Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

September 2017

In recent weeks we’ve looked at the role of the university in supporting the making of new artworks as research at postgraduate level and today review one of the outcomes, Rakini Devi’s Urban Kali. This week we turn to recent graduates, interviewing Jessica Russell and Phoebe Sullivan about the WAAPA Performance Making course that took them straight to the Perth professional stage with a self-devised work. WAAPA lecturer Frances Barbe explains how the course works, emphasising the growing importance of the university as an incubation hub. Also this week, a fascinating interview with UK performer Jo Bannon (image above) who will be in Adelaide shortly to discourse on art and perceived disability.

This week we sadly farewell Lauren Carroll Harris who has completed her contract with us as Acting Assistant Editor. Lauren realised our ambition to incorporate video and sound works into RealTime, built new content into our redesigned website and initiated, among other things, the commissioning of video essays. Her sharp editorial skills, fine writing and constant stream of exciting ideas will be missed. Keith & Virginia

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Top image credit: Jo Bannon, Alba, photo Paul Blakemore

I place the plastic clip on my finger and wait a few moments for the soft rush of sound to find its base rhythm. Soon, the wash begins to swell, remixing the resonant pitch and drop of my own heartbeat. Changes in movement and heart rate cause subtle shifts: the soundscape dips, stretches, slows down, speeds up. In George Poonkhin Khut‘s work, collaborators Gail Priest and James Brown have written music designed for augmentation by the listener’s own body. Simple instructions, asking the participant to take long, deep breaths, align the work with mindfulness principles, prompting thoughts about our biological responsiveness to sound and the kinds of bodily effects we might be subconsciously craving when we reach to put our headphones on.

Geared towards sonic futures of various kinds, those that like Khut’s work feel tantalisingly close to being an everyday reality, and those which are much more speculative, Gail Priest’s interactive and well researched exhibition is especially interested in what future artworks may sound like, and the role art can play in generating new sound-driven ecologies. The intimate and sensual cocoons of bio-remixed sound that Khut’s work generates — there are extra headphones so that others can listen in to your own unique soundscape as it unfolds — offer an exemplary response to Priest’s prompt, and a gentle introduction to the exhibition as a whole.

Shelter Fallout/Spark Harvest, 2017, installation view, Peter Blamey, Sounding the Future, UTS Gallery, 2017, photo David Lawrey

Central to the exhibition is Priest’s own project, also titled Sounding the Future, a mothership-like chair and control pad via which users can explore a range of future sound scenarios, falling into three key categories — the speculative, the scientific and the anecdotal. Sit on the stool at the centre of the space and you can lightly spin at 360 degrees, using a trackpad to click through a series of hypertexts as they light up on the floor around you. Here, the visual effects of blue and green text and a voiceover with subtly robotic inflections recalls 1990s cyberpunk aesthetics. I click through the option “city futures” then “sensory stack overload” and listen to a sci-fi scenario written by Priest where overexposure has led humans to develop sound allergies. Clicking through a different way, I learn about a problem that scientists are currently researching, where older railway workers have no noticeable hearing damage yet demonstrate trouble understanding speech. This is perceived as a reverb issue, with researcher Hamish Innes Brown describing it as a signal feedback glitch, the signal becoming “smeared in time.”

To be smeared in, or by, time is the universal fate of all entities living and otherwise, as Pia van Gelder and Tom Smith explore in their work Iron Star. Here they deliver an impossible scenario sounding the future of iron to its total demise a star’s death-state before becoming a supernova, at a time well beyond human existence; beyond the sun, beyond sound. Two screens sit side by side, the first telescopes out from what can be doubly read as iron ore and the universe itself at a close distance then scaling up in magnitude: delicate markings on a black background hand-drawn by van Gelder repeat to an awesome expanse. On the second screen, small stock photos flash in serial repetition through different categories: anchors, nail scissors, helmets, engagement rings. Smith’s score coldly inquires outwards; moments of intense rupture are bracketed by provisional calm. In one corner of the space, a small pile of iron filings grounds the work, and in the other, a wavelike sheet of chain metal drops from above creating a magnetic interplay between audio, image and object that transports gallery-goers to a richly evoked no-place at the dark fringes of philosophical and scientific understanding.

Iron Star, 2017, installation view, Pia van Gelder & Tom Smith, Sounding the Future, UTS Gallery, 2017, photo David Lawrey

The dual meaning at play in the exhibition’s title, where “sounding” can mean to produce sound as well as to test or ‘sound out’ an idea or concept, holds true in all the works. Peter Blamey’s installation Shelter Fallout/Spark Harvest presents a post-apocalyptic scenario where minimal wooden shelters — including a kennel for the dog, a welcome nod to the necessary centrality of non-human species in any conversation about futurity — are paired with solar technology, allowing possibilities for the manipulation of sound and light even in the barest circumstance. What kinds of cultures could develop from this starting point? Blamey’s work brings to mind media theorist Jussi Parikka’s concept of “medianatures” in its neat distillation of inseparable yet distinct conditions: biology and technology bound in an eternal state of coproduction. Developed from Donna Haraway’s “naturecultures,” medianatures help us to understand that the technology we use to produce sound is always at the same time matter from the Earth as well.

The documentation for this project, over three hours of material in all, is a substantial fictocritical project in its own right, available in an enhanced ebook that reproduces the hypertexts of Priest’s title work and as an adaptation on Radio National’s Soundproof program. The focused contributions of Khut, van Gelder and Smith, and Blamey offer three distinct sonic futures that illuminate aspects of this research; bio-sonic for George Khut, geo-sonic for Pia van Gelder and Tom Smith, eco-sonic for Peter Blamey — there are countless more. Gail Priest’s surprisingly upbeat show successfully expands possibilities for art-making and begins to redress the historical sidelining of sound across disciplinary fields.

Read the exhibition catalogue and view the full Sounding the Future project website.

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Sounding the Future, curator Gail Priest, artists Gail Priest, George Poonkhin Khut, Pia van Gelder & Tom Smith, Peter Blamey; UTS Gallery, Sydney, 1 Aug – 22 Sept

Top image credit: Sounding the Future, 2015, installation view, Gail Priest, Sounding the Future, UTS Gallery, 2017, photo Gail Priest

Early in Second Chance Theatre’s Laika we hear yips from the eponymous dog calling out from her space capsule via the radio to her Soviet masters. In 1957, Laika became one of the first organisms launched beyond Earth’s atmosphere and the first to orbit the planet. She came to a sad end, terminally overheated by a technical malfunction, pre-empting plans to euthanise her.

Laika’s fate forewarned of the brilliance and brutality of the Soviet space program during the early years of the Cold War. Amid failing Five Year Plans for economic development, widespread goods shortages and faltering attempts to govern and modernise the then world’s largest nation — still recovering from 20 million war dead — Soviet scientists achieved incredible feats, regularly venturing into space years before their counterparts in the ‘free’ world. However, Soviet idealists proved the superiority of their regime by skimping on safety procedures and treating cosmonauts as no more than cargo.

Space is an inherently radiophonic subject, full of waves, including radio and the thermals that killed Laika. Communication with satellites was via radio and the majority of audiences for space travel feats (even for the Moon landing) heard about them via wireless. Not surprisingly then, the drama of apparently free-floating voices and sound effects features heavily in ‘space’ art, ranging from David Chesworth’s meditative opera Cosmonaut (2015), works by Laurie Anderson (USA Live, 1984), David Bowie (Space Oddity, 1969) and George Clinton (Chocolate City, 1975) and his techno successors.

Laika: A Staged Radio Play, Second Chance Theatre, photo David Cox Media

The director and author of Laika, Scott McArdle, lines his performers along the front of the intimate Blue Room stage, each standing crooner-style before a large valve microphone. Most dialogue is delivered directly forwards to the audience, with side glances and interjections serving to punctuate and further dramatise the writing. When Yuri Gagarin (St John Cowcher) — the first man to travel beyond the Earth’s atmosphere – comes on the scene, his helmet illuminated green and red from within, he sits to the side and slightly to the rear of the other performers, as the stage goes to black and they are individually spot-lit.

Although live foley sounds are employed for footsteps, clinking glasses and so on, McArdle and his ensemble largely eschew sound processing or spatialisation, which would be difficult in such a small space. There is none of the foley-making as theatre such as that superbly rendered by the Ennio Morricone Experience and Chamber Made Opera’s Phobia (2004). By contrast, microphone placement itself provides the scenographic structure. By having the actors simply stand at their microphones, the piece attains a certain abstract and Brechtian quality, while nonetheless feeling intensely personal.

Although Laika chronicles key events, sketching Machiavellian conflicts and moral challenges, the focus is on our dream of being embraced by space itself. The protagonist (Taryn Ryan) dreams of flying into the blue rim of the planet, while her boss (Arielle Gray), before a glowing projection of the Moon relates how, when interred in a gulag, he was hypnotised by this orb and determined thereafter to work to consummate his rapture. These small touches of melancholic reverie complete Laika as a compact, well-judged production — an immensely enjoyable example of how to modestly evoke sublime spaces.

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Second Chance Theatre, Laika, writer, director, lighting designer Scott McArdle, performers Taryn Ryan, Daniel Buckle, St John Cowcher, Arielle Gray; foley Andrew David & cast, designer Sara Chirichilli, projection George Ashforth; The Blue Room Theatre, Perth, 12-30 Sept

Top image credit: Laika: A Staged Radio Play, Second Chance Theatre, photo David Cox Media

Singapore has just celebrated the 52nd year of its independence as a nation, it’s a multicultural society of immigrants and their descendants and its music draws on many traditions, particularly Chinese. The three members of SA the Collective grew up experiencing a mélange of musical traditions, not only from within Singapore but across the globe. They especially look to their Chinese ancestry in developing their music, which embraces experimental as well as classical Chinese styles.

Formed in 2011, SA the Collective comprises Andy Chia on dizi (Chinese flute), dijeridu, vocals and electronics, Natalie Alexandra on guzheng (Chinese zither) and electronics and Cheryl Ong on drums, percussion and electronics. All were trained from an early age on their Chinese instruments. The band’s name includes SA, which in Chinese means three, is from a northern dialect and was chosen to evoke the artists’ origins.

The ensemble travels widely, performing in locations as diverse as Museum Siam in Bangkok and the International Society for Music Education’s 32nd World Conference (Glasgow, 2016). They blend dijeridu and overtone singing with modified versions of traditional Chinese and other instruments, all of which they mediate electronically to create a unique and compelling sonic tapestry. A blend of genres, their music hints at rock, jazz and ambient drone, and can involve multiple rhythms and a blend of chromatic and pentatonic scales, often in long, swirling improvisations. Their use of looping to add layers of sound and extended instrumental techniques, such as bowing or tapping the guzheng instead of plucking, and channelling it through effects pedals, broadens and enriches their sonic palette. Their music can be quietly meditative, hauntingly beautiful, joyously danceable or overwhelmingly powerful and complex.

SA (仨 ) photo courtesy OzAsia 2017

The instrumentation is significant for the trio, not just for its sonic potential but for the mixing of musical traditions. Andy Chia said that while they are aware of the cultural significance of particular instruments and musical forms, “For us [in Singapore] everything is borrowed, the language we speak is borrowed… Our ancestry might be from China but we are not really connected with and are constantly borrowing from it.”

Cultural identity seems a perennial issue in Singapore. Cheryl Ong feels that Singaporeans are more Southeast Asian: “although we are by race Chinese, because our ancestry came from China, we don’t really carry that baggage of tradition anymore.” Their intention, as outlined on their Soundcloud page is “to create Musical Art that represents their modern identity as Chinese from a diaspora.” Their latest release, titled Flow, demonstrates how the trio weaves new music out of traditional forms and aesthetics, reinventing traditional Chinese music and bringing it into a high-tech, globalised world.

In planning their program for OzAsia in Adelaide, Cheryl says the trio will play some of their current repertoire and perform some improvisations. Andy suggests, “a lot of it has to do with the people that are there, the environment and of course ourselves, and in that sense these three elements will mix to create the sonic experience you will hear.” Their forthcoming OzAsia perfomances will be their only Australian appearances.

See SA the Collective performing and explaining how they play.

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OzAsia Festival: SA the Collective, Moon Lantern Festival, Elder Park, 1 Oct, 5pm; Lucky Dumpling Market, Convention Centre Lawn, Adelaide, 2 Oct, 7pm

Chris Reid spoke to SA the Collective in Singapore courtesy of Culturelink and the Adelaide Festival Centre.

Top image credit: SA (仨 ) photo courtesy OzAsia 2017

These are challenging times for young graduates emerging as performers from our universities into a highly competitive market. Performing arts departments have become increasingly focused on preparing students with more than skills training, encouraging independence, business alertness and investing in self-devised graduating performances that might well go on to become fully-fledged professional productions shortly after graduation or fuel the creation of new works. This is especially the case for students who take to contemporary performance, physical theatre and live art.

I approached Frances Barbe, Lecturer and Course Coordinator for the Bachelor of Performing Arts degree at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, to talk in particular about the Performance Making course subsequent to our review of Blueprint, a production created by three recent graduates staged at Perth’s The Blue Room Theatre in June. Jessica Russell, Phoebe Sullivan and Sean Crofton made Blueprint as their graduating production in 2016 and had now, as theatre professionals, re-mounted it. I was interested in the continuity between course work and ‘real world’ practice, and interviewed Wallace and Sullivan as well.

Frances Barbe replied to my invitation to talk, writing, “I think there is really interesting potential in courses like ours at WAAPA being incubation chambers for new Australian work. Particularly as artists struggle more and more to get support, the universities can be places that offer it.” Each year original, self-directed third year student works are shown at The Blue Room Theatre and now, Barbe writes, “we have a new partnership with Fremantle Arts Centre, a four-week residency offered to graduates to use in their first crucial year out. We are trying to find ways within the course and beyond it to support artists in ways that are meaningful.” I then spoke by phone with Barbe about the structure of the Performance Making course.

Breeding independence

Students continually develop and expand their skills across the three years, says Barbe, “initially learning how to perform from existing texts and study traditional works and artists. But I’d say over 50% of their work is about creating their own work — having a go at it, finding out how hard it is, failing at it and getting feedback in a relatively safe environment.” Students evolve towards becoming truly independent practitioners. Barbe explains the trajectory. “There’s a real progression. At the end of first year they do a group performance, typically directed or co-directed by staff in which we introduce the devising process. They research a theme, pitch a lot of ideas, observe how we shape those ideas and workshop a scene from a rough improvisation into a more developed scene. But we also at some point say, ‘No more ideas; now we’re going to direct you.’”

Going solo

“In second year, they create a solo and while we scaffold them through that creative process, they really find out if they have enough fire in the belly to create a seven-minute solo — a very much independently driven project. One might make a monologue, another a movement piece. We try not to prescribe style and once we see how a work is developing with one staff member taking them through the process, we might bring in mentors from different areas for a few extra sessions. In order to be non-prescriptive, we have to be very responsive in the Performance Making course.”

Site-specificity

In the second semester of second year the students make site-specific works with a professional guest director. “At this moment, our students are working with Barney O’Hanlon from the SITI Company from New York. They’re at Wireless Hill in Perth, a very important Indigenous site but it’s also linked to Morse Code transmission in World War I and later radio developments. The students are going through that process of listening to a site and creating a response to it.” Created by Anne Bogart, SITI Company combines teaching of the Suzuki Tadashi method which Barbe trained in, and Bogart’s Viewpoints improvisation methodology. “It’s really exciting to see the students doing Viewpoints with someone from the company who developed that for performers.”

Pitch, develop, show

Barbe says the three productions in first and second year “really set the students up for the third, in which is they spend much of it creating their own work, either alone or mostly in small groups. At the beginning of the year they pitch an idea and they’re assessed on it. The pitch can be a talk or performative or the showing of stimulus images. They get feedback from teachers but we also invite industry professionals — Blue Room staff, writers, directors and scenographer Zoe Atkinson. After the pitch there’s a creative development phase, a presentation of a certain percentage of the work and an assessment before going on to production.”

Once the works are finished, they appear at The Blue Room Theatre “where staff and audiences gather around and support the students and let them know how the industry works. It’s a really good way to get students thinking about their working lives after graduation.”

Skilling

I ask Barbe about skills training, having noticed in the course outline mention of directing, puppetry and Butoh. She explains, “acting, voice and movement run through the whole three years. There are units called Movement Fundamentals and Devising Physical Performance. In other semesters they do Directing and Playwriting as well. And I embed a series of master classes alongside the productions. In any one semester where there isn’t a unit on Voice, for example, I focus the master class series on vocal technique. The challenge with performance making is depth alongside diversity.”

ITI, Singapore

One of the most attractive aspects of the Performance Making course is the opportunity to visit Singapore’s Intercultural Theatre Institute (ITI) and participate in a 10-week intensive exploration of a performance practice. Barbe, a specialist in Butoh, Japanese Theatre and intercultural performance, says it’s a transformative experience for students. “Typically, we go in January. In 2017, we focused on Noh Theatre with a master from the Kanze School in Tokyo. In 2018, it will be Kutiyattam, really beautiful Sanskrit theatre storytelling from Kerala in the south of India. The solo performer principally uses eyes, face, gesture. This stylising of emotion will encourage students to explore how to authentically convey heightened feeling.”

The students don’t become expert in a form that takes some 15 years to learn, but, says Barbe, over an immersive 10 weeks, 2-6pm daily after training all morning in voice and movement, it opens young Australian contemporary performance makers to thinking about presence, space and time and other ways of storytelling.”

About Frances Barbe

Having viewed Fine Bone China (2008), a haunting work by Frances Barbe available on YouTube, I asked her about her own practice. She taught at the University of Kent from 2001 to 2010 and various training institutions as well as working as a freelance performer, choreographer and movement director in the UK and beyond, including Australia, where she made her last work, Exquisite (2016), performed at Brisbane’s Metro Arts. Working at WAAPA, she says, “is the first time I’ve really committed to teaching and working with emerging artists full-time.” Now in her 40s, she says she’s no longer impatient about making new work: “I’ll typically have two-week intensive creative developments in between semesters. The upside is having incubation time for your ideas and working with collaborators which I love to do.”

Of former Performance Making students Jessica Russell and Phoebe Sullivan, Barbe says, “They both had real strengths when they came to us but we’ve just seen them grow so much.”

Top image credit: Students from WAAPA BPA Performance Making 3^rd year end of year production TILT 2017, photo Stephen Heath

Jessica Russell, Phoebe Sullivan and Sean Crofton’s Rocketman was the trio’s graduating performance for the Bachelor of Performing Arts in Performance Making degree in 2016. Further developed and retitled as Blueprint it excited interest when staged at Perth’s The Blue Room Theatre in June this year.

Our reviewer, Nerida Dickinson, outlined Blueprint’s fascinating scenario. “Successful in a competitive selection process, three candidates undergo a series of experiments to enable space travel and eradicate all the afflictions that have ever plagued humanity. Volunteering to establish the first colony on Mars, Alex (Russell), Lewis (Crofton) and Jane (Sullivan) maintain strict physical discipline while undergoing enhancements in breathing efficiency, boosted skin resilience and bones made unbreakable. Impatient for the application of genetic modification improvements, bickering and plagued by nightmares and regrets, the rigours of the enforced artificial confinement prove too much for Lewis and Jane, leaving a determined Alex to join candidates trained elsewhere.”

Dickinson praised the blend of physical theatre and text: “Impressive extended skipping rope sequences feature the performers delivering text without a hint of breathlessness, while vigorous, stylised aerobic workouts immediately precede extended ethical debates, the onslaught of words and scientific concepts mirrored by punishing physical exertion. The ensemble’s careful choreography offers visual impact from all directions.”

Via email, I asked Jessica Russell and Phoebe Sullivan about their training, their aspirations and the experience of mounting the self-devised Blueprint at The Blue Room.

Russell writes that after working together for a year and a half on Blueprint, “Phoebe and I have this running joke that we can’t get rid of one another. So while (for now, never say never) Blueprint has been put to bed, I’m sure we’ll work together again soon. Phoebe’s an incredible collaborator, but we also respect each other’s interests and practices as individual artists.” Sullivan thinks that Blueprint, a work about adaptations for space travellers’ bodies, might have a longer life: “The bio-engineering technology which the show refers to is constantly developing, and because of this, so too can Blueprint.”

After working behind the scenes on three productions at The Blue Room, Russell writes, “rather than becoming trapped solely in the arts, I’m taking some time out to read and research a whole array of ideas beyond theatre. Work comes from the world around us, you have to stay connected. Also, I’m trying to remember that making work takes time, rather than falling into the trap of making work solely for the purpose of making work.”

Sullivan is likeminded: “For me, trying to create anything semi-decent while stressed is like slowly pulling splinters out from underneath my fingernails, and I absolutely refuse to have a mental breakdown at the age of 25 and burn out completely by the time I’m 30.” She’s landed a three-month residency from pvi collective for the development of a new physical theatre work with “a lot of on-the-floor improvising to generate material… It’ll be exciting to fall back into a familiar process and refine it for myself even further.”

Learning from the work

I asked the pair about what they learned from mounting Blueprint. Russell writes, “It was an invaluable experience. Throughout the run, Phoebe and I had plenty of ‘Ohhh, it’s so obvious’ moments when we realised exactly where we’d edit or add to the work. We accepted those moments for the incredible learning they provided.” Sullivan believes “the show could definitely have done with more refining structurally in terms of the play’s narrative and the journey it needed to take our audiences on. Though, this is borne out of a personal response to the work, as opposed to being influenced by public opinion. Although I agree with some audience feedback from an artistic point of view, I’m not really looking to make a crowd pleaser; the same goes for reviewers.” Russell likewise thinks that taking on responses “is a fine balancing act,” but helpful in respect of achieving clarity: “What ideas are not translating to the audience, and what could be causing it — scene structure, character narrative, physicalisation?”

Preparedness

I asked about the pair’s preparedness for their first professional production. Russell writes, “WAAPA’s training was invaluable, I found myself putting teaching into practice almost subconsciously. I still carry my third year notebook, still filling it with notes on process and work, continually going back to the earlier pages to reread notes from my mentors. More than anything, WAAPA gave me a hunger to continue to learn in this industry, to take up opportunities that challenge me.” Sullivan says of the third year of her course, “It was thrilling being given free rein to tackle such large scale ideas concerning humanity, the environment and the survival of a species. The course certainly prepared me to be flexible and adapt to the oncoming changes. As well as being cost efficient in the process! The transition was made so much easier by the supportive team at The Blue Room Theatre.”

Skills & attitude

On the subject of the skills and the attitudes developed at WAAPA, Russell writes, “Apart from the drive to continue learning my craft, WAAPA has improved upon my skills tenfold. I have a much stronger sense of my work ethic and process, a belief in my abilities as both maker and performer, but also the self awareness that this is a long journey.” Sullivan comments, “It’s so funny how many conversations I’ve had with friends, who have also graduated with similar performing arts degrees, about how drama school fast-tracks your personal development so that you leave with a much more informed opinion of who you think you are. I only say ‘think’ because every time I claim to know who I am, I then do something which proves me wrong. Skills, resilience and courage are certainly tools you gain while studying at WAAPA and that really does set you up for the industry.”

Into the future

I wondered if the two performance makers saw their careers as developing in Perth or beyond. Russell, who trained as a dancer for a number of years, says that thanks to the course, she “became passionate about how movement interacts with text, how in contemporary theatre practice a movement director is an invaluable presence in any rehearsal room. I’m inspired by companies such as Punchdrunk and Frantic Assembly, so, with any luck, one day I’ll be at the helm of a similar company. I’m personally really drawn to the UK, but I believe there’s a huge stirring in Perth for physical theatre. Audiences are becoming hungry for new practices and styles, which both The Blue Room Theatre and WAAPA are accommodating so wonderfully.” Sullivan, attracted to the programs offered by STRUT Dance in Perth and inspired by the likes of Force Majeure and Chunky Move in Sydney and Melbourne, hopes “to create work that positively contributes to the discipline.” A Queenslander, she is now committed to Perth; “it’s transformed into home for me,” though London and Berlin and postgraduate study there beckon, if a while off.

Top image credit: Jessica Russell, Phoebe Sullivan, Blueprints, photo Marshall Stay

For 18 months, Alvin Ng has sequestered himself in his studio apartment stuffed with panda bear paraphernalia. Much like his favourite animal, he’s a loner with doleful eyes. At least one of his friends is concerned, pushing Alvin to leave the house in a stilted Skype conversation. Defensive, Alvin retorts, “I’ve just started meditating.” It’s a strange response — his friend wants him to go out, not further in. But in Alvin’s Harmonious World of Opposites, the latter just might lead to the former. The debut feature from Sydney independent filmmaker Platon Theodoris — here, writing and directing — is a precisely executed character study with a comic and darkly fantastical bent. Shot on location between Sydney, Kalgoorlie and Jakarta, but essentially set in Alvin’s apartment, the film is every bit as curious as its protagonist.

Sydney performer and artist Teik Kim Pok plays Alvin, who spends his evenings scouring eBay for 1970s bakeware, drinks tea out of his commemorative Princess Di and Prince Charles mug, and goes to sleep in a bunk bed made up with panda printed sheets. He owns enough collectible spoons to max out one of those wooden display racks shaped like Australia. They say that a person’s home is a reflection of their personality, and this is perhaps especially true in the case of cinema; between all the panda plush toys and the retro knick-knacks, Alvin’s décor suggests that he is equal parts overgrown schoolboy and retiree. And his apartment is more than a quirky backdrop — it’s his whole world.

Well, not quite. Although Alvin hasn’t left his apartment in 18 months, he has found ways to access spaces that exist beyond its four walls. A hole in the floor, for instance, becomes a portal into the bedroom of the young woman who lives downstairs, Alvin nursing his crush on her in secret. Meanwhile, the internet enables him to talk to friends and work as a Japanese translator from the comfort and safety of his own home — but Alvin interacts with others only on highly idiosyncratic terms, carefully controlling the flow of the outside world into his own. When Skyping his client, he dons a button-up shirt and tie and uses a retractable white backdrop to simulate an office environment. The pair deliberate over the nuances of particular words with great earnestness, his client unaware that, just outside the webcam’s scope, Alvin is sitting on a big green exercise ball surrounded by panda plush toys.

Alvin can’t hide behind these elaborate mechanisms forever, though — something’s gotta give. When the sanctity of his world does come under attack, it’s on two fronts. First off, his foul-mouthed and vitriolic neighbour Virginia (Vashti Hughes) keeps banging on his door, wanting to complain about an apparent flea infestation. What’s more, her visits frequently interrupt him in the middle of his Peeping Tom routine, functioning as a kind of karmic comeuppance. Alvin might shut the door on her, but that doesn’t cease her ranting, nor does it stop her from coming back. And he must reckon with another, decidedly more mysterious intruder: a brown sticky substance that has begun dribbling from the ceiling of his apartment. He is curious and perturbed, the vaguely sinister goop an affront to his fastidious nature. It’s when he starts to search for its source that things start to get weird(er).

His investigation leads him up into the attic and, it seems, another dimension — a neat plot twist borrowed from Being John Malkovich (1999). Alvin suddenly finds himself in a cluttered shanty, where a short-statured woman (Indonesian singer Dessy Fitri) sings and coos contentedly as she potters around with a crutch, keeping house. She becomes Alvin’s tour guide through her otherworldly realm (actually Jakarta), clutching his wrist and leading him across a rocky landscape and through an abandoned carnival — these wide open spaces appearing all the more bizarre after being cooped up with Alvin in his cosy, cluttered apartment for almost the entire film. The woman appeals to him with gesticulations and her singsong babble, but he stares blankly at her, uncomprehending. He nevertheless lets himself be dragged along, a mute tourist way outside his comfort zone, unknowingly moving towards the ooze’s origins, revealed to him in a satisfyingly surreal — and oddly uplifting — climactic sequence.

Alvin crawls through his roof cavity and into the fertile recesses of his psyche, escaping the toxic solitude of his apartment through a new, meditative mode of introspection. In Alvin’s World, confined spaces open up to reveal larger ones, Theodoris (harmoniously) blurring the boundary between physical and metaphysical. The film makes manifest the Tardis-like nature of the mind — its capacity to contain huge expanses; to become a mode of transport.

Alvin’s Harmonious World of Opposites, writer, director Platon Theodoris, performers Teik Kim Pok, Vashti Hughes, Dessy Fitri, cinematographers Hari Bowo, Vanna Seang, Platon Theodoris, editor David Rudd, production designe Mas Guntur, Shin-Shin, screening now on REVonDemand.

Keva York is a film critic and a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney, writing her thesis on Crispin Glover’s It trilogy.

In Alba, performer Jo Bannon unfurls herself into a dark physical and imaginative space humming with hinted presences of ghosts, angels and monsters, cathedral vaults and the massed attention of the faithful, the intimate space between a mother and child and the snug refuge of a hiding place under a table. She holds the contradictions of the work within her body: ritual versus gentle humour, high drama versus mundane domesticity, her many small, careful movements versus her few wide and stylish declamatory gestures. She is luminous. So are her props: a piece of cloth, a kettle, an iron, a puff of dust.

Bannon’s birth coincided with the Pope’s visit to Coventry and her mother constructs a family story where both these events are part of the same miracle. In Alba, Bannon gently martials religious inducements to wonder, faith and spectacle into markers of her own physical and familial identity. She uses her mother’s voice retelling the birth and associated visit as the armature on which she builds her provocation, presenting her self and her bodily difference from within her own sensibility, making her world ours. By the end, we have spent 35 minutes watching a woman wash and dry her hair. It has been enthralling, shot through with a gleaming electric turbulence, and we are left shimmering in the afterglow.

A productive Q&A after the performance touched on investing the ordinary with myth; the white-bread comforts of a working class home; problematics of presenting whiteness as an issue in identity and bodily difference. The audience had felt, in the simplicity of what was visually presented on stage, that they had seen something elemental. Jo Bannon mentioned that even though light feels like the main language of the show, bright light is problematic for her and there is friction and difficulty in her experience of its beauty.

There was always this intention of humour in the work but I didn’t, I wasn’t, I hadn’t landed in the work because I hadn’t performed it enough, I didn’t know its scope. And it was much more tentative when it was performed for the first time. Space has a lot to do with it. When we do it in a big venue it looks really beautiful and it has this feel of being more meditative, more discursive. On the spectrum of one end being that high mass church, quiet and lofty; the other end is domestic, kitchen, Mum. When we’re in a small venue there’s much more of that world. In big venues it’s much more of the church world. And for me there’s always a thing in the work of trying to perform it, pitch it, so that it slips around those two modes. How often that happens I suppose is open to interpretation. For me the interest in the work is something that’s between mundane and miracle and can’t quite settle in one tone or the other.

If I think about how I move about in that piece there’s a few references and one is Child. Like doddering about with my Mum at home just idling time away, these kinds of quite ordinary things. And then the way you operate in a home, which is ‘oh I’ll just get that and then I’ll go and…’ You’re quite precise but you’re also taking your own time and there was a hope or a proposal in the work from me to myself which was to make a stage world that I felt I could inhabit. And maybe a provocation there of turning a black space white. And so when I perform the work, when I’m doing it well or when it’s clicking in for me, I do feel very much like this is my white world and I can take my time and move this and this will go exactly there. So I guess there’s a friction between doddering and exactness.

For me there’s something about creating magic or miracle: like when you see magicians they have to be absolutely precise — that kettle has to go there, otherwise that beam of light won’t hit the smoke and it will be nothing. You wait for five minutes for this kettle to be placed and boil and whatever. And something about the labour of that feels the same as this decision of my Mum’s to do the labour to tell the story and to tell the story and to tell the story and imbue it with this kind of meaning. There’s something hidden and magical (hopefully) in the way things appear like the smoke. But also you’ve watched every step that leads to that point.

Also the other thing about the doddering is, it’s a practical thing in that I was also interested in how my body, how albinism within my body affects how I am in the world and therefore on stage. And I do have really restricted vision. Okay, I don’t have a Scoobydoo sheet over me; I can see more than under a sheet. But there is a way that I move in the world that is often about touch and knowing how far things are. It’s a way I’ve learned to navigate and it’s kind of subconscious. I was interested in exploring that skill or ability. And so it doesn’t feel surprising to me that I end up bobbing about the stage under a sheet because it’s quite a natural way of being, in a weird way, for me, because of my less accurate vision.

The biographical work I’d made before was Exposure and that was the first quite delicate, tentative foray into how I look in and how I look out. I never mentioned the word ‘albinism’ in that work although it’s implicit within it. Maybe I’m interested in my Mum’s story because it’s her words, her description, of this experience. So it felt useful to kind of go into my identity and how that feels to have albinism through someone else’s story of it.

I worked probably for a year, off and on, researching and sitting in studios and not really making anything on stage, just thinking and writing, and there were some images that kept coming up. One was this image of a head on the table with the hair in front and as the head rises the hair covers the face. I kept thinking about this and then I made this silly Pope mitre hat. So these kind of fragments of visions happened but I didn’t really know what it was, their sitting together, but I continually kept working with white objects. It’s funny when you make a process when you look back. I look back at the beginning, at little videos I took in studios or things in notebooks and it’s very clear; it’s almost like a description of what the work is now. But, of course, you don’t know that then, you have to go through this kind of circular journey.

I think I was always aware of fighting this interpretation of albinism — if looking in the media, for instance, for examples of people with albinism — or depictions of albinism like The Ghost, The Monster, The Alien, The Vampire; we get into The Bullied, The Victim; and we get into The Angel, The Savant, The Mystical. And there’s not room in any of that for the human.

I remember working in the studio and thinking I’m gonna put this sheet over me and do some hoovering. And film it and see. Really like, I think I’ve gone mad, I don’t know what I’m doing here; and that doesn’t happen in the show but I think there’s an echo of it somehow. To literally embody this idea of a ghost, with a white sheet over yourself but then do something that cuts against that, of something funny and normal and boring like hoovering. So yeah, it starts with weird fragments, things like that.

Then I was on a residency in Belgium and I went to this big cathedral and there was this huge High Mass with seven priests, it must have been some saint’s day or something. They were carrying these objects, books and bowls, all the things that are used in a mass. And there was this kind of click: these are some of the same objects that I’m using in the studio.

As soon as that idea came, in my mind it was like, ‘Oh, you’ve been making a Mass.’ Not, ‘I will make a Mass,’ but ‘That’s what these things are, that’s why they’re here.’ And then there’s quite conscious decisions about, well in that case, what we have to start with, Communion comes near the end, so the sandwich comes near the end. Then things get filled in. I find it really satisfying making it like a puzzle. Just keep waiting and waiting and waiting to see the picture, like you’re putting a jigsaw together and then suddenly you can see what it is.

On a chilly spring night in September, two tall churches blaze out from the dark in the town centre of Launceston, Tasmania. The first, St John’s Anglican, houses two participatory artworks. In one, Launceston Queen Bee performance artist Edwina Blush drops beads of honey into audience members’ palms. In the other, for local artist Kirsty Máté’s Knit, audiences sit in a circle knitting plastic bags into sleeping mats for the homeless. The second, the deconsecrated Presbyterian Chalmer’s Church, across the block, is lit with blue and purple and cast with the shadows of the young performers of Launceston’s Stompin interacting with the church facade twice nightly in Brisbane choreographer Liesel Zink’s site-specific SYCP2017.

The sight of these churches, otherwise conventional, Gothic spaces, repurposed for ephemeral, whimsical, site-specific contemporary art projects and thrown with vivid coloured light, perfectly captures the essence of Junction Arts Festival. Not merely staged in Launceston, it comes directly from the small but engaged community of its valley town. Junction is a grassroots festival that feels genuinely alive and without the PR gloss of many of its mainland counterparts.

The festival takes place at a moment when the state of Tasmania is at its own junction. As Australia’s poorest state, one third of the island’s residents rely on some form of welfare and the workforce is split largely between tourism and hospitality, logging, mining, and government (over 50% of the state budget comprises public service wages). While uber-rich arts patron David Walsh’s Museum of Old and New Art has tilted Tasmania’s reputation (and economy) into a more positive space, continued mining and logging threaten to extinguish the very environmental beauty that the state’s growing tourism sector is founded upon, not to mention its ecological equilibrium. In a place where colonial history feels close to the present and the contradictions of late industrial capitalism seem more visible than elsewhere in Australia, the thoughts and actions of artists — and the broader arts community — have surfaced as genuine stabilisers of the economy.

Where the impact of arts festivals in the major cities can be diluted by sprawling urban populations and competing events, regionally focused ones have the potential to really electrify their communities. Walsh’s Dark MOFO pitches itself as a Gothic festival at the end of the world, while Ten Days on the Island festival also draws international and local artists into its program. Junction has no such pretensions — it locates Launceston’s local community at the centre rather than the edge of the world. The difference is about more than marketing speak. Junction has strategically switched from spending money on mainland and international acts to largely filling its program with local, Tasmanian artists. Though this year’s program is smaller than before, it’s oriented directly to Launceston citizens, whose demographic seems to be distinctively family-oriented. By basing itself in the centre of Launceston, with a large program of free events (nightly music, live comedy, self-guided art tours, light shows, a big public bar), Junction has been able to draw to it a reservoir of goodwill from local artists and community members.

Paul Murphy, Traces

The Nightlight program — a self-guided tour of site-specific art happenings in shops and other spaces surrounding Prince’s Square — provided the most interesting glimpses into Tasmania’s visual and community arts, including a wonderfully loopy community-photographic art project by Team Textiles called Masked Family Portraits, which lined the square’s north-eastern fence in a strange, friendly greeting to passers-by. In St John’s Church, the treatment of young Tasmanian designer and architect Paul Murphy’s Traces, hewn from styrofoam resembling delicate rose quartz and rendered in homage to seastack (geology) formations in Lake Pedder, was an illuminating example of how site-specific context can bring an artwork fresh energy and meaning. Cast with red light, the crystalline pillars formed their own, new conversation with the church’s vertical columns, and it became impossible to think of them installed conventionally in a pristine white cube gallery.

Uta Uber Kool Ja

Uta Uber Kool Ja provided the most lasting impression of the festival — of solidarity and community through live art. The concept, by actor Georgina Symes and performer and activist Nic Holas, is to use a hotel room as the stage for a new kind of intimate and immersive participatory performance, hurling the audience into an after party in the private suite of a rock star at Launceston’s Hotel Grand Chancellor. Desperately glamorous Uta Uber (Symes) is the centre of attention, and our host is her manager and confidant George (Holas) whom we meet in the hotel lobby before shuttling upstairs to the suite. We’re given glasses of bubbly and a warm welcome, but rather than the glitzy affair that’s promised, Uta has passed out behind the bedroom door on the other side of the suite. Once she rouses herself, it becomes clear she’s not the star she imagines herself to be. As she nostalgically recalls lost relationships with those more famous and important than her (Michael Hutchence), shines the dull glitz of her once-almost-sparkling career (her biggest hit made the top 20 behind the Iron Curtain) and launches a new remix with the lights out (dancing to the DIY strobe of a torch held by an audience member), we realise that Uta is a lot like a former child star — someone who’s been told she’s very special, only to be left dejected and prone to inflated overcompensations.

But the show has the utmost respect for Uta’s has-been status: a theme of overcoming failure — by building resilience and stitching together your family — comes into focus as the audience is brought into the bedroom, the suite’s inner sanctum. Uta’s journey is honourable for the very fact that she attempted it.

Given feather boas and trashy sunglasses to don, our transition into full-blown characters within the fantasy is complete. As we all pile onto the bed, Uta and George reveal themselves as Georgie and Nic, a breaking down of character that allows for a wonderfully self-reflexive epilogue in which Nic espouses the show’s values in a kind of late-night party polemic. “We’ve been telling people to ‘say yes’ at parties in every state in Australia for the last six years,” he says, addressing the ‘respectful’ debate around a certain postal vote at present. “And right now, at this moment in history, it may seem like all anyone is talking about is saying ‘yes’ or saying ‘no.’ I don’t assume what your politics are when you come to our party. If you’re a ‘no’ person, you are welcome here with Uta and I. If you are a ‘no’ person, I would like to let you know that standing in front of you is a person who would like you to say ‘yes.’ You’ve just met one, you can’t say you haven’t ever again. There are far more people who look and sound nothing like me, who don’t have the same freedoms and privileges I do, and they want you to say yes, too.”

Just as Uta Uber Kool Ja’s staging has changed as it has inhabited different hotel rooms across Darwin, Melbourne and Adelaide, its creators are nimble and responsive enough to allow each new moment to shift the show’s content. This particular installment of Uber became a declaration of love and togetherness — of uniting and saying (and voting) yes, even when failure is possible or the outcome you crave is not assured. A hit at mainland fringe festivals, Uta Uber Kool Ja showed me that contemporary performance can be presented to broad audiences in unusual spaces without sacrificing rigour or depth for funny, feelgood vibes. Launceston’s audiences were as respectfully disinhibited and keen to participate as any performance artist could wish for.

Local emergence

In his capacity as Creative Director, former Adelaide Fringe director Greg Clarke’s focus is on an outward-looking approach to programming that brings in the general public — indeed, most of the ticketed events sold out. It goes to show that there’s space in the arts ecology for all kinds of curatorial approaches. The mandate here is not a rigorously conceptualised and academic orientation to the insider art world, but a whimsical focus on fun, public-facing art projects that also relate directly to those making work in Launceston. That means for example, that Pronoun, an amateur theatre production of a fairly conventionally conceived stage-play about a trans teenager emerged from the work of students at Launceston College and was as rough-and-ready as you’d expect. But that’s where its charm lay — a more professional production would have likely used polished actors in their 20s rather than the actual teenagers who gave Pronoun its authenticity and rawness. In that sense, Junction has a more inclusive view of the arts ecology — including its local schools, colleges and high school teachers, and a brand new theatre company, Pronoun’s producer Relevant — than many big-city cultural events.

Earlier this year, Junction Arts Festival secured $1.25 million in state government funding until 2021. It’s good to know that Prince’s Square will light up again in September for the next four years. Illuminated in fluoro each night and designed by local emerging lighting designer and Launceston College student Ethan Stanley, Prince’s Square didn’t have anything as high-tech as Vivid Sydney, but it’s nice to think of its rainbow-lit trees as emblems of what small Australian cities could more frequently accommodate in terms of welcoming, lively art events, with the will and inclination of councils and policy makers and those within the arts keen to look beyond the east coast metropolis.

Junction Arts Festival, creative director Greg Clarke; Prince’s Square and surrounds, Launceston, 6-10 Sept

Top image credit: Nightlight with Masked Family Portraits, Junction Festival, photo Jacob Collings

Conor Bateman observes how analogue and digital, real and constructed, bleed into a paranoid, video-game vision of 1970s San Francisco in David Fincher’s classic crime procedural, Zodiac.

An urban Kali? What’s in it for me? Very briefly a student of Indian history, I read of Britain’s suppression in the 19th century of the thuggee, a 600-year-old cult whose members murdered, often for profit, in the name of a four-armed, variously black or blue-faced, bloody-tongued Hindu goddess wearing a necklace of skulls. At her grimmest in black, Kali is at her most radiant when glitteringly bejewelled and frocked in swathes of colour. She is, alternatively, a demonic figure driving us unsparingly into the void, or a glorious generator of new life, though her eyes are as piercingly fearsome in both incarnations. Like many an ancient god, she is, of course, both destroyer and maker, inherently spinning the wheel of life and encouraging philosophical acceptance.

An ancient diagram turns slowly in the film that opens the performance of Urban Kali, at its centre images of the goddess, each embodied by Rakini Devi, staring eyes and dancing fingers in close-up, all veiled behind shooting flames. This is Kali as mutable and mysterious and, ever so briefly, literally urban. Garbed in black, she stands against a building as passing cars blur ephemerally. The accompanying music too is contemporary urban, not faux Indian; it breathes like an agitated monster, signalling this is our Kali, now, but irrevocably ancient, as the ritualistic stage framing suggests. A lone skull sits front and centre. To one side is a vivid installation — a miniature pandal, a temporary street temple made for festivals — built around a tiny statuette of Kali. Mid-left, is an enigmatic tall fabric cone, dressed with a chain of skulls and red thread evoking the blood often seen on Kali’s tongue.

Devi/Kali steps into this ceremonial space, hands aloft, drawing behind her a long swathe of red sari cloth. The thump and soft belling of the music confirm that hers is a procession in which the sari is laid as a path along which she treads with gentle steps and spare gestures before gathering it up as if, like blood, it’s a sacred substance. In tandem, the music intensifies, chugging, rattling, grinding and introducing the first of a series of unnervingly shrill chords alongside fluted cosmic winds. Kali, in black save for a gold-threaded skirt, features invisible, is still remote, elegant, but the sounds that surround her intimate danger. In the film that ensues, we are in jolting proximity with the goddess in close-ups of demanding eyes and red-daubed dancing feet juxtaposed with a growling meditative “Ommmm…” Devi’s voiceover celebrates love for the goddess — her feet, her skin (the deepest of close-ups) — and the void, the blackness, she embodies. We have come closer to Kali, and Devi, and nearer again when the goddess dances. Bands of soft colour vibrate across the screen before which Kali stands, one focused solely on her eyes. Staccato drumming settles into a regular pulse and the body, covered in black, breaks into wide-stanced, right-angled articulations, stampings, red-palmed hands turning in and out.

Kali might symbolise the inevitability of death, but not the rightness of murder. In an utterly chilling film sequence a pair of bloodied hands are suspended directly above a bucket of water in a dance of guilt-laden anguish as Devi explicitly details the horrors of female child murder in India, including the words of some of the perpetrators, victims of another kind. The ensuing dance, with Kali/Devi sliding on her back to the stage and writhing, seems to become a restorative expiation when she sits centrestage, the opening diagrammatic image projected onto the floor from above and her hands and feet turning eloquently in and out. The goddess turns slowly, rolls onto her front, feet and legs rise behind and head and torso lift to create an image of yogic grace. This might be Kali, the mother her many followers believe her to be, and whom we finally meet fully face to face in the last scene in a blaze of glory, framed by a huge image of an eternally deep cave — not black, but a soft haven, a macrocosm seemingly made from a close-up of gently ruffled cloth and textured with a lovely half-melody. Urban and atheist as I am, I might not believe in Kali, but I welcome the emotionally complex connotations that swirl about her and acknowledge that for a secular society she has the power to evoke the sheer scale of the epic recurrency, individual and social, of the glory and the trauma that constitute life and death. Rakini Devi has given me a Kali to keep and reflect on.

Urban Kali is a voyage from dark into light, wonderfully costumed and filmed, finely scored (if at times overwrought) and quite delicately performed by Rakini Devi for all the work’s inherent drama. Not everything felt right. Several segues felt perfunctory and a too-long interlude before the final scene — with music angsting and an indeterminate image flickering on the conical sculpture — proved taxing. The sculpture itself seemed inadequately integrated into the production. I’ve since learned that the projected image in Urban Kali is a yantra, a sacred diagram, and that yantras integratively manifest across architecture, art and science as well as in religion and that the conical sculpture and other elements of the work are also yantras, at once sacred and secular. Devi writes of the cone: “The Kali yantra serves as both ‘receptacle’ and symbolic manifestation of Her attributes. The cone, as the central triangle diagram of many yantras, is symbolic of the female energy personified as the black void of Kali.”

While Devi’s approach to Urban Kali has been to provide a richly impressionistic, if deeply informed, encounter with the goddess, one from which I made my own sense of her, I think that the artist could have provided more information in the program for the audience to take away with them to meaningfully reflect on this fascinating work’s iconography and cosmology and share more of the extensive research Devi has generated for her Doctor of Creative Arts degree. We’re up to it.

FORM Dance Projects & Riverside Theatres, Urban Kali, creator, performer Rakini Devi, sound, film designer Karl Ford, lighting Frankie Clarke; Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, Sydney, 22-23 September

The Samaya Wives’ wittily inventive The Knowledge Between Us, performed by Tara Jade Samaya and James Vu Anh Pham and filmed by Pippa Samaya took out the Outstanding Achievement in Dance on Film or New Media in the 2017 Australian Dance Awards this week. It had already won awards in Scandinavia’s 60secondsdance 2016 competition. I spoke by phone with Pippa.

I’m a photographer and I shoot a lot of dance. When I first discovered dance it was through Tara Jade, before she was my wife. I’ve known her since 2006, the beginning of her time as a dancer with ADT. I’d taken some photographs of her just out of interest and what I discovered blew me away and definitely started a journey. What really took me as photographer is that dance allows me to capture things that are outside of myself and it’s purely visual. Dance provided me a visual language for all those complex, inner emotional states of being human. It enabled me to express things that words can’t and allows a level of empathy that’s otherwise difficult to find. So I became somewhat obsessed with dance, and still am. Being a moving form, I think it was a pretty natural progression for me too to move into film.

The very first was with Tara and I think it was for one of the first Rough Draft seasons at ADT. We put together, quite impulsively, a little half stop-motion, half film, called No Ordinary Moments. We just naturally went on from there. I’ve made a few things without Tara as well but we work together really well and increasingly we’ve made things together. That’s how Samaya Wives was formed very organically — just out of passion and love and curiosity.

I guess the name Samaya Wives is self-explanatory. You are each other’s wives?

I’ve become increasingly interested in a more surreal approach to imagery. I think that’s where the idea of having a ridiculous number of books in it came about. We wanted to explore humankind’s obsession with knowing everything, the constant hunger for knowledge and how it can also stand in the way of that beautiful state of wonderment and awe of not-knowing. So we were sort of bouncing between those two things.

Yes, very interesting. I researched all the area within a six-hour radius of where we were and I found this incredible location, a young volcano basin. I don’t know if we were technically allowed to go in there but we did, and as soon as I saw it, I said, “That’s the place. It has to be there.” Naturally, the dancers [Tara Jade and James Vu Anh Pham] were uncertain at first because they have to protect their precious bodies. There was a very, very steep descent to the bottom, so I had to do a bit of persuading and we all had to muster a bit of courage. We had massive suitcases full of books, which I ended up rolling right down to the bottom. It was quite an adventure but such an incredible natural space.

Was it improvisation-based, trying to find out what could be done or did you have a storyboard?

It wasn’t completely mapped out. We had some images we wanted to find: a few sketched out images like the one of Tara and Jimmy facing each other with the books between their chests. That and the one of them flying out from the stack of books turned out to be practically very difficult. But then there was a bit of task-based improvisation.

We made it specifically for a 60-seconds dance competition, which is held in Scandinavia It’s quite an incredible competition. That was what inspired us to make something so short. Before that we’d always made works of four minutes minimum. It’s quite a challenge to get something that’s poignant and has depth and flow and has a completeness about it and all in 60 seconds.

We won the 60secondsdanse award this year in the Denmark and Sweden sections. It’s extremely satisfying and very humbling as well.

That’s another of our favourites and, again, made with our good friend Jimmy. That was definitely a lot more improvised and shot in a studio, so I got to play with my lights. We had the idea about using paint and the concept itself was born of an actual experience of Jimmy’s. He’d gone through a very difficult break-up and it was essentially based around his process of picking himself back up, as the title suggests.

The flared contrast between hands, the flow of the paint on skin and the fall of the black cloth on the body look digital at first glance.

That’s all for real, actually. There’s nothing added in. Obviously, I’ve edited it quite a lot but there are no added elements. It’s all in-camera.

That’s quite a while ago, in my last year at university, 2014, doing a Bachelor degree in Commercial Photography at RMIT, which was very spread out because I kept having to take time off to travel and learn in that way, which I think is equally important. In the last year I came back and my major project was making the full-length documentary about contemporary dance, Dancing in the Now. It won an award last year. We shot Pick Yourself Up in one of the holiday breaks.

Read a 2015 article in which I respond to Pippa Samaya’s documentary Dancing in the Now and interview Tara Jade Samaya about its making.

Samaya Wives, The Knowledge Between Us, makers Pippa Samaya, Tara Jade Samaya, performers Tara Jade Samaya, James Vu Anh Pham, film Pippa Samaya; An Ubuntu Samaya Production

It’s 1949 in fascist Chile, and the communist poet Pablo Neruda — an excellent performance from Louis Gnecco conveying affection, charm and arrogance — is on the run. He’s pursued by Gael Garcia Bernal’s opportunistic police detective whose near misses at capturing the lazily elusive poet only exaggerates his belief in imminent success, but delusion ensues. Pablo Larrain’s critically acclaimed film is a thoroughly enjoyable, big screen experience, intimately observed and fascinatingly opened out from claustrophobia political and domestic interiors into a snowy landscape that offers freedom, but at the loss of home.

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In a world steeped in cynicism and buffeted by escalating crises, it’s difficult to fantasise peaceful and socially equitable futures. Too Close to the Sun’s The Bluebird Mechanicals [image above] conjures an exquisitely beautiful world, a museum-ish miniature of our own, doomed by hubris to imminent destruction, but blessed with the fertile imaginations of the production’s numerous makers.

The Singapore Art Museum’s After Utopia, about to open as part of Adelaide’s OzAsia Festival, creatively puts speculation back on the agenda at a time when rising inequality is met with growing arguments for a universal basic wage and entrenched homophobia must give way to marriage equality — utopianism by democratic degrees. In our ongoing Arts Education feature we focus on the influence of the Adelaide Central School of Art and on works by five luminous graduate filmmakers — kick off your watching with Michael Candy’s amazing Esther Antenna. Keith & Virginia

As I write, I’m listening to works by Australian composer Lisa Illean. The music is long-lined, indeterminately ambient and its spare layering seemingly simple but quietly gripping in its yield of resonant, sometimes microtonal, complexities. The first work I heard by Illean, Lands End, was performed by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in the first of its twice-yearly contemporary music series at Carriageworks in 2016 under the baton of the SSO’s principal conductor, David Robertson.

Robertson is known internationally as a supporter of new music for orchestra, but not in Australia, where the SSO program is infuriatingly backward looking. The two one-night contemporary offerings annually offered by Robertson and collaborator Brett Dean attract a large, eager audience, just as Sydney Chamber Opera does with new works in lieu of Opera Australia’s unstinting taste for the past.

Although so much smaller in scale than the SSO, and braver than the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Ensemble Offspring offers a more incisive vision, consistent commissioning and engagement with new media and theatrical idioms that an increasing number of composers see as part of their remit. Equality of opportunity figures strongly too, evident in the ensemble’s 2017 program, entirely comprising works by female composers.

The ensemble’s latest concert — Who dreamed it? — features world premiere performances of Cantor by London-based Australian Illean, Half-Open Beings by Taiwanese-born and Australian and New Zealand-raised Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh and Incipio, bibo by Iranian-born Anahita Abbasi. These will be heard alongside Acrostic-Wordplay by Berlin-based South Korean composer Unsuk Chin, a major figure in contemporary music, and the enigmatically titled Everything you own has been taken to a depot somewhere, by radically innovative Irish composer Jennifer Walshe. An 11-strong Ensemble Offspring joined by the wonderfully adventurous, Chicago-based Australian soprano Jessica Aszodi, will be conducted by Roland Peelman.

Illean’s new work Cantor, looks likely to match the concert’s title; not only is there an etherial quality to her compositions, but as she told me, “I have three musical interludes which sit between the [three] songs and have quite a dream-like quality, and slip quite quickly into a very strange sound world and then back out again.” As well as vocal and instrumental components, Cantor includes a variety of sounds from field recordings and radio. Illean writes on the Ensemble Offspring website, “I will be probing the ways in which meaning can be quietly accrued through a piling up of sound scraps — borrowing from Paul Celan’s term ‘hoerreste’ (which one might roughly translate as ‘scraps of heard things’).”

I spoke by phone with the composer who had just arrived from London — where her career is burgeoning — for rehearsals with Aszodi and Ensemble Offspring, for the world premiere of Cantor.

This is the first time I’ve worked with voice. It’s something I find deeply fascinating, the way voice makes and un-makes itself and the way that it’s not entirely fixed. And it’s the way we communicate both with ourselves and with other people. It’s by far the most difficult instrument to write for, because each voice is very particular for a particular person, and it’s their body. So there’s a lot to consider and be sensitive and attentive to — particularly with this piece, which although it’s being performed next week by Jessica, who’s incredible, there’ll also be other singers [Cantor is soon to be performed by ensembles in the Netherlands, Canada, United Kingdom and New Zealand. Eds]. I always had her in mind, but I also wanted to create a piece that when others came to it there was space for them to bring their imagination and their voice and their person to it as well.

When composing Cantor, what were you looking for in the voice, what characteristics?

My main approach in this piece was to think about how porous the voice is, which is something I’ve been observing and experiencing in my own voice, thinking about how different mannerisms and subtle inflections are folded or absorbed into an individual voice. The parts of Cantor are essentially songs, kind of drawing on a very ancient tradition of songs of twilight, something like nocturnes. But I wanted to find a way where I could explore subtlety in the voice, which is something different, to do with subtlety of pitch. The texts for Cantor come from a collection of poetry by American writer Willa Cather and the poems I selected from her April Twilights [1903] are set where she was growing up, which was Nebraska at the end of the 19th century. What I’ve done in an imaginative way, and in no way comprehensively, is to draw on some of the vocal traditions which were brought by a huge wave of transatlantic migration to Nebraska in the 1890s. It’s a way of opening up the possibility for exploring traces of these in the voice.

It’s not mimetic. Some of it is wound into the musical line and into the notation. There’s also an audio file that accompanies the score that opens up an imaginative territory and gives quite a lot of space for the vocalist to find their way through what I’ve put down on the page.

So is the audio file scored into the work? What kinds of things does it include?

It’s not so much scored as including examples of these folk traditions, with me talking about particular aspects and where they relate to things I’ve notated in the score. It’s kind of like having a long conversation with someone. I’m reticent about being too specific about what they are because there’s quite a lot of space for that to change from performer to performer. To give one example, part of this arose out of a quite organic thing from the text as well. There’s one part of a poem which is set at dawn but has these very specific phonemes — a lot of ‘aaah’ sounds. There’s a connection between that use of sounds and a kind of holler [field worker songs. Ed].

It’s more subtle than that; it’s woven throughout the entire line of the work.

It’s quite standard: flutes, alto-flute as well, clarinets, piano, percussion and one of each of the strings — violin, viola, cello, double-bass.

It’s notable in some of your work that you contrast tempered and microtonal tunings. Does that kind of layering occur in this work?

There are definitely microtonal aspects to the work but unlike some of my others, the instruments are largely not specially prepared, if a little on some of the strings. What you might have heard is more to do with the way that I tend to set up very simple lines within each of the instruments so there’s a sort of convergence of quite simple elements but creating a much more complex sonic result.

With the instruments there’s often also an idea that they’ve been coloured by something else. So, for example, in this work, the piano is still very much a piano but within it is an allusion to hammered dulcimer sounds, which I think is a particular characteristic. So each instrument brings its own voice to this sound world.

The works of yours I’ve heard seem fairly long-lined. You said in an interview I read that, atypically, there are sudden shifts in Cantor.

Well, I like how when you have a long line it has its own sense of drama in the way it unfolds and I guess, to use a visual analogy, imagine if you set up a film camera with a fixed gaze and allowed the world to move in front of it. You need a patient eye to watch something like that. Similarly, I think, when you’ve got long [musical] lines it encourages a patient form of listening. I was also interested with this piece in the idea of moving quite quickly into a territory and then snapping out of it. So I have three musical interludes which sit between the songs and have a dream-like quality and slip quite quickly into a very strange sound world and then back out again. I was also interested in sharp shifts between tempo and between rhythmic ideas. So there’s something which starts off sounding like it could be a fragment of a polka but very quickly becomes something much slower and more haunting.

It sounds like it will be quite beautiful. I’m intrigued by the title. A cantor, of course, is a singer but also a leader of singers. Does that relate at all to what you’ve written?

The title came first and when I first spoke to Ensemble Offspring about it, I had a strong image of someone throwing their voice out into the world. In working over the course of a year, on and off, on Cantor and thinking about texts and changing tack a number of ways, I think it’s shifted much more to do with a sense of throwing the voice out and then also of repetition. Obviously, there are a lot of different cantorial styles and one that comes to mind as a good analogy might be the tradition of Gaelic psalm-singing. There’s a cantorial voice and then congregational singing. You get an incredible swarm of responses and a very unusual, haunting sound.

So I started to think more about how it is when you try to respond to a voice. The response contains a kind of almost empathetic mimicry but also [represents] your own voice. Then it shifts into what it is for different traces of voices to find their way into another voice. That’s a line of thought from where Cantor started.

Having created a work for voice that will go on to be sung widely, have you other prospects in store for writing more for voice?

Yes. My next project, which I’ll begin when I get back to London, is for London-based soprano Juliet Fraser. I think that will be quite different in that it definitely won’t be a song-based exploration of voice, but it will be a kind of very deep, collaborative process, making something specifically with her voice in mind and also electronics and moving image. It’s fantastic having thought about voice quite a lot, to immediately be able to keep thinking about it and deepen my idea of how I approach it, working with another person and asking them to use their voice in particular ways, with all the dynamics of that relationship.

Carriageworks & Ensemble Offspring, Who Dreamed It?, soprano Jessica Aszodi, conductor Roland Peelman; Carriageworks, Sydney, 23 Sept

Nestled in the leafy suburb of Adelaide’s Glenside is a not-for-profit private school with a principal aim: to produce visual artists. Founded in 1982 by artist Rod Taylor and led by Ingrid Kellenbach, Adelaide Central School of Art (ACSA) has established itself as an institution of distinction in both teaching practices and student success. I spoke with three generations of graduates about their experience at the school and its enduring impression on their practices: Julia Robinson (Class of 2002), Anna Horne (2008) and Andrew Clarke (2015).

Approaches to teaching and learning that consistently arise at ACSA align with “growth mindset,” a concept developed by US psychologist Carol Dweck (Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, 2007), who suggests the way we approach challenges has an impact on how much we learn from them. Robinson, Clarke and Horne all point to the following as pivotal to their education and their careers since graduating: an intimate and collaborative environment that promotes creativity; the encouragement of experimentation, with the recognition that failure is part of learning; and, to build aptitude, the freedom and flexibility of choice when it comes to method and medium.

Julia Robinson

I meet Julia Robinson in her studio at Switchboard Studios in Norwood, where she works alongside other ACSA alumni and staff including Deborah Prior, Luke Thurgate, Zoe Freney and Jess Mara. She is stitching one of the Elizabethan era garments that cloak the sculptural gourds of her recent work. Robinson is best known for meticulously constructed works of art that reflect a history of ritual and religion across culture, time and place. Her work stems from an enduring interest in human responses to sex, death and the afterlife and she draws inspiration from a multitude of sources including myth and legend, poetry, the Bible and European folklore.

Since graduating from Adelaide Central in 2002, Robinson has been positioned at the forefront of Adelaide’s contemporary art scene, while gaining national acclaim. Already this year she has featured in a major exhibition, Versus Rodin: Bodies across space and time at the Art Gallery of South Australia, and a solo exhibition, Long Ballads, at Artspace’s Ideas Platform, Sydney. She is currently working towards the upcoming Tamworth Textile Triennial. Robinson’s conceptually and materially ambitious approach to art making is evident in her output. She attributes this to ACSA, proposing that her education afforded her “a strong framework for a rigorous practice.”

The school forms a significant part of Robinson’s life and practice, as both a former student and current lecturer. For her, “[ACSA] offers a strong sense of reality in regards to the life of an artist.” The diverse yet tight-knit community, the encouragement of critical thinking and verbalisation of ideas and the dynamic multidisciplinary approach by the teaching staff are, she says, defining elements of the school. The significance of being active in the wider arts community becomes evident to the students through the school’s dedication to employing practising artists as lecturers and supervisors. Seeing her teachers at work on site between classes and visiting their exhibitions at major institutions helped shape Robinson’s understanding of the ways to sustain a life in the field and aided in her motivation towards her own making under their direction.

A resistance to labelling was also important for Robinson, who was encouraged to relax a self-imposed definition of herself as a “painter” and embrace a broader approach to making. “I was creating these elaborate sewn sculptures but still identifying myself as a painting major on my enrolment form,” she says. “When Anna Platten, my supervisor, suggested I didn’t need to label myself that way, it was a freeing moment.”

Robinson says that ACSA has a strong reputation for building technical skill as the cornerstone of an artist’s practice. However, the school is also keenly focused on conceptual thinking, operating under the premise of the artist “thinking through making.” Since 2004, Robinson has helped build upon this dynamic firsthand through her involvement in the development of ACSA‘s Contemporary Studio Practice curriculum.

Anna Horne

Fellow graduate Anna Horne is an artist exploring materiality and process through sculpture. Her practice plays with balance and the force of gravity and focuses on the interplay between the familiar and the strange. Horne’s forms exist in a precarious state, possessing both an intense physicality and a latent energy: they are at once soft and hard, light and heavy.

In the artist’s studio, Horne gives herself over to the process of making. She works on multiple sculptures at once, allowing the forms to shape her direction. Industrial techniques such as fabricators are relied upon sparingly as Horne prefers to use her own hands in a manner that, she tells me, allows for a “certain amount of individuality and emotion to find its way into the work.” This process of repetition with subtle variation began during her time at the ACSA under the supervision of artist Roy Ananda, who promoted experimentation, autonomy in problem-solving and the creation of a visual language that was truly her own. “[Ananda] helped me tease out my personal process”, says Horne. “Nearly 10 years later, I still tap into ways of making that feel familiar from my time at ACSA”.

Much like Robinson, the shared studio has been critical for Horne. Along with fellow ACSA affiliates Amy Joy Watson, Mary-Jean Richardson and Roy Ananda, she shares a space at Fontanelle studios, now located across Port Adelaide and Bowden sites. Here, the artists continue the community experience of art school, sharing and talking through ideas and approaches. This environment naturally lends itself to collaboration, as evidenced in Horne and Watson’s 2017 exhibition in Adelaide’s Art Pod gallery, The Collaborators, curated by ACSA supervisor Andrew Purvis.

Horne has exhibited frequently since graduating. This year she has shown a body of work titled A Balancing Act at Greenaway Art Gallery and participated in the group exhibition Soft Spot, Hard Feelings at the artist-run Holy Rollers Studios, both in Adelaide. In 2016 Horne undertook an Asialink residency in South Korea, culminating in the exhibition Between the Lines at Gachang Art Space. The artist says that she owes her diligent work ethic to ACSA. The training taught her to be determined, stay focused and to make, exhibit and apply for as much as possible.

Andrew Clarke

2017 has been a similarly prolific year for 2015 alumnus Andrew Clarke. He has exhibited at BMG Art and Hill Smith Gallery in Adelaide and continues to operate Floating Goose Studios Inc, a studio and gallery space he founded in 2014 with fellow graduates Chris Carapetis and Leah Craig. Clarke creates large-scale figurative paintings that re-investigate the historical phenomenon of the grand narrative. Making use of a hybrid gestural language derived from a multiplicity of sources including the commedia dell’arte, baroque and 19th century French history painting, Clarke presents circumstances in which the characters performing the history become cognisant of their involvement in a fiction, subsequently acknowledging the audience and at times suffering existential crises.

Hearing of the school’s focus on technical skills, Clarke enrolled at ACSA with a keen interest in drawing and painting. He did not anticipate the intellectual rigour with which he would learn to approach his medium. “Drawing became a mechanical function, a universal system that anyone can learn to use. Once equipped with this skillset, we were taught how to operate that function on an intellectual level,” says Clarke. “We were encouraged to look at drawing as proposition, as poetry and as a form of language.” This approach was evidenced in the recent exhibition, The Drawing Exchange, curated by ACSA drawing lecturer Luke Thurgate and held across Adelaide Central School and the National Art School, Sydney. The exchange saw student and lecturer alike experiment with drawing next to each other in the space and across the spaces via the internet.

The focus on propositional works and the ability to verbalise ideas with his peers has been key to Clarke’s life as an artist beyond art school. “The critique process set me up for self-criticism and idea generation. I began to call my own ideas into question and learnt not to run with the first idea but to delve in deeper and to find complexity.” Positioning himself within a history of art was another revelation. “We were learning art history and practicing art history at the same time — learning divine proportion while measuring boxes with a stick; learning about Modernism while experimenting with Expressionist painting; learning about conceptual art while building a thoroughly conceptual practice”.

The growth mindset is about fostering a way of thinking that allows for constant development. For Robinson, Horne and Clarke, this came in the form of being thrown into a space where lecturers and peers alike were experimenting, problem-solving and proposing ideas. As Julia Robinson says, “you have to be a bit of a romantic to be an artist” and at Adelaide Central School of Art, students are with others of the same mind.

Joanna Kitto is Curatorial Researcher at the University of South Australia’s Samstag Museum of Art. She is co-founder and co-editor of fine print magazine.

Top image credit: Long Ballads, 2017, Julia Robinson, installation view, Ideas Platform, Artspace, Sydney, photo: Jessica Maurer.

Soft Centre, a new, big, bold 12-hour festival of electronic music programmed by Jemma Cole, Thorsten Hertog and Sam Whiteside has added depth and scale with light works commissioned by Whiteside and collaborations between musicians and performance artists curated by Alice Joel at the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre in Sydney’s west.

A Made Up Sound, from the Netherlands, Brooklyn’s Via App and Australian artists Jasmin Guffond, hndsm/Louis McCoy, Harold, Makeda and Lawrence English are some of the experimental electronic musicians who will be performing in Soft Centre. As well, Jannah Quill and waterhouse will collaborate with performance artists while groups phile and Divide and Dissolve will play as one.

The festival draws together a wide range of experimental, queer, underground and politically conscious artists and promises to transform the building’s interior with “the extremities of electronic music” (press release) and rare works of scale. I spoke by phone with Alice Joel about her curation of the collaborative performances.

The Soft Centre team booked the music and DJ line-up and then gave me free rein to choose four artists from the line-up and curate collaborations between each of them with artists from other fields.

I originally built sets and props for film and TV but got a bit disillusioned and started building things for live events in both galleries and music festivals. It’s always been about facilitating and building for artists, be it performance artists or dance troupes or DJs and I guess doing this for Soft Centre is the next logical step towards not just building spaces for artists but more about curating them into each other’s spaces, so to speak.

That’s a fairly exciting development for you, I imagine, bringing the artist out in you.

I have a vision about who might successfully collaborate with who, who can vibe off each other, whose practices complement each other and now it’s about facilitating whatever resources and ideas that they need. So I’m less of an artist and more of a producer, but definitely needing that bigger vision to see where everyone slots in and how it works in this unique space — Casula Powerhouse is so beautiful.

Sam Whiteside, who’s one of the directors of Soft Centre, has booked three light installation artists. So that’s a whole other element for all the artists to work within as well. There are so many variables.

Let’s talk about the House of Vnholy who will stage a performance with the live music of waterhouse. What prompted you to put those two together?

Most of the other artists I have a bit of a relationship with, but these two, both Melbourne-based, I’ve never met. It was really a leap of faith in terms of whether they could collaborate, because it’s not just about concepts of work, it’s also about personalities and working styles.

I had listened to everybody on the Soft Centre line-up. I listened to waterhouse (Jade Foster) and I was really familiar from Dark MOFO with the work of Matt Adey, the creative director of House of Vnholy. Even at a distance I could see that there were some things that definitely connected. Both are really occupied with rituals, with epic myths and with the Gothic. You can really feel that in waterhouse’s work. I had a feeling she might be up for a collab because she has a lot of accompanying visual material with her tracks online. I got in touch with Matt and he jumped at the chance. They had a few preliminary conversations and got along really well. Of all the collaborations they spent the most time in conceptual territory. Their relationship with Greek mythology will interpreted through music, dance, props and light, which is Matt’s forte. It’ll be a very striking and a quite still performance.

In the main Turbine Hall, the biggest space at Casula. In so many raves or music events, the visual focus is so much on the front stage, whereas, particularly with waterhouse and House of Vnholy, we’re putting collaborations on a raised platform in the centre of the room to play with and distort the sense of the venue. The eyes of the audience will be drawn all over the space. It’ll re-address what it means to be at a gig. Matt and Jade are really playing with that.

The musician SIMONA is collaborating with Adonis and Beau Kirq in a performance described in the festival’s press release in terms of “The Dames of Dungeon Kink and two Cyber Goth Queens armed with boxing gloves.” Tell me about it.

SIMONA (Simona Castricum), Adonis (video, photo and performance artist Anastasia Zaravinos) and Beau Kirq are champions of queer underground culture — techno, party, kink and fetish culture. SIMONA is the DJ but she also does a lot of live drumming so Adonis and Beau will take their cue from her heavy beat in a very jarring, very physical performance.

Hossein Ghaemi, an artist who makes remarkable costumes, and his choir are collaborating with musician Jannah Quill.

Jannah‘s a DJ and a noise artist. Hossein has 10 dancers and 10 singers he’s costumed and has created a choral arrangement with Jannah who’ll be providing a techno soundscape for the collaboration. I’ve watched the work come to life over the past couple of days and it’s really incredible. Hossein is larger than life, crossing the line into very theatrical territory which, I think is pretty unique in a techno or electronic music festival space. There’s a real sense of play and scale and colour and light. It’s very joyful.

Tell me about phile’s collaboration with Divide and Dissolve, an unusual combination.

Divide and Dissolve [Takiaya Reed, guitar, saxophone; Sylvie Nehill, drums] are an incredible punk doom band who spend their time between San Francisco and Melbourne. They’re collaborating with phile [Hannah Lockwood, musician, producer; Gareth Psaltis, electronic musician, DJ] from Sydney. They’re very different music acts and will be creating a whole new sound together. We’ve scheduled them for five days of rehearsal. Divide and Dissolve are incredibly politically charged. Their whole thing is black supremacy as a response to white supremacy, but with black supremacy being a message of hope and reclamation for minorities and Indigenous peoples all over the world. Their performance will be very politically charged and, I think, a sombre moment in the festival. It will be less about the light and the space and a lot more about creating walls of sound that might be quite confronting for an audience, more a moment for reflection rather than partying.

Let’s talk about the light works commissioned for Soft Centre. Meagan Streader is one of the artists and has created some remarkable sculptural, installation and site specific light works over the years.

There are three light installations. The two by Sam Whiteside and Hyper Reelist [Jobe Williams] act as stages, not traditional stages but using the industrial interior of Casula to create really immersive light spaces. Meagan’s work will be installed in a wholly discrete, immersive space between the stages where people can be quiet and contemplate where they are.

Hyper Reelist is playing with the height of the space with light helixes that twist down and around the artists playing on one of the smaller stages, really connecting the audience with the players, erasing the line between them. Sam has built a giant six by four metre illuminated scaffold, very industrial and illuminated with white LED lights and strobes. It’ll be in the Turbine Hall with a lot of the DJs working from it.

What’s important to you and the Soft Centre team about the way you’ve worked with your collaborating artists?

It’s about giving them space to do whatever they want. They have full autonomy over their sets and what kind of noise they want to make and the space they want to take up. None of us is really 100% sure how this collection of live acts is going to pan out and that’s part of the allure.

Let’s hope it’s the first of many more such events. It could be a great template.

Obviously “soft centre” evokes “softcore,” in opposition to “hardcore,” but was there a more particular reason for the naming of the festival?

This is co-director Thorsten’s explanation: “I guess it’s kind of tongue in cheek. We push what most people would call ‘hard’, ‘challenging’ music and experimental performance/light art, which usually exist on the fringes because they aren’t easily digestible or don’t fit politically polite norms. But our community finds solace and peace within that. Spaces that champion the strange, murky and ‘hard’ are inviting, inclusive — it’s our ‘soft spot.’ I also think about lava cakes and how you have to dig to get to the delicious, gooey centre. The good stuff isn’t found on the surface, it isn’t always visible, you only find it if you dig.”

Yes, ticket sales are great. I think people are excited about the venue, about being out in Liverpool and Casula, which is a really beautiful area, and I think they’re excited about a gig that’s not only 12 hours, but really, really immersive.

Top image credit: Sylvie Nehill, Takiaya Reed (Divide and Dissolve), photo courtesy the artists

The P J Kool images were made while the late Congolese musician Passi Jo was undergoing treatment for cancer at St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, his adopted home. Passi Jo’s Congolese heritage, his affinity for dressing well and the unfortunate circumstances that necessitated him virtually living in his pyjamas for most of 2016, gave rise to this unique project.

We collaborated to create a series of playful images referencing La Sape, a sub-cultural movement that Passi Jo was a part of in his homeland and in Paris. Having been embraced by the Congolese community via marriage, it provided me, as his wife, with an opportunity to highlight this ‘cloth’ movement. Followed mostly by urban men, it is little-known locally but representative of many in the Congolese community in Australia and abroad.

La Sape is an acronym for the Society for the Advancement of People of Elegance, from the French La Societé des Ambienceurs et des Personnes Elégantes — those who create ambience, the atmosphere-makers. Passi Jo grew up in the Bacongo district of Brazzaville, Republic of Congo, “the true birthplace of Sape, the religion of style” (Daniele Tamagni, Gentlemen of Bacongo, 2009).

The movement spread across the Congo River to Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC, formerly Zaire) and was closely aligned with the Congolese music scene, especially in the 1970s and 80s. Sapeurs work hard to save their earnings so they can dress resplendently in expensive designer attire. This allows them to rise above the harsh daily reality of political, social and economic upheaval from years of civil war and oppression. They don the uniform of the international fashionistas in order to survive and feel inspired.

In this spirit, Passi Jo rose from his hospital bed and dressed for the camera to reconnect with and celebrate his culture, and be transported from a life defined by cancer to one of feeling the joy, style and swagger of living again. P J Kool showcases Passi Jo styled-up in checked and somewhat irreverent, politically incorrect pyjamas with affordable K-Mart and Target labels and price tags. Rather than being bed-rumpled, they were well-pressed and accessorised with sunglasses, walking sticks, hats and other flamboyant accoutrements not usually associated with sleepwear, but essential to complete the Sapeur look.

Because the pyjamas have the initial appearance of many of the expensive colourfully patterned designer suits worn by the Sapeurs, the images are imbued with a lightness of touch and subtle irony. It is a gentle humour, seeking the attention of audiences with a wish to extend engagement between and within the myriad cultural threads that make up Australia’s “kitendi,” a word meaning fabric in Lingala, a Bantu language of the Congo.

Participating in the creation of these photographs enabled Passi Jo to share his culture with the hospital staff and other patients. Like the Sapeurs, he created atmosphere, ambience and colour in an often confronting and emotionally fraught medical environment. Though the images were carefully planned, they embody a more organic photographic process common to my work as an independent documenter of live performance, and as the rehearsal photographer with the Melbourne Theatre Company for 15 years. We both felt the strong performative element revealed Passi Jo’s vulnerability as well as his strength under exceptionally distressing circumstances.

They are a true testament to his mental discipline and courage as he faced increasing physical fragility, and to a life dedicated to the arts of music, performance and personal style.

The P J Kool exhibition aligns creativity for both the subject, Passi Jo, and myself as the photographer. It combines illness and creative practice, highlighting the crucial role the arts can play in health and wellbeing, disease and illness. It’s an area of increasing interest for me as an artist, ripe with opportunities for others across the creative spectrum, but particularly in music, and greatly deserving of ongoing and sustained levels of funding and support.

This exhibition is dedicated to the life and work of a complex man, a devotee of Congolese Rumba and Latin rhythms, a born soukous star who lived to sing and perform, radiating joy globally on stage and in his recordings. Just like La Sape, Passi Jo was full of “contradictions and paradoxes.”

This essay by Melbourne artist, photographer and lecturer Pam Kleemann-Passi comes from the catalogue accompanying her exhibition of photographs and memorabilia, P J Kool — Dissecting Culture, Cancer and Cloth which she collaborated on with her partner, the late Passi Jo.

For more about the project and Sapeur culture, download the catalogue and visit the exhibition.

Top image credit: P J Kool: Fear No Evil, Seek No Evil… photo Pam Kleemann-Passi (Background painting: Candy Street, Bruce Earles, from the St Vincent’s Hospital Collection)

In the half-millennium since Thomas More wrote Utopia (1516), a political commentary that considered the characteristics of a fictional republic located on an island, “utopia” has come to mean an idealised state. Our ostensibly post-ideological world, beset by overpopulation, violent conflict, mass refugee movements and climate change seems a long way from any kind of utopian ideal.

In Singapore’s golden jubilee year of 2015, the exhibition After Utopia: Revisiting the Ideal in Asian Contemporary Art came at a time of reflection on Singapore’s development as a nation over the preceding half century. The Singapore Art Museum is developing an exemplary collection of Southeast Asian art, in which participating artists come from across the region. Works in After Utopia are from the museum’s collection, exhibited alongside new commissions.

Rather than benchmarching the current state of the world against More’s fictional state, the exhibition is grouped into sections based around broad parameters as outlined in the museum’s exhibition guide: “Other Edens,” which surveys the ideal as paradisal garden; “The City and its Discontents,” which considers the urban ideal and a failure to achieve it; “Legacies Left,” which looks at the aftermath of 20^th century ideologically driven social planning and nation building; and “The Way Within,” which concerns our psychology, an inner utopia. OzAsia 2017 will present a selection of works from this 2015 exhibition.

Perhaps the exhibition’s most dramatic work is Filipino artist Kawayan De Guia’s Bomba (2011), comprising 18 mirror balls in the shape of falling bombs — mirror bombs — suspended above viewers’ heads like Damoclean swords, reflecting the fragility of peace and of civilisation itself. This work is newly relevant to the current drama unfolding on the Korean Peninsula and to terrorist bombings in venues such as concert halls. The exhibition guide indicates that “the Tagalog word ‘bomba’ broadly translates as ‘exposed’ and ‘naked,’ stripping bare the true intentions that lie beneath the grandiose words of politicians and world leaders.” Death lurks behind society’s glittering surfaces.

In “The Way Within” section of the exhibition, Cambodian artist Svay Sareth’s Mon Boulet (2011) comprises a video and an 80 kg metal sphere. Drawing attention to the desperate plight of refugees, the former war refugee documents his six-day performance in which he dragged the object from his home in Siem Reap to Phnom Penh.

In “The Other Edens,” Filipina Geraldine Javier’s Ella Amo Apasionadamente y Fue Correspondida (For She Loved Fiercely, and She is Well-Loved) (2010) is a painting with assemblage — framed insets of embroidery and preserved butterflies — as if the work is itself a preserved garden, with a female figure, suggesting Eve or possibly a gardener, a naturalist or even the Madonna, pensively examining two young birds. It may be that, as the world’s human population expands and engulfs the planet, gardens and preserved specimens will be all that is left to remind us of nature. The painting is a self-portrait by the artist, suggesting the difficulties encountered by the female artist in the Philippines, and perhaps positioning women as the thoughtful guardians of nature.

“The City and its Discontents” is represented by two artists working with video. Malaysian Chris Chong Chan Fui’s video Block B (2012 -2014) observes city life in the form of high density urban dwellings in Kuala Lumpur that are home to heterogeneous social groups. Shannon Lee Castleman’s Jurong West Street 81 (2008; see an excerpt) is a multi-screen video installation that depicts residents in apartment blocks in Singapore videoing each other’s daily activities and then discussing the process over a meal. It’s a relational artwork that promotes community interaction. As well as revealing the nature of apartment living (80% of Singaporeans live in such apartments), Castleman’s work reflects on the wider issue of privacy subjected to surveillance and voyeurism.

In “Legacies Left,” the Vietnamese-American collective Propeller Group’s Television Commercial for Communism (2011-12) is a multi-channel video installation that reveals how a high-profile advertising agency (the one behind Apple’s “Think different” campaign) quite seriously develops a TV commercial to rebrand and advocate communism. In the process, the makers discuss the criteria for a communist society and how an advertisement might be designed to counteract negative perceptions of a contentious ideology.

These works starkly contrast with Singaporean Ian Woo’s We Have Crossed the Lake (2009) a painting that suggests the lush foliage of a verdant garden in which we might wish to live. Grouped under “Other Edens,” it is an abstraction rather than a representation, as is the concept of utopia.

After Utopia is an eloquent exhibition that draws attention not only to our failure to achieve utopian ideals but also to the Singapore Art Museum’s philosophy of collection which, with this exhibition, indicates growing self-reflection in the region. OzAsia’s audience will be invited to consider the criteria for an ideal society, how well Australia meets them and how they connect us with Southeast Asia. The need for critical self-evaluation has never been greater.

Chris Reid visited the Singapore Art Museum courtesy of Culturelink and the Adelaide Festival Centre.

Top image credit: Mon Boulet, 2011, Svay Sareth, After Utopia, photo courtesy the artist and OzAsia 2017

Depending on your vantage point, watching for the next wave of bold voices in cinema before it crests is dizzying; there’s no single, let alone assured, pathway towards making films in this or any country. What this collection of young, up-and-coming Australian filmmakers shows is that the path into the cinema industry is peripatetic. One filmmaker attended art school, one studied industrial design, one completed a media and communications course in their undergraduate study, one attended a dance college and one did a postgraduate course at an esteemed film school. Their point of unity is their mastery of the short film format. In the breadth and depth of their talent, and in coming to filmmaking from different sensibilities, they are less concerned with conventional ways of making short films than in finding new ways to speak to audiences in diverse cinematic languages. Here, we share excerpts and short films by five artists exciting us with distinctly zigzagging approaches into filmmaking.

Anya Beyersdorf, Gayby (2014)

Education pathway: Masters of Arts (Film and Digital Image), Sydney College of the Arts (2015)

For too long, Tropfest has come to define a particular genre of short filmmaking: though it’s often called the world’s most famous and prestigious festival dedicated to short films, a reliable blueprint has emerged, in which shortlisted works’ comedic conceits are resolved in a single punchline revealed in the film’s final moment. In 2014, Sydney filmmaker Anya Beyersdorf broke the mould with her shortlisted film Gayby. In the context of the Australian film industry, which presently favours neatly defined commercial genres, Beyersdorf has a nonconformist approach to storytelling, integrating moments of magical realism into everyday locales. Often her films’ premises are founded in a real-world situation — in Gayby, a young boy at school bullied for being part of a queer family — which progresses into a dreamworld as the films grow increasingly whimsical and fantastical.

After Tropfest, Gayby was subsequently selected for St Kilda Film Festival, Rhode Island Film Festival and Palm Springs International Shorts Fest. Following her inclusion in this year’s Sydney Film Festival’s Lexus Short Film Fellowship, Beyersdorf’s next project is writing a feature and a short film for Bluetongue films, with Nash Edgerton and Jan Chapman producing.

Brooke Goldfinch, Red Rover (2015)

Education pathway: Bachelor of Arts (Media and Communications), University of New South Wales, and postgraduate study at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (2014)

Sydney writer and director Brooke Goldfinch’s Red Rover was made in 2015, but as a spooky end-of-days drama, it feels more attuned with the atmosphere of 2017 than could have been predicted. Red Rover zooms us into the society of two teen lovers who escape the cocoon of an American religious cult to find a world on the brink of apocalypse. A former journalist, Goldfinch’s skill is in creating and bringing us into very full and lucid storyworlds that connect a particular time and place with a character’s inner world, with a minimum of exposition and dialogue — which might be precisely what good cinema is all about.

The film won the Rouben Mamoulian Award for Best Director at the 2015 Sydney Film Festival’s Dendy Awards. After graduating from NYU’s prestigious graduate film program at Tisch School of the Arts, Goldfinch shadowed Ridley Scott last year as director’s attachment on Alien: Covenant, and her most recent short is Outbreak Generation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXrPPcjTb9E, which played this year’s SFF Lexus Short Film Fellowship.

Lucy Gaffy, The Fence (2014)

Education pathway: Masters of Directing, Australian Film Television and Radio School (2012)

In this short 2014 film, AFTRS graduate Lucy Gaffy seizes on the moment in Australian history when mandatory detention was introduced. Shot from the perspective of Cambodian immigrants living in detention and working at a local factory, we see razor wire unfurl around them and their lives change accordingly: policy become personal. The success of The Fence is that it doesn’t manifest as a social issue documentary, but rather as an intimate, personal portrait of those stuck in the increasingly unbridgeable gap between detention and the outside world. The film has a strongly experiential quality that allows it to cut through macro issues of political rhetoric with a micro-level attention to the character subjectivity of migrant detainees. With few subtitles and a structure that slips forward and back in time, the film plunges us into a world in which old and new traumas are constantly thrown together.

The Fence won Gaffy her second Directors Guild nomination and went on to premiere at the prestigious Busan International Film Festival in South Korea. Gaffy has since been awarded Hot Shots funding through Screen Australia for her proof of concept short Dream Baby.

Perun Bonser, Blight (2017), excerpt

Western Australian writer and director Perun Bonser’s Blight is a supernatural outback crime/Western about black trackers uniting in solidarity against white police, and to my mind it’s one of the most interesting short Australian films of recent years. With a background and an education in dance, Bonser brings an astute understanding of space, place and his character’s presence within them and a context of films that explore Indigenous themes. It’s this Indigenous cultural knowledge that enables Bonser to subvert the conventions of the Western.

Bonser told RealTime that “the film is partly inspired by the many Indigenous warriors in Australia and the common belief that they were in possession of supernatural powers (maban), powers [such as metamorphosis] that made them impervious to injury. I’m a big fan of genre (horror, action, etc) and surreal Australiana (Picnic at Hanging Rock, Wake in Fright). I really want to utilise Indigenous mythology and spirituality in film to tell idiosyncratic Australian stories, inclining to the contemporary. I think Australia is rich in cultural resources, it’s a shame [they’re] not further utilised.” Blight was produced within Screen Australia and ABC’s Pitch Black short film initiative. We eagerly await the next movement in Bonser’s filmmaking trajectory.

Michael Candy, Ether Antenna (2017), trailer

Education pathway: Bachelor of Fine Arts & Industrial Design, Queensland University of Technology (2013)

Though it showed at Melbourne artist-run gallery, Bus Projects, earlier this year, Michael Candy’s Ether Antenna departs from the norms of video art in that it reaches toward narrative: its plot trajectory is undoubtedly odd but present, unfolding as a series of chapters in the life of 10 robots wandering around a peopleless Nepalese landscape. It’s a nimble and witty film that creates a world at the juncture of industry and ecology, roboticism and mysticism; like all the best science-fiction films about artificial intelligence, the robots have souls, but Candy’s are Buddhist and collected by an angel.

Drawing on Eastern philosophy and populated with bipedal, wheeled creatures built by Candy himself and journeying from a pure spring to a polluted riverbank, Ether Antenna is as experimental and wonderful as anything we’ve seen in any cinema this year, and its central character as engaging and empathetic as any Pixar creation. Having completed the film on residency at the Robotics Association of Nepal, Candy told RealTime that “there’s a lot of Nepali text in the film, as it was intended to be a Nepali film. Yet there’s only one scene with dialogue. What happens is one robot says, ‘What is this?’ and the other says, ‘I don’t know.’”

As for the overt layers of symbolism embedded throughout, Candy says that the “film itself is in three parts, [and] each chapter is divided by a solar powered prayer wheel within the chapter’s environment. Chapter one has the prayer wheel rotating clockwise, as all pilgrimages are completed with the gods on your right side…In the second chapter, everything is going wrong, thus the wheel is rotating backwards, and by the final chapter the wheel stands still as it rotates its body around itself since this chapter is set somewhere in the afterlife.”

Michael Candy continues to use industrial technologies to communicate ideas about ecology and spirituality in moving images: his website is a trove of thoughtful, accessible short videos and films combining low-tech inventiveness with intellectual curiosity and deep compassion, and suggesting new possibilities for filmmaking originating within contemporary art.

An addendum to a Chekhov play melds with the last moments of the Hindenburg airship and the inner psyche of windup birds to cumulatively explore the winddown of the world in The Bluebird Mechanicals.

Writer and performer Talya Rubin opens by pouring water into a glass diorama containing a toy writer at his toy desk. The tiny figure at a typewriter is trapped, immersed. This drowning-in-miniature is projected live on stage, a small tragedy broadcast and made grand in scale.

Rubin then weaves her way through the audience, asks if we’ve ever seen a Chekhov play, perhaps even a bad one — The Seagull, at school, she suggests, with a knowing nod. In any case, she’s about to rewrite the ending.

It transpires that the playwright Konstantin in The Seagull, troubled by his unrequited love for Nina, an ambitious actress who rejects him for a more successful writer, has written a play about extinction. Rubin and her collective Too Close to the Sun take up the Chekhovian narrative after Konstantin’s suicide. We are privy to imagined exchanges between the jilted writer and his ex-girlfriend, the makeup conversations that lovers Nina and Konstantin didn’t get to have. Rubin as Nina, like the submerged writer, inhabits a life-sized glass cabinet for these scenes. In this living diorama she is visited by a ghost, pursued by an owl and rows with the dead playwright on the lake that was central to their relationship. There is, in the end, with Nina’s drowning in the lake, a sort of watery transcendence compared with Konstantin’s offstage death in Chekhov’s play. At the same time The Bluebird Mechanicals offers Konstantin a voice beyond the grave, and more depth to the pair’s relationship.

In between these scenes, Rubin confides that she’s had a dream about the ill-fated Hindenburg, the famous airship disaster of 1937. She can’t shake the idea that she has been destined to make a show about it. She transforms into a cynical and snarly Hindenburg tour guide, treats us to a slideshow of the attractions offered by the luxury blimp and suggests a glass of sherry, perhaps to sedate us as we hurtle towards oblivion.

It’s the toy bluebirds in the production that steal the spotlight when brought to life by Rubin. She listens, allows them to speak, and as their voices emerge — one is a fatalist while another is almost inanely positive — so too do their opinions on climate change. Bird brains they are not and though struggling with human speech they indicate humanity is “too stupid” or in too much denial to acknowledge that it is going down with the ship. The icebergs are melting, the waters are rising and we come to understand that we, collectively, are the Hindenburg, an overinflated folly headed for disaster. Diversions like off-blimp excursions and luxuries like crystal stemware will not save us, not then and not now.

And so The Bluebird Mechanicals unfolds, its imagery and layers of meaning interwoven and patterned as intricately as forms found in nature, like a school of fish or a flock of birds. The wunderkammer as linking device is well realised; the scenes are all animated from the inanimate — dioramas composed of lush landscapes and taxidermy or toys, miniatures and symbols of the natural world that together form a wunderkammer across the stage.

The work flickers between the Chekhov, the Hindenburg and the birds towards an inevitable end. The vignettes are like shooting stars, each a luminescent moment in the dark. Sometimes though, these are over too quickly and we are left waiting in blackout while the set is adjusted, the transitions clunkily inhibiting the flow.

The joy of this work is felt in the performance and design. There are exquisite moments: a windup bear is set loose in a model forest, complete with powdered snow. This is projected as well, showing us that microcosms and the epic may coexist and suggesting there are always bigger concerns beyond our own. The sound and lighting design are precise and Talya Rubin is a mesmerising artist to watch, even in stillness, slipping uncannily and effortlessly between characters.

There is also a fourth character knitting the threads of this work together, a European woman who lives alone in a vast city and who reminds us of the many ways we have betrayed our planet. She’s a kind of seer, a sage who dares name what we do not. Towards the close, she tells us she had a vision of an urban world cracking open, the figures on the street like toys toppling into a void as the end came. If the Earth was just that, a toy world, then the damage we have done might not feel quite so devastating.

Too Close to the Sun, The Bluebird Mechanicals, writer, co-devisor, performer, visual concept Talya Rubin, co-devisor, director Nick James, sound designer Hayley Forward, lighting designer Richard Vabre, video designer Samuel James, set consultant Corinne Merrell, object/miniature designer Nancy Belzile, object/miniature makers Caitlin Ross, Alizee Millot, set builder, cabinet designer Mark Swartz; Metro Arts, Brisbane, 7-16 Sept

On our recommended arts reading list for the week, smart creative thinkers offer new ways of looking at an increasingly incoherent world: from The Wire creator David Simon’s approach to political storytelling to Jason Di Rosso’s analysis of the figure of the migrant in Australian cinema, to the new Slow Art theory.

A Guardian piece on The Wire creator David Simon’s new project, The Deuce — about the rise of the porn industry in 1970s New York — offers a tour de force on the journalist and television innovator’s analyses on everything from the monetisation of the US presidency to the ways that sex work differs from other forms of labour (in that sex workers sell direct access to their bodies: “flesh is the commodity here”), and the role of storytelling in an increasingly divided and incoherent society:

“Simon is animated by the perpetual struggle between capital and labour and believes that, after the ravages of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and globalisation, and the anti-establishment anger that produced Donald Trump and Brexit, the argument for unions and collective bargaining is as vital as ever…

“‘What I stumbled into seemed to be a ready-made critique of market capitalism, and what happens when labour has no collective voice, and that seemed to be apt for this moment because I think a lot of the lessons of the 20th century are going to have to be learned all over again thanks to Reagan and Thatcher and all the neoliberal and libertarian argument that has come after,’ says Simon, 57, unfailingly intense as he leans forward on a sofa.”

A recent local film has reignited discussion on the figure of the migrant in Australian cinema. Ali’s Wedding is a conventional, feel-good romcom except for one thing: its leads are both Muslims. RN’s Jason Di Rosso penned a sharp piece of analysis on Ali’s Wedding, arguing that in failing to take on the broader context of racism in Australian society, it lies at the more conservative end of the spectrum. The piece offers some fascinating background context to the uncertain place of migrants in local storytelling and a neat counterpoint to Steve Dow’s recent piece on the screen industry’s bleak commercial and creative imagination. Di Rosso writes:

“Australian migrant comedy, with its roots in pantomime and community theatre, has never quite emerged into a cinematic sub-genre in its own right. That said, you recognise it when you see it. There are the first generation characters, who speak in thick accents, sometimes comically misreading the new country, other times offering surprising insights. Then there’s the second generation, who straddle two cultures but are typically beset by an identity crisis.

“At the more radical end of the spectrum — in Paul Fenech’s TV shows like Fat Pizza, for example — the swirling tensions of race, class and generational change never resolve. Chaos reigns and the centre doesn’t hold. At the more conservative end, in films like They’re a Weird Mob [1966], a resolution always beckons. The new country is forgiven for its shortcomings, while the migrant’s arduous journey results in a measure of contentment. The Australian romantic comedy Ali’s Wedding sits in this latter category, and it has something significant to say.”

“The term ‘Slow Art’ may be a contemporary coinage, but Reed sees a prehistory to the idea. ‘At first I assumed that Slow Art was ahistorical — that it was what happened whenever the beholder and the beheld meshed,’ he explained. ‘I realized over time that, in fact, Slow Art is historical. It’s a product of modernity.’

“In essence, there was no Slow Art before about 250 years ago, because life was just slow in general. Reed argues that as capitalism and urbanisation sped up the tempo of civilization, and Enlightenment secularization stripped away forms of devotional practice that were experienced in church, the church-like experience of art took on a new, consoling function as a way to step outside of the breakneck pace of life.”

Two highly experienced performers, Rakini Devi, studying at the University of Wollongong, and Steve Matthews at the University of Sydney, are well on their way to completing doctor of creative arts degrees. They tell us what motivated them to deepen their practices with intensive research, reflection on their art and the making of new works. The demands on them have been considerable and often isolating but have been met with determination and joy. That universities can provide artists with time, space and intellectual challenges that sustain, extend and revitalise practices is more than simply laudable; it connects the academy palpably with the arts community and the broader culture as artists take their findings to fellow practitioners and audiences. Also in this edition, don’t miss a witty and disorientingly engaging video that takes you out on the road — Runtime by Laura Hindmarsh (one of the MCA’s 2017 Primavera artists). Keith & Virginia

The past is ever present in Sera Davies’ new documentary Namatjira Project, its tragedy haunting the frame, its possibilities opening up the future. In the film’s first moments, grainy images of Indigenous artist Albert Namatjira’s funeral in 1959 are intercut with scenes from a contemporary stage play, Namatjira (2010), celebrating his life. This moving film is the result of an eight-year collaboration between the arts and social change organisation Big hART and Namatjira’s descendants. It is also the story of a meeting between black and white cultures that is inspiring in its potential, even as it is coloured by an all too familiar Australian tale of exploitation.

At the heart of the film are two friendships. The first, between the artist Albert Namatjira and his mentor Rex Battarbee, is evoked through archival footage and voice recordings of the pair. Battarbee, a World War I veteran, severely wounded and traumatised by his experiences in France, embarked on a series of extended tours in outback Australia during the 1930s, looking for landscapes to paint. Namatjira encountered Battarbee’s work in 1934, when the artist exhibited in the remote Northern Territory town of Hermannsburg (Ntaria). Two years later, Battarbee returned and took several trips into the surrounding desert with Namatjira, teaching him the basics of oil painting. It was the only training Namatjira ever received, yet by the late 1930s, with Battarbee’s help, his extraordinary landscapes were being exhibited and sold in Australia’s major cities. Namatjira achieved considerable fame, met the Queen and was the first Indigenous person “granted” Australian citizenship — an “honour” the artist unsurprisingly regarded with ambivalence.

The astoundingly frank racism of the era is shown in a newsreel detailing Namatjira’s visit to Sydney’s Taronga Zoo at the height of his fame in the 1950s. The presence of “a full-blooded native,” the newsreel narration proclaims, provoked a clear reaction in the animals — “especially the apes” who recognised a fellow “descendent of the jungle.” Despite such widespread attitudes in Australia at the time, Namatjira and Battarbee remained close friends until the former’s death in 1959.

Between these sounds and images of the past, the documentary traces the development of the contemporary Namatjira stage production by the writer-director Scott Rankin and Indigenous performer Trevor Jamieson, working with Namatjira’s family. The intimate artistic partnership between Rankin and Jamieson neatly mirrors the friendship between Namatjira and Battarbee, illustrating the wondrous possibilities generated when individuals from different cultures open their hearts, minds and knowledge to one another.

This is no simplistic feelgood yarn. Davies’ film is frank about how fraught the meeting of black and white cultures can be, and how difficult it is for even the warmest friendships to transcend the power imbalances and institutional racism woven into Australian life. The entire Namatjira Project — encompassing the stage work and film — has been driven by the desire of the artist’s descendants to regain control of Namatjira’s work. Despite copyright on his paintings being bestowed by Namatjira to his family in his will, the Northern Territory Public Trustee sold these rights to the Sydney-based Legend Press in 1983, for just $8,500. This single transaction has left Namatjira’s family in dire poverty, while the artist’s estate has generated millions of dollars.

The collaborations around the creation of the Namatjira stage production portrayed in Davies’ documentary are also difficult, informed as they are by the copyright controversy, the wider history of Indigenous dispossession and complex politics within the Aboriginal community. One of Namatjira’s relatives, for example, expresses disquiet to camera about Trevor Jamieson playing the artist, feeling that the actor comes from the wrong cultural background. Davies’ camera also captures the tense discussions with Namatjira’s relatives about the representation of the artist’s final years, during which he endured the pressure of having to support 600 members of his extended family. Clearly, the fruits of cross-cultural collaboration are potentially rich, but the process requires patience and understanding that can only be attained over time.

Namatjira Project echoes an earlier documentary in a similar vein, Catriona McKenzie’s Mr Patterns (2004; see RealTime 62), which traced the friendship between art teacher Geoffrey Bardon and the Central Australian artists of Papunya in the 1970s. The fruits of that friendship were also marred by exploitative practices in the wider Australian art world. Indigenous painting is one of this country’s great contributions to the visual arts, and like so much of our history, it is a field rich with little-known stories of cross-cultural collaboration — and the exploitation of Indigenous talent.

Big hART’s Namatjira Project relates a fascinating slice of our history through a complex, multilayered story. It is also a tale about cultures connecting in ways that can enrich, as with this project, but, when mishandled, can be highly destructive. The film shows us that non-indigenous Australia has much to learn, and how we might begin to open up to that process. Addressing historical wrongs like the selling of Albert Namatjira’s copyright would be an excellent place to start.

Namatjira Project, director Sera Davies, producer Sophia Marinos, featuring Trevor Jamieson, Derik Lynch, Kevin Namatjira, Lenie Namatjira, Scott Rankin; Big hART, 2017. Currently screening nationally.

Top image credit: Rex Battarbee, Albert Namatjira (circa 1950), photo Tamara Mara

Rakini Devi is a compelling presence — sometimes a very funny one — and a highly distinctive artist whose work stretches from the 1980s to the present in Indian classical dance, contemporary dance and performance, installation and collaborations with photographers, filmmakers and sound artists. Her latest performance, opening next week at Parramatta’s Riverside Theatres is central to the postgraduate degree, a Doctor of Creative Arts, which she is undertaking at the University of Wollongong and, she tells me in a phone interview, is near completion.

The University of Wollongong website explains, “The Doctor of Creative Arts is for those individuals with a track record of high level professional experience, who wish to extend their practice within a scholarly context… [It’s] based on presentation of creative work and supported by written documentation (dissertation) of the context and theories underpinning the work.” This interview with Rakini reveals her to be an ideal candidate for the degree. As she explains, her preoccupation with the seemingly terrifying Hindu goddess Kali has strong cultural and artistic roots and first manifested in her performance in the 1980s and then in subsequent works. Her extensive research into Kali could now be extended and deepened with university support.

It’s not so much that I identify with her but that she’s been a part of my history since I grew up in Kolkata. I’ve had a very hybrid upbringing — my mother was Burmese Buddhist, my dad is Indian, my uncle a Brahmin Hindu. I grew up very involved in all the different festivals, Hindu and Buddhist. I was educated in a Catholic convent with Irish nuns and after that at a college called Loreto, also run by Catholic nuns. I was always drawn to the spirituality of Catholic ritual and faithfully went on retreats with Jesuit priests and nuns. I was questioning spirituality from a very young age, asking my mother why she didn’t have to go to church and things like that. She said to me from very early on, “You choose when you grow up whichever direction you want to take. This is my faith and this is what I do.”

I was very attracted to the whole pantheon of gods and goddesses of Hinduism and to pujas (ritual offerings in the home) and the massive celebrations that happened in the cities, which I’ve replicated in my work. They involved huge, temporary roadside temples called pandals, which I’ve written about in my doctorate. They inspired me; they’re elaborate but the art is very naïve, very gaudy, sort of close to Mexican aesthetics, which I’m also drawn to.

The goddess Kali stands apart from the other gods and goddesses. She’s been regarded as a terrifying, inappropriately scary goddess compared with the others. In fact, in most other states in India, you won’t see images of Kali in homes; they’re too scared of her. She’s predominantly the main deity for Kolkata, if also made famous by being worshipped by bandits and thugs, like the Mexican Santa Maria. She’s always attracted me because of the wild iconography associated with her, which protests all of those things that are supposed to be decent and good and pure and conservative.

The British, of course, were horrified. They couldn’t understand the image of her standing naked in a cremation ground, garlanded with skulls, wearing a girdle of hands and holding a decapitated head. They didn’t understand that the decapitated head represents the seat of ego. The multitude of meanings in Kali iconography has fascinated me. Each part has a long history attached to it, including her tongue, which represents shame or defiance.

I’ve used the iconography of Kali over the past 27 years of my dance career in various forms: sometimes as a celebration of her in the classical form, at other times as an abstract form and in Urban Kali — my doctoral presentation — a culmination of all my past work, looking in particular at how I’ve used Kali over the past 10 years in my live art works.

Kali didn’t play a specific role. I was more or less a personal devotee. Classical dance repertoire favours the more conventional gods and goddesses and the love between them. What it did teach me was how to use Hindu iconography, which is what classical Indian dance embodies. It grew out of the ritual temple dances and became what it is today. Indian classical dance has evolved through the years — it’s not the same as it was 2,000 years ago. It’s been revived, contemporised. It was only after I graduated and embarked upon working with my dance company in the 1990s and working with Australian dancers that I started to question how Kali might be relevant to my current life in Australia and to working in a cross-cultural sense. I started to look at different aspects and how I could represent this goddess I was so attracted to. I made my very first work in 1990 working from paintings of the goddess with three male dancers and it was called Graves, Slaves and Kalika — one of Kali’s names. It was an ambitious, naïve first production.

I never try to replicate; I reference her. I use my own visual art and my body for the palette, taking from her elements that I want to exaggerate.

I was working with graduates from WAAPA, using their contemporary dance training and basically ‘infusing’ them with Indian classical dance techniques. I never, ever attempt to transform a Western dancer into an Indian classical dancer; obviously that’s not possible. I used the strength of Western contemporary dancers, those things that really attracted me to the form — duets, contact, lifts, floor walk — when I studied contemporary dance for eight years.

After 1990 I had my company, the Kalika Dance Company in full swing. In 1995 I made one of my favourites, Kali Digambar. Digambar means “clad in space.” It was for a three-week season at PICA in Perth for four women, one male dancer and myself, an Indian classical singer and a didjeridu player. I performed as well as recited and sang in the orchestra. It was a work of full devotion to Kali and very special to me because I used sacred texts from hymns to Kali, with permission from Hindu priests who all attended the performance. I created a sort of sacred space with my own shrine I’d made from a replica of a roadside shrine. On film we had dancers in full Kali regalia immersing themselves in water. People thought it resembled something filmed in the 1930s. It was a quite beautiful work I’m still proud of.

In 2004, I made a work titled Kali Yuga at Parramatta Riverside in Sydney. I was teaching at the University of Western Sydney so I worked with 12 third-year students and five professional dancers all crammed into the Lennox theatre! I really wanted to play with the strength of numbers — 17 dancers masked in black with my characteristic painted red foreheads and third eye and again using a cross-cultural vocabulary. It was quite exciting.

Now, with Urban Kali, it’s like going full-circle. I had started in the 1980s doing a few solo works on Kali totally on my own and then I created my company, then worked with a big group, and now it’s down to me. I have to say it’s a bit scary.

Do aspects of Kali — the blood, the tongue or the four arms, or dancing on Shiva’s breast — play a part in Urban Kali?

It’s a very abstract work. I’m not literally enacting or dancing out anything in particular. But in my durational installations I’ve been using red wool coming from my mouth to represent the flow of blood or Kali’s tongue. But how can the body represent everything about her? To deal with that, I’ve separated the performance into three sections. The first is the blood ritual of Kali, represented in the unravelling of a 12-foot long red sari.

I started out thinking, I’m going to do the arms, then the head and the eyes. Then, I thought, no I don’t have to explain. It’s a work of art. It’s why I’m using film for aspects that would be ridiculous to try and show myself, that would look rather garish or kitsch if I tried to replicate them. These, like the wool as blood, appear as discrete movements of their own, which I’m not interacting with. It’s my concept translated into film and beautifully photgraphed and designed by Karl Ford.

There are two more sections, again very abstract, with me dancing in between the filmed sequences. In my gesturing, I reference all the iconographies of Kali, whether people recognise them or not. I like the mystery of performance.

All in the hands; they’re all second nature to me because I’ve used them for so many years. When audiences give me feedback, they come up with all sorts of things they’ve seen that I never intended. That’s the most rewarding part of the performance. On the other hand, I hate it when people say, “Oh, here’s Rakini, she’s just going to do another little Indian classical dance.” Even though I’ve been grovelling on the ground, wearing a corset or whatever, they still reference me as the Indian dancer doing classical Indian dance, whereas what I’m doing bears no resemblance to the classical form.

For all the notions of darkness around Kali, it’s not a solely negative darkness, is it? It’s a necessary prelude to regeneration.

Absolutely. The darkness is the void but in Bengal where I come from, Kali is the mother. She is offering options. In Mexico people embrace death in their festivals and display skulls and skeletons — iconography that embraces death in a way it’s not in Christianity, or conservative Catholicism.

How do you translate this into feminist protest, which is part of your doctorate research around Kali?

In one of the film clips I reference female infanticide in India. It’s quite gruesome. In Melbourne, I had done a work called Disturbing Elements (2011), which was completely devoted to the issue and to suttee, the burning of widows. It’s part of the motivation behind everything I’ve done, not just during my doctoral research but long before I ever started academic study, referencing the injustices and misogynistic acts in India which I grew up with and which have now risen to scary proportions in India and elsewhere in the world. I feel Kali is perfect to use in protest against female shame.

It’s titled “Urban Kali, from sacred dance to secular performance,” and I’ll be submitting my final thesis towards the end of the year. I have only the final chapter to write.

It’s been a wonderful experience. I’ve had colleagues who’ve done a creative doctorate ask, “Aren’t you sick of it? Aren’t you stressed?” No, it’s a privilege to study. As an artist who’s struggled to do each and every project over the years, it’s such a luxury to be given three years to research a subject I’m absolutely passionate about. Mind you, having been steeped in this area of misogyny and atrocities for three years, I’m looking forward to the complete opposite. I say to [Professor] Sarah Miller, “I can’t wait to be funny again” and everyone agrees, “Yes, we can’t wait for you to be funny again.” But I never thought I would love research so much. The first year was traumatising just to get into the mode of academic writing, but once that was over I turned the corner, so my supervisor said, and I started to thoroughly enjoy the whole process.

It is a very isolating time. I’ve had wonderful guidance from supervisors, but it’s not something where you’re meeting people. It’s been a solitary journey but since most of my life has been about solitary research anyway it’s nothing different.

It has. And it’s changed my way of making work because I’m always cross-referencing — ‘is this relevant; is this not relevant?’ The editing process in making work changes as well. You’re not so precious about hanging on to things. When you’re younger, everything seems important. You’re emotionally attached to every single thing and you’re devastated if you can’t put everything into the work.

I certainly hope so. There’s been a lot of writing about who Kali is and what she may be, but has her iconography been used in this way? No. That’s one of the things that’s called ‘a gap in the research.’

I’ve had people sneer at me, “Oh, why do you artists all feel you have to be academics?” And that’s not the case. I’ve been researching for over 20 years. Every work I made with dancers, I researched, I studied books, I made sure I cross-referenced. There’s a responsibility when you’re dealing with culture, you can’t just madly quote stuff and pick out what you fancy and just perform it.

I’ve known Karl for about 15 years. The first time he created music for me was about 2003. He’s a sound artist and he’s also been doing film and photography. Karl and I share a passion — we’re both really nerdy horror movie fans. It’s a fantastic background for a Kali work. So we’ve had some intense working periods and then come home and watched a whole slew of gory slasher movies. I’ve always known that Karl’s sound was good but I never anticipated we’d be on the same page with film and photography. I love what’s happening on the film, but can I live up to it? That’s why I don’t want to interact with the film; I don’t want to be overshadowed by my own magnificence onscreen (LAUGHS).

FORM Dance Projects & Riverside Theatres, Urban Kali, creator, performer Rakini Devi, sound, film designer Karl Ford; Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, Sydney, 22-23 September

Keith Leung Kei-cheuk is GayBird, a prolific composer, performer, producer, visual artist and creator of new musical instruments who makes sound installations and audiovisual artworks. A classically trained composer, he has a masters degree in music composition and electro-acoustic music from the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, and a Master of Philosophy (creative media) from Hong Kong City University. As his videos demonstrate, he composes and performs in the widest variety of musical styles and genres, his work can be hypnotically beautiful and often complex and elaborate, and he pushes every new-media boundary.

On his website, GayBird expresses an organic vision. “I don’t divide sound, music, art and technology in my creations, in fact I can’t.” He considers that musical evolution has been accompanied by the evolution of instruments and the combination of sound with visual material and installation, often involving audience interactivity.

GayBird’s Living for Machines is a combination of installation and performance in which the artist’s bodily functions and actions trigger the production of sound and visual effects. He wears largely unseen sensors and interacts at times informally with his audience — a handshake, for example, can have artistic results, but also allows the audience input and a degree of control. With GayBird as a working part of his installation, he is asking if machines work for humans or humans serve machines. By contrast, Gravitation in Time is a work for orchestra, robotic instruments and electronics, with notated scores for the orchestra. The conceptual, technical and musical diversity of his oeuvre is extraordinary, and he is an acute observer of the impact of technology in daily life.

“My background is as a composer. But I think nowadays when people listen it is not only to the sound. There are many different kinds of media [that can be used in collaboration] with sound and music. So my philosophy for making music and sound is not only for the sound itself. I always think about how to present sound, what kind of tools or instruments to use to perform sound, or even the environment — the space, what kind of set-up — about how to create an artwork. The visual component is a means of presenting the sound.”

For OzAsia 2017, and in line with the Hong Kong Arts Development Council’s interest in fostering collaboration, GayBird will work with Adelaide’s innovative Zephyr Quartet in his Music in Anticlockwise which will trace the history of music from the origins of the string quartet to the present day — in reverse. He will also create an installation entitled Home, involving objects and sound, to be located on the Goodman Lawns outside the University of Adelaide on North Terrace. The installation will form part of the celebration of the 10th anniversary of the establishment of the Confucius Institute in Adelaide, and will comprise rows of little houses with model pigs inside.

New instruments for new music

I spoke to GayBird in his apartment, which is filled with a fascinating array of electronic devices, including some early synthesisers, as well as instruments of his own creation. He says, “The instruments and the equipment absolutely influence the sound and the evolution of the music. I use a lot of new instruments and new inventions. This is my intention for creating new instruments and new installations — we create new instruments for new music.”

At the time we spoke, GayBird had not finalised the detail of the artwork to be used in Music in Anticlockwise but said there would be an installation to go with the music. “It will involve laser and light refraction… The performance with Zephyr will be divided into two parts. The first part will be my solo with the installation and some audiovisuals, and the second part my collaboration with Zephyr.”

On thinking about the collaboration, he says, “This distance between electronic music and the traditional string quartet is very interesting. I designed a timeline for the concert, from a future atmosphere and then back to the past to ask why do we really need technology in our daily lives. I will start with a new composition — more electronic, more digital — and then Zephyr will perform the Haydn String Quartet No 1, the so-called first string quartet in the world.”

Making Home

In discussing his intentions with the installation, Home, which features dozens of little homes emitting sound and (at night) light, GayBird says, “When Joe [OzAsia director Joseph Mitchell] invited me to write a proposal to make an outdoor installation, it was my first time in Adelaide and I tried to get a feel for the city. Then during the research process I found that all people are the same, no matter the region. I adapted a very ancient Chinese concept of home. This is very suitable for Adelaide, because I think it is a very humble city, very basic, everything is like home. The installation is based on the Chinese character for home: a rooftop and a pig under the rooftop because, in ancient China, a home is just a rooftop and then a pig underneath, providing food for the people. When people enter the installation area, they’ll hear a bell sound, the kind of sound you hear on entering home.”

OzAsia Festival, GayBird & Zephyr Quartet, Music in Anticlockwise, Nexus Arts, 6 Oct; GayBird, Home, installation, Goodman Lawns, North Terrace, Adelaide, 3–15 Oct

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

Early on in Prevenge (2016), a nervous Ruth (Alice Lowe), the heavily pregnant central character, is escorted through a reptile shop by its sleazy proprietor, who’s clearly relishing her discomfort. They stop at a glass case containing a pregnant arachnid, which the owner insists on digging out to place in Ruth’s hands. “Is she dangerous?” she asks in a flat, tense voice. “Yes,” he replies, unaware of the fatal significance his words will assume a moment later, as Ruth embarks on a murderous vendetta at the urging of her unborn child.

English actor and screenwriter Alice Lowe was seven months pregnant during the shooting of her debut feature, a black horror-comedy about the roiling emotions of pregnancy, overlaid by themes of grief and social injustice. Like The Love Witch, Anna Biller’s flamboyant 2016 satire on feminine romantic ideals as filtered through a 70s B-movie lens, Prevenge takes a womanly archetype — the serene and radiant expectant mother — and transforms it into something calculating and dangerous. As Ruth systematically works her way through victims, each of her midwife’s (Jo Hartley) platitudes take on a lethal edge: “You have absolutely no control over your mind or body now.” Ruth comments it’s like a hostile takeover.

In a recurring visual motif, Prevenge references a snippet from the 1934 American thriller Crime Without Passion, where three Furies are shown swooping down to punish earthly moral transgressions, arms outstretched, long robes streaming, each livid face a rictus of laughter. Catching the film on TV, Ruth aligns herself with these beings, not only for the sake of entertaining passages where she campily imitates their Expressionistic gestures, but in the deeper, moral sense, of “the three sisters who lie in wait for those who live dangerously and without Gods,” as the 1934 film puts it. Ruth is driven to avenge her partner’s death, but with each slaughter she also makes a gruesome commentary on various social ills. There’s the sexually harassing pet shop owner, grotesquely selfish “weekend warrior,” “DJ Dan,” and the corporate manager smugly doling out austerity. These are people who screw others over. “I’m Fury,” says the unborn child.

The encounters with her victims function to some extent as seductions, with Ruth acting a part designed to draw out her target’s most loathsome self before the blade does its swift, inevitable work. With predominantly medium close-ups bringing us into a space of intimate awkwardness, each episode is a minutely observed satire of human awfulness. The dialogue in these scenes is full of deadpan irony, precisely timed so that the sordidness hangs in the pauses.

Like Ben Wheatley’s horror-comedy Sightseers (2012), about caravanning serial killers, co-written by and co-starring Lowe, Prevenge showcases the revenge of the socially disenfranchised, to which Lowe adds a layer of feminist anger. “I’m not grieving; I’m gestating…fucking rage.” Lowe is clearly adept at creating that rare entity: the horror film whose humour is inextricably tied to its bleakness.

Toydrum’s synth soundtrack, recalling classic 70s horror and Giallo cinema, heightens Prevenge’s hallucinogenic subjectivity as it shifts from flashback to kill scene to private moments of crisis. Without being self-indulgent, this is a deeply personal film, both for protagonist and director. From a horror filmmaker riffing on her own experience with great immediacy, something vivid and unpredictable is born.

Sydney Underground Film Festival, Prevenge, 2016, writer, director Alice Lowe, performers Alice Lowe, Jo Hartley, Tom Davis, Kate Dickie, cinematographer Ryan Eddleston, score Toydrum (Pablo Clements, James Griffith), editor Matteo Bini, production design Blair Barnette, Factory Theatre, Sydney, 15, 16 Sept

Over the last decade a wave of mature aged artists have undertaken creative doctorates which provide opportunities for making new works that will contribute vital research for their artform fields. Well-known Sydney-based acting and leadership teacher Steve Matthews, who took on a Doctor of Creative Arts in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Sydney without the support of a scholarship and juggled work and research, is completing his thesis around a deeply personal autobiographical performance made for the doctorate.

Personal solo performances comprised an important strand of contemporary performance and theatre-making in the 1990s and 2000s in Australia, not least from Aboriginal, NESB and female artists whose works had more than personal resonances. For Matthews, these makers have provided inspiration and have helped frame and influence his own work and thesis writing. We met with him to discuss his background in theatre and teaching and his experience of making a demanding personal work and meeting the considerable demands of the academy. He gave us an enjoyably frank and judicious account of the experience and an assessment, which any artist, of whatever age, scholarship or not, should consider before taking on a creative doctorate.

I started out as an actor in New Zealand in the early 1970s. I left school, there was no drama school and so I went to the local theatre, auditioned and started working professionally at the age of 18 in Wellington and regional theatres in New Zealand for a few years. I went to Wellington’s Victoria University as well, did an Arts degree and then I came across Francis Batten, who had been at the Jacques Lecoq School in France for a couple of years. He had convinced four French graduates to set up a professional company, Theatre Action in New Zealand, which was pretty amazing. I went to one of their workshops, along with Sam Neill, as it turned out. I was invited to join the company and virtually did my training on the job, moving from being a text-based interpretative actor to developing skills in performance-making. After Theatre Action, I set up my own companies and gradually moved into running acting and performance workshops in New Zealand.

I came to Australia at the end of 1988 and I was fortunate; chatting with someone at NIDA, who said, “we need an improvisation teacher.” That’s when I moved more into teaching, taught at the Actors Centre for 15 years, spent 1991-94 at Theatre Nepean, Western Sydney University, and 2004-08 at Charles Sturt University. More recently, as Principal Lecturer, I ran the Performing Arts department at the Adelaide College of the Arts in 2014-16, came back to Sydney and am now teaching at AIM and AFTT as well as doing some executive coaching and leadership development consultancy.

After 20 or so years of teaching, I was feeling I was doing a lot to facilitate other people’s creativity and I really wanted to do something for myself. The trigger was the death of my father. Ours was not an easy relationship. By the end of his life we had reached a place where it was good, but I was aware that there were aspects that I needed to explore. I had seen and been very inspired by Spalding Gray in the 1980s. I had also worked with Playback Theatre both here and in New Zealand, so the idea of working with personal stories got me really interested.

I’d been working in tertiary education where they keep raising the bar — ‘you need a masters,’ ‘no, you need a doctorate.’ So I was looking at a way of combining something in which I had a strong personal interest as a practitioner with working within a research community and, of course, gaining a qualification. I don’t think I really understood the extent and the depth of the work required both as a practitioner and as an academic.

It was definitely about creating my own solo performance. There was a big challenge in that. I wanted to work with my own lived experience and my own family story. The second thing was thinking this could be a really interesting practice-led research project. What was critical was finding two former practitioners who are now academics, Glen McGillivray and David Wright. Your supervisors are really key to your success. And it’s been a fantastic journey with them. It’s a challenge as a mature-aged student, becoming a student again when you’re more used to being in the lecturer-director position.

The two parts of the doctorate comprise “a substantial creative project” and a thesis or exegesis. I did the practice part a few years ago. Because I’ve had to do this along with full-time and part-time work — fitting everything else in — it’s taken probably longer than I would have liked to write the thesis. But the process has been good in terms of the challenge and understanding my own history and my own performance modality.

In a solo autobiographical show you’re talking directly to the audience and dealing with real life experiences. You’re triggering and visualising all that material. I spent three months with a dramaturg. Improvising on the floor with the material was really interesting in terms of accessing and embodying those experiences. Some of it was cathartic. I’d written a scene — about the last time I saw my father — that was challenging to replay, but a necessary part of the process. I only gave the one showing at the university, followed by a Q&A session, but I had to get to a point where I was a bit detached from the material. Not completely, but I didn’t want to be acting out this material and feeling so emotionally vulnerable. Then, when the performance was shaped and crafted, in the end I was working with a script.

Why did you choose this degree at the Department of Performance Studies at the University of Sydney?

I’d started the doctorate at Western Sydney University but the performance school was closed down. It was just circumstance that I could take it up at the University of Sydney as one of my supervisers, Glen, was offered a job with the Department of Performance Studies. The department has a very supportive postgrad culture. There are seminars every Friday during the term. You present your next chapter or a paper, receive feedback and listen to everyone else’s research as well. It’s great.

What did your extensive research into Australian autobiographical performance do for you?

Initially I did it because I had no template around how to make a solo autobiographical work. I wanted to be challenged. I wanted to step into an area where I didn’t really know what I was doing. So, firstly, it involved going to see the work of a lot of different practitioners and then interviewing them, which I hadn’t planned to, but it made sense. It was just curiosity really. I attended performances by and interviewed nine solo autobiographical performers: William Yang, Tim Stitz, Meme Thorne, Deborah Leiser-Moore, Paul Capsis, David Page, Paul Dwyer, William Zappa and Michel Workman.

I’d written a book, Getting into the Act (1988), about improvisation, acting and performance-making and I’d been part of theatre companies devising material, but I had not written a play as such. The first thing for me was to understand the process of autobiographical writing. I checked into courses at the NSW Writers Centre and I came across a wonderful teacher, Patti Miller, who specialises in teaching life writing. So I went to one of her courses and this gave me the structure and some techniques for starting to write my own life stories. I also went to courses with the writers Beth Yahp and Jacquie Kent. These helped to give me the discipline and motivation to keep writing my stories. Initially I found myself focusing more on the playful, fun stories of childhood. It took a while to say to myself, ‘Okay, Steve, you’ve got to get into the darker stuff.’ The writing process continued for about three years. I went back home, did an interview with my Mum, got the suitcase full of family photos. Then I had about 80 pages of stuff, which I sent out to colleagues — dramaturgs, writers and a few academics — and said, “Be honest, just tell me what you think.” And they did!

They gave me some really valuable feedback around my writing style and what was working and what wasn’t. I realised that this was now the time to get up on the floor and to start working it. I was fortunate in that a colleague, Elaine Paton, who is a dramaturg and director, had already read some of the stories and had helped me transcribe the interviews, and said, “I really like this project. If you want someone to work with you …” So that’s what we did. We got a space at the University of Sydney, and I got a bit of money to pay her and we worked away. It was very challenging for me because I was still unsure about the material. I hadn’t really been working as an actor for a long time; I’d been working as a director and teacher. It took us a while to find a good working relationship, which we did. But it was an exhausting process. Really demanding.

Oh, completely! Totally satisfying. Great feedback from the audience after the show. Always, you need more time. I think, too, it was not only the performing of the work that was demanding. I was writing it, producing it, compiling all the photographs, props, music, doing the marketing, everything. The lesson next time would be to get a bigger budget, delegate, have a longer rehearsal time. Having said that, I had a good production team in Elaine as director and dramaturg, lighting designer Ben Anshaw and multimedia designer Aime Neeme.

At the end of it I’m definitely in a position to help anyone who wants to do an autobiographical solo show, to workshop and direct it with them. I can now add this to the list of performance workshops I teach. It is so different from a solo show where you’re playing scenes from a scripted play, because of the personal nature of the material and the way to write, craft and perform it is quite different.

Creative doctorates are still considered a little bit like the poor cousins of PhDs. It’s almost like you do twice the work — make a professional work and then thoroughly document and reflect on it. My expectation was that it was going to be more about the practice and less about the theorising. I haven’t minded doing it, but it’s been a helluva lot of work. It’s why I think having former practitioners as supervisors makes a big difference. But still I think the expectation is that it’s going to be like any other PhD.

90 minutes. I had to go into rigorous physical training — yoga, swimming — so I could sustain the energy required. I don’t regret any of it. It’s been a huge challenge and I’ve really loved it. I’ve had to really step up. It’s meant sacrificing a lot in terms of my personal life and professionally.

This year. I’m determined. As well as extensive reflection on my own work there’s a chapter on the Australian performers I interviewed. Then there’s the literature review which looks at the development of this genre of solo autobiographical performance — I’m calling it a ‘genre’ because I think it’s quite specific — and how it developed through contemporary performance in America. Most of the literature is about what happened in America from the 80s onwards, and the UK as well. There isn’t much written about what’s happened here. There’s a book in it, but whether I want to spend another five years of my life writing it… (LAUGHS).

It’s an inky night at the Gold Coast Aquatic Centre where I don my earphones ready to dive into PLUNGE, a new work from Seeing Place Productions, a site-specific, audio-immersive company based at the Gold Coast and founded by Kate Shearer. The tunnel-like entrance is lit with bands of primary colour as we’re ushered in by a chorus of tracksuited and capped divers. Like land-locked synchronised swimmers, the troupe fan out in phalanxes front and back to guide us through the pristine new centre which will be hosting water sports at the Commonwealth Games in 2018.

The sense of eerie intimacy generated by being in this major public site with such freedom of access is immediate. That together/alone frisson is reinforced by a lulling voice-over which weaves together a mesh of sound composition and interviews with real athletes, their coaches and parents. Then, live dialogue from the actors cuts through the soundscape as we watch from above or at floor level across large expanses of pool and cement.

PLUNGE delivers its spectacle quickly and with authority, starting with an introductory sequence behind a glass wall as two male swimmers try to psych each other out. This is followed by our female protagonist, a diver, whose story plays out atop the elegant white diving tower, climaxing with the pleasure for us of watching one, two, three, four and then five divers plunge effortlessly from the heights into the silver water below.

The simple and accessible narrative has all of the classic sports story tropes — the boy who could, the former great on the decline, the child prodigy diving for her parents’ dreams rather than her own. But all the narrative clichés are forgiven for the lyrical quality of the language, the visual poetry and scale of the projected animation and the deftness of our positioning in relationship to the site. My only quibble is that the female diver’s story is never resolved.

It’s mesmerising watching elegant bodies dive into moonlit pools and witnessing heartbreakingly beautiful contemporary dance performed in dark, warm, steamy wading pools. Add to the mix the arresting black and white scaled-up projections onto the water and walls and the pull under and into the stories is irresistible.

PLUNGE felt like the culmination of the form that Shearer has been developing across Seeing Place’s prior siteworks like CAPSULE and ALL ABOARD! with a calibrated balance between audio, site and performers. PLUNGE included longstanding collaborators Guy Webster (sound) and Geoff Squires (lighting) with the addition of AV man-of-the-moment Nathan Sibthorpe, and showcased the choreography of local independent choreographer Alicia Harvie, the powerhouse energy of Hayden Jones (of Shock Therapy theatre company) and the talent of relative newcomer, actor Mitch Wood. Such collaboration is now characteristic of the performance work on the Gold Coast, privileging site and memory and a sophisticated popularism. Hopefully such work will take its place in the arts and cultural events to be programmed for the Commonwealth Games next year.

Seeing Place Productions, supported by Bleach Festival, PLUNGE, concept, writer, director Kate Shearer, AV designer Nathan Sibthorpe, sound designer Guy Webster, lighting designer Geoff Squires; Gold Coast Aquatic Centre, 20 Aug-2 Sept

First seen at Sydney’s MCA, Energies: Haines & Hinterding is now on show at Perth’s PICA. Stephen Jones’ richly informative 2015 response to this subtly mind-bending show is a valuable introduction to the works of Joyce Hinterding and David Haines in this touring exhibition.

Jones guided RealTime’s Keith Gallasch (who added a few observations of his own) through curator Anna Davis’ finely staged assemblage of Haines and Hinterding’s 15 years of investigation into the forces that invisibly surround and pass through us. Lovingly crafted works evoke and embody everything from high science to technological wizardry to the occult.

Read Jones’ “Unseen energies manifest as art” and discover where and when you can experience Unseen Energies: Haines & Hinterding here.

Top image credit: Installation: Earthstar, 2008, David Haines & Joyce Hinterding, Energies exhibition at PICA, photo Cam Campbell

Bio

I grew up with dance and criticism. My mother is a dance teacher who can spot a sickled foot at twenty yards. I learnt to dance, but was never a dancer. I studied creative writing at RMIT. I edited student publications and graduated thinking that I wanted to be a filmmaker. I like words and movement. I thought film was the perfect synthesis of these things. I started working on an animation project that I’m still, slowly, trying to complete.

I applied to participate in a a RealTime review-writing workshop at the 2014 Next Wave festival. I thought, “I can write about dance.” This thought had not occurred to me previously. I took part in the workshop and wondered why I had ever pretended I was anything other than a dance teacher’s daughter with a good grasp on syntax and rhythm and tone. Since then I have continued to write for RealTime. I am studying art history at The University of Melbourne, and am assisting as a sub-editor for the department’s .jpg Art Journal. I love dance and art and words and film, and I want to make it as a critic, whatever that means.

Exposé

I like criticism because it speaks to something directly and indirectly. It necessitates dialogue with a strange temporal logic to it. There is distance and there is the sense that the task at hand might be impossible; in fact, it certainly is, when looked at from a particular angle. If you assume that the role of the critic is to apprehend the object of critique exactly as it was in a given moment then you have misplaced faith in the tractability of language. No experience holds up when siphoned into words. But this is the real joy of criticism. In the translation from physical actuality to textual realisation, the thing becomes something else all together. This new thing is neither text, nor object or performance. It exists in the space that contradiction opens between the two. It’s the energy required to transmit ideas out into the world, and it’s the crackle of reception or interception as they make contact. For me, this exchange is thrilling.

Recent articles for RealTime

Website

Laura suggests you watch this work on a mobile device with your headphones. Eds

A map zooms in, and out, and in, setting us down in the English countryside. A superimposed yellow line stretches out along the narrow road as the specifics of locality warp and waver, the image now and then playing catch-up to the thrust of digital momentum, as in the works of Daniel Crooks. The narrator is also in motion, guided by a running app, unheard by us but which we are told provides “purpose but not direction.” All we hear is the artist’s voice, her breathing, and the slap of running feet on asphalt.

But are we being led on or left behind? An unnerving sense of remove pervades the information relayed from the running app’s temporally specific goal-setting and the GPS’s spatially specific renderings. While the narrator grows increasingly breathless trying to keep us updated, we struggle to discern the realities of the distance being covered, the destination being deferred. This sense of dislocation allows the work to map the points at which the perceived continuity of the digital realm stumbles and fails to integrate our lived experience. Each individual element is gesturing towards a time or space outside the immediate — each to their own elsewhere, so that the viewer is inclined to ask where we are, in relation to all of this.

The narration explicitly breaks from the rhythm of hedges and paths and roads, as Hindmarsh tells us that she is entering the unstructured space of fields and wildflowers. The image rotates from one flat-lined fence to another, helpless to follow beyond the roadways it has been designed to chart. The freedoms afforded by digital movement have a corresponding set of limitations.

We can locate ourselves for a time, in a space, through a screen. But every captured image, every recorded sound is a sign either side of the present, leading us to falter “out of breath, out of step, out of time.” Elyssia Bugg

This week, fascinating works for watching and listening. For our new Critical Audio series, Tasmania’s Sisters Akousmatica (image above) have made a playlist of sound works created by adventurous Australian female practitioners. And visual artist Gabriella Hirst does a double-act. Featured in our latest Critical Video series, she struggles against a relentless wind to practise her craft, and, as part of our ongoing Arts Education feature, reflects on her time at COFA (now UNSW Art & Design) and the National Art School and on the trajectory her career has taken from Berlin to London. In observations that suggest an organic vision of art practice, Hirst writes of cross-disciplinary practice that “research and adopted medium are in constant interplay” and that art schools yield art ecosystems. Also this week, Joanna Di Mattia offers an impressive account of Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country and kindred films that allow “straight audiences [to] deal with the realities of queer desire” and so see in queer bodies “actual flesh and blood human beings.” Keith and Virginia

Top image credit: Julia Drouhin, Pip Stafford (Sisters Akousmatica) at Next Wave, 2016, photo by Keelan O’Hehir.

In Francis Lee’s soulful debut feature, God’s Own Country (2017), an intimate camera tethers us to surly protagonist, 24-year-old Johnny Saxby (Josh O’Connor). Johnny works on his family’s small farm in West Yorkshire’s Pennine Hills. His dad, Martin (Ian Hart), is incapacitated from a stroke, leaving the majority of the physical work to Johnny, while his grandmother, Deirdre (Gemma Jones), takes care of Martin and the house. Everyone is invested, as they say, in simply “getting on with it.”

At the end of a day tending to the animals and maintaining the property, Johnny has little left to give to anyone, including himself. Most nights, he guzzles pints at the local pub, drinking to get drunk. Before we see him in the film’s opening scene we hear him retching into the toilet. Later that day, Johnny attends a cattle auction and engages in wordless, efficient sex with a man whose name he has no interest in knowing and whose mouth he doesn’t want to kiss. At the table, Johnny shovels his meals, functionally. We quickly understand that his life is devoid of any real intimacy or sensual pleasure.

With a focus on the tactile dimensions of its locale and its characters’ bodies, God’s Own Country depicts queer desire with emotional authenticity within a landscape and milieu — rural, working-class — that we don’t often see flourish on screen. Together with a suite of other queer-themed films at the Melbourne International Film Festival in August this year, including Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name (2017), God’s Own Country develops a complex aesthetics of touch that invests the queer male body with subjectivity, individuality and an emotional life. God’s Own Country is boldly carnal but also advances a visual language attentive to sensuality. Given its location, it is an enormously physical viewing experience, comprising textures of wind, birdsong, grass, mud, close-ups on working hands and on desiring skin. What emerges is akin to a queer eroticism of the open land.

This eroticism is encouraged by the camera’s proximity to Johnny, which enables our acute attention to any change in his experience of the land and his body when it comes. His greatest test arrives in the form of Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu), a Romanian migrant worker hired to help with lambing season. Johnny gives Gheorghe a hostile welcome, calling him “gypsy” and practically shoving him into the caravan he’ll be sleeping in. But when they spend a few days alone together with the sheep at an outer paddock, sleeping side by side in an abandoned cottage, a romance develops. Gheorghe, also a man of few words, nevertheless provides Johnny with a new language for expressing desire and experiencing pleasure, which ricochets throughout all aspects of his life.

While we understand Johnny as an angry young man, his resentments are not connected to his sexuality. Lee’s script doesn’t provide any overt homophobia or antagonism for Johnny to deal with. He is out within his community and his family is more concerned that he might leave the farm than they are with who he fucks. His unhappiness runs deeper, attached to the limitations of the land on which he is obliged to remain living. Lee’s representation of that landscape is almost completely devoid of wide shots and romantic vistas, and removes any sense of this as a space of bucolic beauty. It is, mostly, brutally isolating. As Gheorghe says to Johnny, “It’s beautiful here, but lonely, no?”

Lee hasn’t set out to make a political statement with God’s Own Country, telling me during MIFF that he “wasn’t consciously thinking about a canon of queer cinema or other queer relationships on screen.” His only interest was in representing the truth: “If it felt right and if it felt that they would do that then that’s what they did.” Part of that truth involves acknowledging the fact that gay men have sex with other men; that sex is an act of self-discovery. Like a number of recent films, including Andrew Haigh’s Weekend (2011) and Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau’s Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo (2016), God’s Own Country doesn’t apologise for this or seek to police straight audiences’ comfort levels.

Lee orchestrates Johnny and Gheorghe’s first sexual encounter as an urgent, visceral, early morning roll in the mud. Each man’s skin is illuminated by the flat, grey moonlight. Neither expresses what he wants with words, only grunts. But it isn’t anything like Johnny’s other brusque encounters. Shot with an earthy frankness, this sex scene contains real heat and alchemy — two bodies hungry for each other, groping to figure out how they fit together.

But there is a shift in later sex scenes to a more quiet intimacy, focused on kissing, touch and togetherness, which expand Johnny’s understanding of what sex can be. One night in the cottage, Gheorghe resists Johnny’s urge to go straight for his penis. Instead, he slows things down, caressing his face, touching his bare chest and kissing his initially reluctant mouth. Lee captures this up close, catching us inside their embrace. When Johnny returns Gheorghe’s touch, he claws at his skin with a palpably ferocious need. As Lee explained to me, “I had to see that change in Johnny physically, and the most incredibly brilliant way of seeing that is seeing how he has sex.” In this way, Johnny’s body is vital in the telling of his story, especially given the film’s deliberately sparse dialogue.

The importance granted to the body as a vehicle for storytelling in queer narratives was evident in a number of other films that screened with God’s Own Country at MIFF. Along with Call Me By Your Name, Robin Campillo’s BPM (2017) also explores character subjectivity through touch. The film, which draws on the director’s experiences as an activist with ACT UP Paris in the early 1990s, has a large group of characters and concentrates on new lovers, the HIV-positive Sean (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) and negative Nathan (Arnaud Valois). Campillo’s film contains a number of candid, erotic sex scenes. Arguably most significant among them is the first between Sean and Nathan, in which they negotiate what it is and isn’t safe for them to do with their bodies given their serodiscordant status.

After sex, as they lie in each other’s arms, touch empowers the discovery of character backstory. As Nathan’s hand moves down Sean’s bare back, Sean recounts his first sexual experience when he was 16 years old with the married man who infected him. As we follow Nathan’s hand, the image of the new lovers in bed dissolves into a recreation of that fateful encounter, and then seamlessly back again. Sean’s body’s story brings him closer to Nathan and the audience closer to his story.

In God’s Own Country, Lee presents the men in various states of undress in a way that is completely consistent within the film’s emotional context. The film exists very much within the European and arthouse tradition, where male full frontal nudity is neither uncommon nor extraordinary. Here, the couple’s shared nakedness communicates something else — a specific story, about each man’s vulnerability and willingness to bare himself physically and emotionally to the other. With Gheorghe, Johnny is comfortable, perhaps for the first time in his life. He finally starts talking, sharing that his mother left the family when he was a boy. Gheorghe says little but responds with touch — an eroticised lick of Johnny’s grazed palm, a gesture that seems to soothe all his other wounds.

Similarly, in Call Me By Your Name, eroticism is composed from the profound weight of touch and its absence. Guadagnino, cinema’s current master sensualist, builds tension in the audience that rivals that experienced by 17-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and his father’s 24-year-old research assistant, Oliver (Armie Hammer), through languid pacing and low, observant camerawork. We yearn, as Elio and Oliver do, for a resolution to the pressure. But ultimately, when release comes, Guadagnino is less interested in showing us bodies thrusting than in hands reaching, limbs locking, toes tangling, a hungry bite on the shoulder or a finger tracing open lips. In Call Me By Your Name, Elio and Oliver’s bodies slowly curve in, like the Greco-Roman statues Elio’s father researches, to meet each other. A tender, yet extremely sexy foot massage is evidence of deep compassion between Elio and Oliver, and that they are falling in love with every single piece of each other.

Such sensual, tender moments of desire between men are important private moments to witness unfolding onscreen. With their emphasis on the body and what that body tells us about how queer people exist in the world, they remove queer desire from the realm of the private and unknown. Representation, or its absence, limits or expands our knowledge of people’s lives — especially those whose lives are perceived to be radically different from our own. To paraphrase British film critic and academic, Richard Dyer, how we see people determines how we treat them. Visualising sexual and sensual touch between queer bodies bestows these bodies with value, agency — and dignity. When straight audiences deal with the realities of queer desire, they deal with queer people as actual flesh and blood human beings. God’s Own Country, like other recent queer-focused films, also asks us to take a step further — to acknowledge and respect what is different.

God’s Own Country, writer, director Francis Lee, performers Josh O’Connor, Alex Secareanu, Ian Hart, Gemma Jones, cinematographer Joshua James Richards, editor Chris Wyatt; distributor Rialto Distribution; Melbourne International Film Festival, Forum Theatre, 5, 7 Aug; currently in limited release

For our first Critical Audio selection, we invited Tasmanian radiophonic curators Sisters Akousmatica to create a playlist of risk-taking radio and broadcast art by Australian women.

Sisters Akousmatica

Radio exists everywhere — whether we access it via transmission, or not. Its magic is that it is available to just about anyone, anywhere, and is a potent site for both potential radical action and, very simply, communication between people. Radiophonic technology provides an invisible spectrum of possibilities to invade visible territories. In this context, as a constellatory mode of collaborative performance, we created Sisters Akousmatica, a collective radiophonic project to carry voices of women and gender-diverse artists into the public realm. This tracklist involves radio and transmission artists, some of whom we’ve worked with, and whose work has made an indelible mark on the field in Australia, and internationally.

Our first track is by artist and ABC RN radio producer Miyuki Jokiranta. A raw field recording, it’s a poetic combination of sounds that appear to play together, spontaneously, as if directed by an invisible conductor. Field recordists look for the exciting, impromptu and magical moment that vibrates their ears during their sound treasure hunt.

Camilla Hannan’s Stargazing for Beginners: Creating Stars is the final episode of an audio series by ABC RN’s Soundproof. In “an age when humanity’s environmental devastation can be seen across the planet,” Camilla questions the repercussions of our present actions for the future by taking a storytelling approach to explain how stars are created. Speaking with astronomers, Camilla evokes an unknown universe of black holes, world-ending meteors and cosmic space-junk disturbances.

Sydney artist and lecturer Joyce Hinterding’s Electromagnetique Mix is an audio work using live and recorded sound, video projection, custom built VLF (very low frequency) antenna and audio equipment. The soundtrack surrounds us with detailed electromagnetic sounds — we become tiny insects in an incommensurable universe, lulled by hidden activities. Radio is a musical instrument. It’s often seen as just a vessel for content, but with radiowaves, radios can make sounds in and of themselves. Hinterding reveals the presence of invisible forces through audible resonance via a large-scale handmade copper coil picking up low-frequency radiation from within architecture, the city and from the Milky Way.

Nina Buchanan’s Everything is Faster is an exclusive analogue synth experiment for Ears Have Ears on FBi Radio Sydney. The musician and composer semi-improvised the piece at an irregular pace, disturbing the expected dynamic of an electronic soundtrack and meandering between exploding nebulous sonic magma and vibrant single notes. Slowness leads us toward relaxing sounds after the speedy storm. A melody appears and stretches until your heartbeat has calmed down.

For our Next Wave Festival broadcast project in 2016, Melbourne-based artist eves used field recordings of crows, the waves and Beech Forest cicadas. She also used analogue delay, reverb, a looper and a signal tester whose frequency could be changed to provide constant sine tone, modulated through a pedal chain affecting pitch, harmony and octave. The haunting, improvised soundtrack was broadcast in the rain under Inge King’s sculpture, Forward Surge, at Melbourne’s Arts Centre. The cello introduced a far away hypnotising and lyricless voice in suspended silence, hanging beneath the great black waveforms on the lawn.

In the same project, Melbourne-based musician and composer Rosalind Hall broadcast an abstract and minimal piece in the Arts Centre Testing Ground garden, surrounded by birds and drops of rain, using a laptop loaded with sampled and processed sounds all of her own creation. Deploying multiple microphones on her saxophone and throat to amplify her nervous pulse and labouring breath, with speakers, volume pedals and equalisation to form undulating feedback, Rosalind created a soundscape of dependency between body, instrument and presence.

In the final work, made by Tasmanian-born artist Sally Ann McIntyre, extinct birds cry across terrestrial transmission, calling to our animal senses, becoming loud and then lost again amid radio static, VLF recordings, the magnetic sounds of bats and tinkling wax recordings. Ending with the extinct Huia bird refrain, this soundscape builds a haunted ecological state, a record of both real and imagined memories and a new sound archive.

Top image credit: Pip Stafford, Julia Drouhin (Sisters Akousmatica), Next Wave Festival 2016, photo by Keelan O’Hehir.

To my eye, no doubt informed by my own career in the arts, Force Majeure is a no-holds-barred satire of the artistic life. It’s as broad as you can get and refreshingly direct, an elegant slice of Gothic slapstick. Sydney-born, London-based artist Gabriella Hirst speaks to the gap between expectation and outcome, between what we imagined and planned for and what we find ourselves enduring, day-to-day.

Stage one is development. The artist prepares her materials. Thinks. Waits for inspiration. She’s alone in a desolate place. The locked-off frame reveals a clifftop and the ocean far below. It’s windy and the sound recording distorts a little, as tends to happen outdoors. The blank paper on the easel in front of her dominates her thoughts as much as the landscape itself, her subject. It’s not easy to be here, in this moment. It hurts. The only cure is to begin. She’ll pick up her palette and brush. She’ll make a mark on the paper, soon. She is an artist so she’d better begin. Everything is ready. Everything is as it should be. Art is about to ensue. It’s all fine. It’s fine. Any minute now.

We shift with a jolt into stage two, production. It’s a sudden cut, the only one used in the piece, and we find the artist absent from the frame. Her easel has fallen over and she enters the frame to rescue it. The wind is overpowering now, the distortion unpleasant. What was born in innocence comes to bloody fruition, revealed in its true shape. A living nightmare. Chaos. Unpredictability. The elements are indifferent to her suffering. Her smock billows around her as she battles a dark cloud that threatens to engulf. She persists, yet can’t even get the easel to stay upright, let alone think about what she’s doing, let alone create. She’s stopped asking herself, ‘What do I feel? What do I want to express?’ Now she only wonders, ‘Can I carry on?’ But of course she does. There’s no choice.

‘Artist’ is an identity with a set of established behaviours attached. Work hard. Explore. Endure. Go deeper. But what if you can’t get out of the starting blocks, so to speak? What if your trajectory is not from triumph to triumph, from project to project, but to oscillate between depressed anticipation and the quagmire of making, with nothing in between? What if, after all, there’s no safe space? No way to avoid the messiness? And just think, everything you’ve schemed over and hoped for might be a mistake. It might be blown away without warning. Your position is more precarious than you’ve been willing to admit up until now. But you’ve got to laugh. Briony Kidd

Since graduating from both COFA (College of Fine Arts, now UNSW Art & Design, 2010) and the National Art School (Honours in 2012), Sydney-born artist Gabriella Hirst has established an international practice extending her training in painting and drawing into conceptual modes of video, performance, sculpture and installation. Via email she told RealTime about her trajectory since her art school days in Sydney, her creative impetuses and what living, studying and working in Paris, Berlin and London has brought to her art-making practice.

The road to performativity

I completed a BFA in painting at COFA in 2010, and then went on to do Honours in drawing at NAS in 2012. I had started out pretty singularly focused on painting, on being a ‘painter’s painter,’ but slowly my focus shifted towards a more performative, less material-specific way of working. I think this started when I went on student exchange to Italy to a research-heavy laboratorio-based uni during my undergrad, which COFA enabled. But I would say that it was not until Honours (in Drawing, in a very expanded sense) at NAS that I became more comfortable with working in a cross-disciplinary manner where research and adopted medium are in constant interplay.

Art schools & arts ecology

It’s also so brilliant to see the communities that have been formed by those with whom I spent those formative art study years. I’m geographically separate right now, but when I visit and am in touch through friends it’s obvious from my point of view that such a huge part of the arts ecosystem starts out within the art schools. It seems so simple but art communities thrive on communication and a healthy art school system provides the time and space for those conversations to start, and those conversations become exhibitions or publications, or bands or radio stations or festivals without which a city’s cultural life is unimaginable. The more years pass, the more I see my former art school colleagues at the helm of the Australian cultural community, the more I value these original meeting places and believe they need to be supported and valued.

Into the world

I was very lucky to receive the Marten Bequest travelling scholarship [in 2013], which enabled two years of living overseas, during which time I undertook a residency in Paris and then gradually moved to Berlin. Those first two years in particular I was like a sponge just taking everything in, jumping all over the place to do projects with people I met by chance. I stayed in Berlin for almost three years and I really got stuck into work. Contrary to what some may imagine the city to be like, Berlin really allowed me to focus on my research, to dig in. I moved to London in September to begin studying again and this has been super-transformative. Being here, more than anywhere else, has already pushed me to experiment and untangle my work — a combination of the class being made up of a dynamic group of artists and London’s crazy pace.

The appeal of the failure of representation

For a while something that occupied my work was my experience of distance — how the perception of physical distance is condensed and stretched. In relation to this I started looking into star-gazing and archeology, a longing to bring closer what is intangible, and through these routes I became interested in Romanticism and the failure of representation, but taking all of the grandiosity of these traditions with a large grain of salt, focusing on the humour or at least the absurdity of these gestures. I tend to get stuck on super-poetic narratives that I come across and pull material out of them to reinterpret or inhabit.

The failure of representation in general is an ongoing concern and sooner or later all the video versions of Force Majeure will corrupt and disappear too. So you can take the edges of one way of doing or making and see how they blur into another field or format, and then you see this fatigue in human effort and activity (in the Western art historical canon at least) that just keeps on going and going. It’s not even failure because failure requires an end, when at best you just have a momentary pause, and then someone picks up a new tool and tries to accomplish the same thing with that.

For more about Force Majeure, which was shot on the island Rügen in northern Germany where Caspar David Friedrich went to paint in the early 1800s, visit Gabriella Hirst’s website which shows the ‘finished’ paintings installed with the video.

Force Majeure was commissioned by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne, for the exhibition NEW16 curated by Annika Kristensen, 5 March-8 May, 2016.

We’re in a car, travelling down a quiet road that takes us far from urban sprawl and into the bush. For horror aficionados, this is a familiar beginning. Inside the car, typically a couple (or a family or friends) banter. Classic rock plays on the radio, underlining the upbeat mood, the normality. During the drive, characters and relationship dynamics are sketched out before arrival at cabin or campsite signals events will sooner or later take a nasty turn. In the opening scene of Funny Games (2007), Michael Haneke both disrupts and highlights the false naturalism of this trope by blasting a jarring thrash metal track by Naked City over the journey of his central family to their lakeside holiday house.

In his debut feature, the horror-thriller Killing Ground, Damien Power opts for the more conventional approach. The young couple in this car are Sam (Harriet Dyer) and Ian (Ian Meadows), on their way to a secluded campsite to celebrate New Year’s Eve. During their playful exchange we learn they’re in love and that he’s a doctor. They have a bright future; in other words, ripe for destruction. They arrive at a campsite that’s starkly beautiful but unsettlingly still, from the creek’s mirror surface to a solitary tent pitched a little way along the sandy bank.

The film introduces another duo: “German” Shepherd (Aaron Pedersen) and “Chook” Fowler (Aaron Glenane), ex-cons living together in the small town close to the reserve where Sam and Ian are camping. German has already appeared, giving Ian directions to Stony Creek campsite, his dog and ute recalling those of Bradley Murdoch, the man convicted of the 2001 murder of British tourist Peter Falconio. Like Mick Taylor, the outback bogeyman modelled on Murdoch and serial killer Ivan Milat at the centre of Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek (2005), German and Chook are pig hunters from a lower socioeconomic background who represent a sinister aspect of Australian larrikinism.

These are the agents of chaos set to shatter the terrible innocence of middle-class campers; again, familiar horror territory. In this context of stereotypically white Australian masculinity, Pedersen’s identity as an Indigenous Australian raises a question as to its significance to the narrative. But since Power did not write the character as explicitly Indigenous and nor does Pedersen’s performance make reference to it, any meaning attached would appear to be brought to it by the individual viewer. Steve Dow, writing for The Saturday Paper, found it significant; the US writer of a rogerebert.com review who initially referred to German as “poor white trash” clearly did not.

Indigeneity and colonialism are present more generally as themes, however. One camper at Stony Creek tells his family that they are sitting close to the site of an historic massacre of the local Koori tribe by settlers, to which his daughter responds, “I don’t like it here.” In the film’s opening scenes, Simon Chapman’s pellucid cinematography, combined with Leah Curtis’ ethereal score, evokes a landscape of unease, exquisite yet oppressive. In the film’s more striking passages, Power makes use of the lost child motif, an emblem since colonial times of white Australia’s fear of the bush. All these elements suggest a place that’s tainted, inimical.

It remains ambiguous as to whether this unquiet place attracts terrible things, or is the cause of them. What is clear, is that in this instance the terrible things take the form of sexual violence against women. Power seems to have concluded that the most effective way he could communicate ‘atrocity’ onscreen was through the depiction of rape — or at least its graphic prelude and aftermath. Male characters suffer too, but they’re not violated in the way that the film’s women are; the ways in which men’s and women’s bodies are presented is markedly different. Instead of addressing sadistic misogyny in an insightful way, as Karen Lam does in her supernatural horror film Evangeline (2013) or Maki Suzui in Kept (2014), Killing Ground uses sexual violence as a kind of shorthand for the evil that arises from a land blighted by colonialism, reducing rape to a narrative symbol.

Pedersen and Glenane inhabit their roles with skill and menace, but these characters aren’t detailed enough for us to glean more than the bare fact of their predatory natures. Warped Australian masculinity and the twisted mentor-follower relationship are explored in far more depth in the arguably more horrific films The Boys (1998), Animal Kingdom (2010) and Snowtown (2011). Wolf Creek, an obvious antecedent to Killing Ground, provides a much tauter image of Ocker misogyny, as well as evoking a sickened place in the Australian psyche; though brutal, it holds back on explicit sexual violence.

Killing Ground’s depiction of an unquiet landscape, non-linear layering of timelines and fine acting promise a profundity that is never fully realised, instead only hinted at through various tropes — hunter-serial killers, white middle-class holidaymakers, lost children, cursed land — and ultimately overshadowed by gratuitous depictions of rape.

Killing Ground, writer, director Damien Power, performers Aaron Pederson, Harriet Dyer, Aaron Glenane, Ian Meadows, cinematographer Simon Chapman, composer Leah Curtis, editor Katie Flaxman, production design Claire Granville, distributor Mushroom Pictures, 2016

Spirit of 47, the theme for this year’s Edinburgh International Festival, refers to the inaugural festival, which imagined providing a city in the depths of post-war austerity with a sense of community and celebration, and unity with Europe. It’s also, perhaps, an unsubtle reminder of European alliances now under threat, given Brexit, which hangs like a thick fog across the United Kingdom, not least Scotland which has opposed it.

Festival guest, New York novelist and academic Paul Auster, quoted from his New York Trilogy: “Stories happen only to those who are able to tell them.” He was describing the intersections between his personal biography and his books, but the words encapsulate a perspective common to the performing arts — that we are here to tell our stories. This desire becomes problematic with a world in flux, as things become more difficult to understand, explain and retell. Works I saw in the first week of the festival had central figures attempting to re-write histories in new ways, to re-examine the ways that we tell ourselves ‘what has happened.’

Lola Arias, Minefield

Minefield features three men who, in 1982, fought for Britain during the Falklands War and three who fought for Argentina during the Malvinas war. It was, of course, the same war. These men, once enemies, are now co-creators of this work directed by Lola Arias. One by one they introduce themselves, talk about their reasons for enlisting and tell their battle stories. They speak in their native tongues with alternating sets of surtitles. Standing within a white cyclorama, they film each other, provide live foley (the crunching of stones accompanies a story of hiking across dry terrain) and even form a Beatles cover band.

But the stories sit in opposition: two versions of history, two ideas of sovereignty. An Argentinian voice yells at a Brit, “Get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged.” One calls, “Where are the British dead in this play?” The crux of the piece is archival interview footage of one of the British soldiers soon after his return to Britain. He breaks down in tears, “Have I just killed someone who was trying to surrender?”

The director has obviously cast with an eye to audience engagement and intensively coached the players — there is none of the aesthetic of the ‘amateur’ here. These men are charming, comfortable on stage and negotiate an immensely complex pattern of movement. It all makes for a dizzying theatrical experience (see a trailer). But is it too entertaining? Too neat? The performers seem able to move all too easily from “if I met a British soldier before I would slit his throat” to “and now I would buy him a beer.” It suggests that theatrical collaboration can heal all wounds. The men have found new ways to speak about a painful past, with forgiveness fitting elegantly into a theatrical denouement, but feeling too simple in such a deeply complex personal and political landscape.

Martin Creed, Words and Music

Martin Creed leaves us alone for a while with an enormous PowerPoint image flashing, “YES. NO. YES. NO.” In stark black and white, it dominates the stage. Eventually Creed clumsily makes a clumsy entrance through the auditorium. He has been sitting behind us, watching us watch. He walks centrestage, beneath the sign, looks up, gives us a devilish grin and quips that perhaps he has already begun.

What follows falls somewhere between performative lecture and rambling gig. Creed, a musician and Turner Prize-winning visual artist and no stranger to controversy, will not tell us exactly what Words and Music is all about. Personal narratives emerge — he recently received a large-scale public sculpture commission in New York, and wanted the the words “Peace, Love and Understanding” to tower over a park. However, the project was thwarted when the fund could only pay for one word. He chose “Understanding,” not least for the visual pleasure of seeing people standing beneath it.

But he doesn’t dwell on anything too long, flitting between feelings about the art world, the fences between countries, a friend’s wedding, and saying ‘yes’ but feeling ‘no.’ There are musings — “Life’s live, isn’t it?” His trousers are important — he has made them himself — improvised, not looking really like trousers are meant to look, but nonetheless doing the job. A near enough approximation. It’s like hanging out with a slightly batty uncle. There are songs, projected doodles (quite literally, with Creed showing us a dick pic he has sketched) and attempts at humour. The performance — slow and greeted icily by the late night audience I was part of — relies heavily on Creed charming us into trusting him, that associations between the sublime and the ridiculous might somehow add up to a cogent account of the quandaries of modern existence. Somewhere in Words and Music there is a warning about the dangers of binaries, the failures of language and a celebration of things that fall between definitions.

Zinnie Harris, Meet Me at Dawn

Onstage at Traverse Theatre is a conversation conducted by two women, lovers who have washed up from a mysterious accident onto an island in Zinnie Harris’ Meet Me at Dawn. They are in shock, piecing together the moments that led to their arrival. Their memories are slowly gaining clarity, but the realities they recall don’t always make sense. For an hour the performers perch atop a monolithic island designed by Fred Meller. Slowly, facts (or fantasies) are fed to us. We are inside a kind of fairytale which asks, what would you do if you had one wish that allowed you one day with someone you loved who had died? Would you sit in grief, mourning their imminent departure in their presence, or simply while away the time, spending your last day together as any other?

Orla O’Loughlin’s direction is spacious; a heavy atmosphere unfolds slowly across an hour. Much of the performance happens with the actors facing the audience, but not directly addressing us, as their characters ruminate philosophically about love, memory and second chances.

In a work that is poetic and deliberately repetitive, always circling back to the romance central to it, the performances are superb. A lesser director may have steered Meet Me at Dawn towards cliche or sentimentality, but the story is told with gentle sophistication. It’s a drama about grief and 10 minutes in we realise that it won’t have a happy ending, but we are held by a deeply passionate and beguiling ritual of farewelling.

What struck a chord with me in these three works was the struggle of very different individuals to fully grasp the stories they were telling or the realities they were living out, whether actual former soldier enemies seeking reconciliation and forgiveness through theatre, a famous visual artist stumblingly turning to performance to share a lateral worldview, or two characters in a play, sorting out their author’s understanding of love in the face of death. Scotland, deep in political flux about independence and Brexit, is in the process, too, of having a new and uncertain story to tell.

2017 Edinburgh International Festival: Minefield, writer, director Lola Arias, The Studio, 6-9 Aug; Traverse Theatre Company, Meet Me At Dawn, writer Zinnie Harris, director Orla O’Loughlin, Traverse Theatre, 4-27 Aug; Martin Creed’s Words And Music, The Studio, Edinburgh, 4-27 Aug

Top image credit: Martin Creed, Words and Music, Edinburgh International Arts Festival, photo Murdo McLeod for The Guardian UK

Cold time, in these southern trees the sap is running now, so I cut bark for coolamons with my son. I’m working on a shield as I begin to prepare for the season of Law, ceremony and initiation, fast approaching in the next few months. It is a propitious time for me to view Aaron Petersen’s documentary Zach’s Ceremony, which follows the journey of a young Aboriginal boy and his father from 2005 to 2016, when the boy becomes a man and goes through ceremony, comes into Law.

I approach the film with trepidation, glimpsing on the internet excited claims of “never-before-seen footage of secret initiation ceremonies!” I worry that Men’s Business images will be shown to women and children, that our gendered controls of sacred knowledge, designed to protect the agency of both sexes, will be compromised. My fears are allayed as I find that only the pre-ceremony business involving the whole community is exposed. But the film opens another can of worms for me, in its exploration of the destructive intersections between Western masculinity and Aboriginal manhood.

Alec Doomadgee, a Waanyi, Garawa and Gangalidda man from the Gulf country up north, culture man and role model, is attempting to act as a one-man-village raising his son, Zach. Struggling alone in the city to provide the nurturing support traditionally undertaken by multiple aunties, uncles, parents, grandparents and older siblings, Alec is confounded by a conflicting imperative to forge his son into a fine example of the contemporary ‘Indigenous success’ mythology — an enterprising, neoliberal individual who is equally at home in lap-lap or blazer. But this story is not about him — it is about a boy who longs to come into his own knowledge and identity from the unenviable position of being the son of a great man.

His father’s presence looms large both in Zach’s life and onscreen, in a struggle that is sometimes awkward, sometimes poignant. The film is not narrated, although often it feels like Alec is attempting narration in front of the camera, or to curate his family’s story in the public domain. It is difficult for any Aboriginal person, though, to avoid tour-guide registers when coming under the white gaze. That is how we survive in this colonial economy. An animated montage of the history of Indigenous dispossession in Australia would work as a standalone introduction to Indigenous issues for novices, but is an unobtrusive and unifying element of the film.

I wondered in the opening sequences how gender would be framed. I had a moment of worry when the first mention of a woman, Zach’s absent mother, is quite damning and followed instantly by a cut to images of simpering, bikini-clad models signalling the rounds at Alec’s boxing title match. Following his victory, Alec preaches a ‘you can do anything if you work hard enough message’ to young Zach. After this, the difference between this competitive Western masculinity and Aboriginal manhood is made shockingly clear when we see father and son on their traditional lands back up north.

This monumental shift recurs whenever they return to that remote community. Alec’s code-switching to Aboriginal English always signals a reversal from masculine bravado to a humble gentleness grounded in connection to place and people. Zach’s own shrill adolescence flips over into a rumbling, steady repartee with his cousins. Powerful local matriarchs, unrestrained by the straitjacket of Western throw-like-a-girl femininity, fill the screen and the viewer’s heart with their enormous strength and wisdom. The ceremony the filmmakers are privy to involves these glorious old ladies leading a complex process of handing over the boys for their transition into Aboriginal manhood. Talking head shots of clan elders in a variety of locations maintain interest, while some occasional gritty hand-held realism is sensitively included without overuse.

We see the chasm between traditional roles and Western masculinity when Zach emerges transformed from ceremony and returns to his father’s house in Sydney. Having been through ceremony together, there is a loving and playful intimacy that he shares with his little brother, a softness and deep capacity for care that is what true manhood is all about. But Zach reverts during his 16^th birthday party to that lawless, unaccountable maleness that Anglo modernity bestows on all young men, and the viewer is at once devastated as well as relieved not to be left with a simplistic, romanticised message of ‘walking in both worlds.’

Zach’s Ceremony is ultimately not as uplifting as the adults speaking for and through Zach try to make it. But there is a truth in Zach’s eyes and words (and even his sneaky Dave Chappelle references) that triumphantly subverts the powerful genres and agendas whirling around his image, making us connect with him intimately and care deeply about his fate.

The DVD of Zach’s Ceremony will be released by Umbrella Entertainment in July.

Zach’s Ceremony, director, editor Aaron Peterson, writer, producer Sarah Linton, cinematographer Robert C Morton, music Angela Little, art direction Brendan Cook, associate producer Alec Doomadgee, executive producer Mitzi Goldman, distributor Umbrella, 2016.

Dr Tyson Yunkaporta is a Bama fulla currently working as a senior lecturer at Monash University, with research interests in Aboriginal cognition, methodologies, memory and pedagogy.

Top image credit: Zachariah Doomadgee, Zach’s Ceremony, still courtesy Umbrella Entertainment

In the 2017 OzAsia Festival two acclaimed theatre productions from Singapore — W!LD RICE’s Hotel and Checkpoint Theatre’s Recalling Mother — probe Singaporean history, identity and family interaction in vastly contrasting ways, one epic, the other intimate. Previously a British colony and then briefly part of the Federation of Malaysia, Singapore became a sovereign nation on 9 August 1965. Chris Reid spoke to members of both ensembles on 10 August, the day after huge National Day of Singapore celebrations.

W!LD RICE, Hotel

First staged in 2015, Hotel presents Singapore’s history from 1915 to 2015 through the interaction of a succession of groups of people in a room in a hotel not unlike the famous Raffles. Shown in two five-hour parts over successive nights, the play reveals Singapore’s turbulent history, rapid social and political evolution and diverse culture through the eyes of the play’s characters. I chatted with co-director Glen Goei and co-playwright Alfian Sa’at about the development of Hotel and its politically and socially charged themes.

Glen Goei tells me about the scale of the work: “It has a cast of 14 actors who play over 100 roles in nine languages including Japanese, Cantonese and Malay. There are two writers and two directors. Although an unusually long play, each scene is on average 20 minutes, very bite-size, very palatable, very accessible, like binge-watching… If you commit to the two parts, you will be rewarded because some characters re-emerge, older but wiser.” Set at 10-year intervals, the successive scenes reveal Singapore’s development in the context of world history in a text that is predominantly in English and a production strongly imbued with Western theatrical traditions.

A variety of families and groups occupy the hotel room, revealing Singapore’s ethnic and cultural diversity, highlighting the multiple traditions that constitute modern Singapore, rather than glossing over them. Alfian says, “We should not let any one identity try to dominate our understanding of the country and we should have a dialogue about our differences.” Glen adds, “Imagining we are one cohesive whole is unrealistic.” Noting that Singapore existed long before Sir Stamford Raffles established the British colony in 1819, he says, “Let’s celebrate differences. Singapore is a true melting pot… The Indigenous people who were here 500 years ago were the Malays, they were 100% but now form only 15% of the population.”

As in Australia, immigration numbers and the presence of foreign workers are issues in Singapore. Glen notes, “We are allowing 100,000 people in every year… The population is 5.6 million of which really only about three million are native Singaporeans — as in being born here — and that population isn’t growing.” Ethnic diversity and continuous immigration and emigration means that Singapore’s sense of tradition is in flux. Alfian thinks that “we are living in an eternal present and in a society that is quite amnesiac in a way.”

The Adelaide production will be Hotel’s international premiere, providing its makers with its first feedback from a non-Singaporean audience. Glen comments, “I think that Adelaide audiences will be pleasantly surprised at how their experiences will resonate with ours because of similar colonial histories and, right now, problems of immigration and race. I’m hoping Adelaide audiences will go away from Wild Rice feeling something profound. At the end of the day, the themes are universal.”

Alfian frames the key questions that Hotel asks: “What sort of society do we want to be: an open society or a closed one? How do we deal with difference within and outside of our borders? What are our responsibilities as global citizens? Are we aware of some of the privileges that we have? To borrow a line from revolutionary philosopher Frantz Fanon, what do we owe to support the wretched of the earth?”

Recalling Mother

Recalling Mother is a highly unusual work for two actors who play themselves and their mothers from a script that, since the 2006 premiere, has been rewritten for each production in 2009, 2015 and 2016. The dialogues between mother and daughter reveal generational differences and the most recent iterations of the play reveal how the daughters have had to take increasing responsibility for their mothers as they reach old age, become dependent and when minds can fade. The play shows how Singaporean social and familial norms have evolved during the nation’s recent history, for example Noorlinah Mohamed’s mother never went to school while Noorlinah herself has completed her PhD.

I spoke to performer-writers Claire Wong and Noorlinah Mohamed about the play’s focus. Noorlinah says that, “Recalling Mother is not just stories of daughters and mothers; it’s also about our mothers, and we are discovering new things about them as they grow older. Recalling Mother is a durational performance of life [in which] I ask, how do I make meaning of this journey for myself.”

The play is intended in part to encourage inter-generational communication often made difficult by Singapore’s linguistic diversity. This is the case, says Claire, for themselves — her mother speaks Cantonese and Noorlinah’s Malay — and especially affects the relationship between people in their 20s and their grandparents. “Grandparents might speak Cantonese, but the young ones have been schooled in Mandarin because of government policies to standardise the Chinese language.” The Government’s Bilingual Policy encourages proficiency in English and an ethnic mother tongue, such as Mandarin, Malay or Tamil. Noorlinah adds, “people in their 70s and 80s communicate little with their grandchildren. Their worldview is very different because they think in the way they speak their language.” Both actors work with young people who, says Claire, “tell me that there is a great reluctance for their grandparents to talk about different parts of their lives, for example they lived through World War II and the Japanese occupation but will just not talk about it.”

Addressing the recurrent rewriting of their script, Claire explains, “we decided not to keep to the original because we were interested in connecting with the ‘now’ each time we performed it. It’s a living text: we write a new script each time, it’s like a journal. The performances are like pauses in our lives.” She adds, “we considered the question of whether we wanted to incorporate excerpts of the 2009 version which had been videoed, but eventually we used audio bits from earlier performances. There is a consciousness of a sense of documentation, which is verbatim, and of non-performance: we are recalling our mothers.”

The question and answer session at the end of each performance provides an opportunity for audience members to share their own experiences of family life. Claire says she and Noorlinah see “Recalling Mother as a continuous conversation. It was conceived as a conversation and it continues to be even after the formal conversation that we have presented in the theatre space is finished. We didn’t originally foresee the question and answer session as part of the play, but we realised from early incarnations how it opened up space for people to voice what they have inside.” Noorlinah adds, “people in Singapore don’t normally open up, but we have been surprised at how much they have. That has been very humbling for us.”

Recalling Mother has played in New York and Brisbane, and though it is about a culture very different from a Western one, Claire feels that, “the more specific [to the culture] the play is, the more real and authentic it is for the audience. There is a universality to it.”

Chris Reid spoke to Glen Goei, Alfian Sa’at, Noorlinah Mohamed and Claire Wong in Singapore courtesy of Culturelink and the Adelaide Festival Centre.

OzAsia Festival, W!LD RICE, Hotel, Dunstan Playhouse, 28-30 Sept; Checkpoint Theatre, Recalling Mother, Space Theatre, Adelaide, 22-23 Sept

Our reviewer Tyson Yunkaporta was full of praise for Zach’s Ceremony, a coming-of-age story that follows for the first time onscreen a young Indigenous man from childhood to initiation into his society, while avoiding “a simplistic, romanticised message of ‘walking in both worlds.’” Aaron Peterson’s documentary speaks of “a boy who longs to come into his own knowledge and identity from the unenviable position of being the son of a great man… There is a truth in Zach’s eyes and words that triumphantly subverts the powerful genres and agendas whirling around his image, making us connect with him intimately and care deeply about his fate.”

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