehouse-like venues heightened the alienating effects of each play’s depiction of the debilitating uses of language: too little, or too much.

Stone/Castro, The Country

British playwright Martin Crimp’s The Country (2000), like its thematically-linked successor The City (2008), is a tense study in Pinteresque menace that combines an ambiguous narrative with a fascination for language’s ability to conceal and distort.

A middle-class couple, Richard (Nathan O’Keefe) and Corinne (Jo Stone), have relocated from the city to a converted granary in the country. He’s a doctor, she a neurotic housewife who outsources the care of their children to a nanny. Richard claims to have found a young woman, Rebecca (Natalia Sledz), unconscious by the roadside, and has brought her back to the house. “She’s not going to wake up,” Richard tells Corinne ominously. She does, and punctures both Richard’s story—she claims he, a fellow drug addict, moved to the country specifically to be with her—and Richard and Corinne’s fantasy of a rural idyll (“the land, the stream, the beautiful house”).

Uncoiling in a predictable, stuttering rhythm, Crimp’s dialogue, like Pinter’s, is rife with elisions. Verbal obfuscation and aggression draw a permanent veil over unspoken thoughts and accusations. Each conversation, held at cross-purposes and thick with unaddressed questions, has an excruciatingly contrived feel. An additional, meta-theatrical layer is also present: “The more you talk the less you say,” Rebecca tells Richard, in what doubles as a comment on the playwright’s method: “There’s a limit,” Richard observes, “to what we can say—what we can achieve with words.”

Less elliptical than the later The City, a play that marked Crimp’s further move towards a more ‘post-dramatic’ style, The Country remains nonetheless abstruse. Rebecca disappears without explanation, her relationship to Richard still mysterious, and we are left to assemble Crimp’s myriad clues—embedded in, for example, a motif around cleanliness and purity and the involvement of an unseen character, Morris, Richard’s superior—that point to Richard and Corinne’s complicity in removing the tainting Rebecca from their immaculately constructed lives.

Director Paulo Castro has, rewardingly, defied the naturalistic trend established by previous productions. The house, in a design by David Lampard, is an abstracted mess of exposed woodwork and torn wallpaper, reflecting the play’s transmutation from British to Australian setting in its surrounding expanse of grass replete with woodpiles and scattered branches. The interior of the house, viewable through slats that frequently obscure the actors and, puzzlingly, require them to stoop in order to access the lawn, is a jumble of furnitureless, cubicle-like rooms duskily lit by Daniel Barber, whose cinematic, ever-shifting design makes intensive use of side lighting. The music, combining the brooding post-rock of Melbourne band Fourteen Nights at Sea with a short, astringent piece for cello and violin by Johann Johannsson (in Adelaide for the Festival’s experimental music program Unsound), effectively amplifies the prevailing mood of unease. The cast are restrained and balanced, if occasionally lacking in volume when within the house, and happily refuse the script’s occasional invitations to melodrama.

The production is not without its missteps: the presence of a lifelike toy cat is a redundant quirk, and Castro’s decision to omit between-scene blackouts in favour of continuous action throws up some odd stage pictures, such as when we see Richard piling branches into the house for no discernible reason other than to metaphorise the dissolution of his and Corinne’s pastoral sanctuary. Nevertheless, Crimp’s unjustly overlooked play—and this taut revival—compellingly bear out the old paradox that an idyll can only exist once it’s passed.

Tiny Bricks, Deluge

Out of a vast Perspex box emerge 10 actors, each buried to their waist—in this case by hundreds of white foam cubes—like Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days. A weave of multiple, mostly partnered narratives begins immediately and the audience, seated in the round, starts to snatch at the threads: disparately-skilled gamers playing a first-person shooter; a man enthusing to friends about his conversion to Baha’ism; an army whistleblower divulging classified information to “a crazy white-haired Aussie who can’t seem to stay in the same country for very long.” Most troubling is a disturbed man in a crowd, his anxious writhing periodically plunging his whole body back beneath the sea of cubes as he spouts religious-hued nonsense. “So many people,” someone says, “so much noise.”

Suspended above the box is a sculptural web of subtly pulsing LED lights, redolent of the transmission of data through fibre-optic cables or the neural pathways of the brain. Sporadic power surges produce visual and sonic flare-ups that punctuate the intermeshing narratives below.

Deluge, presented by Tiny Bricks in association with Brink Productions, dramatises information overload—or, more precisely, what is known as continuous partial attention—through the simultaneous unfolding of five ‘micro plays.’ Playwright Phillip Kavanagh’s text, three years in gestation over multiple creative developments and a rehearsed reading at last year’s National Play Festival, is musical in its construction, employing, for example, counterpoint and crescendo. Each play forms a sort of melodic line that shifts in and out of harmony with the others. Sections of the whole, although rarely sustaining the same mood, recall the self-containment of a symphonic movement. The dialogue never exactly doubles up but rather overlaps, making for some fascinating instances of textual and, sometimes, thematic congruence.

Kavanagh’s motifs are established quickly and vividly: religious compatibility (“different flowers blooming in the same garden”), the problem of making sense across barriers of space and culture (“we’re all saying the same thing but no-one’s stopping to translate”), and the impact of globalisation on human relationships (“I feel connected to everybody as though they’re distant family”). A further theme, which implicitly links violent video games with American war atrocities (specifically, the infamous ‘Collateral Murder’ incident exposed by WikiLeaks in 2010), left me feeling uncomfortable in its underexplored implications.

Deluge’s piecemeal nature, large cast, and brief running time of just 50 minutes (wise, given the assaultive effect of its storytelling mode on audiences) provides little scope for nuance on the part of the actors. Nonetheless, the young cast—all recent Flinders University Drama Centre graduates—does well to maintain clarity amid Elizabeth Gadsby’s restrictive set and the text’s non-linear sprawl. Nescha Jelk’s direction is canny, adding pleasing dramaturgical texture to Kavanagh’s dense script in, for example, the positioning of the actors in relation to each other and their manipulation of the foam cubes during moments of heightened tension.

But what of the deluge’s human cost—the drowned and the drowning? The polish of Kavanagh’s text—and perhaps too the production’s swamping, maximalist approach to design—prevents us from engaging passionately with this question. As verbal music realised through an impeccably wrought structure, Deluge is an impressive achievement but one that comes off, ultimately, as a triumph of form over feeling.

Adelaide Festival of Arts 2016: Stone/Castro, The Country, writer Martin Crimp, director Paulo Castro, design David Lampard, lighting Daniel Barber, State Opera Studio, 8-13 March; Tiny Bricks, Deluge, writer Philip Kavanagh, director Nescha Jelk, design Elizabeth Gadsby, Plant 1, 8-13 March.

On this page you can open a PDF that details many of the performances and several talks in the 20th Biennale of Sydney in an easily readable form. I made this after struggling to achieve an overview of the performance program that is clearly an important component of this biennale.

Before attending an event, you should check times, dates [these can change], venues and booking requirements on the sites of
The Biennale of Sydney, Carriageworks and the MCA.

Why dance?

Nowadays, you expect to find performance art in international art biennales, even more so because of its Marina Abramovic-led resurgence and popularity (if presented as spectacle). But dance? Occasionally, yes, given Modernist dance’s intimate kinship with the visual arts and the significance of some key 20th century collaborations. But, centre-stage? There are some obvious reasons: galleries and biennales are increasingly opening themselves to performance, performative installations and new media art—in the long wake of the 60s video art revolution. As well, the visual arts and dance have shared an intensive engagement with high theory and the academy, more palpably so than music and theatre. Even so, dance?

Clearly, Biennale Artistic Director Stephanie Rosenthal (chief curator of London’s Hayward Gallery since 2007) rates performance, and especially dance, highly. In 2010 for the Hayward she curated MOVE, Choreographing You, Art & Dance with a pronounced interplay of dance and visual artworks, public participation and a roll call of influential dance artists and videomakers. A book documenting that event appeared in 2011 (MIT). That Rosenthal is on a crusade to open up the gallery to performance is confirmed by her choice of biennale keynote speaker, the dancer-choreographer-philosopher Boris Charmatz, Director of the Musée de la danse-Centre choréographique national de Rennes et de Bretagne. Also telling is the presence of Brazilian-born, New York-based writer, curator and specialist in performance and choreographic studies, André Lepecki, whose interest in the dance-visual arts connection is evident in the title of his latest book Singularities: dance and visual arts in the age of performance (forthcoming Routledge, 2016).

Having absorbed the Charmatz-Lepecki takes on the performance/gallery nexus and the Biennale’s examples of its potentials, Australian contemporary dance artists, writers and scholars will gather several weeks later for “a salon” titled Choreography and the Gallery (2-8pm, 24 April, AGNSW) to discuss, and perform, their own responses.

Boris Charmatz

Charmatz’ appeal is certainly evident in his Manifesto for the Dancing Museum (2009), a radical challenge not only to the way dance is housed in France in regional institutions built around a Paris-based hub, but also to the functioning of the traditional art museum or gallery, or biennale even. Is it living, unpredictable, inclusive? Charmatz’s own extensive practice is all of these. He’s a relentless experimenter who honours tradition in exciting ways, as in his Flip Book tribute to Merce Cunningham and in another work, 20 Dancers for the 20th Century. Here performers demonstrate steps from 100 years’ worth of steps from Charlie Chaplin to Michael Jackson to Yvonne Rainer, performed for a strolling audience in the hallways, stairwells and library of Paris’ Palais Garnier in 2015, after a MoMa season in New York. Charmatz describes this work as “a living archive.”

Charmatz also engages with large numbers of the public. He took his ‘portable’ (another of his ideals) Musée de la danse to the Tate Modern Turbine Hall. Over two days, he and his dancers instructed amateurs and members of the public to create joint performances interpolated with Charmatz’ own. Enfant, which has played in London, Avignon and Salzburg, features nine dancers, 23 untrained children “with a lot of freedom,” a crane and a huge treadmill-like machine. The work appears to alternate between innocent playfulness and haunting images of the manipulation of inert bodies.

After his keynote address, Charmatz will perform in his own words, “the very strange piece” Manger with local dancers.

The works: A Selection

Adam Linder, Some Proximity
Berlin-based Australian writer, dancer and choreographer Adam Linder, who created the striking Are We That We Are for Sydney Dance Company in 2010 and has performed with Michael Clark, Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods and The Royal Ballet, will present Some Proximity. This is the the second of his hire-by-the-hour Choreographic Services. “Two dancers respond to the written observations of an arts writer, who minutes the artistic or social contexts of the location of the hired service. In responding to the observations with danced action, the writer seeks to collapse the viewers’ critical distance to the work” (ICA).

Adrian Heathfield, Ghost Telephone
On the page, some works look simply mysterious, like Ghost Telephone, a “one-month-long chain performance” curated by the UK’s Adrian Heathfield, a key writer about and curator of experimental performance and dance. The piece comprises, “interlinked new performances from internationally renowned artists. Working in situ, performers channel and transform the spirits of works in the collection and displays of the Art Gallery of NSW.” Open 10am-5pm (see BOS website).

Mette Edvardsen, Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine
In the live art world, one-on-one performances are beginning to inhabit galleries, as did the Perth’s Proximity Festival at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in 2015. In Part of The Future of Disappearance, a Carriageworks-based program curated by André Lepecki, Norwegian dancer, choreographer and performance maker Mette Edvardsen presents Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine. In the Newtown Library, you choose a book from a selection and a portion of it is intimately recited from memory to you by a performer.

Mike Parr: BDH
Australian artist Mike Parr’s much-anticipated new performance, BDH, to be performed in the Carriageworks’ carpark on a late afternoon, will reveal the meaning of its acronymic title.

Mette Edvardsen, No title
Edvardsen’s No title is “a simple performance” over 40 minutes which she describes on her website as being “about how reality exists in language and how this extends into real space. It is about how memory and imagination blur. It is about things and how things can be there and gone at the same time, and that what defines this is various. It is about things that are gone and about things that remain.”

Germaine Kruip, A Square, Spoken
Netherland-born Germaine Kruip’s A Square, Spoken is another one-on-one performance which will be performed many times at the MCA and on Cockatoo Island across the duration of the biennale. In 20 minutes, Kruip ‘walks you through’ our ever mutating notion of the square from Galileo to Malevich to Jung to the present. In terms of this biennale it’s interesting that in 2012 Kruip made A Possibility of an abstraction: Circle Dance, dervish-inspired movement in everyday dress incorporated into gallery or public spaces.

Nera Choksi, In Memory of the Last Sunset
In an example of a performer responding directly to an art work, Australian dancer Alice Cummins will engage with her collaborator, Indian artist Nera Choksi’s In Memory of the Last Sunset (a work featuring multi-layered sunsets) by performing for an hour near Choksi’s The Sun’s Rehearsal, 2016, “a site-specific billboard-sized installation” at Carriageworks. “Cummins’ cyclical performance asks urgent questions about the life of an ever-warming planet and the life of an aging body”[website].

Mella Jaarsma, Dogwalk,
Indonesia-based, Netherlands-born Mella Jaarsma will stage Dogwalk, a performative installation in which humans wear the skins of cows, sheep and goats while walking dogs. An interviewer in Trouble wrote, “The skins of frogs, squirrels, bats, snakes and chickens are all put to use in her wearable works, as well as moth cocoons, water buffalo horns, the bark of banana trees, and more. The garment becomes a symbolic protection and a visual representation of fear or a need for security. Her work also alludes to the isolation of human beings and the need for a filtered approach to the world.”

Nicola Conibere, Assembly
London-based artist Nicola Conibere’s Assembly, “designed for galleries, civic spaces and performance places…explor[es] shifts in relation between individual and collective bodies; its configurations respond to the presence of spectators in an investigation of how other people can appear to us.” Assembly acknowledges each spectator’s unique presence without asking them to do more than watch. Assembly is an element of the partnership between the Biennale and Sydney’s choreographic laboratory, Critical Path, where the work will be performed 2-5pm over three days for audiences to come and go as they wish.

Nicola Conibere and André Lepecki will be in conversation at the home of Critical Path, The Drill, Rushcutters Bay, Monday 14 March, 6.30pm.

Nina Beier, The Complete Works
The Biennale website account of this work is entirely abstract. A little Googling reveals that in her The Complete Works series, Danish-born, Berlin-based Nina Beier invites “a retired dancer to dance every piece of choreography that they have learnt, enacted in chronological order. The piece is simultaneously a history of a choreographic vocabulary… while also invoking the personal history of the dancer’s experiences” (Tate.org). The dancer in this case is Meryl Tankard, one of Pina Bausch’s leading performers in the Wuppertaler Tanztheater, director of Australian Dance Theatre and creator of many works since.

Agatha Gothe-Snape, Brooke Stamp, Here, an Echo
From Speakers’ Corner in the Domain to Wemyss Lane in Surry Hills, this work, performed over three weekends, comprises “site-specific happenings and discursive events.” The artist and the dancer “will develop ‘performative interferences’, literal and metaphorical markers that use language to choreograph the viewer, casting new light on quiet things in the process.” You’ll just have to be there to see what happens to you.

Lee Mingwei, Guernica in Sand
In an enticing one-off performance 12-5pm, 23 April, at Carriageworks, Taiwan’s New York-based Lee Mingwei and collaborators meticulously recreate Pablo Picasso’s famous Guernica (1937) with sand and then transform it, walk on it with the audience and finally sweep it away. In an era of increasingly erased protest and diminished democracy, this work should engender resonances beyond the sense of art’s impermanence.

Lilach Livne, TRANSCENDING, for Peace
Allow time too to participate in Israel choreographer and performance artist Lilach Livne’s TRANSCENDING, for Peace, in which you become part of “a temporary community” and “audiences and performers join hands, dance, pray and strive for an abstract way of being.” Livne’s works are not at all tame, as her frank, politically and pop cultural vimeo postings attest. The 75-minute work is presented in association with Critical Path and features local performers.

Alexis Teplin, Arch, The Politics of Fragmentation
London-based American painter, sculptor and performance artist Alexis Teplin will perform on Cockatoo Island amid her own paintings. Critiquing “the fragmentation of language in the digital age,” in her 15-minute performance, she asks, “When decadence fails us in our quest for utopia, where do we end up?” Teplin’s bright, abstract costuming and droll conversational scripting, as in P and C (2014), provide for an arch, theatrical commentary on art and, in Arch, the digital takeover of our lives.

And you won’t see…

Justene Williams, Sydney Chamber Opera, Victory Over the Sun
From the avant-garde Russia of 1913 comes this Futurist performative critique of opera, originally designed by Malevich and reconceived here by Australian visual artist and performer Justene Williams in collaboration with Sydney Chamber Opera, composer Huw Belling and librettist Pierce Wilcox. Sadly, all three performances on Cockatoo Island are booked out.

Korakrit Arunanondchai Boychild: Untitled LipSync #225
Also sold out, but you might glimpse it on YouTube, is Bangkok-raised Korakrit Arunanondchai’s intensely pop-theatrical Boychild…in which the female protagonist “recasts her body as cyborg.”

Art dances

The Biennale’s mantra “the future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed,” is true in many disturbing ways across the globe. As we await equitable redistributions of power and resources, and as the Biennale unfolds, we hope at least to witness dance draw the art gallery into the present rather than simply be accommodated by or absorbed into it.

20th Biennale of Sydney, The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed, 18 March-5 June

On the first Saturday night in November 2015, Melbourne multi-instrumentalist Adam Simmons completed the first week of his month-long project, 100:25:1. As on most nights that month, Simmons played duets with four musicians from different backgrounds. With multi-instrumentalist Mal Webb he switched between a six-foot-high Slovakian recorder and a variety of reeds and woodwinds. On sax he accompanied Matt Bailey’s moody Wurlitzer ballads, stepping out the front door of the Conduit art space in Fitzroy during one song to play a screaming solo from the street. He wound up the night accompanying Domenico de Clario’s grand piano and introspective prose lyrics.

Simmons’ exhaustion was evident, although he had not missed a beat musically. He’d completed 24 duets in six days, and still had 76 to go over the next three weeks.

“He was really depleting at the end of the first week,” recalls John Fitzgerald, Simmons’ key partner in founding the project. “Then he was ‘up’ again. He was mainlining energy from the other musicians.”

“I was learning what the project was in the first week,” Simmons reflects. “Having audience members return over multiple nights was sustenance for me. I wasn’t doing this thing in isolation.”

Simmons has been active in Melbourne music for over two decades. Graduating from VCA in 1992, he is often identified as a jazz reeds player, but plays across a range of genres including free improv, rock, blues and world and contemporary art music. His instrumental palette ranges from contrabass clarinet to saxophone to piccolo, and over the past decade he has become adept at the shakuhachi.

“I think of myself as a performance artist, a storyteller, rather than just someone who plays an instrument,” Simmons says. “This project is a good representation of what I do.”

Performance as data

As well as the performative challenge of 100 duets, 100:25:1 involved the musicians as a data source to construct a map of Melbourne music with Simmons as the central node. The impetus for this idea was a conversation with Fitzgerald about the size of respective musicians’ pay packets.
“I was astounded at the difference [in our incomes]; at the way he is treated,” Fitzgerald says.

Fitzgerald is an Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne. His research looks at the structure of illicit social networks, such as those shared by drug users and criminal scenes, to quantify the value of non-monetary transactions. His ‘money on the table’ conversation with Simmons spurred him to do something to address “the inequity of what we understand about music in Melbourne. We only really count those people who make a lot of money,” Fitzgerald says. “It’s about quantifying the value of what we do,” Simmons adds. “Funding assessments miss half of what the arts is about.”

The 100 names Simmons selected (20 each from five genres: jazz, experimental/free improv, contemporary classical, folk/blues and world music) were all musicians he has previously played with. “There’s a Melbourne music heritage that we don’t celebrate,” Simmons says. “We’d rather look overseas for validation.”

Each musician completed a questionnaire including details of their income and who else in the 100 they had played with in the past year. Simmons and Fitzgerald represented these relationships by linking photographs of musicians with coloured yarn on a wall in the performance space.

Simmons curated each of the 25 concerts to include not only a diversity of genres, but also performer ages and experiences. Every day he wrote conversational posts on social media about his shared history with each musician.

Performance as community

“The posts Adam wrote were beautiful,” says Carmen Chan, one of the 100 musicians and a regular in the audience. “It made it more than just about the music; it was about connecting people.” Simmons offered free admission to each of the 100. “I don’t like travelling on my own,” Simmons explains. “You don’t get to share things.”

Vocalist, member of the 100 and audience regular, Carolyn Connors cites the composition written and performed by pianist Michael Kieran Harvey as a personal highlight. “It was a by-the-skin-of-your-teeth survival performance, just extraordinary.”

“It got madder as it went on, particularly in the last week,” Simmons recalls. “Andrea Keeble’s instruction was to just play one sound. Leah Scholes made rumballs as her performance.”

Simmons completed his 100th duet on the last Sunday in November with long-time collaborator, Nick Tsiavos. After a solo performance the following night, the map came down off the wall.

Carolyn Connors recalls approaching a weary Simmons after this final duet. “You’re a chameleon,” she said of Simmons’ metamorphic performance over the month.

John Fitzgerald will submit a statistical analysis of the data gathered to Music Victoria this year. There are also plans for the map to be digitised to an online platform where it can continue to grow. “It’s a way for the Melbourne music community to say ‘we’re here,’” Fitzgerald says.

In Go Down, Moses, Italian auteur Romeo Castellucci reconceives the Book of Exodus’ story of Moses, liberator of the Israelites, as an elliptically sequenced dreamscape that “transfigures the various moments of the life of Moses” [program]. Each episode is filtered through a stridently contemporary aesthetic, narrative causality eschewed in a startling weave of deconstructed mythologies and mises en scènes almost overwhelming in their vivid, painterly composition.

In a prologue of sorts that commences while the house lights remain up, well-heeled visitors to an art gallery move about purposelessly. In the seeming absence of anything to look at, they begin to objectivise each other in an eerily impersonal exchange of touches and what look like measurements based on various body lengths (perhaps referencing the cubit, the ancient unit that appears in the Bible, describing the distance from elbow to fingertip). The movement is abstracted and unsettling, recalling the grim history of institutional attempts to classify individuals into discrete races and character types. A repeated gesture, something like the thrusting of a knife, periodically scatters the visitors, who nonchalantly regroup in different parts of the space, all memory of the earlier violence forgotten or suppressed.

One member of the party finds a reproduction of Dürer’s masterpiece of observational art, Young Hare, on the floor and affixes it to the wall as if to say ‘there—now you have something to look at’ (Castellucci is, in his own way, saying the same thing, both acknowledging and ironising our voracious relationship to his art). Unmoved by the painting, the visitors saunter off, Scott Gibbons’ elusive soundscape of muffled pops and clicks giving way to the roaring of an industrial turbine, the gigantic, captivating object—the one the gallery visitors, and we, the audience, have been waiting for?—having materialised during a blackout. The scalps of three women, long hair trailing, descend slowly from the ceiling, their ensnarement by the turbine’s rotor a profoundly unnerving inevitability (the sequence is, superfluously, later repeated without meaningful variation).

The drone of the turbine extends, momentarily, into the third scene wherein a young woman (Rascia Darwish) occupies a remarkably lifelike toilet cubicle, from which we are distanced by a scrim that remains in place for the duration of the work. Bleeding below the waist and in visible pain, she stuffs toilet paper between her legs and chaotically veers from cistern to sink, smearing the walls and mirror with her blood. Hemorrhaging after having given birth in secret, this is Castellucci’s Jochebed, mother of Moses, filtered through a contemporary lens that sees emoticons projected onto the scrim throughout her ordeal—a withering, if rather gauche, statement on our technologised indifference to suffering.

We are provided a brief glimpse of the baby’s fate—alive, put in a plastic bag and cast into a dumpster, reflecting the Biblical narrative in which Moses is abandoned on the banks of the Nile—before the woman is questioned by police (English surtitles accompany the Italian dialogue). Even allowing for the implausibility of such an interview occurring prior to medical treatment, this scene’s relative naturalism vexes, and feels overly self-conscious in its calculated, unimaginative appropriation of the conventions of the police procedural. It becomes interesting only when the woman’s refusal to reveal the location of her baby—an unthinkable dereliction of feminine duty in the eyes of the detective (Sergio Scarlatella)—gives way to apocalyptic ramblings (“there are animals all over the floor, they live in the same world as us”) and seer-like declarations (“we have meat to eat and we are sated but we are slaves”).

At the conclusion of the interview, the woman is placed in a CT scanner. As the platform slides into the tunnel, penetrative resonances are unavoidable given the significance of fertility in Castellucci’s reimagining of the Moses myth (a second baby, as well as heterosexual intercourse, feature in the final vignette). In an astonishing coup de théâtre, the woman emerges into a vast, exquisitely rendered prehistoric cave replete with opening that looks out onto a crepuscular, star-flecked sky. As mathematician John Playfair remarked in Scotland in 1786 when he saw the Siccar Point “angular unconformity”—discrete geological layers suggesting vast time spans—“the mind grows giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.”

Sacred choral music, contemplative in tone but resounding in volume, accompanies the arrival of a group of early humans (actors in prosthetics) who, manifesting the woman’s vision of sated slaves, consume a meal of dried meat prior to burying and, briefly, mourning a stillborn baby. Their balletic, slow motion movements are observed by a second group of humans, a competing tribe perhaps, who gather at the mouth of the cave. Two of the cave dwellers copulate, bringing to mind the doctrine of original sin, the Biblical Fall that Genesis tells us corrupted all human nature.

And yet the act, on reflection, feels cyclical rather than foundational, connecting these early humans across the gulf of deep time to both their ancestors and descendants. They have a message for us, scrawled in red pigment across the wall of the cave, SOS, that ripples through the space and time that separate us. The presence of the woman, our avatar, collapses temporality, spatiality.

We have, by this point in the evening, already heard Empire Jubilee Quartet’s take on Wade in the Water, the Negro spiritual whose lyrics (wade in the water, children/God’s gonna trouble the water) reflect the Israelite slaves’ escape from Egypt. But Castellucci’s most distinctive manoeuvre is to project the Moses myth beyond its established associations – its primacy, namely, as a symbol of African American emancipation – towards what he thinks of as ‘our incorporeal slavery’, that of ‘people exiled from being’ [director’s note].

Seen through this lens, all of humanity is subject to different slaveries: not physical and economic bondage à la the 19th century slave trade, but, for instance, helpless attachment to technology (the emoticons) and the perpetuation of gender-based oppression (one obvious reading of the pulverised scalps). Then there are those slaveries that exist beyond the physical world: subconscious drives, and a form of race memory – Jung’s idea of a collective unconscious – that links us to the early humans depicted in the final sequence. Seen in this way, the function of Moses is not so different from the Biblical myth: as a figure of salvation who can lead humanity out of servitude and into the Promised Land. What might it say about us that Castellucci’s Moses remains, for all we know, squirming unfound within an overflowing dumpster beside a forgotten byroad?

Adelaide Festival of Arts 2016: Go Down, Moses, direction, set, costumes, lighting Romeo Castellucci, music Scott Gibbons, text Claudia Castellucci, Romeo Castellucci, Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre, 25-28 Feb

When I speak with Yaron Lifschitz, Artistic Director of the internationally acclaimed Brisbane-based ‘new circus’ company Circa, he’s just received a $25,000 Australia Council Theatre Award, has a show about to open that night at the Gold Coast’s Bleach Festival and is to premiere in a fortnight a new work created in collaboration with Wollongong’s Merrigong Theatre Company. He’s loving all of it.

Circa has enjoyed musical collaborations, for example with UK vocal ensemble I Fagiolini (How Like an Angel, 2012), France’s Debussy String Quartet playing Shostakovich (Opus, 2013), a violinist (What Will have Been, 2015) and with singers and instrumentalists (Il Ritorno/The Return, a version of Monteverdi’s opera, 2015-2016). Landscape with Monsters, however, takes Circa in a new direction—in a number of respects, as Lifschitz reveals.

Very different for us. “All new material,” as they say on those Chinese toys.

It came out of [Merrigong Theatre Company Artistic Director and CEO] Simon Hinton’s brain. I think Simon is one of the great unsung visionaries of Australian theatre. He has this idea that a company from Wollongong can make a difference on a national and global stage and can commission new kinds of work and take risks. We’d involved him in planning a sort of national touring strategy and, partly out of that, we put on a festival of Circa a couple of years ago. That worked well and Simon started talking to us about the idea of creating a new show based in and inspired by Wollongong.

I said, “Look, we’ve never done anything like that before. We make shows here in isolation in Brisbane. But I’m really interested in the idea of landscape and of the post-industrial landscape and how it influences bodies, how we shape it and it shapes us. Can we start there?” And we’ve done a couple of development periods and now we’re about to put on the show!

Circa has travelled a lot. So I suppose you’ve become a bit of an urban geographer. Are you sensitive to the cities you visit?

I hope so. It’s really fascinating to have the chance to go back to places many years apart and to notice the changes in their landscape but also in their psycho-topography, the sense of how people change with it. There are also the simple visceral experiences. Like [for the Merrigong project] we visited the Steelworks that used to have thousands of people working there, now it has 1,500. It’s just huge empty halls with machines and one guy sitting behind a console. It’s this extraordinary, ‘absent’ place. Obviously the jobs and the economy have disappeared along with it. But, of course, that doesn’t naturally talk to anything we do. We basically chuck people in the air and stand on them. There’s a limit. So we had to find a way to get those two things to talk to each other without getting too interpretive or metaphorical.

There are plenty of pitfalls in this business. We just don’t do ‘about’ very well as a kind of default setting. And we have to. We have to find some way of infusing the work with ‘about.’

You have a strong dramaturgical, musical and choreographical sensibility when working with bodies—their strength, flexibility, vulnerability—but what do you do when you have to convey a sense of a place?

It’s very complicated. What it does is to bring out the worst in all of my multiple personalities. At some point the musical side or the choreographic side wins. And what I ended up making through the initial developments of Landscape with Monsters was a series of things that I didn’t like very much. They all made sense but just didn’t have the oomph that I think our work needs. In the end I wanted to boil it down to a simple dramatic question that I felt we could deal with. And the question was: What happens when the body meets the right angle of the built environment?

As a starting point that was something we could work with, physically as well as conceptually. So we started to work with simple structures—a series of boxes. And we ended up with no circus apparatus in the show. We work with boxes, ladders, planks and with balance. We’ve had to learn a new vocabulary. There are acrobatics in the work but [ideas like] ‘let’s put someone on a trapeze or someone doing hula hoops for five minutes to a pretty piece of music,’ that’s not this show. It’s really built on a very different kind of architecture because we wanted to answer those questions with some sort of depth and authenticity.

Mainly boxes. We stack them and climb into them and jump off them. That transforms into very large trestle ladders and planks. It’s all very simple, industrial. At times, they’re used as projection surfaces. We’re still working through the dramaturgy of that, trying to find a way to make it work. As always with projection, there are some pretty things but are they good and meaningful? I’m not sure. It’s really reduced, a boiled-down set of languages about how bodies interact with right angles.

The angle versus the curve of the body—a great piece of aesthetic discipline for you.

We’re working with [Sydney composer and sound designer] Daryl Wallis and he’s been terrific. We’re finding our way through. We started with the music that was put on the Voyager spacecraft, of which a little bit is actually retained but not a lot. There was a bizarre set of eclectic tracks sent out that will continue to journey through space probably long after we’ve blown ourselves up…or drowned ourselves. The idea of these tracks without a civilisation behind them [suggested] a sense of a kind of eerie afterglow to our civilisation. There is a kind of post-apocalyptic sense about the show.

That said, it’s really easy for young artists, and performers in particular, to make ‘depressing’ kind of work. You know, ‘heavy’ for its own sake, and I’ve been working really hard to avoid that because that’s not the experience of being in Wollongong and it’s not the experience of the environment. It’s actually that complex negotiation where there are beautiful natural features, rotting industrial carcasses and new developments and apartment blocks going up. So I’m trying to make a show that spans some of those perspectives and [deals with] how we live in our environment from living in small boxes to building big structures to hanging precariously off things that may not even be there in a few seconds. That’s the range we’ve been working with.

You’re dealing with complex issues but I notice the publicity material says “suitable for 10-years old and up.”

Look, [as a circus company], we always have this issue with kids. It’s fascinating. I just saw a New Zealand dance company at APAM [Australian Performing Arts Market]. It was pretty terrific, five women dancing. And I took my son who’s a special-needs child who barely watches and who hates sitting in a theatre through my shows. But he sat pretty much transfixed through the whole 70 minutes of the show. He’s 14 and has a complex set of conditions, and I can’t predict [his response], but he loved it. So, I’ve long since given up trying to work out what audiences will like and what they won’t. I just think if the work has integrity…And, look, the first imperative of anything in circus is Do Not Bore Your Audience. In theatre you can think, ‘Look, I know I’m bored but I also know this is Eugene O’Neill and I need to see this play in my life.’ That never happens in circus. People just go, this is a boring show. So we don’t have the cultural imprimatur to carry through the kind of patches of tedium you might get with a classic play or opera or ballet. We have to keep an audience engaged. It doesn’t mean simply ‘entertained,’ but we work from a low boredom threshold and a high sense of audience engagement.

But it is critical that your work is not just for an audience with pre-conceived notions. Circa is a company that changes the notion of what circus can be.

That’s right. We’ve been working hard at this over the last two years. I think we became conscious of the fact that we had a choice: we could develop a house style or break with that. And we chose to break from it. That’s why we’re really keen to work in ways that are very different. So coming up tonight we have a show [Horizon with Angels by Circa offshoot Preposterous] that’s outdoors for the Bleach Festival [accompanied by local choirs].

We’ve got in rehearsal a show that’s going into La Boite’s subscription season based on a fantasia in which three heroines—Nora, Hedda Gabler and Miss Julie— encounter each other in some kind of after-life meets circus.

Yes it’s kind of joyous romp as well as quite a searching piece. We re-did all the dramaturgy the other day. It starts in a narrow physical theatre [format] with what you might expect—women being oppressed by men—and then it turns into a beautiful Steppenwolfian explosion of colour and circus-ness, hinged by those [same] issues and ideas. And that’s very different from something like Landscape with Monsters, which is much more compressed in its tonality and more ‘held’ and considered, but has humour in it.

It came from a couple of places. Derrida’s idea of the monstrous. We’re all faced with change from the obvious things that are happening, from Wollongong to the environment to Donald Trump. There are plenty of monsters in the world. But for most of civilisation and most living things, we are the monsters. We’re not just victims of the environment or just shapers of the environment, we’re in a complex negotiation with it; that idea’s really important. That’s how I conceived the work. So one of the questions for me is: who are the monsters here? Then, of course, there is Goya and the sleep of reason producing monsters and the monster is the thing to which you haven’t applied conscious thought, which seems to me to be not an unusual thing.

Circa & Merrigong Theatre Company, Landscape with Monsters, director Yaron Lifschitz, associate director Alice Lee Holland, sound designer Daryl Wallis, lighting, AV designer Toby Knyvett, costume designer Libby McDonnell; Illawarra Performing Arts Centre, Wollongong, 17-20 March

The James Plays Trilogy, a cycle of historical dramas written by Rona Munro and directed by National Theatre of Scotland Artistic Director Laurie Sansom, like Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s Go Down, Moses assays the nature of complex inheritances from a distant time populated by beings that feel (at least superficially) like our psychological kin. The plays, first performed in Edinburgh in 2014, dramatise three generations of Stuart kings, variously enthusiastic presiders over a feudal, fragmented 15th century Scotland.

In the first, The Key Will Keep the Lock, James I (Steven Miller) returns to Scotland after 18 years of detention in an English prison to an impoverished nation beset by factionalism. His long exile and bookishness make him the subject of suspicion (“what sort of a king is brought up reading books and writing poetry?”) but his dutifulness and patriotism—he quickly marries Joan Beaufort (Rosemary Boyle), daughter of the 1st Earl of Somerset and decries the financial rapaciousness of the English—win grudging respect in a volatile parliament (though not enough, of course, to prevent his assassination).

In the second play, The Day of the Innocents, James I’s heir (Daniel Cahill, in place of an injured Andrew Rothney)—known as Little Red Face on account of a conspicuous birthmark—becomes King of Scots at just six years of age. Acutely aware of his tumultuous inheritance (“I have dark blood like snakes under my skin”), the boy is plagued by nightmares and seeks respite through friendship with an older boy, William, the future Earl of Douglas. Douglas’ powerful family, however, led by the mercurial Balvenie (Peter Forbes), has designs on the throne, an ambition unlikely to be jeopardised by an infantile king driven to hide in a box, fearful of fulfilling his dark fate. “You’ll grow to be a monster,” James is warned. In this world—where “God can take our lives in an hour, in a minute,” as John (Ali Craig) puts it in the third play—survival, let alone success, demands it.

The cycle is completed by The True Mirror, the longest of the three plays, in which the flamboyant James III (Matthew Pidgeon) leads a parliament increasingly ill-at-ease with his profligacy—he wants £60,000 to visit the cathedral at Amiens for inspiration for the European-style court of his fantasies and a choir (“just forty or so”) to follow him everywhere, so as to “cushion every moment with something beautiful.” The Queen, the prudent Margaret of Denmark (Malin Crépin), begins to steady the ship of state by taking control of the court’s finances. “This whole country,” she tells him, “is like a house we’re trying to hold together with our bare hands.” The King’s excesses, both fiscal and sexual (he takes a mistress, the first to appear in the trilogy, and has dalliances with numerous men), take on paranoid (“I’ve long suspected I’ve been surrounded by liars”) and, finally, hubristic dimensions.

The first play is the slightest of the three, reducing the courtship of James I and Joan Beaufort to pure soap opera; for the most part, the machinations of 15th century Scottish feudalism are little more than a suitably alien backdrop for comedy over-dependent on fish out of water-isms. Four nooses that overhang the stage during the first scene prove to be a red herring, presaging only Munro’s consistent difficulty in organically working up tension out of the drama. The Day of the Innocents is a significant improvement, in that it at least has an absorbing character arc at its centre, as is the final play, the most stylistically diverse of the three, which introduces some invigorating contemporary accents in Jon Bausor’s otherwise firmly period costume design, and which sees a commanding performance from Pidgeon as James III. The trilogy as a whole (able to be viewed in Adelaide in a single sitting, albeit with multiple meal breaks) benefits from a strong ensemble.

The texts themselves are problematic, tending towards the blandly expository. Munro and Sansom seem so frightened by the idea of a single audience member losing track of events for even a moment that everything is spelt out to the letter in the manner of a crude ledger. The result is staidness, a flattening absence of intrigue or subtext and unwelcome recourse to ‘edgy’ language and soap operatics to artificially enliven proceedings. In contrast to the plays’ publicity, their nearest TV counterpart isn’t Game of Thrones or House of Cards, both fine exemplars of long-form cable TV drama, but the soapy Tudors.

As with that series’ creator, Michael Hirst, Munro has been upfront about taking significant liberties with the historical record—perfectly admissible in the name of populist entertainment—but the real problem is the paucity of psychological depth. Few, if any, of these characters seem motivated by anything except generalised longings for sex or power, and none, until we meet James III in the final play, The True Mirror, exhibits a compelling personality flaw. Death comes and goes, usually offstage or antiseptically stylised, with few aftershocks. However cheap human life may have been in the 15th century, it’s strange, and ultimately distancing, that grief and guilt—those mighty catalysts of Shakespearean tragedy—are here in short supply.

The only theme to really emerge over the trilogy is the loneliness of governance (“the king has no friends”) but its treatment is insufficiently nuanced to prove insightful. Its claim to contemporary resonance is staked, mainly, on Munro’s use of demotic language, but there is little in the way of universality here: these plays may usefully synopsise a neglected period of history but no amount of colloquialisms, however tunefully rendered, can disguise their essentially hermetic concerns (initial reviews picked up on the trilogy’s timeliness in light of the then-current referendum on Scottish independence, but even that localised reverberation has already died away).

It can all, perhaps, best be summed up in the centerpiece of Bausor’s set: a gargantuan sword embedded, Excalibur-like, into the stage. For such an overwrought statement, it’s surprising how quickly you forget it’s there.

Adelaide Festival of Arts 2016, National Theatre of Scotland, National Theatre of Great Britain, Edinburgh International Festival, The James Plays, writer Rona Munro, director Laurie Sansom, design Jon Bausor, lighting Philip Gladwell, Adelaide Festival Theatre, 26 Feb-1 March

Looking for Grace is a film marked by divisions: the deliberate dividing of the narrative with the same events revisited as ‘stories,’ as seen from different characters’ perspectives, as well as the perhaps not so deliberate tonal shifts that mark its three main acts.

The introductory segment, Grace’s Story, is evocative, presenting an aerial view of salty desert landscape before descending to follow teenage Grace (Odessa Young), who’s taking a bus to an undisclosed destination along wide flat roads with her best friend Sappho (Kenya Pearson). The arrival on the bus of a slightly older boy (Harry Richardson) sounds an ominous note that’s picked up in Elizabeth Drake’s temporarily noir-ish score as the three check into a motel for the night.

The adolescent tensions that surface within the triangle are subtly observed by writer and director Sue Brooks: the resentment, attraction and conflicting loyalties portrayed with skilful naturalism by the three young actors. This moody mini-episode creates anticipation.

Disappointingly, as the action switches to suburban Perth in order to track Grace’s escapade through other eyes, the film begins to shed its initial subtlety and suspense. In conveying the stories of Grace’s parents, Denise (Radha Mitchell) and Dan (Richard Roxburgh)—as well as that of Tom (Terry Norris), the elderly private detective who provides sporadic support—Brooks favours the broadly drawn Oz personalities that underpinned her 2003 film Japanese Story.

At a gathering of relatives and police at the couple’s home in the wake of Grace and Sappho’s disappearance, Brooks dials up the farcical quirkiness. The gags come thick and fast, with Dan’s secretary attempting to reassure Denise by inappropriately alluding to murder and rape, while her sister irrelevantly wonders aloud if they should use the good china. There’s fussing over the police detective’s dropped cigarette and deadpanning over Death Dog, the name of the band the girls have probably run away to see.

If this were a brasher film, like Muriel’s Wedding (1994)—itself a triumph of tragicomic farce—the relentlessness of this scene wouldn’t be a problem, but here it sits oddly alongside the naturalism of Grace’s story.

This tonal dissonance carries over into the roles of Denise and Dan, with Mitchell and Roxburgh emphasising their characters’ bumbling ineptitude and perpetual bemusement in a manner that occasionally tips into caricature. Denise is spacily suggestive of a housewife from a slightly earlier era (“Yoo hoo!” she calls, mounting the stairs in search of her daughter). The quirks might be intended to evoke a universal fallibility, but their exaggeration makes it difficult to see Dan and Denise as real people.

Other potentially interesting narrative threads and characters remain undeveloped, as with Bruce, a long-haul truck driver whose presence in the film is pivotal yet unexplored; perhaps the signalling in onscreen captions of various characters’ ‘stories’ leads us to expect more than the fragment delivered.

In her visually innovative 2005 feature Look Both Ways, the late Australian director Sarah Watt used similar tropes of everyday awkwardness to compellingly confront the spectre of death. Sadly, the tonal unevenness in Looking for Grace dilutes the sense of loss so crucial to its climax.

Looking for Grace, writer, director Sue Brooks, cinematography Katie Milwright, editor Peter Carrodus, composer Elizabeth Drake, Palace Films, 2015

The metamorphosis of the old Albury Regional Art Gallery and its heritage building into the new contemporary art museum that is MAMA (Murray Art Museum of Albury) is all but complete. After an 18-month closure and rebuild, MAMA opened her doors last October. While not aiming to emulate a MOMA or MONA, the wink in their direction is appropriate. MAMA is a bold step toward a total transformation of Albury’s relevance in the cultural and contemporary art landscape and, in particular, the way Albury’s rather conservative population engages with art.

The director: the making of MAMA

“MAMA is everything the old gallery wasn’t, it’s the complete opposite.” MAMA Director, Jacqui Hemsley, is adamant that MAMA had to shake off every vestige of its previous incarnation. With minimal budget and only a skeleton staff, the Albury gallery wasn’t engaging with the changing art world or the community. “It was fast becoming irrelevant.”

Hemsley has invested considerable energy to change that. Heading up AlburyCity’s Cultural Services for the preceding six years, she was a key driver behind the significant achievement of securing community support and $10.5m to create the impressive new AAA-rated, 2,036-square-metre facility. Now, with the gallery yet to make a permanent appointment, Hemsley has been seconded as its caretaker director to ensure MAMA unfolds as envisaged.

Hemsley has been the director of other public art galleries: Latrobe Regional Gallery prior to moving to Albury; Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery, where early in her career she oversaw its $2.6m redevelopment; and Southland Museum and Art Gallery in New Zealand, where at the time she completed a Master of Arts plus post-graduate qualifications in both Accounting and Arts and Entertainment Management.

Given she’s worked exclusively in the arts, I was surprised to hear her undergraduate degree was in business. It wasn’t her idea. Her dad promised her a car if she would postpone archeology studies in favour of business. “An 808 Mazda station wagon! What was I thinking?” It does seem a rather unimpressive trade-off, yet perhaps it illustrates Hemsley’s pragmatism and willingness to embrace economic imperatives while maintaining the deeper cultural interests that also sustain her. It’s apparent she brings this approach to the direction of MAMA, which has her cheerfully and matter-of-factly using the term ‘bi-polar’ a number of times, to describe programming and operational agendas.

Albury public space as gallery

Blockbuster exhibitions like Marilyn Monroe: An American Icon, MAMA’s second and current major exhibition, might seem populist to some, but shows like this will be the bread and butter for MAMA, important in attracting visitors from outside the region and significantly higher attendance by locals. Getting people through the door is essential, and Hemsley articulates a completely revisioned model for the facility which focuses on enhancing the audience experience, even before one sets foot in the building.

“Albury is unique in that in the middle of a regional CBD we have a dual high street and public square (QEII), a one-acre green space smack bang in the heart of the retail, commercial and entertainment area, which sees half a million people passing through it. The gallery forms only one corner of this precinct, bounded also by the LibraryMuseum and Albury Entertainment Centre. Why not curate the entire space as a gallery?”

AlburyCity’s public art strategy and landscaping of QEII has allowed digital media infrastructure to be embedded throughout the public square and neighbouring city lanes, extending and building on the gallery and LibraryMuseum’s use of their glass frontages as digital galleries. Conduits for sound filaments and large video screens, CAD5 cabling and hollow poles to house additional cabling will enable the first of a curated new media program by the end of 2016. Hemsley says it’s part of creating ‘art by accident’ experiences which will be an intrinsic part of transforming Albury into a creative city.

Festivals like Sydney’s Vivid and Melbourne’s White Night have showcased the possibilities for application of new technologies, and a priority for Hemsley is to have MAMA play a role in developing the creative industries with artists, designers, architects and digital media professionals working together. Her long-term vision is for the region to become a mecca for the creative community. Partnering with LaTrobe University to deliver an arts degree in Albury is part of this plan.

The museum’s opening party featured Craig Walsh’s 2007 projection installation, Incursion, filling the foyer of Albury Entertainment Centre with water, floating furniture and giant fish. Opposite, on the southern edge of the public square, coloured light washes picked up Matthew Harding’s stainless steel sculpture, Cross-Knit, suspended atop MAMA, and the stonework and steeple of the church on the west side. It was a mini-taster of what’s possible as MAMA seeks curators for the various digital galleries and media elements, developing programs that integrate local, national and international artistic engagement.

Multiple spaces, forms, media

It’s not all about spectacle on the outside and blockbusters on the inside however. With 10 flexible gallery spaces, MAMA will present more than 50 shows a year, curating 70 percent of its exhibitions and commissioning new works. MAMA’s major opening exhibition laid out its commitment, not only to new and challenging contemporary work, but to contemporary Indigenous artists. Presenting new work by Wiradjuri artists, Wiradjuri Ngarumbanggu included a large-scale site-specific piece by Brook Andrew and Jonathan Jones’ Diamond Light installation.

The small Quest gallery, wholly dedicated to screen and digital media, recently showed Imagining Victory, a trilogy of provocative and political video works by Richard Bell dealing with the uneasy relationship between Aboriginal peoples and white Australian hegemony; and new work by Christian Thompson is on Hemsley’s wish list.

At minimum, half the program will feature screen works, installation and new media. The entire gallery has been designed to accommodate new technology, 3D and multi-media work. Furthermore, digital mediums present significant opportunities to engage and collaborate at an international level without the cost and transport logistics of material art forms. Hemsley’s intention is that MAMA build its own collection of new media and multimedia works.

The recent show, Current, occupied the Quest and adjacent galleries and featured new work by national and international artists working in photography, video and sound art to explore issues of sustainability and describe the industrialised landscape of the Bogong High Plains hydro-electricity scheme. It was a project of The Bogong Centre for Sound Culture, established by sound artists Philip Samartzis and Madelynne Cornish, as a site for facilitating residencies and works that interact with the place, its inhabitants, geographic space and memory.

Art local and regional

Sonic Splendour incorporated a survey of music video clips by local photographer and filmmaker Andrew Pearce and the Backyard Bonanza project, which teamed Pearce with Vic McEwan, regional music producer and installation artist, to support three local emerging musicians in creating world class music videos.

Four miniature installations by UK artist, Slinkachu, made use of child-height peephole wall cavities, continuing the art-by-accident experience inside the building. The Little People Project placed miniature figures in humorous and precarious situations, such as floating in an upturned bottle-top on a puddle of beer leaking from a stubby lying on its side.

New works currently on show include Sydney artist Julia Davis’ time-lapse video Consilience: as the world turns, projected to fill one wall of a small dark room, while another gallery has been transformed by Sydney-based Mona Ryder’s surrealist sculptural installation Dance me to the end of night. Upcoming works include AgX by Grayson Cooke, from Lismore, and One on One by Ella Sowinska from Melbourne.

The more frequently rotated, experimental and challenging shows, in tandem with the ‘art-by-accident’ strategy, are what Jacqui Hemsley believes will ultimately underpin the story of MAMA’s projected success. They might only be a peripheral part of the experience for many but will sustain a developing creative community, opening up perceptions and possibilities. For now, the task is to put Albury on the map as a destination for national and international artists to show their work.

3800 kilometres south of Perth, overlooking the Windmill Islands is Casey Station, the biggest of three Australian Antarctic research stations situated in Eastern Antarctica. The sprawling site on a craggy outcrop accommodates up to 100 people during the busy summer season, which spans November to March. East is Law Dome, rising ever so gently towards a peak of 1400 metres, while in the west is Shirley Island and its boisterous population of Adélie penguins.

Directly across from Casey is Newcomb Bay where the abandoned US station Wilkes is located, and just beyond it a horizon filled with icebergs of assorted shapes and sizes. Wilkins Runway is approximately 70 kilometers south-east and serves as a desolate terminal for the intercontinental air service. It takes four and a half hours to reach Wilkins from Hobart and a further four hours to reach Casey by Hagglund. The terrain between Wilkins and Casey is flat with only rutted Caterpillar tracks and sparse waypoint markers disrupting the pristine vista of white striae set against the deep blue sky.

I am at Casey as the Australian Antarctic Division Arts Fellow. The fellowship is offered each year for an artist to undertake a project within the Australian Antarctic Territory. The current program has been running for three decades and has hosted artists from various backgrounds and disciplines. I’m here to document the presence and effects of katabatic wind on the station as well as the general environment.

Katabatic wind is a low gravity wind that gains force as it travels down elevated slopes. It is particularly prevalent at Casey due to the station’s location at the base of Law Dome where the wind oscillates between mild and strong. When the cooler temperature of a katabatic mixes with the warmer temperature of the onshore wind, a very unstable weather system emerges. No two days are ever alike which makes Casey a fascinating place when it comes to weather observation.

My project emerges from a fascination with the photography of Herbert Ponting and Frank Hurley who combined subject, composition and climate to convey the sense of a deeply mysterious and alien place. I am particularly intrigued by Hurley’s depictions of life on the ice in two iconic photographs, The Blizzard and Leaning on the Wind, both taken in 1912. The photographs convey the ferocity and atmospheric effects of the conditions using a mix of techniques including staged scenes and composite printing to viscerally express something that is close to impossible to articulate through conventional documentary photography. It is something Hurley was criticised for but which I deeply admire about his work. Inspired by these evocative depictions of abstract landscapes shaped by volatile conditions, I wondered how I could produce an equivalent account using sound recording techniques and technologies to render an embodied experience of extreme climate.

The time I have spent at Casey has acutely sharpened my sense of audition. The stillness enveloping the station and its environs provides an immaculate framework for close listening, in which each and every sound is uttered in intoxicating detail. The protean conditions inevitably shape the way these sound events propagate throughout the built and natural environment leading to complex aural and spatial cues and interactions. The main powerhouse is the constant sound emitter on station—its deep omnipresent thrum radiating all the way out to station limits and beyond. Within its radius assorted industrial sounds occur generated by heavy machinery used for construction, maintenance and transport. Staggered throughout the station are various buildings used as workshops and for storage, or for operations, science and meteorology that are sources of localised sound events. The circulation of these concentrated sounds within a pristine soundscape provides a heightened experience of industrial and mechanical noise that is simply breathtaking.

With snowfall the industrial exuberance becomes muted, as does the pervasiveness of the diesel engines resounding throughout the station. Eventually the snow becomes more audible, rhythmically triggering various metal surfaces with a gentle but persistent patter. As the wind exerts its influence the patter becomes strident with disused fuel drums, oxygen tanks, steel crates and landings filtering the sound into a syncopated series of resonant patterns. Depending on temperature and wind speed, snow can quickly transform into hardened granules of ice that generate showers of oscillating noise as they collide with various objects. The effect is particularly notable on large sheets of heavy plastic used to cover various building materials. The sound of people wearing heavily reinforced Baffin Boots moving around the station is also quite distinctly heard as they negotiate snow flurries, ice and rock-strewn paths.

The presence of katabatic wind inevitably shapes the way sound is heard and experienced on and off station. It can push sound away from you and it can draw it closer to you. Its intensity can mask sound and its absence can heighten it. At its most ferocious it simply obliterates everything within its path. A collision with the built environment transforms a katabatic into an intense series of ascending and descending pitches—a supercharged aeolian harp. Inside, station time and space are distilled into a series of discrete sonic gestures: a howling air vent, shuddering doorway, convulsing ceiling or a disconsolate-sounding hallway. Each event seemingly occurs in complete isolation as the station waits breathlessly for the blizzard to pass. While sheltering in an ice-encrusted porch I am informed that wind gusts are exceeding 185 kph. The piercing shrieks of the anemometer emerging from the white abyss are testimony to its ferocity.

Over three weeks I recorded an assortment of sound activated by wind and shaped by the cold—ice granules dancing across sheet metal, agitated flags, murmuring cables, brittle plastic sheets billowing in the wind, indifferent buildings and infrastructure, wind gusting across desolate ice fields, and the transformative effects of warming and cooling upon the polar environment. I have not experienced a place so mutable, so confounding. A century has passed since Hurley documented the dramatic events at Cape Denison. I wasn’t anticipating weather events of the type that he endured, nor was I seeking them. The effects of katabatic wind are intriguing for their subtle qualities as much as their capacity to express nature in extremis. Wind and cold are elements not easily rendered but I am hopeful I have captured in the sonic ecology of this rarefied place something that is new and evocative for those who have encountered the ice—whether in actuality or in dreams.

Philip Samartzis is the artistic director of the Bogong Centre for Sound Culture (see reviews of the Bogong Air Festival here and here) and sound coordinator in the School of Art, RMIT University, Melbourne. His book An Absent Presence, published by Thames & Hudson, will be available in May.

You might be able to hear it from where you are—a kind of buzz, growing into a thunderous hum of meticulously sculpted noise. This is the sound of analogue synthesiser enthusiasts’ collective anticipation, as they await their first visitation to MESS—the Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio.

MESS is the creation of Robin Fox and Byron J. Scullin. Fox has appeared many times in RealTime with his audaciously awesome laser noise spectaculars (see realtime tv). Scullin is an educator (currently at RMIT), audio engineer (mentored by the famous Francois Tetaz) and sound artist collaborating with many of Melbourne’s contemporary performance companies.

MESS is a little like a lovechild of the 1960s BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the Electronic Music Studio, but true to 21st century preoccupations, it’s all about interaction. What’s getting everyone so goddamned excited is that MESS will offer unheard of levels of public access to a staggeringly large and unique collection of analogue synthesisers and electronic instruments.

Living history

For Fox, the idea has been incubating since he inherited Keith Humble’s collection of rare electronic music-making machines. Humble was the driving force behind La Trobe University’s transformative Music Department (1975-99) and hugely influential in the development of Australian electronic music (see Experimental Music, Audio Exploration in Australia, editor Gail Priest, UNSW Press, 2009).

Fox came across the collection via his step-father, Jim Sosnin, Humble’s technician during this period. Given Fox’s hectic touring schedule, he had been feeling lately that it was a waste to have these machines sitting unused in his studio and began scheming to allow others access to them.

Humble’s original set of machines has been significantly augmented by other impressive collections on loan from generous, anonymous benefactor/backers. All up, there is a pool of around 300 machines, with each “season” offering a differently curated set of around 80. However, Fox and Scullin are keen to stress that this is not just an exercise in heritage and hoarding. Fox expresses frustration with “the museum culture around electronic music and synthesis. A lot of these machines aren’t really that old in terms of musical history [but] are locked behind glass. The musical project isn’t over.”

From Scullin’s perspective, “As well as being tools and devices for making sound, [these machines] all tell stories. They all talk about the bias of their designers’ thinking about how electronic music can be made and articulated.” Through the use of these machines it’s hoped that stories will be relived, embedding this legacy in contemporary practice and providing continuity.

Detail of the Transaudio Pro Case 6. One of only three ever built and part of the output of a company started in Melbourne in 1976. Designed by Bruce Bryan with additional design (sequencer and pitch to voltage follower) by Jim Sosnin

The joy of knobs & sliders

Putting historical importance aside for a moment—given there’s so much music-making potential in the slim, shiny lozenge of a laptop—what is so good about these bulky machines with no screens, a spaghetti of patch leads and more knobs than, well…any online tech forum?

Fox believes that digital audio work stations (DAWS) offer the “façade of facility.” Software makes so much possible without ever really knowing why, whereas working with analogue synthesisers is about “opening up the physics of electronic music…actually sculpting electronically.” He believes that the absence of a screen makes you listen to the sound itself rather than being guided by its visual representation. But perhaps most of all he likes the unpredictability of these instruments: “You’ll build [a patch] from the bottom up…and then [you may] never be able to recreate it on that machine again—because it’s just the nature of these things. The temperature in the room can have an effect on it. How you’re feeling probably has an effect on it…Digital technology is very precise and very predictable and sometimes working with [these analogue] machines is going to end up in a more interesting musical situation.”

Scullin is quick to de-emphasise the fetish factor that often comes with these kinds of tools. He draws an interesting parallel: “Tradies don’t stand around debating the merits of hammers…whereas in the culture of sound-making there’s a lot of talk about which hammer is better for which job. And there’s a lot of magical thinking that goes along with it, that using a particular hammer to drive in a nail [offers] an incantation, an echo of all the other records and cultural things that were made with it…We don’t really want to say software is bad and analogue is superior…but it’s all about the subjective experience of sitting behind an instrument and discovering a sound…and how the machine as an object embodies the designers’ intentions and feeds you through this process or journey.”

Given the attendant fan culture for these machines, high on the MESS agenda is accessibility for a broad range of people. Fox says “It would be easy for this place to fill up with beardy white synth nerds like me and while I love those guys—essentially they are my people—it would be a really annoying place if that was the only dynamic.” With that in mind, the two will be implementing proactive strategies in terms of engagement, education and employment to ensure that non-bearded folk—women for example—will be an integral part of the growing community.

The grand plan

There are four aspects to the program to be rolled out over a three-year incubation period. First is the members’ studio which will offer 500 subscribers the chance to get their hands on the machines. To enable access to a larger number of people, the organisers are offering a hot-desk model rather than a solo studio situation. Members can book a desk, select some machines from the season’s collection, don headphones and dial up some noises, recording them for later use.

The MESS school will offer workshops and courses taught by artists along with guest presentations. Fox and Scullin are very clear on the idea that these are courses to be undertaken for the joy of learning, rather than any form of academic or vocational accreditation. Fox is particularly excited by the prospect of curated listening sessions (an idea inspired by composer Warren Burt) where you sign up to listen to examples of interesting music, discussing it with other artists and experts.

MESS Show will be the presentation arm of the organisation, comprising performances and recordings from artists working in the studio and from visiting guests. There are also plans for a residency program to allow artists to have a more intense engagement with the collection.

Finally MESS Schematic is the technical workshop component. Not only will it conserve and maintain machines but will bring in senior artists and engineers to train up younger enthusiasts to ensure that specialised knowledge is retained. In the far future there are also plans for MESS to produce its own range of Eurorack-style modular synthesisers.

Choose your baby

To gain some sense of the collection I ask Fox and Scullin to each name their favourite. Fox proposes the Transaudio Pro Case 6, an Australian invention of which only three were made. It has a six-oscillator synthesiser and an unusually numbered 10-step sequencer that Jim Sosnin designed. “It’s a beast of a thing and it’s unique in the collection. It’s the one that I like to spend the most time with. But it’s a really tough choice because we did just take delivery of the reissued Moog System 55,” the iconic mammoth unit used by pop royalty in the 1960s and 70s.

Scullin also opts for the Transaudio Pro Case 6, but for more poetic reasons. He suggests that because of its rarity “it’s like a 40-year-old flower, it’s only just blooming now,” a simile that he extends to electronic music in general. “Sometimes we like to think that electronic music is a bit old hat, but it’s not. It’s not even up and running…We’ve only had 75 years of electronic sound and people are writing it off as old hat?…I’d like to think that if Tristram Carey [English/Australian composer and cofounder of the EMS studios London] was around now he’d be happy to see that we’re doing this. In all the correspondence of his that we read there was this utopian and very open idea of [how he wanted] more people…to be able to experience the fascination of these machines to make these incredibly unique sound worlds. Electronic instruments are the latest embodiment of that essential human spirit to find new ways to make new sounds, to express new ideas and new thoughts.”

If you’re being deafened by the hum of anticipation, just hold on until Member Subscriptions to MESS open in early March, when it’s bound to get wonderfully noisy.

Extras

French artist Aurélien Bory builds his dramaturgy by setting impediments to Kaori Ito’s movement and finding ways to use these as the impetus for novel scenic events. Ito is sandwiched between two horizontal platforms, one just over a metre above the stage, another about 20 metres above. Connecting these is a geometrically precise set of vertical threads which would do Op Artists like Bridget Riley proud. These run up/down in proximate rows, extending left and right as well as diagonally, depending on your viewing angle. To move, Ito forces a path through this net, driving her foot down in forceful, amplified stomps. This produces a work of dynamic sculpture, in which acoustic effects and the way Ito appears and disappears depending on spatial depth, visual obstruction and selective effects, become the dramatic focus.

The piece is relentlessly formal without text, narrative or humanised nuance. Ito is impassive apart from intense concentration—which is not to say that Plexus is not rich in emotional resonance. Responses arise, though, in our viewing alone. Plexus makes some of Beckett’s late choreographic works seem almost Expressionistic.

This resolute attention to the relationship between body and environment produces an impressively varied set of responses. After a prelude with Ito standing before the platforms running a microphone between her chest (we hear the heart), throat (breath) and across skin (a rich, thunking crackle), she draws the massive black curtain behind her through a gap between two previously unseen threads, producing a deep vulval cavity into which she disappears. After wending her way horizontally with relatively little force, she reveals the full depth of field by progressively beating out a set of parallel corridors, each one further from the audience.

The strings’ resistance creates a choreography of jerks and jolts, of highly measured and directional punches and stabs, alternating with glacial, all but weightless action, as the net holds her weight. At times Ito seems to have the viscous support of water. At others she surges forward, treating the strings as little more than a field of wheat through which she powerfully strides. Plexus consequently acquires the tenor of Classical or Absurdist tragedy, of human struggle against a vengeful god or universe. Ito is literally woven into the fabric of the Hades she struggles within, dropping into supported leaning poses at acute angles while rich, sproingy tones suffuse the space. If Plexus were to represent the Sisyphean torment famously described by Camus, then it is one co-extensive with her actions and her being. Hell is not other people, as in Sartre’s No Exit. It is oneself.

If the space rapidly takes on the character of a cage suspended in an Existential no-place (or Magneto’s prison in X-Men), Ito is far from being simply oppressed by it. Having established its limits, she toys with its possibilities. Fixed by the toes of one foot clasped about a vertical, Ito inverts her body, clothed in a velvety black costume which sensuously encases and breaks up the downward extension of her body. Later, staring out of her prison from under a parted shock of black hair, she sways left to right, and the floor responds. Threads swing to nearly 45 degrees and an infernal whooshing encases all of us in the theatre. Later Ito scuttles up to the top horizontal, suspended like a grey crab in the weave. She repeatedly drops down, defying gravity and danger, her recurrent survival a miracle of the ‘teknos’ within which she acts.

For all of these cosmic and tragedian suggestions, Plexus largely functions within the realm of the technical sublime. The stage is literally a marvel. One can more or less consciously determine how effects are achieved, but on an emotional or intuitive level, as with circus, rationality baulks. Ito becomes a magical Nietzschean Ubermensch, able to fly from rope to rope through the application of her will. The all but incomprehensible difficulties of moving in such a space make Ito’s resilience a wonder. Joan Cambon’s musical accompaniment, which alternates with the amplification of Ito’s exertions and the creakings of the set, enhances this sense of an unknowable, threatening yet ecstatic mechanism. Her score moves from watery musique concrète to droney, repetitive and scintillating phrasings recalling Steve Reich, and moments of purist electronic noise in the mode of Ryoji Ikeda. As the physical force of the sound reverberates through the auditorium, we see Ito’s body marked out by a band of light which travels from her head to her feet, before the angle of diffraction tilts. It’s as if the strings have become pinprick LEDs marking out a triangle of white in the blackness (very much in the style of Ikeda’s installations and his work with Dumb Type).

Nor does my account exhaust Plexus’ scenic imagination: moments of black theatre, with Ito appearing like a wraith out of nowhere; transformation of the set into a giant loom while Ito drags black cloth in a circle behind her; and the dancer, seated, calmly playing the strings. These and other moments reflect an enormously inventive creation, at once formally astonishing and affectively endless. Bory and Ito definitely benefit from the massive logistical power they are able to deploy. Plexus—like works by Ikeda, Dumb Type and others—tends to obfuscate its own means of production. If I were to be an ungenerous Marxist, there is much one could say about such works as fetishes of an expensive, labour and energy-intensive global capitalist festival circuit. This was however far from my mind while enraptured by Plexus, and I would make a case for the intelligent deployment of such an aesthetic given its immeasurable rewards.

Perth International Arts Festival 2016, Campagnie 111, Plexus, choreographer/director Aurélien Bory, performer Kaori Ito, composer Joan Cambon, lighting Arno Veyrat, costumes Sylvie Marcucci, sound designer Stéphane Ley, technical conception of the set Pierre Dequivre, Heath Ledger Theatre, Perth 17-20 Feb

James Berlyn is a charming host. He greets spectators singly before inviting us to sit about a large, paper-wrapped round table accommodating up to 20 guests. He joins us, periodically moving between four positions located among our seats. He is an engaging speaker, leaning deeply across the board, shoulders typically slightly hunched, long arms pivoting on the tabletop as wide hands splay out at chest level.

Berlyn trained in dance before switching to acting, and some of the most beautiful moments in the work occur at the conclusion when he leaves the table to dance behind each of four paper panels located behind us. His movement is supple, a collection of relatively straightforward gestures and gentle, balletic arcs in which the physical accent is relaxed and free. Its unadorned kinaesthesia made this one of my favourite sections, although Berlyn was only visible in shadow throughout. When spinning, his arms outstretched at shoulder level, the shadow produced deformations of his limbs, making the artist’s hands appear to squash grotesquely into his torso—not an image of achievement.

Berlyn’s direct, generous delivery is the piece’s principal focus, largely to the exclusion of other elements. I Know You’re There is an act of storytelling, a text spoken aloud by an empathetic subject directly to his audience. To a degree, Berlyn plays with light and props. A ball of paper is passed about the audience, individually unfolded by each of us; we are then invited to tear it into a ribbon. Berlyn places four small LED torches at each of his stations. He raises one to represent a Russian satellite passing far above his child self; another becomes a miniature puppet of himself. In a memorable display of personal trauma, he points a torch deep down his throat. These are however minor flourishes in an otherwise very wordy piece.

Berlyn’s tale is that of his life, and more particularly his vexed yet loving relationship with his father and his own not always successful career in the arts. The story is not especially new. Oedipal stories of rivalry and fractured relations between fathers and sons is a constant of Western dramaturgy up to Star Wars. His father is both metaphorically and literally distanced from the son in this age-old tale. In a pleasingly melancholy touch, we hear a recording of the absent father playing guitar for Berlyn’s mother in an audio letter made at sea. The striking marginalisation of his mother elsewhere is unfortunate, since stories about men and mothers—particularly when not cast as the smothering maternal archetype of US film and TV—are less common. None of this is to say that Berlyn’s story is not a good one, nor not well told, but its form is familiar. This is a classic humanist narrative of coming to terms with oneself and overcoming obstacles in order to like the skin one is in. Berlyn tells this well and with generosity, if not novelty.

Also problematic is a reference to what Berlyn calls “the big pink elephant in the room.” He tells us he once repeatedly engaged in unsafe sex in Sydney in the 80s seeking death through AIDS. This lone allusion to Berlyn’s sexual identity creates a perplexing lacuna within a performance otherwise based on personal revelation.

For those seeking a direct, one-on-one empathetic relationship with a charismatic speaker in an intimate setting, I Know You’re There is highly rewarding. Having attended numerous intimate performances (Lloyd Jones’ superb Seven Brides For Seven Brothers in Seven Audience Parts at Melbourne’s La Mama, 1997, comes to mind), I found this one offered few surprises, with Berlyn’s physical performative strength marginalised in favour of words.

At one point Berlyn cites a moment from a work by Pina Bausch and director Jim Hughes claims her work inspired I Know You’re There. However, the rich physical dramaturgy of Bausch and Raimund Hoghe is not in evidence. I Know You’re There is in fact closer to Jacques Le Coq and John Bolton in its open-handed dependence on principles of verbal honesty supported by a simple, relaxed physical presence close to ‘clown’—Berlyn gently mugs and emotionally fails, and we love him for it. The work appeals to those with an empathetic narrative bent, who see the origins of Western theatre not in the affronting frenzy of Bacchus’ writhing priestesses so superbly evoked in Bausch’s Rite of Spring (1975) but rather in personal identification with characters described in the texts of the once recited epics of Homer and Virgil. For the latter, I Know You’re There succeeds.

Perth International Arts Festival 2016: I Know You’re There, creator, performer James Berlyn, director Jim Hughes; State Theatre Centre, Feb 19-Mar 6

Three very different works in Artistic Director Wendy Martin’s first Perth International Arts Festival address major social challenges for individuals and communities: a Kathak dance work responds to sexual violence in India, another dance work—over cups of tea—reflects on religious attitudes to physical disability, and an audience takes to the streets to trade for survival through trading possessions and skills after the collapse of the cash economy.

Aditi Mangaldas, Within

A leading if controversial choreographer and teacher in the Indian Kathak dance tradition, Aditi Mangaldas has worked with international designers to present the two discrete works that comprise Within. Knotted is contemporary dance firmly rooted in Kathak. Evoking the tumultuous self-examination of Indian society in reaction to the Nirbhaya gang rape case of 2012, Mangaldas presents a relentless cascade of disjointed abstract movements. Individual and paired performances danced to the discordant industrial tones of the recorded soundtrack depict conflict and self-doubt eloquently expressed in the tortured repetition of arms reaching upward and bodies isolated in an island of light on a dark stage. Western dance movement is interspersed with rapid-footed whirls and arm movements straight out of Kathak, although the dancers never totally sacrifice traditional posture for the asymmetric poses demanded by the contemporary choreography. Ensemble sections appear particularly awkward, with conflict often conveyed through unevenly realised facial expressions. Kimie Nakano has designed the costumes in earthy colours, using a sombre palette and with the quintessential Kathak whirls emphasised by loose folds of cloth flying from the hips. Knotted is an interesting study in Kathak-Western dance fusion, but is unremarkable in execution. Capturing the restless spirit of contemporary Indian society, the work’s evocation of conflict is difficult to witness.

The other work, Unwrapped, is a stunning piece in the traditional style, with both male and female dancers performing with scarves: a defiant response by the choreographer to criticism made of her for not using them—as tradition requires—for female performers in other of her works. With a recurring mirror motif, Mangaldas’ choreography flows from striking individual scenes into a dynamic whole with an end that echoes the beginning. Onstage musicians add to the atmosphere, the dancers’ feet slapping the floor creating a counter rhythm in spectacular group pieces. In her extended solo Mangaldas is amazing, interacting with musicians and lighting to create memorable silhouettes and bursts of movement that turn to near stillness, that edge emphasised by her subtle control of Ghungroo—the bells tied around her ankles. Mangaldas has designed dignified traditional costumes for Unwrapped, marked by her use of scarves and the unwrapping and putting aside of veils covering faces. Unwrapped is masterful, the choreographer working in a dance tradition she loves and with highly experienced performers.

Claire Cunningham, Guide Gods

In Guide Gods UK dancer Claire Cunningham welcomes everyone to share her discoveries about the attitudes of religions to physical disability. Her inclusive performance presents thoughts on karma, and theological interpretations of healing along with an explanatory narrative, movement and audio recordings (with screens for the deaf).

Cunningham’s practice is informed by her own disability and especially her use of crutches. She takes us slowly through the challenges presented by simple movements, ascending and descending stairs, carrying a tea cup, then carrying a tea tray with both hands. This slow and steady precision is later replaced by exuberant celebration of movement as her crutches enable her to “fly” about the performance space, the tips of the crutches following her body in ecstatic whirls around teacups positioned on the floor. Her movement responds to the stories she tells and sound recordings of her respondents expressing a range of religious beliefs and teachings in various countries. She finds that while prejudice and discrimination may exist within these cultures, their religious doctrines or belief systems do hold room for believers with disabilities to participate and celebrate. Alongside her usual strong advocacy for body-and-mind, Claire Cunningham opens up space for consideration of the soul.

pvi, Blackmarket

Perth’s pvi collective takes us onto the streets of suburban Subiaco with their real-life gaming experience, Blackmarket. Participants are instructed to bring five items useful for survival. On arrival at Blackmarket headquarters we are briefed via a slickly edited video about how life is harsh and uncompromising in the wake of the great global economic collapse. We will need to use our five material possessions to survive by trading with existing providers of services and to develop our own skills to trade in turn with other players. We hand in our items, which are recorded into a smartphone app to allow us to trade out on the street. We then venture into the night to determine our chances of survival in a world without money.

The app provides a dynamic list of all skills and services currently on offer, with an audio description of the impact of each on our prospects for survival. On choosing an option we offer one of our items as payment, which may be accepted or declined by the trader offering the service. Earphones remain in ears at all times with a clear voice guiding, instructing and informing us, and featuring soundscapes evoking scenarios which are variously amusing, provocative, disturbing and alarming.

Trading duct tape for a course in weaponry sends a player down an alleyway to construct a Millwall Brick, an improvised weapon made from newspaper. A revolving cast of local actors provides wordless directions. In another trade, a cigarette lighter is declined but a tarpaulin accepted as a swap for “compassion,” an acted scenario forcing the player to reach past their own emotions and prejudices. After completing some trades, players are invited to provide skills of their own. If accepted, they follow the cues from the app to train their fellow players in subsidiary skills such as tracking and decoding in exchange for goods that will allow them to trade further. Some survival skills are communicated solely through the app soundtrack with props kept inside wheelie bins, labelled and locked against casual use, with an array of items for inspection and interaction.

High production values, interesting content and sharp delivery left Blackmarket audiences keenly aware of their place in the world and with a new appreciation for the conveniences and assurances that sustain us every day.

2016 Perth International Arts Festival: Aditi Mangaldas, Within, Heath Ledger Theatre, 11-14 Feb; Claire Cunningham, Guide Gods, Fly By Night, Victoria Hall, Burt Hall, St Georges Cathedral, 11-21 Feb; pvi, Blackmarket, Subiaco, 10-27 Feb

Adelaide audiences are no strangers to the work of British ‘post-dramatic’ playwright Martin Crimp. Geordie Brookman, currently Artistic Director of the State Theatre Company of South Australia, has helmed two of Crimp’s major plays, Attempts on Her Life (2008 for STCSA) and The City (2012) for former independent company nowyesnow. Curiously, however, it is Crimp’s adaptations—of Molière’s The Misanthrope (STCSA, 2011) and Botho Strauss’s Gross und Klein (Big and Small), (STC 2011)—that have been most enthusiastically taken up by the majors. The Country, a companion piece of sorts to the cryptic, less immediately accessible The City, has been only sporadically produced, for example by Melbourne’s Red Stitch in 2005.

As with The City, The Country is a nonlinear exploration of middle class ennui; the fillip, however, is that the neurotic couple at its centre, Richard and Corinne, evince the old maxim about the portability of unhappiness by relocating from the city to the country only to find themselves entangled in a mystery involving a young American woman apparently found unconscious by the roadside in the middle of the night. One can only surmise that the play’s relative conventionality has worked against it, that its idiom–lying somewhere between a plot-driven thriller and a Pinteresque exercise in sublimated menace—has made it a hard sell.

It is, in any case, now being presented for the Adelaide Festival by Stone/Castro, the production company of Portuguese-born, now Adelaide-based director Paulo Castro and his partner, actor Jo Stone, who will be performing the role of Corinne alongside Nathan O’Keefe as Richard and Natalia Sledz as Rebecca, the young woman. I spoke to Castro during a break in rehearsals, our unlikely surrounds the recently renewed St Barnabas parish church in Croydon, an inner suburb of Adelaide. Castro, in characteristically energetic fashion, sweeps a table clean as soon as I arrive and hastily assembles a model of David Lampard’s set that has clearly been kicking around for a while. Nevertheless, its bold abstraction is clear: a disintegrating house with multiple levels and telescoping rooms, no furniture (just a door that seems to have been repurposed as a table) and disconcerting irruptions of the surrounding countryside. I remark to Castro that the set seems to affirm UK critic Michael Billington’s contention that the play is “an assault on the pastoral myth.”

“Exactly,” he says. ”We wanted something conceptual, not a naturalistic house. Because here are two city people who think it’s a good idea to move to the countryside but it begins to consume them. It’s very metaphoric: the relationship at the centre of the play has fallen apart, so I said to David, the house should be falling apart too. We also decided very early on not to use furniture. There are no chairs, there’s no carpet. For a set designer to hear that…! We talked a lot about the Volksbühne in Berlin and the designs there, very big and architectural, often opening up onto room after room after room, back, back, back and open doors. I said to David, why don’t we create something like that?’

“We’ve been working on the set and lights for two months,” Castro continues. “So even before we started rehearsals we all knew exactly what set to expect and the lighting is very important because Daniel [Barber] is quite experimental; we don’t have general lights. Everything will be very lateral, lots of floor lights, and very cinematic. Atmospheric. Between the five scenes there are no blackouts—we show everything—because I like to direct what is between scenes, how the characters get from one moment to another. It’s something I experimented with when I worked on Benedict Andrews’ play CADA SOPRO [Every Breath] in Portugal. I found it creates much more tension.”

“You have a reputation,” I say to Castro, “as a director in what might be called the contemporary European tradition, as someone who puts production dramaturgy at the centre of your process. I’m wondering, though, if The Country has challenged that. As Jo has said [see video interview], in Crimp’s work it is the unsaid that creates the space; but it seems to me that The City, for example, is much more ‘finished’ than The Country.”

“I prefer,” Castro tells me, “to be on the floor, generally, to work up the production through improvisation and so on. I would say there wasn’t much room for that with this text. Everything has been very calculated during rehearsals because that’s how Crimp has constructed The Country—unlike Beckett, say, it’s never just conversation, there’s always much more going on. Each scene you feel the characters want to say one thing, but say another. At the beginning of the rehearsal process we spent a week around the table talking through this stuff, which is an unusually long time for me. Because Crimp hides so much in the text, there is so much to discover. It has a lot in common with, for example, contemporary Nordic writers like Jon Fosse, or the work of Thomas Bernhard, where you need to discover all the background of the play and the characters. We’re rehearsing here in this big church hall so one thing we did was to get each character to confess to God, alone. That was the key with which we were able to unlock the personality of each character.”

The production’s most recent development has been the almost 11th-hour securing of Melbourne post-rockers Fourteen Nights at Sea to provide the score (remixed versions of two pre-existing songs); otherwise the project has had a long gestation. Says Castro, “Ever since Benedict did The City (Sydney Theatre Company, 2009), I’ve been wanting to do this text, so it reaches back a long way. I was thinking about doing it then, but Jo and I have been delayed by other projects—movies and dance theatre and other things. We wanted Stone/Castro to go back to our roots: Jo’s are in acting in the theatre, mine in directing plays, that’s my form—contemporary writers. And I’m quite shocked why the big companies haven’t picked up this text more often. I don’t say that it’s better than Beckett but it is not inferior at all.”

Adelaide Festival 2016, Stone/Castro, The Country, State Opera Studio, 7-13 March

Like much of the work in the Video oediV exhibition Kawita Vatanajyankur’s rewards careful viewing. The vivid digital colour spectrum alone is a workout for the eyes. Acid yellow, dazzling orange, brilliant pink or bright sky blue remind us of the synthetic colours of plastics—or Thai silk. Against each vivid backdrop we observe the artist’s slender body—dark hair pulled back from her face, a slash of bright red lipstick against pale skin—performing one of a number of challenging, often desultory tasks. All in a day’s work for Vatanajyankur includes the following:

To accomplish each of these tasks, Vatanajyankur’s body blends with the tool it mimics. In the sixth and definitely one of the more disturbing tasks the artist has set herself (The Ice Shaver, 2013), we observe her face-down in a solid brick of ice, using her nose, lips and chin to move it like some cruelly designed mandolin. Watch for a while and you’ll feel your own lips freeze.

On first viewing The Basket, you’ll note the artist’s deft landing but stay a while to watch the subtle grimaces on the face of the older woman in hair curlers who’s holding the receptacle and with her, feel the weight of that body.

The question as to who might be responsible for all the off-stage hurling and the dipping and the pouring remains unanswered. More important is the sense of cumulative audience discomfort generated by the subtle modus operandi of this Thai-Australian artist who graduated from RMIT in 2011 and who has exhibited widely across Australia as well as Asia and Europe. Last year, she was a finalist in the Jaguar Asia Tech Art Prize in Taipei and curated into the prestigious Thailand Eye exhibition at Saatchi Gallery, London. Her focus is on creating “works that examine the psychological, social and cultural ways of viewing and valuing the continuing challenges of women’s everyday labour…. undertaking physical experiments that playfully, often painfully, test her own body’s limits.” (Artist’s website)

As well as the often-observed juxtaposition between its seductively glamorous surfaces and the gruelling experience of this work, is the contradiction inherent in its creation—the contrast between gothically exaggerated domestic tasks and the “meditation postures,” as she calls them, which Vatanajyankur adopts to enact them. These “acts of extreme physical endurance,” the artist says, “offer a way to free herself from her mind: a mechanism to lose her sense of being. This deliberate objectification,” she says, “turns her body into sculpture.”

Kawita Vatanajyankur’s work can also be seen at Stills Gallery, which represents her, in Sydney until 13 February. She has posted other work, The Robes and The Dustpan, in Vimeo.

Top image credit: Kawita Vatanajyankur, Poured, 2014 – Image courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney

Find

March 2016

The Australian String Quartet, Alleged Dances

Zephyr Quartet, Exquisite Corpse

Day 1

Day 2

Trainspotting

Time travel

The volume of video

Commission consequences

Future-past projections

Howl

Hotel Obscura

Give Me a Reason to Live

Skype Duet

Portraits in Motion

you are not a boy

Genius

Australian Dance Theatre, Habitus & The Beginning of Nature

The Holy Body Tattoo, monumental

Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Nelken (Carnations)

Common Wealth, No Guts, No Heart, No Glory

Claire Cunningham, Give Me a Reason to Live

The Empathy Museum, Walk a Mile in My Shoes

Apocrifu

Pindorama

Vanitas

Are We The One?

Alter

The Naked Self

Programmed to Reproduce

Sex and Death

Erotic Dance

i might blow up someday

The keynoters

Zoom In: On…

First Nations’ Perspectives

Stone/Castro, The Country

Tiny Bricks, Deluge

Why dance?

Boris Charmatz

The works: A Selection

And you won’t see…

Art dances

Performance as data

Performance as community

The director: the making of MAMA

Albury public space as gallery

Multiple spaces, forms, media

Art local and regional

Living history

The joy of knobs & sliders

The grand plan

Choose your baby

Extras

Aditi Mangaldas, Within

Claire Cunningham, Guide Gods

pvi, Blackmarket

realtime