Australian
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February 2017

Top image credit: Kip Williams in rehearsal, Chimerica, Sydney Theatre Company, photo Hon Boey

A scene from Possibilia, an interactive short film by Daniel Kawn and Daniel Schienert

From a revelatory story about film with a thousand storylines to a podcast about the productivity of adult boredom, RealTime editors recommend the week’s best art reading and listening.

Keith is astonished by the vision, scale and complexities of the revitalised interactive cinema project extensively delineated in this article in The New Yorker.

The Movie with a Thousand Plotlines

Raffi Khatchadourian’s account of the intellectual and aesthetic challenges and breakthroughs in developing interactive movies—their video clip and gaming origins, actors’ accounts of juggling multiple plot trajectories and makers being thrust into meta-thinking about screen storytelling—is a thrilling read. Millions are being invested in these ventures to create a potentially unanticipated artform that goes far beyond audiences simply making plot choices.

Lauren recommends this article in Guernica about the link between experimental art and experimental spaces in New York.

Cranky, Creative, and Controversial: Recalling artists’ collectives of the late ’50s and early ’60s.

“[T]he downtown aesthetic, embedded here and there in co-op galleries and other short-lived experimental spaces, altered the artistic landscape, paving the way for a pluralistic arts community and for alternative spaces that survive today. Although booming real-estate prices resulted in most of the downtown galleries moving to Chelsea, some arts organisations persist, including The SoHo Arts Network, a consortium of non-profit spaces, Apex Art, More Art and the Gross Foundation.”

Listening in to Radio National’s Future Tense, Virginia finds heartening philosopher and game developer Ian Bogost’s ideas about boredom, curiosity and play for adults.

Time, play and a word from Lord Russell on Future Tense

Bogost, the author of Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games (Basic Books, 2016), says that in an era of ever-escalating instant gratification (bored? turn to your phone, to Facebook) adults need to see “playfulness as a mode of living” that helps us build some control over but also “commune with the world.” Boredom, he argues, is “a sign, an opportunity…for real work” and that we adults must run with our curiosity rather than see it as foolishness or “dismiss as [the subject of] poetry.”

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RealTime issue #137 Feb-March 2017

Life, Animated is the 2016 documentary about Owen Suskind, a young autistic man whose intense identification with the heroes and sidekicks of his favourite 90s Disney films provided him and his family with the roadmap to growing up. A portrait of autism, a coming-of-age story and a film about film, Life, Animated combines interviews, film clips and home video footage to mark Owen’s tentative steps from regressive illness to independent adulthood. Directed by Roger Ross Williams to widespread critical praise, Animated Life is based on the book by Owen’s father, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind.

5 copies courtesy of Madman Entertainment

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Include ‘Giveaway’ and the name of the item in the subject line.

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RealTime issue #137 Feb-March 2017

Libby Harward, Tallebudgera Valley, Enter the Map

photo Alex Chomicz

Libby Harward, Tallebudgera Valley, Enter the Map

“Everyone welcome, come as you are,” was the invitation emblazoned across the 2017 program of The Walls Art Space and everyone did, jamming into the reclaimed industrial estate behind Miami Beach as the sun was setting. Hosted by the razor-witted Carlotta (resident now on the Gold Coast for 11 years), the crowd watched an eclectic array of local experimental short films to celebrate the launch.

The mix showcases again that characteristic GC phenomenon, a postmodern cultural adjacency where forms that wouldn’t sit together easily in other artistic geographies make sense. So we begin with the enchanting MKO Sun video, Michiko, by young filmmaker Mia Forrest. She co-opts the classic analogue slit-scan technique made famous in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey into ‘digital time-slit,’ elongating the clichéd mid-shot staple of the music video clip. By dwelling on these durational images of a male body encased in silk and MKO Sun’s singing, she forces us to receive them as composition, a kind of dynamic sculpture rather than an empty image we gobble vacuously while we consume the music.

After a quick double entendre from Carlotta comes an Alex Chomicz public art video piece for the new Metricon Stadium, Rising Suns, in which The Suns AFL players rise up from a silvered ocean like ominous water gods. More banter and next is Cino, a slick, suburban gangsta noir short by Jaen collective, a dynamic young production house on the Gold Coast that melds arthouse tropes with commercial genres. They are followed by the highlight of the screening for me, a short video poetry work, Poem for Rent, by veteran experimental filmmaker Marie Craven. This tightly composed, rhythmic and witty montage intersperses the cryptic lines of Kim Mannix’s poem with still images from Flickr, flashing staccato close-ups of ceramic swan necks and neon signs. The screening closes with another electronic music video clip, Check Ya in Burleigh, by hip-hop artists Madboots. Potential tensions between commercial and experimental, genre and arthouse, sport and culture, image and text are transcended by a shared vocabulary embracing the glamorous leisure culture of the GC landscape, its movement and push.

Indeed, the momentum around the scene here is palpable and the The Walls’ 2017 program across the year reflects this scale and confidence. Artistic Director Rebecca Ross and Deputy Danni Zuvela have curated a balanced program of exhibitions, site works, performance art, installations and residencies that reach out to the rest of the world. With their first international exchange, Dimensions Variable, a Miami ARI will collaborate with local designer and renaissance man Byron Coathup, whose multi-disciplinary works include installation, graphic design, re-appropriation and typography.

There are two local residencies, autumn and winter, with electronic pop goddess and visual artist Michelle Xen creating Benevolent System II and Lowana Davies whose Action Unmarked will be a reflection on the work’s devising. Rising Brisbane-based star Yannick Blattner brings his biting deconstruction of masculinity and phallic Australian pop culture, Thrust, encapsulated in the enlarged floating jet-ski image that adorns the back of the A3 program with suitable pointless machismo.

The Walls, PrizeNoPrize, opening night, 2016

photo Alan Warren

The Walls, PrizeNoPrize, opening night, 2016

The Walls’ open call #PRIZENOPRIZE returns, as does Game Plan [In the Zone], an exploration of the collision of art and sport which will be a part of the local Bleach Festival’s 2017 program and is one of a series in the lead-up to the 2018 Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast. With appropriate gravitas and historicisation there will be a NAIDOC celebration featuring leading Aboriginal artist Archie Moore, whose recreation of Bennelong’s hut was an integral part of the 2016 Sydney Biennale and who will this year challenge the alleged heroism of Australia’s founding fathers.

Amy-Clare McCarthy and Kieran Swann will curate Netherworlds with artists Naomi Blacklock, Anastasia Booth, Caitlin Franzmann, Chantal Fraser, Clay Kerrigan and Blake Lawrence to explore sexual orientations and gender politics, “craft[ing] dark and potent spaces of empowerment through ritual, talisman and world-building.”

Dancer and recent Australia Council Dance Fellowship recipient Brooke Stamp will collaborate with Anna McMahon from feminist performance art collective Ok Yeah Cool Great. This looks like an exquisite collaboration that draws on landscape and speaks to the form of the work emerging from The Farm collective led by Gavin Webber and Grayson Millwood just down the road.

The Walls’ broad and intriguing program kicks off with a corker of an exhibition—the Danni Zuvela-curated Enter the Map, a pyschogeography of the Gold Coast mapped through the eyes of iconic artist and former Gold Coaster Scott Redford, the legendary Carlotta and Aboriginal activist and artist Libby Harward. These are charismatic and provocative artists and the thought that we might navigate the dangerously glamorous terroir of the Gold Coast through their eyes is an irresistible proposition.

The Walls, Program Launch

See The Walls’ 2017 program dates here.

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The Walls, Gold Coast, Queensland

RealTime issue #137 Feb-March 2017

A mezzanined, underground thoroughfare connecting Sydney’s Wynyard Station and Clarence Street. Bordered by escalators, a softly curved LED screen sleekly wraps around the wall, tapering off into sharp corners. On it stretches a moving painting. Blue watery brushstrokes form the background to floating planes of smaller elements, like feathers or light coming through dust or through a window.

This is the science fiction-like setting for a new urban screen for video art produced for TfNSW by Cultural Capital with curator Alessio Cavallaro. Launched in December last year, Wynscreen is timed to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Australia’s first railway station opened in Newcastle in 1866. In the coming months, the public art installation will feature commissioned artists James Price, Ross Gibson and Robyn Backen with Ian Hobbs.

“Rail travel has influenced our lives directly,” says Beatrice Chew, of doeanddoe, the creative collaborators whose commissioned work Woven Moments currently graces Wynscreen. “Rail is not only about transporting us from A to B, it has altered our rhythm, our sense of space and how we experience time.” The works within the Wynscreen program all relate somehow to these ideas of moving through space: time, travel and place. Woven Moments brings two further ideas to that basic premise: that visual exposure to nature has an innately calming effect and quantum physics provides some visual ideas about how to abstract natural elements. The work joins Gary Deirmendjian’s Presence (also currently screening) and previously screened videos En Route by Sue Healey and Locomotion by the Lycette Bros, all on display for 30,000 passers-by daily.

Beatrice Chew works in graphic and object design, Su-An Ng is an animator and their collaborator on Woven Moments is painter Michele Morcos. I spoke with Chew and Ng about the relationship between the content of their artwork and the context of its unusual exhibition space.

How do you describe the work to someone who hasn’t seen it?
Ng It’s a moving painting. It’s a mixture of drawn, digital and painted animation and paint on glass. Everything is hand-done, scanned or captured under the camera, animated and arranged digitally. People have said it’s like a galaxy or being underwater, and that’s totally right. You’re reminded of all these natural movements that exist, but it’s abstracted.

Tell me about your idea of the relaxation response.
Ng That idea came from the specific site the work is in. We wanted to create a work that is harmonious and pleasant.

Chew [The work] is intentionally somewhat slow, because this is a hectic space for people to pass through. We wanted to make works related to health and science. This piece is very inspired by quantum physics, the theory that everything exists in particle and wave states. With nature, humans experience that as a relaxation mode. That’s why people go to the beach, that’s why they go on hikes. It has a natural mystifying impact on our wellbeing. This is a pretty heavy-impact area, and we’re hoping to see if even just five seconds of experiencing the video can relax them.

How did you think about the shape of the screen and the content of the work? What were you thinking about in terms of the relationship between the borders of the screen and the architecture of the transit space?
Ng [At the outset] it was really hard to imagine the feeling of the space, because everything wasn’t built yet. It was totally abstract. We had a rough sketch of the shape of the screen and dimensions of the space. Then we had two opportunities to test it and get it right; we just brought the file here with our hard-hats on to see if it worked. Until then we didn’t realise how much time you’d spend looking at the curves and angles of the screen; they are a huge focus. Immediately we picked that up and rejigged some of the elements. We also had to consider the negative space beyond the screen and between the screen edges.

Chew Now I can’t imagine it not being curved. That’s a key feature. It becomes part of the space rather than a giant TV.

How did you consider the ways people would encounter the work when moving through the space? They see it first while either coming up or down an escalator, then they walk past this curved screen. What’s the relationship between the viewer’s body and that screen?
Ng During rush hour, I stood upstairs and looked at people against the screen. You start to see there’s this relationship between the elements in the work and people moving through the space. In the first impression, you’re like ‘this is a cool piece of work,’ but for someone who wants to spend 10 minutes with it, there is a poetic relationship between the present space and the space in the work. Sometimes it’s as quick as someone turning their head to the screen.

Chew In peak hour, in the afternoon, the way that people interact with the space is different. It could be that the work makes people feel comfortable—you often see them lingering in front of the screen on the phone or using it like a meeting place. I find that quite interesting because from a design perspective, this is a thoroughfare. So through their interactions, people become part of the work in a different way.

So the video has changed the usage of the space in a way you wouldn’t expect.
Chew We’re interested to see the other pieces in the program, to see how they affect the audience. Does it not matter what the work is? Do the other works change the space?

Right, to see if the context and just the fact this project exists or the work itself is the main impact.
Chew And should it be the work’s responsibility to make the space feel safer? I think there’s value in that. There are spaces in the city where I would not pass through or I would pass through very quickly. So how is a digital piece of work going to impact someone psychologically, how can it impact their experience positively rather than just be fancy wallpaper?

So the job of the artwork changes substantially depending on its context and usage. And the work actually has a usage in this setting.
Chew Yes. Sue Healey’s En Route was a dance film and this space became a stage.

You’re attracting quite a different group of viewers from a gallery-attending audience. Did that affect how you approached the making of this work?
Chew We’re of the view that people, including us (we live in the city), deserve beauty as well. There are events and things that our city is doing that are great to go to, but it’s nice to be part of something that is more permanent, that people can enjoy every day without going to a gallery. This is part of their life.

Woven Moments, created by doeanddoe, 10 mins, 2016, produced for TfNSW by Cultural Capital with curator Alessio Cavallaro, architects Woods Bagot

Screening times: 6am-3pm on even-numbered days throughout February; 3pm-12am on odd-numbered days throughout February

BACKGROUND TO THE INTERVIEW

As tensions escalate between co-dependent superstates China and America, STC Artistic Director Kip Williams and Keith Gallasch discuss Lucy Kirkwood’s Chimerica, its alarming timeliness and the director’s determination to maintain a sense of human scale in a three-hour, large-cast epic.

Events in the play are triggered by information given to a photojournalist that the Tank Man who, in 1989 and with plastic shopping bags in hand, stared down a Chinese army tank in Tiananmen Square, is alive and living in the US. The search begins, meshing the lives of the photographer, his contact in China (whose wife died on the Square) and an English demographer with an understanding of the cultural differences between state and democratic capitalism. While the Chinese writer is subject to direct political repression, the dangerously zealous photojournalist is constrained by the politically nervous editor of a major American newspaper. The action plays out against scenes of protest from 1989 in China and an Occupy-type protest in the US late in the play.

The title of this epic play conjures, first, the chimera—a beast from Greek mythology with a lion’s head, a goat’s head rising from the creature’s back and a tail ending in the head of a snake—and then its embodiment as a hybridised China and America. The label “Chimerica” was invented by economists Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick in 2006. They saw these two nations as being dangerously co-dependent: mutually hostile and intricately entwined economically, with the US at the greater disadvantage in the event of divorce. China has invested some $800 billion in US government securities and the US had a trade deficit with China of $366 billion in 2015. The danger for the rest of us in an unravelling of “Chimerica” is that with the two countries accounting for at least half of recent economic growth, a third of GDP and quarter of the world’s population, any disruption will have severe global consequences.

In 2014, Chimerica won an Evening Standard Award for Best Play and the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play. Having started out as an improviser, Lucy Kirkwood began writing for the stage in 2005 with subjects including the terror of war, sex trafficking and sex in the mass media (the award-winning It Felt Empty When the Heart Went At First But It Is Alright Now; 2015).

BOLD, a new dance festival, is an initiative led by Liz Lea to celebrate the legacy of dance. The inaugural festival will be held 8-12 March at the National Film and Sound Archive, the National Library of Australia and QL2 Dance in Canberra.

In response to Australia’s ageing population, entrepreneurial programmers are targeting older audiences. Liz Lea, a widely travelled Australian-born performer has used the theme of legacy to frame BOLD. Rather than catering to a specific audience with the lure of nostalgia, however, Lea wants to pay respect to dance legacies that continue to inform and evolve in the present.

Trained in ballet and contemporary dance from an early age and later in the mudras (conventions of gesture) of Bharatanatyam, Kalariapayattu and Chauu with teachers in London, Bangladesh and Bangalore, Lea developed a healthy respect for the importance of conveying knowledge embedded in dance forms that have been cultivated over hundreds and even thousands of years. In a present of instantaneous consumption and disposal in which obsolescence is a chronic affliction, Lea recognised that such artistic and cultural knowledge may offer an antidote.

Elizabeth Cameron Dalman, whose photo emblazons the BOLD festival materials, observes how dancers, often unaware of the legacies of forms and methods which they carry in their bodies, can find clarity and purpose in knowing these histories. Taught first by Nora Stewart in the Russian style of classical ballet and then by Margaret Morris, an early proponent of the Isadora Duncan technique, Cameron Dalman also recognises Eleo Pomare, a student of José Limón, from whom she learnt at the Folkwangschule in Germany and who grounded her creative worldview. As a venerable torch bearer of her lineage and self-identified shape-shifter, Cameron Dalman believes that it is not only the physical techniques, but also mind and spirit carried kinetically, psychically and intellectually, which can be passed on.

Rakini Devi, a Kolkata-born Australian performance artist and guest of the festival, is also trained in classical Indian dance forms—Bharat Natyam and Odissi. While respecting the origins of sacred traditional Hindu rituals and icons, Devi creatively translates and transforms this legacy by situating it in paradoxical and hybrid contemporary performance contexts and rituals. In doing so, she seeks to subvert and rewrite the hegemonic image of the feminine across the binaries of East and West, sacred and secular, traditional and contemporary.

For movement artist and BOLD guest Glen Murray (Artistic Director, In-visible Practice), the legacy of other artists is to be negotiated during rehearsal time, and then forgotten in the ephemerality of the moment. Prioritising emotional and intellectual dialogue with an audience, Murray, who has worked extensively with mature dancers, seeks to liberate himself from the boundaries of social norms and to become, if temporarily, a purer self: “braver, more intelligent, kinder and more generous.” The extent to which he can achieve the sublime is his measure of success, and failure is only the refusal to try.

Cameron Dalman, who perceives success and failure as akin to the cyclical seasons of nature and by extension to death and regeneration, also concentrates on the immediacy of the physical and emotional exchanges at the cellular level. Devi too recognises the potential in sculpting the body in time to transform her lived reality, although she cultivates “uniqueness” through “difference” in rejection of society’s daily negativity in order to transcend conventional Indian or Western standards.

In a similar vein, movement improviser Matthew Shilcock, who has lived nearly half his life in a wheelchair as he repaired from “one break or another” due to osteoporosis, is on a path of alchemical transmutation. Influenced by Embodied Unity, which incorporates modalities from Qi Gong, Tai Chi, Kundalini Yoga, craniosacral therapy and meditation, Shilcock devised the Osteogenuine method (“Osteo” relating to the bones and “Genuine” to truth or authenticity). This allows him to move authentically in real time as he explores the limitations and restrictions of pain, mobility aid devices and physical injury. Inspired by Laban, Shilcock notates the sensory and emotional interactions, or “inner alchemy,” which he reads from his study of the dynamics of meridian lines and the five elements of traditional Chinese medicine and Western alchemical writings found in the Magnum Opus (of Alchemy), Alistair Crowley and Manly P Hall.

Underlying BOLD is the constant and permanent legacy that informs our shared landscape: Australian Indigenous cultural heritage. Speaking and performing from this place are Murruwurri performer, choreographer and theorist Tammi Gissell, Wiradjuri dancer and choreographer Vicki Van Hout and choreographer, performer, dance historian and Wonnarua man Garry Lester.

In what promises to be a rich and stimulating collection of ancient, recent or combined dance forms, rituals and practices, BOLD appears to value accumulated artistic and cultural experience as translated through bodies beyond the marketable nostalgia of an oblivious, infantilising present.

Set deep in the jungles of the Vanuatu island of Tanna and created in collaboration with that island’s communities, the 2015 feature film Tanna honestly and simply tells a culturally-specific true story of rebellion against arranged marriage with the universal dimensions of a Romeo-and-Juliet forbidden-love tale. Imagine Rolf de Heer’s Ten Canoes against a volcanic Pacific island backdrop. Stripped down to the barest essentials of cinematic storytelling, Tanna is finally getting its due recognition as a nominee for Most Outstanding Foreign Language Film at this year’s Oscars. It’s one of the loveliest, most underseen films of recent years.

An Australian-Vanuatuan feature film, Tanna (2015) was directed by Australian filmmakers Martin Butler and Bentley Dean while living and working with the Yakel tribe in Vanuatu. Lauren Carroll Harris

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It’s heartening that two Adelaide-based companies, Restless Dance Theatre and Gravity and Other Myths, will make their Adelaide Festival debuts this year in Artistic Co-directors Neil Armfield and Rachel Healy’s first of three programs. Both companies, one featuring dance artists with disability, the other a circus theatre ensemble, will venture into unfamiliar spaces for their performances.

Restless Dance Theatre, Intimate Space

Hotels are liminal places. Not quite public, not quite private, their shared spaces tease and tantalise the observer with glimpses of other people’s lives. Their occupants rarely stay for long, usually leaving for less transient destinations near and far after only a day or two. Little trace of them remains: a faint paper trail, a stranger’s remembered glance, something left behind in the rush for a red-eye flight. To the passerby, hotel rooms remain a mystery and back of house, as it’s called—kitchens, service corridors, loading bays— is the preserve of staff alone. Only the bar is open to all. Or is it?

Michelle Ryan, Artistic Director of Restless Dance Theatre since 2013, lives near a large city hotel. Watching its patrons come and go, fleetingly hunched over drinks and laptops in the ground floor bar, it occurred to Ryan that she rarely saw anyone with a disability, hardly a person who reflected her own existence—she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2001—as a wheelchair user. “I think I’ve only seen one person with an intellectual disability at the hotel,” Ryan tells me. “There’s not that visibility. I’ve always wanted through my work to bring that to the foreground. Everyone has the right to be part of the community so why is it that people aren’t being embraced in that way, or prepared to take the risk to go out into those places?”

And so, 18 months ago, was born the idea for Intimate Space, a site-specific work for a promenading audience featuring performers from Restless’ youth and senior ensembles, as well as three acting students from Flinders University whom Ryan met during a workshop last year run by UK physical theatre company Frantic Assembly. The Hilton Hotel, which overlooks Victoria Square in central Adelaide, accepted Ryan’s proposition to use multiple spaces in the work, including those normally off-limits to guests, and during an unusually busy period in the city’s events calendar known locally as “Mad March.”

“We did look at another hotel but the Hilton has some great features that I thought would work well,” says Ryan. “For example, there’s a function level, one up from the ground floor, that has a view directly into the bar area. So audience members will have a voyeuristic experience as the dancers perform, and hopefully the bar patrons won’t realise that they’re part of the work as well.” Scenes will also take place in other parts of the hotel, sometimes with Geoff Cobham’s minimal lighting but mostly as found, including kitchens and the laundry—one of the last in operation in an Adelaide hotel—where Jason Sweeney’s soundscape will intermingle with the rumbling of industrial dryers. All the while, the hustle and bustle of the hotel’s underworld, its shadow life of endless, frantic maintenance and preparation, will continue as normal.

The most intimate of the work’s vignettes is a duet in a guest suite, where each intake of 10 audience members will gather around a double bed occupied by two performers. “It’s not naughty,” Ryan tells me, “but there’s a level of inference and it’s very up-close and playful. I’ve shown the duet to a couple of people now and they are always surprised. They find themselves thinking: ‘should they be allowed to do that?’ I don’t want the work to be overly confronting but people with disabilities are sexual beings and I want this fact to make audience members question what they perceive or think should be happening, both in the work and the world.” For Ryan, Intimate Space opens up not only questions of visibility and autonomy, but authority too. “The audience will not be passive,” she says, “they will be engaged in certain ways and led at all times by our dancers. I’m interested in how audience members will feel about following someone with a disability to areas unfamiliar to them.”

“The beauty of this work,” she continues, “is the detail of its choreographic language. Because the audience is so close you can say the most important thing with the smallest movement. We’ll rehearse things over and over again until they’re the way I want them to be, but it’s also a question of thinking about space. It’s important, especially in areas that are far more confined than a conventional theatre, that the interactions between the dancers and the relationships they have with each other are really clear.” Unlike the two previous works Ryan has directed for Restless, In the Balance (2014) and Touched (2015), Intimate Space will not end with a “big, happy dance number. There might be a dance,” Ryan says wryly, “but it’ll be subtle.”

Gravity and Other Myths, Backbone

Like Restless, Gravity and Other Myths is something of a local institution, a fixture in an unstable arts ecosystem. Formed in 2009 by alumni of the Cirkidz circus school, the company has developed a national and international profile through its works, most notably A Simple Space (2013) which combined acrobatics and physical theatre with a stripped-back aesthetic that emphasised physicality over elaborate stage effects. Their festival offering, Backbone, will see the company upscale from small fringe circuit venues to the 600-seat Dunstan Playhouse with its proscenium arch and wide, deep stage. Its director is Darcy Grant, a former acrobat who taught many members of the company’s current ensemble when they were kids.

I begin my telephone interview with Grant by suggesting that the work’s theme of strength is a vexed topic at a time when the world seems at the mercy of dictatorial strongmen like Trump and Putin and a resurgent far-right. “The work loosely touches on that,” Grant says. “I’ve got three clear streams of material: personal strength, which is self-explanatory, then what’s immediate—the people who are close to you, your family, friends, community, your country even—and finally there’s a global sense of strength, the question of how you react to what’s happening out there. I know that particularly my generation—but everyone I speak to actually—feels quite disempowered. How should we respond when there are tyrants getting into power and protests don’t seem to work any more and social media seems too manipulated?” While Grant acknowledges that the theme is multivalent, he stresses that he is “trying to find the ways that we are strong and powerful, and answers to the question of how you remain strong when lots of stuff is quite depressing.”

The work is also, in part, a response to the company’s internal dynamics. Grant explains, “We have interrogated the actual relationships that exist within this group of people—who have known each other for some time, in some cases 15 years—and looked very specifically at what each member is to the group. At the moment we have a scene in the show that we’re calling ‘Keystone’ where the longest-serving founding woman in the company, who’s kind of a pillar of strength, really subverts the idea of female power we see in tattoos and flexing biceps and puts forward other ways of being strong, such as how women can bind a group of people together. By examining what she is to the group and how she is strong, we’ve arrived at a whole bunch of new physical material.”

Grant describes the physical vocabulary of Backbone as an evolution of, rather than departure from, the group’s previous works, retaining their muscularity and directness of form and purpose. “The thing I always say about Gravity and Other Myths as a relative outsider is that they have an incredibly good sense of what they aren’t.” In Grant’s mind, this is what he refers to as “chamber circus,” the discipline’s popular form in Australia that is “vacuous and poetic. One person climbs on another person and they look like they’re struggling and so on. There is a formula there and while we recognise that that is our heritage as a circus company we are not interested in being slaves to it. Many of Backbone’s scenes begin in that space, as a form of circus theatre sports, and then grow in complexity after that. These performers are in what I describe as the sweet spot where they’re mature enough to have strong conceptual ideas but still have bodies that obey their commands.”

The challenge, as the group reaches the halfway point of its final rehearsal period, is to maintain the close connection with audiences it is used to while also adapting to the necessarily distancing nature of the Playhouse stage. “With MFI [Major Festivals Initiative] support behind us,” Grant says, “this feels like a big opportunity. So the company doesn’t want to do something with it that’s very safe or too familiar. For instance, we’re doing something completely new with our designer Geoff Cobham, covering the stage with this sort of granulated earth-coloured gravel that accentuates sliding and movement by flying through the air whenever it’s kicked or scooped up. That’s something we discovered through a fairly arduous process of looking for points of difference from, as I described earlier, the chamber circus model—vacuous space, minimal set—which is pretty popular right now. Gravity and Other Myths describe themselves as everyman or every person circus, so everybody should be able to get something from these works. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be sophisticated and layered. The word that keeps getting thrown around in rehearsals at the moment is ‘epic’.”

Adelaide Festival: Restless Dance Theatre, Intimate Space, Hilton Adelaide, 3-19 March; Gravity and Other Myths, Backbone, Dunstan Playhouse, 14-19 March

The key fuel which energised the 20th century shift from ‘art object’ to ‘post-object’ was performativity. Think Duchamp donning alter egos, Pollock painting in real-time, Klein directing paint-covered nudes, Nauman videographing himself. Of course, a host of ‘new objects’ were made in the process, defining new media along the way. Video art is likely the most notable outcome, born from half a century of furrowed brow mirror-phase enquiry, crucially citing the artist not only as performer, but ‘post-object’ performer akin to his or her ‘anti-material’ brethren.

Nam June Paik is routinely touted as the godfather of video art. It’s not a term he came up with, but one that he neither denied nor avoided. Paik—like Duchamp, Pollock, Klein and Nauman—exploited himself as matter and used himself as material. Specifically, he ghosted his presence within the comparatively ‘immaterial’ phosphorescence of the CRT video monitor and its ‘technostic’ transference of magnetic videotape. Conceptually reflecting on video’s innate presence as a form of new media, he further networked these strategies into a wide array of multi-media events, constructions and strategies. For this, he is undoubtedly an important historical figure. The two-part exhibition at the Watari Museum in Tokyo, 2020: Who is the one grinning ?+?=??, celebrates Paik’s legacy and works towards maintaining his place in history.

And so the Watari Museum should. The institution was founded as a private entity in 1990 by Shizuko Watari, following the establishment of Galerie Watari some 10 years earlier. The museum boasts a flashy bubble-era architect-designed frontage in Shibuya. It specialises in a robust representation of Japanese contemporary art informed by internationalist modernism and postmodernism. Nam June Paik staged some of his most ambitious works at both the Galerie and the Museum on numerous occasions, and this exhibition revisits those canonical works from its collection. As such, the exhibition promotes Paik’s history as braided into the Watari Museum’s supportive infrastructure—which is worth acknowledging in Japan where staging contemporary art has always been a vexed enterprise for difficult artists.

Looking another way

Now, much of what I’ve said above easily sidles up to orthodox historical assessments of radical modernist ‘post object’ new media production from the latter half of the 20th century. Let’s move past clean didactic check boxes to murkier tendrils of artistic evidence. Paik’s key role in the Fluxus venture—especially in promoting its internationalist multicultural spread—enabled him not only to travel on the movement’s dispersion of performativity, but also to apply its indeterminate, collective, interactive and open-ended processes to his solo works. But sharply considering this in the Watari Museum exhibition, a conundrum presents itself when forensically assessing the videos. Art history usually gets away with Chinese Whispers, lost documents, destroyed works and bad photographs. Indeed, the mythos of Fluxus is sealed in old black and white snapshots of men in suits doing messy, wacky things. Conversely, Paik’s work is there in all its videotaped RGB glory. In a YouTube era (a cliché that here I am forced to use) where historical artefacts get splattered online in random fragments—which can sometimes illuminate through the veracity of their innate materiality—watching Paik’s videos and performance documentations generates conflicting impressions.

The first lies in the cultural overlays which will always energise art beyond its mad authorial dictates. Paik (and his proselytisers) will make claims of radicalism, but in a post-war media realm, only a fool (or a curator) would persist in honouring an artist’s post-object/new-media vision while ignoring how the artist’s chosen technologies operate outside the art gallery. By inference, Paik is associated with the medium of television and video becoming what they are as if by his provenance, and as if technological society needs such visionaries. Despite the mantra-like trail of paragraphs which mythologises Paik’s ‘invention’ of things like television interventions, video synthesisers, global satellite broadcasts and electronic intercommunications, I see only default-position videographic aesthetics played out again and again. Roughneck chroma-keying, insipid colour-wheeling, and lo-fi parabolic patterning document less a renegade incursion of media protocols and more the absence of a responsive eye. Particularly throughout the 80s and 90s—two decades across which televisual, digi-cine and pixel-dependent aesthetics developed in leaps and bounds—Paik’s work looks like community TV slots from the late 70s.

On the second floor, a large space contains Paik’s Earth Theory (1990), previously installed here in 1993. It’s a faux tree sprouting a slew of various sized monitors. Some are synched, playing the same tape; others play separate non-synched tapes. The content seems archival even for the time, playing as it does fragments of footage Paik would have produced across the preceding decade. One monitor here is allowed sound. In keeping with Paik’s idea of television being media maybe moreso than video per se, it appears to contain fragments of the type of ‘conception and co-ordination’ he did for the ambitious intercontinental real-time live tie-in/broadcasts like Good Morning Mr. Orwell (1984) and Wrap Around The World (1988). Here, one piece really stands out: Transpacific Duet (1988), which features casual audio-visual flipping and mixing of Ryuichi Sakamoto in Tokyo (performing his version of the Okinawan ballad “Chin Nuku Juuishi”) and Merce Cunningham improvising dance movement in New York.

Paik, Sakamoto, Cunningham

Sakamoto’s song originally appears on his album Neo Geo (1987): a gaudy hi-tech decimation of a truly beautiful song, its only saving grace is the embarrassing tastelessness of its 80s production. But for Transatlantic Duet, all the Trevor Horn drums and Spandau Ballet slap-bass are absent: it’s just Sakamoto on synth pads and three beautiful Okinawan madams warbling while striking their shamisens in slow-metered clockwork. Against this minimal melodiousness, waves and washes of voltage-controlled filtering of abrasive noise and crackling straight out of the IRCAM textbook sweep throughout the ethnographic fluttering of the delicate Okinawan modal. Cunningham executes one of his amazing ‘I’m-not-really-here’ explorations of space with his lilting metamorphosings of positions. Observing his movement is like watching an hour of 10 people waiting for a bus, all compressed into a single corporeal movement. The mix between these two events is magical. It’s also strangely prophetic of Sakamoto’s collaboration with Alva Noto for records on Raster-Noton (2002-2011) and portions of the score to Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant (2015).

Having later re-watched the complete satellite events of Good Morning Mr. Orwell and Wrap Around The World (presented earlier in the first part of the exhibition), I can only say that Transatlantic Duet is an anomaly: the rest of both shows is mired in dated Downtown NY insularity and hipness. But what I’m most struck by is how this transcultural merger of what Paik termed “global disco” unwittingly produced a complex intermedial audiovisual work unlike anything else evidenced on the spray of monitors at the Watari Museum.

Returning my experience

The second confounding factor in Paik’s technological self-hagiography lies in the bald badness of his performance. On the third floor, a variety of works illustrate Paik’s longstanding performance relationship with Joseph Beuys, technically spanning 1961 to 2006. Various monitors play famous works like Coyote III at Sogetsu Hall in Tokyo. In it, Paik doodles at the piano playing classical excerpts, while Beuys stands at a microphone intoning concrete poem-like grunts and phonetic syllabic stabs. The piano playing is pedestrian, and Beuys has to be the worst performer I’ve ever seen: entirely self-conscious while megalomaniacally convinced of his intellectual grandeur. It’s like watching your dad doing karaoke and being really really serious about it. It’s neither engaging post-poem-performance nor charismatic spectacle. Is this a subversive hallmark of Fluxus performativity—being so bad that one is transported to a liberated plane of unhindered possibilities? I can buy the theory, but I’m returning my experience.

On another monitor with headphones, Paik performs Farewell To Our Beuys (1986) at Watari Museum. The piece is a requiem for the deceased Beuys, Paik’s compatriot in forming their ‘Eur-Asia’ conceptual continent based on their Fluxus-derived performances. Paik slowly moves around a grand piano and hammers nails into it, symbolising it as a coffin and finally planing the lacquered keyboard lid. All the time, he’s checking that the camera is in the right position to ‘document’ this incredible event, as if history is being made. It sure isn’t. He can’t even hold a hammer or planer properly, and he certainly isn’t listening to what he’s producing. Most offensively, he patronisingly directs a seemingly conservative woman from the audience to help him, getting her to ‘listen’ to the amazing sound world arising from this intervention into the history of classical propriety in the name of his and Beuys’ performative legacy. As the sloppy thuds reverberate the piano strings inside, the polemic rings hollow. A high schooler, a drunk or even your karaoke dad could make more interesting sounds banging up a piano. This heightened artlessness I see time and again when contemporary artists ‘revisit’ the performative world of the post-object. I also hear it when many a classically-trained musician attempts improvised sections in a scored composition.

Digesting all these works at the Watari Museum—particularly the post-object new media works moving beyond Paik’s earlier fascinating deconstructions of TV cabinets and CRT monitors—I can cerebrally and historically comprehend his playful concepts of “feed back & feed forth” and “Present > Infinite.” But I can also perceive and audit a surfeit of bad video and poor performance.

10th Anniversary Retrospective of Nam June Paik, 2020: Who is the one Grinning ?+?=??; Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 17 July–10 Oct, 2016; 15 Oct, 2016-29 Jan, 2017

In a “post-truth”, virtual world of alternative facts, the challenge of making films representing reality has never been greater. Meanwhile, questions that have long been centre stage for documentary makers—do we have the right to represent others, is there such a thing as objective truth, where is the line between opinion and fact?—now loom large in our everyday political discourse. Into this contested terrain steps the new director of the Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC), Andrew Wiseman who took up the role just months out from the 2017 event. With a resume in film and television going back to the 1980s that includes writing, directing and producing, Wiseman brings a wealth of filmmaking experience (including The Tale of Ruby Rose, My Brother Jack, After the Deluge, Sisters of War, Curtin and Kokoda) to his new job. I spoke with him on the eve of the 2017 conference to discuss the state of play in a rapidly changing documentary world.

As someone with long experience in the local industry, what do you see as the key critical challenges facing documentary makers in this country today, and how are these challenges different from what they were, say, a decade ago?

The key challenges are to do with the plethora of ways in which films can be financed and shot in terms of emerging technologies, and the myriad ways in which they can be distributed. These are really positive changes, but the paradox is that they provide so many opportunities for a filmmaker to be bedazzled. Given the speed with which technology changes and distribution platforms emerge, it’s incumbent on filmmakers to be even more discerning and selective at the outset of their filmmaking journey. The central questions become even more critical for filmmakers to ask themselves: who will watch this film, who will buy it, how will I finance it, how will it be distributed, why am I making it—and what are the ethical parameters around the project? If they can successfully and judiciously answer that matrix of questions, it puts them on a stronger footing, because it allows them to say, “This is what I want to make and this is what I don’t want to make.” That second part is really critical, otherwise everything becomes possible and filmmakers can get bogged in a swamp of possibilities.

One of the most important emerging technologies—virtual reality—features heavily at this year’s conference. What do you think VR means for existing documentary models: the feature film, the TV series, the short? Are we on the verge of a technological shift that will fundamentally redefine film and television? Or do you think VR represents a new, parallel arena to traditional forms?

I think the jury is out. A lot of major companies and filmmakers are circling around the edges of VR, and it’s all tantalising. My guess is it will be a very substantial player in the communication market. Whether it captures every area of that market—games, training, education, narrative, factual—I don’t know. I suspect it might go gangbusters in a way that won’t crush other forms; it might enhance them. Incoming technologies often remind us of the idiosyncratic and unique features of other forms. I can certainly see the benefit of VR in terms of training and games. Storytelling in all its myriad forms is another kettle of fish. I think the claims that it might challenge traditional storytelling techniques is an interesting one, because there is a substantial shift when the world in which you are participating is immersive and exists all around you. But questions like what is an edit, what is depth-of-field and how do you have a blended experience as an audience are yet to be answered in terms of VR. My guess is there will be some really creative documentary filmmakers who will run with the form and find those unique aspects of the technology, rather than just cleaving onto it existing techniques.

A major area to be discussed with VR is the ethical implications, because if you can run an argument that it feels more ‘real’ and immersive, then an audience’s ability to disassociate themselves from what they are watching will be diminished, and therefore perhaps the impact, and the unintended consequences of that impact, may be more real. The Russian writer Maxim Gorky, when he saw the earliest Lumière films, is alleged to have said that it was like going into a kingdom of shadows. I wonder what he would make of VR, whether he might say that it is a kingdom of possible visual delights that might be illuminating, but also beguiling.

The question of the relationship between truth and representation is becoming particularly fraught in recent times, and you were quoted in a recent AIDC press release as saying, “The malleability of truth is coming into sharp focus for activists and filmmakers alike.” What role do you think documentary can or should play in a world that seems increasingly defined by wildly varying worldviews and an embrace of “alternative facts”?

The AIDC theme this year is, “There are three sides to every story.” It’s there for each delegate to interpret in whatever way they want. My take on it is, if you think of stories as having only one side or another, you have a kind of brutal dichotomy. Whereas if you open your eyes and mind to the possibility of many sides to a story, then all sorts of things can be considered. Some of the masterpieces of documentary are those where filmmakers went out quite confidently to investigate a story and there was an about-face—a fault line occurred within the story—and they were agile and adept enough to follow the change. Whether it’s Waiting for Fidel [Michael Rubbo, 1974] or Capturing the Friedmans [Andrew Jarecki, 2004] or many others, there is a huge change, a 180-degree turn that gives the filmmaker and the participants a whole other angle. That’s one of the things that documentary is particularly good at providing.

AIDC has gone through a period of considerable change in recent years, relocating to Melbourne after being in Adelaide for a prolonged period, and going through two conference directors in as many years. You took over from Britt Arthur less than six months out from the 2017 event, but as you settle into the job, where would you like to take AIDC in future?

I was lucky to come into an organisation in very solid, good health. Britt Arthur and her team did a really outstanding job in 2016, and a great deal of the 2017 program was already in train when I came into place. My first reaction is not to upset the apple cart.

Having said that, there are some areas I’m looking at and considering for next year. It’s very early days, but they include some of the things we were talking about before. The ethical challenges for filmmakers working in this space is something I want to potentially look at. There are possibilities of making stronger connections to the world of academia. Some of the craft areas would be really fun to investigate in other ways, including editing and what it means to write for documentary given the emergence of new technologies like VR. And I’m really keen that the “I” in AIDC continues to be strengthened. It’s fabulous that we have over 45 international decision-makers and guests coming to the conference. We absolutely want to maintain that, and try to reach out to more of the world, with a focus on Asia.

So those are some loose thoughts. Ultimately, AIDC is a place where you want to make great connections. Whether those connections are ideas, creativity, business, craft, finance, distribution, broadcasting or an amalgam of all of these—AIDC has to be the place where it’s really easy and lots of fun to do that.

AIDC sessions related to this interview:

The image [above] is from 1979 Revolution, leading American digital artist Navid Khonsari’s docu-video game that puts players into the world of revolution in Iran during 1979. Khonsari is currently working on a number of VR projects.

Khonsari will then join Australian VR artist Lynette Wallworth, the maker of Collisions, and Oscar Raby, Co-Founder of Melbourne Factual VR studio VRTOV and director of the VR documentary Easter Rising: Voice of a Rebel (image at top) at 2.30pm to “discuss the vital importance of story in developing a truly engaging VR experience.”

On 6 March at 3.45pm, Anna Broinowski (Pauline Hanson: Please Explain), Nicola Harvey (Buzzfeed Australia), Matt Davis (Foreign Correspondent) and chair Linda Brusasco (ABC) will address the topic “Political Documentary in a Post-Truth World, How Vital are the Virals?” Should documentarians “add vital [social media] weapons to their storytelling arsenal”?

The best documentary films reflectively illuminate the complexities of a person, a place, a situation, precisely in ways that news stories don’t. Can a news outlet commission truly great documentary work that transcends the daily news cycle?

Broadcasters and print publishers as diverse as Al Jazeera, the New York Times and The Guardian seem to think so; all three have been showcasing, and in some cases commissioning, documentaries for some time. While Al Jazeera has always been primarily a broadcaster, the New York Times and Guardian now also focus on the internet as a platform for disseminating their screen works.

A selection of films showcased at this year’s Australian International Documentary Conference, curated by Guardian Documentaries head Charlie Phillips, illustrate the potential—and pitfalls—of this new form.

Early days

Charlie Phillips’ appointment as Head of Guardian Documentaries in October 2014 signalled an intention to commission work that went beyond news coverage. Formerly the deputy director of the esteemed Sheffield Doc/Fest, Phillips was also an editor for the pioneering FourDocs, an online initiative launched by the UK’s Channel 4 in 2005.

“It’s a different kind of storytelling that’s relevant to the news but isn’t itself news,” Phillips says of Guardian Documentaries via email from the UK. “That’s an exciting new format for The Guardian and it means we can access different forms of storytelling, and do it through people with access to stories, people and situations that we might not have access to ourselves—certainly not for an extended amount of time.”

From early 2015 to mid-2016, Guardian Documentaries broadcast 43 films, mostly 10 minutes or less in length. The best of these are outstanding works in miniature—pithy, entertaining and compact. Ruth Sewell’s From the Bronx to Yale, for example, is a beautifully engaging 13-minute film about a group of kids from New York’s poorest borough, who practice a form of competitive acting. A film about underprivileged youth that never talks about victims, it clearly illustrates the potential for Guardian Documentaries to delve into subjects and perspectives daily news journalism rarely touches.

In contrast, Erol Mintas’ From Space, Syria is Here illustrates the drawbacks of such a condensed form. The subject is attention-grabbing: Muhammed Faris, the first Syrian in space, is now a refugee in Turkey. The film opens with his warm exchange from an orbiting spaceship with Syria’s then-president Hafiz al-Assad via a video link in 1987. Exiled to Turkey in 2012 for his opposition to the regime of Assad’s son, Bashar, we are told Faris is now a supporter of the Free Syrian Army.

Faris’ story immediately provokes a barrage of questions. How did a Syrian get into space? How and why did a former air force general end up as a refugee? Did his political views change, or was he always secretly opposed to the Assad regime? Faris went into orbit under the auspices of the Soviet Interkosmos program, designed to help astronauts from pro-Soviet countries, as well as non-aligned states, get into space. Astronauts from countries as diverse as India, Mongolia and (surprisingly) France took space flights as part of the program, which paved the way for the International Space Station in the post-Soviet era. Unfortunately, we learn nothing of this from Mintas’ seven-minute film, nor are any of the other questions posed by Faris’ life answered. His call to Assad from space is simply dismissed by the former general as propaganda, while the film reveals nothing of his current political views beyond his opposition to the present regime.

Deeper, longer

Guardian Documentaries were paused mid-2016 and relaunched in September that year. The pace has slowed, new releases are now posted monthly and the newer films average closer to 30 minutes in length. There has also been a concurrent increased deepening of content. “Our audience want more immersive, longer stories that clearly differentiate themselves as documentaries rather than news reports,” explains Phillips.

The half-hour Desert Fire, directed by Sebastien Rabas and Jack Losh, is a good example of the lengthier, more complex works on the site. It follows the journey of the Kurdistan soccer team to the “alternative world cup” in Abkhazia, a breakaway region of Georgia, in 2016. The competition comprises stateless groups and unrecognised territories, including Kurds, Japan’s Korean minority and the population of Padania, an independent state proposed by separatists in northern Italy.

Relying on the strong personalities comprising the Kurdistan team and climaxing in a tense quarter-final penalty shoot-out, Desert Fire never glosses over the myriad tensions and ambivalences contained in this story. At the same time, it deftly avoids getting bogged down in political or historical minutiae.

Radical Brownies, directed by Linda Goldstein Knowlton, similarly uses observation and interviews to portray the Radical Monarchs, a troupe of girls in Oakland, California who focus on principles of social justice, particularly in relation to gender and race. Oakland was home to the founding chapter of the Black Panthers in 1966, the city’s radical history providing the bedrock of the Monarchs’ beliefs and practices. It’s a stark contrast to the domestic tasks and apolitical values traditionally taught by the Brownies.

The young girls interviewed in the 21-minute film are highly articulate and historically informed, as are the women leading the troupe. Their thoughtful commentary is set beside a Fox News segment, which manages to extensively discuss the Monarchs’ actions and philosophy without ever speaking to those in the group. It’s a textbook example of the way certain media outlets actively work to demonise people and ideas that question the social and economic order, masking their ideological agenda beneath a veneer of paternalistic concern. Radical Brownies is engaging, critical and incisive, setting a high bar for future Guardian films.

Opportunities for local filmmakers

These and other recent offerings from Guardian Documentary indicate that Charlie Phillips, true to his word, is actively seeking work that goes beyond the constraints of daily news journalism. “We want stuff that will work online and pull in an audience hungry for brilliant stories that tell them something new,” Phillips says.

While the Guardian films tend to follow a fairly set formula—fast-paced observation driven by interview commentary and explanatory subtitles—the range of subject matter is impressively diverse. The majority of these works have also been commissioned rather than acquired, opening exciting possibilities for the kind of stand-alone documentaries that struggle to find slots in Australia’s current broadcast environment. Most enticingly, this online platform offers filmmakers a global audience at the click of a mouse.

The Guardian Documentaries Showcase will screen from 8.30–10pm, 7 March, Federation Square Big Screen, Melbourne (free to the public).

“His temper knows no middle state, / Extreme alike in love or hate.”
Handel, Saul

Saul, King of Israel, made mad by his jealousy of David, slayer of Goliath and saviour of the realm, glowers, rages and relentlessly intimidates family and subjects. In the score, his role is critical, not dominant, but in Barrie Kosky’s fantastical realisation of Handel’s great oratorio as opera, Saul’s stage presence is expanded and intensified, his delusion and inevitable destruction intricately and passionately delineated—ever faithful to the vision of the composer and librettist Charles Jennen, the pair’s fine sense of drama allowing Kosky to open out the oratorio, respecting its integrity and unleashing its enormous power. It’s a gloriously wrenching experience, this luxurious pleasure of being invited to observe at a distance and at once empathically inhabit an extreme state of being.

Hearing about the 2017 Adelaide Festival program from Co-Artistic Directors Rachel Healy and Neil Armfield (he on the phone from rehearsals of The Ring in Melbourne) at a press briefing last year at the Sydney Opera House, I recall being immediately struck by a number of core works that pivoted about such states of being and realised in highly expressive productions—Kosky’s Saul, Thomas Ostermeier’s Richard III, the Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young dance work Bettrofenheit and Motus’ MDLSX. So too will Andrew Bovell’s Secret River also be writ large—performed in a disused Adelaide Hills quarry, recalling the 1980 Adelaide Festival staging of Peter Brook’s The Conference of the Birds and the subsequent 1988 performance of The Mahabharata with its sense of the sacred, this time on what is inherently Aboriginal sacred ground.

While Saul, Richard III and Secret River reveal the wounds that scar nations (the fall of kings in the first two, the unresolved divisions of race wrought by colonisation in the latter), Bettrofenheit (a form of post-traumatic sadness) springs from the agonies of a parent, Young, whose own young children died tragically, the performance an act of grieving shared with a dance company and realised with “phantasmagorical clowning and mask work,” says Healy of a work she also describes as “almost [emotionally] unbearable.” In Complicite’s The Encounter, an actor, Richard Katz, plays his director, the work’s writer Simon McBurney, whose emotional engagement with the true story of a photographer lost in the Amazon rainforest results in the sonic conjuring of that world (the audience in headphones) and a living out of severe anxieties about the vulnerability of tribal peoples, the environment and his small daughter to the depredations of advanced civilisation. Bettrofenheit and The Encounter provide the link between works of scale with ones that focus intimately on individuals, some living and some of them the artists we’ll see onstage.

MDLSX from Italian performance company Motus features “punk god/dess” Silvia Calderoni delving, says Rachel Healy, into “an archive of family footage of growing up as girl/boy,” interwoven with passages from the Jeffrey Eugenides novel Middlesex (2002) and the music of The Smiths. R.E.M. and others. Healy says of this account of “being born twice” that, aptly, “it’s wild and hard to classify.”

This sense of the intensely personal recurs in a cluster of seemingly gentler works. In Every Brilliant Thing (writer Duncan McMillan with Jonny Donahoe, performer James Rowland; UK), a man recalls dealing at six years of age with his mother’s attempted suicide and its legacy. In another solo performance, Wot no fish (UK), Danny Braverman discovers in a shoe box his great uncle’s drawings for his wife inscribed on pay packets from 1926 to 1982, revealing aspects of love and family life. In Portraits in Motion (Germany), Volker Gerling shares with his audience photographs (projected onto a large screen from the artist’s engagingly handmade flip books) of portraits made of strangers on his travels and with whom he manages to briefly bond.

Some works in the festival give intimate voice and body to non-performers. William Yang and Annette Shun Wah, in The Backstories, another of their productions that reveal the complex lives of immigrants, present a trio of Adelaide citizens—Malaysian-born chef Cheong Liew, Australian women’s soccer star Moya Dodd and fashion designer Razak Mohammed—each exploring their lives through their private photo collections. Choreographer Jérôme Bel, who has playfully challenged the norms of contemporary dance for two decades, has chosen 15 very different Adelaide locals to attempt various dance styles from moonwalking to ballet, “blur[ring] the line between failure and success,” says Healy, describing the work as “irreverent but also moving, funny and poignant.” These performers might not speak but their bodies, presences and how they address Bel’s challenge will tell us much.

Audience members themselves become performers in Arab performance-maker Tania El Khoury’s Gardens Speak which, says Healy “gives grieving shape for the victims of the Assad murders” in Syria. Many families have had to bury their kin in home gardens. Each participant, with a torch and in protective plastic clothing, approaches a low mound of earth, digs into it with their hands and ‘unearths’ a voice that tells of a lost life. A gentle ceremony of acknowledgement and sympathetic grieving, Gardens Speak is also a stark reminder of individual lives that remain buried beneath statistics.

The wounds that Saul, Richard III, Betroffenheit, The Encounter, MDLSX, Every Brilliant Thing and Gardens Speak represent each seeks healing through art, just as The Backstories, Wot no fish, Portraits in Motion and Gala should provide the gentle affirmations of well-being that can be shared in the absence of unwarranted hatred, oppression and war.

A celebration

Festivals provide a sense of ceremony, of intense emotion and transcendence, of communality and of continuity: Secret River in a quarry; the recreation of a 1920s floating palais on the River Torrens (“a gift to Adelaide” from the Co-Directors says Healy); the welcome return of former festival director Barrie Kosky. We experience works and states of being we might otherwise not. We’re compelled to judge: Armfield declares, “Lars Eidinger gives an utterly mesmerising performance that surpasses any performance of King Richard that I’ve seen—and that includes [Antony] Sher.” In interviews Kosky sees Saul as “revolutionary” in form—Handel’s oratorios as inherently more dramatic than his operas. Armfield thinks Kosky’s production “revolutionary,” breathing new life into an 18th century work that was passionately adopted by 19th century choral societies, just as Kosky sees himself as inheriting and revitalising the legacy of Peter Sellars’ seminal 1996 production of another Handel oratorio, Theodora. Adding to the festival’s sense of occasion and complementing Secret River, 1967 Music in the Key of Yes is a wonderful celebration in song and film of the Referendum that acknowledged Aboriginal peoples as citizens of Australia.

There’s more to the 2017 Adelaide Festival than identified by the connections I’ve made here between apparently kindred productions. Part of the pleasure is not to see a festival just as a bunch of best choices, but as a work of art (conceived consciously or not) with its own internal correspondences and synchronicities which will reveal themselves as the festival comes to life and the ritual takes hold. When it’s over, we might ask, as we might of any work of art, ‘Did it sustain us? Did it change us?’ Once upon a time, Adelaide Festivals had that gravitas. Does it this time; it has that air about it.

There is nothing quite like having a piece of theatre defined by its maker as a dose of wasabi. Jo Randerson is Banging Cymbal, Clanging Gong. We know from the outset that there is swearing, drinking, aggressive behaviour and occasional attempts at smoking but what we do not know is that the show is actually a strangely gentle call to arms to defend the right for difference, whatever that difference may be.

Banging Cymbal, Clanging Gong has been playing in various incarnations for 20 years. A New Zealander with Danish ancestry, Jo Randerson found herself in the old country at a gathering of women theatre makers where she felt rather out of place among the formally precise, serious European theatre folk. She used this displacement to make a work about reclaiming the “uncultured.” Back in New Zealand, she found a home for her portrayal of a wonderful punkish multi-accented truth-seeker, “the Barbarian,” who has a penchant for shoving her sword into anyone or anything. Randerson played the role herself for five years before letting other women take it on. So it continued for another seven years or so until Randerson heard the call of the Barbarian again and here we find her at the Blue Room Theatre for Summer Nights at Perth Fringe World, providing a rare opportunity to witness a contemporary performance piece with such a long lineage and appreciate that so many women have taken up the challenge of the role before this, fighting on stage to be angry and proud and different.

Banging Cymbal, Clanging Gong is essentially a monologue about the search for kin. A rudimentarily drawn family tree of the Bastardos clan has many ancestors making swooping entrances and gruesome exits (including a devastating boating accident that lost an entire line) with countless family members dying in the fight for what they believe in and others ending their own lives in desperate isolation. There is a moment where Randerson reveals that she doesn’t understand the difference between theatre and real life. The longer I’m around neither do I—especially amid the post-truth spectacle of the White House Press Room, trying to determine where performance begins and ends. Which means that Banging Cymbal, Clanging Gong has never been more important.

While the Barbarian plays Bach—and provides the best reading of Robert Frost I’ve ever come across—she is both incredibly funny and so alone. To me, this is the point: to be a fighter, a person of ideological action, you are often alone. We see her seeking fellow kindred spirits in the audience and hear of a great lost love, but otherwise she is alone. Until, that is, the closing image of the play in which we are given a glimpse of the glorious hope of another generation of Barbarians in the person of Randerson’s son Geronimo, in a late appearance complete with Bastardos outfit. It is impossible to be the Barbarian or the truth-seeker, or even the Shakespearean fool, and be alone. We need to find our kin. Jo Randerson, I will keep being angry as long as you do.

Banging Cymbal, Clanging Gong, creator, performer Jo Randerson, The Blue Room Theatre, Perth, 7–11 Feb

From the erosion of land art to the rise of fake art in the US, stay in the loop with what RealTime editors are reading about this week.

For what it reveals about continuing tension between analogue and digital in photography, Keith recommends this NYT article:

“The embrace of the digital was probably inevitable for the [International Center of Photography], an institution that clearly doesn’t want to freeze into a yesterday-museum. But it necessitates a rethinking of old ideas. It requires seeing photography as part of a larger, amorphous category, one morally up for grabs, called visual culture. And it requires recognizing that in the digital present, visual culture does more than reflect reality: For better and for worse, it creates it.”

Lauren wonders what the rise of fake art means for Australian artists in the Trump era.

“Perhaps all the living artists in the Kushner-Trump collection might disown their work, say it is ‘fake,’ making it instantly worthless (in addition to being an aesthetic and political slap in the face). I couldn’t help agree with all of them that having one’s work owned by the Trumps does somehow taint the work, almost negating it already. But even if this en masse disowning is only an isolated action, limited to those artists lucky enough to live off their work, just a drip in the middle of this building shitstorm of a presidency, I gleaned an artist trying to take back his name, his work, do something, anything.”

Did anyone see this coming? We ponder the end of 20th century land art as we know it when climate change ‘desiccates’ Spiral Jetty.

“Comparing a Google Earth screengrab of Spiral Jetty taken by Hyperallergic in 2014 to one today shows a…dramatic movement of the shoreline away from the sculpture.”

China’s most in-demand contemporary dance company returns to mesmerise with maverick choreographer Tao Ye’s explorations of the human form. Presenting a captivating double-bill 22-24 February as part of Asia TOPA, TAO Dance Theater are as close to perfection as you’ll ever see.

In an interview with RealTime, Asia TOPA Creative Director Stephen Armstrong spoke about Tao Ye’s remarkable choreography:

“Tao Ye’s choreographic language is something that you simply haven’t seen before. He explores the notion of synchronicity to an absolutely extreme degree. These performers literally move and breathe as a single organism. There’s one piece that we presented in 2015 as part of Supersense where they were touching one another’s bodies for the entire performance. So they were literally a single entity. But for both of these pieces for Asia TOPA they are separate. He wants us to see that these are individuals performing exactly the same movement and through the most minute of difference in expression to understand how we as individuals exist in the world. And you really do feel that. In the second piece, no 8, he has his performers lying on their backs for the entire performance. He’s bold, he’s daring and he’s a philosopher artist. No question.”

To win a double pass to opening night, Wednesday 22 February, email realtime [at] realtimearts.net with GIVEAWAY TAO DANCE in the subject line by 5pm Friday 17 February.

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Four potent, formally very different works in the 2017 Sydney Festival reveal great cultural relativities and assay the power, limits, excesses and abuses of language.

The Encounter

This critically acclaimed and hugely popular creation from UK company Complicite immerses its audience not just in the mind of Loren McIntyre, a National Geographic photographic journalist seeking the source of the Amazon in 1969, lost in the rainforest for two-months and deprived of his camera, but in the head of the show’s maker, Complicite writer-director Simon McBurney, played with showman verve by Richard Katz. McIntyre lived with the Mayoruna tribe without any bearings, no compass, no watch, no shared language.

An intermediary layer between McBurney at work at his desk—against a huge backdrop that evokes an anechoic radio studio—and McIntyre in the jungle is the work’s source material, Petru Popescu’s Amazon Beaming, an account of the photographer’s revelatory adventure, with the performer speaking McIntyre’s words from the book in an American accent. We also hear Popescu on several occasions speaking about McIntyre. Recurrently heard is McBurney’s young daughter, interrupting his night work, wanting food or a story but also asking questions that trigger ever-escalating anxieties in her father about parental and environmental responsibility.

This overlaying of texts, chronologies and places is realised sonically as an immersive hearing experience (we all wear headphones) but it’s equally visual. We watch Katz at every step make the sounds we hear. He changes vocal pitch with a foot pedal, triggers a storm, makes mosquito and jungle path sound effects (rustling a box of tape from busted VHS cartridges with their own little story) and activates playback from small recorders which he moves around a centrestage binaural microphone—the sound circling our heads. As well as constantly manipulating sound equipment, which takes him back and forth from his desk to the binaural microphone, Katz acts out key moments from Popescu’s narrative—McIntrye’s invention of a running ritual that perhaps saves his life, a drug-affected dance, a destructive tantrum of helplessness.

Everything we see and hear is predicated on words, endless words, such that the physical and aural elements of The Encounter become illustrative. There’s barely a pause, even for some of the most powerful sounds of rain or storm or Katz’s evocative DIY effects. Rather than transporting me to McIntyre’s experience of another world with a different temporality, hallucinogenic states and telepathic communication, The Encounter hurried me along with its busy Western theatrical time-telling, all narrative bases neatly covered, moral points heavily underlined, an effect for every detail and a subsequent flattening of affect. I was rarely disoriented, I was rarely transported, however much I was taken with the narrative or absorbed in the respective plights of the Moruyana, McIntyre and McBurney. For all of The Encounter’s immersiveness, when, towards the end, McIntyre declares, “I am no longer modern,” I can only appreciate its meaning at a distance.

I admired the personal nature of the work, the commitment (including onsite consultation with the Moruyana), the cleverness of the layered writing and its artfully integrated sound world, the virtuosity of Katz’s performance with its relentless gear-changing, and the sentiments of the work, not buried in subtext but open for serious consideration of cultural relativity and conservation.

Today, linguists, anthropologists and the likes of McIntyre, are rarely granted access, if at all, to remote Amazonian communities. Like Ciro Guerra’s recently screened, award-winning feature film Embrace of the Serpent (2015), about an ethnographer in 1909 and, in his footsteps, a botanist in 1940, The Encounter focuses on a relationship with a shaman, an incarnation of cultural, scientific and spiritual knowledge potentially lost to the predations of Western invasion. In both works, like their protagonists, we are outsiders, sharers of a 21st century rendition of “the white man’s burden;” no longer to rule, but to learn from and to care for tribal peoples, often, for our own sake. A non-fiction work, Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes (2008), by Daniel Everett, an American missionary to the Amazon who lost his faith (and his belief in Noam Chomsky’s theory of language) when he came in contact with a remote tribe and struggled with the apparent atemporality of their language, took me closer to what The Encounter attempts to convey, at least conceptually.

This distance between us and ancient but contemporary cultures underlines the importance of a Sydney Festival which attempts to give voice to the peoples who are so often subjects in works like The Encounter, which is not to deny that work’s significance or its concerns, but to try to understand how it positions us and to recognise that the immersiveness it offers is a long way from real knowledge, let alone prey to a distorting idealisation of shamanism and belief. It’s at its best when McIntyre realises what he has misunderstood. So much of what The Encounter is about, a non-verbal world of limited or non-verbal communication, is densely conveyed through a torrent of words, as if McBurney could not entirely trust the technology he adopted, making the work’s soundscape semi-immersive, more akin to a film score than fundamental to his conception.

Nathan Maynard, The Season

Indigenous writer Nathan Maynard’s first play, produced by Tasmania Performs, might be conventionally structured around a family gathering, but what a family, tense but not dysfunctional (a blessed antidote to the angst of Redfern Now), hilariously droll, sexy and alive with the changing realities of seasonal Aboriginal Tasmanian mutton-birding. It ends with goodwill, ritual and the enduring pleasure of having been generously invited into another world.

That world is a complex one for Aboriginal people living in Launceston but, once a year, residing on country, an island in the Bass Strait, where they maintain an ancient practice, the harvesting of their totem species, the mutton bird for meat, feathers and oil. The two states of being are also transitional; son Ritchie (played by Luke Carroll with a sinister edge) aims to supplant his father Ben (Kelton Pell’s amiable, slightly fragile patriarch). Environmentally careless, Ritchie is threatened with expulsion by a Senior Park Ranger (Trevor Jamieson gives this loose-limbed, benign but firm character a delightfully explosive laugh). Other changes are evident, daughter Lou (an effectively droll Nazaree Dickerson) declares she’s lesbian (Ben claims he’s always known) whereas Ritchie’s sexuality and the reasons for his various cruelties are not made explicit. There’s also Ben’s concern that the mutton bird flock has lost its pilot bird (a position akin to his own).

Otherwise there’s continuing territorial competition, mostly a war of words with another family led by Ben’s rival, the roguish, commercially-oriented Neil Watson (Jamieson in a very funny wheedling characterisation). Watson is close to Ritchie, making for increased tension. And there’s his secret affair with Marlene (Lisa Maza), sister to Ben’s wife, Stella (Tammy Anderson). Maza effectively reveals the emergent shame and hurt Marlene feels about this “once a year sex” on country.

All the members of Ben and Stella’s family are equitably treated by Maynard without overloading his plotting. Lou’s young son Clay (James Slee, another finely realised performance) waits in hope for the arrival of his white dissolute, criminal father, the pain eased by an act of violence but, better, by finding a girlfriend on the island. His story becomes a kind of non-ceremonial initiation, learning how to capture and pluck the birds and to always release the powerfully symbolic white bird. Women’s craft also has its place: the making of shell necklaces. When Stella—played warmly by Anderson as a loving, understanding matriarch and happy partner to Ben (the play’s sexual banter is consistently funny)—and sister Marlene reconcile, letting past tensions dissipate, Stella passes on an inherited necklace to the younger woman. The sense of conciliation in The Season is powerful; at its centre Ben will give way to Ritchie, whose new status might just change his character, but it’s the sense of the whole family coming together, celebrated in dance, that is stronger.

I thought The Season a highlight of the 2017 Sydney Festival with its finely integrated weave of character, place and culture and its insights into quite unfamiliar lives, glimpsed in photographer Ricky Maynard’s superb black and white portraits of mutton-birders, Moonbird People (1985-88). Nathan Maynard’s writing is rich in well-observed detail, humour and moments of passion and poignancy. Director Isaac Drandic has produced a seamless ensemble performance from a talented cast. Richard Roberts’ set design—a coastal rise on which the family gathers, the mutton birds nest and behind which characters gather or pass by below an overarching sky—conveys a sense of space at once domestic and sacred.

Nathan Maynard has created for us outsiders a world of essentially gregarious characters, who might have secrets or the inability to fully express themselves, but for whom talk is vital, familial and communal and connected with country. See The Season soon in Hobart’s 10 Days on the Island.

Patricia Cornelius, SHIT

For all its grittiness, SHIT is a crystalline study of language, its realism stripped of all but the most essential details, engendering a netherworld inhabited by a trio of young women, both abusing and abused, reaching the limits of expression and the will to survive.

The trio—Billy (Nicci Wilks), Bobby (Sarah Ward) and Sam (Peta Brady)—perch languidly in the recessed windows of what looks like a concrete bunker or the inside of a prison or some Brutalist building. Their choreographed movement in front of it—clustering like fascinated observers or lined up like prisoners—breaks when they play or turn on each other or race to the other side of the building, engaging out of sight in called conversation or a fracas.

SHIT commences with a virtuosic litany of “fucks” from Billy who is challenged by her friends to cut back because she’s “stuffing too many of them in.” Their language might be limited, but these girls know something about the power of words to hurt, to control, to dismiss, to amuse, to relieve pain or despair and to express anger when no other words or silence will do. And they sound good. The trio are observant about language, and life: stoics, cynics and fatalists, they know “life is shit.” Shit is excretion, waste. “We’re beyond saving.” But they have each other, or do they?

Conversations that reveal sorry fragments of their earlier lives at times turn nasty or reveal deep hurts. A carer calls Sam “forsaken.” It hits harder than any expletive. In Cliff Cardinal’s Huff, also in the Sydney Festival, it’s the word “irrelevant,” uttered by a teacher, that undoes a Canadian First Nations boy. When Bobby rages against women in short skirts and high heels, the other two turn on her. “You talk like you’re a bloke.” They bully her into lowering her pants, forcing her to admit she’s a “cunt,” like them. When Sam fantasises a better life, Billy sets her straight; their lives are fucked. When Sam accuses Billy of attempting to steal her boyfriend, calling her a “slut,” the word is too much for Billy who brutally punches Sam in the stomach. The abuser then hugs the victim and each declares their love for the other. What could doubtless turn into a cycle of violence is interrupted when Billy commits a greater violence outside their circle and nothing can save her, her joyful litany of “fucks” or her compensatory pride in being “shit.”

Patricia Cornelius, director Susie Dee and actors have finely crafted this painful descent, beyond words into an abyss, from the sheer fun of swearing to its expression of stoicism, to its cruelly dealt verbal blows and physical assault when no word of abuse will do. There are moments that recall the incisiveness of Beckett. When it is revealed that Sam had a baby when younger, Bobby asks, “Did you love it?” SHIT gets as elemental as that while facing head-on a very real social problem.

post, Ich Nibber Dibber

“Life is 90-99% shit,” says Zoe Coombs Marr, resolutely. There’s an all too apparent kinship between Patricia Cornelius’ SHIT and post’s Ich Nibber Dibber. Both works focus on three young women reflecting on their lives, their frank exchanges revealing the camaraderie and tensions that make and test friendships. The obvious difference is that post (Mish Grigor, Zoe Coombs Marr, Natalie Rose) are reproducing verbatim conversations made after performances across a 10-year-period, opening up their lives to us. The text cannot be finely crafted, but the performers’ easy familiarity with each other carries with it cadences, hesitations, interruptions and overlaps that yield a satisfying rhythm and underpin the trio’s shared sense of the absurd.

The other kinship between SHIT and Ich Nibber Dibber is that the young women in each live un- or ill-informed lives. In the first this is tragic, in the second it’s fuel for fun as post keenly rattle off un- and half-truths gleaned from magazines, television shows and movies, agreeing with or mocking the teller. Were post, for all those years, just being silly—their sense of the absurd is finely calibrated—or have they decided to target the knowledge deficit induced by a dumbed-down mass culture, revealing at the same time their own misadventures, inadequacies and anxieties? Of course they have, they’re post and they like big subjects—dead male playwrights, the global financial crisis; but here the medium is their own lives. Whatever their intention, Ich Nibber Dibber is pointed fun because it unleashes the kind of everyday talk about the female body rarely heard in the theatre, the performance’s opening image making the point with a grandiose bluntness and music to match.

From out of the dark appear three idealised figures swathed in white silk, suspended in space: Baroque angels minus the wings, until they open their mouths. SHIT commenced with a “fuck” litany, here it’s “poo” and vomit. The challenges of height, weight, an eating disorder and pregnancy vividly unfold across the show, rapidly de-idealising the body. Keenly relayed media stories about Siamese twins push body anxieties to the extreme alongside various takes on Richard Gere and a recollection of passing out at a Blue Light disco and being helped by ‘a guy who was a real gentleman because he laid down his jumper so we could have sex’ (or words to that effect). It’s a scary mix. Fears about being 30 and “over the hill” trigger characteristic post riffing, including “go on to a different hill.” Like Seinfield, Ich Nibber Dibber is about nothing (the apparently inconsequential everyday) and everything (life, death and the whole damned thing).

We’re not guided chronologically; the year of each conversation is not signalled. The mention of an event (“Atkins died of the Atkins Diet”) might give us a clue as to where we are. Sometimes one of the trio says, “Should we stop?” or “Is the tape still running?” suggesting an imminent transition. Overall there’s a kind of seamlessness in which certain subjects recur like motifs and the timelessness of an enormously creative friendship is underlined.

Towards the end, after sorting randomly through relationships and celebrating a successful birth, death makes an appearance. A proposed murder-suicide pact, the kind of thing friends might consider in jest, is wittily undone (who’s going to be the murderer?) and the passing of the great writer John Berger is acknowledged, “The first celebrity death of 2017.” Two of the trio don’t know him; is he Baby John Burgess, the game show host? Ich Nibber Dibber is great fun, raw, sharply observant and culturally incisive, in that singular post way.

Sydney Festival: Complicite, The Encounter, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, 18-28 Jan; Tasmania Performs, The Season, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, 10-15 Jan; SHIT, Seymour Centre, 17-21 Jan; post, Ich Nibber Dibber, Campbelltown Arts Centre, 20-28 Jan

We welcome Lauren Carroll Harris to the RealTime team. A writer, researcher and artist, she’ll be Acting Assistant Editor and will develop content for our forthcoming new website. Lauren’s scholarly research focuses on film distribution. Her monograph, Not at a Cinema Near You: Australia’s Film Distribution Problem was published in Currency House’s Platform Papers series in 2013. She is a contributing editor for Metro, the author of the 2017 Wake in Light essay series on Australian cinema for Kill Your Darlings and she writes a monthly column on online cinema called Stream Lover for Guardian Australia. Her work has been published in Meanjin, The Lifted Brow, Overland and Indiewire.

Since 1993, we’ve had Brisbane’s wonderful Asia-Pacific Triennial celebration of the region’s visual arts and, since 2007, Adelaide’s annual OzAsia Festival, ranging across the arts but with principal focus on performance and revitalised since 2015 under the direction of Joseph Mitchell. Now Melbourne has Asia TOPA, a triennial event with a rich performance program manifesting a multitude of origins, forms and collaborations. I asked the festival’s dynamic duo, Creative Director Stephen Armstrong and Associate Director Kate Ben-Tovim, to talk about some key works in their impressive program.

Indonesia-Australia: Satan Jawa

KBT Satan Jawa is a big Indonesia-Australia film and music collaboration. I have a long history with Indonesia. I lived there for a year in 2009 and I guess I’m always really surprised at the lack of large-scale work from Indonesia that we see in Australia. This has changed over the last couple of years, particularly in the experimental realm. There are so many globally significant artists in Indonesia.

We met filmmaker Garin Nugroho and invited him to one of our early Asia Labs—the development process we’re running here through the Melbourne Arts Centre—in the very early life of Asia TOPA. Garin is a cultural leader and innovator in Indonesia and makes stunning works. At that point, about two and half years ago, he pitched to us this idea of making a silent film based on a Javanese myth about a deal made with the devil to attain wealth. He said, “I’ve always imagined an orchestral score going along with it,” and he spoke as if this was an almost outlandish proposal. But this was one of those situations where we could actually make it happen. About two weeks later he came back to us and we thought he’d give us some early rushes or a more detailed outline but he said, “We’ve done it. We’ve made the film,” and sent us a link to basically the rough-cut. Indonesia is so like that; if you’re going to do it, you just do it and you do it now.

It’s about 70 minutes long and in black and white. His style is really lush and evocative. All of the performers are dancer/singer/actors, which is also common in Indonesia. A lot of the movement language is actually Javanese classical dance. It’s very much based in tradition, which all of Nugruho’s work is. Javanese culture even now has so much tradition but also religious layering. He’s really interested in mysticism, also really important in the culture.

Garin has worked a number of times with the Indonesian composer Rahayu Supanggah who wrote the score for Robert Wilson’s I La Galigo (2004) and worked with Garin on Opera Jawa (2006). He’s had some experience working with Western musicians but he’s certainly not a Western orchestral writer. Garin didn’t want a pure gamelan score because the film is actually set in the 1920s-30s during the Dutch colonial time in Java. He always had the idea of a Western symphonic element because that was the world he wanted his piece to be in, that time before independence when there was still very heavy Javanese tradition but also strong Western influence.

We knew someone had to come into that mix and that someone had to be Iain Grandage. Not only is he a great composer but it’s such a huge cultural thing to do, to bring these two musical worlds together. A huge process of swapping music, trips back and forth, two different notation types, two scales. They’ve been working over the last year to put this piece together. They have final rehearsals with all of the musicians and we see it in a couple of weeks.

Investing in reciprocity

SA This is an exemplar project for us, firstly because it came out of the process we established through the Lab. Instead of buying and putting on a performance for two nights only with no context and pretty much struggling to find an audience and to find a resonance for it, we invested the Asian arts budget here at Arts Centre Melbourne in reciprocity. So we’re actually part of building repertoire, supporting artists, offering artists mobility and giving them the capacity to make their own choices about whom they collaborate with. Rather than saying, let’s put the money into a co-production and then go to that artist and that artist and put them in a room together and then program something, actually, just give them the capacity to meet and spend time together.

Indonesia-Australia: Attractor

SA One of the works I’m really excited about is Attractor. In 2015, we offered choreographer Gideon Obarzanek an opportunity to work with us on Kuda Lumping which was presented during Supersense Festival of the Ecstatic (2015). That experience, which involved working with a group of Indonesian performers and a shaman, convinced us that Gideon was the person to help shape what would [in its original setting] have been a durational event in a village lasting a whole day, if not longer, into something approximating a performance that was still durational and about participating at a sensual level, which is what this particular form does. The performers end up being possessed by spirits. They roll around and eat glass and perform all manner of superhuman feats. It was quite astonishing to have that on the stage here at Arts Centre Melbourne.

Gideon has the sensibility to understand what will connect with a Western audience. What we don’t want to do is to program works and have to teach people how to read them. Nothing turns people off more than the idea of their cultural experiences being pedagogic. Instead, we celebrate the fact that contemporary performance is contemporary performance, regardless of where you’re from. All of us bring our traditions to what we do, however contemporary we are. So Gideon was the perfect person to work [on Attractor] with the music duo Senyawa because he’s inter-disciplinary and he understands space and time. That’s something choreographers have that many theatre directors don’t.

Describing this work is difficult. It’s like a combination of heavy metal, opera and wild invention, using [electrified stringed] instruments the artists made themselves. When we visited them in Jogjakarta, the main room of their house was full of these extraordinary instruments that they’d been building out of farm equipment made redundant because the land had been re-purposed. Instead of trashing it, they converted it into instruments so that each piece could continue to ‘sing’ its knowledge. It was an incredibly powerful story and made me understand why artists make work, particularly in South-East Asian communities that have been so rapidly urbanised—and not in a lifetime, in a decade! There’s enormous pressure on contemporary artists to be part of the protection of their culture, finding ways for it to be performed, be relevant. That’s what these guys do.

We brought them out here and it was Gideon (and subsequently with Lucy Guerin) who understood that a collaboration with them would only be meaningful if their performance was actually at the centre of the work, not the choreography with the sound as support act. He really understood how to integrate what he might do and they understood his sensibility in making that choice and so agreed to work with him.

It’s a participatory performance. It begins with just the music and then the dancers—eight performers from Dancenorth. It’s quite a large-scale work, [staged in] a fairly intimate performance space. The performers begin to engage with the sound in an ecstatic style—seemingly random but gestural, at times syncopated and then during the course of the performance, becoming freely abandoned. The audience is seduced to join the performers onstage and while some audience members are ‘pre-set,’ they’ve not been rehearsed but have earphones conveying what is to be achieved at any particular point.

Gideon calls it “an ecstatic ritual for non-believers.” It’s not trying to reproduce for a Western audience an experience that can really only happen if you have an understanding of its various stages, if it’s part of your life, part of your village culture. But at the same time, we are endlessly seduced, endlessly drawn into ritual and endlessly obliging in this Western capitalist life. So there are all sorts of resonances for me. And it’s really stretched Gideon and Lucy in their choreographic language as well.

Australia-China: Little Emperors

SA I’m also excited about Wang Chong working with Lachlan Philpott on Little Emperors. I think Lachlan is one of our really top writers. He embraces the idea that playwriting is about sub-text and he does it exceptionally well. Director Wang Chong is a real maverick in China. He recently had a production that won an award and was closed down. China’s one-child policy is an amazingly fertile subject.

India-Australia: One Beautiful Thing

KBT The program involving artists from India is pretty interesting for me—I also lived in India for a couple of years. What I really love is that our program ranges from, say, the work of composer A R Rahman who’s pretty close to a god in India. When things have cultural saturation, the scope of influence these people have is just impossible to imagine, and particularly so for anyone associated with Bollywood.

And then to see some of the collaborations between Australian and Indian artists like the production One Beautiful Thing has been really great. I was with Circa’s Yaron Lifschitz on his first visit to India and their recent audition trip for the performance. Yaron’s creative exploration has broadened out to include other Circa ensemble members and the Indian physical performers who introduce the form called mallakhamb, which is almost like wrestling. It’s a sport and there are competitions but it’s also a yogic practice, something you do to be a well-rounded person. And it is also like a circus performance on a pole that looks a little bit like a Chinese pole and requires those sorts of skills. The performers are all between 16 and 20 and they’re all absolutely not out there on the professional circuit—in fact, there is no professional circuit—and they’re going through the process of being creative agents in the making of this work and all of the rigours of presentation. I think these are really important examples of what you can do in a festival like this.

India: Parvathy Baul

KBT Parvathy Baul is in the mystical Sufi tradition from Bengal. She’s kind of transcendent love really, just the most amazing performer and we’ve commissioned her to bring a group of master musicians with her and also women from her community in Bengal who make huge mandalas made of coloured sand on the floor of the performance space. It’s a four-hour durational performance. And again, this is one of those beautiful, ritual processes you don’t often get to see out of their context.

Sharing resources

SA We should also mention Lukautim Solwara (look out for the ocean), which is the Next Wave component of the program. The $2 million we raised through the Sidney Myer fund was really the kick-start for this whole event. At our own choosing we devolved a quarter of that money to ensure that a broad cross-section of Melbourne arts makers and cultural leaders could initiate something early and then use that to leverage more support to make really exciting things happen. Georgie Meagher had just come on board at Next Wave and we had some conversations with her. In the end, she decided she wanted to focus on Pasifika artists and young, emerging Indigenous Australian artists, which was brilliant for us. She selected Rosanna Raymond—a Samoan-New Zealand artist who works in museum contexts. She created a room called The Savage Club at the most recent APT. She’s a fantastic mentor for young Pasifika and Indigenous Australian artists who will work together for over a month to create a space and performance staged at ACCA.

China: TAO Dance Theater

SA Tao Ye refuses to offer any rationalisation for his works so he just numbers them 1, 2, 3, 4, like a series of untitled works by a visual artist. Secondly, because in each of the works he’s increased the number of dancers. He started with no capacity and slowly built. He had three dancers. And then a friend said he’d join the company and suddenly he had four. He had no money. None of these artists have money. We have to acknowledge that when these works come to our festivals.

Tao Ye’s choreographic language is something that you simply haven’t seen before. He explores the notion of synchronicity to an absolutely extreme degree. These performers literally move and breathe as a single organism. There’s one piece that we presented in 2015 as part of Supersense where they were touching one another’s bodies for the entire performance. So they were literally a single entity. But for both of these pieces for Asia TOPA they are separate. He wants us to see that these are individuals performing exactly the same movement and through the most minute of difference in expression to understand how we as individuals exist in the world. And you really do feel that. In the second piece, no 8, he has his performers lying on their backs for the entire performance. He’s bold, he’s daring and he’s a philosopher artist. No question.

The thrill of the challenge

SA We’re enjoying the experience. It’s impossible not to be daunted by the challenge at the same time but really, in our estimation, we cannot go back from this. And that’s the best reward of all. So many of these artists would not have been seen on the Melbourne stage if not for this opportunity and we’ve commissioned so much work. I think there are 20 new works in Asia TOPA and well over half of them have been created specially for the event. That is not how festivals normally work. While there is an inherent risk, there’s also an imperative. Is this not what a festival can be? I’m not going to say ‘should’ be because I think festivals can be many things. But if a festival is about celebration, celebration always throws light on something and I think Asia TOPA is throwing light on something pretty bloody special.

One immediately striking thing about Biographica is its spatial inventiveness—Ensemble Offspring occupies half of the stage, the actor-singers the other, the latter sometimes working around the players. Given the Renaissance subject matter of this opera, the close presence of the ensemble offers a period sense of courtly space which we the audience share with the singers.

The other fascinating element of Charles Davis’ design is a ‘widescreen,’ seemingly suspended box-stage at the far end of the space. It’s initially populated with a line of four choral figures (with gongs and drums forecasting the principal character’s death). Internally lit (Davis again), it reaches out emphatically to us, pulling perspective in an era then so preoccupied with it. It also doubles as a screen for a sequence of swirling projections of drawings by the opera’s subject, Gerolamo Cardono (1501-76), of his ideas and inventions, making them appear aptly cosmic (AV design James Brown). Ahead of his time, Cardono could see the microcosm in the macrocosm, a theme wound through the opera. I had high hopes for this added space. It was used again, as in the opening scene, and also for Cardino to madly dash across when in state of high anxiety, but not to its full potential.

There’s no potential lost in the acting and music making. Composer Mary Finsterer and librettist Tom Wright have fashioned an engaging and accessible opera that economically unfolds as Cardono looks back over a life of remarkable achievements which anticipated modern preventative health care, advanced astronomy and computing. Expressions of these are interwoven with Cardono’s guilt about the dark fates of his three children and his anger at the religious repression of science. Expositions of observations and ideas are tautly integrated into the drama. For example, we witness him coolly delineating the progress of plague in the body of his dying daughter, Chiara (Jessica O’Donoghue). The subsequent scene reveals Cardono’s keen desire to educate Chiara, here a child, about the stars. She spins in the light of his projections of the heavens, singing sweetly of a dream to find eternal life in a star. It’s a bitter juxtaposition. One son, Aldo (Andrew Goodwin) becomes a thief, an ear cut off as punishment, the other, Giambattistia (Simon Lobelson), is hanged for murdering his unfaithful wife, Caterina (Anna Fraser). Sadly, pathetically, and angrily, they all in turn and then as ghostly trio berate Cardono, the great scientist, for not being able to foresee their failings and thus save them.

What gives weight to Mitchell Butel’s intense portrayal of a moody, angry Cardono and makes the work much more than a bio-opera, is his persistent preoccupation with fame and the nature of time, believing, astrologically, that he knows the day he will die. He will not be famous in his own time, but passionately believes the future will acclaim him: his name will spread “like a ripple on a pond and return with a roar!” At the opera’s end, Cardono defies time to what sounds like a grinding funeral march. Further weight is added in the clue to the cause of his emotional distance from his children: his enduring angst about being an unwanted child. This is brutally revealed in the opera’s second scene in which his mother (Jane Sheldon), blaming her yet to be born child for the loss of her others, begs, from a long list, for the means for abortion. From soaring fear to guttural rage, Jane Sheldon sings with frightening power against a contrasting, soft, pulsing score.

Janice Muller’s direction yields strong performances. A head-miked Butel fills the space with psychodrama intensity while all the singers excel vocally. O’Donoghue conveys Chiara’s despair with a chilling sweetness, Goodwin expresses Aldo’s utter fear and pathos (“you could have taught me to love you”) and Lobelson exudes Giambattista’s dangerous strength, fully felt in the raging dialogue with Caterina (a fearless mezzo match for Lobelson’s baritone). Ensemble Offspring, excellent as ever and conducted by Jack Symonds, realise with great finesse Finsterer’s adroitly orchestrated score, its Renaissance underpinnings and operatic drive, and its kinship with Glass, Adams and Nyman, if more economical and varied, and here and there Sondheim in Sweeney Todd mode thanks to a finely calibrated relationship between score and libretto. Another fine premiere from Sydney Chamber Opera, warranting a longer life for both opera and Cardono’s dream of enduring fame.

Sydney Festival: Sydney Chamber Opera & Ensemble Offspring, Biographica, composer Mary Finsterer, librettist Tom Wright, director Janice Muller, designer Charles Davis, lighting Max Cox, musicians Ensemble Offspring; Carriageworks, Sydney 7-13 Jan

In frustrated haste, a seemingly ordinary woman stuffs the items littering her floor into a cardboard box. Then, with a screeching roll of packing tape, she seals it. She might be any exasperated woman packing to move house under less than pleasant circumstances. But she is none other than Mary, mother of God in the Sydney Theatre Company’s adaption of Colm Tóibín’s novel The Testament of Mary.

Told by Mary (Alison Whyte) from her recollection of events, this performance covers the adolescence of Mary’s son (whose name is never spoken), his raising of Lazarus from the dead, his crucifixion and its aftermath. The bulk of Tóibín’s 81 pages are delivered, less as formal monologue than as a series of vignettes accelerating into narrative. In this sense, the work takes not only content but also structure from Tóibín’s text, which, chapter-less, unfolds in jagged episodes punctuated by emptiness.

Onstage, this discontinuity is marked by blackouts and the strains of a repeated hymn jolting to a start only to be cut off by the ensuing scene. Later in the performance, nearer to Mary’s experience of the crucifixion, this sound effect changes to a cacophony of curious gurgling and arguing, the echo of a drunken mob. Max Lyandvert’s sound design also creeps into the background of some of Mary’s more impassioned speeches, particularly when she quotes his words or recounts her son’s supposedly miraculous doings.

I say “supposedly” because this Mary is skeptical. With keenness and authority she presents her perspective, challenging versions of her life recounted by male prophets. Whyte’s vocal delivery of the text eases between a series of registers: casual to the audience, private to herself and mightily declamatory. At times she sermonises. Then she rails desperately as though she alone were aware of one of the largest conspiracies in existence. A few stumblings over lines only enriched the humanity of Whyte’s Mary in a piece that was as much an encounter with the performer as with her character.

Elizabeth Gadsby’s shrine-like set of black marble, veined with white, becomes plinth, platform and pulpit for Mary. The audience is roped off from the space by a border of red velvet cords and gold dividers, as in a museum. Sometimes Mary approaches this boundary, clearly seeking freedom among the audience. At others she hangs back in the centre of the space, separating herself off as a woman who could never be entirely ordinary. At her most conversational she sits down on the set’s three rows of steps leading up to its rear wall, like a neighbour chatting on her doorstep. At one time she sits wrapped in a space blanket, the image of a traumatised survivor huddled on the footpath.

Bold lighting from Emma Valente tightly focuses each episode. A swathe of deep blue falls over the set as Mary describes an uneasy encounter with her grown son. Arid yellow light beating down on her adds an edge to the narration of the crucifixion. A jewel-red tone as Mary sits cradling a bundled dress like a baby gives her the aura of goddess, a super-human exemplar of the maternal. While Mary narrates the reanimation of Lazarus, a shadow covers the centre of her body, allowing her to inhabit the wizened corpse of a man slipping back from death. One transition brings the house lights up to full, implicating the gaze of the spectator in Mary’s struggle to achieve her own truth.

Director Imara Savage and Alison Whyte have wrought a complex, physical Mary. Whyte’s hands and fingers are especially active: both bending in pain and folding into a holy gesture, two fingers raised, recognisable from religious artwork. Touching her thumb to her index finger, she seems to pinch divine energy between them as she evokes the sensations of her experience. Once, in threat, she crouches, a knife in her fist. This Mary means business.

The description of the execution of her son is Mary’s most harrowing, an uncompromising testimony of strength in the face of suffering. Whyte’s body becomes small, shrunk into itself, her face drawn and pinched. She asks herself how she could stand and watch during her son’s agony. “But” she affirms quietly, “that is what I did.”

Sydney Theatre Company, The Testament of Mary, writer Colm Tóibín, performer Alison Whyte, director Imara Savage, designer Elizabeth Gadsby, lighting Emma Valente, composer, sound designer Max Lyandvert; Wharf 1 Theatre, Sydney, 13 Jan-25 Feb

A soot-smeared Queen lifts her husband’s hands and presses them shut over his eyes. She implores him to see in the darkness, to imagine a shepherd-god who exists in the “smile of the stars—the sound of the storms.” This moment attained a surprising sense of truth in Kasper Holten’s production of Karol Szymanowski’s 1926 opera King Roger.

The opera, a Nietzschean reading of Euripides’ Bacchae, centres on the tension between Apollonian ideals of intellect and Dionysian ideals of sensuality. The plot presents a King drawn into this conflict that not only challenges his authority, as a mysterious Shepherd spreads a wild religion in his land, but also his sense of self and purpose in life. His wife Roxana is converted to the Shepherd’s faith and Roger concludes the opera, attended by his constant advisor Edrisi, seemingly ready to re-dedicate his life to something beyond these clashing ideals.

A giant, sculpted head towers as focal visual metaphor, first governing the space as statue in Act I, then revolving open in the second to reveal Roger’s mindscape. There, wisdom, shown as stacks of books, is confronted by erotic impulse, conjured by a bevy of begrimed, masked, semi-naked, male dancers at the base of the head. During an exotic dance they take over Roger’s skull, hurling the books away in an illustration of the King’s inner turmoil. In the final act, all that remains onstage is a smouldering pyre that becomes the site for a dangerous ritual led by the Shepherd.

The combination of music and stage movement sustains tension throughout the performance. Called before the King in Act I, the Shepherd is hurried onstage by the crowd, spat on and shoved to the ground to music that anticipates his arrival. The serene lyricism that suggests his confident gaze and dignified approach to the King is reassigned to Roxana who stands with a look of pity above the prostrate Shepherd and turns to her husband with pleading eyes.

In the second act, a pantomimic orchestral hubbub evokes the passage of the Shepherd and his followers into the guarded courtyard. A sudden restatement of the melody that opens the Shepherd’s aria, “My God is beautiful as I am,” cues the moment where Roger glimpses him through the crowd. As the Shepherd completes his entry the orchestra repeats the theme, this time in a climactic explosion. The impression is of a grandiose encounter that is almost an erotic consummation, a moment of marked homoeroticism. In this staging the Shepherd simply walked into the giant head after dancers pelvic-thrusted to the music.

While I defend an opera director’s right to push against musical signification, opportunities for clarity, delicacy of action and sensitive characterisation were missed here. Holten acknowledged the work’s homoerotic nuances elsewhere with gestures such as Roger reaching out for the Shepherd’s hand in Act I before pulling away at the last moment. Later, while facing one another, the pair raised hands to their faces as though they reflected each other in a mirror.

Directorial choices such as these shifted focus away from the attraction between Roger and the Shepherd, instead emphasising the psychosexual relationship of the royal couple. Roxana’s slinky 20s costuming, especially her Louise Brooks bob, recalled Berg’s Lulu. Her stretching out to embrace her husband and suggestively rubbing her breasts and hips, signalled an operatic seductress, the ubiquitous femme-fatale. The portrayal felt like an oversimplification of Roxana’s character, framing her as a figure of stereotypical operatic melodrama, as if opera’s go-to subject material must be passionate love and woman’s only role therein the sexualised object and instigator of desire. Mitigating this effect, Holten, if only initially, observed Szymanowski’s direction that Roxana remain “unseen” during her aria. The sensuous undulations of her opening vocalise allowed, if only for a precious moment, the voice not the body to operate as erotic material.

The manipulation of the chorus could have benefited from greater attention. Instead of participating in the Shepherd’s dance and gradually losing themselves in Dionysian ecstasy, they filed onstage to raise their hands in adulation before scurrying off again. This snap conversion was hard to credit after their stentorian piety was driven home in the first act. Though they often appeared more as a mass rather than a collection of participants in the drama, their musical contribution deserves nothing but praise.

Holten’s substitute for a full-throttle Dionysian ritual in Act III was a book-burning that involved the full company. The choice of this demonstration, recalling those overseen by the Third Reich, was an effectively confrontational evocation of what the experience of witnessing a Dionysian ceremony might be. Despite its visual efficacy, this moment was confusing in the context of the production’s ideology. Was the audience being prompted to equate Dionysian ideals with the rise of totalitarianism? Surely fascist regimes are to be condemned equally for their brand of unfeeling rationalism, an Apollonian ideal, as well as any sensual corruption.

Notes in the program seemed to apologise for the intention of the production, glossing that “inner conflict isn’t the easiest thing to put on stage.” This however was the height of the production’s accomplishment: using visual metaphor to suggest a psychodrama. Other notes observed how Szymanowski conceived of the work less as an opera than as a “sort of mysterium,” something between naturalistic drama and impersonal allegory. The characters in the opera are half-human, half symbolic. They comment on human experiences but not in everyday human speech or behaviour. Attempting to ground them in a worldly context cannot bring them to the same level of humanity as the audience. Holten regrettably never allowed his Shepherd to achieve the awesome status of god. In trying to render this opera significant to the experiences of a modern audience, this staging achieves only half success. What these characters might look like and do if they were people living in the 1920s comes across loud and clear. What’s missing is a sense of divinity that cannot be seen—divinity that can only manifest, as witnessed by the Queen’s covering of her husband’s eyes, in an activated imagination.

Royal Opera House London and Opera Australia, King Roger, composer Karol Szymanowski, Sydney Opera House, Sydney, 20 Jan-15 Feb; Arts Centre Melbourne, 19-27 Jan

Jacob Boehme, Blood on the Dance Floor

I don’t know if I could ever be objective watching, experiencing, reliving and now reflecting on Jacob Boehme’s largely autobiographical dance theatre work, Blood on the Dance Floor, that draws on his experience as an Aboriginal man living with HIV. In a way, he is of my ilk, if not exactly my kin. His memories as a young gay male Indigenous dancer in the 90s are inextricably interwoven with mine.

NAISDA (National Aboriginal Islander Skills Development Association) of the late 80s and early 90s represented an insular family made up of youth from all over the country, needing to get away from Country to find out who they/we really were; dance was the vehicle that enabled us. As a result, I witnessed many young men embrace their sexuality and, as if overnight, lose their lives to it, as the HIV/AIDS epidemic took hold and flourished.

Entering the theatre we are personally greeted by Boehme with plenty of light embraces accompanied by multiple air kisses. Dressed in a pastel satin kimono and with heavy costume jewellery adorning his lobes, he is loud and camp, delivering blue banter with acerbic wit and a slightly gravelly, deadpan cackle. I am immediately transported to Sydney’s Oxford Street in its heyday. Boehme’s alter-ego is Percy. Sadly, I forget if she comes complete with her own in-built punch line.

Boehme deftly disrobes and Percy is no more. She does not return, nor herald a linear chronological beginning. She is, as she claims, merely an epilogue.

Before Boehme reintroduces himself in a new guise, he dances. Choreographed in collaboration with Mariaa Randall, the language is uncluttered, augmented by simple, small gestural motifs which consolidate the narrative. One of the more poignant moments features a bleeding finger, presented to the audience as one would an offending exhibit in evidence, before turning it on us in accompaniment to accusingly repetitious quizzing: “Are you clean? Are you clean?” Perhaps daring one of us to be the first to cast a stone.

The dance is definitely not what I’m expecting. I thought there’d be more clear evidence of the Indigenous community-based languages we were taught as students of NAISDA. The dominant language in Boehme’s dancing resembles what I’ve seen from many of my VCA graduate peers from roughly the same era (90s onwards).

As a fellow Indigenous contemporary performance maker, it takes me a while to understand that if Boehme had danced the way I expected, he would be surrendering to a stereotype. In fact, the training at NAISDA drawn from Indigenous communities belongs to him (and to me) as do the techniques of Graham, Limon or Cunningham; they are alien in that none of them come from our respective Countrys. If Boehme is truly aiming to recapture ancestral processes—as he claims to be when speaking of his work as part of a panel at the Seymour Centre, titled Talking Dance: handle with care—then utilising the predominantly Western contemporary dance forms of the time he was referencing, was most logical as he was performing on Western theatrical country (the stage).

The set is also simple and spare, consisting of a raised rectangular mainstage with a short runway attached from downstage right. Quick shifts in theme and character, from relatives to friends and past lovers, are enhanced by block lighting that has Boehme recede in shadowed relief or lit in concert with video artist Keith Deverell’s slow moving images in extreme close-up. Weathered limbs clothed in grubby, worn fabric evoke a nameless man Boehme had seen on the street, deteriorating from the AIDS epidemic’s first wave. An eye as big as Boehme’s head— bigger, still and staring—signifies close scrutiny from “Daddy Eyes” and is used as a segue to introduce his father, whom Boehme plays as a gruff yet likeable man who has always known his son was “that way,” before humorously proceeding to problem solve how he might have grandchildren to carry on the bloodline. An image of red blood accumulating bubbles fills the screen, prompting us to think of the virus infiltrating Boehme’s system and the futility of his father’s wishes. Last is the horizontal brushing of a dark woman’s chest with the tips of her fingers, reminiscent of a ceremonial act with ochre, while the father talks carelessly about the black woman working at the shop, before Boehme is told by his sister that the black woman is his grandmother.

The pace of the show is deliberate and steady. Boehme brings a changing perception of HIV to some of today’s younger gay demographic. In a throwaway he speaks of the young men playing a type of careless Russian roulette, almost wanting to be a part of the positive “club.” He describes the earlier gay sex scene, of the dark beats in parks and bars, in visceral detail. He speaks of his quest to find love in equal measure. At one point, with uncertainty, he asks us if he looks all right. He’s about to go on a date. It epitomises the overall tone of the show, which is hopeful and surprisingly refreshing.

La Boite, Prize Fighter

Prize Fighter’s narrative is fast from beginning to end. Really fast, as quick as the interim between a pugilist’s battery of blows. The play depicts the fate of a 10-year-old boy, Isa, forced to witness the execution of his family before becoming a child soldier in the war-torn republic of Congo.

Prize Fighter is told in a series of flashbacks as Isa fights in the ring for the crown of Australian heavyweight boxer. Light on their feet, Prize Fighter’s five players dance, duck and weave around idyllic childhood memories until crushing blows precipitate memories of horrendous scenes nobody should have had to experience.

All too quickly the gruesome past is dropped and we are back in the ring which we never really leave since all the action happens on, or around an elevated square platform. In the shadows, old truck tyres serve as the peripheries of the jungle, of life outside the safe haven of competitive boxing.

Writer Future D Fidel also features on the final of three Dance Speaks panels along with Jacob Boehme. The panel’s chair, Claire Hicks, director of Sydney’s Critical Path, asks how the notion of care was considered while making the work. Fidel divulged that he feels it his responsibility to share his country’s volatile history in increments through his semi-fictional narrative. He feels too that he has an obligation to other victims not to over-sensationalise the violence by staying with it too long. He eschews what he considers a two-dimensional tactic in favour of revealing the complexity behind the face of this still relatively new wave of immigrants to Australia.

Fidel prefaces his presence on the panel with a comment about being a ring-in, since Prize Fighter had been billed as neither dance nor physical theatre; although he did reveal it was imperative that the actors learn how to box. The exacting physicality performed throughout was a powerful visual metaphor for the enduring will to survive at all costs.

There is an assumption that shows like this are preaching to the converted. I consider myself among the enlightened. News coverage of NSW Australian of the Year Deng Adut as a refugee and former child soldier himself, had appeared as an abstract idea until I saw this show and could imagine myself in his shoes.

Native Earth Performing Arts, Huff

Like Blood On the Dance Floor, Cliff Cardinal’s Huff is a First Nations work produced by Canada’s longest-running Indigenous theatre company, Native Earth Performing Arts. Like Boehme, Cardinal is both writer and solo performer who immediately breaks the fourth wall. From the beginning, we are made complicit.

The lights come up on Cardinal with arms bound behind him. He has a bag tightly taped to his head. We watch it inflate and deflate as he breathes. He addresses us while the seconds count down on his limited oxygen supply. He is in the middle of committing suicide before he changes his mind and asks a woman from the front row to free him. He then hands her the bag. The woman questions the reasoning behind this request, asking if she’s keeping it for later. This does not go down well and he offers it to another audience member on the condition that he not relinquish it to Cardinal, even if he begs for it.

Cardinal is Wind, one of three brothers he portrays growing up on an Indian Reservation. An Indian Reservation sounds very much like many of the former Aboriginal Reserves in Australia. When I was a student of NAISDA, we had to be granted permits to enter certain communities. Reserves are isolated places, segregated. Like their North American counterparts, huffing or sniffing solvents by young Australian Aboriginals is a well-documented problem. There are too many hours in the day and not enough activities to fill them, but the relationship to country still remains of paramount importance.

What sets Cardinal’s Huff narrative apart is the unseen presence of the Trickster, a shape-shifting spirit who wreaks havoc, creating mischief for the three brothers and their extended family. He could be a metaphor for the battle between conscience and impulse, but to Wind and his people the Trickster is tangible and has a firm hold. Huff is not a romanticised account of cultural belief, but a raw depiction of the ancestral world and its very real relationship to contemporary society.

Searching for comparative similarities in contemporary Australian storytelling I am drawn to the TV series Cleverman, a sci-fi fantasy, but the similarity lies in the work’s success in making old knowledges relevant today.

There is a particular humour that is born from the kind of hardship and futility portrayed in Huff which by no means lessens the gravity of the work. I am reminded of Warwick Thornton’s film Samson and Delilah. Huff’s dark self-effacing comedy is epitomised in the opening description of youngest brother Huff’s inability to spell “cat.” He likely suffers foetal alcohol syndrome and is regularly sexually abused by his siblings. Dark humour is also evident in the confrontation with a skunk that marks Wind and Huff with putrid scent in folkloric retribution for burning down an old disused building, inadvertently killing a local fireman in the process. In a classroom, Wind ascribes a traditional Indian name, translated as Ratface, to the teacher. This leads to the boys’ dismissal from the school, Huff defecating in his trousers under the humiliating gaze of his peers and the incompetent teacher’s labelling him as “irrelevant.”

Ironically, it is Huff’s need to redeem himself that causes him to tell the truth about the hapless caper that resulted in the fire; a dark momentum takes hold and the play draws to an almost inevitable close.

Cardinal’s performance of his script is virtuosic, leaving little to the imagination in his rendering of multiple characters. We move with him at the mercurial speed of a child and it’s through the logic of a child that we are forced to appreciate the gravity of consequence. We learn that Huff has inadvertantly hanged himself—a suffocation game often played with Wind who was always there to bring him back from the brink. The play ends where it began, as Wind asks for the plastic bag back. The audience member denies him as instructed. No matter, Wind has a spare.

Sydney Festival: Ilbijerri Theatre & Jacob Boehme, Blood on the Dance Floor, Carriageworks, 21-25; La Boite, Prize Fighter, writer Future Fidel, director Todd McDonald, Belvoir, 6-22 Jan; Native Earth Performing Arts, Huff, writer, performer Cliff Cardinal, director Karin Randoja, Seymour Centre, Sydney, 24-28 Jan

Several years ago at Melbourne Museum I saw A Day in Pompeii, a spectacular and moving exhibition that used a wide variety of artefacts to conjure a sense of commonality with the people of the ancient Roman town. The exhibition culminated in a darkened room at whose centre lay the famous body casts of those buried beneath the ash of Vesuvius. A grim enough sight in themselves, the casts were all the more disturbing given the museum’s success in making the fate of Pompeii’s victims so relatable.

It was in anticipation of similar emotions that I approached Another Day in Paradise, Campbelltown Arts Centre’s survey show of paintings from the all-too-brief career of Bali Nine prisoner Myuran Sukumaran. Sukumaran began painting in earnest in 2012 under the guidance of Australian artist Ben Quilty, whom he approached for lessons through his lawyer, seven years into his prison sentence. The two became friends and Quilty co-curated this exhibition with CAC Director Michael Dagostino.

With the exception of one small room showing Australian landscapes, the entire exhibition space is devoted to Sukumaran’s impassioned output in the years, days and hours leading up to his execution on 29 April 2015. Shown alongside Sukumaran’s paintings are commissioned works by six contemporary Australian artists that respond to the issues at hand: capital punishment, systems of justice, incarceration, dehumanisation, prejudice, death. But Sukumaran’s bold paintings predominate.

Arranged thematically and to some extent chronologically, the exhibition begins in the foyer with a scene-setting row of portraits of the Bali Nine—those nine Australians infamously arrested in 2005 in Bali on suspicion of attempting to smuggle eight kilograms of heroin out of Indonesia. Painted in 2013, these depictions of Andrew Chan, Scott Rush, Si Yi Chen, Michael Czugaj, Matt Norman, Martin Stephens, Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen, Renae Lawrence and Sukumaran himself date from the beginning of the artist’s tutelage by Quilty but already show assurance, capturing the immediacy and directness of the newspaper montages Sukumaran initially used as a reference. The heads of Sukumaran and Chan are sculpturally rendered with a pleasing solidity, while a broader approach is taken to their fellow inmates, with choppy brushstrokes and the application of bright, unmixed white, especially visible in Czugaj’s toothy smile.

Around the corner there are four landscapes. Two of these show nightmarish abstracted imaginings of Nusa Kambangan, the prison island where most of Indonesia’s executions are carried out. They have a striking dynamism and ominousness, but it’s the human condition as explored through portraits that preoccupies Sukumaran, and the following rooms are full of works in this vein. Lining two walls of a room devoted to images of prison life are portraits of fellow inmates and guards, interspersed with the occasional pig’s head from the Balinese prisoners’ yearly feast, all painted from life—one of the most challenging exercises in a technical sense. Here you see an artist still working things out in terms of technique, experimenting with different stylistic approaches, grappling with anatomy and foreshortening, occasionally scrubbing off paint to correct a mistake.

Sukumaran shows himself to be a natural portraitist in these works, and obsessively dedicated. His sitters display dignity, solemnity and that very particular resigned expression that results from long sittings. Individuality emerges from dense agglomerations of impasto brushstrokes or, occasionally, from a more angular, Matisse-like approach. In one painting, Sukumaran sketches in the outline of his subject’s shirt collar with a single green brushstroke, something which confuses a couple of viewers, who mistake it for a noose.

In this same room, one of the exhibition’s commissioned artworks is installed—an imposing three-channel video work, Tsomi, wan bel (Sorry, win-win situation) by Taloi Havini, showing aspects of a restorative (community) justice ritual in northern Bougainville. Mostly unsubtitled, the video loop is dominated by simultaneous close-ups of a young woman, a young man and a female tribal elder, all of whom gaze out at the viewer and by implication each other. The extreme clarity of the footage shows such subtle expressions that, even without understanding the sparse conversation, it’s almost certain who is guilty and who accuses. These faces form an interesting counterpart to Sukumaran’s many portrait heads on the adjacent walls, and transfix gallery visitors.

In the gallery’s largest space, Sukumaran’s numerous self-portraits are hung salon-style. Taking on a shrine-like aspect, they are interspersed with paintings of relics of capital punishment—execution crosses, bullets—and on its own, on the right-hand wall, an AK47. Here again Sukumaran experiments with different approaches. Some self-portraits are sketchy and linear, others very modelled, still others displaying Quilty’s signature robust impasto and colour palette. There are elements of Francis Bacon in the paint drips, the scrubbing out of features, the truncation of seated bodies through a curvilinear shorthand. Whether by chance or design, there’s a Mannerist fervour to many of these self-depictions, the artist’s eyes raised in El Greco-esque torment.

Adjacent to the self-portrait wall are 12 paintings from Sukumaran’s final 72 hours of life. The context is staggering. As someone who shares Sukumaran’s commitment to painting, I can’t help but wonder, would I be compelled to paint or draw so close to execution? Or would I be paralysed? These works are urgent, despairing, yet transcendent. They rise above cruelty and annihilation. They are incredibly courageous.

The final painting, exhibited in a smaller room, is of a bloody Indonesian flag. A gesture of defiance, it was signed by the nine prisoners due to face the firing squad that night (Filipina Mary Jane Veloso was to be granted an 11th hour reprieve). Suspended from the ceiling so both sides are visible, it’s a difficult object to contemplate with its pathetically upbeat messages around the familiar Windsor & Newton label on the back. Positioned nearby, Abdul-Rahman Abdullah’s hyper-realistic sculpture of a dove sitting at the centre of an immense circle of eggs, The Days, pays quiet tribute to the 3,665 days Sukumaran’s loved ones endured from the time of his incarceration until his death.

There’s a noticeable contrast between the powerful rawness of Sukumaran’s paintings and the highly finished sculptural or video installations produced by the commissioned artists, which really function as a sort of parallel exhibition requiring a different, less visceral mode of appreciation (the exception is Matthew Sleeth’s intense video double-portrait of Sukumaran and Andrew Chan). This ensures Sukumaran’s paintings aren’t obscured by similar work, but it does mean regularly switching between two discrete modes of viewing as you move through the gallery.

The circumstances surrounding Another Day in Paradise are undeniably bleak, but in contrast with the Pompeii exhibition, my parting impression is not one of sadness. The artist’s presence is too vital—in his self-portraits, in his passionate commitment to his artform, in his sheer creative output—for me to see the exhibition as anything other than life-affirming.

Sydney Festival & Campbelltown Arts Centre: Another Day in Paradise, artists Myuran Sukumaran, Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Megan Cope, Jagath Dheerasekara, Taloi Havini, Khaled Sabsabi, Matthew Sleeth, curated by Ben Quilty and Michael Dagostino; Campbelltown Arts Centre and Sydney Festival, 13 Jan-26 March

Curator Brian Ritchie’s exciting 2017 MOFO program seems to have sprouted from two very fertile seeds—two under-acknowledged pioneers of electronic music, British composers Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire.

Oram and Derbyshire made revolutionary use of the development in the 1950s of the capacity to record sound onto magnetic tape and individually produced some of the most original and visionary electronic music ever created. This MOFO program explored electronic music from its early 20th century beginnings, with the invention of the Theremin and the ondes Martenot, to the latest applications of the analogue synthesiser, establishing the historical context for appreciating the significance of these pioneers in generating a new world of music and sound.

As well as dozens of live indoor and outdoor performances over three days, the MOFO program included several cinematic works, among which was Geoffrey Jones’ short film Snow (1963), for which Oram (1925–2003), a co-founder of the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop in 1958, provided the soundtrack. As well as sound effects for film and television, Oram composed works for performance, sometimes jointly with other composers, and her use of sine-wave oscillators with tape and filters anticipated the development of the analogue synthesiser. Kara Blake’s experimental film The Delian Mode (2009) portrays the life and work of Derbyshire (1937–2001), who joined the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1960 (after Oram had left) and who produced hundreds of electronic works, especially for BBC TV, including most famously the Doctor Who theme based on Ron Grainer’s score.

Parisian ondes Martenot exponent and teacher Nadia Ratsimandresy gave some absorbing solo and other performances, notably with the dynamic Korean cellist Okkyung Lee and guzheng champion Mindy Meng Wang—a unique instrumental trio that produced captivating music. Ratsimandresy also guested with the duo Tasmanian guitarist Julius Schwing and Victorian sound artist Myles Mumford on electronics. For their work Rust and Thirst, Schwing and Mumford had suspended two rusty corrugated iron rainwater tanks, inverted to resemble giant bells, from the ceiling of the MONA winery and attached several transducers inside them. Performing as a duo or with guest musicians, they relayed their sound mix through the transducers to make the tanks vibrate and, with a mike placed underneath to feed the sound back into the mix, created an ethereal and quite haunting effect for the audience sitting under and near the tanks. Their enchanting set with Ratsimandresy was wonderfully coherent musically as well as symbolically powerful in evoking the arid Australian climate.

Carolina Eyck, a theremin virtuoso from Germany, demonstrated the full capacities of her instrument with Jennifer Marten-Smith (piano) and Jim Moginie (guitar) in popular classics such as Rachmaninov’s Vocalise. She controlled the theremin’s whine with the slightest movement of a hand or finger to give it the character and subtlety of the human voice.

Meanwhile, musically diverse performances using all kinds of synthesisers ran throughout the weekend. Robin Fox and Byron J Scullin, of Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio (MESS), created Tone Temple, in which they performed on a pyramid-shaped stack of early synthesisers and drum machines in homage to the analogue synthesiser revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Scot Cotterell gave a solo performance for various synthesisers, and most outstandingly, MOFO featured US performer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s delightful songs in which she morphs her own voice with rich electronic orchestration.

Many solo performers used electronics and sometimes pre-recorded material to provide musical accompaniments to their own voices. Kelsey Lu, alternately playing cello and guitar, Circuit des Yeux (Haley Fohr) on guitar and Moses Sumney (guitar) gave fine solo performances using accompanying samples of various kinds, orchestrating as they went. All three are fine singer-songwriters. Lu’s soprano voice and Fohr’s extraordinary vocal range, from baritone to soprano and her brooding emotional power, stood out. Even so, in each case, I wondered if their music would have benefited from interaction with and the spontaneity of live accompanists. The sound of legendary Australian rock band Regurgitator, whose current lineup includes Seja Vogel (voice and synthesiser) and Mindy Meng Wang (guzheng), seemed more complete in their fine set. Tuareg singer-guitarist Mdou Moctar and his band delightfully rendered traditional Tuareg songs of West Africa, adapted for two electric guitars and drums with much less in the way of electronic mediation.

Tetema’s unforgettable performance provided the most powerful and eloquent use of electronics in the MOFO program. Tetema—Mike Patton (of Faith No More) and composer and multi-instrumentalist Anthony Pateras—were joined for this performance by Errki Veltheim (amplified violin and mandolin), Will Guthrie (drums) and for one piece, Scott Tinkler (trumpet). Pateras dexterously manipulated an array of synthesisers and a tape loop while Patton provided gymnastic vocals, alternating between two microphones, each of which was connected to a desk-full of sound processors that sampled and transmuted his voice. A headline act for MOFO, Tetema produced a high-voltage fusion of driving rock, jazz and electronica, with dazzling solos by Pateras, Veltheim and Tinkler that blew the enthralled audience off the manicured MONA lawn.

The cutting edge of technical development in the field of electronic music currently seems to be Guy Ben-Ary’s CellF, described as the world’s first neural synthesiser, which he developed in cooperation with a team of scientists, technicians and musicians. CellF comprises a small ‘brain’—biological neural networks grown from Ben-Ary’s own stem cells in a Petri dish—that controls a series of analogue modular synthesisers. It functions autonomously and can perform solo or with other musicians to whom it responds. In separate performances, CellF worked alternately with Scott Tinkler, Mindy Meng Wang and Okkyung Lee (cello), each performance exploring the sonic and musical possibilities of the interaction between a human performer and a bio-engineered performer-instrument. Technically, CellF seems the ultimate extension of the musique concrète of Oram and Derbyshire, except that it has a mind of its own. [Read Gail Priest’s interview with Ben-Ary.]

Other than electronic

Not all the MOFO program was concerned with the origins and nature of electronic music. Alim Qasimov and his ensemble gave an exquisite performance of traditional Azerbaijani music, preceded by a video that suggested that such musical traditions are sadly dying out. And Julian Day performed a characteristic keyboard work of his on a beautifully maintained 200-year-old pipe organ. Using heavy bolts to hold down selected keys, Day creates sequences of droning chords that induce a subtly evolving and meditative effect over 50 minutes, a composition that is musically characteristic of the electronic era but isn’t electronic.

IHOS, Before the Flame Goes Out

The curtain-raiser to MOFO was a performance of Before the Flame Goes Out: Memorial to the Jewish Martyrs of Ioannina, Greece, by Constantine Koukias who, until his recent relocation to Amsterdam, had for many years run the opera company IHOS in Hobart. The work is scored for soprano, ondes Martenot (Ratsimandresy again), violin, cello, piano and tape, and was staged in the Hobart Town Hall free of charge to the public. Set in Ioannina, the home town of the composer’s parents, Before the Flame Goes Out is in 10 parts in three languages and is accompanied by videos including archival footage from the Holocaust. This evocative work traces the history of a Jewish community in Greece that suffered under successive occupations over many centuries and was all but obliterated in the Holocaust, the few refugee survivors establishing a small community in New York. This story of the Romaniote Jews is a timely reminder of the plight of refugees generally and of the effects of bigotry and prejudice.

MOFO (Festival of Music and Art), Museum of Old and New Art and other locations in Hobart, 18-22 Jan

In the arts, competition is for the most part temporally and spatially scattered, evaluations impressionistic and one-size-fits-all 5-star scoring utterly reductive. In sporting matches, competitors occupy the same space, compete face to face and the scores are an indication of actual outcomes. Scores in, say, an international piano competition, are the results of voting by judges. The similarities between art and sport actually reside in the bodies of players and performers—talented, trained, skilled, capable of great subtlety, effort and endurance—and also in varying degrees of spectacle and the loyalties of followers and fans. The movements of great sports players are often described aesthetically, for example, as dance-like; but rarely the other way round, when, say, a player is perceived to be faking or exaggerating an injury: “an Academy Award winning performance!” Making a convincing case for comparing these activities, is not as easy as it might seem.

In Champions, Martin del Amo and his collaborators at first push the art-sport analogy hard with a dance-football synthesis: there’s a big AstroTurf field in Carriageworks’ largest theatre, multiple video screens, media commentary, a mascot, heroic music and the dancers’ names are printed on the back of their sporty tops. But, in a calculated point of difference, the dancers are not uniformed. It’s a touch odd given that most dance productions still lean towards shared costuming and, of course, there’s intense team work on display here. Nonetheless, once on the field, there’s a strong sense of the dynamic played out between individuals and the all-female team which features star players in the contemporary dance scene—Sara Black, Kristina Chan, Cloe Fournier, Carlee Mellow, Sophia Ndaba, Rhiannon Newton, Katrina Olsen, Marnie Palomares, Melanie Palomares, Kathryn Puie and Miranda Wheen.

The mascot, a robust white comic-book swan (Julie-Anne Long), executes dainty, balletic steps while appearing to fart smoke from its rear. Clearly the analogy is going to be a soft, if pointed one, and initially funny, confirmed by actual sports broadcaster Mel McLaughlin’s pre-game interview on the big screen with dancer Carlee Mellow about the dancers’ fitness and states of mind. Kristina Chan has a right hip problem for which she’s getting “spiritual treatment.” Catherine Puie does the splits, declaring, “I want to dance better than myself.” The dancers are briskly identified, each displaying distinctive moves and the writing wittily sustaining the art-sport connection.

The action commences with the screen announcing, “Winning the Moment,” a term drawn from sports psychology but apt given all the attention paid in dance to the ‘now’ in recent years. The dancers mass before us in wedge formation, knees lowered, bodies almost still, individuals slowly rising, leaning left or right in a demonstration of united ready-to-go manoeuvering. A line of defence forms, underscored by a soaring synth melody. The line breaks into smaller units and circlings, while profiles of the players appear on the screens (tricky to absorb amid the action, but I noted CV fragments: numbers of shows, awards won, grants not received, how many times appearing topless). Fast running breaks out in big circles, aerial shots on the screens, adroit sidestepping to stabbing pizzicato in the score, spins, slides and dancers dropping out of the circling until the last is applauded for her endurance. It appears that preparation has morphed into the dance performance proper. But in a break the dancers, taking up golden pom poms, look about to transform into cheer squad as McLaughlin details the inequities in women’s sport. It’s a didactic swerve barely rescued by the dancers’ sympathetic, if low key (no cheering, no wild formation dancing) response to the plight of their peers. In a line across the stage, to the rocking and chiming of the music, they appear defiant, individuals posturing and slowly re-shaping, as if collectively offering refined art as support.

In a return to the game, our attention spread across a busy field, the team breaks into discrete units involving low turns, floor work, hoisting individuals aloft, falling and being caught, some dancers stopping and, like players, masking their faces with singlets pulled-up to show a bit of skin. Again we see admirable finesse and exertion, if not tension. Perhaps the second half will deliver, expectation aroused by an hilarious but finely finessed dance by the mascot channelling Pavlova’s dying swan, more humorous media commentary—this time on the choreography—and rousing, almost anthemic music.

But, as if resisting a too obvious impulse, Del Amo takes us onto a field of dreams, slower, contemplative, beautiful, as if extracting and compacting an essence of elegant vigour. The music continues to pulse but with delightful Baroque invention, transcending any sense of mimicry or parody and, on the screens, notations of strategic moves become lyrical abstract artworks. I let my reviewer’s pen drop from scribbling in the dark and reverie (no, not asleep) to the movement until an eruption of activity anticipates game’s end with fabulous images of exhaustion, head-hung-low defeat, ecstatic jubilation.

Champions is an intriguing work, grandly mounted (design Clare Britton, lighting Karen Norris, video Sam James, music Gail Priest) and finely performed with visible team spirit. “Intriguing” because the sport-art analogy never quite settles (not that it should or could altogether), swinging tonally from comedic to parodic to didactic to mimetic to calculatedly artistic in the second half where the connection is hardest to read. Director Del Amo cleverly suffuses sports team movement with the characterful detail dancers can bring to walking, running, jumping, ducking and weaving and standing still in formation. There’s a fine interplay between team and individuals with room for some more expressive play from the latter. Champions is never less than enjoyable, the team an impressive one, and if the overall game plan is a touch re-thought, it could be a winner.

In the final week of Sydney Festival, two works revealed humans controlled by outside forces, operating in endless loops of predetermined behaviour. Still Life draws on Albert Camus’ reading of the absurdity of the Greek Sisyphean myth—”the struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart”—while the dance theatre work Institute channels a dark, Kafkaesque humour in a monstrous empathy-destroying office.

Institute

In a suffocating world of lockers and tall filing cabinets, everything is dark grey-green with a patina of an early industrial era. A muttering office worker, Martin, opens drawers and flicks through papers and is joined by his work companion, the architect. Their camaraderie turns to play as they break out of office behaviour, only to be brought back into line by lights and buzzers and a directive voice in a panopticon dystopia of ticking clocks and ringing phones.
With a taut physical language of playful exactitude and high adrenaline, the (now four) male performers dance and talk simultaneously, manipulate each other with sticks and other appendages, and magically slide new worlds out of the wall of cabinets. At one point, Martin extracts a small restaurant from one of them and engages with a phantom dinner companion, Margaret, who appears only as a pair of mannequin hands that Martin madly licks and passionately devours. Later he goes in search of her and, with a café lamp attached to his head, becomes a pilot fish. He only finds one of Margaret’s legs, then a gloved hand and a floating hat.

Later, he is a figure of sorrow, lurching around the stage with table and chair literally attached to his body as a remnant of the fictional relationship. In a gesture of sympathy, his boss Lou enables Martin’s fantasy by becoming an unconvincing stand-in Margaret, with wig and ill-fitting coat. Then, following a decree from above—”Martin, we’re going to have to let you go”—we witness his total breakdown and the awkward sympathy of his fellows as the forlorn lover is repeatedly told he has lost his grip on reality.

Throughout Institute, performers turn to recorded tapes from their pasts, fragmented episodes replayed in a secret drawer. A lush soundtrack includes the thrill of Sarah Vaughan’s “September Song” and Sinatra’s “Blue Skies,” while composer Dave Price creates an undercurrent of threat and paranoia, as in one dizzying choreographic sequence where we see, in split-second timing, flying furniture and the construction of a towering architectural maquette that can never be quite completed. Pressure to create and make decisions in bureaucratic environs leads to a moment of near suicide when the architect climbs atop a table, which is magically transformed by a lighting shift into a sheer cliff complete with an expansive sea soundscape.

Repeatedly overwhelmed, the men fall apart under stress, suffer panic attacks and require oxygen. The four performers take turns to rescue and medicate their stricken colleagues. Their pretence of care leads to a balletic group therapy of handholding and supported turns and twists. Upstage on an elevated platform-cum-hospital ward, a repeated motif of an old man falling backwards out of sight, to death or another beyond, is followed by the playing-out of various shapes of grief.

Towards the end, in an excruciatingly beautiful sequence even the boss Lou breaks down, isolated in a glass case. His near naked, fragile body flails and contorts slowly, accompanied by an aching vocal lament.

Gecko Theatre Company, based in Suffolk, has used this work to create dialogue with communities in the UK around mental health in the workplace. In doing so they have not only crafted a masterwork that is moving and delightful in equal measure, but extended the gesture of care beyond the stage.

Still Life

Dimitris Papaioannou uses a spare stage dominated by a floating sphere of swirling cloud to highlight the ant-like scale of the human body in a vast, indifferent cosmos. He begins with a man sitting alone on the edge of emptiness. Then, the man as worker ant walks a long pathway dragging a huge square of crumbling concrete on his back.

It seems only fitting that a Greek artist would proffer the plight of Ancient Greece’s mythic Sisyphus as the pivot point for a work that muses on the weight of the material world as ballast for the lightness of evanescent spirit.

As I watched Still Life (from ‘the gods’ in row U in Carriageworks’ enormous Bay 17) the sense of scale and distance was a mixed blessing as the work offered moments of visual delight and temporal tedium. I guess the tedium, the sometimes laboured nature of an over-extended illusion, was a deliberate impost on the audience. Yet at times the accretion of images and repetition of tasks gathered into a satisfying meditative feat of endurance both for the doers and the watchers.

There was time to wonder: when does a metaphorical act, in this case of ‘bodies balanced and broken apart’ cease to be an illumination of humanity’s neverending ‘search for meaning’ and become a repetitive circus trick? Perhaps when the performers play for laughs? When a clever illusion, such as being swallowed by a wall and morphing into an impossibly multi-limbed creature, is repeated ad nauseam and becomes more acrobatic than enthralling?

I have to admit that though I was less than enamoured of some stretches of this work, on reflection the strength of its elemental ponderings has stayed with me: the power of its conceptual structure; the endlessness of tape ripped from the amplified floor; the classically dressed body of a woman distorted behind a wobbling blade of Perspex; a table carried aloft by four performers—the male equivalent of the Caryatids who support the porch of the Acropolis’ Erechtheion on their heads; the dragging and scraping of the cement monolith leaving a long pale circular trace on the dark floor. Above everything the looming nebular sphere of gas is transfigured for a time into the sublime surface of an oceanic wave, prodded into movement by the tip of a performer’s shovel; while below, the presence of dust and concrete rubble alludes to the ruins of civilisation as well as to the grittiness of manual labour and the work of building and demolition.

Riffing simply from the graphics on the beautifully produced program, (still) life is what happens between the rock and the cloud. We mere mortals must be satisfied with that. Or, as Camus writes, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Institute, created by Amit Lahav, producer Rosalind Wynn, devising performers Chris Evans, Amit Lahav, Ryan Perkins-Gangnes, Francois Testory, set design Rhys Jarman, Amit Lahav, lighting design Chris Swain, Amit Lahav, original music Dave Price, Seymour Centre Sydney, 25-28 Jan; Still Life, visual concept, direction Dimitris Papaioannou, performers Prokopis Agathokleus, Drossos Skotis, Costas Chrysafidis, Christos Strinopoulos, Kallopi Simou, Pavlina Andriopoulou, Dimitris Papaioannou, sound composition Giwrgos Poulios; Carriageworks Sydney, 27-29 Jan

Based on the memoir by Saroo Brierley, Lion traces the trajectory of an extraordinary journey. A five-year-old boy, separated from his family, catches a train that doesn’t stop, and 1500 kilometres later he’s in Calcutta, adrift in a sea of commuters who can’t hear him and, if they do, can’t understand him. They mostly speak Bengali; he speaks Hindi. Lost in every sense, he has no option but to live on the streets, and makes do with the resourcefulness that small children have: surviving on gut-feeling to avoid harm, eating fruit offered to gods on the riverbank, running faster than the adults who steal away with the street kids when they’re asleep.

First-time film director Garth Davis frames much of the Indian action from a child’s height, adult torsos and heads chopped off, decapitated, giving a true sense of the powerlessness felt by a child when he’s not listened to, when the stakes are impossibly high; he’s unable to even reach the ticket counter at Calcutta station. The adults sweep him away with a flick of their hands. Davies comes to the film having co-directed Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake (2013), deftly handling a horror story of Dickensian proportions as Saroo moves through Indian institutions where children are beaten and disappear into the night. He is eventually adopted by a Tasmanian couple, Sue and John Brierley (Nicole Kidman and David Wenham) and grows up in a caring home. But he can’t forget where he’s from, the deep bond with his mother and siblings. When helpful adults in India, searching in newspapers, ask him his mother’s name, he says, “Mama,” a loving word—so resonant with futility and loss.

With no previous acting experience, Sunny Pawar’s performance is powerful and wrenches the heart. Chosen from 2,000 boys, at the beginning of the film shoot he speaks no English. Perhaps this helps him. After Saroo finds a large spoon in a deep pit of rubbish, a shiny treasure he hides in his clothing, he sits outside a café under a tree and pretends to eat with it, bringing the spoon slowly to his lips, copying a man sitting opposite in the café. This man sees the play and then sees the boy and how hungry he is. Luke Davies’ elegant script works well at conveying such scenes of exchange with few words spoken.

Saroo’s story is a tale of the times. Played as an adult by Dev Patel, he sets out 25 years later on an impossible quest. To find his Indian family, he starts to search on Google Earth. He has a name (that he pronounces incorrectly and can’t find), an icon (a water tower he sees from the station) and a memory of the landscape that weaves around him as his small feet move, nimble, across it. He has a radius of about 1,500 kilometres from Calcutta. He clicks along each train track, looking at the layout of each station, searching for the water tower. It’s difficult in film to convey the grinding boredom of this search, the obsessive-compulsive nature of the slow click, that keeps Saroo in lockdown in his room for years, losing a girlfriend, Lucy (the luminous Rooney Mara), and family in the process. But it’s a mark too of the resilience of a small boy, now fully grown.

Hollywood film is always drawn to the fast pace of technological advances, the forensics, the nabbing of a criminal. Here, the film has to rely on the low-tech and stagnate for a while, and Patel goes for a sense of Saroo slowly breaking down, mind-numbed and exhausted by all-night searching, wandering malls, lost again among the familiar this time, snaps of memory filtering through. It’s the physical presence of objects that brings the past back to help him, sense-memories: the smell of the bright Saffron-red jalebi, a sticky sweet in his friend’s kitchen, and the weight of rocks that he helped his mother carry as she worked.Sometimes a story is so personal that as a viewer it’s impossible to stay outside it. My brother was adopted from Bangladesh when I was five years old. I met him at the airport: a six-month old, bundled in white, carried by my mother. He came with a doll and a name printed out, “Sony.” But the pronunciation (as with ‘Saroo’) was different, and so my parents changed it to be more like the name they heard; he avoided the branding. Like Saroo, he arrived with a story lost to us. Nicole Kidman was drawn to the role because she has also adopted children and the Brierleys are portrayed as caring, loving people whose desire is to help children without other means of support. The ethics of international adoption are left alone—although Saroo’s adopted brother, Mantosh, battling addiction and depression in Tasmania, is a counterpoint to any seductive happy-families reduction.

In the cinema, my mother and I do our best to keep ourselves together as we watch the film with my son. The memory mapping forces me to go back and recall my own tracks as a five-year-old, the year my brother arrived, no adults in sight, the steps to school, the round-the-block dawdle, the large trees you could climb as markers, the sounds of cars hooning around Mt Panorama, the cut through the neighbour’s backyard to a friend’s on the other side where a swing set beckoned.

I think of my own son, how he flits between the virtual and actual worlds, Google Earth and the ground between his feet. His parents wait at the school gates. The GPS talks to him in the car, mispronouncing streets and towns, giving him polite directions. His parents walk him, holding hands, across the street. Always holding hands. What paths has he forged on his own? What paths will he remember? And as I hold my son’s hand tight on the train home from the cinema, I wonder if he will really need to remember at all? Perhaps it’s a notion that will pass him by—this idea of getting lost.

Lion, director Garth Davis, writer Luke Davies from the book by Saroo Brierley, cinematographer Greig Fraser, editor Alexandre de Franchesi, production designer Chris Kennedy, producers Emile Sherman, Iain Canning; 2016

The Manganiyar are a Langha, or Muslim community, whose roots can be traced back to the medieval Rajput dynasties of the Indian subcontinent. They are folk musicians and oral storytellers, their ancestral home the vast Thar Desert that, stretching over 320,000 square kilometres, forms a natural border between India and Pakistan. Manganiyar culture combines secular and religious traditions, their songs constituting an oral history of the Thar region—recalling the exploits of Alexander the Great and the maharajas who ruled over the former native states—while also offering up praise to Krishna and the Sufi saints.

The name itself means something like ‘beggar’, a derogatory appellation derived from the close relationship the Manganiyar have traditionally cultivated with their wealthy Rajput patrons. It is now proudly claimed, and no wonder—the Manganiyar are virtuoso musicians whose unique vocal style and instrumentation have made them a major cultural export since their initial exposure to Western audiences in the 1960s and 70s.

The Indian director Roysten Abel first incorporated the music of the Manganiyar in Manganiyar Seduction, which saw an intergenerational group of 43 Manganiyar placed within a ‘magic box’ set—individual curtained compartments opening one by one to dramatically reveal the all-male musicians—inspired by the appearance of Amsterdam’s notorious red-light district. Premiering in 2006 in Delhi (the city that had, in 1963, played host to the first staged performance of Manganiyar music), the work also featured in the 2010 and 2011 Sydney and Perth festivals, and was well received by Australian audiences. In Manganiyar Classroom, which premiered in 2014 at Jackfruit, a children’s festival in Bangalore, Abel revisited the Manganiyar tradition, this time focusing on its youngest inheritors, school-age children from the villages of Rajasthan, the Northern Indian state bordering Pakistan.

Speaking to Abel by telephone, he tells me, “When I first encountered the Manganiyar people about 11 years ago I listened to a lot of musicians. At one point they brought their children along and I heard them sing for the first time. It was a mystical experience—they all had this high range and an extraordinary clarity of tone. It was from another world altogether. At that time I thought about creating a work with just the children, something along the lines of a boys’ choir. And then we went ahead with the other show [Manganiyar Seduction]. It was only a couple of years back when Gayathri Krishna, who runs an organisation called Bhoomija [a Bangalore-based performing arts trust], asked me if I would do my boys’ choir idea for the Jackfruit festival. The time seemed right, so I went back to Pakistan and asked what had happened to those children who had sung for me eight or so years before. Obviously they had grown up but what I had not expected was that they had lost the spark in their eyes. They had become timid, had dropped out of school. Then I kind of realised how much damage the public schooling system in their villages had done to them. And I thought maybe I won’t do a boys’ choir, maybe I’ll just start talking about the prevalent school system and how these kids might address that through their music. And that’s how Manganiyar Classroom came about.”

In the work, Abel’s anxieties around the incompatibility of state education in Rajasthan with the Manganiyar tradition play out in the relationships between the 35-strong cast of eight to 16-year-old boys and two of their teachers: one old-fashioned and authoritarian, the other cleaving to the archetype of the inspirational educator who encourages his students to nurture their own creative and intellectual potential. Most of the children had not been on stage before—indeed, had never so much as seen a play—but their own experiences informed the work’s development and Abel’s final script.

More than anything, however, the work is a showcase for the boys’ unique variation of Manganiyar singing, a tradition passed down matrilineally by the women of Rajasthan who, Abel tells me, generally do not sing outside of their villages. The children perform most of the music themselves, providing their own accompaniment on a range of traditional Manganiyar instruments, including the percussive khartal and the harmonica-like morchang or so-called Jew’s harp. Abel explains to me, “This is music that’s been polished over centuries. There is a pain and joy in it that is universal. People come to me in tears after the show and they always say, ‘I’ve been moved.’ There is something deep within our audiences that it connects to.”

“Ultimately,” Abel tells me, “I see the production as a means to creating an alternative school for the Manganiyar children,” although he admits he is “not an educationalist.” His aim, he says, is to assemble a team on the back of Manganiyar Classroom capable of creating a school that is responsive to the specific needs and abilities of the children. “The homogenisation of education is a huge problem in India and Pakistan, and especially when it comes to communities like the Manganiyars, who are not like the children I’ve worked with in urban cities like Delhi. They are intelligent and efficient because of the music that they have in them. I miss those things when they are not there, which is a part of how I figured out how much potential these [Manganiyar] kids have.”

Five concerts revealed the strength of the 2017 Sydney Festival programming of unusual concepts, forms and instruments. This was music-making of high order for welcoming audiences.

1967: Music in the Key of Yes

In the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall, Yirrmal Marika opened and closed this superb concert (which will be repeated at the Adelaide Festival) with a fine sense of ceremony. His remarkable vocal skills (performing largely in language), didjeridu playing and dance (birdlike to Emily Warrumara’s account of the Beatles’ “Blackbird”) evoked a vast cultural history in dialogue with powerful popular songs in an event focused on celebrating a crucial political event, the 1967 Referendum that recognised Aboriginal peoples as Australian citizens.

On two large upstage screens, archival film deftly unfolded an impressionistic narrative from across the 20th century, featuring images of traditional Aboriginal pride, assimilation, destitution, protest, and the speeches (notably from Faith Bandler) and polling booths of 1967. Brief interviews with the public at that time revealed support, condescension, prejudice and hostility. Oddly missing from the footage were images of the beauty of country so fundamental to Aboriginal life.

The singers—Yirrmal Marika, Emily Warrumara, Leah Flannagan, Dan Sultan, Adalita, Radical Son, Thelma Plum, Alice Sky, Ursula Yovich—and a wonderful supporting ensemble led by Neil Murray drew on a wealth of Australian songs. “My Island Home,” Archie Roach’s “Took the Children Away,” Warumpi Band’s “Blackfella/Whitefella” and Yothu Yindi’s “Treaty” were heard alongside Goanna’s “Solid Rock,” Midnight Oil’s “Dead Heart” and American classics such as Sam Cooke’s “Change is Gonna Come” (a powerful rendition from Radical Son), Nina Simone’s “Feelin’ Good” (Thelma Plum in a beautifully restrained account) and Patti Smith’s “People Have the Power.” Among other pleasures was Dan Sultan’s affecting “The Drover,” about Gurindji man Vincent Lingiari, the stockman who became a leading land rights activist.

With its songs passionately performed, subtly arranged and juxtaposed with historical film and an intriguing projected text by novelist Alexis Wright, 1967: Music in the Key of Yes generated an embracing sense of community between singers and audience. A rousing ensemble encore rendition of the Beatles’ “With a Little Help from My Friends” was followed by a sense of return to ceremony in a gentle transition from “Blackbird” into Yirrmal Marika’s performance of Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu’s “Wukun,” a song about storm clouds (Wuku) which are images of the songwriter’s mother’s people, the Gälpu.

Ellen Fullman Long String Instrument

Eyes closed, ears wide open, I’m swathed in the complex hum and buzz of Ellen Fullman’s 25-metre-long string instrument which the artist plays as she walks the great length of its resonating wires, holding them pinched between her fingers. The aural halo conjures string orchestras, sitars and electronic droning (the device is acoustic but its resonating boxes are miked), music rendered more complex by Theresa Wong’s cello layering of slow, deep riffing and digitally treated high carolling. Eyes open, it’s performance art: the slightly built Furman first moves slowly backwards for much of the length of her instrument, close enough for me to hear the soft click of her white-soled black sneakers, then all the way forwards and then, in shorter forays, in both directions, pausing only to apply rosin to her fingers or set a small motorised wheel spinning to generate a drone passage. Definitely a show for those into sheer reverie and the musical unusual. I ached for a post-show demonstration of the instrument’s capacities. Which, in a way, was what Chris Abrahams offered in the show’s opener on the Town Hall’s magnificent organ, unleashing its highest and lowest notes—the latter unearthing a rumbling, mechanical beast—and, in between, playing passages of delicately considered counterpointing and soaring organ romance.

Gabriel Dharmoo, Anthropologies Imaginaires

After experiencing Montreal composer Gabriel Dharmoo’s Anthropologies Imaginaires, I was buzzing and twitching with a profound sense of the pre-verbal, pre-instrumental music of tribal peoples as played by this virtuosic artist via complex vocalisations, physical self-manipulation and movement, subtle and rough.

Having just enjoyed the Denis Villeneuve film The Arrival, in which a linguist (Amy Adams) attempts to communicate with giant heptapod aliens, and reading Ross Gibson’s 26 Views of a Starburst World (UWA Press, 2012) about the 1790s encounter between English surveyor William Dawes and 14-year-old Patyegarang (read in order to better appreciate the festival’s attention to local language), I attended Anthropologies Imaginaires eager to appreciate a composer’s account of ancient music-making across cultural and temporal barriers. I was in for a surprise.

What I encounter is a lean, dark-haired young man in black T-shirt and trousers who never speaks but performs a series of non-verbal utterances, tuneful and otherwise, each introduced by onscreen cultural experts who identify and comment on the tribes who made these proto-musics. The vocal elaboration and gesturing is convincing, commencing with a wordless prayer with wafting notes, clicks, falsetto and allied hand glides. As the performance proceeds, the cultures the artist evokes grow stranger, though the techniques—yodelling, overtone singing, vibrato-induced chest thumping and rasping growling make sense—but in this case all from one tribe? Then there are screen cutaways to a making-of-documentary in which the ‘experts’—whose commentaries are beginning to sound weird—are revealed to be stage hands. A demonstration of the music of “Third-Sex Children,” delivered from a low, wide-legged stance and in long-note falsetto and mask-like face-making evokes Chinese opera but perhaps also ancient Indian dance in which one performer plays multiple roles.

“Weborgez,” is a 12-tone music culture in which music is literally presented as child’s play. Irony and parody have clearly entered the frame. An exorcism for “male sexual guilt” in another tribe is executed by vocalising into a bowl of water, drinking and expelling the liquid as if vomiting, violently wrenched from the stomach, and then self-flagellating after cleaning up the mess. The audience giggles. Any sense of reality has long exited. But even so, the “Aquatic Songs” sequence, with water kissed, puffed into, sucked and voiced with a pulsing falsetto, seems plausible.

We are gently cajoled into becoming a trance choir so that, as an onscreen specialist derisively puts it, the leader can “solo purely egotistically.” One tribe is condemned for its failure to drill and mine—the mumbling performer looks lost. In contrast, a “hit song” follows—jazzy, pop and “world,”—its culture celebrated for having survived via cultural absorption (akin, of course, to mining). Finally, the specialists are revealed for what they are: casual surmisers, ideologues, a Minister of Assimilation and a promoter of wine and golf tours. Our shared culpability in desecrating cultures we don’t understand has been deeply sounded in Anthropologies Imaginaires with the tools of musical expertise, deployed with wit, vocal grace and dextrous physical performance.

Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Rautavaara

Things that fly. Birds. Angels. Spirit. Mine did in the Sydney Festival’s Rautavaara concert, lifted by superb performances of the composer’s distinctive blending of impressionistic world-making and soaring neo-Romantic melodising. Einojuhani Rautavaara died on 27 July, 2016. This tribute event offered a scandalously rare opportunity to hear his work in an Australian concert hall, in this case one with an ideal acoustic, warm and responsive to the tiniest details in orchestration and the recording of the bracing calls of huge flocks of swans commencing migration from Finland’s north.

Cantus Arcticus, Concerto for Birds and Orchestra (1972) features birdcall taped near the Arctic Circle in marshland and bogs awash with birdlife. It opens with an entrancing, warbling flute duet (beautifully acquitted) which is then joined by woodwinds, together anticipating the arrival of the birds and a corresponding swelling cello-led melody. The subsequent shifting dynamic (sensitively captured by conductor Benjamin Northey) between orchestra, individual birds and flocks (the calls sometimes pitch-adjusted by Rautuvaara) achieves a glorious synthesis of avian and human music-making, above all in the work’s glorious third and final movement, the swan migration, transcending the fleeting suspicion that you’re listening to the score from a nature documentary. A trumpet soaring above the fullness of the score’s unsentimental sense of triumphant nature suggests the flock rising to leave while flute and woodwinds carroll indefatigably, as they did in the first movement, at one with the swans. Softly descending harp notes signal departure within seconds. Silence. Although heard many times on CD, this live performance breathed new life into my appreciation of Rautavaara’s sublime entwining of birdsong and the music we ‘sing’ through our instrumental prostheses.

The intensely dramatic 11-minute Isle of Bliss (1995) also evokes birds if not so literally, its inspiration Finnish dramatist Aleksis Kivi’s “Home of the Birds,” a poem seeking repose, possibly the calm of death. After opening forcefully with a rising sense of urgency—woodblocks rattling and flutes piping, bird-like—calm briefly ensues until recurrent deep string orchestral strummings introduce a return to the opening melody, now yearning and soaring. It is twice interpolated with ‘birdcalls,’ which towards the work’s end become incessant chatter beneath the emotional turbulence and then, on their own, dive into a sweet tumbling of notes and, wonderfully, a final lone, gliding two-note call, so distinctly birdlike. Northey and the orchestra have delivered us and the poet, with care and passion, to the Isle of Bliss.

With larger instrumental forces, Symphony No. 7 Angel of Light (1994) evokes the power and sense of transcendence associated with angels but also their role as intermediaries between god and humans. French horns and brass rise above full-bodied, sometimes keening, sometimes soaring strings in another of Rautavaara’s surging constructions—here underlined with strummed harp—and their descents into thoughtful, meandering reflection. Angels here are reassuring, the movement ending in calm. The second movement’s series of three powerful trumpet calls, from two slightly different pitched instruments—followed by brief bursts of fearsome percussion, conjures alarming angels, although their last fading appearance, undeniably bird-like (and wonderfully played), softens the angst. As does the dream-like third movement, a reverie ending with soft, repeated warblings behind the string and horn musings. The brass fanfare opening the final movement is followed by emphatic carrolling from woodwinds and strings—akin in the density of movement to Canticus Arcticus—underscoring soaring brass. In the ensuing softening, we see the trumpets muted but finally no less powerful in the work’s climax, simply more integrated, bringing human and angel together. Rautavaara didn’t aim to write a programmatic work, but the kinship of birds, angels and spirit were evident in the concert’s admirably selected three works and superbly conducted by Benjamin Northey with the balance of restraint and release necessary to realise Rautavaara’s vision.

Nicole Lizée, Sex, Lynch and Video Games

Nicole Lizée with the Australian Art Orchestra, Sex, Lynch and Video Games was another festival highlight, an exciting and fruitful pairing of Canadians (Lizée, pianist Eve Egoyan and guitarist Steve Raegele) and Australians (AAO, led by Peter Knight).

Lizée ‘s David Lynch Etudes (she’s also tackled Hitchcock) are played by Egoyan to projected and radically edited clips from David Lynch films. The outcome is funny, alarming and aesthetically satisfying in the fusion of playing that yields rippling waves, dark intoning, astonishing stuttering and grand romantic pianism with revealing investigations of very short film moments. My favourite was of Naomi Watts as Betty in Mulholland Drive (2001) surprised by the sudden appearance of Laura Harring as Rita. Lizee cuts and repeatedly stutters the film so that it becomes an intense, sustained portrait of Betty saying “You came back” in quickfire states of happiness, shock, fear, suspicion and hatred as the piano shuffles darkly. Watts is perfect for such dissection and elaboration. As are Nicholas Cage and Laura Dern in Wild at Heart (1990) elsewhere. At one point, Egoyan leans to the side and plays slide guitar as well as piano as a guitar is played in Twin Peaks onscreen. Motifs emerge that appear in this and other excerpts in the program: images totally flaring or sparkling, a brush appearing and painting in, for example, tears, small photos of characters (and Lynch) placed on a tongue, and an obsessive preoccupation with seemingly incidental details like the window that the camera tilts towards and away from Watts. I’m not sure what they add up to but they lend the works an intriguing totality. What is impressive is not only the dynamic between live piano and edited visual imagery but the cut-up sound of the film made musical in itself and in tandem with the keyboard.

In B-Bit Urbex, Lizée, now upstage with the orchestra at her computer, plays with malfunctioning early computer games, with a keen focus on their “pixelated cities.” The simple, often stuttering images and freezes are aurally textured with complex music that has to responsively slow, compulsively repeat or hover. Band members clap in time, two trumpeters play into buckets of water, there’s a wild big band passage and some fine gentle guitar work, pitched against the image of a plodding game robot. The unpredictability of these old games yields rich musical rewards.

After a turntabalism improvisation between Lizée and Sydney’s Martin Ng, which, though fascinating in part, warranted more duration to be revealing, the concert concluded thrillingly with Karappo Orestutura (literally “empty orchestra”) in which a singer adjusts her performance to a malfunctioning karaoke machine (as played by the Australian Art Orchestra). Gian Slater, in superb voice, stays ‘in tune with’ the warped pitches, grinding glides and relentless repeats, maintaining, as Lizée requests, “composure.” Things begin well enough, songs complemented by old footage of couples kissing, fighting, crying, hugging and images of fire. Then a screen explosion anticipates a world about to go wonky, which it does with Devo breaking up on screen and the singer seamlessly executing fractured vocals for “Whip It.” Unexpected images pop-up: the joint-sharing scene from Easy Rider, the dead mother in Psycho, as if the imagined machine has locked onto some other platform. The climax is spectacular: Diana Ross and Lionel Richie onscreen in aged video gazing lovingly at each other, microphones in hand for “Endless Love,” their voices finely realised by Slater and conductor Tristram Williams riding with aplomb every tape stutter, enforced glide and mad looping. The Australian Art Orchestra and Slater, along with a very busy Vanessa Tomlinson on percussion, rise to this demanding occasion with precision and gusto.

Nicole Lizée makes impressive new music—and new audiovisual experiences—from the manipulation, decay and malfunctioning of old technologies. In this concert, the challenging melding of music and media reached a deeply satisfying apotheosis.

Sydney Festival 2017: 1967: Music in the Key of Yes, Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House. 17 Jan; Ellen Fullman Long String Instrument, Sydney Town Hall, 13, 14 Jan; Gabriel Dharmoo, Anthropologies Imaginaires, Seymour Centre, 9-15 Jan; Rautavaara, City Recital Centre, 11 Jan; Nicole Lizée, Sex, Lynch and Video Games, City Recital Centre, Sydney, 19 Jan

In December 2016 I travelled to Italy to attend the Venice International Performance Art Week. The ambitious event brought together an extraordinary daily program of live works, an exhibition and panels with which to generate dynamic discussion and pedagogical platforms. Held biannually over the past six years, it is an international drawcard for performance art makers, curators, cultural operators and audiences alike, to gather for a week that is as much think tank as aesthetic experience.

2016’s Fragile Body-Material Body concluded a trilogy conceived by German artist duo VestAndPage. The curators are dedicated to representing diversity in cultural practice and to hosting a space where groundbreaking and established artists mix with mid and early career performers in a generous and impartial environment. There is an expectation for all artists to attend the whole of the week-long event. This year, seminal artists Stelarc, Orlan, Franko B, Marcel Antúnez Roca (a founding member of La Fura Dels Baus) and Antonio Manuel (Brazil) gave platform presentations to an absorbed crowd. Each iteration has seen Australian artists bringing new approaches and ideas to the mix. In 2014 Leisa Shelton Fragment 31 came on board as a co-curator and in 2016 presented artists Casey Jenkins, James McAllister and Stelarc alongside the UK artist and In Between Time Festival director Helen Cole.

Casey Jenkins, sMother

The room in which Casey Jenkins quietly performs sMother each day is strangely like a contemporary shrine. The architectural space plays into a reading that resonates with religious signifiers. Flanked by mirrors, Jenkins sits on a small clear plastic faceted stool which mimics cut glass. Behind is a life-size video portrait rendered iconic by its fluorescent light frame. Intentional or not, these quasi-religious references reinforce the artist’s sense of enquiry.

This durational performance is the final in a trilogy exploring how society preserves “absurd gender roles” and reinforces expectations of women perceived to be “of child-bearing age.” Over the week, Jenkins calmly knits a constrictive bind from yarn emerging from the vagina. Woollen knits, often associated with nurture and warmth, here take on a more insidious role, restricting and hobbling the artist’s body as the length of the narrow scarf increases each day. Manual Zabel’s soundscape adds to the sense of menace.

Positioned on either side of the room, resembling altar candles, are two pedestals, each with six red buttons. The audience can choose to activate these and in doing so their devotional action unleashes a volley of recorded public commentary. Patronising, opinionated and judgmental, it serves to remind us how we can all be complicit in the collective controlling of women’s bodies. Jenkins silently and stoically absorbs the relentless psychological barrage in this, the more precarious and disturbing part of the performance. The work’s religious overtones are made more apparent with the inclusion of the particularly oppressive and dogmatic voice of a conservative evangelist. Combining these overt commentaries with subtle activities, Jenkins reminds us that we still have a long way to go if we are to unbind deeply held expectations of the female body.

James McAllister, (utter) Oratorio

In contrast, James McAllister occupies a constructed architectural space in which the performing body is so subtly present as to be almost invisible. Situated in an exhibition space away from the first floor performance galleries, (utter) Oratorio comprises a false wall in which a number of apertures have been inserted: a frosted rectangular window; a perforated masonite slide box; a small display box containing the smoothly contoured, used soap bar; a peep hole; and a letter box. McAllister refers to the functioning of his deceptively understated work as “a strategy for the soft architecture of human transaction.”

On numerous visits to the site, I witnessed subtle changes similar to the shifting landscape of a domestic space: the soap bar had altered; the slide box was open. Once, the small frosted window played host to a shadowy figure. I watched mesmerised as the grey-blue light blurred on contact with the palest skin: a cheek, a lip, an eye-socket, a hand. One moment I felt as if I was looking into an underwater abyss, the next a ghostly threshold. As with sMother there is an offer to actively engage, however in McAllister’s work it comes in the form of exchange. Via the letter-box, visitors post an item and a minute later receive a signed and stamped receipt describing the item delivered, the location, the date and the transaction number. On the final day I returned to this whispering-wall of sorts to find a gallery of tickets, photos, pictures and messages scrawled on postcards, pieces of paper, shopping receipts. The past week had been transformed into an archive of human interaction reaching through a literal and metaphorical barrier in an effort to connect.

Anna Kosarewska, Redirecting through

Barriers and borders manifest in a number of works this year, made more urgent in light of the current global socio-political landscape. Ukrainian artist Anna Kosarewska’s Redirecting through, performed across three days, could be seen as a triptych exploring inheritance, invasion and survival. On the first day, Kosarewska sits on a pedestal, her lap and head covered with a traditional embroidered fabric. Carefully and serenely she picks out a pearl, holds it for a moment and then either drops it or chooses to delicately sew it to the skin of her décolletage. A gas mask hangs ominously on the wall.

On the second day, this composed space is replaced by a more menacing one. Illuminated by the light from a looped geometric video projection, reminiscent of 20th century socialist design, a naked Kosarewska prowls the space to driving, repetitive music. At one point she traverses the room, slowly guiding torches across her body. Reminiscent of searchlights, they take on a sinister tone, seeming to probe deep beyond the barrier of the artist’s skin. References to war are evident in props such as toy soldiers and tanks. Pinned to the walls these cast distorted shadows generated from Kosarewska’s handheld flashlights.

On day three there is a return to a state of repose. Beneath two photographs, a long bolt of light cloth drops from the wall and unravels toward Kosarewska, shrouding her supine body on its low-lying gold podium. A mask of sprouting seeds covers her face and similar seeds are embedded in the cloth close to the wall. Renewal is evident in this image and I can’t help thinking about the opportunity to seed possible futures predicated on the acknowledgment of cultural inheritance and the effects of war. Kosarewska’s journey over the past three days has directed my attention to various states of instability—personal, cultural and national—and I am reminded that we must all take responsibility for the consequences of manufacturing borders across all three.

PREACH R SUN, For Whites Only

This notion is echoed in PREACH R SUN’s performance epic, For Whites Only, which makes explicit the incredibly personal effects of racism accrued when crossing borders and experienced via cultural artefacts. From the moment he crossed from the USA to enter the EU the artist donned an orange boiler suit with the work’s title printed on the back. Once in Venice he was manacled to a cinder block which constantly accompanied him until his performance on the sixth night of the festival. Evoking a black evangelical preacher, he challenged and harangued the audience, repeating, “White Guilt, Black Shame.”

Welcoming us to the “auction block,” PREACH R SUN painted his dark skin to an extreme black, asking us if he was beautiful. As he cried out to Jesus for salvation, we watched with him cut-up porn movies eroticising black males in submissive roles to white males. Tensions rose notably when a woman in the audience intervened by taking hold of the staple gun the artist was using to affix fake money to his body. He responded by exclaiming that the work was real and not a performance and that no intervention could save him.

At the work’s penultimate point, working with images of a crucified and sacrificial black man, he implored us to acknowledge his humanity by repeating the words: “I am a man!” At first defiant, this repetition moved from anger to plain statement and concluded in a heartrending supplication. At the end, a visibly emotional PREACH R SUN deftly shifted the mood, asking who would share his burden. One by one, audience members passed the cinder block out of the space, down the stairs and into the courtyard, where it was smashed. A symbolic action heavily charged with the intensity of the last 90 minutes, it served as a potent reminder of how we must take steps to change the ways we unconsciously reinforce privilege and racism.

Over 50 artists performed across the eight days of Performance Art Week. It is impossible to convey the high calibre, dedication, depth of inquiry and generosity of each. There is more I would like to write about: the panels, the exhibition rooms; the late night artist dinners; but for now, know that we laughed, we cried, we squirmed and we were entranced. But most of all we celebrated a brilliant and diverse international community.

The Venice International Performance Art Week and VestAndPage publish limited edition post-event hard cover catalogues documenting the exhibition and live performances, with essays on performance art-related issues by international scholars. 2012 and 2014 editions are now available. They include documentation of performances by Australian artists Jill Orr, Barbara Campbell, Sarah-Jane Norman and Julie Vulcan.

Julie Vulcan is a Sydney-based artist and writer best known for her durational performance works (Squidsolo, RIMA; Drift). In 2014 she performed at the Venice International Performance Art Week and attended the 2016 iteration as a writer and respondent with the support of the Australia Council for the Arts.

Interactive musical composition and performance have come to epitomise human interaction and social evolution generally. Lloyd Cole’s Identity vs Noise: 1Dn extends an interest in electronic music that he has pursued following his success with the band Lloyd Cole and the Commotions in the 1980s. The work builds on his earlier album 1D: Electronics 2012-2014, the superscript ‘n’ added to indicate an infinite number of possible sonic variations that can be generated within the new work.

Cole discussed in depth the origins and mechanics of Identity vs Noise: 1Dn with a fascinated audience at the work’s launch at Nexus Arts in Adelaide. His specially designed equipment comprises a modular synthesiser that generates sequences of sounds to form pieces of music, heard through a pair of loudspeakers and transmitted to three other galleries—in Dublin, Tokyo and Helsinki—via a video screen showing a live feed from the Nexus gallery. The sonic raw material, or the ‘identity’ to which the work’s title refers, resembles the sound of an acoustic guitar or electronic keyboard.

Adjacent to the synthesiser is a foot switch labelled “Press” that invites viewers to participate with is a corresponding switch in each of the other three galleries. Pressing it can cause subtle or significant changes to the sound—perhaps a shift of key, of timbre or even from consonance to dissonance. Such interventions constitute the ‘noise.’ If audience members in all four galleries happen to press their switches simultaneously, they will trigger a significant change in sound. If no-one in any of the galleries presses a switch, the sound will still evolve by itself as the synthesiser responds to the sounds it has itself generated—noise is inherent in the compositional design. But while we can influence the sound, we can’t control it and can’t predict what changes will be induced by pressing the switches.

Cole’s synthesiser is capable of a greater range of sound shifts than, for example, a Mini-Moog, and the equipment overall is very attractively presented, establishing a persuasive audio-visual aesthetic in its art gallery setting. This work adds to the tradition of musical composition and performance using synthesisers and Cole pointedly states that he eschews the use of computers to make music.

Lloyd Cole was commissioned to produce Identity vs Noise: 1Dn by the Hawke EU Centre for Mobilities, Migrations and Cultural Transformations, a department of the University of South Australia that focuses on the politics and culture of the European Union. The Hawke EU Centre’s website indicates that the Centre “examines migration, asylum and protection issues in an environment where war and conflict, climate events, and global economics are acting as ever-present catalysts for large-scale movements of people.” The intention in commissioning this work was to explore “the interplay of identity and difference.” The interactive, distributed nature of the work is thus a metaphor for human interaction across the globe, interaction that is uncoordinated and whose effects are unpredictable—sometimes harmonious, occasionally chaotic and always evolving.

In his opening remarks, Cole indicated that once he has released a song it becomes, in effect, public property. This principle is extended in Identity vs Noise: 1Dn as viewers partly ‘take over’ the compositional process, and we might see this also as a metaphor for the process of public interaction, where a concept or principle expands and evolves as it circulates, its origins lost. Lloyd Cole and the Hawke EU Centre provide important insights into music, electronic composition, performance and the nature of human interactivity. It’s to be hoped that viewers in all four galleries, rather than seeing this work as a musical novelty, will appreciate how, in experiencing it, their interaction with the world shapes the world itself.

Lloyd Cole, Identity vs Noise: 1Dn, Installation hosted by the Hawke EU Centre for Mobilities, Migrations and Cultural Transformations at the University of South Australia.

Nexus Arts, Adelaide, transmitted to TAV Gallery, Tokyo; Trinity Long Room Hub, Dublin; and the Museum of Finnish Architecture, Helsinki; 25 Jan-3 Feb

Two works encountered in the first week of the 2017 Sydney Festival, one effecting sensory deprivation in its audience, the other demonstrating causality itself through the dancing body, provoke the question: how does live performance touch us?

Michelle Stevens, Heather Lawson, Imagined Touch

“Will I be all alone?” Michelle Stevens had wondered when, some years before, she began to lose her hearing. She was already blind, but she had a constant companion—the solace of the piano. And then she found herself sitting next to Heather Lawson, who is deafblind, and a dialogue and a friendship began.

In a survey prior to attending Imagined Touch (a good preparation for some new rules of engagement) I ticked the box that said: “I use my eyes to see and my ears to listen.” Part-way into the performance, donning the goggles and headphones supplied and guided by unseen hands from my seat, I too wondered if I would be “all alone.” I am a stranger in a strange land, stranded in empty space, the usual primacy of my visual and aural senses upended.
Knowing there would be sensory deprivation, I was expecting complete darkness and silence. Instead, a milky diffusion of light and shadow and a barely audible sound score of haunting keys and electronica, later merged with Stevens’ live piano, allowed an otherworldly immersion, a heightened sensory embrace in this work’s generous installation. I was invited to dance, to change speed and levels, to walk alongside another or to simply be with myself.

As in the reality of those who are deafblind, we the audience are thrown upon a reliance on smell and touch, on our innate sense of balance and geo-location. It is a rare experience in theatre or live art to be so directly invited into a semblance of another person’s life experience. Here, with the elevation of my own haptic sense, I notice how clumsy many of us are with our sense of touch. Although it is arguably our first, most pervasive and ever-present sense, touch is often in the shadow of our ‘normal’ navigation through a world saturated in optical and aural information.

But I’ve skipped ahead. Imagined Touch opens on a bare stage with two performers and two chairs. Red velvet curtains lend a sumptuous air of cabaret, a vaudevillian simplicity that complements the warmth of Lawson and Stevens’ presence and their direct welcoming address to the audience. They set a playful tone, checking us out, “looking for a hot guy” among us. But as both are deafblind, and only Stevens speaks, they occasionally need assistance. Their interpreters appear instantly as needed (and just as quickly fade into the background).

What follows is a breathtaking sequence that could be a multilingual summit at the UN. Performers and interpreters communicate in a mixture of Auslan English, a tactile version of signing where two speakers touch hands, and a newly developed mode that involves drawing on each other’s backs (reminiscent for me of a school yard game). The rapid-fire exchange is confounding, funny and beautifully choreographed.

For Heather Lawson, already deaf, losing her sight was like a “dimmer switch” slowly turning the light level lower. She loves to dance, to dive, to feel the force and compression of air on her body. My impression is that air and vibration can be, for her, like light, like melody, poetry, composition. Towards the end of the work, after she had danced, liberated in the space while Michelle Stevens played piano, her thoughts are projected onscreen: “It’s about being here…I’m here. You’re all over there.” Except for me the separation between us all had diminished in a gut-wrenching illumination of our difference and connection, a testament to the work of a truly exceptional collaboration under the direction of Jodee Mundy.

Dancenorth, Spectra

Dancenorth is a well-regarded regional company with a 30-year history. Currently they have a small troupe of fine dancers and Artistic Directors Kyle Page and Amber Haines have reputedly shown both performance and choreographic brilliance in pursuit of their interest in causality and other mysteries of human existence.

I gather from the program note that Spectra is a Buddhist-influenced study in cause and effect, the endless chain of action and reaction. A rope flicks, the dancer moves; one dancer touches, the other responds. That sort of thing. Fair enough. The dancers are skilled. I have hope, patience and some expectation.

However, some way in, I grow dissatisfied at the number of times there is a set-up, an entry or movement phrase that suggests a deeper development (or causality) to follow. The ideas ebb away or are abandoned too soon. To give an example: the dancers join arms and transfer a wave of movement back and forth, then lift their conjoined limbs above their heads to resemble something like the buttress roots of a giant fig tree. Ah! I wonder where they will take this striking organic formation. But it dissipates, rather than manifesting the potential energy of the image. Likewise, later in the work, Japanese dancer Kie Teranishi appears upstage, arms extended, as though electrified in a shaft of white light. The other dancers form a huddled horseshoe at her feet while she stands charged and still and then shudders as though struck by lightning. This heightened Butoh-esque moment, redolent of an operatic tragedy, held a promise for a strong trajectory or energetic arc. I tried to make sense of where this moment had originated and how it related to what came after, but was at a loss as it dissolved without any satisfying denouement into yet another sequence of swirling hybridised group choreography.

Perhaps I missed something pivotal that held the key to this collection of sequences? All this left me with a feeling of having watched a series of disconnected episodes and solos held together by the strength of Niklas Pajanti’s lighting, Tatsuo Miyajima’s spare installation (which includes a suspended multiverse of light bulbs) and the continuity and nuance of Jiro Matsumoto’s live sound environment.

Unlike Australia in the 80s—when we were first exposed to the strange intensity of Butoh with performances by Kazuo Ohno, Sankai Juku and Body Weather performer Tess de Quincey—these days artists, choreographers and companies looking for new influences, new approaches to the body and movement, have far easier access to cross-cultural collaboration. But sometimes the resulting explorations, like this one, where contact improvisation meets hip hop meets Butoh meets breakdance meets something like Mark Morris’ endless curvings, can become a stylistic soup where the potency of each distinct form becomes bland; where compulsion and necessity (be it conceptual or physiological) are sacrificed for a product diluted for public consumption without achieving any deeper interrogation..

I have no doubt that Page, Haines and Dancenorth will continue to make compelling work, in this case bringing together a melange of styles and influences with a hint of drama, if lacking an empathic entry point. The parts of Spectra remain greater than their sum.

Sydney Festival 2017: Imagined Touch, artistic director, creative producer Jodee Mundy, performers, collaborators Heather Lawson, Michelle Stevens, performers, interpreters Mark Sandon, Marc Ethan, Georgia Knight, David Pidd, Dennis Witcombe, composition, sound design Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey, set, lighting, visual design Jenny Hector; Carriageworks, Sydney, 9-14 Jan; Spectra, direction, choreography Kyle Page and Amber Haines; performers Dancenorth company and guests from Japan’s Batik dance collective, set design Tatsuo Miyajima, live music Jiro Matsumoto, lighting designer Niklas Pajanti; Seymour Centre, Sydney, 11-15 Jan

The internet is where innocence goes to die and you can come too, zin, PACT Centre for Emerging Artists

So much art today is made of the internet. Richard Prince recycles Instagram shots. Michael Manning uses Microsoft Paint to make work in a Windows 95 aesthetic. Lorna Mills puts together outdoor installations of animated gifs. But how do you make a live art show about the process of surfing the net?

Using a Facebook group chat as the structure for engaging audiences and presenting the work, it seems. The internet is where innocence goes to die and you can come too is the newest work by performance art duo zin, and it does just that, drawing audiences over the course of an hour down a series of Internet black-holes. Artists Roslyn Helper and Harriet Gillies sit at two tables onstage, the contents of their laptop screens projected behind them. After inviting the audience into a group chat, the artists ask a series of questions and the answers become the show’s substance: what song should we play next? Cher’s “Believe”? Who wants pizza? Who’s vegetarian; garlic bread, too? From the big screens to our iPhones, the group chat explodes. One participant is Tindering as the show goes on and posts screenshots of chats with prospective dates. Cher photos fly around everywhere.

The next batch of questions provide fuel for a trail of Google searches. Who’s your favourite internet celebrity? What’s your favourite place on the internet? Eventually, the trail leads Gillies to enquire about buying a gun and Helper to look up and comment in Spanish on Natalie Portman porn. Meanwhile, the pizza order provides an arc for the show to follow: on the big screen, we intermittently see the progress of Domino’s GPS-enabled order tracker. The show ends with a bewildered delivery guy called Sampath Kumar bringing our pizzas to the front of the theatre to great applause, and Helper and Gillies taking a big theatre-wide selfie with the audience, promptly posted to the FB chat.

The internet is where innocence goes to die and you can come too, zin, PACT Centre for Emerging Artists

Initially developed by Kaldor Public Art Projects during the duo’s 2015 residency with performance artist Marina Abramovic, the show has the aesthetics of any internet artwork you can think of (like the kitsch slideshows of Jennifer Chan), but the sensibility of pop art: half-ironic, half-celebratory and coming from a place of immersion in mass culture.

What was the task of the work, what was it doing? I see zin’s latest work as part of that fusion of live art and theatre—as a semi-scripted performative project that creates a set of rules and a framework for facilitating audience involvement, propelled by the fusion of Gillies’ writing background and Helper’s in performance. It has things that you usually expect from a theatre show—a script, a structure with a beginning, a middle and an end, and seats facing a stage in a black box environment. In that sense, this work functions not so much as the artists describe it—taking “a common social structure, or form of activity or action, that we engage in every day, and heighten[ing] or subvert[ing] it in some way, to make the audience think of it in a different way”—but more as an exploration of its own hybridity: a way of working with audiences in which the act of facilitating participation is more important than the content generated.

The internet is where innocence goes to die and you can come too, zin, PACT Centre for Emerging Artists

The show didn’t reveal anything new of the digital deep, rather it reinforced what most of us probably know instinctively: that the net is a pretty weird place, that a Google search can unearth most things, but not all exist IRL (we found out that neither “Joe Biden xxx”or “Bunnings fetish” are a thing), that the net made cats famous, that it is changing our sense of humour and that it’s developing a particular brand of visual media literacy and way of speaking that is evident in the gifs and memes and comments you see everyday. People have become strange combos of smart, funny, silly, low-brow, cheesy and hyperverbal because of the net. That sensibility was all over the quick answers and associations made by the audience in the group chat.

It wasn’t a Deep Thoughts show but a fun one, designed for LOLs and structured by a social-media messenger app. Eating trashy pizza and soaking in that thick pepperoni smell in a theatre was a neat thing to do, as was looking around and seeing people’s smiles lit up by their phones and realising that that was okay and necessary for the work to function. In an accessible, simple format, zin have come up with another iteration of the net’s power as an engine of visual culture, of the ways it is reforming media literacy, the way art is produced and the small spaces for live performance in the smartphones in our pockets.

zin, The internet is where innocence goes to die and you can come too, PACT Theatre, Sydney, 11–14 Jan

Contemporary dance festivals are proliferating, attracting audiences with their sense of occasion, supporting local dance scenes and programming national and international dancemakers and companies. Salamanca Moves in Hobart, MoveMe in Perth, Dance Massive in Melbourne and now, in Brisbane, Supercell Dance Festival, co-founded by Kate Usher and Glyn Roberts. Sydney? Don’t ask. I spoke by phone with Roberts about the festival’s origins, its roots in Brisbane’s performance culture and Supercell’s overseas guests.

Tell me a bit about the nature of the collaboration between you and Kate Usher, but first tell me a bit about Kate and how you met.

Kate was originally working as a producer for Queensland Performing Arts Centre—about six years all up. During that time, she and I knew each other very vaguely. Then we both attended the Atelier for Young Festival Managers run by the European Festival Association held in Gwangju in Korea.

August-September of 2015. Of the four Australians at the event, there were three producers from Brisbane. Kate and I met there but we didn’t really talk about doing a festival until we returned home. We were highly stimulated by being in Korea and excited especially about what might be the future of festivals and how impactful a festival can be when it’s even on a relatively small scale. We were there for the opening of the Asian Cultural Centre, a vast complex in the middle of Gwangju. It’s the size of, I don’t know, 10 city blocks, most of it underground, and they were having the opening festival with all the big names on the festival circuit—you know, Romeo Castellucci etc. It struck us that there was an international festival hierarchy and when you have the money these are the people you have to book to give your festival credence. We started to refer to these people, and then ourselves, as the “festival mafia.”

Separately, we were interested in what artform Brisbane might get behind and support. I work in theatre but I’m interested in a whole lot of different artforms and Kate has a background in contemporary dance—a Dance Major at QUT—but was working across many kinds of art in her job at QPAC. We thought, there’s an interesting little dance scene in Brisbane and also three small-to-medium contemporary dance companies in Queensland—one in Brisbane (Expressions Dance Company), one on the Gold Coast (The Farm) and one in Townsville (Dancenorth). We thought that was interesting in itself. No other state has this spread of relatively large dance companies producing quality work across the state. So we thought of putting on an annual event that traversed Brisbane and South-East Queensland to some degree and brought all of that together. Initially we thought, well, Brisbane is a town that has always been interested in movement and concepts…

Liu Qing Yu & He Min, Point One (Excerpt), Guangdong Modern Dance Company (China), SUPERCELL

Yes, you also have Suzuki companies like ozfrank and Zen Zen Zo and physical theatre companies like Circa and Cassus, and a dance course at QUT.

That’s right. All these disparate things come from different places and I’ll never truly understand why this town loves Butoh so much, but it does. It goes back many years. Anyway, we thought dance could be something for Brisbane to get behind.

For a small festival, there’s a lot happening in your program. There are some works RealTime has covered at Next Wave and OzAsia. Let’s talk first about some of the overseas works. How did the Chinese connection happen?

At APAM I met Karen Cheung, the Artistic Director of both the Beijing and Guangdong Dance Festivals. She was very upfront. She said, “Well, you’ve got a festival going, can I bring a collection of works from Southern China to you?” And we thought that would be fantastic. And she’s stuck by her word and she’s done it! Hers is a very specific cultural export need to get works out from the Pan-Pearl River Delta through a supporting Delta Moves http://www.gdfestival.cn/en/delta-moves/ project. There’s a large very classical, almost contemporary ballet work from the Guangdong Modern Dance Company which has had a longstanding collaboration with Brisbane’s Expressions dance company.

And then there are some interesting works out of Macau—Stella & Artists and Max Dance Hall. They’re much smaller works, much more experimental and almost sketch-like. They express a really interesting sensibility and sense of humour, quite weird and whacky and they sit beside the very serene and beautiful piece by Guangdong. While the companies are based in Guangdong and Macau, the dance artists are from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Guangzhou and Malaysia and the Philippines as well. So it’s fantastic that we have a delegation coming to show their wares in Brisbane.

From the other side of the world you have from Switzerland (To) Come and See. How did this work appear on your radar?

This comes back to Korea. Simone Truong was at the same event in Korea with us. She’s the AD of TanzPlan Ost, a festival that spreads all over the German-speaking half of Switzerland out of Zurich. It puts on amazing, highly complex contemporary dance works for a couple of weeks every year in small villages on the tops of mountains. Simone’s worked extensively with artists like Jérôme Bel. (To) Come and See has been created by Simone with four other female performers—Swiss, French, Greek and Israeli—and they all work out of Geneva and Zurich. This piece plugs into our desire with this festival to represent the broadest church of contemporary dance across the world, not focusing on any one city or particular style. This work is highly experimental, much more about performance and place and quietness. It’s also very much about identity and femininity.

Among the Australian works, you have Sarah Aiken and Rebecca Jensen’s Underworld, which was very well received at Dance Massive and at Next Wave. Tell me about Depthless, a new work by The Farm with dancer Kate Harman and musician Ben Ely.

That one is going to be fantastic. I saw a development showing of it the other day at JWC. It truly does have that great rock ‘n roll dance theatre that Gavin Webber and Grayson Millwood do so well. It has a single dancer (Kate Harman) responding to the ‘noise’ that Ben Ely puts out on a multitude of instruments. Instead of him playing music and Kate dancing to it in her own world they’re responding to one another and it’s almost become a dance between the two different forms—perhaps even romantic. I don’t know where it might go to next. It’s great to see one of Australia’s legendary musicians rocking out to one of Australia’s best contemporary dancers. It’ll be a really amazing way to finish the festival. And very Brisbane, with a bit of Regurgitator!

You also have an interesting film work in Interprète’s Inappropriate Behaviour.

That one was very simple. Australian dancer, photographer and filmmaker Sonia York-Pryce emailed us asking, “Would you be interested in showing my work that explores dancing and dancers who are getting older?” No-one else had approached us with film work and we hadn’t considered it because we weren’t sure of the capacity of the venue to show it. But it became more apparent that we could. So that one was a lovely bolt out of the blue and we thought, why the hell not? It should be great.

The festival has a connection with the Gold Coast—is that through The Farm?

Totally through The Farm. How lucky is the Gold Coast to have Gavin Webber and Grayson Millwood set up shop down there and create Gold Coast’s first professional performance company? They’re amazing guys with such pedigrees with the works they’ve made and the companies they’ve worked with. We couldn’t put on this festival without them. That’s also why they’ve created the Bare Bones workshop. Before the festival starts, there’ll be a three-day dance workshop event at The Farm studios on the Gold Coast. It will involve artists from the collective but also Simone Truong and her ensemble will come early from Switzerland to take part. They’ll be creating and developing work and sharing skills down on beautiful Miami Beach. Once that’s finished, the participants will decamp, come to Brisbane and start the festival proper.

The one work I forgot to ask you about was Bridget Fiske’s Inner Terra.

We were really interested in Bridget and Joseph Lau. They’re a couple who had come through QUT Dance and gone on to great things. They’re based in Manchester, artists in residence with University of Salford and work a lot with Dance Manchester. Bridget has also been doing movement choreography on Belarus Free Theater https://www.belarusfreetheatre.com/. We wanted these guys back in Brisbane—a town they hadn’t brought any work to for a very long time—to open the festival. We’ve given them free rein to put on some of their best works and show a new one created with local emerging dancers. We’re desperate to see what Bridget has been doing and how it can inspire more makers in Brisbane to go out into the world.

Do you think there’s a substantial audience for dance in Brisbane?

I think we’ll attract the dance scene audience and those people who love Expressions and The Farm and Dancenorth when they come to town, and love contemporary dance in the Brisbane Festival. I think one’s first festival has to be for the industry. You have to convince those who are closest to the artform that this is for them, that it belongs to them. And then I think as we move to 2018, we’re going to see a more diverse audience come out, once the niche is extraordinarily passionate about it. It’s an interesting process to go through, mapping that strategic expansion, talking to funders who basically want a festival as if it’s been running for a decade. And you say, “Well, you have to start at an intimate level that will be talked about in nostalgic tones for years to come and then move outwards from there.”

After working with Melbourne’s MKA Theatre, as Creative Producer with Brisbane’s La Boite and as co-founder of Supercell Dance Festival, Glyn Roberts has recently been appointed Festival Director of Victoria’s Castlemaine State Festival. He tells RealTime he’ll move to Castlemaine but will assist Kate Usher and remain on the Supercell Board.

In Cat Jones’ Scent of Sydney people speak about the smells they associate with Sydney and what they say about the city. Visitors to Carriageworks listen on headphones to recordings of the speakers and sniff the artist’s responsive olfactory concoctions. Smell is the most underrated of our senses, long demoted to the status of an evolutionary leftover despite the enormous amount of perfuming, deodorising and sanitising we invest in. Science increasingly tells us that smell can determine mating and social behaviour, even if it’s less of a determinant than for our earlier selves. Freud, and others, thought that when we became bipedal we lost direct oral and olfactory contact with our aromatically potent ‘nether regions’ and hence the power of smell was reduced as other sensory signalling gained dominance. It’s good to see smell making a comeback whether in the savouring of food and wine or, here, art.

Having grown up in dry oven-heat Adelaide, I’ve found humid Sydney summers to be sub-tropical fecund, making for a smelly city, ideal for investigation. Cat Jones’ contemplative Scent of Sydney yields personal associations prompted by the recorded reflections of 10 citizens pondering themes like Competition and Extravagance. Sitting around five circular tables (each labelled with the names, aromas recalled and interests of two speakers), we listen on earphones and sniff at related odour-laden ceramic bowls, joining fellow sniffers in a subtly and comfortably staged olfactory celebration. At the room’s centre is a large circular carpet, comfortable chairs and “live art” consultants in aprons and with clipboards, ready to answer questions and take aromatic queries to Jones. Low lighting, soft grey woodwork and materials reduce distraction, enabling close listening and smelling. It’s a pleasure to observe the patience and attentiveness of listeners, the pockets of quiet conversation and individuals browsing a row of computer screens that reveal the responses of visitors and commentators.

Over two visits I listened to most of the recordings. A few focus incisively on a number of smells and their significances, for some one aroma triggers a huge wave of recollection, for a few it seems to play a minimal role—either that or, as for many of us, it’s difficult to talk about smell with any definition. A favorite of mine was the account by Michael Darcy (a specialist on social housing policy and the connections between social disadvantage and place) itemised under Competition, of how the aromas of industries once mapped the city—hops, biscuits, industry, coffee grounds, the abbatoir—but no longer. His account centres on the brewery once located on Sydney’s Broadway—now a shopping centre and apartments. He recalls hops being cooked, “almost burning the nostrils, but rich and chocolatey.” Beer was made and consumed by a then well-paid working class, its production coming about as close as you could get to Marx’s notion of “unalienated labour” under capitalism, says Darcy. That class, its industries and their aromas have been displaced and scattered. There’s a certain beeriness to the aroma in the cup and, I suspect, other smells my nose is not fine-tuned enough to name.

For filmmaker and feminist Pat Fiske, a 1970s builder’s labourer, it’s wet concrete that triggers powerful recollections of a changing Sydney, of emergent feminism, of working on building sites and beginning to make the documentaries that would shape her activist career. To this day, she says, when walking past a site she immediately knows how long ago the concrete—”a musty, dusty, heavy smell”—had been poured. I acutely recognise the smell of damp concrete in the ceramic bowl from childhood recall of new houses springing up around ours. Writer Anne Summers recalls the aroma of brown rice being cooked in the 70s to feed women in refuges—established against the odds by activists in “a totally corrupt Sydney” dominated by developers. Also lingering are the smells of mops and balloons, of cleaning and celebration. There’s little to celebrate now, says Summers, when the NSW Liberal Government has reduced the number of refuges and rationalised their management at the height of the challenge to domestic violence. Leaves a nasty smell.

Jones’ rendition of the smell of “fireworks, sweating bodies and a whiff of amyl nitrate,” the odours that accompany photographer William Yang’s contribution—about the 80s and 90s, AIDS and Mardi Gras—is pungent. Yang doesn’t detail the characters of the aromas. Other speakers are more specific. Writer Elizabeth Farrelly, a specialist on architecture and urbanism, delights in “a bushfire morning,” the smell of smoke leaking into the city, a reminder of where the Australian magic is, in the bush, she says, but the aroma can also be alarming . She ambles her way to her topic, Extravagance, arriving with a fascinating example that sidesteps the familiar examples on Sydney indulgence: solemn mass in a High Anglican Church in Redfern, its frankincense—”earthy, magical”—supplanting the stink of vomit outside and inducing a sense of “pagan ancientness” and transcendence that is “almost therapy.” Storyteller and documentarian Patrick Abboud identifies himself culturally in terms of food aromas elemental to the ingredients of Lebanese cuisine—thyme, olive oil, oregano, marjoram, caraway, sumac, sesame and bread—but juxtaposes these with the smell of “a fresh-washed jumper,” belonging to a fellow adolescent he was deeply attracted to. He comes to learn that in coming out to his parents about being gay that his struggle is not, however, binary, and that shame and anger are not necessary outcomes.

For Auntie Fran Bodkin, a descendant of the D’harawal people of the Bidiagal people, educator of Dharawal knowledge and holder of a Bachelor of Arts and Sciences (including Environmental Sciences), the scents of boronia and native frangipani—”my native plant”—trigger memories as well as concerns. An uncle told her, “The Earth will live forever, but we’ve go to help it. The Earth is our mother.” The senses also affirm knowledge, she says, that is at once inherited and scientific—for example, “bellbirds tell us which land is under pressure.” The connection between sensory alertness and environmental responsibility is powerfully made and resonant with Professor William Gladstone’s ecological sensitivity associated with briny air, rotting algae and the power of electrical storms.

Listening to the work’s quite long recordings, I wondered a number of times when mention of the particular smell or smells key to a speaker’s thoughts about Sydney would actually manifest. Sometimes that mention seemed incidental or, even when significant, briskly passed over. At other times the connection was incisive and worth the wait. Either way, whether for an iteration of this work or a new one, greater focus and economy in recording and editing would be welcome. I was also uncertain at times about precisely what I was smelling, despite the tabletop cues; though I think I fared better on my second visit.

Scents of Sydney, alongside Imagined Touch and The Encounter, is part of a wave of works emerging over the last decade or so that engage audiences either by limiting or intensifying sensory impact, usually in order to deal with a subject, here the character of Sydney, in a new way while simultaneously expanding our sensory responsiveness, or, as in Imagined Touch, making sensation (or its loss) the subject. Jones and her collaborators have created a fascinatingly distinctive work, one with a quiet sense of ceremony, olfactory stimulation and insights into the intricate entwinings of sense, memory, thought, feeling and place—emotional, social, political and environmental. Engrossing and altogether memorable.

Sydney Festival 2017: Scent of Sydney, artist Cat Jones, speakers Patrick Abboud, Auntie Fran Bodkin, Dr Michael Darcy, Elizabeth Farrelly, Pat Fiske, Professor William Gladstone, Sarah Houbolt, Lyall Munro Jnr, Anne Summers, William Yang, live artists Rebecca Conroy, Sumugan Sivanesan, Nick Atkins, Maria White, exhibition design Pip Runciman, lighting design Neil Simpson, ceramics Naomi Taplin; Carriageworks, Sydney, 7-29 Jan

Cry Jailolo

Eko Supriyanto’s internationally travelled Cry Jailolo featured in the Darwin Festival and Adelaide’s OzAsia in 2016, in this year’s Sydney Festival and will appear shortly in Brisbane’s new Supercell Dance Festival and Melbourne’s Asia TOPA, a three-month celebration of Asian and South-East Asian performing arts. Also in the Sydney Festival was the premiere of Balabala, a new work from Supriyanto’s EkosDance Company.

Cry Jailolo features seven young male dancers (untrained until they worked with Supriyanto) from the remote community of Jailolo on the Indonesian island of Halmahera in the northern Maluku Islands (Moluccas). Supriyanto has created a contemporary dance work for them “inspired by the Legu Salai dance from the Sahu Tribe and Soya-Soya dance from North Maluku,” (EkosDance Company website), as well as traditional Indonesian martial arts. He aimed to empower young men living on an island which is fast losing its fishing industry to coral reef degradation. Hence the title, a call demanding our attention. Cry Jailolo will be travelling in our region and beyond for many months to come this year.

As he explained in an interview, Supriyanto saw in the local dance the swirling movement of schools of fish and the way that individuals separate from and rejoin a school. The martial arts dimension, the work’s other polarity, indicates assertiveness, confidence and, Supriyanto told me when we met in Sydney, “preparedness.” He’d found in Jailolo, he said, a spirit of “get up and go” not so evident in, say, Jakarta.

In near darkness and wearing only traditional knee-length pants, a solo dancer bounces lightly on his right foot and on his left too, but with the foot pointing upwards, barely anchoring him at the heel. His arms hang loose. The persistence of the rhythm and the complexity of this apparently casual foundational movement suggest strength and a great capacity for endurance—and this opening passage is long. The left arm is then raised and suspended defensively across the chest while the right rotates, resolving into a thrusting clenched fist, body tilted forward. This and like shapes will recur throughout, to Setyawan Jayantoro’s haunting percussive score, as the dancer is joined by others, forming a cogent mass that travels as with one mind and body about the stage with seductive fluidity, arms twirling.

Within the darkness and deep red ambience of Iskander K Loedin’s lighting-driven stage design, the group breaks into units, reforms and in one striking passage creates a circle within which another revolves counter-clockwise. Dancers appear to weave from one to another—the precision and subtlety is entrancing. Now and then an individual will glide speedily away from the cohort, still facing us like his comrades, only to return. There are also moments of storm-like turbulence and others of fraught cohesion.

The martial character of the dancing is further enhanced by a uniform stance in which each dancer raises one knee, holding arms wide with hand and finger movements finely articulated to evoke traditional dance. This is again felt in a sinuous solo with arm-led spinning and a rocking, wide courtly stance. After a march-like passage and sudden running the performers disappear into upstage darkness and silence before remerging defiantly with a Haka-like challenge, arms raised high and wide and then with fists hammering repeatedly into palms. All fall and rise and a solo dancer gracefully completes the work’s assertion and celebration of community, of the individual and oneness with nature.

Balabala

This new work for five young women from the same region is clearly kin to Cry Jailolo if with a greater martial arts emphasis and touches of traditional female dance in foot and hand shaping and the angling of the body. Eko writes that the work’s “slow, rhythmic movement patterns create an image of strength, not in protest nor opposition but through the carving of space. Space for the individual amid the noise of duties. A space of potential, of creation—held by the women of remote regions. Hierarchies of culture and gender give way to the strength of these young women.” The work is “founded on the Pencat Silat [Indonesian martial arts in which Supriyanto is trained. Eds] philosophy of the nine directions and the multiple roles of women in Indonesia.”

A solo performer enters in a deep blue circle of light with white at its centre, and is still. She sways gently, arms loose then lifting and falling across her body to what sounds like a folk song, sung by a woman soon joined by layered voices. The dancer’s movement accelerates, arms moving up, down and out, fists closed, legs stepping wide and drawn back in. The movement is less tightly articulated than in Cry Jailolo’s opening and is something that Westerners might suspect as belonging to a folk idiom (so too the accompanying singing). Two more performers take centrestage (the space now white and subsequently alive with shifting colour; design Iskander K Loedin), lowering their bodies at the knee and progressing with long slow strides and arms twirling in and out in soft circlings. As the recorded vocals (composer Nyak Ina Raseuki) move from delicate formal patterns to jaunty song, the initial performer executes a high stepping dance about the stage, resolving downstage into an assertive posture—body low, left foot far forward, right arm held back, left to the front, anticipating the martial arts dance to come.

To a multi-tracked slow, gliding calling of the word “Jailolo,” another dancer executes a slow, low turn, fists raised to her chest and then held wide. She initiates a lively dance, joined by the others, hands above heads, then extended, legs kicking out left and right, bodies spinning; it has the folksiness of an earlier passage and the bounce of the previous stepping dance. The five performers line up across the stage, facing forward and, to march-like drum and gong, uniformly adopt that dance pattern, over a long period, in various formations, with individuals separating out and returning, as in Cry Jailolo.

Towards the work’s end, martial shapes are assumed—arms raised, elbows out, hands on hips—triggered by a gong. The formation of a line moving defensively back and aggressively forward precedes an expressive solo. What ensues is less certain—four of the dancers raise quivering fists and all speak and call out volubly to each other. (There is no translation. Supriyanto tells me later that the women are simply speaking about everyday things. Some transparency here would be helpful.) A lone dancer holds her body low, ready to attack, lunges forward, leaps back and leans towards us again, completing Balabala and complementing the warrior strength of her peers, carving out and holding newly won space.

Balabala is a new work, less formally structured than Cry Jailolo’s highly developed, exquisite patterning, more loosely expressive and due for inevitable tightening of some of the longer passages and focusing of images as it matures. The confidence of the performers, their sense of freedom—aided by loose black costuming (Oscar Lawakata, Erika Dian) that flows with and reveals the body, rendering it heroic—and their passion, evident in the strength and poise of their martial posturing, suggest another significant work in the making.

Sydney Festival 2017: EkosDance Company, Cry Jailolo & Balabala, Carriageworks, Sydney, 7-10 Jan

Find

February 2017

BACKGROUND TO THE INTERVIEW

Restless Dance Theatre, Intimate Space

Gravity and Other Myths, Backbone

Looking another way

Paik, Sakamoto, Cunningham

Returning my experience

AIDC sessions related to this interview:

Early days

Deeper, longer

Opportunities for local filmmakers

A celebration

The Encounter

Nathan Maynard, The Season

Patricia Cornelius, SHIT

post, Ich Nibber Dibber

Indonesia-Australia: Satan Jawa

Investing in reciprocity

Indonesia-Australia: Attractor

Australia-China: Little Emperors

India-Australia: One Beautiful Thing

India: Parvathy Baul

Sharing resources

China: TAO Dance Theater

The thrill of the challenge

Jacob Boehme, Blood on the Dance Floor

La Boite, Prize Fighter

Native Earth Performing Arts, Huff

Other than electronic

IHOS, Before the Flame Goes Out

Institute

Still Life

1967: Music in the Key of Yes

Ellen Fullman Long String Instrument

Gabriel Dharmoo, Anthropologies Imaginaires

Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Rautavaara

Nicole Lizée, Sex, Lynch and Video Games

Casey Jenkins, sMother

James McAllister, (utter) Oratorio

Anna Kosarewska, Redirecting through

PREACH R SUN, For Whites Only

Michelle Stevens, Heather Lawson, Imagined Touch

Dancenorth, Spectra

Cry Jailolo

Balabala

realtime