Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

December 2016

Artlands is the new “brand” name for the bi-annual national Regional Arts Australia Conference and Festival which this year hosted international speakers alongside delegates from across the nation. Held in Dubbo, its ambitious and densely packed program was animated by the themes regeneration, connectedness and emergence. While it was possible to experience these in various combinations, this report reflects my own interests in the program, focusing on several highlights of its investigation into what we might mean by ‘regional’ in contemporary global culture.

A UK perspective: diversity and community

Skinder Hundal, Chief Executive, New Art Exchange, Nottingham UK spoke about New Art Exchange as a hub of cultural and social reinvention through diversity and experimentation in creative practice, focused on local/global interaction, and the engagement of local audiences by using local histories and practices. As well, he questioned our assumptions about how the arts ecology works, delivering a timely case study on the arts as a driver of inner city regeneration and bringing communities together. Rather than rethinking the idea of region, he proposed that we rethink the idea of centre. This was an exciting proposal, although the differences between UK and Australian regions are very marked.

Art practice and health

Focusing on ways to engage artists as agents of change in immediate and direct ways, exemplary presentations on this complex topic ranged from a discussion of art and social justice to art as a measure of quality of life, especially made meaningful through creative expression, including in the face of death and in tackling a serious crisis, such as HIV in the Free State of South Africa. When health funding is very limited, artists can be instrumental in creating strategies and discourse.

Here in Australia, Kym Rae, Director of the Gomeroi gaaynggal (Babies from Gomeroi lands) program, was very frank about the way fostering creative practice in First Nations communities could have a significant impact on mental health outcomes in much quicker timeframes than a solely medical approach.

Rural routes

On recasting art and theatre practice in rural communities, Henk Keizer, Co-Coordinator of Rural Routes in The Netherlands, spoke about long-term projects in the farming areas of the Netherlands that have needed, and employed, artists to articulate community experiences and concerns to government, commissioning theatre and performance to communicate more effectively. With regard to methodology, including in terms of research and development and the need to invest time in rural locations and communities, this was an effective lesson in the demise of fly-in-fly-out approaches to cultural production.

By contrast, even with a distinguished line-up of speakers—Michael Brand, Director, Art Gallery of NSW, Dolla Merrilees, Director, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Blair French, Director Curatorial and Digital, Museum of Contemporary Art, Caroline Butler-Bowden, Director of Curatorial and Public Engagement, Sydney Living Museums and Steven Alderton, Director Programs, Exhibitions and Cultural Programs, Australian Museum—the institutional presence of large key organisations provided little more than animated press releases (albeit quoting some impressive regional audience numbers for their programs), but a dearth of considered embedding of cultural process over time. The MCA’s C3West, a long-term project in Western Sydney (in partnership with councils and businesses) was an example of artists working with communities to deal with urban social and cultural issues, but without necessarily serving as a transferable model for regional needs.

The exceptions here were Sydney Living Museums, clearly taking the initiative with ongoing programming, and the Australian Museum with its considered repatriation of Indigenous objects program and community building through working with families and in relation to artefacts in its collection. These programs seem symbolic of real institutional change, deep understanding of cultural issues and the inclusion of Aboriginal history.

Taken from Country, Jason Russell, Wala-Gaay, photo Liz Bradshaw

First Nations

The heart of the conference was without question the generous and rigorous presentations by First Nations speakers. I cannot stress enough the power of their direct address—based in personal experience—to move, inspire and galvanise.

In his opening keynote about sovereignty Mark McMillan, Associate Professor, Melbourne Law School invited us to consider creative making as a meeting place, where acknowledging sovereignty is a personal, transformative and mutual experience that takes place through culture and cultural production.

Lee-Ann Buckskin spoke eloquently about mentoring and agency, championing the expertise and experience of First Nations artists and arts workers; and Rhoda Roberts articulated the impact of institutional intent in including First Nations content and context across all aspects of cultural production. I particularly valued her impatience with ‘closing the gap’ rhetoric and her provocation that instead of First Nations people adopting Western cultural aspirations, that the broader population should “sit down with us.” I can only hope that these ideas are taken up by all who attended, and that this translates into action across the sector.

Wala-Gaay

A highlight of the Festival program was a small but coherent exhibition at the Fire Station Arts Centre. Wala-Gaay was an ambitious group show of artists who were part of the Orana Arts Left Field Project, a long-term creative mentoring program in its second year. It presented a collection of powerful, visceral, diverse works engaged with historical references, lived experience and culture in the present. All were by local regional artists who were encouraged throughout the project to work in new ways with previously untried materials.

Jason Russell’s (Worimi) Taken from Country is both a visceral image of violence and colonial rule, and a highly resolved physical presence that brings the viewer into the work. Arresting from the moment you enter the space, neck irons hang in line in front of an old saddle, keys attached—symbols of imprisonment and subjugation, equal parts beauty and horror.

Locked up, by Dylan Goolagong (Wiradjuri), reflected on museum practice and its historical roots in theft and acquisition, asking who has access to and who act as gatekeepers for First Nations cultural artefacts. A series of crosses and carved wooden blocks hidden in a set of old steel lockers, the work questioned viewers’ notions of what is sacred by placing a physical barrier—a closed door—between us and some elements of the piece, while echoing the systems and structures of collection and display.

Our girls by Paris Norton (Gamilaroi) is a lyrical and painstaking memorial to young women who were stolen and taken to homes to be trained for a life of domestic servitude by the Aboriginal Protection Board. Each hand-painted and hand-cut circle of paperbark, as personal as a fingerprint, is an eloquent stand-in for records that were lost or destroyed, and lives profoundly altered, under this regime.

All these works are direct yet densely layered and moving. There is not space here to discuss the equally accomplished works by Aleshia Lonsdale, Alex Nixon and Robert Salt; and credit must also go to mentors Blak Douglas, Jonathon Jones, Chico Monks, Nicole Monks and Jason Wing, and curators Khaled Sabsabi and Emily McDaniel. While there were moments where the viewer could see the influence of a mentor, there was more a sense of artists entering into a field of practice rather than imitation, and the diversity of the work was testament to the benefits of structured support and creative dialogue. It was exciting to see a local event that so clearly stood out in an abundant program of interesting work from around the nation. This is a show that deserves to tour; and I hope to see more work – more bodies of work – by these artists in the future.

Our Girls, Paris Norton, Wala-Gaay, photo Liz Bradshaw

Conference/Festival divide

One of the troubling issues of the event however, was something of a separation between the conference and the festival. This was particularly visible for me as I spoke to local artists who felt ‘priced out’ of a conference where the frameworks and practices that shape the arts system with which they engage were up for debate. While being part of the festival was of course a valuable opportunity, and included artists from other regions as well, there still seemed an unnecessary and problematic divide between the makers and the decision-makers. Few artists were involved in articulating how to proceed in the cash-strapped present. (And if organisers think that the cost to attend was not prohibitive for many artists, then they need to get to know the reality of artists’ incomes a little better.)

Equally, given the ways artists were being recognised as the motor of engagement, community building and delivering outcomes, a dialogue with what artists need to produce these outcomes—over the long term, and with adequate remuneration—should have been an important inclusion. Austerity politics and diverted funding have devastated budgets within the arts, but also in arenas where artists are increasingly the service bearers of not just creative or cultural outcomes, but diversity, health and community outcomes as well. And in this context is it too much to expect inclusivity to extend to queer artists and artists with disability? Both were conspicuous in their absence from the programs I attended.

Rethinking ‘regional’

The conference concluded with a discussion of the future and a panel on thought leadership, bringing together Wesley Enoch, Artistic Director, Sydney Festival, Lindy Hume, Artistic Director, Opera Queensland and Mathew Trinca, Director, National Museum of Australia to imagine futures, collaborations and new approaches. While attempting to redefine the idea of what the regions are—in their diversity—there was a clear call for us as a field to name and promote and value what we already do, and to articulate that value more effectively in order to have it recognised.

I think Wesley Enoch queried the term ‘regional’ in the most productive ways: through speculating about working region to region, relocating large companies to regional towns and suggesting that large established institutions and organisations forego government funding. I took this to mean in favour of the smaller organisations that form such a significant testing ground in the arts ecology. He also proposed no longer taking culture to the regions, instead developing and supporting culture in the regions, and in a global not just national context. He also suggested how we can all take action in the current climate: go to more shows, practice your elevator pitch and meet five strangers and start a dialogue that lasts at least a year.

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The next ARTLANDS will be hosted by Regional Arts Victoria in 2018.

ARTLANDS Conference and Festival, Dubbo, NSW 27-30 Oct

Liz Bradshaw is an artist and cultural researcher. She gave a presentation at ARTLANDS on creative education for dLux Media Arts.

Top image credit: Locked Up, Dylan Goolagong, Wala-Gaay, photo Liz Bradshaw

Betroffenheit

photo Michael Slobodian

Betroffenheit

Given the nature of Wendy Martin’s programming of PIAF 2017, it’s tempting to envisage the festival not as a series of events so much as a place to inhabit—an inclusive space, joyfully drawing in all kinds of abilities, communities, ecosystems and sport through the commonality of art.

Like Wesley Enoch, Artistic Director of the Sydney Festival, Wendy Martin has programmed a festival with a passionate sense of social and moral purpose, celebrating the land shared with the Noongar peoples of Western Australia, addressing environmental and asylum concerns and nurturing artists with disability. These are ongoing themes which constellated around empathy in Martin’s 2016 festival. In 2017 place ranks highly: the need to acknowledge and sustain biodiversity, collaboratively with Indigenous communities, and to explore West Australians’ relationship with water in, says Martin emphatically, “the driest state on the driest continent.” Her focus on opening events that celebrate place with local performance, media art and writing—rather than with imported European spectacle—reveals an aesthetic, cultural and ecological commitment to her new home. Here’s a selection of the works Martin and I discussed.

Boorna Waanginy (The Trees Speak)

photo Tori Wilkinson

Boorna Waanginy (The Trees Speak)

PLACE & DISPLACEMENT

Boorna Waanginy (The Trees Speak)

In a large-scale three-night public event, Boorna Waanginy (The Trees Speak) directed by Nigel Jamieson in Perth’s Kings Park, sound, music, light and animated projections will fill trees with the birds and animals of the Western Australian ecosystem. Participating school students are committing to helping preserve particular species.

Museum of Water, Amy Sharrocks

photo Ruth Corney

Museum of Water, Amy Sharrocks

Amy Sharrocks, Museum of Water

UK artist Amy Sharrocks will heighten water awareness—emotionally, intellectually and aesthetically—by collecting citizens’ water stories (and donated water and bottles) at “gathering points” in Perth and Albany.

Martin tells me that Sharrocks has already spoken with farmers, surfers and also a refugee who had been pregnant on a leaking boat when her waters broke prior to rescue. For the 2018 festival, says Martin, Sharrocks will create an Australian version of her award-winning Museum of Water in which visitors meet performers who tell donors’ stories and see related exhibits. When the Rem Koolhaas-Hassell-designed WA Museum is finished in 2020, the Museum of Water will become part of its permanent collection.

A O Lang Pho

photo Nguyen The Duong

A O Lang Pho

Nouveau Cirque du Vietnam, A O Lang Pho

Place plays a key role in works from Vietnam and America, says Martin. In Nouveau Cirque du Vietnam’s A O Lang Pho, 15 performers use large bamboo baskets to conjure a Vietnamese village encroached on by a city, its sounds and music—traditional form giving way to hip hop. You can glimpse the choreographic and unusual design virtuosity here.

The Gabriels

photo courtesy PIAF

The Gabriels

Richard Nelson, The Gabriels

Another village, Rhinebeck, in upstate New York, is the home of leading American playwright Richard Nelson and the setting for The Gabriels, Election Year in the Life of One Family. This eight and a quarter hour trilogy observes a family (including a piano teacher, playwright, costume designer and producer) whose small town is being taken over by wealthy New Yorkers. They prepare actual food and dine, successively, through the confusion of the primaries, mid-campaign and election day. The audience is offered similar food in the intervals. Although in interviews Nelson doesn’t see his plays as political (he thinks Tony Kushner “makes the cut”), they are important barometers of values under pressure in small l liberal America in what he regards as chaotic and confusing times. Martin describes the trilogy as Chekhovian.

The Encounter, Complicite

image Tristram Kenton & Gianmarco Bresadola

The Encounter, Complicite

Complicite, The Encounter

A different sense of place is played out, largely aurally, to a headphoned audience in Complicite’s The Encounter. With an onstage performer-narrator and sound manipulator, the UK company presents an intensely aural experience that recreates a journey up the Amazon via binaural recording (in which the microphones were ear-positioned), acutely reproducing the spatial experience of human hearing. “In 1969, National Geographic photographer Loren McIntyre became lost in a remote part of the Brazilian rainforest while searching for the Mayoruna people. His encounter was to test his perception of the world…” [press release]. The Encounter has been described as sensorily and culturally disorienting. Martin recalls audience members turning, looking for the sources of sound apparently behind them.

Flit, Martin Green

photo Rowland Thomas

Flit, Martin Green

Martin Green, Flit

Flit is a multimedia song cycle on migration created by English experimental accordionist and composer Martin Green, performed with large-scale paper sculptures and whiterobot’s stop animation and played by Green and a formidable trio: Becky Unthank, Mogwai’s Dominic Aitchison and Adam Holmes. Martin tells me that Flit was inspired by both bird migration and the story of Green’s Austrian-Jewish grandmother.

Inua Ellams, poet-performer, artist-in-residence

Martin is excited to have Nigerian performance poet, graphic artist and playwright Inua Ellams as a PIAF artist-in-residence. His Christian father and Muslim mother fled with him to Ireland and then to England. He was 12 when he arrived in London but still does not have a British passport, despite his creative output. Ellams will perform his biographical work An Evening with an Immigrant and Martin has partnered him with Perth’s The Last Great Hunt to conduct audiences on a six-hour journey, The Midnight Run, through “a city you never knew existed.”

Vertigo Sea, John Akomfrah

John Akomfrah, Vertigo Sea and Auto Da Fé

I saw John Akomfrah’s powerfully immersive, three-screen film installation Vertigo Sea (43 mins) in UNSW Galleries’ Troubled Water exhibition earlier this year. It engenders a kind of contemporary sublime with its visual sweep (from many sources including his own), historical evocation (lone costumed figures on coastal landscapes), dramatic scoring and documentary components, including images of slavery and voiceovers about migration and the flight of refugees. A new work, Auto Da Fé (40 mins), “a fictional narrative that looks at migration over four centuries,” makes its Australian premiere at PIAF.

Jacobus Capone, Forgiving Night for Day

Perth artist Jacobus Capone synthesises place and song in Forgiving Night for Day. On seven locations seen on seven screens, seven Fado singers each greets the dawn in a work that “contemplates the poetic Portuguese word ‘saudade,’ an expression of deep nostalgia and longing for people, places and times irrevocably lost” (program). See images from the work here and hear a little of the beautiful singing here.

PLACE & SPORT

Last year Wendy Martin’s PIAF program featured a British work, No Guts, No Heart, No Glory about empowering young Muslim women through boxing. This year, Martin has two projects. She’s commissioned from Inua Ellams, a basketball addict, a suite of poems about sport and “embedded him in schools that focus on basketball and a youth centre with the highest percentage of Indigenous and African students in Perth.” And she’s programmed a work about women and sport.

Lara Thoms & Snapcat, Before the Siren

In the festival’s visual arts program, curated by Anne Loxley and Felicity Fenner, Melbourne’s Lara Thoms and Perth duo Snapcat are creating a large-scale public artwork about communality achieved by women through sport. It’s timely given the Freo Dockers will be one of the eight teams in the inaugural AFL National Women’s League in 2017. Martin says that the finale will be a party at Fremantle oval, “a cross between halftime entertainment and a political rally.” With works like Before the Siren, Inua Ellams’ poetry and basketball workshops and, in the Sydney Festival, Champions, about women’s soccer (interview) and La Boite’s Prizefighter (review), the relationship between art and sport appears to be flowering (a phenomenon doubtless inspired by Ahilan Ratnamohan’s pioneering football dance).

Opus No. 7, Dmitry Krymov

photo Natalia Cheban

Opus No. 7, Dmitry Krymov

ART & POWER

Dmitry Krymov Laboratory, Opus 7

A highlight of PIAF 2014 was master designer-director Dmitry Krymov’s fabulously playful A Midsummer Night’s Dream (As You Like It) with its giant puppets and players watched by Russia’s new indolent nouveau riche, all fiddling with mobile phones and behaving like aristocrats in the theatre’s box seats. Opus 7 is a more serious work. “A succession of terrible but riveting images,” as one critic put it, the work first evokes the maltreatment by Stalin of Russia’s Jewish population and then, in its second part, portrays the composer Shostakovitch’s oscillation between critique of the state and surrender to its will as his peers were imprisoned or murdered. Recordings of the composer’s propaganda speeches are played but he is realised onstage by an agile actress as a survivor, a Chaplin-esque figure, precisely Krymov’s view of the artist.

The work’s images are persistently surreal—disembodied limbs, a 12-foot Mother Russia (fond but murderous), large photographs of the dead, Jewish figures (like ghosts) painted on a wall by the performers and then cut out, unleashing an enormous storm of torn newsprint; “is this what happens to the truth?” asks Martin. Shostakovitch grapples with three outsize pianos. Such is the challenge to his craft under dictatorship. This is a work I’d travel to Perth to see. You can glimpse some of it in this trailer and, spoiler alert, if you intend seeing Opus 7, avoid longer excerpts from Opus 7 on YouTube.

The work’s title refers to the Scherzo in E flat Major, Opus 7, written by the student composer in 1923-24; it’s already indicative of his characteristic manipulations of mood, playfulness and irony, but just as Stalin was assuming power after Lenin’s death.

Lola Arias, The Year I Was Born

photo David Alarc

Lola Arias, The Year I Was Born

Lola Arias, The Year I was Born

Another work about political oppression is Chilean artist Lola Arias’ The Year I was Born. Martin tells me, “She works in documentary theatre, between fact and fiction. Some years ago in Argentina, where she grew up, she’d created a work with young people whose parents had been murdered by the military government. She was then asked to do the same for young Chileans who appear in the production, their parents victims of the Pinochet regime, and one young man whose uncle was Pinochet’s lawyer.”

DANCE

Crystal Pite & Jonathan Young, Betroffenheit

Leading international choreographer Canadian Crystal Pite has collaborated with actor Jonathan Young to make Betroffenheit, a dance theatre work, says Martin, “about bewilderment in the face of disaster,” in this case the deaths of children. Alex Ferguson, reviewing in Vancouver for RealTime, wrote that, although clearly about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and addiction, “there’s no particular trauma specified but many of us in the audience know that performer Jonathan Young of the Electric Company has sourced his own story… With effort I’m able to pull out of the emotional morass and take Betroffenheit in as a work of art.” It’s a demanding work in which Young speaks the words that run through his mind and a dancer doppelganger gives physical expression to his attempts at survival, climaxing, says Wendy Martin, in one of the most remarkable solos she’s seen.

Anthony Hamilton, Alisdair Macindoe, Meeting

photo Gregory Lorenzutti

Anthony Hamilton, Alisdair Macindoe, Meeting

Antony Hamilton Dance Projects, Meeting

The meeting of the title of Antony Hamilton and Alisdair Macindoe’s dance work is an increasingly complex and fateful one between the dancers and 64 small percussive robots (created by Mcindoe). Jana Perkovic wrote in her review for RealTime, “the movement itself is so precise, irregularly paced and randomly organised, that watching it is never less than mesmerising.” Because Meeting had only been seen in Melbourne in 2015 before garnering overseas acclaim, Martin thought it vital to include it in her program. Hamilton and Macindoe are remarkable dancers, masters of fast intricate articulation and states of temporal suspension.

Meeting Place

With Arts Access Australia, PIAF is hosting a national forum on arts and disability featuring special guest Jenny Sealey, Artistic Director of leading UK disability theatre company Graeae, who co-directed the London 2012 Paralympic Opening Ceremony. Martin says that Sealey’s work ranges across installation, theatre and opera and talks such as “dissecting Sarah Kane’s play Psychosis 4.48 in terms of how access can be made central to artistic decisions.” For PIAF she’ll conduct workshops and deliver talks. For Martin, the forum is part of a four-year commitment, which commenced in 2016 with among other things, revelatory performances by Claire Cunningham.

Wendy Martin’s positioning of Perth and Western Australia as central to her festival, while drawing in international works which connect thematically and excite with new forms, is at once celebratory and exploratory.

Wendy Martin

photo Frances Andrijch

Wendy Martin

PIAF 2017: Perth International Arts Festival

RealTime issue #136 Dec-Jan 2016

Walyja Ngurra, 2016, Ngamaru Bidu and Sohan Ariel Hayes, Light Geist

photo Eva Fernandez

Walyja Ngurra, 2016, Ngamaru Bidu and Sohan Ariel Hayes, Light Geist

Like moths drawn to light, humans have been magnetised by this ephemeral force, whether the light of the skies, fire or electric light. In ancient Greek philosophy and the book of Genesis darkness was banished to all that was considered wrong, pushed into the depths of the psyche, whereas light was seen to represent good. This has troubling social, cultural and racial ramifications, as is argued by writers such as Richard Dyer, who problematises the ‘culture of light’ in White, Essays on Race and Culture (Routledge, 1997).

More literally, electric light has utterly transformed our being in the world. It has impacted upon natural circadian rhythms, hidden the stars of the night sky with light-pollution, changed work and leisure habits and radically defined our consumption of culture through media.

The exhibition Light Geist curated by Erin Coates at the Fremantle Arts Centre aesthetically deconstructs the opposition of light and dark. New works by Ella Barclay, Ngamaru Bidu and Sohan Ariel Hayes and Sam Price, present the phenomenon of light as a powerful, ambiguous and seductive medium, where darkness and light, both literal and symbolic, are woven into each other. The artists wield light in a way that is counter to the habitual passive consumption of screen content. You can step inside the light, blow it away and witness an intense field of projection-mapped hexagonal forms. Darkness is not banished by these artists but rather it has informed the creation and exhibiting of their works.

A clue to this lies in the tripartite English translation of the German term ‘Geist,’ as mind, spirit and ghost. Each of the works links to one of these categories, defining the way they tackle light, while also conjuring darkness.

Hive Mind, Sam Price, Light Geist

photo Rebecca Mansell

Hive Mind, Sam Price, Light Geist

The dark recesses of the mind become the source of inspiration for Sam Price. In Hive Mind he has CNC-ed (computer numerical controlled. Eds) a model of a brain that protrudes from the wall as a cluster of white hexagonal forms, split into two as indicative of left and right brain. This becomes the screen for a tight, icy white projection coupled with a pumping electronic soundtrack. The rhythm of the light is controlled by data taken from a scan of Price’s own brain. The light dilates, then disappears only to reappear and shimmer across the surface. The effect is hypnotic, appearing almost holographic while reminiscent of the eclectic visual spectacles accompanying electronic music acts.

Ella Barclay gives us ghostly figures emerging from mist in This Comes to You From the Past. Three rectangular pools are suspended with wires that weave through clouds of mist, the blend with technology recalling science fiction movie scenes. As with the Cylon birthing pools in Battlestar Galactica, it suggests some ghostly or alien life form will appear from within. Instead, the vision is fairly quotidian, with a projection of bodies of swimmers filmed at night from above. There is nonetheless something transcendental and otherworldly about them and the way they float. This is emphasised all the more by their disappearance when the mist is blown or brushed aside to reveal the floor through the glass bottom of the tanks.

This Comes To You From the Past, 2016, Ella Barclay, Light Geist

photo Eva Fernandez

This Comes To You From the Past, 2016, Ella Barclay, Light Geist

The idea of spirit courses through Walyja Ngurra, the work of Ngamaru Bidu and Sohan Ariel Hayes. Ngamaru is a senior member of Parnngurr in the Western desert. She paints ancestral connection to land with close attention to fire cycles. The burning of the land leaves the blackest black out of which springs new growth. Her use of colours is irrepressibly vibrant and the canvas comes to life, dynamically animated by an intense spectrum of warm tones. Hayes has collaborated with Ngamaru to translate her paintings into the digital realm. These are animated in a 180-degree floor to wall projection coupled with sounds of the outback and Ngamaru singing and are quite unlike more familiar encounters with abstract projection of Indigenous painting.

Although technology has exacerbated a denial of darkness, Light Geist, as with many of the dark spaces of media arts, challenges the bifurcation of dark and light by seeing the darkness within the light, celebrating ambiguity and complexity. Forms are half glimpsed, ancient stories are brought to life and activity of the mind is made manifest. Darkness feeds into each of these works as part of a series of ghostly, spiritual and cognitive encounters with light.

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Light Geist, curator Erin Coates; Fremantle Arts, Centre, 19 Nov 2016-22 Jan 2017

Perth-based freelance writer and lecturer Laetitia Wilson is the partner of Sohan Ariel Hayes.

RealTime issue #136 Dec-Jan 2016

Cat Jones

photo courtesy the artist and Sydney Festival

Cat Jones

When I was in my early 20s I became obsessed with making my own perfume. In particular I wanted to capture the scent of my favourite flower, the freesia. Weekly I trekked to Rookwood Cemetery to gather baskets full of flowers that grew wild there, then layered them between oiled muslin cloths in an attempt to extract their fresh, sweet smell. After a month’s steeping and changing, steeping and changing, I wrung out my oily rags to reveal what could only be described as a sweaty, meaty scent, with undertones of rot. I named it “Essence de Burger Ring.”

From this I learned that perfumery is alchemical and from sweet things horrendous smells can emerge and vice versa. (For example, sweet musk was originally derived from unpleasant substances in the gland of a range of animals including the musk deer, the musk rat, the musk duck and even the crocodile, where you’ll find it nestled away in the cloaca.) Artist turned conceptual perfumer Cat Jones has been dabbling in this mysterious art for a while now and, at the invitation of the Sydney Festival, will be exploring the scents, both sweet and rank, that might be distilled from this big, bad, beautiful, mixed blessing of a city called Sydney.

Leading with the nose

Olfactory elements have been present in Jones’ previous works Somatic Drifts and Anatomy’s Confection, but it was not until Port Adelaide’s Vitalstatistix commissioned her to create a work in 2015 for their Climate Century project that scent became the central element, materially and thematically.

Jones’ Century’s Breath responds to the site of the LeFevre Peninsula in South Australia which is called, in the language of the Kaurna people, Mudlhannga, and translates as “the nose place.” Through conversations with locals, peers and passersby the artist gathered visions of the future, more specifically “olfactory portraits” of it. She explains the process: “Each person has their story documented and describes the smell of the idea or the place or the habitat and gives it a title…I act as a verbatim scribe with a few tweaks. So it comes in forms that are either prose or poetry or block words—the writing form changes because everyone expresses themselves in a different way.” The resulting installation took place at the South Australian Maritime Museum and contained a series of smellable “olfactory landscapes” and “commemorative perfumes,” along with brief text evocations that include the scent concept, the aroma description and the materials used to create the smell. The work won the Sadakichi Award for Experimental Work With Scent in the Art and Olfaction Awards 2016 presented at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

Essence de Sydney

Subsequently Jones was approached by Sydney Festival to create a work along the lines of Century’s Breath for the 2017 festival. For this manifestation, Jones says, “[Visitors] will come into a room that is kind of like a social space. I will have two artists who are there to talk to them—engage them in conversation. There will be five tables, one for each of the themes— Competition, Extravagance, Resistance, Democracy, Landscape—the key identifiers of Sydney’s personality or Sydney’s foundations. In each of the tables will be embedded audio excerpts from interviews I’ve had with selected participants over the last month or so—two for each theme. Visitors will listen with headphones and then on each side of the table will be the smell that has emerged from the [interview]…The scents are on the inside of a ceramic cloche which will sit upside down on a ceramic plate. People can lift it and sniff—almost like a wine tasting in some ways.”

The 10 interviews were conducted with “people from all different walks of life who have a unique relationship to Sydney and the theme”: feminist author and publisher Anne Summers, Indigenous elder and environmentalist Aunty Fran Bodkin; creative entrepreneur, performer and accessibility advocate Sarah Houbolt; academic and social housing expert Michael Darcy; Kamilaroi political activist Lyall Munro Jnr; journalist and TV presenter Patrick Abboud; documentary maker and activist Pat Fiske; photographer/performer William Yang; and author and architecture critic Elizabeth Farrelly. Jones says, “I wanted to capture a diversity and nuance. To build an olfactory portrait of Sydney you need a lot of input, it’s not something that one person can decide. [The interviews are] installed in a group, as if they are in conversation with each other [and] the two scents on each table are in conversation as well.”

To create the scents, Jones has undertaken extensive research, including a residency in 2015 at the Institute of Art and Olfaction in Los Angeles. In preparation for Scent of Sydney she has a residency at the University of Technology’s Science Super Lab, where she is generating the 10 signature fragrances, an exciting process for her. “I have found a methodology that I love—[in particular] the scale; the macro and micro. This tiny, tiny scale that has a huge emotional and [temporal] impact inside you. [Scent] has a materiality and an ephemerality that is immediate, or in the case of base notes, can last for days. Each of the choices in the making has an impact on the concept you’re trying to communicate so I find it is rich in conceptual materiality.”

Cat Jones

photo courtesy the artist and Sydney Festival

Cat Jones

To tell a smell

With our sense of smell being so subjective I was curious as to what kind of language Jones is finding people use to describe these olfactory imaginings. “Every person is incredibly different and that’s reliant on their scent history, their sense memory and their relationship to scent itself. I don’t know about other languages but particularly in English we don’t necessarily have words that describe smells. We have words that describe things that are like smells or things that might emanate smells, so we describe the thing rather than the smell. Descriptions are of the literal object; or metaphors [are used]; or sometimes people will describe emotions around a particular smell, rather than the smell itself; or make a moral judgement whether it’s good or bad. There’s always a moral judgement. But some people are able to describe texture and smell’s dynamic. Does it emit? Does it linger? There’s a movement, a choreography essentially in the sense of smell.”

Scent-carried conversation

While scent is the carrier, conversation is definitely the key to this work and Cat Jones’ relational art practice. During our interview, she deftly manages to turn the tables and I find myself a participant in the kind of discussion in which a visitor to the space might find themselves. Through gentle interrogation I am encouraged to concoct a conceptual fragrance called “Grinding through to Green,” that smells of grinding metal and human sweat with an after-tang of dusty city greenery, that describes my feelings about Democracy in this currently Baird-bullied city. My conversation joins those of other audience members to be compiled into an online archive for wider access.

But don’t expect to come home with your own sample swatch of Sydney’s Democracy or Competition or Landscape. Resisting the demand for takeaways is partly an environmental consideration, but Jones is also hoping to slow participants down so they can “immerse themselves in each scent and the conversation it came from…They will verbalise the experience, describing it rather than just saying, ‘Here, smell this’.” This, in addition to a comprehensive public talks program confirms that for Cat Jones, Scent of Sydney really is all about dialogue and communication, which is timely because in this corporate capital-driven city, where culture fights for every waft of sweet air, there’s a lot we need to talk about.

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Sydney Festival: Cat Jones, Scent of Sydney; Carriageworks, Bay 19, 7–29 Jan, 10am-6pm; public conversations, 10, 11, 17, 18, 24, 25 Jan, 6pm–7pm; FREE

You can buy the limited edition scent Radical Ecologies from the work Somatic Drifts here and samples and the boxed book set from Century’s Breath here.

RealTime issue #136 Dec-Jan 2016

I’m chatting with Robbie Avenaim amid the rattle, clash and clatter of his Motorgenic exhibition at Melbourne’s Substation when he explains that this is a retrospective not of his work, but of his instrument, the Electronic Motorised Stick (EMS). He says this with a real affection and respect that stops just shy of anthropomorphic. This sentiment is affirmed as he goes on to describe his robotic creations not simply as instruments but as collaborators that he uses to push his own skills as an improvising musician.

Given Avenaim developed his Semi-Automated Robotic Percussion System (SARPS) as a performance tool, it’s fascinating to see the methodology very successfully deployed as a series of kinetic sound sculptures. If you approach the three-room installation in a roughly clockwise direction, you experience the evolution of Avenaim’s collaborative partner from shop-purchased vibrator (cheekily presented on a plinth, under glass, like a precious archaeological artefact) to the first model Electronic Motorised Stick whose sideways action is limited to playing a single drum, to the 360 degree multi-instrumental version. Then on to his latest work which sees the stick robot let loose on both vertical and horizontal planes. The learning process for both artist-maker and robotic instrument is clear, each new variation refining the “musculature” and increasing the range to include even more interaction with chance.

The first Electronic Motorised Stick was the EMS180°. Inspired by the mechanics of the vibrator that he had been using in his expanded percussion performances (a short sample of which is included on a small monitor in the room), Avenaim attached a small DC motor with a counterbalance to a drumstick and then strung it up so that it could hit things. In this first iteration the stick is constrained to a 180° range by two metal rods attached to the frame of a tom tom. The drum is covered in felt and on it is placed a small gong. Consequently, rather than an arrhythmic drum roll, the sonic results are soft thuds, metallic thunks and an occasional higher ring as the stick makes contact with the gong that wobbles around the surface trying to escape the beating. The modification of the drum and its surface indicates that Avenaim’s interest is in creating unexpected sonic outcomes, not simply in the perceived novelty of autonomous playing.

Releasing the EMS from its metallic bondage, the second installation, EMS 360° sees the vibrating stick suspended in a long drop from the ceiling and mechanised so that it continuously rotates in clockwise direction. As it does so it makes contact with a circle of carefully placed objects on the floor—metal pipes, gongs, porcelain bowls, woodblocks. Set to a fast frequency, the hyperactive stick skips across the objects that are all differently textured, yet have a similar bright hollow timbre— a ‘tick tocki-ness.’ This is a music of relentless action—sonic markers of seconds irregularly tripping away much faster than Greenwich Mean Time.

The final installation EMS 360° Mobile, allows the motorised stick access to movement not only across the horizontal but also the vertical plane. While this introduces more chaos, curiously the result is less hyperactive and more mesmeric than the previous installation. This has to do with the speed of the stick’s frequency and its length but also with the hovering grace of the large-scale mobile that Avenaim has constructed from long metal tubes to counterbalance the vibrating stick. Subtitled “a work-in-progress,” this exploratory feel is built into the work as the stick tests the territory, tapping its way across the floor, on which are placed large cymbals, bass drums and snares that produce a weightier breed of percussive sounds.

Like an obstacle course or training ground there is also a range of wooden blocks among the instruments that encourage the EMS to ascend to different heights and to bounce to different areas of the playing field. Here you can really see the machine negotiating its environment as the stick gets caught in little micro-rhythms between objects before ricocheting off into other new zones and patterns. Nothing is repeatable and almost anything is possible, yet there are clearly rules at work—mechanical, mathematical, physical and aesthetic. While I’m in the gallery Avenaim adjusts some of the objects and the instrument recalibrates itself to a new world order. “In-progress” is the very nature of this piece: it can never, and should never be resolved.

During our conversation, Avenaim is keen to emphasise that for him, this exploration has always been about how to be a better musician by learning from these mechanised minds. It is this humble yet deeply conceptual engagement that makes these works so elegant and convincing as kinetic installations. The form is very much defined by the function, opening up the awe of physics-in-action. This is best illustrated by the small study-type work in the first room that comprises a metal ring suspended 30cms off the floor. As the DC motor in the ceiling turns the metal object spins in a beautiful undulating arc—like rings orbiting a planet. I asked Avenaim about this curiously silent work and he said that when he installed it, it was touching the floor so that the circling produced a metallic sound, but that the continuous action has caused it to wind around itself, gradually lifting the ring further and further off the ground. He prefers to leave it this way, seeing the work now as a visual study of oscillating frequencies. It’s this sense of curiosity and wonder that makes Robbie Avenaim’s Motorgenic a very satisfying and cohesive exhibition, visually, sonically and conceptually.

Kupka’s Piano perform four works in an all Chris Dench show: two solo works from when London-born Dench was in Europe in the 1980s and two recent ensemble pieces written since his move to Australia in the mid-90s.

The performing space has been reworked for the night, the usual sound-deadening curtains drawn back to reveal an old roller door and hipster brick. Gives the room a bit more bounce and reverb. Dench and the other “complexists” (Ferneyhough, Finnissy, Barrett, etc) often layer highly complex individual parts into dense textures. One can listen for the individual lines but also listen to all that activity as a sonic mass. By setting up a livelier space Kupka’s Piano let the room acoustic subtly impose itself on each instrument in support of the “sound mass” interpretation of Dench’s work.

The first work is Flux (2016), specifically written for Kupka’s Piano and premiering tonight with composer attending. Flux beautifully illustrates the tension between individual line and ensemble coherence. It is as though the instruments each express their own agency yet somehow coalesce their individuality into periods of profound cooperation. Throughout there is a sense of anticipation, instruments waiting for a cue or maybe their own need for expression, and then bursting into action when the time is right. I think of summer, bobbing in the water with dozens of others, singular in our thoughts as we wait for that perfect wave. And when the perfect wave comes, we ride the wave together, each in our own way.

The other large piece, eigenmomenta (2001), makes more use of massive, warm and embracing bass sonorities and, rather than the individual agency of Flux, I hear lots of follow-the-leader as parts begin on one instrument to be picked up and elaborated by the others.

For many, eigenmomenta and Flux (and the “new complexity” works generally) are the definition of rhythmically fiendish, yet I’m bouncing in time with the conductor so the musical pulse is clear. The performers are also nodding their bodies so maybe the difficulty of the work—see the scores on Dench’s website for examples—leads the performers to signal a strong pulse for themselves and each other as a deliberate performance strategy. There is no doubt that any underlying complexity is in complete service to a musical purpose deep with feeling.

Vier Sarmstädter Aphorismen (1989), four short and very lovely pieces for flute, was written when Dench was living in Europe. Shared between two performers, the works stretch and repeat fragments into longer lines. The mood shifts from pastoral lyricism to melancholic interiority, the tone of the performers rich and subtle. Masterful writing and a showcase for Dench’s fondness for flute. A perfect contrast to the works for full ensemble.

Sometimes reviewing a concert can be a drag—maybe the work is just not that interesting, or the performances not that good and it is hard to think of anything to say. But sometimes reviewing is difficult because the concert is such a pleasure that I really don’t want to be listening-to-write, I just want to sit back and enjoy the unfolding moment. This was that sort of concert.

Kupka’s Piano: Singular Vectors: A Chris Dench portrait concert, performers: flutes Hannah Reardon-Smith, Jodie Rottle, clarinets Macarthur Clough, violin Lachlan O’Donnell, cello Katherine Philp, percussion Angus Wilson, piano Alex Raineri; Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, Brisbane, 2 Dec

An opening confession: this writer knows nothing about sport and often finds the very sound of sports commentary mildly repellant. However, like many sports-obsessed art lovers, Champions choreographer Martin del Amo is betwixt and between. He tells me, “When I open the newspaper, I am torn between the sports pages and the arts entertainment section. Then of course there is the gossip column that probes the ins and outs of both worlds.”

Celebrity gossip—titillating hearsay and tall tales—is an important facet of the public’s attraction to sport, according to del Amo. He notes that a professional sporting match begins with the ‘before hype,’ involving scrutiny of the players and coaches, their recent form, performance record and in some cases their personal lives. By spinning conjecture and multiple predictions, the spectator’s interest is snared long before they even book their tickets to the match. The speculative dissection of a player’s reputation, and of course the heightened physical stakes of the game itself, an almost ‘life and death’ aspect, as del Amo emphasises, are integral to making sport accessible to a diverse public.

Bolstered by increased arts funding in Western Sydney and aware of arts/sport disparity, Champions’ producer, FORM Dance Projects, is keen to participate in an outreach type program to cross-fertilise between different groups, such as a highly visible football club and a burgeoning dance community. FORM approached del Amo in 2015 with the hybrid concept for Champions already in the incubation stage. What followed was the assembling of an unbeatable crack squad of fellow artists, designers and consultants.

The team

For the creation of Champions for the 2017 Sydney Festival del Amo has gathered an impressive line-up of 11 dancers, an all-female cast who are in their prime and at the top of their game (excuse the football analogy). The size of the cast alone is a rare feat for a local dance work and these dancers bring with them a diverse and complementary range of experience and expertise. The ace team will be graced with a mystery mascot, and they have received advice and coaching from some of Sydney’s top sporting players—the women from Western Wanderers W-League. Even some members of the Matildas dropped in to deliver a pre-match pep talk. (For those who, like me, are less than sporty, the Matildas are our national women’s football squad).

Del Amo particularly picked up on their professional sports psychology advice on the concept of ‘winning the moment’ and he sees this approach can be usefully applied to a dancer’s focus on being ‘in the now.’ Onstage, as on the field, each play, each move, requires full attention and it is important to see that each and every moment is as strategically important as any other.

Moves & strategies

The building of a new gestural or choreographic vocabulary can be a choreographer’s holy grail, and there are a few unique ingredients in the formulation of the Champions’ lexicon. Apart from del Amo’s evident interest in the sporting world, this sport/dance crossover undoubtedly had its origins in his exchange with soccer playing performer Ahilan Ratnamohan, who is the project’s training consultant. (His 2009 groundbreaking work Football Diaries, made with Lee Wilson and UTP, brought Ratnamohan’s story and deft dance-like moves to the attention of the contemporary performance scene.) In 2011 in the lead-up to their collaboration, Mountains Never Meet, del Amo and Ratnamohan traded moves and training methodologies. While Ratnamohan offered the agile footwork and swift direction-changes of soccer, del Amo countered with Body Weather’s MB (muscle and bone/mind and body) practice. Coincidentally, many MB moves are derived from Body Weather founder Tanaka Min’s basketball training.

Woven into the mix, influenced by European conceptual dance artists such as Xavier le Roy and Jerome Bel, is del Amo’s ongoing exploration of ‘reduced’ movement, where choreographies are often created by simply walking at different speeds combined with a grammar of spare repeated gestures which reconfigure—in the space and the audience’s imagination—through patterns built over time into a kinetic composition of accumulation and palimpsest. Like his other choreographic heroes Pina Bausch and Alain Platel, del Amo is interested in exits and entrances, overlapping actions and multifocal points of action and attention. “Now at last I have a group large enough to play with these strategies,” he says. Bringing his usual cool cerebral approach together with the blood-pumping character of the sports arena promises a potent confluence. With the luxury of 11 high-powered dancers and the gathering force of some excellent collaborators there is the potential for composition that slides between minimalism, populism and post-postmodern complexity. I just hope the in-game sports commentator, Seven Network sports presenter Mel McLaughlin, can keep up!

Extremes and agonies

Del Amo and I ruminate further on where the edges blur between ‘elite’ athletes and ‘elite’ dancers, particularly in their cultivation of essential modes of preparation for the body and for the mind. Both groups train their bodies intensively, both take direction from outside experts (coach, director, health professionals), both are likely to suffer performance anxiety or pre-match nerves, both engage in physical and psychological warm-ups, both require intense dedication to their chosen pursuit. Dancers, like athletes often push their bodies to extremes and are liable to sustain injuries. Notably though, as del Amo points out, “the visibility of difficulty and success is entirely different in dance.” Dancers are much less likely to be rewarded for showing pain or incapacity and will often dance on stoically after a stage injury, hiding their agony. On the other hand, sporting matches are sometimes closer to gladiatorial contests; spectators love a bit of biffo and will valorise a player who fights on despite a dislocated joint, tendon strain or a spray of blood and mud.

Imagine this…

As the lights go down on Champions in Carriageworks’ enormous Bay 17, exhausted sweat-soaked dancers limp from the stage, a few visibly in pain, blood seeping from open wounds, the odd bone fractured and ligament torn. The audience are on their feet. Some of the volatile crowd are booing, some cheering wildly, chanting their favourite’s name amid whistles and catcalls. There is a media scrum backstage. “How did that go for you?” Flash of cameras. “Did you do enough preparation?” “Was it tougher than you expected?” There is sweat and there are tears. Reporters question the breathless dancers and the overwrought director before speaking directly to camera with their analysis of the performance. The forensic examination of dramaturgical fault and/or conceptual victory, alongside commentary on the dancers’ presence and their gestural virtuosity, continues for days if not weeks in the press and on social media. This is the usual scenario after a contemporary dance work. Isn’t it?

Champions, director Martin del Amo; Associate Artist Miranda Wheen; performers Sara Black, Kristina Chan, Cloé Fournier, Carlee Mellow, Sophia Ndaba, Rhiannon Newton, Katina Olsen, Marnie Palomares, Melanie Palomares, Kathryn Puie, Miranda Wheen, commentator Mel McLaughlin,dramaturg Julie-Anne Long, composer Gail Priest, video design Samuel James, lighting Karen Norris, design Clare Britton, training consultant Ahilan Ratnamohan, executive producer Annette McLernon, producer FORM Dance Projects

Much more than an entertainment about a compulsive sexter, Weiner, directed by Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg, examines the the 2013 New York City mayoral campaign of disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner, two years after his resignation from the House of Representatives. The candidate is fascinating: as one reviewer wrote, the film “captures him in the fullness of his ambition, passion, intelligence, serial contrition and bizarre self-delusion.” It also tracks the media response—horrified, fascinated, gleeful—and Weiner’s staff as they try to bottle escalating revelations and their own shock. It’s amazing that Weiner gave himself, family and friends so willingly to his documenters, but the film reveals a personality whose courage and egotism lent him perfectly to the venture.

Email us at giveaways [at] realtimearts.net with your name, postal address and phone number to go in the running.

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Bangarra Artistic Director Stephen Page's striking debut feature film centres on tensions felt by a young man caught between an ancient, still vibrant Indigenous culture and a competing, feverish modernity played out across Sydney streets and landscapes.

The strong core cast features Hunter Page-Lochard as the teenage boy, Aaron Pedersen as Suicide Man, a raging alcoholic, and Yolngu elder Djakapurra Munyarryun in what is essentially a full-length dance movie—a true rarity in Australian filmmaking.

Greeted with praise in The Guardian and Variety, Spear was less enthusiastically received elsewhere. Perhaps set dance passages, little dialogue and minimal plot were inevitably limiting, but Dan Edwards, in his review for RealTime, “Men’s Business in another world,” points to fragmentation and a curiously static filming of the dance. Nonetheless, he sees Spear as “a probing experiment, a first step into a new realm by one of our leading dance makers. Experiments are becoming increasingly rare in our constricted screen environment, so let’s hope this is a beginning, and not an intriguing one-off for Australian Indigenous dance on screen.”

Spear, director Stephen Page, screenplay Justin Monjo, adapted from Bangarra Dance Theatre's Spear/Skin

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Artist John Gillies, whose choices of form range across and critically integrate performance, moving image, installation, sound and music with a particular focus on the history of film, has recently completed Witkacy & Malinowski: a cinematic séance in 23 scenes. His screen works have included Techno/Dumb/Show (with The Sydney Front; 1991), Armada (video installation; 1998), The Mary Stuart Tapes (1999), My Sister’s Room (2000), The De Quincey Tapes (2001), Divide (2006) and Road Movie (2008). These didn’t prepare me for Witkacy & Malinowski’s historical characterisations, narrative, formal shooting and heightened naturalism, but, as anticipated when coming to a new work by Gillies, not everything is what it seems. It’s an intriguing film, at once accessible and formally disconcerting, invoking the radical spirit of the great Polish playwright Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, nicknamed Witkacy (1885-1939), an artist who has long fascinated me.

SNO127—John Gillies

Around the time I first saw Witkacy & Malinowski…, I visited SNO Contemporary Art Projects in Sydney’s inner west to see SNO127—John Gillies, curated by fellow artist Ruark Lewis. The selected abstract, non-objective works 1982-present made for engrossing viewing and listening. Dense, scratchy verticals in Scalpel/Wood/Table (1982-2004) soon turn horizontal, white blobs form and mutate behind, and sounds become increasingly train-like in what turns out to be a wonderfully abstracted “view from a fast train” video. In a darkened room six elderly cathode ray tubes noiselessly collaborate to form a barely stable starry night of varying intensities with odd hints of red and blue. In Homage to Gerald Lewers and Margel Hinder (2015), impressive fountains designed by these two Australian modernists are filmed with mesmeric visual and aural musicality, the world beyond banished as the movement of water and light make sense of the artistry of stone and metal. At apparent odds with these works, two large abstract, richly coloured photographs occupy the first room (I’ve left them to last). Golden Horde and Duchess of the Fields (both 2016) continue Gillies’ preoccupation with light, but here, after seeing works that pulse, is light as still life, compelling thoughts of sunset, storm, volcano and the sublime. In terms of scale and colour this feels like quite a departure. As does Witkacy & Malinowski.

Witkacy and Malinowski

Witkacy and Malinowski (1884-1942), friends since childhood, are on a train heading to Toowoomba. After the suicide of Witkacy’s lover, Jadwiga Janczewska (a ghostly presence in the film), Malinowski persuaded the distraught writer to come with him to Australia and on to Papua New Guinea. In later years, Witkacy conducted séances in an attempt to reach Jadwiga—a clue to the significance of the film’s title.

On the trip, news of Russia’s invasion of the Polish part of the Austro-Hungarian empire causes tensions over whether or not return home. It’s impossible for Malinowski, whose response infuriates Witkacy. In fine performances, Tom Herman plays Witkacy with a neurotic intensity against the guarded restraint of Matej Busic’s Malinowski. At the same time, the train’s driver (Craig Meneaud) and his fireman (Richard Hilliar) —both in love with the same woman—conduct a funny, highflown discussion about time and relativity (taken from a 1923 Witkacy play, Crazy Locomotive) while pushing the machine to excessive speeds. At the beginning of the film we see the aftermath of a train accident, towards the end the crash, or do we? In an email exchange I asked Gillies about the film’s sources and his stylistic choices.

Witkacy and Malinowski were close friends whose relationship ended tumultuously in Toowoomba, Queensland. They represent two archetypal potentialities, antagonistic but complementary. Malinowski put it rather grandly in his diary, that their split in Australia at the beginning of WW1 was, “like Wagner splitting with Nietzsche.” Their time in Australia was seminal for them personally, but also for their disciplines: the proto-performance artist and painter Witkacy as an inventor of contemporary theatre and Malinowski as a ‘father’ of contemporary anthropology. The two modernists rubbed up against indigenous cultures and colonial society in this new modern world at the edge of empire, altering their work in profound ways.

The story is also the end of the love story between two men and a conflict between materialist and metaphysical thinking, science and art. Everything in this work is based upon or developed from something that was reported or recorded. When I do change and invent, I do so to retain an underlying meaning or image or to extend the metaphor or idea. Also the possibility of linking Toowoomba and St Petersburg in the same sentence could not be ignored, it had to be done!

I first heard about it from a short documentary about 1914 that Stan Corey made for ABC Radio National many years ago. Corey had produced the radio version of the first Witkacy production in Australia in the 1970s, directed by Algis Butavicius from a translation by Roger Pulvers.

Do you have a particular connection with Witkacy or Polish art and culture more broadly?

My only connections are links with friends and colleagues from the Australian Polish diaspora from the two main migrations, post WWII and the 1980s Solidarity generation and their children, each significant to the arts in Australia. The direct influence of theatre artists like Jerzy Grotowski and Tadeusz Kantor in the development of contemporary performance in Australia from the mid-1970s is also important. I guess as a teenager I was touched by the legacy of Grotowski’s visits in his laboratory phase. I am also impressed by the ability of an artist to work across visual art and theatre, a recent example being visual artist Paulina Olowska’s production of Witkacy’s Mother at Tate Modern (2015), and the use by some in the Polish avant-garde of emotion, which is so often missing from contemporary, experimental and avant-garde art. In Australia visual artists were trained to steer well clear of any association with the ‘falseness’ of theatre. This comes from essentialist ideologies historically around painting.

Eastern European music and cinema in general, and particularly pre-1989, have also been inspiring, especially the sometimes expressive performance style that is at odds with much contemporary screen performance, but also its deep naturalistic strains. I am very interested in how some cultural ideas, developed from the 19th century, played out in Eastern Europe in the 20th century.

I am interested in stories that can affect the future, as the future is in the act of being made from fragments of the past.

Why the particular structure: the oscillation between an imagined dialogue between Witkacy and Malinowski and exchanges between the driver and his fireman in the engine cabin just prior to a crash. Obviously it’s metaphorical—a train disaster paralleling a relationship split—but what more’s going on about Witkacy’s psyche and his apparent anti-modernist hostility to, say, mechanisation? What does he have to say to us today?

Witkacy hated metaphor but my work is built of metaphor piled on metaphor, perhaps a bad case of metaphoritis!

Witkacy’s psyche was profoundly modern, multi-faceted, humorous, destructive and restless, fragmented like a montaged cinematic structure. My imagined dialogue between Malinowski and Witkacy is based on their diaries, letters and Witkacy’s plays over a 25-year period. For example my Witkacy, while attacking Malinowski, says “Totems are true, no matter what you scientists write about them,” a line that the ‘bohemian’ Papuan chief says in Witkacy’s Metaphysics of the Two Headed Calf: a Tropical Australian Play (1921).

I knew I had a work when I saw the chemistry between Tom Herman as Witkacy and Matej Busic as Malinowski. Witkacy wrote, “people are ghosts pretending to be people.” My performers are ‘representations’ speaking across time and space, but I also tried to imagine what they might actually have said on 1 September, 1914. Other lines come straight out of the Brisbane newspapers they would have read on that day or just before, for example a story about the developing Great War being great for Australian farmers; as you see parochialism lives on!

As in scenes from Crazy Locomotive, the engine drivers, Mr Tengier and Nicolas (Craig Meneaud and Richard Hilliar), act like a chorus, or the ‘clowns’ in a Shakespeare play. But there’s also a sense that the whole action could be coming out of their heads, from their black and white world into the colour world of Witkacy and Malinowski. The ‘factual’ colour world is not more naturalistic. Its look is closer to a 1950s Hollywood film or even an expressionist painting, whereas the black and white world of the engine drivers is more like a documentary film and shot as such.

If modernism is equated simply with modernity or the naïve idea of progress then Witkacy is anti-modernist, but he was a quintessential modernist artist and thinker, associated with the Formalists in Poland in the 1920s as theorist and artist. Long after his death he became a Polish counter-culture hero. His theatrical works and writings are read as anti-fascist and anti-communist; he knew communism intimately from his first-hand experience of the Russian revolution. They parody and critique bureaucratic society, and predict art brought to an end by a mindless, uniform future society. He said he was writing for the future. He could almost have been writing about Trump’s America in some of his later works.

He was wary of ideology, for example Constructivism and its technological positivism. Crazy Locomotive is often read as critique of Futurism’s fascistic death drive, as the inverse of Marinetti’s foundational story. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto begins with a non-fatal car accident whereas Witkacy’s play ends with a catastrophic train crash that kills everyone, like the last scene in Hamlet. There is speculation that the play was also the genesis of Andrei Konchalovsky’s American film Runaway Train (1985). Witkacy is not anti-modernist but profoundly critical of it, a precursor in some ways to Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. We could argue that the Futurist death drive is even more dominant in 2016 than it was in 1909. But there is also a counter metaphysical narrative in Crazy Locomotive that sees catastrophe as a portal to a new understanding of reality: “We’ve got to break through all day-to-day relationships, and then everything will become clear and explain itself.”

A refugee in a forest in eastern Poland trapped between Nazi and Soviet armies, Witkacy committed suicide on 18 September, 1939. Perhaps the decision was justified given what was happening around him; after all he had grown up not that far from Auschwitz.

Your filming in Witkacy & Malinowski… appears unusually straightforward and theatrical—reverse field dialogue, cutaways to the engine, rails, landscape and with a reinforcing score. But there are very tight close-ups, some straight-to-camera gazes, bluntly cut newspaper advertisements, the extended and escalating carriage buffer close-ups and Jadwiga, the ghost of Witkacy’s lover, speaking all the final dialogue. There is also the early and unexplained aftermath of the train crash and the switching between colour and black and white. The viewer is prepared for the unexpected even if the film’s rhythms are secure. Is it an attempt to play off the unexpected against the conventional?

A friend viewing said the work was like a 1960s film, which for me is a great compliment. It is open and sometimes ambiguous, at times self-reflexive, like the Crazy Locomotive text. For example Nicolas says, “I’ve always dreamt of something extraordinary happening, like in a film!” It’s a complex work. I want to create a space for reflection and thought; to find a constantly shifting emotional and intellectual space. So while there are moments of naturalism and naturalistic acting it will suddenly switch and become the opposite. I use switching devices in many of my works from Techno/Dumb/Show (1991) with The Sydney Front onward. I play off the expected or conventional against the unexpected and un-conventional in much of my work.

My structures are deliberately dialectical. Yes, they are actors and they are acting, but I hope that there is a sense that they are inside and outside of the dialogue at the same time. The Jadwiga Janczewska presence (Pollyanna Nowicki) functions like one of Witkacy’s casually resurrected corpses. She is even more of a meta-character, speaking lines uttered by other characters in the film, direct to camera. It is as though she has been observing everything that has come before. Perhaps we see everything through her eyes? I also call on iconic performers from the Sydney contemporary performance scene (Clare Grant, Katia Molino, Christopher Ryan). I am attempting to produce an amalgam of performance styles.

Film editing can symbolically expose the new spatial and temporal speculations that the engine drivers discuss in Crazy Locomotive. Film editing expresses the contradiction of a seemingly unstable system that can be perceived as stable and ‘real.’ It is not unsurprising that film montage appeared around the time Witkacy was writing, in Einstein’s new theories. We accept it as a continuous reality even though it is made of discontinuities similar to how our experience of reality is created.

What role have Poland and Polish artists played in the film’s development?

The Polish-Australian actor and theatre director Lech Mackiewicz was consulting producer and one of the translators of my text and Witkacy’s texts from Polish and French, including a new translation of Crazy Locomotive. Lech’s contribution was absolutely essential to the development of this project.

In Warsaw I met Witkacy’s great-niece Agnieszka Zawadowska who, in a sense, gave me the ‘permission’ I needed to create this work. This experience is so different from what happens with the Beckett estate. In Zakopane I shot part of the snow scene close to where Witkacy and Malinowski would have played as children, and the rest in the Kosciusko National Park much closer to home, as this is also a work about absurd spatial dislocation.

The film was invited to screen at the Grotowski Institute in Wroclaw and also via the Museum of Middle Pomerania in Slupsk, which has the largest collection of Witkacy’s portrait paintings in Poland as well as examples of his Australian landscape pastels.

In the installation version of the work for the gallery, audience members become train passengers. The film is displayed at one end of a white-walled construction that mimics the space and dimensions of a train carriage complete with cut-out ‘windows.’ They will be seated like a cinema audience in the ‘carriage’ while other people in the gallery can see them as ‘passengers.’ In a sense we are all passengers, though sometimes we might rebel and attempt to make contact with the front of the train and confront the engine drivers. We can see the runaway train through the prism of technological ‘progress,’ the First World War and the breakdown of a relationship, but we don’t necessarily see that we are also on a real runaway train. That is one reason aspects of Witkacy’s texts seem so relevant today. Perhaps Witkacy is one of the first writers of the Anthropocene?

I am continuing to show the work overseas but we are also looking for the right museum or gallery in Australia to present the installation version as well as screenings of the film. I would love to borrow Fright by Witkacy from the Art Gallery of NSW to show alongside my work.

SNO127—John Gillies, curator Ruark Lewis, SNO Contemporary Art Projects, Marrickville, Sydney, 15 Oct-13 Nov

First principles

I’ve written quite a bit on audiovision over the years. If there is a determining principle that guides my angle on aural perception, my choice in media subjects, my thrust in critical discourse, it would be that audiovisuality is a given state. No sight exists without physical, psychoacoustic, imaginary or cultural simultaneity in sound. The inverse is equally so: no matter how pure or essentialist one’s desire for ‘sound alone,’ the colour of your shirt will always betray an ulterior motive to your sound-making. The beauty of audiovision, then, is how inevitable its eventfulness becomes, and how overwhelming the sensation of sound and image merging can be in the present moment of experience.

Furthermore, this invisible inevitability has yet to be excluded from critical writing on visual things presumed to be silent, sonic things presumed to be beyond image, and all the chaotic attempts to either neutralise or radicalise the relationships between opto-cine-theatrical languages and sono-musical languages. My task in writing on audiovisuality is to discern and navigate those moments where things happen in ways more maximising and problematising than perceived wisdoms would like and avant-garde gestures would claim.

Within avant-garde practices, audiovision has been consistently pursued as if it can unlock the divisive channels of linguistic discourses and/or medium-based protocols. This collective dream is reiterated as a type of mystical synaesthesia, wherein all sono-musical events exist only because of their visual prompting, and all optical-visual occurrences exist only because of their aural triggering. Maybe, this would be okay if interesting and unexpected things happened in the rigging of systems (faux-mystical, performative, pseudo-scientific, technological, theatrical etc) so that the aural and ocular planes could generate an X-factor beyond one’s conceptions of how the two could co-exist. But this never happens. And the more artists attempt to authorially engineer this through the above-mentioned systems, the more they over-determine their outcomes to contradict the push to expansiveness to which their composition is logically aligned.

A paradigmatic shift to the percussive plane

Speak Percussion’s recent Fluorophone concert exemplifies this dilemma. In many respects, Speak Percussion synchronises to the contemporary state of avant-garde musical mechanics, where the act of ‘sounding’ is derived ostensibly from the audible gesture actuated by ‘touching.’ Percussion instruments have long been relegated to the roles of chronometry, accentuation and enhancement within the orchestral machine’s academic hierarchy. Thankfully, the 20th century witnessed an amazing destabilisation of this vertical stigmatisation, as numerous notable composers foregrounded percussionists as logical explorers and sonic cartographers of how ‘sounding’ in post-melodic, atonal or meta-harmonic realms could best be navigated.

This legacy is heard today in the works of just about every exploratory musician interested in prepared instrumentation and frequency interpolation, who must consider their attack, sustain, decay and release as singular self-contained events—just how a percussionist strikes their instrument of choice. Indeed, the state of music now in so many ways can be interpreted as a paradigmatic shift into or onto the percussive plane, as if we are now inhabiting an expanded temporal realm where a single strike of a timpani becomes a symphonic movement, time-stretched to reveal the complex minutiae of what previously was presumed to be a transitory blip on the score. Speak Percussion have carved pathways upon this plateau, forwarding a range of highly professional and often engaging compositional and performative considerations of how percussiveness generates these maximalising sonic events.

Performative staging vs sound-making

The Fluorophone concert arguably exists on another plane. In its intention to embrace a technologically mediated incorporation of visual contraptions into the musical performance, Speak Percussion have dislodged the maximising centrality of sonic eventfulness that their less visually/theatrically preoccupied performances have generated. Two key pieces by members Damien Ricketson and Eugene Ughetti demonstrate this. Ricketson’s Rendition (2016) is performed by two percussionists punching strobe flashes whose actioning is further modified by a third performer. The result is a changing grid of literal clicks, synchronised pulsations and triggered envelopes of tone. The piece deftly moves through a series of micro-movements as the two performers on a raised stage face each other or turn away, sometimes operating the light switches, at other times performing handheld or hand-swung percussion instruments. Watching its staging, one can enjoy the stroboscopic effect of the performers’ bodies suddenly appearing in tight synch to their ‘sounding,’ or generating a Muybridge-like stop-motion effect with their swinging arms as they sustain their ‘sounding’. But is this truly interesting? Or is this the type of window-dressing that theatre and lighting directors now routinely impose on musical performers?

Ughetti’s Pyrite Gland attempts a playful experiment in converting three tom-tom drums into light-emitting screens which respond to sensors registering a range of vibrations brought to bear on their skins via direct attack and various mediated pressures (from foot pumps, ribbed tubes etc). Again, the performative staging overwhelms the sound-making, transforming the performers into whimsical faux-nerd game-players with absurdist contraptions. Their skills are foregrounded in the circus-like arena of their synaesthetic operation. Both works paled when audited with closed eyes: they sounded over-composed and over-read. Their visuals equally smacked of the cursed ‘droll wit’ which classical performances often extol as a sign of their refusal of concert hall propriety. And finally, their synchronism cancelled out audiovisual complexity, transducing the works’ eventfulness into mimetic charades of their ontological base.

Theatre/performance-centric criteria dominance

‘Sounding’ has been promoted in a variety of performance events in the last five years. Sometimes it has been well-considered and fruitful: the integrated audiovision of Zoe Scoglio; the unsettling inter-scoring of the Bolt Ensemble with the Amplified Elephants; the anarchic art-music partying of Slave Pianos. More often, it has been theatrically laboured and sonically withering (Kate McIntosh’s All Ears (see a Vimeo trailer); Matthew Sleeth’s A Drone Opera (read Andrew Fuhrmann’s review); Ashley Dyer’s Tremors).

In times bereft of consciousness in the act of listening, staging overcomes sounding. What would you prefer: a boring presentation of an amazing sonic event or a tantalising, distracting, spectacularised presentation of rote avant-garde gestures toward the legacy of exploratory sound-making? The latter tends to dominate now, maybe because it services musical ensembles strategically ensnared by the theatre/performance-centric criteria which most funding organisations favour above all else. A boring drone piece: 30 people in attendance. A boring drone piece played by 50 blindfolded players suspended by straps festooned with LED lights changing colour via a MAX-patch as their motion sensors twist and turn: 300 people. (Set it to Cate Blanchett reading tweets from teenage girls in refugee detention centres: 3000 people.)

Contrary to how this might sound, I’m not the cynical one here. The current climate which mandates that all arts should somehow be interconnected and/or relate to ‘the world’ legislates these types of intermedial events and happenings. Hyper-synchronism and authored-synaesthesia might be historically grounded in mixed/multi-media experiments from Cage to Stockhausen, but their contemporaneity betrays their being bound to the dream of making relative/relational art. Fluorophone symptomatically reflected how contemporary theatre has subsumed those intermedial experiments into a utopian multi-sensory façade. For many people—indeed, maybe everyone but me—this is a welcome transition. I don’t hear it that way at all.

Speak Percussion, Fluorophone, The Substation, Newport, Melbourne, 23-25 Nov

At its most overt, Wesley Enoch’s 2017 Sydney Festival programming is about sensory engagement, indigeneity and innovative art-making. Alongside works that challenge the senses there’s a cluster of works by and about First Nations peoples and an overlapping one, principally theatrical, from independent Australian and visiting artists. These are complemented by discrete programs of contemporary circus and Canadian performance amid diverse festival fare from around the world, beyond easy summary.

Unlike most festival directors, Wesley Enoch is, expectedly, forthright about matters social, cultural and political. Although his festival might not be themed top to bottom and despite its considerable breadth, it has a core, the man himself. Towards the end of our conversation in the festival office in the Rocks, he asks rhetorically, how it could be otherwise: “How am I so of this place and of this time that I’m responding and reflecting what’s here?” It’s a question he thinks all festival directors should ask of themselves.

He adds, “When I look through the program, I think my politics are there for everyone to see—my way of seeing the world. The big thing I find challenging is going from being someone who makes theatre to someone who curates a festival. I still think like someone who’s got to make it. It’s not a curated experience this one. It’s about me going, this is what I want to happen; can we make it happen? It’ll succeed or fail or spark conversation or people will go ho-hum. This is what a festival is about.”

DIY festival

The large format program features the colourful festival logo breaking up over a lively black and white portrait of a Sydneysider. There are eight of these selected from public submissions and eight program covers to match, depending which one you pick up. As well as inviting the public to make art, Enoch says play with the festival logo is “all about extensions and connections; about it being broken apart and finding its own way back together again. It’s an invitation to the audience to make their own Sydney Festival, literally from bits and pieces, to have confidence in themselves as individuals now that everyone’s a maker—having at their fingertips the means of production to make a film or do whatever.”

Enoch hopes that the curiosity festivals can excite might counter “the fracturing of our body politic. Individuals are now tribal in the way they see the world and we get a lot of [self-reinforcing] feedback through social media or our choice of news media. Things get reflected back to us that an algorithm says we’ll like. I find that fascinating. It builds a confidence that I don’t always like…We really need to say, ‘Be creative in your own thinking, be curious in the way you see the world, engage with otherness, with difference, so that you bring a quality to your life that is outside your lived experience.'”

Enoch’s program, delineating the sensory, Indigenous, Canadian and circus/physical theatre mini-programs, provides festival-goers with clear starting points for entering what at first glance might appear to be a maze. He underlines the importance of clustering, arguing, “If you do one [of a kind of work], it’s saddled with the idea that it has to be representative of a whole practice. Once you do a number of them you have a diversity of approaches.”

A festival of the senses

A featured festival work is conceptual and olfactory artist Cat Jones’ Scent of Sydney, to be staged at Carriageworks. I mention Indigenous artist Archie Moore’s ‘perfume portrait’ series, Les Eaux d’Amoore, with its robust scents. Enoch recalls, “One of them was stale beer and cigarettes wasn’t it? That was full-on! As we’re living in an increasingly digital, disembodied world in our leisure time, in our work, artists are asking, how do you get back into the corporeal, the body of things? I wonder if we have lost the subtle vocabulary for our senses.”

Cat Jones will tell us about Scent of Sydney in next week’s RealTime. In the meantime, Enoch explains that the scents will be made by the artist in response to the recollections of a small group of participants of the aromas they associate with subjects like democracy, resistance and landscape. Audiences will be able to experience the outcomes and ponder their own associations.

Also on the sensory front, in deafblind artists Heather Lawson and Michelle Stevens’ Imagined Touch the audience wear goggles and earphones to share a quiet, dark, complex world. It can be experienced as a performance or a free installation. House of Mirrors in the Festival Village offers another kind of sensory disorientation. In Encounter, the UK’s Complicite, utilising the depth of field and detail generated by the binaural microphone, takes its headphoned audience on a recreated journey up the Amazon.

Australia’s bold independents

Parramatta’s FORM Dance Projects is mounting Champions. Focused on women’s football, it’s directed by Sydney choreographer Martin del Amo whose engrossing signature works have often sprung from the act of walking—a short step to field moves. Created in consultation with Western Sydney Wanderers W-league, the work features 11 female performers enacting the drills, tactics and rituals of the game and expressing the joys of playing along with the frustrations of imposed gender limitations. We have an interview with del Amo in next week’s RealTime.

Enoch was keen to premiere Champions at Carriageworks: “It doesn’t have to be that Western Sydney is just a colony of Sydney.” Conversely, Ich Nibber Dibber by those proud Westies, post—featuring the astonishing trio reproducing excepts of conversations from their 10-year performance history—will open at Campelltown Arts Centre.

Prize Fighter from Brisbane’s La Boite plays out as a convincing real time boxing match in its telling of the life of a Congolese child soldier relocated to Brisbane. It was written by Future D Fidel, himself a Congolese refugee. Reviewer Kathryn Kelly wrote that it “showcas[ed] the breadth of African-Australian talent in this country with local performers Pacharo and Gideon Mzembe matched by recent NIDA graduate Thuso Lekwape…The opening night felt genuinely significant, evoking descriptions of the first night of Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman’s Seven Stages of Grieving at Metro Arts in the 1990s.”

Urban Theatre Projects and Blacktown Arts Centre come together to present Home Country, a work about intra- and cross-cultural tensions—Indigenous, Algerian and Greek—played out in a Blacktown car park from scripts by Andrea James, Peter Polites and Gaele Sobott. Also in Western Sydney is Hakawati from the National Theatre of Parramatta, featuring shared food and song from the Middle East.

Innovative Australian works from across borders include Melbourne’s Patricia Cornelius, with her play Shit (about class and misogyny), Jacob Boehme’s dance theatre work Blood on the Dance Floor from Melbourne’s Ilbijerri Theatre (read the review “To live, dance and love with HIV“), Brisbane’s Circa in Humans, from Tasmania, Terrapin Puppet Theatre’s You and Me and the Space Between and from Cairns, Dancenorth’s Spectra. Enoch says of the strong interstate showing, “I don’t think Sydney sees enough of the work that’s created outside of Sydney. Is that terrible to say?” I’m also interested in what happens when works like Prize Fighter get a rare second outing. There are things that can change, mature. Jacob Boehme’s Blood on the Dance Floor is another example. Aesthetically, it’s a real step on for Indigenous storytelling.”

Indigenous culture: continuity, 1967, language

Enoch’s prominent Indigenous program ranges across theatre, play development, dance and visual arts. The Season, by Tasmanian playwright Nathan Maynard, a descendant of the chief of the Trawlwoolway Clan and of the North East Tasmanian Indigenous peoples, made its first appearance in the 2015 Yellamundie First Nations Peoples Playwriting Festival. I ask Enoch the writer’s age. “Oh, if you told me he was mid-30s I’d believe you; if you told me he was early 40s, I’d believe you—wise old man that he is. The writing reminds me of some of the early Jack Davis work where you have family environments in which cultural continuity is being expressed just through lived action. There’s a lightness of touch, of comedy, that belies a heavy burden, especially coming from Tasmania where the dominant myth is that all Aboriginal people were wiped out.” The Season addresses “cultural continuity around mutton-birding which has gone on for hundreds and thousands of years.” Also in the program is Ilbijerri Theatre’s “road trip comedy,” Which Way Home, by writer-performer Katie Beckett, about a daughter’s relationship with her single-parent father.

In Not An Animal Or A Plant, Vernon Ah Kee responds through drawings, paintings, text and projections to the 1967 Referendum which recognised Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as citizens and included them in the census.”He’s bringing together his work as a conversation about that historical event. I don’t think this country’s even cognisant of the fact that this year is the 50th anniversary. It was such a successful referendum, 90.77% of the population voted. I wonder if it happened now, would it get through? What’s changed?”

The referendum will not be forgotten with the mounting of 1967, Music in the Key of Yes, in the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall, featuring film footage from the period and a stellar line-up of singers: Leah Flannagan, Yirrmal, Dan Sultan, Adalita, Stephen Pigram, Radical Son and Thelma Plum.

Bayala, Let’s Speak Sydney Language, is a very special component of the festival’s Indigenous program, an opportunity to become familiar with—through documents, classes and a “sing-up”—with the once assumed lost languages of the Eora and Darug peoples.

Meeting Canada

Enoch is pleased to be presenting “a big chunk of Canadian work, including Huff by writer-performer Cliff Cardinal from Native Earth Performing Arts [Canada’s oldest professional Indigenous theatre company]. There’s been a lot of exchange between Indigenous Australians and Canadians for quite a while now, especially the further north you go in Australia and through the tri-nation agreement between Australia, New Zealand and Canada over at the past decade.

“Huff literally means to sniff, as in solvent sniffing. It’s a multi-generational story where the performer plays all 20 roles. The youngest of three brothers has the gift from the Creator to make people feel good, and by the end, with all the tortuous things that he observes or that happen to him, he’s lost it. Huff marries the spiritual nature of a lot of First Nations storytelling with this story of growing up. It has a lot of black humour. The storytelling is both beautiful and tragic as you’d expect from any First Nations story. That’s where it works best: I’m laughing, but at the same time, I’m feeling like it’s dragging me under.”

Also from Canada is Company 605 in the dance work Inheritor Album; Tomboy Survival Guide’s words and music investigation into gender identity; Montreal composer Nicole Lizée’s form-bending Sex, Lynch and Video Games; and Anthropologies Imaginaires, Gabriel Dharmoo’s fictional chants and rituals which “examine Western culture and the way we look at others” (program). Also featured is iD by Cirque Eloize, the centrepiece in Parramatta’s Circus City, where all the circus works, associated workshops, forums and films will be presented. “Canada has a rich circus tradition but amazingly, we hear very little of it, except for Cirque du Soleil,” says Enoch.

Remembering Myuran Sukumaran

Myuran Sukumaran was executed on 29 April, 2015 in Indonesia for drug trafficking. Sydney Festival, in conjunction with Campbelltown Arts Centre, is staging an exhibition of his paintings, curated by friend and mentor, the Australian artist Ben Quilty, and CAC director Michael Dagostino. Programming it makes a strong statement. “It’s important,” says Enoch. “Next year is the 50th anniversary of the Ronald Ryan hanging, the last legal execution in Australia. So there’s a sense of convergence. I think that as a festival we’re here to prod debate and discussion. There’ll be some people who’ll say, ‘How dare you elevate a drug dealer to the ‘hallowed halls’ of art!’ Well, if we believe that you incarcerate people because there’s a possibility of rehabilitation, there is the case to argue for the redemptive power of art. And after 10 years, my opinion is that those two people (Myuran and Andrew Chan) found a way to be rehabilitated. Capital punishment is such a final thing.”

We began our conversation with scents and senses and end with what is so evident about this Sydney Festival, its great sense of occasion—timely celebration of the 1967 Referendum, remembrance of the unnecessary death of Myuran Sukumaran, an embrace of Canadian art, and acknowledgment of the breadth and depth of Aboriginal culture and the innovative Australian art-making of which it is a sharer and driver. For all the breadth of its summer festival fare, Wesley Enoch’s 2017 Sydney Festival is a rarity among its peers for its sense of purpose, its aesthetics inseparable from its politics. It looks to be the festival Enoch sought of himself, “of this place and of this time,” of this city, of Australia in all its cultural complexity.

Top image credit: Cliff Cardinal, Huff, Native Earth Performing Arts, photo Akipari

I’m waiting in the reception area of ACMI X, the new “shared co-worker” space behind Melbourne’s Art Centre, created by the Director of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Katrina Sedgwick. The decor is all post-industrial chic, with concrete floors, exposed air conditioning ducts and corrugated plastic sheets on the wall.

Later, I’m taken through a series of open-planned desks, a large kitchen and event space, editing suites, meeting rooms and a cute library nook. ACMI staff—previously scattered across several offices in Melbourne’s CBD—have been brought under one roof here, and the local branch of the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) occupies one corner. Desks are let to a diverse range of tenants, from contemporary art group Aphids to digital studios working on virtual reality technology such as Sandpit, to a screenwriter sponsored by the Copyright Agency.

This is Sedgwick’s vision for ACMI in physical form—an outward-looking institution engaged with industry and the broader creative sector, overseeing a conceptual space in which people, forms and ideas intermix. In her office at the centre of it all, I spoke with Sedgwick about her far reaching plans for ACMI as she approaches her second anniversary at the organisation’s helm.

The co-working space is 60 desks, and it houses a really diverse range of practitioners, companies and businesses who work across our remit—the moving image. It’s all about cross-disciplinary opportunity and collaboration, to have practitioners and makers from all sorts of different industries in our space every day—to be standing next to them making coffee, having conversations and allowing that sort of spontaneous interaction to feed into how we work, and hopefully leverage our resources back out to the sector. We moved in in March, and the co-workers have been here since May.

EXTENDING THE MUSEUM EXPERIENCE

Last year, you were quoted in Fairfax media saying that “a really significant shift” is planned around the way “ACMI audiences experience our content.” Can you elaborate on what that shift will comprise, and the role your new “Chief eXperience Officer” Seb Chan will be playing in that change?

I can’t get into specifics, as we’re working on a whole lot of those programs now. But in broad strokes, look at Seb’s background and the work he has done previously at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York which has series of three-dimensional display objects, in a very traditional museum sense. These have been digitised, and there is a device—a digital ‘pen’ that was developed by Seb and his team—that allows a way of collecting that experience and continuing it when you get home, and sharing that with your friends and family really easily. It’s that idea of extending the conversation with the museum’s visitor before, during and after the visit, rather than it being a passive, come-and-consume experience. That’s where we’re heading, and Seb is central to our being able to develop a vision for that.

So digital technologies are central to the changes you envision for the visitor experience at ACMI?

There is a creative opportunity to change the way we work and connect with audiences using new digital tools—beyond marketing. Everyone’s got their heads around social media, but actually we have the opportunity to tell stories in completely different ways.

MINING DIGITAL POTENTIAL

In the very first Adelaide Film Festival I did back in 2003 [Segdwick headed the festival 2002–12], we did a crossover digital lab encouraging filmmakers to consider digital tools and different ways they could create work. By the time I left the festival a decade later, the conversation hadn’t changed one bit. Then I went to the ABC, which was all about digital, and it was still the same conversation with the film and television industry that was going on 14 years earlier. People have not got their heads around all of the creative potential that is there.

I think it’s really generational. And the way funding is set up, the way the broadcasters and agencies work…

All those structures have been in place for a long time, and they were really built for a different era.

It’s about old school approaches for a certain group of people—mainly older white men—working in a particular way. And it has not changed in my time in the film industry, which is now 16 years. So it was very clear to me when I got the ACMI job that I needed to get someone who was a really incredible progressive thinker, who was able to look three years ahead of anybody else. So that title and position of Chief eXperience Officer was created because I knew I could get Seb Chan. For me he was precisely the person I needed.

So can we expect to see the level of change that Seb delivered at the Cooper Hewitt in New York here at ACMI?

It is. For Cooper Hewitt they were doing a massive renovation and previously their principle demographic was women over 50 who lived within a two-kilometre radius of the museum on the Upper East Side of New York. We’re in an utterly different position. We had nearly 1.5 million people come through the building last year. Clearly we have a series of stories the audience wants. What we’re interested in is how we make that better. How do we make ourselves a truly innovative institution that is at the forefront of 21st century museum practice?

Will that mean physical changes to the main cinema and exhibition space on Federation Square?

There will be some physical changes and shifts in content. The permanent exhibition is coming up to 10 years old and needs a significant reimagining. But we’re certainly not knocking down the building and starting again. It’s about reconfiguring and better connecting what we have. If someone comes in to see a David Bowie exhibition downstairs, how do they connect with the fact that four floors above them are two fantastic cinemas? We find that audiences in fact don’t currently connect. So there’s a series of tools to bring in, some of which are as simple as a visitor guide with a map [laughs]. People will see changes as we go, but I think the big bang will be around 2019–20 which will lift the curtain on ACMI mark II.

BEING A MUSEUM AND PROUD OF IT

Apart from appointing Seb, what changes have you already made since your arrival in early 2015?

Firstly to our overall strategy. We’re now describing ourselves as a museum. That’s been an interesting move. When I came for my interview I was talking about being a 21st century museum, and I was asked, “Why are you calling it a museum? We’re not a museum.” And I said, “I think we are.” We have a 160,000-object collection that we preserve and provide access to. We have a permanent exhibition that our audience interacts with, we have temporary shows and we have a team of curators and a dynamic exhibition team. We also have cinemas that show cultural and art objects. And we have a connecting social space. I think those things make us a museum rather than a gallery or centre.

OPENING DOORS

The next big shift was opening the doors on Flinders Street. We had one entrance when I arrived, on Federation Square. Now we have two. That had the immediate impact of increasing our visitations by 200,000 people per year. It also started a rich conversation about how we engage with our audiences and their journey through the institution. You see that reflected in our corporate strategy, thinking very holistically as an institution, to connect all the different parts of what we do.

ARCHIVE ACTION + NEW COMMISSIONING

We’ve created a collection strategy, which I think is really robust and really the first one we’ve done. It has triggered a whole lot of conversations around our collection and how we make our archive—as well as the NFSA archive—more accessible and as easy, playful and fun as it could possibly be. We’ve signed a new memorandum of understanding with the NFSA and begun a series of projects with them over the next three years. Ultimately our philosophy will deliver a very participatory archive; one where the content is as sharable, playable and re-mashable as it can possibly be.

We’ve commissioned three virtual reality pieces over the past 12 months, and we currently have Lynette Wallworth’s Collisions—the first time we’ve exhibited a single virtual reality work as a major exhibition piece.

So, more commissioning, more responsiveness and spontaneity. We’re very audience focused, we’re leveraging our collection and the ACMI X co-working space represents a shift to a more visible and ongoing connection with the breadth of industries that we showcase.

More information about the ACMI X co-working space, including application forms, can be found at www.acmi.net.au/acmi-x

Now at ACMI: Philippe Parreno is a leading French synthesiser of visual art and film, creating installations that play disorientingly with time and space. Parreno’s large-scale, partly bio-reactor-driven Anywhen with its mobile screens and fish inflatables) has been a hit at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in London. Watch an interview with the artist.

While the relationship between music and light is usually metaphorical, Speak Percussion has no time for such conjecture. With its purpose-built instruments used as lights and lights as instruments, the Melbourne-based ensemble’s latest program Fluorophone steps beyond simple choreography. Presenting works by Damien Ricketson, Eugene Ughetti, Juliana Hodkinson and Simon Løffler, Speak fills the iconic industrial space of Newport’s The Substation with sound and light.

Opening the program is Rendition Clinic, Damien Ricketson’s unsmiling exploration of the role music and light have played in ‘soft’ torture practices. Combining live percussion with bright flashing lights and samples of recorded music, the work is unsettling and disorienting right from the onset. Percussionists Louise Devenish and Matthias Shack-Arnott are sporadically illuminated by custom-built strobe lights that emit loud clicking noises upon discharge. Precise metallic tapping in the percussion mimics the distinctive sound of these contraptions, incorporating the lights both visually and sonically into the piece.

Pyrite Gland, a recent composition by Speak’s Artistic Director Eugene Ughetti, features two tom-toms with custom-built LED lights fitted inside. Radiating an odd yellow-green light, these drums offer an impeccable synaesthetic reflection of the eerie cooing sound created by foot pumps on the floor. The ensemble generates a palette of unsettling sounds with balloons, sticks and the ribbed plastic piping which carries air to inner cavities of the drums and doubles as a kind of plastic guiro.

Scored for amplified matches, Juliana Hodkinson’s Lightness explores an equally inventive sound world. Speak Percussion finds the rhythm in striking, igniting and extinguishing matches, sacrificing an immeasurable number of Redheads in the process. In the final sequence, the audience watches with bated breath as outstretched arms slowly pass a dwindling flame.

Most prominent in the program are two works by Danish composer Simon Løffler. The first is a new commission by Speak Percussion simply titled e. Performed on what could be an art installation—panel lights arranged in the shape of a subdivided triangle with an actual triangle suspended in the centre—e lacks nothing in visual stimulation. Seated behind the instrument, the four players use pedals and clickers to operate a geometric lightshow accompanied by exhilarating electronic noise. After extensive crackling and buzzing it is almost ironic to hear the unexpected timbre of the triangle, which plays in sync with a satisfying pattern of lights.

Løffler’s earlier work b (2002) sees three Speak members seated shoulder-to-shoulder at a small table. Three neon lights flicker ominously as two players stamp out complex rhythms on effects pedals and a third exploits the crackling of a loose jack cable. By touching the lights and clutching each other’s arms the performers pass static electricity from body to body, creating distorted sounds and jolting rhythms. Truly a pleasure to watch, the musician’s ecstatic interaction alone fills the room; an especially remarkable feat considering the openness of the venue.

Fluorophone is an electrifying experience that truly lives up to its name. Speak Percussion is to be commended not only for an exhilarating performance but also for curating a program that maintains diversity in instrumentation and style while successfully synthesising music and light.

The word “COSMOS” is faintly visible against a curved white backdrop. The word is split, “CO” on the left-hand wall and “SMOS” on the right. You can’t read the whole word at once; from one half to the other your eyes traverse scaffolding holding a pile of green fabric like a mossy hillside, a cluster of rubber faces, double-belled brass instruments and a magnificent bird’s head mask. It is as though Tree of Codes’ composer Liza Lim and the artist Massimo Furlan have cut out the middle of the cosmos, leaving this stage of apparently unrelated images. It is the audience’s job to reassemble it.

Tree of Codes is based on Jonathan Safran Foer’s sculptural book of the same name, which was created by cutting words out of Bruno Schulz’s collection of short stories, Street of Crocodiles. Just as you can see words from multiple pages through the holes in Foer’s Tree of Codes, the overlapping images of Lim’s opera can be assembled in different orders. Faced with so much ambiguity the audience (or at least those with whom I spoke) brought to it the glue of their own personal experience. For me this was evident from the opera’s first sounds: the chirping and warbling of bellbirds and magpies. While these calls are immediately recognisable to anyone who has taken a walk in Australia’s temperate rainforests, I wondered whether the audience in Dresden’s Hellerau Festival Theatre heard the almost-electronic sounds as birds at all.

The musicians of Ensemble Musikfabrik dribble into this laboratory of the mind and don white lab coats and biohazard suits. They exchange greetings and congregate around the tables, picking up their modified instruments. Carl Rosman playing the Mutant Bird lets out uncannily avian calls on the nose-flute. Among the musicians move the principal singers Adela (Emily Hindrichs), the Son (Christian Miedl), two actors playing their doubles (Anne Delahaye and Stéphane Vecchione), the Father (Yael Rion) and an Octopus constructed from inflated black plastic bags (Diane Decker).

A primary constellation can be identified among the images: that of a son coming to terms with his father’s death. This story furnishes the opera with its denser musical textures, such as a death march played on the twisted, augmented brass instruments. But the music is in large part sparse and charged with a meditative concentration. The magnetic voices of Hindrichs and Miedl carry the exposed attention.

Despite the interest of the opera’s cut-up/assemblage form, some of its most powerful moments are those of singular focus, including when the Father dons the bird-head mask. On his shoulders the mask takes on a beady-eyed and intelligent stare. He stands downstage with his arms outstretched like skinny wings, looking decidedly like a plucked bird. At the end of the opera the Son sings a frantic solo while rattling and tooting toy instruments spread around him. “I accepted the experiment of life/ I submitted to the frenzy/ the scraping danger./ I endured the urge to joy.” I can’t think of a better description of Tree of Codes.

Cologne Opera, Tree of Codes: Cut-outs in time, composer Liza Lim, Ensemble Musikfabrik, Hellerau Festival Theatre, Germany, 26 Oct

The 2017 Sydney Festival is overflowing with art. What to see? How much time and money to spend? Artistic Director Wesley Enoch wants you to be adventurous, to break out of the internet-driven niches our culture is generating. But he’s provided initial guidance, creating mini-programs around the senses, circus, Canadian performance and Indigenous culture. Beyond that, off you go into the maze of theatre, dance, music and Spiegeltent fare.

I’ve made a list of some 25 shows I’m eager to to see (will I even get to 10?) and think you might too, but not in every case—some niches are admittedly forbidding. I’ve seen previous work by some of the festival artists but, like you I’ll be going mostly on what I’ve heard, read and seen on YouTube and Vimeo (valuable but can mislead). I promise nothing beyond what my art-tuned intuition tells me. And I’ve cited clues from Wesley Enoch and RealTime reviewers and supplied video links which grabbed my attention. Good choosing.

SENSES

In the festival’s Senses program, Scent of Sydney (identify the city via memory and smell), Imagined Touch (enter the world of the deafblind), House of Mirrors (not the reflection you know) and The Encounter (get lost in a sonic Amazon rainforest) will appeal to those eager to experience the physical, emotional and aesthetic effects of sensory deprivation and amplification.

Complicite, The Encounter

Guided by an onstage performer-narrator and sound manipulator, UK performance company Complicite presents an intensely aural experience that recreates a journey up the Amazon via binaural recording (in which the microphones are ear-positioned), acutely reproducing the spatial experience of human hearing. “In 1969, National Geographic photographer Loren McIntyre became lost in a remote part of the Brazilian rainforest while searching for the Mayoruna people. His encounter was to test his perception of the world…” [press release]. It’s a work that has been described as sensorily and culturally disorienting. And it appears to be an ideal companion piece for Anthropologies Imaginaires.

Gabriel Dharmoo, Anthropologies Imaginaires

Canadian composer, scholar of song cultures and a physically vigorous vocal performer, Gabriel Dharmoo, has created Anthropologies Imaginaires, a live mockumentary in which the artist, with sound, video and audience vocal participation, conjures imaginary cultures—their folklore and vocal techniques—compelling us to reflect on how we impose Western culture on others. It’s not part of Senses but makes a good lateral fit. I’m intrigued.

DANCE

Ekosdance Company, Cry Jalailo and Balalala

I first saw Eko Supriyanto’s work in Jakarta, in the Indonesian Dance Festival of 2010 and was excited by the propulsive minimalism of a choreography rooted in local dance and other traditions. Cry Jailolo won praise at this year’s Darwin and OzAsia Festivals, with its focus on young men and their Climate Change-endangered remote Javanese coastal town. Alongside Cry Jailolo, Supriyanto is premiering Balabala, a work for five women from the same town about role and gender and expressed through martial art-driven dance.

Dancenorth, Spectra

Contrary to Enoch’s intent, the Ekosdance double bill looks like a lone Asian presence in the festival, but the alert festival-goer will grab a ticket to Spectra, a dance work from that inventive powerhouse from Townsville, Dancenorth in their believe-it-or-not first appearance in Sydney. Read about Spectra, a collaboration with a Japanese designer, composer and Butoh performers, in Ben Brooker’s interview with Artistic Director and choreographer Kyle Page.

FORM Dance Projects, Champions

INDIGENOUS PERFORMANCE
Nathan Maynard, The Season

Among the most striking photographs by Tasmanian photographer Ricky Maynard are those in his The Moonbird People (1985) series—images of mutton-birding, the capture and butchering of muttonbirds for food, oil and feathers, an ancient practice on the island. Now Nathan Maynard (a descendant of the chief of the Trawlwoolway Clan and of the North East Tasmanian Indigenous peoples), who has experienced this harvesting, has written a play around it, featuring powerful performers Trevor Jamieson and Tammy Anderson.

Jacob Boehme, Blood on the Dance Floor

Wesley Enoch regards Boehme’s fusion of autobiography and dance as “aesthetically a real step on for Indigenous storytelling.” The premiere performance, jointly presented with Melbourne’s Ilbijerri Theatre impressed Andrew Fuhrmann (read the review “To live, dance and love with HIV“).

Cliff Cardinal, Huff

MUSIC
1967 Music in the Key of Yes

A grand musical celebration of the 1967 Referendum at the Sydney Opera House—with superb singers Leah Flannagan, Yirrmal, Dan Sultan, Adalita, Stephen Pigram, Radical Son and Thelma Plum.

THREE NORTH AMERICAN FEMALE COMPOSERS
Nicole Lizée, Sex, Lynch and Video Games

One of North America’s most inventive composers, Montreal musician Nicole Lizée draws on an armoury of instruments and forms with which to produce contemporary classical works, with the likes of the Kronos Quartet and music video creations, like her Hitchcock Etudes (sounds, scores and images wittily reconfigured against solo piano) and the recent (David) Lynch Etudes, which will be heard in Sydney. Also in the concert is 8-Bit Urbex, a “homage to 80s video games with retro video footage…employing traditional and electronic instruments along with old tape machines” (press release). Karappo Okesutura is “a messed-up karaoke performance of pop hits including The Bangles’ “Eternal Flame,” Diana Ross and Lionel Ritchie’s “Endless Love,” and Devo’s “Whip It.” Lizée’s taken with the wealth of creative possibilities to be found in the malfunctioning of antique electronic equipment.

Described as “an exploration of 90s screen culture,” Sex, Lynch and Video Games, features Canadian pianist Eve Egoyan (playing to video projections) and the Australian Art Orchestra, renowned for their cross-cultural exchanges with Indian and Australian Indigenous performers, here moving into new territory under the direction of trumpeter Peter Knight.

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith

Another North American in the program is Los Angeles-based Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, player, programmer and composer specialising in the rare analogue Buchla 100 Synthesiser, a generator of remarkably idiosyncratic sounds. She was mentored by synthesiser pioneer and Buchla composer Suzanne Ciani. You can watch a short, lovingly made video of Smith operating this beautiful instrument with its colourful knobs and plate keys and listen to a variety of her works on YouTube, ranging from contemplative to the pop-ish “Sundry“. Her albums include Euclid (2015) and Ears (2016). Smith has toured the US and Europe and appeared this year in David Lynch’s Festival of Disruption.

Ellen Fullman, Long String Instrument

Unlike Lizée and Smith, Ellen Fullman, another experimental American artist, operates entirely in the acoustic domain, playing the 25-metre instrument she’s developed over some 30 years. Large spaces, like Sydney’s Town Hall for this festival, become larger resonators for an already complexly resonating device such that audiences apparently feel like they’re inside the instrument. Fullman walks between the strings, stroking them with rosin-covered hands. A YouTube sample of a performance reveals sitar-like sounds, drones and, as Fullman says, a chamber orchestra at a touch. Hear her talk about the evolution of the instrument. Definitely a concert for those ready to have their ears fine-tuned within a contemplative musical aura. Harbors is performed with cellist Theresa Wong.

THEATRE/CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE
Dimitris Papaioannou, Still Life

Greek experimental performance director Dimitris Papaioannou’s creations are remarkable, whether as theatre works, performative installations or the Opening Ceremony of the 2004 Athens Olympic Games. He’s made excerpts of these available on Vimeo. You can watch a 17-minute version of Primal Matter (2012) in which Papaioannou directs, choreographs and performs—with eerie physical dexterity and more than a nod to surrealism. A 30-minute sampler, 2001-12 reveals the sheer range of his vision and talents. One European reviewer has called Still Life, a work inspired by the myth of Sisyphus, “philosophical dance” in which “life is both a lusty dance and a perpetual struggle….the whole work feels like a magic show, but with frightening existential tricks and nightmare images.”

Gecko, Institute

Wesley Enoch tells me that Institute, by UK’s Gecko, is “Kafka-ish physical theatre,” not least because it comprises a world of filing cabinets “in which are memories; triggers for what might be mental health episodes. The performers play out a failed date and what it means for one of them, and there’s a re-playing of what I read as the death of a father figure—I’m reading into it all the things I want to read into it. It’s a beautiful work, ending with an almost euphoric sense of what I would call healing.”

Le Boite, Prize Fighter

Prize Fighter from Brisbane’s La Bôite plays out as a convincing real time boxing match in its telling of the life of a Congolese child soldier relocated to Brisbane. It was written by Future D Fidel, himself a Congolese refugee. Reviewer Kathryn Kelly wrote that it “showcas[ed] the breadth of African-Australian talent in this country...”

Patricia Cornelius, SHIT

Leading Australian playwright Patricia Cornelius’ creations are too rarely seen in Sydney. In his review for RealTime of the Melbourne premiere, John Bailey wrote, “SHIT opens with a monologue that elevates profanity to Beckett-like wordplay (I’ve never heard ‘fuck’ used as noun, verb and adjective in the same sentence). It’s an immediate reminder of Patricia Cornelius’ versatility as a writer, able to produce poetry from vulgar argots without sterilising their power along the way. It’s also a potent introduction to the three protagonists, a trio of women who are the subjects and agents of violence, who inhabit a cruel and complex social sphere but who will not be written off as either victim or monster.”

post, Ich Nibber Dibber

Ich Nibber Dibber by those proud Westies and true artistic disrupters, post, features the astonishing trio reproducing excerpts of frank conversations about life and art conducted across their 10-year performance history. This will be a special treat for those familiar with the post repertoire and hopefully a revelation to those who haven’t had the pleasure.

Urban Theatre Projects & Blacktown Arts Centre, Home Country

UTP and BAC come together to present Home Country, a work about intra- and cross-cultural tensions—Indigenous, Algerian and Greek—played out in a Blacktown car park. Guided from scene to scene, the audience will encounter performances scripted by Andrea James, Peter Polites and Gaele Sobott. Design is by Clare Britton, direction Rosie Dennis.

OPERA
Opera Australia, King Roger; Sydney Chamber opera, Biographica

One festival, two operas. That’s impressive, especially when one is a new Australian work and the other, a rarity from the early 20th century—the Polish composer Karol Szymanowski’s King Roger (1926). It’s a co-production by London’s Royal Opera House and Opera Australia, looks great on DVD in Kasper Holten’s production and should be even better live. Szymanowski’s distinctive late Romanticism, infused with orientalisms, is deeply engaging as is its strange tale of a mystical shepherd who releases the king from religion and jealousy in a Dionysian ritual.

Sydney Chamber Opera will premiere leading Australian composer Mary Finsterer’s Biographica, an account of Gerolamo Cardano (1501-76), a Renaissance wunderkind who excelled as mathematician (inventing algebra), physician, biologist, physicist, chemist, astrologer, astronomer, philosopher, writer and gambler. Add “flawed father, solitary, aggressive, peculiar [and one who] would listen to a guardian angel, swear by science, and dream of defeating time” (Sydney Chamber Opera website) and you have a fine specimen for an opera. Tom Wright, who has collaborated successfully with Michael Kantor and Barrie Kosky, is the librettist, Ensemble Offspring the musicians and Janice Muller the director. Jack Symonds conducts and Mitchell Butel plays Cardano.

Rautavaara

The great Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara (1928-2016) died in July this year. Once he’d abandoned serialism in the 1970s his style moved towards an immersive neo-romanticism, richly melodic without sounding archaic and often exuding a mystical aura. This festival concert focuses on Canticus Arcticus, a glorious snowscape poem that incorporates beautiful birdsong, Isle of Bliss (which has been described as “a grandchild of the Sibelius tone-poems”) and the 7th Symphony, Angel of Light, one of his most acclaimed major works and one of several inspired by an angel he thought he saw as a child. Not a concert for hard-nosed modernists and their diverse heirs, but for those open to music of great generosity and emotional power, this tribute event is more than welcome.

VISUAL & MEDIA ART
Myuran Sukumaran: Another Day in Paradise

While in Bali’s Kerobokan gaol, awaiting execution for drug trafficking, Myuran Sukumaran realised his talent for painting under the tutelage of friend Ben Quilty. On show at Campbelltown Arts Centre will be many of his works alongside others, commissioned for the exhibition, by Abdul Rahman Abdullah, Safdar Ahmed, Megan Cope, Jagath Dheerasekara, Taloi Havini, Khaled Sabsabi and Matthew Sleeth. Curated by Quilty and CAC’s Michael Dagostino, the exhibition will reflect on the rehabilitative power of art, the nature of compassion and the limits of capital punishment. The multiple ironies of the show’s title already say so much.

Vernon Ah Kee, Not An Animal Or A Plant

Leading Australian visual artist Vernon Ah Kee, showing extant and new works in drawing and installation, will address the Referendum of 1967 which recognised Indigenous peoples as Australians; an event, says Wesley Enoch, too little acknowledged. His exhibition, aptly titled Not An Animal Or A Plant, will show at the National Art School.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Exit

Based on an idea by philosopher-urbanist Paul Virilio, Exit is a 360-degree animated overview of “a planet in trouble,” mapped using extensive disaster, climate, wealth, population and migration data. Philip Brophy, who saw it in Paris, praised its formidable production values but criticised it for “ultimately smack[ing] of grandstanding, intimidation and the type of passive-aggressive address to which so much politically committed art succumbs despite its often laudable concerns.” A RealTime reader begged to differ, citing the immersivity of the work, created by artists/architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, architect-artist Laura Kurgan and statistician-artist Mark Hansen, and, too rare these days, the totality of its vision. Judge for yourself.

AND…

Retro Futurismus

I almost missed this one at the back of a crowded festival program, Retro Futurismus which John Bailey had praised back in July. He describes it as “a new kind of variety show based around the future as it was imagined by people in the past. Think Grace Jones, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 50s SF movies and 80s fashion.” He also notes a level of seriousness: “There’s great glee and energy in the romance of science fictions gone by, but also a painful realisation that this hope was let down by the reality in which we now find ourselves.” Retro Futurismus features stellar performers Anni and Maude Davey, Gabi Barton, Anna Lumb and Teresa Blake.

The desire to tell our parents what family life was really like and to bear witness to the conditions of childhood is shared by many, so it’s no wonder that this inventive new documentary concert piece by composer Kate Neal and director-librettist Tamara Saulwick has been such a hit with Melbourne audiences.

Based on recorded interviews with more than 20 volunteers, Permission to Speak reflects on the difficulty of establishing meaningful communication across the generations, providing a ceremonial space for the public confession of feelings. It’s performed in the round by singers Georgie Darvidis, Edward Fairlie, Josh Kyle and Gian Slater, with a bold but simple set and lighting design by Bosco Shaw.

There are about a dozen scenes or movements, each one arranged around a different theme or mood or story. In one, Darvidis gives voice to the thoughts of an interviewee whose mother was a holy-roller-writhing-on-the-floor-style Pentecostal Christian. We hear memories of a childhood spent in dread of the coming Rapture. In another scene we hear a woman reflecting on the reasons why her mother was so rough when disciplining the kids. And in one collage-like section, we hear a barrage of brief descriptions of different fathers: the nuggetty one, the wiry one, the tall one, the peacock, the introvert and the one who is “a bit fucked.”

Edited excerpts from the actual interviews are played through speakers positioned at various points around the room. Some of these excerpts are quite long and some are only fragments. The performers, meanwhile, wear earpieces and deliver live audio-cued recitations of the same interviews. It’s a complicated combination, full of rapid cuts and transitions and overlaps. Sometimes it even sounds like the voices of the interviewees are coming directly from the audience, cutting off the performers, reasserting ownership of their stories.

And then we have Kate Neal’s composition for four voices, which is sometimes an accompaniment to the interview material and sometimes the main focus of our attention. Mostly performed a cappella, the work is rhythmically intricate, but also somehow naïve-sounding. (Is there a connection here between the complicated inner lives of children and their limited means of expression?) The score’s minimalist gestures, with short notes and a regular but insistent tempo, provide a necessary contrast to the hectic cut-and-paste clutter of the sound design, and its chant-like style suits the austerity of the staging.

The lyrics are selected by Tamara Saulwick from the interviews, and there’s something important about the fact that what is being said is also being sung. The permission which is granted in this show is also a kind of celebration; and, while there’s much that is sad or poignant in the remembered stories, the overall feeling is of airiness and giddy relief.

And there is something about the energy of the music and the urgency of the sound design which encourages more introspection than usual. The silence before the applause after the lights went down for the final time was one of the longest I’ve experienced. It was almost as if the audience had instinctively agreed to remain there in the dark for a minute, to think about parenthood and childhood and the ambiguous gift which lies between them.

Permission to Speak, composition, instrument design Kate Neal, concept, direction, libretto Tamara Saulwick, performers Georgie Darvidis, Edward Fairlie, Josh Kyle, Gian Slater, sound design Jethro Woodward, lighting design Bosco Shaw, costume design Marg Horwell; Arts House, North Melbourne, 23-27 Nov

The entire floor of the upstairs studio at Dancehouse is lined with a silvery padding. The audience sits in a single row of seats against three of the walls. It’s a bright, aseptic environment, full of reflected light and slender, transparent shadows, with something like the atmosphere of a laboratory or test facility.

But instead of quietly humming computers and bubbling alembics, this lab contains an occasional carpenter’s odds and ends. Distributed throughout the space, without apparent system, are three large wooden panels, long and short lengths of two-by-four, a partially constructed wooden frame, a cordless drill and a handful of five-inch nails. There are also five squares of different coloured fabric, a tube of Berocca tablets, five drink bottles, a bunch of bananas and a single coin.

In this largely improvised hour-long presentation, Matthew Day—current artist-in-residence at Dancehouse—probes and modifies, discomposes and recomposes this odd medley of everyday materials. There is no formal beginning and no formal conclusion: the work simply breaks off when Day calls time. Indeed, the final two stagings in this season are billed as “durational performances,” lasting three hours, with audiences invited to come and go as they please. There’s also a library attached to the performance where audience members can consult various theoretical texts which have informed the work.

But what does Day do? He snatches up a piece of wood, drags it across the floor and uses it to prop up a large wooden panel. He adds the Berocca to one of the bottles, turning the water red. He drinks it. Then he drinks from a bottle of blue liquid. He eats a banana and throws the skin at a pair of shorts hanging from a rafter. He puts the nails in his pocket and prances across the room, tinkling. A few concrete—and even somewhat gratuitous—images emerge: Matthew Day wrapped in colourful fabrics, like a harem attendant; Matthew Day in his underwear standing on one leg, leaning on a spear, reminiscent of David Gulpilil’s famous pose in Walkabout.

As he navigates the room, mapping its irregular features to his instincts and inclinations, Day seems to waver between two distinct planes of movement. On the one hand, there are pulsing bodily contortions reminiscent of the concentrated physicality of his acclaimed TRILOGY series. And on the other, there are the more subdued and undancerly passages where it appears Day is merely performing a task, such as changing costume or manoeuvring lengths of wood. Indeed, in terms of this latter dynamic, this work bears an outward similarity to the contribution Day made to BalletLab’s Kingdom in 2015, which involved performers wandering around a large open space constructing a landscape from mats and long poles.

And then there are also traces—like colourful fragments of old posters glimpsed beneath torn remnants of the new—of what looks like a much earlier dance training: a jaunty skipping step, a partial twirl, a loose flourish of the arm.

Assemblage #1 is a laboratory piece: an attempt to translate a complex tangle of ideas about the composition and relation of social objects and things into a new form of choreographic expression. There are several long passages where, as if waiting on the results of some obscure examination, Day simply stops, sitting quietly in a corner and observing his apparatus.

It’s interesting enough as an insight into the artist’s creative processes and his attempt to open new territories beyond those he has already explored, but it isn’t a particularly engaging spectacle. It has little that stirs the senses, fires the imagination or perplexes the mind. The most exciting moment on opening night was when a decayed wood knot caused a long piece of lumber to snap unexpectedly under pressure. This was at least a genuinely spontaneous event. And it was the only time that the doubtful assemblage seemed really functional, with an identity greater than, but still encompassing, the artist himself.

But perhaps one hour isn’t enough. Perhaps this is a work that needs to be experienced as a durational event, to allow time for contingent and accidental events to accumulate and flow, and for a more intimate connection with the audience to develop.

Assemblage #1, concept, choreography, dance Matthew Day, choreographic assistant Tim Darbyshire, dramaturgy Martin del Amo, sound design James Brown, lighting design Katinka Marac; Dancehouse, North Carlton, 23-27 November 2016

Find

December 2016

A UK perspective: diversity and community

Art practice and health

Rural routes

First Nations

Wala-Gaay

Conference/Festival divide

Rethinking ‘regional’

PLACE & DISPLACEMENT

Boorna Waanginy (The Trees Speak)

Amy Sharrocks, Museum of Water

Nouveau Cirque du Vietnam, A O Lang Pho

Richard Nelson, The Gabriels

Complicite, The Encounter

Martin Green, Flit

Inua Ellams, poet-performer, artist-in-residence

John Akomfrah, Vertigo Sea and Auto Da Fé

Jacobus Capone, Forgiving Night for Day

PLACE & SPORT

Lara Thoms & Snapcat, Before the Siren

ART & POWER

Dmitry Krymov Laboratory, Opus 7

Lola Arias, The Year I was Born

DANCE

Crystal Pite & Jonathan Young, Betroffenheit

Antony Hamilton Dance Projects, Meeting

Meeting Place

Leading with the nose

Essence de Sydney

To tell a smell

Scent-carried conversation

The team

Moves & strategies

Extremes and agonies

Imagine this…

SNO127—John Gillies

Witkacy and Malinowski

First principles

A paradigmatic shift to the percussive plane

Performative staging vs sound-making

Theatre/performance-centric criteria dominance

DIY festival

A festival of the senses

Australia’s bold independents

Indigenous culture: continuity, 1967, language

Meeting Canada

Remembering Myuran Sukumaran

EXTENDING THE MUSEUM EXPERIENCE

MINING DIGITAL POTENTIAL

BEING A MUSEUM AND PROUD OF IT

OPENING DOORS

ARCHIVE ACTION + NEW COMMISSIONING

SENSES

Complicite, The Encounter

Gabriel Dharmoo, Anthropologies Imaginaires

DANCE

Ekosdance Company, Cry Jalailo and Balalala

Dancenorth, Spectra

FORM Dance Projects, Champions

INDIGENOUS PERFORMANCE Nathan Maynard, The Season

Jacob Boehme, Blood on the Dance Floor

Cliff Cardinal, Huff

MUSIC 1967 Music in the Key of Yes

THREE NORTH AMERICAN FEMALE COMPOSERS Nicole Lizée, Sex, Lynch and Video Games

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith

Ellen Fullman, Long String Instrument

THEATRE/CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE Dimitris Papaioannou, Still Life

Gecko, Institute

Le Boite, Prize Fighter

Patricia Cornelius, SHIT

post, Ich Nibber Dibber

Urban Theatre Projects & Blacktown Arts Centre, Home Country

OPERA Opera Australia, King Roger; Sydney Chamber opera, Biographica

Rautavaara

VISUAL & MEDIA ART Myuran Sukumaran: Another Day in Paradise

Vernon Ah Kee, Not An Animal Or A Plant

Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Exit

AND…

Retro Futurismus

INDIGENOUS PERFORMANCE
Nathan Maynard, The Season

MUSIC
1967 Music in the Key of Yes

THREE NORTH AMERICAN FEMALE COMPOSERS
Nicole Lizée, Sex, Lynch and Video Games

THEATRE/CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE
Dimitris Papaioannou, Still Life

OPERA
Opera Australia, King Roger; Sydney Chamber opera, Biographica

VISUAL & MEDIA ART
Myuran Sukumaran: Another Day in Paradise