Dean Walsh, Matt Shilcock and Mel Tyquin, Underbelly Arts 2015
photo Tom Jones
Dean Walsh, Matt Shilcock and Mel Tyquin, Underbelly Arts 2015
In Part I of For All We Know (or thought we knew), dancer, choreographer and marine environmentalist Dean Walsh wrote of the experience of discovering that he was living with a disability. In Part II, he describes how working with Restless Dance Company, Murmuration, Catalyst Dance and RUCKUS has inspired him, developed self-awareness and helped him build an inclusive methodology for shared performance-making.
Fierce adaptability
Back in early 2010 Philip Channells, then newly appointed Artistic Director of Adelaide-based inclusive company Restless Dance Theatre (RDT), invited me to make a work for the new touring company. I facilitated a workshop for about 30 people who orbited RDT activities at the time to try out some physical ideas and gain a sense of what working inclusively might entail. It was a bit of a baptism by fire but I absolutely loved it. At the end of the two days I told Philip that what seemed to stand out to me was a phenomenon of fierce adaptability. These people all seemed to constantly adapt to so much in life, not just artistic ideas and tasks. This was no more evident than when I went to lunch with some of them on day two.
Elizabeth Ryan, Dana Nance, Bundanon residency, Dean Walsh with Restless Dance Theatre, 2012, Stage 1 development of True to Nature
photo Heidrun Löhr
Elizabeth Ryan, Dana Nance, Bundanon residency, Dean Walsh with Restless Dance Theatre, 2012, Stage 1 development of True to Nature
True to Nature
So I was interested to look at this idea of adaptation as an overriding theme for the work I’d devise with these people and with the working title True to Nature, because it was about their physical and neurological reality. I started to talk to a young and emerging artist, Matt Shilcock, whom I have since mentored over the last five or so years. Matt is a highly intelligent and gifted artist who identifies as living with a congenital physical disability. He is the very epitome of adaptation. He overcomes his physical hurdles time and again to produce conceptually dangerous works that, without necessarily aiming to, sit within a new type of avant garde.
Matt became a member of RDT and our cast. He and I talked about his history and he revealed that he loved Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, X-Men and Martial Arts history as a kid and their acceptance of ‘mutants’ into their troops. We discussed the recent resurgence of ‘mutants’ as powerful and empowering heroes and heroines and this brought us to a subtext we’d look to explore for him within True to Nature. We are all mutations of the primate gene pool. Mutation is a part of evolution, some successful some not—but genetic mutation defines evolution. I also came to discover that mutation offers a very useful movement composition method that I have since employed in all my practice.
Next I had to consider how I’d work with all members of the cast inclusively on such a subject. Apart from Matt the diverse cast was made up of independent dance artists Elizabeth Ryan and Miranda Wheen and RDT dancers Dana Nance, Jianna Georgiou and Andrew Pandos, so I had my work cut out in terms of making the process entirely inclusive and in no way imposing ideas. A challenge most definitely, but I was up for it.
In our three-week Bundanon residency in 2011, I orchestrated various immersions in nature in order to gather sensory information that we could all relate to through embodied experience. We called the big she-oak down by the river our “family tree” and spent an entire day around her dreaming creativity into her branches and back out to our group discussion. Blind-folded tasks allowed us to meet our various intellectual differences within a common physical application, opening us up to the themes and how each of us might comprehend them.
We’d go back into the dance studio and see what we each had distilled and from there talk about how we might adapt our material to suit one another. In other words, we were in constant states of mutating our individual findings and ideas to work out ways to include one another. I adopted a ‘leave no one out’ approach. I needed to constantly shift and challenge my preconceptions if I was to direct a work that would reflect upon genetic mutation to help demonstrate the redundancy of prejudice based on physical and/or neurological difference.
I was very new to this then but I loved the challenge. Having to think on my feet and constantly review if I was practising an authentic inclusion or just imposing my creative dictatorship on others. It didn’t always work but when it did we found we’d made some stunning passages. The material is all on video and I look forward to perhaps one day revisiting it and finally finishing the work for an audience to experience.
Dana Nance, Miranda Wheen, Bundanon residency, Dean Walsh with Restless Dance Theatre, 2012, Stage 1 development of True to Nature
photo Heidrun Löhr
Dana Nance, Miranda Wheen, Bundanon residency, Dean Walsh with Restless Dance Theatre, 2012, Stage 1 development of True to Nature
Evolving inclusion
Post my experience with RDT I attended the Accessible Arts Catalyst Dance Program symposium at Carriageworks in 2011. This was another turning point for me. I met some great people who were all very experienced in inclusive practice, in particular, Alison Richardson who was director of Beyond the Square, the disability inclusive program at Riverside Theatres, Parramatta. Under this umbrella she had formed a performance group known as Ruckus Ensemble, now just RUCKUS. At the symposium she asked me if I’d like to come in and teach some classes for the group. Five years later and with three major works under our belt RUCKUS are still together with some incredible stories to tell (another time). Alison and I position ourselves as co-collaborators alongside the members of the group. Our last work Speed of Life was presented at PACT centre for emerging artists, receiving a lot of praise as a significant contemporary performance work, let alone one that was led by six people living with intellectual disability who are professional artists in their own right.
In tandem with these two company engagements I’ve also worked as workshop facilitator and artistic advisor for Sydney-based inclusive dance company Murmuration and as facilitator and mentor for the Catalyst Dance Program through Accessible Arts in Sydney. Catalyst afforded me the chance to work with many different bodies and minds and learn how to develop my own PrimeOrderly methodology into an entirely inclusive movement research practice. If I am to reflect on the state of our marine environments but exclude certain people then I’m not being at all environmentally sensitive and my inclusive practice would be unsound. So I continue to develop its properties and get feedback from participants and adapt it accordingly.
The art of constant renegotiation
How do I engage with people with disabilities? When I say “inclusive,” by definition I do mean some major adapting has to happen on my part as much as on the part of the workshop participant or cast member living with disability. When the group I’m working with has a very diverse range of abilities I am in a position of constant renegotiation with my ideas and how to implement them fairly and encourage ideas from each person to be heard and at least tried out and given a run. Often these spark alternate routes to finding more specific meaning in a scene.
This can be an extremely tiring process at times, a bit like a head chef also playing waiter, maitre d’ and dishwasher, but it is a process that also suits the speed at which my mind often works. It gives me a chance to try out so many ideas and reiterations of these that might otherwise be missed opportunities in an able-bodied or neurotypical setting. But to go into more depth about the process of facilitating workshops or productions is for another article.
Matt Shilcock, Mel Tyquin (white mask), The Likes of Me, Underbelly Arts, 2015
photo Gabriel Clark
Matt Shilcock, Mel Tyquin (white mask), The Likes of Me, Underbelly Arts, 2015
To truly listen
What I will say is that, if you’re open to learning, working outside your comfort zones and usual directorial timeframes and are ready to slow a process right down and to truly listen, then your artistic leadership skills will develop ten-fold. It also awakens you to a whole new work ethic and more democratic creative authority. It isn’t good enough to have people with diverse abilities in your class or rehearsal room sitting in a corner because you don’t know what to do with them, and then call it inclusive. This is not inclusion and it most definitely is not integration. In the inclusive arts sector we call this “tick-the-box practice” and it irks us senseless.
Community and self-awareness
Working in the inclusive sector has awoken me to so many new and positive attributes of my practice but also myself. It has awoken me to my own identity as someone living with disability, one you cannot always see and is not always evidently ‘disabling.’ Finding the disability arts community and becoming a part of its growth from strength to strength has been totally serendipitous for me. I knew I’d found my clan but it wasn’t until 2015, when I was finally diagnosed with Complex Trauma Disorder (considered an acquired disability) as well as Autism Spectrum Disorder/Condition that I suddenly realised why I had found such a brotherhood and sisterhood in the inclusive arts community.
Here I can be my differently wired self. Congenitally, I am not normal, after all, thank God! Here I can be accepted for my sometimes overwhelming picture brain and sensory-emotional overloading and fall in and out of clarity without judgment. Here I can ask for the extra support I sometimes need in order to function without feeling categorised, shunned or dismissed. I understand the power of being acknowledged for who you are in all that you are. I have for so long so often felt like I’m viewing situations through an impenetrable membrane – I’m there but not there with far too many thoughts, full of extraordinary detail, functioning all at once that I can even feel physically ill. This is a fairly common trait of the Aspergian/Autistic mind and far too often misunderstood by neurotypical people. At the risk of sounding a little daggy, not only have I found my clan within the disability inclusive community, I’ve finally started to find my authentic self and the systems of practice I need to better function as a leading artist with an ‘invisible’ (well, sometimes) disability.
Matt Shilcock, The Likes of Me, Underbelly Arts 2015
photo Gabriel Clark
Matt Shilcock, The Likes of Me, Underbelly Arts 2015
Dean Walsh and Matt Shilcock are looking to develop The Likes of Me—premiered in the 2015 Underbelly Arts Festival—“exploring eugenics and the idea of ‘perfect’ birth narratives.”
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.
As its name suggests, Arts Northern Rivers’ ambitious If These Halls Could Talk program aims to use airy, character-filled old community halls as a departure point to explore the wider history of the Northern Rivers region. In telling the stories of these buildings, they may offer some insight into the general character of regional Australia through an exploration of settlement, environment, politics and changing demographics.
Dreamland, staged in the Eureka Hall (in Eureka, 23km north-east of Lismore), managed this and more with its mixture of rough-and-tumble farce, eclectic musical numbers, uncomplicated dialogue and, most spectacularly, the contortions of acrobat Darcy Grant. Produced by Lismore-based NORPA, Dreamland is the fifth of seven site-specific, multidisciplinary If These Halls Could Talk productions.
Not exactly a play, it’s a hybrid performance work written by Janis Balodis and directed by NORPA’s Artistic Director Julian Louis. The show opens on a three-person Eureka Hall committee meeting when flippant gasbagging between members is interrupted by a passerby enquiring about using the hall for his soccer team’s gala ball. This exchange precipitates the high-octane, often surreal telling of each of the four characters’ backstories, in which actors switch roles amid flashbacks and ghostly recollections. One committee member, for example, is a farm owner (Toni Scanlan) wondering how to manage her property as old age approaches, while the soccer player (Darcy Grant) is a ‘tree-changer’ struggling to find fulfilment (and employment) on the back of a naïve move from the city to this so-called Rainbow Region of northern New South Wales.
Phil Blackman, Toni Scanlan, Katia Molino, Dreamland, NORPA
photo Kate Holmes
Phil Blackman, Toni Scanlan, Katia Molino, Dreamland, NORPA
These sequences are compelling, thanks in part to some rudimentary but charming dance routines and the exceptional backing music provided by a trio headed up by Fourplay’s Shenzo Gregory, their eerie drones and chirpy cabaret melodies only occasionally pulling attention—particularly when a theremin is introduced.
The strongest of these mini-biographies comes courtesy of Katia Molino, whose monologue is delivered as she offers a tray of lamingtons around the audience. Her passionate reflections on the socio-economic hardships that many experience, in an area generally marketed as a breezy promised land, is a genuinely moving highpoint. The fourth character, another ageing farmer (Phil Blackman) has a penchant for partner dancing and is bewildered by the New Age residents in the area.
With employment scarce and the cost of living sharply rising, a sense of existential ennui can afflict many in such places, as explored through the plight of Grant’s soccer player. While his cartwheeling and hand-standing make for absorbing spectacle, the character’s ultimate listlessness and frustration make a stark point about social isolation.
The prevalence of musical numbers and dancing put one in mind of Britain’s great TV dramatist Dennis Potter, while the sharp comedic back and forth between the committee members, in its best moments, has Stoppard-esque echoes as well as occasionally profane local vernacular. At times unsubtle jokes look for laughs and historical exposition seems a touch educational in an otherwise rambunctious, colourful, life-affirming extravaganza.
With an affectionate but not uncritical commitment to locality, Julian Louis and collaborators have brought much-needed life and a modicum of cultural depth to not only a hall, but also an entire region.
Read an interview with Craig Walsh and Grayson Cook, artists involved in other If These Halls Could Talk productions.
Dreamland, NORPA
photo Kate Holmes
Dreamland, NORPA
Arts Northern Rivers: NORPA, Dreamland, director, devisor Julian Louis, writer, devisor Janis Balodis, musical director, lead musician Shenzo Gregory, performers, devisors Phil Blackman, Darcy Grant, Katia Molino, Kirk Page, Toni Scanlan, lighting designer Karl Johnson, costume designer William Kutana, movement director Kirk Page; Eureka Hall, Eureka, 23-26 Nov, 28 Nov-3 Dec, 5-10 Dec
Forthcoming productions in the If These Halls Could Talk season:
Arts Northern Rivers, If These Halls Could Talk: Grayson Cooke, SCU, Bonnywood Rising, Bonalbo Hall, 10 Dec; Opera Queensland, Tumbulgum and the Countdown to Midnight at the First Supper Between Now and Forever, Tumbulgum Hall, Northern New South Wales, 16-17 Dec
History and politics are generally subjects of written discourse, sometimes of cinema and theatre. Adelaide’s Zephyr Quartet has taken the extraordinary step of analysing Australia’s immigrant history though music, presenting their concert Arrivals—subtitled “Music exploring notions of migration to Australia by boat”—in the South Australian Maritime Museum in Port Adelaide. The museum is housed in a 19th century warehouse in the historical port, a precinct that celebrates and tells much about the colonisation of South Australia and the aspirations of the colonists.
Dominating the museum’s main hall is the 18-metre ketch Active II, a full-scale replica of the original, which was built in 1873 and in use until 1959, a boat typical of the kind used extensively for carrying cargo and passengers around South Australian waters in that era. For the concert, the audience is seated in narrow rows along the walkway between the ketch and museum display cabinets. Some are seated on the deck, observing the concert through the rigging. Surrounded by maritime history, South Australia is at the front of our minds as we listen.
The concert opens with Zephyr Artistic Director Hilary Kleinig’s Great White Bird (2016), in which her gentle cello introduction gives way to a seagull-like sound voiced in the violins. Kleinig based the simple, repetitive tune on an anthropologist’s 1928 Edison cylinder recording of a song sung by a Wirangu woman from the Eyre Peninsula, acknowledging the Indigenous people who witnessed the arrival of the colonists by sailing ship and who thought the ship was a giant white bird. Next is Kate Moore’s Broken Rosary, a short work inspired by a story concerning her grandmother’s rosary which she links to her family’s immigration from the Netherlands. Here the cello is the primary voice work, its swaying sound suggesting a child’s swing. These two works introduce us to people on both sides of the story of colonisation and immigration—those displaced by it and those whose lives are improved by it.
Paul Stanhope’s String Quartet No 2 (2009) is a magnificent piece of writing that makes the utmost technical demands of the quartet, Zephyr responding admirably. The ensemble playing is excellent, bringing out all the dramatic and emotional power in a work which is a tribute to Czech composer Pavel Haas who died in Auschwitz in 1944. In the program note, Stanhope indicates that the work references old Europe, the origin of the string quartet and much else in Australian culture. Zephyr’s inclusion of Stanhope’s work gives the concert great musical depth as well as another significant political dimension.
The program then takes a leap in a different musical direction with second violinist Emily Tulloch’s transcription for string quartet and tape of Vola Colomba (Fly, Dove) by Carlo Concina. This romantic song was the winning entry in the 1952 San Remo Festival and was evidently much loved by Italian immigrants to Australia longing for the old country. Tulloch blends into this transcription the voice-over from an Australian Government film about Australia that was shown on ships bearing immigrants (sometimes known then as “new arrivals”). In her program note, Tulloch invites us to compare Australian government immigration policies then and now. Both musically enchanting and deeply thought-provoking, Tulloch’s work recalls a significant piece of Australian history and highlights contemporary attitudes towards immigrants and refugees.
Another conceptual leap takes us to psychologist Jason Thomas’ Mulysa (2016), a response by the composer to his time working with staff in the Regional Processing Centres on Manus Island and Nauru. This is powerfully emotive music, evoking the monotony and despair of camp life. Carefully positioned to follow Thomas’ work is Kleinig’s For those who’ve come across the seas (2014), for smart-phone choir and quartet, first premiered in 2014 as part of Zephyr’s Music for Strings and iThings concert. That concert foregrounded the use of new technologies and engaged the audience directly as participants through the use of their phones as instruments. Kleinig’s For those… invites the audience to participate in the performance by using their smart-phones to play into the hall pre-recorded elements of the music. No longer passive observers, they are actively enjoined in the work’s critique of the refugee crisis as a humanitarian issue. Recontextualised in this concert, Kleinig’s approach also raises the question of why a country that was built on immigration now refuses asylum seekers.
For the final work, the composer Motez, whose father arrived by boat from Iran in 2000, joins Zephyr for Beginnings, an upbeat joint composition that blends his electronics with the quartet’s strings, leaving the audience with a feeling of optimism.
Zephyr’s program note for Arrivals opens with the statement, “Australia is very much a nation of ‘boat people’, past and present,” and the concert is intended to celebrate the contribution migrants have made as well as draw our attention to the difficulties experienced both by Indigenous peoples and those attempting to travel here. Once again Zephyr has taken musical performance in new directions, creating a musical exposition on the politics of colonisation and migration and the crucial issue of asylum. Zephyr has shown how a concert can be developed around a significant and complex political theme, selecting music that relates to that theme and demonstrating how central it is to the conduct of debates on matters of national and international significance.
Arrivals has also been staged at the Western Australian Maritime Museum with the support of Tura New Music.
–
Zephyr Quartet and Motez, Arrivals, South Australian Maritime Museum, Port Adelaide, 17-20 Nov
Installation view, Patrick Pound, Thinking Through Things, Flinders University City Gallery, 2016
photo Grant Hancock
Installation view, Patrick Pound, Thinking Through Things, Flinders University City Gallery, 2016
Thinking Through Things is a curatorial collaboration between artist Patrick Pound and the Flinders University Art Museum, drawing on FUAM’s holdings in Australian conceptual or ‘post-object’ art—documentation and ephemera from the 1970s when artists staged events, actions, interventions and performance art works which may have faded from memory but for their documentary traces. The poetic idea or provocation which inspired the original act, and not the material object, was what typically mattered in conceptual art.
Pound’s practice is as a hoarder and arranger. His own contributions—subtitled Circles Spheres Mirrors and Holes, after characteristics which define exclusion or inclusion—were sourced online. Nevertheless, they are resolutely analogue: faded photographs and snapshots, newspaper reports, mundane monochromatic objects (plastic balls, rolls of tape).
The exhibition is laid out horizontally in three bands: two discontinuous rows along a waist-high shelf set against a long wall, then above a row of framed displays featuring one or two scrappy photographs mounted on a square of brown cardboard resting within an unpainted wooden frame. The top of the frames produces a continuous line slightly above eye level, which binds the collection. These horizontals rest between wings produced by walls at either side, on which an additional four mounted images are placed.
Installation view, Patrick Pound, Thinking Through Things, Flinders University City Gallery, 2016
photo Grant Hancock
Installation view, Patrick Pound, Thinking Through Things, Flinders University City Gallery, 2016
There has been a trend in the last 30 years regarding the exhibition of conceptualist ephemera towards what one might almost describe as a deliberately overstated rustic formalism: planed wooden benches, carefully arranged photobooks and magazines in vitrines designed to look inexpensive but elegant. Pound ironically provides a formal and plastic unity to the objects, suggesting an altogether more material and tangible effect than the original artists intended. Pound notes his interest in how these ineffable events left material traces: “It’s called Post-Object art but they are all objects, so no matter what we do, we end up with things”.
Considered in this light, the exhibition is redolent with pathos. I felt a melancholy twinge in seeing these enigmatic residues reduced to simple matter. Like the photographs which accompany them, the contents of FUAM’s collection have a rich contextual backstory. This history has however been almost wilfully stripped away and aestheticised. Instead, one approaches the objects as Surrealist readymades or sources of chance encounters. I pored over Bob Ramsay’s fascinatingly opaque bound collection of photographs of banal domestic corners (Sites and Situations, 1974), for example.
But largely, these documents appear lost and abused—much as when Marcel Duchamp proposed a “reciprocal ready-made,” using a Rembrandt painting as an ironing board. Notable here is the inclusion of a recording of a 1980 National Gallery of Victoria survey of video art, as well as reel-to-reel tape of Peter Kennedy’s But the Fierce Blackman (1971). Conforming to Pound’s wilfully abstract rule, tapes are here aligned with plastic balls resting alongside Jãnis Nedêla’s sculptural Bolter No. 5 (2005; a found hard cover book drilled through with holes) and John Baldessari’s Brutus Killed Caesar (1976; its pages display a pair of flanking politicians gazing at a roll of tape floating between them), for the sole reason that the central spools about which the tapes are wound are circular. Visitors will not—cannot—hear what is recorded. As an archivist, I can only be mournful standing before tape rendered mute, its voices and secrets imprisoned within dumb matter.
Installation view, Patrick Pound, Thinking Through Things, Flinders University City Gallery, 2016
photo Grant Hancock
Installation view, Patrick Pound, Thinking Through Things, Flinders University City Gallery, 2016
This is not to say Pound is not generously playful, offering moments of joyous revelation. Three axes to the display are provided by cardboard squares from Bob Ramsay’s An Archery Piece (a conditions and distribution activity in collaboration with the Adelaide Archery Club Inc) (1974), in which the glowing coloured rings of a target, and the shaped distribution of holes across it, make up three art works. In the centre of the main wall, at the line of Pound’s photographs, is the front of the target, while each of the wings shows the cardboard backing. Names and scores have been neatly laid out across the latter: evidence of a previous existence as scorecards. Throughout and among these handmade markings emerges a ghostly, spherical collection of pricks. This revelation of past use later violently reinvigorated is a metaphor for Pound’s own intervention. It recalls a signature telekinetically stabbed out by occult forces. That which we could not see before has been magically revealed.
Elsewhere, newspaper reports and photographic documents offer wryly compressed narratives: an image of a hole in the road into which a man fell, or a black and white photograph of a helmeted inspector beneath a perforated, concrete dome looking like a modernist visionary bathed in light. These items are hopeful, suggesting possible recuperation. Patrick Pound’s appropriation is affectionate, but it is tinted with sadness at these once brimming documents falling into an abject state of pure thingness.
Installation view, Patrick Pound, Thinking Through Things, Flinders University City Gallery, 2016
photo Grant Hancock
Installation view, Patrick Pound, Thinking Through Things, Flinders University City Gallery, 2016
Thinking Through Things, Patrick Pound and the Flinders University Art Museum Collections, City Gallery, Adelaide, 24 Sept-27 Nov
Melbourne’s Dancehouse, nestled between Victorian-era terrace homes on Princes Street in North Carlton, has long been an important centre for independent contemporary dance in Australia. Established in 1994, it is one of the few organisations in the country dedicated to the exploration of experimental choreography. But in recent years there’s been an extra buzz of enthusiasm and excitement: the feeling that something has finally clicked and that a niche has been filled.
The company has impressed many with its crucial involvement in large-scale events such as the Keir Choreographic Award and Dance Massive. At the same time, it has maintained a solid program of public performances, significantly increasing the number of international guests it presents while also providing a home for established and emerging local choreographers.
Generating urgency and dialogue
Artistic Director Angela Conquet, appointed in 2012 and formerly the dance director at the artist studio Mains d’Œuvres in Paris, has worked hard to provide context for these events and performances, and to create an atmosphere of urgency and anticipation.
“I think it’s my responsibility as Artistic Director to connect the present corporeal moment with other areas of life, with philosophy and sociology and politics,” she explains. “I think it’s my duty to create conversations and dialogues, to stir as much constructive debate as possible, connecting ideas with embodied gestures.”
An example of this work is the two-week program of events organised around French choreographer Xavier le Roy’s visit to Melbourne in December 2015. His performance of Self Unfinished (1998) was accompanied by two exhibitions, several public talks and a week-long workshop with local artists.
“What do you know about Xavier le Roy in Australia?” says Conquet, shrugging. “For me, it was really important to contextualise the work, and I could only do that, for example, by putting him in conversation with philosophers, urbanists, architects; people who think on a micro- and macro-economic level about how one produces work today.”
The immediate future looks bright for Dancehouse. Audience numbers are up, and this year the company was one of three Melbourne-based dance organisations to receive four-year funding from the Australia Council. But despite her success, Angela Conquet isn’t tooting her own horn. An artistic director ought to work in the shadows, she says, and she is suspicious of any attempt to glorify the role.
Nacera Belaza, The Shout
photo Gregory Lorenzutti for Dancehouse
Nacera Belaza, The Shout
International pairings
One program, however, that she does talk of with evident pride is Dance Territories, presented biennially with the Melbourne Festival. Dance Territories is a double bill which pairs an Australian artist with an international artist. It’s the only Dancehouse initiative where she feels she has a genuine curatorial role, and it’s the one in which she feels most invested as artistic director.
“I came up with the concept when I realised how much the work of artists here resonated with the work of artists I was seeing in Europe and in the US,” says Conquet. “Without realising it, they are exploring the same themes and topics but from different political or aesthetical angles.”
This year’s edition, Borderlines, which was the third, paired French-Algerian choreographer Nacera Belaza with local cross-disciplinary artist Sarah-Jane Norman.
“As an artistic director, I see so many shows. I see work in all four corners of the world. And sometimes I sit there and think, for example, oh, Nacera, she has a completely different body of work from Sarah-Jane’s and yet they are exploring the same thing. Different politics, different meaning, visually a very different thing, but the driving force feels the same.” [Read the RealTime review of Dance Territories, “The ambiguous cry of blood.”]
Sharing this moment of recognition with Australian audiences is, she claims, the great privilege of being an artistic director, and one that she takes very seriously. “We frame the connection, and then the journey is for you,” she says. “We’re just pointing you in the right direction.”
Is it surprising that the idea of connection should be so central to Conquet’s philosophy? Born in Romania, she grew up in a country which at that time was still relatively isolated from the West. She migrated to Paris as a teenager and, after a brief stint as an interpreter, dived into arts management. Her first role was with the Avignon Festival, where she worked for a group called Theorem, helping to build links between artists in Eastern Europe and the West. Now in Melbourne she is doing something similar, building links and making connections. And perhaps this explains why Dancehouse is so fascinating. In a country where we’re apt to fall into the trap of hoping for things elsewhere, this small company is pointing to similitudes and affinities that were always dreamed of but never noticed. Of course, Conquet insists that any work first needs to connect with an audience at a physical and emotional level. “It has to reach somebody,” she says. “If the work touches someone’s heart, and that feeling stays with them, then we’ve nailed it.”
A good indicator of this is if a show provokes a lot of debate or strong reactions. “At the first Dance Territories I had someone who stormed out of the room and told me I could go back home if this was the sort of work I was bringing,” she says. “They’d seen something in the work that really bothered them. And I thought: good.”
But audiences here are rarely so demonstrative, even if they have been moved. “In Melbourne I think that sometimes people are too well behaved,” admits Conquet. “They tend to applaud immediately. I love it when it’s not immediate. I love those five seconds of silence where you can feel that something has hit them. The longer the silence the more I feel I’ve achieved my goal.”
Matthew Day, Assemblage #1
photo Gregory Lorenzutti for Dancehouse
Matthew Day, Assemblage #1
International reach
Dancehouse has also been busy promoting links between the local, the national and the international dance community. One local artist who has benefited from this is Matthew Day, described by Conquet as part of a “new wave” of Australian choreographers with a minimalist, almost conceptual aesthetic.
In 2013, Day and fellow choreographer Sandra Parker presented separate works at the Faits d’Hiver Festival in Paris. In 2014, Day and Natalie Abbott presented at the Avignon Festival. And then last year, in 2015, he participated with James Batchelor in a workshop and presentation at the B.MOTION Festival in Bassano del Grappa, Italy.
These European peregrinations were all facilitated—at least in part—by the Dancehouse International program, a network of partnerships and alliances with likeminded companies in Australia and Europe. The program is an expression of Conquet’s belief that travel is the best way to encourage the development of emerging artists.
“The whole idea behind this was to get the artists circulating,” says Conquet. “It was really about exposing artists to a different context and a different territory and a different kind of audience.” Conquet’s biggest concern is that there aren’t more opportunities for this kind of circulation at a national level, and that there isn’t the infrastructure to tour dance works.
“I think it’s a shame to have so much effort, so much money and so much commitment from the artists and the presenters, and here they have a five-night season and then they’re gone,” she says. “When I arrived here I was outraged that the artists were not outraged. There is a sort of acceptance of this.”
She cites the example of Natalie Abbott’s Maximum, which not only toured to the OFF section of the Avignon Festival, but also to five Australian cities. “That should be the normal life of a work,” says Conquet. “The more you tour a work the better it gets. You can see how it has lived in the body through all the many different performances.”
Composer-performer collaborations can yield unique results from the synergy both parties bring, becoming testing grounds for the exploration of instrumental techniques, novel notation approaches and virtuosity in performance. In Tura New Music’s 2016 Scale Variable series, Soundstorm’s The Calm Before focused on this type of collaboration, presenting solo works by Perth-based composers Dominik Karski, Dobromila Jaskot and Pedro Alvarez. The title of the concert alludes to the cast of musicians (Soundstorm) but also evokes a mutable character in the music. A rendition of Okanagon by Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi (1905-88) brought together the many strands of the concert with a focus on timbre and reference to non-Western traditions.
Jim Coyle in his overview of Australian music for the double bass, describes Dominik Karski’s Along the edge of darkness (1999) as “the most advanced contrabass piece by an Australian composer in the twentieth century.” Performed by its dedicatee Joan Wright, the work employs scordatura, circular bowing, harmonics and glissandi, while the amplification colours the sound of the instrument to bring out its most minute details. The double bass is stripped of any tradition and becomes instead a sound object for physical expression. Wright raps on its body and rattles the strings, all the while maintaining multiple layers of dynamics and articulations. The piece never quite settles into a single direction but presents sounds in a state of flux, with their transitions demarcated by the performer’s movements.
Pedro Alvarez’ De mares imaginados (2009) approaches instrumental exploration more lyrically, using pitch to construct sinuous and volatile lines separated by long pauses that accrue in tension as the piece progresses. Flautist Kirsten Smith gives unity of mood to seemingly broken motifs, and the way she holds the work’s silences serves to amplify their inwardness. The tightly constructed themes assert their own context and are unbound by what comes before or after. Alvarez’ treatment of the material is akin to sculpting, with shifts in perspective that offer new insights into the composition’s elusive core.
Contrasting with the preceding works, Dobromila Jaskot’s hanna (2009) extended the cello with live processing, a backing track and four speakers. The title is the scientific name for the King Cobra snake whose growling hiss is referenced throughout. Tristen Parr negotiates the hectic counterpoint between the electronics and his instrument, sometimes dodging and sometimes falling prey to the aggressive interjections of the backing track. The work seems to enact a viper’s sallies and recoils with deftly spatialised sounds moving across the venue.
Tristen Parr, The Calm Before, TURA New Music
photo Bohdan Warchomij
Tristen Parr, The Calm Before, TURA New Music
The second half of the concert begins with Jaskot’s Atnongara (2002), an extended solo piano piece performed by the composer herself. The title refers to crystalline stones used in Aboriginal shamanism, their possession giving virtue and mystic power to the one who carries them. The work features relentless figuration, conjuring up eddies and ripples within a revolving stream of high notes. Jaskot proves to be an arresting performer, swaying with eyes closed and instilling the pianistic gesture with flair. There was something of the Romantic tradition in the broadly orchestrated passages, yet the harmony remained static, as if exploring a single idea through a wide scope.
Dominik Karski’s Streamworks (2003) belongs to a series of works that focus on the physicality of producing sounds, the material stemming from close collaboration with the player who explores the ergonomic properties of the instrument. Performed by Kirsten Smith on bass flute, the piece starts with a restless flow of keys clicking and sinewy lines from which breaths, pitch inflexions and different attacks emerge. Smith’s embrace of sounds normally avoided in traditional performance has a keen compositional sense, serving to emphasise the corporeal character of Karski’s music.
Since the renaissance of his work in the 1980s, Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi has become a father figure for musicians working with texture. His focus on timbre, or what Tristan Murail describes as “the exploration of the interior of sounds,” is well manifested in Okanagon, the concert’s closing work, featuring Catherine Ashley on harp, Joan Wright on double bass and Louise Devenish on tam tam and with Pedro Alvarez conducting.
Okanagon begins with an incantatory pulse representing the “heartbeat” of the earth. The musicians play in unison to create a fused tone, its microtonal progression later interrupted by percussive, tabla-like patterns. Wright assumed an intermediary role between the harp and the tam-tam parts, adding fluid microtonal lines that turned sound into a pliable material.
The Calm Before was successful in presenting adventurous music that not only showcased the uniqueness of each composer but also the identity of the musicians. The introductory speech by concert curator Dominik Karski conveyed enthusiasm for works exploring formal concerns but also an intuitive and unselfconscious approach to music-making.
Kirsten Smith, The Calm Before, TURA New Music
photo Bohdan Warchomij
Kirsten Smith, The Calm Before, TURA New Music
Tura New Music, Scale Variable series: Soundstorm, The Calm Before, Studio Underground, State Theatre Centre, Perth, 2 Nov
Esther Tuddenham, Sarah Ellis, The Amplified Elephants, Shhh, The Book of Daughters, JOLT Arts
photo William Shiels courtesy Footscray Community Centre
Esther Tuddenham, Sarah Ellis, The Amplified Elephants, Shhh, The Book of Daughters, JOLT Arts
The Book of Daughters, an event presented by JOLT Arts, reminded audiences of the diversity within Melbourne’s sonic art community. Rounding out three nights at the Meat Market in North Melbourne, the third concert featured the Amplified Elephants with Nat Grant, the resident BOLT ensemble with text artist berni m janssen, and Japanese drummer and sound artist Yoshimio. Their three works showcased the female voice in very contrasting settings.
Amplified Elephants
To begin the evening, the women of The Amplified Elephants played a compelling set directed by Nat Grant and poet Esther Tuddenham. Established by the Footscray Community Arts Centre and JOLT, the group consists of sound artists with an intellectual disability. In its decade-long existence, The Amplified Elephants have performed extensively throughout Australia and in London, Edinburgh and Tokyo, showcasing their unique brand of democratic music-making.
As the ensemble worked through different families of instruments—hand bells, cymbals, shakers, guiros and toy music boxes—Grant’s processing and direction was sensitive, resisting the temptation to over-process the recognisable sounds to the point of obscurity. She looped and added resonance to create an echo chamber-like soundscape from the original sources. Subtle references were discernible: the underwater quality of the metallic instruments, the insect-like sounds from the wooden and the gritty yet sparkling white noise of the shakers. Guest text artist and ex-Elephant, Esther Tuddenham, confidently recited two sections of text, with Grant’s processing transforming these into a crowd of voices. The first explored Tuddenham’s relationship with music, while the second was an almost stream-of-consciousness list of affirmations. The text conveyed the power of music-making and served to remind how music and sound art can give voice to those who may not have a platform in other settings.
berni m janssen (centre) and members of BOLT ensemble, Windspoken, The Book of Daughters, JOLT Arts
Slow Riven Whirl
James Hullick’s Slow Riven Whirl, written with dramaturg berni m janssen, was created for the composer’s two young daughters as a reflection on women’s place in society. The text draws from the experiences of four individuals—Sappho, Rosa Parkes, Karen Silkwood and Sylvia Plath—tied together as “women felled by misguided communities.” Performed by the women of the BOLT ensemble with janssen, this was a work full of theatre and politics.
Musically, the work was innovatively composed and performed with vitality. To open, the instrumentalists joined janssen in a series of vocalisations. The soft exhales and hisses of the ensemble contrasted with the abrupt gasps of the speaker. Haunting hummed chorales provided points of stillness and reflection, the singing female voices supporting the spoken word. The first entrance of the full instrumental ensemble almost felt disjointed, after the incredibly effective use of voice and sparse bass-heavy scoring. But, with growing intensity and the introduction of each of the four characters, the audience was treated to some fiery and precise playing. The piece followed a trajectory in which the ensemble broke free of its hushed beginnings, mirroring second-wave feminist anger in the time of Plath, Silkwood and Parkes, an anger that had been bubbling under society’s surface since Sappho.
With its theatricality, the work was able to reinforce its musical themes and content. The double bass was borne through the the audience on the shoulders of four performers as janssen recited text exploring Plath’s domestic oppression; a macabre reminder of the fates of countless women who still suffer in that sphere. In the section addressing the experiences of Parkes, janssen spoke with a small loudhailer, alluding to civil rights movement protests and expressing the anger and defiance which defined feminism of that time.
Janssen’s oration was full of passion and sensitivity. Using her voice to explore female identity politics, she flitted between subversive, acting submissive and indignant, all the while unafraid to use her voice to convey deep frustration and anger. Hullick’s familial voice was never far from the surface of the work and, while obviously a deeply personal work for the composer, there were occasions when the imploring “listen to your father” detracted from the celebration of women—as narrators, subjects, artists and performers.
Yoshimio, Drum Drum, The Book of Daughters, JOLT Arts
photo Tim McNeilage for JOLT Arts
Yoshimio, Drum Drum, The Book of Daughters, JOLT Arts
Yoshimio
Yoshimio is an intriguing artist, spanning alternative, art, noise and ambient music worlds. Best known as a drummer, keyboardist and vocalist with bands OOIOO, Boredoms and Free Kitten, her explosive solo set melded her many influences, showcasing Yoshimio as a dynamic and virtuosic performer.
With the drum kit close miked, feedback was a constant feature. Sometimes contributing to the overall soundscape, and sometimes taking centrestage, this kind of noise can become physical rather than auditory, unrelenting in the discomfort it has the potential to cause. Adding to the physicality of her electronic sound was Yoshimio’s unbridled use of voice, often distorting to match the pitch and grating quality of the feedback. Where janssen primarily expressed a sort of rational, controlled feminist anger, Yoshimio yelled and screamed in a primal way which, despite the increasing participation of women in noise music, is still fairly shocking and unexpected.
A small synthesiser keyboard sat in place of the second tom and was used throughout for either simple minimalist vamps, which were then overlaid with more complex rhythmic ideas from the rest of the kit, or child-like melodies with which Yoshimio sang. These were playful and sarcastic moments, with Yoshimio’s vocals parodying the sickly sweet innocence of the songs before enveloping them within her aggressive rhythmic soundscape.
Electronics, vocals and keyboard aside, Yoshimio’s incredible kit playing formed the basis of an exhilarating set which energised the audience. Despite not expressing the overt political and social themes of the previous performance, her work more broadly challenged notions about women in music, providing a fitting end to the festival which had for three nights featured women in both the Australian and international sonic art community. James Hullick and JOLT Arts must be applauded for creating the engaging and diverse program that was The Book of Daughters.
“…radioart cannot remain in the field of ‘aesthetics’ any more. It has to be involved in ecology, micro-politics and philosophy of technology, too.” Tetsuo Kogawa, Radio Revolten Pre-Manifest
Medium wave radio in Germany has been vacant for a while. However, in October this abandoned bandwidth was taken up by a temporary station broadcasting from the regional city of Halle. This pop-up station—also on FM—housed in the spiral tower of the vacated Physics Institute invited a question: What if we turn these abandoned analogue frequencies over to artists?
This is a festival that very much happened on the radio, with the installations and performances activated by, and made for, radio and transmission. A once in a decade event, Radio Revolten sidestepped the question of what radio art is to showcase what artists are doing with radio right now, creating a space where artists could experiment together.
Blindfold Babies, Radio Revolten
photo Marcus Andreas Mohr
Blindfold Babies, Radio Revolten
Headquartered in a previously unoccupied building in the city centre, alongside performance and installation spaces, the broadcast studio set up by local community station Radio Corax was kept available for spontaneous collaboration and as a canvas for experimentation. Curator Sarah Washington explained to me, “We’ve been working for years to try to have radio without a schedule, and we’ve sort of managed it this time.” To achieve a mostly open schedule, she says they had to throw artists in the deep end, but that they appreciated the freedom. Each day’s broadcast is anchored in a program of live performances made for, and sometimes about, radio. Live sound effects with all manner of objects, sophisticated microphony, electromagnetic explorations, blindfolded turntablism, virtuoso vocalities… these performances are as diverse as they are breathtaking.
Aki Onda
Aki Onda walks in slow circles holding a radio. Subtle fluctuations ensue. He plays the space and the spectra within it, fragments of radio voices and the whines and buzzes between, building to a flickering synchronised interference between a strobe light and the radio.
Tetsuo Kogawa, Radio Revolten
photo courtesy the artist
Tetsuo Kogawa, Radio Revolten
Tetsuo Kogawa
Tetsuo Kogawa, pioneer of mini FM, cannot be here in person but sends a single take video of his performance. Four circular coiled antennae dance carefully around each other spinning and intersecting as we listen to the subtle interferences in-between. The crowd knows he’s listening.
Getting physical
After the performances people talk long into the night, converse in shapes on the dance floor, play ping pong in the garden and get to work on shared imaginaries for possible radio futures. Bringing people together is critical to the festival’s mission. Washington explains, “We wanted to make the network physical instead of having [it virtual]. It’s important in this day and age, in times of real turbulence in the world, to bring people together.” Artistic director Knut Aufermann adds, “The important thing was to try and get as many people here as possible, to show what they do and to meet and form new alliances, new bonds, new meetings, new ideas.”
Talking community radio
Alongside the artworks, performances and workshops, Revolten hosted two community radio conferences. The overlap of participants in all these events created a fruitful mash-up of politics and aesthetics. A day of presentations of various community radio projects by and with diverse groups of refugees showed innovation and diversity in radio form. Creative re-purposing of digital material alongside terrestrial broadcasting is happening in these multilingual cross-cultural and borderless contexts. This is a deliberate juxtaposition: “Everything we do, every radio project, is about giving people access and that is such a political thing, being in control of your own media, dealing with whatever political regulations there are in the country you are in. The art and the politics for me are completely blended,” says Sarah Washington.
I speak with some artists who don’t see their work as intrinsically political and some community broadcasters who question aesthetics as a priority. The middle ground is a shared recognition that the freedom to experiment aesthetically is itself political, and can open up new understandings that existing forms and formats might leave closed. Telling diverse stories requires a proliferation of ways of telling.
Rodrigo Rios Zunino performing with installation 360 for Radio Relay Circus, Radio Revolten
photo Marcus-Andreas Mohr
Rodrigo Rios Zunino performing with installation 360 for Radio Relay Circus, Radio Revolten
Fernando Godoy and Rodrigo Rios Zunino, 360°
In a darkened room four small radios hang from the ceiling, dimly lit from above. They spin. Faster and faster. Slower. Almost stopping. Going back the other way. Spinning and spinning. Each receiving as it spins. A crackle, a between signal that is modulated as the antenna rotates, flickers, spins, slows. 360° by Fernando Godoy M and Rodrigo Ríos Zunino rewards sitting for a long time to simply listen, partly because within what appears to be very simple is an endless subtle complexity. It goes around and around but changes all the time. Many small revolutions.
Radio Space is the Place
At the Radio Space is the Place conference organisers keep a couple of seats on the panel open for members of the audience to join in parts of the discussion which explores future radiophonic collectives, alternative spacialisations, politics and poetics of wireless space radio as an experimental laboratory and issues of archiving.
Sally McIntyre and Meredith Kooi both make important contributions related to localised listening and critical spaces of micro-transmission. Sometimes place is the space.
At one point the predictable debate surfaces about whether actual radio waves need to be involved for something to be radio. At this point even analogue radio is highly digitised in its core infrastructure, and the histories of radio and the Internet are closely intertwined. But some are critical of trends towards allowing our listening to be enclosed by podcast subscriptions and curated by playlist algorithms that choose things they expect us to already like.
Amid the collective reflection on filter bubbles following surprises from Trump and Brexit in polls of recent months, the value of listening to things we are not expecting to hear, as a way of better understanding our world, would seem to take on a fresh urgency. Whether digital or analogue, an aesthetics of openness and inclusion is something we need. Throughout the conference Anna Friz keeps bringing us back to this question of listening, and to thinking about listeners.
Sweet Tribology, Julia Drouhin, Radio Revolten
photo Marcus-Andreas Mohr
Sweet Tribology, Julia Drouhin, Radio Revolten
Julia Drouhin
Julia Drouhin (AU/FR), dramatically veiled in black lace among the mossy
tombstones of Halle’s Renaissance cemetery, performs something ephemeral and edible. This French-Tasmanian artist, who has featured on ABC Radio’s Soundproof, is known for making records out of chocolate. A delicate process of casting confectionery in state of the art silicone reproduces the grooves with surprising fidelity. The sounds are as good as they taste and can be played for a little while before disintegrating. Some of the records break coming out of the moulds and are distributed to the crowd for consumption without ever being heard. I am surprised by how this brings the crowd together, like a strange sweet communion. Small radios across the cemetery play a broadcast backdrop composed of works by 40 women who collaborated on the project, their creations printed to vinyl disks from which Drouhin’s confections were also cast.
Australia’s Soundproof: achievement and erasure
With her usual skill in inviting us to follow our ears, Miyuki Jokiranta, producer and presenter of Soundproof, Australia’s internationally acclaimed creative radio and sound art program, presented a showcase of Australian creative radio delivered on Radio Revolten Radio.
The very recent news that Soundproof will be decommissioned by the ABC leaves us with fewer surprises ahead and less chance of turning the dial to that unanticipated sound that catches our ear and stretches our imagination in new directions. Radio Revolten gathered many international artists who have graced Soundproof’s airwaves, so this news comes as a particular shock on the back of such an extraordinarily inspiring and affirming event.
Radio Revolten’s Artistic Director Knut Auferman said, “At a time where the international art world’s curiosity about radio as artistic material is constantly rising […] this decision smacks of shortsightedness and parochialism. It takes years to build up the expertise to produce program strands like Soundproof, and seconds to axe them” And Gregory Whitehead, who has worked closely with different iterations of the ABC’s creative programming over several decades, commented, “In a very short period of time, Soundproof has become internationally respected for encouraging a beautifully polyphonous diversity of storytelling, in every dimension. To pull the plug now, reveals a massively self-defeating narrowness of mind and spirit. Soundproof is a program that speaks for the infinite possibilities of the human imagination in the world of words, music and sound. Killing such a program in its infancy reveals a toxic corporate mindset that rips out the garden for yet another parking lot.”
The national broadcaster has systematically gutted the local ecosystem for creative radio with the decommissioning of more than six programs in the last two years that used to support Australian artists. Now it has laid out its plans to wind Radio National down completely over the next few years as it abandons audiences who listen, to chase audiences who can be counted. The ABC touts the move to more talk as a way to lead the national conversation. Talk is not conversation. If we want new listening experiences, we must make them ourselves and find new forms and platforms for sharing them.
When RN is done with medium wave, then maybe it will be time to give the frequency back to artists…we are not short of ideas for what do with it.
Go to Radio Revolten
Missed the revolution? Head over to the Radio Revolten archives for extensive audio, photos and the daily reflections of Revolten’s official diarist Gabi Schaffner throughout the month.
In recent years Melbourne-based Speak Percussion have continually explored experimental repertoire, showcasing their depth of talent both as performers and creators. The brainchild of Matthias Schack-Arnott, Anicca is an ambitious project with a new rotating instrument taking centrestage. Pairing this with a light installation and multi-channel audio, the event promised a multi-sensory experience inspired by Hindu and Buddhist thought.
The body of the instrument stands as a large musical tabletop a few metres in diameter. Adorning its surface are concentric circles of different materials. Natural materials—stones, shells and sticks—are positioned alongside wires, sandpaper and finely tuned chimes. With the speed of the table’s rotation controlled by a foot pedal, the intricacy of both the creative and industrial design is evident from the outset.
With the instrument already whirring in motion, Schack-Arnott and his musical partner, Speak’s Artistic Director Eugene Ughetti, approach it, placing cymbals on a carpeted surface. This initial eerie resonant sound continues as a thread throughout the performance, whether achieved by the friction of cymbals or through sound design. Gradually, new sound sources are introduced. First, small prayer bowls are placed with great deliberation atop the instrument, moved around and struck with mallets. Seeing the players work with the rotation is like watching gamers in intense concentration, careful not to miss a step in this deceptively tricky choreography. Like chain reactions, the other surfaces are set off with mallets; the chattering and rattling of the objects cut and pasted into a rich palette of sound, reminiscent of early tape music. The gradually changing textures and rhythmic patterns become even more hypnotic.
Matthias Schack-Arnett, Eugene Ughetti, Anicca
Layering atmospheric resonances with active sounds hides changes in speed, increasing the impact of the work’s three key passages, executed with a drastic deceleration in the rotation speed and a near-complete blackout. During the first passage, a set of chimes tuned to the same pitch is spotlit by the rotating light system and struck by the players. This paring back of the busy patterns is introspective, a moment of stillness and meditation. The second round deploys chimes tuned to two different pitches, and in the final section all the chimes are illuminated and played.
Reaching for large cymbals towards the end of the performance, the players draw muted chuckles from the audience. These instruments create a grand resonance; when applied with pressure to the rotating surface, the friction produces an uncomfortably high pitched grating, increasing the sense of tension before the work’s abrupt end.
Making a new instrument from scratch allows for notions of music and interaction to be challenged. This work’s disruption of typical relationships between instrument and performer was one of its most striking aspects. In highly controlled sections, Ughetti and Schack-Arnott played decisively and with precise movements, striking individual chimes and prayer bowls. But the cyclic motion of the instrument played an equal part in the performance, seemingly playing itself when the musicians held their tools to its surface and let it speak.
To construct a new instrument on this scale is not just a feat of engineering, but an exercise in creative musical thinking unlike any other. In their consideration for every aspect of materials, mechanics, scoring and performance, Schack-Arnott and the team behind Anicca have demonstrated their intriguing practice, producing a captivating work which felt far shorter than its 45 minutes.
Speak Percussion, Annica, composer, instrument-maker, performer Matthias Schack-Arnott, performer Eugene Ughetti, creative engineer Richard Allen, video system Pete Brundle, James Sandri (PDA), lighting Richard Dinnen (Megafun), producer Michaela Coventry; Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, 2-6 Nov
Eurovision 2015 includes Australia as official contender for the first time
You’re a presenter for SBS television. How proud you must be to work for a renowned multicultural broadcaster, delivering content for the multitudinous diasporas who have washed up on Australia’s fatal shores since WWII. And you’re a commentator on the SBS broadcast of Eurovision. I can’t tell you how hilarious it is to have a wog like you nudge-and-wink at the broadcast audience as you make fun of all those awful woggy pop singers. Lithuania, Albania, Macedonia, Slovenia—unlike cool Australia, they’re all so embarrassing they make for an easy target.
Who am I? I’m just a sarcastic intellectual, trying out the same septic spittle that you pour onto the contestants of Eurovision. I figured that you like hateful remarks: you’re so good at them. And like all the intelligentsia of Australia, I revel in mocking pop music, degrading its artists, dismissing its cultural worth, lampooning its gaudy theatrics and dishing smarmy drag-bitch snipes at televisual images which will never turn around and bite me.
Why trash Eurovision?
Why is the concept of Eurovision such an embarrassment to so many people? Why do they feel so empowered and elated by being so insulting toward every aspect of its production—while shedding tears of wrought empathy when their own national anthem is played at the Olympics? Why is there any sense that Eurovision is different from the Olympics? Both are politically deluded, economically cynical, emotionally manipulative and aggressively disingenuous. But am I alone in seeing their similarities while feeling equally involved in the theatrical drama of each of them? I’m no sports fan of any measure, but the Pavlovian response to the adrenaline moments of Olympic conquest are undeniable. For me, the sentimentality and pizzaz of Eurovision are equally engaging and affective. And this is despite not liking the music.
Eurovision—like the Olympics—is capable of generating a schizophrenic identification with the show’s pyrotechnical staging and self-absorbed performance. Institutionally, Eurovision is plainly the Olympics with songs. It’s nationalistic, competitive, international and reflective of how individuals can be willingly employed as nodes in a showy fabrication of diplomatic exchange and assessment. This year’s Eurovision returned to Stockholm, Sweden, following last year’s winner Mans Zelmerlow and his song “Heroes.” Eurovision originated in Switzerland, largely as a white-paper proposal for promoting Swiss cultural identity within the global arena of diplomatic exchange following the establishment of the European Broadcast Union, an organising and inter-sharing body for many post-war public broadcasters across Europe. The crowning glory of Eurovision’s impact was its levering of Sweden’s ABBA into the international pop industrial chain with their 1974 win “Waterloo” (in England, the host country that year). Of course, smarmy pop-haters wouldn’t notice what’s in a name: ABBA competed against Britain’s stranglehold on disposable pop which in the early 1970s had reached the point of critical meltdown through the most outrageously facile concoction of songs and artists. ABBA effectively distilled this acidic Dickensian musical bile and played it back to the UK, copying the saggy baggy para-Glam pub-boogie of the time and referencing Napoleon’s defeat at the hands of the British. How perversely ironic: the Waterloo here was not ABBA’s, but Britain’s inability to keep Eurotrash from infiltrating its closely guarded WWII-era radio waves.
Origins of the assault
The Eurovision 2016 Semi-Finals went so far as to include a tediously smarmy fake-documentary about the origins of Eurovision. Replete with fake digital scratched film and ‘dag’ iconography (making it look like the 70s, despite Eurovision being formed in 1951), it was as funny as every ad which lampoons cardigan-wearing nerdy office-workers today (as if late-20-something advertising ‘creatives’ these days are style icons). The sad thing was how Eurovision itself had succumbed to the international subversion of its purpose and programming: to ridicule its production and disparage all those who treat it seriously. It was the British who pioneered the smarmy para-racist attitudes towards Eurovision’s contestants via the infamously droll commentary of Terry Wogan (over 30 times intermittently until the mid 2000s). Contrary to the country’s pride in being well-mannered, the sound of British broadcasting has always borne the sound of something in its mouth, be it plums, tongues, silver spoons or plain bile. It’s a remarkable sono-oral effect, born of vowelling and tonguing words so that a counter-tone modulates the meaning (hence America’s infinite misreading of British comedy). But with the Eurovision broadcasts, this gained global momentum in English-speaking territories where the show’s broadcast was franchised.
By the 1980s, the broadcast commentary had become the ulterior motive for many audiences to watch Eurovision. It was like travelling into the hellish chaos of woggy Europe while sipping bitter tea in a mouldy bedsit armchair. Nudge-nudge, wink-wink, laugh at the woggy pantomime of awful pop music while Cool Britannia intones snide remarks like Oscar Wilde sitting in the peanut gallery during a House of Lords session, close-miked and broadcast without the downstairs auditorium in hearing distance. Before long, numerous countries employed their own presenters to provide sportscaster-style commentary in their native tongue atop the lowered volume of both the host nation’s presenters and the BBC-sanctioned commentary. Some kept things straight; many couldn’t resist poking fun. After all, it’s not like it’s the Olympics, right?
Eurovision 2015 includes Australia as official contender for the first time
SBS joins the club
SBS started showing Eurovision in 1983, following the slimy smarm trail left by Wogan. By the late 1990s, it had approached the broadcast as a multi-layered revoicing of the event: part-hacking, part-cackling, like all smarmy media interventions it believes it invented the word ‘subversion.’ Its format now includes a ‘team’ of wanna-be comedians falling over each other’s words as they struggle to get in their pithy snarks betwixt the cacophonic voicing of the original broadcast. The show also adds snippy behind-the-scenes interviews by some guy who ranks himself with Norman Gunston and Chris Morris. Dude, you so ain’t: taking pot shots at foreign singers—most of whom can speak at least three languages plus English—and implicating us in your double-entendre Anglo mocking is a massive fail.
It gets harder each year to filter out the ‘de-broadcast’ voiced-over noise of racist-not-racist tap-dancing and lip-synching of SBS’s broadcast of Eurovision. One can almost miss the actual songs. And in case you were wondering, Eurovision 2016 Semi-Finals televisual staging was far more advanced in terms of screenic projection, calibrated lighting, choreographed camerawork and post-Broadway spectacularism than most 90s-lagging media artists. Sure, their ‘content’ might be dismissible—but believe me, so is the ‘content’ of most international arts festivals, in case you were wondering. Additionally, there were some well-crafted pop songs. Crack harmonic modulation, on-a-dime emotional shifts, melodic multiplicity and generic atomisation ruled. When I could actually hear and see the acts, I found little to hate.
Taking to the stage as herself, Xan Fraser revisits traumatic childhood experiences to shine a light on how our society continues to accept a rape culture. Fraser, a firm central presence in Project Xan, tells an unfolding story of her rape when aged 12, in 1981, and the horrors of medical and legal examinations in its aftermath. Verbatim courtroom transcript excerpts reveal that, in a system unable to consider a rape victim as innocent, Xan was blamed for the circumstances of the gang rape and that when sentencing was being determined, judicial sympathy was expressed for the rapists.
Xan’s memories and her reflections on them play out between vignettes that address today’s rape culture in terms of dictionary definitions and problematic beliefs and behaviours evident in pop song lyrics and contemporary cases that continue to feature victim-blaming.
Siobhan Dow-Hall, Marco Jovanovic, Project Xan
Addressing both the audience and her younger self, played by Daisy Coyle, Fraser guides us through the events and the impacts that lie behind dry legal jargon. Physically convincing as a 12-year-old, the 19-year-old Coyle expresses bewilderment and naivety in responding to unjust questions posed by doctors and lawyers at a time when Xan lacked a supportive adult. Fraser’s presence as a sympathetic observer allows her to explain events to the traumatised child.
The limited stage space is strongly defined by the miniature skating rink which skirts it, recalling Xan’s original plan for the evening, to go rollerskating with a friend. Coyle deftly skates by as watching adults discuss Xan’s sexual appetite. Her freedom of physical expression contrasts vividly with Fraser’s account of the rape and its ramifications for her adolescent life.
Project Xan
Fraser and Coyle are supported onstage by Siobhan Dow-Hall, Marko Jovanovic and Nick Maclaine who, in basic black T-shirts— printed with slogans which sometimes appear on casual wear, relating to issues of consent, rape humour and the denigration of female sexuality—appear in the issue-based vignettes and play roles in hospital and courtroom scenes. The vignettes resonate at many levels with Xan’s own story when she turns from considering the devastation of her young dreams to recalling walking onstage at a stand-up gig where she was abused by the comedian for not appreciating his jokes about sexual attacks.
The central story of Project Xan carries additional weight in having Fraser herself onstage. Acknowledging what she suffered was horrible, she refuses to let herself be defined by the crime, the trial, the blaming, shaming and ostracism; instead, Fraser celebrates the triumphs of her life since. Addressing a difficult subject, writer-director Hellie Turner’s Project Xan delivers a powerful message about the need for cultural change.
Xan Fraser, Project Xan
photo Daniel James Grant
Xan Fraser, Project Xan
jedda Productions and The Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Project Xan, writer, director Hellie Turner, consultant, dramaturg David Williams, performers Xan Fraser, Daisy Coyle, Siobhan Dow-Hall, Marko Jovanovic, Nick Maclaine, design consultant Lawrie Cullen-Tait, lighting Chris Donnelly, composer, sound Ash Gibson Greig; PICA Performance Space, Perth, 8-19 Nov
Ella Barclay, I Had To Do It, Greeting Programs (best left unsaid), installation view, UTS Gallery
In my path as I turn at the end of a dark corridor are four squat, crumpled, art paper (white, blue and pink pastels) sculptures in my path. They look a little like flowers, loosely hand-inscribed (not easy to decipher) and threaded here and there with twisted aluminium wire. Greetings Program (best left unsaid) offers an enigmatic welcome to Ella Barclay’s solo exhibition at UTS Gallery, titled I Had To Do It. These objects conjure an image of the artist hard at work and compulsively scrunching up and, as suggested by the curious presence of the wire, discarding unacceptable prototypes.
Turning into a darker space, reveals a low, human-length container of furiously bubbling liquid, colour-shifting through intense pink, blue and green and issuing swathes of mist. Dark wires twist over the surface which seemingly breaks as a hand appears, legs, a face, a smile, someone climbing out and another body rising up (video projected from above onto the water) in this spa-like device. It’s the wires that disturb and the rather hallucinatory bathing humans in what appears to be an emerging sci-fi-ish scenario about being taken by data capture. But the work’s title, Summoning the Nereid Nerdz, is playful (the Nereids are sea nymphs in Classical Greek mythology)—as are the titles of the show’s other works, contrary to its overall mood.
Ella Barclay, I Had To Do It, Summoning the Nereid Nerdz, UTS Gallery
photo Joy Lai
Ella Barclay, I Had To Do It, Summoning the Nereid Nerdz, UTS Gallery
About the pool are sleek, black plastic shapes—each metre-length or more; two on the floor, one on a wall, two suspended. Hard-edged and sharp-ended, they are roughly triangular. Where open to be peered into, they reveal the kind of wiring already seen, sometimes running to an outer edge and aglow in sections with a soft blue luminescence evoking data transmission. From several of these ‘devices’ comes the sound of women’s voices, layered, distant and accompanied by a soft, haunting wordless melody, again female. The impression is of a cluster of advanced computers, having long ago left boxy designs behind and functioning in quiet harmony.
Barclay says the “singing tones” in Mystic Heuristics IV, V, VI, VII + VIII (Periodic Boundary Conditions) “are potentially homage to the 300 years of women who contributed to computational history, whose stories are not well known” (interview in Artist Profile, by Lucy Stranger).
Ella Barclay, I Had To Do It, Mystic Heuristics (foreground), installation view, UTS Gallery
photo Joy Lai
Ella Barclay, I Had To Do It, Mystic Heuristics (foreground), installation view, UTS Gallery
On the wall, three large, circular photographic ‘portraits’ frame the black devices and the burbling pool, inexorably foregrounding the centrality of the wiring in I Had To Do It. In each a coloured wire is overlayed or entangled with thicker, more vigorous, almost brush-stroked black ones. For all their stillness, these images suggest some kind of drama, of colour or technology contested. But there are no clues to be found immediately in the works’ enigmatic titles: The nerds have got to stop working for the thugs; Plastic environments imaginatively inhabited (Dopamine long morning bed head); and Love is a metaphysical gravity.
The compulsiveness declared in Barclay’s title for her show, I Had To Do It, is evident in the intensifying focus on wiring, from the detritus of creative frustration to the black lines twisting ominously over the Nereid Nerdz, from the workings of fictional machines to a set of ambiguous portraits that altogether supplant the human. Yet Barclay’s titles are jokey, the ‘spa’ work is kitschy, the song in Mystic Heuristics celebrates women’s role in the making of the computer and there’s historical to and fro-ing: nerds as nereids, retro framing of the wiring ‘portraits’ and the play between art paper, hand writing and a wordless song emitted by futuristic computers. I Had To Do It conjures a dark vision, but assuredly captures the ambivalences of our relationship with contemporary technology. (Kailana Sommers’ catalogue essay, “Minimum requirements for a feeling of schizophrenia,” which accompanies rather than directly contextualises the show, prompts grimmer thoughts.)
As Barclay says of her work, in the interview with Lucy Strange, “It’s a kind of techno-romanticism or dealing with the idea of techno-sublime. I’m not particularly interested in ideas of new technology or innovation; it’s more about our experience as we navigate this kind of landscape.” With its spooky ambience, curious creations and restless ambiguities, I Had To Do It is an engagingly disorienting experience.
Ella Barclay, I Had To Do It, Mystic Heuristics, UTS Gallery
photo Joy Lai
Ella Barclay, I Had To Do It, Mystic Heuristics, UTS Gallery
I Had To Do It, artist Ella Barclay, UTS Gallery, Sydney, 4 Oct-25 Nov
Ella Barclay has exhibited extensively in Sydney, as well as in project and group exhibitions in Tokyo, Taipei, Edinburgh, Brisbane, Kassel, Bathurst and New York. She has been a finalist in the Helen Lempriere Travelling Arts Scholarship, the New South Wales Visual Arts Fellowship (Emerging) and the John Fries Award. She is a current PhD candidate at the University of Technology, Sydney. This year she is a resident artist at both the Australia Council Studio, London and Casula Powerhouse, Western Sydney.
Ben Wheatley, maker of the much admired thriller-horror hybrid, Kill List (2011), went on to make another success in 2015, an adaptation of JG Ballard’s 1975 novel High-Rise. The 40-storey high-rise of the title has the wealthiest occupants living on the upper levels with sufficient facilities to warrant them not going into the outside world. Below them live the less well-off middleclass. With a declining sense of mutual responsibility, social relations and services go to pieces with appalling consequences: pet-eating, possibly cannibalism and certainly murder.
Wheatley sets the film amid 70s economic and social decline and Margaret Thatcher’s soon to hold sway “there is no such thing as society” ideology. But we can do the updating ourselves thanks to Neoliberalism’s inexorable push into the 21st century for endless deregulation, tax cuts and consequent rapid infrastructure decline and decreasing social justice. Wheatley puts it thus, “The idea of a book looking to a future that has already happened and making a film looking back to the past to show a possible future was interesting.”
High-Rise has been praised for its “future-retro vision,” “coolly immaculate” design, a fine central performance by Tom Hiddleston, its strongly realised sense of escalating decadence and Chris Mansell’s score which includes “an inspired slow-jam cover of ABBA’s S.O.S., by Portishead. It’s a party track for a party at the end of the world.”
5 copies courtesy of Transmission Films.
Email us at giveaways [at] realtimearts.net with your name, postal address and phone number to be in the running.
Include ‘Giveaway’ and the title of the item in the subject line.
Offer closes 30 November.
Giveaways are open to RealTime subscribers only. By entering this giveaway you consent to receiving our free weekly E-dition. You can unsubscribe at any time.
RealTime issue #135 Oct-Nov 2016
Zsuzsi Soboslay, Anthems and Angels
photo Andrew Sikorski
Zsuzsi Soboslay, Anthems and Angels
As twilight deepens, a figure in top hat and skeleton suit sneaks in among the small crowd in the courtyard, then shakes a tambourine to command attention. A beady eye scans the assembly, and the reckoning begins. We’re kind to our animals, says Death, but what of others? “The world pushes against our shores, like an angry tide,” and what do we do to help those who are set adrift?
The opening of Zsuzsi Soboslay’s Anthems and Angels in the beautiful courtyard of Gorman Arts Centre in Canberra evokes the mediaeval play Everyman, in which Death is sent to fetch someone at random. Anyone will do, because Death is the great leveller. In the face of it, we are all Everyman, and whatever sense we have of ourselves and our lives melts away. There is nothing to come. We are only what we have been. “The summoning of Everyman” in the original morality play triggers a desperate appeal for companionship on the way. After he is deserted by friends, family and all the material goods he has called his own, Everyman reaches out to Good Deeds and a succession of personified moral virtues, who declare themselves too weak for the journey. All this is compressed into a brief prelude in Anthems and Angels, as Death fixes upon the chosen victim and ushers him, together with the audience, into the darkened theatre.
Anthems and Angels
photo Andrew Sikorski
Anthems and Angels
Video screens display black and white images of ruins in a war zone, and a line of refugees progressing down a narrow path on a hillside. Where is this? When? Probably somewhere in Eastern Europe during the Second World War, but in Death’s endgame, time and place are sliding in all directions. As Everyman takes his place on a small vessel, steered across the high seas by a lone boatman, this is Anytime and Everywhere. The Angels of Earth, Air, Fire and Water speak over the sound of the waves.
But in a well-judged transition, Soboslay’s drama then has Everyman stepping off the boat and into the life of a new immigrant in a fully realised scene from 1950s Australia. He doesn’t speak the language and the figure of the boatman transforms into an established settler, who tries to teach him… but Death won’t leave him—or any of us—here for long. Everyman sleeps, and we re-enter the existential register as the exquisite melody of the 16th century Coventry Carol is sung, a capella.
The tides are rising again. There will be no control over what happens next in the blizzard of the world. Paper fortune cookies are distributed through the audience, containing messages that tell of a shared future in which we are all refugees. “I wish you a roof over your head.” “I wish that your family stays together.” “I wish you could come back.”
Anthems and Angels
photo Andrew Sikorski
Anthems and Angels
As an audience, we belong to a culture that has lost touch with the language of metaphysics and mythology. When it comes to ‘the refugee problem’ our talk is politicised. It’s a battle of vested interests: those of politicians, ‘people smugglers,’ voters, the media. Dialogue on Twitter and comment lines in the 21st century do less to create meaningful communication than a shouting match across the garden fence did way back in the 20th. Theatre offers different languages. It connects with other zones in the human psyche, the atavistic parts of the brain that do not deal in categories, and where the mystery of being alive on this planet may be experienced in larger terms.
Anthems and Angels is an experimental work, the first of three in a series titled The Compassion Plays. It is, perhaps predominantly, an experiment in poetics. What kinds of tones and images speak to us across the deepening rift between cultures and nations? Soboslay herself has a natural gravitas, and holds the stage with consistent strength as the figure of Death. Co-performers Robin Davidson and C S Carroll have the versatility to work through a range of subtle tone changes. Video artist Sam James provides visual poetry and there is haunting live music from Benjamin Drury, Jess Green, Richard Johnson and Michael Misa.
–
Anthems and Angels: The Compassion Plays, direction, script Zsuzsi Soboslay, performers Robin Davidson, C S Carroll, Zsuzsi Soboslay, video artist Sam James, musicians Benjamin Drury, Jess Green, Richard Johnson, Michael Misa; Gorman Arts Centre, Canberra 2-4 Nov
Leah Shelton struts across the stage of her new “grindhouse cabaret,” Terror Australis, in hotpants, flourishing a bag of goon, while lipsynching to a mash-up of Ozploitation films. Her ripped Australian flag T-shirt flutters as she slides up and down the pole of a wonky Hills Hoist that spins slowly, its attached sheets providing a projection surface for an eerie Australian landscape of serial killers and car crashes, of dead animals and screaming women, of paranoia, sweat and stale alcohol. Welcome to what Shelton describes as the “fucked up outback Contiki Tour that hacks Australia to pieces…”
Shelton has had a stellar career in a sweet spot between cabaret, burlesque and performance art. Trained as a contemporary dancer, her most enduring collaboration is with the Samoan-Australian company Polytoxic and many of that company’s trademarks are in Terror Australis—supreme costuming, cheeky humour and pop culture-inspired choreography. But the show also holds Shelton’s obsession with film noir and schlock tropes and showcases a form she has made her own—where she performs to a screen—lipsynching, dancing, mincing and wringing every possible ironic and juxtapositional reference from the relationship between the mediatised image and her body.
Leah Shelton, Terror Australis
photo Anthony Rex
Leah Shelton, Terror Australis
In Terror Australis the beautiful, polished noir body is replaced by the body politic of mainstream Australian culture and it gives the work a raw and guttural energy—a ripping political commentary about the brutality of masculine Australian popular culture. But this is no distant deconstruction. Shelton gives us permission to go with her into that violent heartland and to relish its performativity while witnessing its misogyny and excesses. The work comprises a string of short routines that morph with quick costume changes and are interspersed with short films that play with urban myth horror tropes (hitch-hiking, late night road accidents and road kill). As eerie as these films are at times they do feel a bit like placeholders for costume changes rather than intrinsic elements. Similarly, some of the routines, while enjoyable, do not quite feel like they are in the same world as Terror Australis. These include the burlesque legs-in-a-suitcase routine that took Shelton to Las Vegas and the dreamy pastiche re-enactment of Picnic at Hanging Rock that never steps from reconstruction into satire.
But the routines that feed directly into the central theme of Terror Australis are an extraordinary testament to the wit, intellect and performance energy of Shelton. These include the quivering kangaroo head in an evening gown sequence where we linger to watch her shot down and die on the road; the iconic 80s black togs of Linda Koslowski in Crocodile Dundee cleverly staged with a blow-up inflatable crocodile; and finally the goon-girl who clads herself in Australian paraphernalia. She leads us to the show-stopping finale, wielding a cock-strap that unfolds a string of Australian flag bunting and highlights the horror of a popular culture that mires itself in mediocrity and brutal nationalism.
Leah Shelton, Terror Australis
photo Anthony Rex
Leah Shelton, Terror Australis
Terror Australis was the winner of the John Chataway Innovation Award, Adelaide Fringe 2016, and was a nominee for Performance Award, Melbourne Fringe 2016.
–
Terror Australis, creator, performer, designer Leah Shelton, conceptual collaborator Daniel Evans, sound design Kenneth Lyons, video design optikal bloc, original lighting design Jason Glenwright; Brisbane Powerhouse, 3-5 Nov
The excited chat and noise from a mostly teenaged matinee audience fades to silence as the lights go to black. DADS has begun and will sustain these young people’s interest for the next hour. This achievement is perhaps indicative of Dance Makers Collective’s currency as a young group of independent dance-makers pooling resources to create new work.
From the gloom of the Lennox Theatre, the doo wop classic “Only You” is heard as diminutive, besuited Miranda Wheen begins a prone journey across the stage. She ends her sliding against the upstage “Dad” home bar (a set built by one of the subjects of the piece) and we hear the first voice of a father. “I feel really good when I’m dancing to a song I enjoy listening to.” And so a soundtrack convention is established and a vehicle provided for an episodic dancework which is much more than a satire on daggy dad-dancing. Soon the company joins Wheen one by one, each rising and falling through supple spines, following distractions low to the ground, squatting, rolling up trouser legs: a preparation perhaps for the coming dance. The moving is not parodic; perhaps we are witnessing a reenactment of a male ritual observed while recording the Dustyesky Russian Men’s choir in Mullumbimby, whose voices now ring out from the PA.
DADS, Dance Makers Collective
photo Dominic O’Donnell
DADS, Dance Makers Collective
This beginning transforms into three trios that range across the stage and culminate in a crescendo of frenetic rolling and choreographic patterns. Then as the Everley Brothers urge us to “Dream,” we also hear Melanie and Marnie Palomares interrogate their father’s attitudes to dancing. “[Dance] anyway you feel like it,” he urges and the women comply in real time. A sequence follows with dancers and Del Shannon’s “Runaway” all slowed down at first, giving us time to appreciate trained bodies moving through an accelerating exposition of Dad dance aesthetics.
This aestheticising of untrained movement is a recurring motif in DADS, and it displays an underlying sensitivity and respect towards the men heard on the recordings. The work hits many poignant notes such as a father overcome with emotion in his connections to dancing and daughter. Another dad talking about loneliness provides a soundtrack to an accumulating walking formation as the company creates a pedestrian dance. A contact duo occurs briefly before Wheen emerges, shadow boxing light as a feather. The group disperses, leaving her to leap and skip through an imaginary combat that shifts between sparring, twisting and shaking moves. All through this section Matt Cornell supports the onstage physicality with a pulsing sound collage that contains remnants of distant, wistful songs. A solo from Anya McKee starts as a duet with a comfy chair. She rolls and folds through a physical prologue that brings her into full-bodied travelling as we hear a dad confessing that his involvement in the project has nurtured a new interest in dancing which now includes private moments of “air guitar”!
DADS, Dance Makers Collective
photo Dominic O’Donnell
DADS, Dance Makers Collective
But DADS’ most humorous moment arrives in the form of a trio by Sophia Ndaba, Miranda Wheen and Marnie Palomares. In a bar scene with Carl Sciberras, the trio stand in for his (heard) father as they physically lampoon the imaginings of Mr Sciberras’ own “old school dad …Cranky Frankie cutting a rug.” The women create caricature extensions of blokey poses, corny knee-slapping bobs and ducks that swing them into hilarious responses to Sciberras’ interrogation of his dad.
Rather than being a light-hearted surface-skate across embarrassing dad anecdotes, DADS ventures a subtle enquiry into male frailties. It challenges stereotypes of paternity and masculinity and exposes a charming vulnerability in older men. It also uncovers seams of Sydney’s social history and multicultural character, audible in the many accents and historical expositions evident in the soundtrack texts. These fragments of interviews with dads, grandfathers and even a great grandfather, interspersed throughout, focus our attention on dads’ stories about dancing and in the curtain-call boogie, we see three of them onstage. This family reunion shows clearly that DADS, as Dance Makers Collective’s tribute to their fathers, manages to link contemporary and social dance via a touching exploration of the parent-offspring relationship.
–
FORM Dance: Dance Makers Collective, DADS, director Miranda Wheen, choreographers, dancers Miranda Wheen, Carl Sciberras, Anya McKee, Matt Cornell, Sophia Ndaba, Katina Olsen, Marnie Palomares, Melanie Palomares, Rosslyn Wythes, designer Anya McKee, composer Matt Cornell, lighting designer Guy Harding, producer Carl Sciberras; Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, 2-5 Nov
Speak Percussion has become a favourite of the Australian and international percussion scenes with razor-sharp presentation of large-scale new works. If percussionists usually have complicated relationships with their instruments, which are large and numerous, Speak is no exception. In 2011 the ensemble brought a shipping container of over 400 instruments to Tasmania for MONA FOMA and often ships bespoke instrumental setups around the world. But in a world where music can be made with the scraping of pebbles and found electronics, Speak is moving beyond the world of multiple vibraphones and tam-tams into one of post-instrument experimentation. I spoke with Eugene Ughetti and Matthias Schack-Arnott about their ventures into the music of shells, bells, and fluorescent lights.
Anicca
I catch up with Schack-Arnott and Ughetti while they’re preparing for Anicca, a percussion duo to be performed early November at Melbourne’s Arts House. Schack-Arnott is showing me an enormous wheel, a couple of metres across, which lies in the middle of the room. Covered in concentric circles of bamboo, shells and stones, it might be called a musical mandala.
Schack-Arnott: This is the wheel that Eugene and I will play in Anicca. I came up with the idea while visiting temples in India and reflecting on how cycles are represented in Hindu and Buddhist culture.
[With a sensitive press of a foot pedal Schack-Arnott sets the wheel in motion. At first it spins slowly, then picks up speed as the objects on the wheel blur into rings of colour.]
Schack-Arnott: The wheel has two sound worlds. Resonant metals, including tuned aluminium rods or “power chimes,” have an almost Doppler-effect as they spin on the wheel. The second group of instruments are friction-based objects. On the one hand there are natural materials, but there are also man-made elements like sandpaper that allow us to work with textural, polyrhythmic worlds. It sounds almost electronic, almost like an acoustic musique concrète. I use speed as an expressive musical tool that blurs rhythm into texture. In an acoustic setting you are not used to hearing sounds being sped up and blurring into tones.
[Schack-Arnott lets a mallet drag over a line of bamboo shards close to the centre of the wheel. At first separate tones pop out, stringing together an angular tune. As the wheel speeds up, the tones stream forth in a slithering line. The effect is uncannily similar to early electronic music, where thousands of tiny pieces of tape were painstakingly spliced together to create timbres that would be otherwise unplayable by an instrumentalist. Schack-Arnott moves the mallet to a ring of stones which let out a higher, even crisper tone. A line of shells sped up goes from croaking frog to twittering goblin.]
Schack-Arnott: The power chimes are tuned to the overtones of a group of Chinese cymbals which I let drag along the textured surface of the wheel to create white noise, or along the wood to ‘bow’ the cymbals for a singing tone. The vocabulary is completely acoustic, but sounds electronic or post-electronic.
Fault Traces
Schack-Arnott is also exploring the music of the natural world in Fault Traces, which is to be performed at the Unconformity Festival in Queenstown, Tasmania,15–16 October. His inspiration is however very different this time. The work is a commission from the festival and reflects upon the complex relationship of the town with its natural environment. Queenstown has a history of copper mining stretching back 120 years and, though reliant on it, Schack-Arnott says you can plainly see the destructive effects.
Schack-Arnott: It’s a great place to reflect on basic questions around our relationship with the environment. The festival asked me to make a new work and initially I was going to be playing 750 metres underground in a copper mine, but for logistical reasons that is not happening, so now I’m playing in a Boy Scout hall. It’s a piece about tremor patterns, exploring movement beneath the surface, which for me is an exploration of the subterranean in a larger sense. The instrument I play is a 2.4m by 1.4m panel activated by tactile transducers which are fed low-frequency information. These create vibrational patterns that get the surface moving in different ways. On this surface I have percussive objects like cymbals, glass and bamboo that quiver sympathetically with the low-end frequency patterns. I play the instruments in a percussive way, but also trigger these patterns with a foot pedal. It’s a dynamic live performance situation. Because of the scale and nature of the program it has a topographical feel that I think speaks to that place.
Fluorophone
Schack-Arnott’s focus on natural materials must be a nice change from the ensemble’s recent work with light sources. Fluorophone, makes music from lights, lasers and even matches and has been performed numerous times overseas (see Gail Priest’s review of the SONICA performance in Glasgow), but will receive its first Australian performance at Melbourne’s The Substation, 23–25 November. I asked Schack-Arnott and Eugene Ughetti how the technical difficulties inherent in developing new instruments from light sources have shaped the works.
Ughetti: In this project the technology is very complex and a lot of it has been developed from scratch for the work. Obviously Simon Loeffler’s piece E, which uses interference in electromagnetic fields around fluorescent lights as a sound source, is probably the most extreme example where he has spent I don’t know how many months on a piece of only 12 minutes, as well as testing expensive processes for realising his idea. We have spent more than $10,000 building the instrument and it still requires further modifications. We cancelled the first world premiere and it’s still being revised. Each of the composers for it have had a really high artistic goal in mind and haven’t just accepted a mediocre result from their initial idea. Other works have been more straightforward, including my own Pyrite Gland which uses tom-tom drums as lighting fixtures housing two rings of RGB-controllable LEDs.
Bell Curve
As well as being the Artistic Director of Speak, Ughetti is also a composer and is working on a new piece, Bell Curve, to be performed with the Federation Handbells at Arts House on 3 December.
Ughetti: Bell Curve is based around the bronze Federation Bells at Birrarung Marr in Melbourne. The idea of the piece is that with the simplest of musical skills some of the most complex musical ideas can unfold in a group. We custom-built a set of wireless click-track headphones for 12 musicians who play patterns in slightly different tempi. The piece is based on “pendulum waves,” which you can watch on YouTube. Imagine a group of pendulums each swinging with a slightly different period. When they are all set in motion at the same time, every rhythmic permutation of the twelve bells will occur. Viewed from the side, these pendulum wave machines make beautiful patterns. Your ears play all sorts of tricks on you, all sorts of polyrhythms and patterns emerging from the bell players.
It is a beautiful piece because every part is in constant flux, but because of the way our brain perceives time and space we will find regularities and patterns in what we are seeing. So you see a three-dimensional pattern, then couplets and groupings and subdivisions. But that is just one section of the work. There are all sorts of other beautiful patterns with random and computer-generated tempo changes. All of the complexity is in the programming. It’s very easy to follow the click track.
I wanted to create a very beautiful piece of art music that would be satisfying for students to play, but at the same time democratic, so you wouldn’t need your Associate certificate from the AMEB (Australian Music Examination Board) to have the technical skill to play it. Even non-musicians could play it.
By using the Federation Handbells, which are a resource free for all Victorians, any school, even those with very small music departments, could access the instruments. We would then provide the synchronised click-track headphones. They can also study the work as a package.
—
Watch Speak Percussion performing excepts from the works discussed in this interview.
Speak Percussion won the 2016 Art Music Award for Excellence in Experimental Music (see all the award winners here).
The ensemble’s busy program for October-December takes them to festivals in Queenstown, Tasmania and Salihara, Indonesia and back to their home-base Melbourne for a substantial series of appearances.
Fault Traces, The Unconformity Festival, Queenstown, Tasmania, 15-16 Oct; Fluorophone and TRANSDUCER, SIPFest, Salihara, Indonesia, 19-20 Oct; Anicca, Arts House, Melbourne, 2-6 Nov; Fluorophone, The Substation, 23-25 Nov; Bell Curve, Arts House Summertime Party, 3 Dec
River Lin, River Walk, Liveworks 2016
Over two art-intensive weeks, Performance Space’s Liveworks in 2016 provided the excitement of discovery we yearn to have all-year round in Sydney, even knowing that these days such a program would likely be economically impossible. With this Liveworks, Artistic Director Jeff Khan and his team have taken the festival up a notch; it felt more integrated and, welcomely, more challenging, with works that took us into Asia, got very personal, conjured some very strange but telling visions and took us to meet Performance Space’s Redfern neighbours. It’s the personal dimension of Liveworks, thematically and communally, that powers it. All strength to intimate, focused festivals!
From the serene performance by River Lin in the Carriageworks’ foyer on a bed of sand for his River Walk, amid the festival’s opening night hubbub, to the quietly strenuous solo and group performances from Liesel Zink’s The Stance, also in the foyer, to Jon Rose’s free concerts, a corridor-installed Softmachine video archive and the works performed in Carriagework’s theatre spaces, this often crowded Liveworks exuded a sense of adventure, its varied moods reflected in the shifting colours of Ross Manning’s inverted ‘conveyer-belt’ foyer installation, Melody Lines.
Ross Manning, Melody Lines, 2016, Carriageworks, Sydney
Into Asia
This year Liveworks took us further into the world of Asian performance with the programming of Taiwanese performance artist River Lin and Choy Ka Fai’s masterful Softmachine with its brave performances by Rianto, from Indonesia, and China’s ZiaoKe x ZiHan alongside Ka Fai’s video interviews with 88 choreographers from across Asia. We’re hoping this invaluable video archive will be made widely available, to open us up to the range and depth of thinking in cultures so near us, yet still so far. Liveworks, alongside Adelaide’s annual OzAsia Festival and Melbourne’s forthcoming triennial Asia TOPA, diminishes that distance with continuing commitment and strategies around dialogue, exchange and collaboration. (We’ll tell you about a fascinating Liveworks-Critical Path forum about the Asia-Australia relationship in a coming E-dition.)
Getting personal
XiaoKe and ZiHan’s performance was the festival’s most memorable work, transcending its performance documentary format with quiet intensity as political repression invaded the lives of the artists and the options for resistance became fatally narrow. The Softmachine performances revealed the complex intricacies of lives in which art-making is variously shaped by tradition, politics and notions of gender. Mish Grigor structured her performance The Talk—about her sexuality and the way families talk about sex, or not—such that its constant humour and the fun of audience participation gradually gave way to deeper reflection.
The Stiff Gins’ The Spirit of Things: The Sound of Objects was another personal quest, this one built around the singers’ encounter with Aboriginal cultural artefacts locked in museum archives. They sing these back into life with great passion in a powerful work that needs further shaping but which, with its sometimes very strange tales of loss, murder and ghosts, takes us into unfamiliar cultural landscapes.
River Lin provided a very different approach to the personal in his one-on-one work, Cleansing Service, generating for Nikki Heywood some curious synchronicities and queries about the nature of ritual. At its induction gathering, Ecosexual Bathhouse appeared to promise personal engagement but languorously offered little beyond various kinds of voyeurism and underdeveloped metaphors for the relationship between sex and ecology; although the enveloping Moth Man, breathing softly on one’s neck, hinted at the work’s performative potential.
There was something immensely personal about Jon Rose’s splendid The Museum Goes Live. His idiosyncratic collection of violins with its astonishing range of associated paraphenalia is a work of art in itself, deeply informative and endlessly witty. Packed out free concerts included Tess de Quincey’s remarkable performance as a corpse erupting from a coffin, evoking Butoh ghost dances, even perhaps celebrating Halloween with Rose and collaborators’ fierce playing.
Chan’s vision, framed by Clare Britton’s striking design, appeared unremittingly dark, a warning without the offer of consolation about the effects of Climate Change, but expressed with fraught precision and buffeted vigour. In Mermermer, the performers—surreally outfitted by Shio Otani—move and chatter compulsively, their entwined exercising increasingly perilous until a little dance brings apparent solace (or does it?) in this funny, sardonic account of obsessive contemporary life. Mermermer, alongside Xiaoake x ZiHan was one of the festival’s best.
Timothy Lum, Deborah Kelly, Exercise Your Rights, We The People
Visiting the Neighbours
Liveworks’ We The People, curated by Tulleah Pearce, took us on a pleasant Sunday afternoon walk around Redfern, dropping into Esperanto House, The Association for Good Government and Yaama Dhiyann, buildings we knew well by sight, but nothing of their insides or the people we would likely encounter there.
Upstairs in The Association for Good Government, beneath a portrait of the man who inspired its founding in 1901, Henry George (1839-1897), an American who visited Sydney in 1890, we browsed a table-full of documents about the organisation’s social justice goals, mysterious economic flow charts and sketches of the people from all walks of life who live in or come to Redfern and regularly meet in the building. We were invited to attend meetings, took in a video with graphics and speakers addressing stark inequalities and headed downstairs to a street-side yard where we participated in the group exercise described by Lauren Carroll Harris in her report on We The People and admired a banner by Leigh Rigozzi and Deborah Kelly featuring the finished portraits in colour of association members.
Next stop, Esperanto House. On the ground floor was a video by Benjamin Forster in which short sentences in English and Esperanto, spoken by the artist, alternated so that we’d see the English and hear the Esperanto and vice versa, such that gradually the novice could begin to make connections—about the vocabularies and syntaxes the makers of Esperanto drew on. The sentences came from Esperanto stories and the artist’s observations about language more broadly, for example the ‘tense-less’ language of an Amazonian tribe reported by Daniel Everett in Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes (2008). It’s a very spare video work, but for for those with an interest in language, a clever introduction to Esperanto from an artist who spent four months learning it while visiting the building. Upstairs, in the extensive library and archive, a Russian immigrant and member of the organisation conversed with visitors about its activities, the remarkable spread of the language and how it was made.
At Anna McMahon’s installation, When we talk about food, we talk about it with our heart (see Lauren Carroll Harris’ report), at Yaama Dhiyaan, a hospitality training centre, we enjoyed lemon myrtle shortbreads, damper and chocolate lavender truffles and a long conversation with Beryl van Oploo about both her connection with food and land and her career in catering and teaching.
Having conducted workshops for locals at the Top Work-shop (a resource centre for alternative art-making, unfortunately not on the agenda for a visit), dancer-choreographer Emma Saunders and performance artist David Capra demonstrated DIY performance-making on a small patch of open ground alongside a busy Cleveland Street. The pair, swathed in plastic wrap, cajoled audience members into a wildly funny, somewhat indeterminate improvisation as drivers honked horns and bemused pedestrians lingered. We The People might not have taken us deep into the local community or revealed the ravages of gentrification Lauren Carroll writes of, but we savoured its character, more diverse than previously imagined, and enjoyed its generosity.
We’re looking forward to another great Liveworks in 2017, in the meantime living off memories of 2016, of incredibly diverse works that shared a common adventurousness and an exploratory sense of self and culture.
Emma Saunders and David Capra, We The People, Liveworks 2016
Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art; Carriageworks, Sydney, 27 Oct-6 Nov
Tess de Quincey, Jon Rose, The Museum Goes Live, Liveworks 2016
An ominous thumping emerges from a coffin standing upright in a corner. The black box emits a roar, the door crashes open and the room reverberates with amplified thunder, the wooden casing employed as a full-bodied resonating chamber. The coffin-turned-instrument is just one of the many exhibits on display in The Rosenberg Museum, the private collection of experimental violinist Jon Rose—a bizarre stockpile of violins, violin-like instruments and violin-related paraphernalia collected, invented or built over the course of the artist’s career.
Violin-shaped liquor bottles cover shelves, coloured violins with inset clocks hang in a row on the wall. A 1970s issue of Life magazine with a young, violin-wielding Richard Nixon on the cover, is on display next to the “Sex & Music Issue” of Playboy from 1998 featuring Linda Brava posing seductively with a white violin. A pedal powered violin is displayed next to a kind of musical surveyor’s wheel.
It is among these exhibits—the first time the collection has been displayed in Australia—that the second instalment of Music for a Time of Dysfunction takes place. On one side of the room is a player piano delivering a transcription of the sound of the busy gaming floor at the Sahara Casino in Las Vegas—“The sound of extremely poor people losing the rest of their money,” quips Rose. He introduces us to the seemingly random notes dribbling out of the piano. The pokies, Rose explains, are tuned to C major and while the notes sound haphazard, over the course of the performance the key area provides a point of stability.
In the centre of the room is the robotic Data Violin, which turns trading activity on Wall Street into music. Mechanical hooks line the side of the instrument, each ‘finger’ representing a company; the longer the tones are sustained, the more money is changing hands. The performance begins with these two instruments: music generated by the sound of money. Sparkling flourishes from the piano—poker machine payouts—adorn the huskier, drilling sounds of the Data Violin, “billions of dollars going down the plughole.” As Rose points out, “They talk to each other.”
The lights dim and the performance shifts gears, Rose shoots out a single violin note, illuminated by a standing lamp that clicks on and off in synch. Robotic instruments—the SARPS (Semi Automated Robotic Percussion System) string quartet controlled by Robbie Avenaim—add a rattling voice to the mix. A junkyard organ warbles softly. Rose spins bright flourishes from his violin while Clayton Thomas imitates the hammering robot string quartet on his bass. The Data Violin seems, impossibly, to respond—as if the players are influencing the trade on Wall Street with their music.
The piano and Data Violin are switched off and the players ride their own momentum, Rose’s frenzied fiddling a sinister hoe-down while static hisses through speakers and the robot quartet jackhammers away. Thomas produces soft harmonics while Rose’s violin emits a far-off screaming that becomes a guttural roar.
Jon Rose in the Rosenberg Museum, 2015
The lid of the coffin [Jon Rose tells the editors that violin cases were commonly called coffins in the 19th century] bangs open and shut, an onslaught of percussion while the amplified string inside growls. With a shout, the lid swings open to reveal an ashen white figure. Dancer and choreographer Tess de Quincey, ghostly white, completely naked, wails and screams, slamming the lid and convulsing as if electrocuted. She fills the room with wild ululations—Rose’s violin screaming in sympathy—as an arm and a leg emerge, cabaret style, from the coffin, lights strobing. A number plate wedged into the double bass’s strings sends splintering white-noise through the speakers and De Quincey screams at the audience before she leaves the coffin to walk out through a green-lit Exit, the coffin generating a residual hum of feedback that bathes the audience before Rose cuts it off.
Music for a Time of Dysfunction—Part 2 emerges from and recedes back into the Rosenberg Museum exhibition as if the strange, experimental instruments have all come to life on their own. The result is a chaotic experience of a performance that embraces experimental sounds infused with a critique of contemporary life and capitalism, alongside kitsch, Halloween playfulness.
Rose has indicated that this may be the last time the collection is displayed and the exhibition definitely has the feel of a retrospective. A room off the main space displays footage from Rose’s bicycle and fence projects and the museum’s guide-book is full of reminiscences. An anecdote about being stopped by the border guards between East and West Berlin and made to explain his 19-string cello—the unusual number of strings disqualifying the instrument as a cello in the eyes of the suspicious guards—is a kind of comic microcosm of Rose’s practice as a whole. But while The Museum Goes Live might draw a line under one part of Rose’s career it is by no means an ending. With the violinist having recently been awarded the Peggy Glanville-Hicks Residency for 2017 there is no doubt we will be hearing more of Jon Rose.
–
Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art: Jon Rose, The Museum Goes Live, Music for a Time of Dysfunction, Part 2; Carriageworks, Sydney, 2-5 Nov
We are inducted into another time-space, pulled into synch with the close-by body of a tightly spotlit dancer, Kristina Chan, rising and coming down on her heels with a corresponding thump that grows denser, roaring like WWII fighter planes. Darkness. In the distance, high, horizontal, a wide rippling wave of soft material evokes wind, colour shading revealing complex patterning out of Chaos Theory. The dancer lies below, still. The thunderous thumping not so much fades as travels away, soft wind its residue. Wind and dancer co-exist.
The dancer is in a different space, poised, almost hovering but off-centre, leaning back and almost over-balancing forward, a less than voluntary cycle, hand hanging from wrist, body swathed in intensifying, ghostly blue light. The movement is repeated in another space, a touch sinuously, a little faster, but still as if subject to some unrevealed force. There is little sign of agency, save for self-correction.
Centrestage, a wide circular platform, raised mere centimetres above the floor, becomes a bed for the foetally curled dancer. She unfurls into other shapes, her mouth locking on a hand, an arm, a knee, a leg, like thumb-sucking of another order, or a slow devouring of the self before she contorts into a headless crab-like creature. Her stillness is protracted, rendering her/it a specimen seen through an electron microscope. Release comes with a jolt, an intense crackling lifting the dancer to her feet, as if she’s escaped regression to some earlier life form from which we evolved.
Kristina Chan, A Faint Existence, Liveworks 2016
The pervasive feeling of vulnerability in alien space is fully felt when the low platform mutates into a sheer black hole, white light flaring from beneath like an eclipse. It preludes the return of the beautiful wind, this time its imagined force propelling the dancer in wild, wide circles, over and over, to the point of palpable exhaustion. Thunder, sounding like the real thing, brings stillness and reprieve, the very real catching of breath. Chan steps carefully backwards on the edge of the platform, circling into darkness as deep organ-like and choral tones imbue these final moments with a quasi-spiritual, funereal solemnity. It looks like tip-toeing backwards around an environmental black hole of our own making.
Everything about A Faint Existence suggests the fatal fragility of our life on an Earth subject to the vicissitudes of human-generated Climate Change. The dancer is relentlessly buffeted, turned in on herself, regressive, ultimately passive (doubtless there’ll be other readings, perhaps of resistance; but fighting the wind is not taking on Climate Change unless there was symbolism I missed). These states are convincingly conveyed by dancer-choreographer Kristina Chan, putting aside her acclaimed fluency in works by others for long-held, subtly modulated states of ‘possession’ and passages of violent movement that together border on durational performance; the influence of dramaturg Victoria Hunt is evident here as well as in the work’s image-making.
Although always receptive to powerful images, at the time I was irritated by the length of some, by awkward segueing from one to another, and the aforementioned passivity of the dancer. But the work’s images, intricately fusing movement, sound and design, have proved memorable. Claire Britton’s design is eminently sculptural; with Benjamin Cisterne’s haunting lighting and James Brown’s highly responsive score it could almost function as a standalone installation, shifting from state to state. For her first major work, Kristina Chan has embodied our shared plight with a welcome physical and emotional intensity; it’s a work that warrants further evolution, countering the current political threat to undo the best that we have made of ourselves.
Kristina Chan, A Faint Existence, Liveworks 2016
Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art: Kristina Chan & Force Majeure, A Faint Existence, creator, choreographer, performer Kristina Chan, composer James Brown, designer Clare Britton, lighting Benjamin Cisterne, dramaturg Victoria Hunt; Carriageworks, Sydney, 27-30 Oct
It’s as if, out walking, you’re passing two joggers who have slowed to do stretches, their muttered, barely audible utterances riding on breathy exhalations, overlapping as if each speaker knows the other so well that talking in disjunctive tandem is a given. When this foggy sussuration clears a little, you hear mention of innocuous specifics—sex, giraffes. The conversation is funny, everyday, as silly as the awkward, lurching moves the pair make, the work’s harp-like minimalist score meanwhile anchoring us with its sane, sweet pulse.
The sense of intimate, exercised entwinement will return, but for now playfulness takes over: arms and legs disappear beneath large grey blanket-like outfits, rendering the pair variously swaying objects and crawling critters, garlanded with glittering strands fallen from above (costuming by Shio Otani). As they play, one rattles on about addiction—nicely matching the pair’s obsessive drive and monstrous fantasy-making.
What ensues makes this vision seem a mere diversion. In an astonishingly sustained scene of furious entanglement, frightening in its risk-taking, artful in its remarkable synchronisation, the pair engage in countless holds that evoke all-in-wrestling, extreme sports workouts, chiropractic, cramp treatment and the excesses of Eurotrash dance. Heads fly past each other with apparent millimetres to spare, arms swirl and swipe and the talk—youth, beauty—goes relentlessly and unbelievably on.
The pair’s oneness, expressing mutual dependency, perhaps dangerous co-dependency, is at once profound, in its care and artistry, but equally banal in its profusion of pointless exercising and rabbiting on. It’s seriously parodic.
One of the pair adorns herself with a mass of glitter, again fallen inexplicably from above, and circles the stage, breathlessly pondering what she wants to be and why “Tilda Swinton pops up in funny places.” It’s mildly parodic.
Jo Lloyd, Nicola Gunn, Mermermer, Liveworks 2016
A gentle rattling, first train-like, is underscored with a heavy shuffling and thumping beat which sets the pulse for the compulsive little three-step dance that the pair, now wordless, execute, moving in parallel, drifting apart in wide circular trajectories and, as ever, drawn together. But this final union is unusual. Side by side, facing into the same corner from which they had entered, each balances on one leg, heads, torso, extended arms tilting down, as if rendered statues, fading into black. The scene is a baroque conclusion to an otherwise wild scenario. But how wild? The fantasies are trivial, the exercise-saturated activity banal, however viscerally engaging and funny. It’s ultimately a dark vision.
The artists’ program, describing the work as a “phantasmagoria,” details the etymology of their invented title, Mermermer, its association with MERMER (forensic “brain fingerprinting”), memory and memoir (from the Latin and Greek) and “Indo-European mer-mer: ‘to vividly wonder,’ ‘to be anxious,’ ‘to exhaustingly ponder.’” These states Mermermer successfully induces.
The work has clear kinship with Nicola Gunn’s Piece for Person and Ghettoblaster, which also follows physical and verbal (and moral) exhaustion with a dark reverie. In Mermermer, performance-maker Gunn, typically droll, delivers the solo spoken passages and dancer Jo Lloyd’s distinctive choreographic precision is evident most of all in the challenging entanglement duet. This charismatic team has produced an engrossing work—surprising, visceral, satirical, simply funny and, worryingly altogether something else.
–
Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art: Mermermer, concept, direction, choreography, performers Nicola Gunn, Jo Lloyd, lighting design Matthew Adey (House of Vunholy), composer, sound designer Duane Morrison, costume design Shio Otani; Carriageworks, Sydney, 2-5 Nov
A key component of the program of Newcastle’s Catapult Dance (read the RealTime interview with director Cadi McCarthy) is its Propel Professional Residency scheme which grants invaluable time and space for dance artists to develop works over one to three weeks, the latter period including opportunities to collaborate with local artists (read our review of PROPELLED at the Lock Up gallery). RealTime spoke with Omer Backley-Astrachan who, with partner Sharon Backley-Astrachan, has a one-week residency this month, and Craig Bary, whose residency with Newcastle composer Dale Collier takes place in January 2017.
Omer Backley-Astrachan
Omer, who is Israeli, and his Australian partner, Sharon, worked in Israel from 2008 with Kamea Dance Company, The Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company and the Israeli Ballet and then in Tel Aviv as independent artists before moving to Australia in 2014. He explains the move: “We stayed in Israel as long as we could but life there was was tough and we always knew we had the option of moving to Australia. Sharon missed her family and thought it was time to move closer to home.”
Omer and Sharon have two works in development that they’ll be focusing on at Catapult, TOHU and Valley. TOHU, says Omer, “started in Israel as a very political statement. We went through several wars and we could really see how disparity grows, how racism grows and it made me try to understand if it’s a human thing to be racist, for human beings to be afraid of each other. Or is it natural for human beings to love each other and then learn to hate?” He researched history, Eastern philosophies, including Tao and then tried to allow these philosophies to inform the movement, very literally at first. I think it’s important to visit literal places before making the work completely abstract. The essence of dance is abstract; its language is far broader than spoken language and with a huge range of emotions.”
The character of much Israeli dance seen in Australia is vigorous and sinuous; Omer concurs, “it’s definitely embedded in me, but having said that there are moments in our work that are more minimal, more about the visual aspect—almost like an art installation rather than a dance.” In TOHU, the pair “use marbles to represent constellations, galaxies and the movement of stars and to look at how as human beings we’re influenced by gravity not only as a physical force but as a mental one; gravity’s a dramatic universal force.”
As to how the marbles are deployed, Omer laughs. “Well, I don’t want to reveal too many secrets. We pour the marbles onto floor and, using light, we want the audience to feel as if they’re looking at micro-versions of a universe. There’s continuous movement on the stage not actually motivated by our bodies. There’s an echo, a certain relationship. If there’s a message we want to deliver it’s that we’re all connected. We’re all a bit like marbles bouncing off each other. The problem is that we forget those connections. In a political example, a lot of Israelis coming from Arab countries themselves don’t define themselves as Arab and are today increasingly right wing or feel angry with or scared of the Palestinian people. If they were able to remember their connection to the language, the culture of the place they came from, perhaps they wouldn’t feel so scared of the other. Of course, the audience doesn’t always get what we want them to get.”
Dancer Ali Graham will perform the second work, Valley, a 15-minute piece that might grow longer during the residency, says Omer. It’s described in a press release as “captur[ing] the submergence of a young woman into the deep abstract amorphous space of love and loneliness” [press release]. Omer elaborates: “Ali’s solo is about love and loneliness but the general idea of Valley speaks about a certain looseness of meaning that we’re experiencing in our society. A hundred years ago, death was super-meaningful. If a storm wiped out an entire village, it was regarded as an omen or that the gods wanted something. People could grasp and rely on that meaning. Religious people still have that today but most secular people are losing it because nothing is meaningful except growth and jobs and money. Land is not important unless it makes money for the government. Dance is not important unless it gives back to the economy.”
Once fully developed, Omer and Sharon want to tour the works, including overseas. But as for many artists, life is complex. Sharon is undertaking a veterinarian degree at Sydney University and Omer teaches dance, including at NAISDA (National Aboriginal and Islander Skills Development Association). Omer’s ambition is “to start a dance company, something a bit more stable; working with people who have a certain commitment. I feel there are a lot of really beautiful dancers in Sydney who are looking for this kind of opportunity.”
TOHU and Valley will be performed at Catapult Dance Studios on 26 November.
Craig Bary in Joshua Thomson’s Sum of Parts, Lockup 2016
Craig Bary
New Zealand-born dancer Craig Bary’s career is remarkable, performing consistently since the late 1990’s with a long list of NZ and Australia’s leading choreographers, documented on his website—but only up to 2012. Craig explains, “the site’s in hibernation. I’ve been busy. Most recently I’ve been working on my own choreography and also teaching at NAISDA Dance College up on the NSW Central Coast. I’m the manager for the Contemporary Dance Unit. It’s casual employment, so when I’m not doing that I keep dancing with other companies. At the moment I’m working with Lisa Wilson in Brisbane who has a show coming up next year. I’ve also been choreographing on a group of friends and have a show coming up next year at Parramatta Riverside.”
Asked if he’d like choreographing to become the centrepiece his career, Craig replies, “I’m very passionate about creating work and exploring new ideas and new movement styles and also working with different collaborators. But right now I’m really enjoying a balance of dancing for people, creating my own work and teaching tertiary and pre-professional level dancers. I’ve found quite a nice little balance that’s sustaining me at the moment—which is pretty fortunate.”
For his Propel residency he’ll collaborate with “trans-disciplinary” artist Dale Collier whom he met when in PROPELLED at Newcastle’s Lock-Up gallery. “Cadi McCarthy suggested maybe the two of us could do a residency, with me as choreographer and Dale as lighting designer to see what we could come up with. We’ve never worked together. I think we’ll come in with a few basic ideas. It’s about getting into the space, having the conversation and starting to discover what kind of potential topics we might be interested in exploring and developing; whether it’s going to be abstract or have some kind of narrative or whether we’re going to just play with technology and movement.”
Craig’s attitude to light, he says, “is really a matter of what the work is about. But I’m very passionate about theatrical elements to enhance the work I create. I really love working with designers and technicians, exploring what will complement the material we’re working on. Also, Dale has some new technology he’d like to explore and I’m excited to see what that may do as well.”
Asked to describe his choreography, given the huge range of his dance experiences from Douglas Wright to Garry Stewart’s ADT, Craig says, “As time has progressed, as a choreographer and collaborator, I really enjoy what each individual brings to the table, what their skills are. I think one of my great strengths as a choreographer is partnering and Contact work. I’m also very interested in seamless movement interrupted by dynamic shifts and variations. For me it’s really about playing with physicality all the time, always exploring different pathways, new ways, but always going back to what you know and then exploring inside of that.”
–
Catapult Dance, Propel Professional Residencies: Omer and Sharon Backley-Astrachan, 21-27 Nov; TOHU and Valley, 7pm 26 Nov; Craig Bary, Jan 2017; Catapult Dance Studios, Newcastle
RealTime issue #135 Oct-Nov 2016
XiaoKe x ZiHan, SoftMachine, Choy Ka Fai, Liveworks 2016
Softmachine, a four-year project, 2012-16, by Berlin-based Singaporean artist and performance maker Choy Ka Fai, has generated four widely travelled dance performances and 88 video interviews with choreographers in 13 cities in five countries across Asia. The work offers unprecedented visibility to enormous varieties of regional dance forms and choreographic thinking. With two performance works and the video interviews (unfortunately only accessible in the first week of the festival), Softmachine featured as the best of the Liveworks’ program.
XiaoKe x ZiHan
Performers and partners, the choreographer XiaoKe and sound artist ZiHan open their performance with video of the couple arriving home in Shanghai to find they’ve had ‘visitors,’ that computer data is missing and passwords blocked; “In 2015, we thought we were being watched.”
Although described as “documentary performance” (catalogue)—an apt term for the other Softmachine performance in Liveworks by Indonesian dancer Rianto—XiaoKe x ZiHan is more dramatically organic, focusing consistently on the emotional impact of intensifying political repression of art in China.
ZiHan, in silhouette from behind a large red curtain that dominates the stage, plays an interrogator. XiaoKe, his subject, clutches a ball of white material which, leaning into, she pushes abjectly about the floor; sliding, crawling, rocking. She is asked her age. “37.” “Contemporary dance?” “Physical theatre.” Where? “Not in official venues. No licence needed.” Nor, she says, do they need a licence to performance overseas. She is asked about Choy Ka Fai. “Fat, like a businessman.” “Why the crawling?” “To express struggle” is her provocative, mock ideological retort.
The curtain falls to the floor, the interrogator appears to collapse and our attention is drawn to the screen where XiaoKe x ZiHan are seen in their apartment, with a glimpse of one of his six cats. Chopping vegetables, she muses about their being together: “Love? Artistic collaboration and a defence against loneliness?” The couple go walking. We see couples dancing in daylight in city squares. She reveals to us she’s a Communist Party member; she had to be if she wanted to a journalist, the role she trained for at university. It was the only way to legally access parliamentary business. Back home, ZiHan cuts her hair. She explains that it’s not the “system” they oppose; they just want to know the truth. We then see them with friends in a bar; moving clothes racks down a street in a performance; and, on a train in another performance, applauding with friends station names as they’re announced. The film conveys the everydayness of their life and art, a kind of innocence. We momentarily forget the threat embodied in the opening scenes, the dominating red curtain, the voice of the interrogator.
Now the floor is fully covered with the curtain, as if taken over by the artists. ZiHan, to one side at his computer, plays his score, its buzzing and tinkling asymmetrical to XiaoKe’s abstracted traditional folk dance (the form she’d been trained in as a youngster), her centre of gravity low, arms wide, elegant, fluent. Staccato piano and a larger, ominous sound inflected, I think, with traditional music, lends the movement additional drama as XiaoKe slips between folk, martial art and contemporary dance moves, her prancing widening around and diagonalling across the red floor. The building freedom of her expression is halted. “Stop,” says the interrogator. “What are you doing?” “Dancing,” she replies.
XiaoKe x ZiHan, SoftMachine, Choy Ka Fai, Liveworks 2016
The interrogation this time is palpably threatening, with XiaoKe frozen, ZiHan again playing inquisitor but now onstage touching an arm, a cheek, a breast (XiaoKe pulls away). “Everything has to be absolute in China,” he says. Onscreen, the pair gently mock absolutes, performing the propaganda Laundry Song as a pop video, with XiaoKe as a young woman singer (digitally multiplied) in traditional dress on a river bed, declaring her desire to help the Peoples Liberation Army (represented by ZiHan) do its laundry. At a time when President Xi Xinping’s campaign against “nihilism” (criticism in any form of Communist Chinese history) is escalating (“Nihil sine Xi,” The Economist, 29 Oct), the makers of even light-hearted works like this video can be punished.
Taking scissors to the red cloth (which XiaoKe has shrunk into a bundle with her gliding feet) and then tearing it into lengths, the artists swap irony for symbolic statement. The inquiring voiceover persists. “How do you feel?” “It’s too complicated. I feel tired. I feel ridiculous.” “Do you want tea?” “I want coffee.” (An invitation to tea at the Cultural Bureau is an order to present oneself for interrogation, which happened to friends of the artists during the making of the work. See my interview with Choy Ka Fai.)
ZiHan binds the utterly still XiaoKe with the cloth pieces—around her waist, crisscrossing her chest, around her brow. He lays out a white cloth on the floor, the music throbs, she binds him too in red. They look oddly like ancient warriors. Sharing a bottle of water, they wash down tablets and lie down side by side on the cloth—a stark double suicide image we’re familiar with from Japanese Bunraku and Kabuki, here love and art defeated by ideology. The red cloth, symbol of absolute power, despite their taking control of it and subsuming it to their art, defeats them regardless. Alternatively, XiaoKe x ZiHan have taken it with them into oblivion.
Choy Ka Fai’s conception and direction, Tang Fu Kuen’s dramaturgy and the craft and, for all the work’s intensity, the gentle, sad presence of XiaoKe x Zihan have produced a deeply affecting personal and political work of art.
SoftMachine: Rianto, Choy Ka Fai, Liveworks 2016
Rianto
Indonesian dance artist Rianto addresses us directly, from stage and screen, about his life and art. He illustrates the art with excerpts from classical Indonesian Topeng dance, Lengger folk dance and contemporary dance. In Topeng’s Javanese Ramayana dance drama he performs, masked (Topeng means mask) as the princess Sekaritij awaiting her beloved prince, Panji. Rianto describes it as “a dance of love, pain and hope,” adding, “Love always comes with pain. I know this.” Elaborately and glitteringly costumed, Rianto’s elegant movement is highly articulated, almost puppet-like at times (referencing the form’s origins), when, with back extremely arched, the masked head moves sharply side to side, or hands dance from wrists.
Commencing a striptease sustained to the show’s end, Rianto slips off his mask and unwinds and untucks the swathes of material wrapped around him without pins, buttons or Velcro. Beneath is his costume for Lengger, dance performed by men dressed as women. The music is lively, the dancing faster, with rapid turns, exaggerated shoulder rolling, an emphatic bounce in the step and a coquettish eye on the audience. Again the dancing is exquisitely realised, supple and sinuous. Another layer of costume is peeled away. The ensuing movement—an extremely wide-legged stance with which Rianto pushes down into near splits and rocks from the waist—preludes his declaration, “I can dance as a man.” With the mask of the villain Krone of the Ramayana drama, he glides, strides and threatens: a warrior, his muscles rippling. However, after demonstrating classical and modern movements, with clear signs of overlap, and male and female, Rianto declares his goal: “No gender!”
In documentary film which takes us to Rianto’s village in Java, he and his mother reveal that, when a child, a blue birthmark between his brows foretold that he would be a Lengger dancer. He tells of marrying one of his traditional dance students, a Japanese woman, moving to Tokyo, teaching (we see him preparing wigs and costumes for his students who dance with him on an outdoor stage to a large audience) and, after the performance, heading to Shinjuku to wind down with “sauna and DVDs…with gays and bisexuals.” Choy, off camera, stops Rianto, asking, “So I can’t use any of this material?” Rianto answers with a grin, “Depends.” The oscillation between gender roles, the “no gender” declaration and this moment take us to the work’s conclusion, Rianto’s idealised, fantastical vision of a transcendent self.
SoftMachine: Rianto, Choy Ka Fai, Liveworks 2016
Rianto, a distant figure, his back to us, emerges from utter darkness into a narrow corridor of low light, purple and pink, his skin glittering. As a deep accompanying score is layered with high bell notes, he glides nearer, the soft angular moulding of shoulders and elbows subtly evoking ancient dance. He stops and turns to us, naked, a man, of “no gender” in art…and life?
Rianto’s “performance documentary” is an engaging, neatly constructed illustrated lecture, its brief passages of dance (I yearned for more in each case) constellated around the artist’s attempts to both maintain and merge old and new, and, in parallel, position himself in respect of gender, let alone sexuality. Despite the apparent joy of the work’s final image, it engendered a certain existential melancholy reaching back to “Love always comes with pain. I know this,” to video of Rianto laidback with his wife in his Tokyo home, to that moment of ambivalence: “Depends.”
–
Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art: Softmachine, XiaoKe x ZiHan; Rianto, concept, direction, Choy Ka Fai, dramaturgy Tang Fu Kuen; Carriageworks, Sydney, 28-30 Oct
Kaleena Briggs, Nardi Simpson (Stiff Gins), The Spirit of Things: The Sound of Objects
Non-indigenous knowledge of Aboriginal culture is notoriously poor in Australia, worsened in recent years by the former Abbott Government attempts to cut back Indigenous curriculum content for schools. Aboriginal artists carry much of the weight of responsibility for conveying to other Australians the spirit and complexities of their cultures. In August, Sydney-siders saw Winyanboga Yurringa; written and directed by Andrea James, it focused on a group of women brought together by an elder around ritual and cultural artefacts. Now, another fine production, of a very different kind, also tells of the significance of objects so often locked in museums.
Popular Indigenous band Stiff Gins, Nardi Simpson and Kaleena Briggs, have celebrated their 17th anniversary with the premiere of an ambitious theatrical production, The Spirit of Things: The Sound of Objects. The singers open with “a happy song” in language, but interrupt it midway, declaring “this is a show,” not a concert, proceeding to take us with them into some very dark places, albeit with passion and humour and, at times, apparently perverse delight.
On a visit to a museum archive the pair had seen objects taken from Aboriginal people and sites that hey felt should have been “rotting or burning” or, better, “at home.” These artefacts “spoke to them,” so the singers decided to choose eight and “sing them into being,” accompanying each song with a story and projection.
A large transparent curtain hangs the width of the stage, a screen for ghostly images of feathers, leaves, water and stars, spilling wide across the floor. Through the scrim we see a guitarist, bassist and two drummers who play evocative arrangements with clarity and subtlety, if conversely, and unnervingly, amplified stadium-force, reducing the intelligibility of the singers’ lyrics.
A crackling old wax cylinder recording prompts the artists to make their own version of the song they hear. It’s about a good woman who dies, decays into bones and sludge, then sprouts feathers (as abstracted ones float across the screen) and becomes a bird, singing to her loved ones. The singers tell her, “You are never dead.” Less hopeful is a story about a girl who becomes a victim of relentless racial abuse until she adopts “a mask” to defend herself from the world.
Even more painful is a tale full of dark ironies. A good relationship with a local white farmer secures goat’s milk for a mother whose children she fears are the targets of child-stealing government officers. She expertly trains her offspring to watch for such men and in ways of escape. However, made drowsy by their loving mother’s honey sandwiches, the boys, high in a redgum, fail to see the arrival of the officers. The mother takes fright, surrenders the girls to the river, where they drown, and witnesses her sons trapped in the tree. The singer completes her song with deeply affecting, sustained soprano sobbing, a lament for a good mother seen as bad through white eyes. Wave lines ripple across the space, a ghostly representation of a river since lost to drought.
Kaleena Briggs, Nardi Simpson (Stiff Gins), The Spirit of Things: The Sound of Objects
Sitting beneath the night sky, the singers describe the stars in the Milky Way as the “fires of the dead” and speak of their desire to join those who have passed, one conjuring an image of her throat cut, the blood comfortingly warm; “flowing like juice out of a mussel,” says the other. These are disturbing images, though clearly cosmologically satisfying for the artists. A subsequent monologue about a woman who is abandoned by her husband only for him to return to bond with his son–to her exclusion—seems grimly existential rather than cultural; she concludes, “I don’t want them.”
The final scene, the work’s most alarming, serenely tells of an Aboriginal serial killer who strangles and cuts the throats of his people. He is pursued by the hated police who inadvertently take another man in his stead; but then find the killer when they hear his dog barking. Killed, his spirit passes into the dog, to the delight of the tellers who admit that, although he betrayed his people, he was a great man, born with the knowledge of a hunter. The singers sit, affectionately stroking the imagined dog as light fades.
The Spirit of Things: The Sound of Objects is a fascinating concert-theatre hybrid, performed with great ease by Nardi Simpson and Kaleena Briggs and, in monologues, with controlled emotional intensity (director Felix Cross). Design (Lucy Simpson), lighting (Fausto Brusamolino) and projections (Mic Gruchy) effectively transform the performance space, making it intimate and local and opening it out to a cosmological vision of the mutability of life, acquainting us with ghosts and the ever-present dead. For the work to entirely succeed we need to hear the songs clearly and be certain which object triggers which story. Hungry for understanding, I long to hear the Stiff Gins speak about what this bracing work’s dark tales mean to them.
–
Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art: Stiff Gins, The Spirit of Things: The Sound of Objects, creators, performers, Nardi Simpson, Kaleena Briggs, director Felix Cross, design Lucy Simpson, lighting Fausto Brusamolino, video media designer Mic Gruchy; Carriageworks, Sydney, 27-30 Oct
Mish Grigor and audience participant, The Talk, Liveworks 2016
Mish Grigor’s The Talk focuses on the frank conversations about sex most of us have likely not had with our families. She successfully persuaded her family (mother and father—divorced— and three brothers) to contribute their memories and feelings about sex as material for a performance, adding to it her own vivid recollections of moments when sex disrupted family life—for instance, one of her three brothers announcing he’s gay and, at a later gathering, that he’s HIV positive. Later again, the family turn on Grigor: the project’s “gone too far,” “you’re passive-aggressive.” But, aggressively, she pushes the family to explosive, cathartic release using a device which she then turns on the audience (and best not revealed here).
These conversations, which provide essential structure, are interpolated with recollections—the ludicrous ‘sex talk’ her father gives her and a brother in the most uncomfortable of circumstances and the hilarious, wince-inducing saga of a lost condom—and one-on-one conversations with her mother and her gay brother. In one of these Grigor becomes her mother listening to her daughter tell her that as a child she could hear her parents having sex and the kind of sex it revealed her mother liked. In the ensuing silences, Grigor’s lips purse, cheeks are sucked in and eyes downcast; it’s painfully funny. The conversation also reveals the sadness of an attractive woman who thinks her “ugly” friends have much happier lives; who, in a conversation with her son, who wants to take her to a gay bar to meet his friends, and where “you’ll be treated like royalty,” is repelled, for now, by thoughts of the aroma of “sex, drugs, farts and Red Bull.”
The Talk is more than fun; it’s a moral quest, with Grigor attempting to understand her own sexuality, one complicated by the lack of talk about it when she was a youngster, the nature of her mother’s sexual enjoyment and her father’s constant nakedness—his large penis setting up unrealistic expectations of the men in her life (“It fucked me up!”). Above all it’s a call for openness, franker than her family expected and perhaps more than some of Grigor’s audience might accept in their own lives beyond being amused by and tolerating others’ honesty, outside the home.
Up until now, you might be thinking I’m writing about a monologue or a fully cast play. Not so. Mish Grigor is determined to implicate this audience in her personal investigation. She has masterfully scripted her recollections and recordings, dextrously sketching family members, subsequently adding telling details (like the revelation that her father identified with a TV soap opera character) and progressing towards honestly facing her attitude towards her gay brother and his illness and staging the work’s aforementioned climax. With the audience seated in a semi-circle facing a few chairs and a table, Grigor gently cajoles individual audience members to sight read, directing them (“speak up”) to play herself and family members, sometimes standing from their seats or more often on stage at the table with her. They do so with varying degrees of confidence, the natural awkwardness amplifying the tentativeness of the recreated conversations.
Grigor’s hosting is relaxed, personable, firm and quick-witted. By the work’s end its many voices become one, deeply felt and touching, before Grigor wickedly turns the tables. The Talk worked for me, prompting some surprising recollections of conversations—awkward, evasive, interrupted, pointless, a few that hit home—and reflections on the evolution of the sexual self. The Talk’s light, inclusive touch packs a punch.
Mish Grigor, The Talk, Liveworks 2016
Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art: The Talk, writer, performer Mish Grigor, collaborating artists Anne Thompson, Jess Olivieri; Carriageworks, Sydney, 2-5 Nov
Tina Havelock Stevens, Thunderhead video still, Liveworks 2016
You’re driving on an open highway, with plains extending either side of you. There are sheets of rainfall a way off and mist coalescing into a central vortex of vertical, upward-moving rain. This is a video, displayed on a huge screen. The storm is contained and centred, we move around it rather than it moving around the frame or through the space, with dark green mountains at the furthest point of our sight.
The environmental phenomenon captured is a supercell—an extreme thunderstorm. Thunderhead shows us a violent rupture from the environmental norm. The artist, Tina Havelock Stevens, performed an iteration of the work at Performance Space’s Liveworks, accompanying the looped thunderstorm video on drums, with Liberty Kerr on guitar. The music is improvised, mostly minor key, mostly slow, with occasional moments of upswing when Kerr chords forcefully and Havelock Stevens rolls, drops and throws a big soft mallet across the large toms, with big intermittent blustery bass kicks. There are great pillows to lie on and watch the storm roll by, which is pretty nice and allows you to space out for as long as you wish rather than analyse the work.
Many will describe Thunderhead as cinematic, because it is a moving image work of a wide vista accompanied by an airy, atmospheric soundscape, but I think it is more painterly in the sensibilities of its framing and treatment of light and colour. The Texan setting is a little reminiscent of some south-eastern parts of Australia, in that it shares a high yet soft light, and the droplets of rain in the air create a dispersed screen through which the light trickles. A friend with whom I attended one night of the performances said she found the loop, and the fact that we never went into the storm’s eye maddening (unlike Francis Alÿs’ Tornado, Milpa Alta, 2000–2010), but I didn’t have a problem with that ‘on the cusp/on the outside’ feeling.
Tina Havelock Stevens, Liberty Kerr, Thunderhead Performance, Liveworks 2016
Havelock Stevens has said that her encounters with land art on the same trip on which the footage was taken have informed the work’s sense of scale and repetition in how she cut and looped the video. Land art aside, Thunderhead also naturally draws on audiences’ familiarity with art history’s depictions of the sublime: that Romantic notion that overwhelming art encounters with nature—tall mountains, stormy waves, towering clouds, deep fogs—connect us to larger faiths. There’s no doubt that Thunderhead follows that continuum, albeit without the religious heaviness of church ceiling frescoes or Friedrich or Turner paintings.
Rather than deliberately drawing a thematic link to the sublime, the artist has gone for something more enigmatic and porous, and I think Thunderhead is stronger for that breathing space. The airiness around it is deeply attractive to me as a viewer, because it means the artist is letting the work wrap itself around me in a unique way that makes sense only to me and will be different for you. The emotional makeup of this work is strong but in a very open-ended way, and for that reason, I’m loath to give you a sentence along the lines of “the work is about [blank],” and would much rather talk about how the work felt and the associations it triggered.
Without art terms like “the sublime,” Thunderhead reminded me that two-dimensional images of light and landscape, of storms and other natural and environmental phenomena, form something of a universal visual language that can communicate both directly and obliquely to an individual. I think because the work comes from an actual encounter of being in the world rather than an academic or studio practice, it speaks to pre-intellectual forms of knowledge beyond verbal language.
Tina Havelock Stevens, Liberty Kerr, Thunderhead Performance, Liveworks 2016
That wordless, feeling element of Thunderhead made me wonder about the extinction of affect in contemporary art. I have become increasingly surprised that more artists and curators do not make an effort at human connection, do not aim for inherently emotional and immersive works that move toward the viewer and offer the chance of a moving experience. Not that these are the only valid types of art, but there is such a dearth of them.
So much contemporary art is made from theory, a self-examining approach which, to paraphrase New York Magazine critic Jerry Saltz, “is far too tight to let real art breathe.” Thunderhead is made from instinct, while staying grounded in art history and Western formal approaches to depicting landscapes in one-point perspective. It has that sense of pure intentionality, lending weight to the idea that creativity probably comes from a place we don’t know. It recalls road-trips, the erotics of open space, pure colour as shown by Abstract Expressionists, the bigness of everything, Impressionist interpretations of light, the smell of rain and holidays where you finally have time to think. But those are just what it made me think of: Tina Havelock Stevens has ‘merely’ established a constellation of audiovisual forces that viewers can do something with themselves, and though art’s job has changed a lot since those peak sublime times, that remains a really lovely thing to do.
–
Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art: Thunderhead, concept, videography Tina Havelock Stevens, music Tina Havelock Stevens, Liberty Kerr; Carriageworks, Sydney, 2-6 Nov
When We Talk About Food, We Talk About It From The Heart, We The People, Liveworks 2016
Where does art belong today? Outside the void of the white cube in museums and galleries, contemporary art is more present in everyday life than ever before. In shopping centres, squares, train stations and on street corners, everyone from developers to local council officers is in the business of exhibiting art in its many forms. As arts organisations continue to move outside traditional spaces, We The People placed contemporary art installations and performances in the lodgings of community organisations that surround Performance Space’s Carriageworks home. Part of Liveworks and curated by Tulleah Pearce, the project was a kind of festival of goodwill and an effort to find new ways of doing site-specific work, with artists working with small community organisations for a number of months to develop works that reflect those groups’ aims.
The rapid changes in Redfern seemed to form We The People’s unspoken undercurrent of architectural and spatial politics. Though the process of gentrification began in 2000 with Indigenous people being moved on for the benefit of Olympics tourists, the process has visibly sped up over the last five or so years. In the new Redfern, creativity is conflated with entrepreneurialism and the “creative class,” with customers for $5 matcha lattes supplanting the residents who shaped and created the value of the area’s culture and history. Along with developers, small businesses and the public sector, artists and art organisations have also played a role in gentrification, an uneasy reality that is rarely discussed within the contemporary art world.
I interpreted We the People as a sideways correction of art’s activity inside processes of gentrification. Rather than the project’s self-professed aim of examining the social fabric of the Redfern-Darlington area, the works were more celebratory in nature: a way to praise the handful of non-profit groups remaining in the area and for Performance Space to relate to its local community (a bit like its Microparks projects in 2013-14). Or maybe just to create pleasant spaces for people to spend time in for half an hour on a weekend arvo. It was a reminder that even when they’re not highly visible, small community spaces persist in this war of urban attrition, and perhaps that gentrification can never be entirely successful.
When We Talk About Food, We Talk About It From The Heart, We The People, Liveworks 2016
It’s not just the presentation of work in public spaces but cultural production that is changing. Interesting in its aim if not always its manifestation, We The People’s faults are reflective of a broader trend I’ve noticed in festival-like engagements by small to medium arts organisations in which the works have a strong core concept not fully realised: resulting in a certain flatness and unripeness. This is not a criticism of Liveworks per se but more a worrying tendency in the arts ecology: I fear there’s not the time and space and funding available for curators to develop work—to mentor artists from a project’s conception to presentation.
To me, the most engaging of the four We The People projects were the ones that engaged members of community organisations in the process of making the work. Anna McMahon’s project used Indigenous foods as the sensory trigger for a whole range of community bonding activities. The work titled When we talk about food, we do it from the heart, took place at Yaama Dhiyaan, a hospitality training centre right next to Carriageworks, specialising in Indigenous food and culture. McMahon laid the length of the room—a standard office-y space—with a large blue carpet, laced with a perimeter of rock salt. We took our shoes off to approach the rug, along which were laid small piles of delicious food made at Yaama Dhiyaan. Damper baked fresh that morning could be dipped into a bowl of honey and sunflower seeds, and shortbread biscuits and chocolate lavender truffles were laid on large leaves. People sat and walked around and chatted and chewed as they pleased; McMahon created a nice space for people to hang around and meet other art-goers.
The project clearly involved members of the host group in a meaningful way, this time, Aunty Beryl van Oploo, and other community members who were visible and active during the exhibition, replenishing the food and just generally being around. Writer Rebekah Raymond from Humpty Doo, NT, provided text which was projected as a backdrop to the long exhibition space. Much installation art functions on a very intellectual level, but it was satisfying to engage in a tactile manner beyond visuals: big crystals of rock salt between the toes, tasting sticky honey, crumbling shortbread and still-warm damper.
Audience participants, Exercise Your Rights, We The People
Likewise, Deborah Kelly’s By George! Exercise Your Rights at the Association of Good Government, had a spirit of earnest light-heartedness. The Association is an idealistic group dedicated to reforming the current political system, its home an unassuming red-brick structure I had walked past hundreds of times before, facing Redfern Station. On a modest square of astroturf, we audience members took part in some gentle exercises led by softly-spoken Association member and fitness instructor Timothy Lum, who just seemed like a really nice guy. We rolled our wrists and walked gently on the spot while Kelly intoned some of the Association’s core ideas: “against privatisation, a philosophy of equality.” Dance academic Julie-Anne Long then guided us through movement-based mindfulness exercises, drawing our focus to small sensory aspects of the site—the feel of the turf underfoot, the sound of trains alongside us, a banner by Kelly and Leigh Rigozzi depicting Association members—and inviting us to make eye contact with each other as we walked. A wide basket of apples sat at the exit, so we could replenish ourselves with the fruits of society’s labour.
The set-up was spare but suffused with Kelly and Long’s ‘come on board’ energy. The simple, neat, unifying metaphor of exercise really worked: there was a feel-good atmosphere, everyone could participate and it generated that vibe of ‘being up for it,’ which good participatory art projects tend to do. A humble, neighbourhood project, it reminded me that art can be a gesture of kindness and generosity, an invitation to participate.
………..
For the other two works in We The People, Benjamin Forster’s Kelkaj Fragmentoj at Esperanto House, and David Capra and Emma Saunders’ See you at the Top, on a Redfern street corner, see our Liveworks overview.
Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art, We the People, curator Tulleah Pearce; various locations, Redfern, 20-30 Oct
Opening night of Liveworks, I descend the stairs from the street and approach the large glass windows of Carriageworks. The first sight, framed behind the glass and greeting all comers, is a pair of bare buttocks. They seem a fitting start for a festival of experimental arts. They are the shapely haunches of Taiwanese performance artist River Lin.
Inside the building, I see Lin is bent double over a rectangular expanse of white sand, his dry river bed, his trailing fingers delicate, leaving incremental tracks as he moves. In a noisy foyer filled with people who drink and talk, I observe his quiet progress over the coming hour. Lin’s River Walk is circuitous; rarely upright, the artist navigates a slow, repeated shift from bending down onto haunches, then on all fours, finally prone and pressed into the fine granular surface. With each of these repetitions another portion of his skin changes colour with the imprint of sand. The naked figure gathering pale markings puts me in mind of a Sadhu in the market place and this process could be read as a kind of supplication. Alone in the crowd on his sacred patch, River Lin carries out his concentrated procedure. It’s a tough gig this, to be the ascetic sideshow attraction amid a profane wash of free drinks, but his focus never leaves the river.
A few days later I arrive for a private performance. Again in the foyer, but this time in a square of shelving lined with clear plastic water bottles, River Lin conducts his other work, Cleansing Service. He greets me warmly and invites me to choose a bottle from the shelves. Each one has a label with a single word, including names of cities, feelings, colours, objects; some words are innocuous, some have more weight. I wonder at their inclusion; where have they come from? I forget to ask. I think about research into the information-carrying ability of water and the vibrational qualities of words. Swimming in choice, I take the word that draws my attention more than once.
River Lin, Cleansing Service, Liveworks 2016
“You have chosen MOTHER. You wish to be cleansed of mother?” I mutter something in reply about recent death and grief and he nods slightly. We sit together on the floor in the centre of the square, eyes level. Lin has a basin and a cloth. The room becomes a contemplative space. While he carefully washes each of my hands with the chosen ‘mater water,’ I have time to consider my own skin and its condition, the scars and their history. After the gentle water treatment and hands-on cleansing and drying, there is a remnant bowl of water. I get an inkling something is about to happen to that water. What I least expect is that Lin will drink it. Suddenly his name—River—takes on an entirely new meaning. The baptism is sealed with his taking the residual water into his own body. I am quietly astounded by this brazen yet tender act. River Lin hands me the remaining unused water and I carry the bottle home and sit it on the kitchen bench.
I am left to ponder in what way this act constitutes a ritual. Is it a shared agreement in a context where two or more people concur as to the special nature of an action or transaction? A series of actions where something is exchanged or elevated, where what is produced is greater than the sum of its parts and that changes/ heals/transforms a pre-existing condition? I am not sure about the healing, transforming efficacy of this experience, but I appreciate that Lin’s works are deceptively simple, and in Cleansing Service he does what he sets out to do. The artist’s act of care, of purification, for me evoked stray memory and my body’s history and provided a rare moment of intimacy between strangers.
Later that week my son unwittingly drank the rest of the water in the bottle. It seemed a fitting end for MOTHER.
–
Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art: River Walk and Cleansing Service, artist River Lin; Carriageworks, Sydney, 28-30 Oct
The smell of Dencorub is in the air. Ceramic formations pointing to the celling are laid out atop a six-metre horizontal plinth. A man wearing jeans and a blue singlet enters and proceeds to wrap his legs around the plinth. Mark Shorter’s performance, as part of Artspace’s exhibition The Public Body, concerns the plinth, the body and moreover, the objects that lie between.
Shorter’s performance work is usually in the guise of Renny Kodgers, an often obscene and boorish Kenny Rogers impersonator. Renny can’t be found here. In 6 metres of Plinth, Shorter doesn’t seem to be doing it for the laughs. The artist at this moment is very focused on the task at hand.
A collection of short ceramic towers covers the plinth. They could easily have been crafted from a cast, maybe taken from inside of a rectal cavity. Discussing the work with the artist post-performance, I wondered, “what if you froze your own shit?” and, “once frozen, what would you do with it?” But these objects, according to Shorter, are less than faecal or phallic. “Non-objects,” he says, is a more fitting description, oblivious to themselves.
Shorter mounts the plinth and proceeds to squirm forward, groin first. The sculptures fly about, tumbling over, thumping onto the gallery floor. Assisted by hydraulic air compression jacks, the plinth is systematically raised higher and higher. The artist once again mounts the plinth in dog-like fashion, thrusting across from start to finish. The action is repeated, each time getting closer to impossible. The plinth, now more rodeo bull than gallery art pedestal, seems to have found a new calling. Shorter, who lectures at the Victorian College of Arts’ Sculpture and Spatial Practice department, says, “its plinthness is under negotiation.”
Trace Collective, TRACE (Post-Colonial-Cluster-Fuck) live work/installation view, Artspace, Sydney (2009)
The performer is dressed, not unlike fellow artist Tony Schwensen, in blue collar worker attire. Schwensen’s TRACE: Displaced (Post-Colonial-Cluster-Fuck) had taken place at Artspace in 2009. (It’s uncanny: look closely at the documentation and you can see Shorter working behind Artspace’s information counter, sporting a handlebar moustache). Both performances seem fixated on an act of labour, unclear in their reasoning: absurd. TRACE saw Schwensen taking a steel cutter to a car and 6 metres of Plinth featured a man who felt audacious enough to move objects through the gallery with his groin.
As the performance develops, it’s hard to not be drawn to Shorter’s buttocks as he dodges countless awkward looking relics. It appears that through strategic employment of the plinth, the artist has produced a dance he must endure, a choreography perhaps inspired by the famed Simone Forti (for example, Huddle, 2012) or devised by the creators of Freddy Got Fingered (a 2001 worst picture award winner).
Mark Shorter, 6 metres of Plinth, Artspace, Sydney
In equal measure, Shorter has produced a walk, far less John Wayne or Texan in swagger, but more in tune with the likes of Bruce Nauman. Particularly Nauman’s Walk with Contrapposto (1968) where the artist used a narrow corridor to shape and affect his gait. Shorter’s walk too reveals the mechanics of its action, parading an enduring Olympian strain. The broad movement of the hips and the tumbling tip-toeing of the feet is created not by way of mimicry, but by negotiation.
Here Mark Shorter removes his screwball cover and finds a way of holding a position with the plinth. In doing so, he fashions a posture between endurance and farce, an unlikely meeting between two forces. Endurance breaks through the farce, until it’s no longer funny, becoming something universally tragic.
Mark Shorter, 6 metres of Plinth, 27 Aug; The Public Body, Artspace, Sydney, 25 Aug-23 Oct
Assyrian wedding procession, performance documentation, Women of Fairfield
It’s six o’clock on Saturday night and almost 200 people are gathered outside Fairfield train station. Ordinarily such a gathering might attract the attention of law enforcement but we are a mild mannered lot, standing patiently, consulting our foldout maps and expertly corralled by people in fluorescent orange caps that have the word “women” printed in black across the crown. Daylight saving started last week, so it is twilight: the birds are loud, the trains are soft and the cars roll slowly by. We stand opposite two butcher shops, a grocery and a tobacco store.
The performance begins with a Welcome to Country from Aunty Wendy, reminding us that the suburb of Fairfield stands on the land of the Cabrogal people of the Darug nation. From here, the performance follows Powerhouse Youth Theatre Artistic Director Karen Therese’s now trademark structure, which combines the processional and the installational as we wind our way through the neighbourhood, occasionally pausing for a performance or artwork and then carrying on.
We are invited to cross the road and follow an Assyrian wedding procession led by a band of men in navy pants and tan vests. They also sport black caps with red, white and blue feathers and one is wielding a silver sword. The women are in deep purple and black velvet dresses, with beautiful silver belts and headpieces. Three streets have been blocked off for the occasion, which is lucky because we are walking on the road headed for a roundabout.
We turn left and head down Harris Street, past cafes and hairdressers on the right and Powerhouse Youth Theatre on the left. We turn right into a narrow passageway that opens out onto a concrete courtyard wedged between a set of flats and a car park. From the flats, an intrigued father brings his baby down for a look while from the second floor of the car park a man in a fluorescent vest films with his phone. Indeed, phones are absolutely everywhere: even participants often film and photograph as they perform. The dancing continues and the procession becomes a circle, incorporating several audience members, who are held by the hand and encouraged to join in the gentle bounce.
Atra Gewargis in Kate Blackmore’s All Wedding Wishes (2016), dual-channel HD video installation for Women of Fairfield
When the dancing comes to an end, most audience members head into an adjacent garage. Inside, Kate Blackmore’s two-screen video work, All Wedding Wishes, illuminates the dark space. Also focusing on an Assyrian wedding, it has three strands: interviews with the bride and her parents; footage of the wedding preparations; and then scenes of the wedding itself. It’s a highly performative affair, with the bride and groom posing patiently for the photographers. Later, at the Grand Paradiso Reception Centre, footage seemingly from earlier in the day—of the bride getting ready for instance—is projected onto the wall. Finally, a smoke machine bursts into action as the couple take to the floor for their first dance.
It’s so colourful and theatrical that Blackmore needs hardly add anything, but it’s clear from the interviews that she’s not just another wedding photographer and that bride Nahren Georges and her family place great trust in her. They speak with a mixture of pride, joy, relief and sorrow about the wedding and explain in detail how it functions as both a welcome distraction (from worrying about family far away) and an important affirmation (signifying personal and cultural survival against the odds). These gentle interviews bring an emotional weight to a work that might otherwise have become a meta-document of an already highly documented event. On the night that I attend, I happen to stand near one of the participants, who explains to the women next to him that his house is in the video. “And now I’m here!” he exclaims.
Once I’ve seen most of the video, I head back out onto Harris Street to Powerhouse Youth Theatre to see a series of zines, animations and self-portraits as superheroes created by the students of Fairfield High School in collaboration with MCA art educators. I’m admiring the superheroes when a group of women come out of a rehearsal room and head outside. They’re costumed so I follow them back to the roundabout for Zoe Scoglio’s In the Round.
Indigenous Women of Fairfield, In the Round, Zoe Scoglio for Women of Fairfield
Three cars arrive, one from each direction, announcing their arrival with honking. The first belongs to a group of Aboriginal women, who have adorned their white car with red, yellow and black tulle, green leaves and a grey toy koala riding on the rooftop like a tiny Pope. The second belongs to Khmer women, whose red hatchback is festooned with flowers and blue and white gingham bows. The last car belongs to Iraqi women and it too has ribbons and tulle, though in green. The women exit their cars, circle the roundabout and invite the audience to join them. I do a few laps with a friend before we peel off to talk.
We watch as another friend takes a picture for one of the participants. He insists on reciprocating by taking a picture of her, but not with her camera, with his—a record of the visitors who came to town one night in October. It’s a neat inversion of the typically masculine ritual of hooning around the block in your car; instead we are promenading around the roundabout, admiring the newly feminised cars and taking selfies. I’ve always read these young men as claiming sonic space in a society that grants them little cultural or political space, but this is an important reminder that women might not be permitted—or do not permit themselves—to do the same.
Pero no cambia mi amor, 2016, Claudia Nicholson, performance documentation, Women of Fairfield
Next, we head up Ware Street to Fairfield Chase. The shops are closed and the fruit is covered but the fluorescent lights are on and the food court makes for a surprisingly good theatre in the round. In the middle of the space is what I can only describe as a sawdust mandala, but, rather than tracing sacred patterns, it depicts flowers, brand logos and the words “Pero no cambia mi amor” (Google translate helps me to decipher it as “But it does not change my love”). The work is a modern version of the traditional alfromba de asserin from Central and South America, created by Claudia Nicholson and the local South American community. The Spanish Speaking Community Choir sings two songs with flute and guitar accompaniment. Then there is dancing with four older women in blue and white ruffles, their feet messing the mandala. Behind me, two young women are itching to join in and are delighted when an inviting wave finally comes.
Once the mandala has been destroyed, we head to the car park for the final performance of the night, Hissy Fit and Maria Tran’s Supreme Ultimate. On the top storey is a platform stage and three large screens on which three women, one on each, perform martial arts drills. On the left, a woman beats a punching bag; in the middle, another does a high kick, resets, rotates and then eventually does a flip. On the right is Maria Tran, martial arts movie actor and artist from Fairfield. She is an elegant mover; even moreso in slow motion, all three screens eventually focusing solely on her, showing footage of her striding through the car park preparing for a fight.
Supreme Ultimate, 2016, Hissy Fit & Maria Tran, performance documentation, Women of Fairfield
After this surprisingly long introductory screening, the live bodies finally arrive. There is the beginning of a dragon dance, but a fight breaks out between the two operators. One woman sends the man packing. Two others strike poses and execute kicks and punches. Tran joins them and they perform another brief series of moves. The movement is fluid but the dramaturgy is awkward. There are some bows and thank-yous, including to the audience for attending, and with that the evening is over, unless of course you’re headed to the Green Peppercorn for the after party.
I find it increasingly difficult to review this genre of performance, as my experience as an audience member seems less important than that of the local participants. It is clear from their enthusiastic documentation of the event as well as their conversations with the audience that they are enjoying themselves. Taken together, the evening’s many parts become a performance of identity, community and hospitality. As an outsider, I feel slightly ambivalent about the encounter and its ethnographic structure.
I’m thinking of Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s famous 1991 essay “Objects of Ethnography,” collected in her book Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums and Heritage (1998). She writes about various genres of ethnographic performance, including museum exhibitions, neighbourhood excursions (often advertised as “discover the food of …”) and multicultural festivals. The overall effect of such performances, she argues, is to cast recently arrived migrants as the ethnographic other. This serves to create a social distance to counter the experience of physical proximity when we pass each other on the street.
While Kirshenblatt-Gimblett was writing about London and New York of the 19th and 20th centuries, the situation in contemporary Sydney is slightly different. With its walking, dancing, drawings—and yes, eating—Women of Fairfield combines these genres into a single evening, but its overall effect is almost the reverse of what Kirschenblatt-Gimblett describes. For this performance seeks to counter Sydney’s social distance by creating physical proximity, if only briefly, by inviting audiences to spend time in a suburb they might otherwise not visit. Of course, the distancing effect of ethnography works for the participants too, who now return to their daily lives and locales with memories of the time they sang in the food court, danced on the roundabout and met strangers at the station.
Ethnographic performance is not a problem per se, but it can involve problematic power relations. Occasionally projects like Women of Fairfield seem haunted by what Joseph Pugliese has called, in a different context, “infrastructural whiteness”—staging projects that are performed by migrant communities but are conceived, developed and credited to organisations and artists that are predominantly white. It seems to me that while these projects often invite inner-city audiences west, the invitation isn’t always returned. Perhaps the next step for C3 West and its collaborators is to contemplate how to reverse the ethnographic gaze: commissioning an Assyrian-Australian video artist to document an Anglican wedding; and encouraging the good people of Potts Point to close their streets for an evening and perform their identity, hospitality and gratitude. And RealTime will send a non-Caucasian reviewer.
In Conversation: Women of Fairfield will be held at the MCA, 1-4pm, 3 December “to reflect on the successes and complexities” of Women of Fairfield.
–
Women of Fairfield, co-curators PYT Artistic Director Karen Therese, MCA Senior Curator Anne Loxley; a C3 West 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, Sydney, 7, 8 Oct
American choreographer Faye Driscoll’s Thank You For Coming: Attendance is all about connection. Beginning with a series of relational activities among the six performers, it increasingly pleats and folds its audience, culminating in an all-encompassing maypole dance. This is quite an achievement, offering a utopian glimpse of people enjoying a sense of connection—a form of community through performance.
As they enter, audience members are asked to take off coats, bags and shoes, prior to settling around a large, raised square. The dancers line up and then enter the square. They form a living tableau, an unruly string of bodies that slowly moves through a series of assemblages. Their shapes are fairly ordinary, a wonky arabesque here, a precarious lean there. They shove, grab, pull and push each other, all the while holding on or touching.
The chain created by these linked bodies slowly rolls off one side of the square dais and through the audience. We watch spectators rise up to manage the oncoming mass. The dancers pause then return, rolling up the top layer of the raised dais before moving onto the other side of the square. These flows disrupt the stability of the audience, its sense of place made temporary.
Thank You For Coming, Faye Driscoll, Arts House
The dais is disassembled to reveal a series of underlying benches that are used to form seating banks around a now empty square. This is filled with a pastiche of interactions, accompanied by a musician singing names which are repeated by the performers who rhythmically jerk from pose to pose in a sequence of exaggerated greetings and responses. This is a pantomime of interaction, characterised by hyperbole and parody. As the musician moves through the long list of names, we perhaps recognise our own.
The effect of this and other successive actions is to slowly bring the audience towards a sense of participation. The finale introduces a maypole around which most (but not all) of the audience circulate, skipping and following the performers. This active form of participation brings joy, reflected in bodies and faces, as individuals are absorbed into the group.
Thank You For Coming is an ontological piece aiming to create a mode of social being through performance. The intention to enact its vision shows a commitment to making a kind of political reality, one which is able to leave a trace in the bodies of the audience beyond participation through mere spectatorship. This is admirable.
Thank You For Coming, Faye Driscoll, Arts House
My reservations are ethical and aesthetic. From an ethical point of view, there was too much of the spectacular for my liking, including a strong dependence upon the fourth wall which the work as a whole purports to deconstruct. For example, in the first half, performers lurched into individual audience members, landing on their laps and peering into their faces, producing nervous smiles at best. People were given props to obediently wave. Some of us were also given ‘jobs.’ Mine was to hold a rope so as to make the maypole shape. Since the performers’ own interactions were marked by hyperbole, it was not surprising that these one-on-one interactions were not greatly nuanced. I was given my orders in a very bossy and urgent manner. Such momentary encounters nonetheless formed the basis of the work’s becoming-community.
I had the feeling that the performers were throwing themselves fully into their task, but not taking a great deal of care how they did so, as if the process of making the work required less attention towards how they moved than to what they wanted to achieve. As a result, I felt that the work’s component sections were instrumentally devised towards result rather than process.
The subtitle of this work is “attendance.” Can we attend to the body in new ways as we attend to each other, so that our work is not merely an instrumental good but transformative of the social corpus?
Watch an excerpt from a 2014 performance of Thank You For Coming: Attendance.
Melbourne International Arts Festival: Thank You For Coming: Attendance, concept, direction Faye Driscoll, choreography Faye Driscoll in collaboration with performers: Giulia Carotenuto, Sean Donovan, Alicia Ohs, Toni Melaas, Brandon Washington, sound design, composition Michael Kiley; Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, Melbourne, 7-10 Oct
Queenstown is a place of contradictions and mythologies. On one hand, the small town on Tasmania’s rainy and remote west coast seems like an unlikely place for an interesting and challenging festival, with director Travis Tiddy acknowledging the “absurdity of having an arts festival in ‘a regional backwater’ on the fringes of cultural activity in the state.” Yet at the same time, its unique landscape, history of mining and changing fortunes makes it a natural location for site-specific art and performance. This year, the name changed from the didactic Queenstown Heritage and Arts Festival to The Unconformity, which refers to a local rock form, the Haulage Unconformity (a touching point of three geological agents). But it’s equally indicative of the festival’s mission to represent an isolated community that doesn’t conform. It’s a festival that embraces the unexpected.
Driving from Hobart to Queenstown is a lesson in the extremes of the Tasmanian landscape. For visitors like myself, travelling there is an integral part of the festival experience. From the Derwent Bridge it’s a winding and hilly crossing through the largely impenetrable South West Wilderness. Emerging in Queenstown, I’m greeted by near naked hills—the result of widespread deforestation due to bushfires, mining and its consequential sulphur fumes, acid rain and erosion. This landscape is still mythologised as a ‘moonscape,’ despite the gradual regrowth.
Participants in We Are Mountain, Mish Grigor, Zoe Scoglio, Unconformity Festival
We are mountain
It’s on this rocky peak that Mish Grigor and Zoe Scoglio’s participatory performance, We Are Mountain, is based. The respectively Sydney and Melbourne-based artists became obsessed with the mountain during a recent visit, declaring, “Let’s be the mountain.” We are loaded onto a bus and driven up via hairpin bends to the Iron Blow lookout while an audio guide-like voiceover provides facts about the history and geology of the site. I learn that Iron Blow was the original open-cut mine established by the Mount Lyell Mining Company in 1884. Audience members from Queenstown laughingly add their own impromptu facts, including a story about one local who was seen throwing whitegoods off the lookout into the now water-filled hole. We are dropped at the turnoff to the lookout and instructed to walk single file slowly up the road. “Feel the ground beneath your feet. Really feel it,” the artists instruct us. We take turns yelling “cooee” off the lookout, listening to the echoes until the wind and horizontal rain force us away from the edge.
My initial admiration for the artists’ bravery and untempered enthusiasm, hosting a dusk performance outdoors in a town where clear days average only 29 a year, turns a little sour as my beanie is whisked away by the wind. At this point, the performers’ spirit of play and celebration seems to far outstrip that of the audience. Their improvisational style and humorous commentary match the absurdity of the situation. One of the pair climbs up a short slope in an attempt to “be legendary.” Exaggerating her struggle up the rocks, she breaths into the microphone, “I feel like one of those white guys who discovered something.”
Replica of The Iron Blow in cake, We Are Mountain, Mish Grigor, Zoe Scoglio, Unconformity Festival
We soon return to town to feast on a replica Mount Lyell fashioned from cake. As we descend into Queenstown to the sounds of ambient music and the occasional recorded cooee, we’re provided with stunning views of Jason James’ light installation, part of the Flux program, in the far-off quarry—a representation of the festival’s thematic and aesthetic coherence.
Flux, Unconformity Festival
Flux
The former limestone quarry-turned-garden with its deep cliffs, natural waterfall and pond proves to be a dramatic and magical music bowl and performance space. With no specific Flux program published, the series of free rolling performances by artists and musicians like Pip Stafford, Omahara, Rob Thorne and Jacqui Shelton encourages visitors to embrace the unexpected and return again and again throughout the festival, despite the lack of shelter from the weather.
Katrina Gill, Dark Water, Unconformity Festival
Dark Water
Like Flux and We Are Mountain, Dark Water (writer Halcyon McLeod) also uses a former mining site as a performance space. Boarding a train at Queenstown’s station, we end up in one of the former Mount Jukes mines around midnight. Over the journey, the initially well-dressed female train attendant (Katrina Gill) becomes increasingly distressed as she descends into grief. The soundtrack, provided via wireless headphones, is a steady monologue of her progressively disconnected thoughts.
The performance is initially sited in a largely empty carriage. Holding onto the walls against the train’s jolting, we form a natural arena around the attendant. For a show about grief, Dark Water has some oddly humorous moments, such as when the attendant stuffs a pudding into a stocking and shoe, creating an object that half-resembles a rock, or a surreal decapitated leg. As we alight at Lynchford station and walk into the train’s blinding headlights, we’re calmly told “she pushes a crystal as big as a bus” as the now dishevelled attendant, pulling her skirt off, runs angrily at the train. The humour is dark—and perhaps represents a therapeutic strategy in the context of sadness and mourning.
The train, the historical stations and the cold, dark mine are fascinating. However, the wireless headphones distract from the performance and surroundings. While the journeying admittedly makes it difficult to provide a constant source of sound, the headphones seem like a poor solution. Aside from the technical problems (mine kept dropping out), the headphones blocked the all-important sounds of the moving train, the river alongside Lynchford station and the drips in the mineshaft. In a steady beat, the water drops into the pools around our feet, echoing in the deep, narrow tunnel, representing the passing of time and an emotional hollowness. Wireless technology works well when isolating and noise blocking effects are integral to the performance, but not here.
Fault Traces, Matthias Schack-Arnott, Unconformity Festival
Fault Traces
Away from the mountain but still geology-themed, Matthias Schack-Arnott’s Fault Traces in the Boy Scout Hall evokes the deep rumble of industry using subsonic frequencies and a variety of resonant objects, including metal, bamboo, rocks, bowls and nets of seashells. Bending over the carefully arranged groups, positioned on a “panel activated by tactile transducers which are fed low-frequency information,” the composer appears half-performer, half-conductor as he orders and reorders objects. Schack-Arnott maintains a swift but light touch despite the increasingly violent frequency vibrations, allowing us to concurrently hear, feel and ‘see’ the various soundwaves.
Geologies
A performance installation, Geologies, explores the body as “inherited geology.” This collaboration between composer and visual artist Leigh Hobba and dancer Wendy Morrow is performed within Queenstown’s Masonic Hall on a crystal-shaped raised stage. The surrounding lights glow through textured woodblock prints that resemble rock faults. Performed by the Southernwood String Quartet led by Thibaud Pavlovic-Hobba, the music is lively and exciting. Hobba at one stage crosses into the audience, playing harmonics to produce a soft, chimelike accompaniment to Morrow’s fluid movements.
Leigh Hobba introduces each movement with a series of words and ideas (“dissonant, river, composure…”) that acts as an interpretative tool, invoking visual images or emotions to overcome the fragmentation and atonality of his score. Although the performance is anything but predictable, Hobba finishes with an announcement: “and then to anticipate…. this!” before leaping at the adjacent piano and striking out a dissonant chord.
Again, art comes back to the unexpected—a theme that describes Queenstown’s serial changes in fortune as much as the festival’s critical edge. The 2014 festival followed multiple mine fatalities and subsequent closure of the Mount Lyell mine, resulting in a significant economic downturn. During the 2014 opening address, the five-metre-tall Angel of the West sculpture (intended to symbolise hope and resilience) accidentally caught fire, an unintentional yet tragically fitting metaphor for a once booming mining town now suffering depression and decay. The Unconformity does not run away from these gritty truths, nor does it romanticise the past. With a criticality that’s rare in arts festivals, The Unconformity is a celebration of community, geology and history in all their contradictions and ‘unconformities.’
Turkish-French film director Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Mustang, her first film, compassionately portrays the plight of five young orphaned sisters living in a small conservative village. When seen riding the shoulders of boys from their school amid the waves on a local beach, their grandmother, shocked by the physical contact, betrays them to their uncle who takes increasingly stern measures to constrain the girls, whose energy and humour, and escape tactics, keep them momentarily buoyant. Worse is to come in this indictment of gender inequality, sexual abuse and rising fundamentalism in Turkey. As the older girls fall prey to depression and arranged marriages, the younger ones maintain resistance. Beautifully filmed and finely directed and acted, Mustang balances its increasing tension and claustrophobia with the youngest girl’s spirited sense of possibility.
5 copies courtesy of Madman Enertainment
Email us at giveaways [at] realtimearts.net with your name, postal address and phone number to be in the running.
Include ‘Giveaway’ and the title of the item in the subject line.
Offer closes 16 November.
Giveaways are open to RealTime subscribers only. By entering this giveaway you consent to receiving our free weekly E-dition. You can unsubscribe at any time.
RealTime issue #135 Oct-Nov 2016
Foreground: Louise Weaver, no small wonder, courtesy the artist and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney; background: Mikaela Dwyer, Empty Sculptures (2008-12), courtesy the artist, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Soft Core is immediately surprising. Hanging high in the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre’s large foyer/exhibition space, Brook Andrew’s two huge balloons (The Weight of History, The Mark of Time, 2015) slowly inflate, deflate and change colours—unusual yellows, pinks, greens and blues. The intense black patterning on the balloons is “inspired by the wood carving of [the artist’s] mother’s Wiradjuri people” (wall note). These creations delicately and patiently project a sense of constant cultural renewal, their size underlining its importance.
Floor: Jim McMurtry (2004), Michael Parekowhai; above: Brook Andrew’s The Weight of History, The Mark of Time, 2015, Soft Core, image courtesy Casula Powerhouse
On the floor, immediately below and taking up much of the foyer space is an inflatable cartoonish rabbit, 12 x 4.5m, lying on its back, one eye closed, tongue hanging out—New Zealander Michael Parekowhai’s Jim McMurtry (2004). Although cute, the sheer size of this bunny is chilling, the artist’s reflection on the sheer scale of the impact of the rabbit on New Zealand’s ecology, a grim inheritance of colonialisation.
Balloons make another appearance in an adjoining gallery, if much smaller, suspended from the ceiling or draped over girders with unexpected weightiness, intense colouring and a sense of indolence. Their unlikely anthropomorphic presence suggests potential movement as well as recalling the distorting objects in Salvador Dali paintings. These witty creations, the Oooh Aaah series (2016), are by Todd Robinson (read an interview here). His balloons, out of our reach, appear to be at once soft and firm, light but heavy, sagging, as if not quite able to support themselves.
Mezzanine: Todd Robinson, Oooh Aaah, 2016, photo courtesy the artist and Galerie Pompom, Sydney. Soft Core, Casula Powerhouse
A cluster of works by Patricia Piccinini also evokes a sense of things near-alive: past life caught in bronze in A Deeply Held Breath (2009), life prematurely aged—a very realistic oversized baby in a carrier—in Foundling (2008), and mutant life in Ghost (2012), a disturbing suspended sculpture in which an amorphous torso with a long-haired groin hangs from a twisted car tyre. The desire to touch, to test the softness and the ambiguous reality of these objects, is dampened by their spookiness.
Mikala Dwyer’s Empty Sculptures (2008-12; she’s been making these since 2003 from transparent, hand-mouldable plastic) suggest roughly formed giant crystals, but air-filled, kin to the show’s balloons and inflatables. These appear, like Robinson’s balloons, intriguingly solid and ethereal at once.
Louise Weaver, Moonlight becomes you (two squirrels) 2002-3, Collection Lisa Paulsen; Soft Core, Casula Powerhouse
With her fantastical animals and a surreal landscape (no small wonder; 2005), Louise Weaver introduces to Soft Core different kinds of softness—the distinctive tactilities suggested by lambswool, cotton, silk and synthetic fur and the traditional crafts associated with women, including knitting, embroidery and crochet. Weaver’s view of the world playfully integrates nature and culture. My favourite work has a very touchable pair of intensely black squirrels—Moonlight becomes you (two squirrels), (2002-3)—poised half-way up a wall, each adorned with a silver brooch and their very long, very furry tails joined by a hanging silver chain, rendering them, if problematically, a desirable decorative acquisition. Another soft/hard dichotomy.
American artist Tony Oursler’s video sculpture, Spectar (2006), in the show’s third space is the only work to engage directly with media technology and with sexuality (Piccinini’s Ghost aside)—something of a surprise given the exhibition’s title. With images of mouths and eyes, small and large, projected onto it, the human-scale, bulbous fibreglass sculpture assumes the three-dimensional softness of a surreal limbless body, awash with rich colours sliding over its rounded protuberances. Behind it turns a starry cosmos as breathy voices urge each other on, ramping up the work’s strange eroticism. Softness here is entirely illusory.
Koji Ryui, Have a Nice Day, Soft Core
Infinitely more down to earth is Japanese artist Koji Ryui’s installation of detritus found in Casula Powerhouse. As with Robinson’s balloons and Weaver’s creatures, little scenarios spring to mind as one takes in the random spread of apparent incident laid out across the gallery floor: a broken wine glass, a dragged flower trailing dirt, an object fallen from its plinth. Personalities emerge in the form of “Have a nice day” plastic bags filled with perhaps sand and moulded into rotund little creatures of various sizes scattered about the installation or left waiting in a cardboard box. Some hang limply on the edges of plinths, wittily honouring Robinson’s balloons. Others gather around half-eaten food, as if stilled by my presence. This is sculpture softened up and wittily responsive to the everyday.
On the mezzanine above the foyer, Kathy Temin’s wonderfully furry orange monuments and pet tombs and a delightfully formal Purple Tree (2105) comprise a contemplative world of their own, of past or alien cultures, or something closer to home—a range of monster cat clawing stands. Brook Andrew’s balloons loom just above me and a downwards glance brings me eye to eye with Michael Parekowhai’s Jim McMurtry—is that rabbit dead or just down for the anti-colonial count?
Kathy Temin, Pet Tomb, 2014, courtesy the artist, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne. Soft Core, Casula Powerhouse
For an exhibition in which I had to constantly suppress the desire to touch, Soft Core proved to be a thoroughly engaging visual experience (there are more fine works than I could mention here), revealing an impressive range of contemporary sculptural practices and detailing multiple degrees of softness, real and imagined, sensual and contemplative, and fun.
……….
Soft Core is within relatively easy reach of people living in Western Sydney and, by train, not too far for Sydney-siders. The train from Central takes an hour (if you select the right one), depositing you at Casula Station for a five-minute walk to Casula Powerhouse (open all week), and the trains are frequent (check for track work).
Soft Core will tour to eight regional venues in NSW and Victoria. The catalogue, which will include tactile elements and critical writing about each artist, will be available shortly.
Soft Core, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre in partnership with Museums & Galleries NSW, curator Micheal Do, commissioned works Tully Arnot, Tully Moore, Todd Robinson, Koji Ryui, Simon Yates, Paul Yore; extant works Brook Andrew, Mikala Dwyer, Tony Oursler, Michael Parekowhai, Patricia Piccinini, Kathy Temin, Louise Weaver; Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, 1 Powerhouse Road, Casula, 15 Oct-4 Dec
The Book of Daughters, three nights of richly varied and purposeful sonic art at Melbourne’s Meat Market, focuses largely on women as subjects and makers. Australian talent—vocalist Carolyn Connors, performance poet Berni M Janssen, harpist Mary Doumany, percussionist Louise Devenish, the BOLT and Hullick-Duckworth Ensembles and Amplified Elephants—will play alongside guest artists from Japan: vocalist Noriko Tadano, Yoshimio (aka Yoshimi P-We of the Boredoms and OOIOO and xxx) on drum kit, electronics and vocals, and shamisen virtuoso Yumiko Tanaka. It’s an impressive and characterful lineup.
I spoke by phone with JOLT Arts Artistic Director James Hullick, musician, composer, nurturer of the Amplified Elephants ensemble of artists with disability, and father of two young daughters—a likely key to the title of this ambitiously conceived event. Hullick is at pains to point out that the event is not solely his vision: “It’s been curated collectively with JOLT and a lot of the artists who have worked with us in the past. It’s a collection of performances presented in 25-30 minute blocks, three different shows per night. It’s a bit like seeing bands but the context is sound art. It’s a model we’ve been using for JOLT events in Japan and it works there and in quite a few Asian countries. The Book of Daughters has come out of our experiences in Asia and that’s reflected in the program with our Japanese guests.”
James Hullick, Rotation Post-Sapien performance, Hong Kong (2015)
The connection with Japan is ongoing, Hullick explains: “JOLT first presented a sort of mini-festival in 2012 in partnership with Test Tone, the Japanese sound art organisation, and we’ve been doing them annually in some form since. They’re significant events in their own way with major acts like Merzbow, Phew and Haino Keiji.”
I ask Hullick what the Asian connection does for JOLT and Australian music and sound art. “Australia needs to wake up to the fact that, at least in the sound art world, it’s part of an international movement. I would argue that sound art is one of the few art movements that has grown up as an international baby rather than necessarily being located in one city or region or country. It’s emerged as international with artists from different countries improvising together and immediately understanding the language they’re working with and doing quite amazing things without heaps of preparation. That’s evidence of an international language.”
I’m curious about the title, The Book of Daughters. Hullick tells me, “We were originally looking at responding to gender balance within sound art, which has been traditionally male-dominated. But, collectively, we didn’t want to call it a ‘women’s event’ or somesuch, because it’s about celebrating great artists, full stop. What audiences will be seeing are different chapters of people’s perspectives on sound art and many of the authors happen to be women. Some of the contents are quite feminist; others are just straight ahead sound art and might happen to be made by a woman, or not.”
Who are the “daughters” in the title? “In my life, I have two daughters, aged five and eight and certainly there are other people within JOLT who have daughters or are daughters. A conversation had been growing about what the future is looking like in terms of gender balance.”
Noriko Tadano, The Book of Daughters
I ask where Hullick’s own contribution to the program, Slow Riven Whirl, fits the theme. “It’s one half of a kind of ‘mirror’ project. Slow Riven Whirl (played on 12 November) is mirrored by Windspoken (10 November). Both works are performed by Berni M Janssen and the BOLT Ensemble. For Windspoken Berni Janssen, a great Australian poet, has written the text and it’s the women of the BOLT Ensemble performing, not the men. Belinda Woods, the ensemble leader, has co-directed Windspoken with Berni. I have directed and written the text for Slow Riven Whirl from the perspective of a father talking to his daughters, but with words delivered by Berni. You’ll hear sentences like “I am your father” uttered in a woman’s voice. The notion of mixed-gender is a big part of the event. I’m talking to my daughters, saying, ‘Look, I’m trying to understand your perspective, what you’re going to grow into, the issues you’re going to face and I really want to help but I really don’t know how to do that…’
“Slow Riven Whirl rolls straight into a performance by Yoshimio, this amazing Japanese drummer and leading sound artist from Japan, an amazing and heroic woman in my eyes. She’s an incredible performer. So, I’m hoping there will be an arc across that night in the way the team has programmed it.” Windspoken, says Hullick, includes some elements of Berni Janssen’s life as a poet and a woman in the context of the Australian landscape, “but not literally; her work is very metaphorical.”
As for instrumentation, Hulllick tells me, “in Windspoken it’s flute, viola, cello and double bass. It’s a smaller ensemble but this means the individual has more room to speak. In Slow Riven Whirl, it’s an ensemble of eight musicians. It’s an interesting dynamic because the text has been written by a man for an ensemble of women plus the orator, the leader, who’s also female, taking on that text and music and translating it into a new context. I think it would be very different if it were performed by men.”
Yoshimio, The Book of Daughters
One of the distinctive nightly features of The Book of Daughters is Sonic Flock, originally presented in the 2013 Melbourne Festival and staged prior to each night’s three works. “There are seven black tepees and, inside each, one performer and an audience member. Overall it’s set up like an installation in a gallery through which people can wander and have intimate experiences for two to three minutes with The Book of Daughters’ artists. Depending which night you attend you’ll encounter Carolyn Connors with her extended technique vocals or Kathryn Sutherland, who’s from the Amplified Elephants, playing found percussion or Yumiko Tanaka on shamisen or Cal Lyle, a Canadian-Japanese musician, playing prepared banjo. You can also hear all the improvisations from outside the tepees—a kind of collective abstract texture. It’s a gentle welcoming to The Book of Daughters.”
Hullick tells me, “It’s quite a big network that’s been involved in this project and next year it’s going to tour to Asia; not all but about half of it. The artists will be collaborating with predominantly female artists in the cities they visit.”
Making it clear that JOLT is not alone in promoting the work of women artists. Hullick says, “We acknowledge Liquid Architecture’s focus on feminist programming and all the work that has gone into other music events that celebrate women.” What is admirable is the carefully fostered interplay between Australian and Japanese sound cultures: “The key is maintaining long-term relationships with particular ensembles, people and organisations within Asia, rather than just show up, do your thing and go home. It just doesn’t work that way in Asia. That’s what I think JOLT has been really good at, these collective relationships.”
With the The Book of Daughters, JOLT and its co-programmers looks to the future, creatively addressing gender balance in sound art, extending cross-cultural relations with Asia, embracing artists with disability and, above all, has programmed with festive intensity great performers, idiosyncratic compositions, collaborations and doubtless remarkable improvisations.
Robert Duckworth at his Resonance Table, The Book of Daughters
Rainer Werner Fassbinder on the set of Berlin Alexanderplatz, 1980
“I had to lead the life I led to be able to make my films.” Fassbinder in The Wizard of Babylon (dir Dieter Schidor, 1982)
The day after the filming of Schidor’s documentary was completed, Rainer Werner Fassbinder died, aged 37. A compulsive creator, with inordinate talent he had made 42 feature films, Berlin Alexanderplatz as a television series and written 26 plays.
The number of works is astonishing but more important is their scope. Has there ever been another film director who has so closely probed a national psyche and its history, from the late 19th century to the challenges of the 70s—the confluence of Baader-Meinhof and state terrorism, homosexuality and, in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), anti-immigrant racism. Fear Eats the Soul will show on the same night as Annekatrin Hendel’s documentary, Fassbinder, in Melbourne and Sydney, amid a strong festival line-up.
“Does it tell you more about the work—which is his legacy—or the man?” These words appear early in Hendel’s feature-length biography. They’re in white subtitles against a white background; I don’t know whose words they are, if quoted or the filmmaker’s. Even so, they invite judgment. Fassbinder is about the man, his relationships and their role in his compulsive output. The film assumes his genius; it’s not an appreciation of his craft. What it tells you about his work is that it was inextricably tied to his life, not how he made the translation of life into film or what shaped his filmmaking virtuosity. These are for other documentaries.
Hendel’s film draws principally on the personal reflections of those who worked closely with Fassbinder. Degrees of proximity—and sometimes brutal separation—in Fassbinder’s relationships with his collaborators are key to his creativity and the film’s power. Actor Harry Baer recalls joining the Action Theater (which became the Anti-Theater) and gradually realising that Fassbinder was the emergent leader, not the director Peer Raben (later, composer for most of Fassbinder’s films). Actor Hanna Schygulla recalls, “I noticed this boy, both touching and intimidating, both vulnerable and predatory, rapacious.” In due course she was seduced by “the ecstasy of acting.” Another key Fassbinder performer, Irm Herrmann, says that drugs and alcohol were not part of the younger artist’s life, just the compulsion to make; “I was totally under his spell.” She lived with him and then others, forming a collective, from which some actors kept a safe distance: “We would have killed each other.”
Hendel initially focuses on the making of Fassbinder’s first film, the noirish/Godardian Love is Colder than Death (1969) which despite being booed at its premiere won a German Film Festival Award in 1970. Volker Schlondorf, who was making Baal (1970; not distributed) cast Fassbinder as the poet. Fassbinder insisted not only that the director find roles for his ensemble and crew but that they all see the daily rushes and cuts. Shocked to find that his pay had been taxed, he demanded gross payments, “which is how he funded his next three to four films.” A TV producer describes Fassbinder presenting “as a sullen, temperamental rock star with a certain tangible aggression.” But in a long meeting, in which he smoked 20 cigarettes and consumed half a bottle of whisky, he negotiated the support he needed, resulting in “a frenzy of production, more and more focused on him.” Film titles flicker by in confirmation. At this stage Fassbinder, uncomfortable with large crews, was working with performers who took on, says Baer, two to three production roles each, resulting in “quick and efficient” filmmaking.
Fear Eats the Soul
Other aspects of working closely together were less agreeable. A principle Fassbinder performer, Margit Carstensen, says waiting to see who would be cast in the next film “was like a competition. Actors were afraid of him.” Stories of the director’s cruelties are chilling, including his casting aside male actors he had been in love with (and with appalling consequences), propelling Baer into his first gay sexual encounter (Fassbinder laughing as he watched), and his pushing Schygulla into on-screen nakedness beyond her comfort zone (she quit at one point).
The one film that gets extended attention is The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), Carstensen revealing that, at the time, she hadn’t realised that the film “was an analysis of Rainer’s love life. He was Petra.” Hendel brings it home, rather cutely, in one of her film’s recurrent animations of imagined storyboard drawings, by having the two actresses in a key scene transform into Fassbinder and his married lover.
The challenges of acting for Fassbinder were clearly considerable. Herrmann was constantly belittled with the director “divulging intimate details” of her life before cast and crew. On the other hand, Fassbinder relied heavily on his ensemble (even as it lessened when he “brought in outside actors and stars,” like Dirk Bogarde in Despair; 1977). In one of a number of filmed interviews, Fassbinder says that he was “trying to develop a form of acting together with the actor, and it involves a development from one film to the next as long as [the director] is inspired by them and they by him.” This “development” was crucial to his output. As one actor puts it, “It was like a machine, road construction advancing slowly but surely.” As one film was being shot, the next was in pre-production under actor Kurt Raab.
A few other films receive close attention; The Marriage of Maria von Braun, for its trenchant account of post-World War II transformation of Germany—“as if nothing had happened,” says Schygulla. Another is Germany in Autumn (1977), an omnibus film with Fassbinder’s contribution widely regarded as the best. Thirteen directors try to make sense of the kidnapping and murder of a German industrialist, kidnapped and murdered by terrorists and the alleged suicides in prison of three members of Baader-Meinhof. Fassbinder sits naked on the floor, speaking on the phone, snorts coke and then argues over a meal with his (actual) mother, Lilo Tempeit, who appeared in a number of his films. Volker Schlondorf says that his fellow directors were mostly shocked by Fassbinder’s approach. As Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times, “It’s typically, intentionally disorienting in the Fassbinder way, photographed and acted with such intense self-absorption that it has the effect of transforming narcissism into a higher form of political commitment.” That narrowing of the apparent gap between the personal and the political was not only a marker of the 60s and 70s but especially of Fassbinder’s potent form of filmmaking,
Fassbinder’s decline, his friends report, was evident; “it was too late,” says Schygulla, who had presented him a farewell bunch of roses at their last meeting. His girlfriend, an editor on his late films, recalls his love for her, his desire for a child, his enduring love of men and a desire to escape the production machine.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Hanna Schygulla
Fassbinder is an engrossing biography. The director’s many collaborators are given ample time to be eloquently critical yet grateful and loyal. Schygulla is a strong presence, working at her painting as she speaks wisely with her characteristic, measured lilt. Fassbinder himself appears on TV monitors in the studio that frames the film, quietly authoritative save for one moment of distress after his play Garbage, The City and Death, had been refused production in Frankfurt (where he had become artistic director of a major theatre company, a short-lived venture) because of the play’s alleged anti-semitism. In the interview excerpt, Fassbinder expresses concern that someone with his record could be so accused. A 1985 production, three years after his death, was stopped after Jewish citizens occupied the stage and later attempts to mount it were challenged.
Annekatrin Hendel’s film gives us the life that led to the films: the rapid turnover of favourites, relationships and productions, complicated sexual relations and, regardless of the completion of so many works of art, profoundly unresolved desires. It left me a little depressed, if buoyed by those collaborators who survived Fassbinder’s clearly monstrous regime, but grateful for the information and rare footage of an artist I’ve long admired. But I’ll soon have to put some distance between the documentary and the Fassbinder films—in order to engage with the art, not the life, however inextricably they are entwined.
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
