Australian
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August 2016

Jane Sheldon, James Wannan, Brenton Spiteri, Sydney Chamber Opera, Notes from Underground, 2016

Reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground is hell. Sydney Chamber Opera’s adaptation tempers the agony with musical and theatrical beauty, easier to take than a lone reader’s dark imaginings, but still painful and, in its final image, more nightmarish than the novel.

Librettist Pierce Wilcox’s layering of the second part of the short novel—a series of incidents which the 24-year-old Aboveground Man precipitates—over the first, in which his 40-year-old self, Underground Man, monologues, makes lucid sense of the ramblings of the embittered, retired public servant. Everything in the opera—score, direction, design—services this dynamic. The stage is a wide, white platform, backed by a soft, semi-transparent curtain-cum-screen of equivalent width and colour; together they provide a canvas for transformative hues from dreamy pastels to nightmarish primaries. This is the world of the Aboveground Man. Below and forward of the stage is the lounge chair of Underground Man, from which he addresses us directly, as an imagined audience of his hated peers. Aboveground Man is a tenor (Brenton Spiteri), his older self a baritone (Simon Lobelson), each with his own musical language.

Aboveground Man lives out the past, neurotically strategising and ineffectually avenging himself for an imagined slight by a police officer (a crazy musical march culminating in a mere nudge); forcing himself on former school mates whom he detests but feels a desperate need to impress, with embarrassing consequences; and, drunk and humiliated, sleeping with a prostitute, Liza. The sallow, alcohol-consuming Underground Man observes, comments and philosophises, caustic, righteous but rattled by what plays out before him.

Jane Sheldon, Simon Lobelson, Sydney Chamber Opera, Notes from Underground, 2016

The opera’s binarism is transcended as worlds merge. Underground Man cannot help but enter Aboveground Man’s terrain, to observe his younger self close-up, to mock, to warn, to predict, to regret. There are moments when the two voices eerily become one, early on with the desperate “I am” motif they share with the opera’s other principal character, Liza, and at its end in an anguished battling of selves. Liza is the novel’s and the opera’s reality check. Underground Man finds solace for his self-hatred, inertia and paranoia in anti-Enlightenment posturing, priding himself on his cruelty to others and applauding human irrationality. Aboveground Man, failing to feel empathy or love, decries German Romanticism, but finds himself helplessly acting out compassion for the prostitute, warning her, in near sadistic detail, of an early death, advising she marry and offering her his address. His lyrical account of how he would treat a daughter reveals the fantasist in full flight. Despite her flatly spoken objection, “You sound just like a book,” (the opera’s only unsung words) Liza takes up his invitation.

Spiteri and Lobelson bring home with force the bewilderment recalled and newly felt when she arrives, full of hope, expressing her desire to live, asserting “I am,” at Aboveground Man’s apartment, spinning him into tantrum, attraction, physical aggression and then rejection while Underground Man declares “only do evil.” Aboveground Man forces money on Liza and she leaves. In one of the opera’s most exquisitely painful passages, he rationalises furiously that he has purified her with the knowledge of her condition. Finding she’s left behind the money, Aboveground Man falls into doubt and regret and Underground Man admits having lived “under life”. Both men collapse into protracted annihilation in which the “I am” of one is asserted against the other’s and the notion of “we” rejected in a physical struggle in the Underground, music fading, words stuttering and breaking up. Darkness.

Brenton Spiteri, Sydney Chamber Opera, Notes from Underground, 2016

It’s a far more emphatic ending than Dostoevsky’s which is open-ended and still resolutely anti-idealist, his character’s failure “to live” an illustration of a pervasive social and intellectual malaise. That character in the novel even posits that, given his experiences, “perhaps I turn out to be more alive than you, [the reader].” The opera’s hyperbolic obliteration of the character (and the concomitant elimination of the novelist’s voice) suggests the out and out failure of the kind of thinking that drives Notes from Underground, rendering it just nihilist thinking. It feels like a moral conclusion apt for our own times, that a failure of empathy will, in the end, destroy us. This is amplified by the powerful onstage embodiment of Dostoevsky’s “anti-hero” (his term) in palpable conflict with himself. Aboveground Man’s pain, frustration, anger and near psychosis render him a complex figure whose self-destruction engenders pathos as we and Underground Man witness the appalling inevitability of his unravelling.

Jack Symonds’ score captures Dostoevsky’s voice. A writer has described the book’s style as progressing “in his ejaculatory, stop-and-start way.” The composition is aptly turbulent, frequently aggressive (Claire Edwardes’ percussion is pivotal), heavily punctuated (intensely dramatising the sung dialogue) and full of comment—a wah-wahing trumpet and a hee-hawing trombone are self-deprecatingly and defensively deployed (Underground Man: “I am not funny!”). Vibes ‘dance’ playfully to a nasty recollection. Strings whine with complaint. The two male characters fall in and out of sync, apart in their discrete worlds or sitting side by side, lingering simultaneously on long anxious notes or mutually and pathetically revelling in “ecstasy” after vengefully nudging the offending policeman.

Spiteri—youthful and nervously vigorous—and Lobelson—sombre, slow-moving, threatening—sing the demanding score with passion and conviction, deftly realising their characters’ wild mood swings. Jane Sheldon seems an earthier Liza than Dostoevsky’s idealistic innocent, in part because librettist and composer have interpolated an episode from a poem mentioned by the novelist which does not appear in the book. Aboveground Man now first encounters a vampish Liza singing of love, accompanied by an exotic viola d’amore player (James Wannan). Although deliciously sung and staged, the song pre-empts subsequent episodes and has Liza giving voice to unlikely sentiments (“for you I am a symbol”) and images (of herself as “a vision wrapped in skin”), while some lines suggest a previous encounter. The episode, however effective in itself, is essentially a literary conceit that muddies the progression of the opera’s narrative, otherwise so judiciously realised. Perhaps it was incorporated to suggest a more complex, contemporary and knowing Liza or simply to underline Dostoevsky’s anti-romanticism, which is already evident.

This one reservation aside, Notes from Undergound is a deeply compelling, finely composed, written, directed, designed and performed work which effectively draws us into a frightening world where absolutes throttle nuance, an all too familiar feeling in our own. It profoundly tests our own capacity for empathy as we witness its failure in a man, withdrawn to his underground, living “under life,” as we might too be tempted.

Sydney Chamber Opera, Notes from Underground, 2016

Sydney Chamber Opera & Carriageworks, Notes from Underground, composer Jack Symonds, librettist Pierce Wilcox, conductor Jack Symonds, director Patrick Nolan, performers Simon Lobelson, Brenton Spiteri, Jane Sheldon, design Genevieve Blanchett, lighting Nicholas Rayment; Carriageworks, Sydney, 13, 15, 17, 19 Aug

RealTime issue #134 Aug-Sept 2016

God Bless Baseball

Since the formation in 1997 of the Chelfitsch (“selfish”) Theatre Company, a collaboration with dancer Natsuko Tezuka, Japanese writer and director Toshiki Okada has developed an international reputation. Informed equally by Japan’s “quiet theatre” movement of the 1980s and 90s, and his early interest in American alternative cinema, Okada’s theatre is distinguished by a heightened style that marries colloquial language with Brechtian distancing techniques. Strongly political, his work has often been read as sympathetic to Japan’s so-called “lost generation,” which came of age during the crippling recession of the 1990s.

His most recent work, God Bless Baseball, had its world premiere in South Korea last year and has since been performed in Tokyo, New York and at Braunschweig’s Festival Theaterformen. The play uses a mixed ensemble of Japanese and South Korean performers to explore those countries’ relationships to the United States through that icon of cultural imperialism, baseball. It’s a sport that, since its introduction to East Asia by American educators and missionaries around the turn of the 19th century, has become thoroughly nativised in Japan and neighbouring South Korea.

I spoke to Okada via Skype ahead of the work’s Australian premiere at this year’s OzAsia Festival in Adelaide. If he is able to make it to Adelaide for the festival—he’s still not sure if his schedule will allow it—it will be only the second time he has been to Australia, following a short season of perhaps his best known work, Five Days in March, at Melbourne’s Arts Centre in 2010.

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In the play you set up Japan and South Korea as siblings, with the United States as a kind of father figure. Did that idea come first, and then you decided to use baseball as a way of expressing it, or was the initial spark to do with wanting to write a play about baseball itself?

The biggest trigger was that I was invited to create a new production for South Korea’s art complex in Gwangju [The Asian Arts Theatre, a part of the government-funded Asia Culture Centre in Gwangju City]. I started to think about an international collaboration, specifically with South Korean artists. It was an idea that they really liked. And then the topic of baseball came to me because that sport was something both countries had in common. And of course, the reason Japan and Korea are so familiar with baseball is because of the great cultural influence of the United States in this part of the world.

Australia’s relationship with the United States is in important respects similar to Japan’s and Korea’s. How do you personally view the relationship between Japan and the United States at the moment? I’m thinking of the current tensions around the United States’ military presence in Japan.

Big question! I have to say that Japan is still a kind of colony of the United States so we have to start thinking about how we can move beyond that. For example, there are many United States military bases still in Japan, which doesn’t make sense from my point of view. And Japan is paying for them! So there are many things about this relationship that remain to be solved. I think it’s almost time for Eastern Asian countries such as China, Korea and Japan—and probably Australia too—to set their own programs without any interference from the United States.

Pijin Neji in foreground, God Bless Baseball

I wanted to ask you about how the translations work in the show because, as I understand it, parts are in Japanese and others in Korean. So how do those translations into English work across the performance?

When it comes to the English language, I am very happy to have an excellent translator [Hongyie Lee] who has been working with me for a long time. In the case of God Bless Baseball it’s a bit unusual because normally in my work there is only Japanese, but this piece contains Korean as well [two screens provide Japanese to English and Korean to English subtitles, and a voice-over provides additional commentary in English].

There’s a character in the play inspired by the legendary Japanese baseball player Ichiro Suzuki who acts as a mentor to two novice players. The character is portrayed by Pijin Neji, a Butoh-trained dancer. How did his involvement influence the development of the production?

When we started to think about how the United States relates to Japan and Korea we found three different aspects that we thought were important. One is that the United States is above us. The second one is that the United States is behind us. And the third one is that the United States is inside us. So if we tried to be independent from the United States we would have to do it through these three ways. And I realised that if we were to do this, the most difficult one would be the third because the United States is already inside us.

Because its cultural influence is so pervasive?

Yes. We had to find a way of realising that in the performance so that’s the reason I wanted to work with a Butoh dancer. They are good at working with their bodies and I knew this aspect of the show needed a choreographic solution. One very important sequence in God Bless Baseball that Pijin Neji had a lot to do with is when all of the characters try to get the United States out from inside them—it’s weird and serious at the same time, which I like.

Can you talk a little about how important the show’s design aspects are, especially given designer Tadasu Takamine’s reputation as quite a provocative visual artist?

I asked him for basically one thing: to create an object to represent the United States that could collapse or melt or disappear, something like that. I explained to him that I wanted to be able to use the object to show a future in which we are not as dependent on the United States. This appealed to him because in his work in the visual arts world he is always interested in political and social issues. And so he came up with a design that the production team thought looked like an umbrella or an antenna, and it melts away at the end of the play. For me, it represents an alternative future for us. It’s quite direct really but American audiences couldn’t get it, which is really interesting.

Maybe Australian audiences will get it?

I hope so!

Toshiki Okada

God Bless Baseball, 2016 OzAsia Festival, Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, Adelaide, 30 Sept-1 Oct

RealTime issue #134 Aug-Sept 2016

Vera Tabuzo, Landed, Tracks Dance, Darwin Festival, 2016

Tracks’ Landed integrates dance, site and community to express a sense of sacred belonging. From a spiritual base, Rianto’s Medium melds ancient cross-gendered dance with contemporary form. Finucane and Smith’s The Birds blends traditional cabaret with New Burlesque. These three Darwin Festival works exemplify more than diversity; they represent respect for and a capacity to build on the past and, for Landed and Medium, to acknowledge the power, currency and survival of traditional spiritual life.

Tracks Dance Company, Landed

Landed is the kind of work Tracks has done so well for several decades now, drawing together diverse communities and providing an opportunity for the young and not so young to develop and extend their practices with the support of professional practitioners. In this production it’s the school children of Millner, the dance students of Casuarina Senior College (CSC), the local Breakdance company and an ensemble of young dancers who get to work with three lead dancers, guest choreographer Gary Lang and Tracks creatives David McMicken and Tim Newth.

Well known for its site-specific work, Tracks often performs in beautiful sites around Darwin and occasionally in concrete bunkers and car parks. This time the site is especially integral to the meaning and theme of the show. Landed is set on the Gurambai Walking Trail which runs by Darwin International Airport. The production investigates what it is to return to Darwin; how we re-integrate with a place where we are “constantly affected by the vastness of our landscape, the extremes of our weather, the fullness of the cultural diversity and our links to Indigenous people and knowledge” (program notes).

Landed begins with the break dancers driving a baggage trolley stacked with suitcases onto an open-air stage. Cases are thrown between dancers in a comic evocation of the baggage carousel. We are introduced to three characters landing in Darwin, each dancing their initial response to the heat, the remoteness and, of course, the mozzies—danced by Millner primary school children. The soundtrack of airport announcements is supported by the noise of real planes arriving and leaving from the nearby airport.

Landed, Tracks Dance, Darwin Festival, 2016

The audience is then divided into two groups to walk in different directions along the trail to the next performance areas where the main characters are individually nurtured into wisdom and linked to land and community. Each section is choreographed by Larrakia choreographer, Gary Lang, working with local Indigenous dancer Darren Edwards and the young ensemble who gently propel, lift and lead Darren through leaf-strewn bushland until he finds his strength and connection with the environment.

Tracks dancer and animateur Kelly Beneforti excels on many levels as she dances on rough ground among the trees and leads the primary children in a piece that begins her character’s re-integration. Beneforti’s VCA dance training is evident and her strong connection to the young dancers keeps them focused as they scatter in the bush around her to dance their books into butterflies. Using lead dancer Vera Tabuzo’s stack of pink suitcases and bowls of water, Beneforti also choreographs the CSC dancers and Tabuzo in their characters’ growing wisdom.

Lang also choreographs the three leads in the finale to a soundscore composed by Matt Cunliffe with Steve Wanta Jampijinpa Patrick’s vocals urging the dancers to “speak to the land and the land will speak back.” The dancers move fluidly as they come together to settle into home and place, taking each other’s weight then extending into solo moments danced concurrently. The rest of the company watches in stillness, the work of showing the returnees the way to connect now done.

Rianto, Medium, Darwin Festival, 2016

Rianto, Medium

Growing up in the small central Javanese village of Banyumas, Rianto mastered the traditional cross-gender dance Lengger Banyumasan at a very young age and began learning and performing classical Javanese dance in 1997. Since 2001 he has developed a contemporary form that fuses with traditional and ritualistic practices. Medium is a compelling and extraordinary work that explodes boundaries and takes the audience on a journey through complex and multi-layered experiences.

Rianto dances alone in the space but is watched by his childhood friend and collaborator, the Kendang musician and singer Cahwati. Wearing a traditional Indonesian costume, she sits at the edge of the performing space with an array of classical instruments in front of her, but for a long time plays nothing. The only sound is the breath of the dancer as he slowly explores his body, first with delicate caresses then with slaps, then frenzied shaking before running on the spot for an incredibly long time, his breathing building. It’s hypnotic.

Rianto is a master of rhythm, playing with space and time and managing to surprise the audience with sudden changes of form. He moves fluidly between wild contorted angst and a state of childlike innocence, from graceful and contained movements where he barely flutters a finger to explosive body spasms. At all times Rianto appears connected to something deeper, some sense of ritual and culture, something profoundly spiritual that is the base from which he journeys out.

When Cahwati finally breaks her silence, playing intermittent percussion and vocalising, the connection between the two is powerful. In traditional Lengger the role of musician is one of lover but here it moves through lover, mother and playful, childlike friend. The two work together with such connection it becomes impossible to tell whether Rianto is being puppeteered by her or she by him.

Medium premiered in Darwin and is now set for an extended European tour. Rianto will doubtless mesmerise audiences when he appears in Choy Ka Fai’s Softmachine: Rianto in Adelaide’s OzAsia Festival in September.

Moira Finucane, The Birds, Darwin Festival, 2016

Finucane and Smith, The Birds

Well-known for their provocative burlesque shows, Moira Finucane and Jackie Smith have been crafting thought-provoking and hugely entertaining work for decades. The Birds is their most recent production and brings together another eclectic mix of performers who work across genres from cabaret to circus to what seems like screaming mad punk performance art and back again. The individual acts are loosely based around wild and wonderful feathered creatures and songs, music and dance that inhabit a fluid time zone stretching from 1880s Paris to modern day clubbing.

The Birds opens with Clare St Clare, a traditional cabaret artist in a glittering gold evening dress, singing a torch song. Unusually for a Finucane and Smith production, this opening is entirely conventional without the subversive and quirky elements we have come to expect from them. The production then moves through a series of solo acts including hoops, trapeze, a walk across champagne bottles in glamorous high heels, a dynamic booty-shaking African dance number and torch songs from around the globe, most accompanied by the superb Miss Chief on piano.

Within a production that otherwise has yet to find its flow, what makes the evening memorable are moments when, between the more traditional acts, Finucane lets loose with her blend of poetic anarchy, appearing with black cape and long talons that are at once razor deadly and strangely delicate. She dwells in the gothic horror realm, decrying love and weaving in astute comments about contemporary life and politics.

The highlight for me was the duet between the extraordinary Mama Alto and Finucane’s slightly deranged wild raven. Mama Alto has a crystalline voice that totally bewitches. Transcending gender, she is sublime as a powerful, ethereal being who sits front-stage dressed in sparkling silver, singing about love. When she opens her mouth to sing I feel that I am a believer. Then, in violent contrast, Finucane, clad only in her talons and see-through black cape, emerges from behind. They are striking as they sing in opposition about love and death. This is a moment of genius.

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Tracks Dance Company, Landed, concept, direction David McMicken, Tim Newth, design Tim Newth, choreographers Gary Lang, Kelly Beneforti, Aaron Lim, David McMicken, Tim Newth and dancers, original music David McMicken, sound mastering Matt Cunliffe; Gurambai Walking Trail, Darwin Airport, 5-7, 12-14 Aug; Medium, choreographer, performer Rianto, dramaturg, collaborator Garin Nugroho, scenography, lighting Iskander K Loedin, vocals, percussion Cahwati; Brown’s Mart, 5-7 Aug; Finucane and Smith, The Birds, creator-directors Moira Finucane, Jackie Smith, performers Moira Finucane, Clare St Clare, Rockie Stone, Mama Alto, Holly Durant, Beni Lola, Yeshe Meherate, Miss Chief; The Lighthouse, Darwin, 10-13 Aug

RealTime issue #134 Aug-Sept 2016

Moths & Mathematics, MetaData, De Quincey Co

Where to turn to for the latest in physics and cosmology? To De Quincey Co’s team of dancers, video, sound and animation artists—and guest scientists—whose two new works, Pure Light and Moths & Mathematics, comprise Metadata. In her own works and those with her company, Tess De Quincey always seems to incline to the metaphysical, even a secular transcendentalism, partly because of the way she undoes our time-space coordinates and our relationships with objects and other bodies. In Metadata, she and Peter Fraser, address science, intuitively and directly.

Artists are increasingly doing fascinating science, not simply as explainers or illustrators, but as explorers, like Brisbane’s Keith Armstrong (see this e-dition) and Perth’s SymbioticA, making science-art and responding critically to the cultural and scientific status quo. Other artists can convey something of the sense of a finding or a theory, its strangeness or even sublimity while maintaining a footing in the science, as Fraser, performer and choreographer, states in the Metadata press release:

“We are already being danced by nature in our heartbeat, our breath and the pattern of our walking. Our molecules move us according to physics we don’t necessarily understand but feel in harmony with. Tess [De Quincey] and I wanted to make performances that are informed by the underlying physical and mathematical patterns that already determine and shape our lives and possibilities.”

Metadata offers audiences a discussion with a scientist at the end of each performance. In our ‘information culture,’ this simultaneous juxtaposing and partnering of art and the explanatory is an important cultural development.

Thanks to the Snowden revelations and the hesitancy of governments to face up to the demands of privacy, “metadata” has accrued negative connotations, but in this De Quincey Co production the title suggests we might gain sight of a bigger picture, whether biological or cosmological—possibly of the same make— in which data is at once meaningful and magical.

Pure Light, MetaData, De Quincey Co

De Quincey Co, Metadata, choreographers and performers, Tess de Quincey, Peter Fraser, sound Pimmon & Warren Burt, animation Boris Morris Bagattini, video Martin Fox, lighting design Sian James-Holland, costumes Claire Westwood; Dancehouse, Melbourne, 9, 10 Sept, 7pm; FORM & Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, Sydney, 15, 17 Sept 8pm, 16 Sept, 12.30pm

RealTime issue #134 Aug-Sept 2016

Any festival that boasts the UK’s Liz Aggiss as a headliner is a must, especially when she’s in the company of Portugal’s Ana Beatriz Degues, Townsville’s Dancenorth, Melbourne’s Stephanie Lake and James Batchelor, Brisbane’s Liesel Zink and Tasmanian groups Tasdance, Second Echo Ensemble, MADE, Stompin and Drill. Salamanca Moves’ monumental program is to be staged in the last two weeks of September. The festival is a welcome, highly distinctive and richly inclusive addition to Australia’s contemporary dance festivals and events—Melbourne’s Dance Massive, Perth’s MoveMe and the Keir Choreographic Award.

Appearing in the festival’s Mature Moves program, Aggiss, a UK dancer in her 60s, will present two works, The English Channel—in which, with spoken word, dance and film, “she becomes an unwitting channel for wilful women and forgotten archives”—and Slap and Tickle, an hilarious performance “that embodies feminist dance practices [and] is framed by the politics that challenge and resist the ‘authority’ of formal conventions, revising attitudes towards mature female visibility” (program). Aggiss will appeal not only to dance audiences but lovers of contemporary performance and live art. You’ll find excerpts from her works online.

The Salamanca Moves program suggests that the festival is very much about diversity but, above all, making diversity visible—as I discovered when I spoke by phone with the festival’s curator Kelly Drummond Cawthon.

Tasmanian dance fanciers, artists, the public and interstate visitors are to be treated not only to a variety of performances but also intensive workshops, forums, guidance for young artists, the revival and reworking of could-be classics and a number of public events. The festival’s range of talent is considerable, from secondary school performers to artists in their later years, with practical programs encompassing how to make dance magic with new media and address health and ageing through dance.

Drummond Cawthon, who is Salamanca Arts Centre’s Live Art + Education Coordinator, was raised in Tasmania and after starting out in acrobatics and musical theatre moved into dance. She travelled to the United States to pursue an MFA degree in dance choreography and performance at Florida State University and an MA in Performance Studies at NYU. Working in the US for 20 years, she danced with numerous companies, made widely travelled works, taught in the University of Florida School of Theater and Dance faculty and developed curricula in, among other fields, transdisciplinary collaborations and new media and was involved in the founding of the Digital Worlds Institute, participating in its online collaborative performances. The festival’s range of performances, workshops and discussions reflect the range of Drummond Cawthon’s interests and passions. I asked about the key artists and features of the festival.

Salamanca Moves includes a Creative Intensives program of two to five-day workshops with Australian and international artists such as Sannamaria Kuula from Finland and Neta Pulvermacher from Israel. Another is Ana Beatriz Degues who sings as well as dances with highly focused slowness and has created some intriguing site works. Tell me about her.

She’s from Portugal. A couple of years ago she did some dancing with us here at Salamanca Arts Centre. She’ll perform her site-specific dance, El árbol in the Salamanca courtyard and also run a workshop she’s been wanting to do for quite a while, titled From Horizontal to Vertical, looking at the health benefits of dancing—at the spine and how you can keep it flexible and working.

You have a Youth Dance Program. How does that work, through workshops or performances?

In the last week of school term, which is the beginning of the festival, we’ll be taking the festival into schools and the Moonah Arts Centre. High schools will participate on one day and colleges—those where students are studying dance as an academic subject—on the other. We’re looking at dance pathways into the academy or into higher learning. Each school will present a work created by the students. We’ll have Movers-in-Residence who’ll get together with students and talk to them about their work and also about opportunities.

We have fantastic youth companies here on the island that exist outside the competitive dance world: Stompin in Launceston and Drill in Hobart. So, for the other part of this program, I’ve brought them together for the first time, to share an evening program at the Moonah Arts Centre.

At the other end of the age spectrum is Mature Moves, described in the program as “an event celebrating mature dance, and challenging the conventions of aging through dance.”

We’re calling it an “un-convention.” It’s a two and a half-day celebration presented by Tasmania Performs of older movers and move-makers. We have keynote addresses from Jill Sonke, Director of Dance Arts and Medicine at the University of Florida, and the extraordinary Liz Aggiss, who is in her 60s, as a featured performer. There’ll be performances by Tasmania’s astounding Mature Artist Dance Experience (MADE), panels, presentations—including the ground-breaking Glen Murray of [in]visible practice—and workshops. Then, on the last day, we’ll have Mature Moves in Concert with any or all of the participants having an opportunity to get up on the stage. Dancers grow old but they can still dance. We just change which body parts are moving, depending on which bits are hurting on the day.

We’re looking at completely breaking dance out of the concert stream. Sometimes you can’t get to an audience because they can’t get to you. So, I’ve tagged and encouraged movers to create a work and to figure out how to activate it outside a theatre; asking, how do you make it come alive in a new way?

Lz Dunn is one of the artists leading this project with a work called Aeon, A Listening Movement, which is about listening, birds flocking and group navigation. Alice Taylor, a local artist and the producer of Aeon, is working with members of local dance schools, dance studios and community groups. Participants, each carrying a little sound speaker [sound by Brisbane’s Lawrence English], move about with the dancers in the performance.

We have Liesel Zink coming from Brisbane with her work, The Stance, about the body in public protest which will be performed in Salamanca Square. It’s an awesome work. The participants have already done a workshop, Calling All Dance Agents For Change! with Liesel and Bec Jones from Tasdance to inspire them. They’ll be popping up on both Saturdays of the festival all around the Salamanca Market.

It’s about thoughts in progress, not yet complete. I’m encouraging the artists who’ve put themselves forward to be brave and show us things, even if they’re not really working. Something’s there, but maybe it’s failing and you need feedback. So often when we do a showing we only show the good bits—kind of like the trailer of a movie. We don’t really need to see that. This is an opportunity for artists to show the kernel of an idea which will be mediated by different Movers-in-Residence. We’ve got two programs. There’s been a lot of interest.

Of dance works you’ve mentioned Aeon and The Stance. I see, among others, there’s also a Rite of Spring.

Of course! If you’re doing a dance festival, you must have a Rite of Spring. This is a re-imagining, of course, performed by Second Echo Ensemble and co-presented by the Tasmanian Theatre Company. It’s a processional work in four acts. It’s about two hours long and it travels around four venues in the Salamanca Precinct. I’m really excited about it. Second Echo was founded by playwright Finegan Kruckemeyer and is an integrated ensemble involving people with and without disabilities. Most of them have been working together for 10 years.

I’m the Creative Producer on this ensemble-devised work. We worked all of last year and presented a preview of each act independently. We were at Raw Space for Ten Days on the Island and we went to Brisbane to perform another act. Now we’re bringing all four together. It’s mammoth!

Cari Ann Shim Sham teaches Dance and New Media at New York University Tisch School of the Arts and has curated an international program of shorts and several features. The rule was each film had to be made by a mover, someone who identifies as such. It could be about anything.

Cari Ann will be here as one of our Movers-in-Residence at the Festival Hub each day with technology and cameras. In her Creative Intensive you learn how to dance with or for your iPhone, to make avatars dance, how to work with software, and screens, to work solo or in a group. Three hundred and sixty degree dancing I think she calls it. We’ll upload the short films onto our website on the last day of the festival.

In Re-works you’re reviving works by Wendy Morrow, Glen Murray, Julie-Anne Long, Neil Cameron, Ina Sladic, Rob Flehr and the Wagana Aboriginal Dancers. These have been performed for one season and then never seen again.

It’s difficult, in contemporary practice especially, to generate new classics. We’ll see works, for example, that were performed in Launceston but never made it to Hobart, and pieces that were performed in the 1980s and 1990s making a come-back. And we’re looking not just at re-presentation, but re-working, seeing what a work turns into now.

I see you’ve programmed a large-scale interactive public performance called Relax the Chimp—a strange title. It’s subtitled “An Experimental DJ Dance Party.”

This is from Felicity Bott, the new Artistic Director of Tasdance. From what I understand, ‘relaxing the chimp’ is about when you’re trying to relax your mind to find what triggers the dance in you. There’ll be workshops where you can learn parts of a dance, create an avatar, use choreographic software to animate it and have it projected by VJ Nick onto a large screen in the Salamanca Courtyard. The public can submit favourite songs which DJ Chimp is turning into a soundtrack.

We’re throwing the ‘relax the chimp’ idea in at high speed on that last day of the festival when all the Creative Intensives participants and local cultural groups will perform. We’re calling it Salamanca Moves at 30,000 Feet, from an idea of VJ-DJ Darren Hunnerup about travelling around the world and visiting different musical ideas. I’ve bent the idea a little to travelling to places both real and imagined at different times—past present and future—and dropping into everything which has moved us or that we want to move. Instead of a big gala we’re ending the festival with little bits and pieces made by the festival’s participants, saying, yes, go out and finish them!

I see that Stephanie Lake, who is presenting her Dancenorth commission If Never Was Now was a Stompin performer when she was young and is Salamanca Moves’ patron.

Yes, she’s a Tassie girl. We shouldn’t celebrate only completely established, long-living artists. Here we have a young artist really making a name for herself and we thought, this reflects our festival. She’s fantastic. She’s been back and forth. Her work is being performed on the 16th, before the festival, but we’re opening up the theatre to everyone here working on or participating in the festival—a bit of a kick-off party.

The vision for the festival is of dance for everybody. It’s a very embracing approach.

I’m really passionate about the diversity of the dancing body and that everybody can dance. We all move and this festival is really looking at what triggers that movement in us, that makes us either want to shake our head or tap our toes, join in or actually create a movement for change in any way you like. We’re out to have some fun, to definitely get some moves on and to see what happens.

See the full Salamanca Moves program for information about other workshops and performances, including James Batchelor’s Deepspace, Ria Soemardjo, Jade Dewi Tyas Tunggal and Paula van Beek’s Enfold, and a host of workshops, presentations and public events.

There was an air of collusion at this year’s Darwin Festival as three highly technical productions brought audiences closer to the process of theatre-making. In Lippy, by Ireland’s Bush Moukarzel and Dead Centre, the playwright, producer-director and sound designer were also performers. Filipino performance company Sipat Lawin Ensemble presented Gobyerno (government), involving the entire audience as writers, cast and crew in the production. And Australia’s Terrapin Puppet Theatre created the sights and sounds of strange worlds onstage with an animator and musician in You and Me and the Space Between.

Bush Moukarzel and Dead Centre, Lippy (Ireland)

Beguiling, disorientating and jarring, Lippy is based on the true story of four related women in Ireland who, in a suicide pact, starved themselves to death. They clearly intended to leave no trace, shredding all evidence of their lives. Co-director Bush Moukarzel created the work and invited leading Irish actor and playwright Mark O’Halloran to contribute the work’s final soliloquy—for one of the dying women—hence his being credited as “cameo playwright.” O’Halloran also plays the lip-reader who tries to make sense of the suicide from viewing CCTV footage of two of the women in a Dublin shopping centre. [Listen to an interview with Moukarzel. Eds]

Lippy challenges perception on every level. It begins, surprisingly, with a ‘post-show’ discussion in which producer and co-director Bush Moukarzel, playing a version of himself, interviews the lip-reader. Too late, his subject is questioning the ethics of telling the women’s story. In reverse his experience unfolds.

The technician (sound designer Adam Welsh) sits on stage layering and disrupting live and recorded sound, video and live performance. YouTube’s Bad Lip Reading is turned on its ear putting real words in the mouths of the disempowered, instead of fake words into the mouths of the powerful.

The gravity-defying set tips this jagged world even further off-kilter. Designers Andrew Clancy and Grace O’Hara juxtapose floating bin bags and biohazard suits with leaf blowers and a leaky roof. In a tableau-esque depiction of their last days, the women (played by Joanna Banks, Ali White, Clara Simpson and Liv O’Donoghue) interact on ever shifting planes. The realisation of their act of starvation is hypnotic.

Lippy is a surreal experience. Memories, contexts and interpretations are warped by time and shifting perspectives, leaving us wondering who controls the way we are perceived in life, and in death.

Sipat Lawin Ensemble, Gobyerno (Philippines)

Sipat Lawin Ensemble director and facilitator JK Anicoche meets his Gobyerno audience in the foyer of Brown’s Mart Theatre. With local media personality Lisa Pellegrino at his side, Anicoche announces, “Protest is a rehearsal for revolution! How would you solve the world’s problems?”

Gobyerno is putting government back into the hands of the people. From the outset the audience is engaged, dancing into the theatre with their “one big idea” held high on cards. Eventually like meets like and everyone settles at work benches, tasked with agreeing on our “most urgent” policies. Guided by members of the ensemble (which includes Australian David Finnigan as dramaturg and facilitator) wielding the Dice of Reason, the pros and cons of each suggestion are considered.

Agreement came easily and energy levels, already high, cranked up a notch as hit music played while new teams were formed. The audience self-selected into groups of performers, costume designers, set designers, sound designers and urban planners. With a party atmosphere, basic materials and plenty of ingenuity, within 15 minutes we were ready to rehearse a State of the Nation Address.

The theatre transformed into a film set ‘in the round’ and the Ensemble put everyone through their paces, blocking the show. Soon, clapperboard at the ready, we were ready to make history. That night, Gobyerno did us proud.

Sipat Lawin Ensemble’s process was sustained, focused and liberating, giving people an opportunity to speak up and act—on stage at least. Their ideas will join with those of other Gobyernos from around the world on YouTube.

Terrapin Puppet Theatre, You and Me and the Space Between

The world premiere of You and Me and the Space Between was a magic carpet ride of puppetry. Choreographed projections, live drawn animation and performance explored the plight of refugees fleeing environmental change through the eyes of a child.

Written by Finegan Kruckemeyer, the work is the story of Eve whose blissful life is disrupted when her island springs a leak. Narrated by Emily Tomlins, the production was rich with childlike whimsy and wisdom, read in lilting story-time style. Between the tale’s two worlds, The Proud Circle and The Long Cliffs, we saw fantastic images: The Final Circle, where old people went to die, un-animals, fish that eat carrots and the obligatory angry giant.

Designer Jonathon Oxlade and lighting designer Nicholas Higgins created deceptively simple backdrops and props that doubled as screens. A single hole in the backdrop was at times a leak, an eye, a mouth, a planet or an island. A tarp on the ground was the ocean and then cliffs. Effortlessly (it seemed), puppeteer Felicity Horsley manipulated all the moving parts.

With keyboard and cello, musician Dean Stevenson generated storms, moods and fun, as well as voicing the characters and crowd scenes. On the other side of the stage, hand flying across his tablet, sat cartoonist Badiucao drawing animated places and creatures projected live onto multiple screens.

The production was fast-paced. I wanted more time to enjoy Badiucao’s drawings, more time to dwell on Kruckemeyer’s words. With its happy ending, befitting a fairytale, You and Me and the Space Between was a memorable journey for Eve and audience between two imaginary cultures.

2016 Darwin Festival: Bush Moukarzel & Dead Centre, Lippy; Darwin Entertainment Centre, 5-7 Aug; Sipat Lawin Ensemble, Gobyerno, director, facilitator JK Anicoche, writer, facilitator David Finnigan, dramaturg, facilitator Ness Roque, filmmaker Brandon Relucio; Brown’s Mart Theatre,16-19 Aug; Terrapin Puppet Theatre, You and Me and the Space Between, writer Finegan Kruckemeyer, director Sam Routledge, Darwin Entertainment Centre, 11-14 Aug

When choreographer Tim Darbyshire chooses to work with fundamental principles such as turbulence, duration and rupture in performance he does so by surrendering agency to the movement of machines and situates himself among the elemental rawness of rock and dust. He invites invisible forces of vibration and gravity to act upon his body over just enough time for the viewer to become a participant in his dystopic ordeal. The aural and spatial constructions provided by his sound and design team offer a seamless collaboration, creating an environment of powerful affect.

Darbyshire appears in dim light, hunched and slow moving, turning atop a tall wooden tower. A kind of Everyman in crumpled nondescript pale shirt and trousers, he circles, ponderous as a beast in a lair. The soundscape begins as a hum and transmutes into electronic scratching on a digital blackboard.

He sways on his haunches to a growing, insistent beat and with each repetition his body rises and falls until compelled by tempo it explodes upwards, long hair and arms swinging. There is an inevitability about this evolution of impact as mechanical rhythms command an inner spring of muscular impulse, fast twitching, switching, turning. Head and torso gain and lose momentum, human spheres in a fleshy Newton’s Cradle. He’s raising dust, dividing and subdividing the beat, then slowing down, minimising movement to stillness.

From this caesura point of pause, the man standing high and bare, we hear a sudden snap—sense the rupture in our own guts—as with a breathtaking gallows drop he falls feet first through the platform roof, from top to bottom of the tower.

Embodying the momentum of energy available within a closed system, Darbyshire appears subject to the laws of entropy, moving under pressure from order to disorder. This theme is amplified in Stampede the Stampede, beginning as an assault on the performer’s senses from the outside by sound or mechanical device, creating an eruption from within his body, firing movement that gathers almost to excess and then dissipates in his exhaustion or collapse.

Now at ground level in the tower, lit from the inside, Darbyshire is captive in a transparent Tardis-like box bombarded by a storm of language. A harsh machinic voice multiplies itself: “ag-it-a-tion, rev-el-a-tion, fab-ric-a-tion, alt-er-a-tion, stim-ul-a-tion, prob-ab-il-it-y, an-xi-et-y.” Pummelled by this long list of nouns, he dons a dust mask, earplugs and goggles to block his senses and prepare for the next intense episode.

Another portal ruptures as Darbyshire bursts through a low trapdoor, work lights snap to brightness and the scratchy drone returns. Moving slowly along a predetermined track as though on a conveyor belt, face covered, he gathers weight as his pace quickens to a trot and he makes a quick jump onto a low, gravel-strewn platform.

On this central bed of rocks Darbyshire prepares himself before inverting to hold a long headstand. The whole structure begins to vibrate and he becomes a human jackhammer, head drilling down, going nowhere, long shoelaces dangling. He sustains his position as long as possible then drops and readjusts, returning to the headstand. He does this again and again and as the earth beneath him shakes, rocks gravitate slowly to the edge, fall and bounce with speed and dust swirls around the vertical figure, like a doomed man in a post-mining purgatory.

As he endures the deep onslaught of bass-toned vibrations, absorbed through the top of his head and his hands, there is time for us to wonder. Imagining the shock to his muscles and organs, mesmerised amid our own personal, mythic associations triggered by the sparse composition of elements, we witness a body both subject to and complicit in forces outside of itself in this choreography of kinetic impact. Darbyshire doesn’t hide the preparation required to repeatedly return to the strenuous operation. Rocks give themselves up to gravity, he gives himself up to the unending quake. He must stay till all the rocks are gone, the surface stripped.

We witness the gradual erosion. We witness his responses and endurance. His bones must be rattled, jaw and skull jarred. Dominated by unseen remote force, he holds out until the excavation is complete and eventually slumps, then crawls, demonic, moved like the rocks towards the edge. He drops to the floor and comes to standing. How can his mobile molecules be still? Divesting mask, goggles, earplugs, his next slow transit leads to the third platform.

He climbs aboard, hoists into harness, hangs limp at first as though dead. As this new ground revolves beneath him, he lifts to stand supported, then flips upside down in the sling. A suspended falling, fallen angel turning on a sixpence, turning on only a fingertip’s contact with the turntable for a moment. Eventually he floats, he flies, blown by the wind of fans below. He opens and closes as though over a burning pit in Dante’s Inferno, and then I see a disfigured painterly Baconesque body reduced to spinning, spinning, spinning, eternally in dust and finally liberated in darkness.

While Tim Darbyshire enjoys the notion of a stampede’s “absurd irrationality”—where a surge of herd movement begins with “no clear direction or purpose”—he and his collaborators have assuredly created a world with a strange yet captivating inner logic. They have led me on a quixotic tour, swinging between detachment and visceral empathy. Spun, shaken, dropped, lifted, slightly brutalised, I come to land, immensely impressed.

Stampede the Stampede, choreographer, performer, voice Tim Darbyshire, sound design Madeleine Flynn & Tim Humphrey, set & lighting design Jennifer Hector & Bosco Shaw, Producer Alison Halit; Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney, 19-20 Aug

Three immersive spaces and two introductory works in Keith Armstrong’s Over Many Horizons combine into one installation, creating a synthesis of philosophy, science, art and technology. These engender an intriguing representation of the world in an ever-changing ecological state. Contingent to this kind of research is the question of how an artist might go about making an artwork in relation to environmental issues without seeming too didactic.

Unlike the scientist who relies on method and objectivity, the artist is able to use the tools of perception and to trigger emotional responses. Armstrong does not answer ecological questions or address how to restore what has been destroyed, but challenges his audience to immerse themselves in worlds that teeter between a sense of hope and of fear.

His enquiry provokes both philosophical and scientific questions in relation to how we, as a species, have evolved via the life/death cycle and the sensory apparatus that makes us unique as human beings. This kind of thinking also demands an emotional response from an audience.

The last show by Armstrong I had the pleasure to experience was Intimate Transactions (Stage2) at The Performance Space in 2004. Even though in a developmental stage, it created a vibrant response around Sydney as an exemplar of ‘cutting edge’ technology as used by an artist. The idea that one could form a ‘telepresence’ via an embodied experience fascinated new media artists who lined up in order to not only explore the nature of the work but to also analyse the technical processes and resources that sustained it.

With Over Many Horizons, nothing has changed in relation to Armstrong’s amazing ability to pull together an extraordinary mix of mediums including mechanised forms, robotic devices, spatial interactive sound, glass, fibre optics, video, 3D printed forms and organic materials, creating a curious amalgam of materials and energies.

The artist’s philosophical concerns are embedded, symbolically and metaphorically, throughout the exhibition space, which one traverses non-linearly. Three of the spaces [Deep Ecology] Horizon 1, [Seasonal] Horizon 2 and [Shifting Dusts] Horizon 4, are immersive, dark chambers that rely on complex mechanisation, interactive software, video and multi-channel sound. Outside the chambers, acting as a minimal introduction to the exhibition are two works [O Tswellang] Horizon 3 and [Inter State] Horizon 5, which reveal the artist’s reflections and drive the exhibition’s inherent thesis.

Drawing back a thick black curtain and stepping into the darkness of [Deep Ecology] Horizon 1, I notice a thin fibre optic light, which I immediately follow to two portholes in the wall. Staring into the first and allowing for my eyes to adjust, I see a transparent shape which twists and turns in a murky, black viscous environment. My first impression is of a piece of bubble wrap; however, on closer examination the object, or organism, seems to have tiny gills around a large orifice. The second porthole reveals glowing eel-like forms, which appear and then disappear into the darkness. Accompanying the fluid movements of these strange synthetic organisms is the dominant sound of a ventilation machine which, in turn, is accompanied by low to mid frequency abstract resonances. Although one can create a number of narratives from experiencing [Deep Ecology], Armstrong himself sees the work as an “anthropomorphic lament,” specifically one that backgrounds our unquestioned rush towards synthetic, lonely futures.

In both [Seasonal] and [Shifting Dusts], large circular shapes on the floor reveal what could be portals into new worlds. In [Shifting Dusts] a circular form is projected onto sand giving the impression of a porous magnified petri dish in which a black and white human form writhes and morphs through various embryonic stages. The form ultimately disappears in a dramatic veil of white noise and video static, creating a sense of the symbolic decay of the organism and offering a surreal cinematic experience.

The [Seasonal] chamber, which is close by and can be heard on approach, offers another morphing experience, in which subtle grey-tone shifting shapes traverse a circular dish elevated in the middle of the room. On entry, there seems to be a connection between robotic lights to which organic detritus is attached, casting shadows on what appears to be a wall-mounted satellite dish. Moving around the space, I become aware of the soundscape and how it shifts in relation to my proximity to various hidden sensors. The result is a live mix of wild nocturnal creatures and machines—foreboding presences.

What the audience picks up on in the immersive space is, according to Armstrong, “disturbance,” which causes the evolution of all aspects of image and sound. It also becomes an acknowledgement of our own presence and our power to create change, which can be both problematic and beneficial.

What is so extraordinary about Keith Armstrong’s work is his ability to create an interactive experience that is not instantly reliant on cause and effect. Due to the lag in the response time of the triggering systems he uses, the effect is not immediate and hence a more fluid sense of time and space is achieved. Chance and possibility are given freedom as an algorithmic process choreographs a theatre of sensations. This freedom is also evident in Armstrong’s interactive system which is analogous to an ecological system, and is not about balance. According to the artist, “We always talk about balance, but if you ask a scientist, there is no balance; it is about different co-existing states which have the propensity to move dramatically, and we get to a tipping point and then something must vanish. That is the history of the world, therefore balance is not a perfect world. It is much more about states, which co-exist while it suits them. When one drops out, other ones can, as we know, rush in and fill the void. So I guess in a very small way we even try to demonstrate that, even in the way the works work.”

On exiting the exhibition, I pause to reflect on [Inter State] Horizon 5 and [O Tswellang] Horizon 3, situated at the entrance of the exhibition. [Inter State] is a complex work, which conceptually conjoins and contrasts the thinking of science and futuring philosophies. It takes the form of a reimagined scientific periodic table, displayed as a transparency, examined by the user via a microfiche reader. Even though the table mimics formal science, elements are represented visually in relation to human development (understanding, thinking and acting). During my interaction with the work I paused on a quotation from Georges Bataille, “The sun gives without ever receiving.”

Quotations are from an interview the writer conducted with the artist at UTS Gallery.

Dr Keith Armstrong is a Senior Research Fellow at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane. He is also the creative director, media designer and system integrator of the transdisciplinary arts organisation Embodiedmedia.

Debra Petrovitch is a new media artist and academic with an interest in creative immersive spaces, sonics and performance. Her most recent publication is the essay “Mike Parr: Performing the limits of language” in Elspeth Pitt and Roger Butler eds, Mike Parr: Language and Chaos, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2016.

A not-for-profit private school with a single purpose—the training of visual artists—the Adelaide Central School of Art was established in 1982 and has been registered as a higher education provider since 1998. It has produced many professional artists of the highest calibre. Quite separate from universities and TAFE colleges, it is able to operate without compromising its curriculum, its teaching methods and educational and artistic ideals.

The School is located in a rapidly developing cultural precinct based at the former Glenside Hospital site in the inner Adelaide suburb of Glenside. Prominent staff include Julia Robinson (winner of the Advertiser Contemporary Art Prize in this year’s SA Living Artists Festival), Roy Ananda, Johnnie Dady, Christopher Orchard and Luke Thurgate, and outstanding graduates such as Julia McInerney, Ash Tower, Rebecca Hastings, Chelsea Lehmann and Anna Horne. The School is particularly notable for its graduate resources, supporting artists by providing a range of programs to enable exhibitions and travel. As the School’s Vimeo channel demonstrates, graduates such as Jenna Pippett are able to explore the widest range of interests and ideas in their practice. I asked Lecturer Luke Thurgate about the School’s philosophy and, subsequently, Chief Executive Officer Ingrid Kellenbach about the School’s aim to develop a national profile.

Luke, what’s distinctive about the School’s academic program?

Our approach to balancing the technical and conceptual development of our students. We have maintained our focus on cultivating sophisticated making skills in a range of studio disciplines while increasingly challenging students to be engaged thinkers, researchers and professional practitioners. We are also distinct from many Bachelor of Visual Art programs in not requiring students to specialise in a particular studio discipline in their final year of study. We understand that contemporary artists are increasingly hybrid in their studio practice. We model this by making sure our students generate meaningful connections between thinking, researching and making in their graduate work.

The other main distinction between our program and most others is the intensity of the delivery. Through smaller class sizes, increased contact hours and frequent access to lecturers and facilities our students experience a more focused learning environment.

It’s a core component and a versatile teaching methodology. We use it like scaffolding, around which the degree is structured. We believe it’s essential in developing the fundamental skills in analysing, making and thinking. We start by using drawing to teach our students how to observe, judge and respond. We then use it as a way of making links between the experience of the artist and the experience of the audience. Drawing’s directness and adaptability allows our lecturers to unpack the importance of making strategic formal, material, contextual and conceptual choices, not just in drawing but across all studio practice.

With rapidly changing technologies and an evolving visual culture, the education of visual artists must be moving in new directions?

The School has a balanced range of practitioners who lecture in our degree program. By strategically recruiting and supporting academic staff who are actively involved in the visual art industry, we not only ensure currency in the delivery of our degree programs but also expose our students to artists who are shaping new directions in visual culture. We are able to build on our core units by leveraging our lecturers’ experience of using new technologies in their own artmaking to give our students options in how they develop and execute work. We also believe that the ‘why’ is as important as the ‘how’ when it comes to using new technologies in art-making.

How does the School support students in developing distinctive forms of personal expression? Are artists becoming more concerned with political commentary or conceptual art, for example?

We often use language as an analogy when we talk about developing our students’ art-making. From the outset of the degree they develop a wide ‘vocabulary’ of techniques. They get to know materials, what they are and how they work. From there the ‘grammar’ of making is introduced. Students learn how to use techniques in combination to create particular effects. As they get a firmer handle on the ‘language,’ students start pushing around a range of possibilities for creating meaning in their work. At this point personal expression becomes increasingly important and students are supported in developing not only what they want to say but how best to say it.

In terms of content, everything is up for grabs for contemporary artists and we find the conceptual concerns of our students are as varied as their backgrounds. There are lots of different ways of taking the pulse of contemporary practice. We encourage our students to get to biennials, art fairs and exhibitions as regularly as possible so their own making is done from an informed position.

The School only employs lecturers who are practising artists, writers or curators. It also holds masterclasses with leading artists such as Anna Platten. How do students respond to this kind of professional approach?

Our students have the opportunity to work directly with a range of visual art professionals, both in the degree program as well as our public programs. Employing active artists, writers and curators is essential in cultivating trust between students and academic staff. Our lecturers model practice in and out of the School. Through their own professional activities they benchmark the initiative and commitment needed to maintain a career in the visual arts.

Grace Marlow (2015 BVA graduate), settled/unsettled, dual channel video projection, duration variable

Being an artist has always been a somewhat precarious way of earning a living. How does the School prepare graduates for visual arts-related careers and how successful are they?

Our degree aims to equip graduates with the skills to become professional practising artists but we understand that this can be a challenging way of generating income. We develop skills in critical thinking and writing and expose our students throughout the degree to the wider industry. The approach is as hybrid as the nature of careers in the visual arts. Students are in constant contact with galleries, organisations and professionals who will support their careers. Through the connections formed during their studies our graduates generally hit the ground running. A number of our graduates from 2015 for example are already getting regular work in the Art Gallery of South Australia’s Public Programs Department.

Ingrid, I notice the School is offering travel grants and scholarships to attract prospective students. Are you looking to expand the School and develop its profile nationally?

We believe that Adelaide is an ideal place to establish a career in the visual arts and our degree program is of a leading national standard. We are completely independent and not exposed to the changing priorities of universities or reliant on either state or federal government funding. Students who are serious about studying to be artists need to consider the changing landscape of visual arts education in Australia. Given the climate of uncertainty surrounding the viability of art schools within university structures we have recognised an opportunity to attract prospective students from across Australia. We hope that our stability, independence and the quality of our degree attracts a wider range of interstate students to the School.

Michael Shaefer (2015 BVA graduate) FireHold, JumpDraw, IceHold, 2015, dual channel video installation

Since playing their first concerts at the Footscray Community Arts Centre in 1986, ELISION have become one of Australia’s most successful new music exports. Their close relationships with composers working at the edge of instrumental virtuosity and notational complexity in the UK and the US have redefined the possible in music. In 2016 ELISION return to Australia to celebrate their 30th anniversary with, among other events, concerts at the Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music and an exhibition at the Melbourne’s RMIT Gallery. Matthew Lorenzon speaks with ELISION’s Artistic Director Daryl Buckley about the ensemble’s past, present and now sprawling influence around the globe.

LOOKING BACK

Your forthcoming exhibition at the RMIT Gallery reflects 30 years of groundbreaking work by ELISION, much of which has taken place overseas. Audiences who have only come to new music in the past decade (including millennials like myself) might not even realise that ELISION is an Australian ensemble. Can you fill us in on how ELISION started out and grew?

Essentially we began as a group of Melbourne students from the Victorian College of the Arts. Our intention was to engage with and perform a diverse range of Australian contemporary music; it was a thrill to just have contact with living composers. There was a great deal of instrumental activity in Melbourne, but even so the circumstances of the day were limited. It all happened in a fishbowl. There might have been one significant critic—Clive O’Connell writing for The Age—and one or two bureaucrats relevant to [our seeking] support for funding.

Audiences for new music were amazing and I believe they have since declined in Melbourne. They were fuelled by the combined pedagogical activities at La Trobe, the VCA and to some extent Melbourne University. We were seriously annoyed if we got anything less than 150-200 people to a show.

One instance of internationalisation occurred when I discovered that we could make submissions to the Italian Ministry of Culture and secure funding to engage Italian composers and conductors. We brought conductor Sandro Gorli out, from Milan to Melbourne, over 11 times in the following decade. He became like a father to the ensemble with his warmth, intellectual engagement and care, and fully developed the group’s latent potential with his detailed attention to the scores we were playing. I really doubt that ELISION would have become what it did without his input.

By the early 90s I was also writing applications to the Arts Council of Great Britain, the Canadian Arts Council and the Holst Foundation in the UK to either commission composers like Richard Barrett or Alistair MacDonald, or sponsor recording releases. With Richard we were able to access not only his publisher, who publicised our work in Europe, but British arts funding and philanthropy for a CD that came out on the boutique Dutch label etcetera. We sold over 3,000 copies of it and received rave reviews around Europe. Our first European concerts, in Milan 1991, secured a massive audience. The internationalisation of the ensemble that began in those early years fuelled our later capacity to shift base and survive.

Eventually you all found yourselves overseas on a more permanent basis. What were the key elements encouraging that shift?

Well, in the early ‘90s a prodigious talent called Carl Rosman joined the ensemble. Liza [Lim, composer and Buckley’s partner] and I would make absolutely all of the scores and information we possessed available to him and he would just strip the house of it and consume it all. Given the size of the Australian scene, it was evident that such a talent needed to be overseas. I made opportunities for him through ELISION, such as a joint commission with Ensemble Modern of a new work by Liza, Alchemical Wedding.

Also, I was younger! I had no hesitation in arguing with a funding agency. A massive spat with Arts Victoria in 1994 led to us being defunded by the State. We moved to Sydney for a year, then Brisbane. Each shift was like a rebirth for the ensemble. There were new contacts and new possibilities.

Queensland began an important phase in the ensemble’s story. In our Queensland period we engaged heavily with site-specific performance installation work. We worked with visual artists such as Domenico DeClario, Heri Dono, Judy Watson, Judith Wright, Justine Cooper, Araya Radjarmrearnsook and curator Rhana Devenport of the Queensland Art Gallery. We had some amazing projects at the Third Asia Pacific Triennial, which were documented in RealTime.

The Queensland adventures also saw a huge amount of beautiful documentation in RealTime. Keith Gallasch came up for Dark Matter (read his response), another insanely large performance installation piece with CIKADA ensemble from Norway, Per Inge Bjørlo, and Richard Barrett, all at the Brisbane Powerhouse. RealTime covered the Adelaide Festival in 2000—Robyn Archer’s amazing Adelaide Festival where we were able to do Liza’s Yuè Ling Jié on an eight-sided barge on the River Torrens.

SHIFTING GROUND

So when and why did you definitively shift your operations overseas? Was there an exodus of players at some point?

No, very early on we fielded players from all over Australia, and then the world. In those days it was expensive to fly people around, but we refused to be defined by a single geographical location. While our impact in Europe was felt from the early 90s, we only moved our fundamental base of operations in 2007 and 2008. First of all, Liza had the opportunity to live in Berlin for a couple of years through the DAAD [German Academic Exchange Service], so we pursued that. That coincided, disappointingly, with a deterioration in our relationship with Arts Queensland, also resulting in the eventual loss of our Australia Council funding.

So you had one foot in Europe and one in Australia. When the rug was pulled out from under one foot you just shifted your weight. This sounds like a common narrative in the Australian arts scene.

Perhaps unusual for an ensemble though! Our joint decision was, however disappointing and disruptive those attitudes coming out of Arts Queensland and the Australia Council were, they were not going to be the epitaph for the ensemble. It was only when I left the country for six or seven years that I could really see the ensemble’s work from the outside. You might know that something has had an impact when you’re inside the bottle looking out, but to be outside looking back in is a completely different experience.

You’re back in Australia for your 30th anniversary celebrations, how does it feel to be back in the bottle?

The impact of the Global Financial Crisis in Europe and Australia is a huge point of difference. The rolling impact it has had within the social fabric and the arts in the UK has been devastating and has underwritten Brexit and a stack of other events. The wealth, opulence and opportunities present here—this is not to say that the arts are funded well here, or funded enough—means that a lot of practitioners aren’t propelled to make the most of the opportunities available. Australia is fearful for and protective of its wealth and that projects onto how it deals with refugees and immigration policy as much as it does on how art is made. Although there are exceptions, it is happily unambitious.

REFLECTING AND EXHIBITING

You are now reflecting upon your own artistic production by curating an exhibition at RMIT. What kind of a story are you going to tell?

The initial idea for the exhibition came from Associate Professor Lawrence Harvey, who was my PhD supervisor at the time. We’ve been involved with both the RMIT gallery, who commissioned work from ELISION through the RMIT Art Committee, and with SIAL Sound Studios as a long-term collaborator. That provides a natural framework for an exhibition, a story of this group of people who had a certain arts adventure that had consequences and a meaning, not just for us, but for many other practitioners and audiences elsewhere in the world, and how we have become part of other people’s practices. For instance, in the US you’re now seeing an increasing presence of what I term the “American choreographic school,” including composers Aaron Cassidy and Timothy McCormack. Particularly through the recording legacy and performance advocacy of Tristram Williams and Benjamin Marks, a new generation of players in the US is really rocking and rolling with it.

Are you surprised at some of the things that you have found trawling through the ensemble’s archive?

Yes! A lot of it is in the National Library of Australia in Canberra. There’s a massive amount of stuff there that I deposited when we left Queensland in 2008. It’s all catalogued and organised into years, correspondence with particular composers, and particular projects. There are some great objects there. When we first performed Yuè Ling Jié on a barge on the Torrens River the conductor’s score fell into the water. Simon Hewett did some wild gesture and the whole stand went into the river with the sconce—which was attached to a socket—still lit. So when Simon reached into the river to rescue the score we had looks of frozen horror on our faces. The river was potentially live.

The soprano Deborah Kayser and the rest of the singers took turns drying it out with hair dryers in a nearby rowing club. I put the score into the archive with a note about the incident. The NLA’s Curator of Music Robyn Holmes recently told me that a PhD candidate has been researching the collection and came across the score, which had gone all mouldy.

You inadvertently preserved the biodiversity of the Torrens River in this petri-dish of a score.

TURNING 30 AT BIFEM

As one of Australia’s most distinguished contemporary music ensembles, you are performing this year in Australia’s youngest new music festival, the Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music. You are comprehensively represented through three concerts.

I really have to thank David Chisholm for including us. David stands squarely outside some of my earlier remarks. He is indefatigably himself and is pursuing his vision in his own rugged, inimitable way. He’s not appreciated enough here. As you gain a broader perspective it’s often the people who stand for something, who have a vision that’s not being shaped by or filtered through compromising to meet funding constraints, the people who are chasing down their vision, they’re the people that you really value in the music community.

There are three strands to our program at BIFEM. There’s our collaboration with ANAM [Australian National Academy of Music] which sees the first performance of Enno Poppe’s massive orchestral work Speicher in Australia as well as Liza Lim’s Machine for Contacting the Dead. Machine… is a beautiful work dedicated to the women, the courtesans, musicians and entertainers at the court of a Chinese Marquis who were interred in his tomb alongside weaponry, jewellery and other material belongings.

The second strand is purely ELISION, which includes a new work by Liza. She hasn’t written a new work for us since The Navigator (directed by Barrie Kosky, 2008; read the RT review) which was about eight years ago now. The soloist is the amazing sheng player Wu Wei. It is called How Forests Think and was completed in the world’s largest remaining rainforest—the Amazon. How this unusual circumstance came about would take another 10 minutes of interview. Lastly, Aaron Cassidy has written a work for the two giants of trumpet—ELISION’s Tristram Williams and Peter Evans. It’s massive.

Over three days Perth’s MoveMe dance festival featured four major works, including the touring production of Force Majeure’s Never Did Me Any Harm. STRUT Dance, the National Choreographic Centre of Western Australia, provided the centrepiece, their young dancers performing under Batsheva Dance’s Artistic Director Ohad Naharin in a restaging of his Decadance (2000). The other two works I saw came from relatively new ensembles. New Zealander Raewyn Hill, who moved from Queensland’s Dancenorth to found Co3 in 2015, has made The Cry, while Praxis, a new collaboration comprising choreographer Laura Boynes, visual artist Alexander Boynes, composer Tristen Parr and five dancers premiered Dark Matter.

STRUT Dance: Decadance

Decadance is the most assured piece in the MoveMe program. STRUT’S dancers nail the complex, off-balance choreography. The work consists of 10 disparate studies of varying degrees of classicism. The choreography has a strong sense of line and precision, as well as an ambience of light sexual/erotic play (generally recalling Nederlands Dans Theater). Hip movements, especially from the women, often lead, and upright postures are broken by sweeping bends and crouches into the floor. The design is simple, including monochromatic, body-hugging jeans and tank tops. Pointe and partnering emerge, as do games with shoes. Arrayed in rows, dancers often run in parallel lines across the stage. When unison arises, the rippling responses recall a great machine, pushing the work into a focused ecstasy.

Decadance’s highlight, apart from its unbalanced, hip-rotating partnering, is an engrossingly cyclic explosion of Jewish ritual prayer. Sixteen dancers attired as Hasidim (including women in men’s black hats and suits) sit, legs apart, heads bowed, in a curve of chairs facing outwards. A drum-and-bass-remix of “Hava Nagila” is played (in a serious oversight, Naharin and STRUT do not credit the artists whose music is appropriated here). As the urge to move travels left to right, shoulders lift each body up in punching, diagonal gestures, before the chest explodes outwards and each dancer is thrown onto their feet, head and arms behind them. Each time this call runs through the chorus, the dancer at the far right is flung face down onto the stage, the sheer force of the appeal overwhelming him. This set of reflexes repeatedly plays out before the dancers throw away their chairs and tear off their shoes and shirts, creating a ‘bonfire of vanities’ at their feet. This eloquent display of the physicality of God’s call to man later segues into a perhaps overlong sequence where the dancers, back in their suits, draw audience members onto the stage to dance with them in a series of awkward but mostly touching tangos. While the deliberately kaleidoscopic nature of Decadance makes it an inconsistent journey, it is affecting and physically precise.

Co3, The Cry

Hill’s The Cry also had a sense of sharp, classical precision disturbed by low, sliding movements into the floor, together with an affective intensity derived from an apparently complex dramaturgical narrative behind the piece—though the ‘story’ remained opaque to me. While the piece certainly had an Expressionist tendency to produce gestures which suggested their origins in artesian sources of emotional complexity, this was countered by a remarkable blankness in the performers’ faces. Emotions stirred but characters and narratives were withheld, producing a charged but fundamentally abstract, semi-formal work.

This emphasis on inarticulate passion served the men best. Much of the action occurs between rows of chairs on either side of the stage, upon which impassive, lethargic dancers sit. Andrew Searle enters first, a vaguely Mephistophelian character in loose black clothing; a short but strong dancer who glides across the floor before rising up to pivot and place his torso facing the audience in a mute address. Others come and go but it is Co3’s tallest and most imposing dancer, Mitchell Harvey, who literally picks up and shoves his colleagues—notably Katherine Gurr, who repeatedly becomes a doll in his arms. This rather problematic gender construction is challenged at times, as when Harvey himself is ‘manhandled,’ but ultimately it is the men who get the best moves.

Such issues aside, the piece is notable for a clean, optically deceptive design from Hill. The rear wall consists of a sheet of vertical white corrugations. Under the largely consistent, white light of Mark Howett, this produces curious moiré illusions and distortions about the edges of the dancers. The performance is thus not only often explosively aggressive, but also has a meditative, mesmeric quality.
Musician Eden Mulholland is on stage throughout, guitar in hand. Thick soled boots elevate him above the dancers he observes. He crosses the stage several times, and at moments whispers vocals or plays keyboard. There is an ever shifting, grungy intensity to his contribution, metallic strums and string-bending accents giving a sense of modern disaffection to the piece.

Praxis, Dark Matter

The most experimental, if least successful, work in the festival was Dark Matter. The program note claims that the piece is inspired by everything from “human displacement” and “adaptation,” to how not only our “identities” but also our very “experiences” are “shaped” by the effects of “our environment,” be this the organic or social. Not surprisingly the work was dramaturgically lacking in cohesion. The choreography was also varied, drawing not only on Expressionism (in the suggestion of emotional states and a sense of groping towards an obscure symbolism) but also Contact Improvisation (rolling points of contact between bodies and climbing over each other), as well as general contemporary technique after Cunningham (more conventional moments of long lines and duets broken up by clawed gestures, less statuesque posing, dropping into the ground, and so on).

Dark Matter is excitingly framed. We first see a pair of tall, rectangular boxes. Material within rustles and billows upwards, driven by fans and bass speakers. The boxes are rolled into various positions and projections screened onto them. Several sequences feature digitally re-composed figures, which look as if they have been cast from green sand, including for some reason an oversized dog. The dancers frequently pause to gaze out, and the piece largely maintains a satisfying balance between a sense of dramatic resonance and simple formal play. The piece begins with the dancers slowly spreading rice in great drifts across the floor, and while interesting, once achieved, this central design element is largely ignored until the final sequence. Alison’s Halit’s To Run—Sand it was not.

Tristen Parr’s music combines cycling, glitchy digital tones with the sharp whine of an amplified cello. This infuses the typically subdued choreography with drive and shape—although the sound is poorly mixed. Still, Parr’s shuddering walls of noise are satisfying even when the cello is inaudible. For a new ensemble, Dark Matter is a fine start.

MoveMe is still a young festival, first staged in 2012 with works by Didier Theron, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and local artists and then followed with an intensive focus on improvisation in 2014. It will be interesting to see what influence the international improvisers of the 2014 MoveMe festival (see here and here) and the aesthetics of Ohad Naharin will have left way of legacy on local artists while C03 and Praxis emerge on their own trajectories.

Ausdance WA and partner companies: MoveMe 2016: Strut Dance, Decadance Perth 2016, choreography Ohad Naharin, lighting Avi Yona Bueno; Co3 Dance Company, The Cry, choreography, direction, design Raewyn Hill, music Eden Mulholland, lighting Mark Howett; Performing Lines WA, Praxis, Dark Matter, choreography Laura Boynes, music Tristen Parr, lighting Chris Donnelly, costumes Imogene Spencer, projection, design Alexander Boynes with Roly Skender; State Theatre Centre of Western Australia, Perth, 15-17 Sept

In the latest Currency House Platform Paper, described by Jana Perkovic as “an excellent work of political journalism,” cultural policy scholar Ben Eltham guides you through the history of the LNP Government’s assault on artists and the Australia Council.

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On 11 December 2005, a crowd of approximately 5000 mostly young white men converged on the Sydney beachside suburb of Cronulla with the aim of ‘taking back’ the beach from what they saw as an encroaching Middle Eastern community. Escalating into attacks against lone Middle Eastern men, this initial riot kicked off retaliatory violence in the following days, both in Cronulla and other suburbs. Opening with grotesque documentary footage of the event, Abe Forsythe’s dark comedy Down Under propels us back to an ugly period at a time when organised racism is again gaining traction in this country.

The film follows two groups of men, one made up of Anglo-Australians, the other Lebanese, both seeking retribution in the wake of the riot. Each group contains a more reluctant member: Hassim, a diligent student (Lincoln Younes) and amiable stoner “Shit-Stick” (Alexander England). With a misguided sense of familial loyalty, each ultimately succumbs to the zealots surrounding him. While Down Under’s scenario is mired in its characters’ bigotry, it’s also a study in the sort of toxic masculinity that defines itself through clannishness and violent exclusion of the other.

All sorts of strutting, posturing masculinities are unflatteringly displayed: the beer-swilling ‘Aussie’ numbskulls are virulently racist, but some of the Lebanese cohort are just as quick to lash out at innocent bystanders. A gay underworld clique of bare-chested South-East Asian men led by a camp white Australian (David Field) flaunts its potential for violence along with its pecs. Forsythe assembles all the markers of male aggression: cars, alcohol, weapons, the promise of a fight and the desire to link incipient thuggery to some vaguely articulated greater cause—the legacy of Gallipoli, or of Ned Kelly.

Down Under’s subject is as grim as any other Australian film examining toxic masculinity in the context of actual events, but unlike The Boys or Snowtown, which would have been obscene as comedies, Forsythe gets away with his unsubtle humour because his subjects are dangerous buffoons rather than calculatedly evil. The joke, sour as it is, is on them. The gags in Down Under are for the most part heavy-handed and reliant on stereotypes, a case in point the token ‘Aussie’ girlfriend who’s a foul-mouthed, heavily pregnant chain-smoker. Elsewhere, it’s the characters’ sheer offensiveness that’s meant to be funny, though laughing at those whose speech is a barrage of crude bigotry can feel uncomfortably close to laughing along with them.

Despite drawbacks in some of the writing, Forsythe has gathered a compelling cast whose performances transcend caricature. The film’s cinematography, editing and pacing convey a pulsing energy and ominousness. Once the warring factions hit the road, the heady build-up to confrontation is captured with sickening immediacy. Lachlan Milne’s cinematography perfectly combines night-time suburbia and rampant testosterone as a car, viewed aerially, does 360 degree burnouts, smoke pluming while that menacing ode to female seduction, Kelis’ “Milkshake,” plays over the top. Claustrophobic scenes in crowded cars show a revolving tableau of sweat-dripping, lank-haired figures caught mid-yell. In these moments the film’s comedy and seriousness coalesce in a vision of adrenalised ridiculousness.

The characters in Down Under may be clueless and inept, but they’re not softened around the edges. The film doesn’t pull its punches when showing the consequences of knee-jerk behaviour, whether fuelled by hatred, misguided loyalty or a wish to belong. In one scene, the white Australians sing along to the title track from 80s fantasy film The Neverending Story—a timely reminder that the lessons of the Cronulla Riots are yet to be learnt.

Down Under, writer, director Abe Forsythe, cinematographer Lachlan Milne, music Piers Burbrook de Vere, editor Drew Thompson, production design Nicholas Dare, distributor StudioCanal, 2016

It has been hard to avoid spiritual and emotional fatigue in the face of the policy turmoil that has characterised Australia of late.

“The arts in general have been in a state of free-fall,” said Angharad Wynne-Jones, AD of Arts House, in conversation with Esther Anatolitis on Audio Stage in October 2015. The industry, characterised by precarious employment and low wages at the best of times, in the last two years has been hit by a string of far-reaching, non-consultative and thinly explained funding and policy decisions which have left the sector in a state of collective burn-out.

These decisions are charted and analysed in Ben Eltham’s Platform Paper Number 48, When the Goal Posts Move, which reaches wide, from direct reporting of the political situations as they took place to broader cultural analysis of the spirit of these policies. For those whose income, professional practice, and sense of social belonging, are tied to the arts economy, the tally is devastating: $105 million removed from the Australia Council at no notice in 2015, followed by $87 million removed in 2014; $52.5 million further removed in December 2015; a grant round cancelled by a shocked Australia Council in June 2015, followed by the suspension of the eagerly awaited new six-year funding program for small-to-medium companies; one-third of the $105m returned to the Australia Council; and, finally, 65 organisations defunded on 13 May 2016, the ‘Black Friday’ for the arts in Australia.

In response to the policy decisions that affect Australian culture, the arts sector has historically tended to be idealistic, politically naive and disunited, with large, well-funded organisations rarely willing to side with the independent arts, and the independents too often consumed with basic survival to engage with politics on a larger scale. However, the severity of the impact of recent policy decisions has prompted changes in the ways the sector engages in the political arena, as well as in industry conversations. We now talk about burn-out in a way we haven’t before. Under the banner of #freethearts, artsworkers, for the first time, are speaking to the public with one voice. And grassroots political organising put the arts on the 2016 parliamentary election agenda to a degree unprecedented in Australian politics. All of this, too, is described in Eltham’s essay.

“It’s one of those fraught times, when the challenge is to reflect back that confusion in a way that shares the empathy, frustration and concerns that we all have, while communicating the confidence that the arts are stronger than any arts minister,” said Esther Anatolitis, CEO of Regional Arts Victoria. Importantly, a lucid and impassioned analysis of cultural policy has been on the rise, creating a serious discourse around an industry that, as we can now say, with data on our hands, employs more people than the mining sector. Ben Eltham’s paper forms part of that discourse.

When the Goal Posts Move is, first and foremost, an excellent work of political journalism, describing what happened behind the scenes as important decisions were made. Historians will be able to consult it for a fine-grained account of the general political atmosphere that poisoned cultural policy-making in Australia in this period. The essay sketches the role of the right-wing Institute of Public Affairs in public discourse, as well as the general spirit of the Abbott government years, initially with Senator George Brandis as Arts Minister. It also documents the wider political dysfunction of the Rudd-Gillard years that nonetheless delivered Simon Crean’s 2013 Creative Australia, the nation’s first cultural policy in 19 years, only to have it undone with ideological sleight of hand by the succeeding Abbott government. It records the political aftershocks of the artist boycott of the Sydney Biennale in 2015 and notes how Australia Council CEO Tony Grybowski cut short a family holiday in Britain to rush back to Sydney when his agency’s funding was slashed in the 2015 federal budget [Brandis had dined with Australia Council Chair Rupert Myer at the Venice Biennale on the eve of the announcement but did not consult with or forewarn him about the forthcoming cut. Eds]

The essay is less interested in documenting the grassroots activism that the cuts have spurred, though here, too, Eltham’s reporting is meticulous. Noting the country-wide protests, the galvanisation of the arts community in response to the Senate Inquiry into Brandis’ policy decisions and the establishment of the Free The Arts alliance, he takes time to chart the advisory role of the SLAM (Save Live Australian Music) organisers, who bring their know-how to Tamara Winikoff of NAVA, Norm Horton and Sarah Moynihan of Feral Arts, and Jade Lillie of the Footscray Community Arts Centre, in mobilising independent artists. The essay is not, however, a manual on how to build a grassroots political movement—though perhaps that would be even more useful to know.

A single, uninterrupted line of thought runs through this essay: we could be doing cultural policy better. At regular intervals, almost as a way to breathe out between reporting the workings of a cultural milieu, Eltham digresses into spaces of deep reflection on what cultural policy is meant to be. What is culture? What is power? How have the two historically met in Australian arts policy? How do Australians actually engage with the arts? He delves into the toxic combination of neoliberalism and cultural cringe: “There were times during 2013 and 2014 in which Abbott and his Conservative ministers seemed more interested in fighting culture wars than in governing the country,” he writes. Most notably, Eltham compares the discourse around arts funding—essentially seen as propping up an unsustainable industry—with the discourse around the ANZAC Centenary, demonstrating how “arguments for culture in and of itself can be powerful forces in the intellectual life of a nation.”

This is Ben Eltham speaking as a cultural policy scholar, deeply engaged in fundamental questions of what cultural policy could and should do, and it is a shame that neither the limited scope of a Platform Paper, nor the highly politicised state of arts policy in Australia, allows for those questions to be at the fore of this paper. Arts funding decisions should be a reflection of what we value, and who we want to be as a nation. One can only hope that clear, considered essays like this one will pave the way forward.

Ben Eltham, When the Goal Posts Move, Platform Paper 48, August 2016, Currency House, Sydney

Mahdi Mohammadi, Jawad Yaqoubi, Karen Therese (background), Gholam Nabi (screen), Tribunal, Powerhouse Youth and Griffin Theatre

Tribunal is raw, conversational theatre built, rather fragilely, on a conceit: the holding of a public tribunal overseen by a female Aboriginal elder before whom refugees living in Australia tell their stories. It’s a highly flexible hearing that allows for singing, dancing, re-enactments in which refugees deal with threatening Australian Government officials and tender accounts of life in their countries of origin and in their new home. Above all, it allows the elder, Aunty Rhonda Grovenor Dixon, to herself speak as a witness, providing a point-by-point analogy between the treatment of refugees and our Government’s maladministration of the lives of Aboriginal peoples. When one of the refugees asks if they can tell their story in their own words, Grovenor Dixon replies, “It’s theatre, you can do what you like.”

Charismatic performers and the work’s informal structure lend Tribunal necessary cohesion and warmth. Two young Afghan Hazaris, Mahdi Mohammadi and Jawad Yaqoubi, bringing wit and casual energy to the performance, offer unfamiliar tales. Mohammadi is a theatre director, formerly the leader of a women’s rights theatre troupe built around Hazari women’s dance. In Kabul they played to audiences of women—whose husbands had to be bribed into ‘believing’ the women were going on a picnic—as well as performing in schools and a women’s prison. They also toured to India. However, back home, Sharia Law’s hostility to dance resulted in threats and the death of a relative, a prelude to Mohammadi’s leaving Afghanistan.

Another speaker addressing the tribunal is an impassioned community worker, lawyer and here, a strong performer, Katie Green, who worked for three years for Red Cross, supporting refugees released from detention. Her account of the arrival of refugees in Australia tells of “chaos,” always “a mad dash,” night time, “always dark,” herself carrying a large amount of cash in an Aldi bag to be distributed $400 per person to arrivals. The upside for Green was the sheer joy of seeing refugees re-united with family. But, with only 89% granted of a Centrelink payment per week, long-term prospects did not look good for these people. Given the intractability of the situation, “I felt like a cog,” Green says.

Karen Therese, wearing headphones, reproduces verbatim the words of a Human Rights lawyer, now based in London, who feels profound guilt at not being able to help a mother “who lost the plot,” washing herself compulsively after her child was sexually abused. After some four years the woman and child were granted refugee status and admitted to Australia but denied justice and compensation. It’s not precisely clear why the lawyer had to leave Australia, presumably compelled by the helplessness he shared with the Red Cross worker and, as he says, knowing “we were biting the hand [the Government] that was feeding us [Legal Aid]” and the likelihood, as has happened, of a reduction in funds.

L-R: Rhonda Grovenor Dixon, Mahdi Mohammadi, Katie Green, Tribunal, Powerhouse Youth and Griffin Theatre

Not long after his arrival in Australia and with a bridging visa, Mohammadi is bluntly advised by a Department of Immigration officer (Paul Dwyer playing all the baddies) to abide by a code of conduct including not “running a red light” if he didn’t wish to lose his visa. It’s this which triggers Grovenor Dixon to declare that she recognises similar codes her people have been compelled to live by. But first she invokes her own proud standing as elder and grandmother, recites the names of her totems, displays a magnificent possum coat (with artwork on the inside) and recounts her father Chika Dixon’s activism on behalf of his own people, having defeated his alcoholism. Grovenor Dixon then recalls the code that led her grandfather, a fine tenor, to fear the loss of welfare payments if he spoke in language. The codes by which Aboriginal people are compelled to live today has resulted in mass imprisonment, the Intervention and suicide. Mohammadi says he can take no risks, there’s “no more party”—a neighbour might complain. Grovenor Dixon sings “Miss Celie’s Blues” from The Colour Purple and Mohammadi and Green dance, but the reprieve is short-lived, Mohammadi telling of young refugees killing themselves: “four while we were making this show.”

Grovenor Dixon offers consolation, acknowledging shared resilience in the face of these nightmarish circumstances. As a buzzing and a rumbling pervade the theatre, the performers form an awkward, slow-moving tableau, shifting back and forth or repeatedly half-sinking to the floor. Its significance eluded me. But, we are saved by tea, offered by traditionally dressed Iraqi members of Fairfield’s wonderful Parents Café which supports new arrivals to Australia.

Karen Therese opens the conversation to a hesitant audience—so much had already been said, so much to accommodate, all of us doubtless feeling the burden of privilege. A psychologist and guest of the production, Sarah Coconis, joins the artists, explaining that the impact of Australian racism (and our denial of it) “is worse than the original trauma” of being a refugee. We are, she says, like a bad parent, betraying those in our care.

Two final ‘scenes’ lift Tribunal to another plane. First a young man and woman (Bilal Hafda and Iman Etri), further guests of the production, step out of the audience and rap poems with verve, he telling us to “reclaim your honour” and “atone for your apathy,” and she, traditionally attired, declaring in her last lines, “This is what a feminist looks like,” having taken exception to an attitude that argues (as close as I can recall), “you’re the norm, my clothing oppression, yours fashion.”

Mahdi Mohammadi and Jawad Yaqoubi take centre-stage and fill in the missing part of their story, their coming to Australia. There were three of them in Indonesia after they fled Afghanistan. Mohammadi arrived here by boat, Yaqoubi by plane, having been granted refugee status, and Gholam Nabi Hayati who went by boat too but has now been on Manus Island for three years. The pair sing a song for their friend. Tribunal doesn’t so much end as open us anew to the plight of others and our responsibility for them. Closure seems as yet barely conceivable, but as public concern about refugee and Aboriginal suffering grows, Tribunal compels us to apply greater pressure to the Australian Government to respond to the needs of those in its care—in reality, our care.

PYT [Powerhouse Youth Theatre], co-presenter Griffin Theatre Company, Tribunal, concept Karen Therese, creative collaborators/text/performers Paul Dwyer, Katie Green, Rhonda Grovenor Dixon, Mahdi Mohammadi, Karen Therese, Jawad Yaqoubi, design Province Studio (Laura Pike, Anne-Louise Dadak), sound, video design James Brown, lighting Emma Lockhart-Wilson; SBW Stables Theatre, Sydney, 12-20 Aug

The first indication that we are about to enter an unusual, indeed discombobulated world, one “off the record,” is seen on a row of video screens built into a black monolith. The arms of five digital clocks rotate at very different speeds, some ticking to the minute, others blithely sweeping their way through 24-hour cycles. In the background, a deceptive sense of order is conveyed by quiet classical piano. Each clock bears the name of one of the deeply frustrated characters in Force Majeure’s Off the Record, the first production from the company’s new artistic director, Danielle Micich, co-directed by Dance Integrated Australia’s Philip Channells.

These people—the performers use their own names: Alex, Jana, Gerard, Marnie, Neil—desire identity, social intimacy and sex. For those with disabilities there are additional hindrances—how to communicate, how to resist assumptions—but, for all of them, telling the truth—about themselves and each other—is deeply challenging. Off the Record moves quite laterally, character by character and in various couplings, towards revelation—uncomfortable truths and inescapable relativities.

Atop the monolith and above the action is Auslan interpreter Neil, who eventually finds himself with the others on the floor, embroiled physically and emotionally in complex interactions, making him a sensitive avatar for the audience. Other characters assume his role at times as they engage with Alex, who is deaf, manipulating and embracing him.

Brief movement duets are among the the work’s key motifs, first seen as Gerard attempts to gently embrace Marnie. She slithers up and down, resisting but still touching body to body until she enters into the play with passion, before exiting abruptly, something she will do in a more elaborate and disturbing encounter later with the desperately lonely Alex. Her audio diary entries and a subsequent scene reveal her desire for sex, despite painful experiences, communication misunderstandings and the enduring damage done by rejection in a dance competition—her impairment is psychological.

Gerard, who has Down Syndrome, is also lonely, meeting his needs by identifying with an actress in The Bold and the Beautiful and holding a fixed view of himself—his mantra: “I don’t lie, don’t do drugs, I’m not judgemental”—until he encounters Off the Record’s most complex character, Jana.

Initially slumped upstage, Jana is barely intelligible, muttering as if perhaps brain-damaged, but it’s a voice she can turn on and off. Similarly, her movement oscillates between seemingly difficult to control—wide, staggered stances, odd-angled arms, if with a determined elegance—and, partnering with Marnie, a fluent, unconstrained duet. Later, in a somewhat confusing episode of further shape-shifting and contradicting earlier instances of awkwardness, she stands behind the clocks, head invisible, stripped down to a bikini, striking convincing body-builder poses.

Likewise, she plays with the truth. Does she have Tourette’s Syndrome? She declares, “I never tic on stage,” dismisses the notion that Touretters all swear and in the end refuses us certainty about what we’ve witnessed in general. Jana’s a classic trickster figure, but not entirely in control. In their duet, Marnie, typically, exits, leaving Jana to solo, but her dancing and music glitch and break down. In a later pairing, Marnie attempts to control Jana’s wayward limbs.

Jana, whose ‘sin’ is having introduced another child to sex play with Ken and Barbie dolls, adroitly lies to adults about it and repeats the ‘act’ with a submissive Alex as Ken (another fine pairing). She lectures us: “Not everyone needs to know the truth.”

It’s Jana who throws Gerard, already feeling he’s an imposter, into confusion. He becomes disruptive, singing a wild Irish folk song at the top of the long ramp on the other side of the stage because no-one is listening to him. After lamenting feeling “old, cold” he calls a hiding Jana to “come out and be Jana again.” But which Jana will it be? This time it’s Jana with the awry voice. After infuriating Alex by signing meaninglessly, she apologises to him via Neil. Alex signs, “Apologise to me! He’s just an interpreter!” underlining the complexity of communication when a third party has to be involved. It’s a funny-sad moment, prefacing darker scenes to come.

By the end, Jana admits, “Sometimes people do need to know the truth.” Alex knows that he should have admitted his fault in crashing his girlfriend’s car, the crisis which, recalled at the beginning of the performance, has unleashed all his anxieties. It’s after his gentle duet with Marnie—feeling each others’ weight, one carrying the other in a scene of hopeful intimacy until she walks away—that Alex reveals the full extent of his pain, surprising us with speech: “I could love…[but] I avoid and fear you.” He’s profoundly alone in his deafness, which is “a dull noise,” the truth of his condition profoundly felt before the work’s riotous coda in which the characters ‘fuck’ each other, themselves, walls and floor in a celebration of liberating, primal desire beyond the complexities, lies and painful revelations we all experience but which can be overwhelming for those disadvantaged by physical, intellectual and emotional limitations. In Off the Record we see minds and bodies at work, honestly, confidently and proudly defying those limits.

Micich and Channells have been careful to keep their choreographing of movement and dance within a tight frame so that the difference in skill levels between the actors and the dancers is never too pronounced. Where an actor and dancer come together the pairing is subtly and convincingly played out and not as simple as it might at first look. Not everything felt right: Jana’s body-builder posturing; Marnie’s protracted dance competition angst; the awkward alternation of fragments of two stories in one scene; and the extreme width of the performance space sometimes disappearing words and movement. The density of the material in the first third or so of the work was daunting as I put names to bodies, adjusted to different forms of delivery and absorbed a lot of information. I wondered about the limited use of the screens, especially when text was projected onto walls, and why the clocks that prefaced the show didn’t make a return appearance.

Direction was assured, design starkly striking, lighting effectively austere and sound in tune with the variety of dramatic needs and moods. The script, though word-heavy, returns consistently and playfully, sometimes head-spinningly, to matters of truth. Alex Jones revealed great range: amiability, anger and despair. Gerard O’Dwyer (seen recently at PACT in Ruckus’ Speed of Life), a bold presence with fine diction and a great sense of humour, extrovertly delineated his feelings of isolation with finesse. Marnie Palomares’ oscillation between easeful engagement with the other characters and her ‘turning off’ was chilling. Neil Phipps’ persona was gentle, responsive and became more complex as he found himself at once trapped in and freed from his service role. Jana Castillo created a bewildering character, sometimes closed, sometimes a catalyst, embodying the work’s relentless dialectic of truth/lies, real/not real, able and not so, but never limited. She and Palomares gave the work a lyrical dimension with expressive dancing in their solos. Although the work doesn’t reveal the extent of new artistic director Danielle Micich’s choreographic artistry, the well-crafted, inventive couplings she’s created with Channells provide a very busy work with an engaging and thematically rich through-line that keeps movement centrestage.

Off the Record is a promising start for a new era for Force Majeure, one in line with the company’s distinctive dance theatre, issues-based model, with a new edge and defiant in the face of inexplicable defunding by the Australia Council.

Carriageworks, Force Majeure with Dance Integrated Australia, Off the Record, directors Danielle Micich, Philip Channells, performers Jana Castillo, Alex Jones, Gerard O’Dwyer, Marnie Palomares, Neil Phipps, set, lighting Benjamin Cisterne, sound design Kingsley Reeve, text dramaturg Zoe Coombes Marr; commissioned by Carriageworks for New Normal National Arts and Disability Strategy; Carriageworks, Sydney, 17-20 Aug

Stiff Gins, Force Majeure and Kristina Chan, Jon Rose, Ross Manning, Mish Grigor, Tina Havelock Stevens, Liesel Zink and Asian artists Choy Ka Fai, Xiao Ke and Zi Han, Rianto and River Lin are the featured artists in 2016 Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art. Even at first glance, it looks impressive and, as you’ll read, concentrated and immersive. Dance figures well with five works (Chan, Zink, Xiao Ke and Zi Han, Rianto and an exhibition focusing on 21 Asian choreographers by Choy Ka Fai), alongside contemporary performance/live art (Grigor, Lin), music/installation (Rose, Havelock Stevens), visual art (Manning) and Indigenous duo Stiff Gins taking their music into contemporary performance.

Gender, protest, climate change, Indigeneity, the body and the politics of cultural history manifest strongly as festival themes. In an era of arts festival gigantism, Liveworks offers audiences an inclusive, intensive and highly focused exploration of experimental art. With turbulences large and small unleashed by festival works, Liveworks will loop us into its storm of creativity.

A few days before the release of the program, an exuberant Performance Space Artistic Director Jeff Khan fills me in on key components of his programming. The current vision for the event, first taking shape in 2015, is now firming, especially in terms of the festival’s engagement with Asia.

THE CARRIAGEWORKS TAKEOVER

We’re activating the whole of Carriageworks with a range of works for people to really immerse themselves in the festival. We’ve looked at last year’s three-week model and condensed it into two with a view to really amplifying the energy of multiple works. So, it’s over a shorter time-frame but it’s much denser in programmed activity.

ENGAGING WITH ASIA

We’ve expanded our focus on the Asia-Pacific region with not only more Asian artists but also three streams of exchange running through the festival. The Producer and Presenters Program brings in leading Asian producers, presenters and curators to see works and explore further opportunities for the artists in the festival. In the longer term, it means opportunities for Performance Space to collaborate with these visitors.

There’s also the Artists Exchange Lab which is about bringing Asian and Australian artists together to experience the festival as observers and to critically respond to it, to learn more about each other’s practices and to then decamp to Bundanon for a more intensive dialogue. They’re from across Australia and Asia—four Australian and four Asian—coming as festival guests and representing a range of experimental art-forms and career stages. It’s really about seeding long-term conversations with the aid of two facilitators.

The third aspect of the exchange program is a Taiwanese Arts Manager Exchange in partnership with the Taipei Performing Arts Alliance. Every year for the next three years they’ll send us a Taiwanese arts manager to be embedded in the festival for a program of professional development and exchange and we’ll send an Australian producer to Taiwan.

RIVER LIN, CLEANSING SERVICE (TAIWAN)

There are a lot of interesting parallels between Australia and Taiwan in the experimental scene. Many Taiwanese artists are crossing art-form boundaries and engaging with new technologies—the sort of work we’ve been interested in at Performance Space for a very long time. It seemed like a natural fit to deepen. As part of it, we’ve curated into the program River Lin, a Taiwanese performance artist who visited Liveworks last year. He makes one-on-one performances and other quite intimate exchanges with audiences. He also makes durational works where he evokes an expansive and very different sense of time.

All of Lin’s work is centred in the body and is about invoking a sense of ritual exchange between himself and the audience. One of his well-known works of recent years is titled Kiss It Better. With a small audience, Lin is blindfolded and his lips painted with bright red lipstick. One by one he approaches his audience and asks them which part of their body hurts. The ritual performance involves kissing it better.

The brand new work he’s developing for us is called Cleansing Service and it continues that sense of intimacy in the exchange between performer and audience by looking at baptism rituals and the role of water in spiritual practices around the world.

CHOY KA FAI, SOFTMACHINE: RIANTO [INDONESIA]

I’m really excited that we’re bringing two works from Singapore artist Choy Ka Fai’s SoftMachine to Liveworks. [The artist has been creating an “inventory” of Asian dance since 2012 which includes performances and a multimedia archive. Eds] One is by Indonesian dancer Rianto, whom I saw at a festival in Japan last year, Kyoto Experiment, and was absolutely blown away. As you know, we do a lot of programming around gender and sexuality at Performance Space. This is a very traditional dance, called Lengger, in which men have been performing as women for centuries. It’s an erotic fertility dance that has a completely different reading in tradition than in a contemporary context. His solo is all about unravelling that gender dynamic. He’s also an extremely accomplished contemporary dancer. As the performance progresses, there’s this slow transition from traditional Lengger garb as an Indonesian woman, stripping away those layers to become a man as the movement style shifts to a much more contemporary vocabulary. There’s also documentary film Choy Ka Fai has shot, which documents Rianto’s life. It’s a portrait of the artist as a kind of bridge between male and female, between traditional and contemporary art forms.

CHOY KA FAI, SOFTMACHINE: XIAO KE AND ZI HAN [CHINA]

Chinese duo Xiao Ke and Zi Han make dance works in public spaces in China, practising their art outside traditional institutions. A lot of their work is politically and socially engaged to the point where they’ve come under fairly constant surveillance and scrutiny by the Chinese government. Their performance portrait is really about these conditions that inform their practice. Over the years they’ve been able to create a very detailed, very beautiful choreographic style and a spoken narrative with which they open up about the motivation for their practice and their experience of friction with authority. As with the whole SoftMachine series there’s also a documentary film component.

There’s also the SoftMachine exhibition for which Ka Fai has built an archive of interviews with 21 Asian choreographers alongside other visual material.

STIFF GINS, SPIRIT OF THINGS

One of the major commissions is the Stiff Gins’ project, Spirit of Things. You might know them as Indigenous musical duo Nardi Simpson and Kaleena Briggs; this is their first step out of that frame into contemporary performance. It arose from a residency they did a couple of years ago at the Australian Museum in its permanent collection of cultural objects. They have a keen interest in that very current debate around Indigenous objects held in museums and the call to return items to their communities as living objects that have a lifespan and a broader cultural resonance beyond their materiality.

Nardi and Kaleena had a really interesting experience during the residency where they felt the objects speak to them, each with a story or quite distinct vision or series of images. These turned into stories and songs. They knew they needed a broader performance frame than just a music gig to be able to convey the weight of that cultural information that came to them and the pressing need for it to be released, which parallels the need for us to re-think how Indigenous culture is positioned more broadly. They’re collaborating with Felix Cross, a British theatre director who established Nitro, the first black theatre company in the UK. He’s very experienced in creating experimental theatre works that incorporate music.

JON ROSE, THE MUSEUM GOES LIVE

Another key work involves much-loved Performance Space collaborator Jon Rose, whom I know RealTime has written about quite extensively. We’ve really reignited our collaboration with Jon in the last few years, presenting WRECK with Sydney Festival in 2013 and Ghan Tracks in 2014. This project, The Museum Goes Live, is an exhibition of the vast archive Jon has amassed over his career of violin-related iconography and ephemera. There’s a whole series of hand-made instruments—he’s a prolific instrument builder and experimenter. He’s also collected representations of the violin in advertising, the violin in commercial products, finding links between the violin and consumerism and capitalism. Every night over the two weeks Jon will come in with a team of experimental musicians and activate the exhibition in a concert format.

FORCE MAJEURE: KRISTINA CHAN, A FAINT EXISTENCE

A Faint Existence, a collaboration with Force Majeure, is the full-length choreographic debut of Kristina Chan, one of Australia’s most accomplished dancers who has been making forays into choreography of late (see this review of her contribution to Catapult’s PROPELLED in Newcastle). This work, in which she also performs, is being co-directed by Victoria Hunt. The two struck up a great relationship in the making of Tangi Wai in last year’s Liveworks in which Chan performed. So it’s wonderful, after fostering that connection between two artists, for Performance Space to be presenting this new work.

A Faint Existence looks at Kristina’s sense of responsibility and futility in the face of environmental change. She’s collaborated with Clare Britton to design an expanded elemental installation within which the performance takes place and James Brown will be doing a live sound score to create weather effects that also reflect internal states and are about the struggle of the individual to act in the face of such a globally scaled phenomenon.

MISH GRIGOR, THE TALK

Mish is in Edinburgh at the moment doing a season of The Talk at Forest Fringe. I’m delighted that she is presenting this work about the ways a family talks about sex She’s structured it around the style of her own family gatherings. (Read a review of a performance of The Talk at Field Theory’s Site is Set).

TINA HAVELOCK STEVENS, THUNDERHEAD

I’m really delighted that we’re presenting Thunderhead by Tina Havelock Stevens, which has just premiered at DARKMOFO in Hobart. It’s an enormously scaled projection of this incredible storm that Tina filmed from a car window as she drove on a road trip in Texas last year. Tina is an Australian artist who spends a lot of time in the US.

The storm is an incredible form that doesn’t even look real, an almost divine manifestation of the turbulence of the climate captured in an extended tracking shot. It’s projected onto a large wall, so it’s very imposing, overwhelming. Tina is a musician as well as a video artist and will perform to her recorded score every night of the exhibition. The video loop is about 15-20 minutes and the storm itself is a loop so the whole work becomes hypnotic and the musicians, Tina on drums and Liberty Kerr on guitar, enter a trance-like state, drawing themselves musically into the storm. This is another work for me that engages with the environment in a really interesting way. At DARKMOFO the audience was completely riveted, drawn into the storm. The sense of foreboding is very tangible.

ROSS MANNING: MELODY LINES

With Carriageworks we’ve co-commissioned a large-scale installation work, Melody Lines, from internationally exhibited, Brisbane-based visual artist Ross Manning. Using lo-fi mechanics and industrial materials, it’ll be a constantly moving, psychedelic landscape of light and colour in the vast Carriageworks foyer.

WE THE PEOPLE

We the People has been curated by Tulleah Pearce, Performance Space’s Program Manager, pairing four contemporary artists with four of the idiosyncratic community organisations in the Carriageworks neighbourhood. Artists are currently in residence working towards creating a site-specific performance or installation or intervention into the host organisation. Activist artist Deborah Kelly is paired with the Association for Good Government, which occupies a tiny building on the way from Redfern railway station. It involves a group of concerned citizens who hold government accountable, addressing the principles of good government. Ben Forster, a visual and media artist, is paired with Esperanto House, one of the last bastions of Esperanto enthusiasm. He’s an artist interested in self-generating data and random connections, so I think the idea of an invented language fits very well with his conceptual concerns.

Aunty Beryl Van-Oploo, a local Indigenous elder who runs a whole range of Indigenous catering, hospitality and employment training programs, is collaborating with Anna McMahon, an installation artist who uses live plants and food in her practice. The fourth is visual artist and performer David Capra who is making a work with the Sydney Arabic Choir who practice in a beautiful venue at Sydney University. Given his interest in religion, ritual and speaking in tongues David and the choir are going to create a ceremonial performance.

We the People is a kind of satellite project happening on the first weekend of the festival. Audiences will be invited to come to Carriageworks, receive a map and take themselves on the tour to each of these spaces.

LIESEL ZINK, THE STANCE

We’re working towards staging a different aspect of Liesel Zink’s The Stance (read a review of the Brisbane premiere) every night in the Carriageworks public space in the festival’s second week. It looks at the history of protest in Australia and translates its physical language into choreographed movement. It’s a durational work and quite gruelling for the dancers as they speak to the physical commitment of activism and protest. That will be on every night in a different part of the Carriageworks public space, culminating in a full-length presentation in the morning of the final day of the festival at the Eveleigh Markets, using the thoroughfare [between the market and the Carriageworks building] as shared civic space.

A FESTIVAL-BASED PERFORMANCE SPACE: PROGRESS

We were so excited to see Liveworks unfold last year and to see audiences take up the offer to really immerse themselves in the festival. We’re really keen to build on that and to refine the programming to create an even more intense experience for audiences. For me, the international aspect locking in—the Asian artists, the Artists Exchange Lab, the Producer and Presenters Program and the Arts Manager Exchange with Taiwan—and our other programming create a festival on a much bigger scale than we’d be able to achieve in a year-round program; and at the same time we’re seeding future possibilities and collaborations between Australia and Asian artists. The festival model is very much alive and we discover something new about it each year.

Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art; Carriageworks, Sydney, 27 Oct-6 Nov; see the program here.

Mira Oosterweghel, The Conditions Were Simply Perfect to Catapult into Infinity, The Screen as a Room, The Substation

At one point in Fanni Futterknecht’s video Across the White, a character moves across the screen stating, “when I walk to the left, your eyes follow me to the left and when I walk to the right, your eyes follow me to the right.” The scene neatly demonstrates how we view a performance on a screen compared with seeing one live, a distinction that is explored in the group exhibition, The Screen as a Room, at The Substation. Curated by Nikki Lam, it brings together video works by Eugenia Lim, Christian Thompson, Mira Oosterweghel, Fanni Futterknecht and Caroline Garcia, alongside opening and closing night performances by Garcia and Oosterweghel.

Taking aesthetic and narrative influence from Chinese opera, Futterknecht’s Across the White follows an artist-curator character who, “to keep away [the] boredom of white,” arranges minimalist sculptures in a gallery-like space. Later in the video, his authority is undermined when he finds himself in a debate with a female character who alters his sculptures and accuses him of being “predictable.” With playful humour, Futterknecht compares the decisions that create meaning in the gallery with the fixed connotations of camera angles and film techniques. As when he is holding our gaze in the earlier example, the artist-curator character is happiest when in control; in another scene, looking down to the camera he claims that having “power is when you are on top of things.”

In ensuring that nobody questions his “composition,” he overlooks the complexities of the works he’s arranging. The woman who alters the sculptures invigorates them by literally pulling shapes like shimmering silver tongues or pale pink spikes from their insides. As she draws out each one, “to deliver itself from its form,” her act implies deliverance, not only from within the sculptures, but from the strictures of the camera that the artist-curator represents.

Responding to surface and shape in a completely different way, Mira Oosterweghel’s videos, Holding a Point, show her suspending herself for as long as she can between brick pillars in the gallery. In her works, immovable architecture not only supports the body, but the screens themselves, as each one is fastened on a steel pipe, squeezed between the walls and held there only by pressure.

In another room, a video of Caroline Garcia twerking in a skirt strung with banana peels is projected on a wall. With the recording sped up slightly, we see her whipping the skins about her waist until all of them have fallen. The skins—now black and shriveled—are to be found on the floor of the room in which the video plays, revealing this is where the performance took place. Titled Plantation Dance (Reprise), Garcia’s work references Josephine Baker, the black American star of the 1920s Paris theatre world, and the exploitative practices of Chiquita Brands International, the American banana market corporation. Using the empty banana skins, Garcia strips away the value of the fruit and, in turn, the brand’s remodelled image [the company was prosecuted in 2007 for bribing terrorists to protect its interests in Colombia -Eds]. The skins, as traces, create a compelling middle-ground between live action and documentation.

Blurring these distinctions, Christian Thompson’s three-channel video, Heat, shows the faces of three young Indigenous sisters, each framed in front of a pale orange background, sweating and being buffeted by wind. Or is it air from a fan? Using the simulation of a desert environment to blur fact and fiction, Thompson subtly questions the discrepancies between performance and screen.

If I start thinking about the constant expansion of infinity, other than getting a headache I might imagine room for spontaneity and, more importantly, room for potential. The closing event for The Screen as a Room was Oosterweghel’s performance The Conditions Were Simply Perfect to Catapult into Infinity. It hinted at the potential for change in a situation designed to thwart it. Performed by a collaborator, The Conditions… comprised eight cement blocks placed one by one at the end of a see-saw like structure while the performer balanced at the other end. As the disproportionate weight increased, the wooden plank holding the tension warped enough to unnerve me. Eventually, the performer curled around one end in the air, throwing her weight into the effort. The other end lifted slightly, then lowered with repetitive thuds as it hit the ground.

When the potential for radical change—a catapulting into infinity—is fixed to fail from the beginning, the performer can only aim to usurp the inevitable for so long. As the performance ends with the performer lying on the raised plank, her arms dangling over the end, the title accrues a sarcastic ring. Evident in everybody’s hesitancy to leave the room or talk once it had finished, The Conditions… controlled the space in an uncomfortable way. Perhaps accentuated by the performer’s plain grey uniform and sombre mood, The Conditions… lacked casualness or the openness that I prefer to see in performance.

Behind the black ropes hanging in front of a stairwell and down into a cave-like room covered in black tarp is Eugenia Lim’s video installation, Nest 2011. Exploring Japanese mythology and the phenomenon of hikikomori—a condition in which people stay in their rooms subsisting on computer entertainment while being fed by their family—Lim creates an isolated space in which the focus of our attention is the screen.

The video shows Lim’s collaborator, butoh performer Yumi Umiumare, dancing erratically as if acting out the anxieties that come with screen-based isolation. In this dark nest, fixed on the screen, we too take on the role of a hikikomori addict and dissolve the boundaries between screen and performance.

The Screen as a Room, curator Nikki Lam, The Substation, Melbourne, 16 June-7 Aug

One tiny arts grant; one month of summer; 14 young people; one dynamic dance practitioner; one public park; one newspaper article; some black and white flyers. These components comprised the founding of Stompin’ Youth Dance Company (now Stompin), the development of its mission and its first show in the summer of 1992. To the group’s shock and delight, a thousand people turned up to the park to see the show and they discovered they were onto something.

Driving home from Stompin’s 2016 show Panorama, I found myself wondering about the nature and history of this company, which has continued to thrive, producing shows yearly since that first production almost 25 years ago. Devised for an ex-industrial headland in Triabunna on Tasmania’s East Coast, Panorama included a contingent of local school children in the choreographic sequences and involved members of the community in a wide range of ways. I was curious. Was the expression of ideas through dance still the company’s first priority, or had the emphasis and energy shifted to other goals, such as community engagement? I spoke with founding director Jerril Rechter (1992-2003) and outgoing creative director Emma Porteus (2010-2016).

Remarkably, 24 years on, the founding mission of the company has remained at the core of what Stompin does today: bringing great arts practitioners into the company to co-create works with young people, using dance as a vehicle to allow them as a group to learn about and express themselves, performing in and “owning spaces that they don’t normally own,” says Rechter. Even in that first month of development in 1992, the initial group of young people co-created the Stompin mission and the choreographic language of the show with Rechter. Working within the community and mentoring have been woven into the company mission since that time. All of these aspects have been distilled into the company’s current tag-line ART/YOUTH/COMMUNITY/4 EVER.

Site-work

Stompin has continued to seek and ‘own’ sites, producing work in vast industrial warehouses, in aircraft hangars, on beaches, in local swimming pools, on expansive industrial sites. While her favourite show is possibly still that first one, Rechter fondly remembers many others, including Arboreal from 1996, a performance she developed with the group for Hollybank Forest, north of Launceston. The ambitious work involved a large dance group, several bobcats, horses, fire, woodchoppers and opera singers.

Building community

While the early days were definitely about building community, they initially related to the young company members and their immediate locale. This has expanded to include building long-term relationships with communities around Tasmania. Stompin worked with the community in Triabunna for a year leading up to the performances of Panorama in 2016, conducting fortnightly workshops with students at the local school and meeting with other town stakeholders. Porteus describes how it took six months, beginning with storytelling strategies, to build trust among the participants to the point where they could comfortably express their ideas through movement. She explains how working with those grade 5-8 students “cracked their world view open,” and reflects on conversations with one young participant, who was not only amazed and moved that people would come from all over the state to hear his story, but also became interested in joining Stompin as a result of his experience. At the show’s culmination, Emma found herself in conversation with Triabunna’s local council about funding for further Stompin work in the town.

Show-making: matching concept with skills

Collaborating with young people presents challenges, let alone choosing unconventional spaces for performance and bringing in other members of the local community. The shows that Emma sees as being most successful are those that matched the concept of a show with the skills, interests and passions of the performers: WeTubeLIVE and 6000 to 1. WeTubeLIVE allowed audience members to wander within a grid punctuated by one-metre marked squares, each containing a performer recreating or reinterpreting a YouTube clip of their own choosing. This wonderfully chaotic format supported a very broad range of skills. Skill levels became irrelevant when thrown into the kaleidoscopic mix. Together these young people presented a complex portrait of a moment in time that was particularly relevant to them. 6000 to 1 also keyed into the preoccupations of the age group, exploring the consequences of choice and chance, sometimes reflecting upon traumatic stories from the dancers themselves. Here, these personal connections and the atmosphere of trust and cohesion generated by the process fuelled the presentation by the dancers. These aspects were palpable within an emotional performance. Interestingly both shows were presented in enclosed spaces within Launceston, removing some of the standard site-specific challenges usually facing Stompin.

Anyone can dance

Shows where all of the elements come together are the goal, but the notion of success for Stompin is broader and more multifaceted. As both Rechter and Porteus describe it, bringing a young person to the point where they are performing before an audience, in concert with the group, music and a set might appear simple, but there is a tremendous amount of work leading to that moment. Free of auditions, any young person can dance with Stompin as long as they commit to the program of creative development and rehearsals. They are offered a “safe, fun environment” within which to “challenge where and what their limits are,” Porteus tells me. They may become part of the company for several years and are equal players in the development of shows, working alongside established professionals to develop everything from the initial concept through to the dance language and the details of a production.

Emergence

Through a peer-to-peer program established with Australia Council funds in Rechter’s time, particular skills are passed on to those who demonstrate interest. Mentored in choreography, sound, lighting, production or administration, young performers Bec Reid, Luke George and Emma Porteus became Stompin artistic directors. Then there are the accomplished young adults who leave Stompin to build careers across Australia and around the world, such as dance artists Becky Hilton, Adam Wheeler and Stephanie Lake.

Rechter now works as the CEO of VicHealth and while that may seem a world away, she doesn’t view it that way, continuing to work with young people. With the knowledge gained from research into youth, she knows that a company like Stompin is critical to building resilience in its members as a protective mechanism against the difficulties of adult life. In answer to my question about the company’s priorities, the sense of continuity evident in the reflections of Rechter and Porteus confirms that dance remains central to the Stompin mission, with performances that are conceptually and aesthetically strong, but which also reveal that a bigger, richer story is created in the lengthy journey to reach each artistic outcome.

Stompin’s new Artistic Director is Caitlin Comerford who holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Dance Performance) from QUT and a Bachelor of Arts (Dance) Honours from WAAPA through LINK Dance Company. She has been a Brisbane-based dance practitioner, working in performance, installation and choreography and is a co-founder of MakeShift Dance Collective, which was nominated for an Australian Dance Award for Achievement in Independent Dance in 2015.

In a lovingly curated exhibition, Stephen Jones resurrects the richly creative years, 1969-75, of the too short life of dancer and technological innovator Philippa Cullen whose aim, above all, was to free dancers from what she saw as the ‘tyranny’ of music by having them generate their own as they performed. The show exudes a potent sense of the late 1960s-early 1970s: years of protest, intensive collaboration, technological experimentation and enormous curiosity—a world the young video artist Jones was himself entering.

While the many posters, reviews, photographs, diagrams and the artist’s notebook drawings in the exhibition convey a palpable sense of the excitement of the period, the videos offer eerily fleeting visions of Cullen and her dancers in motion. I experience them as if ‘through a glass darkly.’ There’s a pervasive sense of mortality—of the loss of a pioneer whose work was not completed—and of a corresponding techno-archeological dig. Video ages and dies and the equipment that once played it is often lost. Thanks to unceasing commitment, Jones has digitised the video record and maintained the machines. Even if the figures in the images are frequently ghost-like and it’s not always easy to ascertain the precise shape of the dancing and its connection with the sounds generated, there’s so much to treasure here.

Philippa Cullen rehearsal Homage to Theremin II, NSW Conservatorium of Music 1972

Dance freed of music makes its own

The exhibition’s narrative reveals that a large number of innovative artists in Australia and beyond constellated around Cullen as she tirelessly built on the relationship established between dance and electronic devices initiated by Merce Cunningham and John Cage in 1965 in Cage’s Variations IV. Here dancers triggered signals via antennae or photo-electric cells when they interrupted light beams. Jones explains in the exhibition’s catalogue that the actual musical output in the Cage was still made by musicians (David Tudor and Gordon Mumma), whereas Cullen’s use of the theremin allowed her and her dancers to actually generate sound and her pairing of that instrument with the synthesizer was truly innovative. Cullen pushed beyond her peers, later adding pressure-sensitive floors and biofeedback to her systems to allow dancers the freedom she sought.

Dance: natural, communal, political

The rise of electronic music, computing and video art in this period corresponded with a new sense of freedom in dance. In America, Judson Church drew on everyday movement and improvisation, as did Cullen in Sydney, “highlighting the movement of natural activities.” She was fascinated with the sounds the body could make (slaps, claps, cries) when integrated with dance. Her preoccupation with dance as a communal activity led her, in 1968, to commence open workshops on Sunday afternoons in the University of Sydney Quadrangle (one image includes a young Helen Herbertson, subsequently a leading dance artist, performing with Cullen) and to create events on public transport and in city spaces including “confrontational” performances at the time of the Vietnam War. In a very clear recording by Melinda Brown in Martin Place in 1974 we witness Cullen and two dancer collaborators gently engaging with the public until a military band arrives, a wreath is laid and the trio stage a simple tableaux of opposition. The subsequent exchanges with the observant crowd are funny and fascinating in a recording that gives us the strongest sense of Cullen’s charismatic presence.

She also investigated communal dance, specifically on a trip to Ghana, where, she says she witnessed dance as “an act of rejoicing… participation, not performance.” She likewise saw the technological tools she was developing as potentially part of the public domain.

Finding her way

The six years of Cullen’s explorations were busy with an astonishing number of critical discussions, experiments, collaborations, performances and events. Vision, determination, a capacity to find the right people and to make the most of fruitful chance encounters all drove the work forward despite the frustrations and failures that came from innovating with new tools and systems prone to breakdown.

The cultural intensity of these years, evident in posters and reviews and further detailed in Jones’ catalogue essay, is found in a rich litany of artists, computer scientists, technical engineers, venues, galleries, events and festivals. Cullen studied jazz and primitive dance from eight years of age at Bodenweiser Dance Studio where she performed in works by Jacqui Carroll, who later became a key collaborator. It seems that Cullen first found her niche at the University of Sydney Fine Arts Workshop (the highly influential Tin Sheds) in 1969-72 meeting artists and members of the experimental music scene, which included David Ahern’s AZ Music. At the Tin Sheds in 1969 she saw a theremin-based installation in which the audience “triggered sound and light patterns”. Cullen made a note that the electrical engineer on the project “wants to compose music for ballet.” She had also met Karlheinz Stockhausen when he visited Australia in 1970 (and would later spend time with him in Europe in discussion and performance). In Jilba Wallace’s 1976 documentary, A Life’s Work, Philippa Cullen, 1950-75, Jacqui Carroll describes Cullen as “initially, strictly a dancer,” but one with “a single-minded focus on experiment and process.”

Dance with theremin

Cullen commenced work on performing with the theremin in collaboration with electrical engineer Phil Connor and technician and composer Greg Schiemer who connected the instrument with a VC3S audio synthesizer (courtesy of the University of Sydney’s Music Department), principally to yield better sound. Architecture student Manuel Nobleza designed an elegant set of theremin aerials. With dancers added, the group became Philippa Cullen’s Electronic Dance Ensemble. The work came to its fruition with Homage to Theremin II in 1972 (apparently a 1970 version, Electronic Aspects “was not particularly successful,” writes Jones) with four aerials and a photo-electric cell.

The stately, slender wire loop theremins, seen in the exhibition on video and in photographs (taken by Lillian Kristall), appear as simple exemplars of Modernist design and vehicles for human-scale interaction with technology. In one photo you can make out Cullen and Carroll with the loop aerials and, in the background, Schiemer, Connor and Nobleza. In another the two dancers are caught poised on the low pedestals, Carroll with arm raised high. On video we see Cullen and another dancer transitioning from supple arm movements to rapid, joyful bouncing, yielding corresponding sounds.

In 1972 Sydney Morning Herald reviewer Beth Dean wrote of Homage to Theremin II, “Jacqui Carroll took her place upon a circular pedestal base (aerial A). This created a quiet humming tone. As she slowly extended her arm upwards the pitch (frequency) [of the] sound rose louder and higher. The mood developed to an intensity of yearning. The fingers opened. She reached out, stretching both the sound and the body to taut heights of thinnest strain, she clenched her fist. The tone of audible sound and visual tension receded.”

Video images reveal Cullen, with two other dancers, rehearsing for Homage to Theremin II. She balances, one leg raised, arms shaped elegantly, hovering between stillness and the movement that will trigger sound. A tilt of the head, a sudden drop from the waist, the swing of an arm engender sounds ranging from long sustains and swooping glides to rounded whip-cracks. With arm extended slightly up, a reaching hand seems to touch a sweet sound. Another dancer joins Cullen on the small pedestal, the pair moving in and out of synch and sinking low to to generate a deep siren that becomes a growl. The trio moves about the theremins, unleashing staccato burblings, blips and zips. For a moment towards the end of the tape, a smiling Cullen suddenly comes into radiant focus.

Dancing experimental music

In the same period, Cullen continued to perform with musicians while also addressing sound, language and movement. Teletopa, an AZ Music-related electro-acoustic group, responded directly to her dancing. In an enthusiastic review in The Australian, in which she mocked conventional ballet, Maria Preauer (years later a vigorous opponent of innovation) wrote, “In some strange telepathic way [Cullen] became almost composer and conductor.”

Dancers given voice

Cullen expanded the engagement between voice and the dancing body in Utter (1972), a work for five dancers which, Jones tells us, was based on the sounds from the four languages spoken by writer George Alexander. It received a special mention in that year’s Ballet Australia Choreographic Competition. The video of Utter is not easy to interpret but the sounds heard are indicative as recalled in George Alexander’s account for Writings on Dance 4, 1988: “noises of unamplified voices, feet, hands, mantras, open chord droning, noisy yoga exhalations, gibberish, screams of rage, groans of agony, yesses of willing victims.” As for the movement, “Dancers were choreographed into amorphous turbulence, eating up gobs of audience or making carpet patterns of writhing bodies.” Stephen Jones confirms what is glimpsed on the video: Utter was “a free-wheeling radial performance centred on the cast of a spotlight on the centre of the stage.”

Cullen’s adventurousness was also evident in Lightless—at her most radical, comments Jones—a university lunchtime performance in a pitch black, carpeted room in which the dancers (identified only by different aromas) moved, according to dancer Patrick Harding-Irmer, among the scattered audience “rubbing up against bodies” and gradually removing layers of clothing. A very 70s performance but also related to Cullen’s interest in reaching out to “the threshholds of perception.”

Not merely bodies

Cullen says in Wallace’s documentary, “Dance in Australia has been too limited to those who want to learn it as a performance skill. The dancers are merely bodies used by the choreographer. This is unsatisfactory for an intermedia type of production. The performer must have an acute awareness of the media involved.” Many years later, Darren Tofts in “Cutting the new media umbilicus,” RealTime 27, Oct-Nov, 1998, argued for “intermedia” to replace “new media,” a term he regarded as redundant. “Intermedia” did not take on, but it’s fascinating that Cullen deploys the word at a time when hybridity in the arts was profoundly in the making.

Europe, Ghana, India

A grant from the Australia Council in 1972 to explore “the medium of electronics and its potential for extending dance as an art form” took Cullen to Europe where she failed to find fellow explorers of interactive dance, but studied with Pina Bausch for a month and at The Institute of Sonology at Utrecht where she developed ideas for pressure sensitive floors (there’s a photograph of her tilting back on one) and investigated the potential of bio-sensors (seen in a colour image by Sydney artist Ariel of Cullen, eyes closed, with electromyogram readout made after her return). She worked with electronics at STEIM (Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music, Amsterdam, where Jacqui Carroll joined her), learning to become, out of sheer necessity, “a technical director,” visited Stockhausen, appearing in his Summer Nights Concerts, and spent three months in Ghana and then India “presenting workshops and learning Indian dance technique.” She saw India as the ideal place for bringing together the Ghanian sense of community and her work with technology within a cosmological dimension.

Back in Australia

In September 1974 Cullen presented 24 Hour Concert at Hogarth Gallery, Sydney, an event taped by Stephen Jones that involved dance (without electronics), a protracted chess game (Aleks Danko and Ian Robertson), cooking and the playing and deconstruction of an old upright piano by Chris Mann. The dancing also took place at the front of the Art Gallery of NSW and on the Domain and the train network.

Challenging times

Philippa Cullen continued her investigation into the possibilities of electronics and dance, presenting seminars and giving workshops and demonstrations of the findings of her travels. In 1975, she was invited to give workshops at the Computers Electronics in the Arts exhibition at the Australia 75 Festival of the Arts and Sciences (March, 1975) in Melbourne and to perform at the 6th Mildura Sculpture Triennial. Jones reports that she used the combined fee to buy a Synthi A (a portable version of the VCS3) to work with a set of pressure sensitive floors for Homage III. Computer failure, which meant that the dancers would not able to create sound, led to a chance encounter with two computer scientists who enabled movement on the floors to generate “computer images and video feedback.” There are impressionistic photographs of Cullen dressed in golden silk, her back to us, facing the bank of video monitors on which appear images of her dancing alone and with her company. Unfortunately I didn’t get to see the video recording of the performance, but I hope to do so.

Jones writes of the pace and generosity of the last-minute collaboration that “all this happened almost overnight and illustrates just how much interest there was in integrating all sorts of disparate systems as well as how willing everyone was to do everything possible to make the convergence work.” There were other challenging times, “a disastrous theremin breakdown.” Towards the end of his account, Jones reveals Cullen’s increasing feelings of frustration after the Australia 75 and Mildura events, one artist citing “a rapid falling out and shorter and shorter collaboration periods.”

On the thresholds of perception

However, she pushed on, developing pressure-sensitive floors. Noting the potential accessibility of her equipment for the public and “even children,” Cullen wrote, “The hard part is to program the synthesizer so that you are controlling a variable which is satisfying for the operator of the floors. And this is precisely the part of the system which is completely unknown to all but the initiated few. But I shall go on exploring the field because I am interested in the threshholds of perception.”

Although she spent some productive time with composers Vineta Lagzdina and Tristram Cary at Adelaide’s Elder Conservatorium in discussion and in workshops, including with ADT dancers, Jones writes that Cullen felt “somewhat alienated from computerised interactive work” and left for India where, sadly, she died on 25 July, 1975.

Before leaving, she had planned to work with friend and videomaker Melinda Brown in India on “a collaboration…which involved aspects of geology, astronomy and DNA—loosely working titled Dance of Life.” Had she lived, perhaps interactive dance technology would have found a place in Cullen’s expanded vision given her persistent drive to bring together diverse peoples, artforms, systems and philosophies.

Achievement & legacy

Cullen’s achievement, writes Jones, is the making of “perhaps the most technically sophisticated interactive systems of the period, many of which have not been surpassed since.” Clearly, she was a great experimenter. Jacqui Carroll says of Cullen in a videotaped discussion between friends after the artist’s death, “she was interested mainly in the process of dance, the process of experiment.”

Stephen Jones’ exhibition, simply and effectively staged, is a fine, archivally thorough tribute to Philippa Cullen, to an artist who might be too easily forgotten, and to the collaborative experimentalists of the 1970s who gathered about her. Cullen could well become an inspiration to a new generation as she already has for Adelaide composer, musician and sound engineer Iran Sanadzade. As part of her Honours project in Sonic Arts at the University of Adelaide, Sanadzade devised her own movement-sensitive floor panels using updated electronics and staged a performance for four performers, titled If/Then (read Chris Reid’s review).

In this exhibition, its catalogue, in his book and articles, in collected images notebooks and extensive digitisation of the record, Stephen Jones has admirably secured the rightful place of Philippa Cullen in the history of Australian experimental art.

Dancing the music: Philippa Cullen, An Archival Exhibition for Philippa Cullen 1950-1975, curator Stephen Jones, SNO (Sydney Non-Objective Gallery), Marrickville, Sydney, 23 April-22 May

Video artist, historian, curator and electronic engineer Stephen Jones is the author of Synthetics, Aspects of Art and Technology in Australia 1956-1975 (MIT, 2011) which includes a substantial section about Philippa Cullen. From 1982 to 1992 Jones was a principal member of the electronic music group Severed Heads.

Subject undergoing George Khut’s interactive brainwave experience, 2016, National Portrait Gallery

George Khut looks a little coy. “I want to help people appreciate being alive!” he says. “It sounds naff, but I mean it.” From childhood practices in martial arts to later learnings in Feldenkrais, Khut finds somatic awareness invaluable, particularly in a culture where our bodies are problematised as things we love, hate or need to control and where authority over our wellbeing is often handed over to others.

Khut works at the interface between art, technology and neurophysiology. He is a passionate and compassionate man. In an earlier project he devised interactive software for iPads to help children in hospital lower their anxiety levels before undergoing intrusive medical interventions. His new project, Behind Your Eyes, Between Your Ears, a video and installation work, is designed to provide insights into ways in which concepts of embodiment, agency, self-efficacy and cognitive/emotional self-regulation are reproduced and/or transformed through the experience of neurofeedback self-regulation. Over two weeks in July at Canberra’s National Portrait Gallery, in single sittings, volunteers were invited to become part of an interactive artwork that included being video-recorded, then interviewed and later asked to make drawings.

Khut is artist, observer and researcher. The ‘artist’ part is significant: portraits are ‘tweaked’ in situ, both aurally and visually, and later as Khut renders and edits in studio, adds segments from the interviews and then posts a finished aesthetic result online. But the experiment also moves beyond the usual interface of self-presentation versus re-presentation by another to tap into a subject’s agency.

As a volunteer, I arrive at the National Portrait Gallery with my signed ethics clearance forms. We are situated in the nexus between feeling and function, about which any researcher must be careful. I follow Khut into a labyrinthine corner of a gallery space, separated by a false wall. It is dark here, and a little secretive. Gallery announcements penetrate the space, as if from another world. Spectators—here, my family and friends—can huddle in a small corner, but their presence is incidental.

Subject undergoing George Khut’s interactive brainwave experience, 2016, National Portrait Gallery

Essentially I am given a goal to increase and sustain an alpha-wave brain state. A sensing device is fitted to my forehead and, over that, I wear headphones. After a calibration, where Khut’s software senses my threshold levels, the experiment begins. The software reads my brain-wave states and transforms them into sound and colour. The spectators see abstract geometric imaging—ranging from dark reds through to blue-green—which overlays my live video portrait projected on a screen. Initially I do not see these overlays as, eyes closed, my own attention is focused on the brainwave-influenced sound spectrum which varies from a crackle (linked to the alert, beta state) through to a sustained, gong-like sound. I only see the colour fields during the subsequent interview, when I see and talk to the full video document.

A natural synaesthete, curiously I see no colours in my head. But then the experiment is about sustaining an alpha, not a theta or delta state. I wonder if that would make a difference. I forget to ask. Or rather, that is a question that only comes up much later.

Within 10 minutes I score ‘high’ on sustaining the gong-like sounds and eliminate most of the crackle. But this is not meant to be a competition. In fact, I observe that ‘needing to do well’ causes a crackle, from thinking about thinking. Even certain kinds of penetrative focus I associate with meditation seem to interfere. I undergo my own inner calibration. Quite suddenly, the space around me becomes viscous, my bones clarify, spinal segments lift and fill. I become a clearer architecture, my attention sifting and settling through the silt of my body’s geology. I sit in all-time: old and new.

It is a quiet and sustained pleasure, similar to but different from meditation. It is perhaps the self-regulation that is important: the crackling is definitely less pleasant than the other vibratory sounds, the gong-like vibration much more inviting. So is looking for pleasure a part of the project? Do we fundamentally desire peace? I have taken to the exercise like a duck to water, swimming in calm. I wonder if George Khut has ever observed an experimental subject who resists this.

He finds it important for a subject to respond visually before verbally. At the completion of the sustained alpha-state exercise, I am taken into a second room. Here I am given two black A4 sheets, one with the outline of a body drawn on it. The other is a birds-eye view of a head. I am given a soft white pencil and invited to draw my experience of being ‘hooked in.’ I draw a cone spiralling from my head. I draw the awareness of my family watching. I draw a sense of weight in my feet. Only then do I view the video recording, with colour and sound, and give words to the experience.

I emerge from this contemplative haven into a screaming world—cold sharp air, long queues, loud music, bad curries, conflicting needs. Oh brave new world. The discrepancy makes me reflect on how agency and volition to be well and calm are so heavily influenced by context. George Khut’s experiment has invited me into a state of being I can’t, for one day, maintain. Such contemplations, to make a sustainable difference, need practice, and contexts that want us to sustain our agency. If only, if only.

George Poonkhin Khut, Behind Your Eyes, Between Your Ears, Artist Residency and Open Studio; National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, 27 June-17 July

Dr George Khut is an artist and designer working across the fields of electronic art, interaction design and arts-in-health. He lectures at UNSW Art & Design. He was the winner of the 2012 National New Media Art Award, Queensland Art Gallery.

For much more about George Khut see our extensive coverage of his work in the RealTime Media Art Archive.

George Khut, Kaldor Public Arts Project Meeting of Minds event with UNSW Art & Design, 2015

Interactivity: self to self, self to Earth

I spoke with George Khut shortly after he’d completed his residency at the National Portrait Gallery. Next, he says, he’ll analyse and edit the tapes he’s recorded, look at making an electronic book compilation of the portraits, interviews and the drawings the subjects made, and write an academic paper about the project. I asked him about the work he’s doing at UNSW Art & Design.

Absolutely. Lots of teaching, lots of lecturing. So far I’ve been teaching a lot in the Design degree and in an in-between stream in the Media Arts degree we’ve re-branded recently as “Interactive Media.” It’s taking the place of subjects being taught within what was called “Cross-Media Arts.” We’ve put a more explicit focus on computation and interactivity. It’s available to students in the Fine Arts, Design and Media Arts programs in the second and third years of their degrees.

The subjects are studio-based, but include the history of media arts practice, using it as a way for students to think through what they might want to explore and as a reference point for reflecting on their studio practice.

It tends to be fairly playful explorations of the behaviour and materiality of electronic systems; for instance, a video that responds to input from sensors that might be worn on a jacket. A couple of students had works in VIVID this year. You can say what you like about VIVID but its program offers a great space for students to cut their teeth and to observe how a mass audience engages with their ideas.

One of our students, Jonathon Bolitho, co-created Attune, giant fibreglass crystals the public can sing into and which sing back with electronic melodies and drones which are paired with internal colour lighting.

As a supervisor I’m interested in working with people, who already have a practice, thinking about the impact of their practice in public situations. I get really excited about how critical practice engages with and pushes ideas. One of my Masters students, Leanne Thompson, is an established artist with a background in sculpture and public sculpture in particular. She’s researching how she might incorporate real time environmental data in a public setting, in some sort of interactive sculpture. Leanne’s focus is on people’s relationship with threatened plants. She’s bringing her project to a very local level, starting with a tree species in Bathurst.

Since you began working with interactivity in the 1990s, has there been significant progress in the field—by increments or leaps?

I think it’s by increments. What’s interesting is that there’s a lot more critical debate around the meaning of participation these days, which is really healthy. Just because something allows people to participate doesn’t mean it’s intrinsically good. Issues around information and social media are obviously a big part of the [lives of] undergrad students I’m working with and when we’re thinking about media technologies.

Media technology is part of the fabric of their lives, but their ability to actually work with or hack into it can sometimes be limited. There’s a big transition to be made from being the consumer to being the producer.

You’re still working using a highly developed bio-feedback practice. Is that an area you’ll continue to explore?

Yes. We’re doing a series of research partnerships at UNSW Art & Design with the Black Dog Institute. Professor Jill Bennett is working on Anxiety 2017, a cultural program involving many institutions looking at art/science/medicine connections around anxiety and mental health. We’ve received some Catalyst funding for a suite of programs; one of those will include a version of the work I’ve been doing with heart rate and interactive visualisations. I’m also trying to work on a new project about ‘situatedness’ and geography but it’s very slow to get going. It’s something I’m working on with programmer and media artist Warren Armstrong.

Yes, I’ve spent so long on body experience and the relationship between embodiment and identity and subjectivity, I just really want to move beyond a very individualistic idea of identity. How do we experience the idea of Earth? The intuitive experience of it is as flat but we know conceptually that it’s a rock in space. It’s really hard to embody that. We’ve got the blue marble icon but are there other ways we can spatialise Earth? I’m really interested in working with virtual reality technologies, augmented reality and very simple ways to spatialise so that people realise, ‘Oh, right. Yes, we are on a rock in the middle of space’ [LAUGHS] and all the limitations and precarity that goes with it.

I’m trying to take the simple embodied, concrete, sensual things I’ve been doing with bio-feedback; figuring out how I might transfer that from the individual body and to the planet as a whole. Ambitious?

I’ve been so conscious of the limitations of the bio-feedback approach and how it’s appropriated by Neoliberalism—everything is the individual’s responsibility and ‘here are some tools to relax and be more resilient so we can make your working conditions even more unbearable.’ I’m painfully aware of that aspect of it.

In the first year are the keystone courses—introductions to everything. In the second and third years we get the students interested in interactivity and computation and such. Fourth is the Honours year where we focus on various research clusters. I teach in a cluster on health which is primarily for students in Design. That will change from year to year as we move onto different research themes.

How you might support a health education campaign or designing for dementia sufferers, lighting environments, things like that.

Finally, what was the outcome of the BrightHeart project you wrote about in RealTime in 2013 in which patients at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead used your heart-rate controlled artworks on electronic tablets to manage pain and anxiety?

We completed the pilot trial and the results are all in. We’re just waiting to confirm the publication of the data. The next stage is to do some kind of randomised control trial. We also ran trials in high schools as well.

Thanks George. Love your work!

Tim Darbyshire, one of Melbourne’s most idiosyncratic dance artists, is in-residence for two weeks at Campbelltown Arts Centre re-immersing himself in Stampede the Stampede, a solo work he premiered at Dance Massive 2015. He tells me by phone that the residency is allowing him to recapture the work’s spirit and to experiment with possible changes. At the residency half-way mark, a substitute dancer will take on Darbyshire’s role, providing the artist with a short-term opportunity “to zoom out and take a look at the picture from the outside” before resuming his role for the 19-20 August performances.

Catch a glimpse of the magic of Stampede the Stampede here, ponder the title in which “stampede” as verb and object doubles—or dismisses—panic and note in the publicity a reference to a performance staged “within a turbulent yet controlling choreographic apparatus.” Although a solo work, Darbyshire sees his choreography as extending to set and lighting (Jenny Hector, Bosco Shaw) and sound (Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey), such that they are performers too.

Stampede the Stampede looks to be a work about extreme involuntarism for performer and possibly audience, hence a description of the work as “[a] stampede of the senses.” In More or Less Concrete, a work that impressed me in Dance Massive 2013, Darbyshire used low lighting levels, slow sculptural movement and headphone sound to induce sensory confusion to great effect (see Keith Gallasch, “Dance and disorientation”). Of that work Darbyshire wrote in his program note, “The bodies are abstracted as they transform between human, animal, monster, machine and ‘other’.” Very little sense of agency was evident in these bodies; they moved as if primally and organically driven.

Involuntarism seems central to Stampede the Stampede—you and your collaborators have created a device that buffets you about. When I saw More or Less Concrete in Dance Massive 2013, its three figures appeared to have no agency, functioning cellularly or mechanically. A stampede is a state of panic, doubly so in the work’s title. What is it about lack of agency and involuntarism that preoccupies you?

I guess I’m trying to work out what that grey area is, the paradox of [agency versus] very mechanised and controlled, prescribed environments or prescribed choreographic structures. In the case of More or Less Concrete, a lot of that prescription came from the sound. It was almost like we three dancers were figures enslaved to it or moving surfaces in the creation of sound. And that leads into trance-like states. The sound in that work was driving the structure. In Stampede the Stampede, it’s the mechanics of the kinetic structure we’ve made that govern the body.

For this project there were many weeks focused on the development and implementation of the machinery, the mechanical elements, with the body kind of waiting in line—waiting to be activated. And in that waiting time, there’s a natural rebellion—the body reminding us that it’s there, that it’s an animal and it has a different kind of energy. That’s what I’m looking at, that kind of paradox between pre-determined mechanical structure and then the animality and rebellion of the free-willed body.

So there is a sense of rebellion in the work; you’re not just battered and panicked. You’re stampeding the stampede, panicking it, banishing it?

For a long time in the early stages of development I was particularly focused on the determinacy of the mechanics and imagined that the body was more or less a cog in the machine or like a crash test dummy—completely passive. I had fantasies of the machinery moving the body throughout the entire show. There was no free will at all. Then towards the end of the period, I became interested in the middle-ground and changing the ratio: the body as both passive crash test dummy and rebellious animal.

How much energy does it take from you to get through a performance? Reviewers have noted the extreme stress you appeared to be enduring.

A lot of it is about putting the body on the line because I’m working so fundamentally with ideas around rupture, rebellion and turbulence—volatility—and the body is a part of all of that. My body does take a battering but we’ve implemented precautions and ways to protect it. We’ve gone through most of the material this week and at the moment I’m feeling quite good, a little bit sore and tender in places, but not like the first season. We’ve implemented strategies to allow me to survive the work.

How deeply does this work reflect your feelings that we live in a constricting and buffeting time?

I’m in a very privileged situation. I’m a white Australian male who hasn’t had any horrendous things happen to me or my family. I feel very lucky generally speaking. It’s when zooming out—and I don’t have to zoom out very far to see the issues faced by people around me, within Australia and around the world—situations of real political and social turbulence as well as environmental disasters. All of these are catastrophic situations. Where do I put myself? My position is one of not knowing what to do or how to react. I have a sense of empathy, but a very limited one. In making this work, I put myself inside that chaos—albeit very superficially—figuring out from a performative, a choreographic perspective, what is the grain of that experience.

In the broader spectrum of experimentation I need to stay true to my exploration, about being a very passive body, a dead weight, one in reaction to the machinery functioning around me. I’d also say that I consider the sound and the mechanical structure to be performers in themselves. I’m taking the definition of choreography outside of the body and into the spaces of kinetic objects and architecture.

In the development time, I needed to hold myself back a lot from creating choreography in the traditional sense. There were times when I thought I needed to make movement phrases and rhythms and do something more along the lines of More or Less Concrete. But I had to keep reminding myself that there was a whole other layer of meaning I have to stay in check with.

Tim Darbyshire studied Dance at Queensland University of Technology, graduating in 2003. His education continued through programs including DanceWEB (Scholarship recipient in 2006 and 2009), Formation d’artiste choréographique at Centre National de Danse Contemporaine (France 2006-2007) and Victoria University’s Solo Residency program (2008). He has worked with many choreographers including Vera Mantero, Emmanuelle Huyhn, Nuno Bizarro, Meg Stuart, David Wampach, Marianne Baillot, Antonio Julio, Christine de Smedt, Eszter Salamon and Shelley Lasica.

Julie Vulcan is kneeling on a white rectangle, counting the indentations in a white blanket draped across a structure that constitutes a narrow white bed. It’s barely half an hour into her 23-hour stint in this two by three-metre wall-less ‘cell’ but Vulcan already seems restless, and perhaps she must be, not only for her sanity, but for the work to function. A computer program, or “virtual room,” is monitoring the state of the cell and its inhabitant through qualities such as movement, heat, light and sound. In this moment, the system is filling the space with a quiet static, a swooshing reminiscent of sliding doors.

Though the work is focused on the experience of solitary confinement, Vulcan is not entirely alone in undertaking the durational performance that is RIMA. In a corner of the room, a short distance from the confines of her rectangle, Vulcan’s collaborator Ashley Scott mixes the soundscape. On the back wall a series of short correspondences are projected in groups of three, fading, reappearing and being replaced as they’re triggered by Vulcan’s movements. The text, simultaneously posted on Twitter, is a nonlinear series of dual dispatches from a dystopian future, or perhaps futures. One persona details an exploratory mission through science-fiction techno-jargon, exemplified in lines like, “In CN0 we wait for the initiation procedures. We wait for the signal from Umbraz. I am in awe.” In contrast, another persona narrates the harrowing physical and emotional struggle of being held captive in a state of solitary confinement, expressing growing despair in phrases such as, “Here is human desolation. Here is human desecration.”

Watching Vulcan pace around her cell is at times uncomfortably voyeuristic, but the problem RIMA’s audience faces is not whether or not they should avert their gaze. Instead the difficulty exists in locating a sizable point of entry amid the cross-platform, cross-medium, inter-textual content. As a work that can be watched in person or via a live stream, as well as sought out on Twitter and contextualised via a series of accompanying essays, RIMA makes gaining a holistic sense of engagement a challenge. However, it is apt, maybe even necessary, for a work about incarceration to refuse to provide its audience with an easy way in, or out.

In a week where images of abuse within Australia’s juvenile detention system have filled newsfeeds, a work such as this could become tethered to, or oversimplified by broad political debate. Yet RIMA’s concern is with the internal, with how we can, or must, narrow in on particular ideas, feelings, gestures, in order to make sense of the present and our shared humanity. Checking in on the live feed, searching the Twitter dialogues for something recognisable, something representative of my understanding of the world, I felt the vastness of abstraction in the work, rather than the claustrophobia of confinement, become actively oppressive. Consequently, for all its ideological reach and technological dissemination, RIMA is asking its viewers to hone their gaze, focus their attention. It is, as Vulcan writes “a cry for vigilance” (the title of one of her essays is “A sliver of wood and a drop of blood: Keeping the lines open) in an age where constant updates and data streams can lead to overwhelming apathy.

In the piece’s accompanying notes, Vulcan includes an interview she conducted with paralegal and human rights activist Charandev Singh. Commenting on the emotional toll of incarceration Singh says, “All of the impacts of solitary confinement are intentional.” There is a parallel kind of intentionality in the performance of RIMA that seems jarring. Vulcan begins the performance standing, arms crossed, glaring at the ceiling. Later she clasps the white mug that has been set on a table for her and peers dramatically into it. These actions, in conjunction with the Twitter updates (composed pre-show and triggered by Vulcan’s movement), disrupt the reality of her present situation with a sense of the scripted. The actuality of her personal experience registers only durationally and in the minutiae of the computer’s environmental tweaking. Though exceedingly self-conscious, these theatrical elements serve to blur the lines between past, present and future, contributing to what Theron Schmidt, in his accompanying essay, “Living in augmented times,”calls “a form of augmented reality.”

After 23 hours, the piece ends as Julie Vulcan slowly stands and exits her cell, leaving the room still and silent. RIMA is a work fascinated with the way in which memory and imagination can be torturous, but also harnessed as survival mechanisms, as tools of comfort and hope. This idea is echoed in the Twitter correspondence: at one point the incarcerated character laments, “Sit with me please sit with me now. I try to conjure you from somewhere in the back of my memory. Try to bring you into focus.” It’s in the final image of absence that the audience may truly focus on the presence of moments past and potential futures; filling the space with a reality separate from that of the present, from the world outside. This is itself a kind of freedom.

Squidsolo, RIMA, performance, text, set design Julie Vulcan, music, web, computer programming Ashley Scott; Arts House, North Melbourne, 30-31 July

Successor to the long-running Australian National Playwrights’ Conference, Playwriting Australia’s National Play Festival is now in its ninth year. At its centre is a program of full and partial readings of new works developed through PWA’s various strands. There are also regionally focused showcases featuring excerpts by emerging playwrights; industry forums and artist panels; talks and master classes. A litmus test of Australian playwriting, the festival is also a community of spirit: a rare opportunity for playwrights and other stakeholders—directors, dramaturgs, actors and producers—to come together over the course of four days to debate, discuss and embolden.

This year’s festival, held at Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre, was notable for being the last before it shifts from an annual to biennial format, a consequence of funding cuts to the Australia Council. Happily, the high level of artistry evident throughout the festival’s four days of readings assuaged lingering discontent with this state of affairs.

Cultural diversity in play

Perhaps most impressive were this year’s two regional showcases, Lotus and Aotearoa Now, which featured works by Asian-Australian and New Zealand playwrights respectively. Formally daring and possessed of a striking energy, excerpts from these plays provided tantalising glimpses into cultures and dramaturgies that remain woefully under-represented on Australian stages. They also reflect a welcome and sustained focus on cultural diversity at PWA: of the festival’s 13 playwrights, seven were non-Anglo, as were 15 of the 27 actors involved in the play readings.

This diversity was also evident across the main program of six plays, four of which were by female playwrights, including the wildly inventive Skylab by Indigenous actor Melodie Reynolds-Diarra. An emphatic, almost sui generis fusion of her Wangkathaa heritage, pop culture influences and an alternate history of the falling to Earth in WA of the Skylab space station in 1979, the play marks the first time Australia’s three major Indigenous performing arts companies—Yirra Yaakin, Ilbijerri and Moogahlin—have collaborated on a single work. It could be described as magic-realist, but it is wholly distinct from the Latin American tradition.

Among Skylab’s creative team is Iain Sinclair, PWA’s Resident Dramaturg, who spoke to me about the special challenge of applying dramaturgy to works arising from, or incorporating, non-Western playwriting and performance traditions. It’s a conversation that seemed especially pertinent given not only the festival’s majority non-Anglo makeup, but also its overarching theme of ‘craft,’ which saw much discussion—flowing on from Michael Gow’s keynote address (“The Agony and the Agony: A Totally Impractical Guide to Playwriting”)—turn to dramaturgical first principles rather than the big picture questions which predominated at last year’s festival.

An emergent dramaturgy

Sinclair describes Skylab as a “beautiful dance,” a metaphor that neatly suggests a reciprocal, non-hierarchical model of dramaturgy that is flexible and needs-based. “When the idea of craft is applied as a closed system,” he says, it can imprison ideas rather than release them.” If pioneering companies such as the Australian Performing Group (APG) initiated the breakdown of a British dramaturgical model based on the well-made play in the 1970s, then Sinclair sees culturally diverse artists as those most likely to lead what he calls a “post-enlightenment” dramaturgy that is responsive to the needs of individual plays, emerging “somewhere in the meeting point between cultures as a new Australian dramaturgy.” Sinclair nominates Indonesian-Australian playwright Shari Indriani’s Squint Witch, which featured in the Lotus showcase, as an example of this emergent dramaturgy, freely mixing “sacred performance, Gen Y neuroses and traditional Indonesian puppet theatre.”

As a further illustration, Sinclair points to Isaac Drandic, actor, writer and Associate Director of Ilbijerri, whom Playwriting Australia is now in the process of teaming with playwrights who the company feels stand to benefit from his craft—as a kind of dramaturgical gun for hire. This is, in conjunction with PWA’s dramaturgy mentoring program now in its fifth year, all part of a long-term strategy to centralise the role of dramaturgs in the development of new Australian work.

“Australian dramaturgy,” says Sinclair, “is in a process of evolution. We have largely moved on from the typical dramaturgy of the 80s and 90s—a ‘Pinterising’ style led by deficit thinking that was always asking ‘what is wrong with this play, what can we cut to fix it?’—to a next level dramaturgy that is fluid and artistically orientated. But unquestionably we are still a few years behind America and Europe.” The key for playwrights who want to develop their craft, Sinclair believes, is industry exposure (easier if you’re based in New York) and familiarity with the work of as many other writers as possible. Exposure is crucial for dramaturgs too. Sinclair reckons it takes being in the room for 10 to 15 productions before anything teachable can be learned, but humility is also vital: “dramaturgy,” he tells me, “is less about dictating form or taste than being an advocate for what the medium does best.”

In the first instance, Sinclair believes, this is simply the art of rendering ideas into behaviours. It’s an idea that can be applied equally to the Lotus plays, with their often complex interaction of inherited and contemporary cultural traditions and to the six works—Skylab, Melissa Reeves’ The Zen of Table Tennis, Steve Rodgers’ King of Pigs, Olivia Satchell’s I Sat and Waited but You Were Gone Too Long, Chris Summers’ Pedagogy and first-time playwright Emily Sheehan’s Hell’s Canyon—that comprised this year’s main program.

Workshop, Melissa Reeves’ (bottom R) The Zen of Table Tennis, National Play Festival 2016

Stage-ready

At various stages of development, only two of these works feel stage-ready: King of Pigs and The Zen of Table Tennis, the latter surely in danger of what Sinclair calls ‘shop spoiling,’ so long has the script been around under different titles. Both plays are bold, finely crafted takes on difficult issues—domestic violence and trauma respectively—but it is Reeves’ signature humour and eccentricities of character that add up to the richer vision; all the more reason to wish for its rapid progress to full production. Taken as a whole, it might be argued that it is a shortage of ambition rather than craft that undermines the progress of some plays; small casts, narrow concerns and an absence of politics confirm in my mind Hannie Rayson’s assertion during her master class that Australian playwrights are, broadly speaking, reluctant to write about those in positions of power.

But that, I suppose, is a question of inspiration, and perhaps a topic for another festival—one that will no doubt build on this year’s considerable achievements in diversity and craftsmanship—to unpack.

Playwriting Australia: The National Play Festival, Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, 27-30 July

Agata Dmochowska, Metamorphoses, music theatre work written and performed by students at the Centre for Theatre & Performance, Monash University

The notion of the New Australian Musical has become something of a unicorn in the Australian performance imagination, and any number of factors—the costs and complexity of mounting a musical, the dearth of appropriate venues, and the relatively small amount of funding, training and support available—make a fully-realised new music theatre work a rare beast indeed. Ten years ago, after its third outing, the Pratt Prize for Musical Theatre ceased to exist as an open competition after judges noted that outstanding entries tended to come from a tiny pool of the same names.

The enthusiasm for new work created locally has only grown, however, and the talent pool has certainly expanded as well. Monash University’s Centre for Theatre and Performance has taken an encouraging new direction in recent years with a substantial rethinking of its music theatre units. Where training institutions such as WAAPA or VCA might focus on voice, acting and other practical elements of music theatre, Monash now includes the history and historiography of music theatre, along with dramaturgy, songwriting and assistance in imagining innovative new ways of approaching the form.

The Centre’s Head of Section—and actor, writer and director—Jane Griffiths calls it a “very holistic course” which is “very, very different from a traditional musical theatre course where it’s more about learning performance skills.”

This new approach has won praise from high places: recently Dr Jeanne Pratt announced a $1 million donation to the Centre to bolster its music theatre teaching. The funds will allow the number of units taught to be doubled and, as of next year, a new residency program will see professional music theatre artists putting down roots at Monash.

Similar residencies at the university have already proven highly successful for non-music theatre artists. “So far we have a very good reputation in the independent theatre sector for providing residencies and as much support as we can to companies like Fraught Outfit or THE RABBLE,” says Griffiths. “We feel that we’re part of an ecosystem. We don’t just want to be a university; we want to be contributing to the industry. With music theatre now we can take that one stage further.

Sticks and Stones, music theatre work performed by students at the Centre for Theatre & Performance, Monash University

“We’ll have two year-long residencies for professional artists who are mid-career, established but still wanting to have time to work on their own practice. They basically come and live at Monash for a year, work on their own material but also mentor the students who are creating new work.”

The benefits students will derive from contact with professional music theatre artists are obvious, but for the artists themselves the residencies offer an opportunity to take stock in what can often be an anchorless job hopping from gig to gig.

“We’re hoping that this will appeal to artists who may already have had a busy career but want to take some time out. That’s important. And the collegiate atmosphere. I think lots of practitioners get to a stage in their career where they need to readdress what they’re doing and we have the collegiate atmosphere where you’re allowed to do that.”

Many practising artists don’t necessarily come from academic backgrounds, either. For them, Griffiths says, there might be appeal in “an environment where there’s a vocabulary or methodology or theory which explains your practice and interacts with your practice.”

The Centre’s expanded, holistic approach to the form and its incorporation of pedagogy and practice has been further amplified by its new ties to Monash’s School of Music. In combination this allows students both comprehensive instruction in what the musical has been in the past as well as encouragement to rethink what it could be in the future.

“I think that one of the exciting things that we’ve discovered and that the students are certainly keen to explore is the different range,” says Griffiths. “They don’t all have to be massive musicals like Wicked, great though those are. They’re exploring smaller scales, exploring site-specific musicals, theatre-in-education musicals. There’s potential for what we think of as the musical to really alter quite radically, in the same way our conceptions of traditional theatre have. At the same time we can really enjoy and celebrate tradition. You can’t beat a good Broadway musical and we understand that.”

Of the enhanced music theatre course and its residency program for experienced music theatre professionals, Jane Griffiths says, “I very much hope our program won’t just nurture our students but nurture practitioners.”

A call for expressions of interest in the Centre’s residencies program will be announced shortly.

Associate Professor Jane Griffiths is an active theatre performer and writer and Head of Section of Monash University’s Centre for Theatre and Performance. She will appear in the lead role in the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Drama winner, Wit, by Margaret Edson, at 45 Downstairs, 1-17 September. Read more about her here.

The Three Dancers represents a departure from Lee Serle’s recent works. Since the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative 2010-11, when he was mentored by choreographer Trisha Brown in New York, Serle has turned to creating interactive sonic and choreographic installations (such as Multimodal, coming shortly to Melbourne’s The Substation). The Three Dancers, however, is pure, abstract dance performed to a recording of Elena Kats-Chernin’s orchestral 2015 composition of the same name (premiered in the UK in 2015 by the Rambert dance company, choreography by Didy Veldman). The only interactive option Serle has given us this time is to “…let the audience find their own narratives within the dance” (program note).

Kats-Chernin’s composition was in turn inspired by Picasso’s painting The Three Dancers (1925). The arts-astute audience gathered at Dancenorth for this leg of the annual Australian Festival of Chamber Music (AFCM) Sunday Concert Crawl is presumably not short of reference points from which to derive meaning for this dance work.

The canvas is a black stage, with a series of black curtained wings. The simple lighting grid is utilised judiciously to alter the mood during the 25-minute piece. The five ensemble members, three of them on stage at the outset, are topless, dressed only in loose black trousers. Nothing detracts, yet everything suggests a passion play. The deliberate visual minimalism allows full focus on movement and music—and these elements amply bring colour, albeit darkened, like blood slowly drying.

Kats-Chernin’s piece is rich with emotion, drama and mystery, lifting and dropping the audience with each aural rise and fall. It is spare and sinister one moment, all bass-y cello resonating in the gut; lush with accordions the next; then descending again into frenzy and discordance. I read with some surprise after the event that Serle has partly structured the choreography without reference to the music. The movement, without narrative, is difficult to describe, but it appears complicit with the score, elucidating parallel emotional tangents. It is in turn (and sometimes simultaneously) balletic, contemporary, athletic and gymnastic.

The Three Dancers exudes unrelenting energy, capitalising wonderfully on the strengths of the young ensemble. The motif of the trio is constantly shifting, re-integrating and separating again. I cannot help but read into it the story behind Picasso’s painting, the melancholic inevitability of a tragic outcome to his friends’ love triangle. It reeks of love, sex, jealousy and death. The dancers outside of the transitioning trio are perhaps implicated bystanders (like Picasso?) or external forces influencing or observing the disintegration.

Among graceful arcs and staccato contractions, a small gesture of fingers clenching and unclenching, eerily sidelit, suggests a fuse burning, and I see a momentary reference to the shadowed figure on the right in Picasso’s painting. There’s a passage where the whole ensemble rushes forward and back repeatedly, all five in a row, then oppositionally as two and three. The movement appears compelled rather than co-operative, individuals chasing direction, not a deliberately shared experience. Yet it is beautiful and paradoxically cohesive, and sticks in my mind.

The Dancenorth ensemble is maturing apace under the canny directorship of Kyle Page. In the program the dancers are credited for their input in Serle’s choreography. Even with such a consistently bold troupe, each choreographer and performance this year seems to bring a particular dancer to the fore: Ashley McLellan in Rainbow Vomit, Jenni Large and Harrison Hall in the double bill If_Was_. In The Three Dancers, it’s Mason Kelly’s solo of graceful, controlled elasticity which provides the ‘whoah’ moment, revealing Serle’s choreographic breadth, even outside his usual oeuvre.

At last year’s AFCM closing concert, Kats-Chernin’s The Three Dancers was performed live by a septet in the presence of the composer. I feel wistful knowing that perhaps it could have been within the realm of possibility to repeat the live performance in tandem with the dance work this year. There is a precedent for live collaboration between Dancenorth and AFCM, with Iain Grandage creating the score for Gavin Webber’s poignant Remember Me in 2008. Live music would have taken The Three Dancers from wonderful to sublime.

Dancenorth, The Three Dancers, choreographer Lee Serle, composer Elena Kats-Chernin, performers Harrison Hall, Mason Kelly, Jenni Large, Ashley McLellan, Georgia Rudd, lighting design Bosco Shaw; Townsville School of Arts Theatre 31 July-2 Aug

Lee Serle’s Multimodal will guide randomly selected audience members through a series of physical, sonic, olfactory and choreographic experiences in Melbourne’s The Substation, 30 Aug-4 Sept.

Lost children have a strong grip on the national psyche, as documented by Peter Pierce in The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety (Cambridge University Press, 1999), reaching from the 19th century to the present in fiction, film, painting and real-life. Pierce could have more accurately written “White Australian Anxiety” for a phenomenon generated by settlers’ fear of an alien landscape. Angela Betzien’s The Hanging perpetuates the anxiety while Andrea James’ Winyanboga Yurringa returns Aboriginal women to country hitherto lost to them and in doing so suggests, in turn, that endangered young women’s lives need not be lost. Both are conventional plays, but the originality and, for white audiences, unfamiliarity of James’ vision makes it a special experience.

Winyanboga Yurringa

Winyanboga Yurringa is Yorta Yorta for Women of the Sun, the title of the four-part TV mini-series Women of the Sun (1981), co-written by Hyllus Maris and Sonia Borg, which inspired James to write, as she explained in a recent RealTime interview, about a new generation of Aboriginal women.

Winyanboga Yurringa opens and closes ritually. Initially a lone female elder bearing a ceremonial digging stick stands astride a small circular rise and finally a teenage girl is dressed in the centre of a sacred site with traditional female attire. In between, the play is an ever-darkening comedy of conflicts between six very different Aboriginal women as banter turns bitter and anger and despair threaten to take hold. Below the rise is another circle—camping space and sacred site—girded above by a semi-circle of exquisite suspended sculptures and several in the distance, from which hang curled, leaf-like shapes. Transforming dramatically with the play’s mood shifts they suggest a magical place, of serenely floating trees that can become eerie presences.

The elder, Neecy, has invited five women to the site with a purpose (something to do with the contents of a large box) but is thwarted by joking and bickering, Carol’s need for alcohol and her fear of spiders and snakes, the teenage Chantelle’s urgent desire to call her exploitative boyfriend (reception’s too weak) and tension between two sisters—Margie, a lesbian with a white girlfriend, and Wanda, a mother of six with an abusive husband and a dislike for anyone insufficiently ‘black.’ A late arrival, Jadah, a pale-skinned photographer becomes the perfect target for Wanda’s prejudices which she relays with relentless hostility: “do you make art for white people;” “why does she want to be a blakfella now?” That Jadah has made an artwork in which she has her family paint their faces black (as Bindi Cole, the AV artist for this production, did in a controversial photographic series) unsettles the whole group.

Neecy manages to corrall the women from time to time: they weave long grass, sing “Pretty Woman” rawcously, joke non-stop from the outset—“you can’t go wrong with a small businessman”—and conjure a scary spirit, but increasingly share moments of sombre insight: “If not for grandmother weaving in the dark, we wouldn’t be weaving in the light,” and they rally to defend Jadah. A greater problem is the vulnerability of Chantelle with her mother in gaol, no job and, as she says accusingly, “you all argue.” Rejected by her money-demanding boyfriend (reached on Jadah’s phone), she wanders into the night and is assumed lost, causing panic (and some funny business about Aboriginal people using GPS). But her carer, Neecy, knows that the absence of a sense of belonging could lose the girl to drugs and a pointless life. Chantelle’s return is nonchalant but coincides with growing conciliation between the women. At last, through ceremony, Neecy can make these individuals one, with a place at their centre for Chantelle. From the box come items of traditional adornment (bravely “borrowed” by the usually cautious Carol from a museum archive) with which to dress an accepting but slightly bemused Chantelle in the manner of her great, great grandmother. Once lost, she is now found, if symbolically, but with great hope.

Winyanboga Yurringa is a work of great feeling, fraught with tension, leavened with laughter and racked with gut-felt anger. Tessa Rose brings stately authority and determination to the role of Neecy. Pamela Young is a gently funny, unsettled Carol; Kylie Coolwell an unfussed, benign Margie who sees though her sister’s anger; and Alexis Lane’s Chantelle a wounded adolescent, played with just the right reserve. Matilda Brown’s sensitive Jadah is initially scared off by Wanda but grows in strength. And Angeline Penrith’s portrayal of Wanda, racist against her own people, played without exaggeration, is consistently unnerving. Her anger could undo this fragile community of women, but their coming together on country finally does its magic. Andrea James has drawn a variety of talents together for a perfect ensemble performance.

Designer Daniele Hromek’s ‘tree’ sculptures make her set a work of beauty, given colour and depth by Karen Norris’ superb lighting, Bindi Cole’s haunting projections and an aural depth of field created by Phil Downing in which, instead of a conventional composition, an array of wonderful, highly articulated sounds evoking nature and the night have been scored to amplify the immersiveness of the setting and a sense of very special country. With wit and passion, Winyanboga Yurringa generously invites us into a world of Aboriginal women in search of heritage, belonging and spiritual unanimity, a rare and treasured offering.

Winyanboga Yurringa plays 17-20 August at the Playhouse Theatre, Geelong Performing Arts Centre.

(L) Luke Carroll, Ashleigh Cummings, Genevieve Lemon in Sydney Theatre Company’s The Hanging

The Hanging

At a time when crime fiction devotees are steadily fed with television series and novels of great depth and complexity, Angela Betzien’s STC commission, The Hanging, proved to be an entirely frustrating procedural, short on logic, insight and suspense. Three 14-year-old students in an all-girls private school have gone missing. One of them returns, tight-lipped, to be interrogated by a young detective sergeant (Luke Carroll), at first out of his depth in dealing with a sulky, snarky adolescent (Ashleigh Cummings) and the girls’ droll teacher (Genevieve Lemon) who had introduced the trio to Picnic at Hanging Rock and other novels in private sessions at her home, feeling that the school had become authoritarian (after another mysterious event) and that the girls needed a sense of freedom.

A long, slow stretch of getting nowhere is broken when the detective suddenly reveals a pile of evidence he had all along, girl and teacher turn on each other and revelation is in sight. Save for a few of the teacher’s witticisms, the dialogue is dull underlining the absence of serious characterisation—the detective is nothing more than an earnest policeman and family man, the girl, a real pity, is allowed limited psychological complexity and the teacher, in love with one of the missing girls, borders on cliché.

The conceit of updating Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel Picnic at Hanging Rock, shorn of its supernatural dimension, is laboured, having to do work not done by the script. Projections on a wide screen atop a ground-level long stone wall periodically show the girls wandering through deep forest right up to the climactic reveal, overtly recalling imagery from Peter Weir’s 1975 film. The found girl appears on top of the wall in the director and designer’s awkward attempt to integrate live performance and film—with melodramatic consequences. Other reviewers of The Hanging were uniformly gripped and thrilled, but I couldn’t engage with a play that is too casual with procedure to be suspenseful, seriously evasive about what would drive young girls to an extreme fate and relying on associations with the novel and film without suggesting anything more than an impressionistic updating.

Carriageworks & Moogahlin Performing Arts: Winyanboga Yurringa, writer, director Andrea James, assistant director Liza-Mare Syron, dramaturg Patricia Cornelius, performers Kylie Coolwell, Alexis Lane, Angeline Penrith, Tessa Rose, Pamela Young, Matilda Brown, set design Danièle Hromek, AV artist Bindi Cole, lighting Karen Norris, sound and AV design Phil Downing; Carriageworks, Sydney, 3-6 Aug

Sydney Theatre Company, The Hanging, writer Angela Betzien, director Sarah Goodes, performers Luke Carroll, Ashleigh Cummings, Genevieve Lemon, design Hannah Gadsby, video design David Bergman; Wharf 1 Theatre, 28 July-10 Sept

A confession: my experience with James Brennan’s remarkable collaborative work The Chat might have been coloured by my sitting in on a brief slice of its rehearsal, though ‘rehearsal’ is an inadequate word for the hour I witnessed. There was a point during that practice run when I lost all perspective on where ‘rehearsal’ ended and where the performance really began. The Chat doesn’t so much erase the boundaries between artifice and reality as multiply them, to produce a head-spinning kaleidoscopic effect. It wasn’t just me. On the evening I saw the final work, audience members were actually storming the stage to intervene in the action.

The rawest premise upon which The Chat operates is provocative enough: real ex-criminals and actors play out an improvised parole interview. The ex-offender decides on the nature of the crime and the circumstances surrounding the possible probation, and the interview goes on to assess whether it should be granted.

While the parole officer is clearly an actor (David Woods), the ex-offender himself is playing a role too, albeit one he is particularly qualified to inhabit. Since we don’t know his real background, the level of fiction or veracity in the history of crime and punishment being explored in front of us is unknowable.

Once the if-not-fictional-then-at-least-fictionalised roleplaying scenario is established, parolee and parole officer switch sides. Woods steps into the role of the offender and the real ex-offender playing an ex-offender begins playing the parole interviewer. He tests Woods, digging into his past or making propositions about his motivations, perhaps getting angry, perhaps attempting to penetrate his defences. All of this is improvised, remember, but the shifts in power come thick and fast as the inherent authority dynamics of the parole interview format become clear.

All of this is being assessed not just by the audience but by the ensemble of fellow ex-criminals who are rotating their roles throughout the season. At various points they interject, lambasting Woods for caricature or the performing ex-offender for going too light on him. Other actors play facilitators or directors pushing the fiction this way or that, but this only makes it harder to distinguish the structural dynamics of the work as a whole —just as the parole interview is both a performance and a power play, so is every one of the various frames around it.

There are many, many more reflecting surfaces in this ‘funhouse,’ not least of which is Brennan’s in-built criticism of both the parole interview (he’s a former parole officer himself) and the very format of inverted role-play that he has invented for this work. It’s hugely intriguing, the idea that criminals can gain new perspectives on themselves by switching roles with an interviewer, but Brennan knows the limits of utopian thinking, and keeps that in the spotlight here, too.

In the end, the audience plays the parole board who will decide whether the man in the chair goes back to prison or whether he walks free. But we’ve gone so far into the woods by this point—watching a real ex-convict don a fictional role, who then dons another fictional role, which then interrogates an actor simulating one (or more) of those roles, while many others criticise and direct both performances—that by the time the question of how we’re to finally pass judgement on the man is put to us, it’s no wonder that some audience members lose sight of the fact that their decision isn’t that of a real parole board.

On the night I attended, people were shouting out offers of jobs, mentoring, cooking lessons, all in exchange for the freedom of the man they thought they’d just seen reflected in this endlessly complicated house of mirrors. That a performance so embroidered with artifice, embellishment and absurdity can somehow seem to connect with such a deeper reality is astonishing, and like many of those in the room I could have stayed in this realm for many more hours. It will stay with me for much longer.

The Chat, concept, lead artist JR Brennan, co-creators J R Brennan, David Woods, collaborating artist Ashley Dyer, performers Nick Apostolidis, Arthur Bolkas, JR Brennan, Ashley Dyer, Ty Luke, Nick Maltzahn, John Tjepkema, David Woods, lighting Jennifer Hector; Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, 27-31 July

Alexander Garsden walks quietly behind a wide arc of four large gongs, each suspended in front of a transducer mike affixed to their rear faces. He adjusts things slightly as his mixer channels their sympathetic frequencies. Messages To Erich I & II (2015-6) is the opening piece for this evening of membranous sonic events. You can call it music if you want. I certainly do.

The resonant riches of gongs have long been appreciated both within and outside the academy as an aural portal into the dense verticality of tone (over, sub, upper, hyper, psycho etc). The ringing gong, cymbal or bell—each notably circumscribed by celestial circularity—is like Narcissus’ pool in terms of its attractiveness. Yet unlike narcissistic drive, listening to these enriching tones has long granted listeners consciousness of the fathomless depth of the sonic. Their distinctive harmonic drone and its transmogrification from one pitch constellation to a range of shared resonating shapes holds the power to extinguish human centricity.

The Inland concert series is clearly committed to this appreciation of the sono-musical excitation of sound. Garsden’s piece is a perfect hors-d’oeuvre for the evening’s tacit remit: to foreground the experiential through compositional, performative and improvisational strategies. True to the surfeit of sensation which inevitably arises from this approach to welcoming sound as extant rather than extracted, my mind cruised through a semiotic pathway, recalling how the histories of analogue and digital synthesis pursued sympathetic resonance as an enlightened plateau which returned artificial electronics to naturalised sonics. Some moments of Messages sounded wholly electronic.

A counterpoint to this piece was Rohan Drape’s sumptuous dive into the microtonal mist unleashed by live processing of his digital keyboard. He mimicked grand organ tones in order to transform them into dense clouds of partials and harmonic transitions of originating diatonic notes. Titled which, unlike the heliotrope, turn timidly away from the sun (2016), the work, performed in darkness, commenced and finished like an hallucinated interruption to the evening. It presented more than an exploratory excursion down the well-worn safety-roped pathways of alt tunings. The listening experience hinged on the simultaneity of conflicting tunings, granting the slippery ear both an indoctrinated framework and its programmatic alteration. This powered the piece beyond pure sonic sensation.

If Drape’s piece hovered at the membranous aural periphery between the diatonic and the microtonic, Jim Denley’s masterful improvisation actualised and physicalised this epidermis. Performing on a bass flute modified with a thin membrane affixed to its end, Denley deftly shifted the instrument to his right so that the membrane touched three thin rods spinning furiously, courtesy of a modified power tool. We should all by now know of the predictable sonic occurrences of these devices rigged this way, but in the hands of some performers and their configurations, the result remains transfixing.

Denley notably displayed a range of extended techniques which shaped his performance through an agitated dialogue with his instrument’s fundamental architecsonics and its transformation via the vibrational induction of rods spitting onto excitable membrane. Whenever I hear such performance of wind-based instruments, I can never not forget the legacy of the shakuhachi—particularly that instrument’s unique ideological grappling with materialism, physicality and its near-mystical transduction of human breath into a resonating energy source. More importantly, the fact that noise—or rather, the overload of frequency specificity—is entirely embraced by the most traditional strictures of shakuhachi performance highlights the narrow binaries with which even Western-based experimental practices make their claims as being somehow ‘beyond music.’

Denley’s performance circumnavigates this critical shortcoming which I feel plagues so much exploratory music. How? By exciting possible semantic tangents. His rhythms grounded the improvisation, as he articulated both the determinants of his physicality (height, posture, arm-reach, breathing cycle) as well as their transcendence (shifting body weight, circular breathing, proximity sensitivity). Once he turned on the power tool and commenced breathing, the effect was like a Rube Goldberg event predicated on causal balance. The aural result was a series of passages which formed envelopes of sound, each carrying miniature algorithms of his performative situation and moment. Listening to the tubular flanging of the vibrating membrane and its frenetic aural speckling resembling spectral equalisation, I was reminded of urinating into a stainless steel toilet—sadly a pleasure disappearing from our contemporary soundscape. This is no mere vulgar assertion on my part: an enriching sonic experience in concert can propel the listener into the most unexpected locations and moments. If sound is to be truly regarded as something greater than the listener, this is where the open ear can end up.

Threaded through the evening’s pieces was a suite of interactions between Anthony Pateras on piano and Anthony Burr on bass clarinet and sine waves. Two compositions by Burr presented his rigorous articulation of how breathing, listening, intoning and toning can generate a choral dialectic for a composer-performer of his calibre. A fixed tonal chord of maybe two or even three sine tones droned from his laptop. Now, we have heard sine wave tones many times before. I wrote a potted history of the sine wave tone last year as a chapter in the book Abstract Video Art (University of California Press), so it’s hard to make small comment about it.

Burr’s pieces—Life seen by life (2016) and Word And Also Its Echo (2016)—made me think of many things. The first is the weird occurrence of hearing sine waves in a church. Who would have thought such a sonic thing would ever happen? Yet this very juncture between the ‘acousacred’ and the ‘sinospritual’ frames the semiotic substantia of how experimental music thankfully will always exist beyond prescription. Second, the uniqueness of experiencing these sine waves.

Treated as orthodoxy, Burr’s compositions are inevitably aligned with the activated listening required by and for Alvin Lucier’s excitable frequencies and Pauline Oliveros’ excited spaces. But how dull to attach an exciting performance such as this to the historicist template of what now is a modus operandi of over a half-century’s standing. Burr’s compositions granted a specific experience which—true to the Eastern perceptual philosophies which shaped certain early experimental practices—were more about the space between events rather than the events themselves.

Even that reduces the sensation of the performance. I was amazed by my doubting the sine tones’ fixity each time Burr stopped his channelled breaths and tense embouchure. Was the pitch higher now, or lower, or constant? The greatest depth of any sound lies in one doubting its presence, its identity, its characteristics. For when one doubts while listening, one knows that sound is greater than can ever be heard.

Burr’s sonically invisible tones—countered by Pateras’ measured interjections of data-sets summarising the harmonic interaction between Burr’s notes and the sine wave tone—guided the audience around the sine wave tone. It was like being taken for a walk around a superstructure which patiently invited close inspection of its form and surface. These compositional techniques informed the evening’s concluding improvisation, The Long Exhale (2014-16), which re-interpreted moments from the tracks on the gorgeous Immediata CD of the same name released this year.

As Pateras and Burr sounded their final lingering tones, the membranous returned to its infinite equilibrium, like the aerated skin of water in a glass. The Inland concert series evidences a wealth of talent dedicated not merely to being ‘transgressive’ or ‘avant-garde’ (terms as radical as Bruce Willis singing the blues), but to quietly conducting contemplative research and presenting fascinating results. Sound by nature, but music by name.

In these challenging times for publishers, journalists and reviewers, it’s encouraging to see UNSW School of the Arts & Media offering a new one-semester intensive course, Reviewing the Arts, which includes consideration of the role of the critic in the digital era. While the future of quality criticism in a mutating mediascape is uncertain and payments to reviewers diminish, new platforms and innovative models for criticism will emerge. In the meantime, such a course can at the very least help sustain the artform that is reviewing.

The course has been devised by Senior Lecturer Dr Erin Brannigan who has written extensively for RealTime, wrote Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image (Oxford University Press, New York, 2011) and co-edited, with Virginia Baxter, Bodies of Thought: 12 Australian Choreographers (RealTime & Wakefield Press, 2014). She is currently conducting research towards a book on dance and the visual arts. Brannigan’s extensive writing career and depth and breadth of arts knowledge as well as engagement with the practicalities of dance film curation for film festivals (she was founding director of Reeldance in 1999) make her an ideal teacher in this field.

I first ask Brannigan where the idea for the course came from. She tells me, “I was asked to contribute to Performance Studies and was looking for something I was really interested in teaching and also for ways to teach across disciplines. I really enjoyed doing that in the Dance Major I used to teach—I had a subject called Composition across Music and Dance which I co-taught with a music lecturer and it went really well. So I proposed Reviewing the Arts, which would be open to all of the students in our school and also as a General Education subject for students in other programs as well. I’d have a mixed cohort and also be involved in team-teaching, something in which I’d had expertise. So it seemed like a good idea.”

The course has a wide ambit: dance, theatre and performance, music, visual arts and film. How are they all accommodated? “There are two strategies. One is to bring in experts from those areas; the other is to find generic concepts and frameworks for students to think through their disciplines.” Central to the latter, said Brannigan ”is the big one, the subjective/objective framework and the various ways it manifests in different kinds of reviewing and evaluation.” She adds too “the tension between getting something on record—particularly for the more ephemeral arts—and the making of judgments.” Judgment, she points out, has to also be balanced with advocacy, for example “the kind RealTime has focused on, its writers educating and bringing readers with them by introducing artists and their processes.”

Students taking the course will find that they have to acquaint themselves with some less than familiar artforms. This will require a willingness to engage. Brannigan notes, however, that “some students identify with disciplines other than the ones they’re enrolled in. You might have an Economics student who’s very interested in music reviewing or a Literature major writing about film. I have worked with different discipline groups at various times [and found] they had areas of interest in their private lives which were quite different from what they were being trained in. Some are already blogging and contributing to substantial online publications.”

The course also deals with ethical issues like conflict of interest. In our experience at RealTime the rise of social media and blogging has led to a widespread misapprehension that it’s fine to review the work of friends or professional associates. Brannigan sees this issue in terms of “communities of criticality,” not just the difficulty of writing about artists one knows but, more broadly, of talking to and writing about your community. She cites her own experience of moving away from reviewing: “the dance community in Sydney is so small that eventually it became too difficult for me to write critically about the work of people I knew.” She thinks that in a larger community, “the writer thinks in terms of the the artist reading their words as a way of opening up a conversation, as might happen in publications like New York Times Review.”

The course involves studying 20th and 21st century arts journalism and coming to understand various modes and styles. There are any number of review formulae; we all recognise the standard ones. Brannigan says she adapted a set of formulae developed by guest lecturer Sacha Molitorisz “when he was having to write short, punchy pieces for Sydney Morning Herald’s Metro for many years. They’re a very good starting point to thinking about what makes a good review.” At the other end of the spectrum, the course includes Virginia Woolf, Gilles Deleuze (his fascinating little book on Francis Bacon) and the literary taste-determiner of the moment, James Wood.

“Of course,” says Brannigan, “there is no formula for a good review—it’s an unquantifiable ‘something else.’” As well as discernment and judgment, ‘voice’ is critical, a recognisable style as opposed to “the anonymity of blogging voices” that Brannigan’s students tell her they find generic. With a voice, she says, “you garner attention and gain a readership. Good reviewing is so much about the quality of the writing, the deployment of metaphor and voice.”

The course’s practical approach entails “seminars of 90 minutes each with writing exercises in the first half-hour to unlock new approaches, new voices.” Brannigan thinks that descriptive writing is a good way into developing quality writing: “it forces students to be specific and to think beyond clichés.” She adds that it also encourages them to be critical about their writing. In her writing workshop at Melbourne’s Dancehouse earlier this year, leading American dance reviewer Deborah Jowitt likewise emphasised the importance of description as fundamental to writing criticism.

I notice in the course outline the term “post-descriptive” criticism. Brannigan explains, “There was an excellent conference at the Walker Center a couple of years ago on digital arts journalism in which a number of people spoke about the possibilities for online reviewing that weren’t so text-based. If video excerpts or complete performances are now available online, do we need to recount what we’ve seen or do we just need to move on to judgment? Another possibility is not to respond with text but with image. One of the speakers talked about the Instagram review, where you respond with a series of images that becomes the commentary. We play around with these ideas.”

I comment that some non-descriptive approaches have yielded very personal, quite poetic accounts of artworks, valid responses that might be enlightening for those who’ve also experienced the work, but not for those who were not there. Brannigan notes that RealTime writing often strikes the balance between the descriptive and the poetic, “but when a piece refuses to give me that I get very frustrated.”

I point out that it’s largely dance reviewers who are inclined to poeticise. “It’s a big debate in Dance Studies,” says Brannigan. “I think it was in the late 1980s that Deborah Jowitt and Roger Copeland went head-to-head on this. He accused the Jowitt ‘school’ of being all description and without substance. And Jowitt’s famous response was that the substance was in the description. I really believe that. To be fair and respectful, I think it’s very important that you paint a clear picture of the work.” I concur, pointing out that it’s what we call in our RealTime writing workshops, “fidelity to the work.”

Descriptive writing doesn’t come easily. It requires heightened sensory awareness and much vocabulary-building to be able to translate the experience of a work into words that will be sufficiently evocative for the reader to have a sense of it. It’s easy to make judgements, but to describe the qualities, say, of sounds in music or sound art can be very challenging. Brannigan thinks “music and dance suffer similarly in this translation when you don’t have a character or a story or a set to describe. Expanding your vocabulary and practising the use of artform-specific language is part of the project, of being accurate and being faithful to the work.”

I’m amused to see that Brannigan’s students are tasked with “writing a crap review.” The parodying of reviewers has a substantial history and requires accuracy, as Brannigan notes, “in pulling apart a review and working out why it’s bad. It’s a huge help in understanding what to avoid.”

There is a big-picture dimension to the course: aesthetic philosophy and also major shifts in aesthetics, as evident in tensions between Modernism and Minimalism in the visual arts in the 1960s. Brannigan describes the course as “running the gamut from short, blog-type reviews to quite dense, high-end reviewing and writing, which is why the seminars are quite long. We need to spend time with the writing and what we’re reading.”

Brannigan tells me that Reviewing the Arts attracted 40 students, “a good number for a first time course. It has potential but I don’t want it to grow too huge because I like the intimacy of the writing workshops and being able to be across everybody. If it attracts Media students, we’ll look at including audio and video reviewing.” We end the interview concurring that specialised artform and genre knowledge is vital to reviewing but that looking beyond one’s niche is critical, and that’s what this course offers.

Doing a course in art reviewing not only broadens horizons. The act of translation from experience into words for an audience of readers deepens aesthetic and critical responses, as any experienced reviewer will attest. Not every student will become a reviewer, but as the course description puts it, “Reviewing the Arts supports those of you who may find yourselves in arts administrative and freelance/portfolio careers where writing for and about the arts plays a central role.” I’d like to think that the course will generate new reviewers and, in the long-term, new ways and kinds of reviewing.

Chris Ryan’s great pleasure in teaching and directing is evident at every stage of our discussion about the courses he and his colleagues conduct in Performance and Theatre in the University of Wollongong’s School of the Arts, English and Media. He says it’s about taking students “into the unknown” in an era of pervasive social media “where not having some sort of integrity in just being can interfere in what it is to perform.”

Ryan’s accomplished fellow staff are Professor Sarah Miller, Head of School of the Arts, English and Media, a writer, producer and curator; Janys Hayes, Lecturer in Theatre and Performance and theatre director; Tim Maddock, Lecturer in Theatre and Performance, director and designer; and Catherine McKinnon, Lecturer in Writing, Theatre and Performance and novelist, playwright and director. Ryan is Lecturer in Theatre and Performance, a director and dramaturg. Postgraduate scholars include some key figures from Sydney’s performance scene: Malcolm Whittaker, Deborah Pollard, Nikki Heyward, Eleanor Brickhill and Nigel Kellaway, while tutors include Pollard, Linda Luke and Matt Prest.

Independence & ensemble

I associate the University of Wollongong with inventive, idiosyncratic, independent artists—the ensembles Team MESS and Appelspiel and individual performance makers like Malcolm Whittaker and Nat Randall. I ask Ryan why this is so. “Because,” he says, “our students get to work with a lot of independent artists and the post-dramatic world has really shifted the nature of training.”

He emphasises the importance of ensemble—“how you encourage students to be responsible for the whole work. It comes from task-based responsibility”—and the benefit of working in “a very trusting climate” at UOW. He also says that he and his fellow teachers engage about their work with students in “a dialogue that goes on beyond the rehearsal room,” providing a shared view of student development. As well, students commit themselves contractually to courses and productions. It’s not surprising then that UOW graduates are notable collaborators and facilitators—Ryan reels off examples, which we’ll come to later. He believes that independence comes from the way courses and productions are structured.

I ask how a teacher can generate a sense of ensemble. “With a cast of say eight to 15, it’s group dynamics and really we can have no control over it, but we expose everyone to the pragmatics of mounting a production. I’ll often ask, what do we need to do to get this show on; including things like, what to do about absences from rehearsals?” Dynamics will vary: “Each production has its own way of working.”

Process & progress

I ask how students prepare to work on a play. Research comes first, “with Bachelor of Performance students in their second year working in pairs on plays for two to three weeks and then presenting their findings—the cultural undercurrents, the politics, the life of the writer. A base in research gives you choices.”

Is there much subsequent discussion once work has begun? “Not a lot of talk. I say, put your thoughts online so I can see what you’re thinking. Do, Do. Do.” At the same time Ryan ranks reflection highly, “asking course tutors—the fellow artists we bring in—to encourage it, for example to make students do a score: detailed documentation of their journey through an evolving production. In the bigger picture, it becomes, “Take time off and look at what you’ve done and ask does it fit with why you’re here.”

Ways of working: dramatic & post-dramatic

Students are exposed to a range of plays, adaptations and ways of working. Ryan cites a third year production in which director Deborah Pollard had students read Alan Seymour’s Australian classic The One Day of the Year (1958) and use it as a jumping-off point for creating a performance that “managed to merge the ‘rage cultures’ of the Melbourne Cup, the Cronulla Riots and Anzac Day.”

Ryan himself relishes having someone rewrite or adapt a classic: “then you can do the post-dramatic thing, looking at and making choices.” Alex Tutton, a 2012 graduate of the UOW Bachelor of Performance program, has adapted the Frank Wedekind plays Franziska and Spring Awakening for Ryan. The latter became Teenage Wildlife. Now the pair are working on a version of the Lulu plays. Ryan underlines the value of the teaching model of “having the writer in the room,” and one who is pedagogically aware. Tutton, he says, “pops in once a week to rehearsals and often gets on the floor, directs and answers students’ questions.”

Another kind of experience comes from having a play written for the students. Cath McKinnon, herself a playwright, brings writers to the course. “Tom Holloway came with a concept for Lyrebird, saw the students he was writing for, went off to write, came back several times, right up to changing the ending. About texting and sexting in the last two years of high school, it was the perfect play for students.”

Very different works, says Ryan, come with Linda Luke, tutor, Body Weather exponent and performance maker, in her “pulling apart Bergman’s Through A Glass Darkly, The Seventh Seal and Persona or doing Jenny Kemp’s Still Angela. Each of our productions are totally different animals.”

Luke and Ryan (Feldenkrais) share movement teaching for second year students. Ryan especially “likes to use fight choreography. It’s a, b, c and you’ve got to be safe and you’ve got to act on top of that. So it’s actually quite difficult. Get fit. Watch The Bourne Identity!” Then there’s training in voice and singing. It’s the responsibility of the students to put their skills together in their own tool box. You can’t do that for them.”

UOW doesn’t offer a directing course per se, which hasn’t prevented graduates from making significant work, like Jackson Davis and the re:group collective’s Lovely, a tribute to the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, or the creations of Team MESS. Lovely (read the RealTime review) was a masterful choreographing of swirling bodies, props and cameras, which as Ryan observes, “meant that everyone was right on the same page.”

There is a mentoring program for students who want to direct as part of their final year and opportunities to direct in SIP—Student Initiated Projects—which is run by Ryan. Applicants propose and are selected to create 20-minute works for which they are responsible for all aspects of production, including front of house, letters of agreement and publicity, guided by Professor Sarah Miller so that students build a sense of what’s involved in being a self-producing artist.

I ask what the works are like. “Interesting and all over the place. Maybe they’re making works of genius? Tim Maddock and I mentor, dropping in and out. One of our current students, Steffani Gardner, has just directed her second SIP production, the first was a devised work mentored by me and the second Vanessa Bates’ Checklist for an Armed Robbery, mentored by Tim.”

When does the course finally come to fruition? Ryan says that he asks of his final-year students, “What is it you want out of this last semester? Write it down. Let’s talk about it. That may be the basis for a scene in the show.” Final year productions, usually text-based such as with Teenage Wildlife and Jackson Davis’ adaptation, Ur-Hamlet, are then staged at PACT Theatre for a welcoming Sydney audience.

Recent graduates at work

We chat about UOW graduates of the last 4-5 years who are appearing in or making a fascinatingly diverse range of productions. Solomon Thomas, says Ryan, “is a bundle of positive energy,” who graduated with Honours in 2013, has worked with My Darling Patricia, touring with The Piper to Edinburgh and now with Erth Visual & Physical Inc to Japan as a puppeteer. Christine Woodhouse (2013) was awarded the PACT BMM Travelling Fellowship which took her to UK, then undertook a development project mentored by Latai Taumoepeau and is currently part of PACT’s Rapid Reponse Team. Cath McNamara (2014) worked on Victoria Hunt’s production, Tangi Wai…the cry of water and also has been working with Erth and was in producer-director Christine Dunstan’s The Defence performed in Sydney and at Perth’s The Blue Room in 2015.

Kevin Ng started out as a youngster at Shopfront Contemporary Arts & Performance in Sydney, trained at UOW and has returned to Shopfront where he recently directed three senior ensemble members— Maud Mitchell, Emma Douglas and Adara Eyre—with Steve Wilson-Alexander, another UOW graduate, in Welcome To My World. Ryan was impressed by Ng’s clever exploitation of the theatre workshop model. Appelspiel’s Nicole Kennedy is the Co-Artistic Director of Crack Theatre Festival 2016, part of Newcastle’s national arts event, This is Not Art (TINA) and Jackson Davis is now a casual teacher at UOW. Nat Randall, of the collectives Team MESS and Hissy Fit has performed solo works, appeared in the UK and in the 2016 Next Wave Festival, which was directed by Georgie Meagher, a former Team MESS collaborator. And Jen Medway is resident dramaturg at the Australian Theatre for Young People (ATYP).

Chris Ryan’s wowed by Canberra science-theatre ensemble Boho Interactive’s The Best Festival Ever: How to Manage a Disaster, which featured in Performing Climates (part of the Performance Studies International 2016 Performance Climates conference in Melbourne after appearing in London and Stockholm and then recently played in Sydney where Ryan saw it (see review). The cast includes UOW alumni and Appelspiel members Nathan Harrison, Rachel Roberts and Nicole Kennedy in a work that interactively sharpens its audience’s minds about managing and changing systems of thought.

Ryan tells me about a new work from Appelspiel (Kennedy, Harrison, Roberts, Emma McManus, Mark Rogers, Troy Reid, Joseph Parro and Simon Binns). Titled Jarrod Duffy Is Not Dead, the performance is based on the disappearance in 2010 of a fellow student two weeks before he was due to perform in an Honours show. The work, supported by Adelaide’s Vitalstatistix through their Adhocracy program and a HotHouse Month in the Country residency, concerns the loss, search and recovery of Jarrod and was seen in development in April this year in Merrigong Theatre Company’s Make it @ Merrigong program.

Ryan says of Appelspiel that “they turned the distance of Wollongong from Sydney to advantage, going to see everything they could in the city and then arguing about it all the way back on the 90-minute train trip. It established the sense of playfulness you see in their work. Seeing them with Boho, I thought, perfect.”

About Chris Ryan: from performer to director & teacher

Although I know of Ryan’s impressive history in his work with the Sydney Front, version 1.0, PACT productions and numerous outside-eye roles, I’m curious about his background. He tells me he nursed in Adelaide for a few years, directed the annual hospital review and then left that career behind, attending movement classes run by the legendary Madam Zora Semberova (1913-2012) who had just left Flinders University and set up a studio in the back of her home to teach mime and movement. “Her practice was not always…pleasant but hugely influential, not only physically but visually. I’m a bit dyslexic but the advantage is that I see patterns and structures very easily; that combined with her work has been a great foundation. She’d say, ‘You have the jellyfish buttocks.’ At 6pm would lock out anyone who was late for class.”

He then worked with director Gale Edwards’ company Energy Connection before moving to Sydney where he took classes with Kinetic Energy and made use of tuition and space made available to performers by the One Extra Dance Company. He also encountered Richard Lawton, ex-KISS: Theatre Research Company, Rotterdam. In 1985 a performer pulled out of a One Extra production, so Ryan was invited to join Clare Grant, John Baylis, Roz Hervey and Julie-Anne Long in Dinosaur (1985), a highly structured, improvisation-based work directed by One Extra choreographer Rhys Martin, who had worked with the Reinhild Hoffman’s dance theatre ensemble in Germany. The work featured music by Elena Kats Chernin. The Dinosaur experience, says Ryan, in part triggered the formation of The Sydney Front with Ryan, Grant, Baylis and Hervey among its initial members (the company’s works are available on DVD or for streaming from artfilms as is Clare Grant’s documentary Staging the Audience: The Sydney Front).

Ryan cites Clare Grant as a significant influence on his teaching, visiting her performance classes at UNSW, where she taught and is now an Honorary Lecturer, and observing her “incredibly generous ways of working with a group and seeing her pull something out of an impro that I didn’t see coming. And then there is our ongoing conversation about the pedagogy of performance making.”

After The Sydney Front disbanded in 1994, Ryan became Artistic Director of PACT Theatre (1997-99) and set up the IMPACT Ensemble. After which he taught movement classes and “hung out with PACT directors Regina Heilmann and Chris Murphy as outside eye.” He taught at ACTT (Actors College of Theatre and Television, now AFTT, Academy of Film Theatre and Television) as a movement tutor and was involved in the early years of version 1.0, one of the most significant Australian performance ensembles of the last two decades.

I ask Ryan about the move from the performance scene (where he continues to make notable contributions) into the academy. He tells me, “I felt I’d lost my mojo for performance over a couple of years and then Tim Maddock approached me to teach at UOW. It felt serendipitous ‘to put up my ballet shoes’ and teach.” Many are the students and graduates grateful that he did.

For details about the University of Wollongong’s School of the Arts, English and Media Bachelor of Performance and Bachelor of Creative Arts (Theatre) degree programs, visit the website.

Imagine wading ankle-deep in mud for 300 metres only to be blinded by floodlights and greeted by a herd of bleating sheep and a passionate, rain-drenched festival crowd singing the chorus of “Jolene” accompanied by Dolly Parton on acoustic guitar. This is the emotionally charged and comically chaotic finale to The Best Festival Ever, an interactive performance work in which the audience addresses the ecological viability of an outdoor musical extravaganza and how it came to be so vulnerable to the elements.

Thankfully for us, seated around a green-felted banquet table, the festival manifests as a collection of miniature figurines, plastic toy trucks and wooden blocks strewn across a scaled-down representation of sprawling cattle farmlands.

Billed as “part-theatre show, performance lecture and board game,” this immersive experience is a Boalian exercise in confronting the ecological impact of collective decision-making and the brainchild of an alliance between two distinct interdisciplinary collectives, Boho Interactive and Applespiel. Boho is represented by theatre-maker David Finnigan and science writer David Shaw who provide the directorial and scientific framework drawn from their research into game theory and systems science, while Appelspiel display the ‘rockumentary’ credentials they established in Appelspiel Make a Band and Take on the Recording Industry. Putting together a music festival provides the narrative scaffolding for a board game punctuated with instructive climate science sound bites in a fast-moving 80-minute production.

Appelspiel’s Nathan Harrison, Nikki Kennedy and Rachel Roberts serve as a tight team of presenters, straddling the duties of game hosts and lecturers while recounting the emergence of the festival through the experience of three avatars: Valerie Kay, an emerging festival producer; Liz Hausman, a local independent musician looking for one final taste of guitar heroics on the eve of enlisting in the army; and Eliot Bulson, the hyped-up festival-goer who works at the local carwash, who helps measure patron experience and is a subtle romantic foil. Audience members are occasionally called upon to be scene partners with prepared dialogue cards to read from.

Tightly-timed and stress-inducing tasks are administered as we build the festival, while being reminded of the scoring system in which we can win “happy festival goer” figurines and avoid accumulating miniature garbage bags which signal negative environmental impact. When bags outnumber figurines, the festival is deemed a failure and vice versa a success.

The first act takes the audience through the early stages of project management. We begin with a festival programming exercise that is tied to a sponsorship procurement that involves keeping mini-barrels balanced on an inverted umbrella through which we summon the unholy trinity of News Corp, Uber and Nintendo to pledge cash for Parton and her support acts, generically named the “aging 90s band” and “YouTube Sensation.” We are swiftly directed to unlock wooden blocks with coloured dice in order to accumulate resources—food stalls, roads, toilets and smaller stages—all the while considering patron and vehicular egress. After Parton’s likeness is displayed at the head of the table in what has been designated as the main stage, the rest of the lush farmland undergoes transformation.

With the festival underway, we are reminded to consider the environmental impact of the volume of patrons and the catering businesses, our instructors take us through an adrenalin-inducing game of waste collection and management up and down the site.

Bite-sized lectures—revealing links between energy consumption, waste and pollution feedback loops and impact on the farmland—allow us to catch our breath and reflect on the complex analogous relationship between event management and the ongoing climate crisis. These scientific adbreaks do not detract from the denouement, an extreme weather event that triggers a fraught evacuation plan. Sweeping through the festival site, the violent storm threatens to wipe out the farmer’s livestock, destroy the patrons’ camping gear or drain generators meant for other performances but now diverted to rescue efforts.

The big unknown we are asked to invest in is whether Dolly Parton will fulfill her role as festival saviour. In the end, campers are left without their temporary shelter, but it’s all worth it. We end up with more happy patrons than garbage bags.

Heaving a collective sigh of relief, we are gently led into a post-show discussion with climate ecologist Linda Beaumont from Macquarie University, whom the artists call upon to report on the real world application of systems science and game theory to illustrate the fragility of our habitat and our part in it.

Boho Interactive, The Best Festival Ever, How To Manage A Disaster; 107 Projects, Sydney, 22-23 July

Emma Serjeant’s new work appears heartbreakingly simple, exploring the last five seconds in the life of a woman named Grace. The work feels as much dance theatre as circus with a hypnotic soundscape, swirling, cloudy video projections and the narration of those last seconds as Grace faces the oncoming truck that will inevitably kill her.

As noted in my RealTime interview about Grace, Serjeant is part of a close-knit circus community in Brisbane and has had a long career with much international acclaim. The work emphatically signals a new direction for this talented performer and a new collaboration with UK-based improvisation and ensemble director John Britton (DUENDE), composer Ben Ely (formerly of Brisbane 1990s band Regurgitator) and lighting and video designer Penny Cunningham.

There is, as always, Serjeant’s trademark circus virtuosity in her work with aerial rings, balancing apparatus, a sequence where she stands on wooden planks laid on treacherous looking assorted glass bottles and an impressive contorted, repetitive floor routine. These are the heart of the show alongside an extraordinary sequence where she falls, smashes weightlessly onto the ground only to bounce up again and again while chanting a final sing-song monologue that charts Grace’s thoughts as she faces death. This routine is repeated across the work, building to climactic intensity in the final dramatic sequence where Grace ascends her tight silver aerial ring up to the top of the theatre space to hang askew above us.

The childlike candour of Serjeant’s delivery is beguiling. With her charisma marshalled alongside the physically arresting splendour of the floor routine—teetering on the brink of contemporary dance—Grace is a mesmerising exploration of inner psychology through physical form. However, the two monologues about Grace’s childhood and her fear of monogamy suffer from a paucity of physical movement, feeling more like easy naturalism rather than offering genuine insight.

I longed for a heady cocktail of words and movement to experience the full intensity of this portrait of a woman in transition from life to death. A penultimate sequence, that involved taking Polaroid photos of the audience and wrapping us and the stage in police tape, felt like padding rather than the deeper and more difficult work of pushing the boundaries of form evident in more successful scenes.

While individual elements of Grace were admirable, including Cunningham’s ambient video and intimate lighting and Ely’s eclectic soundtrack with its trademark catchy riffs, somehow the work didn’t quite knit together. What was clear was Emma Serjeant’s ambition to make an arresting hybrid: a meld of voice, video, music and physical form that sits somewhere between theatre, contemporary dance and circus with the potential to cement Serjeant’s reputation as a brave and ever evolving artist.

Grace, performer Emma Serjeant, creator-writers John Britton, Emma Serjeant, director John Britton, composer Ben Ely, lighting, video designer Penny Cunningham; Judith Wright Centre, Brisbane, 27-30 July

Basin is a play about a fictional town of that name where a man-made lake has been diminishing as a result of drought and an older town revealed as the water recedes—as happened in the Snowy Mountains town of Adaminaby when Lake Eucumbene evaporated during last decade’s drought such that the foundations of the old pre-dam town became visible. The imaginary Basin is also reminiscent of Lake Jindabyne, another dam site in the Snowy Mountains and the setting for a film (director Ray Lawrence, 2006) where the lake took on a menacing character, as the Australian landscape does in so many stories.

It’s neat that the title Basin refers to a fictional town but also a much bigger geographic area, such as the Murray Darling Basin. The fluid in this vessel is water, the subject given to the seven writers in this Eastern Riverina Arts project. Director Scott Howie’s set design reflects the writing with seven bowl-like basins circling the stage. In the middle sits an empty rowboat that unnerves the locals. At first it’s covered with a sheet as though unneeded during the drought but later used for a refugee to tell of her sea journey to Australia.

Basin is populated with a variety of characters reflecting the demography of regional Australia: mostly older people but with a new arrival, the refugee Lily who provides contrast and holds a metaphorical mirror up to the society. With slight adjustments to costumes—unbuttoning a shirt or adding a headscarf—and subtle changes of facial expression, the capable cast of three play multiple characters in stories more tragic than comic, including a number of deaths, caused not by drought but by drowning. The lowering of the lake’s water level triggers dark recollections. With set and seating positioned on the stage of the Wagga Wagga Regional Theatre, this touring production was intimate—the actors within a few metres of us and firmly in focus.

If you’ve ever lived in a country town, the difference from living in a city is the feeling that everyone knows everyone else’s business. It’s through conversations that the stories of Basin are told—of old affairs, love denied, a suicide by drowning, another by accident—along with expressions of fear and admissions of feelings of guilt. Robert delivers Meals on Wheels to the older residents, Arnie and Patsy, who gossip about each other. Mary misses her drowned brother. Jacob, who talks to the lake, worries that this death was caused by the lake being insulted when dammed—not so crazy if you’ve seen prayers made public in periods of extended drought.

Eastern Riverina Arts’ CEO Officer Scott Howie developed the project with Newcastle-based playwright Vanessa Bates. “She had to develop a model which allowed for seven writers to write rather than sit around and talk about what to write,” he explained. “By the third workshop none of us really knew what the play was. Then Vanessa deftly explained a structure that fitted. There were pages and pages of writing left on the floor. The workshops included the writing of monologues, but once the characters started interacting, the writers had to let go a little of theirs and let the others write them.”

The ‘water’ theme was realised from various perspectives, but I wanted the lake to feature more strongly and with a more consistent character, like the landscape in Picnic at Hanging Rock. It would have made Basin more cogent. However, the short scenes resonated strongly, both for their dramatic impact and sense of authenticity. Six of the writers live in country towns and a couple of the names I recognised as published novelists. Basin defies the adage that “too many cooks spoil the broth” with a succinct and well-paced production that reveals concerns that lie beneath the surface of regional Australia.

After its eight-town tour of the the Riverina, Basin will next be performed in Dubbo at the Artlands 2016 National Regional Arts Conference and Festival, 27-30 October.

Eastern Riverina Arts, Basin, project playwright Vanessa Bates, writers Marty Boyle, Diana Lovett, David O’Sullivan, John Riddell, Sulari Gentill, Freda Marnie Nicholls, Craig Palmer, director, designer Scott Howie, performers Virginia Anderson, Haya Arzidin, Stephen Holt, lighting design Sophie Kurylowicz, sound design Dave Burraston, textiles Julie Montgarrett; Wagga Wagga Regional Theatre, 23 July

To describe an artist as self-indulgent is one of the harshest forms of dismissal. Most other slurs are directed at the work itself: to decry its excessive length or muddled premise or cliches is only to criticise its maker in an indirect fashion. To call it self-indulgent, however, is to tie its faults back to those of its creator. It’s a self-reflexive criticism, of course. Pretty much all art involves the interests, obsessions or idiosyncracies of the artist. To label only some works ‘self-indulgent’ is to reveal that you don’t share those concerns or would never express them in such a way.

Zoey Dawson, Conviction

Zoey Dawson certainly isn’t the first artist to make a work about herself, but Conviction got me wondering whether self-indulgence can be a potent tool. I’d heard someone call the work self-indulgent prior to seeing it myself; thankfully this didn’t colour my experience, since one of the production’s many fascinations is its overt and explicit foregrounding of the very notion of self-indulgence.

The piece begins with a fairly overwrought scenario set in Australia’s convict days. A young woman and her mother attempt to establish their life in the colonies with the help of a handsome military officer and an earnest worker from the lower classes. There’s an overlay of unreality to it all, though, that goes beyond the slightly-too-loud sound design, the is-that-wall-swaying set and the occasionally ham-fisted performances. It’s almost a camp take on the colonial genre—and it bears obvious similarities to director Declan Greene’s outrageous burlesque on that genre, The Sovereign Wife (2013)—but at the same time it seems to be camping camp itself, denying us the twin comforts of knowing superiority and affectionate recognition afforded by camp in favour of radically destabilised viewing.

This becomes more literal as the young woman’s plight is infused with the problems of a middle-class 20-something today. Baulking at the idea of teaching (she’d have to work with orphans) or nursing (ditto sex workers) she decides to become a writer, that most selfish of roles. She drunkenly quizzes her mother before declaring the results: “You got Carrie Bradshaw!” and soon enough the artifice of her situation physically dissolves to leave her sucking bongs on a sharehouse couch in contemporary Australia.

Dawson’s program notes make it clear that an impulse to write a ‘proper’ play about important subjects such as women’s colonial experience was never going to entirely jibe with her own practice, and this work would be a mess if it simply ended in the playwright’s living room. It really just starts there, however, and the next hour torpedoes through kitchen sink realism, post-apocalyptic horror, adventure tale, meta-theatrical implosion and a recursive looping back to the work’s opening. And it’s all wonderfully self-indulgent.

Perhaps one of the funniest tiny details I’ve ever spotted in a live production comes when the wallpaper projected onto the set’s rear is replaced by a computer desktop and we see an image search for an Australian landscape bring up the autofilled text “Australia Council” for a fraction of a second. Of course a theatremaker’s browser has searched those words before. Why should that be omitted from this story?

Conviction doesn’t try to paint its writer in an attractive light—her self-absorption and inability to act ultimately leave her grizzling like a helpless baby in a nightmare deathscape. But that’s a depiction of the playwright’s avatar as much as any flattering fantasy would be, too. The question posed here is whether work that is unashamedly self-interested can be just as engaging as work that is more circumspect about the process. Rather than bringing everything back to Dawson in a solipsistic manner, Conviction presents an artist pulling herself apart at the seams, and it’s telling that its playwright, who seems so central to the production, is only actually present in it via a very brief, ironic and presumably prerecorded voiceover in its final moments.

THE RABBLE, Cain and Abel

It’s easy to imagine a newcomer to THE RABBLE’s work writing off its latest production, Cain and Abel, as self-indulgence taken to the extreme. Over the years the company has proven itself increasingly confident in erasing obvious appeals to the common denominators that usually signal ‘proper’ art. Its adaptations of classic literature can appear to bear no resemblance to their source, and aesthetic choices can seem based on a logic impenetrable to an outsider. Most absent is an authorial voice, something declaring ‘and this is why this work is important.’ With Cain and Abel, the results are electrifying.

Long-time RABBLE regulars Dana Miltins and Mary Helen Sassman respectively play the Biblical brothers of the work’s title. Cain kills Abel (spoiler) again and again in a succession of vignettes that evoke different associations. One draws on the realities of domestic violence as Miltins interrogates and murders Sassman over a stove; another conjures the abject violence meted out to women in cinema and television. The design is clinical and dazzling, the blood spatters and gore visceral in contrast.

Sex and gender are central here—two women are playing two men, but it’s unclear at what level, or if they’re ever, playing ‘men.’ On a surface level there are no reliable indicators of gender at all, even though they’re everywhere. Is that menstrual blood? Is the domestic abuser necessarily male? At the same time, the very fact that these roles are being enacted by women screams out for interpretation. Co-creators and company founders Kate Davis and Emma Valente produce particularly vicious scenes of butchery here, but it’s unmoored by anything approaching overt condemnation.

One possibility is that Cain and Abel requires that we fill the deliberate void of meaning it produces—that the audience is God, in a sense, making us at least in part responsible for the violence we’re witnessing (and the sacrifices we’re demanding). Another is that the audience is made conscious that theatre is not the communal sharing of space and time it’s so often touted as, but is just as much a fantasy of private voyeurism, that what we make of this work is finally saying something about ourselves.

I found yet another entry point in the way that ‘nature’ and the ‘natural’ were mentioned several times in the work: “It seems natural…” “Naturally…” The aesthetics of Cain and Abel are so heightened that these phrases stand out. What, in all of this, is natural? Is human violence natural? Is male violence, especially, somehow part of nature? By denaturalising this foundational myth, THE RABBLE make the constructedness of cultural assumptions on these matters more apparent, but by leaving open-ended the answers Cain and Abel puts our own complicity in determining them out there on the stage.

Darebin Arts Speakeasy & The Zoey Louise Moonbeam Dawson Shakespeare Company, Conviction, writer Zoey Dawson, director, dramaturg Declan Greene, performers Ruby Hughes, Caroline Lee, Dushan Phillips, Troy Reid, design Romanie Harper, lighting Amelia Lever-Davidson, sound design James Paul; Northcote Town Hall, 21 July-6 Aug; THE RABBLE, Cain and Abel, co-creators Kate Davis, Emma Valente, director, lighting, sound design Emma Valente, design Kate Davis, AV/video design Meg Wilson, Emma Valente, Kate Davis, performers Dana Miltins and Mary Helen Sassman; The Substation, Melbourne, 20-30 July

“So you want to be a critic? Isn’t there a conflict of interest?” Or so I’ve been asked, since starting to write.

This conflict of interest—between someone who dances and someone who thinks deeply about dance and writes about it—rings true as long as dancers are perceived as merely physical agents, incapable of deep scrutiny, and critics as crotchety outsiders.

Regardless, popular logic agrees: artists and critics are rivals. Criticism (reflection) is secondary, while art (experience) is primary. Certainly most criticism assumes a secondary position, directly responsive to someone else’s art. What about a criticism in which the primary subject is the critic, observing the critical mind in a Proustian way, whereby “the seeker is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking?”

…here Matthew Goulish in 39 Microlectures: In Proximity of Performance (2000): “If a critic believes in his or her own power to cause a change in audience thinking, that critic lives in delusion. Any changes of this kind are peripheral effects of a more central event. Criticism only consistently changes the critic—whether further narrowing the views of the art policeman, or incrementally expanding the horizons of the open-minded thinker. If we accept this severe limitation—that in fact the first function of criticism is to cause a change in the critic—then we may begin to act accordingly.”

Criticism at its most enthralling, is more like a thought process rendered than a judgement delivered. The critical mind arrives on the page structured, the order of words fixed, linear. This form is a necessary part of the translation: “to preserve the works of the mind against oblivion” (Coleridge and Valéry). The mind itself however abounds with contradictions, tangents, multiple voices, fog.

Thought process is action. Can writing be said to be in action? The mind wanders…

…to Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text (1973): “[The text] produces, in me, the best pleasure if it manages to make itself heard indirectly; if, reading it, I am led to look up often, to listen to something else.”

…now Maggie Nelson in The Art of Cruelty (2011): “True moral complexity is rarely found in simple reversals. More often it is found by wading into the swamp, getting intimate with discomfort, and developing an appetite for nuance.”

I’ve never taken to the notion that ‘Opinions are like arseholes; everybody’s got one.’ Just because everyone has an arsehole, doesn’t mean the arsehole is not without its pleasures. Doesn’t everyone also have a face, eyes? Are those features rendered redundant because of our daily encounters with them? And, while everyone may be capable of having an opinion, not everyone is equal in the powers of articulation.

… now Oscar Wilde—flaunting his snobbishness ironically as much as taking himself seriously; an enviable skill—in The Critic as Artist (1891): “More difficult to do a thing than to talk about it? Not at all. That is a gross popular error. It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it.”

All this navel-gazing, this centring of the critic, may also arouse suspicions of snobbery, of self-indulgence. Remembering Goulish’s ideal of the critic as “incrementally expanding the horizons of the open-minded thinker,” I imagine such horizons calling for a vast outward-looking. That in locating myself as a site for change, what I actually reveal is not myself, but the world around me.

…now Eileen Myles in Inferno (A Poet’s Novel; 2010): “‘World’ always just means mind.”

…now David Riesman in The Lonely Crowd (1950): “…of course, one must always ask whether, in changing oneself, one is simply adapting to the world as it is without protest or criticism.”

If a critic becomes the site for change, they must also remain the agent of that change, not merely swaying to culture’s presumptive values. If the disdain for the critic is born of the art policeman’s narrow-mindedness, the adverse risk for the critic is to become so agreeable as to become insignificant, a yes-man. In this era of aggregated scores and Metacritics—of generalised tastes—the critic has an indispensable opportunity to speak for him/herself and dissent from popular opinion, whether by challenging what is routinely lauded or celebrating what is routinely dismissed.

…now Margaret Atwood in Negotiating with the Dead (2002): “There has been a widespread suspicion among writers… that there are two of him sharing the same body, with a hard-to-predict and difficult-to-pinpoint moment during which the one turns into the other… that one half does the living, the other half the writing. As for the artists who are also writers, they are doubles twice times over.”

How to observe the exact moment of writing? Thoughts are collected over time, sparked by conversations, art, unremembered sources. Tenuous connections are made, consciously, or congealing peripherally in such a way as to be indecipherable when looked at directly. Time is needed so that the mind might work its way towards self-comprehension without conscious interference; a picture slowly fading into focus. Ideas that seem self-evident easily fall apart when I try to explain to others. The mind completes one puzzle, then language must complete the same puzzle over again.

Now sitting at the computer: a flurry of typing, fragments of thought all pouring out, sometimes with words I don’t know that I know, this unknown double emerges, needing translation, a clearer phrase found, or a murkier one, another memory, another writer who said it better, cutting and pasting, new meanings created with each rearrangement; and then I read it back and it’s no longer simply my voice. Now the writing talks back to me.

…now Rebecca Hilton (Australian dancer, choreographer), a maverick when it comes to succinct insights about one’s dancing, telling me “You pick up movement very quickly. That means you don’t really have to do the labour of processing the co-ordination internally; it just arrives full-formed, like mimicry.” I’ve since imagined my self-hood as a collage of copied behaviours, borrowed ideas, influences. Which leads to an inescapably philosophical question: What is the essence of a person uninfluenced? Is there even such a thing?

A critic’s opinion is never wholly their own. Might criticism, once translated and expunged from the critic, who has drawn on a multitude of other voices, belong equally to the reader who resuscitates it in the reading, coerced into voicing the writer’s collected thoughts as their own, if only momentarily?

…again Wilde: “The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.”

If all art is quite useless, let’s acknowledge the critic is also useless. That affords some freedom at least. No longer beholden to the burden of functionality (and hopefully not aspiring only to evaluative authority), criticism might now aspire to admiration in the same way the artist does; admiration requiring of the reader a critical mind—the very thing the critic is trying to advocate and cultivate.

…now an older woman, I forget her name, a self-proclaimed veteran of New York dance audiences, telling me “A choreographer has to make a decision. And really what they choose is arbitrary, but you have to pursue the decision so that it can lead you somewhere. And that is when things can get interesting, but still the decision is arbitrary.” I like how counterintuitive that sounds.

…now Connor, a friend, over dinner at my local Nepalese Indian restaurant, in whose company conversations like this are chewed over for hours. I repeat, “An artist has to propose something, they have to make a decision and follow through. And I have always had a conflict with that, the decision moment, the taking of perceived sides, even among the arbitrary.”

Connor says something about power always calling for resistance. (Connor is preoccupied with power, and usually steers the conversation this way.) Wherever authority is claimed, resistance to that authority makes itself known. To consider this conflict, between authority and dissent, within your own thought process, and to make that conflict visible, the doors of a privately-working mind flung open, exposed, in action, risking humiliation and judgement; now here is a celebration of criticism.

…now Keith Gallasch, who edited this piece, suggesting about my first-draft ending that “it does not allow the critic a body of work—surely the writing is a representation of an experience—the review translates one experience into another for the reader, and decisively.” To which I responded, “I will have another look. I think the final paragraph could be clearer, as to my interest in things being decisive without necessarily being wholly conclusive.”

Rennie McDougall is a performer, choreographer and writer, originally from Melbourne, and now living and working in NYC. Rennie currently writes for RealTime and New York performance blog Culturebot. He is currently studying for a Masters of Journalism, Cultural Reporting and Criticism at the Arthur L Carter Journalism Institute at NYU.

Rennie and the Editors thank Sally Smart for allowing us to use an image of her installation The Choreography of Cutting. Rennie sees the image as corresponding to “the critical mind…in a state of movement.”

Performance Studies as a discipline was developed by director Richard Schechner and others out of the crucible of 1960s counter culture. Drawing upon anthropology, the study of ritual and political activism, its masthead The Drama Review was scrutinised by Australians, introducing many to Artaud, Grotowski, Fluxus, Kaprow, Cage, Cunningham, Hijikata, Barba, Kantor and more. Conceived as junctures for artforms, cultures and politics, performance studies institutions have waxed and waned. The University of Sydney’s Performance Studies department recently became Theatre and Performance Studies in a retreat from the formal impartiality long espoused by the discipline’s scholars.

While global in outlook, Performance Studies International has been held predominantly in the northern hemisphere. In 2015, PSI distributed the conference to multiple locations, describing it, with a touch of hyperbole, as “a year-long, globally dispersed and cross-cultural” performance of “UnKnowing.” This year, the conference was held in Australia, hosted by the University of Melbourne.

The challenge addressed by those who attended was nothing less than world climate change and the environment. Ironies abounded, much carbon being burnt to transport us to Melbourne. But then location and locally situated actions were espoused by many as entry points for political efficacy. Samoan poet and writer Albert Wendt’s formulation of the Pacific as an arc of oceanic interconnections between Polynesians and others might exemplify this coincidence of geopolitics and proud provincialism. However, the championing of ‘nomadic’ mobility and digital diasporas so prevalent in the 1990s recedes in the face of Brexit and the hyper-policing of Australia’s and Europe’s national borders.

New Materialism

At the heart of PSI 2016 was a slightly belated acknowledgement of the so-called New Materialism and its centrality to environmentalist alternatives. New Materialism reminds us that matter is never static. Atoms move, objects and systems interact. If we think of things, rocks, animals and systems as co-actors in the world—as subjects, capable of actively doing things; and the weather now is certainly ‘acting on’ us—then perhaps we might become sensitive to what Jane Bennett calls “vibrant matter” and “thing power” (Vibrant Matter: The Ecology of Things, Duke University 2010). Objects and weather systems perform as part of a complex dramaturgy within which we are interwoven, and to which we—like those made ghosts by the Fukushima tsunami—are all subject.

Bruno Latour

Bruno Latour, Professor at Sciences Po, Paris where he is director of Sciences Po médialab and a Centennial Professor in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics, is a founder of the New Materialism and his keynote placed him firmly at the centre of Performance Studies. He recently translated his book We Have Never Been Modern (1991) into Reset Modernity (ZKM, 2016), an exhibition which abounded with uncertain—one might say abject—artworks such as Pierre Huyghe’s Nymphéas Transplant (2014). This was a tank containing murky pond-water harvested from beneath the famous floating lilies of painter Claude Monet’s thoroughly sterilised garden.

Latour insists that art, science and politics must be messily collapsed into each other. Art remains a place to stage the impossible and hence a realm within which to grope towards apprehending anything which eludes our rational control or even our ability to think of it. Latour also cited Tomás Saraceno’s extraordinary installation On Space Time Foam (2015; see video), in which figures clambered awkwardly across fluctuating, clear film-enclosed packages of air located 24 metres above the audience. He noted that passing beneath the piece was terrifying, a reminder of the forces which the atmosphere exerts on us, and which we also influence, as illustrated by the movement of participants above as they pushed gases into fragile new shapes to be negotiated. In 2015, Latour staged a “theatre of negotiation” in Nanterre-Amandier, in which students were invited to participate in a virtual climate conference, lobbying on behalf of non-human assemblages such as swamps. Latour challenges us to experimentally act as if we are “objects,” without seeking to dominate; to be “objective” in thinking about our being and actions, but not in a Cartesian, Rationalist or Instrumentalist fashion.

Peta Tait

Peta Tait, Professor of Theatre and Drama at La Trobe University and a Visiting Professor at the University of Wollongong, extended this notion by proposing Jill Orr’s deliberately ridiculous but oddly moving Antipodean Epic (2015) as an example of performance that elicits a strangeness regarding one’s own subjectivity. Orr squats and cavorts birdlike in a wheat field at sunset, scrabbling in a mound of seed for a nest or perhaps food. Her comic and atypical movements embody, according to Tait, an emotional dysphoria which we cannot place, eliciting a destabilising empathy in audiences. Tait proposes that such aesthetic journeys beyond familiar human emotional expression unsettle our tendency to separate ourselves from the mise en scène we inhabit. We share performance networks with non-human actors.

My own contribution to the conference consisted of a call to move beyond thinking of “site-specific” performances and to identify sites—especially resonant and unknowable historical sites such as the Ring of Brodgar stone circle in far north Scotland—which themselves ‘perform,’ oscillating between filling us with a sense of their pregnant presence and rich history and then evaporating into the very absence of this history, now signified only by the tangible, haptic surfaces of turf and stone. Sites here not only provide stages, but also actors, who come and go as audiences move through their spaces.

Richard Frankland

Richard Frankland, Aboriginal singer/songwriter, author, filmmaker and Head of Curriculum and Programs at the Wilin Centre for Indigenous Arts and Cultural Development, interrupted such reveries by reminding delegates that when Indigenous Australians are asked to discuss climate change, or to share the sense that many have of their country as brimming with potent, tangible spiritual presences, most have more immediate social matters foremost in their minds. He offered an account of the Cultural Safety workshops he runs, dramatising in devastatingly simple terms the “cultural load” most Indigenous people carry, from the horrific regularity of funerals through to conflicts in negotiating land rights claims (who can make what claims on whose behalf), to the need to support and care for relatives and to deal with high levels of home invasions and assaults and interruptions to work and the financial stresses which arise from such unpredictable disturbances.

Frankland ran through three prerequisites for enabling Indigenous peoples to become the cultural leaders they should be, across all fields. Firstly, we need to move beyond viewing Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders as an “undifferentiated Other,” in the words of activist and historian Marcia Langton. Secondly, as historian Patrick Wolfe put it, colonisation is a process which continues beyond initial violence and the appropriation of lands. To put colonisation to rest one might begin with basic rituals honoring the dead. Thirdly, we must find a way to make home actually be “home” for displaced and harried Indigenous people.

Rebecca Schneider

Rebecca Schneider, Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University, USA, too insisted on the racial implications involved in thinking about the environments within which we are embedded. She described imaginatively touching the ancient handprints emblazoned on the walls of Pech Merle in France (comparatively modern interventions compared with Australia’s, though coincident with the Brodgar stone circle). She identified their authors as hailing her. This gesture of greeting “inaugurates a relation” through call and response. It acts across distances of time between two subjects and generates distinction as palm is placed against stony palm. In touching the hand or the rock, we come to see that we stand apart from the other. Schneider claims that “performance is another word for the intervallic.” It acts across spaces between bodies or things, encouraging us to recognise alterity even as we empathise across it. The interval is the space of performance, which can be violent, as when US police execute black men for allegedly failing to respond to their hailing. Schneider nevertheless insists that because such calls act across distance, free exchange is possible.

From an environmental perspective, we must attend to these spaces of distance. The Pech Merle “performances,” and those of the modern woods above the caves, generate “cross-registers of time,” of things and events which act at different paces: mosquito time, rock time. Schneider argues that dramaturgical reflection enables us to encounter radical distinction. It is not only police who hail us, but protesters. On the streets, they call out “black lives matter” and by recognising such hailing we reconfigure relations between entities, groupings and populations.

Schneider’s model of performance is characterised by fissures at the fault-line of interaction. I am tempted to call it dialectical. It is based not only on immediacy, but also distance and reflection; on touching, as well as on drawing away. Schneider warns us that possibly uncritical celebrations of “liveness” and physical immediacy might be complicit with Capitalist exploitation. Capital also seeks to animate the world as ever moving, labouring bodies and productive systems. An intervallic pause might be what is required. Schneider’s keynote was a virtuosic rhetorical display, as much speculative poetry as academic analysis, providing a striking example of how metaphor might be deployed by artists and commentators to enchant and critique the world.

Performance Studies International 2016, No 22: Performance Climates. Keynote speakers: Bruno Latour (France), Peta Tait (Australia), Richard Frankland (Australia/Gunditjmara), Rebecca Schneider (USA). Conference convenor: Eddie Paterson & committee; University of Melbourne, Meat Market and Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, 5-9 July

A Perfect Specimen is a new work by young WA playwright Nathaniel Moncrieff. It portrays “human oddity” Julia Pastrana, an indigenous Mexican woman who suffered hypertrichosis and was exhibited as a “human ape” due to her thick facial features, heavy jaw and beard. Pastrana died shortly after giving birth in 1860 while touring Russia with her husband, impresario Theodore Lent who toured on with the mummified bodies of Pastrana and her child.

Pastrana’s remains were still on display in 1976, when they were stolen and vandalised. She was laid to rest in Mexico 2013 at the intervention of artist Laura Barbata who was prompted by her sister Kathleen Culebro’s staging of Shaun Prendergast’s 1989 play The True History of the Tragic Life and Triumphant Death of Julia Pastrana, the Ugliest Woman in the World. [A musical, Pastrana, by Australian writers Allan McFadden and Peter Northwood was performed by Melbourne’s Church Theatre in 1989. Eds]

Such human exhibits have attracted theatre-makers since Bernard Pomerance’s Elephant Man (1977). Their frequently tragic lives offer an opportunity to explore the darker side of theatre’s love of spectacle and display, while the relationship between ‘freaks,’ their managers and the public, is typically shown to be tangled. In Pastrana’s case, although Lent was domineering and controlling, the couple did have a child together. Lent later married Marie Bartel, who shared Pastrana’s condition, and they too toured. The pair settled in St Petersburg around 1880 before Lent became mad, dying in 1884. Bartel however remarried and toured with the bodies of Julia and Julia’s son, becoming an impresario in her own right.

Tangled passions also characterise Suzan-Lori Parks’ superb 1996 play Venus, which the playwright calls “a tale of love.” Critic Karen Kornweibel notes that the audience sees how Venus’ subject, Saartjie Baartman, was “singularly ‘unloved’” by history (South Atlantic Review Vol 74, 3, 2009). In the play The Venus Hottentot, as Baartman was publicly known, is constantly crying out for recognition—to be loved, to be touched and, in the last line of the play, to be kissed.” The attentions she receives however do constitute a kind of love, inadequate as it may be.

Adriane Daff embodies well the slight, high-voiced woman who comes to occupy both the centre and the margins of the play’s narrative. Pastrana does little other than tragically endure her lot, intermittently protesting to Lent and imploring him to spend the night with her again—which he refuses. Pastrana’s otherness is initially signalled by a veil and beautiful embroidered costume, ironically allying her with the famous “Circassian beauties” exhibited throughout the 1860s. The Circassians supposedly represented a remnant of the original white race which was said to have come out of the Caucasus. The veil here however is soon removed, highlighting how in all other respects Pastrana was graceful and ordinary. Nevertheless, the lack of a visual signifier in director Stuart Halusz’s staging, unlike the comically enlarged buttocks with which Parks’ Venus is usually equipped, renders Pastrana if anything too ordinary. But Pastrana is not the freak on display: rather it is Lent.

The play alternates between scenes in which Lent (Luke Hewitt) encounters various moral and philosophical interjectors: his wife, a small town Russian doctor (Igor Sas), his trapezist lover Marian Trumbull (Rebecca Davis) and business partner Cornell Wurlitzer (Greg McNeill). In between, Lent delivers bleak monologues. Lit from above in dark blue, heavy draped curtains of the show-tent behind him, he stands centre-stage like someone about to be drawn into an infernal pit below. His deeply resonant, basso-profundo voice and heavily marked out bags beneath his eyes, give these interludes the sense of dark truth-telling by a man who has seen his share of evil. Lent describes the horrible, aberrant appearance of his wife and her mummified remains, and how this may instruct us as to the cruelty of evolution and of God.

The slightly static staging and dialectal mode of the intervening scenes means that much of the dramaturgical force resides in vocalisation. Hewitt’s gravelly growl partners well with Greg McNeill’s heavily accented, lilting delivery in his portrayal of Wurlitzer. While Wurlitzer will only scrabble so far in the professional showman game, Lent transcends his own limits. The back and forth between Lent as carnie promoter and his more ambiguous demeanour in the dialogue scenes keeps alive the possibility that he might not believe the words he recites or the role he plays; that he might truly love his “beastly” wife. The play effectively, if perhaps predictably, charts his apparent loss of compassion.

The play closes with a meeting between Wurlitzer, now in charge of his own troupe, and the Russian doctor. Wurlitzer relates Lent’s fate, but has no time to converse further. A snowstorm threatens, and these characters too disappear into the chilly whiteness of the past. It is a slightly trite but nevertheless visually superb tableau on which to end Moncrieff’s modern-day morality tale.

Black Swan State Theatre Company: A Perfect Specimen, writer Nathaniel Moncrieff, director Stuart Halusz, performers Adriane Daff, Luke Hewitt, Greg McNeill, Igor Sas, Rebecca Davis, set design Frances Danckert, lighting Joe Lui, sound Brett Smith, costumes Lynn Ferguson; Studio Underground, WA State Theatre Centre, Perth, 30 Jun-17 July

Over four years the Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music has grown a committed audience with its unique combination of ambitious contemporary music, community engagement and affordable or free ticketing. During the highly-anticipated weekend, Bendigo’s historic performance spaces come alive with some of the finest performances of contemporary music from Australia and abroad.

Each part of the festival has its own flavour, from the inevitably sold-out solo showcases in the historic Old Fire Station to rare, large-scale contemporary masterworks in the Goldrush-era Capitol Theatre, performances by internationally renowned visiting ensembles in the superb new Ulumbarra Theatre (built into and around the former Sandhurst Gaol), intimate performance lectures and a bespoke acousmatic sound projection space.

It’s a lot to take in over three days, but the exploratory spirit runs high and stays with you for weeks. This year BIFEM looks bigger than ever and hopes to become an international cultural exporter. Artistic Director David Chisholm spoke with me about what’s in store this September.

In the first year we had 42 musicians and this year we have 120. It’s insane. It’s a completely different scale of event.

Part of that scale comes from increasing the size of your house band, the Argonaut Ensemble.

That, and the ELISION ensemble’s collaboration with ANAM (Australian National Academy of Music), as well as having 40 musicians from the Bendigo Symphony Orchestra performing the festival’s grand finale, André and Michel Décosterd’s PHO:TON. The orchestra is arranged in rows on stage and when a light shines on a particular musician they play a module. The lights are triggered by a digital piano. You never hear it but somehow the work is like a giant organ console that plays people with lights. It’s a beautiful amalgam of what grand organ writing originally was: a symphonic substitute. The patterns are beautiful and even though some of the modules for the musicians are single notes, it is very effective as a half-hour work.

In the program you say that the piece “completely reframes the traditional orchestral concert experience” and sometimes people will do this by opening a bar or playing the Lord of the Rings soundtrack, but here you’re really doing it.

That’s right! One of the Décosterd brothers is an industrial designer and the other is a designer and composer and their father is an engineer as well. They grew up in La-Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland, which is Clock-Making Central. You can think of this work like a cuckoo-clock. There is something so precise and patterned about it, something so Swiss. They look at the symphonic orchestral experience through the lens of a visual medium and that is true reinvention. I haven’t seen anything like it. There are no sconce lights on the music stands so the music really appears out of darkness. It’s like looking at a Flemish master’s painting, but instead of a bowl of fruit or a face appearing out of dark clothing, you get a musician and sound. It’s very clever.

The Décosterd brothers specifically asked for the Bendigo Symphony to work on this project. You can almost only work with community musicians on this. Professional musicians would be too precious. This is apparently what happened with the Montréal Symphony. They did a fabulous job, but a work with straightforward musical language and experimental design doesn’t work so well with professional musicians.

Negotiation between composers and musicians is the focus of this year’s Composers’ Colloquium, which has become an incredibly popular part of the festival. The theme is “Codes, taboos, and permission-giving in the compositional process.” Who came up with that?

It was Liza Lim! As well as being a featured composer this year, she is a great convenor. To me the theme addresses all the strange things composers ask musicians to do and the problems this raises for non-specialist musicians. Why is the gap so wide between contemporary musicians and musicians who might work in an orchestra full-time? Why aren’t there more fully-rounded artists who can say, “Sure, I can blow through that or scrape this. I can understand how one of [German composer] Helmut Lachenmann’s physical techniques needs to be made musical.” What is the resistance point for some musicians? What do musicians need to be given to allow themselves to do these things?

What other large-scale works have you been able to program because of this increase in forces?

There are double concertos by Jack Symonds and myself which will be played by Argonaut. Our aim throughout the previous festivals has always been to grow Argonaut to chamber orchestra size. When I did Kursk in 2011, that was a proof of concept to show what a chamber orchestra would look like and what sort of work they could do. To come back five years later and put on another work with 29 musicians shows what the festival can achieve.

It’s ELISION’s 30th anniversary and they are celebrating with three concerts at BIFEM.

Yes, that was a no-brainer! They’re collaborating with ANAM to present Speicher, a 75-minute, large ensemble work by the German composer Enno Poppe. Part of our mission is to present Australian audiences with important, under-represented composers and to mount works of scale and duration. Poppe is a missing voice in Australia, just as Olga Neuwirth was last year and Claude Vivier the year before. It’s like putting together a puzzle and saying “what’s missing in our ecology here?”

As well as being ELISION’s 30th anniversary, it is also Liza Lim’s 50th birthday just before the festival and given her close connection to ELISION the ensemble will play the world premiere of How Forests Think, along with the Victorian premiere of her Machine for Contacting the Dead and Aaron Cassidy’s The Wreck of Former Boundaries. How Forests Think is like a concerto for the 37-pipe sheng performed by the Chinese, Germany-based sheng player Wu Wei, who is pretty much the sheng master. These are difficult, substantial works that only ELISION could pull off.

Alongside these large-scale works is BIFEM’s prized series of solo recitals.

These have been insanely popular. So much so that we are presenting each recital twice with a break in between each performance.

That is going to be a huge job for Peter de Jager, who has to perform a recital of keyboard works by Iannis Xenakis twice in a row!

That’s why we’re calling that concert Marathon. An hour-long Xenakis program, an hour-long break, then another hour-long concert all over again. There are very few people who can do a program like that, let alone twice.

And two of these works, Khoaï and Naama, require a rare, modern harpsichord. Did you find one?

We found one in Tasmania! It’s costing us a bomb to transport it, but if you’re going to do something, do it properly.

It’s my understanding it’s also the physicality. The instrument can take what is needed in the same way that the modern piano developed from instruments that Liszt would wreck. Peter actually bought the harpsichord so that he could perform this repertoire in the future. I said, “This is exactly what our festival is about.” The recital programs should be a) a breakthrough, b) a showcase and c) a pivot-point in the performer’s musical life. These programs are the most intimate relationships I as director have with the performers. I say, “It’s your program. Don’t think of yourself as a musician. What do you want to do as an artist?” Inevitably, it has been a transformative occasion for everyone involved.

You’re also shining a spotlight on Leah Scholes, who must be one of Australia’s most meticulous, refined, not to say busiest percussionists.

Leah has been the warhorse of percussion in Australia for years now. She’s always there, always part of the team, but it’s time to turn the spotlight on the work she’s really doing. This concert pulls together the solo repertoire she has been working on into a dramaturged program that will have a life long after the festival is over.

So many great programs like this receive their premiere at BIFEM, it would be wonderful to see them toured.

In this festival we’re taking our first steps into international market development. For the first time we have presenters coming to experience the festival and hear artists whom they might like to collaborate with or tour in the future. Graham McKenzie will visit from the UK’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and Mauricio Peña from Bogotá. People don’t usually look towards South America for touring, but Peña runs the equivalent of the Melbourne Recital Centre in Bogotá and programs over 24 other venues around Colombia. Plus he’s a lovely guy. Creative Victoria have really stepped up to support these initiatives.

There are some other high-profile collaborators involved in the festival, interestingly around the Sound Gallery.

Sound Gallery, curated by Mauricio Carrasco, is going to be great. It’s so rare to have a dedicated space for high-fidelity acousmatic music, and this year Christopher Boots—a Fitzroy-based industrial design company specialising in lighting—is designing the space. We’re working on a donors’ club for people under 40 to build a new generation of donors and we asked Chris to be an ambassador. He agreed and also embraced the opportunity to enhance the Sound Gallery experience.

Performance lectures are always a great way to start the day at BIFEM, though I’ll be busy workshopping reviews from the Music Reviewers’ Workshop with RealTime editors Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter. This year the performance lectures feature Melissa Doecke and Luke Carbon, both working with live electronics by José Miguel Fernández.

Melissa will introduce the audience to Embedding Tangles by Lara Morciano, a fiercely virtuosic work. Luke will present one of José’s works from the performer’s perspective: how do you approach it; what are the challenges?

Kids are going to love the Friday morning Cushion Concert by the harpist Jessica Fotinos. I understand this is a fiercely sought-after slot.

They all want it! You think you know everything about performance at such a high level and then you’re faced with a room full of five year-olds and they’re brutal. None of your tricks work any more. You have to go back to the very fundamentals of performance and ask, “How do I hold their attention? What is it about what I’m doing that will actually captivate them?” For that reason alone musicians want the slot. It makes you ask, “What happens if you strip the etiquette around ‘challenging’ (though I feel that is such a misnomer) new music? What do you need to do to make it immediate and make it work?” Because if your attention slips or you are distracted these kids will leave you. They will leave you in a heartbeat. There’s no middle ground, whereas adult audiences are so malleable and negotiable.

I’m really fascinated by Kaspar’s music. He has worked with Zbigniew Karkowski, who died a couple of years ago, as well as Daniel Buess, who died tragically earlier this year. Kaspar has been very much the custodian of Karkowski’s wall-of-sound ritualistic noise. You think that things can’t get any louder or denser and then they do and it’s very powerful and physical. You give people earplugs out of kindness, but really you want them to be able to take that threshold, audio-physical experience.

Toeplitz will be working with Myriam Gourfink, a proponent of “micro-gesture,” which has been an important stream in contemporary dance for about a decade. Gourfink wears body sensors that provide input to the sound and lighting. Very slowly but surely over an hour she might shift 90 degrees in her chair. It is a very weird illusion, somebody moving that slowly. The smallest movement seems like the greatest leap because everything has been slowed right down.

The Argonaut ensemble is even venturing into chamber opera this year. XXX_Live_Nude_Girls. The title says it all.

This is a great chamber opera by Jennifer Walshe, who is a real rogue. The makeshift nature of this production—which has been shipped in from Chicago—is really in her spirit. She uses everyday objects in much the same way as junk theatre did 10 years ago. If there is junk theatre then this is junk music. It breaks down hierarchies by using materials anyone can afford. It’s a 13-year-old work and our doing it in a slicker environment is a way of recognising it as an historically significant work. Again, it’s unbelievable that no opera companies big or small have done it in Australia. Who wouldn’t put a work called Live Nude Girls in their program?

And the Argonaut Ensemble is fielding another all-star string quartet. There is something so honest about string quartet writing. You can’t hide a bad piece in special effects.

I have a piece in this program, and after the excesses of the double concerto I feel like this is a really serious work. The piece is called “Down South” and it’s about what happens when you bring new music to a very old culture in a very new place. I think it’s funny that we talk about the “old world” as Europe in a country like Australia which is ancient, or the Americas which are ancient. Europe is new. Modernity is new.

It’s a packed program, but I see there’s a bit more time to eat this time. Maintaining adequate nutrition has to be one of the main challenges of the festival.

Gustavo Capanema Palace, home to the Rio de Janeiro office of Brazil’s Ministry of Culture, is no Versailles. It was created in the image of the Brazilian people, bearing the socialistic influences of figures like the painter Cândido Portinari and architect Oscar Niemeyer and recognised globally as a leading example of the unique Tropical Modernism style. In Brazil’s arts community in particular the building is remembered as a site of artistic sustenance during the years of dictatorship between 1964 and 1985, a period which saw prominent (and heavily sanctioned) resistance from world famous cultural figures such as Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso.

As Brazil faces another move on its democracy in the form of a not popularly elected President, Michel Temer, artists are again showing their colours. This time it’s in the performative shape of Ocupa MinC (Occupy Ministry of Culture), the movement that has seen Ministry of Culture buildings occupied in 22 of 26 states across Brazil in a deeply embodied response by Brazil’s classe artística to the illegitimate removal of former President Dilma Rousseff by Temer and his right-wing cronies. In Rio de Janeiro, Ocupa MinC has animated the Gustavo Capanema Palace for over 60 days, brightening Rio’s downtown government and consular district with anti-Temer graffiti, colourful banners, makeshift shelters and music and conversation running late into the night.

“It was after we heard that the golpista (coup plotter) Temer had closed the Ministry for Culture,” says Bruno Falci, a young film historian, showing me his tent on the building’s mezzanine. “The Ministry directorates in Curitiba, Brasilia and Belo Horizonte had been occupied by artists in response, already. We called the community together—collectives from dance, theatre, cinema; other artists, workers, activists, students—to meet at the Palace. We all joined together in a huge group hug. And that’s how Ocupa MinC Rio de Janeiro began.”

The occupation is in operation across three floors of the building and reflects the organised logistics and aesthetics of opposition that the world came to know during the days of Occupy Wall Street: tents, hand-crafted signs, a communications centre, a communal kitchen, spaces for relaxation, a women’s space, a queer space. That the building is currently undergoing renovations adds an extra layer of provisionality and anticipation to the visual effects of this political performance: furniture covered in tarpaulins and masking tape, artworks cordoned off with signs that warn against touching them, the building’s facade dominated by tradespeople and scaffolding as well as the canvasses and graffiti of the occupiers. The building is still operational as an arts bureaucracy, and the public servants who come there to work every day are largely supportive of the occupiers, agreeing that the country has undergone a coup d’etat and that the resistance of the cultural sector is vital. In its day-to-day operations, Ocupa MinC is careful not to extend any of the resources already in use by the building’s workers (including electricity for the lights, which gives my photographs a mellow haze), and prides itself on keeping the floors clean and the cultural patrimony intact.

The stakes of losing the Ministry were high for Falci and his colleagues. Government support and funding for culture-making was hard-won in post-dictatorship Brazil and the community is not willing to let it go quietly. Under the government of Rousseff’s predecessor and mentor “Lula” (Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva), artists who had been targeted by the dictatorship found space to flourish, with Gilberto Gil, for example, serving as Minister for Culture. One of Gil’s best-loved innovations as Minister was the Pontos de Cultura (Points of Culture) program, where any group who could make a claim to be producing culture in Brazil could apply for government funding to do so.

“We have made a Ponto de Cultura here!” notes Bruno, and he’s right. As a visitor to Rio I have already attended concerts and debates at the site, taken photographs, found lively and thoughtful conversation, often in English and Spanish as well as Portuguese. Free performances, talks, dances and debates are held every evening, organised through social media and attended by people from all over the city. Events have included a panel discussion with radical geographers Ananya Roy, Oren Yiftachel and Ken Salo; and a concert featuring composer, singer and activist Caetano Veloso and singer, songwriter and actor Seu Jorge.

Temer re-instated the Ministry of Culture after just two weeks of Ocupa MinC across the country, but the occupiers want more than their Ministry back. They want Temer gone, and the legitimate President re-instated, and they think that cultural production is critical to this project. “We don’t know what’s going to happen,” says Bruno. We don’t know if we will have to end the occupation and we don’t know the destiny of the country. Our occupation is tied up with the destiny of the country….”

Most of the other occupations across Brazil have been disbanded under threat of prosecution, but Rio’s Culture directorate has had more flux than some (indeed, as Bruno tells me, nobody seems to want the director’s job at the moment, and negotiations with the occupiers have been handed over to the national department for cultural heritage while the state challenges their presence in the courts). When I visit in late July, the impending Olympics and its aesthetic concerns seem to have created some urgency among the authorities about removing the occupation, but it remains unclear whether efforts to disband them will succeed.

In keeping with the philosophy of Occupy across the world, the performativity of Ocupa MinC is key to its power. “We are using a public space for the public,” says Bruno, as he guides me in fading light to a Cândido Portinari (1903-62) wall painting in the Palace’s auditorium. “This is controversial because the public space wasn’t quite public before.” Indeed, in a speech made during his time as Minister for Culture, Gilberto Gil laid out his vision of creating an “unparalleled infrastructure for public visitation” of the building, with respect to its particular cultural heritage, referring to “the commons that impel the construction of public policy, here in its cultural expression”—allowing “the city of Rio de Janeiro… access to itself” (Gilberto Gil, “In Praise of a Modernist Monument,” The Rio de Janeiro Reader, Duke University Press, 2015). In this sense, Ocupa MinC feels less like the “invasion” it has been called by the authorities and more like the fulfilment of a promise. As my eyes adjust to the Portinari painting, I realise it depicts the Palace being carried by the people.