Australian
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March 2017

Proposed site of a new cinematheque for Sydney, 107 Projects in Redfern.

Lauren longs for a promised land of cinema. An audio conversation on Radio National considers how a cinémathèque could support Sydney’s film culture. The debate is back.

Jason di Rosso spoke recently with one of the proponents of a new campaign for a Sydney cinémathèque—a specialty space for historical, experimental and other important films—this time perhaps at an artist-run gallery in Redfern. We’ve covered the push before and we’ll cover it again in coming weeks.

And for a tangentially related read about inspired spaces for watching films: Mexico’s drive-out cinemas on wheels, in Guernica Magazine.

Teju Cole

photo Chester Higgins Jnr, New York Times

Teju Cole

Photography critic Teju Cole’s most recent essay in the New York Times Magazine on what he calls “activist pictures”—archival images of immigrant Mexicans harvesting tomatoes, slaves picking cotton and Brazilian miners digging gold, all barely individualised or distinct from their mass experience—goes beyond the usual strictures of art criticism.

“A photograph can’t help taming what it shows. We are accustomed to speaking about photographs as though they were identical to their subject matter. But photographs are also pictures—organized forms on a two-dimensional surface—and they are part of the history of pictures. A picture of something terrible will always be caught between two worlds: the world of ‘something terrible,’ which might shock us or move us to a moral response, and the world of ‘a picture,’ which generates an aesthetic response. The dazzle of art and the bitterness of life are yoked to each other. There is no escape.”

Video: JFK on art and politics. Like a miracle, a new clip has surfaced on YouTube.

In an unfinished 1992 documentary on John F Kennedy, the former US President expounds his ideas on the relationship between art and society. Try to imagine the current POTUS saying:

“If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical, it is because of their sensitivity, their concern for justice…power corrupts where poetry cleanses.”

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RealTime issue #137 Feb-March 2017

Ash Keating

photo Jeremy Blincoe

Ash Keating

In 2016, Ash Keating developed a painting for choreographer Lilian Steiner’s Admission into the Everyday Sublime, a dance performance that was part of the Next Wave festival. Those who saw the performance will recall Keating’s enormous painting exuding a monumental energy not unlike that of the mysterious monolith in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

This element of emotional theatricality began a new turn in Keating’s work which will be at full force in his latest exhibition, Gravity System Response, at North Melbourne’s Meat Market. Those familiar with Keating’s public murals—the VCA, NGV and RMIT are just some of his commission sites—will recognise his distinctive style of spraying and layering paint to achieve a topography of abstracted landscapes. Keating has never shied away from acts of grandeur but the works in this exhibition suggest a maturity in his oeuvre. His paintings have evolved from the spectacular to the theatrical in their move from facade to canvas, from public space to controlled environment.

Theatrical lighting designer Matthew Adey has been working closely with Keating to develop a system for lighting the paintings to dramatic effect. Adey has said that his lighting design for Gravity System Response is a way of “suspending the canvas in negative space to draw you into it.” The audience is encouraged to perform a meditative procession past these still, monumental works and to stay for extended periods. Adey’s “tight focused lighting technique” will work hand in hand with the Meat Market setting, combining to produce a sort of agnostic chapel and bringing to the fore the energy of Keating’s canvasses.

Keating’s process involves mixing rich and sometimes luminescent paints, applied with an airless sprayer to the canvas. Between layers he sprays water onto the wet surface to create a translucent set of strata, allowing colours to interact. He expresses excitement, calm or purity with the combination of these techniques and his careful choice of colours.

Ash Keating

photo Jeremy Blincoe

Ash Keating

Entering the Meat Market, the audience encounters a number of small canvases. Then, moving through a set of black curtains, they come face to face with three versions of the earlier canvases, only now they are much larger. A triptych of sky blue, cobalt and magenta faces onto a second triptych of earthy ochres and oranges. The former elicits a frenetic energy while the latter effuses warmth and purity. Between these two triptychs and on the adjacent wall is a quadriptych of magentas, orange and pink that creates a balance between the two divergent triptychs. Each canvas measures a colossal 3.5 x 2 metres. But the scale does not feel threatening: rather, it encircles and invites the viewer in.

Having visited him in his studio numerous times during the process, I witnessed the way in which Ash Keating’s emotions peak and trough with the layering and colouring process. Simultaneously, the works themselves exude a certain energy that affects the mood in the studio. During visits, I could quickly gauge whether the artist would be calm or agitated based on the state of his canvases. He would work on a single set of paintings for weeks if not months: the end point based purely upon intuition rather than any need to work towards a strict deadline.

In many ways, the final product as theatrical exhibition mimics the audience-less performance staged in Keating’s studio in the months prior. Having moved his process away from the public eye, Keating has now employed the expertise of Matthew Adey to produce a delayed performance that expresses the emotion and drama not seen by the audience. The choice of the calm, dark environment of the Meat Market also creates a potential for catharsis that again mimics Keating’s experience during creation. In this sense, the lighting dimension of Gravity System Response helps reveal the emotional energy ingrained in the fabric of these paintings.

photo Jeremy Blincoe

Ash Keating, Gravity System Response, Black Arts Project, Meat Market, North Melbourne, 6-13 April

RealTime issue #137 Feb-March 2017

William Barton

photo courtesy Adelaide Festival of Arts 2017

William Barton

This year’s Adelaide Festival music program spanned a 400-year musical trajectory, encompassing one of the very earliest and greatest operas, Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (1607), Handel’s masterpiece Saul (1738), the 19th century romanticism of Schubert and Brahms, and a tiny but engaging survey of contemporary composition delivered by US ensemble Eighth Blackbird. The centrepiece of this festival’s classical music program was Adelaide pianist and author Anna Goldsworthy’s Chamber Landscapes festival-within-a-festival, juxtaposing Schubert with contemporary Australian composers.

The 2017 Adelaide Festival particularly acknowledged Australia’s Indigenous and colonial history and culture in a number of performances, notably the monumental theatrical work The Secret River and the rock concert 1967: Music in the Key of Yes. Launched at the recent Sydney Festival, it’s a showcase of selected hits by Indigenous Australian and American artists drawn from the last 50 years. In aggregate, the songs revealed the strongly political agenda that can be found in popular music. The guest appearance of William Barton, singing and playing the yidaki [the traditional Arnhem Land didjeridu] and guitar, enriched the Adelaide performance. The emotionally charged concert generated a strong sense of community between the performers and a predominantly non-Indigenous audience.

Anna Goldsworthy, curator, Chamber Landscapes, Adelaide Festival of Arts 2017

photo Tony Lewis

Anna Goldsworthy, curator, Chamber Landscapes, Adelaide Festival of Arts 2017

Chamber Landscapes

Chamber Landscapes curator Anna Goldsworthy’s immersive four-day series of concerts and panel discussions was an outstanding element of the Adelaide Festival’s music program, with Schubert as the central composer, but featuring significant contemporary Australian works. The intimate UKARIA concert hall in the Adelaide Hills is the perfect setting for such a series, its wondrous acoustics enabling the audience to hear clearly every sonic nuance. The sound seems visceral so that one almost enters a trance-like state. The Australian String Quartet’s magnificent performance of Schubert’s String Quartet in G, D887, completed shortly before his death, was superb, the magnificent sound and setting enticing the audience into Schubertian introspection.

The Chamber Landscapes program included significant new works by Indigenous composer-performers Deborah Cheetham and William Barton. Soprano Deborah Cheetham, who is one of the Stolen Generation, introduced her work “Eumeralla Prelude,” for soprano, piano and string quartet, by indicating that it constitutes the first part of a much larger work she is developing, a war requiem intended to acknowledge the lives lost through the colonisation of Australia. She acknowledged the influence of the great requiems of the Western canon, especially Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, and said that her work is dedicated to peace and is intended both to draw attention to the history and impact of colonisation and to enable participation in performance by descendants of its survivors. Performed by Cheetham herself with the ASQ and pianist Toni Lalich, “Eumeralla Prelude” is an eloquent, highly accomplished composition, magisterial in its musical ambitions and its transformative potential. Just these preliminary elements are sufficient to establish a new musical paradigm in Australia— the adaptation by an Indigenous person of a traditional Western form to the reconsideration of Australian history.

Australian String Quartet, Adelaide Festival of Arts 2017

photo Jacqui Way

Australian String Quartet, Adelaide Festival of Arts 2017

William Barton’s “Square Circles Beneath the Sand” opened with Barton entering through the auditorium and singing while the Australian String Quartet played a quietly intense introduction. Barton then sits with the quartet to play the yidaki, his dramatic entrance embodying a rapprochement between Indigenous and Western cultures. Barton’s legendary virtuosity is on display as he creates multiple voices through the instrument, evoking the spirits that continue to occupy this land, his complex and powerful composition adroitly blending the sound of the quartet and his own playing into a mesmerising sonic experience. In creating “Square Circles Beneath the Sand,” Barton adopts and extends the form established by the late Peter Sculthorpe that added the sounds of the yidaki to Western instrumentation to generate compelling, symbolically powerful music.

Barton’s and Cheetham’s works do more than reconsider Western and Indigenous musical traditions. They offer a potent vehicle for reconciliation through culture, one that acknowledges the past while looking to the future. While we appreciate their music and that of 1967: Music in the Key of Yes, we are reminded that the situation of Indigenous people generally has not been adequately addressed since 1967, and the rapprochement that is articulated today through visual art, music, dance and drama has not been fully realised outside the concert hall, theatre and gallery. Perhaps this festival will inspire its audiences to act.

Concert Italiano, Adelaide Festival of Arts 2017

photo Hanwa Group

Concert Italiano, Adelaide Festival of Arts 2017

L’Orfeo

Presented here as oratorio rather than opera, Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo is one of the earliest operas, establishing the genre and bridging late Renaissance music into the Baroque. In the absence of the theatrical staging and lavish costuming typically associated with operatic productions of L’Orfeo, the audience concentrated on the music—the marvellous voices and instruments. The story is of Orpheus’s descent into Hades in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to bring his wife Eurydice back from death. Monteverdi’s message is clear: “Worthy of eternal glory is only he who has victory over himself.” Concerto Italiano’s performance is wonderful, with a small cast of outstanding soloists performing in multiple roles and doubling as the chorus of shepherds and underworld spirits. Bass Salvo Vitale, in the role of Caronte, and soprano Anna Simboli, as both Musica and Eurydice, drew special applause from the enraptured audience. The use of period instruments, especially the early trombones and cornets, added to the delightful production. The legend of Orpheus and Eurydice attests to the seductive power of music and to the tragic consequences of overwhelming desire.

Promotional Image Eighth Blackbird

Eighth Blackbird

The contemporary component of the festival was enriched by Eighth Blackbird’s concert that emphasised approachable, accessible music, though in all cases, music that is finely wrought, often polystylistic and technically demanding of the musicians. Ted Hearne’s “By-By Huey” is a driving, percussive work with prepared piano at the heart of the sound. Bryce Dessner’s seven short pieces titled “Murder Ballades” are based in part on American folk themes and the music recalls Aaron Copland’s use of such themes. In Dessner’s “Pretty Polly”—about the murder of a young woman and the guilt of the murderer—the mournful style of the music suggests the tragic nature of the event that inspired it. Nico Muhly’s “Doublespeak” is a pulsating work with layered melodic lines, multiple musical styles and competing rhythms that fully demonstrates Eighth Blackbird’s excellent ensemble playing. The instrumentation—piano, violin, cello, flute, clarinet and bass clarinet and a vast array of percussion instruments—provides a rich sonic palette, and much of the attraction of this concert lay in the colours and textures generated by combinations of these instruments.

Young Australian composer Holly Harrison’s “Lobster Tales and Turtle Soup” was for me the most engaging piece of the evening. Harrison has already produced an extensive body of work for ensembles of various sizes and has an abiding interest in themes from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Stylistically eclectic, with abrupt shifts that evoke the surreal action, “Lobster Tales and Turtle Soup” wittily recreates Alice’s mad world, although the music is complex and resolved. In a program note, Harrison indicates that the two characters in this story, the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle, are composite animals and the music reflects their composite natures. While playing, each performer takes a turn at reciting a line from the text: “’Will you walk a little faster,’ said a whiting to a snail, ‘there’s a porpoise close behind us and he’s treading on my tail.’”

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Adelaide Festival 2017: Concerto Italiano, L’Orfeo, Adelaide Town Hall, 7 March; Eighth Blackbird, Adelaide Town Hall, 9 March; Chamber Landscapes, UKARIA Cultural Centre, 14 March; 1967: Music in the Key of Yes, Adelaide Festival Theatre, 15 March

RealTime issue #137 Feb-March 2017

The Unconscious Collective experiences Heart Colloquy

photo Remi Chauvin

The Unconscious Collective experiences Heart Colloquy

Established in 2014, The Unconscious Collective makes large-scale installation and experience-based artworks based around an informal investigation of communication that occurs outside of language or intention. The collective has, for example, created complex environments in motels and hotels for the purpose of affecting the dreams of guests by using subtle sound and light-based works designed to enhance and expand whatever experience people might have when not awake.

This is an area of investigation that might be more traditionally seen as scientific, asking questions about the nature of dreaming and whether it is a permeable state. The Unconscious Collective do use scientific information and concepts, but they also disavow clinical approaches, allowing experiences to occur rather than seeking to control them. There’s an interest in the subliminal and the haunted, and much of the group’s continuing practice has developed ways of experiencing and investigating these states.

The collective’s most recent work sidesteps the world of sleep for the awakened state, but still focuses on the natural rhythms of bodies not under conscious control. The subject under investigation is a somewhat peculiar phenomenon, known as entrainment—a complex and fluid concept that might refer to a crowd of people all tapping feet together at a rock concert, or to an activity more deeply biological. Colloquy of Hearts is concerned with a very particular articulation of this concept: if two people are able to hear one another’s hearts beating, and if they calmly listen to these beats for a length of time, their heartbeats will begin to move towards synchronisation. It’s a real and quantifiable occurrence at once eerie and rather sweet: two hearts beating as one, and not in some metaphorical sense. It really happens, if the circumstances are right and the participants are people who are able and willing to relax and listen.

That’s the idea and, rather ambitiously, it’s what the Unconscious Collective aimed to achieve in their latest work: a tranquil space where people can hear one another’s hearts beating. One of the work’s makers, David Patman, says that up to 4 heartbeats can fall into sync through the entrainment process. The journey towards realising this possibility was challenging, taking 18 months to realise. How was it done?

The answer arrived in the form of a lounge suite. Located at the University of Tasmania’s Menzies Institute for Medical Research, The Cardiophonic Lounge consists of four beautifully designed and extremely comfortable chairs and some equally pleasant footrests. Created by Michelle Boyde and Guy Paramore, the chairs are elegant beasts, each upholstered with a slight variation on the colour of either venal or arterial blood. Once you’re seated, a gently rushing score composed by Matt Warren seeps from the chair’s wings next to your ears, and after another short pause, a gentle throbbing announces the arrival of your pulse.

Matt Warren in the Cardiophonic Lounge

photo Remi Chauvin

Matt Warren in the Cardiophonic Lounge

It’s a remarkable technological achievement. You simply sit in the chair and there’s no need to strap in or wear some disconcerting headband, the furniture does it all by using a non-invasive ballistographic sensor which records the vibrations blood makes as it moves around the body. There’s one inside the chair and it becomes active as soon as anyone eases into the seat.

The real trick was to write an algorithm that converts the electrical signal into sound, and for that sound to mesh with the soundtrack as part of an overall pleasant experience. This rather intricate feat of coding was accomplished by Richie Cyngler, an electronic sound maker in his own right, but wearing more of a programmer’s hat here.

The big thing is that it doesn’t just work, but it works seamlessly. Every detail has been polished and checked; the chairs are very satisfying aesthetic objects, gorgeously constructed; the sound is elegant and transporting; and the moment when one’s heartbeat arrives is gently thrilling. The execution is masterful, but where this work really shines as successful art is that it is really about a magical human interaction. After I sat for a while, I and my companion—my mum, as it happened—experienced that moment of wonder as the audible beating of our hearts softly aligned.

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The Unconscious Collective, Colloquy of Hearts: The Cardiophonic Lounge, concept, direction David Patman, Michelle Boyde, sound artist Matt Warren, lighting artist Jason James; collaborating furniture designer Guy Paramore and multimedia artist Richie Cyngler; Menzies Institute for Medical Research, Hobart

See images and sounds from other Unconscious Collective creations including a digital confessional, a two-night road art trip to Cradle Mountain National Park, sound sculptures using the dreams of primary school children and an installation of suspended, custom knitted snooze pods, presented at Melbourne’s MPavillion this year. There’s more on the group’s website.

RealTime issue #137 Feb-March 2017

“I’m tired of being asked if I’m a man or a woman. This should never be the first question. There are other questions.” Silvia Calderoni

Transgenderism is increasingly visible in art, popular and celebrity culture, activism and everyday life. The Italian performance company Motus’ MDLSX addresses the subject via the life of one of its ensemble members, Silvia Calderoni. Director and dramaturgs (including the performer) merge incidents from childhood to early adulthood with material from Jeffrey Eugenides’ best-selling 2002 novel Middlesex, in which the central figure is a boy, Cal, raised as a girl, Calliope, by parents unaware they’d had an intersex child. Co-director Daniela Nicolò says of MDLSX, “It gives a lot of information about intersexual people, even technical information. This is, for us, important.”

Publicised as a party, MDLSX is a far from didactic work. I felt like the guest of an enigmatic host who, averse to eye-to-eye contact, DJs (The Smiths, Dresden Dolls, Vampire Weekend etc), dances furiously, obsessively self-videos and constantly changes outfits—male and female—as if I weren’t quite present but still desperately needed.

A sound system, lighting controls and video camera sit on a long table before a wide screen on which, to the left, hangs a metre-wide disk showing family videos; to the right, surtitles for the many moments when Calderoni interrupts frantic activity and soundtrack with lucid unemotional recollection, commentary and quotation. The desire to communicate is passionately felt and vigorously conveyed in free-form dance and changing guises, but otherwise laterally realised via a technological arsenal. Well into the performance, Calderoni’s face is obscured, seen only on the disk screen via video camera.

Calderoni says MDLSX is not therapeutic for the performer, but the work is clearly engineered to drive through social and ideological barriers to a cathartic climax of personal release and familial conciliation. It’s also one in which the subject of the work has apparently total control over the means with which an ambiguous state of being is conveyed to us and a search for resolution pursued.

The first video we see is of an 11-year-old Calderoni, “a little girl always mistaken for a boy,” singing badly on microphone. It’s funny but disconcerting, the first glimpse of a string of escalating pressures, anxieties and compensatory behaviours: invasion by “mother’s brutal” camera; lack—no breasts, no penis; female friends “a different species;” bra-stuffing and a faked explosion of pubic hair; a frightening visit to a clinic for assessment and possible gender reassignment; and the ultimate fear of being labelled an hermaphrodite, eunuch or “monster.” Legs wide, genitals bared, a fraught Calderoni casts a laser beam body-length, dividing an unresolved self in two.

When escape from family becomes a necessity, Calderoni (like Eugenides’ Cal) runs away and performs in a cabaret ‘freak’ show—as a glittering mermaid (Cal a hermaphrodite)—but finds adjustment to a male world and the association again with the “monstrous” complicated. But there is pleasure: video-ed in a hotel room, Calderoni revels in dressing in a svelte cowboy-style suit and hat.

Gorgeous flowers slowly open on the screen, their stamens suggesting beings at once male and female, their projections spilling out around the hitherto containing disk—”I was no longer in the mirror.” The final image, another home video but not a constricting one, is of a smiling Calderoni, boyish, hair tightly cropped, dancing casually with a reconciled father. But it’s the mature being I’ve witnessed onstage and seen in the media, swinging between male and female appearance, who more fully represents gender transcendence, if not always granted it.

“I’ve had the question all my life. Some days it is painful. Other days it’s not a problem. It is my life. I don’t want it to define me. Sometimes I dress like a man, sometimes like a woman. I don’t want a label or a classification.”

Personal pronouns are gender labels, hence “non-binary” transgender people ask for “they,” “them” and “theirs” to represent them in the singular, which can be grammatically and logically confusing. I challenged myself to write this review without recourse to “he,” “she” or “they.” It wasn’t easy. In the print version of the Sydney Morning Herald interview quoted in this review, Daniela Nicolò says that company members refer to Calderoni with feminine pronouns without causing offence, but I suspect that a context of familiarity and friendship explains that. It’s clear that our lexicon is undergoing a huge change as gender barriers are progressively broken down.

The complexity of the personal, cultural and linguistic transition is epically surveyed by Jacqueline Rose, in a mind-bending essay about inter- and transsexuality in the London Review of Books, in which the writer cites a range of terms listed for a conference on transgenderism—”non-binary, gender queer, bigender, trigender, agender, intergender, pangender, neutrois, third gender, androgyne, two-spirit, self-coined, genderfluid.” Also quoted is an observation from a psychoanalyst: “you will meet persons who could be characterised, and could recognise themselves, as one—or some—of the following: a girl and a boy, a girl in a boy, a boy who is a girl, a girl who is a boy dressed as a girl, a girl who has to be a boy to be a girl.” Binary distinctions become fraught and nouns as well as pronouns rendered unstable.

MDLSX can only convey limited information, including excerpts from audio interviews with specialists and technical content from Eugenides’ novel, which caused consternation in transgender and professional circles for its attributing Cal’s intersex status to the genetic consequences of incest—not an issue in MDLSX. For those who haven’t thought much about transgenderism nor met transgender people, MDLSX, as intended by the artists, is a trigger for learning and empathy as we watch a driven personality create a narrative that asserts and celebrates (hence the frantic partying) a state of being beyond conventional notions of male and female.

Transgenderism has long been kept secret and often subject to punishment if revealed. In MDLSX, a child’s confusion and shame, and an adolescent’s quests, revelations and determination are mapped out such that we witness a more than personal, cultural escape from ignorance and secrecy, such that Silvia Calderoni can stand naked before us, our eyes meeting.

Adelaide Festival 2017: Motus, MDLSX, performer Silvia Calderoni, directors Enrico Casagrande, Daniela Nicolò, dramaturgy Daniela Nicolò, Silvia Calderoni, sound Enrico Casagrande with Paolo Panella, Damiano Bagli, lighting design, video Alessio Spirli; AC Arts Main Theatre, Adelaide, 10-13 March

The Battle of Long Tan lasted just a few hours and yet it has, in the 50 years since it was fought, acquired the force of myth. It was Australia’s most costly engagement of the Vietnam War. For 105 men from 6th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (6RAR) and three soldiers from New Zealand’s 161 Field Battery, the afternoon of 18 August 1966 was one of bitter struggle against the odds; for others, it was a rare success that salvaged a moment of triumph—albeit at the price of 18 Australian and at least 245 Vietnamese dead—from a profoundly divisive war.

Presented by Brink Productions in association with State Theatre Company of SA and receiving its world premiere in Adelaide this month, Long Tan explores the battle’s human dimension and the effects of trauma on memory and testimony.

Combining Verity Laughton’s “semi-verbatim” script with Luke Smiles’ immersive sound design, the work is being presented alongside Malcolm McKinnon’s audio-video exhibition, Ripples of Wartime, which documents the stories of veterans, refugees, doctors and family members of those who fought. I spoke to Laughton on the phone as the production entered its fourth week of rehearsal.

Given that it happened 50 years ago, and that Australia is engaged in current conflicts worthy of debate, why did you want to write about the battle of Long Tan now?

I guess it’s partly a function of my age. I was young when the Vietnam War was a defining and polarising event of my generation and it still seems to me as if there is quite a lot of unfinished business about it. It was a war that people felt violently about. It’s clear to me from the couple of public events I’ve done about this production that it remains a very loaded subject for many people. There’s a quote from one of the people who was interviewed for the foyer exhibition that sums it up: “Everyone thought they were right and everyone suffered.” There’s the feeling that after 50 years it’s time for a reckoning. Maybe after this period of time has elapsed it’s easier for people to come back and look at the 360 degrees of it with more human eyes.

And I guess one of the things that interested me about Long Tan is that it was in the nature of a charismatic event, a constellating event that by itself was so extreme and so extraordinary that it has the potential to become a point of national myth, in the same way that Gallipoli has—like a keyhole into the culture. And so it seemed to me worthwhile, while these veterans are still alive, to look back on an event the intensity of which most of us never go near in our whole lives and that has shaped them forever.

There’s a bit of a perception that Long Tan is still kind of under-considered in the roll call of significant Australian battles. At the same time there is, as you say, a certain mythology that’s grown up around the narrative of Australians winning this ferocious battle even though they were greatly outgunned and outnumbered. How did you approach engaging with those layers of mythology?

I think that aspect of the Long Tan ‘story,’ for want of a better word, has come about because it was a very short, extremely intense battle. There were other engagements in Vietnam that went on for several days. Long Tan took, basically, the better part of an afternoon to be fought. But it was of such intensity. The Australians should have been overwhelmed. They should have been wiped out. And yet there were a whole series of small twists of fate that made a difference, like the spacing of the Australian soldiers—which made the North Vietnamese think there were more of them than there really were—and the fact that the rain came in, creating a curtain of mist and mud over the entire battleground, hampering everybody but providing a layer of cover for the Australians. [The Australians were also advantaged by air and artillery support. Eds]

Chris Drummond (r) & cast, rehearsal Long Tan, BRINK/State Theatre Company of SA

Let’s talk about the form of the work, which is described as “semi-verbatim.” I’m interested in what that means. Can you also talk about the audio-visual aspects of the work and the decision, which I assume you took with the director Chris Drummond, to create an immersive experience for the audience.

I set out to write a verbatim piece with absolutely every word coming from the interviews I did with the veterans and their families and some of the Vietnamese people too. But I think any verbatim piece will always be massaged slightly in the choosing of which bits you use, what structure you put them in and all the rest. So there’s no such thing as a seamlessly verbatim piece. If you think of David Hare’s play Stuff Happens (2004), he interpolated verbatim material with possible but imagined material. So my interest was partly in telling the story of the battle and partly in putting it in a human context, which, in my terminology, means accessing an eye view of eternity. So, for example, after I’d finished interviewing the veterans about what happened to them before and during the battle, I asked them questions like “What is a leader?”, “What is a soldier?”, “What is a battle?” Their answers gave a sort of philosophical underpinning that, in the end, I only used in two of the scenes, but is there as a kind of bedrock for the rest. I wanted to know what it was like for these particular people, in this particular time, in this particular situation. What it would feel like to be them?

The audio component was a decision that Chris made. Brink came on board at about draft three and we had a couple of workshops. For much of the period we were thinking of it in terms of something like an oratorio because we didn’t think we’d have the money to do a fully-staged version so it was going to be actors plus scripts and a strong emphasis on sound. Then, at a certain point, Chris made a leap into deciding that it was going to be an immersive sound experience using headphones. And I guess I hadn’t written it that way but because I had been keeping in mind the oratorio idea, and because I actually think that verbatim material lends itself to a kind of choral presentation—I’d been through that with Red Cross Letters [State Theatre Company of SA, 2016]—I was quite happy to go with that.

The actors are miked and the audience will have headphones with which they’ll hear the dialogue but also battles, the sounds of the jungle and military bases, and some music. There’s no voiceover in the sense of a voice telling the story—this is not a documentary. The intention, as with Red Cross Letters, is to combine the crosscurrents of many different experiences into one tightly woven whole. The audience will be asked to take their headphones off for the epilogue, where the actors, too, will be un-miked—so we go from the intensity of the immersive experience of being inside a battle, to the human one, to one of reflections immediately after the battle, which gradually become more long term and then spin out into a single moment of meta-history at the very end.

One question I often find myself asking when I approach works of art that attempt to humanise war is whether or not there’s a process or a danger of the war itself being de-politicised. What do you think? And does having a verbatim component around former Vietnamese soldiers as well kind of address that?

My take on that is that quite early on in the piece I attempt to give a quick overview of the politics behind the war. And the point of telling the stories of the human beings involved means that there is an obligation to tell the story of the so-called ‘enemy’—human beings as well. My rule of thumb was everything had to come out of the soldiers of D Company—it’s D Company that’s the protagonist, not any individual soldier—so in order to deal with the North Vietnamese side of the story, I incorporated material from my interview with a man called Terry Burstall, who has written two books about the battle of Long Tan, and who is sympathetic to the North Vietnamese point of view. And the person who has the last word in the play is a South Vietnamese villager who was also sympathetic to the North Vietnamese.

But, you see, most of the soldiers whom I talked to—and these are fairly right-wing men, they haven’t reneged on their politics—would now say that the Vietnam War was a political mistake on the part of the Australian Government. So that’s not even particularly controversial anymore, but the thing that people forget is that, at the time, in 1966, most of the Australian population was behind the commitment to Vietnam. It was only later, as the 70s rolled around, that the anti-war movement became really strong. There are all these nuances that can often get lost. I have attempted to deal with the politics of the place and the battle and the people and the time but in the context of that word again, ‘eternity.’ Human beings have been making war almost since they were apes. We’ve been attacking and dealing badly with each other for all of our biological history. This is nothing new, and I expect we’ll keep on doing it. So you have to factor in that this is what humans do. And given that this is what humans do, how can you judge it? How can you go straight to a binary of right and wrong? It’s more complex than that.

Brink Productions and State Theatre Company of SA, Long Tan, Space Theatre, 31 March-8 April. The Ripples of Wartime installation will be open for viewing 31 March-8 April before and after performances.

Gravity & Other Myths, Backbone

Self-described as “acrobatic physical theatre,” Gravity & Other Myths’ muscular, stripped-back mode of contemporary circus has become a staple of the international fringe festival circuit since the company’s formation in Adelaide in 2009. Backbone, commissioned through the Major Festivals Initiative, marks the ensemble’s first work of scale and its Adelaide Festival debut. As such, the work has a deserved celebratory air. Parsing notions of what strength means and the various ways in which it is derived and measured, Backbone is a marathon of dexterity and endurance, answering director Darcy Grant’s question, “Are we strong enough to carry it?” in the affirmative.

The work starts with something like an in-joke. The stage is strewn with bodies, standing among them a knight in a full suit of armour and brandishing the sword with which he (or she) has just, presumably, slain them. It looks like the beginning of some high-concept piece of dance-theatre, as though this is what is expected of the company now that it has reached the big league. But then the bodies slowly animate, milling around and making small talk; familiar, phatic pre-rehearsal routines. The house lights remain on as costume racks are shuffled about, a series of different-length swaypoles erected upstage. Two musicians wait patiently on a dais.

Out of the hum of activity come distinct shouts of “ready!”—a preface to the evening’s first tests of physical aptitude as performers assemble into human columns up to four bodies high. There are somersaults and backflips and particularly athletic takes on a classic breakdancing move, the worm. It all feels like a primer for audiences who are not circus-savvy—a sort of physical lexicon—but it is also a display of concept, as direct a rendering of the idea of strength as any the work will offer, as well as a necessary preface to the mode of the work, each scene building in complexity from a base that Grant has described in an interview with RealTime as “circus Theatresports.”

The surface of the playing area is gradually covered with what looks like red-coloured earth, but is in fact a synthetic, granulated material that both frames and accentuates the movement of the performers as it becomes airborne. It’s ritualistically poured out of steel buckets—which then double, upended on the heads of the performers, as visual echoes of the knight’s helmet—and produces, in combination with Geoff Cobham’s lighting design that incorporates huge reflector panels, an elemental effect, suggestive of the idea of strength that’s tied to working the land. But other, more radical representations of strength are in play too, most obviously when the female performers—sometimes dressed in boiler- and pant-suits—dominate the work’s physical and conceptual spaces. There are moments, too, when the idea of strength is problematised, shading into violence and cruelty: a running fly-kick to the chest recurs throughout the work and performers are sometimes cajoled and struck as they attempt tricky balancing acts. In one uncomfortably funny scene, the familiar theatre game of counting as a group is subverted into an exercise in withstanding physical punishment as the ‘losers’ are struck across their exposed torsos by a fast-moving rope unleashed by the ‘winners’ as they perform a synchronised handstand.

It is, however, the displays of pure circus skill that linger in the mind—the adagio lifts and throws, the human columns that, at their extremities, seem to graze the ceiling of the Playhouse stage, and, especially, the work with swaypoles that culminates in the suspension of a performer, perhaps 15 feet in the air, on a single pole. Some of the material that hews closer to a sort of representational dance theatre—such as a scene in which a cargo net full of rocks is held aloft by a slowly diminishing group of performers while the others gather around and beneath it—looks a little weak in comparison.

Darcy Grant’s fluent direction and Elliot Zoerner and Shenton Gregory’s live score—an eclectic mix of drum loops, free jazz, club beats and flourishes that evoke Satie and traditional Arabic music—provide the foundation even when individual moments fall flat. For audiences who expect contemporary circus to trade on more than displays of skill there is sufficient conceptual and image-making invention here. But undoubtedly Backbone’s greatest strength is its physical virtuosity, matured to often breathtaking effect in the ensemble’s longstanding working relationships (up to 15 years) as well as their deep craft and trust in each other’s bodies.

L-E-V, Killer Pig and OCD Love

As with Backbone, Israeli dance company L-E-V’s double bill of short works, Killer Pig and OCD Love, vibrates with an uncompromising physicality. Choreographed by Batsheva alumnus Sharon Eyal and inflected with frequent collaborator Gai Behar’s Spartan, warehouse rave-like aesthetic—all dry ice and soupy light—both works foreground the dancers’ athleticism and exactitude. Long-limbed and sharply beautiful, they look—in Odelia Arnold’s drab, form-fitting undergarments and in concert with Ori Lichtik’s techno score—like models who have wandered in off the set of some dystopian reimagining of a Robert Palmer music video.

The first work, Killer Pig, is described in the program notes as “a glimpse into the place where the group originated.” The movement, hard-edged and robotic, begins sparely, working inwards from the arms and legs, taking in the shoulders and, finally, the pelvis and the heart, indicated by a dramatic two-handed plunging gesture. Positions and jumps from classical dance are transfigured and subverted, both an acknowledgment and disavowal of the company’s roots. A self-choking gesture hints at this dichotomy. Elsewhere, the choreography evinces a leering, almost monstrous quality—arms akimbo, shoulders raised, head thrust forwards—suggestive of a sense of inexorable growth, for good or ill. After a middle section of accomplished solos, Lichtik’s swampy, bass-heavy score—replete with DJ-style flanging and filtering—cranks up, pushing Eyal’s choreography towards its signature tribalistic group work.

The second piece, OCD Love, takes as its point of departure the slam poem “OCD” by Neil Hilborn, a video of which went viral in 2013 (current number of YouTube views: 12,694,040). Its leitmotif is a ticking clock that recalls, in its unerring regularity, Hilborn’s description of OCD’s “tics” and “constantly refreshing images.” The dancers continually draw our attention to what appear to be small points of focus offstage—presumably representative of the OCD sufferer’s familiar obsession with minutiae—while the debilitating nature of the condition is embodied as the dancers clasp their hands behind their backs. Perhaps, though, this is too literal a reading of Eyal’s choreographic vocabulary, which, as the work wears on, clarifies as a response to rather than rendering of Hilborn’s poem, positing the experience of OCD as a metaphor for love—its fixating and fine-grained quality, its capacity to possess and distort. A duet by two female dancers sums it up, full of mirroring and shadowing at first, then modulating into ecstatic coordinated leaps and, finally, dissolving into enmity and estrangement as one pokes the other in the eye.

In Hebrew, “lev” is the word for heart. It is perhaps a grave irony, then, that this is exactly the quality missing from these works. Each proves wearying in its relentless virtuosity, its monotonous insistence on weirdly machine-like erotics—the sexless sexuality of the high-end catwalk repurposed as underground art party exhibitionism. There is something inward-facing about Eyal’s choreography, a narcissism that invites voyeurism but not engagement. Lichtik’s unbroken and unsubtle scores—anonymous, pounding techno in the first work, sentimental washes of synthesised strings, played live to no obvious effect, in the second—compound a sense of bludgeoning, of being performed at rather than to.

These are also works whose superstructure is largely without shape, that accrue only in terms of the physical demands placed on the dancers. As the curtain fell at a seemingly arbitrary point during Killer Pig I found myself thinking of Theodor Adorno’s dictum: “The finished work, in our times and climate of anguish, is a lie.” When the same thing happened at the end of OCD Love, it simply registered as a failure of imagination, or perhaps a concession—what does it matter where these works begin and end, fading in and out of view like a good-looking stranger at a party?

Jérôme Bel, Gala

If Killer Pig and OCD Love represent what happens when a surfeit of technique meets a deficit of spirit, then Jérôme Bel’s Gala presents as the opposite. As in previous works Disabled Theatre (2012) and Cour d’honneur (2013), Bel foregrounds local, non-professional performers in keeping with his long-term project of “deconstructing the institutional representation of dance” [program]. Here, Bel’s performers are, for the most part, amateurs who perform what look like partly or wholly improvised group and solo routines in a variety of classical and contemporary styles, each one identified by signs written in felt-tip pen on the pages of an old calendar: “ballet,” “waltz,” “Michael Jackson.”

The cast is diverse to the point of appearing “tick-boxy”—two children, a woman in an electric wheelchair, men and women of various ages, body types and ethnicities, one person with Down syndrome and a transgender performer. To the music of Giselle they execute haphazard ballet leaps with gusto, then combine into wonderfully incongruous pairings for the duets. In the section entitled “Company Company,” they swap costumes—a colourful, apparently self-selected miscellany of tutus, leotards and everyday clothes, glittering here and there with flashes of sequins and fluoro activewear—and earnestly attempt to follow one member of the group as they perform an improvised solo to a pop song. The results are lively and funny, not least because it is easy to see our own bodies reflected in those on stage in their effortful, intensely human striving, in their inevitable falling short and ultimate embrace of amateurism in its truest sense—a kind of love.

Bel has said that its his intention to “destroy the dream of the audience.” Gala opens with a long, silent slideshow of theatres from around the world. In this context even the grand ones—the Royal Opera House, the sweeping amphitheaters of ancient Greece and Rome—appear unimpressive, the photographs, many of poor quality as though hastily downloaded from the internet, reduced to the numbing banality of family holiday snapshots. The images flatten out, the theatres depicted in them draining of interest and individuality. Curiously, the rest of the work suffers a similar fate. While it is hard not to applaud the efforts of individual performers, the work’s diverse representation of bodies begins to resemble something like the United Colours of Benetton, offering diversity not as a departure point for exploring each body’s uniqueness but as a kind of homogenising fait accompli. None of the solo or group routines is allowed to develop beyond the superficial. Why, I wondered, isn’t Bel more interested in who these people are and what they can do than in using their presence alone to thumb his nose at a dance establishment that has, in any case, already received its fair share of post-structuralist critique? And why embed professional dancers like Larissa McGowan in the ensemble? Is Bel, for all his talk of destabilising old hierarchies, unable to resist having two bob each way?

Adelaide Festival 2017: Gravity & Other Myths, Backbone, director Darcy Grant, designer Geoff Cobham, composers, musicians Elliot Zoerner, Shenton Gregory; Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre, 14-19 March; L-E-V, Killer Pig and OCD Love, creators Sharon Eyal, Gai Behar, sound artist Ori Lichtik, costumes Odelia Arnold; Her Majesty’s, 18-19 March; Jérôme Bel, Gala, conception Jérôme Bel, assistant Maxime Kurvers; Scott Theatre, Adelaide, 15-18 March.

Flipbook sequence from Portraits in Motion, Adelaide Festival of Arts 2017, Volker Gerling

Pre-performance, Volker Gerling paces the width of the Radford Auditorium. Perhaps the distance covered here will be added to the 3,500 kms Gerling has already walked, mainly in Germany, every summer commencing in 2003. Over this time, and at the “leisurely pace of a walker” he has assembled a series of black and white photographic portraits of people he’s met along the way, gradually turning the images into small flipbooks. He subsequently assembled them into an exhibition of what he calls “flipbook thumb cinema” and now into a stage show, Portraits in Motion. Gerling is a film scholar so I guess the documentary is not far off.

Gerling moves to a microphone; a tall table stands alongside holding his flipbooks and a small video camera positioned to project the images onto a large screen centrestage. He’s affable and precise in his delivery and, in the manner of much work matching personal photographic images with solo narration, his performance is undramatic. The power of the work emerges slowly as he lovingly selects and animates each of his flipbooks, often more than once and at varied pace, at the same time sharing casually intimate details of the encounter between photographer and subject.

Gerling tells us that the people he chooses for his “documentary portraits” are generally not expecting the 12 seconds it takes to capture them in his lens, nor the 36 frames that will later constitute a tiny analogue film and therefore they “react spontaneously.” These reactions range from amusement to mild embarrassment and occasionally suggest some secret thought or desire. At a time when people are well and truly rehearsed in their responses to the ubiquitous camera, even an unconventional one, whether this candour can be read as “true and real” as claimed in the program notes is less certain.

Some encounters are clearly more charged than others. Among many charming portraits is one of a mother and daughter. What Gerling has captured in this “document” is suggested only on a second viewing of the sequence once we’ve heard Gerling’s account of a conversation with the two in which the older woman confesses concern for her adventurous daughter’s future.

In other series, a spontaneous action on the part of the subject turns the tables. A woman sitting in a bar defiantly removes her top. Two teenagers steal a kiss while a third looks disconcerted by it. I was especially taken with the series featuring two young boys sitting beside a river holding fishing poles, who remained disconcertingly motionless as the pages flipped. All that moved was the grass behind them.

Finally, Gerling moves on to some more familiar lapse experiments: the moon moving across the night sky; a new candle illuminating a café customer extinguished in 12 seconds; the high speed choreography of men in a public urinal, all keeping their distance.

More intriguing than claims of documenting reality is Gerling’s suggestion that his technique heightens the sense of time as flexible and that the gaps between images add to his subject’s fleeting gestures an undefinable power. “What we see,” he says, “comes from what we do not see.”

This year’s Adelaide Festival featured works of grandeur (Saul, Richard III) alongside challenging intimate pieces such as Portraits in Motion. Later the same day, Silvia Calderoni’s startling solo, MDLSX combining personal and fictional tales of transgenderism, fusing family video with DJ-ing and an unguarded performance presence, managed to bridge that divide.

Adelaide Festival, Portraits in Motion, Volker Gerling, Radford Auditorium, 11 March

Crystal Pite & Jonathan Young, Betroffenheit

About two years ago I underwent a course of cognitive behavioural therapy following a traumatic experience. My therapist told me my patterns of thought—negative and obsessive, relentlessly circling back to the same two or three ideas—were literally wearing ruts in my brain, like a cutting machine etching a groove into a record. In Betroffenheit, a dance-theatre work devised by Canadians Jonathan Young (performer and playwright) and Crystal Pite (choreographer), Young’s real life experience of trauma—the tragic loss of his teenaged daughter in an accident—is transposed into a kind of iterative psychodrama, Young’s fictional alter ego inching towards closure through a compulsively repeated series of thoughts and actions.

The work begins with a memorably uncanny image: thick black electrical cables snake like alien tendrils across the floor of Jay Gower Taylor’s industrial, engine room-like set, at the centre of which stands an imposing pillar. The cables slither up the walls, appearing to spark a disconcerting sentience in other objects too: a fuse box, an intercom and a ghetto blaster-like box out of which, synchronised to a pair of flashing lights, emerges a voice that evokes 2001’s HAL 9000.

The voice, as with most of those we hear during the work, often vocally and bodily synched by the other performers, is a recording of Young’s own. Like everything else we witness in this purgatory-like room, the voices—substantially forming the work’s soundscape—are emanations from his alter ego’s disturbed consciousness. Psychotherapeutic phrases repeat to the point of semantic satiation, drained of meaning, as Young’s competing interior monologues converse and overlap, hectoring and lulling. In a process called “chronic re-entry,” he keeps mentally returning to “the room” from where he seems to think the victims of an unspecified accident can be rescued. But it is too late. “It happened,” Young keeps telling himself, as if to sequester the memory in time, to thwart his mind’s endless stretching out of the moment of catastrophe.

“Betroffenheit” translates literally from German as “consternation.” More fully, it describes a kind of stopping dead, an immobilising perplexity in the face of some event. Here, it finds its choreographic analogue in the shape of a repeated gesture, a tic-like rocking back and forth on the spot, like misfiring neurons passing the same signal back and forth between two barely separated points. Vaudevillian figures—the impressive performers of Pite’s company Kidd Pivot—lurk on the periphery, appearing to offer Young’s alter ego a way out via “epiphany,” a word that resounds with hope but here seems to represent something akin to an addict’s fix, an impression reinforced by the sinister, Droog-like appearance of some of the dancers. A sort of meta-narrative emerges as Young, as lithe and athletic as any of the ensemble, is persuaded to take to the stage again, as though it, and not the therapist’s consulting room or the drugs he is sometimes urged to take, were the true source of potential catharsis.

Young’s Electric Company Theatre, a co-producer of the work, has long held a fascination with nostalgic genres of entertainment—vaudeville, Hollywood musicals and the like—and it is given full rein here in accomplished tap and music hall routines. After the interval, however, all of this is stripped away. The cabaret-style costumes are replaced with the drab, loose-fitting uniforms of contemporary dance, and the set is radically pared back. Only the central pillar remains, a black megalith thrown into sharp relief and conferred a totemic, rather than functional, quality by Tom Visser’s chiaroscuro lighting. The gearshift is substantial, and discombobulating.

If, in the first half, the traumatised mind is conceived as Lynchian dreamscape, in the second it is presented as existentialist void (Electric Theatre Company produced Sartre’s No Exit in 2008). It seems thin after what has come before, even if the sparse group choreography, with its rhythmic knotting and unknotting of limbs and bodies, feels closer in spirit to the tentative, drawn-out work of recovering from trauma.

Restless Dance Theatre, Intimate Space

Hotels are some of the last places left that are neither wholly public nor private. They exist, instead, on the borderland between the two. Any member of the public, theoretically, is able to make use of their areas designated public—their bars, lobbies and restaurants—even as paying guests and staff members pass through to private rooms and the back of house spaces that are off-limits to all but a few. In Intimate Space, Restless Dance Theatre’s first Adelaide Festival offering, distinctions between the two are readily broken down in a promenading, site-specific work that situates the company’s performers with disability in various quarters of the Hilton Hotel in Adelaide’s CBD.

The work is, in part, a response to the dismay of director Michelle Ryan—who has multiple sclerosis and uses a wheelchair—of seeing so few disabled bodies in the public areas of a hotel near her home. But, she confesses in her program note, she is also a voyeur: “I can’t help but look at people and I’m aware that people look at me too—because I’m different to them…The show is an invitation: to look…or look away.” This double-bind is at the core of the work: largely absent from public view, people with disabilities are nevertheless subject to the often dehumanising gaze of passersby or a sort of looking-through that, in its own way, refuses the subjectivity of its nominal target.

The audience, led through the hotel in groups of eight, is greeted in the lobby by a concierge (able-bodied performer Ashton Malcolm) dressed in retro cap and tunic like the bellhop from Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel. We are offered mints, and given baggage check cards and a classification of our own choosing: I’m a “sentimental fool,” others “hopeless romantics” or “open-minded” (curiously, though, these never end up informing the audience’s journey). Another concierge (Kym Mackenzie) teases us with glimpses of aphoristic text sewn into the lining of his tunic, before a third whisks us up in the lift to the 27th floor. In a corridor, a seemingly abandoned suitcase unzips from the inside and disgorges a performer, Darcy Carpenter. Ryan’s interest in destabilising the subject/object relationship—the observer and the thing observed—is signalled from the get-go.

After this, the work mostly unfolds as a series of intimate duets. In one of the hotel’s suites, a young couple (Kathryn Evans and Michael Hodyl) performs possibly post-coital play, challenging the taboo around sex and disability. In the laundry, accessed via an industrial lift and decked out like a rave in ultraviolet light (designer Geoff Cobham), Chris Dyke and Lorcan Hopper, dressed in white boiler suits, perform a muscular, high-energy routine to Jason Sweeney’s techno score, assailing each other’s bodies with unwashed linen. A final duet—tense and faltering, a relationship in crisis—between the formally dressed Alice Langsford and Jesse Rochow, takes place on the hotel’s “function level” with its glossy, corporate sheen.

Finally, the audience is given headphones and led to the edge of the space where, clutching the brass handrail, we gaze down onto the ground floor bar. Hard to tell apart, performers and patrons mingle alone and in pairs and groups as voices whisper in our ears, the private thoughts of public bodies for a moment revealed. Ryan is there in her wheelchair. “Should they be doing this?” one of the voices repeatedly asks, and I locate the couple under scrutiny: a young man and woman on the staircase that connects the two levels. In their finery and intimacy they look like wedding guests who have slipped away from the throng to surreptitiously adore each other. The woman, I think, has a disability; the man, I think, does not.

But we are all subject to the gaze here, to a Lacanian anxiety that comes from looking, and being looked at. It is in this “play of light and opacity” that Intimate Space revels, and most rewardingly during this last scene. I have my quibbles about the work—given that it’s site-specific, the relationship between bodies and space feels underdeveloped and, in addition to the odd loose thread like the baggage check cards, I think the overall structure might have been fruitfully reversed, moving the audience from the public space of the bar to the private space of the suite; down the rabbit hole as it were. Nevertheless, the ensemble performs with skill and charm and, in the process, emphasises the significance of both locating bodies with disability in spaces that they are all too often absent from, and the powerful effect of the return of the gaze to its subject. After all, what are we doing there, in those parts of the hotel that, by rights, are not ours to occupy?

Wot? No Fish!!

In British theatre-maker Danny Braverman’s unassuming solo show Wot? No Fish!!, a series of projected illustrations is used to tell the history of Braverman’s family as it was recorded by his great uncle Ab Solomons, a Jewish shoemaker from London’s East End. The illustrations—irreverently drawn and wittily captioned, and not without skill for an amateur—were made on the backs of Solomon’s wage packets between 1926 and 1982, gathering in shoeboxes which eventually ended up in Braverman’s hands.

He brings one onstage at the beginning of the performance—only later we realise there are many more—as well as a Tupperware box. To one side of the stage is a desk and a tabletop projector, but Braverman wants to talk first, wants to know if we’ve tried fish balls before, whether we can tell him what the traditional accompaniment called “chrain” is made of (horseradish and beetroot). These “delicacies” are passed around the room in their box for us to try as the relative merits of cooking techniques (fried or boiled) are discussed. Braverman is personable and disarming, his mode of address conversational but controlled. Tall and tousle-haired, and dressed in a rumpled, oversized suit, he is, in the Yiddish word he will later use to describe Ab, a “schlump.”

The work, as Braverman explains, is the “story of a story.” It is simply told, in that the performer merely projects one image after another chronologically and then comments on each, sketching out their context and cast of characters—Ab’s wife Celie (always drawn with a clown-like nose because, possibly, she had a cold on their wedding day), her overbearing sister, and Ab and Celie’s children Larry and Geoff—and making imaginative leaps where necessary. And yet the pictures, beginning with a basic line drawing of a saucepan and broom and later complexifying with Ab’s introduction of vivid paint, accumulate an emotional heft as Braverman patiently draws out their significance. Many are funny, reminiscent of the satirical cartoons Ab would have been familiar with from publications like Punch, or are inflected with the lewd humour of the British seaside postcard tradition. They are “love letters,” explains Braverman, fuelled by a sort of compulsion—Ab “has to draw,” he says.

But there are also pictures that depict Larry’s undiagnosed autism, and his eventual committal to an asylum. We watch him age there, Ab melancholically recording his visits with Celie. “You can go home now,” Larry tells them every time, and it is heartbreaking. Ab and Celie’s marriage seems, at times, close to disintegration. In one image he draws her outside the divorce court, thinking about going in but apparently deterred by the intimidating bustle of lawyers. In another, a brick wall separates the couple in old age, Ab turned away from the viewer, Celie, red-nosed as always, reading a book, her expression downcast. And then there is the war, lightheartedly rendered at first—Hitler is lampooned, and the annexation of territory turned into a bawdy joke—but there is also an abstract, chilling image of Ab’s family gathered at the bottom of a staircase. Each step represents a year in the future. The family looks optimistic, but the final step is 1939.

These are, lest we forget, Jewish working class people. Ab’s pictures form a record of struggle and aspiration, of a search for both heavenly and earthly Promised Lands. More than anything, like many East End Jews, the Solomons want to move to the upmarket Golders Green. They make it, but it’s here that Ab draws the wall that separates himself and Celie. The Promised Land is a disappointment. Eventually, Larry dies in his home. Celie follows, and then Ab himself. But there is happiness too. Braverman describes his surprise and delight at finding himself depicted, as a baby, in one of the drawings. “It’s like I’d stepped into the story,” he says.

Near the end, Braverman cups his white-gloved hand over the head of the projector. The final slide is up—Ab and Celie in old age, out for a stroll—and I wait for it to be consumed by darkness. Instead, the image springs into animated life. Ab and Celie walk on. In an Adelaide Festival thick with the high-concept, it is a joy to be returned to (seemingly) unaffected storytelling. And perhaps, if it’s not too grand a claim for such a modest work, Braverman’s quietly masterful performance will only grow in importance as the US experiences an upswing in anti-Semitic attacks, and our own moment in history increasingly resembles the 1930s—that staircase of Ab’s climbing into the unknown. For now, Danny Braverman lends us his great uncle’s hope.

Adelaide Festival 2017: Electric Company Theatre and Kidd Pivot, Betroffenheit, creators Crystal Pite, Jonathan Young, writer Jonathan Young, choreography, direction Crystal Pite, set design Jay Gower Taylor, lighting design Tom Visser; Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre, 3-4 March; Restless Dance Theatre, Intimate Space, director Michelle Ryan, assistant director Josephine Were, composer Jason Sweeney, lighting design Geoff Cobham, design Meg Wilson; Adelaide Hilton, 3-19 March; bread&circuses, Wot? No Fish!!, creators Danny Braverman, Nick Philippou, writer, performer Danny Braverman, original director Nick Philippou; AC Arts Main Theatre, Adelaide, 4-8 March

Oscar Raby, AIDC/ Film Victoria VR Workshop, ‘Making Virtual a Practical Reality’, which ran in conjunction with AIDC 2017’s VR Plus Day program.

The computer game WarBirds may not sound like the most promising conduit for a revelatory experience. The game offers players the chance to participate in World War II air combat missions with a startling degree of realism. I’ve never been much of a gamer, but it was through playing WarBirds that I began to grasp just how tricky it is to fly an aeroplane. When machine guns began rattling in my ears and I fell out of the sky, I also began to sense how terrifying it must have been to have actually faced death with no more than a few dozen hours of flying experience. In other words, I began to understand—in a small way—an historical moment through a simulated experience of its conditions.

Cut to November last year. I’m donning a headset in a gallery at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, to experience Lynette Wallworth’s virtual reality work Collisions. Seconds later I’m atop a ute, traversing the land of Indigenous elder Nyarri Nyarri Morgan and the Martu tribe in Australia’s red centre with sand, scrub and sky stretching in every direction. All my senses tell me I am there—or rather here—in the desert, experiencing this environment. It’s overwhelming, thrilling and a little scary. When I emerge 18 minutes later, I feel like the audience at the Grand Café, 1895 after the Lumière brothers screened their films publicly for the first time—as if I have witnessed the birth of a whole new mode of mediated perception.

These two encounters late last year opened my eyes to the embodied, empathetic possibilities of virtual reality for documentary practice. The organisers of this year’s Australian International Documentary Conference evidently share my enthusiasm, for the event opened with a special VR+ Day dedicated to presentations from some of the leading VR practitioners working in the documentary field.

Shooting the revolution

Iranian-Canadian Navid Khonsari has been a games developer for the past 17 years, including work on the notorious Grand Theft Auto III, a third-person shooter game that aroused intense controversy for its violence. More recently, Khonsari has been exploring quite different terrain, with the founding of his own company, iNK Stories, and the creation of what he calls “vérité games” that put players directly inside carefully researched historical situations recreated using virtual reality. The emphasis is on experience, not achieving an objective.

1979 Revolution: Black Friday is iNK Stories’ first VR work, set amid the Iranian uprising that overthrew the dictatorial regime of the Shah. “Human experience is never black and white,” Khonsari told the AIDC audience, the development of 1979 Revolution being informed by a desire to bring to life an historical moment that has been reduced to a one-dimensional descriptor—the Islamic Revolution. Players inhabit the streets of Tehran through Reza, a young Iranian photographer who is forced to make various decisions as he witnesses the revolution unfold. Each choice sets the narrative—and the player’s experience—off in a different direction. Indecision also has consequences: if choices are not made within a certain time, events continue to unfold regardless.

Khonsari detailed the historical research that informed the creation of the work, noting that the presence of French photojournalist Michel Setboun in Tehran during the uprising inspired the decision to base the game around a photographer. Setboun’s images are also recreated in the game’s action. Extensive interviews were carried out with witnesses and experts from a range of backgrounds, to ensure the viewpoints of all the diverse political factions that participated in these events were represented. “Documentary makers are already doing 80% of the work required to do virtual reality projects in their existing historical films,” Khonsari explained.

Ethics and deep memory

Other speakers at VR+ Day discussed projects based around guided narratives set in immersive environments, rather than a choice-based gaming model. All, however, echoed Khonsari’s emphasis on existing documentary practices. Local artist Lynette Wallworth, along with Oscar Raby and Katy Morrison of the Melbourne-based VRTOV virtual reality production studio, stressed the ongoing importance of story, even in a medium that so radically redefines the experience of moving images. Raby, for example, was inspired to create his VR documentary Assent by a tale his father told of his time as an army officer in Chile, 1973. Raby’s dad witnessed a massacre of civilians by fellow soldiers during the brutal military coup that brought down the leftist government of Salvador Allende. Part of Raby’s motivation for immersing users in that time and place, he explained, was to understand what it is to be witness to horrific events over which you have very little control.

While all speakers expressed enthusiasm for the experiential potential of VR, several also sounded a warning about the medium’s highly manipulative nature. VRTOV’s Katy Morrison noted how VR taps into different parts of the brain from those involved in viewing conventional moving images, generating an embodied experience that leaves a deep emotional memory, no matter how critically we try to approach the medium or its content. What are the ethical implications of recreating an embodied experience of intense trauma, she asked. Or of placing users in a situation likely to elicit intense feelings of hatred? Ethical debates that have long been part of documentary practice look set to be reignited with a vengeance by VR.

Funding the VR frontier

What is the state of play vis-à-vis funding for documentary practitioners wishing to explore the VR storytelling frontier? Melanie Horkan, a Canadian producer currently developing a VR project with iNK, noted that the involvement of Telcos in the Canadian funding landscape has proven invaluable in terms of support for the new field (see RealTime 66 for an earlier discussion of Canada’s unique, innovative funding structures for interactive works). Local speakers agreed that Screen Australia and the state film agencies have shown a keen interest in supporting VR, but also pointed out the difficulty of working within existing funding structures built around traditional film development models.

Prototyping, for example, was emphasised by all speakers as essential for the success of VR projects. A 360-degree virtual environment makes it impossible to predict exactly how audiences will respond to and interact with the work, therefore monitored experiences of early iterations of each project are essential. Dedicated prototyping funding, however, is currently lacking in Australia. “It’s still a film development model, with an emphasis on script development,” Katy Morrison commented.

Nonetheless, Australian practitioners like Morrison and Raby, along with artists such as Wallworth, are at the very forefront of documentary’s incursion into the virtual reality field. The technology’s potential is both thrilling and daunting, with its ability to engender profoundly empathetic experiences and to whip up intense emotions of a more negative kind. As headsets become cheaper and more standardised and VR likely moves out of the gallery and into our living rooms, the question of how the medium will be deployed is very much a work in progress, the ethical and philosophical questions VR poses barely touched. AIDC is to be congratulated for offering a very early roadmap for local practitioners wanting to explore this exciting new world—and to forge ahead into unexplored realms.

Australian International Documentary Conference www.aidc.com.au (AIDC), Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, 5–8 March, VR+ Day 5 March

Barrie Kosky’s Saul, the centrepiece of the 2017 Adelaide Festival, is a glorious, never literal evocation of the spirit and look of 18th century opera, featuring dazzling costuming, joyous dancing, striking tableaux vivants, foot-lighting and a field of fluttering candles in a sumptuous staging that radically darkens as the opera’s paranoid protagonist, Saul (Christopher Purves), King of the Israelites, fearing David (Christopher Lowrey), the slayer of the giant Goliath, will supplant him, orders his son Jonathan (Adrian Strooper) to kill the very man he is deeply attracted to, as is his sister Michal (Taryn Fiebig). Kosky has transformed Handel’s great oratorio into a superb opera in which life is writ large, but nuanced at every moment of the work’s vibrant unfolding, from triumphant celebration to emergent love, escalating madness, the deaths of Saul and Jonathan, intense grieving and new national resolve with David as king, Michal his queen.

Fidelity

Some reviewers admiringly imagine that Kosky has built his own substantial edifice on the seemingly slight foundations of Charles Jennens’ spare libretto, but in interviews the director himself has paid homage to its lucid, inherent dramaturgy, superior to those, he thinks, of Handel’s operas. Kosky’s ingenious dramatic realisation of the oratorio is faithfully rooted in and flowers from libretto and score. His masterstroke, without disturbing the original’s shape, has been to expand and intensify the stage presence of Saul (his songs are relatively few; see the Glyndebourne Festival Saul DVD interview with singer Christopher Purves about his being convinced by Kosky to take on the role), granting the performer an entirely believable emotional and physical trajectory (petty jealousy, frantic pacing, violent fury, alternating madness and lucidity, a fit and hallucinations, most enacted within the framework of others’ songs) and giving full weight to the impact of his jealousy and madness on his family and nation—already so strongly felt in the music. Purves’ performance, intensely physical, is a miracle of concentrated anger, helpless insanity, self-hate and admitted cowardice.

Kosky also transforms the oratorio’s chorus from choir into a forceful stage presence—a curious and energetic participator, mourner and moral observer—while wide-smiling, robust and agile Stuart Jackson merges multiple small roles into a cabaret-like shapeshifter, leading the chorus, commenting or grabbing our attention to take the action in another direction.

Yes, Kosky’s inventiveness is prodigious but it’s well-founded and organic, evident in the smallest touches, like David’s refusal of praise abruptly interrupting Saul’s invitation to join his court with the sustained opening note of the piercingly beautiful “O King, Your Favours.” It adds potential fuel to the fire of Saul’s envy, first witnessed when he picks up David’s sling and savagely jams the handle into the eye of the slain Goliath, as if to proclaim his part in the victory; but his court, so taken with David, takes no notice.

Kissing and touch

After deflecting Saul’s praise, the physically reticent David suddenly takes Saul’s head in his hands and plants a kiss on the bewildered king’s brow. The few kisses in the opera stand out like motifs: the violent one forced on his older daughter Merab by Saul in a fit of rage; the kiss between David and Jonathan, a declaration of their love for each other; and the kiss given Saul by the Witch of Endor (Kanen Breen) so that the king can be possessed by the spirit of the prophet Samuel in order to predict his fate.

Touch, in this courtly world, is rare, but compelling when it happens. In the opening revelry, the royal family and the chorus are compulsively drawn to the dazed David, coursing about him, hoisting him onto the banquet table that dominates the stage and resting him against a wild boar amid other fare, flowers and the king’s subjects. Saul, Michal, Jonathan and Merab tenderly wash the sleeping David, an image of familial intimacy that will soon dissolve.
Once recovered David becomes the target of Michal and Jonathan’s desire, admiring him in song for his courage and piety and repeatedly approaching and withdrawing until David acts, drawing both to him, arms about them (while Saul silently admonishes Merab for her rejection of marriage to the low-caste David promised by Saul).

Christopher Purves, Christopher Rowley, Adrian Strooper, Saul, Adelaide Festival of Arts 2017

After Saul collapses in an agonising fit—Jonathan, Merab and Michal holding him down—it is not simply David’s sublimely consoling song (“O Lord whose mercies numberless”) that revives the king, but the young man’s taking the king into his arms, cradling and rocking him. Saul slowly raises a hand, reaching tenderly for David’s cheek in a brief respite from his madness. We hear, not see, the hero’s harp played; Kosky opts for touch with David’s simple, caring act which palpably brings home the shared concern of the family for Saul and their understanding of his condition which they express in heartfelt song.

In the second part of the opera, when Saul feels abandoned by his family (Jonathan berates and strips him) and God, he turns like Macbeth (with whom he shares self-loathing) to the underworld, calling up the Witch of Endor who rises from the earth between his thighs—as if the king is giving birth to a monster—and breastfeeds him, preluding the kiss that will unleash the spirit of Samuel. The dark embrace between king and witch signals a corruption of the intimacy David has brought to Saul’s family.

Scene by design

Towards the end of the opera’s immersive 11-minute overture, an indistinct shape emerges slowly out of the dark: a huge bloodied head resting on its side. Suddenly, we are dazzled by a brilliantly lit stage-wide banquet table with a white cloth and dressed with ravishing floral arrangements, a swan, a fish, a giant clam and, at its centre, the body of a wild boar. Amid these, on the table, the Chorus of Israelites, richly attired in astonishing materials, colours, heightened makeup and wigs, celebrate with song and highly articulated gesturing, victory over the Philistines that came with David’s defeat of Goliath whose head lies before them.

From their number spring six dancers whose expressiveness amplifies the already evident joy. The highly contrastive floor is a gently upward sloping field of black, fine-grained coal-like soil through which the whole cast wade, barely impeded but nonetheless feeling the weight of the earth, so potent in the work’s second part.

Kosky, set and costume designer Katrin Lea Tag and lighting designer Joachim Klein deploy the banquet table from three perspectives in the first part of the opera before focusing solely, in the second part, on the soil, a field full of surprises and of horrors.

If the work’s first major scene, in which Saul’s envy of David grows, is marked by stage width and grandiosity, in the second, in which Saul first goes mad and is consoled by David’s singing, it is depth of field (and deep-felt passions), established by breaking the table in two—still dressed for the banquet—so that its parts run parallel upstage with a wide, open space that gives full focus to Saul’s rants and sudden collapse. The third setting is quite abstract, the two parts of the softly glowing table positioned parallel across the stage with a a narrow gap from which emerges the head of a mad Saul, shorn of his long locks and with a host of hands surreally scampering about him and over his skull. It’s here too that David and Jonathan first kiss in uncluttered space and a recovered and seemingly repentant Saul offers Michal (who jumps for joy) to David to be his wife. It’s as if all the superfluities of the world have been stripped away, drawing us more palpably into intractable worlds of love and madness.

Throughout the opera’s second part we have a single view of the hill of soil, benign at first, when out of it rises a rotating organ played by be-wigged conductor Erin Helyard (a version of Handel who shocked his librettist by purchasing the very expensive instrument for the premiere), but then increasingly disturbing. Amid a field of implanted candles, Merab is raised up out of the soil, lamenting her father’s madness, acknowledging that the David she rejected for marriage “has qualities which justice bid me love” and singing the superbly affecting aria “Author of peace” in sinuous counterpoint with cello and harpsichord.

The soil becomes a vast, eerily dim field, Saul racing about in circles and rolling down it before calling up the Witch of Endor. Subsequently the field is littered with the ghost-like, restless battle-dead, momentarily jerking into life, and the heads of Saul and Jonathan. Michal and David grieve over them before assuming power, joining chorus and dancers in a final dance of celebration on this soil from which life flows and wherein perhaps it ceases.

The opera dances

Kosky’s Saul is alive with movement. The superb State Opera chorus is highly animated, each member characterful, gesturing distinctively and drawn at times into large-scale dance. So too, at the end of part one in the celebration of the imminent marriage of David and Michal, is an apparently recovered Saul, moving calmly upstage, swaying slightly, gently swirling his skirt and then treading down through the happy throng to face us; his demeanour etched with panic, he cries, “I am the King! I am the King!” (a rare, perhaps debatable, directorial addition, as is an earlier desperate utterance, “I am not mad,” but in line with the influence of Shakespeare’s Lear, as Kosky has noted, on Handel and Jennens).

Otto Pichler’s choreography for his dancers seamlessly blends elements of courtly dance, folk, even Can Can kicks and the rapid, sharply articulated movements of 18th century automata. If the dancers appear compulsive and the chorus a mass of movement (when not in tableaux) and Saul a chronic wanderer, David is a singularly still presence, save for our first sight of him, battle-dazed, bloodied, staggering about, almost assaulting Saul and perching on Goliath’s head, indifferent to the victory celebrations. Recovered, he is as if from some other sphere, calm, resolute, his voice angelic but capable of anger (he is unforgiving of the killing of Saul—a king is a king, whatever his faults), exhortation and redemptive power.

What the opera said

Like Handel and Jennens, Kosky is taken with the oratorio’s kinship with Shakespeare’s King Lear, his direction, dramaturgy and scenography physically and visually intensifying this family drama of abused royal power threatening life, love, loyalty and the state. The love between David and Jonathan is made homosexual, sealed with a passionate kiss, giving David’s lament for his friend a contemporary weight doubtless reaching beyond Handel and Jennens’ idealised vision: “Great was the pleasure I enjoy’d in thee, / And more than woman’s love thy wondrous love to me!” Otherwise there is no disruption: David holds his queen’s hand in the final scene of a revived Israel. Nor is there comment, implicit or explicit, on Biblical Israel’s bloody territorial wars in terms of today’s incursions into Palestine.

Kosky’s Saul emerges from and sustains a rich humanist tradition, just as Peter Sellars did in his seminal transformation of another Handel oratorio, Theodora, into opera for the 1996 Glyndebourne Festival (an inspiration, says Kosky). While remaining faithful to its source, Sellars’ production is an explicit condemnation of US state-sanctioned execution of criminals (Christians under Roman rule in the oratorio) in a frightening contemporary setting. Kosky doesn’t ‘update’ in that sense, rather he reimagines and vigorously heightens our sense of what 18th century opera might have looked like, making Saul a great 21st century work about then and now and for other directors and collaborators to make their own in a grand, if ever contested and mutating, humanist continuum.

Don’t altogether lament not being able to see Saul in Adelaide; sound and image are top quality in the DVD of the Glyndebourne Festival premiere. The superb principal performers and the dancers are the same as in the Adelaide remount.

Adelaide Festival 2017: A Glyndebourne Festival Opera Production, Saul, composer George Frideric Handel, Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, State Opera Chorus, conductor Erin Helyard, director Barrie Kosky, costume & set designer Katrin Lea Tag, lighting designer Joachim Klein, choreographer Otto Pichler, chorus master Brett Weymark; Festival Theatre, 3-9 March

Back to Back Theatre, Lady Eats Apple

Back to Back’s Lady Eats apple is a curious work. A parapsychologist (Brian Lipson) tests the ability of God (Scott Price) to predict which animals are depicted on a set of flash cards. An annoyed Price petulantly asserts his power and determines to create man “in his own image.” Given the mixed ability cast, the irony is clear, but the larger dramaturgy less so. Lipson enthuses that in this newly forged dramatic scenario, he could play “an old god,” but Price cuts him off, insisting Lipson is “a forgotten one.”

These lurches between dramatic framings characterise Lady Eats Apple, often giving it a throwaway feel. Few dramaturgical lines are followed through, and some are (apparently intentionally) over-extended. As a third wheel in the tragedy of the Fall of Man, Lipson is unable to fully occupy the role of God’s avatar Satan (though he is briefly the Snake). Lipson therefore asks God to kill him. The demand is made many times, and when Price finally makes a pistol with his fingers and says “Boom,” Lipson must be repeatedly shot before he dies.

The production is broadly ‘postdramatic.’ Little develops fully, with performative lines emerging only to trail away. The performers seem to be asking us to muse widely over themes of death, love, disability, respect and imperfection, and so the work never really emerges in any consistent form. This is either a brilliant conceit, or sloppy dramaturgy. Certainly, inconsistency is built into the structure.

Lady Eats Apple is staged inside a huge fabric bubble which includes the audience. The cloth is later pulled back to reveal the seating bank before us, now populated by the cast playing disaffected cleaning staff. Simon Laherty and Sarah Mainwaring engage in a lengthy dialogue in which they describe their desire to touch each other. The banality of Laherty’s language contrasts with the pair’s delicate expression of shared longing. Less effective is the sound-and-light show of the work’s second act, which involves monochromatic oscillating horizontal lines projected onto the fabric as we hear familiar voice-over reflections on near-death experiences, out-of-body transits and being bathed in “warm light” (all of which have been shown not to be universal experiences of life-threatening events but, rather, culturally influenced neuropsychological reactions to non-lethal altered brain chemistry). Chris Abrahams’ droney musical accompaniment is affective, but as far as quasi-existential audiovisual events go, the combination does not compare well with precedents from the 60s-70s from the likes of John Whitney, the Joshua Light Show or Harry Smith. Overall, Lady Eats Apple is an intriguing, if not wholly successful, experiment.

Antony Hamilton, Alisdair Macindoe, Meeting, Perth International Arts Festival 2017

Antony Hamilton & Alisdair Macindoe, Meeting

Antony Hamilton and Alisdair Macindoe’s Meeting is, by contrast, a study in perfection and its human limits. An intricate dance between two people and 64 bluetooth-controlled percussion automata, the piece reflects a superb simplicity (the basic conceit of this exchange) with maddening complexity (number-structures and rhythms which strain human capacity).

Movement here takes the form of an expanded version of hip hop popping. Each gesture clicks distinctly into motion, before being sharply cut off, while the physical shapes themselves expand on those of hip hop’s more robotic tendencies. Hamilton especially eases into low, widely supported crouches in which he interdigitates from below into Macindoe’s taller, straighter poses.

Surrounded by a clock-like circle of small brown boxes fitted with pencils which gently tap out wind-up rhythms, the human choreography begins with simple arm raises and other movements reminiscent of a dippy-bird which are executed on a single plane, before increasingly complex twists and rotations through shoulders and other joints arise. Pace rises and falls. The accents of the percussion signal the commencement and change of movement, while the actual gestures alternate between coinciding with, or smoothly riding over, these notes. At one point we witness an almost Shaolin battle of to-ing and fro-ing between the pair.

Antony Hamilton, Alisdair Macindoe, Meeting, Perth International Arts Festival 2017

The dancers periodically drop out of focus to intone complex number sequences (shades of Einstein on the Beach). These become increasingly ornate and non-sequential (three printed scores rest on stage to assist), leaving Hamilton and Macindoe to garble and grunt irregular patterns beyond their capacity to echo their mechanical accompanists. Automated paradiddles and rhythmic variations attain a highly accelerated pace.

Before the performers exit, they move an assortment of painted found objects (coffee cup lids, plastic tubs, blocks of wood) in front of the now reconfigured automata, and leave them to take centrestage. Having explored a wide range of interlocking rhythmic alternatives, this denouement is a trifle long given few spectators can see well enough to recognise which boxes are acting at which times. Nevertheless, the artists use this formal conceit to partly realise Heinrich von Kleist’s dream of an “über marionette,” so unthinking and superbly automated as to enact human performative perfection, even as the physical performance of the humans approaches but fails to reach such an impossible level. Meeting presents a deliberately self-critical fetishisation of embodied perfection, providing an interesting counterpoint to Back to Back’s theatre of beautiful failure.

Perth International Arts Festival 2017: Back to Back Theatre, Lady Eats Apple, director Bruce Gladwin, devisor-performers Mark Deans, Simon Laherty, Romany Latham, Brian Lipson, Sarah Mainwaring, Scott Price, set designer Mark Cuthbertson, projection designer Rhian Hinkley, lighting designer, technical direction Andrew Livingston, bluebottle, composer Chris Abrahams,sound designer Marco Cher-Gibard; Heath Ledger Theatre, 2-5 March; Meeting, choreographer, director, performer Antony Hamilton, instrument design, construction, composer, performer Alisdair Macindoe, costume design Paula Levis, lighting design Bosco Shaw; Studio Underground, State Theatre of WA, Perth, 1-4 March

The right for same-sex couples to legally marry in this country has become a political issue that all sides air on the political stage like dirty laundry for party point-scoring. The unfortunate result is to characterise any valuable exchanges on the issue as divisive.

Holding a very expensive, public plebiscite is logically futile when ultimately this issue will be decided by parliamentarians behind closed doors. Transforming the intensely personal issue of how one individual loves another into a national debate appears to only deepen the cruelty. While the voices of those deprived of basic civil liberties should be heard and listened to, Craig Bary’s new dance work, In Difference, prompted me to realise that the discourse could be less exposing of their lives.

Two men downstage sit, relatively motionless, opposite one another in close proximity. The set-up reminds me of Jérôme Bel’s Nom donné par l’auteur (1994)—but sans the objects, sterility of posture and the emptying of one’s subjectivity aimed at in these European dances of stillness. One man begins to cry unashamedly. The wail is gut-wrenching, like real grief over a life or love lost. The other man begins to writhe sensually, tracing his skin with his hand, stirring an orgasm, subtle in its release. Masturbation juxtaposed with weeping in this opening scene neutralises both eroticism and pathos, only making sense as an affective form of protest. It is a protest that reveals a striking paradox: in seeking privacy in matters of the personal, their most intimate selves are laid bare for all to see.

The relationship between the intensely personal and the exposure to public view continues as a theme in the simple, yet semiotically strong choice of a movable flat, built and designed by Bary and co-performer Joshua Thomson in their spare time. Its metal scaffolding is constructed on wheels and has two faces, a smooth surface on one side and exposed bars on the other; and two openings, one a door-like passage, the other a cross-like formation. The flat, while clunky, is expertly manipulated by all four dancers to divide the space, to conceal bodies and to enable transitions. Ambiguity is felt between what we ought and ought not see, the flat revealing the dancers in all manner of physical and emotional states. Karen Norris’ lighting dutifully assists, blurring any edges and at times artfully eclipsing the action.

At first glance, the piece comprises mostly duets exploring same-sex (Bary and Joshua Thomson) and different-sex (Timothy Ohl and Kristina Chan) configurations; but then the movement begins to transcend gender typification, rolling out bodies in a series of couplings so attuned in depth, grace and tenderness that we are viscerally overcome by the rich movement vocabulary and its display. While some of the routine phrasing has a deliberate and measured polish in timing, spacing and placing, there are many complex conversations between pairings locked in close contact that keep the work raw and reactive—whole body tipping, turning and twisting on multiple planes, each in the supportive arms of their other.

In one duet, Timothy Ohl begins flat on his back downstage, having just been flung by Thomson after a ‘stag-like’ combat that rips through the calmness of the quartet’s exchange: interlocking arms like antlers, pushing and ramming with equal force to finally repel and submit to the power of the other. Ohl trembles, shakes, convulses. Every cell screams with affliction in the sense of Simone Weil’s observation that “if there was no affliction in this world we might think we were in paradise.” Kristina Chan rushes to his side and places a hand on his chest. This gesture syphons the very energy that has called her to his aid, setting off a hyperventilation that rattles her tiny frame, only ceasing with the same duty of care from Ohl.

In another set, we find Bary and Thomson deepening their intimacy with straightened arms and hands in an open palm motif to clutch, cover and blindfold. Hands that were manipulated by Chan earlier grab at each other’s genitals. Lines of tension, zig-zagging like a proud Hellenistic bronze, never stem the flow of an acutely shared and responsive biorhythm. The bodies mingle from a single foundation, at times belying the laws of physics: Thomson floating and spinning perpendicularly in Bary’s lap.

Each major interaction is set harmoniously with a discrete piece of music without bridging, creating an episodic, jarring feel that makes little dramaturgical sense. Though Eden Mullholland has composed an enjoyable classically-inspired suite, where the songs each have a different feel in their pure instrumentation—one with a coldish post-minimalist arrangement for piano, another more buoyant with syncopated beats and thicker melody, and one a Baroque-ish harpsichord number feeding the eclecticism—there is little wedding of this compositional structure with the choreography.

In Difference never strays into dance theatre, nor didacticism—even if in the final scene we are hit with the unsolicited voices of Australians giving their opinion on the issue of same-sex marriage. In taking up Craig Bary’s offer to think seriously on the topic, we could imagine a meta-ethical frame for understanding and giving value to all of the moral perspectives on marriage—a not-divisive, healthy pluralism. This way we might be clearer on what’s at stake, not only about rights and justice nor superficial political gestures, but questioning a society’s commitment to discreetly honouring a basic human value.

Form Dance Projects & Riverside Theatres, In Difference, conception, direction, performance Craig Bary, co-creators, performers Kristina Chan, Timothy Ohl, Joshua Thomson, music: Eden Mullholland, lighting design Karen Norris; Lennox Theatre, Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, Sydney, 2-4 March

The Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Chimerica is so timely it feels predestined. Lucy Kirkwood’s play premiered in 2013 but was prescient enough to include a reference to Donald Trump, which now gives the piece what director Kip Williams, in an audio interview with Keith Gallasch, describes as an “internal irony.” Of course, this irony was not yet apparent when Williams programmed it last year but in March 2017, Chimerica feels like the perfect play.

The image

The performance commences with the entire company, which consists of 12 principals and 20 ensemble members, entering from stage right. Dressed in black pants and white shirts and carrying white plastic shopping bags, they shuffle back and forth and swing their bags in an abbreviated version of the tank man’s movement that inspired artist Deborah Kelly to make it the focus for her 2009 large-scale public participatory work Tank Man Tango: A Tiananmen Memorial (see RealTime 93). Suddenly the company departs and leaves a single man standing downstage, his back to the audience. This is tank man and the premise of the play is that he might be alive and living in the US.

Time frames

The scene changes rapidly to reveal another lone man—American photographer Joe Schofield (Mark Leonard Winter)—watching the protest from his hotel room with a phone in one hand and a camera in the other. He interrupts his frantic narration once to take some photographs and then again to hide the roll of film from soldiers at the door. The scene dissolves and now we are in the present day, seated on a flight about to leave from New York for Beijing. Joe is older and travelling with his colleague Mel (Brent Hill); they are seated near an Englishwoman, Tessa (Geraldine Hakewell), who is knocking back the drinks. She’s feisty and witty but afraid of flying. Joe extends a comforting hand across the aisle and the story takes off.

Over five acts and across three hours, Chimerica traverses three worlds: the “Chi(na)” and “(Am)erica” of 2012; and the China of 1989. In the China of five years ago, Tessa is a demographer working for a credit card company hoping to do business there, Mel is researching working conditions in factories and Joe is going to see an old friend Zhang Lin (Jason Chong). Lin works as an English teacher and lives in an apartment with walls so thin he can hear his dying neighbour’s constant coughing. His brother Zhang Wei (Anthony Brandon Wong) stops by occasionally to argue about Wei’s son Billy, among other things. The place is full of smog and tourists and contradictions. The China of 1989 appears through Zhang Lin’s flashbacks to his student days, when he and his pregnant wife, Liuli (Jenny Wu), stood on the street, joining the pro-democracy protest. Now her ghost appears when he least expects it: sitting in the fridge or sliding out of a garbage bag.

In the America of 2012, Obama and Romney are on the campaign trail, as are Joe and Mel. Joe is increasingly distracted by the possibility that the tank man is living nearby in New York. The distraction tips into obsession as Joe prevails upon ex-girlfriends, bails up fishmongers, punches a florist, stands up Tessa, falls out with Mel, shouts at their editor, and even blackmails a senator in order to gain privileged information. Even more foolishly, he communicates some of this activity to Zhang Lin, putting him at immense risk.

The thriller, the televisual & non-people

Chimerica is vast and although it could be described as sprawling, it is too precisely plotted for that. Instead it seems televisual: the meet cute at the start, the snappy dialogue, fast pace and rapid edits. The thriller plot has been written for audiences who are in the habit of following several stories at once and who have faith that a scene of mere seconds and with no words is nonetheless significant.

To facilitate the relentless flow of images, set designer David Fleischer has left the vast stage all but empty. Williams then has the actors change the scenes by carrying on pieces of furniture and props. As in Williams’ production of Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information (2015), scene changes can be riveting in themselves: highly choreographed and beautifully back-lit (Nick Schlieper). In contrast, the scenes proper are often staged in tableaux: characters sit at restaurant tables with their cutlery poised or stand in groups at an art gallery, holding wine glasses.

There is also a televisual sense of repetition and seriality. So many scenes take place in what anthropologist Marc Augé calls “non-places,” planes, bars, fast food restaurants and hotel rooms. The production design suggests that even our homes are becoming non-places, filled with the same blond wooden stools and silver floor lamps. Who fills these non-places? The answer, of course, is non-people, which is why Chimerica’s characters almost read as types.

In the West, there is the jaded journalist, his wise-cracking offsider and the pragmatic career woman. In the East, there is a brother who is no longer willing to pay the price of progress and another whom progress has served well. The Chinese-American diaspora varies: first-generation migrants are working menial jobs; second-generation migrants are police officers. The most recent arrival is Wei’s son Benny, educated at Harvard and employed by an oil company.

These non-people wear non-uniforms (costume design by Renee Mulder). Benny sports sneakers and bling; Joe is dishevelled in battered double denim; Mel wears brown runners and navy jackets; and Tessa has a wardrobe of pencil skirts and sheath dresses. We know things are getting serious between her and Joe not when they have sex but when she hangs out at in his apartment in a chunky sweater. The costumes are but one element of the beautiful design in which the green of a beer bottle offsets a white fridge or a red napkin provides a flash of colour in a scene of beige, blue and grey. THE SWEATS’ sound design is just as encompassing. In some scenes, the music is minimalist; in one, the thumping “Harlem Shake” kicks in, bringing the memory of the 2013 meme with it.

In the play’s penultimate scene, we flash back once more to June 4, 1989. The scene is striking: side-lit, engulfed in smoke, with people pelting across the stage. Once again, tank man appears, only this time we know who he is and how and why he came to be there. We also know what’s in his shopping bags.

About us

Like David Hare, Kirkwood has an ability to explore macro-political issues through micro-personal relations. Unlike Hare, however, she is not preoccupied with making a “state-of-the-nation” play. Instead, she realises that the only way to analyse the contemporary experience of the ‘national’ is through the international, which is why she, an English woman, has written a play about China and America’s mutual entanglement. This triangulates the relationship between the old British empire, the waning American one and the waxing Chinese one. When staged in Australia, this triangle becomes a square. We know all three of these empires and have faithfully followed both the United Kingdom and the United States into war. We have also skilfully negotiated the shift in power from the former to the latter. But what to do about China?

One of the clichés of Australian politics is that every generation rediscovers Asia and announces our need to engage with the region. It’s probably true of the performing arts too. However, with the recent success of OzAsia, AsiaTOPA and the Contemporary Asian Australian Performance (formerly Performance 4A) program as well as individual works like Michelle Law’s Single Asian Female at La Boite and Asian works in Performance Space’s Liveworks, it feels like a larger and longer-lasting change is on the horizon. This mainstage production of Chimerica—so beautifully performed, directed and designed—adds to the air of inevitability.

In the days between my seeing the play and writing about it, Premier Li Keqiang holds a press conference saying that he does not want the Asia-Pacific nations to feel compelled to choose sides between China and the US. Ostensibly reassuring, the statement has the opposite—and ominous—effect. It’s like a frontbencher telling the media that the party leader has their “full support”—suddenly you know it’s on and that the future will be here before you blink.

Sydney Theatre Company, Chimerica, writer Lucy Kirkwood, director Kip Williams, designer David Fleischer, costumes Renée Mulder, lighting Nick Schlieper, music THE SWEATS; Roslyn Packer Theatre, Sydney, 28 Feb-1 April

“We Live By The Sea isn’t my story. It’s nothing like my story. But it joins my life at the edges, just a little, stitching something of me together. For some in this audience, their experience will be of this: a reminder, or a reflection. For others, the artists ask them to sit for an hour, to spend time with a story and a family they haven’t seen before, to perhaps expand their understanding of the world. And as I watch, I feel the old fear rush back into every inch of my body.”

On the cinephile 4:3 website, Lauren finds a thought-provoking review of Iranian master filmmaker Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman, the perfect antidote to the latest onslaught of blaring, oversized blockbusters:

“The Salesman is bookended by distinctly theatrical motifs, drawn, as the title implies, from the Arthur Miller play in which its central couple are involved. Plays within a film can herald hack thematic signposting, but Farhadi is on an elevated game here. Consider his carefully composed intro: a stage-bound empty marital bed, lit with the sickly glow of pre- or post-intimacy, a deserted battleground or one waiting to happen. He swiftly cuts to construction work threatening to collapse an apartment building, from which married theatre couple Emad (Shahab Hosseini) and Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti) are forced to flee; blunt, perhaps, but effective shorthand in establishing his film’s slippery domestic terrain. That his final image puts his two leads in tight close-up as they apply stage makeup is both more and far less intimate—layers of disguise caked onto faces reduced to empty reflections.”

These images of Paris’ Brutalist architecture, all of it outside the city’s centre, prompted Lauren to search Instagram for the Sirius building, recently opened to the public for an art tour. She found #saveoursirius, an astonishing, spontaneous collective effort at documenting a near-extinct piece of the city’s history of public housing.

A current if curious resurgent interest in Brutalism, says Keith, is documented in a terrific review, “The Brutal Dreams That Came True” by Martin Filler in the New York Review of Books of a host of new books on the subject.

photos: (clockwise from top left) @saveoursirius, @meganblakeirwin, ABC RN/Tiger Webb, @maynardarchitect, @housesmagazine

Lars Eidinger’s Richard is a breath-taking invention—funny, scary, extra life-sized and loaded with the ammunition of self regard. But he’s equally familiar: a companion of the order of Australian tennis brats, wife-beating, drug-ingesting footballers, nipple-baring, wild animal-wresting Putins and lying, bragging, golfing Trumps, all dangerous boy-men. But what happens when I run out of breath? Can Eidinger deliver a resuscitative shock and keep the show rolling?

A towering, battered wall, metal steps, ladder and walkway. A large Persian carpet, relic of better times, as make-do centre-wall entrance, split down the middle so that it flaps on entry like a heavy plastic emergency ward door. Across the wall huge projections of stormy clouds and flocks of carrion birds, or a live-feed of Richard’s face. Suspended from the ceiling is the kind of microphone seen in boxing and wrestling stadia, loaded here with a light and a video camera for the showman villain to broadcast fantasies and victories and confide the psychological pain of the unhealed wound of his much-mocked disability. And he swings from the mike; in the end, hung from it, dead, upside down like hunting kill.

This Richard looks hybrid: part boxer, bouncy, head capped in protective leather; part rock star, rapping lines on his mike, backed by a stage-side drummer; part child, ready to run naked for his fans, for Queen Anne (to play vulnerable and honest) or for the heck of it—squatting, legs splayed, genitals bared as he chats to us. He’s unpredictable, toying with us as much as with his victims. Key lines delivered in German are then tossed to us in English. Losing the thread of a devious argument, he’ll turn to the surtitles, grab the words he needs and with an ah-ha smile render us complicit in the deed and in the theatre game.

Taking it to the extreme, Richard as punk humiliates his erstwhile co-conspirator Buckingham by pushing food into the man’s face and rubbing soil into his suit, yelling in English, “You look like shit!” and “Have you eaten any pussy today?” and inviting a partly-willing audience to join in the abuse.

A neck brace and a corset for an otherwise naked Richard added midway suggest physical decline, but it’s more like a fashion statement since he’s no less full of drive. His end comes even quicker than usually anticipated. Instead of nightmares and self-doubt followed by a stage battle to the death with his enemies, director Ostermeier compounds these into a solo delirium within which Richard leaps from his bed to fight empty space—a war more against himself than his enemies. It’s a chilling image in itself but does feel peremptory and off-kilter. It sits restlessly with me and heightens the sense of having witnessed a brilliant one-man show, so much does this Richard not only eat the furniture, but crowd the stage and auditorium.

But even Lars Eidinger’s Richard needs ensemble performers with heft: an Anne (Jenny König) almost too strong to be duped, a Margaret (Robert Beyer) psychologically beyond defeat and an Elizabeth (Eva Meckbach) he thinks he’s played but we see the strength he does not. The tense scene in which the ailing King Edward (Thomas Bading, another fine performance) and his court are manipulated by Richard is masterfully constructed, with Eidinger in lower key. The crises of conscience of the two murderers are affecting and the exchange between the doomed princes (realised in the manner of bunraku puppetry) and Richard, in which one hoots at him like a chimp, is unnerving. But not all scenes are of the same order, some surprisingly conventional, some sluggish.

What strikes hardest is the absolute distance between Eidinger’s brilliant, complex grotesque and the characterisation of the rest of the court, as if not of the same universe, or stage. For all that, I was impressed with the extremity of Ostermeier’s vision and Eidinger’s performance, putting Shakespeare’s genius and our empathy for Richard to test. We can be forgiving because he’s wickedly funny, an expert deceiver of the all too gullible and he’s a villain with disability—his one emotional claim on us. Did I forgive? I felt gullible. This is, after all, theatre for our times.

Adelaide Festival: Schaubühne Berlin, Richard III, writer William Shakespeare, translation and version Marius von Mayenburg, director Thomas Ostermeier, dramaturgy Florian Borchmeyer, designer Jan Pappelbaum, costumes Florence von Gerkan, Ralf Tristan Scezsny, music Nils Ostendorf, video Sébastien Dupouey; Her Majesty’s Theatre, Adelaide, 3-9 March

Loop into hallucinatory video, an online realm dedicated to the Carel Fabritius painting The Goldfinch and articles about a James Baldwin documentary, the 19th century origins of “empathy” and how refugees stay in the loop via mobile phones—and you can help.

A Documentary Envisions a Book James Baldwin Never Finished

Lauren finds a sensitive response in Hyperallergic to a new documentary by Raoul Peck on James Baldwin titled I Am Not Your Negro. It resonates creepily with the Australian context.

“In the film, [Baldwin] refers to white America as ‘monstrous’ at least three times. He explains why: because people in the US are caught between narratives as to who they actually are and who they want to be, and narcotizing, populist television circulates a story that always emphasizes the latter…The film left me with questions that I suspect won’t be answered in my lifetime, because successive generations of Americans have been brought up with the conviction that they need never understand anyone, not even themselves. How do I live with that?” ¬

The Goldfinch, a bird’s eye view

Lauren discovers a new online exhibition by Mauritshuis Museum in the Hague that reveals the techniques, influence and hidden history of one of its most popular paintings, Carel Fabritius’s The Goldfinch (1654), as well as its connections to literature, including Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer-winning 2013 book with the same title. A fully-integrated experience combining painting, design, words and sound, it’s a fascinating example of how the internet is becoming art’s new natural habitat, even for the most traditional forms.

“A little painted bird. Carel Fabritius saw it: the beauty of the black, yellow and red in front of the white wall. The light and shade. A single glistening beady eye. The shadow on the wall. He painted the bird—a goldfinch—with loose, visible brushstrokes. Not too much colour or detail. A little bird on a chain, in front of a rather battered wall. That is all. Not much, but just enough.”

Dream Study (Hibernation) by Kamil Franko

A new moving image work, Dream Study (Hibernation), published online by BOMB magazine, occupies a strange, lovely space somewhere between video and cinema. Shot in Zagreb, Croatia, it evokes the early surrealist works of Luis Buñuel.

“Hibernation became a way to derail linear time. Watching the seasonal shifts in Sljeme—the orange turning black, my repetitive routine of filming, the movements within the frame—all somehow speak a language of circular progression. Hibernation, as in a dead-like sleep, spirals into a never-ending journey.”

The Invention of Empathy: Rilke, Rodin and the Art of “Inseeing.”

Long fascinated by the workings of the perceptual phenomenological loop that is our experience of art, Keith chanced across a book review and felt an urgent book purchase coming on. Writing about Rachel Corbett’s You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin on her invaluable Brainpickings blog, Maria Popova focuses on the book’s initial account of the emergence in the 19th century of “einfühlung” (“feeling into”). The notion was principally conceived and developed by German philosopher Theodor Lipps—a key influence on Freud, Kandinsky, Rilke and Merleau Ponty—and translated as “empathy” by British psychologist Edward Titchener in 1909. With “empathy” nowadays deployed so casually (often desperately as we invoke it in the face of the effects of disaster, war and Neoliberal cruelties) it’s reinvigorating to read of its origins in an understanding of the art experience: “Lipps originated the then-radical hypothesis that the power of [art’s] impact didn’t reside in the work of art itself but was, rather, synthesised by the viewer in the act of viewing.”

Migrants with mobiles: Phones are now indispensable for refugees.

If you need a charge to power up your empathy for refugees around the world then consider your relationship with your phone. The prostheses that are mobile phones are so integrated with our minds and bodies we feel disabled when they break down are lost, stolen or run out of power or credit at the very times they are most needed. But we can usually handle it. However, for millions of refugees, power and credit are life sources and their phones sometimes more important than food, as reported in The Economist that grabbed Keith’s attention.

“Migrants with mobiles” is an eye-opener, revealing the astonishing scale of mobile phone activity by refugees: keeping in touch with family, calling for rescue, protecting unaccompanied children, researching government routes and work prospects and getting an online education (not least in coding). In camps, people gather with their phones around power sources, a few aided with credit by the likes of Phone Credit for Refugees and Displaced People and Mercy Corps in Lesbos and Athens. You can help buy time and credit by making a donation.

If you lived in China between 1967-1976, you could see just eight “Revolutionary Model Works”—five operas, two ballets (of which The Red Detachment of Women was the more famous) and one symphony. Jiang Qing (Madame Mao) had trashed traditional works that promoted Confucian values and featured “emperors, ministers, scholars and beauties.” Her Model Works portrayed only heroic Gong-Nong-Bin (workers-peasants-soldiers) pitted against evil landlords, merchants and the bourgeoisie in an endless loop of class struggle.

Behind these spectacles of revolutionary romanticism, the Cultural Revolution shredded social and economic stability and ruptured artistic and intellectual life in 10 years of carnage. Orchestrated by the ultra-leftist faction of the Chinese Communist party in order to dispose of its enemies, the Red Army was its instrument of execution. Jiang Qing argued these dramas were needed to “consolidate our hold on this front and hunt down reactionaries.” To enact class struggle, the masses were galvanised to participate in huge political rallies focused on denouncing “class enemies” through mock trials, public humiliation and staged “self-criticism” sessions.

In 2017, it’s hard to imagine how the post-ideological generation of dancers in the China National Ballet would be able to embody Madam Mao’s directive that “every action, every word, every gesture, every bar of music must dramatise the class struggle.”

Outside Melbourne’s Arts Centre, a small group of Chinese protesters hand out leaflets with posters equating the Red Army with ISIS and Nazism. The plot, they say, is about “brutal revenge, mass slaughter of landowners and looting the wealthy by the Red Army.”

The ballet opens with an elegant dancer strapped to a wooden pole. She’s dressed in red and placed dead centre of a dark stage, spotlit en pointe. There are no doubts this is our heroine, slave girl Qionghua. In a cinematic sequence of scenes, we follow her conversion to a patriotic daughter of the revolution, one who must undertake class struggle and education to join the newly formed Red Detachment of Women.

The ballet is set amid the Civil War between the Kuomintang and the Communist party. Every theatrical device is harnessed to accent the division between the landlords and the people. Dressed in semi-imperial garb, with his gang dressed in dirty brown, “despot” Nan Batien inhabits a dark and dingy stage. His lackey Lao Si almost steals the show with his acrobatic antics and comic swagger. Scenes in the “Red Area” feature boundless blue skies, palm trees and ever-fluttering flags. The newly formed Red Detachment of Women, with identical bobs beneath their caps, sport crisp grey shorts and pointe shoes and are equipped with pistols and guns. Their highly synchronised dancing is steeped in Western ballet; military drills inhabit, without incongruity, romantic form.

Qionghua escapes the despot’s dungeon, only to be captured and left for dead. She is rescued by two scouts from the Red Army and invited to join the revolution, but not before the real hero, party representative Hong Changqing, uses her tale of misery and oppression to fire up the troops.

During an attack on the landlord’s home, Qionghua gets carried away and fires at the landlord, upsetting battle plans. Again Hong Changqing educates her in revolutionary tactics and party discipline. The peasants arrive to offer food and bamboo hats in gratitude for their “liberation.”

As the score races to the final showdown, battle-scenes between Nan Batien’s rogues and the Red Detachment troops are electrified by Chinese Opera fighting choreographies. Iconic phrases from “The Internationale” and Mao’s own “The East is Red” signal imminent Red Army victory. Workers-peasants-soldiers unite to join the Red Army as dark skies on a vast scrim turn into a rainbow. Rousing victory songs are heard and Qionghua is rewarded with the ultimate political prize: the role of Party Representative.

The Red Detachment of Women is performed to perfection by a large company. I swing between excitement at seeing such a vibrant rendition of a “Model” work and reluctance to validate such striking art performed, as it had once been, totally in the service of dirty politics.

Asia TOPA: National Ballet of China, The Red Detachment of Women, director Madame Feng Ying, music director, chief conductor Zhang Yi, Orchestra Victoria; State Theatre, Arts Centre, Melbourne 15-18 Feb

“End the Sausage Party” demonstrator, AACTA Awards red carpet in Sydney, 2016

Gender representation in Australia’s film industry hasn’t improved in 40 years. With dominant industry bodies and policymakers failing to make change, fringe film festivals are gaining the most headway in achieving gender parity. Given the huge failures of establishment players to correct the film industry’s background culture of discrimination, women’s film festivals are now aiming to fill a larger space in the film ecology, going beyond merely exhibiting films by women to supporting the creation of new, more daring works by women.

RealTime spoke with two festivals working in the vacuum left by the commercial film industry players and policymakers. The Melbourne Women in Film Festival launched its inaugural season this past weekend and For Film’s Sake (formerly World of Women film festival) will run 26-30 April in Sydney. FFS attracted infamy last year for its involvement in the “End the Sausage Party” protest which occupied the AACTA Awards’ red carpet, decrying the low number of nominations and selected films driven by female creatives.

For Film’s Sake

“There’s nothing happening on a policy level, and that’s leaving huge gaps between what’s being said [by policymakers] and what’s being experienced [by filmmakers]. We’re moving into film creation as well as exhibition,” says FFS festival director Sophie Mathisen, who has recently quit her job to work full-time on the festival. “The way that it was before, it was just a nothing festival. It wasn’t doing anything, it wasn’t changing anything.” The move from exhibiting films to supporting the production of new films should allow for the festival to have a direct effect. To this end, the new The Big Pineapple program will award a $50,000 micro-production budget to a team in which at least four of the following roles are fulfilled by women: writer, producer, director, cinematographer or lead character. Male filmmakers are encouraged to apply as members of teams that tick at least four female roles. The award also includes funds and support for post-production, marketing and distribution.

Mathisen has worked as a filmmaker within the existing public screen agency and commercial structures, and has found that the barriers to women becoming filmmakers are as present and powerful as ever. “Everyone believes that they will be the lucky one who doesn’t smack up against the glass ceiling. And then suddenly they do. There was no point [in me] continually making films if they’re never seen and there’s no platform for them. We know that women are already working outside the system, so we need to make room for what they’re creating.”

Audience-building

The next step is to attract an audience. Though its main screenings are at Sydney’s Event Cinemas, Mathisen says FFS wants to create interesting cultural events around the films to generate a better audience experience, and engage other moving-image media beyond feature-length films. “We’re doing a program of Small Bar Activations, getting digital art, media, animations, anything that doesn’t fit within a normal theatrical context, some works from Next Wave festival and a gif collective called Loop the Loop, and projecting and installing them in eight small bars throughout the city.

“The big one for us is to change the conversation from the ‘worthiness’ of female filmmakers” by boosting the cultural currency of the films and creating more tantalising film culture events that match the type of film with the type of exhibition setting. “We’re doing the first screening ever at the Chinese Garden of Friendship with two Chinese films; we’re doing a dance film in partnership with the No Lights No Lycra dance community, and we’re doing a six-hour horror marathon in a carpark.”

Unexplored avenues, new models

Mathisen says that festivals, given their independence from the norms of commercial filmmaking, are ideal homes for the unexplored avenues of cinema that women’s participation opens up. The festival will support women who “inhabit entirely new [storytelling] spaces, are more experimental with form and go beyond the normal narrative escalation.” Lower-budget filmmakers in the festival circuit, she has observed, are taking more creative problem-solving approaches by “doing things on the hop. There’s a sense of uncensoredness because the film wasn’t put through the frame of the film school and the templates and rungs of [screen agency-led writing] development.”

In this way, festivals funding production could lead to more daring films by women than the screen agency and film school models. “And they have to, because those other models aren’t working,” says Mathisen. “The existing models are complicit in the perpetuation of women’s invisibility.” Beyond the strictures of male-dominated filmmaking and beyond the industry issue of ending workplace discrimination, new types of films, new types of storytelling and new themes become evident when women have access.

Melbourne Women in Film Festival

Kirsten Stevens and Whitney Monaghan of Melbourne Women in Film Festival (MWFF) have likewise found that as a small festival, they can program more experimental, feminist, political and queer material that has evaded wide distribution. Stevens doesn’t see this as “niche programming,” given that “[most] people see taste and programming through the prism of a white, hetero, male status quo. It’s not that the stories that women tell are weird and different, it’s that they’re not the stories we have easy access to. It’s not that women’s films won’t speak across gender and sexuality divides, it’s that they haven’t had the chance to be put out there.”

To address this, MWFF has taken a retrospective and alternative approach to programming films that Stevens says, “break the ideas of cinema”, with the aim of calling for contemporary films next year. “We’re looking back to the International Women’s Film Festival in 1975 which was organised in the Year of the Woman, and pulling the Australian films from that program. We read that festival’s manifesto and realised it could all be said today.”

“The session ‘Art and Life’ in this year’s festival played 50 minutes of contemporary, avant-garde and experimental filmmaking by women in Australia,” says Monaghan, who curated that wing of the program. Expanding the festival’s mandate to include a wider spectrum of screen culture, it included video/art films by artists The Kingpins and Soda_Jerk and under-seen shorts, like Gillian Armstrong’s AFTRS Graduate Diploma Student film of 1973, One Hundred a Day (1973; see it here).

“I think film festivals are the ones pushing equity because they can,” says Stevens. “They’re short-term, very focused on a couple of days or a week, and you can put a lot of resources and effort into it and focus the conversation. But no-one wants to talk about it year-round, which is the problem.” Stevens says the measure of success for women’s film festivals will be making equity into an ongoing concern for the industry rather than an occasional burst of talk. “Festivals won’t solve the issue but they can be the pointy end of the wedge.”

RealTime will be covering Hobart’s Stranger with My Face International Film Festival (4-7 May), another event dedicated to creating spaces for women filmmakers in the festival landscape. See reviews of previous Stranger with My Face festivals here and here. Eds

Although I didn’t attend many of Supercell’s daytime events—performances, workshops and technique and master classes—I felt their impact in the evenings. The foyers were brimming with life: eager audiences, improvised dance pieces and overseas artists hanging out with local dancers. Supercell was substantial enough to create the glamour of a major event but with the hothouse ambience of, say, a writers’ festival.

Brainchild of über producers Kate Usher and Glyn Roberts, who met while attending the Atelier for Young Festival Managers at Gwangju, South Korea, Supercell brought together some compelling national and international work to sit alongside performances from the robust local contemporary dance community in Queensland. (Read an interview with Roberts about the festival’s origins.)

Simone Truong, (To) Come and See

The festival’s showcase international work, (To) Come and See, was a feminist contemporary performance work conceived by Swiss-based Simone Truong who drew together a group of four European female choreographers to create a “real-time process of working through…personal and collective eroticism.”

The work opens with a deconstructed set—floor-length white curtains in the far corner, the stage littered with cushions, a white plastic pedestal fan, a mirror and a desk. The women move sinuously, with a casual grace that is slightly predatory. They introduce themselves and begin with the gambit, “If I had to sleep with one of you tonight, it would be you.” There is a palpable stilling in the room, arousal and embarrassment, but also utter engagement. Watching the documentation of this heavily toured show online, you see the same glazed fascination on the faces of audience members around the world.

The choreography unfolds with precise delicacy and control. Surreptitiously, the women set up subconscious Freudian feints, handing audience members notes and instructions. At one point I looked up with complete surprise to see a single shoe had mysteriously appeared, vulnerable and alone, on a cushion centrestage. Each of the women performs languorously ordinary solos—the white plastic pedestal fan tilts slowly to blow the hair of an almost falling woman; a monologue is addressed to the mirror; a slow exit is made via a stage door left ajar. The work builds into sequences with pairs and threes, sylph-like and deliberate with a choreography of not quite sexual movement—hands grasping just under the waistband of another’s jeans, the slow pull of arms and legs entwining. The show climaxes with two motifs designed to pull us out, just a little, from our pleasuring gaze. First, a tableau sees the women moving together slowly, like sea creatures, spittle falling delicately from their mouths. They don transparent plastic masks that pull their faces into shining distortion, then gently remove them and watch us as we leave the theatre.

Amrita Hepi, Jahra Wasasala, Passing

The focus on the gaze and the female body was also central to Passing, a work by Bundjulung and Ngapuhi dancer and choreographer Amrita Hepi and multi-disciplinary performer from Fiji/NZ, Jahra ‘Rager’ Wasasala. This dynamic trans-Pacific duo set out to explore the idea of racial passing and what it means to live across different cultures.

This voluptuous piece unravels, literally and metaphorically, through the draping flesh-covered costumes and their long, flowing sleeves that sometimes confined the dancers. The work relies heavily on sound, with music and words representing post-colonial objectification but also the fierce reclamation of traditions and urban culture.

The most arresting scenes occur in the final stages of Passing when both women, stripped back, lower themselves into steel buckets and we watch their muscled backs and long hair become engulfed in and saturated with water. While very different in tone from (To) Come and See, Passing employs similar strategies—using the power to shock, arouse and disrupt in order to reclaim the female body.

Pearl River Delta Dance

Another international work, Pearl River Delta Dance, comprised a series of short excerpts from contemporary works: four from Macau and one from mainland China by the prominent Guandong Contemporary Dance Company, long-term collaborators with Brisbane’s Expressions Dance Company. Sadly, we saw only four minutes of a lyrical and flowing two-hander, Point One, an excerpt from a full-length work by young choreographers Li Pian Pian and Tan Yuan Bo.

In contrast, the pieces from Macau were much less classical and hinted at a fertile and wide-ranging culture of contemporary dance, from Albert Garcia’s cheeky Four Legs is Good, Two Legs is Better, that explores the idea of contemporary royalty and stars the best puffy white shirt I have seen since Seinfeld’s pirate version. Garcia primps and poses in his satin boxer shorts and the narcissism explored seems very culturally transportable.

The third work, a solo titled The Sun Rises as Usual created by Macau-based Stella and Artists, was probably the most opaque for a Western audience. My reading was a political one as the title is also the response of the Chinese government to a pro-democratic incident in Hong Kong in 2014. It was also the most implacable, with the bulk of the choreography expressed in one move: the dancer back-flipped, then held her back-bend in pose until she collapsed, only to flip again until she had crossed the stage.

Finally came The Hands by Macau company Max Dance Hall, a kaleidoscopic short work that followed a duo of corporate-clad “fake journalists” reporting on events since the Cultural Revolution of 1967 but then throwing away their desks, sun-glasses and briefcases to pull, jerk, salute and collapse their way through what seemed to be a disintegrating world.

What united the works in Supercell was quality, displayed across a “broad church” of contemporary dance as expressed in the festival’s curatorial rationale. Let’s hope this distinctive festival continues well into the future.

For more about Passing, which appeared in the 2016 Next Wave Festival and was reviewed by participants of the DanceWrite Workshop, read here, here and here. Eds

Supercell Festival of Contemporary Dance: (To) Come and See, concept Simone Truong, choreography, performance Anna Massoni, Eilit Marom, Elpida Orfanidou, Adina Secretan, Simone Truong, design Roger Studer, 22 Feb; Passing, choreography, performance Amrita Hepi, Jahra Wasasala, music Lavern Lee, costumes Honey Long, 21 Feb; Pearl River Delta Dance: Guangdong Modern Dance Company, Point One (excerpt), choreography, Li Pian Pian, Tan Yuan Bo; Stella & Artists, Four Legs is Good, Two Legs is Better, choreography, performance Albert Garcia; The Sun Rises as Usual, choreography, performance Lou Hio Hio Mei; Max Dance Hall, The Hands, choreography Lin Yu Ju; 23 Feb; Supercell, Judith Wright Contemporary Arts Centre, Brisbane, 18-25 Feb

Dmitry Krymov Laboratory, Opus No. 7

The 2017 Perth International Art Festival highlight to date is Russian director Dmitry Krymov’s Opus No. 7. Consisting of two discrete works separated by an interval, the work is a meditation on the fraught career of compromised Soviet composer Dimitri Shostakovich. A recording of Shostakovich’s enthusiastic address to the Congress of Soviet Composers is counterpoised with images such as a giant babushka puppet—at once standing in for Stalin, Mother Russia and Shostakovich’s mother—taking pot-shots at a diminutive incarnation of the composer, who flees across a circus-style stage while large-scale photographs of his condemned compatriots (like theatre maker Vsevolod Meyerhold) waltz about him.

Shostakovich’s biography has received many renderings (notably the superb film Testimony, 1988) and Krymov’s poetic images here are not especially dense. As in agitprop, they communicate in a single gesture (Shostakovich is pierced through the body with the pin of a massive Order of Lenin) and gather little over time. Even so, the sight and sound of rusted metal pianos on wheels careening into each other like incensed battle-tanks in an even more literal incarnation of Shostakovich’s 7th Symphony (1941), a memorial response to the Siege of Leningrad, gives much to muse on, even where the images are not always complex.

This is not true of Act 1 however, which is a semi-continuous series of mnemonic acts in homage to the dispersed Yiddish Ashkenazi and Sephardic populations of the Russian Empire, mostly from Ukraine. In the Australian context, Act 1 is almost a companion piece to Barrie Kosky’s Gilgul Theatre productions like The Wilderness Room (1994). As in the latter, a blend of melancholy and magical summoning arises from the manipulation of simple objects such as cardboard (a rear wall through which arms, objects and cast members protrude, depart, and out of which rough shapes are carved with knives), old photographs (laid out in a corridor across the front of the performance space), shambolic but skilled musical motifs (tuba, song and the percussing of the stage wall), tins of black paint, staple-guns, a blizzard of torn newspapers (the cast pick through them and read the Jewish names they find on each), a rickety pram violently rolled across the floor (an ironic reference to Battleship Potemkin, 1925), and the now inescapable symbol of pogroms old and new: abandoned shoes, such as those that piled high at Auschwitz.

Opus No. 7 is unashamedly a work in the tradition of the Theatre of Attractions, a model enunciated by Meyerhold, Eisenstein and Tretyakov in the heady days immediately after the Revolution as a theatrical style for the masses. Akin to Dada, the mode is one of opportunistic juxtaposition and montage of what in the 1920s were mass entertainments: popular music theatre, boxing, cabaret, acrobatic skits, cinematic interludes and periodic surprises. A particularly affective such moment in Opus No. 7 occurs when the set’s rear panels become screens for the projection of photographs of wizened men in long black coats and fur hats. As at the first screening of a moving image by the Lumière Brothers in 1895, what we initially mistake for a still slowly comes to life as images stutter into mobility. A voice-over commences: thickly accented men talk about their woes, about who is left and who has gone.

Using scraps, the performers gesture towards these lost presences, but the fragmentary nature of Krymov’s mise-en-scène prevents their restoration. Mikhail Umanets, perhaps the star of an otherwise ensemble performance, comes forward to tell us about the relatives shown in the photographs on the floor. His impressionistic biographies offer a taste of their personalities, a sense of idiosyncratic behaviours, but only in pieces.

Indeed, when a sense of presence does flood the stage, it somehow seems too much to be borne. Memory here is not only an obligation, but a pain itself: memory is cruel. Umanets takes a girl’s pair of red shoes and animates their delicate steps. Performers paint silhouettes of dead children on the wall, beside which Umanets stands, hopelessly and absentmindedly dropping his hand to grasp that of the painted figure. In a moment beautiful and horrible, a painted arm literally peels off the wall and reaches into his fingers. Neither the children nor the old men will come back. We are left with a performative scar.

Significantly, the lone woman who greets the audience in the opening, amusedly sweeping the floor (and its past) clean, later unbuttons her comically massive coat to reveal her pregnancy, before singing exquisite—but also tragically isolated—notes. If hope exists, it lies with these Sarahs upon whom the Jewish line depends. While Act 2 concludes with Mother Russia literally smothering her offspring, it is these mothers-yet-to-be of Act 1 who, simply by being among the cast, suggest rebirth. By scenographically reinventing a central aesthetic dream of the Revolution—the Theatre of Attractions—Dmitry Krymov stages an unbearable history of violence, repurposing an otherwise tarnished toolkit with which to attend to this same history.

Crystal Pite & Jonathon Young, Betroffenheit

Working through trauma is the explicit subject of Betroffenheit (Canada). A collaboration between Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite and actor dramaturg Jonathon Young, it draws on Young’s personal experience of the loss of a child. He appears onstage, mocked and enticed by a cast of white-faced provocateurs as he recites a series of excoriating observations regarding the destructive, addictive patterns of behaviour into which he has fallen.

Recalling Existentialist classics like Sartre’s No Exit (1944), Act 1 occurs in a grey, prison-like room. However, this sparse scenography houses melodramatic outpourings. As in Fellini’s 8 1/2 (1963), images from circus and vaudeville provide a conduit for nightmarish recollections and extroverted dreaming. The piece is accompanied by voice-over narration and sonic rumblings which do not speak for themselves; every key word or emotional jolt is underlined by exaggerated gestures such as clownish frowns or arms reaching to the sky in mock horror. The intent is presumably to pummel Young’s character (and us with him) into the broken figure left after traumatic loss.

For me, Betroffenheit works best when it reflects a faith in its own expressive language such that choreography or text are allowed to communicate on their own terms, without hyperbole. The more restrained opening shows an isolated Young speaking back through a microphone to a recording of himself, which demands that he acknowledge his behaviour. In Act 2 the body speaks without text, via repetitive ticks and distorting vortexes into the floor, as dancers scatter across the now void-like, black stage. Elsewhere however, Betroffenheit is close to a David Lynch spoof. To paraphrase Tom DiCillos’ film Living in Oblivion (1995), who really has nightmares which feature carnival dwarfs or white-faced 1920s clowns? Or are they only found in derivative post-Expressionist performance?

Gregory Maqoma, Exit/Exist

Exit/Exist is low key by contrast, its content and dramaturgy largely carried by South African dancer Gregory Maqoma. He is accompanied by guitarist Giuliano Modarelli as well as a four-piece choir performing mostly in the “isicathamiya” mode developed by Zulu urban migrants in the early 20th century. Considerable vocal material is delivered as Xhosa-language voice-overs as well as in song. London audiences found subtitles distracting, so none appeared in Perth.

Consequently the narrative of Maqoma’s 19th century forebear—Xhosa leader Maqoma (1798-1873) who resisted the British expropriations of land, cattle and grain—is rendered opaque. Scenes function instead as meditative tableaux in the manner of Raimund Hoghe’s solos like Another Dream (2000), in which a simple ritual or choreographic gesture is explored and repeated, beginning gently before gathering force.

Exit/Exist is close to performance art in its slow build of unadorned action, and is perhaps too long and ill-suited to the large State Theatre. My patience was strained by repeated, belaboured gestures and songs of pathos, which presumably dramatised Chief Maqoma’s imprisonment and death. Appreciated on its own terms though, Exit/Exist is a beautiful, modest work, notable for its sense of cultural fusion. Post-Apartheid South Africa has struggled to reconcile Zulu with Xhosa (both of whom share much as Nguni peoples). The two cultures come together here, along with postcolonial and trans-African influences. The music of Modarelli and the quartet draws on Christian polyphony, Zulu “isicathamiya,” Xhosa song, South African township music, as well as Ghanaian “highlife” and Nigerian “ju ju”—the latter audible in Modarelli’s plucking, which recalls the transposition of kora (West African harp) onto electric guitar.

Maqoma’s choreography enhances the sense of stasis. His passages across the stage are infrequent; he largely stands in a loosely defined area, fluidly exploring its modest kinesphere. A dramatic stare from a barely moving face contrasts with hips snaking side to side or feet lifting even as the torso is held stable. Signature dance movements—such as seen in Zulu dance—appear intermittently, such as raising a leg straight up in front of the torso before swinging it down in a single arc as arms swing to where the leg had been.

Maqoma pauses to change from a golden ‘sharkskin’ suit into a cowhide tunic while holding horns mounted across his knuckles with which he scythes and gestures. I imagined a cultural return of Martha Graham’s use of what she characterised as the “primeval” dances of tribal cultures and ancient Greece in works such as Errand Into the Maze (1947). Rather than Graham’s focus on the eruption of repressed psychosexual energies, here Maqoma almost queers his more contemporary performance, his stochastic gestures and blank opacity suggesting something both pained but also distanced, approaching camp aesthetics. Compared with how Graham and now Pite and Young in Betroffenheit attempt to bring groaning ghosts into direct communion with their audiences, Gregory Maqoma’s insistence on filtering history through flat, stylised symbols seems more sensitive.

I am indebted to Tom Gunning’s essay “The Cinema of Attraction[s]” (1986) which draws on Eisenstein’s account of his collaboration with Tretyakov on their performance “Enough Stupidity in Every Wiseman” (1923) and which Eisenstein published as “Montage of Attractions” (1923).

Perth International Arts Festival: Dmitry Krymov Laboratory, Opus No. 7, ABC Perth Studios, 21-26 Feb; Gregory Maqoma, Exit/Exist, Heath Ledger Theatre, 1-12 Feb; Kidd Pivot and Electric Company Theatre, Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young, Betroffenheit, Heath Ledger Theatre, Perth, 23-25 Feb

Perth has changed, and so has its festival. The last time I visited the distant West Australian capital, in 2006, I remember vividly how there was nothing to buy as a souvenir to take back to Melbourne, nothing more distinctive of the local culture than a dot-painted boomerang and other assorted Australiana. In 2017, Perth is a place that cultivates its own: there are small shops and small eateries, there is an acceptance of its own multicultural reality, and there is support for the local arts, as well as some self-conscious funnelling of all that mining money into bringing in international acts. A fellow festival guest, Artshub Performing Arts Editor Richard Watts, remarked, “The wonders of gentrification?” To which I wondered, “Or civilisation?”

Playwright Marcel Dorney once remarked to me that Australian art is always asked to reflect the views of the majority, more so than art is required to elsewhere. An astute observation, particularly as I ponder those dot-painted boomerangs that used to be all that Perth had to say about its local art scene. The first work I saw at PIAF, an eight-hour American family saga, was as specific and multi-layered as those boomerangs are not.

There is so much that is noteworthy about The Gabriels, a trilogy of naturalistic plays by Richard Nelson, each set on a specific date in March, September and November of 2016, and centred around the kitchen table in the Gabriel family house in Rhinebeck, a town in upstate New York. The first might be just how naturalistic it really is, a kind of carefully observed recreation of reality that is never, ever produced in Australia. It is a naturalism of so many details that it bypasses gesture and recreates a certain feel for three-dimensional reality: the naturalism of socks and clogs, of knives and garlic, of conversations that trail off, of inaudible dialogue, of things left unsaid—not for the purpose of creating a dramatic pause, but because people often don’t spell out their lives to those they love and speak to often. The three plays, Hungry, What Did You Expect and Women of a Certain Age, were originally written and performed separately, each set on the date of the premiere, each rewritten to reflect current affairs right up until opening night, and despite the subtitle (and the way in which the last play takes place in the early evening of the election day), Donald and Hillary loom in the background as merely one part of the world that unfolds before our eyes slowly, gradually and in all of its lifelike complexity.

In March, Mary Gabriel has just buried her husband Thomas, a playwright, and his family has gathered in the house, confused and bewildered in that quiet way of life: there is a house to live in, interlocking mortgages, aging parents, Thomas’ belongings, Mary’s expired doctor’s licence (she took time off work to care for her dying husband), and nobody quite knows why Thomas’ first wife Karin is intent on staying for dinner. The year passes in aftershocks of that loss: Karin moves in to help order Thomas’ papers or perhaps to keep Mary company while she rebuilds her life; the aging mother Patricia has moved into a nursing home and her health is rapidly declining and her mismanagement of family finances is coming to the fore during the inheritance settlement. We meet Thomas’ siblings: costume designer Joyce who lives in New York and may or may not be gay; and George, carpenter and piano teacher who stayed in Rhinebeck with his wife Hannah, a caterer, and now has to deal with the dynamics of gentrification as the New York wealthy spill over from Long Island.

Watching The Gabriels is like visiting your American friend’s family home, being privy to conversations that involve both neighbours you don’t know and politicians you do. It is an experience of making sense of the world while observing the lives of people you gradually learn about: their financial decisions, their political decisions, their decisions to trust and to mistrust, to relent or push through. There is the macro class disappointment with the New Yorkers who move to Rhinebeck and publish entire books about the white privilege of the village, blind to its working class history and failed industries. But there is also the micro-sadness of coming to terms with the eroding financial accountability of an aging parent, and balancing unexpected debts with a child’s college loan. There is Mary’s growing realisation that her home is no longer hers, and that her grown-up daughter from her first marriage is no longer close family. There is Karin’s quiet insistence on belonging to “the Gabriels,” having kept her ex-husband’s surname and having, it appears, nowhere else to go—she is an unmarried actress with a small apartment in Manhattan, and art, for all its presence in the conversation, is not as solid as that family kitchen. The Gabriels make space for Karin’s presence, first awkwardly, then habitually, as the year goes on and she becomes a valuable interpreter of Thomas’ life in the arts. The tremendous naturalism of Nelson’s plays makes space for it all, the great and the humble, the complication that is ordinary life.

During the eight-and-a-quarter hours of observing this family shuffle around the kitchen table, chopping vegetables and pulling ready dishes out of a real, working oven, I wondered repeatedly about Dorney’s observation about art and the majority view. It occurred to me that something else is at play: so much naturalist theatre in this country falls short not because it accurately represents the majority, but because it is invested in upholding myths of what our country is, myths that were always only a flattened version of reality.

The pleasure of watching The Gabriels comes largely from the absence of grand narratives upheld by the text. It is not a play ‘about’ class, or about family or about politics, though it contains them all. Though they might dread the presidential debates and make a sideways sigh, “Be human, Hillary!”, the Gabriels are not there to represent a left-leaning middle class with artsy professions, nor provincial working class hicks with hearts of gold. We are never in danger of seeing these as political plays, or of understanding the plot as a microcosm of larger social processes à la Jonathan Franzen’s great tomes on contemporary America.

In lesser hands than Richard Nelson’s, the Gabriels would dissolve into symbol without substance, but the family firmly remains a group of three-dimensional individuals, their lives spent navigating the consequences of grand narratives, without ever over-identifying with them. In the last play of the trilogy, set 5-7pm on the day that would give us Donald Trump as the President of the United States, as the Gabriels discuss the year with the same tired hope that we all held—that certainly, things could not go so badly wrong—George Gabriel reflects on his son’s first ever vote, his lack of enthusiasm and his words: “Dad, it could have been about so much more.”

There is something here to be said for individual maturity, for these are characters who can observe ideology and groupings without ever losing sense of themselves as built out of a variety of roles: as daughters, wives, mothers, employees, cooks and voters all at once, each role bringing its own agency along. It might be that the Australian settler identity, rooted in the collectivism of unions and racial laws, hasn’t yet identified this Enlightenment individual, this person with agency that goes beyond any particular group belonging, and perhaps that is why naturalism in Australian theatre is so often accused (rightfully) of being ideological and reductionist. Who knows? Either way, Richard Nelson’s The Gabriels is brilliant.

PIAF 2017: A Public Theater production, The Gabriels: Election Year in the Life of One Family (Hungry, What Did You Expect?, Women of a Certain Age), writer, director Richard Nelson; Subiaco Arts Centre, 11-18 Feb

It is impossible to view the Perth International Arts Festival (PIAF)—and perhaps all art right now—through any prism other than that of the strange, deeply disconcerting political moment in which we find ourselves. 2016 threw political surprises of the highest order, and then failed to follow up: unfathomable news, followed by the holiday season. As we return to art in 2017, there is no way to believe that everything is the same as usual, and yet there’s no real sense of how exactly things are different. Or rather, it seems that things may have been different for a while, without us noticing.

Either way, I have watched every work at PIAF 2017 as a possible answer to the same question: how do our individual reality and our collective reality collide? What in ourselves is made by great historical events, and what in ourselves sets those events in motion? It is a question coloured by news of the social media strategies that had driven extremist campaigns for both Brexit and Trump, and articles that describe Milo Yiannopoulos’ rise to fame through the coordination of thousands of his Twitter followers into attack mobs. Still, it is a question bigger than this month’s news.

Amy Sharrocks, Museum of Water

Amy Sharrocks’ Museum of Water (UK) is a collection of publicly donated waters with accompanying stories that has travelled the world from its origin at a street corner in London’s Soho, four years ago. There is water of all kinds: water from a bottle that spent decades in the pantry, melted ice from an ancient glacier, waters from childbirth, sea waters, as well as tap water from around the world. There is a water bar, with tap water infused with native Australian plants (eucalyptus was the popular choice). Then there are books, including a tome on Rotterdam’s water squares, a city-wide design strategy to adapt the city to rising oceans by creating squares that double up as flood collection basins. Set on beautiful Cottesloe Beach among beach towels and waddling kids, Museum of Water is a subtle and profound work, taking us on a journey that starts with sipping from a glass of water and ends with pondering our relationship with our planet.

Lara Thoms and Snapcat, Before the Siren

Lara Thoms and Snapcat take similar stock of the entire vertical relationship between the individual and the collective on the topic of feminism. Before the Siren is a community event set on the Fremantle Oval, in which the inaugural season of the AFL Women’s League is celebrated through a showcase of women’s community groups. “It is modest—eight teams, smaller salaries and a two-month [season],” they write. “Despite this, the first televised women’s game in September last year attracted record viewers. We know this competition is the beginning of something big and important.”

Writing from Melbourne, where tram stops were crowded, social media flooded and tears shed for the first AFLW match in February, it does seem like a moment of profound change is taking place, at least in this city’s psychology. Before the Siren traces the genealogy of this moment through groups large and small, political and not. Wearing team colours and props, the players arrive, presented by the MCs Lara Thoms and Hannah Gadsby, who introduce each club and squad, their history, membership rules and achievements. There are women’s rights activist groups, including Reclaim the Night Perth and the West Australian chapter of Amnesty International. There are the Fremantle Dockers banner team, the Gorna Liyarn Indigenous dancers, the only male cheerleading team in the country, the WA Roller Derby, WA Women Motorcycle Riders and Girl Guides WA. There is the club for everyone named Shirley and the Embroiderers’ Guild of WA.

By the end of the event, the oval has filled with women of all ages, wearing all colours and costumes, with props ranging from giant embroidery needles to placards with feminist slogans held by tiny Girl Guides. It is an entire local history of women’s organisations, embodied, present, loud. If AFL has a women’s league today, is it because of the accumulated work of these women? Before the Siren suggests, here are the individuals whose labour has made an historical event.

Lola Arias, The Year I Was Born

One extraordinary work, however, asks the same question backwards. How are we made by history? The Year I Was Born, written and directed by Lola Arias, reverse-engineers the historical facts of Pinochet’s coup in Chile by charting its echoes on the lives of 10 performers born during the coup years of 1973-1990.

The echoes are more than faint. Pinochet’s coup d’état, which, backed by the United States, on 11 September 1973 replaced the democratically elected government of President Salvador Allende, established a brutal dictatorship responsible for the murder, torture, disappearances, political repression and exile of thousands of members of numerous resistance organisations that had sprung up before and after the coup. Every family story told on Arias’ stage could be a stand-alone narrative of exceptional vividness: one performer talks about how her parents, members of the urban guerrilla group Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front, were so poor that they committed a robbery to pay for her mother’s ultrasound; another describes how her mother was killed by the police, and a photograph of her semi-nude corpse displayed on the front pages of newspapers. Then there is the woman whose apolitical parents spend the coup years partying, and the man whose father remained a staunch supporter of Pinochet even though the coup kept him unemployed for over a decade. The stories tell of families broken and truncated through exile, imprisonment and disappearances—I was struck by how few of the performers grew up knowing both of their parents, or had anything resembling a geographically stable childhood.

Formally, The Year I Was Born is the most classic of devised political theatre, almost a perfect recreation of a moment in theatre history circa 2005. There is the video screen with historical documents, radio recordings of the coup, cut-and-paste personal narratives. There are moments of physical dramaturgy, such as when the performers line up according to class, skin colour and the political beliefs of their parents. The performers are not professional actors, their natural body language keeping the performance dynamic even and nicely uneventful. We are simply told one harrowing story after another, in the neutral language in which ordinary people generally tell life stories.

And that is The Year I Was Born’s greatest achievement. I cannot be the only one who, after 2016, is tired and suspicious of heightened rhetoric, of connections too smoothly and swiftly made. The Year I Was Born builds a world out of small pieces of information: 10 people born into a ravaged reality, whose lives nonetheless include skateboarding and watching TV, continuing past 1990 to include childbirth, graduations, coming out. And that world is recognisably our own.

PIAF 2017: Amy Sharrocks, Water Museum, Cottesloe Beach 18 Feb-5 March; Lara Thoms and Snapcat, Before the Siren, Fremantle Oval, 19 Feb; Lola Arias, The Year I Was Born, Heath Ledger Theatre, Perth, 15-18 Feb

The abundant visual stimulation of a chamber-sized Melbourne Symphony Orchestra concert with projected film and a 20-piece gamelan orchestra incorporated in the mix makes it almost impossible to know where to look. Set to a silent film by leading Indonesian film director Garin Nugroho, Satan Jawa combines Central Javanese gamelan and contemporary Western orchestral instruments in a co-composition by Iain Grandage (Australia) and Rahayu Supanggah (Indonesia).

Satan Jawa portrays the ill-fated romance of humble village labourer Setio (Heru Purwanto) and Asih (Asmara Abigail), the daughter of a wealthy family who cruelly reject Setio. In a Faustian turn of events, he makes a pact with the devil to attain the wealth and status that will allow him to win Asih’s hand. Yet things don’t go as smoothly as hoped, and a joint ensemble led by Iain Grandage takes us through the many dark twists and turns we might expect from a Nosferatu-inspired black and white film.

While the amplified string section is at first extremely prominent, an initially tonal soundscape begins to evolve with stunning dovetailing between Western and Indonesian flutes. This fluid dialogue of tonalities peaks later in the film in an hypnotic passage featuring contrabassoon, strings and saron, a type of Indonesian metallophone. The creation of interesting or unusual timbres is one of the most exciting aspects of new music and Grandage and Supanggah certainly excel in this regard.

Sitting cross-legged at the front of the stage are three female and two male vocalists, with a third doubling on saron positioned slightly behind. When Setio’s deal with Satan begins to sour, the collective male vocalists deliver a haunting chant accompanied by tremolo strings and solo cor anglais: an exquisite yet ominous combination. In each scene depicting the physical contortion of demonic possession we hear the same chant underscored by instrumental voices such as contrabass clarinet, low brass and low strings. It’s an association that seems basic in theory but the execution is purely chilling.

Asih’s journey also allows the female vocalists to take the limelight, particularly during her most emotionally vulnerable scenes. Realising the devil has stolen Setio away, a female singer mirrors the sadness and self-pity to which she temporarily succumbs by incorporating sobbing, shrieking and physical rocking back and forth into her vocal lines. It’s easy to forget we’re supposed to be watching a film when such a heartbreaking performance is taking place live on stage.

Another truly unforgettable element of the score comes with the alarming appearance of Satan himself, portrayed on screen by Luluk Ari Prasetyo. Members of the gamelan ensemble trade their mallets, flutes and vocal parts for a variety of drums and other percussive instruments and suddenly we are drowning in rhythmic cacophony. The collaborative force of the MSO plus 20 percussionists might actually have felt threatening if the musicians hadn’t looked like they were having the absolute time of their lives.

It’s not quite a happily-ever-after tale but there’s a strangely satisfying conclusion to Satan Jawa I definitely didn’t see coming. Fingers crossed this film with live music returns to screens in the near future; my only dissatisfaction with this action-packed performance was that there was only the one.

Asia TOPA: Satan Jawa, filmmaker Garin Nugroho, composers Iain Grandage, Rahayu Supanggah, gamelan ensemble, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra; Hamer Hall, Arts Centre, Melbourne, 24 Feb

They sit in their high chairs, their fat little faces feasting on morsels delivered by a circle of devoted family—mother, father, grandparents—all fixated on their precious only child.

These so-called “Little Emperors,” born of the strictly enforced one-child policy in China, have grown up. They feel burdened by family expectations to marry, reproduce and care for their aging parents. In this skillfully constructed bilingual play written by Lachlan Philpott (Sydney) and cleverly directed by Wang Chong (Beijing), we see them struggle to define who they really are.

Kevin (Yuchen Wang), now living in Melbourne, is a “ghost-child,” who officially doesn’t exist. The second child born illegally during the one-child policy, he was hidden away in boarding school in Hong Kong. His elder sister, Huishan (Alice Qin) is ‘on the shelf’ at 31 and harassed by her mother Baohua (Diana [Xiaojie] Lin) to marry and have children.

Kevin stands calf-deep in a huge rectangular pool of water which covers half the stage. His mother and sister in Beijing are seen behind a curtain of strips covered in hand-written advertisements posted in Beijing parks by parents seeking marriage for their only daughters and sons. In Skype conversations filmed in real time and projected onto the curtain, Huishan begs Kevin to return to China to take part in their mother’s 60th birthday celebrations. Meanwhile Kevin directs a student play in which masked performers wade through the water with gifts for a Little Emperor doll’s birthday. As his frustration mounts at their incompetence, the actors one by one mutiny. Dressed in the Emperor’s traditional yellow robes, he is left to perform his unsanctioned tale of the one-child to an audience comprising his mother and sister.

The play switches fluidly between English and Mandarin and between on-screen and live action. Angry outbursts propel Huishan or her mother through the curtain in an attempt to reach the increasingly cagey Kevin.

The text is smattered with absurdist touches of a world Baohua no longer understands: an online post of a cat goes viral; a whale in Huishan’s office is “good for business.” Onscreen, Huishan struggles to zip her mother into her party dress, using gaffer tape, safety pins and finally a hammer. Baohua brushes her daughter’s hair with increasing violence. Wang Chong uses many comic gestures to signal underlying tensions.

He directs wonderfully executed actions in the pool: tiny children’s chairs become stepping stones placed by performers to negotiate a difficult conversation. Kevin and his gay lover splash each other in a simulation of foreplay. Wading through the water in her party dress, Baohua escapes her 60th to deliver a desperate tirade on her humiliation in front of her sisters. It climaxes in a spectacular face plant into the water.

Little Emperor slides into Chinese soap opera by upping the stakes way too high. Does Baohua really need a terminal illness to make her case for progeny and does Kevin really need to be gay to show how unlikely he is to provide it? It is however a remarkable collaboration of writer, director and audiovisual designer with a skilled locally-based Chinese-Australian cast.

Asia TOPA, Malthouse: Little Emperors, writer Lachlan Philpott, director Wang Chong, dramaturgy Mark Pritchard, design Romanie Harper, lighting design, AV consultant Emma Valente, performers Diana (Xiaojie) Lin, Liam Maguire, Alice Qin, Yuchen Wang; Beckett Theatre, Malthouse, Melbourne, 9-26 Feb

Nic Green, Cock and Bull

Cock and Bull by Nic Green begins quietly enough. Rosana Cade stands, rooted to the spot in shirt and tie, mouth and hands sprayed a glistening gold. As her body arches she sings a tumbling, Philip Glass-like encyclical of repeated syllables that will eventually land upon the word “hard.”

Hard, as in “hard-working people,” becomes a key to unlock the ritual that follows: an exorcism, where soundbites rendered meaningless through masculine party politics are pummelled into submission by three female voices, three synchronised bodies in bland suits and smart shoes, all smeared with residue from the robotic gold on their hands. At first those hands mark out the space in front of them, block by invisible block, a parody of the geometries of conviction employed by trained politicians the world over. But repeated precisely and relentlessly, the movements grow more exaggerated, outlandish and spasmic until they become a mysterious fugue. At one point I feel compelled to close my eyes and let the absurdity course through me. I don’t know whether we’re reclaiming or deriding these phrases, whether we’re gaining any ground, or just treading water in the same way those source speeches are. This not-knowing? It feels good. It feels electric.

Part of Cock and Bull’s joy lies in how metred its three performers are while also maintaining distinct identities: Nic Green is cherubic, welcoming; Simone Kenyon is the most haunted of the three, an Ibsen heroine; Rosana Cade has a David Bowie-like mercurial confidence. These identities hold fast even as they fall to the floor under the weight of their own inanities, or shout about the strength of the economy while dry-humping chairs. At once female and male, the patriarchal aspects of the performance keep fighting for dominance as shirts and ties are ripped away. Then Green is left alone in the spotlight, arms outstretched, wrists upturned. A piano rendition of Dido’s Lament by Purcell is time-stretched until it’s a beautiful, granular wheeze and Green’s voice responds accordingly, exhaled in a heart-breaking shiver: “This…year…has…not…been…hard…it’s…been… impossible.” We’re seated in traverse; directly across from me a fellow audience member bursts into tears.

Forced Entertainment, Real Magic

Of course, much like an exorcism, like any human ritual of transformation, the act only really works if the viewer believes in it. And in performance art the heavy use of repetition can be a terrible turn-off for some people. Elsewhere at In Between Time 2017, Forced Entertainment (FE) presents Real Magic, a relentless show based entirely on the constant cycling of the same failed mind-reading trick, where the mistakes remain stubbornly constant, and the only aspect that changes—for over 90 minutes—is the performers’ attitudes to their failure. It’s a portrait of hell with chicken suits, blindfolds and canned laughter.

Late into the same evening FE’s writer-director Tim Etchells performs A Broadcast / Looping Pieces, a simple solo iteration where, pacing back and forth, he repeats phrases like, “I want to talk to you, I mean I know I’m talking to you now but I really want to talk to you,” glitching and skipping with obsessive rhythms, sometimes barked, sometimes murmured. In Arnolfini’s foyer afterwards I hear many different audience reactions. Forced Entertainment has spent a long time working in the space between theatre and performance art and I still find it exhilarating that the company continues to enchant and divide fans of both.

It would be a mistake to approach any of these looped experiences as one might purely narrative theatre, aiming as they do to lend additional weight, additional profundity, through pompous reiteration. What the repetition actually allows in all these instances is time and space to process your own responses, as might happen with a liturgical rite or a piece of poetry. It’s an act of concentration. Funnily enough, if the failure at the heart of Real Magic were expanded from two-minute bursts to episodes of 30 minutes at a time, we’d call it sitcom—where the protagonists always end up where they began, no matter how hard they try, and we love them for it.

Rachael Young, Out

This isn’t to say that IBT 17 is forever a snake eating its own tail. The weekend is a carnival of amazing, morphing images, often with a gratifyingly diverse aesthetic. In Rachael Young’s Out, a rite to reclaim Caribbean culture from its homophobic aspects, Young and collaborator Dwayne Anthony twerk and strut in high heels, juddering their bodies against beats synched to the hoarse shriek of a homophobic evangelist. Naomi Watson’s sound design is the best of the festival, opening with a fantastic collage of clashing Jamaican sound systems that, even in the compact Wardrobe Theatre, flies you direct to Kingston.

Rachael Clerke; Cuncrete; Lucy McCormick, Triple Threat

In Rachael Clerke’s Cuncrete a drag king punk band rattles through Thatcherite odes to self-preservation—somewhere between the Bullingdon Club and The Slits—Clerke ending the gig with feet firmly planted in a mixer full of her own setting cement. Triple Threat by Lucy McCormick is like nothing else on earth, a hyperactive retelling of the New Testament by an X-Factor also-ran, where the old live art trope of ‘I’m not really very good at this’—everything chaotic, unplanned and too loud—is subverted by McCormick’s music video dance routines being step-by-step perfect. The Virgin Mary’s reaction to Christ’s assumption is presented as her singing Snow Patrol’s “Run” to the Son of God before descending into grief-stricken, ear-splitting screaming, naked from the waist down in a puddle of her own glitter upon a stage strewn with salt, instant coffee, mayonnaise, underwear and sweat, accompanied by aspirational chord progressions. Welcome to the UK in 2017, everyone.

600 Highwaymen, The Record

In this company The Record by 600 Highwaymen (USA) is an interesting anomaly. A wordless onstage installation of 45 Bristolians scored by live electro-acoustic music sometimes reminiscent of experimental music duo The Books, it sees the participants facing the audience in various configurations and poses: a taxonomy of human shapes and faces that disperses and reforms to the bidding of an unseen, unheard conductor. For a portrait of a city like Bristol it’s surprisingly austere and unsmiling. The formal loveliness of this diagram of faces in the playful surroundings of Bristol Old Vic can’t be denied, but it feels like a work made with a community rather than from them. I’d be more interested in reading a review of The Record by a participant rather than by me. [See Ben Brooker’s response to the 2016 OzAsia Festival staging in Adelaide.]

Dickie Beau, Lost in Trans-

From many bodies performing as one, to one performer with many bodies: in recent years Dickie Beau has carved out a reputation for conjuring surprising and emotive images through the art of lip-syncing. A slight but powerful presence—apparently with the response speed of a hummingbird—he inhabits a carnival of characters from queer history and outsider culture, adding subtexts and storylines to borrowed audio through simple but careful staging. Shifting textures are projected onto gauze, behind which Beau unfurls, vogues, flits, snarls and giggles like an off-Broadway ghost. In the three times I’ve seen him perform, Beau has never been anything less than a shaman, transporting me to the dressing rooms of Soho or SoHo, the Beverley Hills hideaways of decomposing film stars and, on one occasion, he gave a performance as the actor Kenneth Williams that I can only describe as an act of possession by the dead.

In Lost In Trans- his focus is once more upon those monologues of self-definition and strength that have become such a distinctive music accompanying the story of sexuality in the last century. But he also includes what sounds like some genuinely stumbled-upon material, the quiet and anonymous diaries or love letters made by a generation of Americans, discovering their voices on the medium of tape. These found soliloquies are all presented as creatures from Greek myth, in a mixture of live and video manifestations. Medusa, severed head held aloft by a headless suit, intones with the gorgeously confident cadences of a New York drag queen, imparting a lifetime of wisdom. Narcissus is a bald beat poet, tapping his watery mirror like a jazz cymbal, and that old intersectional wanderer Tiresias presides over it all like a blind MC.

The most remarkable synchronisation, a live one, represents the nymph Echo and is spectacular even by Beau’s standards: a crumpled tape detailing a woman’s quiet, domestic ruminations that handbrake-turns into something so unexpected and beautiful I feel compelled not to spoil its surprise. Suffice it to say that it feels voyeuristic, generous, troubling and intensely human all at once. Embodying its intimacies, Beau hunches into a microphone like a worshipper before a priapic shrine. So in a festival full of very different and very current songs, perhaps the most effecting and affecting is that of a ghost, found by a random tapehead in some thrift store, long ago, far away.

Osunwunmi reviews more of IBT here and you can read dialogues about the festival between Mary Paterson, Maddy Costa and Diana Damian Martin on Something Other (Collecting writing, performance & their others).

In Between Time, IBT17 Bristol International Festival, Artistic Director Helen Cole, Bristol, UK, 8-12 Feb

An artist peaking late in his career, British filmmaker Ken Loach’s latest film has been met with far-reaching critical acclaim and political debate. Continuing the social-realist approach to dramatic cinema that Loach himself helped craft, I, Daniel Blake is a moral tale and a polemic: the story of an older working-class man who, struggling for state welfare, finds emotional solidarity with others discarded by government. Beyond its political aims, the film has also earned serious accolades within the world of art-house cinema, including the Palme d’Or at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival and the Prix du public at the 2016 Locarno International Film Festival.

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A stocky, bearded man in a soldier’s uniform drips with sweat midway through a physically demanding performance of Dario Fo’s one-hander The Tale of the Tiger. He is a well-known Iranian actor, Hedayat Hashemi, and we are in a small ‘salon’ of the City Theatre of Tehran. Every now and then I catch a phrase with my very limited understanding of Farsi. “Kabab mikonam” (“I make kebab”), he repeats when the mother tiger has entrapped him in domestic service upon discovering she and her cub prefer their meat barbecued.

Despite the language barrier, Hashemi’s physical rendering of every character and event is understandable and hilarious. As he becomes a small-statured Chinese leader, standing on tiptoes to peer over an imaginary counter, one of the translators assigned to our group of foreign visitors leans over to me and whispers, “he is making fun of our former president, Ahmadinejad.” This show exemplified what impressed me about the Iranian theatre I saw during the Fadjr Festival, namely highly skilled performances, a mastery of storytelling and the subtle political jab.

The Fadjr Festival

Now in its 35th year, the Fadjr Festival embodies some of the contradictions of modern-day Iran. It is a state-sponsored festival that marks the return of Ayatollah Khomeini to lead the new Islamic Republic after the 1979 revolution. Tehran also has notable film and music festivals, and a visual arts program that is less notable, not for want of impressive Iranian artists, but their ambivalence towards participating. It seems there would be barriers to establishing an internationally-positioned theatre sector in Iran, such as strained diplomatic relations, the subsequent difficulty for some in travelling in or out of Iran and the extent to which the arts are censored and controlled. However, Iranian theatre practitioners have responded with a focus on developing home-grown talent, while the works themselves engage with contemporary forms, international influences and Iran’s cultural history.

The Unhealable Wound

Theatre as it is known today (as opposed to folk performance of mainly music and poetry) is relatively recent to Iran, dating back about 100 years to the Qajar dynasty’s first embrace of Western culture. The traditions established then involved high melodrama, archetypal characters and the integration of traditional music, which could still be seen in some of the shows in Fadjr, such as The Unhealable Wound directed by Afsaneh Zamani. Its set of four wooden columns and joining platforms evokes Qajar architecture, with sheer curtains suggesting veiling and traditional modesty. The setting is the women’s sanctum of a noble household, however a man has been admitted—a revolutionary in hiding who is also a musician. He and the female protagonist, Malek, build a romance through their love of singing. Malek also plays something of a clown to entertain her sister. In a convoluted plot, the sister also falls for the revolutionary, an older matriarch interferes and Malek, in a fit of jealousy, sells out the man to the police. The acting is over the top—Iran first adopted western dramatic forms when melodrama flourished in Europe—but enjoyable and highly skilled.

The Trumpet of Israfil

There was a definite tendency towards adaptation and appropriation in the festival’s “Stage Plays” program. The production of The Trumpet of Israfil, based loosely on Hungarian novelist Ágota Kristóf’s The Notebook, adopts a European period aesthetic evoking the book’s World War II setting. This was despite the title’s reference to the Islamic archangel Uriel among other culturally incongruent references, like the Priest in his long, black cloak and white clerical collar reading from the Quran. The protagonist is a young boy of about 10, yet he refers to himself as “we” in an ambiguous nod to the twin boy narrators in the book. It is a striking performance from the child actor, Illia Nasrollahi, who observes cruel events with an often chilling blankness or a precociousness inviting laughter. The stage design is quite modern, consisting of a circular platform with a revolving outer section yielding seamless scene changes and at times a sense of travel or time passing. The plot is a watered down version of Kristóf’s novel, omitting rape, violence and paedophilia and employing euphemisms for vaguely salacious events, such as a scene that opens with the affable ‘crazy girl’ waking in the officer’s bed with her heavy lipstick now smeared across her face. The Trumpet of Israfil is a likable and well-crafted example of mainstream theatre.

Diabolic Romeo and Juliet

Diabolic Romeo and Juliet moves into another European tradition, that of the postmodern auteur director, by way of actor turned director Atilla Pessyani and a significant rewriting of Shakespeare’s play (with English surtitles). A traverse stage becomes a road, a no-man’s-land where the warring Montagues and Capulets converge. The cast lie on stage, wrapped in white shrouds and are stirred by a strange priest, seemingly recommencing a cycle of war and death. The families are warring drug barons and small packets of white powder induce a high and erratic state in the young lovers throughout. Juliet is a badass in sparkly gumboots and weapons take on an erotic charge. As they confront each other, Juliet brushes her knife across Romeo’s cheek. Characters killed in various skirmishes return as the undead, puppet-like and, having shed their allegiances, join in with commentary and prophesies of doom. Adding to the dark tone is a live soundtrack in which moody keyboards and rumbling electronic effects are mixed with a traditional bagpipe and a lament sung by one of the actors. Addressing the audience before the show, the director informs us that the actors playing Romeo and Juliet are siblings, making a point of the lengths gone to bypass restrictions like the one forbidding male and female actors from touching onstage.

With most of the 20 international productions in the festival sold out and the seeming impossibility of obtaining a media pass, I joined up with a group of invited European presenters and was taken to almost exclusively Iranian theatre. So it was hard to gauge how overall content was programmed. I did see an outdoor production from a Polish group, directed by Jerzy Zon, which sat somewhere between epic spectacle and avant-garde street theatre. The appetite for European avant-garde was confirmed in a visit by Eugenio Barba to Tehran in the week following the festival that included a workshop program attracting over 400 Iranian students.

Beyond the “Stage Plays” was a program of environmental and public works. These were largely performances on outdoor stages such as the one in the forecourt of the City Theatre set up in the Iranian tradition of Ru Howzi (literally “on the fountain”), in which a public fountain is boarded-over to make a stage, often for lewd, festive comedy.

Butterfly

A more contemporary site-specific work was Butterfly (written and directed by Hossein Tavazonizadeh), performed for three audience members at a time in an abandoned stately building in the centre of Tehran. As we enter we are handed sweets and flowers to give as gifts, suggestive of the conventions of an Iranian marriage proposal. Initially we are cast as guests in a family home, blurring the distinction between the performers (three women and on this occasion a translator) and the audience. As we are led through the rooms, a story unfolds and we slip into roles of confidants and voyeurs. The space is made strange by the arrangement of furniture and detritus, perhaps from the building’s former use, such as a wall piled high with antique computer monitors, which sets the scene. The central character Parvaneh tells us about a boy she wants to marry who has studied IT.

According to the program the work is about the taboos surrounding intellectual disability and autism, however the theme of isolation and fantasy embodied in Parvaneh could apply to anyone trapped in a domestic space or considered an outsider. Butterfly is an intimate experience where the magic of the space is sensitively merged with the company’s poetic storytelling.

The Maids

Aside from consistently full houses at the main stage plays, an indication of the vibrancy of Tehran’s theatre scene was the large “Fadjr Plus” program, showing emerging and experimental works across a number of smaller and independent venues. Despite performance of dance being currently banned in Iran, a production of Jean Genet’s The Maids was billed as being of “body and movement repertoire.” In a series of choreographed exchanges in the dark cavernous space of Da Theatre (once a public bathhouse), two performers (Reyhaneh Nabiiyan and Maral Ostadi) play out the sinister plot of two maids planning to kill their mistress. They feel out the space by running rubber-gloved hands over the brick walls like spiders, crumbling mortar and making dust. Cleaning motions morph into violent and erotic games. There is a little bit of heavy-handed symbolism, but the relationship between the two and to the outside aggressor is clearly established and explored for its tension and drama.

The Fadjr International Theatre Festival reveals the esteem that theatre has garnered in Iran as a valuable means of expression extending rich artistic traditions. There is a sense of theatre craft being mastered, of the harnessing of its social power insofar as is permitted. It was heartening too, to see so much activity from the next generation of performance makers, who will no doubt continue to look for ways to push boundaries.

After playing to full houses at Griffin Theatre Company’s The Stables in 2016, where Karen Therese was artist-in-residence, Tribunal will now play at PYT’s Fairfield home from this week until 11 March. Fairfield is also the Western Sydney home to many of the people—Aboriginal and immigrant—who are the subject of this production. Some of them appear in it and what they have to tell us becomes a call to action.

In “A just hearing in the court of theatre,” I wrote that Tribunal’s Australian Truth and Reconciliation Tribunal, led by an Aboriginal Elder, “is a highly flexible hearing that allows for singing, dancing, re-enactments in which refugees deal with threatening Australian Government officials, and tender accounts of life in their countries of origin and in their new home. Above all, it allows Elder Aunty Rhonda Grovenor Dixon, to herself speak as a witness, providing a point-by-point analogy between the treatment of refugees and our Government’s maladministration of the lives of Aboriginal peoples. When one of the refugees asks if they can tell their story in their own words, Grovenor Dixon replies, ‘It’s theatre, you can do what you like’.”

Presentation is warmly and engagingly informal and the key performers—Grovenor Dixon, two young Afghan Hazaris, Mahdi Mohammadi and Jawad Yaqoubi, and community worker and lawyer Katie Green—are charismatic. Surprise guests and open discussion with the audience add to a sense of shared concern and allow us to identify directly with people we know of, if at all, as the largely anonymous subjects of news reports.

Tribunal reveals the persistent bureaucratic and social hostility with which Aboriginal people and refugees are treated and, for the latter, threats of deportaton for even minor traffic offences. The situation, as revealed by the latest Close the Gap report and the rise of the political right, is not improving, rather it has become more urgent than ever.

I asked Karen Therese about the current significance of Tribunal. She wrote, “It’s been only six months since we performed it at Griffin and the world has changed so much. It feels more important than ever now to listen to the words of Aunty Rhonda and Mahdi Mohammadi and Jawad. In Fairfield right now 6,000 refugees from the Syrian crisis are arriving to be re-settled—6,000 just in Fairfield. It’s big. There are crowds of Syrians and Iraqis in the streets outside PYT when I get my morning coffee. Doing Tribunal in Fairfield gives me opportunities to literally witness the world in action. The neighbourhood here gives me hope. We welcome everyone to visit Fairfield and support the local community.”

In one of Tribunal’s most affecting moments in the 2016 production, Mahdi Mohammadi and Jawad Yaqoubi recounted how they managed to reach Australia, but not their friend Nabi. Karen Therese tells me, “Nabi is on Manus Island, he’s been there for four years now. We send our thoughts and our love to him.”

Tribunal is set to reach a wider audience, Karen Therese tells me that it will be presented at Melbourne’s Arts House in July and before that in June as a “a live art version” at Sydney’s MCA.

PYT, Tribunal, Thurs-Sat, 2-11 March, 7.30pm, The PYT Fairfield Theatre, 19 Harris St Fairfield

It’s like being inside a cloud. The air of the rehearsal room is thick with stage fog, shot through with flickering beams of yellowish light. Choreographer Anouk van Dijk and multimedia artist Ho Tzu Nyen stand near the door, peering into the roiling dimness, watching as dancers fade, vanish and then reappear. This is day two of rehearsals for ANTI—GRAVITY, a new work presented by Chunky Move and Malthouse Theatre for the Dance Massive and Asia TOPA festivals. And clouds are indeed the theme.

Yearning for release

“It’s about the yearning for some kind of release from the gravity-bound body,” explains van Dijk. “The yearning is a curiosity about going beyond.”

The work explores associative links between cloudiness and classical ideas about dancing. Both clouds and dancers can—in manifold ways—be symbolic of lightness and transcendence, and all things rising above and beyond.

“Looking at clouds in the sky makes us think of elevation,” says Ho, “and makes us wish we could fly, but the flipside of that experience is when we realise we can’t ascend, when we feel our flesh, our mortality.”

The remoteness of clouds—their loneliness, as Wordsworth has it—can also be a reminder of the bonds which restrain our yearnings and which bring even the most athletic dancer back to earth. ANTI—GRAVITY therefore proposes a spectacular meeting between stolid earthbound bodies and evanescent and elusory vapours.

The work also addresses more complicated histories of representation, and not only in the context of classical dance.

“The aim,” explains van Dijk, “is to make a work that starts with more representational images about how mankind relates to clouds, and then slowly becomes more experiential, both for the performers and the audience.”

East-West instabilities

Ho Tzu Nyen, a Singapore-based artist who has worked extensively in video, photography and performance, has a special interest in art history, representation and the construction of culture, and his work often dwells on the movement of symbols and myths across cultures and through time. He is fascinated in particular by instabilities, uncertainties and unlikely transformations revealed in these shifts.

“Coming from Singapore,” says Ho, “where Eastern and Western culture is in this complete mesh, that movement is one point of my interests.”

He collaborates frequently with performance makers, and his installation and video work has a distinctive mood of self-aware theatricality. His 2009 video EARTH, a series of post-apocalyptic tableaux in the grand style of Gericault and Delacroix, is typical: it was shot entirely on a theatre stage and painstakingly put together with theatre designers. He has also been involved in a number of theatrical performances that have toured throughout Europe. “But,” he adds, “this is definitely the first time I’ve worked with dance.”

Cloud art

It is not, however, the first time he has made a work about clouds. In 2011 he created a multichannel video installation called The Cloud of Unknowing, recently acquired for the Guggenheim collection (see an excerpt). In a series of vignettes recorded at a derelict apartment building in Singapore, he explored the representation of clouds in art and culture around the world.

Now he is returning to the subject. As groundwork for the creation of ANTI—GRAVITY, Ho provided 30 pages of notes on cloud iconography in art to van Dijk and her team. According to van Dijk, the eight sections of these notes will form eight distinct sections in the dance.

“For a lot of my works, I never ever view that they are finished,” says Ho. “I always wanted to return to clouds. But having already done Cloud of Unknowing, I also didn’t really want to repeat another work with video, and that was what was stopping me a little. So when Anouk and I started having our conversation, it was a perfect opportunity for me to return to this theme.”

And clouds have just as complex a history in dance and theatre as they do in painting. Fogs, fumes, mists and hazinesses of all kind have long been standard theatrical effects. The Elizabethans used different-coloured smoke to suggest the approach of thaumaturgical powers. Seventeenth-century Rome had a device called “the heavenly machine” which was used to create cloud scenes for angelic hosts. And designers for Romantic ballets in the 19th century invented misty Rhineland valleys and vaporous dreamscapes using scrims and painted backdrops to suggest insubstantiality and mystery.

Anouk van Dijk herself frequently uses atmospheric effects. The first work she presented as Artistic Director of Chunky Move, An Act of Now (2012), began with a man in a trench coat standing before a glass-walled house, smoke billowing around him as if he were standing on a fumarole.

On a much smaller scale, her most recent work, Lucid (2016), experimented with dancers, cigarette smoke and video cameras. For ANTI—GRAVITY, however, she’s investigating a broader range of haze effects.

“On stage we’re also going to work with a glaciator and with dry ice,” says van Dijk. “The glaciator sits a little higher off the ground, but it’s just cooled air so it doesn’t leave any residue. It’s very ephemeral. It’s very different to the one that we used in the studio today, which is smoke.”

Other ways of seeing clouds

The Cloud of Unknowing was partly inspired by a semiotic history of clouds in Renaissance and Baroque painting, and the way in which clouds signalled an interruption of the closed, rectilinear space of 15th century perspectival painting.

“Clouds in the Western iconography—we kind of always associate it with transcendence or the presence of the divine, at least in the early Renaissance,” says Ho.

For ANTI—GRAVITY, he plans to focus more on Asian and East Asian art traditions, where, he notes, the symbolic function of the cloud is often quite different. “The way Chinese landscape paintings depicted clouds was by not painting at all, letting the virgin whiteness of the paper shine through,” he says. “That conflation of emptiness with the flux of clouds was something that always fascinated me in Chinese landscapes.”

But how do you inscribe emptiness in a theatre? What’s the performative analogue of nothingness? “That’s something that we’re hoping to find in this session,” says Ho.

The six dancers in ANTI—GRAVITY include Chunky Move regulars Tara Jade Samaya and Niharika Senapati, as well as Luigi Vescio who had a role in both Depth of Field (2015) and Rule of Thirds (2016). There are also three new dancers joining the team: James Batchelor, Marlo Benjamin and Sarah Ronnie Bruce.

“I picked dancers who have very different movement qualities, but they all move very fluid and fast,” explains van Dijk. “That was the common denominator.”

Being a cloud

Ho Tzu Nyen’s Cloud of Unknowing is named after a 14th century monastic text that encourages young students of the divine to acknowledge and accept as inevitable the feelings of doubt that cling like a shadow to the contemplation of God.

An immersion in unknowing is also crucial to Ho’s creative practice, and he admits that he is still not sure how he should define his role in this current project.

“Before coming I was telling myself to try to be like a cloud, just be a little bit amorphous,” he says. “I see myself as at once an observer, like a cloud viewed at a distance, and at other times like the cloud inside, being drawn into all aspects of the production, a vapour slipping in everywhere, whether it’s the lighting design, the projections, the sound design or with the dancers. It’s a bit like contagion.”

“It is,” says van Dijk enthusiastically. “I see Tzu as the cause of the project. Through him everybody gets infected. Maybe that’s how we should describe you in the credits—our contagion?”

Asia TOPA and Dance Massive: ANTI—GRAVITY, Chunky Move, Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, 17-26 March

As each year passes on the festival circuit, I become more aware of dominant trends. There are styles of human performance that cut across disciplines and there are typical ways of revealing spaces. I enter Wallflower by Quarantine (UK) to discover something underway. People are settling into seats around a thrust configuration. Performer Sonia Hughes is in conversation with DJ Greg Akehurst who has set up his gear at a downstage corner of the playing area. Hughes asks him to search for a song on YouTube but can’t quite remember the title. Both performers casually acknowledge the audience but make no special effort to be heard.

When the track is finally found, Hughes gets herself into the groove and recounts the circumstances in which she originally danced to it. The performance carries on like this with Hughes trading memories and dances with two other performers, and sometimes trading banter with a spectator. The search is genuine, unscripted, ‘for real.’ So is the set: an upstage plywood wall has been left in its rough, store-bought state. The performers are just ‘themselves.’

This is a version of the anti-theatrical, anti-illusionist ‘performance of self’ that’s been a staple on the festival circuit for years and traces its lineage to postmodern dance and performance art of the 1960s and 70s, and more recently to the French non-danse movement, lecture-performance and certain strains of documentary theatre. It emphasises the materiality of bodies that are present, and often includes direct address that gestures toward revelation of ‘authentic’ being. It’s been the preferred (but not exclusive) performance style at festivals like PuSh. The scenography in these performances tends to draw attention to the architectural features of a theatre, exposing rather than obscuring the room. In this way a space is allowed to express its bare materiality. This is often aided by a lighting design that favours work-lights, fluorescent tubes, and ‘white’ LEDs that bring out the surface qualities of floors, walls, and performers.

Endurance performance as genre

Sweat Baby Sweat (Belgium/Netherlands) and Folk-S, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? (Italy), both contemporary dance works, employ the scenographic tactics described above. Sweat Baby Sweat features two performers—Kimmy Ligtvoet and Steven Michel stripped down to tight-fitting underwear—in slow-moving feats of deep core strength. For example, Ligtvoet fastens her legs around Michel’s waist and levers herself up, millimetre by excruciating millimetre, to meet his torso. They are lit by a single amber work-light. This makes the dancers’ skin look very skin-like. There’s a fascinating specimen-like quality to their coupling that continues to intrigue for the duration of the show. The wood grain and black paint of the walls are also affectively wood grained and painted black.

Similarly, Folk-S opens with a single light illuminating the upstage-left corner of the theatre. Six performers (five of them ‘real’ Tyrolean “shoe beaters”), barely visible at the darkened centre of the stage, slap out a traditional folk dance on shoe and thigh. The relative darkness focuses my attention on the way the dancers and the large studio produce sound. I listen in a way I don’t normally listen. The lights come up to reveal that the dancers are, astonishingly, blindfolded. They have slap-danced while travelling in a circle, unaided by eyesight. For the next two hours, blindfolds off, they will repeat, in several iterations, the same dance. As explained by one of the performers, the show will end when either the audience or the dancers leave the theatre. Hence another common feature of ‘the real’ at these festivals: genuine physical exhaustion for the dancer, genuine mental exhaustion for the spectator.

This is true of Sweat Baby Sweat: physical effort, rather than virtuosity, is central. Quarantine’s Wallflower, too, asks for mental patience from the spectator while the performers struggle for close to two hours to recall past dances. To be clear, these are not the endurance tests of performance art. Neither the shoe beaters, nor the actors, nor the contemporary dancers will go to their physical or mental limits. Endurance performance in these cases is a genre, a performance style associated with the real.

Performative lecturer as hermaphrodite

Oil Pressure Vibrator by Geumhyung Jeong (South Korea), a lecture performance in which Jeong sits at a laptop and shows video clips on a large screen, also trades in the affects of the real: the room, the table and the screen are just what they are—institutional grey vinyl surfaces. However, unlike the other shows, self-referentiality is disrupted through ironic narration that asks us to alternate between taking things at face value and searching for other meanings. Jeong recounts a journey of trying to increase her sexual pleasure by becoming an “hermaphrodite.” This unfolds through a series of videos in which her male self usually takes the form of a mask attached to a machine such as a vacuum cleaner, while Jeong-as-human-female lies on the floor letting the mask stimulate her. At the conclusion of each video we return to the unadorned surfaces of the studio and to Jeong’s flat, emotionless narrative. The videos are humorously successful until the metaphor becomes clichéd—an excavator with a phallus-like breaker-tip penetrates a sand-sculpture of a woman reclining in ecstasy. It doesn’t take much effort to decipher and there’s only one conclusion to be had.

Presence/meaning balancing acts

The performances described here exemplify what philosopher Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, in his book Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford University Press, 2003), calls “presence effects” and “meaning effects.” Presence effects arise from the spatial relationships and affects of things that are tangible and (relatively) proximal. Rather than interpreting these things, we take them as sensory experience. Of course “meaning effects”—what we think things stand for (their ‘deeper’ meanings)—cannot be banished, because we live in a culture that privileges interpretation. Oil Pressure Vibrator keeps the spectator oscillating between the two—the sensory and the interpretive—through ironic commentary. Sweat Baby Sweat also makes a move toward irony in its final section when, in karaoke style, popular love songs are played and projected on the upstage wall as the dancers linger below. This shifts my attention from the engrossing materiality of the dancers’ relationships to thinking about the choreographer’s somewhat biological take on romance and heterosexual coupling. I find this kind of ironic commentary facile and reductive. I lose interest in what has otherwise been a compelling performance.

Two shows that attempt a middle-ground between spatial affect (the presence effect) and fictional narrative (the meaning effect) are The City and the City by Upintheair Theatre and The Only Animal (Canada) and Concord Floral by Brubacher/Spooner/Tannahill (Canada). The City and the City begins with 60 patrons seated on grey milk crates forming a square around other milk crates arranged in the central playing space. We’ve been given transmitters and are receiving instructions through earbuds. As I listen to a voice talking about a situation in which two cities occupy the same geographical space without knowing each other, half of the spectators get up suddenly and begin walking briskly among the crates. I’m not able to follow the information in my earbuds but I can follow the action.

The balance between spatial affect, 30 people in transit where moments before there had been only inert crates, and the meaning effect—their allegorical status as representations of a state-controlled civilian population—is beautifully accomplished. For the next two hours, however, a stream of text is delivered at an almost unvarying tempo. Individual spectators, following prompts, are called upon to speak parts of the play and take designated positions within scenes, but are not allowed to alter a narrative that races through a dizzying number of story points. The early promise of space-as-main-affect is overwhelmed by a narrative that’s hard to parse. Except in a few inspiring instances, I’m not sure why this play needed such a complex technological and spatial set-up to tell its story.

Concord Floral opens with a huge rectangle of plastic grass on the floor. Wonderfully textured and bright green, it’s very haptic—the visuals evoke sensations of touch. Like the skin of the dancers in Sweat Baby Sweat the grass is very tangible, very right-there. Following a blackout, 10 teenagers appear on the upstage edge of the patch. They are illuminated by that marker of the real, white fluorescent tube lighting. They stare at us, threatening a confrontation. Instead, like The City and the City, we get a play, a ghost story about the cruelty of teenagers and how a particularly naive girl is humiliated by her peers. The fluorescent-lit gaze returns frequently but becomes a mere convention of direct address.

The play is well-crafted if overly symmetrical for my taste (the angst of a teen is directly paralleled by the metaphor of a bird bashing itself repeatedly against a window), but ultimately depends on the psychological-realist quality of the acting, which, given the performers have mostly been recruited from local high schools, is varied. Despite promotional material that claims the youth are demanding “to be seen on their own terms, in a space they have claimed as their own,” it’s hard to see how this is anything other than a play with teen actors representing fictional characters. Both Concord Floral and The City and the City give a nod to spatial affect but seem to prefer the interpretive pleasures of fictional narrative.

Great tragedies have their own naming conventions. When our shorthand term for a disaster is based on time—9/11, the Boxing Day Tsunami—the horror acquires a life cycle, and we can think of the world before and after that moment. When it’s based upon a place, a perhaps more cruel result is that the location becomes frozen in time for those outside of it, and as years pass our imaginations still leap to a moment further and further away from, say, the Chernobyl or Hiroshima or Bhopal of today.

On March 11, 2011, the fourth largest earthquake on record occurred off the north-eastern coast of Japan. The effects were so enormous as to permanently shift the earth’s axis, and a tsunami devastated many hundreds of kilometres of coastline and left more than 18,000 dead or missing. It also led to a catastrophic failure at a nuclear plant requiring the evacuation of a 20-kilometre area. All of this, to many in the West, is collectively termed “Fukushima.” It’s akin to describing the World Trade Centre attacks as “New York.” Or, rather, “North-Eastern US,” since the evacuation zone surrounding the two Fukushima nuclear plants occupied only a fraction of the total area affected by the disaster, yet the name expands the site to the entire prefecture it’s within and, worse, ignores the fact that other prefectures suffered as much carnage and ruin.

It’s telling that two Japanese productions responding to the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami don’t really make reference to the nuclear fallout. Both are by Japanese artists who don’t come from the affected regions, and both draw tense energies from the issues that raises: who has the right to speak of disasters, and what role art can play in the face of such real and widespread sadness? When the works played Melbourne recently, the sense of distance between stage and event was only amplified, but in ways that lead the mind to ponder that problem rather than paving over it with artifice or the placation of fiction.

Kagerou: Study of Translating Performance

Hamanaka Company’s Kagerou: Study of Translating Performance puts the challenge of articulating another’s grief right there in its title. Creator Shun Hamanaka travelled to Hisanohama as a volunteer in the wake of the 2011 earthquake and has been returning since, working with locals in a wide variety of ways to document their experiences and help in rebuilding their community in ways less literal than ordinary infrastructure.

The performance is based on interviews he conducted with a woman whose husband was lost in the tsunami. It’s a verbatim piece, with a single actor performing her words as their recorded version is fed to her via an earpiece (similar to the kind of process local artist Roslyn Oades has pushed in fascinating directions, though in this case much simpler in execution). Richly hued and at times painterly photographs from the town today are projected as her backdrop, providing a fine sense of the region as one that continues to live and grow, and not at all one frozen in time.

When numbers relating to a disaster describe the dead or missing, it’s easy to collapse those categories—it seems profoundly unlikely that someone who went missing on March 11, 2011 will turn up alive today. But as Kagerou gently makes clear, the two are not the same for someone who has lost a loved one. The work’s narrator returns again and again to her need to find at least a bone, and this story squares with many reports describing similar experiences—of people who still comb the beaches today, or learn diving so they can seek for some proof of death on the sea floor. To call this a need for closure is too pat. During Kagerou, this proof of death feels more like the validation of a life.

The title roughly translates as “mirage” and Hamanaka has spoken of how his time in the fishing village led to a moment when it almost appeared as if he could see the vanished town hovering over its broken foundations. The feeling the work produces is similar; we have been offered not a snapshot of a tragedy, but a glimpse of its echo, no more solid than the shimmering light off the harbour waters.

chelfitsch, Time’s Journey Through a Room

Shun Hamanaka’s background is as an architect and he has only recently begun working with performance. Tokyo-based company chelfitsch has a much more established performance history, its work, Time’s Journey Through a Room, building upon a gestural vocabulary that is quite distinctive. Director Toshiki Okada maintains a focus on small, even unconscious movements that are repeated to a point approaching choreography, and the relationship between inner states of being and bodily expression is given curious rendering as a result.

The play’s conceit is simple: a man and a woman are in the first stages of a new relationship, but he is haunted by the ghost of his dead wife, who invisibly observes the action. What unfolds, however, is a more startling challenge to the ways we think about disaster. In the days following the East Japan earthquake, the then-living woman found herself in a state of unbounded joy and hope, as if the catastrophe were a reminder to live a better life. She died of unrelated causes shortly after, leaving her husband to make sense not only of his own grief but of the bizarre call to optimism in the aftermath of unimaginable disaster that his wife’s last days bequeathed him.

The production is minimal, the set mostly composed of items whose functions are abstract: a subtly rippling curtain, a length of tubing occasionally pumping bubbles into a glass of water, a large, rolled-up sheet suggesting anything from a drum barrel to a tree trunk. As the work progresses there is a sense in which the furniture and the room itself are invested with some kind of life, a type of animism, and by its end we may be wondering whether the humans in this space are only half of the story—if we haven’t, in fact, been watching a room’s journey through time.

All of this takes place a long way from Fukushima, or anywhere directly affected by the earthquake. Okada’s story is one of people responding at a distance, just as both he and his audience are. But his themes aren’t of respectful compassion or thoughts and prayers or any of the conventions of sympathy that circulate around disasters. He is confronting us with responses that are harder to process—perhaps selfish, perhaps perverse, perhaps useful, though it’s not clear when or to whom. In an odd way, a lot like grief.

Asia TOPA Festival: Hamanaka Company, Kagerou: Study of Translating Performance, director Shun Hamanaka, performer Yoko Ito; Arts House, 15-18 Feb; chelfitsch, Time’s Journey Through a Room, writer, director Toshiki Okada, performers Izumi Aoyagi, Mari Ando, Yo Yoshida; Arts House, Melbourne, 9-12 Feb

Circa, One Beautiful Thing

If you’re the kind of person who’s clued in to RealTime it’s likely pretty rare that you come across an artform you’ve never even heard of. Hence the considerable buzz surrounding Circa’s recent collaboration with a group of mallakhamb performers: even in the form’s homeland of India, mallakhamb is hardly mainstream stuff, and the almost millennium-old discipline was on the verge of dwindling into extinction until a recent resurgence of interest.

Mallakhamb centres on an imposing wooden pole of the same name, about two and a half metres tall and securely anchored so that feats of balance and strength can be performed around and upon it. There are other modes, including hanging mallakhamb, in which the pole dangles from a rope, and rope mallakhamb, which omits the pole entirely. It’s a fascinating form, not least because it’s not quite like anything else.

It’s often compared with wrestling, martial arts, gymnastics or contortion, but to me the performance styles I was reminded of in Circa’s One Beautiful Thing are bodybuilding and pole dancing. A series of physically impressive poses makes up each routine, performers twisting or straining their bodies into painfully demanding shapes and then holding the pose for the viewer to appreciate. It’s as stripped back as the almost naked men performing, the possibilities of the human form producing the limits of the work’s intent. Director Yaron Lifschitz’s program notes make reference to more transcendental themes throughout the work’s three parts, but for me the sheer materiality of the mallakhamb exerts a dense gravity far more compelling than any metaphors or allusions that might otherwise arise.

It seems a mostly gendered sport, with rope mallakhamb largely performed by women and the polework a male domain. The spectacle of muscularly defined men engaging in a particularly masculine form of pole dancing is a long way from the Western gendering of the same. Not that mallakhamb upsets any familiar divisions of the body and the gaze, culturally camped more as a sport than a dance, but its very division into gendered lines is hard to ignore. Plus, there’s the leg-crossingly visceral moments in which men perform a high-velocity forward flip that impacts the pole at crotch-level, thighs catching them in place to freeze the pose.

The rope mallakhamb performers present more familiar images, their climbing and aerial posturing more seamlessly stitched into the Australian components of One Beautiful Thing. The local contributions seem to complement the Indian elements, focusing on group balance work, rope and strength, but where the overall production falls down is in creating something that is more than the sum of its parts. The various sequences of mallakhamb in several modes are bewitching in themselves, but the more recognisable interspersed circus and dance requires that the audience find the points of connection and departure that justify their inclusion. It’s somewhat like a fascinating conversation that’s just out of earshot.

Next Wave, Lukautim Solwara

The range of voices speaking throughout the Next Wave one-off event Lukautim Solwara (look out for the ocean) is even more impressive—not just from the performers, who include Maori, Pasifika and Aboriginal artists, but from the dialogue between their contributions to the evening and its setting within the current Sovereignty exhibition at ACCA, a wide-ranging collection of works by First Nations people of SE Australia.

Lukautim Solwara could be positioned in a similar space to the club acts that have propelled some of the most interesting performers of this century into prominence, and its individual performances were dispersed throughout the meandering ACCA exhibition space across the course of one night. The event was led by Samoan artist Rosanna Raymond, whose presence throughout the evening was striking and memorable, her quite astonishingly accomplished command of adornment as a way of commandeering the historical visual representations of First Nations peoples was here expanded across the bodies of her collaborators.

The parade of deity-like characters who kicked off proceedings set the tone. Each was an assemblage of parts—grass skirts, body paint, nets, headdresses, armour, pearls—that accumulated to engender a character both mythic in scope and utterly unique. These were characters in both of the contradictory senses of that term, as a universal type and a distinct and solitary individual.

The scattering of these figures across the space produced varied results, from acts that explicitly responded to the existing exhibition (Amrita Hepi’s dance with its costumed echoes of Destiny Deacon and Virginia Fraser’s “Something in the air”) to sequences that could carry just as much resonance without reference to the setting.

Lukautim Solwara was the product of an intense, 10-day period of collaboration and while its one-off nature gave it an ephemeral aspect it was a solid introduction to, or reminder of, a spread of talents of considerable power.

Asia TOPA: Circa, One Beautiful Thing, director Yaron Lifschitz, associate director, producer Ben Knapton, design Libby McDonnell, lighting Jason Organ; Playhouse Theatre, Arts Centre, 16-19 Feb; Next Wave, Lukautim Solwara (look out for the ocean), creator, performer Rosanna Raymond with Léuli Eshraghi, Amrita Hepi, Thomas ES Kelly, Nicole Monks, Steven Rhall, Reina Sutton, Jaimie Waititi; Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 17 Feb

Helen Cole, Breathe; Noëmi Lakmaier, Undress/Redress

Bristol’s IBT was more spread out this year, taking place over five days and making use of more local venues. It was quite impossible to see everything, so easier to be relaxed about what you were missing. I visit Helen Cole’s Breathe in the cellars at Colston Hall and it’s like a talisman containing the essence of the festival, as I sit on a mat of pulsing LEDs listening to invisible dancers surge and pant around me. Another time I pass a lighted cube framing a moment in which Noëmi Lakmaier, an artist with disability and inert for the duration of Undress/Redress, is methodically dressed and undressed by a strapping, fully clothed man. Apart from her eyes there is not a movement she makes of her own volition and yet the lines of power and permission could hardly be more evident.

French & Mottershead, Woodland

Thursday was bitterly cold. I took the bus to Arnos Vale, the big Victorian cemetery, but the venue was next door in the park where IBT staff were gamely shivering and rubbing their fingers in a small pavilion. You couldn’t fault their kind professionalism. I was given a smartphone, headphones, a blanket and a foil-backed camping mat. The app on the phone led me through the bare park, past the winter-bleak playgrounds; a cursor guided towards the activated circle. In Bristol the words “Arnos Vale” are so evocative of peace and memory, the aura of the cemetery still whispered around me. I struggled with my bundles along the path into a sparse patch of woodland. Now I was in the significant circle.

Leaves messed up the muddy ground between trees. I skirted mud, leaves and thorny whippy shoots to find my own little leafy nestling spot. Lying down, I began to listen.

A mature female voice started to tell me, now that I had died, how I was beginning to decay. Blood pooling, temperature dropping: each little step described thoroughly, serenely. I looked up through branches into grey sky and was immersed in this tale of gradual putrefaction. The details were precise, pinned to me with pronouns and possessives: bot flies land and swarm (on me.) Flesh melts, skin blackens, organs ferment (all mine.) I observed, dispassionate.

The voice was self-consciously as soothing as possible. But as I listened, it proved too quiet for this semi-urban location. I heard traffic, lawnmowers, people being loud on their phones, and I lost the words being spoken into my ear. Worse, I began to hear one or two value words, something was named “toxic,” something else was “foul” in some way: it jarred me out of the meditation. I wanted more specificity, and more objectivity, and less direction as to my feelings: ‘How toxic?’ I wanted to ask, ‘To what?’ ‘Why are your badgers more sympathetic than your maggots?’

Time was variable in this account, a minute represented hours, days or years. The seasons turned as the body disintegrated. By the time summer came with a heap of fragile bones, I had slipped more into sympathy with the lesson, which clearly depends on the disposition of the listener to be effective.

Stacy Makishi, Vesper Time

London-based Stacy Makishi is from Hawaii. A small woman, she is waiting for us as we filter into the auditorium. She has a patter going, an ease with the overtures of friendliness, of introductions and making people comfortable. And she has the air of a veteran performer, versed in the vagaries of stand-up, long in the lists of cabaret. Explaining the word ‘vespers’ she promises us something between a memoir and a sermon.

We are an open and generous audience, but surely we expect disruption and deconstruction, not faith and confessional? Still, her persona is charming and chirpy, maybe she can carry us along.

I love her clothes. In her 50s, she is both chic and cute. She has on a white filmy pleated trouser suit with bell sleeves, on her feet scarlet vinyl mules. Her black hair is in a bob and she wears the serious heavy-framed glasses of a young mod. On each side of the stage is a plain black wooden stool. One has on it a white American mailbox with a little red flag. On the floor beside the other is a magnificent pair of iridescent-white plastic high-heeled clogs, sitting there like a promise. At the back of the stage hang white sheets, a curtain of ropes, hooks and sails.

Now Vesper Time begins. We are charmed, teased, coaxed, we do a little audience participation; a promise is made to us, dependent on whether we can join in wholeheartedly. She references family, religion, loss, love and courage, Patrick Swayze and Moby Dick. Makishi uses kitsch tricks, shamelessly invokes the spirit of popular music and cheesy cinema with clips projected onto the white curtain. Our participation is gauged shrewdly, managed expertly, manipulated like a boss. But it is a fair exchange: she has already revealed herself and the ways in which she is vulnerable to us, hardened live art appreciators.

As her reminiscing continues, the ground it covers becomes more difficult and painful. Yet the more vulnerable she is (and she is always funny), the more artifice and skill kick in. The props are versatile; the white curtain, activated, becomes many things. Suddenly on this sparse stage, with masterful puppetry, there is the white whale, there is agony, there is power, there is spirit. The threads of her eloquence, presence and stagecraft have been woven into a shocking, diaphanous apparition—and then, we come back to earth. This time, loving the cheese of it, we can join in with her and Tracy Chapman and sail over that bridge.

Stacy Makishi was transcendent, meticulous, earthy, delicate, cheesy and sophisticated, and she attained the wearing of the most kitschy, the most fabulous shoes.

Project O, Voodoo

Notes are projected in the dark. As I read, I feel familiar. I know this territory, I can recognise these moments and these conversations. It’s a collection of evidence with an inclination towards black consciousness: personal moments, pop culture, landmark events, shocking things, fun things, trivial things. This is the prologue to the piece. Depending on how I relate to this I will be at home with the work or be challenged by it.

We’ve been ushered in by attendants draped in black, we shuffle about to find a seat, sit down and read the slides or whisper to friends.

The two dancers make their way to us in a constrained and systematic series of gestures. They wear white quilted, pleated garments and blocky black high-heeled shoes. They demonstrate a confinement, an entanglement and then a birth. Each emerges with a long steel pin in her hair. White balloons are burst and bones are flung on the floor. They play us, singing, touching, chanting at us.

We are exhorted to retreat to the sides of the room and remove our shoes. The music is insistent, the sound escalating. The dancers themselves are shrieking, whistling, talking and signifying. All instructions have to be repeated till we get it. We are a little slow and it is not at first clear what is noise, what is atmosphere and what is direct instruction. We are urged to our feet, told to claim our space. We are to surrender to the music. We must move and then we must dance. The build-up and instruction are repeated, steps up a hill.

There was darkness, there was pulsing music. I looked up and saw bones suspended on a net above us. It was like being in the bowels of a ship (‘What ship?’ Ask yourselves.) Forced into history, it was we who were the ghosts.

The loud voice said at last, exasperated, “You’re all going to die! So dance!” And since this is true, I perked right up and got into it. Not everybody could, or liked it: about a quarter of us sat this out. But I felt I was somewhere I understood deeply, and I’d not been out dancing for more than a year. So for me, it was a wonderful breakthrough, and I was grateful. Dance like the Devil, for tomorrow you die.

Then there was closure, the lights came up and the music changed, and the two priestesses of this movement danced themselves with some frenzy down the aisle between us till they reached the far wall and sat, still and in darkness, inscrutable, gazing at us as we left. They would work this ritual, two hours twice a day for two days of the festival. They had done an impossible thing, and endured.

Read more about Noëmi Lakmaier’s Undress/Redress as well as another of her works, Cherophobia, in which her immobilised body is lifted by 20,000 helium-filled balloons, and watch a video interview. Stacy Makishi’s body of work is also worth exploring.

In Between Time, IBT17 Bristol International Festival, Artistic Director Helen Cole, Bristol, UK, 8-12 Feb

Find

March 2017

Chamber Landscapes

L’Orfeo

Eighth Blackbird

Gravity & Other Myths, Backbone

L-E-V, Killer Pig and OCD Love

Jérôme Bel, Gala

Crystal Pite & Jonathan Young, Betroffenheit

Restless Dance Theatre, Intimate Space

Wot? No Fish!!

Shooting the revolution

Ethics and deep memory

Funding the VR frontier

Fidelity

Kissing and touch

Scene by design

The opera dances

What the opera said

Back to Back Theatre, Lady Eats Apple

Antony Hamilton & Alisdair Macindoe, Meeting

The image

Time frames

The thriller, the televisual & non-people

About us

A Documentary Envisions a Book James Baldwin Never Finished

The Goldfinch, a bird’s eye view

Dream Study (Hibernation) by Kamil Franko

The Invention of Empathy: Rilke, Rodin and the Art of “Inseeing.”

Migrants with mobiles: Phones are now indispensable for refugees.

For Film’s Sake

Audience-building

Unexplored avenues, new models

Melbourne Women in Film Festival

Simone Truong, (To) Come and See

Amrita Hepi, Jahra Wasasala, Passing

Pearl River Delta Dance

Dmitry Krymov Laboratory, Opus No. 7

Crystal Pite & Jonathon Young, Betroffenheit

Gregory Maqoma, Exit/Exist

Amy Sharrocks, Museum of Water

Lara Thoms and Snapcat, Before the Siren

Lola Arias, The Year I Was Born

Nic Green, Cock and Bull

Forced Entertainment, Real Magic

Rachael Young, Out

Rachael Clerke; Cuncrete; Lucy McCormick, Triple Threat

600 Highwaymen, The Record

Dickie Beau, Lost in Trans-

The Fadjr Festival

The Unhealable Wound

The Trumpet of Israfil

Diabolic Romeo and Juliet

Butterfly

The Maids

Yearning for release

East-West instabilities

Cloud art

Other ways of seeing clouds

Being a cloud

Endurance performance as genre

Performative lecturer as hermaphrodite

Presence/meaning balancing acts

Kagerou: Study of Translating Performance

chelfitsch, Time’s Journey Through a Room

Circa, One Beautiful Thing

Next Wave, Lukautim Solwara

Helen Cole, Breathe; Noëmi Lakmaier, Undress/Redress

French & Mottershead, Woodland

Stacy Makishi, Vesper Time

Project O, Voodoo

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