Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

August 2017

In this edition, we have more about Adelaide’s forthcoming OzAsia Festival, introducing you to idiosyncratic Hong Kong visual artist Doris Wong Wai Yin (installation image above). In our ongoing Arts Education feature, Nat Randall anticipates her 24-hour performance of The Second Woman for Performance Space’s Liveworks and looks back to her formative years at the University of Wollongong.

Democracy is being eroded on all sides: Australian copyright is under threat from the Productivity Commission, media ownership looks set to fall into fewer hands, the same-sex marriage postal vote creates an appalling precedent for non-compulsory voting and Immigration Minister Peter Dutton’s assault on pro bono lawyers defending refugees is unconstitutional. This at the very moment he is maltreating those for whom all Australians have a duty of care. Call the Government out. Keith & Virginia

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Top image credit: A Place Never Been Seen is Not a Place, Doris Wong, photo Kwan Sheung Chi, courtesy OzAsia 2017

Though human history is far too chaotic to move in predictable cycles, there’s a poetry to the notion that dance history has something of that rhythmic flow to it. In Melbourne, at least, the period of 1995 to 2005 saw a flurry of activity as new companies formed — the likes of Chunky Move, Lucy Guerin Inc and Phillip Adams BalletLab — whose influence is still obvious today. Then came a time when dance activity was no less energetic, but the stable of companies mostly remained the same. Who would fill the generational gap? A pair of recent works at Arts House delivered an encouraging reply.

Both Stephanie Lake’s Pile of Bones and Melanie Lane’s Nightdance are clearly made by choreographers young enough to have spent more than a few nights at clubs, dance parties and outdoor festivals. The ecstatic, spontaneous rituals of these experiences are baked into the choreography, and this is one of the notable features that seems to be cropping up in work by dancemakers their age and younger. It’s a generous act, looking to harness the energy of a shared dancefloor, and a world away from the cerebral spikiness of purely form-based dance.

Jack Ziesing, Samantha Hines, Marlo Benjamin, Pile of Bones, Stephanie Lake Company, photo Bryony Jackson

Stephanie Lake, Pile of Bones

Lake’s choreography in particular has long been inflected with emotional expressiveness detached from narrative. Pile of Bones furthers this by producing a set of evolving relationships that a viewer can supply their own meaning to, whether through imagination or experience. A powerful opening sees its four dancers as one organism, emerging into narrow light like something ejected from primordial darkness. As the forms split, their physical complexity multiplies too, though they’re still a long way from the human — think a Francis Bacon painting without the ick factor.

Whether animal, vegetable or even molecule, these figures develop in an evolutionary rush, and soon enough the universe has expanded to the point that they can become small, more still, under the majesty of the night sky in the Australian bush — though, again, this is one viewer projecting onto the sound and movement that composer Robin Fox and Lake have built. The next person along might read something entirely different into the stage pictures this work strives towards. They might not read anything, which is always the danger of choreography that seems so pregnant with meaning but never gets literal about it. However, there’s no doubting Lake’s ability to produce both robust and thoughtful dance.

Melanie Lane, Lillian Steiner, Gregory Lorenzutti, Night Dance, Melanie Lane, photo Bryony Jackson

Melanie Lane, Nightdance

Melanie Lane’s Nightdance is even more fearless in its personal vision. There was a moment late in the piece when I was forced to put my note-taking aside and just accept that I had no frame of reference for what I was seeing. You’ll know it if you were there. It’s a work that shouldn’t be spoiled, but that doesn’t prevent discussion — there are no twists, as such, but it’s an hour of frequent surprises.

An extended, hypnotic opening sequence sees three dancers undulating in an ochre haze, the animal eroticism to their movements balanced by the technical precision with which they’re performed. The trio almost never uncouple their gaze from the audience, lending a presentational aspect that’s part sex show and part mating display, and the libidinally-charged set-piece establishes the tone for what will follow.

Nightdance isn’t about sex, exactly, but its evocation of nocturnal life — from the bed to the dancefloor — necessarily yokes sexuality to its performance. To a driving beat a succession of memorable figures emerges on stage, transforming the space as they do so: now a drag club, now a fetish den, now a rave. There’s a polymorphous perversity to it, not merely in the free-floating desire that hovers over everything but in the instability of the visual image itself. At one point a figure is so bedecked with sequins that they almost appear to be composed of digital pixels, while another sequence features a dancer I didn’t even realise was there for a long time.

I’m still trying to make more sense of the finished work, but this is Lane’s triumph — Nightdance is filled with secret dramas and impenetrable mysteries the way that any dancefloor is, and it’s stitched together with the tight but invisible logic of a dream. And like a dream, when you’re in it you don’t question why this carefully but inexplicably costumed character appears at one point, because there’s an emotional sense to it that’s beyond waking thought. That Melanie Lane successfully puts her audience in that state is a rare triumph, and one that won’t be forgotten.

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Pile of Bones, choreographer, director Stephanie Lake, performers Marlo Benjamin, Samantha Hines, Harrison Ritchie-Jones, Jack Ziesing, composer Robin Fox, lighting design Matthew Adey, costume design Harriet Oxley; Arts House, 15-19 Aug; Nightdance, choreographer, director Melanie Lane, co-creators, performers Lilian Steiner, Gregory Lorenzutti, Melanie Lane, sound design, composer Chris Clark, lighting design Ben ‘Bosco’ Shaw, costume design Ryan Ritchie, Benjamin Hancock, Sidney Saayman; Arts House, North Melbourne, 24-27 Aug

Top image credit: Melanie Lane, Sidney Saayman, Lillian Steiner, Night Dance, Melanie Lane, photo Bryony Jackson

Doris Wong Wai Yin makes art to explore the nature of art and her own nature and presence in the world. Her first exhibition in Australia, at Nexus Gallery in the 2017 OzAsia Festival, will offer just a glimpse of the very substantial body of work she has produced since she graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2004 and completed her Master of Fine Art at the University of Leeds in 2005.

Wong uses painting, sculpture, collage, installations, photography and performance — whatever suits her purpose — and has exhibited in Taiwan, Japan, the USA, Singapore, the Netherlands and Guangzhou as well as Hong Kong. Strongly conceptual, her work up to 2012 was characterised by an exploration of what constitutes art, while the work I decide to make 100 Paintings to learn and unlearn PAINTING 1-111 (2014) specifically addressed the one artform. Many of her works have been made in collaboration with her partner Kwan Sheung Chi, for example, videos in which both perform, such as Everything Goes Wrong for the Poor Couple (2010), with its stuttering black and white 16mm film-style footage, part of a 34-hour, five-day performance and installation.

To Defend the Core Values is the Core of the Core Values (2012), Doris Wong Wai Yin, photo courtesy OzAsia 2017

There is often humour and wit in her work, but as is clear from her essay on her six-month residency at the Asia Art Archive in 2011, she is concerned with the wider role of art in society. During that residency, she created a new archive of Hong Kong art, drawing on alternative sources of information such as failed applications for residencies which she includes to identify the potential value of unrealised artistic work. She thus questions the accepted history of Hong Kong art and challenges more generally the traditional sources of art history. And so the issue of Hong Kong’s identity emerges from the investigation of its art history.

Another strategy is for Wong to invite audience participation. For example, in To defend the core values is the core of the core values (2012), made with her partner, participants could win a solid gold coin embossed with the phrase “Hong Kong’s Core Values” by expressing what those might be. The work comments on Hong Kong’s commercial profile internationally and its people’s pre-occupation with material wealth, at the same time asking fundamental questions of a post-colonial society that is in political and social transition.

Man’s Future Fund, Doris Wong Wai Yin, photo courtesy OzAsia 2017

Wong temporarily stopped making art about five years ago, explaining, “Just after my marriage… I was so confused about the duties, whether I should cook the meals or something.” Shortly thereafter, the birth of her son also had a significant impact. The baby was small and she and her husband were frightened that their son, who they named Kwan Man, might not survive, but he did (the couple created for him a distinctive long-term project, Man’s Future Fund yielding new works for sale each year). “This was the first day of my life I believed the power of belief… It was a very intense lesson, the first time we really experienced what life and death is.”

Wong’s art changed as a result and there is now a much more personal, even spiritual, aspect to it. For her Wish You Were Eternal (2016), she cut up paintings she made from 2005 to 2016 and placed the fragments in a series of timber pyramids, thus enclosing her own art history in objects that suggest crates but, in evoking Egyptian burial chambers and the transportation of the deceased to the afterlife, invite historical investigation. She had planned this work for two years and engaged a psychic medium to detect messages that might lie within it. The medium identified the Hindu goddess Kali who symbolises destruction and rebirth. It seems that for Doris Wong the transition to motherhood was profound and this work symbolised that transition; it publicly enacted the rebirth of her art and preserved and historicised her previous artistic self.

A Place Never Been Seen is Not a Place, Doris Wong, photo Kwan Sheung Chi, courtesy OzAsia 2017

Wong’s work for OzAsia 2017 exemplifies OzAsia Artistic Director Joseph Mitchell’s “focus on very personal and intimate stories told from Asia”. Titled A Place Never Been Seen is Not a Place, Wong’s installation is based around a telephone booth and videos, including an image of the Earth rotating inside an unusual object. The phone will ring, inviting audience members to answer. Spoiler alert: Wong says, “if you answer there will be someone reading a page of a book… the book is called Conversations with God.” The installation “is about how I perceive the relationship between myself and the universe… The first step of your healing is confronting your fears.”

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OzAsia Festival, Doris Wong Wai Yin, A Place Never Been Seen is Not a Place, Nexus Gallery, Adelaide, 7 Sept–8 Oct

Chris Reid visited Doris Wong in Hong Kong courtesy of the Hong Kong Arts Development Council and the Adelaide Festival Centre.

Top image credit: Doris Wong Wai Yin at her Hong Kong exhibition, A Place Never Been Seen is Not a Place, photo courtesy OzAsia 2017

A pink, neon-lit motel room nestles in a foreshortened cube on a stage. A blonde-wigged woman, Virginia, waits patiently. A selected but unrehearsed male member of the public enters the set as Marty, her husband, and plays a scene with her. It’s a domestic, verbal war of minute dramatic shifts and long-simmering resentments: the couple argue, they dance. Virginia demands her partner’s compassion and Marty brickwalls her. The scene lasts around three to six minutes, depending on how the pair interact. Two camera operators capture the action in six shots and a projector beams their live edits onto a screen beside the set. Marty has been given a script beforehand and one crucial moment of agency: to vary his final line of dialogue, choosing between “I love you” and “I never loved you.” Virginia hands him $50 (his fee for performing), he departs, and the loop starts anew with a new audience member.

This is The Second Woman, in which Sydney artist Nat Randall invites 100 men to act opposite her in a scene from John Cassavetes’ Opening Night, replayed live over 24 hours. The 1977 drama featured Cassavetes’ real-life partner, Gena Rowlands, as Myrtle, an ageing stage actress cast as Virginia in a play about what she calls “the gradual lessening of my power as a woman as I mature.” Myrtle is worn, alone, drinking heavily but stoic in her devotion to her character and the play, and the film, described by scholar George Kouvaros as a story about “the figure of the female performer in crisis,”, continually violates the boundaries between on-stage, on-screen and real life.

The Second Woman continues Randall’s trajectory of making risk-taking and experimental work since graduating from the University of Wollongong in 2008 and working with live performance groups Hissy Fit and Team MESS. Randall performed The Second Woman at 2016 Next Wave Festival and at Dark MOFO this year (read Briony Kidd’s review). I spoke with her and collaborator, filmmaker and dramaturg Anna Breckon as they prepared for the work’s third outing at Performance Space’s Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art in October. “It began with our interest in multiple levels of performance,” says Breckon of the project’s evolution, citing Opening Night’s “trickiness” as a film, and its many reference points to Hollywood backstage dramas and 1950s melodramas like All About Eve.

The Second Woman (video still), Dark Mofo, 2017, image courtesy the artists

Performing intimacy

“Watching Opening Night,” says Randall, “I was attracted to the different layers of performativity and the slippage between three relationships that Gena Rowlands had with Cassavetes,” who was the director of the film, her husband in real life, and plays ex-husband Maurice in the film and ex-husband Marty in the play within the film. “They had these three levels of intimacy and performed that intimacy, and I hadn’t seen anything like it. I was so taken with this inability to locate [just] one emotion from the three levels, and the possibility of [translating it into] live performance. That was the genesis for me.”

Having dealt with the bureaucratic hurdles involved in staging a round-the-clock performance in Sydney — Carriageworks’ venue licence had to be modified to allow 24-hour operation, which was only approved by the council the week of the Liveworks program’s launch — the pair are now free to focus on “opening up” Randall’s performance.

“After doing it twice, it’s difficult to bring freshness. Anna and I are working towards opening me up as a performer to be much more responsive to each participant and whatever energy or intention they bring into the room. I’ve been attempting to be more open, but I return to ‘lockedness.’ You just return to crutches when you’re exhausted.”

Myrtle’s defining struggle in Opening Night is also to stay present against the lock of habit and the slope of indifference. She says, “When I was 17 I could do anything. It was so easy. My emotions were so close to the surface. I’m finding it harder and harder to stay in touch.” Perhaps the relationship between Opening Night and The Second Woman is growing closer as the latter evolves across its iterations.

“I read the dynamic [in the scene] between the two as the end of intimacy,” says Randall, “where Anna reads it as too much intimacy; but whatever it is, it’s the end of an intimate space between a man and a woman.”

One man or many?

The surprising element for Randall has been the blurring of a stream of different men into a single man. The memory of one Marty to the next passes across performances: the many iterations of the male character merge into one and slide from scene to scene interchangeably. What emerges from the format of a repeated script is a passage, made deeper and wider in each restaging, in which a single male character is rewritten along fairly similar lines by a succession of non-actors, who tend to perform learned and stereotypically alpha-male behaviour. It’s that fastened positioning between Randall and her procession of onstage counter-agents that the pair are now working to revitalise as Liveworks approaches.

“The work’s model of repetition allows difference through sameness and sameness through difference,” says Randall. “The generic rises to the fore when you consider a spectrum of men over 24 hours. A sameness and predictability and boredom emerges, but also this quite melancholy space. It’s interesting how many of the men play at the same level, [even though] there’s no character summary or emotional preparation [given to the participants].”

The Second Woman (video still), Dark Mofo, 2017, image courtesy the artists

From the University of Wollongong…

Contemporary art in Australia has taken a distinct postgraduate turn in recent years, with artists increasingly making work within Masters and PhD programs under the banner of creative research. Since her undergraduate days at the University of Wollongong — which has a reputation for producing inventive live art practitioners like Malcolm Whitaker, Dara Gill and the Team MESS, re:group and Applespiel collectives — Randall has forged a divergent path by primarily participating in residencies and festivals. Her practice has been founded on constantly and collaboratively devising work with other artists and curators — and, ultimately, audience members.

“I haven’t established my practice within an institution. What I got from the University of Wollongong was a really robust sense of the history of performance art and theatre through a really incredible dramaturgy course which was compulsory for every one of the performance practitioners. That theoretical framework was so important and fed into the practical parts of the course. We did conventional acting but we also had movement and voice classes. The practical was intrinsically tied to the theoretical. There are not many places that do that. It’s very contemporary. And you are trained to be resourceful for when you get out of the school, to be proactive in creating your own work that challenges the canon.” For Randall, it has meant devising work “to challenge what it means to be a woman and to be queer today.”

While everyday performativity is central to John Cassavetes’ films, a broader iteration of it comes into view in The Second Woman where repetition, duration and video-framing push cinema into a large-scale live art framework. Anna Breckon brings her knowledge of cinema to the partnership, while Nat Randall brings the participatory and durational components. “I don’t know how to make work by myself. It’s always collaborative,” she says, and the audience completes that collaborative circuit.

“There’s been this weird collective journey that we didn’t anticipate,” says Randall. “The audience has been on this journey with us and wants to finish it with us. For the first iteration, I thought, ‘who the hell will turn up at three in the morning’ [to watch performance art]. But people come and they stay. There’s something quite special about that collective viewing at a time when nothing’s happening in the city.”

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Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art, The Second Woman; Carriageworks, Sydney, 6pm, 20 Oct – 6pm 21 Oct

NOTE: Tickets are $15 and available on the door only. Ticketholders receive a wristband allowing them to enter and exit the theatre over the 24 hours until the theatre reaches full capacity.

Top image credit: The Second Woman (video still), Dark Mofo, 2017, image courtesy the artists

Meeting strangers can be anxiety-inducing or fun or a mix of each, depending on your degree of introversion. An audience member, seated in the semi-dark, faced with actors usually feels quite safe (short of the fear of unanticipated participation), but when the performers are playing themselves and revealing sometimes disturbing features of their lives, you might feel some real-life discomfort. It’s less likely these days after nearly four decades of what was once disparagingly labelled “confessional” performance in the 1980s, but it’s a not uncommon feeling and one that in fact makes (let’s call it) “reality theatre” attractive, especially when it’s tied to a social, cultural or political issue or community that we have limited understanding of and for which we feel concern.

Shopfront’s Harness Ensemble of performers with a disability and the Australian Theatre for Young People have come together to make Dignity of Risk. In ATYP Studio 1, the multiracial, mixed ability group of 11 young women and men (possibly late teens to late 20s) stand or sit facing us in low light while we listen to their recorded voices in a stream of utterances, each no more than a sentence long, offering clues about how they view themselves and the world. Aptly, the first concern is with appearance, how they think they look and feel about being looked at. Some care, some don’t. The next time they speak it’s live and we begin to match voices with bodies and as more of these utterances are presented and with more detail and in occasional solo passages, we build a cumulative sense of each performer, not a complete picture, but enough to register dimensions of a personality from fragments of appearance, movement, information and interaction.

Essentially, Dignity of Risk is a first meeting, and, if it stays with us, might affect our attitudes to the people these 11 actors represent to varying degrees. A true meeting would require our interaction with them and people like them. Perhaps that will come, and should, in an empathy-challenged Australia. These actors generously open up to us so that, in turn, we might be openly receptive and inclusive.

Litanies of “Don’ts” and “Wishes,” from the humble (“When am I allowed to get drunk?”) to the unusual (to be a 40-year-old out-of-touch-with-fashion dad, perhaps a desire for normality) and others reveal that those with and without disability share everyday anxieties and the weight of depression. We hear of suicidal impulses, bipolarity, the stress of a broken marriage and the hurt of racial prejudice and cruel utterances like, “If I’d been your parents I would have killed you at birth.” These are tempered with good humoured self-deprecation, amusing anecdotes and bouts of party dancing to James Brown’s artful electronica and Fausto Brusamolino’s cascading colours.

One of the strongest scenes comes late in Dignity of Risk as each of the actors jostles for a place in a hierarchy of disadvantage. The engaging and lanky Caspar Hardaker feels he’s been victimised for being a straight white male, which rouses a laugh from his comrades, but he returns to it with conviction, revealing the extremity of his depression. After itemising her considerable medical and other challenges, a relatively quiet Teneile English wryly declares herself the most advantaged because she’s got a very good, well-paid job. It’s a lovely swerve and comes out of a scene in which the actors are actually talking to each other rather than to us.

Another unusual moment features Mathew Coslovi standing centrestage and simply changing from his clothes into an identical set with an air of conviction about the rightness of the task. Riana Shakirra Head-Toussaint (a lawyer and disability activist) in a wheelchair and Jake Pafumi perform a striking role-reversal duet in which Pafumi first does the pushing but is soon pulled along by Riana and then rests on and arches out from her lap. Later, when the set’s soft curtain falls to the floor, Pafumi picks up one end of it and progressing across the stage, gently wraps it around himself in an act of unemphatic cross-dressing.

Designer Melanie Liertz’ set comprises sleek black, reflective flooring framed by the semi-transparent curtains mentioned above. These are dreamily lit, falling away to reveal long narrow panels of firmer material splashed with dark colours, suggestive of a wider, perhaps tougher world, although the correlation isn’t clear, especially when the performers move slowly in and around this second curtain, stroking, lifting and letting the panels fall. Liertz’ design, Busalomino’s lighting and Brown’s tautly composed and rhythmically diverse score collectively complement the cumulative layerings that constitute the personalities of the performers. Margot Politis’ choreography has its moments — the wheelchair duet and pummelling fists and stamping in another scene and in Holly Craig’s solo — but hasn’t realised a consistent, simple vocabulary apt for the work, resulting in an unrevealing looseness in an otherwise tightly ordered production.

Holly Craig, who expresses her concerns about being able to look after her dog and knows that she has to be in care, affectingly brings home the complexity of the issues that drive Dignity of Risk. The production’s title is the same as the medical and social policy protocol “Dignity of Risk” which is about respecting each individual’s autonomy and self-determination (or “dignity”) to make choices for himself or herself, despite (“reasonable” is sometimes inserted here) risks. Sometimes Duty of Care clashes with Dignity of Risk, as in the case of sports people with disabilities.

The extent to which the performers with a disability other than Holly might be at risk had to be largely guessed at. Given the title of the work, I wanted to ask, what risks, physical, emotional or intellectual, might these people actually take to maintain or achieve dignity; but this issue is not seriously canvassed. Instead, the production asks us, at the very least, to listen and to accept the right of people at risk to dream, express and test their limits just as their fellow cast members without disabilities do.

While I felt that the notion of “risk” was insufficiently probed, that movement could have been more considered and the theatrically well-worn litany structure, while working well initially, limited a sense of conversation, Dignity of Risk nonetheless granted me a revealing first encounter with a fascinating group of strangers. Their frankness, moments of eccentricity, anxiety and passion and their determination opened me to their various worlds. Under Natalie Rose’s direction they seized the stage with fluency and confidence — that’s risk-taking.

Dignity of Risk, devised by Shopfront Harness Ensemble and Australian Theatre for Young People, director Natalie Rose, dramaturg Jennifer Medway, Mathew Coslovi, Holly Craig, Teneile English, Caspar Hardaker, Riana Shakirra Head-Toussaint, Steve Konstantopoulos, Wendi Lanham, Briana Lowe, Sharleen Ndlovu, Jake Pafumi, Dinda Timperon, set & costume design, Melanie Liertz, choreographer Margot Politis, sound, AV Design James Brown, lighting design Fausto Brusamolino, ATYP Studio 1, The Wharf, Sydney, 9-26 Aug

Top image credit: Jake Pafumi, Riana Shakirra Head-Toussaint, Dignity of Risk, ATYP/Shopfront, photo Tracey Schramm

Two things born of fire preoccupy US filmmaker Bill Morrison in his new documentary: a city’s history and cinema itself. Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016) surfaces the archives of the photographs and early silent films from a chilly Canadian Gold Rush town to present a new vision of North American history and myth. The documentary follows Morrison’s earlier works montaged from rescued footage in varying states of decay and after being shown at the New York Film Festival last year, has finally entered the orbit of the Australian festival circuit, which has offered a select but fine collection of essay films this year.

First came Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro (2016) at Sydney Film Festival, which brought to life the words and spirit of James Baldwin to posit that the shame and responsibility for contemporary racism is on white people not black people — that white supremacy is not a blot on the surface of the USA but a brick laid in its foundation and a moral affliction for the dominant culture that makes black people its monster. Then at the same festival came a retrospective screening of For Love Or Money (1983), an almost-lost feminist history of women’s labour in Australia made entirely from archival materials. An exemplary and collectively authored work of the essay film genre, it was all the more striking given the absence of a continuous tradition of that strain of filmmaking in this country.

Dawson City: Frozen Time submerges itself in the archive to nudge to other parts of film history: it is in some moments a gold rush drama and in others a Western in the way that it summons an icy frontier, slowly encroached upon by tiny, impoverished, determined settlers. In Yukon, Canada, Dawson City was properly colonised in 1896 and experienced a fever dream of messy capitalist growth spiked by gold mining. For the final years of the 19th century, gold dust was the central currency traded in its brothels, bars and, yes, cinemas. Among the rickety buildings that sprang up in this period were theatres of silent films entertaining exhausted, drunken workers whose families had only just been sent for. Given the town’s remoteness, it lay at the end of the film distribution line: studios refused to pay for the cost of freighting cans of abundant — and dangerous — celluloid film back to California, and the town became a tomb for entertainment industry detritus.

Tonnes of reels past their economic use-by date were stashed in the basements of Dawson City’s frontier buildings, and were liable to burst into flame on account of their highly combustible nitrous base. As such, fire marked the foundations of both the town and early cinema: around once a year, until acetate stock was introduced, a nitrate fire would rip through the streets and colonisation would begin again. Cinema proprietors came to dump film reels by the tonne into the Yukon’s great ice floes: down the river they went, along with archived knowledge of the period’s early silent films.

Over the course of two hours, Dawson City: Frozen Time unfurls a slow-encroaching mystery to reveal the source of the visual material it uses: a self-reflexive discovery of a strange, surely impossible stash of celluloid, preserved in the Yukon permafrost and forever linking the concurrent birth of the gold rush, silent cinema history and the founding myths of this colonial town pitched so perilously in Indigenous snow. Along the way, we learn of Dawson City’s other connections to cinema: the film City of Gold (1957), documenting the Klondike Gold Rush, was the first to use the now-ubiquitous convention of zooming and panning over still photographs, laying the basis for Morrison’s own approach in form and aesthetic as director, writer and editor.

It is of course extraordinary to think of the absence of any notion of cultural heritage in the early days of cinema: that film was so costly to make and transport, but would still be thrown into landfill or a river once its immediate economic value was spent. Nobody thought of keeping cultural objects for posterity. But Dawson City: Frozen Time is much more than a cinephile’s film. Bill Morrison ensures the inhabitancy of the region’s Indigenous people is quietly but tangibly felt, tracking moments in the life and death of Chief Issac of the Han-speaking Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in nation, Mayor of the township of Moosehide, where his people were dislocated, five kilometres downriver as Dawson City ballooned in population. The fragility and waste of the colonial project becomes a ghostly presence throughout the documentary, with overhead photographs later in the film showing how mining has carved the Yukon landscape into gloomy, grey pits of ever-greater scale. The ever-changing geography that cinema crosses becomes a way for Morrison to hint at boundless thematic rivers, depending on what viewers themselves bring to the viewing.

Dawson City: Frozen Time’s most intense quality is its richness, both visually and historically. Every little part of it is inflected with the weight of more than a century of time, every frame full with Morrison’s distilled intentionality. It is a long film, but to spend 120 minutes with it is to be pulled directly into its quiet, largely greyscale world. The flickering, floating footage on which it is almost completely founded, developing from black-and-white to colour, from silence to sound, doesn’t just lend the film its spectral feeling, but writes a new, modest chapter in the much-mythologised story of cinema and frontier America.

Dawson City: Frozen Time, director, writer, editor, producer Bill Morrison, producer Madeleine Molyneaux, composer Alex Somers, Melbourne International Film Festival, Kino Cinema, 13 Aug; Sydney Underground Film Festival, Factory Theatre, 17 Sept

Top image credit: Dorothy Davenport in Barriers of Society (1916), Dawson City: Frozen Time, courtesy of Hypnotic Pictures and Picture Palace Pictures

You cannot press ‘pause’ on a sound. Well, you can, but once paused, it is no longer the same sound. The duration, and thus the timbre, the tone, the effect of a sound, is altered. Indeed, if paused, a sound simply becomes a void. An image can be frozen in time, lifted out of the many images around it and examined in detail, but a sound cannot; pressing ‘pause’ on a tape player will only create silence, or perhaps the gentle humming of an idle speaker.

Michel Chion often writes about pausing sounds, and the way that sounds transform in different conditions, different scenarios. A French writer, composer, filmmaker, and sound theorist, it is impossible to capture Chion’s body of work in a single essay, impossible to cover everything of interest in a single conversation. He refuses to call himself an authority, but his output would suggest otherwise, as his books, and their translations, are widely read and taught at universities across the globe. In Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise, recently published in an English translation by James A Steintrager, Chion writes that “observing sounds is like observing clouds rapidly streaming.” This nod to the ephemerality of nature evokes a world across its spectrum, from tranquility to wild havoc. Sound is always coming and going around us, constantly shifting and forming new shapes and reverberations. It is respiration, it is the ebb and flow of the sea, an introduction and a disappearance, a negotiation of harmonic spectra. It is both natural and artificial, a product of deliberate design and construction.

Sound exists in time, and so always exists. Chion’s expression “frozen sounds,” he tells me, “considers that it’s impossible to freeze sound because it is in time.” He is in Melbourne for a series of performances and lectures in late August, curated by Liquid Architecture, the Melbourne International Film Festival and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. Of keen interest to him, as well, is the texture of recorded sound, something he began experimenting with decades before the digital renaissance. As situations, surroundings and perspectives change, so too do the sounds. Listening back to the recording of our conversation, which took place in a busy, and noisy, café in Melbourne, I’m aware of the discordance between experience and recording. Joined by his wife Anne-Marie Marsaguet, we were surrounded by — as Chion might call it — “bruit,” a French descriptor for anything that interferes with our aural receptors, that we don’t necessarily want. (The French language can be more descriptive, he says to me.) Certain sounds are enlarged and others dulled in a distracting litany behind our voices echoing back to my phone’s recording point. In one sense, it’s unpleasant, but there’s much to be gained from a close study of it. I hear a bird chirping loudly somewhere above us, and remember a particular moment, as Chion mentioned Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and gestured to the sound, smiling.

“If I had to describe me, it’s difficult,” says Chion. “I would say that I am a searcher.” He also admits to being a writer of books, an historian and an observer of phenomena. Observing is a neutral term and a multisensory one, not restricted by Western civilisation’s typical ocular bias, but importantly not excluding sight. “I am trying to be a scientist. A scientist of listening,” he says, but later he seems to reconsider this, and rephrases. He is an observational scientist.

For Chion, the experience of seeing and listening together is an essential part of everyday life. And this life experience can be found in the cinema, the world refracted on the silver screen. These experiences are about being attuned to the spaces and sounds in the audiovisual, polyphonic expanse around us. “We cannot, from morning to night, be actively listening. We have to be sensitive [to what’s important].” But it’s a fact, says Chion, that the inner ear redirects itself towards the dynamic sound phenomena around it. A film’s sound, emanating from speakers, only truly takes place when it reaches the ears, something he states in Film: A Sound Art, his book translated into English in 2009 by Claudia Gorbman.

Chion’s performance in Melbourne on 17 August included the world premiere of a work of musique concrète, The Scream, and was followed by his famous Requiem and the 80-minute Third Symphony, the most sensorially dynamic of his three concert pieces that enlarge the visual space of the screen with sound from surrounding speakers. In Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, also translated by Gorbman, he writes, “Cinema is not solely a show of sounds and images; it also generates rhythmic, dynamic, temporal, tactile and kinetic sensations that make use of both the auditory and visual channels.”

His compositions aim to create this kind of cinematic affective sensation, too. By contrasting the meaning of words with images and sounds, he creates a fluid shift between alignment and chasmic disagreement. “What is important for the experience is totality,” he says of these compositions. “You can, with an orchestra, or with a movie, rebuild a soundscape. But it’s completely artificial, made with different sounds, at a different time.” He thinks of his compositions in the same way, as new experiences. “As a composer I define musique concrète as an art of fixed sounds, but fixed sounds are not the recording of precise sounds, pre-existing sounds. They are new objects.”

The sound of David Lynch

Chion has been a key thinker about these soundscapes for decades and even his older writings remain relevant. With this in mind, I ask about the soundscapes of someone with whom he is very familiar.

“There are extraordinary moments, and it’s very experimental. The most important thing in David Lynch’s case, is that he has a feeling of space and time,” Chion says of Twin Peaks: The Return. “And if you have a feeling of space and time, you can express it with time and image.” He describes the opening scene of Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) that he uses while teaching, where husband and wife, Fred and Renee (Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette), engage in slow conversation, with deliberate pauses in their dialogue. For Chion, the scene is an image of eternity. Moments that appreciate time in this way — as a sort of anti-narrative — are becoming extremely rare. “Today on the TV there are no more intervals, because of commercials and with remotes, people change channels. That people keep going to the movies, especially slow movies, is in my opinion to rediscover what is important in an interval. So, even if in David Lynch movies there were no strange situations or no strange sounds, his sense of tempo and space would be very strange, very specific.”

It’s clear that this sense of temporal experience is key for Chion. Throughout our conversation, the concept he returns to the most is not sound but time. Waiting, he says, is an essential part of our existence and we need to appreciate the interval. Slow down and observe the world; he and Marsaguet smile. “To let the cosmos exist.”

Melbourne International Film Festival, Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, ACMI, 16 Aug; The Audio-Spectator Concert, ACMI, Melbourne, 17 Aug; Presented by Liquid Architecture, Melbourne International Film Festival, ACMI and Institut Français.

Rhiannon Newton’s Doing Dancing makes me think about being, through time. Given her interest in the way dance “insists on disappearing,” as the artist writes in her program note, it feels appropriate that the work seems to dissolve in my grip, prompting questions and ideas that too have a delicious way of slipping through my fingers.

The work’s audiovisual installation is on show at Firstdraft gallery for several weeks, punctuated by three performances and/or making sessions that generate new material for it. I attend two of these. During one, Newton works alone, with Benjamin Forster operating recording and playback software he has built; during the other, she works with Forster and six other dancers.

The sessions follow a repetitive, almost circular structure: a performer reads a piece by Gertrude Stein, and then improvises a dance for a set period. Both the reading and the dance are recorded, and the video of the dance is projected in real time onto a nearby wall. This process is repeated over and over (the Stein text almost identical each time), by different dancers or, in the solo session, by Newton herself. And with every repetition, the recordings of previous iterations are also present: we hear each reading over (or alongside) audio recordings of previous readings, and see each presently unfolding dance projected onto previous dances.

The Stein text is a written portrait of Isadora Duncan, edited for this work by Newton. It is an extended cascade of phrases that meditate on being, oneness, likeness and dancing. The phrases dovetail and overlap; they sound like each other but bifurcate constantly, disorienting you just at the moment that you think you will figure out “where you are.” While the human body is so easily (and widely) understood as something solid and bounded, this text makes me ponder whether the persistent existence of a body through time might actually involve an infinite number of unique moments, and an infinite number of potential movements, actions and expressions, held tenuously together.

Watching the dancers improvise their way playfully and attentively around the circular rug laid out on the cement floor, thinking-and-moving, thinking-through-moving, I find myself thinking about moving as a process of going forwards through time — of always leaving a significant ‘now’ behind you. Watching the layered video, in which so many Rhiannons spill across and away from each other, and hearing all at once the eight different ways she has spoken a particular phrase, I reflect on the single body’s ability to trace a multitude of potential dances (and pronunciations of a word) over time.

Such ideas, I gather, are persistently interesting for Newton: her earlier work, Assemblies for One Body (2011), explored what “remains” of dance as we move forward through time, and how repeating a dance might allow us to examine that. The later Bodied Assemblies (2014) explored, among other things, the body’s capacity to be uniquely itself (to be radical, different), and equally its capacity to be like something or someone else.

“Dance insists on disappearing,” she writes, and indeed, over time, the accruing, translucent video layers grow wafer-thin. While the projection initially feels almost as solid as another physical place, in which the present dancer is in the company of one or two past selves, it transforms layer by layer into a vast and shimmering retrospective that vanishes even as it expands.

Being is so elusive, so diffuse, I marvel. And yet, watching Newton or Julian Renlong Wong or Miranda Wheen dance in the flesh, in the waning afternoon light, shouts from a nearby sports match drifting in through the open window, it strikes me that, just now, a dancing body doesn’t feel complicated at all. These dancers, who perform as themselves — who are always themselves, here with us, doing dancing — possess roundness, weight, hair and breath. They feel solid, significant, and all of this feels wonderfully straightforward.

Doing Dancing gives ample space to such double perspectives. It also allows for experiences like the one I have at the end of the group performance, when the room breaks into applause and I get the strange feeling that I don’t know who I’m clapping for — or, that I’m clapping for no one in particular. Of course, on one level I know. But it feels like, in doing this work, the artists are facilitating the emergence of something else: something that is at once all of them, and none of them. The work has an inbetweenness, maybe even a vanishing, at its centre. And even so, it makes dancing, and the ‘here and now,’ feel entirely weighted, persistent, sensuous.

Doing Dancing, Rhiannon Newton with Benjamin Forster, group performance with Brooke Stamp, Lizzie Thomson, Ivey Wawn, Miranda Wheen, Julian Renlong Wong, Trish Wood; Firstdraft gallery, Sydney, 2-25 Aug

Salt, like memory, preserves through a process of permeation — altering the structure of its ‘host’ while acting to retain some essential, singular quality. In the landscape of Sonya Lacey’s By Sea, salt fills the gaps and fissures opened up by the erosion that it has set in motion. The architectural space through which the camera glides shows the cumulative result of this process. Each passageway is translucent, constructed of cast salt that appears blemished and brittle when in close-up and in focus.

This imagery sits in uneasy accord with fragmentary narrative pieces afforded to the viewer by voice-over. These shards of information refuse distillation, their loose ends and peculiar tangents circuitously housing the world of the film within a larger set of metaphysical dimensions. We hear of glimpses of life inside a seaside apartment complex where each building forms a letter shape, so that an aerial view elicits the phrase “Par Mer.” We are told that the building is less legible on the inside, that no one knows for sure what it might be like to inhabit anyone else’s living quarters. Despite these challenges, the narrator says, “We resolve to share our partial information.” In these instances, the work’s eerie sense of profundity amplifies such notions beyond the geometric specifics of any one apartment, just as it echoes the conditions and confines of our subjectivity as individuals.

By Sea was inspired by the writings and short films of New Zealand poet and experimental filmmaker Joanna Margaret Paul, which, like Lacey’s work, often take the form of intimate meditations on the experience and minutiae of place. Such a focus is apparent in a 1985 issue of Cantrills Filmnotes, in which Paul wrote that “in a landscape or garden one discerns messages from within.”

Initially, the message-writ-large seems to elude those inside Par Mer. But the specifics of interiority — the slight tilt, the curved walls, the sound of a Supremes cassette, the salt in the flaws — cumulatively come to contain something that exceeds the reach of a two-word phrase read from above. We are told that coastal attrition is threatening to sweep Par Mer off the map. Yet it seems that if this were to eventuate, or if it already has, the granular particulars will preserve, for a select few, what it was like to experience their unique reality from within. Elyssia Bugg

Three guitars are held aloft, one played by the musician’s tongue, and all of them are blasting out Acid Mothers Temple’s euphoric brand of psychedelia. It’s the kind of blistering sonic lather that is rarely encountered at 6pm on the stage of Melbourne’s State Theatre. But tonight, and for a majority of Supersense’s “festival of the ecstatic,” the theatre and the Arts Centre that houses it, are doing their best to portray a different kind of space — one that is transformed and transformative.

Audiences descend into the belly of the Arts Centre via stairwells and passageways that gurgle and heave with a soundscape that anthropomorphises the building, suggesting digestion. Yet what is being absorbed, and by whom or what, is a question that arises repeatedly over the festival’s weekend.

Memory Field

A thematic concern with dream, memory, the alien and otherworldly pervades the Supersense program. Amid these, and perhaps despite its name, Memory Field feels very present. A duet between Bangarra dancer Waangenga Blanco and PVT drummer Laurence Pike, Memory Field begins in a haze of static and a pool of light. The stage is divided in two, Blanco caught in the spotlight on one side, Pike sculpting the soundscape from behind his drum kit on the other.

Blanco incorporates elements of traditional movement from the Torres Strait in his choreography. This vocabulary is woven through the tormented lyrical style, as the dancer makes angular contact with the floor to crawl, roll and claw his way around the perimeter of the light’s broad circle. Over the course of the performance, his charting of the light’s limits turns its initial enquiring focus outwards, the movement actively labouring beneath the weight of increasing distress.

Blanco’s circular journey is met beat for move by Pike’s restless score, which teeters, staggers and shudders through the Playhouse. As the circle, or memory field, finally tightens around Blanco’s writhing body, a tightness takes hold of Pike’s obstinate patter, uniting the performance elements in a claustrophobic embrace.

The way in which the artists sustain this seamless tension gives the piece’s exploration of memory (perhaps of ancestral culture) an ominous quality. This in turn reflects the oppressive cyclicality embedded in the act of remembering when the past itself is unforgettable. In a way that is uncommon throughout much of the festival program, Memory Field thus refuses transcendence. Instead it sets past and present in a deadlock, and holds the audience at this impasse, in a manner both challenging and memorable.

The Dream Machine

Touted as “the world’s first work of art you look at with your eyes closed,” The Dream Machine seems to come with the implicit promise of upending artistic convention. Conceived in the 1960s by Ian Sommerville, Brion Gysin and William S Burroughs, the work was originally intended to transport the participant into the phantasmagorical, using a record player and flickering light.

For Supersense’s reimagining of the work, an ensemble of artists from across the program, including guitarist Dave Harrington, saxophonist Arrington de Dionysio, harpist Zeena Parkins and the festival’s curator Sophia Brous, have been assembled to provide a live soundtrack for mass delirium. The audience is sprawled across the stage of the State Theatre, eyes closed, when the strobing begins. The music crests and light explodes across the hallucinatory field behind my eyelids. Hot shades of orange and pink burst and blur, following the blazing pace and squeal of Dionysio’s saxophone veering across the multi-instrumental clamour. I surrender to the tide of colour and sound, slightly nauseated, but mostly thrilled.

We are given brief respite when Parkins and cellist Oliver Coates perform an interlude that is striking for the sudden sparsity that is felt sonically and visually. This transitory lull achieves a sense of subtlety otherwise lacking in the performance. For while The Dream Machine’s hallucinatory powers are novel, its dynamics feel less innovative, the score relying heavily on two distinct peaks that intensify the visions one sees while listening. These render the work somewhat predictable, with the audience anticipating the return. That said, as I open my eyes to the sound of Brous muttering poetry, her breath catching on the edges of the score as it winds down, reality feels just a little too sharply focused, suspending a desire to keep dreaming in its wake.

The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane

We return on Saturday night for a different kind of transcendent experience. Again, we sit on the State Theatre’s stage, but this time the aesthetics of ecstatic intimacy are challenged by the numbers in attendance. The space’s transformation into a long hall hemmed in by white curtains forces disgruntled patrons to spill out beyond the peripheries of the space.

The overcrowding is mostly forgotten as the Sai Anantam singers vividly animate the legacy of Alice Coltrane, musician and founder of the ashram from which they’ve travelled. During the performance, transitions from prayers on high to deep, gospel grooves occur repeatedly, each time drawing the listener a little closer to a conception of the divine that intertwines the cosmically vast with the exquisitely personal. This feeling of totality is encapsulated in the breadth that the synthesiser’s ascending glissando lends to chants of victory, peace and bliss.

However, the Arts Centre’s limitations continually impede inclusivity. Invitations are extended for the audience to make use of the songbooks they are handed on entry and the performers’ sound levels turned down to allow the voices of the audiences to fill out the arrangements. But by design, the space favours loud, grandiose and amplified sound, muffling audience input. Consequently, when a handful of people do take up the invitation to sing, their unamplified voices fail to rise up in elation as they would, one assumes, in Coltrane’s ashram.

Arts centres like Melbourne’s only function efficiently when their Western, metropolitan bias is the default setting. A festival like Supersense directly and indirectly problematises this notion, as its access-all-areas approach denies the space any claim to passivity. Yet in such an initiative, the most effective interventions tend to be ones in which the performers instigate subversion, while the arts centre plays itself. Where an artist like Keiji Haino benefits from being able to pump his screeching sonic miasma into every acoustically submissive corner of the Playhouse, the songs of Alice Coltrane are lost in the ungainly process of imitation that the space undergoes in trying to create context for work that sits outside of its cultural ambit.

In this way, it’s unfortunate that the crowd seemed resistant to joining the Sai Anantam singers in song, but it’s also unsurprising. One doesn’t enter a spiritual state of ecstasy through a side door or the back stage. Such a reaction relies on more than externalities. It must originate, primarily from within.

Overground

This is perhaps why Overground, the “festival within a festival,” most closely resembles something of the ecstatic. Featuring performers from inside and outside the main program in an afternoon of collaborative improvised works, the festival transpires in the Arts Centre’s foyers. In these spaces, encounters between artists and works may be accidental and ephemeral, the results unexpected and electrifying.

Such is the case in an hypnotic collaboration between Deborah Kayser, Peter Knight, Matthias Schack-Arnott and Cleek Schrey. Schrey, who on Friday night had conjured the falling walls of biblical Jericho through the refrains of Appalachian folk song, here seems to use his instrument to summon the demonic. The tortured whining and sighing he elicits from his hardanger fiddle urges on Kayser’s wraithlike moans, so that for a time, the scene wavers on the brink of becoming a séance.

Curated in collaboration with The NOW Now and Liquid Architecture, Overground eschews assimilation of any one element into another. Instead, it instigates fluid, responsive exchange between the artists, the audience and the site’s specifics. In doing so, the pretensions of the Arts Centre and its audience are dispersed, opening both up to the possibility of rapture.

Top image credit: Memory Field, Waangenga Blanco, Laurence Pike, Supersense, photo Mark Gambino

The APRA-AMCOS and Australian Music Centre’s 2017 Art Music Awards ceremony at Sydney’s City Recital Hll engendered a genuine sense of occasion, opening with a richly expressive and welcoming didjeridu performance by Mark Atkins and closing with an affecting performance of “Koolja” by the stellar Narli Ensemble comprising Stephen Pigram (voice, guitar), Errki Veltheim (violin), Stephen Magnusson (guitar), Mark Atkins (didjeridu), Tristen Parr (cello) and Tos Mahoney (flute).

AMC Chair Genevieve Lacey spoke of how “humbling and fortunate” it is to be a musician and to “reveal what tears at us” in troubling times in which, she says, we should turn for inspiration to the recent Uluru Statement from the Heart. She paid tribute to outgoing APRA-AMCOS CEO Brett Cottle, who emphasised the importance of experimentation and community and in turn praised as “selfless and hardworking,” the indefatigable AMC CEO John Davis, whom other award winners also praised.

Another champion of Australian music, ELISION artistic director and managerial force to be reckoned with, Daryl Buckley, received the Award for Excellence by an Individual. For some 30 years, he has promoted Australian music-making and composition principally by sustaining the ELISION ensemble, which he described as “a family of equals,” and expanding its international reach, at times against considerable odds.

Many compositions, including three operas, by the profoundly inventive Liza Lim have been premiered by ELISION. This year she won two awards, including Instrumental Work of the Year for the ecologically and anthropologically-inspired How Forests Think, which the ensemble thrillingly premiered at last year’s Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music (BIFEM), featuring sheng player Wu Wei and conducted by Carl Rosman. The work is dedicated to John Davis.

Lim also won the Vocal/Choral Work of the Year for the opera Tree of Codes premiered by Ensemble MusikFabrik and Cologne Opera, conducted by Clement Power and directed by Massimo Furlan. Excerpts from the production reveal surreal staging (including something of the heft of the score). Lim spoke of the joy of being able to produce “a work of scale,” and, at her reckoning, “one every seven years.”

Marshall McGuire played Lim’s Rug Music, which draws deeply on the harp’s resources, while cellist Tristen Parr strikingly played Cat Hope’s Shadow of Mill (1st movement) with a bow in each hand.

Melbourne’s Speak Percussion won the Award for Excellence by an Organisation, pianist Peter de Jager (who impressed so much with his monumental Xenakis concert in BIFEM 2016) received the Award for Performance of the Year, and Lyle Chan was awarded Orchestral Work of the Year for Serenade for Tenor, Saxophone and Orchestra to words by Benjamin Britten about a pre-WWII relationship.

Tura New Music won the Award for Excellence in a Regional Area for its unique remote WA touring and development program. Artistic Director Tos Mahoney spoke of the importance of “learning, not just delivering” in the organisation’s contact and collaborations with Aboriginal peoples.

One winning group stood out for the highly unusual nature of their collaborative achievement. The Award for Excellence in Experimental Music went to Clocked Out (Erik Griswold, Vanessa Tomlinson) with Bruce and Jocelyn Wolfe, who accepted it on the night, for The Piano Mill Project. Sited near Stanhope in Queensland, it’s described on the project’s website as “a square structure clad in copper, designed by architect Bruce Wolfe and purpose-built to house 16 pianos — eight on the first level and eight on the mezzanine. The walls consist of large-scale louvres, which can be opened and shut to alter the Mill’s acoustic.” Griswold has composed a score for the collective pianos which are of various ages and conditions. You can see the Mill and hear its distinctive sound on the project’s website.

Jazz drummer and until recently leader of Ten Part Invention, John Pochée received the Award for Distinguished Services to Australian Music. Peter Rechniewski’s glowing tribute, a short documentary and the artist’s speech revealed not only his innovations and his democratic spirit but also a life in which Pochée could happily combine playing exploratory jazz side by side with working for club bands and for visiting artists like Shirley Bassey, for whom he was a favourite. This segment of the evening gave us a fascinating glimpse of Sydney cultural life from 1950s clubs El Rocco and Mocambo to Pochée’s 1986 creation of Ten Part Invention — in which everyone was a composer — and on to the present with the band’s current lineup paying tribute to Pochée with a performance of And Zen Monk, composed early in the band’s career by Roger Frampton, embracing its quickfire subtleties and executing it with big band verve.

Andrea Keller won the Award for Excellence in Jazz and performed her “Darest Thou Now” with impressively supple singing from Gian Slater, while Tom O’Halloran won Jazz Work of the Year for the furiously complex album Now Noise, performed on CD by Memory of Elements.

These and other awards given out on the night collectively illustrate the wellbeing of adventurous Australian music-making across forms, cities and regions, paying tribute to the durability and influence of long-term contributors like John Pochée, Daryl Buckley and ELISION, Liza Lim, Clocked Out, Speak Percussion and Tura New Music who have engendered a new Australian musical landscape. The 2017 Art Music Awards, in a crisp two-hour ceremony with bravura performances curated by Gabriella Smart, did them proud.

APRA-AMCOS, Australian Music Centre, Art Music Awards 2017, City Recital Hall, Sydney, 22 Aug

Top image credit: Richard Whalley, Greg Stone, Helen Thomson, Hir, Belvoir Street Theatre, photo Brett Boardman

Chloe Wong & Dance Lab

As part of the 2017 OzAsia Festival, Hong Kong dancer, dance teacher and choreographer Chloe Wong will be one of 11 choreographers from Australia, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore undertaking a five-day residency, titled Australia-Asia Dance Lab, at LW Dance Hub in the Lion Arts Centre, Adelaide. Under the overall guidance of acclaimed choreographer Leigh Warren, the residency will enable participants from diverse backgrounds to collaborate in an experimental dance laboratory, and audiences will be offered the unique experience of being able to see them exchanging ideas and developing work together. I recently spoke with Chloe Wong in Hong Kong.

A 2006 graduate from the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts majoring in Modern Dance, Wong undertook a Masters degree program in the US and has extensive experience as both dancer and choreographer. Her solo and ensemble works have been performed in Asia, Europe and America and she is engaged in a three-year exchange in Japan.

Wong has a distinctive often theatrical approach to choreography, making extensive use of props and dialogue. In Heaven Behind the Door (2014), the dancers use an overhead projector to shine a beam of light through a glass bowl around the darkened stage, focusing the image of shimmering water over other dancers and onto the stage backdrop to create a visual effect that suggests a watery searchlight. The work was developed in 2014 at the time of the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement. Demonstrators carried yellow umbrellas and the protest extended more than two months. “It moved me a lot,” says Wong, having witnessed many ordinary people become very vocal and protective of their freedom, confirming her belief that if people act to protect their own space and identity, they can be very powerful. Hong Kong is a society in transition, which raises the question of identity, an important theme in Chloe Wong’s work, especially when it’s repressed, as wittily demonstrated in the 2012’s The Red Cage, performed and choreographed by Wong, conceived with art director Moon Yip and subheaded “NO Brainwashing!”

Chloe Wong likes to work with other dancers in exchange programs, acknowledging each participant as an individual and what they bring to a workshop. Her own work, she says, is about enabling every individual to express their beliefs, with sharing an important part of the process. Her choreography develops organically, evolves over time and may be redeveloped with each new production.

Having previously worked with Australian dancers, Wong is excited to be doing so again. The other choreographers in Dance Lab are Alison Currie, Richard Cilli, Natalie Allen and Lina Limosani (Australia), Victor Fung (Hong Kong), Yu-ju Lin, Kuan-Hsiang Liu and I-Fen Tung (Taiwan), and Christina Chan and Ricky Sim (Singapore). “You just don’t know what will happen in the workshop… it’s the same as life,” she says.

As there is no plan to create a finished work or present a final performance, Dance Lab is an experiment without a predetermined outcome, and thus places no constraints on how the 11 participants might interact over the five days. At the end of the Lab, the artistic outcome will be the sharing of ideas between the participants. Wong suggests that working with other dancers “is a challenge, like making friends,” and she has no specific plans for the residency, preferring as she normally does to work spontaneously with the others involved.

Given Dance Lab’s open-ended, exploratory nature, offering such a workshop is a courageous innovation by the OzAsia Festival, but one optimistically supported by numerous agencies suggesting expected benefits for the contributing countries and their artists in the long-term.

As well as being able to visit the Dance Lab workshop, the public are welcome to attend a public discussion (details below).

Dr Wilfred Wong Ying Wai, Hong Kong Arts Development Council

Collaboration and cultural exchange are central to the OzAsia Festival. In 2016 the Adelaide Festival Centre signed a memorandum of understanding with the Hong Kong Arts Development Council (HKADC) to provide for shared programs to be delivered in 2016 and 2017. Hong Kong choreographers Chloe Wong and Victor Fung, new media artist and composer Gaybird and writer Dorothy Tse appearing in OzAsia 2017 are supported by HKADC.

I spoke to HKADC Chairman Dr Wilfred Wong Ying Wai, who emphasised the importance of enabling collaboration between Hong Kong artists and artists in other countries. He suggested that, in a world where artists collaborate, “it is important to have a wider network cultivated for Hong Kong as a whole… It is not just showcasing how good we are, it is also helping our artists to go to the next level… OzAsia has a very special meaning because it is a festival that really focuses on Asian art.”

Dr Wong noted that there has there has been much development in the arts in Hong Kong over recent years. “There is more of an attempt to identify who we are. In the past, all our artists are very happy to just go along with [for example] classical western music and do their best and hopefully be the best … But now, in the last 20 years, there is a search — what is local, who do we represent? What is the Hong Kong identity? There are a lot more creative works emerging in this area, particularly in the visual arts and dance.” He suggests that Hong Kong’s significant artistic development reflects a change in social values: “We have become much more artistic and cultural. We know that enjoying life is as important as making a living.”

OzAsia Festival: Australia-Asia Dance Lab, open workshop, 10.30am-12.00pm, Tue 26-Sat 30 Sept, 1.00–4.30pm, Sat 30 Sept, Lion Arts Centre; public forum, The Mill, Adelaide, 5.30 pm, Fri 29 Sept

Australia-Asia Dance Lab has been jointly funded by the Government of South Australia, Arts SA, DanceHub, The Mill, the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, Culturelink Singapore and the National Arts Council Singapore.

Chris Reid visited Chloe Wong and Dr Wilfred Wong Ying Wai in Hong Kong courtesy of the Hong Kong Arts Development Council and the Adelaide Festival Centre.

American playwright Taylor Mac’s Hir moves relentlessly from seemingly low farce to near tragedy, blessedly without a gun in sight, but with a needy young soldier returned from Afghanistan seeking a hero’s welcome and patriarchal order. He’ll get none of it. His working class family has changed, possibly America too.

The apparent chaos that greets him and us — an ordinary loungeroom and kitchen epically awash with scattered clothes, rubbish and unwashed dishes — is in fact a new order. The audience gasps, the ex-soldier, Isaac (Michael Whalley), screams and subsequently vomits at every instance of change. His father, Arnold (Greg Stone), appears to be a cross-dressing clown who can barely speak. His mother, Paige (Helen Thomson), has abandoned domesticity and mastered the lingo of feminism and LGBTQI politics, wielding it with a mix of wicked panache and amusing uncertainty and allowing Mac to satirise aspects of queer rhetoric, including that ever-lengthening acronym.

Worse, Arnold, who used to beat his wife and children, has had a stroke and is subject to Paige’s vengeance — dressed as a woman, fed mush, hosed down and kept cold with the aircon on (Paige’s taming of the stink of male sweat). There might not be a gun in Hir, but the competition over the control of the temperature is dangerously akin to its threat. Worse again for Isaac, his sister is now transgender Max (Kurt Pimblett), hence the play’s title, Hir, crossing his and her, and the injunction that Isaac use ‘zee’ as the preferred pronoun for Max (the arguments about transgender identity are an education). Can Isaac adjust to this new domestic order, how viable is it, especially for Max, and where does Arnold fit in, if at all? These are the questions that Mac’s characters must face as the greater part of the play unfolds and darkens between explosive bursts of comic conflict.

Although it’s clear that patriarchy has no place in this household (Arnold’s debilitating stroke is as symbolic as it is actual), the complexities of gender orientation and typecasting will endure. Paige notes that with Isaac’s arrival male moodiness is on the rise and that Max is inclining to a masculine polarity. It’s indicative of the play’s character and moral complexities that Isaac, instead of demanding the return of his sister, opts for masculinising Max, whereas Paige clings to the teenager’s gender ambiguity and their life together, which includes the “cultural Saturdays” she insists Isaac join — “[Our family] never loved art,” he retorts. Paige declares that Max has saved her life, which indicates how culturally and morally pivotal Max is to the play, even though Paige and Isaac are its actual plot drivers. While intelligent and sharp-witted, Max is too young, too easily bossed about to shape events, although a final gesture might suggest at least a developing empathy for defeated manhood. The question remains, will Max be constrained by Paige’s vague fantasy of abandoning the home and setting off into the greater world? The adolescent’s own dream for now goes no further than tentatively imagining joining a queer anarchist commune.

What is that greater world? There’s little reference to it, beyond Paige’s mention of impoverished, drug-addicted veterans hanging about the streets. Max is not palpably part of an LGBTQI community. Paige has a job with a non-profit that is clearly not part of her projected future. Hir’s isolated working class family is a microcosm of a society undergoing the transformations wrought by the weakening of patriarchy and the concomitant rise of feminism, queer culture and transgender identification. It’s strongly felt, hotly argued; there is violence, there is banishment and, finally, lingering uncertainty. Paige’s determination to pursue her vision is at once valid, given all she has suffered and been joyously liberated from, but it’s also obdurately limited, not least for Max.

The progression in the first act of Hir, from the riotous comedy of its opening and subsequent deliriously tense arguments to a not at all funny final scene with Isaac and Arnold alone (in which the son menacingly talks the father through a litany of the man’s brutalities), is indicative of the overall momentum across the whole play and its comedy-drama dynamic, from comic disruption to dark ponderings. Hir is not a classically redemptive, procreative comedy. Mac humours his audience, with a jolt, into being open to social transformation but also to its obstacles and the play ends without laughter. Arnold’s stroke, Max’s transgender status and Paige’s acceptance of that identity and of her own potential have wrought enormous change, its consequences only just being fully felt at Hir’s end.

Director Anthea Williams and her cast honour the play’s distinctive drive from laughter into darkness with precise comic crafting and subtle characterisations that render the seriousness of daunting issues intelligible. Helen Thomson seems to blend Phyllis Diller’s deadpan bluntness and Samantha Bee’s vocal and gestural animation, reeling off Paige’s declarations and assaults with quick-fire screwball comedy verve, but, when events require it, revealing the woman’s fearsome determination, cruel as it can be, to never, in any way, return to her previous subjection.

Isaac, who, despite knowing too well his father’s sins, yearns for the status quo, is manipulative, hypocritical (he was a dishonourably discharged ‘hero’) and possibly suffering, as his mother suggests, PTSD (he was on a mortuary detail in the war, collecting body parts). Michael Whalley finely delineates Isaac’s homecoming astonishment, its convulsive physical consequences and his inherent rectitude, inflected with escalating desperation and with hints of trauma stress.

The role of Arnold limits Greg Stone to a narrower but no less impressively realised ambit in which he delineates a lost soul, uttering single words he’s heard, ordered about like a pet dog, confused about but embracing his cross-dressing and now and then revealing a surfacing undercurrent of anger and momentary knowledge of his plight. As required by the playwright, a transgender actor, Kurt Pimblett, plays Max with a vividly apt mix of teen confidence and confusion, caught between hir mother and brother and hir own impulses (sometimes to just to go to bed and masturbate), or attempting to extricate hirself from what Paige assumes are shared attitudes.

With Hir, Taylor Mac, who crafts many kinds of plays and performance art, has chosen to take on the American dysfunctional family genre which reaches from Eugene O’Neill to Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee and Sam Shephard, but rendered it fiercely comic, to a point, and white working class. In a program note, Mac invokes Stockton, California, the town he grew up in, as the model location for Hir. Presumably, this and like towns across the country are Trump territory, but Mac doesn’t make the connection. It’s as if the radical but difficult transformation he portrays will ensue regardless of politics. But is the microcosm of change that is Paige’s dissolving family representative of a macrocosm that includes, say, Black and Hispanic Americans? That’s too big a question for this play, though doubtless one that will be raised. Instead, Mac has focused on a class where change would seem least likely incipient and shown it painfully taking shape, like a prophetic test case.

Paige recalls being raped by a drunken Arnold. She likes to think that her subsequent dismissive shrug triggered his stroke. Hir is that kind of funny — a grim, scabrous, point-scoring battle of ideas and drives. Mac’s ending feels a tad underdeveloped and a couple of passages in the second act, one with Max struggling to play banjo, the other Paige’s spectacularly camp “therapeutic shadow play theatre,” felt somewhat awkwardly integrated if still rich in, respectively, frustration and release.

Hir is an invigorating experience, as didactic but also less so than you might expect, and utterly timely. I was reminded of Nakkiah Lui’s Black is the New White, staged by the STC earlier this year, which appropriated the Australian family comedy-drama à la Williamson, increasingly testing its limits with white and black middle class families facing home truths and crossing boundaries, social and sexual. It’s a gentler play than Taylor Mac’s, but imbued with a tough kindred spirit.

Belvoir, Hir, writer Taylor Mac, director Anthea Williams, performers Kurt Pimblett, Greg Stone, Helen Thomson, Michael Whalley, set, costume designer Michael Hankin, composer, sound designer Steve Toulmin, lighting designer Sian James-Holland; Belvoir Upstairs, Sydney, 12 Aug-10 Sept

Top image credit: Kurt Pimblett, Michael Whalley, Hir, Belvoir Street Theatre, photo Brett Boardman

How do film editors think? Dr Karen Pearlman’s new short film, Woman with an Editing Bench, is a 15-minute biopic about Russian film editor Elizaveta Svilova, unsung creative collaborator on the classic essay documentary Man with a Movie Camera (1929). That film’s pioneering approach to the storytelling strategy of montage has become a pillar of film theory, but Svilova’s contribution has been eclipsed by those focusing on director Dziga Vertov. Though it’s alarming to think that a woman’s role has been historically so under-credited, Woman with an Editing Bench does more than reclaim a piece of cinema’s founding story: it aims to understand editors’ broader role in the process of co-writing and producing films.

A key scene in the film shows Svilova (Leanna Walsman) and Vertov (Richard James Allen) working furiously and collaboratively: cutting and recutting celluloid strips of film, scrawling diagrams that block movement and key plot points, and redrafting scenes together, on-the-fly. From two minds a new kind of film emerges, Man with A Movie Camera.

Film as research

Where Woman with an Editing Bench differs from most other new short films is that it also qualifies as an original contribution to scholarly thought, having been produced through Macquarie University’s Creative Ecologies Lab, a haven within the academy for around 20 artist-scholars working in dance, performance, music, creative non-fiction and film. “Woman with an Editing Bench is a creative research output at Macquarie University, which put substantial funding into it as well as providing the studio, camera, the lights, the technical facilities,” says Pearlman. “Where I teach Screen Production is the old AFTRS building. So we have these fantastic, world-class facilities for creative research and practice. Parts of the facilities are reserved for the student and staff researchers.”

Pearlman’s own path through academia is that of an artist-scholar. She came to Australia from the US as a dancer, but “pretty quickly realised that my entire cultural context and history in New York was not going to work here. I retrained and did two Masters degrees in editing and production and a Doctor of Creative Arts in about seven years.” The book resulting from her doctorate, Cutting Rhythms: Shaping the Film Edit, is in its second edition through Focus Press, and Pearlman is now a lecturer teaching filmmaking in Macquarie’s Screen Practices and Production course, after having spent six years at AFTRS as head of Screen Studies. Continuous throughout all her work is the idea that a well-edited film is a film that moves well.

Editing as distributed cognition

“It can’t be just a good film,” says Pearlman of her approach to making cinematic projects within the university structure. “It has to make a new contribution to knowledge. So there’s been a whole lot of research questions that have led to Woman with an Editing Bench, and one is around distributed cognition. It says that you don’t just think in your brain, you think in your brain and your body and in the world, and that cognition is distributed and felt and intuitive, and it’s not just reasoning: it’s thought and action together. So I’ve been looking at film editing as an instance of distributed cognition.”

For Pearlman’s research, that meant asking: how does the editor think through the process of editing? “And how does the film think with the editor and how does it change? The editor doesn’t make any decisions apart from the filmed material. The thinking is integrated with sourcing, selecting, trimming, composing — it’s thinking with the material, it’s thinking in practice.

“I started looking at the historical record of Dziga Vertov and his editor Elizaveta Svilova through the lens of distributed cognition. Using the film Man with a Movie Camera, my claim is that I can use Svilova’s techniques to reveal her thoughts. Dziga Vertov is well documented. He gave interviews, he wrote a lot, you can have a career as a Vertov scholar. But Svilova’s thoughts are virtually undocumented. But fortunately what we do have is Man with a Movie Camera. We can see what her processes are — literally what actions she was taking as an editor, and can say, that’s her thinking. I brought her clips into my editing software and analysed them frame by frame, looking for her sense of rhythm and juxtaposition, the structures she designs, the way she shaped the flow of the story, the strobing technique that was so hard to achieve back then [with analogue technologies].”

In other words, Pearlman found Svilova’s blueprint. “In the creative process, I’m embodying Svilova’s process, I’m thinking with her thinking. So my claim is that Woman with an Editing Bench recuperates her thoughts and puts them onscreen and that’s the new knowledge it contributes. The filmmaking has absolutely confirmed my hypothesis that editing is an instance of distributed cognition.” The lessons learned in the process of crafting her film have now created new pedagogical tools that Pearlman builds into her teaching in the university’s screen studies course. She’s since written a book chapter and several peer-reviewed papers on the subject of editing as distributed cognition, and the research is ongoing, with further films to come.

In this sense, Pearlman’s output reveals an important function for creative practice in universities: to test the theories that are developed in scholarship about how meaning is created in film, images and sound. The film resulting from this process is very different in feel and form from the short films coming out of Screen Australia’s short film funding programs, and has screened at international film festivals, been collected for research and preservation by 10 international film archives and acquired for educational distribution by Ronin Films.

Creative works are questions

But how to make short films that function as both a piece of creative research and a complete artwork to viewers who aren’t approaching them academically? “At a basic level, all creative works are questions. If you already knew the answer, you wouldn’t make one. You’re not going to remake the thing you made last year. So in creative practice research, you have a chance to articulate those questions in a really rigorous and sound way. I worked as a dancer for a long time, and for choreographers, there’s no requirement that they articulate what they’re trying to do. Not everybody needs to do it this way, but for me, it’s incredibly enriching and enlivening for my practice to do research and to theorise it — thinking about editing, thinking about history, thinking about film, thinking about women, thinking about cognition. It’s wrong to think that theorising your work will interrupt your intuition. Intuition is richly valued, and so is scholarly enquiry.”

Woman with an Editing Bench, writer, director Karen Pearlman, director of photography Kieran Fowler, production designer Bethany Ryan, costume designer Anna Cahill, editor Karen Pearlman, music Caitlin Yeo; 15 mins, Physical TV Company, 2016

Either Or is the latest concert program from the long-running Soundstream Collective, helmed by Adelaide-based composer and pianist Gabriella Smart. On this occasion, the Elder Conservatorium’s Elder Hall hosted a diverse program of solo and small ensemble works for traditional instrumentation and electronics, taking as its unifying (albeit loose and thoroughly abstracted) theme the construction of language.

Disappointingly, Irish composer Gerald Barry’s one-act opera for soprano and piano, La Plus Forte, based on Strindberg’s short play The Stronger, could not be performed, soprano Allison Bell having fallen victim to the vagaries of Adelaide’s weather. If the revised program felt at times insubstantial without the opera’s inclusion, additional works by Erkki Veltheim, Elena Kats Chernin and Alvin Curran nevertheless proved canny substitutions.

The evening’s first bracket opened with Cat Hope’s Stella Degradation for viola and cello. Taking its inspiration from Xenakis’ Terretektorh (1955-56) and a version of its accompanying score, the work emphasised glissandi, drone and noise, quiet passages of lightly bowed glissando giving way to abrupt bursts of dissonance. Reading graphic notation on iPads and bathed in crepuscular blue light, performers Erkki Veltheim (viola) and Ewen Bramble (cello) performed with considerable control and virtuosity.

An over-reliance on the upper registers of the instruments, however, proved irksome, preventing the harmonic characteristics of the lower registers — an important compositional interest of Hope’s, as displayed in the recent work-in-development showing of her new opera Speechless at Vitalstatistix in Adelaide — from being sufficiently explored.

With a structure skillfully and affectingly built over its six-minute duration, Leah Blankendaal’s composition, titled We were met by ordinary devotion, was a concert highlight, with its exceptional marriage of clarinet and electronics. Mitch Berick’s richly tonal high solo clarinet, recalling Messiaen’s birdsong transpositions, contained a distinctive recurring motif that, sampled live and relayed with modulated treatments, fractured and complexified, Blankendaal’s lightly abrasive sonic layering gradually giving way to low rumbles as the work concluded.

The use of austere lighting enhanced the performance’s overall effect, Berick illuminated by a single spot centrestage, Blankendaal stage right, lit solely by the glow of her laptop. A Soundstream Emerging Composers Forum commission, We were met with ordinary devotion perfectly demonstrated Blankendaal’s considered choice of instrumentation and treatments while intriguingly exploring ideas of pregnancy, female autonomy and body ownership (the title is taken from Maggie Nelson’s memoir The Argonauts) through the morphing, growing form of the work.

The first bracket of the program concluded with Errki Veltheim’s The Continuity Hypothesis, an ambient ensemble work for electronics, woodwinds, electric keyboard and cello, underscored by what Veltheim described in his introduction as a “machine soundscape” (think of those ominous, industrial chugs and drones that bookend Pink Floyd’s “Welcome to the Machine”).

As well, Veltheim nodded to absurdist theatre and language acquisition theory, warning the audience to expect “not a piece of music but a listening experience.” In his program notes, he states that the work involves each performer being given a “vocabulary of short musical gestures that mimic the phonemes observed in infantile babbling, adapted for each instrument through specific techniques such as slap-tongues for the bass clarinet, muted pizzicato for the cello and sampled sounds on the keyboard.”

However, the work’s near-half hour duration and unvaryingly languid pace challenge without reward, becoming an exercise in audience endurance rather than a dynamic expression of the composer’s interest in “the relationship of (language) processes to the semiotics of musical composition and performance” (program).

Veltheim returned to the stage following the interval to perform his Turing Test for improvised viola and electronics. Following a similar compositional approach to that of Cat Hope’s work, the first half of Turing Test — named for Alan Turing’s famous experiment designed to gauge the ability of a machine to think like a human — was characterised by dissonant glissandi, occupying the entire range of Veltheim’s viola.

The electronic accompaniment arrived abruptly a couple of minutes in, somewhat unsubtly relaying captures of the viola across stereo delay with granulated textures and pointillist tones. With Veltheim’s bow visibly shredded, the second half offered some reprieve with an exploration of drone and an emphasis on the harmonic qualities of the viola’s tone, which nicely melded with the electronic treatments.

Two works for solo piano concluded the program — Elena Kats Chernin’s Piano Memories (1^st movement) and Alvin Curran’s For Cornelius — equally impeccably performed by Gabriella Smart. Both offered a welcome contrast to the erratic atonalities of Veltheim’s works, accentuating complex yet frequently spacious tonalities, and strongly reminiscent of Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s works for piano. Kats Chernin’s Piano Memories — inspired by the ‘silence’ of the now-retired piano at the old Alice Springs Telegraph Station — came across as the lighter of the two works, with phrasings tending to drift solemnly before gently slipping away.

Curran’s For Cornelius — dedicated to the memory of English experimental composer Cornelius Cardew — developed along similar lines, its comparably pensive mood underscored by subtle dissonances that made for an uneasy, funereal first half. Contrastingly, the second half saw an abrupt shift to pounded open chords, cascading aggressively with sustain but impressively controlled by Smart.

Given La Plus Forte’s regrettable omission from the second half of Either Or’s program, Gabriella Smart and company must be commended for curating a replacement suite of works at such late notice that complemented the rest of the program in terms of relative tone and consistency. Of the newer works presented, Blankendaal’s beautifully realised We were met by ordinary devotion was the most successful, the other works demanding greater expression, depth and momentum to realise their full potential.

Tristan Louth-Robins is a sound artist based in Adelaide. Writer and playwright Ben Brooker is RealTime’s Adelaide reviewer for contemporary performance, theatre and dance.

Few operas are written in Australia and even fewer are publicly workshopped as part of the development process. Cat Hope, Professor of Music at Monash University, and Head of the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music, is developing a major new operatic work, titled Speechless. The audience response to the opera’s first outing over two nights as part of Adelaide’s Vitalstatistix incubation program was overwhelmingly positive.

Hope describes Speechless as “an experimental noise opera — in three acts, for four soloists, the Australian Bass Orchestra and choir.” Distressed at the inadequacy of the response to Gillian Triggs’ 2014 Human Rights Commission report, The Forgotten Children: National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention, Hope based the graphic score and thematic material for Speechless on elements of the report.

This intense and dramatic work of roughly an hour’s duration involves four outstanding soloists — Alice Hui-Sheng Chang, Kusum Normoyle, Judith Dodsworth and Sage Pbbbt — with two Adelaide community choirs, Hoi Polloi and Born on Monday, and the Australian Bass Orchestra (formed by Hope in 2014) playing cellos, double basses, bass guitars, bass brass (trombones, tuba and euphonium), bass drums, electronics (including a theremin), and a harp, all held together by conductor Aaron Wyatt. While the orchestra all play below middle C, the choir and soloists extend into the upper registers, creating a dialogue across the treble and bass staves that suggests children being tossed around on stormy seas. In other contexts, this might be considered experimental music, that is, music intended to explore sonic or instrumental possibilities. Importantly, there is no dialogue in the opera. The extensive range of vocal sounds, from hissing and muttering to screaming, do not convey speech, reflecting the opera’s title. Hope’s intention is to convey the silencing of protests against detention, and the opera is thus both a personal statement and a highly successful musical innovation.

Your program note makes clear how the situation of children in detention has inspired the opera, but that you did not want to be didactic. The resulting work is emotionally intense without being so. How well do you think it worked in expressing your concerns?

The opera is about my concern for people who have been rendered speechless by decisions made by the Australian government: refugees, children (as refugees from domestic violence) and Indigenous communities. I was aware that any attempt to communicate this was a big risk — how to make a work on a very specialised topic without any narrative, words or action, and not be programmatic? Are the tools of my music enough? And, is the intent communicated or is it all too abstract? I think that once the context is provided (through the program note, for example) people find their own connections, their own narratives and meanings. It can be different for each listener, no one is being told how to feel or react. The work is driven by my response to important issues of our time. The singers need to find meaning in it for themselves. I think we succeeded in that performers and audience alike found that meaning.

Speechless is a large-scale work that combines a unique ensemble — a bass orchestra — with community choirs, soloists using extended vocal techniques and graphic scores. It already seems highly resolved, but having seen it in performance, how do you now feel about it musically?

I came to the workshop process with 50 of the 55 minutes we presented written, then added a new interlude, and made some significant changes once I got there. I had engaged many operatic devices and plotted the structure out quite carefully. But I have worked with the Australian Bass Orchestra, and low frequency instruments more generally; I knew more or less what to expect. I chose my collaborators carefully, and made sure that there were people leading sections who know my music, who understood it and, when required, could bring their own style to the piece. It was a very moving moment, one that I will never forget. There are still some changes I would like to make that will take longer than we had between rehearsals.

What was the impetus for the creation of the Australian Bass Orchestra and why did you incorporate a pre-existing musical concept into Speechless?

I formed it to perform low frequency music that was not driven by any style or instrument plan and could be formed in any place with any players of any instrument with a bass range. It is a sporadic project that only occurs when an opportunity arises. I thought a lot about how to handle the complex topic of the opera, and realised the concept of the bass orchestra would suit. As with the engagement of the community choir, it was important to me that the work speaks from, as well as in, the place it is performed. Local performers bring that. Given how important it was for me to not speak on behalf of anyone, it seemed the right place for an orchestra like this to be engaged.

Were the soloists selected to introduce their individual vocal techniques into the overall composition? Is there flexibility in the score to enable performance with other soloists?

It was important that the singers each came with their own style, and their parts reflect different qualities they bring — not them personally, rather their approach to music. The soloists coming from an improvisatory practice have more freedom; Kusum Normoyle has her own “scream” part, while the operatic soloist, Judith Dodsworth, has a poignant “aria” moment. I have thought a lot about what makes this work an opera, and how opera reflects issues and music of the day. Music of the day is a varied and complex thing: pop music, improvisation, classical, jazz, sound art and so on… So I chose the four singers from this pool of contemporary practice, and my score enables them to interpret it from within their own realm of experience.

You have considerable experience in the use and development of graphic scores. Are they effective in encouraging the performers to extend themselves and to be active interpreters of the material?

Graphic notation has enabled my compositional practice for a couple of reasons. It’s the best way for scoring the elements core to my composition: drone, glissandi, texture, aleatoricism and the absence of pulse. Its openness can remove implication of style, another thing that is important in all my music. You know how jazz charts often use a special “jazz font”? You almost have to play it differently when you see that. Most music is not notated at all these days. This kind of graphic notation — coordinated and carefully plotted — can be followed by any musician. As you say, it enables active interpretation, which is key to the theme of the work. But you need a musician’s skills to get the best out of it. I am particularly excited about how well our Decibel ScorePlayer iPad application, the mechanism we used to deliver the score to the performers, managed with such a large, spread-out group. Everyone had their own part, but could still see the others, and the score was controlled and led by the conductor. There were even lighting and audio cues in the score. We really pushed the graphic notation copying and typesetting process during the development period, and by the end, we had real time edits going on as the orchestra was playing the score, ready for the next day’s rehearsal.

Including local choirs engages the community, as does your Speechless blog in which you reflect on the process of development. Is this broader strategy of engagement valuable in reinforcing the opera’s message for the public?

Jeff Khan, Artistic Director of Performance Space, mentioned after the performance that the presence of a choir made it seem like a “citizens’ address,” which I think frames it perfectly. Community choirs are often formed for reasons other than musical interest, and more for wellbeing and bringing people together. I found these choirs to be more open-minded about experimentation and extended techniques than a formal choral group singing, say, The Messiah. They wanted to empower themselves somehow, to communicate about this issue of the lack of voice. Some came from troubled circumstances and the project really offered them something.

Presenting a work like this involves coordinating and supporting large numbers of performers, crew and venue staff. How important is it to have organisations like Tura New Music and Vitalstatistix to provide a platform for public workshopping?

I was very fortunate to have them partner this workshop period. As you probably know, most operas come to life with the composer holing up and writing the work, then the performance being locked in after with a very short rehearsal period. In this case, we were fortunate to have just under two weeks to try things. I only had the full orchestra for four rehearsals, but I was able to work with the choir, the soloists and the orchestral leaders — Tristen Parr, strings; Aviva Endean, winds; Tina Havelock Stevens, percussion; and Stuart James, electronics and everything else — leading up to and in between the big rehearsals. This was important as it gave everyone time to process what for many was pretty out there new material and a different way of working. The Vitalstatistix venue was perfect for this; they made us feel very welcome, and Tura kept everything running smoothly. I am very pleased with the way it worked out, and can’t wait to see and hear a fully staged production.

Speechless, composer, director Cat Hope, for Australian Bass Orchestra, choir, vocal soloists, producer Tura New Music, development partner Vitalstatistix, 2017 Incubator Residency Program.

Top image credit: Cat Hope and Susan Studham (stage manager) at production desk, Speechless workshop, photo Deborah May

Multidisciplinary Melbourne artist Charlie Sofo makes tender artworks in which modest ambitions are rescued from the totalising power structures in which we live our daily lives.

In Split (2014) a series of slides silently and repeatedly opens like pairs of dining room drapes, revealing digressions in taste and style from landlords who happen to share common façades. It’s impossible to tell the spirit with which the borderlines are maintained. In one image the owners of two ornate terraces appear to have made complementary — or are they rival — colour choices. The funniest slide reveals a dark grey paint job that has skidded way over the boundary line. The effect of these images — visual match-cuts where the compositional structure repeats each time — prefigures the video’s concern with human agency and heightens the drama and satisfaction of each new reveal.

Sofo’s practice draws comparisons with Patrick Pound, another Melbourne-based collector of images who works across media. Yet where Pound is geared towards universals, uncovering patterns untethered to particular times and places, the borders of Sofo’s works are hyper-local: his beat is the neighbourhood/the suburb/the walk to the shops.

We humans like to watch and mimic and judge, share jokes and intimacies. We like to keep up with the Joneses. And the “curatorial cadence of the homeowner,” in the words of architectural critic Sylvia Lavin, is how larger cultural and political values begin to show themselves. Owning property is in itself politically loaded, as are the tactics we use to police and control space. Suddenly the atmosphere of the video seems to shift.

Where at first the façades represent idiosyncratic, even cute examples of individual creative expression, en masse the effect becomes parochial, a strict maintenance of borders that edges on the tyrannical. Sofo treats the figure of the homeowner with great empathy while giving shape to the contours of this difficult double bind. Emily Stewart

A brilliant white five-stepped amphitheatre dominates an otherwise deeply dark performance space, the orchestra suspended immediately behind and above. If Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia is a curious melding of Greek Tragedy and mediaeval Catholic morality play, this set inclines to the former but also evokes a space for debate, a symposium in which tensions between pagan and Christian values play out as we attend to the dictums of the opera’s two Christian narrators while witnessing ever evolving psychological tensions.

Sydney Chamber Opera tackles head-on the long acknowledged infelicities of Britten’s opera, an inherent sexism compounded by its Christian narrational framework and a much-debated ambiguity: is the Roman Lucretia raped or seduced by Tarquinius, son of the city’s despotic Etruscan ruler? Directors Kip Williams and Elizabeth Gadsby leave us in no doubt about the latter and overtly subvert the work’s sexism.

Conductor Jack Symonds, singers and chamber ensemble reveal the full range and heft of Britten’s score — gloriously intimate, seductive, martial, probing, emotionally nuanced and grandly impassioned. Authoritatively played and sung, it’s a sublimely cogent listening experience, one that provides a firm foundation for a challenging directorial response to the opera.

The company’s well-publicised solution to the work’s problems entails a kind of gender role reversal to heighten, for example, our sense of the brutality of the male characters’ drunken sexism. Three casually modern-dressed female performers, lightly attired with props (a crown, a cloak, a breastplate) play the male characters, lip-synching the singers of their roles, who largely hover nearby and sometimes move in parallel with their actors, individually or in carefully choreographed clusters across the amphitheatre.

The men likewise perform the female roles, albeit in relatively elaborate costumes which make much more, possibly too much, of the gender swap, turning gesture into transformation. At its best the device works as intended, underlining the binary absolutes that drive the tragedy and delivering a Brechtian distanciation. There are moments of affecting mime with male bodies expressing heightened vulnerability.

At other times, it’s distracting, the focus on the lip-synching actor lost amid stage movement and variable light levels. At its most potent, largely later in the production, actors’ and singers’ bodies become so closely entwined that there’s an almost Bunraku effect, in which the actors become avatars for their singer-characters or, most affectingly, a melding of genders, for example in the staging of Tarquinius’ assault, the singer Lucretia is as much threatened as the man who is playing her. Finally, the device disappears, giving each key character sole possession of body and voice to bring home the full power of the opera’s closing stages.

The splitting of body and voice makes it difficult for a performer to consistently develop character, especially Lucretia, whose response to Tarquinius and subsequent suicide (a rather literally staged account of the wrenching “Blood washes my shame away”) require a clear emotional through-line. There’s no doubting the acting of the lip-synchers, like Jessica O’Donoghue’s haughty, prowling, sword-wielding Tarquinius or Jeremy Kleeman’s distraught Lucretia, but the discontinuity between the latter and Anna Dowsley’s sung Lucretia when the soprano fully takes the stage is telling, undercutting the full weight of the tragedy. We know the voice, but not the body as Lucretia. The execution of the device is at times brilliantly realised but its effect is only partly revelatory.

The handling of the Male and Female Chorus by the directors implicates them deeply in the drama; they’re not the physically detached commentators Britten insisted on. They move among the other characters, paying not only close attention but sometimes becoming third partners in the physical pairing of the singers and their actors and, if not acknowledged by the others, sharing in the evolving tragedy. But they diverge, the Female Chorus spatially aligning herself with Lucretia, while the Male Chorus, in the production’s boldest stroke, transforms into a mitre-crowned priest conducting a mass, bathed in red light and dominating the amphitheatre.

This directorial strategy corresponds with and underlines the Female Chorus’ potential loss of faith when she sings “Is it all? Is all this suffering in vain?” with passionately existential plangency and conjuring images of ocean, desert and wilderness, in contrast with the Male Chorus’ predictable re-assurance, a blanket hope offered from a position of power but unable to reveal what Christ’s sacrifice and God’s forgiveness have to precisely say about Lucretia’s fate.

Prior to the Female Chorus’ expression of loss, the Romans’ collective shock and grief is expressed with great power by singers and orchestra in the complex weave of the work’s penultimate song, “This dead hand lets fall,” framed by Christian ceremony and the white amphitheatre awash with blood. Their demanding “Is this it all?” declines into a softly resigned “This is all…” which prompts the Female Chorus’ retort, “Is it all?” This is a formidable challenge, which Jack Symonds believes musically represents Britten’s position and which the directors have made visually explicit, countering the Male Chorus’ calm answer, “This is not all” and “He is all,” with an image of all-encompassing Christianity. Within this sits Lucretia, to whom the Female Chorus, refusing to wear the church’s purple, slowly reaches out, dangling her small golden crucifix as if about to drop or, less likely, offer it. It’s an affecting and bold take on Britten’s vision.

By strikingly foregrounding The Rape of Lucretia’s contradictions and inventively resolving them within the logic of the production, largely non-naturalistically but for the most part without loss of feeling, Sydney Chamber Opera has produced a challenging account of the work. Its strength lies in its ensemble playing, musically and theatrically, with singers skilfully responding to the acting demands of non-stereotypical characterisations, lip-synching and complex blocking. Damien Cooper’s subtly graded lighting of David Fleischer’s embracing set amplifies the production’s pyschological nuancing. Jack Symonds believes Britten’s opera more than stands alongside its grand peers. Certainly this production, while in the end veering towards hyperbole, grants the opera an unexpected sense of scale if forgoing organic character evolution, not least for Lucretia.

Anna Dowsley’s singing nevertheless provided lucid aural continuity, from the liquid beauty of “Flowers bring to every year….” (woven with solo oboe) and the near mad fierceness of “Give him this orchid” to the horrified sense of almost numb suspension in lines that poignantly hover between song and speech in “Last night Tarquinius ravished me.” Sydney Chamber Opera’s The Rape of Lucretia is a memorable provocation, made by collaborators determined to free the opera’s greatness of its formal and cultural limitations, quite a task, but an admirable attempt in which the work’s raw power and fine subtleties were frequently felt.

Sydney Chamber Opera with Victorian Opera, The Rape of Lucretia, composer Benjamin Britten, musical director Jack Symonds, director Kip Williams, co-director, costume designer Elizabeth Gadsby, performers Anna Dowsley, Nathan Lay, Celeste Lazarenko, Andrew Goodwin, Jeremy Kleeman, Simon Lobelson, Jane Sheldon, Jessica O’Donoghue, set design David Fleischer, lighting design, Damien Cooper; Carriageworks, Sydney, 19, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26 Aug

Top image credit: Jane Sheldon, Jessica O’Donoghue, Nathan Lay and Anna Dowsley in The Rape of Lucretia, Sydney Chamber Opera, Carriageworks 2017, photo Zan Wimberley

The virtual reality packages at this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) were everything the rest of the festival wasn’t. For a start, there were no queues around the block to get into the venue — in fact there was no queue at all. Eight of us in the session I attended assembled in a nondescript office foyer in Melbourne’s CBD, from where we were led into a darkened room with a circle of swivel chairs. There was none of the shared anticipation of a big festival event. Instead, we simply sat down, donned headsets, put on earphones and became immersed in our own, solitary worlds.

There has been much talk in recent years about a looming VR revolution, as technological capabilities, costs, and standardisation of equipment have all reached the point where content producers and funding bodies have begun to pay serious attention to the form. My first encounter with virtual reality was a viewing of Lynette Wallworth’s wonderful Collisions at ACMI earlier this year. That work was based on the recollections of Nyarri Nyarri Morgan, an Aboriginal man who witnessed one of the nuclear tests conducted in the South Australian desert in the 1950s. At the time, he had no idea what he had seen. I emerged from that experience feeling I’d witnessed the future of cinema — or the birth pangs of a whole new medium. After experiencing four additional works at MIFF, however, I’m not so sure VR is quite the radical new form it initially appears — or that it is necessarily effective for storytelling. Collisions worked because it allowed viewers to experience something of Nyarri Nyarri Morgan’s dramatic memory of the nuclear blast and its impact on the surrounding landscape. The rest of the work was a philosophical rumination on this experience, rather than a detailed story. In contrast, three of the four VR works seen at MIFF were very much driven by narrative journeys, and were less effective as a result.

Longing for Wilderness

First in the package was the three-minute Longing for Wilderness by Marc Zimmermann. It began at pavement level, bitumen stretching in every direction, buildings walling me in. The harsh sound of a car alarm blared in the middle distance. Then, slowly, I started to move. Initially, I was facing the flashing lights of the car emitting the alarm, so the movement carried me backwards, away from the vehicle. As I grew accustomed to the VR environment, I swivelled in my chair to face the direction I was travelling. The buildings around me thinned out as trees replaced brickwork. Overhead a brilliant galaxy of stars became visible as the city lights faded. Eventually I was propelled over a vast canyon, suddenly suspended over a landscape of jagged, snow-capped mountains that plunged steeply into thick forests in valleys below. It felt like an illustration from a child’s fairy tale — that is, it felt wholly unreal. After a few moments of turning this way and that to explore the 360-degree vista, the scene faded to black. Technically impressive, the work felt entirely obvious, the clichéd daydream of an urbanite with no real experience of places beyond humanity’s realm.

Sergeant James

Moments later I was in the next work — Alexandre Perez’s seven-minute Sergeant James – set in a cramped space topped by wooden boards, surrounded by narrow openings on three sides. Toys spilled out everywhere beyond the enclosed space. It took some time, and a lot of looking around, to realise I was under someone’s bed. A figure entered — glimpsed as a pair of feet — while James, the boy whose room I was in, jumped up and down, bending the boards over my head. When his mother turned on the lights, James said he was worried that someone was under his bed. Telling him not to be silly, mum flicked the lights off. In the darkness, the toys slowly came to life.

The effect was mildly creepy, partly because in the immersive environment you weren’t sure where the next slithering toy snake, or rampaging mechanical locomotive, was going to come from. But again, the scenario simply felt too hackneyed to really be effective. By the time James rolled off his bed, hit the floor and pointed his toy gun directly at me, the reflexive joke felt like it had gone on several minutes too long.

The Extraction

The one Australian work in the selection was Khoa Do and Piers Mussared’s six-minute The Extraction, set in a Melbourne of the near future. Or more precisely, inside an armoured vehicle of the near future. I was in the position of a woman who had just been “extracted” (from what, or from where wasn’t clear), while two guards talked in concerned tones about the blood on my legs. The picture kept flickering, as if the character herself was viewing this world via a screen. There was much shouting as one guard realised the other was an enemy and shot him dead. Moments later the vehicle was attacked, and b-movie zombies ripped open the metal walls. The scenario was confused and, again, horribly clichéd, with the zombies looking more like rejects from a high school Halloween ball than figures of terror.

Step to the Line

The only work in the package that attempted to do anything remotely innovative with the VR form was, curiously, also the most conventionally filmic. Ricardo Laganaro’s Step to the Line was a twelve-minute documentary about a rehabilitative program in a maximum security prison in California. A series of jump-cuts took us from the wide-open desert spaces outside, to the close, metallic surrounds of the prison. I was there next to prisoners as they went through their program, privy to their conversations and up close to the soul searching provoked by their experience. I stood beside a prisoner as he recalled being molested as a child by his babysitter, who was herself a teenage mother. Later, the same man discussed the death of his fifteen-year-old son while he was incarcerated, and thus unable to help his boy. In between these conversations, I visited the man’s tiny cell, pressed up against the wall while he stood beside me, looking into my eyes. It was a powerful deployment of the sense of proximity engendered by the VR experience, and a thoughtful confrontation with a world most of us know little about.

The sense of empathetic connection with a foreign environment and its subjects in Step to the Line was powerfully heightened by VR’s immersive qualities. Like Wallworth’s Collisions, Step to the Line used the technology to create a sense of being there, experiencing what others have experienced, rather than attempting to tell a conventional story. Otherwise, it relied on ingredients seen in many effective documentaries – an open, reflective engagement with arresting characters in an unusual situation, and the avoidance of pat solutions to the issues depicted. Conversely, the other VR offerings in the package demonstrated that a cliché is still a cliché, even when virtually rendered.

VR: a world unto itself

Experiencing VR in the midst of a film festival provided a good opportunity to think about the new medium in relation to conventional cinema. When you first put on a headset, VR feels incredibly, almost overwhelmingly “real” – yet watching it alongside more conventional films, it actually felt more like an otherworldly experience. Cinema — or at least a certain kind of cinema — provides a representation of the world we inhabit. VR is a world unto itself, a world that feels quite separate from this one — and this feeling is physical, as well as mental. Having my senses and mind in one place, and my body in another, was quite discomforting after a time and I became nauseous and hot, a feeling intensified by viewing four works in a row. For this reason, I find it hard to imagine long-form VR storytelling being a pleasurable experience.

Telling stories in a 360-degree environment also demands that the viewer’s gaze be strongly directed, while the potentially significant differences in what each viewer sees means that the stories must be based on broad brush strokes and easily recognised generic tropes. This is why the medium works best, I think, when it relies primarily on immersing us in a sensory experience — the witnessing of an atomic bomb test, the inside of a prison — rather than a three-act narrative arc.

VR is also a starkly individualised, almost solipsistic experience. There is sometimes a certain connection with the characters in the VR world, as in Step to the Line. But the nature of this world made it hard, at least for me, to relate these figures back to flesh and blood people. Perhaps my perceptual apparatus is yet to adjust. Or perhaps VR is the quintessential representational technology of our time: disorientating, self-centred, exciting, world-changing — and rife with dissociative potential.

VR Package 1, SpACE@Collins, Gear VR Cinema, Melbourne International Film Festival, Melbourne, 3-20 August 2017

In the beginning there is light. Seven performers assemble downstage. They look into the light and introduce themselves. They tell us who they are playing tonight. They share their private worries, secret desires. There’s collective unease. A sense of impending doom, somehow. The performers move into position. They don deconstructed garb — stylised versions of Elizabethan period costumes. The play Hamlet commences. With a sprinkling of ash and dust, we are transported to Denmark. Claudius is taking his late brother’s crown; he has already taken Hamlet’s mother, Queen Gertrude, as his wife.

But this is not your conventional coronation. There is an extra layer of menace to the one inherent in Shakespeare’s play: the countdown to zero is on and the end of the world is nigh.

Peta (Peta Ward) as Laertes cues us to the coming apocalypse. She breaks character (the actors enact the play’s roles but also versions of themselves, using their first names) interrupting the court scene to get stuck into the edible props, the stash of wine. She states, apropos of nothing, that she will never be a wife, never have children. We understand then the stakes are life and death and this ensemble has chosen, despite its imminent demise, to follow through with the performance although, sometimes, the brave facade slips and they squabble, as well as buck each other up. Thomas Hutchins, who plays Claudius, is a kind of self-appointed director, demanding the actors re-work unsatisfactory scenes. He’s the kind of guy who reminds you when you’ve forgetten to add a flourish. Thomas seems to especially pick on Mitch Wood, the young performer playing Hamlet, later confessing that his has been his own dream role.

For other characters though, the task of performing is futile. As the countdown continues, they falter and withdraw from the ensemble. Chris Beckey, playing Guildenstern, refuses point blank to commit to this absurd farce and retreats upstage to say his goodbyes in private. Peta as Rosencrantz, the Lano to Guildenstern’s Woodley, stands in for him during their shared scenes. When she doesn’t know his lines, she ad-libs, “Shakespeare, Shakespeare,” with a flourish. We get the gist. There will be moments of dark humour as well as pathos at the end of the world, it seems.

Time rolls on, furious as the four horses of the said apocalypse. No one can outrun or ‘out act’ it. The countdown is heralded by blinding spotlights and a jarring sound design. Together these, by Ben Hughes and Dane Alexander respectively, produce a terrifying effect. The Hamlet Apocalypse is physically spectacular as well; Stephen Mitchell Wright’s direction is incredibly precise, the performances heavily stylised, built on sustained movement techniques and evoking something of Antonin Artaud’s notion of performing bodies as animated hieroglyphs. The pacing of the action during the countdown is demandingly erratic and the cast appear to be white-knuckling it too.

Towards the end, there is a moment where Caroline Dunphy, playing Gertrude, breaks character to tell us about her real life son, what it has meant to be his mother and of her hopes for his future. Not only do we get a glimpse of the actor’s personal life here, but her statement has great bearing on where her character is at in the play.

And therein lies the joy and terror of this work. Sometimes the thoughts of the performers echo and amplify the epic themes in Shakespeare’s text and at other times they eclipse it. Either way, these little overshares are always heartbreakingly human and honest.

Even in the last moments, after the cast have counted down to “one,” the show must go on, resulting in a furious, fractured montage of the final scenes of Hamlet. Action is distilled into pure imagery, which feels like the end of Sarah Kane’s work Blasted.

And when it’s over, once more the performers step into the light. They offer their final reflections, both as the players and themselves. Nicole Harvey as Ophelia is grateful to the point of tears that she was able to finish the show for us. And Mitch as Hamlet wonders whether it is better to be or not to be, of course.

The Hamlet Apocalypse is a startling and beautiful rumination on what it means to live now. It asks what we will treasure and regret most when the world folds in on itself. We can never know what will happen until we each experience death for ourselves, but we can ensure we make the most of our time during the countdown.

The Danger Ensemble, The Hamlet Apocalypse, director, performers Chris Beckey, Caroline Dunphy, Nicole Harvey, Thomas Hutchins, Polly Sará, Peta Ward, Mitch Wood, designer Steven Mitchell Wright, lighting designer Ben Hughes, sound designer, composer Dane Alexander, costume designer Oscar Clark; Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, Brisbane, 9-19 Aug

Dancenorth delivers an intensely moving, lithe and at times visceral short work with Tectonic, touching on place, history, nature, colonialism, industrialisation, climate change and rising sea levels, on a site that underpins the premise spectacularly.

Tectonic is presented in two parts. In the second, a traditional song and dance cycle by the Urab Dancers from tiny, slowly sinking Poruma Island in the Torres Strait introduces us to the friendly people at the heart of this increasingly universal story of impending catastrophe and potential displacement. Their presence, part of an ongoing collaboration with Dancenorth, renders Tectonic personal. Ancient patternings of rhythm and gesture echo back and forth between the two parts of the event.

Townsville’s unique beach site slopes down to the water, overlooking the Coral Sea and Magnetic Island. 180 colour-coded fitballs are uniformly half buried in the sand to form an enormous grid delineating the performance area. Dramatic side lighting constantly changing the visual sense of depth and colour, the resonant soundtrack and a tropical night sky with a slight wind moving the palm fronds, all collude ethereally to focus the senses on the dance.

At first, a figure in shimmering black and green, suggestive of elemental forces, stands near the tideline, her back to the action, imposing even at a distance. As the other six dancers, in loose flesh-coloured trousers and tops, enter the grid of balls, it becomes clear that there is a relationship between the far figure and the others, a kind of orchestration occurring via her gestures. At first this appears synergistic, the dancers bouncing on and flipping from the fitballs.

As the figure (an imperious Samantha Hines) edges closer in barely perceptible increments, the mood darkens. Suggestions of fear, aggression, exploitation and sickness appear and the dark figure now seems invasive and polluting, a harbinger of industrialisation. Sand runs through the dancers’ fingers like time running out. They frantically bound across the fitballs, dive-bombing into the ground and rising up to repeat.

The central figure begins to remotely and remorselessly lift and drop the others, allowing them to almost stand before a flick of her hand fells them, onto their backs, splayed over the balls, gradually moving them all the way back to the shoreline. Once on the far side of the grid, they strip and slowly disappear into the water and darkness.

The work includes an outstanding duo by Ashley McLellan and Jenni Large, which is so close, intense, despairing and evocative of death that I’m anxious for the children nearby in the audience. The Dancenorth ensemble is fearless and expressive, and I see no flagging of energy between a show early in the run, and one at the end. The unhappy conclusion of the first half of the show is tempered by the cultural vitality presented by Urab Dancers in the second half. They continue to dance and sing even though the sea has advanced 30 metres in a decade to literally lap at the back doors of their homes. Their spirit suggests that if we act as a global village, we can work to reverse the havoc wrought by rampant industrialisation, everywhere.

The public flocked to (and in some cases, stumbled upon) the free show’s twice-nightly sessions and milled along the foreshore, children on shoulders, smartphones recording the moment for social media. Dancenorth Artistic Director and Tectonic choreographer Kyle Page has taken public accessibility for contemporary dance to a new level, with a diverse audience of some 7,000 people engaging with the work on the Strand during its week-long run, part of the biennial sculpture project Strand Ephemera and coinciding with The Australian Festival of Chamber Music.

Dancenorth, Tectonic, choreographer Kyle Page, dancers Harrison Hall, Mason Kelly, Jenni Large, Ashley McLellan, Georgia Rudd, Samantha Hines, Jack Ziesing, Urab Dancers of Poruma Island, costumes Andrew Treloar, sound design Alisdair Macindoe, lighting design Tom Wright; The Strand, Townsville, 29 July-5 Aug

Public art feeding into fake history, new critical voices on film emerging from MIFF and words that sound like the future: three vital art reads, recommended by RealTime staff.

“The president has very effectively appropriated the term ‘fake news’ for his own ends. I hope, then, that I am not walking into a trap when I say that the important thing to stress about the contested monument to Robert E Lee is that it represents ‘fake history.’ Moreover, its particular brand of fake history is engineered to do exactly what it is doing now.”

Melbourne International Film Festival has wrapped again, leaving the lasting imprint of a handful of sharp, young writers who formed this year’s Critics’ Campus, shepherded by RealTime contributor Luke Goodsell. The MIFF blog makes for thoughtful reading in a media ecology with less space than ever for criticism; here’s Kai Perrignon on Claire Denis’ perverse romance Let The Sunshine In:

“There’s a tonne of sex implicit in Claire Denis’ new film Let the Sunshine In, but we only ever see it once, in the very first scene… [B]itter dissatisfaction — hilarious and real and uncomfortable — is the mode of choice for Denis’ latest, a breezy elliptical exercise from the usually sombre director. Let the Sunshine In is a rom-com without the sentimentality. A series of seductions and heartbreaks, the film follows Binoche’s indecisive and frustrated divorcee Isabelle as she pings from suitor to suitor… Agnes Godard’s lonely camerawork turns the film’s multitude of conversations into a series of melancholic singles, which isolate Isabelle and highlight the deep sadness of her travails. When this pain is felt, it burns.”

A new digital publication accompanies the Gail Priest-curated group show Sounding The Future — an exhibition at UTS Gallery that audibly imagines the future. Amid almost 100 pages of critical writing are audio streams, extensions of the artworks, interviews with the artists and speculations on what tomorrow might bring:

“An hour out of Seoul, we are standing in the middle of a six-lane highway — not a car in sight. Evenly spaced in the near distance are at least a dozen glitteringly new high-rise developments and to the right an edifice that looks like a spaceship — locked-up and uninhabited. This is Songdo Future City, part of the massive redevelopment of the Incheon Free Economic Zone of South Korea, including the islands of Yeongjong and Cheongna. But it’s a ghost town.”

Top image credit: Gail Priest, Sounding the Future installation view, 2015, photo Samuel James

In the opening moments of its first season in 2013, Top of the Lake sets itself at the fringes of a brutal story — a young girl, alone, seems to be contemplating suicide in a lake. Wide shots of a mountainous region are filled with a dense low-hanging mist, the landscape almost white, which then lifts as the day breaks and reveals the ground’s rusty covering of grass. The young girl, 12-year-old Tui (Jacqueline Joe), was pregnant, but couldn’t explain how she became so, and the explicit details of a local paedophile ring remained unknown until the final episode. This was a television series distinctly attuned to the atmosphere of a remote wilderness. With a mystery at its core, it was clearly dedicated to beauty concealing violence and corruption masked by visual tranquility.

Top of the Lake: China Girl, the new season from creator Jane Campion and co-writer Gerard Lee, immerses the viewer in a much darker atmosphere, and in the opening moments of the first episode, the brutality of Campion’s Sydney is immediately unveiled. In darkness and in silence, a man and woman take a heavy suitcase from a brothel, Silk 41, walk through a cemetery on a bayside cliff and throw it into the water, where the camera cuts to it plunging through the ocean’s mesmerising blue depths. Sea life swims calmly past. A little later, a thick lock of hair escapes from a crack in the suitcase. It’s a sinister opening.

Set approximately four years after the end of the first season, China Girl falls into some repeated narrative tropes. A central mystery is investigated by Robin Griffin (Elisabeth Moss) at a new precinct as Detective Senior Constable. There’s another sexually menacing antagonist with long hair and a foreign accent, this time the German intellectual Alexander (David Dencik). There’s another male senior colleague who is not always supportive, and more cold, sterile rooms in a police station. This time, the criminal investigation probes a death in Sydney’s migrant sex worker trade — a storyline heavily criticised by sex workers in Australia, for prolonging and enabling harmful stereotypes — and a troubling illegal surrogacy industry. In its Sydney setting, Top of the Lake’s pacing and visual composition are driven by the native speed of a highly populated capital city. Integrating these factors into the narrative, Campion and collaborative director Ariel Kleiman demonstrate skill in the conceptual use of screen space to evoke the claustrophobia of a busy mall and crowded beach.

In terms of story, too many easy coincidences beggar belief. In the first season’s setting of the small New Zealand town of Laketop, a small cast of players was believable, but not so in Sydney. Given Campion’s catalogue of rich narratives that usually don’t shy away from complexity, this is really disappointing. Yet I can forgive the absurdity and even clunkiness of some of the plotting, and the unlikely conclusion, because Campion gives Elisabeth Moss another opportunity to portray Robin Griffin. Her face brims with sensitivity, intense trauma, fear, strength and naïve hopefulness. Where the writing might lack nuance, Moss brings to the series a devastating emotional reality. I have barely stopped thinking about her since watching it.

Robin has returned to Sydney, a hometown no longer her home. She is not warmly welcomed at the workplace, but her small apartment welcomes her nightmares. It is not a place of refuge; the gothic sensibility, key to so much of Campion’s work, resides here. The motif of a body of water as a possessor of power rises up as a consistent thread between the first and second seasons; the ocean is often filmed in close-up, the camera attuned to its beauty and darkness. The sea rings out with that eternal note of sadness evoked by 19th-century poet Matthew Arnold in “Dover Beach.” Water enthralls, in centuries of literature and mythology, and Campion has clearly been drawn to its visual and sensual effects ever since her feature debut, The Piano (1993). As the body in the suitcase is taken in and then offered up by the ocean current, drifting onto Bondi Beach, the second season earns its right to the aqueous resonances of the title.

The series still rings with the reserved anger that Robin feels, every day, towards the systemic professional and personal discrimination and harassment she experiences as a woman. I lost count of the number of these moments; there are too many, not because the writing is obvious, but because this is what it is like for women, especially in certain professions and cultures. Her male subordinates still treat her with aggressive disrespect and resist her skill as a detective. Robin’s senior, Adrian Butler (Clayton Jacobson), doesn’t believe that Al Parker (David Wenham) sexually assaulted Robin back in New Zealand, and has an essential inability to understand female experience. Another consistently harasses her for a date, ignoring her refusals, and there is an explicit sense that women must constantly fight to be heard. A reluctant case partnership with Miranda (Gwendoline Christie) provides both comedy and distress, as the two women somewhat awkwardly and frustratingly navigate their way in a world that men are hesitant to give up.

Robin has also returned to Sydney to find her daughter, Mary (Alice Englert), given up for adoption 17 years earlier. Reuniting the two brings up Robin’s past as rape victim and birth mother, and along with the show’s focus on surrogacy, Campion also offers variegated accounts of difficult parental experiences, a theme made stronger by Nicole Kidman playing Mary’s adoptive mother Julia, who has separated from her husband and now lives in a secure lesbian relationship. A recalcitrant teenager, Mary resists Julia because of it and searches for comfort in Robin, a decision that no one prepared for.

Dynamics between mothers and daughters are always fraught, and Campion weaves in a lot of thorny material here that intensifies maternal tension. The show sides with both mothers and judges neither. In conversation at the Melbourne International Film Festival in July, Jane Campion commented on her desire to confront the strong and powerful drives in motherhood which both Robin and Julia fear and struggle with. Their unwanted and unpleasant relationship, imposed by Mary, is the show’s most daring, and exciting, provocation.

While there is not a lot of detective work in Top of the Lake: China Girl, which the creators acknowledged at MIFF, there is an increase in dramatic moments. This means that the show proceeds at a faster pace, akin to the conventions of an episodic procedural series, but lacks some of the first season’s more restful, reflective moments. Part of that season’s satisfaction was the slow terror with which the plot unfolded, but the elements that tie this new case together are a little too simply determined, and tonally, its fluidity could be experienced as erratic.

Beyond depicting the lives of sex workers as essentially and stereotypically dangerous, Campion’s feminist focus figures the world as a treacherous place for all women, as long as men are blind to their own misbehaviours. That is the show’s strength.

As a crime series, Top of the Lake: China Girl is uneven and tonally a little scattered. But even in its first season, the show was always more interested in a psychological examination of characters and relationships. The second season amps this up, and the key characters are its real focus, with the criminal scenario diffused. Given its focus on a dynamic group of women, the series makes a necessary contribution to Australia’s screen culture right now. The final episode of Top of the Lake: China Girl ends on a true cliffhanger; an unknown figure stands behind a closed door. Unlike the finale of the first series, it seems almost certain that we can expect to see some of these characters again.

Top of the Lake: China Girl, co-creator, co-writer, director, executive producer Jane Campion, co-creator, co-writer Gerard Lee, co-director Ariel Kleiman, performers Elisabeth Moss, David Wenham, Gwendoline Christie, Nicole Kidman, Ewen Leslie, Alice Englert, Clayton Jacobson, executive producers Emile Sherman and Jamie Laurenson; distribution Foxtel, from 20 Aug

Advanced learning and research have become vital to artists in all fields, including those making work for film, television and new media platforms. The Australian Film, Television and Radio School’s new two-year full-time Master of Arts Screen, offered in 10 disciplines from directing and screenwriting to animation and producing, is focused on nurturing a new generation of filmmakers. Motivated by a practice-based research question, students are supported by small class sizes (no more than six per discipline), one-on-one mentorships, industry practitioner teachers and guest speakers, excellent resources, professional placements and funding for individual screen projects There’s also a part-time Master of Arts Screen: Business and Leadership, focused on creative approaches to business planning, strategy and public policy.

Postgrads in work

The school has a proud record of outstanding graduates. Always interested in Australian animation, I noticed on the AFTRS website the progress of recent postgraduates working in the field: Patrick Clair, Emmy award-winning titles designer for Man in The High Castle (2016) and True Detective (2014); Sandy Widyanata, feature film director, Monument 14 (in development); Ben Wright, Layout Artist, Animal Logic (Happy Feet 2), Flying Bark Animation (Maya the Bee); and an earlier success, Sejong Park, who received an Oscar nomination for his 2004 short animation Birthday Boy.

UWS Theatre graduate, actor and writer-director Brendon McDonall completed an AFTRS Master of Screen Arts in 2014 and had been a finalist for the Dendy Awards for Australian Short Films in 2013 for All God’s Creatures. Beautifully and adventurously crafted, All God’s Creatures (2012; watch it here) is about the relationship between two young brothers following the death of their father and won the Iris Prize, Cardiff’s International Gay and Lesbian Short Film award, in 2014. McDonall used the £25,000 prize money to make a new short film, Spoilers (2016) in Wales. His film The Dam (2016), about two elderly men visiting the dam that defined their young lives, has just won Best Student Short at RiverRun International Film Fest 2017, one of the oldest film festivals in the USA. In an interview, McDonall talks about the making of Spoilers, in which he applies the notion of the spoiler alert to real life.

MA Screen: inside the program

I spoke with Nell Greenwood, Course Leader for AFTRS’s MA Screen program, who has an extensive career in directing and writing (with awards) in England, Ireland and Australia and was previously Head of Screenwriting at AFTRS. She explains, “I started off here as a way of taking some time out but I’ve fallen in love with teaching. I find it such a sustaining thing to do. I gain so much from being with the students and facilitating the journeys they’re on, that I’m now a full-time educator. I still teach a bit of screenwriting but my main area is around research and creative practice.”

In the Masters program we really focus on practice-based research. We don’t actually offer an MA in Research; we have two Masters degrees by course-work: Master of Arts Screen and Master of Arts Screen: Business and Leadership. Research, enquiry and critical thinking are integral to both those programs. In our MA (Screen), which is a two-year full-time program offered in 10 disciplines, students complete a substantial practice-based research project.

That’s right. In the first semester of the second year students make a major creative project, supported and informed by a practice-based research question. This project is something they’ve been developing from the first week they arrive here in their first year. We describe the research question as an “area of creative enquiry.” It’s really about students tapping into a particular area of interest, a passion they may have for some area of practice or some question about how the film industry works, and then using that to drive their own practice.

Do they usually arrive with an idea of what they want to do or is it a chance to challenge and explore and push themselves?

It really varies. Some students arrive with a set project they have in mind. For others, as you say, it’s a chance to be challenged, to push themselves and to really start engaging in a more meaningful way with the whole idea of a reflective practice and to ask questions. What are the impulses and passions that drive my practice? Do I have any burning questions about the stories I want to tell or how I tell them? But it can be a slow process in terms of people teasing that out in a meaningful way.

How do you get students to be introspective and open to a process like this?

There are a couple of strategies. As you can probably appreciate, we’ve got students from a diverse range of backgrounds and there’s a real variety of learning styles. We find a more socratic, seminar based approach is effective — asking students questions and encouraging them to start gently probing their own practice. We ask everyone to keep a reflective journal. That process of diarising is something we talk about quite explicitly in the first couple of weeks when students are just teasing out the notion of what reflection is: why you do it, why it’s valuable. We get industry practitioners to come in and talk about their own reflective practice so it doesn’t seem like just something you do in the ivory tower of film school but something that will continue to have meaning for you when you get out into the industry. Finally, all exercises and class work are structured around the spirit of inviting students to make as much work as they can, to keep doing, to fail fast and fail hard and in this process of doing to keep gently testing and asking questions of how they work, why they make the choices they make, what they do well, what they love, what they do less well, and love less!

In their first year, what chances do they get to fail or succeed? What are the practical dimensions?

The first year is structured around intensive, practice-based coursework. The second year allows students to pursue a major creative project supported by an area of practice-based research. The coursework in the first year comprises four subjects: two discipline-specific subjects — Theory and Practice — and two shared subjects — Research & Development and Cinematic Storytelling. Cinematic Storytelling is a screen studies subject, a combination of lectures, seminars and screenings in which students interrogate a range of historical and contemporary Australian approaches to powerful cinematic storytelling.

In Research and Development, students develop their research question and test the project they will realise in year two through a series of tutorials and creative workshops in which we set students particular challenges or provocations that they have to respond to through practice. These are usually quick, high turnover exercises, and we find these low-stakes exercises encourage students to take more risks and play with and test ideas and act as a useful foil to the much slower pace of the research process. We set an exercise last semester where students had to make a one-minute film in response to the provocation of testing your research question within the physical environment. One of the students, whose area of creative enquiry is exploring the differences between sound and noise, headed out to the park and recorded the sound of trees and made a strange but powerful film, that had a surprising kind of menace to it!

Then within the discipline specific strands all the teaching is practice-based. It’s about getting out and doing stuff, whether it’s a VR workshop, a green-screen exercise or working with actors. There are three major collaborative exercises in the first semester — plenty of opportunity to test, hone and refine skills. The semester culminates in an ambitious exercise where students have to reimagine a scene from Macbeth with a VFX component. The theory subject acts as a quieter reflection space where students can contextualise their practice.

Students are actually developing projects in first year and if they’re going to get proper post-production, we encourage them to think about shooting fairly early in the second year. In last year’s masters program, two students shot feature films. They were particularly well-organised and able to develop their projects and their scripts through the first year and then start shooting pretty smartly in semester three to complete as much of the film as possible by the end of the course.

If someone is directing, is another Masters student, say, in sound or music or writing involved with them? Or are these fairly discrete areas of operation?

Interesting question. Previously the Masters was more writer/director-focused and the director had to work with whoever was available. In this new iteration of the Masters, because we’re offering it in 10 different disciplines, the expectation is that students will collaborate and work together. I think one of the things that students find so valuable about their experience of the MA is that opportunity to build lasting collaborative networks, to find the peers and sympathetic creative partners whom they can continue to work with throughout their careers.

Who are these people who do the MA? Are they AFTRS graduates turned postgraduates or are they coming from all over the place?

They’re really coming from all over the place. I think in this current bunch we have two who’ve come from our BA program but that’s possibly because the BA is in its infancy and we’re only just running our third year now. On the whole it’s a diverse range of people. In this particular cohort of the Masters, we have a 22-year-old coming straight out of QUT and professionals in their 50s who are looking for an opportunity to take some time-out and reflect on where they’re going and possibly give their careers a bit of a shot in the arm and reinvigorate their practice. It’s exciting and makes for a really dynamic and interesting cohort.

We have a fantastic faculty. Our Head of Directing at the moment is leading film and television director Rowan Woods. Our Head of Editing is Roland Gallois who has fantastic industry experience and is able to bring that very direct and contemporary way of looking at work and is also very generous and supportive. Stephen Murphy is Head of Sound. He’s also President of the Screen Sound Guild and an experienced sound person and teacher. Rachel Landers, our Head of Documentary, has extensive teaching experience and industry credits. Susan Danta is leading our newly reinvigorated animation and VFX department.

What are the career expectations at the end of the program and what do you provide the students with as they move out into the world?

This is something we’ve thought really hard about in terms of transitioning our students out into the industry so they can have sustainable careers. They’ll have a portfolio of work, the final project they’ve made and also the exercises they’ve done in semester one. So there should be a good range. The course ends with a four-week professional attachment, which is found for them in consultation with their head of department so they can sit down and actually think about where might be the best place for them to spend time in the industry to really get a foothold. The ideal would be, of course, that the placement goes really well and they’re offered some kind of position at the end of it.

In the end it’s more than just having a finished work; it’s about research and reflection?

We’re really keen on the whole ‘research’ dimension and that students get a broader understanding of their own practice and process. It’s one of the most valuable skillsets of all in terms of sustaining a career in a landscape that’s always changing. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the next five years, do we? An adaptable skillset can allow them to be more versatile.

The emphasis is very much on the idea of the producer as a kind of creative shepherd, someone who knows how to facilitate and manage teams. There’s a lot of focus on being able to recognise what kind of leadership style works for you and how you do best at managing creative teams. Producers are really key in our collaborative cycle in the MA. They’re actually given quite a lot of autonomy in being able to lead and problem-solve within the set of exercises we set up for them in semester one. It’s a challenging experience but they get authentic real-world experience having to deal with tight limitations and being able to deal with a range of creative personalities.

It must be fascinating for you and fellow staff to constantly negotiate these relationships between collaborators. I imagine that must take up quite a bit of consultative time?

It really does. In fact, we just had some professional development for all of us on creative collaboration. People assume it’s a skill that you’ll just pick up but I think it needs to be quite consciously discussed and observed within the cohort: how does collaboration work; what is the best way to really bring these very different people together in the service of a single vision? And whose vision is it and who is the keeper of the flame? I think they’re provocative questions that will probably shift from project to project.

The Master of Screen Arts, Business and Leadership is something quite different.

It’s part-time over two years and it’s a transformative program in terms of allowing people to upskill in creative leadership and their understanding of business. During that time, they develop a business plan or some kind of model for a future creative business. They also develop skills around strategy and innovation and do work around public policy. So, again, like the other MA program it’s very forward-looking.

Finally, tell me about the Graduate Certificate Screen students coming in on weekends, sharpening their skills or moving beyond “emerging” into something else.

The Graduate Certificate Screen is a part-time course offered at a slightly different skill-level. Whereas the Masters is a degree that will get you to that head-of-department position, a Graduate Certificate will take you from one skillset to another — another course of study or some other career pathway. We look at: screen practitioners who want to build skills in their discipline and people who want to transition from one field to another. It could be a journalist who wants to become a screenwriter or a scientist or architect who might want to explore documentary. It has that kind of appeal whereas with the Masters we really do expect people to have some kind of established skillset in their discipline already.

There are many uncalculatedly dramatic moments in the complex four-screen, high definition video work Watershed showing in the exhibition titled The Derwent. One of the most poignant occurs when the relative calm of the drifting vision of Tasmania’s Derwent River is disturbed by the noisy passing of a boat ferrying passengers to the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona). The wake rolls closer and the stillness is disrupted, and there’s even a moment of anxiety that everything might be upended and immersed. To read this moment as an unintentional metaphor for the museum’s impact upon Hobart is irresistible, but it also reveals something greater about The Derwent as a complex exhibition: this conglomerate of video work, IT creativity, static visual art and archival materials is a dissection of time and human impacts.

Rivers are born of networks that flow from higher altitudes, linking mountain and plateau to the ocean. The Derwent River is one of the most distinctive geographical features of Hobart, and to some extent defines the city as much as kunanyi (the Indigenous name for Mt Wellington) beneath which the city nestles. Since 2011, local artists David Stephenson and Martin Walch have developed a project that documents and explores the Derwent, its many tributaries and the lakes that feed it. The resulting exhibition features three works by the pair, complemented by a selection of archival materials that grant glimpses of the Derwent over many decades.

Time Slice

The first work, Time Slice (Derwent Time Lapse Array: 1/8/2015 – 31/7/2016) comprises visual data gathered at regular intervals over a year by 12 cameras placed along the river from the highlands to the estuary where the river becomes ocean. The cameras recorded every five minutes, resulting in a tsunami of over two million images that eventually became a 12-channel animation showing the passing of each day. Software was specifically written to facilitate this display, the whole thing running off a group of Raspberry Pi programmable devices. The outcome is time’s passing visualised as steady flowing digital molasses: the pixels ripple and crease as a year is truncated into 140 minutes that seem to speed up and slow down at the same instant; the pace of what we see is not hurried or frantic, and even has something calming about it.

Matrix

The second work, Matrix, also relies on the huge data trawl caught by the still cameras to create a series of print works that arrange the many images into grids, which end up resembling the periodic table itself; and it is fair to say that what is being displayed here are the elements that make up the work. These images hint at the scale of the data used and convey a symbolised vastness, making a neat parallel with Time Slice.

Watershed

The climax of the exhibition – and it certainly feels like one – is the four-screen work Watershed. This is where Stephenson and Walch did their hard yards, heading to inland regions of the river system and taking to the water on a portable raft that supported four cameras, each pointed in a different direction. It’s not that complex an idea, but its implementation must have been challenging. Still, the results do something that claims the word ‘immersive’ back from game developers and techno-fetishists.

The captured images of water and land are spread out over the four screens, each shot allowed its own space. They’re not stitched together and editing decisions are minimal, yet something deeply engaging does emerge: that which surrounded the artists on location is flattened out in the gallery space and this simple manipulation gives an odd sense of hypnagogia (that space between sleeping and waking): what is clearly real becomes unreal, despite the high definition meticulousness of each image. It’s the sheer beauty of the drift that draws you into the film, but what encourages you to stay for the 70-minute duration is the symbolic narrative that emerges. As the cameras meander across a foggy lake filled with stark, dead trees, the sense of being inside the vision grows. Further down the river system, more signs of humanity impinge and the story of change emerges: we see colonial housing, a paper pulp mill and a zinc manufacturing works, until the disruptive churn of the ferry breaks the spell.

Time and place are manipulated in Watershed in a truly human way, making the vastness of nature accessible and inducing a sense of genuine wonder.

The Derwent, artists Martin Walch and David Stephenson; Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery, Hobart, 28 July-5 Nov

Top image credit: The Derwent Project, David Stephenson & Martin Walch, HD video images courtesy the artists

ADT, Be Your Self

Australian Dance Theatre’s Be Your Self only premiered in 2010 but its first performance in Melbourne was a reminder of how much an art form can shift in a relatively short time. It’s a bravura work, riddled with ambition and rewarding on multiple levels, yet every so often a moment arises that has a viewer thinking: oh yeah, that’s what dancers were doing back then. This isn’t a criticism. If anything, it puts into relief the many sequences and images in this work that are as fresh as anything debuting in 2017.

It’s a piece that juxtaposes the organic and the mechanical, with a soundtrack machine-gunning from power drills to hoarse coughing and bodies that go from almost superhuman feats of athleticism to become fragmented and devoid of human identity. The realisation of some of these themes is already a bit dated — masks of faces on the backs of heads aren’t as uncanny as they might once have been, and muscle-locking to produce an artificial strobe effect doesn’t feel fresh. The work as a whole doesn’t suffer, however, because Be Your Self is stuffed with so many ideas per square inch that there’s no time for your attention to drift elsewhere.

The work begins with a dancer performing a simple leg extension while another performer provides a precise medical description of the various biological processes that are occurring along the way. It’s an onslaught of information for such an unimpressive move, and immediately announces the unconvertibility of dance into mere language.

What follows is hugely physical dance: I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a muscular production in Melbourne, where dancers tend towards leaner frames, and the strength on display here is at times jaw-dropping. If the choreography emphasises the ability of a highly trained body to accomplish things mere words cannot capture, by the work’s end these bodies have become so isolated in terms of muscle groups and formation that they are literally in pieces. Emerging from almost invisible slits in an angled wall, they are dismembered limbs and decapitated heads bleeding out across the space. Like much that preceded it, this sequence is both lurid and hypnotic, all the more so for a welcome lack of editorial direction by choreographer Garry Stewart, who presents these rich stage pictures without hammering home how they should be interpreted.

The Melbourne production was critically underrated, in my mind, and there’s much here that lingers. It’s a work both of its time and outside of it, both intensely material and quietly abstracted.

Arena Theatre, Trapper

Arena Theatre’s Trapper bears a different but just as curious relation to time. It’s a new work that’s somehow redolent of the past, or at least past visions of how the future looked.

It’s a gorgeous production, inviting to the eye. It seems as if every element of Jolyon James’ ever-moving set can be illuminated from within, and lighting designer Paul Lim and video designer Sean Healy further add to the sense that the physical environment on stage is as fluid as pixels on a screen. It’s the ideal space for a work exploring identity in the internet age, and the unfolding of the work is as jagged and disconnected as any other hour spent online.

The bulk of the piece comprises an original series of spoken word works by a range of writers, given (often overlapping) expression by four performers. There are physical sequences that break up and sometimes continue through the oration, but the poetry here appears to be the foundation for the work. I don’t know that it speaks to its subject in a way that 2017 needs.

A girl discovers that maintaining her digital identity takes all day, leaving her with no time to get things done IRL. A boy delivers a Fight Club-style tirade against social conformity, determining that “psychotic is someone who’s just found out what’s going on.” The internet opens up windows to the world, but it can also define the walls of our prison.

While it’s visually lavish, the movement in the work is slow and measured, and conceptually it proceeds with just as much deliberation. The experience is one of contemplation, not distraction, giving it the air of a work grappling with the digital age when it was in its infancy rather than several decades down the track. I saw the work during a matinee full of school students, and I don’t know how much of the slam poetry married up with their own navigation of the digital world today — then again, I’m hardly the target for a work like this. It’s probably me that isn’t speaking to today.

See a video interview with Garry Stewart here and read about his research here. Watch a video of Trapper in rehearsal here.

Australian Dance Theatre, Be Your Self, concept, direction Garry Stewart, choreography Garry Stewart & dancers, performers Cathy Adamek, Jana Castillo, Zoe Dunwoodie, Harrison Elliott, Thomas Fonua, Chris Mills, Matte Roffe, Tara Jade Samaya, Felix Sampson, Kimball Wong, set design Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, sound design Brendan Woithe, lighting design Damien Cooper, video design Brenton Kempster, costume design Gaelle Mellis, dramaturgy Julie Holledge; Sumner Theatre, Southbank Theatre, 2-5 Aug; Arena Theatre, Trapper, creators Christian Leavesley, Jolyon James, director Christian Leavesley, performers Rachel Perks, Hamish Irvine, Daniel Schlusser, Naomi Rukavina, text Angus Cerini, Emilie Zoey Baker, Christian Leavesley, Jolyon James, design Jolyon James, sound design, composition Ania Reynolds, video design Sean Healy, lighting design Paul Lim, costume design Matilda Woodroofe, movement direction Ashlea Pyke; Fairfax Theatre, Arts Centre Melbourne, 2-5 Aug

Top image credits: Be Your Self, ADT, photo Chris Herzfeld and Camlight Productions; Trapper, Arena Theatre, photo John Fish

Benjamin Britten’s chamber opera The Rape of Lucretia is as powerful as many a grand opera. Its spare, haunting instrumental scoring and deft character portrayals briskly engender a melancholy mood (Ancient Rome under Etruscan rule), a deceptively seductive night-time ambience (susurrating harp and strings), brutal tensions (men arguing over which of their wives are whores) and escalating suspense (as the Etruscan Tarquinius sets out to seduce Collatinus’ wife Lucretia whom the Romans believe to be resolutely chaste). Ronald Duncan’s libretto, if at times archly showing its age, is economically evocative and aptly aphoristic for a moral drama — “Life is dark except when wine sheds light” — and psychologically striking as in the only utterance Lucretia makes about Tarquinius’ effect on her: “In the forest of my dreams you have always been the tiger.”

Despite a morality play framework with two Christian narrators — a Male Chorus and Female Chorus — guiding our judgment, the opera has the emotional weight and force of a Greek tragedy. But the formal mix is uncomfortable. What are we meant to make of Christian moralising that is as fundamentally limiting for women as the pagan culture it criticises, let alone left wanting in grasping the scale of the tragedy witnessed. I spoke by phone with Sydney Chamber Opera Artistic Director Jack Symonds in a rehearsal break about the substantial challenges of staging the opera. Clearly, Symonds and collaborators have come up with some fascinating strategies to be at once true to and critical of it, but better than that, revealing something more complex in Britten’s attitude to the fate of his heroine.

I think it’s one of Britten’s greatest operas and, importantly, I knew that with the right team we could solve its seemingly intractable problems in a very creative way. And that’s the kind of thing that attracts me to a piece really. Something that needs a ‘solve’ and can take a very creative ‘solve’ and that is so rich in musical possibility that you almost can’t say no.

The opera is like a blend of Greek tragedy and a mediaeval Catholic morality play. Is that one of your intractables? How will you frame your production?

I think that two points that Kip Williams and Elizabeth Gadsby, director and associate director respectively, have picked up on — and something we discussed when we first talked about this piece many years ago as the two, not ‘problems,’ but issues one has to look at — are certainly the Christian element and the portrayal of gender roles in the piece. This team has tackled these very much head-on, especially the gender matter.

Essentially, for all his greatness as a composer, Britten never questions gender roles in The Rape of Lucretia. The women sit at home in cotton dresses spinning and waiting for their husbands and these men sit around discussing all women as whores. What Kip and Elizabeth have done is to split up the action and the characters into performing and singing characters by lip-synching gender reversal. This creates an incredible dialogue between the musical content and the performed element. For instance, the three women who play and sing Lucretia and her two maids also perform Tarquinius, Collatinus and Junius by lip-synching to the male singers, and, of course, it’s vice versa for the men. The net effect is both a questioning of and a distancing from the work in terms of how we look at these roles, asking who is complicit in ideas about how men and women behave and the nature of the events that lead to the rape of Lucretia.

I’ve wrestled with it since I first knew the opera. It’s very hard to know what Britten was driving at with this element. He insisted on its inclusion against the advice of all his collaborators — against the director, the librettist and some of the performers. He insisted on this ‘Greek chorus’ of two characters, called Male Chorus and Female Chorus. It’s strange that he needed to have this morality framing. A lot of my thoughts on it come back to the detail in the music and the way I hear it and certainly the way we’ll perform it. Britten questions the morality deeply by asking us whether or not we should in fact be judging this story within a Christian moral framework and what the implications are for all of us if we just apply a received idea of Christian tradition onto a time and a place that was certainly pre-Christian.

The ultimate question asked about the rape and suicide by the Female Chorus towards the end is, “Is this all?” and “How can this happen?” Britten’s music here is incredibly pained, not the beatific halo of Christian morality we might have expected. It’s the same with the Male Chorus who answers her with a parable of how Jesus’ death and resurrection absolved us all of sin, but Britten himself in the music, doesn’t absolve us. He leaves us with an enormous question.

That’s very interesting. I‘d noticed it in recordings, especially the words and singing of the Female Chorus but thought the Male Chorus’ attitude was conventional, even dismissive. But the scoring of instruments so often provides a narration of its own, which I’ll be listening out for in your interpretation.

I think it’s the first chamber opera that deserves the name in that rather than simply being an opera for small forces Britten makes it into a piece of chamber music and zeroes in on the tiniest details of the drama through soloistic instrumentation. While that might seem rather academic, what it actually allows him to do is be freed from the constraints of grand opera. The opera immediately preceding The Rape of Lucretia is Peter Grimes and two more different works couldn’t possibly be imagined. Peter Grimes is essentially an updated 19^th century opera. It’s an extraordinary piece and fully deserves people’s love of it, but it’s a 19^th century mechanism with 20^th century add-ons. The Rape of Lucretia is actually a modernist piece, I think, a completely different take on what an opera can be — a chamber opera with chamber music with which to create a whole new world of operatic possibility.

It’s a remarkable through-written musical and theatrical ensemble work and the solution your team has come up with in terms of gender is interesting because you’re building on something that’s already in the work — the way that the Male and Female Corus sing some of the thoughts of the characters who become silent. So the Chorus pair provide both a moral commentary but also passages of psychological interiority.

That’s right. The way they take sides and the placement of them in the drama means that in this production, rather than being two meta-theatrical figures, they become two of eight players who assume various roles during the production to act out this drama. This frees it from being sort of an embarrassing dumb-show of Roman tragedy, which is a danger.

The music is superb. The night music and night language of the libretto in the music of Acts One and Two is astonishingly seductive but relies on very spare instrumentation, notably in the presence of the harp.

It’s certainly a soloist piece. It’s a wind quintet with a string quartet with double bass, percussion and harp and piano played by the conductor. And what Britten does is use the wind quintet as a wind quartet and the string quartet as a string quartet, as they would play in a chamber music concert. Then he finds all manner of different combinations between them to bleed the edges in sound, with superb technique, to completely re-imagine what we hear in the instrumental accompanying of the singers. Indeed, the harp plays a big role in that it can blend with all these instruments. Sometimes it virtually seems a harp concerto, the writing for it is so relentless. And the piano recitative played by the conductor has a strange relationship with the form of the work — in no other Britten opera is there that kind of relationship. The piano never plays with the orchestra. It’s like a separate world, literally a chamber piece. Sometimes it’s like the rehearsal pianist never went away and you wonder why it’s there. But the punctuation in the recitative is a wonderful way of dividing up the colour palette.

Finally, the almost entire percussion part is made up of timpani and its constant ominous presence, doubled by the other instruments, means that Britten is able to use the sparest resources to create the fullest symphonic effect when he wants. It’s typical of this composer that he’s completely sparing, almost calculatedly finding combinations building up from one to two to three all the way up to the twelve instruments. And that’s a joy to work with. That’s what musicians want to play when they do this kind of work.

There are some remarkable passages, like Tarquinius riding his horse into the Tiber with amazing rhythmic shifts and some beautiful Act Three singing. Who’s singing Lucretia?

Anna Dowsley who is a wonderful mezzo-soprano. She was Young Artist and Principal Artist with Opera Australia for a number of years. She did three of our earliest pieces in 2011 and 2012. It’s great to have her back and in a role that suits her. She has a wonderful sense of gravity but without ever becoming bathetic. She’s able to really carry this role convincingly and able to act as a man superbly. This is a co-production with Victorian Opera and we’re welcoming two of their baritones, Jeremy Kleeman and Nathan Lay, making their company debuts with us. Male and Female Chorus have the biggest roles in the piece, so it’s great to have Celeste Lazarenko and Andrew Goodman. Andrew is a wonderful Evangelist in Bach’s Passions so to have him in this role as a modern evangelist is beautiful indeed. It’s an incredible cast who are very hard-working. When they signed up to play some of these smaller parts, little did they know that they’d be onstage for the full two hours acting all sorts of different parts. This is very much an ensemble piece.

This is very much a Sydney Chamber Opera team for The Rape of Lucretia — the kind we would have assembled ourselves but having Victorian Opera involved means we can imagine a more ambitious production, show more people our work and potentially have a national reach.

Sydney Chamber Opera with Victorian Opera, The Rape of Lucretia, composer Benjamin Britten, musical director Jack Symonds, director Kip Williams, co-director, designer Elizabeth Gadsby; Carriageworks, Sydney, 19, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26 Aug

Onscreen, bleeding, dark red fingers in close-up. A man, suspended by ropes from a vertiginous cliff face, cries aloud he wants to go home. Onstage, Australian Chamber Orchestra violins and cellos briskly build from a Vivaldi concerto and segue via The Four Seasons’ “Winter” into the striking ebullience of “Summer.” Then presto, in both the fast musical and magical senses: Mountain, a melding of live performance and cinema without interval has this audience member briefly shielding his eyes when the high-altitude footage and sublime sounds drive home a dash of vertigo.

First performed in Australia at the Sydney Opera House this year during the city’s winter Vivid festival, Mountain combines the compositions by the orchestra’s artistic director, Richard Tognetti, with works from Vivaldi, Grieg, Beethoven and Chopin, as well as contemporary pieces by Estonian Arvo Pärt and Peter Sculthorpe. These have been specifically assembled to enhance an array of extraordinary footage of mountains from around the world. Directed by Jennifer Peedom of Sherpa (2015) fame, with Renan Ozturk as principal photographer, Mountain is itself enjoying commercial life in cinemas, with an ACO soundtrack.

The concert version has the added benefits of staging director Nigel Jamieson’s oversight, Damien Cooper’s lighting design subtly attuned to the work’s fluctuating moods, from majestic through mournful, and the immediacy of live playing in a sonically superior venue, amid the blond wood panels of the City Recital Hall. Close-ups of oozing, bright red lava flows are made that much more visually arresting thanks to to floor lighting from beneath the musicians and Tognetti’s own mountainous shadow playing his violin, rising above the screen.

In an era when the language of cinema captures the popular imagination more than the difficult but arguably equally rewarding language of classical composition, it might be asked whether the listening experience itself suffers in projects like this. Certainly, the cross-pollination of art forms creates, as Tognetti told me on the phone recently, a “synergistic synaesthesia,” in which audience members may hear more with their eyes and see more with their ears.

But are we still paying conscious attention to the call and response within the orchestra, the lines of auditory inspiration, when our eyes are so busy drinking in daredevils launching themselves off clifftops on bicycles and skis? On the other hand, can we afford not to be experimental, given aging audiences? Australian Bureau of Statistics surveys consistently show that people in the first decade of retirement are twice as likely to attend a classical concert in a year than 18 to 24-year-olds.

This is “a new art form that hasn’t been over-explored,” says Tognetti: live bespoke film edited to accompany a performance, which should be differentiated from an orchestra cashing in on popular movies by recreating pre-existing soundtracks. These sorts of multi-sensory experiences, anecdotally, do attract more diverse audiences than older, traditional concertgoers, but whether curious newcomers will stay on to join the ranks of the ACO’s subscriber base of 10,000 steady and loyal regulars is yet to be seen.

A mixing of audiences was most apparent during the ACO’s live performance of The Reef, set to a filmed backdrop and seen by more 12,500 people in nine concerts around the nation in 2012-13, and restaged in March this year at London’s Barbican. Surfers with sun-bleached hair were scattered among paler audience members.

Onstage, string bows were gently drawn across crystal drinking glasses partially filled with water to create exquisite sounds, while on a huge screen behind the musicians, a man on his surfboard glided through a wave barrel in slow motion, a close-up lingering on his ecstatic face. The performance segued from the avant-garde of George Crumb to Brisbane-born composer Brett Dean’s Peripeteia, building to a frenetic Shostakovich chamber symphony. Simultaneously, the sensuous video work of Tognetti’s erstwhile surfing buddy, the London-born, Sydney-raised ocean photographer Jon Frank, projected the lip of a wave kissing its trough. The audience was plunged into a musical and visual consummation.

Tognetti is wary of competition on stage that can “nullify certain senses,” and concedes the ACO was less successful with its 2013 concerts of The Crowd, with music played to footage of people in urban spaces and audience responses to the experience ranging from “incredibly distracting” to “totally immersive.” It’s excellent that the ACO is listening, although The Reef didn’t set out to attract a surfing audience, any more than Mountain has a mountaineer demographic in its sights. “There would have been, of course, some classical music lovers who thought it might have distracted from the pure musical experience,” says Tognetti, “but it’s not like they don’t have enough opportunities for pure musical experiences. And so, don’t buy a ticket — or, no, please buy a ticket, but keep your eyes closed.”

For the most part, I couldn’t keep my eyes closed during Mountain. I then went home and streamed the Vivaldi pieces running in my mind’s loop as earworm. Mission accomplished: sight and sound enhanced each other, even if the experience was greatly different from the singular auditory fidelity that concentrated my mind on, say, the works in the ACO’s recent and more boutique Mozart concert.

There was one irritating and distracting aspect of Mountain, however: pre-recorded narration by US actor Willem Dafoe, which may be a useful feature in the commercial release of the film, though with its paternalistic Disney overtone, I’d doubt it. Not only bobbing up between movements but during the playing of the music as well, Dafoe’s sermons about the mightiness of mountains proved redundant and distracting.

I wondered, when speaking to Tognetti, whether concert newcomers attracted by cinema might feel at all intimidated by traditional classical audience deportment. I didn’t hear any clapping between movements during Mountain, but a few surfers may have applauded at such moments during The Reef. “Clapping doesn’t worry me at all between movements, and it’s encouraged in The Reef and hopefully Mountain,” says the maestro. “Go for it!”

Mountain, a cinematic and musical odyssey, writer, director, producer Jennifer Peedom, musical director, composer Richard Tognetti, principal cinematographer Renan Ozturk, staging director Nigel Jamieson, lighting design Damien Cooper; City Recital Hall, Sydney, 12, 15, 16 Aug; Sydney Opera House, 20 Aug

Interested in the connections between art forms and sometimes puzzled by the understatement of the importance of arts in Australian life, Steve Dow is a Melbourne-born, Sydney-based writer across visual arts, stage, screen and music, who also contributes to The Saturday Paper, Guardian Australia, The Australian Financial Review, Art Guide Australia, The Monthly and Limelight magazine.

Intestines explode, evil lurks in cul-de-sacs, a soapie star is devoured by her unborn child — this is the faux-nightmarish suburban world of, as David Stratton (a fan of Philip Brophy’s Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat [47min, 1988]) puts it, “the yucky, schlocky, tongue-in-cheek horror film, Body Melt (1993).”

It’s a gloriously odd, low budget feature that diverges from the arc of Australian cinema in its refusal to embrace what is normally thought of as realism onscreen. The houses look like two-dimensional pop-ups, the acting, slime and gore are over-the-top and the people and the props look plastic. It’s all real in the mind of writer-director-artist Philip Brophy.

In the second ever edition of RealTime, John O’Neill spoke to Brophy about why he rejects naturalism as a mode of performance, why he prefers casting soapie actresses and extras from health insurance advertisements to ‘real’ actors and why he criticises what he sees to be the prevailing “ABC-drama aesthetic.”

Philip Brophy’s 1997- 2001 Cinesonics series about films and their soundtracks was commissioned by RealTime (not yet archived on our site but available on the writer’s website), as is the AudioVision series (2012-present).

Body Melt: Acting Degree Zero

RealTime #2, August 1994

Art-splatter auteur Philip Brophy tells John O’Neill why he casts his films in the ad breaks

Philip Brophy cast his first feature film, the schlock horror movie Body Melt, from television advertisements. “If I see most actors in an Australian movie I groan; I think ‘Oh, God’,” he says. “What I’m groaning at is what most people see as a sign of quality; some sort of ABC-drama aesthetic. I’d rather some Martians just came down and blew them all away.”

And, in a sense, that is what happens in Body Melt. Brophy’s film is centred on a cul-de-sac in an archetypal Australian suburb, Pebbles Court, where the residents have swallowed both the promotional hype and pills of a drug company that promises “cognition enhancement,” not at all unlike Prozac. The only problem is a willfully mis-held missing ingredient. As a result, the pills lead to horrific mutation and essentially turn people inside out. A jilted, similarly mutated genius who lives in the country town of “Nowhere” is ultimately revealed to be responsible.

The art of performance was, for Brophy, at its highest point in a scene where a young married couple, played by Brett Climo and Lisa McCune (a Coles New World girl from television advertisements and now a star in Blue Heelers), are confronted with the consequences of the drug. McCune’s character, eight months pregnant, discovers her unborn child is feeding off her. The genesis of the sequence was a television commercial for health insurance starring another, since successful theatre and film actor, Zoe Carides.

“She did this amazing ad that is just so disgusting,” says Brophy. “She’s down because she’s just had a baby in hospital. It’s all white. It’s just got this sterility to it. She’s handed her baby which she sees for the first time and then she’s unsure what to do. They’ve got this music with a woman who sounds like she’s orgasming while she sings piano breathlessly and there’s a tinkling piano. It’s a soft-rock ballad and then, suddenly, the baby smiles and Zoe breaks into tears and touches the little baby’s forehead with her forefinger. I thought: ‘Great, this is the person to drop her placenta.’”

Carides was unavailable but McCune (Cheryl in the film) was an equally “nice” stand-in whose performance enhanced the original. “Doctor,” she asks on the phone. “Is it possible to drop your placenta one month prior to birth?” Her unborn child then appears to rape her before the placenta suffocates her husband.

Brophy’s previous film was the 47-minute Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat which is now available on video. Ironic and funny, it is driven by a synthesised musical soundtrack and Brophy’s actors, principally Jean Kitson and Phillip Dean, utter just 11 lines. They include: “Well, God, piss on me,” and “Knock your scrot on that dick-twister.”

“It’s virtually a form of puppetry,” says Brophy of film acting generally, and of Salt, Saliva… in particular. “It’s not that far from pornography: ‘Okay, pan back, right. Okay jerk off a bit to get an erection. You up yet? You up? Ok, quick, go in now. You scream. You scream. You scream.’ It’s not far removed from a dramatic situation where a director’s told the actor: ‘Ok, you come back to this mark. You stand there. You say that line, then turn. We’ll do the focus-pull on the lenses at that point, we’ll shift the reflector boards around and you move across there as the track comes back.’ Whether they’re saying: ‘I think we should get a divorce’ or having their head dunked into a bowl of shit (as occurs in Salt, Saliva…), the content of that action becomes slightly nullified or overridden by the mechanics of the whole situation.”

Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat is a series of days in the life of “The Man” played by Phillip Dean. “Phillip always struck me as being like one of the Thunderbirds. I don’t like actors who are in my face, the whole Method approach. This emotional outpouring; this angst-ridden identification with the onscreen person etc,” Brophy says. As a result, Dean’s most contemplative and demanding performance moments occur while shitting — which Brophy acknowledges a great character actor like Robert de Niro could do well. But naturalism is a style to which Brophy doesn’t aspire.

“That’s only one option of how you can actually look at these strange, granular, floating, abstract, pseudo-photographic, ghostly images of people on a screen,” he says of realism. “In essence they are highly iconic and hieroglyphic anyway, just by their photographic status, despite their fleshy appearance.”

The consequence is that for Body Melt he has cast soap stars and other actors for their preconfigured iconography, and the icon that looms largest is Gerard Kennedy of Division Four and Homicide fame. “It goes back to this artificial logic of the whole film,” Brophy says. “Why have a cop in a film who is really only a plot device and try to pretend that somehow the person’s a character. Why not just go straight to an iconic instance of copness?”

Brophy also casts on the basis of voice. “The bulk of all changes in anyone’s expression doesn’t particularly come from their face,” he says. “I think the face is just a slight adjunct to the much greater range of tonal differences that happen in projection: shifts in pitch, paraphrasing, beats and what not. The projection, quality and delivery of the voice gives a much more precise impression of what the character is. The face doesn’t move around as much. This is marked when you’re watching something on a screen where the face just hovers there in a sense and is very often quite internalised in its projection.”

Body Melt was shown at the Melbourne Film Festival in June 1994 where, according to Brophy, it achieved the highest attendance of any film show. It has been sold to distributors in New York, England, Canada, Mexico, Turkey, Cyprus, Malaysia, the Phillipines and Thailand, and negotiations continue with Europe and Japan. In Australia, Brophy and producer Rod Bishop are organising theatrical release themselves.

John O’Neill was formerly Head of Events NSW and is now a Company Director for Komosion, Surfing NSW and Adopt Change.

Rachel Storey’s Palace of Memories is a brief, fascinating three-part documentary about Barrangal Dyara (Skin and Bones), a massive art project by Aboriginal artist Jonathan Jones that sought positive ways to close the gaps in Australia’s collective memory of history, both Indigenous and non-indigenous.

Presented by Kaldor Public Art Projects this year, the installation Barrangal Dyara resurrected the forgotten history of colonial Australia’s most astounding architectural achievement: the massive Garden Palace for the Sydney International Exhibition in 1879. Commissioned by Sir Henry Parkes, the “Father of Federation,” the Garden Palace was heralded as something that would put Sydney on the world map. It housed government documents, census data and convict records, as well as huge exhibits from museum collections, including the earliest colonial acquisitions of Indigenous artefacts. Within three years it burnt to the ground under mysterious circumstances, and in a remarkably short period it vanished from the colony’s collective memory taking with it records, aspects of which have been otherwise erased and denied since Federation.

But this is not the angle explored by either Jones’ art project or Storey’s ABC documentary. Both offer a gentle, reconciling journey of nostalgia for Australia’s forgotten places and cultural achievements. Jones honoured the architectural achievement of the Garden Palace by placing thousands of gypsum replicas of Aboriginal shields where the enormous building’s foundations once lay in Sydney’s Botanic Gardens. In doing so, he also dignified the earliest collections of Aboriginal material culture destroyed by the fire — the very first artefact acquired by Captain Cook in Australia was a shield. However, Jones subtly challenged the ‘primitive savage’ stereotypes that informed those first collections, which wrongly perceived such cultural items as shields as mere weaponry and framed Aboriginal people as violent, placeless nomads with only a rudimentary culture and society.

Jones’ installation emphasised the shield’s ceremonial purpose. He invited Bangarra Dance Company to perform onsite and installed soundscapes of Indigenous languages and audio of a traditional grinding stone rather than the ubiquitous didgeridoo, illuminating the little-known fact that our First Nations peoples were grinding flour for bread tens of thousands of years before the Egyptians. Then came the installation’s centrepiece — kangaroo grass beds placed at the site of the old building’s dome, which originally housed a statue of Queen Victoria. Kangaroo grass was the native wheat planted and harvested for thousands of years in Australia — another forgotten piece of history revealed in this documentary by Bruce Pascoe, author of the definitive work on this topic in his book Dark Emu: Black Seeds, Agriculture or Accident? (Magabala Books, 2014). An aerial shot reveals that the grass beds have been planted in the shape of an Aboriginal symbol of two people facing each other by a fire, thereby inviting viewers to participate in a dialogue about invisible histories, shared histories.

In the Western academic tradition, the term ‘memory palace’ refers to a memorisation technique promoted by ancient Greek philosophers, in which visualised structures and landscapes in the mind helped scholars store vast amounts of information. In Aboriginal cultures, song-lines and Dreaming stories worked in the same way for thousands of years as internalised maps of memory for ancient knowledge. Rachel Storey’s documentary offers insight into a process by which Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people together might reclaim and retain cultural and historical memory through a deeper understanding of and connection to place.

Palace of Memories explores these elements with surprising depth and sensitivity for such a brief documentary. It’s also a well-executed piece of neuro-linguistic programming, first offering the non-Aboriginal viewer the satisfying reminiscence of a proud piece of forgotten history, followed by an Indigenous critique. Conventional talking heads convey the feel-good content and informal interviews in outdoor locations soften the more challenging messages. Narrated diary entries from the era evoke colonial nostalgia, with fades to historical photographs and watercolours. This sanitises the violent reality of the fire, which Jones calmly reframes as a “cultural burn,” a metaphor for Aboriginal firestick farming — burning off grasses in an act of regeneration and renewal. In this way, Storey piggybacks an Indigenous political message from the documentary’s nostalgic foundation, as Jonathan Jones softly asks, “What else have you forgotten?”

Hand-held sequences of rapid shot duration depicting the installation process build tension to give us a sense of Jones’ personal investment in his artistic vision. These elements combine to produce the feeling of enthusiastic, equal participation in an intriguing shared journey of historical revisionism, free from grief, guilt or recrimination. The documentary, like the artwork it examines, is a celebration, containing both truth and reconciliation while carefully avoiding a truth-and-reconciliation agenda.

Palace of Memories, writer, director, producer, camera operator Rachel Storey, editor Stuart Miller, camera operators Gemma Deavin, Micah Walker, episodes 1-3, ABC iView until 31 Oct, 2019

Top image credit: Barrangal Dyara, Jonathan Jones, Kaldor Art Projects, photo Peter Greig

From the Sundance Institute and New Zealand Film Commission comes a small, lovely film about cinema’s hidden history in Afghanistan. With the country’s future still on a precipice, a group of men come together to rescue and restore thousands of hours of celluloid film footage — some concealed, some burned during the Taliban’s reign — in the at-risk national archive. At the helm of the restoration project is Ibrahim Arify, the new Director of Afghan Films, established in 1968 by Mohammed Zahir Shah with the assistance of US funds. Arify is a serious and fastidious figure who watched with sorrow from afar over the decades as his homeland succumbed to rolling invasions. Though there are tonnes of unprocessed film that will deteriorate without intervention, the archive project is framed from the beginning as being about more than the delicacy of a dying medium: it signifies the reclamation of his country. “It’s crucial we find our cultural heritage again,” says Arify. “Our own culture. Not Arab, not American, not Russian. We need our own culture. We need to be able to see Afghan films across the country.”

The film’s structure unspools as a long trawl through warehouses overflowing with newsreels, unprocessed negatives and forgotten films. Bullet holes in the walls cast thin beams of light across the dusty film cans. Some of them are unsalvageable, their celluloid chemicals have long since bled into the ground, but director Pietra Brettkelly makes good use of the resulting twisted, abstracted images (part of the film’s pleasure lies in Jacob Bryant’s graceful cinematography, which combines these interstitial montages with skilled handheld camerawork that invites a low-budget cinematic intimacy).

Every day yields new discoveries, which we see thrown onto a wall, a projector ticking away behind us and the faces of Arify and his team full of wonder and pain. US President John F Kennedy visits the Shah in the 1960s. The mountains of Helmand, a distant province now run by the Taliban, hover across the wall. We see the Palace of Forty Columns, surrounded by flowering trees, now destroyed. We see Kabul in all its seasons; King Shah’s wife and family diving into a pool of shimmering blue; President Daoud in 1973 flanked by terrifying rows of marching soldiers. We see dramas of lost love beginning with the archive’s oldest film Love and Friendship (1946) and House of History (1992), in which Kabul appears like a black-and-white war-stricken dystopia. And we see an abundance of army footage: soldiers dropping out of planes in parachutes and tanks rolling across Kabul in 1978 for the Saur Revolution. Among the unedited negatives, Arify finds one labelled “The Execution of President Dr Najib” from 1996. “This is a critical piece of evidence,” he says, motioning to the flickering image on the wall. “Should anyone question who killed President Najib, we can show them the Taliban did it.” All of it was captured by the cameras of Afghan Films.

A picture begins to build: a fragmented chronology of an almost-nation, in which history is savagely, daily contested. In the West, nostalgia is ever-present in popular culture, in the ironic forms of cassette-shaped iPhone cases, Jurassic Park T-shirts and cafes with menus devoted to childhood cereals. With its visions of grand, long-destroyed cities and almost-lost romances, A Flickering Truth trades in an altogether different kind of nostalgia. Each clip of archival footage shows not just a relic of Afghanistan’s lost history, but a snapshot of its many, potential lost futures. The film is eulogistic in tone (aided very much by Benjamin Wallfisch’s floating score), while reaching for optimism.

As Ibrahim Arify’s efforts culminate in a film festival, named We are who we are not, and a mobile cinema touring to rural schools (avoiding Taliban-controlled provinces), the film lands on images of children watching the rescued material, thereby projecting hope for social cohesion at last. The memory and threat of violence remains vivid — one former actress recalls shooting a film with the very real fear that “music, cinema, culture would cease to exist” in Afghanistan. But A Flickering Truth connects the archive to a much broader project: cinema as inextricable from history and from hope itself.

A Flickering Truth, 2015, director, writer Pietra Brettkelly, cinematographer Jacob Bryant, original music Benjamin Wallfisch, editors Irena Dol, Margot Francis, Ken Sparks, Jacob Schulsinger, Cinzia Baldessari, Cushla Dillon; in Dari and English, distributor Umbrella Entertainment

In Afghanistan, a group of cinephiles gather to rescue the country’s film archive, much of which was burned by the Taliban. This 2015 documentary, New Zealand’s Oscar candidate, unspools rarely seen archival films and footage of the Afghanian Shah, JFK visiting in the 1960s and once grand cities destroyed by the USSR, the US and the Taliban. RealTime’s reviewer calls A Flickering Truth “a eulogistic, cinematically-shot documentary” that speaks to the role of film in building a new cultural narrative of hope and cohesion for a war-torn country.

Email us at giveaways [at] realtimearts.net by 5pm 18 August with your name, postal address and phone number to be in the running.

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In our ongoing Arts Education & Training feature, we focus on recent graduates embarking on their careers and reflecting on the university faculties and courses that helped shape them. Visual artist Gwan Tung Dorothy Lau (with her doppleganger in the image above) specifies QUT’s opening her up to a range of practices and encouraging experimentation as pivotal to her development. A UNSW School of Arts & Media Alumni Residency Program maintains connections with graduates, like the team of singer Sonya Holowell and designer Elia Bosshard, by supporting them to develop early career projects with real outcomes. Both profiles make for fascinating reading about the thinking of emerging artists. And Maggie Tonkin’s new book Fifty, Half a Century of Australian Dance Theatre, will be an invaluable asset for teachers, students and researchers in Australian dance. We’re giving away two copies to some lucky subscribers. Keith & Virginia

Top image credit: Gwan Tung Dorothy Lau, Para-Selves #1, 2016, digital manipulated photograph courtesy the artist

Black Hole Theatre’s The Book of Revelations invites audience members into a “performance installation” that imagines the interior world of someone experiencing dementia, a character named Ada. Writer Alison Richards, in the central performance as Ada, is both the inhabitant of this world — its progenitor — and victim of its surreal alarms. It’s a world where the variegated elements of an apparently vivid personality are splitting off from each other and in the words of director Nancy Black, “as they fall, each element exists, sparkles from time to time, but the fragments don’t cohere.” As the title suggests, The Book of Revelations presents this disintegration as a series of fantastical appearances, materialising from everyday existence, alternately wondrous and terrifying.

Audience members wander around the smoke-filled set, peeking at and into arrangements of furniture, pictures, household stuff. An installation of cabinets houses a box of cutlery and one of photo slides; a set of cords dangle reading glasses and a hairbrush from the ceiling. We spot objects that must have more personal significance — a tiny fuzzy peach clings to the top of a column while a massive human-sized one lurks next to a park bench on the other side of the room. There are also peaches in the cabinets. Motifs proliferate but are distorted in shape or scale — the criss-crossed web of a rope ladder reappears in a slanted frame on the floor; doily patterns pop up here and there.

The repeated warping of forms gives us a sense of Ada’s fracturing perceptions. Although her world has more ‘through the looking glass’-style topsy-turvy than rawness or true horror, the production doesn’t treat the symptoms of dementia fancifully. We recognise anomia (the inability to recall words) as Ada lapses into a frustrated, “it’s on the tip of my… the tip of my….” People with dementia can also experience hyperacusis, a sensitivity to certain frequency and volume ranges of sound, making everyday noises seem unpleasantly or painfully loud. Through headsets, the audience hears ordinary sounds of daily life quickened with an hallucinatory quality and the occasional auditory shock. Bird twitters might be interrupted by the scream of a train grinding on tracks, a fly buzzes annoyingly, an opening door brings on thunder.

“He has brought me a peach from the tree in my garden, the last of summer.” The question of what is real and what is fantasy, what is happening now and what is reminiscence, what can be done and what is hopeless, constitutes Ada’s conundrum. As she moves around the space — which could variously be her immediate external world, a landscape of events from her past or in her own mind — each object she encounters has the potential to conjure a memory, or a monster. An old bed is lit from below with a childlike carousel scene; a letterbox throws out a stream of colourful images that seep and morph over Richards’ transfixed face.

As Ada speaks she breaks into song, almost involuntarily (Richards is a classical singer); maybe the voice sings when speech is inaccessible, or insufficient. There is paranoia, helplessness, collapse: Ada asks, “Is this the end?” before deciding, “I’ll go on,” and then returns wearily to the Beckettian question. A chorus of disembodied voices responds: “not yet not, yet not, not yet not yet.” Richards’ interactions with audience members are mostly light-hearted and/or cheesy, but some are genuinely affecting — when, on her knees, she reaches out for help, will the woman who’s right there take her arm? And Richards’ finds unexpectedly moving words for Ada’s exhaustion: “As I turn I burn /and turning see /a thousand others burning just like me.”

The work of puppeteers Rod Primrose and Bao Ghislain makes a striking contribution to the show. Towards the end of Ada’s ordeal, a mass of glossy, claret-coloured strips of celluloid emerges from a chest and hovers upward, assuming a benign seaweedy form: is this another monster? Or an angel? When Ada eventually runs from the room, she’s refigured in the form of two miniature rod-puppets who swoop and dance, mesmerising audience members. The larger one strokes the swollen, chalky cheek of the smaller one, suggesting a nostalgic relationship between older and younger selves.

It’s a scene that epitomizes the overall impact of The Book of Revelations – the various design and production elements were inventive and gave quiet surprises, although at times I wanted a few drops of Beetlejuice surreality to darken the imagery. At times the sad, difficult aspects of dementia were movingly drawn – it must be a sad, difficult experience – but there were other revelations here too.

Black Hole Theatre, The Book of Revelations, writer, performer Alison Richards, director Nancy Black, composers, sound designers Faye Bendrups, David Franzke, Christine McCombe, Dagmara Gieysztor, lighting design Bronwyn Pringle, video & animation Lindsay Cox, puppet design & construction Rod Primrose, puppeteers Rod Primrose, Bao Ghislain; fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne, 19-30 July

Top image credit: Alison Richards, The Book of Revelations, Black Hole Theatre, photo Sarah Walker

Mary Anne Butler’s The Sound of Waiting is a response to former Leader of the Opposition in the Australian Government Tony Abbot’s comment in 2010 that “Jesus knew there was a place for everything, and it is not necessarily everyone’s place to come to Australia.” An allegory for a world that has closed its door on humanity, The Sound of Waiting uses magic realism to deep-dive on the question: as a global community, where do we go from here?

With just two characters, a refugee called Hamed, and an Angel of Death, Butler’s script is economical but her words have wings. Under the direction of Gail Evans (who directed Butler’s award-winning play Broken [2015]), Kyle Walmsley is devastatingly effective as the suited Angel of Death, his narcissism monumental. At the other end of the spectrum is Hamed Mokri, convincingly played by Osamah Sami, who embodies the trauma of millions of faceless refugees the world over.

The minimalist set by Kris Bird and lighting design by Jessie Davis evoke the enormous landscape of Butler’s imagination. With a stack of blocks, sheer voile backdrops and white, red and blue filtered light, The Sound of Waiting appears as beautiful as it is terrible. It takes you from war to sea, and below into its inky depths. You can’t look away.

The play opens with a soliloquy from the Angel of Death: “There is a space between sea and sky… the whisper between hope and despair… And if a person can reach in there — if they can grab that tiny sliver of light-capped possibility — then the rest of their life… will become golden-edged with opportunity.” Through the eyes of one refugee, Hamed, pitted against the Angel of Death, Butler explores that tiny space.

In a war-torn city, a bomb blast flings body parts of Hamed’s wife and small son past him in the street. He though is saved by the simple act of bending to tie his daughter’s shoelace. He notices that his son’s dismembered foot has one tiny stubbed toe. His wife’s scarf is caught on a bloody jaw bone. These details plunge us head-first into Hamed’s heartland. Based on an amalgam of asylum seeker stories, the drama is profound.

Hamed is barefoot and dishevelled, but it’s clear that he’s been a successful man. He clings to hope and logic in a world where life has been reduced to chance. We follow him as he deals with grief, escape plans, false documentation and officialdom. He and his daughter join the “river of refugees running to the ocean” and pack onto a boat. Hamed is every father — we ache at his loss, his desperation, we laugh at his jokes. We know this “leaking coffin” is his only hope.

Presiding over Hamed’s suffering is the Angel of Death, faithful minion of the Host. White light accentuates his chiselled features. His neat grey suit has black feather epaulettes. We are inexorably drawn into the mindset of this figure, who pumps and thrusts and flies with practiced perfection. The Angel of Death is steely, magnificent, unmoved — and all too familiar. The loss of lives will guarantee his continued status. He has been charged with responsibility for ensuring Hamed’s demise. His words conjure a storm in which the sky teems with murderous angels, waves crash, the leaking vessel sinks and life jackets dissolve like tissue paper. As lives are lost, black feathers rain from the sky. The Angel rejoices, but Hamed hangs on. Undeterred, the Angel takes the shape of Hamed’s loved ones and lures him to the bottom of the ocean.

We know how this ends. Some lives weigh more than others. The outcome is pre-determined. There can be no survivors. There’s nothing we can do. And yet, when Hamed gives up, we find ourselves willing him to live. We want the Angel of Death to show mercy. We feel the energy shift. The Angel loses his bearings. Has Mary Anne Butler managed to draw us into that tiny space where new choices can be made? The Sound of Waiting should be on every stage in every city and town in Australia.

Knock-em-Down Theatre and Brown’s Mart Productions, The Sound of Waiting, writer Mary Anne Butler, director Gail Evans, set, performers Osamah Sami, Kyle Walmsley, costume designer Kris Bird, sound designer Matt Cunliffe, lighting designer Jessie Davis; Brown’s Mart Theatre, Darwin, 25 July-6 Aug

Top image credit: The Sound of Waiting, photo Glenn Campbell courtesy Brown’s Mart Theatre

“Cable television is the new arthouse,” David Lynch said recently, and he if anyone should know. The statement is borne out by the Series Mania festival at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, the first local edition of an event that has run in Paris for years. The packed program featured previews of several brand new Australian TV shows, such as the Melbourne-made Sunshine, set in the South Sudanese community. There’s also much intriguing international content, such as the thrillers Your Honor and Supermax, from Israel and Argentina respectively. First and foremost, however, I’m here to meet the legendary Vince Gilligan ― creator of Breaking Bad, co-creator of Better Call Saul and the festival’s guest of honour.

Of the handful of genuine innovators in current American television, Gilligan may be the hardest to pin down. While he tends to present himself as a straight-up genre storyteller, TV history has seen few hits more unlikely than Breaking Bad, a slow yet grotesquely violent melodrama in which a repressed Albuquerque science teacher deals with his cancer diagnosis by becoming a meth kingpin. Intricately plotted and often unbearably suspenseful, the show also proposed the most corrosive view imaginable of patriarchy and capitalism, whether or not Gilligan and his team gave these abstractions a moment’s conscious thought.

Better Call Saul is closer to art for art’s sake. Having conquered the universe, Gilligan and his collaborator Peter Gould set out to give themselves a treat, plunging into the earlier years of Breaking Bad’s most beloved comic character: shonky lawyer Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk), known in his younger days as Jimmy McGill. Like the small-town showman played by Jack Black in Richard Linklater’s great true-crime comedy Bernie (2011), Jimmy is both a folksy hustler and an artist after his own fashion, ruled by an imaginative temperament which impels him to colour outside the lines.

In truth, Jimmy’s creative and destructive tendencies are impossible to separate: the resulting moral ambiguity lies at the heart of the show, and is only heightened by our knowledge that the character is doomed to devolve into the ruthless dirtbag Saul, who routinely proposes killing people or as he euphemistically puts it, sending them to Belize. In this sense, Saul is as much tragedy as comedy. But is Jimmy solely to blame for his own moral decay, and does he deserve all the suffering he’s in for?

Gilligan’s equivocal reply suggests the question is still in play. “Jimmy McGill is a sweet guy who is a bit of a rascal, but by and large, especially in the early days of Better Call Saul, many of the morally questionable things he does are to help people in need, friends and clients and whatnot. And it’s kind of a shame that he’s going to have to become this calcified individual with a smaller heart, if you will, and someone who does not seem to care as much about doing the right thing, once he becomes Saul Goodman.”

Not that this transformation looks like occurring any time soon. Breaking Bad was known for its deliberate pacing, but Saul pushes this even further, as if testing its ability to create fascination through the mundane. Recent episodes have featured a lengthy set-piece centred on a Bingo game in a retirement home, and a scene in which Jimmy’s fellow lawyer and paramour Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn), preparing a legal document, hesitates endlessly between a semi-colon and a full stop.

“We try to have a pretty accurate internal clock,” Gilligan says when asked about the philosophy behind this. “Are things slowed down enough to be even more interesting, because people are used to the opposite? Or at a certain point, is it too slow, so it suddenly becomes dull? I guess the answer is slightly different for each individual viewer, but we try to use that slower pacing, ironically, to increase tension rather than to lessen it.”

Like Breaking Bad before it, Saul is full of enigmatic visual symbols, especially in episodes directed by Gilligan himself. The grid patterns that recur from shot to shot could represent either Jimmy’s chequered moral nature or the cramped spaces, physical and spiritual, in which he’s forced to function. Gilligan, however, is having none of it. “I’m not sure I was aware of that,” he says politely. “I’m going to look for that now. I mean, we’re always looking for interesting framing, and maybe that grid pattern is something that subconsciously appeals to us.”

Not much more emerges when I try to find out if any novelists have influenced Gilligan’s approach to storytelling, given his pioneering use of multiple seasons of TV to tell a single story with a beginning, middle and end. “Well, I hear a lot about Charles Dickens,” he starts out, before admitting that he’s read only A Christmas Carol. “I need to read more Dickens,” he muses. “Such a wonderful writer, and one that I am woefully not as well-versed in as I should be.”

Before meeting him, I’d imagined Gilligan as a version of Kim, a perfectionist who agonises over details. In the flesh, he’s more like another character from the Breaking Bad universe, the criminal mastermind Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito), maintaining an air of calm courtesy while preserving his secrets. The closest he gets to personal revelation is when I ask about his collaboration with Gould, and if the pair have different strengths. “He’s much more of a grown-up than I am,” Gilligan says. “He’s not as emotionally volatile as I am capable of being, and I think that’s a good thing.”

The volatility may not be obvious on the surface, but Gilligan’s advice for Australian TV makers could only come from an artist of stubbornly individual temperament. “Take a look around, see what everyone else is doing, and go in the opposite direction. That is advice, I think, that works in any country, in any culture.” Rules, in other words, are made to be broken ― even, perhaps, in Belize.

Top image credit: Bob Odenkirk, Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan on set of Better Call Saul, photo Jacob Lewis/AMC

The recent Meshuggah album The Violent Sleep Of Reason (2016) was largely recorded live in a studio. As per their usual compositional method, the Swedish musicians sketch out a riff, rhythm or pattern using drum machines, sequencers and samplers. These composed micro-units are then appended to others, molecularly braided within metric patterns of cross-synching time signatures. The approach is machinic in the true sense: an elemental fuel (the riff) is inserted into a generator which outputs structured forms (the song). Those finger-tapped tattoos and hummed bass-lines replicate and self-procreate to produce echoes, versions, duplications and variations which are concreted into sonic mountains and aural canyons. The resulting soundscape is simultaneously molten and glacial: a hot throbbing blanket of bottom end and a chilling shower of high frequency shards.

Like all Meshuggah records since Nothing (2002), The Violent Sleep Of Reason intensifies the tropes of Nu Metal by existing despite the music’s ostensibly impossible construction. The tracks’ micro-managed building blocks and their monolithic concatenations have been rehearsed and recorded as real-time performances. Two things are worth highlighting here. The first is that this mode of impossible composition has spurred Modernist music composition for over a century. From the timbral expansion of the orchestral palette to the gestural extension of instrumental technique to the graphic extrapolation of score manuscripts, the human composer has long sought how to generate maximal music beyond one’s means. Meshuggah — drawing heavily on the stupefying mathematics of bands like King Crimson (circa 1992’s Thrack) — channel this drive into the dialectics of metal and its myriad inflections. The second point is that while Meshuggah had to date mostly used digital tools to simulate this type of compositional complexity for their recordings, they only ever did so in order to confront themselves with the near-impossible task of physically performing such work in front of an audience, utilising the most traditional of tools: a drum kit, a bass guitar and two guitars with lots of distortion. In doing so, they have consistently promulgated an aggressive Ludditism predicated on generating maximal experiential effect.

Live sonic assault

Seeing and hearing Meshuggah live is like having this intense proof-of-concept wrack your body. The sheer sonic assault of the band’s unique blend of frequencies is unavoidable. Snares and kicks crack like welding sparks, dancing atop an undulating field of bass frequencies. Unlike techno’s pleasurably relentless conveyer belt of discrete sub-sonic detonations and eroticised bass palpitations, Meshuggah’s refinement of hi-tech metal production constructs a dense merger of multiple lo-end bandwidths, coalescing into a unified yet layered meta-blob of noise. Bowel-massaging bass is felt from down-tuned eight-string guitar rumbles, muscular shuddering bass guitar throbs, and lingering booms of the kick and toms.

With the superior mix and presence of their live sound on their March tour to Australia (lower in volume yet raging with more elemental presence than their previous tours here) their songs appear as architecsonic objects, like black diamonds being compressed from subterranean coal right before your ears. Their sound is a unified mass: it takes you nowhere, but rather stays in a fixed position, slowly rotating with tectonic gravitas.

Restricted access

Words flail in attempting to effectively describe Meshuggah’s acoustic physics and its magnetic pull. Yet I remain convinced that the band’s focus on aural craftsmanship and their determination to amplify sensorial extremes are the prime factors in ensuring their live performance sculpts music in post-human guise. The resulting effect is so overwhelming it invites pleasure through our not being allowed into the music. I can’t think of any other band or performer who so fastidiously constructs music bent on repelling identification and access, yet at the same time inspiring awe through granting the listener a post-human experience. Meshuggah have long traded in post-human operations (boggling time signatures, impossible executions, abstracted musical grammar, alienating precision etc). Their live performances build a spectacular arena wherein a human audience is stimulated by a post-human performance predicated on dispelling every device employed to connect to an audience. For some this is preposterously arrogant; for others, it is absurdly self-defeatist. For me, it is liberating to witness such vibrant atonality born of a dark Schoenbergian Sabbath. The pleasure of music is often described in empathetic humanist terms as that which occurs when the listener surrenders to the music to attain ecstatic union. When Meshuggah unleash tracks like “Future Breed Machine,” “Bleed,” “I Am Colossus” or “Clockworks,” I feel like I have been vaporised into nothingness, obliterated in and by sound.

The look

This brings us to the sight of Meshuggah and their visual presentation on stage. The world tour promoting The Violent Sleep Of Reason features an elaborate lighting design by Edvard Hansson, who has been working with the band for over five years. Superficially described, it’s a brutalist onslaught of laser lines, bank flashes, tilting shafts and sweeping beams, all tightly synchronised to the cryptically encoded polyrhythms of the pummelling music. This type of hyper-synchro synaesthesia has long formed a tunnelling surge typical of Modernist progression: everything gets louder, faster, tighter, brighter, as if hurtling toward an ultimate point of cosmological fusion. The concept is interesting, but for over half a century this pursuit plots markers along the same linear vector, each competing with the other solely to be one node ahead. Lighting technologies for stagecraft (especially in the faux pyrotechnics of rock concerts) urge designers to charge along this vector, creating a glut of visual bombast that is pleasurable but tiresome in its lack of critical thinking in audio-visual assemblage and narration. Conversely, Hansson’s lighting design proceeds from digesting the molecular and modular mechanics of Meshuggah’s compositional technique to produce a flashing, illuminated chart of how the music’s rhythms are energised by its interlocking logic. Think of it as a thousand nano signal lamps translating musical notation to simulate photic retinopathy.

Drums, fingers, light

Standing in the audience, it is as if one is being pricked in a mysterious constellation of acupuncture points, matched to the drummer’s patterns and the other instruments’ blocking and forming. The amazing reveal is that Hansson is performing the light cues and their flashing with his fingers, manually tapping hieroglyphic tattoos in perfect synch with drummer Tomas Haake’s playing. For many, this reveal is astounding, based on the presumption that such complex lighting could only be programmed by MIDI authoring and computer processing (recalling that MIDI was employed in stagecraft in the late 80s, eventually transforming into MSC — MIDI Show Control — in the early 90s). But considered corporally and cosmologically, Haake’s hands control Hansson’s fingers, in turn triggering blasted light code signalling the ECG readout of the post-human corpus embodied by Meshuggah’s being. Thus the body, so the drum kit, hence the lighting. In a glut of Max/MSP/Jitter realisations, two humans synched by nerves and muscles power this audiovisual spectacle.

The SAM Alumni Residency Program at the University of New South Wales offers recent graduates the opportunity to stay in touch with the institution where they were taught and trained by supporting them in the making of new work. At a time, not least in Sydney, where equipped and serviced workshop spaces are a rarity, this is a welcome development from the School of the Arts & Media (SAM) in the Arts & Social Sciences Faculty, one that provides academic advice, the resources of the UNSW Creative Practice Lab and the Arts & Social Sciences Technical Resource Centre.

This year’s recipients include the duo Sonya Holowell and Elia Bosshard, UNSW Music graduates who are working on an experimental staging of American composer Morton Feldman’s Three Voices (1982), a work that to this day still feels vitally new when heard, let alone seen. Holowell and Bosshard’s production will also, as our interview with the artist reveals, implicitly engage with Holowell’s Aboriginality.

In Three Voices, a live soprano voice is ‘shadowed’ by two recorded voices (the same singer) in a haunting weave of floating vowels until the late entry of a line from Frank O’Hara’s poem “Wind,” the words forming, mutating and dissolving in a rippling reverie (hear an excerpt of Holowell in performance). Written in memory of O’Hara and painter Philip Guston and dedicated to experimental singer Joan La Barbara, the 50-minute work is about to be performed at this year’s Sydney Fringe Festival by Holowell in the event’s newly-adapted industrial warehouse space which offers the singer and her designer collaborator Bosshard some wonderful acoustic and spatial possibilities. Holowell and Bosshard plan to subsequently tour this rarely experienced piece, seeing their account as the foundation for their company, Cache in Point.

Both artists have furthered their learning. Holowell, who has a Bachelor of Music Performance degree (UNSW, 2012), majoring in classical voice performance, recently completed a second degree in Electronic Sound Production at Sydney TAFE. Bosshard too has a Bachelor of Music Performance degree from UNSW (2011) as well as Honours in Music Performance from ANU (2012) a TAFE Certificate IV Design (2014), and for a time studied Design for Performance at NIDA (2015-16), “but withdrew before completing the degree to follow my own artistic inquiries.”

In an email exchange, I asked Holowell and Bosshard about the importance of their education and training, the value of the residency and what motivated them to take on Feldman’s Three Voices, not least in terms of Holowell’s indigeneity. Their account of the work in terms of hypnagogia is particularly interesting.

How important were those years at UNSW to you and in what ways did they endure in your careers?

SH Those were crucial years! Firstly, they disproved the misconception I had that not finishing high school disqualified a person from tertiary studies and academia. It was also during my studies that I became exposed to the genres of music I now love and specialise in — new, early and experimental music. I met Elia, and our collaboration has proven to be the most fulfilling, complementary and exciting partnership I could have imagined! I fell in love with UNSW, with its music faculty and its progressive, embracing attitude towards music and education, its nurturing of students and its genuine commitment towards supporting Indigenous Australia, closing gaps and striving for reconciliation.

I was invited back to lecture at UNSW in new music performance, which has been an honour and an inspiration. My second degree in electronic sound production at TAFE has given me skills to be self-sufficient with music software, empowering me with sound-making and shaping tools to realise all kinds of visions. I would love to do postgraduate work in the near future. I’ve been brewing some ideas of how I can bring together (or at least prioritise) the broad range of interests that I have and want to explore, but for now, post-genre music and reconciliation are the two stand-out areas I’m drawn to pursuing in research and practice.

EB Studying at various institutions really provided a deep understanding of the traditions and lineage of classical music, theatre and arts, and the sets of rules or expectations that develop in parallel with various artistic perspectives of a period. Particularly important in my studies was getting to know the “repertoire” — works that are regularly in performance somewhere in the world. For me the most interesting aspect has been exploring ways to extend or subvert these standards. At times I feel it’s led me to have quite a cynical perspective, but then why study or build anything if not to be challenged and ask questions? I’ve worked with many people I also studied with and was very fortunate to cross paths with Sonya again after I studied at ANU. It’s been a fantastic partnership and friendship since then.

SH & EB We already had Three Voices in motion for the Sydney Fringe Festival and knowing that UNSW was offering resources such as a studio space, equipment, technical support and funding, really provided an amazing opportunity for us to refine and fully realise the vision we have. UNSW is also close to both of our hearts, having had really positive experiences in our undergraduate studies, and so we were excited to deepen our connection with, represent and make a contribution in turn to the arts culture of UNSW.

We have the black box Studio One space for three weeks and full access to sound and lighting facilities, workshop costumes and props, research facilities, all kinds of assistance from staff and the freedom to use our space as we wish. We will be constructing and testing ideas around the set design, sound and lighting for Three Voices, conducting a lecture for music students and holding a promotional event. In our final week we will have an open workshop-performance for anyone who would like to attend. The residency also provides funding towards the costs of artist fees and production.

SH Elia introduced me to the piece a couple of years ago and I instantly knew it was something I could translate. I realised I had a real affinity, not just for Three Voices but for much of Feldman’s general ideology and aesthetic. The spotlight it shone on sound, tone and interval felt to be offering me a platform to explore those things I too am naturally drawn to exploring in music. This work would provide both a great challenge in focus and endurance, but also an opportunity for restfulness and, in a sense, improvisation. I like it that vowel-shape (and therefore colour) is left to the performer’s discretion, as is tempo. What Feldman does with rhythm in the piece is amazing; there is a real implicit groove at times that I love dropping into. The grooves provide reprieve, almost like oasis points for me to stop and drink, or rest, in the piece’s long journey. It’s a relentless piece, so any means of finding rest (or a sense of it) is both necessary and really potentially quite enjoyable. I love that, because the piece is soft and un-striving, I have the opportunity to co-experience the meditation and the moment with the audience; it’s an experience I find fairly rare in the world of pre-composed music performance, but often more achievable in improvisation.

EB The complexity of this piece is that it appears to be quite simple to the listener and yet is full of meticulously notated contradictions. An example would be repeated, energetic rhythms that create a feeling of pause or freeze. Listening to it I’m constantly shifting focus from following one voice to embracing the effect of the ensemble of three. The design is based on shapes inspired by the phrasing, rhythmic material and construction of the voicing, particularly how the three voices are arranged individually, as an ensemble or a one-against-two structure.

Morton Feldman was very much integrated in the visual arts scene of his time and had a long friendship with the painter Mark Rothko, so we were naturally drawn to his large paintings in the Rothko Chapel. In the design I’m striving to find a delicate balance between a monolithic monument and afragile and intricate structure. It’s similar to framing a painting for display, in exploring how to give space and simple context to view the central work within. So the design will be spatially and sonically immersive, with the audience surrounded by three sound sources and seated within a circular set structure of thin vertical threads. A fluid lighting design will liven this space and challenge how we perceive the live performer and surroundings.

SH The work exists in a transitory sort of space, where time is suspended. It is constructed of shifting material, of dualities of conceal and reveal, community and isolation, harmony and discord. These dualities imply a need, or search, for reconciling and balance. We noticed a lot of parallels between the shifts and evocations of mood in the work and the way that I have felt, both in reconciling my conscious knowledge of my indigeneity but also in living with the unconscious lifelong spiritual knowledge of it.

There is also a certain experience that is unique to those affected by the Stolen Generations, particularly as the complexities of effects are passed down generationally. A dissociated, dislocated trauma. A restrained confusion. An arrested development. A subdued and subverted intensity. A quiet storm. Of the fight, flight and freeze responses to trauma, it is the freeze. Even in the lyrics of Three Voices — “who’d have thought that snow falls” — we realised that this work provided a strangely perfect vehicle for embodying the quiet reconciling we attempt in varying states of conflict, freedom and consciousness.

We liken this hidden space to hypnagogia, the state of consciousness between waking and sleep. It’s an interesting analogy for the de-realisation experience in trauma, which causes us to shift out of reality as a coping mechanism. Our account of Three Voices is not an explicit narrative or representation of any of this, but it is breathed with it. While heavily informed by experience and psychology, the result is far removed and abstracted from those influences while remaining fortified by them, becoming a narrative of identity as it journeys through obscurity and assertion.

Dancer Anya McKee was the residency recipient in 2015 and performance-maker Mish Grigor in 2016. The other 2017 recipient is the political theatre company Filibuster (Nick Atkins, Kevin Ng, Ryan McGoldrick). They’ll make a new show drawing on their hosting four Long Table performances from August to November at Customs House as part of City of Sydney’s Late Night Library series, addressing the mess that democracy’s in.

Thanks to Peter Nelson of Fine Music FM for the recording of a Sonya Holowell concert performance of Three Voices.

Sydney Fringe Festival sydneyfringe.com, Cache in Point, Three Voices, HPG Festival Hub Stage One, 225 Euston Rd. Alexandria, 12, 13 Sept, 10.30pm

We first spotted the work of Gwan Tung Dorothy Lau in the catalogue for this year’s HATCHED National Graduate Show at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. Her work titled Para-Selves consists of a series of striking double and triple images of the artist herself in various guises. The intriguing aspect of these digitally manipulated portraits is the subtle changes in expression and gesture, which make the subject appear as if she is adjusting her own image or presenting a number of versions of herself — one aggressive, another passive, or as Lau describes them, “physical interactions with my doppelgangers” — within the same frame. Lau says, “Para-Selves interrogates how these conflicting representations can paradoxically co-exist.” As well as building on this photographic self-portraiture series, she has also created installations and wearable art.

Dorothy Lau received her Bachelor of Fine Arts (Visual Arts) with distinction at Queensland University of Technology in 2016. She is currently undertaking a Master of Fine Art degree with RMIT and Hong Kong Art School. An active member of Brisbane’s local art scene before her recent relocation to Hong Kong, she was involved in an artist residency at House Conspiracy event space in Brisbane and contributed to curatorial programs with several Brisbane artist-run initiatives. She has exhibited internationally at PMQ (Hong Kong) and London Gallery West (UK) in addition to Melbourne, Sydney and Perth galleries.

In an email exchange, I asked the artist about her work and how her education has influenced it.

Using an auto-ethnographic approach, my works initially draw from the feelings of confusion and frustration that derive from assessing my cultural identity. I have dual citizenship; I was born and raised in Hong Kong and spent the last six years in Australia to further my education. I observe the ways my cultural identity influences my experience in Brisbane and Townsville. These are important starting points but I believe that my works should not merely document and interpret my experience, or present a therapeutic process, but rather I employ this self-inquiry to relate to a greater social context. I examine the way my actions oscillate between conforming to and excessively defying generalised portrayals of East-Asian culture. By figuratively depicting that observation, I attempt to evaluate and critique the influences of Western social expectations on cultural minorities. While I provide a personal and intimate account of the notion of displacement, I acknowledge that this is a bigger social issue and experienced by millions of people in similar situations. I am now pursuing postgraduate studies in Hong Kong and relocating temporarily to see how my exploration of cultural identity will develop once it is removed from a Western context.

Some key influences are Mona Hatoum, Cindy Sherman and [leading Chinese contemporary artist] Cui Xiuwen. Their works respectively inform the conceptual, methodical and formal aspects of my practice. I’ve also studied the work of Australian contemporary artists who deal with the issue of identity such as Michael Cook, Christian Thompson and Thai-Australian artist Nathan Beard. This research helps me locate my works contextually in the contemporary art landscape while also giving me insights into the rationale behind my creative decisions.

My undergraduate education at QUT was fundamental to developing my practice and my understanding of contemporary art. Rather than initially training our technical skills in a specific discipline, we got to develop our practice conceptually across a range of mediums and methodologies. In my first year, I experimented with all sorts of processes and materials from using clingwrap and cardboard to chopping up metal pieces using the big machines in the workshop. I think the freedom and encouragement to experiment I was given in the initial stages of the degree was critical, as it allowed me to explore art beyond traditional painting, which, to be frank, was the only medium I was invested in before going into the course.

Being exposed to thematically curated collections of modern and contemporary art during seminars and lectures also broadened my definition and understanding of what art can be. So, initially I was allowed to go crazy and be ambitious with materials and processes. The group critique sessions and individual consultations then demanded I review what was working and what wasn’t, and where my works were situated contextually, and gradually assisted me in developing a clearer understanding of what I was doing. It wasn’t until my final year that I finally started to comprehend what themes I felt most compelled to explore in my art. The guidance and critique from the teachers were crucial. I still try to evaluate my works in a similar way after graduating. My BFA at QUT basically shaped my practice.

In your show coming up later this year at Brisbane’s Artisan Gallery, you’re presenting a very different but equally paradoxical work. A sculptural piece that when worn (as in earlier showings) could be interpreted as cumbersome baggage or even some kind of enveloping entity. Then again, it’s soft and covered in pretty pink material. Even the title Gloom is contradictory.

It actually predates Para-Selves. While that series directly confronts the confusion of cultural identity, Gloom embodies a more passive response. It presents the difficult process of introspection as a burden to the body. I created Gloom as a wearable artwork using a mixture of garment-making methodologies, developed from my experience working for a fashion designer, and domestic crafting processes. The material choice of pink embossed fleece and yarn, and the craft aspect of the work connect to childhood, which I associate with safety and certainty. The work presents my desire to retreat from the feeling of displacement and reconnect to the past.

I had previously shown Gloom on a mannequin at my graduate show and on a white chair next to a dining table in a traditional Queenslander house during my residency with House Conspiracy. I was aware how differently the work operates in these situations. Gloom was my first venture in wearable art. I think there are a lot of possible extensions.

Gwan Tung Dorothy Lau, Gloom, Ivory Street Window Gallery, Artisan Gallery, Brisbane, 4 Oct-5 Nov

When I graduated from art school, there was a lot to be part of in Sydney’s art community — a packed itinerary of new ARI shows opening on weeknights and art events on Friday and Saturday nights. Things feel radically different five years on. Gutted by funding attrition, gentrification and the hardships associated with managing Sydney’s ever-climbing living costs, the city’s art community lacks just that: structures for a community, like a hub and a reliable itinerary of events. In this picture of decimation, PACT Salon is an important addition: it promises an after-dark art party that’s more experimental, more inclusive and more grassroots than the Museum of Contemporary Art’s ARTBAR. The Big Bounce, the first night of the quarterly series in January, made good on that promise; its curator, Matt Cornell, a dancer, created a loose night of happy, shared energies — a dance class, compelling conceptual performances, cheap drinks — combining smart art-thinking with party vibes.

Skeletons and Self-Portraits was a more earnest affair. Though the promotional material spoke of a somewhat scattered constellation of subjects — all women artists, feminism, mental health, identity defined against others’ perceptions, a masquerade costume theme — the real, albeit undeclared, point of unity was an exploration of the identities of artists with different physical and invisible disabilities. Curated by writer, actor and motivational speaker Emily Dash, this was a night of monologues (Cheryn Frost’s Confessional), performance (Georgia Cranko’s On Grip and Grief), solo dance theatre (Kay Armstrong’s The Last Half), spoken word and pop performances (Jessica Wiel’s song “Innocence; Addicted; Feelings,” among several others by the artist) that focused on what it feels like to be a person with a disability in a careless society.

Skeletons and Self-Portraits made me think of Stella Young, the deceased activist and writer, who insisted with sharp, nimble humour that her body was not disabled — that this notion was constructed by a callous, neoliberal society without the services or inclination to include all its members. In focusing on how big-picture injustice structures individual prejudice, Young opened up a cultural conversation about what a society that prioritised support needs might look like. Skeletons and Self-Portraits also made me think of a likeminded figure in the art world, the UK’s Claire Cunningham (read RealTime review), who became a dance artist after realising that the field needed new aesthetic perspectives that moved away from the able-bodied consensus: that she could take her crutches and use them to find a fresh physical vocabulary for the stage.

These attitudes were not evident in Skeletons and Self-Portraits; perhaps its aim was more about merely giving curatorial control to those who are often invisible in the art world. I was a little perplexed by the fact that the most ‘contemporary art’ aspect of the program, zin’s interactive Glitterbox (a huge glowing cube in which audiences choose their favourite song to dance to in a storm of glitter), was malfunctioning after adaptations were made following its first outing at Sydney Festival, and seemed thematically distant from the night’s other works. And I was ethically troubled by a work by Louise Kate Anderson. Billed as an installation to confront mental health stigma with audience members able to ask the artist anything about herself, it detoured from personally-framed conversations toward something of a DIY therapy event in which declarations about deeply complex issues were made and diagnoses offered with seeming authority and without professional expertise. It worried me that giving over a part of the event without clear curatorial guidelines resulted in misinformed (though well-intentioned) discussions that provided mental health advice from the artist and audience members without considering the experiences and safety of those present.

As a community art event premised on self-expression and self-representation, Skeletons and Self-Portraits worked best as a platform for those who still often don’t have one. The night’s most interesting flashes of insight, though incidental, spoke to the possibilities of an art world that foregrounds access and inclusivity. First, the event’s Auslan translator, Sean Sweeney, struck me as the strongest performer: he was focused, present, connected, emphatic when called for and subtle at other moments. And second, Emily Dash’s videos of her own spoken word poems, I Am Not a Work of Art and The Cards I’m Dealt, featured closed-captions with functional descriptions like “music continues.” This made me wonder about the prospect of video artworks that leave behind sound altogether and describe fictitious audio elements, for viewers of all abilities — and on a level playing field — to imagine themselves. In these two moments, Skeletons and Self-Portraits inadvertently opened up two unexplored rivers of communication and thinking for disability arts in Australia. The usual audience of artists and followers seemed largely absent, suggesting that the artistic conversation didn’t reach as widely and effectively as it might have, but despite the program’s shortcomings PACT managed to open up its doors to a clearly underserved sector of the art-going community.

PACT Salon #2, Skeletons and Self-Portraits, curator Emily Dash, PACT, Sydney, 29 July

Top image credit: Georgia Cranko, On Grip & Grief, Skeletons & Self-Portraits, PACT, photo Tiyan Baker

Composer and performer (and, declaration, fellow staff member) Lindsay Vickery’s latest project is GreyWing, an ensemble founded last year with a core membership of himself on saxophone, clarinet and electronics, Catherine Ashley on harp and Jameson Feakes on guitar. In Tura New Music’s Scale Variable series, Vickery’s program for a concert titled Rio 1917 drew on artists from his local and international connections and his role as Coordinator of Composition and Music Technology at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. Performers and composers included WAAPA staff members (composer Pedro Alvarez, guest keyboardist Stewart Smith), former students (GreyWing members Ashley and Feakes and guest flautist Kirsten Smith) and WAAPA-trained composers Sam Gillies, Alexander Turley, Ellie Cumming and Eduardo Cossio.

Vickery’s starting point for his programming was the visit to Brazil by French composer Darius Milhaud in 1917 where he worked with that country’s greatest composer, Heitor Villa-Lobos. The latter’s lovely Modernist pastoral, Sexteto Mistico, opens the concert. New works by Gillies, Turley, Cumming and Vickery use details of Villa-Lobos’ piece as the inspiration for new works (although the musical similarities are indirect), and further South American influence is presented in compositions by Chilean expatriate Alvarez, Peruvian expatriate Cossio and Brazilian Felipe Lara.

Given the central place of musical Modernism, Surrealism and Impressionism in the programming, this is definitely not a Latin music concert as the phrase normally suggests. The material is extremely diverse, ranging from the slightly Gothic, Bernard Herrmann-esque feel of the Villa-Lobos sextet, through to some surprisingly approachable pop fusion in the mode of The Necks (Turley’s Nocturnal), while others are virtuosic explorations of formal instrumental challenges (Lara’s fabulous Parábolas na Caverna for flute). There are even pieces which approach acoustic noise-music (the controlled chaos of Cossio’s Ghost). Although several pieces draw on or evoke the pastoral, or music which would seem to suggest landscapes — Villa-Lobos’ sextet and Turley’s contribution, as well as Cumming’s pastiche-like Változó Évszakok, which evokes the repetitive canons of Philip Glass’ minimalism and even something of a John Barry feeling of light classical fusion. Overall however the effect of the programming is of rather extreme shifts in style as we are moved across a wide field of musical approaches.

Within this array, one highlight was Kirsten Smith’s grappling with Lara’s Parábolas, which demanded quick leaps from austerely minimal playing into rapid-fire, tongued sections accompanied by vocal interjections — almost a Berio Recital I (For Cathy) meets Ennio Morricone in its somewhat 1970s ambience. Smith is a physically expressive performer, her seesawing body describing parabolas in space while the music does the same. Still, I’m not quite sure she entirely nailed this very difficult piece, which could have used a dash more charisma and totalising precision. Cossio’s composition, with its intense rolling up and down of energies in a densely textured structure, was also striking, foregrounding the ensemble playing.

The standout work was Vickery’s own Liminario, which closed the program. Much of the composer’s previous work has involved feedback loops with MAX MSP computer processing, in which real time sound is processed, each new sonic addition changing the way sound further evolves or is processed, or sometimes how the score itself unfurls before the performer (Vickery has also reworked the variable scores of Karlheinz Stockhausen and others for notebook display and control; see here).

Liminario though is an acoustic piece, with neither amplification nor computer processing. The music is aggressive and stabbing. The wind instruments especially (flute, oboe and clarinet) smash and squeal in hard strikes of four, which recur to bracket sections. Despite these harsh structural elements, the work is very much an ensemble piece, with material widely shared. The specific tonalities of each instrument — including harp, electric guitar and celeste — all have their stand-out moments as the work moves across drone-like intermissions between the wind interjections. Spaces within the music begin to reduce as volume and harshness increase, bringing us to an almost Penderecki-like explosion at the conclusion.

The presence of amplified guitar and string-bending means that reverberating electronic sounds are present and Vickery’s love of somewhat chaotic yet mathematical structures is certainly still audible. But from my own knowledge of Vickery’s oeuvre, this feels like quite a change. The arch sounds and carefully measured and restrained quality of the quieter sections positions the piece close to New Complexity and other styles which, rather than rejecting the Modernism of Milhaud and Villa-Lobos, have returned to these concepts and extended or transformed them — quite unlike the ostinato-dominated postmodern minimalism of Glass, which Cummings’ piece briefly evokes. I look forward to seeing if Vickery and his collaborators will treat this program as a precedent for future performances, and which of its not altogether compatible components will re-appear.

Tura New Music Scale Variable Concert 2: Rio 1917 by GreyWing: Lindsay Vickery, Catherine Ashley, Jameson Feakes; guest artists Kirsten Smith, Niamh Dell, Stewart Smith; WAAPA, Main Music Auditorium, Perth, 22 July

Writer and freelance art critic Jonathan W Marshall is Coordinator of Research Higher Degrees at the Western Australian Academy of the Performing Arts.

Top image credit: Jameson Feakes, Rio 1917, WAAPA, photo Bohdan Warchomij courtesy TURA New Music

I read Adelaide writer and academic Maggie Tonkin’s Fifty, Half a Century of Australian Dance Theatre, in two shifts, thoroughly engaged by the ease of its informal account of the history of the country’s longest-lived (if frequently against the odds) contemporary dance company and the best known internationally. Tonkin makes no claim for the book as a formal history; it’s essentially an aesthetic response with, she writes, “a focus exclusively on the artistic achievements of the ADT and its many works.” Fifty admirably tracks artistic influences, lineages and legacies. Works are briskly evoked, ample large photographs are provided and reviews cited, but, where apt, ticket sales, deficits, funding ups and downs and sponsorships are also invaluably noted, pointing the way for future researchers and enriching our sense of the practical complexities involved in art-making.

A special part of Fifty’s appeal for me is that ADT formed when I was in my early 20s. I witnessed not a few works from the late 1960s until 1986 when I left Adelaide, and have seen subsequent works since when (too rarely) toured or I returned for festivals. Fifty conjures a living history.

Although emphatically not “a settling of old scores,” Fifty does not stint on recounting the effective dismissals of four artistic directors by successive boards and detailing the eventual constitutional reform that had to be implemented by the time Garry Stewart became Artistic Director and a member of the company’s board. What Tonkin doesn’t mention is that similar problems were experienced by a swathe of South Australian arts organisations and companies across these 50 years, but that would require a deeper cultural and political reading beyond this book’s remit. The pain felt by those four ADT artistic directors still palpably lingers on the pages of this largely interview-based book.

Tonkin’s consistent approach to her material throws up striking continuities in ADT’s history from directors with very different visions. Multimedia and cross-artform collaborations are there from the beginning, dance as ‘theatre’ (though rarely as narrative) is variously and vigorously realised, ballet classes persist throughout and non-dance body regimes (from Alexander Technique to yoga, martial arts and also meditation) are successively introduced. Overseas choreographic influences are marked but Australian makers, many now prominent, are persistently nurtured. Touring is frequent, with bouts of enormous overseas success. Big collaborations in theatre, opera and spectacle reach wider audiences. Classes and community projects flower from time to time.

Taking shape

How much of ADT’s history can be read in its beginnings? Founder Elizabeth Cameron Dalman provides her own account of her artistic directorship, emphasising a then rare commitment to Australian dancers and choreographers, composers, visual artists and the projection and computer art of Stan Ostoja-Kotkowski (see Stephen Jones’ Synthetics, MIT, 2011) in seminal multimedia productions. Social issues, the Australian landscape and Aboriginal culture preoccupied Cameron Dalman, as did Asia, where the company first toured. In naming the company, she writes, two words were critical, Australian and theatre: “We believed that by using the word theatre it would allow us to push the boundaries of dance performance and lead us into new fields of movement and dramatic experimentations. It also connected us strongly to artists of other disciplines who were breaking new ground in their art forms.”

Cameron Dalman was particularly influenced by José Limón whose work she’d seen in London in 1957 and especially the Colombian choreographer Eleo Pomare whom she worked with in Holland and brought to Australia and whose work astonished us with its vivid theatricality in the 1972 Adelaide Festival. The company toured successfully, gained Australia Council funding but at the cost of having board members selected by the Council. After a final performance in a late 1975 Sydney season, Cameron Dalman and the performers found letters in their dressing rooms announcing, with five days’ notice, her dismissal and the dancers’ contracts terminated. As with subsequent sackings we’re not made privy to the board’s motivation.

A new ADT

Two years later in 1977, English choreographer Jonathan Taylor, ex-Ballet Rambert, launched a new ADT with new dancers and a strong UK choreographic input which would include Glen Tetley and Christopher Bruce as well as US guests but also, as Cameron Dalman had done, nurturing Australian talent from within and outside the company, including Graeme Watson, Jacqui Carroll, Barry Moreland and Ian Spink. Tonkin details the company’s output, which in the English repertory manner, was prodigious, with the company servicing both Adelaide and Melbourne (thanks to joint states funding), touring here and overseas (opening the Edinburgh Festival in 1980; eight-week European tour in 1982) running workshops and an influential children’s project, appearing on live TV broadcasts in Australia and Europe and making films. As with Cameron Dalman there was a sense of engagement with the zeitgest: sexual politics, punk and contemporary classical Australian music and, in collaborations with event wunderkind Nigel Triffit, spectacle. Wildstar (1979), based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, ran for two and half hours, the company reaching out with it to a receptive, wider audience here and overseas.

Whatever the reasons for Taylor’s effective removal, doubtless drops in funding levels, limited box office in a small city and Victoria pulling out of joint funding (a merger with Sydney Dance Company was then mooted) were all contributing factors despite the company’s critical and touring successes. It’s fascinatingly revealed that when Taylor’s contract was not renewed, the company lost its repertoire — Taylor owned his works and overseas ones were licensed to be directed by him.

Controversial caretaking

A caretaker period ensued in 1985 overseen by 1986 Adelaide Festival Artistic Director Anthony Steel and a former Nederlands Dans Theater dancer and rehearsal director for Jonathan Taylor, Lenny Westerdijk, once again revealing the company’s persistently adventurous spirit. Their program included Nigel Kellaway’s controversial Fantastic Toys, to a score by Sarah de Jong, and for the festival, A Descent into the Maelstrom, a large-scale collaboration between American choreographer Molissa Fenley, the Phillip Glass Ensemble and ADT with a notable set design by Eamon D’Arcy. Debate about these works “heated up the critical climate.”

Pedagogy & postmodernities

Leigh Warren, who’d spent six years with the Nederlands Dans Theater and is a choreographer whose pedagogy is always spoken of highly by Australian dancers, became the next artistic director. In one of many moments in the book with an ironic edge, Tonkin notes that of the previous company of dancers Warren did not ask Garry Stewart to stay on: “experience told him that the training regime [Stewart] would bring to the company would not work for him or his physicality.” For choreographers, Warren brought in Graeme Watson, New Zealand’s Douglas Wright and Nanette Hassall to make new works, including in 1987 the latter’s Open Weave to a live score by Robert Lloyd and a design by Mary Moore of horizontal poles ‘dancing’ above the performers. Other choreographers who were commissioned included Helen Herbertson, Michael Whaites, Sue Peacock and Kate Champion.

The challenges of postmodern dance for the performers compelled Warren, writes Tonkin, to institute “formal composition classes based on those he had taken at Julliard.” José Limón was once again a key influence, but also William Forsythe. As in all phases of ADT’s history to the present, classical ballet training continued to provide precision and strength, this time alongside Alexander Technique.

In another recurrent trend, the company successfully expanded its reach in collaborations with the State Theatre Company in Cabaret in 1991 and with Opera South Australia in Gale Edwards’ production of Nixon in China in 1992. Not long after, and despite a tour to Asia and the first Australian premiere of a work by William Forsythe, Warren’s contract was shortened as the board determined to go in a new direction. Warren poignantly reflects on his standing as a choreographer at the end of his tenure: “I often ended up making work to balance the program around the guest choreographers, so nothing would impede their absolute freedom to make whatever work they wanted. I made more conservative work to counterbalance their experimentation, and as a result, I was criticised for creating works that were too middle of the road.” This is an underestimation of Warren’s best work.

Choreographer as director/collaborator

After another caretaker period led by Bill Pengelly and with a touch of rebranding the company became Meryl Tankard’s Australian Dance Theatre and with the choreographer who had performed for six years with Pina Bausch, often in key roles, came an approach to collaborating with dancers, and actors in her company, that was “more democratic and inclusive,” something, says Tankard, that emerged from working with student actors at NIDA. As subsequently with Garry Stewart, the choreographer becomes director and co-collaborator with her performers, even though the latter often didn’t know the overall direction she was taking them. Dancer Tuula Roppola is quoted as saying, “[Meryl] always treated us as creative artists. We were never just doing steps or movement; we were always working with intention behind the movement.”

As well as hugely successful productions like Furioso that travelled the world with its striking aerial work and physical intimacy, and, with partner, photographer Regis Lansac, generating multimedia performances and working innovatively with live music, Tankard and ADT also collaborated extensively with Opera Australia on Gluck’s Orphee et Eurydice. There was an Australian Ballet commission, Deep End, for Tankard, the company won critical praise and numerous awards and toured globally. But the end was nigh. Tonkin writes, “paradoxically, it was this heightened international profile … that would be held against her.” Even though Tonkin details at some length the likely motives for the sacking (just after the success of Possessed at the 1998 Adelaide Festival) and subsequent events (in the press, in parliament), it remains difficult to all but guess what actually happened, especially given that Tankard was legally silenced. What ensues is remarkable — a mooted proposal for the Australian Ballet’s Artistic Director Ross Stretton to take over (Dalman and Tankard protested this likely destruction of ADT’s heritage), while retaining his AB position, or for the company to merge with the financially troubled WA ballet. Neither happened, but what kind of company did the board imagine was their cultural responsibility?

A new body of dance

Garry Stewart’s tenure has seen a heightened multidisciplinarity and the implementation of extensive and intensive skills training that had made Leigh Warren wary. These became integral to ADT’s practice. Stewart tells Tonkin, “As we toured, the vocabulary became seamless in the way in which entrained technique does. It transcended into a domain I wasn’t expecting, ending up saturating [the dancers’] bodies and becoming a consummative cohesive vocab rather than a series of skills.” One result was that distinctive moves were named after the dancers who “pioneered” them, for example, a Flying Craig after Craig Bary. As with Tankard, Stewart collaborates intensively with his performers, crediting them as co-choreographers.

It was Stewart’s Birdbrain that initially made the ADT internationally prominent, starting out in Galway in Ireland, where a nervous Stewart walking the streets, assumed failure, and then on to Seoul and later Sydney, Toronto, New York and Ottowa. Why did ADT succeed in Europe at a time when choreographers — Jerome Bel, Xavier Le Roy — were stripping dance of virtuosity and speed, “critiqu[ing] the notion of dance’s attachment to constant kinesis.” Stewart says, “At that time my work claimed an oppositional space with its hyper-virtuosity that, however, seemed to capture the audience’s imagination,” adding, that to have “Derrida, Swan Lake and breakdance and very contemporary — almost pop video — graphics and semiotics and virtuosity altogether in the same sentence was an unusual amalgam. With Birdbrain we seemed to crash through the domain of postmodernist minimalism with a certain naive bravura, I guess.” Stewart attracted major overseas commissioning partners and, once certain of his work, reached out to international arts collaborators in photography, robotics, video engineering and design, giving ADT a cosmopolitan edge underlined by the intellectual and scientific scenarios that Stewart gives life to in his works.

Stewart has enjoyed huge success and, compared with his predecessors, stability and certainty. His Ignition program breeds new choreographers, there’s an ADT youth ensemble, diversification has yielded installations, films and new community projects and the ambition to create an international choreographic centre. But as Tonkin reports, it’s never easy: “extensive international touring is the only way ADT can stay within budget because it generates a fee without box office risk, whereas touring within Australia is made prohibitively expensive without special funding.” Local box office is small, interstate venues are cautious. Consequently, ADT’s international reputation exceeds its national one. But the company serves Australia superbly and Adelaide in particular where Stewart and the ADT are so clearly building a dance culture on and beyond the stage, as in its Embedded program of dance in public spaces, recalling in spirit performances by Elizabeth Cameron Dalman’s ADT nearly 50 years ago and giving cogency to the stirring book that is Maggie Tonkin’s Fifty.

Fifty is another welcome addition to Wakefield Press’s list of finely designed and produced dance books — Alan Brissenden and Keith Glennon’s Australia Dances, Creating Australian Dance 1945-1965, Erin Brannigan and Virginia Baxter’s Bodies of Thought, 12 Australian Choreographers (co-published with RealTime), Alex Makeyev’s Captured, Leigh Warren and Dancers, and The Ballets Russes in Australia and Beyond, edited by Mark Carroll. In a country with limited, let alone accessible, documentation of the performing arts, Fifty is an important addition to the record.

Although focusing principally on ADT’s artistic achievements, Maggie Tonkin skilfully, consistently and accessibly contextualises them in terms of the unpredictable financial and political forces that always threaten to keep art in check. Some things go unmentioned, such as the competition at times for funds between ADT and Leigh Warren and Dancers in a small city with a limited arts budget — and most of the reviews cited are apt for a celebration but reveal little of Adelaide’s critical dark side. Fifty’s recounting of the effectual sackings of four artistic directors, however, is chillingly inescapable, texturing the joys of success and visionary self-belief with harsh realities. But what stands out in the end is ADT’s prodigious productivity, so many productions, so many commissions, so many wonderful works and dancers (from Jennifer Barry and Cheryl Stock to Antony Hamilton, Larissa McGowan and Kimball Wong and all listed in the excellent addenda). Words and images convey the passing of generations and the emergence of careers and above all the durability of Elizabeth Cameron Dalman’s vision. Every few pages, I would pause, to recall a work or wish to see one never experienced. It’s that kind of book.

Maggie Tonkin, Fifty, Half a Century of Australian Dance Theatre, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 2017, RRP $75.00

We’re giving away two copies of Fifty, a beautifully produced large format book, featuring numerous images of the Australian Dance Theatre in action and celebrating an enduring legacy of innovative performance.

In his review, Keith Gallasch writes, “…what stands out in the end is ADT’s prodigious productivity, so many productions, so many commissions, so many wonderful works and dancers (from Jennifer Barry and Cheryl Stock to Antony Hamilton, Larissa McGowan and Kyle Page and all listed in the excellent addenda). Words and images convey the passing of generations and the emergence of careers and above all the durability of Elizabeth Cameron Dalman’s vision. Every few pages, I would pause, to recall a work or wish to see one never experienced. It’s that kind of book.”

Maggie Tonkin, Fifty, Half a Century of Australian Dance Theatre, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 2017, RRP $75.00

Email us at giveaways [at] realtimearts.net by 5pm 16 August with your name, postal address and phone number to be in the running.

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We kickstart our annual Arts Education and Training feature, running August-September, with profiles of two inspiring Adelaide-based artists: musician and composer Dan Thorpe (above) and choreographer and Artistic Director of the Australian Dance Theatre, Garry Stewart. Each is engaged in innovative postgraduate research — Thorpe at the University of Adelaide’s Elder Conservatorium and Stewart at UNSW Art & Design — arising directly from their artistic practices and informed by deep reflection on subjects such as queerness, technology, neuroscience and emotion in relation to performance. Whether for an emerging artist like Thorpe, already garnering numerous commissions, or an established artist with an international reputation like Stewart, postgraduate opportunities offered by universities have become, over the last decade, integral to many artists’ creativity. There’ll be further profiles of fascinating artists and articles about courses and degrees over coming weeks. Keith & Virginia

Australian Dance Theatre (ADT) Artistic Director Garry Stewart tells me in an email exchange, “My current Research MFA at UNSW Art & Design actually comes out of Be Your Self,” a work that premiered in the 2010 Adelaide Festival. Stewart wrote a fascinating account of this work’s gestation in 2009 for RealTime. In consultation with scientists and theorists, Stewart drew on the tensions between the rational language of physiological and neurological accounts of the body and the phenomenological experience of the body that we control but which at the same time exerts itself autonomously over us. Be Your Self is a remarkable evocation and probing of this wondrous, sometimes alarming dynamic which is given its full visceral weight in the production — hearts attack bodies, bones grind, tendons crack and inner liquids burble via a score tightly synchronised with movement and triggering the lighting.

Be Your Self, a co-production with Grand Theatre de la Ville de Luxembourg, La Rose des Vents Villeneuve d’Ascq, Le Rive Gauche Centre Culturel de Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, Centro Cultural Vila Flor and Arts SA’s Major Commission Fund, has played in 16 cities across Europe and the UK, appeared in Sydney in 2012 (see the RealTime TV interview with Stewart at that time) and is about to open in Melbourne and then tour as Be Your Self (Redux) to seven suburban and regional centres, from Frankston to Townsville. Stewart’s consistent success in achieving international partnerships and extensive touring for his major works for ADT — and which he keeps in repertoire — makes him unique among Australian contemporary artistic directors and choreographers.

Stewart is a tireless researcher and innovator. His collaborators across a number of productions include a roboticist, a video engineer, architects, a physiologist and a neuroscientist. He’s made short films and installations and investigated the relationship between dance and live drawing. He was Thinker-in-Residence at Deakin University in 2012-2013. He writes, that after developing a number of video installation works, “I really wanted to take the opportunity with the MFA research to investigate the form more fully and be challenged in the process of doing so.”

Neurological mapping

We’ll shortly come to how Be Your Self triggered Stewart’s MFA research. First in our exchange, he mentions how his subsequent work, Proximity (2012), “sits in similar conceptual territory. We used live video cameras and live video effects to suggest that the neurological mapping systems we use to negotiate the world are actual connections between humans and the world.” Stewart’s approach to neurological mapping is infused with French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, as is clear in the choreographer’s account of our everyday map-making:

“Your brain creates innumerable maps of your body, both its surface and interior. These operate in concert to comprise our body schema — the sense of our body’s mass, density, position, direction, weight, velocity etc. They are elastic and also incorporate your clothes as you put them on, the pen you are writing with, along with the surface of the paper you are writing on and your car as you drive. This is how you instinctively get to know where your car is in relation to the surface of the road and also to other cars and objects as you drive. Our body schema maps the car into its sense of physical self. We sense if the rear of the car is going to hit something. We instinctively judge how much force we need to put on the brakes when we see another car or pedestrian in front of us. Our body extends its map to encompass the car as a component of itself. It’s the same in sex or holding someone’s hand or even simply looking at someone. We integrate objects within our field of vision into our sense of bodily self.”

Emotional expression as choreography

Now, with his “continuing interest in the areas of phenomenology, neuroscience and the shifting nature of choreography,” Stewart is focusing on the body and emotions. He had written in 2009, “Owing to the deeply fundamental way in which we have internalised Cartesian duality and also the prevailing rationalism inherent in Western philosophy and scientific thinking, human emotions have been relegated to secondary status. Conventionally, emotions and feelings are the antithesis of logos and are associated with the feminine and hence are subordinate to the objective logic of rational, male line of thinking.”

Be Your Self’s influence on his research, Stewart tells me, came in the form of “the two-minute video sequence shown in the middle of the work which is a short essay on our expressions of emotion as patterned choreographed sequences.” I had also noted in my review of Be Your Self in 2012: “unusually for contemporary dance, changes of mood are facially, if fleetingly, expressed.” A 2015 commission for Stewart from the Adelaide Film Festival resulted in Mood Machine, a 12-minute film in which a vast range of human expressiveness is compellingly compacted. Clearly, Stewart’s interest in emotion was taking him over a long period deeper into research and the making of new works around the subject.

In a logical extension of the map-making behaviour explored in Proximity, Stewart explains that “we recognise emotions in others through witnessing repeatable and entrained physiological responses that we associate with specific emotion states. Emotions aren’t just nebulous feeling tonalities, but are intrinsically associated with a whole compendium of physiological outcomes that are attached to each motion state. What would happiness be without smiling which causes the upturn of the corners of our mouths, the lift in our eyes and its sense of lightness. Extreme anger produces tension throughout the body and extreme fear results in the dilation of the pupils and shaking.

“The neurological and physiological patterns that underpin emotion expression are choreographies. They are relevant to a discourse of choreography when viewed as a methodology for underlying patterns to emerge. Some time ago I read an essay by Michael Klein and Steven Valk, who had worked as researchers for William Forsythe on the broader phenomenon of pattern generation in nature as an analogy for the choreographic. So I was curious how the repeated neuro-physiological processes of emotion generation embody a dynamic, broader definition of choreography.” Stewart’s thesis and an accompanying installation, he writes, “will focus on this corporealisation of emotions as the raw material for the choreographic.”

As well, his research opens up another possibility. “Against the robust macro choreography of my stage works, I was interested in taking an opportunity to think about the micro-scale of human movement as dance. To some extent this recalls Steve Paxton’s notion of the ‘small dance’ which underlies the act of standing still, but also Erin Manning’s more recent conjecturing on incipient movement and what she refers to as ‘pre-acceleration’ — the welling up of movement before it fully arises through action.”

Just as Stewart’s thinking opens up new philosophical and aesthetic vistas, and the artist continues on as researcher and innovator, so does his organic attitude to his works as perpetually evolving. “I watched a run of Be Your Self yesterday and I haven’t seen it in some time. For me the work seemed completely relevant and germane. It still feels in some ways quite new. This is also because we have new company members since 2010 as well as the fact that it’s difficult for me to leave my work alone. My works are never fully ‘complete.’ To continue to have vibration or aliveness they need to be in an ongoing process of evolution.”

Be Your Self (Redux)

This flexibility applies to touring a large work like Be Your Self to small stages. “We just took out the set, making Be Your Self very mobile and more affordable for smaller venues that want to experience the company and this work but where a two-day bump-in with a complicated set makes that challenging. The main use of the set is quarantined to the final scene, which we’ve eliminated. That scene acts as a kind of coda to the work but we found that the work can exist and be powerful without it. It now finishes with a final speech about the phenomenon of having a body as a site of meaning and experience. It’s a beautiful, poetic summation and is delivered alongside an extraordinarily expressive solo performed by the stellar Kimball Wong.”

This apparently upbeat new ending for touring to smaller venues suggests a different vision from the original in which humans come apart, form new shapes or decompose in “an enveloping black void,” as Stewart put it in our 2012 interview, suggesting “a loss of meaning” or “confusion around notions of the body” — but “nothing definitive.” In my review at that time I read the work’s coda as a dark reverie on mortality or even regressive human evolution — doubtless a tad literal of me and less than ‘philosophical.’ For this email exchange I had first asked Stewart if the ideas that informed the work had changed since it’s 2010 premiere; he said no. By juxtaposing my experience of the original version of Be Your Self with the ‘redux’ version when it plays in Parramatta, I might discover the nature of the evolution of my own thinking and emotional response since then.

Read about the UNSW Master of Fine Arts degree here. The two-year full-time or four-year part-time course includes “supervised research and investigation into an approved area of Fine Arts or Media Arts including experimental arts, emerging technologies, creative robotics, digital imaging, interactive and immersive media, creative robotics, sound, drawing, performance” and much else.

Australian Dance Theatre, Be Your Self, Southbank Theatre, Melbourne, 2-5 Aug; Be Your Self (Redux), Townsville Civic Theatre, 15 Aug; Northern Rivers Performing Arts (NORPA), Lismore, 18-19 Aug; Empire Theatre, Toowoomba, 24 Aug; The Art House, Wyong, 30 Aug; Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, 2 Sept; Frankston Arts Centre, 8 Sept; Mildura Arts Centre, 12 Sept

Top image credit: Garry Stewart & ADT Dancers, promotional image for Be Your Self by Chris Herzfeld Camlight Productions

“This is a history people really want to learn and know about, and there is a desperation, I think, to look beyond Australian film history’s dominant white-straight-male narrative,” says Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, co-curator of Pioneering Women retrospective at Melbourne International Film Festival. Programmed with MIFF Artistic Director, Michelle Carey, the retrospective presents 10 ‘should-be classics’ made by women in the 1980s and 1990s that got little initial traction in the annals of Australian cinema.

Retrospective programming at film festivals in Australia can be an unrelenting echo chamber with lauded filmmakers chosen for their star power. Over the past two years, the Sydney Film Festival has featured retrospectives on Martin Scorsese and Akira Kurosawa, sure to be a hit with Sydney audiences living in a city with a retrospective scene facing extinction. But the value of this type of programming is becoming reductive. Presented with the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA), Pioneering Women seeks to reframe the meaning of a retrospective by acquainting audiences with the unfamiliar, as it becomes clearer that festivals have an important role to play in bridging the gap in female representation.

“There’s so much discussion at the moment about the gender disparities facing Australian women filmmakers,” says Heller-Nicholas. “Ideally, I would like our program to play a part in providing a historical foundation for that discourse: we know women can make rich, diverse, unique cinema not as some vague ‘maybe,’ but because we have concrete evidence.”

Festivals step up

Much of the discussion about gender in cinema has focused on getting more women behind the camera in key creative roles. But beyond the realm of production, festival exposure is also a vital acknowledgment of female filmmakers’ presence in the Australian film landscape. “There are so many strong women filmmakers out there that if you’re not including a serious number of films by women, it’s now weird and obvious,” says Heller-Nicholas. As Kate Robertson wrote in last week’s RealTime, “… there continues to be critical — and importantly, public — interest in women filmmakers, with film festivals now providing the backbone of structural support.” This momentum is especially gathering in Melbourne, for instance with last year’s Gaining Ground stream at MIFF, the new Melbourne Women in Film Festival and the Girls on Film Festival, which recently drew on popular interest to crowdfund a program to offer “movies chosen by feminists, made by feminists, with a bunch of other feminists…so that people can feel the excitement that comes from seeing the stories of women and girls taken seriously.” In 2015, Screen Australia invested $5 million in the Gender Matters initiative to address imbalance in the local film industry but, beyond incentives for distributors, no funding was allocated to support female filmmakers in festivals. A gap remains in the plan between getting more films made by women and ensuring they see the light of day. Or is Screen Australia letting history repeat to ensure there’s a Pioneering Women program of forgotten films in 2040? Film festivals are increasingly making moves to stop this cycle.

A legacy almost lost

Heller-Nicholas says there’s no simple answer as to why the films in the Pioneering Women program didn’t make waves upon initial release: “It’s a different answer from film to film – they are all so distinctive. Celia [directed by Ann Turner, 1988] at the time really confused critics with what we see now is its remarkable playfulness and spirit of experimentation with genre – it employs horror codes and conventions, but is not really a horror film per se so it really stumped a lot of critics and distributors regarding how to actually push it,” said Heller-Nicholas.

This upending of expectations meant that many of the films, despite their greatness, “came out at precisely the wrong moment: people wanted Australian cinema to be upbeat, even perky, romantic, or, in the case of Romper Stomper [1992], certainly high energy. Broken Highway [Laurie McInnes, 1993] is consciously and deliberately none of those things: we can see it for the dark, brooding Australian Gothic noir it is today, but at the time it was simply out of vogue.”

The legacy of these films began to manifest in the stories that others told in their wake. “The late 1990s saw an absolute explosion of women’s filmmaking in Australia: when I was working on my website, Generation Star Struck, which is a mini-database of Australian women’s filmmaking from this period, I was genuinely astonished by how many women released feature films during this period,” Heller-Nicholas said. “They’re quite diverse both in terms of what they are about and the kinds of women making them, and I think in the broader sense the legacy is that they created a strong precedent for ‘other’ voices to speak through making movies – not just women filmmakers, but non-white filmmakers, queer filmmakers and so on.”

Bedevil (Tracey Moffat, 1993)

“Moffatt’s reputation is broadly linked more to her photography than her film work, and in the case of the latter her shorter works (Night Cries [1989], Nice Coloured Girls [1987], Heaven [1997]) are generally better known than this, her sole feature film. But what a film it is: combining the white and Indigenous ghost stories she heard as a child into a three-part anthology, Bedevil is not only a crash-course in why Moffatt is still one of the nation’s most distinctive and talented visual artists but – at a time when the ‘women in horror’ movement is making massive steps forward – it is to my knowledge the first horror anthology made by a single woman director.”

Broken Highway (Laurie McInnes, 1993)

“Discovering Broken Highway for me was like being punched: I had no idea that this film existed, and it radically changed the way I thought about women filmmakers in Australia and the work they had done historically. A dark, introspective film, it is a noir-imbued Australian Gothic tale by way of the Western, and – shot in sharp, consciously gloomy black and white – it speaks of a destructive masculine mythology built into our culture like few other films I’ve ever seen.”

Celia (Ann Turner, 1989)

“This film feels like an old friend, seen many times on television and clapped-out video tapes. The very idea of a NFSA restoration is genuinely thrilling! So many people I know remember this movie in some vague way, even if not by name then certainly ‘the one about the Hobyahs!’ A career-defining turn by then-child star, Rebecca Smart, and evidence that Turner is a filmmaker of extraordinary talent, why both of them aren’t household names today and on our film and television screens with deserved regularity I’ll never know.”

On Guard (Susan Lambert, 1983)

“Along with Broken Highway, this was one of the real hidden treasures we uncovered. A 50-minute feature, On Guard was promoted as a lesbian feminist terrorist heist movie about the ethics of IVF made by an almost completely all-woman cast and crew: what’s not to love? It’s clearly made with a lower budget than some of the other features in the program, but from this grows a raw energy that is absolutely contagious. It came out a year after Lizzy Borden’s Born in Flames [1983] that played MIFF last year, and the two films are perfect companions.”

The other films in Pioneering Women are Starstruck (Gillian Armstrong, 1982), Tender Hooks (Mary Callaghan, 1989), High Tide (Gillian Armstrong, 1987), The Big Steal (Nadia Tass, 1990), Only The Brave (Ana Kokkinos, 1994) and Floating Life (Clara Law, 1996).

Pioneering Women, Melbourne International Film Festival, co-curators Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Michelle Carey, presented in association with National Film and Sound Archive, ACMI, Forum Theatre and Kino Cinema, Melbourne, 4-12 Aug

Dan Thorpe, 2016 winner of the inaugural APRA-AMCOS Art Music Fund Award and, in the same year, winner of the Adelaide Critics’ Circle’s emerging performer award, is establishing himself as an innovative and accomplished composer and performer, nationally and internationally. In 2015, he devised and performed the music and produced an accompanying video for Concrete Collective’s dance work personwhowatchestoomuchtelevision (see the 2015 RealTime review) and then successfully toured the production to the USA. He has released a number of albums, received significant commissions and frequently collaborates with other musicians and composers.

Education, thesis, teaching

A classically-trained pianist and piano teacher, Thorpe graduated in 2013 with a first class honours in Sonic Arts and Composition at the Elder Conservatorium in the University of Adelaide, where he is completing a Master of Philosophy degree. His thesis is titled “Desiring Machines — Queering Methodologies in Reactive Performance.” In the exegesis he discusses performer interactivity with musical software used in performance and considers whether that interaction can be proactive rather than reactive.

He notes that the currently accepted paradigm, based on performer reactivity to a pre-determined design, symbolises institutional control more broadly. “There is a queer necessity to imagine and enact possible futures outside of these limits, to explore the not-here-yet, of which queerness offers us a glimpse.” In devising software that is “editable, extensible and manipulable” by users, he indicates he is developing “a personal, queer resistance to this technological and social paradigm.” As part of the project, he has devised software that draws scores based on input from the performers as they perform. For example, in personwhowatchestoomuchtelevision, the dancers wore accelerometers that traced their movements and generated a graphic score for the accompanying musician. The musician thus follows the dancer — instead of the dancer’s body being controlled, the body exerts control.

Thorpe currently teaches an industry readiness class on digital production in the Popular Music and Creative Technologies program at the Conservatorium and is a tutor in the University’s Indigenous Tutorial Assistance Scheme. He is also working as copyist/composer’s assistant on a new opera Speechless from Cat Hope (Head of the Sir Zelman Cowan School of Music at Monash University) which was recently workshopped at Vitalstatistix in Port Adelaide.

In concert at Format Gallery

In June, Thorpe completed a five-week residency involving weekly concerts at Adelaide’s Format Gallery, a key venue for contemporary music and art. In the first, he performs solo on his own well-used upright piano that has been wheeled into the gallery’s café, off busy, noisy Hindley Street. There are two works: California Fragments and Homecoming (three years later), both for prepared piano and electronics. Thorpe introduces them by saying they are born of sadness and pain — these are very personal pieces. California Fragments is quiet and introspective, performed with exaggerated physical gestures that contrast with the gentle music, as if he’s conveying multiple emotional states simultaneously. Such work seems intended for a small, intimate setting or private contemplation, and the piano seems an extension of his persona. But the electronically mediated sound is a crucial element — it’s as if his thoughts have been recorded and broadcast in parallel with his playing. Thorpe combines the two kinds of sound artfully, the juxtaposition of the aging piano, which symbolises a long musical tradition, with the newest electronic media offering a metaphor for cultural dissonance and transition. These works are more than musical, more than personal and consider contemporary musical culture and aural cognition.

For concert three, Thorpe, on piano, electronics and electronic keyboards, is joined by Mat Morison on sampler, electronics, synths and vocals in two half-hour sets of high-energy free improvisation. During the interval, he tells me that the second set will be “more ethereal” than the first, but after starting off that way the dynamism builds again, seeming to grow organically. For the second set, Thorpe removes the front of the piano so he can dampen the strings with his fingers. He hits the keys with such vigour that he bruises his hand — performance seems a cathartic experience for him. Thorpe and Morison make magic together, creating a long, elaborate dialogue across sonic forms, each offering musical gestures or phrases to which the other responds to weave a dense tapestry of sound, with Thorpe throwing in fragments from classical composers, again artfully mixing traditions and genres. The audience filling the small café sits enraptured.

The fourth concert comprises a thoughtful selection of works by a range of significant composers, including Anne Boyd’s Angklung for piano, Missy Mazzoli’s Orrizonte for piano and electronics, Erik Griswold’s delightfully evocative Bellbirds (Mt Nebo) for piano, Alex Temple’s Inland for piano and melodica, with Thorpe playing both instruments simultaneously, and Cat Hope’s Chunk, an overwhelmingly intense work involving two simultaneously realised graphic scores, one for piano and one for disklavier, performed by Thorpe on piano and computer. He is joined by Melanie Walters (flute), with whom he often collaborates, to perform a version of his own work False Cognate, for bass flute and electronics, and he finishes the set with Sydney composer Kezia Yap’s Lightjar which he commissioned from her, a delightful piece for piano and electronics.

Through the PA, Thorpe later broadcast his Debussy Remixes, for which he electronically morphed out-of-copyright recordings of Debussy’s piano music, thus filtering traditional piano literature through new media. It’s like listening to someone else’s experience of listening to or remembering Debussy. Debussy Remixes can also be seen as a metaphor for the changing nature of musical composition, performance and transmission, which involve appropriation and re-presentation.

Throughout his Format residency, Dan Thorpe illustrated the potential for performers to work interactively, both with software technologies and with each other, within various compositional frameworks. His residency also brought to Adelaide works that might not otherwise be performed, and especially showcased his own compositional interests, philosophy and energetic and innovative approach to performance.

The interview

Firstly, you perform a wide range of music — solo piano, solo electronica, ensemble performance of various  kinds, and you have collaborated in 2015 with Concrete Collective in a dance work. Are there particular fields of music and performance that interest you? What are you focusing on in the near future?

In the near future and, also, in the past and present of my career what interests me is storytelling. I think there’s plenty of genres you can do that through, and maybe that’s the question you’re asking, but for me the story is primary. And I guess how I tell them depends on the story in question! At the moment, I’m working on pieces for the MSO’s Cybec Program, Decibel Ensemble and Gabriella Smart. As for what they’re about, I’ll have to cheekily suggest you come along and listen! I’m also constantly writing for myself, and nothing has changed there.

Do you think the Adelaide contemporary music scene, and the Australian scene, offer adequate support to young composers who are developing new music? You have performed in San Diego, Los Angeles and New York — is there more public support, more receptiveness to new music elsewhere?

I can say, in my case, I feel very supported by my colleagues and audiences; but materially making ends meet as a young artist is so far from possible. I feel like there are limited opportunities, but not particularly through the fault of any organisations or audiences than an across-the-board failure by governments in this country to show anything other than utter contempt for young people, culture and the future of the country on any level, not just in our little pond of dissatisfaction in the arts.

As for the States, well, this is a tricky thing to talk about without acknowledging that my experience of the US is as a touring artist. I feel like my conversations with young composers are very polarised… the rich ones, certainly, still struggle existentially but as for the ones from the equivalents of Adelaide’s outer-north, my home turf…? It honestly feels like the stakes (and chance of failure) are higher, but for some the pay-off far surpasses what we would ever consider here. There’s certainly a public, and a culturally engaged one, in major urban centres; but these also exist in Australia.

You said your music comes from the body, and some of your work at the Format residency has been very personal. Is this intuitive approach effective aesthetically?

I think we need to talk about the idea of intuitiveness. There’s very little about a queer body that is intuitive, because we’re taught about our bodies through overwhelmingly straight frames. I would argue that my work that deals with my body is my most exploratory; I use the privilege of making art to find new ways of expressing and understanding my body in a society where that sort of understanding is meant to be suppressed.

As for the aesthetic effect… I mean, it’s not primary for me. I want to give audiences a sensation of what it’s like to be in a queer body when I perform my work. I want to invite them, through my own vulnerability, to be vulnerable. A dear (queer) friend once described this, jokingly, as being a “messy faggot,” which is something I’ve become fond of. I think there’s traditional, masculine expectation to be a certain degree of emotionally/sexually/physically ‘tidy.’ I want to invite audiences to be messy with me, to allow contrary feelings to exist at the same time, to allow their bodies to contain questions instead of answers, to find catharsis in the way the work discomforts them. Maybe that’s how a queer body feels, maybe it’s just how I want to feel about my queer body; it’s kind of immaterial, both can exist simultaneously and maybe it’s important that they do.

You spoke of the connection between music and sexuality. Is there a new music scene based around sexuality and is the aesthetic different? When you write or perform, are you addressing a particular audience?

Queerness is something that’s thrust on us by a society concerned that we’re not straight; making a decision to own an identity that should mark you for exclusion is bound to create community. Whether there’s a specific queer new music scene is vaguely like asking if the Gay Agenda is a Google group… queer people go to things that speak to their experience because very little does; maybe some of my audience comes for that reason. Maybe some of my audience comes because they want to hear something that makes them think but they’re pretty repelled by the politics of the aristocracy that define concert halls. Maybe some just like coming to the pub and I’m an added bonus/inconvenience. That said, if someone wants to start the Gay Agenda mailing list, sign me up.

Has the Format residency been valuable for your own development as a composer and performer? 

Sure! I love to play, and I especially love to play with my friends, and Format gave me an incredible opportunity to do that. The residency itself also gave me a chance to reflect on my Carclew-funded trip to the States, where I wrote a lot of the work I premiered during my residency. I think it’s safe to say that having time, space and money to explore your practice is the most important thing any young artist can have access to, and I’m incredibly grateful to Carclew for the opportunity they provided by funding me.

Read more about Dan Thorpe, including his albums, at www.danthorpe.net. Information about courses and degrees at The University of Adelaide’s Elder Conservatorium can be found here.

Opposite ends of the business spectrum revealingly meet in Michelle Lee’s frantic fable of life shaped at every turn by neoliberalism — or opposition to it. Brash, recklessly ambitious and single, Indian-Australian Nisha (Kristy Best) is a young executive officer with a major Australian rice marketer; her ambition is to break into Indian distribution after floods there have apparently threatened supply. Older, wiser and a single mother, first generation Chinese-Australian Yvette (Hsiao-Ling Tang) is a failed importer of fake Prada products; now she’s a cleaner bickering with Nisha about the extent of her duties, which she drolly redefines as a set of mutual obligations.

In soft pastel early evening light, the pair recurrently meet, forming a highly tentative friendship, each of them essentially lonely, conveying the battles they’re engaged in, but not by telling. When Yvette argues with her law school student daughter, Sheree, who’s being prosecuted for throwing food at the Coles CEO in protest at wastage, Nisha/Best becomes Sheree; just as Tang/Yvette becomes Graeme, Sheree’s boss, a bland, pragmatic downsizer, whom she fatefully overrides at a board meeting, lying about her contact with the Minister of Agriculture in order to push into India.

The performers execute these and other roles with gestural and vocal finesse. Johnny Song, Yvette’s unsympathetic warehouse landlord is listed in the script as a Chinese-Australian bogan, but in production he’s an hilariously convincing bro, all dancing pointy fingers and elbows. Costume changes minimally gesture transformation: Tang’s Gretel Patel — Nisha’s opponent in India — swans about with a trailing scarf; the Coles CEO’s grimly cocky son is Best in a hoody. Other characters include Tang as Avineet, Nisha’s too smooth boyfriend and successful operator of a food truck business while disdainful of Nisha’s ambition. Valerie (Best), the amusingly tough Russian boss of the cleaning business, enjoys mocking the rice company executives with Yvette. It’s a rawly competitive world where clipped, blunt joking and knowingness cover ignorance and allegiances are provisional.

Scene setting and segues into these multiple characterisations are sparely framed and signalled: “This is the part of the story where we first meet;” “Take the stair to ground floor. Get into the car. Made-in-Melbourne daughter, she pissed off.” “This is the part where we eat.” Otherwise we are plunged into encounters. On opening night at The Stables, the frenetic pace and a performance pitched at max by Best, left not a few of us chasing the narrative early on, a problem not solely attributable to the performers in a work with brisk transitions barely minutes in.

I began to wonder just how having two actors play all the roles benefited the play; taut economy of action and performer virtuosity are insufficient. Stripped of the minimal framing device and distributed to a larger cast, how different would the work be; what might be lost? At its best, the writer’s structural conceit is realised as a nigh surreal, sometimes farcical, sometimes melodramatic world of relationships playing out in terms of class, race, generations, gender and power, and all embodied in two characters who feel the enormous weight of the world pressing down on them and who, in effect, cast each other in the roles of those with whom they struggle. This is not literally the case, but it is what’s felt and is, to varying degrees, successful in suggesting a haunting connectedness across cultures and hierarchies and from global business to personal crises — Nisha’s wracking concern for her Didima (grandmother) who has dementia and Yvette for her about to be gaoled daughter Sheree (a plight melodramatically ramped up with a late, unwelcome confession from Yvette about her separation from the girl’s father).

Business (even with food trucks) and relationships don’t end well in Rice and punishments are assigned, as if some kind of slate has to be wiped clean. Thai-Australian playwright Disapol Savetsila’s Australian Graffiti, which I reviewed last week ends with a slightly more optimistic but similarly provisional ending in another tale of failed business. In Australian Graffiti it’s racism and traditional familial expectations that block cross-cultural harmony. In Rice, cross-cultural encounters are largely functional and don’t run deep; the exception is Nisha and Yvette who share much and learn a lot about each other and without the intrusion of racism. But, after a tender final meeting, they toy with us, telling of time spent together beyond the workplace, but promptly reveal it’s a lie. There’s no room for sentimentality. Is this the reality of multicultural Australia — a failure of cross-cultural intimacy? Distance from one’s inherited culture is also emphatic in Rice: Nisha is unprepared for India (weather, food, protocols), Yvette refuses to live in a heavily Chinese-Australian suburb.

Rice’s persistent wit, its satirical bravura and its cultural and economic scope cannot be reduced to a warmhearted account of an unlikely friendship, as some reviewers have done. Step back from the immediate experience of the production and what stays with you is existential and social unhappiness, the brutal individualism of neoliberalism and the anger of the play’s helplessly bitter “fuck you” moments. But tonally, Michelle Lee cleverly balances angst and humour and in this is well-supported by Best, Tang and director Lee Lewis and a spare almost otherworldly office design by Renee Mulder with lighting by Jason Glenwright that matches the sense of fable that the writing conveys — fantastical, while all too real.

Griffin Theatre Company, Rice, writer Michelle Lee, director Lee Lewis, performers Kristy Best, Hsiao-Ling Tang, designer Renee Mulder, lighting design Jason Glenwright, composer, AV designer Wil Hughes, associate sound designer Tony Brumpton; The Stables, Sydney, 21 July-26 Aug

Top image credit: Hsiao-Ling Tang, Kristy Best, Rice, Griffin Theatre & Queensland Theatre, photo Brett Boardman

Drawing heavily on pop culture and science, Gabrielle Nankivell’s Split Second Heroes conceives of the visible colour spectrum as a science-fictional site of personal struggle and self-discovery. Unusually for a work of contemporary dance — even one that leans towards Pina Bausch-like dance-theatre, if without its multivalent meanings — the bodies on stage represent emotionally distinct characters.

There is Black (Nankivell), a risk-taking sort with a penchant for danger and things that go fast (racehorses, sports cars). There is White (Luke Smiles, also composer and sound designer), an astronautical engineer, locatable perhaps on the autism spectrum by way of his awkward sociality and repetitive behaviour. And there is Grey (Vincent Crowley), achromatic narrator and intermediary, who relates, in the familiar but detached manner of a TED-talk speaker, the unlikely love affair that blooms between his seemingly antithetical counterparts.

We meet Grey first, as monochromatic as Benjamin Cisterne’s set in pallid, jacketless corporate wear and sneakers. Encircled by floor lights, he strides to a sort of rostrum-cum-control panel — two vertically-stacked industrial packing crates — from where he is able to stop and start the dancers, and even, with both a prismatic cube and joystick-like device, manipulate their movements and placement in the space.

Black and White, their distance at first conveyed in highly individualised and expressive solos, gradually converge, Grey describing their depolarisation in terms both whimsical and (pseudo-)philosophical. Each milestone in the relationship — tracing a path of Black’s emotional softening and White’s flight from routine — is marked by Grey’s producing of a representative toy or Lego sculpture (or, in one case, a functional Polaroid camera).

There is a sense at first that the trio, even the ostensibly neutral Grey, are in competition (for dominance of the spectrum?), for example running laps of the space following a rocket launch-style countdown. Black’s athletic, combative choreography is a blur of martial arts-style kicks, blocks and strikes. White’s movements are jerky and robotic, defensive rather than belligerent. Gradually, though, various accommodations are reached, Grey ultimately withdrawing to a place of objectivity, Black and White becoming partners rather than rivals in the intergalactic adventure first signalled by the work’s opening countdown. “I will miss Black and White,” says Grey, as though speaking — not entirely lamentingly — for a broader loss of the old, inflexible certainties.

As in previous collaborations between Nankivell and Smiles, most notably School Dance (2012), Split Second Heroes is rich in Gen X nostalgia. Smiles’ score, making effective use of multiple stereo channels, recalls early video game music, while the pre-digital moment is also evoked by the centrality of the Polaroid camera and Grey’s props (Lego, the arcade-style joystick, even the cube with its Rubik-like colouration). It was, substantially, the 80s too that gave us the figure, captured by Smiles’ White, of the nerd as (anti-)hero.

It’s a pity then that Nankivell’s text — rather flatly delivered by Crowley — proves frustrating. Though seamed with a non-scientist’s enthusiasm for the workings of the physical world, it too often comes off as trite rather than profound (I kept thinking of what the philosopher Daniel Dennett has dubbed “deepities” — statements that, on one level, are true but trivial and, on another, sound important but are essentially meaningless).

Grey’s control panel is similarly misconceived, too small and fiddly to register fully in each moment, and strangely causally inconsistent — sometimes the pressing of a button or moving of the joystick seems to do something, for example, trigger a piece of music or choreographic shift, and sometimes there’s no obvious effect.

More successful is Will O’Mahony’s dramaturgy, which effectively centres the work’s constituent parts and provides a stronger narrative through-line than seen in much contemporary dance with its discontinuous performance ideas. Perhaps this in itself is a kind of nostalgia, a return — both pleasurable and faintly unsatisfying — to the privileging of story over idea and image.

Gabrielle Nankivell, Adelaide Festival Centre & inSPACE, Split Second Heroes, concept, direction, text, choreography Gabrielle Nankivell, performers Vincent Crowley, Gabrielle Nankivell, Luke Smiles, score, sound design, interactive software design Luke Smiles/motion laboratories, dramaturgy Will O’Mahony, set, lighting design Benjamin Cisterne; Space Theatre, Adelaide, 27-29 July.

Top image credit: Split Second Heroes, photo Chris Herzfeld Camlight Productions

In last week’s interview with OzAsia Festival Artistic Director Joseph Mitchell, he spoke about major performance works in his festival. This week we’ll look briefly at three Australian collaborations that reveal an increasingly complex and exhilarating weave of cultures, before moving on to the festival’s music and visual arts shows in coming weeks.

In Between Two

Mitchell emphasised the importance of the personal in his 2017 OzAsia programming, even in large-scale works. One of the standouts of the 2016 Sydney Festival was In Between Two. I wrote in my review, “In a logical but equally lateral extension of the modus operandi favoured by photographer and solo performer William Yang, In Between Two [dramaturgs Yang and Annette Shun Wa] features two artists in conversation, with their life stories, projected photographs, video and live music.”

The performers — both are musicians and they accompany each other — are Chinese-Australian spoken word and hip hop artist Joel Ma aka Joelistics and Filipino-Dutch-Australian guitarist, producer and songwriter James Mangohig who generously and engagingly share their family histories, having first swapped them with each other as they became friends and “each other’s therapist.” They tell fascinating tales about heritage, love, drugs, religion and politics. Among them is Joel Ma’s account of his beautiful, energetic Chinese grandmother who came to Australia from Hong Kong when she was 17, had several children and co-founded Sydney’s legendary Chequers nightclub in the 1930s (there are wonderful photographs and film footage). I saw In Between Two as “expanding our sense of what it means to be Asian-Australian, to achieve a sense of cultural heritage, to escape the strict dictates of religion and family but also to reconcile and be able to turn life into art with music and wit.”

Macau Days

This mixed-media exhibition about Macau — administered and then colonised by Portugal from the mid-16th century until 1999 and handed back to China (with some autonomy until 2049) — features paintings by the Australian Hong Kong-born John Young, poems and prose by Brian Castro (also born in Hong Kong) and soundscapes by composer and media artist Luke Harrald evoking the lives of Chinese and Europeans across centuries of the region’s history. This is an intruiging combination of talents focused on a place most of us know little about beyond James Packer’s casino problems.

Fairweather

Born in Scotland, Ian Fairweather (1891-1974) is widely regarded as one of Australia’s greatest painters. First-hand experience of Asian art, especially Chinese calligraphy, and Australian Aboriginal art transformed his painting in an astonishing life of travel across Asia, involvement in both World Wars and often impoverished life in remote coastal Queensland locations where he made some of his best-known work on brown paper or cardboard, often leaving it open to the elements. His greatest concern was to simply keep painting.

Composer Erik Griswold, author and narrator Rodney Hall and video artist Glen Henderson will stage Fairweather, their response to his art and life, with koto virtuoso Satsuki Odamura and Adelaide’s Zephyr Quartet. You can see part of a 2013 performance here and hear an ABC interview about the work in which Hall emphasises that the collaborator’s creation does not aim to tell the story of the artist’s life, “it’s the opposite of storytelling,” rather “it’s about an accumulation of extraordinary incidents that lay bare the depth of his character and his alienation.” Hall adds that he’s running “a campaign against the plethora of stories we’re surrounded by.”

For Griswold, Fairweather’s appeal lies in “the musicality of his paintings, the rhythmic quality of line and colour.” When looking at the paintings, he says, “I could almost hear these musical patterns.” For Griswold and Henderson the fusion of Western and Asian techniques are central to their response. Fairweather promises to a be fascinating collage of image, text and music.

Hot Brown Honey

Black Honey Company are on a roll. Teik-Kim Pok in his review of their latest work in May this year (a co-production with Campbelltown Arts Centre and Brisbane’s La Boite, where it will play 10-21 October), wrote, “One the Bear is a stunning gathering of artistic talents and a timely allegorical warning about cultural commodification and its oppressive narratives. And Candy Bowers and Nancy Denis’ skilful, iconic buffoonery excites hope for life beyond this production for the artists’ bear alter-egos.”

After successful seasons in 2016 at the Edinburgh Fringe and Melbourne’s Arts Centre and in June this year at the Sydney Opera House, Kim ‘Busty Beatz’ Bowers and Lisa Fa’alafi’s Hot Brown Honey will appear in OzAsia with its giant beehive set and matching honey cell-patterned costumes in a political burlesque featuring women of colour from Africa to the Pacific to Australia wickedly protesting white patriarchy.

Top image credit: Joelistics, In Between Two, photo Prudence Upton courtesy OzAsia 2017

This week, Australia rendered uncanny by ‘white dreaming,’ four decades of Adrian Martin’s incisive writing on film culture and a digital collection of archival portraits of local artists fill gaps in our cultural narrative.

Mainstream Australian culture’s insistence, in the past week, on continuing to traffic in the cheap comedy of Chris Lilley’s blackface nonsense, warrants a return to a brilliant piece on ABC online in June by Stan Grant on the ways in which Indigenous culture is always both present and absent in Australian ‘white dreaming’ stories. Palace of Memories, a documentary on artist Jonathon Jones’ work on the Sydney Garden Palace, pulls Grant into a “an eerie world, a world of loss and memory; a world both familiar and yet strange.” He then presents possibly one of the most cogent arguments anywhere for Picnic at Hanging Rock as “a white dreaming story, an initiation into the land itself” and a key moment acknowledging the eerie presence of Indigenous custodianship and the myth of terra nullius:

“The girls are forever lost, the school headmistress commits suicide and those who are left have been forever changed, no longer ‘British’ but now altered into something else — becoming Australian. [Scholar David] Tacey says the film creates a ‘grinding tension between the colonial overlay of society and the unconscious substratum of ancient and denied realities.’ Tacey sees Australia as immature, inauthentic. ‘This spirit of place,’ he writes, ‘is not mystical, it is social and geo-political.’ Picnic at Hanging Rock and Palace of Memories are each a meditation on what scholars Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs have dubbed ‘Uncanny Australia.’ In their book published in the late 1990s, they posed questions about how ‘Aboriginal sacredness manifests itself in the public domain of the modern nation.’ They saw Australia as ‘unsettled,’ disturbed by the recognition of the ‘Aboriginal sacred.’”

Acclaimed Australian scholar and critic Adrian Martin (also a RealTime contributor in the 1990s) has launched a site archiving the accumulation of four decades of reviews, interviews, actor profiles, book reviews and essays about cinema. It’s an extraordinary resource for lovers of film, presented in the low-tech glory of 1990s-style HTML. Here is an especially entertaining and astute take on that beloved Aussie classic, Babe, by George Miller, futher pinpointing the uncanny incongruity identified by Grant in cultural objects made for the global market:

“Babe is not bland, but it is bizarre. A student of Australian culture might take it as the perfect picture of our national, cultural schizophrenia – since it overlays a nostalgic evocation of British pastoralism with a thick layer of sentimental Americana. It is especially disconcerting to see a local comic icon such as John Doyle (of Roy and HG fame) dubbed with an American accent.”

The National Film and Sound Archive has released a new collection of audio-visual and audio portraits of Australian artists from the 1950s to the 80s; each portrait is available to researchers and organisations for a fee. There are pieces on Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Rosalie Gascoigne, Margaret Olley, Olive Cotton, Banduk Marika and Martin Sharp. There’s also some really interesting archival material: home movies from Philippe Mora of the Melbourne art scene in the 1950s and newsreels from the 1960s that cover the controversy surrounding the Blue Poles acquisition and the year when no Archibald Prize was awarded. This is the sort of stuff you’d otherwise have to travel to Canberra to look at — a fantastic resource for artists, writers and culture lovers. A documentary on filmmaker and photographer Tracey Moffat and members of Boomalli Artist’s Cooperative is a particular highlight:

“Moffatt talks about growing up as ‘the only Aboriginal kid in the school photograph’ in the suburbs of Brisbane. She says: ‘In the different mediums I work in, photography and film, I’m basically concerned with contemporary Aboriginal society. Be it people living in a traditional way or living in the cities and … I’m wanting to depart from a documentary or ethnographic mode. I just feel that nowadays people tune out when they think ‘here we go again, another predicable documentary about Aborigines.’”

Top image credit: NFSA Archival image, Boomalli: Five Koori Artists — Tracey Moffatt, 1988

Find

August 2017

Stephanie Lake, Pile of Bones

Melanie Lane, Nightdance

Performing intimacy

One man or many?

From the University of Wollongong…

The sound of David Lynch

Memory Field

The Dream Machine

The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane

Overground

Chloe Wong & Dance Lab

Dr Wilfred Wong Ying Wai, Hong Kong Arts Development Council

Film as research

Editing as distributed cognition

Creative works are questions

Longing for Wilderness

Sergeant James

The Extraction

Step to the Line

VR: a world unto itself

Postgrads in work

MA Screen: inside the program

Time Slice

Matrix

Watershed

ADT, Be Your Self

Arena Theatre, Trapper

Body Melt: Acting Degree Zero

RealTime #2, August 1994

Live sonic assault

Restricted access

The look

Drums, fingers, light

Taking shape

A new ADT

Controversial caretaking

Pedagogy & postmodernities

Choreographer as director/collaborator

A new body of dance

Neurological mapping

Emotional expression as choreography

Be Your Self (Redux)

Festivals step up

A legacy almost lost

Bedevil (Tracey Moffat, 1993)

Broken Highway (Laurie McInnes, 1993)

Celia (Ann Turner, 1989)

On Guard (Susan Lambert, 1983)

Education, thesis, teaching

In concert at Format Gallery

The interview

In Between Two

Macau Days

Fairweather

Hot Brown Honey

realtime