Adelaide’s Her Majesty’s Theatre, built in 1913 and Australia’s last remaining Tivoli theatre, was aptly chosen for the premiere of Angelique by local all-female ensemble isthisyours?. The company, comprising graduates of the Flinders University Drama Centre, has been around for almost 10 years, producing work that is distinctively playful, audience-focused and formally experimental and staged in small venues and on the fringe festival circuit. The site-specific Angelique, however, is markedly more ambitious than the company’s previous offerings, and benefits from the scale of Her Majesty’s proscenium arch, expansive auditoria and faded elegance (the theatre is currently undergoing a major redevelopment, expected to be completed by late 2019).
As the small audience is herded into one section of the stalls by energetic ushers — who, we will learn, are integral to the performance, later assisting us at various moments to promenade through the theatre’s backstage spaces — a letter descends from the ceiling on a red ribbon, and an audience member is instructed to read it out. “Think about why you are here,” it says. “You imagine you are one thing but really you are something else.” The work’s concerns with the slipperiness of identity and the unreliability of appearances thus flagged, a scene of domestic disquiet begins to unfold on the stage against the backdrop of Jonathan Oxlade’s characteristically retro-flavoured design: big velvet drapes, daggy furniture and a large gilt mirror.
Schoolgirl Angelique (Jude Henshall) writes in her diary, mother Carole (Anna Steen) pores over an ‘improving’ book, while father George (a moustachioed Louisa Mignone) huffs and snipes ineffectually. There is an elephant in the room — the disappearance of Angelique’s sister, Evelyn — and, soon, a ‘real’ animal in the form of a blue parrot. Captured and caged, the parrot begins to speak a strange language that fascinates Angelique but seems to threaten her father, who — in a moment of rupture pitched somewhere between horror and farce, and reminiscent of Ionesco or Frisch in its darkly comic absurdity — wrings the life out of the bird. In subsequent scenes, the parrot’s spirit returns in human, English-speaking form as the flamboyant Birdy (Ellen Steele), who is like a cross between a life coach and a sleazy variety act.
It’s not easy to summarise what follows. The audience is, at first, taken backstage in two groups to view the remainder of the scene from the wings — decentralising our perspective on the unfolding family drama, and evoking for me the idea of the mind as a sort of ‘backstage’ space — and then ushered past the dressing rooms as the actors await their cues. We are led up and down various fire escapes, and return several times, at the behest of a bell, to a classroom located behind the theatre drapes, where Angelique’s teacher (Nadia Rossi) facilitates a series of student presentations responding to the theme “Your Career.” When, at the show’s dénouement, Angelique has to make her presentation, she tells us, cryptically, that she wants to be an anaesthetist. It seems partly a joke, perhaps on the conformism of her classmates, or does she just want to numb the pain — of her sister’s disappearance and her family’s slow breakdown — and continue, like everybody around her, to elide and supress? What does Angelique really want, and how can she know at an historical moment in which, as playwright Duncan Graham observes in his program note, quoting Italian theorist Bifo Berardi, “we have entered into the field of chaos” in which humans struggle to “critically decide between good and bad, between true and false.”
There is a stimulating, if ultimately frustrating, elusiveness in Graham’s script — co-written with isthsyours? and realised with flair by director Tessa Leong — as well as a great deal of both humour and cruelty. A critique of the hypocrisy of bourgeois values runs through several scenes, such as one in which a Dadaist, life-sized lobster is ‘painlessly’ boiled alive at a party for Angelique’s mum (the lobster, despite Carole’s assurances, screams theatrically as it dies). There are echoes of the films of Michael Haneke and Luis Buñuel, as well as Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1943 film Le Corbeau in which anonymous poison pen letters signed “The Raven” are sent to various residents of a small, unnamed French town.
Steered back out into the foyer at the end of the work, the ushers encourage us to read one of several dozen letters suspended from the ceiling on red ribbons. “Thank you,” the letters read, and tell us we have been “anxiously suspended in the mirror of [our] choices.” We are on the threshold of the world again. The blind master awaits us.
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inSpace: isthisyours?, Angelique, writer Duncan Graham, director Tessa Leong, designer Jonathan Oxlade, lighting Chris Petridis, composition, sound design Alice Keath, performers Jude Henshall, Louisa Mignone, Nadia Rossi, Ellen Steele, Anna Steen; Her Majesty’s Theatre, 13-21 Oct
Top image credit: Jude Henshall, Angelique, isthisyours?, photo Cynthia Gemus
Top image credit: The Ride, Cigdem Aydemir, Proximity Festival 2017, photo PAVLOVA
Located in the newly developed complex near St George’s Cathedral, with restored and reinvigorated Treasury Buildings and the architecturally-celebrated new City of Perth Library clustered around Cathedral Square, Proximity Festival 2017 sends participants on a walking tour of discovery.
A whirlwind of experiences takes each participant through the festival’s diverse offerings. Jen Jamieson generates oxytocin with her participants in a re-working of Let’s Make Love, first presented at Proximity Festival 2014. In Tresse // Passing — Don’t Touch My Hair, Hannah Brontë weaves together hair, personal and political reflections in a poetic braid. The Trees of St. Georges Square has Mike Bianco making horticultural digs at Australia’s immigration policies. Liam Colgan hides in plain sight while sharing his daily experience of invisibility with Reflex of a Blush, and Nat Randall perseveres with an extended cultivation of celebrity in Exclusive.
This Little Light of Mine, Rachael Dease, Proximity Festival 2017, photo PAVLOVA
This Little Light of Mine
In This Little Light of Mine, Rachael Dease uses silence, darkness and the evocative experience of lighting and extinguishing candles to present the perspective of a lifetime. Following the concise written instructions within a progression of gift boxes, I light a row of 83 candles, in line with statistical data for Australian average life expectancy, before extinguishing one for each complete year that I have lived. The process creates time for silent contemplation in the flickering light. When I’ve exited through blackout curtains into a bright, colourful space, Dease slowly walks toward me while singing; asking what would I choose to do if this were my last day, if this were my final candle? Departing with a candle labelled with my expected remaining years, I am left shaken and thoughtful.
Consent
Through dance, Tyrone Robinson challenges our self-perceptions and sense of compassion in Consent. A slightly opaque plastic sheet and cumbersome headphones detach me from the world as Robinson, covered in white paint, scampers around with animal motions, including cute and endearing mannerisms. A red lanyard strapped onto his head and face becomes a muzzle as an assistant, concealed in a whole body suit and mask, attaches a carabiner and tether. Restrained, Robinson rears upright, reminiscent of a dancing bear. On my cue, I take a seat in front of him and Robinson, seemingly nervous and unbalanced, holds my attention with his staring dark eyes emphasised by the white paint. Disconcerted, my headset silent, I rise and detach the tether. Returning to all fours, Robinson scampers until again restrained by the assistant. Trembling, he faces me, as recorded instructions direct me to the table next to my chair. By marking the creature’s white body with powders and dye provided, I am promised qualities such as “strength,” “grounding” and “wisdom.” Unable to proceed, I listen to instructions to run a coloured line across “its” chest” and rub dye into “its” mouth, while Robinson shivers and watches me. Each moment is confronting, intense and distressing, later reflection further questioning my sense of privilege, ownership and self.
Shell Game, Martyn Coutts, Proximity Festival 2017, photo PAVLOVA
Shell Game
Meeting on the street at the corner of Treasury Building, Martyn Coutts in Shell Game engages me in ice-breaking small talk, sharing stories of recent life experiences and our hopes for the future. He skilfully moves the conversation to developments in the South China Sea while we adjourn to the atrium. Coutts produces a deck of cards to scry the fortune of the Spratly Islands. Each card depicts an island, with a satellite photo, its name written in the language of the occupying nation and a simple symbol. Coutts explains the symbolism as we examine the cards, lending context to the shape, vegetation and facilities of each island. My three chosen islands are all claimed by China, each displaying extensive development and fortifications, indicating a Chinese influence in the Spratly Islands’ future. Geopolitics has never been so convivial.
The Ride, Cigdem Aydemir, Proximity Festival 2017, photo PAVLOVA
The Ride
The Ride transforms a church hall into a movie set. Industrial fans are arranged in front of a motorcycle which is ‘posed’ for a camera that sits before a screen with an image of the Australian outback. As I don a jacket and sunglasses, Cigdem Aydemir briskly puts on a black hijab, tucking excess cloth into her black leather jacket that co-ordinates with her form-hugging black trousers. An extra, I wait for rescue by the main character. After a brief practice run, we record. With slow graceful movement, Aydemir steps lightly onto her bike. I follow, ungainly in comparison, mounting the pillion seat. She starts the bike and we move along the road, the fans blasting as we accelerate and the scenery rolls past. The calm hero, Aydemir, is in control, as the wind unfurls her hijab and its magnificent length trails us across the desert. She points as we pass something and we turn our gaze before the ride ends and she leaves without a word. The screen replays Aydemir rescuing another extra, the glamorous star creating an iconic image of machine in the vast red landscape framed by the fluttering hijab flying free, a breathtaking rebuttal to white masculinity’s likely attempts to monopolise a heroic narrative like this one.
Let’s Make Love, Jen Jamieson, Proximity Festival 2017, photo PAVLOVA
In 2017, Proximity Festival continues to celebrate ideas and innovative communication where intimate collaborations between artist and audience create unique and memorable experiences. Blurring the lines between artistic disciplines, with no fourth wall and focusing on the individual in each moment, Proximity Festival challenges boundaries, creating art that defies neat categorisation while expanding personal horizons.
In moving from an annual to a biennial performance schedule, Proximity Festival has been able to grant nine artists longer sessions and greater resources for each work than in previous festivals, which each comprised 12 performances. For 2017, curators Sarah Rowbottam and Kelli McCluskey invited artists with unique ideas, fresh perspectives and the courage and enthusiasm to push the comfort zones of their participants. Provocateur Jeff Khan, with Rowbottam and McCluskey, ran a two-week Proximity Lab in December 2016, assisting artists to develop their presentations. With a longer lead time between the Lab and performances than in previous festivals, artists have been able to develop mature works.
Listen to Claire Nichols’ interviews with Proximity artists here.
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Proximity Festival 2017, director, curator, mentor Sarah Rowbottam, curator, mentor Kelli McCluskey, provocateur, mentor Jeff Khan, artists Cigdem Aydemir, Mike Bianco, Hannah Brontë, Liam Colgan, Martyn Coutts, Rachael Dease, Jen Jamieson, Nat Randall, Tyrone Robinson; Perth, 26 Sept-7 Oct
Top image credit: Consent, Tyrone Robinson, Proximity Festival 2017, photo PAVLOVA
As host and co-producer of FBi Radio’s experimental music program Ears Have Ears, I listen to new releases by innovative artists every day. And even though our team is sent mountains of music from city acts, it has been vital for us to recognise and appreciate the exciting sounds coming from Australia’s regional areas. This playlist features artists outside the city creating interesting audio — from coastal creatives reimagining local histories, to statement makers whose music is a form of activism.
Jason Campbell, photo courtesy the artist
Jason Campbell (Newcastle, NSW) has delved into concentrated synthesiser studies under aliases Stitched Vision, Collector and most recently, J.Campbell. When J. Campbell’s debut cassette A Death At The Steelworks landed on my desk earlier this year, I was thoroughly impressed. The heavy, melancholic 8-tracker — released by Canadian label Summer Isle — offers a uniquely Australian take on musique concrete. Each soundscape features fragments of piano, organ, viola and, of course, synthesiser. Added to the mix are field recordings from Newcastle’s ill-fated and abandoned BHP Steelworks. The piece is a striking reflection on Newcastle’s industrial past and Jason’s familial connections to it.
Some time ago, I interviewed Kris Keogh (Nhulunbuy, Arnhem Land, NT), about his choice of instrument. He told me that the harp is a reflection of its regal past and he wanted to destroy that concept. After all, why should a certain pocket of society own this instrument’s history? What happens when you take the harp outside its usual context and subvert it even further using home-made software, drawing inspiration from Debussy and Atari Teenage Riot? You’ll find the answer on Keogh’s delicate, shimmering release Selected Harp Works II, from Provenance Records. He has rewritten the harp’s history, much to his delight, I’m sure!
Monica Brooks (Blue Mountains, NSW) is an accomplished and prolific artist whose musical collaborations include Great Waitress, West Head Project and Electronic Resonance Korps. Whenever I listen to Monica’s solo piano work I get the sense that time is elastic because there is fluidity and space in each and every note.
Leah Barclay, photo courtesy the artist
Leah Barclay (Noosa, QLD) is a sound artist, composer and researcher whose art intersects with science and technology. Instead of watching static performances, her audiences are invited to explore Queensland’s coastline through a river listening phone app, or hear the impact of climate change through an installation. Barclay’s fascinating studies have taken her from Noosa to Vanuatu, New Zealand and Canada to explore the sounds and science of very different environments.
Warren Burt (Daylesford, VIC) has shaped Australia’s experimental music landscape since the 70’s. I’m struck by his creative flexibility, which veers into electroacoustic, installation and text-based music.
In the remainder of this mix you’ll also hear dizzying soundscapes from Bateman’s Bay NSW duo School Girl Report alongside electronic, almost interplanetary music by Lismore NSW’s Tralala Blip. Finally, there’s a track by UK-based, Australian artist Kate Carr who has fastidiously captured and released sounds from the farthest reaches of Australia (and beyond) since 2011 through her label Flaming Pines.
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Brooke Olsen in a Sydney based broadcaster and curator. She’s been involved in experimental and innovative music for a decade — curating, writing, documenting and broadcasting across multiple formats. Currently Brooke hosts and co-produces FBi Radio’s award winning music and soundtrack program Ears Have Ears.
Top image credit: Brooke Olsen, photo courtesy FBi Radio
Oh to be in Cleveland, Brisbane, for the Cleveland Contemporary Music Event (CCME) which features concerts by ELISION and Kupka’s Piano, ensembles foregrounding electric guitar in works that are visceral and haunting.
Every now and then in new music the electric guitar is allowed out to play. James Hullick in Were/Oblivion, which he performed in the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s recent Dream Sequence concert, drew on the Hendrix legacy to unleash a powerful instrumental and vocal poem-letter to his daughters. In the 2012 Aurora Festival of Living Music in Sydney’s west, Zane Banks, grippingly focused and passionate, performed George Lentz’s 60-minute Ingwe (available on Naxos CD and on Spotify), part of a body of works with a cosmological drive. In a review, I described the experience as “an epic coursing through the dark night of the soul for solo electric guitar with the doubt, passion and wit of a metaphysical poet cut adrift from his god.” As in the Hullick, the scoring drew on a heritage of popular and jazz electric guitar techniques to powerful effect.
And now the electric guitar is to be let loose in two concerts in Brisbane’s Cleveland Contemporary Music Event. ELISION Ensemble Artistic Director Daryl Buckley on lapsteel with electronics will perform solo Aaron Cassidy’s short but exacting The wreck of former boundaries (the title too of the concert), while in a Kupka’s Piano concert, Hauntology, Co-Artistic Director Liam Flenady will play electric guitar with the ensemble in the premiere of his own work, Hauntolgy (also the concert title). Electric guitar takes the lead!
ELISION, The wreck of former boundaries
Australia’s leading new music ensemble is a force to be reckoned with, as demanding with audiences as it is with itself in concerts that have a visceral intensity.
Cassidy composed the 33-minute Wreck… so that it can be played in full by the ensemble or in short modular units. Daryl Buckley will be playing one of these, described as “music that sets movement, energy, force and velocity against various states of friction, resistance, viscosity and elasticity. Its material bends and grinds, wobbles and pulls, flickers and swerves, leaps and twists, gurgles and coils. And erupts and explodes.” It does so, epically in a mere seven minutes with a nuclear fusion of guitar and electronics. In a video trailer where you can glimpse some of the playing, Buckley says, “The wreck’s notation inscribes itself into the body of the player.”
One of my favourite 21st century works is UK composer Richard Barrett’s Dark Matter, a massive cosmological creation written for ELISION and performed and spectacularly staged by the ensemble in Brisbane in 2001 (you can read my description of the experience here).
Seek out the work on Spotify, listen to track four and feel the power and the textural subtlety of Buckley’s playing which will also feature in one of two Barrett works in The wreck… concert, world-line (2012/14; 35 minutes), for electric lap-steel guitar, piccolo trumpet/quarter-tone flugelhorn, percussion and electronics. The tuning and setup was devised by Barrett in collaboration with Buckley, to whom world-line is dedicated.
Daryl Buckley, ELISION, photo Nico Keenan Lichen
ELISION says of the work that, drawing on the Theory of Relativity in which a “world-line” denotes the history of a particle passing through time-space, “the music could be thought of as a miniature universe, whose matter and energy are composed of sound, which expands (from low pitches) and recontracts (towards high pitches)…”
After grunting and growling in world-line’s opening like a demented power tool, Buckley’s guitar loops and soars in spectacular slides over a murmuring sea of sounds and impressively engages in a sustained dialogue with Tristram Williams’ eloquent trumpet. Elsewhere it’s one sinuous voice amid others in a sublimely extended, quiet soundscape.
Also in the program is Barrett’s codex III (2003; 16 minutes) for trumpets, percussion, violin and electronics and James Gardner’s Torc (2016; 12 minutes) for violin and trombone. Playing alongside Daryl Buckley will be Benjamin Anderson on alto trombone, Graeme Jennings on violin, Peter Neville on percussion and Tristram Williams on trumpets, all superb musicians. The wreck of former boundaries promises to be a very special experience.
Kupka’s Piano, Hauntology
Kupka’s Piano, the Brisbane new music ensemble have garnered praise in RealTime in recent years and today in Matthew Lorenzon’s report from BIFEM2017. They’re presenting a concert in CCME titled Hauntology, featuring works that are variously eerie, weird, bizarre and strangely beautiful, as in American composer John Luther Adam’s mesmeric Red Arc / Blue Veil. I spoke about the concert program by phone with ensemble member, Co-Artistic Director, composer and guitarist Liam Flenady.
The title of the concert, Hauntology, is also the name of work that you’ve composed.
It’s the first piece I’ve written that’s semi-improvised — sliding between fully-notated sections and guided improvisation sections. It’s for a quintet, a bit of a strange one: two flutes, clarinet, percussion — mostly vibraphone and glockenspiel — and the electric guitar.
Where did the idea for the composition come from?
Well, it’s a nice title! I’d been reading books by Mark Fisher who wrote about hauntology, a concept he borrowed from Jacques Derrida. It’s about the persistence [as, for example, in the case of ghosts, ideas etc] of traces of absence as in the presence of [a sense of] absence or the absence of presence. That’s what I’m trying to deal with, at least vaguely.
How have you realised that play between absence and presence musically?
The difference between the electric guitar and the other instruments is dealt with in a way that sharply highlights rather than disguises the difference between them — like putting the guitar in a completely reverb-saturated space while the other instruments are very present, and then switching the guitar to a fully brittle, in-your-face sound while the other instruments are more mellow. These are ways of generating the sense of a trace of something that’s absent or distant from the room, but also actually supremely present.
It’s more than a theory inspired notion then?
Its about the affect that you get when you have an eerie feeling that something is there but it’s not.
Is Hauntology a dialogue between the guitar and the other instruments, between the present and the absent?
There are moments of dialogue, like communicating via Ouija board — the idea that you might commune with a spirit that’s not actually there but nonetheless some kind of interaction takes place.
I wasn’t suggesting it’s a concerto. Tell me about your guitar playing.
LAUGHS No, not a concerto; that would put the pressure on me and my guitar skills. So ideally not. I studied jazz guitar and played a lot of rock music and only in the last year or two have I started playing with Kupka’s Piano even though I’d been composing for them and have been co-Artistic Director for a long time. I’ve recently plucked up the courage to be a new music guitarist.
What other works are in the program?
We’re playing the Australian premiere of a duo for flute and clarinet by Israeli composer Adam Maor. It’s a beautiful, I guess, Giacinto-Scelsi-inspired dialogue between the two instruments with extended techniques and very subtle microtonal interplay between. We’re playing a short very enjoyable piece by US composer Natacha Diels for piccolo and audio playback. It’s quite bizarre and virtuosic. We’re also playing John Luther Adams’ Red Arc / Blue Veil, something of a departure from Kupka’s normal aesthetic, but we thought it would provide an interesting counterpoint to some of the more European Modernist sounds we normally go for.
We’ll also play Adelaide composer Dan Thorpe’s false cognate for flute and electric guitar [hear a version of this other-wordly creation here. Eds] and Olive, a flute duo, composed by Hannah Reardon-Smith, one of our ensemble members. Olive appears on our new album, Braneworlds; it’s a gorgeous, haunting work.
Next week RealTime will preview another of the CCME concerts, Lawrence English’s immersive sound work, Viento: Blizzards of Antarctica and Beyond (10 November).
Top image credit: Kupka’s Piano, photo Jai Farrell
The first busy week of the Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art is over, leaving in its wake recollections of excitement and foyer debate over “experimental” as a valid descriptor, and if so, which works warranted it. The adjectives alternative, hybrid, multidisciplinary, exploratory and experimental have been deployed since the 1970s to distinguish emergent modes of performance from traditional mainstream practices. Experimental currently enjoys common usage, reinforced by some funding body criteria and doctorates in creative practice research.
If a work is to be experimental, we expect it to pose a question and come up with an answer, but a conventional play can also do that. The actual expectation is that the work challenges not only mainstream forms but prior experiments in its own field — modernist or postmodern, in contemporary performance and dance or live art — and makes new the art experience. These days the experimental and the experiential are bound together in a culture forever in love with the new, setting a high bar for any artist who lays serious claim to experimental practice. Any formal regression or standing still will be criticised, as if the artist has failed to shake off the past, their work helplessly haunted by ghosts with their own agenda.
Rhetorical Chorus, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Liveworks 2017, photos by Document Photography
Agathe Gothe-Snape, Rhetorical Chorus
We enter the vast Carriageworks Space 17 via the stairs to find ourselves suspended high above a deep stage and before a huge screen, either side of which are monitors, small at this distance, on which appear in particular the gesturing hands of American artist Lawrence Weiner, often called a conceptualist and who himself creates works of scale and believes art to be a language. Clearly, from Gothe-Snape’s program note, Weiner has been influential for her own practice. Onscreen, he speaks (unheard) and gestures (mostly in close-up). Onstage, two dancers ‘become’ his hands, left (Lizzie Thompson) and right (Brooke Stamp). In solo forays and bursts of synchronicity, the arms of each arc and shaped hands touch — the choreography’s most interesting moments residing in the upper body as much as the lower.
Renowned American singer Joan La Barbara (The Transmitter) sits to one side while The Rhetorical Chorus of six populate the floor in various permutations and vocalise with La Barbara to composer Megan Alice Clune’s gradually intensifying and increasingly layered score in Benjamin Carey’s wraparound sound design. On the screen large regular slabs of colour — a reddish orange and blue — persistently glide, rearrange themselves and ultimately fuse, in part, into a vivid purple. This geometric abstraction, reminiscent of Elsworth Kelly’s Colour Field paintings, seemed an apt pairing with Weiner’s conceptualism.
That’s the picture, but chronologically the work opens grandly, like a movie, with projected credits identifying the participating artists with letters that slip and fall, signifying the instability of language and the difficulty of linguistic representation that we associate with conceptual art (this is writ large in a video sequence within the body of the work with words falling from and returning to columns with fluid ease). We are suddenly lit and performance artist Brian Fuata (The Prologue) appears among us delivering Weiner utterances collated by Gothe-Snape. Fuata speaks the enigmatic text eloquently, but it’s his intensifying dance of arms and hands that makes “gesture become language,” of a kind. In the work’s final passage, La Barbara will sing the same words, “transmitting” them to another aesthetic plane, rendering them quite beautiful. The music reaches a new level of intensity and the hard edge of conceptualism is softened. Or, as Gothe-Snape puts it in her program note, the work’s trajectory “fragments the singular, rhetorical voice, dissolving it into a spectacle of transmission.”
Her purpose, inspired by Weiner when she met him briefly in an airport, is essentially to humanise the artist, to separate him from his artwork, or a standard view of it, by “transforming his rhetorical delivery into new forms.” She writes, “The sense of hierarchy that I had inherited and so willingly accepted — centre/periphery, old/young, male/female — dissolved. This was replaced by the reality of physical, temporal and visceral proximity: hair, bones, skin, sweat, aeroplane smell.” This hierarchy is not necessarily, however, dissolved by The Rhetorical Chorus, a work of such scale that its stage performers remained distant figures and a new form hard to discern. While the dancing was engaging from time to time, the choreography and the deployment of the chorus lacked palpable overall shaping or a sense of collective being — heard in the singing but not otherwise experienced. The middle of the work felt increasingly amorphous, improvisational and distended. I’ve been told that in subsequent performances, the work’s sequence durations, which are directly controlled by Gothe-Snape, were shortened, but this would address little of the work’s spatial and focal problems; a work of this theatrical scale demands a stronger directorial and choreographic vision.
As to its standing in a festival of exploratory art, Rhetorical Chorus is, in terms of its staging and theatricality, in the lineage of what was once American experimental performance, from Cage and Cunningham to Glass and Wilson and Robert Ashley — with whom Joan La Barbara worked — and the image-makers of American contemporary performance, like Mabou Mines. Consequently, Rhetorical Chorus felt familiar. Though the work failed to surprise, I was intrigued by its subject, Weiner, sadly minus the promised “bones, skin, sweat,” and what little I could grasp of him; by the alchemical transformation of rhetoric into song; and by an enduring, confounding, uncommunicative distrust of language. Weiner is still alive, but the ghost of his cool project is no less present, however warmed up by Gothe-Snape. That said, I admire the artist’s ambition — works of scale in contemporary performance are, sadly, rare these days. I thought her staging striking, although overblown (including glossy cinematic framing). I relished the superb singing from La Barbara (why wasn’t her presence trumpeted about Sydney?) and the Chorus and in particular the magnificent mutation of Brian Fuata’s prologue into La Barbara’s finale. Something of Rhetorical Chorus has stayed with me, like a dream memory, a keeping and compacting of the best bits into a memorable if fragile whole, while feeling haunted by a sense of a vision that looks further back than forward.
In her “transmission” experiment, Gothe-Snape has asked if she can ‘dissolve’ the influence of a dominant artworld figure on herself, and presumably her generation, and see him as a fellow skin and bone human. In the work’s own terms, she achieves some of that, but without breaking from the constraints of a conceptualist vision (she well might not want to) and without rigorously addressing an inherited postmodern form.
Christian Thompson, Tree of Knowledge, Liveworks 2017, photo Heidrun Löhr
Christian Thompson, Tree of Knowledge
Tree of Knowledge commences in the dark with a growled, quickfire voiceover, an epic litany of words attached to “Aboriginal” — “black Aboriginal, gay Aboriginal, Nicole Kidman Aboriginal, pussy Aboriginal” and on and on. A reclining Christian Thompson is a barely discernable silhouette in the performance space. On the opening night, a spotlit white Auslan interpreter (Neil Phipps) gestures the words with a brilliant dance of hands, arms and facial expressiveness that gave the stream of utterances added lyricism, heft and humour.
Christian Thompson onstage and off is funny. His remarkable body of photographic and video works too are laced with wit and irony, but there’s an essential seriousness allied with pristine image-making. But in Tree of Knowledge the performance is raw, the images roughly hewn, blackouts clunky, presence casual. Initially ignoring us, Thompson, in a face-obscuring, bulky hoodie, reclines on a bed, smoking and flipping over the pages of a magazine. We’re here on his terms and in his real time.
Thompson turns to a screen above him and activates in turn images from a video album of a white cat observed, a small child the artist greets, queuing for the cash register in a supermarket. He’ll consider one or two of them again. From then on the work comprises a series of discrete scenes in which Thompson peels off layers of hoodies (the designs unreadable in dim light) to reveal a glittering Aboriginal flag top; brutally brushes out his abundant hair as we hear his complex DNA delineated, not a lot of it Aboriginal it would seem; appears on screen singing gloriously in the language of his people; undresses a Boy George Barbie doll, sucks the head and spits it out. And there’s more glorious singing, again untranslated.
Tree of Knowledge is brash and elusive, funny and irritating. It recalled contemporary performance works of the 1980s and 90s that frequently left the audience to make of them what they would, which is why Thompson’s artist talk suggested a work that could give a little more, without becoming too literal, and with some force. The talk revealed that the video album reflected his life in Amsterdam when studying for his MA at DAS Arts in Theatre: an outsider, he identified with the cat which knew nothing of life outside the apartment. When a child, the Boy George doll was allowed him by his father, but not a desired black Barbie doll. When asked about the songs he’d composed, the words not translated for us in performance, Thompson said he simply preferred his listeners, and all Australians, to grow used to hearing Aboriginal languages. Point taken, but even so. Together the performance and talk added up to a more complete experience. Without surrendering his idiosyncratic presence, Thompson needs to work at reducing the distance between himself and his audience and create a form of performance that is as individual as his constantly evolving photographic and video work with its inherent sense of relentless experiment.
It was clear from the talk that Thompson felt the move to the stage and its three-dimensionality liberating. It’s not surprising then that he’ll be making a commissioned VR work over the next 12 months, which will inevitably be, he says, performative, and shot in the western Queensland landscape he grew up in, one location in a peripatetic childhood with an RAAF father.
The Second Woman, Dark Mofo 2017, still from production
Nat Randall, The Second Woman
Nat Randall’s The Second Woman looked like a real experiment. The 100 men who perform in the work over 24 hours, one after the other without rehearsal, just lines learned and instructions absorbed, are lab rats, with Randall effectively the stand-in for the cheese — the chance to perform publicly and for a $50 fee. The audience observe closely each iteration of the brief scene, aided by intense video feed close-ups, get to know the lines and the moves and look for any telling variation — aggression, apparent rule-breaking, overacting, being funny — and what it says about the men individually and collectively. The easiest assumption to make is that most of the men will run with Marty’s indifference to Virginia when it come to the subject of love, which he deflects back to her; the blunt force of the line itself is inescapable. But there is some room to move at the end: the man can choose from the available options to profess or reject love and/or perhaps even refuse the money. Or, while following the rules, possibly texture the scene with palpable affection. A very hard call in tightly constrained conditions. It’s pretty much inevitable that the men’s responses read as callous and sexist. In her Guardian review, “Stunning endurance theatre takes aim at patriarchy,” Stephanie Convery describes, in some detail, most of the men as playing to form, which is what I witnessed in a small sampling of performances.
Is The Second Woman a rigged experiment? In part, and it has to be, but there are other variables. Randall herself is an experimental subject: how will she endure over 24 hours, responding, for example to varying degrees of aggression and, representing womanhood across history, for just how long? She becomes, against the odds, a survivor, a heroic figure, however abject. And there’s the audience, wonderfully patient and observant or variously looking for laughs and too easily mocking the men, or enjoying Virginia’s abjection or her drunken collapse (which man will restrain her fall more than any other?) or relishing the moment when she dismisses Marty, or tensing for his last words.
There’s no doubt that works that fall within the field of relational aesthetics, where the public become participants or co-creators in the moment and outcomes can be unpredictable are ideal for experimentation. I hope Randall will at some time give an account of how she felt the men and the audiences for The Second Woman performed, what the experiment revealed of herself and how it might shape future work.
The ghost of performances past in The Second Woman, resides in Randall’s source, a stage play within a 1977 film written by a male director, John Cassavettes, featuring his wife and collaborator Gena Rowlands, whose remarkably ambivalent smile (which can turn feral or hilarious in an instant) Randall expertly reproduces, especially in exquisite close-up. Postmodern theatre and performance works have mostly tackled familiar classics, making for public dialogue about legacy and hegemony. Few in The Second Woman audience would know the film or the traumatising stage slap which is pivotal to this scene and the whole film, wisely not retained in Randall’s edited version. But for those of us who do know the film, The Second Woman conjures briefly the spirit of the original, but, understandably, with little but a hint of its complexity — felt here in that smile, the falling down and the messy mix of abjection and assertion. I was agreeably spooked by Nat Randall’s dreamlike condensation of a scene from a film that ever haunts me. Randall looks back to the past with little to say about Opening Night, doubtless not her aim, but deploys it to conduct a telling experiment, which might not reveal much more than we already know about male behaviour, but, like any good experiment, in testing volunteers, audience and the artist herself The Second Woman opens up myriad possibilities for performances to come.
Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art: Rhetorical Chorus, lead artist Agatha Gothe-Snape, 19-22 Oct; Tree of Knowledge, artist, performer Christian Thompson, 19-22 Oct; The Second Woman, concept, performer, Nat Randall, script, direction Anna Breckon, Nat Randall, 20-21 Oct; Carriageworks, Sydney
Top image credit: Christian Thompson, Tree of Knowledge, Liveworks 2017, photo Heidrun Löhr
A staticky, granulated landscape, foliage blotched into opaque black. A touch of Australian painter Louise Hearman in the lone car, road off kilter, the whirling trees. Ghost tape, mangled documentary. An artefact of colonisation, corrupted by trauma.
Like the weird VHS tape in Japanese horror film The Ring, Matthew Berka’s sinister, melancholy video, responding to a particular place and the colonialist narratives that have shaped it, has the quality of being sentient in itself, born of terror or rage — or shame. It’s a filmic badland, the kind Ross Gibson talks about in Seven Versions of an Australian Badland: a place that’s become a no-go zone, charged with fear for colonising populations due to deliberately concealed histories of atrocity. Uncanny, alien; the sort of place that can swallow you up.
It’s a piece of found footage where fragments of meaning swim to the surface, coming in the form of intercepted wireless signals, of repeated phrases thrown up on the screen, of the soft strains of convict folksong “Botany Bay,” of abstracted landscape resolving Rorschach-like into faces. The male narration (Bill Peach, maybe?) from some 20th century documentary about Hume and Hovell’s 1824 expedition across the Great Dividing Range tries to assert itself over the landscape only to be intercepted by scratchy, hissing grabs of image and sound, the tape fracturing as though besieged by what has been suppressed.
But this is not merely a haunted historic document. Amid the buzz of imagery imprinted on the tape there’s that one car fuzzily driving through the bush, ultimately vanishing into the video’s pale ether. A warning, perhaps, to us onlookers: drive into the badland at your own risk, for here is emptiness. Here is absence. Katerina Sakkas
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Matthew Berka is a London-based artist and curator from Melbourne who works with film, video and sound. Through audiovisual assemblage he creates speculative films that explore associations between place and the unknown. You can see more of his works on his website.
Matthew Berka, Hume’s Disappointment, Super 8mm transferred to 2.5K video,
colour, b/w, stereo, 11’00
Top image credit: Hume’s Disappointment
Hold on to your plastic safety helmets, fasten your fantastical seat belts, you are in for an epic cosmic ride! Route Dash Niner: Part II, by Re:group Performance Collective, picks up where their 2016 Part I left off. A fast initial recap of Part I’s Earthbound press conference heralds the group’s intention to launch an intergalactic investigation to find the source of a mysterious signal emanating from “the deepest corner of the universe,” somewhere in the vicinity of Absconsus.
Despite the fake media briefing, when the lights go out for the start of Part II, Australia’s first interstellar mission has already departed and the “brave souls” bade a fond farewell to seek contact with alien life forms. Aboard their transport vessel, Hat-Thrower, the valiant crew surf the celestial slipstream of Route 9 toward an uncertain destiny. They stretch the umbilicus of live video feedback to the blue planet for as long as possible and, as reception fades, they keep filming nonetheless. The pacey action of preparing the scenographic tricks, and then shooting live film onstage, is what drives the quirky spatial choreography of this inventive and deftly handled work.
Route Dash Niner Part 2, re:group, photo Jackson Davis
Successfully creating a live performance experience while focused on the camera is no easy feat, but the clunky playfulness the performers employ is what makes this work such a delight. A seemingly random scattering of tables, monitors, shonky modules made of cardboard and styrofoam and a staircase going nowhere transform the wood panelled Wollongong Town Hall into something resembling an early set from Lost in Space. As Hat-Thrower ventures beyond contact with Earth, the question is, can this foolhardy group of space cadets really “trust the universe to take care” of them. Indeed, who or what can they trust at all?
Twelve months into the voyage it is the task of Mark (Rogers), a bearded human-like-machine (part nerd, part spooky hipster embodiment of HAL) to wake the crew, somewhat early, from cryogenic slumber. One of those woken, Carly (Young) is a drily downbeat version of Princess Leia. Together, across the breakfast table, they need to deal with some unexpected technical “anomalies” and the impending threat of collision with a random neutron ball — a wobbling maquette made of aluminium foil.
Hurtling at great speed among comets and arguments, crunching numbers, obscure formulae, floating breakfast cereal and existential angst, the cast deftly slide between tasks as paranoid astronauts and film crew. Employing “acceleration” and a “bypass,” they narrowly miss a suction event into the oblivion of a black hole.
Route Dash Niner Part 2, re:group, photo Jackson Davis
Dizzying sequences and scene cuts abound as live camera feed is projected onto multiple projection screens. Instead of CGI animation Re:group makes hilarious and inventive use of toy spaceships moved by hand across black cloth to simulate space cam footage, creating the impression of an extensive craft by filming in corridors, broom closets and barely concealed behind pillars.
Sitting near the control desk I could see how dextrous the vision switching needs to be and how tight the sequencing of action. At times it’s breathtakingly fast and very impressive for this group of distinguished University of Wollongong grads, who claim never to have made a film before. In the few years since university they have however made some memorable theatre across a number of configurations and artist collectives. These are fresh and unafraid voices.
Re:group gorges with relish on the innate human desire to scout the stars, to hitchhike across the pearly galaxy. They take the piss, they re-invent. They manage convincing scene shifts as one brave soul must make the narratively inevitable excursion outside the craft to repair the engine — with a rubber hose and a hammer. Dripping heavily with irreverent borrowings from and spoof-like tributes to all the sci-fi movie blockbusters, Route Dash Niner Part II conjures moments of suspense and mystery as well as some pathos associated with the loneliness of the long-distance voyager, the abject ennui of one-way travel into the as yet unknowable. The long muffled goodbye. Can you hear me Major Tom…?
The next question is, when will we see Route Dash Niner: Parts I & II staged as an epic double, on tour or programmed into a major festival? Don’t miss the next smoking orbit of this eccentric craft. No doubt, they’ll be back.
Re-group Performance Collective, Route Dash Niner Part II, creator-performers Jackson Davis, James Harding, Tahlee Leeson, Mark Rogers, Steve Wilson-Alexander, Carly Young, director Jackson Davis, camera operators Tahlee Leeson, Harry McGhee, sound design Tom Hogan, lighting design Taryn Brown, producer Merrigong Theatre Company, Wollongong Town Hall, 29 Sept
Top image credit: Carly Young, Route Dash Niner Part 2, re:group, photo Jackson Davis
The 2017 Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music’s Music Writer’s Workshop for emerging critics was conducted by Matthew Lorenzon and Alistair Noble. You’ll find links to Partial Durations reviews by Joel Roberts, Kishore Minifie Ryan, Lewis Ingham and Simone Maurer in Matthew’s overview of the festival below.
Plank Rodeo
The festival began with four of its most virtuosic soloists balancing atop a pile of amplified wooden planks. In Plank Rodeo, Jacob Abela, Matteo Cesari, Jessica Aszodi and Jane Sheldon share each other’s weight, bending and swaying according to a series of performance directions devised by the composer Jenna Lyle. At times, they hold one another as though they are delicate musical instruments; at other times they stomp around the planks, which explode in loud pops and creaks. The planks and bodies are echoed in the frames and figurative paintings adorning the walls of the performance space, a small room in the Bendigo Art Gallery. An opening ceremony of sorts, the inextricably linked sounds of bodies and wooden instruments echo out of the room and throughout the gallery’s collections.
Plank Rodeo, Argonaut, BIFEM 2017, photo Jason Taverner Photography
Already known for her physically demanding performances of contemporary opera and concert music, Aszodi has opened a rich seam of physico-vocal exploration through her partnership with Lyle. Their co-devised work Grafter saw Aszodi and Lyle intertwine into one sound-producing body by muting, resonating and modulating each other’s sounds. Aszodi convened the BIFEM Composer Colloquium around the topic of Author/Agent/Process/Frame, where much was made of the festival’s role in mediating the audience’s experience of such performances. Whereas the BIFEM audience seemed happy to perceive Aszodi and Lyle’s works as primarily musical, this was apparently not necessarily the case in prior showings within visual art and dance contexts.
You who will emerge from the flood
US singer Juliana Snapper and UK composer Andrew Infanti’s underwater opera You who will emerge from the flood continued the theme of vocal exploration. The modular work incorporates video, pre-recorded audio and live singing above and below water (see excerpts from earlier productions). BIFEM got the budget version, which is performed in a dunk tank, but the work can also be performed in a swimming pool with the audience’s ears submerged. The context informs the work so profoundly that I doubt one can really compare the two. Atop the tank in a black dress and with long blonde hair extensions, Snapper cuts a carnivalesque figure.
A dunk tank is an instrument of ritual humiliation and frames Snapper as an object of sexualised humiliation. However, she is not dunked, but enters it willingly, lying on the platform and singing just above the water before slipping in as if as an afterthought. As she explores the tank with her voice, a close-up video feed is projected onto two large screens. Snapper forms striking and beautiful tableaux, as when, floating face down, curled in a ball, the hair extensions protruding from between her legs fan out symmetrically. Her movements become gradually more frantic and a video appears of two men repeatedly holding her underwater, letting her rise to the surface briefly to breathe. In the tank the power relationship is more nuanced. She dives to the bottom, holding herself underwater by pressing her foot into the cage above. The audience feel empathy with Snapper, holding its breath as she dives. However powerful the performance as a work of theatre, the phenomenon of underwater singing sounds exactly as you might expect.
Juliana Snapper, Illud Etian Concert, BIFEM 2017, photo Jason Taverner Photography
Illud Etiam
Strip the stage back to a music stand, four speakers and some atmospheric lighting, and Juliana Snapper is able to sing with her full terrestrial force, accompanied on electronics by Miller Puckette (inventor of the ubiquitous Max/MSP software). Their program provided a panorama of possible interactions between the voice and electronics from the unobtrusive background of Philippe Manoury’s En écho to the fire and brimstone of his Illud Etiam, after which the concert was titled. In a simple but powerful gesture, Snapper lights a match as bells toll at the end of this arcane work. The small flame seems to banish all the water of the previous night.
Argonaut String Quartet
The almost universal appeal of the string quartet makes the Argonaut String Quartet’s program a favourite each year. This year saw the premieres of new works by Samuel Smith and Caterina Turnbull next to works by Clara Iannotta and Anahita Abbasi. I wasn’t sure whether Turnbull’s quartet was animal, vegetable or mineral. Eminulos (a Latin adjective describing a slight projection) was commissioned by Julian Burnside QC, and is a menagerie of bird-like chirps and call-and-response. The repeated gestures fork and grow organically between the instruments. On the other hand, the stratification of instrumental effects folding into one another gives the sense of aeons of geological activity. Smith’s BIFEM Box Office Commission, Dead Oceans, is a dense microtonal flow of harmonics, rocketing glissandi and wood-on-string death rattles. Nothing stays still, but the audience catches glimpses of harmonic repose that founder and disappear from sight. While the composer claims the work is only tangentially related to climate change, it is one of the most devastating environmental works of recent years.
Matthew Horsely
BIFEM’s coveted solo recital series was back with concerts by Matthew Horsley on uillean pipes, Mauricio Carrasco on classical guitar and Anna Kwiatkowska on violin. The odd one out in this list is clearly Horsley, a proponent of contemporary music for the Irish bagpipes. His performance of Liam Flenady’s A Book of Migrations for electronics and uillean pipes involved the composer wayfinding through Horsley’s own catalogue of almost 200 fingerings on the instrument. The microtonal part is supplemented with electronics and readings in medieval English and Gaelic from the Seamus Heaney poem Buile Shuibhne. Kwiatkowska’s survey of contemporary works for violin by Polish composers was a welcome link between present and past in a festival that focuses on the bleedingly new.
Kupka’s Piano
This festival saw the Victorian debut of Brisbane’s Kupka’s Piano, the most exciting contemporary music ensemble north of Sydney. Their program included Elliott Gyger’s first thoroughly microtonal work, a double concerto for flutes entitled Fray. So finely managed were the microtones that the piece did not sound very microtonal at all. Instead one was lost in the thoughtful and restrained atmosphere as Gyger carefully worked his way through all the possible permutations of two players and bass flute, alto flute, treble flute and piccolo.
Matteo Cesari performing with the Argonaut Ensemble, photo Jason Tavener
The Argonaut Ensemble
Never a festival to shy away from political or controversial works, BIFEM’s house band The Argonaut Ensemble performed provocative works by the Israeli composer Adam Maor and the Argentinian composer Fernando Garnero. Maor’s BEYROUTH15072006 takes as its inspiration the recorded improvisation of the Lebanese trumpeter Mazen Kerbaj during the bombing of Beirut in 2006. The trumpet is here transformed into the trombone played by Charles MacInnes, which slides anxiously among samples of bombs and car alarms from the original recording.
Garnero described Neon Pig as a work “with no historical depth,” but he began the concert with a speech about the disappearance of the indigenous rights activist Santiago Maldonado. It was particularly alarming given he was one of over 30,000 people “disappeared” during the Dirty War of 1974–83. At the end of the oinking and snorting work, Garnero stood up from the electronics desk at the back of the stage and ‘withdrew’ each performer one by one with a grasping hand gesture. Far from a work with no historical depth, in this performance context the work was a warning against ahistoricity.
More BIFEM
An endless stream of events including the Monash Composers’ Concert, the tape duo Sultan Hagavik, Erkki Veltheim’s late night Ganzfeld Experiment, a concert and forum dedicated to the Australian composer Keith Humble (1927-1995), Miller Puckette’s computer music workshop, a concert for massed clarinets, an electroacoustic listening room, a children’s concert by the percussionist Madi Chwasta, the Music Writers’ Workshop (linked liberally here) and a pre-concert analytical lecture from the Melbourne Music Analysis Summer School (by yours truly) ensured that festival goers were both entertained and exhausted throughout the weekend.
This year’s concert program was perhaps most interesting within the context of Australia’s wider contemporary music culture. Despite the privileged place of percussion music in Australia and all the clichés of sports-loving Australians, contemporary performers remain stubbornly glued to their instruments. The occasional scored physical gesture or sprinkle of dramaturgy usually suffices to signal a boundary-breaking work. I don’t think anyone really minds an excellent performance stock-still in front of a music stand, but if you’re going to move you might as well somersault with a partner, jump in a water tank, or make an overt political statement.
BIFEM 2017, Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music, Bendigo, 1-4 Sept
Top image credit: Juliana Snapper, You who will emerge from the flood, photo Jason Taverner Photography
The plain fact is that a lot of what we call independent theatre in Melbourne is actually subsidised by one government arts funding program or another. Not always well subsidised, but subsidised nonetheless. This is widely known and not generally regarded as incongruous. It has been the reality for many, many years.
So, no, the word “independent” does not imply a commitment to financial self-sufficiency. In the Australian context it in fact implies dependence. For most independent theatre makers, subsidies are not only desirable but necessary. And everyone, it seems, or practically everyone, is comfortable with this. Within the industry, anxieties about grant reliance and application fatigue are focused more on the inadequacy of available funds and the bureaucracy associated with their administration. The importance of subsidies is not in question.
Enter local government. Despite intensive recent debate about federal and state government support — or lack of support — for independent artists, the important role of local government has gone largely unremarked. This is curious because local governments, which are only relatively autonomous from state governments, are in many ways the perfect friend for the independent performing arts sector. And over the last 20 years they’ve been getting a whole lot friendlier.
Take the City of Darebin, in Melbourne’s inner north. In addition to dealing with roads, rates and rubbish, Darebin also has its own arts agenda, part of a broader cultural engagement plan for a more vibrant, more innovative local economy. And independent theatre and dance artists have a significant role in this. Since 2013, the council has funded the Darebin Arts Speakeasy, a performing arts program at the Northcote Town Hall that develops and presents new work from Melbourne’s independent performing arts community.
Speakeasy has partnered with many leading independent companies and artists, and has also provided an opportunity for new artists to show their work in a professional context. Their 2017 season is typical of the kind of work they support, opening with productions by two stalwart independent companies. First, Elbow Room presented Niche, a new play created by Eryn Jean Norvill and Emily Tomlins. And then Little Ones Theatre, led by director Stephen Nicolazzo gave us an adaptation of Christos Tsiolkas’ Merciless Gods.
Underworld, Sarah Aiken, Rebecca Jensen, Darebin Arts Speakeasy, photo Gregory Lorenzutti
Underworld
Then, in September, there was a new dance-theatre work by Sarah Aiken and Rebecca Jensen called Underworld, described as a companion piece to the enormously messy and involving OVERWORLD (2014, reviewed here and here). Underworld translates an obscure Australian thriller called Long Weekend (1978) into an agitated, at times frantic, procession of shadowy images and fragmentary scenes. The movie tells the story of a couple who are attacked for no obvious reason by an army of demoniac marsupials while on a camping trip somewhere north of Sydney. It’s a badly made film, but the idea of malevolent natural forces thrumming beneath a picturesque landscape is intriguing.
In Underworld, the four dancers manage both to parody the trashier aspects of the film and also to amplify its supernatural thrills. The performance maps fairly closely to the film, responding scene by scene, beginning to end, but gives everything a darkly surreal twist. It’s certainly a more concentrated theatrical experience than OVERWORLD. But while the dramaturgy is tighter, I feel as if Underworld is too restrained, lacking something of the hugger-mugger madness and originality that made OVERWORLD so irresistible. It seems less ambitious, less motivated and overall less energetic.
The Sky is Well Designed
Also in September, the Speakeasy presented two shows as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival. The first was The Sky Is Well Designed by Fabricated Rooms, an intimate work of eco-critical science fiction written and directed by Patrick McCarthy. This is the story of two scientists, played by Emily Tomlins and Ben Pfeiffer, who journey to a remote corner of the world in order to establish a dialogue with the Earth’s atmosphere.
This is a serene but melancholy work, brightening at the edges, full of subtle implications suggesting a great variety of ideas about our relationship with the environment. It alternates between meandering conversations about life, death and the mysteries of the cosmos and musical passages featuring unique instruments designed by Robert Jordan. These instruments are the devices by which the scientists attempt to make contact with the Earth — to speak, to explain and to beg for help.
It’s a polished piece of theatre with many thought-provoking details, but I don’t admire McCarthy’s so-called hyper-realistic writing style: to me, all those phatic asides and mumbled circumlocutions sound like the most unnatural kind of prattle.
Too Ready Mirror, Darebin Arts Speakeasy, photo Greta Costello
Too Ready Mirror
The second Fringe Festival show was Too Ready Mirror, directed by Rachel Baring and written by Jamaica Zuanetti. This is a sharply intelligent play: political, confessional, poetic and formally daring. It has a strong feminist theme — announced in the title, a quote from Simone de Beauvoir — but also an earnest personal quality that gives it a kind of understated authenticity.
There are three separate narrative strands that come together in a tight collage-like structure. There’s the real-life story of Nell Gwynne, English actress and royal mistress who was famous during the Restoration. There’s a young couple living in Melbourne who squabble and fight and tear each other down. And then, in the not-so-distant future, there are two students at an ominous-seeming institute for girls.
It’s a play that makes visible a web of labile connections between gender, sex and class, and points to the ways in which these constrain our everyday behaviours and interactions. I taught Zuanetti for a semester at the Victorian College of the Arts and I’m impressed with how far this play has come since I first encountered it at a reading almost two years ago. This is her first play and has many of the flaws of a first play, but this is a more than encouraging debut.
The production itself is very sleek and slick, albeit the tempo being a bit on the slow side. Indeed, all the productions I saw as part of the Speakeasy season were very slick. It is not simply that they were artfully produced. They also had a cool, polished quality to them that seems almost – dare I say it – mainstage.
Again I find myself worrying about that word “independent.” I’m not talking about the money. I’m talking about the ethos. The look of the work. The ambition. The politics. Do the works featured in the Speakeasy program suggest a relationship of alterity with main-stage tastes? Would we be surprised to see these works, say, at the Malthouse Theatre? Or even — God forbid — the Melbourne Theatre Company? If not, well, what value does the word independent have? Is the rhetoric of independent now obsolete? Is it time to put it back on the shelf next to alternative and experimental?
Perhaps a more appropriate term for the kind of dance and theatre at the Speakeasy is “emerging.” No doubt this observation is belated. Looking back, I think the signal moment was probably the Melbourne Theatre Company’s three Neon seasons (2013-2015). Billed as a festival of independent theatre, this short-lived program in fact announced the end of independent theatre. It was an acknowledgement that separateness from large cultural institutions was no longer regarded by theatre makers as something in itself desirable. It was no longer us and them. The Neon Festival was the dream of a single integrated performing arts ecology with clear career pathways from the fringe to the centre, gleaming like emerald-coloured bike lanes.
“Emerging” means not yet completely institutionalised, but oriented in that direction. It has little to do with age or experience. It is a relative term. Some theatre makers will always be emerging. It is worth pointing out that both Elbow Room and Little Ones Theatre participated in the Neon program. Are they still emerging? Can we describe them as stalwarts of Melbourne’s emerging theatre scene? Why not? Deferral of the desire for institutional acceptance bestows even greater significance on the dream of what it would be like to work with — or to work for — a major cultural institution.
Anyway, that’s what I saw at the Northcote Town Hall. Emerging artists. The Speakeasy project gives artists a taste of what institutional acceptance feels like. And it shows them, and their audiences what their work might look like if it were produced on a main stage. In this way the Darebin Speakeasy feels like a rote perpetuation of that Neon dream.
This article is a review of two fringe shows and a dance work that happened to be subsidised by a local government organisation. It is not a developed reflection on the role of government subsidy in the performing arts. And it is not a proper survey of the independent scene. I offer it only as a provocation, a starting point for thinking about the discourse of creativity and the growing significance of local governments in shaping that discourse.
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Darebin Arts, Speakeasy, Underworld, 1-9 Sept; The Sky is Well Designed, 15-28 Sept; Too Ready Mirror, 15-28 Sept; Northcote Town Hall, Melbourne
Top image credit: The Sky is Well Designed, Fabricated Rooms, Darebin Arts Speakeasy, photo Greta Costello
Early this year, artist Georgie Pinn was awarded a three-month residency at The Cube, in Queensland University of Technology’s Science and Engineering Centre, to develop and exhibit her interactive artwork Echo, which was shown in QUT’s Robotronica. The Cube brings together researchers from the STEM disciplines and the Creative Industries.
Echo is a singular experience of interpersonal portraiture and narrative that attempts to engender responses of empathy and identification. In a media culture dominated by sound bites, tweets, Instas and Snapchats, Echo swims against the tide, revealing deeper potentials for human and transhuman interaction.
Taking a form similar to the photo-booth, the work links back to older technologies — to an era of pre-digital images where photos were arguably more intimate, precious and less disposable. Photo-booths were designed for taking official headshots for passports or other identification documents, but were popularly used for taking photos of friends and couples play-acting and pranking. This booth calls herself Echo and offers to “help you connect.”
Leaping from the daggy analogue past to an AI future, you sit down and touch the screen as instructed. Echo takes your photograph, placing it centre screen, and brings up a side menu of other people’s faces. When selected, each still portrait then plays as a short film, telling a highly personal story of an important life experience. The booth is now a confessional, linking back to even older technologies and social relations. The interface’s aesthetic mix of popular entertainment, official surveillance, retro and sci-fi is tightly controlled, seamless and original.
While a film plays, Echo gradually maps your face onto the narrator’s, so that by the time the story is finished it is still your own face, but slightly distorted by the speaker seen behind. You select other characters, all quite different in age, race, gender and appearance with no hint of what their story might be. Each time your face meshes with theirs, as though listening were a transformative act of absorption. The stories are intimate in nature, often dealing with difficult life experiences that relate to the person’s appearance, including experiences of discrimination. These are stories that would only be told to a trusted friend, someone who would listen with sympathy and understanding. The meshed portraits are uncanny and watching yourself tell their story, wear their account, is unnerving.
Echo, Georgie Pinn, photo courtesy the artist
Echo works to suspend judgement and urge reflection, prompting thoughts such as, ‘What if this story were mine?’, ‘what if this had happened to me?’ The filmed subjects are not the characters of a game, their stories are not clues for a puzzle-solving exercise, they are not your friends or part of your social circle. Echo is a relational archive that can potentially teach the value of intimacy, the value of listening to those unlike ourselves in a way that allows us to experience that difference safely. Such acts of identification, however mediated, may expand identity formation and build tolerance. Pinn’s use of technology may potentially foster a deeper sense of inquiry into what it is to be human.
The next phase of the work is more playful. In real time, sections of your face on screen can be selected and replaced by the facial portraits in Echo’s gallery. These include more characters than the narrators, and even animals. The hybrid portraits animate in real time by mirroring your facial movements through facial tracking technology. When the portrait play is completed, there is an option to upload the portrait to Facebook. This stage of the work is perhaps not as successful as the first, but it nevertheless continues to build the interpersonal, allowing the viewer to feel the slippage between identity and appearance, raising awareness of the constructed and fluid nature of both. The mirroring and tracking technology intensifies the experience of the uncanny and turns the viewer’s gaze inwards via self-portraiture. Echo’s dynamic unpacking of self and other pivots beautifully around the stranger without and the stranger within.
Interestingly when Pinn was developing the work, she initially produced the confessional stories as fictional narratives, based on real accounts, written and acted with QUT drama students. However, this proved a degree of mediation too far. In the end she approached her friends to participate, drawing on an existing platform of rapport and trust. Echo certainly relies on the authenticity of the first-hand accounts, but it also succeeds through Pinn’s masterful editing which makes the accounts sharp, compelling and sometimes confronting. You are not being asked to bond with these individuals; their stories are for you, to bear and understand, and that emphasis offers a critical perspective on the nature of media communications. The mediascape is undoubtedly becoming more intensely personalised and predictive, as consumers are profiled and targeted ever more closely and competitively. Echo pursues an alternative line of transhuman communications, deeply invested in a feminist ethics of care. It is Pinn’s intention to keep developing Echo and build the archive of intimate confessions. Perhaps Echo might one day become a real AI, directing us to the stories that really open our eyes, saving us from narcissism’s curse.
QUT, Robotronica: Georgie Pinn, Echo, commissioned by The Cube; The Cube,Brisbane, 20 Aug
Beth Jackson is an independent arts writer and curator based in Brisbane. She is the owner and Director of Artfully, an arts consultancy with a focus on art for the public realm.
Top image credit: Echo, Georgie Pinn, photo courtesy the artist
This week we look forward to the Wired Open Day Festival with its art and agriculture synthesis, including Cat Jones’ participatory, diet-changing edible insect installation (image above), and we complete our extensive coverage of a thrilling 2017 OzAsia Festival with, among others, reviews of works that forecast radical change, featuring a tragic virtual pop star in The End and an autonomous singing android in Scary Beauty. Also this week, more change: Experimenta: Make Sense, an exhibition of the latest in experimental media art, and Soft Centre, a successful foray into expanding the creative dimensions of an electronic music event. And we look forward to Perth’s ever provocative Totally Huge New Music Festival, which includes a sublime 100-performer percussion work. All change for the better. Now, we’re off to Performance Space’s Liveworks. Keith and Virginia
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Top image credit: Cat Jones, Insecta Delecta, Wired Open Day, promotional image courtesy the artist and Wired Lab
Tucked away in the rear of Experimenta’s current installation of its International Triennial of Media Art is a modest video installation titled Shoum. Created by Dutch artist, Katarina Zdjelar, the viewer first encounters a blank screen while Tears for Fears’ “Shout” plays on the soundtrack. Hands appear, writing in a notebook, an old iPod player occasionally in shot. The hands, we are told by the didactic panel adjacent to the video screen, belong to two Serbian men who speak no English. They are transcribing the song’s words (“Shout, shout, let it all out”) phonetically: ŚHON ŚHON LAJDI O LAU.
The words are not a translation of what is being sung but a new language based instead on a perception of what is being heard. It is an elegant enactment of an idea Jonathan Crary describes in his Techniques of the Observer (1990). Writing of the attempts by philosopher Maine de Biran (1766–1824) “to grasp the density and the immediacy of the ‘sens intim’ [‘inward sense’],” Crary notes that de Biran “began to blur the identity of the very inwardness that was his original object. He employed the term “coenesthesis” [“coenesthesia”] to describe “one’s immediate awareness of the presence of the body in perception” and “the simultaneity of a composite of impressions inhering in different parts of the organism.” In other words, de Biran and others, were coming to see that a new multilayered and temporally dispersed perception made “a soul reduced to pure receptivity” an impossibility. Subjective observation, Crary continues, is not the inspection of an inner space or a theatre of representations. Instead, observation is increasingly exteriorised; the viewing body and its objects begin to constitute a single field on which inside and outside are confounded.
Sense, in this sense, is co-constituted. It is from this place that Make Sense as an exhibition mounts its first question. How do we, or can we, make sense of the world? Works like Anna Munster and Michele Barker’s Pull play with our sense of temporality, forcing us to rethink our experiences as they relate to time through our immersion in the instance of the breaking of a wave overhead. One large screen slows down the moment, drawing the experience out over roughly seven minutes. The other screen renders the GPS-tracked movements of the underwater cinematographer as a 3D animation. Both renderings simultaneously resemble and dissemble that moment when a force of nature renders the body mute against it. The work is both sublime and serene. It is also a subtle commentary on the relations between our own inflated human sense of time and the magnitude of geospatial time at a time of ecological crisis.
Keith Armstrong’s collaboration with Luke Lickfold and Matthew Davis, Eromocene (Age of Loneliness), takes its title from the work of Harvard biologist EO Wilson who coined the term in his book The Meaning Of Human Existence (2014). Noting that “Earth relates to the universe as the second segment of the left antenna of an aphid sitting on a flower petal in a garden in Teaneck, NJ, for a few hours this afternoon,” Wilson’s view of the fate of humanity as no more or less important than any other species is given life in Eromocene as an ephemeral, chimeric projection in a totally blackened space. The work asks us to consider a world of perception without human perception because humanity has ceased to exist. It is delicate and beautiful and reminiscent of something made from smoke and mirrors.
Similarly mesmerising is Scale Free Network’s A Hierarchy of Eddies, an art-science collaboration staged to capture the materiality of turbulence. Small foam balls, like those that endlessly escape from bean bags, are housed in a large glass box. Two fans, placed at different heights from the floor, engage intermittently, sending the balls into the characteristic whorls that make turbulence both an essential but mysterious force in nature from blood flow to tornadoes to the smoke rising from a cigarette. Changing patterns of light capture the movement, rendering it improbably beautiful. Unlike other works in the exhibition, A Hierarchy of Eddies celebrates perception without any consequent demand to make sense of it in the vernacular use of the expression.
Other works play less directly with our perceptions and more with perceived norms of communication. In The Thought Leader, Liz Magic Laser takes the now somewhat prosaic form of the ubiquitous TED talk and twists it into a bizarre and menacing visual spectacle. The video features a young boy delivering a monologue adapted from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novella Notes from the Underground (1864). He delivers his lines with the same idealistic blandness that characterises many such performances while his audience remains quietly hostile and unmoved. Only when he encourages them to poke their tongues out at him do they become animated and the initially child-like gesture grows more and more grotesque.
Jane Gauntlett’s In My Shoes: Intimacy takes a similarly familiar technological form and subverts it into an uncanny encounter. Wearing a Samsung Gear VR headset, the viewer is invited into three intimate scenarios — two strangers, two comrades and two lovers — alongside another viewer similarly equipped with a headset. Once inside the virtual space, you encounter the other person as a character who is engaged in a dialogue with the character you are inhabiting. What is surprising is that there is not that much to see. The development of virtual reality has been so heavily invested in visual mimesis that the absence of a sense of visual immersion is disconcerting. The connection to the world is predominantly auditory as you try to follow both the internal commentary of your own character alongside the often awkward interactions they are having with the other person present in the space. Given the confessions of Occular Rift’s creator, Palmer Lucky, that VR is still a long way from being able to craft stories using the technology, Gauntlett’s foray into this space is intriguing.
Materialisation is a constant connective theme in the exhibition. In some works, we are reminded of the material basis for our perceptions while in others we are able to see materialised worlds that alter our perceptions. Judy Watson’s two works — The Names of Places and The Keepers — both render visible the repressed and repressive histories of European colonisation. The Names of Places is a web-based work which seeks to collaboratively document the massacres of Aboriginal people following the invasion of this continent. The Keepers documents the artist’s encounter with stolen Aboriginal artifacts now housed in the British Museum. As the camera moves over the objects, the viewer is invited to contemplate what it means for them to be far from their own place and what it would mean for them to be returned. The violence of their removal from an ancient, living and continuous human culture is made stark in the sterility of the images of blue plastic gloved hands moving across them.
There are many other works in Make Sense deserving of comment (19 in all) but not time and space to make sense of them all. Experimenta continues to strive to make these kinds of works and ideas accessible and interesting to a wider public. In an age of such austerity, as it relates to arts funding, it’s refreshing to see that some attempt is being made to keep Australia’s rich media arts legacy alive and to showcase artists who help us make sense of what is an increasingly fragile and chaotic world.
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Experimenta Make Sense: International Triennial of Media Art, artists Robert Andrew, Keith Armstrong with Luke Lickfold and Matthew Davis, Ella Barclay, Michele Barker and Anna Munster, Briony Barr, Steve Berrick, Antoinette J. Citizen, Adam Donovan and Katrin Hochschuh, Lauren Edmonds, Matthew Gardiner, Jane Gauntlett, Liz Magic Laser, Jon McCormack, Lucy McRae, Gail Priest, Scale Free Network: Briony Barr and Gregory Crocetti, Andrew Styan, Judy Watson, and Katarina Zdjelar; RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2 Oct-11 Nov
Lisa Gye teaches media and social impact at Swinburne University. She is also a member of Memefest, an international collective of activists, artists and academics who are interested in socially responsive communication and art.
Top image credit: Hierarchy of Eddies, Scale Free Network, image courtesy the artists and Experimenta
Tos Mahoney, Artistic Director of Western Australia’s Tura and its annual Totally Huge New Music Festival has come up with a highly attractive program for the 2017 event, revealing the extraordinary range of today’s contemporary music-making and featuring works with wide appeal. Leading American composer Anne LeBaron will be in residence; Melbourne’s award-winning Speak Percussion will present their compellingly crafted creation Fluorophone and lead the 100-piece performance of American composer Michael Pisaro’s A wave and waves. These are works that will be as exciting to watch as to listen to and, in A wave and waves, to sit amid.
I spoke with Mahoney by phone, asking him about the choices he’s made. He’s emphatically open to chance, telling me, “the process ends up being curatorially improvisational. Taking clear intention out of it ends up making for more interesting connections and juxtapositions not necessarily planned for.” The important thing, he says, is that each of the choices “has its own story.” I ask what the story is behind the programming of LeBaron, whose operatic works, easily accessed on YouTube, have impressed me with their inventiveness and accessibility.
Anne LeBaron, photo courtesy Totally Huge New Music Festival
Anne LeBaron
Mahoney explains that he’d long known of LeBaron’s work as an expander of harp technique and as a composer, but that the connection with her came through a young Perth musician, experimental harpist Catherine Ashley who, he says, “has been developing her own work with electronics and improvisation with the harp and has worked with Tura both last year and this on Wreck projects in the outback, including the recent one in Warmun with Jon Rose [read about Wreck in a forthcoming edition of RealTime]. Out of that collaboration with Catherine we thought it would be fantastic to invite Anne to Perth for the whole festival to be artist in residence. She’s not just a harpist but a composer, thinker and philosopher. She was the obvious choice for the keynote for the festival conference as well.”
Mahoney’s looking forward to LeBaron’s semi-improvised Concerto for Active Frogs, which is for a large ensemble (with Perth’s iMprov Collective), vocalist and field recordings of frogs. (LeBaron’s concern over the widespread reduction of frog populations and their diversity led to the making of a music theatre piece titled Croak, or The Last Frog.)
Speak Percussion, Fluorophone
A festival highlight is bound to be Speak Percussion’s Fluorophone in which music and visual components strikingly synthesise in works composed for what is effectively a quite theatrical installation using an array of percussion instruments, fluorescent lights, lasers and matches too. Video excerpts, Gail Priest’s review of the performance at SONICA and an interview with Speak Percussion provide ample encouragement for audiences to experience this ensemble’s radical expansion of the realm of percussion.
A wave and waves
That realm is huge in a Speak Percussion-led performance of American composer Michael Pisaro’s A wave and waves, a work for 100 musicians in which, writes the ensemble, “the audience sits among the performers to experience the music as if part of an ocean of sound. Colossal percussive waves are created by layers of imperceptibly soft sounds — sandpaper on stone, seeds falling on glass, bowed bells — forming a textural landscape bristling with detail.”
Mahoney tells me that “after two full weekends of rehearsal,” the work will be performed at the Midland Railway Workshops, an ideal place for a work of this scale. He explains that A wave and waves is not conducted as such: instructions are followed from large screens. A musician who participated in the Australian premiere at the 2015 Melbourne Festival, has written a vivid account of what it feels like to be part of this musical organism.
Ross Bolleter, Quarry Music
One of WA’s most significant musical figures is Ross Bolleter whose works with and for ruined pianos are legendary. In what he says will be his final appearance, he’ll perform Quarry Music with pianos “in surround and with other sounds,” says Mahoney. “The work is inspired by the Claremont Dump, which no longer exists but is the site of new sports arenas and the state swimming centre, and the gas from the dump provides energy for the sporting activity.” Quarry Music will be recorded and placed in the West Australian New Music Archive.
Rick Snow & Chris Tonkin, Daybew
New Orleans artist Rick Snow, another international guest of the festival, has been working with Chris Tonkin, Head of Composition at the University of Western Australia, on a most unusual project, Daybew, which promises to generate a new music album at every push of a button. As to how this device, named Mississippi Swan works, the festival’s program notes give some indication: “Beginning with the notion of ‘originality as synthetic’— a fusion of existing ideas and information — the artists implement custom text-to-speech algorithms, assembling lyrical material from tweets and news feeds originating in Mississippi Swan’s home cities of New Orleans and Perth. This vocal content is accompanied by algorithmically generated rhythmic and harmonic musical structures derived from popular electronic music idioms.”
Callum G’Froerer, photo courtesy the artist and Totally Huge New Music Festival
More Totally Huge
For a very different take on the use of information, in a concert titled DDC: Glitch, Japanese artists Kouhei Harada (electronics), Mitsuaki Matsumoto (prepared biwa) and Shohei Sasagawa (experimental video) creatively embrace the loss of data and its effects. Mahoney tells me that these artists have a strong connection with the Perth ensemble Decibel whose own concert Electronic Concerto will feature co-composed works for solo electronic musicians and ensemble, including one by Catherine Ashley. Callum G’Froerer, a Western Australian composer and trumpet player based in Berlin since 2015, will present a recital of new electro-acoustic works featuring the double-bell trumpet, “an instrument never seen on Australian stages.” A program note explains, “A second bell allows for graceful transitions between different tone colours, new methods of articulation, and for allowing acoustic and electronically processed systems to occur simultaneously within the one instrument.”
Gathering to face the big questions
The festival conference, provocatively titled Embracing the Irrational: The Sonic Arts in a Post-Factual World, says Mahoney, “runs for a full day with Anne LeBaron as keynote speaker and about 15 papers being presented across the day.” Speakers include Adelaide’s Melody Watson and Dan Thorpe whose paper, “A Discourse Analysis of Wikipedia’s LGBT Composers Category,” posits them as “Candidates for Deletion.”
“Without being clichéd, Keith,” says Tos Mahoney of Totally Huge, “it’s the notion of a festival being much more than all the individual parts that counts. It is about that gathering, that energy, that exchange, the things that come out of a festival like this as much as the actual events and performances themselves.”
Top image credit: Fluorophone, Speak Percussion, photo Robert McFadzean
In several RealTime articles over the last few years I’ve bemoaned the lack of a Sydney-based experimental electronic music festival of scale. We have been fortunate to have Brisbane-based Lawrence English presenting Open Frame at Carriageworks ove the past two years and the large attendances illustrate that there is an audience, but there is still the issue of the right multi-room venue and, more importantly, the right promoter willing to take the risk on such a venture.
Then a few months ago word got around of an ambitious all-day festival slated for Casula Powerhouse in Sydney’s South-West. The Soft Centre producers publicised the event as taking inspiration from international activities such as Unsound, Berlin Atonal and Norbergfestival. As I haven’t haven’t had the pleasure I can’t make a comparison but I can say that Soft Centre was a vibrant festival with an impressive selection of local, interstate and international artists from various bands of the experimental spectrum, with a clear emphasis on cross-disciplinary collaboration and multi-sensory stimulation.
Meagan Streader installation, Soft Centre Festival, photo Charl Anfield
Inhabiting the whole of Casula Powerhouse, one of Sydney’s first industrial art space conversions, Soft Centre offered two music stages. The cavernous Turbine Hall was home to the more large-scale dance-oriented acts such as Made Up Sound, Simona, Various Asses, hndsm. and Harold (beyond the scope of my review but who certainly had the crowd moving) as well as performance/music collaborations. The smaller Hopper Gallery offered the experimental, less party-focused artists, or at least it was so in the earlier stages of the day, getting progressively more beatsy as the evening progressed.
The gallery adjoining the Turbine Hall was handed over to visual artist Meagan Streader. Her installation Response VI (Partition II) comprised long lengths of electroluminescent wires tracing the perpendiculars of the space to create a series of suggested rooms and corridors. It was an elegant and immersive intervention into the site, well suited to the dance party context. In a smaller chamber by the side of the stage was ASTERISM’s Desire//Loss, a four-screen video installation showing large glowing objects, reminiscent of both magnified cells and floating asteroids. These masses pulsated and changed colour with shifting levels of saturation, subtly interacting with the sounds floating in from the main stage. Best experienced lying on the huge bed made of Koala mattresses, this space served as a very popular chill-out room.
Asterism Desire Loss, Soft Centre Festival, photo Jordan Munns
Another light installation formed the set-piece for the Hopper Gallery. Hyper Reelist’s Helixis featured a floor-to-ceiling strand of DNA that appeared to be sound responsive. It served as ambient lighting for the music acts as well as holding its own as an impressive luminous sculpture. Given the experimental nature of the acts in this space, this was where I felt most at home. The impressive sound system allowed the complex textural and interlocking rhythms of Jasmine Guffond’s music, drawing on her recent impressive release, Tracings, to really reach full intensity. Lawrence English’s dense curtains of sound fully bathed the audience who lay supine on the concrete floor, offering more tonal ascension than previous performances of his I’ve experienced. Half High’s set presented some satisfying semi-chaos, a kind of sonic stream of consciousness, replete with whispered poesy and unexpected noise ruptures. The non-metric tone of the space started to shift with the mesmeric minimalist beat studies of Matthew Brown that got the crowd moving. This transition continued through the set by Makeda, a hybrid between DJ set and delicate textural electronica, so by the time DIN (Rainbow Chan & Moon Holiday) took to the stage, the dial was well and truly turned to party. (Alas my end of winter illness meant I could not stay to experience it all.)
House of VnHoly, Soft Centre Festival, photo Sean Foster
While the Hopper Gallery was my natural habitat, I popped into the Turbine Hall occasionally to get a feel for the full flavour and scale of the event and to check out the specially commissioned performance collaborations. Catching only the second half of The House of Vnholy & waterhouse collaboration, I missed how the semi-naked body became slathered in white clay, but the subsequent performance image of the black-sheathed archeress with beams of light scattering from the tube of reflective material covering her head, was particularly powerful. The moody reverb-drenched tones of waterhouse were well-matched to the neo-gothic image-making.
Hossein Ghaemi and Jannah Quill’s collaboration also made for some strong visual stimulation. Inhabiting the floor of the space, Ghaemi’s choir wore hooded white robes with neon-light trimmings and the accompanying dancers were in bronze spangled dresses and veils. The choir’s ecstatic dronescape, and occasional flute bursts were difficult to hear in the mix with Jannah Quill’s hard-edged alterna-techno, but a certain level of ironic ritual ecstasy was unlocked.
Hossein Ghaemi Choir, Soft Centre Festival, photo Sean Foster
Deliberately less ecstatic was the collaboration between Melbourne’s Divide and Dissolve and Sydney’s phile. Divide and Dissolve have an unabashed political agenda attempting to “abolish white supremacy” through their wall of noise conjured up from guitar, drums and saxophone. Matched with the dark machine drones of phile, the instruments were once again slightly lost in the mix but the power of the message was certainly not, reinforced by powerful words from Divide and Dissolves Takiaya Reed.
In fact, it was this commitment not just to music and partying, but to larger social issues that created the unique tone of Soft Centre. With behavioural guidelines posted around the space it was very clear that this was to be an event that strongly encouraged individualism but also insisted on mutual respect. Perhaps this next generation of producers and audiences has learned that if you want a safe space, you need to actively construct it — you can’t assume it’s going to manifest on its own. This attention to social responsibility was in every detail of the event, from the impressive ratio of non-male artists programmed (with no calling to be congratulated for it), to the gender-neutral toilets, the use of local Turkish and Egyptian vegetarian food vendors, down to the not-for-profit ticketing company, a portion of the proceeds going to Women’s Community Shelters. The producers of Soft Centre succeeded not only in presenting an impeccably organised electronic music festival that reached locals but also got people out of the inner city to Sydney’s South West, building a little temporary world where things could actually be better for everyone, if only for a little while.
Read an interview with Alice Joel who commissioned Soft Centre’s music and performance art collaborations.
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Casula Powerhouse, Soft Centre, curator-producers Jemma Cole, Thorsten Hertog, Sam Whiteside, commissioned collaborations Alice Joel; 23 Sept
Top image credit: Cassius Select with Hyper Reelist’s Helixis sculpture, Soft Centre Festival, photo Jordan Munns
Near Cootamundra in South-West NSW, the Wired Open Day Festival, a much loved, adventurous open-air celebration of place this year features performances, installations, photography, sound art, edible insects, Indigenous weaving, insights into the characterful architecture and sounds of the shearing shed, immersive listening to a body-quaking elephant herd on the move, the murmur of mycelium networks, young people podcasting urban/rural viewpoints and great local food and beverages. It’s an art event with a distinctively experimental edge, rooted in the region but with far reaching appeal.
Festival host Wired Lab is a significant regional arts venture and an idiosyncratic one. Located on the farm that Artistic Director Sarah Last grew up on and now runs, it enjoys a long-term national and international reputation for its focus on sound and site. The Wired Open Day Festival hosts leading multidisciplinary artists who engage with the local environment, the region’s community and visitors who come to the event from afar. It’s a festival that celebrates not only place but reveals the extent and range of the organisation’s commitment to environmental and cultural sustainability via a range of exploratory art practices and its projects with local Aboriginal communities and young people.
Currently central to Wired Lab’s activities is the agri(culture) project, “a participatory landscape-scale and omni-sensorial exploration of rural and agricultural phenomena for regional and metropolitan audiences.” The project makes its inaugural appearance in this year’s Wired Open Day Festival, featuring 12 interdisciplinary artists. I spoke with Sarah Last by phone about the open day and Wired Lab’s current projects.
Tell me about the aims and the scope of the agri(culture) project.
It’s a long-term focus and a lot to do with the location of Wired Lab on a working farm and my background as a fourth generation farmer. I want to have a very deep engagement with the agrarian sector over coming years. This first iteration takes a very broad look at the theme — agriculture past, present and future.
Cat Jones, probably best-known for Scent of Sydney, an aroma-driven participatory work in this year’s Sydney Festival, is “working with Soon Lee Low, an internationally trained molecular chef [to] create a human-scale terrarium of edible ‘exotic’ delights.” I asked Cat via email, to tell me a little about the Insecta Delecta experience. She wrote, “Audiences will enter the vivarium of live insects and begin a graded exposure, an aesthetic sensory transition, towards eating (them).” She added that “Bogong season has just begun and The Wired Lab is very close to a migratory site. The vivarium will become a giant moth trap after dark.”
Cat’s been meeting with entomologists and is addressing future agriculture in terms of edible insects. We need to diversify our protein sources and Cat’s research reveals what an incredible source they provide, they’re small and they can be farmed on a large scale without needing large areas. If I’m mustering cattle, I’m doing it at landscape scale; with insects it’s at a very human scale. The problem is how to overcome resistance in Western culture to eating insects.
DARKbody, Julie Vulcan, photo courtesy the artist and Wired Lab
In your notes to the festival, you mention participants “lying down on a fungal super-highway” in a work by performance artist Julie Vulcan.
For her new installation, DARKbody, Julie has been doing a lot of work around scotobiology, the biology of darkness. Darkness and light are such fundamental elements — we need both for growth. Julie is fascinated by the idea that we’re sandwiched between darkness above and below us. She’s built full-scale mounds on the farm using mycelium that we sourced from local mushroom farmers — it’s compost off-casts. People will lie down on the mounds and via an audio work they’ll meditate on a mycelium super-highway. We’re only just discovering how remarkable mycelium is, including as a communication network for plants and trees.
UK sound artist Chris Watson, who has worked extensively with David Attenborough, is promising the experience of a herd of elephants. At first, I thought “agrarian?” but then I recalled that one of the major wildlife problems in Africa is that farms and wilderness adjoin.
Exactly. As soon as human management of wildlife comes into the picture, it becomes an agrarian practice issue. To maintain elephant population and the pathways they’ve walked for who knows how long needs human intervention to take into account all of the considerations that good farming would do — maintaining a habitat for survival of the animal you’re wanting to preserve.
Beyond Ol Tokai, Chris Watson, photo courtesy the artist
Watson’s work, Beyond Ol Tokai, is described as “a multi-channel sound diffusion which follows a herd of African elephants across an equatorial sunset after a day in the Olodare marshes of the Amboseli National Park, Kenya.”
Chris is working with a sound system that we’ve developed for the performance. The audience will deeply feel these elephants as well as hear them. It’s going to be very spatial. We have eight channels, eight speakers and huge sub-speakers.
Human culture is the subject of another part of your project, the Melbourne company Field Theory’s Kids vs Art Podcast Seriesin which “kids from a small rural school (pop. 19) meet urban counterparts to survey rural living and review contemporary art.”
There have been a number of residencies led by Jackson Castiglione from Melbourne’s Field Theory working with young people from rural NSW. He has [a group of] city-based young people he worked with in the first iteration, which was a Melbourne Fringe commission. It’s about capturing the rural context and the honesty with which these kids convey [their experience] that is quite wonderful. We forget the way they grow up in the country — the embededness of the world around them is very distinctive and different from what we might stereotypically expect a young person to experience. They have an environmental intelligence; the way they talk about the seasons is completely different… and the kinds of activities they’re involved in. I think the city kids found [the rural kids] quite wild, but it’s just their normal state: they ride motor bikes and go off on their own for hours; they help their parents in hard manual labour; they have an acute understanding of primary production and where food comes from; some of them even have gun licenses.
There’ll be six episodes all up and the kids have started interviewing artists. Because of the expansive art forms that we work in there’s some rich material. The way Jackson’s editing tells a story, capturing the counterpoints between the kids. The first episode really sets the scene, with the kids getting a feel for each other. It’s kind of amusing. The country kids are expecting the city kids, in their words, to be “really soft.” One says, “They’re gonna run for the hills!” It’s sweet but I think there’s a real poignancy to it as well.
Kids vs Art, Wired Open Day, photo courtesy Wired Lab
What are the regional visual arts pair, The Ronalds [read the RealTime profile], contributing?
The Ronalds are collaborating with David Burraston and myself. I really wanted to capture some of the vernacular architecture in Australian agrarian practices and a really good example of that is the shearing shed. The way they’re built, their appearance and the materials they’re built from have not changed in 200 or so years. We got access to a heritage-listed shearing shed on a property called Beggan-Beggan and The Ronalds have done a sort of forensic photographic documentation. We’re working similarly with sound; David in particular has been recording the shed when it’s in use and highly productive. He also captured the auditory signature of the building when it wasn’t in use, the changes due to environmental conditions. As the day warms up, it creaks and wonderful wind patterns pass through because they’re highly ventilated spaces. That will be an audio-visual presentation. We’ve developed lovely little boxes with lenses, each for viewing a sort of diorama of the shearing shed. The installation will be laid out in the footprint scale of the shearing shed.
Where does the performer Bronwyn Batten fit into your program?
I asked her if she’d be interested in adapting her show On Stage Dating, because I wanted to play on the way that the farming community is often negatively portrayed in popular culture. It’s important to set up projects like this so the event doesn’t seem entirely earnest. We’re calling it On Farm Dating, like Farmer Wants a Wife — it’s a play on that, drawing out the men or women who are of that agrarian background and vernacular.
A really diverse audience that represents where we live attend Open Day. I’m proud of that. We program quite expansive contemporary art works and these people often say, “I never thought I’d like something arty,” but then they realise it’s actually about them and that’s the point of connection.
Tell me about another of your projects for young people, The Edge.
That’s been a two-year community-based project with photographer Tamara Dean working with young people from Cootamundra and Tumut. Cootamundra is a farming town and Tumut is an alpine town at the foothills of Kosciusko, very different places for young people. We’ll be screening the stunning images they made with some recordings of them talking about the experience of the project and then their work will be shown in Wagga Wagga Art Gallery next year.
Aunty Anne, Sarah Last, photo courtesy Wired Lab
Lastly, the Wiradjuri Grasslands Project provides you with a focus on the Aboriginal communities in the region. In what ways and why “grasslands”?
It’s another ongoing project. In the Wiradjuri community in recent years there’s been a lot of cultural rejuvenation activity around language thanks to Uncle Stan Grant Snr. Charles Sturt University now has a Graduate Certificate in Wiradjuri Language, Culture and Heritage. As well, a lot of activities have been happening around weaving and other cultural practices.
One way I engage with the Indigenous community is through native grasses and pastures which I’m interested in and that relate to what I do as a farmer. As people learn to weave we’re bringing in grasses from surrounding areas which are known to be good fibres. We have two weavers, Melanie Evans and Harriet Gould, leading the project. Harriet is based in Robertson, but is originally from the Wired Lab area, and Melanie is an Indigenous curator who’s done a lot of work with the Indigenous community in the South-West region.
The weaving also relates to a project about managing country. We’re establishing a grassland and learning about plant identification — how to re-establish native grasses using different ways of planting, growing and harvesting techniques.
There’s also interest in learning natural tanning because possum-skin cloaks were part of Indigenous culture here. Possums are protected so last weekend we ran a kangaroo-skin tanning workshop. With each of these projects, I’m really aware of how culture evolves over time and cultural progression correlates with growing the grasslands, with the natural cycle.
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Read more about Wired Lab from Sarah Last here and here, and about earlier Open Days from our archive here and here.
Wired Lab is offering a special discount to RealTime readers and subscribers: $60 tickets for $45. Enter the promo code EARS at Wired Lab’s trybooking checkout.
Top image credit: Beggan Beggan shearing shed, The Ronalds, photo courtesy the artists and Wired Lab
In the second of his reviews of OzAsia performances, Ben Brooker embraces works by Hot Brown Honey, Joelistics and James Mangohig, Darlane Littay and Tian Rotteveel, and Aakash Odedra, their performances revealing the complexities of cultural heritage and exchange.
Hot Brown Honey
“Moisturise and decolonise” is the catch cry of Hot Brown Honey’s MC Busty Beatz (Kim Bowers), who presides, resplendent in oversized afro, over Black Honey Company’s ensemble of “black, brown and mixed beauties” – six female performers of Indigenous Australian, South African, Maori, Tongan and Samoan heritage. The work, which has toured extensively since 2015, defies categorisation. Intensely politically charged, it is burlesque-like in its parodic treatment of popular forms, especially those reliant on racist stereotyping, but hews closer to the Victorian era idea of burlesque as extravaganza. Routines draw on circus, cabaret, stand-up comedy and striptease.
The aesthetic is similarly mixed, heavily inflected by vintage hip-hop but spruced up with designer Lisa Fa’alafi’s glittering costumes, their multiple layers frequently cast off in ways that suggest the performers’ disavowal of imposed identities. The stage is bare except for “the hive,” a honeycombed, open-sided gallery — designed by Tristan Shelley and vibrantly lit by Paul Lim in a way that synchronises with much of the action — that serves as Busty Beatz’ base. From here she musically directs the work, marshalling the performers around her own compositions and delivering short, sharp sermons on feminist theory, quoting, among others, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”
Hot Brown Honey is an unapologetically didactic, rallying work. Sequences touch on and subvert the longstanding typecasting of women of colour as maids, the casual racism of white Australians on holiday and stereotypes of the dusky maiden/noble savage variety that have long been the source of sexualised European fantasies. Some scenes are more abstruse, such as those including Ofa Fotu’s scorching torch song-like reclamation of James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” and Crystal Stacey’s aerial routine that serves as a powerful metaphor for intimate partner violence. Underlying all of this is a discourse — sometimes edgily evoked, as in a scene in which Torres Strait Island performer Ghenoa Gela pointedly casts off the Australian flag —on the rights of indigenous peoples in a post-colonial world. While the tonight’s predominately white audience is implicated in the intersecting oppressions exposed, the atmosphere remains unifying and celebratory. Everybody is clapping and dancing by the end, some spilling onto the stage to mingle with the performers as the last of Busty’s pounding, soulful grooves reverberate around the theatre.
Joelistics, James Mangohig, In Between Two, Contemporary Asian Australian Performance, photo William Yang
In Between Two
In Between Two, a collaboration between Asian-Australian musicians Joelistics (Joel Ma) and James Mangohig, also recuperates the political charge of early and alternative hip-hop. In the opening song, Ma raps about what the form means, or rather doesn’t mean, to him: misogyny, homophobia. His political awakening was concomitant with the rise of Pauline Hanson and her infamous warning that “we are in danger of being swamped by Asians.” Ma informs us he and Mangohig — both ‘mixed race’ with Asian fathers and white mothers — have been long-term friends since meeting under a tree in Darwin during a music festival. There, they bonded over their shared status as outsiders in a majority white music industry and their worship of Brisbane band Regurgitator, led by Asian-Australian multi-instrumentalist Quan Yeomans.
Produced by Contemporary Asian Australian Performance, In Between Two is the latest iteration of a performance model developed by theatre-makers William Yang and Annette Shun Wah. Here, as in The Backstories, which premiered at this year’s Adelaide Festival, Yang and Shun Wah provide dramaturgy with Suzanne Chaundy directing. The setup is simple and effective: against visual designer Jean Poole’s backdrop of sensitively curated archival photos and videos the performers share stories from their lives and family histories in a series of direct address monologues. The stories are interspersed with songs that utilise both live and recorded instrumentation, Mangohig occasionally taking up his bass guitar, Ma rapping and playing a variety of instruments including keyboards and samplers. As performers, Mangohig and Ma have an abundance of chemistry and charisma. “Each of us,” Ma muses, “is a vast archive of our family stories.”
And what stories they are. Ma’s grandparents — the beautiful, Australian-born Edith and the handsome Charlie from Hong Kong, who chose her from a photograph to be his bride when she was just 17 — were well-known identities in Sydney’s Chinatown. Charlie ran a fruit and vegetable business. In the 1960s, Edith was a partner in the glamorous Chequers nightclub, mingling with the top entertainers of the day (in one photograph she poses with Bob Hope) as well as assorted gangsters. Ma’s parents were bohemians, setting up for a time in a London squat before returning to Australia and separating by the time Ma was two (“I grew up between two households,” he says).
Mangohig’s story contrasts sharply. His father was a preacher from rural Philippines, his mother the daughter of conservative Dutch migrants. Pen pals at first, the two eventually overcame parental objections to their marriage and settled in Darwin. Mangohig was a “pastor’s kid,” playing in a Christian rock band and seemingly headed for the ministry until experiencing a crisis of faith. He marries and divorces, earning the wrath of his father and his church. Ma, too, has a dark night of the soul, his dislocated adolescence resulting in truancy and drug abuse, a collapse of purpose. Both are troubled by racism and alienation, and locate music as a potential site of redemption. “So what was mine to embrace?” asks Ma rhetorically. “Music.”
For Ma, the arrangement and telling of these stories is in itself a kind of sampling, wherein “little nuggets of gold” are unearthed to construct new ways of knowing. “We are [our family’s] wildest dreams and their most elaborate remixes,” he says. In their careful crafting of these dreams and remixes, Ma and Mangohig, and their skilful collaborators, provide fresh insights into the nature of multicultural identity, and the power of meaning-making — whether through music or theatre — to suture and transcend.
Darlane Litaay, Tian Rotteveel, Specific Places Need Specific Dances, photo Tian Rotteveel
Specific Places Need Specific Dances
In Specific Places Need Specific Dances, Papua-born, Indonesia-based dancer Darlane Littay and Netherlands-born, Berlin-based composer and choreographer Tian Rotteveel take as their starting point the idea of waiting — for inspiration to strike or, more prosaically, simply for something, anything, to happen.
It’s an idea embedded in the form of the work, which is structurally loose, and presumably largely improvised (I say presumably because, though the work often feels extemporary, videos available via Google show marked similarities between this and earlier productions).
Littay and Rotteveel chat with each other, sometimes inaudibly, both in English and their native languages. They wander around the space in everyday clothes, show us a little bit of what looks like rehearsal footage on a TV monitor they wheel on and off. Eventually Littay picks up his mobile phone and inserts it into a cardboard cup for amplification. He plays snatches of music. Some of it sounds like it might be Papuan — traditional, ethereal —some of it Western, beat-driven. Rotteveel moves a little to it; nothing too defined. He sways, fans his arms out slowly. Mostly I think he is just listening.
The roles are reversed to no particular effect, Rotteveel eventually finding his way to a mixer attached to a subwoofer on castors. He pushes it around the space, manipulating a sonic pulse that becomes steadily louder until we can feel it in our bodies. Rotteveel wields a shaker in time with the pulse. Both he and Littay vocalise synchronously with it, sometimes grunting, sometimes seemingly issuing short injunctions to each other. They undress fully, and individually don koteka, elaborately decorated penis sheaths of Papuan origin. Also applying luridly-coloured face paint, the two dancers become strikingly ‘other,’ a process complicated by the cultural reciprocity – or is it appropriation? — underway. We may speculate that Littay has given Rotteveel permission to enter into this highly specific tradition, that he is even suitably placed to do so, but we can’t be sure.
Littay and Rotteveel continue their meandering explorations of the space, and each other’s practices, replacing all of the theatre’s lighting gels with red ones, holding a sheet of plastic over the subwoofer to create a startling buzz saw-like effect, and making each other dance to Empire of the Sun’s “Walking on a Dream.” Finally, Rotteveel reads from a long, rambling letter detailing the daily rituals — most of them a kind of waiting or delaying — that surrounded the duo’s working together. It’s a fittingly offbeat conclusion to a work that, despite its title, engages less with the idea of site specificity in performance than with the complexities, both banal and unexpected, of creative process and cultural exchange.
Aakash Odedra, Rising, Photo Chris Nash
Rising
The work of British-Bangladeshi choreographer Akram Khan bookended this year’s OzAsia Festival, which opened with Khan’s momentous Until the Lions and concluded with British dancer Aakash Odedra’s suite of four solo works, Rising, featuring Khan’s In the Shadow of Man.
The first solo is choreographed by Odedra himself, and takes its names from nritta, a ‘pure’ version of the classical Indian form Kathak that emphasises footwork, gestures and turns, all gradually increasing in speed and energy. Barefoot and dressed in traditional dhoti and loose-fitting trousers, Odedra uses the full depth and breadth of the Playhouse stage to execute a mesmerising series of pirouettes, turns and leaps accompanied by a soundtrack of tabla and drone in traditional 16-beat time. He spins on his knees, so rapidly that the eyes can’t keep up and his whole body blurs, in a partial deconstruction of Kathak’s characteristic verticality. Elsewhere the solo is more traditional, Odedra’s face retaining Kathak’s expressiveness, and sharp turns of his head indicating shifts in speed and motion.
In Khan’s In the Shadow of Man, atmospherically lit by Michael Hull, Odedra is transmuted into a monstrous figure. He crouches in the near-dark, emitting an animalistic howl, bare-chested with his back to us, his shoulder blades flexing grotesquely. As Jocelyn Pook’s ominous electro-acoustic sonic landscape builds, Odedra starts to move, arms bent back behind his body, reminiscent of a newborn animal learning to walk, conscious and frightened of its vulnerability. In a move that will be replicated in the following piece, Odedra — supremely confident and supple — extends backwards onto his hands, his face leering horribly at us from floor level.
In the third solo, Russell Maliphant’s Cut, Hull’s lighting is used to create columns, walls and washes of sometimes diffuse, sometimes tightly focused white light that Odedra manipulates — casting shadows that create the illusion that his hands are growing in size, or that sand is running through them — in a choreography that is fluid, controlled and deeply sensuous. In a repeated gesture, something like cradling or praying, and sonic and choreographic references to the movement of clock hands, I detected themes of entropy and the inexorability of time.
The final piece, Constellation, choreographed by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and lit by Willy Cessa, brings the evening, and the OzAsia Festival, to a reflective, quietly transporting close. Fifteen light globes hang above the stage at different levels. Odedra moves slowly, gracefully among them, activating each in turn with his touch, and setting them in motion with gentle pushes that have unpredictable results. Sometimes the lights merely bob up and down, gradually expending their kinetic energy, and sometimes they careen erratically through the space, narrowly avoiding each other and Odedra. Olga Wojciechowska’s cascading, reverberant score for piano adds to a sense of the numinous, of a cosmos in perpetual flux, moving out of darkness, into light, and finally — as Odedra floats and whirls among the lights, extinguishing each one — returning to its germinal, pre-time state.
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OzAsia Festival: Black Honey Company, Hot Brown Honey, creator, musical director, composer, sound designer Busty Beatz, creator, director, choreographer, designer Lisa Fa’alafi, lighting designer Paul Lim, set designer Tristan Shelley, Space Theatre, 26-30 Sept; Contemporary Asian Australian Performance, In Between Two, writers, composers, performers Joel Ma, James Mangohig, director Suzanne Chaundy, visual designer Jean Poole, Space Theatre, 5-6 Oct; Darlane Litaay and Tian Rotteveel, Specific Places Need Specific Dances, choreographers, dancers Darlane Litaay, Tian Rotteveel, Nexus Arts, 27-28 Sept; Aakash Odedra, Rising, Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide, 6-7 Oct
Top image credit: Busty Beatz, Hot Brown Honey, Briefs Factory, photo courtesy OzAsia
The End is a highly unusual meditation on mortality in which a virtual pop star suffers intimations of her coming death. The eternally 16-year-old, 3D-animated vocaloid singer Hatsune Miku (literally “the first sound from the future”) has a huge following in Japan and Southeast Asia, appearing on large screens in concerts and singing to live musical accompaniment. In The End, composer Keiichiro Shibuya, himself famous, and his team emphatically duplicate the concert feel with a big screen and powerful wraparound sound, but lift Miku out of the pop realm into an existentially fraught cosmos. She looks similar to her pop self — skinny, wide-eyed, ribboned turquoise hair flying wide — but the calculated cuteness and sexy teen moves have gone. So have the sexy outfits, replaced with a Louis Vuitton-designed range patterned with large and larger checks in a limited set of colours. Gone too are Miku’s multitudinous songs about love, replaced with recitatives and arias of contemplation and internal conflict. Also missing is the stable animated world that sustains her in manga and anime worlds. Instead, in fragile spaces that blur and fade, she is subject to ominously recurrent transmission glitches. And unlike her in-concert self, she rarely moves with simulated human agility; save when running though outer space, she is frequently still, seen in radically shifting perspectives, often face to face with us, or floating.
Shibuya and team have thus created a Miku who is transparently a virtual human, akin to Skeleton, the android who performed in response to the music of the composer and the Australian Art Orchestra in OzAsia’s Meeting Points: Scary Beauty. And akin too to the replicants in Blade Runner and so many other sci-fi creations, artificial beings for whom sudden awareness of mortality, in the face of their apparent perfection, is overwhelming — hence the play on “perfect”/’imperfect” in The End’s libretto.
The End, image Kenshu Shintsubo
Miku’s self is as unstable as the world around her — other figures appear, evoking other dimensions to her psyche. The End is not a monodramatic opera. Miku’s companion is a cute, tubby cartoon cat fixated on being her guardian, desperately hanging onto their bond as the singer slips from it: another instance of Miku’s removal from her teen world. More demanding is the arrival of a stranger emerging from the deep distance, at first glance another Miku but naked and with a skull face. The cat nervously exits and an exchange ensues between our heroine and her doppelganger to the opera’s end, face to face and then, curiously, by phone. At first Miku thinks the woman an imitator — “Are you on a diet, like me” — but reality gradually takes hold — a dry, musty, powdery odour, which prompts the donning of a gas mask. Miku’s other says, “When in the end they die [humans] smell the most.”
However, rather than being repelled, Miku needs to connect with her effectively dead self to learn about dying, until she is ready to let go of her living self. The two engage in lyrical half-sung dialogues, voice pitches barely distinguished, heightening the sense of interior crisis.
The opera’s stage design lends weight to Miku’s plight. As well as a large forescreen, there are three more angled behind it providing gripping depth-of-field with projected images on each amplifying the play of intense intimacy and profound distance. It’s most powerful when, in a burst of emotional strength Miku becomes a universe-traversing dragon, her face staring out from between the beast’s open jaws as Shibuya’s score thunders with bracing prog rock grandiosity. Elsewhere the screens reveal depthless spaces in which undetailed Miku models or dummy body parts slowly tumble, painfully underlining her artificiality. In a fantasy of an imagined bodily self, we are plunged into Miku, coursing down the oesophagus and up to the heart, a jewel-like sculpture which, stuck with forks, transforms into the singer’s face as she asks herself “Why are you so scared?” and recalls a cut finger which she worries is a false memory.
The End, image Kenshu Shintsubo
The genius of the stage and projection design lies in its creation of an entirely abstract space — a white box, a perpetually transformable tabula rasa for the projections of the artists, Miku and ourselves. Within it floats another box, itself a screen, and within it in turn, the composer-performer, barely visible, the consciousness from which The End emanates.
As Miku’s end looms, running through space as if suddenly free to face death, she yearns nonetheless for connection: “I’d like you to watch me and I will watch you too,” and some kind of eternity: “A melody to sing over and over.”
The cat returns, huge, looming over Miku in a final effort to hold onto her (“You’re much too cute for a human being” and, contrarily, “Remember when we were one? You were much closer to a human being”), but, glitching, floats helplessly away like a balloon. To complete her individuation, Miku then breaks off a phone conversation with her doppelganger but not before the pair entwine, drifting in space, the skull face of her other becoming her own before dissolving into nothingness, the richly layered music speeding with the emotion of union and separation.
Miku appears to be about to take flight but disappears into total whiteness from which dark shards surge as Shibuya’s score with organ churns relentlessly. Miku reappears, floating on her back: head, arms, legs hanging limply — “Do I look like I’m dead or only asleep. It makes no difference for you.” In a series of single utterances she sings movingly of her self rapidly departing — she cannot see, turn, touch, grasp…
In the opera’s last phase the meaning of “you” becomes richly ambiguous – the ‘you’ that is her doppelganger, which is herself; the ‘you’ that is us, her audience; and some other ‘you’ — “You’ll be in my memory forever,” “I’ll scream your name but not be able to call you,” “I’ll no longer have to keep you behind my eyelids.” It’s known that the opera was composed in the wake of the suicide of Shibuya’s fashion designer wife, Maria, adding another layer of emotional response to The End’s sad tale of a puppet given provisional life. Doubtless for Shibuya, as for Miku,”Dying was disappearing for other people. But not for me. Dying was the furthest thing from my mind.”
The script was written with Shibuya by playwright and novelist Toshiki Okada, Artistic Director of the theatre company chelftisch (God Bless Baseball, OzAsia 2016; Time’s Journey Through a Room, Asia TOPA, 2017), an ideal librettist given his incisively spare and quite lateral approach to dialogue, which here conveys the naivety of not merely a 16-year-old, but a virtual one. The limits of Miku’s reality are occasionally underlined with the cat’s report of rubbish piling up in the streets or by the sound of a helicopter thundering over us, but otherwise the singer’s world is a small one if metaphysically big.
The End might work for Miku’s pop fans (the few I saw appeared fully engaged) given the creative boldness of much manga and anime. The composer also works within careful limits, with hook-like recititatives that almost bloom into song and with songs that resonate closely with each other, as if to leave us with one haunting melody, richly and variously textured with beats, electronics, piano, organ, strings and enveloping spatial flow. Miku’s voice (built from an actual one) sits on the borderline of real and synthetic, but inclines deliberately to the latter — complexly tuned and textured by Shibuya and his vocaloid programmer — than to her often quite realistic pop singing. This again gives strength to Shibuya and Okada’s vision of an innocent technical intelligence burdened with the weight of mortality in a work that simultaneously resonates with our own experiences of facing death, our own or of others, at whatever age. Miku invites and warrants empathy in Keiichiro Shibuya’s splendidly realised virtual opera, growing more human the closer to death she comes.
OzAsia: The End, performer Hatsune Miku, performer, director, concept, music Keiichiro Shibuya, original book concept Toshiki Okada, Miku costumes Mark Jacobs (Louis Vuitton), visuals YKBX, stage design Shohei Shigematsu, spatial sound design evala, vocaloid programming PinocchioP, lighting Akiko Tomita; Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide, 30 Sept-4 Oct
Top image credit: The End, image Kenshu Shintsubo
The Australian Art Orchestra — Meeting Points
The Australian Art Orchestra (AAO) is acclaimed for its musical inventiveness and openness to collaboration. Their Meeting Points series, a highlight of this year’s OzAsia Festival, comprised three unique and captivating performances: Seoul Meets Arnhem Land: Ecstatic Voice, for voices and percussion; Cocoon, for guzheng and chamber ensemble; and Scary Beauty, an opera with an android as the solo vocalist.
AAO composer/trumpeter Peter Knight tells me that the AAO’s strategy is to establish “spaces of potential” for musicians from around the world, and for OzAsia 2017 it focused on meeting points between Asian, Indigenous and Western music. Such collaborations, which are workshopped through the AAO’s annual intensive program, produce significant developments in composition and performance. The three works in this Meeting Points series, each of about 35 minutes, are unique and wonderful world firsts.
Bae Il Dong, Meeting Points, photo courtesy OzAsia 2017
Seoul Meets Arnhem Land: Ecstatic Voice
Featuring Bae Il Dong (South Korea), Daniel Wilfred (Arnhem Land) and Jenny Barnes (Melbourne), Seoul meets Arnhem Land: Ecstatic Voice is a unique exploration of the power and the traditions of the human voice. The concert juxtaposes two of the world’s most distinctive vocal practices: Yolngu manikay from Arnhem Land and South Korean p’ansori or street opera. Bae Il Dong and Daniel Wilfred were joined by vocalist Jenny Barnes, whose Western experimental vocal practice recalls Cathy Berberian, and drummer Simon Baker.
P’ansori singers spend years developing their voices outdoors, using techniques such as singing into waterfalls to develop their power. UNESCO has declared p’ansori a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity and South Korea has declared p’ansori a National Intangible Cultural Property. Yolngu manikay is one of the oldest musical traditions still practised, and like p’ansori is about story-telling. Drawing on pre-existing forms and motifs, the three performers alternately sang solo or together, generating a visceral response as we felt the ecstatic power of the voices deep inside us.
Significantly, Seoul meets Arnhem Land: Ecstatic Voice brought out the essential features of both manikay and p’ansori oral traditions rather than creating any kind of diluting hybrid. Heard and seen together, we appreciate how important it is to preserve the forms. The addition of Barnes’ unique oeuvre added to the effect by demonstrating an even wider range of vocal techniques and concepts. Peter Knight told me that there was a natural rapport between the three singers when they began their collaboration, and an organic, spontaneous vocal arrangement emerged. This concert is an exhortation to maintain our significant oral traditions and above all to experience them in the presence of the singers.
Daniel Wilfred, Meeting Points, photo courtesy OzAsia 2017
Cocoon
Guzheng virtuoso Mindy Meng Wang‘s Cocoon, her first major composition to feature the guzheng with a chamber orchestra, is an autobiographical musical journey that takes listeners across half the world. Wang’s enchanting work traces her life musically from her childhood in Lanzhou, which lies on the Silk Road, to her subsequent involvement in the new music scene in London and her arrival in Australia in 2014.
Scored for guzheng, violin, bass, electronics, brass, shakuhachi and percussion, Cocoon shifts through many styles, from the music of the Uighurs of Western China to Chinese royal court music to jazz, and includes field recordings of Tibetan monks chanting. There are monastic gongs and the sound of the kind of frame drum common across the Middle-East. We feel as if we’re traversing the countries that lie along the Silk Road and hearing Asian-inflected Western music along the way. Orchestrated by the AAO’s Jem Savage, Cocoon is wonderfully coherent and engaging musically, despite the frequent shifts in musical style and genre. Starting with the gentle sound of the solo guzheng, a series of musical forms unfold. The sound of the Tibetan horn, produced by the bass trombone, competes with jazz saxophone as if the composer is being pulled musically in different directions. All kinds of musical dialogues develop between instruments and cultures. The bass trombonist, Adrian Sherriff, who doubles on shakuhachi, is outstanding in this performance and his dual role also embodies an East-West musical duality.
Mindy Meng Wang considers that the use of the guzheng, its history spanning over 2,500 years, should not be limited to traditional music. “It has much more potential and I want to explore all its different aspects,” she says. “I use modern composition methods, Western musical instruments, electronic music samples, Chinese folk music, religious music, ancient court music and local opera elements. [Cocoon] seeks true harmony and connection of Eastern and Western music by taking elements of Chinese philosophy and arts into a contemporary context that reflects my cross-cultural life experience.”
The video Silk Road Metaphor, made jointly with dancer Victoria Chu, depicts some of Meng Wang’s travel and research for Cocoon. Cocoon is the first element of what will be a longer work entitled “I am the Silk Road,” a trilogy that “chronicles the past/origins, the present/transformation and the future/evolution.” She says that the first part, Cocoon, intended to symbolise origins, gestation, tensile strength and growth, responds to the ancient Silk Road cultures and ethnic tribes from North West China. Mindy Meng Wang is looking for a new identity where East meets West and for there to be acceptance of the differences between them.
Mindy Meng Wang, photo courtesy OzAsia 2017
Scary Beauty
Can a startling vision of the future be found in an opera? Scary Beauty is a short operatic work for android and orchestra by Japanese composer and pianist Keiichiro Shibuya, featuring an android named Skeleton that has neural networks corresponding to human ones. Shibuya composed three songs to be performed by Skeleton with the Australian Art Orchestra, and developed the work as the next logical step beyond his vocaloid opera The End It is not unusual today for vocalists to be accompanied by electronic devices, but Scary Beauty’s inversion of this paradigm, to require an electro-mechanical vocalist to be accompanied by humans, reminds us that fully autonomous androids may one day be members of society. The opera’s title reflects its dual character — it is both frightening and beautiful.
The orchestration combines strings, brass, piano, percussion and tape loops to produce music expressing the emotions normally associated with opera. Shibuya conducts from the piano, next to which Skeleton stands in red robes and Doc Martins. Skeleton’s voice suggests some human characteristics — it can be soft, loud or breathy — though for the third piece, it’s distorted. The android’s actions are driven by algorithms based on emergence theory and chaos theory giving it control over its limbs and facial expressions. Electronic sensors detect and process the pitch and amplitude of ambient sound, light and movement to generate autonomous and very realistic gestures and expressions. By comparison, the experimental Swiss-designed robot conductor Yumi was not designed to respond to external stimuli. Yumi seems little more than an evolved metronome.
Though by no means a full-scale opera, Scary Beauty is a fine composition that would still work wonderfully if a human singer were substituted for Skeleton. Shibuya has set to music compelling texts selected from Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island, which considers a future world that includes human clones; Yukio Mishima’s The Decay of the Angel, which muses on a deteriorating society, one of his last works before he committed seppuku; and William S Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s The Third Mind, a cut-up novel. The articulation of these texts by an android amplifies these writers’ concerns and the work may be seen both as a prediction and a warning.
Skeleton is the creation of Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro and his team at Osaka University’s Intelligent Robotics Laboratory. The presentation of Scary Beauty formed a central element of the 2017 Australasian Computer Music Conference program as well as the OzAsia Festival. In a discussion session (part of Adelaide’s Open State Festival), the conference’s keynote speaker, Professor Takashi Ikegami of Tokyo University, joined Shibuya, the AAO’s Peter Knight, OzAsia Artistic Director Joseph Mitchell and Kohei Ogawa of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory in a talk on Scary Beauty. The discussion ranged around the future of android development — could an android go beyond autonomous physical and facial expression and develop emotional sensitivity, empathise with humans, demonstrate artistic ability and perhaps coexist with humans on equal terms? In short, could androids replace humans in a post-Anthropocene world? To answer such a question, robotics research must consider what a human being really is psychologically and emotionally and must consider what elements of human society we value and how they might be retained in the presumably inevitable post-Anthropocene era to come. Unless we can define what makes us human, we cannot protect and maintain our humanness.
The AAO’s Meeting Points program demonstrated the potential of music to highlight the most fundamental issues of contemporary life. In a post-Anthropocene world, how would the intangible heritage of Korea, Arnhem Land and the Silk Road be retained and appreciated?
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OzAsia Festival: Australian Art Orchestra, Meeting Points: Cocoon, performers Mindy Meng Wang, AAO; Seoul Meets Arnhem Land: Ecstatic Voice, performers Bae Il Dong, Daniel Wilfred, Jenny Barnes, Simon Baker; Scary Beauty, composer, Keiichiro Shibuya, performers Keiichiro Shibuya, Skeleton, AAO; Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, 30 Sept
With three excellent concerts — a stunning combination of electronic music and dazzling visuals, a biographical portrait of a great painter and a revival of a classic 1960s rock album — this OzAsia Festival covered the widest range of musical and artistic territory.
Regurgitator — The Velvet Underground and Nico
Renowned for reviving great hits, Regurgitator is a rock trio with two regular guests, German-Australian singer and keyboard/synth player Seja, and guzheng player Mindy Meng Wang. 2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the seminal 1967 album The Velvet Underground and Nico and this extended Regurgitator line-up has performed this album many times in different contexts, for example at MOFO this year.
In the musical arrangement they have developed, drummer Peter Kostic uses a kit typical of Velvet Underground drummer Moe Tucker’s set-up, emphasising tom-toms and bass drum, frequently using mallets and making little use of cymbals. The significant change to the original arrangement is the introduction of the guzheng, which adds a sonic and cultural dimension to what by 1967 standards was already an experimental sound. The guzheng’s delightful tone lifts the music out of the New York underground and renders it more universal. Presumably the addition of the guzheng provides the Asian link that prompts the inclusion of this production in the OzAsia Festival. In her contributions to this festival, Mindy Meng Wang demonstrated great versatility, and for her work with Regurgitator she creates a unique vocabulary of sound, adding swirls and gestures to the rock arrangement, playing the equivalent of a guitar solo on one track, and contributing an ethereal headiness that gently transforms the music.
The essential strength and character of the original album lies in Lou Reed’s intense and insightful songs such as “I’m waiting for the man,” and many tracks are now considered all-time rock classics, variously musing on drug addiction, sadomasochism, sexual promiscuity and other aspects of 1960s New York life — themes still relevant today. Regurgitator give a fine performance, Seja engagingly delivers Nico’s three songs, and the final track, “European Son,” in the original version of which the musicians really let their hair down, is an invitation to Regurgitator and friends to do likewise. The audience is delighted.
Music in Anticlockwise
Energetic Hong Kong composer, performer, instrument inventor and visual artist GayBird (Keith Leung Kei-cheuk) produced one of the most optically involving concerts I can recall, as much a visual art experience as a musical one. Working with a team of video, illustration and lighting artists, he uses lasers and a huge LED screen covering the rear of the stage to create a mesmerising cascade of fantasy-inducing visual imagery.
In the first half of the concert, GayBird performs to one side of the stage on synthesisers and voice, creating a web of rhythmic, danceable sound, the music and visuals closely synchronised, creating parallel languages. There are sound samples including one of Stephen Hawking’s computer voice declaring he was born 300 years after Galileo. The screen displays cartoons, abstract imagery and geometric forms, while red laser beams move through the air. This concert bears out GayBird’s statement that, “I don’t divide sound, music, art and technology in my creations, in fact I can’t. I am one person, all my ideas are united as one in my head.”
For the concert’s second half, Zephyr Quartet members were positioned on stage in front of the LED screen while GayBird on the auditorium floor worked at a table of synthesisers, a shallow box with springs stretched over it that he bowed or plucked, and an old manually operated siren. In contrast with the advanced technologies he used in the first half of the concert, some of the devices deployed in the second, never intended as musical instruments, reminded us that interesting sounds may be made from simple means.
GayBird said in a RealTime interview that he chose the concert’s title, Music in Anti-Clockwise, to indicate that he was starting the concert with the future of music and working backwards to early forms, here Haydn’s first string quartet. The version presented here is dramatically reworked and blended with other sounds, perhaps suggesting that our idea of the past is imaginary. The dazzling mix of sound and imagery in this magical concert continued, with added images such as ticking clocks, floating musical notation and keyboards.
GayBird’s performance was preceded by a fine set by Adelaide singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Tracy Chen. Her unobtrusive but sophisticated use of digital technologies to sample and loop her own soft voice and her instruments made for a seductively layered sound. She refers to her creations as ‘bedroom music’ — it can be made at home and has an introspective, melancholic feel, but its complexity and coherence suggest a clear musical vision, perhaps reflecting the direction of future music production. Her gentle sound proved a well-chosen curtain-raiser to Music in Anticlockwise.
Zephyr Quartet, Fairweather, photo Erik Griswold, OzAsia 2017
Fairweather
Legendary Scottish-born painter Ian Fairweather (1891-1974), who spent the latter part of his life in Australia, is revered today as one of our pioneering abstractionists. Dramatically evoking Fairweather’s life, this production combines visual art, music and spoken text, and was developed collaboratively by video artist Glen Henderson, composer Erik Griswold and writer Rodney Hall.
Hall’s narration eloquently captures the central characteristics of Fairweather’s history. The artist spent many years travelling through Asia, particularly China and Indonesia, studied drawing and Japanese language during and after his time as a prisoner in World War I and, later, Chinese visual art and language, also spending some time living in a temple. “China was the nearest place he ever came to home,” says Hall. These experiences deeply affected his thinking and his art. Hall notes that calligraphy, which is central to Fairweather’s art, is “a journey manifested by the hand alone.” In his last years, living on Queensland’s Bribie Island, Fairweather became a scholar-hermit, perhaps in the manner of Chinese antecedents. Such a life story seems surreal: “This is not a life you choose, nor did I,” he had said.
The performance of this 2013 creation is compelling, the images and music subtly underscoring Hall’s text. Griswold’s music is scored for koto, bass koto and string quartet, the opening passages have a Chinese flavour and dramatic passages relating to the war years suggest the psychological disturbance of war. Performers Satsuki Odamura and Adelaide’s much-in-demand Zephyr Quartet are outstanding. At one point, Odamura brushes the bass koto with a small eucalyptus branch, making a soft sound like wind in the island’s trees that is symbolic as much as musical, and she uses the bass koto to suggest swelling ocean waves to accompany the description of Fairweather’s raft journey across the Timor Sea. Griswold’s score for The Raft part 1 (“Epiphany”) is marked ‘hypnotic’ and the music takes us into that dreamy state.
Glen Henderson’s video sets the tone, using layers of imagery in the manner of Fairweather’s paintings. One scene shows an image of the sea through mangroves, the swirling lines of the branches resembling Fairweather’s sinuous drawing. A photographic portrait of the artist can be seen faintly hovering through the branches over the sea like a spirit and it returns regularly to haunt the story.
Following the performance, there is a Q and A session in which Art Gallery of SA curator Tracy Lock introduces the three collaborators and provides important insights into Ian Fairweather’s artwork. Evidently, one painting was found to comprise 70 layers of paint, the layering of imagery becoming a metaphor for the aggregation of life experience. Griswold says that the rhythmic flow of Fairweather’s paintings suggests the flow of music — it inspired his composition and was the genesis of the production. He describes this production as, “a poetic homage to Fairweather… We are trying to create a very immersive experience that will hopefully take you into that psychological mindscape.” Hall, Henderson and Griswold’s Fairweather succeeds wonderfully in this endeavour and is a magnificent portrayal of an artist’s life.
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OzAsia: Music in Anticlockwise, composer, performer GayBird, Nexus Arts, 6 Oct; Fairweather, Zephyr Quartet, Satsuki Odamura, Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, 23 Sept; The Velvet Underground and Nico, Regurgitator, Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, 29 Sept
Top image credit: GayBird, photo Cheung Chi Wai, OzAsia 2017
OzAsia Artistic Director Joseph Mitchell’s third festival featured three superb theatrical works — W!ld Rice’s Hotel, Keiichiro Shibuya’s The End and Niwa Gekidan Penino’s The Dark Inn — making my one-week visit supremely worthwhile, with the bonus of the Australian Art Orchestra’s Meeting Points series of wonderful cross-cultural collaborations. Fellow RealTime writers Chris Reid and Ben Brooker have made clear their praise for much else in the three-week festival that opens us up to works made here and in Asia that expand our sense of what is possible artistically and what we can learn culturally.
Two men, a son and his dwarf father, arrive at a remote hot springs country inn, named Avidya (ignorance), located, a narrator tell us, in Hell Valley. The pair have been invited to entertain the inn’s guests with their puppetry, but it turns out they’re not expected and that the owner is not present. An old woman is unhelpful, though father and son seem unfazed, even when they discover they’ve missed the last bus. The woman relents and offers them a room. Action to this point, and for much of The Dark Inn, moves at a leisurely, often less than everyday pace. The acting is low-key, voices quietly projected. We are compelled to look in on an unfamiliar world with few signs of the present, despite our being told it’s 2013.
The Dark Inn, Niwa Gekidan Penino, photo Shinsuke Sugino, OzAsia 2017
The intricately realistic timber-framed set revolves with cinematic verve from reception to bedrooms on two levels, to a changing room and then a rock-girded, steaming hot spring bath. Seen though a rear window is a persimmon tree, its leaf fall and flowering indicating the seasonal change pivotal to the play’s meanings, first unhurriedly revealed as the characters observe the social niceties; when they don’t, physical and emotional chaos ensue. While first expectations are that the father, Momofuku Kurata, and son, Ichiro, will fall prey to whatever absurdist situation they’ve found themselves in, in fact they will be catalysts for change, some of it already brewing.
The two-and-a-half hour play is not easily summarised, so I’ll follow one thread. A sense of growing unease is triggered in small increments. Kurata and Ichiro find a guest in their room, the blind Matsuo, who believes the hot spring will cure him. His earnest soul-seeking is deflated by the pair, Kurata bluntly hinting that masturbation might help and, before they are interrupted, asking if would he like to be touched. Matsuo wishes he could see the father and son; Kurata says, “I’m horrible, my son’s even more so.”
When father and son are cajoled into performing by two drunken geisha (resting at the inn in the off-season) who have entertained them with a “snappy” shamisen duet, the bright yellow puppet — a little larger than Kurata and with a big head and outsize hands — is slowly revealed. Kurata activates it, lunging about, mounting and being mounted by the creature and gasping with post-coital relief. Everyone’s shocked — the geishas, the bathroom assistant peering through the window, and Matsuo, who doesn’t like what he hears and flees the room. However, his curiosity persists; he seeks out the puppet and, horrified by what he finds, screams and curls up naked in the bathroom. But Matsuo’s already been dealt a blow by Ichiro when he tries to draw the young man into a discussion, in Buddhist terms, about escaping ignorance. Ichiro cuts him off; abstractions will not cure Matsuo. In the play’s climactic scene, Kuratu and Ichiro, about to leave the inn, invade the bathroom, where the guests are recovering from their diverse crises, with the puppet, revealing its huge penis. Matsuo vomits.
Takiko, the old woman, will call Ichiro “lightless” (effectively” ignorant”) for his treatment of the blind man, but come spring, Matsuo has left the inn on which he had become helplessly dependent. Ichiro reveals his own plight — “a life without choices,” he’s unschooled and unable to abandon his father, whom he treats with utmost deference. A rare smile passes between them as they leave the inn — perhaps a kind of ‘mission accomplished’ by two tricksters.
The Dark Inn, Niwa Gekidan Penino, photo Shinsuke Sugino, OzAsia 2017
Each of the inn’s residents has problems to resolve. The elder geisha plays mother to the younger but knows she must let her go, into the arms of a traditional bath attendant, a Nagashi (one of a dying breed), a giant, bumbling sexually repressed mute who has to comically fan his erection when Kurata undresses to bathe and lets down his long black locks. Takiko wanted to become a geisha in the 40s, learned the shamisen but WWII eventuated, she wasn’t pretty anyway and grew old and envious. We know least about the elegant, self-contained Kurata (Mame Yamada), but his liberating provocations are central to The Dark Inn. Ignorance of the body — a form of self-deception — and its needs are as fateful as ignorance of mind. Though not a Buddhist, writer-director Kurô Tanino said in an interview, “the characters are based on 12 Buddhist ideas, such as Avidya, ‘no light,’ which can mean no knowledge or being lost.”
The Dark Inn’s larger picture entails not only the ritual renewal of Spring — the younger geisha and the bath attendant have a baby and the other residents have returned to the world. However, there are no new guests and a new railway line threatens demolition; geishas, bath attendants and travelling puppeteers perhaps barely belong in the play’s 2013. The Dark Inn is neither defeatist nor wilfully optimistic; it is playfully pragmatic.
The production’s pacing is deeply engaging, its incremental surprises and escalating shocks bracing and rich in meaning. The performances are subtly informal and beautifully shaped across the play’s uninterrupted two-and-a-half hours. Set, lighting and sound design are superbly integrated. Director (and psychiatrist) Kurô Tanino’s cogent assemblage of the complex components of The Dark Inn yields a deeply memorable experience in which time is tellingly distended, opening up our attention and incisively putting ignorance to the test.
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OzAsia: Niwa Gekidan Penino, The Dark Inn, writer, director Kurô Tanino, design Kurô Tanino, Michiko Inada, lighting Masayuke Abe, Kosuke Ashidano, sound design Koji Sato, Yoshihiro Nakamura, technical director Isao Hubo; Her Majesty’s Theatre, Adelaide, 3-4 Oct
Top image credit: The Dark Inn, Niwa Gekidan Penino, photo Shinsuke Sugino, OzAsia 2017
We return from Adelaide, bearing delights and insights granted us by the artists whose work we experienced in just one of the three weeks of OzAsia Festival. Singapore’s Hotel, reviewed this week, and Japan’s The Dark Inn, expanded and deepened our sense of time as well as sharpening our cultural awareness. Also from Japan, Keiichiro Shibuya’s opera The End for virtual pop star Miku transcended its pop sources with tragic heft. Reviews of this and The Dark Inn next week. Ben Brooker welcomes OzAsia performances by Akram Khan, Eisa Jocson and Checkpoint Theatre that spoke powerfully to the complexities of gender, and Chris Reid embraces the festival’s visual arts program. Now it’s Sydney’s turn to enjoy the growing Australian-Asian symbiosis in Performance Space’s Liveworks which features works from Japan, South Korea and the Philippines alongside Australian creations, including Justin Shoulder’s Carrion [image above]. Art that unites in a time of division! Keith & Virginia
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Top image credit: Justin Shoulder, Carrion, 2017, photo courtesy Performance Space
At the opening of W!ld Rice Theatre’s Hotel and from time to time between episodes, performers in black fill the stage as if citizens (singing “Rule Brittania” or Singapore’s national anthem), travellers (the nation state’s influx of diaspora) or hotel staff — unpacking their livery or practising routine tasks. Two walls and assortments of furniture draw in to complete a room with two entrances. Changing rear-projected wall-paper and costuming deftly signify eras, as do documentary photographs, film footage and other images, such as for The Good Manners Campaign accompanied by the singing of “Stand up for Singapore.” It’s a space cleverly designed for a close encounter with a culture unfamiliar to most Australians, but in many ways close to home.
Hotel comprises 11 plays, each around half an hour, each with a bracing sting in the tail, all linked by being set in one hotel room à la Raffles and unfolding over the course of 100 years in one nation state, Singapore, from British colonial rule to independence from Malaysia in 1965 and on to the present, and performed in two gripping two-and-a-half hour instalments.
An ensemble of 14 role-changing, sometimes gender-swapping performers virtuosically engage in situation comedy, wild farce, high drama and song and dance. What unites all of these apparently disparate components is an unremitting focus on Singaporean culture in terms of race, class, religion and gender, evoking at once rich diversity and unresolved tensions. What makes Hotel deeply fascinating is its dramatically rich account of the escalating complexity of Singapore’s racial and cultural diversity, unforgettably felt not least in the production’s last scene. But I’ll begin at the very beginning of Hotel and then jump to the end.
Hotel, W!LD RICE, photo courtesy the artists and OzAsia 2017
From first to last: the drama of diversity
In the first scene, in 1915, the Eurasian and devoutly Christian wife of a racist, sexist and bullying English planter is shocked when he delightedly insists they attend the public execution of some 50 Sepoys: Muslim Indian soldiers in the British army who had violently mutinied in protest at being sent to fight against Muslim Turkey. She defiantly refuses to attend, her husband departs, she communicates sympathetically in Malay with a Muslim bellboy who admits a desire to “kill every white face,” gives him a valuable necklace (a gift from her husband a short while before) and, deciding to leave her husband, exits for the Sepoy lines. Her act won’t upset the status quo but it indicates the depth of the tensions that will drive Hotel. Shots are heard, the cast sing “Land of hope and glory” at the end of a scene that commenced with “Rule Britannia.”
The scene plays out tensely, the wife reserved, consistently insulted for being a woman and of mixed race and then nervously frantic under pressure. But in her husband’s absence, a sense of resolve firms. It’s a surprisingly rapid but convincing release, in a scene already focused on power, class, gender and the ‘otherness’ of being Eurasian and, under British rule, Malay. That ‘otherness’ will play out across the hours in many permutations as will the role of language in throwing up barriers or allowing alternative expression.
While this might seem like a thematically complex beginning, compared with what’s to come it’s relatively simple if true to the way most scenes play out: a social binary will be met with a third element, either from within the pair, or from without, in a recurring dialectical dynamic.
In Hotel’s final scene, set in the present — if with an air of prophesy — an elderly man (Ivan Heng, one of Hotel’s two directors) and his wife have installed themselves in the hotel room, with a nurse, as long-term residents. Because he’s ill, management are not keen on having the hotel treated like a hospital. The scene is built around the seemingly well-to-do Singaporean Chinese couple’s resistance to being moved out. As pressure builds, what commenced as comedy — including the wife’s blunt sexual comments and her husband’s curmudgeonly casual racism towards his daughter’s Mauritian husband (who fights back) — turns ever so gradually dark. Under pressure from management, he reveals he’s dying of prostate cancer and asks to see the hotel staff whom he thanks and quizzes about their origins, revealing diversity beyond the anticipated Chinese, Malay and Indian mix and including two mainland Chinese workers who, to his surprise, speak no English. “What’s the need?”, is the response, an indication that Singapore is changing beyond the comprehension of a member of a cultural group that comprises 76% of the state’s population and whose first language is English.
Even the man’s economic standing has been undermined: he reveals that his and his wife’s properties have been sold out from under them by developers, that the couple have tried unsuccessfully to live with their adult children in Australia and returned home to enable him to die in peace and comfort in a hotel room. This revelation tempers our dislike for the man and we’re amused by his allowing the staff to take selfies with him and shake his hand, but it’s his words to them about “home” that cut deep and shift the play’s mood into sadness. Asked why he decided to spend his last days in a hotel room, he says, underlining the many different periods and states of being in Hotel, that the room is “a temporary space” and that “home” is “all an illusion.” He feels, in effect, that his kind are on their way, sooner or later, to becoming the ‘others’ he has mocked. This final scene — typically compact, linguistically sharp and deft at briskly changing the emotional temperature — tautly draws together the thematic threads of Hotel’s rich weave. It acknowledges a persistent preoccupation, as one character in this scene puts it: “We don’t even know what to do with diversity,” while revealing an already arriving future of even greater diversity, something in an era of globalisation we can all recognise, but more overtly experienced in a small nation state. The one connection to the past is a benign Indian woman who has worked at the hotel for 30 years and assures management that, yes, other people have died in the hotel over the decades.
Issues and eras
The nine scenes between the first and the last accommodate a vast range of characters, historical events and issues. In a comic scene set in the 20s, a housemaid, caught out in a hotel guest’s dress, is confronted by a nun and two policemen, little knowing that she’s adopted the role of a woman who has beaten her fellow maid and that the nun, in response to new legislation forbidding the abuse of maids, is following up on a reported crime. In 1935, a scene is built around a spiritualist who anticipates a coming war in the face of British indifference; in 1955, a famous filmmaker, P Ramlee, battles to make a socially conscious film without singing and dancing and focused on Malay culture.
In 1975, in an hilarious drug-fuelled farce (the wallpaper warps) a Eurasian transgender person, Brigid, is confronted with the Virgin Mary, giant walking penises and angels arguing for commitment to one gender or another. It’s revealed that the first sex reassignment operation in Singapore took place in 1971 and that by 1973 identity cards reflected the transition. But Brigid declares love for both her/his breasts and cock and is determined to be a different kind of ‘other.’ This passion is juxtaposed with the sudden appearance from a wardrobe — at the mention of God — of the nation’s founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, railing against men with long hair spoiling foreign investment in Singapore and opposing ambiguity in general. Brigid and the US Viet Vet who provided the drugs have sex, she mounts him, and in a segue we see them celebrating marriage.
Hotel, W!LD RICE, photo courtesy the artists and OzAsia 2017
Across generations: continuity & disruption
Occasionally, characters in one scene reappear in a later one. The perky aspiring film starlet of 1955 reappears, now devoutly Muslim, in 2005, travelling with her businessman son from Malaya, but Singapore is not what it used to be. Worse, post 9/11, her angry son is an easy target for over-zealous security forces and is arrested. Her grandson comments that although his father has no bomb, “the bomb is in the minds” of the Singaporeans. This was the one scene, that although painfully tense, lacked the telling extra dimension common to the others.
In 1945, a Japanese captain, Matsuda, is told by his senior officer that the army is leaving Singapore and that he can bring his son with him, but not his non-Japanese wife Sharifah. The separation is brutally painful, especially when we learn that Matsuda, in act of unexpected kindness, had rescued her from working in a “comfort station,” where women were forced into sexually serving Japanese soldiers. Her anger is unforgiving. In 1985, in Hotel’s most moving and emotionally complex scene, the son, Natsuo, nervous to the point of vomiting and struggling to practice his limited English, has returned to Singapore to meet his unsuspecting mother, now considerably aged and confined to a wheelchair and assisted by her English-speaking grand-daughter who translates for her into Malay. The barriers to communication are many, until Sharifah in anger, leaps up from her wheelchair and yells “Inu!” (dog) at Natsuo, and then a string of other words in Japanese that she explains, “feel like blood in my mouth.” He’s profoundly shocked, falling back as if hit, but persists, offering a recording of his father, who “wanted to come back,” singing for her. In a wrenching exchange Sharifah declares this will be their only meeting and, as he bows low before her, acknowledges him as her son, though she cannot forgive her husband. The full weight of the impacts of war and racism are conveyed in nuanced performances of awkwardness, stuttering hesitancy, misunderstanding, unleashed pain and provisional conciliation.
Another scene, set in 1995, plays out as a classic wedding farce awash with complications around Chinese and Indian intermarriage which, if difficult enough in themselves, are exacerbated by the Chinese bride’s decision to wear a sari for the second stage of the ceremony, to the unyielding resistance of her mother who walks out on the event, just when you expect accommodation. It’s a chilling end to an otherwise riot of contrasting characters — an overly accommodating Indian aunt, a stereotypical gay makeup artist, a sniping Chinese sister of the bride, the wearied father of the bride, an indifferent groom and his understanding mother who comments wryly to her Chinese counterpart, “Yes, the sari is a little too Indian.”
Hotel, W!LD RICE, photo courtesy the artists and OzAsia 2017
Close to home
In many respects, Hotel offers a conventional theatre experience, but provides evidence aplenty that with ambition and vision there is still life in an often tired model. With its two writers, two directors and 11 substantial episodes it’s akin to contemporary television series with their heightened creative teamwork and their appeal to sustained audience engagement. The OzAsia Festival audience met Hotel and its talented cast with unbridled enthusiasm, including the local Singaporean diaspora, some of whom were heard singing along with the national anthem and others, too long away from home, rumoured to have been surprised that the production could get away with the God/Lee Kuan Yew moment.
Although Hotel might not have addressed continuing constraints on democracy, including on the arts (read an interview with leading theatremaker and Director of the Singapore Festival 2014-17 Ong Keng Sen), it was nonetheless disarmingly frank on key matters and admirably culturally self-critical. As our own country increasingly inclines to authoritarianism and struggles to deal with expanded multiculturalism, Hotel’s Singapore feels close to home. OzAsia Festival Artistic Director Joseph Mitchell’s decision to program was bold, apt and timely.
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OzAsia Festival: W!ld Rice Theatre, Hotel, writers Alfian Sa’at, Marcia Vanderstraaten, directors Ivan Heng, Glen Goei, set designer Wong Chee Wai, lighting designer Lim Woan Wen, multimedia designer Brian Gothong Tan, composer, sound designer Paul Searles, The Gunnery, costume designer Theresa Chan; Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide, 28-30 Sept
Top image credit: Hotel, W!LD RICE, photo courtesy the artists and OzAsia 2017
For his third year as Artistic Director of Adelaide’s OzAsia Festival, Joseph Mitchell promised a “large focus on very personal and intimate stories told from Asia“. Two productions exemplify his approach: Filipino contemporary dancer and choreographer Eisa Jocson’s solo work Macho Dancer and Singaporean company Checkpoint Theatre’s two-hander Recalling Mother. A third production, British-Bangladeshi choreographer Akram Khan’s Until the Lions, is epically scaled, but shares with the other two works a theoretical framework that explores the constructed and contestable nature of gender.
Eisa Jocson, Macho Dancer
Performed by young men, often of low socio-economic status, to mixed audiences, macho dancing is unique to the Philippines, a distinctive though largely underground subculture of, especially, the capital Manila’s nightclub scene. Borrowing the iconography of normative Western masculinity, macho dancing performs a complicated deconstruction of gender. Unlike other forms of strip dancing, its movement vocabulary is slow, almost viscid, and heavily grounded. Its soundtrack ranges from American heavy metal to Asian power balladry, with performances working up a palpable sense of camp in the space between.
Eisa Jocson wears khaki hotpants, a black singlet, kneepads, a necklace in the shape of a cross, and cowboy boots — black, with chunky heels and steel tips – which she frequently and commandingly raps on the floor. She makes her entrance onto the thrust stage through a fug of dry ice, accompanied by Metallica’s Devil’s Dance (“snake, I am the snake/ tempting, that bite to take”). Removing her singlet and stripping down to her underwear, Jocson exposes her breasts as the outline of a phallus becomes visible, unsettling our perceptions of her gender. Her body is muscly, athletic. Its energy is concentrated in Jocson’s thighs and legs, and expended in a series of impeccably balanced squats, knee-bends and lunges. We are invited to admire her ‘masculine’ physique, just as Jocson herself spends time flexing her biceps seemingly for her own edification. During a sequence that takes place in silence, she patrols the edge of the stage, fixing audience members with a hard, inculpating stare that suggests the performer’s complete control of the space.
Jocson has written that the work activates a “gender loop,” contradictorily framing the dancer as a powerful physical presence while acknowledging the limitations of this power. Unavoidably situated within macho dancing’s socio-economic context, Jocson’s body remains both objectified and of uncertain social capital due to its transgressive nature. Her stage persona is grim-faced — a mask of dispassionate heteronormative masculinity — but Macho Dancer is a thoroughly playful work, locating joy as well as critique in its subversions. Bookended by aggressively posturing heavy metal and George Michael’s breathy, saxophone-drenched ballad “Careless Whisper,” it could hardly be otherwise.
Musicians, Until the Lions, OzAsia 2017, photo Jean Louis Fernandez
Akram Khan, Until the Lions
Having performed as a child in Peter Brook’s landmark production of The Mahabharata in the 1988 Adelaide Festival, choreographer Akram Khan returns to both the city and the Sanskrit epic with the large-scale dance-theatre work Until the Lions. Khan’s point of departure is Paris-based Indian poet Karthika Naïr’s 2015 collection of the same name — the title references a Nigerian Ugbo proverb, “until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter” — which retells episodes from The Mahabharata from the perspective of various marginalised characters, many of them women. The woman at the heart of Khan’s work is the princess Amba (Ching-Ying Chien), abducted by the warrior Basheema (Khan himself in the original production, here portrayed by the Lengger-trained Indonesian dancer Rianto). Rendered unmarriageable, Amba kills herself and is reborn as the male-gendered Shikandi (Joy Alpuerto Ritter) who, as the “incarnation of penance,” ultimately slays Basheema in battle.
Tim Yip’s set is a vast cross-section of a tree trunk. Prefiguring the battle ground it will become, it appears at first more grey than brown and ash- or bone-like rather than wooden. The trunk’s thick rings suggest deep history, its roundedness the Hindu conception of time as cyclical rather than linear. As the lights rise it is stuck with a dozen or more spears, one bearing the decayed head of an old warrior to which Basheema repeatedly genuflects. Perhaps, in its dead eyes, he glimpses his own fate reflected back at him. During the work’s dénouement the trunk will spectacularly split into three sections, smoke billowing from the fissures, as though Shikandi’s victory over the prince has upended the natural order, shaking the world itself.
Incorporating Western contemporary dance and the classical north Indian form Kathak, Khan’s choreography is varied, emphatic and steeped in ritual. It is also sharply individualised. Rianto’s Basheema is unerringly vertical and straight-backed, an authoritarian figure. His limbs punch out like weapons from a body that moves — in tightly contained leaps and whirls —with military swagger and precision. Chien’s choreography compellingly tracks Amba’s journey from princess to warrior, the angles of her body sharpening, an initial fluidity hardening into something indomitable, almost machine-like. Ritter, meanwhile, registers the strangeness of the character of Shikandi — the progeny of a demon as well as the gender-shifting re-embodiment of the princess — in a series of remarkable disarticulations, limbs at odd angles, crab-walking or on all fours like a dog, scuttling around the stage at speed.
Vincenzo Lamagna’s cinematic score effectively underlines the work’s sense of mythical struggle while four musicians seated around the edge of the trunk provide a mighty wall of percussion, sometimes using traditional instruments, sometimes pounding the stage with their fists. They sing, too, conjuring evocative atmospheres of war, loss and even celebration. If the work’s narrative sense is occasionally compromised by Khan’s febrile kinaesthetics, then its vivid and quietly transfiguring world-building — shaped, no doubt, by Khan’s grasp of our deep-rooted receptiveness to the mythic — is never less than compelling.
Claire Wong, Noorlinah Mohamed, Recalling Mother, OzAsia 2017, photo Jack Yam (Lime Pixels) courtesy of Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay
Checkpoint Theatre, Recalling Mother
During the Q&A that followed the performance of Recalling Mother I attended, an audience member asked writer-performers Claire Wong and Noorlinah Mohamed if, in making a show about their mothers, they had set out to explore notions of gender. They replied that they hadn’t — resisting, I think, the question’s political overtones — but acknowledged that the experiences of women, especially in the realm of labour, were reflected in the stories of their mothers. “We’ve always felt,” Mohamed told the audience, “that the more particular the story, the more universal it can be.”
On the surface, Recalling Mother is an unassuming, simply staged piece of autobiographical theatre. Petrina Dawn Tan’s set comprises two chairs and a back projection screen, its trapezoid shape reflected in the muted, two-tone linoleum that covers the stage. There is no music or, perhaps more accurately, the music is entirely verbal, the work’s text woven from the performers’ interviews with their elderly mothers. Wong’s — who is not biologically related — is Cantonese-speaking and fiery, Mohamed’s Malay-speaking and mulish. Wong describes both as “complex and contradictory.”
Mostly told in the first person and past tense, the work’s storytelling mode is demotic and conversational, firmly rooted in the oral tradition. Layers of theatricality — such as the performers’ occasional slippages into physical and verbal imitation — are gently and sparingly applied. Personal histories are sketched out in relatable vignettes seamed with humour and melancholy (Mohamed’s mother was diagnosed with dementia in 2010 and Wong’s father died in 2016, both events worked into the show over successive iterations since 2006). Quotidian routines, especially those revolving around food preparation — the Malay rice dish nasi lemak, a popular school snack, is especially laboured over — are recalled in loving, fine-grained detail.
For all the work’s lightness of touch, however, the shifting idea of ‘women’s work,’ as shaped over time by culture, class and generational divides, is central to Recalling Mother. Unsurprisingly, it is the mothers who perform most of the unrecognised labour, emotional and domestic. We learn that Mohamed’s mother, an uneducated former metal worker, is illiterate and that her first husband was abusive (“he was no good for us,” Mohamed says matter-of-factly). As the mothers grow old and infirm, the caretaking roles are reversed. At one point, Mohamed, now with a PhD, cradles her sobbing mother in her arms. Elsewhere, Wong traces her adoptive mother’s progression from “elegant, stylish” office worker to an old woman who struggles to get out of bed and watches too much TV. Even in the poignancy of such moments we are reminded of the distant place of men in these stories, an absence that hangs like a pall over these impressively resilient women.
In her introduction, Wong describes Recalling Mother as a project of “honouring and remembering.” At the end of the night we are told the mothers’ names as the cyclorama fills with a close-up photograph of their aged hands, pale and bony, the skin coarse and flecked with liver spots. It’s an image of endurance, tender and tough at the same time — much like the play itself —that speaks to the too little acknowledged work of women, as makers of the home and of the world.
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OzAsia Festival: Macho Dancer, choreographer and performer Eisa Jocson, lighting design Jan Maertens, coach Rasa Alksnyte, dramaturgy Arco Renz, Nexus Arts, 21-22 Sept; Akram Khan, Until the Lions, choreographer Akram Khan, set design Tim Yip, lighting design Michael Hull, performers Ching-Ying Chien, Rianto, Joy Alpuerto Ritter, music Vincenzo Lamagna, Dunstan Playhouse, 22-23 Sept; Checkpoint Theatre, Recalling Mother, writers, performers, directors Claire Wong, Noorlinah Mohamed, set design Petrina Dawn Tan, Space Theatre, Adelaide, 22-23 Sept
Top image credit: Ching-Ying Chien, Until the Lions, OzAsia 2017, photo Jean Louis Fernandez
In our concern with the negative effects of colonialism, we often overlook the enrichment that cross-cultural intercourse can bring. Macau Days offers a glimpse of that enrichment by illuminating the history and mythology of Macau, a 500-year-old European outpost and the first European settlement in Asia. A collaborative work by visual artist John Young, author Brian Castro and composer Luke Harrald, Macau Days includes a book of the same title by Castro (himself of Portuguese, Chinese and English parentage) and Young (Chinese and French-Dutch). All are Australian residents, and both Castro and Young were born in Hong Kong which neighbours Macau. The exhibition demonstrates the human need for travel and migration in personal and spiritual growth.
The beautifully produced and illustrated trilingual book is itself an art object, comprising poems by Castro and Paul Carter inspired by Macau’s colonial history, an introductory essay by Art + Australia editor Ted Colless, and images of Young’s artwork. Castro’s delightful and darkly humorous poems, collectively entitled Macau Days: or Six Poems in Search of a Dish, bring to life six characters he has discovered who exemplify Macau’s history — the Chinese sea goddess Mazu (originating c 960, and whose name may have been the source of the name “Macau”), the Portuguese poet Luis Vaz de Camões (born c 1524), Chinese poet and painter Wu Li (born 1632, an early convert to Christianity following the arrival of the Jesuits), court artist and Jesuit Giuseppe de Castiglione (born 1688), Portuguese writer and Japanophile Wenceslau de Moraes (born 1854) and Portuguese poet Camillo Pessanha (born 1867).
Castro includes recipes that reflect Macau’s multicultural nature and invites readers to prepare their own dishes to recreate the character of Macau on the premise that food is emblematic of culture and identity. He researched his subjects closely and these recipes were evidently the favourites of the six characters — it’s as if we could enter their hearts and minds or become Macanese by eating these tantalising concoctions.
Mazu, Goddess of the Sea, John Young, Macau Days, image courtesy 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong
The visual component of the exhibition, John Young’s outstanding Macau Days series (2012), comprises several paintings in which images resembling photographic negatives or digital prints of old photos are overlaid with coloured abstract imagery. The figure of a woman in these paintings evocatively represents the goddess Mazu. A series of digitally reproduced historical photographs evoke the history of Macau with, for example, images of significant buildings such as Jesuit churches and a photo of Wenceslau de Moraes in Japanese garb with a small child. And there are texts chalked on paper painted with blackboard paint, as if lessons were being learnt (perhaps in a Jesuit school). These texts are personal musings, for example “to the ends of the world to find my anima,” “our souls meet here” and “absolutely foreign — see how I became.” Some of these chalk-on-paper works bear erasures and re-inscriptions, as if thoughts have been corrected. Young’s layering, corrections and juxtapositions symbolise the layering and juxtaposition of cultures found not only in Macau but throughout the world.
Luke Harrald’s meditative sound installation is a 21-minute tape loop of voices reading Castro’s poems in Mandarin, Portuguese and English. Depending on where you stand in the gallery, you hear each reader separately and quite distinctly. In the background are field recordings of splashing water, bells, street noises, voices and horses’ hooves evoking old Macau’s aural character. The whole exhibition is an immersive and enchanting experience, part history and part magic realism, and it could only be improved by adding servings from Castro’s menu.
The crucial point of the exhibition is that our subjectivity determines our response to colonisation, migration and cultural hybridisation. Of Young’s artworks, Castro writes: “Having studied Ludwig Wittgenstein/ you know that culture determines/ the way we see; that a person’s name/ is, has to be, the picture of a situation./ Doubled and tripled we crossed borders/ easily; but now the paranoia of ignorance/ has folded up your tapestry/ and it’s a DNA test for ancestry/ which supposedly clarifies how/ humanity runs in generations/ alongside insanity/ depending on the periodic flood/ that brings on the clash of blood.”
The colourful history of Macau shows how travel and migration are long-standing human traditions, precipitating enrichment and development. As Ted Colless puts it in his introductory essay: “In this spectral and sensual liquidity of Macau — a version of the city not so much groundless but ungrounded: a city (as one tourist brochure puts it) with no flora and fauna to speak of — borders become porous or ebb and flow, and the earnest chauvinism of identity politics can be supplanted by mashups and medleys.”
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OzAsia Festival: Macau Days, artists John Young, Brian Castro, Luke Harrald; Migration Museum, Adelaide, 23 Sept– 8 Oct
Top image credit: Marienbad, John Young, Macau Days, image courtesy 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong
Jeff Khan’s in high spirits about the imminent opening of the 2017 Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art and his programming tells me why. The works he conjures are fantasias, at once beautiful and disturbing, and political provocations embodied in intimate close-ups and works of scale. Liveworks artists are experimenting with contemporary performance, performative installation, lecture-performance, one-on-one interaction, environmental dance, live art and a visual art exhibition that entails performance. Cultural representation in the program includes Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Indigenous and other Australia. An influential Singaporean curator and dramaturg, Tang Fu Kuen, will deliver one of two keynote addresses (a new initiative for the festival), the other by Indigenous artist r e a, a leading figure in Australian new media art. I met with Jeff Khan and asked him to guide me through his 2017 Liveworks Festival program.
What’s your big picture for Liveworks in 2017?
It’s our third festival and we’ve established Liveworks as an Asia-Pacific festival and it feels like that aspect of the festival is really hitting its stride. It features the largest contingent from Asia that we’ve had and a first tentative step into the Pacific with Mark Harvey who’s from New Zealand — not a broad reach into the Pacific, but a start. All of the relationships we’ve been developing with artists in the region have come to fruition though research and Performance Space being present at festivals, platforms and events in Asia over recent years.
LabAnino, Liveworks 2017, photo Toni Muñoz
Let’s talk about those Asian artists. From the Philippines you have Eisa Jocson, who appeared in your 2015 program with Macho Dancer, which provoked strong responses and has just been well-received in Adelaide’s OzAsia Festival.
There are three Philippines-related projects this year. Eisa is returning with a brand new lecture-performance work, Corponomy, in which she’ll reflect on her works and demonstrate systems of physical exercise that transform the body. We also have LabAnino, a collective of Filipino and Australian artists who’ve been practicing for over a decade: Valerie Berry, Paschal Berry, Kenneth Moraleda, Deborah Pollard and the Anino Shadowplay Collective from Manila. Performance Space has presented both of their previous collaborations and hosted them in our Liveworks Lab last year. We’re spotlighting what is a really enduring and very exciting collaboration
Who is the third Filipino artist?
Justin Shoulder, whose new work is Carrion [a post-human spectre that has the ability to shapeshift into multiple forms and speak multiple languages] is an Australian artist with Filipino heritage. Much of his creative development over the last few years has involved going back and forth, first from the Philippines to Australia and recently to Hong Kong and China.
Geumhyung Jeong, Oil Pressure Vibrator, Liveworks 2017, photo Gajin Kim
And from South Korea?
Geumhyung Jeong who was also involved in the Liveworks Lab last year is a solo artist whose work crosses the borders between dance, puppetry, performance art and sculpture. It’s idiosyncratic work and very weird in a really interesting way. She’s an extraordinary performer and all the work is driven by her physicality. In the suite of two works we’re presenting, [she focuses on] the relationship between her body and a series of inanimate objects. Seven Ways, an iconic work and her first full-length production, is a duet between her body and seven very carefully chosen domestic appliances or objects including a vacuum cleaner, a mannequin and a suitcase. These encounters are very charged, highly eroticised and overtly sexual. It’s a unique depiction of a side of human sexuality that we don’t really explore much on stage. Her most recent performance work, Oil Pressure Vibrator, takes this idea several steps further in a performance-lecture that describes her relationship with and her lust for a huge industrial earth excavation machine. She looks back at Seven Ways, the relationships she’s had with objects, explains the rationale and then moves on to this idea of falling in love with the excavation machine and applying for a license to drive one in Korea. There’s footage of her lining up with construction workers of Seoul to test and fail, test and fail, until finally she gets her license to drive the machine so that, essentially, she can “commune” with it.
I wonder what this says about her view of South Korean culture.
I guess because South Korea is so technologically driven by the merging of the human and technology.
And perhaps too an extension of the kind of animism afforded nature in that culture.
She has such a singular vision about this. In Seven Ways she operates all of the inanimate objects almost as puppets in their interaction with her. So she’s performing as herself and the objects.
Who do you have from Japan in your program?
Osaka-based Tetsuya Umeda will present his installation Ringo. He’s a sound and installation artist coming from a long tradition of experimental sound practice in Japan that’s been pioneered by people like the legendary sound artists and instrument builders Akio Suzuki and Aki Onda. Tetsuya is an artist I’ve wanted to work with for a long time. He also works with mundane domestic objects — lampshades, tin cans, Bunsen burners, plants — and arranges them into quite elaborate installations which he activates through performance, where he either sets up chains of cause-and-effect or manipulates objects live to produce quite fantastical light- and soundscapes. There’s a beautiful respect for objects both in Geumhyung and Tetsuya’s practices that re-orient our own relationship to things around us and the world.
I see that Ringo is a ticketed event, but you describe Tetsuya Umeda as an installation artist.
Ringo is a ticketed event in the form of an installation performance. Tetsuya sets up a series of scenarios in a very low key way, wandering through and activating the installations, transforming them to produce quite magical sound and light effects.
Christian Thompson, Purified by Fire from the Lake Dolly series, 2017, image courtesy the artist
Let’s talk about Indigenous Australian artists in the program. Christian Thompson is a highly performative visual artist who’s often been the subject of his own work in quite unusual ways in exquisitely staged and costumed photographic and video works, and now in live performance.
Christian has maintained a live performance practice. I remember working at Gertrude Street in Melbourne and organising a few live gigs where Christian performed punk music/performance art. He also has a Master of Theatre degree from the Amsterdam School of Arts, Das Arts, which he received in 2010. He’s very comfortable in the world of performance but those works are rarely seen or given equivalent recognition. This work, Tree of Knowledge, was originally seen at the Art Gallery of NSW for the Anne Landa Award exhibition in 2012, but performed in the foyer with a transient audience. We’ve supported him to redevelop it into a full-scale performance work and also introduced Christian to Claire Britton who, of course, is a much loved and well-known designer who stands between the visual and performing arts worlds with her practice. She’s coming in as an outside eye to help adapt the performance for a theatre context.
Another Indigenous artist, r e a, a leader on the Indigenous new media front, is to give a keynote address.
This is the first time we’ve had a keynote lecture component to Liveworks. R e a is a pioneering new media artist in Australia and she’s also about to finish her PhD. She’s been doing fascinating research into the relationship between technology and the construction of the Indigenous body. This has obviously informed her own work but is also really relevant to the work of artists like Christian and others of our leading Indigenous artists. Also, r e a’s newer work is [dealing with] the intersection of indigeneity, gender and sexuality — exploring fluid gender identities in indigenous cultures and the transition between male and female, which reflects much of the work we present at Performance Space and the increasing national and international interest in gender and sexuality in contemporary culture.
The other keynote will be given by the Singaporean Tang Fu Koen, a well-known curator and dramaturg in Asia.
He was involved in the early Time_Place_Space creative laboratory initiatives, a really important moment for Performance Space, before my time here. As well as being a dramaturg for artists like Eisa Jocson and Thailand’s Pichet Klunchun, Fu Koen has recently been appointed Artistic Director of the Taipei Arts Festival in Taiwan. It’s always been an interesting, outward looking festival and Fu Koen is certainly one of the foremost curatorial experts in SE-Asian performance practice and how traditional cultures are finding contemporary expression through experimental work. His perspective on practice in the region will be a real boon for the Liveworks audience.
Let’s talk about other Australian and New Zealander works in your program. You’ve just returned from the Proximity Festival in Perth where you’d been one of the provocateurs assisting artists in developing their performances.
Jen Jameson’s Let’s Make Love was one of the Proximity performances. It’s a really beautiful 20-minute encounter between Jen and one audience member at a time, in a real time attempt to generate oxytocin, the hormone that produces the feeling of love, which, one might argue, we need more than ever in the world right now. The capacity to have very intimate encounters alongside large-scale works like Agatha Gothe-Snape’s Rhetorical Chorus or Justin Shoulder’s Carrion is very exciting
Mark Harvey, Three Stages to Turqoisation, Blue Oyster Gallery, 2016, photo Chloe Geoghegan
Does New Zealander Mark Harvey’s work fit as an intimate work?
Yes. Mark is almost like an artist in residence because his series of free performances will happen in and around the Carriageworks precinct over the two weeks of the festival. He’ll set up quite physically absurd situations in which he’ll invite conversation with passers-by about politics. For example, one of his works is called Face-down Projections. He will lie face-down at the threshold of the entrance to Carriageworks and invite you to step on his back so he can telepathically intuit your carbon footprint and then broadcast it to everyone else in the building. In Backward Conversations, he walks backwards for two hours through a space and invites people to walk backwards with him and have a conversation about what they find frustrating or immoveable about the politics of the day. It’s a very disarming way to try to crack open conversations about politics.
Nat Randall’s The Second Woman is both intimate, with its one-on-one encounters, and epic, because they are watched by a large audience over 24 hours.
There’ll be 100 ‘co-performers’ over the 24 hours of the performance. Like Mish Grigor’s The Talk in last year’s program, this is a work by a local artist that belongs at Performance Space and Liveworks. It’s a real thrill for us to present the Sydney premiere of The Second Woman.
Lz Dunn’s AEON impressed our Hobart reviewer when it premiered in the Salamanca Moves dance festival last year and has since been shown in Melbourne.
It’ll be presented in a secret location in the Newtown vicinity not far from Carriageworks. It’s a beautiful walking and sonic experience of nature.
A flocking experience, based on bird behaviour I gather.
Yes, the participants flock. AEON was commissioned by Mobile States consortium which is great for Performance Space to be part of and to be able to present the Sydney premiere before it then goes to PICA.
Rhetorical Chorus, Agatha Gothe-Snape, 2017, Liveworks 2017, photo courtesy the artist
Tell me about Rhetorical Chorus.
We commissioned Rhetorical Chorus alongside The Keir Foundation for the Performa Biennial in New York in 2015. It’s a really wonderful large-scale performance work by Agatha Gothe-Snape based on the hand gestures of Lawrence Weiner, the legendary conceptual artist from the 1960s. Weiner’s text-based work has been a major influence on Agatha’s practice. She chanced upon him in 2011 while in transit at LA airport where they had an encounter in which their hands touched. It was a very arresting moment for her. She was amazed at the softness and sensuality of his hands as opposed to the very hard-edged, masculine rhetoric of his work. She’s compiled a dictionary of Weiner’s hand gestures, which are interpreted by Agatha’s long-time collaborator, performance artist Brian Fuata in choreography by Brooke Stamp and Lizzie Thomson, alongside a choir of experimental vocalists led by local composer Megan Clune and by Joan La Barbara, the internationally renowned vocalist and composer from New York who’s visiting Australia.
And lastly, the intriguingly titled The Future Leaks Out.
Our Program Manager Tulleah Pearce has curated this exhibition, which looks at the future as this contested site and the contrasting utopian and dystopian narratives that we’re currently facing, largely around the relationship between humans and the environment — all of these science-fictive narratives that are starting to become real in our lives. The centrepiece of the exhibition is a huge 10-metre waterfall of mist in the Carriageworks public space by Emily Parsons-Lord [see a video of the artist speaking about the air we breathe]. The waterfall will release distressed plant pheromones into the air throughout the festival.
Literally?
Literally. The pheromone can be chemically replicated.
It should be beautifully disturbing.
Exactly — much like our obsession with the future with apocalyptic fantasies that are both beautiful and disturbing at the same time. This undercurrent runs through the exhibition, which includes works by Angela Goh and Tully Arnot that will be activated at times with performances by the artists.
Thanks, Jeff. I’m ready now to give myself over to Liveworks’ cultural adventuring and speculative questing, the beauty and the disturbance. Bring it on.
Top image credit: Geumhyung Jeong, 7 Ways, Liveworks 2017, photo Wooshik Lee
The 2017 OzAsia Festival’s visual arts program takes viewers into magical worlds of history and legend and worlds of harsh reality. In telling of catharsis, identity crises and soul-searching and of the need for both travel and home, these well-chosen exhibitions reveal much about Asia and about ourselves. I review three of them here and the impressive Macau Days in a separate response.
A place never been seen is not a place
You enter Doris Wong’s installation through a black curtain to find yourself in a place resembling a street at night. There is brick paving with weeds poking through, a litter bin, a street lamp, a phone box and just enough illumination to allow you to navigate. But inside the litter bin is a repeating video of a light bulb glowing brightly and then exploding. The street lamp is upside down and in place of its globe is a small moon. The weeds are painted silver and there are two more videos on large screens, one showing planet Earth rotating and then suddenly being snatched away by a child’s hand, and the other showing a passenger jet also rotating as if controlled by unseen forces. The phone in the phone box rings and when you answer you hear a voice ruminating on why life seems so miserable and how you might move from a negative to a positive frame of mind.
Doris Wong is an established Hong Kong artist whose work has always been strongly conceptual, but in recent years it has exhibited a mystical quality (read an interview with the artist). Her exhibition, A place never been seen is not a place, represents a shift in her work, and it’s accompanied by a small bilingual booklet in which she sets out the thinking behind each of the five works in the installation. Each has a sentence as its title: “A place never been seen is not a place” is also the title of the moon suspended in the inverted street lamp. Wong is concerned with the proposition that “space and time do not actually exist, but are tools to understand ‘reality’.” By offering us a reality that does not conform to our understanding of it, she provokes us to rethink our perceptions. What is the right way up? How does the moon affect our lives?
“You have already heard the most important story in your life” is the title of the phone box component of the installation. It refers to an occasion when Wong was staying in a hotel room and the phone rang. She heard voices, and though the call was presumably the result of a technical fault, she wondered if she had missed an important conversation. Subsequently the event became imbued with mystical significance since it prompted her to question her own awareness of potential communications with inner or other worlds.
A place never been seen is not a place, Doris Wong, photo courtesy the artist and OzAsia 2017
“What lies inside you is not a person, but personality,” is the title of the exploding globe in the litter bin, a metaphor suggesting we are all repositories of discarded ideas. Doris Wong also suggests that some people have different personalities in their dreams. They have no fixed identity; their identity is their own creation. The video of the spinning world grabbed by a child’s hand, entitled “Since you were born, I have realised the universe is full of kindness,” is a reference to the birth of her son, the day of his birth being the only one when the universe seemed kind. The spinning passenger jet, entitled “You choose the safer side,” mimics the spinning Earth but also suggests a plane crash. Wong cites an American hypnotherapist who believes that souls choose their destiny, while the two videos placed opposite each other collectively suggest that supernatural powers control our lives.
Wong’s installation is a stage with you, the visitor, as the actor, inviting you to rethink your beliefs. Her work recalls various New Age philosophies and an essay by Anthony Yung in the booklet discusses the aesthetics of occultism. For me, Wong’s exhibition is about the unreliability of perception and comprehension, and the human tendency to fill gaps in understanding with imaginings. We explain what we don’t understand as being the work of god or some other paranormal force and Doris Wong’s exhibition obliges us to admit to this tendency.
Zhang Kechun, Yellow River series, image courtesy the artist and Chengdu Blur Roof Museum
Shifting Permanence
This absorbing group exhibition, curated by Ding Fengqi of the Chengdu Blue Roof Museum, showcases performance art in Chengdu, a city of over 10 million in China’s Sichuan province. Artists there have been leading the development of performance art in China, and the exhibition’s works dwell on the personal and social impact of rapid social change, urbanisation and evolving personal values and customs.
Tong Wenmin captivated the opening night audience with a live performance entitled A Silent Discourse, in which she grasped a hot light bulb with a hand covered in honey, the softening substance dribbling onto the floor. She then ground charcoal into powder, smearing herself with it. The catalogue quotes the artist as saying, “Language cannot fully express ideas, and sometimes becomes a trap in itself… Through the exploration of the body movement and physical structure, in a specific time and place, we may be able to search and approach the truth, where we can seek peace and retrieve origins.” This view seems to characterise many of the works in the exhibition and the idea of performance art generally.
Tong’s video, Flying Wind (2016), shows her standing bowed forward on a windy, desolate, rocky mountain ridge. Her long hair — barely visibly weighted with stones on the ground and connected by threads to her hair — becomes a part of the arc of the body, a living sculpture until she walks off into the distance. The work apparently expresses the artist’s interest in wilderness and its contrast with the urban environments to which she is accustomed. Wong also showed two juxtaposed videos from her HW Factory Project (2016): Factory Program. Forge Iron shows her in a range of simultaneous screen images hammering hot iron at a blacksmith’s anvil. In Sleep, again in multiple frames, the artist rests, sleeps on and rises from beds made in the factory. These works perhaps suggest the exploitative nature of intensive industrial labour and the use of outdated technologies. Next to the videos are photos of the work produced — the ‘products’ are pieces of mangled iron, suggesting the futile nature of earlier industrial production.
Zhou Bin’s two works are compelling. His Diary (1986-2015) features a video of the artist cathartically pulping the diaries he kept from 1986 to 2015 and converting them into fresh paper, available for reuse, as if he is turning himself into a tabula rasa. The resulting stack of fresh paper is displayed in the gallery beneath the video, symbolically inviting us to overwrite his life. Zhou Bin’s use of traditional papermaking methods speaks of occupations that are disappearing and the video also evokes the erasure of the self in an online, non-paper based world. For his other video work, 4000 Miles (18-23 August 2015), Zhou Bin made a bronze cast of his own head and then dragged it behind his car as he drove 4000 miles from Chengdu to Xi’an, one the city he was born in and one where he now lives, and back again. As the bronze head scrapes along the road, it slowly wears down on either side, leaving only a thin outline of his head in profile. The resulting object is displayed adjacent to the video, the journey and its outcome symbolising the wearing down of the self by the contemporary world.
Li Liang’s work Father 1927.12.03 – 2010.08.27 is a sequence of photographic images of the artist’s father, including images of him as a boy and as a frail old man facing death. The artist was concerned that his father’s life — all 30,219 days — should be remembered as more than the hyphen connecting his dates of birth and death. So, in a painstaking homage, he carefully wrote all the dates of his father’s life in tiny print over the photos.
Award-winning Photographer Zhang Kechun’s Between Mountains and Rivers is a sample of four colour images from a large-scale series that documents changes to the Chinese landscape resulting from development. His documentary photography represents a personal journey and the compositional style and flavour of his work recalls the romantic sublime of European artists such as Caspar David Friedrich, except that here we see humans dwarfed not by virginal, awe-inspiring nature but by an environment disrupted by human intervention. One image is of a group of people gathered in teams beneath a gigantic but incomplete bridge, a freeway that abruptly ends in mid-air — its construction presumably discontinued sometime before. Zhang’s eloquent art comes at a time when despoliation of the planet has reached crisis point.
The exhibition attests to the strength and insightful nature of Chinese performance art and its title, Shifting Permanence, embodies a contradiction increasingly evident throughout the contemporary world. [The exhibition also included the seriously engaging performance artist He Liping who, in four spirited video encounters, delivered in rap rhythm his thoughts on the importance of performance art and the possibilities/difficulties of art/life relationships while submitting himself to a range of bodily challenges including some conspicuous consumption and a marathon smooch in a moving vehicle. Eds.]
Home, Gaybird, photo Keith Gallasch
Gaybird, Home
Hong Kong musician, composer and inventor of musical instruments, Gaybird (Leung Kei-Cheuk), is also a visual artist, and his installation Home, on the Goodman Lawns outside the University of Adelaide’s Elder Hall, is a delightful but telling statement about what home might be. The installation comprises 72 tiny houses of reflective red plastic set on springs on the lawn, their neat rows suggesting tidy suburban streets. The houses are shaped to mimic the roof-line of the Elder Hall and each contains a white toy pig facing the street. Beneath each house is a wind chime, and if you gently push a house the chime rings, representing the sound of a doorbell signalling arrival and hospitality. Gaybird says that his “intention in making new instruments is to explore how to use bodily gestures to create sound.” Home invites us to make sound by activating the houses on springs, and at the exhibition launch, adults and children alike enjoyed playing with the sculptures.
But the work has a serious side. Gaybird says that it is inspired by a visit to Adelaide earlier this year — “It is a peaceful city, well-balanced between urban and suburban areas,” he says. Each little house represents the ancient Chinese ideogram for ‘home,’ a roof with a pig or boar underneath representing the owner’s wealth, security and food. “All that is needed to make a home is a roof and food.” His simple work asks us to think about what we genuinely need to make a home. In the context of this OzAsia Festival, which explores issues of migration and cultural identity in many performances and artworks, Gaybird’s installation asks us to consider the meaning and importance of having a home, something we should not take for granted in our peaceful, welcoming city.
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OzAsia Festival: Doris Wong Wai Yin — A place never been seen is not a place, Nexus Gallery, 7 Sept-8 Oct; Shifting Permanence, Artspace Gallery, 7 Sept-7 Oct; Home, Goodman Lawns, Adelaide, 3-15 Oct
Top image credit: Tong Menwin, Play with the Wind, 2016, Shifting Permanence exhibition, image courtesy the artist and Chengdu Blue Roof Museum
Entering the mysterious world of birdfoxmonster, we are encouraged to wash our hands before eating, which we duly do on moist, warm towels handed through an opening in a black wall by unseen persons. Then, all 30 of us gradually file into a darkened space towards a spotlit pumpkin stuck with forks wrapped around with spaghetti and spinach, which we pull out and eat. A soft, rumbling voice, somewhere between the Cookie Monster and (as a fellow audience member observes) Tom Waits, riffs upon the delights of spaghetti smothered in melting butter.
We are here for an unorthodox dinner designed by artists from Studio A (a Sydney-based organisation that fosters the professional development of artists living with an intellectual disability) and Erth, the live-theatre company known for creating up-close, exhilarating puppetry encounters for children. Gathered in this dimly lit space, with its promise of anthropomorphic characters, there’s more than a hint of having fallen down the rabbit hole.
Entrees eaten, our attention is drawn through a subtle adjustment in lighting to a long, narrow table that bisects the rectilinear room, with projected text on either side directing us to take a place, to sit, to reach for our glasses and raise them in a toast. And so, with a sense of occasion, the performative dinner begins. Black-garbed and masked wait staff issue plates from opposite ends of the table to be passed from person to person until all are served; a nice touch that fosters a communal atmosphere among the participants. But there isn’t much time to talk, as three striking, even somewhat sinister, figures appear at the far ends of the table.
birdfoxmonster, Erth and Studio A, photo Zan Wimberley
The first I see is red-robed, with a broad-brimmed hat framing a white fox-mask with dark eye holes. Then I become aware of a bridal figure in a white, sequinned owl mask, and an imposing black-clad monster with a boxy, geometrically patterned head. During the three-course meal, the table will by turns function as a canvas for projected animations, a dancefloor and a ceremonial aisle. As we work our way through dishes chosen for their significance to the three performers – fillet mignon for the Owl (Meagan Pelham), seasonal vegetables on seaweed for the Fox (Skye Saxon) and “Thom’s Burgers!”, slapped together at the behest of the Monster (Thom Roberts) – each of us will experience birdfoxmonster differently. There is so much to take in: a wealth of sensual clues with which to decode this immersive work of live art.
Early on, the Owl Bride and her Monster fiancé climb onto swings rigged either side of the table and crest languorously back and forth through the darkness, as if to hypnotise us into entering their personal fantasy realm. From this point on, I experience the work as a series of impressions that seem to mix memory, imagination and desire.
While we eat, the Bride dances down the length of the table repeatedly stamping, booty-shaking and descending into a graceful back arch, one arm extended. Animated flying hearts dance along the table too, as the music (composed by James Brown) pulses. For a little while, there’s a soundtrack of heavy rain, with a recorded conversation between two performers about the experience of being in the eye of a storm. The Fox circles the diners, howling. The table swims sinuously with digital artist Elias Nohra’s projections of animated fish, owls, romantic text and geometric patterns, all of them derived from the three artists’ drawings.
birdfoxmonster, Erth and Studio A, photo Zan Wimberley
The event climaxes in a wedding, with Fox officiating as the lanky Monster and petite Owl Bride step in stately time-honoured fashion to organ music along the wedding aisle of the table. Ceremony over, the Bride primal-screams hip-hop into a mike in the centre of the table, music pounding: a triumphal, full-bodied response to the solemnity of the occasion. Then, the guests wash the dishes at the same table, inhaling drifts of, alas, a purely olfactory dessert of blueberry pie.
Dining here was like entering some shadowy Max Ernstian realm where animal-headed gods conduct strange rituals within a formal setting, or perhaps the world of Australian artist Vali Myers, who decamped to Positano and adopted a large number of stray animals, developing a folkloric narrative of her life through her paintings and personal style. Through their three alter-egos, Pelham, Saxon and Roberts created an idiosyncratic mythology of self that imbued every last detail of the production, from the costumes to the delicately hand-painted crockery, resulting in a wonderfully rounded and transportive experience.
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Erth and Studio A, birdfoxmonster, artistic directors, collaborators Scott Wright (Erth), Gabrielle Mordy (Studio A), artists, performers Thom Roberts, Meagan Pelham, Skye Saxon, principal support artist Emma Johnston, digital artist Elias Nohra, sound designer James Brown, lighting designer Frankie Clarke, production manager Solomon Thomas; Carriageworks, Sydney, 21-30 Sept
Top image credit: birdfoxmonster, Erth and Studio A, photo Zan Wimberley
This video essay by Conor Bateman parodies the film Turkey Shoot by recutting it as a fight between man and nature. This video has been made available for study purposes only. Eds
Brian Trenchard-Smith’s 1982 Ozploitation spectacle Turkey Shoot was widely panned on its original theatrical release. Writing for Variety, David Stratton said that “nobody connected with this travesty can take any credit,” while Michel Cieutat, in the cinephilic Postif, argued that “aside from the beautiful Australian forests and Olivia Hussey’s inexpressive visage —- which looks both youthful and wizened — there is nothing to be saved from this array of varied incompetencies.”
Overcoming the hurdle of critical sniping, the film went on to be released worldwide under a variety of new, region-specific titles, like the prescient Escape 2000 (US) and the politically subtle Blood Camp Thatcher (UK). The film’s broad appeal is fairly self-evident; Trenchard-Smith crafted an absurd bloodbath, one which dispensed with the complexities of plot fairly quickly. The political struggle the film depicts is as follows: a totalitarian government (uniformly white) rounds up any potential dissidents (uniformly white) and detains them in an off-shore labour camp run by a prison warden named Thatcher, where a select few inmates are offered a chance at freedom if they can survive a day in the scrub, on the run from heavily armed VIP guests, most of whom are decked out in British colonial khakis.
Many Australian films of the 1970s and 1980s depicted landscape as a mysterious unknown. Academic and filmmaker Ross Gibson has written extensively on the depiction of the Australian landscape in film, photography and painting (and even made an essay film about it, Camera Natura, in 1984). Many of the films he wrote about are now widely celebrated — Walkabout, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Mad Max — and feature a dwarfing of human figures within the landscape, which is seen as a hostile and unknown environment.
In a shift from this approach, Turkey Shoot depicted the northern Queensland landscape as an impassive backdrop to human conflict. The camera leers at exotic locales, attempting to convey a sharp contrast between natural beauty and man-made horror. The only point at which these two notions converge is in a sequence where a field is burned down, though here the emphasis is entirely on the people trapped inside the blaze, rather than the destruction of landscape itself.
In this video, I have taken sequences from Turkey Shoot which involve the hunting of prisoners but have cut out the prisoners entirely. What remains is a series of comedic vignettes where the colonial powers attack the landscape, seemingly without purpose. And, since the original film sees prisoners rise up against their captors, I ensured that the landscape got that same opportunity.
Notes
This video features text from Ross Gibson’s article “Camera Natura: Landscape in Australian Feature Films,” which appeared in 1983 in issue 22/23 of Framework, a journal published by Drake Stutesman and Wayne State University Press.
Turkey Shoot was directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith. It was produced by Filmco, Film & General Holdings and Hemdale Film Corporation. It was distributed in Australia on VHS by Roadshow Home Video (circa 1982) and on DVD by Umbrella Entertainment (2003). There is no local Blu-Ray release of the film.
Thanks to Ivan Čerečina for translation assistance in this piece.
Editors’ note
The title of Bateman’s video essay is also that of the 1989 Elvis Costello song which anticipated that when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died, “They’ll stand there laughing and tramp the dirt down.”
At its most transformative, the camera has the capacity to shape both time and space, preserving a simulacrum of life that will eventually supplant the real with the dream. “The eye,” avant-garde jazz musician Cecil Taylor warbles midway through a performance caught in The Silent Eye, is “the indivisible subterranean matrix.” The new work from filmmaker Amiel Courtin-Wilson is all about that lucid eye, the spectral death dance that cinema orchestrates between the physical and the spiritual.
Filmed across three days in early 2016, The Silent Eye captures the legendary pianist and poet Taylor, 88, and Japanese Butoh performer Min Tanaka, 72, friends and artistic kindred collaborating free form in the former’s Fort Greene brownstone. Loosely demarcated into several improvised tracks and a spoken word interlude, it’s an ostensibly casual performance piece that comes to resemble less an informal session between two old pals than the communion of slippery entities on astral terrain.
The performance takes on a familiar rhythm: Taylor, expressively freestyling at his careworn piano while Tanaka responds in movement, weaving and contorting to the sounds, face fixed in motion rapture. It’s a game of tag in which Tanaka is alternately the jazzman’s cosmic marionette and his playful tease, each inviting the other into guessing the form the other will take. Taylor might grin as he maniacally pounds the keys, watching Tanaka bob like a demented meerkat, or ease back into reflective pause, drawing out the Butoh artist’s paradoxical capacity for stillness and grace.
Min Tanaka, The Silent Eye, Amiel Courtin Wilson
Courtin-Wilson’s gift for capturing the tension between the corporeal and the spiritual — honed across films like Hail (2011) and especially the woozy, somnambulist Ruin (2013) — is in full flight here, alchemising Taylor’s Brooklyn residence and ascribing an otherworldly aspect to these physically ageing men. Viewed in abstract silhouette, Tanaka throws celestial shapes; with his out-of-focus form; he might be stepping down the gangway of the alien mothership from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Though the film never leaves Taylor’s apartment, the space feels unbounded by walls. Director of photography Germain McMicking works with the natural winter light to suggest parallel dimensions bleeding into each other, the handheld camera pushing into corners of the apartment only to find untethered pockets of nothing, like a video game avatar gone off grid. At one point he stays transfixed on the tiny splinters in a double-glazed window, and the cracks form a circular portal to the sun that beckons us to head toward the light. Elsewhere, the camera catches glimpses of the pictures on Taylor’s wall, which serve as a kind of shrine to other ethereal spirits: Billie Holiday, Michael Jackson, Eartha Kitt, smiling in collusion from the other side. The tableau also conjures the spectres of history: faded portraits of long-gone jazzmen, a lithograph of a native American leader, and the weight of 20th century Japanese tumult on the lines in Tanaka’s face and gestures.
Shooting digitally on a 2K ARRI Alexa Amira, McMicking and Courtin-Wilson’s camera has the effect of transforming the intimate into the infinite, where a brief image of the outside skyline somehow feels diminished in comparison to the dance that plays out inside. A macro-tight shot on Tanaka’s profile collects a single drop of falling sweat that forms a refracted diamond, while what sounds like a passing subway car — a ghost train, perhaps — rumbles offscreen, spirited to another realm.
Amiel Courtin-Wilson, photo courtesy the artist
The film’s non-performance breaks are almost primal. In a disorienting sequence, the frame goes tight on Tanaka’s hand swaying in some phantom breeze, while the feedback of disembodied chords swirls around it like an ancient volcano threatening eruption. These aural interludes come not from Taylor but sound designer Rosalind Hall, whose collages — strangled, discordant saxophone set to exaggerated heartbeats and ambient noise — loom like some studio applause track that’s just reached the Earth having been dispatched a hundred million years ago.
Courtin-Wilson has developed an ambivalent relationship to narrative, from the subjective immersion of Hail through the disorientating audio-visual passages of Ruin and his recent video art piece, Charles (2015). Indeed, The Silent Eye is born of the art world: the project was funded by the Robert D Bielecki Foundation and premiered at the Whitney Museum of American Art last year. Courtin-Wilson has called it an in-between work, anticipating what he’s described as a time travel sci-fi biopic of Taylor. The Silent Eye’s transformative power certainly bodes well for that project. Courtin-Wilson gets cinema as art’s temporal vessel, the craft that navigates dimensions and disrupts our learned cognition.
That sensation of moving through time and space extends to the players themselves, whose physical forms can barely contain the spirits shimmying to bust loose. In one of many extraordinary scenes, Min Tanaka’s head tilts back to the sky mid-film, and Cecil Taylor’s chords recede into the sounds of heavy, overdubbed breathing, as though the weight of the physical realm is finally about to be lifted. It’s followed by a cut to a simple shot — ever so brief — of an empty chair and piano. In that moment, it’s enough to believe that Cecil Taylor has ascended.
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The Silent Eye, director, producer, editor Amiel Courtin-Wilson, line producer Kate Laurie, director of photography Germain McMicking, editor Alena Lodkina, sound designer Rosalind Hall; Antenna Documentary Film Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 14 Oct
Top image credit: Cecil Taylor, The Silent Eye, Amiel Courtin Wilson
Until recently I wasn’t aware that the glaring gaps in my worldly education included the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the cinema genre of football comedy and the family history of Canadian-born artist Deborah Pearson. But in the lead up to her performance lecture History History History I realised just that. Review praise and strong word-of-mouth won me over despite a lack of anchor points, and I now have both a working knowledge of all three subjects and a fine appreciation of Pearson’s very considered practice.
For those who haven’t seen it, a primer: one night in October of 1956 a black-and-white football comedy due for a screening in a Budapest cinema was cancelled due to revolution. Local students and, later, much of the remaining population rose up against USSR rule, and one early base of resistance was in the Corvin movie house, whose curved architecture made it an ideal place for defence against siege. The resulting civil conflict led to one of the century’s largest refugee crises, and among those who fled the country was Pearson’s own grandfather — who, coincidentally, was the star of that very same football comedy. Or not so coincidentally. History History History is a remarkable and nuanced meditation on connection and chaos, how history is both constructed and out of our control, both ever-present and irretrievable.
Deborah Pearson, History, History, History, photo Paul Blakemore
Pearson spends the duration behind a small desk with minimal props, while behind her the screwball caper The Wonder Striker (Márton Keleti, 1956) plays in its entirety. Pearson explains the story as it unfolds, but since she speaks no Hungarian the subtitles are provided by her mother. It isn’t long before our trust in the faithfulness of the onscreen translation is made to falter, as Pearson’s mother’s voice arrives in the audio mix, stumbling over a particular phrase and trying to find the best way to render it in English. Pearson’s pre-recorded words appear in the mix, too, and when The Wonder Striker disappears from the large screen (though it continues to play out on a smaller monitor) the film is replaced by documentary footage and archival images that tease out the movie’s context in both public and personal ways.
The Wonder Striker is a precious example of the precarious situation of popular entertainment under oppressive regimes — like most cultural work produced in such situations, it doesn’t fit into the dichotomy of propaganda versus sedition, but is somewhere in between. It was created during one of the thaws that saw Soviet censorship somewhat relaxed, but even so its outright political content is a surprise. It follows a bumbling low-level grifter (Pearson’s grandfather) as he travels to a soccer-mad South American republic that has just experienced a coup. He’s mistaken for a real-life Hungarian football star and press-ganged into playing during a match whose sidelines prove to be the stage upon which the political future of the country will be decided.
Deborah Pearson, History, History, History, photo Paul Blakemore
That this goofy work of Billy Wilder-esque comedy itself preceded real world revolution is fascinating enough, but its star’s life is just as compelling. An earlier, minor role as a character named Swing Tony had been an unexpected hit with the public and elevated him to national attention, but such attention isn’t so desirable when the cultural and political landscape is undergoing seismic upheaval. After fleeing as a refugee, he frequently returned to Hungary over the years but never seemed to resolve his own relationship with it. Pearson herself met him only on a few occasions, too, so there is a distinct sense that he is both a central figure in her family mythology while remaining as elusive and untouchable as the figure projected on the screen.
Whether it began as such I don’t know, but finally this is a work about translation, as hinted at early on by Pearson’s mother. As the film progresses, the subtitles begin to reflect contemporary reality, or fictions invented by Pearson, or take on a performative aspect that calls into question the whole work. This could seem an entertaining cop-out — the historian giving up on the task of inquiry — if it wasn’t such a strong reflection of how different kinds of history are themselves formed. Pearson doesn’t need to put too much overt emphasis on the fact that her mother and grandmother’s recollections of both The Wonder Striker and the man at its centre will never be purely objective, and that this part of her own history will always be seen through a distorted lens. So too will the circumstances of a cultural artefact’s original context be approachable only to a limited extent — this doesn’t invalidate the historian’s project, or make history purely subjective, but it’s a reminder that there’s no definite version of personal history, a “time that is frozen and moving,” as she puts it. Why should capital-H history be any different?
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History History History, writer, performer Deborah Pearson, dramaturg Daniel Kitson, producer Greg Akehurst; The Substation, Newport, Melbourne, 19-23 Sept
Top image credit: Deborah Pearson, History, History, History, photo Paul Blakemore
Reveries and dreamlike game-playing populated Ensemble Offspring’s Who Dreamed It?, a concert of five fascinating, formula-bending works by female composers. Three of the compositions were inherently theatrical, ensemble members engagingly meeting the demands with their usual casual aplomb, while the other two works were immersively contemplative.
Irish composer Jennifer Walshe’s contribution to the program, titled Everything you own has been taken to a depot somewhere, features flautist Lamorna Nightingale and percussionist Claire Edwardes glitteringly costumed in contrast with clarinettist Jason Noble attired for baseball. The work mysteriously progresses through a series of states in which the performers exercise their arms, variously gesture, speak or sing chorally in short bursts, as in part two, titled “Views On Computerwork Romance” in which, stretching vowels, they deliver the text “OK /Bye/Who.” Elsewhere, cards with words are held aloft while Noble signals, lines from a movie are performed, bubbles blown and, finally, any sense of cohesiveness dissolves, bringing home, if lightly, the sense of loss and delirium prefigured in the work’s title — although the name of the last piece, “His seizures stopped when he started collecting rocks,” is reassuring. I couldn’t possibly deliver a cogent interpretation for this calculatedly discombobulating 10-minute work, one that might have come out of Fluxus and is performed with a conviction that strengthens its evocation of a frustrating dream state. Walshe, a composer-cum-performance artist has made works for herself and others (many available on YouTube) with titles the likes of Language ruins everything, which are well worth a look.
Veronique Serret, James Wannan, Who Dreamed It? Ensemble Offspring, photo Heidrun Löhr
Taiwanese composer (educated in Australia and New Zealand) Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh’s Half-Open Beings and Australian Lisa Illean’s Cantor (After Willa Cather) proved to be quite complementary, both long-noted and suggestive of interior worlds. Over 14 minutes, Half-Open Beings, largely soft-edged and abstract, sinuously weaves its way to a rush of vibes, cowbell, high-calling clarinet and, via pizzicato strings and plucked double bass, dips back into a soft musing. I’d need another hearing to grasp its totality, but it stays with me like a half-glimpsed modernist painting.
Illean’s 13-minute Cantor is also ethereal, but warmer, romantic even, in its evocation of twilight via words from three poems by American poet Willa Cather, gloriously sung by Jessica Aszodi entirely at one with a large instrumental ensemble. Vowels are sensually extended, the voice glides up from mezzo depths to moments of passion and down, in the end, to lingering sadness. It’s a memorable work, not least for the “infusion” (as Illean calls it and reflecting the call-and-response cantor-led choral singing that inspired her) of sounds between instruments and between instruments and voice. I was surprised that I could barely detect the audio file of folk song, commentary and radio broadcast Illean had told me about when I interviewed her. I heard nothing other than a rustling and another distant soprano voice. Perhaps the ABC recording of the concert will reveal more; I wasn’t sure if I’d experienced the work in its totality.
Zubin Kanga, Who Dreamed It? Ensemble Offspring, photo Heidrun Löhr
Incipio, Bibo for soprano, clarinet and percussion by US-based Iranian composer Anahita Abbasi — performed between Half-Open Beings and Cantor — was another work for trio: Edwardes, Noble and Aszodi, each additionally equipped with a small bell with which they rang for tea, in the spirit of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books which had inspired the composer and provided the work’s text. Aszodi exuded child-like excitement in tightly scored, witty vocal and instrumental exchanges that climaxed existentially with Alice’s “Who in the world am I?”
Berlin-based Korean composer Unsuk Chin’s Akrostichon-Wortspiel (Acrostic Wordplay) shared the playfulness of the works by Walshe and Anahita Abbasi, and like Illean and Abbasi’s provided Aszodi with wonderful challenges, here not only with nonsense words (“a tool for singing,” and largely minus consonants, says Chin) but also with demanding flights across registers and styles of utterance — snarky, aggressive and supremely high-flying soprano. The large ensemble provided multiple contexts — ripplings running from harp to piano, mandolin and percussion; fabulous outbursts and deep song glides akin to falling into Abbasi-Carroll’s rabbit hole; and rapid rustlings in an eerie night-time soundscape (to Aszodi’s half-whispering). The wonderfully romantic 5th movement comprises a repeated sung motif descending in steps and taken up by the harp and others, the long notes drawn out by bowed vibraphone. In “A Game of Chance,” a rattled-off alphabet seemingly evoked a child learning with gritty gusto, while the final wild movement brought with it a voice rising from the depths, a trumpeting clarinet and a surging ensemble.
The 16-minute Akrostichon-Wortspiel — full of play and reverie — was an apt finale for an embracingly cogent concert, one too that premiered commissioned works from Abbasi, Hui-Hsin Hsieh and Illean. Ensemble Offspring performed superbly, playing the game with Aszodi with observable watchfulness between members, whether as a trio or, wonderful to witness, a sizeable team admirably coached by Roland Peelman.
Carriageworks & Ensemble Offspring, Who Dreamed It?, soprano Jessica Aszodi, conductor, Roland Peelman, violin Veronique Serret, viola James Wannan, cello Blair Harris, double bass Kirsty McCahon, mandolin Michael Hooper, percussion Claire Edwardes, clarinet Jason Noble, piano Zubin Kanga, flute Lamorna Nightingale, oboe Ngaire de Korte, harp Rowan Phemister; Carriageworks, Sydney, 23 Sept
Top image credit: Who Dreamed It?, Ensemble Offspring, Carriageworks, image Zan Wimberley
Stories about actresses have been a favoured mode of self-examination for the film industry since the earliest days. Going beyond meta commentaries on the artistic life, the archetype began to stand in for ‘woman’ herself. Fragile yet strong, mysterious yet overflowing with emotions, beautiful and yet ugly, the actress on screen became everything men wanted to say about women, in one alluring bundle of contradictions.
As searingly revealing as these portrayals were, with stars like Gloria Swanson, Bette Davis and Gena Rowlands offering up some of their greatest performances, male artists framed and directed the work. Men chose when to move in for a close-up, how to light the face, when to cut away. They chose how ‘messy’ to let things get, and where to end the story. If an actress wanted to say something that was not on the page, she could do so in the subtext, with her skill, but always within a framework established for her by others.
The star
The Second Woman responds to that tradition by placing performer Nat Randall in a box on stage, playing a woman who’s waiting for her lover to visit. A single scripted scene is repeated over and over, with a different man playing the lover each time. The all-female production team, led by Randall and her co-director and co-writer Anna Breckon, includes two camera operators who are live-capturing everything so that it appears on a large screen next to the set. The sound is mic’d so Randall and guest can speak at a conversational level. We are given very little information about the character played by Randall but her glamorous 1960s style (messy yet fabulous hair, perfect make-up) tells us she belongs on screen. As she stands waiting, music swelling, we see her in glorious close-up, glowing with charisma and vitality despite her tortured circumstances. She’s a star.
The performance is scheduled to last for 24 hours, from 3 pm Saturday until 3 pm Sunday, but we have no idea if there will be any particular ‘ending’ to it. With a rolling audience of stayers and newcomers, it’s a popular event even in the early hours of the morning. By the time the last hour begins on Sunday afternoon the theatre is packed, with a line out the door of the Arts Centre and onto the footpath. Most won’t get in; there’s no way those inside are going to give up their positions now. There’s a sense of being part of something special.
Nat Randall, The Second Woman, photo Zan Wimberley
Repetition compulsion
The scene is inspired by lines and characters from the 1977 John Cassavetes film Opening Night, which starred Gena Rowlands as an actress in crisis. The story in The Second Woman is simple but idiosyncratic. A man named Marty arrives to visit a woman, bringing takeaway Chinese food. They talk and drink J&B whisky, although she’s already drunk. She draws him out on his feelings for her (“What a mess I am, begging again”) and he responds, listing some of her admirable qualities. But what she most wants is not something that occurs to him: that he would think of her as “capable.” Frustrated, she throws food at him and turns on the stereo. They dance for a minute to a disco song (“Taste of Love” by Aura), until she falls down drunk and then tells him to leave, handing him $50 that is perhaps for the meal or perhaps an insult (in reality it’s the man’s fee for performing in The Second Woman). They share a final moment and he leaves her alone. To clean up the noodles. To think. To wait. And then it all begins again… with the same words and actions, more or less, but with a new Marty.
The men
Short, tall, young, old, suave, awkward, cynical, sentimental; Randall encounters men of many varieties. Some are actors, some are obviously not; with others it’s hard to tell. One wears a suit, one a huge colourful sweater, the next a cape. One man has only one hand. One man brings flowers. One tucks the $50 into his hatband as if to say, “I will make lemonade from the lemons of your rejection.” Each has memorised the same script and is operating from the same set of instructions, although able to deviate in certain moments, such as whether he chooses “I never loved you” or “I always loved you” as his last line.
Trust
But Randall owns this space. She’s calling the shots, no matter how much her character’s behaviour might imply otherwise, and the audience’s appraisal of each performance is subtly dictated by hers. But this is not a study of subjugation. Acting doesn’t work like that. For something interesting to happen — something usable, in film terms (although that’s a complicated notion here, where every ‘take’ is shown and has an intrinsic value) — there must be mutual trust. Even the most unlikely of acting partners must be taken seriously, his oddest choices honoured, or it all falls apart. Randall is the star of the show, but it’s also her task to allow each man who enters the room his moment to be seen. In this, and in the careful calibration of her own performance in response to each scenario, she excels, never losing sight of what is being created.
Audience variables
There’s a discipline to this work that can’t be easy to maintain in the face of exhaustion and in front of a festival audience looking for a good time and not always capable of appreciating nuance. Even from the first few iterations of the scene on Saturday afternoon there was laughter where none seemed particularly warranted (maybe some of the audience knew the men on stage, maybe they’d already started drinking) and by the time day turned into night a carnival atmosphere took over, with cheers and laughter flowing freely. By around two in the morning things got a little wild. T-shirts were torn off, dancing got sillier, noodles were flung more exuberantly. The men on stage, and the men in the audience, it has to be said, became increasingly competitive. When a man seemed to win over Randall, and win over the crowd, it became a badge of honour. “That’s our boy, a fine ragout,” I heard a guy in the audience say proudly at one stage. Later, another man waiting for his own performance timeslot muttered to his friend, “This is my moment. I’m scared now though. How do I follow Diamond Shirt Guy?” How indeed.
In-jokes developed: how weirdly will she eat the noodles this time? How could we be surprised by that moment where she totters in her high heels again? The cult of The Second Woman grew at an astonishing rate. By noon on Sunday it would have hardly been surprising to go out into the foyer to find festival-goers wearing “What a mess I am” T-shirts and swigging from ironic bottles of J&B.
Nat Randall, The Second Woman, photo Zan Wimberley
Men and being
But through all the fun Randall and team, led by Breckon behind the scenes, maintain the integrity of their experiment. Patterns emerge. We see that the same moments — the paying of a compliment, a kiss on the cheek, the slow dancing — are uncomfortable for many of the men. Some of them struggle to express emotion of any kind, and we recognise how vulnerable they are. We begin to understand their attempts less as good or bad acting, but as either honest or dishonest. We’re not looking for gimmicks, we’re looking for something elusive and yet irrefutable. We’ll know it when we see it. Hence the work’s addictive quality, and the danger of binge-watching. (Thought you’d drop in for half an hour? Why not stay for six?).
Women and being
The Second Woman offers a fascinating insight into craft. You’d be hard pressed to find a film about filmmaking, for example, that so cleverly takes you inside the experience of directing (although the show’s live vision-switching can only roughly approximate actual editing). On a deeper level, it’s an exploration of the barriers of behaviour that divide us as human beings, and those too rare, brief moments when we let them go. The work’s feminist perspective allows us to challenge our preconceptions. Could it be that it’s more powerful to ‘beg,’ after all, than to stay silent and ask for nothing?
Happy ending
And, oh yes, the ending. The final Marty is the only female Marty. She brings champagne, and she pours it out too quickly so they have to drink a lot of froth but they enjoy it and the scene is strange and tender and undeniably something. Only some of those watching know that this is Anna Breckon, Randall’s partner as well as collaborator. It doesn’t matter. The audience, by now, is well versed in paying attention to important things that remain unspoken. And as they stand to applaud they’re happy because their actress is happy and can finally rest. And that last bit sounds like a dream but it really happened.
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Dark Mofo 2017: The Second Woman, concept, performer Nat Randall, script, direction Anna Breckon, Nat Randall, video direction EO Gill, Anna Breckon, lighting design Amber Silk, sound composition Nina Buchanan, camera operation EO Gill, Lewa Pertl, Ella Richmond, Amy Brown, lead vision-switcher Anna Breckon, set design Future Method Studio, hair artist, make-up Sophie Roberts; Peacock Theatre, Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart, 17-18 June
Top image credit: Nat Randall, The Second Woman, photo Kate Blackmore
