Australian
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exploratory
performance and
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December 2017

“The death of net neutrality and RealTime in the same week was almost too much.”
Rebecca Conroy, Facebook, 15 Dec

A huge thank you for the multitude of phone calls, cards, emails and ever-escalating social media messages responding to the announcement that we’ve ceased regular publishing of RealTime. Some of you were “shocked,” “stunned,” even “gutted,” feelings we understand, but mostly, like us, you were sad but looking forward to the completion in 2018 of the enormous RealTime archive and a celebration of 25 years of freely accessible arts reportage.

The response — from arts audiences, artists, arts companies, organisations, publications and educational institutions — has been infinitely larger than anticipated and very rewarding, coming after years of never being sure how many of you were on track with us. Clearly more than we suspected.

It was especially gratifying to hear from non-artist readers for whom RealTime has provided awareness of works they would not otherwise have encountered from across Australia and beyond. Artists whose careers were supported or influenced by RealTime have expressed their gratitude.

Writers reflected on their years, in some cases decades, with us. Our special thanks to Ben Brooker and Matthew Lorenzon who posted affecting accounts on their blogs about working with RealTime, capturing some of the essence and joy of our collaborative venture. Former Assistant Editor and OnScreen Editor Kirsten Krauth who worked with us 1998-2002 posted a fond recollection on Facebook.

Very special thanks to our wonderful staff — writer and sales manager Katerina Sakkas, online producer Lucy Parakhina and writer and acting assistant editor (February-September) Lauren Carroll Harris — and our wise and compassionate Board of Management — Tony MacGregor, John Davis, Julie Robb, Urszula Dawkins, and Phillipa McGuinness. And to the Australia Council for the Arts its long-term support and understanding. We’ll be in touch in 2018.

Happy holidays, Keith & Virginia

From the Managing Editors and the Board of Management of Open City, publisher of RealTime.

RealTime is now ceasing regular publishing and will embark in 2018 on the task of completing its online archive and publicly celebrating its legacy of 25 years’ coverage of innovative Australian art.

“Reality check. This is the last edition of RealTime. It’s been an extremely difficult and a very sad decision to make to draw the magazine to a close — to cease weekly publishing at the end of 2017. In 2018, the magazine’s 25th year, we will complete the archiving of the deeply personal, totally consuming project that the magazine has been for us. It’ll be a year of reflection and celebration for RealTime’s many contributors, readers and supporters and, we hope, provide an enduring legacy — a unique record of a period in which the arts have radically transformed.” Virginia Baxter & Keith Gallasch, Managing Editors

RealTime, the national arts magazine uniquely focused on innovation and experimentation in the arts across Australia and beyond, is coming to an end. In 2018, its 25th year, the magazine will be published informally, but no longer on a weekly basis. Staff will focus on completing and making publicly accessible the enormous RealTime archive from 1994 to the present.

The decision: social media vs sustainability

This decision, made by the Board of Management of Open City and the Managing Editors and in close consultation with the Australia Council for the Arts, the association’s key funder since the magazine’s inception, was not an easy one. But it was a necessary one. Despite considerable creative and technical effort — and achievement — in 2016-17, it was clear the operation would soon become unsustainable, a result of the widely felt negative impact of social media on advertising sales.

2018: Archiving RealTime & celebrating an era

Across 2018, the Managing Editors will complete the magazine’s invaluable online archive, issue a number of special editions, commission historical overviews and conduct public forums surveying the period from the mid 1990s to the present of monumental change in the arts, much of it not easily accessed or otherwise on the public record. The archive, including digitised print editions of 1994-2000, will be freely available to artists, audiences, students and researchers with a plan to house it within a major arts institution.

A tribute to artists

Above all, the archive pays tribute to the work of the thousands of artists who inspired RealTime’s Managing Editors and writers with their bold reshaping of forms and genres, their experiments in hybridity, their embrace — and critiques — of new media technologies, cross-cultural exploration, art-science cross-pollination and the complexities of ethnic and gender identity.

…and to writers

The archive will equally pay tribute to the contribution of hundreds of writers, many of them artists and arts specialists, who have written generously for RealTime, some of them for over two decades, responding constructively in creatively turbulent times. We deeply regret we can no longer commission them to review new work by emerging and established innovators that warrants serious attention at a time when arts journalism is seriously threatened.

…and to readers, funders and supporters

The archive also represents a record of RealTime readers’ keen embrace of experimentation in Australian art. Our supportive advertising clients allowed us to commission extensively and our sponsor Vertel provided us with several years of superior network capacity.

The Australia Council for the Arts, from a seeding grant in 1994 for RealTime to its funding of Open City as an ongoing key organisation, has been a consistent and responsive funder of the magazine, its support allowing a significant breadth of national coverage and a focus on art that often defies categorisation and is ever enquiring.

…and our staff

The Board and Managing Editors pay particular tribute to the staff of RealTime who, across the decades, have been hard-working, generous, loyal and committed to supporting innovation in the arts.

Looking forward to the retrospective

The Open City Board, Keith and Virginia proudly welcome the opportunity to complete the RealTime project in 2018 and look forward to engaging with artists, writers and supporters in our grand retrospective of 25 years of transformed and transformational art.

Unmissable from the floor of the main hall of the Casula Powerhouse, the words “Have you seen MY Emily?” stretch grandly the length of a long mezzanine wall. On approach, you find it ends with a painting by Emily Kame Kngwarreye (Untitled, 1994) followed by six vertical video screens — a playful, experimental performative video work by Wiradjuri artist Amala Groom.

On each screen a woman speaks directly to you — as her partner in conversation or confidante as she comments on the exchange. It’s like arriving at a party and being rapidly addressed by a succession of eager strangers, six of them, taking turns that require you to shift attention from screen to screen, person to person and from a position of ignorance (especially if you arrive part way through) that requires you to piece together this reconstruction of an unsettling encounter. But this fascinating challenge for the viewer doesn’t stop there.

Glasses of champagne in hand, the women are elegantly outfitted and coiffed as discrete individuals — all of them played by Groom. But as the words flow, it dawns on you that three of these women, though differently attired, represent just one — the hostess for a reception — and that the other three are variations on Groom herself, the guest. What you are witnessing is in fact a dialogue but one distributed and multiplied to amplify a sense of party ambience, tension and subsequent reflection. It’s a cleverly immersive and simultaneously disorienting device.

Even if you take in the work at its starting point (not common in the weird world of video viewing in art galleries) where Groom’s personae lay the groundwork for the narrative, there’s still work to do, to accommodate the diversity of voices and the dispersion of the narrative and ponder their purposes. The narration, delivered by Groom in present tense by all six characters at once, reveals that she is the guest of the wife of a former Prime Minister of Australia (the artist declines to name her). Groom, one of a number of Indigenous representatives to a UN event, is immediately wary:

“Me 1: This is my job as the performance of my cultural sovereignty to follow my feelings which have led me here to New York. [….]

Me 3: I fear this to be an opportune escapade for the former Prime Minister to shower us, the ‘Indigenous Australians,’ with alcohol and pleasantries so that he may exploit us in furthering his ever ambitious career pursuits. This is politics. This is all about optics. Do not be swayed; there will be photographs, there will be videos. Be diplomatic but do not leave the room empty-handed.”

The former Prime Minister’s welcoming speech, focusing on American race relations “in a room full of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander delegates,” is for Groom, “not only distasteful but offensive.” She turns her attention elsewhere: ” Only minutes after arriving at the event, the artist, already frustrated to the point of exasperation, focused her attention on [the former Prime Minister’s wife] who was conveniently sitting next to her.”

Amala Groom, Have you seen MY Emily? 2017, Casula Powerhouse, production still, courtesy the artist

Chorally, Me 1, 2 and 3 announce, “We are me,” and Her 1, 2 and 3, “We are her” and the discussion commences with a “quite robust conversation spanning both religion and politics.” But it quickly falters at the mention of political art, Groom’s writing deftly gear-shifting between speech and reflection with comedic and satirical verve.

“Her 1: So what do you do for a job?

Me 1: I make political art.

Her 2: I need to change the subject.

Me 2: I would normally just say I am an artist, but I am provoking this lady into having a semi-uncomfortable conversation with me.

Her 3: How do you contribute to the Gross Domestic Product?

Me 3: I still subscribe to the Black Tax which means that Aboriginal peoples should be receiving a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product to support our own political, social and economic independence so that we may be self-determining on our own lands which the Colonial Project has stolen from our Ancestors and continues to steal from us.”

The discussion grows particularly tense when it turns to the ex-PM’s wife’s proud ownership of the Emily Kame Kngwarreye painting referred to in the work’s title.

“Her 1: Have you seen my Emily?

Her 2: I own a very expensive painting.

Her 3: I cannot pronounce Kngwarreye.

Me 1: In the sitting room? Yes, it’s beautiful.

Me 2: Did she really just say that?

Me 3: And the world just stopped.”

The repetition of “her Emily,” “my Emily” and “Have you seen my Emily?” morphs into a grimly comic litany amid the ex-PM’s wife’s increasingly insensitive utterances.

“Her 2: This painting is ‘authentically Aboriginal’ and therefore is an extension of my own personal authenticity.

Her 3: I own a piece of your culture, can’t you see? Have you seen my Emily?”

Me 3: One cannot purchase culture, it’s not a materiality. Yes, I have seen ‘your’ Emily.”

Preferring traditional Aboriginal art, the ex-PM’s wife is afraid of political art. Me 2 comments, “She equates political and social commentary on contemporary society and race relations as being ‘angry,'” adding and later repeating, “Hmmm, does she know the revolution is coming?” while Me 3 wonders, “Does she think ‘angry’ art is going to jump off the wall and go at her?”

Amala Groom has taken a conversation she experienced and elaborated on it to make explicit what she thinks the ex-PM’s wife actually believes, rendering the woman’s utterances ignorant, cruel and sometimes just unbelievably silly — as in Her’s opening lines, ” I am rich …. I am so rich” and when she sings:

“Her 2: I think you are also really angry, why are you so angry? Can’t we all just get along? ‘Kumbayah my Lord, kumbayah… ‘”

Amala Groom, Have you seen MY Emily? 2017, Casula Powerhouse installation view, photo Hamish Ta-mé

The viewer doesn’t know which of the Hers’ words are actual and which invented, but Groom adopts a tonal strategy that keeps all utterances on a similar plane with a simple vocal realism in which there is no mimicry, no differentiation between voices, little exaggeration, just a gentle flow of casually uttered sentences of largely similar length, the rhythm reinforced with the raising and lowering of champagne glasses. This approach tempers the sheer bluntness of the lines I’ve quoted, allowing them room to correspond with the laid-back, ironically well-mannered demeanour of all the women in this work. It allows us to be amused, shocked here and there and yet contemplative. Have you seen MY Emily? might come from a place of anger (at the ex-PM’s wife’s comments) and it might well engender anger, but Amala Groom has fashioned a seductive video installation that implicates the viewer with face-to-face engagement in a casual conversation which seduces us into becoming attentive listeners and amused observers.

One of the most striking characteristics of innovative Indigenous art practice over recent decades has been the extent of artists’ inclusion of images of themselves in their works (Fiona Foley, Christian Thompson, Warwick Thornton, r e a, Tracey Moffatt to name a few working in video), not simply as self-portraiture but as personal statements of connections with country, culture, history and community, as well as satire, as in the video works of Richard Bell. In her first major commission and institutional solo exhibition, Amala Groom has extended this practice with a work that is at once personal, satirical and formally innovative.

–

Have you seen MY Emily? (2017), artist Amala Groom, curator Adam Porter, commissioned by Casula Powerhouse, 6-channel digital video, 9′ 56″; Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, 30 Sept-19 Nov

Amala Groom is a Wiradjuri conceptual artist whose practice, as the performance of her cultural sovereignty, is informed and driven by First Nations epistemologies, ontologies and methodologies and articulated across diverse media. In 2017, Groom’s work has appeared in The Public Body .02, Artspace; System of Objects, National Art School; Moving Histories Future Projections, a dLux Media Arts exhibition toured by Museum & Galleries of NSW, 2016-17; and in Visual Bulk, Hobiennale 2017.

Top image credit: Amala Groom, Have you seen MY Emily? 2017, Casula Powerhouse, production still, courtesy the artist

Raoul Peck’s documentary about James Baldwin, titled I Am Not Your Negro, has won unanimously high praise from critics and audiences but been limited in Australia to short cinema seasons. Now it’s available on DVD from Madman and is a viewing opportunity not to be missed.

Lauren Carroll Harris, who saw I Am Not Your Negro at this year’s Sydney Film Festival, wrote on Junkee, “What sets this film apart from other political docos is its profound emotionality. Spoken in melodious, low tones by Samuel L Jackson, Baldwin’s words ring out with an eloquent rage and passion that cannot be contained by the film frame. Peck pairs the sound with montages of the Black Lives Matter protests and portraits of Trayvon Martin and black youths slain by police in the last five years.”

The power of the film as a reflection on the inadequacies of the American psyche (and, by analogy, our own) was captured by Siddhartha Mitter on Hyperallergic:

“In the film, [Baldwin] refers to white America as ‘monstrous’ at least three times. He explains why: because people in the US are caught between narratives as to who they actually are and who they want to be, and narcotising, populist television circulates a story that always emphasizes the latter…The film left me with questions that I suspect won’t be answered in my lifetime, because successive generations of Americans have been brought up with the conviction that they need never understand anyone, not even themselves. How do I live with that?”

We have 5 copies to give away, courtesy of Madman Entertainment.

Email us at giveaways [at] realtimearts.net by 5pm 19 December with your name, postal address and phone number to be in the running.

Include ‘Giveaway’ and the name of the item in the subject line.

Giveaways are open to RealTime subscribers only. By entering this giveaway you consent to sometimes receiving updates from us. You can unsubscribe at any time.

The backlit silhouette of a lone female figure appears centrestage in a voluminous skirt of billowing waves. A soft light shines on her face as the sound of a turbulent current escalates around her and we are introduced, via recorded voiceover, to the Djurra Dreaming narrative of the Bundjalung nation of north-eastern NSW, of the mother summoning her sons from the sea, to the shore, to her, for she is also the headland.

This arresting image is immediately followed by the entrance of the three sons sliding on their backs to emulate the watery expanse from which they’ve come. The brothers, dancing with sticks which are at once paddles and subsequently spears, are depicted as archetypal men of the Dreaming. Featured solos set them apart as individual characters, while also serving to subtly shift us from the Dreaming into the here and now. A chair is placed on stage and the woman (Sarah Bolt) is reintroduced as a frail patient in aged care. We discover the three men are also her sons, who will also return, as her death is imminent.

Director Kirk Page’s Djurra is important for so many reasons, first and foremost as a multi-disciplinary performative ceremony including dance, spoken text and physical theatre in which ritual is enacted.

On opening night Djurra is framed by coinciding events, the first of which is a large-scale sand painting created by local artist Digby Moran. The mandala’s repetitious squares within squares act as a meditation, gently guiding the observer to quiet contemplation.

Immediately preceding the performance, at the base of the steps of the Lismore City Hall a large crowd gathers to witness a performance by local Indigenous girls’ dance group Nini Ngari-Gali, organised by Sarah Bolt through NORPA . This is followed by a Welcome to Country ceremony in English and in Bundjalung Widjabul language given by Roy Gordon, who along with Rhoda Roberts is one of the cultural consultants on the production. One of the speakers was from a group of weavers commissioned to respond to the Djurra Dreaming history by creating a collection of traditionally woven artifacts installed in the foyer directly opposite the entrance to the theatre.

By the time we take our seats we have unwittingly processioned to our modern day dance ground.

Edward Horne’s set is spare, uncluttered, rendering the stage space flexible. Two large woven mats hang as textured curtains upstage, utilised as vertical projection surfaces on either side. The large horizontal space between also serves as a projection surface, creating a triptych effect with images softened around the edges like floating thought bubbles. A large roving platform is manipulated by the cast to emphasise distance, from one continent to another, from one state, one room or one bed to another, while also serving as the mother’s eventual deathbed — the exposed innersprings of a mattress, suspended directly above, appear to emulate that in-between space otherwise known as purgatory.

This deathbed image is augmented by a captivating dance momentarily taking us out of the narrative. Performed by Joel Bray it begins on the floor, gradually ascending through deft harness work. Bray embodies the spirit through a series of circular movements growing ever more expansive, from smaller sequential isolations, progressing to floor rolls, graduating to larger and larger leaps until he eventually takes flight, eschewing his (and presumably the woman’s) mortal body.

In an earlier scene, the eldest brother played by Damion Hunter, introduces the harness by emulating the whirligig motion of a helicopter’s rotating blades. By holding onto a short pole attached to the floating platform while directly addressing the audience, Hunter succinctly embodies the precarious dangers of combat his character has left behind.

This transcendental approach is extended to the execution of text, to varying degrees. Not quite abstract nor surreal but not entirely literal, the text was subtly stylised in places, notably by James Slee who plays the youngest brother, who has never ventured far from his childhood roots. With an obvious hip hop background Slee includes the odd quick alliterative analogy accompanied by equally subtle changes in a rhythmic delivery indicative of rap.

In Bray’s first soliloquy I recognise substantial autobiographical elements meshed into his onstage persona as the middle brother who has purposefully distanced himself from, yet is staunchly proud of his familial origins — evidence that the text has been developed through a collaborative devising process.

In another of Bray’s soliloquies — delivered after his mother’s funeral and about men and mourning and upholding a code of male stoicism — I witness something deeply poignant followed by a sense of missed opportunity. This brief scene is framed by a ritual of funereal preparation performed in unison, of shaving, combing and donning the multi-purpose suit jackets that in this instance serve to speak of solemn resignation. It’s followed by Bray’s reminiscence of his mother’s description of a cry. His physiological recollection of a lament as consisting of five short inhalations followed by a long exhalation as having the inverse properties of a laugh — five short exhalations and a long inhalation — so succinctly describes the way in which men are programed to compartmentalise emotion and distance themselves from attachment. As one of the most universally topical issues, this beat is over all too soon.

Djurra’s text doesn’t preach declarative fact at the audience, telling them what it is to be Aboriginal in any generalised sense. Rather, its potential strength lies in its revealing the Blackfella condition through character content, through circumstance. For Bray, it’s what it is to be a white Blackfella when having to explain his race to each person he meets while travelling abroad. For Slee it’s the significance of staying on country and maintaining kin connections, and for Hunter it’s the obligation to share personal wealth with community while secretly paying for his mother and brother’s upkeep while he’s on tour in the armed forces.

The text became problematic where it felt simply under-rehearsed or broken in mid-sentence, forcing the audience to work harder than it needed to stay on track and when its delivery was not sufficiently well modulated to get a sense of the work’s dramaturgical arc, ultimately compromising levels of intimacy and audience access. This could also be said of transitions between scenes, which were at times slow and clunky.

As an actor in the inaugural Black Playwrights Conference of January 1987, I can attest that even this raw state Djurra is testimony that we have come a long way from the early days where we were trying to establish an Indigenous vernacular within mainstream theatre. The use of parallel narratives is becoming a more widespread technique, illustrating the element of embodiment, of actually ‘becoming’ in order to access the Dreaming and using the theatrical space to sing those histories alive as seen in Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Bennelong which features a vignette where all of the male performers declare, “I am Bennelong.

Kirk Page’s strength as a director lies in his physical performance history and the inclusion of the harness work, aided by the continuity provided by Jade Dewi’s choreographic hand. Video artist Rohan Langford consolidated images rather than introducing new information, while at low levels, Karl Johnson’s lighting provided an atmospheric quality to the Dreaming scenes, in juxtaposition with the present day narrative, which was imbued with a bright clarity of the everyday. Composer Ben Walsh was also able to work across a broad emotive range without overpowering the work, lending an almost cinematic structure in the versatility of sound the work demanded. I feel this short season is not the end for this production. It would be good to see the actors given the chance to truly inhabit Djurra and for the production to continue to evolve.

NORPA, Djurra, director, devisor Kirk Page, cultural consultant Roy Gordon, performer-devisors Joel Bray, Sarah Bolt, Damion Hunter, James Slee, choreographer Jade Dewi, composer Ben Walsh, contributing artists Mitchell King, Blake Rhodes, set & costume designers Charlotte Hayward, Edward Horne, video artist Rohan Langford, lighting designer Karl Johnson, cultural consultant Rhoda Roberts, dramaturg Julian Louis, Lismore City Hall, 29 Nov-2 Dec

Independent choreographer, performance‐maker and teacher, Vicki Van Hout is a Wiradjuri woman born on the south coast of NSW. Vicki travelled to Lismore courtesy of NORPA.

In the second of two articles on experimental music in Adelaide — the first featuring Dan Thorpe — Chris Reid interviews Stuart Johnson aka Wolfpanther, curator of Metro Experimental Night. RT

A cornerstone of contemporary and experimental music in Adelaide is the series of monthly concerts titled Metro Experimental Night held at Adelaide’s Hotel Metropolitan. Stuart Johnson curates evenings of mainly electronic music that can range across ambient, drone, noise and all kinds of instrumental work. Importantly, Metro Experimental Night is open to a variety of performers and thus encourages emerging artists and new developments. Three acts featured on 12 July this year are good examples: sympathetic | DIVISION using synthesisers and electronics, Little-Scale also using synthesisers and electronics but stylistically quite different, and a high-intensity solo performance on guitar and effects pedals by Insomnicide.

On another evening, Wolfpanther himself performed — on miked banjo mediated through an array of electronics —with Melanie Walters on flute. Walters has a significant profile in the Adelaide scene, works with Dan Thorpe in the duo Stereo Mono and was a member of the Australian Bass Orchestra in the workshop production of Cat Hope’s new opera Speechless. The 8 November Metro Experimental Night program included a stunning solo recital by Walters who alternated between bass flute, flute and piccolo in works by German-Australian composer Felix Werder (on whose music she is writing her doctoral thesis) and Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. Wolfpanther pointed out that it is unusual to include composed music in a Metro Experimental Night program, but the audience was enchanted.

The music in the program can be variable in quality but is always interesting and sometimes exhilarating. I spoke to Wolfpanther about Metro Experimental Night, his own work and Adelaide’s contemporary and experimental music culture.

I took over the Experimental Night from the previous organiser in early 2016, so I inherited something of the approach it already had and particularly the name. Of course the question of what “experimental music” means is not necessarily a simple proposition; my approach was to have a very broad interpretation. I don’t have a clear-cut definition but generally it’s about genres that aren’t usually well represented in a pub live music environment, uncommon instruments; improvisation, genuine experiments… There is likely a bias towards the sort of things and people I’ve been involved with, for example a bit of modular synth, but I try to keep the nights open to as many different approaches as possible. Certainly if someone approaches me with a genre that hasn’t been represented before I’m very keen to get them involved. My aim is to be very inclusive. Doing somewhat unconventional music in a regular pub show can be pretty daunting, so I think it’s good to have a chance to get people to play to an audience open to different kinds of music and understanding that occasionally a performance might not be particularly polished. I think it’s also interesting to get people from the academic side of music to come and play a pub show.

I gather you receive no government funding for the show, but the hotel does pay the performers?

The event exists thanks to the ongoing support of the Metro which provides a guarantee that goes to paying the artists [which] allows the event to be free, and it pays for a sound tech which makes a big difference. Sometimes there are fairly straightforward setups which I could probably handle myself, but when instruments, particularly drum kits, need to be miked up it is great to have someone who knows what they are doing.

In the last few years I’ve played in about a dozen or so groups, ranging from Thom Bordism Group — who played regularly for a couple of years and released an album — to bands which existed for one or two gigs. I can’t really settle on one particular approach to playing music so instead I try to do lots of different things with lots of different people. Not all of it is particularly experimental; I spent some time in the Loose Cannons, a singing group which sang traditional sea shanties, and I’ve played lead guitar in a rock band, Stable Vices. I’ve also played solo, mostly in an exploration of various electronic instruments I’ve been collecting for a while, though occasionally on guitar as well. Often I’ll develop an approach for a particular show and work on that before moving on to something else immediately afterwards. Most recently I played a no input effects loop at Metro Experimental Night, which is about the most literally experimental thing I’ve done.

The experimental scene in Adelaide is small and rather fragmented. Do you think that it has the potential to develop, perhaps with targeted funding of some kind?

I guess my approach to music is as a sort of folk art. I’m not looking to do it professionally; I just think it’s really good to be involved with a community of artists and listeners and I always try to encourage a strong participatory aspect to the scene. But I acknowledge I am in a privileged position to be able to have this attitude. I would like better support for experimental music, but it’s difficult to make a living even in more popular forms of music.

The helpful thing for musicians is to be able to perform, to record, to have the opportunity for those recordings to be heard. While anyone can release online this also means everyone does and it’s hard to get noticed, so radio stations and record labels are still important. Being able to have a regular event is a big benefit since most gigs get an audience by advertising a genre, like jazz, or an established name, whereas we have a mix of genres and quite often a whole lineup of musicians almost nobody has ever heard of. Being on every month has meant being able to build a regular audience.

I think it could be nice to have funding to help bring interesting acts from interstate and have them play with locals, which would be good for creating networks for Adelaide artists to tour. We’ve had a couple of interstate acts just through good luck and with local support, for example Ancient World, an artist-run venue, brought over Helm/Croatian Amor who otherwise would have only toured the east coast and put them together with a lineup of great local acts. There have also been great small-scale festivals like Lost City, Half Strange and Bungsound bringing interesting interstate acts together with locals. These sorts of endeavours are always pretty risky and some financial support would be beneficial. I think the Adelaide Festival under Artistic Director David Sefton has done a lot for the local experimental scene — exposing audiences to very interesting music and inspiring musicians with the Unsound program to try new approaches.

Top image credit: Shakey and Rosie from Insomnicide, photo © Noa Gfrerer Photography

Top image credit: Bhenji Ra, Interchange Festival 2017, Critical Path, photo Matthew Syres

Critical Path’s Interchange Festival, held over a weekend from Friday evening to Sunday night, invited guests and participants to share experiences of working across and between cultures as part of choreographic practice via forums, workshops, performances and talks by international guests. Cleo Mees reported on the second day, themed The Political Body, while Nikki Heywood focused on the third, The Start and the End of the Body. RT

Where is the body in interdisciplinarity?

Over the course of the third day of Critical Path’s Interchange Festival 2017 we discussed a diverse selection of works, witnessed small showings, participated in workshops and snacked on a veritable degustation of interdisciplinarity: 22 artists/presenters over five sessions and 12 events.

It is true that Mornings are Difficult (the title of Sunday’s first session), especially so when the question “Where is the body in interdisciplinary work?” is posed before the caffeine has kicked in. Our morning convenor dancer Lizzie Thomson instinctively (and wisely) invites us up onto our feet for a short and sweet exercise. We’re asked to place any surface of our body against any in the room where we’re gathered. My senses start to wake up as pathways of sensation, beginning where my forehead is in contact with the doorjamb, spread to spine and limbs, small shifts of my weight suggesting the potential for further movement. Something so simple as the conscious meeting of fleshy and inanimate surfaces is an effective interruption to the normal arrangement of seated or standing bodies, our usual modes of occupying social place and time. This short awareness task somehow sets the tenor of the day, where the intelligent vehicles of our bodies and our bodily senses are foregrounded as the surface of interchange between self and other, be that other objects, environments, cultures, stories, systems…

Back in a seated position, alert for conversation, Lizzie makes a short introduction to interdisciplinarity. Describing her experience of being a living/talking book in the Newtown Library for the 2016 Biennale of Sydney in Mette Edvardsen’s time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine, Thomson riffs on being subject to the tidal rhythms of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. The “pauses of forgetting” and then the feeling of “words rushing toward” her, highlight for Thomson the “magical force of memory” as well as the labour of embodying and conveying language and the kinetic quality of remembered story.

The theme of the kinesis of language continues as performance-maker Brian Fuata plays on bringing together his parallel practices of ghostliness — where he literally occupies space in various venues covered in a sheet — and his more remote email performances, where curtains of text rise and fall on a scrolling page for an audience in isolated darkness as BCC (blind carbon copy) recipients. Here in the morning sunlight, framed by the open double doors against a backdrop of swaying masts in the harbour, Fuata stands wavering on one leg, interrupting his own stories about performing and accidents, as his ghostly white sheet and large pieces of paper are lifted by the wind. Notions of ephemerality underlined by his descriptions of what might happen are such that I drift in the vestiges of possibility, glimpsing the ghost of a performance that may never appear.

What is the body?

The session continues with two breakaway groups (about eight people in each) tasked to tackle the morning’s question headlong. Our group’s captain Justine Shih Pearson lobs a small grenade; she asks us to consider “What is the body?” Ouch! More coffee anyone? In contemplating the different conditions in which we ascribe its value and whether indeed there is a shared consensus on the nature of the body, I quietly ruminate on why we use the distancing and generic definite article for ‘the’ body? Why not a body, my body, our body? How does our language determine our proximity to the subject in the terms under discussion, such as vulnerability and care? Does the general term “the body” reduce our complexity and objectify our understanding of what it is to be human? We duck and weave amid unsettling notions, pondering the uncertainty of bodies impacted by the forces of power and labour. The tantalising threads of content that we generate are impossible to contain in the short time available to us.

For me, the profusion of thoughts echoes Lizzie Thomson’s earlier proposition of “story as excess,” connecting with threads of my own thinking and research around dance and creativity more broadly as a form of excess. Not in terms of waste product but rather, at times, as an offering or outpouring, even a gift to be bestowed. The creativity that Australian philosopher Elizabeth Grosz refers to in Chaos, Territory and Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (2008) as the excess of our (and other animals’) being. As to the overarching question “Where is the body in interdisciplinary work?” I also wonder if interdisciplinarity is something existing in the body of the viewer. As a consumer of less determinate forms of art practice, I may be called upon to harness my own understanding of history and its codes, my visual acuity, my ability to listen and translate sound and language, my sense of touch and empathy for movement and, possibly primarily, my willingness to suspend knowing and desire for certainty. The synthesis of disparate elements, or crossover of inter-related disciplines, takes place in my body, your body, our bodies, as we participate in art as a form of exchange.

The body on-site

Our next session continues the theme of interdisciplinary work, as architectural theorist, designer and UNSW Art & Design Senior Lecturer Sam Spurr facilitates a conversation between performance ensemble Branch Nebula (Mirabelle Wouters and Lee Wilson) and Rochelle Haley, an artist and researcher working with experimental drawing, movement and spatial performance practice. The common link between these artists is their work in site specific contexts, often with untrained performers; Branch Nebula have worked in shopping centres and skate parks, while for Afterglow, Haley used an empty gallery as a site.

Wilson and Wouters have taken the choreography of skateboarding, BMX-riding, parkour and dance into the realm of the virtuosic and along the way struggled with the paradox of locking out locals from the park, while they make art with the express intent of community inclusion. They have actively engaged with this problem to develop strategies of infiltration, gaining acceptance and subtly challenging territorialism by involving local park users and infecting them with the spirit of collective creation. They embrace anarchic tendencies by making improvised performance with whoever is there.

Haley’s strategies are of a more overtly aesthetic nature. She enlists young Physical Education participants to create a type of expanded painting across a space with moving bodies attending to line, colour and drape of cloth; filling and emptying rooms and corridors with simple choreography, movers and viewers all wearing the same pale mantle of costume. While Branch Nebula and Rochelle Hayley are mutually interested in collectives and bringing people together, and perhaps — Spurr introduces the term — in “the care of looking” and audience behaviours, I am most struck and amused by the stark contrast between Branch Nebula’s gritty, sweating, risk-taking bodies and the apparent cool effortlessness of Haley’s timeless, gliding maidens.

Philippe Blanchard: sensitivity to proximity

Our post-lunch convenor Adelina Larsson introduces two international artists. Sweden-based French choreographer Philippe Blanchard outlined the parameters of his current project, also in terms of bringing bodies closer together. He is generally interested in the experience of migration and uncertainty, literally reflecting destabilisation through practices such as jumping and shaking to exhaustion. Scale and space in Australia provoke questions for him that relate to synchronising impulse and sensitivity to proximity, describing how doing away with the sense of his own body as a personal entity has led him to ask rather, “How do our bodies function together?” This inquiry seems to readdress concerns that have been investigated by practices such as BodyWeather, Body Mind Centering and Contact Improvisation among others across decades.

I-Chin Lin: language unleashed into dance

Taiwanese dancer I-Chin Lin speaks about the recovery of her culturally suppressed ancestral language, when at the age of 26 she experienced heartbreak and found herself swearing in her native Holo. The cathartic explosion of energy brought about what she describes as a connection to her core and to something fundamental to her own culture. For I-Chin the energetic force of passionately expressed language allowed her to newly identify the distinct character of her Taiwanese-ness, such as the inter-related qualities of humidity and the salty sweet nature of Taiwanese cuisine. The inner and outer climates as conditions of influence, embedded in the sound and feel of Holo language, now infuse her choreography in subtle ways. It was refreshing to hear about an artist, triggered by a visceral life event, turning inward to savour the nuances of her own culture. This highlights the tendency of many of us, myself included, who have scanned and sampled the depths of exotic art forms that are not our own, which can of course by its problematic nature be quite creative… notwithstanding our capacity for integration and hybridisation.

Matt Shilcock: The bones of truth

The late afternoon offerings are less talk, more action but here, as always with parallel sessions, the problem is making a choice, with the inevitable FOMO.

Having had a brief chat with Adelaide artist Matt Shilcock about alchemy and essences, I found his session, Osteogenuine – Alchemia Exteriores, intriguing. His own story of transformation, from wheelchair and a propensity for broken bones, to martial arts and the dance floor as a way of staying alert to his body’s capacity, is inspiring. He is interested in how desire and intent can inform his own and others’ embodiment and ensuing choreographic patterns. I marvel at how his circumstance and awareness of his own bony anatomy has carved his approach to conceptual structures, reinforcing the ways in which the architectures of body and mind are intrinsically entwined. I enjoy hanging out in the unknown, in a room with a young choreographer who is finding ways to simultaneously articulate and evolve his process.

To the session’s task. Each of us distils a statement of intent down to an absolute sentence, which is then deconstructed by creating a pattern across a circular arrangement of letters (an alphabetical clock or prima figura) transposed over a diagram of Leonardo’s Vitruvian man. In this way we configure our own 3D movement score in a process that is both mysterious and pragmatic. I am reminded of Surrealist procedures that rely in part on chance, in part on assemblage, as I swing my right outstretched Vitruvian arm from letter N at 10 o’clock diagonally across to Y at 2.30 while lifting left foot from the central V at 6 to G at 4ish, and other variations on that theme. As in alchemy there is a combination of the abstract and the concrete in such processes that I find appealing. Mostly I am left with the memory of Matt Shilcock stating that he is “not so interested in being seen” but in engaging with the osteo genuine or the bones of truth.

Performances: exchange, alchemy & ritual

In the curated evening session Julie Vulcan presents six artists under the title Continuity. Transgression. Interruption. Two of the artists are not present, their work shown in absentia. However, dancer Kathryn Puie and Lux Eterna using live camera and projection are in the building and fully fleshed. Their field of enquiry circles the ambiguity of prosthetics and their use to enhance capacity or to replace what is missing, and they propose that prosthetics are already ubiquitous in our lives in the form of spectacles, appliances, furniture, even cars. When Kathryn straps on her stilts and Lux her steadycam apparatus and they take over the space, they demonstrate, via shifting speeds, proximities and angles, the potential for exchange enabled by their individual prostheses. I was particularly interested in the video document showing them both blindfolded, taking the sighted camera for a walk, and also Lux’s developing facility to follow movement with her camera through enhanced awareness of her own body shifts and adjustments in dialogue with her ocular attachment.

Engaging in another kind of alchemy, indeed sorcery, Vulcan presents absent performer Weizen Ho’s work. Vulcan and Ho share an interest in hair as both debris and artefact for rituals of grief and memory. In this instance we are served with Chinese bowls containing a blend of tea and a tightly wound hair ball (blatantly disguised to look like tea) which connects to a ritual involving a slowly brewed herbal concoction that mothers and their children partake in after arguing. There is something of the abject in this offering that elicits a mix of disgust and curiosity in those assembled. Who will partake? As I tentatively sip, a person nearby asks, “How is it? Taste like forgiveness?’ Hmmm…more like green tea shampoo.

In a room upstairs. Alison Pevey, accompanied by the curtained darkness, a rumble of low sound and then a flood of natural light through the window, employs her “body as site” to bring attention to global and human energy cycles. As she expands and contracts in building waves of motion toward a short explosion and then exhaustion, I ponder the evident futility for Pevey as a single body/human to speak of excess and consumption. The collective of bodies stand idly at the sidelines while the cycle continues.

In the next room, the absent artist Joshua Pether is represented by a video screen displaying an x-ray of a spine affected by scoliosis as a kind of headstone atop a slab-like table. We are invited to read aloud the fragments of his text that forms a frieze around the walls, and then to construct the missing body out of an array of available ingredients. Cotton wool, stones, wire, a small light, bright plastic objects, organic things are all arranged by us, the collective, into a spontaneous humanoid assemblage to the repeating distortions of Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” and white noise. I was reminded of William Forsythe’s more sophisticated participatory work seen in Berlin, 2005 where “You made me a monster” involved a hanging cardboard anatomical assemblage and the tracing of the moving shadows. Like Forsythe, Joshua Pether evoked a sense of memorial and an energetic ritual dispersal of grief.

For the day’s finale and in the fading light, Rakini Devi is laid out ceremoniously in black beside a long piece of cloth that stretches almost the entire length of the Drill Hall. There is an ambient gurgling sound and I am drawn to the blood-red stain on her feet, chin and décolletage. An undulating movement rises in her torso and Devi begins her slow worm-like passage up the space. Her obeisant form rises at the end to invoke the spirit of Shiva in a short series of words and gestures before turning with a lifting of the cloth that now becomes her long train. We form her retinue and fall in line to carry the diaphanous cloth out into the evening air and further still some 250 metres to a jetty. I have little idea what this ritual signifies, but the soundtrack now is of bird call, clanging masts and voices of fishermen. Finally Devi/Shakti turns, her face wrapped in a red flower garland, and walks blindly toward us back up the rocking jetty. Not your usual Sydney Sunday by the harbour, beginning with a white-sheeted babbling ghost and finishing with a dark queen of the night — the start and end of the/my/your/our body are slippery co-ordinates.

Critical Path, Interchange Festival 2017, The Start and the End of the Body; Drill Hall, Sydney, 12 Nov

Nikki Heywood’s response to The Start and the End of the Body was jointly commissioned by Critical Path and Open City, the publisher of RealTime.

Top image credit: Rakini Devi, Interchange Festival 2017, Critical Path, photo Matthew Syres

The second day of the Interchange Festival, The Political Body, yields robust conversation and sharing. In all five sessions I attend from those scheduled, questions and propositions are offered with both candour and care. Morning sessions consider the complexities and political implications of intercultural creative practice.

Mornings are difficult: protocols vs appropriation

The breakfast session, Mornings are Difficult, is facilitated by Raghav Handa in conversation with Tim Bishop, Rakini Devi and Liz Lea. Handa asks how we might think about protocols that seek to prevent cultural appropriation in performance-making. If we accept that culture is not immutable, and doesn’t exist in an airtight container, then where is the line between “appropriate experimentation” and “appropriation,” as Bishop puts it?

Several propositions emerge: one is that intercultural work should, by definition, involve a commitment to deep, extended research and training in all the cultural practices involved. Devi proposes that the term “intercultural work” should describe a methodology, not a product, and that a methodology should come from more than a two-week residency.

Other recurring ideas include the crucial importance of genuine respect for collaborators and cultural materials, and the importance of acknowledging when one has has appropriated something, or acted inappropriately. We talk, too, about what materials one can or cannot touch when making intercultural work, and what audience members can or cannot “read” in performances that draw on specific cultural vocabularies.

This last question has particular relevance for me as a writer reporting on this day. I am a Dutch-born immigrant to Australia, and my life experience has always been one of white, middle-class, colonial privilege. I am queer, I am cisgender (to my knowledge) and I currently do not identify as having a disability. An awareness of what I might not be noticing as a result of my position comes up again and again throughout the day — and I feel it is important to note it here.

Cultural identity: what can & cannot be claimed

Related questions come up in the following morning session I choose, which is a discussion between facilitator Paschal Daantos Berry and artists Caroline Garcia, Amala Groom and Martin del Amo, about how ancestry and a sense of cultural identity inform their practices.

Two hours of rich discussion pass quickly. Wiradjuri visual artist Amala Groom explains how spirituality and Aboriginal law live in her body, and how they inform her working method — from instances of spiritual inspiration that reveal the beginnings of a new work she should make, to questions around when she works, and at what pace. This gives rise to a discussion about how one structures one’s time as a performance-maker, and about the decolonising of one’s own working methods as an Indigenous or a Filipino artist working in an environment that preferences what we might call ‘Western’ approaches to time-management.

Performance-maker Caroline Garcia says that her Filipino heritage is not so much something that she references explicitly in her work, but something that informs process or “how she puts things together.” Among other things, Garcia’s work explores the complexity of both feeling that she is, and is not Filipina as she was born in Australia and has lived here all her life. The experience of travelling to the Philippines — a place that wasn’t so much “home” as a place “of ancestry” — was valuable as a process, too: it was an occasion to explore her “non-belonging.”

Something Garcia has grappled with is the question of what she can and cannot take, or claim, in relation to Filipino culture. A similar question about what can and cannot be “claimed” has come up for German-born dancer and choreographer Martin del Amo, who confronted the question of whether or not to call himself a Butoh dancer at a time in his life when he had trained extensively in BodyWeather and his work lent itself to associations with Butoh, but he had never been to Japan.

The conversation grows to include other people in the room. We work our way into meaty questions. Where does ‘whiteness’ live? When you claim a certain heritage, are you ever at risk of stealing something, or can we say that your ancestry lives in your bones, and that you always get to say who you are? Who in your world receives the authority to establish your mythologies, your identity? Under what creative or performative circumstances can you claim the authority to call something a truth (even if that truth is only a temporary, local one)?

Bill Shannon: skateboard, crutches & perceptions of ability

After lunch, we move into a presentation by American choreographer Bill Shannon. Shannon has moved and danced on crutches since he was young. He talks and dances us through key aspects of his practice, in particular those that relate to the theme of the political body.

He discusses the oft-perceived disjuncture between his tools — his skateboard and crutches, often used simultaneously — as the former connotes a radical, transgressive relationship to architecture and the latter tends to be associated with a need to cling onto the built environment, to avoid falling.

He speaks about others’ scepticism about his condition; some fellow nightclub-goers, for example, doubt that he actually needs his crutches. Shannon shows us a dance move with which he fakes being a fake, and thereby playfully and transgressively instantiates a shift in power relations, turning himself from the subject of this idea of fakery, into its host.

He also introduces the idea of his “condition arriving,” that his “condition” (of being on crutches) always “arrives” in a space before the rest of him does. To many, he is first a man on crutches, and then everything else. Caroline Garcia said something similar earlier in the day: that her body is always already politicised, because it is brown. This notion of the politicised body comes up again in the following session.

Bhenji Ra: patience & disruption

Trans Filipinx-Australian artist Bhenji Ra’s afternoon lecture explores disruption on many levels, the performance itself shaking up what a performance lecture could or should be. Before it starts, we wait outside a closed door until Ra steps out in a shiny, head-to-toe alien costume and casually waves us inside.

She sprawls on her belly in front of a laptop, a few other necessities spread about (a book, a phone, audio speakers), and communicates with us through the laptop’s text-to-speech function. As she types, a computerised voice delivers poetic introductory thoughts about disruption and our being here together.

The typing takes time, and Ra jokes with us that “today is all about patience.” It feels like we are hanging out in Ra’s bedroom, on her terms. It’s a given that we’ll pay attention, and it’s a given that we’ll take our time. I think of all the cisgender heterosexual white male film directors whose work I was expected to give my time to as an undergraduate student — the many hours spent watching and analysing their films, many of which were, in retrospect, misogynistic — and think to myself that there is literally no one I would rather be giving my time to right now than Bhenji Ra chilling on the floor in an alien suit, suggesting to me via text-to-speech that we listen to her playlist.

Later the suit is peeled halfway off so we can see Ra’s face, and she continues to talk, or think out loud, about disruption. She talks about the disruption of heteronormative desire — “how could something as delicate as my Adam’s apple disrupt your desire?” — and describes knowing from a young age that her ethnicity would be disruptive in her rural suburban surroundings. Later, the conversation opens up to include the rest of the room. As has been the case several times today, the discussion is at once forthright and careful.

Acts about change: Newton, Crisp, Ra

The evening program considers the dancing body’s potential to act politically. Curated by Adelina Larsson, it features works by Rhiannon Newton, Ros Crisp and Bhenji Ra.

Sydney dancer and choreographer Newton begins by sharing two scores from her recent work, Bodied Assemblies. Through group improvisations that require listening, collective responsibility and a capacity for working in the face of the unknown, these scores ask both how we can come together and how we can change together.

The scores are attempted in pairs, in a group of four, and then, eventually, with everyone in the room — 40 or more people. As we all attempt to change together, the question of how to do that in a wider political sense — and the complexities, the requirements, the difficulty of doing that — begin to become apparent to me.

Ros Crisp shares fragments of DIRt, a work in progress that addresses her grief and perplexity at witnessing the environmental destruction of the land she grew up on after returning home from a career in Europe. There are video excerpts; there is a lamp-lit reading (an extended barrage of facts about the devastation of the planet); there are bursts of dancing; and there is Crisp’s distinctive way of talking to us — wonderfully loose, but also precise.

Overwhelmed with the question of what to do, and of what (if anything) dance can do about this ecological devastation, Crisp describes a process of “crashing around” — of “crashing back and forth” between dancing and the problem, or between dancing and activism. Crashing around to find, perhaps, a productive relationship between the two. We witness a problem unresolved, and a state of mind very much politically alive.

Finally, Bhenji Ra returns to wrap up the day. She slinks into the performance space in the alien suit I saw this afternoon. As she moves on all fours towards and through the audience, she begins to speak, rhythmically. Together, movement and speech (or is it a chant? or a song?) raise questions about power with both humour and a serious, darker edge. Again, we are in Ra’s space, even as she leads us out of the Drill Hall, through the foyer and into the warm evening, where she disappears into a roaring blue Mustang that tears off into the night.

I have been at the Interchange Festival for 12 hours, and I go home not tired, but satiated — full of food for thought.

Critical Path, Interchange Festival, Political Body; Drill Hall, Sydney, 11 Nov

Cleo Mees’ response to Political Body was jointly commissioned by Critical Path and Open City, the publisher of RealTime.

Top image credit: Rosalind Crisp, Interchange Festival 2017, Critical Path, photo Matthew Syres

Disruptive Critters

The game has rules but no stakes. Two men kneel either side of a digital interface, the display projected on a large screen for the audience’s benefit. On the screen, a series of dots and dashes each emit their own particular squeal, sigh or belch when set in motion. The men take turns tapping the interface, dragging the geometric flotsam and jetsam from the margins to sonically cross-contaminate. This produces a human-sounding hubbub that distinguishes the shapes as the Disruptive Critters of the work’s title.

The result of the Duckworth Hullick Duo’s collaborative practice, Disruptive Critters is presented in a double bill for Melbourne Music Week with City-Topias. Sharing performers and a childlike sense of wonder, both shows foreground play as a fundamental mechanism of the creative process. In Disruptive Critters this delights the children in the audience, who respond positively and audibly to the humorous grumbling and groaning that the shapes’ interactions and combinations generate. This gleeful response is perhaps further provoked by the framing narrative that features a child protagonist (Astrid Bolcskey-Hullick) in the role of the god-figure from whose mind and whims the game and the critters seem to emerge.

However, it’s ultimately these efforts to frame the interface at the centre of the work with external theatrics that sees the appeal of the performance eventually wane. Between each level or scene of the work’s game, the three performers enact rituals, carefully laying pebbles out across the stage and walking slowly with arms outstretched from station to station. These actions, with their measured speed and air of importance, perform purpose. But their inclusion implies a lack of faith in the interface’s ability to immerse the audience. The intent here, in cloaking the technology in a narrative of gods toying with their creations, is not misplaced, as without it the show is, in effect, just two people playing a videogame for 45 minutes. But the performative elements appear to be the afterthought of the work’s digital world-building, and consequently the piece’s creation myth lacks visual sense.

At work’s end, the theatre fills with a thunderous rumble, as the digital imagery zooms out from the flat field of play, contextualising the many writhing, squeaking, growling shapes as specks collectively comprising a much larger globe. This image brings unity to the piece’s themes of disruption and creation in a manner that circumvents clumsy theatrics in favour of a clear graphic statement. And while the message is not earth shattering, the revelation of some bigger picture provides Disruptive Critters with the meaning it elsewhere failed to locate.

City-Topias

City-Topias continues the mythological premise of its precursor, albeit in an expanded form. Featuring the Bolt Ensemble, in collaboration with Jonathan Duckworth, James Hullick and Milica ZZAA, the work is an 80-minute orchestral rock odyssey that claims to investigate “modes of social organisation and disorganisation.”

To this end, City-Topias, like Disruptive Critters, employs the ritualistic as an organising principle. Dressed in a fur and feather headdress, Zzaa initiates the show by wafting pungent incense throughout the performance space. She then assumes her position as VJ behind an audio-visual desk, projecting mystical imagery of labyrinths and stars and nebulously philosophical lyrics onto the big screen for the duration of the performance. Entering the space, the musicians also assume the pose of the ceremonial, their faces painted with colourful slashes of war-paint.

Flautist Belinda Woods sits before the digital interface with her flute, playing short, breathy notes that fill the space with anticipatory tension. Hullick, face smeared with glittering paint, takes his place as frontman, emitting a guttural drone at the microphone and intermittently plucking at his guitar. Amid the swelling commotion there is a suggestion of the carnivalesque, discordant sonic and visual elements uniting in a manner that renders the absurd significant in the work’s exploration of social configuration.

This thematic focus on rituals and organisational methodologies is realised more fully in the diverse modes of instruction that shape each of the atonal pieces that make up City-Topias. At times an onscreen interface is employed with various members of the ensemble spinning, aligning and highlighting a series of circular graphics complementing the movement of the composition. In one piece, Woods conducts the ensemble with an enchanting physicality that characterises her as sorceress or sibyl with her sweeping numerical gestures. Yet often the musical content is less remarkable than the means by which it is being produced. In particular the more lyrical songs tend to invoke the mythic, building to electrifyingly cacophonous summits only to be flattened by the vocals steering the work into the predictable territory of maudlin rock opera.

Everyone involved appears to have been given the opportunity here to play out their distinctive contributions, the joy apparent in the multiplicity of ideas and methods that have been implemented. Indeed, there is pleasure to be found in watching people revel in the creative process, but what is missing in City-Topias is a cohesion that the vague thematic arcs cannot bring to the performance’s disparate elements. Trying to strike a balance between order and disorder, disarray and design, the performance regularly falters either side of this equilibrium.

There are moments though when this balance is achieved, as in Heterotopian Manifesto. Here the score is projected onto the screen, letting the audience witness the performers’ interpretation of a series of colour-coded brushstrokes spattered and slashed across the musical stave. The dissonant outbursts and frenetic spates are thus visually contextualised as part of some grander plan in a manner that reflects the heterotopia of the title, and touches upon notions of the polyphonic. If this piece is indeed the performance’s manifesto, then it realises the chaotic cohesion it preaches in a way that the rest of the program’s works don’t quite manage.

There is great value in the sense of fun and experimentation that both City-Topias and Disruptive Critters bring to the field of sound-based performance. Experimental practice is often imbued with a tone of high seriousness, as if to justify its divergence from established norms; the inherent exuberance and wonder of noise-making sometimes seems sorely lacking. On the flipside, that wonder can be denied an audience when the performers become enraptured by their own delight. I leave City-Topias glad to have witnessed skilled performers ply their craft with great joy, but am left wishing I could access their sense of revelation from my place up in the bleachers.

Melbourne Music Week: JOLT http://www.joltarts.org/, City-Topias, artists James Hullick, The BOLT Ensemble, VJ Milica ZZAA, Jonathan Duckworth; Disruptive Critters, artists Duckworth Hullick Duo, Meat Market, Melbourne, 17, 18 Nov

Top image credit: Bolt Ensemble, Jonathan Duckworth, James Hullick and Milica ZZAA, photo courtesy of JOLT

Responding to a current MoMA exhibition of works by Louise Bourgeois, American visual artist David Salle, a superb arts writer, declares her evocation “of the female body as having an inside might be her greatest legacy”.

“One drawing — Hair (1948) — lays out the vocabulary that would remain in place for more than sixty years. Using a brush and ink, Bourgeois draws a female figure as two vertical columns of sacks topped by a featureless oval head, the whole figure enveloped in a cascade of hair that flows down both sides of the body, from the top of the head almost down to the feet. The roughly almond shape of the streaming-out mass of hair that frames the pod shapes, all seamed down the middle and topped off with a little button head, give the image another, labial reading. It’s like going inside Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866) and coming back out again as a doppelgänger in disguise. The detail contains the whole, like an image out of Nabokov — the world reflected in a soap bubble.”

Top image credit: Louise Bourgeois. No. 5 of 14 from the installation set À l’Infini, courtesy of MOMA

Two works presented by Sydney’s PACT in its Afterglow series — the organisation’s principal program of works from emerging artists — offer distinctive visions. Thomas E S Kelly’s Shifting > Shapes is a contemporary dance theatre exploration of the drama of shape-shifting in Aboriginal culture, and Fishhook’s FEMMENACE is a contemporary performance work in which women face fears that are embodied in disturbing stage imagery.

Karul Projects, Shifting > Shapes

Choreographer Thomas E S Kelly takes a multifaceted approach to the subject of shape-shifting commencing with a mockumentary in which he interviews a trio of people who reveal that they have other selves — fish, cat and gorilla. Intermittently funny, the video conjures everyday fantasies of transformation and then moves on to something more serious: a solo dance performance imbued, at first impressionistically and then quite specifically, with Dreamtime shape-shifting.

The first stage of NAISDA-trained Taree Sansbury‘s performance is relatively abstract, drawing on but not mimicking traditional Aboriginal dance. Holding her centre of gravity low, she articulates her hands sharply at the wrists, steps firmly and becomes recurrently animal-like — but not literally —whether crouching, moving on all fours or dragging herself across harshly lit terrain. Kelly’s soundtrack evokes desert — a bell, clanging metal, a hollow distant wind — but with urban beats, amplifying the sense of an ancient culture’s timelessness.

With pronounced spinning and stamping (to an emphatic drumming), a sense of determination in the movement emerges, but oscillating with bouts of involuntarism — the body freezing or arms flicking forward. Hands now and then flutter over the heart, evoking depth of feeling in what looks like incipient, compulsive transformation, the body low, elbows reaching out, a finger drawing a snaking line in the dust. A voiceover tells a Dreamtime story of Dirawong, a totem lizard, protecting its people from the Rainbow Serpent and in the process becoming a headland. In a final phase, Sansbury stands still before us, struggling to name herself and succumbing to forces that recall the push and pull and trajectories of the earlier dance — crawling, rolling, arms thrusting, the body locked — but now as if possessed, while eerie electronic birdsong underlines her otherness. Finally, Sansbury utters calm acceptance of her shape-shifting being.

Sansbury’s shape-shifting performance, made in collaboration with Kelly, is earthed, fluent, tautly controlled and convincingly driven. Shifting > Shapes is another fascinating work from Thomas E S Kelly, the maker of (MIS)CONCEIVE (seen in Next Wave 2016) in which Sansbury also appeared and, like it, exudes relentless energy which can at times blur the clarity of the choreography, as it did in Shifting > Shape’s overlong centrepiece. Next to the rest of the work, the introductory mockumentary seems an odd fit, tonally and conceptually, but, strongly danced, Shifting > Shapes has the makings of an economically expressed and even more powerful work.

Fishhook, FEMMENACE

Three long illuminated poles dance in the dark. Light flares, No Doubt’s “Just a girl” blasts forth and a trio of young female performers advance on the audience before roosting in an upstage scaffolding tower. This opening assertiveness of sexuality in Fishook’s FEMMENACE is immediately put to the test in a string of quickfire exchanges that recall post’s laterally logical way with words. Each, between Cheryn Frost and Cath McNamara, is speculative — What would I do if trapped by an Uber driver, was followed on the way home, attacked at home? Crash the car, scream…? — and complicated with the repetition in each of “What if it was a woman?” “What if there was a gun?” “A gun changes the whole situation.” The first menace faced by women in FEMMENACE is essentially male and the conversation, even though delivered drolly, is a kind of panic control, subsequently played out by the trio leaping about on the scaffolding.

Menace is not felt in Tahlee Kiandra Leeson’s langorous recital of an erotically witty account of a teenage sexual encounter in which personal euphemisms dominate — pinecones for breasts, lunchbox for knickers — followed by regret that “I was too much in the moment to see how he touched my body. Jesus Christ, my cunt hurts.” This time an aura of sexual pleasure is followed by greater threats.

In the work’s major scene, Frost in a totally consuming HAZCHEM outfit adjusts and breaks down the scaffolding. Leeson is locked in a black bag from which she eventually struggles barely free, swathed in black and aglow with tiny lights while a voiceover reflects anxiously on love — “we fit together and fall apart.” McNamara appears modelling a glittering, sexy bridal outfit, adorned at crotch level with a sparkling, mysterious sculptural extension. In stark contrast, from bride to mother, she returns in a pyjama top, heavily pregnant, squats downstage and proceeds to pull out innards of cloth while slowly backing up, leaving a dark trail. The combination of sustained images of, I’m guessing here, suffocating love, fear of pregnancy and a singing HAZCHEM worker cleaning up in its wake made for a grim if not altogether cogent spectacle. The menaces evoked are multiple — including relationships and women’s own bodies — transcending the work’s opening bluntness and evoking a more complex womanhood.

FEMMENACE is a raw work from an emerging ensemble (the trio are recent University of Wollongong graduates) capable of creating striking images and delivering idiosyncratic writing. Once Fishhook achieve greater clarity in their image-making and tauter structural cogency, FEMMENACE will become more than a recollection of vividly provocative moments from bold performers.

PACT, Afterglow: Karul Projects, Shifting > Shapes, choreographer, composer Thomas E S Kelly, collaborator, performer Taree Sansbury, lighting designer Gigi Gregory; Fishhook, FEMMENACE, creator, performer Cheryn Frost, co-creators, performers Cath McNamara, Tahlee Kiandra Leeson, lighting designer Gigi Gregory, sound design Stephen Kendrick; PACT Theatre, Sydney, 22-25 Nov

Here are brief profiles of the emerging artists appearing in Shifting > Shapes and FEMMENACE.

Thomas E S Kelly, a Bundjalung and Wiradjuri man of Queensland and New South Wales, studied at NAISDA Dance College, graduating in 2012, and went on to work in dance, theatre, puppetry and as a choreographer ([MIS]CONCEIVE and 1770: A Tale Not Often Told with Founding Modern Australia) and composer. He appeared in Vicki Van Hout’s Long Grass and Les Festivités Lubrifier and Shaun Parker & Company’s Am I.

Taree Sansbury, a Kaurna, Narungga and Ngarrindjeri woman from South Australia is NAISDA Dance College graduate who performed in Force Majeure’s two-year Culminate/Cultivate program, undertook an internship with Australian Dance Theatre in 2014, appeared in Vicki Van Hout’s Long Grass, Victoria Hunt’s Tangi Wai: a cry of water, Martin Del Amo’s Champions, Thomas E S Kelly’s [MIS]CONCEIVE and Branch Nebula’s Snake Sessions for the Artlands Festival in Dubbo, NSW.

Fishhook’s members met while studying at the University of Wollongong and developed a partnership for devising experimental theatre, prizing physicality in performance given backgrounds variously in gymnastics, contemporary dance, ballet, and BodyWeather.

Cheryn Frost, a Yuwaalaraay woman and lead-artist on FEMMENACE graduated in 2015 with a Bachelor of Performance (Acting) from UOW, co-devised, co-wrote and performed Smut & Half Truths (2016 Melbourne Fringe Festival), collaborated on and performed in PACT Collective’s iDNA (2016), and wrote and performed Confessional in PACT’s Salon #2: Possible abilities (2017).

Catherine McNamara has a Bachelor of Performance (Acting) from UOW and Communications and Media (Journalism) degrees, studied ballet and contemporary dance for many years, recently trained in BodyWeather, collaborated on and performed in ERTH’s Prehistoric Aquarium and was a dancer/company member of Victoria Hunt’s Tangi Wai: the cry of water.

Tahlee Kiandra Leeson has a Bachelor of Performance (Acting) degree from UOW, performed in young Australian playwright Ava Caruso’s The History of the World From Now (Adelaide Fringe Festival 2016), collaborated with Bonnie Cowan on Two Marbelous Girls, a performance action at the Ultimo Community Centre, and recently appeared in re:group performance collective’s Route Dash Niner Part II.

Chauka was furtively shot on a mobile phone from inside detention on Manus Island and sent to Iranian-Dutch filmmaker Aras Kamali Sarvestani. This important 90-minute film by Kurdish-Iranian refugee and journalist — and honorary Australian Media and Entertainment Alliance [MEAA] member — Behrouz Boochani, shows us something of what life is like for the 600 people held hostage to our Government’s failed “Pacific Solution.” They have been imprisoned in indefinite detention for over four years now and with no end in sight. Co-director Sarvestani was a student of Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami and that experience strongly influenced his collaboration with Boochani.

Special screenings have been organised by the Refugee Action Coalition which continues to build pressure on the Government to safely re-settle these people.

Sip my Ocean marks the first major retrospective of the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist in Sydney. Ironically, prior to this we have only been offered “sips” of her gently transgressive, colour-saturated dream worlds in which the human is playfully reintegrated into nature, but in this current exhibition we are invited to utterly slake our thirst.

At the entrance is Meditation for Suburbbrain (2011), a two-channel work comprising a small projection of the artist, in super close profile, in front of motion-blurry scenery, the details of which are subsequently projected, floor to ceiling, onto the adjoining wall. The projection surface is covered, bas-relief style, in a series of white objects — boxes, packaging, tattered underwear and baby clothes — aesthetic detritus that Rist has titled The Innocent Collection, dating from 1985 to approximately 2032 (the artist’s predicted retirement or demise?). We don’t hear her words but subtitles indicate she is talking about relationships: “All this overblown romanticism,” “Should one end the relationship at its best?” The tone of this work is surprisingly sombre, the colours muted, the text tinged with pessimism — not what we have come to expect from Rist. It introduces a curious melancholy early into the otherwise positively pleasurable sensorium that is the rest of the exhibition.

Video hits

Beguiling soundtracks lure us around the corner to experience two of Rist’s best known early works. The video from which the exhibition takes its title, Sip my Ocean (1996), introduces us to the artist’s fondness for underwater scenography, showing a water-baby in sunny yellow bathing suit frolicking among the swirling verdant plants of an azure ocean. It’s bright, idyllic and joyous even as we see plastic cups tumble in the currents and hear the guttural wail of Rist as she reinterprets the Chris Isaak hit “Wicked Game.”

The same jubilance is present in Ever is Over All (1997), in which a gorgeous woman in a 1950s pale blue frock and Dorothy-in-Oz red shoes, skips in graceful slow motion down a sidewalk, joyously smashing car windows with her long-stemmed Kniphofia flower. Fields of these flowers, also known as red hot pokers, streak across the adjoining screen, blurry oranges and reds bleeding onto the edge of the other image. In Rist’s world we will destroy oppression with grace and natural beauty, a secret to which a passing, winking female policewoman is privy. In these works we see the key elements of the artist’s thematic and stylistic oeuvre: the natural world represented by water and flora; smashing of gender constraints and social mores; colour as content; and sound as seduction.

Single channel histories

In a small room on the other side of the entrance is another slice of Rist’s history, Das Zimmer (1994/2017), a selection of 15 single-channel video works and excerpts. Ever attentive to the way in which we watch, she invites us to clamber up onto giant couches and channel-hop via an enormous remote control. I notice many people eschew this room, preferring the more spectacular treats that await further into the exhibition space, but for me these works such as I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much (1986), PickelPorno (1992) Sexy Sad I (1997) and Open my Glade (1997, the Flatten series), are integral to reading greater depth into Rist’s work as a whole. In these pieces we see the strength of her feminist beliefs and her battle against sexual and moral convention, leavened with a strong dose of play. Perhaps it is the self-conscious quality of early video and its clunky and limited compositing techniques, but in their rawness these works show Rist’s agenda at its most charged and defiant.

Behind the eyelids, beyond the beauty

Heading further into the exhibition we move away from the flatness of single channel into greater degrees of immersion and three-dimensionality. Marking this shift is the 2011 work Administrating Eternity. For a moment, amid multiple screens made of sheer fabric, fragmenting and diffusing the projections of psychedelic sheep, plant life and geometric patterns, I feel quite happily lost. The gallery walls recede and I am simply surrounded by diaphanous abstractions made from floating colours. For this brief moment I say, yes, this is enough, Rist has succeeded in conjuring the stuff of which dreams are made.

In contrast to the amorphous nature of Administrating Eternity is Sleeping Pollen (2014). While maintaining all Rist’s main concerns in terms of subject matter (the almost excruciating beauty of plant life) and form (fully integrated installation systems with projectors placed inside large mirrored baubles hung like pendulous fruit around the space), this work is startlingly different for its sense of reduction and restraint. Here the plants float in isolation from their environment, as precious, highly detailed specimens on black backgrounds. It is a darkly seductive environment but I struggle to find more meaning beyond the beauty.

Similarly overwhelming is Pixelwald Motherboard (2016). It seems every contemporary art exhibition has to have a work that is perfect for visitor selfies, and this is the one. Three thousand LED lights in sculptural shades (made in collaboration with Kaori Kuwabara) represent pixels of a video image. We are offered a stunning cascade of shifting colours and patterns that Rist intends to appear as an exploded screen or a simplified brain. Though rendered even ‘cooler’ by the (once again) accompanying Chris Isaak cover from Sip my Ocean, it’s another work that fails to resonate beyond its remarkable aesthetics and technical execution.

Worlds made of worlds

At the end of the gallery space a small neon sign implores “help me” and we proceed through a maze-like curtained corridor to emerge into a massive assemblage of works collected under the title Your Room Opposite the Opera. Comprising 14 pieces made between 1994 and 2017, this room alone represents a Rist retrospective. More than a wunderkammer it is a wunderzimmer: a dining table becomes a kaleidoscope; a gin bottle glows with botanic lifeforms; a bed is blanketed with a whole universe; a mobile of underpants whirls with colour; no surface is safe from projection. Beneath our feet, in a tiny hole in the floor, a miniature, naked Rist looks up, yelling to us from the depths of hell (maybe this is the origin of the call for help?). These moments of magic are scattered among books, vases and knick-nacks and we are invited to sit in lounge chairs to become part of the decor.

At the far end of the space, the perpendicular walls form a screening space for Another Body from the Lobe of the Lung Family (2009). The segment I view involves a very cute piglet gambolling in a meadow in extreme close-up on one screen and a naked, nubile young woman doing the same on the other, I witness a toddler, around 18 months old, run screaming with joy towards the enormous piglet. At that moment the screens swap. He stops for a minute, looking at the enormous woman, and then resumes his joyous squealing — it’s all the same to him. A little later I notice what I think is a curious sea slug, and then realise it is in fact a bobbing penis and testicles. In this video Rist has certainly achieved her ongoing aim of fusing the human and natural world.

Following the neon sign to “trust me” we negotiate another curtained maze to encounter 4th Floor to Mildness (2016). We are invited to kick off our shoes and lie on beds to look up at the ceiling projections. A kind of sequel to the video Sip my Ocean, here we are under the Old Rhine rather than the sea. It’s a slightly more fetid world of slimy weeds and tattered lily pads, yet no less visceral and sensual. At times flesh pink pigment is introduced into the water, swirling in clouds through which a breast may emerge, or Rist’s more mature face, or her slightly more weathered hand. In Sip my Ocean the camera follows behind, chasing the image, but 4th Floor to Mildness (2016) is filmed from below looking up at a liquid sky, with little camera movement. This allows us to float, peacefully, almost ambivalently, as we become one with the primordial soup. The soundtrack is also more melancholic. Mixed in with bubbles of submersion are two wistful folk-pop songs by a group called Soap&Skin that allude to lost childhood, memory and nostalgia.

A crack in the oeuvre

It’s in 4th Floor to Mildness that I find the connection to the discord sensed in Meditation for Suburbbrain. This is an older Rist with a touch of disillusionment perhaps, or simply resignation to being one who sees differently. And this is perhaps what I’m seeking more of in the exhibition as a whole — more of a sense of stress fractures in this fantasy world. Sip my Ocean is indisputably a stunning exhibition full of sensuousness, beauty and wonder, but reflecting on the development of Pipilotti Rist’s oeuvre, as the exhibition deftly allows us to do, leaves me feeling that as the works get bigger and the technology more complex, the more abject aspects, the dangerous ideas, so clear and raw in the earlier works, become codified and aestheticised.

Listening afterwards to the artist’s commentary on the excellent online guide, I am enlightened as to the deeper intentions of Rist’s later works, which at the time of viewing read to me as variations on a theme. Perhaps in seeing such a generous selection of works there’s a danger that, easily overwhelmed by the accumulation of style, we are left with a simplified impression.

By Rist’s own admission, her work is primarily about fantasy. In the audio guide she says, “I don’t think artists have more fantasy than no[n]-artists, but it’s our job to take it seriously and to try to materialise it.” Judged on these terms, there is certainly no denying that the Pipilotti Rist catalogue exhibits seriously fantastic(al) art, offering undeniable sensory pleasures.

MCA, Pipilotti Rist, Sip my Ocean, curator Natasha Bullock; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 1 Nov 2017-20 Feb 2018

Top image credit: Pipilotti Rist, Sip my Ocean, installation image Jessica Maurer courtesy MCA Sydney

Kirsten Johnson has spent a career behind the camera as a documentary cinematographer. Her 2016 film, Cameraperson, is built from decades of footage from films she shot like Citizen Four for Laura Poitras and Fahrenheit 9/11 for Michael Moore. “Here, I ask you to see it as a memoir,” Johnson tells us in an intertitle at her film’s beginning.

How exactly does a filmmaker build a memoir from the material of other peoples’ films and lives—from scenes as diverse as a Nigerian birth unit to a strolling street-side conversation with Jacques Derrida? How does Johnson use the dialogue of her subjects to give herself a voice?

Critics and editors such as Matt Zoller Seitz, Koganada and Kevin B Lee have produced video essays, an experimental form of audiovisual criticism currently blooming in the digital sphere and all manner of academic and popular circles. In this video essay produced especially for RealTime, Sydney-based critic and video editor Conor Bateman shows how Kirsten Johnson has hijacked conventional forms of editing, montage and dialogue to contribute something entirely new to documentary cinema. Lauren Carroll Harris

Credits: All music used in this video essay was licensed under Creative Commons:

“Ocean Day,” written and performed by rin ishi, is licensed under an Attribution 3.0 Unported license. You can listen to “Ocean Day” here.

“Sayonara,” written and performed by rin ishi, is licensed under an Attribution 3.0 Unported license. You can listen to “Sayonara” here.

“White,” written and performed by rin ishi, is licensed under an Attribution 3.0 Unported license. You can listen to “White” here.

“don’t worry about it,” written and performed by [ocean jams], is licensed under an Attribution 3.0 Unported license. You can listen to “don’t worry about it” here.

Despite its provocative title, referencing Valerie Solanas’ Scum Manifesto of 1967, which advocated the elimination of the male of the human species, and the invocation in the performance of the Wilis, the ghosts of betrayed young women in the ballet Giselle (1841) who force men to dance to their deaths and throw their bodies in a lake, Scum Ballet is largely contemplative, focused on female being, imbued with a sense of ritual and magic and endowed with symbolism that is variously literal and elusive.

Five casually attired female performers stand in a cluster on a stark white floor, expressionlessly regarding the arriving audience. They exit to appear in various locations on the grid high above, leaning or seated, legs swinging, looking down on us. In a sustained blackout they fragilely harmonise a gently melodic, wordless chant. As our eyes adjust to the dark, the voices draw closer and we see shadowy figures crawling onto the floor. The careful shaping and the sense of time suspended at the beginning of Scum Ballet transport us to what will prove to be a most unusual realm.

In the ensuing scenes, the women configure themselves in ways that largely suggest a deep unanimity, at first seated in a diagonal across the space, gently sliding, touching, reversing direction, pairing and resting heads across each other’s shoulders before once again gazing at us. An early exception to this togetherness arises in the subsequent scene performed against music that threatens with heavy beats and the startling crash of metal and glass. While others watch, performers face off in successive, circling pairs, dragging long strips of wood — weapons never wielded and only borne when wearing the heavy trousers the performers take turns at sharing. It’s a strange ritual, the tension heightened by the intensity of locked gazes, arms loose but bodies in readiness and a slow, heavy pace barely varied. Is this a ritual refusal of violence? Are the trousers adopted meant to represents a male animus? Blackout and the sound of sticks dropped.

The sense of threat returns. The performers collect short blades, ply them between their fingers, modestly evoking Edward Scissorhands or Wolverine, and, gathering, seat themselves centrestage in an engaging, slow-moving tableau of touching and stroking. The painterly image successively suggests power, danger, intimacy, care and fond togetherness. Subsequently the dancers adopt loosely balletic poses, the blades now eerily extending the natural gestural reach, a variation on the power of Giselle’s Wilis?

A burst of song, percussion and roaring drives the performers across the stage, each adopting a distinctive shape, step or momentum — together but apart. This brief surge, later repeated, is quickly countered by formal balletic groupings, three dancers to one side, two to the other in an evocation perhaps of the Wilis but without any intimation of threat, or perhaps it’s simply an expression of harmony through formal dance. An ensuing cycle of intensely coloured lighting cast across the empty stage is attractive but indecipherable, perhaps designed to extend the calm before a new mystery emerges in a scene that suggests ecstatic ritual.

The dancers carefully build a large mat from interlocking segments, on which they sit close in various positions which allow them to each discretely bounce with rapidity and force, Angela Goh facedown, fully extended, body rippling and pounding like a caught fish. This strange violence is self-inflicted but is also a collective expression of strength and considerable endurance, recalling and contrasting with the earlier image of the tender stroking with blades. I did fleetingly wonder if this floor dance correlated with the men danced to their deaths in Giselle, but the connection was slender and identification with the men seemed unlikely given the “scum” in the work’s title. The mind is busy when engaging with image-based works.

Finally, venturing a kind of magic, the performers slide the mat about while one of their number slowly traverses it, all the while our expectation building that the segments will disjoint beneath the weight of the body; they don’t. Scum Ballet might not offer the kind of dance that defies gravity with propulsive steps and giant leaps, but the deeply earthed pounding of the previous scene and the victory over friction in the next exhibit in different ways dancers’ capacities to unsettle expectation, here in the service of metaphor-making to illustrate female strength through collaboration. A similar, perhaps less necessary and less collective, though dextrously executed, routine follows using a door-sized plank in place of the mat. In the end, there is darkness and song, lines gently overlapping, the ritual completed.

Though from time to time experienced as a series of disparate images, welcome in their strangeness, Scum Ballet coheres more memorably on recollection. The strength of female collaboration is evident in strong performances that exude the sense of building “intimacy, love, care and magic between us” that Angela Goh writes of the work’s making, but it’s made even more fascinating by the tensions and ambiguities conveyed in the most potent of her images.

Angela Goh’s intruiging solo work Desert Body Creep is programmed for New York’s PS122 13th Annual Coil Festival, 10 Jan-4 Feb, 2018. Read reviews by Elyssia Bugg and Alison Finn of its 2016 Next Wave premiere.

Campbelltown Arts Centre: Scum Ballet, choreographer Angela Goh, performers Angela Goh, Eugene Choi, Ellen Davies, Verity Mackey, Ivey Wawn, lighting consultant Mirabelle Wouters, outside eye Sarah Rodigari; Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney, 24-25 Nov

Top image credit: Scum Ballet, Campbelltown Arts Centre, photo Catherine McElhone

Find

December 2017

The decision: social media vs sustainability

2018: Archiving RealTime & celebrating an era

A tribute to artists

…and to writers

…and to readers, funders and supporters

…and our staff

Looking forward to the retrospective

Where is the body in interdisciplinarity?

What is the body?

The body on-site

Philippe Blanchard: sensitivity to proximity

I-Chin Lin: language unleashed into dance

Matt Shilcock: The bones of truth

Performances: exchange, alchemy & ritual

Mornings are difficult: protocols vs appropriation

Cultural identity: what can & cannot be claimed

Bill Shannon: skateboard, crutches & perceptions of ability

Bhenji Ra: patience & disruption

Acts about change: Newton, Crisp, Ra

Disruptive Critters

City-Topias

Karul Projects, Shifting > Shapes

Fishhook, FEMMENACE

Video hits

Single channel histories

Behind the eyelids, beyond the beauty

Worlds made of worlds

A crack in the oeuvre

Credits: All music used in this video essay was licensed under Creative Commons:

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