Spring brings promise in the shape of highly focused, inspirational arts festivals of the ilk of Performance Space’s Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art (image above), Adelaide’s OzAsia Festival and the recent Extended Play Festival of Experimental Music in Sydney. South Australia’s artists and audiences, however, are set to endure a wintry slashing of art funding and unified portfolio support. The restructure, as reported by AICSA (Arts Industry Council of South Australia), includes the reduction of Arts SA staffing by nearly half (the director had already been removed before the budget announcement), a $1m grants funding boost (as promised) rendered a nonsense by $4.9m ‘savings’ cuts 2018-19 across the board, Arts SA responsibilities (SA Film Corp, Adelaide Film Festival, Jam Factory) delegated to the Department of Skills & Development and, astonishingly, the renowned Windmill Theatre, among others, to the Department of Education.
At the federal level, we learned from the Brandis-Fifield Excellence/Catalyst assault that no amount of self-justification (employment and income generation, educational and community benefits) by the arts community could save the arts ecology from ideological intervention. That depredation is now echoed in the South Australian Government’s utterly functional, neoliberal dispersal of responsibility for the arts, amazingly in a state with a significant reputation in the field. Meanwhile the Commonwealth simply has no arts policy. Bring on the next election. Keith & Virginia
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Top image credit: Daniel Kok & Miho Shimizu, xhe, image Ryuichiro Suzuki
Spring for ravenous culture vultures means Liveworks, the annual, two-week feast of seductively challenging live art presented by Sydney’s Performance Space with Asian and Australian artists working side by side.
Artistic Director Jeff Khan has once again curated an artform- and ideology-testing program in which Australian and Asian artists work side by side. Experience, Khan writes in the program brochure, “bodies at the edge,” bodies as “powerful agents of change,” “transcending narrow definitions of gender, sexuality and identity.” Elsewhere, it’s dress to be “immersed” and invited “inside the works.” Anticipate “collisions” and, of course, plenty of “celebration.” It’s a wonderful opportunity too to experience a fully art-activated Carriageworks, often the province of corporate gigs, art fairs, food, fashion and writers’ weeks.
Female artists feature prominently in this year’s program as does the solo, though the lone performer is often supported by multiple sound and design collaborators onstage and off. Here are just a few of the highlights in a proliferation of possibilities.
Nicola Gunn, Working with Children, Liveworks 2018, photo Justin Ridler
Nicola Gunn, Working with Children (Australia)
A new work by this wildly inventive Melbourne artist is always eagerly anticipated. If you saw the wondrous Mermermer, Nicola Gunn’s collaboration with dancer Jo Lloyd at last year’s Liveworks, you won’t want to miss this new one, which begins with a monologue about teenagers asking adults questions about sex and, as always with Gunn, veers from witty digression into “ethical minefields and moral ambiguities.” Jana Perkovic reviewing the work for The Guardian sees Working with Children as “a startling multi-stranded work” and “a mature work of an artist who has defined her terms.”
Angela Goh, Uncanny Valley Girl (Australia)
Another idiosyncratic performance-maker, dancer and choreographer Angela Goh, tackles fear of machines in the context of an increasingly empowered female body in Uncanny Valley Girl. I first encountered Goh’s work at Dance Massive (2016). RealTime writer Elyssia Bugg described her solo work Desert Body Creep as “(performed on) a half-way to nowhere landscape where mundanity merges with the otherworldly…a land forsaken, where life slithers through the cracks, coiling and recoiling beneath the almost too bright light.” More recently, in Scum Ballet, which Goh choreographed and performed with four fellow dancers at Campbelltown Arts Centre, we were tempted once more into Goh’s measured, sensual realm with its haunting images and an atmosphere of subtle menace.
Su Wen-Chi, Infinity Minus One, Liveworks 2018, photo Etang Chen
Su Wen-Chi, Infinity Minus One (Taiwan)
In the second of two works inspired by her month-long residency at CERN (European Centre for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland, Taiwanese choreographer Su Wen-Chi throws up some BIG questions, eg “Can infinity itself be sensed or is it simply a feeling of uncertainty?” Reflecting the scale of the enterprise, Chen and a fellow dancer are joined by a seven-strong design, AV and installation team. The live music by Indonesian experimental duo Senyawa (Rully Shabara and Wukir Suryadi) alone is, by all accounts, worth the visit.
Daniel Kok & Miho Shimizu, xhe, image Ryuichiro Suzuki
Daniel Kok & Miho Shimizu, Xhe (Singapore/Japan)
Singapore-based Daniel Kok spends quite a bit of time in Australia, most recently working with Melbourne dance artist Luke George on the hugely successful bondage performance event Bunny, since widely seen, here and internationally. In XHE (pronounced Jee) Kok teams with with visual artist Miho Shimizu who works with an eclectic range of forms and materials including painting, costume, sculpture and film. Unfolding over an evening, the theme here is fluidity of identity, gender and otherwise, with three dancers exploring “how a singular body might already be an expression of multiplicity, moving,” says Kok, “between a square and an octopus.”
Lee Wilson, Branch Nebula, High Performance Packing Tape, photo Tristan Still
Branch Nebula, High Performance Packing Tape (Australia)
Sydney’s fearless Branch Nebula team now turn their hands to product testing with co-artistic director Lee Wilson as the nominated crash test dummy. Flouting all sorts of OH&S regulations, High Performance Packing Tape will deploy a range of disposable hardware items to place the performer in “a series of mind-bending planes and predicaments.” Given the plethora of product recalls of late, Branch Nebula may have hit on a nice little side-line to the art business as they push “the tension of cheap materials to breaking point.” As in much of this hardworking ensemble’s body of work, in High Performance Packing Tape, they’ll “face fear, self-preservation and risk management to create enthralling new possibilities for physical performance.”
Game still, Escape from Woomera, Liveworks 2018
Applespiel, Return to Escape from Woomera (Australia)
In 2003, a group of gamers (Mark Angeli, Julian Oliver, Ian Malcolm, Stephen Honegger, Kate Wild and Morgan Simpson) created the video game Escape from Woomera that put players in the shoes of a refugee held in immigration detention. Melanie Swalwell, reviewing the work for RealTime that year wrote, “Evidence that it has fired imaginations is contained in the witty suggestions for sequels posted to newspapers: Escape from Nauru and Manus Island and Escape from Camp X-Ray. We might not have known it, but we needed an Escape from Woomera. It broadens the field of what can be said, thought and felt about Woomera, refugees and detention. That is where the art lies.”
The “witty” suggestion is now, of course, stark reality. Seventeen years later, we’re still trying to escape the cruel politics of mandatory detention of asylum seekers.
Applespiel is a Sydney-based company specialising in generating innovative and dynamic audience experiences. Let’s hope they can shift collective thinking beyond the obscene “Pacific Solution” in this live version of the Escape game in the company of the original game-makers, refugees and their advocates.
John A Douglas, Circles of Fire: The Amphitheatre, Liveworks 2018, photo courtesy the artist
More Liveworks
There’s so much more to Liveworks including the return of Indonesian dancer Rianto (exploring trance and the dynamics of cross-gender Javanese dance in Medium); Japan’s Asuna in 100 Keyboards (cheap plastic instruments yielding an unexpected sound world); Indigenous artist Hannah Bronte in Fempre$$ Wishwitch (an epic club performance-cum-installation); SJ Norman’s Rest Area (15 minutes in the embrace of the artist “in a meditation on longing, comfort and the melancholy eroticism of loneliness”); John A Douglas’ Circle of Fire: The Amphitheatre (a sci-fi-ish installation-performance inspired by the artist’s experience of a life-saving kidney transplant); 110%’s mysterious Sweating the Foundation, a revisioning of the Carriageworks building); and a keynote lecture from leading artist, curator and director of TheatreWorks and the Singapore Festival, Ong Keng Sen. There are artist talks, workshops and the queer art party of the year, Day for Night.
Oh, and we’re also on the bill this year with RealTime in real time, a rolling discussion over five hours, interrupted by micro-performances, on the transformation of the art experience over the last quarter century with the writers, artists and audiences who were there. More details soon. Join us.
Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art, Nicola Gunn, Working with Children; Carriageworks, Sydney, 18, 19, 20 Oct
Top image credit: Nicola Gunn, video still: Piece for Person & Ghetto Blaster, Liveworks 2016, Kelly Rhyall
I recently met with OzAsia Artistic Director Joseph Mitchell in our Sydney office to discuss his expansive and thematically rich fourth festival. Mitchell’s knowledge of his field is deep and his enthusiasm contagious. In our 18 July edition, Ben Brooker spoke with Mitchell about several of the major works in his program: Danish company Hotel Pro Forma’s response to Japanese popular culture, War Sum Up, South Korea’s Dancing Grandmothers and Taiwan’s Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land. Mitchell introduces me to a substantial part of his program allocated to five female visual artists: Jeeyoung Lee (South Korea), Yee I-Lann (Malaysia), Kawita Vatanajyankur (Thailand, Australia), Anida Yoeu Ali (Cambodia) and Chiharu Shiota (Japan).
Jeeyoung Lee, Monsoon Season, photo courtesy the artist and OzAsia 2018
I see that Jeeyoung Lee, whose creations are about revealing an inner sense of self, graces the cover of the festival brochure.
It’s a good cover shot for the festival because it’s beautiful but at the same time it’s other-worldly, open to interpretation. Jeeyoung Lee puts either herself or models into her installations to complete them. Her primary art form is photography but really she spends 98% of her time physically building her sets. In Adelaide she’ll build a brand new one the public can enter and be photographed in.
Thai-Australian artist Kawita Vatanajyankur’s wonderful Scales of Justice series has a similar approach, with the artist’s body in the frame undergoing some surreally strenuous tests.
It’s very much about representations of the burden of women’s labour.
Yee I-Lan, Seated Women series, photo courtesy the artist and OzAsia 2018
Tell me about Yee I-Lann’s Like the Banana Tree at the Gate; its images also feature photographs of women performing.
Yee I-Lann’s three big digital collage prints are about a vengeful witch figure, the Pontianak, that exists all across South-East Asia and Japan. Using models in a studio, she re-imagines this spirit as a contemporary woman, addressing issues of gender and power. All of these five artists deal with how, as contemporary women, they’re recalibrating perspectives of certain narratives around female identity, most of which have been created by, framed by men in previous times.
The festival brochure tells us about Anida Yoeu Ali’s Red Chador: In Memorium that “on April 6, 2018 Ali publicly announced the death of The Red Chador following an incident in Palestine where the artist’s original trademark costume went missing under suspicious circumstances.” What is the significance of the costume?
Anida has been working on her Red Chador character for six or seven years. She created a big red, sequined chador and wears it in public places as a kind of provocation, a live art work. She’s done it in places like the Smithsonian and elsewhere in the US and in Paris. She’s addressing the idea of a Muslim woman in contemporary society, saying, “I’m not invisible. I’m here and I choose to wear this chador. I’m not a problem. Accept me for who I am. And that’s that.” Of course, it is provocative, one, because of the places she chooses to perform in and, two, I think there is still a long way to go to reaching harmony between our cultures. It’s not often you see a Muslim woman in contemporary society being so radical in terms of how she’s presenting herself. I think, whether she says it or not, she’s almost trying to normalise her identity, her culture, by provoking discussion —a lot of her work is photographed because it’s so visually appealing. She’s passionate and strong and very much sees herself as a political activist as well as a visual artist.
We’re really thrilled about this part of our 2018 program. Anida is looking at dress and visual appearance as a tool to re-present perceptions of contemporary female Muslim identity. Yee I-Lann is doing something similar but using mythological figures and updating them for contemporary identity. Jeeyoung is very much about looking at her own internal psychology. She says, “These are my dreams, and this is how I interpret them and some of them are beautiful and some of them are scary and others are surreal. I’m in control of my own internal narrative for better or worse. This is what I see.” And then there’s Kawita’s work about women’s labour. The five pieces are all dealing with similar matter from different perspectives.
What about Shiota’s work, which appears to be more abstract, but similarly existential.
There are three parts to Shiota’s exhibition. This is the first big retrospective of her work. She really made it onto the scene with her [blood red] string installation Uncertain Journey (2016). The new work looks prior to that, to a turning point when she dreamed she was covered in string. In classic Art Gallery of SA style — a bit of the legacy of what the director Nick Mitzevich did for 10 years — they’re not going to create a discrete space for the installation. It will be positioned in the heart of the permanent collection. This is about disturbing the status quo as represented by the well-known works on display. I really admire how the gallery will never shy away from that. I’ve worked with them every year since I’ve been in Adelaide.
One thing that’s immediately striking about your program is the number of countries represented and reaching beyond Asia. While some commentators worry at the increasing reach of China, some more broadly discern the rapid growth of a revitalised Eurasia. You have works from Syria and Iran, a Danish company responding to Japanese popular culture and Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s latest collaboration with China’s Shaolin monks.
Yes, and it also works in the opposite direction in works like Andropolaroid 1.1 where a contemporary Japanese dancer Yui Kawaguchi, who has located herself in Berlin and whose solo work is about the journey of displacing herself from her home culture into another. There’s a heading-in-both-directions narrative. Sidi Larbi spent three months in a Shaolin temple, immersing himself. I don’t think he even went there to create a show, he just went and now he can’t stop. There’s a sense of displacement going on across the program. Artists sometimes voluntarily do that to open up their eyes. And, of course, some artists don’t have a choice.
What kind of dancer is Yui Kawaguchi?
She has a hip-hop/street style, a bit of classical ballet training, and contemporary. She merges all three, which is what’s interesting about her. At the same time, you could almost call her work an installation. Her husband is a lighting designer and the set comprises about 100 specifically placed drop lights all programmed to the nth degree. The work is a dialogue between her as a body in space and this extremely complex lighting arrangement…and a few other things that I won’t divulge. This is a really good example of how we break down perceptions of genre. You can look at it as a lighting installation that just happens to have a dancer moving through it, or as a dance piece.
Here is the Message You Asked For… Don’t Tell Anyone Else, photo courtesy the artists and OzAsia 2018
Tell me about the production from China, Here Is The Message You Asked For…Don’t Tell Anyone Else ; -)with a group of girls onstage living out their social media lives.
Director Sun Xiaoxing is really the next big thing to come out of China. Here Is… is in the Theatre section of the program but it’s performance art. There’s structure but no narrative. The girls mumble in Mandarin but they’re not saying anything of narrative relevance, so we’re not doing surtitles. We want people to watch and read in the same way they’d watch contemporary dance. I was spellbound when I saw it. What’s so great about it is that it’s about a culture of young people — and I hate to generalise about generations — choosing digital existences in their bedrooms where they can live off their computers, social media, the internet, chatting with friends, eating chips and drinking Coca Cola and that’s it. And dressing up. The influence of the whole cosplay movement from Japan is also big in China and other parts of Asia.
You watch a fishbowl of girls in their late teens to early 20s choosing not to engage with the world, or not in the way you or I might have [at their age], but to engage in a digital narrative that’s a reconstruction of their own lives based on the way they might want to see themselves. What’s so great about this is the director is making zero judgment. That’s completely up to the audience. You can see this as a valid existence or think, ‘Get a job!’ That’s what makes the work soar. You can also just watch or download WeChat and engage with the performers. Essentially, if you want there to be some form of connection, understanding and narrative you have to do it on the performers’ terms as fellow digital beings. There’s more to it than that but I don’t want to give too much away.
A surprising presence, given the ongoing war, is a Syrian work, While I Was Waiting, by director Omar Abusaada and writer Mohammed Al Attar.
It’s a really strong, solid piece of theatre from Syria that toured the big festivals in Europe last summer. I thought it was a really important piece to do. Syria and the Middle East are a part of the Asian continent. There have been two waves of Syrian immigration to South Australia, one in the 1980s and, of course, now because of the refugee situation. This is a large-scale company, 14 people, including seven actors and a big, two-tiered set in a major presentation by a group of artists who are telling a story of an average middle-class family living in Damascus in the middle of a horrific civil war. It’s set in 2014 and the premise that it’s based on is that a young friend of a friend of the director — in what is sadly not an uncommon occurrence — was beaten up at a security checkpoint by President Bashar’s men, is in a coma and found after going missing for six months. His family have to come back Damascus to see if he’s okay, if he’s going to live or die.
Essentially, While I was Waiting gives us insight into the everyday experiences of people living in Damascus. What we get on the other side of the world on the nightly news is cities flattened by bombs, ISIS, corrupt governments, chemical warfare. But Damascus is still a fully functioning city with people going to work, going home. You can still see plays, movies, go on holidays. The play gives us an insight that we don’t otherwise get into one of the most highly talked about countries in the world — not for the right reasons, unfortunately. Again, it’s a very powerful piece in that the director sees the boy in the coma as a metaphor for his country, as neither alive nor dead…in a state of purgatory.
Baling, OzAsia 2018, photo courtesy Asian Culture Centre
The Malaysian play, Baling, has a political scenario drawn from the transcripts of an historic meeting between a British Government representative, the Malaysian leader and the Communist leader held on 25 December 1995 after seven years of civil war.
This is immersive verbatim theatre. You’re not in a seating bank; you enter and move through rooms into different experiences. For the younger generation, it offers a fascinating insight into the complexity of the region and the world post-WWII as colonialism was basically being overthrown, and the role and impact that Communism had at the time. For the older generation who understood the withdrawal of the colonists it’s a recalibration, asking was the Communist leader Ching-pen trying to do something good or was he nothing more than a terrorist? The cast get divisive about it, take positions and audience too. This is real life drama.
It could make an interesting comparison with Wild Rice’s HOTEL, a vibrant account of 100 years of Singaporean culture and politics very successfully staged at last year’s OzAsia .
There’s a generation in South-East Asia now who feel comfortable going back, revisiting the narratives created by their parents’ generation and using the tools of contemporary theatre and performance to open up questioning so that history is not just clear-cut but open for debate.
Where does the New Zealand-based Indian Ink Theatre Company’s The Guru of Chai fit in your program?
It’s just a riveting piece of theatre with one actor and one musician but so much more than that. Jacob Rajan is a phenomenal actor who gives you a direct line into the extreme diversity of contemporary life in a large modern Indian city. Everything from poor street tea-sellers, such as his central character, to abandoned children begging in the street and corrupt politicians, government officials and local beat cops. It’s a no-holds-barred insight into contemporary India.
Nassim, from Iranian writer Nassim Soleimanpour, will doubtless attract a large audience after the success of the widely travelled White Rabbit, Red Rabbit.
This is one of my personal favourites. When I spoke to Nassim about the work he said, quite bluntly, that when White Rabbit, Red Rabbit went all around the world, he had to stay put. Of course, it was never performed in Iran. Since then, he’s moved to Berlin and has citizenship there. He thought, next time I write a play, I’m going to write myself into it and I might get to have some of the experiences that my play has had. It’s an interactive performance about language, Nassim wanting to let us know how important his mother tongue is to him and that he wrote this play with his mother in mind, as something she would understand and be proud of. Your mother tongue defines who you are and why those personal close connections are so meaningful.
Eko Supriyanto, Salt, photo courtesy the artist and OzAsia 2018
I see Eko Supriyanto, the maker of Cry Jailolo and Balabala, is back in Australia with a new solo work, Salt, exploring “the duality of the tensions between life-giving water and caustic salt” in the island cultures that make up Indonesia.
Eko is essentially an exceptionally strong dancer as well as a choreographer. Salt is his physical response to life-changing experiences. What’s really wonderful about it is that the first half is about him exploring his upbringing in Solo with Central Javanese dancing and then merging into the life-changing experience he had when he went out to North Maluku.
We see Eko playing out these two completely different backgrounds. When he went from Solo to Maluku it really changed him as a choreographer. Sidi Larbi went to China and Yui Kawaguchi went to Berlin. Nassim talks about displacement of language in our modern society and how we have to go back to our mother tongues and not forget who we are. And the Taiwanese production Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land is about displacement because of the Cultural Revolution. In the Syrian work the characters are all displaced. Many come back to Damascus but some escape to Lebanon and Europe and some escape by smoking pot. Then you’ve got the Chinese piece with girls moving away from reality into a digital existence.
Jose Da Costa, Hello my name is…, photo courtesy the artist and OzAsia 2018
OUT OF ADELAIDE INTO ASIA
Among Adelaide companies and artists, Tutti Arts are working with a large group of female artists from Malaysia and Indonesia, Alison Currie is collaborating with Singaporean dancers and Paolo Castro with a Timor Leste performer, while David Kotlowy, whose work I don’t know, is creating Patina, featuring dancers Ade Suharto and Shin Sakuma and visual artist Juno Oka.
David Kotlowy is an Adelaide-based artist specialising in Indonesian and Japanese music. This year we’ve commissioned five productions by Adelaide artists collaborating with artists from other countries. Because I’ve been in Adelaide for three years now, it’s given me a chance to get to know local artists very well. Because we’re a festival, we can reach out to other festivals and producing partners so that these newly commissioned works aren’t simply produced once in Adelaide but have ongoing presentation possibilities around the world.
So we’re doing Patina and Tutti Arts’ Say No More, and Alison Currie-Singaporean dance collaboration, Close Company, Paolo Castro directing actor Jose Da Costa from Timor Leste in Hello, my name is… And there’s Flower, a work for infants aged 4-18 months created by Sally Chance Dance and Korea’s Masil Theatre. Alison Currie’s show will do Singapore and then come back to Adelaide in September-October. Tutti Arts are doing Penang, then Adelaide, then Yogyakarta so that’s a three-way presentation. Hello my name is… will do Adelaide and then Portugal.
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As well as developing and touring Australia-Asian collaborations, Joseph Mitchell has invited the Borak Art Series — South-East Asia’s major performing arts conference and performing arts market — and the Jaipur Literary Festival to be part of OzAsia 2018. He says, “while there’s a strong track record of artist-to-artist engagement between Australia and Indonesia and quite strong institutional links between Australia and Singapore; beyond those two countries, not as much. Hopefully the three-day Borak Art Series conference will lead to some fruitful collaborations over the next few years. I also thought that it would be a really refreshing point of difference to do a literary festival from the perspective of contemporary culture in India and South Asia and looking out. What makes it really strong is that it is not about people talking about their books; there are only panels on broader topics, which spark more debate.”
There’s much more to OzAsia 2018: numerous forums, film (including a celebration of Thai film director Apichatpong Weerasethakul) and popular music outdoor concerts. Once again Joseph Mitchell has created an enticing program drawing on an expansive vision of Asia and delivering idiosyncratic regional creations and cross-cultural and often experimental works that further our sense of what is artistically possible, what is mutually advantageous and where displacements signal challenges that must be addressed.
Top image credit: Anida Yoeu Ali, From The Red Chador series: Smithsonian Arts & Industries Building, 2016, Washington DC, photo courtesy the artist and OzAsia 2018
The curious and the committed crowded into Sydney’s City Recital Hall on 25 September to explore the range and depth of contemporary experimental music and were rewarded with superb performances midday to midnight by leading Australian artists and ensembles alongside America’s Bang on a Can All-Stars. The Extended Play Festival occupied the hall’s auditorium, studio and multiple foyer spaces yielding continuous action and a sense of intimate communality and celebration.
ELISION, Extended Play, City Recital Hall, photo Poppy Burnett
ELISION Ensemble
Extended Play opened explosively with ELISION Ensemble Artistic Director Daryl Bucklely, on electric lap-steel guitar with electronics, powering his way through Aaron Cassidy’s fiercely swooping, subtly looping and frenetically buzzing The wreck of former boundaries. I first heard this as a half-hour work for large ensemble at the 2016 Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music (BIFEM) and subsequently on CD (NMC Recordings). The wreck… is modular, yielding short solo outings like this one and various instrumental combinations. You can hear an earlier account of Buckley’s riveting solo posted by Cassidy on YouTube.
In stark contrast, Graeme Jennings performed Liza Lim’s ethereal The Su Song Star Map for solo violin, musing, conversing, growling and soaring with an ear-ringing cosmological purity. It was written for Ashot Sarkissjan, who plays it here. Buckley, Peter Neville on percussion and Tristram Williams on trumpets performed Richard Barrett’s world-line (hear an earlier account here) with fascinating variations in instrumental interplay yielding a performance akin to watching an intensively communicative jazz ensemble. I was entranced, again, by Buckley’s playing: rapid high-note plucking, powerful attack and swirling, gliding notes produced by the brisk rotating of the steel slide. ELISION provided a perfectly head-clearing, provocative introduction to Extended Play.
Lisa Moore, Extended Play, City Recital Hall, photo Poppy Burnett
Lisa Moore
A tight schedule, some poor door management and over-crowding in the small studio denied me New York-based pianist and vocalist Lisa Moore’s rendition of Philip Glass’s Piano Etude No 2 and most of Randy Newman’s “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today.” But the balance of this intimate recital was richly rewarding. New York composer Martin Bresnick’s Ishi’s Song was inspired by the story of the last remaining Yana-Yahi Native American, Ishi, who walked off the land in the early 20th century speaking a language no-one understood but which was phonetically transcribed and recorded on an Edison cylinder by anthropologists. The opening sung melody of the piece is based on Ishi’s singing of a healing song, for which there is no translation. The piano then gently ripples and flows on without the voice with a late increasingly dance-like intensity only to ebb with Debussyan depth and delicacy into poignant silence. Once contextualised, Ishi’s Song speaks with specific eloquence of loss of culture, of language and lives — Ishi’s people had been massacred, their land ruined.
In Sliabh Beagh, Moore as commissioner-performer and Australian composer Kate Moore inhabit their long-ago Irish origins, lyrically at first but then with a tad melodramatic forcefulness resolving into an emphatic Irish folk dance (you can see this work’s Mt Stromlo Observatory premiere here).
The highlight of Moore’s recital was American composer Frederic Rzewski’s De Profundis, a dramatic rendition of excerpts from Oscar Wilde’s anguished prison letters to his young lover. Spoken text, sudden gasps, cries, song fragments, roars, fearsome body slapping and head-holding are tautly meshed with dramatic pianism revealing Moore’s talent as a pianist-vocalist; definitely one of Extended Play’s highlights. Moore’s performance celebrated Rzewski’s 80th birthday.
Ensemble Offspring
Ensemble Offspring enthralled its auditorium audience with a celebration of 82-year-old composer Steve Reich, juxtaposing two relatively recent works, Double Sextet (2008) and Radio Rewrite (2012) for large ensembles, with a percussion version of Vermont Counterpoint (1982), the recorded percussion component arranged, with Reich’s permission, by performer Claire Edwardes. Originally composed for alto flute and 10 recorded flutes, Edwardes’ bravura account conjures a ringing, crystalline world of escalating accumulations and magical gear-shifts, realising a memorable real/virtual dialogue. In contrast to the rigorous intricacies of this mid-career work, Double Sextet and Radio Rewrite have a distinctively more lyrical feel, not least in their reverie-like slow movements.
The ensemble opened its program with the immediately deeply engaging electric bass- and piano-driven Radio Rewrite, with the other instruments soaring. The work borrows from, if deeply embedding, the Radiohead songs “Jigsaw Falling into Place” and “Everything in Its Right Place.” Reich has explained that the former’s opening chords provided the impetus for the work’s three fast movements and the harmonics of the latter the two interpolated slow movements. Whether or not you know the songs, Radio Rewrite is a beautiful standalone work, the sparely scored slow movements particularly affecting, the second one, even more spacious than the first in the ensemble’s sensitive reading, is imbued with a dark melancholy from which we are released with a final joyous dance.
The ensemble’s performance of Reich’s Double Sextet granted us the luxury of two live sextets — flutes, clarinets, violins, cellos, vibraphones and pianos. Often performed by one sextet against a recorded part, here we witnessed the subtle interplay between the two groups with minimalist big band verve. Again there were oscillations, quite rapid, between fast and slow passages with a melodically plangent slow movement dominating the central third of the work, before the pounding ride home, interlocking percussion and pianos driving hard, fractionally slowing and pushing ahead — all credit to Edwardes on vibes and Zubin Kanga and Sonya Lifschitz on pianos, and superb ensemble playing all round.
Gabriella Smart, Extended Play, City Recital Hall, photo Poppy Burnett
Gabriella Smart
The South Australian pianist and leader of the Soundstream Collective talked us through and played piano works for the most part commissioned for her Of Broken Trees and Elephant Ivories project, inspired by colonial pianos and, in four pieces, the no-longer playable instrument housed behind glass in the old Alice Springs Telegraph Station, originally installed, no doubt, for the pleasure of the station master and family. De-commissioned, the station was then used to incarcerate Indigenous people including as an orphanage for Stolen Generations children. David Harris’ Station Chains unfolds like an unstable dance with alternations between anger and elegy. In Picnic at Broken Hill, Jon Rose has MIDI-converted into a piano score the written protests in 2015 of Afghan cameleers over the attempted World War I invasion of Turkey. After attacking locals, the two men killed themselves. Smart retained the vocal renderings of the text adding them to the performance, with one voice declarative and the other a reverberant whispering.
Luke Harrald’s Intensity of Light deploys a recording of the artist Hans Heysen celebrating “the intensity of the light” in Central Australia while fearing it being forgotten. Harrald breaks up and repeats fragments of the tape of Heysen’s warmly resonant eloquence to suggest fragility and a sense of loss. It’s eerily evocative if, for whatever reason, at times dramatically overwrought.
James Rushford’s Haunted Place is the least literal of the commissions, quietly and lucidly suggesting the beauty of the old piano even though, as Smart reminds us, it sits behind glass. Elena Kats-Chernin’s Piano Memories evokes the instrument brought to life with a lilting old-world expressiveness that reminds us of the cosmopolitan spirit the piano, along with the telegraph, could bring to even the remotest of places.
Other pieces included Cathy Milliken’s Steel-True Gold-Sole, celebrating the culturally adventurous novelist Robert Louis Stevenson with piano and flageolet and concluding with a brief recording of the one opportunity Smart had to record the writer’s piano at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum before the instrument was suddenly declared unplayable.
Cat Hope’s The Fourth Estate was palpably experimental. Composed for solo piano, AM radios and Ebows (hand-held, electronic bows applied to the piano strings) it’s a generative work of variable ordering. This is the second time I’ve seen it performed (experience Zubin Kanga’s account here); it continues to be mysterious, yielding moments of lyrical pianism, neat piano and harpsicordish unison, keyboard fury and passages of hum and radio static. While there’s nothing seemingly literal about the work if you don’t know its purpose, Hope’s agenda is explicit in its defence of an embattled democratic media: “As the Fourth Estate is thought to be an element of society ‘outside’ official recognition, here the electronics attempt to pull the piano into a different sound world outside its usual realm.” The Fourth Estate was best experienced with eyes shut, eliminating the various visual machinations of its making.
Bang on a Can All-Stars, Extended Play, City Recital Hall, photo Poppy Burnett
Bang on a Can All-Stars
In another Extended Play highlight, the Bang on a Can All-Stars program celebrated early works by the band’s founders — David Lang, Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe — and aptly added Philip Glass to the roster alongside the UK’s Steve Martland and Australia’s JG Thirlwell, revealing the incredible diversity of what can be limitedly labelled as post-minimalism.
David Lang’s Cheating Lying Stealing successively orients and disorients the listener with its spacious, tense beat, disturbing hesitancies and a mournfully growling cello, expressive of guilt and regret. Overtly and playfully Reichian, Michael Gordon’s Gene Takes a Drink was inspired by the wanderings of his cat and originally accompanied by a delightful cat POV film (a cut above the usual kitty videos, it can be found on YouTube). Conflicted with internal tensions, Julia Wolfe’s Believing is furiously paced from the start, but with cellist Ashley Bathgate’s long-noted wordless singing the work suddenly achieves a kind of transcendence without surrendering propulsion. Philip Glass’s aetherial Closing provided easeful counterpoint, and was in turn countered by JG Thirlwell’s riotously Grand Guignol Anabiosis. The late Steve Martland was celebrated with a powerful rendition of his Horse of Instruction imbued with rock and jazz drive. In the spirit of that work, the band encored with the quick-fire fifth movement of American composer Marc Mellits’ Five Machines. As ever Bang on a Can met complex challenges with precision and pristine clarity, complementing Ensemble Offspring’s equally illuminating performance of Steve Reich works earlier in the day.
Topology, Love Stories, Extended Play, City Recital Hall, photo Joan Shortt-Smith
There were other engaging dimensions to Extended Play, including a theremin workshop, a much-lauded Brett Dean-Zubin Kanga collaboration (which I missed as the event’s schedule became more complex), and numerous small group performances as well as an event-long exploration of Erik Satie’s Vexations by numerous participants in the hall’s main foyer. I also caught Love Stories, a collaboration between filmmaker Trent Dalton and Brisbane’s Topology, in which the director documents homeless people and staff at Brisbane’s 139 Club (now 3rd Space) talking about love. Topology, with guitarist Karin Schaupp provided affecting live accompaniment (composers Robert Davidson, John Babbage) to already emotionally rich material while avoiding the darker specifics of their subjects’ lives, which are largely taken as a given.
Although needing a little fine tuning of its scheduling (it’s frustrating when you purchase a day-pass but can’t access preferred events) and crowd and space management, Extended Play proved to be an exhilarating festival, wonderfully supportive of local artists and ensembles, emerging talent and an audience eager to engage. Sydney needs more Extended Plays.
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City Recital Hall, a co-production with Lyle Chan and Vexations840, Extended Play; City Recital Hall, Sydney, Aug 25
Top image credit: Ensemble Offspring, Extended Play, City Recital Hall, photo Poppy Burnett
“They are 50 drawings / taken from exercise books / containing notes / literary / poetic / psychological / physiological / magical / especially magical / magical first / and foremost. / So they are mixed up / with pages / laid down on pages / where writing / is at the forefront / of vision, / writing, feverish notes / effervescent, / ardent / blasphemy / imprecation.” Antonin Artaud, 50 drawings to murder magic, translator Donald Nicholson-Smith, Seagull, NY, 2004
When I briefly explained the story below to a friend he asked if I knew “how to travel with a salmon.” No, I said; it’s a book by Umberto Eco, he said, you should read the chapter about writing an introduction to an art catalogue. I did; and discovered a ‘uselessness’ to writing about art; a ‘uselessness’ based on the time of one’s life, or rather the ideas of note (or fashion) at the time of one’s life when one is writing about the particular art (a review or an essay); a ‘uselessness’ in time and over time, as time holds dear its own time; or, a ‘uselessness’ based on tense and clever proposals of meaning. Writings are works in miniature; like drawings on a page, they have a formal order to them in the formal dimensions of the book or magazine. They could be all the same; they ‘look’ all the same. Their differences, their energy and their composition lie internal to their look; it’s in their way of saying what they say that one can sense the writer and their world, the singular person writing.
Interpretation (in writing) is useless too, although there is always interpretation. It’s the thing that remains, when all is said-and-done; the description of the thing, the ‘thing’ as description; the emotional experience of looking at the thing-in-itself; the thing-in-itself being anything, not just art, or art-like, or isolated out, special, and displayed. That is, I think, that one can cut-into the thing, shift the thing (the meaning of the thing); the “passage from the felt to the perceived is activity, being-in-the-world as construction of Abshaetungen cut deliberately in the very flesh of the thing-in-itself” (Umberto Eco, “How to Write an Introduction to an Art Catalogue,” in How to Travel with A Salmon & Other Essays, Harcourt Brace & Company, Orlando, 1994). The thing is as it is; it is its own sense — and then there is everything else.
I was relieved then (or less dejected) after reading Eco, about the rejection (the story below), as I’d written in close proximity to the work (and perhaps done little damage to the work), writing what I saw while looking at the work, and what I imagined while looking at the work, and about the space of the gallery where the work appeared — that is, the work’s appearance in space, precisely positioned, and acting upon and acted upon by that space. However, writing is never ‘the thing’ being written about; writing raises its own issues, internal, nebulous and additional to its communicative role; it follows thought for instance (and thought is primed and tempered and composed), and uses words with varied (and interpreted) meanings. Writing is influenced; and Eco’s message has a salty mocking tone; does Eco mean (seriously, that is) that writing about art is a cut into (and out of) the art-itself, into and out of the thing-in-itself, into and out of its own sense; that writing about art removes (deports, exiles) the art from itself?
Writing usually doesn’t happen as Antonin Artaud’s did in his “drawings from the exercise books” — pages of notes and sketches and holes and erasures, deliberate fields of contrary internal forces. In his last text, 50 drawings to murder magic, he wrote: “When I write, / I generally write / a note all / at once / but that / is not enough for me, / and I try to extend / the acting of what / I have written / into the atmosphere, so / I get up / I look for / consonances / aptness / sounds, / for attitudes of the body / and limbs / that testify, / that call upon / surrounding spaces / to arise / and speak / then I come back / to the printed / page / and …” Still, one is (or tries to be) in this process, calling upon surrounding spaces, dwelling on any flickering light, any “rush of feeling / that has occurred / and magnetically / and magically / worked its effects …”
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This story is a response to Katerina Sakkas’ article titled Convergence & Resurgence (Part 2), recently published in RealTime, and it’s also in response to what is termed ‘house-style.’ Katerina’s article crossed paths with a comprehensive rejection I received for a new piece of writing about an exhibition. Her article looks back at visual arts writing published in RealTime between 1994 and 2004. I wondered whether I’d written anything for RT during that decade, and if so, would it be mentioned. Near the end of the piece I found I’d written about Rick Martin’s Maria Ghost (RT 23, Feb-March 1998, p31) and Jonathan Dady’s Construction Drawings (RT 42, April May 2001). Katerina has summed up my writing in such a way (using some of my words) that I felt “understood” (and instantly cringed at that tiny moment of relief/encouragement). She wrote:
“…(the two reviews) are little artworks in themselves; text-based analogues of the original installations. Her meditation on drawing in the latter review could apply equally to her reviewing: “Is drawing an after-effect in its own right? Does a drawing make its subject (overall) a completely different thing — a thinking thought-of thing, a point of transition, from which it desires to be the effect of ‘afterwards’; after-the-fact of presence comes another presence (over and over) from which the thing cannot recover, it’s there anew, however slight the change may be – perhaps changed only by acts of thought.”
It was good to have the intention of the writing’s form, its investment in being a particular and tenuous voice/body, recognised; in other words, recognised for being writing that was ‘with’ its subject. Anyway, acknowledgements of one’s small contributions are rare, and gratefully accepted.
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Linda Marie Walker, Image courtesy the artist
It was a commissioned text about a significant exhibition/installation that was comprehensively rejected. The writing was assessed unsuitable from beginning to end. I had not observed the ‘house-style’; I should have, I was told, understood the ‘house-style’ from reading reviews previously published by the magazine; and, some writers diversify their writing to fit different commissions; as well, there were inconsistencies, contradictions, multiple entry points, multiple theoretical agendas, and the political issues were considered ‘a given.’ In fact, it was unredeemable; its ‘approach’ was fatal.
I went to bed very early. I was overwhelmed by the magnitude of the text’s faults. I was embarrassed too, as the work I had written about was strong and considered and subtle and beautifully installed, and its concerns were of contemporary cultural relevance; it deserved to be written about.
I was lucky to have read Katerina’s article shortly before reading the rejection. Suddenly I could reflect on what it was that RealTime had provided for me, as a writer; what sort of venue it was for writing compelled by the visual arts (and by other art forms, in my case, dance and theatre), and how it encouraged writing that engaged with work as if the work was ‘part’ of the world not ‘apart’ from the world. It believed in art, trusted art, had faith, which is probably why it allowed writing about the work to be personal, fluid, emotive and strange. Writing was not just information about the ‘work’ and ‘meaning,’ but ‘work’ itself. And what’s more, the ‘work’ emerged from someone who was singular and responsive, someone who had experienced something. In other words, inconsistency, or variation, of voice was core to the venture — the art of the publication.
I imagine that my writing is not ‘glum’ or dour. I imagine that it is ‘light,’ kind, and mostly tenuous and undetermined (with tiny blue wings). I imagine my writing as a ‘community’; and as a community that starts (up) again, or stops and starts, takes a breath, as it goes; then takes another track, then another, slowly getting home (and praying the weather will hold); and, during this ‘following’ process, other writers offer (to the writing) insights that help it out.
If I chose to rewrite the rejected text I was advised to introduce the “poetic language” gradually; I have no idea what this means. Firstly, I don’t set out to write “poetic language.” That is, “poetic language” is not a strategy or a desire of mine. Secondly, how does one write gradual “poetic language,” or gradual anything-else language — theoretical, philosophical, whimsical, ironic, funny, literary etc. There is a ‘general reader’ at large, somewhere, who is thought to need gradual introductions to notions such as “poetic language,” and therefore to what is held (and assumed incomprehensible) within “the poetic” relevant to the artwork or the garden or the landscape.
There are questions of function that confuse me: does a reader read for ‘house-style’ or does a reader read to discover what is being said by the writer, or is a (general) reader only able to understand a writer’s writing if it is filtered by ‘house-style’; is the benefit (usefulness) something to do with excision or re-arrangement or modification — from one condition or presentation (of self, let’s say) to another (still it’s not the ‘thing’ pursued); therefore, what is ‘house-style,’ what does it do, what ‘good’ does it bring the reader or the writer?
What is it (then) when ‘house-style’ is ‘not-a-house-style’; when it’s every voice for itself, for its own worth and vulnerability, in the same way that the performer/artist is their own voice for themselves (in public); their own body making their own work and showing that, being on-show for others to see (as that body); the writer, on their own (in a manner of speaking), stumbling along, looking this way and that, tripping, getting up, falling, laughing and so forth, says what they saw, in this strange abstract non-material material called language; it’s weird and demanding and often frantic.
I’d written in the review Katerina mentioned: “Architecture is a poetry of joining, an awkward, difficult, demanding, beautiful engagement. It’s messy when you build something. And what is an ‘overall effect’? Can there be such an effect, overall, after? Is there ever a single unified thingness about ‘the thing’? Overall.”
An overall unified effect in writing is an illusion. There is always a dim corner, a dead end, a broken window. Writing holds together by fine soft threads. For me, and once again it’s imagined, writing is a kind of building/assembling activity; and ‘poetry’ here is ‘making’ (as in the Greek ‘poiesis’: making a new thing). The text looks ‘overall’ on the page, but it’s word-by-word, thought-by-thought. One comes upon, while writing, the writing; it’s prompted by, and emerges from, the encounter with the art. It’s not a neutral encounter; all types of memories kick in — from other art works, from books, conversations, wonderment, childhood, and so on (and from my dog or new rose bush).
Reflection here is driven by age as much as event, and by what seems like dwindling opportunities for gatherings of voices; there’s demand for everything to be the same (bureaucratic forms, institutional agendas, party politics, fruit and vegetables: phrases, figures, slogans, accusations, sizes), to be of-a-kind, or understandable even (obvious, immediate, black-and-white, large, blemish-free). The world is layered and surprising and nuanced; sometimes it takes a long time to think about ‘things.’ There are minds of infinite kinds in all directions, yet writing is beaten into submission, into tortured ordinariness — as if its job is to transmit at speed an easy, painless, linear, ‘leap-off-the-page,’ doubtless message, and without ceremony.
RealTime editors Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter are interested (and have been from the start) in how writers respond to, and express, the experience of being in the middle, or along the edge, of creative works as critics, participants, visitors, fans and fellow artists; and how they make connections to other art-forms of different yet resonant, textures and sensibilities — that is, how they make work (writing) as themselves (making writing a life-event, alongside the work being written about). They give/gave writers confidence to swing-out, rack their brains, be ridiculous, or reserved; writing could be enthusiastic, positive and supportive, on the side of art rather than at a remote (or discreet) distance; writing could be small, slow, meandering; it could get lost and emerge dishevelled yet still in the presence of the work (and with an uneasy inkling of something until then unknown (to oneself)).
Each article in a publication can have an entirely different ‘approach’ — as do collections of poetry, essays or short stories. Readers of art-writing do not have special needs that require writing to be reined-in, or ‘gradual’, or noiseless (do they even know they are thought of this way; and I’m being a bit over-the-top, a bit graphic, but the ‘general reader’ might be me or you or our artist/writer colleagues). Editing is still necessary in terms of the text’s own character, in fact it’s ongoing, never finished, and valued; perhaps editing is charged with being open to unlikely possibilities and unfamiliar forms (after-all the natural world is pretty amazing, and crammed with extraordinary living structures, patterns and colours); perhaps a reader has to make adjustments to the voices as they shift from one writer to another (from speaker to speaker, as we do in the everyday), but that’s hardly gruelling (Eco’s essay “Editorial Revision,” on editing, is short and sweet).
Reading might not then be such a smooth affair, or such an effortlessly consumed product; and might not give up, surrender, its subject without loose ends — it might have moments of pause or puzzlement. Although, and simultaneously, a noticeable framework is wonderful, a structure and/or a folly, that concentrates, focuses, and helps carry subtle insights and forensic dreams. Regardless, as readers we can be physical and flexible in reading, in being ‘at home’ in a field of differences, conscious of the ‘voice,’ and of other planets and creatures and perspectives (“surrounding spaces”); hearing and adapting to slight or sudden shifts, or broad sweeps, in words, sentences, and paragraphs, and trusting (or taking the chance with) links (or jump-cuts) between disparate references; ‘at home’ without the consolation of flattened-out idiosyncrasies and obsessions and plain old playfulness and joy. Writing is hard work, but it’s also fun and absorbing and worrisome; sometimes it comes as one-thing-after-another; sometimes further reading is necessary, and the views (counsel) of others come and go — not as revelations/opinions but as company for oneself, and as company for the ‘work/subject’ too. The written ‘work’ is a minor act on paper, a pack of good/bad cartwheels that never reach their full potential; nevertheless, they all belong (even when they collapse in a heap and disappear), these odd and jerky movements with glints of drama, mischief and darning.
RealTime let me write as I could, which is an important point; it did not attempt to have me write another way: as I couldn’t. (It did not say to me: you’re no good at writing because you can’t write ‘properly.’) “As I could” and “as I couldn’t” are a little too bare and raw though; their opposition is not quite true, having written for academic publications with all their impossible criteria; and having studied for a journalism degree way back in the olden days, and having been a good student of literature, writing practices, and contemporary philosophy. Slowly, and, to more or less extent, without design, I came to an ‘approach’ (faulty and frail as that might be); an approach without formula or template — conditional, interdependent, circumstantial.
(I told this story to another friend who was responsible for exhibition texts and he said he was urged “to make essays on exhibitions…simple so that the community could understand them. My response was that the writing was straightforward English and I expected most people to understand if they put their minds to it. I really thought that there was an arrogance in thinking people weren’t intelligent enough to engage.”)
RealTime purposely (willingly) understood that a magazine could reflect a way of being in the world; it could be an assemblage of various expressive modes; its writing could say things differently; it could show how something is seen/experienced oddly, excitedly, politically; it could practice multiplicity, contrariness, tenderness, pleasure; it could give space to small and new performances and events, as well as major festivals and the machinations of arts education; and could be, as a place, plural, an actual location of ‘many.’
‘Overall’, writing is political. How it’s thought about by a publication, how its thoughts are enacted, is political; different engagements, experiments and observations, modestly accept the world as transient, fragile, composite, colourful, discordant and infinite.
I’m not complaining about the rejection, I’m trying rather to dissolve the bodily (gut) feeling of shock or dismay (as one can stay silent for two reasons: accusations of thin-skin and sour-grapes); I did take it to heart though; and, it’s been difficult to read the text again as I’ve found myself chastising myself, reproachfully examining the relationship between my (rejected) ‘approach’ and my encounter with the work and with the artist’s practice over the longer term. I do though stand by the text in terms of its written-shape (and its relation to the work’s arrangement, sculpturally, in the gallery); the writing is something-in-itself, mildly textured, and made so as not to cut too deeply into the flesh of the work. (Susan Sontag wrote, and it’s salutary to be reminded to stay with the ‘image’: “leave the work of art alone”, “show…that it is what it is”, “(i)nterpretation makes art manageable” (Against Interpretation, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1966).) It was, actually, rather understated, and ‘useless’ in terms of explaining (away) the ‘meaning’ of the artist’s work. But, as is always the case, a transformation takes place — from ‘work’ to ‘work’; writing can only be another work, literal and measured, a present-tense act, an invention, while appearing otherwise.
Postscript
The rejected writing about Aldo Iacobelli’s A Conversation with Jheronimus, titled “Strangeness is not so far away“, unexpectedly found a home on the Samstag Museum website. Another writer was commissioned to write about the exhibition by the same publication and her text too was comprehensively rejected.
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Linda Marie Walker is an Adelaide-based writer, artist and independent curator.
Top image credit: Linda Marie Walker, image courtesy the artist
In her new work, plenty serious TALK TALK, reviewed in this edition, Vicki Van Hout humorously addresses the issue of appropriation in dance with serious intent. In 2012 for our Burning Issue series, Vicki wrote “Authenticity: heritage and avant-garde,” an essay on the challenges faced by an artist of Wiradjuri heritage when making use of dance steps from other Australian Indigenous peoples in experimental hybrid dance works with a growing expectation that permission for borrowing had to be sought at every turn.
Top image credit: Vicki Van Hout working on installation for Briwyant, 2012, photo courtesy the artist
Vicki Van Hout’s new dance theatre work, plenty serious TALK TALK, is wickedly funny, existentially intimate, culturally complex, bitingly political and superbly danced. In the persona of Ms Light Tan, Van Hout is trapped between black skin and white, between heavily marketed Indigenous culture and an ambivalent relationship with her ‘appropriation’ of traditional Indigenous dance. We are the confidantes for a woman on the edge, “a middled-aged dancer with OCD problems,” tipping a glass of water to the floor from her talk show desk, dangerously tilting a large, old cassette recorder (not working but she madly stabs away at its keys) and transforming into a vicious three-legged mongrel. We’re all off-kilter.
Commencing in a mood of wicked irreverence about welcomings to country (ably abetted onscreen by Cloé Fournier and Glen Thomas) and followed by an hilariously brilliant display of hybridised dance forms (including flamenco-Aboriginal and “a moggy with wings”), the work palpably darkens as Ms Light Tan lives out awkward phone conversations about style and appropriation and a series of stressful experiences, the entrapments that close in on her. There’s intense emotional pain realised as a dance that excruciatingly hovers between seemingly real physical sensation and highly crafted choreography. A nasty hospital experience where she’s treated as if she’s an addict morphs into a nightmarish drug deal, a metaphor (“I do contemporary”) for the ambiguities suffered in pursuing one’s craft (the dealer offers her clap sticks). It’s a chilling piece of writing, powerfully realised as Van Hout plays both self and dealer, the transformations accentuated here by lighting designer Frankie Clarke’s moody framing.
Vicki Van Hout, plenty serious TALK TALK, FORM Dance Projects, photo Heidrun Löhr
In the work’s moving penultimate scene, Van Hout writhes, teeters and staggers near collapse but gradually transforms pain into manageable shape to rise above crisis. The show concludes with an overtly political, bitterly funny onscreen suburban land grab juxtaposed with phone cold-selling of Indigeneity, typical of the opposing pressures imposed on Ms Light Tan. The pulsing of the lighting and the replay of voice-over from earlier on somewhat over-literalise the already intensely meaningful final dance and elsewhere there is room for some judicious editing; otherwise the dance/theatre interplay and the calculatedly disruptive “where are we now?” structure feels organic.
With stand-up comedy verve, skilful acting and multimedia dexterity, engrossing, illuminating dance, an eerily spare music score (in an era of sonic lambast in dance) and, above it all, the artist’s glowing woven-grass sculpture-cum-screen suspended centre-stage, plenty serious TALK TALK is a wonder, revealing the complex entwining and unravelling of race, craft and culture in one fraught soul querying her courage to persist against the odds.
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FORM Dance Projects & Riverside Theatres, Dance Bites 2018: plenty serious TALK TALK, director, performer Vicki Van Hout, dramaturg Martin del Amo, videographers Marian Abboud, Dominic O’Donnell, screen performers Vicki Van Hout, Cloé Fournier, Glen Thomas, sound designer Phil Downing, lighting design Frankie Clarke, stage manager Gundega Lapsa; Lennox Theatre, Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, 30 Aug-1 Sept
Top image credit: Vicki Van Hout, plenty serious TALK TALK, FORM Dance Projects, photo Heidrun Löhr
In 2003 Migration Minister Phillip Ruddock and Arts Minister Rod Kemp were furious with the Australia Council’s New Media Arts Board for funding the video game Escape from Woomera. Woomera was then a refugee detention centre. In anticipation of Sydney performance collective Applespiel’s revival of the work as a live gaming and performance experience, we’re linking you to Melanie Swalwell’s fine account of the saga in our archive.
While Ruddock thought the game would encourage a refugee breakout, some refugee advocates thought it trivialised the plight of refugees, but others saw it as encouraging empathy: “Rather than being a game ridiculing the situation of detainees, EFW will enable those who are unlikely to ever get inside a detention centre, to imagine themselves there. Virtually recreating these sites elegantly undermines their ‘no go’ status, simultaneously shrinking the space between ‘us’ and ‘them’.”
With the cruel treatment of refugees escalating in Australia, Return to Escape from Woomera is a timely addition to the Liveworks program from an ever-inventive ensemble with participants including refugees and advocates.
Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art: Applespiel, Return to Escape from Woomera, artists Nathan Harrison, Nikki Kennedy, Emma McManus, Rachel Roberts, Mark Rogers, Simon Vaughan, dramaturg Paschal Daantos Berry, technical Director Solomon Thomas; Carriageworks, Sydney, 24-27 Oct
Top image credit: Video game still, Escape from Woomera
“Occasionally (The Democratic Set) is like a dream sequence in a David Lynch film, disturbing, unstoppable. Sometimes it reeks of loneliness, people going about their business in some seriously fucked-up economy hotel. But mostly it’s full of laughter and hope, a feeling very much helped by the wide demographic of its contributors.” Timothy X Atack, RealTime, 2010
Eight years ago Back to Back Theatre made a Bristol version of The Democratic Set which had premiered in the 2009 Castlemaine State Festival in Victoria. Osunwunmi, who has been a regular contributor to RealTime since participating in a 2006 RealTime-In Between Time Festival review-writing workshop, was intrigued to see how the work had evolved in Back to Back Theatre’s return visit to her city. She spoke with the festival’s Artistic Director Helen Cole and Back to Back creator-performer Simon Laherty, artistic associate Tamara Searle and producer Alison Harvey at the making of a new Democratic Set at the Filwood Community Centre with the original 2010 Bristol performers.
Within the work’s frame individual Back to Back artists provide as prompts examples of what can be done, Simon explaining, “That’s what all of us do, like a small performance to show what we saw, sort of like to give the guys another go, show them what I can do; then they have their turn.”
This is what Osunwunmi witnessed as new episodes of The Democratic Set took shape.
Light fills the box, gorgeous and peachy with seaside colours: yellows, pinks and turquoise. A golden woman stands inside telling a risqué story. She’s not actually in a bikini though I remembered her so before checking the photos. She’s in jeans, and two shiny beach balls in the corner add luminous splashes of light.
A man is juggling. He and the director decide what lights to have on, whether to use purple or blue gels. Should there be a chair in the box? A projection? Someone throws single clubs into the frame at him from the wings — badum tish! It’s like he and the director are playing.
A pure-voiced youngster sings his own composition, meaningful rock-accented pop. Outside the box in shadow his mother shushes his baby sister.
An old clown — actually I think he was the Centre’s caretaker — has a whole 20-minute routine worked out but his collaborators haven’t turned up. Seventeen-second puppetry improvs follow, waspish, earnest, corny and hilarious. (“Let’s do another take.” “Are you sure? People have lives you know.”) Alison encourages him in the same innuendo-ridden music hall vernacular he uses himself. On the floor afterwards to be cleared away: the bowler hat, the pink wig and the flat cap, reminders of old variety in this community arts setting.
Behind the scenes a couple return to the Set eight years on, explaining that their no longer biddable sons, now teenagers, have better things to do this afternoon than collaborate with parental whimsy. The Fly Family are back! They have morphed into giraffes! They enter the box from opposite sides to negotiate a kiss, very much hampered by their heavy necks. The crew speculate whether puppeting, puppeteering or puppetry is the right word for these moments.
People come with punchlines that must be worked up to, with aphorisms that must be demonstrated, with crafted mini-dramas, with simple presentations: “Hello, I’m (Person) and I work at (Place) and I’d just like to tell you what we do, and we welcome everyone…” Some people come with just their name and where they live. A woman comes in with a bunch of golden shoes on her head. New people are always surprised that they’ve only got 17 seconds. Old hands from eight years ago find that their time has expanded.
The crew are smart, kind and super-efficient, expert at encouragement, at coaxing content out of small beginnings and at trimming content into crafted packages. They are also expert at knowing when not to push it, and I suspect in the final film some of the less shaped material may stand in its own truth, as compelling as anything. That is because I’ve seen the outcomes of this process before.
That last time I was struck by the edges of the performance frame, the places where light from the box leaked into non-performative space. The edges were like marginalia to the main event, discursive, full of possibility and of people waiting and geeing themselves up. Now the edges have been tidied up. The plywood performance box is guarded on all sides with a structure covered in blackout curtains. The Set is less accidental, eight years on. But what it is now, is stable, streamlined, mature and adaptable.
Boy Scouts came over after their meeting down the corridor to show off their routine: teaching the crew how to floss (that arm-swinging dance adults are incapable of.) Squeaky little, I mean irrepressible, young persons. I don’t know how the crew kept their energy up. Two people tried to keep their little dogs playing in the Set with a basket full of balls. Small plastic balls tipped slowly out of the box and rolled all over the hall, where the dogs followed. They were wary of the brightly lit space anyway, and there may be some footage of timid dog refusals at the edge of the frame. Or coaxing cries of “Come here boy!” from invisible sprites.
It was a long day: a bunch of artists turned up as it was growing dark and the crew would be working till past 10pm. They may have been sustained by cake, because there was cake in the kitchen (there were flowers in the garden, sun on the railings and hot air balloons sailing over the roof —we were having a heat wave) but all the packed lunches I saw were alarmingly, frugally, healthful. A description I’d been given of company members checks out. As Simon Laherty says, “When we go on tour, work hard, be on time, and don’t slack off, just keep going, just work, work, work, work, work.”
Talking about The Democratic Set: Helen Cole, Tamara Searle and Alison Harvey
HC Back to Back had originally been experimenting with film: what happens with using a simple frame, the same frame for everybody? What if you pass a lot of people through that frame and they all have the same democratic conditions: time — 17 seconds — and a box? I instantly thought, I really want to make something like that in Bristol. And I said, maybe we can look at whether it is tourable? Thirty shows later, it certainly is tourable! It’s worth considering that when they did it with us it was really the first time outside their Australian home base, whereas now they’ve done it in 30 different countries.
TS Our technology has gotten better. We’ve gotten fancier with the way that we run it. We’re always looking for different ideas to be in it so that’s always pushing us to explore what else it can be as a form. Since that first iteration now we light it and we project into it, we project behind it, we take the back off the box and we use the sides of the image rather than just the box so sometimes we shoot outside or around the sides of it. What’s changed, I guess, is that originally we were trying to make perhaps the perfect kind of frame. But now we’re just as interested in exploding the frame, as in what the frame can give us.
AH We also have taken it and worked with specific groups and remained with them for the whole three days rather than just having that 20-minute sweet spot with people. The difference there is that we get to explore, we get to break, explode the box a little bit more because we’ve got more time to play. So it becomes a different film but still very identifiable as the Dem Set.
It has an ever evolving and ever growing audience which is the beauty of the project and why it continues to expand in what it is and how it can work, and how it can reach its own community and its own audience. It actually inspires us to experiment with other models.
TS I tell you there’s quite a lot of formal facilitation here in terms of providing this quite strong offer. And beyond that it’s up to the person what they want to do. But the frame is quite strong. There are discussions about the Democratic Set, creating it as a model for giving it over to communities to do it for themselves rather than us having to be there to curate or produce it.
HC There’s something interesting for me about what it means to work with an artist or company from the other side of the world and have a 10-year relationship with them. There’s something about that company having a knowledge of this place because of the people they’ve met — and they’ve properly met them, they haven’t just done a show in front of 150 people and been there for two days and left. They’ve been in Bristol for two to three weeks each time. We ensure that we’ve got people for the project beforehand, some who wouldn’t normally come into an art space. It means the company is seeing a picture of Bristol that probably most of the artists we work with don’t have. It’s part of We Are Bristol, a three-year program to bring international artists into direct collaboration with people from the city, creating a community of people with international links — people who want to present a picture of Bristol that includes them.
Helen Cole, program launch In Between Time, 2017, photo Jack Offord
Postscript: on RealTime
HC Of course there are more academic publications and then there’s the more populist culture-vulture kind of publications; but RealTime is something very specific. It’s also specific because it’s been part of a practice in one country that has lasted decades. So they’ve been the witness and the critical friend of an entire community of practice in Australia. That’s the thing I think is incredible: that longevity.
Also I think it’s really important in a country like Australia that that publication has existed. Coming at this as an outsider, what I can see is a country that’s massive. So the cultural communities congregate in the key cities like they do in all places, but those key cities are a long distance away from each other. Often artists don’t spend time with each other, they don’t see each other’s shows. Times are changing of course: social media, technology, have changed how we experience any kind of artistic experience, and any experience is mediated in different ways now. RealTime has been a part of that, of mediation of experience. Mediating the sense of value in a type of practice that often falls outside of mainstream media, they’ve done that brilliantly.
That’s looking in to Australia, but I’m very aware of what they’ve done for In Between Time, since that amazing workshop that we did in 2006. That was utterly them, their selection of writers, working with writers in an intense workshop situation and then retaining these relationships with people. When we did it I thought it would just boost some writing for that festival and be brilliant professional development for people from Bristol. But actually as a result of that deep connection between the writers and RealTime, they have covered every festival ever since, independently of In Between Time, completely.
Not only that but they’ve published my writing on occasion. What I know that has done for In Between Time is raised its profile massively in Australia. Now we have artists and producers — usually but not just professionals — coming to IBT, attracted to IBT because of that writing. And it’s not just In Between Time that has a high profile in Australia, I think there are significant artists from the UK who are known in Australia because of that relationship.
O At that first workshop Keith expressed very particular things he wants as an editor. One of them is precision, and one of them is vividness. Write about it so that a person who wasn’t there gets as good an impression of what it was like in a sensory way as you can possibly do. What did you think and feel as you were looking?
Since there’s such a bias towards academic writing, which can be incredibly dry, I always think it was a wonderful direction to have at the beginning of writing about art, and I’ve kept it to heart. Because art doesn’t work with words. It works beyond words when it’s proper, it’s a different thing. If you could just write an essay about it we wouldn’t need artists.
You don’t process art all at once, it stays with you. I think for that reason, describing an artwork conveys stuff beyond words that gives someone who wasn’t there, who then reads it, a chance to understand the work perhaps a little bit better.
Also I think there’s some realisation of the point of view of the practitioner by doing this. The question for a practitioner is How can I bring this out? A critical review asks, Do you want to go and see this show, or not? But what RealTime did was ask, What’s this show about, what do you think they were trying to get at? Did they make it? Did anything get in the way from the point of view of practice?
HC Sometimes the artists themselves don’t know the answers to all those questions and possibly having that writing about it helps them see it.
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In the room for The Democratic Set and making it work at Filwood Community Centre were all the people who came to make art and be visible including Dans Maree Sheehan, Rod Machlachlan and Sera Davies, and Tamara Searle, Alison Harvey and Simon Laherty from Back to Back Theatre, Helen Cole and Juliet Simpson from In Between Time, and Paul Blakemore, photographer.
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We Are Bristol, In Between Time Festival: Back to Back Theatre, The Democratic Set, original concept, design, direction Bruce Gladwin, design, original set construction Mark Cuthbertson, original videography Rhian Hinkley
Previews of The Democratic Set video will take place at Trinity Centre, Easton on 4 October, and at Filwood Community Centre on 12 October. We Are Bristol is produced by In Between Time and developed in partnership with Knowle West Media Centre, Up Our Street, Ambition Lawrence Weston and UWE Bristol.
Top image credit: The Democratic Set, Back to Back Theatre, photo Paul Blakemore
