Australian
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exploratory
performance and
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April 2016

Arts Minister Mitch Fifield’s Catalyst grant scheme has become a showcase for highly publicised and strategically staggered grant announcements that have about them the whiff of pork barrelling.

Recall that Catalyst’s funds were taken from the Australia Council’s budget for the small to medium arts sector. Now Catalyst is funding a Brisbane commercial art gallery, the WA Ballet and Kaldor Arts Projects. In an announcement last week that Sydney’s Art Gallery of NSW, MCA and Carriageworks were “going national,” creating a biennale of Australian contemporary art, Carriageworks’ director Lisa Havilah is reported as saying “additional funding has been sought for the event from the federal government's Catalyst program (SMH, 21 April).

Clearly, Catalyst is not going to be an alternative funding source for the small to medium sector. Artspeak is forming a National Election Strategy Group, holding a National Arts Debate and providing updates: sign up here.

RealTime issue #132 April-May 2016 pg.

Participant, Playing Up (Lone Twin’s Beastie)

photo Seraphina Neville, Tate Photography

Participant, Playing Up (Lone Twin’s Beastie)

Walking through the Turbine Hall, you notice that the Tate Modern feels different this weekend. Loud, not unhappy screaming is heard in the distance, dads sprawl on cushions with children draped across their laps, families sit on floors as though at a music festival, people are gathered in groups strategising, plotting and scheming.

At first glance you can see a different set of permissions is being performed, there is mess, dressing up, wearing masks and holding signs. You can’t help noticing the way play inhabits the body; it’s like an irrepressible force erupting within the tired old halls of the museum. As you wander the landing of the Turbine Hall finding a mum dressed as a Lone Twin Beastie (2010), children Freeing the Voice (after Marina Abramovic, 1976), tiny Guerilla Girls campaigning for less chilli and more ice cream, these live art works intersect and grind against one another.

Taking place over three days in the Turbine Hall, Playing Up launched a live art education project of the same name—a game designed by Sybille Peters of Hamburg’s Theatre of Research. Thirty-six live art projects are presented on cards via illustration and description with instructions for participants to re-perform these artworks.

We queue up to join the game and are asked to invent a live art name for ourselves. In our group we had peter(pizza), big bird, spaghetti, metal and an image of a horse. Students from Wapping High School enjoy telling us what to do and leading us through the simple process of choosing a card from the deck. There are six subject headings: Beings and Things, Dare and Danger, Science and Tinkering, Body and Perception, Memories and Collections and Out and About. We choose Dare and Danger (of course!). Handed a large card on the back of which is Santiago Sierra’s Person Saying a Phrase (2002), we are directed to another area to collect our materials, including a small pile of change (£1.57), a piece of paper and a pencil. The game has begun.

The game involves inventing a phrase about money and then paying someone to say it. We come up with a sentence, deciding on having them say to us, “You don’t have very much money but I earn (fill in the blank) per year.” We think this pretty much nails the challenge and we set off to find people to take our change. Our first participant is very agreeable, letting us film him making an impassioned plea for people to give money to homeless people. He tells us he is unemployed, but is very well dressed and when we wish him well at the end he tells us we don’t have to worry about him. We give him a penny for luck. The next participant has to be convinced to take our money, but simply and quietly tells us what he earns. It sounds riskier than it felt and in the interest of full disclosure I was participating in the game with a group of live artists and this kind of interaction comes easily to most of us.
Drawing for The Guerrilla Girls

Drawing for The Guerrilla Girls

by David Caines

Drawing for The Guerrilla Girls

We learn the next day that 60% of people attending over the weekend chose Dare and Danger, perhaps indicating that both children and adults are more interested in risk than we give ourselves credit for. It seems clear that we need to create spaces for experimenting with risk or we will all find other ways to thrill-seek. One of the most exciting and radical things about this game is the way it brings live art projects that may once have been consigned to the shadows of history out into the open to be playfully experimented with by middle class families at the Tate.

The instructions on the cards don’t shy away from risky subjects, including experimenting with gender in Marcel Duchamp’s Rrose Sélavy (the artist’s female persona, 1921) or talking about the artist crawling through glass and shooting himself in the arm, when describing Chris Burden’s Transfixed (1974), though the game itself only involves lying on a car, staring at the sky. Chinese artists Mad for Real’s Soya Sauce and Ketchup Fights (2000) is one of the most popular of the weekend’s events which we didn’t see but heard tales of families lined up along the banks of the Thames in garbage bags, squirting ketchup and soy sauce in each other’s faces. In a lovely closing of the circle, Mad for Real began their working life as a performance duo in the late 90s with their disruptive action Two Artists Jump on Tracey Emin’s Bed (1999) at Tate Britain’s Turner Prize Exhibition.

Participants at Playing Up (Mad for Real’s Soya Sauce & Ketchup Fight)

photo courtesy Live Art Development Agency

Participants at Playing Up (Mad for Real’s Soya Sauce & Ketchup Fight)

While I love seeing these works being paraded around the gallery in miniature form, and even enjoy taking part, I’m aware that the effort, context and politics of the originals is absent. What is missing from the event is permission for ‘kids’ to take a critical stance. In the accompanying symposium Gregg Whelan of Lone Twin and ANTI Festival remarked, “There is a turn in participation where resistance is the thing that you are working with and becomes the object of study. The smart stuff would endlessly signal the exit; you should always be asking questions. Am I now in agreement with you? Am I complicit? Am I responsible?” So perhaps in every game we need to be building in an exit, an outside, making it possible to play your own kind of game.

The instruction manual that accompanies the game reads, “Kids are explorers of the everyday; for them to light a match can be something extraordinary that needs focus and time and creates an experience.” In the symposium Richard DeDomenici comments, “Children are natural live artists and the best time to learn the language of live art is when you are young.” I just hope that in the re-enactments something of the original urgency of these artworks lingers. I hope too that these games enable children as political subjects to realise agency and create critique in their daily lives. Adults are constantly trying to get back to a place of ‘curiosity and wonder’ and, playing this game, this actually seems quite easy. The question we have to ask ourselves is: is it kids learning about live art or is live art learning from kids?
Young participant at Playing Up (Lone Twin’s Beastie)

Young participant at Playing Up (Lone Twin’s Beastie)

PLAYING UP, Live Art for Kids & Adults, 1-3 April; PLAYING UP Symposium, 4 April, Tate Modern, London

PLAYING UP’s cards include: Mammalian Diving Reflex’s Haircuts by Children, Tehching Hsieh’s Rope Piece, Vito Acconci’s Following Piece, Joshua Sofaer’s Name in Lights, Lone Twin’s Beastie, Yoko Ono & John Lennon’s Bagism, Bobby Baker’s Cooking the Sunday Dinner, Bow Gamelan Ensemble’s Concrete Barges, Stephen Cripps’ Roundabout for a Crashed Helicopter and more.

The PLAYING UP card set is available for purchase and sample cards can be seen here.

PLAYING UP produced and published by the Live Art Development Agency (UK), FUNDUS THEATER/Theatre of Research (Germany), Tate Early Years and Family Programme (UK), Best Biennial (Sweden) and Live Art UK, with the support of the Goethe-Institut London and the Collaborative Arts Partnership Programme (CAPP).

RealTime issue #132 April-May 2016, web

Kaileigh O’Keefe, Gash Land

How can a festival strengthen a community? How can an environment be created that reflects the way we would like society to be? These questions were posed by organisers of the BUZZCUT festival, artists Rosana Cade and Nick Anderson, as they launched their fifth annual program of performance and live art in Glasgow.

Held in a stately century-old community centre in Govan, a little out of the city’s centre, BUZZCUT managed to side-step a lot of the debates that come with mentioning community, particularly those looking at ‘artistic engagement’ with specified groups. Instead it focused inwardly on an artistic community, ensuring all was accessible and comfortable for those involved over the four days. There were no signs of a defeated clan licking wounds as one might expect in a city that last year lost one of its most important performance venues with the much lamented closing of the The Arches. A robust and congenial arts scene featured many local artists and attendees, as well as delegates from throughout the UK and abroad. A pay-what-you-can system of support further recognised economic barriers to participation.

Aby Watson, This is not a euphemism

Mish Grigor; Aby Watson

Many of the shows dealt overtly with sexuality and gender identity. Australian Mish Grigor’s The Talk foregrounds the artist’s heterosexual exploits while telling an achingly personal story of a family member’s coming to terms with HIV. Grigor’s reliance on the audience as actors is tricky but skilfully handled, paying off with a huge sense of camaraderie. There is synchronicity between The Talk and Aby Watson’s This is Not a Euphemism. Where Grigor plays a soundtrack of herself allegedly having sex, Glaswegian Watson employs four retro TV monitors to screen her ‘sex tape.’ With Watson in an ill-fitting flesh-coloured leotard, the frankness of the screening is cushioned by awkward live dance sequences and apparent attempts to seduce an audience member. She insists he be a man who is assigned the name “Dicky” via Watson’s sign-language interpreter. The naturalness of the artist’s performance is also grounded in her being a “proudly dyspraxic” dance practitioner. (Dyspraxia, also known as Developmental Co-ordination Disorder, DCD, is a condition affecting physical co-ordination. Eds).

Kaileigh O’Keefe, Gash Land

Kayleigh O’Keefe

Another work putting sex ‘in your face’ is Gash Land, an ongoing project by Londoner Kayleigh O’Keefe in the form of a durational interactive performance. You feel as if you’ve arrived at a debauched party in full swing —Jabba the Hutt’s alien nightclub comes to mind. “Glorious Leader” O’Keefe reclines while yelling commands and accepting offerings for her graces. Participants fill in Gash Land citizenship application forms, to be reviewed by the leader. The main qualification for acceptance is that you appear to be having a “Rayt Gud Time.” With the limited attention span of much social media, karaoke segments with invented lyrics, a telephone hotline to the leader, virtual fisting (cardboard fist emojis on a pole and string for waving at the Leader’s bottom) and dancing were ‘scrolled’ through, all framed within a cardboard cut-out, pink acrylic aesthetic. Later, I enter the internet domain of Gash Land and discover I can make offerings to the Leader by paying for the paint and other equipment she’s deployed—an ingenious support method.

For me, O’Keefe’s use of Yorkshire dialect softens any obscenities she utters, as if they are part of another culture; that might be the point. Gash Land is an imaginary place where you can feel safe in your sexuality and was made in response to O’Keefe feeling “slut-shamed” at a sexual health clinic, as she mentions in this interview. Using online platforms aesthetically integrated with interactive live performance can be effective in building an alternative community.

Ria Hartley, Descansos

Ria Hartley

As sure as there is sex there is death, although the latter is arguably more taboo to speak of in the modern West. In Descansos, Ria Hartley, from Bristol, offers a performance of mourning involving one participant at a time building a memorial that forms part of an installation growing over four hours. In each cycle a spectator is invited by Hartley’s imploring eyes and an outreached hand to join the ritual. I walk hand in hand with her along a timeline drawn on the stone floor charting recent years in the lives of participants. I try not to step on the black marker scrawlings, sensing their sentiments, and brush past boxy grave-like structures on either side.

Now facing me, Hartley leans in and whispers an instruction, “Write down a death, a moment of rupture, perhaps a path not taken or a loss you are still feeling.” Afterwards, Hartley sets a square of bricks alongside my writing. I am prompted to throw down dirt, make a bed with soil, select and lay flowers, light a candle and place a cross, thus personalising these familiar symbols. The cross is not explicitly Christian, the arms being of equal length, and the stick and twine construction suggest it could be pagan, or Voodoo, which is significant given that Hartley often deals with postcolonial themes. Descansos is a gesture for those unable to mourn in traditional ways. The time and care given by the artist in considering death was reciprocated by her audiences, all of whom I witnessed sincerely taking up her offer.

Louise Doyle, Dark Side of the Boob

Louise Doyle

Rock’n’roll came in the form of Dark Side of the Boob, one of the more technically ambitious shows. Conceived and directed by Glasgow-based Louise Doyle, its surreal papier-mâché odyssey enlists half a dozen student puppeteers from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland’s Contemporary Performance Practice BA to attentively bring alive a massive puppet woman, constructed from the groin up with spinning breasts, seaweed hair and red eyes that light up. A professional erotic dancer develops a little agency within the wisp of a story while another pole-dances for over an hour with athletic, slightly bored eroticism. She becomes an anchor or a kind of metronome for the weirdness that unfolds.

We are crammed on the floor around and between ‘tracks’ on which the action, including a deathly chuffing train with puppet skeleton driver and plumes of smoke, is paraded. There’s a fantastic live band, albeit under-utilised in favour of a cheesy pop soundtrack, and sperm-headed dancers who burst aggressively onto the scene and later offer some delightfully nuanced, imagistic choreography. It’s evident that Doyle’s DIY puppet works will develop and grow more coherent; as with many of the works in the festival, BUZZCUT has provided the platform to road-test new performance.

Tilley and Del, Puffing and Wooling

Tilley Milburn

On the penultimate day of the festival, I find myself in a workshop-style piece, a how-to, in Tilley and Del’s self-styled relaxation technique, Puffing and Wooling. Entering a blanket-covered, lamp-lit and stuffed-toy populated room, I am apprehensive. But after airing some of our grievances about what stops us from relaxing, we hear a little from Londoner Tilley Milburn and stuffed-pig Del about why they advocate for doona days and de-stigmatisation of mental illness. I’m swept up, building a fort with sheets and soft things and curling up within it. Strangely, the group becomes somewhat self-directed, sharing their feelings about relaxation, with one charming man even attempting to hypnotise people into falling asleep. With a new age soundtrack overlayed with recordings of Tilley’s guinea pig’s little grunts, everything feels finally okay. Within contemporary performance, the workshop approach seems to be a trend. However, given Milburn’s transformative aims and her previous work involving people with disabilities in creative processes, the model makes absolute sense.

Lucy McCormick

Back in the main hall, things are abuzz. There is proper coffee, a kiddies’ crèche, hearty café fare for breakfast, lunch and dinner and BUZZCUT’s symposium organiser, Phoebe Patey-Ferguson, stalwartly holding a drop-in discussion table for hours every day, creating an environment that feels open, accessible and welcoming. Later that night, London-based Lucy McCormick, with two male dancers, performs a raucous ‘re-enactment’ of the “Easter bits” of the Bible with herself as Jesus in Easter Performance. It has the power-ballads, popping and locking and feminist performance art one expects from this performer from GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN.

Afterwards I got a text after from a friend who had come along that said, “What a show. The woman got fingered on stage. Damn.” He was referring to McCormick’s version of the moment when Thomas places his finger inside Jesus’ wound. I admit, I looked nervously around the room to see if families were present. Still, you can’t fault McCormick on her ability to entertain and provoke.

BUZZCUT was outrageous, its boundless openness extending the exploration of sexuality in performance and allowing artists to take risks. Perhaps it was frustrating for those expecting more polished works, but there was a sense of enjoyment felt by a community built through feedback and mutual support.

–

BUZZCUT, Directors Rosana Cade, Nick Anderson, The Pearce Institute, Glasgow, Scotland, 6-10 April

RealTime issue #132 April-May 2016

The Silences

family photo courtesy the artist

The Silences

Quiet as a prayer, The Silences is a crystalline memoir, an unearthing of secrets, a solemn ritual of provisional forgiveness, a healing. In her own voice, filmmaker Margot Nash very simply lays out her family’s history over three generations, rendering each complex with re-evaluated recollections and revelations wrought from research—the family album, letters, history and the recorded words of her mother and sister. The silences of the title are things long unsaid, denied and refused but finally spoken, requiring not just attention, but action—the making of a film as memorial.

Narrated memories and photographs are tellingly juxtaposed with excerpts from Nash’s film fictions—a father slumped, weeping in a hallway, a mother turning slowly in a golden gown, a drawer full of jewellery opened by an inquisitive child. In the course of the film’s making Nash comes to understand something of the nature of her body of work, with its focus on neglected and abandoned children. In The Silences, her voluble mother, who cannot express her love for her daughter, tells her that she tried to abort her by drinking gin and jumping off the piano. Nash asks:

”What madness possessed her to tell me this story when I was still a little girl? I grew up feeling unwanted and unloved and somehow to blame for everything. How can I move past blaming her now, except by speaking my truth and following her story like a detective, uncovering clues, digging deeper and deeper into the archives, questioning everything. I try to listen to the voices in the gaps and silences. How attached am I to being wounded?”

The more Nash learns the more she comes to understand her mother and father and the more there is to repair in her life. Both parents suffer mental problems, the mother depression, the father paranoia, his condition kept secret from the child Margot until it’s all too clear. The marriage is weakened by the mother’s thwarted aspirations, to be an actress and a “lady”—the latter came within her reach, but what happened? Did Nash’s father’s World War II experiences generate his madness or was it inherited? We watch the detective work carried out by both the child and the adult Nash. The child knows there are secrets and searches for clues, finding a hidden album of photos of an unknown child. Meanwhile the mother’s cultured piano playing and tales of high times in Ireland, Scotland, England and India are the noise that covers the silences, that entertains her children but veils the truths that the film reveals step by step.

Ethel & Margot, 1976,
The Silences

photo Ponch Hawkes

Ethel & Margot, 1976,
The Silences

The embittered, caustic mother cruelly projects her sense of failure onto the “naughty” Margot—child, teenager and young adult anarchist, radical feminist and alternative theatre actor. Sister Diana had been regarded as beautiful, talented and well-behaved. At 10 years of age, however, she was burdened with the knowledge of her father’s illness, expected to support her mother when her husband turned violent and told not to tell Margot. Diana felt this unfair, “it robbed me of my childhood in a way” and allowed Margot, who, like her mother wanted to become an actress, to be a free spirit: “you carried the comic edge in the family,” says Diana. The gentle tension between the sisters adds another layer of feeling to the film. At its beginning they cannot agree on the words for the plaque on their mother’s memorial. As the film progresses our sense of a need for resolution grows—between sisters, mother and daughter, and with some deeper understanding of their father, which comes with his letters, although we are horrified by the extent of his Cold War paranoia and sexual jealousy.

The power of The Silences doesn’t reside alone in the growing, tangled complexity of the lives of a traumatised family and the detective work that unknots it, but in the faces that we quickly learn to recognise, interpret and re-estimate as Nash discovers more about them. She thinks that photos of each of her parents at the time of their honeymoon already suggest discomfort, but qualifies the thought: “I search their faces. What can photographs tell us about the heart, about desire, about longing?” Other photographs are read by Nash with a sense of certainty. One is of her father, back from the war, holding the baby Diana, staring into the camera with a brooding intensity that suggests a damaged psyche. Another image becomes central to the film, a secreted photograph found in the back of the frame holding one of Diana. The mother denies that it’s of her, but the daughters concur, Diana imagining the seemingly troubled mother looking watchfully at someone out of frame, Margot seeing a rare, atypical absence of artifice. This, they believe, is a portrait of a woman who never dealt with grief. The image returns to preface the film’s credits.

Simply framed within black space, photographs are juxtaposed with historical film, Nash’s own screen fictions and images and sounds captured specifically for The Silences—reeds bending in a gentle breeze become a melancholy motif; or one–offs, like the poplars she loved as a child, in which, she says, the wind held its secrets. The intoning of “silences” and “secrets” acquires a liturgical resonance. At the film’s beginning, explaining the motivation for her quest and recalling the idealism of the 1970s, Nash says, ”I thought I could build a new family and leave the past behind. No matter how hard I tried, the past returned again and again and the silences whispering their secrets demanded to be heard.” Text, sound and image become a poem.

Elizabeth Cook,
Shadow Panic (1989)

photo Corrie Ancone

Elizabeth Cook,
Shadow Panic (1989)

The film’s sense of history is finely tuned and inherent in the lives of its protagonists—the well-to-do young at play on shipboard and in English society in India in the 1930s; Nash’s mother working as a radio broadcaster, talking music and literature, in the 40s when men were at war; images of the Petrov spy scandal that inflamed her father’s paranoia; photos of street protest in the 70s and footage from Nash and Robin Laurie’s activist film We Aim to Please (1976), in the which the words of the title are texta’d onto a naked female body. The latter contrasts strikingly with the dozens of genteel snaps and street portraits taken across generations.

For me there are many resonances in this film, historically and personally, which made for painful viewing. My father’s silence and my mother’s bitter volubility (though in her case there were no secrets, everything was laid bare) provoked resistance and protest in the 60s. I felt as Nash did, when she says of her mother, “I hated her and at the same time I craved her love.” Both were women who denied they were depressed and whose sense of potential was thwarted and its hurt turned on others, especially those closest to them.

There is comfort at the end of The Silences, in the symbolic coming together of the family in one serene place and the return of a lost child to the fold. Nash’s understanding of her parents and her art has deepened, as has ours of the artist. We assume she has found the answer to her opening question: “How attached am I to being wounded?”

One image in particular, a delightful one, of Nash’s mother posing elegantly in her wedding gown made of “magnolia silk encrusted with tiny pearls” has stayed with me, because of the dress’s unfortunate origin but moreso its fate. Later in the film, Nash in her 20s asks her mother if she can have the dress, which then, she tells us, she cut in half and wore, partly stuffing it into her jeans, partied and then “went home with a notorious womaniser who broke my heart.” The perhaps vengeful cutting up of the dress wrenches at me, as does its cool telling. More than any other moment in the film, this is where I felt, or simply imagined, the depth of Nash’s wound and an anger not revealed elsewhere in a film which contains its pain, just as its soundtrack of pieces by Chopin, Schumann and Debussy (performed with apt delicacy by Elizabeth Drake) recalls the relief the mother’s piano playing brought to her distressed family.

This is not to say that The Silences is without drama—scenes from Nash’s earlier films, standing in for her childhood, are disturbing—but, above all, it is a finely crafted meditation from the perspective of a melancholy maturity, ready to uncover and address truth and accept compromise, with love.

The Silences, Margot and Diana (c1955)

The Silences, writer, director, producer, editor, voiceover Margot Nash, composer, pianist Elizabeth Drake; 71 minutes; As If Productions 2015. Distributor Ronin Films.

The Silences is showing at the Hayden Orpheum, Sydney, 27 April-4 May; Cinema Nova, Melbourne, from 28 April; Arc Cinema, Canberra, 29 April; The Mercury, Adelaide, 10-22 May; The Regal, Newcastle, 30 April.

Margot Nash’s other films are Speaking Out (1986), Shadow Panic (1989), Vacant Possession (1994), Call Me Mum (2005) and, with Robin Laurie, We Aim to Please (1976). Nash is Senior Lecturer in the School of Communications at the University of Technology, Sydney. In 2012 she was the Filmmaker in Residence at Zürich University of the Arts where she began developing The Silences.

RealTime issue #132 April-May 2016 pg.

Perhaps it’s the constant butting up against barriers in daily life that makes Indigenous artists so good at traversing creative boundaries. Leading filmmakers such as Ivan Sen and Warwick Thornton, for example, effortlessly move between drama, documentary and video art. Bangarra Dance Theatre director Stephen Page continues this form-crossing tradition with Spear, moving for the first time from stage to screen with his directorial feature debut.

Based on the Bangarra production from 2000 of the same name, Spear opens on a stunning clifftop beside the sea. A group of Indigenous men are dressed in jeans, their naked upper bodies marked with paint. The image stakes out Spear’s key concern: the difficult negotiation of tradition and the demands of modern life. The images in the opening moments feel tactile, with close-ups of sand, skin and hair alternating with wide-shots of the stunning landscape. From this seaside setting we move to the city, where the play of light in a shadowy world replaces the sun and sweeping natural vistas. Here Spear’s central character—a young Aboriginal man played by Page’s son, Hunter Page-Lochard —encounters crowds, tunnels, substance abuse and confronting street life in a city haunted by an Indigenous presence. Aaron Pedersen turns in a disturbing performance as a raving drunk, eaten up by anger, pain and mental ill health. Page-Lochard as the young man is trailed through the streets and tunnels by a line of red sand, carving a bloodline, a trace, a wound, across the city’s concrete skin.

Cinematographer Bonnie Elliott captures a string of recognisable Sydney locations in stunning high-definition digital images, from outdoor stone staircases in the Rocks to the grim public housing towers of Redfern. Elliott launched her career in 2009 with one of the strongest Australian features of the past decade, Granaz Moussavi’s My Tehran for Sale, and since then has turned her talents to a consistently diverse body of work, including the post-apocalyptic These Final Hours (2013), the TV drama The Slap (2011) and Lesley Branagan’s documentary A Life Exposed (2013). In Spear she draws mainly on a dark palette characterised by gradations of black, brown and silver grey.

While Elliot’s work is admirably cinematic, less well-realised is the translation of Spear’s dance-like drama for the screen. The film is surprisingly static, the images pregnant with a slow-building action that never quite comes to fruition. Bodies are too often arranged in immobile tableaux rather than fluid combinations of movement. Their restraint is matched by the camera, with rhythm conveyed more often by rapid-fire cuts than the motion of the lens.

The most effective sequences are the few where Page allows his performers to cut loose. Ironically, one of these is set in a prison, where twisted contortions of limbs and bodies convey the tortured strain of containment. Another great sequence is set to the 1961 hit by British comedian Charlie Drake, “My Boomerang Won’t Come Back.” One of George Martin’s less admirable productions, this song tells the story of a young man who is a “disgrace to the Aborigine race” due to his inability to throw a boomerang. Fortunately, a local “witch doctor”—with a bizarre Cockney accent—is on hand to give advice. The Bangarra dancers perform a set of suitably buffoonish, caricatured moves to this jaw-droppingly offensive track, in a hall festooned with a banner proclaiming, “Welcome to Country.”

Indigenous screen work has offered an ongoing reflexive commentary on its intervention into a century of astoundingly racist images in Australian cinema and art. Sally Riley’s Confessions of a Headhunter (2000), for example, irreverently decapitated statues symbolic of British colonisation scattered across the land. Warwick Thornton rewrote the cinema legend of Jedda in Rosalie’s Journey (2003). Ivan Sen subtle reflected on divergent black and white views of the same landscape in Beneath Clouds (2002). Spear’s “Boomerang” sequence adds another chapter to this ongoing reappropriation of the objectifying and dehumanising power of words, images and songs.

Yet despite these flashes of brilliance, Spear never quite coalesces into a convincing whole. The episodic story, such as it is, alternates between the city and the bush, an aphoristic set of encounters with different people and situations. The final scene plays out on Sydney Heads, the city skyline forming a backdrop to striking surrounds that mirror the film’s opening setting. Reunited with his fellow dancers, the young man appears to achieve a reconciliation of sorts, acknowledging his roots and the demands of modern life, enacted in a borderland between city and bush. Given the fragmented experience of the previous 80 minutes, however, the resolution fails to convince, and the dawn setting skirts the realm of cliché.

Page has described Spear in terms of a question rather than a statement, “What is men’s business in this contemporary Indigenous world that we live in?” The film is perhaps best understood in these terms: a probing experiment, a first step into a new realm by one of our leading dance makers. Experiments are becoming increasingly rare in our constricted screen environment, so let’s hope this is a beginning, and not an intriguing one-off for Australian Indigenous dance on screen.
Spear

Spear, director, co-writer Stephen Page, producer John Harvey, cinematographer Bonnie Elliott, co-writer Justin Monjo; Arenamedia and Brown Cab Production in association with Bangarra Dance Theatre, 2015

This year Zoe Coombs Marr won the comedy world’s second most prestigious prize, the Barry Award at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, and it’s not a stretch to imagine her going on to scoop the number one at Edinburgh too. That double-win has only occurred twice before, but for several reasons she’s in with a chance. Firstly, those other two-timers were Dr Brown and Sam Simmons, both of whom are running mates in a kind of loose pack straddling comedy and performance art that also includes Coombs Marr. Secondly, the show in question, Trigger Warning, is such a meta-theatrical tour de force that it threatens to alter the comedy landscape in profound ways. And finally, it’s just that funny.

Coombs Marr has been playing with her alter ego Dave for a few years now, and at first the character seemed an easy if welcome mark: a straight, white, male stand-up comic whose casual prejudices and blind privilege are as cringeworthy as they are familiar. That Coombs Marr can make Dave more laughable than lamentable is worth lauding, but with Trigger Warning the figure expands accordion-like to such unexpected lengths that his audience is left reeling.

The conceit of the show sees Dave left becalmed by the ‘feminazis’ and politically correct spoilsports on Twitter who have responded with outrage to his misogynistic gags. Desperate to find a form of humour that will offend no-one, he enrols at the exclusive Philippe Gaulier school in Paris—exclusive in terms of the price, not the talent required—and embarks upon a quest to find his inner clown. His inner clown, as it happens, is a cranky lesbian in her 30s, who bears a remarkable resemblance to Zoe Coombs Marr, and whose own inner clown in turn looks a lot like an unreconstructed male stand-up named Dave, whose inner clown is… you get the idea. This recursion is only the beginning, and as the attempt to create a kind of “clownception” spools out it becomes an almost unwinnable challenge to work out exactly how many layers deep we are at any one point.

This is a conceptual juggling act whose technical mastery works not simply to illustrate Coombs Marr’s genius but to shift our perspective on more than one artistic field. It’s not satire, really, since Dave is ultimately a sympathetic figure, a product of an extremely narrow and confining comic culture who honestly can’t see an exit from his box. It says something that his sexist jokes are actually funnier than those of the real comedians he’s based upon, too. As recognisable as he is, Coombs Marr’s drag and the layers of auto-referentiality she employs reveal that the real Daves are playing characters themselves, without necessarily being aware of it. Any comic who witnesses this work will have to ask big questions of themselves between laughs.

The alternate world of “art comedy” isn’t paraded as an ideal retreat from the problematic mainstream of Daves, either—the clowning and mime of peers such as Dr Brown and the many, many comics he has influenced is made just as much fun of here. Dave himself admits he’s no fan of these comedians—most of their repertoire is just exaggerated shrugging, he says—and he protests the pretentiousness of comics who think they can get the crowd laughing simply by making eye contact. By the performance’s end, Coombs Marr is doing precisely that, of course.

In more conventional parody there must be posited some kind of normalcy from which the object of ridicule is set clearly apart. The brilliance of ‘Dave’ isn’t that Coombs Marr has made fun of the figure who typically occupies that position of normalcy, and whose jokes are at the expense of anything that deviates at all from himself. It’s that in unseating him from his position of power, she goes on to destabilise any sense of a norm whatsoever, both within comedy and beyond. Our laughs become the kind of mad flailing of someone drowning, and when the work ends with a wordless act of extremely visceral, physical excess, it is both inexplicable and entirely necessary, as if Coombs Marr is channelling the collective frenzy she’s whipped up in her audience.

For many RealTime readers Zoe Coombs Marr will be better known through her work with the trio Post, and these solo forays into comedy might seem a departure from the excellent path that collective has already charted. This isn’t a side project. I’ve heard more than one commentator describe this as Coombs Marr’s masterpiece, and for any artist to achieve a triumph such as this just once would be enough. I think there’s even more to come.

Melbourne Comedy Festival, Zoe Coombs Marr, Trigger Warning; Victoria Hotel, Melbourne, 24 March-17 April

Rainbow Vomit is a joyous romp from beginning to interactive end, transporting the audience for 40 minutes into a childlike state of engagement somewhere beyond the reach of care or distraction. Its brilliance lies in its simplicity—the use of lo-fi elements we all remember the feel and smell of—to peel back the self-conscious veneer of our wordly armour. Dancenorth achieves this without compromising the sophistication of the choreography or patronising its audience in the slightest.

The choreographers, artistic director Kyle Page and rehearsal director Amber Haines, together with the dancers and the company’s cultural engagement staff, delved into research on the effects of digital media technology on developing brains.

The show opens with a voiceover by four-year-old Bella: “When I’m watching TV, my brain feels smooshed, and my body feels sick and lumpy…The back of my neck feels scrapey and itchy when I use my iPad. When I do the iPad, my eyes get stuck open for the whole night and then I get tired the next day…It’s too fun, I can’t stop” (Moving to Learn, exploring the Effects of Technology on Children, 7 May, 2015).

The dancers, who have been sitting, unmoving, in black and white patterned pyjamas on clear bubble-like fitballs as the audience enters, mime the scrolling of hand-held devices to Bella’s words, which echo and distort. They all gaze forwards at a screen’s cold glow, craning their necks from side to side. “Wow,” “Whoah,” they exclaim louder and louder as they rock from side to side on the balls, faster and louder until they are bouncing and laughing, they forget the screen and potential energy becomes kinetic.

The large balls are thrown, balanced on, swapped, compressed, transformed into caterpillars and three-headed monsters, a Mexican wave, as the dancers dissolve and reassemble formations without missing a beat. Lights go out, back on, repeatedly, and each time the balls have changed colour. The audience, comprising all ages from toddler to elderly, responds with oohs and aahs and laughter to these seamless switches.

To music reminiscent of old-school 8bit game sounds, the five dancers form a machine of upended and connected bodies which scoops, passes and quite literally spits ping pong balls, which seem to have appeared from nowhere. There ensues a sort of spitting contest, the dancers attempting to vocalise and sing with the balls in their mouths, looking like sideshow alley clowns for just a moment. The music gets bigger and funkier and they ricochet across the floor ejecting the balls with whole body contractions which lift them off their feet, nailing every hit in Alisdair Macindoe’s soundtrack.

The music slows to a heavier beat with an almost industrial wail, the mood shifts from jolly to ominous. The other dancers begin herding, climbing the scaffolding in slow motion while Jenni Large holds the floor with a low solo of athletic shapeshifting. The crew run and slide as though on the deck of a ship in high waters, heaving from one side of the floor to the other. Mason Kelly’s intense solo has the feel of someone trapped inside a huge pinball game, as the others fade out.

Large and Georgia Rudd reappear in playsuits of splatty electric colours, swaying head to head like conjoined twins, their hair forward and completely hiding their faces. They move, jump and roll in tandem, forming creepy creatures. Harrison Hall joins the blonde movement for a solo with a breathtaking forward slide in which his long hair takes on a life of its own.

The others return with a shiny motorbike helmet. When they place it on Hall’s head, lightning flashes, there is deafening white noise, and he looks as though he’s being electrocuted. They remove it and instantly the sun shines and birds sing. Like a delighted toddler who’s found how switches work, it’s compulsively on and off for a while, then they all move away and the helmet is left floating in the air.

Ashley McLellan next assumes the helmet, and with shifts in the music and lighting, we are briefly in outer space and under water. Hall holds the helmet still, and McLellan’s body ‘hangs’ from the helmet as though she is made of rubber, in the most astonishing, liquid dance. McLellan, freed from the helmet, continues the rubbery isolations with her expressive face, slow-motion girning of the highest order. The audience is in stitches.

From there, Rainbow Vomit segues into its final quarter, in which audience participation becomes key in a totally unexpected way, and the title makes perfect (non)sense. The show has been immediately picked up and will be touring, and it would be unfair to totally blow the premise and deprive future audiences of their moment. Suffice it to say, there are unicorns and a forecast of rainbows, and Page is willing to reveal that it involves kilometres of neon rope.

This show is a rare achievement, a resonant sensory journey into our inner, earlier, less convoluted childhood state. Or, as Bella puts it at the start, “Family game night is better because it doesn’t have any sore or wrinkly feelings.”

Dancenorth, Rainbow Vomit, direction, choreography Kyle Page, Amber Haines, performers, co-choreographers Harrison Hall, Mason Kelly, Jenni Large, Ashley McLellan, Georgia Rudd, composer Alisdair Macindoe, lighting, set design Govin Ruben, costumes Andrew Treloar; Townsville School of Arts Theatre, 11-16 April

“Realness.” The word suggests an art grounded in truth, but also ‘fabulousness,’ exaggeration, the illusion of real; It has its cake and eats it too. No wonder it’s a staple of the drag lexicon, where the construction of both truth and illusion is so playfully muddied.

The American Realness festival—which took place at Abrons Art Center in January, in its seventh iteration—has become a flagship for experimental dance and performance in New York City. Founded and curated by Thomas Benjamin Snapp Pryor (that “Snapp” really fits the bill), the festival brings together artists who “expose issues and questions around identity, ritual, blackness, history, pop-culture, futurity and consumption.”

A breeze through the festival program reveals a penchant for pinks—lipstick smeared, hair-dyed, skin blushing, pearlescent light through fog. This is the “future,” where we will witness “transformation,” taste the “erotic,” the “ecstatic.” (This language loses its power through so much repetition. One artist knowingly fills the space for his program note with a solid black box. Words just won’t do.)

One word that hovers over the festival, although it doesn’t actually appear, is “queer.” That word is now wielded like a brand, along with its difficult relationship to definition, but here it feels relevant, perhaps due to its omission. There is a strong queer presence among the artists and their propositions, but any political agendas, rather than being trumpeted, are more covertly entrenched in the art, a queerer act in itself.

So much of a festival is about catching glimpses of other people’s reactions, gauging the ‘vibe,’ looking for someone to agree or disagree with. If post-show talk is anything to go by, Americans seem to want to love things so badly. Their praise, sometimes offered with evangelical levels of enthusiasm, renders any dissenting voices threateningly cynical. There’s a spirit of community championing: the more positive the feedback, the stronger the art becomes. This raises plenty of dilemmas: again the question of truth and illusion (or delusion), and the endless challenge of critical evaluation. We are completing a qualitative circuit with the work; we are responsible for its actualisation as much as the artist. We create our own realness.

One artist who directly engages with this confusion is Heather Kravas. Over her 20-plus years of making work in the US, Kravas has examined a politics of the body—particularly the female body—by unpacking choreographic conventions, and at Realness she continued this line of questioning in her methodical and affecting work titled dead, disappears.

“[Heather Kravas’] dead, disappears invites the audience to view the performer as simultaneously woman and object—and to see their own observation as completion of the artistic act.” [program note]

Pillow heaved over body and thrashed against floor. This sequence on repeat, this incessant rolling with a pillow. Now comes the exhaustion, hers and mine both—surely more than this rolling with a pillow could actually generate. Her heavy breathing, her frustrated heave intensifying. Rolling with a pillow. My bottled frustration. Her trapped activity, there’s nowhere to go. This ritual of effort. This rolling with a pillow. Stop this, please, end this now.

We discourage each other from assessing art in terms or liking or disliking, or at least from only thinking in those terms. Any unreasoned response then feels shameful, incorrect. My physical act of watching takes on an object quality, a mirroring of the ubiquitous contemporary object performance.

Kravas, “simultaneously woman and object,” complicates this relationship, presenting herself as both an object-body, complicitly executing a roster of tasks in the prescribed order—sometimes literally reading them off the wall—and as a woman pushing back against these self-imposed limitations, full of frustration, absurdity and power.

Citing Richard Serra’s 1967 verb list, To Collect, as catalyst, Kravas performs a series of choreographic actions: to stamp heels in a precise number sequence; to walk a fine line on tiptoe, shrouded by a garbage bag, shouting “Bimbo” repeatedly (Kravas’ voice so wonderfully brash, so Jennifer Jason Leigh); and to roll, with a pillow.

There’s a masochistic pleasure to be had—a rebellion against my own object-hood—when finding myself in a state of anger over something as inconsequential as rolling with a pillow. Kravas inflicts her own flagellating ritual, and I inflict mine by watching it.

If my observation is the “completion of the artistic act,” surely I have to accept this generous invitation and observe all my readings, however inappropriate, including my unaccountable disdain for this rolling with a pillow.

Each of Kravas’ actions is self-contained, the space between a jump-cut, an A-to-B. My sense of time keeps refreshing, fracturing my impulsive habit to connect the images, to follow some kind of holistic logic. Instead: Now this, look at this. Look closely. Now forget that, what about this?

Kravas ties the aforementioned pillow to a chair and metronomically beats it with a wooden pole, while reciting, alphabetically, a lengthy list of verbs. The virtuosity of the task—the fastidious recitation coupled with the violence inflicted on the pillow—brings the two performative proposals, the object and the woman, into their greatest tension. She is sustained by the thankless task, wielding her exhaustion like a weapon. The collective desire of the audience to drive this action together with Kravas was palpable. And that pillow had it coming.

“Women are not objects” is an unimpeachable maxim and one that Kravas now momentarily disrupts, confusing my perceptions somewhere between the troublesome, the funny and the commonplace. Who wields more power in this exchange? Is it me, observing through my ‘male’ gaze, sitting cross-legged, arms folded, vainly qualifying her actions? Or is it she, owning and subverting her representation, offering equally “woman” and “object,” leaving us to grapple with the responsibility of that dichotomy? While tempting to choose her side of that coin, it never actually lands resolutely, such is the potency of Heather Kravas’ rich dilemma.

Australia’s Luke George and Singapore’s Daniel Kok will appear at the Abrons Arts Center 20-23 April with Bunny, a co-production of Campbelltown Arts Centre and The Substation (Singapore). Read the review of the Australian premiere performance here.

Heather Kravas, dead, disappears, American Realness, Abrons Art Center, New York, Jan 7-11

“If you are trapped in the dream of the Other you’re fucked,” says French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, quoted in Circa’s new work When One Door Closes at La Boite’s Roundhouse Theatre.

Deleuze’s words frame the major inquiry of the work: what if the three greatest heroines of modernist drama were to meet? What if Nora, Hedda and Miss Julie were acrobats? The show begins with a routine of high impact tumbling as the male acrobats use the full scope of the in-the-round configuration to run in from off-stage and collide with and cross one another. This virtuosic performance sets the benchmark for the show—stunning routines whose immediacy has been amped up with clever use of the Roundhouse space.

The mood of the work then shifts from contemporary spectacle to something more ominous. A pair of male acrobats don hats and read us a short and camp précis of each of the heroines’ trajectories in their respective plays. Each introduction culminates with the quotation from Deleuze. The polemic is simple but powerful—the women are trapped, not only by the structural injustice of the othering that arises from their original contexts but in this dream world too where they must navigate their own desires and vices.

The first three routines by each of the women are electric, particularly one by the orange-haired contortionist Bridie Hooper as Hedda, who chalks the floor with the outline of her dead body. These solo pieces with the individual women in striking colour-blocked costumes (pink/red/orange) are contrasted with male choral routines—indistinguishable husbands, clad in blue, wearing bright-red lipstick.

The score by Oonagh Sheppard is cinematically atmospheric and underpins the intriguing concept—how will the highly psychological characterisation of these women be expressed in circus form? Suddenly, the show changes trajectory and the dreamlike atmosphere is shattered by the fall of the black silk that covers the circus apparatus hidden in the rigging above. What follows are some extraordinary routines: playful duos of dominance and subjugation built around lollies, undies and bags of flour; whole company set pieces where a single performer carries the entire cast; and a mournful clean-up of the dirtied stage as a ratty old office chair spins in the centre holding two performers miming to the sounds of a vacuum cleaner carried on the back of one of the performers like an old-fashioned carnival instrument.

Circa never fails to deliver this supremely entertaining yet edgy aesthetic and the audience relishes every moment. Yet somehow the original promise of the work disappears. The women do not meet again in a routine until the climax. Indeed it is the charismatic male performers who take centre-stage. While this is interesting too—the burden of otherness expressed through the male body, the power of camp to disturb traditional gender assumptions—I still mourned a missed opportunity to fully interrogate the delicious premise of the show: three of our boldest heroines trapped in a room together.

La Boite Theatre Company & Circa: When One Door Closes, creator Yaron Lifschitz, Libby McDonnell & the Circa Ensemble, directors Yaron Lifschitz, Libby O’Donnell, dramaturg Todd MacDonald, set design, lighting Jason Organ, costumes Libby MacDonnell, composer Oonagh Sheppard; Roundhouse Theatre, Brisbane, 6-23 April

Director Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s engrossing 2015 feature-length documentary account of the life of Peggy Guggenheim conjures an empathetic portrait of a wealthy woman whose aesthetic tastes were ahead of the times and whose support for male artists in particular (especially Jackson Pollock) was significant if sometimes reciprocated with insults and romantic betrayal (Max Ernst). Excellent documentary footage, including of Guggenheim herself—frank, droll—and much of it unfamiliar (Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Paul Bowles, Salvador Dali, Yves Tanguy), finely rounds out the film’s sense of an era. Art Addict screened for months in Sydney as word spread of its finely tuned account of a troubled but sympathetic nurturer of great 20th century art.

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Xavier Le Roy, Temporary Title Open Rehearsals. Commissioned by Kaldor Public Art Projects and Carriageworks

We—me and the other clothed humans—are an outer circle of eyes and flickering attention. We are on safari, watching the behaviour of the human lion, where the being, playing, resting of some 20 bare-skinned creatures unfolds in a large light-filled studio as a play with no drama. So, what are we seeing here? And what else are we sensing?

We see the performers are present—on all fours or down on their haunches—watchful, ready, but without any sign of performance adrenalin. As time passes we feel the lions’ and our own imperceptible shifts of state and intention, a flux of movement that ripples across the imagined grassy savannah of the carpeted Track 8 in Carriageworks. We experience a long-range choreography with no discernible beginning or end, a plateau of existence with intimate high points of individual motion and group interaction. Bodies seeking comfort, or company. Formations evolve effortlessly from scattered topography to clumps of action and then the unexpected appearance of a line of human animal figures in a queue stretching diagonally across the plains of the floor. With nowhere to go, the queue proceeds, then dissipates.

Time stretches. The singular figure or the whole group make transitions on a continuum of transformation between states of alertness and relaxation, between action and passivity, between human and animal, between plant and machine. The group body spreads horizontally, a rhizome-like organism, and limbs entangle. I find my mind letting go, letting desire for spectacle subside, desire for meaning drop away. Not in any evident order but with tacit agreement, a small clump begins a group metamorphosis from animal to vegetable. The collective tone of their bodies changes as limbs begin to reach and sway in the language of plants, dancing in air.

Sitting in on an earlier studio rehearsal I hear French choreographer Xavier Le Roy and his collaborator, dancer Scarlet Yu, discussing the emergence of the performance language. For them this is not an exercise in imitation or representation; instead, by observing the behaviour of lions, they have evolved a ‘vocabulary’ of movement and attitude. The performers learn this vocabulary of the lion, and of plants (I’m not sure if it was a specific dialect of grass or bush or vegetable) and with practice are more able to be simple in their embodiment. Receiving and transmitting through skin the qualities of vegetal permeability, bare arms and legs adrift become a soft, mobile meadow. Falling/dropping to the ground through the hips with their full weight speaks the movement of big cats as they simply give up/give way to gravity.

Xavier Le Roy, Temporary Title Open Rehearsals. Commissioned by Kaldor Public Art Projects and Carriageworks

Seeing humans do this offers an uncanny glimpse into animal behaviour and physiognomy. I become aware of the human lion’s occasionally flared nostrils and a quality of cat-like panting and notice the whole body engaged in a breathing pattern that has a different speed and depth from normal human breathing. When slowed it is more like a sleeping breath or the breathing of a baby. The human lion’s gaze is altered, more diffuse in a resting state and dropped back behind the eyes in a way that alerts me to my usual sharp frontal focus.

I am not the only one to become languid. In Track 8 the audience are stretching themselves, some lying on the floor. This is not a sign of boredom but of ease. In the circle of watchers, I’m not sure if this young lion is looking at me or straight through me or taking in the periphery. I feel the stirrings of empathy and unnameable identification as you might with a real non-human animal. Then, like a switch, the quality of their gaze snaps to attention. Being approached by a naked crawling person/creature could be confronting, but somehow my position, seated on the floor at the eye level of the animals and all the other spectators, equalises the dynamic. The lion’s approach precedes from a respectful distance with: ‘May I ask you a question?’ Then settling in —‘How is growth for you?’

I’m wondering what it takes to move between states: from immersion in the bodily/ animal breathing/ being weighted/ fleshy /succulent plant to the psychological sense-making of the human question? I sense no assertion of will but wish to simply choose a partner for dialogue. The odd naturalness of speaking, exchanging on profound questions of love or transformation with a naked person who is about to turn back into a lion or a plant, in a roomful of clothed and unclothed people, starts to feel entirely normal.

We are all animal, vegetable and mineral, are we not? It makes me ask, why don’t we come to this place more often?

Kaldor Art Projects in collaboration with Carriageworks: Project 13, Temporary Title 2015, Xavier le Roy, Scarlet Yu & Collaborators: Natalie Abbott, Christine Babinskas, Geraldine Balcazar, Georgia Bettens, Eugene Choi, Matthew Day, Lauren Eiko, Peter Fraser, Ryuichi Fujimura, Alice Heyward, Becky Hilton, David Huggins, Marcus McKenzie, Kathryn Puie, Amaara Raheem, Darcy Wallace, Adam Warburton, Ivey Wawn; Carriageworks, Sydney, 2-22 Nov, 2015

Kaldor Art Projects brought Xavier Le Roy and Scarlet Yu to Sydney in November 2015 to collaborate with 18 Australian performers on an open rehearsal work, Temporary Title 2015, which “experiments with the process of pattern recognition, exploring forms which are not quite distinguishable as human—yet not completely anything else—and the idea of movement as a continuous process of transformation. The performers transition between strange and familiar forms and formations, challenging our perceptions of the human body and its capacity for physical expression and representation” (Kaldor Public Art Projects).

Dan Edwards writes in RealTime’s On the Dox column, “Tehran Taxi is the third instalment in Panahi’s ‘cinema of confinement’—a cycle of inventive and self-reflexive features shot following the director’s arrest in 2009 and his subsequent 20-year ban from filmmaking and overseas travel” (see RealTime 107 for Dan’s review of Panahi’s This is Not a Film, 2011).

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

“Instead, Panahi utilises the taxi as an interface between public and private space—a mobile interior in which the filmmaker can construct his work as he moves through a public realm from which he is officially excluded.”

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We are standing on contested property, clustering on an exposed headland looking to Maria Island in the east and the small Tasmanian towns of Triabunna and Orford to the south and north. We are within the grounds of the large, decommissioned Spring Bay woodchip mill. We pause, the voices of local young people in our ears, as the dancers of Stompin and young performers from Triabunna fill the semi-circular embrace of this remnant industrial structure. They raise their arms up and outwards. They look up. They flick their wrists back and forth. They cup their palms. Taking in this extraordinary view, we are experiencing Stompin’s Panorama.

Throughout Tasmania, small towns, often within astonishing landscapes, are experiencing change as the state shifts away from primary industry to secondary and tertiary forms. Many consider this to be a positive, sustainable change, but the residents of small communities like Triabunna feel the transition directly through threatened salaries, dislocation of their families, loss of local businesses and the consequent disappearance of life within their towns. Triabunna’s mill was closed in 2011 and then sold to private developers, instigating a lengthy period of limbo while plans evolve for new uses. This is fertile ground for Stompin, a Launceston-based youth dance company focused on issues relevant to young Tasmanians. The company worked directly with the townspeople to create Panorama, which leads an audience to several locations within the mill. The issues presented mix local concerns with wider interests and fears held for young people.

The work is divided into three parts. In the first, the audience splits into two groups and each led by a local child throughout the site. All of us wear tuned headphones that pick up a transmitted soundscape. The initial dance episode, as described above, happens at the walk’s mid-point within a concrete structure. Small solo or paired dance vignettes occur as we complete the site loop. The second act takes place on the spacious plateau just beyond the entry to the site, with dance formations bookended by large earthmovers, their giant claws made for log movement. The final act takes place within one of the mill’s industrial buildings, its steel cladding offering a percussive surface for the performers.

Dancers are costumed to represent different roles and interests. They are mill workers, they are tradies, they are environmentalists, they are high-vis-clad bystanders. Within the lexicon of Panorama’s choreographic language there appear to be representations of trees, the organic lines of the local landscape, the muscular language of workers and the line of the horizon, underscored by continuous movements back and forth—a macro theme of ebb and flow. A particularly successful sequence within the mill building sees the dancers moving as though parts of a machine, their piston-like action underscoring the theme.

The soundscape components by sound designer Dylan Sheridan and sound artist Alisdair Macindoe comprise the strongest dimension of Panorama. They draw together local voices and sounds, often using field recordings as the basis for rhythmic sequences or establishing the sense of change. The compositions establish the emotional tenor of the work, ranging from an angry industrial feel to sweeter, anthemic sounds that cast a sense of optimism over the final sequences of the show. I particularly enjoy a section that uses the thump of large machinery as the rhythm for the dance.

The use of headphones is very smoothly managed in the first section of the show and is so successful in creating intimacy and connection and reducing the problems of sound projection within a vast landscape that I wonder why it wasn’t used more extensively as a soundtrack for all the movement sequences. When the dance later kicked in, the transmitted soundscape dropped away and external speakers took over—a missed opportunity.

In an increasingly unsupportive environment for the arts within Australia, Stompin must be applauded for continuing to take on challenging sites and situations. This show is no exception, contending with an unsettled town, a languishing industrial site and the ghosts of a politically charged situation. To this Stompin brings empathetic commitment, engaging locals for the show as storytellers, performers, volunteers and audience members. The site becomes a strong player in the work and the soundscape connects all of the pieces (introduced prior to the visit with a podcast). Yet amid these challenges of production it seemed as though the dance received less attention, particularly those sections performed outside and incorporating local performers. While it is obviously quite challenging to work in this context, building more complexity and breadth into the movement could have helped pull the choreography into line with stronger elements of Panorama.

Stompin, Panorama, director, choreographer Emma Porteus, guest choreographer, sound artist Alisdair Macindoe, lighting, spatial designer Matthew Adey, sound designer Dylan Sheridan, costume designer Bones Sylvan; Spring Bay Mill, Triabunna, Tasmania, 8-10 April

In commissioning an original composition from French composer Eliane Radigue and her US collaborator Carol Robinson, Perth’s five-piece Decibel has entered the history of experimental music. Radigue’s creations are part of the canon of contemporary music. She was a student of musique concrète in Paris in the 1960s, before branching off to make electronic music that aspired to the state of Tibetan meditation. She did this with a synthesiser, slightly and slowly drifting ethereal sounds alongside each other. In the 21st century she turned for the first time to acoustic instruments, and Decibel’s commission is for one of these ‘sound fantasies’ that make the meditations of her electronic work palpable through live players.

In Decibel’s recent concert, Radigue and Robinson’s OCCAM OCEAN HEXA II was followed by two other commissioned compositions by Lionel Marchetti, a younger French artist who remains dedicated to musique concrète. In Marchetti’s Une Sèrie de Reflets and Première étude (les ombres), players sit next to speakers so that the sound of instruments and recordings becomes indistinct. Sèrie creates a spectacular, loud and brilliant atmosphere from the registers of instrumental and recorded sounds, while Première synchronises recorded and pre-recorded ocarinas, in a virtuosic aural simulation of a forest.

While Marchetti wants to obscure his players with clever, buzzing confusions and atmospheres, the Radigue and Robinson piece allows listeners to tune in to one instrument or another, as wind and acoustic instruments pluck long, ethereal notes from the air. So it was that the concert created a space between tonal intensities and individuating sounds, the mind’s interest in precision washed over by an immersive, atonal atmosphere.

The quality of these original works lies in the way that they turn conceptual gravity into dazzling affectivity, something typical of new and experimental music since the 1960s. While the West Australian Symphony Orchestra is currently playing a program of Bach, Haydn, Mendelssohn and the interminable Mozart, Decibel is forging ahead with a new classical canon, one in which composers like Radigue are central.

The meaning of classicism is however something that many Australian arts organisations have not yet come to understand. For classicism describes a return to the aesthetics of an older period in order to set standards for the present time. Yet ideas of romantic composition like harmony, melody and expression are barely comprehensible in a discordant 21st century, that must look instead to the 1960s for its ideals.

For the 60s was the decade in which anti-war, civil rights, feminism and decolonisation movements changed the cultural landscape, and art reflected these changes. Composers became interested in feedback (Robert Ashley), indeterminacy (John Cage), extended techniques (Meredith Monk) and repetition (Terry Riley), creating a classicism for our contemporary times. In being rigorously conceptual and yet achieving intense sonic affects, composers like Radigue and Marchetti aspire to this classical condition. In the face of Decibel’s venture, classical Australian orchestras need to think through what it means to keep playing golden oldies, when the very material from which music is made has been so radicalised by electronic and recording technologies.

The Nature of Sound, Decibel New Music Ensemble, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Perth, March 23

One of a mere handful of films to deal with the horrendous personal impact of the Global Financial Crisis on homeowners, Ramin Baharani’s 99 Homes (2015) tells of one victim who, to survive, abandons his conscience and crosses the line to join the evictors. It’s a finely performed, directed and emotionally demanding film that presents quite a different perspective from the GFC films and documentaries that address the backroom, big business machinations that resulted in and sometimes exploited (as in wonderful The Big Short) the opportunities created by the GFC.

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A huge, tired, unused Carriageworks space, flatly and brightly lit. Thirteen performers scattered singly through the space, lying stretched out or writhing on cold unforgiving concrete or standing and slowly consuming A4 sheets of paper—each performer has a neat stack—murmuring, groaning, speaking, self-preoccupied. For an hour or so their obsessiveness, feigned hunger and pain will escalate as we wander from dancer to dancer, attracted by a wild cry or a sudden display of extreme movement or, pausing, recognising a yoga-like pose or intrigued by a strangely graceful movement.

A crowd gathers about a performer building small houses with her paper. We catch words in French and sometimes English, spoken as the performers chew and gulp down paper in an apparently mindless continuum of ingestion and expression. Some of us glance at the text in the program—shouted, variously pitched, spoken and sung. It’s Un homme de merde (Shitman), excerpted from a poem by Christophe Tarkos in which the speaker encounters a man whose appearance, his innards, his brain (“two turds of very dense shit”), his thoughts and his dance are all shit. The delivery is shrill or guttural, wrenched from the inside. The image of humanity reduced to valueless function appalls the performers—“It can’t be that a man is completely full of shit”—but they continue to eat and contort, living their shit lives.

Slowly swelling up from these disparate abject bodies come harmonious voices, singing the beautiful Allegretto from Beethoven’s 7th Symphony. The song fills the vast space, connecting performers far distant from each other, making us all, for the moment, one. This choral togetherness comes as a relief, however the singers’ faces yield no shared joy. The song fades. It’s as if beauty is real but incidental, a residue of a lost culture.

A grim communality ensues, as couples and trios form, twisting arms and legs, standing on each others’ feet or hands and torsos, on bodies which gasp and choke, coughing up chewed paper. Where pain first seemed internal now it is imposed with brutal realism. A contorted, interlocked foursome appears like a living sculpture. At one end of the space a performer, standing tall and repeatedly executing a strange twisting leap, is gradually joined by others as he sings Tom Waits’ “King Kong,” a grinding, bluesy chant: “they shot him down/ they thought he was a monster/ but he was the king.” Again, widely scattered individuals come together in song, this time lamenting human arrogance and further evoking a species that has debased itself.

A kind of slow panic completes the work, each performer nibbling small paper leftovers picked up from the floor or hurriedly gorging their last sheets. They all gather in the centre of the floor, some licking fingers, until the last of the paper is consumed, soft voices resonate (“you have made me smile again,” though no one does) and the one performer still moving completes his compulsive little dance. Stillness. Exit.

Speaking with Biennale director Stephanie Rosenthal after his 20th Biennale of Sydney keynote address, Boris Charmatz, the choreographer of Manger, said, “I am more visited by dance than I visit dance.” Manger’s sheer strangeness was a visitation, a work that created its audience rather than playing to it. We were uncertain where to put ourselves; we looked for dance (where were the steps?); we became anxious (the performers’ suffering looked too real, the floor too hard for them, the paper picked from the floor likely toxic); we were surprised and embraced by the swell of choral voices; we were distressed by the darkness of Charmatz’ vision, its violence and utterly tenuous sense of community so central to Charmatz’ work, in public spaces and with the public. We know from his keynote address that he despairs over the diminution of public space. Dance, he thinks, can regenerate it. However, Manger, with its fecal imagery, suffering, torments and only temporary respite, suggested, indeed induced, a profound anxiety about the state of human communality.

At the end we welcomed small signs of togetherness and vigorously cheered the performers, who might not have danced recognizable steps, but whose trained, expert bodies could express with movement at once raw and precise the extent and depth of human pain and cruelty and with their voices the sound of hope. Manger appears to be a work of protest, one against ourselves. But you wouldn’t know that reading Charmatz’ stream of consciousness program note which focuses on the mouth, eating, singing, swallowing, “the Dance in the palate In the teeth In the tongue and above all with no end…” But the bodies in Manger do more than eat and sing.

Manger literally means ‘to eat’ and the poem which provides the text for the work is The Shitman. While there was eating in Manger (of rice paper standing in for the real thing) and much more in the way of physical activity, I recall no evocation of shitting (such were the bodily contortions, cries and grunts, there may well have been), just the all too vivid metaphorical images of Tarkos’ excremental poem. Physical performance in Manger, though delivered with Artaudian force, stops short of the scatological.

When interviewed by Francois Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock revealed he’d fantasised making a film about 24 hours in the life of a city, commencing “at 5am, at daybreak, with a fly crawling on the nose of a tramp lying in a doorway.” The film would track the arrival of all the city’s food supplies and follow them all day, cooked and consumed and “showing the sewers and the garbage being dumped out into the ocean… the cycle would show what people do to good things…[The] theme might almost be the rottenness of humanity” Hitchcock (1968). Charmatz only goes so far: “the choreography of people also becomes a choreography of food that traverses the inside of space then of the body the essence is packed down the throat we don’t want to die…” The Shitman text aside, Charmatz’ vision in Manger is not excremental, although it shares some of scatology’s unblinking view of the fundamentals of our existence, making for an unnervingly powerful, complexly suggestive and viscerally memorable work.

20th Biennale of Sydney, Musée de la danse, Manger, choreographer Boris Charmatz, Carriageworks, Sydney, 19 March

Phillip Keir’s done beginners’ dance classes at the Merce Cunningham Studio in New York, read scripts and directed youth theatre for the Royal Court in London, learned German in order to study Regietheater (directors’ theatre) in Cologne, directed and translated plays for four years at the Sydney Theatre Company, published the Australian Rolling Stone music magazine for 20 years, in 2004 formed the Keir Foundation with Sarah Benjamin, to principally support visual arts and dance ventures, and in 2013 established the Keir Choreographic Award, first given in 2014. The semi-finals and finals of the 2016 Award are fast approaching.

Arts benefactors are not often arts practitioners (there are notable exceptions of course, like Margaret Olley). They variously come to benefaction through curiosity, invitation, board appointment or simply keen amateur interest in connecting closely with an artform. Keir’s early art experiences have shaped the vision he has for his foundation and the dance award. His passion is not simply for dance, but for cross-artform collaborations, high/low cultural morphing and the bringing together of organisations, including his foundation, as co-commissioners, for the sharing of visions and the making of works between cities (he has no time for the Sydney-Melbourne schism) and internationally.

Jump this paragraph if you already know about the award. The announcement of the founding of the Keir Choreographic Award—a collaboration between the Keir Foundation, Melbourne’s Dancehouse and Sydney’s Carriageworks—was enthusiastically welcomed by Australian independent contemporary dance choreographers and their supporters. While visual artists, writers and playwrights have long benefited, if to varying degrees, from awards and commissions, there’s been little if any private support for independent dance makers and certainly not an award like this. Atlanta Eke received the first award and Jane McKernan the public prize. Now in its second round, the KCA funds the development of eight 20-minute works, selected by the judges from submissions. These are staged in semi-finals at Dancehouse. The four winning works are then presented at Carriageworks where the jury winner [$30,000] and the people’s choice award winner [$10,000] are announced. These are significant amounts that doubtless generate choreographer confidence, aspiration and recognition.

Keir is a straight talker, fluent, amiable, eye contact unwavering. He speaks with a sense of certainty about where he’s been and what’s made him, but is open about how long it’s taken to become an effective benefactor. We meet at his home, seated at a very long dining table, framed by large contemporary art works and visited by a fine cat with a penchant for conversation.

STARTING OUT

Your connection with art, was it something you were born with, or did it come with your family or experience or…?
It very much came out of experience. I was born in Wollongong and I don’t think I went to the theatre for the first time till I was 16. We moved to Sydney when I was about 14. Art was something I very much discovered for myself. It was something outside my family experience. At the age of 16, I got very interested in popular music and also used to go along to the early Nimrod plays. I ranged across music, film and theatre—I even went to some dance events. Then I went off to Sydney University as one did at the time and began studying philosophy. I did the usual thing of getting involved in SUDS and so on. And then I had a kind of epiphany or a break-down… I decided I didn’t find it interesting enough or compelling enough so I decided to go to the UK but via the US.

NEW YORK

I ended up in New York intending to stay for a week but I found the whole place so exciting I actually stayed for a year. I’d seen the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at the Sydney Opera House, when the company toured to Australia. So I wound up at the Merce Cunningham Dance School, taking a class there. I’d arrived with 100 dollars in cash and no job, no contacts really. The school very generously got me a student visa which allowed me to stay. So I became part of that Downtown Manhattan scene—well, the scene I aspired to I guess. I was about 20 at this stage. I worked in restaurants and bars and composed my own education in the arts. At the time, there was a very interesting course being run by New York University’s Experimental Theatre Wing. I had no money to do the course. American universities, as you know, are quite expensive but I’d ring up each of the workshop groups and ask, “Could I join the session because I’d be very interested to be part of it.” I did some work with what became the Wooster Group. In fact, it was the year they became The Wooster Group so it was very early days. As payment for the course, I did technical work, assisting with the set and lights and so on. I worked on their first production called Rumstick Road, written by Spalding Gray. I guess I got lucky in one sense. I was in the right place at the right time.

And it was a time when New York was bankrupt. You could live there for almost nothing. It’s what allowed that whole Downtown scene to really grow because there were lots of people from different persuasions in art who worked together. I performed at The Kitchen in 1976. There were interesting mixes. Laurie Anderson was there, Talking Heads had played their first gigs the year before in a bar. There were visual arts people. I remember meeting Cindy Sherman because she was part of that set. I guess it gave me a grounding in art across a whole lot of things but dance was actually the most generous—there is a kind of fundamental humanity about the way dance works. I always had an interest in contemporary dance. The Merce Cunningham School itself had that sense of combining John Cage’s music with movement and the work of Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. So it was always multi-art form.

So you took classes at the Cunningham School?
I did beginners’ dance classes. I never aspired to be a professional dancer but I just liked the idea. Lessons must have been fairly cheap because I had no money. It’s a thing you could do on a come-and-go basis. They took a very open view as to the kind of students they took. You didn’t have to have done eight years of ballet or six years of ‘modern dance’ as it was called at the time. It had a kind of looseness about it that I found really attractive.

LONDON

After that year my visa was up so I travelled on to the UK. I had an English grandmother so I didn’t have any problems with visas and so on. I started to pursue a more conventional theatrical process even though I started at the ICA in 1978 which, again, had that multi-art form element to it, though I worked at the theatre end of it. But that’s where I received a lot of my visual arts education because there was always something going on in the gallery.

The ICA was a pretty adventurous place at that time.
People don’t realise because London is now a capital of the visual arts but at the time the ICA was contemporary art. So that was my education in this multi-art form and it’s always interested me. To some extent as an artist I ended up doing more conventional theatre work, with the youth theatre at the Royal Court. I was a script reader and became part of their literary process as well as doing fringe productions and community theatre around the East End.

GERMANY & SYDNEY

Towards the end of that period I became quite interested in the European Regietheatre process. I learned German at the Goethe Institut in London and then arranged an internship at Schauspiel Köln in Cologne run by a German director called Jürgen Flimm who’s still active in his 70s. I then came back to Australia, did some student productions around Sydney University and was offered the job at Sydney Theatre Company because, although it’s fairly common these days for Australian theatre directors to have some German experience, at that time there was no-one. I was the only person who’d done it at all.

Richard Wherrett who was running STC at the time was interested in the whole ‘dramaturg’ thing. At that stage we still called that role ‘literary manager,’ the way the British did. Richard wanted to dress everything up so, even though it wasn’t my role, the Literary Advisor became the Dramaturg and all productions had a dramaturg. I spent four years there and directed maybe six or seven plays, some I translated as well. I directed one of the first three plays that opened the Wharf Theatre in 1984, a version of Brecht’s The Bourgeois Wedding, which I translated from German.

Was it a good experience, life at the STC, overall?
It was a very good experience but I became a bit frustrated with the process, the commercial constraints. I would always defend [Wherrett] in the sense that he would always like a new idea, but then sometimes he’d get bored with those ideas. So he decided that this European theatre model was not quite so interesting and we parted ways.

THE ROLLING STONE YEARS

I had a period of freelance work and then oddly enough, the Rolling Stone thing came along and, having been a poor artist for my whole life, I thought wouldn’t it be great to have a little bit of money behind me. I was still under 30 and had been dealing with subscription audiences who were not in my age range. I’d always been interested in popular culture and music in particular. So the idea of actually spending time on something that appealed to people more in my age group was quite attractive. But that said, I thought I’d do it for a couple of years and get back to the theatre but that didn’t transpire.

And in that period did you sustain your art interests?
Rolling Stone was by and large music first, some film and some visual arts. Initially there was a very small staff who did everything, it became more commercial, more commercially viable and ultimately I ended up buying my partners out. We developed a whole lot of other products. We were very good at launching new magazines. Rolling Stone was, obviously, a pre-existing American title that had been published under license prior to us and had fallen on hard times, but we were very lucky to be in the right place at the right time. It was in the late-80s that Australian music broke through from being to some extent a niche to being quite mainstream in terms of charting. At the same time there were quite a few bands that had something to talk about because Rolling Stone always did best with acts that had strong ideas, strong lyrics. Bands like Midnight Oil and to a lesser extent, INXS, Cold Chisel became the staple of that coverage. The ‘Australian-ness’ and the fact that we put in much more local coverage combined to assist the title and it grew very strongly over some years. It was quite exciting to be part of that process. Ultimately we developed a lot of other titles in the popular culture space. We launched the first Computer Games and PC Gaming titles and ended up with 70 staff and 13 full-time titles. So it kind of took me over to some extent.

BECOMING AN ARTS BENEFACTOR: THE FOUNDATION

What did you feel at the end of the Rolling Stone years? Did you leave with a new ambition?
I guess it’d become a commercial thing and I was completely overwhelmed by it. Towards the end, I formed the Foundation and started to fund certain arts projects.

Do you remember the moment you decided or the rationale, when you decided to become an arts benefactor?
I guess it had been brewing for a while and it was a way of re-engaging. And also I had all the finances I hadn’t had before, more money than I needed at this stage. It started fairly small in about 2004 and right from the beginning it linked back to where I started, with my interest in visual arts and dance and that’s where the Foundation has gone full-circle, back to the beginning, as in New York in 1976.

And that kinship between the two?
It also worked closely in with the music which at that time was Patti Smith, Talking Heads, The Ramones, who all had a strong visual art element. Velvet Underground, Lou Reed and so on. It’s always one of the things I’ve been interested in as well as the high art/low art schism. I’m interested in things that don’t just sit in what I would call a traditional high art box. I have some knowledge of traditional ballet but I’m interested in what’s contemporary, what’s saying something to people now about what is of now. Dance to me is very much part of that in the local context because it is about a contemporary performance practice which is often quite open. It’s that interest I’ve held throughout. It’s fair to say that if there’s a sweet spot in what the Keir Foundation covers, it’s work that’s multi-disciplinary, that works between areas and sometimes does have a high/low culture kind of [mix].

THE FOUNDATION AS A WORK-IN-PROGRESS

The Foundation was very much a work in progress. We had no knowledge of how to conduct one and we were probably a little slow initially trying to work out what worked and what didn’t and so it’s taken the best part of 10 years to get a strong definition of what we think is interesting and where a foundation can work. There are many kinds of philanthropy and people give to arts and culture for many different reasons. Sometimes there’s a social dimension. Sometimes there’s an interest in one particular form—all kinds of reasons. It took us a while to work out what exactly we could do best and also in a practical sense. For instance, with large theatre projects the production costs are such that, as a relatively small foundation, we can’t “move the dial” as the Americans say. The attraction with, say, visual arts is that sometimes things can be large in scope but they’re also very modular so you can deal with individual projects and these don’t necessarily cost that much. Dance is a kind of poor man’s craft in one sense; artists often have to work under very tough budgetary constraints. From a pragmatic point of view we can actually make a difference because government funding in some of these areas is very modest.

THE POWER OF CO-COMMISSIONING

So your Foundation contributes to the developmental costs of a work or production costs or… Is that the kind of support you’re giving?
Our view is to always work closely with existing institutions, encouraging small to medium organisations to work together. We take the view that sometimes pooling funds from different places helps with the budget in a pragmatic sense, but also that the process of working together is part of what the project is about [as happens] in Germany, the UK and the US. [But then] you come back to Australia and find that there are state arts infrastructures that seem to encourage people not to work together and people live in their bubble in their city in their home state and don’t collaborate very closely with their peers in other states.

Garry Stewart’s ADT has been a stand-out example of a company finding European co-commissioning partners who then also present the work.
Certainly that’s what a lot of the big European performing arts companies do. Not only do you get money to actually make the work but also, you don’t have to go back and sell it to them later because they’ve already to some extent bought in. It means that they have a commitment to that artist’s work. I find arts markets difficult things; the process of commissioning and buy-in has more potential.

The Foundation has a relatively low profile. There are no ‘apply now’ advertisements.
We don’t want to set up an infrastructure and that’s why we don’t have that process of application. By and large if you have an open application you end up with a lot of paper and phone calls and so on. A lot of the money that could go out in the form of a grant winds up in administration. And really, the arts scene in Australia is not that large. If we’re partnering with organisations it’s a matter of having a conversation. That’s often how the commissions come about.

It often comes out of us having an interest in a particular artist and the organisation having a similar interest. A recent example was a film work made by Melbourne-based visual artist Nick Mangan, a co-commission between Chisenhale Gallery in Bow in East London and Artspace in Sydney. The nature of film is that by visual arts standards it’s a relatively expensive medium because you’ve got to go to places and shoot the film and edit it and you usually have quite a few collaborators. The good thing about film is that you don’t have that conventional problem with freight, which is the big killer with visual arts. If you’ve got a big bulky object, you’ve got to get it from one end of the world to the other and most of the budget can be sunk in shipping costs. The project needed extra commission money. It was an innovative work between two institutions of similar size with an Australian artist with an international reputation. One of the things that still really interests me about the visual arts is that it has become the most international of forms. We don’t support scripted theatre because it often has limitations as far as language goes. Watching a two and a half-hour play in German is hard-going if you’re not understanding the text at all. I’ve always been interested in this international question so that’s another reason why dance and visual arts, to me, are the most international forms, and music too.

THE KEIR CHOREOGRAPHIC AWARD

Is the award something you instituted or were you approached?
I started talking to organisations that I thought would be receptive. Dancehouse in Melbourne is virtually unique in that it’s a centre for dance and it has a full range of outcomes, including performances as well as workshops and rehearsal space and so on. Critical Path in Sydney does some of the same but has some limitations in terms of performance because of a licensing issue.

We’d already done some projects with Dancehouse and also I was keen to work with Carriageworks in Sydney so we looked at various ideas, existing commissions they were keen to gain support for. At the same time, I had been aware that in Europe there have been some choreographic prizes. I also did some due diligence and discovered that the visual arts have about 160 prizes each year across Australia. The literary world has probably 110 or 120. The dance sector has none, not a single one. I was interested in developing more of a profile for choreographers and to some extent prizes, in the common imagination, seem to denote value because you can read in the newspaper, “Oh, someone won an award of X dollars.” If there’s no money attached, the conventional press ignore you. It was an effort to give contemporary dance a profile that I thought it wasn’t getting and, at the same time, to have commissions. Just having an award or a prize on its own can appear a bit of a novelty. It becomes about the press and nothing else. [I wanted] to combine a commission series with an award—and just under half the money actually goes to the commissions.

What we’ve tried to do with this most recent Award is to add a third component—public programs [talks, workshops]. Again, this is an idea from the visual arts world—talking about what you do. One of the interesting questions that came out of the last award was that people started to ask, “Is this choreography?” “Is that dance?” [See the review of the 2014 Award, “Was there dancing?”] And what each of the eight individual commissions is doing to some extent is asking those questions. I thought, we have some eminent international jurors here, why not expose them to the broader audience as well as the wider dance community?

Sometimes contemporary dance falls under the radar because it doesn’t have critical mass. That’s one of the things we’re trying to do, to say, well you might not like this piece but there are three other works in the program. You might not agree with that person’s opinion in terms of dance or choreography but there’s a bunch of others on a panel [discussing the works] and another panel the next day. With more of a festival process with lots of things happening, hopefully you get more of a critical mass.

How closely are you involved in the process? You’re one of the judges. Obviously your attitude is not about putting your name up there but also about being a player, a part of the process?
Yes, I’m one of five. The sourcing of the judges is developed by three parties, that’s me and Dancehouse and Carriageworks. We try to seek consensus. I think the exciting thing is that already this jury is quite different from the last one. To some extent this time I’ve sat back more because I know more of the people involved already and I’ve been through the process. [Decision making] must be a huge challenge for government funding bodies—many of these artists have been around for a long time and at the same time, many of the people have been in positions of supervising the process and it has a certain circularity to it. I think it’s often one of the challenges with so-called peer assessment that there are a lot of pre-existing relationships usually between the peers. One of the strengths of the jury process we’ve set up is that new people come in and the internationals, by and large, have not been here before. The work is very much judged on merit. There’s often no preconception. What is presented on the CD [submitted for selection] is all that that jury member knows. We ask for a video. We don’t ask for a text-heavy application.

What are the long-term outcomes do you think? It’s nice that one artist wins a big prize and another receives a smaller prize. Is there a hope that some of the works will become larger ones taking off from their 20-minute origins? And do you hope, given the judges you have, that some international interest might come out of this?
Absolutely. Atlanta Eke’s Body of Work has re-appeared. She applied for funding to do a full-length version of the work, which has just been at the Adelaide Festival. She’s also performed the original length version at Mofo [formerly Mona Foma] within a music context. Shaun Gladwell’s piece was done in a black box format in Melbourne and then I saw it in UNSW gallery re-done in a white box. That’s one of the things contemporary dance artists are exploring at the moment—white box versus black box. It’s now called ‘grey box.’ So we hope that these works go on into lots of other outcomes and even into completely different outcomes. Shaun told me that out of working on his commission he ended up doing a set of prints with the Australian Print Workshop in Melbourne. That’s one of the things that fascinates me about art. You can go back to people like Rauschenberg. There was a very interesting exhibition in the gallery at London’s Barbican not so long ago which took the work of Cunningham—which, of course, I know and adore—and looked at how it affected other things. Rauschenberg is an interesting case in point. He’s maybe a far better known artist than Cunningham; certainly his works sell for stratospheric prices. But it was interesting to see the curator of that show trying to say that Rauschenberg’s interest in dance influenced the look of his work. I guess I’m hoping that the Award will spin things out into different forms, influence other things—culture as a kind of chain.

In answer to your second question, we absolutely hope that Australian artists will become part of an international conversation. For instance, one of the judges in this round, Pierre Bal-Blanc, is a curator for Documenta dealing with its performance program. I think part of his interest in coming here is to see work. He’s already had input into which eight artists have been chosen for the 2016 Award. So he’s already involved in the process and so hopefully there might be interest in some of the works, though we don’t see the award as a platform or any kind of market.

2016 Keir Choreographic Award Semifinalists: Sarah Aiken, James Batchelor, Chloe Chignell, Ghenoa Gela, Martin Hansen, Alice Heyward, Rebecca Jensen, Paea Leach.

Award Jury: Bojana Cvejic [Belgrade], performance theorist and performance maker based in Brussels; Pierre Bal-Blanc, Documenta 14 curator and independent art critic based in Athens and Paris; US based choreographer Sarah Michelson; Perth International Arts Festival Artistic Director Wendy Martin; choreographer Atlanta Eke, winner of the 2014 Award; Phillip Keir, Keir Foundation

2016 Keir Choreographic Award Semi-finals, Dancehouse, Melbourne, 26-30 April; Finals, Carriageworks, Sydney, 5-7 May

“There are more armed soldiers than non-armed dancers in public spaces.”
Boris Charmatz

Recent threats to public space in Europe come from terrorism on the one hand and the incursion of the state with surveillance and weapons on the other. We have felt the latter in Sydney—after the Cronulla riots in 2006 and the 2007 Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit and the government’s consequent purchase of a still unused $700,000 water cannon. Increased restrictions on public protest, over-determined security laws and the commercialisation and constant threat of appropriation of under-funded public and national parks have grown to alarming proportions, potentially undoing the enlightened beneficence of our 19th and early 20th century forbears.

French choreographer Boris Charmatz, director of Musée de la danse, framed his keynote address for the 20th Biennale of Sydney (the session was chaired by the Biennale’s Artistic Director, Stephanie Rosenthal) in terms of current threats to public space and the loss of communality and democratic confrontation that accompanies it. In this context he presented the intriguing notion of a living museum of dance and, in doing so, suggested a possible relationship between performance and public space to include the traditional art museum, if conditionally.

Charmatz’ vision is vigorously political. He addressed the anxieties shared by many of us regarding the “contemporary stress about togetherness.” He says of his own country’s public spaces, such as town squares, that as well as offering communality they have been “places of paroxysm and questioning…historically places of confrontation in the 1960s and since then peaceful, even asleep, sites of anaesthesia.” But “recently everything has changed; public space has almost disappeared as a place of creation for the common, the encounter, the open construction of identity and differentiation.” He ascribes this condition “to social exclusion, homelessness, the abandonment of refugees… and more armed soldiers than non-armed dancers in public spaces.” He decided that “public space would become the place of Musée de la danse,” creating a series of actions minus “the cliches of street theatre.” There would be no costumes, sets, special lighting, just “dance as fire, burning all day, noon to midnight.” In the process, social dance would become an artwork “with the absence of sharp demarcations on all fronts” between dancers and the public, and creating “new moving postures for the body for civic communion.”

Charmatz sees “dance as the medium to encounter political failure, [bringing together] bodies that would otherwise not touch; a medium adapted [to undo] the malaise of the public space.”

Dance and maybe the museum

Charmatz was emphatic that his and his collaborators’ mission is not to treat art galleries, referred to throughout as museums or art museums, as venues for dance performances. Rather, his Musée de la danse, based in Rennes in Brittany, is “a living archive,” as yet without a major building of its own but embodied in Charmatz and his dancers who have performed the work we were about to see, Manger. This and other works have been performed in town squares, parks, at MoMA and Tate Modern, occupying those spaces with a site-specific intent to create living, ephemeral art objects in, as he put it, “permeable spaces.” (See Charmatz’ 2009 manifesto for a National Choreographic Centre.)

Museums are not ideal for dance, Charmatz said, citing critical issues of humidity and temperature control for the preservation of artworks. Working in a space with an architect in Utrecht he had “visitors dance like hell.” Once they’d left, he could “sense the space was still hot, a white box wet with sweat.” Exhibiting dance in a museum is no simple matter.

Rosenthal’s vision, manifest in her dance-oriented Biennale performance program (still unfolding; see our guide) and her questions to Charmatz after his address is to open up the museum to the ephemeral, expanding the sense of it as a public space and questioning the nature of art. Charmatz was again clear: he does not wish “to integrate dance with art museums or challenge their limits.” What Musée de la danse brings to a public space, he says, is an “archaeology in the body” which “can dialogue with the space and its art objects. We deal with their collection [by juxtaposing it] with ours.”

A key work exhibited in a variety of spaces is Charmatz’ 20 Dancers for the 20th Century first performed in a regional gallery and then MoMA. In Paris’ Palais Garnier opera house its audience strolled grand hallways, stairwells and the library, encountering 20 performers each demonstrating three solo gestures from 100 years of dance steps, including those of Charlie Chaplin, Merce Cunningham, Yvonne Rainer, Michael Jackson and Trisha Brown. (See below an account of Meryl Tankard’s personal archival performance at the MCA.)

Charmatz was in agreement with Rosenthal about the current condition of contemporary art museums: “they are not so stable, not so far apart now [from Musée de la danse],” given technological and other changes in the arts. Rosenthal said that while the visual arts are “getting away from the object and saying we want to embrace the ephemeral, you [Charmatz] ask how to collect the ephemeral. Your radicality lies in using the word ‘museum’.” He laughed. “Everyone was against it… Dancers thought they would be musée-ified.” But “it’s not a laboratory for visual art and dance collaboration… [it’s] a place to welcome the muses. If we [dancers] can’t welcome them who can?”

On Performance Curation is the subject for a discussion between Stephanie Rosenthal with Edward Scheer at the IO Myers Studio, UNSW, 20 April, 6.30pm (reservations). Australian choreographers, dancers and the public will gather to discuss their relationships, actual and potential, with the art museum in Choreography and the Gallery, a 2-8pm gathering at the Art Gallery of NSW, 27 April (reservations).

Nina Beier’s The Complete Works: Meryl Tankard

On Sunday 10 April at the MCA, for the Danish Berlin-based artist Nina Beier’s The Complete Works series, Australian dancer Meryl Tankard, long-time principal member of Pina Bausch’s Wuppertal Tanztheater and choreographer, performed a series of dance fragments for some 90 minutes in a crowded gallery, carving out space in which to dance. Each fragment was a physical recollection of part of a work performed across a long career; each was unannounced, some revealed an exertion of memory or the odd moment of amused forgetfulness in an informal presentation. Most revealed a well-preserved subtle dexterity of movement, fluent gesturing and some demanding articulation: a hip that constantly and comically drops as the dancer attempts to sustain an elegant walk. Moments from Bausch works that we recognised, like Kontakthof (1978), were the most potent and affecting. Above all there was Tankard’s dance theatre sensibility—a sly smile, flashes of comic anger and engaging if fleeting characterisations, including those of semi-autobiographical childhood memories in her own work, Two Feet (1988).

In The Complete Works, 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, collectively recognisable, while also invoking the personal history of the dancer’s experiences.” Despite the specificity of the brief, the outcome was inevitably impressionistic, save for those in the audience who might have seen many of Tankard’s performances. What was recognisable was a particular identity and presence. Pleasure was felt in watching a dancer engage in active recall, in witnessing a personal archive flickering by and delighting in recognising and having immediately called to mind performances experienced long ago. This is the ‘archive’ as ephemeral art, not as object, unless made so, say as a video of the performance, if Beier’s intent goes that far.

Boris Charmatz, Keynote Address, 20th Biennale of Sydney, Carriageworks, 19 March; Nina Beier, The Complete Works, dancer Meryl Tankard, MCA, Sydney, 10 April

In an age of apathy amid bombardment with information, it is often said that science has “a communication problem,” so artists are called on to shine a light on it in ways that are more effective than academic writing and mass media accounts. The video art exhibition Emergence features screen works made in partnerships between seven research scientists and eight artists who reside in northern Queensland. The artists were challenged to draw upon, visually communicate and expand the reach of scientific research.

In the eMerge space at Townsville’s James Cook University, three walls are filled with four imposing projections, each comprising two video loops. Seven of the eight works focus on reef or water-related studies. With sound heard only through headphones and the imagery being mostly acquatic, the exhibition space is flickeringly reef-blue and silently thought-inducing. With seamless editing, Matt Whitton’s Water depicts the journey from liquid to vapour while Posse’s textural montage, Reap What’s Sown, blends various textures to hint at the threats to the reef from connecting industrial waterways.

There is a tension in the works between the need to be didactic—to uphold the science—and to produce something with creative strength; some films were either simply meditative or too pedagogical. Aaron Ashley’s ambitious sweeping history of the Earth and the mineral zircon and Johan Larson’s description of cacao pests each work as a form of communication but less so as conceptually and visually robust art.

The films that use science as a point for creative departure are the strongest. Ashley and Ruby Holmes’ Immanence and its Distortions is a moving visual ode to the process of coral spawning. The film shows the rhythmic night-time dance of spawning pink egg and sperm bundles as they are released from coral polyps and and float up into azure liquidity. Even though made under scientific conditions the filming is mesmerising, the quality of the rendering glossy, the colour sharp and sexy.

As Chopin’s Nocturne sounds, the camera zooms out and the viewer realises they are not watching coral spawning once-removed, but through a screen, one framed and gilded. As the camera continues to zoom outward, the image reveals a Spanish or Mexican shrine-like installation with many more frames and an inset tiny scroll. A wunderkammer collection of lit candles and dried white coral forms fills the final shot. So framed, the coral spawning feels aligned with the past, as if already lost.

Donna Maree Robinson’s Pathogenicity is also a lustrous creation, despite its imagery being drawn from water samples collected for the Mackay Council Water and Waste Laboratory. The video displays concentric, boldly coloured disc shapes twisting within each other. Inside each circle is a kind of lava-lamp movement—unctuous, gleaming, rolling. Exploring the microbiological colour change processes used by scientists to measure water bacteria, Robinson takes us through a portal to reflect on the invisible aspects of a finite resource that flows within all things. Synthesised sounds and the rubbing of a finger around a wine glass reinforce the work’s cyclical motif, evoking water’s essence. The hypnotic fluidity of the movement of the disks inclines the viewer to slowly tilt their head from side to side in another mesmeric and contemplative creation.

Some of the works, while conceptually and visually strong, jeopardise the original meaning and purpose of the scientific data. In Katya Venter’s Un-In-Vaded, for example, created in partnership with Reef HQ Aquarium, the silhouette of a cityscape is overlaid on film of a seabed with ocean rocks and inquisitive reef fish. Animated black drawings combine human features with tentacles to create hybrids that swim in this ‘city in the sea’ with the fishes. It’s a big departure from the original film data and the reason behind the juxtaposition is not clarified beyond pointing to the similarities between humans and reef life.

Graeme Sullivan writes that the status of the artist is one of a “cultural lamplighter, human visionary, and educator” (Art practice as research: Inquiry in the visual arts. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2005). Emergence provides examples of the magic with which artists can illuminate complex knowledge as well as underlining the challenges of shining light on data and expressing it in a captivating, communicative way.

Emergence, curator Michelle Hall, JCU eMerge Gallery, Townsville, 19 Feb-27 March

The works in Emergence will be screened at COCA Theatre Cairns, 15 April and shown at CQU Conservatorium, Mackay 13-23 May.

The death of any stellar figure in rock and pop’s pantheon of propped-up puppets instigates numerous public relations crises. Most entail pseudo-ethical means of exploiting while commemorating, honouring the star’s passing while recouping long-term investment in their career. This is entirely acceptable: rock and pop stars work within an industry. Fawning outrage over their post-mortem commercialism is disingenuous. Far more offensive is the angsting over how one should respectfully acknowledge their legacy.

The post-mortem hagiography of David Bowie is a salient demonstration of this irksome moralising over the assignation of tributes to his audiovision. Out from the damp chipboard of rock and pop’s image-hoarding crept a gaggle of singer-songwriters on whom the industry could confer the temporary crown for voicing their respect to their fallen gladiator of Glam. The uppermost echelon of this hustling tower of pop Babel is the Grammys. What worldly—nay, universal—responsibility the chosen performer will carry upon his or her Olympian shoulders. Who would have thought so many people would come to bury David Bowie?

Bowie had been preparing himself for erasure from the world of rock and pop for quite some time. The most recent signs were managerial. From his incorporation of economic selfhood via the securitising of bonds signed with his name-brand to the start of near-death lyrical projections with Hours (1997), to the projective haunting symbolically threaded through the musical Lazarus (2015, with playwright Enda Walsh) and his final albums The Next Day (2015) and Blackstar (2016). But the early signs were theatrical. He killed off the fictional Ziggy Stardust in his tacky messianic narrative of The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars (1972)—a great-sounding proto-Glam hyper-electric album, but textually on par with a Ken Russell script. Then not too long afterwards on his 1974 US tour, he ditched the mash-up of Broadway showbiz glitz and wannabe-Burroughs dystopianism for the staging of Diamond Dogs (1974)—possibly Bowie’s best album despite its literary portentousness. Halfway through the tour and embattled by frightfully expensive logistics, Bowie radically reduced the staging. The concerts are documented on the second worst live double-album ever released: David Live (1975). (The worst? David Bowie’s Stage, 1978.) The only saving grace of this debacle is the weird image Bowie crafted, dressed in a baby blue zoot suit and vibrant Henna-red hair combed back like an androgynous 50s delinquent. Most of the concert photos from the tour are fuzzy and indistinct, contradicted by harsh arc-spot lighting. Did Lady Gaga think similarly when she chose to reference this look for her live tribute performance on the Grammys?

Let’s do the semiotics. In his original get-up, Bowie looked like a white bayou ghost of James Brown made up like Marlene Dietrich and wearing a stage outfit stolen from The Stylistics. He dreamt he was all three Staples Singers rolled into one, but as evidenced on David Live, he sounded like Foghorn Leghorn doing Rufus Thomas. In her haute-couture homage, Lady Gaga colours her shoulder-padded suit white and adds some naff brocade. I’m sorry, but she looks like a squat theatre student doing drag king cosplay of Lt Gay Ellis from Gerry & Sylvia Anderson’s UFO (1970). But bizarrely, she sounds like Bowie on David Live: hoarse, dull, barking. Watching her performance initially was a cringeworthy experience. Then I remembered how woeful David Live is. At the time of that album’s release, it dawned on me that despite all the great momentary fragments, images and poses, Bowie left a trail of embarrassing tchotchkes. That’s how Bowie’s career panned out: a long line of stunning fake gems threaded onto long stretches of plastic barbed wire. Was this what Lady Gaga was honouring? Was this what the Grammys came to mourn?

Within America’s post-70s over-therapied self-obsessed culture, all successful rock and pop music intent on flaunting ‘newness’ seems equally bent on facilitating plurality and eclecticism for its populace. Maybe it starts with Alice Cooper. One can easily draw a low-brow suburban through-line from him to Marilyn Manson to Insane Clown Posse to Lady Gaga. They all psycho-babble about society, tribes, identity, self, expression, communality, difference and reflection. Bowie’s long-standing fascination with reflecting the sci-fi decay of the United States (from “Panic In Detroit” to “Fame” to “Black Out” to “Fashion” to “This Is Not America” to “Day In Day Out” to “I’m Afraid Of Americans”) formed a tacit backdrop for the staging of these recording artists. Consequently, Lady Gaga has over the last decade succeeded in being a quasi-feminist version of this anthropological averment of Otherness. It has been curious to witness her strategy limp forward: riffing off Madonna’s sampling of Abba’s “Gimme Gimme Gimme” (1975) for her hit “Hung Up” (2005) while performing tacky pantomime interpretations of Matthew Barney’s deluded follies. Essentially Billy Joel in Rocky Horror drag, Lady Gaga’s songwriting displaces her from Madonna’s trajectory, which always aimed for a hedonistic utopian nexus between Warhol’s Studio 54 and Sondheim’s Broadway. So despite all that feels wrong about her initially, Lady Gaga is the logical successor to the American reconstruction of David Bowie.

While I entertain the perversion that Gaga and Barney are the Siegfried and Roy of desperately modish contemporary culture, Lady Gaga’s David Bowie Tribute for the 58th Annual Grammys was more pathetically Las Vegas than I could have imagined. It starts off with her in close-up, holding still while murmuring “Space Oddity” as facial-mapped animation is projected on her face. It’s as artful as an aisle in K-Mart selling Venetian masks. This is but one ‘hi-tech’ feature of her Intel-sponsored showcase.

Released online simultaneously is an embarrassing documentary showing the overwrought ‘creativity’ behind-the-scenes that resulted in the Grammys’ flaccid live televisual event. Following her Smartphone booth intro of ‘technology placement,’ Gaga the performer bursts forth with a 20-piece show band. What follows is a frenetic overture compacting eight Bowie hits into undifferentiated musical drivel: “Changes,” “Ziggy,” “Suffragette City,” “Rebel, Rebel,” “Fashion,” “Fame,” “Let’s Dance,” “Heroes.” Even though the band boasts Nile Rogers, it’s on par with the Paul Shaffer Band from Letterman’s Tonight Show. For six minutes, we hear nothing but predictably professional playing and alarmingly anaemic arrangements. The sound is numbing, typical of contemporary instruments, amps and FX being corralled into a thin, amplified reality. The implicit ideology behind this televisual aesthetic desires to counter ‘studio trickery’ with the direct sound of ‘real players’ with ‘real instruments.’ It always sounds lame and insipid, by attempting to suppress the aural transfiguration unleashed by the studio’s laboratory environment. This is why Stage sonically sucks: hearing all those unworldly anacoustic songs from Low, Heroes and The Lodger played by session musos through bad stage acoustics. David Live is the sound of Glam dying right before your ears. Weirdly, Intel’s sponsorship attempted to claim the opposite. The ridiculous robotic piano stand (about as thrilling as watching the robot Twiki dance from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century [1980]), and the downright stupid Curie Ring™ (a glorified Bluetooth mouse which generated facile trail-graphics on screens behind the singer) were meant to unleash unimaginable creativity. Gaga’s frenetic, flailing live performance perfectly captured this contradiction, because its live sound reinforced the obvious: David Bowie is dead.

Almost three weeks into the Sydney Biennale and we’ve already sampled some pretty striking performances. In Boris Charmatz’ Manger (see our 13 April E-dition) an incredibly dedicated company of dancers defied all manner of OH&S by putting themselves though 40 minutes of peristaltic convulsion and ecstatic seizure on the concrete floor of Carriageworks, all the while consuming a stash of edible paper. In a tight spot on Level 2 of the MCA, Adam Linder’s Some Proximity (one performer of the three down on the day we saw it) wove prose into gliding movement, using randomly gathered texts pinned to the wall as an impetus for some eloquent locomotion, not always revealing in the juxtaposition.

Meanwhile, Norwegian dance artist Mette Edvardsen worked some quiet magic in two contrasting and poetic works. I couldn’t get to it but word on the first, titled Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine, was glowing with many people signing up for a second visit. Staged at Newtown Library, it involved a group of local dancers/performers memorising chapters from a series of books. Audience members chose a volume from a list of possibilities and then located their reader who, in turn, led them to another part of the library and, seated opposite or casually strolling alongside, imparted the text from memory.

In her solo performance No Title, Edvardsen is interested in “how reality exists in language and how this extends into real space… how memory and imagination blur” (artist’s website www.metteedvardsen.be). The use of lists is a commonplace in performance but in this case, the framework is powerfully deployed.

Edvardsen stands before her seated audience, her appearance unremarkable except for the fact that her eyes are closed. In a while she announces, “One leg and one arm—gone. Balance—gone. Me—not gone.”

And so begins a subtly unfolding tragedy in which our fears of death, of unstoppable destruction, of vanishing landscapes, the extinction of species are called up as Edvardsen in plainly articulated speech moves undramatically through the space of Carriageworks Track 8, simply reporting one by one the end of the world of ordinary things we have come to know and love.

“Facing the light
Being warmed by the light
Falling
Floating
Flying
All gone.”

Blindly, she walks in a circle around the empty space. It’s more of an ellipse but not bad, considering. Returning centrestage she reveals flatly, “Going in circles—gone.” There’s a ripple of relieved laughter. Who needs circles anyway? Gradually, as in Peter Handke’s play Kaspar (1967), the language becomes more surreal: “Me not all/ Me not gone/ Not all/ But gone.”

Edvardsen draws a straight chalk line through the middle of the space. Again, it’s not too shabby whereas erasing it ramps up the degree of difficulty. Again, tension eases. Later, in the one seemingly superfluous gesture of the performance she places a set of painted paper eyes over hers. But it’s the visions playing behind our own eyes holding our attention.

“First row—gone
Closeness—gone
Floods and dimmers
Power supply
Green Emergency Exit light gone
The corners of the room are gone
The foreground and background gone
What this space has told you already
Gone.
Clouds sliding in opposite directions
Gone.”

I’m thinking, she’s forgotten the sound of trains travelling back and forth on the tracks so close to Carriageworks and the barely detectable rhythm of the audience breathing. Maybe these will remain?

20th Biennale of Sydney, Mette Edvardsen, No Title, Track 8, Carriageworks, Sydney, 19 March

There’s a slight danger when a highly regarded artist in another medium makes a feature film that the result will fail to meet expectations raised by the artist’s expertise in their accustomed field. Novelist Julia Leigh’s thematically interesting yet aesthetically flat Sleeping Beauty (2011), which she both wrote and directed, is a recent case in point. Theatre director Simon Stone, simultaneously acclaimed and criticised for his signature reinterpretations of classic plays, dispels this fear with a cinematically assured debut feature, following an initial experience directing one of the short films that make up The Turning anthology (2013); Stone also has a background as a film and TV actor.

The Daughter is an extension of Stone’s customary theatrical practice, being loosely based on his stage production of The Wild Duck, itself a significant reworking of Ibsen’s play. The film presents us with a similar array of characters: Geoffrey Rush’s unendearing landowner, Henry Neilson, whose impending nuptials follow the closure of his timber mill (which heralds the town’s demise); Christian (Paul Schneider), his returned estranged son; Sam Neill’s broken patriarch Walter, who lives with his happily married son Oliver (Ewen Leslie)—a far more sympathetic character than Ibsen’s Hjalmar Ekdal—daughter-in-law Charlotte (Miranda Otto) and their luminous daughter Hedvig (Odessa Young), possessor of the wild duck.

Despite the reinvention of the story as a contemporary Australian scenario, the narrative set-up still suggests a theatrical, larger-than-life contrivance, a sense of archetypes being brought together to lock horns; the title itself bears this out. The Daughter is more mythic than naturalistic, beautifully realised in Andrew Commis’ cinematography which, with its sylvan scenes of mist-shrouded woods and lakeside landscape (alpine scenery that recalls the Scandinavian setting of the source material) coupled with the elegiac appeal of the rapidly depopulating Australian country town, creates a domain that seems to hover fantastically outside time and place. Hedvig has a tryst with her boyfriend in a massive grove of towering trees. Characters laugh and argue in darkened interiors that are softened and dreamlike. Much of the film takes place at dusk, or later. Imminent betrayal and destruction loom like storm clouds over this Edenic locale, a microcosm of which is found in the small bushland animal sanctuary created by Hedvig and her grandfather.

Anti-naturalistic too is the film’s minimalist use of sound. The most heightened scenes of anger, sadness and bliss are characterised by the deliberate avoidance of diegetic sound, with the occasional exception of the merest hint of a heartbeat. In one slowed-down sequence, Hedvig is pulled behind a speedboat, reclining and laughing, the silence that blankets the scene lending a transcendent serenity. A less effective decision, perhaps, was to have dialogue frequently overlapping two or more scenes. There’s an interesting initial fluidity to this, but the more it’s repeated, the more it seems like an affectation with no deeper significance.

The Daughter shows its dramatic heritage in a range of emotions writ large. Ewen Leslie’s Oliver is an exuberant jokester whose warm-hearted devotion to his family somewhat belies his behaviour towards the end of the film, even considering the revelation which prompts it. Paul Schneider skilfully conveys the darkness that can emerge when good intentions are perverted by despair, while Neill’s performance as the eccentric Walter is engaging and comparatively understated. Odessa Young, an impressive new performer who was also very strong in Sue Brooks’ Looking for Grace (2015), is a standout, embodying Hedvig’s youthful passion with utter conviction.

While Miranda Otto and Anna Torv make a pair of graceful spouses to Oliver and Neilson respectively, their characters aren’t written with a great deal of complexity. Not even skeletons in her closet can make Otto’s decent, loving Charlotte (an interesting diversion from Ibsen’s Gina, who exists more solidly as her own person) much more than a foil to her husband and, to a lesser extent, her daughter.

As events spiral towards a drastic denouement, the cinematography begins to mirror what’s happening, moving away from still, stately shots to handheld camerawork that captures the agitation of a husband’s confrontation of his wife. Towards the end, some of The Daughter’s fine cinematic sensibility is marred by histrionics (a contrast with the deliberate suppression of sound in previous scenes). This excessiveness makes it a little harder to invest in each character’s personal fate. Yet the powerful atmosphere evoked over the course of the film, of an idyllic community slowly leaking its lifeblood, ensures The Daughter’s overarching theme of innocence lost is ever striking and tangible.

The Daughter, writer, director Simon Stone, cinematography Andrew Commis, production design Steven Jones-Evans, art direction Maxine Dennett, editing Veronika Jenet, score Mark Bradshaw, distributor Roadshow Films, 2016

Brett Dean’s Pastoral Symphony is by turns tranquil and terrifying, a beautiful and passionate decrial of the destruction of pastoral idylls so lauded in 19th century music. Led by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s new principal conductor David Robertson, the work opens with distant sounds of natural chaos: viola murmurings, a gong and lengths of shaken aluminium foil mingle with an electronic track of recorded birdsong—a sonic forest. Piano notes drift longingly and in the vast concrete and metal space of Carriageworks the lighting design mottles like sun filtering through a canopy.

Dean is the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s first ever Artist-in-Residence and this work was a highlight of the inaugural concert of the orchestra’s new contemporary music series in partnership with Carriageworks.

The Symphony (a name chosen for its associations more than as a description of musical form) begins as a celebration of the natural sounds of the Australian bush, but there is a sense of menace. Pianist Jacob Abela leans into the instrument to strike the strings with a percussion mallet. The steady beat of axe on wood thumps through the sound system, first one tree falls, then the next. The chaos becomes more insistent, panicked even, the strings rhythmic as whip birds crack. The forest screams and goes quiet, rages and deflates. The brass cry out and before long the forest is filled with the fast snare drum rhythms of pop music and the sound of cars speeding past. The work fades out with a rattling of industrial noise and a final deep-echoing crash.

The Pastoral Symphony is followed by a very different evocation of the natural world. Based on pencil drawings of seascapes by Latvian-American artist Vija Celmins, Australian composer Lisa Illean’s Land’s End is a new work commissioned by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Her music is hushed and understated. Strings slide delicately on the edge of hearing, the bass drum rumbles softly, the work inhabiting a liminal space on the edge of silence. The use of a sheet of aluminium foil as an instrument is a visual as well as aural motif linking Land’s End to Dean’s Symphony. A creeping sonic figure softly crosses the ensemble over gently weeping pitch-bends. Microtonal tunings create a mildly unsettling dissonance that threads through the work. The sound-world is so fragile that small gestures gain enhanced significance; glissandi become soft tears across the fabric of the orchestra’s sound. A gentle lapping conjures the movement of tides and waves, before the music evaporates like steam.

The soft hiss of bass drum skin opens the first movement of Gérard Grisey’s Quatre Chants pour Franchir le Seuil (Four Songs for Crossing the Threshold). Like Land’s End, Grisey’s Quatre Chants… brushes the borders of sound and silence, but here the chilling effect of the almost imperceptible entry is disfigured by a wash of lighting, the border between darkness and light awkwardly well-defined. Grisey’s final work—the last before his unexpected death from an aneurysm at age 52—employs Javanese gongs and, like Illean’s work, microtonal tunings.

The first song, La Mort de l’ange (The Death of the Angel), is a setting of poetry by Christian Guez-Ricord. Chicago-based Australian soprano Jessica Aszodi’s articulate, accented interjections and soft sustained notes give the grief of the text a disturbing clarity. Her keening voice reaches out to that of the trumpet, their timbres mingling. Hissing skin decorates the silence between movements, Grisey’s “insubstantial musical particles intended to maintain a level of polite but slackened silence” (program notes).

In La Mort de la civilisation (The Death of Civilisation), a setting of Egyptian sarcophagus inscriptions, a repeating plucked figure in the harp proceeds solemnly. La Mort de la voix (The Death of the Voice) opens with bell-like chiming and jagged soprano line, high violin notes disintegrating into bright shards. The interlude between the third and fourth movements is a threatening rumble and hiss before the cataclysmic climax of the work, La Mort de l’humanité (The Death of Humanity). The text Grisey set for his final movement comes from the ancient Mesopotamian poem The Epic of Gilgamesh, and depicts an apocalyptic flood: “Squalls, Pelting rains, Hurricanes.” Brushes on the bass drum mutter of rain, thunder rolls across the percussion section and cries of violin, piccolo and piccolo trumpet rend the air. Aszodi screams above the carnage, delivering her lines with jabbering, unhinged vigour. A bass drone introduces the work’s denouement: a cathartic lullaby from Aszodi to an uneven, swaying accompaniment. There is a sense of peace. It is, as Grisey writes, “music of the dawn of a humanity finally unencumbered by nightmare” (program notes).

The program opened with a late addition: Pierre Boulez’s Dérive 1, in memory of the composer who died in January this year. Robertson, a colleague of Boulez, conducted a small ensemble of musicians from the SSO who, along with French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard—appointed by Boulez as Ensemble InterContemporain’s first solo pianist—deftly navigated Boulez’s trill-laden fluttering and crisp subito dynamic changes.

Crossing the Threshold was a beautiful, challenging and elegantly programmed tribute to both Pierre Boulez and new music more broadly; the sell-out crowd a vindication of David Robertson’s vision and an encouraging sign that Sydney can sustain, indeed craves, more of this kind of concert.

The second of the two concerts for 2016, on 20 November, is titled Oblique Strategies. Conducted by Brett Dean, it will feature works by Steve Reich, Frederic Rzewski, Dean himself and premieres from Australian composers Natasha Anderson and Alexander Garsden.

The SSO at Carriageworks: Crossing the Threshold, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, 13 March

While discourse about climate change increases daily in the media, we remain largely ignorant of what is happening on our doorstep in the Pacific. Latai Taumoepeau is one artist combatting this, making work for years now that focuses on the effects of this calamity in her ancestral homeland Tonga and its neighbours (read a review of Taumoepeau’s Repatriate I and II).

Disaffected, drawn from a concept by the work’s creative producer Katy Green Loughrey, is a collaboration with performers Valerie Berry and Ryuichi Fujimura and director Kym Vercoe, developed in residency at Blacktown Arts Centre over a four-year period. The large Pacific community in Sydney’s west was a contributing force, most notably in Sean Bacon’s accompanying video Affected, which played in the adjacent room. Affected cut interviews with residents about their threatened homelands with imagery of the three performers dancing chest deep in the ocean. Loss of country is a familiar story in an immigrant nation, yet climate causality is new.

With its immersive darkness and Tom Hogan’s audio building with gradual menace, the beginning of the performance promised a dynamic experience. Moving through story, image and movement, Disaffected placed the individual firmly in context and brought emotional resonance to the issue. In a trio combining skill and personality, Berry’s account of the 2009 dust storm in Sydney was one of the most deeply affecting scenes, especially for this writer who experienced the event as images only when living overseas.

Fujimura spoke of the single pine that survived from a forest of 70,000 after the 2006 tsunami in his native Japan. The pine became a sort of cenotaph, invested with so much symbolism that when it began to die, a process of preservation was embarked upon that was so costly and arduous it elicited much criticism. The pathos of the ‘Miracle Pine Tree’ was emblematised in a blue sculptural prop, garlanded with fairy lights, carried with reverence from the edge to centre stage.

The effect of natural catastrophes on cultural materiality came to the fore more than ever with Taumoepeau’s monologue about the fabrication of long shell garlands—Beroana, or ‘shell money’, displayed in certain ceremonies. Taumoepeau used a giant ceramic replica gifted to her by artist Taloi Havini, of Bougainville heritage. This ancient blend of resource, ritual and ‘art object’ is one of a myriad that die with the environment. Taumoepeau’s great gestural gifts carried this monologue as eloquently as her words.

The power of these individual stories was not matched by the recorded voiceover, partly since it provided more impersonal information, also because the production as a whole was so busy, effects overlapping one another to the point at times of swamping them. Storms were naturally frequent, Amber Silk’s lighting in turns flickering, glaucous, glowing hot and, at its most subtle, conveying empty devastation.

Props such as corrugated iron and blue tarp were used to varying success. The iron, such a familiar workaday material of colonised Oceania as to be totemic, crescendoed to violent tempest in the hands of Fujimura. The blue tarps, signifying waves, were less convincing.

The energy and commitment of the performers was relentless, as they shouted, wailed, ran and rolled across the floor. We sat around the perimeter of the room on mattresses and cushions, the setting reminiscent of a disaster shelter, our comfort compared to their duress making for slightly uneasy viewing.

I did sometimes long for more space and reflection. The Butoh and Bodyweather training of the performers could have been drawn upon more. Viewed in terms of Taumoepeau’s single body of work on these themes, I felt the impact of Disaffected not as strong both in aesthetic and political terms. Yet that is not the main point. Disaffected is a refined and captivating piece of theatre: it should have seasons elsewhere.

It is striking how much good art, from visual to performing, at reasonable prices, is going on out west—Campbelltown, Penrith, Bankstown, Casula. Once upon a time, Disaffected would have received a season in the inner city at Performance Space. This seems unlikely now. So forget Sydney Theatre Company and its $80 pageants. Check the bills of our outer suburban arts centres, consider the conviviality of a train trip from Redfern: the balance of a reasonable ticket price is sure to get you a great meal out there as well.

Disaffected, concept Katy Green Loughrey, director Kym Vercoe, performers, devisors Valerie Berry, Ryuichi Fujimura, Latai Taumoepeau, composer Tom Hogan, dramaturg, designer Carlos Gomes, movement consultant Victoria Hunt, lighting designer Amber Silk, creative producer Katy Green Loughrey; Blacktown Arts Centre, 17-20 March

“A groundbreaking version of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya…the fourth wall of traditional theatre resoundingly broke down as the audience perched amid the action, inside and out.”
Norie Neumark, Real Time

This acclaimed two-day, live-in, site-specific production, premiered in Avoca in 2015, now travels to the regional Victorian towns of Steiglitz, April 9 & 10, and Eganstown, April 16 & 17. The audience, with the performers, will move through and around the buildings in which they are staged. As well, “between the acts audience members can speak to the characters as they go about their lives. They will be invited to attend a number of talks presented about the history of the houses and the local area. They also have time to explore the local areas” (press release).

Melbourne’s La Mama, producer of this event, declares Uncle Vanya to be “the first environmentalist play. Written more than 100 years ago, it is every bit as relevant today. The character Dr Astrov says, ‘Forests are disappearing, rivers are running dry… the climate is spoiled…’ words which resonate with growing urgency. The play (subtitled A Portrait of Country Life in Four Acts) depicts the lives of its characters—the economic difficulty of living on the land, isolation, tensions around property and family inheritance, people’s resilience and deep family bonds. The themes of the play resonate strongly with contemporary issues of people living in regional Victoria” (press release).

For information about bookings, accommodation etc go to the La Mama’s website.

Georgie Meagher is firing, exhilarated by and optimistic about her choice of works by emerging artists for Next Wave. Her background in visual arts—as artist, writer, curator and director—and performance—from an MCA in Performance from the University of Wollongong to presenting her works at ANTI Festival in Finland and You and Your Work Festival at Arnolfini, Bristol—make her an ideal Next Wave artistic director, one with considerable breadth and depth of experience, practice and a commitment to contemporary art. I spoke by phone with Georgie shortly after the launch of her program.

How did you go about the process of programing and what was your time-frame?
I started in this role in September 2014 and from about week two or three we were going out and having artist meetings and travelling to capital cities and sitting down with as many artists as we could, getting recommendations from friends and colleagues in different cities, as well as past artists and just letting it be known that we’d be in town and open to meeting with any emerging artist or curator we had time to see. We go out with guns blazing at the beginning to meet as many people as possible. Then there were a series of open calls for proposals.

Talking about works is one thing. What about experiencing work? For emerging artists it’s often difficult to get attention. What are the experiential things you’re looking for? Are you looking at images of works, recordings…What else goes on beyond talking?
We definitely trying to look at recordings or preferably the real thing, as much as possible. One thing I’ve repeated to many artists is if you’re a performance artist you need to send video of your work. You can’t assess performance through still imagery. But [we look at] the Fringe Festival down here and visit artist-run spaces that provide lots of good context and real experience of artista’ works. We also have a big network and opinions that we trust.

What’s the age range of Next Wave artists?
Next Wave has gone through a shift from the early days as a youth-focused organisation to one focusing more on emerging artists and we are continuing that trend. We have quite a broad age range this festival and that’s because we haven’t actually set an age limit, particularly for our key learning program, Kickstart. That’s because we think you can be emerging and over-30 and there are lots of things that might affect when an artist is able to start developing their practice in earnest. These can include having children or not being able to afford it. These things, of course, disproportionately affect women and people from lower socio-economic sectors. We didn’t want to exclude them. The youngest artist is 23 and most, if not all are under 35. So it’s still mostly in that younger range but we’re thinking more about where people are in their careers rather than anchoring it to, you know, five years out of university or under-30 or something like that.

Tell us a bit about Kickstart and how much is invested in it.
Kickstart is the major development program that we run. Artists are selected at the end of 2014 and begin their development from a residential intensive which happened in March 2015 followed by a series of other intensives in Melbourne where we bring the whole group together to speak about the development of their work but also about issues that are important to them, that concern their practice more generally—in the first instance, issues of identity and representation, which are often concerns for emerging artists. [There] are also issues of cultural diversity and seeing that reflected in programing as well as the ethics of engaging on many different levels with communities and audiences and participants. These were among many meaty topics that came up in that first intensive and really showed us where we needed to be providing support.

This, I suppose, would relate in particular to the significant number of Indigenous artists you have in the program.
Yes, although a lot of artists are thinking about these issues, whether or not it comes through in the content of their work.

How many artists or works are supported as part of Kickstart?
We had 14 projects this time.

That’s a lot and presumably quite labour intensive?
Absolutely. Each of the projects is supported by an Associate Producer, which is a model that Next Wave has worked with for quite a long time. They are often artists in their own right and this year all three producers are artists who understand the artistic process and have empathy for it.

Let’s talk about some of the works in the program. Decolonist, for example.
Katie West’s exhibition Decolonist is on at West Space. I met Katie at Artsource Studios in Fremantle. She was incredibly shy and hadn’t exhibited much publicly. She applied to us with a project that investigated the merging of Indigenous and non-indigenous world views into a kind of third space—a kind of meeting of the two. She wanted to create an installation that was an image of what this third space could be. [In the process of] her research and development throughout the year, as often happens, the project completely shifted as you will have noticed from the title, Decolonist. She had quite a personal realization, along with an artistic and creative one, that informed the work—that the merging of these two world views was actually perhaps impossible and that the Indigenous world view needed to be [made prominent], placed at the centre, focused on and cared for and cultivated in a unique way. The way that non-indigenous world views can sneak in, seep through the corners of all parts of practice and of identity is something she began to notice in many different aspects of her life and practice.

I think conversations within the Kickstart group were quite important to Katie. When we talked in Fremantle, she spoke about how jealous she was of the community in Brisbane, where there are groups like the Indigenous artists collective ProppaNOW. Hannah Bronte, another Kickstart artist, was assistant to Richard Bell and had moved in those circles when she was growing up and going through art school and Katie really didn’t have anything like that. So I think bringing that conversation into the room at Kickstart where there were a lot of very politically engaged people, whether Indigenous or not, was important for her.

And what kind of work is this?
It’s an installation with video and sculptures made from natural materials. Katie does very delicate woven textile work but with found leaves, flowers and string. She encourages audiences to touch the work and to understand the feeling of it, which will essentially destroy it over the course of the exhibition and take it back to the earth in some way. She shows these sculptures alongside videos of herself. She’s developed meditation videos that show breathing in and breathing out in a ‘decolonised’ state of mind. This process of meditation she’s developed over the 12 months is demonstrated in these videos.

As well as your own performance work, you have a strong background in visual art. Is this a strong element in this Next Wave?
There are some really incredible exhibitions that I’m excited about. We’re also working with a number of new partners for our Emerging Curators Program including Arts Projects Australia, which works with artists with intellectual disabilities, and Liquid Architecture, an interdisciplinary organisation centred in sound. Thinking about visual arts practice but also curatorial practice in a more expansive sense is something I’ve tried to do this festival, seeing curation as more than choosing things to put on walls in an exhibition. There are a number of significant visual art works. One of them is by Eva Abbinga whose work is titled Arrival of the Rajah. Eva is another Kickstart artist and this work has been made with a community of quilters in Melbourne and Geelong. It’s a large textile sculpture that is made in response to the Rajah Quilt, one of the most precious textile art works in Australia. It’s in the NGA collection and it was made a group of convict women who were travelling on the ship called The Rajah to Australia in the early 1800s. This quilt provides an alternative colonial narrative from a feminist perspective. The original work is incredible, so meticulously detailed, an amazingly beautiful image of female collaboration and collective work.

Is this a recreation of that work?
Eva’s made a quilt that is about 12 metres wide, but it’s a large circular sculpture. She has told the story of The Rajah Quilt to many different women and asked them all to contribute different pieces to what is basically an homage or a response to it. It’s quite different aesthetically because Eva’s used natural dyed materials. It’s not mainstream quilting. The project took on a life of its own with Eva mailing out small squares to women and having them mail the completed pieces back to her and then bringing this large sculpture together through a long term process of exchange.

There’s a strong dance and performance component. What were you looking for in dance?
I’m not sure I had a specific thing in mind. The Melbourne dance scene and community is quite tightly interwoven and so we definitely wanted to make sure we were looking both within and outside of that. Two of the artists we’re working with—Angela Goh (Desert Body Creep) and Geoffrey Watson (Camel)—are both very inter-disciplinary in their practices as artists and in their collaborations. Geoffrey is into design, costume and fashion and Angela into visual arts. And that’s quite interesting to me about their practice and what it brings to their choreography and their projects. Really, we were just trying to look at—and this is the case across the board—who’s making work, who has ideas that we really want to see.

Within the dance program there’s some intriguing collaborations, for example Amrita Hepi (Bundjalung NSW/Ngapuhi NZ) and Jahra Wasasala’s (NZ) Passing, a collaboration in hip hop and contemporary dance with costumes styled by installation artist Honey Long and music by Lavern Lee.
The work’s still in progress, so I don’t want to lock anything down about it, [involves] design, installation work and amazing costumes. [Another kind of collaboration] is Emma Fishwick from WA working with composer Kynan Tan to bring a really strong audio-visual and sound component to her practice of writing and photography.

The Indigenous scope of your program looks very strong: BlaaQ Catt (Maurial Spearim), Blaksland and Lawless (Lorna Munro, Merindah Donnelly & Tjanara Talbot), Decolonist (Katie West), Thomas ES Kelly, Hannah Bronte and Amrita Hesp and Jahra Wasasala whom we’ve just mentioned.
That’s something we’re committed to in an ongoing way. One thing I’m thrilled about is that there are also Indigenous artists in two of the curatorial projects. And Indigenous voices are coming through in various publications and events. We’re trying to embed Indigenous presence in everything we do, ensuring those voices are being heard.

Going back to the dance program, is there an example of a dance work and its evolution in the Kickstart program you can describe?
Angela Goh came through the Kickstart program. Her work, Desert Body Creep, will be performed by herself and an over-sized Gummy Worm. Angela is very interested in the line between reality and fiction. She began at the outset of Kickstart thinking about Yvonne Rainer’s Dance is Hard to See and looking at everything being dance and everyone potentially being a choreographer. She’s opening that out and asking questions about it. Through her research, she came across the Devil Worm, which is found in prehistoric groundwater a number of kilometres towards the centre of the Earth. [Its discovery] completely changed the way people thought about what sort of conditions are necessary to sustain life as we know it. It’s one of those moments that completely shakes the ground upon which we all stand, theoretically speaking, in terms of what we know and don’t know. This idea of mystery Angela takes to the next step, looking at intuition and almost going to magic. Angela’s work in development— which I’m sure has changed a lot since I last saw it—is remarkably funny in a way that I didn’t expect at all. She’s incredibly intelligent and articulate in the way she speaks about her ideas and her work but also can come across as a very serious person. I have to say it was quite surprising, and hilarious, when she commenced animating a large Gummy Worm with a broomstick during a work-in-progress showing.

Another of the dance projects I’m really excited about is Under My Skin. I can’t wait to see how it unfolds. The Delta Project (VIC) is a group of both hearing and deaf dancers. Their choreography weaves Auslan into the movement. There will be parts that only deaf audiences will understand and there will be text and sounds at other times that only hearing audiences will understand. And the artists have created the work with these parallel experiences completely in mind.

What do you think you’ve brought to Next Wave?
I think this festival has been made in collaboration with the artists who are part of the festival, and particularly the Kickstart artists. The conversations that began in that first Kickstart intensive really drove the direction of what we knew we needed to think about and talk about in the festival itself. Keeping myself open to those conversations is the reason I didn’t set a theme for the festival this year. [More crucial] is to be able to be responsive to what is urgent and important to those artists we’re working with and particularly to artists who may be Indigenous or TSI or culturally diverse or who might have disability.

What happens, of course, is that regardless of the absence of a theme, some big shared ideas will doubtless emerge.
That will definitely happen but I’m leaving out the one single lens through which to look at everything. That allows more openness and for different types of connections to form between projects that I might not have thought about, which I think is much more exciting.

In a world familiar but not, we come face to face with profoundly strange humans, their bodies gloriously embellished with but made awkward by volumetrically eccentric head pieces, leggings and skirt-coats. Two equally odd characters, if of a different ilk—elegant, fashionable women—hymn ambiguously to the sun:

“immolateus plasmaperfect
we crave your soft little red little
nucleus/ nuke-kiss/ nuke-kiss/ new kiss/ kiss me
kiss/ (nuke) my skin all cancertender
kiss me.”

The singers are characters in a recreation of Victory Over The Sun, the seminal Futurist opera conceived and staged in St. Petersburg in 1913 by Russian futurist artists Aleksei Kruchenykh, libretto, Mikhail Matyushin, music and with set and costumes by Kazimir Malevich. The work has been re-invented in 2016 by visual artist Justene Williams and Sydney Chamber Opera.

As their hymn turns into a defiant tango, these Strongwomen, fierce, glamorous sopranos, reveal their determination to capture the Sun, box it in concrete and celebrate the “multi-faceted” dark. The work’s non-naturalistic characters embody various states of being—Bad Man, Vast Man, Time Traveller, New Human etc—and the plot is a broad arc full of bewildering events that lead up to and observe the consequences of the Sun’s capture. A New Human celebrates its digitised body but is anxious, “We have executed our own history,” while the one formally named character, who symbolises history, Nero/Caligula (the remarkable Mitchell Riley executing huge vocal swoops), despairs, “I will slide into another century/ hidden in the folds of a quotation mark.” A Traveller reports, “In the future?where I visited, yesterday,?some of my best friends are weaponry.“

In 2016, we seem to be helplessly living out our escalating digitisation, but the points of reference in Victory Over the Sun are equally those of the Russian Futurists of 1913, their aspirations and fears juxtaposed with ours via the recreation of a pivotal 20th century avant-garde anti-opera. This new version implicitly claims Victory Over the Sun for opera, but without relinquishing the dark energy, eccentricity, wit and passion we imagine of the original and its bold ‘what-if’ scenario. It’s a remarkable fusion, oscillating between past, present and grim speculation but with an acerbic, often comic sense of pervasive nonsense, resonant with extreme vocal delivery, exaggerated movement and bizarre costuming. Much of it flies past, sung and declaimed words and surtitles grasped for, but it doesn’t matter, the scale and sweep of the vision is enthralling.

This contemporary Victory Over the Sun sings, dances and moves to an engrossingly propulsive keyboard-led score from a tight ensemble seated in a circle at one end of the traverse staging, an integral visual component of the work. From within a tight framework, the music embodies and reinforces the extravagance of the rest of the production with theremin, sounds and effects that belie the scale of the small ensemble. There’s little known of the original 1913 score; all that remains is a badly transcribed fragment. But the 100 years between now and then is heard in the theremin, invented in 1928, Minimalism maybe, the tango certainly, the Moog sound familiar from Wendy Carlos’ Switched on Bach (1968) and, for my ears, not a little Prog Rock in the keyboard alongside the more ambiguous tonalities and jagged shapings of ‘contemporary classical.’ Keith Emerson died 10 March; I wasn’t a fan of Emerson, Lake and Palmer (founded 1970), but recognised Emerson’s agility with the Moog and admired the keyboardism of fellow prog rockers Rick Wakeman of Yes (founded 1968) and Tony Banks of Genesis (founded 1967), often forgiving their many musical excesses. I was doubtless hearing things, but Victory Over the Sun is nothing less than a treasure house for a century of associations and is, above all, dreamlike, if verging on nightmare when we are faced with the future we are inventing for ourselves—very different from the one envisaged by the Futurists, but no less alarming in the ways we continue to challenge nature and our bodies.

At a forum held at the MCA (Translating History: Justene Williams and Sydney Chamber Opera in Conversation, 31 March), composer Huw Belling said that when Justene Williams described what she was doing as “baroque grunge,” he thought, “You beauty… I can be myself.” With ravishing ornamentation, Belling has composed a tight-knit, swirling chamber score centred around the keyboard (Jack Symonds) alongside theremin (Symonds also), piccolo and alto flute (Jane Bishop), viola and viola d’amore (James Wannan) and electric and bass guitars (Joe Manton), collectively elevated at times to orchestral dimensions and space opera theatrics by electronics and sound design (Belling, Matthew McGuigan, Alex Goldstein). The theremin’s glides are echoed in voices and other instruments while the sources of, say, percussive sounds—a beautiful gonging over which soprano voices soar—were not evident. The Futurists’ Victory Over the Sun was in part a reaction against a Wagner opera craze in Russia at the time, resulting in a work with only a piano, no arias, neither characters nor plot in the conventional sense. Belling’s new score for the work is at once challenging and engaging, sustaining the impulse of the original.

Victory Over the Sun depicts a revolutionary overthrow of the star at the centre of our planetary system, provider of our energy, determiner of our sense of time and space and symbol of traditional power. The Strongmen in the original capture the Sun in a black box, aiming to create a new future for humanity. From the original text, designs and a fragment of the score, visual artist Justene Williams and Sydney Chamber Opera have fashioned a largely new work brimming over with invention, anarchic fervour and a sense of artistic, if not political, transformation. Save for its revolutionary artistic drive, even the original was politically opaque. As librettist Pierce Wilcox explained at the forum about the work, insider knowledge was required to recognise political references amid the nonsensical lexicon and neologisms of ZAUM, the anti-language deployed by the Futurists to undo logic and the literary establishment.

The black box in the production of 1913, painted on a stage cloth, anticipated Malevich’s famous painting of 1915, Black Square. In the traverse staging of this new production, it’s an impressive, tall, black perspex box dominating centre-stage in an old timber-beamed building on Cockatoo Island; above it, in a transparent case, is the Sun, its rays at times blazing across us before it’s captured and slowly lowered into the black box.

For Malevich and the Futurists the removal of the Sun’s rays would allow our senses greater play in the dark, realising a new awareness of time, space and human potential. However, their vision was neither programmatic nor rational; the work was, and is now, invigoratingly nonsensical, but nonetheless loaded with striking images, observations and, in the end, potential contemporary meanings.

Malevich’s costume designs are wonderfully realised by Justene Williams with a mix of fidelity and invention. In particular, the artists collectively felt the need to reflect the much transformed gender relations of our time compared with those of 1913. As Rosamund Bartlett—a British specialist in Russian literature and translator of the original text from which librettist Pierce Wilcox worked—explained in a deeply engaging and entertaining lecture at the MCA (Malevich and the Black Square: 100 Years On, 23 March), the Russian Futurists followed the masculinist code of their Italian peers in the making of Victory Over the Sun—no female characters and a libretto using only masculine nouns. In this new version, the Strongmen are now Strongwomen but, unlike the other characters, Williams has not dressed the pair in Malevich’s disjunctive collaging of geometric and volumetric shapes (soon to be expanded on in Picasso’s costumes for the dance work Parade in 1917 and The Triadic Ballet in 1922 by Bauhaus visual artist and choreographer Oskar Schlemmer).

The two near-identical soprano Strongwomen—wonderfully sung and performed by Jessica O’Donoghue and Sarah Toth—are glitteringly high-hatted, long-legged, high-heeled and draped front and back with a transparent plastic that stylishly aligns them with the centre-stage perspex boxes. They are clearly 21st century women. The other 13 characters—distributed between seven actors, singers and dancers accompanied by an 18-strong chorus—are largely costumed in the Malevich mode, with some witty variations. Another costume with a heightened contemporary look is given to a Time Traveller, a female figure (Hannah Cox), appearing to be a self-illuminating cyborg, clothed top to toe in a tight-fitting metallic-sheen jumpsuit evenly covered in hundreds of small nodules that refract light. The Malevich costumes noticeably distort and restrict bodies (something Williams says she delights in), making for intriguing appearances and movement, collectively suggesting a mutant ecology. This meshes finely with the world of our own evoked in Wilcox’s libretto.

If the Futurists aspired to create a new non-naturalistic art free of restraint, to override nature and exult in masculine power, we aspire to ‘de-gender,’ globalise and make a better future for ourselves out of the Singularity of becoming one with digital technology: “Live/ Where the datasphere whispers crack, fizz, /the blood shouts with narcotic truth/ the eyes read every spectrum?/Take my body for raw material.”

At the MCA, Wilcox commented that in the original, despite the joy of capturing the Sun, the work ends on a sombre note, as if the revolution has gone too far. Artistic speculation has unleashed fear. Similarly in this new version, the erasure of difference results in entropy, nothing grows, “[everything] changes everyday, so no-body knows where to have lunch,” and, as musical director Jack Symonds described it, the final part of the score becomes “a cloud of unknowing, dismembered, single grains of sound.”

Victory Over the Sun makes explicit concerns about progress; the New Human points to its ambiguities, “We built an organ factory where you can get anything: eyes for the blind, hearts for the psychopath, arms for the pacifist. Another character asks, ”whose hand can I hold in a thousandyear?/ will you still have a hand/ will it be warm and willing/ will it be gunmetal tentacle spiked/ and where did you put all your skin? … what is victory/ without a fleshmatefriend to share it with?”

It occurred to me that in an era of extreme dependence on electricity and, above all, digital tools and massive electronic networks, we should re-estimate our relationship with the Sun. A major solar flare could be more than merely disruptive and the consequences regressive, in ways good and bad, but most likely disastrous. It’s not enough to just back up your files.

Any future for Victory Over the Sun?

Is there a ‘back-up’ of this production of Victory Over the Sun? At the MCA talk it was made clear that video of the performance will become part of Williams’ installation, still a work-in-progress on Cockatoo Island. Biennale Artistic Director Stephanie Rosenthal, who chaired the session, hoped that a copy of the performance would be made available to researchers and that the production might be remounted at some time and tour, although admitting the financial investment was considerable and of the kind biennales can manage but which might be otherwise challenging. It’s a pity; although sold out, the three performances of this remarkable work were for small audiences. The scholar Rosamund Bartlett, who revealed she’d seen unimpressive versions of Victory Over the Sun, thought this one “an absolutely brilliant recreation,” a sentiment shared by we lucky few who experienced it.

Special tribute is due to the brave, expressive and highly skilled performers—Simon Lobelson, Jessica O’Donoghue, Sarah Toth, Mitchell Riley, Hannah Cox, Danielle Mass, Eleni Schumacher; the dancers—Nicola Enrico Bruni, Olive Dwyer Corben; and the Inner West Voices choir. All were sustained and propelled by the musicians conducted by Jack Symonds within the precise staging by Justene Williams and Pierce Wilcox.

Victory Over the Sun offers a different perspective on Stephanie Rosenthal’s mantra for the 20th Biennale of Sydney, William Gibson’s “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” The future shared here is distributed chronologically, resurrected after 100 years; here again, same, same, but different. For all their masculinism, the Futurists share with us a challenge to comfortable art in uncomfortable times.

20th Biennale of Sydney, Justene Williams & Sydney Chamber Opera, Victory Over the Sun, Cockatoo Island, Sydney, 18-20 March

A functioning dance ecosystem is fuelled not only by talent, training, education and the making of works, but by choreographic hubs—like Sydney’s Critical Path and Perth’s STRUT—and Melbourne’s Dancehouse, an incubator and producer of new work. These have become organic components of Australian independent contemporary dance, fuelling emerging and established artists with classes, national and international guests and the exchange of practices and ideas. In coming weeks we’ll interview Claire Wickes, director of Critical Path, and Angela Conquet, director of Dancehouse, but first, we spoke with Cadi McCarthy, director and founder of Catapult Dance, the latest addition to Australia’s evolving dance ecology, one which adds a significant and much needed regional dimension for dance in New South Wales, embracing Newcastle and the Central Coast and Greater Hunter regions.

One of the key components of Catapult’s activities is the Propel artist-in-residence program in which McCarthy invites innovative choreographers to Newcastle, pairing them with artists from a variety of fields to create cross-artform works. Two Propel works from 2015-16—one by choreographer and dancer Kristina Chan and Newcastle filmmaker Neil Mansfield and the other by choreographer Josh Thompson and local composer and musician Zackari Watt—will soon be shown in re-worked versions at Newcastle’s Lock-Up, an adventurous gallery showing visual, sound and performance art.

The other 2015 Propel collaborations teamed choreographer Adam Blanch with Neil Mansfield, choreographer Marnie Palomares with fashion designers High Tea with Mrs Woo; and choreographer Miranda Wheen with visual designer Jessica Coughlan.

McCarthy, a 2007 Churchill Fellow, has had an extensive career as dancer and choreographer, in dance education and as Artistic Director of Perth’s Buzz Dance Theatre, 2009-2013, making work for a variety of age groups including Look the Other Way, winner of a 2014 Australian Dance Award for Outstanding Achievement in Youth and Community Dance. Now she’s created a dance home in which to house her talents and a vision for the benefit of a new generation of artists in regional Australia.

I spoke by phone with the passionately committed McCarthy about Propel. She told me that there had been Propel showings from August 2015 to January this year. She hoped to soon commence a new cycle, depending on funding, but in the meantime Propel will live on in the form of performative installations at Lock-Up, a repurposed police station and women’s prison. In Propelled, Chan and Thompson and their respective collaborators will each occupy a half of the gallery with duets danced in various rooms, promising, says McCarthy, “quite a beautiful experience.”

I asked McCarthy about her motivation for establishing Propel? She explains that after running Buzz dance company in Perth she’d come to Newcastle where she found there were many artists “but not so much contemporary dance or professional dance practice. I thought, wouldn’t it be fantastic to bring contemporary choreographers to collaborate with Newcastle-based artists working across disciplines in a three-week intensive program to see what they could come up with. I also wanted to open Newcastle artists’ eyes to contemporary dance because it hasn’t been so much part of the culture here. There was also the idea of bringing regionally based artists together with nationally based artists to see how that collision of ideas could work.”

McCarthy said that the choreographers “have been mainly creating solo works but Joshua Thompson worked with a cast of five dancers and Adam Blanch, who was involved in our first residency, worked with a cast of two. It’s up to each of the choreographers. Some have worked with film or created work on themselves. Some of the dancers are local. I’m trying to create opportunities for emerging artists in Newcastle to work at a professional level.”

Is the talent there in Newcastle, I ask. “Yes, there’s an amazing number of dance schools and young people who train in dance here, but they often leave once they get to a certain level. What I’m trying to do is to bring them back and say, hey, there are some opportunities here, some professional practice starting to happen, so come back and work with the artists [I’ve invited]. It springboards them into the professional dance world. I also try to provide work experience for Year 12 students so they get an understanding of what the practice is. So it’s about education on many levels about contemporary dance, as well as interdisciplinary practice between dance and other art forms, which I’m very interested in—the idea of pure collaboration where you both walk into the space and no-one is dictating what the terms are, and you’re working together.”

Do these artists have any prior knowledge of each other? “No, they don’t. I set up a situation where they can talk to one another for many months before the residency begins. They come up with ideas, they Skype, bounce ideas off each other. The works that have come out of these collaborations have been incredible.”

How do you choose the artists? “With the first residency I curated it based on artists I thought would come up with interesting and diverse things. Adam Blanch was formerly with Sydney Dance Company; Kristina Chan has worked in numerous collaborations. They interested me as emerging choreographers and I’ve had a lot of interaction with each of them throughout my own career as they’ve been growing as artists. They’re all NSW-based artists. That was my starting point because I wanted to have people who were close by, but I’m hoping the next Propel is going to expand beyond that.”

McCarthy says she’s still quite new to Newcastle, so some of the building of collaborations has come though word-of-mouth. I wanted a range of disciplines—composers, filmmakers, fashion designers…I just took note of what was happening in the community and asked, would you be interested? Since the first program, I’ve had lots of Newcastle artists approach me and ask, can I please be part of it. I actually have a waiting list of artists who are desperate to work in this way. It’s fantastic.”

What is Catapult, the structure within which Propel works? “We’re a not-for-profit organisation with three strands. There’s the Propel professional residency program. Then throughout the year there’s the Flipside youth project. Marnie Palomares is currently working here and Kristina Chan coming up—high calibre choreographers working intensively with young people. Then there’s the community program where we run classes, master classes and other programs for young people and adults who are interested in dance. So everyone gets to work with these professional artists and see how they approach choreographic practice. What I also try to do with the Flipside program is to provide some paid work in the form of opportunities for Newcastle-based artists to compose music alongside the choreographers. So I’m really trying to engage the whole community in different ways.”

And what are the practicalities of survival for Catapult? “The initial Propel program was funded by the Australia Council and the Flipside project by Arts NSW. We also receive some support from the City of Newcastle. Community support has been quite good. Basically, I just arrived and set up and said, ‘this is what I want to do and the community has embraced that’.”

And you found a building in Newcastle to house your vision? “I’ve established a purpose-built space with two quite big studios with sprung floors. I did it independently. And then I built the organisation around the space. Always, part of the battle is to find the right space so that was really important to me, to find a space that I could then fill with activities.”

Do you feel a strong commitment to Newcastle? “Yes, I do. Now that I’ve started Catapult I’m committed to making it work and to bringing artists here. My long-term goal is to make Newcastle a regional hub for contemporary choreographic and interdisciplinary practice. It’s a rather large town—the second largest in NSW—and there just hasn’t been this kind of support for contemporary dance in the region. Hopefully it will all work.”

Our discussion returns to the forthcoming Lock-Up season, a free access exhibition for the audience to move through. McCarthy suggests taking a look at a video of the Chan-Mansfield work which she describes as “absolutely stunning.” Joshua Thompson and Zackari Watt add to the excitement with their installation featuring well-known dancer Craig Bary and Newcastle dance and theatre practitioner Angelyn Diaz performing with reactive light and sound technologies. For Newcastle, already a city with a strong artistic bent, the addition of a contemporary dance hub with cross-artform inclinations should be a very welcome development.

The curtains part to reveal what looks like the interior of an abandoned warehouse. Streaks on the wall. Opaque windows on swinging doors. Electrical boxes. A massive black girder driving from ceiling to floor. Fluorescent lights casting a sickly glow.

Several piles of thick, coiled electrical cables sit next to the girder. An ominous sound— part storm, part wrathful static—descends upon the theatre. The cables slowly uncoil like sentient plastic snakes. They crawl across the floor and up the walls. I feel an overwhelming sense of dread in every part of my body.

I know I’m not alone in this. And so here comes the full disclosure. Betroffenheit is about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and addiction. It’s about surviving unspeakable trauma. There’s no particular trauma specified but many of us in the audience know that performer Jonathan Young of the Electric Company has sourced his own story. And we know the mind-breaking details. Although these are left unnamed it’s easy to connect the dots. Some people, much closer to Young than I, spend the entire show weeping. With effort I’m able to pull out of the emotional morass and take Betroffenheit in as a work of art.

Young is revealed in the corner of the room, head between knees. A pre-recorded internal dialogue begins. The room is Young’s fractured consciousness and his inner voices are distributed throughout it. They speak from a fuse box, an intercom or a door. Every part of the room has a voice. It’s always Young’s voice. His mental state is described in psycho-therapeutic terms. One voice speaks with the authority of a therapist. Other voices answer back, agreeing, protesting and negotiating. There’s frequent reference to a room holding “the victims” and an attempt, a failed attempt, to rescue them.

Cabaret-type figures appear on the periphery. They gradually make their way into Young’s warehouse of the mind. In keeping with the Electric Company’s nostalgic penchant for late 19th and early 20th century entertainment genres (vaudeville, flea circus, melodrama, Busby Berkeley, Film Noir), the figures become his showbiz alter egos. They represent his craving for escape from the pain of trauma (and to be clear, I’m speaking of Jonathan Young as a stage persona). They lure him with the promise of putting on a show and forgetting it all. This makes Betroffenheit an intriguing mix of virtuosic dance-theatre and ritualised therapy. Young seems to be having it both ways: he gets the drug—the show (referred to as an “epiphany”) —and he gets it as therapy. Where traditional therapy has perhaps failed him, an audience might still offer absolution.

The “show,” the addictive drug, emerges as a series of routines performed by Young and the sublime dancers of Kidd Pivot. The main performance score is Young’s pre-recorded voice. Director-choreographer Crystal Pite has the dancers lip- and body-sync it with astonishing physical articulation. Add to this the genre numbers—a tap routine, a vaudeville duet, a salsa—and we get a sense not only of the spirit-crushing effects of PTSD but the attraction of the colourful performance world Young can’t help turning to in moments of weakness.

Young is a precise, articulate mover and speaker. The dancers embody these traits and take them to a higher level. Where Young is nimble, his main alter ego Jermaine Spivey positively floats, seemingly able to independently lever and pulley any part of his face and body. Where Young is flexible, Tiffany Tregarthen is absolutely plastic, molding and unmolding herself to any available surface like a rubber doll. Where Young has pizazz, David Raymond’s self-choreographed tap routine exudes menace.

After a while though, the routines and internal monologues start to feel like mere accumulation. Like going over the same ground. There’s a logic to this. The victim can’t help returning to the source of trauma. But it feels to me like a writer and director trying too hard to achieve a predetermined dramatic goal. Pite has discussed learning about the three-act structure from Young, and of plotting out Betroffenheit with sticky notes on a board. How the creative process flowed between wall chart and studio improvisation I’m not privy to, but the dramatic structure of Betroffenheit doesn’t grow organically from the moments. It lacks the dramaturgical nuance of a practised playwright. I can see the manufacturing of each plot complication, the obstacles thrown in the protagonist’s way, and the attempt at an incremental ascent to climax, turning point and resolution. Despite the laboured attempt at a three-act story structure, however, Betroffenheit’s inventive choreography and scenographic turns make for compelling viewing.

And then there’s an intermission. What comes after it is both puzzling and predictable.

Most of the set is gone. Only the massive black girder remains. The girder is a performance unto itself. Designer Tom Visser casts a light and shadow play around it that projects mental force and impenetrable mystery. If we are still witness to Young’s mind, it’s something we can never really come to know. Nor can Young. So far so good.

Then the dancers dance—fantastic dancers dancing fantastically. But to what end? It’s all very familiar. As in Dark Matters (2009), another Pite piece considered “theatrical” (in that the set played a dramatic role and elements of Japanese bunraku were approximated) and in which the post-intermission stage was cleared of set elements, we are left with what might be called social-group dynamics dance. Half a dozen performers cluster and uncluster. Individuals are pushed out and pulled back in to the group, they lift one another, or run in a kind of slow motion glide. I guess this is Pite’s signature style but I wonder if it represents a lack of confidence, a compulsion to re-assert her dance credentials by removing set elements that distract from the human body. That’s my best guess. The earlier set/dancer interactions made for surprising physical combinations. Now I feel like I’m watching a different piece, a choreography that is very similar to what I’ve seen in many Pite shows over the past seven years. Where did the vaudeville figures go? The dancers now wear drab dance sweats. I suppose they’re meant to represent the truth of depression and addiction.

In addition, the lights, sound and dance are all doing the same thing—conveying a sense of tragedy. No longer a dialogue between conflicting inner voices, the questions at the centre of the work are gone. I’m left to contemplate a choreographic style, a type of dancer training, the bombastic soundscore that is telling me exactly how to feel. I start to wonder if this can really be called contemporary dance. I muse about the influence on Crystal Pite of companies she once belonged to—William Forsythe’s Ballet Frankfurt, Ballet BC. I think about the contemporary ballet aesthetic running through her work. I conclude this is indeed contemporary dance but at the conservative end of the spectrum. I think about the presenter, Dance House, and its bias toward the same contemporary ballet aesthetic. It has something to do with ballet training equalling ‘real’ dance. It starts to feel like a cultural night out rather than a vital engagement with art.

I try to erase the second act from my mind and get back to what was powerful about the first. It returns. The trauma, as embodied by the dancers and Jonathan Young, haunts me for days to come.