“Artists can never be tourists,” declares Ashley Crawford in his catalogue essay for the compelling OzAsia 2016 exhibition Unworldly Encounters. Artists reflexively respond to their surroundings and develop not only new art but new ways of seeing the world as a result of immersive travel experiences in their own and each other’s countries.
Unworldly Encounters
Crawford accompanied a group of Chinese and Australian artists who undertook the first of three extended road trips through China and Australia in 2011. In Unworldly Encounters, four of those artists—Shi Jinsong, Cang Xin, Sam Leach and Tony Lloyd—show work inspired by the most recent trip which took them through southern China, Tibet, Arnhem Land and the Kimberley and culminated in a residency at Oratunga, north of the Flinders Ranges. This project, conceived and managed by AEAF director Steve Eland, has already produced several exhibitions in China and Australia. Unworldly Encounters is thus an ideal inclusion in the OzAsia Festival, whose ethos is cultural awareness-raising and artistic cross-fertilisation.
This exhibition looks as if it was conceived by a single mind rather than four separate artists, such is its coherence. Shi Jinsong’s extraordinary Other Shore forms a visual spine running through it. Winding across the entire length of the gallery floor is a blackened S-shaped trail of the ashes of animal bones and timber he collected from the Flinders Ranges and then burnt. Cang Xin’s Salvation is a series of ink-on-paper illustrations mounted in a line that runs from the floor up and along the gallery walls, starting from a series of calligraphic forms constructed from rows of seed-pods. Looking as if they have sprouted from the pods, the illustrations are of primitive life forms, the sequence’s form referencing Tibetan ‘spirit ladders,’ images drawn onto rock faces to allow spirits to climb to heaven. The seed pods are from Adnyamathanha country, Cang Xin’s work thus implicitly linking two significant cultural traditions with the origins of life.
Sam Leach’s Sky Burial is a platform bearing human bone fragments, referencing the Tibetan ritual practice of dismembering the deceased and feeding their remains to vultures instead of burying or cremating them. Tony Lloyd’s The Ocean Floor comprises hundreds of seashells suspended from the ceiling in a formation that outlines a mountain, suggesting how underwater mountains can be formed from shell deposits over millions of years.
Unworldly Encounters pays homage to the rites and traditions of Tibetans and Indigenous Australians and their territories, it speaks of geological time, human evolution and mortality, and it evidences four artists’ journeys of personal and artistic transformation that bridge cultures and generate a common spirituality.
Divine Interventions
By contrast, Damien Shen and Badiucao’s joint exhibition Divine Interventions looks critically at contemporary Chinese and Australian politics. Australian-born Shen, of Chinese and Aboriginal descent, produced a series of large-scale drawings entitled Team Gweilo. “Gweilo” is a derogatory Chinese term for Westerners and the drawings are of Australian politicians whom Shen considers have made racist, sexist or other inappropriate remarks. Badiucao (a pseudonym), a Chinese immigrant to Australia, has installed a series of election posters of Chinese President Xi Jinping, mockingly titled If You are the One, which he has over-painted, establishing a parallel with Shen’s portraits. On the floor is Badiucao’s Why Do They Buy Out Our Baby Formula, a series of images of dead babies outlined in white powder (formula) on black rubbish bin liners that refers to the deaths of Chinese babies fed tainted Chinese-manufactured formula and the consequent purchase of Australian formula by Chinese parents.
At the Divine Interventions opening night performance, Badiucao, wearing a mask resembling those imposed on inmates of the Don Dale Detention Centre and bound at the wrists, sits on a child-sized chair facing into a corner as if he is himself a child detainee. Hooded accomplices cut him free and he proceeds to paint “gweilo” calligraphically over Shen’s portraits in red paint, defacing them. As well as critiquing Chinese and Australian politics, the exhibition represents a cathartic personal journey for both artists, in which they reflect on their own identity within Australian society.
At an artists’ talk involving all six artists from these two exhibitions, Badiucao, who wears a mask at public events to hide his identity, raised the issue of the invasion of Tibet by China, and a vigorous debate ensued over the impact of Chinese politics on Chinese art, artists and the community generally. Shen indicated that the Divine Interventions exhibition shifted his artistic practice to a new level of political awareness and he and Badiucao gained valuable experience in working cooperatively.
Record Light
While Divine Interventions is confrontingly political, Hong Kong artist Kingsley Ng’s enchanting exhibition Record Light creates a magical visual and aural experience that makes its comments more subtly. Ng uses electronic technology to create a language of wondrous lighting effects, as in Moon.gate. On entering the darkened CACSA gallery, we first see what looks like dappled light entering through a window and illuminating the gallery floor. But there is no window and this poignant image is a projection, an illusion. A portable radio emits pre-recorded fragments of programs sourced from the ABC, SBS, Vision Christian Radio, Kaurna Warra Pintyanthi, Radio ENA and 5PBA. The flickering light on the floor appears synchronised with this rapid succession of topical news bulletins, documentaries and religious messages, as Moon.gate gently reflects on the complex and conflicting philosophies and beliefs evident through Australian media.
Ng’s Record: Light from 220 16’ 14” + 1140 08’ 48” comprises a music box through which viewers are invited to feed a paper tape like a piano roll that triggers not only sound but also light effects in a wall-sized projected image of the Hong Kong nightscape. The title’s coordinates identify the source of the effects as the Hong Kong Peak, and this transformation of sound into light using old and new technologies is as romantically evocative as the location.
Spring: Homage to Liang Quan comprises a low, cloth covered table holding an empty glass which appears to cast a shadow that moves across the table as if glass and table form a sundial and the day’s length is compressed into a few moments. Numerals then appear through the cloth: the latitude and longitude of an unknown location and time of day. On the adjacent wall, identified by coordinates, is a list of locations from which bottled water is sourced. The work speaks of the proliferation of imported bottled water and invites us to think about the commodification of this essential substance with which we might fill the empty glass. The light patterns simulate the light that might be seen at the locations listed on the wall, transporting our thoughts to those places. The cloth on the table turns out to be the paper used by Chinese calligraphers, so that the work symbolically substitutes artificial light for the calligrapher’s ink, while beneath the paper, a flat screen emits the illusions.
The central work in Ng’s poetic exhibition is his enthralling Galaxy Express, a row of screens showing images of train windows flashing by, as if the viewer is observing a moving train at night. A female narrator describes her train journey through time and space towards the centre of the galaxy, a surreal story in which passengers of the future travel back to the past in order to escape their no-longer habitable earthly environment. Again, Kingsley Ng demonstrates virtuosic use of light effects and sound, this time to comment on the impact of environmental degradation on the future of humanity.
These OzAsia exhibitions offer profound insights into contemporary life and politics, and the vital message that emerges is that we are one community inhabiting a tiny, disrupted planet and trying to speak to each other.
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Unworldly Encounters, Australian Experimental Art Foundation, 9 Sept-15 Oct; Divine Interventions, Nexus Arts, 8 Sept–11 Nov; Record Light, Contemporary Art Centre of SA, 10 Sept–16 Oct
Top image credit: Galaxy Express, Kingsley Ng, Record Light, Contemporary Art Centre of SA, image courtesy OzAsia 2016
Andrew Mujunen, Daniel Monks, Second Skin, 2013, choreographer Dean Walsh, Catalyst Dance Masterclass Series
At the age of 17 I started working as a roofing plumber in an uncle’s raging heterosexual “no sheilas” business. Deeply confused, having survived a highly violent and homophobic upbringing, this job seemed like a way out. After two years of macho theatrics, I left. I moved into the city and got a job in a 24-hour newsagency in Kings Cross. One day in 1987, while stacking newspapers, I saw an advertisement for UK-based dance company, Michael Clark & Company. At the time I was attending a group for young survivors of abuse and our facilitator, Faye, organised an excursion to see their show. This was a massive game changer for me. Afterwards Faye found the Bodenwieser Dance Centre and the following year, aged 20, I began full-time training, graduating in 1990.
I mention this early personal account to outline the importance of outreaching to marginalised groups and individuals, if for no other reason than to include a more diverse range of human experiences in dance practice within Australia. Faye also sparked a seismic change in my life by helping to guide me. I have never forgotten this and have maintained an inclusive practice for much of my 26-year career.
Having facilitated many workshops since the early 1990s for community centres in Western Sydney (and for a week in NYC in 1998) for traumatised and suicidal youth, I can vouch for the fact that many kids with complex trauma disorder (CTD) symptoms are too traumatised to attend a tertiary arts course without considerable guidance. There is currently no dance course catering for people living with disability (PLWD) in Australia. Inclusion starts with education so why isn’t there a course that is inclusive?
Further disclosure: my name is Dean Walsh and I live within the arts. I also live with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) that has lain hidden beneath the largely misunderstood CTD. I’m not one to say that, if I’d known earlier, “I wouldn’t change a thing,” because if I could, I most definitely would have. However, we cannot change the past nor our genetic make-up so we must learn to survive, in other words, adapt. I have carved out a career where I’ve sought to communicate, through dance and performance, diverse experiences—lower socio-economic life, domestic violation and LGBTQI stories—without apology and without pity-pulling. I know now (I was diagnosed in 2015) that my autism has driven most of these works with a need to tell-it-like-it-is and in great detail.
I largely devised my works in solitude because other people often confuse me. Their input more often than not tips me into overdrive that can lead to complete physiological and emotional meltdowns, sometimes for days on end. Coming out of these is like being liberated after days stuck in a room of white noise and conflicting thoughts (pictures) played at the highest frequency. When I think of the days I’ve lost to these meltdowns, I would say they’d equate to a couple of years. There have been months on end when I’ve been unable to be around many people because of the exhaustion of trying to pretend they make sense. Solitude is bliss but also a curse.
Then in 2007 I found scuba diving. I am happiest underwater, in deep pressurised space where people don’t talk or confuse me with myriad conflicting expressions and ideas. All I need to focus on is my technical equipment, a quieter and more sensitive social interaction and the series of stunning pictures around me that are relayed within the sensory medium that immerses me—environmental integration.
I’m very adept at adapting, like so many other people I now know. When we adapt we learn new skills for life and when we learn we have something more we can pass on, keeping the wheel of progressive social change revolving. This is a good thing. However, we need more platforms from which to share our findings. The Accessible Arts Catalyst Masterclass and Residency series in Sydney (2012-2016) is one such platform I’m very pleased to say I’ve taken part in. This program has the capacity to spark seismic shifts nationally when it comes to the inclusion of difference within dance.
Dean Walsh and artist participants, Catalyst Dance Masterclass Series, 2012
The arts are good for many reasons, not least for sharing, questioning and showcasing the diversity of our existence as it evolves, contemporaneously. When we do this authentically, from a core need to understand and express ourselves better, I believe we are being truly innovative rather than superficially trying to tick a box. As artists we are not just innovating when we choreograph or direct new works but also in the methods we employ while researching, teaching and facilitating our arts practice beyond conventional theatre stages.
Some artists choose to focus on quite limited choreographic aesthetics, some with very narrow definitions of beauty and ability. Others, myself included, look to challenge this constantly, not only through artistic choice but as a lived necessity. Adaptation (and one could call this innovation) is, for some of us, an intrinsic part of daily life, not just a work ethic or funding prerequisite.
I have recently started to ‘come out’ as autistic and this has sometimes been met with incredulous scoffs, dismissive shrug-offs, rolling eyes and even outright laughter. For me, this is no laughing matter. And there’s that awful, dismissive, “Oh, but we’re all on the spectrum; we’re artists.” The Autism Spectrum has been analysed for decades and defined by the World Health Organisation and many other global and national agencies and experts, for very important reasons. It articulates a level of severity of a whole range of autistic experiences, not just your average, creative, single-focused drives. People who live on the spectrum are nine times more likely to suicide than neurotypical people, due, often, to a lack of understanding, including not being believed.
Our artistic expressions have the potential to reflect upon and challenge prejudices and satiate the ceaseless human desire for exploration and knowledge. The inclusive arts community has begun to grow exponentially in Australia, adopting a sense of unorthodox practice like no other arts sector I’ve ever worked within. Through its Catalyst series, Accessible Arts has promoted this and embraced my developing movement research with openness and encouragement. A further prerequisite for innovation is to allow artists to try things out: ‘failure’ is part of that process.
In 2010 I received a two-year Australia Council Fellowship to further my methods of research into marine environmental understandings, in order to formulate means with which to express these through movement and develop a practice intrinsically focused on reconnecting us to environmental realms—the oceans. I call this practice PrimeOrderly—embodied environmental awareness research [see an interview here. Eds).
I think there is huge potential in the arts for us to be more inclusive of people of greater physical, intellectual and neurological diversity. In fact, I feel this could be the next major evolutionary arts movement. But it must be steered by people living with disability or those who are authentically invested in the sector. This movement would have its basis in ethical practice. It could also teach us to be less elitist and egotistical and more versatile in our approaches to performance making. This is not to say we cannot continue to be methodologically rigorous.
In dance terms, inclusive practice could lead to the acknowledgement of a need to develop entirely new inclusive methodologies enabling people with disability to develop systems that best support and express their inquiries as artists and communicators; from this we could all learn so much more about the human condition. For all we know (or thought we knew), a social revolution could ensue.
Dean Walsh
In collaboration with Ausdance NSW and Accessible Arts, the Catalyst Dance Program engaged dancer and choreographer Dean Walsh, a long-time supporter of the program, to write this article around his work in integrated dance.
Read Part II, where Dean Walsh describes how he has worked with and been inspired by Restless Dance Company, Catalyst Dance and RUCKUS.
Accessible Arts’ Catalyst Dance is an intensive integrated dance skills and career development program that includes working with key national and international dance leaders and artist mentors. The Catalyst Dance Residency is a national artist development program across two years initiated by Accessible Arts; the most recent was held at Critical Path, Sydney, 21-27 August this year.
Dean Walsh has worked in Australia and overseas as a performer, director/choreographer and teacher, including as a dancer with companies such as DV8 Physical Theatre, Stalker Theatre, Japan Contemporary Dance Network, Australian Dance Theatre, Opera Australia, The opera Project, Sydney Dance Company and One Extra Dance. He has a long and deeply held personal interest in marine ecology, biology and interactive disciplines (surfing, snorkelling, scuba and breath-held diving), which forms the basis for his most recent choreographic explorations. Since 1991 he has devised more than 35 dance/performance works from solo through to small groups. He recently presented two 30-minute group movement lecture demonstrations as part of World Parks Congress, a multi-national event held every decade and attended by more than 4,000 delegates from 166 countries.
Walsh was co-director and choreographer for Speed of Life, produced and performed by RUCKUS, a Sydney-based disability-led ensemble. Read the RealTime review.
Read an interview conducted by integrated dance choreographer Philip Channels with Dean Walsh.
Benjamin Hancock, MULTIMODAL, Lee Serle, The Substation
The inductees lie on the floor, their bare feet pressed against massive subwoofers throbbing with a deep, resonant pulse. Atop the subs, trays of water vibrate, casting ripples of light across a vast ceiling: an outward representation of the powerful vibration permeating their bodies. Melbourne contemporary dance audiences have found themselves in similar ritualistic territory before in works such as Rebecca Jensen and Sarah Aiken’s Overworld (2015) or Phillip Adams’ All Things Return to Nature Tomorrow (2013), but Lee Serle’s newest work, MULTIMODAL, largely eschews cult or irony, addressing an audience’s thirst for connection with greatness directly.
“Multimodal” is apt. It’s an amalgam of contemporary choreography, visual art, sound installation and audience participation. Serle’s 20-strong team includes visual artist Liz Henderson, sound designer Byron Scullin, costume designer Shio Otani and 16 dancers. All the elements are significant, but the immediate, human interaction lies between the audience and the performers. The dancers are divided in two: a chorus-like group who guide audience members, and a core of four principals—Deanne Butterworth, Benjamin Hancock, Rebecca Jensen and Geoffrey Watson.
In the foyer before the performance, the principals select eight audience members who are ushered across a fragrant floor of crushed star anise to a suite of galleries (later viewable by the public). These rooms contain scented sculptures, videos, a microphone for collecting voice samples, and a naked man.
Meanwhile, the remainder of the audience enters the performance space: the double-height main hall of Newport Substation. We sit in traverse arrangement, with eight empty chairs and eight dancers dressed in black on the floor before us. The dancers languidly recline, lunge and stand, turning their heads slowly from side to side. The effect of their calm, gradual movements is subtly hypnotic. Offered headphones augment the soundscape with echoes of the inductees’ sampled statements.
Entering the main space, the inductees bring an assortment of mundane objects—a paper bag, a soft drink can— to a microphone, contributing to the soundscape before taking their seats within the performance. When they do, there’s a clear sense we have all been inducted into the work.
MULTIMODAL, Lee Serle, The Substation
A structured improvisation then heightens our relationship with the principals as they casually pace the floor, occasionally gesturing half-heartedly—a hopping shunt across the floor, an arm extension that dissolves into apathy—building to a full-blown, accelerated mash of proficient bodies hurling themselves through space. If the improv format is familiar, Butterworth, Hancock, Jensen and Watson make for an intelligent, cohesive, investigative team. All choreographers in their own right, they share an embrace of abandon: a desire to push into and fracture space.
Watching, I’m struck by how, in an age of fame and social media, we look to performers of all sorts to provide a sense of personal greatness we’re reluctant to find in ourselves. Gently involving and empowering his audience, Lee Serle doesn’t allow this separation. Our proximity to the dancers is a distinct reminder of our own corporeal potential.
As the improv winds down, it is replaced by intimate interactions between the four main dancers and their subjects. The dancers hover unusually close. Ben Hancock’s grounded nearness has a kind yet disquieting ambiguity. The inductees are moved and interviewed by the secondary group of dancers. In the performance I witness, simple questions about the inductees’ experience in the galleries below yield intimate reflections on grief and loss. Their shoes removed, they lie on the floor in contact with the speakers. Transitions are handled smoothly and it feels natural to arrive at this final sequence.
Byron Scullin’s throbbing soundscape takes over, and the whole audience seems to have entered an altered state, mesmerised by the vibration generating ripples of light across the ceiling.
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Lee Serle & The Substation: MULTIMODAL, The Substation, Newport, Melbourne, 30 Aug–4 Sept; read the program here.
Filmmaker Richard Kelly was only 25 when he directed his standout debut feature in 2001. Donnie Darko might have confounded box office audiences but has become a cult classic in the ensuing years, and deservedly so. It’s a remarkable film that effortlessly traverses the genres of high school comedy, psychological horror, science fiction and romance as it moves through 28 days in the life of its troubled teenaged protagonist. Intelligent, cynical Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) is tormented by visions of a nightmarish rabbit-figure, “Frank,” who makes cryptic utterances and incites Donnie to acts of criminal destruction.
By turns humorous and melancholy, the film is notable for its sharp characterisation (Drew Barrymore’s presence as producer and cast member attracted a number of celebrated actors) coupled with the dreamlike quality of Steven Poster’s cinematography. To enter its world is to witness the warping of reality as we know it. With all it encompasses, Donnie Darko bears watching—and puzzling over—time and again. Katerina Sakkas
5 copies courtesy Madman Entertainment
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RealTime issue #134 Aug-Sept 2016
L-R: Maria Tran, Nat Randall, Emily O’Connor, Jade Muratore (Hissy Fit), Supreme Ultimate, Women of Fairfield
When I met Karen Therese, Artistic Director of Powerhouse Youth Theatre, for this interview she’d recently completed a season of Tribunal (read our review) at The Stables for Griffin (where she’d been a Studio Artist), Jump First, Ask Later (a new season of the 2015 Force Majeure-PYT co-production of a parkour-based work created by choreographer Byron Perry) is playing at the Sydney Opera House and a major PYT-MCA two-day event, Women of Fairfield, is only two weeks away. But, says an exhilarated Karen Therese, life is more than manageable and her company, Powerhouse Youth Theatre is well-resourced, in contrast with early ambitious works of scale that threatened to derail her career.
Western Sydney is alive with cultural activity driven by Powerhouse Youth Theatre, Urban Theatre Projects, FORM, Casula Powerhouse, ICE, Parramatta Riverside, The National Theatre of Parramatta and Campbelltown Arts Centre, plus the outreach programs of Carriageworks and MCA and much more. Significant local pressure has swung more state funding towards the west, and there’s the bonus of James Packer’s $30m gift (an attempt to assuage public discontent over his and the government’s mishandling of the Barangaroo development in Sydney Harbour; another $30m went to city arts). Much cultural activity in the west is socially oriented, dealing with disadvantaged suburbs, the needs of young people, refugees and new citizens, and drug and health issues. Other state and federal agencies provide funds for these ventures, allowing richer development and reach: “A three-year grant from the Department of Social Services was a complete game-changer for our company,” Karen Therese tells me.
Above all, the works produced by Powerhouse Youth Theatre and others transcend these particularities by making our fellow citizens visible, not as content or issue-bearers but as active participants and art-makers: “The work we create and the processes we engage are really supportive of individuals whether they become artists or not.”
Nothing could be more important as Pauline Hanson and her ilk not only aim to narrow our understanding of the complexity and richness of contemporary Australian culture but, by arguing for cessation of Muslim immigration, to prevent its civilising evolution. Powerhouse Youth Theatre’s Little Baghdad was revelatory: three nights (I experienced one) of performance and discussion over a meal shared with Iraqis of different regions, religions and cultural traditions, so far beyond the stereotypical image promulgated by mass media and politicians. I recalled that one of the Little Baghdad dinners focused on Iraqi women and wondered if that played a role in triggering the forthcoming event, Women of Fairfield.
Co-curated by Karen Therese and MCA Senior Curator Anne Loxley, Women of Fairfield is a collaboration between the MCA, Powerhouse Youth Theatre and NSW Service for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture and Trauma Survivors (STARTTS). Facilitated by Jiva Parthipan, STARTTS Community Cultural Development Officer, each artist is working with the communities of Fairfield to create artworks which celebrate and reflect on the experiences of women. Karen Therese tells me about the inspiration for the event and the artists and communities involved.
Women of Fairfield
The Women of Iraq night, which I curated with Victoria Spence, is one of my favourite events. It became a little research event for how to deal with the enormous cultural sensitivity around working with women in Fairfield and an opportunity for women to talk openly about issues affecting them. Theirs is a very patriarchal culture. The stories were extraordinary. We traversed 80 years of Iraqi history—where women were part of a rebellion, were activists in the 1950s and 1960s, artists and actresses—all the way to contemporary Iraq where some are enslaved. In Fairfield, women don’t necessarily feel safe within the civic space. And there are homeless women. I was thinking about how our company would handle something like this, it’s huge, and had been discussing it with the Council. When the MCA came in, I pitched the idea: Women of Fairfield, Concepts of Home. Now it’s just Women of Fairfield. The focus is on the kind of performative site-based work I’ve done before.
I’m co-curating with Anne Loxley, the Senior Curator at the MCA for the C3West program. It’s been really great. I work with people, I do people and I do performative spectacle—big vision—but I’ve always worked with very limited resources. Anne gets the opportunity to make spectacle art-work. Together we can give Fairfield something it’s never had before.
Kate Blackmore & the Assyrian Community: All Wedding Wishes
Kate Blackmore, who worked on Little Baghdad, is creating a work with the Assyrian community called All Wedding Wishes about an Assyrian wedding. It’s a two-channel video installation that’s going to be introduced via an actual Assyrian wedding procession that will lead the audience through the site, an abandoned shop.
Claudia Nicholson & the South American Community
Claudia Nicholson is doing probably her largest sawdust carpet (an alfrombas, made of flowers, plants and dyed sawdust in Central and South America) to date, making it over five days in Fairfield Chase, a 1980s food hall. That will have a number of video artworks surrounding it and include the South American Women’s Choir. It will be hugely celebratory.
Hissy Fit & Maria Tran: Supreme Ultimate
We also have Hissy Fit (Jade Muratore, Emily O’Connor and Nat Randall) working with Maria Tran on a hugely ambitious project. Maria is potentially Australia’s foremost martial arts action woman. She’s in the new Jackie Chan movie and has just won Martial Artist of the Year. The work will play on two floors of a car park with interactive video by Toby K. And there’s going to be a martial arts mass action so we’re looking to get up to 50 people from the region to be involved.
Zoe Scoglio & Aboriginal, Assyrian and Khmer Communities: In The Round
Melbourne artist Zoe Scoglio is doing an extraordinary work bringing together Assyrian women, the Khmer women’s community and the Indigenous women’s community of Fairfield for In The Round. She’s run individual workshops with the women and recorded their singing. She’s placing those recordings inside three cars which will each be dressed by the women. With this amazing soundtrack, the cars will be driven around Fairfield to literally place women’s voices into the civic space. On the second night we’ll close down two roads and create a ‘revolution’ of circling cars in a cul-de-sac at dusk. Zoe’s work is about the cosmic— about revolution that can happen when three communities come together at a particular time of day. It’s a really exciting project that also gives the opportunity for our First Nations women to meet newly-arrived women and that’s the first time they’ve done that. I’m really interested in the Indigenous community meeting particularly the Assyrian community because they’re an indigenous Iraqi community. Both use language when they speak about their cultures, which are so ancient.
Unique gathering, unique expression
Seeing so many women come together from different cultures is something that actually doesn’t happen. Cultures tend to stay tightly together because everyone feels really vulnerable and protective. So Women of Fairfield will be extraordinary—all these women from so many cultures in the one space.
Johnny Do, Jump First, Ask Later, Powerhouse Youth Theatre & Sydney Opera House
INTERVIEW: FROM PERFORMANCE MAKER TO CULTURAL LEADER
I’ve seen a lot of your career, first when you were a contemporary performance maker and interdisciplinary artist. Since then you’ve become a creative producer and a cultural leader. It’s clear that some of your interest in this area came from growing up in Mt Druitt in Western Sydney. What was your impulse when you went to the VCA? Were you planning to become an actor or an animateur?
When I first got involved with PACT (Centre for Emerging Artists, Sydney), I realised I wasn’t going to be an actor. I was always interested in making work from my own ideas. I didn’t know about contemporary performance or devising but I’d put on my own shows from when I was really young. I didn’t apply to the VCA; I was invited into the animateuring course by Tanya Gerstle in 1999. I had also done The Journey [a year-long acting intensive with Gerstle at the Actors Centre in Sydney]. At the end of the Journey, we did a devised work and I got to write and perform things that I’d written and I really enjoyed that process. Eventually I found out about PACT and then very quickly was at The Performance Space and I saw Heterosoced Youth directed by Chris Ryan and I’ve pretty much made my own versions of that work ever since [LAUGHS].
This was a PACT production?
Yes, at the height of Mardi Gras. It was really big for PACT in 1997: a documentary work about young people coming out from different regional areas and telling their stories. I thought it was really exciting and a kind of cool contemporary work as well. Back then, it was pretty radical.
When I was at PACT they used to have ‘Zings’ and I created a work called whitegirlblackdreams, which was really a seed for so many things. I didn’t know a lot about Australian culture. I didn’t know anything about my own culture or my own family. So I performed it as a five-minute piece and Chris Ryan said it had “legs,” and I was, like, “What does that mean?” Not so long after that I went into the VCA and my sister and my mother unearthed family documents from which I started to create the ideas for Sleeplessness (background; review) which, in one form, became my graduate work. That began a whole exploration of Australian identity and realising that my mother was one of the “Forgotten Australians.” She grew up in a home in the care of the State. Now we have the Royal Commission, which my Mum is part of. She was also at the protests in Canberra demanding that George Pell come to Australia. So I’m pretty proud of her.
Sleeplessness was a fascinating combination of the intensely personal and a broader social political issue. And the work was also very exploratory in terms of form.
Yes, I look back at Sleeplessness now and think it was quite amazing how I was piecing together all the fragments in the making of it, and the experience. I couldn’t judge it when I was in it because it was bigger than an artwork. I feel like Tribunal is in the same kind of line but that I’ve found a way to create, maybe, a clearer narrative for audience about the complexity of Australian identity.
GATHERING GROUND
You’ve moved a long way from a very private work through large scale works and research to a cultural leadership role. Obviously, early on, there was something about works of scale that attracted you. You did Gathering Ground, a work for PACT with the Sydney’s inner city Indigenous community?
I did Gathering Ground twice. They were my largest works before Fun Park for Powerhouse Youth Theatre in 2014. I didn’t set out to make a huge spectacle; I wanted to make a walking tour. Do you remember Urban Theatre Project’s Speed Street (1999)? As a young artist, it changed my life because I grew up in a street like Speed Street and I first thought, you can’t bring people to a show in a street like this.
Gathering Ground was a collaboration between PACT and Redfern Community Centre and involved myself and Tracey Duncan who was running the centre. The idea was to bring non-indigenous people to The Block in Redfern. These were ‘reconciliation’ works, I suppose—a lot of Indigenous people I know don’t like that word. It brought non-indigenous people to an Indigenous space, often for the first time. The relationship I set up with Tracey was really strong. We talked for about three months. We were women of similar age. We cemented the idea of a history/ceremony/protest and telling the story of The Block and of each building, touring the audience and putting different artists in charge of developing works. This was 2006 and pre-Apology. The idea really took off. By the third night, thousands of people had come. It was an extraordinary experience. Then we did it again and Lily Shearer came on board.
RACE & CROSSING THE THRESHOLD
We thought, maybe 100 people might come. The whole idea emerged when Regina Heilmann was PACT Artistic Director and I got the job as Community Cultural Development Artist. She said, “Well, I’ve got to take you to all the youth centres around Redfern and to The Block.” We walked there and I got scared when I stepped over that threshold. I kind of checked myself and went, “What am I afraid of? I’m from Mt Druitt!” That was my innate racism coming out and I thought, “I want other people to have this experience of stepping over.” On opening night we thought, “No-one’s here. We were right—no-one’s gonna come.” And we looked over and there was this big crowd outside Redfern station and we had to say, “It’s over here. You can come over.” The last night along the whole of Eveleigh Street was crowded, you couldn’t move.
Where did that take you next?
I needed a break. That was really intense. The first one was really exciting to do. With the second one in 2008 the politics really got on top of it. It became really complicated. I think also at that time there wasn’t a lot of knowledge around how these relationships work.
At the same time, I was still interested in making works. I’d done Sleeplessness and I did a little piece at UTP called Misspent Youth and that led me to the idea for The Riot Act (2009) with Campbelltown Art Centre. I worked on that for a few years. I also did Constellations at PACT, which was my homage to Heterosoced Youth. After a family tragedy which impacted me hugely, I was ‘out’ for a couple of years. I wanted to make works of scale but the issue wasn’t so much the scale as the complexity. I was exhausted after Gathering Ground. I was exhausted after The Riot Act.
TURNING TOWARDS HOME
I woke up one day in 2010 and realised that I wanted to base my practice in Western Sydney. As an artist I always felt a little bit different from my peers. I never quite felt like I fitted in, feeling like I should be making work like The Fondue Set or Martin del Amo did. I was a bit too serious and everything was hard as well. Small pieces aside—The Walk, Waterloo Girls and Comfort Zone—I stopped making large works. I needed to make a really small work with Indigenous people—Waterloo Girls—after Gathering Ground, just a simple work that helped me realign my politics. Then I performed in my own show, The Comfort Zone, which was a good thing to do. I thought, I’m just going to step to the side for a few years. So I went and did my Masters with Professor Sarah Miller at the University of Wollongong. Former Performance Space Director Fiona Winning was also a mentor. I was about to stop working because life was a little bit hard at that point. She was really frank with me as a young artist and gave me some tools with which to work sustainably in the community.
CULTURAL LEADERSHIP GRANT
I got the inaugural Cultural Leadership Grant in 2010 from the Theatre Board of the Australia Council. My focus was not on outcomes; it was to get feedback from all the people who’d supported me and knew my practice and then go to New York with a vision to explore and research innovative practice across disciplines and across cultures. So I was at PS122 for a period of three years in and out. That was really fantastic. It was at the end of the building redevelopment so they had a 30_year festival and had alumni short works nights. So I’d be producing The Wooster Group and Phillip Glass and Thurston Moore. I got a lot of inspiration from managing and curation—I really wanted to work in Western Sydney but to come in with a dynamic approach. Conflict management has become a really big part of what I do. Then there’s business. And you have to be creative.
FUN PARK
So it all started coming together for you?
Yes. In New York I was looking at a new picture and with my Masters I was reflecting on the past and untying a lot of it to create a sustainable practice to enable me to move forward in Western Sydney. And then, around that time, I had the idea for Fun Park and applied a number of times for the $80K Australia Council Creative Producer Fellowship. I didn’t want it to be a project thing; it would pay me a wage for a year to develop and commence Fun Park. After a lot of hard work and making connections it got up with Sydney Festival.
I was able to put in place everything I learned through my Masters about sustainability. It was also about me going home, making a work in my place. That was really big. In Sleeplessness I remember I uttered the words “Mt Druitt.” You don’t tell people you’re from there. For me to invite 2,000 people to Mt Druitt was huge. (see Virginia Baxter’s review of Fun Park)
In my Masters I was studying ideas of comfort and failure in performance companies like Forced Entertainment (UK) and Goat Island (USA). Those guys have generated a lot of writing about failure in their work. Failure is just a radical opportunity to change. And I think coming from Mt Druitt I wasn’t as confident maybe as everyone thought I was and I was always worried about failing. Every time I performed. I’d work really hard and try my very best and then afterwards give myself a hard time. [LAUGHS]
You’re over that, I hope?
I am. Absolutely. With Fun Park everything was kind of constantly collapsing because it was really complicated. But every time something else collapsed, I’d think, well, that’s interesting; now, what haven’t I thought of? And that’s completely how I think now. Working in Western Sydney I feel more aligned as an artist and as a person that I’m kind of with ‘my people.’
And you’ve reached out to a lot of new people too, like the Iraqi community in Little Baghdad.
I share parts of their history and I suppose through my research in my art and my personal experience, I understand to a degree some of their experience and I’m able to work with them in ways that perhaps other artists aren’t.
The scope of your approach is considerable, embracing multiple forms, communities, issues.
Yes, I can do whatever I want in all my capacities because I have worked across a lot of artforms and I can speak all of those languages to some degree. So it wasn’t just luck—I was really on a five-year plan to base my practice in the west—and I ended up with my own company. It couldn’t be better.
Karen Therese
Women of Fairfield, co-curators PYT Artistic Director Karen Therese, MCA Senior Curator Anne Loxley; a collaboration between Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Powerhouse Youth Theatre, Fairfield (PYT), and NSW Service for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture and Trauma Survivors (STARTTS), presented with the support of Fairfield City Council, Fairfield, 7, 8 October, Free, 6.30-9.00pm
Our phone discussion opens with mention of Perth’s MoveMe dance festival. Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) Lecturer Michael Whaites has seen the three principal works, one of them by choreographer Laura Boynes, Dark Matter. He tells me Boynes was a member of LINK Dance, the graduate dance company Whaites runs for Honours level students and whose performances are choreographed by Australian and international artists and toured interstate and overseas. Although now triggering competition, LINK is a unique venture for dance artists looking for joint academic and professional-level experience.
Whaites tells me that Boynes’ Honours thesis was on dance film, “so she’s been weaving her way as a maker of choreography with an interest in film and dance on film.” Dark Matter features a metric ton of rice moved about the stage, digital projections by her artist brother Alexander and a live score by her partner and Decibel ensemble member Tristen Parr. Whaites says, “the work has been in development for three years and finally realised, which is great.”
I ask if he thinks LINK played a role in Boynes’ development as an artist. “Definitely. It’s an opportunity for students to finally to start to think about what they’re really interested in, to have the time to understand that they’re not just trying to replicate what their teachers and others are telling them to do. They’ve got to have an opinion as well. And I think it was that moment when Laura decided she was going to do Honours that she realised she could start to put her own ideas into the work, become a maker herself.”
Tipping Point, LINK Dance Company, 2015
What’s the relationship between LINK Dance and the Honours degree?
LINK is Honours. The students write a thesis along the journey while I’m throwing choreographers in front of them or taking them interstate or off on overseas trips. So, it’s a huge year. It’s a bit of a horse race, doing Honours. They’ve got to get on the horse and ride as fast as they can. Unlike a Masters or a PhD where they’ve got a bit of time to think, they don’t have much time at all. You’ve got to grab your idea, get ethics approval and then write the damned thing up and get it in.
Most Honours are 50-50 in terms of course and theoretical work and how it’s assessed. We used to have a 70-30 balance with more weight on the physical dimension. Now it’s a 60-40 balance and the thesis component is becoming more important. But most of the students need to have 70% grade point averages from their BA years. They have to be smart kids; they can’t just be fabulous dancers and not have a brain on their shoulders. Most of the people coming to LINK, this group-organised Honours course, are wanting to do it because of all the fabulous choreographers and the international tour I organise.
Does LINK attract graduates from other universities as well as WAAPA BA graduates?
From all over. I’ve been here for 11 years now and I’ve had dancers from VCA, QUT, Adelaide College of the Arts, Deakin University, New Zealand School of Dance, Amsterdam High School for the Arts, Laban Trinity in London…The fact that the course is organised like a professional dance company and the dancers get to tour and to work with a lot of different choreographers, I think that’s the difference.
Other Australian universities have started up similar courses in recent years where the students get to work with choreographers on a group work but essentially it’s about training them to be independent artists, nothing like how LINK is organised. But the emergence of these courses has pushed us to think about how we can keep ahead of the game.
That’s why, in some ways, we’ve established a Masters course that’s going to run alongside LINK. It’s not a new Masters course. That already exists here at WAAPA as a Performing Arts MA, but we’ve realigned it to fit with LINK.
In the first semester of the Masters journey, students have the option of working with LINK as a dancer and to perform in the first season and then to do the international tour with us, which happens in the middle of the year. We’re trying to bring these people with more experience into the program so they’ll have an opportunity to work in a full-time environment with choreographers for the first six months. And they’ll be able to share their experience with Honours students, which will hopefully bring their level up as well.
You’ll be drawing these Masters students from all over as well?
“From all over. I have four people interested already who have come through the LINK program and have been out in the field for three or four years. Talitha Maslin who’s worked with Lucy Guerin for the last couple of years, she’s now back working with Co3, Perth’s newest dance company. The course is a bit bespoke. It will depend on who applies as to how we precisely engage with them.
We’re thinking it will be people who wish to extend their dance careers or who are interested in being makers. They will design a project—whatever they want to do in their second semester and their second year—and then they go about implementing it. The facilities are available here—all the resources they’ll need. If they’re interested in choreography, I’d propose that in their second year in the Masters program they make a work on the Honours group for LINK.
Some might want to take on a three-month residency in Toronto or San Francisco or somewhere in Australia, like Bundanon, as part of their program. Absolutely, as long as they can keep on track with their project.
Dr Reneé Newman has replaced the late Maggi Phillips as postgraduate supervisor. She’s a theatre maker with an avid interest in dance and is really doing a fabulous job exposing the dancers to new cross-artform and interdisciplinary ways of working. We’re really trying to expand their knowledge in that way as well.
Motion State, LINK Dance Company, 2013
Returning to LINK, how often does the company perform?
We normally have two seasons, but this year we had one program in May with three choreographers and took it to Mouvements sur la Ville, the off-festival of Montpelier Danse, at the invitation of Didier Theron with whom we’ve had quite a strong relationship. He’s been here working with STRUT Dance (National Choreographic Centre of Western Australia). Didier has been a strong supporter of LINK and that’s the reason we’ve been going to Montpelier each year. He invites people from all over the world and we go there in June-July to present works that we make in the early part of the year. Then in Semester Two we have a new partnership with Co 3 in which LINK get to work with Artistic Director Raewyn Hill and the Co 3 dancers on an extended secondment that lasts through an entire creation and performance process. How exciting is that? Later in the semester this year will be a studio showing and our annual East Coast Tour to both Sydney and Melbourne.
Who are some of the artists LINK has worked with recently?
This year we had two choreographers—Lee Brummer and Israel Aloni—who have a company in Sweden called ilDance. They’d been in Australia working with Melbourne’s Yellow Wheel youth dance company, which is housed in Lucy Guerin’s Studio—and then with Adelaide College of the Arts. They did a workshop here at WAAPA and I commissioned them to come back and make a dance-theatre work on the company.
The other choreographers were Scott Ewen and Isabella Stone. Scott graduated from WAAPA some years ago and has been working with ADT for the last five years. He left ADT at the beginning of this year and came over and made a work on LINK, his second one. He’s an emerging choreographer whose work has a particular ADT flavor, as you might imagine. Isabella’s also an emerging choreographer here in Perth and an ex-LINK dancer. I like to do that occasionally, to bring people back into the fold. Isabella made her first full-length work last year at the State Theatre Centre.
Last year I invited Didier to come out and remount a work called Shanghai Bolero on LINK along with five professional female dancers including Claudia Alessi, Sue Peacock and former LINK dancers. We staged it at Fremantle Arts Centre and it was a huge hit. We took the men’s section to Sydney to perform at the end of last year.
It’s clear you keep track of graduates and bring people back into the fold and some of these people will come into the Masters degree.
That’s right. We have people all over the world and around Australia. In fact the new Artistic Director of Launceston’s Stompin, Caitlin Comerford, is a graduate of LINK.
You’re still enjoying the work after all these years?
Yes. Who would have believed it? I came over for three years and, blink, it’s 11 years. I was at the 2016 Dance Awards in Perth the other night and so many of those dancers on the stage, I’ve trained. It’s such a joy and a privilege to see those people. I’ve said, I don’t think it’s my end journey here, but for now, it’s going well.
And you continue to train dancers at WAAPA?
Yes, I’m working in the undergraduate program as well. I teach composition to first years and improvisation to second years and technique to third years. That’s half my job and the other half is running the LINK program and now this new Masters component. It’s keeping me busy, that’s for sure.
L-R: LINK Dance Company, 2016: April Vardy, Cheyenne Davis, Anthony Rinaldi, Tanya Brown and Michael Whaites
Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA), Edith Cowan University, Perth. Read about the one-year Bachelor of Arts (Dance) Honours degree incorporating LINK Dance Company here and the two-year fulltime Master of Arts (Performing Arts) degree here.
Originally published on Partial Durations, a collaboration between RealTime and Matthew Lorenzon.
Like all good neo-noir dystopias, the city of Michael Bakrnčev’s Sky Jammer has roots in contemporary urban life. In this episode I speak with Bakrnčev about property speculation, Macedonian folk dances, and conflicting advice in his Cybec 21st Century Australian Composers commission.
Thanks to the ABC and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra for giving us permission to use their recording of Sky Jammer from the 2016 Metropolis New Music Festival.
As we live through this moment of anticipating a glorious technological future, the promise of the Asian Century and the catastrophe of climate change, we are increasingly reliant on our screens to inform, connect and disconnect us from our world. In a new book, Screen Ecologies: Art, Media, and the Environment in the Asia-Pacific Region, authors Larissa Hjorth, Sarah Pink, Kristen Sharp and Linda Williams examine these overlapping paradoxes: of art, media and global warming as screened in the Asia Pacific region.
Explained in as few words as possible, this book explores how information and technologies both engage us with and disengage us from the environments we inhabit. But at ground level, a tremendous deal more is going on. The entanglements of creativity, ecology, geography and technology are investigated through sociological, media-archeological and remediation approaches. The methodological skeleton key unlocking these varied research trajectories is the interdisciplinary approach that forms productive connections across the diverse fields of study. It is at times an intricate maze of ideas and a challenging thread to follow, but the scope and urgency of this book makes it well worth the read.
Manabu Ikeda, Meltdown, 2012
In the opening chapters, art, media and climate change are grouped as an interconnected ecosystem, a complex circular network in which all three are produced, experienced and discarded. This media-arts ecology is then situated within the Asia-Pacific Region, home to the vast bulk of device factories, technology consumers and e-refuse destinations. Further tightening the Asia-Pacific focus is the UN’s 2013 report suggesting that the coastal megacities of Asia—Manila, Hong Kong, Tokyo—will be hardest hit by the worst effects of global warming. The problems are proximate and the stakes are high.
Asia’s increasing vulnerability to natural disaster and the way information about it is mediated is taken up in the fourth chapter. Explored here is how mobile screens and camera technologies can instantly transmit disasters such as Japan’s Tohoku earthquake and the Philippines’ typhoon Haiyan, but also how our consumption of these devices makes us complicit in the gradual but larger catastrophe of climate change. Just as the sublime devastation of disaster footage makes for compelling screen viewing, likewise the mass dumping of rapidly obsolete screen technologies makes for tremendous environmental disasters. It’s a close symbiotic relationship.
Moving beyond the apocalyptic, the discussion enters the calmer waters of contemporary arts as a ‘platform’ to productively engage with climate change. Here, the authors trace the rise of trans-regional art spaces such as biennials, triennials, community arts projects and micro-sites as locations for exploring ecological concerns. This examination includes an essential critique of the arts, both as a means for disseminating and investigating cultural zeitgeists, as well as an industry through which Capitalism reproduces itself in new and creative guises, often at the same time.
In the book’s central chapters, eco-critical arts practices from across the Asia Pacific are introduced with vital analysis of the strengths and limitations of both art and social media as effective means for rethinking climate change. In an exceptionally useful conclusion, the authors look beyond present models of engagement and collaborative art projects to offer new possibilities for participation in which media technologies might be usefully mobilised: new ways of connecting with each other and our natural surroundings to which our screen technologies somehow make us blind.
This book is unmistakably an academic text, and as such it often favours factual rigour over arresting prose. It can, at times, be clinically scholarly in its delivery. What breathes precious life into the study is the extensive discussion and analysis of the works of art that populate the volume, works that through a different vernacular, illustrate the pressing concerns taken up by the authors.
Yao Lu, The beauty of Kunming, 2010
Noteworthy is Chinese Photographer Yao Lu, whose composite images masquerade as beautiful instances of traditional Shan Shui landscape painting, replete with calligraphy and signature stamps. Yet on closer examination, the scenery reveals layers of industrial pollution and construction refuse, offering a critical assessment of China’s exploding metropolitan growth. Parallel concerns, but in a Japanese context, are expressed in the work of artist Ikeda Manabu whose hyper-dense ink illustrations envisage the lush intricacy of the city jungle, evoking the brutal yet beautiful insect-like industry of human urban construction.
From an Australian perspective, Adelaide sound investigator Jason Sweeney draws attention to audio pollution, offering a radical approach to the noise of the city by inviting participants to record its silences via mobile, thereby acting as “earwitnesses” to the nuanced urban soundscape. A comparable potency of amplifying silence is shown in the work of Natalie Jeremijenko who equips water-cleaning mussels with sensors, so that the opening and closing of their shells lends each creature a voice. The work enables audiences to observe and celebrate the tremendous environmental services these molluscs provide.
Natalie Jeremijenko, The Melbourne Mussel Choir, 2014
The spectrum of problems this book unearths and the creative tactics used to address them is perhaps best manifested in the work of photographer/activist Ravi Agarwal whose practice exceeds traditional boundaries of art to remind us that environmental policy, grassroots activism and the preservation of the planet are not simply social, environmental and political activities, but are also deeply creative and aesthetic endeavours.
Yet for all the ground this book covers, there is much it does not. Subjects from the Pacific trash vortex to the toxicity in e-waste city Guiyu receive little to no treatment, while numerous potentially worthy artists are not included. Given this area of investigation is so immense, evolving and urgent, it’s curious not to find more examination of these interwoven topics in other publications and media.
Inspired by the book’s thrust, I was left wondering how its content could be expanded and its messages made more explicit. Could the relationship between creativity, technology and sustainability and the quickening cycles of consumption they produce somehow be explained through more popular means? Would people re-engage with these burning issues if they transcended academic pages and gallery spaces to be made into mobile apps, web documentaries or games? But again in trying to screen the problem, it reproduces itself.
Larissa Hjorth and Sarah Pink are Professors in the RMIT School of Media and Communication; Kristen Sharp is Senior Lecturer and Linda Williams Associate Professor in the RMIT School of Art.
Amid a concentrated festival program, Leah Scholes’ Simulcast concert was scheduled simultaneously with a Xenakis keyboard marathon by Peter de Jager, the afternoon a kind of meta-simulcast of scheduling by BIFEM director David Chisholm. Thankfully these performances were repeated for those wanting to experience both; though the Xenakis program might have looked on paper the more intensive of the two, Simulcast was its true equal in quality and presentation, no less of a physical feat and with its own singular aesthetic. All five percussion pieces shared a concern with the uncomfortable interaction, the friction, between sound and meaning, and the slippage and failure of language.
Mark Applebaum’s Aphasia enlists his percussionist not as a maker of sounds, or even as a striker of objects, but as a practitioner of a kind of fake sign language. There’s something absurd and yet sublime about the juxtaposition of mundane domestic signs—manipulating a Rubik’s Cube, swimming breaststroke, turning a vehicle’s ignition—with totally unfamiliar, otherworldly sounds, distortions of a human voice in the pre-recorded tape part. The voice is both synchronised with the signs and semantically alien to them: this is a form of puppetry more than any kind of meaningful sign language.
Scholes combines the substantial repertoire of hand gestures with an entirely deadpan expression. There’s impressive counterpoint not only in passages of simultaneous and rapidly alternating gestures (all memorised in sync with the complex and rhythmically irregular tape part) but also between this highly animated, angular physical virtuosity and the deliberate blankness of the performer’s face and body. Furthermore, despite heavy processing, the taped voice is clearly recognisable as a deep male one. In this version of the piece, the disjunction between the sound of that voice (Nicholas Isherwood’s) and the physical appearance of the female performer heightens the sense of ventriloquism, an operatic alien puppeteer loading the performer’s semantic capacity with unfamiliar sounds, to be translated and performed as familiar but contextually meaningless gestures. What begins as a stream of audio-visual objects that could form meaningful language is revealed as a kind of expressive paralysis.
All the pieces on the program shared Applebaum’s interest in spoken language, and perhaps in questioning its communicative function. However some works took a less cynical viewpoint.
Far from deadpan, the emotional tone of Vinko Globokar’s Toucher was highly energetic, switching quickly between characters and conversations in an imaginary series of dialogues with the mathematician and astronomer Galileo Galilei. Toucher presented a kind of formalised musical lesson. After a short solfege-style key to the sounds we were about to hear (each specific syllable associated with a unique pop or swish of a percussion gesture), Scholes launched full speed ahead into these aphoristic encounters. Each section was clearly numbered and announced, including the pauses, much to the amusement of the audience. From what I could make out of the French, these sections were arranged in a non-linear order, and the spoken language came in and out of the texture while the percussive simulacra remained a constant, such that our focus (particularly for non-francophones) was not on deciphering direct semantic meaning, but on observing the inner logic of inflection and phrasing.
Leah Scholes, Simulcast, BIFEM 2016
Such was her familiarity with the material, so well ingrained was the cadence in her voice and hands, that Scholes was a perfect foil for the potentially didactic structure: nonchalant, incisive and theatrically convincing in embodying a whole cast of characters.
Francois Sarhan’s Homework #1 (part of a series of music-theatre works by the composer) has neither historical figures nor universal signs to tie it to the concrete. Instead Sarhan employs the jargonistic language of instructional manuals to imagine a seemingly innocuous mechanical object which the performer is involved in building or fixing (“take the lip of the pipe” etc). What begins as a cheerfully optimistic charade (think daytime children’s television) soon dissolves into concern and then panic, as the exterior pragmatic world of systems and details comes into conflict with an interior emotional world—“no, not like that!”—and gets altogether out of control.
At its climax Homework recalls Georges Aperghis’s Le corps à corps, in a complex groove of hitting, twisting and ragged breathing. Although some of the tiniest sounds—the facial percussion, for example—may have benefited from amplification, the increasingly urgent trajectory carried the listener’s attention right through to a silent, hollow coda.
The longest and most texturally complex work on the program was Rick Burkhardt’s Simulcast, a riot of translation, miscommunication and fragmentation. Scholes was joined by fellow percussionist Louise Devenish, seated at a sort of radio announcers’ table and armed with microphones, suspended cymbals and a range of unusual percussion instruments, including harmonica and clickers. The pair were precise and in sync, down to the matching pitch and inflection of their voices in a dreamlike unison episode. Scholes and Devenish began as a kind of bilingual sports commentary team, but as the empty language of management-speak intruded and complex interference patterns emerged, the narrative sense started to unravel. By the end of the work language was being described not in communicative terms but as a kind of interrogation or torture. “Most of what is happening now is shouting.”
Rounding off a sleek and satisfying concert came Australian composer Kate Neal’s declamatory Self Accusation. Like the Globokar, Neal’s work conflated language and percussion gestures, but in a more insistent pulsation, a list of self-reflections that ranged from neutral observations to descriptions of restriction and conflict. Peter Handke’s 1966 text, Self-Accusation, had an appealing Beatnik quality, reveling in repetitive grammatical structures: it might invite comparison with Ginsberg’s seminal anti-establishment poem America.
The whispered control and formality of the opening, with its delicate metallic sounds and tentative self-discovery, opened out into a joyful looseness, proclaiming a rebellion against all the arbitrary constraints of society: “I did not husband my sexual powers! […] I CROSSED ON THE RED!”
In the course of these five works (mirroring the structure of the Xenakis concert), Scholes revealed not only an attention to the finest details of complex percussion music (with the exception of the Rick Burkhardt duo that gave the concert its title, Scholes’ program was memorised, to an extreme degree of precision), but also a theatrical flair in spades, a special combination required to pull off such ambitious works. In this regard the expert contribution of director Penelope Bartlau should be specially acknowledged. Scholes used her own body and voice as a site of crisis and discovery, a site for a fascinating interplay of emotional and intellectual currents, interior and exterior worlds. It must be mentioned too that both the works and their interpretation were serious fun, the concert an unashamedly flamboyant and engaging vision of what music can be.
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Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music 2016: Leah Scholes, Simulcast; Old Fire Station, Bendigo, 3 Sept
Chun Yin Rainbow Chan, Broken Vessel of 1996, Autotune, Liquid Architecture
Over the last three years Liquid Architecture has become an integral part of a rapidly expanding conversation around sound-based practices in Australia. Through a diverse program of events including this year’s Autotune Everything, 2015’s Capitalist Surrealism, and the ongoing What Would a Feminist Methodology Sound Like?, Liquid Architecture is providing a crucial context for a particular set of practices rapidly exceeding ‘sound’ as an appropriate descriptor.
Over three nights at Melbourne’s Greek Centre for Contemporary Culture, Autotune Everything provided a long and varied program of critical and conceptual performances, evoking the Antares pitch correction software as a metaphor for cultural standardisation (sadly, none of the artists actually used it). Autotune limits an incoming vocal signal to a predetermined range of notes, typically those within a given key, scale or mode in order to guarantee conventional musicality. When a singer sings through Autotune, the software will automatically ‘correct’ the pitch by shifting it to the nearest note—one cannot sing a ‘wrong’ note through Autotune. If we apply this restrictive logic to culture, politics, listening and seeing, we arrive at the central problem addressed here: everything appears to be Autotuned in some way.
Thus the Liquid Architecture team focuses on Autotune’s subtractive qualities. The implication is that in our time as in all others, only certain modes of political and social organisation are thinkable; only certain sounds are hearable, certain images seeable and only certain statements sayable—all human activity is constrained by some physical, social, psychological, or anatomical limit. The works in Autotune Everything all speak to this basic truth in some way. How can we think the unthought, hear the unheard and see the unseen? Is hearing possible outside the frameworks we rely on to make sound intelligible? What would these expanded practices sound like?
Andrew McLellan, Unilateral Directories, Autotune, Liquid Architecture
Andrew McLellan, Unilateral Directories
Andrew McLellan’s performance Unilateral Directories is concerned with the increasingly polarised nature of political discourse and the overwhelming volume of information we often consume (or perhaps, more accurately, are exposed to) on a daily basis. As Facebook filters the news to reflect our views, our opinions are funnelled back to us through an algorithmic echo chamber. McLellan feeds diametrically opposed journalism (articles from The Australian vs New Matilda—though it is not apparent which articles) through a patch that renders a single word at a time on a screen. Words taken from the headline, the article and the comments section scroll endlessly while McLellan desperately tries to keep up, reading the words aloud as they fly by. As the speed and volume begin to exceed his capacity to read and speak, the data jam is rendered physical via the performer’s body. As comprehension becomes impossible, McLellan begins to choke on the words and his facial expression freezes, suggesting saturation point has been reached. The performance climaxes in an explosion of vocal pyrotechnics that bursts through the echo chamber, revealing the embodied entity lurking behind the echo.
Chun Yin Rainbow Chan, Broken Vessel
Chun Yin Rainbow Chan’s work, titled Broken Vessel of 1996, operates in more personal territory. The reference to Walter Benjamin’s 1923 essay “The Task of the Translator” in the title hints at the theme. Via Google Translate, Chan gives a potted account of her family’s migration to Australia in the year 1996. As Google Translate has no setting for her native Cantonese, Chan is forced to speak into her phone in Mandarin. What comes out in English is a humorously garbled yet poignant description of the process of adapting to life in Australia. Chan describes losing the ability to communicate in precise Cantonese with her parents and becoming what they mockingly refer to as a ‘Banana’ (yellow on the outside, white on the inside). Following this Chan launches into karaoke versions of “Killing Me Softly,” “Wannabe” and “Unbreak My Heart.” The songs refer to a box of VHS tapes that accompanied the family on their journey—a time capsule of a popular culture left behind in Hong Kong, but which bleeds into this new and different context. The songs are sung in Cantonese, in a literal phonetic translation that violates the tonal specificity demanded by the language. As such the songs exist in both and neither worlds; they are in Cantonese but are bastardised by English phonetic structure. The performance reimagines the process of translation and the experience of the first generation migrant.
Johannes Kreidler, Product Placement; Fremdarbeit
German composer Johannes Kreidler took the audience through two of his works—Product Placement (2008), and Fremdarbeit (2009)—explaining the works verbally and demonstrating them with the aid of documentation. The first is a 30-second composition made of 77,200 samples. On completing the work, Kreidler attempted to register it with GEMA, the German equivalent of APRA. He arrived at their office with all 77,200 printed forms required for registration. So emerges the social and political territory of the work—a critique of copyright law and the ways in which its attendant bureaucracy structures and controls creativity. The presentation was interesting, and the crowd laughed audibly throughout, although it is unclear why the work is being discussed in this context given its age and the obviousness of the critique in 2016. An interesting tangent might be to note that since (and before) this work was published in 2008, music and other forms of cultural production have in practice been forced to sidestep copyright restrictions rather than continue to confront them in the explicit manner of artists like Negativland or John Oswald (both of whom made similar critiques a central theme in their work dating as far back as the late 70s). Hip Hop production’s move away from sampling practices since the early 2000s seems relevant here as an instance in which the kinds of cultural constraints the Liquid Architecture team is trying to critique might actually be thought of as generative.
Johannes Kreidler, Product Placement; Fremdarbeit, Autotune, Liquid Architecture
The second work Kreidler presented, Fremdarbait (German for ‘outsourcing’), focuses on the inequity inherent in trade relations between wealthy countries and their partners. He brings attention to the devaluation of labour in non-Western countries by outsourcing his composition to an Indian programmer and a Chinese composer. Kreidler describes in very matter of fact terms how he paid them $15 and $30 respectively for the privilege. There were four pieces in total, all performed at Autotune Everything by an ensemble of white classical musicians, presumably being paid for their time. In the first piece, the Chinese composer, named by Kreidler as “X Xiang,” was asked to write a piece in the same style as Kreidler’s other works. In the second, a programmer from India named “Ramesh Murabai” was paid to write software that would automate the composition of similar works. In the third Xiang was asked to write a piece using Murabai’s software. In the fourth Xiang was asked to write a piece which incorporated 20% “plagiarised” material, in the form of a Maria Callas sample.
What emerges from all this composition, primarily, is a critique of neo-liberal logic and the economic brutality of globalisation. Kreidler states in an interview on his website that refers to the work, “Tonight’s goal is that no one here tonight will vote for the EDP [German neo-liberal party] ever again.” As with the first piece, the temporal lag between the creation of the work and its presentation here is instructive. Given the pervasive nature of neo-liberal critiques, events such as the Seattle WTO protests and recent movements such as Occupy—it is unclear who exactly will be surprised to learn that globalisation extends to musical composition. Fremdarbait is certainly an interesting work, with many possible interpretations, but I think what it ultimately provides is a demonstration of Kreidler’s rhetorical, formal and aesthetic virtuosity, rather than a new perspective on the global economy and labour practices. A broader question as to whether representation equates to critique is also relevant to Kreidler’s work: does simply re-enacting a set of injustices do anything to ameliorate them?
Eric Demetriou, Makiko Yamamoto presents…, Autotune, Liquid Architecture
Eric Demetriou, Makiko Yamamoto presents…
Melbourne artist Eric Demetriou’s work—titled Makiko Yamamoto presents Eric Demetriou who presents Camila Galaz, Sam George presents Travis John, Joel Stern presents Kalinda Vary—was an hilarious exploration of the absurdity of the rituals of cultural production. The work roughly mimics a chat show format, where Demetriou obsesses over the social and political details of organising his band. Makiko Yamamoto interviews Demetriou throughout the performance, but they consistently fail to reach meaningful dialogue. Demetriou derails the lines of questioning, always bringing the conversation back to his own genius and his neurotic mode of inflicting it on others. There are live and not-so-live crosses to former and present band mates, who are in various states of disinterest with respect to the project. The performance climaxes when the band—made up of various collaborators and audience members—manages to play a shambolic cover version of “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Demetriou’s orchestration of this moment is a humorous allegory for the difficulty and complexity of organising a group of people to do just about anything.
Seth Kim-Cohen, Against Ambience
Chicago-based academic Seth Kim-Cohen delivered a performative version of his 2013 polemic, Against Ambience. He read out an edited and condensed version of the book while playing guitar through a series of pedals. There was an accompanying Powerpoint presentation with his academic credentials in the footer, various quotes from art critics and images pertaining to his examples. Each time he said “see,” he would pull out a digital camera and take a picture of the crowd. At a certain point his voice became inaudible, drowned out by the guitar drone.
To provide some context, Kim-Cohen’s book frames certain art practices as ‘ambient’ (James Turrell and Brian Eno are two notable bugbears) and argues they are insufficiently social, discursive, political and relational. Citing a rush of seven shows in New York in 2013, Kim-Cohen argues that the recent popularity of ‘ambience’ has ushered in an event no less momentous than “the symbolic death of conceptual art.” For Kim-Cohen, the conceptual traditions inaugurated by the “linguistic turn” of the early 60s are in danger, threatened by a rash of vapid, crudely sensual art. By his account, ambient practices promote a singular, passive, subsumed mode of interaction that is not representative of the kind of relational, political, critical and conceptual sound-based practices Kim-Cohen would like to see and hear.
Transposing this argument back on to Kim-Cohen’s performance is a perplexing exercise. Perhaps he’s trying to problematise the ‘ambience’ of his own guitar work by highlighting its tendency to drown out the efficacy of his words. Perhaps he is trying to demonstrate the way in which sound is always pregnant with meaning—as if his arguments are somehow contained in the guitar drone. Is he beckoning us to extract the discourse embedded in sound? Or is he performing an immanent critique of his own performance by generating a vacuous apolitical experience? There is no neat conclusion to draw, perhaps necessarily so, and I think the work is most usefully construed as constructing a murky interpretive zone in which competing ideologies, (ambience vs conceptualism, if you like) jostle for ethical and intellectual high ground.
Seth Kim-Cohen, Against Ambience, Autotune, Liquid Architecture
A new version of an old binary?
Aside from forcing me to engage with his book, (there is no choice for someone wishing to understand the work), Kim-Cohen’s awkward superimposition of a pre-existing argument onto a performance raises another set of questions. If conceptuality and discourse are to be taken as not only a background of interpretive possibilities but as the work itself, what remains of live performance as an aesthetic form? And what sort of ideological conflicts are at work in this apparently benign desire for the primacy of discourse? What seems to emerge in Kim-Cohen’s writing is a general assertion that critical discourse and conceptual practices are more sophisticated than other ways of doing things. A binary is constructed whereby the realm of the popular/explicitly aesthetic and the more rarefied, prestigious and self-consciously intellectual realm of critical thought and its attendant practices are put in opposition. This strikes me as a new version of a very old, Eurocentric, high vs low binary. In this conception of culture, discourse is the self-appointed arbiter. It comments on, analyses, critiques and appropriates the culture beneath it, producing a rarefied reflection that has come to constitute its own culture of detachment and reflection.
There is certainly a place for this thinking, and Liquid Architecture’s curatorial ventures pose an interesting and relevant problem: can discourse, interpretation and critique ever be primary mediums? Can criticism ever exceed that to which it refers? What happens when these principles are mobilised as entertainment in the form of sound-based performance? This conversation between ‘content,’ ie the world of popular aesthetic production (taken to include art) and the possibilities contained in its critical appraisal via performance, is to my mind the axis around which the Autotune Everything program ends up revolving. Questions of cultural standardisation recede into the background.
When is criticality its own form of ‘ambience’?
Rather than championing criticality and conceptual intent as some sort of end in itself, a more interesting gesture might be to ask: when is criticism its own form of virtuosity? At what point, particularly in the mildly corrupt world of academic publishing, is criticality its own form of ‘ambience’? A central problem in Kim-Cohen’s argument emerges with the consideration that ‘ambience’ is no more or less imbricated with capital than criticism and conceptuality. These immaterial, or de-material commodities (Kim-Cohen thinks there is a difference), are arguably functions of the art market. Interesting critiques and ideas drive the relentless production of the new. Conceptual frameworks, elaborated in so many paid-for catalogue essays and artist statements, differentiate cultural products that are aesthetically equivalent. Seen in this light, ‘ambience’ is a straw person that implies the commodification of certain practices while mysteriously excusing others. If we take critiques of neo-liberalism seriously, it is clear that in a contemporary context subsumption is complete and automatic—re-enacting critical discourse as live performance does no more to address this than Turrell’s grandiose light shows.
Sound domestication
Additionally, I think there are some unacknowledged interests bound up in the value system established in Against Ambience. Chiefly, a barely concealed desire for ‘sound’ (whatever that might be and however we might designate its limits) to operate in the same rarefied realm of prestige and distinction as the visual arts and academia. Why can’t sound works have weighty catalogue essays? I can’t avoid the suspicion that this elevation of sound to critical discourse is in no way emancipatory, rather, it merely domesticates sound within the same stable of discursive art practices on rotation in the academy. While I agree that sound-based art works can operate in this field, I do not believe Kim-Cohen presents a coherent argument for why they should.
Perhaps it is unfair to single Kim-Cohen out here. His stated goal of encouraging practices that engage with “institutional critique, gender politics, economics, the AIDS crisis, foreign policy/cultural imperialism, globalism, philosophy, interpersonal and societal power relations and the distribution of knowledge” is laudable. But by critiquing Against Ambience, what I would like to do here (and what I think Kim-Cohen and Liquid Architecture have effectively done with Autotune Everything, intentionally or not) is to hold a mirror up to the practices that purport to hold the mirror—in order to clarify what these critical practices do. This is of course an open question, and Liquid Architecture is attempting to generate these discussions at a timely point in the trajectory of sound as a medium.
The Greek mathematical genius is no stranger to history: Euclid of the distance and Pythagoras of the triangle, to start with. Using his own 20th century mathematical genius to create musical structures of a completely other aesthetic dimension, Iannis Xenakis expanded the rhythmic and musical conceptual capacities of countless musicians. He consolidated hitherto untethered art processes of music and architecture, allowing composers to see that they may follow the same conceptual paths as mathematicians.
But Xenakis was famously fell out with his teacher, Honegger, who claimed his creations “weren’t music.” A prodigious architect for Le Corbusier, Xenakis entered the post-WWII Paris music scene with the power to realise majestic physical structures of beauty, and sheer will to apply these musically foreign processes to sound structures. The great Messiaen saw something quite different in Xenakis’ untrained potential, and in what has to be the most hilarious doctoral thesis defence ever given, instead of grilling Xenakis on the canon, Messiaen began by insisting Xenakis himself was a giant figure in music for creating a new system while Xenakis sincerely attempted to defend a position of modesty.
Xenakis saw beauty in line and not just in the simplistic pitch/time functions of the original Cartesian planes we call staves. He took our parameters of slow-fast, soft-loud, short-long and high-pitch-low-pitch and brought to our equal attention those we tend not to think of in such explicit terms: disorder-order, resonance-decay, density (musical events per second)-emptiness until musical events become complex multi-dimensional systems normally only comfortably contemplated by physicists. But today Xenakis’ multidimensional musical algorithms are the mental test for contemporary musicians.
The parameter of disorder-to-order is the most pertinent in this music as it reflects Xenakis’ deep sense of cultural and social responsibility in his art. He believed that artistic forms created environments for political structures, and that without allowances for random events and aggregations, if the standard deviation is too low in music, this could amount to an expression of totalitarianism. Therefore the keyboard works build upon scaffolds of unpredictability, in places literally unplayable in all prescribed dimensions, meaning that the performer’s choice of how best to realise the ideal is integral to the works. In 2008 Daniel Grossman realised these same works that de Jager explores but used computer MIDI programming and so missed Xenakis’ concept entirely in terms of both political ideals and closing off the potential for the composer’s intended transformation of the performer.
Peter de Jager’s choice to perform these five works shows artistic integrity, mental might and chops, chops, chops. He played two marathon concerts of the same program and I, like others in the audience, attended the first and returned for the second. In Evryali, de Jager’s lines were fluid and sweeping, a complete other world to the chopping, rhythmic play of the opening, leading to the most beautiful execution of the sparse, pointillistic seven bars, each note created with unique astral intensity and placement. De Jager creates uncannily clear contrapuntal journeys via the expansive block chords, remaining true to close, lower-register voicing, eliciting the most captivatingly secure and organically transfigured syncopations.
Instruments awaiting Peter de Jager, Marathon, BIFEM 2016
De Jager’s Khoaï is high drama for the left hand, with digital beep codes in the upper register for the right, both conveyed without tainting and impressively unreactive to each other. The thumping of the harpsichord’s pedals lends the piece the quality of a censored organ’s foot manual, determined to be heard regardless. The expansions of register with increasingly drastic changes of tone were spine-tingling. Wild polyrhythms with both dynamic and timbral short leashes made de Jager a musical lion tamer. After the landmark bar’s silence, the sextuplets, quintuplet and nested triplets and duplets are hair-raisingly energised. An expectation-thwarting ending of an exponential reduction of musical density and energy drops seemingly towards silence only to be interrupted by a final shattering resonance. Returning to the piano timbre for Mists brings us back to the expansive resonances that evoke the title of the piece. A juicy B-flat bass line repeated only twice, allows de Jager to convey a moment of jazz idiom with weight and placement for our ears to sink into. The first phrase ends with a tense resonant cluster, and in the second the resonance-structure seemingly hovers over the piano, vividly realised with angelic tone colour.
Naama, far from the nebula of Mists, hits out with clear lines of time-marking and a gradual increase in intensity, tempered by skipping rhythms. The insistent metallic power chords lead from a controlled robotic waltz, to ironic anthem and then return. De Jager pounds the low register to the limit and gives serious anchorage to frenetic rhythms. This motif then leads to cascading right-hand passages.
For the final work, the epic Herma, de Jager uses a sensitive touch and a tempo that allows the space to breathe. He employs formal rigour and thematic pitch sets, with weighted meaningful legato contrasting with the stamping resonances of the final grandly integrated super-pitch-set. Choking the final chord, he springs away from the keyboard so abruptly that these musical models keep pounding away in the listener’s mind long after the rounds and rounds of standing ovations and cheers and whoops subside.
Alternating between piano and harpsichord was perhaps a kindness to the marathon-related risk of audience timbral saturation, and testament to Peter de Jager’s physical dexterity and adaptability. The symmetrical programming of the works seemed a little classically formed but I guess a stochastic method could still result in this same form. But this wouldn’t bother Messiaen…I happily promulgate the event of the local bird-life resonantly chirping accompaniment to de Jager’s performance of Mists as a cheeky, symbolic nod of approval from Messiaen.
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Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music 2016: Peter de Jager, Marathon, Bendigo Trades Hall, 3 Sept
Inanition: A Speculation On The End of Times, curated by Laetitia Wilson at Success Gallery in Fremantle, is an exhibition caught between the now conventional moralism of eco-crisis and a desire for the speculative possibilities afforded by jettisoning our all too human perspective by reaching for something beyond terrestrial morality.
Certainly, the show is refreshing in substituting for ecology the more progressive tropes of science fiction. Unlike recent shows in Perth such as PICA’s Radical Ecologies, which felt conservative in its emphasis on a static conception of nature—animals, insects, humans, organic entropy etc.—Inanition looks beyond such familiar tropes to recast the debate about the crisis of the anthropocene in a speculative guise. Instead of moralising about a nature lost, the works in Inanition seem geared towards the possibility of nature as the unforeseen, manifesting in works that challenge precisely the conservative reception of ecology—ie that organisms have homes.
In particular, Kelly Richardson’s The Last Frontier, which depicts an enormous atmospheric dome pulsating in a barren landscape, and Claire Evans and K.M. Merrill’s OK TO GO, a super-cut of “hyperspace” travel sequences from science fiction films, speak to the radical uncertainty of nature at an ontological level without simply reproducing the visual language of the romantic sublime. Embodying science fiction’s capacity to charm, both works cast aside the natural world of nature documentaries, public service announcements and pastoral imagery in order to invoke the possibility of zones and phenomena that are radically incommensurable with humanist notions of nature.
Kelly Richardson, The Last Frontier, 2013, Inanition
Joshua Webb’s inhuman geometry, structured in glowing LEDs and polycarbonate, shimmers beautifully in the darkly-lit basement space of Success. At the base of Webb’s polygonal sculpture, viewers can see themselves partially reflected, albeit in muted form, and obscured by the glossy obsidian support. What is gestured towards in Richardson, Evans and Merrill’s works is made literal by Webb, insofar as its stark vibrancy suggests natural forms that function to absorb, rather than reflect, the human gaze.
Despite the refreshing speculative character of the individual works presented, the framing of the exhibition by Wilson lingers perhaps too long on the more conventional preoccupations of art that grapples with the anthropocene. Meditations on the “end times,” and the influence of Christian eschatology on such meditations are common in the broader genres of science fiction that Inanition draws on. Classic works such as Arthur C Clarke’s Childhood’s End and the popular anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion are obvious examples of the power of sci-fi re-readings of the end of days. Placed outside a conventional Christian notion of apocalypse, such re-readings are able to avoid a moralistic stranglehold and to approach the question of what it means for beings to exist on a finite planet and in a potentially finite universe. In many ways Inanition’s project feels similar, and the show’s willingness to take seriously the fanciful and imaginative aesthetics of science fiction is refreshing. However, the privileging of the apocalypse as a single event, as something that will actually be encountered at a specific end point of history, is one of the more conservative tropes that Inanition struggles to throw off.
One of the reasons the conventional approach to the notion of the apocalypse is conceptually and aesthetically inhibitive is the manner by which such a notion of the “end of days” fails to deal with the personal apocalypses that are continuing all around us. Our own mortality, and the mortality of those we love, can make the sense of a broader extinction too abstract to really have any powerful impact. I could be wrong, but perhaps the fragility of one’s own life, and the lives of those we care for, hinders our ability to worry about a future apocalypse that will be worse than what many already endure. There is, however, an alternative tradition of approaching the end of days, one that can be found in re-readings of the Christian tradition (see Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s later work) and in Inanition’s stand out work: Erin Coates’s Driving to the Ends of the Earth. In this video work, Coates takes on the role of a Donna Haraway-esque figure, situated in a station wagon replete with a host of non-human kin, like dogs and plants, driving through crumbling landscapes and hellish infernos. In such a work one finds not one traumatic ‘end,’ but rather a host of different ending times, each of which poses different challenges. Such is perhaps the only way to truly affirm the challenges ahead.
Erin Coates, Driving to the Ends of the Earth (HD video still), Inanition
Inanation: A Speculation On The End of Times, curator Laetitia Wilson, artists Thea Constantino, Joshua Webb, Erin Coates, Kelly Richardson, Patrick Bernatchez, Claire Evans, KM Merrell; Success, Fremantle, 4 Sept-2 Oct
James Wannan (viola d’amore), Argonaut Ensemble, Decadent Purity, BIFEM 2016
The 2016 Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music explored extremes of scale, from experiments in the macro-organisation of orchestras to the barely audible micro-sounds of violins. This fourth and largest instalment of the festival included works of unprecedented scale and vision thanks to the involvement of globetrotting new music heroes ELISION, an augmented Argonaut Ensemble, the Bendigo Symphony Orchestra and students from the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM). Despite the rare and valuable opportunities to hear new works for large ensembles, the festival’s coveted solo showcase recitals and string quartet program were once again the talk of the festival club.
This year BIFEM’s house band the Argonaut Ensemble reached chamber orchestra proportions, a size the festival’s artistic director David Chisholm hopes to sustain independently of the festival when he leaves the directorship in a few years. Argonaut launched the festival with two double concertos by Chisholm himself and the director of Sydney Chamber Opera, Jack Symonds. Though beautiful examples of chamber orchestration, both pieces demonstrated conspicuous imbalances between their solo instruments, with Symonds’ Decadent Purity foregrounding the glorious resonance and string-crossings of James Wannan’s viola d’amore over Kaylie Melville’s percussion part. Chisholm’s Harp Guitar Double Concerto included a brilliant cadenza for harpist Jessica Fotinos that could easily be a standalone piece, while Mauricio Carrasco’s guitar part, already struggling to be heard above the harp, was given a more concise solo statement.
Rehearsal, ELISION Ensemble and Wu Wei, How Forests Think
ELISION are celebrating their 30th anniversary in Australia after the better part of a decade working intensively with leading composers in Europe and the US. They are a natural fit for Australia’s most ambitious contemporary art music festival and delivered on their reputation with a world premiere of Liza Lim’s How Forests Think featuring sheng master Wu Wei. Informed by Eduardo Kohn’s book of the same title about the subterranean communications systems of trees, and completed by the composer in the presence of the Amazon rainforest, the piece evokes all the wonder and quiet terror of the natural world. The world premiere of Aaron Cassidy’s The Wreck of Former Boundaries provided a suitably unrestrained counterpoint to Lim’s musical poise. Two concerts presented in collaboration with students from ANAM and conducted by Carl Rosman brought to Victoria much appreciated performances of Lim’s Machine for Contacting the Dead—featuring some truly hair-raising writing for bowed piano—and Enno Poppe’s musical meditation on memory, Speicher.
Solo showcase concerts have become such an important fixture at BIFEM that this year Peter de Jager’s program of Xenakis keyboard works and Leah Scholes’ performance of choreographic percussion pieces were both performed twice with minimal intervals. Both programs gave the impression of high-wire tightrope acts, with Scholes’ masterful coordination with tape parts and second percussionist Louise Devenish leaving the audience awestruck. As well as courting musical danger, Scholes walked a fine dramatic line between humour and profound fear and anger. In text-based works by François Sarhan and Kate Neal, Scholes not only commanded the audience as a musician, but also as an actor.
If the complexity of Xenakis’ scores prohibited most of the audience from fully appreciating the tightrope of de Jager’s performance (though greater musical minds assured me it was technically almost faultless), they could be in no doubt as to its physical and mental demands. That de Jager was able to perform three hours of Xenakis without breaking a sweat was almost unsettling. Two of the pieces, Khoaï and Naama, were performed on a 20th century harpsichord, an instrument so rare that one had to be imported from Tasmania. The instrument has pedals to change registers and is larger and more robust than the baroque harpsichord, with a rich, almost electronic tone.
Argonaut Quartet, Glossolalia, BIFEM 2016
This year the Argonaut String Quartet (Erkki Veltheim, Elizabeth Welsh, Graeme Jennings and Judith Hamman) spent most of their time in the realm of whispering bowings and harmonics. In the case of Chisholm’s Bound South the restriction to use only the lowest strings of the instruments and the quietest dynamic markings produced a piece of superb focus and discipline. Pedro Alvarez’s Étude Oblique I and Sergio Luque’s Through Empty Space were by turns brooding and metallic meanderings in the meditative spectrum of string quartet writing. Erkki Veltheim’s explosive Glossolalia provided a welcome contrast.
XXXX Live Nude Girls!!, Argonaut Ensemble, BIFEM 2016
BIFEM continued its commitment to contemporary musical theatre and opera with Irish composer Jennifer Walshe’s junk-opera XXX_LIVE_NUDE_GIRLS!!! Promising nudity but delivering a deconstruction of intimate partner violence, XXX_LIVE_NUDE_GIRLS!!! dares the audience to laugh at the deadly serious. Using a Barbie mansion as a puppet theatre, a Barbie doll with a beard sends another doll flying from a second-storey window. Rose petals are dropped on her, pooling like blood. A toy ambulance comes to pick up the body. This moment entails a fit of nervous laughter from the audience. When a puppeteer’s booted heel crushes the doll even this laughter dissipates, the line between the toys and human figures all but disappearing. Similarly, an excruciatingly extended rape scene only serves to highlight the reality of intimate partner rape. The dolls are an important conceit in getting the audience to this point. Would an opera marketed without such levity be as enthusiastically attended? But with its snippets of mainstream radio and sitcom accents, it is too easy for a contemporary music audience to dismiss domestic violence as a mainstream issue. It does not hold up a mirror to the contemporary arts world, which is not untouched by intimate partner violence.
Two programs combining noise and dance by Myriam Gourfink and Kasper T Toeplitz pushed the limits of the very slow and the very loud. In Data_Noise and Ascension in Noise, the shifting textures of Toeplitz’s synthesised noise met their choreographic match in Gourfink’s micro-movements. In Data_Noise sensors on Gourfink’s arms and legs controlled sand-blasting granular-synthesis sounds, while in Ascension in Noise hundreds of oscillators made their way from very low to very high pitches over several hours, while Gourfink moved ever so slowly in the space. Toeplitz and Gourfink’s focused simplicity provided moments of respite from the complexity of BIFEM’s program of notated music. The noise duo Sister (Marco Cher-Gibard and Ben Speth) provided a very different experience, blasting the audience with feedback and processed guitar while Matthew Adey improvised lighting design by deploying fluorescent lights and gels around the space. Adey’s creative lighting designs were so affecting that this duo properly deserves to be a trio.
After a weekend of performances by dedicated new music ensembles, it was refreshing to close the festival with the Bendigo Symphony Orchestra performing Michel and André Décosterd’s PHO:TON for orchestra and solo keyboard. The keyboardist (Peter Dumsday) triggers lights above the orchestral performers, with each key lighting up a single instrumentalist. The light is a cue for the performer to play a musical module. Single figures appear and disappear out of the darkness, revealing not the preened homogeneity of a contemporary music ensemble, but the whole range of demographics that make up a community orchestra. The rhythmic patterns of the lights and music are hypnotic, with criss-crossing, diagonal and meandering lines moving across the ensemble. For a festival that receives and gives back so much to its local community I cannot imagine a more fitting ending.
Bendigo Symphony Orchestra & Peter Dumsday (piano), pho:ton, BIFEM 2016
Described as “one part talent show, one part improvisation laboratory,” Clinton Green’s Improv Idol premiered in 2015 with powerful performances, a spirited audience and a team of incisive, wickedly witty judges: Carolyn Connors, Ian Parsons and Sean Baxter. You’ll find video excerpts from the 2015 event on the Improv Idol website.
2015 Improv Idol winner Gemma Horbury joins Connors and Baxter on the 2016 judging panel.
The 2016 cache of contestants—Roger Alsop, Aviva Endean, Rod Gregory, Carey Knight, Derek McCormack, Michael McNab, Roni Shewan and Adam Simmons—represents a diversity of formal and improvisatory talent ranging across sound design, classical contemporary, sound art, song and jazz and on a rich variety of instruments.
For all Improv Idol’s inherent sense of fun, this lineup of artists should make for some serious competition. Read about the artists, the judges and contest rules here.
Improv Idol 2016, Wesley Anne Bar & Restaurant, 250 High St, Northcote, Melbourne, 8-11pm, 29 Sept
RealTime issue #134 Aug-Sept 2016
Jo Lloyd, Nicola Gunn, Mermermer, Next Move
Making live performance, as Robert Lepage once said, is all about meeting people. Things only begin to happen in the moment of creative encounter, where there’s a connection or a collision of different artistic, intellectual or corporeal energies.
De Quincey Co, Metadata
Collaboration has always been a prominent feature of choreographer Tess de Quincey’s work. Think of the ambitious sprawl of DeQuincey/Lynch’s Compression 100 (1996), a collaboration with a host of Sydney-based musicians, writers and visual artists, or her work with visual artist Debra Petrovitch, poet/performer Amanda Stewart and media artist Francesca da Rimini in Nerve 9 (2001). More recently there was Moondance (2015) in which she worked with both a photographer and a video artist.
In her latest project, a double bill titled MetaData, collaboration is again at the fore as she works with a team of video, sound and animation artists, deploying techniques of data visualisation in a shadowy meditation on the relationship between science and art.
The first piece, Pure Light, is described as an homage to American artist Dan Flavin, best known for his minimalist installations of the 1960s and 1970s. Images of large fluorescent tubes are projected onto a screen at the back of the stage to create a series of shrine-like frames for an enigmatic solo figure dressed all in white.
Later, the space is suffused with colour: gradated orange through to peach, garish apricot and hot pink. The figure seems to diminish, but her shadow looms large on the screen and draws focus, cutting through the colour.
It’s a short work which shuttles easily between the playful and the sinister. Using the images of fluorescent tubes as a way of lighting the stage is a fun irony, but it also creates some spooky effects on the creeping figure.
As the figure, de Quincey is a compelling dramatic presence. Her movements are slow, forced and slightly tremulous, as though she were subject to unwilling possession. The moment when she turns to face the audience for the first time is a breathtaking reveal. Against a dark background, with her pale skin, spiky white hair, white eyebrows and large white hood, she seems a profoundly mournful vision.
The second piece, Moths & Mathematics, which de Quincey dances with Peter Fraser, is more challenging. Again, the dancers perform before a screen. Flickering points of projected light slide across their bodies as they pace back and forth, tracing a grid pattern on the stage floor. Gradually the animation develops in complexity with long curving lines and small star bursts. Shapes and patterns emerge that move with the sound design, as if responding to frequency data. There are long twisting particle streams and thickets of saw-toothed waveforms; three-dimensional bar charts rise up like brutalist apartment blocks, each with hundreds of pulsing cells.
All the animation is beautifully detailed, but by the end we lose sight of the dancers. In discussing Nerve 9, which also used frontal projection, de Quincey once suggested that it was the fact that the body kept getting in the way and fragmenting the projected images which—paradoxically—held the work together. In Moths & Mathematics, Fraser and de Quincey seem too small to influence our perception of the animation, which towers over them and is in any case already fragmented and abstract. Often it’s like they’re huddling, limbs folded together, disappearing into one another beneath a squall of data.
Tess de Quincy, Peter Fraser, MetaData, Dancehouse
Chunky Move: Next Move, Re-make
Over at Chunky Move, as part of the 2016 Next Move program, contemporary dance maker and performer Melanie Lane and former Australian Ballet soloist Juliet Burnett engage in what looks like a more traditional collaborative relationship: the choreographer and her star dancer.
At its core, Lane’s piece, called Re-make, places us at an intersection between one dancer’s embodied knowledge of ballet traditions and another’s contemporary desire to pull apart classical forms and refashion them after a futuristic contemporary dance aesthetic.
It begins with five variations on a short but beautiful balletic study en pointe danced by Burnett—in gold-brown body suit and gold lipstick. Lane, all in black, watches from the sidelines. At first the mood is one of cool reserve with an emphasis on poise and control; but with each successive repetition Burnett becomes more and more expressive. At the same time, the lighting becomes more atmospheric and the musical accompaniment more affecting.
This progress toward expressivity culminates in a whirlwind tour through the various bits of mime and prop work in the ballet Giselle. We get Giselle and her mirror, Albrecht and his sword, Bathilde and her goblet, and plenty more. We also get their deaths. Soon after this, Lane joins Burnett on the floor and attempts to wrestle her in a new direction, away from romantic storytelling toward a sort of arty expressionism with gothic overtones. And so it is that Re-make eventually finishes with a heaving half-lit pas de trois between Lane, Burnett and a hefty black Kubrick-esque monolith.
In one memorable passage on the journey toward that point, Lane pulls a long black tutu over Burnett’s head. With Burnett doubled over, all we see are her long legs surrounded by a mass of tulle. It’s an image reminiscent of Xavier Le Roi’s Self Unfinished (1998), performed in Australia in 2015), but more theatrical. She begins to move laterally, again en pointe, fluttering around the stage on swift little steps. It’s like the remnants of a torso-less statue come to life. Is this the long pas de bourrée of The Dying Swan, seen from below?
This is ballet as radical subtraction: Fokine’s sentimental mime without the expressive arm movements on which so much of the sentiment depends. The question then shifts to one of substitution.
Not all sections are so original. A kind of intermission where Burnett, with a few glam rock accessories, strums awkwardly on an electric guitar is superfluous, and I wonder if the wrestling isn’t a little too obvious, even though it does generate some interesting hybrid shapes.
They’re a well-matched pair, Burnett and Lane, despite their different dance backgrounds, with both artists seemingly at home in uncanny nightscapes. Burnett may have danced La Sylphide while at Australian Ballet, but she also thrilled to the alien lines of Wayne McGregor’s Chroma (2006). In Re-make she displays almost entomic sangfroid, relishing the metamorphosis of ballerina into praying mantis.
Melanie Lane & Juliet Burnett, Re-make, Next Move
Chunky Move: Next Move, Mermermer
In Mermermer, the second work on the program, collaboration centres on a meeting of artistic philosophies. Jo Lloyd and Nicola Gunn have been collaborating on and off for several years now, with Lloyd providing choreography for Gunn and Gunn dramaturging for Lloyd. Here they are sharing creative responsibilities in what feels like a real vanguard piece, extending the old maps and testing the ground for new ways forward.
Mermermer is billed as a conversation between the last two surviving humans about the process of making art. This set-up, however, is not referred to in the performance itself; instead, choreography becomes a way of cataloguing or structuring past affective experiences. Remembered bodily reactions become brief dance phrases which, when strung together, draw the two dancers round and round the stage.
While performing, they describe or label each memory, speaking to no-one in particular, murmuring softly. “Oh,” says Lloyd, “that’s hard to digest,” as she pulls a face and rubs her tummy. “Really good sex,” sighs Gunn as her head lolls back, eyes closed, “just a distant memory now.”
It’s all held together with a bouncing, vigorous back-and-forth rhythm, an energy characteristic of Lloyd’s work. After some 15 minutes, Gunn abruptly leaves the stage to fetch something which she calls “the view.” This turns out to be two large grey ponchos and piles of shiny streamers. There is an extended moment of stillness as the two performers pose beneath their props, and then the murmured talk resumes, but less concentratedly, with meandering anecdotes and more conversational interaction.
Both artists have in the past made plenty of art that reflects on the process of making art, but here the composition is more random or fragmented, like a collage of memories. In their program note, they force an imaginative link—via a quote from American author David Shields’ book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010)—between the word memoir the French la mer, “the sea.” And Mermermer, particularly in its last section where the conversation falls away completely, does have a soothing effect reminiscent of the mimic motion and medleyed sound of a calm ocean.
If it isn’t dance enough for dance or theatre enough for theatre, perhaps it is, after all, no more than a meeting. In one of her many digressions, Nicola Gunn describes an idea for a new performance piece in which a group of bald men with straggly beards arranges chairs and tables on a stage as if in preparation for a meeting. When the room is finally ready, a woman draws the stage curtain and explains to the audience, in French, that the meeting is a private one.
Ah, well, sometimes art is like that: not everyone is invited and not everyone speaks the language. Chunky Move’s Next Move commission seems like an appropriate platform for work that is—at least in part—a conversation in petto about the future of performance, one which may later develop into something more engaged and engaging.
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De Quincey Co: MetaData, dance Tess de Quincey, Peter Fraser, sound Pimmon, Warren Burt, animation Boris Morris Bagattini, light Sian James-Holland, Liam O’Keefe, costume Claire Westwood; Dancehouse, 9-10 Sept; Chunky Move: Next Move, Re-make, concept, direction Melanie Lane, choreography, performance Melanie Lane, Juliet Burnett, light Matthew Adey, sound Chris Clark, costume Paula Levis, dramaturg Adena Jacobs; Chunky Move, Southbank, Mermermer, choreography, performance Jo Lloyd, Nicola Gunn, light Matthew Adey, sound Duane Morrison, costume Shio Otani; Chunky Move, Southbank, Melbourne, 9-17 Sept
Peter & Molly, The Superior Animal III (video still), 2015, Radical Ecologies
A name can work against you. This seems to be the case with PICA’s most recent group exhibition, Radical Ecologies, an audacious title that invites the show to be judged on unforgiving terms. Rather than present the most extreme or challenging ecologically-minded work being produced today, the curatorial team of Nadia Johnson, Andrew Varano and outgoing head curator Leigh Robb has gathered a diverse assortment of art that resists a simple unifying label. If this makes for an occasionally puzzling viewing experience, it also reveals compelling confluences among superficially disparate art practices.
Radical Ecologies spans PICA’s ground floor and greets you with a rich array of materials: floor-to-ceiling fabric, branches, ceramics, video monitors, prints, ant-chewed book pages, wooden constructions and robotic displays. Its mixed aesthetic suggests the multivalence of ‘ecology’ in an unstable world, and (happily) avoids clichés endemic to the ‘eco art’ genre.
The most striking works lie along PICA’s south wall. Here, Peter and Molly’s The Superior Animal and an excerpt from fellow duo Pony Express’ Ecosexual Bathhouse [see RT’s Next Wave review] explore sensual interactions with flora and fauna. For Peter and Molly, this entails a triptych of videos with glossy production values, dramatic music and erotic horror overtones as they get messy with leeches, octopuses and clams. Pony Express’ tone is more playful, reworking porn magazines, graffitiing a sauna cabin with eco-sexual puns, photographing vegetal orgies and contriving sext-message conversations between Gaia and Gaia. Both collaborations portray the (human) ecstasy and agony of interspecies encounters: Deleuzian excursions into the double-edged bliss of transgression. None of this promises to transcend the safe sandbox of art performance and become a way of life—that is to say, truly radical. But both offer well-wrought speculative worlds, even if Pony Express acknowledge their own absurdity, while Peter and Molly’s quest for aberrant closeness is undercut by the whiff of animal exploitation.
Mike Bianco, Bee Bed, 2016, Radical Ecologies
A gentler kind of exploitation—promising more mutual benefit—is offered by artist and beekeeper Mike Bianco. He has constructed a steel-and-plywood “bee bed” that allows visitors to lie atop a hive, experiencing its sounds and smells without fear of stings. From overhead, one can inspect the bees at close range through a clear tube, affording a rare intimacy with these all-important and imperilled insects. Bianco’s nearby drone painting attempts a two-colour composition designed to appeal to humans and bees alike, while his woodblock print situates this interspecies relationship in a mythological and art-historical context. Bianco’s works evince both a thorough ecological understanding and a resolved aesthetic approach, making them undeniable highlights of the show.
Stelarc’s Re-Wired / Re-Mixed: Event for Dismembered Body comprises a five-day performance in which the artist cedes control of his robotically-enhanced arm to an internet audience, while also receiving audio and visual input from different bodies (in New York and London respectively). It’s a worthwhile inclusion, if only in kindling important questions about technological augmentation of biology, but it hardly feels cutting edge, drawing heavily on the veteran’s decades-old projects such as Fractal Flesh: Split Body: Voltage In/Voltage Out—performed (in Perth, no less) in 1996.
Stelarc
Certain works seem more preoccupied with the impression of radicalism than with radical practice itself. Tim Burns’ mini-retrospective installation, incorporating the punky aesthetics of spray paint and exploded TVs, fails to say anything you couldn’t read on a Fremantle bumper sticker. Backlit photograph-cum-sculpture, The Dyeing Ones, documents a fabric-staining ritual by local “end times” art cult The ‘Cene. Thus it emerges from an intriguing premise, but the work’s content fails to provide any meaningful elaboration. Nathan Beard’s Oriental Antiquities sculptures comprise versions of porcelain Buddha heads appropriated by the British Museum. These are beautiful, but don’t seem to belong in the exhibition at all; to shoehorn them with references to a global-political ‘ecology’ feels tenuous.
The ‘Cene, Compact Spirit Rituals, 2016, Radical Ecologies
Other works reveal an intriguing subversive undercurrent. These forego spectacle in favour of quietude and patience. Katie West’s narrated video Decolonist channels nature to foster a meditative space in which to “slowly unlearn what we have been taught” and release the mind from toxic, ingrained discourse. Fellow Noongar practitioner Noel Nannup shares his deep ecological knowledge and wisdom with Matt Aitken in a series of conversations set to local footage, lending a fascinating counterpoint of learning to West’s unlearning. Rebecca Orchard’s sculptures and drawings subject unremarkable stones to a time-consuming, laborious process of replication, thereby eschewing Capitalist notions of value and embracing an intensive intimacy with natural forms. There’s a telling irony at play, whereby art that ignores the aesthetics of ‘radicality’ suggests some of the most radical results. Perhaps it’s unsurprising, though, that an ethos of patience and openness should foster the most promising remedy to a contemporary moment so bereft of both.
PICA, Radical Ecologies, curators Nadia Johnson, Andrew Varano, Leigh Robb, artists Matt Aitken, Nathan Beard, Mike Bianco, Tim Burns, Andrew Christie, Pony Express, Steven Finch, Cat Jones, Rose Megirian, Peter and Molly, Rebecca Orchard, Perdita Phillips, Mei Saraswati, Stelarc, Katie West; PICA, Perth, 31 July-4 Sept
Carl Rosman conducts ELISION Ensemble & students from ANAM, Machine for Contacting the Dead
Speaking before the performance of Liza Lim’s Machine for Contacting the Dead (2000), conductor Carl Rosman drew parallels between the ELISION ensemble in its early days and the young musicians from the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM) joining them for this concert. Celebrating its 30th anniversary this year and recalling how ELISION’s initial approach was to “bite off more than they could chew, and then chew like hell,” Rosman praised the young players for their similarly committed attitude towards such a daunting project.
Lim composed Machine for Contacting the Dead for France’s Ensemble Intercontemporain. Premiered in 2000, it sprang from the discovery of Chinese archaeological treasures recently excavated from a 433BCE tomb, and coincided with a Parisian exhibition of the artefacts. Among the bodies of the noblemen and concubines were several well-preserved musical instruments, some of which were unidentified. As she so often does, Lim became interested in the link between history and memory, and created this work to imagine female musicians and dancers of the distant past.
Machine for Contacting the Dead received its Australian premiere in Brisbane in 2002, performed by ELISION together with members of The Queensland Orchestra; but that’s the last we’d heard of it. A work of many challenges, perhaps its demands —or the lack of a permanent contemporary music ensemble large enough to tackle such works—had prevented it being programmed elsewhere in the composer’s home country. ELISION have found a natural match in musicians from ANAM who also joined the ensemble to perform Enno Poppe’s Speicher. Hopefully, the two will recreate this fruitful collaboration to perform similarly ambitious contemporary works in the future.
From the outset of the piece, Lim’s nimble orchestration is on show. With her highly developed ability to craft layers of sounds without overwhelming the piece’s texture, each flutter of high wind and muted brass, wail of string harmonics and punctuation points from the three percussionists helps weave a rich tapestry. While the overall effect is quite visibly and musically raucous, the volume remains understated; recalling a distant memory of imagined music.
Emerging from these memories at various points throughout, the solo cello and bass clarinet assert their presence. Cellist Séverine Ballon’s playing is exceptional. She throws herself into the highly technical and physical part, using extended techniques to make the instrument sound in unfamiliar ways. A brief duet between Ballon and ELISION veteran Peter Veale in the first movement produces some delightful interplay, with Veale’s overblown oboe a perfect match for Ballon’s suitably violent playing.
ELISION Ensemble and ANAM, Machine for Contacting the Dead, BIFEM 2016
Equally impressive is Richard Haynes, who doubled on the bass clarinet and contrabass clarinet. Seamlessly carrying on Ballon’s opening solo in the second movement, the bass clarinet at first matches the tone of the cello before diverting into an energetic and almost jazz-influenced line, punctuated by aggressive tongue slaps and jumps in register. Playing the contrabass clarinet, Haynes brings out a deep and resonant tone, with some frightening low grumbles to underscore the rest of the ensemble.
Each movement contains opportunities for individual musicians to shine. In an interview some years ago Lim hinted that, despite its commission by another ensemble, Machine for Contacting the Dead was written with ELISION musicians in mind. Marshall McGuire’s harp, with its pitch bends and sustained notes, is a great match for the piano, which switches between conventional playing and contemporary techniques including plucking the strings and bowing them with nylon wires. Trumpet flourishes are perfectly suited to Tristram Williams, who precisely executes each one, and Paula Rae’s performance shows her mastery of each of her instruments—in the shrill announcements of the piccolo and the lusty tone of the bass flute.
According to Lim’s specific instructions, the solo bass clarinet, solo cello and contrabassoon are seated front and centre. The remaining musicians surround them, meaning that instrumental families are split up. With the composer’s rich orchestration, this provides some great moments of dialogue and spatial play. A particularly effective moment is shared by the two violinists. Staring down his ANAM counterpart on the other side of the stage, Graeme Jennings’ power is evenly matched by the student in a fiery duet, with a stereo sound effect. The unique arrangement causes some problems with communication and entries, but on the whole the choice enhances the sense of space and drama in the work.
Towards the end of the final movement, attention is drawn to the back of the stage as the three percussionists, harpist and trombonist gather around the piano. With nylon wires, the five bow the grand piano strings, while the remaining percussionist ominously beats on a low bass string with her mallets. Changing the speed and intensity of the bowing wires at different rates, the effect of the pitches emerging and ringing out through the auditorium is magical. The removal of the piano lid is Lim’s own unearthing of centuries-old sonic treasures from the tomb, and a fitting end to a work which demonstrates Liza Lim’s phenomenal ability to push the boundaries of what audiences can expect to hear in a concert hall.
Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music, 2016: ELISION/ANAM, Machine for Contacting the Dead, composer Liza Lim; Capital Theatre, Bendigo, 4 Sept
Sydney College of the Arts is fighting for its future. Dedicated, articulate and formidable students currently occupying the Dean’s Office in the Callan Park campus have faith in their education and in the history and significance of this institution; and they are supported by alumni, artists and communities who recognise the value of both SCA and visual art education to our culture.
It is a much bigger issue than the future of a single art school. This is an important fight, and potentially a turning point for culture in Australia. The protest is a defense of the integrity not only of SCA, but all other Australian art and design institutions, including increasingly beleaguered TAFE college departments.
Undermining culture
The NSW Government’s land grab for Callan Park, the SCA site, and the old Darlinghurst Gaol, home to the National Art School—shifting the classification of both from education to property—and the devaluing of art education are not isolated events, but symptoms of a concerted undermining of art and culture more generally. This insidious push towards privatisation comes at the same time as arts sector funding cuts have devastated small to medium arts organisations and those funds diverted to pork barrelling by Arts Minister Senator Mitch Fifield—arts spending without transparency, consistency or expertise. At the same time we see, more broadly, a profound erosion of civil liberties, including our rights to protest and to privacy.
Slow death by asphyxiation
Thus far, the proposed closure of SCA by merger with UNSW Art and Design has been effectively prevented, but under the University of Sydney’s strategic plan, released last year, SCA is slated to be absorbed into the massive Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, ostensibly to reduce bottom line costs, including devastating cuts to staff numbers.
Moving SCA to the main campus of the University of Sydney could easily result in slow death by asphyxiation: in other words a continuation of the current management strategy that has overseen, rather than countered, falling enrolments at SCA. The numbers of those enrolling in creative tertiary education had slowed markedly 2008-2013 (The Arts Nation: an overview of Australian arts, 2015 Edition Australia Council, p16). This legitimises as much as creates the short-term economic arguments for closing art schools. The University of Sydney has form here, having overseen the dilution of the once vibrant Tin Sheds Art Workshops.
To lose a proposed 60% of SCA staff, whole departments and important equipment and space is an attempt to fit art education into a philosophical and economic model that smacks of the dumbing down and anti-intellectualism that has pervaded commercialised and privatised education internationally for at least a decade, particularly in the US and UK. Forcing art schools into conventional learning environments cannot but reduce the efficacy of teaching and learning. If you lack the resources of space, time and equipment you cannot effectively and expansively engage in the creative process, the limitations of the environment curtailing what you imagine as possible in your practice.
In the last five to 10 years, the UK has implemented a particular kind of austerity politics that has had profound effects: funding cuts, fee deregulation and short-term economic models of governance have placed even the most renowned art schools under duress. The push to sell off grounds and incorporate art schools into other campuses has also been underway for some time. The Sir John Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design at London Metropolitan University effectively resisted this process until February this year, when the property was sold for £50 million and leased back to the university until the faculty moves to the university in 2017.
Students occupy Sydney College of the Arts – Photo ZebedeeParkes.com, GreenLeft.org.au
UK austerity
Part of this cultural shift has meant that art and design universities in the UK have increased their fees to £9,000 a year (and are looking at deregulating further), directly pricing out students from poorer backgrounds, but also likely deterring women, mature age, CALD and LGBT students, and those with disabilities, for whom the financial burdens seem a significant risk. Enrolments are reduced, in effect reducing the vibrancy and diversity of creative voices, debate and, in the long term, cultural breadth and depth. Education becomes the privilege of those with significant funds. My former students are now graduates with fee debts of around £60,000 and loans. The threat of $100,000 degrees in Australia is already both a cultural and economic reality elsewhere. The real deception here is the notion that knowledge and learning have definable monetary value, and that such value is predictable and tied to current ideas of employability.
Similarly, in UK further education colleges and schools, the availability of art and design study is now up for debate, as new models of assessment and evaluation of learning exclude creative subjects from essential study by prioritising instead so-called STEM subjects: science, technology, engineering and mathematics. This year’s art and design enrolments at GCSE level (General Certificate of Secondary Education, year 10) have declined 6%. This is not because young people don’t want to pursue creative subjects, but because access to them is being restricted by political and economic agendas. [See the NAVA letter to Education Minister Senator Simon Birmingham. Eds]
Of course this is not the only model of education on offer. If Sydney University had included art and design education expertise in developing a strategy for the future of SCA, we might even have seen a University of the Arts emerge comparable to the University of the Arts, London, which has preserved the rich, independent cultures of its constituent art and design schools while streamlining administrative functions.
Beyond UAL, London has many significant art schools, further testament that no international city should have only one art and design centre of excellence. It is, rather, an essential characteristic of creative education—and an outward-looking international city—that the range of institutions and cultures should be diverse.
Political consequences
Perhaps politicians think artists are an easy target—powerless, politically naïve, unlikely or unable to fight back. Perhaps that’s what University of Sydney Deputy Vice Chancellor Stephen Garton anticipated when he agreed to meet with very determined SCA students on 29 July.
Universities should take note of the possible consequences of the hasty and ill-conceived implementation of their short-term economic agendas. UK Labour leadership has placed arts education at the centre of debate, proposing the reversal of funding cuts to the arts and the reduction of university fees, pledging to introduce a pupil premium for creative education [as established for sport in 2013] as central to its arts policy and political platform. We should learn from this reversal of the current approach to cultural education before we lose the expertise and resources that will prove so hard to replace: we must go straight to championing creative education in Australia.
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Keep up to date with the activities of the SCA students and alumni at www.letscastay.com
The back-to-back presentation of four string quartets which rely near exclusively on extended string techniques is perhaps a risk, lest audiences tire of the continuous glissandi and harmonics which have become almost clichés in modern works of the medium. However, the finely crafted compositions presented by the Argonaut Quartet each worked on a level beyond using these techniques arbitrarily, demonstrating different approaches to writing in this idiom.
David Chisholm’s Bound South opened tentatively with a delicate sequence of extended techniques shared across the quartet. A soft tapping of strings with the wood of the bow provided the percussive backdrop to the harmonic glissandi and soft tremolo gestures which each player executed in turn. This sequence formed the basis of the work’s material, gradually extending and developing as the instruments overlapped. The overall effect was icy and fragile, reflecting the work’s title and positioning itself in complete opposition to Chisholm’s flashy double concerto, premiered the previous evening.
A point of sudden agitation burst from the viola, seemingly unable to continue with the glacial pace of development. Joined by the second violin for the shortest moment, both quickly retreated and continued with the work’s established slow trajectory. This fleeting release of built-up tension seemed to foreshadow a coming section in a more agitated style, yet this was never reached. Instead, Chisholm continued to taunt and whet the appetite with intensity only built within a narrow schema. A dynamic peak was reached towards the end with three tremolo chords played in unison, before a return to the short fragments of the opening material, this time presented with more cohesion.
Argonaut Quartet, Glossolalia, BIFEM 2016
Through Empty Space continued the delicate sound world established by Chisholm, opening with all four parts playing glassy pure harmonics. Mexican composer Sergio Luque scored much of the work in a close range, blending the sounds of the four string instruments to make the quartet act as one entity. Pitch material played with semitone dissonances spread over an octave, sliding in and out of consonance. The work embarked on a smooth descent through the empty spaces left in the scoring, with Luque demonstrating immense restraint in seeing through his musical idea.
The smooth veneer of the work’s surface was only momentarily broken in a fragment which called for bouncing the bow across the strings. It was almost unexpected to hear the conventionally bowed long tones, but their presentation without vibrato ensured that they worked within the established context. Ending the work the viola and cello traded these long gliding strokes, emerging and disappearing from the violins’ atmospheric bowing over the bridge.
The muted bouncing opening of Chilean composer Pedro Alvarez’s Etude Oblique I immediately announced a shift in gear, moving away from the highly austere first half of the program while still presenting similar sounds and techniques. The pace of development in Etude Oblique was the fastest of any of the works presented so far in the concert, and the dialogue between the instruments was the most contested. Agitation and flashes of urgency were hinted at in the wailing high pitched glissandi and the ricochet bowing gesture which formed the basis of the work’s rhythmic fragments, but yet again these remained contained within a small dynamic structure.
Bendigo Town Hall, venue for Glossolalia concert, Argonaut Quartet, BIFEM 2016
Erkki Veltheim’s Glossolalia was a natural conclusion to the concert. Establishing some violent string playing from the outset, here was the opportunity to fully release the tension so finely built up throughout the program. Reflecting the work’s title, the score was often frenzied, jumping from one idea to the next in rapid succession, with techniques used to create sounds far removed from the traditional capabilities of a string quartet. Aggressive bowing south of the bridge created great noise tones, and the tapping of the bridge with the base of the bow produced a satisfyingly resonant percussive sound. Veltheim fully explored the bass range of the cello, requiring some grungy playing from Judith Hamman who skillfully tuned down during the performance.
The physicality of playing a string instrument suddenly burst to the fore in Glossolalia. Shedding the high control required for the light bowing and isolated gestures in the other works, Hamman’s acrobatic glissandi and Veltheim’s dynamic leading providing a welcome visual change. In this final work the arrangement of the quartet, all four player facing inwards from the corners of a square platform, made sense artistically; it was a delight to watch chains of reactions set off by fragments and move around the players.
In a different context, Glossolalia could have come across as a little too uncontrolled and wild, given its length and jerky movement between ideas. But within this program, it seemed to be a continuation along a smooth path, Veltheim’s composition ultimately fulfilling the hints of outburst promised by Chisholm, Luque and Alvarez. The Argonaut Quartet is lucky to have three such versatile and experienced upper string players in Veltheim, Graeme Jennings and Elizabeth Welsh, who rotated roles throughout the performance to play to individual strengths. Together with Hamman’s cello playing, the Quartet is a fine interpreter of new music.
James Wannan (viola d’amore), Argonaut Ensemble, Decadent Purity, BIFEM 2016
Bendigo’s Ulumbarra Theatre, a converted jail, may soon be home to BIFEM’s resident Argonaut ensemble on a more permanent basis. At Friday night’s opening concert Seeing Double, Bendigo festival founder and featured composer David Chisholm waxed lyrical about the “criminal” lack of this kind of permanent new music infrastructure. “All criminals need to be brought to justice, and this is the jail where that can happen.” BIFEM’s opening double bill of double concerti showed us both the possibilities and temptations of that infrastructure, embodied here by large, skilful instrumental forces and consummate soloists and conductors; a veritable toybox for two precocious postmodernists.
Jack Symonds, Decadent Purity
Jack Symonds’ Decadent Purity is a work that attempts to blend quite disparate elements. At the outset a cloud of high harmonics hovers over a stop-start grumble of double bass and contrabass clarinet, opening up a chasm of registral space and spectral colour. The two solo instruments, too, carve opposing roles; the viola d’amore draws out its long line against percussive exclamation marks: elaborated argument against decisive punctuation. The first of seven movements also sets out another more uncomfortable dichotomy: two harmonic worlds in combat. A sturdy neo-Baroque tonality, reminiscent of Arvo Pärt’s Fratres, is pitted against the subtle slippage and inflection of microtones and textural nuance. It’s a promising collision.
Both soloists hold the drama of the work in their phrasing and movements. James Wannan sways on tiptoe, his viola d’amore an ornate, many-stringed creature of clear resonance and line, making the most of the acoustic at the front of the Ulumbarra Theatre stage. Wannan’s approach embodies the decadent purity of the title, imbuing Baroque details with a rich, almost Romantic sensibility. Percussionist Kaylie Melville moves with a pixie swagger, each entry dashed off with a cutting, almost sardonic precision. But her role for the most part remains one of commentary and fleeting gesture, unable to enter the harmonic and melodic realms that form the bulkhead of the work.
As captivating as the soloists were to watch and listen to, the dramaturgy and flow of the work itself at times seemed forced, imposed from above rather than extrapolated from the rich materials already at play. You couldn’t help but be seduced by sighing herds of ascending or descending microtones, but these remained as fixed objects rather than catalysts for generating gesture. The restraint and sensitivity of more spacious sections (for example the penultimate movement with its slow-moving scales) was several times undercut by overtly dramatic tropes. High-energy toccatas recurred throughout the work, most forcefully in the final movement where the marimba propelled us, no, forced us, towards cadential release.
The attractiveness of Symonds’ work is undeniable, but the promise of that initial collision of soloists, ensemble and the stylistic strains of both Baroque and modernist Avant-Garde is ultimately unfulfilled.
Argonaut Ensemble, Harp Guitar Double Concerto, BIFEM 2016
David Chisholm, Harp Guitar Double Concerto
David Chisholm’s Harp Guitar Double Concerto seemed a more natural and less masochistic pairing than viola d’amore and percussion: here were two forces of equal dynamism and resonance. A striking, hard-edged opening hints at the diverse gestural possibilities of those two soloists. Rapid pinball glissandi in the brittle high reaches of the harp answer a deep upward sweep in the guitar.
Like a flickbook, the opening cuts rapidly from gesture to gesture, often blurring in the orchestral maelstrom of an expanded Argonaut Ensemble. You get the sense that this is a kind of pastiche, but not of direct quotation, or even of particularly strong stylistic allusion. Occasionally more distinctive slivers poke through: swaggering muted brass recall Miles Davis, and later a frantic viola solo has echoes of Elliott Carter, a haywire cog spinning in the wrong machine. These are relatively rare moments, and you sense there might be a wealth of such detail hidden amid some ambitiously thick, even clumpy textures. These aren’t helped by an acoustic that throw the soloists into relief at the front of the stage, while damping the intricacies beyond the proscenium arch.
For much of the work, the action continues in postmodern pile-up fashion, impulsive, rather than linear, time hammered out ecstatically. For a time, this was immersive, like those pools of plastic balls you used to get at some adventurous fast food chain playgrounds, a liquid made of solid objects. But as the piece progressed there was a more and more present feeling that these gestures, constrained as they were in a four-square metric scheme, rarely got beyond fragments. You have to say too that the obvious talents of conductor Maxime Pascal were utilised sparingly with so much martial time-keeping. However within the relatively square metric scheme, Pascal was able to draw out a range of bold shapes and colours from the ensemble.
It wasn’t until the fluid, effortless harp cadenza, a dazzling display of delicacy both from Chisholm and from harp soloist Jessica Fotinos, that we glimpsed an interior alternative to the glitzy, pluralistic mass offered by the front half of the work. Even though, like the rest of the piece, it might have benefited from more space and breath, the finely crafted but rather lengthy cadenza allowed us to pivot towards lyricism and fragility. Out of the cadenza came a positively decadent cor anglais duo from Jasper Ly and Benjamin Opie, foreshadowing their oboe heroics at the exquisite, abrupt ending. In turn the cor anglais led us tag-team into a nostalgic, washed-out kind of texture, strings fluttering between solid pitches and combinations of ethereal partials.
The guitar soloist, Mauricio Carrasco, also had a chance to show off his solo chops, delivering both sheer brutality and lyrical nuance in a much shorter but no less impactful cadenza. In fact, it contained to my mind the evening’s most sensitive, fantastical moment. Out of the resonance of guitar harmonics came a delicate veil of sound, initially difficult to place but revealed as a falsetto vocal hum from Fotinos across the stage. The harmonics and falsetto continued, a true interior world, almost haunting in a fragile continuity against the flamboyance of what had come before. After a brief and brutal swansong in the guitar, we returned to that interior, but more confidently, as if a fresh discovery had been made. Over a breathy mass of sustained string harmonics, the oboes asserted this new, insistent lyricism: at the very end, a way forward.
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Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music 2016: Seeing Double: Decadent Purity, composer Jack Symonds; Harp Guitar Double Concerto, composer David Chisholm. The Argonaut Ensemble; Ulumbarra Theatre, Bendigo, 2 Sept
ELISION Ensemble and students from ANAM, Speicher, BIFEM 2016
Enno Poppe’s Speicher is a play on memory, a greatly expanding field of knowledge for our generation. We know our memories are malleable, largely illusory, constantly mutating, decaying or enriching. In German, the term ‘speicher,’ meaning ‘storage,’ refers both to psychological memory storage, and also more specifically to a store of pitch class sets used in a compositional process.
At the opening of the piece there is no memory, only attention. Poppe’s atom of musical thought is the salty sul pont viola paired with bleak sonar-radio emissions from the accordion. These bare elements return recognisable, yet in eloquent settings and manipulated through unexpected readings. Vibrato is Poppe’s justification for challenging our traditional concept of a note as belonging to a fixed pitch. With intervals-wide, pitch-traversing vibrato we learn to reconsider our idea of a musical atom. We’re reminded of the pitch continuum at play in vibrato and reassess our assumption in our perception of the discrete tone.
By contrast, after these hypervibrato and ‘hyperchromatic’ divisions of less than a semitone, late Romantic string vibrato is introduced only for a moment and suddenly we can hear this normally ubiquitous left-hand string technique as a chaotic, over-stimulating, maelstrom of thousands of incomprehensible musical events. And in these small moments we might experience an appreciation of sound units on a small order of magnitude and perhaps experience the reverse operation of Schenkerian analysis which looks for the skeleton of a work, not for its biochemistry.
Conducted by Carl Rosman and performed by the champion forces of ELISION ensemble joined by the fresh blood of Australian National Academy of Music, the combined ensemble convincingly evoked cohesive textural moments and colouristic effects. The students clearly delighted in their full citizenship in any register of their instruments.
Speicher, BIFEM 2016
Shout-out to a grand-effort Parker-esque solo on alto sax by clarinettist Luke Carbon. Kyla Matsuura-Miller tag-teamed the second violin part at the 4th movement and knocked it out of the park with rhythmic finesse and delicious tonal ferocity. Props to Eli Vincent in valiantly helming the nucleus of the work as first viola. Applause to the professionals: concertmaster Graeme Jennings who was a consistent and efficient leader, cellist Séverine Ballon, whose early attack on the cello was the first and true expression of musical violence in the work; her solo in section one explores the highest pitches of the deepest strings, creating an innocent, swallowed sob in melody that was reminiscent of the frailty of a child’s voice. Tristram Williams, a strong advocate of this work, played with precision and expression. There were seriously stunningly executed harp treats in the texture from Marshall McGuire. Best and Fairest goes to James Crabb on accordion. The evolution from harmonics to accordion hums was sublime. Crabb, master of camouflage, introduced a foreign species of instrument to the full palette of orchestral instruments. It returned to the fore of the work’s texture, evoking a unique voice: an imperceptible transformation before our ears, as if Escher himself could draw sound. Like Escher, Poppe is a numerologist and does not believe the 12-tone technique would have been so successful were it not for the cultural significance of the number 12. This piece appears to be based around the number six on multiple levels. Six movements, each containing six parts, the hyper chromatic use of 6th tones.
Stylistically, most of this work is in Poppe’s own compositional language of clear texture and microtonal organic development. However, in a potential nod to John Adams’ The Chairman Dances, Poppe enters the stylistic world of the foxtrot challenging some students struggled to find their groove. Some bebop stomps were finely executed on the drum kit and one wished for similar conviction in the strings. From the ironic use of grotesquely pretty Hollywood strings to tone-dense Mondrian-esque geometric forces in the winds and Debussy’s harmonic gravity-defying language, textural transitions were the most spectacular feature of the ensemble’s interpretation.
A humble woodblock knock, emerging meekly from an apocalyptic orchestral force, elicited a chuckle from the audience, and true, a musical ugly-duckling it was. Our duckling returns as a pluck in the harp and we delight in its glorious transformation into a swan-tone adorned in overtones. Outside of this piece I would have serious doubts as to whether a single harp note held sufficient aesthetic power.
All these micro-details are essentially developmental links in an 80-minute epic, expansive enough to puff its chest at Beethoven’s 9th. In fact, at the close of Speicher it’s possible to hear the initial notes of that work’s recitative, a melody symbolic of refusal of new material. One can’t help but feel Poppe reached the precipice of a musical mind verging on new material, only to reiterate and reaffirm the work’s fidelity to singular ideas and their possibilities. Thus the piece exits before new material can be spoken, suspended on the trumpeter’s tongue.
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Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music 2016: ELISION/ANAM, Speicher composer Enno Poppe, conductor Carl Rosman; Capital Theatre, Bendigo, 2 Sept
Bendigo Symphony Orchestra & Peter Dumsday (piano), pho:ton, BIFEM 2016
“Shrouded in darkness, a piano soloist brings a 40-piece orchestra to life by triggering lights and musical patterns.” This appropriately tantalising description in the festival program draws a hungry audience to BIFEM’s blockbuster finale. Concluding a weekend of exemplary community engagement, local gem the Bendigo Symphony Orchestra rises to the challenge of delivering the Australian premiere of pho:ton, a multi-sensory work composed and designed by COD.ACT, the Swiss brothers André and Michel Décosterd. With pianist Peter Dumsday, the orchestra enraptures its audience.
A chatty audience is abruptly silenced when the lights fade, leaving hundreds of eyes darting across a pitch-black stage, searching for something to focus on. Out of the darkness emerges a steady snare drum line, interjected by sparse yet measured, long tones from a bass trombone. As each note is played, a spotlight illuminates the player. I assume Dumsday will be a soloist. Instead, his instrument has forfeited its natural resonance and morphed into an electronic device, where each key is a button that activates a designated light above each performer. Solo players in the upper strings join in a gradually building pattern, spectators eagerly following the lights as they flicker across the orchestra. Something of a melody forms as disjunct tones increase in pace, resulting in the odd overlap of lighting patterns.
As more and more players are illuminated, we begin to fully appreciate the practical nature of the orchestra’s unusual distribution on the stage. By placing the musicians in elevated rows and columns in a rectilinear grid, the brothers Décosterd are able to maintain the spontaneous nature of each illumination.
We see only the musicians who play in a particular moment and barely a silhouette of their neighbours. There is also a degree of symmetry in the layout, which is seen most clearly when first and second players of each woodwind instrument light up from opposite sides of the orchestra, passing notes back and forth.
An incessantly catchy tune evolves into a more challenging sextuplet pattern in the strings followed by simple long tones in the woodwinds. As well as toughing out dissonant notes, various brass sections execute overlapping, syncopated phrases that pass from middle to lower voices. A small army of French horns brings courage to individual moments in the spotlight (quite literally), but it is an intrepid piccolo trumpeter who truly steals the show with a high, attention-commanding solo. The players tackle these musical challenges fearlessly, with several ‘deer in the headlights’ moments only adding to the overall charm of the performance.
A brief flash of red illuminates the stage allowing us to see the entire ensemble for the first time. Engulfed in darkness once again, we soon realise that red was the warning signal for an upcoming passage of sheer visual insanity. In sync with downbeats of the music, vertical lines of light move across the orchestra, illuminating different groups of players as they go. Next, horizontal lines move up and down, until these two patterns criss-cross to create a strobing effect, which builds in intensity and culminates in an erratic pattern of diagonally travelling lights.
Music and lights have taken turns as the sensory foci until this point, so it makes sense that the final section should explore their intersection. Returning to the opening structure with an even more complex rhythm, the introduction of steady triplet patterns is mirrored in the lights, which blink three times on the players in these passages. A hemiola pattern [two groups of three beats are replaced by three groups of two beats. Eds] soon emerges with some players lit up twice and others three times, creating a degree of visual stimulation completely unexpected in an orchestral concert.
Musically speaking, pho:ton is quite a simple piece. Yet there are inherent difficulties when every player has solo passages, since section players are prevented from relying on their principals (often a helpful practice in non-professional orchestras). Indeed, some rhythmic patterns placed rank and file players outside their comfort zone. Nonetheless Peter Dumsday and the Bendigo Symphony Orchestra performed admirably and the many thrilling visuals added a whole new dimension to an already colourful symphonic sound. In piecing together this truly egalitarian work, the orchestra demonstrated just how much regional communities are capable of achieving when given equal opportunity to embrace serious artistic challenges.
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Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music, 2016: COD.ACT, pho:ton, composers André and Michel Décosterd, piano Peter Dumsday, musical and technical design and direction COD.ACT (André and Michel Décosterd), Bendigo Symphony Orchestra; Ulumbarra Theatre, Bendigo, 4 Sept
How Forests Think, ELISION Ensemble & Wu Wei, BIFEM 2016
What do free jazz and South American rainforests have in common? Very little, other than being respective inspirations for Aaron Cassidy and Liza Lim’s latest world premieres. Joined by international guests Peter Evans and Wu Wei, ELISION ensemble takes to the stage once again at BIFEM to present an extraordinary concert of two radically different works.
Aaron Cassidy, The Wreck of Former Boundaries
In The Wreck of Former Boundaries, Aaron Cassidy is heavily influenced by American multi-instrumentalist, composer and innovator of the free jazz movement, Ornette Coleman. As the composer generously shared in a post-concert chat, his piece is analogous to a work for large jazz combo. Some of the seven segments that make up the work existed prior to its completion, entwining here to deliver an array of innovative, contrasting and often discordant subsections. These modular units are delivered, said Cassidy, much in the vein of Coleman’s inventive 1971 album Science Fiction.
One of the pre-existing works provides material for an opening solo performed by double bassist Joan Wright. The unassuming ELISION veteran is powerful and hypnotic in her realisation of hyper-masculine extended techniques such as striking and grinding the bow on the strings. Trumpeter Tristram Williams joins the incidental bass with soft, squeaky interjections that play out like a musical dialogue between a clumsy elephant and an anxious mouse.
L-R: Daryl Buckley, Peter Evans, The Wreck of Former Boundaries, BIFEM 2016
It doesn’t take long for the ensemble to begin pushing ‘former boundaries’ of accepted volume. Enter sound engineer James Atkins, accompanied by a cacophony of extended techniques from the acoustic instruments. Spacey electronics reverberate powerfully around the auditorium while screaming and wailing from the clarinet and alto saxophone becomes almost intolerable for audience members and instrumentalists alike (you know it’s loud when the trumpet players cover their ears).
A sudden spell of conducting from the trumpet section leads in to the work’s next exciting instalment: improvisatory passages from BIFEM guest artist and international trumpet royalty, Peter Evans, taking the piccolo trumpet to virtuosic extremes. Appointed with the difficult task of relaying live performance cues to the sound engineer, the composer uses a microphone to apply gradual distortion to the timbre. Following an exhilarating moment of solo electronics–which felt like being inside a crashing spaceship—members of ELISION physically stand back to give way to Evans in an extended experimental passage. Solid foundations in jazz and improvisation are self-evident in his expert navigation around the microphone. Initially standing tall to enjoy the instrument’s natural resonance, Evans repeatedly leans in and away from the microphone, exploring the evolving distortions Cassidy and Atkins place upon his sound. A structurally climactic point of the work sees him place the bell of the piccolo trumpet against the microphone, surrendering the instrument’s acoustic capacity. Warped sounds of churning air and clunking valves now become part of a disconcerting atmospheric sound, like being trapped in the belly of a monster.
ELISION Ensemble, The Wreck of Former Boundaries, ELISION Ensemble, BIFEM 2016
Daryl Buckley’s electric lap-steel guitar solo is another exciting feature of The Wreck of Former Boundaries. In a real rockstar moment, Buckley relishes the thrill of the sound, once more challenging audiences tolerance for high volume with visceral pitch bends and ringing chords. A concluding solo in the multichannel electronics has a similar impact; several performers can be seen smiling at the audience’s shock and uncertainty as to whether this electrifying, action-packed work has truly come to a close.
While The Wreck of Former Boundaries is an extremely effective collaboration of performers and styles, Aaron Cassidy’s only concern about its future is that it relies heavily on certain performers. At the very front of the stage and in the foundation of the work is an inimitable creative partnership between Peter Evans and Tristram Williams. Such an adrenaline-charged premiere makes it almost impossible to imagine the work played by anyone else.
How Forests Think, ELISION Ensemble & Wu Wei, BIFEM 2016
Liza Lim, How Forests Think
In the second half of the program, ELISION ensemble expands to its full membership for the world premiere of Liza Lim’s How Forests Think. Completed in Brazil and inspired by anthropologist Eduardo Kohn’s book of the same title (University of California Press, 2013), the work explores the relationship between trees within a forest by extending the breath and sound identity of the instruments. In the opening bars, pensive saxophone and rainmaker lay the foundations for a dense, interplaying and evocative sound world.
Lim has fashioned a highly distinctive instrumental texture in How Forests Think with the addition of a sheng to the ensemble. In an intermission interview with Matthew Lorenzon, the composer explains how the traditional Chinese instrument comprises 37 vertical pipes and can be played by both blowing and inhaling. With such a wide range of pitches and tone qualities at his disposal, sheng virtuoso Wu Wei is able to match and bring out nuances in timbre of various instruments in the ensemble. There are countless moments where he effortlessly blends both chords and single notes with low notes from the bass flute, the top register of the oboe and even, at times, with percussion. These criss-crossing timbral interactions peak towards the end of the piece when Wei beautifully mimics a poignant duet between cor anglais and cello.
Wei also theatrically delivers a brief, untranslated text which is followed by percussive grunts and unpredictable rushes of breath from the wind instrumentalists. In these mesmerising passages, the audience senses the heightened awareness and responsiveness to ensemble breathing that Lim’s writing demands from the musicians. Saxophonist Joshua Hyde is exquisite in his control of sound, which consistently balances with the assemblage of high wind instruments. Similarly breathtaking is Paula Rae’s almost inaudible delivery of a tender flute melody, played eerily behind powerful throat singing by the multitalented Wu Wei.
After a sudden, slightly confusing conclusion to the penultimate section where unified quavers are repeated à l’ostinato, we settle back in for an ending full of charm. Percussionist Peter Neville is entrusted with the unusual job of scooping beads out of a bowl with his hands, then slowly pouring them inside a violin and various percussion instruments. A more puzzling moment occurs when conductor Carl Rosman—nothing short of outstanding throughout—relinquishes his duties as leader, walks leisurely to the back row of the ensemble and sits down. With the addition of Richard Haynes and Joshua Hyde (to this point clarinettist and saxophonist) the percussion section is suddenly augmented to four. Gentle shakers and soft whistling from the brass players bring this stimulating work to a close.
For BIFEM’s second double bill of world premieres (the first, Seeing Double featured concerti by David Chisholm and Jack Symonds), Aaron Cassidy and Liza Lim certainly delivered the goods. Reaching an astronomical standard of musical innovation and performance this ELISION concert evoked emotion, pushed boundaries, educated and inspired.
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Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music, 2016: How Forests Think, ELISION ensemble, composer Aaron Cassidy, The Wreck of Former Boundaries; composer Liza Lim, How Forests Think; Capital Theatre, Bendigo, 3 Sept
BIFEM 2016 Workshop L-R: Madeline Roycroft, Zoe Barker, Virginia Baxter, Bec Scully, Keith Gallasch, Claudine Michael, Matthew Lorenzon, Alex Taylor
The Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music’s Writers’ Workshop participants and their Partial Duration and RealTime mentors pose for the camera before once again facing the music. You can read all the reviews on Partial Durations.
The Music Writers’ Workshop for five emerging reviewers was conducted by Matthew Lorenzon, whose blog Partial Durations is a joint project with RealTime, and Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter, Managing Editors of RealTime.
RealTime issue #134 Aug-Sept 2016
Work, Sister, BIFEM 2016
Promising the audience an “exceptional, immersive and transcendental experience” with not much else said about the elusively titled Work, collaborators Marco Cher-Gibard and Ben Speth, playing as SISTER, created a piece that displayed not only the connection between performer and medium (laptop processing and guitar) but between the network of performers themselves. I would go so far as to say that with the inclusion of artist Matthew Adey on lighting design and smoke machine, this work represented the synergy of a collaborative trio. The improvisatory nature of their performance, the lighting design, the use of the space—and some free whiskey—made for an absorbing and at times deliciously antagonistic sonic experience for both audience and performers.
The work opens with an unapologetic cacophony of audio feedback as Cher-Gibard swings a microphone back and forth in front of his bass amp. The feedback sits on a layered sound of electric guitar (pitched up) which sounds like distant bells and carillon looped and processed. These harmonics become a feature, emerging in various parts of the work. In quieter sections they evoke an ethereal mood when juxtaposed with the droning bass. The lighting design in the beginning burns red, engulfing the space. Once the audience settles into this meditative sound bed, the improvisation begins with Speth alternating between single tones, chord shapes, noise and scraping strings. These licks/riffs are picked up by Cher-Gibard on his mixer, processed on his amp emulator and fed back into a loop that undulates ceaselessly followed by scraping of guitar strings and the hiss of the smoke machine processed as white noise on the laptop. The lighting design reflects this as coloured gel is removed to expose white light. White noise escalates into thunderous amp feedback and unexpected explosive crackles. Using a drumming algorithm to trigger the drum rack, Cher-Gibard sets off a series of drum patterns that add to the animalistic frenzy of the loop.
Adey scurries around the space, swapping coloured gels, unplugging and re-positioning lights, taking part in the sonic conversation through the medium of light. In a transcendental moment the illumination of yellow light on purple gel evokes a sunset. In the second section, the light turns green, signifying a renewal of energy. The guitar drone emerges again from Cher-Gibard but this time more like a cascading glockenspiel, which Adey then deploys as a rhythmic device for introducing a flickering light pattern. This gradually becomes red alternating with darkness and juxtaposed with a thumping techno-like bass (pitched down guitar) and the sigh of Speth’s guitar as he moves closer to his amp for acoustic feedback. This felt like the climax of Work. The three artists had worked till that point to create this energy around the space by swinging microphones to amps, creating feedback and a loop current. It felt like a culmination of the deep synthesis between the three of them within the context and outcome of the sound and light dialogue they had created through their improvisation.
Work, Sister, BIFEM 2016
Towards the end, things got more eardrum-shattering. At one point Cher-Gibard seemed to turn down the level but I suspect that was only so he could highlight the introduction of a new sound idea (a sample of guitar harmonic) to the mix. The end was abrupt but effective, almost like a pull of the plug or a minor explosion, audience leaving with trails of smoke still in the air.
Work, being improvisational, was hard to predict and, safe to say, the feeling was mutual among the performers. At some points, Speth appeared visibly surprised at the direction of their discourse, as was Cher-Gibard when selecting his guitar noise motifs to process.
The alchemical energy generated by the three performers was built from the pulse Cher-Gibard created through his foundational soundscape. He moved to the meditative drone, reiterating the idea of looping sound energy in the space. It became a reference to the Larsen effect, or acoustic feedback, which is a sound loop in itself: a sound loop between audio input and output. This relationship between the loop of listening, feedback, reaction and reflection demonstrated an effective sonic partnership, the chemistry developing a piece that was resonant, electric and loud.
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Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music 2016: SISTER, WORK, laptop Marco Cher-Gibard, electric guitar Ben Speth, lighting, installation Matthew Adey; Old Fire Station, Bendigo, 2 Sept
After a day of complex musical experiences, sound artist Kasper T Toeplitz and dancer Myriam Gourfink proposed a concert of radical simplicity. Noise art can be irreverent, challenging and confrontational, but Toeplitz and Gourfink’s hour-long arc of noise left me feeling cleansed.
Noise audiences are no strangers to slow changes in texture, but Gourfink’s movements bring a new level of embodied appreciation to these prototypical forms. Myriam Gourfink is a master of micro gesture, performing slow and small movements over long durations. In Data_Noise she turns slowly on the spot, arms held out wide as she pivots on and off a table. She is an inveterate planker, spending most of her time half-on and half-off the table. Her extreme physical control extends right to her eyes and face, which are fixed in an eerie half-smile for the entire performance. Her movements are translated into data by sensors on her arms and legs, as well as a pad of buttons that she stands on for the brief earthbound moments of her performance. This data controls parameters in Toeplitz’s sound design, making the dancer and sound artist true collaborators in the total experience.
Toeplitz’s noise does not attack you with eardrum-shattering bursts of sound—it is bread-and-butter noise. Layers of hums and static build to a crescendo and fade, rumbling through your body like a wholesome deep-tissue massage. The introduction of a heartbeat at the loudest part of the performance (was it Gourfink’s?) enhanced the already deeply embodied sonic experience.
With the performers dressed in black inside a black box performance space, the immensity of Toeplitz’s sound design took on fantastical proportions. To me the performance evoked a natural setting. The granular-synthesised atmospheres sounded like the leaves of a great forest rustling and dissolving in the depths of a deep, black lake. Projections introduced over the entire performance space added clusters of long, curving lines like reeds swaying in the wind. When projected over Gourfink’s body the moving lines became a dazzling, rapidly flashing pixellated texture.
Dance is a great aesthetic leveller. Audiences who cannot stand contemporary music may enjoy it during a contemporary dance production. Similarly, Toeplitz’s layers of white noise have found their choreographic match in Gourfink’s micro movements. After an hour of tracing the mutating envelopes of Toeplitz’s sonic layers through Myriam Gourfink’s rotating limbs (or was it the other way around?) I left the black box of the Old Fire Station ready for another day of—sadly static—orchestras and chamber music.
Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music 2016: Data_Noise, composer Kasper T Toeplitz, choreographer Myriam Gourfink; Old Fire Station, Bendigo, 3 Sept
artwork by Andres Busrianto, Malaysian premiere of Beastly, Tutti Arts & Stepping Stone, 2015
Founded in 1997 by playwright and composer Pat Rix as a choir for people with intellectual disabilities, Tutti has developed into a multi-art form organisation with performance, visual art, digital design and music programs accessible to artists of mixed abilities. In the 2015 OzAsia Festival the company presented Shedding Light, the result of a two-year cultural exchange with two Yogyakarta-based artists, writer-activist Khairani Barokka and visual artist Moelyono. Drawing on the traditional kaki lima food carts and neon-lit sepeda lampu (pedal-powered cars) that are a common sight in Indonesia’s big cities, Shedding Light aimed to expose OzAsia’s international audience to the art practice and lived experiences of performers with disabilities through a series of one-on-one exchanges across Adelaide’s Dunstan Playhouse and Riverdeck precinct.
An Indonesian-Malaysian-Australian collaboration
The site, currently the subject of a major redevelopment, will accommodate a similarly diverse and multicultural group of Tutti members and guest artists at this year’s OzAsia Festival, when the fruits of another two-year collaboration with Indonesian artists, titled Beastly, are revealed. Led by Andres Busrianto, renowned street artist and currently Director of the annual Geneng Street Art Festival in Java, the work is an exploration of humanity’s relationship with animals across cultures. As with Shedding Light, Beastly will be both large-scale and intimate, situating a series of one-on-one encounters with artists with disabilities within an “alternative experimental zone” featuring Busrianto’s stencil-based street art and interactive installations by artists from Tutti and Stepping Stone, a work and arts training centre for people with disabilities based in Penang (Beastly premiered there in July, at this year’s George Town Festival).
Identifying with animals
I met Pat Rix, Tutti Artistic Director, and Julian Jaensch, Beastly’s performance director, at the Tutti hub, the cottage-style Lady Galway building located amid the sprawling Minda Disability Care Services site in the coastal suburb of Brighton, south of Adelaide. My first question was about the work’s conceptual origins. “If you look inside yourself,” Rix told me, “what animals do you identify with? What is your strongest sense? Are you nocturnal or diurnal? What is your diet? We began by asking these questions of our performers and creative team. That led us into explorations which took a long time really, of things like Aboriginal and Native American totems and the mythologies of Java. And from there we looked at how hard it is for animals to survive in a world that is being overdeveloped.”
artwork Andres Busrianto, Malaysian premiere of Beastly, Tutti Arts & Stepping Stone, 2015
Encounter beasts in pods
These conversations led Rix and Patricia Wozniak, Tutti’s visual arts coordinator, to conceive of three “pods,” intimate, tent-like spaces that would each house a different, three-minute performance by a member of Tutti’s performing arts ensemble. To arrive at a pod, audience members will first be escorted by Tutti and Stepping Stone guides through the “village” where they’ll be able to have their photographs taken with interactive artworks and alongside Busrianto’s half-human, half-animal street art figures. They’ll then engage with one of three performances: the beast, the bowerbird or the collector. Each one, according to Rix, offers a distinctive aesthetic and experience: “There is a cardboard beast pod which contains a performance drawn from actor Lorcan Hopper’s interest in wolves; the bowerbird pod, made of bamboo, is about both the lengths bowerbirds have to go to in order to attract a suitable mate and the destruction of habitat; and finally the collector pod, which is made of clip-lock, a kind of lightweight metal that can be fitted together. Whereas the beast is quite intense and the bowerbird somewhat light-hearted, the collector is creepy. We use preserved animal body parts in jars—similar to our habit of pinning butterfly species onto corkboards—to project a future in which there is nobody left to collect anything.”
Rix explained that the pods will have substantially altered since their first appearance at the George Town Festival. “In Penang, the bowerbird pod was like this amazing chandelier that floated from the ceiling of the performance space, but it will be much more like a shrine in Adelaide, partly because we will be outdoors, and partly because we have involved different people with the design. Adelaide artist Nina Rupena, who is now based in Melbourne, was central to the work as it appeared in Penang, but now we also have Laura Wills and Indonesian visual artist Mawarini collaborating on different aspects of the pods.” Rix added that there would be a fifth installation, in addition to Busrianto’s street art and the three pods, led by visual artist Henry Jock Walker, whose work has traditionally been rooted in Australian surf culture. It’s just one more indication of the project’s ambitious scale and rich interchange of diverse cultural and artistic practices.
Shared art, shared concerns
“For our part,” Rix told me, “there’s a genuine dialogue starting between Tutti and these individuals and organisations in Malaysia and Indonesia. It’s easy both here and over there for artists to become overwhelmed by theory and policy discussions, but nothing compares to when you get a group of likeminded people working together on a project and everybody realises that, in among all the different bits of each other’s languages they’re picking up, there’s a commonality to the work we’re all doing. In this case, it’s our shared concern with the kind of environmental legacy that we are creating and how that will impact on the animal species we profess to care about. That we can communicate this through what will be, for many audience members, their most intimate encounter with a person who has a disability, is a really special thing, I think”.
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OzAsia Festival 2016, Tutti, Stepping Stone and Andres Busrianto, Beastly; Adelaide Festival Centre Riverdeck, free event; 22-24 Sept; 28 Sept-1 Oct, from 6pm nightly
ACA students Lachlan Scown, Evie Leonard in Dreamers, 3D’15
Established in 2001 and centrally located in Light Square, just west of the city centre, TAFE SA’s Adelaide College of the Arts is unique in being Australia’s only tertiary institution where performance, visual arts and design are taught in a single, purpose-built facility (sadly, the Advanced Diploma of Professional Writing—which this writer completed in 2011—has been discontinued as of this year). While there is an increasing focus on online courses, a State Government-funded $3.82 million expansion announced in August will see the relocation to the city campus of the music and sound production programs from TAFE SA’s Salisbury campus. Students studying graphic design, digital media and game art development at the Tea Tree Gully campus will also transfer to Light Square as part of the expansion.
The College’s Advanced Diploma of Arts (Acting) is a three-year, full-time actor-training program that covers four broad disciplines: acting, movement and voice, performance/production and contextual studies. Originally introduced at the Centre for the Performing Arts (CPA) in Grote Street—one of two institutions, along with the visual arts-focused North Adelaide School of Arts (NASA), folded into the new college in 2001—the acting course was established by David Kendall in 1986. It is now overseen by Head of Acting Terence Crawford, one of three core members of staff alongside voice specialist Simon Stollery and movement lecturer Jenn Havelberg. Graduates of the course include Nathan O’Keefe (who has worked with Slingsby, Windmill, SA State Theatre Company and Bell Shakespeare), Renato Musolino (Windmill, STCSA, The Other Ones). Kate Cheel (Windmill, STCSA, Kneehigh), Nathan Page (theatre, film and television, including Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries) and Rory Walker (STCSA, Brink, Slingsby, Windmill and more). During my conversation with Crawford, he nominated three further graduates as exemplars of the course: Josie Were (multidisciplinary performer Crack Theatre Festival, Vitalstatistix, STCSA; trained with SITI in NYC and Philippe Gaulier in Paris), Matilda Bailey (STCSA) and Charles Sanders (STCSA; Artistic Director Early Worx; trained with SITI). All, while still young, have since returned to the college in various teaching and leadership roles.
In the cultural centre
I begin by asking Crawford to contextualise his approach to teaching at the College within a career that saw him graduate as an actor from NIDA in 1984 and subsequently take on Head of Acting roles at Western Sydney’s now-defunct Theatre Nepean and, in Singapore, TTRP (since renamed Intercultural Theatre Institute) and LASALLE College of the Arts. “The thing I recognised immediately about Adelaide—and I’ve been in this job for eight and a half years now—is that we’re in a little city square in a little city, where the cultural industry happens around us, so my determination from the beginning was to make sure that this place was thought of as part of that broad industry.”
ACA students Lucy Sutherland, Jack Sumner, Patrick Klavins in Mouth Machine, 3D’14
The advantages of distance
Crawford compares the relative isolation of Adelaide and its lack of proximity to the cultural centres of the eastern states with that of Theatre Nepean—“50 kilometres into the bush away from Sydney and NIDA”—but believes this can also work to the city’s advantage. For a start, he says, “If you make mistakes, you’re not making them in the glare”—a sentiment echoed by 2010 graduate Charles Sanders, who is in mid-rehearsal for a production of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children by the College’s acting, design and technical production students. “One of the really nice things about working in Adelaide, and especially inside this building,” Sanders tells me over coffee, “is that you’re removed to some extent from the east coast industry, which is very competitive and not particularly good at allowing people to fail or take big risks.”
Crawford expands on this theme: “The great benefit of studying the arts in Adelaide, reflective of the great benefit of being an artist in Adelaide, is a sense of community. Our students don’t feel they have to cower at the thought that Geordie Brookman [Artistic Director of State Theatre Company of South Australia] is going to come and see their grad show; they’ve already met and worked with him because he’s part of the program.”
The teaching-directing mix
Sanders, fresh from completing a Masters of Directing at NIDA, has been added to what Crawford calls his “Lazy Susan” of directors—a rotating roster of industry professionals employed on a casual or part-time basis to undertake a mix of teaching and directing commitments—that also includes Brookman, Jon Halpin, David Mealor, Chris Drummond, Elena Carapetis and Corey McMahon among others. Under their tuition, second- and third-year students keep to an intense schedule of rehearsing four shows a year, and a final year that culminates in a self-devised project, 3D, and an industry showcase that incorporates a graduate show. Sanders describes these guest directing gigs as “three-quarters directing and one-quarter teaching or two-thirds directing and one-third teaching,” contrasting this division of time and energy with that of fellow graduates Josephine Were and Matilda Bailey. “Matilda’s focus is on voice,” Sanders tells me, “so she comes in at more of a pure teaching level, whereas Josie probably has something like a 50/50 split between directing and teaching duties.”
Bailey will be taking up a casual teaching post as of October, after having completed a course of study in voice at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama. Although still in her 20s, the role will be a homecoming for Bailey in more ways than one: in addition to being a guest lecturer in voice at first- and second-year levels, she will also be teaching an evening course that will have as its initial focus the preparation of aspiring actors for drama school auditions. “It was at a short course similar to this,” Bailey tells me by email, “that I first discovered AC Arts and began my journey to being an actor. The idea of being a mentor makes me feel somewhat embarrassed as I still feel I have much to learn. However, Adelaide’s isolation makes it even more integral for practitioners who have pursued further studies overseas to bring that learning back with them.”
Josephine Were, who graduated in 2009, has also spent a significant amount of time away from Adelaide, undertaking training in Suzuki and Viewpoints with New York’s SITI Company and Le Jeu and Clown with Ecole Philippe Gaulier in Paris. “I view mentoring as a two-way relationship,” Were writes in an email. “I have had and continue to have some brilliant mentors in my life. These are people who have given me the energy and time to play, talk, share and dream without fear of failure. I try to carry this philosophy too. It’s always exciting how the process of trying to mentor others causes you to further distill ideas and questions for yourself too. So it’s very much an exchange.” As to her specific role at AC Arts, Were states, “I often mentor the 3D project, which is a relaxed, provocateur-like relationship over one term. I also teach the first years for a unit of performance skills in which I lead them through games and tasks based around play, listening and ‘being together,’ which draws heavily on my Gaulier training.”
Were also directed a devised show, HOME, by 2014’s second-year class, a production that Crawford recalls with typically generous praise: “This kind of gig is one I’ve been programming for about six or seven years, a moment when students are led by a theatre-maker in the devising of something as a stepping stone to the genuinely group-devised piece that they do in third year. And Josephine did an extraordinary piece that was thoroughly owned by the actors, and very humanely and directly shared with its audience. All three of these people are very special talents.”
HOME, devised theatre performance with 2nd and 3rd year theatre ACA students lead and directed by Josie Were
The actor: dramaturgical & Stanislavskian
As Crawford reflects on nearly 30 years of being an actor-teacher, he nominates two pedagogical interests that have been key to what he calls the “last chapter” of his teaching career: the development of, in his phrase, the “dramaturgical actor—an actor for whom writing and acting are symbiotic”—and furthering a conversation around the aesthetics of performance that doesn’t reject the Stanislavskian acting tradition. It remains to be seen whether Crawford’s successors will pick up and run with these particular balls, but planning for the future is clearly on his mind.
Legacy, succession, change
Crawford tells me, “I think important institutions have fallen into major holes because there have been long periods of neglect in relation to succession planning and I’m determined that that doesn’t happen—not just for this institution but for the whole sector. Because there are so few of these jobs, and while it’s an incredible privilege to have one, I think you owe it to the world not to cling to it but to share all the knowledge you can and to make sure there’s a whole load of people who are the next generation of teachers.”
And can he see that next generation starting to take shape? “Put it this way,” he says, jabbing a finger towards the College’s third floor, “there are three offices up there that are occupied by me and two other outstanding performance teachers, Simon Stollery and Jenn Havelberg. If in five or 10 years those three offices are occupied by the three graduates we’ve been talking about today, it will be an amazing course; very different, but I would be excited for the future of South Australian theatre training. That would be a dream. They might even employ me occasionally!”
SCA students protest the merging of Sydney’s two university art schools outside the Art Gallery of NSW
Sydney College of the Arts is fighting for its future. Dedicated, articulate and formidable students currently occupying the Dean’s Office in the Callan Park campus have faith in their education and in the history and significance of this institution; and they are supported by alumni, artists and communities who recognise the value of both SCA and visual art education to our culture.
It is a much bigger issue than the future of a single art school. This is an important fight, and potentially a turning point for culture in Australia. The protest is a defense of the integrity not only of SCA, but all other Australian art and design institutions, including increasingly beleaguered TAFE college departments.
Undermining culture
The NSW Government’s land grab for Callan Park, the SCA site, and the old Darlinghurst Gaol, home to the National Art School—shifting the classification of both from education to property—and the devaluing of art education are not isolated events, but symptoms of a concerted undermining of art and culture more generally. This insidious push towards privatisation comes at the same time as arts sector funding cuts have devastated small to medium arts organisations and those funds diverted to pork barrelling by Arts Minister Senator Mitch Fifield—arts spending without transparency, consistency or expertise. At the same time we see, more broadly, a profound erosion of civil liberties, including our rights to protest and to privacy.
Slow death by asphyxiation
Thus far, the proposed closure of SCA by merger with UNSW Art and Design has been effectively prevented, but under the University of Sydney’s strategic plan, released last year, SCA is slated to be absorbed into the massive Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, ostensibly to reduce bottom line costs, including devastating cuts to staff numbers.
Moving SCA to the main campus of the University of Sydney could easily result in slow death by asphyxiation: in other words a continuation of the current management strategy that has overseen, rather than countered, falling enrolments at SCA. The numbers of those enrolling in creative tertiary education had slowed markedly 2008-2013 (The Arts Nation: an overview of Australian arts, 2015 Edition Australia Council, p16). This legitimises as much as creates the short-term economic arguments for closing art schools.
To lose a proposed 60% of SCA staff, whole departments and important equipment and space is an attempt to fit art education into a philosophical and economic model that smacks of the dumbing down and anti-intellectualism that has pervaded commercialised and privatised education internationally for at least a decade, particularly in the US and UK. Forcing art schools into conventional learning environments cannot but reduce the efficacy of teaching and learning. If you lack the resources of space, time and equipment you cannot effectively and expansively engage in the creative process, the limitations of the environment curtailing what you imagine as possible in your practice.
In the last five to 10 years, the UK has implemented a particular kind of austerity politics that has had profound effects: funding cuts, fee deregulation and short-term economic models of governance have placed even the most renowned art schools under duress. The push to sell off grounds and incorporate art schools into other campuses has also been underway for some time. The Sir John Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design at London Metropolitan University effectively resisted this process until February this year, when the property was sold for £50 million and leased back to the university until the faculty moves to the university in 2017.
Students occupy Sydney College of the Arts
UK austerity
Part of this cultural shift has meant that art and design universities in the UK have increased their fees to £9,000 a year (and are looking at deregulating further), directly pricing out students from poorer backgrounds, but also likely deterring women, mature age, CALD and LGBT students, and those with disabilities, for whom the financial burdens seem a significant risk. Enrolments are reduced, in effect reducing the vibrancy and diversity of creative voices, debate and, in the long term, cultural breadth and depth. Education becomes the privilege of those with significant funds. My former students are now graduates with fee debts of around £60,000 and loans. The threat of $100,000 degrees in Australia is already both a cultural and economic reality elsewhere. The real deception here is the notion that knowledge and learning have definable monetary value, and that such value is predictable and tied to current ideas of employability.
Similarly, in UK further education colleges and schools, the availability of art and design study is now up for debate, as new models of assessment and evaluation of learning exclude creative subjects from essential study by prioritising instead so-called STEM subjects: science, technology, engineering and mathematics. This year’s art and design enrolments at GCSE level (General Certificate of Secondary Education, year 10) have declined 6%. This is not because young people don’t want to pursue creative subjects, but because access to them is being restricted by political and economic agendas [See the NAVA letter to Education Minister Senator Simon Birmingham. Eds].
Of course this is not the only model of education on offer. If Sydney University had included art and design education expertise in developing a strategy for the future of SCA, we might even have seen a University of the Arts emerge comparable to the University of the Arts, London, which has preserved the rich, independent cultures of its constituent art and design schools while streamlining administrative functions.
Beyond UAL, London has many significant art schools, further testament that no international city should have only one art and design centre of excellence. It is, rather, an essential characteristic of creative education—and an outward-looking international city—that the range of institutions and cultures should be diverse.
Save SCA rally, Camperdown campus
Political consequences
Perhaps politicians think artists are an easy target—powerless, politically naïve, unlikely or unable to fight back. Perhaps that’s what University of Sydney Deputy Vice Chancellor Stephen Garton anticipated when he agreed to meet with very determined SCA students on 29 July.
Universities should take note of the possible consequences of the hasty and ill-conceived implementation of their short-term economic agendas. UK Labour leadership has placed arts education at the centre of debate, proposing the reversal of funding cuts to the arts and the reduction of university fees, pledging to introduce a pupil premium for creative education [as established for sport in 2013] as central to its arts policy and political platform. We should learn from this reversal of the current approach to cultural education before we lose the expertise and resources that will prove so hard to replace: we must go straight to championing creative education in Australia.
Keep up to date with the activities of the SCA students and alumni at letscastay.com
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BIFEM 2016 Workshop L-R: Madeline Roycroft, Zoe Barker, Virginia Baxter, Bec Scully, Keith Gallasch, Claudine Michael, Matthew Lorenzon, Alex Taylor
