In a time when so much arts critical writing is under threat, Lauren finds inspiration in seeing how things were done in the past. The digitised version of UK’s Performance Magazine (1979-1992) was launched in Hull in March and will have a London launch on 27 April. The resulting website is a huge trove of energy and information, archiving 15 years of live, performance, technological and weird art. Even just at the level of design, it’s a wonderful resource, but it also shows how artists of yesterday answered questions that are still being pondered today. Consider this writer’s contemplation in issue 5, 1980, of what technological art can achieve in a “country of unichannel monochrome.”
“When artists use new technology, are they being gimmicky, boring, or are they just doing what comes naturally? If you put video art on television will everyone switch off? Will performance art, as the New Musical Express suggests, be the pop ‘thing’ of the eighties. Have the long succession of tapes watched in back rooms of small galleries merely provided groundwork for the Kenny Everett Video show, Top of the Pops and Saturday morning children’s fun shows? These are questions I ask myself as I stand perusing the ‘Computer Art’ display (this exhibit out of order) in the Science Museum on a Sunday afternoon, prompted by memories of keen technology fever as a bright eyed ten year old innovation fanatic sweating over suggestions of ‘Three-Dee Colour TV’ in a country of limited unichannel monochrome.”
The Games
The ABC iView gods have bestowed something amazing upon us: John Clarke’s classic mockumentary sitcom The Games (Series 1, 1998). Each episode critiques a standard format of political performance and language—the press conference, the talkback radio interview, the government TV advertisement. All up, it amounts to a forensic dissection of the bullshit theatre of contemporary politics.
Poet of Science, Diane Stanley
Who are our cultural heroes? And how do writers and artists represent them? Maria Popova’s website Brain Pickings has a great piece on the beautifully illustrated children’s book Ada Lovelace, Poet of Science, by Diane Stanley for ages 4-8. The illustrations, by Jessie Hartland, are witty and deft in their characterisation of the world’s first computer programmer and her contributions to science and technology. Here’s a bite of Popova’s commentary:
“One of the most interesting and timeless aspects of Lovelace’s story is that her foray into programming bore the mark of what Albert Einstein called ‘combinatory play,’ which he considered the key characteristic of how his mind worked and which bespeaks the combinatorial nature of all creativity—the ability to connect the seemingly unconnected by cross-pollinating questions and insights across disparate domains to create something entirely novel.”
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RealTime issue #138 April-May 2017
Raw
A brutally perceptive portrait of adolescent transformation, Julia Ducournau’s Raw is a symbolically rich experience, replete with multiple cultural references. Following the unworldly Justine (Garance Marillier), cossetted daughter of a family of vegetarians, as she embarks on her studies at a prestigious veterinary college, the film recalls a range of bloody coming of age tales in which a young woman’s innocence is lost during the emergence of a true, monstrous self.
There’s Carrie (1976), of course—a scene in Raw where all the first year rookies are ritually drenched in pig’s blood echoing its heroine’s infamous humiliation—as well as the Soska sisters’ American Mary (2012), whose protagonist, a talented medical student, turns down a much darker surgical path after her studies are derailed in a grave betrayal of trust.
Also pertinent is American Mary’s spiritual antecedent, the 2000 cult black comedy Ginger Snaps (a film of personal significance to the Soskas as well as Katharine Isabelle, star of both films), about sisters grappling with the combined hassle of puberty and lycanthropy. Then there are the subversive heroines of Angela Carter’s 1979 short story collection The Bloody Chamber, who shed their skins to become killers and wild animals. The list could go on.
In Raw’s production notes, Durcournau names the Marquis de Sade’s Justine, her character’s namesake, as a key influence. A lamb to the slaughter, de Sade’s orphaned heroine must endure a host of sexual cruelties over 15 years, in the face of which she maintains her essential moral fortitude. Ducournau uses the theme of the corruption of innocence to create sympathy for her main character, to magnify her degradation and—in divergence from de Sade—to act as a foil for the obscenity of her emergent true self. “Juju” is the baby of the family, the brainiac, far more naïve than her louche older sister, Alexia (Ella Rumpf), a senior at the same vet school.
The film plays up Marillier’s childlike appearance and mannerisms: her eyes like saucers and a brow that furrows in hurt surprise when confronted with the callousness of college hazing. Our own innocent assumption, and Justine’s, that an institution such as a veterinary college will be caring, is undermined by the reality of the bastardising culture within—a culture ultimately surpassed by Justine’s individual transgression.
Raw
Raw’s abundant body horror is graphically connected to ingestion, as Justine’s body violently rebels against certain substances while compulsively craving others. It’s the horror of eating disorders (after vomiting up quantities of her own hair, Justine is given friendly advice in the toilets by a bulimic classmate). It’s horror that alludes to the societal curtailment of women’s appetites, for food and otherwise; unsurprisingly, when Justine’s craving for meat reaches its cannibalistic zenith, it’s inextricably linked to her sexuality.
Raw’s French title is Grave, meaning serious, heavy—a weightiness emphasised by passages of Grand Guignol stylisation that accentuate the film’s symbolism. When Justine takes up residence in the vet school, she moves from sunny normality into a quasi-nocturnal world of dimly lit corridors and labs inhabited by trussed-up animals. Scenes of student hedonism, such as the improvised on-site nightclub where a toy lamb hangs by its neck, are saturated in lurid monochromatic light. Composer Jim Williams’ organ motif lends extra weight to key moments, as does the mellow Baroque lighting that transforms the more tender moments between Justine and Alexia and the disconcerting animal tableaux of Justine’s nightmares.
The gravity of Justine’s situation, of the struggle between human caring and her all-consuming cannibalistic urge, is never downplayed nor simplified. This is serious horror indeed: multilayered, rich and strange.
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Raw, writer, director Julia Ducournau, cinematographer Ruben Impens, editor Jean-Christophe Bouzy, music Jim Williams, art director Laurie Colson, distributor Monster Pictures, 2016
A set of subversive figures populating Rogue Agents—a performance night and workshops curated by London-based artist-led organisation Auto Italia South East—sought to explore “fictional, esoteric and latent modes of self-representation” at Sydney’s Firstdraft. Cyborgs, body hackers, trans identities and chthonic ones were key figures in this project to find agency in new modes of technological shapeshifting, and appeared in multifarious guises throughout the night.
Projected above the courtyard and overlooking a solid crowd drawn by the line-up of international guests and local artists, a bald, pointy-eared woman of impossible proportions walked confidently through empty space. This glamorous yet Gollum-like figure was one iteration of Ursula, a character devised by Auto Italia and CGI-rendered by Pablo Jones-Soler in three Hi-NRG EDM videos punctuating Auto Italia’s performance piece —also titled Rogue Agents—in the darkened upstairs gallery.
Here, a Lycra-clad trio recounted the total collapse of their earthly environment, “a dense mesh grid of bodies, metal, concrete and production,” and their encounter with the interplanetary Ursula, who, after accessorising with body mods (her mirrored eyes a wink, perhaps, to William Gibson’s Neuromancer), takes the group to dance on Planet B, to “dissolve into a common” of disembodied bliss or, in their embodied state at Firstdraft, into the crowd to dance. Jones-Soler’s videos flashed on multiple screens as dance music burst through the space.
“RECONNECT / LOVE / BE INFINITY TOGETHER / CAN YOU FEEL IT / TRANSCEND YOUR HORIZONS / TRANSFORM YOUR NETWORK / FLOW ACHIEVED
Rogue Agents Performance, Auto Italia South East
photo Catherine McElhone, courtesy Firstdraft
Rogue Agents Performance, Auto Italia South East
Unsure of the tone being sought in this mix of performance and media, this energy wasn’t successfully transferred to the crowd, who, rather than spontaneously segueing into a rave at the end, shuffled downstairs to see what else was going on. Maybe Sydney is too sunny for dystopian transcendence. Though humorous in parts, the second staging of Rogue Agents that evening was received by sections of the audience—perhaps used to the comedic strain in local performance practices—as an all-out comedy.
Auto Italia South East’s name is derived from its first location, a huge former Alfa Romeo showroom in south-east London that allowed the organisation to stage impressive large-scale projects like Auto Italia LIVE (2010-12), an online live-streamed program produced on a fully-functioning television studio set in the space, and this emphasis on high production values and collaborative, event-based projects has carried through into more recent work. At the open workshops conducted during the week, successfully bringing together project artists and others for generative discussions, the curators worked to produce a large backdrop banner for Rogue Agents depicting a female cyborg framed by fragmentary phrases developed during these conversations.
Screenshot, Linda Dement, Rogue Agents
photo Catherine McElhone courtesy Firstdraft
Screenshot, Linda Dement, Rogue Agents
These phrases also became the foundation for Linda Dement’s code-based work displayed in the downstairs gallery, part of a temporary exhibition assembled for the evening, where the words flashed and echoed onscreen in an endless cycle: “faggot witch / biopolitical bitch boy /molecular fork / evoke aberration / placebo + fiction / mummy molecule / true state / pharma-penetration / some people mutate / get over it…”
In the adjacent gallery housing Spence Messih’s minimal but striking installation Slow Dance, thin copper poles reached from floor to ceiling. Any dance with these delicate structures would have to be slow and careful indeed. Skewing the assumption that the dancer would be a cis female performing her sexualised gender were empty sachets of Testogel littering the floor at the base of each pole. Developed as a testosterone replacement therapy for men, the dermal gel has been appropriated by medical and trans communities to help break the binary of cis gendering, acting, as Paul Preciado puts it, as a “molecular prosthesis” for a transgendered identity.
On the basketball courts behind Firstdraft, a different display of queer athleticism played out in a surreal and beguiling battle and display of strength between Sydney dancers Angela Goh and Bhenji Ra. Strapped into climbing harnesses over stubbies and with Pippi Longstocking braids, black lipstick, large pointed ears (Ursula again?) and spray-on tans betrayed by discarded bikini tops, Goh and Ra scaled the fences and basketball hoops with ropes and carabiners before performing what can only be described as a choreographed rope-jumping sequence with BDSM undertones. With their mobile phones blaring competing dance FM stations, the soundtrack evoked a gym or building site, often hyper-masculine zones where bodies are pushed to peak performance. To finish, Goh and Ra came together and held bodybuilding poses for the crowd, relishing the gaze of the circle surrounding them.
Rogue Agents was Firstdraft’s first international exchange, supported by all three levels of government (and project funding from the Keir Foundation). It’s satisfying to see the organisation growing evermore ambitious in its programming. With the now proven capacity to facilitate such an exchange of ideas, practices and working models, we can look forward to seeing who they’ll next bring from over the horizon.
Bhenji Ra and Angela Goh, Rogue Agents Project
photo Catherine McElhone courtesy Firstdraft
Bhenji Ra and Angela Goh, Rogue Agents Project
Firstdraft: Rogue Agents, a project by Auto Italia South East in collaboration, artists Holly Childs, Linda Dement, Angela Goh, Mette Hammer Juhl + Lorenzo Tebano, Spence Messih, Bhenji Ra, Victoria Sin, Pablo Jones-Soler; performances also featured Veronica Baric, André Shannon, Erica Englert, Athena Thebus, Jana Hawkins-Anderson; Firstdraft, Sydney, 28 March-1 April
A melancholic air hangs over the tumbleweed town of Kandos, population 1,284, in regional New South Wales. “For Sale” signs haunt the gardens of dozens of fibro and weatherboard houses. Many shops on the town’s main strip are closed. This empty, unrepaired air is apparent before you even arrive: you learn that coach services run only once a day since the trainline was decommissioned in 2007; you make numerous unreturned calls to the proprietors of the few motels and pubs.
This is the unlikely site of Cementa Contemporary Arts Festival, established in the long shadow of the cement plant that closed in 2012. So embedded was the industry in the town’s history that its name was originally Candos—an acronym based on the names of the founding members of the Board of NSW Cement, Lime and Coal Co Ltd, which christened the town in 1914. The largest industry is now the public school system.
How do you build a biennial art event in a dying town? What can art offer a place like Kandos? And what exactly is the relationship between Cementa and the town and townspeople? These questions recurred, almost intrusively, in my mind and in conversations over four days in Kandos exploring a program of over 60 artists working in sound, performance, installation, photography and sculpture in 20 different venues ranging from a garage at the CWA to the Kandos Museum.
A Galaxy of Suns, Michaela Gleave, Cementa 2017
photo Ian Hobbs
A Galaxy of Suns, Michaela Gleave, Cementa 2017
A Galaxy of Suns
For me, the festival was most energised and effective when it related directly to the general population of Kandos. A Galaxy of Suns was one of two choral-based performances that directly engaged Kandos’ seniors and their interest in singing. It tracked the rising and setting of stars, with Kandos at the centre of the universe. Real-time data was translated into musical notes and piped via a smartphone app into the ears of townspeople who sang individual tones while arranged around the perimeter of the community hall. Draped in silver Eyes Wide Shut-like capes, the singers were intensely focused and evidently proud of their performance. The audience, seated on the floor in the middle of the space, listened for 40 minutes and watched as neon ‘Northern Lights’ cast the singers’ shadows against the high, barn-like ceiling—a relaxing and embracing experience, conjured by visual artist Michaela Gleave, composer Amanda Cole and new media artist and programmer Warren Armstrong.
The resident I was billeted with, Bronwen, a retired nurse and passionate painter, came into this work expecting a more traditional choral approach, but came out with a sense of wonder about how the human voice could be included in contemporary art projects: “It was so interesting!” she said, “I could never have conceived of what those artists did!”
Wiradjuri Murriyang, Scott Towney, Cementa 2017
photo Lauren Carroll Harris
Wiradjuri Murriyang, Scott Towney, Cementa 2017
Wiradjuri Murriyang
This turned out to be one part of a successful stream of the festival program: collaborative works that connected the tiny town with grander celestial or ecological themes, giving Kandos its own place in the cosmos. Like Lynette Wallworth’s recent video installation, Coral, at Carriageworks, Scott Towney’s Wiradjuri Murriyang (Wiradjuri Sky World), was a video projected inside a large dome. I lay on the floorboards of the community hall and watched 24 hours of sunrise to sunset compressed into three minutes. Over the stars, Towney had drawn his own versions of Wiradjuri constellations in white linear forms: Baiame (the creator), an eagle, a serpent. The piece really captured the way the Earth moves in a way you rarely think about or see represented visually. There is a problem: although the video of the stars is based on the Kandos night sky, the landscape at the work’s perimeter is a generic one, an image of the French countryside derived from the automatic inputs of the program Stellarium in which the work was rendered.
But in concept, Towney’s work reminded me that everything in Australia has a secret Indigenous history and the stars are no exception. Like every society, Aboriginal nations had astronomical systems; theirs mapped the constellations and the negative spaces between them, weaving that material knowledge into each nation’s stories, morals, laws and navigational systems. “Those systems have not been destroyed,” said Towney’s work. Wiradjuri Murriyang is an instruction to art audiences that Indigenous notions of ecology are not just about the land; they extend through the air to space, encompassing globe and universe, and in that sense are well-suited to a spherical frame rather than a rectangular one.
Pagoda Parkour
Presented by Fairfield’s Powerhouse Youth Theatre, Pagoda Parkour was successfully sited in Ganguddy, in Wollemi National Park, 30 minutes from Kandos. The area is gorgeous, with a river and large mystical boulders scattered around. The six performers of Dauntless Movement Crew were skilled and charismatic; the choreography (by Victoria Hunt) moved from strong tableaux of the performers high in the ancient landscape and accelerated in pace and dynamism to the point where the crew were running and jumping off three-metre cliff-faces and somersaulting over big piles of dirt. I turned from the performance to the audience to see mainly locals and their children, gazing with pure rapture. I guessed the kids had never before thought of art in these terms. Not only did PYT make the work over five days at Ganguddy, but they conducted parkour workshops at the local high school over the course of a month—a great example of the festival implanting itself in meaningful ways in the community and landscape of the area.
Tony Albert installation
image courtesy Cementa 2017
Tony Albert installation
Tony Albert
The larger works, backed by the brains of organisations and teams of artists, often provided the most engaging and well-contextualised moments of the festival. Artists cannot be part of the Cementa program unless they have been in residence at lead curator Ann Finnegan’s Kandos Projects or made work that relates to the region, but that wasn’t always apparent from the placement and development of individual artists’ works. Two pieces by solo artists left lasting impressions. Conceptual artist Tony Albert is preoccupied with the ways that 20th century artists have represented Aboriginal people in cliched, racist and naive ways. For Cementa, he collected objects within that tradition—vintage service trays, golliwog-like figurines—and transformed them into absurd contemporary works by installing them as sculptures in geometric compositions in the Honeytree Cafe. The colonialist legacy that Albert ironises is ever-present in Kandos: a sign at the perimeter of the town declares its foundation in 1914, with no mention of the Wiradjuri nation that predated it by 60,000 years. The charity store on Angus Avenue stocks any number of $2 prints of paintings in a bland European style that render the bush unrecognisable. Albert’s work plugged an important gap in the festival program, by critiquing overtly racist elements of Australian art history.
Untitled (Wire No. 5), Paul Greedy, Cementa 2017
photo Ian Hobbs
Untitled (Wire No. 5), Paul Greedy, Cementa 2017
Paul Greedy
Paul Greedy’s Untitled (Wire No.5) epitomised what site-responsive work is all about. Inside disused cement mill equipment—a giant horizontal cylinder with gaps so that you could walk straight into it—Greedy installed a single piano wire. Bounced by the wind, it played a single note, and also picked up radio transmissions from time to time. Installed in an off-street location outside Kandos Museum, its purpose was to deliver a site-specific work not for a gallery-going audience but for the public. It was complete.
An absent hub
In Futurelands2, a publication circulated at the festival, artist Ian Milliss writes that the first iteration of the event in 2013 “was born of an optimism that the active attention of artists could somehow change the future of Kandos for the better.” True, but a festival also incurs a cost: if it doesn’t have the bricks-and-mortar infrastructure to sustain a four-day event, that infrastructure must somehow be created and developed. This issue became deadly apparent by Sunday afternoon, when all of Angus Avenue’s bins were overflowing. Presently, accommodation for visitors is sparse and the festival failed to secure space for a temporary camping ground. Festival attendees were dispersed all the way out to Mudgee, some 60 kilometres away, and getting to and around Kandos without a car can be very difficult indeed. That means a critical festival mass—the feeling that we’re all in this together—was rarely reached. A festival without a hub leaves its attendees stranded and isolated. My mother and sister attended Cementa15 and describe pulling into the main (and only) strip thinking, ‘There’s a festival here?’
How else might the attention of artists transform Kandos? Cementa’s Land+Art residency is an attempt to go beyond the festival’s four-day duration and create a broader impact; it’s not strictly a contemporary art project, but this year artist Gilbert Grace tried to obtain a licence for local sequence-farmer Stuart Andrews to grow a crop of low-THC industrial hemp to aid the production of a bamboo-hemp bicycle as a form of low-cost transport for the area.
With the leadership of incoming artistic director Bec Dean, alongside Alex Wisser and Christine McMillan, whose efforts have fuelled Cementa through its first three iterations, this cross-section of art thinking and ecological-cultural impact is an interesting one; I’m curious to see how the residency develops and if it can achieve resonant outcomes. Cementa sets itself high goals. After all, a festival is not just about the art, but everything around it: the experience, the environmental and community contexts, the stop-and-chats on the street, the sense of belonging and purpose that we are all going somewhere together, constructing some kind of future that has space for us.
Cementa17, Contemporary Arts Festival, lead curator, Ann Finegan, curator, marketing, projects Alex Wisser, curator, administrator Christine McMillan, Kandos, NSW, 6-9 April
Still from Nebuchadnezzar video experiment, Trevor Flinn, Bundanon residency
courtesy the artist
Still from Nebuchadnezzar video experiment, Trevor Flinn, Bundanon residency
Based in the small western Victorian town of Dunkeld, Trevor Flinn is an idiosyncratic cross-media and socially engaged artist whose “observations of place often play out in tangential responses involving non artists and the re-working of everyday objects in ‘live art’ events staged in unusual settings” (Bundanon website).
Since 2010, Flinn has created works for Next Wave and a variety of regional festivals, often working with locals and focusing on the characters and lore of place. He has also helped develop TWIG, a partnership with Australia’s Creative Rural Economy (ACRE—artists on farms) that saw him work with farming families in the Mallee region around Swan Hill and Esperance.
On 7 April this year, Flinn texted a friend: “I’m currently mid-way through a dream residency at Bundanon. Something that came out of the blue and something very timely. I found last year pretty taxing in some ways so nice to recharge and stir up the creative juices again…[It’s] very inspiring and rejuvenating. The country here practically hums with creative possibilities.
“I’ve been roaming the bush, amongst the undergrowth and generally getting close to the earth. Up early for yoga/run/swim/walk and regular drawing practice. Bliss…The animal, mineral and vegetable life is phenomenal. A magic spot indeed.”
The following is Flinn’s generous response to RealTime’s request for an account of his experience of his stay at Bundanon.
From Trevor
“The country here practically hums with creative possibilities,” seems to sum up my time at Bundanon. From the moment I arrived I felt the surge of energy and enthusiasm that accompanies the creation of new work.
I had come with a plan to tap into the farming side of Bundanon and focus, among other things, on the abundant weed varieties in the area, including the infamous Lantana Camara, a weed of national significance. However, it wasn’t long before the place started to work its own peculiar magic on me and the solid plans I had concocted months ago evaporated. My comfortable digs and spacious adjoining studio space demanded that I nestle in and embrace the incredible countryside around me.
At first it seemed enough simply to greet the sun with an early morning dip in the Shoalhaven, or commune with the wombats on quiet bushwalks in the golden light of the late afternoon, but before too long I felt myself becoming increasingly drawn to the landscape that Arthur Boyd made his own, and compelled to respond intuitively to my surroundings.
I soon fell into a daily routine which included yoga, exercise, porridge, drawing and walking. I found myself collecting sticks and stones, fashioning crude animals from handfuls of collected clay, photographing and videoing myself in the guise of Nebuchadnezzar, Narcissus and Christ on the cross. There seemed to be no end to the creative possibilities…
At a certain point I even seemed to be channelling the great man himself. I made a stretcher from purloined tree stakes and primed a large piece of material using melted granules of rabbit skin glue. I set myself up under a tree on the banks of the Shoalhaven and as the late afternoon light turned the rocks on the opposite bank a warm pink, I attempted to capture the scene in paint which I smeared across the canvas in a wild frenzy.
The Easter weekend suggested to me the possibility of creating a small ‘artistic intervention,’ so I set about clearing a tiny piece of lantana-infested bushland that could only be reached by crawling along a series of wombat tunnels. Like Alice in her proverbial Wonderland I discovered a secret place safe from intruders, surrounded by scented flowers, home to countless grass tics, hungry leeches and fat little glow worms that would respectively feast on my blood and light my way home. I lit a small ceremonial fire in the middle of the clearing, and as the full moon rose and the Milky Way crept around the sky a strange calmness descended upon me.
After waiting for my fire to go out I returned to ‘civilisation,’ leaving behind a small pile of ashes and little wombat effigy that I had fashioned from mud and sticks. These humble offerings to the land would quickly melt into the soil and be swallowed up by the lantana and, like countless visitors before me, my time at Bundanon would become but a distant memory.
I feel privileged to have experienced the unique gift that Arthur and Yvonne Boyd left behind. Their generosity and foresight has enabled so many to share in the delights of a landscape that both nurtures and inspires. The creative outpouring that occurred during my visit reminded me why I have devoted myself to the process of art-making and how important it is to remain present and open to what is right in front of you.
Located in NSW’s Shoalhaven region, the Bundanon Trust property is treasured by artists, locals and its many visitors. For artists, it provides the all too rare opportunity in Australia (compared with the US and Europe in particular) to find not just creative refuge but also inspiration in the glorious natural surrounds of what was once the home of Arthur and Yvonne Boyd who so generously bequeathed it to the nation.
To gauge the appeal of Bundanon, I approached four recent resident artists: actor William Zappa, choreographer Rhiannon Newton, Next Wave Artistic Director Georgie Meagher (with a team of mentors and emerging artists, curators and producers) and artist Trevor Flinn INTERNAL LINK. Their experiences might tempt you to apply for a residency (applications for 2018 open 27 April and close 19 June) and escape everyday intrusions, and if you’re concerned about keeping in touch, I’m told that Bundanon’s new microwave tower now provides faster internet than most places in Sydney.
William Zappa
A leading Australian stage actor with Australia’s major theatre companies for over 40 years, screen performer and maker of his own performances, William Zappa’s recent stay at Bundanon has allowed him unfettered time to work on his rendition—drawn from a variety of translations and delivered with iambic pentameter “as its base rhythm”—of Homer’s The Iliad, soon to be seen at Canberra’s Street Theatre, 28-30 April. Zappa writes:
“The great thing about going to Bundanon has simply been the chance to work on my project, and that alone. There are none of the distractions associated with being at home. Everything about being here is about what you’re working on—in my case, an adaptation of The Iliad. A big project. I like the spaciousness of Bundanon, not only the studios, but the environment as well. There’s thinking space, which means that when I get stuck with a particular passage and have a real struggle finding my own words for it, I can go outside and walk in a completely different environment from when I’m at home. Again, no distractions. Except for the beauty you’re surrounded by, which seems to clear the head of any blocks and, as I’ve experienced several times, helped find solutions.
“Then there’s the chance to share with other people, who are all here trying to solve problems or explore possibilities with their creativity. It’s great to chat about what one is doing, sometimes to share a meal and a drink together, but always knowing that you can just be all alone with your own struggle.
“I’ve been to Bundanon three times now and the struggle I’ve had while there has helped me get much more of my adaptation completed than would have been possible at home. Something I’m really grateful for.”
Rhiannon Newton, Bundanon residency
photo Heidrun Löhr
Rhiannon Newton, Bundanon residency
Rhiannon Newton
Sydney-based dancer and choreographer Rhiannon Newton is focused on ” the relationship between the live-ness of dance and the process of repetition, problematising how humanity’s innate dancing spirit meets economies of production and authorship.” In a residency earlier this year, she worked with dancers Bhenji Ra and Ivey Wawn, performer and musician Julian Wong and musician-composer Bree van Reyk on Bodied Assemblies prior to the work’s premiere at the 2017 Dance Massive.
This is Newton’s third Bundanon residency. She says, “It’s a very special place to work, the freedom to concentrate and being in nature—there’s nothing but the work you need to do. There’s something very special when you’re out in the landscape and everything becomes more open and porous and ideas arise in different ways.”
Asked about how much time she spends outdoors at Bundanon, Newton says, “I follow my nose. I usually go for one big walk each day or a trip down to the river. I try to resist being too strict with myself while I’m there—the impulse to work produces itself quite easily. There’s a balance between the two.”
In 2015 and 16 Newton’s residencies were with dancer and choreographer Angela Goh: “We’d work on our own projects but support each other in doing them. This year, in the two weeks leading up to my Dance Massive premiere, a few of the dancers came when they could, but the focus was on finalising the text for my program note, editing video trailers and identifying and working through aspects of the work that needed a bit of problem solving, conceptually and in the studio. It was kind of weird doing all of this production management in the bush, but it was really great.”
As for the reception to Bodied Assemblies at Dance Massive, Newton says that for a young choreographer “it was a fairly intense scenario in which to launch a work,” but that she received “beautiful feedback and the work seems to have resonated with some people and less so with others, which is to do with the nature of the work which includes repetition and highly structured game-like improvisation and requires a level of patience.” I ask if Bundanon shored her up for Dance Massive. “Yes,” she exclaims,” It’s such a treat to have that kind of focused working space; it’s rare and very special.”
Next Wave Bundanon residency
photo courtesy Next Wave
Next Wave Bundanon residency
Georgie Meagher, Next Wave
For Next Wave, the national, emerging artists’ festival, Bundanon provided an ideal location to bring together artists from across Australia who are part of Kickstart Helix, the organisation’s year-long program of creative and professional development and workshops for the 2018 Next Wave Festival.
Artistic Director Georgie Meagher experienced a sense of privilege: “You feel so lucky when you’re there—to be the recipient of such a gift. We were at Riversdale in the spectacular building that overlooks the river. There’s an amazing sense of distance from the everyday, that allows for incredible conversations and work to happen. It’s brilliant, with little visitors—wombats and roos hopping by. We also did a number of exercises that involved walks and being in the bush and near the river. Talking about land, about country, about place feels like it comes more naturally when you’re in such a beautiful spot.
“Each day we ‘connected’ with country in ‘rituals,’ different forms of meditation, which was really important not just for the Aboriginal artists. I think we were constantly wanting to acknowledge our sense of privilege—to give back to country while we’re on it. These ‘rituals’ were generally centred around the Shoalhaven River, thinking about how it connects with ideas of depth, in water systems under the ground, and to where we’ve come from and where we might be going. It was a very grounding way to start the morning.”
With a residency comprising a large group of artists, including those visiting and Next Wave staff, ranging around 31-33 daily, Meagher explained how each day was timetabled. “We would come together in the mornings and then generally break up into smaller groups, come back together to share what had been discussed and also have opportunities for one-to-one discussion. That discussion was generally done through the walks where one person talks non-stop for 10 minutes, the other person just listens, and then they swap.
“Cooking together was also very important, a fundamental moment for connection and informal discussion and sharing. We had teams each night, making different meals and sharing stories about families and experiences of cooking.”
I asked if there a specific focus of the residency was on developing the commissioned works for the 2018 festival. Meagher explained, “Some of the projects are quite well-formed and others less so. What we tried to do was to focus on ways of thinking, principles by which to make work. There was also some sharing of skills via peer-to-peer learning and with several guest artists: Latai Taumoepeau and Angela Goh came for a day that was themed around care—care for yourself, for your collaborators, your audiences. I think that was a really important conversation for everyone to be having when embarking on such significant projects as they all are.”
I asked Meagher how she felt at the end of the six days of intensive discussion and workshopping of ideas. “I felt elated. I hadn’t met some of the artists before; our Creative Producer Erica McCalman had done some of the travel and meetings involved while I’d been doing other things. Just being able to have in-depth conversations that are separate from the minutiae of everyday life allows you to really dig quite deeply into participants’ ideas and processes, their ways of thinking. It allowed us to understand these artists so much better, to think about who we might connect them with and how we can give them support over the next 12 months towards the festival.”
We all know that the web has forever transformed the way that films reach us by shifting eyes from the cinema to video-on-demand. But how is the distribution of video art changing in a digital age? Thanks to the internet, we’re able to access a mammoth quantity of film works within a few clicks. The sheer volume is deceptive; we persist with the illusion of a well-nourished collective media diet. But services like Netflix, which currently dominates the Australian streaming landscape, consistently push viewers to the familiar, whether through focus-group tested original television programming or selective acquisition of blockbuster films.
There’s limited commercial appeal in moving image works that push the boundaries of their form; despite several major streaming platforms in Australia, none actively pursue a representation of experimental cinema or video art. Of any major player globally, Fandor, an American streaming service, comes closest to this pursuit, with licensing agreements with artistic organisations like Canyon Cinema and The Film-Makers’ Cooperative.
Access = poor images?
The emergence of online streaming creates, at face value, yet another conflict between authenticity and access in the distribution of artists’ moving image works. Erika Balsom, in her comprehensive new book After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (Columbia University Press, 2017), writes that the continuing presence of “traditional values of authenticity and rarity” looms large over video art distribution. Like previous shifts in distribution, the contemporary move towards online streaming involves an implicit quality loss. The reduction print championed by Stan Brakhage in the 1960s was similar in nature, a distribution model that allowed viewers to purchase 8mm film prints of experimental film works for affordable repeated home viewing yet at inferior quality compared with the 16mm originals. But digital streaming goes further in radically altering the context of viewing.
Artist and writer Hito Steyerl refers to moving image works distributed online (legal or otherwise) as “poor images“; wide circulation is clearly prioritised over image quality and fidelity. The best example of a loosely curated streaming service heavily reliant on Steyerl’s poor images is UbuWeb, an online archive of avant-garde art founded by conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith in 1996. UbuWeb offers low-quality copies of video art among its vast (and legally dubious) collection. Goldsmith has written in defence of his site that it exists as a “provocation” aimed at distributors, challenging them “to go ahead and do it right, do it better, to render Ubu obsolete.”
The continued existence of UbuWeb suggests that we have not yet reached that “right” point. Though in the last decade streaming services which offer up experimental works have emerged, they differ from UbuWeb (and, in turn, the notion of the reduction print) in that that they provide no option for consumers to purchase work. These sites instead draw on a rental model that came to define video art distribution throughout the second half of the 20th century.
John Baldessari, Inventory
From the co-op to the streaming portal
Emerging from artist-run co-ops in the 1960s, the rental model saw video art move away from a limited run approach to distribution, wherein works of moving image media were treated like any other artwork, bought and sold and kept in private collections. In the 1970s, the establishment of the Video Data Bank in Chicago and Electronic Arts Intermix in New York City set a template for organisations involved in renting and distributing video art. Both are still operating today as online databases, primarily for the benefit of educational and archival institutions, which can order copies of the works starting at USD$100 each.
VDB, though, has embraced the promise of online streaming. Launched in May 2015, VDB TV consists of short, curated video programs comprising works from the VDB archive, presented every two months and available to view for free. The strengths of this approach lie in the curatorial element; the VDB TV programs are essentially educational in nature, exposing viewers to a range of video artists and their work, as well as providing expert commentary. Recent programming at VDB TV has centred around a decade-by-decade look at American video art in honour of VDB’s 40th anniversary in 2016. A recent highlight in this series was John Baldessari’s amusing Inventory (1972), in which he presents around 30 objects ascending in size, accompanied by his detailed and deadpan voiceover narration. VDB TV also focuses on the contemporary.
One of the first VDB TV programs—FEELINGS, curated by writers Leo Goldsmith and Rachael Rakes—featured more contemporary fare, including Jesse McLean’s Somewhere Only We Know (2005), which challenged the emotional manipulation embedded in American reality television by re-purposing its images. We’re watching contestants from various reality TV programs on the verge of tears when an earthquake interrupts a Big Brother episode and a news anchor suggests that their lived experience is merely entertainment.
Like VDB, LUX, a London-based arts agency, offers both an online database of its film collection—from which institutions can order copies—and a streaming service. Its video-on-demand service LUXPLAYER launched a few months prior to VDB TV. LUXPLAYER offers films for a 48-hour digital rental, at US$4 a pop, regardless of the runtime. Some of the films can be streamed for free within a limited window as well.
What makes LUXPLAYER particularly compelling in the online video art landscape is that much of its video content is available in high-definition format, a feature not matched by VDB. Unfortunately, the player isn’t very often updated with new content; most of what is available to rent right now has been there for over 10 months. That said, the service remains the easiest way to view a film like William Raban’s experimental documentary Thames Film (1986), a landscape essay film charting the changing perceptions of the titular river, which outside of LUXPLAYER is only available on DVD in the United Kingdom. It’s also the only non-educational service where you can watch Chain (2004), Jem Cohen’s fiction feature debut scored by Canadian post-rock band Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
Video art in the curated online gallery
More regular catalogues of video art available to stream online come in the form of virtual art galleries, curated online spaces which screen works for a small window of time and which are free to view. Balsom uses Vdrome, an arm of Italian publisher Mousse, as her central example of this approach, noting that the site draws on “the dialectic of rarity and reproducibility.” Launched in February 2013, Vdrome streams one artist’s film at a time, for a 10-day period, in reasonably high quality format and, like VDB TV, with an accompanying curator’s text or interview with the artist. The collection has since found a physical home at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), where one of the site’s curators, Jens Hoffman, has served as Senior Curator since 2012.
The films screened on Vdrome tend to come from already notable video artists and experimental filmmakers, like Jonas Mekas and Ben Russell. Its curation can’t be aesthetically or conceptually pigeon-holed; in the last year, Vdrome has screened films like the surreal Wutharr: Saltwater Dreams (2016), from Australian artists Karrabing Film Collective, and an extended music video, Sticky Drama (2015), from Jon Rafman and Daniel Lopatin (aka Oneohtrix Point Never).
The limited windows approach that Vdrome uses has been replicated on a variety of other websites which screen, though are not limited to, video art and experimental film. Le CiNéMa Club, a French “online cinema,” screens short film works for free, one at a time. It tends to screen often overlooked work from established filmmakers, though it also includes notable short works from the international festival circuit. In 2016 it screened What Happened to Her (2016), Kristy Guevara-Flanagan’s collage film about the depiction and prevalence of murdered women in popular American crime films and television programs.
Kinet, a Canadian publishing platform run by independent filmmakers Kurt Walker and Isaac Goes, operates in another direction, presenting four works of experimental or avant-garde film every few months, notably drawing from filmmakers working outside existing filmmaking or academic structures. Zachary KerrHolden’s The MovieLand Movie (2016) is a recent highlight, an experimental documentary about a rivalry formed in a Vancouver arcade. In the same vein (though not a free service), tao films operates as a curated VOD platform focused on what has become known as “slow cinema,” allowing for works that were often very difficult to see outside of specialty film festivals to reach a new audience online.
Atlantis, Ben Russell
Multiple platforming
It’s worth noting that many of the films screened on these video platforms are not necessarily restricted to one service or method of distribution. Often films that screen on Vdrome eventually end up on another online platform, whether a rental and educational distribution service like VDB or placed online by the artists themselves on Vimeo. Ben Russell’s Atlantis (2013), which screened on Vdrome 6–19 May in 2015, is currently available to watch through VDB (educational licenses), Fandor (streaming subscription) and Vimeo (free to access, uploaded by the artist).
Breaking the analogue mould
In a discussion published by Rhizome in 2014, artist Jason Simon positions the question of online streaming of artists’ moving image works as one of cultural and economic restriction:
“The entire economy of gate-keeping distributors is rooted in analog, that is, pre-digital culture. Breaking that mold without destroying their economy is the puzzle, and perhaps the solution lies somewhere in subscription streaming portals.”
These streaming sites, from the expansive UbuWeb to tightly controlled Vdrome, don’t yet offer up a total solution to the ultimate question of authenticity versus access. That said, the recent proliferation of sites like VDB TV and Vdrome, strongly tethered to discussion and criticism, suggests an encouraging (and ever-widening) path for viewers to watch and learn about works of moving image art.
Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, Delights of an Undirected Mind, 2016, VDROME
You can stream the big hits of the 2017 Sundance Film Festival right now, before the Australian film festivals kick into gear. Once, it would be a long wait to hear if any Sundance hits had made the festival cut. American indies are a mainstay of film festivals in Australia because they draw crowds and switch people on to the wider scope of a festival program. As the film industry deals with the changing viewing habits of audiences, so too are Australian film festivals.
Local festivals are slowly losing access to films that were once guaranteed to be ‘sold out’ due to the aggressive buying tactics of the major streaming services: Netflix and Amazon. As these films disappear, Australian film festivals face the creative challenge of programming to audiences who have every excuse to stay at home. The streaming giants don’t like to share their films with festivals unless they’re premieres, and Australia rarely gets a shot at those.
Shifts in how we engage with technology accelerate cultural change and Australian film festivals are now facing the might of streaming services nudging in on their turf. Is this shift suffocating local film festivals? Or are we entering a new age in which festivals will revitalise cinema when many naysayers are proclaiming its demise?
The Big Sick
What are the streamers buying?
The 2017 budget for streaming giant Netflix is a reminder of their might: $US 6 billion. Close behind is Amazon, spending $3 billion in 2016, which they’re expected to triple this year. But what are they buying? Aside from their crop of original television series, they’re producing and buying films for distribution to their subscribers—and they’ve got a taste for indies. At Sundance 2017, Amazon inflamed the bidding war for The Big Sick, a comedy based on the lives of writers Kumail Nanjiani and Emily Gordon that buzzed with positive word of mouth following the premiere. Amazon bought The Big Sick for $12 million. The major difference between Amazon and Netflix is that Amazon partners with cinema distributors to ensure the films it invests in get theatrical releases. Amazon has collaborated with Lionsgate to distribute The Big Sick in America, while Roadshow will handle the roll-out in Australia.
Award-winning streamers—anti-cinema?
Sundance saw another milestone reached this year when the highest honour at the festival, the Grand Jury Prize, went to Macon Blair’s I Don’t Feel at Home in this World Anymore (2017), a Netflix original film. Netflix doesn’t play ball with cinemas. CEO, Reed Hastings, who didn’t hold back during a recent interview, asked, “How did distribution innovate in the movie business in the last 30 years? Well, the popcorn tastes better, but that’s about it.” He defended his stance by adding, “We are not anti-theatre, we just want things to come out at the same time.”
Netflix releases its films exclusively to subscribers globally on the same day. I Don’t Feel at Home in this World Anymore premiered at Sundance in January and was released globally a month later. Netflix does give its films a cinema run in America thanks to a deal with iPic Entertainment, a small chain with 15 cinemas. Under the deal, iPic shows 10 Netflix movies on the same day as their online releases. Audiences who turn out to see these films in a cinema are small, but the deal allows the company to qualify its titles for the Academy Awards. To date, Netflix has netted seven Oscar nominations and won its first this year for the short documentary White Helmets. A deal in Australia has yet to be struck to put Netflix films in cinemas.
In the past in Australia, there would be a wait to see the Grand Jury prize-winner from Sundance at a major film festival. Sydney Film Festival (SFF) and Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) are fed with the films from prestigious international film festivals. The wait time is getting shorter, and in some cases, completely bypassing festivals. What does this mean for Australian film festivals?
Manchester by the Sea
Snapping up festival fare
American indies are still a staple of film festival programming in Australia. These films are a major lure for crowds because they’re an easy sell compared with an eight-hour Romanian black and white film. They sit in the eye of the zeitgeist because people must see these films to have a stake in the conversation; plus, there’s the ‘see for yourself’ factor around any major award winner out of any festival. SFF often nets the Palme d’Or winner from the Cannes Film Festival, for instance Amour in 2012 and Winter Sleep in 2014. SFF has developed a reputation for being able to fast-track films from the French Riviera to Australia because they pull crowds, and Sundance has the same power.
Streaming services are sucking these titles out of festival consideration because they want subscribers to see these films for the first time at home; it’s what subscribers are paying for. In recent years, competition to secure American indies has been tight and it looks likely to dry up if the streaming buying power isn’t going away. From Sundance 2017 Amazon paid $6 million for a Grateful Dead documentary, $3 million for a comedy called Landline and $2 million for a documentary about the terrorist group ISIS called City of Ghosts. Netflix bought the international rights for Australian filmmaker Cate Shortland’s Berlin Syndrome and two documentaries: Casting JonBenet and Chasing Coral.
The service also bought the rights to a documentary titled Joshua: Teenager vs Superpower, about a Hong Kong college student who helped inspire a 79-day protest that shut down the city’s financial district in 2014. In 2016, Amazon paid big to secure the rights to Manchester by the Sea after it played Sundance and kept it locked away all year, avoiding all Australian film festivals and rolling it out for awards season where it became the first film funded by a streaming service to win multiple Oscars.
The shortening release window
In Australia the release window is also shortening for when a film plays a festival and when it’s general release. SFF just released the first-look titles for their 2017 program and one of the big-ticket items is David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, which premiered at Sundance this year and was snapped up by Madman for distribution in Australia. Hours after A Ghost Story was announced as part of the SFF program, Madman dated it for a general release: 13 July, one month after SFF ends. Unless you’re the kind of person who has to be the first to see it, A Ghost Story can be skipped in favour of something not slated for release in the next month, if at all. Of course, there are exceptions: Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women played SFF in 2016 and failed to get a distributor despite critical acclaim, good word of mouth and an outstanding cast—Kristen Stewart, Laura Dern and Michelle Williams. The Australian Centre of Moving Image in Melbourne and Golden Age Cinema in Sydney have announced they will screen Certain Women for a limited season in mid-April 2017.
Lily Gladstone, Certain Women
MIFF’s Michelle Carey: What challenge?
The Artistic Director of MIFF, Michelle Carey, doesn’t view the rise in streaming services as a hindrance to the way film festivals in Australia deal with indies. “We are still screening as many American indies as we ever have,” Carey said. “In fact, I would say there has been a resurgence in this genre, if one were to call it that, but less at the Netflix/high profile Sundance end of the scale and more at the truly independent or auteur end of the spectrum. I’m thinking here of filmmakers such as Alex Ross Perry, Eliza Hittman, Dustin Guy Defa or the Safdies.”
Streaming services like Netflix and Amazon operate like Hollywood studios when it comes to producing and buying power. A film can be made independently but once a million-dollar cheque is signed, it becomes part of the system. Joe Swanberg, one of the princes of indie filmmaking and a one-time special guest of MIFF, will have his new film, Win It All, released by Netflix in April.
A new wave of independent filmmakers—who are discrete from the system—are rising in the ranks and their playgrounds continue to be film festivals. But just how much of a draw are American indies anyway?
“High profile American films do draw large audiences, perhaps because they often arrive at Australian festivals surrounded by a lot of buzz and with PR muscle behind them, moreso than films from other countries,” Carey says. “No one does buzz like the Americans! But one could also say the same thing about a new Olivier Assayas, Park Chan-wook or Claire Denis film. They would probably get just as big an audience at festivals.”
Having that mix of auteurs and up-and-comers will present the vital challenge to film festival programmers when there’s a James Franco-sized hole in their schedule. Carey points out the perceived gap may be a myth: “There hasn’t been a discernible absence of any sort of films, so it hasn’t really left a gap to be filled. We try to program as diverse a range of amazing films as possible and our festival is large enough that even more niche propositions can get great, responsive audiences.”
Flying the flag for cinema & festivals
In a recent op-ed piece for IndieWire, the co-founder and CEO of Alamo Drafthouse cinemas, Tim League, spoke out against the comments of Netflix’s CEO, cited earlier, stating, “We are in very different businesses. Netflix is in the business of growing a global customer base by being the best value proposition subscription content platform. But here’s my business: cinema. Cinemas are in the business of offering an incredible, immersive experience that you simply cannot duplicate at home. Our job is to put on a show and provide a great value proposition for getting out of the house, turning off your phone and enjoying great stories in the best possible environment. At our best, cinemas should also be local community centres with a real, tangible relationship to their surrounding neighborhood.”
Michelle Carey shares a similar outlook. “Festivals must continue to present films in the best way possible so the power of story, image and sound can wholly envelop the viewer and transform them. And the other fundamental thing about festivals is that they are about the experience of sharing a film with a large crowd, encountering films one would not find otherwise, meeting the filmmaker in person, hearing the often extraordinary back-stories to these films.”
What thrives in the face of the challenges film festivals face against the streaming giants is an unrivalled passion for cinema.
The death this week of satirist John Clarke is mourned by all who appreciated the wry eye he cast on the increasingly self-parodying state of Australian politics. The vision presented in his classic series The Games (1998, 2000) was beyond prophetic: Australia itself seems to be a mockumentary, stuck in a perennial state of bureaucratic paralysis and privatisation led by the interests of developers and big business. Clarke and Dawe’s The Energy Market Explained, released scarcely a month ago, articulates everything about Clarke’s capacity for towering intellect, satirical edge and creative thinking, that we will miss so much. Lauren
An incisive writer and an idiosyncratic screen presence, John Clarke was a rare being—a virtuosic performative language analyst. Without physically or vocally mimicking politicians and bureaucrats, he joyfully captured and unravelled the relentless illogic of their hard-selling, self-serving utterances. At the same time, as he did with the documentary formula of The Games, an Australian classic, he and Bryan Dawe dismantled the TV interview—”a unique form of comic miniature,” wrote Max Gillies, “[a] take on the vaudevillian cross-talk act [which] matured like a fine whisky.” All of this was executed with disarming conversational ease, as if Clarke (a perfectionist) and Dawe were improvising. Joining the pair on Thursday nights in a country too, too thin on sharp political satire on television, we could briefly enjoy feeling complicit in striking a blow against a politician and whatever evil they were serving up in the name of the public good. Keith & Virginia
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RealTime issue #138 April-May 2017
Kristen Stewart, Personal Shopper
In Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper, Kristen Stewart plays Maureen, a woman in limbo. In Paris, she spends her time with senses attuned for some sort of sign from her recently dead twin brother while working in a desultory way as a buyer of couture for a high profile actress. To be in limbo is to wait; “waiting” is Maureen’s default description for her current situation whenever friends or acquaintances ask.
Personal Shopper evokes the insurmountable greyness of grief; the drabness that descends after someone vital is gone. This is a world defined by what’s missing. While Assayas cleverly incorporates aspects of the crime thriller and supernatural horror, it’s the hollowness of bereavement that’s the crux of the film. Almost all Personal Shopper’s emotional impact in this regard emanates from Stewart’s performance. Contained, weary, grungy, sad, she performs her professional duties with the efficiency of her similarly employed character in Assayas’ 2014 feature Clouds of Sils Maria, minus the alacrity.
There’s something very believable about her, a lack of affectedness in her fast-paced, rather flat vocal delivery that stops just short of monotony. Lank-haired, she slouches, unenthusiastic, occasionally surly—not petulant, but a young woman patently weighed down. Stewart clearly fascinates Assayas, who slyly alluded in Clouds of Sils Maria to mass media intrusions into the star’s personal life, while here strongly capitalising on her reputed taciturnity and guardedness.
In keeping with Stewart’s understated demeanour, the camera follows her closely in casual documentary style, lulling the viewer into a sense of the quotidian, until out of this very mundanity arises a jarring incident that triggers an escalation in narrative suspense and, ultimately, terror.
Viewed in terms of the horror film, Personal Shopper is unusual in presenting various genre archetypes in a relatively everyday light, while rendering seemingly unremarkable subjects uncanny. Maureen refers to herself in a matter-of-fact way as a “medium.” Her nocturnal attempts to connect with her brother’s spirit in the ramshackle Parisian mansion in which he lived are initially presented as business as usual, the camera following her at close quarters in the same way it does when she’s flipping through the racks for her elusive boss at yet another luxury boutique.
Kristen Stewart, Personal Shopper
Interestingly, Assayas bypasses contemporary cinematic ghost tropes (the pallid, hollow-eyed, alarmingly agile spectres that leap out of the shadows in a lot of mainstream Japanese, American and Korean horror) in favour of the quaint rituals and iconography of the mid-19th to early 20th century spiritualist movement with its tapping, spirit photography and ectoplasmic eruptions. In her frustration at not being able to contact her brother, who had promised to leave her a sign, Maureen seizes upon passing conversational references to various spiritualist luminaries like Swedish proto-Abstractionist painter Hilda af Klint, who claimed the making of her groundbreaking works was directed by spirits.
As Maureen delves into spiritualist history via online search engines while fielding text messages and Skype calls, the film increasingly becomes a mash-up of 19th century arcana and the restless distraction of the digital era. Rubbing shoulders with Olde Worlde apparitions are the disembodied presences of modern communications technology, enticing us with signs of life, but ultimately just as capable as the 19th century seance of isolating the participant in a haze of uncertainty. Who are we really ‘talking’ to? Is there anyone there at all?
By referring to these two eras, Personal Shopper underscores the essential loneliness and yearning of grief, with its corresponding susceptibility to the lure of “invisible presences,” as Maureen terms them. Kristen Stewart’s performance makes the film’s themes acutely relatable.
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Personal Shopper, writer, director Olivier Assayas, cinematographer Yorick Le Saux, editor Marion Monnier, sound design Nicolas Cantin, Nicolas Moreau, Olivier Goinard, production design Francois-Renaud Labarthe, distributer Rialto, 2016
photo Scott Belzner for Nikon Australia courtesy Bleach Festival 2017
Frank Enstein, The Farm
Frank Enstein is the first children’s show produced by the newest dance company in Queensland, The Farm, based on the Gold Coast. All animals are equal is the ethos of choreographer-dancers Gavin Webber and Grayson Millwood whose past collaborations have included the perennially touring Lawn (2004) and other iconic works programmed across festivals in Europe. The Farm has been a highly active cultural agent in the blossoming performance scene on the Gold Coast. In the legendary durational work Tide, Webber and dancer Joshua Thomson grappled with each other in office furniture embedded into the coastal estuary at Currumbin for 48 hours.
A collaboration with Perth dance company Co3 in Western Australia, Frank Enstein is one of the flagship works at the 2017 Bleach Festival, which is gearing up for a massive year of programming for the 2018 Commonwealth Games.
Loosely based on Jon Scieszka’s Frank Enstein series of children’s books about a child genius, the performance makes our mad scientist older and yearning for love and companionship. Young actor and filmmaker Daniel Monks who has only recently moved into dance and has a mobility impairment, which plays out on the left side of his body, is the emotional lynchpin of the show.
Frank Enstein, The Farm
photo Scott Belzner for Nikon Australia courtesy Bleach Festival 2017
Frank Enstein, The Farm
Rather than the zany science made by the book’s younger protagonist, the show focuses primarily on the growing love affair between Monks as the lonely scientist who has created a series of human dance monsters from lightning (including one accidently born out of a garbage bin) and an eccentric young girl on a picnic with her dog outside the scientist’s garage-lab. She stumbles upon his experiments during the lightning storm and decides, despite her frizzy hair and his experiments, that he is the one for her.
The show feels a bit like sophisticated panto—think Rocky Horror for kids with snatches of dialogue, lots of mugging, sharp entrances and exits and three signs at the back of the lab that flash to change the direction of the show: “Work, Party, Romance.” The strength of the work lies with the characteristic explosive choreography Millwood and Webber are renowned for and some haunting choral scenes where the other dancers move to echo our hero as he mobilises his weaker left arm and is lifted and manipulated.
Like Circa’s When One Door Closes, the show features not only backpack vacuum cleaners but also a dustbuster solo from Co3’s whipsharp Zachary Lopez as the dance creature who emerged from the bin, half 80s-powersuited woman and half unitard-dance monster.
The show is lots of fun and the audience of mostly young boys with their families snorted their way through the gags and the virtuosic choreography. The messages of self-acceptance and worthiness were heartfelt and sincere. Yet the show lacked the edge, the lingering specificity of the best of Webber and Millwood’s work where you feel as if you are looking through a peep-hole into a complete universe, sharply rendered, just for you.
Frank Enstein, The Farm
photo Scott Belzner for Nikon Australia courtesy Bleach Festival 2017
Frank Enstein, The Farm
Bleach Festival 2017: The Farm & Co3, Frank Enstein, directors Grayson Millwood, Gavin Webber, devisor-performers Brianna Kell, Zachary Lopez, Talitha Maslin, Daniel Monks, Andrew Searle, lighting design Mark Howett, set design Vilma Mattila; The Arts Centre Gold Coast, 31 March-1 April
It’s not often a new art project is also a huge infrastructure project for a city. Since public art has become a standard part of both the art world and urban planning in Australia, we’ve become accustomed to art happening in small, unusual spaces. In laneways (as supported by City of Sydney), empty shopfronts (with Renew Newcastle having leapt beyond its home city), overlooked walls (the Elizabeth Street Gallery Project) and malls, you can encounter art by just moving about the city. But what is the next step for public art’s integration into the functioning of Australian cities? And can art act as a type of public infrastructure outside major galleries and museums?
Wynscreen provides one possible answer to those questions, as well as a seductive projection of what cities could be like. A media art installation incorporated into Wynyard Station, Wynscreen opened in December last year and has since become integral to the daily commute of many harried travellers. A large-scale screen, installed on a mezzanine between escalators, Wynscreen exhibits two specially-commissioned video artworks each day to more than 30,000 passers-by in Sydney’s CBD.
While Vivid Sydney projects moving images for an audience on the streets once a year in the form of a festival of light and projection, Wynscreen differs in offering a permanent space built into the architecture of a major transport interchange: it’s not simply decorative and it’s not going anywhere.
“It’s a unique screen in Sydney and Australia,” says Alessio Cavallaro, an associate of Cultural Capital, the project’s creative producers. “There are other screens in Australia that show some art content, but this is the first screen that we’re aware of that is solely dedicated to artwork without any commercial interjections. We were excited to be part of such a landmark project, with its unique formal challenges, its scale and potential to commission a really interesting range of new artworks specifically to surprise and intrigue audiences in that transit space.” The purpose-designed screen is three metres high, 22 metres wide, gently U-shaped and curved at the edges: its uncommon trapezoid shape, as well as the space in which it is situated, make the project super site-specific.
The artists commissioned by Cultural Capital responded to three thematic platforms—time, travel and place—in their own diverse ways: some with abstraction, some figuratively, some performatively, some text-based. Among them so far have been a video of grand gestures and dance by Sue Healey and a work by Gary Deirmendjian featuring figures moving imperceptibly slowly. The screen and its surrounding space hadn’t been constructed at the beginning of the commissioning process, so artists responded solely to the curatorial brief and architectural drawings.
Bluster Town, Ross Gibson, Wynscreen installation
photo Amanda Jelicich-Kane
Bluster Town, Ross Gibson, Wynscreen installation
One of the current works is a text-based work of public poetry called Bluster Town by Ross Gibson, Centenary Professor at the University of Canberra. The basis of the work is a number of words: suburbs in Sydney, Indigenous placenames and descriptions of natural phenomena. Letter by letter, the words form across the screen in three rows. As an array accumulates horizontally, the shape behaves like a slowed bluster of movement, like wind blowing leaves across the ground or light sparkling on the harbour. “It’s a very impressionistic and evocative work in that regard,” says Cavallaro. “It doesn’t offer a narrative or literal significance, except that the viewer might make poetic associations between different words that allude to the dynamic character of Sydney.”
That notion of associative thinking applies to all the works at Wynscreen. Given the location of the screen and that it’s not a conventional gallery, it is experienced impressionistically by diverse audiences day and night, glanced at fleetingly rather than studied. Generally, a work depends on a viewer spending time with it—say, watching a half-hour video from start to finish. But the works on Wynscreen build a relationship with viewers over incidental encounters—in accumulated moments of passing by the works over the course of weeks.
“Most of what we refer to as public art is usually a sculpture, large-scale painting or 3D object,” says Cavallaro. “This project enlivens the space in a way that static works can’t do. Here, you’ve got the rhythms of the moving imagery, the changing shapes and colours. The flow motions of passers-by adds to the energy in the space and combine to create an experience of elastic architecture,” he says, of the way the screen appears to animate the surrounding building.
In extending the space in this way, Wynscreen takes on a function: to help make a small part of Sydney, an often stressed and stretched place of rushed rhythms and sapped energies, more enjoyable for its inhabitants and visitors by building experiential public art into urban infrastructure.
History’s Page, James Price, Wynscreen installation
photo courtesy the artist
History’s Page, James Price, Wynscreen installation
Beyond pointing to the possibility of a different type of city, the project has the potential to grow and develop the audience for contemporary art among the general public. “Our aim has been to present engaging works that raise the curiosity of audiences in an inspiring way,” says Cavallaro. “It shouldn’t be an unusual event to encounter moving image in a public space. Media screens have been around for a long while in Japan, USA, Europe, and represented in films such as Blade Runner. These concepts and precedents have informed the design of Wynscreen. Sydney is beginning to establish itself as a world city that features permanent public media art projects.”
Sydney has all the pressures of other big cities. What’s Wynscreen’s role and function within that matrix, I ask. “Ideally, Wynscreen will become a regular art destination within the social and cultural fabric of the city, in much the same way that one actively visits MCA or AGNSW. Recurrent Wynscreen viewers have already experienced wonderful works by Sue Healey, The Lycette Bros., doeanddoe, Gary Deirmendjian, Ross Gibson and James Price. They clue into the rotational programming pattern and, hopefully, will keenly anticipate the next works after a month or so. So it’s not only regular commuters or casual passers-by but also the art-curious audience who will make the time to pause at the same level as the screen, or look down from the dress circle view at the Clarence Street entrance level to get the full panoramic sweep. It’s that kind of art-engaged audience that we want to develop, an audience that will intimately, irresistibly engage with moving image art works in a very public place, and have their own dialogue with the works.” The Instagram hashtag that has sprung up in response, #wynscreen, is evidence of that very public dialogue.
“Wynscreen is about setting a precedent,” says Cavallaro, “and has had a very positive response from passers-by. Perhaps other groups have had ideas to stage screen-based public art, but may have been a little trepidatious. Wynscreen has become a kind of proof-of-concept. That has been another exciting and rewarding aspect for all involved in this project. Wynscreen can now function as inspiration or catalyst to those who are interested in presenting permanent public media art installations: property developers, corporations, government agencies and cultural institutions.”
presence, Gary Deirmendjian, Wynscreen installation
photo courtesy the artist
presence, Gary Deirmendjian, Wynscreen installation
From 15 April to 31 May, Wynscreen will showcase commissioned artworks by Nicole Foreshew and Pilar Mata Dupont.
Read an interview with doeanddoe, makers, with Michelle Morcos, of Woven Moments which was shown on Wynscreen in February this year.
Transformer, Robbie Thomson and M.E.S.S. The Substation
photo Theresa Harrison
Transformer, Robbie Thomson and M.E.S.S. The Substation
When Brad Spolding took over as director of The Substation in 2015, everyone told him there was no way he could transform the struggling venue into a hub of experimental art. Located in a 100-year-old building in the heart of Melbourne’s western suburbs, naysayers warned that people weren’t going to travel from the other side of town to catch cutting-edge work. In the year or so since his first program launched, Spolding has proven them wrong. He didn’t need to lure the art-curious out west. There were already there.
“Yes, we get people who come to sound art gigs regularly but our biggest repeat ticket buyer lives within five kilometres of The Substation,” he says. “That was something I wouldn’t have expected. Often I’m looking around the room during a show with 300 people watching and I’m thinking ‘who are these people?’ We’ve got 70-year-olds and people from really different cultural backgrounds and I think that does talk to the West.”
It’s even more surprising given how difficult it is to sell Spolding’s programs in simple, easy-to-pigeonhole terms. Scanning any given season will throw up a bunch of works that might have you asking, “Is this a concert? A dance piece? Visual art?” You’re thinking all wrong. From day one, Spolding’s programs have gravitated towards the works that sit between categories.
These days, he says, The Substation “doesn’t have a theatre program and a music program and a visual arts program. There’s a program and people are invited to come and experience works throughout the whole year across artforms. We don’t talk about our program in terms of practice.”
The Cell, Brook Andrews, coming up at The Substation
A random selection of recent works illustrates this: US artists Ellen Fullman and Theresa Wong’s Long String Instrument situated its audiences around, and aurally within, a gigantic structure of resonating metallic strings with accompanying cello and electronics. Lee Serle’s Multimodal saw audience members led by dancers through an experience of sound partly via olfactory means. The Rabble’s Cain and Abel was a work of visceral theatre that just as frequently took on the dimensions of a visual art installation.
“My interest in The Rabble is that they’re amazing theatre-makers, but it’s really the thought and preparation that they put into the aesthetic of their work. They work like visual artists. They think about every little visual element of the work and how it all sits together and how it progresses. That’s how they make sense for me as a resident artists at The Substation.”
Spolding can be reluctant to describe his role in curatorial terms. He’s more prone to saying his job is to “get out of the way” of the audience-art encounter. He has no interest in exclusives—‘only Melbourne performance!’—or in any proprietorial relationship with work that is developed or debuted in the building. Why put further limits on people already stretching themselves so far? “It’s tougher now for independent artists than ever before, and it still constantly amazes me that any of them manage to do anything.”
The Megaphone Project, Madeleine Flynn & Tim Humphrey, The Substation
photo Theresa Harrison
The Megaphone Project, Madeleine Flynn & Tim Humphrey, The Substation
Spolding’s past as a producer—most recently as Executive Producer at Ilbijerri Theatre—lends itself to a focus on audience experience. He points to last year’s Melbourne Festival production of Robbie Thomson and M.E.S.S.’s Transformer as the kind of work he feels really nailed it. “I thought a lot about the way we staged the show. We commissioned the work right from the beginning and said, ‘You’ll be in the middle of the audience on a megadeck on wheels. What you do up there is up to you, but we’ll hopefully sell 400 tickets or whatever and the audience will be able to see everything you’re doing.’”
At the same time, that producing history also affords him a sense of The Substation’s position within a larger city context, and he’s often thinking about “how we can play a part in a big city with a bunch of other presenters, so that artists can come into different presenting venues and practise in different ways. You go to other big cities in the world and that’s exactly how it works. It’s not like an artist belongs to a venue. Artists practise in different ways in different venues.”
Spolding says that The Substation’s suburban positioning puts it in a different position from venues that are either nestled within the infrastructure of the CBD or operating in regional areas. While the work he programs is without doubt on the edge of contemporary practice, it almost always has some clear entry point for people who might otherwise not have much history with avant-garde art. Again, Spolding doesn’t see it as his role to ‘translate’ such work to unfamiliar audiences—that would be getting in the way, after all—but most work in the venue presents an image, a phrase or a concept that rings out. “I would also say the work I’m drawn to, it’s not that it’s uncomplicated but there’s a part of it that’s easily picked up by audiences. We just presented Urban Theatre Projects’ The Tribe in a backyard in Newport. It’s a text-based theatre show but it’s fairly complex in the way it talks about the Lebanese community and immigration. But because it’s presented in someone’s backyard, local people are like ‘Oh!’ There’s an element to it that they can grab onto.”
By his own admission, it’s all working better than he’d hoped. In barely more than a year the space has established itself for regular art-goers alongside other similarly reinvented presenting venues such as Theatre Works, but just as importantly it’s found new fans among its neighbours. “The most exciting part of my job is bringing in those people from the surrounding five kilometres to see Robbie Thomson play a Tesla coil. I can see them being really excited by it, because it’s a new experience, they’re new audiences, they’re really taking a punt, have no idea what they’re going to see perhaps, but when we go back and look at who our repeat ticket buyers are, a lot of them are coming from really close.”
It’s often claimed (wrongly) that the first film ever screened was the Lumiere Brothers’ Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1896). It’s often claimed (wrongly) that the first narrative film was the 1903 Western, The Great Train Robbery. And it’s often claimed (rightly) that trains and early cinema had a complex symbiotic relationship. The historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch in The Railway Journey (1979) has most thoroughly explored the way that the long-distance train journey opened up new experiences of the world as a panorama framed by the window, while cinema’s expansion of the optical unconscious is the subject of innumerable dissertations. Film transports us; the train window collapses time and space.
The makers of the recent Melbourne work Passenger are playing with and against this longstanding association. Though there’s not a camera or projector in sight, it’s closer to live cinema than theatre. The audience boards a bus rather than a train (though given the Western iconography that swirls around the work, it’s tempting to call it a stage coach). As the vehicle takes a leisurely tour around the city’s windswept West and market-driven Docklands, two passengers strike up a conversation and we’re party to their unfolding exchange.
Unless staring at the back of someone’s head is your thing, as you listen your gaze will inevitably be drawn to a window, where Melbourne’s cityscape plays backdrop to the ordinary dramas of the day and, occasionally, a cowgirl spurring her black steed into a trot or a grizzled farmhand with a shovel on some grim mission.
Passenger
photo Gerard Assi
Passenger
The Western is perhaps cinema’s most mythic of genres because its iconography is so cemented, its dramas so ritualised and its themes so familiar that even the slightest deviation from the usual is heralded as some daring triumph. Here the opposite is the case. While images redolent of the genre appear, for almost all of the journey they are barely glimpsed shadows, while the meandering conversation we’re listening to seems haphazard and awkward. The two strangers haltingly discuss job frustrations, Russian oligarchs, the murder of a homeless man, the price of milk. The text by Nicola Gunn has a very contemporary skittishness, while the performance plays out with the extreme laconicism of a Ranters Theatre work (one of the players, Beth Buchanan, is a key member of that company).
But such is the gravity of the Western genre that even anti-Westerns still end up as Westerns. While Passenger’s juxtaposition of striking cinematic visuals with underplayed and undramatic dialogue gives much of this production a jarring sense of disconnection, in its final minutes the action swells to match the Morricone-esque score that has intermittently risen on the bus speakers.
Everything that’s been said so far, it turns out, is tightly wound into a revenge scenario that ultimately takes the players out into the cinematic world on the other side of the window. Where most of the trip’s visuals thus far have been contingent on whatever is taking place on the street today, this final sequence fulfills the promise of cinema’s mise en scène, in which everything within the frame is under a filmmaker’s control. It’s a moment of minor magnificence at the end of a work in which the opposite had seemed the case.
Lz Dunn and local collaborators, AEON, Dance Massive 2017
photo Bryony Jackson
Lz Dunn and local collaborators, AEON, Dance Massive 2017
Lz Dunn’s Aeon is another peripatetic journey through the city with an even greater confidence that pays off richly. Audience members turn up to a secret location where they are equipped with a personal, hand-held speaker and sent off into nearby parkland at dusk. There are no performers, no-one to guide. The freedom is utterly unnerving, but quickly overrun by the equally startling sense of animal group dynamics.
Some members of the crowd wander off but never too far, while the mass itself seems to follow an instinct larger than any of its members. The sounds emanating from our hands often evoke bird calls (Dunn’s earlier iterations of similar work have drawn more directly on the study of bird flocking patterns), but here she has stripped away most literal references to flight in favour of producing an experience that’s nothing less than human murmuration.
It’s vital that there is no spoken component to the experience, and indeed that there’s little literal explanation of what’s going on. At the core of Aeon is a non-verbal experience of the animal aspects of human community, and with that comes a growing attunement to the details of the bushland in the fading light.
Later, non-avian visitors to this park are referenced as runners hurtle by and partially clothed bodies gyrate under bushes. The work ends with a blind dive into Lawrence English’s overwhelming soundscape, which at times is deep and loud enough to deliver a full-body massage. Arriving back into the now-night, it feels like some kind of wordless rite has been enacted, an Orphic passage, an animal transformation. Something vast enough to merit the work’s title, at least, while to an outsider it might all just look like a walk in the park.
Lz Dunn and local collaborators, AEON, Dance Massive 2017
photo Bryony Jackson
Lz Dunn and local collaborators, AEON, Dance Massive 2017
Passenger, devisors Jessica Wilson, Ian Pidd, Nicola Gunn, text Nicola Gunn, directors Ian Pidd, Jessica Wilson, composition Tom Fitzgerald, conceptual & devising contributions Bec Reid, Jeff Blake, performers Beth Buchanan, Jim Russel, Neil Thomas, Jamie Crichton; Footscray Community Arts Centre and Arts Centre Melbourne, 23-26 March; Dance Massive, Aeon, concept, artistic leader Lz Dunn, sound Lawrence English, choreography Shian Law, dramaturgy Lara Thoms; Arts House, Melbourne, 17-19 March
This immersive double CD features the music, voices and soundscapes of the Mediterranean and the Pacific, brought together through Ros Bandt’s playing of the tarhu in collaboration with myriad musicians.
“Ros Bandt’s tarhu—a handsome, long-necked East-West hybrid string instrument which can be plucked or bowed and has resonant sympathetic strings—is the artist’s means for conjuring a cogent, sonically immersive world view which draws together voices human, animal, instrumental—lyre, harp, viola da gamba, shofar—and electronic. Hence the title of this two-CD set of works made across the last decade: Tarhu Connections. Above all, player and tarhu are always in the world—an ancient cistern beneath Istanbul ringing with dripping water, the talkative streets of Hania in Crete, a rural path along which goats trot, their bells tinkling, a room in Venice where the sound of rain accompanies softly plucked strings.”
At the Whitney, a protest against Dana Schutz’ painting of Emmett Till
photo by Scott W. H. Young @hei_scott, via twitter
At the Whitney, a protest against Dana Schutz’ painting of Emmett Till
The furore last week about “the presence of blackness” at the Whitney Biennal in New York saw a painting by a white artist, Dana Schutz, of the body of a lynched black man—Emmett Till—in a coffin, met with calls for censorship of the artwork and even its destruction. Hyperallergic provided some of the sharpest commentary, including this article by Coco Fusco. For Lauren, the debate points to deeper questions about the art world—the relationship between identity politics and art institutions—that are equally vital in the Australian context, especially given that identity is one of the key themes of Sydney’s new biennial, The National.
“I find it alarming and entirely wrongheaded to call for the censorship and destruction of an artwork, no matter what its content is or who made it. As artists and as human beings, we may encounter works we do not like and find offensive. We may understand artworks to be indicators of racial, gender and class privilege—I do, often. But presuming that calls for censorship and destruction constitute a legitimate response to perceived injustice leads us down a very dark path. Hannah Black and company are placing themselves on the wrong side of history.”
Immigrant at Palm Beach 1986
photograph by Robert McFarlane courtesy ABC
Immigrant at Palm Beach 1986
Catch it now on ABC iView, Mira Soulio’s impressive documentary, The Still Point, about the art of leading documentary photographer, Robert McFarlane, many of whose images—of Charles Perkins, Bob Hawke, Judy Davis, Geoffrey Rush and lesser-known but just as important Australians—you’ll recognise.
Soulio’s film is packed with examples from McFarlane’s enormous body of work across 50 years, demonstrating the range of his practice, his social and political concerns and his capacity to make powerful images in the moment with available light. There is never a sense of his subjects posing for the camera—they’re socially engaged, protesting or lost in thought. McFarlane’s works appeared in newspapers and magazines, he documented countless theatre productions and many of his images have been collected by national institutions.
In the film, McFarlane reflects on his motivation and craft while friends (a fellow photographer, a curator, an ex-wife) and subjects (including Robyn Archer) comment on the compassionate character of his art. Soulio economically weaves a single, affecting biographical thread through the 28-minute film—about the photographer’s relationship with his late son, Morgan. Soulio’s other film about a significant Australian photographer, Trent Parke: The Black Rose, is a powerful account of family trauma seen through photography. For more about the making of The Still Point read an extensive interview with Soulio on ProCounter Australia.
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RealTime issue #138 April-May 2017
Anti—Gravity, Chunky Move, Dance Massive
photo Pippa Samaya
Anti—Gravity, Chunky Move, Dance Massive
Early on in Anti—Gravity, a stage moment distils the feeling that will haunt me throughout this performance. On a stage busy with props that will only later come into use—screens, a large transparent box, a lift, rocks, a laptop—Sarah Ronnie Bruce stands on a small podium, occasionally releasing clouds of stage fog, and slowly speaks a list of Italian words that run along the theme of water, humidity, mist, condensation and so forth. As I struggle to understand (Bruce speaks with the incorrect syllable stresses of someone who doesn’t merely have an accent, but genuinely does not understand the words she is saying), I wonder how many others in the audience could possibly understand, she pronounces one word correctly, with a hint of a regional accent: “meccanico.”
Language, in its fullness, is not mere semiotics; it carries traces of place, of time, of climate, of person, of entire childhoods and entire cultures. The word means “mechanical.” It’s not an important word in this performance, but its perfect articulation, that draws out a fullness of lived life, exposes the perfunctory emptiness of the word shower that precedes and follows it. It will be like that with the entire production, despite my best attempts to see otherwise.
Anti—Gravity is as elegant and empty as any list of words in a foreign language, pronounced incorrectly by a non-speaker to an audience of non-understanders. It is of no use to argue that the surface is the point: we are not in Warhol territory here, superficiality is not the point, merely the unintended effect. With Chunky Move, Anouk van Dijk has created stunning, searing works by physicalising the complex felt reality of displacement, belonging and foreignness. Singaporean visual artist and filmmaker Ho Tzu Nyen deconstructs and rebuilds semiotic worlds with a serious appreciation of how much history, politics and experience are bound up with iconography. Both artists understand that a thing is never just a thing, but will always leave behind an entire associative and felt trail. And yet, the meticulous specificity that characterises the work of both artists is present in the execution of single gestures but does not extend to the raison d’etre of this collaboration, leaving viewers frustrated as we try to grasp the purpose of Anti—Gravity. We are circling the same spot, rather than moving conclusively forward, as amazing technical skill and aesthetic finesse come together not in a considered reflection or urgent feeling, but into a series of well-executed stage gestures that point to nothing beyond their own surfaces: clouds, moving bodies, balance and weight, a stage lift from which Tara Jade Samaya will launch a bucket of paper helicopters.
Anti—Gravity, Chunky Move, Dance Massive
photo Pippa Samaya
Anti—Gravity, Chunky Move, Dance Massive
There is much to observe and relish in Anti—Gravity. Samaya, one of Australia’s exceptional dancers, balances on a tall plinth, her body appearing to be without a centre of gravity, like a cat. Luigi Vescio, on an astro-turfed platform, carries rocks of varying weight, metonymically lending weight to the seemingly weightless bodies around. In a sequence of heart-piercing beauty, a duet of balance and care is reflected, sometimes in a mirror, sometimes in the body of a woman behind the mirror, dancing alone yet perfectly mirroring the movements of the female dancer holding the male dancer above ground. Van Dijk’s countertechnique is on full, glorious display in these slow movements, relishing the way gravity can be used as a force to rest on, rather than resist.
As the tempo speeds up, the six dancers come together into an arm-locked line of jumps and beats, a folkloric dance of sorts—and here again, that same semiotic emptiness of not-a-precise thing. Even in the abstracted white box of the art world, even in the international performance circuit, the ground above which the cloud of abstraction rises needs some form of banal reality.
The see-through box opens and a meteorological balloon, a large white thing, bounces out. With one dancer hanging off, another tilting the box forward and backward, the box becomes the centrepiece of a choreography of catching equilibrium. But what weather is this balloon pointing towards? Are these the invented clouds painted onto the decidedly un-humid landscape of 19th century Victoria, transposing the really-existing clouds from Van Dijk’s native north-western European landscapes into early colonial paintings? Are these the clouds that settle on Ferntree Gully in suburban Melbourne, a reminder that suburbia is not uniform despite our best attempts to make it so, and that Australia is not all desert?
Anti—Gravity, Chunky Move, Dance Massive
photo Pippa Samaya
Anti—Gravity, Chunky Move, Dance Massive
I am not asking naïve questions. Semiotics is not Esperanto. The clouds painted above an Italian altar and the clouds hiding the tops of Gao Ranhui’s misty mountains may both be pointing at the heavens, but it is not the same heavens they are pointing at. The fog that unexpectedly comes out of Ho Tzu Nyen’s visual installation in the Guggenheim Museum is different from the stage fog observed from our seats in Malthouse Theatre.
Hubert Damisch, whose five-chapter Theory of /Cloud/ (2002) has been the inspiration for Ho’s work, would have written a five-slide PowerPoint if things were that simple. The semiotic purpose of cloud historically has been to point to the ethereal realm, to be the last and most faintly physical layer separating our solid world from the world of abstraction, gods, virtue and death. Since this is precisely what Anti-Gravity purports to be about—the tension between the gravity-bound life we willy-nilly live and the weightless abstraction that eludes yet inspires us—getting the real-world part of a cosmology is important, otherwise what is the abstraction abstracting? So much common ground exists between these two artists, both keenly aware that the British sky and the sky in Asia-Pacific are not the same. Ungrounded, Anti—Gravity cannot soar.
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Asia TOPA: Anti—Gravity, concept, direction, choreography Anouk van Dijk, co-creator, concept Ho Tzu Nyen, visual design Ho Tzu Nyen, Paul Jackson, Anouk van Dijk, lighting design Paul Jackson, composition, sound design Jethro Woodward, costume design Harriet Oxley, performers James Batchelor, Marlo Benjamin, Sarah Ronnie Bruce, Tara Jade Samaya, Niharika Senapati, Luigi Vescio; Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, 17-26 March
Wang Shuai, Between 8 & 9, Chamber Made Opera, Asia TOPA 2017
photo Jeff Busby
Wang Shuai, Between 8 & 9, Chamber Made Opera, Asia TOPA 2017
Adrian Tien’s Semantics of Chinese Music (2015) is a cultural-linguistic study of concepts related to the presence, absence, articulation, interpretation and perception of music. The book also considers Master Xu’s 24 virtues of guqin music, which include likely contenders such as “harmonious” and “pure,” but also more abstract aesthetic virtues like “luminous, lustrous,” “warm, moist, moderate, smooth, sleek,” “ancient, archaic, nostalgic,” “placid, plain, simple, quiet, unsophisticated” and “distant, far and profound.” These are concepts that listeners, performers and music critics alike could take note of. With these as the starting point for an intensive collaborative process with musicians from the Sichuan Conservatory of Music, Chamber Made Opera creates a dynamic space of translation and creation.
The audience is admitted to a salon of round tables upon presentation of a coloured card, each defining one of the Chinese musical concepts in Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). Developed in Poland and Australia in the 1970s, NSM reduces language to primitive and universal concepts that are translatable into all languages, such as “I, you, someone,” “this, the same, other/else” or “good, bad.” Once past their phenomenological abstraction, one is struck by how the definitions appeal to musical experiences that almost anyone can recognise, but which are rarely articulated in Western musical practice. My card (a deep rust) described “q?”:
“[a] when people hear this, they can feel like someone can feel when it is like this: [b] this someone sees something somewhere for some time—this something is moving during this time; sometimes it is above the place where it was a very short time before; sometimes it is below the place where it was a very short time before; [c] this something is in many places during this time; [d] this someone can think about it like this: ‘it is like a line, this line has many parts, all these parts are like parts of something round’.”
Between 8 & 9, Chamber Made Opera, Asia TOPA 2017
photo Jeff Busby
Between 8 & 9, Chamber Made Opera, Asia TOPA 2017
Q? resonated with me as a music critic, one whose job it is to articulate “how someone can feel when it is like this.” The definition even follows the critical template of offering a description of a phenomenon and then an observation about it. I was prompted to contemplate the lazy susan in front of me with its arcane lines, circles and arrows as our performer, the virtuosic vocalist Carolyn Connors, assembled sculptures with magnetic sticks and blocks drawn from a trolley. With a green silk cloth and five sticks she created a miniature forest, then a house by a lake with a rising moon.
Each table is presided over by a different performer and the sculptures are accompanied by fleeting musical vignettes on sheng (Wang Zheng-Ting), erhu (Guo Si-Cen), percussion (Wang Shuai), keyboards (Madeleine Flynn), brass (Tim Humphrey) and vocals (Kang Yan-Long, Zhu Hui-Qian and Carolyn Connors). The students and alumni from the Sichuan Conservatory of Music deserve special mention for their masterful performances. Yan-Long and Hui-Qian stunned audiences by singing to each other across the tables in full voice. These more traditional vignettes were smoothly incorporated into the more familiar Chamber Made Opera fare of extended vocal techniques and electroacoustic experimentation, such as when Connors improvised with the other performers while precisely imitating the instruments’ timbre and articulation.
Guo Si-Chen, Between 8 & 9, Chamber Made Opera, Asia TOPA 2017
photo Jeff Busby
Guo Si-Chen, Between 8 & 9, Chamber Made Opera, Asia TOPA 2017
The creative process for Between 8 and 9 was intensely collaborative, led by Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey with Anna Tregloan (installation and costume design), Jim Atkins (sound facilitation), Bosco Shaw (lighting), Felix Ching Ching Ho (dramaturg) and Tim Stitz (creative producer) deserving special mention for the production’s use of space as a reflection on the themes of harmony and community. While the trolleys, tables and lazy susans resemble the public space of a teahouse, each table is a node within a broader community of music-making and music-listening. One can turn inward, focusing on the performer opposite and the intent stares of one’s neighbours, or turn outward, taking in the diverse sounds filling the room. Concealed speakers in each lazy susan thickened the sonic atmosphere with fragmented echoes of performances from other tables, drawing lines of attention across the space much like the circles, lines and arrows decorating the table tops.
Zhu Hui-Qian, Between 8 & 9, Chamber Made Opera, Asia TOPA 2017
photo Jeff Busby
Zhu Hui-Qian, Between 8 & 9, Chamber Made Opera, Asia TOPA 2017
The audience are not bystanders, either. For me the most powerful moment in the performance occurs when a guest at each table is encouraged to spin the lazy susan, each push eliciting a word or note from the performer. The combined rhythm of each table’s irregular pulse creates a musical mobile suspended and spinning in the room.
It is difficult to create an environment for cross-cultural collaboration where all parties feel comfortable contributing ideas, but Chamber Made Opera and the Sichuan Conservatory of Music have triumphed in building this interactive stage for the communal contemplation of forms.
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Asia TOPA: Between 8 and 9, Chengdu Teahouse Project, Chamber Made Opera in partnership Sichuan Conservatory of Music, Castlemaine State Festival & Melbourne Recital Centre; Melbourne Recital Centre, 30 March
The Family, Eildon children lined up according to height, The Family
Pop’s fascination with cults shows little sign of waning, from recent American documentaries like The Source Family (2012) and Jonestown (2013) to deep-dive true crime podcasts, the Manson family’s enduring appeal, superstars with messiah complexes, like Kanye West, and the chic imagery appropriated for fiction films like The Sound of My Voice (2011) and Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011). With its provenance in Melbourne International Film Festival’s production funding program, Rosie Jones’ new documentary explores one of Australia’s most infamous New Age sects, The Family. Led by magnetic mother figure Anne Hamilton-Byrne, this would-be utopia made headlines for allegedly stealing and mistreating children from the late 1960s through the early 1990s.
A yoga teacher turned charismatic enchantress, sect co-founder Byrne believed herself to be a maternal messiah, and set about acquiring her own family of identikit foster kids for her retreat at Lake Eildon, in rural Victoria. “Aunty Anne,” as the kids knew her, readied her cosmic minions for the new awakening via a mismatch of religious philosophies and the promise of intergalactic ascendancy, which Jones and her animators convey with evocatively loopy psychotropic graphics. Her allure, her followers argued, marked her as a powerful woman and thus a prime target for Australia’s dual enforcers of middle class morality: the police and the mass media.
The Family commences with the 1987 police raid on the sect’s compound and plays out like a thriller, complete with a climactic Hollywood stakeout, that feeds into the collective lust for justice that’s become the staple gambit of hit Netflix series. It’s a savvy move: the entertaining slickness of Jones’ approach—an aesthetic collage of high-end true-crime recreation, creepy home movie footage and emotional survivor interviews—bends this weird and woolly narrative into what passes for an audience-satisfying resolution, keenly designed to prompt indignation and wring tears.
Five of the boys raised at Lake Eildon, The Family
Intercut with the police hunt for Byrne is the soul of Jones’ picture—interviews with the shell-shocked survivors who speak with an often haunted affect, which the director accentuates with subtly edited talking-head clips staged against eerie mall photo backdrops. The Family doesn’t miss a stock footage opportunity to cast Byrne and her sect-keepers as malevolent horror movie ringleaders, from disturbing LSD dabbling to Children of the Damned (1964) inserts to an hallucinogenic montage cut wonderfully in the freakout, brainwash style of The Parallax View (1974).
There’s no doubt the childrens’ story is the tragedy of the piece, yet the film at times risks trite othering of those outside the established norms, often ceding its voice to men of ‘reason’ like lead investigative detective Lex de Man—an archetypal Aussie copper whose relentless pursuit of Byrne and subsequent emotional response betray a weird undercurrent of patriarchal triumph. In doing so The Family dances around a larger tale of mental illness and a failure of women’s health care—in which thousands of often teenage mothers were shamed into giving up unplanned babies for adoption—that not only furnished the sect with fresh blood, but arguably positioned Byrne as a preferable option to unpredictable, often abusive, foster care.
Jones’ doco infers that Byrne was pure evil, but uncovers little evidence that her motives went beyond delusional good intent at best, and psychologically damaging exploitation at worst. Granted, administering LSD to kids isn’t the ideal way to realise one’s visions of utopia, but what’s left uninterrogated in The Family is Byrne herself, whose own troubled history might have added a crucial dimension to the story. When the film finally does get to Byrne, an hour in and with sympathies firmly and unshakably entrenched, it’s astonishing: the impoverished, orphaned daughter of a Melbourne railway yard worker and an institutionalised, paranoid schizophrenic mother, her life could make for its own documentary—and in another film, perhaps an American one, Byrne’s ascent from state ward to doyenne of her own mini empire might have been a tale of overcoming adversity (albeit of the cautionary rise and fall variety.) Yet by dumping Byrne’s story into less than a minute of montage, Jones carefully eschews such complexity, where a more formally adventurous work might have wandered at a remove.
But grey zone morality isn’t The Family’s mandate. The film is always at its most poignant when it focuses on the stories of the survivors, whether conveyed in grainy police interview footage or clips of the weary, but inspiring, adults they’ve struggled to become today. Still, one wonders at the possibilities if Rosie Jones had been permitted access to Byrne, still alive at 96, suffering dementia and reportedly nursing a plastic doll in an aged care home, perhaps somewhere, deep down, communing with a pan-dimensional being from the future.
Leeanne, one of the children raised at Lake Eildon and Anne Hamilton Byrne
The Family
Leeanne, one of the children raised at Lake Eildon and Anne Hamilton Byrne
The Family, director, writer, co-producer, Rosie Jones, cinematographer Jaems Grant, editor Jane Usher, art director Georgina Campbell, producer Anna Grieve, 2016
Ros Bandt’s tarhu—a handsome, long-necked East-West hybrid stringed instrument which can be plucked or bowed and has resonant sympathetic strings—is the artist’s means for conjuring a cogent, sonically immersive world view which draws together voices human, animal, instrumental—lyre, harp, viola da gamba, shofar—and electronic. Hence the title of this two-CD set of works made across the last decade: Tarhu Connections. Above all, player and tarhu are always in the world—an ancient cistern beneath Istanbul’s Yerebatan Palace ringing with dripping water, the talkative streets of Hania in Crete, a rural path along which goats trot, their bells tinkling, a room in Venice where the sound of rain accompanies softly plucked strings.
These sounds and spaces are heard on the set’s first disc, Mediterraneo, in which a sense of cultural preservation dominates—of ancient towns and fields, the Greek lyre, Hesiod intoned, a shepherd’s flute, a lullaby—but with a sense of continuity. A modern poet reflects on the persistence of the spirit of a neolithic goddess as a fierce wind whips about and, in a piece of high drama titled Four Murders in Four Minutes, Bandt apocalyptically evokes Medea via amplified tarhu and electronics (Jon Drummond)—tarhu groaning, mad chatterings, distant cries, high bells, a great wave of sound and a gasping sense of air sucked out of a cavernous space. “From the Shofar,” which “mourn[s] the desperate plight of the dispossessed Jewish culture over millennia,” was recorded from within the ram’s horn, yielding a thunderous soundscape through which the tarhu empathically grinds and growls.
These bursts of passion in an otherwise contemplative disc foreground the darker energies of the Mediterranean. Change too is noted: shepherds no longer play flutes (but Bandt does). On the final track, once the goats, now frisky, have been fed, the sound of their keeper’s SUV is heard roaring off into the distance.
Yerebantan Sarayi Palace cistern
photo courtesy the artist
Yerebantan Sarayi Palace cistern
Throughout, the tarhu is an eloquent full-throated voice and harmonious partner, capable of diving to remarkable depths, gliding high or gently droning, always soulful, enhanced by resonant settings like the Yerenaten Cistern (harp and tarhu dialoguing) or merging with a density of sounds—walkers and talkers, a band, a priest, pigeons—in ancient streets. Mediterraneo exudes a sense of wholeness, of a shared journey and commitment to cultural preservation, in a very contemporary way, with an instrument that is a modern hybrid (invented and crafted in Australia by Peter Biffin) of the Turkish tanbur, the Persian kamancha, the North Indian Vina and the Western violin and double bass—alongside soundscapes and electronics.
Pacifica, the second and more diverse disc of works, offers a quite different experience with its focus on protection of the environment and collaborations with Asian musicians. “Silk Bamboo Wind” is an immersive constellation of notes—from tarhu, psaltery, Vietnamese zither and recorders—jangling and tumbling as if in a state of restless suspension through which bird-like creatures fly. In “Sheng and Tarhu in the Bush,” the always impressive Chinese Sheng mouth organ, played by Wang Zeng Ting, engages lyrically in shared and overlapping short and longer phrasing with the tarhu. Recorded in Victoria’s Goldfields, it recalls the Chinese presence during the 19th century Gold Rush, which is also evoked in “Fields of Gold,” a melancholy response to tombstone texts underpinned with insect clatter and briefly interrupted by a burst of kookaburra laughter.
Ros Bandt plays lyre at Delphi
In “Hydra,” elephant sharks are recorded eating pippis in an aquarium: the water laps, there are pings, bubblings and grindings and what seem like surges of static. “Whalesong,” made in a Japanese radio studio as an elegy for the creatures” features long, gliding notes and multiple voices that recall recordings of whales singing, here in a vast, oceanic sound world beyond our landlocked comprehension. Bandt writes, “The [bowed] sympathetic strings of the tarhu become the inner voices and feelings of the whales as they are regularly rounded up and dragged behind ships half alive, close to where I am.”
Animal life figures strongly in Pacifica, Bandt, performing in “ancient acoustic habitats” (in Delphi and a Victorian forest), plays tarhu and Greek lyre, lovingly duetting with recorded lyrebird song. “Rapturous” is “a fast ride with an eagle” in the US: “the granulated eagle calls are stretched to represent the psycho-perceptual orientation of the eagle, solitary, looking down over the land.” Tree life is also intriguingly acknowledged in “Rimu,” the tarhu singing delicately with the burblings high and low of an ultrasound recording of one of New Zealand’s ancient native conifers (they can live to 1,000 years).
Pacifica’s moment of drama comes in the form of “Stranded on Ice;” the context, Global Warming; the instance, polar bears’ loss of habitat. Jim Atkins’ electronics and Bandt’s raw tarhu bowing in widely spaced strokes and her use of randomly precussed glass, generate a nightmare world populated with feral cries in a vast directionless space.
The disc ends serenely with “Windharps remix,” nine harpists playing Australian-made instruments recorded in wind, variously in Istanbul, Lake Mungo and Kyneton. The tarhu flies contemplatively amid murmuring voices and cascading harps, as if to play forever. With its sense of the weave of time, culture, nature, it’s a signature conclusion to Tarhu Connections, a CD set that embodies Ros Bandt’s distinctive commitment to elaborating a musical, cultural and environmental world view with ancient practices sustained and renewed through cross-cultural collaborations.
You can hear Ros Bandt talk about Tarhu Connections and listen to excerpts from the discs here and here.
All profits from the CD sales of Ros Bandt’s Tarhu Connections go towards educational programs for refugees in the Young Citizens of the World program, in Hania, Crete. For more information, please visit the Creative-Intercultural-Dialogue website.
Deep Sea Dances, Rebecca Jensen and ensemble, Dance Massive 2017
photo Gregory Lorenzutti
Deep Sea Dances, Rebecca Jensen and ensemble, Dance Massive 2017
The American writer Claudia La Rocco, currently a columnist for Artforum, was in Melbourne recently as a guest of Dancehouse, running a series of workshops on writing and performance.
In The Best Most Useless Dress, a collection of her essays, reviews and hybrid responses, there is a long essayistic poem called “On Taste” which describes her participation in a collaborative dance performance that premiered at the BFI Gallery in Miami in 2012. It opens with these lines:
The carpet is impossibly white?
The tower is a double crescent
There is a way in which the translator must love failure?
The thin line of light splitting the morning sky
Certainly critics must be, on some level, fascinated with the difficulty of translating the experience of a performance into words. This is uncontroversial. But what about choreographers? Is the love of failure the same? Are they, too, driven by the impossibility of a perfect translation from life into art?
Tangi Wai, Victoria Hunt, Dance Massive 2017
photo Bryony Jackson
Tangi Wai, Victoria Hunt, Dance Massive 2017
Victoria Hunt, Tangi Wai…The Cry of the Water
Tangi Wai is a dim and distant and sometimes disappearing work. Everything happens in darkness and a long way from the audience. This could signal a kind of emergence, as though the Maori mythology and cosmology invoked by director and choreographer Victoria Hunt were rising from the deep past into the present; but it could equally be the opposite, a mourning song for old spirits now departed.
Everything here is so indistinct and overshadowed that either reading is possible. This is a work which demands a speculative leap to finish the translation.
It begins with a complete blackout. Then there is a single white light, some 30 metres away at the other end of the vast Meat Market pavilion. More lights begin to flicker around the space. There is a low rumble, which slowly builds in intensity. Eventually, we see a woman in the distance, surrounded by clouds of watery mist, long bars of white light sliding over her and moving toward the audience.
At this point Tangi Wai begins to look like a kind of birth story. The woman thrashes around, partially naked, a kinetic solo suggesting either ecstasy or agony. The bands of light come faster and faster, like peristaltic contractions. We glimpse something that might be an umbilical cord—and then there is more darkness. In the next scene, a new dancer creeps mouse-like across the stage, zigzagging toward the audience. Is this the child that was promised?
The program notes provide some insight into the kind of traditional materials that Victoria Hunt is working with. Under the heading “Progeny,” she writes:
Lifting out of the bones, flesh and
skin like thin streams of mist,
floating into the atmosphere.
The terrifying and merciful portal
of Hine-nui-te-po.
Hine-nui-te-po, goddess of night and earth, is the ruler of the underworld in Maori mythology. The note doesn’t clarify the spectacle, but it does suggest something of the great mystery that stands between the mythology and our sense of Hunt’s stage translation.
Creature, József Trefeli and Gábor Varga, Dance Massive 2017
photo Gregory Lorenzutti
Creature, József Trefeli and Gábor Varga, Dance Massive 2017
József Trefeli and Gábor Varga, Creature
Stomp. Ting. Stomp. Ting. In they come, József Trefeli and Gábor Varga, wearing big black pumps with little bells on them. The audience sits in a square around them. Immediately, the two performers begin arranging and rearranging various accessories used in traditional European folk dances, including long sticks and stock whips, creating runic figures at the centre of the square.
As they work they also dance, with much energetic stamping and scuffing and clapping.
All this is a long—but delightful—prelude to the revelation of two creatures. It is a costume transformation. Trefeli and Varga climb into matching bodysuits covered with short streamers and place long brown cylinders over their heads. These costumes appear to be made from recycled materials; fragments of old typography, for example, can be seen on the streamers, as if a banner of some kind had been cut into strips. And, indeed, the whole performance can be read as a kind of salvage operation, reclaiming folk heritage from ethnographers and anthropologists.
Staged on an indoor basketball court where the report of every stomped boot and cracked whip seems to linger for a long moment, Creature is as much aural as visual pleasure. Indeed, the work also features chanted lines in Magyar (both men have Hungarian ancestry), the language that British author Patrick Leigh Fermor once described as the most dashing of all European languages: fast, incisive and distinct.
Creature is an ultimately very stylish attempt to translate the exoticism of European folk materials into contemporary dance. Does this translation also fail? Yes, but there is nothing melancholy in this piece. Where there are difficulties, Trefeli and Varga offer them to the audience in the form of cheerful obscurity. It is as if the thing that is lost in translation returns to us as an enigmatical creature with a long brown snout, a kind of mascot for all future acts of choreographic conversion.
The space for Bodied Assemblies is an intimate one. The lighting is low and warm and the stage area the size of a large dinner table. The seating is in the round. In one corner there’s a varied array of percussion instruments, including a gong.
The three dancers, already waiting prone as we take our seats, begin to stir as the soft sound of the gong builds to a deep roar. Bhenji Ra slowly moves around the stage on all fours, Julian Renlong Wong examines his navel and Ivey Wawn stares up into the lights. By the end of the piece, an hour later, they are all on their feet, shaking and grooving as if they were on the dance floor of a private club. Wawn is still centrestage, her platinum blonde buzz cut glowing against the dark background, smiling and whooping as she looks upward.
Newton herself describes the dance as an intricately structured series of collective actions. What are these structures? The three performers creep and murmur, feeling their way into new patterns or playing little games as they move through the stages of their awakening. At one point, the dancers start describing their own bodies, the audience and the room around them in short two-word phrases. These phrases are then taken up arbitrarily as movement improvisation cues by the group.
There is also a dynamic score by percussionist Bree van Reyk, performed here by Leah Scholes, a fine accompaniment to this experience of collective awakening.
James Batchelor, Deepspace, Dance Massive 2017
photo Gregory Lorenzutti
James Batchelor, Deepspace, Dance Massive 2017
James Batchelor, Deepspace
The Australian Antarctic Arts Fellowship provides artists with a unique translation opportunity. Artists with a non-science background are offered a place on a government icebreaker, and the chance to experience Antarctica. The challenge for the artist is to communicate this unique experience to others.
Last year choreographer James Batchelor explored the Southern Ocean, and Deepspace is his response. This is a work that reflects more on themes of confinement and restriction than on frigidity and vastness. The long warehouse space in North Melbourne, with its white walls and polished concrete floor, is reminiscent of the closed world of a ship’s hold. Sound designer Morgan Hickinbotham sits with his laptop on a mezzanine at the far end of the warehouse, overlooking the performance space. You can almost imagine that he’s on a ship’s bridge.
Batchelor and Chloe Chignell run their hands along the walls, dodging audience members, emphasising the fact of confinement. There are several passages depicting the constant heave of the ship, and there is a strange erotic ritual in which Batchelor stands over the kneeling Chignell, both holding large white polygonal sculptures. Is this a comment on boredom as aphrodisiac?
What is perhaps missing in this translation is a sense of the unseen immensity beyond the wall of the hull. I thought I saw it once, when Chignell was standing on Batchelor’s shoulders against a wall, wiggling her fingers. It looked for a moment like a black fissure in a glittering wall of ice.
Deep Sea Dances, Rebecca Jensen and ensemble, Dance Massive 2017
photo Gregory Lorenzutti
Deep Sea Dances, Rebecca Jensen and ensemble, Dance Massive 2017
Rebecca Jensen, Deep Sea Dances
Seventeen dancers sweep through a warehouse space lit by streetlights outside the clerestory windows, surging and then drifting, rising and then sinking, caught up in a delicate pattern of ebb and flow. There are beautiful, quick, undulant phrases, like “grinding water” or “gasping wind,” as Wallace Stevens has it; and there are moments of poised calm.
Who is this amazing choreographer and what has she done with Rebecca Jensen? It is early 20th century dance innovator Doris Humphrey and the piece is Water Study (1928). And whatever you may think of Jensen’s own work, it is surely a minor bit of brilliance to begin the evening with a revival of this early experimental masterpiece. The Dance Massive festival can sometimes feel like a place where dance falls out of dialogue with its past and embraces pure contemporaneity. Wouldn’t it be a good thing to see more independent artists presenting recreations alongside their own work?
This question of the relationship of contemporary dance in Australia to its history feels like an urgent one. It’s a question which is raised also in Shian Law’s Vanishing Point and Martin Hansen’s If It’s All in My Veins in the Dance Massive program. Perhaps we are approaching a turning point? It would not be a bad thing if we saw a new enthusiasm for the lost worlds of avant gardes past.
The other thing to note about Water Study is how compact it is. Performed by Jensen and her team it runs for less than 10 minutes. There’s more than one work in this year’s festival that would benefit from cutting and condensing, dances where a relatively small amount of material is padded with extraneous business and repetition, drawing out to tedious length something that might have been an effective 10 or 15-minute show.
This of course is not just a problem for independent choreographers; it is a problem for presenters and commissioning partners. Why are there no double or triple bills in the festival? Why is the independent sector obsessed with long works?
In any case, Jensen should be applauded for smuggling in a second piece. (No mention is made of Humphrey in the program notes or on the festival website, perhaps because the copyright still has eleven years to run.) But Jensen’s own piece is nonetheless longer than it needs to be.
Where Water Study can be read as a graceful translation of the way water moves in large-scale flows, in Deep Sea Dances we see the competitive interactions and chaotic dynamics in undersea ecosystems. This is a fine enough idea and leads to some interesting improvisations, and Jensen’s nostalgia-tinged sea-punk aesthetic is not entirely unappealing, but there’s no reason for inflating this piece beyond half an hour.
–
Dance Massive 2017: Victoria Hunt, Tangi Wai…The Cry of the Water, Meat Market, 14-18 March; József Trefeli and GáborVarga, Creature, Carlton Baths, 17-19 March; Rhiannon Newton, Bodied Assemblies, Dancehouse, 14-17 March; James Batchelor, Deepspace, Meat Market, 20 March; Rebecca Jensen, Deep Sea Dances, Meat Market, Melbourne, 22-26 March
Yumiko Yoshioka, Evocation of Butoh, Asia TOPA 2017
photo Mifumi Obata
Yumiko Yoshioka, Evocation of Butoh, Asia TOPA 2017
The performance of extreme or heightened states is and always will be a fascination. It could be an exhibition of unleashed passions or a feat of physical endurance. It could be a celebration of deeply sensual experiences or a ceremony of spirit possession. It could be ecstasy or it could be trance-like dissociation. The thrill for the audience is the same: the spectacle of mind and body suspended by a thread above an insensible abyss.
And ever since Dionysus walked into Thebes with jangling bells and ivy garlands, this fascination has been a key theme of cross-cultural exchange in the performing arts, West to East and East to West. The history of ritualised and formalised performance traces hemispherical flows, movements back and forth, from religious dance-drama through theatres of cruelty to experiments in psychophysical transformation and beyond.
So it should be no surprise that this theme is so prominent in the program for Asia TOPA, a festival highlighting Australia’s many cultural and artistic relationships with Asia.
Evocation of Butoh: Yumiko Yoshioka, Before the Dawn
One necessary site of exploration is Butoh. This highly physical Japanese art form developed around a key axis of East-West thinking and practice, with ideas drawn from Artaud and Genet among others translated into a post-war Japanese context. Here, extremity is manifested in the need, as Yukio Mishima once said, to scrape all vestiges of habit or convention from the dancing body.
The Evocation of Butoh program at La Mama, produced by Yumi Umiumare, presented five short Butoh dances from local and international artists, as well as a series of workshops. The high point of this mini-festival was an engrossing performance by well-known Japanese choreographer Yumiko Yoshioka—now based in Berlin—titled Before the Dawn (2002).
Yoshioka confronts us with a catalogue of nightmare imagery, including twitching limbs, puppet-like prancing, shadow play, extravagant gurning and erotic grotesqueries, all of which she gives a unique comic inflection. The recurring scene where Yoshioka uses her hands to mime a pair of demonic swans pecking at her face lingers long after the performance has finished. There are also two neat piles of sand on stage, a vision somehow resonant with Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1964 film Woman in the Dunes.
Yoshioka has a masterful eye for the composition of striking stage pictures with a kind of cinematic stylishness and enthralment. And the fact that Before the Dawn still seems fresh despite the recent deluge of mainstream horror films with Butoh-inspired aesthetics underlines the ongoing vitality of the form.
Dancing with Death, Pichet Klunchun, Asia TOPA 2017
photo Mark Gambino
Dancing with Death, Pichet Klunchun, Asia TOPA 2017
Pichet Klunchun, Dancing with Death
Dancing with Death is a subdued and somehow unconcluded piece in which choreographer Pichet Klunchun uses his own attempt to transform classical masked Thai Khon dance into a more contemporary internationalist style as a metaphor for the political situation in Thailand.
The work begins with brightly costumed and masked figures darting around the stage like a troupe of Phi Ta Khon ghosts. This merry prelude with its folk-style capering soon gives way to something more austere and muted as the colourful spirits recede into the wings, replaced by six dancers in mundane costumes of white, beige and brown.
Dancing with Death, Pichet Klunchun, Asia TOPA 2017
photo Hideto Maezawa
Dancing with Death, Pichet Klunchun, Asia TOPA 2017
The centrepiece of the work is an enormous undulating track, roughly oval-shaped, elevated, set well back from the audience and dimly lit. This represents a kind of limbo around which the dancers walk or skip or sprint. (A state of limbo is one way of describing Thailand since the political crisis of 2013.) Sometimes the dancers pause to peer over the edge of the track or gesture plaintively to one another or to the gods above. Sometimes there is unison or a glimpse of Khon technique, but always there is the discipline of the track.
This is an endurance piece, with the dancers eventually exhausting themselves and dropping out of the loop until there is only one left, Kornkarn Rungsawang, jogging indefatigably around and around. On the night I saw it, the audience somehow missed the cue that indicated the performance was over; we ended up watching for at least an extra 10 minutes until Arts Centre staff intervened. For Rungsawang it must indeed have felt like being trapped in a zone of infinite uncertainty.
Attractor, Asia TOPA 2017
photo Gregory Lorenzutti
Attractor, Asia TOPA 2017
XO STATE DUSK: Dancenorth, Lucy Guerin Inc, Senyawa, Attractor
The XO State series transforms the stage area of the State Theatre into a performing arts club where punters can buy food and drink and see one major performance and several short ones every night. Choreographed by Gideon Obarzanek and Lucy Guerin with music by Javanese duo Senyawa, Attractor is the first of the major performances in the series.
The music is an eerie kind of experimental hardcore, with amplified and distorted riffs played by Wukir Suryadi on crude homemade stringed instruments [built out of redundant farm equipment. Eds], and with theatrical growls and shrieks provided by Rully Shabara. The pair forces an associative link between the throat-shredding vocal acrobatics of contemporary heavy metal and pan-tribalist world music.
The eight dancers from Dancenorth illustrate this link, taking us at high speed from the rock concert mosh pit to the worship of strange new fetishes. This leads us to the depiction of a moment of communal awakening as a clan of some 20 extras emerge from the audience to join the dance. These volunteers—taking direction via earpieces—provide a sort of chaotic backdrop to the lunging and stamping of the ensemble dancers.
It’s a fine performance with an irresistible energy; but it is impossible to believe that the performers, let alone the volunteers, really achieve the ecstatic release promised in the program notes. The choreography is too shrewd, too aware of itself. And so perhaps in this instance the rhetoric of extremity and sublimity has more to do with marketing than creative practice.
TAO Dance Theater, ‘6,’ Asia TOPA 2017
photo Mark Gambino
TAO Dance Theater, ‘6,’ Asia TOPA 2017
TAO Dance Theater, ‘6’ and ‘8’
That is not something you could say of Chinese choreographer Tao Ye, who is committed to an artistic process in which the individuality of his dancers appears to disappear entirely. In the two pieces by Tao presented as part of Asia TOPA, the dancers are placed in a line and perform identical movements, and in both pieces their faces are obscured. Personality disappears into a larger organic unit, submerged by the all-but-perfect sameness of the performances.
In ‘6,’ the dancers stand toward the back of the stage at a slight angle to the audience. Rooted to the spot, they toss themselves back and forth like bottom-dwelling weeds in a dark oceanic trench, each one bending from the waist, rolling and whirling arms, torso and head. With a nerve-jangling score by folk-rock composer Xiao He and moody lighting by Ellen Ruge, the piece evokes feelings of danger and mystery. In the second work,’8,’ the dancers lie on the ground and ever so gradually shift themselves backwards. It’s a little like watching a fractal unfolding as the complex series of pelvic lifts and leg twists repeats and the dancers recede upstage.
The thought of the effort required to master these repetitions is overwhelming, but perhaps this is the point—to let go of the part of yourself which feels overwhelmed. “My pieces take a horrendous amount of time to rehearse,” says Tao. “They may not have much of a message to convey but are certainly a process.” And it’s a remarkable process, but it’s fascinating how the absolute discipline demanded by Tao Ye can also seem like the most dangerous kind of liberation, like the ecstasy or rapture of a zealot.
Takao Kawaguchi, About Kazuo Ohno, Asia TOPA 2017
photo Naoto Iina
Takao Kawaguchi, About Kazuo Ohno, Asia TOPA 2017
Takao Kawaguchi, About Kazuo Ohno
Repetition is also the theme of Takao Kawaguchi’s homage to Kazuo Ohno, presented at Dancehouse. Ohno was one of the founding figures of Butoh and there are extensive archives documenting performances throughout his career. The works which Kawaguchi recreates, drawing on archival footage, include Admiring La Argentina (1977), My Mother (1981) and Dead Sea, Ghost, Wienerwaltz (1985).
Here we have a simple contrast between two different heightened states of being. On the one hand, we have the Butoh master, creating visceral and highly personal modes of self expression. On the other hand there’s the archivist, the one who is passionate about repetition and puts his faith in video recordings and photographs.
And yet the contrast is not really so simple. Unlike Tao Ye and his dancers, Takao Kawaguchi does not appear to believe in the possibility of perfect repetition. Because he uses audio from the original performances as part of his sound design, we can’t help but notice small discrepancies in Kawaguchi’s performance. For example, we hear the sound of Ohno landing, after a short leap, moments before Kawaguchi himself lands. This gives everything in About Kazuo Ohno a slightly melancholic air. It is a special kind of mourning for the master, and an acknowledgement that the archive must always be incomplete.
The final image of the performance is a short video of a carved puppet of Kazuo Ohno held by his son Yoshito Ohno, swaying gracefully to the sound of Elvis Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” The passions of the past become curiosities for the future, and what was once so extremely alive is now a drab little puppet. It is, in any case, a sad and tender moment.
From Supersense to Asia TOPA
What is the position of the audience in these performances or depictions of extreme states of being? Are we only fascinated observers, admiring from a safe distance? Or are we vulnerable? Can the performance of heightened states catalyse an extreme transformation?
Performing arts events are, of course, communal experiences, and there is always the possibility of emotional contagion or affective resonance; but the transmission of intense or heightened feeling is difficult in the context of a large cosmopolitan arts festival where performances are inevitably contoured by multiple layers of bureaucracy and the pressures associated with touring. Does this mean we inevitably encounter these performances as high culture voyeurs, browsing exotic experiences, thrilling to the sight of other people in extremis?
Perhaps it does. Here it is worth noting that Asia TOPA is essentially the child of Supersense, a one-off event held at the Arts Centre Melbourne in 2015. It was billed as a festival of the ecstatic, dedicated to exploring extreme and sublime horizons of human experience. A number of the artists at this year’s Asia TOPA festival, like Senyawa and Tao Ye, were also programmed as part of the earlier festival, and many of the organisers behind the scenes are the same.
The centrepiece of Supersense was Kuda Lumping, an extraordinary ritual trance performance involving a troupe of Indonesian dancers and a shaman from Batu in East Java. During the three-hour spectacle, the performers, apparently possessed by ancestral spirits, carried out extraordinary physical acts of strength and endurance, such as eating glass and hot coals.
The Supersense festival was promoted as an opportunity to experience the excitement and impact of ecstatic performances. “Supersense is an emporium for ecstatic experience,” declared Sophia Brous, curator and artistic associate at Arts Centre Melbourne, “a durational festival-as-theatre that will fill audiences with wonder.”
Some of this language of shopping for new marvels is still present in the marketing for Asia TOPA, particularly in the XO State program, curated by Gideon Obarzanek, the director the Kuda Lumping spectacle. But Asia TOPA promises to be bigger than this. Yes, there is still a certain amount of wilful confusion between the presentation and the representation of extreme states, and some convenient ambiguity about whether it is possible for audiences to participate in the ecstasies of the performers or whether we’re simply being invited to gawp at them. But the shift in emphasis allows for a more critical engagement with the theme of heightened states.
Takao Kawaguchi, About Kazuo Ohno, Asia TOPA 2017
photo Naoto Iina
Takao Kawaguchi, About Kazuo Ohno, Asia TOPA 2017
Think of About Kazuo Ohno, for example. Although Kawaguchi is committed to upholding the legacy of the Butoh master, his performative relationship to the heightened and stylised emotionalism of Ohno is deliberately ambivalent. He confronts the audience with intellectual problems as well as intensive or affective ones.
There is no doubt that Asia TOPA could include more of these sophisticated critiques of the performance of ecstatic experiences and transformations. There is, after all, plenty in our collective fascination—both West and East—with ancient ceremonies, spirit possession and transcendental experience that demands examination.
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Asia TOPA: Evocation of Butoh: Before the Dawn, choreography Yumiko Yoshioka, music Zam Johnson, Kenichi Takemura, lighting Joachim Manger, La Mama Courthouse, 11-12 March; Dancing with Death, choreographer, director, designer Pichet Klunchun, lighting Asako Miura, sound Hiroshi Iguchi, costumes Piyaporn Bhongse-tong, dramaturg Lim How Ngean, Arts Centre Melbourne, 2-4 March; XO STATE DUSK: Lucy Guerin Inc, Dance North, Senyawa, Attractor, choreographers Gideon Obarzanek, Lucy Guerin, music Senyawa (Rully Shabara, Wukir Suryadi), lighting Ben Bosco Shaw, costumes Harriet Oxley, audio design Nick Roux, Arts Centre Melbourne, 22-26 Feb; TAO Dance Theater, ‘6’ and ‘8’, choreography Tao Ye, Music Xiao He, lighting Ellen Ruge, Ma Yue, Arts Centre Melbourne, 22-24 Feb; About Kazuo Ohno, concept, performance Takao Kawaguchi, choreography Kazuo Ohno,Tatsumi Hijikata, dramaturgy, video, sound Nato Iina, lighting Tosho Mizohata, costumes Noriko Kitamura, Dancehouse, Melbourne, 25-6 Feb
In writer-director Julia Ducournau’s feature film Raw, a young woman, raised as vegetarian, loses her innocence (and mind) when she commences studies at a veterinary college. Our reviewer, Katerina Sakkas, calls it a work of serious horror, “multilayered, rich and strange,” with abundant references to classics such as Carrie and American Mary.
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