Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

November 2017

This week we report on two important festivals that feature spheres of often underrated artistic activity, one drawing together artists from across the country, the other making global connections. The Hobiennale Arts Festival, a gathering of Australian and New Zealand Artist Run Initiatives (ARIs), exhibited over 100 artists in and around Hobart, and Unsound Adelaide, an experimental music event springing out of Poland, featured international and Australian artists. For our report on Hobiennale, Lucy Hawthorne takes in a wide swathe of the festival and Lucy Parakhina aims her video camera at artworks, events and participants. You can also watch our streaming of NAVA’s forum on the state of ARIs. Chris Reid applauds Unsound Adelaide’s intelligent programming in a country in which experimental electronic music events of scale are far too rare. Amid generic arts festivals, Hobiennale and Unsound yield idiosyncratic pleasures for audiences and hope for artists. Keith & Virginia

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Top image credit: Greta Wyatt and Grace Marlow perform Theia Connell’s work as part of Greater Union, Sister ARI’s exhibition at Cinema One, Hobiennale 2017, video still Lucy Parakhina

The catchy title for Tasmania’s inaugural Hobiennale festival references the recurring exhibitions that have become ubiquitous around the world as a form of cultural capital. But this is not the Hobart Biennale — it’s not a big budget, state-run event, but a festival that celebrates the humble ARI, the Artist Run Initiative. The festival’s name is a composite that in some respects parodies the scale and seriousness of the biennale as institution, replacing the national pavilions of the Venice Biennale with local ARIs that are more likely to collaborate than compete. Each ARI represents a community, a model of working and a significant contribution to the art scene. Staged just as this year’s trio of internationally dominant art festivals — the Venice Biennale, Documenta, the Munster Sculpture Triennial — draw to a close, the Hobiennale is a reminder of the importance of supporting local, experimental events at the bottom of the world.

The ARI writ large

With 18 participating ARIs from Australia and New Zealand, over 100 artists, dozens of exhibitions, performances, critical discussions and participatory events, Hobiennale was always going to be a busy and ambitious event. It also turned out to be one of the most exciting I’ve ever attended, with unscheduled performances, an interested and engaged audience and an evolving and nimble program that reflected the energy and excitement of the artist organisations involved. The inaugural event was curated by Liam James and Grace Herbert and facilitated by Hobart’s Constance ARI, an organisation that (like many ARIs of late) has shifted from being a physical space with a regular gallery program to a project-based model.

Eloise Kirk, Northland, Hobiennale 2017, photo Lucy Parakhina

Painting & paintwork

Hobiennale inhabited everything from existing art galleries to underground heritage sites and public spaces, many of them usually under-utilised. The 19th century neo-Gothic Domain House held exhibitions curated by FELTspace, Moana, Success and The Curated Shelf + Radio 33. The house is still undergoing vital repairs, but compared to the last time it was open for a one-off exhibition, there was significantly less rot. Eloise Kirk’s installation of paintings picked up on the colour scheme of one of the upstairs annex rooms: the flaking spearmint upper coat and the pink layer underneath. Her paintings were installed upright, the front surface deliciously shiny, the back uncoated wood, picking up on the patchwork of raw timber covering holes in the dilapidated walls.

Xindian Boys’ Lost in Interstellar Space as part of Archive Fever, presented by Success ARI, photo Lucy Parakhina

Admin, instruction & installation

Adelaide artist Monte Masi’s recitation of the text-based work, IN-SPI-RAY SHUN-SHUN APP-LI-KAY SHUN-SHUN (2017) at Domain House was not listed on the official program, yet it was one of the best performances of the festival. The artist’s words were rhythmic, relentless, interweaving the administrative language of applications with absurd statements laced with a mixture of artspeak and lyrics: “describe how you envision the work will be installed in the space / for example / zero visibility / large scale paintings occupying the / south wall / everywhere is hot.” Drawing frequent laughs, he spoke to a specific and very sympathetic audience for whom the language is very familiar.

The work was shown as part of the FELTcult exhibition at Domain House presented by Adelaide ARI FELTspace, which explored the notion of ARI culture as “cult,” and given the knowing glances passing between audience members during Masi’s performance, the point was well made. Also drawing on ARI administration was Jenna Pippett’s Doing Stuff with Anne.J: Episode 6 — How to Volunteer at FELTspace (2017), which used the language of 1980s instructional videos to draw attention to the unpaid labour upon which ARIs (and the arts sector more broadly) rely.

While the FELTspace exhibition was conceptually tight, the install was disappointing and the works seemed to float in the centre of the room, detached from the aesthetically noisy surroundings. By comparison, Perth-based ARI Success, inhabited the basement level with a layout that emulated an archaeological museum – an apt layout for an exhibition interrogating cultural assets and the production of history.

Teen witchiness & play

Light as a Feather… by another Perth ARI, Moana Project Space, also seemed appropriate for the dilapidated neo-Gothic house. The exhibition celebrated the enduring influence of the “teen witch” as a feminist symbol of strength. At its centre was a rather crude wunderkammer that unfortunately received fewer donations of curious objects than it deserved. The shrine by Grace Connors combined 21^st century technology with references to the cult 90s movie, The Craft (1996) — a movie that had (from personal experience) many teenagers of the time in search of magical distraction, chanting, “Hail to the Guardians of the Watchtowers of the East…” Between the installation of mood rings and chewing gum by Oliver Hull and Celeste Njoo, the knitted jumper dress “witch kit” by Emma Busswell and Lyndon Blue’s naïve painting of a Fiat perched atop an open fireplace, the Moana exhibition was a little haphazard. Indulgently nostalgic, it nonetheless succeeded with its strong sense of play.

An element of play could be seen again in the work by Theia Connell, performed by Greta Wyatt and Grace Marlow as part of the Greater Union exhibition curated by Sister (a relatively new Adelaide ARI). In the basement of an abandoned cinema, the duo caressed a ribbon of electronic text in a careful dance of negotiation. The bottom half of the ribbon was dead, although the text would occasionally flow through as the kinks in the wiring were manipulated. While unintended, the anxious energy of the performers trying to coax the text past the faulty connection made for fascinating viewing.

Julia Drouhin’s performance as part of Sonic Systematics, video still Lucy Parakhina

Quoll resurrection

Another favourite performance was Julia Drouhin’s interaction with a taxidermied quoll as part of Sonic Systematics, curated by Pip Stafford. Sitting cross-legged in the corner of the convict-era Bond Store and surrounded by vitrines of specimens, Drouhin treated the animal with an antique Provita Generator or violet ray — an early 20th century device used to address everything from spinal conditions to dental abscesses. Borrowed from the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery’s (TMAG) education department, the quoll was taxidermied in a way that rendered the Tasmanian carnivore cute, domestic and even a little bit cool, making Drouhin’s pseudo-ritual all the more curious and absurd.

Utterly Silent, Utter Silence, Utterly Something, Thinking Thinking, Utterly Listening, Utterly Umm…(s.2 ep.1), Makiko Yamamoto exhibition presented by Bus Projects, photo Llewellyn Millhouse

Headphone art

TMAG also played host to Makiko Yamamoto’s outstanding Utterly Silent, Utter Silence, Utterly Something, Thinking Thinking, Utterly Listening, Utterly Umm… (s 2 ep.1), which used the spoken word as its medium. Presented by Bus Projects (Melbourne), the installation of sound-based works has changed my attitude towards headphones in galleries forever. The artist arranged and lit the headphones in a way that the figures listening with them became a key aesthetic element, and in many respects, the presence of the visitors was as important to the overall experience as the primary soundtracks — something I only truly recognised when I returned to the space after the opening and found myself alone.

ARIs as a social system

Hobiennale was as much about celebrating ARIs as it was exhibiting the work curated by them. Although the forums addressed problematic issues, the exhibitions and openings, parties and performances were largely celebratory events. The NAVA forum, I Don’t Work for Free: Tensions in Artist Run Initiatives could have gone for days, the one hour time-slot barely scratching the surface of this broad yet important topic. However, the issue was continually (and probably better) discussed during the informal conversations that took place throughout the festival. These incidental discussions were particularly evident at events like Frontyard’s (self-described as a “Not-Only-Artist Run Initiative”) potluck dinner and book launch, the culmination of a series of open conversation sessions at a local community arts centre.

FELTspace might have put forth the notion of the ARI as cult, but Hobiennale demonstrated that the ARI is very much a social system, and one that is central to the contemporary art scene. At every event, artists were exchanging ideas, planning new projects and comparing and debating models of funding and programming. Artists might have bemoaned the lack of funding, obstructionist authorities, as well as the difficulties of finding free or low-rent spaces, but the mood among participants seemed largely enthusiastic and positive.

Opening up the city

As noted earlier, few of the spaces Hobiennale inhabited were white-walled galleries. It gave visitors to Hobart and locals alike an opportunity to experience places usually closed to the public, such as Domain House and the underground magazine rooms of the early 19^th century Princess Park Battery. It reflects the current popularity of unusual and meaningful sites as exhibition spaces, as well as the make-do attitude of many artists, who can and will do incredible things with just about any space if only they are made available. The Hobart ARI, Visual Bulk, for instance, exists within a tiny city garage/basement, hosting a fast-paced exhibition program that consistently shows some of the best experimental art in Hobart. Another participating ARI, Alaska, operates out of a carpark in Sydney’s Kings Cross, and the before-mentioned Success ran a program underneath a former department store in Fremantle before recently switching to an off-site model.

Te Ara Te ao Hauāuru, Kauri Hawkins, presented by Meanwhile, Hobiennale 2017, photo Lucy Parakhina

NZ on-site

Of course, when exhibiting stand-alone work (as opposed to work made specifically for a site), there’s a significant difference between a garage and underground fortifications. Yet, when sites are used strategically — as in the case of Christopher Ulutupu’s The Romantic Picturesque (presented by New Zealand ARI, Playstation) — they can enhance certain aspects of place and alter our reading of pre-existing works. On entering the dank underground battery space, visitors could hear the soundtrack of Ulutupu’s central karaoke video work, including the upbeat pop song “Brown Girl in the Ring,” which contrasted with the shadowy environment. The act of entering such a space prepared the viewer for the darker side of Ulutupu’s videos, which evoke romantic ideals of landscape, family and place with an uneasy twist. On first glance the video painted a rosy picture of two women singing karaoke in a forest. However, there’s an unmistakable tension created between the women and the white man being groomed off to the side, his eyes on the women, his gaze unreciprocated.

Representing Meanwhile (the other New Zealand ARI), Kauri Hawkins’ public artwork combined the familiar language of street signage with contemporary kowhaiwhai (Māori painting). Hawkins described a kind of new colonisation in which Māori are moving to Australia from New Zealand seeking wealth. The sculpture was naturally flashy, made from highly reflective signage material and shaped like wings. The initial location was a little odd, awkwardly tucked in among the Glenorchy Art and Sculpture Park pavilion. It was later moved to the colonial era Rosny Schoolhouse complex, which gave it a little more space, although I felt it demanded still more.

lump, Grace Blake, as part of Surface World, presented by ANCA, photo Lucy Parakhina

ACT in The Commons

Surface World, the excellent exhibition by the Australian National Capital Artists (Canberra), took advantage of a half-renovated building, The Commons, to produce installations that worked with the crumbling walls and mis-match of doors. Patrick Larmour’s intricate paintings were hung on bubble-wrap coated walls — a textural lead-up to Grace Blake’s gloriously silky and suggestive web of latex. Cat Mueller’s geometric paintings drew attention to the patterning of the partly exposed lath walls, and Tom Buckland’s tiny peephole dioramas gave us a glimpse into intriguing and sometimes disastrous technological scenarios.

A festival to learn from

There were far too many excellent events in Hobiennale’s demanding program to cover in a single review. The festival was rightly supported by a range of funding bodies, including the Australia Council for the Arts, yet existed on a relative shoestring, relying (as most ARIs do) on volunteer labour and the goodwill of artists and curators. Despite these challenges, it was a festival with a distinct personality, and one that larger biennales could learn from for its experimentation and nimble programming.

Watch a visual overview of the Hobiennale, featuring interviews with festival directors Grace Herbert and Liam James, and participants from Brisbane, Sydney and Alice Springs, below.

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Hobiennale Arts Festival, directors Grace Herbert and Liam James, facilitator Constance ARI; Clarence, Glenorchy, Hobart, 3-12 Nov

Top image credit: The Romantic Picturesque, Hobiennale 2017, photo courtesy Play_station and Christopher Ulutupu

“The Daly River Girl began its life in 2013 over a cup of tea with a fellow arts peer,” says Tessa Rose in her program note. The making of the performance has taken four years and includes several creative development periods; one with the Yellamundie Writers Festival in Sydney and another in Darwin supported by Brown’s Mart where the play’s director, Alex Galeazzi and Tessa Rose worked intensively on the script to balance the painful stories with lighter moments from Tessa’s extraordinary life. This development resulted in a work-in-progress showing which, even then in its raw state, showed clear signs of the powerful piece to come.

Tessa Rose is a warm and compelling performer who speaks directly to the audience, telling her story in non-linear segments that move fluidly across her life. The audience follows her journey — her early childhood with a Seventh Day Adventist foster family in Perth, her failed fostering with three other families, her adult career as a successful stage and screen actor in Australia and on tour in Europe, her teens as she is reunited with her Aboriginal family in Daly River, her excruciating experience of domestic violence as a young woman. Tessa Rose bares it all in a scrupulously honest exposé of her life.

The play opens with Naina Sen’s video projection of a group of young girls laughing as they sing “Ring a ring o’ Rosie” and dance in a circle with hands held. Backing this is Panos Couros’ gently eerie, suspense-filled soundtrack which evokes the essence of this play — the melding of horror and laughter in the life of a resilient survivor who recounts her stories with wry insight.

Tessa Rose, The Daly River Girl, artwork Jacqueline Marranya, photo Glenn Campbell courtesy Brown’s Mart

As the film ends, the lighting changes to reveal Tessa behind a scrim, her face framed in the centre of a projected artwork by Tessa’s sister Jacqueline Marranya — a circular pattern of dotted pathways with tendril paths branching out, each animated with a colour reflecting the story being told. The animation is subtle, almost slow motion so that a path is often fully coloured in before being noticed and then fading to black and white only to be coloured in again, while the evocative soundtrack both punctuates and links the various segments of story.

Standing before a projected photograph of her younger self, Tessa recounts the experience of her first Shakespearean role in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, reciting her lines as Titania. Phil Lethlean’s lighting design and Jessie Davis’ lighting operation are seamless as action shifts frequently from behind to in front of the scrim, into film projection, into images of Tessa’s past theatre productions, into animation of Jacqueline’s artwork. The technical complexity is smoothly done but Tessa Rose’s charisma is such that some of the most powerful moments occur when she appears in front of the screen with nothing but herself and her extraordinary life story and addresses the audience directly.

Tessa Rose, The Daly River Girl, artwork Jacqueline Marranya, photo Glenn Campbell courtesy Brown’s Mart

Tessa Rose has performed with Sydney Theatre Company, Queensland Theatre Company, Belvoir Theatre, Adelaide Festival and Darwin Festival. She has featured on the ABC’s award-winning show Glitch and Glitch 2, as well as Cleverman 2 and Redfern Now, but this is her first time as playwright. As she says in a press release, “One of the hardest experiences of writing my play was bringing up all the years of pain and anger inside me.”

She does not shy away from embracing the hardships and trauma of parts of her life. There is the repeated refrain “falling… falling” backed by a teeth-gritting soundtrack as Tessa clasps her head in response to cruelty from a violent partner, a bully at school, a casually cruel family member and rejection by her Daly River family for “not being black enough.” It is a story that is unfortunately all too familiar, but Tessa Rose’s humour and extraordinary resilience offset the darker moments.

The Daly River Girl is a brave and engaging solo show from one of Australia’s known and loved performers. The NAISDA-trained performer (National Aboriginal and Islander Skills Development Association) sings, acts, dances and she and director Alex Galeazzi weave these together with great understatement, not simply as a showcase of Tessa Rose’s skills but instead as a journey through a varied life and performing experiences. The Daly River Girl is a great piece of story-telling by a compelling performer. I anticipate that it will continue to develop and refine and will captivate audiences around Australia and overseas.

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The Daly River Girl, writer, performer Tessa Rose, director Alex Galeazzi, lighting designer Philip Lethlean, sound designer Panos Couros, video projection artist Naina Sen, artwork Jacqueline Marranya, animation Kingdom of Ludd; Brown’s Mart Theatre, Darwin, 8-26 Nov

Top image credit: Tessa Rose, The Daly River Girl, artwork Jacqueline Marranya, photo Glenn Campbell courtesy Brown’s Mart

Lucy Parakhina provides a visual overview of the Hobiennale Arts Festival, which brought together artist-run initiatives and emerging artists from across Australia and New Zealand for 10 days of exhibitions, music, performance, parties and talks, across Hobart and surrounds in November 2017.

Featuring interviews with festival directors Grace Herbert and Liam James, and participants Llewellyn Millhouse (Outer Space, QLD), Julia Bavyka and Connie Anthes (Frontyard, NSW) and Beth Sometimes (Watch This Space, NT).

Read Lucy Hawthorne’s overview of the festival.

Founded in Krakow, Poland, in 2003, the Unsound Festival is a series of concerts and talks foregrounding new electronic music that has expanded into an international network. The Unsound Dislocation Project 2016-2018, developed in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut, now takes Unsound into numerous locations including Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Central Asia as well as the UK, the US and Canada. Unsound programs have been a welcome inclusion in four Adelaide Festival programs under former director David Sefton (see my review of the 2013 music program and Gail Priest’s review of Unsound 2015), but they were limited in scale. Sefton and Unsound co-founder and Artistic Director Mat Schulz have now established Unsound as a stand-alone festival in Adelaide, the new event involving a diverse range of high-level international and local artists in concerts at Thebarton Theatre, club nights at Fowler’s Live, the Discourse Program at the University of South Australia and sound installations at the Botanical Gardens and Adelaide Railway Station.

Sound Installations

Unsound often locates events in prominent architectural spaces, and Unsound Adelaide this year opened its program with three unobtrusive but immersive sound installations totalling two hours in the tropical plant conservatory at the Adelaide Botanical Gardens. Renowned UK wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson’s 55-minute Mare Balticum-Narva Wall Mix is a blend of field recordings from the Baltic sea with the sound of waves lapping the shore, sea birds, seals and the rumble of fracturing ice transporting the listener to a very non-tropical world. Australian Leyland Kirby’s How Deep is Your Love takes the listener underwater, creating a sound world that sits between music and field recording. Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement’s (USA) work Shield Ferns/Brown Ferns Magic, commissioned by Unsound, is another gentle piece based on what are described as synthetic field recordings. Listening while studying botanical specimens is a meditative experience that focuses the mind on our perilously fragile environment.

Thebarton Theatre, Friday

The first concert opened with a mesmerising sound and laser light show, Euclidian Drone, by regular Unsound performer Robin Fox (Australia) in which he projected dazzlingly coloured geometric shapes through haze. The visual display is synched with a densely layered composition, and in a talk the following afternoon, the artist revealed that he uses drawing software to create the imagery and takes a live feed from it to the sound system, his drawings triggering unexpected and exciting musical effects.

Legendary US band Wolf Eyes delivered a stunning performance, the trio now including an unnamed cellist to accompany John Olson’s array of wind instruments, maracas and tambourine and Nate Young’s vocals, samples and electronics. Blending electronic noise, vocals and acoustic instruments (Olson sometimes playing two wind instruments simultaneously), and recalling free jazz, Wolf Eyes’ music has a humorous edge and otherwise defies categorisation.

Fowler’s Live, Friday

Following the concerts at Thebarton Theatre, Fowler’s Live nightclub hosted Unsound performances until 4.00 am on Friday and Saturday catering both to electronic music and club audiences. The night opened with Adelaide ensemble Club Sync — Rosa Maria, Baby Angel and Sacrifices) alternating back-to-back on the desk. The set was highly involving, the performers successively creating individual musical languages that melded into a wonderful composition.

Club culture is the engine room of much musical evolution, generating consumption and informing aesthetics. Dance brings people together, although, as Nate Young observed during his Saturday talk, “people go to clubs to be alone with other people,” perhaps a characteristic of contemporary society. Sometimes the music is overly loud, even disturbingly nihilistic, but it creates a community to which people relate and there is a feeling of being-in-the-present in such relational activity. Importantly, Unsound acknowledges the culture that has emerged in parallel with the evolution of instrumental and communications technologies dating back to disco.

Thebarton Theatre, Saturday

The evening began with an exquisite performance by classically trained pianist and church organist Kara-Lis Coverdale (Canada) on electronics. In her talk later, she indicated that most of her sounds are sampled from a variety of organs, including some dating back centuries. Her set was like an extended, deeply layered organ symphony, recalling the powerful organ symphonies of French composer Charles-Marie Widor (1844-1937) as well as choral symphonies. Thebarton Theatre was transformed into a cathedral.

Berlin-based, American musician Holly Herndon’s set contrasted with the long instrumental sets of many Unsound performers, being built around shorter songs and creating a hybrid pop-electronica sensibility, the songs articulating concerns about the impact of technology in everyday life. The video for Chorus, from Herndon’s 2015 album Platform, shows desks on which sit the laptops that she suggests contain and transmit one’s existence. The video accompanying her Unsound set shows figures floating about in virtual space, another metaphor for contemporary life. As she and band-member Colin Self sang, Mat Dryhurst overlaid the video projections with a live feed of SMS-style texts such as, “leave facebook srsly its ruinin yr life,” and an image of Dryhurst captured by his laptop camera, as if he were carrying on a live conversation with the audience.

Thebarton Theatre, Sunday

As the first performance of the evening was about to begin, I overhead an audience member behind me remark, “A grand piano at an Unsound concert? That’s unheard of!” Unsound has traditionally focused on electronic music, so the piano did seem unusual, but bringing together a trio comprising Chris Abrahams of the Necks (piano), Oren Ambarchi (guitar and electronics) and Robbie Avenaim (percussion, including his lap-top driven motorised percussion) turned out to be a marriage made in heaven. The effect was magical, like a Necks concert glistening with the complex sonic colours generated by Ambarchi’s instrumentation.

The performance by Señor Coconut was a significant innovation. Sunday’s concert embodied two essential characteristics of Unsound — the willingness of the artistic directors to experiment and create a program appealing to a wide audience, and the capacity of musicians and composers to collaborate to create wondrous new musical forms. Señor Coconut is German artist Uwe Schmidt (who has appeared under the name Atom™ in a previous Adelaide Unsound program) on electronics with an ensemble comprising brass, percussion, bass and vocals. They rework as cha-cha dance music such classics as The Doors’ “Riders on the Storm,” The Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” and Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water,” as well as several Kraftwerk numbers, humorously subverting the character of the originals. The music is a delight and suddenly audience members are no longer dancing alone but joyously engaging with one another.

Discourse Program

Unsound Adelaide’s Discourse Program addressed the revolutionary impact of new technologies not only on music production, performance and aesthetics but on distribution, consumption, monetisation and income generation. Other themes included the difficulties of being a travelling performer (including the carbon footprint that travelling generates), instrument building, the social impact of new technologies and the communities that music creates.

Adelaide’s Gabriella Smart opened with her paper, From Daleks to Noise, by summarising the work of Tristram Cary, a pioneer of electronic music in the UK in the 1950s and 1960s and a composer of film scores and incidental music for Dr Who who relocated to the University of Adelaide in 1974. Without pioneers such as Cary, the kinds of music heard in Unsound might never have developed as they did, Smart noting that much needs to be done to preserve Cary’s legacy. University of Adelaide lecturer Christian Haines demonstrated the VCS3 synthesiser which was co-designed by Cary and used by many notable musicians.

In a discussion on communities, Giuseppe Faraone of Club Sync joined Colin Self, who performs with Holly Herndon and is involved in community practices in Berlin, and Adelaide artist Matea Gluscevic who manages WildStyle which supports emerging artists and performers. They discussed the need for and creation of cultural centres, Faraone describing how Club Sync facilitates musical development through the provision of a performance venue and a record label. Unsound believes it has an important community engagement role, moderator Gosia Płysa (Unsound’s Executive Director Global) indicating that Unsound can now engage more directly with Adelaide music communities as an independent festival.

Robin Fox moderated a revealing discussion on technology and performance with Nate Young of Wolf Eyes, Kara-Lis Coverdale and Errorsmith (Erik Wiegand, Germany), who has created his own synthesiser, Razor. The discussion examined issues such as the definition of electronic music, Coverdale pointing out that organ builders throughout history were designers of sounds. The discussion also raised the question of the extent to which some performers actually perform or, as Nate Young suggests, just press “play;” many performers such as Wiegand set up broad sonic parameters and then work within those when performing. Musical quality was highlighted, Fox acknowledging that some performers substitute high volume for compositional strength.

David Burraston (aka Noyzelab, Australia) gave a lecture on DIY construction of budget modular synthesisers and passed sample components around the audience, revealing how Unsound’s musical magicians do their tricks. There remains strong interest in DIY modular construction, despite the advances made in midi-controlled software such as Ableton.

In her interview with Gosia Płysa, Holly Herndon spoke of how technology and social media shape our lives and how she addresses these issues in her music. The artist expressed her mixed feelings concerning social media, which she acknowledges can bring people together, but has discontinued her personal Facebook page while maintaining a professional one. As well as addressing issues relating to technology and social media, Herndon has produced a track intended to induce autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR). She indicated her interest in the online community evolving around ASMR. And she revealed that the images of desktops in her videos were drawn from invited public submissions — they thus constitute a relational artwork, such activity clearly an important characteristic of her work. Finally, she acknowledged Ableton’s contribution in developing compositional platforms and suggested she and they were almost collaborators. Ableton has posted Herndon’s 2016 talk on her compositional process on YouTube.

The Discourse Program concluded with a talk by Mat Dryhurst, titled “Ideologies on the Blockchain,” addressing the use of emergent technologies to support online music. He highlighted the disruptive and perhaps democratising potential of cryptocurrencies to support Soundcloud. Herndon, who has taught at Stanford, and partner Dryhurst, who teaches at New York University, added an important theoretical dimension to the Discourse Program that contextualises the evolution and consumption of contemporary music and especially emphasises the need for consumers to be wary of an online world dominated by commercial interests and surveillance. Smart and Haines’ talk on pioneer Tristram Cary and Dryhurst’s discussion of the technological future bookended the evolution of electronic music production, distribution and consumption over the last 60 years.

Unsound Adelaide was outstanding in its conception and delivery, adding a crucially important dimension to musical programming in Australia. With a recurrent Unsound, Adelaide is now more firmly positioned in a growing world-wide circuit that focuses on and stimulates experimental composition, performance, technical development, discussion and criticism and supports local performers and communities. It is to be hoped that Unsound continues to flourish.

Unsound Adelaide, Artistic Directors David Sefton, Mat Schulz; venues Thebarton Theatre, Fowler’s Live, the University of South Australia, Adelaide Botanical Gardens, Adelaide Railway Station, 16-19 Nov

The body of our mother (In Utero) is an unaccountable memory. Our first house or home, how strange to imagine this memory. The further we travel from the nonsense of babydom, through ideally, the magic of childhood, to the here and now, the literate, logical, discerning world, the further away we get from this memory and the grainier the image becomes. If this imagining is a memory, it is a sense memory, embodied but forgotten. It is perhaps our most sensuous memory in a literal context, the memory of before thought. Children are atemporal, free of time, but mothers mostly are not. Perhaps this partly explains the sometimes horror of children/motherhood in our present time-structured, machine world.

The maternal body, rapidly colonised by the disciplines of medical science and technology in this century, is still intriguingly absent in the world of art. This body is a place where nothing is sacred or profane, the abject and strange up for grabs by the most everyday of artists. It is as magnanimous and invisible as the red-cloaked Bush Mary in Teena McCarthy’s self-portrait found in the Realising Mother exhibition curated by Zorica Purlija — undeniable, omnipresent yet cloaked and indiscernible. In major galleries and ARIs alike, where Sex and Death lurk around every corner, the subjective maternal body is absent, but not in Realising Mother.

As Serafina Lee elucidates in her catalogue essay, “Realising Mother articulates a critical subjectivity [and has us] question notions of autonomy and agency as a socially selective privilege granted to specific bodies. We consider our own relations and involvements with these bodies. We are urged to adjust our own position, to afford an expanded logic, one that realises the maternal body as unmoored from its genealogical and representational constraints.”

During the exhibition opening I occasionally managed a whole adult conversation (despite the fact that my date for the night was my three-year-old son) thanks to the artistic creation and ritualistic documentation of 02-02, 2014-15, a live performance and video by Rafaela Pandolfini; Claude was mesmerised! Did he intuit his own journey in a pregnant mother giving form to her formlessness through visual documentation of a ritualised dance or just find this uncouth display of animated pregnant dancing as liberating as Pandolfini did herself? This artist elegantly jitterbugs to the intimacy of a body within a body, perhaps an artwork in itself!

Deborah Kelly takes on the miraculous family of the Bible, creating new permutations in her Miracles series, wonderful adaptations of paintings by old masters. Kelly’s 35 miracle portraits (three of which were on show) are of simply anything but the hetero-normative and biological baby-making families of history. With the advent of ART (Assisted Reproductive Technology) we have seen an expanding of the scope of family; Deborah Kelly uses a different art to make these new family forms boldly visible.

Raphaela Rosella busts open a different part of the dominant discourse on family with her divinely luminescent and proud portrait of Tricia and Ty-Leta (2016): a young Aboriginal woman breastfeeding her baby in the light of a staticky television screen. It was my favourite image in the show; shocked by its beauty, I was not surprised to read how Rosella had spent time with Tricia breastfeeding their babies and that she photographs women she is connected with. This begs the question of gaze, and how the photographer sees, being implicit in what is depicted. Rosella’s role as an embedded storyteller, a mother herself, is a defining factor in her capacity to capture the resilience of the young mothers in her photographs.

Anguish might seem to be a recurring motif when one turns the lens on mothers. Anne Zahalka speaks of an unbridled bond in relationships between mothers and daughters in her heartbreaking exploration of her grandmother’s letters to her daughters before her murder in Auschwitz. Having left their family home in Vienna in 1938 following persecution, the daughters fled to Czechoslovakia, eventually finding safe passage to England. Zahalka uses a collection of artefacts including letters, photographs, postcards and archival documents left to her after her mother’s death, to construct a textual still life which, hanging like an artwork of seemingly random points of connection, mapping chronological intersections, overall has a breathtaking beauty. Alongside it is a video work comprising letters written by the mother to her children after their separation, transcribed from German to English and, embedded in a table top, viewed from above. This translation gave the artist historical insight into this very poignant love between mother and daughter over 70 years ago, and makes it available for reinvention and interpretation by the artist and her own daughter in the present day.

These are just some of the powerful and unexpected works exhibited in Realising Mother. Sally McInerney’s photographs capture everyday moments in the lifespan of motherhood including her own mother, renowned photographer Olive Cotton with Sally’s own daughter. Denise Ferris developed a technique of using breastmilk in screen printing to ruminate on ambivalence and resistance, death and nurturance in motherhood. Sarah Rhodes explores how language and place connect child and mother in embodied learning in Indigenous culture. Clare Rae charts the literal territory of the maternal body, photographed in a series of juxtapositions in Sutton Gallery, before and after birth. The exhibition also included variously explosive, dynamic, playful and remarkable works by Ella Dreyfus, Lottie Consalvo, Theresa Byrnes, Donna Bailey, Julie Sundberg, Miho Watanabe and Anke Stäcker.

Never has an art exhibition been so embodied, the body so present, even if reflected through the lens. Absent/hidden bodies, dancing bodies, clutching/bonding bodies, performed/artifice-d bodies, collaborative bodies, lesbian and gay (or LGBTQI) bodies, single, Blak, social, historical, cultural, child and maternal bodies. A body in which something may or may not grow but assumes this indiscernible yet vast conception of the maternal. This vision of the maternal body I now ponder deeply, is so expansive! Unlike the m(other) body of the Male Gazing Art Canon, the meanings alchemised in Realising Mother explode open a sentimentalised, infantilised, worshipped even, other body and restores agency to the lens. The exhibition puts this real and messy, imperfect and beautiful, often unexpected maternal body back front and centre.

Realising Mother, curator Zorica Purlija, artists Denise Ferris, Sally McInerney, Julie Sundberg, Ella Dreyfus, Anke Stäcker, Deborah Kelly, Raphaela Rosella, Miho Watanabe, Sarah Rhodes, Teena McCarthy, Clare Rae, Donna Bailey, Anne Zahalka, Rafaela Pandolfini, Theresa Byrnes, Lottie Consalvo; Kudos Gallery, Sydney, 1-13 Nov

Jasmine Salomon is a mother of four, a scholar of the maternal in art, a midwifery graduate and a curator who has no formal childcare and is re-wilding and unschooling her two youngest children on a headland in mid-north NSW. Her praxis centres around presence, she is investigating several philosophical propositions including the idea that all humans are artists (especially children), that children inherently collectivise for the positive, that genuine collaboration in art (especially with children) is a powerful tool for social change.

Top image credit: Rafaela Pandolfini, 02- 02, 2014-15, a dance for every day of my pregnancy, live performance and video, Realising Mother, Kudos Gallery, Sydney

I have been without a phone since August this year. The transition was awkward at first, requiring some adjustment. However, I have since come to enjoy the sensation of being “off the grid” and the time and space opened up to me in everyday life. Of course, this is much to the ire of friends, family, colleagues and the odd curator who has had difficulty contacting me. It was not a political decision, or at least not at first. What happened was this: the Nokia 3210 I was using became inoperable when the provider I was connected with turned off their 2G service. I had been moved on from another service, also closing, not long before, and simply gave up the chase, deciding to go without. I believe there is now only one telecommunications provider left in Australia that offers a 2G service, and this will become inactive shortly, making all the phones on that platform inoperable in the process. It will be the end of an era.

Aphids’ Artefact provides a memorial service for this sort of orchestrated obsolescence of technology. Originally a ceremonial event staged at the 2016 ANTI Festival in Kuopio, Finland, the project has now taken the form of a video work that had its premiere at a one-off event at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne on 3 November, the same day that Apple released yet another iPhone. The video primarily comprises documentation of the original event, but in such a way that the eulogy it delivered is retained, continuing the memorialisation. The video is more than typical self-mythologising in which documentation provides a trace of the artists’ cultural capital for posterity. Admittedly, it does this as well. It is aesthetically very pleasing and creates a longing to have been at the event. More than this, the video expands the world of the project, in which the death of technology is acknowledged, celebrated and reflected upon.

When we enter the ACMI cinema, an usher warns strobe lighting will be used and hands out a program that asks phones be left on in order to communicate with the audience during the screening. We are requested to text the message “I’m here” to a provided phone number and reassured that we will not have to participate directly. Rather, we are invited to “contemplate the ideas present in this ceremony: technology, obsolescence, death.”

The screening begins with a series of shots of individual children wearing veils and staring forlornly into the camera. One shot is of a baby lying on its back, against a background of seemingly infinite blackness. The sound of old-fashioned mobile ringtones humorously offsets the moody footage. Segue to a church in Kuopio, where something akin to a funeral ceremony is taking place accompanied by a death-metal choir conducted by a figure with a pixelated face. Artist Willoh S Weiland, black-clad and veiled, leads the ceremony in a procession from the church to the nearby Technopolis Park. There, mourners from the local community, somewhat directed by the choir leader, dig a hole as a base for a 15-tonne grey granite monument — a cross between a gravestone and a featureless mobile phone or tablet. The scene brings to mind 2001: A Space Odyssey, but where the Stanley Kubrick film focused on progress, here the emphasis is on obsolescence.

During the screening video artist Emile Zile sent texts at opportune moments to audience members (a friend shared their phone with me), triggering a cacophony of digital ringtones and creating a makeshift orchestra. These contrasted with the sounds of the old mobile phone featured in the screening, making them seem ridiculous in comparison. The texts frame the content of the screening and facilitate its transcendence beyond documentation into an ongoing memorial service. They achieve this with dramatic allusions that, for example, connect the emotional pain of losing a technological device with the experience of sensing a phantom limb, or nostalgically recall the feeling of playing Snake, as well as providing information about the history of Nokia and its commercial standing.

The screening of Artefact sheds light on the economic and environmental consequences of manufacturing for obsolescence. Progress has brought great precarity to brands like Nokia, a Finnish company with a 152-year history and a staple of the country’s economy. Zile texted, “Nokia 3310… lest we forget…. requiem for buttons and keypads laid to rest… please recycle thoughtfully.”

Artefact is wonderfully timely, positing the value of farewelling devices with which we’ve formed intimate relationships, whether your old mobile phones or gaming platforms.

During a post-screening Q&A, Weiland wondered if Artefact could have been made here; would we have been able to take the subject seriously? But this wonderful tension between seriousness and silliness is the strength of Artefact, which is simultaneously ironic and sincere. During the Q&A a child cries and has to be carried out of the auditorium, the parent explaining that the tears were caused by the screen of her phone going dark, adding a final ironic touch to the requiem. Coupled with the release that morning of iPhone X and the impending end of 2G service in Australia, it added a further sense of timeliness to the project.

Over drinks after the screening, ANTI Festival Director Johanna Tuukkanen informed the artists that a gravesstone, a button with an ‘x’ on top and installed with the commemorative monument in Technopolis Park, had somehow been moved to a skate park next to the site. The artists were thrilled to hear it was now being skated on.

Aphids Artistic Director Willoh S Weiland received the 2015 ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art — a commission for the Artefact project.

Artefact: concept Willoh S Weiland, creators Willoh S Weiland, JR Brennan music direction, original composition JR Brennan, cinematography Kim Saarinen with Matthew Gingold, Lasse Hartikainen, editor Kim Saarinen, video editing Matthew Gingold, Artefact design Willoh S Weiland, Susan Cohn, presented by Aphids and the ANTI Contemporary Arts Festival; ACMI performance text Willoh S Weiland, Emile Zile; ACMI, Melbourne, 3 Nov

Writer, performer and a founding member of the performance collective Team MESS, Malcolm Whittaker is completing a practice-based PhD at The University of Wollongong. Titled “An Intellectual Adventure in Ignorance,” his thesis centres on the Ignoramus Anonymous project which takes the form of a support group for the ignorant, with meetings held since 2013 at festivals and in galleries, libraries and community centres across Australia.

Top image credit: Artefact, Willoh S.Weiland and JR Brennan, Aphids and the ANTI Contemporary Art Festival, photo Pekka Mäkinen

Spoiler alert: this review includes key plot details from writer PJ Hogan’s adaptation of his screenplay for the film Muriel’s Wedding (1994) for Sydney Theatre Company’s Muriel’s Wedding, The Musical.

Friday night, 17 Nov: Muriel’s Wedding, the film

Watching PJ Hogan’s Muriel’s Wedding for the second time in two decades, I’m impressed, moreso than on first viewing. I recall my surprise at how grim it was, funny but painfully frank about parental psychological abuse, peer group bullying, compensatory escapism (via wedding fantasies and the music of ABBA), political corruption, sexism, suicide and a devastating brain tumour. On second viewing the film was as bleakly funny as ever, but revealed itself to be far better scripted, shot and acted than I remembered. Not only did it face full-on the issues it confronted, but was largely and very effectively unsentimental. The moment when Muriel announces that she’s taking her wheelchair-bound erstwhile best friend Rhonda with her back to Sydney, is near-teary but brisk and funny and deftly counterpointed with the tense scene between Muriel and her unrepentant father in which she firmly rejects pressure to take on responsibility for her emotionally damaged siblings. Muriel might not be bright, but she’s a far better person than she ever thought, and now she’s wise, leaving behind the self-obsession into which her tyrannical father and helplessly complicit mother had driven her and committing to caring female friendship.

Saturday night, 18 Nov: Muriel’s Wedding, The Musical

Attending the red-carpeted opening night of Muriel’s Wedding, The Musical, I’m apprehensive. How much of the film’s spirit, especially as embodied in the screenplay — adapted from his screenplay by Hogan and with lyrics by the musical’s composers Kate Miller-Heidke and Keir Nuttall — would be retained? I needn’t have worried. And, would the film’s incisively drawn principal characters be reduced to all singing and dancing sketches? They weren’t. Muriel and Rhonda, though more broadly characterised than their film counterparts, are convincingly realised.

Muriel Heslop, a most unlikely lead character, is Hogan’s genius touch. A slow thinker, often unaware of her impact on others, Muriel is slow to pick up on insult and rejection and all too easily slips into her fantasy world. Maggie McKenna acquits herself in the role admirably with a toothy goofiness and a slack-lipped, innocent stare, extra-rounded vowels and vocal register lower than her sharply articulated singing — a quite different voice. Madeleine Jones’ quick-witted, sexy Rhonda perfectly and compassionately counterpoints Muriel, while her descent into pain and bitterness is keenly conveyed. The pair’s soaring, nigh operatic duet, “A true friend,” is a passionate expression of friendship.

I had wondered if the musical would underplay the darkest dimension of the film — the suicide of Muriel’s mother, Betty. It didn’t in one way, but did in another, which I’ll return to. Justine Clarke’s sensitive portrayal of the woman as an emotionally befuddled, physically disoriented, lost soul is acutely felt, if modified by new additions to Hogan’s narrative. Gary Sweet as Muriel’s father is more ebullient than Bill Hunter’s sinister original, a bigger performer on the business stage and given his own number with an enormous regional development maquette to romp about on. A re-write of the screenplay’s final scenes unfortunately undercuts any opportunity for Sweet to deepen his characterisation; I’ll come back to this too.

Sizeably enlarged is the role of Muriel’s Sydney boyfriend Brice (Ben Bennett), transformed into an embattled parking inspector and a more likely romantic prospect for her affections than in the film, if still a tad defeated by life, as expressed in a witty take on “pessimism, the ointment for the rash of disappointment” in the song “Never stick your neck out,” performed with the male cast. The other key character in the narrative, an Olympic swimmer, Alexander (Stephen Madsen) looking for marriage with which to gain Australian citizenship, is this time not South African but more aptly Russian and given a new dimension, very much of the moment. Other characters, like Muriel’s cruel peers, remain outright satirical creations granted additional force through superbly harmonised singing and frantic team dancing, while her siblings, Joanie (Briallen Clarke) and especially the slightly deranged Perry (Michael Whalley), are immediately familiar variations on the originals and truly memorable, the audience erupting with laughter and applause the first time Joanie utters, “You’re terrible, Muriel.”

Good excess

In the film, Muriel’s escapism is restricted to taking refuge in the music of ABBA, holidaying with stolen money, running away to Sydney and visiting bridal shops; in the musical it’s given fantastical dimensions, the most deftly realised of which has been to turn ABBA, who astonishingly pop out of Muriel’s wardrobe, into a glitteringly costumed, supportive chorus who ultimately attempt to keep the immature Muriel all to themselves. When she goes serial shopping for wedding dresses, Muriel’s fantasising is fast running out of control, her neglect of the crippled Rhonda irresponsible. The stage, in the manner of Hollywood musicals of especially MGM in the 1940s and 50s, swells with parading models and swathes of cascading soft curtains washed in pastel lighting, with Muriel as the glorious bride, adored by ABBA.

It’s not just Muriel’s fantasies that are writ large, the whole world is, whether a Chinese restaurant evoked simply with an arc of huge red lanterns or Sydney with a stage-filling Harbour Bridge and, seen beneath, the Opera House which later, courtesy of the revolving stage, arrives before us, revealed to be of human scale and great to loll about on. Muriel’s meeting with Alexander is akin to an Esther Williams’ (MGM again) swimming pool sequence, the dancers on their backs semi-circled across the stage, miming water ballet kicks.

The power of musical theatre and of opera resides in a shared acceptance of distortions of scale — amplification of character, place, sound, movement and everyday behaviour — with roots in ritual and a search for transcendence. In Muriel’s Wedding, The Musical we are implicated far more heavily in Muriel’s fantasising than in the film — the escapism is ours as much as hers with scene after scene of engrossing invention and spectacle. But, for all the excess, the musical feels emotionally true to Hogan’s original vision, with Kate Miller-Heidke and Keir Nuttall’s dramatic fusion of contemporary pop with the idiom of the musical (more Lloyd Webber than Sondheim) providing rich counterpoint to the sheer pop pull of the ABBA songs.

Bad excess

There is however, a point when excess turns bad. The first sign is the disdainful Alexander finally having sex with Muriel (as in the original some kind of limited affection grows between the two, and even there it felt odd); but then reveals he’s gay. Then Hogan’s script and the composers let rip with Betty’s funeral, at which Muriel heroically makes public her father’s sins, rendering him supine and abandoned by his girlfriend and associates. An apparition of a now happy Betty appears, professing, out of the blue, her own love for ABBA, effectively uniting her with her daughter. Muriel breaks into an adoring eulogy, the mawkish “My Mother,” in which Betty’s maternal support and love is applauded. As in the film, and the musical up to this point, unconditional love has not been evident — it’s Betty’s tragedy that she has always capitulated to Bill, never defending Muriel.

As if this sentimental overload isn’t enough, at the very moment that the bond between Muriel and Rhonda is restored, a triumph for female friendship, Muriel is reunited with erstwhile boyfriend Brice — to what end, Muriel’s wedding? Hogan and his lyricists’ additions do pass by in a tumult of high drama, song and dance, but on the morning after I wake to that queazy feeling of a sugar overdose.

Muriel’s Wedding, The Musical was in many ways a special experience, expertly directed by Simon Phillips, deftly choreographed by Andrew Hallsworth, with excellent musical direction and arrangements by Isaac Hayward and endlessly witty inventive set and costume design by Gabriela Tylesova. The play between ABBA songs and new ones validated the update of Muriel’s Wedding to the present alongside a plot strand in which Muriel becomes a short-lived social media sensation (shutting down her fantasies she simultaneously closes her account). The story of the redemption of a psychologically damaged outsider rings as true in the musical as in the film, but an unwarranted turn to high melodrama and blatant sentimentality, the excesses common to the form, made for a magnificent but imperfect musical.

Top image credit: Sheridan Harbridge, Helen Dallimore and Maggie McKenna in Sydney Theatre Company and Global Creatures Production of Muriel’s Wedding the Musical, photo © Lisa Tomasetti

In Adelaide and Melbourne in the 1970s and 80s, the hard talking, hard living poet Christopher Barnett was a force to be reckoned with — socially, artistically, politically. A charismatic public performer, this self-styled “cultural Bolshevik” — after his hero, Russian poet, playwright and propagandist Vladimir Mayakovsky — was a key collaborator with Nicholas Tsoutas and Peggy Wallach as a writer for the groundbreaking All Out Ensemble. Barnett left Adelaide for Melbourne and then in the mid-80s relocated to Nantes in France where he co-founded a highly regarded experimental company, Le Dernier Spectateur, working to enable performances by the disenfranchised.

Adelaide-based filmmaker Anne Tsoulis’ Heathen Dreams is an admirable introduction to Barnett, a significant if underrated figure in Australian cultural history. Tsoulis writes, “To understand what shaped the artist, we explore his formative years, raised in poverty in a dysfunctional Adelaide family to becoming the teenage poet and enfant terrible. We discover that, at an early age, his Communist ideals helped him to survive his own challenging circumstances.”

The 53-minute documentary includes footage of readings, reunions, a rare homecoming to suburban Adelaide after a 20-year absence and an exacting visit by road in a European winter to visit an unwell Thomas Harlan, radical documentary filmmaker and translator of Barnett’s The Blue Boat (1994).

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The resounding ‘yes’ vote for marriage equality legislation came as a great relief, until those same politicians who instituted the postal process (avoiding parliamentary responsibility and hoping for an indifferent public response) commenced demanding discriminatory, theocratic rights out of place in a democracy. The fight continues. Keith & Virginia

Top image credit: A Wave and Waves, Totally Huge New Music Festival, photo Bohdan Warchomij

Something in the lone, three-legged photo-boxes straddling the landscape speaks of dystopian invasion: the spindly War of the Worlds tripods landed here in a remote paddock as forerunners of a semi-remembered technology, an unravelled history of the photograph. The farmland gullies outside Cootamundra have been abruptly colonised by the unknown, the weird and the naggingly unnamed familiar.

On Saturday 21 October, the Wired Lab artist-led organisation, as part of its platform for evolving interdisciplinary art practices in rural Australia, staged the agri(culture) project as “a participatory landscape-scale and omni-sensorial exploration of rural and agricultural phenomena with regional and metropolitan audiences.” Twelve interdisciplinary Australian and international artists and collectives presented creative outcomes, with the viewer/participant trekking into and through site-specific landscape installations, from early afternoon until 11pm — the art-walker on an experiential tour.

The experience of lying flat, pressed to the earth, on grassy hillocks teeming with insect forms, is the core of Julie Vulcan’s DARKbody, an immersion chamber with headphones and sonorous, wry narrative of descent into sleeping pits in the earth. It is a contemplative sound-dive into a recited tale of “humans sandwiched between literal darkness above and beneath us” — of scotobiology (the biology of darkness) as affective encounter with non-human agency. It is a profoundly meditative slumbering encounter with grass, earth and a slipping away into myriad tiny deaths of darkness within the earth hidden beneath us.

Several other site works are part of the late afternoon land-walk, from Cat Jones’ Insecta Delecta — gourmet helpings of edible insects, served up by a chef to walkers thrown into a sudden field-based Blade Runner future of insectivorous farming — to the rampant honesty of Kids vs Art’s podcast critiques of the varied artworks [hear Kids vs Art’s vivid response to Insecta Delacta, shared with a local farmer. Eds]. I had this firmly in mind as a well-intended community art means of engaging kids, an arrogance of mine rapidly dispelled by not only the sheer clarity and insight involved but by the kids’ astute interviewing of UK sound artist Chris Watson, among others. Here was art shoved off its white plinth and viewed through a child’s lens, a finely attuned crapometer, asking ‘Why are you doing this, and why should we give it value?’

I was most taken by Beggan Beggan (created by NSW regional artists The Ronalds, David Burraston and Wired Lab’s Sarah Last), how it constructed and navigated a traditional shearing shed viewed on blank, undulating land through the simple, stolid device of viewing boxes seemingly left idle in a paddock. The tiny dioramas seen in the boxes ‘mapped out’ the spaces and evoked a sense of a ghost-shed, resonating strongly and endemically with the land and place preoccupations of Wired Lab’s focus on agri-culture. Even with the lineage of an eroded technology faded into history, the boxes reminded me of speaker-stands littered around an abandoned drive-in theatre, awaiting some invitation to rise from sleep. At once inert and motionless, these are brown bones of time lost in history’s sepia photobook pages and the disappearing wash of darkroom trays of arcane liquids.

The installation made dramatic use of the spectral histories of landscape to evoke what once was likely roped off with now invisible builder’s string, charting the dormant, heritage-listed shearing shed on Beggan Beggan station near Jugiong. Each almost childlike diorama with its squat, singular scope of one curved viewing lens in a wooden box on legs akimbo is the simplest puppet-show of perception; yet there is a granular, modulated tone to the images that requires the viewer to walk, and tilt and reconstruct in both mind’s eye and memory the spaces and assembled views — the walker in the paddock rebuilding The Ronalds’ images back into the light. The installation is consciously low-tech. According to Shannon Ronald, “We wanted the experience to be as immersive as possible. We designed each of the boxes with peephole lenses so your vision is completely encapsulated by the scene inside the box… We liked the sensory experience of looking around inside the box and straining to see the detail that each vignette presented.” And it is this series of frosted plays, frozen in time as tiny, self-contained vignettes that are so elementally reconstructive of walking through the landscape to pace out the presence of its use, its shearing history, as the viewer/participant becomes an active bricoleur, reassembling footfalls of the past.

David Burraston’s sound sensibilities glide in and under most aspects of the sensory experience of this depiction of the recreated shed in Beggan Beggan — albeit as thin echoes emerging from partially concealed speakers near the boxes or in his soaring co-composition at night with Chris Watson. Watson’s Beyond Ol Tokai multi-channel sound recording is of a herd of African elephants in the Olodare marshes of Kenya. He specialises in natural history and location sound recording but “documentary” would be a limited categorising of his post-production ability to create engulfing soundscapes which not only sample, but echo the presence of animals as overheard monoliths encircling us. In the shivering, jet-black night, we unwittingly join a herd of African elephants lumbering across blackened marshlands.

There is a forlorn edge to the surrounding sounds of elephants snorting, rolling or careening weightily through the brush, coming at the listener from all directions on a stony hill, overseen in the deep dark by a bright roof of stars. We stand rigid on the sloping farmland, alongside cut logs, huddled against the night’s rapidly creeping cold, caught and dipped in liquid sound, a medium usually thought of as background rather than narrative driver. It is the late-night bookend to the earlier visual field full of wooden camera-boxes. As a biting frost begins to cut across the still, darkened treetops, we are left with the curious thought-pictures prompted by Chris Watson’s sounds of looming elephants in an imagined Kenya — beneath an all spangled sky.

Read an interview about the Wired Open Day Festival with Wired Lab, Artistic Director Sarah Last here.

Dr Neill Overton is a Senior Lecturer in Art History and Visual Culture at Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga. He has worked extensively as a newspaper illustrator, exhibiting artist, art reviewer and novelist. His critical essays address the relationship between contemporary regional and urban art.

Top image credit: Participants experiencing DARKBODY, Julie Vulcan, agri(culture) project, photo Joshua Thomas courtesy The Wired Lab

Tura New Music’s biennial Totally Huge Festival of New Music is a major event in Perth. 2017 was notable for two immersive works which offered what one might call a “phenomenal” experience — DCC: Glitch and A Wave and Waves — which provided a combination of felt sound, perception of duration and the sonic dramatisation of space. Featured artist Anne LeBaron was also superb, mixing an arguably more conventional concert model with outrageous fun in open-ended, semi-improvised provocations closer to her early work with avant-garde rabble rousers Raudelunas.

DCC: Glitch

Early in the program, DCC: Glitch featured Mitsuaki Matsumoto on amplified biwa (a Japanese lute-like instrument), accompanied by Kouhei Harada on laptop, while Shohei Sasagawa managed projection. Although the soundscape certainly had glitchy elements akin to say Fennesz and Frank Brettschneider, the broad palette was closer to the razor sharp, bleeping tones and punctuations of minimalist electronic compatriots such as Ryoji Ikeda. Matsumoto led with fairly distinct, harshly plucked notes, initially on his own, before being joined by Harada. The use of a wonderfully precise surround system made sitting in the centre, as I was, an almost hyper Wagnerian experience in the heart of a clinical digital maelstrom. Sounds moved about, at times crossing at angles before engulfing one from all sides. The graphics initially consisted of a shifting architecture of white lines against a black background, with various arcs hinged at rounded joints where they coalesced. With different intensities and configurations of sounds, the armatures expanded and reconfigured themselves, before turning into coloured spots which gradually covered the wall, recalling painter Georges Seurat’s pointillism. The biwa playing was especially pointed, providing a useful counterpoint to a sound world which at times became more like an awesome textured mass, than a blending of distinct tones. The suite was broken midway by a silence of 4 minutes, 33 seconds (pace John Cage) and it was at this point that the audience discovered that exclamations and claps from them rendered the projected lines wavy as data from the room was fed into Sasagawa’s laptop. In short, it was a remarkably varied piece which by and large maintained a sense of exacting minimalism, that nevertheless delivered quite a dense wallop.

Ross Bolleter, Quarry Music

Ross Bolleter, a WA legend who plays “ruined” or severely damaged pianos, gave what was promoted as his “final public performance” at PICA, although at his artist talk there seemed some ambiguity regarding what constitutes either a “performance” or a “public” one. It was perhaps not surprising then that his presentation in the theatre of Quarry Music reflected a similar ambiguity. The work consisted largely of pre-recorded text which related tales of rummaging through a quarry for recyclables after World War II and the figures one might meet there, while the playback of plangent strumming of ruined pianos filled things out. Bolleter himself largely acted as a living sculpture, seated on the ground, back to the audience, his head against the piano frame, fingers occasionally stretching towards the strings or keys, but, more often than not, halting before playing. More frequently, Bolleter joined us in listening. While the presentation lacked the joyous sense of sharing in a moment of spontaneous sonic creation which characterised the last of Bolleter’s improvisations I attended, his outdoor concert at the York Ruined Piano Sanctuary for the 2005 Totally Huge New Music Festival, Quarry Music came across as a session of communal listening to a well presented CD, played back in a space populated by three restive sculptures: Bolleter and his two pianos.

Mississippi Swan: Daybew

Composers Rick Snow and Chris Tonkin collaborated on the installation Mississippi Swan: Daybew into which they fed a diet of chart-topping songs, as well as text from international news streams and tweets. An algorithm then crafted an EP of stylistically related songs. Although programmed to leap from genre to genre when visitors hit a button, the algorithm is also meant to gradually acquire trends and tendencies. At the Totally Huge New Music Festival Conference, Tonkin played the first track it composed, a rather interesting skewed piece of techno music with angry, scrambled vocals, but this appeared to be a one-off. The program does indeed spit out songs which exhibit some recognisable stylistic features (the bouncing beat and echo of dub, for example), but after listening to about 30 tracks, I lost interest. The material is too stylistically inconsistent and weirdly jarring to work as generic pop or techno. Other than the first track, none seemed sufficiently way-out to offer an alternative. The screened video of a multicoloured glass swan tumbling along beside the abstract EP covers (the latter all using the same basic coloured roundel design) had a curiously hypnotic appeal, but if Mississippi Swan represents AI in music, then artists will depend on genius producers like Stock, Aitken & Waterman, Giorgio Moroder, Pharrell Williams and Timothy “Timbaland” Mosley, well into the future.

Anne LeBaron

A festival high point was the retrospective of American composer Anne LeBaron’s compositions for harp and other instruments. After the composer performed the solo prepared harp piece Doggone Catact, Perth harpist Catherine Ashley joined LeBaron for the duet Infrathin I, which explored more extended playing techniques, including agitating rubber balls across the sounding box and frame. Doggone especially offered a series of discontinuous miniatures, with slack sounding twangs as well as sharp attacks.

LeBaron, who has been producing works since the 1970s with both playful and demanding specifications, performs in a remarkably light and relaxed manner. Her notes seem to gently bend into the ear. The relatively young Ashley on the other hand performed with an intensity and hard grasp on the mechanics of the compositions which contrasted well with LeBaron.

I Am An American… My Government Won’t Reward You was a well-balanced but nevertheless angry denunciation of “blood chits” — printed offers in multiple languages of rewards for those in foreign countries who assist downed US airmen but which have been rarely honoured. Performed here on amplified solo harp accompanied by a recording of LeBaron’s premiere of the piece, it commences by evoking Jimi Hendrix’s famous shredding of the US national anthem, and then moves into spooky, scraped, echoed string sounds, together with a reading of the text of the chits, sounds of warfare and other material. Outside of this sense of fury and use of literal noises of destruction, I Am An American… is quite open and meditative, suggesting a metaphysical journey through modernity in its use of train whistles (shades of Steve Reich’s Different Trains), moving in an unhurried way towards a disappearing, bassy thrum at its end.

LeBaron also conducted re-workings of two other pieces, the structured improvisation Infrathin II (slightly marred by a tendency of the performers to rather urgently attempt to foreground their own signature sounds) and Concerto For Active Frogs. The latter was composed by LeBaron for Raudelunas — a Midwestern equivalent to Fluxus, Neo-dada and the Mothers of Invention. It employs a Folkways recording of frog calls as a sort of score. Here performed by a garbage-bag clad choir of singers, set against the extraordinary Perth experimental vocalist Sage Pbbbt as soloist, the piece was enormous fun, performatively engaging (Pbbbt’s grimacing producing a wide range of expressions from schizophrenic joy to grief) and quite acoustically complex. Highlights were the direct call-and-response sections between Sage and the choir, with the two groupings staring intently across at each other as croaks ping-ponged between them. A great piece of po-faced fun which also made for provocative listening.

A Wave and Waves

The festival concluded with the Speak Percussion ensemble leading 96 lay performers in Michael Pisaro’s suite for quiet percussion, A Wave and Waves. Originally produced as a multi-track recording for Greg Stuart, who radically reconceived his practice after an illness left him only able to perform small movements and quiet, subtle noises, Speak Percussion staged the work for the 2015 Melbourne Festival at the Meat Market with players spot-lit in a smoky room as audience sat on the periphery. In Perth however, Wave was presented as a kind of gentle equivalent of DCC Glitch, with listeners seated among a grid of standing performers, dressed in black, and all facing a set of screens which counted down numbers to cue their actions. The audience sat at right angles to this, in two blocks facing each other, intermeshed within the performance space itself: namely the spacious, aircraft-hangar-like former Midland Railway Workshops. Where the Meat Market performance was enhanced by the sound of proximate cars and inner city nightlife, Midland’s vast creaking venue cracked, expanded and breathed in the sun, as changes in temperature caused its aged metal shell to flex. The distant rumble of planes alternated with birdsong. The performed sound itself was a phenomenal, low key experience over an extended duration. Divided into two halves with a silent interlude, the second movement was relatively more active and noisy, and after the deep immersion in small sounds during the first movement, seemed if anything too much.

As fellow audience member and local sound personality Rob Muir explained to me, the title A Wave and Waves refers not just to the sounds themselves, which accumulate very slowly in slightly irregular masses spread about the venue before they ebb and rise, but also to the audience’s attention, which similarly comes and goes, making the perceived noises at times seem much louder than in fact they are, before one falls again into blissful, curious somnolence. An exquisite work at every level, in terms of its elegantly simple and immersive staging and its mysterious sound palette (I later identified a steel bowl filled with gum leaves in addition to rice on drums and gongs of various sizes, bowed cymbals, sandpaper on various surfaces, and more), A Wave and Waves was not only experientially superb, but visibly well attended by diverse audiences from young families through to ageing sound junkies like me; an ecumenical way to end the festival.

Top image credit: Anne LeBaron, Totally Huge New Music Festival, photo Bohdan Warchomij

North-eastern New South Wales is the home of the Bundjalung nation. Djurra, the title of a new stage work produced by NORPA (Northern Rivers Performing Arts) and directed by Kirk Page, an Indigenous actor, physical theatre artist, dancer and choreographer, means “lore.” For Aboriginal and non-indigenous audiences, Djurra’s talented creators will conjure a Bundjalung Dreamtime creation story entwined with contemporary domestic reality. The generous sharing of culture is a hallmark of Indigenous art, but so too is communication of the pain and anger felt over a culture betrayed.

Djurra features artists with considerable experience and culturally diverse backgrounds: dancer Joel Bray, a Wiradjuri man, Bundjalung dancer Sarah Bolt, actor Damion Hunter, actor James Slee, originally from Kuku Yalanji and Goa clan group lands, Lismore-based Indonesian choreographer Jade Dewi, visual artists Charlotte Hayward and Edward Horne designing set and costumes, musician and composer Ben Walsh with Mitchell King, a Yaegl Bundjalung man, and Blake Rhodes, video artist Rohan Langford and lighting designer Karl Johnson. A key role has been played by cultural consultant Roy Gordon, a Bundjalung Elder, actor and teacher who began his acting career performing in Waiting for Godot, performed entirely in Bundjalung language with English subtitles, during the Festival of the Dreaming in Sydney in 1997.

NORPA Associate Director Kirk Page is a descendant of Mulandjali people in south-east Queensland, Badu Island in the Torres Strait, Germany and Wales. His credits, spread across a 20-year career in the arts, are considerable, including acting (Redfern Now, My Place, Bran Nue Dae and Krush), movement consultation, involvement in Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Rekindling Youth Dance Program, as Assistant Director for Sydney Theatre Company’s Bloodland and My Darling Patricia’s Posts in the Paddock, and as an emerging choreographer in Force Majeure’s 2013 Cultivate program. During rehearsals for Djurra I spoke by phone with Page. He was clearly excited by the scale of the work, its cultural resonances and a distinctive collaborative process.

Djurra is inspired by a creation story from this area, from Bundjalung country. The way I’m approaching it is to create a highly visual, image-based experience of an epic dream state, a liminal space. So one line is the creation story and running through it is another line, a real-time family domestic story. In the dream story there’s the Gami [grandmother] who created the three brothers whose families eventually populate the country. The story goes that she was on the mainland — we’re not quite sure if she was grandmother or mother; there are different versions of the story — and that the brothers who can’t find her have left in their canoes. She finds she’s been left on the shore and calls out to the men. Essentially, she conjures up the waves and the wind and brings the men back. So they return home. We also found in our research a story of one of the men returning from a war at the centre of the Earth. Each of the men has experienced conflict. So we found strong themes around return — returning home and, quite simply, listening to your mother.

There are moments of abstract image-making that relate to the elements — fire, water, wind. We’re also working with the men to create personas inspired by elements — wood, metal, air. Djurra’s like a contemporary dance piece with some theatrical scenes. I’m really interested in the audience feeling they’re being taken somewhere.

We’ve built a rostrum on wheels that moves around the space. It provides us with a domestic space and it’s also an island — a sort of floating, liminal space. We have some rigging so there’s flying, ascending and descending. We can tip gravity off-centre and have the men function in the space where they’re not exactly upright. There are also some great scenes in which the men remember their youth; this week we’ve been looking at just what lore means and how it plays out in our lives and the extent to which we follow it.

At this point it’s essentially storytelling, the men recalling moments in their lives when particular things happened. Were they signs, or callings? There are ideas around listening to the environment, having that ‘bigger listening’ to the world and the Earth and the elements.

The men return, appearing one by one. There’s also some really great audio and visual material. We’re signalling the elements and the men with big video moments (Rohan Langford) and some incredible sound design (Ben Walsh). Ben really wanted to create all of the sound material from the earth, on country. So he’s gone out to Evans Head and Lennox recording wind and trying to create the female whose voice is the wind.

How do you represent modern life in this interplay between contemporary life and the heritage of the Dreaming?

We’ve done it [in part] through the costuming. The men appear in suits. There are also scenes of death and the cycle of life. The men are returning dressed as if for a funeral. Or the suit is the colonisers’ skin or a layer of protection or a way of creating status or being accepted through the formalising of attire.

You’re directing a work with a lot of elements — music, sound, video, a set designed by visual artists, and Dreamtime and dance and domestic scenes performed by two actors and two dancers. But although a choreographer you’re not credited as one for Djurra.

We started with tasks and building images. Jade Dewi, a local Javanese lady who’s a contemporary dancer and choreographer, is really putting the performers through their paces and having them create personas and building on their capacities.The dancers are spectacular and I really like the way an actor’s body interprets. We’ve been getting them moving, getting them confident first and building scenes.

When you say ‘personas,’ do you mean the performers are playing particular characters?

I’ve tried to steer away from the idea of character; it conjures up the false creation of an empty body. They are sort of characters — youngest brother, middle brother and the eldest. But really it’s what they represent as archetypes rather than being naturalistic characters

These are Indigenous bodies so they interpret and have a sense of movement that is their own. Some have performed cultural dances in the past. The movement will be contemporary dance — everything from walking to being quite still to quite virtuosic. It’s not going to be beautiful, flowing movement.

In the press release for Djurra, there’s mention of brokenness, eulogies and rage. How central are these ideas in a work in which you’re sharing culture with a racially mixed audience?

In the black community there’s often tragedy and lots of death, whether it’s from suicide or substance abuse. We’ve tried to frame it as a metaphorical war. One man is returning from overseas where he’s been fighting a war for another country. There’s also the rage that comes from inherent anger around the position of a lot of black men in this country, whether they’re on the bottom rung or at the top. There are problematic elements for both. If you’re successful you have a voice but then there’s judgement at community level that says, “Oh, you don’t get to speak for us!” And there’s the rage about our history. That’s been a difficult thing to handle, so that we don’t just have screaming heads on stage. [LAUGHS]. We’re composing a journey through the story so it’s not just angry. But you’re definitely going to see people talk about what it feels like.

I’d really like them to see themselves onstage, to see their stories, especially the local people from this area, to see their own culture, their own history played out and having that put to the forefront on a platform that is magical and beautiful and heart-wrenching. It’s really about inviting these people into the theatre space to see a story that’s not someone else’s; it’s theirs.

I’d like them to walk away with some insights and understanding about the day to day to lives of Aboriginal people and what lies beneath the rage and the hardness. And to also experience the beauty of these stories and our culture and who we are as people.

So it’s celebratory as well as critical. What has making Djurra meant for you?

It feels like I’ve been having my own initiation of sorts. It’s a really wonderful opportunity to have a voice and to work in an artistic realm in a way that I wouldn’t usually do. Over the years, I’ve enjoyed the experience of devising theatre and I like sharing that skill and [at the same time] sharing another way of working with Aboriginal and TSI artists.

NORPA, Djurra, director Kirk Page, cultural consultant Roy Gordon, performers Joel Bray, Sarah Bolt, Damion Hunter, James Slee, choreographer Jade Dewi, composer Ben Walsh, contributing artists Mitchell King, Blake Rhodes, set and costume designers Charlotte Hayward, Edward Horne, video artist Rohan Langford, lighting designer Karl Johnson; Lismore City Hall, 30 Nov-3 Dec

Presented by FORM Dance Projects and Parramatta Riverside Theatres, Common Anomalies is a triptych of solos produced by Carl Sciberras for “young performers” to investigate “cultural identity.”

Imanuel Dado, What We Don’t See

Imanuel Dado begins his solo in a pool of light, dancing a softened krump. While the music mechanically clangs and jingles, a stylish black-on-black costume flows and clings. From internal to external, from contraction to extension, these hydraulic legs, up and down, lever the dance in and out, as Dado leaves and re-enters the light. His hands and face are mobile as he swivels and slides, making circles in discrete body regions until he is wrapped in himself, scared.

White powder breaks the black. Showering in whiteness, creating clouds, Dado smears the black back wall with curves, hand prints and shadows. An ashen man making mess. Drugs? Flour? Washing powder? Ashes?

Forces gather. He is battling, leaning, pounding, hitting, hitting, hitting. Then upside down, fluttering. Where am I? In a solo about choices, Imanuel Dado asks; who are you? Why do you matter? His answer? Listen. Just Listen.

Bhenji Ra: Approaching Gone (#ytfingers)

Bhenji Ra is a trans Filipino-Australian performer who adopts the third person plural pronoun ‘they’ to embody a gendered multiplicity and to politicise experience. Quietly, stealthily they appear in a dark corner of the external courtyard, in a costume that is a love child of the Cookie Monster and a Smurf. Big, blue, with bulbous white eyes atop a round head, the Cookie Smurf treads tenderly. Pudgy blue hands carve calm gestures in a cartoon tai chi. With blue back to the audience, the round belly and soft floppy feet make pelvic sways cutely amusing. But then hip hop Smurf appears, down low. Ra is stripper, sorceress/sorceror, sista/bro: multiple existences that shyly comment on themselves.

They lead us into the theatre slowly, calmly. No rush here. What began in open air silence has become a noisy, smoky, enclosed world. A screen shows rotating two-dimensional figures of goddesses or devils, all horn and tongue behind dripping rain. Where has Cookie Smurf gone? There, in the back corner, doing a half-arsed, almost non-existent dance, mouthing words that cannot be heard amid the din. But words are coming.

The stripper returns, squashing the space between performer and spectator: approaching, touching and sitting, asking to be disrobed, but only a little. The big head is gone. Big sharp ears of wisdom revealed. The miked voice whispers and repeats: “Now that I’ve got you in my space, can I ask you a question?”

The din has subsided, and this slim, breast-less body breathes out, “Can u see it? Can u know it? Can u take it?” Laughingly “Can u rate me” turns into the horror of “I’m a 10” into the even more horrible “Can u kill me” with “ur fat white fingers.” Darker and darker they disappear.

Carl Sciberras: Gbejniet

Gbejniet is a traditional Maltese cheese. During Gbejniet, Carl Sciberras cooks a soup with this cheese, adding, stirring, smelling, eating. Like the soup and the constant returns to the kitchen, this solo relies on admixture and repetition.

A screen hangs like a framed picture in a living room. Todd Fuller has created animated drawings of departure, travel and arrival. An Italian-esque rolling piano soundtrack travels along with the scenes of hillsides and ships, of land and sea. Meanwhile, the chopping of parsley crunches.

Scriberras frees himself from the kitchen to dance, assembling a quirky circle of standing spoons, pulling each from a holster like a gun. He spins and whisks himself, becoming busier, bolder and bigger, his arms slicing and carving, so fast they become a blur where… he is lost. He returns to his soup.

Balloons, tethered to the Earth with weights, sway and lightly bob like comic sentinels. Sciberras dances a waltzy folk dance, circling a balloon ballroom round and round with an absent partner. Then down he goes, into a rolling set of released floor movements.

An occasional microwave ding humorously breaks up the now laboured piano music as the pot steams and aromas spill. He returns to his soup.

Now he dances alone. He is heating like the soup. The once separated elements are becoming entangled and meshed.

His red and white shirt stained with sweat, he has one last dance. Turning turning turning. Music dissolving. He returns to the soup. He blows to cool it. He eats.

FORM Dance Projects & Riverside Theatres: Common Anomalies: Approaching Gone (#ytfingers), choreographer, performer Bhenji Ra, composer Negroma, visual artist Tristan Jallah, costume Matthew Stegh, lighting Mitchell Kroll; What We Don’t See, choreographer, performer, Imanuel Dado, music Ori Lichtic, Olafur Arnalds, Nils Frahm, lighting Mitchell Kroll; Gbejniet, choreographer, performer Carl Sciberras, composer Mitchell Mollison, visual artist Todd Fuller, set, costume design Carl Sciberras, Tricia Cooney, Arnaldo Giordano, lighting, Mitchell Kroll; Lennox Theatre, Parramatta Riverside Theatre, Sydney, 2-4 Nov

Top image credit: Imanuel Dado, What We Don’t See, Common Anomalies, FORM Dance Projects, photo Heidrun Löhr

My interview with Jackson Davis, a member of the re:group performance collective, took place via email in two stages. I’d heard early in 2017 that re:group were to stage a sci-fi work, Route Dash Niner: Part II, in September, a fascinating prospect for a genre fan like myself. In August Davis replied to my request for an interview from Japan where he was performing in Erth’s Dinosaur Zoo. Subsequently I was in Adelaide for the OzAsia Festival and missed Route Dash Niner, but in my stead Nikki Heywood provided an evocative account for RealTime, describing the group’s dextrous deployment of props and cameras:

“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.”

Heywood concludes her review, asking, “when will we see Route Dash Niner: Parts I & II staged as an epic double, on tour or programmed into a major arts festival?”

When Davis next communicated he was again with Erth, this time in Abu Dhabi. I was keen to know about re:group’s influences and aspirations. The collective, comprising Davis and fellow core collaborator Carly Young along with Stephen Wilson-Alexander and Solomon Thomas, all University of Wollongong graduates in performance, had gripped me with their 2014 work Lovely, a hugely inventive tribute to the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. In an attempt to conjure the actor’s spirit, the performers recreate scenes from films he appeared in and which are clustered according to characteristic tropes — Hoffman on the phone, Hoffman smoking, etc. Individual performers variously become the actor against manually wielded cardboard cut-out backdrops while the rest work as film crew operating cameras and microphones in a deft dance of furious studio production. We simultaneously see the original film scenes on monitors suspended across the performance space. My immediate response was that Lovely, with its telling portrait of an actor’s idiosyncracies and an evocation of his charisma, along with its deft use of humble means, warranted a larger audience. Although formally influenced by the work of UK live artist Richard DeDominici’s The Redux Project, Lovely stood out as a highly original work.

I was also intrigued that Davis and re:group are part of a steady stream of UOW graduates in performance from over the last decade who have continued to mount distinctive productions, individually and collaboratively, including Team MESS, Appelspiel, Nat Randall, Malcolm Whittaker and Mark Rogers. One-time Team MESS collaborator Georgie Meagher is Artistic Director of Melbourne’s Next Wave and, in April this year at Belvoir, Shopfront Arts Co-op presented, in a double bill, The Carousel, a sharply observed account of the travails of teenage sisters written by Pippa Ellams, directed by Hannah Goodwin and performed by Alex Francis and Tasha O’Brien, all recent UOW graduates. Jackson Davis attended UOW from 2008 to 2012.

Our projects are experimental, exploring pop culture and videography through hybrid art forms. Personally I like the internet, video games and electronic music. At best my work should be fun, new, harsh and should cast its net as broadly as possible. I want to spend as much time not doing art as I spend doing it. For the benefit of both.

At university I loved Societas Raffaello Sanzio, The Wooster Group and the writing of the Slovenian Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek. Now I like pretty much anything from digital content juggernaut Adult Swim. The more time I spend online, the more I appreciate its fever dream-like body of work. Richard DeDominici’s The Redux Project has been a big influence on my approach to pop culture and videography — he’ll go to the locations of iconic Hollywood blockbusters and re-shoot sequences starring himself and his friends. Lovely borrowed heavily from Richard DeDominici’s style, as well as my lifelong crush on the now dead Philip Seymour Hoffman. I also think a lot about Christian Marclay’s The Clock, how it uses that one cinematic trope to engineer a functioning machine.

The idea was to do a sci-fi work in two parts, separated by a year. The first, performed October 2016, was staged as a press conference announcing the discovery of a mysterious signal coming to us from a distant pocket of the universe. We declared our intention to investigate it, saying goodbye to four brave friends who had volunteered to commandeer the mission. Family members were invited to say their goodbyes and give parting gifts. Now, one year later, we are on-board the ship just weeks from the crew’s destination.

Part Two is a celebration of the making of an ambitious home video and DIY-interstellar wonder — the shooting of a sci-fi film in real time before a live audience. We wanted to build on the trashy cinematic aesthetic we had developed in Lovely, with its bustling performers jumping between actor, cinematographer and prop. And sci-fi felt like a good genre, bouncing around in your seat to simulate meteors hitting the solar array; that kind of thing.

I got a lot out of student-initiated projects during my time there. These allowed my peers and me to put into practice the performance-making skills we had been learning in class. Surrounding myself with a crew of passionate artists of equal inexperience was a really exciting and enriching opportunity. We got to play performer, director, writer, designer and dramaturg, mostly in response to whatever problem a project faced. Being given the freedom to work in this way, under brief and enabling mentorship, gave me a strong sense of experimentation, allowing me to test what worked and what did not, helping my peers and me develop our taste and style. Without these opportunities my first attempts at performance-making would have occurred post-degree, with my resources greatly diminished and my self-discipline a few grits rougher than it should be.

I’m at the end of a tour performing with Erth. It’s a puppeteering first for me, and a really rewarding environment to develop that craft. And kids give very clear feedback. I’m now collaborating on a new piece called UFO Play (working title) that uses tabletop miniatures to stage an alien landing.

Does Lovely, which I’m keen to see again, have a future? And what kind of future do you see for re:group?

We would really love to bring Lovely to a broader audience; I think people would really enjoy it. The dream for now is to give the work the time and production it deserves, getting it up somewhere in Sydney then touring it nationally. A remount is inevitable. I’m confident the work is solid, it just needs an equally solid pitch. Long-term for re:group is to keep making performance works that innovate with videography.

Based on the survival experience of Israeli-Australian Yossi Ghinsberg, Greg McLean’s sixth feature film Jungle is in some respects a departure from the horror in which the Wolf Creek director specialises. But while the genre might differ, there are clear stylistic and thematic affinities with his previous work. Jungle’s motifs of adventurous travel, wilderness, isolation, suffering, endurance and the simultaneous beauty and horror of the landscape are also present in McLean’s Australian-set Wolf Creek opus and monster croc movie Rogue (2007).

Jungle begins in 1981, as Ghinsberg (Daniel Radcliffe), a footloose 21-year-old “desperate to escape the well-worn path” and “experience the extraordinary,” travels to Bolivia. After a carefree sojourn in the country’s capital La Paz, Yossi, along with two friends, is enticed away on a makeshift expedition into an uncharted region of Amazon rainforest by an enigmatic Austrian ex-pat, Karl Ruprechter (Thomas Kretschmann).

There’s a light-hearted, faintly unreal quality to the prelude in La Paz, where Yossi and his friends, Swiss school teacher Marcus (Joel Jackson) and aspiring American photographer Kevin (Alex Russell), camp with others in a forest of stupendously tall trees, wander the streets to gently twanging Bolivian guitar music and wind up in picturesque bars. The yellow-hued, soft-edged cinematography has a nostalgic Kodachrome quality that underlines the fact we’re viewing events through the idealised lens of Ghinsberg’s memory. At this point the Bolivian landscape, soon to become a formidable player, is still picture-postcard territory: an idyllic playground for the Western traveller.

The tonal shift away from this happy-go-lucky introduction is deftly negotiated. Accomplished horror director that he is, McLean cannily teases out the tensions that arise when people are stripped of their usual comforts, individual quirks suddenly thrown into relief. As the four go further off the beaten track, giving the impression of playing at being explorers, a less than appealing aspect of traditional masculinity is brought to the fore, with the sensitive, easily rattled Marcus acting as foil to the aggressively capable Karl, while Yossi and Kevin distance themselves from the former in order to emulate the latter.

The misguidedness, delusion and extravagant, hallucinogenic madness evoked in Jungle recall the benighted expedition taken down the Amazon River in Werner Hertzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972), in which a crazy, messianic Klaus Kinski leads his followers on a futile search for El Dorado (in Jungle, Karl also holds out the lure of gold and an undiscovered tribe to the three younger men). McLean has a talent for intimately portraying humans in extremis, alone in indifferent or hostile environments, dependent solely on fortitude and their wits. In Jungle, the landscape becomes an inexorable antagonist at the point Yossi is swept into river rapids, in a chaotic sequence skilfully (and courageously) shot and edited so as to throw the viewer helplessly into the turmoil both above the churning water and below, dragged under with Yossi, never allowing an opportunity to fix on one position — until all sound is hushed in submerged unconsciousness.

An elemental quality also pervades the jungle scenes following Yossi’s escape from the water, as he is drenched by storms, bogged in quicksand and, sanity disintegrating, clutches a tree trunk covered in fire ants and runs burning back to the river. Having visibly lost weight to play the starving Ghinsberg, Radcliffe shoulders the physically demanding performance persuasively, making the transition from an unassuming yet adventurous young backpacker to a filthy emaciated figure running the gauntlet of torturous nature (which McLean not unexpectedly punctuates with strategic moments of body horror) before seemingly attaining a state of spiritual transcendence. Much of Jungle is a one-man show; Daniel Radcliffe’s intensity easily commands attention for the duration.

As Yossi fights for survival within the jungle, reduced to pain, memory fragments and hallucination, the film becomes an almost purely sensory journey, conveyed through a delirious sequence of images collapsing one into the other, underscored by a cacophonous collage of sound. McLean does not shy away from grandiose cinematic language, and it’s this willingness to break away from realism into bold expressionistic territory, without ever losing sight of the real humans behind the drama, that makes the film striking,

Jungle, director Greg McLean, writers Yossi Ghinsberg, Justin Monjo, performers Daniel Radcliffe, Thomas Kretschmann, Joel Jackson, Alex Russell, cinematographer Stefan Duscio, editor Sean Lahiff, composer Johnny Klimek, production design Matthew Putland, art direction Diana Trujillo; distributor Umbrella Entertainment, 2017

I tried hard to forget Chekov’s Three Sisters and see Andrew Upton’s adaptation, directed by Kip Williams, on its own terms. It’s not easy, not unlike seeing double; the better you know the play, the more giddying the experience when seeing a production that throws an image of the audience back at itself and mirror doubles its players.

Olga (Alison Bell) is filling balloons for a party on the first anniversary of her father’s death. Life, death, inflation, deflation, hope and despair. From simple beginnings, Williams and Upton vigorously ramp up tensions and mood swings. Desires are stalled, blocked and defeated and resilience severely tested as the limited culture of a regional town erodes the sisters’ hopes, especially the desire of the youngest, Irina (Miranda Daughtry), to return to their beloved Moscow. Words are not enough: the third sister Masha (Eryn Jean Norvill), is verbally and physically volatile, so too her speechmaking lover Colonel Vershinin (Mark Leonard Winter).

Passions are expressed with physical heft, conversations overlap, partying borders on cacophonous, “Shut up!” is wielded like an axe. In loose configurations, characters stream casually about the house (simple table and chairs before a huge glass wall, at once mirror and window). Complications ensue; the brother Andrei’s (Brandon McClelland) vulgar wife Natasha (Nikki Shiels) initiates her takeover of the household and an affair commences. Years (number not specified) pass, the world narrows, after a fire, to a small room claustrophobic with despair; more years on, it enlarges to a wide outdoor space with a single tree with barely a leaf. Long gone is the relatively convivial sense of community: the open stage is a closed space of reckoning, tortured separation and a limited future for the sisters. This overall trajectory and the performances in particular deeply engaged me, whatever misgivings I had about the adaptation and design — a disjunct I’m compelled to worry at.

Upton’s Three Sisters transmutes the playwright’s original, albeit constantly recognisable, into a new play, grimmer, fevered and largely stripped of the gentility of its end of the 19th century regional middle class milieu. Masha demands of her lover Vershinin, “I want to see you while you fuck me” and impresses on her romantically fixated sister Irina the joys of sexual penetration. Old folk songs, Pushkin and Tolstoy, who unite the lovers, are replaced by Bob Dylan, whose songs, according to Upton in an interview in the program, tally with director Kip Williams’ desire to set the play in the 1970s, a period of intense sexual, social and political instability in the West and gradually felt in the Soviet Union. The songs are an awkward fit and not all the most recognisable of Dylan’s output.

Far more challenging is Upton’s excision of the sisters’ final words, Olga’s above all, in which, shortly after the death of Irina’s fiancé in a duel, the sisters sadly rise to the challenge of their limited prospects. It’s an authorial decision that denies director and actors to likewise rise to a challenge — how to balance the sisters’ stoic determination with the sheer weight of pain so recently inflicted on them. Presumably Upton felt the original insufficiently hard-nosed for the 1970s and our own times. In doing so he ignored the rigour of the play’s emotional ebb and flow in which a pattern of crisis, acceptance and resilience plays a key role in the overall arc of the work.

Although the Baron Tusenbach (Harry Greenwood) is killed in a duel with the jealous Solyony (Rahel Romahn), Irina had accepted him as her husband, taking to heart Olga’s counsel, “Love is not an idea” and abandoning her romantic idealism — “I let go.” She can now face life more openly. Miranda Daughtry’s performance is an exquisitely delineated journey from optimism to bitter despair and numb acceptance. She is adroit at catching sudden mood swings: from the child-like joy of mocking her brother (who has mortgaged their home without consulting the sisters) with a pillow stuffed up her jumper to seconds later — hating work, lonely — uttering fiercely, “I want to die!”

The production’s most affecting scene is played out between Irina and the Baron (played by Greenwood without bluster as an awkward, sensitive soul, judicious to a fault) as they hesitantly reach an agreement about marrying without guarantee of anything more than affection; it’s in stark counterpoint with the rough separation of Masha and Vershinin, but both exemplify the taut emotional push and pull of the production at its best.

Masha proves to be a surprising realist, admitting her love for Vershinin to her sisters, but with a caveat: “I always knew the crash was coming.” Her determination to live in the moment is thrillingly realised in Norvill’s hyperactive portrayal. It’s hard to imagine that this Masha will ever settle, regardless of the hopes of her accommodatingly optimistic husband Kulygin (Chris Ryan’s fine performance, part witless joker, part empathic observer, dextrously sidesteps pathos). The sexual attraction between Masha and Vershinin is overt, manifesting as a dance-like interaction of people with excess energy resulting in a risky sexual encounter replete with an irrepressible erection and, at the play’s end, a moving departure with Masha clinging desperately to her lover, he stumbling backwards, until Olga intervenes, Kulygin watching on. For Olga, resilience and wisdom are all she has in a town that, as Masha says, can never acknowledge or nurture her brilliance. She is bound to accept an unwanted promotion to headmistress, if with Irina as a fellow teacher. The surface calm and reasonableness of Alison Bell’s Olga barely belie a tremulous psyche and deep disappointment.

Vershinin too is on a path to acceptance of his circumstances. Initially this is expressed as fatalism induced by the burden of a suicidal wife, two small children and the sorry state of the world. But the colonel is also an optimist; whenever he despairs or the conversation slumps he swings into vigorous speechmaking, taking centrestage or standing on a table, speculating on the emergence of a benign society some 200 to 300 years hence (a position Olga takes at the end of the original play). It’s a compensatory hopefulness. When the town is badly damaged by fire, Vershinin’s despair is tempered by his pride in his soldiers’ firefighting and his growing sense of familial responsibility. Mark Leonard Winter fully embodies the drive of a man keeping anxiety at bay — “If I don’t talk I’ll die”. Masha, however, knows that words can be “precious life talked into a stew of blather.”

The sisters, Vershinin, the Baron and Kulygin, in one way or another, adjust as best they can to the cards that personality, class, culture, the state and fate have dealt them, opportunistically in the case of sister-in-law Natasha — pure pragmatist, happy adulteress and unashamed of her vulgarity. Nikki Shiels plays her with escalating force, climaxing in her unrelentingly cruel treatment of the elderly maid Anfisa, affectingly realised by Melita Jurisic. The other characters are beyond change. Already failures, Solony (clearly dangerous from the outset in Rahel Romahn’s performance) and the doctor Chebutikin (Anthony Brandon Wong in an intense, low-key performance) are absolutists, utterly dismissive of others’ concerns; the former is responsible for the Baron’s death, the latter for not preventing it. Upton elaborates on Chebutikin’s cynicism (“Do we exist?”), amplifying the doctor’s sense of professional helplessness with disturbing images: guts described as “a bag of cats.” Andrei is also beyond help. Revealing his suffering, he crawls into Olga’s bed to be comforted, but is not saved from Natasha or himself. All the gradations of hope, despair, denial and acceptance are finely wrought across the ensemble.

Performance in Three Sisters is disadvantaged by the production’s framing. For a director who is usually rigorous with design and screens, the deployment of the wall/mirror seemed limited, providing brief forays outside the house and, for whatever reason, reflecting the audience and doubling the actors, yielding a complex space and reducing focus. Perhaps it aimed to provide a sense of intangibility on the one hand and denser communality on the other. As for implicating the audience, our reflection would need to be put to further use to make a point, but it was abandoned in the second half, as if we no longer counted.

I’ve already mentioned the problematic use of Dylan songs, to which should be added the bridging music of the moment, not of the 70s, provided by The Sweats especially when juxtaposed with a Soviet Union army choir heard within scenes. As with the design, this was indicative of a failure to run with the 70s concept, or whenever, say up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The uniforms worn by Vershinin and the Baron appeared to be Soviet, a newspaper read by the doctor possibly Russian. The samovar given to Irina in the original is replaced with a doll (hardly of the same order). There is little in this Three Sisters that generates a palpable sense of place or time as the years go by uncounted. The 60s and 70s in the USSR saw the emergence of significant dissidence, for example Shostakovitch’s Symphony 13, Babi Yar, a protest against anti-semitism, and the hugely popular and publicly performed poetry of Yevtushenko (whose lines appear in part in Babi Yar). Using these or like materials might have made better sense of an era. The previous Upton adaptation for the STC, The Present, from Chekov’s Ivanov, conveyed at least an apt sense of the brash, corrupt nouveau riche that emerged from the collapse of the USSR. Without sufficient texturing this adaptation fails to evoke an era, let alone correlate relationships between the 1890s, 1970s and now. As it stands, Three Sisters offers moving performances from actors who have embraced the overt emotional range and trajectory of the adaptation and direction, but within a framework that is conceptually underdeveloped.

Sydney Theatre Company, Three Sisters, writer Anton Chekhov, adaptation Andrew Upton, director Kip Williams. designer Alice Babidge, lighting designer Nick Schlieper, composer The Sweats, sound designer Nate Edmonson; Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, 20 Nov-18 Dec

This week we offer our third and final set of reviews of the Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art, an invaluable event in a city where independent contemporary performance, live art and dance often seem scattered and sparsely programmed across the year. Alongside reviews of works by Justin Shoulder and Geumhyung Jeong, Keith completes his series of responses focusing on the expectations raised by the use of the descriptor ‘experimental’ and how it might be more meaningfully engaged with in future Liveworks. Rounding out our Liveworks coverage, we bring up from our Deep Archive a wonderful article about Gena Rowlands, the film actress whose role-within-a-role Nat Randall adopts in The Second Woman, a great Liveworks success. This week we’re streaming via Facebook forums featured in Hobiennale, the current gathering in Hobart of ARI representatives from across Australia and New Zealand. We’ll report on the event’s exhibitions with images, video and a review in coming weeks. After a short break, we’ll be back on 22 November. Keith & Virginia

I learned from reading and listening to interviews with Justin Shoulder that his practice was formed in community — in queer clubs, and in association with queer, activist and diasporic performance collectives. The prominence of community in his work is reflected in the turnout at this evening’s performance, and in the appreciative roar from the audience even before CARRION has begun.

I have previously seen images of Shoulder’s costumes (made in collaboration with Matthew Stegh), but have never seen them animated by a performer. While the costumes possess a transformational power all of their own, one of the aims of CARRION was to explore how the body could become more deeply engaged in these transformations — how the body itself might also transform. What I sense, in CARRION, is a profound melding of costume and body, a mutual transformation which produces creatures that feel real, through and through.

The creatures both are, and are not, recognisable. They possess multiple qualities that flicker in and out of sight, depending on how they move. The effect is mirage-like. A giant, innocuous-looking grub or butterfly pupa has a sensual cleft running down its centre, which folds open to reveal a smooth human back. A long-limbed, masked figure that wears its bones on the outside is simultaneously endearing in its curious exploration of the stage, and somehow sinister, with its gash-like smile and croaky, staccato vocalisations. I often don’t know quite what I’m seeing, sometimes don’t even know if it’s possible to be seeing what I’m seeing. I have had this sort of experience in recent work by choreographer Victoria Hunt (artistic collaborator on CARRION) — it turns my stomach.

The piece takes us through an epic progression of different states, as Corin Ileto’s musical score drives emotion through the performance space in big, vivid strokes.

A costume of bones is prepared in reverent solitude, knuckles clattering on the floor in the quiet. That endearing yet unsettling masked figure becomes riotous, and tears down a cloudscape so that it lies in a heap in the rising smoke. A pink, flouncy enormity rises up, the size of a house, burping, gluttonous, like a spirit gorging itself, and then sinks back down into the earth.

Throughout, a set of small plastic birds is arranged and rearranged on the stage. They shunt their necks mechanically from side to side, spurting erratic squawks, whistles, and the sing-song phrase, “I see you!”

This artificial birdsong takes on a particularly eerie resonance at the end of the work, when only one lone, plastic bird still sputters, and a big, bird-like creature with a long neck emerges from the debris of all that has gone before. This bird-like being strikes me as a lone survivor lost in a destitute landscape. It takes in its surroundings and releases a devastating, otherworldly howl. Mourning. Panic. In this moment, all feels lost in the world.

CARRION presents something like a dream-space – an allegorical space, a space of in-betweens and of fantastical proportions – in which critical questions about contemporary humanity present as vivid, amorphous emotions. It feels apt that this world should disappear the way it does at the end of the work: that, as our lone survivor releases a final wail, it is all whisked away into total, inky blackness.

Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art, CARRION, lead artist, performer Justin Shoulder, composer Corin Ileto, mentor, artistic collaborator Victoria Hunt, costume, set design Matthew Stegh, Justin Shoulder, lighting, visual design Benjamin Cisterne, sound mastering Bob Scott; Carriageworks, Sydney, 25-28 Oct

Once again Liveworks provided us with a concentrated gathering of Australian and Asian performance constellated around the notion of experimental arts — the kinds of mind- and formula-bending works we’re desperate to see at Carriageworks year-round. Works this year proved to be experimental to greatly varying degrees — sometimes simply evoked as such, sometimes actual. A virally pervasive preoccupation with transformation, thematic and formal, offered clues as to how we might test for experimentalism.

Of course, transformation is one of art’s commonest themes, but we largely look to changes in form for signs of innovation and evidence of the experimentation to which Liveworks lays claim. One-on-one works across the last decade have generated numerous performative possibilities, engaged intimately with topics often unlikely to be dealt with in theatres (see our review of the 2017 Proximity Festival) and made members of the public ephemeral co-creators. Nat Randall’s innovation is to have taken the private one-on-one model and made it simultaneously a theatrical experience. Male participants have spoken of how little sense they had of the audience because the room in which they met Randall was so self-contained. The Second Woman exudes a sense of experiment, with its 100 samples over 24 hours (the men I called lab rats in my first review of Liveworks), a strict methodology, performer endurance witnessed by audiences often staying over many hours, all heightened with intimate camera close-ups.

Mark Harvey’s Helping Hand — a mix of one-on-one and group conversations in various spots in and around Carriageworks — also evoked experiment, one doggedly exercised across the two weeks of Liveworks. Video documentation and an artist’s report on how his chance participants responded to his amiable presence and physical discomfort (eg lying down on stairs headfirst while conversing) might make for interesting sociological study in the tradition of Erving Goffman’s investigations into everyday behaviour. Not that such a report is necessary, but like much innovative art today Helping Hand prompts that kind of R&D thinking.

The experiment that is Jen Jamieson’s Let’s Make Love has been encouraged by recent scientific research about self-generated oxytocin’s influence on our sense of wellbeing. The outcomes are necessarily impressionistic but, as with any artwork it’s the degree to which those feelings are shared in post-one-on-one word of mouth that determines if the experiment has worked or not. Lz Dun’s AEON, also inspired by scientific research, had participants mimicking bird behaviour in a work that says much about our own at a time when the human/animal divide is steadily eroding and biomimicry is vital to our future. In these two works, form and content appear to be satisfyingly in synch, however nebulous the outcomes — feelings, impulses, urges (see Cleo Mees’ account of AEON).

Eisa Jocson (Corponomy) and Geumhyung Jeong (Oil Pressure Vibrator) took the lecture-performance model up a notch with their carefully calibrated, personal accounts of vision and the process for its realisation. Jocson’s was quite political, Jeong’s more personal, both delivered precisely and with an air of almost clinical detachment (until Jocson became Snow White and Jeong lay spasming before a screen image of an earthmover probing a sand model of her naked body), each evoking an investigative science of performance. In her review of Jeong’s performances Nikki Heywood applauds the artist’s obsessive artistry and the rigour of her process.

Justin Shoulder’s CARRION, a personal account of stages of human/animal evolution if without Darwinian logic, was strikingly imaginative. Shoulder and his collaborators’ design sense is superb. As Cleo Mees writes, there is “a profound melding of costume and body, a mutual transformation which produces creatures that feel real, through and through.” However, while Shoulder’s experiments in design are undeniably ingenious and his movement skills strikingly improved since I last saw his work, CARRION remains a series of images that don’t cohere. A creature is birthed from a carapace, sits in the dark transforming at length into an indigenous male figure (why are we not to see this?) and is absorbed into a huge gut-like inflatable, his head impossibly poking minutely from a pulsing protuberance. The carapace becomes the body of a monstrous beast which emu-like inspects its terrain and dances its way to apparent extinction. Transformative images and movement (when not interrupted by inexplicable wanderings) are memorable and the sense of a dark, maturing vision palpable, but the work is not compellingly organic, rather it recalled an older model of contemporary performance, as did Agatha Goethe-Snape’s Rhetorical Chorus and Christian Thompson’s Tree of Knowledge, works fascinating in themselves but falling short of experimental.

New to Liveworks this year were two keynote addresses. Tang Fu Kuen, a renowned dramaturg, curator and now Artistic Director of the Taipei Arts Festival, and r e a, a leading Australian media artist. Tang’s overlong address (leaving little time for discussion) focused on the challenges he faces in leading a very large arts festival and dealing with a huge, not yet completed art venue, one of many of such scale that are springing up across Asia ready to house major performances, often without considering the profusion of smaller, innovative works. We learned little of the kinds of work Tang will program at a moment when we’re fascinated with innovative and experimental Asian performance and its connections with Australia through Liveworks, OzAsia and Asia TOPA. R e a delivered a succinct, deeply personal account of her emergence into experimental media practice in terms of her engagement with technology, her Aboriginal heritage and the challenges that come with being adequately acknowledged (if at all) in visual arts discourse simply as an “Aboriginal media artist.” Performance Space needs to rethink the staging of these talks in terms of its experimental credo and build an audience for them.

Either we accept “experimental” as an umbrella term for contemporary performance, live art, one-on-one performance, performative installation, relational works et al, or we get serious about it. Performance Space needs to engage its public in a discussion about the rationale for the festival’s being. Its audiences are the intelligent, supportive subjects of its experimental testings. Q&As for individual works don’t have the scope. During Liveworks, the Australia Council for the Arts and Performance Space held a very welcome one-day forum on experimental performance for practitioners from around Australia and several international guests. Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend, but it prompted thoughts of such a forum shared in part with the Liveworks audience and, far more important, another which, late in the festival program, would draw together Artistic Director Jeff Khan, artists and audience in a substantial discussion on the state and calibre of experimental art as evidenced by the current festival. That would be serious.

Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art, Carriageworks, Sydney, 19-29 Oct

One characteristic of improvised music in this century has been a growing commitment by some practitioners to engage with outback Australia. The last time I experienced Warmun (in a remote part of the East Kimberley) was with my partner Hollis Taylor. We’d just endured a night of hell when our campervan was overrun with hundreds of creeping, crawling, biting critters that had joyfully hitched a ride with us (evidently caused by accidentally parking on the site of a dead kangaroo). The following bright Sunday morning found us waiting for the petrol station to open with the hope of a new day. The most endearing quality of that place was that the petrol pumps were all painted up in traditional iconography — as were the rocks nearby. The rocks are still there, but the petrol pumps have been replaced with some corporate logo horror which shall remain as nameless as it deserves.

The relationship of white Australians to their Indigenous brethren remains a permanent news item — an open sore that never heals. The recent debate about colonial statues is typical of how contemporary a trauma it remains — certainly for blackfellas, and for many whitefellas too (see Stan Grant’s “Between catastrophe and survival: The real journey Captain Cook set us on“). The early thugaroo Lachlan Macquarie, whose ubiquitous name is impossible to escape in NSW (he plastered it over everything he could get his hands on), had a new statue plonked down in Hyde Park as recently as 2013 under the watch of no less than Lord Mayor Clover Moore. Clover, how could you?

I arrived in Sydney in 1976 and a few years later I ran into one of the many contradictions of our confused Australian culture. While playing in a country and western band (covering completely ludicrously displaced tunes like “I’d rather be an Okie from Muskogee”) in outback Queensland, I was gobsmacked to realise that, along with white audience supporters of small-time dictator Joh Bjelke Petersen, there were many groups of Aboriginal fans of country music. They loved the stuff. I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, put the cultural ramifications of that together, and so determined that I best stay clear of working with Indigenous culture as it would most likely turn out for the worst (not that there is anything inherently wrong with country music as originated and played well in the USA by citizens of that country; it was the unquestioned import that disturbed me).

In Warmun

And now here I am in Warmun, deeply involved with a regional residency organised by the intrepid Tos Mahoney of WA’s Tura New Music. Tos has been building relationships with remote communities of The Kimberley for most of this century, and based on the trust he has nurtured, some extraordinary results are showing. I am contributor and beneficiary of this ongoing work.

The first thing that has to be asked is why anybody from Warmun would even talk to a whitefella, let alone collaborate on a musical adventure. Like many outback communities, Warmun is something of a refugee camp, with survivors of various nations who have had their land first stolen, then have been subjected to employment as feudal serfs, then kicked off their land again when the white owners were legally obliged to pay a living wage. In addition, Warmun was wiped out by catastrophic flooding in 2011 (there is a large fridge still sitting in the branches of a tree six metres off the ground) followed by the crooked activities of a builder and serial conman. Contracted by the WA Department of Housing, Craig Dale allegedly embezzled $3 million of federal money in the rebuilding of the town.

Earlier, in 2001, something similar happened when phantom payments amounting to thousands of dollars were made under the stewardship of convicted criminal Kevin Maxwell Curnow, causing the town’s corporation budget to collapse with $1.5 million of debt. Somehow, the Gija people are a forgiving lot. It is a privilege to work among them.

The project: car wrecks as family

So what’s the project? It’s another manifestation of The Wreck — the transformation of a car wreck into a musical instrument [a project commenced by Jon Rose in 2012 and continued with Tura New music in 2016-17]. Wrecks are iconic markers of the outback. While mapping this continent performing the Fence Project, I started photographing the hundreds of wrecks that I came across. Leave a wreck long enough and it morphs entropically into the landscape, indeed eventually bedding down in company with the raw red constituent chemicals from which it originated.

You can’t just rock up to an Aboriginal community and pick out your wreck and go to work; that would be a non-starter, as all the wrecks belong to someone. They are not simply detritus; former objects of mobilisation that have themselves become immobile are, once the spare parts have been selected, too expensive to destroy or move to an official dump. These wrecks are family. They signify a personal and sometimes painful set of stories. In an odd and contemporary linking between the natural and the supernatural, they are kin containing stories, travels, temporary shelter, memories of love, children, accidents, dogs, disasters and hope down the road.

Once a suitable wreck has been negotiated, there has to be interest and desire from the community to set the project in motion. Every move is one of consultation; otherwise there will be no community project — just a classic case of whitefella toiling in the sun with blackfellas standing around in general amusement waiting for whitefella to leave, maybe leave some money, probably not come back.

Lindsay Malay is our next door neighbour. He is part Aboriginal and part Afghan and very keen on this project, providing all kinds of help and practical assistance. But first things first: we gotta get smoked by Gabe. I’m wanting to get on with the project, but Tos assures me, no smoking, no project. He is right. I’m still not in tempo. So we get smoked and welcomed to country as it should be.

The white house

We are staying in the “white house.” That’s not an ironic political name; it just happens to be painted white. The structure is also built on stilts to accommodate the heat and the wet; this also means snakes and other inquisitive animals are unlikely to visit. Wrong. On the second day my shoes are stolen from the balcony. A quick survey of the surrounds around Lindsay’s house finds dozens of single shoes masquerading as dog bones. Well, I find one shoe but the other remains missing (or dismembered). Our two canine crims turn out to be simply curious. They follow us around, more interested in displays of fighting than taking chunks out of our legs. “Us” is the excellent photographer Bohdan Warchomij, who has had guns pointed at him in his line of work in war zones, so deranged dogs amount to trivial pursuits. Despite signs in town demonstrating success with the de-sexing program, shoes and dogs become a running sub-plot over the next weeks.

Two days later, the sole of one of my “tough Australian made” work boots falls off. Much to my amazement, Steve (who runs the East Kimberley Job Pathways workshop) has half a shop’s worth of work boot replacements right there in Warmun. The same cannot be said about the availability of functioning tools. It’s a challenge. As foreman Kevin explains, “someone has greater need than we do for functioning tools” and who’s to argue with that philosophical view on reciprocity? Barry, Walter and Glen are the Pathways home team and we get on well. Barry is completely skilled up on welding and unorthodox use of the Bobcat forklift, and he takes a keen interest in the redesign of the wreck. It is hard to assess what they really make of the project — possibly a passing apparition.

An available wreck

Initially, we ask about two suitable wrecks but for logistic reasons they are not available. Lindsay introduces us to a local man who has ‘the’ Wreck beyond the beyond. Ceremonially burnt, no wheels, engine rusted to chassis, barely any floor left, the panelling decorated with dot paintings and representative Rainbow Serpent generated not by human hand, but by 20 years of weathering. We could have it, but how to get our beautiful Wreck to the workshop? From out of outback central casting steps “Chook.” With an excessively long white beard, ruddy face and an avalanche of expletives, Chook offers to bring it via the biggest forklift in town to the workshop and stick it…where was that? Somewhere dark where the sun doesn’t shine, if I remember right.

Meanwhile, the temperature has risen to 34C in the shade, but the Wreck is not in the shade. I’m trying to show positivity by getting stuck into removing the drive shaft with an angle grinder. With sweat pouring off my face, extremely poor vision (due to a recent unsuccessful cataract surgery) and the thought that my left violin hand could be severed and sent flying across the yard at any moment, Kevin and Steve suggest we wait until the oxy-acetylene cutter is fixed — eh, maybe next week with a bit of luck. Whenever I see Tos, we break out with the Bernard Cribbins classic “Right Said Fred,” a 1960s pop song about a hapless gang of British workers under-employed in the piano moving business. Our piano is the Wreck. Days start to tick by and our time in Warmun is limited by all kinds of parameters, a performance date being the key one. Such linear materiality is not much of a currency in a community such as Warmun, but they humour us. Enter Dallas and Deno. They have the tools, they will do it, they need to be paid. And verily it was done upon the next day. No surprises there as Dallas and Deno have the government contract for fixing most of the roads in the East Kimberley and are the proud owners of the biggest wreck site and car spare parts in Warmun. They know their stuff.

Last year’s Wreck

Last year’s Wreck was converted by the Bardi people of Lombadina and Djarindjin (170 kilometres north of Broome). An old Toyota ‘Troopie’ was selected, the engine removed (to be replaced by loudspeakers in the form of a V8) and a mass of ringing exhaust pipes welded to the side — it looked like a stunt vehicle from a Mad Max movie. A ladder and rack provided access to the roof and rotation hub section for players with the nerve to get up there. The bonnet (hood) was removed and welded to the side of the engine area for ease of access and was played as a large gong. Inside, the Toyota was stripped out of soft fittings, thus increasing the volume and depth of the principal resonating chamber. As is becoming de rigueur in these wreck projects, fence wire and strainers converted the vehicle into a formidable string instrument. More by neglect than design, all the doors of the Troopie still functioned, so cathartic door slamming became the thematic material for the whole three-week experience at Cape Leveque. Amplification, smoke and lights completed the show, which took place in front of the school, exactly on the border between the two communities (who very much run separate agendas).

This year’s model

This year’s Wreck, by comparison, is a tougher proposition, as it is literally a rusted bucket with no working parts (e.g. doors). But if the last one took after Mad Max, this one is clearly influenced by the sails of the Sydney Opera House — an institution with which I have had a special relationship at times!

There are three bonnets welded to the top of the cabin — clearly the Sydney Opera House! The hope is to encourage some of the exceptional painters at Warmun to get up there on a Bobcat and paint ’em up. There is a hinged percussion section bolted onto one side of the Wreck, and an abundance of 44-gallon drums in Warmun adds an auxiliary percussion section. The four fence wires are accessible both front and back of the Wreck. The engine and drive shaft have been removed to make way for speakers and other gear.

Despite the ruthless attacks and wilful stupidity of its CEO Michelle Guthrie, the ABC remains a central conduit to a functioning community here in the Kimberley. Morning show host Vanessa is following the wreck story from last year’s manifestation at Lombadina Djarindjin to this year’s project with genuine interest and curiosity. I demonstrate some of the sonic qualities down my phone live on her show. Later that day, my two constant canine companions produce a stirring performance of my latest composition, “Sonata for two crazed fighting dogs and violin obligato.”

The Wreck: neutral cultural zone

Wreck could be a neutral cultural zone in which to create connections between European and ancient Indigenous vocabularies and avoid such trite Jindyworobakism retrofitting orchestral works with a didgeridoo or simply cutting-and-pasting the exoticism of Aboriginal culture within dominant practices such as jazz or opera. Composers of popular and unpopular music have eaten out the supermarket of exoticism in any case; there is nothing left on the shelf that is not tainted. A car wreck is so far removed from an accepted musical practice that it allows a return to first principles and little in the way of baggage — or maybe it’s just a piece of sonic detritus (finally an end point to Cage’s love of traffic sound).

The development of a music that discards much of the baggage of European and American cultural empire building is probably impossible to achieve in an internet age. But to my knowledge, there is no tradition of wreck music stretching back to the Renaissance and beyond; there are no popular music genres with car wrecks in the feature role like the electric guitar. (There have been performance art events with car wrecks, but these do not constitute an ongoing tradition.) In the context of Indigenous society, wrecks become the containers for a collection of embedded contemporary stories (I hesitate to use the word “dreamings” as I don’t want to push a whitefella’s presumption onto this proposition any more than I want members of the Warmun community to stand around singing “Kumbaya” or droning away on “Om”). The wreck is a canvas ironically clean of presumptions.

But why don’t you just bring in some decent musical instruments for them to play? The arrival of a musical instrument in a remote community brings forth an ownership conundrum. It’s either owned by no-one or by everyone (or at least everyone related through the kinship system of moiety). Apart from the pressure of humbugging, there are problems: who will replace the strings on the guitar, where are the drumsticks, how to fix the amp? A wreck is already part of the community — it can be transformed, but it doesn’t need fixing.

Ready to go

Gabe gives us permission to set the Wreck up on the Joonba ground. This is the community place of spiritual and celebratory dance gatherings. Gabe, not knowing what wreck music is going to sound like, is hedging his bets: we are allowed on the edge, not the centre, of the space. Over the next days, we are visited by various age groups from the school; the teenage boys’ class goes wild. They reduce some of the side drums to crumpled metal. Their teacher controls them with an ear-shattering cyclone whistle. Straight out of Picnic at Hanging Rock, a visiting party of Perth private school girls try their hand: they push the violinist in the class forward to bow the amplified fence wires. I have made samples of every aspect of the Wreck, including the non-existent motor and horn; with these well-audible in the live mix, and some quick demos of technique from time to time, the music just goes off.

The concert

The first half of the advertised concert features a junior class playing homemade harps designed and instigated by Catherine Ashley. Not your average symphony harpist, Catherine is up for all things challenging beyond the concert hall. Now it is common knowledge in the music business, don’t go on stage with children or animals. Catherine’s tiny tots have the audience hooked, oohing and aahing in seconds; then, almost on cue, it’s time for the wild dogs to attack and all hell breaks out with screaming kids running helter skelter. Like a tropical downfall, it’s all over as quickly as it commenced and the Wreck is cranked into action. Soon enough the energy of metal, fence wire, smoke and lights takes centrestage. As with last year’s manifestation, after some initial shyness, it’s often unclear who is in the tag team and who’s just hanging out. Eventually the smell of food wafts into the performance area and…enough of all that wreck stuff. Everyone rushes to fill their stomachs. Food is a big drawcard.

On the second night of performance, kids of ages 5-12 play for several hours, in the course of which they go from beginners who have never held a drumstick or a bow in their hand to some sort of self-educated, fresh, joyful yet incomprehensible system, with waves of sound penetrating the night air. Some might say a music of chaos; others would say a music of polyrhythms. Intense, yes. They play long and hard. There’s no food tonight. The power goes down and sound man Guy Smith disappears into the darkness under the gallery director’s house to wade through all the squelchy cane toads to re-connect. The smoke machine is still pumping and Catherine, playing fence wire, looks like she is about to pass out. Meanwhile, the talented dancer who had committed to performing around the Wreck shows up on crutches, injured in last night’s basketball contest.

The morning starts in Warmun at 5am with raucous mass fly-pasts of ravens, cockatoos, corellas and a host of other hyperactive avians. Amid the mayhem, pied butcherbirds start up a golden duet in the nearest highest tree (song post). Blinding sun reveals the day.

The symbiosis of staggering beauty and piles of trash is a common enough outback trope in both white and black communities. In Warmun, there are grey-haired nomads and the odd big art sale to think of, so large signs point to the trash bins. In the traditional way that South Sea Islanders left their pre-industrial trash on the beach and let the tide take it away, so the original inhabitants of Australia let nature take its course. It’s just that with plastic, tin and wrecks, Nature needs a lot of years to take its course. Many inhabitants of Warmun simply don’t see trash, and after a few weeks here I’m not sure I’m seeing it either. Aboriginal people have a casual disregard for the tenets, products and detritus of capitalism. It is not that they are wilfully refusing economic orthodoxy, they simply have another take on what’s important, another take on ownership — a 65,000 year point of view linking the critical animate and inanimate forever. Things can be discarded, kinship cannot.

The Wreck Residency has been produced in 2016 and 2017 by Tura New Music in association with the Warmun Arts Centre and with the support of the Ian Potter Foundation and Healthway. The first Wreck performance took place in 2012 in White Cliffs, NSW. In 2013 a wreck was hauled 1,000 kilometres from White Cliffs to Carriageworks to be performed as part of the Sydney Festival.

After the first of South Korean choreographer/performance artist Geumhyung Jeong’s two interconnected performances for Liveworks, she left some audience members underwhelmed, pronouncing they’d seen it all before. Maybe they had. Jeong began work on 7 Ways in 2004 and premiered it in Seoul in 2009, and many artists before and since have mined the territory of object-based performance. However other spectators, like me, were fascinated with Jeong’s eccentric dive into human and non-human interaction.

After performing 7 Ways in Liveworks, Geumhyung Jeong presented Oil Pressure Vibrator, a performance lecture that artfully revealed something of the artist’s process and self-examination in the making of 7 Ways and the rigour invested in her ongoing exploration. Oil Pressure Vibrator takes her obsession with objects into an astounding new partnership with an earth-moving machine; it is literally groundbreaking.

7 Ways

White light on a white floor, no music and no pretence. Geumhyung Jeong waits watchful and still as the audience enters. There are objects scattered about, the most prominent being a robed mannequin, sitting close to centre stage. The inanimate female looms large in this work, beginning with a featureless dummy and ending with a brief appearance by an open mouthed plastic blow-up sex doll inflating from a suitcase, bookends to Jeong’s strangely compelling performance.

Nonchalantly undressing and then donning a concealing black body-hugging suit, Jeong becomes … a Ninja? A hooded puppeteer? A void? A white masculine mask, placed on her foot, takes on a life of its own, rising from the floor supported by its long leg/neck and compelled by a magnetic attraction toward the pale mannequin. The creature plays with a threatening proximity, and hovers about the female figure.

Jeong’s dark form is contorted and reshaped as the other leg becomes a hand, stroking, undressing and then detaching the upper half of the dummy and making off with it, like a mutant body snatcher, only to return for the lower half. Torso and legs are reconfigured horizontally and the sequence concludes with the lifeless figure being humped by a shadowy ghoul that climaxes in a whimper of vibration and pathos.

A subdued tone persists throughout, yet Jeong undercuts any sense of mundanity with a series of manoeuvres that verge on the sexually macabre. Her disquieting assemblages confound the senses to create uncanny acts of puppetry between the body and unlikely apparatuses, such as a small electronic organ and later a masted galleon that sails across the ecstatic turbulence of the performer’s body now covered by a sea of blue cloth. Many of Jeong’s manoeuvres involve vibration, pumping or sucking of air, and her understated depiction of female sexual excitement is itself closer to the elements of air and water than the qualities of fire or earth.

The central disturbing sequence features Jeong at her most visible and vulnerable lying across an industrial vacuum cleaner cylinder, manipulated by a shaggy haired male visage attached to the end of the suction hose. Like a mad professor in an act of necrophilia, he comes to life as a long-necked molesting incubus, and she is a rag doll under his leering control. Evoking a sense of menace, as the masculine/alien/machine and prone woman/puppeteer are artfully conjoined in one image, the performer becomes a victim at the behest of her own lamprey-like creation.

Woman as still life, woman dismembered, woman in a suitcase, woman as prey and object of sexual gratification all evoke a passive lack of agency — problematic images that Jeong resists and yet persists with inventively in her revealing performance lecture.

Oil Pressure Vibrator

In contrast to the brightness of the first work’s white space, Oil Pressure Vibrator is staged on a black floor in low light, with Jeong seated at a table with laptop. And now we hear her voice, speaking live in native Korean with succinct English subtitles projected on screen behind her. She presses ‘play’ on a reprise of the blue figure with the ship moving on waves of her breath. This was the image that seemed less congruent with the palette of mechanical objects in 7 Ways, yet there is something delightful and liberating in this version of elated anthropomorphic coupling.

Jeong’s ‘lecture,’ along with video footage of sequences we have seen in 7 Ways, outlines the evolution of her thinking. Most illuminating is her decision to split herself in two in order to become a hermaphrodite. We learn that she wants to become sexually independent by creating new partners for herself and to enjoy the liberty of isolation in a closed feedback loop. It is at this point where it becomes difficult to discern the person from the artist and where I become intrigued with her long-term commitment to this demanding (and one might say onanistic) project.

When people/friends told Jeong of concerns that within her work she was always playing the passive female character, she decided that being passive was unattractive to her. It became imperative to actively play both roles, and to incorporate the characteristics she finds most desirable in men — their hands and mouths. She chose to employ more objects to perform her sexuality at a distance, and we see the example — a vibrating electric toothbrush penetrating the mouth of one of her masks. These playful experiments are humorous and intriguing and also involve other constructions with long flexible necks and “better suction.” We watch on screen as she creates and trains her perfect lovers, but even so, with time and too much familiarity she claims “the orgasms decreased” in intensity. Even resorting to “cheating” with a real life man, she could get no satisfaction. The sheer mechanics of sex are not enough.

Jeong’s resourcefulness knows no bounds (or boundaries) when “destiny” and her quest for total union draw her toward the ultimate apparatus, something huge with the requisite “long neck and flexible joints,” “strength in motion.” Something to satisfy her desire for “orgasm unto death” — a giant, multi-attachment earth-moving machine. Gasps of disbelief and hilarity from the onlookers. But Jeong is serious.

Determined to perform the role of and with this perfect being, she engages in the logistics required to meet the machine. The only woman in the heavy equipment training program she undertakes, she is exultant to learn it moves by the flow of liquid and internal oil pressure. “Breaker” her favourite attachment, a sharp beak-like drilling tip, could fulfil her fantasy: “one gentle touch would melt me away.” After passing the written exam and three attempts at the difficult practical test she is qualified to become one with the machine.

A ritual is prepared and on an empty beach, the perfect venue for a wedding, her proxy sand sculpture woman and giant drilling partner are aligned. With initial gentle strokes from Breaker’s tip — like a tongue or finger — she is ready to be tenderly pierced. In an extraordinary act of puppetry (and hermaphroditism) the larger than life sand Jeong does indeed melt away, finally flattened by machine driver Jeong. “Orgasm unto death,” behold. The climax was also the end of the lecture-performance, and I needed a cigarette.

Both works are exemplars of Geumhyung Jeong’s obsessive artistry, they are skilful and well resolved in ways that were not visible in some other offerings I saw in this Liveworks. Evident depth of thought and aesthetic cohesion surely come with time and the support to experiment and fully develop ideas into action that is satisfying for both artist and audience.

Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art: 7 Ways, creator, performer Geumhyung Jeong, 25 Oct ; Oil Pressure Vibrator, creator, performer Geumhyung Jeong, cinematographers Geumhyung Jeong, Hoseung Jeon, Bongwoo Park, Youngkyo Choi, video editing Geumhyung Jeong, Younghyun Jeong, 29 Oct; Carriageworks, Sydney

Top image credit: 7 Ways, Geumhyung Jeong, Liveworks 2017, photo courtesy the artist and Liveworks 2017

JOLT are offering readers of RealTime two tickets to City-Topias for the price of one. Simply email: charlotte.bolcskey@joltarts.org with your full name and the code “We love sound!” and what date you would like to book for, to redeem.

With concerts titled City-Topias and Disruptive Critters, Melbourne’s JOLT is about to deliver a substantial dose of excitement to the forthcoming Melbourne Music Week. I had a taste of it when JOLT Artistic Director James Hullick recently performed his new work Were/Oblivion on electric guitar with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in its Dream Sequence concert, drawing on the Jimi Hendrix legacy to unleash a powerful instrumental and vocal epistle to daughters Astrid and Scarlet.

For Were/Oblivion Hullick’s visage was painted with bright colours and a touch of glitter and will be again for City-Topias in which he figures as one of the god-like presences visiting Earth in the concert’s fantastical scenario. Were/Oblivion is one part of City-Topias, an 80-minute audio-visual spectacle promoted as “a wild sci-fi sound art/acousmatic/chamber music/pop art experience.” It’s an unusual claim to make for a work even in the rapidly morphing contemporary classical field, but Hullick is emphatic, he wants sound artists, and audiences, to have fun — seriously realised fun. His use of “sound artists” to cover a range of practitioners, composers and players reveals an integrative vision and reflects the functioning of the musical organisation he heads.

JOLT is a production house that presents performances by the BOLT Ensemble (contemporary music, often with a technological dimension), The Amplified Elephants (a sound art ensemble featuring performers with Down Syndrome), Noise Scavengers (a group of young sound art and experimental music makers) and James Hullick himself. JOLT has staged performances in the UK, Europe and Asia and in Melbourne in 2016 an ambitious three-day event, The Book of Daughters, celebrating International Women’s Day and inspired in part by Hullick’s concerns and hopes for his two daughters.

I spoke with Hullick by phone about this year’s event in which he and Jonathan Duckworth will perform at 7pm on 17 and 18 November in Disruptive Critters and then join the BOLT Ensemble and special guest, the VJ Milica ZZAA, for 9pm performances on the same nights.

City-Topias

It was sparked by my daughter Astrid, who is nine. She came home from an art class with a statue that she had painted. When I asked who this fabulously glam rock character was she said, “Dadda.” I laughed of course, because one’s mind tends to gravitate to the flaws in oneself rather than the positives. But I thought about it later, and about her seeing the best in me, and how kind that was of her. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be a loving gift if I could give her that — to be philosophically realised in this way — like the god in this sculpture?” My personal growth — through Astrid’s insight and encouragement — has been significant since that little sculpture came home. And the art has become much richer.

I’m one of the aspects of that entity but another is the BOLT Ensemble themselves and Milica ZZAA who is the VJ for the show. These god-like characters, though they’re not necessarily enlightened, come to communicate with the humans about various facts of life. One of the influences is David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the culture of bringing performance art to pop culture and, in City-Topias, to sound art and seeing how they can co-exist in entertaining and, hopefully, enlightening ways.

Electric guitar and keyboards. There are other machines. This god character I’ve been building doesn’t necessarily operate in human ways. The show’s designed so that things manifest rather than being consciously or deliberately delivered, which plays out, for example, in the scores, which are graphic; that hands a lot of interpretation and creativity over to the players. There’s an emphasis on spontaneity, though there is some notation so it’s quite clear what needs to happen at each point in time — an interesting balance with the moments of freedom. [This corresponds with] the god-like characters who have to work out ways of making themselves comprehensible to human beings who just don’t get it.

The visual artist Milica ZZAA is collaborating with you. How will her VJ-ing contribute?

She’s always the smartest person in the room. At one point she said, “Well, if these gods were trying to communicate with humans they’d probably have to use the languages of symbols and sounds because words are too slow for them and humans can interpret a lot of artistic symbols and sounds much more quickly than they can words.” I thought that was actually a lovely thought about the value of art to culture.

A lot of imagery will be galactic as well as from nature, elements of the performers themselves, projected live, words from the songs in the show and my graphic scores.

There are four sections. The god is saying, “You’ve got these options for how you can live. There’s Dystopia, Utopia, Heterotopia and Ecotopia, each commented on in song. Were/Oblivion, which I performed in Sydney, is in Dystopia. About Utopia he basically says, “it’s going to require you to simplify and detach yourself from your material possessions, but you can’t do that, so you need to find something else!” (LAUGHS). This god does not have a polite button. He just carries on. It’s up to you to decide what you’re going to do. In the end, he’s saying to the humans, “Maybe the best you can hope for is some kind of Ecotopia where you’re attached to nature and somehow melding your cities more with nature.” And this is happening. There’s a beautiful building in Sydney covered in vines. Urban design is really changing along those lines.

About an hour and 20 minutes. It’s become bigger and the reason is that it’s sort of writing itself. We’ve been rehearsing and engaging and adding new thoughts and moments. It’s been lovely to see it develop organically which is not easy in the current arts-funding environment.

As well as an eight-piece chamber ensemble, vocals, guitar and prepared piano, video projection, there’s a Resonance Table. I saw the Amplified Elephants perform with the table at the Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music (BIFEM) in 2015. It’s quite magical. How have you integrated this and other machines in the work?

The Resonance Table is basically a large, horizontal touch-screen, hand-made by Jonathan Duckworth who has been making the interfaces with RMIT. You place objects on the table which can read them and as you move the objects around you change the sound. It’s spatialised with surround sound and features in two scenes in City-Topias. There’s another sound machine in one scene, the Gotholin: a robotic violin that plays in grungy industrial and simple ways; it doesn’t sound like a violin at all. And we have the “whirling dervishes” — literally, re-purposed power tools with spinning bowls on each end. The idea with these devices is that the gods are manifesting material things at will. If something pops into their heads, then it’s there.

There’s optimism mixed with a bit of annoyance. The solutions are there; so what’s the problem?

Disruptive Critters

These gods are disruptive; are they companions to the Disruptive Critters in your second program?

The whole point about City-Topias and Disruptive Critters — and this is something I’d like to emphasise — is my feeling that sound artists just aren’t having enough fun. So the work is playful and still highly skilful and refined in, say, the way the technology is used and the techniques involved. That’s a magical combination that doesn’t often happen in sound art, to be brutally honest. It’s difficult to get all those elements together and it costs money. Sound artists generally don’t have a lot of money to spend on their shows. So the bottom line was why not have fun and at the same time include some hard-core kind of philosophical enquiry within the humour? I love stand-up comedy; there’s not nearly enough of it in sound art!

Disruptive Critters has ended up being like the prequel to City-Topias. It’s like a creation myth that plays out in hilarious ways. Jonathan Duckworth and I are onstage characters who play the Resonance Table, which looks like it has the same interface but runs a different program — Disruptive Critters — which has little avatars and creatures running around that we can control. It’s very simply designed and it’s as if we’re playing with the building blocks of life. There’s a subtext in the form of an emergent female child, voiced by my daughter Astrid. It becomes apparent that she hasn’t emerged out of our Disruptive Critters, it’s the other way around — she made us; she is the elemental force. So we end up as the Disruptive Critters because we’re fools. Initially I was a bit concerned about how these shows would speak to each other. We really didn’t know at the start but it ended up emerging quite effortlessly. I think that’s a really important point about this whole project. It’s not the product of a rational, corporate plan. LAUGHS. I think our audiences will feel like they’ve had a real experience, in the Jimi Hendrix sense of the word.

City-Topias was commissioned by APRA Australian Music Centre Art Music Fund; Were/Oblivion by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Read more about JOLT here.

Melbourne Music Week: JOLT : City-Topias, artists James Hullick, The BOLT Ensemble, VJ Milica ZZAA, Jonathan Duckworth, Meat Market, 9pm, 17, 18 Nov; Disruptive Critters, artists Duckworth Hullick Duo, Meat Market, Melbourne, 7pm, 17, 18 Nov

What a match: neo-fascist industrial band Laibach will play a concert in North Korea. Clickbait aggregators, news-bite feeds and lame TV comedians with late night talk shows devoured it following Laibach’s media missive in June 2015. Typically, it added to the centrifugal force field of disinformation encasing the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) since Kim Jong-un’s bloodline ascendancy to Supreme Leader in late 2011. Superficially read, Laibach’s touting of a tour to the demonised North perfectly synchronises with a slew of pseudo-investigative, morally outraged anti-nuclear projects claiming to ‘expose’ in some way the terror and insanity of North Korea. Everyone (especially those with young families) seems to be teetering on the edge to see whether the DPRK will become the ultimate demon of the new millennium by launching a nuclear war.

While many regard this as an urgent topical issue for global responsibility, the urge to anxiously respond to any floating news node relating to the DPRK’s official proclamations is reflexively powered by irrational fears and fantastical projections. Some readers may be signing off here, but my point is to clear some critical ground to consider (a) how Laibach — a notoriously misunderstood highly-politicised collective addressing radical notions of national identity — have articulated a contentious yet rational relationship with the DPRK, and (b) how the documentary of their concert seems oblivious to both entities’ ‘post-political’ stances and in place replicates the lazy assumptions people hold of each.

The documentary is Liberation Day (2016), directed by Ugis Olte & Morten Traavik. In standard fashion, it follows the travails of Laibach attempting to perform a concert in Pyongyang. The bulk of the footage captures the protracted protocols which seem intent on retarding Laibach’s genuine desire to play there. While the documentary notes how the mostly non-music press had largely treated Laibach’s strategic event as either comical, absurd, duplicitous or delusional, Olte and Traavik unfortunately do little to support or clarify the seriousness of Laibach’s intentions or aims. Some comment on Laibach is therefore warranted.

The collective has long traded in seemingly offensive presentations designed to affront liberal sensibilities. At least, such was a punkish prankster guise in the early 1980s when Laibach became critical darlings in the UK and later were signed to Mute Records. Filed under “Industrial Music,” the band’s presence within English-speaking channels of performance and distribution was submerged by a glut of similar fetishistic bands, ranging from Throbbing Gristle and SPK through to Depeche Mode and Rammstein. Within this milieu, pre-WWII iconography was furiously and — in most instances — naively appropriated in an oil-and-water swirl of Teutonic, Aryan, Gothic, Neo-classical, Supremativist, Bolshevik and Proletariat imagery.

Conversely, Laibach were always specifically engaged with the pre-Modernist pre-globalising historical specificity of their home turf of Slovenia (Laibach is the German name of the country’s capital Ljubljana) and how their identity had been rerouted by both Yugoslavian and SFRY formations since 1918, and further detourned through NATO interventions and manoeuvres since 1991. Indeed, Laibach — and their link to the art collective Irwin (part of the broader grouping of the umbrella organisation Neue Slowenische Kunst) presage much of the cultural identity politics which have excited contemporary art’s global biennale grandstanding in the 21^st century. Watching Liberation Day reminded me of this, but also made me realise how Laibach have been hiding in the light ever since the Bosnian/Serbian conflicts of the early 1990s. To still treat them as a cabaret band posturing politics (which, admittedly, is a governing aesthetic for the Mute roster) implies a dismissive reading of their pop/rock status while ignoring the hardened seriousness with which Laibach have expressed their own globalist critique.

Everything I am asserting here is neither visible nor audible in Liberation Day. Yet I remain confused as to why this is the case. On the one hand, the documentary is yet another insensitive incursion into a foreign culture while laying great claim to understanding that culture. The film abounds with moments where — in my view — Olte exhibits arrogant attitudes towards both the people of DPRK and the hapless go-between assigned to handle these strange foreigners as they attempt to implement their grandiose scheme. But is this all staged? Is Olte deliberately characterising himself this way, as part of an elaborate Banksy/Jackass/Vice-style media gag? And is there a specific reason why the key Laibach musicians remain largely silent throughout the film (apart from officiated interjections by original group director Ivan Novak)?

I’d like to think that in some measure, Laibach actually let their art speak for itself — such as when they perform a special mock-concert, sampling some of the tracks for the forthcoming one. The fiery hoop set for the band is that the DPRK censorship board wish to see and hear the concert themselves so they can decide whether or not it can proceed for the public. Frustrations abound in the preparations for this contrived and stressful event, and this constitutes the central core of the film. But stepping back from the obvious, anyone who has engaged in mounting largish theatrical productions in foreign countries can attest to this being the norm in the trade. Liberation Day’s framing of this as a distinctively DRPK tactic is a bit disingenuous.

The key song Laibach performs here — which is disallowed in the final concert — is a mind-boggling mash-up of “Do-Re-Mi” from The Sound Of Music and the unofficial ‘anthem’ for DPRK, the winsome folk song “Arirang.” Laibach perform it in their distinctive morbid militaristic dirge style, with Milan Fras intoning the former’s lyrics like a lowlands Bohemian behemoth, while a truly innocent young girls’ choir generates dulcet tones of the latter. Adding to this, Mina Spiler admirably attempts to sing “Arirang” in Korean to provide a Bach-like counterpoint. It’s a weird moment. On paper, it reads simultaneously as a glib Pop-ist gesture and an earnest symbolic statement of cross-border unification (which, lest we forget, has been at the core of Laibach’s poetics, aesthetics and politics). In the film, it’s magical: all discursive and contextual framing evaporates into air — not the politicised air preferred by Marxist apologists, but the culturally dense noise field which defines the terrain of popular music. It’s a world away from the camp cynicism which would normally frame any reference to Julie Andrews warbling in The Sound Of Music. Under Laibach’s reterritorialising gaze, the original Broadway play and the subsequent Hollywood film’s (1965) bizarre meld of musicalized Aryanism and corporatised Zionism are recalled rather than repressed. Milan’s voice sounds tender; the girls’ chorale sounds ghostly; Mina’s enunciation sounds forlorn. It is the sad tonality of de-unification.

For all its quasi-interventionist chutzpah, Liberation Day comes nowhere near the committed staging of this performance’s transnationalist punch. Fortunately, the film attests to the power of music, sound and song despite a documentarian’s attempt to rationalise their effects. Director Olte pontificates on-camera in numerous interludes, set against brutalist architectural backdrops of the DPRK, but his rote sociological quips about art and society quickly pale. Again, this could be a deliberate pompous tick, but when Laibach pulls out their “Do-Re-Mi,” Olte’s journalistic rhetoric sounds banal and trivial in comparison. Ultimately, the film is full of suspect sleight-of-hand in its editing and narrative framing which obfuscates the contextual truths which shape DPRK in ways beyond our outsider wishful thinking. (The edits of the audience’s reactions while Laibach finally perform seem suspicious and over-weighted to me.) One of the most powerful aspects of the DPRK is its unknowable logic, its holistic otherness, and its political anti-contemporaneity.

For those who think they ‘know’ North Korea through our available media channels (especially those bent on investigative exposes of “the insanity of the North”), Liberation Day will reinforce the terrible clichés born of ‘weirdising’ another world. I sense that Laibach truly identify with the DPRK due to the meta-linguistic disinformation which decontextualises both parties’ discourse to the world. Therein lies Laibach’s presence: uncomfortably grappling with their performance in Pyongyang, while trapped within this documentary’s journalistic dance.

When we’re ill, worrying about the wellbeing of our doctors and nurses is far from our thoughts, unless we sense in them signs of anxiety and exhaustion which, in turn, exacerbate our own stress. Grace Under Pressure, a verbatim theatre work by David Williams and Paul Dwyer, and directed by Williams, incisively probes the experiences and attitudes of nurses and doctors working in hospitals, essentially 19th century institutions which persist unchanged in some fundamental ways into the 21st with class- and role-bound hierarchies, complex bureaucracies, eternally long surgery waiting lists and punishing working hours. We hear about these matters regularly in the media, along with occasional reports on bullying and suicides. As one of the workers quoted in Grace Under Pressure says, “It’s not as if the public doesn’t know.” But news bites are not knowledge, let alone tools with which to understand and come to the aid of beleaguered hospital staff, adding to an increasing sense of our public powerlessness in the face of inflexible institutions and reform-averse governments. Grace Under Pressure is a corrective, drawing directly on the lives of healthcarers and directed and performed with a sense of intimacy, immediacy and urgency.

The striking set comprises a circular, bright white floor populated with black microphones and stands over which hovers a large white disk. The outer area is emphatically black in contrast with the vivid performance space, underlining the binary tensions that emerge when the four performers seated at the rear periphery enter to deliver the words of ambulance staff, nurses, interns, doctors, surgeons and consutants drawn from extensive interviews for this project. The stylishness of the design recalls new and upgraded hospitals with their sleek facades and reception areas and artworks exuding a sense of wellbeing. But not all is well within. The suspended disk also chillingly evokes a large light suspended over a surgeon, nurses and patient in a white operating theatre. As Grace Under Pressure unfolds, the light on the disk is systematically infused with a variety of colours and shapes reflecting the growing complexity and emotional tension embodied in the utterances delivered by the performers. The set also doubles as a media space, the performers weaving to and from microphones as if speaking publicly for radio or TV, or even a government enquiry, and with minimum need to project, so that intimate engagement with the audience is sustained. The accompanying music, heard cinematically behind the dialogue, quietly doubles as ambient hospital foyer music and a provider of subtly varied emotional subtext, soothing, then quietly haunting and becoming expressively emphatic in the work’s final painful moments.

Williams and Dwyer have structured their expert cut-and-paste of the recorded interviews to move broadly from short utterances, recollections and observations to longer anecdotes, exchanges between speakers, intensely private revelations about suicidal impulses and finishing with a conversation about the final moments of life. The first words come from nurses, then a variety of interns, doctors and surgeons, whether in large hospitals or a small, under-resourced rural one, but in a cumulative weave so that there’s always a sense of many voices and roles, intricately but often problematically connected.

The tales of insult, humiliation and abuse, of overwork, compromise and failure are cumulatively challenging, but full of idiosyncracies which make the four performers distinctively personable even though each never plays a sole character throughout. Captured speech rhythms, hesitations, interruptions and cadences abet differences in attitude from amused to resigned to cynical and despairing. Williams and Dwyer have good ears for specifics that will fascinate us as well as speak to workplace challenges — a nurse who sees herself as a sociologist; another who does ambulance duty on her hospital days off; the first experience of laying out a body; knowing when to declare a person dead and having the authority to do it when a doctor is slow off the mark; and an experienced nurse who speaks to the dead. A soft pink suffuses the rim of the overhead disk and the rippling organ-like music now lingers with sustained notes and light phasings. Death is no longer a horror, but a young nurse is advised that it’s a good idea “to check your own pulse.” Once again, there’s been no time for dinner.

The light now blue, the music lightly warbling, the words from an older nurse firmly assert that she’s there to help her patients, not the doctors whom she sees as always confused about the role of nurses, who often save them from terrible errors. A female intern refuses to join the orthopoedic surgeons’ rugby and booze club. The blue intensifies: an intern learns not to address consultants, not to burst into tears. A senior nurse has finally had enough and “doesn’t give a shit.” An older male nurse is wrongly castigated by a doctor, apologised to not by the offender, but by that doctor’s senior and not in front of the shocked patient and other staff. Someone asks, “Was anyone ever praised?” Staff complaints when made singly or collectively about bullying are ignored. Long notes exude melancholy. Working hours are astonishing: 80 to 120 per week. The rationale, “We pay you for 55, you do 100 because you’re young and lazy.” Suicidal thoughts loom.

What grace remains is now lessening under severe pressure. Beneath an eerie greenish hue, the tale is told of a surgeon who is an hour late for an operation and becomes furiously abusive in front of patient and staff when he finds an associate, a friend, has taken over. They later restore the friendship, but the speaker admits “no-one defends the abused” because the offending doctor, who behaved “like a psychopath,” is regarded as “the greatest surgeon who ever lived.”

The light in the disk mingles darkening colours as authority in the hospital is revealed to be absolute and the emotions constellating around it fraught. A nurse tells of a surgeon quizzing her at “so low a level and so constant” about her sex life over a long operation and his laughing it off as “just joking.” She says of him, “He’s not a great person, just good at his job.” A moon-like cusp forms on the curve of the disk and doctors talk with grim humour of repeated driving accidents, one caused by tiredness from performing an all-night organ transplant. The sheer enormity of the risk taken is breathtaking. Why is it then that “in no other industry are these hours allowed?” This is the knowledge we have, but is never acted on and, says one speaker, is held in check within the system by an “audit culture” and the need to keep the Minister of Health happy.

This hospital world grows nightmarish beneath the disk, hued an ominous orange. Having dealt with a family of car crash victims without sufficient assistance, food or sleep, a traumatised young doctor in a regional hospital registers a complaint. Subsequently appearing before an employment panel she is identified as “that whinger” and decides to leave the profession. Those who don’t can be prone to suicide. The disk becomes an intense blue halo, the music a deep slow pulse and a corridor of white light cleaves the floor. A young doctor on the edge of suicide steps along it and out beyond the frame, to kneel among us, beyond understanding that she could have found help within a system that clearly didn’t vigorously proffer it.

It’s asked, “Are there any good stories?” There are, of course; for example the strange things that can go on in a maternity ward under a full moon. Another, in the work’s final scene, turns to the relationship between patient and healthcarer in the face of death. Can the final minutes or hours of life be made less painful and how is this decided and performed ethically? We hear talk of the slow morphine drip and the agonal breathing (irregular and sometimes with unusual vocal sounds) that might signify imminent death; we hear it in the deep, grinding, slow, sometimes fluctuating pulse of the music. We hear the relatives ask if they can wash the body. Yes, they can, beneath a benign blue halo.

Grace Under Pressure is greeted with passionate enthusiasm by its audience who have been amused, informed and moved. It is a work with a clear sense of social purpose, complexly enriched with the observations of those who are responsible for us in hospitals and whose own lives are subject to often inordinate pressures. We need to care for them.

Isabel Hudson’s set design, Richard Manner’s lighting and Gail Priest’s music serve David Williams and Paul Dwyer’s script and Williams’ direction admirably in a finely integrated production, performed with conviction and conversational ease by Sal Sharah and Wendy Strehlow, who bring great gravitas to their roles as senior hospital staff, and Renee Lim and Rose Maher, who convey the youthful potential of those who should never be driven to contemplate suicide. Grace Under Pressure should be seen widely, so that what is often just news becomes knowledge, becomes action.

Seymour Centre & The Big Anxiety — Festival of Arts+Science+People: Grace Under Pressure, writers David Williams, Paul Dwyer, with Sydney Arts & Health Collective, director David Williams, performers Renee Lim, Rose Maher, Sal Sharah, Wendy Strehlow, dramaturg Paul Dwyer, lighting designer Richard Manner, sound designer Gail Priest, set and costume designer Isabel Hudson; Seymour Centre, Sydney, 25-28 Oct

Australian theatre director Benedict Andrews’ feature film debut is a tense, chilling account of a young woman, Una (Rooney Mara), vengefully confronting Ray, a former neighbour (Ben Mendelsohn), who sexually abused her when she was a child (played by Ruby Stokes in flashbacks). The encounter is staged within a huge, sleek factory, a symbolic labyrinth underlining the film’s moral ambiguities, in which Ray, a foreman on the way up, has been tasked by his bosses to choose who of his workmates should be sacked as the company downsizes. Austerity economics and sexual abuse make a double villain of Ray, but writer David Harrower and director Andrews want us to think better of him, a fascinating test of Mendelsohn’s calculatedly low-key characterisation and the screenplay’s logic. Coolly shot by Thimios Bakatakis (cinematographer for The Lobster and The Killing of the Sacred Deer by director Yorgos Lanthimos), Una is well worth seeing, not least for those who know Harrower’s play Blackbird from which the film has been adapted. KG

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In the wake of Nat Randall and Anna Breckon’s success with The Second Woman, it’s time to consider the film and the performance that inspired it, celebrated in a superb article from 1994 about performance and identification by Lesley Stern.

Perhaps I Want to be Gena Rowlands

“I’m not me. I used to be me. I’m not me anymore,” says Myrtle Gordon, extemporising freely and playing for laughs. Or perhaps it’s Gena Rowlands who speaks here — acting out for all she’s worth and upstaging her own character. It’s the Broadway opening night of a play called The Second Woman and she, the famous actress, has arrived late and gone on stage so drunk she can hardly stand. But we are not actually at the theatre — we are watching the final sequence of a film called Opening Night (John Cassavetes, 1978) which tells the story of Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) and the difficulty she experiences in playing the part of a woman unable to come to terms with ageing.

Opening Night a film is pertinent to current interests: it theatricalises the body, particularly the female body, and dramatises the self — as performance. But to tell the truth, I’m only writing this because I want to contemplate the incomparable Gena Rowlands, to watch this movie over and over again so I might come to know through her many faces, her every quizzical gesture and gut-wrenching grimace, each goofy trick she plays, how it is she’s so sublime. Perhaps I want to be Gena Rowlands. Well yes, but not entirely, for part of me wants her to remain other, out there, up on the screen. I want to watch her again and again because of this: for all the harrowing intensity that frequently accrues to her presence I emerge from her films exhilarated and invigorated — always it is as though I have been taken by surprise, have seen and experienced something new.

In performing, Rowland enacts the declaration, “I like to act” — and this makes me believe that I too can be an actor. Yet it isn’t simply a showing off of pleasure that is inspiring, it is as though the history of herself as a performing body, the skills that have been learnt in her previous stage and film incarnations — in earlier Cassavetes’ films for instance, such as Faces (1968), Minnie and Moscowitz (1971) and Woman Under the Influence (1975) — are written into each role she plays — who knows — there is the possibility that I too can learn those skills, can aspire to a more decidedly nuanced body and way of being in the world.

Gena Rowlands is an actress who particularly foregrounds acting as a process of production (as an engendering of the body) and Opening Night is a film that is particularly concerned with various regimes of fictionality (film, theatre, the quotidian) and also with the very question of identity and identification. It explores the question of how to act: on the most mundane level — how to act when the world and self are disintegrating; and on a more specialised level — how to act on the stage, how to perform a fictional identity, how to seduce an audience.

How to act: for Myrtle this problem is acutely professional and therefore practical, but insofar as it is a matter of identity, it is not separate from her personal or ‘private’ life. It has to do with the troubled relationship between character and actor and with the way in which fictional energy exploits this tension to generate belief and knowledge (and love and despair). Likewise, the film struggles to find a way of articulating this tension. The film itself and the filmic body are both subject to disintegration and marked by resilience. This tensile reciprocity characterises what I call histrionic cinema.

While ‘histrionic’ denotes something about film that is actorly, I use the notion to refer to more than the register of acting. Rather, we might say that in the histrionic a particular relationship exists between the actorly performance and the filmic; the film is conceived within the parameters of a dramaturgy that is not centred on character, but this is nevertheless charged by an intense investment in acting. The cinematic codes tend to be ostentatious and their very amplification owes something to the theatrical imagination — not theatre in terms of staging or even representation, but in terms of an enactment, a fictionality realised through a world that is acted out, in the process of acting up. This suggests the creation and mobilisation of a world that is fraught with surplus value, a world in which objects, scenic terrains, the cinematic landscape itself, are charged as if by the supernatural, as if possessed.

Myrtle Gordon is faced with a conundrum: if she identifies with the character Virginia, with the role she has been assigned (and everyone attempts to persuade her that this is her life), if she plays the part well she will then be identified by her audience as old and her career will be severely limited. If she plays the part badly then her career and identity are also likely to be ruined. The suspense of the film hinges on the question of how and if this conundrum can be resolved. Narratively, it hinges on the question of whether Myrtle — given that she seems to be finding it harder and harder to stay in touch, is drinking excessively, prone to hysterical outbursts, haunted by a malevolent ghost and on occasion herself possessed — will make it to opening night at all. However, there are trajectories here other than narrative ones. One of the major questions is that of how to play. “I’m looking for a way,” Myrtle tells the playwright Sarah, “to play this part where age doesn’t make any difference.”

There are two pivotal ‘events’ in the film. Firstly, what I refer to as the “slapping scenario” — there is a scene in The Second Woman where Virginia has to be hit across the face; Myrtle simply cannot play the scene, and a great deal of drama is generated around her struggle to play and simultaneously resist. Secondly, Myrtle is haunted by a ghost, a young girl fan who is initially comforting but turns extremely nasty so that Myrtle eventually has to exorcise her in an extremely violent encounter. Myrtle’s problem is not that she confuses on-stage and off-stage activities but that she condenses two moments: the girl being hit by a car in the street and herself being hit on stage. The difficulty she has in playing the slapping scene is not to be construed simply as a refusal of violence; more profoundly — and less coherently — it is a resistance to passivity and resignation. It is not the slap in and of itself that troubles and confuses her; in fact the condensation she performs (and the film enacts this cinematically) poses the slap as a gestus that actualises the discursive violence she is experiencing. And her conjuring up and eventual exorcism of the ghost is a way of transforming the scenario.

It is often unclear — during all the rehearsals, improvisations and enactments — whether we are watching, in Myrtle’s hysterical reactions, a consummate drama queen going over the top, or simply a woman cracking up. I think both. At once. Myrtle refuses the terms of the transaction, the brutality of the representational act, but her refusal is not considered, not subject to planning and judgement; something in her refuses — to grow old gracefully, to submit to passivity and being without weapons — but her refusal is inchoate, non-discursive, primarily somatic. It is however a process of improvisation, of working out how to play this part. And it absorbs us because of Gena Rowlands’ acting, her fictionalisation, and the way this is articulated by and with the cinematic codes.

Her ‘crack-up’ is made manifest through a skilful deployment of energy, of bodily rhythms, of shifting vocal intensities. And these modalities are echoed by the camera’s insistent unblinking attention, the long takes often in extreme close-up, hovering and hand-held, the juxtaposition of angles and the sudden recourse to extremely distanced long shots. We know that she (Myrtle) is playing a part or parts, and we know that the identity between the actor (Gena Rowlands) and the character/s (Myrtle and Virginia) is precarious, yet the more we know “the more difficult it is to believe and the more it is worth managing to do so.” (Jean-Louis Comolli).

What Myrtle does, in the end, after exorcising the ghost, is to turn the “slapping scenario” into slapstick. She turns the drama of identity (and age) into hilarious farce. As she goads Marty (played by Cassavetes), as she sends him up by making faces at the audience behind his back and gesticulating with hyperbolic abandon, so he rises to the bait, gets the giggles and enters the game of upping the ante. He becomes the one who is turning grey and becoming anxious about ageing — jumping up and down and thumping his chest like a chimpanzee — “I am Superman! I am Superman!”

Myrtle: OK, it’s definite then! We’ve been invaded. There’s someone posing here as us. And you’re right, there is definitely something wrong with your smile!

What I have referred to as the “I like to act” dynamic opens a space both of identification and contemplation. When Gena acts out the trope “I like to act,” I believe for a moment or more that I too can be an actor; I don’t primarily believe that I am her — Gena or Myrtle or Virginia (though I might get caught up in various regimes of fictionality) — but I know that I too can act differently, be somehow other.

Three films by John Cassavetes featuring Gena Rowlands — Faces (1968), A Woman Under the Influence (1974) and Opening Night (1977) — are included in a 2004 Criterion DVD box set. Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), Gloria (1980) and the sublime Love Streams (1984) are individually available on DVD.

Lesley Stern is a US-based Australian film scholar, writer and academic, author of Dead and Alive: The Body as Cinematic Thing (2012), the Scorsese Connection (1995) and The Smoking Book (1999).

Performance Space’s Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art proved once again that it can challenge and exhilarate, generate intense debate, and party. This week we look at Eisa Jocson’s Corponomy, LabAnino’s This Here. Land (image above), Tetsuya Umeda’s Ringo, Mark Harvey’s Helping Hand, Lz Dunn’s AEON and Jen Jamieson’s Let’s Make Love, a fine constellation of works that expanded our sense of what is possible, formally and emotionally. Next week we’ll conclude our Liveworks coverage with responses to Justin Shoulder’s remarkably inventive Carrion and Geumhyung Jeong’s challenging 7 Ways and her strangely enlightening Oil Pressure Vibrator. While Liveworks offers hope through creativity, the Australian Government delivers despair, whether in its escalating, utterly callous maltreatment of refugees and those refused that status, and its nonsensical clinging to the Adani Carmichael coal mine venture. As we head towards Christmas, there’s no time to party. Art is not enough. Make your voice heard now. Keith & Virginia

Top image credit: Andrew Cruz, This Here.Land, LabAnino, Liveworks 2017, photo Heidrun Löhr

In the era of digitally generated dopamine as stimulant of choice, are we losing the ability to manufacture our own oxytocin? This is a question that has enthralled Jen Jamieson, who greets me in hard yakka overalls lying on a small waiting room couch next to the Carriageworks box office. This and many other questions populate a 20-minute interaction that invites me to consider rebalancing this bonding hormone within my overall biological functioning. Having been temporarily separated from my partner for a month, I am attuned to how I might redress my oxytocin deficiency.

We kick off with a clinically orchestrated hug in view of patrons criss-crossing to various Liveworks events. In any theatre foyer, this first act requiring us straddle the tension between accepting intimacy and being offered up for incidental gawking. Armed with our first dose of oxytocin, we wander the backstage area like a pair of cells navigating the hidden bloodstream of Carriageworks, while Jamieson foregrounds her obsession with oxytocin from different angles. She asks me to consider the differences in male and female responses to the post-coital release of oxytocin and informs me that synthetically concocted volumes of it are used to strengthen tribal ‘in-group’ morale to aid effective military aggression, but also used in shopping centres to establish a warm emotional link with the act of consumption. Jamieson wears her uber-objective on her denim sleeve to help build resistance to these dehumanising actions.

Outdoors, we role-play a shared sense of adventure and, in the process, of building our trust; we pause to literally smell the flowers — a pinch of calming lavender leaves from pots placed strategically around the harsh concrete perimeter. Jamieson signals for us to walk past a metal scaffold structure that reaches a single storey high into the Redfern night sky. She indicates that we would be up there if not for gusty winds threatening the security of some of the props. Instead, I am ushered back into another corridor where a mattress wrapped in silk is installed. We lie side by side, hands held and I stare up into the cavernous space, allowing the shared silence to wash over me as I watch for any feeling of closeness. The rolling of trains punctuates this final meditative embrace. Head rested, I stare in to the distance until “Songs to the Siren” blasts from Jamieson’s phone to bookend the experience. Surely, the feeling of calm that washes over me indicates that oxytocin levels have been raised.

Jamieson leads me away from the space and gently informs me that it is time to disconnect and return to my own life, leaving mind, body and heart mildly discombobulated.

Jen Jamieson’s heartfelt mission acts like a soothing balm alongside Nat Randall’s marathon of tense gender micro-invalidations in The Second Woman. Let’s Make Love is spartan and seeks to unsettle the very forms that it attempts to engage with along the way — interactive biochemistry lecture, guided meditation and mini-date — all unfolding to allow moments of confected intimacy to spread through the concrete box that is Carriageworks. I walk away, still wondering if oxytocin alone can bridge the void we have blown open with our ubiquitous embrace of technology.

Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art and Proximity Festival: Jen Jamieson, Let’s Make Love, Carriageworks, Sydney, 11-29 Oct

Top image credit: Jen Jamieson and participant, Let’s Make Love, Liveworks 2017, photo Heidrun Löhr

In the foyer, like a shrine, looms a Hills Hoist, suspended upside down. Pegged on its sagging, rusty lines are photo negatives from the Filipino-Australian Berry family album alongside other bicultural paraphernalia — a serpentine jade-tinted Catholic rosary, a takeaway box from the Philippines’ own multinational fast food company Jolibee, an errant strip of a plastic doily and a single child-sized gumboot.

When the doors to the performance space open for LabAnino’s This Here. Land, a collaboration between Filipino-Australian and Philippines-based artists, Andrew Cruz’s welcome reminds us to keep our belongings close before crossing into yet another Manila migratory transplant. Unlike the interactive cardboard city of LabAnino’s 2011 production Within and Without at Blacktown Arts Centre, this Manila aspires to Instagrammable cultural cache, dotted with white gallery plinths, red carpets and golden bollards. Our first stop is at large double doors thrown open to reveal more Catholic imagery — a tableau comprising audience members from the previous performance crowded around as Kenneth Moraleda and Valerie Berry recreate an iconic image of one of Rodrigo Duterte’s drug-dealer widows cradling her bullet-ridden partner on the street.

It is an image that Cruz instructs us to illuminate with our phone torch apps before ushering us into the next area. There, in a graphic description of poet Jose Rizal’s execution, he energetically provides the bloody historical context of Filipino independence before splitting us into groups to experience stories that take place either in the heart of Manila or the hearth of the Berry household in Western Sydney. I end up at a street hawker stall where I’m served an instant coffee while listening to a working class man (Cruz) ranting in Tagalog (with Hazel Gutierrez interpreting) his begrudging working class approval of the killings, wishing to dissociate himself from what he perceives as the more criminal elements of his milieu.

Later, Gutierrez performs what could be termed an ultrasound-monologue, broadcasting her unborn child’s heartbeat from her pregnant belly. We also read its worries in a simultaneously projected text, lamenting being born to artist parents in tumultuous times.

Next, Berry whisks us away from manic Manila to peaceful corners of South Australia, reminiscing about many a family excursion aided by projections of old photos and Anino Shadowplay’s exquisite sand-based animation. When the Berrys move to Sydney, Moraleda, repeating the granular motif by cutting up a long coke-line made of Epsom salts, recalls bohemian life in 1990s inner city Redfern, where stereotypes of the suburb’s downtrodden residents abound, linking Australian and Filipino attitudes to drugs.

We wrap up our journey with a karaoke-soaked candlelit memorial for the fallen in Duterte’s war and are ushered into the foyer to form the tableau that greets the next audience.

This Here. Land presents an engaging collage of stories with a sense of continuity that evokes, if on a smaller scale and at some 35 minutes, Alexander Sokurov’s breathtaking Russian Ark (2002), its 96-minute continuous camera shot taking viewers through Russia’s tumultuous history reflected in St Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum collection. LabAnino is a dynamic ensemble. If at the time of viewing, This Here. Land narrowly subordinates the Berrys’ Australian suburban narrative, the sense of urgency expressed in highlighting contemporary Filipino social upheaval is palpable.

Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art, LabAnino, This Here. Land, artists Kenneth Moraleda, Valerie Berry, Teta Tulay, Datu Arellano, Andrew Cruz, Toni Muñoz, Hazel Gutierrez, Paschal Daantos Berry, with contributions from members of Anino Shadowplay Collective, lighting designer, Frank Mainoo, outside eye Paschal Daantos Berry, Deborah Pollard; Carriageworks, Sydney, 19-22 Oct

Top image credit: Hazel Gutierrez, This Here. Land, LabAnino, Liveworks 2017, photo Heidrun Löhr

The second week of Performance Space’s Liveworks had a more pervasive sense than the first of creative processes on show, experimentation and fascinatingly indeterminate outcomes. Next week, Cleo Mees will respond to Justin Shoulder’s remarkably inventive Carrion, and Nikki Heywood to Geumhyung Jeong’s challenging 7 Ways and the strangely enlightening Oil Pressure Vibrator.

One-on-one works yielded a strong sense of participants being intimately engaged in events quite out of the ordinary, if at the same time intricately tied to the everyday. Teik-Kim Pok experienced Jen Jamieson’s Let’s Make Love as “interactive biochemistry lecture, guided meditation and mini-date,” with each form now viewed from a new perspective. In Mark Harvey’s Helping Hand, Pok felt that the limits of everyday political conversation had been revealed by the amiable artist’s physical risk-taking. AEON, in which a number of participants and performers opt to engage in flocking behaviour, produced complex feelings and urges in Cleo Mees: “Questions thump in my chest: ‘What is happening? What will we all do? Also, what will I do? Will I run? Should I run? I really, really want to run.‘” The mark of each of these works, is the option for participants to decide the degree to which they will engage, although art’s seductiveness might well rule out a rational response.

Eisa Jocson’s Corponomy and Geumhyung Jeong’s Oil Pressure Vibrator were enlightening lecture demonstrations about process and vision. 7 Ways, which read like performance art staged as theatre and requiring the requisite audience patience, had the artist engaging erotically with everyday devices and sculpted heads given great agency via Jeong’s sometimes basic, sometimes virtuosic puppetry. Oil Pressure Vibrator revealed the artist’s astonishing rationale for her body of work with brief accounts of episodes seen in 7 Ways and, climactically, in a filmed work about her relationship with an industrial excavator.

Eisa Jocson, Corponomy

Jocson, seen in a previous Liveworks, as well as in Adelaide’s OzAsia Festival and Melbourne’s Asia TOPA, exercises gently on the floor to one side of the stage, stretching limbs before standing, facing a large screen and then vibrating furiously. She stops and moves to a table on the other side of the stage where she sits at her computer triggering a scrolling text that lists her productions and reveals Corponomy to comprise ‘corpus’ and ‘economy’ — a coinage complementing the artist’s consistent preoccupation with exploitation of the body, especially among poor and migrant workers. She will also (in tandem with an offstage technician) trigger videos that reveal an artform that attracts her, herself being taught and mastering it, and a glimpse of the finished work. The videos are incrementally added until they collectively fill the screen. Until the final episode Jocson does not speak.

For Death of the Pole Dancer (2011) we see Jocson watching, learning, performing dextrously and then, in the highly abstracted finished work, moving slowly and sinuously before plunging dramatically down the pole. Onstage she puts on boots and engages in new exercises to prepare her body for Macho Dancer (2013) where we witness her onscreen observing the young men, often from poor backgrounds, who perform erotically for both men and women. Poster images of them in embrace or in the role of St Sebastian flicker by before we see Jocson being vigorously instructed and then, her musculature more pronounced, performing the resulting work. There’s reference to her Philippines Macho Dancing Academy and manual of 2014. Onstage Jocson echoes what we’ve seen onscreen, flexing and breathing emphatically, her body now that of a macho dancer.

Host (2015) addresses the role many Japanese women no longer wish to commercially enact and which Filipinos, female or transgender, will, often in Japanese guise. We see Jocson observing and being taught traditional dance with fan and umbrella by a Filipino transwoman entertainer, performing Filipino Sexbomb dancing and moving to K-pop. In an interview Jocson calls Host “a one-woman-entertainment-service-machine” with which she investigates “how these women negotiate their femininity, or their Filipino identity, in relation to the idea of the female-male identity in Japan.”

For the final episode of Corponomy, Happyland Part 1: Princess, Jocson gathers up her hair in a girlish bob with a red ribbon, slips on red shoes (but not the costume seen in the photograph from the actual production) and shows a scene from Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the excerpt opening with the princess saying to the dwarfs, “I didn’t mean to frighten you…I was afraid.” Jocson and another performer, her collaborator on the project, learn a song and choreography for the Snow White role but, as we are told, “In Disneyland Hong Kong, a legion of dancers from the Philippines are employed as professional entertainers to repeat formatted performances of ‘happiness’ as their daily labour. Excluded from the main roles reserved for specific racial profiles, they are assigned anonymous supporting roles.” In response, “two Filipino performers hijack the white-skinned princess, the archetypal model that dominates the narrative imagination of children while excluding their context, bodies and histories.”

Jocson becomes Snow White; adopting a cute falsetto and sweet giggle she moves among us, asking, “What’s your name?” and, in one instance, “What food do you like?” The answer, “Apple pie,” prompts the only near break in the facade: “I like adobo, which is chicken marinated in vinegar and soy sauce, and I miss it.” Jocson returns to the stage, gradually dismantling her role and becoming, among other things, the Macho Dancer, fake innocence turning muscular and ambiguously sexual as her version of herself and the words, “I didn’t mean to frighten you…” ever so slowly fade. It’s a chillingly triumphant conclusion.

Jocson’s commitment to researching and coming to understand the economic necessities that can drive art-making and, in some forms, the exploitation of that human capacity, is palpably felt because she is willing to embody and, where necessary, critique those practices. Corponomy is an admirable summing up of an evolving body of work, adroitly constructed to delineate the subject, the body regime, the learning, the work, and, not least, though few words are spoken, the thinking and its incisive delvery, as in the interview cited above: “The entrenchment of American culture in the psyche of the Filipino people has produced disciplined bodies suitable for affective labour in the happiness empire.”

Tetsuya Umeda, Ringo

Compared with Eisa Jocson, who finds and fashions movement forms she has encountered and which intrigue her politically, and Geumhyung Jeong, who anthropomorphises domestic and industrial devices to calculatedly erotic and self-transformative ends, Osaka-based sound artist Tetsuya Umeda is an artist whose work brings to mind Alexander Calder’s dictum on abstract art: “This has no utility and has no meaning, it is simply beautiful. It has great emotional effect if you understand it. Of course, if it it meant anything it would be easier to understand, but it would not be worthwhile.”

An apparent experimenter, Umeda is an artist at work in his lab — the space we share with him. Expressionless, casually attired, tool belt around his waist, he restlessly manipulates the lights, objects, liquids, wiring, switches and strange devices littered about the floor. When not triggering or layering sounds or setting up for cause and effect (adding liquid or chemicals or a tiny microphone to containers), he’ll occasionally step back from the attention-demanding minutiae to gauge the space or the evolution of his sono-kinetic creation. Early on he generates a big picture by hoisting high a partly filled, spinning plastic water bottle, angling light to project it onto a wall, later adjusting it so the image becomes a huge abstract whirlpool. Umeda persistently balances small aural and visual detail with his overarching building of a sculpted space and a musical composition.

On the floor are littered myriad devices including small gas cookers, buckets, rubbish bins, conjoined tin cans, a wine bottle, a large hollow glass ball, a car battery and a block of dry ice, which Umeda chisels and hammers. He casually strokes a thin metal pole releasing high harmonics and by turning the pole rapidly in the dry ice block unleashes an elephantine trumpeting. Ringo is full of such surprises — unusual sounds from unlikely sources — some short-lived, some enduring and accumulative, building texture and structure. A suspended horn speaker with a small screen attached picks up a voice which gradually becomes chant-like, growing deeper and increasingly guttural, yielding a persistent sense of ritual.

As Umeda moves among his devices, he takes precautions, puts on gloves (if not always with the dry ice) and mops spilled liquids, enhancing the sense of risk and experiment (and playing the audience with a repeated party trick). Lighting flickers inexplicably. Some things look risky, but are doubtless not. In dimmed light, Umeda adds more and more water to the glass ball, which has within it a pulsing, glowing filament. Reaching in, he places a small device, a microphone perhaps, at the base, instantly triggering a vigorous boiling motion and corresponding burbling. It’s a memorable image in a work with many striking moments, small and large, and an arc that moves from quiet subtleties to a climactic passage — the voice agitated, siren ringing, horn trumpeting and a deep pulsing, from who knows where. It completes itself with a long, sustained, grainy note, interrupted by odd outbursts of cracked dialogue. Umeda switches on the room lights. Illusion over.

Though an improvised composition with many instrumental variables, Ringo has a pleasing cogency, as does the overall audio-visual shaping of the performance: fluent, cumulative and reforming organically after absorbing a plethora of surprises. Tetsuya Umeda is a humble magician, trickster, visual artist, sound artist, composer and ritualist of the everyday.

The extent to which Ringo is experimental, given that its form is of a kind Umeda has used regularly and travelled widely with, depends on the performance spaces he must adjust to, new elements and devices he chooses to add to his collection, and the inevitable variables introduced by often lo-fi devices that are not necessarily stable. The work seems more improvisational than strictly experimental, the outcome broadly predictable, but full of invention and potential in its detail. It’s interesting to note that in other works Umeda has collaborated with the faux violent ensemble contact Gonzo who tussle around his music-making and a large scale work in Korea that includes strings, brass and architectonic lighting. It would be good to see more of his work in Australia.

Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art: Corponomy, Eisa Jocson, 22 Oct; Ringo, Tetsuya Umeda, 25-28; Carriageworks, Sydney

Top image credit: Eisa Jocson, Happyland Part 1: Princess, in The Greatest Show, photo © Anja Beutler courtesy Liveworks 2017

The commemoration of actor-comedian John Clarke’s passing and the ascent of film director Taika Waititi (Boy, 2010, and Hunt for the Wilderpeople, 2016) has thrust irreverent Kiwi humour back into the public consciousness in its dealing with dark worldviews with warmth and laconic resilience. In a similar spirit, the series of public exchanges that Aotearoa artist Mark Harvey offers in Helping Hand may raise chuckles at first, but his personal charm merges cheery humour with acts of dogged openness. The work aims to address the effects of decentred, social-mediatised discussion and asks us to question the ideological filter bubbles through which we conduct political discussion with strangers.

Out of seven different exchanges on offer, I make it to three: Thought Leader, Backward Conversation and Face Down Projections, each occupying or traversing various Carriageworks spaces.

There are no bookings to be made with Harvey. I find him by spotting a festival minder who keeps a respectful distance. Harvey is either waiting for someone to make the first move or is already deeply engaged in conversation with participants, which I am invited into as soon as he catches my eye.

In Face-Down Projections, the artist invites participants to stand on his back while he lies flat on his stomach on harsh concrete and during which he claims to be able to measure our individual carbon footprint. With the help of the artist minder, I take a moment to stabilise my position on the artist’s back before heading into a discussion about climate change and energy policy, checking my balance every so often. Mostly I am concerned about my daily energy consumption converted into body mass and the force I’m placing on his coccyx.

For Thought Leader, I find the artist blindfolded and being led by another participant, who clocks my approach and hands him over. I am instructed to steer Harvey on a walk around Carriageworks by placing my hand on his back while simultaneously offering some thoughts on, well, thought leadership. Initially stumped, I offer a half-baked TED talk impersonation on embracing failure and change as I navigate the physical obstacles ahead. I query Harvey as to why he’s seeking my advice; he simply replies that “as a white male, I feel like I just need to receive.”

For the last encounter, Backwards Conversation, a small group of us discuss the Australian Government citizenship debacle of the day while following the artist who leads us by walking backwards, tracing the entire, vast Carriageworks foyer. We continue without a hiccup, only momentarily interrupting the conversation to warn Harvey of any obstacles behind him. Sadly, my progressive cultural bubble isn’t challenged in this conversation with other live art afficionados. Instead, what Mark Harvey manages to illuminate is that by making physical peril a prerequisite to conversation, we are forced to consider the stakes of voicing our opinions to each other. If passionate disagreements arose at any point, would we have been thrown off our emotional centres and stopped looking out for our own and the artist’s safety? At what cost and risk are we prepared to voice those views?

Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art: Mark Harvey, Helping Hand; Carriageworks, Sydney, 10-20 Oct

Top image credit: Mark Harvey & participant, Face-Down Projections, Helping Hand, Liveworks 2017, photo Lucy Parakhina

I’m hearing my voice played back, out of context, asking, “What’s meant to be happening?” According to the instruction manual, the headset I’m wearing records the sounds of the exhibition space, delaying them by two, four or six seconds. The participant can choose in which of these time differences they will experience the space by pressing a series of buttons on the side of the recording device.

This experience comprises the audio component of Antoinette J Citizen’s multiplatform work Apparatus and Method for Time Displacement (2017), exhibited in the multimedia triennale, Experimenta: Make Sense. The exhibition contains 19 works that employ technology as a means via which to explore an overwhelming array of political, social, scientific and personal subject matters. The result is an immersive sense of disorientation that vacillates between gratifyingly deliberate and unfortunately inadvertent.

Particularly powerful is Robert Andrew’s installation Moving from the Binary (2017), exploring the loss of context and autonomy that colonisation inflicts upon Indigenous cultures. In a complex process of translation, Yawuru phrases and their English equivalents are coded mechanically as a machine processes the textual information as temporal action. This takes the form of a pair of rocks grinding slowly across the surface of a metal table covered in a layer of red dirt. Over time, the movement pushes away the dirt, allowing light to filter through holes in the table onto the floor. The negative space here slowly pieces together shards of light onto dirt residue to form the word “buru,” meaning land, country, time and space. In this way, the machine reveals what is lost in colonial translation. As it converts the difference between the Yawuru “marlu milarrjin,” and the English, “don’t forget,” into the frictional slide of the rocks, the encompassing notion of being and place is written in fragments, and can be viewed only in absentia. In this sense, the repetitive three-hour process of Andrew’s work draws attention to the dispossession of land and cultural sovereignty that manifests in language as a silence and a silencing, but which is present nonetheless in the gaps between the binary of coloniser and colonised.

Lauren Edmonds’ work also enacts a loss of context via the medium of the mechanical. A cardboard Rube Goldberg machine, the piece invites viewers to stamp a piece of paper with the phrase “I DUN GOOD.” This action propels an implement forward to click an oversized and alternating “SIGN PETITION” or “LIKE” button on a touch tablet. The work’s comment is sardonic and self-evident, asking the viewer to participate in a hollow gesture, void of direct action in a manner that mocks the kind of hashtag activism saturating social media platforms. Disappointingly, though amusing in its interactivity, the farcical mechanism fails to transcend the self-satisfaction that it satirises. The work has no function outside of the spoof it performs. Because of this, the viewer’s interaction with the work produces a smugness akin to that which the piece is positioned to skewer.

In contrast to Edmonds’ interest in actions of little consequence, Matthew Gardiner’s The Folded Geometry of the Universe (2016) attempts to visually encompass a sense of infinite expansion. Taking the form of a 3D-printed sculpture, curled nautilus-like atop a plinth, the piece employs mathematical modelling to represent the series of space-time folds that constitute our universe. These folds are apparent on the outer-surface of the sculpture, which recedes elegantly in on itself in a jagged whorl. Prompted by the wall text, we are invited in looking upon the work, to “contemplate an infinity of folds as time oscillates between being and nothingness.”

Without this context, the work would perhaps have appeared simply as an example of the sculptural grace that may be born out through the medium of 3D printing. However, the ideological grandiosity the work strives for is in some ways hindered by its visual humility. As the most static work in the exhibition, the piece struggles to bear out the sense of motion implicit in its thematic concern with time folding and unfolding. The empty space that constitutes its core hints at simultaneity, at presence and absence, “being and nothingness,” and its coiled form and repetitious shape touch upon notions of endless iteration. Yet as exhibits all around it seek to expand our sense of the world — visually, temporally, spatially, sonically — the investigation taking place in The Folded Geometry of the Universe appears comparatively unresponsive.

There is a tendency in an exhibition like this for the novelty of sensory experience to overwhelm ideas that are less tangible than the technological means used to illustrate them. Though visually compelling, Gail Priest’s installation SonoLexic (2017) is challenged in this way. Entering the space, the viewer comes to stand in a spot-lit circle at the centre of a darkened room. Here they are faced with a thin tube, across which holograms of neon-coloured light waver, peak and flow in accordance with a soundscape that rumbles and hums ominously. At different moments throughout the 26-minute cycle the sound morphs into short breathy notes or a textural hiss, and the hologram responds by mapping out a delicate pink staccato across the length of the tube. There is text too, that scrolls by at intervals, posing questions such as “where do the words go after they have been read?” The text fundamentally serves the work’s examination of how words echo and resonate, how sound is internalised and described, or externalised and embodied. However, the lasting impression of the work is of having been transported to the set of a science fiction film, and while this is a joy in itself, Sonolexic perhaps falls short of the artist’s searching. (You can see Sonolexic here.)

Shuffling between the screens and soundscapes and switches and dials, my experience of the exhibition is shadowed by the pervading sense that technology is as much a creator of distance as it is a means of engagement. I feel this acutely as I adjust the headset for the visual component of Citizen’s Apparatus… and try to make out half-formed figures on the dim VR-screen. They’re sketchy impressions of visitors moving through the space throughout the day, recorded by an overhead monitor, then played back. I catch glimpses of people putting on the headset, as I just have, but the rest is a blur.

After a moment, I put down the headset and puzzle over whether the experience, of the work and the exhibition as a whole, is truly engaged in an enactment of the digital’s fragmentation of context. This seems to be the case, as the shared medium of the technological, in conjunction with the exhibition’s theme, sees all of the works, directly or tangentially isolate, manipulate or dislocate the contextual information that ordinarily constitutes our perception. Yet, this feeling of disorientation and distance could just as easily be the result of something vital having inadvertently slipped my grasp in the deluge of information and sound and images. For the most part, I want to believe that it’s the former, as it’s in this way that Experimenta makes sense.

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, Katarina Zdjelar; RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2 Oct-11 Nov

Two pieces of information return to me throughout the experience of AEON and the hours that follow: that flocking birds work in a context of uncertainty, and that flocks are physically a bit like “flying avalanches.”

These facts are written on cards that we, a group of eight participants, read out to each other at the beginning of our journey. The other key piece of information we receive at this time is that there are no leaders or followers, and no right or wrong ways to experience this work. With a portable audio speaker in hand and no further instructions (except to refrain from speaking), our facilitator turns us loose into Sydney Park.

It strikes me immediately that what happens next — what we do next — is potentially in all of our hands. I have agency, and I have responsibilities: to find a listening place between leading and following, to remain open to possibilities on all sides.

We drift over open grasses, filter through banks of trees. We snag and billow, form momentary intimacies that swiftly dissolve. Our portable speakers emit unique streams of sound that feel both electronic and organic. Together we tick, rumble and caw — a haunting, syncopated chorus. Eventually, we see it: a much larger flock of people, up against a hillside. It is clear that this is where we are headed.

We meet, and merge. A sea of half-strangers, weaving, feeling each other out. Unique soundstreams moving in and out of earshot. In this slowly churning mix, something starts to shift: individuals break into sprints, running for their lives in great, swooping arcs, and then return to walking. The running feels urgent, and looks delicious to do. Questions thump in my chest: “What is happening? What will we all do? Also, what will I do? Will I run? Should I run? I really, really want to run.”

Flocks are like flying avalanches, and these runners feel like an avalanche. The vivacity of their movement tugs at me, pulls me toward flight. But most people are not running, and there are no instructions to run (or not to run), and is it really my place to run? I recognise, somewhere in this mix of intense longing and uncertainty, something that relates to emergent frontiers in my own desire and becoming. I also reflect, later, that other responses, including the desire not to run, might have been just as compelling.

I give it a go: I run as fast as I can over the sloping grass. The running feels full, energising. I try again — longer this time. And again.

As the crowd drifts on through the park, those who initiated the running (and who are gradually emerging as AEON’s collaborating artists) start to do other things. They bounce rhythmically on their haunches, rub up against trees, balance experimentally on rocks and logs. Later, their movements evolve again: they become bolder, more sexual. The expanding, expressive vocabulary of this group throws into question what is okay for me to do, and simultaneously floods me with longing and awe, so that by the time we reach the edge of the park, I am brimming with feeling.

This is what AEON, a study of flocking and queer ecologies, facilitates so effectively: an immersive encounter with the feelings of these phenomena — uncertainty, agency, desire, becoming — which have both personal and wider ecological significance.

Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art: AEON, lead artist, concept, performer Lz Dunn, choreographer Shian Law, sound artist Lawrence English, performers Carly Sheppard, William McBride, Kieran Bryant, Bonnie Cowan, Leila El Rayes, Caroline Garcia, Loren Kronemyer, Rhiannon Newton, Sue Reid, Ian Sinclair, Dinda Timperon, dramaturg Lara Thoms; Sydney Park, 19-22 Oct

Leading Australian sound artist, composer and curator Lawrence English once described to an interviewer the origins of his passion for field recording, an art that has taken him around the world to many a unique location, as you’ll gather from sampling his works on SoundCloud. In the 1980s, his father would take him and his brother bird-watching or, as instructed in the case of the reed warbler, bird-listening — to first close their eyes in order to locate the hard-to-find bird: “It sounded incredible, like a modular synthesizer on steroids,” writes English.

For his performance in the Cleveland Contemporary Music Event (CCME), English will present Viento: Blizzards of Antarctica and Beyond, mixing sounds he recorded at Argentina’s Antarctic Station. He writes, “The wind battered the base structures and telecommunications equipment, making a range of unusual tonal phase drones, which you can hear in the recordings… Listening back to these recordings I am struck by the sheer physicality of the wind. It’s rare that you feel physically reduced by the motion of air, but in both Patagonia and Antarctica that is just how I felt. A small speck of organic dust in a howling storm.”

Rather than a documentary, Viento is field recording as visceral poetry and it’s about the intersection between what English heard, recorded and will mix in the theatre and what each listener in the audience will experience, refracted by their own associations when the Antarctic blizzards buffet their ears, as the artist explained to me by email while on a European tour.

In the festival press release, you describe your concerts as “innately synaesthetic.” In what sense are they synaesthetic?

That statement applies more to my solo musical works such as Cruel Optimism. There is a point of nexus where sound transgresses audition and becomes ‘physical,’ where I think a point of synaesthetic realisation can and does occur. This ties into the work I am doing in performance around the concept of the body as an ear — recognising the notion of vibration, more broadly, as an approachable material comprehension of sound.

Will the audience, as you did, feel the force of the winds and sense being reduced to a speck?

With Viento I think the experience is more personal and interior. I think with sound, especially field recordings, there’s an invitation extended to the audience to invest themselves in the sound and complete their understanding of those sounds based on their own experiences and memories. I’ve performed this piece many times now and after almost every performance I’ve had people come up to me and explain where the sounds took them. Some people have told me about memories of being children during big storms or one person recounted being trapped on a boat during a hurricane. Sound is so very pliable in a sense and that opens it up to people, giving them an opportunity to connect to it in ways that can be very direct.

What form will the concert take in terms of structure and the placement of your audience and the sound system?

Viento is in two parts: two distinct storms or blizzards that were recorded in the summer of 2010. It’s essentially a diffusion piece in the classical sense. I use as many speakers as possible to route the work throughout the space, moving around the sound and highlighting certain qualities of the room, the speakers and the piece. It’s very dynamic in that sense. It’s about playing with the space and dimensions of the room and also the system itself. The mixer is the instrument.

For an audience unused to this kind of work, do you encourage ‘eyes shut’? And do you provide an introduction, for example about field recording?

I think concerts like this are a wonderful excuse to reject ocularcentrism for sure. That said I do introduce the piece and explain how the work happened and some of the experiences I had in Antarctica making the pieces. I think it’s important to create a doorway through which people can approach the work. Once you let yourself walk into the room, a universe of possibility opens up and I know from personal experience the beauty that lies within that place.

Playing this week in the Cleveland Contemporary Music Events are concerts by Kupka’s Piano (Friday, 3 November) and ELISION (Saturday, 4 November). Read about these concerts by leading, adventurous Australian musicians and local and international composers here.

Cleveland Contemporary Music Event: Lawrence English, Viento: Blizzards of Antarctica and Beyond; Redland Performing Arts Centre, Cleveland, Brisbane, 10 Nov

Top image credit: Viento, Blizzards of Antarctica and Beyond, Lawrence English, photo courtesy the artist

Spread over three days and two venues — the Adelaide Festival Centre, including the Space Theatre and Dunstan Playhouse, and the Queen’s Theatre in Adelaide’s west end — and presented as part of the 2017 OzAsia Festival, the biennial Australian Theatre Forum was held in Adelaide this year for the first time, attracting nearly 300 delegates from every state and territory (and one from Canada). In keeping with previous forums (the last was held in Sydney) co-curators Alexis West and Steve Mayhew, in their program note, described this year’s conversations as “an opportunity for a sector and those present to find out more, to feel connected, to rally, to identify, to feel heard, to impart knowledge, guidance and much more.”

Real diversity

In low-key introductions, West called for utopian visions, tolerance, diversity and access while Mayhew reflected on the “devastated and devastation” of the last two years [Vitalstatistix Director Emma Webb’s paper incisively revealed the extent of the damage. Eds], describing ATF 2017 as “a love letter, a suicide note and a freshly written to-do list.”

Some numbers give a sense of the diversity of the forum’s delegates, who self-identified as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (31), culturally and linguistically diverse (47), disabled (25), deaf but not disabled (3), them or they (5), LGBTQI+ (58), regional (70) and young or emerging (78). Perhaps, as I heard a few delegates grumble over the three days, the only underrepresented group was the major performing arts companies.

Learning to listen

Each day saw a mix of events adding up to a more conversational approach than in previous forums — fewer panels, Q&As and roundtables, and more informal discussions, surrounded by scattered keynotes, sector updates and “considered responses.” Many of the conversations were organised around a model — a little unwieldy at times — whereby an inner circle of chairs was reserved for those who wished to speak, and an outer circle for those who preferred to listen. The importance of listening, flagged by the forum’s motto, “listen, examine, speak, celebrate,” became a recurring theme. Director and dramaturg Sarah Dunn, in her day one considered response, told us “I don’t know; I’m listening” were “words to speak over and over,” while, in what was billed as a “provocative pep talk” on day two, South Australian Dignity Party representative Kelly Vincent asserted that there is “no such thing as voiceless groups — just stories we haven’t learned to listen to yet.”

Sharing in silence

Additionally, over the course of the three days a “keynote project” unfolded, an iteration of Performance Encyclopaedia by Toronto-based experimental performance collective Public Recordings. The project saw six Australian writers collaborate with co-creators Tomoyuki Arai, Shannon Cochrane, Ame Henderson and Evan Webber to create, print and bind a text featuring reflections on keywords selected by the writers before the forum, as well as responses to the various conversations. The performance itself took place on the forum’s final day during which delegates read the text in silence for one hour before it went “out of print,” providing a welcome moment of shared experience and stillness within a crowded, often intense program designed to be navigated individually.

Timeliness and its limits

The theme of this year’s forum was “About Time,” aptly chosen for its suggestion of live performance’s temporality but more significantly for its intimations of change, too long delayed, perhaps finally having come. Conversations around diversity and the problem of cultural homogeneity in arts practice and governance have figured heavily, albeit sometimes divisively, at events of this kind for some time, but their deep integration in this year’s program felt new, a sign perhaps of an emerging paradigm. In her day one keynote responding to the theme “Our Status Quo,” Indigenous designer Linda Kennedy called for a decolonisation of our theatre, an idea that manifested throughout the forum in conversations that touched on non-Western dramaturgies, colonialist myth-making and best practice for arts organisations working with Indigenous artists who have inherited a legacy of dispossession. In his day three keynote, “Possibilities and Futures,” Indigenous performer and curator Jacob Boehme urged artists and organisations to embrace “60,000 years of dramaturgy rather than performed culture on stage.”

There were designated safe spaces for First Nations and people of colour, and for women (a third, for LGBTQI+ people, was also mooted) while the forum was bookended by irreverent, politically charged opening and closing ceremonies led by Aunty Katrina Karlapina Power, the first, memorably, held at dawn on the Festival Centre’s Bistro balcony and concluding in several dozen sleepy-eyed delegates dancing to Yothu Yindi’s “Treaty” as the sun rose over the Torrens River/Karrawirra Pari. If the framing of the forum in this way signalled a timely corrective to the predominance of straight white male perspectives at previous national theatre sector gatherings — one need only glance back at the first ATF program in 2009 to see how much things have changed — then it perhaps came at a cost. The political tenor of many of the conversations risked exhausting and discouraging us, and failing to acknowledge the progress — however tenuous or incomplete — that has taken place since previous forums.

Making room for optimism

In counterpoint to the ‘heaviness’ of these conversations, others were conducted in optimistic, even visionary terms. In his keynote, Forest Fringe’s Andy Field exhorted us to take care of ourselves and each other, and to conceive of the works we make as “versions of the world we want to live in” and as “fragments of utopia.”

In her sector update, the Australia Council for the Arts’ Marion Potts, while acknowledging “undeniable inequities” in the states, the ongoing issue of gender parity and the risk aversion of the major companies, nevertheless insisted we have “a responsibility to be hopeful.” Drawing on a “desktop analysis” of 2018 theatre company seasons, she cited the burgeoning of a more nuanced conversation around regional performance, the positive reception of Australian work overseas and the “pushing up” of small to medium companies as reasons for hope.

I also detected a utopian strain in the conversations I joined, as well as a desire to embody hope in our processes, practices and politics. A range of both individual and collective measures to address the global ecological crisis were canvassed in a session titled “Imagination for Adaptation,” co-facilitated by producer Pippa Bailey who argued that, while individual artists were “doing great things” in this space, the cultural sector “has its head in its hands.” We discussed how cultural organisations could reduce their carbon footprint and mooted the creation of a body that could oversee this. In “The Spaces We Create to Create,” a conversation facilitated by the Malthouse’s Mark Pritchard, State Theatre Company of SA’s Elena Carapetis and Black Swan’s Jeffrey Jay Fowler, positive noises were made about improvements in diversity, access, and the representation of women in these companies, as well as their relationship to smaller arts organisations and artists working in the independent sector.

Any single view of a program as far-ranging as this forum’s is bound to be partial and highly subjective. It’s also true, as is often observed of such events, that many of the most interesting conversations happen informally, in the cracks of the official schedule — the meal breaks and after hours meet-ups when the pressure is off and guards are lowered. Unlike in 2015, too, there was no grand concluding gesture (however symbolic) at this year’s ATF, no lens with which we could look back on the previous three days with a sense of unified purpose. Instead we were left with echoes. As Jacob Boehme, looking forward two years in his keynote, implored us “to be, embody, and to do,” I found myself thinking back to UK performance artist Jo Bannon’s presentation on the first day, and her provocation that seemed to ring throughout the forum: “How can we unfuck the world?” By talking, yes, but by doing too, and through the embodiment of a politics of the radical.

2017 OzAsia Festival: Australian Theatre Forum 2017, About Time, curators Steve Mayhew and Alexis West, producer Theatre Network Australia (TNA), Space Theatre, Dunstan Playhouse, Queen’s Theatre; Adelaide, 3-5 Oct

Top image credit: Steve Mayhew, Alexis West, Australian Theatre Forum 2017, photo Ben Searcy

In Danny Wild’s Around the Block (2014) discrete images are packaged up and reproduced as flow. Dimensions are rendered flat, yet they are layered. Distinct timescales are interlinked, while also giving narrative the slip. I am thinking about the American architect Greg Lynn and his articulation of a “smooth” theory of architecture. Smoothness, he writes “does not eradicate differences but incorporates free intensities through fluid tactics of mixing and blending.” Expanding on Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the fold, Lynn’s aim is to argue an alternative position in the longstanding deadlock around the two poles of unity and contradiction within architectural theory.

The unities and contradictions of a suburban block are turned into collage, which is turned into diorama, which is turned into a cul de sac. Here then we turn to detournment, the Situationist’s protocol for walking the streets. There we find Danny Wild with his camera. The shape of the cul de sac forces a turning. And turning predetermines volatile change — a known thing can and will morph into something unrecognisable. We have seen this in the case of Ramsay Street, our most famous cul de sac, which has delivered over 30 years of surprise twists.

Brick work, garden plants, carports, front lawns, powerlines, garbage bins. These are the kinds of free intensities that Wild makes smooth. Laid out in flat, postcard-like shapes, as if cut out from a newspaper, it’s as much the intricate affiliations of surface that create the smooth effect as it is the video’s visual spin, a streaming alliance of colours and shapes. As the single Australian flag in the video reminds us, unity is a troubling position to take. Contradiction, meanwhile, can easily be just another kind of holding pattern. So as viewers we are turned to a different, smoother mode of thinking where place remains particular as well as part of a greater sum. Emily Stewart

Sydney-based Danny Wild is a multidisciplinary artist, musician and curator who explores routine and repetition through audio, video, performance, installation and intervention. Since completing a Bachelor of Digital Art at the Australian National University in 2013 he has curated screenings, events and exhibitions nationally and internationally, exhibited in the Sydney Biennale, Tokyo and New York and is a founding member of audio-visual collective Zonk Vision.

Find

November 2017

The ARI writ large

Painting & paintwork

Admin, instruction & installation

Teen witchiness & play

Quoll resurrection

Headphone art

ARIs as a social system

Opening up the city

NZ on-site

ACT in The Commons

A festival to learn from

Sound Installations

Thebarton Theatre, Friday

Fowler’s Live, Friday

Thebarton Theatre, Saturday

Thebarton Theatre, Sunday

Discourse Program

Friday night, 17 Nov: Muriel’s Wedding, the film

Saturday night, 18 Nov: Muriel’s Wedding, The Musical

Good excess

Bad excess

DCC: Glitch

Ross Bolleter, Quarry Music

Mississippi Swan: Daybew

Anne LeBaron

A Wave and Waves

Imanuel Dado, What We Don’t See

Bhenji Ra: Approaching Gone (#ytfingers)

Carl Sciberras: Gbejniet

In Warmun

The project: car wrecks as family

The white house

An available wreck

Last year’s Wreck

This year’s model

The Wreck: neutral cultural zone

Ready to go

The concert

7 Ways

Oil Pressure Vibrator

City-Topias

Disruptive Critters

Perhaps I Want to be Gena Rowlands

Eisa Jocson, Corponomy

Tetsuya Umeda, Ringo

Real diversity

Learning to listen

Sharing in silence

Timeliness and its limits

Making room for optimism

realtime