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May 2016

Lilian Steiner, Admission Into The Everyday Sublime, Next Wave 2016

photo Gregory Lorenzutti

Lilian Steiner, Admission Into The Everyday Sublime, Next Wave 2016

When the doors open to the North Melbourne Town Hall for Admission Into The Everyday Sublime, we walk into a thick haze, there’s a heavy drone. Yes!, I think, skirting around the people wrestling, we’ve zoned into some weird medieval bash or dusty Olympic quadrangle. We haven’t, but the fact that this scene is already underway is a clue to the nature of director and choreographer Lilian Steiner’s work. It will evolve into an installation, constituted by light, sound and space as much as by dance.

There are four performers (including Steiner) soberly costumed in navy T-shirts and loose knit pants. A man and woman grapple, slapping their weight calmly into each other; it looks like a kind of sport or a martial art. The top of his head slumps into her upper back and he rubs it blindly up and down. Another man jogs through a large, precise semi-circle with the other female dancer (Briarna Longville) at its centre like the fixed arm of a compass, and when she shifts, their connection dissolves; he drops away. Circles (and semi-circles and arcs) are already everywhere: they’ll be a major motif in both the movement and spatial design.

They hold and shove each other in pairs; a man jumps onto Steiner and she clutches him for a while, straining to support his weight. We’re in a realm where the body’s latent energy can be corralled, drawn out, exchanged by touch or ritual. Longville’s hands hover a hand’s width from her partner’s sternum, then execute a sudden slap. Hands are remarkable agents in this work that can: perform benediction (index and pointer fingers raised), or hold a rock, now stretch an archer’s bow, and execute myriad flicking, stirring, swatting, patting, jabbing motions. Time stretches while the two men become icon-like, hieroglyphs flooded by an intense red light, their chins fixedly inclined. They rotate very slowly with one palm up (a rock fills it) and the other down.

In periods where the movement is radically slowed or repeated, we might be invited into a meditative self-consciousness. The traverse seating makes visible the range of audience responses to the duration of this sequence, which seems to include both transfixion and fidgeting (two people leave). Maybe it depends on your appetite for this ‘nothing-happens-ness.’ Though compared to some more extreme examples of durational performance across noise music, visual art and dance, where very slight shifts in sensation become tectonic, there were much more stimuli here.

Steiner and Longville return to pony around the semi-circular lines established in the work’s opening, every now and then bursting into a stag leap. When they dance it’s fluid and expansive, ribcages shift and spines roll. They’re visibly sweating and we realise that these women (presumably because they’re the two trained dancers of the four) have performed most of the labour, at times literally bearing the weight of the men. Nevertheless, the choreography allows for a variety of restful states, the performers frequently appear drowsy or slumped, as if there might be only a thin membrane between activity and sleep. Longville picks up a rock and moves it near to our feet, then collapses. The two resume dancing but they’re scribbling now, arms scoop and fling, they shake, wriggle, shoulders dribble jerkily down, elbows shimmy. This is very much about the joints—hips, knees, elbows, wrists all hinge. Patterns are mercilessly interrupted, a pose no sooner assumed than abandoned.

By this time the men have receded, sitting on plinths in the shadows at one end of the space to generate the layers of drones, whirs and growls making up the sound production. When the women assume similar positions, the sound- and light-scape takes over for another long period. We stare, necks craned, as Ash Keating’s enormous artwork is gradually revealed. The sublime, with its potential for awe and veneration and its aesthetic complexity, is an ambitious concept to invoke. Lilian Steiner has said that she wanted to lure the audience to “states of energised tranquility.” Perhaps this is what a reconciliation of the everyday and the sublime would feel like? Keating’s final image could be many things—a hole, cigarette burn or navel, mere circle, ‘the source,’ or God—to me it looked like the interior of a chapel dome with its tiny aperture, viewed from below. Higher up, the circles of the Town Hall’s ceiling roses appear, and the rows of circular lights in their rigs; another neat conjunction of the everyday and the potentially sublime.

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Next Wave Festival 2016: Admission Into The Everyday Sublime, choreographer Lilian Steiner, performers Atticus Bastow, Briarna Longville, Jonathon Nokes, Lilian Steiner, sound Atticus Bastow, Jonathon Nokes, lighting Matthew Adey, costumes Shio Otani, commissioned artwork Ash Keating; Arts House, North Melbourne, 18-22 May

Alison Finn works in criminal law in Melbourne, with particular interests in the law and the philosophy of human dignity, privacy, surveillance and ‘big data.’ She also writes creatively in various forms and continues a contemporary dance practice.

This review was written in the DanceWrite dance reviewing workshop. Read more reviews here.

DanceWrite was conducted by RealTime editors Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter with mentors Andrew Fuhrmann and Jana Perkovic. The workshop was an initiative of Hannah Matthews as part of her Australia Council-funded Sharing Space program and was presented in collaboration with Next Wave and RealTime.

RealTime issue #132 April-May 2016

Just released on DVD, this much lauded film from Todd Haynes—adapted from the Patricia Highsmith novel about a lesbian relationship in 1950s New York—features fine performances from Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara.

There’s been intriguing debate about the adaptation which some felt lost some screen potential, for example by eliminating the lovers’ road trip. Others, like our reviewer Katerina Sakkas, were not convinced by the romance nor by what was perceived as a mannered characterisation of Carol by Blanchett. Sakkas concludes, “Carol is in almost every respect polished, considered cinema, its re-creation of the human dramas playing out in a stultifying era eloquent—but where is its beating heart?”

But the film’s partnering of Highsmith and Haynes, six Oscar nominations, plenty of good reviews and many fans, judging by long screening seasons are reasons enough for you to see Carol and judge for yourself.

5 copies, courtesy Transmission Films

Email us at giveaways [at] realtimearts.net with your name, postal address and phone number. Include ‘Giveaway’ and CAROL in the subject line.

RealTime issue #132 April-May 2016

CAMEL, Next Wave 2016

photo Sarah Walker

CAMEL, Next Wave 2016

In her program notes, Next Wave artistic director Georgie Meagher writes that this year’s festival, unlike its predecessors, focuses on “learning” rather than “development.” For Meagher, learning can be “slow and meandering. It can be useless. Learning can make things seem more complicated and interconnected than we ever thought.” An invitation to learn is an invitation to listen more deeply, and be less intent on finding a work’s final meaning. We become creators too. This is an important framework with which to approach pieces like CAMEL and The Horse, which are, to use Meagher’s words, “stuffed with disparate things banging around against each other,” and the presence of so-called peripheral cultural voices in the festival, as in BlaaQ Catt and [MIS]CONCEIVE, produced by Indigenous artists.

CAMEL

With questions around the nature of creative intuition at its core, young Victorian choreographer, auteur and couturier Geoffrey Watson’s CAMEL produces compellingly clear motifs. Following them is not the point, but they’re glorious to revel in. The staging is simple: a white dance floor expanse before the Arts House main hall stage, on which sits a drum kit, and above which, smaller than you would imagine, hangs a backlit portrait of snowcapped peaks by local image-maker Thomas Russell. Two performers are present, sprawled over white plastic patio chairs, facing each other across the dance floor. Each is in a Blue Man Group-esque, full-body morph suit, a costume choice that hints to the work’s overriding humour. Later, for example, in a section parodying romantic love, the robotic voice-over incants, “I’ll harden to ice and wait for you in the fridge.” The same voice blurts the jussive, “fuck Debussy in the ass,” when classical ballet and its modes are being run through the ringer. It could easily be a live version of a viral video made on the website GoAnimate.

CAMEL, Next Wave 2016

photo Sarah Walker

CAMEL, Next Wave 2016

Experiencing CAMEL through knowledge of Watson’s background in classical ballet illuminates one particular strain of the work’s farraginous constitution. As suburban debris, slurpees play a big part in the second half. They’re sucked, spilled and their cups are rhythmically ground into the floor. They leave tracks, reminding me of a 7-Eleven on a 40 degree day when the machines overheat, no longer pumping out sludge but a gushing sugar water which mocks its drip tray by cascading onto the tiles. Here, the track follows a grovelling and ungraceful folk dance pass-through, while an androgynous and bedraped sylph in the back row of the audience—a puppeteer—pulls two ropes that extend to the ceiling, eventually attaching to two sheets mounded on the stage. Jerked up and down, the sheets parody our image of the mountain summit. The sylph, a common figure in classical ballet, here behaves like another ballet figure, Dr Coppélius, originally the malevolent master-tinker of ETA Hoffman’s nursery tale, The Sandman. But there is no consistency in our string-puller’s narrative. That person begins as an audience member and ends as a kind of techno-erotic behaviour enactor like the other performers.

The Horse

photo Zan Wimberley

The Horse

For Dylan Sheridan’s The Horse, the Arts House’s Rehearsal Room feels like a moderately temperatured but atmospherically intense hotbox. A bit of smoke and no lights render the room pitch black. We sit on rows of high chairs. There’s a slight, deliberate buzzing audible. In the ensuing concerto, of sorts, Sheridan crafts infinitesimally small moments of attention and stimulation. Part of his craft seems to be to articulate elements on three distinct sensorial planes: visual, aural, and olfactory. The work is funniest when these smell elements are introduced: a standard bathroom fragrance dispenser occupies centre-stage at one point, column-mounted in a single down-light. It is allowed three squirts in its own time. A small square of turf lies close to us and is ‘expressed,’ in the culinary sense, by saxophonist Benjamin Price’s missing left boot, which falls on a string from the lighting grid.

As in CAMEL, the relationship between automation and manipulation plays a key role in the work’s symbolic order. Its image-object of centrality—not necessarily its most significant image—is a mechanised violin and bow, again mounted, upright at chest height at the rear of the space. It is perhaps no coincidence that each element of a work called ‘The Horse’ seems ‘mounted,’ in a literal or figurative sense. The piece begins and ends for us with strokes of the violin; ‘for us’ because there is the distinct feeling that the world of the piece extends both before and after our presence in the space. Its guiding aural vehicle is Sheridan’s score (with the composer on electronics) for saxophone (the unused parts of which Price places on a lazy susan), cello (Robert Manley) and violin (Emily Shepherd), whose movements sit, fittingly, next to each other but noticeably distinct.

BlaaQ Catt

photo Zan Wimberley

BlaaQ Catt

In contrast to these two works, the lyric voice of Maurial Spearim’s solo work BlaaQ Catt cuts a clear path through a history of cultural destruction. Spearim tells the history of her people, the Gamilaraay, through European invasion, the agony of children being forcibly removed from families, massacres and the effects of having these as formative, brutal incursions on her people’s story. As one of Spearim’s songs conveys, the challenge is to “let it go.” We, the recipients, are challenged to let go of our objectivity and understand that we are part of this wider culture. BlaaQ Catt enacts this message through Spearim’s remarkable engagement of her audience’s nervous systems, and with provocations to remember versions of history that listen to Indigenous voices, not just the European ones that pervade. Spearim linguistically weaves herself with her audience into what’s “bigger than me, bigger than you”—into “my old people”—and supports this with her embodied presence, especially the dance pieces. BlaaQ Catt feels more like a neurological reprogramming than a piece of objective art.

[MIS]CONCEIVE

photo Zan Wimberley

[MIS]CONCEIVE

Bundjalung and Wiradjuri man Thomas ES Kelly’s dance-theatre work [MIS]CONCEIVE has two distinct halves. The second is highly digestible, gestural and story-based, addressing stereotypes of particularly young, Indigenous Australian people. Kelly’s take doesn’t shy away from the ‘issues-piece’ nature of such an intention. It is direct and unapologetic, utilising repetition of physical motifs, audience engagement and the dominant stage presence of Kelly and his ensemble.

This second half carries themes of repression in the choreography and stagecraft through to vivid traditional dance and song at full power. But it is set up by the first, which is less Brechtian in its announcement of its own code. We arrive to Xavier Rudd’s song “Follow the Sun” and move into a section of dance with an institutionalised feel. The four dancers wear grey tracksuits and the choreography pressures and strains their bodies. They hunch, shunt and curve their backs, hips jutting forward, locked. They repeat brow-wipes and move through the space in false starts and redirections. They appear struck at times, frozen, not as if time has stopped, but as if they have been momentarily concussed. Noticing this is almost nauseating. My reading of this section is that it establishes paradoxical anonymity and cultural ignorance. Literally, signs and indications of the fact that we all exist together and under the same conditions go unacknowledged: emphatic pointing to the sky, for example, as if to say, “look at the cosmos!” The ensemble articulates this landscape deftly, and transform it into the intensely liberating final movement, driven undoubtedly by the imperative to convey a story and pass on a message: “Tomorrow’s a new day for everyone, brand new moon, brand new sun,” as Rudd’s lyrics go.

Art is probably violent—indeed it becomes startlingly unlike art when it ceases to be all the things that these works undoubtedly are: open to interpretation, transformative, decentred and connective. Hopefully such elements, although so conducive to strong communities, will not need foregrounding in future editions of the Next Wave Festival, or other Australian arts festivals. They may produce divergent thoughts and feelings, and that’s a good thing, providing us the opportunity to learn and simply pay attention.

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Next Wave Festival: CAMEL, choreography, text, design Geoffrey Watson, dramaturg Nana Biluš Abaffy, performers Geoffrey Watson, Nana Biluš Abaffy, James Andrews, Matthew Hyde, Michael McNab, lighting design Amelia Lever-Davidson; Arts House, 11-15 May; Dylan Sheridan, The Horse, director, composer, performer (electronics) Dylan Sheridan, saxophone Benjamin Price, violin Emily Sheppard, cello Robert Manley; Arts House 13-22 May; BlaaQ Catt, artist, performer Maurial Spearim, director Pauline Whyman, music consultant Deborah Cheetham, sound designer Mark Cole-Smith, choreographer Sermsah Bin Saad, designer Leon Salom, projection Katie Symes, lighting designer Kris Chainey, dramaturgy Kirsty Hillhouse, Northcote Town Hall, 17-22 May; [MIS]CONCEIVE, choreographer Thomas ES Kelly, performers Thomas ES Kelly, Natalie Pelarek, Caleena Sansbury, Taree Sansbury; Northcote Town Hall, Melbourne, 17-22 May

RealTime issue #132 April-May 2016

Lilian Steiner, Admission Into The Everyday Sublime, Next Wave 2016

photo Gregory Lorenzutti

Lilian Steiner, Admission Into The Everyday Sublime, Next Wave 2016

A gigantic navel—or rather, an image of one—hovers before us. Or maybe it’s an orifice. Or a hole in the heavens. In her program notes, choreographer Lilian Steiner promises “a performance unlike anything we’ve experienced before.” I have to agree: I can’t reconcile what I’m seeing. The moment falls near the end of the work. The journey here has been by turns tedious and exquisite, filled significantly by two men with small rocks in their hands turning slowly for a long time.

Admission Into The Everyday Sublime is apparently rooted in the belief that holistic practices, alternative therapies and somatic dance can themselves lead to transcendent experience. It also offers a reflection of the first world obsession with those practices and their commodification. Steiner re-assembles the creative team from her acclaimed project Noise Quartet Meditation (2014). While the team has synergy, the work takes time to find its own.

We enter a hall filled with smoke. Four performers—two men, two women—wear matching jersey uniforms. They could be day spa employees. They could be New Age devotees. In pairs, the performers wrestle each other to the ground. Their quick contact improv tackles release into erect poses. Each couple reaches a desperate stillness with one partner offering reiki-like healing gestures to the other. The performers separate and run until a new collision forms. The sequence repeats until the audience settles.

The performance simplifies; the pace declines. A bell sounds. The hall could be a temple. The temple darkens. The men are dragged slowly across the floor on lengths of fabric. The women quietly wrap the male performers with the fabrics, then unwrap them. From my viewpoint, the men seem to be asleep. The man seated next to me is asleep.

Now upright, each man holds a small rock in one hand and they turn in unison. Slowly. For what seems like a long time. Repetition and extended duration are hallmarks in the work. Are they intended to break down our resistance? I resist. What am I resisting? Investing in the premise? I shift uneasily in my seat. Three women opposite me hold heads in hands. The men keep turning. Exasperated, I shift my attention to the lighting grid. The light state changes to red and I start to appreciate Matthew Adey’s lighting design. Helped by the ever-present haze, the lighting feels concrete. Adey matches the work’s cosmic allusions by confidently pushing our perception of the venue’s volume. His investment reminds me that nothing here is incidental. I’m newly curious about the work’s potential outcome.

The energy in the room increases as Steiner and Longville prance pony-like around the floor’s perimeter. The dance erupts into release-technique torso twists and body sequencing. The dancers share a powerful drive as their low leaps surge through space. Both women have remarkable focus in their body placement, projecting gravity beyond poise. Their fingers and toes reach and curve the air. The sequence unravels from tight unison into urgent improvisation, but the attention to detail remains.

By now, the male performers have retired to sit guru-like atop plinths at one end of the room. Bastow and Nokes’ soundscape samples and augments the performers’ own guttural moans, developing them into deeply resonant throbs or animalistic growls.

Their dance over, Steiner and Longville join their counterparts. Seated slightly above our eyeline, there’s something mildly condescending in their distance from us. Steiner’s work is titled Admission, rather than Invitation, Into The Everyday Sublime. For me, there is a disconnect between the experience of being directly involved in these practices and watching others involved in the moment. Participating in durational scores where one experiences the body changing, releasing its resistance before arriving at a new state of sensation, is different from watching them. For the observer, these may elicit a powerful, even physical empathy. Or it may not.

The final moments form an experience that certainly feels transcendent. After the tedium and frenzy of movement, an apparition provides catharsis. On the wall opposite the performers, an immense canvas emerges from darkness as the soundscape intensifies. Its form, representation and meaning are ambiguous. From where I sit, I cannot even determine how it exists. Is it a projection, and if so, where is its source? What initially looks like a crater changes colour and texture as the lighting shifts. My perception of it vacillates. It could be skin, or a static storm. Or a hole piercing the sky, forming an oculus to another sky beyond. I never fully define what I see, but I’ve definitely arrived at a state of wonder: wonder about that second sky.

After the performance, several people touch the canvas: a painting by Ash Keating. I talk to a few of them. Understanding its physicality doesn’t explain our experience. Our impressions differ, but we’re all still transfixed.

Next Wave Festival 2016: Admission Into The Everyday Sublime, choreographer Lilian Steiner, performers Atticus Bastow, Briarna Longville, Jonathon Nokes Lilian Steiner, sound Atticus Bastow, Jonathon Nokes, lighting Matthew Adey, costumes Shio Otani, commissioned artwork Ash Keating; Arts House, North Melbourne, 18-22 May

Maximilian plays with fashion, dance, choreography, photography, video, performance production and direction in no particular order or hierarchy. His formal training is in design. His recent work includes Bless the Beasts: Shibuya Summer (Melbourne Fringe 2015).

This review was written in the DanceWrite dance reviewing workshop. Read more reviews here.

RealTime issue #132 April-May 2016 pg.

We all have our monsters, our demons, those things we wrestle to come to grips with, to quash or overcome, perhaps daily. Right now, my monster is how to do justice to Angela Goh’s Desert Body Creep, a work in which Goh, alone on stage, struggles with her monster, evoked in the form of a worm.

Goh’s stage is furnished sparsely, like a contemporary installation art piece: a pile of fabric here, another flat on the floor over there; a microphone, a broom handle, some electronics and a piano. I didn’t notice the piano at first. It felt like the only natural presence in that space, perhaps a left-over from that morning’s community choir rehearsal at the little Northcote Town Hall studio. Goh has delineated a stage with black tarquette, but the rigging of lights is left exposed, as are the walls of the studio; hence the sense of the piano as natural.

I am surprised to see Goh standing patiently on stage, shifting from one foot to the other, not nervously, just slowly. She wanders to the side of the stage and drinks from a metal water bottle. Her face is emotionless, a mask framed by thick black hair dyed bright blonde. She’s dressed casually, in sneakers and mis-matching patterns, which give her the appearance of a child who has combined her favourite clothing with no regard for convention. Or perhaps she is just a woman, dressed as herself. It feels like she needed to see the audience enter, to clock us, before we spend 45 minutes watching her body and her battle. I remember this opening image—set and performer—in such detail as it is so intriguingly unspectacular and sets such a distinctive tone for the performance.

Lights dim and a familiar yet indistinct pop track plays. In one of only a small number of dramatically lit sequences, a spot reveals that Goh has entered a trance-like state, she won’t look at us again until her curtain call. She shifts her body slowly, almost imperceptibly at first. Sliding her feet across the floor, she establishes a series of purposeful shapes that are repeated slowly—hand following elbow, torso following legs—as though hearing the beat of the track at one-twentieth the speed. Here, Goh adds texture to her opening image, setting up a series of parameters—slowness, repetition and surreality—that she carries across the performance.

In these early stages, I am intrigued to find out how Goh will actually perform with “an oversized gummi worm,” as promised in her written introduction (which is accompanied by a digital image of the artist fancifully surfing a pink and blue serpent-like form through a desert). She knows we want to know—it is such a bizarre premise—but makes us wait. In the opening two trance-like scenes she starts a kind of journey towards the floor—perhaps the centre of the Earth—towards her worm, her monster.

It is thus almost unceremonious, a little humorous, when Goh introduces the flaccid, sticky form of the large but not exactly “oversized” worm. Her first actions of discovery and mimcry are equally hysterical and wonderful. On all fours, she positions the worm in relation to her own body by placing the invertebrate along the length of her spine as though training both it and herself. Then, like a puppeteer, she rolls the worm backwards and forwards over the broom handle, in deep concentration. These are delicate and sensual scenes that give no warning of the horror to come as Goh charts an eventual descent into full embodiment of the worm.

One of her most moving and unsettling images is achieved as she finally lowers herself all the way to the floor. Outstretched, she places her arms by her side and slowly rolls her shoulders to inch forward the chest, then stomach, pelvis and legs. Her chin pushes her head back to reveal her open mouth. It looks exceedingly uncomfortable as she wriggles forward pushing one of the outstretched fabrics with her mouth, as a worm would to dirt but as a woman should never have to. It is a bold evocation of the abject.

The long, following sequence—intended to be even more horrific, as indicated by a screaming soundscape—is a blur of Angela Goh in a state of possession traversing the stage, wrestling both with and as fictive monsters, until she herself has become an enormous, writhing worm form in a tube of pale green velour. In an allusion to both environmental destruction and personal cleansing we see Goh enact a frantic, yet still predominantly slow-moving and repetitive passage, cleansing the already sparse stage by ‘consuming’ all in her path into the belly of the beast.

Goh eventually emerges from the tube fully naked. This is another bold statement, that feels at first clichéd until it becomes apparent that no costume could convey the outcome of her battle sequence more accurately than her own skin. She stands, self possessed and for the first time since she began, breaks her trance. Goh punctuates the seriousness of her persona and the inferences of this work with moments of dry humour and this is one of them. Sweaty and naked, she takes a moment to drink from her water bottle, adorning herself only with a purple hair tie, then perfunctorily vacuum shrink-wraps the discarded ‘skin’, placing it to the side of the stage. I half expected her to dust off her hands.

While there is an implicit progression, Goh’s performance feels more like a striking collage of tableaux vivants. She ends the work with two of the more enduring images—which in themselves feel worthy of an essay contextualised by the work of Marina Abramovi? and the history of feminist performance art. In the first, Goh standing on a vibrating weight-loss machine, her back to the audience, slowly increases the speed of the vibration in several stages as the (minimal) fat on her taut body flails wildly until her whole flesh seems to have lost its solidity—all somehow perfectly in time with the increasing speed of a screaming guitar solo. Is she showing us that in embodying the qualities of the invertebrate, her monster, she has come to terms with it?

The second scene is Goh’s perfectly unspectacular finale. Still naked, she seats herself at the piano and slowly plays a simple two handed and vaguely familiar tune, as though recalling a muscle memory from the past. It is an ending that leaves the audience with more questions than answers. Is this a recollection of the song we heard at the start? What was the real nature of her battle, what did she learn from this time in/as the worm? Was this an allusion to the journey of a woman from childhood to adulthood? Or an acceptance, a harnessing and taming of her own internal monster? Is this final scene an indication of her new beginnings or a re-entry into an infinite loop?

Next Wave Festival 2016: Desert Body Creep, choreographer, performer Angela Goh, sound design Matt Cornell; Northcote Town Hall, Melbourne, 17-22 May

Sydney-based Miriam Kelly is currently the curator and collection coordinator at Artbank, sub-editor of the visual arts and culture publication Sturgeon and Chair of the online magazine Runway Experimental Australian Art. Kelly has curated exhibitions independently, for Artbank and for the National Gallery of Australia in her former role as assistant curator of Australian paintings and sculpture and published on a range of contemporary and historical areas of Australian art.

This review was written in the DanceWrite dance reviewing workshop. Read more reviews here.

Performed by its maker, Angela Goh, Desert Body Creep gives us two shape-shifting protagonists: the female body and an oversized gummi worm. The opening sequences establish Goh in preludial mode, spot-lit and dressed in unremarkable, slightly retro leisurewear, she revolves with a gentle robotic slide, making inchoate arm gestures. Loud vintage-sounding pop and moody light suspend her in a kind of cinematic, soft-focus disco, but after a brief black-out the music changes to a twanging guitar soundtrack and she’s on the floor, looping repeatedly through a carefully decelerated backwards roll.

Enter, worm. Goh crawls towards the audience with an invertebrate sitting casually down the length of her spine (a nice visual pun). From William Blake’s invisible worm that flies in the night, to those in Frankenstein that “inherited the wonders of the eye and the brain,” to Mercutio’s howl in Romeo and Juliet that he will soon be food for worms—this is a powerful signifier that death is in the room. On the other hand, here is a rubbery, very cute, super bouncy-looking and slightly pitiable lolly worm. Are we to be horrified, or charmed? When Goh runs a pole up and down the underbelly of the worm, intermittently animating it with absurd but believable character, she does so with attentiveness. There seems to be profound emotional content in this relationship.

From here Desert Body Creep is in full command of its themes—consumption, mutability, horror and decay are enacted in a series of transformations of Goh’s body. She moves to a microphone and multi-track recorder and after establishing a screeching choir of high notes, wheels slowly backwards in terror, her mouth a petrified O. Once more there’s a strong cinematic feel to the music and the slowness of it all, horror and sci-fi film tropes of invasion, gore and monstrosity are increasingly conjured.

Transformation is a central concern in dance, which is fundamentally a licensed invasion of performers’ bodies by the choreographer; Yvonne Rainer used the word “transmission” to describe the process of transferring movement from one body to another. After handling the worm, Goh becomes one herself, jerking along the floor consuming pieces of fabric, which she then uses to throw cartoonish monster shapes. It’s funny and silly, but the replacement of one body with another, the work of worms, is still discomfiting. Rainer famously pointed out that “dance is hard to see.” Desert Body Creep gives us a plain symbol of the body’s (and therefore dance’s) inevitable decay. It also reminds us that if we are only looking for dance where we expect to find it (in a ‘performing’ body, in a ‘choreographed’ body) it’s hard to see in other movement.

The work is structured around successive, not integrated, scenes. Although Angela Goh seems to undergo a full metamorphosis when she is entirely swallowed by a green velour sheath, there’s no illusion. In fact, here she’s almost at her most human, the outline of her bowed head and shoulder clearly visible as she slides around, vacuuming up the clumps of fabric in her path. When she emerges naked (perhaps new) she unfussedly ties back her hair and drinks from a water bottle. We’re suddenly and awkwardly aware that the work has itself transformed into domestic, potentially private activity. Dance is hard to see.

Un-costumed now, Goh’s body achieves its most complete transformation when a motorised muscle-vibrating platform is put into the service of oscillating her flesh into increasingly intense ripples. The guitars are back and totally wailing, it’s unabashedly comical, yet somehow triumphant. After a while every part of her is jiggling and wobbling; even the folds of her elbows spiral.

There’s a modest denouement when the dancer walks calmly to a piano at the side of the stage and plays a few bars, perhaps a nod to the childhood lessons that are no longer necessary in this transformed desert.

Next Wave Festival 2016: Desert Body Creep, choreographer, performer Angela Goh, sound design Matt Cornell; Northcote Town Hall, Melbourne, 17-22 May

This review was written in the DanceWrite dance reviewing workshop. Read more reviews here.

“What happens when your first language is dead?” A rhetorical question asked by one of two dancers who stand firmly; yet these very words uproot them. Displaced from a point of origin, languages dead. This is why this performance is so vital. Passing produces new dialogues through the performers and through us.

Next Wave likewise attempts to create “new discourses in contemporary art and culture, listening hard to whose voices are not being heard.” The festival program reveals diverse cultural representation reflecting contemporary Australia—a more radical and inclusive conversation.

Described as a “physical dialogue” (program note) the movement in Passing is heavy with symbols, at every moment feeling a responsibility to communicate. Amrita Hepi and Jahra Wasasala perform with urgency, their explosive gestures reaching beyond themselves. I feel the tone in their bodies, as if the movement presses out against their skin and stretches toward the audience.

However, movement often feels less essential than the dramatic physicality of the performers. Wasasala, lying flat on the floor, performs rapid rotations, the movement sequence somewhat clumsy as a bold leg swing is repeated; yet the strength of her energy expanding across the floor carries this moment.

Hepi and Wasasala offer an intimate look at the complexity of cultural identity. In the opening image, two pails of water frame a bathing scene, a private moment made public, and an invitation into the personal. Hands draw over the contours of faces to pull long, black hair skyward in a slow and deliberate action. The performativity of this gesture invites our gaze.

The costumes, designed by Honey Long, take on a sinuous quality; elongated sleeves are held taut, connecting the two bodies. This is the first moment of physical contact between the performers; the clothing’s colour evokes skin, wrapping the bodies in further layers of identity. Hepi, as aggressor, roughly ties the sleeves, forming a bodice on Wasasala. Their relationship throughout is fraught, hurtling between aggression and tenderness. Is this tumultuous relationship descriptive of the tension between cultural heritage and contemporary identity?

The use of spoken word is very powerful; it feels essential to the work. Yet when performed with movement, the detail of the text sometimes makes the movement material seem underdeveloped. In one moment, Hepi climbs over Wasasala’s body as if it’s terrain, calling out percentages, referring to an earlier moment of dialogue when percentages of full cream milk were used as a metaphor for race and skin colour,“10%, 35%, 70%.” Here, the movement in the duet lacks the potency of the text.

Passing exposes the complexity of cultural identity—degrees of skin colour, tradition and the contemporary—not offering solutions or answers. The final image sustains the tension within the relationship between the two performers: Wasasala holds Hepi’s head, lips to her forehead, water trickling down Hepi’s face. It is a curious ending: an unfamiliar ritual, an act of tenderness, or aggression?

Next Wave Festival: Passing, choreographer-performers Amrita Hepi, Jahra Wasasala, music producer Lavern Lee, costumes Honey Long, headpiece and flora design Jesse Carey, Sophie Penkethman-Young; Northcote Town Hall, Melbourne, 12-18 May

Chloe Chignell is an artist working with dance and choreography in an expanded field. She is co-curator of Dance Speaks, was assistant editor of Dancehouse Diary and developed Indigo Dance Magazine through Performing Arts Forum, France.

This review was written in the DanceWrite dance reviewing workshop. Read more reviews here.

DanceWrite was conducted by RealTime editors Virginia Baxter and Keith Gallasch with mentors Andrew Fuhrmann and Jana Perkovic. The workshop was an initiative of Hannah Matthews as part of her Australia Council-funded Sharing Space program and was presented in collaboration with Next Wave and RealTime.

The audience files into Admission Into The Everyday Sublime, to find themselves entering a work already in progress. Four dancers move through the smoke-filled space, administering light pressure to the spines of their counterparts, jogging when the desire appears to overcome them, wrestling vigorously with one another only to mutually yield. It’s a scene of wellness-seeking that the audience is eased into tenderly through the softening of spatial and temporal boundaries.

In her 2016 book, Cure Jo Marchant investigates alternate healing practices, positing that the more time a practitioner spends with their patient, the more likely it is that the patient will feel better on leaving the clinic. Like Marchant, Lilian Steiner’s latest work is similarly concerned with restorative practices, drawing on everything from tai chi to crystal healing to yoga in an ever more abstract evocation of the question, “and how does it make you feel?”

Throughout this process, Steiner applies time, or rather, duration as a kind of salve. It is used liberally and as a means of elevating the atmosphere of the work to a higher, meditative state. In an extended phrase in which red light fills the space, the two male performers, heads tilted slightly, turn on the spot like slow-motion Dervishes. Each cradles a rock in the palm of a raised hand, axis points within the repetitious spinning. This sequence is drawn out to what feels like an age, yet it never truly achieves the revelatory quality that the work’s title suggests. Instead the incremental nature of the choreography drove me to distraction.

Perhaps unfortunately, the visual proximity of other bodies in the room provides ample means of diversion. Steiner has arranged the space traverse style with two seated rows on either side. The audience is consequently always looking, consciously or unconsciously, at their counterparts on the opposite side of the room. Though it promotes a sense of connectivity and an awareness of one’s own body, it is of a body, bodies, on the outside of the work—admission into the everyday sublime without the option of complete submission.

There are simple aesthetic moments, near-still images through which the work touches on the title’s promise of transcendence. In one phrase the four dancers stand backlit in the dense white fog, so that the negative space that rings them becomes a kind of aura. In another the dancers oscillate minutely, leaning at alien angles as a deep, bass note reverberates through the space. These moments are beautiful, but largely unmoving.

The work culminates with the dancers retreating to settle atop individual plinths, their bodies lit from above. Four humours, or temperaments, unmoving except for the two male performers, who sit behind laptops, one with microphone in hand emitting a heavily distorted gurgling. As the phrase stretches on, the score bloating with intensity, a painting at the opposite end of the space comes into focus. Using the grand dimensions of the room to advantage, the image stretches nearly floor to ceiling. Slowly, in keeping with the meter of Steiner’s work, the light transforms the image from carnal red to exultant gold. As the house lights come up and the dancers exit discreetly, it fades to dull metallic grey. The doors open, but the score continues; the audience waits, uncertain whether this is their cue to leave. After a time they applaud and confusedly file out, the temporal environment of the piece once again tapering to a point outside of my involvement.

Endurance has the potential to bring one closer to the divine. People seek it out in the form of physical challenge, religious experience and art. Yet time, and the ability to withstand great undiluted doses of it, is not a cure-all. It cannot necessarily alleviate the recurrent symptoms of exhaustion that are produced by the actively languid. That requires some level of preconceived belief in the effectiveness of the practice. As I left the venue I dwelt on the question, “and how did that make you feel?” only to come up blank but for the conclusion that I felt nothing much at all.

Elyssia Bugg is a Melbourne-based writer, filmmaker and dance teacher. Her writing has appeared in Voiceworks, Lip Magazine and the RMIT Creative Writing Anthology. She is currently working on a short film about aliens and oblivion.

This review was written in the DanceWrite dance reviewing workshop. Read more reviews here.

As bright white lights dim to a dull red glow in a thick haze of smoke, all sound drops to a dull, bass-filled growl. Two male figures stand motionless and strikingly silhouetted, foreboding, almost threatening in this dark redness. I trace the outline of the human form, the shape created by loose strands of hair, the curve of a shoulder, the formlessness of loose clothing, and that forearm, outstretched to support a rock the size of the open palm. This is one of those moments that I will take away from the performance that personally resonates for reasons that I may never quite know. It is neither from start nor finish, I can’t place what happened before or after, and as other memories diminish and merge, this stays crisp.

Is this some kind of experience of the sublime? Can we in fact witness the sublime in the present day? In the everyday? The word ‘sublime’ carries heavy associations of danger and wildness and a positioning of the human race as belittled in the face of the insurmountable grandeur of nature. There are certainly those moments when the mundane delights; the way a beam of light gleans dust particles along its journey towards the earth momentarily quickens the breath and sharpens the senses. But those moments are so fleeting that we mostly miss them within the pace and distractions of the everyday. Lilian Steiner invites us into an immersive space that seeks to encourage a renewed state of awareness.

Over the hour of her Admission Into The Everyday Sublime, Steiner offers a compelling and hypnotic rhythm, reaching both extremes of feverishly fast and achingly slow across platforms of vision, sound and movement. Steiner’s work is highly stylised and tightly choreographed. She and co-performer Briarna Longville move almost seamlessly at times between simplified motion—running, turning, walking—and contrasting phrases characterised by open graceful lines suggest Steiner’s balletic training. In one extended sequence they traverse the space, bodies elongated in a type of elegant ‘trot,’ as in a human form of dressage, while in another their frantic motion feels as though they are completing a full day’s mundane movements in the space of a minute. I started to read playing basketball, washing the body, hailing a taxi among other things in their wild abstract gestures.

This work slows us down, requiring an extension of focus to engage with the subtlety and evocative power of its abstraction. In a superbly drawn out sequence, the two petitely built women drag their male counterparts Jonathon Nokes and Atticus Bastow on long lengths of cloth across the stage. The men are curled up at one end, while the women hold the length close to the opposite creating a cradle effect. Completed in near darkness, the action is slow and purposeful, sculpting visual form out of the effort of shifting such weight. When the women reach centre stage they turn to face the resting men. They carefully re-grip the fabric and with feet firmly planted on the floor, bodies erect, they lean back in an exquisite cantilever. Even in the low light we can see the sweat glistening on their necks. It crosses my mind what an extraordinary evocation this is of women’s unseen labour; the thought passes just as quickly as the performers enter a new movement phrase. Steiner writes of her desire to create “kinesthetic experiences;” there is certainly an unavoidable empathetic response elicited from such passages.

It feels like Steiner is non-verbally training the audience in a form of meditation. The audience is positioned within a traverse arrangement—part chapel, part valley—bookended by four ominous podiums at one end and blackness at the other. Splitting the audience either side of the stage at once heightens our awareness of each other, but also of the roles that attention and observation play in this piece. These ideas are eloquently articulated in Steiner’s finale: a classic ‘slow art’ moment.

Steiner and her co-performers settle statue-like on the podiums, and one performer provides experimental sounds that are like fragments of information being gleaned from all that is buzzing soundlessly in the world around us. In the blackness at the opposite end of the room, red and green lights slowly reveal a central ovular form. As the colours intensify, they also illuminate the surrounding textural quality of an expansive painting. Is this an aerial image of the Earth, perhaps the cosmos? Incrementally, over what must have been about 10 minutes, earthy tones in Ash Keating’s canvas shift as the light whitens to expose the oval to be in fact bright blue surrounded by silvery black. I can’t shake that feeling that I am staring at the sky through a hole in the wall, despite knowing that it is night outside. It is a process that rewards in a way not dissimilar to the perceptual experiences within the ‘sky space’ installations of American visual artist James Turrell.

Hypnotic and mesmerising, Admission Into The Everyday Sublime reminds us that art and abstraction are often most enriched with extended viewing. Ironically, one of the things that thrills me most across all art forms is not necessarily technical prowess, but this capacity of something or someone to re-awaken the value of a mundane moment—providing the perceptual tools of insight that can admit us into the everyday sublime.

This review was written in the DanceWrite dance reviewing workshop. Read more reviews here.

Walls lined in grey metal, hanging cords, piled fabric and electronics litter the space; I am in the carcass of a theatre. Angela Goh stands casually, fully illuminated, the theatre baring its skeleton; what expectations can I have of something so dead?

In a “post post-everything world” (cited by Goh in the Next Wave program guide), we are left (and begin) with an endless expanse of time. A wasteland of used parts, the theatre sags. What came before? And what is left? Desert Body Creep moves without urgency, Angela Goh performs with clarity, patience and endurance; she seems not to make promises.

In this work, choreography is understood as the assemblage of elements: the body becomes a material, much like the space, lighting and sound. A series of images and scenes is constructed through careful marriage of sound, object and body. In a powerful moment, Goh sits with microphone in hand, mouth open, to sound a long high note. It strikes me as a visceral gesture, her physicality so involved in this simple and haunting scene. A looping echo multiplies into a body of sound.

A sense of excavation pervades the space, moving beneath the ground and below the skin. The dancer executes a continuous backward roll and burrows under a floating smoke landscape. The body grinds down, inverting the dancerly ideal of flight into that of digging. In another scene, a series of erratic passages across the space, Goh crawls under the sheets of fabric, momentarily becoming monster or ghost.

The long green worm-girl slowly labours across the space, making no apologies, continuing and continuing. A brief pause as the body contorts inside the fabric, then labouring, labouring, until it digests the last piece of fabric. The feeding leaves me exhausted, the worm rests heavy; so do I. The mouth opens once more and Goh crawls out, now nude. Suddenly the worm seems much larger. The body looks tiny as the flesh emerges, all heaviness left inside the deflated green tube.

A guitar solo blasts as Goh steps onto an electronic wobble board, her flesh in a furious shake. Sound ceases. Goh presses a button increasing the machine’s speed, and sound returns. Each element in this scene is given the time it needs. As the pause-click-and-play repeats, the flesh ripples furiously. And I notice myself calling it ‘the flesh’, becoming detached from Goh, who’s now a vibrating light pink mass in the formation of a body.

When I watch dance I find myself looking for what the piece is asking of me: how am I being asked to participate? Am I performing my role? Yet during Desert Body Creep, I realised I was, in fact, fine just where I was; our relationship was simple, I was there and so was Angela Goh. I felt comfortable at a distance, I didn’t need to go ‘into’ the work; illusion was of no interest, but instead what became important was a fiction located firmly in the actual. Constructed with stark visibility, the scenes dealt in real affect—absurd images in real space and real time. As Goh slid inside a long green velour tube and began to eat piles of fabric, she didn’t become a worm, but remained girl-as-worm, feeding on dead costumes. I felt a desire to believe in the transformation, to slip into the imaginary, but the performance did not ask that of me. It was far more absurd and revealing to remain in the actual.

It was all right there before us, a fiction so mundane it became unbelievable. If the imaginary implies a certain elevation from the actual, Desert Body Creep uses fiction to burrow down—a deep fantasy. With sharp persistence Desert Body Creep avoided illusion, posing an interesting problem: what is left to imagine in a post post-everything world? Does fantasy now lie in the actual? A girl, in a worm, eating fabric?

Next Wave Festival 2016: Desert Body Creep, choreographer, performer Angela Goh, sound design Matt Cornell; Northcote Town Hall, Melbourne, 17-22 May

This review was written in the DanceWrite dance reviewing workshop. Read more reviews here.

Through the wilderness of birdsong and a thumping, urban score, a school bell rings. Class is in session and, in Thomas ES Kelly’s MIS(CONCEIVE), the curriculum is one of unlearning.

Kelly is interested in constructing and then deconstructing, through sound, movement and speech the preconceptions of what it means to be an urban Aboriginal person in Australia. Early on he evokes a classroom, where each of the four dancers, in a uniform of grey tracksuits, hoodies tied neatly around their shoulders, take it in turns to raise their hand. They do so enthusiastically, desperately, as they wait to be called on. Though they have the answers, they’re made to stand in silence.

They take to folding and unfolding their jumpers, rolling them up to suggest pens that they use to complete assignments unseen. In light of recent events involving racial profiling, this image is potent: a supposed costume of thuggery used as a means of expression, albeit not the one many assign to it. As the dancers repeat the folding phrases, stereotypes and assumptions are carefully unpacked and repacked.

This sequence escalates as one of the four dancers tries harder, works longer and faster at completing each gestural repetition. Eventually the other three dancers isolate her, donning their hoods and performing violent pivoting movement punctuated by moments of rigid pausing as she clutches her jumper and loiters with uncertainty some distance away. The lone dancer is faced with the decision to either embrace exception or expectation. It’s a simple equation, one or the other, but the sequence ends before it’s resolved.

There is a mathematical thread woven through this work, illustrated most clearly as the dancers alternately take centre stage and try in vain to articulate verbally the simultaneity of their difference and similarity. Eventually, Kelly will deliver a monologue warning against assumptions drawn in black and white. And yet, there are no grey areas in the physical execution of his choreography. Instead there is an exactness, a sense of the well-rehearsed that implies the dancers have given this lesson many times before.

In a sequence in which a voiceover conveys the results of a survey comparing the fictions people associate with indigenous experience to the characteristics they attribute to mythical creatures, the dancers strike poses—vampires, mermaids and unicorns are mixed in with all manner of assumptions about welfare and substance abuse. The sequence is funny, until later, the outlines of the same poses are perceptible in what otherwise appears to be a phrase of pure movement—dragon fire, nicotine suck—among a pastiche of rhythmic circular stomping that is equally familiar in its distinct Aboriginality. The precision of each recognisable posture is striking as without the set-up, the repeated motifs would likely go unnoticed by the audience, taken for granted as just movement in a medium that dictates it.

Thomas ES Kelly is privileging his audience by revealing to them the kind of preconceptions that might otherwise slip by unnoticed in the movement of the everyday. Yet he is also illustrating how these notions can shift, how given time they can become warped, or disappear entirely, for better or worse. He is at play with this concept, encouraging the audience to be implicated in the process as he instigates a game of Chinese Whispers where, though the original phrase is inevitably lost, the intention of the piece as a whole takes on new clarity.

This sense of play and imagined realities takes the audience back to the place or time where notions of race and class are first conceived. It’s here, in the fictitious schoolyard, that the audience must partake in doing the math. Kelly declares in his closing monologue that “we are all the same,” a claim that he seemingly has been trying to dismantle over the course of the previous 45 minutes. From nobody, to many bodies, different bodies, to one experience. Is it possible to arrive at one utopian whole? It’s here that I wish to raise my hand, raise the question, as to whether I’ve drawn the right conclusions. Instead, I go back to the start and begin again.

Next Wave Festival: [MIS]CONCEIVE, choreographer Thomas ES Kelly, performers Thomas ES Kelly, Natalie Pelarek, Caleena Sansbury, Taree Sansbury, Northcote Town Hall, Melbourne, 17-22 May

This review was written in the DanceWrite dance reviewing workshop. Read more reviews here.

Two Indigenous ‘sisters’ come together to bond over the simple ritual of bathing. Their presence is arrestingly physical; Amrita Hepi and Jahra Wasasala are defiantly strong, sensuous women, similar in appearance. Dipping into buckets of water, they wash and spit. Together, they vocally tease out the words and attitudes society throws at them, along with those they’re adopting.

Before the performance, Hepi acknowledged the presence of her mother and her “mother’s mother” in the audience tonight. The inter-generational significance of sisterhood in Passing couldn’t be more apparent. Although ostensibly examining the racial stereotyping of Indigenous peoples of Australia and the South Pacific encounter—at one point the performers cite percentages of difference in skin colour—Passing is more a testament to Indigenous women of the past and their relationship to those of the present. Passing holds the much broader responsibility of bearing the legacy of continuous storytelling, of developing new languages to replace those lost. As Wasasala asks, “So, what happens when your first language is dead?”

Passing’s new language is spoken, cried and danced. Aggressive floor work, writhing and wailing remind us that beyond the performers’ physical grace lies a history of relentless struggle, assault and suffering. The two women inhabit distinct physicalities: Wasasala attacks the floor with her body, Hepi uses hers to articulate words with staccato precision, but the chemistry between them is never in doubt. They move within each others’ space with intimacy and familiarity. The movement quality of Passing is highly tactile: skin against skin, full body against tarquette. Honey Long’s tonal costumes—long swathes of fabric binding and defining the performers’ bodies—further accentuate an awareness of skin and possession in the work.

Colonial eras are evoked in a short series of vignettes—a patronising early movie-reel sound recording asserts male, distinctly British propaganda, “All of me,” sung by Billie Holiday, resonates with the power of absent solidarity—before Passing arrives at its crux.

Hepi binds Wasasala, then addresses her prisoner. The hip-hop influenced articulation of her monologue—the body pops, the crisp hand-flicking—implies a distinctly 21st century attitude towards her heritage. “We’re all the same in the spirit,” she utters, not as a platitude. She climbs onto Wasasala’s prostrate body, forcing her further into the ground.

Elsewhere in the work, Wasasala’s poem ‘bloo/d/runk’ is recited: “I savour the after-taste of an apathetic ancestor.” With the mention of spirit and acknowledgment of previous generations it’s a small leap to read Wasasala now as a captive ancestor. Ancestor or present-day sister, her response is forceful rather than complacent. The result is a confrontational physical conversation. The women are well-matched in physique and their struggle feels genuine. Hands at each others’ throats, the balance of power shifts uncertainly before they finally arrive at a kindred understanding.

When their struggle subsides, the water in their buckets is combined into one source. Hepi crouches before Wasasala, and invites her to drink. Wailing, but more quietly than before, Wasasala repeatedly kisses Hepi’s forehead, gently releasing water across her face. The water traces the contours of her open eyes and cheeks; tears shed and shared.

Next Wave Festival: Passing, choreographer-performers Amrita Hepi, Jahra Wasasala, music producer Lavern Lee, costumes Honey Long, headpiece and flora design Jesse Carey; lighting Sophie Penkethman-Young; Northcote Town Hall, Melbourne, 12-18 May

This review was written in the DanceWrite dance reviewing workshop. Read more reviews here.

Early in Desert Body Creep, amid scattered clumps of fabric recalling road-kill, Angela Goh enacts her own abduction. Tumbling feet over head in a spotlight beam, she stares up and out at some sight unseen. The synthetic guitar twang of the soundtrack together with Goh’s grungy tracksuit pants and sneakers give the moment the strung-out feel of so many backwater x-file narratives.

The piece’s title goes some way to evoking this half-way-to-nowhere landscape, where mundanity merges with the otherworldly. This is a land forsaken, where life slithers through the cracks, coiling and recoiling beneath the almost-too-bright light. In this harsh environment Goh performs her becoming and eventual unbecoming.

Connecting an almost metre-long, giant gummi worm to the base of her neck, and animating it with the movement of her spine as she crawls on hands and knees towards the audience, Goh submits to a world in which the dead and un-dead are playfully symbiotic. The worm is, from this moment of invasion, Goh’s mode of conceptual excavation, embodied or reflected in each new episode.

The dancer is able to conjure its presence physically and, in a striking sequence, aurally. Sitting before a sampler, microphone in hand, she multi-tracks herself singing wordless harmonies. The sounds are extracted like vermicular parasites from Goh’s gaping mouth. Harmonies breed and loop to form a cacophonous other, the cycle rendering the voice abject, no longer a voice but a creature in its own right, stretching and writhing the length of the space.

As in any dreamscape, one thing is always in a state of becoming another. Shadows climb the walls, human screams emerge from the indistinct mass of noise. Goh, open-mouthed and sliding prone, ‘consumes’ the strewn fabrics, only then to rise and hunch beneath them—zombie-like, road-kill reanimated.

Abduction, possession, reanimation—it’s the stuff of midnight movie specials, and apt, given that the piece is, in many ways, a horror story. Yet it’s never quite clear what, or who, is the monster, as every object, no matter how seemingly benign, is made monstrous, only to be consumed, or contained, so that the audience comes instead to be haunted by a cool and unflinching emptiness. The audience’s fear then, is drawn not from things being given life, from spent objects rising from the dead or the dancer transmogrifying behind ever more hideous guises. The fear is that there will come a point, maybe inside this very room, when there is nothing left to consume or transform. The fear is not of an insatiable hunger, but of infinite reprisal without chaos, art-making without desire or fear.

As the performance draws towards its conclusion, Goh becomes the worm, only to emerge naked from its signifier, a velour cocoon. In an act of domesticity no less horrifying, she stuffs her cast-off skin and its contents into a zip-lock bag and uses a vacuum cleaner to render the package airless and without excess. This action is accompanied only by the faint vacuum scream, the sound of empty space being torn from one place to fill another. Here the piece loses its momentum, gaining clarity to its detriment. For in this moment, Angela Goh seemingly unintentionally becomes the model post- post- artist, turning nothing into nothing to say something about nothing in a way that fails to give the exchange the silhouette of something more sinister.

She then stands on a vibrating exercise platform, the kind that a tracksuit-wearing UFO enthusiast from the suburbs might use to tone her glutes. With her back to the audience, Goh allows the machine to shake loose the last vestiges of herself as concrete, the image of her rippling skin rendering her core-less.

The artist is incomplete, empty, and she is free. As the lights dim, she sits at an upright piano at the side of the stage, and plays a tune. It’s almost familiar, leaving the audience to make contact with the piece from a place they’ve since left behind.

Next Wave Festival 2016: Desert Body Creep, choreographer, performer Angela Goh, sound design Matt Cornell; Northcote Town Hall, Melbourne, 17-22 May

This review was written in the DanceWrite dance reviewing workshop. Read more reviews here.

Squinting through a dense cloud of smoke, I find my way to a seat on the far wall of the theatre. So focused are the performers, moving through the space to low vibrating sounds, that our entrance goes unnoticed. Only after the show do I realise how important these first few moments were: the audience softening their vision, preparing to let go of spectatorship and allow sensation to move between us and the performers.

Admission Into The Everyday Sublime merges aesthetic and kinesthetic experience, translating the visual and sonic into sensation. The precise design of the space works to seduce the audience into the body of the work—four symmetrical plinths, two neatly piled cloths, the edges of the space invisible, borders erased by smoke. The performers, two female dancers and two male musicians, move with precision, each decision seemingly purposeful, yet abstract.

Repetition gives the work a sense of ritual. In Separating Hydrogen From Water: A Primer, a Next Wave publication, Steiner writes: “There are words or sentences that I write over and over again, each time meaning something new to me.” This was evident throughout: persistent repetition toward the possibility of transcendence. The two men slowly rotate, a rock in one hand, the other palm open in a gesture of receiving; the dancers’ voices grumble into microphones. In another long passage, the two dancers prance and skip, tracing a long crescent shape, as if following the circuit of an equestrian track. With each repetition the actions become more expressive and the dancers’ attention deepens.

The two men slowly lower the rocks towards the floor: as the music ceases the rocks are dropped in perfect unison; a small but resounding gesture. The two female dancers walk toward the rocks, arms across torsos, as if drawing bows, ready to release the dance. They dance with chaotic exactitude, a sublime unison. Loose limbs are tossed, the energy released reverberating through their bodies in unexpected ways. There are quick flicks of the hands, light elevation as weight transfers from foot to foot and legs swipe spiralling through the body. The sequence breaks briefly, the dancers re-positioning themselves each around a rock. Movement returns, delicate and fiery.

In an earlier scene, warm light glows through the still-pervading smoke; two sources of light cast the dancers as silhouettes. Each man lies atop a long fabric sheath, the women pulling them along parallel lines. With only the outline of the bodies and cloth visible, the lighting removes the detailing of the bodies so we observe the weight slowly dragged. The space, lit by Matthew Adey, feels expansive; his signature minimalist style is essential to the transformation of the theatre.

In the opening scene all four performers are moving in the space; intermittent duets, male and female. The relationships evoke transmission—of energy. The women, accessing a trance-like state, weave energetic pathways through the space, returning to the men to enact transmission—for example with a resounding slap to the chest. There is an emotionality and sensuality to the relationships, as in a kind of healing practice. Lilian Steiner lowers Atticus Bastow toward the floor, their legs intertwined. She stretches out her arm and firmly plants it on his chest. Then stillness: the transmission. She leaves.

At the show’s climax the lighting shifts our attention to a large painting revealed at the end of the space. Its size and position suggest something almost sacred, an atmosphere of mingled terror and fascination. A deity summoned by the performance? The light on the painting alters in colour, transforming between organic and inorganic textures. These become felt sensations until white light reveals grey metallic paint, its ‘true’ surface. The sound grinds, loud motors burble, yet something about it feels animalistic, a purring rhythm.

It seems a belief in the work’s potential for transcendence is vital, much like the importance of faith in spirituality and religion. In the first few moments, I decided to go with this work, to believe in the performers’ sincerity. Yet at times this was hard work. Did being positioned as outsiders on the edge of the performance space prevent fuller engagement? Although Lilian Steiner created a powerful sensorial experience, I wonder whether the work offered true admission into her cult of the sublime?

This review was written in the DanceWrite dance reviewing workshop. Read more reviews here.

The opening twangs of Beyoncé’s “Formation” resound through the theatre at the close of Amrita Hepi and Jahra Wasasala’s performance of Passing. This is no mixing desk accident. The recent release by this pop star—a self-possessed woman whose public persona embodies both sensuality and aggression—canvases the problems inherent in enduring Western constructs of cultural value and authenticity, and offers a loud call to arms to women of colour, to embrace and act on the power of their various heritages. Big claims for a catchy tune that features several lines of “I slay (hey);” but it felt like a simultaneously playful and knowing gesture from Hepi and Wasasala with which to send off the audience.

Hold up. How did we get to heady “Western constructs of cultural value and authenticity” so quickly? Let’s backtrack a moment to reflect on the picture that Hepi and Wasasala painted for the audience over the course of an hour, before that Beyoncé moment. The two women begin the work with an homage to centuries of voyeurism in the representation of women in a quiet moment of private reverie, and certainly not returning the gaze.

Stationed in the far corners at the back of the stage and silhouetted, the commanding forms of Hepi and Wasasala—dressed minimally in low-backed leotards and shorts—enact a stylised sequence of hair-washing over large steel buckets. They are accompanied by Lavern Lee’s soothing, watery sounds and a growing organic pattern projected on a screen behind (the only moment in which this screen-based element added aesthetic value to the performance on the night viewed, perhaps due to a technical error). This first image by Hepi and Wasasala firmly establishes us in the position of viewer.

The sensuality of this serene image quickly descends into violence. The women, bent over the buckets, push their heads below the water as though by an unseen force. They retreat, spluttering and gasping for air, only to return to the action seconds later. This sequence gains terrifying momentum as they force the buckets around the room, heads submerged. Are they drinking, drunk, possessed? The dramatic end to this anxiety-ridden passage occurs with their abrupt collision in the middle of the space. Here, they engage in a gentle, and rather witty exchange while hovering, with relative ease, in powerful squats. What ensues is a discovery of self and ‘other,’ of recognition of the self in the other, and of establishing difference. They pass between them gestures and sounds, a physical and verbal process of mimicry and repetition to find a common language.

A strong rhythm of exchange is established, but also of sensuality and violence: compelling sequences of aggression and affection. A moment in which Wasasala’s palm is pressed firmly against Hepi’s face, while Hepi grips Wasalsala’s throat, dissolves into a tight embrace, before the two recoil. The contrasts and emotions suggested by such actions are particularly moving when witnessed within one body, as in an extended sequence where Wasasala is tossed around the stage, simultaneously self-propelled and resisting her own motion.

A costuming device (designer Honey Long) introduced towards the middle of the work heightens the push and pull between the performers. It is a silky (and not inconsequentially) Caucasian skin-toned shirt with long open arms, part-straitjacket, part-designer wear—both associated with control. The extended arms, first only worn by Hepi, are used to evoke a battleground between the two. Seated, or at times crawling and low, Wasasala attempts to consume the lengths of fabric, while Hepi writhes to loosen them, at the same time seeming to be almost attempting to train or tame the other. Eventually Hepi wrestles free and neatly winds the arms around her body in a swift movement of elegant constraint, before doing the same to Wasasala. The latter had uttered the words, “I am both the colonised and the coloniser” earlier on; is this what we are seeing here? Are they mastering the oppressor’s language as a way of fighting back? This work boldly attempts to unpack the contemporary legacy of imperialist conceptions of the exotic.

The program guide tells us that Sydney-based Hepi is a woman of Bunjalung and Ngapuhi heritage (locating her ancestors in northern New South Wales and New Zealand), and New Zealand-born Wasasala is described as “having roots in many places around the world, but her Pacific heritage comes from the islands of Fiji” (Next Wave, artist biography). It’s not usual for a critic to mention the cultural origins of performers at this point in a review, rather than foregrounding them at the start. Such reference is in itself both necessary and problematic. What is to be included? What is left out? What does it do to geographically and culturally locate an individual? What struggles does this set up around perception, stereotype, authenticity and understanding?

These questions are really at the core of Passing. Indeed, there is a bold verbal sequence in which racial percentages are thrown around as value statements about connections to culture, to authenticity and skin colour. Amrita Hepi calls it at a moment in the middle of the performance. Jerkily moving as if to cleanse herself, to rid herself of a misconception about appearances, she halts in a moment of clarity and self-possession to cry out against the rigidity of categorisation: “That certificate of authenticity, I burnt it.”

Next Wave Festival: Passing, choreographer-performers Amrita Hepi, Jahra Wasasala, music producer Lavern Lee, costumes Honey Long, headpiece and flora design Jesse Carey, lighting Sophie Penkethman-Young; Northcote Town Hall, Melbourne, 12-18 May

This review was written in the DanceWrite dance reviewing workshop. Read more reviews here.

Emerging choreographer Thomas ES Kelly’s first full-length show, [MIS]CONCEIVE repurposes recognisable elements of a well-established, but still expanding, vocabulary of contemporary Indigenous dance. Charging some gestures with greater energy (a thrust, a whip-quick spin, a starkly pointing arm), others are subdued, made circumspect or soft (heads are bowed, hands gently wipe over faces). Ultimately the work deploys humour and political optimism to counterpoint sequences of stormy movement.

Four shadowy figures (Kelly and three female dancers) step out from the curtains with solemn purpose and are quickly skimming, sinking and folding. They steadily accumulate the physical motifs that will structure their repetitions—an out-struck leg puts the sole of the foot on display, an arm cuts a clean arc then hinges to tap the back of the neck. Kelly is a large-framed, striking-looking man. The other three performers fluctuate between developing their own distinctive characters to foil his inevitable prominence, and acting as a collective. Sitting in the front row I can see one of them make a deliberate short exhalation as she falls or contracts—their dancing has a feel of easeful effort rather than strain.

A familiar gesture can expose an unnerving nub of truth. When the dancers each wave their ‘pick-me!’ arms in the air, writhing in their chests with wanting to give an answer, only to be overlooked (again, we understand), you have to ask how dysfunctional our policies and institutions are that such a plaintive representation of discrimination still has urgency. In [MIS]CONCEIVE, the classroom is a predominant site of contest where language and history must be brought to account for their garbling and their omissions. The dancers speak out to find each other and themselves: “me, you? same? different? same but different.”

Interrupting the activity abruptly, Kelly strides to the front of the stage to give us a good-humoured history of the playground game known as ‘Chinese Whispers’ or, he tells us, ‘Arab Telephone’ or ‘Russian Scandal.’ In this section Kelly has capitalised on his easy charisma. When the audience is asked to play along, we all know how it’s meant to end—with baffling and preferably hilarious gobbledygook—but it doesn’t quite work this time, maybe we misunderstood the instructions?

That misinformation leads to mistaken beliefs continues as the work’s central preoccupation when the dance resumes, which from here is at its most theatrically gestural. The dancers invoke a litany of caricatures and grotesques that veer from complaints (“they’re lazy”) to fears (“they steal”) to mythical beasts (drop-bears and unicorns). The poses are cartoonish but the statement is clearly made—it doesn’t take an especially sharp pin to puncture assumptions that are full of hot air. It’s the more ambiguous shifts of character that intrigue—a dancer briefly transformed from hoodie-shrouded brute to sashaying doll. The hoodies worn by each of the dancers are employed throughout as tools of conjuring and concealment; they’re folded and rolled up, pulled over heads, used to make frantic writing on the floor.

In the final section of [MIS]CONCEIVE a recorded voice ranges over the issues already represented in the dance, making the work’s politics explicit. Again in the schoolroom, we’re rightly asked to read “from the first page, not starting in the middle” so that all contributors to history are acknowledged. The work presents evidence that damage and confusion result from accepting the smooth, potentially fictionalised surface of cultures, from wrong assumptions about appearances. But are we really all the same underneath, as this voice tells us? Is the audience let off lightly by this optimism? The threads that connect our watching bodies in the present to our complicated shadows in the past are tugged, but only gently. We’re left with a clear and measured, not furious, claim for identity.

Next Wave Festival: [MIS]CONCEIVE, choreographer Thomas ES Kelly, performers Thomas ES Kelly, Natalie Pelarek, Caleena Sansbury, Taree Sansbury, Northcote Town Hall, Melbourne, 17-22 May

This review was written in the DanceWrite dance reviewing workshop. Read more reviews here.

Angela Goh’s naked bottom is rippling uncontrollably. Standing unclothed atop a vibrating platform her wobbling flesh seems to synchronise with the rock guitar soundtrack. As the speed of the vibration increases, so does her involuntary reaction. On a dancer, it’s an unexpected bodily response and a fitting climax to a work dedicated to mesmerising us with the qualities of movement.

Desert Body Creep, Goh’s solo dance work for Next Wave 2016 opens on a room scattered with debris. Surrounded by discarded fabrics, the platform and a sound sampler, Goh begins her episodic work with two languid dances accompanied by a sultry guitar-laden soundtrack. Recalling her short video works where she tested sending vibes to absent friends via dance, she generates a series of hypnotic pivoted torso twists and controlled backward rolls within the perimeter of a spotlight. A lush sense of being irrevocably connected to the earth is always present.

What begins as a meditation, evolves into a playful performance piece. She introduces her leitmotif: the worm. Its first incarnation is a half-metre gummi worm. Here ensues a surprisingly tender interaction, with Goh carefully animating the worm, twirling it across a stick until we are captivated by its undulating, unfurling form. It’s emblematic of her approach: we are calmly invited to marvel simultaneously at the silent, hypnotic charm in movement and the grotesque. Placing the invertebrate worm along her spine, she crawls slowly across the floor, before undergoing a radical transformation.

Allowing sound the same attention as motion, Goh samples her voice singing high, sustained notes, replaying them as a layered siren call. Entering a trance-like state, she shuffles prostrate across the floor like some B-grade horror movie monster with gaping mouth. Notes merge into a soundscape of screams, and she disappears into a velour casing: becoming a worm and devouring the debris in her path. In this ‘post post-everything’ scenario, as Goh describes it in the Next Wave program guide, it’s easy to imagine the Goh-worm devouring civilisation itself.

In the current context of Melbourne choreographer covering their performers in head-to-toe fabric to divest their bodies of gender and identity (for example: Geoffrey Watson’s Camel, Bec Jensen’s Explorer, Chloe Chignell’s Deep Shine), I wonder what it means for a dancer’s body to disappear into- and re-emerge naked from- a fabric worm. The humble worm may be a hermaphrodite, but Angela Goh emerges unequivocally, unashamedly female. There’s a clear sense of being cleansed of cultural conditioning. Stripped of gender expectations, it’s a pleasure to witness Goh commanding, even proud, in her role. She calmly packs these shed skins into a plastic bag and uses another worm— a vacuum hose— to suck any remaining life out of them before politely setting them aside.

Angela Goh seems to be book-ending for the audience a journey in what we recognise as conceptual choreography: from minimal dance, through performative movement, before returning to an appreciation of pure motion. Nudity is key in her transformation: Desert Body Creep is a meditation on re-claiming and re-seeing the body in motion…as it vibrates naked on a motorised platform.

Next Wave Festival 2016: Desert Body Creep, choreographer, performer Angela Goh, sound designer Matt Cornell; Northcote Town Hall, Melbourne, 17-22 May

This review was written in the DanceWrite dance reviewing workshop. Read more reviews here.

Open City has been granted four-year funding by the Australia Council for the Arts.

We grieve sorely for the many companies and organisations not funded, and for the multitude of artists they would have nurtured and who are already seriously underfunded.

RealTime will continue to support all those working in what is now a dangerously depleted arts ecosystem.

The time has come to protest vigorously the government’s abrogation of responsible arts funding, its undemocratic usurpation of the powers of a statutory authority and its destruction of the arms length principle that has long kept government from directly controlling artmaking.

Given the unlikelihood of the Turnbull Government returning the removed funds now that an Arts Minister has finally realised the dream of not a few to gain some direct control of arts funding, the best we can hope for is a Labor victory in the election – for art’s sake, for artists’ sake.

Perhaps protest will change PM Turnbull’s mind and perhaps it will alert voters to the damage done, and to come, from a government spending opportunistically (for electoral advantage) and chaotically (allowing some arts organisations to benefit hugely from both Australia Council and Catalyst funding while renownedly excellent companies and organisations are refused support and treated as ‘dead wood’). But given the large number of issues the electorate faces, artists, their organisations and supporters will have to speak very loudly to be heard.

Disappointingly, the Australia Council CEO is in denial, arguing to the media that four-year funding was always going to be highly competitive and that new groups would need to be allowed in. He simply does not admit that assessments and decisions were made with significantly less funds than initially projected, much of it for the small to medium sector. This is an issue not of Government funding strategy, but of political interference which is already re-directing previously targeted arts funding into the hands of large organisations and the commercial sector.

Add your voice to the protest. Write to Rupert Myer, Chair of the Australia Council for the Arts r.myer@australiacouncil.gov.au, challenging the four-year funding decisions, demanding their reversal, and copying your message to Arts Minister, Mitch Fifield minister@communications.gov.au. Keep informed by visitng #FREETHEARTS and signing up to Artspeak.

When I first arrange to Skype with Australian sound artist Leah Barclay she’s momentarily confused about what city and time zone she will be in the next day. This is hardly surprising—her schedule of activities encompassing acoustic ecology, environmental conservation and community cultural development is extensive, inspiring and exhausting.

She eventually realises she’ll be in New York presenting her work at the Atmospheres symposium at Brown University. This follows her attendance at the Fourth World Congress of Biosphere Reserves in Lima, Peru. Last year saw her trialling her augmented reality sound walk project, Rainforest Listening, in Austin (Texas) with subsequent presentations in New York and Paris.

When she’s not zipping around the world, home for Barclay is Brisbane where she is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Griffith University, the President of the Australian Forum for Acoustic Ecology and a convenor of the upcoming Sonic Environments Conference hosted in collaboration with NIME 2016 (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) and the Australasian Computer Music Association. We finally settle on a mutually acceptable time (though brutally early for New York and a bit sleepily late for Sydney) to talk about her global sonic adventures.

Biosphere Soundscapes

UNESCO has 699 biosphere reserves around the globe—areas designated as learning laboratories for sustainability with the aim of finding new approaches to conservation while maintaining cultural diversity. Barclay says that at the recent UNESCO conference in Lima the mission was summarised as such: “world heritage is about protecting the past…biosphere reserves are about creating the future.” Back in 2012 Barclay approached UNESCO to undertake a number of sound-driven projects in some of these areas and to date has worked in 14 of them.

“The process is basically going into the biosphere reserve, working directly with the community and developing the project in a very responsive way. Initially we run a lab where we teach the local community about sound and in return they teach us about the local biosphere reserve. We often run residencies bring[ing] in artists and scientists and sett[ing] up various partnerships so that communities can continue the projects. And then with all of the field recordings we create artworks that range from immersive performances to augmented reality projects using mobile phones, to large-scale installations that tour conservation congresses to bring awareness of biosphere reserves. Biosphere Soundscapes has, I would like to think, a strong structure, but then it’s very flexible and responsive with how it works with each of the communities onsite.”

I ask Barclay how this process plays out for the communities involved. She cites the most recent project in Mexico’s Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve as a good example. “In Mexico last year we ran a residency and as a result of that all these partnerships [were formed] with local conservation groups, the Ministry for Environment, a conservation conference they’re having there and Fonoteca which is the national film and sound archive. The project became a catalyst for forming a lot of interdisciplinary collaborations for the local community and the biosphere reserve.”

Rainforest Listening

Under the banner of Biosphere Soundscapes, several ongoing projects have developed—River Listening, Ocean Listening and the most recent project, Rainforest Listening, which Barclay discusses in more depth.

“I was working with an organisation in Austin, Texas called Rainforest Partnership…They work directly with Indigenous communities throughout the Amazon in Peru and Ecuador mainly…finding things that the community is passionate about doing and help[ing] them build up those projects so that the forest becomes more valuable standing than it is cut down.

“We decided to start this project looking at ways that we can use sound to monitor environmental change in the Amazon, but then [also] as an awareness and education tool…So the creative approach was to take a lot of my Amazon field recordings [and] creative responses, then geo-locate these compositions throughout urban environments, and take people on soundwalks. We launched that in New York City, in Times Square, for Climate Week last year.

“The success of that project sparked the idea of expanding this to different places around the world. So we did it for [the United Nations Conference on Climate Change] COP21 in Paris. We developed it further so that we could work on a vertical axis as well. We took the recordings I have from four different layers of the Amazon and planted those on each observatory deck of the Eiffel Tower…The evolution of that project is that we are now installing these live nodes in the Amazon Rainforest so the App will actually connect to live streams. [We are also] building on that idea of being able to [place] the four layers of Amazon onto different iconic structures, hopefully across the world.”

The power of listening

I ask Barclay why she thinks sound is so successful at generating discussions around conservation.

“We put so much more emphasis on our visual perception than our auditory perception. If we have opportunities to listen more or are encouraged to listen more, [we] experience the environment in a different way…I had the opportunity to work in a lot of Indigenous communities throughout my PhD and I was fascinated by this idea that in almost all of the communities I was working in—although they approached this in different ways—the idea of listening to the environment was really at the core of their life and a lot of things they were doing…So coming from a background as a musician with a strong interest in conservation and climate change, it seemed obvious to connect the dots and find ways that sound could bring awareness to these environments and be a tool to really engage people in the richness and diversity of these environments at risk.”

When asked about uncomfortable overtones of exoticism, imperialism and exploitation that potentially accompany a Western field recording practice, Barclay cites the development of the Biosphere Soundscapes model as a direct response.

“Probably eight or nine years ago I shifted away from that idea of going into a community, doing lots of field recordings, leaving, making a bunch of works, touring them around the place. It’s been much more about developing these long-term relationships with communities and having them be an integral part of process… [making sure they] have a voice.”

She also suggests that there is a shift in the conservation community towards understanding sound as a powerful tool. When she recently attended the World Congress of Biosphere Reserves [http://en.unesco.org/events/4th-world-congress-biosphere-reserves], held every six years, she was happy to see that acoustic ecology and sound were now on the United Nations agenda.

“When I’ve presented acoustic ecology and the Biosphere Soundscape project in the past there has been support but, I guess, confusion for a lot of the delegates as to why we would be talking about sound and what on earth acoustic ecology is. This year there was a lot more interest and general understanding of the way that sound can be a tool to understand cultural and biological diversity. There was a lot more interest from other [biosphere reserves] in developing projects and university curriculums and working with communities on the ground. Now it’s just a question of how, really, do I do it all!”

Sonic Environments (ACMC 2016), Queensland Conservatorium, Brisbane, 10-11 July

Coming around once every two years, Melbourne’s Next Wave Festival positions itself at the forefront of where the arts in Australia are going, programming works by the the artists who will take us there. Extending across the city, in theatres, galleries and streets, artistic director Georgie Meagher’s first festival can be read as an inquiry into diversity, continuing the festival’s focus of challenging emerging artists to create their most ambitious work to date.

Ecosexual Bathhouse

“Now remember,” our concierge says to us as we are about to enter the Ecosexual Bathhouse, “no glove, no … ?” “Love?” someone tentatively offers. “No glove, no love.”

Onto our “touching finger” we roll down a single white glove finger. With it, we’re invited to stimulate the stamens of the delicate white orchids, flushing ever so slightly with pink. We are instructed to move to another flower: some concentrate on the one plant; others are more adventurous, moving from plant to plant, cross-pollinating as they begin their no-judgment ecosexual journey.

Most embarking on this Next Wave adventure will be the eco-curious, rather than those fully embedded in the eco-lifestyle. But Pony Express (Perth playwright and performance maker Ian Sinclair and Loren Kronemyer, an interdisciplinary artist from Los Angeles) has created a welcoming environment for all types, postulating that we are all at least a little experienced in the practice: flowers have been smelt deeply; shoes have been discarded to walk barefoot in the grass; bodies have been plunged into lakes and oceans.

Consent and comfort run through the heart of the work. Ecosexual Bathhouse is simply a safe-space—complete with a safe word—to explore this lifestyle further. Company members move though the bathhouse: some inviting you on side journeys, some simply appearing, like you, to be exploring ecosexual pleasures. This normalises the world created and is an easy headspace to slip into.

The real achievement of this installation piece, set in a building on the outskirts of Melbourne’s Royal Botanical Gardens, is how utterly ordinary and joyous this whole subversion seems. As you flip through some of the eco-erotic literature, as you are doused in the scent of dirt or grass, as you lie down in a bed and lightly caress leaves, it all, somehow, makes sense.

On opening night, slight tech issues mean not everyone is able to experience all of the components of the work. Still, when I leave, I have flowers in my hair, dirt under my fingernails and the whiff of bushfire on my wrists. As I step out under the night sky I feel just a little more connected to the park around me and a little more reluctant to re-enter the city beyond.

The Voices of Joan of Arc

In bringing old stories to our stages—be they adaptations of classic plays or retellings of global history—their connection to the time we occupy now is the key to letting these stories resonate. They can exist on our stages today because humanity shares the same echoes through time. If we don’t learn from our past, we are doomed to repeat it.

In The Voices of Joan of Arc, lead artist, Janie Gibson (an Australian actor and author who has been working with companies in Poland and the USA) brushes over the connections between Joan’s life and ours with the lightest of hands. She touches on questions of the place of outspoken women in society; on the notion of occupied lands; on the relationship between religion and country; on how we talk about terrorism—and who is prescribed the label of terrorist. But they are only ever the lightest of touches: notations that swim around the edges, rather than a philosophy that skewers the core.

A two-hander theatre piece, this telling of Joan pits her against a member of the clergy (Daniel Han) after she was captured by the English. She is adamant she acts on the word of God; he believes she is lying. As for the audience, we are left unclear as to where we are supposed to stand. On the side of Joan, certainly; but Gibson never reveals enough to let us know if this Joan is hearing God, or if she is a teenage girl suffering delusions in a world that cannot help nor understand her.

On stage, The Voices of Joan of Arc lacks urgency and a sense of intellectual rigor. In a world where women are increasingly able to claim space and raise their voices—and where women consistently face punishment for doing so—Gibson’s Joan doesn’t raise her voice enough. This production may tell us something about Joan of Arc. Unfortunately, it fails to tell us anything about ourselves.

Under My Skin

There may be four bodies, but we can’t really tell. Limbs and torsos move over and around each other, passing a body towards the front of the group before it is threaded back and another body takes its place. Over this writhing mass more bodies are projected: faces made of light swimming over stomachs made of flesh; projected and physical limbs wind around and meld into each other. The faces of the physical dancers look flattened, misconstrued. Eventually, we realise they are covered in masking tape.

Under My Skin is at its most intriguing when it sits in spaces of discomfort: bodies in half-light encased in a latex sheet; the physical struggle of tape being prised off faces; a scream through sign language—uninterrupted and, physically, painfully clear. These components, however, don’t extend their reach throughout the full 60-minute work, creating a production of many interesting elements but no cohesive whole.

Jo Dunbar and Lina Limosani often play with the unique physical vocabulary of The Delta Project’s deaf/hearing Melbourne-based dance theatre ensemble: signed words extending out of limbs and integrated as dance are a natural fit for such a physically potent medium, while also drawing on a particular skill of these dancers.

Too often, though, the choreography has a tendency to expose the weaknesses of the dancers, rather than support their strengths. Leg extensions are elevated at radically different heights; feet are often not uniformly stretched. One dancer lacks the lower body strength the choreographers demand of him. Much of Under My Skin however evokes a beautiful disquiet.

As bass notes throb through our bodies, it is interesting to consider how few people will have access to all of the elements of this work: the precise text of the Auslan components as well as the deeply layered soundscape of Russell Goldsmith’s composition and sound design. This speaks loudly to the central theme of Under My Skin: a look at the means by which we experience the world. If only this work could rest in those moments more often.

Mummy Dearest

Annaliese Constable, a writer, performer and queer-rights activist from Sydney, was raised by her alcoholic mother. There is no pussyfooting around it, and in Mummy Dearest she lays it all out on the table. It’s a look back at the pain of being a child forced to find her own two feet too soon; the heartache of watching someone you love hurt themselves; and the humour with which you can look back on a life as you keep soldiering on.

Downstairs at Arts House has been transformed into a bizarre bar. Horse racing airs on the big screen; footy scarves drape over the backs of chairs; inflated goon sacks decorate the ceiling. On each table sits a teddy bear—in case things get a little bit too much.

Mummy Dearest is clearly a story Constable felt compelled to tell, and she often finds a connection to her audience through it. There’s personal heartbreak, certainly, but also moments of real pride and love. And yet in its premiere season, it feels like Constable hasn’t quite found the words—or perhaps the right genre—with which to truly share this piece of her life with a room full of strangers. The work shifts between theatre, stand-up and storytelling, but rather than becoming a rigorous collaboration between these elements, the genres are weakened. Jokes are lost to hesitation; narrative cohesion has yet to be found.

It’s a big ask for any artist to put their life on stage so rawly: especially when it’s not just their life, but their family’s too. The strands of a show that could be exciting—devastating and hilarious—occasionally shine through. Hopefully after a week in front of an audience Constable will find the way to to knit them together.

GROUND CONTROL

The interstellar traveller is alone on her spacecraft, on a solo mission to reach a new planet for the human species. Communication with Earth has been lost. All that is left to talk with is the disembodied voice of the operating system.

Created and performed by Rachel Perks, and directed by Bridget Balodis (both are Melbourne artists), GROUND CONTROL is a violent, feminist telling of the end of the world. Chris is tasked with finding Earth 2.0. She is alone except for her plant, Terry, and her operating system, Tina. That is, until she is not.

Are we watching a woman losing her mind or an uprising of sentient robots? Or, Perks and Balodis ask, are we watching a play? If we, the audience, exist, and this is just a play, is nothing real? Or is everything? These splinterings between constructed story and the construct of theatre are gently threaded throughout the work, constantly destabilising our understanding of the world of Chris and the world of us.

Chris is desperately alone: millions of miles away from Earth; communications system down; girlfriend…where? Possibly dead. The statistics aren’t worth considering. Yet, once she was unexpectedly chosen, Chris knew she had to take this job. Even if a woman getting the job was an “administrative error,” she was told. She believes. Perhaps.

It’s these very real fears many women hold today that wallop through the work like a heart on anxious overdrive: the fear of being alone in the wrong place at the wrong time; the fear of hurting someone and the fear of being the one who is hurt; the pressure to be the best, to prove things not only for yourself but for your gender; to survive in the face of being told you only got that job because of quotas—or because of administrative errors. The fear things won’t get better. And still, as in life, Perks and Balodis build in jokes and levity. We laugh through the pain.

The details of Perks and Balodis’ future and destroyed Earth remain hazy, only one thing is shatteringly true: the women will suffer at the hands of the men. And it will be terrifying.

GROUND CONTROL is a taut and devastating, yet often frankly funny and beautiful, look at the future of our world—and an exhilarating look at the future of our theatre.

Angkot Alien

Our hosts wear silver ponchos that billow out and take up as much space as they please. We wear eyes of confusion and maniacal smiles as we sit on gold benches installed in a white van, slightly decorated on the outside, but it’s the inside where it really comes to life. A string of green neon light above our heads, walls covered in sketches, words, a musical score. A map to where we’re going that no-body can read. Karaoke.

A collaboration between Melbourne artist Rafaella McDonald and Indonesian artist Natasha Gabriella Tontey, Angkot Alien is a small shot of live art joy. In a journey across a city (Jakarta) and between cultures (between McDonald and Tontey), the Indonesian Angkot van becomes an interstellar spacecraft: destination unknown. The audience is small and there is no escaping participation. For this economy of means to work, everyone is going to have to play their part.

It’s ramshackle and it’s confusing and you never quite know where you are, or how you got there, or where you’re going. At just 35 minutes it’s over all too soon. Angkot Alien is a glorious mess of ideas that finds truth in the sentiment it’s not about the destination; it’s about the journey.

microLandscapes

The title of Emma Fishwick’s microLandscapes is all we need for the gentle nudge to contextualise her dancers’ bodies as representing fragments of the natural world. In the centre of the main hall at Northcote Town Hall, Ella-Rose Trew and Niharika Senapati are dressed purely in white: soft white wide-legged pants that refuse to stop flowing when they do.

Their movement captures a tree’s branches creaking, rocks tumbling down cliff-faces, the gentle brush of wind over a field of wheat, the incessant power of a snowstorm. Their bodies move in constant communication with each other and the space, but perfect unison begins to fracture and they splinter apart: the land, the environment, the weather are always spinning off onto new paths. Kynan Tan projects CGI landscapes on screens on the edge of the performance space—the world codified into the artificial; his filmed streetscapes glitching out until all we have are lines and colours—the world reduced to pixels.

It is physically demanding on the dancers. As it crescendos the intensity of the demand is passed onto the audience and, under flickering lights and reverberating sound, several audience members are compelled to leave the space.

microLandscapes is an audacious full-length debut for West Australian choreographer Fishwick, and an exciting response to Next Wave’s challenge to emerging artists to create their most ambitious work to date. She creates not only compelling and emotional images via her dancers’ bodies, but also expands her ambition to explore this in an installation work that surrounds and relies on her audience.

Occasionally, the dancers move beyond the boundaries of their white dance floor. This fracturing of the divide between performance space and audience space forces us to confront our own bodies and the way we have chosen to position ourselves within the landscape of the sculptural installation. Among small white rocky outcrops—mountains growing from the wooden floor—we stand or lean or sit on stools or, mostly, sit on the floor. The option is to move around the hall, but mostly we stay still, not wanting to disturb the energies of the performers and of the space.

Sedih // Sunno

Among the performance work in Next Wave’s opening weekend, Sedih // Sunno stands out as a quieter state of affairs. It’s an intimate setting: shoes removed, we sit in a tight circle on wooden stools. Rani Pramesti welcomes us to the space, and asks us to take a look around at the batik—traditional Indonesian dye-patterned cloth—that drapes the walls. With this batik, Pramesti introduces us to Indonesia, to her family, and to her mother—the woman whose story we’ve come to hear.

A quietly devastating story of childhood sexual abuse, Sedih // Sunno (‘sedih,’ ‘sadness’ in Bahasa Indonesian, ‘sunno’ ‘to listen’ in Fijian Hindi) delicately explores its trauma and on-going repercussions, and the way sadness permeates a life.

Created collaboratively by artists who live in Australia—Rani Pramesti Indonesian/Chinese/Javanese), Ria Soemarjdo (Indonesian/Javanese/Australian), Shivanjani Lal (Fijian/Indian) and Kei Murakami (Japanese, raised in Germany)—the work carries a strong sense of responsibility, the artists taking great care with their audience. We are told before we enter we can leave and move into a safe-space at any time; the offer of tissues is gently extended to a crying audience member. There are moments of lightness as, childlike, we play with the artists, covertly wrapping ourselves in Fijian Hindi saris, playing illicitly with pearls from a mother’s jewellery box. It’s only after we leave these moments of joy we realise the weight of revisiting childlike wonder while in a story of childhood pain.

Ultimately, through sadness, Sedih // Sunno becomes a story of connection and care between mother and daughter, about passing on cultural histories and heritage down generations and through to audiences, and about the way we look back on our lives: dropped stitches, mistakes and all.

Adding up

The performance works presented over the opening weekend revealed artists who want to question who they are and the art they make, responding to the challenge to push themselves and their practice beyond their previous limits, and beyond traditional artform boundaries.

Most excitingly, when viewed as a totality, is the way Next Wave acts directly to tear down the hierarchy of voices that have traditionally been elevated in the arts in Australia. Female creatives dominated the performance program of the opening weekend, with works from disabled, queer, feminist and Asian Australian artists. As the festival continues, the festival’s focus on Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander artists, already evident in the visual arts program, will come to the fore of the performance curation.

The quality of work is mixed: some pieces arrived as startling and exciting achievements, while others haven’t yet found their feet in their first seasons. But, in the spirit of Next Wave, you feel these young artists will do nothing but keep pushing themselves—and their forms and practices—forward.

Next Wave Festival 2016: Pony Express, Ian Sinclair, Loren Kronemyer, Ecosexual Bathhouse, Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne, 6–14 May; Janie Gibson, The Voices of Joan of Arc, Northcote Town Hall, 3–14 May; The Delta Project, Under My Skin, Arts House, North Melbourne, 5–8 May; Annaliese Constable, Mummy Dearest, Arts House, North Melbourne, 5–21 May; Rachel Perks & Bridget Balodis, GROUND CONTROL, Northcote Town Hall, 4–14 May; Rafaella McDonald & Natasha Gabriella Tontey, Angkot Alien, secret CBD Location, Melbourne, 7–22 May; Emma Fishwick, microLandscapes, Northcote Town Hall, 4 – 8 May; Rani P Collaborations, Sedih // Sunno, Arts House, North Melbourne, 5–15 May

This double-header of short multidisciplinary dance works, originally developed and shown at Catapult Dance’s retrofitted Newcastle headquarters with its two sprung floors, was transposed for a special two-night season to the cold hard concrete of The Lock-Up contemporary art space (a potentially unforgiving place for contemporary dance). The custodial impermeability of Newcastle’s old colonial-era police station soon took on a more chimeric quality.

In one cell, local filmmaker Neil Mansfield, collaborating with choreographer/dancer Kristina Chan, made the walls of the confined space liquefy with light as a body folded like origami on the floor. In the peephole of a padded cell was a tiny projection of hands fingering coal, raising the spectre of the industry to follow in Chan’s performance in the outdoor exercise yard. These filmic installations in the cells were a perfect precursor to the live performances in terms of merging distinctions between inside/outside, also in the sense of collaborators coming from elsewhere to work with local artists, and perhaps even bringing coal to Newcastle.

The crowd gathered in The Lock-Up’s more conventional gallery space for the first live work, a collaboration between choreographer Joshua Thomson, dancers Craig Bary, Angelyn Diaz and Omer Astrachan and local composer and musician Zackari Watt (known for his art rock performances with now defunct The Hauntingly Beautiful Mousemoon). It was a transfixing experience, with the audience sitting around the perimeter ad hoc and the dancers in jeans and sneakers coming tantalisingly close (close enough to see a bleeding scab on one dancer’s elbow, a bum crack, a tattoo of a pixie chucking a brown eye). The performance was refreshingly unisex: a girl lifting a boy, the two boys dancing interchangeably. If there was a triangular relationship dynamic going on, gender was irrelevant. In fact the trio seemed almost immortal, somehow avoiding whiplash as they grabbed each other’s necks. There was a very mixed crowd on opening night, including young children and teenagers, and there was awe on faces of all ages. I think it was sharing the floor with the dancers that made them at once so ordinary, yet so extraordinary.

The second live performance in the outdoor exercise yard was a darker affair and reached a more discordant crescendo. Kristina Chan writhed on top of a pile of coal like a banshee, her indelible lightness preventing what would have otherwise been a definite sprained ankle or other occupational health and safety issue. The dystopian future projected by this performance was undercut by the retro aesthetic of a single factory lamp hung overhead. The elemental force of electricity, at first seemingly administering psychiatric shocks to the dancer’s body, appeared to come from another era but, although coal can seem positively Dickensian, outside the Lock-Up is one of the busiest coal ports in the world. By the end of the performance, the teenagers especially were looking quite wired, and again the energy of live performance had literally infused the crowd.

This was the first time that contemporary dance had been presented at The Lock-Up and I was impressed by the way the performances integrated the very particular spatial dynamics. The visual, sonic and live elements resonated with the omnipresent architecture exceptionally well and despite the Lock-Up’s labyrinth of passageways and openings, it was never claustrophobic.

The freedom of the walk-through was immersive, rather than constrictive, and in general reflects the Lock-Up’s attitude to making this otherwise heritage space continually responsive to contemporary practice. It’s also heartening to see collaborations occurring between the contemporary arts sectors in Newcastle, given there is nothing like the presence of purpose-built contemporary performance venues that exist in many metropolitan centres available here (which would also open up the touring of live works, including dance). This is also where Catapult Dance, a relatively new kid on the block, is working under director Cadi McCarthy to foster a local contemporary dance culture that is more connected to national and international contemporary dance communities. The works in PROPELLED were initially part of Catapult’s collaborative residency program in 2015. Titled PROPEL, it provides artists with a one to three-week creative space (and live-in apartment) in which to develop work, a program set to continue in 2016 (see the RealTime interview with McCarthy).

The two collaborations presented at The Lock Up were enticingly metonymic: small vignettes that were both decidedly local in engagement but also displayed vast accumulative experience and contemporary dance literacy.

The 2016 winner of the Keir Choreographic Award is Ghenoa Gela, a Rockhampton-born, Torres Strait Islander dancer and choreographer who was raised in mainland Australia. The final night audience at Carriageworks not only greeted Gela’s jury win ($30,000) rapturously but also awarded her the audience choice award ($10,000). These prizes will provide independence and a tremendous creative boost for a talented young choreographer whose Winds of Woerr at the 2014 Adelaide Fringe (and subsequently Next Wave) first excited my interest.

Trained in contemporary Western dance, Sydney-based Gela has a passionate commitment to sustaining Torres Strait culture and is clearly engaged in a quest to bring together not merely forms but peoples—evident in her casting non-Torres Strait Islander dancers to perform her Fragments of Malungoka—Women of the Sea. The final passage of the work entered fully, even winningly, into the powerful dance of Gela’s heritage while the preceding episodes seemed tentative, perhaps reflecting the uneasy engagement between dance forms and cultures but also evidence of the awkwardness of a kind of dance theatre in which abstracted tensions play out between the three dancers. These were complicated by the curious addition of video surveillance feed from one of the performers, suggesting perhaps a self-conscious monitoring, but one not clearly integrated, more a mysterious backdrop detracting from the tight weave of the trio.

The interdisciplinarity the Keir Award keenly fosters is felt in Gela’s meeting of cultures, but not so effectively realised in the work’s other dimensions—her competitors were more assured in that respect. Nonetheless, Gela is a talented and inspired artist, one in whom the judges, in no way short of expertise, doubtless saw great potential. Even so, in terms of the Award’s criteria, Andrew Fuhrmann in the second of his reviews of the semi-finals and the winning work, asks why the award went “to a less conceptually ambitious work, one directed more toward personal dance methodologies than shifting the choreographic paradigm?… [It] does send a mixed message about what the award stands for.”

The 2016 Keir Choreographic Award program has aroused more debate than the first in 2014. Andrew details some of the issues raised in his report. Debate is healthy, indeed invaluable, given that the KCA is the only award of its kind for Australian contemporary dance, let alone one focused on emerging choreographers and at a time when dance is going through many changes. The addition of a public program of talks and other events this year enhanced audience understanding of some of the discussion in contemporary dance circles; the KCA-Critical Path forum with four South-East Asian curators was especially informative (more about this in a future e-dition). But there are challenges to be met by the KCA organisers.

Of the four finalists seen at Carriageworks, Sarah Aiken in her Tools for Personal Expansion seemed to not a few in the Sydney audience to have created the most formally and satisfyingly complete work with its low key rhythms and subtly, and drolly, unfolding magic. But we in Sydney didn’t get to see the creations of Paea Leach and James Batchelor whose work Andrew Furhrmann thought “arguably the most formally satisfying of the [eight] semi-finalists.” The two-city creation of the Keir Choreographic Award is admirable and is developing (with the addition of Critical Path to the fold), but it’s frustrating for Sydney-siders not to be able see the whole competition and for those in Melbourne not to enjoy a final re-estimation, let alone the thrill of witnessing the win and having a hand in deciding the audience prize winner. In an ideal world, the eight works would be performed in both cities. The cost may be prohibitive, but we have to admit a somewhat schizoid feel to the final in Sydney, where we have only half the evidence with which to judge for ourselves. Perhaps as the Award grows in strength and influence it might be able to play out equally in Sydney and Melbourne and then beyond—live streaming even!

A not uncommon opinion was that the eight works were largely under-developed and, in some cases, over-propped and technologised. The Melbourne Fringe and Next Wave have long, and successfully, supported selected emerging artists with dramaturgical and other assistance. Again cost might be an issue, but the advice of independent KCA-appointed dramaturgs or experienced choreographers across the duration of creation might develop the emerging artists and present audiences with more cogent works. By its very nature, the Award is nurturing, but to what degree?

As for the discussion about the disappearance of actual dancing in the Award’s works, Andrew Fuhrmann opines, “we risk falling into repetitive and needlessly divisive debates about whether this is really dance or not. Simply put: there is conceptual choreography that works, and there is conceptual choreography that doesn’t. And this is what we should be talking about.”

We’ll certainly be talking about it in coming e-ditions as we grapple with “the choreographic.” What is it? Is it an appropriation or co-option of dance by galleries and art biennales? A new niche for dance? Concept or con? And how does it relate to the conceptual choreography seemingly central to the Keir Choreographic Award, this year’s idiosyncratic winner aside.

I happily add that I enjoyed Martin Hansen’s It’s All In My Veins, an intelligent and witty take on the importance and limits of realising a performable dance archive in which three performers mimicked classic caught-on-film moves by Isadora Duncan and Nijnsky through to de Keersmaeker and Beyonce’s blatant appropriation of her choreography. I rolled with Rebecca Jensen’s propulsive, physically bold exploitation of the large Carriagework’s space in Explorer, even though the cumulative meaning of its imagery of immersion and flight proved elusive. I’ll not forget the final moment of Sarah Aiken’s Tools for Personal Expansion when one of her fellow dancers offers with a spooky smile the ‘hand’ of Aiken’s fantastically elongated arm to a front-row member of the audience.

The Keir Choreographic Award has again provided welcome indicators as to where dance is now and might likely go, this time keeping us on our toes with its choice of a winner and engaging, via its public program, an audience eager for context, critique and debate.

The Keir Choreographic 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; inaugural recipient of the KCA in 2014, Atlanta Eke and Phillip Keir, Keir Foundation founder.

Sydney-based RUCKUS describes itself as a “disability led theatre ensemble” determined to “smash stereotypes and challenge audience’s preconceptions of what people with disability are capable of achieving.” For their latest production, Speed of Life, RUCKUS is addressing how, in an impatient society, people of differing abilities engage with time.

RUCKUS asks, intriguingly, “Could tuning in to other people who share a similar nature hold the clues? Does nature itself show you the way? Perhaps the answers are buried in the sands of southern Cambodia? Or scattered in the stars above?” Speed of Life is partly inspired by a trip the ensemble made recently to southern Cambodia.

With a creative team and support crew, RUCKUS travelled to Epic Arts, an inclusive arts centre in Kampot, southern Cambodia, where for two weeks the ensemble worked alongside Epic Encounters, an ensemble of eight dancers who are predominantly deaf or have a physical disability.

“We visited rivers, mountain tops and beaches and used movement and video to explore and discover what it means to connect with others who may navigate their world at a different pace and speed to the busy-ness around them and how we adapt to keep up.”

Speed of Life is produced by RUCKUS Director Alison Richardson who co-directs the work with choreographer Dean Walsh.

Walsh is well known in Sydney and beyond as a leading dancer and choreographer and for bringing these roles into play in experiencing and protecting marine ecology. He’s worked with Ruckus since 2012 and elsewhere as a mentor for young and emerging artists living with and without disability across Australia.

Alison Richardson has been with RUCKUS since its inception in 2011 after working extensively as a theatre director and tutor for community theatre companies, Powerhouse Youth Theatre, Shopfront Theatre, PACT Theatre and Australian Theatre for Young People. Her interest and passion for working with people with disability goes back to 2007 with a variety of projects. She has been awarded a 2015 Churchill Fellowship which will enable her to research disability-led theatre practice and inclusive training programs in UK arts and disability companies and organisations.

The ensemble members are Chris Bunton, Audrey O’Connor, Gerard O’Dwyer, James Penny, Rachel Sugrim and Digby Webster. O’Dwyer is a Tropfest award winning actor and also the recipient of the Emerging Leaders Award at the 2012 National Disability Awards and four of the six members have been recognised by the NSW Government and asked to be Ambassadors for its Don’t DIS MyABILITY state campaign. Members Digby Webster and Audrey O’Connor were the faces of the campaign in 2010 and 2011 respectively. RT

Rebecca Jensen, Explorer

For the second semi-final we more or less pick up where we left off with the first with a work by a VCA-trained choreographer, currently based in Melbourne, whose creative practice has strong links to ideas around both conceptual choreography and postdramatic theatre.

Rebecca Jensen’s Explorer plays out like an eccentric pantomime. First, Andre Jessop Smith, dressed in a marble-print bodysuit, enters from upstage. Advancing past a heap of white sheets, he switches on a sampler sitting on the floor beneath a tree branch suspended from the ceiling. Jensen enters, wearing snow goggles and wielding a leafblower. Dancers in white bodysuits are revealed under the white sheets. Jensen clambers over them to a crunching, rattling aural accompaniment.

Is this a winter scene? Is the leafblower in fact a snow blower? Amid the mess of props and idle bodies, a story of landscape exploration emerges. We hear a splash and the lights change to a rippling water effect. Jensen is now deep-sea diving. Crab-like, she scuttles around the edge of the stage. Later, supported acrobalance style by Smith, we watch her rise from the water and through the clouds (suggested by a smoke machine and printed backdrop), reinventing herself like Helene Cixous’ airborne swimmer: the figure who is dispersible, prodigious, desirous and capable of being others.

Carried on Smith’s shoulders up into the audience, all the way to the back row, she reaches out her hand as if to touch the face of—what? Here the work abruptly breaks off, and we are left to wonder at this image of a dancer in distant orbit.

James Batchelor, Inhabited Geometries

The mood turns more contemplative with James Batchelor’s Inhabited Geometries, a visually attractive if somewhat opaque work. It has a similar science fiction feel to a piece called Island that he developed as part of a Dancehouse residency in 2015. Batchelor is one of the country’s most stylish young choreographers in terms of creating overall stage pictures, and he also knows how to find the right collaborators for his projects.

This new work opens with Batchelor, partially hidden by shadows, lying prone on a grey slab toward the back of the space. As he starts to move, the slab comes apart, separating into three blocks. In slow motion, he folds himself into a space between two of them. For an instant, his face is caught in a spotlight, and we see the glint of a long gloop of ectoplasmic slime slipping from his forehead. Has his body been punctured by one of the slab’s hard corners? Or is he liquefying, collapsing under the pressure of all that dark obscurity?

Intricate, abstract animations designed by Zoe Scoglio are projected onto a screen at the back of the stage, lingering for a moment, like Arctic auroras, then fading back to black. Faint splashes of prismatic colour slide across the floor and the walls. Morgan Hickenbotham sits with a laptop at a desk against the rear wall, live mixing the ambient score. Batchelor slowly crawls across the stage.

Is Inhabited Geometries, with all its dim intensity and shards of opalescence, perhaps a bit too refined? Is this really a dance about homelessness, as was suggested in early publicity material? According to the program notes, Batchelor spent time living rough on the streets as research, but I wonder if the image of exquisite pain he presents us with here is really adequate to that theme. And yet, if we think of this Inhabited Geometries as an aesthetic exploration of the stage possibilities for mobile architecture, a problem which was also touched on in Island, then it seems a more conceptually satisfying albeit narrower piece.

Ghenoa Gela, Fragments of Malungoka—Women of the Sea

The three dancers, Elle Evangelista, Melanie Palomares and Melinda Tyquin, come prancing onto the stage in black sleeveless tops, what look like crosses between black pantaloons and grass skirts, and white cut-out, mask-like headdresses. They advance diagonally downstage, taking quick steps in time with busy, shuffling beats provided by composer Ania Reynolds. Occasionally the dancers freeze, and one or two or three of them look out toward the audience, as if uncertain or mistrustful.

The headdresses are called dhoeri in the Western Torres Strait and are used by Islander women in ceremonial dances. Audiences will recognise them as the white device featured on the region’s flag. For choreographer Ghenoa Gela, herself an Islander, the problem is how to combine these traditional dances with her own background in contemporary western dance styles.

The air of uncertainty in the opening moments speaks to Gela’s own anxiety, which she describes in the program, about what happens to traditional dance when performed for non-traditional audiences by non-traditional dancers. And the great strength of this piece is the direct and unpretentious development of this theme. Gradually, hesitation is overcome; the dancers move with more attack and more feeling. Mistrust transforms into a kind of stomping, whooping joy.

One of the dancers, Tyquin, is fitted with a GoPro camera which, during one section, streams a live feed to a screen behind the dancers. This aspect of the work is underdeveloped, perhaps even superfluous, and there are some other design choices—such as glow-in-the-dark paint on the headdresses—which seem a bit naff; still, with its high-energy dynamic, clear dramatic arc and emphasis on actual dance steps, Fragments of Malungoka makes a clear contrast to everything that comes before it on the program. Whether or not it stands out from other attempts to develop a contemporary dance language out of traditional materials is a different question.

Paea Leach, One and One and One

Paea Leach’s One and One and One also makes a strong contrast. Described as a trio for two dancers and a performance poet, the work speaks to feelings of and fear of loneliness. With loose, slightly ragged movements, the two dancers, Leach and Rhiannon Newton, seem always on the verge of falling out of unison, or losing contact entirely. It’s almost like they’re describing a relationship held together only by a mutual dread of being alone. There is anxiety here, and disappointment and frustration.

Poet Candy Royalle initially creates an atmospheric soundtrack of humming and chanting using a microphone and loop pedal, then shifts to a quietly menacing monologue on themes of isolation, fear and a failure to communicate:

“I said you never really suffered. She said you never really loved me. I said you never knew me. She said you never let me.”

Royalle seems to stalk the performers, following them around the stage, keeping them off balance with her words. We often see choreographers exploring the potential for experimental dance to unsettle language, but this is a movement in the other direction.

“Am I really always the savage animal you expect me to be?” she says, sneering.

Royalle is a charismatic performer giving a very strong performance. In the final moments, she seems to dominate completely. Standing centre stage, she turns to the audience while the dancers stand off to the side, finally submitting to the power of speech.

Now the words are addressed to contemporary dance itself. Why dance, she demands. Why not use words? Why not just say what you mean? The obscurities of contemporary dance, she suggests, are a symptom of fear, a fear of being misunderstood or rejected. Face the fear, she urges. Make dance that speaks explicitly to social issues: to racism and the plight of refugees and injustice everywhere. Don’t hide behind concepts.

It’s a bold message to bring to the KCA, this demand for legible meaning, this impatience with the ambiguities of the body. And it’s a message which, powerful as it is, does tend to diminish the significance of Leach’s choreography.

… and the winner is?

It’s interesting that neither Paea Leach nor James Batchelor, both of whom attracted plenty of support among reviewers and in post-show foyer conversations (and whose works were arguably the most formally satisfying of the semi-finalists), were picked for the finals. Instead, it was Ghenoa Gela, Rebecca Jensen, Sarah Aiken and Martin Hansen who travelled to Sydney for the season at Carriageworks.

Of these four, it seems to me that Aiken, Jensen and Martin all share a similar artistic genealogy, perhaps traceable to Jerome Bel’s assertion that choreography is a frame in which much more than dance is inscribed. The work they created for the KCA might be a little scrappy, but it does make new claims for how dance can be experienced, which fits with the stated goals of the KCA.

And yet, it was Gela’s work which took home both the overall prize ($30,000) and also the people’s choice award ($10,000).

Some commentators have already suggested changes to the commissioning process for the KCA, and no doubt there are things that might be tinkered with to encourage the creation of stronger individual works. One idea recently mooted is to downplay the competitive aspect of the award. This, I think, would be a mistake. It’s vital that the award remains competitive.

The function of the award is not simply to support artists, but also to foster a critically engaged audience. Competition gives audiences an immediate focus: a reason for thinking about what they value and why.

And, yes, it’s vital that a critical appreciation of the more expansive definition of choreography encompassed by the KCA is fostered. If we don’t, we risk falling into repetitive and needlessly divisive debates about whether this is really dance or not. Simply put: there is conceptual choreography that works, and there is conceptual choreography that doesn’t. And this is what we should be talking about.

So, does a perceived weakness of this year’s field explain the judges’ decision to give the award to a less conceptually ambitious work, one directed more toward personal dance methodologies than shifting the choreographic paradigm? Maybe—though it does send a mixed message about what the award stands for.

Of course, another possibility—which is just as likely—is that the judges saw something radical in Fragments of Malungoka that I missed. In any case, it’s a point worth arguing about.

Keir Choreographic Award Semi-Finals, Program Two; Dancehouse, Melbourne, 27-30 April

Bright World opens with a chilling recollection by co-playwright Elise Hearst. As a child on Jewish school camp, she was warned by her elders that the local townsfolk were suspicious and fearful of her kind, having been told stories of their wicked ways. Hearst wasn’t the only kid left crying. In the end, it was all a bizarre lesson—see how easy it is to fall for a story? The truth was not in what was recounted, but in the telling. It’s a lesson that underscores every aspect of the play.

The work began when Hearst learned of William Cooper, the legendary Aboriginal activist whose struggles to achieve racial equality in Australia were notable enough, but who also led the world’s only private protest against the horrific treatment of Jews in Europe during and after Kristallnacht. This was at a time when Indigenous Australians were a long way from being recognised as citizens—as humans, in many cases—and outspoken protests were more likely to result in ration cuts than global change. Today Cooper is a hero in the Jewish community both in Australia and Israel, but in 1938 he was merely doing what he knew was right.

Hearst has co-written the play with fellow playwright Andrea James, herself a descendant of William Cooper, and the work’s two historic threads trace the long life of Cooper alongside that of Hearst’s grandparents, who would flee Austria during the period of Cooper’s protest. Given the obvious potency of these two narratives, it’s odd that the strictly historical sequences in the play are the least engaging, though not at all dull. They’re relatively straightforward reconstructions, however, at least compared to the frame into which they’re placed.

This is a work that deeply and effectively problematises the act of telling. Hearst and James perform as versions of themselves, describing the way their troubled working relationship unfurled throughout the creative process of writing, and admitting to their prejudices and presumptions regarding the other. “I think it’s cool to be Aboriginal,” Hearst confesses to James during an online exchange, while James is scornful of her “posh” collaborator. Cooper’s story can be seen as the coming together of two oppressed communities, but James and Hearst don’t paint their own union as a rosy one.

Bright World is richly invested in intersectionality and the difficulties it presents. The intersection of Aboriginal and Jewish cultures is the most obvious case in point, and there are musings both charming and melancholic on the ghettoisation of writers—is James always and necessarily an Aboriginal writer? If Hearst creates Jewish writing, why doesn’t she produce red-headed writing?

These questions are embedded in the structure of the work, too. It’s a shocking moment when an Anglo-Australian actor slips into the role of Cooper’s teacher, a Tamil from Mauritius, complete with his attempt at an accurate accent. James eventually lambasts Hearst for thinking it’s okay to cast a white actor in the role, to which the latter objects that Indigenous actors are playing Jewish figures in other historical scenes. Actors are playing across gender, too, and the struggle to nut out the thorny issues of access, opportunity and authenticity ultimately culminates in a fully fledged fight over who can claim to be most oppressed, a battle that turns physical at one point.

None of these issues can be compromised, but the playwrights realise they’re working with limited resources to bear witness to a story too few know. If they don’t tell it themselves—problems and all—who will?

Paige Rattray’s direction appropriately emphasises the constructedness of the enterprise, setting the whole thing within a school gym and largely eschewing period costume for basketball shorts and t-shirts with slogans or emoji nodding to the character being played (“WHITE ACTOR” elicits big laughs by the time it appears). The playfulness of the mise-en-scène plays counterpoint to the seriousness of the themes explored, though that playfulness runs throughout the meta-theatrical written frame too.

Against all this the historical moments can seem dialogue-heavy and overly expository. James and Hearst do an excellent job illustrating the knotty challenges of telling these stories in Australia in 2016, but Bright World doesn’t seem to resolve those problems internally. Perhaps it’s a necessary contradiction. To leave the theatre fully satisfied would be to fall into the lie that the work has finished. When William Cooper finally makes his appearance in Bright World’s meta-narrative frame, James and Hearst tell him that there’s still a lot of work to be done. He doesn’t skip a beat: “Get on with it then!”

Bright World, writers Andrea James, Elise Hearst, director Paige Rattray, performers Elise Hearst, Andrea James, Kevin Kiernan-Molloy, Shari Sebbens, Guy Simon, dramaturgy, lighting Emma Valente, design Romanie Harper, sound design, music Tom Hogan, choreography Kurt Phelan, presenter ARTHUR, producer Belinda Kelly; Theatre Works, Melbourne, 13-30 April

AUSTRALIANS, END THE INCARCERATION OF ASYLUM SEEKERS. End sickness, mental illness, self- and sexual abuse. End suicide, torture, manslaughter and murder. End hopelessness.

AUSTRALIANS, ADMIT RESPONSIBILITY. For first making war on Iraq. For creating refugees, denying them basic human rights, treating them as criminals.

AUSTRALIANS, END ‘THE PACIFIC SOLUTION.’ It is no solution. Move beyond compassion. Exercise imagination, strategise and act.

AUSTRALIANS, CLOSE OFFSHORE DETENTION CENTRES. Respect the rights of refugees. Bring them to Australia. Invite those whose claims have been processed to live and work among us. Treat other asylum seekers rapidly with new, humane processing.

AUSTRALIANS, END THIS REFUGEE HELL OF OUR MAKING. THIS HELL WE TOO INHABIT, WITH GUILT AND SHAME FOR THE HURT WE DO.

For cineastes, for horror devotees in search of weird new thrills and provocative perspectives, for viewers tired of the all-too-often disappointing characterisation of women in genre cinema, Tasmania’s Stranger With My Face International Film Festival is a significant event on the Australian calendar. Started in 2012 by Hobart-based filmmakers Briony Kidd and Rebecca Thomson, the festival showcases and provides professional opportunities for women who make horror and dark genre films—an especially under-represented group in a broader industry guilty of woeful gender disparity.

The Directors Guild of America found in its 2015 Feature Film Diversity Report that just 6.4% of directors of features released in 2013 and 2014 were female; and closer to home, in December 2015 Screen Australia announced Gender Matters: a three-year, $5 million plan to address gender imbalance in the Australian screen industry.

Over a packed four days at Hobart’s Salamanca Arts Centre, the 2016 festival (this year directed and programmed by Kidd) opened with a session of Australian and international shorts before continuing with a program consisting of eight feature films, industry events and the festival’s regular Mary Shelley Symposium. Kidd had secured some notable Australian premieres among the features, including Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Evolution (2015, France), Anna Biller’s The Love Witch (2016, US), Ginanti Rona Tembang Asri’s Indonesian slasher Midnight Show (2016) and Bernard Rose’s visceral adaptation of Frankenstein (2015, US), which screened at the Museum of Old and New Art’s Cinemona. With the exception of the latter, it’s unlikely Australian audiences will get the chance to see theatrical screenings of any of these films outside the festival circuit.

Talking horror

Part of the fascination of a carefully curated festival like this one is seeing what common threads or ‘conversations’ emerge across the program. While the previous festival in 2014 offered several harrowing perspectives on female victimhood, 2016 reversed that ratio by giving us female perpetrators in The Love Witch, Evolution, Abigail Blackmore’s darkly comedic short Vintage Blood (2015, UK), Australian revenge fairytale short Can You See Them? (Polly and Mike Staniford, 2014) and Izzy Lee’s sexed-up Lovecraftian short Innsmouth (2015, US). In her symposium talk, Shock and Awe, Emma Valente, co-artistic director of feminist theatre company The Rabble, spoke about the taboo topic of female-perpetrated violence. The one powerful exploration of victimhood came, interestingly enough, from the festival’s sole male-directed feature, Frankenstein, with Australia’s Xavier Samuel delivering a searing performance as the monster/victim.

An overarching topic emerged in director Q&As, in a panel discussion on “Horror Now” and in Kidd’s explanation for the 2016 festival name change from SWMF “Women’s Horror Film Festival” to “International Film Festival.” This concerned the blurring of genre boundaries and the difficulty of confining ‘horror’ to a rigid definition. The most interesting horror cinema is difficult to categorise, slipping between gore and arthouse, realism and the uncanny, folklore and sci-fi—thus presenting a challenge to those who prefer to put stories into neat boxes: funding bodies, ‘traditional’ horror audiences, the US film industry.

This ambiguity was certainly applicable to Frankenstein, which, while containing explicit enough violence to make it unequivocally horrific was also profoundly dramatic and moving, with strong artistic production values. Rose spoke in a post-screening Skype Q&A about “arthouse horror” not being a genre that’s generally acknowledged. The cheap horror film, he said, has jump scares; so-called ‘art horror’ leaves the audience deeply disturbed.

Powerful women & imaginary worlds: Evolution, The Love Witch, Girl Asleep

Ambiguity permeates Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s extraordinary feature Evolution, centred on an isolated community of 10-year-old boys who live with their mothers in austere proximity to the seaside. Striking oceanic iconography is used to build an enigmatic narrative that offers an unsettling perspective on puberty, parasitism, birth and surrogacy—with radically reimagined sex roles. Characterised by a sparseness and fluidity, the film’s strange combination of matriarchal ritual and watery science fiction brought to mind Gauguin’s paintings of Breton women, HP Lovecraft and Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring.

The Love Witch, written and directed by Anna Biller, also depicts exploitative female power, but rather than inverting sex roles in the manner of Evolution, simply turns up the dial on existing gender stereotypes in a gleeful parody of 60s sexploitation cinema. With the aid of magic potions, spells and her own considerable charms, “Love Witch” Elaine reduces her conquests to quivering wrecks and worse, all the while espousing flowery Mills & Boon-ish sentiments. With her elaborately camp set design and hand-made costumes, the multi-talented Biller serves up a visual feast in which Elaine is the centrepiece. In a role that would have been merely decorative in lesser hands, Samantha Robinson imbues Elaine with a poise and conviction that’s subtly disturbing amid the wackiness; the film might be a parody but she’s compellingly delusional. (Biller writes eloquently about Robinson’s performance on her blog).

With a constant emphasis on appearances, artifice, the femme fatale trope and superficial romantic fantasy, Biller’s extravagant recreation of celluloid retro-sexism evokes a toxic femininity that’s as disturbing as it is hilarious.

Like The Love Witch, Girl Asleep (2015, Australia) is an arresting period piece, its meticulously stylised sets a glorious tribute to the browns and oranges of 70s interior design. In a Skype Q&A after the film, director Rosemary Myers described the era as a pertinent time in which to situate a girl’s story: a time when feminism was ascendant yet women were still perceived as presiding over the home.

Adapted by Myers and actor and screenwriter Matthew Whittet from their production for Adelaide’s Windmill Theatre, Girl Asleep is a fairy tale of adolescent empowerment every bit as charming as its predecessors, Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz. A heightened imaginary world is realised through a range of theatrical techniques, from fantastical puppet-like figures to stylised landscapes. As the heroine ventures into the night woods behind her suburban Australian house there are echoes of Tracey Moffatt’s Bedevil (1993) and Ann Turner’s Celia (1989), which opened the 2014 SWMF—though the latter is ultimately more waking nightmare than empowering dream. Cinematographer Andrew Commis (The Daughter, The Rocket) is adept here as in his previous films at creating an otherworldly atmosphere.

The merging of the cinematic and theatrical evident in Girl Asleep was another of SWMF’s mini-themes, arising in the Symposium talk by Emma Valente as well as in Tasmanian playwright Alison Mann’s discussion of the influence of cinematic body horror on her works She’s Not Performing and The Surgeon’s Hands.

Thrillers: The Invitation, Crushed, Midnight Show

Stepping away from the supernatural into the realm of human wickedness were three suspense-driven features.

The Invitation (Karyn Kusama, 2015, US) is an intensely disquieting ensemble piece whose action takes place at a dinner party in the Hollywood Hills. It builds tension through a masterfully handled, gradually escalating disruption of social mores—a slap, a personal anecdote that turns unexpectedly sinister, the hosts’ jarring claims of spiritual enlightenment—while at the same time casting doubt on the protagonist’s suspicion that something is awry. From the opening scene, strategic use of discordant strings, slight slowing of movement and blurred backgrounds create a sense of things being off-kilter.

Midnight Show, the debut feature from young Indonesian director Ginanti Rona Tembang Asri, situates its slasher narrative in a struggling Indonesian cinema in 1998, the year of the country’s financial crisis. This, a more gruesome version than that passed by the censors in Indonesia, skilfully uses the cinema’s empty corridors and darkened auditorium as the setting for a bloody cat and mouse game; as you’d expect from any self-respecting post-Scream slasher, the plot is self-reflexively entwined with the concept of horror as a form.

SWMF closed with another strong debut, Megan Riakos’ Crushed (2015, Australia), a finely paced family intrigue set in Mudgee vineyards that makes intelligent and very atmospheric use of its location, which is not just scenic backdrop but integral to the plot.

Community & The Attic Lab

Riakos and Asri were participants, along with US filmmaker Shoshana Rosenbaum (whose impressive short The Goblin Baby was part of this year’s program), Rebecca Thomson (TAS), Donna McRae (VIC), Isabel Peppard (VIC), Carrie McLean (TAS), Katrina Irawati Graham (QLD) and Natalie James (VIC) in a new SWMF initiative, The Attic Lab, “an intensive mentoring program for women genre filmmakers” (press release) involving the development of pitches that were presented to invited members of the film industry and festival-goers.

The Attic Lab is representative of one of SWMF’s best aspects: the festival’s public spiritedness and supportive community atmosphere, evident not only in this opportunity afforded to women for the development of new projects, but also in the hard work of the festival team and the generosity of its volunteers. Stranger With My Face seems set to continue to expand into the future: may the closely-knit community it has created flourish alongside it.

Stranger With My Face International Film Festival 2016, Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart, 14-17 April

L-R Willow Conway, Ange Arabatzis, Nick Stribakos, Lucia Brancatisano, Dirty Pictures

There is an odd sense of déjà vu about Dirty Pictures, a new Australian work made up of silent, and sometimes static, tableaux, performed against a large screen on which a violent mash-up of images is projected. It is a heavily visual performance, even though a monotone voice sometimes overlays the stage happenings, and the images are familiar, resonating.

A couple shoots up; makes out. A sex worker smokes on a street corner; is approached by a customer. A man slouches on the couch, in a drug-fuelled sleep. Drugs are exchanged for money; money for drugs. A man violently gropes a woman, while one of her hands is searching for her handbag on the floor. A woman stands on a street corner; a man appears out of nowhere and grabs her by the hair. A man turns a chair upside down, feeling all its nooks and joints for a secret stash of…drugs, money? Two women make out with a man; then with each other, peeling away from the man’s mouth, his crotch, onto the floor. A man runs in the night, his open eyes bewildered, searching. A woman cries on a bench. More money is exchanged: for a bigger packet of drugs, or, condescendingly, for two small pills and a nasty laugh.

This is the iconography of heroin in Melbourne: the iconography of St Kilda, of the 90s, of two dozen novels, films and plays. It is already-seen in the sense that these images are iconic: we feel we have seen them before even if we haven’t, because we know that this is what addiction is. These four characters are stock characters in the commedia dell’arte of this genre: a couple hungry for each other and for a drug, a pimp, a sex worker. Both women are in high heels and short skirts, both are present exclusively as objects upon which sex and violence are inflicted; a lot of arse is bared, a lot of crotch.

Dirty Pictures is of another time, and not just because it tells a story that is no longer new. The juxtaposition of video projection and silent movement has an industrial harshness and an emphasis on flat image instead of the current more immersive performative experience; it speaks of the experimental theatre of the 1970s, 1980s—it is what Angus Cerini would have been making had he been born three decades earlier.

And yet, it merits recognition. In a city in which so much new work concerns itself either with pure form or fairly self-indulgent personal concerns of rather young and inexperienced makers, it is a breath of fresh air to see a work tackle deep societal trauma. Because Melbourne remains a city steeped in drugs.

Writer-director Tony Reck frames this as a “play about corruption. Corruption of the self; corruption of innocence; corruption of the body; and corruption within relationships occurring within a corrupt society” (program note). There is a raw, emotional tingle to Dirty Pictures, an authentic trauma trying to voice itself, and it comes out not in the stale images, but in their rhythm and repetition. The roles shift: all four characters inflict and suffer pain, sell and buy drugs; it is hard to keep track of character and plot, there is only a sort of rhythm to follow. The ensemble cast—all excellent—glide seamlessly between these arrested moments of violence, despair, relief, mania and boredom.

For those who know cycles of addiction, co-dependency and despair, it is this mindless, banal repetition and variation, same scenes with different actors, that will trigger recognition. Depicted here is the brutal anything-goes-ness of people caught up in vicious cycles they don’t understand: the same aimless violence of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or Dance of Death, just in the key of heroin.

Dirty Pictures, script, direction Tony Reck, performers Ange Arabatzis, Lucia Brancatisano, Willow Conway, Nick Stribakos, sound design Hugo Race, lighting design Matt Barber, La Mama Courthouse, Melbourne, 14-24 April

In “Never turn your back on the sea,” her review of Derek Kreckler: Accident & Process, Laetitia Wilson writes of one of the show’s works, Wet Dream,

“Here [Kreckler] lies, partially submerged within a moment of abandonment, the water streaming over and around his body. There is an element of chance here, of the accident, the flight of fancy, while at the same time the work is highly constructed and follows a predetermined process leading to its realisation.”

Wilson embraces the range and depth of Kreckler’s output: “As an oeuvre focused on experimental, conceptual and post-minimalist arts practice across a diversity of media, it is propelled by a perceptive vision engaged in issues across art history, the environment and Indigenous and non-Indigenous politics.”

This is the first survey exhibition of this leading Australian conceptual artist. Curated by Hannah Matthews it opened at PICA in August 2015.

Kreckler and Matthews speak lucidly about the artist’s work in an engaging film by Peter Cheng made for PICA which also features illuminating footage from the exhibition.

2016
Bunbury Regional Art Gallery: 5 March-10 April
Geraldton Regional Art Gallery: 23 April-25 June
SASA Gallery, Uni SA: 15 July-10 August
Horsham Regional Art Gallery: 9 Sept-6 Nov 6

2017
Contemporary Art Tasmania: 13 Jan-4 March
Plimsoll Art Gallery Tasmania: 13 Jan-4 March
Bathurst Regional Art Gallery; 31 March-28 May
Maitland Regional Art Gallery: 24 June-3 Sept
Wollongong Art Gallery: 14 Oct- 26 Nov

It’s no secret that the biennial Keir Choreographic Award aims to foster an expansive, cross-disciplinary vision of contemporary dance, one in which choreography is re-imagined as an associative process, a way of bringing together multiple artistic, philosophical and critical practices in performance.

This agenda may well unleash howling fantods in dance fans worried about a developing trend toward exhaustive intellectualisation; but, looking at the eight semi-finalists competing for the 2016 award, there’s no doubt that the vision has been embraced by a generation of emerging choreographers—and particularly those who trained at Melbourne’s Victorian College of the Arts.

Deep Shine

Opening the first of two semi-final programs is Chloe Chignell’s Deep Shine. Or, rather, it had been called Deep Shine. As we enter the space, we find a figure, all in gold, standing on a motorised lazy susan, stage left, cordless microphone in hand, repeating in an icy monotone that the work has been retitled. It is now called ‘Shine’. Depth, it is implied, is no longer interesting. The surface and its glamour is all.

Sheathed in Spandex bodysuits, elasticised fabric covering hands, feet and faces, the three performers are like personifications of pure gloss. One body, all in magenta, lies on its side against the back wall of the space. Another, also in magenta, stands on a downstage plinth. Which one is Ellen Davies and which is Bhenji Ra? We know that the figure with the microphone is Chloe Chignell because she tells us so. But, on reflection, can we be sure?

The work suggests a kind of generalised anxiety around the labour of identity construction, a paradoxical need both for self-exposure and also self-preservation. In one memorable scene, Chignell removes herself from an orgiastic tangle of shiny bodies, returns to the spinning dais and strips off her jumpsuit, revealing yet another jumpsuit. One skin is sloughed off to reveal another. We imagine that the figure is nothing but jumpsuits all the way down.

Sarah Aiken (Tools for Personal Expansion)

Sarah Aiken explores a similar complex of ideas in her piece, Sarah Aiken (Tools for Personal Expansion). As in Chignell’s work, the dance begins with the choreographer speaking her name into a microphone. Claire Leske and Emily Robinson then enter the space and each repeat the same name—Sarah Aiken. Aiken then slowly paces out the width of the stage, moving back and forth with Leske and Robinson in her wake performing in canon.

In the middle section, the dancers use the panorama function on an iPhone camera, live streamed to a large screen at the back of the stage, to digitally manipulate an image of Aiken’s body in real time, making it appear as if her arms and legs stretch around the entire room.

There are echoes here of Atlanta Eke’s Body of Work, which won the inaugural Keir Award in 2014, but Aiken is undoubtedly on her own investigative trajectory. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Sarah Aiken (Tools for Personal Expansion) is the surprising way that it builds on her previous work, SET, which was part of the Dancehouse Housemate program in 2015 and which also explored ideas of bodily extension and video manipulation. The final scene of her Keir entry, in which she advances toward the audience with her arms open wide, extended with the help of trick sleeves, seems a particularly clever re-imaging of the closing moments of SET.

If It’s All in My Veins

Martin Hansen’s if it’s all in my veins is a much darker and more overtly physical work, one which seems to suggest that the history of dance—and its future—is little more than the endless reproduction of fundamentally empty appearances.

A laptop sits onstage with a clock counting down on its screen. Performers Hellen Sky, Maxine Palmerson and Michelle Ferris busy themselves aiming mobile spotlights and arranging fluorescent tubes. When the clock hits zero, an animated GIF appears on a screen at the back of the stage showing an iconic dancer—a Nijinsky or a Pina Bausch, say—captured in a rapid loop. The three performers then throw themselves into a rough imitation—not of the dancer, as such, but of the representation of the dancer, with all its glitches and distortions.

The work has a bit of a scrapbook feel, with a lot of different ideas stuck around the central theme of imitation and simulation. And to a greater or lesser degree this same scrappiness is a feature of each of the first four works created for the Keir Award this year. Perhaps there was some pressure on the artists to cram full their entire allotment of 20 minutes, but I think in several of the works a shorter, less fragmented, more focused presentation might have had more impact.

Before the Fact

The final work on the first night’s program is Alice Heyward’s Before the Fact. Heyward has invited artist Ilya Milstein to illustrate a book of imaginary dance notations, which she here interprets for us as a kind of performed sketch. Slowly and carefully, she walks across the stage, folding at the hips, crouching, partially extending her arms, all while reciting a manifesto-like statement on her archive of a future choreography.

The work does have the feel of something that has been unpacked for the first time, like something that has just arrived from the future. Matthew Adey’s set design even includes drifts of bubble wrap, piles of loose cloth and plenty of packing tape. And it all has some incipient interest, but Heyward doesn’t quite manage to suggest the full choreographic potential of the fragmentary moments inspired by Milstein’s drawings.

Keir Choreographic Award Semi-Finals, Program One; Dancehouse, Melbourne, 26-30 April

Next week in RealTime: Andrew Fuhrmann reviews Semi-Finals, Program Two, and we’ll report on the Finals, playing this week at Carriageworks, Sydney, 5-7 May.

Brisbane-born dancer and choreographer Larissa McGowan has built a formidable reputation as a performer and maker of works of intense physicality. Her ‘bone-popping’ style, combined with an overarching desire to make accessible contemporary dance works that are both dark and comic, shaped her first full-length piece, Skeleton, in 2013 (interview, review). McGowan returns to popular culture themes in her new work, Mortal Condition, which employs a two-part structure to juxtapose the real world with the virtual as portrayed in computer games.

In the first part, American singer Mike Patton’s 1996 experimental album of nightmarish vocal improvisations, Adult Themes for Voice, soundtracks a viscerally expressive conversation between bodies in space. In the second, computer game characters and tropes drawn from games as disparate as Pac-Man, Call of Duty and Minecraft are used to explore a virtual world unconstrained by rules. True to form, McGowan also appears in Mortal Condition; she is joined onstage by Thomas Bradley, collaborator on McGowan’s 2012 work Fanatic, Spring Dance, and fellow former ADT luminary Kialea-Nadine Williams.

McGowan tells me Mortal Condition’s development has been a protracted one: “Kialea and I first started on this almost two years ago, on the second half of the show, which was the gaming side of it, the virtual world. And obviously that’s just due to funding, when you get it, when you can move forward with a production. And then Tom and I, in response to that development, spent some time in a studio without funding, just to find that first world, which is reality, based on the Mike Patton album. It felt like [the work] needed something to contextualise the fantasy world that we were creating, something to bring it back to reality, to remind us why we were there in the first place.”

The Patton album provided an anchor for the work’s first half, McGowan elaborates, its guttural quality suggesting a particular kind of choreographic language—heavy, dense, strenuous—suited to McGowan and Williams’ robust physicality. “We’re built to take quite a pummelling,” she quips. “It felt raw, naturally emotive, kind of organic in some ways,” McGowan says of Patton’s music. “The first half of Mortal Condition is very much a conversation between bodies in space and we go through everything from a nice ‘hey, how are you,’ to a fight, to a romantic duet, to a total explosion of something bad happening. So it’s a huge range of naked human emotion that then transitions into this other world. We knew we needed to find a similar kind of soundtrack that could be as epic as Mike Patton’s, and DJ Tr!p—Tyson Hopprich—really found that for the second half. It feels like he’s made the soundtrack to an actual game.”

The work’s dramaturg and associate director is Steve Mayhew, who previously collaborated with McGowan on Fanatic, a short work that playfully deconstructed the Alien and Predator film franchise (It premiered at Sydney Opera House’s Spring Dance in 2012 and was subsequently presented by Sydney Dance Company in 2013 and 2015). Although dramaturgs are normally associated with theatre rather than dance, I suggest to McGowan that this is increasingly changing. She agrees, telling me that Mayhew’s objective viewpoint, and his guiding of the three dancers’ many research tasks, has been crucial to the development of this work.

Mortal Condition initially came out of a conversation McGowan and Mayhew had and the work evolved from there. “It’s so good having someone from another background, particularly theatre, because we are trying to emote something without it being character-driven. What’s also good is someone who isn’t a dancer saying, ‘I like this,’ ‘I don’t like that’ and being so honest. He always challenges me. He goes, ‘here’s something– I’m not necessarily going to tell you what I want it to be’ or ‘here’s an idea’ or ‘here’s a sound’—and I have to go away and find my own dance dramaturgy from his theatrical dramaturgy. It’s a very interesting way to work.”

Not much of a gamer while growing up, McGowan’s research focused on the mechanics of game-playing and which aspects of computer games might possibly be replicated choreographically. In Mortal Condition, Bradley portrays a gamer, McGowan and Williams a shifting array of computer game characters and player avatars. “Kialea and I,” says McGowan, “asked ourselves what computer game characters would be capable of doing in reality. We found that, although many things were impossible, some things weren’t, so our process became to take parts of these games and try to reenact them in some way, in an abstract form.”

McGowan gives the example of a section of the work inspired by a popular breed of YouTube video in which (almost invariably male) gamers narrate their progress through certain games in order to display their prowess and to provide tips for less experienced players. During the section, a voiceover by actor Patrick Graham describes how to purchase and ‘pimp-up’ a car while McGowan and Williams embody the vehicles being ‘molded.’ While for McGowan the gendered nature of gaming—exposed so vividly by the recent Gamergate controversy—is not a central theme of the work, she does acknowledge its presence: “There are two women in the piece playing certain characters and obviously women are depicted a certain way in games. You can’t not read it [in that way] with two women and a guy who is gaming, exerting a certain degree of control over those characters in the work.”

She continues, “We also played with things like, in a game you can stop and start it, you can wind back, you can die and return to life.” Hearing this, I ask how Toby K’s lighting and projection designs will help to create the ‘virtual world’ of the work’s second half. “He’s built screens with robots that can turn them for us—it’s quite amazing, “ says McGowan, “and the screens can be closed and projected onto. The projections will include elements of computer game interfaces such as maps, health bars and weaponry displays, as well as images of virtual environments that the characters portrayed by Kialea and I pass through. So he’s got a lot to play with, but it’s there to complement what we’re doing. We’re getting into the theatre next week to tech all that.”

Mortal Condition, concept, choreography Larissa McGowan, associate director, dramaturg Steve Mayhew, dancers Thomas Bradley, Larissa McGowan, Kialea-Nadine Williams, composer DJ Tr!p, lighting, projection designer Toby K, Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, 11-14 May

Find

May 2016

CAMEL

The Horse

BlaaQ Catt

[MIS]CONCEIVE

Biosphere Soundscapes

Rainforest Listening

The power of listening

Ecosexual Bathhouse

The Voices of Joan of Arc

Under My Skin

Mummy Dearest

GROUND CONTROL

Angkot Alien

microLandscapes

Sedih // Sunno

Adding up

Rebecca Jensen, Explorer

James Batchelor, Inhabited Geometries

Ghenoa Gela, Fragments of Malungoka—Women of the Sea

Paea Leach, One and One and One

… and the winner is?

Talking horror

Powerful women & imaginary worlds: Evolution, The Love Witch, Girl Asleep

Thrillers: The Invitation, Crushed, Midnight Show

Community & The Attic Lab

Deep Shine

Sarah Aiken (Tools for Personal Expansion)

If It’s All in My Veins

Before the Fact

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