Presented by Little y Theatre Company in collaboration with emerging company whatshesaid, Rabbithead takes Barbara Baynton’s 1896 Australian Gothic bush story The Chosen Vessel, which as its point of provocation presents a bleak vision of a harshly malevolent landscape populated with sinister figures preying on women in their isolation. Instead of the threat coming from outside the home as in the story, Rabbithead explores the dangers that come from within: from the person closest to you, from your unattainable desires and the tyrannical sense of entitlement instilled in the psyche by a materialist culture which insists “you’re worth it.”
Housemates Holly and Violette (Holly Garvey and Violette Ayad) are excruciatingly self-absorbed and vapid: hyper products, it seems, of their time—obsessed with their online profiles, always plugged-in and suffering from an indefinite latency period in reaching emotional maturity. Violette doesn’t even have the capacity to look after her pet rabbit. Rabbithead is left in his cage, emaciated and filthy, until Holly decides to kill him rather than take on the responsibility to care for him herself. While Holly deals with her guilt through a drug-induced anthropomorphic soul- transference with the pet rabbit (!), Violette attempts to redeem herself by caring for the batch of eggs she and her boyfriend—literally, a cockroach—have conceived.
The potential of this surrealism-driven menace is never fully realised, and character development is eschewed for camp histrionics and gyrating choreography. The deliberately oversaturated spun-candy aesthetic—a knee-deep cotton-ball covered set from which puppets and the performers emerge—is, unfortunately, a manifestation of the surface treatment of the work as a whole.
As a devised piece, director Ian Sinclair asked his actors to create characters whose values and goals were in deliberate opposition to their own. In doing so, the performers perhaps succeed too well; what we end up with are characters so alienated from their performers that they struggle to infuse them with any significance. The piece does succeed in creating some darkly fascinating moments however, accentuated by the clever and decidedly creepy sound design by local composer and DJ Catlips (Katy Campbell). One is the discovery and subsequent devouring of the hidden cockroach eggs by the ravenously carnivorous Holly/Rabbithead.
Conceptually intriguing but overwrought in delivery, Rabbithead would have benefited from nuanced characterisations and less reliance on lip-synching and street-jazz dance numbers to fill out the scenes.
The Blue Room Theatre, Little y Theatre Co. & whatshesaid: Rabbithead director Ian Sinclair, performers, devisors, co-producers Holly Garvey, Violette Ayad, narrator Humphrey Bower, design Tessa Darcey, lighting Chris Donnelly, producer Georgia King; The Blue Room Theatre, Perth WA, 27 May -14 June
Syzygy are up from Melbourne and playing at the largish Blue Sky Coffee cafe courtesy of DeClassifiedMusic, a fairly new organisation promoting concerts into Brisbane’s Newstead (place of bars/restaurants/things to do and buy). Music as one part of the flow of the day’s events rather than as the full stop at the end of the day. That’s a great addition to the Brisbane scene.
By far my favourite piece of the concert is Charles Ives’ Sonata No.4 for violin and piano. In the neat preparatory talk, Harrald and Khafagi play us the original tunes Ives used for each of the three movements—“Tell me the old, old story,” “Yes, Jesus loves me” and “Shall we gather at the river?” Performers often introduce pieces with a short description of the composer’s intent or perhaps a formal aspect of the music, but this is perhaps the first time I’ve seen performers actually play examples in their discussion. Works well.
Ives wrote Sonata no 4 as a fond tribute to the religious summer camps of his town and Harrald beautifully channels an amateur tent performer for the rambling goofy religiosity of the first movement. It’s a slightly hysterical, almost out of control performance that surges with confidence then shudders and slows to make a tricky chord change only to suddenly ramp up the gusto for a favourite bit that isn’t so hard to play. The second movment couldn’t be more different—slow and gentle, an impressionistic pastorale that lets Khafagi’s violin shine through. There’s a sentimental edge here and there that at times reminds me of Gershwin whereas the final movement ragtimes away like Cole Porter: wild jumps, skipping melody and an abrupt mid-melody end, as though the bell has rung, the hymn books dropped, the kids run out to play.
Of the other pieces, Fausto Romitelli’s Domeniche alla periferia dell’impero is nicely atmospheric with lots of descending glides and squeeky door sounds—tiny motifs that get traded around, repeated and elaborated. Very much an ambient piece and probably the only time I have heard a kazoo used for subtle timbral layering rather than for comic effect.
To finish is David Dzubay’s Kukulkan—six short movements programmed around the structure and use of a Mayan temple. Program music can sometimes get a bit stolid and prog rock or sentimental and twee, symbols grinding away as surrogates for far too fraught emotions. I don’t get that with Kukulkan. Instead, there is more of a cinematic wash to each movement. Forbidding piano and spooky clarinet sound like a 30s mystery, dimly lit passageways, a man with a hat, a door opens and the glimpse of a gun. Or next movement and switch to light, joyful 60s and the end of austerity Britain—young love at Oxford, the student and the shopgirl, ride through the square and scatter the pigeons, punt along the river, plop down on the grassy bank for that very first kiss. Except it’s Mayan, human sacrifice, hearts held aloft.
DeClassified Music, TRIVIUM: The Art of Logic, Rhetoric & Grammar: Syzygy Ensemble, piano Leigh Harrold, cello Blair Harris, clarinet Robin Henry, flute Laila Engle, violin Jenny Khafagi, Blue Sky Coffee, Brisbane, 7 June
Directed by English comedian, actor and writer Richard Ayoade, The Double is a doppelganger comedy that tests the transformational skills of Jessie Eisenberg playing two conflicting selves alongside the ever morphing Mia Wasikowska and Noah Taylor. 3 copies courtesy of Madman Entertainment
DVD: Only lovers left Alive
A world weary decadence pervades this richly detailed, funny film from Jim Jarmusch about a couple of retiree vampires trying, through a love that’s endured centuries, to still that gnawing bloodlust. 3 copies courtesy of Madman Entertainment
Book: Bodies of Thought: 12 Australian Choreographers
From RealTime and Wakefield Press, a groundbreaking, beautifully designed new book for lovers of Australian contemporary dance, focused on innovative choreographers, concentrating on a work by each with an accessible interview and an insightful essay by a leading dance writer. Edited by Erin Brannigan and Virginia Baxter. 3 copies courtesy of RealTime
Book: alephbet, essays on ghost writing, nutshells & infinite space
“To read [alephbet] is to breathe as if we are drowning in binary code, and it is in this ecstatic, hyperbolic universe that Tofts creates arguments about writing.” Darren Jorgeson (page 29) 1 copy courtesy of Litteraria Pragensia Books.
Please note you can nominate for ONLY ONE GIVEAWAY.
Email us at giveaways@realtimearts.net with your name, postal address and phone number.
Include ‘Giveaway’ and the name of the item in the subject line.
RealTime issue #122 Aug-Sept 2014 pg. 56
Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, The Snail Race, Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milan, 06 March 2008
Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, The Snail Race, Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milan, 06 March 2008
Campbelltown Arts Centre’s forthcoming exhibition The List, is possibly their most ambitious project to date with 13 artists working with local community groups involving over 500 young people in total. Outcomes will take the form of video projects comprising an 80s TV musical based of Dante’s Purgatorio created by Pilar Mata Dupont in collaboration with McCarthur Diversity Services (see our realtime tv interview); a work exploring feminist theories of objectivity by Kate Blackmore working with a group of young girls at Mission Australia Claymore; and new visions of utopia created by Zanny Begg and boys from the Reiby Juvenile Justice Centre in Airds. Adding an international edge to the exhibition is UK artist Marvin Gaye Chetwynd who is working with Campbelltown Performing Arts High School students to create both a live performance and a video piece.
Let’s get the obvious question out of the way. Marvin Gaye is not her real name. She changed it in 2013. Prior to this she called herself Spartacus. In a BBC4 interview she says that the name changing is mainly a way to keep herself interested and amused. As Spartacus Chetwynd she made ripples in the visual artwork with her wild, anarchic performances and video manipulations of same and was nominated for the 2012 Turner Prize. The overall flavour of Chetwynd’s work is carnivalesque with a heavy dash of popular culture and the occasional “libertine” or “racy” (her terms) top notes. While her name may change, the aesthetic of her work appears consistent and footage of her recent solo show at Nottingham Contemporary shows a joyously chaotic exhibition combining installation, video, performance with live green screen technology, a recreation of the Star Wars holiday special complete with ink Wookiees and Chetwynd’s hand-made replica of the brain bug from Starship Troopers.
The work she is making for The List draws on a more “erudite” source, the Cretan fable of King Minos and the Minotaur. Working with high school students who are trained in acrobatics and aerial work, she will devise a performance based on the ancient ritual of bull leaping. At the time of this interview Chetwynd had just come from her first meeting with the students. She explains, “It’s quite fun for me because I’ve never really worked with people who are trained in movement before… So rather than me having to accommodate my art practice to meet the needs of community in some way—to be helpful or inspiring to a group that doesn’t necessarily have lots of access to the arts—it feels like I’m quite a spoilt bunny. I’m being welcomed to work with high school students and they’re all totally busting to go and really happy to perform.”
The performance will stand on its own and a video also exhibited. Elements of the recorded work will also be integrated into Chetwynd’s larger project, Hermitos Children 2 which will premier in London in October and includes a giant puppet bull. This relationship between live performance and documentation is integral to Chetwynd’s practice. “I prioritise the live moment. I’m spontaneous and I want to have a natural high. I work very hard to make something happen where people really enjoy themselves and I don’t really care if anyone has a document of it. But what’s happened over 15 years of higher education and being analysed and being encouraged to do things that are for more high profile platforms is that I’ve learnt to protect myself and enable something that’s intimate and totally surprising to continue to happen and to communicate on a more robust level. So what I’ve gone and done is to use techniques like Pasolini and other filmmakers. They use real live moments, something that really happened in history. Whether that’s a gig of a famous band or a funeral of a famous political leader, it’s a real documentation. So in my case it’s the performances that I’m really doing and prioritising and loving doing and then I put a layer of narrative over the top of it with some amateur actors or some continuous story line so that what I’m hopefully doing is making a product that’s enjoyable in its own right as a work—it becomes a film…I can hand copies of these films to institutions who need something to be shown 9-5 [and] at the same time I’m allowing myself to continue as someone who wants to work for the live moment.”
So if liveness is the priority why does Chetwynd operate in a visual arts rather than theatre world? She says “those are the opportunities that have been offered to me. I still do live performances in a domestic interior, or on a street, or on a walk, like the Walk to Dover project. My inclination is to do things anywhere and I still do that. But the [performances] that are given the most attention and the ones that people know about are those that happen in galleries…The thing I know clearly is that I don’t really like the proscenium arch and the set up of the platform being raised and the expectation of a professional, well rehearsed traditional play. I don’t find that pressure welcome. I much prefer political street theatre or carnival—anything on street level. And I actually enjoy the awkwardness of an area to perform where people would be walking past rather than being invited and ticketed, and that doesn’t lend itself to theatre.”
Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, The Cat Bus, A Tax Haven Run by Women, Frieze Art Fair, London 2010
Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, The Cat Bus, A Tax Haven Run by Women, Frieze Art Fair, London 2010
Chetwynd is possibly the ultimate postmodernist, seeing her high literature and popular culture references as equal. I ask her what is it about the references she chooses that she finds significant. “Usually there’s some really profound truth or interesting intellectual concept that you can tell is really within the popular cultural presentation. It really is there; I’m not making it up or putting it on it. I recognise it and the I just want to celebrate it.”
Celebratory really is the best way to describe Chetwynd’s work. Even via the mediation of YouTube this is glaringly apparent. Also apparent is Chetwynd’s beguiling mixture of earthy groundedness and naughty trickster. In her closing comments Chetwynd suggests why her work has such boldness and buoyancy. “People find it strange that I don’t seem to have any problem with crashing and burning or things going wrong. I just don’t seem to suffer in the same way other people do. Experimenting in public—I really don’t mind. I think of it as something totally worthwhile doing and totally fine, so that seems to be part of why I do this.”
Chetwynd’s work alone is reason enough to look forward to The List, but add the collaborative projects by 12 other leading artists and it’s looking likely to be an extraordinary art experience.
Campbelltown Arts Centre: The List, artists Abdul Abdullah & Abdul Rahman Abdullah, Zanny Begg, Kate Blackmore, Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Shaun Gladwell, Michaela Gleave, Uji Handoko Eko Saputro (aka Hahan), Robin Hungerford, Pilar Mata Dupont, Daniel McKewen, Tom Polo and George Tillianakis, 9 Aug-12 Oct, opening party with performances Friday 8 Aug, 6pm; http://www.campbelltown.nsw.gov.au/UpcomingExhibitions
I have worked in professional theatre as a performer, writer, teacher and director since 1980 and am currently Artistic Director of Darwin-based company Business Unusual (BUU). Formed in 1997, BUU has been creating original work which explores the combination of physical theatre, mask, puppetry and text. BUU past productions include The Pearler, Tracy and Contagion’s Kiss all of which used Top End stories as the inspirational springboard.
I work regularly with Horse and Bamboo Theatre, one of the UK’s leading visual companies and was co-founder of Skin and Blisters (London 1987-1991), a circus theatre company that toured major festivals in Europe and the UK. I was also a co-founding member of Amsterdam-based multi media group Too Much Art (1984-7). Other companies I’ve worked with include UK Company Trestle Theatre (1991-2002), Darwin Theatre Company, Knock-em-Downs, VCA, Tracks, The Sydney Theatre Company and Melbourne Theatre Company.
Exposé
I started writing when I had mumps at age seven—The Adventures of Mumpy Doll, not yet published but I have not given up hope (if only I could find the manuscript or to be more exact, the torn out, crumpled, medicine-stained pages of my then diary).
I love language but write shows without words. Actually I do use minimal text so it has to be distilled—a bit like whiskey and poetry. I am inspired by words: the oral histories of ordinary people talking about their lives which immediately become extraordinary in the telling and a starting point for a show.
In reviewing for Real Time I have enjoyed my foray into the world of words again. Painting the picture of the production in the quiet of my home after the event allows me time to reflect on the work and appreciate how it has affected me. I believe the reviewer has a responsibility to add to the richness of the arts by critiquing work in a way which allows the maker to carry on making—supporting and valuing the work while giving clear responses to it.
Darwin is a fertile place for making art, a hugely culturally diverse community living in extreme weather in a part of Australia that feels like a different country from the south. There has been a resurgence in local theatre in the past few years and the link with our national peers is both feeding the artists and showing what the north is made of. I shall enjoy continuing to write about the new productions while starting to research my own next word-less concept.
P.S anyone interested in The Adventures of Mumpy Doll?
Recent articles
Bastardy and identity
Nicola Fearn: Stephen Carleton, Bastard Territory
RealTime issue #121 June-July 2014 pg. 36
The past lives in us
Nicola Fearn: Forced Legacy—The Story of Alyngdabu
RealTime issue #118 Dec-Jan 2013 pg. 36
Not so strange strangers
Nicola Fearn: Polytoxic, Trade Winds
NT Writers’ Centre’s RealTime Workshop Darwin Festival online feature
A Winning punch
Nicola Fearn: Roslyn Oades, I’m Your Man
NT Writers’ Centre’s RealTime Workshop Darwin Festival online feature
Shaken out of the everyday
Nicola Fearn: Yumi Umiumare with Theatre Gumbo, DasSHOKU SHAKE!
NT Writers’ Centre’s RealTime Workshop Darwin Festival online feature
Lawrence English is perhaps Australia’s most prolific producer of exploratory electronic music. His untiring work across his suite of labels—Room40 for electronic music, Someone Good for edgy pop and A Guide To Saints for old-fashioned cassettes—has significantly contributed to creating a context, locally and internationally, for experimental and alternative music. His personal discography alone lists 21 major releases over the last 13-years, the majority of which have been on overseas imprints. However his most recent album, Wilderness of Mirrors, brings things back home to his own label Room40—fitting, as the new release has a particularly local and personal agenda.
Political music
The press release for Wilderness of Mirrors declares the album a political statement. The title is drawn from Gerontion, a TS Eliot poem from 1920 which is clearly inflected with the emotional aftermath of the Great War. The press release explains how the phrase “wilderness of mirrors” was subsequently used in the Cold War to reference miscommunication between international agencies. In an email interview I asked English to extrapolate a little on the motivation behind the album and its themes.
“This past couple of years I have been utterly frustrated and angered by what I see as a completely underwhelming, if not toxic, political environment. We’re a young country, we have an incredibly high standard of living and have been very successful over recent times and yet we fail so many of the crucial tests when it comes to creating a humane and progressive society…This makes me angry and some of that aggression has been funneled into this record.”
Jaques Attali told us that noise was political, but in the 21st century is electronica? I ask English if he believes sound can communicate politically. “When you look back to the protest songs of the late 60s for example, sure there was a dialogue between politics and music, the songs were addressing these grand narratives that were clearly defined and understood in a kind of holistic way. I’d argue today we are faced with the antithesis of this, countless, evolving and shifting political battles on all fronts—humanitarian, ecological, ethical and such. It’s impossible to address the grand narratives in a meaningful way anymore. The complexity is too great, issue to issue, blow to blow, we are up against this torrent of hollow ideology and, at least here, clichéd patriarchy.
“How I think this recording interacts with politics is first and foremost personal. Much of the frustrations I have felt fuelled this record and gave it the intensities it has. This was the first time in my life I’ve found myself so incensed that the only fulfilling way I could address it was through making a work like this.
“More generally, I think what sound can do is offer us imagination and opportunity to contemplate that which lies around us, specifically music that is not rooted in language. Without words, music can suggest all manner of possibilities to all manner of ears. If people read these kinds of conversations, then perhaps my angst over the state of things might resonate with them through the music, but if they hear it cold, it might simply fill them with an energy that only sustained full frequency sound can. I’m not interested in being didactic with the art I make, I appreciate everyone brings themselves to the work and that’s the beauty of it.”
Wilderness of Mirrors
Composition of erasure
This passion has paid off, Wilderness of Mirrors is arguably English’s most arresting output to date. It’s almost a signature of English’s sound that it is slippery and amorphous, but in Wilderness of Mirrors the music grabs you by the ears and the throat from the first second of the opening track, evocatively titled “The Liquid Casket.” It feels like you’ve come in on the middle of an argument and you have to remain absolutely present so as to not lose your place and be subsumed. All the tracks have a hard edge that grows, like an increasing pressure wave—a thick rumbling chord, with pulses, textures and tones emerging and submerging without losing intensity. The tracks segue into one another and while there are dynamic changes you are never left to relax. However some of the English-style elusiveness remains in the sound palette—you can never be quite sure as to what you think you are hearing. This is not uncommon in electronic music, but here it makes you restless; you really seem to need an answer. Is that a voice? Is that piano melody I can just make out? What crazed orchestra is this playing at the bottom of an ocean?
English explains the process he employed to make these ghostly sounds. “Wilderness Of Mirrors has come from a long process of elemental shift and erasure. At the heart of each of the pieces is some single-celled sound organism that has evolved through the duration of the album into the final living, breathing music you hear. Those initial elements are almost entirely gone in the finished works, but some are still buried close enough to the surface that they have a presence. Essentially what happened across quite a few of the pieces was a process of introducing an element, recording against it and removing that element, it was at times a glacial process and often those initial elements were merely points of agitation for me to work against, a kind of creative friction point that I could use to incinerate the sounds that followed.
“It may sound naïve, but I don’t think of myself as making experimental music. There’s really not that much experimenting here beyond what all musicians and composers might partake in. Sure, it’s lacking some of the aspects that make music instantly familiar, like drums in every song, but beyond that it’s not so unfamiliar. To me, Wilderness Of Mirrors shares more with the outer orbit of SWANS’ saturated walls of sonics or the final 20 minutes of every My Bloody Valentine show. These were the groups that in some way influenced the album’s colour and tone. What you hear is a bunch of instruments all gasping for air as they are systematically plunged and held in caustic bath of electronics.”
Musical politics
Of course, in order to be prolific you need longevity and the reality is that English has persisted and flourished when many other artists have fallen by the wayside. I asked him what has kept him going as both an artist and producer and how he sees the music ecosystem in Australia.
“If we examine music we have two very discrete ecologies—that of heritage music, which largely exists and persists thanks to the bilateral funding arrangements between the state and federal governments, and then there’s the rest of the music sector which must make other arrangements for its survival. Looking at many of the state orchestras and opera companies, it would appear that having all that support hasn’t necessarily brought about progressive commissioning of new Australian work or any kind of inspired repertoire, which is a shame as this results in fewer flow-on effects to the rest of the sector.
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with supporting these behemoths—groups like the SSO and ACO are utterly world class—but I do think it raises an important question around equity in the arts. Why some companies have guaranteed survival almost no matter what they program or how they perform and all others are put under stringent analysis against criteria of excellence and the like. Even from a neo-liberal perspective, it makes little sense to approach these institutions as we do. We have a live music sector worth something in the range of $2.55 billion according to Live Performance Australia and of that, classical music represents just $135 million. Contemporary music towers over this figure, but if you look at how funding is distributed it does not reflect this fact. Rather the opposite. I think there’s room for all kinds of music out there, but we should aspire to equity in the arts.”
Lawrence English, through his efforts as an artist and label manager, as well as a gig and festival curator, certainly offers an excellent example of Australian contemporary music’s vibrancy, vigour and relevancy.
In Dance Massive 2013, one of the most curious and absorbing works was Physical Fractals by emerging choreographer and dancer Natalie Abbott. As a sound artist I found the completely integrated soundscape generated from the dancers’ movement in the space particularly appealing, but I was equally taken by the very strict form of the choreography—a relentless unison of simple, abstract movements drilled and repeated to create an uncompromising exploration of pattern and form. Coupled with the often harsh but organic sound score the movement was absolutely mesmerising. It seemed self-sufficient—form equalled content equalled form—with no need for imposed thematics or metaphors.
I was not alone in finding the work intriguing. Along with a strong critical response (see RT Dance Massive coverage by Varia Karipoff and Jana Perkovic) artistic director of Paris dance presenter micadanses, Chrisophe Martin, was also impressed and via a partnership with Dancehouse, Abbott’s subsequent work, Maximum, has just been presented in the OFF section of the Avignon Festival (along with Matthew Day’s Intermission, see realtime tv Keir Choreographic Award interview).
Maximum minimalism
Maximum premiered as part of Next Wave 2014 (see review RT121) and will soon hit Sydney as part of Performance Space’s upcoming SCORE festival. It sees Abbott teaming with a body builder, Donny Henderson-Smith. The original premise for the show was that Henderson-Smith would hold Abbott off the ground for 45-minutes, however as they started working Abbott saw there was much more to explore, or as she puts it, she became more interested in “asking questions of our bodies together.”
Ironically Maximum could be viewed as quite minimal. The piece begins with an almost 20-minute running sequence, in circles and then a series of floor patterns. This is followed by excruciating looking fitness drills and then a 10-minute lift sequence, Henderson-Smith holding Abbott aloft, in an heroic posture, swivelling through a full 360 degrees. The piece concludes with the duo resuming their running sequence.
Natalie Abbott, Donny Henderson-Smith, Maxiumum
photo Gregory Lorenzutti
Natalie Abbott, Donny Henderson-Smith, Maxiumum
Tough love
Abbott is aware that this is tough to watch: “I know that I’m asking a lot of my audience. That made me really nervous because generally people want to be entertained and if you’re classing your show as dance then maybe there are some particular things you need to put in there. But for me it’s really about a physical exploration and not just about entertaining. It’s about asking an audience to come up to that same level of intensity as the performers, asking [them] to persist with us and engage in a different way than in a more obviously spectacular dance show…There were definitely mixed responses to the performances in Next Wave and for me that’s good. I get information from that to take into the next season. I don’t necessarily want to please everybody, so I like getting mixed reviews.”
Presenting the work in Avignon to a different audience in a different space, (this one much smaller) has also made Abbott realise that her works are in a state of constant evolution. “Having a second season of the show has really made me think that when I put work out to the public it’s not necessarily finished. It’s an ongoing process… there are lots of things I’d still like to explore within the work, so I think for the next season we’re going to make some changes and keep experimenting with how we can push our bodies.”
Natalie Abbott, Donny Henderson-Smith, Maximum
photo Gregory Lorenzutti
Natalie Abbott, Donny Henderson-Smith, Maximum
Together apart
As in Physical Fractals, Abbott is working with a live sound score, created once again by Daniel Arnott. She says she wants it to “reflect the idea of Greek gods or some kind of ethereal creature.” There’s a microphone picking up sounds from the space that are augmented by shouts and yelps evocative of sport and military drills. These are then layered into ominous, propulsive rumbles. For Maximum Abbott has also given Arnott more agency in terms of timing and structure. “Sometimes it can be Dan leading, sometimes it can be us, other times it’s a bit blurry. I really like the idea of this external force, this outside voice influencing what happens in the performance space.”
Also like Physical Fractals the work relies heavily on synchronous movements. I ask Abbott what it is about unison that is so appealing to her and she replies, “I guess I never saw it enough or did it enough at university…I’m not interested in two people looking exactly the same. I’m interested in seeing similarities and disparities in the two people and what that brings up for you as an audience. I could watch two people attempt unison all day. I think it’s not possible and there’s a challenge in that.”
Before Abbot presents Maximum at Performance Space in late August, she will be attending the Impulstanz dance festival in Vienna, courtesy of a DanceWeb scholarship. She’s also undertaking a Jump Mentorship with Martin del Amo (no stranger to the walk or run as choreography). By the end of the year she’s hoping to get back into the studio to make her next work. I for one, will be looking forward to whatever Natalie Abbott comes up with next.
Maximum, Natalie Abbott with Donny Henderson-Smith, 27-30 Aug, Performance Space, Sydney. Presented as part of SCORE which also includes works by Jon Rose with Ensemble Offspring and Speak Perscussion, Antony Hamilton/Chunky Move, Pia van Gelder, Narelle Benjamin, Jane McKernan & Gail Priest, Kris Verdonck (Belgium); http://performancespace.com.au/events/score/; http://www.natalieabbott.net
In his seminal text, The Fashion System (1967), Roland Barthes breaks fashion into two forms—image-clothing and written clothing. In the 21st century might we not extend this to clothing performed, musical and virtual?
For Profiler 5 we’ve asked some impeccably attired artists how they view fashion; how fashion influences their work; and their thoughts on the slippage of fashion into art and art into fashion. Gail Priest, Online Producer
When overseas, one of the main activities I do is shopping. And by that I mean I like to walk through high-end malls and flagship stores. I get a lot of inspiration from them. It doesn’t mean I buy anything, although on occasions of course I will. One of the attractions is the holistic world of branding. A concentrated world. A considered, complete world. I enjoy the finishing of a shop fit out: the colouring, carpets, discrete lighting, packaging, scents, music, security guards, hangers, glass and brass cabinets. Mirrors and reflections.
My recent photograph, Dreams End With You, displays a man perhaps looking up to the stars from within a Chanel store I made from plywood, laser cut MDF and spray painted carpet from Bunnings. The work originated from my own life very specifically. I was in Hong Kong, it was dusk and I was in a Chanel store that overlooked the city. With all that brand behind me, air-conditioned air around me and thick carpet beneath, I stood looking out into the night sky. I was daydreaming. The words ‘Dreams End With You’ went through my mind and I made a note of them on my phone.
Chanel Spring Runway Show set, 2009
Soon after I saw the Chanel Spring Runway Show from 2009; the set was a re-construction of Coco Chanel’s apartment in Paris, which in turn has become the template for all new Chanel stores. I remade that moment of me standing in the window, however this time I modelled the store on the reconstructed runway show. It is a copy of a copy. A dream from a dream. http://sullivanstrumpf.com/artists/sylvester-darren/
Love refractually
Urszula Dawkins: Project 12: This Is Not A Love Song
RealTime issue #108 April-May 2012 pg. 44
Elizabeth Ryan, I Was Made for Loving You, dress by Romance was Born
photo Heidrun Löhr
Elizabeth Ryan, I Was Made for Loving You, dress by Romance was Born
Elizabeth Ryan, dancer
The big question (for some of us) of what to wear in a piece is a consideration that comes pretty early on in my creative process. I love exploring the potential a costume has to be a significant contributor. This theme is very evident in my work with The Fondue Set and has continued in the development of my solo practice.
When I was given the opportunity to collaborate with the design team Romance Was Born, as part of an interdisciplinary residency at the Campbelltown Arts Centre in 2012, I was very excited but also somewhat intimidated. Much as I love a good costume, I hadn’t necessarily connected that with fashion. My perception of fashion was that it was from a particular ‘cool’ world of design, form, desirability and status. Combining this with what I knew of the work of Romance Was Born, I anticipated I would be met by a creation that would be highly desirable, evocative and a powerful presence in a theatrical setting. What a gift! However I found myself questioning how my body, my movement and my performance could meet all that.
In the resulting performance, I Was Made for Loving You, I chose to play with removing myself from the costume by wearing a highly undesirable beige bra and undies. Putting my unfashionable and exposed self in relationship to this item of immense beauty and intrigue created a palpable tension which led to the work feeling more like a duet than a solo. I pursued the power play for dominance, attention and status in the space between my performing body and ‘the dress’ as it became known, at times performing as if wearing the dress or ‘performing the dress’ and at other times making a contrasting state of exposure and vulnerability more visible.
Oh how they danced!
Virginia Baxter: Oh I Wanna Dance With Somebody
RealTime issue #112 Dec-Jan 2012 p2-3
Nothing to lose
Keith Gallasch: The Fondue Set’s No Success Like Failure
RealTime issue #86 Aug-Sept 2008 p36
Glamorous calamities
David Williams: The Fondue Set, The Set (Up)
RealTime issue #64 Dec-Jan 2004 p35
Lian Loke, Fox, Underbelly 2007
photo Samantha Hanna
Lian Loke, Fox, Underbelly 2007
Lian Loke, performer, designer and researcher
The theatricality of fashion seduced me as a teenager and continues to provide a platform for creating characters and worlds accessed by the mere donning of a garment. I understand fashion not so much as the latest style of clothing, but as an opportunity to re-fashion or re-invent oneself. The relationship between the garment and the body fascinates me and has led to an exploration of performative clothing, beyond everyday fashion. The reshaping of silhouette, posture, comportment and sensibility through what is worn on the body can break down the conventions of dress and behaviour, opening the body up to creative exploration.
In my performance practice, costume plays an important role and I often begin with a strong vision of a costumed body. The costume becomes a prop or environment, activating the space between and creating spatial, sensory and movement vocabulary. The costume operates as a portal to other worlds. It enables an exploration of body and becoming, of the transformative potential of the imagination.
Lian Loke, Hyperfeminoid
photo Ian Tatton
Lian Loke, Hyperfeminoid
These ideas are present in my performative costumes Hyperfeminoid and Fox. Both of these works explore constructions of femininity and our ability to transgress the border between human and animal. I also draw on Shamanic, Daoist and Butoh movement and energy practices to inform the physical language for performance. These practices can help to access altered states of consciousness where the body moves in unfamiliar and usually inaccessible ways. The Fox is in a state of gradual evolution, each performance adding to its self-fashioning. The next project will start with a prosthetic approach to its feet, replacing the fetish of a high-heeled shoe with a delicate faux pas. http://www.lianloke.com/
Selected articles
Interactive feedback
Lizzie Muller on how to prototype an artwork
RealTime issue #76 Dec-Jan 2006 p24
The body as lived
Mike Leggett: Thinking Through the Body
RealTime issue #93 Oct-Nov 2009 p31
A once and future building
Jodie McNeilly witnesses The Stirring at Carriageworks
RealTime issue #82 Dec-Jan 2007 p29
Laura Jane Lowther, KUČKA
When it comes to high fashion, I’m particularly drawn to the more avant-garde designers. I love dressing up and getting to be another character for a little while so it makes sense to me that the clothing should be unusual or different somehow to what you would expect to see in everyday life. One of my favourite eccentric designers, Walter Van Beirendonck (who is best known as part of the Antwerp Six) was a major influence in the look of our first music video “Rewind.”
Van Beirendonck designs are always bold, colourful and reminiscent of childhood imagery and we thought that the arpeggiated synths and percussion tones in the track were shapely and ‘colourful’ and quite similar to his style. We worked with Perth designer Zoe Trotman to make the dress. She had previously designed the donut dress, as part of her Lonely 8 bit Heroes collection, but we decided to add the dome shaped skirt on the bottom, to create a more striking shape, which a friend laser cut out of plastic for us. The main thing that drew us to Zoe’s design was the playful way she had stitched assorted plastic objects (including candy and donuts) onto the dress. We were playing with the idea of the over sexualised anime character and the cutesy candy theme really worked.
KUCKA, Rewind (video stills)
courtesy the artist
KUCKA, Rewind (video stills)
I always collaborate with my good friend Jessica Small who is a hairdresser but also an artist and watching her work has made me really appreciate how creative styling can be. She has worked on all of the KUČKA video clips and photo shoots and is often the one who refines the stylistic vision of the shoot. Jess decided to go all out with the styling for Rewind, painting Jake’s face and making my hairstyles as big as we could get, even fixing a photo frame into my hair for one of the scenes! http://kucka.net
Ivan Cheng, performer/artist
Now, like all foreseeable time, is a ripe moment to be an advocate for feminist politics.
Connie has a pseudonym, and in conversation she expresses no desire to live abroad; after all, Kawakubo and Margiela detach from home. I’ve been abroad since May—a residency at the Watermill Center (NY) with director Tilman Hecker, a clarinet gig in London, a residency and exhibition in Saint-Chinian, France (open through 2015), and then playing clarinet in Martin del Amo’s Anatomy of an Afternoon at Southbank in London. Now I’m back at the Watermill Center for a third summer, and, as well as questioning my taste for fizzy water over flat, I am thinking about camouflage.
When in conversation about work, the issues of transference to image or text are alarming. There is always so much labour visible in documentation and reproduction; it fails to be invisible. In disguise of my work, I’m not sure what is lost. I studied the clarinet but spend time in other pursuits.
1) Ivan cheng in video still from gargoyles – deinstalled video from three gorges 2) Installation view of three gorges
courtesy the artist
1) Ivan cheng in video still from gargoyles – deinstalled video from three gorges 2) Installation view of three gorges
My work has been interested in the act of reading for a while now and a constant is how a ‘score’ is damaged upon transference into plane. As part of Little Operations, Chamber Made Opera will present a remount of a work of mine titled kelley-gander-floyer at Deakin Edge in Melbourne. A score for 100 performers in my likeness aggregating over 65,000 words of text into an hour-long space, it contains and begins to represent the music of James Brown, Austin Buckett, Lachlan Hughes and Marcus Whale, This score formed the first stage development of epoche-lacan-orbits, commissioned over three years by Carriageworks. In Melbourne, the work will be performed by a small group of children. http://ivancheng.com
I’ve attended a couple of Darwin Festivals over the years, including 2013 when Virginia Baxter and I conducted a review-writing workshop for the NT Writers’ Centre with five participants, several of whom now regularly write for RealTime. The festival is welcoming, lively and intimate, making great use of the town’s parks in the temperate evenings for all kinds of performances plus live music and food.
Director Edwina Lunn’s third and final program offers a blend of local creations that connect the Northern Territory with South-Eastern Asia and fine productions from across Australia that might not otherwise reach Darwin. Reciprocally a Darwin Festival commission, Wulamanyuwi and the Seven Pamanui, premiered at Adelaide’s Come Out 2011 and has toured widely (see Cath McKinnon’s review). I spoke by phone with Lunn after her intriguing 2014 program had been launched.
Although not a local, after five years in Darwin Lunn says she has become a Territorian, “We opened our RealTime [RT121] and said, ‘Look how much Territory there is. Fantastic!’ It was a proud moment. We’re quite proud, we Territorians.”
Calling the festival “100% Darwin” makes sense then.
It was an easy connection to make. We commit to this festival being a celebration of our time and our place in this city. Darwin as a city and certainly the Northern Territory are evolving so much. The people and the population change each year with natural attrition, a new population arriving and our growing Indigenous population, which is nearly 30% and our Asian connections. The white Australian population turns over every four years. The festival re-invents itself every year to respond to what’s happening in our city. So it’s pretty easy to say, let’s call the festival “100% Darwin.” And we’re doing a show called 100% Darwin.
It features 100 Darwinians on stage. What will they be doing?
It’s a very challenging form of theatre making by Rimini Protokoll from Germany (see RT96 for an account of 100% Vancouver and RealTimeTalk for an overview of the company’s work). They’ve done this show in many places—in Norfolk and Vienna and Athens and [in 2012] Melbourne. I knew that Rimini Protokoll staging the show in Darwin would be different from anywhere else in the world because Darwin’s population is unique.
The show is based on Australian Bureau of Statistics data. The idea is that every single person on stage of those 100 people represents 1% of the population, based on a set of selection criteria, which all come from the ABS. We had to work with the Rimini’s to decide what criteria would be prioritised. Not just asking “Were you born in Australia?” we wanted to delve a little deeper and also to find the compositions of families. The show itself then will ask these 100 people on stage to tell us about their lifestyles, how and why they live in Darwin and what their opinions are on the big issues in Darwin, the Territory, the region and nationally. We imagine that Territorians will have a very different response to many of those questions from other Australians. Even the answer to a simple question such as “Do you consider yourself to be a Territorian?” will be really interesting since most people on stage will probably have lived here for less than five years.
But it doesn’t take much to decide that you are a Territorian. I reckon after I was here for two years people started to call me a local. I think it’s hard not to be. When you live in a place that is a capital city but is extraordinarily remote, you have to engage with what is happening here in terms of culture and lifestyle and that means you can’t not be part of the beating heart of what’s happening.”
Including adapting to the climate.
Exactly. Climate and lifestyle means you must live very differently up here and get used to some very odd things—bugs and mould and different kinds of bacteria and diseases. I know many, many people who have Ross River [virus] simply because they’ve lived in Darwin. That’s a life-long legacy. You know you’ve lived in Darwin if you end up carrying that around with you for the rest of your life. I don’t have it fortunately but there’s still a few months left for the mosquitoes to get me!
One of the exciting aspects of the festival is the Asian connection, for which you’ve achieved some additional funding. Not only that, some of the works are the result of collaborations between Australian and Asian artists.
It wouldn’t be a Darwin Festival if we didn’t have a connection with our Asian neighbours. Our international program has always featured Asian work, with a particular focus on Indonesia because it’s very close to us and we’ve developed many ongoing relationships with Indonesian companies. There are many Indonesian people and groups in Darwin, including the Indonesian Consulate, which is the only consulate we have. So already we have strong links with Indonesia and we just wanted to do more.
[The funding was the result] of one of those amazingly fortuitous meetings you might have with a new Chief Minister who points to a map behind his head and says, “If we were to give you some more money, would you be able to do more work within this region?” And the answer to that is always, “Yes!” It’s been quite thrilling to be able to work with local partners—not just government, but corporate partners—on a collective vision. This is what the Territory really needs, to work more and connect more with Asia because we’re so close. And because of our tropical lifestyle in many ways Darwin feels more like an Asian than an Australian city.
The Lepidopters
photo courtesy Darwin Festival
The Lepidopters
What about the nature of the works you’re featuring? Tell me about The Lepidopters.
That’s going to be a challenging work for our audiences, but in typical Darwin audience style they’re lapping it up, buying the tickets even though we’ve been quite open in our marketing to let people know that this is a form of science fiction rock opera with an outer space aspect. It involves a fabulous collaboration with local choirs as well as Indonesia’s Punkasila collaborating with Slave Pianos and pianist Michael Kieran-Harvey (see RT119 for a review of an earlier version of the work at MONA FOMA). Since we booked them they want to work with the Darwin Chorale and some Indigenous composers as well. So I’m pretty confident when I say we don’t know what the show’s going to be but I also have confidence that it’s led by a good, strong team of great collaborative artists and they’re going to make a show that Darwin will probably never forget.
And what about Temporary Territory, by the Indonesian artist collective Ruangrupa?
We’re risk-takers and we really like working with artists on collaborations that respond to our environment. I met with Ruangrupa on a trip to Indonesia and really liked some of the work they were doing. They’d already done a project they’d called “a disruption.” They put installations into Djakartan bus stops.
The Djakarta traffic is hideous. For people who have to rely on public transport it’s an even more hideous experience because the buses are so incredibly over-crowded and so they spend a lot of time at bus stops. Ruangrupa activated the bus stops. I asked them to consider coming to Darwin to do a similar project. I had a wonderful Skype conversation with them before they visited Darwin, trying to get them to understand that we didn’t really have a traffic problem and we didn’t really even have a peak hour.
They’ve had couple of site visits here and we’ve sent some local Darwin visual artists to Djakarta so it’s a truly collaborative project. I was Skyping them saying, “I need to give you some perspective on how few people there are in Darwin.” There are only 120,000 people here compared to the 10 million people who just commute in and out of Djakarta every day. I said, “I’m looking out the window from our office and I can’t see one single person. If I look out of the window on the other side, I still can’t see a single person.” We have so much space. They thought that was bizarre.
They came over and became quite fascinated with our bus stops and how we use them—almost the history and the ecology of Darwin’s bus stops. They’ve worked with two great local visual artists, Sarah Pirrie and Simon Cooper. They’re installing art pieces into at least 30 bus stops. We’re trying to install them all overnight—almost like art by stealth—so when people leave home on the first day of the festival they will be confronted with what is still their bus stop but it could also be something else. The installation and the decoration respond to the location of each bus stop. I suspect that one is going to be installed as if it were a gallery with white walls, complete with a gallery opening with wine and cheese and people standing around talking about art. This is one of the reasons I like working with Indonesian artists. Not only do they have a strong sense of where they fit politically and having a political voice, but they’ve got a fantastic sense of humour and they’re good at taking the piss out of themselves and us. One bus stop might be a tribute to the absence of cats in Darwin, unlike in Djakarta. This as one of those festival events that takes over the whole city and reminds people that this is a month where we should be looking at and using our city in different ways.
Another collaborative work is The Book of Shadows with Tim Parrish and Connor Fox who have worked with puppeteers in Ubud in Bali combining traditional puppetry and multimedia elements.
They bring the show back here after a rehearsal showing in Ubud and they’ll do a sneak preview presentation of the work at Brown’s Mart before the full season in November. There are many people visiting the festival in August who can’t see the rest of the theatre that’s made here throughout the year.
You’ve also got Vietnamese Water Puppets and Cambodian Aerobics— what is that?
LAUGHS I must say The Cambodian Aerobics could be seen as a bit of personal indulgence. I’ve always wanted to do something in the festival that celebrated the dawn. Darwin people get up very early because it’s soon very hot. You see many people out exercising before it gets light, but it’s the usual forms of exercising—walking or running along the foreshore and along our bike tracks. In some ways this mirrors what happens in many Asian cultures. People get up early to exercise in a group style almost like some form of Soviet military style exercise or Tai Chi or an aerobics workout. It isn’t like contemporary aerobics in a gym with lots of lycra; it’s quite literally people who’ve just come out of their houses, many of them in pyjamas and slippers.
Most of the people I’ve observed engaging in this kind of physical activity in Asian capital cities are quite mature but they also include people who are grabbing this moment before a long day of often quite hard physical labour, and they do it with great humour. I suspect that the reason why many great Asian cities are thriving and people are working so hard is because they have a collective culture of ‘let’s get up together in the morning and do this physical activity.’ As a tourist, if you participate it sets you up for the rest of the day—and it just makes you smile.
Arisa Yura, images Yasukichi Murakami, Through a Distant Lens
photo Miho Watanabe
Arisa Yura, images Yasukichi Murakami, Through a Distant Lens
That’s fabulous. A work with an historical perspective is Through a Distant Lens featuring the images of Yasukichi Murakami a Japanese photographer working in Darwin in the 1930s. How did that come into your program?
Mayu Kanamori is a documentary maker and theatre maker who has made works for the Darwin Festival before. She has a family connection to Darwin and she’s a descendent of Murakami. She came to me a couple of years ago when she was in Darwin researching this show. She doesn’t live in Darwin any more but still has a connection to the place. It’s taken at least two years to research it, put it together and to grow it into the theatrical show that it is [directed by former Darwin Festival director Malcolm Blaylock]. It’s also touring to OzAsia in Adelaide shortly after. The idea is to eventually take it back to Japan.
The show is also an acknowledgement of the contribution that Japanese people made to Darwin before the bombing of Darwin in World War II. Just as happened to many Japanese people living in Australia, Murakami was expelled from Darwin and had to leave behind his legacy—all of the things that he did that showed his marvellous contribution to this city. Darwin really celebrates its Chinese heritage. There are loads of streets named after the Chin family and a number of other families who helped to build Darwin and rebuild it after the bombing and after Cyclone Tracy but there’s very little acknowledgement of the Japanese influence in Darwin. If you go to Broome in Western Australia there’s a huge acknowledgement of the Japanese influence there.
So Through a Distant Lens is a little nod to something that we may further uncover as the whole country celebrates our Anzac centenary and we start to look in more depth at our history. We’re really proud to have this show in the festival. And I don’t think it’s controversial because Darwin was bombed. I think it’s actually a much more insightful look at Japanese relations at that time.
You have No Strings Attached’s Sons and Mothers from Adelaide [see our interview with company direct PJ Rose], Ursula Yovich in The Magic Hour, which was created in Perth, Michael Kantor and Tom E Lewis’ The Shadow King from Melbourne [see RT119] and major Australian festivals and Dalisa Pigrum’s Gudirr Gudirr made in Broome [see Dance Massive 2013] and performed around Australia and in Europe. Darwinians are certainly not left off the cultural map.
They are really wonderful shows we’re really proud to have. Not only do our audiences respond well to seeing really high quality national theatre but it’s also really important to bring these works to influence and stimulate our local arts industry. Ursula Yovich and others are also offering workshops and master classes and Ursula is MC-ing our opening night concert. Our local theatre makers will benefit from seeing how artists making works that are of high quality and tourable.
The Choir of Man
photo courtesy Darwin Festival
The Choir of Man
I’d like to mention a show that has a particular NT flair to it and that I think the rest of the country and the world might see soon. It’s The Choir of Man, which is a musical theatre work developed by David Garnham, a fantastic local country music singer who won the Tamworth song competition a couple of years ago and tours with his band, The Reasons to Live. A couple of years ago he said to me, ‘I want to put a choir together and they’ll all be men and we’ll just rehearse over a barbecue and a few beers ‘cause I want to be accompanied by a choir just for a few songs within my show.’ It’s turned into a massive phenomenon with many men in our community trying to get into the choir. Now it’s almost 20-strong and has attracted the attention of Andrew Kay—one of the original producers of Tap Dogs and Soweto Gospel Choir—from AKA Management who was entranced by the NT flavour of it—all these men on stage, in flannies, some not wearing shoes, but really together, having decided to be in this gutsy choir. Producer Wayne Harrison has been to Darwin for the audition process and they’re now about to go into rehearsals, turning what was a rough and tumble music show into a full-length musical theatre piece with the vision of it going on to Adelaide Fringe and then Edinburgh Fringe and the West End. If it gets the same reception that Tap Dogs did it may very well do something for NT masculinity.
I’m really proud in the last few years to have developed this work and am hoping it has a life beyond the Darwin Festival.
2014 Darwin Festival, Darwin, Northern Territory, 7-24 Aug
Creative Director of the Melbourne Festival talks with Keith Gallasch about highlights in her 2014 program. Includes: Heiner Goebbels’ When the mountain changed its clothing (0:30); Trisha Brown Dance Company’s From All Angles (3:20); Falk Richter & Anouk van Dijk’s Complexity of Belonging (6:29); Nanjing Project & focus on circus (9:14); Roslyn Oades’ Hello, Goodbye & Happy Birthday (12:36); and KAGE’s Team of Life (14:19).
Includes images and footage courtesy of the Melbourne Festival.
Atlanta Eke (Keir Choreographic Award Winner 0:07), Jane McKernan (People’s Choice Award 5:28), Matthew Day (10:11) & Sarah Aiken (14:32) discuss their works and the experience of being a part of this inaugural award.
The Keir Choreographic Award was presented by Carriageworks, Dancehouse and The Keir Foundation
Next month No Strings Attached Theatre of Disability’s Sons & Mothers will embark on a national tour that will commence at the Darwin Festival and culminate in October in the company’s home state of South Australia with performances in the regional centres of Renmark and Port Pirie. The show (which I reviewed in RT118) premiered in 2012 at the Adelaide Fringe and last year enjoyed a season at Adelaide’s Space Theatre alongside the premiere of a documentary feature film by POP Pictures as part of the Adelaide Film Festival. Evolving out of writer/director Alirio Zavarce’s struggle to come to terms with his mother’s illness, Sons & Mothers coalesced around the No Strings Attached Men’s Ensemble, a group of 12 performers with disabilities.
Birthing
Artistic Director PJ Rose tells me that Zavarce was forced to take time out from the company when his mother fell ill and he was deeply moved by the reaction of the Men’s Ensemble on his return: “They were all so sympathetic, so genuinely sad at the thought of what they would do without their own mothers. That’s where the idea started. So it lived in Alirio’s mind until 2009 when they did one big workshop which POP Pictures filmed. In fact, some of the things that ended up in the production happened on that one day. Kym Mackenzie’s birthing of himself under the skirt came out of that workshop and it was such gold that it stayed.”
Funding from the Richard Llewellyn Arts and Disability Fund allowed NSA to undertake the show’s first full creative development, a period characterised by Rose as “a lot of sitting and writing, the guys writing stories of their mothers, collecting photographs, family things. We had seven people in the beginning. There are still seven performers, but Alirio is now one of them because, as you know from the film, we lost one [Abner Bradley, multi-instrumentalist and core Men’s Ensemble member had to withdraw]. He hadn’t recovered in time for the first season so the decision for Alirio to join the cast was made about a month before we opened. The Men’s Ensemble is the longest-surviving workshop group we have. Sons & Mothers is the culmination of their work so far but I expect they’ll do more.”
PJ Rose
courtesy the artist
PJ Rose
Home
One of NSA’s most recent ventures is Tracking Culture, an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (ATSI) performance workshop launched in 2005 as a partnership between the company and Kura Yerlo, a services provider to Adelaide’s western metropolitan Aboriginal community. Kura Yerlo facilitates a visual arts and crafts program called Karrarendi (translation: To be proud and rise above) for 30 ATSI participants with disabilities and it is from this group that Tracking Culture has emerged. I suggest to Rose that the workshop must present NSA with a unique set of challenges, bringing together as it does participants whose disadvantage in many cases straddle physical and mental impairment in addition to the socio-economic inequalities particular to indigeneity in Australia. “Certainly,” she says, “we get to the most disadvantaged people in the culture. Most of them can’t speak. Many can’t move. So finding the way in with any particular show is an amazing challenge.”
Tracking Culture’s latest project is Echoes… of Knowing Home, a new, multidisciplinary play by playwright Alexis West who is of Birra Gubba, Waka Waka, Kanak and Anglo-Australian descent. Now in its third phase of creative development, a series of six work-in-progress showings took place in late June and early July. Like previous Tracking Culture productions, the work is steeped in Indigenous myth and ritual, uniting a ‘fish out of water’ parable about a dolphin born in the desert with the use of animal puppets created by the ensemble in conjunction with contemporary fibre artist Sandy Elverd. The elusive ‘way in’ revealed itself gradually, through a process by which the over-protectiveness of the ensemble members’ support workers was redressed by an increasing, shared acknowledgment of the performers’ agency. “Agency,” according to Rose, “is crucial—and being able to demonstrate that agency. So it’s about ways of finding situations in which these performers can be the active ones. And the trick is in finding directors who delight in improvising, playing and creating from what is possible in the moment. That’s what we get from working with Alirio, with Paulo Castro and others—artists who appreciate how they can find and bring forward other artistic experiences.”
John Mack protects his dolphin child from an attack, Echoes … of Knowing Home, by Alexis West
photo Jonny Ratke
John Mack protects his dolphin child from an attack, Echoes … of Knowing Home, by Alexis West
Leaving home
Although not members of the Stolen Generations, all 13 of the performers in Echoes… were removed from their homes and either institutionalised or placed in shared care facilities. Aboriginality was sometimes given as the reason for removal, in other cases disability, limited regional support services or some admixture of all three. Rose says, “Mary, the woman who is introduced as the songstress of the group, was removed from her country at three months. She often warbles exactly as if she is in the middle of a corroboree. How would she know that? She’s never been back home. So this work came out of that, talking about where people are from. These folks have never before had an opportunity to grieve for that loss of home, for that loss of identity.
“I don’t know what the next piece will be yet,” continues Rose. She mentions an embryonic project—a piece about sexuality and disability that will see Melbourne playwright Patricia Cornelius and actor and burlesque performer Maude Davey collaborate—but nothing beyond the current Sons & Mothers tour is fixed. “I’ve been doing this for quite a while now so it’s not necessarily my intention to see myself into the grave here. I hope that eventually a person with a disability leads the company, someone who has a passion for this kind of work and whose artistry I admire. It’s grown much more than I planned for. I just keep programming as these things bubble up.”
No Strings Attached Theatre of Disability, Sons & Mothers, devisor, writer, director Alirio Zavarce, performers No Strings Attached Men’s Ensemble, Brown’s Mart Theatre, Darwin, 14-15 Aug and touring nationally until Oct 22; Echoes… of Knowing Home, writer Alexis West, co-directors PJ Rose, Alexis West, performers Tracking Culture workshop participants, Tandanya, Adelaide, 24 June-4 July, 2014. http://www.nostringsattached.org.au
One of the consequences of being in large part a refugee nation is that extraordinary stories of survival and terror can be found behind most ordinary Australian suburban front doors. Sophia Turkiewicz’s deeply personal and affecting new documentary Once My Mother traces one such tale—her mother’s path to Australia, via Eastern Europe and Russia during the darkest days of the Second World War. Yet, Once My Mother is not a work of mourning; rather it’s a celebration of survival and a tender portrait of a fraught mother-daughter relationship haunted by a traumatic past.
When asked what inspired her debut documentary, Turkiewicz jokes, “Well, I keep making the same story.” An early graduate from the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, Turkiewicz initially attempted to tell her mother’s tale through an unfinished student documentary in 1976. Her first major work, the 30-minute Letters From Poland (1978) was a drama loosely based on her mother’s experiences as a refugee in post-war Australia. Most famously, she made another Polish refugee story in 1984, with the award-winning feature Silver City.
“In a way I see this film as a companion piece to Silver City,” Turkiewicz explains. “But I think the impulse behind making Once My Mother as a documentary was finally getting the story right. While I was lucky to have the opportunity to make Silver City, it’s a pretty glossy account of the real story. I was always aware of that and felt it wasn’t quite the authentic truth of my mother’s real experience.”
Once My Mother, Helen with newborn Sophia in Lusaka refugee camp
courtesy the artist
Once My Mother, Helen with newborn Sophia in Lusaka refugee camp
The sheer scale and horror of that experience perhaps explains the reticence Turkiewicz showed as a young filmmaker. Her mother Helen was one of millions deported east and fed into Stalin’s vast network of gulags when the Soviets and Nazi Germany dismembered Poland between them in 1939. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the desperate need for troops earned the Poles an ‘amnesty’ so they could form an army. Many of these soldiers eventually fled to Persia via Uzbekistan, bringing thousands of displaced civilians in their wake. Having made it to Persia, after the war Helen ended up in a British-run refugee camp in Rhodesia, southern Africa. Six years later, cradling the baby who became a filmmaker, she was taken into Australia as part of the post-war migration program.
Once My Mother traces this story through interviews with Helen shot for the unfinished student film in 1976, along with more contemporary interactions filmed as Helen’s memories were slowly being eroded by Alzheimer’s before her death in 2010. A wealth of archival material from Polish, Russian and British sources fills out the historical backdrop.
This is anything but dry history however. Nor is it a straightforward recounting of Helen’s life. “It was only through the process of making the film that I started to realise that it was as much about me and my relationship with my mother as it was about her,” Turkiewicz says of her decision to return to her mother’s experiences. “What I understood, ultimately, was that my impulse behind returning to this story was to try and nut out my complicated relationship with my mother. So I had to be a character in the film as well.”
Once My Mother, Helen and Sophia Turkiewicz
courtesy the artist
Once My Mother, Helen and Sophia Turkiewicz
Turkiewicz’s bond with her mother was long tinged with resentment over her placement in an Adelaide orphanage shortly after they arrived in Australia. Their difficult relationship and the echoes of Helen’s past in Turkiewicz’s childhood are effectively conveyed through a parallel structure that places the director’s life journey alongside her mother’s earlier travails. In her 20s, for example, we see Turkiewicz’s world open up as she gains a degree, moves to Sydney and joins the burgeoning Australian film industry. Around the same age, Helen was enduring a 4,000 kilometre trek across the Soviet Union with countless displaced Poles dropping dead around her, before finally escaping into an uncertain future as a post-war refugee. These parallel lives not only put the director’s more mundane struggles into perspective but highlight how incomprehensible her mother’s past must have been to Turkiewicz as a young girl coming of age in 1960s Adelaide. We see this story through both Helen’s and the filmmaker’s eyes, in a structure that conveys the epic sweep of the Polish deportee experience while maintaining an almost home movie intimacy with its subjects.
Although the film’s limited means contributed to its pleasingly intimate feel, Turkiewicz would have liked greater resources with which to realise her directorial vision. “I only ever had one day with a professional cinematographer,” Turkiewicz comments ruefully. “If we’d actually got the money and then made this doco, it would have had a completely different look and that’s really one of my slight disappointments—that the production values are not what I would have wanted for this story. It just grew through grabbing any opportunities we could along the way and cobbling it all together.”
As associate producer Bob Connolly explained in a speech before a private screening of the film last year, Once My Mother was rejected by both SBS and the ABC when the filmmakers sought a pre-sale (see On the Dox, RT118). This rendered the makers ineligible for backing from most government bodies. They were also rejected by Screen Australia’s Signature Fund, the only funding program that does not require a pre-sale. Her mother’s rapidly failing health forced Turkiewicz to push ahead and piece the film together over five years with virtually no budget. With the film almost completed, Screen Australia finally came on board and the ABC followed suit with some funds to make a 50-minute television version.
Turkiewicz concurs with Connolly’s criticism of structures which effectively prevent any documentary not tailored to broadcast schedules from receiving funds. But she also sees a deeper problem related to distribution. “There are fantastic feature-length documentaries being made all around the world and they’re not reaching our television screens or cinemas. I don’t think it’s just Australia—it’s a worldwide problem.”
Once My Mother is a perfect illustration of Turkiewicz’s and Connolly’s points—a beautifully moving, essayist documentary that cannot be neatly placed in a television slot and consequently nearly didn’t get made. But as well as being emotionally affecting, this is also a film that speaks to contemporary events here in Australia. “When you look at that whole phenomenon of post-war migration to Australia, it came from government policy, leadership and education. In the course of less than a decade Australia was absolutely transformed—and what a gift those people have made to the dynamic, multicultural and sophisticated society we now have. I want my film to be part of this conversation. I’m driven to despair seeing what is happening to refugees now,” Turkiewicz says forcefully.
As well as her mother’s contribution to Australia, Turkiewicz herself is part of the ongoing refugee story, even if our broadcasters showed little interest in what she had to offer. As always, it seems, the best in our culture has to develop regardless of those in positions of power.
Once My Mother, director Sophia Turkiewicz, producer Rod Freeman, Australia, 2013, www.oncemymother.com
Once My Mother is screening nationally in cinemas.
For some reason I find the bio a faintly embarrassing genre, but mine goes something like this: born in New Zealand, raised in Samoa and Canada, arrived in Australia just in time for high school. More specifically, I left the snowy Rocky Mountains and arrived in sunny Newcastle, which was a minor culture shock. I am no beach babe so I started plotting my escape soon afterwards, moving first to Canberra and then to Sydney where I have been for over a decade. Wherever we lived, I enrolled in a drama class of some description, initially because my mother thought it might cure my shyness (it did not) and then because I loved it and it felt like home when nothing else around me did. In retrospect, it is no surprise that I wrote my doctoral thesis on performance and migration.
Currently, I am employed as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of New South Wales. Conventional academic wisdom has it that during a fellowship you need to finish something, start something else and start thinking about a third thing, so I have been finishing my manuscript on performance and forced migration, starting a project on performance and listening (so many headphones in live art), and starting to think about performance and accidents (in the wake of so-called ‘liveness’ debates, the accident seems to be invoked ever more often in discussions about the ontology of performance).
Exposé
I don’t remember life without writing but, as friends and colleagues have pointed out, I rarely call it that; instead I refer to it as “typing.” I didn’t realise I did this but I suppose ‘writing’ sounds intellectual and intimidating whereas ‘typing’ sounds mechanical and therefore more manageable. Not that it is.
I started typing for RealTime in 2007, having previously worked as a proofreader for the publication. I sent a report from the Explosive Youth Theatre Festival in Bremen where I was performing in PACT Theatre’s The Speech Givers. Since then I have written about asylum seekers in theatre, film and visual art, various types of “theatre of the real,” about emerging artists in Sydney and—inevitably—Newcastle. Occasionally I also write an overview of a festival, like Liveworks, Imperial Panda, Festival a/d Werf and the recent Performance Space 30th birthday celebrations.
Some of my early reviews are clearer of eye but harder of heart. For better or worse, I am more forgiving now, all too aware of the courage it takes to create and the conditions under which most artists labour. During my doctoral research, I also became aware that RealTime is sometimes the only record of a particular performance. This has changed somewhat with the rise of blogs, but in the absence of a dedicated theatre journal (eg American Theatre) and without a dedicated theatre archive or museum (eg New York’s Public Library for the Performing Arts, London’s V&A Theatre Collection), RealTime’s role in preserving Australia’s performance history remains crucial.
When reading old issues—I have an almost complete set of the hard copies!—I find that the reviewer’s opinion is of some interest, but often not as much as his or her “thick description” of the work at hand. I try to keep this in mind now, especially if I have wandered off track. Failing that, I conjure Keith’s voice: “Caroline, this is interesting, but what actually happened on stage?” In short, typing for RealTime is the best of both worlds: as in academic discourse, one can assume that the audience is intelligent and informed, but as in mainstream criticism, one is free of the footnote. Unlike the bio then, the RealTime review is a most agreeable genre!
Recent articles
Meta-theatrical Magic
Caroline Wake, Back to Back Theatre’s Ganesh versus the Third Reich
RealTime issue #120 April-May 2014 pg. 43
Immaculate Conception
Caroline Wake, Mark Wilson’s Unsex Me
RealTime issue #120 April-May 2014 pg.25
History Never Repeats
Caroline Wake with Virginia Baxter and Keith Gallasch, Performance Space Turns 30
RealTime issue #119 Feb-March 2014 pg. 4-10
Machine/performer/spectator
Caroline Wake: Festival A/D Werf, Utrecht, The Netherlands
RealTime issue #104 Aug-Sept 2011 pg. 22
Live work, women’s work
Caroline Wake: Liveworks, Performance Space
RealTime issue #101 Feb-March 2011 pg. 18
In First Grade my mother was called to the school to see a report I had written on Aborigines and the so-called White Settlement. The expected three lines had expanded into three foolscap pages—a lengthy amount for a six year old who barely spoke and now, on this topic, seemed to have a lot to say.
Since…Writing…thinking, making words, forming ideas, learning rules, then breaking them…still writing with a lot to say.
There were years and years of dancing and performing in a variety of collaborations across Sydney, while simultaneously completing a degree in Philosophy at Sydney University and making two pretty fantastic children. This led to a PhD in Performance Studies at Sydney; the teaching of dance and choreography at various universities; followed by a two year stint in the US where I returned to studies in phenomenology. I now research at the Centre for Philosophy and Phenomenology of Religion working on Husserl and the structure of belief, and continue to choreograph with a strong interest in dance dramaturgy.
Exposé
I’m no fiction writer or storyteller. Sometimes characters emerge, but I’m more likely to dress in drag or choreograph a dance than write a novel. Ideas and propositions outflank the fictional—it’s a result of the philosophy training. And yet I’m prone to poetics over clear language, taking any chance to burst forth from the pith to paint the page with images and rhythms. Review writing allows me to play with language in this way. Dance and movement are rich fodder for description. When watching we usually register what we see more than what we feel. Writing is the great emancipator of the felt.
Two current projects involve dance and writing. One is a remote choreographic process between two artists living in different cities sharing the beat of their lives in poetic correspondence for live performance. The second is with a photographer/animator moving along a line between Coast and Outback NSW, stitching word and image as cultural mapping. Writing has taken over. The chest concaves in a tucked computer asana slowly waving the studio floor goodbye…
Heidegger says that man poetically dwells. Dwelling here means no small deal for him. I like this idea (if not so turned on by others) and always find myself at home in language: I write and it’s me. Not because it mirrors who I am, rather it lets me turn towards the world with acute attention. Writing is an act of alterity that evokes understanding, so I practice daily.
Reading is part of this practice; it’s humbling. Sipping the music of language, moved by new rhythms, awash in images and provoked by ideas when reading. This is writing.
Selected articles
Dancing out of trauma
Jodie McNeilly: Samantha Chester, Safety in Numbers
RealTime issue #121 June-July 2014 32
Zaimon and Lizzie Vilmanis, White Porcelain Doll, Prying Eye
FenLan Photography
Zaimon and Lizzie Vilmanis, White Porcelain Doll, Prying Eye
Prying Eye was founded by Zaimon and Lizzie Vilimanis in 2010 to develop “live contemporary performance” with sumptuous visuals that promise to generate “goose-bumps” (www.pryingeye.org). The company’s monochrome aesthetic, filled with deconstructed silent film tropes, creates an eerie, post-gothic world that incorporates character and psychology and shuttles between performance-making, movement and dance theatre forms. They are currently working on their debut full-length work, White Porcelain Doll, which will make its much-anticipated premiere at the Judith Wright Centre for Contemporary Arts in late July.
The inseparable pair are partners in art and love since their days as ensemble members in Expressions Dance Theatre in the noughties. When I met them in the leafy courtyard of a local cafe to talk about White Porcelain Doll I resisted asking them any ‘prying’ questions about what it must be like to make an intimate two-hander exploring the darkest and most terrifying emotional context—that of a captive/kidnapped woman and her predator—with your own partner. However with typical élan the pair raised the issue themselves, talking candidly about how the project didn’t start with this brutal scenario, but actually began in 2010 as an experiment in collaborative process. Lizzie and Zaimon wanted to explore how they might work with each other as co-directors and co-choreographers rather than as fellow dancers in an ensemble, also trying not to fall into a traditional dancer/choreographer relationship. The project, A Likely Distrust, was born with a Fresh Ground Residency at the Judith Wright Centre in 2010, collaborating with video artist Ryadan Jeavons and laying the foundation for much of the visual palette of their work.
While there were a number of subsequent residencies, it was only a return to Fresh Ground in 2013 with most of their existing creative team in place that, as they put it, “the work revealed itself.” In the mysterious alchemy of these creative epiphanies the gestural language and the compelling guttural vocal score that had emerged found a place within a specific narrative: the enclosed and isolated world of captor and captive.
Zaimon and Lizzie Vilmanis, White Porcelain Doll, Prying Eye
FenLan Photography
Zaimon and Lizzie Vilmanis, White Porcelain Doll, Prying Eye
Despite the violent and voyeuristic nature of the material they have consciously decided to focus on the feminine arc of survival in the piece, searching for images that explore not simply the isolation and domination of captivity, but also the resilience and imaginative capacity required to negotiate that environment by the female victim. Neither wanted to give the game away about the work’s conclusion but they did say that the intention is to provide some sense of hope.
Their term to describe the form of White Porcelain Doll is “Silent Theatre.” As they describe it, the piece is a series of intensive image-based vignettes, like the flickering chapters of early silent films. The guttural language they have developed filters into the piece only through voice-over, supported by a haunting piano composition. The elegant and technically assured dance practice of Lizzie Vilimanis is complemented by Zaimon’s brooding stage presence and their ability—rare in contemporary dance performers—to move comfortably into the realms of character-based movement with depth and integrity.
The model of Bruce McKinven’s set design is spine-chilling in its simplicity: a platform, echoing the shape of a grand piano that reads like a sound-proof box, floating in space. It’s surrounded by suffocating, blanketed material, hung in corrugations, able to be projected upon, but with a distorted, scratchy render that evokes the spooky aesthetic so redolent of Prying Eye’s visual iconography.
Zaimon and Lizzie Vilmanis, White Porcelain Doll, Prying Eye
FenLan Photography
Zaimon and Lizzie Vilmanis, White Porcelain Doll, Prying Eye
Making new work is a risky business, but there is a bit of buzz around Brisbane about this show. The long incubation period and the solidity of the creative team bodes well for a ripe work. Having said that, the first debut full-length work for a new company is always tricky and even the most careful processes can go awry.
Ultimately, what is distinctive about Prying Eye is the power of an artistic partnership that is so intensely personal. I think it is best summed up in an image of Lizzie and Zaiman I saw on the Leigh Warren Dance website (http://www.lwd.com.au/work.htm), uncredited but presumably from Lizzie’s time there as company member (2009-2013). They are locked in a fierce embrace, with Lizzie falling away but held safe within the concentrated grasp of Zaimon. Their glowing intensity is made playful by Zaimon’s foot, which sits incongruously in the foreground, emphasising the visual trick of the whole image: two bodies falling together as one.
Prying Eye, White Porcelain Doll, co-directors, choreographers Zaimon and Lizzie Vilmanis, composer, director of photography Ryadan Jeavons, design Bruce McKinven, lighting Dan Black, systems designer Tessa Smallhorn, dramaturg Veronica Neave, choreoturg Clare Dyson; Judith Wright Centre for Contemporary Arts, 26 July-2 Aug; http://www.pryingeye.org; http://judithwrightcentre.com
A few years ago a stranger was moved to write to me in praise of a review in which I’d described a work by BalletLab’s Phillip Adams as fuelled by “obsessive self-indulgences.” My correspondent went further, labelling the same piece “the most self indulgent load of tosh that I’ve ever had to endure! So much so that I will never again go along to see anything that involves him.” I replied explaining that my words had been intended as objective description, not negative criticism, and that those same self-indulgences had also produced some of the most unexpected and daring experiences of my theatregoing career. The writer took this into consideration, and decided to give Adams another chance.
He might want to start with BalletLab’s latest, LIVE WITH IT (we all have HIV). The work is an extraordinary collaboration with more than 50 community participants who have been “infected or affected” by the virus and has been co-created with visual artist Andrew Hazewinkel. Where Adams’ previous work has always been, by his own admission, relentlessly “Phillip-centric,” LIVE WITH IT has seen him consciously forgo his customary position as master and commander in favour of something new. “Not allowing me to be a director feels like it’s the next step,” he says, and suggests that what he is instead doing is closer to “curation, in some ways.”
LIVE WITH IT began with a series of workshops last year followed by one-on-one developments with participants and the July showing will see a series of five or six 10-minute auto-portraits by participants offered each night, drawn from an overall pool of 20 such works. The forms of these portraits range from movement to spoken word, video and pre-recorded audio.
“It’s not Phillip’s vision and it’s not my vision,” says Hazewinkel. “It’s somehow a shared vision which is distributed between all of the participants and ourselves in this kind of strangely morphological way. It’s the experiences that we’ve had the whole way that have revealed what each of these co-authored self-portraits are. They’re not our portraits of these people.” That challenge to Adams’ own method is itself paradoxically typical of his practice, he says: “It wouldn’t be a BalletLab work if I wasn’t challenged and educated in the process. Otherwise I’m just regurgitating the same postmodern canon of shit.”
Adams’ work has always been grounded in real research while drawing inspiration from topics far from the mainstream—the cult dynamics of Miracle (RT93) and Tomorrow (RT114), Aviary’s bird-watching and millinery, Axeman Lullaby’s woodchopping (RT87) and the furry fetishisations of Brindabella (RT83). All have been Adams’ attempts at speaking to personal moments of obsession, and LIVE WITH IT is also informed by his own experiences. Adams lived in New York from 1988 to 1998, during which period his partner of the time contracted HIV/AIDS and died. “I have the passport and the license to talk to the epidemic in the way that I experienced it.”
LIVE WITH IT : We all have HIV, project rehearsal
courtesy the artists
LIVE WITH IT : We all have HIV, project rehearsal
At the same time, the very form of the work is an attempt to transcend atomistic thinking about HIV. As the provocative subtitle We all have HIV suggests, the work is not simply concerned with relaying the experiences of individuals so much as drawing attention to HIV as something shared across time and space. Hazewinkel is uncomfortable with terms such as “community art” and instead likens LIVE WITH IT to the Beuysian notion of the “social sculpture” in which the art, artist and audience are all part of the same organism.
Importantly, the development of the work involved time spent in regional Victoria. The discourse around HIV is often inflected with an implicit sense that it is an urban disease. But, says Adams, “In the country I felt that the people who talked [about] this are less anxious to talk. I don’t know what that’s about. There’s a real sense of Australian country town community.”
Conversely, the devastating effects of HIV AIDS in Africa is frequently divorced from local experiences of the same disease, something connoted by the work. “Without going into a 90s ‘We are the World’ way of thinking, there’s a sense of a unified, global humanity where we all have it,” says Hazewinkel, “whether we’re a rich western country with the latest treatments available or if we’re a much poorer African country where even if you’re lucky enough to get hold of treatments it’s stuff that people here moved away from nine years ago.”
The globalised context of the work is juxtaposed with a focus on “the Australianness of it,” says Hazewinkel. “One of the things we’re trying to do is present really intimate, microscopic, poignant Australian experiences of HIV within a broader aggregate of Australian culture. So we look at the Australian relationship (to HIV) over the last 30 years. It’s contextualised with data that comes from high and low culture, politics, sport, that somehow frame the intimate experiences.”
Those personal experiences, however intimate, do speak powerfully of the ways in which more than 30 years of HIV have seen us all “infected or affected” and have resulted in “scars, enlightened moments, stigmas,” says Adams. One such story from a LIVE WITH IT participant offers a moving illustration. On the eve of the new millennium, a Melbourne woman decided to go to a New Years Eve party in the Docklands. “She rocked up with her friend and they thought they’d go out and have a whizzbang time. She was on the dance floor and having a good time and all of a sudden there was a dude in a Grim Reaper suit.” In 1988 the then 24-year-old had returned from Europe having contracted Hepatitis B and HIV. “She was told she had four years to live,” says Adams. “Imagine being a young woman given this news in 1988.” Twelve years later she was confronted with one of the most impactful icons associated with the AIDS epidemic, right there on the dance floor.
The result? “She danced with him all night,” says Adams. “That is facing 12 years of the infection to the point where she can talk to it literally on a disco floor. And she loved it.”
Phillip Adams BalletLab, LIVE WITH IT (we all have HIV), concept, co-direction, choreography Phillip Adams, concept, co-direction, design Andrew Hazewinkel, with community participants from Melbourne and regional Victoria, Arts House, Meat Market, 17-27 July; http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/ARTSHOUSE/PROGRAM/Pages/LiveWithIt.aspx
At the back of a gravel car park in suburban Adelaide, sandwiched between a church and high-density housing, sits an unremarkable outbuilding in which one of the city’s most distinctive arts organisations, Kneehigh Puppets, has taken root. Known for its giant puppets and large-scale, spectacle-based public engagement, the nearly 20-year-old company has carved out a colourful niche in multidisciplinary Community Cultural Development practice through successive local, regional, national and international commissions.
Now rebranded as Open Space, the company has a new artistic director and CEO, Dario Vacirca, who was appointed the successor to long-serving AD Tony Hannan in 2012. Conceptually, the transition has been evolutionary rather than revolutionary, broadening the company’s practice—the only curatorial criterion is that the work must be outdoor-based and engage open space—and deepening both its relationship with innovative practitioners and anti-privatisation politics as emblematised by the Occupy movement.
Quadrupedism Saves!, Open Space, director Dario Vacirca*
Chloe Billebault
Quadrupedism Saves!, Open Space, director Dario Vacirca*
Art is political
Politics are on everybody’s mind when I meet Vacirca for coffee. Tony Abbott’s first budget has just come down, slashing $60 million from arts and cultural development funding, another $68 million from Screen Australia and the Australia Council. “In the short term,” says Vacirca, “we’ll cope. In the long term, I get extremely concerned about what our government and neoliberal governments around the world are trying to do to more socially responsible and compassionate human activities of which the arts is at the fore. I worry about what those polices are really going to do to our practice and hence our human relationships in the long-term.”
It is, I put it to Vacirca, a vexed time for practitioners whose work is predicated not just on government funding but also on access to public space. Ours is an era marked by the retreat of the public sphere and the ascendancy of state and corporate interests in shaping the aesthetics and power dynamics of our common spaces. The draconian policing of these spaces to protect private interests is a global and intensifying phenomenon, exemplified in this country by the anti-protest laws which came into effect in Victoria earlier this year. As I write this, legislation is being debated in the Tasmanian parliament that could result in non-violent protestors facing mandatory imprisonment. Says Vacirca, “Our public spaces and our public sector supports are both disappearing. They are being supplanted by big secret activity and pop up spaces. All this language is around how real estate is being managed by corporates and by government. There is always a monetary transaction. It’s about deals between institutions and corporations.”
I wonder aloud if Open Space’s artists could thrive without government funding, outside of this increasingly closed system. “No fucking way!” is his emphatic reply. “One of the main things I’ve been talking about a lot in terms of the transition from Kneehigh to Open Space is that Open Space is not a market-driven organisation. It’s artist- and collaborator-driven. In order for us to be non-reliant on government support we would need to slowly develop back towards a more market-driven enterprise. But I don’t think that markets alone are strong enough to evolve the economy, let alone artistic engagement.”
Terror of N, Belle Bassin, Open Space associate artist, (pictured Dario Varirca)
courtesy the artist
Terror of N, Belle Bassin, Open Space associate artist, (pictured Dario Varirca)
New programming paradigms
Open Space’s model consists of two discrete but interconnected “realms”: the core artistic program, under the moniker Shifting/Renaming, and the artistic associate (AA) program. The former, closer in spirit to the company’s roots, encompasses work that is both large-scale and long-term, building on extant relationships with artists, communities and organisations in Australia and overseas. At the moment, however, the company’s focus is on the AAs, the group of interdependent artists—Belle Bassin, Emma Beech, Nadia Cusimano, Paul Gazzola, Sarah Neville, Fee Plumley and Lukus Robbins—whose small-scale CCD projects will define Open Space’s first phase.
Says Vacirca, “It’s really up to the AAs to decide how they want to use the program—what they want to give to it, how much they want back. It’s an energy exchange.” The group will engage through quarterly meetings, skill-sharing workshops and a continuing physical and online interchange of skills, resources and ideas. “It’s an open space for critical dialogue. It’s about making the artist feel supported and secure but it’s also about challenging them. If somebody comes to me and they have a dance work that they want to do I will try and work with them to turn it into not just a dance work but also a video work and maybe a participatory ping-pong show—if it works conceptually!”
The most high profile of the core artistic program’s current projects is Fee Plumley’s opensourcehome, an iteration of her reallybigroadtrip project, a government- and crowd-funded experiment in “nomadic creative digital culture” which takes place on a roving big red bus and across a multiplicity of online platforms. For the duration of opensourcehome, the bus, called homeJames, will be moored at various shared space locations around Adelaide, subject to the application of move-on powers. Other projects, still gestational, include Gina, a large-scale puppet work that will see the Australian mining magnate’s infamous poem “Our Future” transformed into a libretto, and an arts lab and series of supported residencies on a sheep station in the remote Flinders Rangers.
From Winter To Window, Open Space & USD (Korea), director Dario Vacirca*
photo Dario Vacirca
From Winter To Window, Open Space & USD (Korea), director Dario Vacirca*
Uncategorical
Vacirca has been making collaborative, community-focused, cross-disciplinary work of this kind for years, but a sense of what has been lost clearly haunts him—the relatively high levels of state-based funding which existed 20 years ago and the ability and willingness of arts bodies to talk directly to artists and to develop a language around the arts that is responsive to continuously evolving and emerging forms. “What I’m trying to do with Open Space,” he tells me, “is make it a little bit fairer for some of the artists who fall into the gaps between those traditional categories—literature, theatre, dance etc. In the next couple of years we’ll see more artists coming in who won’t even be able to say what art form they are and my aim is to accommodate those artists and those kinds of conversations. As soon as it is named or understood by the economic powers, whoever they are, it is gone.”
Open Space, Marden, Adelaide, Fee Plumley’s opensourcehome will take place in front of the Queens Theatre, 22-24 July including the Open Space Launch Party; http://open-space.org.au
Image background
*2. A quick response public intervention artwork as part of What Does the World Need to Hear by Alex Desebrock in Brunswick, Melb. Vacirca performed via proxy from Adelaide and used a remix of Brother Theodore’s rant on the arrogance of bipedalism in a protest against all levels of institutionalism dictating the framework around our search for truth. (the other side of the sign said – Science is not science)
*4. From Winter to Window is a performance for public private spaces using new and old technologies to create an uncanny experience for multiple individuals simultaneously. Exploring intergenerational trauma through war time slavery. Created for the Asian and Australian touring circuit, this is a collaboration of Open Space with USD and Ludi (Korea), and Well (Vic). Open Space hosted USD for one month where we underwent first stage development. The work is now poised for further development in October 2014, seeking full presentation between Aust and Korea in 2015.
Ever-adventurous Sydney Chamber Opera is about to premiere Sydney-based composer Michael Smetanin’s Mayakovsky to a libretto by poet, novelist and critic Alison Croggon. Their subject offers these artists rich material—a life complex and confounding, revolutionary but, even in the revolution’s terms, rebellious.
Pre-revolutionary and Revolutionary Russia were culturally fecund times, abounding in new ideas, movements and artistic invention. Radical experimentation in all artforms gave revolution succour and inspiration amid horrendous power play and bloodletting until by at least the late 20s when it was absorbed into the State’s mainstream or more often banished—bodily to Siberia or bureaucratically to the outlawed, coverall category of Formalism. Some artists faded into alcoholic despair, some played by the rules or appeared to (as is alleged in the case of Shostakovitch), some were imprisoned or murdered, others suicided.
The poet, playwright and poster artist Vladimir Mayakovsky, who shot himself in 1930, was one of many artistic leading lights in the 1910s and 20s and one of the most famous. His commitment to the spoken word in his public recitations with his deep baritone voice, bardic rhythms and the vividness of his writing—prodding, assertive, tortured, rich in imagery cosmic and streetwise—made his art accessible and bracing. This, we must remember, was a time when in Russia and across the Western world, artists were self-declared prophets, socialist or fascist, waving the wands of new technologies, conjuring new futures, leading the charge as an avant garde, but ever espousing the fundamental power of the Word—spoken, sung, propagandised—and Word as Image—typographically radicalised and collaged in his collaborations with Rodchenko and Lissitsky. This was Mayakovsky’s art.
Agitator and martyr
Mayakovsky’s friends described him as gigantic, anarchic, volatile. Maxim Gorky recalled meeting the young poet: “I liked his verses and he read very well: he even broke into sobs, like a woman, and this alarmed and disturbed me. He complained that a human being is ‘divided horizontally at the level of the diaphragm.’…He behaved very nervously and was clearly deeply disturbed. He seemed to speak with two voices, in one voice he was a pure lyricist, in the other sharply satirical. It was clear that he was especially sensitive, very talented, and—unhappy.”
He also saw himself as a martyr. Marjorie Perloff describes Mayakovsky as a “poet-saviour” in his poem “Cloud in Pants” (1915): “I’ll drag out /my soul for you /stomp it flat /so that it’s giant /and, blood-soaked, bestow it—a banner.”
His most famous poem Listen! is finally reassuring (“Listen, /if stars are lit, /it means—there is someone who needs it.”) but only after first conveying the abject horror of a cosmos without stars: “in the swirls of afternoon dust, he bursts in on God, /afraid he might be already late. /In tears, /he kisses God’s sinewy hand /and begs him to guarantee /that there will definitely be a star. /He swears /he won’t be able to stand /that starless ordeal.” Smetanin’s librettist Alison Croggon (this is her fourth work in collaboration with the composer) says that she “picked up the poem Listen, and extended it as a metaphor through the libretto” (Limelight Magazine, 13 August, 2013). As you’ll read in the following interview, Michael Smetanin has made use of Mayakvosky’s actual voice.
Mayakvosky’s fragility is everywhere evident in his poetry (and the upheavals of his life—centred on the torturously prolonged emotional ties to “the muse of the Russian avant garde” Lili Brik, who rejected him after 1923) alongside self-aggrandisement, self-deprecation and abjection.
The poet’s voice
Appropriately for an opera about Mayakovsky, this emotional tension is felt strongly in respect of his voice. His pride in it is evident in lines from a variety of poems: “the velvet of my voice,” “then shall I speak out /pushing apart with my bass voice the wind’s howl,” “I shake the world with the might of my voice,” “I /the most golden-mouthed /whose every word /gives a new birthday to the soul,” and “If /to its full power /I used my vast voice /the comets would wring their burning hands /and plunge headlong in anguish.”
However, in “Violin and a little nervous,” the deep baritone, “cried out, “Oh, God!” Threw myself at her wooden neck, “Violin, you know? We are so alike: I do also Shout— But still can not prove anything either!”…“You know what, Violin? Why don’t we—Move in together! Ha?” Often in Mayakovsky we sense the uneasy co-existence of two voices, two personalities, and no less in his political life.
In “At the Top of My Voice,” he expresses his pain at having to submit himself to the dictates of the Revolution, “…I subdued /myself, /setting my heel /on the throat /of my own song.” Nevertheless, as he did until his death, he commits himself to Communism, even imagining himself raising high his Bolshevik Party Card—one he never had. As Gorky observed, Mayavosky was a man two voices; they gave his poetry power and personality and reflected the painful dialectic of his life and politics.
I met Michael Smetanin at the Sydney Conservatorium where he teaches composition and music technology. The composer’s career includes two operas with Alison Croggan, The Burrow (1994) and Gauguin (2000), his superb music for the wonderful 2000 Adelaide Festival production of UK playwright Howard Barker’s eight-hour The Ecstatic Bible (directed by Barker and Tim Maddock) and a host of idiosyncratic orchestral and chamber works of great power.
Vladimir Mayakovsky
The interview
What attracted you to write an opera about Mayakovsky?
Mayakovsky is close to my heart in terms of my family background, which is Russian. It goes back a good way to when I discovered books on Mayakovsky at the Soviet Bookshop down the Haymarket end of Pitt Street back in the mid to late 80s.
I didn’t really know about Mayakovsky. He’s well known by schoolkids in Russia. Stalin said that Mayakovsky was his favourite poet but didn’t understand his poetry and really despised him. I think the fundamentalist regime and the fundamentalist apparatchiks didn’t like Mayakovsky and tried very much to keep his lifestyle under wraps because he was not a good example for the worker. Pre-Revolution Mayakovsky and other artists were under the impression that the Revolution would bring them a new freedom for intellectual exploits. But in actual fact, we know it was the opposite. It was not so bad under Lenin but when Stalin took over it was. Stalin was already looking over Mayakovsky’s shoulder before Lenin was gone. He was already a marked man.
If Mayakvosky hadn’t suicided, perhaps he wouldn’t have lasted anyway.
Well, it depends which Russian you speak to whether they think it was suicide or the NKVD, the precursor to the KGB, got him. It might have been a hit or it might have been suicide. Mayakovsky certainly did attempt suicide earlier in his life, even in his teens. So he was a big sack of contradictions, which is interesting.
Are those contradictions just one thing or everything that grabs you about him?
A lot of people say to me, well you’re a big sack of contradictions yourself. That’s me. I think that I kind of—I know I’d never met him and all that and he was dead before I was even born—but I had an almost spiritual connection with the man. And then seeing some of his films…He was a strong, robust type, a handsome guy, smoked like a chimney, drank copious amounts of whatever he could get his hands on, womanised a lot. Although an important feature in the opera is the ménage a trois he had with Lili and Osip Brik, I don’t think it was ever three-in-a-bed stuff. And once again, it depends on which Russian you speak to as to whether you believe or not that Mayakovsky might have been a convenience for Lili to make her own existence more tolerable. Being so close to him she did get visas to travel abroad. Just her connection with someone so famous was obviously going to get her some favours.
How have you focused this interest in the contradictions in the opera? Obviously they offer a lot of opportunities.
It’s very rich ground. The first photograph of him I saw was one in which he had a shaven head. So he looked like a 1920s Punk to me. All this strength and virility makes for a fairly strong score. There are tender moments—a love scene. There’s a lot of electronics in the score. All of my operas have them to some degree but this has much more. There are some eclectic moments, the little quotation, for example, of a Russian tune about a Christmas tree in Scene 3, which is a Futurist Christmas party where the apparatchik Svedova is being taunted by the other guests. It’s an electronic scene.
There are various versions of the attitude towards Futurist sound in the 20s and what it was: what actually is the sound of the future? In Mayakovksy’s play The Bedbug (1929) there’s a Phosphorescent Woman character who says we’re going to travel to the future 100 years from now, which could have been 100 years from the date that Mayakovsky recorded his poem Listen!, which is this year. So [in the score] it’s a combination of these things—almost like Futurist noise music with metal sheets and electronic music’s pure sine and sawtooth waves.
Vladimir Mayakovsky
photo Alexander Rodchenko
Vladimir Mayakovsky
This was the era of the theremin, wasn’t it?
Yes. At the beginning of the work are sounds using those pure waves, which conjure up the notions of futuristic electronic music, but of the 1920s and 30s, very, very early stuff.
What about the fragility of Mayakovsky’s character? He was incredibly self-aggrandising and could be very abject on the other hand.
Yes, there’s a lot of that in the libretto. Mayakovsky’s alter ego is a character in the work, called The Author, no name, nothing. The Author is a tenor and Mayakovsky has to be a baritone. So there’s a kind of duality there but they’re one and the same. That’s addressed in the text and the interaction between the two characters is musically underpinned where it’s necessary in the dramatic flow of the work.
I read you did spectral analysis of a recording of Mayakvosky’s voice.
[Another aspect of] technological newness, if you like, was to include in the score Listen! (or Poslushayte!), a famous poem by Mayakvosky. Every Russian knows it. He did a recording of it in 1914. It’s 52 seconds long and unfortunately the first couple of words are missing from the recording. The first word is Poslushayte! and it is used again at the end of the poem so I’ve just assumed he said it the same way. The spectral analysis of that poem I’ve stretched out for the length of the opera. So the spectral analysis of Mayakovsky reading his own poem provides the harmonic pathway for the entire opera.
It’s not intelligible then as spoken text, but as sound?
You can take the spectral analysis and have a piano score printed out from it. And the piano score also has a rhythm. So when that rhythm is stretched out those time proportions are apportioned to and through the libretto and to carry it. And the actual pictures of the spectral analysis are used to inform the harmonic pathway.
Did this pose a challenge for your librettist, Alison Croggon, to write to it?
The challenge was for me to…
… create the spaces?
Yes. There were at least 11 drafts of the libretto before the final draft which was edited together after I’d completed the score—a few words changed here and there, that kind of thing. So the harmonic direction is imbued by Mayakovsky’s own voice. This is actually explained at the beginning of the opera. There are projections of some texts by Mayakovsky read by the actor Alex Menglet and the actress Natalia Novakova reads the part of the Phosphorescent Woman. Then a little while later there is an explanation read by Natalia as well—of the fact that a spectral analysis made of the 1914 reading shows that C Sharp is the fundamental of Mayakovsky’s voice. Using a different application to do the analysis, it could have given me a C Natural, perhaps—who knows? But that C Sharp appears a lot. It opens the opera.
Are there other characters?
There are six singers. Mayakovsky, Lili, The Author, a high baritone who sings Lenin and Stalin and a few chorus moments, and another singer who plays Lili’s sister Elsa who sings chorus. And then there is the Svedova, an apparatchik.
What about the instrumental ensemble?
It’s relatively small. There are two saxophones, horn, trumpet, trombone and one percussionist. There’s amplified piano and one player doubling on electric guitar and bass guitar. And there’s the fixed media, the electronics.
Is there a political dimension to your approach to Mayakovsky? He did write a lot of propaganda and he was quite a determined Bolshevik in some respects but on the other hand he was the total opposite.
Well, he was never a member of the Party. He was known as the poet of the Revolution. He did poster art for them. The Party itself he despised.
But he went with it.
It’s like the Nuremberg Trials; just trying to survive.
Like Shostakovich?
They don’t issue too many pencils and pieces of paper in Siberia. You know how many people perished there? Both sides of my family had to deal with all that stuff, with Stalin and his enforced famine. It was dreadful.
There was an attempt to make a film about Mayakvosky’s life in 1973 in Russia but because it used footage from films [Fettered by Film, 1918, in which he co-stared with Lili, and The Lady and the Hooligan, in which he acted with her again and co-directed, 1918] showing him as a hooligan and a lovelorn loon it was refused funding. This was at the same time the State was building a museum to an idealised Mayakovsky, opposite the KGB building.
Yes, that’s what he played in his films. He was a big Charlie Chaplin fan.
So what does Mayakovsky represent? Is he like all of us, trapped in the very same contradictions, if less violently?
He symbolises everybody’s struggle with politics. We have our own troubles here. And the average person has more trouble than the rich. After the Revolution, the rich were very quickly supplanted by new people in power who got plenty of whatever they wanted. For artists, for intellectuals, people with their own minds, Mayakovsky’s a great symbol. Unfortunately he gave up early. It was 1930 and he was about 36. He could easily have lived on into the 1980s.
And maybe would have been a living inspiration to Yevtushenko and other Russian poets in the 60s who revived his spirit and the power of a dissenting public voice.
You just wonder what might have happened.
Sydney Chamber Opera & Carriageworks, Mayakovsky, composer Michael Smetanin, librettist Alison Croggon, conductor Jack Symonds, director Kat Henry, designer Hanna Sandgren, lighting Guy Harding, AV design Davros; Carriageworks, Sydney, 28, 30 July, 1 Aug 8pm, 2 Aug 2pm
Twin Cinema: Four Devils and a Woman in Red, 1) Bridget Crone, Lily Hibberd 2-4) Yallourn Theatre demolished, memory screen; Commissioned by NETS Victoria for The Cinemas Project curated by Bridget Crone
photo Din Heagney
Twin Cinema: Four Devils and a Woman in Red, 1) Bridget Crone, Lily Hibberd 2-4) Yallourn Theatre demolished, memory screen; Commissioned by NETS Victoria for The Cinemas Project curated by Bridget Crone
Over more than a decade, artist Lily Hibberd has developed an impressively polymorphous practice, ranging from painting to installation to playwriting, filmmaking, live performance and bookmaking; and from gallery-based, individual endeavour to collaborative, community-centred projects. A prolific creator, she also founded independent contemporary arts publication un Magazine (http://unprojects.org.au). Her interest in cinema traces back to her 2003 work, Blinded by the Light, included in the CCP’s Art + Film exhibition (see RT57).
For curator Bridget Crone, Hibberd was an apt choice for The Cinemas Project, in which five artists worked in regional Victorian sites and former sites of cinemas. Crone paired Hibberd with the Regent Theatre in the isolated Latrobe Valley town of Yarram, one of few locations where the original cinema still stands. The project resulted in Twin Cinema: Four Devils and a Woman in Red, an exhibition of objects and memories at Latrobe Regional Gallery, 4 Devils, Hell and High Water, a play in six acts and an enigmatic silent film, both performed by local residents.
Hibberd was keen on Crone’s suggestion of Latrobe Regional Gallery. It’s a former cinema site and you can still see the proscenium if you know where to look, Hibberd says. “Both of us thought of it as an echo…I’m very interested in memories that have been apparently fragmented or dispersed over time; so attention to something lost brings a kind of productive memory to bear on the community.”
Hibberd has been concurrently working on an IASKA Spaced 2 project with the communities of Punmu, Kunawarritji and Parnngurr in the Western Desert and the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct Memory Project, with formerly incarcerated women (see RT121). “I’ve become more interested in being, not necessarily the author of all the work…[but] producing, I guess, provocations through the work. So that people will be able to be involved and engaged and actually be creators too.”
In the Latrobe Valley, Hibberd found that the process of ‘mining memories’ over 18 months or so brought up more than coal. “There were deeper waters there,” she says—mythologies that seemed to arise not just from shifting industrial histories, or the valley’s frequent, intense fires, but also, in Yarram itself, from regular flooding. “The history of water in the region is played out through the theatre. The building itself has pressed metal panels around the balcony of Neptune [the Roman god of water]. It’s like you walk in there and that’s the first thing you see—and I thought, water, right!”
4 Devils, Hell and High Water, a play in six acts, commissioned by NETS Victoria for The Cinemas Project curated by Bridget Crone
courtesy the artist
4 Devils, Hell and High Water, a play in six acts, commissioned by NETS Victoria for The Cinemas Project curated by Bridget Crone
The Regent began to gather a wider story than the cinematic memories which range across half a century from its first commercial screening of FW Murnau’s 4 Devils in 1930 to its last, The Woman in Red, in the 1980s. “The theatre was built by this amazing woman, Margaret Thompson…Her first theatre was called the Strand [now demolished], and, on the first occasion when I had a gathering, people came and were sitting in the Regent, and I was saying, ‘Tell me what you remember’—and people were like, ‘Oh we thought we’d come to talk about the Strand.’ Every time I tried to do this, people talked about the thing that had disappeared or been lost or taken away: it was where they wanted to deposit, in a way, their story.
“You’ve got this doubling of the thing that is apparent, and the ghost or the lost thing. We’re talking about a lost industry, a lost history, lost towns—Yallourn [home of the Strand] was completely razed when they realised there was coal underneath. So that process when people started to talk about the Strand, which was no longer there, instead of the Regent [which is], well this is a very powerful mnemonic force.”
Twin Cinema: Four Devils and a Woman in Red, Lily Hibberd installation shots, commissioned by NETS Victoria for The Cinemas Project curated by Bridget Crone
courtesy the artist
Twin Cinema: Four Devils and a Woman in Red, Lily Hibberd installation shots, commissioned by NETS Victoria for The Cinemas Project curated by Bridget Crone
The cinema, says Hibberd, has historically been a crucial social space in regional towns, “the connective tissue” that binds people together. Moving beyond the ‘individual vision’ of art-making teases out not only community memories but deeper themes and tropes—such as that of displacement—aided by the “estrangement” that such a project facilitates, prising things out of their context and viewing them from a distance.
“So the Latrobe Valley is actually a huge development of economic madness. Like ‘dig it up and move it.’ And thus people’s way of dealing with that was really interesting. I wanted to put the people I was meeting in touch with themselves, to actually say well it’s not just about art, it’s about recognising what this social activity—cultural production—is that we’re all involved in.”
Lily Hibberd, Twin Cinema: Four Devils and a Woman in Red, Latrobe Regional Gallery, Morwell, Victoria, 12 April-8 June; 4 Devils, Hell and High Water, a play in six acts, The Regent Theatre and Gippsland Regional Arts, writer Lily Hibberd, director Darren McCubbin, The Regent Theatre, Yarram, 24 April; commissioned by NETS Victoria for The Cinemas Project curated by Bridget Crone; http://www.lilyhibberd.com
The Cinemas Project also features Brook Andrew (Bendigo Art Gallery, 12 April-1 June 2014), Mikala Dwyer (Mildura Arts Centre, 8 June-24 August), Bianca Hester (Coles Carpark, Warrnambool, 4-5 July), Tom Nicholson (Sorrento, Indented Head, Geelong and at Geelong Gallery, 6-9 July); http://www.thecinemasproject.com.au/
See RT122 for an interview with Bridget Crone for more about the Cinema’s Project
“Journeys to relive your past?” was the Khan’s question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated: “Journeys to recover your future?” Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
It can sometimes seem that Australian artists are obsessed with travel, their sense of achievement and status intimately linked with international residencies and presentation opportunities. It’s hardly surprising given the general ambivalence towards the arts here, resulting in a small critical mass even when all the art scenes are added together.
But beyond the motives of CV building and presenting your work in an environment where art is respected, travel is vital for an artist (and everyone), as the immersion in difference encourages altered ways of seeing, hearing and experiencing. All that stimulation can’t help but get the creative juices flowing.
For Profiler 4, we’ve asked a selection of artists to tell us about a city that gets their creative curiosity piquing and how that place has influenced their practice or a particular project. Enjoy this vicarious vacation. Gail Priest, Online Producer
Kyoto is one Japanese city I have had little connection to, in terms of embedded time, but somehow its echo resonates. The first few times I visited were during tours in the early noughties. These visits were fleeting and the memories seemed mostly to be confused—a jumble of train stations, giant robotic crabs, transcendental food, record stores, galleries and friends not seen often enough. It was as though my mind was just engaged, I was present as someone focused on a kind of delivery into that space, more than a consumer of it. Time as it were, worked against me.
Recently though I have found myself in Kyoto twice as, well, a tourist. The timeframes were not so generous, but on both occasions I had no agenda except ‘being.’ It’s a luxury that doesn’t present itself very often. It has been in this more free flowing mode and with a casualness of time that I have managed to find what it is that makes this place so reverberant beyond the moment on contact. For me Kyoto epitomises an expression of time and this is probably one of the central themes in my work. In its Zen gardens, time is gradated; rock, water, moss, trees and their inhabitants marking out layers of time, as T?ru Takemitsu put it. Each element exuding a sense of (de)composition over timelines, these timelines weaving into increasingly complex patterns that eventually overcome and subdue the mind.
This affect is in many respects what I hope my music does. I want to trick the mind and create a rupture in time within which the listener becomes disconnected from a notion of linear or narrative time. I want the sonic elements, like those in the gardens to erode and emerge at different rates, creating a wholly consuming experience that hopefully lingers well beyond the moment in which it is first experienced. http://lawrenceenglish.com
English’s latest release, Wilderness of Mirrors, will be released July 21, http://room40.org
1) Cameron Platter, Better Together, Cape Town (graffiti also by the artist) photo Paul Gazzola; 2) Francois Knoetze, artist in OPENLab, courtesy the artist; 3) Sethembile Msezane, artist in OPENLab, courtesy the artist
Cape Town—a city on the edge of a continent where incredible beauty is juxtaposed with the harsh realities of a huge racial divide. Cape Town—home to 3.7 million where only 15% of this number is white. Recently named the best place in the world to visit by the New York Times as well as becoming the 2014 World Design Capital. Cape Town—sun, sea, nature, drugs, crime, disease. Cape Town—yeah baby!
Seventeen years have passed since I was last here as part of an artist exchange. This time was highly formative in my explorations around themes of people, place, history and site and my developing interest in the creation of works with diverse communities and cultures. Seventeen years ago I also learnt I was but a young white boy in a very black world.
So 17 years later I am again in the city and this time in preparation for OPENLab 2014. The politics of democracy and the individual, longstanding quests in this country are still high on the agenda as the transition to a more equal South Africa still seems a long way off. But these unifying themes give weight to many of the artists’ works I have seen and provides a nurturing and provocative guide to my own thoughts as I explore the social realities of an arts and curatorial practice that strives to be inclusive and relevant. www.paulgazzola.org
OPENLab, 8-27 July 2014, University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, Cape Town, alongside the Vryfees festival; www.openlab-southafrica.co.za
Live art from demolition
Keith Gallasch: Michael Dagostino, Paul Gazzola, Temporary Democracies
RealTime issue #116 Aug-Sept 2013 p32
Oh how they danced!
Virginia Baxter: Oh I Wanna Dance With Somebody
RealTime issue #112 Dec-Jan 2012 p2-3
Janie Gibson, Lenox, Massachusetts, USA
Janie Gibson (second from left), Shakespeare and Company Conservatory, Lennox, Massachusetts
Lenox is a small town in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts. I was drawn there to study the theatre practices of Shakespeare and Company who made their home in the area in 1978. I spent 6 months there last year, immersed in the company’s work through the Conservatory training program for actors and as a teacher trainee in the Month-Long intensive Workshop. I was there during the ‘Fall’ and Winter months and loved watching the leaves change colour, eating apple-cider donuts, using Laundromats and getting used to the filtered coffee.
I am an actor, education artist and theatre maker. My work is rooted in Polish ensemble theatre, Shakespearean performance and devising original pieces. Lenox is a place in which I have transformed and discovered new things about myself, my voice, my work and how I want to live in the world.
‘Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say’ is one of the closing lines of King Lear and a principle underpinning the practice of Shakespeare and Company. Through this training I found my voice as an artist and human being. I learned how to investigate and perform Shakespeare and in doing so discovered the power, joy and importance of telling these stories. I experienced the strength I have as a woman and my capacity to effect other people through my words, actions and voice.
Shakespeare and Company was founded on three pillars of training, education and performance. The company runs world-renowned actor training programs, a popular summer season of performances and an extensive program of transformative education work. I am hoping to return to Lenox in September this year to work as a director in the annual Fall Festival of Shakespeare. http://www.shakespeare.org/
<a href="http://www.linklatervoice.com"http://www.linklatervoice.com
Cat Jones, New York (between Billyburg and Beaverkill)
1) Cat Jones, Transcontinental Garden Exchange 2) From the other side, New York; 3) Ladybake 3000, Catskills; 4) Entrance to the Fragrance Garden, Brooklyn Botanic Gardens Library; 5) Intelligent Slime Mould, Genspace, New York
photos Cat Jones
1) Cat Jones, Transcontinental Garden Exchange 2) From the other side, New York; 3) Ladybake 3000, Catskills; 4) Entrance to the Fragrance Garden, Brooklyn Botanic Gardens Library; 5) Intelligent Slime Mould, Genspace, New York
In New York I can start a conversation mid-sentence addressed to no-one in particular and be sure that whoever is nearby will pick it up and carry on. I can walk the street, give directions to a stranger and end up at dinner with same, a dogma changing neuroscientist.
For me, New York is a place I can turn up in and feel like I’m home. A similar summer 11 years ago seasoned me with lifelong friend collaborators and artistic turning points. I was enamoured to see if we still feel the same way about each other. We do.
2013 was a year of cumulative cities for me, rolling in from a retro media art and feminism party reunion, Berlin; a winter retreat with plants and edible olfactions, Brussels; pounding through ideas, SXSW, Austin, Texas; spilling sensory performance and brittle papers, London; and balancing unbalance in Noosa. When I arrived in New York I carried the politics of touch from Performance Studies International 19, Stanford, packing stinging debates on methodology and mind blowing science from the Plant Signalling Conference, Vancouver along with a personal preview of Michael Marder’s Plant Thinking. Within four days of arriving I had an unexpected exhibition of my work in progress for Transcontinental Garden Exchange at point b. Simmer on high in the midsummer heat of New York for seven weeks. Season to taste.
Cat Jones will be presenting Anatomy’s Confection, On the Clitoris, Proximity Festival 2014, 22 Oct-1 Nov, Fremantle Arts Centre; http://proximityfestival.com/
Intimate transformations
Astrid Francis: Proximity Festival 2013
RealTime issue #118 Dec-Jan 2013 pg41
Teik-Kim Pok, Singapore
Teik-Kim Pok, Karaoke Massage, ArtBar, MCA
courtesy the artist
Teik-Kim Pok, Karaoke Massage, ArtBar, MCA
My foundational perspectives on identity were defined by a period of living in two cities within close chronological proximity—first London as a pre-schooler in the 1980s and then ex-colonial metropolitan outpost, Singapore, all the way through to the end of high school years in the 1990s.
Having lived in a fairly multicultural part of east London, I fitted in nicely and any attempts to make me feel like an outsider washed off like water on a duck’s back. When I got to Singapore, my early struggle to understand any Mandarin in the government-mandated ‘mother tongue’ classes for kids of Chinese heritage led to being labeled a ‘banana.’ Even though Mandarin was only one subject alongside every other subject that was delivered in English, I sought further refuge in the English-language theatre scene, aided by a prestigious boys school education. Only after leaving did I have an appreciation for the bilingual and unique bicultural perspective I’d gained, perhaps at the cost of stunted socio-political awareness.
Most of my work treads this overlapping territory in ways that cite and satirise recognisable Western pop cultural influences through a postcolonial Southeast Asian lens. The most enduring example of this is Karaoke Massage, which deals with conflating expectations of both cultures. Dressed in a lab coat, as I sing English evergreens and top 40 hits over the top of a tissue-busting backrub, I actively resist a few narratives at once—of a corporatised Asian by co-opting stereotypical health service tropes but also using hegemonic Western pop against itself.
Later this year at PACT’s Tiny Stadiums, together with Kevin Ng at the Mook Gwa Institute, I will be shedding light on the rise of the diasporic Chinese middle class property obsession over Sydney’s urban landscape.
Selected articles
Boy on the edge of obliteration
Teik Kim Pok: True West Theatre, The Violent Outburst That Drew Me To You
RealTime issue #119 Feb-March 2014 pg. 38
Ljubljana: 1) Luka Princic & Jodi Rose, Bizovik Bridge, 2007, photo by Cym; 2) Luka Princic, mixing live sound under Bizovik Bridge, 2007, photo Jodi Rose;
3) Luka Princic & Luka Dekleva listening to the Bizovik Bridge, photo Jodi Rose; 4) Jodi Rose, T.R.A.C.E.S, Ljubljana 2010, courtesy the artist
Ljubljana: 1) Luka Princic & Jodi Rose, Bizovik Bridge, 2007, photo by Cym; 2) Luka Princic, mixing live sound under Bizovik Bridge, 2007, photo Jodi Rose;
Ljubljana was high on my list when I dreamed of Europe, after seeing the documentary Predictions of Fire, about the infamous NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) art collective.
My first visit is to perform at Break 2.3 Festival “New Species,” where I collaborate with video artist Luka Dekleva. Luka arranges a rehearsal at his apartment and we spend an afternoon playing bridge sounds and video with increasingly psychedelic effects, helped by the judicious ingestion of Medica, the local honey liqueur. Creative friendships and the evolution of projects through ongoing personal connections are the reasons that Ljubljana will always hold a place in my heart. That and the Medica.
My second visit is three years later and Luka has arranged a short residency through his music and festival production company CodeEP, with technical support from Kapelica Gallery and finance from the Ministry of Culture, Slovenia. We spend Christmas Day under the Bizovik Bridge, a cable-stayed structure in a bleak wasteland on the outskirts of town. Luka D, Luka Prinčič and I amplify the bridge and hold an impromptu performance for people out walking their dogs in the snow. The bridge is on the ‘POT’ Path of Remembrance and Comradeship around the outer edges of Ljubljana, commemorating the resistance and underground Liberation Front.
Our recorded material is processed and re-invented in a live ‘expanded’ cinema performance at plush refurbished cinema, KinoDvor. In celebration, the boys take me to Metelkova, the internationally renowned “autonomous cultural zone” created on the site of the former military barracks, now home to artist studios, galleries, bars and clubs. I am initiated into the secret “dark room” bar, Jalla Jalla and introduced to Slovenian Bear’s Blood. The homemade schnapps almost kills me, yet I make it back into town for a club night at K4.
I am thrilled to meet the boys again in Linz, where they are part of the featured Slovenian Art Scene at Ars Electronic and I am cruising the Danube with the European Sound Delta. We play an impromptu gig on the ESD boat and I am tickled to find that my name is listed on the wall of the international arts scene in Slovenia. (Here the performance on SoundCloud.)
Ljubljana’s beautiful setting, nestled between a fairytale castle and the Ljubljanica river, gives the city a great deal of charm. In winter there is a magnificent display of galaxies and comets through the winding cobbled streets, the alternative to Christmas lighting designed by one of the country’s most famous painters. The romantic story of Francè Preseren, Slovenia’s national poet, is commemorated with his statue gazing across Preseren Square. I suggest a stroll along the river to find antique bookstores, experimental fashion and fabulous cake at Kavarna Zvezda,14 Wolfova ulica.
On my third, and most recent trip I am there as co-initiator and facilitator of TRACES, a cultural exchange project funded by the European Commission with partners in Belgium, Lithuania, Germany, Finland, Hungary and Slovenia. We are part of EarZoom, Sonic Arts Festival organised by IRZU Institute for Sonic Research. Opening night of the festival ends on a high note with cocktails atop the Neboti?nik Skyscraper Bar, the first ‘skyscraper’ in Ljubljana. The mix of high culture, serious philosophy and friendly conviviality makes every visit a lasting pleasure. http://jodirose.tumblr.com/http://singingbridges.net
Berlin Wall and Jon Rose, stills from a film by Konstanze Binder 1990, Rosenberg Museum Archive
courtesy the artists
Berlin Wall and Jon Rose, stills from a film by Konstanze Binder 1990, Rosenberg Museum Archive
All you need to know about how bad the former DDR (East Germany) was can be gleaned from the official records of the victors of the Cold War and writers, such as Anna Funder, who have jumped on the band wagon and weren’t even there.
I lived in West Berlin from 1985, but spent much time in East Berlin—indeed I played a number of tours in East Germany. Yes, state sponsored concerts of free improvised music in concert halls, galleries, cinemas and clubs to full houses. My final tour before the place collapsed and the population committed political suicide, consisted of 13 concerts in 12 days, two matinees, and one day off—all paid generously in advance. Of course, if I had been strumming three chords on a guitar and singing about the limitations of the East German government, I would never have gotten the gig. But as it was, “free” improvised and experimental music was considered art by the authorities and thus acknowledged an important part of state culture and community. East German musicians could travel abroad as cultural ambassadors.
My escapades back and forth over the border between West and East, clothed me in the garb of a bit character in a John Le Carré novel—alternative realities, loaded double meanings, Cartesian sign posts, the yellow haze of the smog blowing over the wall from the East and a strange twilight world of opportunities, surreal misunderstandings and dangers too, occasionally. I was once arrested for crossing the border with my 19-string cello. As the guard at Check Point Charlie pointed out to me, “That’s not a cello, a cello has only 4 strings! Do you think we are all stupid over here?”
My experiences and stories from this time could fill a book, but we live our music and culture so much in the past these days, I’ll stop right there. http://www.jonroseweb.com
Rebecca Lane (flute), Aviva Endean (clarinet), Jonathon Heilbron (bass) and Matthias Schack-Arnott (percussion), Quiver, performing David Young’s ‘Not Even Music’ in Berlin-Weissensee, 28 June 2014
courtesy the artist
Rebecca Lane (flute), Aviva Endean (clarinet), Jonathon Heilbron (bass) and Matthias Schack-Arnott (percussion), Quiver, performing David Young’s ‘Not Even Music’ in Berlin-Weissensee, 28 June 2014
Saturday 28 June 2014
7:00am Up early to go for a run, followed by morning skinny dip in the lake (Weissensee literally means ‘white lake’) that gives this district of Berlin its name.
8:07am Breakfast Skype with a Melbourne friend to debrief about shows I’ve seen this week which included a chamber opera by Sciarrino, a radical reimagining of Purcell’s The Faery Queen by Helmut Oehring and then a reconstruction of Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus invention, The Triadic Ballet. Haven’t even scratched the surface of what Berlin offers up every week.
11:12am Wander around my local village, the ‘Componisten Kiez,’ where all the streets are named after composers (Bizetstrasse, Smetanastrasse, Schoenberg Platz). Wind up in Weissensee Jewish Cemetery, ancient, ivy-covered and (according to the caretaker) bigger than the Vatican City.
2:00pm (Australian) Quiver Ensemble arrive at my apartment to rehearse “Not Even Music” a new piece I’ve just composed employing watercolour as graphic music notation. Rebecca Lane (flute), Aviva Endean (clarinet), Jonathon Heilbron (bass) and Matthias Schack-Arnott (percussion) tackle it with their usual passion, openness and virtuosity.
5:47pm People begin to arrive for the house concert. Ute, a photographer, has brought her own thermos of tea. Enrico, a dance therapist, has brought brochures for his Samba workshops. Meggie, a curator, has brought wine and a bunch of exotic weeds. Soon the kitchen is packed, the living room is rearranged, windows are flung open, cushions and rugs repurposed.
6:29pm The world premiere of “Not Even Music” lasts 42 minutes and coincides exactly with the Chile-Brazil World Cup match, so the neighbours don’t even notice the thunderous crescendi. Post-performance exuberance ensues.
9.04pm Find myself in a bar in Neuköln, half of which is in police lockdown due to a standoff between the city council and refugee squatters. Machine guns everywhere.
Interview with visual artist Pilar Mata Dupont about her video work Purgatorio, commissioned by Campbelltown Arts Centre for The List exhibition 9 August – 12 October.
There are remarkable things to see in Art+Soul 2: the intriguing creations of fascinating artists, venerable exponents of ancient practices and a younger generation of contemporary artists working in video, film, performance and installation, melding with the traditional forms and concepts of their inheritance.
The second of curator and writer Hetti Perkins’ much-anticipated Art+Soul series is about to be launched on ABC TV. Perkins travels Australia meeting artists in their homes, studios and beloved country, often with their families and communities. The sense of art as integral to life is woven through the series, profoundly entwining the everyday, the spiritual, the land and collective and personal Indigenous histories. Alongside traditional artists in remote art centres (Yolgnu man Wanyubi Marika; the people of Tjala Arts, SA) and shell artists Lola Greeno and Esme Timbery, Perkins interviews contemporary artists Jonathan Jones, Warwick Thornton, Daniel Boyd, Nicole Foreshew, Vernon Ah Kee, Christian Thompson, Brian Robinson and Julie Gough.
Perkins pulls together threads from across the continent—with its extremes of landscape and climate and sharply contrasting craft and art practices—to reveal lineages of unexpected continuity of influence (sacred tree art in a Jonathan Jones’ fluorescent light sculpture; Albert Namatajira in the works of Warwick Thornton and Daniel Boyd; traditional dyeing in the swirling cloth of Nicole Foreshew’s performative video creations). All the artists in this series make works that speak for themselves, but in conversation each is also eloquent about their feelings of connectedness with a sustaining ancient culture and the deeply disturbing history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history over the last two centuries. Perkins informally and unhurriedly draws them out, in the same way she draws us in, her voice warm, deep, intimate, her manner easy. They in turn are frank, witty and observant.
Hetti Perkins, Vernon Ah Kee, Art+Soul 2
image courtesy Hibiscus Films
Hetti Perkins, Vernon Ah Kee, Art+Soul 2
Perkins herself is more than a guide, more than a delineator of art history, she is a story-teller—the art she reveals to us is part of her own story, not as an artist but as curator, an intimate of the artists and, above all, as someone whose own life parallels theirs in shared culture and history. Episodes are framed with reference to the inspiration from her grandmother, her father—the activist Charles Perkins—and his clan country near Alice Springs, land which Perkins says sustains her.
The series is superbly made with Perkins as writer, director Steven McGregor, cinematographer Eric Murray Lui and sound recordist David Tranter. These are Indigenous filmmakers with extensive experience and considerable achievements, documented over the years in RealTime (see Indigenous Film Archive Highlight) and in Dreaming in Motion, Celebrating Indigenous Filmmakers, AFC-RealTime 2007). With a score largely made up of affecting contemporary Indigenous songs, Art+Soul 2 is engrossing viewing, another fine record of Indigenous Australian art from Perkins and an exhortation, firmly if gently stated by the activist-presenter-writer to understand art as Culture.
What did it feel like to make this series, to be nomadic and travel far and wide?
It’s a thrilling opportunity to travel around and renew old acquaintances and see friends. One of the pleasures of being a contemporary nomad of sorts is that I really love driving out bush, around places like Uluru, Arnhem Land, Aurukun is just amazing—beautiful. And those long drives are something I find quite therapeutic. But doing it in the company of someone like Mrs Porter—we see her in the series [at Warakurna Artists, WA] giving the children their paints and canvases and a little painting lesson—when you travel with someone like her, of course, the country, even though it’s beautiful and enriching, you start to understand why all these places you’re passing by, whether it’s a tree or a rock-hole or hill, have significance. I think that sense of the country being sentient and alive is very important. While obviously we can’t cover every minute of what we do in the series, I hope the sense of that comes through strongly in each episode.
It’s a fascinating range of artists—most relatively young artists but also older people with a very strong sense of craft whose creations we might be surprised to see juxtaposed with contemporary practice. But they all make sense. How did you come up with this amazing ‘cast’?
One of the things we try to do is to say that contemporary Indigenous art practice has myriad forms of expression. So Lola Greeno’s beautiful shell necklaces can be as political as a Daniel Boyd Treasure Island painting [a map of Australia detailing hundreds of original Indigenous language groupings over which the label ‘Treasure Island’ is imposed by wealth-seeking colonialism]. So I think that’s one of the probably not-so-subtle messages we’re trying to get across, that in being connected to country and being an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person, you’re inherently political or politicised and this can be expressed in ways that can often be quite subtle or more suggestive than strident.
Hetti Perkins, Warwick Thornton, Art+Soul 2
image courtesy Hibiscus Films
Hetti Perkins, Warwick Thornton, Art+Soul 2
But with a darker, underlying sense; as Warwick Thornton says, that even to breathe is a political act.
Yes, that’s right. I shouldn’t even be alive. He makes that point very clearly. And as he says, I’m an Aboriginal artist because if I’d been a plumber, I’d be an Aboriginal plumber. Having a film director now as an artist is also kind of fun.
There’s a diversity of voices in each artist. Daniel Boyd can make quite overtly political works and others like his mysterious Dark Matter images. Vernon Ah Kee makes the Tall Man video work but on the other hand those rather scary charcoal drawings, Unwritten [both works triggered by the Palm Island Riot of 2004 and its causes].
They’re quite haunting, aren’t they?
There’s a connection between Boyd’s dots against dark space and Vernon Ah Kee’s ‘faceless’ visages [in each case suggesting faces or bodies not seen by white culture].
What strikes me too as you look at the works of those artists and you see the different presence that they have—some quite subtle, others more overtly political—is the softly spoken artists themselves. I think it’s wonderful to be able to introduce them to people. There’s a lot of compassion and conviction and they’re steadfast in what they say, but I think people will be surprised at how almost self-effacing or even humble they are.
They’ll let their art speak for them and for their people but they can make strong statements.
Yes, they’re quietly persuasive and I think that’s something I’ve always admired about these artists and one of the reasons for doing this series. [It’s] not only their work but because they have the courage to make the work, to put it out there.
There’s also quite a strong emphasis on families—family photographs and archival material, including your own. You make that connection regularly so that each artist reveals a sense of lineage and place.
Yes, I think one of the reasons for doing that was to be open. It’s meant to be intimate, to get to know these people and their country and their homes. I don’t think you can do that if you’re some sort of narrator up on high. You have to meet the generosity of spirit that the artists are offering. It was felt appropriate for me to have the same sort of approach with myself as I asked of the artists.
You pack a lot into each 60-minute program, but there’s still a feeling of reflection and enquiry. You must have spent quite a bit of time making this.
Yes, quite a few weeks on the road and the inevitable post-production. You have to allow for pauses. There’s a term in poetry—I forget what it is. Caesura? I’ve always been struck by that idea. In my experience, a lot of the time, listening is as important as asking. Often if you just wait, when one of the artists stops that pause means something amazing is about to come out of their mouth. But I also think a lot of that was due to Steven McGregor, the way he directs is so inclusive and intuitive. He often will say in the edit, “We just want to give people a chance to breathe; let the art, the landscape, let it breathe.” A lot of that [sense] you’re identifying in it is very much to do with Steven’s editing.
He’s a very fine film director. He’s made his own films and for other people. Working with him must be a great advantage. Also Eric Murray Lui who’s a great cinematographer.
And David Tranter on sound—three super-experienced, super-talented and, I have to say, super-fun people to work with. And that’s really great because, like Art+Soul 1, you can just go into a community and you know you don’t have to have the cultural planning workshop sort of thing before you go in. Nobody’s going to shove a camera in anyone’s face without [permission].
When you’re talking to the women in the Yarrenyty Arltere art centre in the Larapinta Valley near Alice Springs who make soft sculptures, we see a very good stop-animation segment featuring toy figures in a story that combines traditional lore and good advice. Who made it?
That was a couple of people at the art centre. These wonderful people, the nannas and kids and cousins and dogs all get to play a role in these animations about all the stuff that happens out in the town camps—and pretty much anywhere. One of my favourite moments—we used it at the end of one of the episodes—is the little nanna and pop figures in bed. One rolls over and puts their arm over the other one. It’s such a nice touch.
It’s interesting that in your selection of artists for Art+Soul 2 you see younger artists like Warwick Thornton, Daniel Boyd, Christian Thompson and Nicole Foreshew who engage with new technologies, video, installation and performance as clearly sustaining tradition, if in different ways. Are you attracted in particular to these artists?
I’m lucky, because I’m old enough so I’ve been able to work with a lot of these artists in one form or another over the years, which makes it even harder to narrow down who will participate in the series. Often it’s a matter of availability and who’s around that comes into it. But the artists you mentioned, they’re reasonably young and I love the way they’re picking up that mantle, whether it’s Rover Thomas, Emily Kngwarreye…the pioneers. Daniel Boyd talks about Albert Namatjira. They feel they’re very much part of that artistic tradition. They maintain their heritage but [have] their own individual form of contemporary expression…that’s really what Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture is about. It’s about this endlessly adapting, evolving, changing cultural sphere. That’s one of the most exciting things about it.
The series says that art is very important. You say it’s a beacon and that it promotes understanding. Warwick Thornton says it’s very ‘healing.’ You say at one point it’s about finding a way home. For Aboriginal people seeing this art and this series must be a much more profound experience than for the non-indigenous viewer.
We all have common experiences—home and family, place and a sense of belonging are things we all share. My people are no different. We feel the same way. It’s about trying to find touchstones, those things we all identify with, we all crave and need. Indigenous people have been denied those basic human rights. For them and for people like myself who aren’t artists, I similarly can take comfort or guidance or inspiration from the work of our artists. That’s why I pay so much respect to them, because they do have this incredible responsibility that they happily take on their shoulders. They choose to make these works that are inspirational. It’s very important work and it’s no easy task.
Art+Soul 2, writer, presenter Hetti Perkins, director Steven McGregor, cinematographer Eric Murray Lui, producers Bridget Ikin, Jo-anne McGowan, Hibiscus Films; screening July 8, 15, 22, ABC 1
Mickrophonie I, Transducer, Speak Percussion, THNMF2013
photo Brad Serls
Mickrophonie I, Transducer, Speak Percussion, THNMF2013
Audiences for New Music cannot be taken for granted in Australia; you have to make them. The success of Speak Percussion can perhaps be explained by their ability to connect with their music, audiences, collaborators and with composers of different generations. Combining physical spectacle with challenging music, they have proven that, if presented with conviction, new audiences can be drawn to the thorniest of concert programs.
The ensemble has appeared in RealTime magazine for some 12 years, often in innovative collaborations with other musicians, visual artists and scientists. As founding member and artistic director Eugene Ughetti explains to Gail Priest in a video interview for RealTime that the group functions today as a collective, facilitating percussion events rather than a band of regular members (though there is evidently a core group of performers including Ughetti, Matthias Schack-Arnott and Leah Scholes). A 2008 collaboration with sound designer Myles Mumford and installation artist Elaine Miles saw the ensemble crawling among 1400 handmade glass objects in the atrium of the National Gallery of Victoria (RT83). In 2011 Speak collaborated with engineers to develop a program addressing the difficulties cochlear implant wearers experience in distinguishing different pitches and timbres (RT102).
From Keith Gallasch’s first review of “four about-to-graduate VCA musicians” in 2002 (RT49) to City Jungle (a recent collaboration with Terminal Sound System now firmly in Speak’s touring repertoire, see Partial Durations), artistic director Eugene Ughetti has often sought to bring the club to the concert hall. While Ughetti made a virtue of his years dancing to drum ’n’ bass and jungle, other current contemporary composers such as Anthony Pateras, Robin Fox and Cat Hope introduced an aesthetic derived from noise music into their works. In terms of physical movement, a greater opposition could not be imagined. Whereas drum ‘n’ bass inspires the most frenetic movement imaginable, noise music is known for the minimal physicality of its motionless laptop artists and shoe-gazing guitarists.
The combination of Speak’s physical intensity with these other composers’ captivatingly dark aesthetic has proven a winning combination in works such as Transducer (see Totally Huge New Music Festival 2013 online), a collaboration with Fox based on the physical manipulation of dozens of microphones and Anthony Pateras’ large ensemble work Flesh and Ghost at MONA FOMA in 2011 (RT102, also THNMF2011). Speak’s MONA FOMA gig was a case in point for Speak Percussion’s propensity for audience engagement. The immense program featured some four hours of large-scale works requiring multiple batteries spread around the warehouse at Prince’s Wharf. Amid the incredible din, the audience ate tempura with wasabi aioli while lounging on beanbags.
As well as championing the works of their contemporaries, Speak are constantly commissioning new works by younger composers, including James Rushford’s Whorl Would Equal Reaches, which recently had its premiere at the Tectonics contemporary music festival in Adelaide (RT120), and Macrograph, a solo percussion work by Alexander Garsden (RT119).
Speak are also dedicated to playing some of the most challenging works of, broadly speaking, complexist composers including Chris Dench, Richard Barrett and, to an extent, Liza Lim. Since the flight of the ELISION Ensemble to the greener pastures of Europe in 2009, there has been a dearth, despite the efforts of some younger ensembles, of performances of this music. Speak’s upcoming performance with Richard Barrett is therefore a welcome contribution to Australian musical life. At RMIT’s SIAL sound studios Speak Percussion will be joined by Barrett himself on electronics to present a concert entirely dedicated to the composer’s works. Matthew Lorenzon
Prominent choreographer Paul Selwyn Norton, the new Director of STRUT—now refurbished as The National Choreographic Centre of Western Australia—reveals his program for 2014 and into the future, building on his international connections
Deborah Ely, CEO of Bundanon, outlines her vision for the former Arthur Boyd estate which offers artists creative inspiration while she and her staff work closely with local communities and agencies to benefit the region with distinctive workshops and very special events that draw on the local environment and Aboriginal heritage.
Gail Priest ventures to Muttama in regional NSW for The Wired Lab’s Wired Open Day to experience projects by artists, ham radio operators and the Harmonic Overtone Community Choir.
Keith Gallasch applauds ‘We’re People Who Do Shows,’ Back to Back Theatre, a very special new book which combines informal history, interviews, scripts, academic essays, personal statements, excellent photographs and fine design. It’s a tribute to a great company, an excellent resource for audiences and students and the kind of book that is all too rare in its documentation of Australian performance.
We’re exhilarated. We’re dispirited. Here we are celebrating 20 years of RealTime’s support for adventurous Australian art. “Exhilarated” at the thought of artists’ prodigious output, ceaseless inventiveness, resourcefulness and increasing connectedness across the nation. “Dispirited” because the previous Labor Government’s promised increase of mostly new cultural funding, $263m over four years, will not be realised by the new Coalition Government.
Instead, current funding levels for the Australia Council, Screen Australia, ABC and SBS will be radically cut. Worse, the hard-fought Creative Australia National Cultural Policy, the first new vision for the arts in 20 years, will doubtless be disappeared from public view. Worst of all, the independent artists who have been the principal subjects of our coverage will be the most disadvantaged by the cuts—the budget papers dictate that only forward-committed grants (eg for triennially-funded organisations) be maintained (see p15), guaranteeing that artists join the poor, the Indigenous, people with disabilities, the un-well, single parents, the unemployed and many others as the targets of Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s cold-blooded ideological assault. His nostalgia for Knights and Dames, his implementation of Sovereign Borders (headed by a General), his commitment to John Howard’s Intervention (realised first by the Army) and his passion to have “a hands-on, practical, grassroots environmental action” Green Army ($525m) of the unemployed fill out a self-portrait of Abbott as the great Culture Warrior.
One thing of which we are absolutely certain from 20 years of observation, and something we ourselves experienced making performance and creating the magazine, is that culture is not created top-down. Yes, artists are patronised, rewarded, funded and appropriated by those in power, but they make new art, new forms and new ideas that regenerate and challenge the status quo, mostly quietly, sometimes loudly. Without them, major arts organisations stagnate. Look no further than the last decade in which artists from small theatre ensembles and contemporary performance groups around Australia have worked their way into major theatre programs abetted by a few artistic directors who recognised real creativity or aided more recently by those who in acts of apparent beneficence, like MTC’s NEON seasons of independent works, fanfare their belated embrace of the new. This is not to say that major organisations cannot be innovative: we certainly review works and events where we think they’re pushing at boundaries, but we know where that creativity has come from.
For over two decades we have witnessed the emergence into prominence of many young artists who often received their first media attention on the pages of RealTime. But the path to success has not been easy: grants are often smaller than they were in the 1980s and 90s and certainly worth less in real terms. For example, with rising venue and production costs performance seasons for small companies have become almost ridiculously short providing few opportunities for works to mature. Advertising costs have soared if compensated for somewhat by the rise of social media, and not a few artists have turned to rapidly multiplying, intensely competitive crowd-funding schemes. On the other hand, development programs and co-productions with arts centres and touring possibilities are greater than ever before.
As artists poured out of the tertiary education sector annually in their thousands, the Labor Government channelled many millions into small Artstart grants, up to $10,000 each for university or TAFE graduate artists. But where were they to go once they’d benefited from travelling, researching, forming partnerships and creating an ‘arts business’? Apply for diminishing funding? Fight for space in inadequate arts infrastructure? At least the shortage of arts funding was acknowledged by Labor Arts Minister Simon Crean in 2013 promising new cultural funding of $263m over four years including $75m to the Australia Council.
There have been valuable infrastructure developments across the decade: for example the Mobile States touring program operated by Performing Lines for a consortium of enlightened arts centres and organisations. There’s the MAPS program developed between the states and the Australia Council for arts agencies to work with small groups of artists and companies to facilitate touring and to relieve management pressures. The Australia Council funded emerging producers for several years. On the international front, the linking of Australia with IETM, a European organisation committed to the exchange of ideas and the sharing of visions rather than simply marketing works, has been developing steadily over recent years, culminating in the Asian Satellite meeting recently in Sydney and Melbourne with attendees from across the country and overseas. In line with these developments, something we have noted is a greater entrepreneurial spirit in young artists, doubtless born of necessity but also putting to good use the networks they have built or which are offered them. We marvel at their survival and successes.
State government cultural policies and budgets are large determiners of the state of the arts in Australia (they provide at least 60% of all funding). The horrendous slashing of the arts budget in Queensland, cutting adrift youth arts organisations and MAAP (Media Art Australia Pacific) among others creates a nasty precedent for other states to follow suit, especially now that the Prime Minister has made clear his intentions. We suspect however that most states have learnt that their own voters are not inclined to see the arts punished. We live in hope.
From contemporary performance to live art
Hybridity, the impetus for our creation of RealTime, is evident these days across the arts from mainstream to marginal. Dominant artforms remain intact but are no longer the same having more or less effectively absorbed other forms, new technologies, engaged more directly with live audiences as active participants, expanded their scope for collaboration and responded in myriad creative ways to their habitats.
Successful intercultural collaborations between white and black artists in theatre and performance have created some fascinating hybrids—too many to mention—in which conventional formulae are discarded. (Equally, as revealed in our RealBlak edition in October 2012, Indigenous artists wish to create and write about works in the performing arts that are their own, not subject to appropriation and respectful of their cultural protocols.)
In the 2000s European and UK arts festival directors like Maria Magdalena Schwaegermann (formerly of the Hebbel Theatre and Zürcher Theater Spektakel) and Helen Cole (In Between Time, Bristol) were some of the first to fully recognise the unique capacity of Australian artists to cross artform borders in ways only slowly acknowledged here and often resisted in Europe. Where are we now that contemporary performance (version 1.0, My Darling Patricia, post, Branch Nebula and others) and independent theatre (The Hayloft Project, Black Lung et al) have found increasing mainstream attention? Contemporary Performance continues to be a force with new companies emerging and doing things in new ways. But a significant change is embodied in the slow but sure rise of live art in Australia.
Our RealTime residency at In Between Time in 2006 alerted us to just how extensive the development of Live Art was in the UK. We had known about it through LADA (Live Art Development Agency, London), Glasgow’s National Review of Live Art and New Moves International; Brisbane Powerhouse Artistic Director Zane Trow’s 2002 National Review of Live Art event in partnership with New Moves International; and The National Review of Live Art, Midland, Perth, 2005. These early efforts to engender the form in Australia simmered away until various artists began to come together through a range of events. We came home from Bristol forecasting live art’s emergence in Australia. It was often low budget (invaluable with ever shrinking funding) and highly portable, a wild mix of forms and a DIY mentality and opening performance to all kinds of practitioners—artists or not.
We were about to witness a new wave of hybrid practices and inventiveness. Enlightened Australian arts centres and organisations saw live art coming and ran with it. Stephen Richardson at Melbourne’s Arts House programmed it (with visiting UK artists) and made it part of Culture Lab. At Performance Space, Fiona Winning produced the Liveworks festival. Daniel Brine, a former staffer at LADA, followed her as director and pushed it further, encouraging site work. Jeff Khan’s two Next Wave Festivals demonstrated a multitude of the form’s unpredictable possibilities. Jude Anderson’s PUNCTUM in Bendigo, The Castlemaine Festival and the Regional Arts National Conference Kumuwuki/Big Wave, in Goolwa (SA) in 2012 all revealed that live art was not the exclusive province of urban artists. Exist-ence in Brisbane and other cities brought together performance art and live art while in Sydney PACT’s Tiny Stadiums and Underbelly increased live art’s visibility. Performance Space has taken it outdoors in Micro-Parks, Emily Sexton’s Next Wave embraces live art, and Perth’s PROXIMITY Festival is a feast of one-on-one live art engagement. The high point has come with Angharad Wynne Jones at Arts House instigating a biennial Festival of Live Art (FOLA).
Just how far live art will reach in terms of sustainability and influence is hard to predict. It has infinitely less box office earning capacity than contemporary performance which for the most part has hybridized the theatrical experience. It certainly has the potential to be widely experienced and to provide creative models for a new generation of artists and not just those from the performing arts. There are physical games where the artist does not appear, but simply provides instructions. The audience is increasingly becoming direct participant, collaborator, maker and performer, indeed the subject of many works where their senses, perception and judgment are tested. The sensory and physical dimensions of these experiences provide a welcome antidote to the principally visual world of the screen—something that the most innovative of digital artists likewise challenge.
The RealTime team, 2014: standing, Virginia Baxter, Gail Priest, Keith Gallasch, seated Katerina Sakkas, Felicity Clark
photos Heidrun Löhr
The RealTime team, 2014: standing, Virginia Baxter, Gail Priest, Keith Gallasch, seated Katerina Sakkas, Felicity Clark
What about us?
RealTime has grown substantially in its second decade, rolling another 60 bi-monthly editions off the presses and mining our considerable cultural capital to produce additional print publications and freely accessible online archives rich in the history of two decades of innovative practices. We produce more and more content with the same two full-time staff and three part-timers across the decade. Madness. But all of us are artists, quite un-alienated from our labours in art, writing, editing and producing RealTime. Constantly engaging with art that plays with perception, intensifies sensation and sidetracks judgment makes it all worthwhile. As do invitations to arts festivals to conduct writing workshops around the country and overseas from Bristol to Vancouver to Jakarta to Darwin (see p16).
It’s been our great pleasure to witness the growth of inner city, suburban and regional arts centres with their often inspiring programs, supporting and cutting across artform practices. Regional artists can no longer be regarded as the poor relations of city practitioners, as our coverage of the Riverina continues to reveal. We’re inspired by the creations of artists with disabilities. We admire those artists who are turning their media art-science works into interactive tools for palliative care and pain relief. We are impressed by artworkers like Kim Machan in her continued efforts to keep Australian media arts in the loop in Asia. We are excited by the growth of national touring and networking, barely evident a decade ago, allowing us to see more works once at a great distance from us—except on the pages of RealTime. We pay tribute to ADT, Lucy Guerin Inc, Circa and many others who represent the inventiveness of our culture overseas.
We worry about diminishing studio hours for artist students in our universities and the threat to their careers by a new government so wary of art. We lament the limited engagement in the arts between Australia and Asia. Much goes on, often quietly as with Asialink and 4a, or in the shape of the Asia Pacific Triennial and the Adelaide Festival Centre’s OzAsia (defunded in the Abbott-Hockey budget) and a variety of funded programs and in the ongoing work of Rosemary Hinde. But for the greater public, Asian art is still something you might encounter in an art gallery or occasionally in an arts festival.
Doubtless we’re in for tough times, but artists will fight to keep our heads above the rising sea levels denied by the Abbott Government.
Our thanks go above all to Gail Priest, our Online Producer and, for many years, Associate Editor, a great collaborator and friend. Thanks too to Felicity Clark, our administrative assistant, Katerina Sakkas in advertising sales, previous online producers Josephine Skinner and Caroline Wake, assistant editors across the decade Michelle Moo and Mireille Juchau, and Graeme Smith who created the first design for RealTime and continues to re-invent our look.
Particular thanks go to our Board of Management: Tony MacGregor, John Davis, Julie Robb, Philippa McGuiness and Urszula Dawkins and former member David Young. We always look forward to our meetings with them and appreciate their encouragement, not least in these challenging times for publishing. Special thanks to our many wonderful writers across Australia (some have been with us 20 years, some this edition), advertising clients, the Australia Council, Arts NSW, our sponsor, Vertel, and above all our readers.
For the next 20 years, whatever it takes! Keith and Virginia
RealTime has its origins in discussions around a dining table in inner city Sydney in the early 1990s. These were long conversations (often well lubricated with a bottle of red) about the need for the performance community to develop a forum where work could be properly documented, connections made, lineages understood and the achievements of artists acknowledged through supportive and informed criticism.
There were a lot of people involved in those early conversations, many of whom remain close to the magazine, as writers and supporters. But RealTime is above all the realisation of the vision of two extraordinary people, the owners of that dining table. Twenty years ago Virginia Baxter and Keith Gallasch were acknowledged by their peers as intellectual and creative leaders in the world of contemporary performance. Twenty years down the track RealTime is a well oiled machine, and it’s hard to imagine the intellectual and physical energy, the courage and the commitment it took for two artists best known as writers and performers of ambiguously autobiographical ‘real’ stories to reinvent themselves as publishers and editors, responsible not just for filling the magazine with words and pictures, but also for selling ads and chivvying late running writers, and the myriad tasks that go to getting out a regular magazine on a shoestring budget with a small team. Twenty years down the track Keith and Virginia—along with Gail Priest, also an artist and editor who joined the core RT team in 1998—remain at the helm, seemingly indefatigable.
To Keith, Virginia and Gail, the contemporary performance (theatre, dance, live art, music theatre, physical theatre) and media arts communities in Australia owe an enormous debt.
On behalf of the Board of Open City, I want to acknowledge the generosity, commitment, imagination and hard work of these three wonderful individuals without whom…. Thank you.
Tony MacGregor, Chair
Open City Inc, Publisher of RealTime, Board of Management: Tony MacGregor, John Davis, Julie Robb, Philippa McGuiness and Urszula Dawkins
The early years of RealTime now seem like a distant dream, a fuzzy recollection of a fury of creation, learning on the job, reaching out across the country to engage writers and distributors, connecting with artists, knocking out grant applications, labelling bundles and loading trucks, covered in ink, wracked with endless financial trepidation, exhilarated every time an edition rolled off the presses and partying every time (we’re no longer up to that). Final layout happened variously in an old flourmill in Newtown (now home to the Omeo Dance Studio), graphic design studios in Surry Hills and, for years, the crowded city office of Art Almanac with artist Paul Saint patiently at the computer through the long nights.
Home work
Our home was our editorial office for several years. A remarkable team would gather in the kitchen on a Saturday every two months to edit a new edition: John Potts, Annemarie Jonson, Jacqueline Millner, Catharine Lumby, Gregory Harvey, Linda Wallace and Michael Smith, with contributions from Colin Hood (a dab hand at droll headlines) and Richard Harris. Our first assistant editor (thanks to the enlightened Jobstart scheme) was David Varga. Judy Annear was our first manager, followed by Susan Charlton and then Lynne Mitchell. When RealTime became full-time we divvied up the management among ourselves. Gail Priest, an integral member of the RealTime triumvirate, started out proof-reading for us and moved into layout and design and advertising sales and web management! Having our own office and computers in the city made everything a lot easier. David Varga moved on, replaced by Kirsten Krauth who also took over and developed OnScreen from the pioneering work done by Annemarie Jonson and Alessio Cavallaro. Novelist Mireille Juchau followed Kirsten who went to work for the AFC. Before Gail, the hard yards of advertising sales had been valiantly run over the years by Michelle Telfer-Smith, Sally Thompson and then Sari Jarvenpää. Nowadays Gail and Virginia make an affable sales team.
Consultative editorial teams were set up in all states and some members have been with us for many years: Sarah Miller, Chris Reid, Josephine Wilson, Darren Tofts, Richard Murphet, Philippa Rothfield, Anna Dzenis, Diana Klaosen, Eleanor Brickhill, Linda Marie Walker, Barbara Bolt and Erin Brannigan. Others have come and gone, too many to name here, and, like the current contributing editors, have all been invaluable.
The RealTime team, 2004: Keith Gallasch, Dan Edwards, Gail Priest, Virginia Baxter
photo Heidrun Löhr
The RealTime team, 2004: Keith Gallasch, Dan Edwards, Gail Priest, Virginia Baxter
Motivation
In 1993 we were lamenting the diminishing coverage of the arts in the mass media and, specifically, the lack of engagement with performance, hybrid practices and what we then called techno-arts. It was the absence of a national perspective that irked us in particular. We watched performing arts and then film magazines struggle and collapse over the years. We wanted to know what was happening across Australia, what was innovative and who was making this work. The Performing Arts Board of the Australia Council was offering seeding grants for arts magazines, we got one and away we went. A trial edition in February 1994 was followed by an unbroken string of bi-monthly RealTimes from August that year, once funding was secured. We had argued in our grant application that we wanted to produce a magazine that looked across the arts because we thought that was the only way to survive and, more importantly, that reflected growing cross-artform practice. We were right on both counts. We encouraged readers to look for innovation and to go beyond their particular artform interests. We provided a broader context for artists’ work and the writing about it. At any time almost half of RealTime’s writers are practising artists.
The Big Picture
Over the years we critiqued reports by Gonski (bad news for screen culture) and Mansfield (worse for the ABC), tore into Creative Nation and the restructuring of the Australia Council (quite a stoush), screamed arts murder in the wake of the Howard election (see the cover for RT14), and looked at the cultural ramifications of Mabo and Wik. We’ve addressed issues of censorship, globalisation and Free Trade and countless funding issues. We’ve monitored the growth of the international marketing of the Australian arts, the changing nature of arts festivals, the rise of the improvisation movement, issues and successes in the arts and disability field, and surveyed Aboriginal film and new media. Through Philip Brophy’s inspirational Cinesonic column we all learned to listen to films while Hunter Cordaiy’s Writestuff put us in touch with the complex screenwriting side of our film industry. Kirsten Krauth edited WriteSites, an important record of the literary aspect of new media art. We’ve also surveyed the integration of digital media in performance and dance and extensively reviewed new media artworks and the festivals and conferences that constellate around them here and overseas. Experimental, contemporary classical and improvisational music have always had a place in RealTime. As has sound art, right from the beginning, with a number of the editorial team and some of our key writers in the 90s committed to the field, sometimes as creators for the ABC’s The Listening Room. Associate Editor Gail Priest has maintained our commitment to sound culture with its growing number of young adherents. Recently we’ve addressed the burgeoning video art scene and Mireille Juchau has focused our attention on photography’s return to centrestage.
The RealTime team, 1999: Keith Gallasch, Gail Priest, Kirsten Krauth, Virginia Baxter
photo Sandy Edwards
The RealTime team, 1999: Keith Gallasch, Gail Priest, Kirsten Krauth, Virginia Baxter
Diversification
The years of knowledge and data that RealTime had accrued in its files and in the hearts and minds of its editors and writers allowed us to expand our publishing.
We’re particularly proud of editing and producing the In Repertoire series for the Australia Council in collaboration with designer Peter Thorn. These books on contemporary performance, dance, new media, music theatre, performance for young people and Indigenous art are a logical extension of RealTime’s commitment to promoting the work of hundreds of Australian artists, the majority of them innovators and working solo or in small companies. The praise from overseas producers and presenters for the series and the gratitude of artists has been a great reward as has the satisfaction in being a partner with AMD in its vital work. Nor is it just a matter of marketing Australian work to the world: exchange is critical. We have been impressed by the international collaborations initiated by the likes of Elision, Aphids and the PICA-Performance Space Breathing Space program with Bristol’s Arnolfini contemporary art space.
There are never enough festivals and reporting them on the ground, in print and online is a RealTime pleasure, another way to diversify our presence and to meet the artists we write about. We’ve had writing teams at the 1996, 1998 and 2000 Adelaide Festivals, LIFT 97 (London International Festival of Theatre), Asia Pacific Triennial 3-MAAP99, the 2001 and 2003 Queensland Biennial Festivals of Music and Next Wave 2002. This year we’ll also be at BEAP (Biennial of Electronic Art, Perth). We also welcome individual festival reports which come in regularly from Australian artists on their travels.
Bad Signs
The odds have been against artists over the decade. Arts funding has remained static or decreased in frequency for many artists. The positive outcome of the Myer Report is essentially a catch-up for visual artists. Federal government initiative funding for the youth and regional arts has been small scale and held out at election time. Censorship has been on the increase. The threat of Free Trade looms. The film industry struggles on with limited funding and little room for experimentation or vision. Sessional teaching by artists in universities has severely diminished. The commissioning of artists by the ABC has seriously declined across the decade. The managerial model increasingly dominates art at the expense of vision.
Certainly there has been acknowledgment of problems, with funding bodies seeking increased funding and commissioning reports. The Small to Medium Sector Report and Resourcing Dance: An Analysis of the Subsidised Australian Dance Sector, however, proved to be impoverished documents. The recent Theatre Board Report on triennially funded companies, on the other hand, focuses on one strand of organisational practice, clearly defines its problems, proposes what needs to be done and puts a price on it.
However, and this is one of the great ironies, Australian artists have still managed to create an embarrassment of riches, gathering increasing international accolades. This proliferation of art and its successes has so far let governments off the funding hook, but how long before the supply side cannot meet the demand because it is so diminished and so tired? Over the decade, we’ve also sadly watched many talented artists leave the field—quite unnatural attrition.
Good Signs
On the positive side, while federal arts funding in real terms has declined dramatically, state governments over the decade have steadily invested more in cultural funding—though not always reliably—as in South Australia’s funding redistributions and the travails of Melbourne’s ACMI. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s collaborations with the Australia Council have improved opportunities for the international marketing of Australian arts. Australia’s international arts festivals have featured more Australian work since the Kosky and Archer Adelaide Festivals of the 90s. Idiosyncratic festivals like Next Wave, Artrage, This is not art, Noise and others consistently nurture young talent. 10 Days on the Island and The Queensland Festival of Music (with its wonderful regional commissioning model) have shown how festivals don’t have to be city-centred. They are mirrored by the growing arts strength of Darwin and centres like Launceston, Mildura, Cairns, Newcastle, Lismore and others from which our arts future is emerging. The advent of Artshub, the Quarterly Essay and the forthcoming arts equivalent, Platform Papers, from Currency House provide us with a growing opportunity to build a picture of Australian culture that we can discuss and debate.
The New
In 1994 and again in 1999 we reported the suspicion with which hybrid and new media arts were greeted in certain quarters, not a little because limited existing funding had to be shared with new forms. Much has changed since, in attitude if not funding. Australian works are consistently acclaimed in Europe and elsewhere for their multimedia and cross-cultural innovations. New media might not be that ‘new’ any more but what is remarkable is the constant inventiveness and relative ease with which Australian artists explore the relationship between the physical and the virtual, the potentials of interactivity and computer gaming, and the art-science nexus. It is an increasingly rich site for new ideas and tough-minded social critique and it is happening across all art fields, much of it documented in our pages over the decade. Dance, for all its financial difficulties, has excited with its commitment to new media explorations and a burgeoning dance screen culture. In film the assuredness of Aboriginal film directors (and actors and cinematographers) reveals not only great talent but the success of its nurturing through carefully tailored training and funding schemes, let alone a strong sense of community. And across the board there has been, in the last few years, a real intensification of political and ethical concern evident in the arts, finding its way quickly into theatres and galleries and, through documentary (but rarely feature) films, onto screens.
Virginia Baxter, Keith Gallasch, Managing Editors, RealTime 61 June-July 2004
Our RealTime 14 cover anticipated the worst from then Prime Minister John Howard’s Liberal-National Coalition Government Budget of August 1996. It was a shocker, from the closure of the Commonwealth Dental Program (resulting in a consequent decline in the nation’s dental health) to a cut of $470 million from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) budget, forcing it to close community, cultural ($40m) and youth support programs as well as women’s centres.
Ultimately the Howard Government’s treatment of the arts wasn’t as destructive as anticipated, but for most artists funding levels remained stagnant. The Government was censorious and an Arts Minister side-stepped the Australia Council’s peer assessment requirements to directly fund the Melba Foundation at $1m per annum—this was withdrawn by the Gillard Labor Government in 2012. Worse, there was no vision for the future of the arts in Australia, not until Labor Arts Minister Simon Crean led with Creative Australia—The National Cultural Policy in 2013 with funding promises of $236m over four years including $75m to the Australia Council.
Over four years the Abbott-Hockey budget will cut $30m from the Australia Council, $25m from Screen Australia ($38m with other program losses) and $33.8m of Ministerial cultural programs. Prime Minister Tony Abbott declared, “[Arts Minister George Brandis] has very substantially protected arts funding generally—and literary funding in particular—from the stringencies of these times and in so doing has made himself deeply unpopular with all his colleagues.”
Australia Council CEO Tony Grybowsky told the ABC that this will mean “smaller and fewer” grants to individual artists and cuts to small companies, as directed in the budget [ie grants not forward-committed as in the case of triennial funding]. “[Grybowsky] was relieved that funding for the 28 major performing arts companies would be maintained” (abc.net.au). Already poor artists will now face the government’s stringent new welfare measures.
Howard was not unfavourable to the arts, but we can’t expect the same of Tony Abbott. His first budget signals a revival of the culture wars of the 90s but with a much more comprehensive agenda and much larger view of culture in which science (cuts to the CSIRO and a vengeful dismantling of environmental agencies) and the democratic right to education (the execution of a calculatedy elitist strategy) have been targeted for weakening.
The past has come back with added bite. Keith Gallasch
Since 1996, RealTime has been commissioned to run writing teams and workshops at national and international arts festivals, producing reviews online and in print.
1996 Adelaide Festival
1997 LIFT [London International Festival of Theatre]
An important new book on Australian contemporary dance, Bodies of Thought: 12 Australian Choreographers features a generation of award-winning, innovative Australian choreographers with international reputations and legacies of influence:
KATE CHAMPION, ROSALIND CRISP, TESS DE QUINCEY, RUSSELL DUMAS,
LUCY GUERIN, SUE HEALEY, HELEN HERBERTSON, GIDEON OBARZANEK, STEPHEN PAGE, GARRY STEWART, MERYL TANKARD, ROS WARBY
Focusing on a work by each artist—with an interview and an essay by a leading dance scholar—this groundbreaking book offers invaluable insights into the creation of remarkable works, at a time when Australian dance is enjoying international acclaim.
Launching in July 2014.
Published with the support of the Dance Board of the Australia Council and the University of New South Wales
As part of the preparation for the book we also created the realtimedance archive.
The most powerful horror films are underscored by reality, presenting recognisable fears and anxieties in magnified and fantastic form. Writer-director Jennifer Kent’s first feature The Babadook, the newest film to arrive on the Australian horror scene, encompasses within its monstrous narrative themes of loss, the fragility of motherhood and mental illness.
Kent, who has a background in acting and short filmmaking (she also worked for Lars Von Trier on Dogville (2003) to gain directing experience), developed the project for six months at Amsterdam’s Binger Filmlab. From this point it was barely three years before the film was in production. Kent says of the film’s development, “I’d made a short film called Monster, and I wouldn’t say that this film is the extension of that but there’s certainly the seed of Babadook in Monster, this idea of what happens if we suppress our darkness and our painful and difficult experiences. I guess when I was looking for a film that I could make on a modest budget and actually get to the finish line, The Babadook just kept coming back, this idea, this woman and this little boy in a house, so it just grew from there.”
The film’s eponymous monster, while convincingly folkloric—some audience members at the film’s premiere in Sundance thought it was an Australian creature—is Kent’s invention. “I wanted it to sound like something a child could have made up, so it comes in the form of a book called Mister Babadook, which sounds reasonably innocuous, and then develops into ‘The Babadook,’ which is a far more sinister entity.”
The film focuses unflinchingly on the relationship between Essie Davis’ Amelia, who lost her husband the night their child was born, and her young son Sam (Noah Wiseman), a ‘problem’ child assailed by nightmarish fancies which get him into trouble in everyday life. It’s a scenario demanding a great deal of emotional force from its leads, something particularly challenging when one of them is a young child. Drawing upon her professional acting experience and her history as an imaginative child who would write and act in her own plays, Kent was well positioned to support the fledgling actor. She is full of praise for Wiseman’s commitment, but doesn’t understate the difficulties: “It nearly killed me to get that performance on the screen, and I say that with absolute love for him, but anyone who’s directed a six-year-old will know what I’m talking about. They’re very little beings. But the genius in that performance really lies with Noah. He had it there to begin with.”
The transformative role of Amelia requires an actor of Essie Davis’ versatility to do it justice. While Kent didn’t write the role specifically for Davis, the two have been close friends since studying acting together at NIDA. “When you’re casting a role that has this much of a range, you don’t have a pool of actresses that are actually that suitable, so it was really a boon to have her on board,” says Kent.
“She’s very grounded as a person, very strong and full of heart…if the performance became too cerebral, people would disconnect from her; she brings a warmth to a very difficult character to find empathy for, I think, and it made her very human. My job largely lay in toning Essie’s strength down and making her more fragile in the beginning part of the film; then when we got to the end I just let her rip, because she has that power. And she’s not afraid to look less than perfect on the screen; she’s an extraordinarily beautiful woman but that performance is full of all sorts of horrors, and she went there and I owe the film to her and Noah, but her performance was extraordinary.”
Davis’ performance is instrumental in making The Babadook into that rare thing: a horror film exploring a nuanced female perspective; one dealing with motherhood to boot. Kent has been “tremendously moved” by mothers—friends and strangers—who identify with Amelia. “I thought that there would be perhaps a disapproval of her actions in this film from some women, but what I realise is that all mothers feel like that at some point and they all feel not good enough, so I think it taps into what it means to be a mother. Motherhood is a big taboo, isn’t it? It’s a thing we can’t really discuss in regards to not being good at it, or not wanting to do it sometimes, or not liking your child, sometimes even wanting to kill your child on certain days…that’s why I wanted to put it into the horror genre and not just a drama, and to take it further, and it’s worked in that it helps some women connect to it.”
The film’s stylistic approach mirrors the trajectory of its characters, with Kent describing a progression from balanced camera work using wide lenses into a slightly off-kilter world which becomes increasingly Expressionist. There’s a quiet intensity characterising the film which separates it from the manic bombast of much contemporary horror. Kent was inspired by John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), which she describes as, “a very simple film, [with] a mythical quality to it. There’s no bells-and-whistles and so it gives an audience time to be genuinely terrified. A lot of, say, American studio pics are too crowded; visually, aurally we’re just assaulted and we’re not giving the audience credit for just taking things in on a very simple level.”
Homegrown horror is notoriously difficult to get funded, promoted and seen in Australia. Kent, who speaks positively about the support she received from Screen Australia, believes the fault lies with Australian exhibitors and distributors: “I feel that there is an unwarranted snobbery towards genre in general and particularly the horror genre, so although people can say, ‘Oh well, horror’s not popular in this country,’ it’s actually a fallacy, because it’s incredibly popular. It’s just that people are being forced to illegally download it in order to see it because it’s not on enough screens in our country.”
Of further concern to Kent is the Commission of Audit’s proposal to cut Screen Australia’s funding by 50% and merge it with the Australia Council, a move she believes would lead to the death of film here. “Then not only do we lose all of our independent films and most of our big films, we lose all of the talent being discovered that goes into those independent films. You look at Strictly Ballroom, you look at Chopper, you look at Snowtown—any of these kind of films have birthed some amazing directors, actors, technicians across the board, so we can’t let that happen.”
Kent’s next project is a tragedy set in Tasmania in the 1820s exploring “the true nature of violence and revenge.”
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The Babadook, writer, director Jennifer Kent, cinematography Radoslaw Ladczuk, music Jed Kurzel; opening night film Sundance 2014; Umbrella Entertainment, Australian release 22 May
I missed Sue Dodd’s video Significant Others (2012; a portrait-oriented single screen video, it’s now on her Vimeo page) at the 2012 Melbourne Art Fair. But even when I first heard about the work it felt like a smart, snippy nipple-twist, commensurate with Dodd’s established work. The concept is clear, concise and simple: a parade of animated sculpted bronze busts of Australia’s prime ministers, who each in turn mouth the name of their wife. (It concludes with Julia Gillard mouthing “Tim.”)
A performer as much as an artist, and one with a keen ear for Pop musicality, Dodd has ceaselessly trawled tabloid effects which progressively embalm icons regardless of stature or merit. Their emptied significance is intensified by her artistic appropriation of their eventuated nothingness. I feel Dodd’s point is never judgemental or neo-Maoist in its orientation: for her, pop culture is accepted as fully formed and as unquestionable as those sitting with you on public transport. Lofty leftists often presume any engagement with pop culture is somehow automatically critical within the context of art—they probably don’t use public transport much.
Like all good sharp-and-simple art, Significant Others amounts to more than the type of quips one could find on any two-bit feminist blog—written by some home-dad freelance copywriter for NPOs. The bronzed busts are all filmed onsite at Prime Minister’s Avenue at the Ballarat Botanical Gardens. That place is a ground zero for the dumb meeting between art and politics. Presented to scale and installed at actual height, the busts have the gawky effect of bringing a PM down to the level of ‘the people.’ But it’s a meeting on shaky ground: their post-war workmanlike sculpting (slightly expressionistic, but ultimately bad caricatures) ensures that far from being inspiring figures communing with their public, they now live out a life most ordinary as bad art.
ue Dodd, Significant Others, 2012
photo Sue Dodd, Anna Pappas Gallery
Sue Dodd, Significant Others, 2012
Yet this numbing normalcy generates a perverse hyperreal effect founded on their audiovisual potential: they look like what politicians sound like. Confronting their visage face-to-face evokes hearing a politician talk. And could a PM’s voice —omnipresent in the mediasphere of its life span—be any more lacking in charisma, character, impact? What with their para-schizophrenic vowel-twisting that folds in rural xenophobia, grammar-school smarminess, concerned-parent ethical sighing and cheap filibuster theatricality, the voice of any PM is a choral overload of disingenuous and wasted earnestness. Always unconvincing, you can hear their shitty speech-writers cynically mouthing lame altruisms worthy of the most banal script-writers (without exception.) Looking at these bad bronze busts is like witnessing their collective vocalisation.
Significant Others utilises base-level digital animation (vector-warping zones of the filmed footage to simulate heads tilting and rotating, eyes opening and closing, and mouths parting) to have them enunciate a single name. It brings these dumb heads to life, ordinarily. This is the people (via Dodd the artist) speaking back through the PMs, just as they attempt to speak for the people while speaking through them. The animation is as dumb as the original busts: rather than impressing one with amazing effects and realism, it apes a technical cliché that crudely animates the busts to perform a completely unimpressive feat of magic (the opposite impulse of all current phantasmagoria). No, Toto—we’re still in Ballarat; they’re still a bunch of dead or near-dead PMs; and there is nothing of interest to be born of engaging with prime ministers as if they’re important in the first place.
Well, that’s how I read it when these pathetic heads spookily call their wives’ names, gasping an unfinished sentence on their domestic deathbed, as chirpy morning birds babble in the background. For me, the power of Significant Others is the opportunity it takes not in debunking or mocking the power of politicians, but in emptying them of all power, and rendering them as mere ineffectual partners. As any gender-split 30-something BBQ will prove, wives love laughing at their husbands (despite them marrying the jerks in the first place), and the moaning automatons of Significant Others undress the male PMs as self-important schmos dressed by their wives. But this work is only superficially about politicians and gender issues. The smug mockery which the intelligentsia love so much in critical culture might be attributed to Dodd’s puppeteering of the Ballarat PM busts, but it’s the voicing of the unspoken that emboldens the work. By rendering sonic the aural utterance of an invisible power source within these people (ie ‘the wife’), Significant Others incants solitary names which—like all fatal incantations—actualises the socio-political environment within which political performances are so unconvincingly staged. Under Dodd’s audiovisual palette knife, each name uttered is like their last political breath.
For many, something like the outré nude cartoons of naked PMs in Larry Pickering’s Playmates (instigated in 1978 and ongoing annually for 18 years) is an acceptable marriage between art and politics. But if there’s anything more boring than politicians, it has to be the parasitic media/theory/comedy industries which drip from their collective colon. Just the thought of making a smart-arse crack about a politician—or worse, some investigative exposé of a politician’s ethical infractions—marks your critical wit as deserving of as many Walkley Awards as you can fit up where it hurts. Contemporary Art—perhaps wisely, perhaps snidely—avoids such obviousness. It plays a cunning game of espousing (mostly soft-leftist) neo-global politics without veering too clearly into advocacy or militancy (though sideline supporting and petition-signing exonerate many artists’ political opacity). But both tendencies—the parodic in the former, the poetic in the latter—are so clearly pre-labelled one wonders why they state anything in the first place. Conversely, Significant Others is a precisely attenuated act of name-calling: it utilises an accusatory device to highlight a form of silencing, and does so by defacing the sanctioned monumentalism of honouring the legacy of a nation’s political leaders.
Artists being political is like politicians being artistic. One can only imagine what Sunday landscapes the Ballarat busts created over their combined lifetime. Significant Others sees Dodd reversing the Pygmalion impulse—a pathology founded equally in male artists reconstructing their female muses through breathing life into clay, and in politicised artists believing that their conscionable statements achieve a reality effect purely through them opening their didactic mouths in the mediasphere. In doing so, Sue Dodd breathes politics into Sound Art by refusing to mouth the pseudo-revolutionary self-address endemic to neo/retro-modernist strains of the form. Instead, she lets the art speak for itself.
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Sue Dodd, Significant Others: Prime Ministers, http://vimeo.com/63632074. Source images were taken on location at the Prime Minister’s Avenue at the Ballarat Botanical Gardens. The exception is the bust of Julia Gillard which was created by the artist for the video.
The opening night of the 17th Revelation Perth International Film Festival is fast approaching. In recent years Rev, as it is affectionately known by its fans and audience, has become for me the most exciting and innovative film festival in the country.
Last year’s program was as challenging as ever, with a world premiere-screening of Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England, Italian prog-rock band Goblin playing their soundtrack to Dario Argento’s Suspiria live in front of a pristine new print of the movie, Shane Carruth’s almost impenetrable Upstream Color and a smorgasbord of experimental short films, documentaries and non-Pixar, non-Disney children’s films.
The festival website announces that in 2014, “We look forward to sharing our unique perspective on the world…” But what makes Rev unique? I strongly suspect that a big part of this difference lies in the person of its Program Director, Jack Sargeant. For example, Jack is responsible for at least one ‘first’ in Australian film festival programming. He tells me: “We focus on a lot of independent cinema and there’s always a handful of underground movies in there too. We have the academic conference which is now entering its third year, and that certainly marks us as different—I don’t believe any other Australian film festival does that.”
Unlike most academic film conferences, RevCon places no limits on possible topics for discussion. Last year papers ranged over Russian vampire movies, Iranian cinema, the contribution to film culture of Australian horror ‘zines and a deconstruction of the politics of The Lion King, as well as a special session run by Pozibles on crowdfunding for independent filmmakers. This year the call for papers seeks, among other topics, papers on new and emergent genres, neglected histories and alternative perspectives on any aspect of film and film theory. It is this explorative, experimental spirit that distinguishes Sargeant’s take on cinema. For him, “Cinema should seek to push people into a space in which they are unfamiliar. I don’t think art should be a predictable safety net for vacuous thinking. I enjoy the chaos of possibility.”
Sargeant has been the Program Director of Rev since 2007. There was a lot of excited talk among cinema aficionados when festival director Richard Sowada first announced that Sargeant was going to take on the role: high expectations of challenging cinema, of cinema with an edge. After all, Sargeant is the author of such cutting-edge books as Deathtripping: The Extreme Underground and Naked Lens: Beat Cinema. He has published essays on Richard Kern and Nick Zedd, pieces on J G Ballard and essays on topics ranging, he notes, from “obscure grindhouse movies through to theoretical pieces on body hair that have been published in various academic publications.” Our expectation was that Sargeant would show us films that would jolt us out of our seats, or at the very least cause our parietal lobes to vibrate at a significantly higher rate. Thankfully, these expectations have been well met. Perhaps this is because Sargeant sees his role as that of a curator rather than a program director. I asked him if this is what makes Rev different.
“I think that a program director programs films—choosing movies that reflect what’s going on in the industry and so on. But a curator has a wider conversation, it’s not just about a snapshot of the moment, but about the works and the events around the festival (whether they are talks or conference papers or whatever) and the ways these works are in conversation with each other or perhaps even with works from previous years. We eschew the red carpet culture and we really emphasise the idea of community and sharing ideas.”
This inter-media conversation at Rev is a reflection of Sargeant’s wide-ranging involvement in music, film and the visual arts, something that he has continued to pursue since settling in Australia after moving from the UK. In 2012 he co-curated a photography exhibition at Alaska Projects in Sydney with artist Linsey Gosper, with whom he is presently developing another collaborative performance/photographic work. The creative challenge of such collaborations ensures that Sargeant maintains his ‘edge’:
“As a writer…I feel that it is exceptionally liberating to think in a different medium, because it forces you to engage with practice differently, and it forces you to think differently, which is probably healthy. Over the years I’ve worked in photography and so on, but not in this way.”
He has also started writing a libretto for a ‘noise opera’ with music to be composed by Cat Hope. The libretto is “part of an ongoing process of forcing myself to think in a different manner and pushing myself in a new and challenging way. The process of writing a screenplay and libretto, and simultaneously thinking about cinema or staging, demands a visual imagination and a different application of language.”
And just to prove that too much is never enough for Sargeant, he has been developing a script for a ‘body horror’ movie, “but not like anything people have seen before.” Perhaps this should not come as a surprise; he admits, “when visiting a new town I search out medical museums and outsider art galleries before the established institutions.” Sargeant began this screenplay “to see if I could do it.” When the opportunity arose for him to pitch his horror movie to an audience, evidently “a lot of people felt it went too far. I took that as a positive sign,” he says.
With his latest book, Against Control, a collection of essays on William S Burroughs and related counterculture figures such as Brion Gysin, recently published, Sargeant clocks up more than two years of writing books, articles and essays. His curation of Revelation Perth International Film Festival reflects this intense involvement with cultural commentary and analysis and his championing of independent and underground film culture. At Rev this year we can expect challenging experiments in film such as Rodrigo Reyes’ Purgatorio and Toby Amies’ The Man Whose Mind Exploded, as well as the Adelaide-made feature, The Dead Speak Back. Let the conversation begin.
Revelation Perth International Film Festival, director Richard Sowada, program director Jack Sargeant, July 3-13
Gary Foley, Darlene Johnson, courtesy Sydney Film Festival
“I wanted to make a film, or a document, that really only presented the Aboriginal perspective on that whole issue. I wasn’t interested in the white perspective or the colonial point-of-view.” Director Darlene Johnson was talking about her documentary Stolen Generations (2000) when she made this statement, but her words could equally apply to her entire body of work.
This is Indigenous history and culture through Indigenous eyes—a celebration, a mourning, and a commemoration of self-empowerment against overwhelming odds. Her latest documentary The Redfern Story, unveiled at this year’s Sydney Film Festival, continues her project with an account of Australia’s largest urban Indigenous community and the cultural and political activism it has fostered.
One of the striking features of Sydney from the late 1960s onwards was the presence of a large Indigenous community that at its height reached 20,000. Aboriginal people, organisations and militancy, as well as an overwhelming police presence and intense poverty were all starkly displayed in Redfern, right on the city’s doorstep. It is this “impoverished community of landless refugees”—to quote one of the interviewees—that Johnson’s film commemorates. Relying on a combination of talking heads and a wealth of archival footage, The Redfern Story does a good job of tracing the rise of activism in the area.
Sydney, as the activist and actor Gary Foley reminds us, was an incredibly white town in the mid-1960s, when Aboriginal people began to drift into the city as the reserve system in rural areas was wound down. The formation of a black community in Sydney’s heart was not welcomed by police, and harassment was constant and brutal. “The beginning of my political education,” Foley recalls wryly, “was when I got a good kicking from a bunch of thug coppers in the Regent Street Police Station.” Indigenous academic Marcia Langton recalls the Regent Street cells on Redfern’s edge were known as the abattoirs : “The cells were covered with Aboriginal blood,” she tells us.
From this violence a Black Power movement arose that set about creating Indigenous organisations like the Aboriginal Legal Service in an attempt to provide a measure of protection for local people. An Aboriginal Medical Service soon followed. A little later, following a visit by actor and playwright Bob Maza to the Black Theatre in Harlem, New York, the National Black Theatre was formed. These organisations provided an incubator for many of the key figures in Indigenous cultural, political and intellectual life, from the aforementioned Langton and Foley, to cultural luminaries like Lester and Gerry Bostock and the Maza family.
Although The Redfern Story makes clear the enmeshment of culture and politics in the heady years of the 1970s, it’s the cultural activities that take centre stage here. The film opens with a skit from Basically Black, the 1973 television version of a highly politicised and satirical stage review that grew out of the Redfern community. There is also an extended discussion of the first Indigenous-written full length play, Robert Merritt’s The Cake Man, staged by the Black Theatre in 1975 and starring a young Bryan Brown alongside the Indigenous cast.
As Gary Foley says at one point, these activities and organisations transformed the world in which a generation of Aboriginal people had grown up. Those living in Redfern in the early 1970s had, after all, spent their childhoods in an Australia in which the reservation system was still in place and the White Australia Policy still very much in effect. Yet for all the sense of celebration in The Redfern Story, there is another tale behind the stunning archival footage, as the film looks back on this period from a contemporary Australia in which so much remains unchanged. Indigenous people as a whole continue to be treated as second-class citizens and poverty remains endemic. In many ways the aggressive drive for political and economic empowerment led by figures like Foley seems to have dissipated, while Redfern itself has been remade and pacified, with gentrification achieving what police brutality could not.
A more critical approach might have provided a fuller, more rounded picture about the lessons to be learnt from the Redfern experience. Why, for example, did the Indigenous organisations formed there have such a dramatic impact on the lives of individuals, while failing to improve the economic lot of the community as a whole? The archival footage also alludes to how many of the key figures in this story died before their time, including the great Charles Perkins and the charismatic actor Zac Martin, but the film itself makes no reference to this sobering fact. At 57 minutes, The Redfern Story simply feels too short to fully do justice to the rich, complex history of the area and the people who made it. Unfortunately the film’s account ends rather abruptly around 1975.
Then again, perhaps it is not yet time for more critical portraits—until a few years ago the only stories told about Redfern on our screens were hysterical reports of riots, poverty and substance abuse. The Redfern Story, like so many Indigenous documentaries of the past 25 years, looks at the other side of the coin. If it feels somewhat uncritical, it provides, as Johnson says, an unabashedly Indigenous take on a slice of Sydney’s history that for years was written in purely negative terms by Australia’s mainstream media. It’s a testament to the work of the Redfern trailblazers that filmmakers like Darlene Johnson are able to make films today in which we are, for once, spared a white perspective.
The Redfern Story, writer, director, producer Darlene Johnson, producer Sue Milliken; 2013 Sydney Film Festival, 4-15 June
Individual artists of all kinds, cross-artform collaborators, dance groups, theatre companies and orchestras: all have enjoyed the beneficence of Arthur and Yvonne Boyd’s legacy to the nation, their one-time property—1,100 hectares of bushland two and a half hours south of Sydney—on the Shoalhaven River. Artists can escape everyday pressures to concentrate solely on creation in incredibly beautiful and isolated surrounds. A composer friend once described sitting by the river that Boyd so often painted and feeling the joy of the emergence of a new composition.
The range of artists and their points of origin, from the local to the international, is astonishing and testimonials to the importance of the Bundanon experience for generating new work are uniformly inspired and deeply grateful.
Deborah Ely, the CEO of the Bundanon Trust is an artist and art historian. She was formerly the Visual Arts and Craft Program Manager for Arts NSW and has been Director of Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney, the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne, EXPERIMENTA and Watershed Media Centre in Bristol. Ely is an utterly dedicated CEO with an inspiring vision for the Trust, its relationship with the people of the Shoalhaven region and beyond and with Australian artists of the highest calibre, emerging and established, innovative and committed to hybrid art explorations.
The evolution of a vision
I spoke by phone with Ely and asked her about the evolution of her vision, which she saw as “enlarging the already significant cultural capital of the estate”—the Boyd studio, the art collection and the residency program. She says that she became aware of three key issues. “First we are 22km from the nearest town which is economically challenged. Secondly we have Arthur Boyd’s home, his studio and the collection, which is very attractive to a particular demographic and age group, but is not really a strong drawcard for young people or people with families. So we wanted to work out how to engage with different parts of the local population. Thirdly, I had noticed that the main component of cultural diversity in this region is Indigenous. These were the things that struck me and in many ways they have taken us on a very particular trajectory. We’ve done a lot to address these three things. It’s funny that where you start is often where you stay.”
r e a, MAANG, SITEWORKS 2010
photo Heidrun Löhr
r e a, MAANG, SITEWORKS 2010
Attracting the locals
Underpinning the capacity to respond to these needs “was the incredible resource of artists coming here from all over the country and all over the world doing amazing things and finding different ways of sharing them with this regional community.” Initially Bundanon staged concerts and like events—and people came—and then, “we worked with some really great creative producers who analysed what we wanted, who was out there and who we wanted to reach. We produced a mini-festival format with lots of very surprising content for local audiences, pulling together artists as diverse as Kate Miller-Heidke and Jimmy Little—who had a very deep local connection—as well as circus and hip-hop which related strongly to young people and local Koori kids. They drew people out to the properties and we made the events mostly free or really low cost. That was critical because the extent to which people in the region are unable to pay is actually quite shocking to people who live in Sydney. But they do come in large numbers.”
Arts schooling
“Secondly, we decided to build on our own unique, all practice-based, residential schools program, whereby children come from all over the country for up to a week at a time to engage with creative arts activity. We thought why don’t we have more programs for children who actually live here, and that is now huge.
“The umbrella title for the program is ‘Bundanon Local.’ It’s enormously diverse. We’re delivering poetry programs with Sydney’s The Red Room Company and Transmit—with choreographers from NAISDA [National Aboriginal Islander Skills Development Association] and didjeridu artist William Barton, who’s been working with us for several years, [performance artist and poet] Candy Royale who does performance poetry with the kids, and local musicians. We’ve got Song Company working with East Nowra, which is one of the most disadvantaged schools imaginable and with a very substantial Indigenous population.
“We’re in the fifth year of a program with the Australian Ballet, which is a kinaesthetic, not a ballet program for young Primary School children. A really significant program for us is Touched by the Earth, a year-long arts and science SITEWORKS program with five schools, starting with Indigenous cultural education with local elders and scientists looking at flora and fauna and with artists doing sonic and visual workshops.”
Ten Trenches Project, Bundanon
photo Doug Spowart
Ten Trenches Project, Bundanon
Across borders
“Choreographer Philip Channells has been developing his own work in-residence at Bundanon as well as working with a number of integrated [mixed ability] dance ensembles here for several years. When we decided to bring him into the Bundanon Local frame he was based in Adelaide [with Restless Dance]—how could he develop an ensemble at that distance? We decided to work with film, with Philip making solo and very small ensemble performances. So he’s back and forth now making that work with video artist Sam James. I watched some footage today of solo performers working with green screen made in our dance studio. They’re making intimate performances in the Shoalhaven landscape.
“We decided to penetrate the community through a range of structures—the formal education system, the prison—the Sydney Symphony Orchestra Fellows were here last week working in the maximum-security gaol, the third time they’ve worked with us—the Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation Centre in town and agencies that deal with disability and disadvantage. We can’t say to kids, “Come on out here after school and do something.” It’s just too far. A lot of people here don’t have cars or they can’t afford the petrol. So we really have to work out how to make the connection meaningful, how to share the artists who come here.
“We make no concessions [about the quality of art]. We are skilling people up physically but also intellectually about what they understand can be delivered by the arts. It’s completely in counterpoint to the expectation that it’s just about art workshops for the community.”
Artist investment
“Almost always, an artist will come here to do one thing to do with their own development, but in conversation they might suggest that there’s something they’d like to do for the locals. William Barton came to us as a performer, then as a resident and now a repeat resident. We asked him if he’d do something with the local kids. Now he flies back between international gigs to do four days with them. He’s devoted to the place. People are so generous.
“One of the most amazing examples is the Chooky Dancers [now Mala Djuki], who developed Wrong Skin here (RT99). We organised some special interaction with the local community [after which] the Chooky Dancers did a performance for 500 Indigenous kids for free at Bomaderry High School.”
Niteworks
photo Heidrun Löhr
Niteworks
SITEWORKS
“SITEWORKS is quite the opposite of an intentional local engagement: it doesn’t really matter how many people come, this is really about the depth of conversation. I draw SITEWORKS as a coil, like a mosquito coil—an intense core and more and more outer circles of participation. It emerged from a conversation between two brothers, a scientist Tim Cohen and creative producer Michael Cohen. The core remains fairly constant so there’s always a lot of continuity in the people involved. It didn’t start out as a big art and science thing. Michael and Tim asked us if we could support the scientific research on the property and if we’d allow the artists to mess around with it, and we said, “Sure.” It was fascinating because the science was around research into climate change and suggested that our property was at a real tipping point for important measurements.
“I decided we should own SITEWORKS because it was about our place and because it gave us special information that we couldn’t afford to pay for. From that initial interaction—about 70 people at the first showing—there are a lot of other scientists and artists who contribute to SITEWORKS through research and commissions. And we now have a significant partnership with the University of Wollongong across arts and science faculties. I see SITEWORKS as very porous: we might be doing something about archaeology and memory in 2015—we’ve got a lot of farmers’ diaries and Indigenous history. Last year we focused on astronomy and the night sky and it was pretty sensational—1,000 people came. This year we’re looking at biodiversity. The thematic will often come from outside: scientists in the region came to us a couple of years ago and said food security is an enormous issue, can you use SITEWORKS to talk about it?” [See RT112]
Sharing the labour
Awed by their scope, I ask Ely how she manages such comprehensive, labour-intensive programs: “We have a really amazing staff. They’re very hard won. When we recruit it’s a very slow and painful process. We have an incredible skill set both in the arts and education staff, with huge experience, and our property and housekeeping staff are really beloved by our artists and visitors.”
Thinking about the future
“We’d like to share with the world the significant work developed at Bundanon. We are building a new digital platform because we know most people won’t necessarily come here, so we have to work out a way to allow people to engage with the conversations we’re having”—and develop “thought leadership given we’re the kind of place where ideas are hatched and shared, where ideas are jumping the fence all the time—because we’ve got a strong environmental platform as well as an arts and cultural and historical one. We also have plans for more built infrastructure to support the activity and the level of interest and to create opportunities for more people to stay here.”
Go deep
Staying at Bundanon is what Ely calls a “go deep experience. It’s not just a day visit. There’s something quite unusual about the landscape. Bundanon means ‘deep gully’ in language. So it may be something in the landscape itself.
“What is genuinely happening here is that Bundanon’s become a really important engine room as a resource for and across a lot of contemporary practice. I think the industry values it. People are relying on it. Australia’s very lucky to have it.”
A cold front hit NSW on the weekend of the Wired Open Day with torrential rain and temperatures dropping to single figures. Nonetheless a large group of locals and visiting audience members were not deterred. Rugged-up in puffer jackets and gumboots we all piled onto the courtesy bus in Cootamundra for the 40-minute drive, in part navigating a precariously muddy road, to the Wired Lab in Muttama for the deeply rewarding experience of Wired Open Day 2014.
Located on the farm on which artistic director Sarah Last, her father and grandfather grew up, The Wired Lab (also home to sound artist and computer scientist David Burraston) is a space for explorations around what Last calls “landscape scale practice.” The initiating project saw the construction of long wire instruments, made in collaboration with West Australian artist Alan Lamb. While they feature as a conceptual anchor to the lab, over the six years of its existence, the focus has extended to a range of listening engagements based in nature and environment. The 2014 instalment of the Open Day, incorporating elements from Last’s (G)local Frequencies Project, was focused on communication—not only between the local and global but between species as well.
In the main tent, offering a stunning view of the surrounding hills and vales, we are welcomed to country by Wiradjuri elder Bob Glanville and his grandson Peter Beath. Divided into four groups we are then led off into the landscape, our first stop being TARC, the Temporary Amateur Radio Club. Using the Wired Lab’s preinstalled wires as a Beverage antenna (used for short and medium wave transmission), the Wagga Wagga Amateur Radio Club, a group of ham radio enthusiasts is seated in a tent ready for transmission. In pairs, we get two minutes to communicate by voice or Morse Code with either the northern or southern hemisphere. The success of the communication is rated according to its reception strength and then we map our results with strips of bright pink tape rolled out across the grassy hillock. As the afternoon progresses the pink stripes fan out, a graphical manifestation of lines of connection. The framing of the experience by Jackson Castiglione, Dario Varcirca, Zoe Scoglio and Alice Dixson with Last and Burraston, including a cosy tent displaying ham radio paraphernalia, is well conceived and allows everyone a first-hand, if all too brief, experience of the ham world.
David Burraston, Grain Silo Meditation Tones, Wired Open Day and (G)local Frequencies Project
photo Jacob Raupach
David Burraston, Grain Silo Meditation Tones, Wired Open Day and (G)local Frequencies Project
Up over a hill and down a vale is an empty grain silo in which David Burraston has installed ring modulators and microphones to create a multilayered drone that changes and grows as the day unfolds. Poking your head in the chute or tapping the outside affects the resonance of the chamber, adding new properties to the sound. We are invited to sit on hay bales around the silo and meditate on the rich tones while looking out at the landscape. It is indeed a transcendent sound, the only problem is that everyone in our group is so damned friendly that there’s constant chatter and it’s hard to really have a moment of focused listening.
Cat Jones, Evolution: A Walk [with Herbivores], Wired Open Day and (G)local Frequencies Project
photo Jacob Raupach
Cat Jones, Evolution: A Walk [with Herbivores], Wired Open Day and (G)local Frequencies Project
Cat Jones is a guest artist for this year’s event presenting two works that continue her ongoing investigation into our relationship with plants. Evolution: A Walk [with Herbivores] is made specifically for the Wired Lab site and is an audio walk through the landscape (with sound by Melissa Hunt). Audience members don a protective jumpsuit adorned with leaves from the Grey Box Gum—offering an olfactory element—and are guided on a speculative journey into the life of both herbivore and plant. Alas I do not get to experience this directly since I choose to partake of Jones’ other work, Plantarum: Empathic Limb Clinic. In this one-on-one exchange in a small glasshouse in the middle of a field, Jones awakens my sense of smell, taste (with a fortifying nip of port) and touch, stroking my hands with a velvety soft branch of wormwood found on the property. Jones expands on the metaphorical connection of physical and psychic grafts as she attempts a kind of hypnotism. It’s subtle, multi-sensory, esoteric and a great lateral addition to the program. (See RT118 for a review of this work at Perth’s Proximity Festival).
The fourth afternoon activity is located in two listening tents. One contains Joyce Hinterding’s Very Low Frequency recordings made at the King’s Tableland in the Blue Mountains. This is an example of ‘natural radio’ as described in Douglas Kahn’s recent book Earth Sound, Earth Signal (RT120). In these recordings Hinterding taps into the sound of the ionosphere as radio waves and electrical energy ping around the globe. It’s fascinating material—a deep hum overlayed by static, chirps, whips and cracks—prompting you to ponder the vastness of space and its electromagnetic energies.
The second tent holds two headphone listening stations. The first allows us to hear the Wired Lab wires in real-time. Acoustically these wires literally sing: the two different lengths set up in a V-shape generate different pitches with glorious harmonic overtones. When miked up and amplified there are more zaps and pings as we hear the wires’ vibrations and shudders on a micro-level. The second listening station plays field recordings made by Burraston and UK artist Chris Watson, of the surrounding natural habitat of the Box Gum Grassy Woodlands—a world of birds and frogs and rustling winds.
As darkness hits, we all gather in the main tent where we warm ourselves with wine and are fed hearty dhal and cake. The evening’s performances start with Burraston’s Computational Beauty of Nature IV which looks at patterns and progressions in nature and translates them into sonic material—swathes of hum with warm static taken from the wires. Burraston, with Garry Bradbury, also performs The Bovine Opera, a piece conceived with Last using field recordings of cows and calves as they are being separated. Among the mournful bellows of the animals is Bradbury’s signature industrial throbbing that gives the work drive and a dramatic arc.
The centrepiece for the evening performance is a completely acoustic affair. In the lead-up to Wired Open Day, Last organised a workshop led by Western overtone singer Dean Frenkel and Mongolian overtone singer Burku Ganburged. Ten of the workshop participants join them to present a short work with many displaying a distinct level of skill. Frenkel and Ganburged are astounding, the room buzzing with a remarkable combination of harmonics.
The connection between this activity and the wires may at first seem oblique (though Last tells me there had been an intention to channel the voices down a temporary wire instrument, the weather rendering this experimentation too difficult). The link is to be found not so much in instruments or materials as in the sound itself. The majority of sounds generated at the Wired Lab are long and glorious drones encouraging the listener to explore the shifts and subtleties inherent in sustained tones. Listening to drones trains you to listen deeply, to appreciate sound in a profound way. Within this framework, the inclusion of the overtone singers is a perfect addition, not least because it offers a direct and meaningful engagement with local community, making them an integral part of the Wired Open Day.
In a realtime tv interview Sarah Last and I discuss how brutal weather made this event all the more significant; it required a different level of commitment from the audience, a capitulation to the forces of nature, as is always the case when you live on the land. Significantly the landscape, the weather, the art and our presence became one interconnected entity. The dominant memory I take away is the warm hum of communing.
The Wired Lab, Wired Open Day 2014, artistic director, curator Sarah Last, research & technology director David Burraston; www.wiredlab.org
In the heart of Darwin in a set of lovely heritage buildings adjoining a large park is Brown’s Mart, the city’s first home for theatre and live performance. It’s a key site for the development and production of new work, providing professional support, affordable space and nurturing programs: Build Up, Shimmer and Share.
When Virginia Baxter and I were in Darwin last September, running a review-writing workshop for the NT Writers’ Centre during the Darwin Festival (territorians Fiona Carter, Nicola Fearn and Mike Bodnar now write for RealTime), we met Sean Pardy, Executive Director of Brown’s Mart Theatre, and chatted about his organisation’s connections with the city’s performance culture. I recently spoke with him in more detail about this.
Are you a Darwinian or Northern Territorian by background?
I wish I could claim that title but unfortunately no. We moved up here about five and half years ago. Previous to that I was doing theatre in Sydney, running a company called Critical Stages, which has been growing in leaps and bounds since I left—hopefully not because I left! Before that I was technical director at Darlinghurst Theatre, tour managing and stage managing, production managing and then just some quiet lighting on the side.
What drew you to Darwin?
I thought, we only live once and I wouldn’t mind seeing a different part of Australia and embracing a different community. We drove up with our car full of stuff. We had no friends, no jobs and no house to come to. We just arrived. And Darwin being the very welcoming place that it is, we soon landed on our feet. Slowly but surely I picked up a few contacts here and the industry is very supportive and easy to get to know. Eventually I found myself doing the venue managing here for about 18 months. I had a little spell as an independent artist, producer, freelance lighting designer and production manager. Then I took a job at the Darwin Council as a youth worker. At the beginning of last year I started here as Executive Director.
Brown’s Mart has been historically associated with community arts; what’s its focus and character now?
There’s been a very interesting shift in the venue and particularly the organisation in the last four to five years. It’s very much supporting professional Top End artists but the performance sector is so small up here that to truly support it we need to support all avenues of theatre creation. So not only do we run our Shimmer season of professionally produced local work, but we also run a Share program that provides affordable access to community groups or to artists who might be prepared to do a co-operative production or maybe some minority groups who are trying to get some work staged. We also support music by hosting Happy Yess, a live original music venue in the precinct and there’s Live on Fridays—free live music in the afternoon into the evening. There is a degree of crossover—an actor might also be a musician; sometimes theatre shows have a live musician [from our music programs] on stage.
Shimmer is your annual program of new work?
I would describe it as artist-driven work. Each production has a lead artist or creative producer driving that work; often it’s the writer or director but doesn’t necessarily have to be. They’re putting that work on because it’s important to them and they understand who the audience is they want to reach. Those artists then apply for funds—philanthropic or private sponsorship or government—to generate the resources to get the production on. We provide support as well. We put in some cash for those productions, some infrastructure and marketing support and guidance along the way in terms of producing the shows.
Are these co-productions?
Absolutely. We consider ourselves the presenters of the work and those creative individuals are the producers and they own the work; it’s theirs and we wouldn’t ever want to take it away from them.
What’s in the Shimmer program this year?
There are four works. The first was Jehovah’s One Table Restaurant by local writer Levin A Diatschenko, a philosophically based comedy, very funny and very well attended too. Set in a one-table restaurant, as the title suggests, it delves into the question of who we are and what we’re doing on this Earth mixed up with a love story and a philosophical take. Diatschenko’s a young up and coming writer with a background in film and literature. He’s written a few books and he’s just started to get into writing for the stage, which is great because he’s certainly a prolific writer. And paired up with the right dramaturg and directors, I think he’s got a bright future.
Next up was a co-production between Knock-em-Down and JUTE Theatre Company called Bastard Territory by Stephen Carleton [see the review, page 36].
Stephen is a Brisbane playwright. JUTE is based in Cairns and Knock-em-Down is a Darwin-based theatre company.
Yes, it’s exciting. It’s a big mix with actors from Darwin, Cairns and Brisbane; a great collaboration in that way. And it’s been really successful. Tongues are wagging. One of the characters describes the place as the “bastard territory” because everyone has an opinion on how it should be brought up but nobody sticks around long enough, which is very true. People fly in for a couple of years, get the experience and then fly out again.
The next play, The Hoist by a young writer Sarah Hope, has actually gone into rehearsal today. It won the prize for best script in the NT Literary Awards last year. Sarah’s a great young writer who has done a lot of work in remote communities, a lot of cultural development work. She’s a tutor at Corrugated Iron Youth Arts based here in Darwin. This is also a co-production, between Salt Theatre, which is Sarah’s company and Corrugated Iron and it’s going to help celebrate [the latter’s] 30th Anniversary this year.
Programming a work like this is a way to get new young artists involved and also to attract a younger audience. It’s a coming-of-age story about two boys who’ve been best mates for most of their lives, coming to the end of high school and contemplating questions like, ‘What am I going to do with the rest of my life?’
The Hill’s Hoist is such an Australian icon.
It’s in the design and part of the storyline involves climbing up on it, looking out to sea and dreaming of your future. In the script the Hoist is a character called Shirley. She doesn’t speak, I’m pleased to say.
The last of the works is a multimedia and puppetry show, The Book of Shadows. Is this another local product?
Yes. The creative brain behind The Book of Shadows [bookofshadows.org] is a Darwin-born writer, documentary maker and cross-media artist working here and in Melbourne, Tim Parrish who has paired up with an excellent local puppeteer, Conor Fox, and Stephen Mushin who has great puppeteering experience in Melbourne. In January, the artists went to Ubud in Bali to meet with masters in shadow puppetry and enjoyed a fantastic collaboration with them. What’s going to be interesting about The Book of Shadows is the combination of live performance with actors, puppets, shadow puppets and live projections. So the audience won’t always know which they’re watching. It’ll be a visual feast.
The Build-up is a seeding and development program, what kind of commitment do you make?
It’s very important because without support a lot of the ideas for works wouldn’t even get off the ground. We fund four developments a year with cash support of up to $12,000 and in-kind support valued at $6,000 per development. Again, it would be led by a key creative producer or lead artist and they’re able to source more funds if they feel they need them or if they want to have a longer development stage. It doesn’t have to end in a performative outcome, but it’s great for us if maybe the year after they might be able to propose a production.
We ran the first Build-up development last year and we’re negotiating to put that work on in 2015 and a second is toying with the idea of maybe 2015-2016. Another had an outing at the This Is Not Art Festival in Newcastle. It’s through the Build-up that we hope to grow the Shimmer seasons.
You regularly feature Indigenous works at Brown’s Mart. Are they part of these programs?
We’re very supportive of Indigenous artists. Last year we programmed three productions in which the key artists were Indigenous. One [was reacting to] the 100-year commemoration of the Cullen Compound, where local people had been kept, part of the Stolen Generations experience. We work very closely with the Darwin Entertainment Centre’s Indigenous Creative Producer Ben Graetz. Together with him we’re working on getting [well-known actress] Tessa Rose’s scripts developed and produced. We’ve also worked together with local artist Ali Mills for a similar program. And we’re trying to provide support for Lynette Hubbard to get her show, The Adventures of Namakili, further ground. It had a season here but we’d like to see Lynette touring the country with it.
Darwin is a fantastic melting pot of cultures and Indigenous people represent about a third of the population so it’s just natural that we’re big supporters of Indigenous work.
Do you have ambitions beyond what Brown’s Mart is currently achieving?
I think our programs, particularly in the last 18 months, have really started to develop. Beyond that our ambition is to have a sustainable theatre model. All the [artists and producers] flog their guts out trying to generate enough income so that everyone can be paid fairly. We’re receiving Program and Presenter funding from the Australia Council while the NT government provides the bulk of our funding. We’d like to even that up a little, increasing our federal support to provide certainty for the artists that there will be work into the future.
Raised in Africa and the West Indies and based in Amsterdam for 25 years until his recent move to Australia, Paul Selwyn Norton has danced with Amanda Miller/Pretty Ugly and William Forsythe’s Ballet Frankfurt. He set up a production company, no apology, in 2003 to support his work in the Netherlands while creating and restaging work for Ballet Frankfurt, Batsheva Dance, Galili Dance and, in Australia, Stalker Theatre and Chunky Move.
Norton was about to undertake Doctorate Studies in Dance with QUT in Brisbane when he was offered the job as Director of STRUT, The National Choreographic Centre of Western Australia, Perth. Norton’s vision is transforming STRUT into a national organization, opening membership up across the country and providing choreographers with introductions to unique methodologies and offering considerable development opportunities.
He is emphatic about his aim for STRUT in 2014: “This year is literally about bringing in benchmark training methodologies. There are a lot of performance outcomes but nothing really massive until the end of 2014 with the Mini MoveMe Improvisation Festival and then in early 2015, a co-production with Perth’s Fringeworld.” 2014 is really about coming back to our physical poetry and how we research that in our work.” With a national review of dance, Future Moves, and state government reassessment of the WA dance scene, “I thought, okay, what a great opportunity to come back to the body and not immediately produce work.” He’d also noted that there is little of the training associated with William Forsythe in Australia and nothing of Gaga [Ohad Naharin’s unique movement vocabulary which is now the daily training for the dancers at Batsheva Dance Company]. “As soon as I got this job, I phoned Ohad and Bill and said, hey, those methodologies are very pertinent, very resonant still and not practised here.”
Was it government policy decisions or your perception of the field that determined your approach?
It was a combination of three things—a paradigm shift in terms of benchmark training here in Perth, a strategic policy move and [a reflection of the fact] that I’ve worked with most of the national artists on previous visits to Australia. It was easy to get strategic leverage by bringing in two really high-end international choreographers. The Board and I thought it was a good balance between policy and artistic direction. Besides, Forsythe and Naharin will be represented by people who’ve worked with them, for instance Rachel Osborne—an Aussie girl who trained at QUT and used to work with Batsheva—has invited [another Batsheva alumni] Guy Shomroni to join her.
The Forsythe method is coming via Riley Watts and Michael Schumacher?
Yes and we’ve just signed off a deal with Christopher Roman, the Director of the Forsythe Foundation, who proposed mounting Forsythe’s One Flat Thing reproduced (2006). As we build it over the next three years, we’ll use this piece as a choreographic training model, since it has many extrapolations back to earlier Forsythe works such as Robert Scott (1986) and forward to Synchronous Object (2009, a website exploring One Flat Thing’s choreography). We’ll be doing the same with Batsheva, building pieces of repertoire into a full evening performance, exclusively on Australian dancers.
What are your plans for 2015?
In 2015 we just add another layer on top of 2014, working with a lot more locals, like Rachel Ogle, Jo Pollitt and Shona Erskine—who is doing some incredible work with Performance Psychology. Plus we’re designing a collaborative program, helping young choreographers who haven’t worked with composers before or those who’ve worked with them later in their development and would rather have developed the vernacular and understanding earlier on in their process.
Are you maintaining current programs?
Some of the current STRUT Seed Residencies that will go on to second and maybe third stage development, ready for presentation will be supported and presented in the bigger MoveMe Festival at the end of 2016. For the first time this year, a Seed Residency went to interstate artists. That was a contentious issue, but it’s about actually sharing and communicating across the states. So it is great that Gabrielle Nankivell and Luke Smiles will work with WA artists—it’s about making a beautiful, robust garden and sharing that experience.
Short Cuts has been a staple for STRUT for years and I wouldn’t want to shift that because it’s a great platform. But artists tend to use it as a launch into development and grant applications. I want to take that pressure off. So I thought let’s pull back and do Off-cuts with a smaller turnaround, more like an open-mike approach, or show part of your work and get some critical feedback, so artists don’t feel like they get one shot at that one Short Cuts program and that’s it for a whole year.
And what sort of support do they get?
It depends on what level. Say with Short Cuts, you get the performance space, production money, the door money—we don’t take anything from that—and technical support. Off-cuts is just studio time and you get the door. Prime Cuts, which is the final stage, is curated from Short Cuts and then there’s a substantial fee to produce the work in a real venue; this year we’re doing it with the WA Ballet Theatre. We are also building bridges between ballet and contemporary. Jane Smeulders, principal of the WA Ballet, was already in the first Gaga workshop.
What about the high male quotient in your 2014 program?
I’ll put it this way, Erin, Ohad and William are the two choreographers I’ve danced and created for and I needed to get some serious clout into the organisation because government was like, okay STRUT’s on standstill, Paul, you’re gonna have to pitch. So, I phoned up Bill and Ohad. I can phone them but I can’t phone say Trisha [Brown] or the Pina Bausch Foundation as I don’t know them. I phoned Stephanie Lake but she’s a very, very busy lady. I had to write a business plan in two and a half months. I just pulled what I could when I could. I talked to Nellie Benjamin who will be coming over and a lot of local female choreographers will be working with us next year. It’s something that’s happened by default. I have no preference either way. It’s got to be good work, good art, good poetry…
How do you see STRUT in terms of the changes happening in Perth?
The city is undergoing infrastructural change. The Metropolitan Redevelopment Authority (MRA), has four massive centres that it’s re-igniting and connecting so you’re going to get grungy Northbridge meets the corporate south. And all the beautiful local cafes that we have here—three of which we’re in partnership with because I really believe in community exchange—are full of tats, inks, beards and suits and power heels: a fantastic mix and that’s either our audience or potential new members.
There’s also the reactivation of the Cultural Centre where PICA, the Blue Room and the State Theatre Centre are. That’s why the Mini MoveMe Festival is centred there. STRUT is working with the MRA’s reactivation mandate to specifically enhance it. They’re ticking their boxes and we’re ticking ours. Michael Schumacher will present his Dans Le Jardin to JS Bach solos in the courtyard of the State Theatre Centre and then Pied-Piper the audience out into the Cultural Centre.
As for your own practice, you will be working with the Sydney Dance Company’s graduate year students later this year?
I was there in May. I did a two-week process and I come back in June and I think the work will be shown sometime in September. I think it’s important to continue those dialogues with your own practice and to feed it back into the sector. And dancers who are graduating there, not all of them are going to the Sydney Dance Company.
We’re saying to them, we’re a beacon and not a lighthouse. It’s not career suicide to go west. It’s actually career development, a beacon of opportunity and that’s why the Australia Council was so excited to get involved. This is something else I use when I enter the corporate conversation: ‘You’ll be investing in a national organisation and it’s in Perth.’ There are not many national arts organisations in this city, but we’ve got big dreams and the hope is that it all feeds back into the dance ecology here in WA.
The 2014 STRUT program includes Master Workshops with Byron Perry, Antony Hamilton, Improvisation Workshops with Riley Watts and Michael Schumacher and the Mini MoveMe Festival in partnership with TURA New Music, Ausdance WA, the State Theatre Centre of WA, the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, The Blue Room Theatre, FORM, Venn Gallery and Moana Project Space and featuring artists Rosalind Crisp, Ros Warby, Andrew Morrish, Peter Trottman, Jo Pollit and Paea Leach, workshops and a ‘caravan’ of works travelling on to Sydney’s Critical Path, Melbourne’s Dancehouse and Brisbane’s Judith Wright Centre (with Ausdance QLD). Nov 21-30; www.strutdance.org.au
dance for the time being – Southern Exposure (2013), an earlier iteration of Love is Blind, Dance Exchange
photo Rachel Roberts
dance for the time being – Southern Exposure (2013), an earlier iteration of Love is Blind, Dance Exchange
There is an hypnotically silky texture in the movement of Russell Dumas’ dancers. It is not the tautly muscular control we link to any contemporary dance of a certain calibre. It doesn’t really look like control at all, but as though everything falls into place naturally, and the dancers’ volition is incidental, as light as a breeze.
In his new work, Love is Blind, this exquisite smoothness is in evidence again, and remains the most captivating aspect of the work. That said, such uncanny qualities are only made possible by Dumas’ commitment to dance as enquiry in its own right, a form that can stand alone “without marriage to other forms,” as he puts it.
Love is Blind seeks to examine how hearing and vision interrelate—in the experience of the audience but also in that of the dancers, for whom movement is obviously in the equation. A Schubert song cycle is an aptly emotive choice for this, and the work’s two parts are presented in separate spaces at Dancehouse: first the open floor of the theatre, which is cast in deep shadow by the black curtains of the proscenium stage behind; then the upstairs studio, with distinctive lighting.
To begin, seven dancers run onto the bare and darkened floor, form a brief, spinning circle until the form breaks, then softly spread out in the room. The cycle of songs begins and we watch the dancers find ways into structures: radial patterns reminiscent of snowflakes or merry-go-rounds in centrifugal play. With interlocking arms their counterbalance allows for descent to the floor, and ascent with the structure intact. At one point, a small ‘circle’ of three rotates, enclosed by a circle that moves in counter-direction. There’s a formality here (acknowledged in moments of muted humour with quaint nods and bows) that might appear prim if delivered in a different way. But an almost tender quality in these moving bodies—a transparent sensitivity as they fold into and out of each other—awakens a different view. Display of external precision is clearly not the goal here. Instead, in how these bodies rely on each other there is an intrinsic order of sorts revealed: self-regulation that still gives space for individual feeling.
A succession of duos and trios unfolds through the rest of part one, with seamless lifts and gliding descents, structures that segue into other structures with ease. These take place simultaneously and obliquely on the floor, then culminate in a solo performed in double. An image of this still lingers in my mind: one male dancer alone on the floor; his doppelganger on stage behind him, obliquely, framed to one side by the black curtain, beneath a weak and distant glow of light. While their movements are identical, they slide subtly in and out of sync.
Dumas tells me after the performance that he didn’t ask his dancers to mark time by music, but assigned them bodily tasks to foil the influence of rhythm—in the case of this double solo, a breath-based score to induce an embodied sense of time. This flexing apart of sensory response is an obvious challenge for the dancers and meanwhile, for the audience, Schubert’s song offers up its melodic persuasion. “Music affects emotion, and breath, and hence the way we see,” says Dumas. So we have, side by side, separate systems of sensory stimulation.
The result is both dreamlike and strangely reassuring. Things hold together, but not in an exactly familiar way. And the not-quite-in-kilter details yield to a strangely smooth ride.
After interval we move to the studio space upstairs for part two, Dumas appearing briefly to announce this is a sketch, not a resolution. It is a playful displacement of expectation, a kind of macro-synchronisation of the show. The lighting design is no longer the oneiric penumbra of downstairs, but a sort of lantern effect: an almost stark jumble of shapes and shadows against the wall. Part two then unfolds with similar material to part one, but with the contrast of silence, and I ask myself if this really does sway my perception.
In truth, I’m not sure. On that night I was not yet privy to the particulars of Dumas’ experiment, and the unique magic of those moving bodies was quite a sensory spell, never mind the explanation. But there’s no doubt his curiosity has profound outcomes and shows what can be done by fine-tuning a lens on the simplest ingredients of performance. Through careful attention to the nature of our senses—rather than just feeding or bombarding them—a realm of exquisite sensitivity is laid bare in this work. And this feels reassuring, somehow, like a lost memory being quietly recovered.
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Love is Blind, choreographer Russell Dumas, dancers Jonathan Sinatra, David Huggins, Molly McMenamin, Eric Fon, Nicole Jenvey, Beth Lane, Esperanza Quindara, associate artist Linda Sastradipradja, Dancehouse, Melbourne, 28-30 March
Samantha Chester’s Safety in Numbers is as much about trauma as it is about hope. The dance recalled for me a fragment from Voltaire’s response to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755: “Man in the field with wounds all covered o’er, Midst heaps of dead lies weltering in his gore…Yet in this direful chaos you’d compose. A general bliss from individuals’ woes?” Voltaire questions God’s existence in his poetic proof for the problem of evil while Chester explores with physical acuity the paradoxical presence of bliss, beauty and human resilience in the aftermath of disaster.
We see and feel turbulent bodies rocking and bobbing in ones, twos and as five catapulted into a world no longer concordant with perceived balance. Among the strewn chairs and floating debris, the figures hold up their world with lengthy stillnesses—corporeal fortresses which then tilt at slight angles, splintering off their vertical axes and either falling to relocate weight or being caught in the embrace of another. Clutching, pulling, resisting, yielding, couples intimately press fear and hope in their skin-to-skin pas de deux to resuscitate each other. A contrast is felt between frenetic floor sequences that crash and roll out erupting forces and the measured, crisp folds of straightened limbs that tip and reach beyond the rubble: poised, silent, serene. Elbows carried at right angles to the body form a unique gestural language that supports hands blunted at wrists, not cleanly, but with a twisting atrophy. From intermittent trembling, arms softly wave above the head while torsos torque in individual and group collapses with a gnarled root-like quality. All movements absorb and show the shock.
Rumbling earth sounds are ripped in foley-like fashion by a deafening urban materiality, cracking and splitting through. Composer Ekrem Mülayim (see p46) sustains this sonic tension throughout, seeming to mirror our fragile inner scramble beneath a ‘sky that is falling.’ We hear the voices of actual survivors of disasters telling their stories. They sound remote, steady, but safe. Danielle Micich recites her nightly activities over and over, struggling to remember at first, then finding flow in repeated utterance. It is a reminder of how we seek stability in clinging to our everyday routines: surviving the disaster of being.
The dance smoulders in a grey-green haze. This McCubbinesque light—like one might see in a mid-Western bush setting in Southern NSW—provides an atmosphere that distorts time and place: we are everywhere and nowhere. Chester and her collaborators create an impression of catastrophe, rather than narrating an event. Movement, voice, colour and sound are finely balanced to form images that resonate in the mind days later. The final scene sees Micich exhaust a joyful, whimsical jig centre stage. She whips up the flotsam with the aid of fans which encircle her. Plastic bags undulate like jellyfish in a column of air. The image is mesmerising and we are left feeling lighter—blissful even. Trauma curls toward hope in the aftermath.
FORM Dance Projects, Dance Bites: Safety in Numbers, director, choreographer Samantha Chester, performers-makers Danielle Micich, Gavin Clark, Ryuichi Fujiruma, Anya Mckee, Simon Corfield, designer David Fleisher, sound Ekrem Mülayim, Lennox Theatre, Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, 9-12 April; http://form.org.au
Wailing fills the darkened theatre. These are the lamentations of a woman in grief. As a single spotlight cuts through the dark from left of stage our eyes make out the figure of a woman holding her dead daughter. “Oh my baby girl,” cries the mother, “Oh my baby.”
Mokuy is Gary Lang’s first major work since Goose Lagoon in 2010. ‘Mokuy’ is a Yolgnu word meaning ‘spirit.’ “Mokuy began three years ago after two young children suicided in Arnhem Land, where [Lang’s] family lives.” Initially an expression of grief, “over time the work has developed to become a dedication to all who have passed and my healing for all who feel the pain of loss. Mokuy follows the soul’s journey after death” (director’s program note).
Mokuy moves to and fro between Aboriginal and Western cultures, its music between traditional Aboriginal clapstick and singing and the uniform structures of classical strings and piano, clearly defining each chapter of the work. The choreography is a hybrid of ballet, contemporary dance and Aboriginal dance movements symbolic of animals and of daily life. I was particularly drawn to the women’s digging movements and their power as they slapped at the ground.
Initially the juxtaposition of Western and Aboriginal music was effective but as the format of moving from one to the other was repeated throughout I found myself wishing for more variation, or a contrast in musical style, something to nudge me out of the predictable rhythm I’d fallen into. Unfortunately this never arrived and I was left wondering at the sameness of each stage in this journey through the afterlife.
The dancers’ performances were strong and passionate, perhaps acknowledging the long-term commitment they have made to the development of this work. Gary Lang’s company features dancers with a diversity of cultural and dance backgrounds and this work brought together Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, Asian and Western members of the company. Catherine Young stood out as the young girl travelling from death through to the final chapter, Wonderment.
The lighting design is a highlight of Mokuy. Vanessa Hutchins has blended muted tones of purple and yellow to create an eerie world punctuated at times by brilliant white spotlight to dramatic effect. Four sharp white lights, beamed across each other from overhead, create a cathedral-like atmosphere and paint a dappled pattern on the floor, reminiscent of shadows cast by trees.
A screen flown in at the back of the stage featured projections of leaves, clouds, floating seaweed and water lapping at a sandy shore. While the images were engaging and brought the bushscapes of Arnhem Land directly to the stage, once again the repetitive format diluted their impact.
It is clear the thematic material of Mokuy has very personal significance for Lang, which his choreography shared through moments of tenderness. This is undeniably a work of grace, but I felt I was too quickly released from the challenges of death, pain and loss set up in the opening scene. Overall, Mokuy provides tantalising glimpses of an emotionally powerful work, all the while displaying the many strengths of its creative team.
Mokuy (Spirit), Gary Lang NT Dance Company, choreographer Gary Lang, performers Catherine Young, Darren Edwards, Hans Ahwang, Michele Dott, Kyle Ramboyong, Bryn Wackett; Artback NT, Arts Development & Touring; Garrmalang Festival, Darwin Entertainment Centre, 9-10 May
Next Wave is an ambitious festival—a major, well-funded biennial curatorial project which commissions and develops innovative work by young artists (notably through its Kickstart program). The final works, unveiled only at the festival, are often variable in their execution. This, I have come to realise, is legitimate. The level of risk involved in working with very inexperienced artists on extremely ambitious projects is extremely high, and it is part and parcel of the project that the whole experience can feel very hit-and-miss. As the statement of intent for 2014 said: “We support what is attempted over what is achieved.”
2014 Next Wave, however, was the most even I have yet experienced. Not only was the quality of the work high overall, but the program was presented in a very cohesive manner, thanks in no small measure to Emily Sexton’s strong curatorial steering. This was Sexton’s second Next Wave, and her customary attention to detail was visible at every step: in day tickets tailored to various audience profiles, a well-considered talk program and two excellent publications. The heart of the festival was BLAK WAVE, a festival within a festival, incorporating seven works by Aboriginal artists that in various ways questioned the place of Aboriginal art, a series of talks and its own book.
BLAK WAVE
Perhaps the most notable thing about BLAK WAVE is that it happened in the first place. Sexton’s foregrounding of Aboriginal art and artists in the context of new, emerging, urban and experimental art made a very strong statement about the place Aboriginal artists should occupy in Australian culture. Through talks and the book, BLAK WAVE also created its own critical and analytical commentary, forging a nuanced, discursive context not likely to manifest in mainstream media. The entire project was simply extraordinary in its scope, both educational and emancipatory.
The inclusion of so many Aboriginal events radically changed the feel of the festival, and, in a certain sense, our expectations of contemporary art and performance. In Melbourne, a southern city, Aboriginality is not very visible. Yet at Next Wave we were introduced to an alternative reality, in which every evening we were welcomed to country—did you know how varied is the traditional ownership of inner-city Melbourne?—with elders praising young artists and speaking about the importance of contemporary art—when is the last time you have seen an elderly Australian of stature, a non-artist, speak from the heart about the importance of contemporary art for our culture? Here a performance was first and foremost a social event, a gathering, where we were welcomed as guests, not simply as paying customers. For a little while, BLAK WAVE created an alternative Australia, an Australia that could have been, and may still come to be, in which hatred, ignorance and fear were bridged over by gestures of generosity; in which silent gaps in our history were filled with stories; and in which our own history of art expanded to connect ancient traditions and the cutting edge of the present. It offered an immense gesture of healing.
Winds of Woerr
Ghenoa Gela, an accomplished dance performer, devised Winds of Woerr to introduce a traditional Torres Strait Islander story of the four winds, whose influence shapes the climate more than the notional four seasons. It opens with a greeting, a cup of tea and the voice of Gela’s mother Annie correcting her daughter, instructing her on how to properly conduct the performance. The dance theatre piece unfolds with four performers (two Indigenous, two not) each representing a wind with a mask and a prop. They are the four sisters Kuki, Sager, Naigai and Ziai. It is impossible to critique Winds of Woerr through the prism of Anglo-European performance history because it is not yet integrated into that experience, but is here brought to life as pure cultural material, to be shared, spread and saved from extinction. The beauty of the work is primarily in the texture of its culturally specific material: a yarn from Creation Time, narrated through Islander movement, sound and costume.
White Face
Carly Sheppard’s White Face, a predominantly abstract duet between Sheppard and non-Aboriginal dancer Ryl Harris, was easier to read as a dance piece in the conceptual/formalist Anglo-European tradition. It explores the experience of a fair-skinned Aborigine—the cultural dislocation and gaps, the ungrounded sense of identity, the loss, the insecurity. Sheppard covers her face, rubs her skin with white powdered sugar, wrestles with Harris and compares their shades of fair skin side by side in a powerful gesture of uncertainty. At the height of tension, the work breaks out of solemn silence and abstraction. Sheppard becomes ‘Chase,’ and tells us how, “When I discovered I was an Abo I was bloody ropeable…But, like, I thought about it ‘n I realised that it all makes sense coz I’ve always been real spirichulle…After I found out I went straight down to Cenners to claim me cultural heritage…you know like free house, free car, free Abo money.” The extremely harsh caricature is powerfully accusing, reclaiming discursive ground without ever becoming complicit.
Jesse Hunniford, Concerto No. 3. Sarah-Jane Norman
courtesy the artist
Jesse Hunniford, Concerto No. 3. Sarah-Jane Norman
Concerto No. 3
Sarah Jane Norman’s Concerto No. 3 moved away from Aboriginal identity to address failure. Norman, formerly a prodigious pianist, sets an impossible task. Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto is considered one of the most difficult piano pieces ever written (even the performer for whom the work was originally composed refused to perform it in public). For 12 hours straight, six non-virtuosic performers (former pianists, post-prodigies) attempt to sight-read the concerto, one at a time, in a dark and solemn Melba Hall at the University of Melbourne Conservatorium of Music.
Immediately on arrival, I realised what a mistake it had been to assume I could see other shows around this performance. Next Wave 2014 is for me marked by regret at not having spent 12 hours in Melba Hall. For spectators without classical music training, this was a work of incidental sound art. But for spectators aware of the intense physical training and sports-like culture of classical music, Concerto No. 3 was like watching an extreme sport in which all our anxieties were realised: like seeing a tightrope walker endlessly fall and climb back up, or a high-jumper repeatedly dislodge the bar—and, say, break an arm. The intense focus and effort of pianists struggling through “Rach 3” put this performance on a par with some of the most involved dance improvisation pieces I have seen.
New Grand Narratives
The theme of the 2014 festival was New Grand Narratives, somewhat vaguely described as “potent visions of a new world, and the relationships within it.” Sexton accurately noted the cracking of old institutions and old ideas. However, the artists did not respond with the same political perspicacity. Indeed, the most overtly political works were not very interesting, reflecting the broader problem the new generation of young Australians has with envisaging possibilities for political engagement. The biggest offender, however, was Dutch outfit New Heroes with Club 3.0, a combination TEDx talk and Fight Club.
Club 3.0
There were four parts to Club 3.0. It opened with a list of well-known collaborative, creative, make-world-a-better-place initiatives that sit halfway between urban design and performance: Reclaim the Streets, local currency initiatives, Park(ing) Day and one very entertaining spoof. It launched into a full-blown retelling of Fight Club, culminating in an actual tournament between audience members. Amazingly, even the hipster, late-night Next Wave audience was inspired to fight amongst themselves, roused by the two performers’ passionate call for action and finding meaning. Had it all ended there, it would have been the best work of the festival. Instead, we were then encouraged to renounce literature and philosophy (this did not work well, probably because the weight of culture is lesser in Australia than in Europe) and were finally sent out into the cold, to receive a non-committal phone message about already knowing all there is to know. I have rarely seen a work rise to such powerful rousing of emotion and agency and then fall into such non-committal disappointment. Club 3.0 managed to deploy all the neo-fascism present in Fight Club, with the very neo-liberal, free-market fallacy of choice that it purported to resist.
New feminism
However, a new grand narrative did emerge at Next Wave 2014: new feminist performance. There has been an undeniable renaissance of feminist thought and activism in the last few years globally, but more so in Australia than elsewhere (probably fuelled, in part, by the horrific treatment of Julia Gillard and the murder of Jill Meagher in 2012). Combined with strategies to increase the presence of women in theatre roles, undoubtedly the most interesting work around Melbourne in the past few years has been made by women. Female performance-makers at Next Wave presented work that was not only thematically, formally and politically world-class, but exceptionally innovative, original and deeply imbued with Australian sensibility. In fact, its major innovation is that it transcends the label of ‘feminist performance.’ It is unmistakably made by women and politically progressive, but it is not overtly ‘about’ gender anymore.
Natalie Abbott, Donny Henderson-Smith, MAXIMUM
photo Sarah Walker
Natalie Abbott, Donny Henderson-Smith, MAXIMUM
MAXIMUM
Natalie Abbott’s MAXIMUM exemplifies this shift most thoroughly. It starts off as a unison dance of two bodies: Abbott’s young and dancerly and Donny Henderson-Smith’s that of a bodybuilder. There is running: circular, across corners; the performers are already visibly exhausted by the time they move onto squats, which expand into lunges, push-ups, twerking, and a whole series of other actions not found in classical ballet. MAXIMUM is conceptually extremely simple: an endurance work stretching two dissimilar bodies to their limits. Halfway through the 60 minutes, the audience is already uncomfortable. In the last section Henderson-Smith lifts Abbott, who assumes the dignified, supplicant pose of a Greek statue; yet both of them keep falling. It is almost unbearable to watch. (The person sitting next to me started shaking uncontrollably.) However, the concept is executed so thoroughly that its meaning comes from a formalist contemplation of how the material (body) is reacting to form (physical stress). At the start, it appears to be a confrontation between an artist and a sportsman. As little signs of fatigue add up (millisecond delays, beads of sweat), it becomes increasingly clear that Abbott, while smaller, is the stronger of the two, foregrounding the invisible labour inherent in art-making. However, as both bodies reach their limits, confrontation becomes camaraderie, and the central question not so much which one will win, but can they push through. A ballsy, yet humble work, which will soon be performed at the Avignon Festival in France
OVERWORLD, Sarah Aiken and Rebecca Jensen
photo Gregory Lorenzutti
OVERWORLD, Sarah Aiken and Rebecca Jensen
OVERWORLD
Sarah Aiken and Rebecca Jensen, young choreographers associated with Abbott, presented the other dance highlight: OVERWORLD. It is an extension of their work Deep Soulful Sweats (which I missed): a participatory, audience-centred combination of dance, yoga and ritual. It brings together movement vocabulary, visual and thematic references and performance practices spanning Kundalini yoga, neo-pagan rituals, contemporary witchcraft practices (à la Buffy the Vampire Slayer), elements of the Zodiac, bush doofs, creation myths and unabashed silliness. OVERWORLD has a gleefully sprawling structure like the beginnings of multi-cellular life: the four performers dividing the audience into elemental groups based on the horoscope; dressing-up and tearing each other’s clothes off in a beautiful, intelligent reference to creation myths across the globe; guiding a meditation session; and finally, as traces, disappearing into a screen, singing and dancing in preparation for a night out.
In the central sequence, once the performers have torn each other’s clothes off while shrieking and wielding their smartphones, one of them remains, totally naked. The lights dim, she lies on the floor and the smartphones are put into glass jars. It turns out they were used to record the action, which is now replayed. The girls’ shrieks now sound eerie, resonating with associations of rape and other violence. Amid it all, the naked performer slowly and sexily eats an ice-cream. One does not necessarily have to know that the central moment in most creation myths is the rape of an Earth goddess to fertilise and create life in order to appreciate how masterfully the point is made about the cultural milieu in which we live.
I admired enormously how unafraid OVERWORLD was to claim supposedly trivial, ‘girly’ concerns and aesthetics. The puzzlement with which it was greeted reminded me of the dismissal of Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (youngest-ever recipient of Man Booker Prize in 2013) because of its low status genre (Victorian thriller) and its structural basis in something as ‘unserious’ as the Zodiac. Like The Luminaries, OVERWORLD heralds a new aesthetic in high art: maximalist, freely mixing high and low references, unapologetically feminine, silly rather than stern, but thoughtful.
Madonna Arms
photo Sarah Walker
Madonna Arms
Madonna Arms
The only text-based work among those by women at Next Wave was Madonna Arms by I’m Trying To Kiss You. Critics were extremely confused, calling it unclear, but I thought it was the most exciting staging of new writing I have seen in Melbourne in a long time. Madonna Arms is a postdramatic text. The first half builds a cacophony of overlapping voices, freely blending media messages, small talk, and the subconscious—reminiscent of Elfriede Jelinek’s plays in which language becomes disembodied material with its own, depersonalised force (“Sprachflächen” or “planes of language”). Madonna Arms overlaps the sex-and-violence of popular culture with the vicious sublimated misogyny of ‘female interest’ magazines and celebrity gossip. At one point, we hear the voice of someone fleeing her house to escape danger: “I am running in a/ Bright white nightgown that clings to my/ Firm breasts/ I glow against the burning sky /Flying /A bullet!” The staging goes against the grain of the text, creating its own demented reality: women in bathing suits and boxing robes stand in front of a greenscreen, eschewing character, realistic setting, or dialogue, in favour of an abstracted work of pure theatre.
The second half, however, is a parody of naturalism: an ultra-macho fantasy of world rescue by three bureaucrats all named Martin, performed in drag. Here, again, an initially dark lament against sexism turns into an irreverent, gleeful counter-attack on patriarchal nonsense. It shifts from anger to a very Australian kind of ridicule. Theatrically interesting while clearly text-focused, I thought Madonna Arms signalled a major new force in Australian playwriting, picking up the kinds of inquiry that Black Lung championed in Melbourne a few years ago. Indeed, I am curious as to why Black Lung never met with the misunderstanding that greeted I’m Trying to Kiss you—their aesthetic is very similar.
Smell You Later
One small, humble work deserves a mention. Katie Lenanton’s curated installation Smell You Later became, unexpectedly, one of the great joys of the festival as well as one of the strongest devices binding the whole experience. Grace Gamage and Olivia O’Donnell’s scent sculptures were pure sensuous joy: sweet-smelling, melting mounds shaped like candy, cakes, sea shells or just pastel-coloured lumps made out of oils, soap, scrub, glitter and occasional edible stuff (glace cherries, for example). These were installed near washbasins in bathrooms of participating venues, which meant that a regular Next Wave audience member constantly ran into them when least planning to encounter art. There was something extremely satisfying in being able to freely touch, mould, scrub and scrape, taste, rub on oneself and wash off, and then offer oneself to other people’s noses in the foyer. This repeating solitary game became one of the experiences echoing through the festival, bringing together inner-city galleries, town halls, a suburban substation and other varied venues under the coherent experiential umbrella of Next Wave.
Next Wave 2014, director Emily Sexton, Melbourne, 16 April–11 May
Colonialism, sexual politics, the beginnings of Papua New Guinea’s independence and family and identity are all in the mix in Stephen Carleton’s new play Bastard Territory. It is an engaging three-act drama that moves between three time zones and two countries as it explores the life of Russell who is searching for the truth about his parentage and in so doing reveals the culture and politics of life in PNG in 1967 and Darwin in 1975 and 2001.
The play opens with Russell (Benhur Helwend) addressing the audience directly—introducing and watching his memories come to life—and then becoming part of the action. As narrator, he poses questions to the audience as he tries to find out who his biological father is. Russell is a direct link between audience and storyline, passing wry comments on the action throughout. Helwend’s pleasure and easy engagement as narrator led to some audience members responding verbally on opening night.
The playwright’s dry humour underpins the action across all time zones, exposing political corruption, homophobia and racism while revealing the circumstances and vulnerabilities of their perpetrators, who are never excused. In Darwin in 2001 we see characters repeating some of the mistakes of the older generation and grappling with the same issues but the outcomes are different. Some issues are re-cycled through the generations revealing how little times have changed.
Kris Bird’s set, beautifully lit by Sean Pardy, is a skeletal framework of a typical elevated tropical house offering director Ian Lawson multiple playing spaces. The framework has a door but no walls, giving weight to the idea that ‘truth will out’ and adding to the sense of claustrophobia as members of the colonial community watch each other closely. The unfinished house echoes the notion of PNG in 1967 as a place in transition and the set transforms easily from PNG 1967 to Darwin 1975 until finally in Darwin 2001 it becomes a “hip urban café and art gallery by day, queer cabaret dive by night” (Carleton, program note). Now dressed in a tight-fitting sparkly black frock and dancing to Shirley Bassey, Russell parades on the upper level as the drag queen his father cannot accept.
Bastard Territory
photo Kerrin Schallmeiner
Bastard Territory
Kirsten Faucett’s costumes are a gorgeous celebration of colour and playfulness as she reflects the various eras. Ian Lawson’s direction is tight with smooth transitions between time zones and styles melding narration and action with brief choreographed dance routines. The sound design by Guy Webster is a strong element of this production with the three eras delineated by the popular music of the time.
Audiences have become less used to three-act plays but Bastard Territory holds us with its combination of good writing, comedy, diverse theatrical elements and strong performances from all the cast. Kathryn Marquet as Lois transforms from the young hopeful newlywed to a bored wife desperate for diversion to an embittered woman trapped in her own life. She is powerful in the role and handles well the playing of different ages. I was disappointed to have her story end with a sudden disappearance—I wanted to know more about her departure and subsequent brief return.
Peter Norton gave depth to Neville junior, Russell’s adoptive father, and later transformed into the role of Russell’s boyfriend and unwitting father of a child. Veteran actor Steven Tandy played Neville senior, the elderly father who finally comes clean about past acts committed in PNG and who comes to some form of acceptance of his adoptive son’s sexuality.
Suellen Maunder’s heightened comic character Nanette is played with great craft and obvious relish. The audience were too afraid not to answer her school mistress “Good morning!” Although the role is a deliberate caricature, Maunder brought veracity to it, allowing the audience to connect with Nanette’s vulnerable side. Benhur Helwend played multiple roles—all the Papua New Guineans and, as he pointed out, the three possible fathers as well as the son.
I believe it is difficult and rarely successful when adult actors are required to play children and the heightened style chosen for the young Russell and his friend Aspasia was stereotyped. I was relieved when they grew up and resumed their friendship as adults in Darwin 2001.
Bastard Territory is a well-crafted, intelligent and entertaining new Australian play. As Stephen Carleton says in the program notes it’s not only a play about searching for roots and identity but it also asks larger questions about Northern identity: “are the NT and the former Australian ‘territory’ of Papua New Guinea the illegitimate offspring of the larger host nation? Are we as Northerners the bastard children of a perceived national nuclear family or norm? I hope so.”
Knock-Em-Down, Brown’s Mart Productions and Jute Theatre: Bastard Territory, writer Stephen Carleton, director Ian Lawson, performers Ella Watson-Russell, Suellen Maunder, Benhur Helwend, Kathryn Marquet, Steven Tandy, Peter Norton, designer Kris Bird, lighting Sean Pardy, sound design Guy Webster, choreography David McMicken; Browns Mart Theatre, Darwin, 7-18 May; Jute Theatre, Cairns, 6-21 June
Dalara Williams, Wulamanayuwi and the Seven Pamanui
photo Lucy Parakhina
Dalara Williams, Wulamanayuwi and the Seven Pamanui
Wulamanayuwi and the Seven Pamanui is a delightfully bonkers theatrical fusion of Tiwi Island Dreamtime stories and characters, pantomime, fairytale, drag, song, puppetry and visual projections.
The narrator, Jarparra the Moon Man (Jason De Santis), introduces us to Wulamanayuwi (Dalara Williams), a young girl and daughter of the Rainbow Serpent totem, who is having trouble at home—her warrior father Jipmarpuwajuwa (Kamahi King) plans to marry her off to a stranger and her evil stepmother, Jirrikalala (performed with gusto and lots of evil cackles by Natasha Wanganeen), is plotting against her.
When Jipmarpuwajuwa goes away he leaves Wulamanayuwi as ‘boss.’ She sets off hunting but instead of arriving at her usual lush hunting grounds she is surprised to find a black and burnt land. Luckily a white cockatoo guides her to bush apples and she returns from the hunt laden with food. Jirrikalala, jealous of the clever daughter, decides to kill Wulamanayuwi and her seven brothers (embodied by seven Tiwi designed puppets) and so seeks counsel from an Evil Spirit of the Water (played with drag queen theatrics by Jason De Santis). The two come up with outrageous and murderous plans. Most don’t work out but one hot day, when the brothers go swimming with their sister, the Water Spirit drowns them. Wulamanayuwi is blamed for their deaths and is exiled from her family and country. Bereft, she journeys to a magical land where she meets the Seven Pamanui spirits (not unlike her drowned little brothers), beings out to seek revenge. Later, she eats food from an old woman (Jirrikalala in disguise) and seemingly dies. Her promised husband Awarrajimi (Jaxon De Santis) turns up, tries to revive her, but can’t. The white cockatoo, however, materialises in time to save Wulamanayuwi.
By the end of the play order is restored to the family and the land. Deftly written by Jason De Santis, ebulliently directed by Eamon Flack, quirkily designed by Bryan Woltjen, with AV by Sam Routledge (who was also the puppetry director), Wulamanayuwi and the Seven Pamanui was performed with zest, a whole lot of cheek and a gleeful sense of anything goes. This is a creative team unafraid of mixing Tiwi Island traditional story with European fairytale convention and pop culture tropes. Tiwi language is mingled with English, colloquial speech with rhyme, ballad singing with traditional Indigenous songs, Mozart and Beethoven. The production is staged around a set of portable proscenium arch frames decorated with crosshatched Tiwi designs. Set painter, Raelene Kerinauia, and painters of the brother puppets, Pedro Wonaeamirri, John Peter Pilakui and Linus Warlapinni, all artists from the Jilmara Arts and Crafts Association in Milikapiti on Melville Island, worked with Bryan Woltjen to realise the design.
The production was commissioned by the Darwin Festival and premiered at Adelaide’s COME OUT Festival in March 2011. It continues to tour Australia. The performance I saw was opened with a welcome to country by local elder Richard Davis and the audience ranged from the very young to the very old. This was a noisy, happy, slightly lunatic theatrical event, an enchanting and cheeky tale—testament to the potential for levity in storytelling and the importance of laughter and song in negotiating life.
Wulamanayuwi and the Seven Pamanui, a Darwin Festival commission, toured by Performing Lines, IPAC, Wollongong, 19-22 March; Cairns 19-20 June, Mackay 24 June, Brisbane 26-29 June
The animal inside us, the wild and the civil, and the sea-shifting currents of journey were each explored by three new performance works in Brisbane: Circa’s Beyond, which premiered in Berlin before landing at the Brisbane Powerhouse; Sally Lewry’s powerful physical theatre work Cimmarón; and Julie Vulcan’s new live art work, Drift, the two latter works commissioned by Metro Arts.
I have to admit that I am a shameless fangirl of Julie Vulcan’s work. I say this as a caveat for those readers who are perhaps less engaged with the fragile experience of live art, or who are not as attracted as I am to the indubitably feminine aesthetic explored in Vulcan’s arresting body of work. Drift is a follow-up to I Stand In, an intimate piece where spectators witnessed Vulcan massaging volunteers, a private act in a warm, communal space (RT116). She brings that same quality of shamanic intensity to Drift, where the audience can watch or participate. You are invited to lie on a lime-green, inflatable lilo with a nest of shredded paper atop, which looks inviting but has a disconcerting texture and an unpredictable waterbed motion. Vulcan attends to each of the lilo-layers with precise dignity, providing a face-mask and an ear-bud for the sound-scape. She then massages your hand with a firm and sensual stroke until you relax. Your interaction ends with her photographing you, wrapping you in a metallic blanket and then folding the massaged hand around a delicate, palm-sized origami boat. Participants stay for as long as they want within the confines of the two hourly sessions.
The work’s gentle thematic is a commentary on passage and the precarious nature of boats as refuges, which has such a charged history for Australian immigration, not just in the latest brutal incarnation of White Australia in our refugee policies, but for the waves of immigrants who have come to our shores in vessels of all shapes and sizes. I could see many a traditional theatre patron at Metro struggle with an anxiety about time: when should I leave the lilo? This is partly the thematic of the work, but also a clue that some aspect of the timing isn’t quite fully formed. Perhaps this is a result of programming two short sessions daily that re-set, rather than a longer durational work that accretes over days. Paradoxically, in her artist’s talk Vulcan noted she had attracted a number of repeat, city-commuter walk-in spectators, who were coming back in their lunch hours. I think this is testament to how Vulcan as a performer and artist can hold a space, elevating and deepening it into a profound experience: sensorially, politically and, dare I say, spiritually.
In contrast to the delicacy of Vulcan’s live art practice was the earthy and engulfing experience of Sally Lewry’s new work Cimmarón. Lewry is a familiar face to Melbourne audiences but this was her debut in Brisbane. The intense, almost wordless piece played out on dirt, lit by the delicate shadow-play of lighting designer Paula Van Beek.
Sally Lewry, Tamara Natt, Cimmarón
photo Miklos Janek
Sally Lewry, Tamara Natt, Cimmarón
The trajectory of the work follows two bodies. The first is Lewry, dirt-strewn in a shapeless hessian sack: a grunting, pawing, howling wild beast but in no way aggressive or out of control, simply wild, tender and vulnerable, like a brumby or a new-born bird. She encounters Tamara Natt, a statuesque dominator, hair pulled back tightly into a plait at the top of her head, clad in dark, narrow clothes, with echoes of the military and dressage. The moment of first contact includes a full range of emotion: curiosity, distrust, potential seduction, but in what seems like an inevitability given the history of these binaries of centre and margin, dominant and abject, the wild is brutalised in what was for me the most powerful sequence in the whole show, bleeding in and out of Patti Smith’s “Wild Horses,” as Lewry’s figure was whipped and broken, made to dance in circles, to learn to obey and be remade in the image of her dominator.
The work reads beautifully across a range of political, feminist and historical contexts as well as conjuring a detailed immersive world. My only hesitation was around the journey of the dominator. This wasn’t about the quality of Natt’s performance, but a sense that the trajectory had been less interrogated and was less specific in movement vocabulary, in design choices, even in the objects allowed her in the space which were clichéd (whips/red carpets/sunglasses) compared to the genuinely surprising and satisfying nature of Lewry’s initial hessian attire, her naked torso revealed under pressure and her wild ram skull. When Lewry unburies this in the final third of the show it pulls the whole thematic of the piece together: the wild that is now dead, fossilised and curated and what was once pulsing and irresistible is lost but still encodes for us an involuntary and simultaneous attraction and repulsion.
Bridie Hooper, Circa, Beyond
photo Andy Phillipson Photography
Bridie Hooper, Circa, Beyond
Ironically, the piece with the most dialogue and literary pedigree was CIRCA’s new show Beyond. This Brisbane company is an absolute international juggernaut, perpetually on-tour and cycling through stages of formal experimentation—from digital technology to text-based collaboration. Beyond signals a back-to-basics circus form with a simple stage, traditional skills and a delightful, show-stopping premise: the animal inside us all. Drawing from a range of cultural references as varied as Alice in Wonderland, Donnie Darko and Cats the show is a smile-a-minute experience. You could take your most belligerently anti-theatre friend to see Beyond and they would thank you. That isn’t to say that the work is lightweight, quite the contrary, its magic lies in the way the death-defying skills of the tightly bonded ensemble skim across sophisticated cultural references to a charming soundtrack of Broadway standards and classic songs. The image of the supple bodies of the circus performers under their enlarged fluffy bunny heads says it all: the surreal and secret pleasures to be found in releasing our inner beasts.
Drift, concept, performance Julie Vulcan, sound design Ashley Scott, The Basement, Metro Arts, 1-5 April; Cimmarón, creator, director, performer Sally Lewry, co-devisor Xanthe Beesley, performer Tamara Natt, Sue Benner Theatre, Metro Arts, 4-22 March; CIRCA, Beyond, director Yaron Lifschitz, Brisbane Powerhouse, 30 April-11 May
Here is a true rarity, an Australian book celebrating the long life and distinctive vision of a theatre company—Geelong’s internationally successful Back to Back Theatre ensemble. Rather than its works being playwright-driven, the company is an exemplar of contemporary performance, teaming an intensely collaborative director, designers and composers with performer-devisors with perceived intellectual disabilities to collaborate over very long periods on creations that unsettle our sense of time, space, identity and, not least, ability.
Published in the UK by the Centre for Performance Research in Wales, ‘We’re People Who Do Shows,’ Back to Back Theatre, has been ingeniously edited by Helena Grehan (writer, lecturer, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Murdoch University) and Peter Eckersall (writer, dramaturg, Associate Professor, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne). It’s a one-stop shop for scripts, interviews, artist statements, personal recollections, documentary history and complex academic analyses, an excellent collection of images, many by the great Melbourne photographer Jeff Busby, and admirably spacious design (Lin Tobias of La Bella Design, Melbourne) along with some fun touches like two brief flicker picture book series. I was surprised that ensemble performers are not always identified in photo credits, although the reader can sometimes make guesses based on discussions about roles in the essays.
The editors’ aim was to “create an archive” that is “multilayered and sensory or what Walter Benjamin calls ‘the mosaic’: ‘an immersion in the most minute details of the material content.’” They also saw the book as “dramaturgical,” “presenting a range of speaking positions juxtaposing image and text, creative and critical modes of response as well as….insights into the production process.” Further, the works would be “analysed through the lens of new media dramaturgy because it explores theatre’s compositional elements in relation to mediatisation and visuality.” These are frameworks within which Back to Back’s performances are so powerfully realised, conjuring associations with performance makers Romeo Castelluci, Robert Wilson, Hotel Pro Forma and light artist James Turrell, a key influence in recent works says Back to Back artistic director Bruce Gladwin in a long, wide-ranging interview with Performance Research director Richard Gough.
The editors certainly fulfil their ambitions in a book that views the company from numerous angles, inside and out. There is no literal account of the company’s history from 1987 save for a handy list of productions, each with an image and credits for the creative team, but in “In conversation,” previous directors meet with Gladwin and talk through Back to Back’s emergence and struggles for recognition. They recount how some support for the work came from a period of “normalisation,” which aimed to get people with disabilities out of institutions (“and save money”); a time when performers were allowed to move on stage but not speak; the discovery that one of the performers, Rita Halabarec, was a gifted writer (her piece Assembly is reproduced a few pages later); and the push to move from being “a sort of disability organisation” to getting support from the Theatre Board of the Australia Council as a company in its own right, which it became in 1997. The company developed as it engaged with Deakin University’s Woolly Jumpers Theatre-in-Education company, Handspan, Arena Theatre and Circus Oz, always developing skills, maintaining continuity and, as Gladwin puts it, “finding those mechanisms to get the best from people…the best framework to support them on stage and in the process of creating something.” The emphasis on democratic processes is emphatic: Gladwin talks about the importance of “hanging out,” sitting, chatting and “then we’d get up and try something.” Barry Kay recalls learning to focus on the “level playing field” of play. Ian Pidd remembers “always trying to push [performers] beyond their comfort zone,” a goal that Gladwin iterates elsewhere in the book.
The academic essays in the book engage passionately with the works that have emerged from Bruce Gladwin’s artistic directorship—these are the focus of the book. ‘Passionately’ because it is evident that they are moved by these works, disturbed by their capacity to deal directly with big issues and with a deeply unsettling ambiguity. Lalita McHenry, writing about SOFT (2002), approaches the work in terms of empathy, specifically Emmanuel Levinas’ notion of “Substitution—putting oneself in place of another.” At the end of SOFT we are left “face to face with the last man with Down Syndrome”—the rest of his kind have been eliminated in a massive eugenics campaign—but in the work’s first half a couple with Down Syndrome baulk at having a child despite the fact that the doctor they meet has the condition too. We are being tested, even more so, says McHenry, by the design, a vast bubble in which we sit each with headphones: “We see and hear from the inside out, as if we, the audience, are not yet formed, not yet human…[in] a womb-like sculpture.” It’s a striking observation that explains the sheer strangeness of experiencing SOFT.
Eddie Paterson’s “Script after script: Back to Back and dramaturgy of becoming” observes that “in recent works the process of writing for performance comes increasingly to the fore…highlighting the connection with performance art and the collapsing distinctions between author, director, maker, performer and spectator.” Citing scholar John Freeman, Paterson sees this as “a textual playground, where nothing is sacrosanct.” More than that, he writes, the works resonate with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘becoming,’ in which “minoritorian subjects strategically rupture dominant notions of language and power.” He focuses on the banality of the dialogue in small metal objects (2005), noting reviewer Alison Croggon’s initial feeling that the show needed a strong writer but later realising that “the script they have serves their purpose adequately.” Equally the notion of sole authorship is dispensed with by Back to Back, reflecting the collaborative creation of the work. Besides, the dialogue “becomes poetic” with the punctuating rhythms of the sound score. In Food Court (2009) the spare, brutal deployment of language (spoken, projected, “unstable”) makes radical demands on the audience. In a step further, if with transparent dialogue (and in various languages), Ganesh Versus the Third Reich (2011) becomes a “meta-theatrical commentary” on the work’s creation and issues of ability, casting, power (political, directorial), race and exploitation. Paterson’s account very aptly describes Back to Back in terms of its own dramaturgical becoming.
Food Court, Back to Back Theatre
photo Jeff Busby
Food Court, Back to Back Theatre
Helena Grehan in “Responding to the unspoken in Food Court” like McHenry leads from Levinas: “we have no option but to respond to the call of the other” without any expectation of reciprocity. She writes, “While [the performers’] bodies and voices act as markers reminding spectators that they are disabled, the content and searing or (awful) power of their exchange compels us to think and feel beyond a focus (solely) on questions of dis/ability.” She adds, “this is not the other after all, this is a group of performers performing the ‘majority.’” She finds this “shattering,” “it disallows any bystanding,” and there is no “panacea for spectators.” Agreed, but the performance is surely also, in the dialectical manner so true to Back to Back, about people with disabilities maltreating others with disabilities—there is no escaping that. In the same essay, Grehan quotes Gladwin as saying he feels ‘“an incredible responsibility to present [artists with disabilities] in a positive light’ but that for this work the decision was ‘to let it be as dark as it was.’”
Caroline Wake and Bryoni Trezise, in their essay, the one most acutely focused on form, “Disabling Spectacle: Curiosity, contempt and collapse in performance theatre,” also attend to Food Court, in which, as in all of Back to Back’s work, “perception is all.” Spectators are asked “to consider perceptions of disability through performances of disability,” the resulting tension “startl[ing] them into a moment of self-conscious insight.” The work achieves this, they argue, because it is “a hybrid form of ‘performance theatre’” [presumably contemporary performance + theatre, in a work calculatedly staged in a theatre ] “unsettl[ing] the historical alignment between spectacle and spectatorship…keep[ing] spectators in a zone of deferred perception such that a fixed vision of either self or performer can never fully arrive.”
To this end Back to Back’s work has “avoided the framework of disability theatre,” a form in which the nature and sociology of disability is delineated. Instead the company has realised, write Wake and Trezise, “disability performance in which performance is called upon to denaturalise the naturalisation of disability as performed spectacle” in which actors “perform only their [disabled] selves.” The writers add depth to Paterson’s approach to language, focusing on the unexpected, reversals and inversions, the creating and undoing of perceptions. They detect in the production’s impressionistic scenology “the same liminal Zone that Bill Henson’s images occupy, what has been called in the context of Romeo Castellucci’s work the human/dis-human.” Here they argue that the “visuality of spectacle” is “forestalled” by projected text “both explaining and obscuring the action,” along with extreme contrasts in lighting, at turns distancing and immersive. They point to the power of the final bare image of a human body after Food Court has “hurl[ed] every possible theatrical tradition onto the stage” as if “the medium of performance theatre [has seemed] to turn against itself.” In a relentlessly shifting dialectic “the audience perceives performance theatre as simultaneously staging the spectacle of disability and,” as the writers pointedly if drolly express it, “the disabling of spectacle.”
Ganesh Versus the Third Reich, Back to Back Theatre
photo Zan Wimnberley
Ganesh Versus the Third Reich, Back to Back Theatre
Adding breadth to the editors’ appreciation of Back to Back’s collaborative approach is “Lighting Design: Between theatre and architecture, An interview with Andrew Livingston and Paul Jackson.” Helena Grehan couples an interview with Bruce Gladwin and an essay about the participatory video work The Democratic Set (2009), applauding it “as some small space of resistance to the troubled and bleak mainstream” critiqued by Henry Giroux. She captures well the sense of inclusiveness, shared responsibility and the “space of wonder” that the Democratic Set represents and the question it poses to all who make or watch it, “What is art?” Barry Laing reports on the “arrests” he suffered teaching a Back to Back Summer School, having to “change gear, slow down and somehow accommodate this voice: a voice that emerged as witty and irreverent and rich in imagination. This changed the way I was working.” As well, in their introductory essay, the editors condemn the unjust pressure (and lack of support from some key arts organisations) applied to Back to Back by a US-based fundamentalist Hindu organisation over the representation of Ganesh in the Melbourne Festival premiere of Ganesh Versus the Third Reich. Such crude opposition stood in the way of appreciating the work’s much needed insights.
Grehan in “Irony, Parody and Satire in Ganesh Versus the Third Reich” addresses audience complicity in a postmodern work which “positions its audiences in such a space of undecidability that it is difficult to know what ‘good’ spectatorship (in ethical terms) may entail. Fear of laughing at the wrong moment, wondering if the performers are behaving as they actually did in rehearsal or is this work parody, concern about your motives for seeing “a bit of freak porn” (as one of the ensemble, Scott Price, puts it), “feel[ing] empathy, at times a sense of embarrassment,” or sensing that “Scott’s frustration” with the dictatorial director is “very real” (despite the fictional frame)—are cumulatively unsettling. “We don’t want to be bad spectators; instead we want some idea of what it is we should be doing. There is no resolution.” Grehan sees Ganesh Versus the Third Reich as placing us ethically in a position of profoundly questioning the act of spectatorship, just as Wake and Trezise do in respect of perception and the play with forms.
In “Scott’s Aired a Couple of Things: Back to Back rehearse Ganesh Versus the Third Reich, ” Yoni Prior documents her experience of observing the development and rehearsal of the production, focusing on “the ways in which the company positions members of the ensemble as entirely legitimate professional artists, whilst claiming the authority of outsider artists to challenge the perceptions and representations of disability.” She details “an improvisation in which a serendipitous misinterpretation opened up unmarked territory between ‘what is fiction and what is not.’’’ And she adds another layer to the list of ambiguities perceptual and moral addressed in previous essays, writing “[to] borrow Richard Schechner’s distinction, Scott [in what is to become the scene mentioned above] is acting and not-not-acting in this moment as he performs a version of himself.”
In her conclusion, “Playing the reality line,” Prior writes, “The fact that the actors bear the unmistakable marks of disability generates both anxiety and excitement. They appear vulnerable and we who watch them are not always sure if they are safe [onstage]. We are not sure if they are in control, if they know what they are doing…we may be watching authentic distress rather than ‘good acting.’” However, “Ganesh Versus the Third Reich plays masterfully with ambiguities of ethics, meaning, control, intention and authenticity by confronting the audience with multiple challenges to their own ability to identify ‘the reality line.’” This means our stare is turned on us, she says: “the work glares back, remorselessly demanding an apologia from its audience, asking, ‘What are you looking at.’” Or, as in Grehan’s essay on Food Court, the question is presumably “Who are you?”
Tessa Scheer’s “The Impossible Fairytale, or Resistance to the Real” directly addresses the bodies of the performers in Ganesh Versus the Third Reich specifically in terms of their challenge to “the hegemony of the well-trained, socially approved ‘body beautiful’’’ and in the context of a well-established ‘Hollywood’ desire for the disabled to become the “honorary disable-bodied,” more ‘normal’ than different. Disturbed by audience members who preferred the work’s non-meta-theatrical scenes with their visible disabilities, Scheer thought she detected a desire to “favour the fairytale.”
Ensemble members, former and current (Rita Halabarec, Sonia Teuben, Nicki Holland, Simon Laherty, Brian Tilley, Sarah Mainwaring, Scott Price and Mark Deans) figure strongly in the book—in photographs, in essays and interviews where the power of their performances and their willingness to meet challenges are acknowledged— and in their ensemble statements—“We’re people who do shows/ We’re all quite short/ a little bit taller than the one before/ We’re agile and we work/ professionally in a theatre company” and “We’re not afraid to step into the cold, dark side./ At first we’re scared, but/ afterwards we feel good. We are witty, We are emotional. We go deep into the work./ We go to places you can’t go/ in real life.” Of course, many of the words in the scripts are theirs too, borne of exchanges or improvisation, or found, as they were for Food Court.
In New York, at the Under the Radar Festival in 2013, Scott Price and other ensemble members wrote and presented From Where I Stand which included the lines: “I can see the end of ultra-conservatism/ We will stand up in defiance, even though standing is difficult/ for some of us…And I can also see a post-disability world where there is an/ important place for everyone to occupy…”
‘We’re People Who Do Shows,’ Back to Back Theatre is a book for many people, at once accessible and erudite, intimate and esoteric, illuminatingly edited, illustrated and designed—a tribute to a great and enduring company, whose presence onstage we welcome again and again, greeting their difference as part of our lives, admiring their performances as we would any professional ensemble of high calibre and acknowledging the genius of Bruce Gladwin who shares his creative life with his talented ensemble, “providing the best framework to support them on stage and in the process of creating…” I thank Back to Back for taking me, as they write, “to places you can’t go / in real life.”
‘We’re People Who Do Shows,’ Back to Back Theatre, Performance, Politics, Visibility, editors Helena Grehan, Peter Eckersall, Performance Research Books, UK, 2013
Tim Walter, Andrea Demetriades, Glenn Hazeldine, Rebecca Massey, Perplex, Sydney Theatre Company
photo Lisa Tomasetti
Tim Walter, Andrea Demetriades, Glenn Hazeldine, Rebecca Massey, Perplex, Sydney Theatre Company
Step back from the comedy of German playwright Marius von Mayenburg’s Perplex and you see it for what it is: a nightmare of the age of identity theft. But it’s one where you don’t have to have your cards stolen or your phone or computer hacked. It just happens. And you have another identity foisted on you.
STC, Perplex
In Perplex you come home from a holiday to the friends who have been looking after your apartment, they treat you like intruders and force you out. There are subsequent displacements, increasingly bizarre: unwelcome new roles assumed, sins inherited, sudden adulteries and big ideas (in the shower a man comes up with the Theory of Evolution, only to be disabused of his too late discovery by his erstwhile wife). There’s a child who grows quickly into a Nazi; man-on-man sex (to the surprise of both parties) at a wild Viking dress-up party with a woman who has turned into a volcano.
And so it goes until the work’s larger mutation into a meta-theatrical and metaphysical confection when one character demands to know, “Who cast me?” The subsequent postmodern game playing (the director has abandoned the show and the set is pulled down around the actors) is a tad too familiar (“Are you doing a monologue? We said we wouldn’t do any more monologues”), although it has its moments, including the sudden appearance of a nutty (God is dead) Nietzsche at the window. He is inadvertently shoved and falls: “We have killed him!” one of the characters cries and the knowing audience laughs as the certainties—social, sexual, political, metaphysical and theatrical—of middle class life fall away.
Perplex is fun if not metaphysically particularly convincing or consistently funny. On opening night the performance was initially strained, over-emphatic instead of convincing us of the realism that would soon be ruptured. However, once underway performers Andrea Demetriades, Glenn Hazeldine, Rebecca Massey and Tim Walter excelled in their comic dexterity in Sarah Giles’ brisk, quick-witted production. Perplex doesn’t match the depth and reach of Marius von Mayenburg’s Fireface, Moving Target, The Ugly One and Eldorado, although the number of productions of Perplex across Europe suggest he’s hit a nerve with a work that evokes the instability of dreams and the terrors of erased and imposed identities. It’s good to have seen it here.
STC, Fight Night
ABC TV’s Q&A angers me. I can rarely sit through it. It’s raison d’etre, giving citizens the opportunity to have “your say” is a nonsense. Questions remain partly or not answered at all or are deflected to an inappropriate panellist by a mediator who cannot stop himself from repeating and interpreting the question and editorialising. Rarely is any argument sustained. Outrageously, in subsequent advertising Q&A exploited the recent onstage student protest it failed to respond to. Jones’ retort, before subsiding into bewildered silence on the night, was that old standby: “You’re not doing your cause any good.”
Fight Night (a collaboration between Adelaide’s The Border Project and Belgium’s Ontroerend Goed for the Adelaide Festival and STC) irritates me too, as soon as “your voice,” the audience’s, is invoked by another smug host (at least he’s being ironic, if tiresomely so). Shortly, he has us on the path to choosing a winner from a group of candidates in a protracted, shallow process that barely justifies itself by being thinly satirical and occasionally funny—or very funny for pockets of the audience. The ‘choices’ are all too quickly revealed not to be choices at all—the point being that we vote for mere appearances and with rapidly diminishing information with which to judge. What’s new?
It’s presumed our voting will tell us something about ourselves. We have in our hands iPod-like devices that record our votes, which will determine who leaves the contest, as in reality TV shows. When the show veers into the surreal or the obscene its potential is revealed, but even here choice is a joke—there are only obscenities to choose from. Cynical fun, but not revealing. Predictably the candidates manipulate each other and us, compromise, shift ground, change the rules and in a coup, depose our host, causing a revolt where we are asked to vote as one for a winner to be our leader or to leave the theatre. Some 20 of us do. The process is rigged. The show’s a fiction but we can’t conscionably stay. If the message is that we voted shallowly, well of course we did, the options were far too thin to provoke self-awareness, of any sense of our identity in a democracy.
The actors do a fine job, constantly adjusting to audience whims with a mix of scripted declarations and quick-witted improvisation, and the two vote-counters at computers keep the stats rolling. Certainly in their conservatism the audience on this night remained true to the sad state of our nation. As for the work’s title, the boxing ring set and capes worn by the five performers at the outset, the mike hanging from above and the bow-tied MC give limited life to the boxing match metaphor which was neither adequately sustained nor at all revelatory.
Parramatta Girls
A reunion of former inmates of the Parramatta Girls Home (1887-1973) provides a straightforward formula for recollection, denial, power play and revelation, simple and complex, in a new production at Riverside Theatre of Alana Valentine’s Parramatta Girls (2007). Despite passages of blunt exposition, awkward scene transitions and episodes of laboured dialogue the play delineates the lives of some intriguing individuals, victims of an antiquated and often physically and sexually abusive system of punishment—in some cases simply for being an Aboriginal child.
Long after their incarceration is over, the women are still haunted by its legacy—some ashamedly admit to hitting their own children, others recall nightmarish incidents—and by the ghost of the young Maree who died in custody. She is the link between the reunion and re-lived moments from the past. Other wounds are psychosomatic; Valentine uses the condition to suggest the potential for social and psychological healing. At the beginning of the play, Judi (Anni Byron) hides an elbow wound that hasn’t healed in decades—initially the result of endless floor scrubbing in the Girls Home. At the conclusion, after much denial in the face of accusations, she admits she had sexual relations with the institution’s director and thus enjoyed certain privileges. Now she finds her wound has healed; she can apologise to her fellow inmates and also acknowledge the existence of the ‘Dungeon’ and the institution’s other dark punishments she had refuted.
Other prisoners had first been wounded by their families, by class, race or psychological problems, their suffering cruelly exacerbated by incarceration and their sense of difference making for uncomfortable lives in prison—the middle class Lynette (Vanessa Dowling) sits to the side for much of the first of the two acts, sadly probing a life split-in-half. Valentine’s characters are sharply delineated if to varying degrees, each expressing pain, anger and joy vividly conveyed by Byron, Downing, Anni Finsterer, Sandy Gore, Sharni McDermott, Christine Anu, Tessa Rose and Holly Austin (as the ghost of Maree, who, pregnant to a guard was kicked in the stomach by him; she then suicided).
The horrors visited on these women (based in part on those Valentine met while researching for the play) were many: beatings, the removal from their mothers of babies born in prison and humiliations—Maree forced to wear a bedpan as punishment for bedwetting. More complex was the pain they inflicted on each other and the mutilations of their own bodies. Although the ending of Parramatta Girls is briefly upbeat, some of the women have pride in their subsequent achievements (including helping shut down the Home), some are still recovering, some forgiving, but the play makes it clear that to develop and sustain a sense of identity in such circumstances of constraint, humiliation and enduring self-doubt is a near impossible task: “We didn’t get out with our dignity intact,” says one. (For more on the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct Memory Project see http://www.pffpmemoryproject.org/)
EMD (exposed to moral danger)
Projected onto the stage floor of Parramatta Girls, below designer Tobiyah Stone Feller’s evocation of the semi-ruined Girls Home, are the letters ILWA, standing for “I Love, Worship and Adore.” These affirmations addressed by the inmates to each other can be found carved into the walls and doors in the actual building, 20 minutes walk from the Riverside Theatres.
The site exhibition EMD (exposed to moral danger) evokes the lives of the inmates by means documentary and impressionist with video interview (Lily Hibberd speaking with former inmate and writer Christina Green), sound, painting, installation and sculpture throughout the building. Among works by Bonney Djuric the projected eyes of an abusive director of the institution greet you at the top of the stairs; opposite is a decaying room in which long paper dresses sway like ghosts; and further along two perspex screens conjure now disappeared ‘segregation rooms’—or solitary confinement cells. In a small room downstairs, in three Broken Spirit linocuts by Jeannie Gypsie Hayes, small ghosts dance behind bars and nearby Elizabeth Day’s I Love Worship and Adore fills a large room with the letters ILWA. She has worked outside casting ILWA writ large in plaster on hessian and brought the sculpture inside complete with earth and freshly growing grass. The work dramatically turns a small, ambiguous act of defiance into a memorial of growth and hope. Along with archival photographs, these works evoke something of the lives and identities lost to cruel institutionalisation.
Members of a social club dedicated to matters cosmological gather for a final meeting in which they keep their distance from each other, bicker over scientific ideas to do with the Big Bang and Singularity theories and execute an agenda of performance routines for their mutual entertainment—or, more likely, egotistic self-expression. Each has a guise—one is a ‘star,’ a Marilyn Monroe imitator (Valerie Berry) who precisely reproduces the scene from The Seven Year Itch (1955) in which the character’s dress is forced up by ventilation from the New York underground rail system. Another would-be star is the club’s dictatorial Chairman (Arky Michael) who is prone to breaking into impassioned song with a bad Italian accent. Another star of a kind is a pretend Astronaut (Phillip Mills), aglow in his bubble helmet, while the fourth member has cast herself as a sexy brunette Alien (Kym Vercoe) and, as such aptly unpredictable, begrudgingly performs dramatically with that staple of sci-fi movie music, a theremin. The final member presents herself as catwalk star—a fashion Model (Katia Molino) with very firm scientific ideas, an array of sparkling outfits and a bouquet of songs. A barman-cum-musician (Paul Prestipino) serves drinks and a soundtrack of quakes, cosmological soundscapes and live electric guitar and other accompaniments.
The design, like the members’ performances, is calculatedly ‘amateur,’ capturing the DIY naivety of the club—paper lanterns hang like planets about a high wall of golden glowing fairy lights—but hints at something more profound.
The Chairman speaks of his fascination with the heavens as a child, “I grabbed a star—it tasted so sweet.” Moments of whimsy and spacey dreaminess alternate with jokiness and home grown spectacle. As the astronaut gently swings a lamp, like a planet, around the head of an increasingly panicky Monroe (“160 heart beats per minute”), the Model’s gentle lyrics about loneliness reflect on “thinking of your private parts.” These are lonely people, the Chair longs for “another world to find love in,” the Astronaut seeks someone to “boost my rocket.” These desires escalate into a near orgasmic eruption of explosions and all-encompassing vibrations. Little micro-dramas play out as well. The Alien pops on an ET-type mask and dances erotically before the Astronaut but attraction-repulsion forces play out—drawing him repeatedly to and from Monroe; the Alien tears off her mask and weeps. Her ‘routine’ has not succeeded. The Model explains that Dark Matter is holding the cosmos together but that “repulsion is everywhere.”
The meeting progresses: a competition offers the winner an Armageddon survival suit or a bottle of tequila, the Model sings that “the Earth is round but the universe is flat” and hosts a quiz. The Alien gets all the answers wrong but defiantly defends String Theory and the right to speculate. She withdraws, weaving cats’ cradles before erupting into an immolating rant wreathed in smoke.
A huge quake preludes the meeting’s “last dance”—not that they take to the floor. Instead they lean into their little bar tables, hands circling the tops, then reaching up and out and vibrating into a near lift-off into space. In the following calm, comforting words are spoken about our lives as “sharing a common ancestor [carbon],” as “just a spark or an incident,” or “a prelude to a new adventure.” Slowly, the club members exit through the wall of light: “We have loved the stars too much to be afraid of them.”
We now know why this meeting has been announced as the club’s last. But this death wish provokes as many questions as it answers. Is their final act, like their other performances, just a routine, or simply metaphorical—they would if they could defeat their loneliness by merging with the stars. Not recommended for serious sci-fi fans but for those who enjoy contemplating the big questions at a safely whimsical distance it’s fun. If these humans can’t identify with each other they at least can with the stars. ClubSingularity is diverting, if not hilarious, structurally somewhat flat, if lifted by moments of enjoyably tacky spectacle and cartoony characterisations performed with verve by the cast. ClubSingularity is a reminder of how in everyday life—and not just in poetry and drama—we employ metaphor and analogy to help explain our lives, reducing big ideas to fit simple emotional needs, accruing a sense of identity—of oneness with oneself, possibly others and, yes please, the cosmos,
Sydney Theatre Company, Perplex, writer Marius von Mayenburg, director Sarah Giles, Wharf 1, STC, 20 March-13 April; STC, The Border Project and Ontroerend Goed, Fight Night, Wharf 2, 22 March-13 April; Riverside Productions, Parramatta Girls, writer Alana Valentine, director Tanya Goldberg, Parramatta Riverside, 3-17 May; Parramatta Female Factory Precinct Memory Project, EMD, curators Alana Valentine, Lily Hibberd, Michael K Chin, 12-18 May; Theatre Kantanka, ClubSingularity, director Carlos Gomes, lighting Mirabelle Wouters, presenters Performance Space, National Art School; Cell Block Theatre, Sydney, 21-24 May
Some themes are so universal that they approach redundancy. When the author of a work states that its intended subject is identity or the body or place or consciousness there’s a very real risk of tautology, because there are so few works that don’t address every one of those broad notions in some sense. Navigating your way to the bathroom in the middle of the night does too. Doing something interesting with such grand notions is obviously a grand challenge itself, but sometimes the most effective method of painting big pictures is with a very fine brush.
Kate Hunter, Memorandum
Kate Hunter’s Memorandum concerns itself with one of the hoariest of topics, at least since mid-90s academia wrung every last drop from its cadaver. ‘Memory’ is the face that launched a thousand theses, perhaps second only to ‘desire’ in the empty signifier stakes, and there have been oceans of ink sacrificed by students justifying how (insert favourite text) is an exploration of memory’s vicissitudes. Proust did that, but someone has probably made a decent argument that Seinfeld did as well.
Hunter’s own performance history is one rich with promise. She’s a regular with physical theatre ensemble Born in a Taxi, has trained with Anne Bogart and Tadashi Suzuki’s SITI and her solo outings over various Melbourne Fringes have been engaging and well-received. She has a keen sense of the theatre as an embodied space and there’s a liveness to each of her performances that is likely a result of her work in improvised contexts.
But there’s a distinction between a work about memory and a work about a bunch of stuff that the artist remembers. Where once there was frequent lament over cultural amnesia, it now seems as if most lives are worthy of a memoir and any gaps in historical consciousness can simply be spackled over with the grey paste of a few childhood recollections.
Hunter’s narrative doesn’t rise above the memoir mode, but does trouble it in a way that ultimately bears fruit. Amid billowing clouds of smoke or overlaid with projected mirror images of her own form, or bouncing between layers of live and pre-recorded audio, she begins to lay out a narrative that commences in her own childhood but quickly dissolves into false memory, blatant fiction, recollection rendered in the second person, dream, speculation and commentary.
She names names, too: those of the youthful classmate who flashed his penis or the kid whose obvious poverty was made a laughing point, or the one who was chased down the street by a father brandishing a woodsplitter and threatening murder. Her adult self abruptly rounds a corner to face a man administering euthanasia with an axe head to a cow that has tumbled from a cliff. She has that awkward nocturnal encounter you have with a parent you’ve already buried in the ground and who is now asking for an explanation as to what the hell that was all about.
Perhaps the reason artists so often return to memory as a subject is that it is a thing of such stupid artifice. How dare we think that time can be arrested! The ego of it, the unfettered individualism, to think that those things we’ve lived through can be removed from the passage of natural decay and preserved by some private magic. From the inside, the memory of one person is close to all that there is of this world. Viewed from space, or even from the vantage point of a theatre seat in comfortable darkness—same thing, really— the same memory is as inconsequential as a breath.
But there’s not much life without breath. Hunter’s performance might not reveal a great deal about ‘memory’ and there’s an irony in the way that works about memory are themselves rarely memorable. But her words have that trained liveness, complemented by Richard Vabre’s sterling and deeply responsive lighting design, to allow each recollection a moment’s return. Hunter’s memories aren’t our own, and often may not even be hers, but rather than validating ‘memory’ there’s the possibility here that she’s paying respect to the dull and tiny inevitable death of everyone. Hunter doesn’t attempt to glorify her own recalled moments but treats them as subjects of curiosity, humour and sport.
Death at Intervals
photo Anna Malin
Death at Intervals
Colleen Burke, Death at Intervals
Death: that’s another one of those big and tiny subjects. Colleen Burke’s Death at Intervals balances its major and minor chords in unexpected ways. Liberally adapted from Jose Saramago’s As Intermitências da Morte, this puppetry work’s narrative delivers an unnamed nation in which death has inexplicably ceased—murders, accidents and even plane crashes leave their mutilated results still counted among the living, though not without resultant agony.
A lot depends on death, it turns out. Puncture the cycle and religion, politics, the economy and much more will suffer. Death at Intervals is less about the metaphysical implications of its premise and more about the socio-economic. At first we have only the moaning of funeral directors to put up with, but in time the wheezing almost-dead build up enough presence to force any audience member to wonder what would happen should cessation really cease. The zombie narrative is omnipresent today, but cauterise it of its violence and things actually get far more unsettling.
Burke’s adaptation bears obvious resonance with today’s Australia; the rising tide of the not-dead is used by a Prime Minister to justify a cruel and demanding new budget, while the fact that the bizarre situation is restricted to one nation establishes a xenophobic obsession with borders that is all too familiar.
Burke and fellow veteran puppeteer Frank Italiano incarnate a range of puppet styles in full audience view, themselves occasionally performing alongside, or instead of, their tiny charges. A character may be embodied by a long and lovingly detailed carving, or by the expert manipulation of little more than a hat. Some of the success here is due to director Rod Primrose of Handspan and Black Hole Theatre. Primrose’s eye for visual nuance and the changing character of the lit puppet are in full effect, but Burke’s puppet designs and performance are the most notable stars.
When Death returns, she is a wonder. A silver-grey skull atop a twisted spine and skeletal hand, she is a puppet of rare ingenuity, straddling the mimetic and abstract, functional and ornate. She happens upon a cellist and becomes variously fascinated and repulsed by him, and the strange conclusion, in which death attains a kind of love, is as mysterious and ephemeral as the exhalation that accompanies its final image. A sigh, a gasp, a death rattle? But this is not a work that looks to answer questions big or small, and is all the more satisfying for it.
Memorandum, creation, audio design, performance, Kate Hunter, Theatre Works, 20 May-1 June; Death at Intervals, creation Colleen Burke, performers Colleen Burke, Frank Italiano, director Dave Evans, La Mama Courthouse, Melbourne, May 14-25
“Meet you at the Judy” is part of the vernacular of performance-making in Brisbane, a refrain heard as artists and audiences rendezvous at the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts on 420 Brunswick Street, Fortitude Valley. The four-storey (plus Bell-Tower studio) heritage building is an old biscuit factory, converted in the halcyon era of cultural infrastructure investment in Queensland in the late 90s.
The thing about the Judy is that it sits in the sweetest spot in the arterial that is the edgy live music and entertainment precinct of Fortitude Valley: the young, the hip and the crazy all walk by seeking kebabs and the pleasures of the night. Like the Powerhouse before it, the Judy has taken a good decade to cement itself into an owned public space, despite such an incredible location and the fact that the building is home to our flagship circus and dance companies: Circa and Expressions Dance Company. But in some mysterious alchemy that seems part good programming and part natural justice, the Judy is well and truly open for business, jammed with gossiping patrons and artists wandering upstairs to use its two intimate studios: the Theatre rehearsal space and the Music rehearsal space.
This change is not only because of the post-industrial elegance of the Judy as a public space, but also a push from the Judy management to invest in ways to open up the space. The Judy was the first to trial licensed cabaret seating. They refurbished the Shopfront venue, formerly an intractable space with concrete floors and intriguing open windows, laying down wooden floors and improving the facilities to make it a functional space for contemporary dance and physical theatre, as well as installation. Consequently, the 300-seat theatre—the Performance Space—and the Shopfront are the most responsive and versatile spaces for experimentation with non-traditional audience reception in the city. Both are regularly transformed into new configurations that surprise, delight and perplex audiences. The Danger Ensemble’s Sons of Sin in an empty Performance Space with a five-storey scaffold is a personal highlight for me (RT 116, p39).
I spoke with Programming Manager, Lewis Jones, a canny and longstanding Brisbane theatre director about the upcoming Judy program and I’m excited to say we have a scoop about a change to their Residency program: Fresh Ground. Fresh Ground has a proud history of supporting local performance-makers, circus and contemporary dance. This ranges from high profile independents such as the Danger Ensemble, the circus collective Casus and contemporary dance company Lisa Wilson Projects. The current Fresh Ground slate includes circus royalty Chelsea McGuffin’s Company 2; Head Office (a Brisbane theatre supergroup with members of The Escapists, The Brides of Frank and Polytoxic); Phluxos2 with choreographers of the moment Neridah Matthaei and Leisel Zink; and energetic, post-gothic contemporary dance-makers Prying Eye.
Traditionally, the Judy’s overall public program is a blend of contemporary music, circus, contemporary dance and theatre, with a strong emphasis on bringing in high-calibre works from interstate and overseas. Historically, there has been a strong correlation between the programming at the Powerhouse and at the Judy and a great deal of the program resource was spent on bringing in shows from outside of Brisbane.
With the currents of Brisbane theatre shifting and a cast of new faces (Artistic Director Kris Stewart at the Powerhouse, incoming Artistic Director Chris Kohn at La Boite), the Judy is responding to the new landscape with an emphasis on local work. Jones wants to make Fresh Ground a platform that supports and “validates” local artists to develop and produce new work at the Judy and to move it on for sustainable touring. This bodes well for a local industry hungry to connect to venues and to find a stable platform to develop new work. On a personal note, I have always found the very short seasons of work at the Judy difficult. Shows are often over before you find them. Perhaps this new approach will settle this restlessness into a more distinctive Judy house style.
The curatorial change is clearest in the upcoming program in the second half of 2014 with new shows from Fresh Grounders old and new: Caligula by the Danger Ensemble, White Porcelain Doll by Prying Eye and Casus’ new work Finding the Silence as well as the perennial Women in Voice. I think the future for the Judy is best summed up by Lewis Jones himself when he says that the mantra at the Judy is “to try and always say, ‘Yes.’”
Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, Fortitude Valley, Brisbane
Depending on which study you read, social media networking may or may not have an improving effect on the mental health of adolescents. Outside of the academy we hear a lot about the web’s risks for young people—cyber bullying, sexual predation, ‘Facebook depression,’ exposure to inappropriate advertising and content—and not much about why so many young people are drawn to it in the first place.
Jesikah, the titular (anti-)heroine of Phillip Kavanagh’s play, performed in this production with persuasively youthful élan by Kate Cheel, is a digital native, a permanently restless member of the iGeneration. Like many of her peers, she has probably already deserted Facebook for mobile messaging apps like Snapchat, which at least she knows her mum (Elizabeth Hay) won’t have figured out how to use yet.
But most of Jesikah’s engagement with social media revolves around the uploading of videos in which, unimpeded by notions of privacy or propriety, she sounds off about her teachers, her friends, her hobbies and, most of all, her endlessly shifting template for personal fame: rock star, actor, whiskey-soaked writer. Online users with names like DemonToaster and OpenSeeSaw variously applaud and troll Jesikah’s posts, her sense of self-worth suspended like a Damoclean Sword between the two extremes.
Her real-world BFF is the seemingly squeaky-clean Denise (also Hay), whose relationship with Jesikah’s internal world—riddled with anxiety and fear of rejection and failure—remains murkily ambiguous throughout. Olivia Zanchetta’s design unobtrusively supports the idea that Jesikah’s headspace is insistently inner-directed, the teenager standing out in punkish red and black while Denise, Jesikah’s mum and her drama teacher Miss H (Hay again) blend into the set’s pinkish-grey wash.
Kavanagh’s script is busy and the dialogue noisy in just the right ways, effervescent with teenage buzzwords and alert to the heightened dynamics and emotional stakes of close high school friendships. The play’s pivot points—heavily accentuated by director Nescha Jelk through an almost dizzying telescoping of the action of the final, increasingly shorter scenes—lie in what in Jesikah’s head are betrayals of her friendship and the passing over of her talents. Fixated like Narcissus on her own (social media) reflection, Jesikah resorts to self-harm as her personality begins to break down, the play taking an altogether darker turn. Her ever more desperate attempts to attract online hits have both a comic and tragic dimension.
But what exactly is Jesikah’s problem? An undistinguished teenager has transformed into an enfant terrible by the play’s end, a trajectory with powerful dramatic motion but that leaves too little explicated. I wanted a clearer sense of the source of anguish in Jesikah’s life, to know how much Kavanagh thinks social media has to answer for in terms of its hold on still-developing minds, and how much of Jesikah’s profound disquiet stems, by contrast, from elsewhere. Given social networking’s relative infancy, the jury remains out on many aspects of its cognitive impact but I can’t help but feel an opportunity may have been missed with Jesikah, rewarding though it is, to mount a stronger case either way.
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State Theatre Company of South Australia, Jesikah, writer Phillip Kavanagh, director Nescha Jelk, performers Kate Cheel, Elizabeth Hay, designer Olivia Zanchetta, lighting Ben Flett, sound Will Spartalis; Hopgood Theatre, Noarlunga, 9 May; Space Theatre, Adelaide 27-31 May
A decade after Greek composer Iannis Xenakis’ death, the rarely performed Pléïades remains uneclipsed in its ability to take audiences on a complex, imaginative journey. In Carriageworks’ Bay 19, Synergy reprised their 2011 performance, pairing it the following evening with Beauty will be amnesiac or not at all, a new work by Australian composer Anthony Pateras. Publicised as a ‘competition,’ Xenakis v Pateras, Synergy framed their consecutive-night shows as an attempt to settle who deserves the appellation of ‘world’s greatest composer for percussion.’
Pléïades
A four-movement composition for six percussionists, Pléïades delivers a galaxy of sound, at once tribal, elemental and kaleidoscopic, as showers of tonal colours ricochet between performers. Xenakis leaves movement sequencing open to performers’ interpretation. Synergy chose the order of metal, keyboards, skins and then the mixture, a choice less notorious than Les Percussions de Strasbourg’s decision at the 1979 premiere to play the piece during a ballet, interspersed with Giovanni Gabrieli’s Renaissance polyphony—at once combining Modernism, moving bodies and history in a constellation of artistic stardom. Synergy’s performance echos that original’s innovation, shaping history by incorporating the moving bodies of the audience into the event.
Six podiums formed a rough ring of about seven metres radius. Each platform overflowed with drums, marimbas, vibraphones and sixxens: microtonal metalophones commissioned in 2011 for the piece. The audience mingled and burbled in the darkened space between platforms and a mixing HQ like a Kugelhopf cake baking. Co-director and choreographer Zsuzsanna Soboslay worked with Synergy to design the simple performance space that melded Synergy’s high art technicalities with hipster lounge-room casualness. She helped Synergy find ways to express the music beyond the formal constraints of its composition and the demands of interpretation. And Synergy made it look easy.
Xenakis is famed for his approaches to form, texture and timbre. “Every single note is precisely calculated and notated, leaving little room for interpretation,” Synergy’s artistic director Timothy Constable said when I spoke with him after the concert. “It’s musically complete. There’s a mythological aspect but the music is fiercely abstract.”
Métaux (Metal) showed off Synergy’s sixxens, which clang, jar and beat in your ears if you’re in close proximity. Patterns emerged from seeming disorder; moments of clarity flickered, always briefly. Clavier (keyboards) featured ascending scalic passages and a notorious double-page spread in which the musicians each played 1,000 notes in hair-raising unison. In other parts they came together and split away, phase-beats in an intricate Mandelbrotian overlay.
Balinese associations often arise in relation to the keyboard movement. Xenakis toured Bali in 1972 with Toru Takemitsu and others, but the scale employed in the section is not, to Constable’s mind, lifted from our neighbours, but rather assumes similar interval relationships. “Xenakis uses an infinite mode that might never come back to zero,” Constable said, “but each octave is different. It can make really melodic cells and chaos. If he’d written ‘in a scale’ or ‘regular mode’ it wouldn’t have that dynamism or range of effects.”
Peaux (Skins) had flashes of mind-boggling synchronicity. Thuds on bass drums were reminiscent of a Law and Order scene-change, punctuating energetic passages. In Mélanges (Mix), the final movement, six other percussionists—Claire Edwardes, Eugene Ughetti, Louise Devenish, Rebecca Lagos, Leah Scholes and Yvonne Lam—ascended the podiums to take some heat off core Synergy members’ mallets for an all-in finale.
Synergy Percussion, Xenakis v Pateras,
photo Michael K Chin
Synergy Percussion, Xenakis v Pateras,
Beauty will be amnesiac or will not be at all
As part of their 40-year celebrations, Synergy commissioned Anthony Pateras to deploy the same instrumentation as in Pléïades. Its title comes from Sylvère Lotringer’s “The Dance Of Signs,” a neo-Marxist semiotic enquiry published in the Hatred of Capitalism anthology (Semiotext(e), 2002). But listening to the music itself, few references to its philosophical underpinnings were obvious.
The composer was present to diffuse electronic sounds and witness the execution of his invention, partially derived and edited from electro-acoustic improvisations with Jérôme Noetinger. Watching Pateras trigger sound cues while he sat amid the world he had created was telling. When he swayed, grimaced, mellowed and absorbed the manifestation of his creation, it looked like he couldn’t savour the moment enough.
On this second evening we, the rising bundt cake, were microwaved between loudspeakers as each podium radiated layers of six-channel electronic sounds through us. Meanwhile the acoustic score utilised woodblocks, crotales, keyboard percussion and drums. Polyrhythms emerged from fervent repetition, periodicity, duplication, recurrence and imperfect copying. Aeroplane sounds, repetitive metallic jitters, hissings, and whooshings proliferated—some plain to hear, others evasively encoded. Sometimes the electronics greased the pan and other times skewered us. It was a physical experience, either way, just as we were warned in a pre-concert announcement about the work’s aggressive dynamic range.
Synergy performers Timothy Constable, Joshua Hill, Bree van Reyk, William Jackson, Mark Robinson and Leah Scholes, a slightly different group from the first night, again encircled the audience. Some seats were provided on the periphery outside the ring, but most people stood or meandered. I noticed that the volume of sound appeared to increase as I moved—not only when shifting closer to sound sources, but even when I spun slowly on the spot. What an amazing discovery that could propel future audience etiquette from mere static reception into soma-sonic investigation!
Constable explained, “I could sense some key flocking motion. During the Xenakis I noticed people were forming into lovely constellations. A perfect semicircle formed facing me, bringing me into heavy duty focus. Here we go! It was quite serene when I realised everyone was there with me.” He confessed, “The social aspect for the audience was just a byproduct. If we’d sold out completely it would have been more of a mosh-pit. It was a gourmet experience then, with room to bust out handstands… I wanted someone to start running around screaming because that’s exactly what I was doing inside during fiendishly difficult passages.”
Like Xenakis, Pateras makes music using systems and models from other disciplines like mathematics. “Anthony doesn’t use musical notation software or anything, so he didn’t have a way to play back his composition and hadn’t heard it until he attended our rehearsals. There’s a 400-500 page long spreadsheet with all the permutations of every magic square in graphs that someone has copied into musical notation.”
Antony Pateras is a philosopher whose axiomatic medium is sound. Obsessed with autonomy, the new, independence and difference, he strives to challenge notions of what music is and can be. Durational play in Beauty… created something which worked not only with spatial metaphors such as -scape and the distances between entities, but also temporal relations. Pateras authors an aesthetic, but does not act like a composer (a trait that he sees as faulty transmission). “Refining an aesthetic can so easily become trapping and killing an aesthetic,” he said. “Names are for tombstones!” He suggests we “stay slippery” so our inquiries don’t become industrialised. Could this be a way to sabotage winning the contest for sovereign percussion lord?
“Seeking fearlessness in form.” “Creative Ethics.” “A relationship with time driven by materials.” These are Pateras mantras that I find beautifully challenging. In a world where everything is recordable, recorded and re-recorded, Pateras asks, “Are we too haunted to invent anything?” His interest in omnipresence of information and its ability to dull desires, fuels his attempts to produce “difficult or almost impossible [works] to imitate.”
Special effects
It was informative to experience this staging dynamic two nights running. At Pléïades it felt awkward, like walking through a long train tunnel in a big city, being unsure whether to smile at strangers or power on, head down. The type of crowd that attends challenging modernist percussion ensemble works is niche enough that familiar faces emerge. Would it be rude to ignore someone you know? This social tension added another layer of engagement. When this dimension quickened my heart rate, my awareness of the music changed: it heightened all my senses. I wanted to dance and move, but didn’t want to distract or divert attention from the musicians or the music. What a dilemma! To live or to let live?
“We’re not dancers. We’re not actors. We’re keenly aware of that. But some works get us thinking and feeling in a certain way.” A stickler for form’s immanent virtues, Timothy Constable revealed, “I have the sense that the more accurately we play these works over the coming years, they will reveal themselves in more beautiful depth. The devil really is in the details.”
Synergy Percussion, Xenakis v Pateras: Pléïades, composer Iannis Xenakis, performers Ian Cleworth, Timothy Constable, Joshua Hill, William Jackson, Mark Robinson, Bree van Reyk, co-director Zsuzsanna Soboslay, Bay 19 Carriageworks, 22 April; Beauty will be amnesiac or will not be at all, composer Anthony Pateras, performers Leah Scholes, Mark Robinson, Joshua Hill, William Jackson, Bree van Reyk, Timothy Constable, sound Byron Scullin, Bay 19 Carriageworks, Sydney, 23 April
RealTime issue #121 June-July 2014 pg. 46
James Nightingale, Voyage Through Radiant Stars, Aurora New Music Festival
courtesy Aurora New Music Festival
James Nightingale, Voyage Through Radiant Stars, Aurora New Music Festival
The first half of the opening night of the 2014 Aurora New Music Festival in Sydney’s west sparkled with variety and invention while the second half introduced us to a major new work, Brian Howard’s Voyage Through Radiant Stars, which shone obsessively with cosmic aspirations.
The immediately engaging concert opener was Marcus Lindberg’s Ablauf (1983/88; Finland) featuring clarinettist Jason Noble in rapid vertiginous flights from raw depths to lucid heights while positioned between the emphatically slow-paced boom of two bass drums (Claire Edwardes, James Townsend). In the end, after a moment of silence there emerged sibilants, sharp consonants, soft drum beats, like distant thunder, final flourishes and a single full-breathed exhalation from Noble.
Ekrem MuLayim’s Sonolith (2014, Australia) is an aural and visual response to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for piano (Roland Peelman) and projections (MuLayim, Mic Gruchy): “certain pitches are ascribed to certain letters, certain chords to certain words and certain melodic phrases to key words or word groups” (composer’s program note). On three long screens, the words appear in various patternings almost simultaneously with the notes, as if the pianist is typing them (an impression reinforced by recurrent dings, piano slaps and cries). The outcome is a flexible minimalism now and then powered by a fluent, assertive stride (from 20s American jazz pianism) or disintegrating into near discordancies.
The inclination of composer and pianist (who is given room to freely interpret) is not seemingly programmatic although Clause 5 on Torture is stressfully fast and high pitched, Clause 7 on Discrimination threatens to break up, 11’s Presumption of Innocence strides proudly and in 14, on Asylum, the loud pedal is held firm on deep notes beneath those rushing on above, as if hope is disintegrating. Associations are fleeting but inevitable in an ambitious and audio-visually potent work (convincingly played by Peelman) although the composer’s commitment to illuminating all the clauses of the charter with a limited sound palette and a lot of reading proved a tad taxing in the long run.
Claire Edwardes, Aurora New Music Festival
photo courtesy Aurora
Claire Edwardes, Aurora New Music Festival
Iannis Xenakis’ Rebonds A/B (1987-89, France) is a work for percussion in two resonating movements. The first, A, has a dance-like compulsiveness, its deep beat soon overlaid with a multitude of improvisation-like, increasingly rapid-fire flourishes until it finally slows to a hesitant if emphatic halt. B feels less complex with its open pattern on drums and then on woodblocks; then it’s back to the drums at a steady pace but with some fast counterpointing. Pause. The woodblocks chirrup and are joined by the drums in a race to the finish. Both movements are finely articulated, played as ever with Edwardes’ capacity for finesse and passion—Xenakis’ music might be conceived in part algorithmically but she makes its beauty self-evident.
Sydney composer Alex Pozniak paired virtuosic dijeridu players Mark Atkins and Gumaroy Newman in his new work Blow by Blow, focusing on the drone potency of the rich sonic textures offered by these traditional instruments. Alongside the anticipated sounds of animal and bird cries, cars and aeroplanes, soft sssh-ings and Atkins’ vocals we hear strikingly high, long sustained horn-like notes, pulsating deep beats and surprising (and recurrent) glissandi. Each player handles three instruments, swapping from one to another, introducing new layers of sound at once familiar and strange—as if not coming from dijeridus at all. At the end the players slip into improvisation, merging with the distant offstage strings of two members of the Noise Quartet.
Brian Howard’s Voyage Through Radiant Stars (2013, an Aurora Festival commission) with its constant ascending flights felt more often cyclical than linear, each star (one per movement within its “radiant constellation”) evoked as if like any other—save in degrees of luminous intensity or aural mood, including passion or awe as brass and percussion repeatedly and thunderously grounded the work with an emphatic motif often at the beginning of movements and then later in each. Against this deep tremulousness, as if in flight from it (or like lines of radiating light), is the saxophone (James Nightingale), variously solo, placed within the 18-strong ensemble or before it as in a concerto—which the overall work is not, at least not conventionally.
The compositional motifs in the sax solos and ‘concerto’ movements evoke the traveller more than they do the stars. There’s a greater freedom than felt in the gravitational pull of the brass. Indeed there are movements when the saxophone seems to draw the ensemble up with it—the drumming accelerates, oboe, clarinet and brass scale upward, the strings echoing the saxophone’s ascending dance.
Howard and Nightingale exploit much of the saxophone’s range—pure, whistling, staccato-voiced, jazzy, guttural and striving and soaring to ever increasing heights before commencing its flight yet again, but with little suggestion of fall or defeat despite the ensemble rumblings beneath. It is the characterful saxophone, in a work of some 60 minutes, that keeps Voyage Through Radiant Stars luminous, in a journey in which the saxophone is itself a star or, elsewhere, part of one or even absent, just listening, when one star is solely represented by a sinuous string quartet. This is an epic work, needing firmer acquaintance and perhaps greater concision, but on first hearing superbly realised by James Nightingale, conductor Daryl Pratt and the Sydney Conservatorium Modern Music Ensemble.
The Aurora New Music Festival’s opening night proved to be memorable, programmed with fascinating new Australian works that innovated with text and piano, the dijeridu and the relationship between saxophone and ensemble. The long first half of the concert did put Voyage Through Radiant Stars at risk; my attention certainly wavered, partly because the work’s patterning became hypnotic however varied it was in the detail. If deserving a stand-alone outing, its premiere performance was nonetheless welcome and highly significant. Thank you, Aurora.
Aurora New Music Festival 2014, Opening Night, Aurora Artistic Director James Eccles, Riverside Theatre, Parramatta, 30 April
What’s more courageous: doing something wild where anything is permitted, or doing something vaguely contrary where conventions are still strictly adhered to? If scope and scale matter, then choristers are some of the most dauntless folk out there. As part of this year’s Aurora Festival, participants from the community joined in Aurora Chorealis, a day-long program of workshops and performances, with guidance from Song Company, Scandinavian calling expert Christine Strandli and vocal coach Rachelle Elliott at the Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre in Penrith.
These Western Sydney singers put on one hell of a show at the evening concert. But the program was far too long. Much of the repertoire explored diversity and obscurity with a little too much vigour. The exceptional Song Company held our interest with two sets. First their signature repertoire including 13th century chant and a Cantiga from the wise old Alfonso captivated, followed by spectacular contemporary songs of Elena Kats-Chernin and Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen.
After a trip to Estonia with Kooskōlas, a local community choir about to embark on an international tour to sing at the UNESCO Heritage-listed Estonian Song Festival, Song Company returned with a light set of popular song from more recent centuries including an arrangement of Bon Iver’s “Skinny Love” made famous again in 2011 by starlet Birdy. Other recondite diversions came from Sonya Holowell who delivered a committed and expressive performance of Gyorgy Kurtag’s Jozsef Attila Fragments. This confronting modernism, starkly lit and traversing more octaves and emotional vignettes than Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst’s side-show, was followed by Strandli’s rendition of four Sami songs. These Norwegian ditties had subtly shifting tonal centres and were based on non-rhyming poetry without definite structures.
As is often the case at community choral events (this has been my experience as a chorister) there are seldom more in the crowd than on stage. It was a great idea of the festival to reach out to the public by making Aurora Chorealis inclusive, open to anyone to participate, regardless of previous singing experience.
Aurora New Music Festival commissioned two new works for this event’s massed choir. The first, Cooee Karjapasun by Paul Kadak, explored sonic calls common in Australia and Estonia. A cooee might be vocally sounded in the bush to echo-locate or signal to a companion, and a Karjapasun is a type of herding trumpet, nearly two metres long. Folk stories tell us that these instruments are not allowed to touch little boys who instead should play trumpets and horns, and that’s about the only fact available online about them. Needless to say, the Karjapasun entered this aural landscape in foghorny tones. The second premiere, Aurora by Paul Jarman, was sung twice by the massed choir as both finale and encore. Performers had learnt Jarman’s piece from scratch on the day under Roland Peelman’s animated direction. With whispering, stomping and clapping this was the show-stopper.
Unusual repertory. Daring non-uniformity in performance attire. Risqué back-row bop-alongers. Aurora Chorealis showcased the everyday gallantry of the community choir.
Aurora Festival & The Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre: Aurora Chorealis, Song Company, director Roland Peelman; Sonya Holowell; Kooskōlas, director Rachelle Elliott; Penrith Conservatorium Singers; Christine Strandli; massed choir Aurora Chorealis, Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre, Penrith, NSW, 3 May
Written on the body, University of Queensland Anthropology Museum
photo Carl Warner
Written on the body, University of Queensland Anthropology Museum
Two exceptional exhibitions at the University of Queensland Anthropology Museum both involve relations between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and their artefacts and the artefacts associated with European Australia—mobile phones, kitchen tools, hunting tools, potato mashers, shields. Visit and visit again.
Gapuwiyak Calling is a fascinating presentation of Yolngu people (mainly Gapuwiyak community, Arnhem Land) talking about and showing how they’ve used mobile phones as media devices since 3G arrived there in 2008. The standout for me is where the Yolngu have taken ringtones, ditched the defaults, and made them their own as a signal of place and family relations.
“This is a song by my mother-in-law’s brother, especially beautiful as it is a clan funeral song,” says a woman speaking of her ringtone as a moment for deep feeling and sorrow. A young man listens to his favourite band “all the time to feel good,” another to the call of the Green Frog, another to a clan song from a circumcision ceremony, yet another to a ceremony with her father singing. He’s been dead 12 years, she misses him—the ringtone reminds her of him and fills her with sadness.
The oft expressed use of ringtones as triggers for sadness, concern and worry about family is perhaps the most surprising aspect of the show. Contrast with mainstream (Anglo/Euro) culture, where sorrow and worry are emotions to avoid, quasi-taboo, indications of failure in emotional control. For the Yolngu in this exhibition sorrow and worry about family are embraced directly and honestly.
Similarly for the old-style home-movie directness of the short phone videos of kids dancing, the grandpa and grandson going out fishing in the tinny, man and boy using in-camera edits to make a little magic show to send to friends and family. This relatively direct expression of lived experience is now almost impossible to achieve in places where mainstream media dominates the flow of information with non-local imagery and a hubris that can even stake a claim to reality as a genre.
Written on the body, University of Queensland Anthropology Museum
photo Carl Warner
Written on the body, University of Queensland Anthropology Museum
The other exhibition entitled Written on the body, is a collaborative work from artist Judy Watson and the Director of the UQ Anthropology Museum, Diana Young. It is an astonishingly layered, gentle, subtle and visually sophisticated exhibition combining Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander material culture with well used household kitchenware of the modern suburban era—the toolkits of everyday life spanning the last hundred years or more. Objects are beautifully arranged in small groupings on the wall, on plinths, in “museum quality” cabinets, or on a glass shelf, casting shadows below and along the gallery wall.
Relations within the groupings might be visual (a cylindrical grater next to a club garnished with old hand-forged nails), functional (a clear glass tumbler and a bailer shell) or both visual and functional—pink silicon ice cube tray next to a flat tray-like rock, both having hemispherical depressions for holding whatever the person wants held.
Collected in the early part of the 20th century, almost all the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander objects were stripped of their particulars and written on during the collection process. While the show has an underlying critique of this colonial naming and claiming, stripping objects of their social relations not only dehumanises them, but also transforms the objects into signifiers of universal embodiment and through this universality colonial practice speaks against itself.
We see two shields and an aluminium teapot clumped together on the wall—they have handles: the handles are the same in size, the same in shape, the same in ‘graspability.’ A potato masher is placed next to a smooth, graspable rock, both are objects through which the body acts upon the world to pound and soften starchy foods. Such is the underlying humanity of the show, that all bodies across all time are the same body with the same functionality. Stripped of their particulars, of the relation between maker, owner and user, the objects end up not as ‘your’ object but as ‘our’ object, part of the common human heritage of building a toolkit that is fit for purpose, part of the transformation of the world into graspable, scrapable, heftable tools. Needs and goals acting into the world through a world made into tools. By us. For us. Always and everywhere.
Gapuwiyak Calling, curator Miyarrka Media in association with the UQ Anthropology Museum; Written on the body, curators Judy Watson, Diana Young; University of Queensland Anthropology Museum, Brisbane, 15 March-15 Aug
My favourite work in Dark Heart, the Adelaide Biennial, was by Ian Burns—a fantastically large, ramshackle wooden construction, which through seemingly primitive analogue magic, projects images and texts while playing little ditties to itself. Thus, a few weeks later I was very happy to discover that the assorted materials that had been piling up in the UTS Gallery had transformed into an Ian Burns solo exhibition, Too Much is Real.
The pieces in Too Much is Real use similar methodologies to the Dark Heart sculpture but are displayed as smaller, single units. One construction, Blender (2014), presents just that—a domestic blender that sporadically activates, along with a keyboard that plays fragments from the Sex Pistols’ “Pretty Vacant” and ABBA’s “SOS.” A signature technique of Burns is the use of magnifying glasses and light bulbs to project squiggly lines and texts; here he alternates between lyrical fragments from both songs—but timed with the alternated tune. It’s a kind of analogue mash-up. (The exhibition title is also taken from the same Sex Pistols’ anthem.)
Another assemblage, Martha’s Shadow (2010), is an earlier work that uses old household lamps and magnifying glasses to create a static light projection illustrating the primitive outline of a ship—a homage to the one that ran aground while discovering Lake Macquarie, the area from which Burns hails. The third assemblage, Strange Cloud Above (2012), offers a fine example of Burns’ trompe l’oeil technique. A monitor on the front of the assemblage shows a simple landscape scene with drifting clouds, but as you move to the back you see that the image is being created in real time from analogue materials—a strip of carpet, a fan and light refracted through a dimpled salad bowl. The combination of process and product in these assemblages makes them enclosed systems, self-contained micro-universes that are conceptually satisfying yet imbued with poetic ambiguity.
The final work is Breath (AC) (2014), a video which depicts a monstrous corridor at Bunnings hardware store with a single fluorescent light gently swaying in the breeze of the air conditioning. While markedly different from the other assemblages it deftly summarises Burns’ preoccupations with light, simple actions, the found object or experience and a DIY ethic.
Ian Burns, Extended Stage (2014)
photo Alex Davies
Ian Burns, Extended Stage (2014)
But there is even more to the Burns experience. Delayed by red tape, Extended Stage, a site-specific installation in the rail tunnel behind UTS Gallery, was finally mounted just after the gallery instalment was over. Running down either side of the dark tunnel are four pairs of antique china cabinets. Those on the left contain medium-sized electric pianos which activate in sequence, playing single notes like slowed down Morse Code, amplified by large gramophone horns mounted on top. The cabinets on the right become tiny stages for a series of what Burns calls phenomenological actions: a vacuum cleaner on reverse suspends ping pong balls in the air; a cabinet begins to gush with water; another manifests puffs of smoke; the fourth quietly and patiently freezes. The elemental nature of these images is undercut by the mechanical means of their generation.
This corridor leads you to a final alcove, flanked by terrariums containing grasses blowing in the breeze from a fan. An old ship’s piano forms an altarpiece and as you step onto the scrap wood parquet floor you activate pistons and motors which depress keys rendering a wonky atonal tune. The entire installation is in fact driven by sensors and, rather than using cables, elements are activated by lights, with sequences flashing up and down the tunnel. While outwardly it appears purely mechanical there’s some significant digital programming involved here.
In Extended Stage, Burns’ affinity with objects and materials, his nostalgia for domestic furniture and appliances combined with his mechanical acumen create a wonderful wabi sabi world, one in which machines come with their own rituals. But there’s also a sense of melancholy surrounding these objects and their actions, as though they feel misunderstood, their poetry unheard in the bright daylight beyond the tunnel. I leave Extended Stage feeling for these machines, wondering if there might be something very important to learn from their curious communications.
Mikhail Karikis, Children of the Unquiet 2013-14 (video still), courtesy the artist
The title of the 19th Biennale of Sydney, You Imagine What You Desire, may have been a nod to George Bernard Shaw but with its emphasis on psychological and sensory experiences its curatorial philosophy was unashamedly Surrealist. While the influence of Surrealism on contemporary culture is everywhere apparent, its legacy is more contested and as a curatorial strategy for such a heavily scrutinised event as the Biennale it represented a gamble. For while supporters of Surrealism passionately defend its attitude of psychic revolt as binding the world of dreams and desire to social transformation, detractors just as readily dismiss its infatuation with the unconscious as a mere flight from reality.
Like the polarities that separate the proponents and detractors of Surrealism, the 19th Biennale of Sydney has inevitably provoked both positive and negative reactions in equal measure. How much audiences got out of it appeared largely determined by the extent of one’s willingness to surrender to Artistic Director Juliana Engberg’s somewhat esoteric premise that art represents a form of “active desiring.” Given that I hold the first view of Surrealism, I was genuinely excited to encounter a Biennale that in most respects offered compelling evidence for the continued vitality of the movement’s politics of subversive re-enchantment. As expected, moving image works feature prominently across all five principal venues: the MCA, the AGNSW and Cockatoo Island as well as Artspace and Carriageworks. And while thematic concerns ranged from explorations of cognition, memory and psychoanalysis to more humanistic and ethnographic works, the thread of continuity among them was undoubtedly a sustained fascination with film as a medium of sensation.
Douglas Gordon, Phantom, 2011
photo Ben Symons, 19th Biennale of Sydney
Douglas Gordon, Phantom, 2011
Douglas Gordon
Since he was one of the first artists to pioneer video art as a conduit to psychic disturbances and disruptions in perception, the invitation to Douglas Gordon to present the Biennale’s opening keynote lecture signalled Engberg’s interest in exploring these themes in Sydney. As the banners and bill posters went up in late March, the disembodied eye of Gordon’s epic video installation Phantom (2011), made in collaboration with musician Rufus Wainwright, cast its uncanny gaze across the city. At the MCA, where cognitive, Surrealist and psychoanalytically inflected works across mediums were arranged in what Engberg termed “proximities and itineraries of encounter,” Gordon’s Phantom engineered a spatially disorienting sensorium. Placed upon a stage was a Steinway and another piano burnt to the ground in a ruinous heap lying beside it, creating an atmosphere both funereal and theatrical. As Wainwright’s heavily made-up eye blinked eerily in slow motion on a luminous white screen the melodious lament of his vocals and piano resounded in the space and the viewer was absorbed in a moving yet impersonal performance of grief.
Pipilotti Rist
Where Gordon’s video work explores the darker undercurrents of the workings of film, memory and the psyche, there was a fascinating dialectical tension between the dystopic Surrealism of Phantom and the engrossing utopian sensuality of Pipilotti Rist’s six-channel high digital video installation, Mercy Garden Retour Skin (2014). Situated on the ground floor of the MCA, Rist’s immersive “video aquarium” enveloped the viewer in a liquid and ethereal space brimming with lush imagery of microscopic and macroscopic views of nature, seducing the viewer with the psychedelic cosmologies of the natural world. Sometimes critically overlooked thanks to their hedonism, Rist’s installations nevertheless reinterpret the Surrealist notion of libidinal excess as a subversive force from a feminist perspective. In overstimulating the senses Rist seeks to dissolve the boundaries of the ego upon which we base not only our identity but also the repressive and disciplinary structures that order the world at large.
Tacita Dean, Event for a Stage, 2014, presented at Carriageworks in association with ABC RN, courtesy the artist, Fifth Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris, co-commissioned by the 19th Biennale of Sydney and Carriageworks
photo Zan Wimberley
Tacita Dean, Event for a Stage, 2014, presented at Carriageworks in association with ABC RN, courtesy the artist, Fifth Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris, co-commissioned by the 19th Biennale of Sydney and Carriageworks
Tacita Dean
Riffing further on the Surrealist associations, British artist Tacita Dean has remarked that “André Breton once explained ‘objective chance’ as external circumstance acting in response to unspoken desires and demands of the human psyche.” Highly regarded for the conceptual elegance of her rigorously edited 35mm and 16mm film installations, Dean is an artist for whom the workings of chance, or the “lucky find,” has played a determining role in her practice and as a highlight of the Biennale’s middle program the artist travelled to Sydney to undertake the risky venture of her first foray into live performance, Event for a Stage (2014). Dean insists that she never pre-plans or storyboards her films, preferring to work from a state of chaos in an indeterminate artistic process that threatened to unravel as she moved into the scripted, rehearsed and ritualised world of theatre.
The opportunity to present a performance work was prompted by the inclusion of Carriageworks as a Biennale venue partner and in response to Engberg’s invitation Dean devised the intriguing meta-theatrical scenario of casting an actor to play himself in the role of an actor. The experimental undertaking was accepted by British film, television and theatre actor Stephen Dillane though not without trepidation. Not only was the project lacking in the usual credentials that an actor relies upon to assess a role, like a script and a story; even a week out from the first programmed performance details of its content remained scant prompting speculation of tensions between the two collaborators. As it turns out, these tensions were productively utilised by Dean who turned the mismatched expectations between actor and artist into the ‘middle ground’ where the limits of what delineates visual art from theatre were bravely tested in a highly exposed fashion.
From the outset, Event for a Stage strategically blurred the lines between artifice and real life. At each performance audiences were seated in the round and the stage simply comprised a circle drawn on the ground with white chalk. Costumed in a periwig and white face powder (which varied slightly with each performance) and wearing a modern top and trousers, Dillane was immediately present on stage, stalking the perimeter of the circle as the audience entered the space. There was a tense atmosphere in the theatre as if we had stumbled into a dress rehearsal or trespassed onto a movie set as two cameras stationed on tripods and manned by crew filmed the performance in real time. As Dillane switched between a kaleidoscope of personas, veering from Shakespeare’s Prospero and a version of himself to readings from Heinrich Von Kleist’s On the Marionette Theatre, it became apparent that the central drama in fact lay in the antagonism between the actor and the artist who had cast him in this most unsatisfactory of roles.
Seated in the front row of the audience, Tacita Dean periodically slipped Dillane pieces of paper (which he sometimes snatched) with notes that probed the inner workings of the actor’s process and her own. In her recent film works Dean has largely worked with ambient sound, however Event for a Stage represented a return to narrative and the spoken word. Intertextual references abounded and the storm of The Tempest, which of course is not a natural phenomenon but a product of Prospero’s magic, particularly resonated with Dean’s concern to reveal the artistic process as artifice, an illusory surface that says more about the preoccupations, obsessions and desires of the conjurer than it does about any objective reality or subject portrayed. In one sense falling short (one suspects deliberately) of presenting a satisfying conclusion that resolved its disparate parts, Event for a Stage nevertheless succeeded in the most difficult task of absorbing the audience in the drama of its self-reflexive concerns. Its coup was to turn the precarious uncertainties of the artist’s encounter with the medium of theatre into a disquieting meditation upon the performative nature of art, identity and life itself.
At Carriageworks
Not only propelling Tacita Dean’s courtship of chance into the risky terrain of theatre, the inclusion of Carriageworks as a venue and partner also provided the Biennale with expanded space in the form of a newly opened Bay. Previously leased as a film studio, Engberg responded to the recent filmic origins of the space with screen-based works that charted surreal currents between the structures of the cinema and the psyche. In its dark nocturnal ambience there was a scenic reconstruction of a Disney children’s classic in Mastering Bambi (2011) by Dutch duo Broersen & Lukács; a trippy journey into the repressed artistic alter-ego of an architect in Henry Coombes’s I am the Architect (2012); and an uncanny remediation of the 1930s Hollywood musical in Mathias Poledna’s A Village by the Sea (2011), among other works. Particularly impressive was Brisbane artist Daniel McKewen’s Running Men (2008-14), a five-screen installation that composited footage of running scenes by Hollywood’s leading men, such as Harrison Ford and Tom Cruise, onto black backgrounds. Divorced from their original context and suspended in a repetitive motion the running scene was exposed as a mere special effect that nevertheless embodies a powerful ideal of masculinity shaped by, and reflected in, action film culture.
Where the video installations at Carriageworks sought to subvert the entertainment values of film to illuminate cinema as a psychic space of fantasy and desire, nearby the presentation of The Long Program was more subdued. A rolling two-day program of films by artists working with feature length or documentary style and screened in a dedicated theatrette, many of the films were drawn from Northern Europe and could be situated within the ethnographic turn in video art characterised by research-driven projects that use non-actors and involve extensive collaboration and low production values. In the selection of films that I caught not all projects transcended the ordinary but those that did, such as Renzo Marten’s confronting journey into the spectacle of poverty in the African Congo, Episode III (2008), were reminders that artist documentaries can make important interventions into the dominant perspectives circulated by mainstream media.
On other screens
While these ethnographic works provided a counterpoint to the more spectacular larger-scale moving image installations, there were also a number of humanistic gems scattered across other venues. Over on Cockatoo Island, the post-industrial site provided an evocative setting for the screening of Mikhail Karikis’ Children of Unquiet (2013), a stunning portrayal of a group of young Italian children occupying a recently abandoned workers village located in the vaporous terrain of an industrialised geothermal region in Tuscany. In a haunting collage of human, industrial and geothermal sonorities the children’s voices, movements and their uninhibited play reactivated the disused village, releasing a sense of potential amid its industrial ruins. At the AGNSW, Australian video artist Angelica Mesiti’s In the Ear of the Tyrant (2013-14) similarly sculpted space with sound. In the cathedral-like space of a 20-metre high limestone cave in Sicily, the artist engaged an Italian singer to perform a traditional lamentation. As the acoustic properties of the cave amplified the intensity of the vocalised mourning, Mesiti’s video offered a powerful connection to a lost tradition of catharsis rarely expressed in the modern world.
The Surrealists believed that in liberating the world of dreams, the unconscious, the irrational and those two key terms in the Biennale title, imagination and desire, they might prise open a more enchanted reality. World events extinguished their optimism, yet whether subliminally courted through objective chance or returning unbidden in moments of heightened affect and visual shock, the 19th Biennale of Sydney revealed to what extent sensation, rather than mere perception, continues to shape our encounters with contemporary art. In this respect You Imagine What You Desire was indeed a Biennale of “lucky finds.”
You Imagine What You Desire, 19th Biennale of Sydney, Artistic Director Juliana Engberg, Museum of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Carriageworks, Cockatoo Island, Artspace, Sydney, 21 March–9 June.
The gracious old stone house in the leafy inner Adelaide suburb of Parkside—the Contemporary Art Centre of SA’s home for around half a century—has been the subject of several exhibitions intended to address its architecture and its function as an exhibition space. For example, CACSA Contemporary 2013: Provisional State Part Two comprised works by James Dodd, KAB 101 and Johnnie Dady that deliberately filled the three main internal spaces so fully that viewers hardly had room to move, drawing attention to the limitations of the space for exhibition.
The latest occupation of the building is by the now Melbourne-based Adelaide graphic designer turned visual artist Sam Songailo whose oeuvre recalls 20th century abstraction, especially 1960s Op Art and Geometric Abstraction. Songailo’s Digital Wasteland is a painting of complex grid-like patterns that covers the entire inner walls and floor of the gallery, much of it in dayglo colours under UV lights. Vividly expressionistic colour contrasts create a shimmering, disorienting effect and there are many subtle nuances in the patterning. Here and there are coloured sticks leaning against the wall—strips of MDF cut from the temporary walls Songailo painted for CACSA’s New New survey exhibition (2010)—and there is a video of the painted walls and floor of his contemplative 2013 Zen Garden installation at Adelaide’s Fontanelle Gallery. By incorporating fragments of previous work, Digital Wasteland becomes a study of his work. Songailo also makes abstract paintings and some of these adorn CACSA’s walls, referencing the gallery’s exhibition format and subject matter of earlier years.
In eschewing narrative or direct political commentary, Songailo’s work offers a return to optical experience, extended here into spatial experience. In calling to mind the work of Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely, it reconsiders Modernism and revitalises the technological sublime. But in contrast to his previous installations and extensive public art (at a train station, in a car park, on a road and under a bridge) there are discordant elements in Digital Wasteland, for example, the gestural blurring of some passages of paint, which disrupt its mathematical precision and restore, the human element. His addition of pictures on the wall, the sticks and the video, the smeared paint and the use of colours associated with street art distance Songailo’s work from the formal closure and perfection of high Modernist Geometric Abstraction, reminding us of the inevitability of imperfect reality. This isn’t a virtual world, nor the return of the Modern after all. Digital Wasteland contemplates a post-digital world.
Songailo’s installation is nicely complemented by Zoe Kirkwood’s installation in the CACSA Project Space adjacent to the main building. ENTER EXCESS: Space Invaders combines dazzlingly coloured painting with mechanical sculpture. The publicity states it’s intended to “…engage with notions of contemporary excess and superabundance…” and the transposition of “the visual extravagance and opulence of 17th century Baroque into a contemporary art format…” This is a very different theme from Songailo’s, but the juxtaposition of Kirkwood’s work with his creates a powerful resonance that generates great interest in formalist art. Among numerous other prizes, Kirkwood, from the University of South Australia, has recently been awarded the $35,000 Dr Harold Schenberg Art Prize at the 2014 Hatched: National Graduate Show in Perth.
Sam Songailo, Digital Wasteland, Zoe Kirkwood, ENTER EXCESS: Space Invaders, CACSA, Adelaide, 24 April-24 May
Typically the task of a survey is to historicise and contextualise an artist’s practice with the aim of revealing how it has unfolded over time and where it is headed. There was a certain novelty then in the idea of one of the boundary riders of Australian media art, TV Moore, self-curating his recent mid-career survey, Rum Jungle, at Campbelltown Arts Centre. While expecting an exhibition that was a bit out of the ordinary, it was a surprise to discover to what extent Moore had engineered what was essentially an anti-survey, a kaleidoscopic romp designed to pervert the conventions of the survey in the most delirious and disorienting fashion possible.
Having transformed the gallery’s white walls into a lurid candy-coloured space, Rum Jungle was worlds apart from the pared back gothic spectrality of the video works for which Moore became renowned during the 2000s. With no catalogue or wall plaques the viewer was encouraged to explore the galleries intuitively rather than programmatically. Predominantly comprising Moore’s recent hyperactive cartoon animations, colour-saturated psychedelic painting-photographs and light box imagery, Rum Jungle’s presentation of mainly new work was lightly contextualised by a condensed presentation of Moore’s earlier body of work.
For all its claims to happy anarchy then, Rum Jungle actually appeared a brave refusal on the artist’s part to reify his own practice. The works were not chronologically arranged, however the inclusion of a handful of earlier pieces provided clues as to how to decode the exhibition’s logic. A key work in this respect was Moore’s 2009 video installation, What Say U Wii?, a single projection portrait of an adult video gamer in a blond wig and oversized nerd glasses who riffs into the camera on the merits of Wii vs Nintendo DS. Filmed against the distinctive green of the chroma key screen, a trigger for the gallery’s brightly-hued walls, the juxtaposition of an adult slacker persona with the soundtrack of a young boy’s voice projected a sense of dislocated identity that anchored Moore’s concern in Rum Jungle to explore the psychological implications of virtual immersion.
TV Moore has long exhibited a preoccupation with the subliminal elements of screen culture. His recent transition to animated video extends these concerns albeit in the more spatial medium of cartoons, in which moving figures exist in a state of a-temporal flux, rather than in the more temporally complex and richly allusive medium of film. For the presentation of two animated GIF works, Pig GIF (2014) and Bike GIF (2014), Moore installed the pair of animations on flat-screen monitors placed at crooked angles on a partially collapsed piece of metal scaffolding. In Pig GIF a man clutches a beer in one hand and rides cavalierly upon the back of a pig cantering horizontally across the screen while a visual collage of sexy consumer imagery pulsates in the background. Banal yet seductively hypnotic, the sped-up time of the GIF amplifies the alienation of the surface and signals the dystopia of psychological space constituted by repetition and depthlessness.
The trope of the outsider figure has underpinned some of Moore’s most memorable works such as his acclaimed video cycle The Neddy Project (2001-04). While not an explicit feature of Rum Jungle, the outsider was present in a few guises including in a pair of future primitive light box images featuring the artist inhabiting the identity of hermitic painter Ian Fairweather. One of the Fairweather images was sited near Moore’s suite of nine cibachrome print paintings, Rum Jungle Series (2014), deepening the allusions to outsider art in the works. In this suite of abstracted art brut-style portraiture, Moore melds recurring motifs like the free-floating eye with broad gestural brush strokes and thick drips and smears of paint. Yet in presenting the paintings in the smooth high-gloss finish of the cibachrome print the sensuality of the painted surface is negated and transformed into a more standardised photographic serialisation.
While Rum Jungle allocated generous space to the new works, the history of Moore’s video practice was largely confined to the darkened interior of a single room with the atmosphere of a time capsule. The effect of pulling together several multi-channel installations into an assemblage of videos screened on old analogue television sets was of a polyphonous quoting and sampling of past projects. The aural assault of the sound bleed between videos was not conducive to focused viewing, although one work presented fairly discretely was The Dead Zone (2003). More than a decade after its initial presentation the portrait of a possibly hunted man stumbling and tripping backwards through a deserted cityscape still conveys a palpable sense of post-millennial unease.
Rum Jungle presented itself as an intoxicated and chaotic ramble through a psychedelic fun parlour but ultimately its seductive surfaces were a ruse. Across a decade of video practice, TV Moore peered into the dark recesses of screen culture as a void into which we project our desires only to have their fulfilment endlessly deferred. Rum Jungle did not suggest an abandonment of these concerns but continuation in a new guise—the manic intensity of its trippy animated world was far from innocent whimsy but confronted the viewer, rather, with a discomforting harbinger of the inevitable alienations of a depthless future.
TV Moore’s Rum Jungle, Campbelltown Arts Centre Sydney, 22 March–25 May
It begins with a dive 310 metres down into the lush Jurassic rainforest of the Jamison Valley. From here you disembark onto the Lilli Pilli Link, a winding boardwalk which takes you on a 30-minute stroll through the forest past the 30 sculptures comprising this year’s Sculpture at Scenic World.
The competition, now in its third year, faces considerable environmental and aesthetic challenges presented by the highly sensitive nature of its rainforest location. Even some of the mossy rocks, my guide tells me, harbour ecosystems which have taken millions of years to evolve. The weight of artworks must be taken into consideration to avoid soil compaction. The entire exhibition takes an intensive three weeks to install and remains in situ for another three.
Alongside these environmental concerns stands the aesthetic problem of how to make artwork resonate conceptually and visually in such imposing surroundings. To attempt to make a bold statement is almost futile; the forest tends to dwarf sculptures, to swallow them up. Most artworks selected by this year’s judges—Anthony Bond, Binghui Huangfu and Richard Goodwin—have been designed to emerge subtly from the brilliant tangle of vines, foliage and rocks. Encountering even the larger works among the abundance of natural forest detail is like stumbling across some small natural curiosity on a bushwalk: a nest or a cluster of berries.
A few of the most effective pieces are not immediately prepossessing but gain power the longer you look at them, raising questions about the relationship between man-made and natural. In Jacqueline Spedding’s winning entry Transcend, a large cluster of white flowerpots hangs in a state of discolouration and decay from the sinewy branches of a tree vine and spreads onto the ground below. At first glance the effect is slightly jarring: an impression of tacky intrusion. But pause a little longer to examine these distressed production-line objects—each actually an individual ceramic piece crafted by Spedding—and an uneasy meditation on the fragile barrier between the domestic and the wild arises.
A similar theme is apparent in Network Breakdown by DoGsWooD, a work which first assails the eye with an awkward collection of what appear to be steel aircon ducts, or perhaps filing cabinets, sprawling down a small slope. As with Spedding’s work, however, a closer look reveals the organic taking over in the form of an extensive root system joining box to box and blending into the environment, connecting the machine-made to the earth in a display of Cronenbergian mutation. In a further twist, while the boxes appear to be steely the entire work is sculpted wood.
This masquerading of the hand-made behind a deceptively machined appearance reaches its peak in Louis Pratt’s contorted life-size figure, A Backwards Attitude. Metallic, slick and out of place, yet strangely confident in its prehistoric forest surrounds, it’s a 3D print, the very definition of hands-off process—until you learn that Pratt himself built the printer that realised the sculpture.
While these three works occupy an interesting grey area between artificiality and nature, other sculptures fall on either side of the more straightforward divide between minimalist abstraction and idiosyncratic whimsy. CULKIN+GEYER’s Uh-uh! A forest! A big dark forest, cuts through the intricate curves of the landscape with hard-edged bars of colour, suspended yet heavy to the eye, while around the corner Ana Carter’s Dream Catchers, assembled from mattress frames and other found objects, demonstrates a more personal engagement with flora and fauna. Continuing the whimsical strain, Todd Fuller’s pastel ceramic bunny men enact a dark tableau, adding a note of subversive weirdness.
The feature sculpture in the exhibition, Ken Unsworth’s Harlequin’s Shuttle, isn’t easily categorised. Commissioned especially for Sculpture at Scenic World by curator Lizzy Marshall, the work’s title describes it aptly. In an elegant pattern of coloured perspex it rises, ever so slightly off kilter, in the manner of some exquisite stained glass sci-fi religious monument, alternately glowing and dulling with the changing light. The lyrebirds apparently love it.
The lone sound work in the exhibition, Three Phases of the Dark Moon, is located within the darkness of a reconstructed coal miner’s hut on the boardwalk. David Sudmalis has composed a sonorous melodic piece incorporating infrasonic sound; the sombre quality lends itself to meditation while simultaneously underlining the closeness and darkness of the hut. To enter is to escape the sheer scale of the forest for a more intimate space redolent of recent human history.
There’s a sense at Sculpture at Scenic World that spectacle isn’t the main game here; a welcome absence of brashness that can afflict other open-air sculpture competitions. Thanks as much to curator Lizzy Marshall and the considerable efforts of the installation team as to the artists involved, this year’s exhibition inevitably draws our attention, in contrasting ways, to the unique environment which houses it.
Sculpture at Scenic World: 2014 Exhibition, Katoomba, 24 April-18 May
Gary Carsley, D.106 The Annunciation (Whitlam in China), detail, 2014, courtesy the artist and Thatcher Projects, New York and Torch Gallery, Amsterdam
photo Jennifer Leahy
Gary Carsley, D.106 The Annunciation (Whitlam in China), detail, 2014, courtesy the artist and Thatcher Projects, New York and Torch Gallery, Amsterdam
“It’s Time.” With this slogan Gough Whitlam swept to power as Labor Prime Minister in 1972, ousting a stale and stagnating Liberal government that had ruled for 23 years. Whitlam delivered his “It’s Time” speech at Blacktown, home of this exhibition in Blacktown Arts Centre. The exhibition title, It’s Timely, suggests the need for another leader with Whitlam’s vision. He was our last visionary politician (some say our first) and his legacy looms large over the deep shadowland into which the damaging shenanigans and budget carve-ups of the Abbott-Hockey leadership are currently casting Australia.
Just as Whitlam prophetically stated, his government was going to change the country so definitively, and so rapidly, that any incoming Liberal government would never be able to change it back again, so Abbott and Hockey seem hell-bent on a copy-cat approach—the dark inverse of Whitlam policy.
Whitlam ended the lottery of conscription and our participation in the Vietnam War, gave us a multicultural policy, promoted feminism, championed the rights of Indigenous Australians, introduced universal health care through Medicare and a multitude of other access and equity reforms. His abolition of university fees replaced a system in which only the rich, or those winning the prestigious Commonwealth government scholarships, could attend (if you missed out you signed a bond and attended through a teachers’ college). He scandalously approved the purchase by the National Gallery of Australia of Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles for a million dollars (an investment now worth infinitely more). He bought art—astounding given that during the long Menzies years money for the arts was so tight that the government could refuse credit for any sums over 10,000 pounds, crippling the Australian film industry. The Liberals attacked Whitlam, calling him Father Xmas. Now, as fast as they can, the Abbott-Hockey team is ripping through the social fabric, tearing apart as much of the Whitlam legacy as they can.
It is therefore fitting that, in the current political darkness, this exhibition pays tribute to Whitlam and to kinder, more egalitarian times. Deborah Kelly’s devastatingly cynical banner, THE BILLIONAIRES UNITED WILL NEVER BE DEFEATED, lies on the floor, a direct hit at the likes of mining magnate Clive Palmer, now in parliament, and Gina Rinehart who infamously paid her workers to faux protest Kevin Rudd’s super-tax on big mining—respectable first world countries like Norway tax big mining at 70% to compensate for environmental damage. Hockey-Abbott just abolished the mining tax. It’s open slather now to destroy the Great Barrier Reef—only falling coal prices can save it from the ravages of shipping.
Kelly’s banner lies on the floor, ambivalently a thin ray of hope. The billionaire rulers have been defeated and don’t need their banner any more, or, more cynically, more reflective of the contemporary times, it’s discarded because they have won. Kelly’s work symbolically holds the ground of defeat, an abject centrepiece that eclipses its own hope, and tilts in the direction of rule by magnates. It lets us know we are living in politically dangerous times—when much is being taken away, even though thousands of citizens, including the Knitting Nannas (KNAG, Knitting Nannas against Gas in the Northern Rivers region, NSW), war veterans and even members of the priesthood are on the barricades, getting arrested in far away places out of sight of the media, in rural backwaters like the Pilliga and the Liverpool Plains as they try to protect our precious farmland and water from the predations of big mining and coal seam gas fracking companies. The people might have had a recent minor win at Bentley in NSW, but the tide is hardly turning.
Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan
Common-wealth: Project Another Country #130010FFS, 2014, courtesy the artists and The Drawing Room Gallery, Manila
photo Jennifer Leahy
Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan
Common-wealth: Project Another Country #130010FFS, 2014, courtesy the artists and The Drawing Room Gallery, Manila
Common-wealth (Project: Another Country) by Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan, arranges a series of tin crowns of state—one from a recycled sign for Vegemite—in mock reference to a tourist visit to see the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London (a rite of passage for Australian royalists). In respect of curbing our evolution towards a Republic, one of Abbott’s first acts was to re-instate knight and dame honours. This work’s nod to the English Crown reminds us that its Australian representative, the Governor-General, John Kerr, infamously sacked the Whitlam government during an unprecedented double dissolution of Parliament when the Liberals blocked supply. Ironically, the Abbott-Hockey team are now potentially facing the same fate.
As political commentary the exhibition is subtle and spot-on, not overtly laboured or burdened with metaphor. A room dedicated to memorabilia from the It’s Time event includes a poster signed by Whitlam, a video and copies of his original 1972 speech. Local wedding photographer Anthony Berbari has produced a series of portraits and images of Blacktown locals who were present for the historic event, revealing shocking details that as late as 1973, under a state Liberal government, much of ‘westie’ Blacktown did not have basics such as sewerage. Whitlam fast-tracked a National Sewerage Program.
Aunty, 2014, courtesy the artists and Neon Parc
photo Jennifer Leahy
Aunty, 2014, courtesy the artists and Neon Parc
Perhaps in oblique reference to the sewerage situation circa 1972, the King Pins’ Aunty with its giant boxing gloved hands reaching out from the wall to ‘rip your bloody arms off,’ has a mouth, or an anus (say the room notes), speaking onscreen through a giant pair of lacy underpants. The message is scatological—politics is crap—as a moustached mouth, recalling Grahame Bond in bad drag in the ABC TV cult comedy The Aunty Jack Show (1972-3), slurs its way through snatches of pop songs which circulate in the media in much the same way as political promises or threats: “Your time is gonna come,” “This could be the last time,” “If you fall, I will catch you, I’ll be waiting, time after time”—and in respect of being politically done over—“Do it to me one more time.”
Countering the cynicism, Gary Carsley’s D.106 The Annunciation (Whitlam in China) sets into stone in ‘pietre dure’ inlay technique the historic meeting between Whitlam and Mao in the Chairman’s Bejing library in 1973. Asked by Mao whether he would dare a revolution, Whitlam replied he believed in evolution. Consisting of banknote-proportioned twin panels, in one the faces of both leaders are blacked out, the work simultaneously glorifying but also erasing these men. Who remembers or even knows the personages portrayed on our currency? The work wryly suggests that perhaps it’s time for a Whitlam bank note, but more importantly for re-evaluation of our political history and future.
It’s Timely co-curators Gary Carsley, Paul Howard, Blacktown Arts Centre, 29 April-28 June
Director John Curran and screenwriter Marian Nelson’s adaptation of Robyn Davidson’s book Tracks recounts the young writer’s epic solo trek from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean with her four camels and dog Diggity. Australia’s Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland, Jane Eyre, Stoker) plays Davidson and American actor Adam Driver (Girls, Frances Ha) appears as the New Yorker and National Geographic photographer Rick Smolan who flew in from time to time to document Anderson’s achievement. The film conveys the power of a challenging landscape few of us will ever experience. 5 copies courtesy of Transmission Films
DVD: Nymphomaniac, 2 DVDs
Some people love the films of Lars von Trier, others hate them. Some like certain of his films and loathe others. I couldn’t engage with Dogville but I took to Melancholia. Reactions around the world to Nymphomaniac are similar, some critics rejecting one of its two parts in favour of the other. The film is the third part of von Trier’s ‘Depression Trilogy’ after Antichrist and Melancholia. Supporters love the filmmaker’s ambition (the unfolding of life from birth to 57 years), his obsessiveness and willingness to go into very dark places, even where they find the violence and sex scenes too extreme. The film’s full running time, as shown at the Berlin Film Festival, was five and half hours; the “international version,” comprises two volumes and totals four hours on two DVDs. KG 5 copies courtesy of Transmission Films
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RealTime designer Graeme Smith took on the challenge to create the perfect cover for the magazine’s celebratory 20th Birthday issue in collaboration with two young artists Beatrice Chew and Su-An Ng.
Graeme (peonypress.com.au; goodhabitat.com.au), describes himself as a rare communications hybrid: a roughly 50/50 balance of writing and designing for any appropriate medium. He’s a distiller. “I work out what things are, what they mean, where they are now and what and where they may be next, then present the findings in words and pictures. Sometimes the aim is to sell things and other times it’s to try to make places better for living in.”
Beatrice Chew works with Graeme in Good Habitat, a working unit formed with prominent designer-writer Heidi Dokulil. Social and educational programs, government and private, the built environment, talks and workshops, exhibitions and conferences, good food, reporting and publishing are some of the things that come within their sphere of interest and influence.
Beatrice (www.beatricechew.com) created the amazing masks made from back issues of RealTime and worn by founding editors Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter. Beatrice is a researcher whose interests include design processes, technology and sustainability (especially in the areas of food and education). She says, “The masks are an exploration in modules. They were executed in two ways: a mathematical tessellation and a floral arrangement that gave birth to: [1] parasitical hexagons engulfing the face; [2] an over-sized floral arrangement made to create contrast and communicate the romance of publication. I am sure in the 121 editions that have been published, there are many parts that make RealTime what it is today. Similarly, with the masks, no one part can exist without all the others.”
Su-An Ng (incognito), paper sculpture by Beatrice Chew
photos courtesy the artist
Su-An Ng (incognito), paper sculpture by Beatrice Chew
The images were photographed by Su-An Ng, an award-winning animation graduate from Emily Carr University of Art & Design in British Colombia who has shown her work in film festivals here and internationally. She’s recently completed a short animated film with the National Film Board of Canada. Entitled ITCH, it’s an engrossing, short stop-motion film made with ceramic clay, an abstract expression of what it feels like to go through an eczema flare-up. You can see more of Su-An’s multi-faceted visions at www.su-anng.com
Graeme’s brief from the editors was to create an image that celebrated the hybridity that has been the focus of RealTime’s attention over two decades. What he and his collaborators came up with was the miraculous transformation of copies of the magazine into another form—hand-crafted, intricately woven paper masks which become the faces of the editors who are at once themselves and an enduring publication.
In late May. Broome dance theatre company Marrugeku showcased Cut the Sky for an invited community audience as a prelude to a program of national and international touring in 2015. Cut the Sky looks to the future, contemplating global climate change from an Indigenous point of view in a multi-artform work. It has been developed by a team of artists and Indigenous cultural leaders from across the Kimberley and urban Australia collaborating with artists from Burkina Faso, Belgium and Assam in Northern India.
The work is presented in five acts based around five poems by Walmajarri/Nyikina poet and ‘dream catcher’ Edwin Lee Mulligan, with two original songs composed by Papua New Guinean born ‘future soul’ singer/songwriter Ngaiire and extant songs by Nick Cave, among others, all sung by Broome-based actress Ngaire Pigram.
Mulligan’s poems are a standout, capturing what I have observed over the years to be an Indigenous three dimensional grid of knowledge and perspectives that encompasses the heavens, earth and water, and which has existed via traditional stories and lore in this part of the world for over 40,000 years: “…Taking a transformation as an eagle and in that formation I was travelling within the cloud dust…”
To see and hear Mulligan performing his poetry without artifice and with an accent that suggests English may be his second or third language brings an integrity to the work that is in keeping with the authenticity of Marrugeku’s ethos.
Mulligan’s poetry encapsulates a way of being in the world, of “holding it, that may demand a new kind of attention of its audience” as Cut the Sky director Rachael Swain puts it in her essay, “Time and a Mirror: Towards a Hybrid Dramaturgy for Intercultural-Indigenous Performance” in New Dramaturgy, editors Katalin Trencsényi and Bernadette Cochrane, Bloomsbury, 2014.
Marrugeku’s hallmark style of contemporary dance—devised from the performers’ personal and cultural backgrounds—is on full display. In a memorable sequence dancer-choreographer Dalisa Pigram’s portrayal of a drunk FIFO mine worker veered from the comic to the compelling, before morphing into a study of a disturbed psyche in a disturbed land, culminating in a frenzy of ‘digging up’ her own self.
A distillation of the unique perspectives of Kimberley cultural and artistic leaders is the work’s heart and greatest strength. Other contributors to these perspectives include Marrugeku’s patron Patrick Dodson, Bunuba cultural leader June Oscar and Yawuru dancer and language speaker Dalisa Pigram, the company’s co-artistic director. These perspectives are then framed within a multi-art form expression embracing both contemporary video and archival footage—including the famed Noonkambar Station anti-drilling campaign in 1979—original music and sound-scape design, virtuosic contemporary dance and original text.
The sum total is an ambitious and richly imaginative work that eschews didacticism. Instead, it ignites our imaginations by using the transformative power of metaphor to provide a window through which we can glimpse the possibilities of a different way of being, both before and after what would appear to be inevitable climate catastrophe.
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Cut the Sky, co-created by cast and creative and cultural team; concept Dalisa Pigram, Rachael Swain, director Rachael Swain, co-choreographers Dalisa Pigram, Serge Aimé Coulibaly, storyteller Edwin Mulligan, performer, singer Ngaire Pigram, dancer Miranda Wheen, Dalisa Pigram, Eric Avery, Josh Mu, dramaturg Hildegard de Vuyst, cultural advisor Patrick Dodson, musical director Matthew Fargher, new media artists Desire Machine Collective [Sonal Jain, Mriganka Madhukaillya], costumes, set realisation Stephen Curtis; Broome, May 22, 23
I had the idea for a narrative about a world spray-and-wiped into apocalypse years ago after reading an article about dirt pills given to children in the United States to boost their bacteria. When I was completing my last album, Gen Y Irony Stole My Heart, I was already thinking about what I could do next to up the ambition ante: I wanted to do a long-form, orchestrated narrative song. After marrying the two ideas, I composed Sanitary Apocalypse over roughly a year, followed by a year of recording, mixing, finalising and publicising the beast.
I wanted it to come as a surprise in the story that, despite the apocalypse, people are generally getting on, doing okay and finding a way rather than regressing to violent competition and eating each other or whatever else they do in apocalyptic fantasies these days. I also worked from the principle of swapping the gender of all characters once they’ve been conjured (where gender politics aren’t integral to the narrative); you seem to get much more interesting stories that way. I ended up with a ‘final girl,’ only she doesn’t suffer quite the humiliation, breakdown and torment most final girls do.
Perhaps the most challenging thing I did was to write a bunch of themes—hopefully independently interesting—that would lock together at the climax. So I wrote those synth arpeggios and keyboard chords at the end to sound continuously ascendant, adding themes from throughout the piece until the whole thing is being played at once.
Wyatt Moss-Wellington
Wyatt Moss-Wellington
photo Stephen Lew
Wyatt Moss-Wellington
Folk phantasmagoria
Wyatt Moss-Wellington’s fiercely ambitious and willfully idiosyncratic Sanitary Apocalypse is something of an anomaly within contemporary Australian music. Described as a single 28-minute song, the work consists of distinct song-like fragments that emerge from a body of through-composed musical tissue, blending elements of folk, jazz, prog-rock, electronica and the 20th century avant-garde. It charts the journey of protagonist Clara through a disturbing post-apocalyptic vision of an Earth cleansed of all complex life.
Sanitary Apocalypse is a far cry from Moss-Wellington’s 2009 debut The Supermarket and the Turncoat, a more conventional collection of songs in the accepted manner of an acoustic guitar-wielding troubadour. Certain tendencies are clear in this earlier incarnation however: whimsically direct lyrics curling around unpredictable melodic twists; a lyrical style both tenderly heart-felt and savagely satiric; the occasional frenetic solo bursting out of unthreatening finger-picked patterns. It’s a style further developed in his more fully produced follow-up, 2011’s Gen Y Irony Stole My Heart.
With Sanitary Apocalypse, Moss-Wellington seems to have taken the limited broader reception of his earlier efforts as a license to push himself into new artistic territory. Although still embedded in the folk tradition, the concept of the folk ‘refrain’ is here refigured as a series of recurring musical idée fixe. The omniscient yarn-spinniner of folksong is re-imagined as a Greek Chorus offering commentary and information in a tone at once firmly solemn and archly ironic, a scene setting line such as “in the end we sprayed and wiped our whole world away” dismissing cataclysm with a raised eyebrow and a shrug.
There are many delights to be found here, Clara’s farewell to her dying husband featuring some beautifully realised vocal writing, perhaps reminiscent of Björk’s Medulla. This section unravels in a cluster of voices chanting over one another, fragments of lyrics thrown to the foreground before being chewed back into the mass, cohering around the words “I love you” in a gloriously illuminated moment of consonance, before collapsing into despair in the form of an unhinged solo from violinist Ian Watson.
Moss-Wellington has assembled a broad range of musicians to realise his artistic vision. One of the pleasures of this recording is hearing performers such as jazz drummer Tim Firth or The Crooked Fiddle Band’s Jess Randall brought together to produce something inclusive, unexpected and complementary, an approach suggestive of Moss-Wellington’s love of Robert Wyatt or the North Sea Radio Orchestra. It is his own vocals that command most attention however, at times relating the saga with cool detachment, at others taking advantage of his startling range for dramatic effect, straining towards his highest possible note at the moment of his heroine’s nadir, pinching the sound to a point of almost unbearable intensity on the single plaintive word “how,” stark piano chords rising into an electronic blizzard of sound before collapsing once more.
There are other moments of almost manic playfulness, a mandolin solo from Moss-Wellington becoming a mashed pastiche of motifs cribbed from violin studies. Elsewhere, the moment of Clara’s rescue is celebrated with an over-the-top bluegrass duel between Dave Carr’s banjo and Randall’s nyckelharpa. The unreality of the narrative moment is underlined by the almost too-cheerful melodic motifs and the breathless delivery of Moss-Wellington’s cartoonish lyrics describing the hyper-futuristic bunker in which Clara finds herself: “the dining room is massive / It’s bustling—full of food, and people, and smiles, water cooler banter.”
Unfolding in a comic phantasmagoria, the work ends with themes from all previous sections swirling together over an inexorably rising bass line, colliding on a single, almost screamed note before voices drop out one by one, leaving Moss-Wellington to close the epic with a single snarled note on the guitar. Self-funded, uncompromising and uncompromised, Sanitary Apocalypse is a unique musical gift.
In December 2013 I spent three weeks at the Bundanon Trust Artist Residency on the former estate of the artist Arthur Boyd, 40 minutes west of Nowra, NSW. While I was there I spent a lot of the time with my head down. I was working through some personal issues that were troubling me, but what really caught my eye was the residue of previous residents. Bundanon can accommodate artists of all disciplines—dancers, musicians, writers—but Fern Studio was clearly used by painters.
It’s not uncommon for art studios to be covered in paint, but what makes Fern Studio interesting is its history. Each swatch of colour, drip and splatter represents the work of an artist who has participated in the residency prior to my arrival—each of us, I presume, motivated by Boyd’s legacy and the prospect of creating something meaningful.
Armed with a camera and a wide stance I commenced documenting the floor, searching for dramatic compositions. It seemed that everywhere I looked there was a new constellation of colour and form.
Like all my work, in which overlooked things are transformed and allegorised, Fern Studio’s floor is rendered fantastical through its treatment as an animation of slow moving photographs. This process has been informed by the potential for each image to appear not only as a paint-covered floor, but something else. Exhibited at The Walls, Fern Studio Floor is projected upwards, onto a floating screen hanging from the ceiling. Visitors are encouraged to lie down and be seduced by this well trodden floor and its transformation into art. Chris Bennie http://www.chrisbennie.com
Chris Bennie, Fern Studio Floor: a cosmology
courtesy the artist
Chris Bennie, Fern Studio Floor: a cosmology
Mediating legacies
Over 30 years ago, in my first years at university in Canberra, we were taken on a day trip excursion to the Arthur Boyd property at Bundanon on the Shoalhaven. The artist had recently returned to Europe but had left his newly completed, timber-lined studio electric with his recent presence. As a student of art history whose experience of painting was largely confined to the finished product on the walls of a gallery or reproduced in large tomes and labored over in libraries, to see such a working studio was a revelation. This was the kind of place from which Boyd’s almost terrifying canvas depicting the painter gripped with doubt and false greed had come (Paintings in the studio: Figure supporting back legs; interior with black rabbit, 1973-74). We had all just seen this work hanging, as I recall, in the cavernous downstairs spaces of the newly opened National Gallery of Australia, one of the few Australian paintings to make it into that hallowed territory where its near neighbours were de Kooning and Pollock.
Ten years on from that work and in the shadow of the escarpment on his bend in the river, Boyd was now producing more meditative images, but it wasn’t so much the paintings on the easel that I remember from that visit, but most indelibly the latest and smartest Bang and Olufsen CD sound system mounted on the wall, its pristine lines abruptly and irreverently disrupted by a brilliant multi-coloured finger mark of paint on the play button.
Fast-forward to the hot early summer of late 2013 and Chris Bennie is artist-in-residence at the Fern Studio, one of a number of artist studios now provided for and managed by the Bundanon Trust. After a busy and successful year of art prizes, grants, exhibiting and lecturing, Queensland based New Zealand born, Bennie was looking forward to a fresh break and the rare opportunity that such a residency offers to be absorbed and focused on a new environment.
Encountering the studio, Bennie reflected on the many artists who had been there before him, all generating new ideas and producing work under the legacy of the Boyds and their regard for the importance of making culture. In an artist talk at the Walls Contemporary Art Space Bennie said that, like Boyd, he reflected on the nature of a studio as a private space of chance, ambition, doubt and mistake, as well as a place from which considered and successful creative output emerges.
Chris Bennie, Fern Studio Floor: a cosmology
courtesy the artist
Chris Bennie, Fern Studio Floor: a cosmology
He found the past presence of all these artists most manifest in the colourful residue of paint: dripped, spilled, dropped and splattered over the timber floor, reading it like a layered contemporary archeology of place. However, unlike the sensation of a patina which fuses the past life of the object into a single texture on the surface, Bennie has read these layers as a three dimensional view and, through hundreds of photographs documenting the minutiae of this floor, has literally inverted and elevated it to become a new and unlikely cosmology.
The formal language of video practice is in relative infancy and often constrained by technological limitations, but Bennie has been consistently interested in physically framing the way that the viewer encounters his work using projection within and onto banal or overlooked architectural spaces. These have included most recently a repurposed caravan retrieved from the devastating floods in Bundaberg. The installation for this work, on a screen suspended from the ceiling, invited the viewers to lie down on their backs on a large raised platform covered in soft carpet and to look upward as a slowly moving constellation of vivid colours passed above. The images of the Fern Studio floor were set within a second frame of a darker blurred image and this highlighted their potency.
The shared experience of lying quietly side-by-side on the platform encouraged strangers to be briefly united by Bennie’s seemingly physically replication for us of his own feeling of absorption, of being in that studio for three weeks. Looking up and allowing ourselves to relax and be taken into this work was a rare and satisfying experience and, of course, if we doubt the importance of artworks that consider the intimacy of our relationships with the built environment, there is the sweet irony that the work depicts a floor on the ceiling in a gallery called The Walls.
Chris Bennie, Fern Studio Floor: a cosmology, 2014, The Walls Contemporary Art Space; 15 March-5 April, 2014; http://thewalls.com.au/about.html.
Virginia Rigney is Senior Curator at Gold Coast City Gallery.
Installation view 2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Dark Heart featuring Ian Strange, 2014, Art Gallery of South Australia
A life-sized suburban house, painted black and embedded in the footpath, greets Art Gallery of South Australia visitors and passing Adelaide commuters. Ian Strange’s Landed is provocatively unavoidable in Adelaide’s North Terrace, confronting the CBD with the darker characteristics of suburbia. Welcome to the 2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Dark Heart.
Mounted by the AGSA since 1990, the Adelaide Biennial is unlike its internationally-oriented Sydney counterpart in being exclusively a high-level survey of Australian contemporary art. Typically, the AGSA invites external curators for its Biennial, but the 2014 Biennial is curated by the AGSA Director, Nick Mitzevich. This is the first time the director has been appointed to this position.
Explaining the reasoning behind this decision, Mitzevich said, “The Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art is our most important and ongoing artistic undertaking. At this stage in my directorship I feel that it is important to harness every element of the institution to advance the Biennial. The best way that I can do this is to lead from the front. This is also the most direct way of communicating the Biennial’s message. It is important to have a strong curatorial perspective—this is part of my philosophy and my day to day life as a director.”
Installation view Melrose Wing of European Art,
Art Gallery of South Australia, 2013, featuring Berlinde De Bruyckere, We are all flesh
photo Sam Noonan
Installation view Melrose Wing of European Art,
Art Gallery of South Australia, 2013, featuring Berlinde De Bruyckere, We are all flesh
The gallery
In his four years at AGSA, Mitzevich has made major changes, rehanging the galleries, broadening and increasing the audience (27% in that time, now with 685,000 visitors annually in a city of 1.3m) and extending educational outreach. When I spoke to him, he made clear his intention that AGSA should not mimic other Australian galleries but develop a distinctive character.
AGSA’s eastern wing is hung chronologically with predominantly South Australian and Australian art, providing a comprehensive survey of state and national art history through which visitors gain an appreciation of its social history. Aboriginal art of corresponding periods is interspersed with colonial and post-colonial Australian art, telling a parallel story and creating a dialogue. The material includes prints, drawings, decorative arts and photographs as well as paintings, placing all forms on an equal footing. Mitzevich’s intention is to allow the work to tell the story. The display itself is not a revisionist history nor a critical examination of forms and genres (though it encourages critical examination), but shows how history can be represented through art.
But the Gallery’s western wing is hung very differently. The successive rooms each has a theme, for example “Seduction” and “Classical,” where the works presented are from different eras, genres and forms but characterise the theme. The juxtaposition of works that contrast both eras and styles might appear jarring but engages audiences more deeply in the work. AGSA gallery guides invite visitors to choose which path to take through the Gallery—chronological or thematic—and they predominantly go for the themed rooms. The work is densely hung and Mitzevich says that the interior and hanging are intended to convey the feel of a 19th century mansion. The two parallel streams demonstrate alternative ways of thinking about art, art history and visual culture, a lesson visitors take with them.
Mitzevich says, “Audiences are engaging, they want to think and feel and to nurture emotional experiences. They want to be able to leave the gallery with a strong memory of the experience.” The reconfiguration of the Gallery’s exhibits initially came under intense public scrutiny. “South Australian audiences felt part of the transition that this rehang involved, and 6,000 people attended the opening weekend.”
The AGSA has one of the largest collections of the capital city galleries—Mitzevich considers that “the gallery’s strength is in its collection, being asset rich but cash poor”—and so the effective presentation of the collection is crucial. But it is also acquiring new work and its most recent major acquisition, Camille Pissarro’s Prairie à Éragny (1886), fills a gap in AGSA’s European story and will resonate with the gallery’s other landscape works, including a definitive body of Hans Heysen works and its Heidelberg pieces, to address the idea of landscape.
Installation view 2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Dark Heart featuring Warwick Thornton, 2014, Art Gallery of South Australia
The Biennial
The 2014 Adelaide Biennial: Dark Heart, comprises the work of 28 artists and collectives around a broad theme concerned with the darker undercurrents in Australian culture. The temporary exhibition space is divided into separate rooms “like cells or chapters of a book.” Mitzevich has worked with many of the artists before and wanted to allow them to develop new work—70% of the Biennial works were made in response to the invitation to participate. Some artists made their most significant work for it, for example Ben Quilty’s The Island, which addresses Tasmania’s colonial past, is his largest painting and one of his most profound, using a Rorschach-like design to suggest a psychological reading of colonisation. Within the Biennial’s broad theme, there emerges an emphasis on Australia’s colonial past and the situation of Indigenous people. Mitzevich’s Biennial thus not only catalyses significant new developments in Australian art, it raises awareness of these important issues.
Installation view 2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Dark Heart featuring eX de Medici, 2014, Art Gallery of South Australia
The Biennial art is demanding and audiences now expect to be challenged. Mitzevich states that “art should push the envelope in a considered way.” Film director Warwick Thornton’s Rebirth references Albert Namatjira’s work, exemplifying the reconsideration of iconic Indigenous art and culture through contemporary eyes and highlighting the still unresolved impact of Westernisation and colonisation. Some artists engage directly with existing works in the AGSA collection, creating a dialogue between the Biennial and the AGSA itself. eX de Medici’s installation The Law, a consideration of Iranian politics and culture, incorporates historical Iranian items from the Gallery’s collection.
Brook Andrew’s powerful Australia I-VI considers past representations of Indigenous culture by creating what he describes as large-scale history paintings based on Gustav Mutzul’s 1860s etchings depicting Aboriginal lifestyle and ceremonies that he encountered in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge. Andrew shows how Indigenous culture was first recorded and reconsiders history painting and its role in visual culture, an artistic strategy well suited to Mitzevich’s approach. Many Biennial works appear to extend the Gallery’s historical and artistic considerations and many Biennial artists reconsider art itself, referring overtly to other art and its place in our cultural history. As the AGSA becomes a co-producer, it enlarges its role beyond the traditional museum role as repository and exhibition space. The Biennial’s interaction with the AGSA collection shows how Australian contemporary art forms a continuum with Australian art history and simultaneously reflects the contemporary world.
In his essay on Tony Garifalakis’ Mob Rule, Mark Feary suggests that art can never provide more than a superficial and thus inadequate analysis of a political situation; similarly, there is no “correct” fully analysed history. Nick Mitzevich considers that showing art of political commentary in an institutional setting doesn’t neutralise the commentary but rather brings it to the public’s attention. While it might not offer an exhaustive or dispassionate analysis, this Biennial urges consideration of major issues.
Nick Mitzevitch
courtesy of the Art Gallery of South Australia
Nick Mitzevitch
The aesthetics
In his catalogue essay for the Biennial, Ross Woodrow suggests that the Biennial is concerned with aesthetic appreciation and that the AGSA hang also encourages a return to aesthetics. I asked Nick Mitzevich whether this idea was consciously developed in curating the Biennial and whether it is also an intention in the AGSA hang generally, or whether the hang is rather concerned with the historicisation of aesthetics. He replies, “Woodrow suggests that the Biennial is part of a zeitgeist return to aesthetics—a broader impulse that he has observed the world over. The idea of Australian artists and even curators as aesthetic sailors was not a conscious conceit but I am drawn to the figurative and to the narrative, and to the matter of making and memory, and these things can be seen as players in what Woodrow calls the aesthetic moment, which in his words is ‘triggered when objects reveal their psychic capacity’…This concern for affect is a conscious player in the AGSA hang generally and with a transhistorical and multimedia approach an aesthetic experience is inevitable (following Woodrow’s argument).”
The aesthetic atmosphere is palpable. For example, Alex Seton’s Someone died trying to have a life like mine is a series of lifejackets carved from marble (the material of classical sculpture) which doesn’t float, scattered on the floor around Quilty’s The Island as if washed up on its shore, referencing drowned asylum seekers.
Mitzevich indicates that he will not curate the Adelaide Biennial beyond 2014. It will be interesting to see how the 2016 Biennial develops under another curator and whether the aesthetic turn continues.
A creative individual’s desire for ideas is unquenchable. Inspiration is drawn not just from other works of art in their chosen field but from the abundance of concepts, narratives and atmospheres found in films, books and music. For Profiler #3 we’ve asked artists to tell us about the words, pictures and sounds that have influenced their practice overall and what’s currently keeping them tipsy.
I am about making an experiential form that is new, a place where unorthodox behaviours and research sit at the edge of physical and cross disciplinary offerings. At my most comfortable place of experimentation I take great pleasure in engaging audiences in the live experience of performance and art. For example in Tomorrow, I ask for totally nude participation of the entire audience to build an architectural installation that activates a sexualised, ritual cleansing and group transference and transportation of energies. Tomorrow grew from my own esoteric research into alien abduction and a revelatory experience at The Integratron in the Mojave Desert, USA.
On the other side of the fence I’ve taken to literally hypnotising the audience. Thumb is my first solo work: a cross-disciplinary performance, part installation, part film. It explores the psychology of scale in terms of the gigantic and the miniature, inspired by size changing themes from 1950s and 60s cinema including The Incredible Shrinking Man, Fantastic Voyage and cult Scandinavian film, Troll Hunters.
During the research phases I took a course in hypnotherapy. The bigger question I am asking here is to what degree can the experience of hypnosis affect and effect an art marking practice to create an authentic scale-shifting perception inside the performance. After a 30-minute hypnosis session participants awaken to a world of multiple polystyrene building blocks that suggest any number of backdrops such as Norwegian mountains, caves and snow capped peaks. They also encounter a strange silver alien and a gigantic wall collapsing over them. Midway through they are dressed in green puffer jumpsuits with fur hoods and introduced to an off-the-wall Scandinavian film director and his actors on a movie set. The scale of the work continues to shrink as they watch a film on a 1960s home movie screen of footage shot in the Banff mountain ranges (Canada) and studio developments recreating scenes from The Incredible Shrinking Man.
In addition to Thumb, future projects include a commission from the National Gallery of Victoria that is a response to the Italian Masterpieces from Spain’s Royal Court Museo Del Prado (1 June, 3pm) and LIVE WITH IT we all have HIV (17-27 July, Arts House Meat Market), supported by the Victorian AIDS Council and their regional networks. http://www.balletlab.com
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Sam Routledge, Martyn Coutts (right), I Think I Can presented by Intimate Spectacle and Performance Space at the Art and About Festival 2013, Sydney Central Train Station
courtesy the artists
Sam Routledge, Martyn Coutts (right), I Think I Can presented by Intimate Spectacle and Performance Space at the Art and About Festival 2013, Sydney Central Train Station
Coming of age in the 1990s had a profound affect on the way I view the world. While the mainstream was filled with Stock, Aitken and Waterman pop classics, the underground saw the rise of rave and electronic music. I learnt a lot about repetition, about the structure of a piece of work and about total immersion in a space from raves and clubs. In this respect it is hard to go past “Blue Monday” by New Order, the biggest selling 12-inch single ever, completely unplayable on radio due to its length.
Around the same time that rave became popular, Japanese Anime and Manga broke in the west. The first wave of movies that were dubbed into English were Akira (1988), Ninja Scroll (1993) and Ghost in the Shell (1995). All three borrowed strongly from Japanese history, yet all carried an apocalyptic vision of a post-nuclear future. You could feel the still present fear that the atomic bombs of 1945 had on the makers of these stories. What I took from these films was a questioning of who we are as humans/cyborgs/post-humans. The meshing of the body and technology has always been a key theme of my work. Akira was always my favourite of these films due to its wrapping together of science and spirituality.
More recently I have been undertaking research into Sydney’s Parramatta River for an interactive app called Against The Tide. I have always had an uneasy relationship with Sydney. As part of the reading for the project I started with Delia Falconer’s Sydney (2010) which is such a beautiful evocation of her home city that I almost believed that it is as romantic as she suggests. However, after reading John Birmingham’s Leviathan (1999) I understood where my unease comes from: the terror of the settlement on convicts and Aboriginal people, the corruption stemming from the mixing of government and business and the brutality of the police (among other concerns). I now believe that somewhere between the viewpoints of these two books lies the true Sydney. http://www.martyncoutts.com
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Alex Davies
Alex Davies, portrait photo Tommy Oshima; The Very Near Future, photos courtesy the artist
My recent project, The Very Near Future, was undoubtedly influenced by the following works to some degree. The installation combines spatial cinematic storytelling with complex electronically mediated illusions.
Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography, Errol Morris, (2011)
Morris, who is mostly known for his documentary film works has written an intriguing book on photography. Morris examines photography with a healthy skepticism (and in almost forensic detail) with regard to the meaning and authenticity of images. This exploration sheds light on how we can readily jump to conclusions when interpreting photographic images. Although the discussion is centred around photography, the ideas are relevant to all mediated experiences, and many of these concerns inform the ways in which I think about and create electronically mediated illusions in The Very Near Future.
Los Cronocrímenes (Time Crimes), Nacho Vigalondo (2007)
In addition to media illusions, a key theme of The Very Near Future was time travel, or specifically, how one can physically represent a sense of future time travel through media. Los Cronocrímenes is simply a wonderfully inventive film exploring some of the dire implications of time travel. The narrative structure of the film is also quite refreshing and both these elements provided inspiration in terms of potential structural approaches to story telling, and some of the many possible ways time travel can be conceptualized. http://schizophonia.com/
Lucy Guerin, photo Toby Burrows; (front to back) Stephanie Lake, Alisdair Macindoe, Jesse Oshode, Live Movie Rehearsals, photo Lachlan Woods
At the moment I am working on a project called Live Movie in which I want to screen a full-length feature film (not sure which one yet) and use it as a score for a dance piece. I want to use the edits, camera movements, sounds, characters and narrative as ways to generate movement both improvised and choreographed, responding to the movie in real-time. I aim to show not so much a representation of the film but to use the elements of filmmaking to create a dance work.
I saw David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet (1986) in my mid-twenties, when it first came out. I haven’t seen it since, but I clearly remember the opening scene with its bright, cut out world of the ordinary everyday, and then the zoom in to a bright green lawn drilling down to a close-up of subterranean insects chomping savagely below the surface.
This was the film that made me realise that you could see things differently. That there’s a multitude of perspectives from which to view something; that artistic expression was not just about an idea that you had, but about how you showed it; about how style and genre connected to meaning. It was entertaining and had great music, but also a dark, unfathomable side. These two things sat together.
As a choreographer working mostly in theatres, I have often thought about how we can shift the frame of viewing from the square of the proscenium where everything is life-size, to give a sense of close-up, to draw the eye of the audience in a filmic way. Lighting helps of course, but how, as a dance-maker can I create movement that draws us in to see detail?
Growing up in Adelaide in the 1970s and 80s I wondered how my middle class, unremarkable background could offer up anything unique or interesting as artistic material. Seeing Blue Velvet revealed to me that the ordinary aspects of life can be horrific or beautiful or funny, depending on the way they are presented. That zoom in to the lawn revealed how the simplest things could contain worlds and that looking closely is where I could find poetry. It was in detail, and in what lay below the surface. http://lucyguerininc.com
Where most artists are tangled within postmodernism my work remains in phenomenology—pursuing the connections between perception and material—or literally between video and performer. My concern is how all of our mediums—body, films, sound—are related. I have been reading lots of secret things, things that exist under the veils of reality and things that are the veils of reality: Victoria Nelson’s The Secret Life of Puppets (2001, when I was working with puppeteers) and in the last two years The Secret Life of Plants (Tompkins and Bird, 1973) and also the profound Rinrigaku by Watsuji Tetsuro (1937). In my videos I was compelled to take work beyond the performer and object to the plant universe and the inanimate. This has helped deepen my understanding of body and matter and what we are actually filming.
Merleau Ponty’s intertwining of perceiver and perceived for me still encapsulates indefinable existence, an endless, churning assemblage of things in more or less proximity and awareness to an individual. Being conscious of the actions and processes of video, when I film something, I film whilst knowing I am filming, yet I am also presently in some ways not-filming, drifting into distractions, smells, noises, physical interactions which make the capturing of a performance an unending and complex activity. For me, this aesthetic research reveals how the tools become a mirror reflecting the subconscious. Media is inextricably bound up with perception and fed back into external phenomena. As Deleuze says, the actual comprises nothing more than clusters of virtuals—all by-products of our own presence and life-making. Video art is nothing more than pulling out and isolating some of these events.
Just as important as the video itself, the screen experience is also about the narcotic, cinematic, performative space, where the witnessing makes possible the offering of one’s own dreams into another’s dream. Where every action in an artwork or characters in a film are seen as the same actions you are living through this very day, in this moment. The life in the cinema is transposed into the viewer’s. Video and materialism are bound in a way that produces an event that says nothing but we understand it totally and vividly as our own, it becomes embodied as part of us. http://www.shimmerpixel.blogspot.com.au
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nova Milne
nova Milne, 1) Jete 2) There There Anxious Future, 3) Xerox Missive
courtesy the artists
nova Milne, 1) Jete 2) There There Anxious Future, 3) Xerox Missive
It took an aging French philosopher to reinvest in the existential problem of love. Alain Badiou’s In Praise of Love (2009) emancipates love from the dumb simplicity of inward-looking narcissism. Instead, it can be a radical construction: a project formed no longer from the perspective of one, but through the lens of difference and infinite subjectivities. It emerges as a way of thinking that privileges risk, chance, reinvention and a new way of experiencing time. Badiou’s notion of enduring love is really about locking a chance encounter into the framework of eternity, an event that is returned to, but always displaced and re-declared afresh. We imagine that as the loop passes, it reinvents itself.
We’ve been collaborating informally since 1998, including with the generic conjunctive title Ms&Mr since 2003. Through a range of forms such as large-scale video assemblages and installations, we create moments of connection or disruption that often take the form of an abstract encounter across the breach of time. Orlando, the novel by Virginia Woolf (1928), its title character and Sally Potter’s film adaption (1992), have been in our heads since we were teenagers. It’s a strange love letter that seems inspired by the theory of relativity.
Philip K Dick’s Ubik (1969) represents time spatially (and comically psychedelic) in an imagined future of 1992. One character, Glen Runciter, repeatedly visits his dead wife (suspended in cold-pac) as she continues to offer corporate advice through telepathic communication. In our XEROX MISSIVE we had Dick’s living fifth ex-wife commune with the deceased author from the future (as he predicted) by visiting his 1977 self in documented footage form.
In the original COSMOS series (1980), Carl Sagan stands like a monk by the sea, elucidating in his dulcet, melancholic tone. In episode 8’s thought experiment on Time Dilation, a kid leaves his friends on a park bench, taking a short ride on a bike that travels near the speed of light. From his perspective, a few minutes pass, but he returns to find that, for his friends left behind, time flowed at its usual rate and they have since grown up and died. His brother remains waiting, now an old man, and their gaze meets across the bridge of time that now separates them. http://www.novamilne.net/
Processing paradoxes
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Soda_Jerk
1) Soda_Jerk; 2) Hito Steyerl, Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 3) Parliament – Funkentelechy Vs. The Placebo Syndrome, 4) Microsoft Windows 95 Video Guide
Whether we’re working with video, lecture performances or cut-up texts, a kind of errant pedagogy is fundamental to our practice. The sources we’ve selected here also share an educational impulse that’s gone wayward.
Hito Steyerl – How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013)
How Not to be Seen… takes the form of an instructional video on how to remain invisible in an age of image proliferation. Equal parts Harun Farocki, Monty Python and post-internet art, this work manages to occupy the treacherous territory between the absurd and awesomely astute. So digital politics. Much entertainment value. Very respect.
Parliament – Funkentelechy Vs. The Placebo Syndrome (1977)
The third instalment in Parliament’s epic concept album trilogy, this LP sees the Starchild educating listeners on how the forces of uncut funk can be deployed in a fight for freedom. At stake in this intergalactic P-Funk mythology is a sharp critique of the socio-economic conditions of the late 1970s. Along with Sun Ra these guys delivered us our first schooling in the secret powers of combining social politics with speculative fiction.
Microsoft Windows 95 Video Guide
Sometimes the most ingeniously bent educational formats are deadly earnest in their intent. Research for our new lecture performance Netsploits has us deep in VHS tapes of 1990s operating system manuals and internet instructional videos. Special mention must go to Microsoft Windows 95 Video Guide which bills itself as “the world’s first cyber sitcom” and stars the best friends we never had: Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry.
We will be going errant educational in our upcoming AGNSW Contemporary Project 3 Live Video Essays. Over consecutive Saturdays in November we will perform three video lecture performances including The Carousel (2011), Netsploits (2014) and Terror Nullius (2014). http://www.sodajerk.com.au
Upgrading and evolving
Sarah Pirrie, Videodromo 1.5 At 24hr Art
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Sam Songailo
Sam Songailo, Digital Wasteland, CACSA
photos Emily Taylor
Sam Songailo, Digital Wasteland, CACSA
I’ve always loved the background art in sci-fi, particularly in Anime. The Anime series: Space Adventure Cobra (1982) contains in my opinion some of the best. The world seems to be made of metal interspersed with colourful lights, patterning and oversized computers performing some mystery function. The background art continually threatens to steal the show. I like to think of my installation work as the background art for something else that has or will take place. When I started painting I was trying to recreate these backgrounds. What I ended up producing was nothing like it. That initial trigger created a series of paintings leading up to where I am at today. Now it feels like my practice has a life of its own.
Through the look of the work I am seeking to reproduce a certain fictional atmosphere, which I would best describe as the emptiness of being inside a computer game. The first game machine my brother and I owned was a Commodore 64. The tape drive was unreliable and often we would spend hours trying and failing to load games. Eventually we would get one to work and it was kind of magical when it happened. Sometimes a ‘crack intro‘ (see 64 legendary examples) by the team that pirated the software would load before the game. Typically they consisted of colourful graphics, bouncing letters and an accompanying SID tune (SID was the name of the sound chip). The graphics on the 64 were low resolution and really forced game makers to be creative. I remember these crack intros having some of the best graphics at the time.
I have recently completed a couple of exhibitions. The first at Alaska Projects as part of the SafARI festival and then the exhibition Digital Wasteland at the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia. Both large scale painting installations. Currently I am finishing off a mural in West Footscray and working on an exhibition opening in July at Hugo Michell gallery (http://www.hugomichellgallery.com/). Finally I am working on a commission for a university which will be completed late this year. http://www.songailo.net
Sam Songailo’s Digital Wasteland will be reviewed in RT121.
Lindsay Vickery
1) Lindsay Vickery, 2) Silent Revolution, detail (2013), 3) Nature Forms I, detail, (2014)
courtesy the artist
1) Lindsay Vickery, 2) Silent Revolution, detail (2013), 3) Nature Forms I, detail, (2014)
Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco’s book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (2013) has been hovering over a lot of what I’ve been making lately. It’s a confronting look at where society is heading (and already is for some): the final pages are as heart- and gut-wrenching as anything I’ve read. The combination text/“graphic reportage” they use was a big influence on the visual style of my recent works Silent Revolution and Sacrificial Zones.
I think the creative response and energy around the Occupy movement, artists like Molly Crabapple et al (http://mollycrabapple.com), has started a kind of community of intention that hasn’t been around for some time. I’ve also been following the work of this New York composer Bil Smith, an enigmatic Luther Blissett kind of character, who has been publishing these amazingly unrestrained scores incorporating notation, graphics, photographs, data visualization and so on.
In particular this year, I’m looking closely at the boundary between representation of sound and image, partly through some experiments with eye-tracking technology, but also with some new works involving sonfication and visualisation (and re-sonification of visualisations and vice versa). My interest in this is an outgrowth of the ‘screenscore’ works we’ve been doing with Decibel, but also some other things: Peter Ablinger’s Quadraturen series that explores the distortions that occur as a result of translation from one medium to another, and Manuella Blackburn’s compositional approach using visualised sound shapes. For example, in my recent works Nature Forms I, three performers and a computer sonify images derived from trees, rocks etc, with differing degrees of fidelity/freedom; and in Lyrebird, software I’ve made for Vanessa Tomlinson’s 8 Hits program, field recordings are transcribed in real time into a ‘score’ that she can play or improvise with. This has led to some interesting questions about innate associations between colour and shape, some of which have been answered by the interesting work at Stephen Palmer’s Visual Perception Lab in Berkeley 9 into “weak synaesthesia,” the sort of cross-modal correspondences that naturally make us group light, high and bright together. www.lindsayvickery.com; http://lindsayvickery.bandcamp.com
Related articles
Man-machine music
Sam Gillies: The Mechanical Piano, Waapa
RealTime issue #107 Feb-March 2012 p40
Earbash: Decibel
Disintegration: Mutation
Online exclusive, May 24, 2011
Julie Vulcan
1) Julie Vulcan, 2) Drift, 3) Wishing Dark
photos Michael Myers
1) Julie Vulcan, 2) Drift, 3) Wishing Dark
The current series of work I am developing is Wishing Dark and this has led me to revisit some cult classics from the 1970s and 90s: Neal Stephenson’s sci-fi novel Snow Crash (1992), Wim Wender’s epic film Until the End of the World (1991), Alex Proyas neo noir thriller Dark City (1998) and Andrei Tarkovsky’s enthralling Solaris (1972).
I have been exploring themes of sensory deprivation, what makes us resilient and the thin line between what is real and what we perceive to be real. All these have echoes in the book and films above. Reading and watching these classics again affirms how close some of the ideas are to current neuroscientific research which influences some of my investigations, especially around visual perception, hallucination and how our brains fill in the gaps.
Some of the themes might seem dark and a bit gloomy: existential crisis on a space station; amnesia, murder and time/memory manipulation; dream addiction; language as virus. Well they are dark, both literally and figuratively and that is my interest. Dark = Manifestation. It’s not particularly a new idea but I am interested in this idea of self-implosion as survival—a path to mind expansion.
I am also a bit enamoured of the 1960s/70s futurism aesthetic—it was so hopeful…and silver. This filtered into my new work Drift at the recent Festival of Live Art (Melbourne) and Metro Arts (Brisbane). The predominance of silver and lime green in the installation was my homage to that era. The work on one hand seemed to present a nurturing haven offering some time out, but on the other it was highlighting how we hold onto small gestures in the face of uncertainty. What courage does it take to step into our space pod and warp our view to survive? http://www.julievulcan.net
Related articles
Do you want me to touch you?
Madeleine Hodge, SPILL Festival of Performance
RealTime issue #115 June-July 2013 p12
Director Carlos Gomes and performer/devisor Katia Molino discuss the making of Theatre Kantanka’s latest show Club Singularity, presented by Campbelltown Arts Centre (16-17 May, 2014) and Performance Space in association with National Art School (21-24 May, 2014).
The Wired Lab Artistic Director Sarah Last talks us through the immersive experiences offered at this year’s Wired Open Day, in Muttama regional NSW. Includes projects by Cat Jones, David Burraston, Garry Bradbury, Joyce Hinterding, Temporary Amateur Radio Club, Bukhu Ganburged, Dean Frenkel and Harmonic Overtone Community Choir.
Aña Wojak with Odalisque with Fascinator (1995); 3 Decades
photo David Corazza, courtesy the artist and The Channon Gallery
Aña Wojak with Odalisque with Fascinator (1995); 3 Decades
Artist’s Statement
How to write 250 words about 30 years of art practice: painting, performance, installation, assemblage and theatre design?
This diversity is akin to being multilingual, having different languages in which to express myself, each having words and expressions unique to itself. Yet, there are also always common words, links, expressions that cross over between those languages.
An exhibition of paintings is just an ephemeral site-specific installation comprising images in a room. So, with each successive suite I have made a point of emphasising this aspect of the work.
Although earlier paintings clearly display the Eastern European pre-Renaissance influences, the later work, focussing purely on the abstract quality of light, maintains continuity, being painted with the same technique of transparent glazes on metal.
Painting on salvaged metal and found objects adds another layer to the vocabulary. I am not dealing with tabula rasa, rather a dialogue with the complex histories and textures each found object or surface brings to the conversation, site specificity being an important element in my work.
Ritual has also played a role: the fetish of objects and actions, imbuing them with power and significance. This is manifest in the mythologised subjects of the painted works, through the intimacy of assemblages, the power of suggestion with scents in large-scale installations, the repetition, rhythms and visceral pain of durational performance…
Which brings me back to the act of painting, which is in itself a durational performance for an unseen audience.
photo David Corazza, courtesy the artist and The Channon Gallery
Aña Wojak, Divine Madonna (1988), 3 Decades
A fleeting 30 years
In this survey of three decades of AñA Wojak’s paintings, it is clear the cross-disciplinary artist has a close but evanescent relationship with her art.
Each painting has a story, history and purpose and the works explore Wojak’s favoured inspirations: her Eastern European heritage and its religious iconography, eroticism and the environment she lives in. She approaches the gathering of art materials like a bowerbird, working on recycled wood, pressed tin and industrial steel sheet. She has a penchant for gold leaf, found objects and lustrous oils. Creation is an active meditation and the exhibition is a careful, deliberate installation and performance of her art. She’s connected to all her works, but attached to none.
To grasp her philosophy of ephemerality, I asked Wojak to walk me through her exhibition. She strode immediately to her abstracts from past decade: works from the four exhibitions from the Chatoyant series (2001-2009). These exhibitions (Standing on an Island, lightboxes, LATITUDE and 4 quarters) were both site installations and painting exhibitions.
Chatoyant, which means to have a changeable or undulating lustre, marked a shift for Wojak from working figuratively and in landscape on pressed tin to working with recycled steel sheets. She burnishes the steel with industrial wire brushes and applies translucent, subtle layers of oil paint to create light-reflecting textures, inspired by early Renaissance techniques. The result is more modern, producing an impressionistic and evocative shimmering, a Monet without the lilies.
Wojak described how 2005’s lightboxes exhibition at Sydney’s Depot Gallery reflects her work’s ephemerality. Originally, the 80 panels (30cm x 30cm) were arranged in a 16×8 grid to create an overall flow, yet all were for sale as individual works. Wojak encouraged people to buy singles, or blocks or strips of panels. Once sold and dispersed, the grid could never exist again.
In 3 Decades, lightboxes make fleeting appearances as singles, pairs, strips and blocks around the gallery. A standout is the golden Genesis, a set of 16 squares of flashing luminescence in a re-imagined configuration that came together after the lightboxes exhibition was dismantled. This was Wojak’s 2003 Blake Prize for Religious Art entry. (She would win the prize in 2004 with pieta, darfur). A trio of works from 2007’s LATITUDE hang together, offering an intimation of the powerful original configuration of 52 steel panels, graduating in colour and size and united by a horizontal band of light through each centre.
This horizontal line has connections with Wojak’s earlier landscape paintings. The sunset horizon, the kiss between day and night, in WEST ONE is one example of the site-specificity and durational aspects of her art practice playing out. She captures a sunset’s fleeting intensity, drawing the eye to a thin horizon line of gold leaf, dividing rust red from deep twilight blue. The faded lettering on the derelict tin Weston Butter sign clues her direction to the sunset, while the corroded texture influences the painting’s narrative.
While that application of gold leaf is subtle, in many of Wojak’s figurative works from the 1980s and 1990s, it was a dominant compositional tool. Divine Madonna (1988), an electric Krishna blue standing nude woman, levitates above a soft green mound. Painted in pure manganese blue, she is otherworldly, pre-Renaissance against the shimmering gold, but pockmarked dunny door she is painted on. In the Odalisque series, with its attention on eroticism and performance, gold leaf appears as a light source, highlighting both the figurative poses and the decorative fleur de lys patterns and stippled surfaces of the pressed tin ceiling panels she employed from the 1990s.
However, 3 Decades is incomplete as a survey exhibition, as Wojak’s art practice has incorporated performance since the mid 1990s, and this has been a particularly productive stream of activity in the past four years. Wojak’s performative installation exploring her family’s migration from Poland, stepping stones…, exhibited at Lismore Regional Gallery in April 2014, demonstrates the integration of transience of time and of place as the uniting theme of her art practice.
Aña Wojak, 1) St Christina the Amazing; 2) St John the Baptist; 3) St Paul the Hermit; 4) St Simeon Stylites, (1983); 3 Decades
photo David Corazza, courtesy the artist and The Channon Gallery
Aña Wojak, 1) St Christina the Amazing; 2) St John the Baptist; 3) St Paul the Hermit; 4) St Simeon Stylites, (1983); 3 Decades
But Wojak often brings the performative alive in the subject matter of her paintings. You can see this in the Odalisque series and in her earliest works in 3 Decades, the mixed-media portraits of eight Christian saints which she painted in the early 1980s for her Masters degree in Gdansk, Poland. Wojak speaks warmly of these works and their materials, as they represent an extended period of keen focus, and years spent studying in her family’s homeland.
She depicts the hermit-saints’ miracles as Gothic narratives but in a naïve style, using the colours of a children’s Golden Book. Around each tableau, an old window or cupboard doorframe invite us to look in and become witnesses to the unfolding miracles. And then, suspended, as if on a stage, is each saint represented as a puppet. Created from objects found around Gdansk, the puppets are like dancing relics. The St John the Baptist puppet is made from plant stems and a dried mouse body, his head a tiny clay sculpture. The puppet of St Christina the Amazing, whose miracle was to rise from the dead and levitate, is part bird’s wing.
It seems unfortunate these curious, quirky saints are for sale individually, that this collection of early works will be split up. But, AñA Wojak says, one found a home years ago in Sydney and she is happy for them to go to new owners. One now sells at the exhibition opening. Everything, after all, is ephemeral.
Jeanti St Clair lectures in journalism and radio production at Southern Cross University in Lismore, NSW, and is the arts critic for ABC Radio North Coast.
Tamara Gazzard, Lucy Shepherd, Sarah Coffee, Spent, Paper Cut Paper Cut Contemporary Performance Collective
photo Tahnee McWhirte
Tamara Gazzard, Lucy Shepherd, Sarah Coffee, Spent, Paper Cut Paper Cut Contemporary Performance Collective
The cultural ethos of Newcastle has always been distinctly DIY. From This Is Not Art (TINA) to the Renew Newcastle project activating unused commercial properties for cultural pursuits, Newcastle artists like to do things for themselves. While the early manifestations of TINA had a decidedly media art focus more recent editions have included the Crack Theatre Festival, revealing a developing performance culture in Newcastle. Three ambitious emerging artists—Sarah Coffee, Tamara Gazzard and Lucy Shepherd—have joined together to create Paper Cut Contemporary Performance Collective. With two significant productions under their belt they are currently in development for a third. We asked them to tell us about their developing company, in particular their most recent production Spent, which premiered in late April in a disused commercial property.
How did the Paper Cut Contemporary Performance Collective come about?
The three of us collaborated as devisers on The Past is a Foreign Country in 2012. This project was initiated by one of our core members, Tamara Gazzard who at the time was doing her Masters of Applied Theatre Studies, conducting practice-based research into self-reflexivity and the verbatim form. We were actually all guinea pigs in her experiment!
We are all interested in exploring verbatim and documentary techniques, but at this stage we aren’t limiting ourselves to that. Our latest work, Spent, for instance, began as a documentary project—collecting discarded grocery receipts and attempting to make performance using only the text found therein. But we also went into it with the question: how can we take a more embodied approach when working within the verbosity of documentary theatre? The final product ended up being much more movement based than documentary.
Generally speaking we want to make contemporary performance that is bold, sharp and playful. We enjoy testing and stretching the boundaries of conventional theatre. We also enjoy making work that has participatory elements—where the audience becomes active in creating the performance with us.
Sarah Coffee, Tamara Gazzard, Lucy Shepherd, Spent, Paper Cut Paper Cut Contemporary Performance Collective
photo Tahnee McWhirte
Sarah Coffee, Tamara Gazzard, Lucy Shepherd, Spent, Paper Cut Paper Cut Contemporary Performance Collective
What was the inspiration for making Spent?
The Past is a Foreign Country was interesting and unique because it took a mundane little family anecdote, imbued it with profound significance and transformed its retelling into a deep and complex exploration of the notion of absolute truth. After that project, we were excited to discover other ways of making the seemingly insignificant significant. So we stumbled upon the idea of making a show using text found on discarded grocery receipts.
What was the process? Was it different from previous ones?
The process for making Spent involved a lot of research, task-based devising, a couple of development showings and copious rehearsals. It was different to our previous process with The Past… in a number of ways. When we started, we had nothing. At least with The Past… we had an existing narrative to work with. With Spent we just had piles and piles of receipts. Just factual information. We had to speculate and imagine the narratives that tied those facts together. We also had to research in and around the system of consumerism, because there were grand narratives there that impact on the way people shop and what they buy.
The process was also different because the style was different—drawing so much on physical theatre and movement we were challenging ourselves to step out of our comfort zone and express ideas through a different medium from words. We were fortunate to be able to engage a mentor on this project, Cadi McCarthy, who is an established dance theatre artist and choreographer. Cadi stretched and pushed us to find new ways to link text and movement.
The collaborative nature of the process was important. We are committed to working in a democratic way to create new work. We share all of the responsibilities for creating and producing the work, which is really developing our versatility as theatre practitioners. It does bring certain challenges: it can take us days of arguing before we make a concrete decision about something, and it can be scary presenting the work to an audience for the first time without the certainty of having a director tell you exactly what to do.
How did you feel the project turned out? Is there a future for it?
We were all really impressed with how it turned out. It was an ambitious project in many ways—Spent is an hour-long show that features a full-length original sound track created by Huw Jones, accompanying animations designed by Alex Ball and the entire performance is one intricately choreographed movement piece. We also had the challenge of transforming an abandoned shop space at The Store into our performance venue. It took a lot of effort and we’re thrilled that it all came together. We hope there will be a future for Spent. It’s a very portable show, so we’ll be looking into options like touring or an independent season somewhere else.
How do you find making theatre in the context of a regional city
There are many advantages to working here in Newcastle. Space is much more affordable and because there are so few people making new work it’s easier to get noticed. Also, Newcastle hosts one of the nation’s most amazing festivals every year (Crack Theatre Festival as part of TINA), so we have the perfect platform for testing new ideas right on our doorstep.
There are definitely disadvantages as well. Newcastle has a vibrant artistic community and traditional theatre is well respected here. But the kind of performance we make is sometimes met with suspicion. So we have to work really hard to create an audience for our work. We also simply do not have the pathways into the industry that metropolitan areas do. So if you want a career as an artist in Newcastle, your only option is DIY. As emerging artists we’ve benefited from the support of Newcastle’s only funded youth theatre company, Tantrum Youth Arts. This kind of local support is invaluable for emerging artists in regional areas.
What’s in store for the company and you as individual artists?
We have a creative development lined up for later this year for our next work A Minute of Your Time. We’ll also be looking for opportunities to give another life to Spent.
Individually, Tamara has just been announced as a recipient of an ArtStart grant from the Australia Council, so this year will see her developing her creative business through mentoring, professional development and travel. As Tantrum’s Associate Director, Lucy will continue to work on various creative projects for and with young people in Newcastle. Sarah is a member of live art collective Big One Little One and is currently working on a new audio theatre work, I might just take you on the AstroTurf, which will premiere in Bathurst in July.
A line of cars stretches over a kilometre as they inch their way slowly into the Dromana Drive-In. Tonight, Aphids the Melbourne-based hybrid artists company is premiering The Drive-In Project—the culmination of 18 months working with a quirky alliance of communities from the Mornington Peninsula including the Dromana Senior Citizen’s Marching Ladies, Ulysses Motorcycle Club (Mornington Wanderers and Two Bays branches), Rosebud’s Astral Theatre Society, Frankston Symphony Orchestra, Mornington Peninsula Chorale, the Kunyung Primary School and the Peninsula Youth Music Society.
While working in the nearby National Park for another development, Aphid’s artistic director Willoh S Weiland had been driving past the Dromana Drive-In site each day. Fuelled by the heady mix of nostalgia that only a drive-in can elicit, Weiland jumped at the chance to use the site when she heard the owner was replacing all the 35mm projectors with digital. Her dream to combine a staged live event with the making of a short experimental film thus evolved. Her dream also incorporated that of one of the locals, Evan Noble, whose story of how he communicated through musicals as a child forms the key conceptual narrative. Directed by Weiland and co-written with Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Thoms, Tristan Meecham, Finale is described as “a short film of serious magnitude.” The production, performed entirely by a cast of locals, is slow moving and strange, with a David Lynch quality. The premiere evening also included a selection of live radio interviews with participants and artists, broadcast prior to Finale, followed by a curated program of video art (by Jared Davis) and finishing with a screening of the Gillian Armstrong classic feature film, Starstruck (1982).
Aphids offers an interesting lens through which to examine the situation of artists currently working with communities. As a company that is artist-led and whose small collaborative team also produce each other’s work, Aphids’ preferred approach to working with community is to offer an open invitation for them to participate in the making of contemporary art. It’s a different approach to that of CCD practitioners and large community arts organisations whose programs are generally designed around intentions to address and remediate complex social problems. While Aphids acknowledge the significant work done by community artists in this area, Weiland is circumspect about the kind of instrumentalising of art for these purposes. The Aphids team are clear in their desire for the company to remain artists working explicitly in the creation of hybrid, experimental and contemporary work, alongside and with community. For example, in The Drive-In Project, participants were selected based on their desire to perform and take part in the experience of making a film and are represented by groups organised around the performative and visual. Significantly these groups were also from an area in the Mornington Peninsula area where Aphids had already been working for a number of years.
Finale, film still
courtesy Aphids
Finale, film still
The debate about art and community has shifted in recent years as the market driven imperatives of use-value within the context of advanced neoliberalism have pushed funding paradigms to validate and measure the efficacy of arts in the community. It has also pushed an agenda for the arts to remediate the excess of social dysfunction when other parts of the government funded housing, healthcare and education systems have failed, leaving many artists working in complex social situations requiring long term solutions. Reflecting on this, veteran community arts leader Scott Rankin wrote in Arts Hub recently (“The Emperors New Social Work,” Wednesday 23 April) about how young Aboriginal boys engaged in high-level international arts events nonetheless return home to reoffend. His argument speaks to the complexity of intergenerational poverty, violence, substance abuse and entrenched dysfunction within these communities—for which art is no singular solution and certainly not in the short term. But his concern is not just with the inability of the arts to deal with these problems, he is also equally concerned with the quality of the artists engaged, their competencies and the honesty with which these programs are evaluated and assessed and how learnings as failures are chalked up, rather than reintegrated into improved programming.
Somewhat exacerbating this, or perhaps interestingly coincidental, has been the rise of participatory/exchange based live arts or socially engaged artists whose work places them in community settings which become the material with which to create work. This has been written about much by academics—referred to as the “social turn” in the arts, by academics such as Claire Bishop, Shannon Jackson, Grant Kester et al. In Melbourne last year the conference Spectres of Evaluation attempted to address questions about the efficacy of community arts, the evaluation tools used to gauge the effect of art and the protocols of artists working in community. Presented by The Centre for Cultural Partnerships, VCA & MCM, University of Melbourne & Footscray Community Arts Centre, it was also an attempt to historicise community arts practices in Australia, to develop a more robust discourse appropriate to the changing landscape of Community Arts practice within an emerging contemporary context of “socially engaged arts.” The conference brought together a broad cross section of academics, community arts practitioners, policy makers, non-government agents and contemporary artists. This proved to be a double-edged sword as the sheer diversity of participants revealed sharp differences in genealogies and languages and prevented a maturation of discussion of the many points of difference into a full fledged debate that could evolve into a new set of languages with which to arrive at some new place. This seemed to be a missed opportunity to articulate and acknowledge a kind of in-betweenness or straddling as a radical position which could be adopted strategically by the ‘sector.’
The Drive-In Project, Aphids
photo Bryony Jackson
The Drive-In Project, Aphids
As Weiland remarks, “As collaborating artists we are always trying to work out our strategy around that particular problematic—none of us comes to this from a Community Cultural Development background at all; it’s very much from the art.” Aphids are very careful to be clear about their role as makers of contemporary art—which implies the experimental, or as Weiland puts it, “Weird art.” For the Drive In project, the process and the product were treated as two separate (but related) entities. This allowed for the film process to evolve with all the care and attention required for working with several large and different community groups. As Weiland notes, in this way the making of the film was informed by a more traditional community theatre practice model, while the post-production of the film and the drive-in event were directed by Aphids. The project was also based on long-term relationships they had built up through other projects. For example Evan Noble, the key protagonist in the film, was involved in an earlier project with the company.
The audience rolled on in and tuned their car stereos to pick up the film sound track. As familiar faces appeared and members of the community recognised themselves on the extremely large screen, the sound of cheers and rowdy car horns interrupted the film—the perfect complement to the sound track, and a great night out.
Aphids, The Drive-In Project, artists Willoh S Weiland, Liz Dunn, Lara Thoms, Tristan Meecham, cinematography Andy Lane, composer Kelly Ryall, Dromana, Mornington Peninsula, 1 Feburary, 2014; http://aphids.net/in-laboratory/The_Drive_In_Project
My research specialisation is in the field of media art history and I have completed a doctorate in interactive art and ludic interfaces. Currently my interests launch more broadly toward contemporary and hybrid arts, however I still have a keen interest in developments of the media arts sphere. On the practical artistic front I have collaborated in art projects and residencies in Scandinavia, Singapore and Taipei and exhibited locally and internationally. Following over half a decade of lecturing at the University of Western Australia my work currently involves academic programming at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, in addition to being art critic for the West Australian newspaper and contributing to the academic sphere as a freelance writer.
Exposé
Writing in the visual arts for me is about having that extra sensory component to text, having more than words, having images, sounds, tactile and immersive experiences available as zones of research. Whether in the gallery context, in private or public space, these things make life richer. I was very close to doing my doctorate in philosophy but I found I craved more than words and heady concepts. In addition to this multi-sensorial experiential range, the arts also seduce me with the capacity of artists to be at the forefront of engaging the world and creating meanings pertinent to social, political, spiritual and ethical being. For me it is not solely about the aesthetic or sensorial potential of art, but how it can push boundaries and delve into the core issues of our times. Artists both shine a mirror back onto humanity and imagine wild and varied visions of the future. It is then the role of writers and publications such as RealTime to discuss, debate, theorise, philosophise and make such creative production history, while also communicating the relevance, potency or indeed utter irrelevance of the given art.
My earliest extant piece of writing was an illustrated book that went by the title The Haunted Skeleton and while five-year-old me never finished the thing he did go to the trouble to write a back cover blurb for it. The young critic's summation simply ran thus: “Is it good? Yes it is.”
I largely abstained from criticism for the next several decades but studied and often tried my hand at every art form within reach. At some point I found myself writing about stuff. This isn't the only way of extending your own thinking on a subject—there's a place for live conversation and opposed argument and sheer wordless immersion—but for a certain type of personality there's a particular reward that comes from talking to yourself on the page.
I quickly discovered that while all of the artworks that had driven me to write still compelled my imagination, it was the writing itself that people were willing to allow me. I suppose I am absolutely the failed artist that critics are sometimes disdainfully characterised to be, but if you'd seen The Haunted Skeleton's drawings you would have encouraged me to stick with the words as well.
Also: I write for The Age, sometimes broadcast on RRR and have been known to do teachy things at tertiary and high school level.
Exposé
Writing can be a way of realising the self, but why should anyone else care? No one's reading me because I'm me.
A critic is a haunting. We're there but we shouldn't be and that can result in humility or arrogance. I feel that mystery has more appeal than authority, though there's ample evidence against that position.
I don't think criticism necessarily equals a judgment of merit. Criticism that argues for a work's value or lack thereof is persuasive, rhetorical, prescriptive. That's not what draws a lot of people to art in the first place, unless they're looking to fill some void once occupied by religion or politics or a parent figure.
So while the five-year-old's question “is it good?” is one that has its function, the answer is inevitably the least interesting thing for a person to read. Writing that instead offers ways to reframe something, even those somethings we otherwise have good reasons to turn away from, gives you more to do with your time. I'd rather spend mine with some thoughtful words inspired by the dullest of experiences than merely nodding or shaking my head at some umpire's signal.
Selected articles
Dark mothering
John Bailey: Katie Warner’s Dropped; The Rabble’s Frankenstein
RealTime issue #120 April-May 2014 p41
A reason to care for strangers
John Bailey: Bryony Kimmings, Melbourne International Comedy Festival, FOLA
RealTime issue #120 April-May 2014 p14
Creative exploitations
John Bailey: Melbourne International Arts Festival
RealTime issue #118 Dec-Jan 2013 p33
Strictly in the moment
John Bailey: Side Pony Productions; Grit Theatre
RealTime issue #117 Oct-Nov 2013 p27
Re-working & new expectations
John Bailey: NEON: The Rabble, The Hayloft Project
RealTime issue #116 Aug-Sept 2013 p41
The Wired Lab Artistic Director Sarah Last talks us through the immersive experiences offered at this year's Wired Open Day, in Muttama regional NSW. Includes projects by Cat Jones, David Burraston, Garry Bradbury, Joyce Hinterding, Temporary Amateur Radio Club, Bukhu Ganburged, Dean Frenkel and Harmonic Overtone Community Choir.
Soundcapsule #4
Ida Duelund Hansen – Chamber Made Opera; Kraig Grady – Clocks & Clouds; David Burraston – The Wired Lab
Beth Buchanan from Ranters Theatre talks with Gail Priest about her intimate audience exchange based around sleep, presented at Arts House as part of the Festival of Live Art (FOLA).
Dance Journalism #1 – protest action at the Yongah Hill Immigration Detention Centre, 2013, dancer Sam Fox.
photo Alex Bainbridge
Dance Journalism #1 – protest action at the Yongah Hill Immigration Detention Centre, 2013, dancer Sam Fox.
The choice of our featured theme, art, empathy & action, was triggered by what appears to be a failure of empathy among Australian citizens, media and politicians for refugees, the unemployed and for future generations likely to be the victims of climate change.
What role can artists play in challenging this failure? We focus on distinctions between sympathy and empathy, on identification in the works of Mike Parr and Kym Vercoe, character complexities in the current wave of epic TV series, who feels for whom in Wolf Creek 2 and on art addressing Climate Change. John Bailey reports on the empathy generated by UK performer Bryony Kimming’s Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model.
Film. Low budget is viable. Dan Edwards looks at independent distribution of independent films online, Andy Ross’ Well Beyond Water and in cinemas, Genevieve Bailey’s I Am Eleven. Kath Dooley interviews Sophie Hyde about the making of 52 Days after its triumphant Sundance premiere.
Image note: for more on Dance Journalism #1 see The Arteffect
“It is crucial…in advancing art’s political agency, to identify and make visible—and open to discussion—the forces in play…” Dean Kenning and Margareta Stern, ‘Which side is art on?’ Art Monthly, Sept 2013.
A performance by Mike Parr is always an event for the art world, ironically perhaps given his well known antipathy to art’s rituals, its “alcoholic” culture, its “window dressing” as he calls it, the attractive display while the real business grinds on behind the scenes. His performance artworks, in their public manifestations (there are also now a number of significant closed performances made for camera), are also rituals of a kind, for the artist, and for a certain public. I form part of that public but have also been studying these works and writing about them for almost 20 years (since 1996). In this time, the artist and myself have become occasional collaborators, passionate interlocutors and friends. So if I have come to lack objective distance in the case of Mike Parr perhaps I can make up for it in insider knowledge. On the other hand, his kind of performance art plays on this very border of intimacy and public imagery so in a sense I am not in a unique position at all.
Daydream Island is the name of a savagely ironic piece of what Parr calls ‘theatre’ and while it actually felt like theatre for much of the time—we spectators were sitting, intent on the action, observing passively from our seats in the auditorium—it wouldn’t be the sort of thing students at NIDA are learning much about. On the contrary, where the most complex acting is simulation, Daydream Island featured only the actions of participants (“non-matrixed” in the critical language) carrying out various real tasks. I am used to seeing Mike’s wife Felizitas at these events and admiring her sangfroid as her partner’s body undergoes various acts of violence. Acts which are measured but no less real. This time I couldn’t see her and asked John Loane, sitting adjacent, where she was. He pointed to the stage area where she was engaged in sewing tiny toys and monsters onto her husband’s face, eliciting grunts of pain when she went too deep with the needle.
Two videographers circled them relaying close-up visuals to three large HD screens. The lighting was altered awkwardly, clumsily by manually inserting coloured gels over one of the spots as if to say, this is ‘theatre.’ Lisa Corsi stage-managed the event and would interrupt the action when a ‘scene’ had been completed for example when Felizitas had completed, the sewing of objects. While the ‘scene’ changed Mike sat in his chair on the stage unrecognisable behind a mask of fishing line and monstrous children’s toys. Felizitas Parr gave way to Linda Jefferyes, a visual artist, and took her seat downstage with her back to the audience like the other participants. Black monochromes were fixed stiffly to their backs (part dada gesture, part Parr’s typical mobilising of the minimalist image). The sewing became face painting as at a children’s party but instead of Spiderman or a princess, Parr’s face was camouflaged. When this was complete he lay prostrate, subjectilian, on the floor and a Pollock style drip painting was enacted on his face. At the climax of this scene a battery-powered toy pig was let loose on the stage space waddling around the inert form of Parr and grunting. At the close, Corsi read a statement which quoted Prime Minister Abbott’s recent remarks describing any linkage of climate change and increased bushfire activity in Australia as “hogwash” and asked the audience to return to wherever they had come from.
Like Parr’s other performances of the past decade, this intertwining of delicately elaborated sado-masochistic action and imagery with overt political statement is a clear vernacular. (While it may be tempting to observe that it is an aesthetic vernacular that has found its essential theme in the ghastly asylum seeker politics of our time, it is also true that Parr has worked this seam for over 40 years, but I will remain with the most recent work here. For anyone interested, the performances of the first decade post 9/11 have been covered in my book The Infinity Machine, Schwartz City Press 2010.) But it’s different in a crucial respect too. The earlier works were all durational, that’s to say they were elaborated over an extended measure of time, 24 hours or more, while Daydream Island was just on 80 minutes, the length of a Williamson play. This was a deliberate structure imposed on the work but one which I want to question.
I wrote to Parr after the event to point out the following:
“The piece (…) left those present with a mark, a tiny wound, to work at and re-work… It also raised some issues for me in its theatrical nature, specifically its limited duration. In my view this tends to shut things down in the manner of a theatre piece rather than open things up, which your durational works do, in allowing a wound its own time to develop and the viewers their own time to experience and to work through. I wonder if the structure of the piece might tend to suture over the wound…”
The discourse of wounding is, of course, an important currency for performance art since so much of this form engages directly the artist’s body by placing it at risk or subjecting the body to interventions of different kinds. The language of the wound also explains the peculiar affective quality, its sometimes repulsive valency as well as its ethical and aesthetic power, literally aesthetic in its capacity to forcefully engage the senses of a spectator.
Parr responded in part with a version of the theatre metaphor:
“…theatre is a kind of scab so this piece was about opening up a wound and closing it down at the same time….Burying it in a way…that’s why I decided we should perform the piece with our backs to the audience and with the monochromes attached to the backs of my crew so that Modernist patches were created to block vanishing points…a miscellany of negations of drafted theatrical space and the fixed positioning of the audience…”
The embodied vanishing point is a concern of many of Parr’s works as it deals with the art historical discipline of drawing in perspective while also alluding to a certain disciplinary structure on the self, the way we are taught to view art and by extension the world around us. By blocking it he resists this kind of discipline and the viewer is forced to find another way into the image. I guess this is art-speak for trying to get people to look for themselves…Parr’s response also reconnected the shorter form of the work to the issue he was trying to represent:
“…I felt that this structure of theatrical convolution was exactly like our treatment of the wandering arrivals to our northern shores…wounds that are constantly opened and closed… boats turned back and people left adrift…the collusive, muffled reportage. I’m thinking now about theatre space, theatre conventions and wondering if I can condense and invert my understanding of ‘theatre’ to a further extremity. Amputating duration in this way was a fierce hit for me.”
The telescoping of ‘wandering arrivals’ and their grisly fate in our camps into a form of national theatre seems just right, an entirely accurate observation, but this still does not address the issue of the recurrence of the experience Parr is trying to capture in this work, the eternal return of asylum seekers and of the carefully administered suffering our representatives continue to inflict on our behalf, in our name, whether we like it or not. To represent this accurately and truthfully which we surely expect our artists to do, the work must forcefully engage these tropes, these experiences. For me the durational form Parr adopted in previous works was the more adequate vehicle, but we will continue to debate this question.
For now, after the recent Biennale brouhaha, the broader question of the proper role artists can play in this scenario is still pertinent and very fresh. What valid function can art have in this context given that intervention at best provokes a debate about—and possibly a crisis for—arts funding and not ultimately a debate about the policy of indefinite detention itself. What can art ever do in the face of the major party/neoliberal consensus about the threat posed to the concept of the ‘public’ by stateless individuals?
Of itself, of course it cannot affect the policy. At best art can recompose the terms of the debate and the relations between the actants, whose identities seem so fixed, like a well-made play: the evil politicians, the hapless asylum seekers, the concerned citizens etc. In Parr’s ‘theatre’ these entities, indeed all entities, become unrecognisable. Painted over. Subjectilian (a surface to be painted on). What takes their place is the play of forces, the flux of urges and drives. The cruelty it stages and re-performs is ours, we share in it. We love it. After all we pay to see it. Of course we are ultimately hurting ourselves. The wound we create for others, for us, is an elaborate durational artwork of its own. A national treasure like Blue Poles. As Mike Parr observes of the work: “a wound is on display but it is being hoarded.” Maybe the bitter message of Daydream Island is that enlightened self-interest is the only way out of this labyrinth.
Mike Parr, Daydream Island, performera Mike Parr, Felizitas Parr, make-up Linda Jefferyes, Project Manager Lisa Corsi; Performance Space, 30 Ways with Time and Space, Carriageworks, Sydney, 30 Nov, 2013
Physical pain has no voice, but when at last it finds a voice, it begins to tell a story…” Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (1985)
This observation comes from Scarry’s introduction to her seminal work on pain, its full title—The Body in Pain, The Making and Unmaking of the World. “Intense pain,” she writes, “is world destroying.” For refugees whose worlds have already been undone, Australia’s treatment of them mentally and physically is doubly unkind.
We can protest on behalf of refugees, make art for or with them. The art signals our sympathy and can be taken as a form of action designed to generate sympathy in others, encouraging them to take action in turn, maybe charitable (not since the 19th century has the notion of doing good works by donation had such traction), perhaps political.
Art can ‘give voice’ to our own and others’ pain, with or without words, and in any form. Scarry writes, “Ingmar Bergman’s film Cries and Whispers opens with a woman’s diary entry, ‘It is Monday morning and I am in pain,’ and becomes throughout its duration (a duration that required its cinematographer photograph 200 different background shades of red) a sustained attempt to lift the interior facts of bodily sentience out of the inarticulate pre-language of ‘cries and whispers’ into the realm of shared objectification.”
An artist can be a stand-in, as in the case of Mike Parr suffering on behalf of refugees, by having pain inflicted on himself in a durational performance. In Kym Vercoe’s seven kilometres north-east, the performer nightly relives the suffering felt over the unveiling of the tragedy of 200 Muslim women raped and murdered in one location during the Bosnian War. The most affecting moment of a performance otherwise saturated with words comes at its end when Vercoe silently disrobes, steps beneath a cold shower (as did the women before being raped) and then disappears into a void. In Parr and Vercoe there is deep identification between artist and victims in their enactments of sympathy. Neither is a character in a performance, they are, selectively, themselves.
In an essay on seven kilometres north-east, “Tragedy at a distance,” on the realtimetalk.net blog, I note that Vercoe tells us very little about the dead women, although through her identification with them we, like her, become sympathetic. We can go beyond sympathy (we could be equally naïve travellers) to empathy for Vercoe, because we learn so much about her, her motives, very specific feelings of pain and guilt. But we know little about the women, nothing of the few survivors or the relatives. This tragedy is Vercoe’s, not the women’s, for the ignorance for which she berates herself, having blindly fallen in love with a country, its customs, music and language, yet which has its secrets and will keep her at a distance, even threaten her. In this way our feeling for Vercoe’s plight provides the potential for us to develop empathy for the slain women, should we be so motivated by her performance.
Similarly with Mike Parr’s Daydream Island, we sympathise at a distance with refugees via a performer who identifies with them to such an extent that he willingly endures very real pain, sublimating the experience by becoming a work of art himself. Parr tellingly writes to Edward Scheer about the shape of his performance, “…I felt that this structure of theatrical convolution was exactly like our treatment of the wandering arrivals to our northern shores…wounds that are constantly opened and closed… boats turned back and people left adrift…the collusive, muffled reportage.”
Parr and Vercoe are stand-ins not just for the people for whom they care so deeply, but also for us; they are willing scapegoats embodying our fears and guilt. The emotional outcome in tragic drama for the audience is supposed to be the “calm pity” espoused by Aristotle—catharsis purging us of the pity and fear experienced upon witnessing the horrors of tragedy, relieving us of excessive emotions and returning us to a rational state. There is some truth in this, but some tragedies are more tragic than others, their effects long lasting. Performance art can likewise stay with us, more sharply perhaps because of the real pain witnessed. For some of us, to have experienced such events is enough. The demands of the experience and the work’s resolution—something satisfyingly complete, cruelly beautiful even—require nothing more. We might feel a “calm pity,” absolved for having seen the work.
Elaine Scarry reveals concern about “the danger that artists so convincingly express suffering, they may themselves collectively come to be thought of as the most authentic class of sufferers, and thus may inadvertently appropriate concern away from others in radical need of assistance.”
Is this an overstatement, that the artist rather than being a conduit for empathy stands in its way, becoming a substitute for action, the aforementioned scapegoat? It’s nothing less than a reminder that art alone is insufficient when it comes to developing empathy in a population. If the millions whom we are told attend and participate in the arts truly cared, then would we have the growing empathy deficit that has been likewise statistically tallied?
It’s fascinating that programs developed around the world to nurture empathy are not unlike works encountered in live art. Roman Krznaric, the author of Empathy: A Handbook for Revolution (Random House, 2014), reports that some seven million people in 130 cities have experienced the museum-based work Dialogue in the Dark (www.dialogue-in-the-dark.com) for an hour each since 1988, guided by the blind as they negotiate everyday tasks and sensations in total darkness. Krznaric argues the necessity for creating “experiential adventures” in order to develop our capacity for empathy, to put ourselves in the position of others, to not simply sympathise, but understand. He cites a widely adopted Canadian scheme, The Roots of Empathy, commenced in 1995, putting groups of school children in regular contact with babies (“what is it feeling, thinking; why is it crying?”); results included a claimed drop in bullying. Another program put Israeli and Palestinian citizens in contact with each other for long conversations in over one million phone calls. Krznaric recommends we move beyond the introspection so favoured in the 20th century into what he calls “outrespection,” or stepping outside ourselves.
Krznaric writes in the Guardian Australia (“Is Australia losing its empathy?” 26 Feb) that former Paul Keating speechwriter Don Watson told him, “If you wanted to disenfranchise refugees, and leave the public thinking they have no rights, then call them ‘illegal’ over and over again.” Politicians, Watson says, do everything they can to “keep any kind of empathy at bay,” finding language that “dulls the instinct to ask, ‘What if that were me and my children in one of those boats, or in one of those detention centres?’”
Climate Change too is an empathy issue. Empathy is an act of the imagination at once latent and culturally developed by upbringing, education and art; if you cannot imagine the suffering of Pacific Islanders whose homes are falling below sea level or the agonies our own future generations are likely to face, then you will not care about their fate. With Western lifestyles focused on living in the moment, in yourself and in your space, whether actual or virtual, there’s a limit to how far one’s sympathy, let alone empathy will reach. You might share a digital space with people far and wide, but well within the Facebook and Twitter niche you have created or been coopted into.
Sympathy is one thing, empathy another. We can feel sympathy for Pacific Islanders and refugees, sign up to online protest campaigns and donate to campaign funds, and believe we’ve done enough. The great social scientist Richard Sennett distinguishes between sympathy and empathy, asserting, “Curiosity figures more strongly in empathy than sympathy,” a notion resonant with Krznaric’s ‘outrespection.’
Sennett writes, “Both sympathy and empathy convey recognition, and both forge a bond, but one is an embrace, the other an encounter. Sympathy overcomes differences through imaginative acts of identification; empathy attends to another person on his or her own terms. Sympathy has usually been thought a stronger sentiment than empathy, because ‘I feel your pain’ puts the stress on what I feel; it activates one’s own ego. Empathy is a more demanding exercise, at least in listening; the listener has to get outside him- or her self” (Together, The Ritual, Pleasures & Politics of Cooperation, Penguin 2013).
With empathy, adds Sennett, “we don’t experience the same satisfaction of closure, of wrapping things up.” Empathy “is a cooler sentiment than sympathy’s often instant identifications…” He argues it arises from open-ended dialogue, a desire to learn and to be known “without forcing ourselves into the mould of being like” those we are attempting to understand.
There are limits on art when it comes to making us empathic; it can’t provide the detailed information and dialogue that understanding requires, but it can go part of the way: sympathy yes, empathy by degrees. Some live art and new varieties of participatory theatre do bring people from very different circumstances, classes and cultures together in activities not unlike those described by Krznaric.
We cannot expect art to save the world. Nor should we accept art itself as an adequate response to the suffering of others. Of course there’s only so much any of us can do—although the density and speed of life in the West denies us a sense of what we might actually be able to do. In the first instance we need at least to recognise the differences between sympathy and empathy, and be aware when “our instinct to ask” is being repressed—by politicians or by our own feelings of helplessness.
version 1.0, seven kilometres north-east, devisor, performer Kym Vercoe, Seymour Centre, Sydney, 8-22 March; Mike Parr, Daydream Island, Performance Space, 30 Ways with Time and Space, Carriageworks, Sydney, 30 Nov, 2013
TV’s True Detective has started off a conversation, the idea that long-form television series can be compared to the ‘old novel’—most notably 19th century serialisations—offering viewers the chance to develop along with the characters on a week by week basis as the episodes screen live to air: to confront their lies and peculiarities, to see structural and psychological changes, to find compassion even when they do diabolical things.
Charles Dickens and Alexandre Dumas’ novels often started out as instalments in magazines or newspapers, giving readers the opportunity to see the characters gradually emerge over months or even years, before the entire series was published as a novel. Television in the US (and it’s starting to change in Australia) is giving writers the freedom to challenge conventional TV wisdom by offering philosophical meanderings and deep psychological insights, compassion for the building complexity of characters who are initially difficult to like, the chance to draw on a number of intertwining perspectives, and movement between main and minor characters as the series unfolds. Central to many of these shows—Girls, Homeland, True Detective, Rake, Redfern Now—is an argument for empathy for those stuck in a wasteland of socio-economic-moralistic ambiguity, where the rage against the machine is no longer heard, where characters—and viewers—are no longer sure where they are placed when it comes to the slippery line between good and evil.
Miah Madden, Kylie Belling, Craig Mclachlan, Consequence, Redfern Now, A Blackfella Films production for ABC TV
We are all refugees
In Rake, Frank the priest (Tony Barry)—who Cleaver visits regularly to ‘confess’ —argues that “we’re all refugees in one way or another.” And it’s this idea that underpins most successful contemporary TV series, where we grow to care intimately about characters who are outsiders, drifting aimlessly, despite (and because of) their exposed flaws.
In Redfern Now, the residents of the inner-city suburb are shown to be displaced even on their own turf. Aaron (Wayne Blair) is ostracised within his Indigenous community, for being a copper and for letting a man die on his watch. When he walks down the street he takes his granddaughter “as a shield” against the hostility of local residents. Allie (Lisa Flanagan) tells him he’s “not a proper blackfella,” even when he has just come to the front door to help after her husband has assaulted her. Listening to karaoke at the local pub, Aaron is refused bar service and Allie stops mid-song to confront those judging her bruised face. They’re united in their exclusion: Allie asks if she can join his “leper colony.” When they go out on their first date to a ‘flash’ Japanese restaurant in Surry Hills, Aaron says to Allie as they are walking in, “We’re Brazilian, not blackfellas—remember?” to put her at ease.
In Girls, Hannah (Lena Dunham), an aspirational writer, doesn’t fit into the NYC ideal of heavy-hitting glamorous go-getter and stands on the outside looking in. She is often seen naked, her voluptuous, soft un-Hollywood body a revelation with its unsexualised bulges. Watching her with Dunham’s neutral gaze, we want to be exposed to her, even when she’s grating—and she can be (in that funny, neurotic way that Woody Allen and George Costanza can be). When Hannah’s editor dies, she feels nothing, only concerned about whether her e-book will still be published. Attending her editor’s funeral, she cries, “Oh my God! I think I see Zadie Smith. That is definitely her.” Just when we’ve had enough of Hannah’s solipsism, the focus pulls back and we see her in bed, counting everything in eights, contending with OCD, sticking a Q-tip in her ear so hard she ruptures an eardrum, alone, cast aside and so vulnerable it wounds us too.
The limits of compassion
The ABC’s Rake has become ever more expansive, series two taking Cleaver Green to the limits of our (and other characters’) compassion. He’s like the Aussie larrikin (the questionable stereotype that our identity is apparently based on: mischievous, rowdy, a lad) taken to the extreme, to the point where he’s completely devoid of charm, in a slow process of disintegration. When Cleaver gets out of jail he’s repeatedly punished for his casual neglect: by the young man (Dan Wylie) who stands (too close) by him in prison and then kills himself; by the son (Keegan Joyce) who accepts Rake’s failures with complete and unnerving clarity; by the wife (Caroline Brazier) who has literally moved on and sold the family home; by the woman (Jane Allsop) who refuses to sleep with him and ends up in hospital three times as victim of Rake’s suspected domestic violence. At one point, the show’s sleazy TV show host, Cal McGregor (Damien Garvey), asks, “I mean, what country are we living in, people? The United States of Self-Interest?” It’s only when Cleaver finds an emotional connection and empathy with his clients—one, a priest (Paul Sonkilla), who reveals his brother, also a priest, was a paedophile—that he starts to win his cases. And the wider scope of Rake, which gives the second series its pace, is that it’s always up for seeing through systemic oppression and hypocrisy, exposing upper class cruelty, the cover-ups and silent witnesses among the silks, the Gina Rineharts, the tax lawyers, the priests who look past sexual abuse, the pollies who rely on polling for their shifting morality.
In Homeland we are continually forced to navigate large-scale hypocrisies and cross narrative boundaries where the line between good and bad is not stretched thin, it is completely gone. Both CIA ‘case manager’ Carrie (Claire Danes) and ‘terrorist’ Brody (Damian Lewis) are shown to be worthy of respect yet deeply conflicted, and their lives are often paralleled: Carrie is forced against her will into a mental institution for bipolar disorder, Brody is strapped down in a high-rise slum in Caracas, reliant on heroin to deal with the horrors of incarceration. Carrie and Brody are seen as the heroic anti-heroes because they are guided by intuition and how they relate to others, compared with the failures of the large impersonal corporations they work for. The turning inwards and isolationism of US culture and policy at large after September 11 is exposed in Brody’s being turned over by the US to his Islamic torturers. Forced to perform his prayer rituals while cowering in a corner of his locked garage, he is seen as unforgivable: a US marine who has converted to Islam.
The gender divide
With True Detective, the main characters Rust (Matthew McConaughey) and Marty (Woody Harrelson) come to us fully formed. Like babies seen as ‘old souls,’ they appear as if they’ve been here before, lived other lives. This is accentuated by the opening sequence with its cinematography by Australian Adam Arkapaw (Animal Kingdom; Lore): we feel like we inhabit the landscape, and the language, of these men. The opening image arrests us. We begin in a cane field, looking at a tableau of a naked girl, her body purple-hued, huddled in prayer position, delicate antlers crowning her head. A deer in the rifle sight, she sets the detectives off into a meandering expose of Southern comfort and culture, how men relate to one another, and how they fail to communicate. As the men look longingly at the pretty, dead prostitute laid out in extreme closeup on the slab, she is, in all her glory, ‘fridged.’
But when the women are alive, they get to the heart of the matter very quickly, and perhaps this is a problem for the shape of the overall narrative. It takes Marty’s wife Maggie (Michelle Monaghan), who’s not a detective, five minutes to find out what Rust has been concealing from Marty for months. Perhaps if the series let Maggie speak more, she would get past the bullshit and solve the crime, and the show would be over in an hour. The exciting thing about True Detective is that the men are deeply flawed, contrary, enigmatic and compelling characters—but portraying women as ‘whores,’ ‘crazy bitches,’ ‘teenage sluts,’ ‘corrupted innocents,’ or the open-all-hours attractive women that sagging Marty seems to seduce with ease, ultimately reduces the series’ dramatic possibilities.
The demanding viewer
While Australian TV series writers and creators don’t yet have the lit-celeb status of those starting to tour here (like Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad and David Simon, The Wire), shows like Rake and Redfern Now are pushing characters beyond the usual conventions of prime-time TV, blending dysfunctional family dynamics, occasional tragedy and off-the-wall humour. Like their 19th century counterparts, some people are happy to view their show at the same time each week, sometimes waiting months for the final instalment. Meanwhile the impact of iView, Apple TV and illegal downloads means more viewers are binge-watching entire series, just to keep up with social media conversations. Either way, the new-found popularity of TV series is forcing writers to keep up, to create characters that invite intimate connections, stimulate discussion and open up new narrative possibilities for increasingly demanding viewers.
A waterwheel can convert the energy of falling or free-flowing water into expedient forms of power. The limitation on its functionality however is its dependence on flow, which effects where it can be located. Igneous, Inkahoots and Suzon Fuks’ ambitious online project, Waterwheel, now in its third year, offers a global platform to share ideas, perspectives, performances and artistic interpretations with water as its theme, designed to build awareness for conservation and other issues. In a virtual platform the project assumes every location and is thus ripe with potentiality.
The Waterwheel website is free to use and designed to be participatory. It calls on everyone—artists, scientists and environmentalists, students and academics, anyone anywhere—to make a splash and start a wave. It’s a forum for exchange, expression and experimentation. This year Waterwheel hosted its annual week-long symposium in line with the UN’s World Water Day on 22 March. Performance artist Ulay opened proceedings with his listing of the words for water in 100 languages. Within just a few minutes, our need for interdisciplinary co-operation and compromise was clear.
Workshops, real-time discussion and live, networked performances are presented on the Tap section of the site. For easy access The Wheel has featured works and artists. But the hub of Waterwheel is its Media Centre where more than 3,000 artistic items are stored and tagged. You can search, comment and share your own content by uploading video, audio, photography, animation, slideshows, performance, music, text and other media. The Fountains section list events all over the world on a flashing map. The website claims, “There are no boundaries. Waterwheel flows along its natural course.” This it does, if you have access to high-speed internet, with Flash updated, on a non-Apple product. For Aussies, various symposium events were inclusive, if you’re not too fussed about circadian rhythms.
The artist and the water engineer
It’s widely accepted that there are major problems surrounding the world’s water and societies’ views on the rights to its exploitation. These problems are not well understood, particularly with international, inter-actional specificity. Many will have heard of the human rights issues of the Three Gorges Dam or pollution of the Mediterranean. But how many are aware of Bangladeshi arsenicosis or Punjab’s ever-decreasing water table? Technically, our engineers and innovators are providing solutions, from billboards that collect water from night air in arid areas to unglazed ceramic pots used to dramatically reduce evaporation in irrigation. Politically, the Mexican-American experimental pulse recharge of the Colorado River demonstrates progress, as does the EU’s oft lauded if flawed Water Framework Directive. While we didn’t come across the specifics of any such projects on Waterwheel, the website is not designed solely to inform on water policy and politics, but rather to build awareness and show art that provokes thought, and in this way it has been successful.
Waterwheel triggered florid debate between the two of us about the purpose and function of art in communicating big issues. Ben, a water engineer, argued that catchy, shareable images and infotainment-style videos are more effective in communicating to a broad audience the severity of water issues we face globally. He suggested we watch SABMiller’s Energy Food Nexus video instead. To humour Ben’s lumping together of art with advertising, Felicity, a musician, recalled the meme of an African kid with raised eyebrows beside a woman who appears to be an aid worker or tourist. The meme has a re-fillable speech-bubble, a favourite of which says, “You mean to tell me you poop in perfectly clean water?”
We agreed that decision-making and practical action should be based on informed opinions and not nebulous ideologies but Ben found little in the content of Waterwheel’s discussions that demonstrated this sort of information. Scientific ideas were present, but almost as an aside. Artworks were “pretty, amusing and interesting,” but few educated with directness. In Art and Ecology, a panel discussed for 40 minutes the idea of floating off messages in bottles. Ben saw this endeavour as little more than “justified pollution,” and, angered, suggested we look up a story about a load of rubber ducks that fell into the sea and were later found on far-away coastlines, to learn about ocean currents. Dropping hundreds of bottles, or even one, into a water course for the purpose of demonstrating that water moves, is redundant. In obliquely saying that this method of education is acceptable, it validates both waste and mindlessness. Yes, even when the pollution is ‘accidental’ or the by-product of didactic art.
Many artworks in Waterwheel were to Ben’s mind dreamy, sensualist expressions of artistic autonomy that did not deliver facts about the shittiness of the creek we find ourselves up. He wondered where the discussions about agricultural processes were, particularly because 70% of world water is consumed in this way. Smart decisions in choosing between spray, drip, gate or sluice gate irrigation can make the difference in sustaining cultures. Economic incentives need implementation to ensure methods for irrigation address local environmental circumstances. When Ben tried to throw these ideas into discussion at the symposium, nobody engaged. What was wrong with his mode of communication then?
As fonts of knowledge, our scientists and technicians are productive, but at times the implications of their studies get lost in data: their communication fails them. Dry data, even when concerning water, is still dry and indigestible. If artists’ aim is to explore the beauty and power of water, Waterwheel provides some wonderful pieces, but if it’s promotion of environmental stewardship, the audience must be engaged with the nature of the crisis we face.
Art at work with water
Felicity approached Waterwheel’s 2014 Water Week Symposium with an aesthetic eye and was excited by several contributions. Submissions and discussion investigated our collective relationship with this constant but volatile resource as an environmental issue, political dilemma, universal theme and symbol of life. There were several videos of pilgrims carrying containers on their heads and plenty of folks splashing by the seaside. Some artists shared work that only tangentially referenced wetness.
A short video of the Sonic Water project by Kim Pörksen & Sven Meyer posted by Esteban Yepes Montoya calls water “the blood of the Earth” but counters this natural and embodied metaphor with geometric designs produced in a bottle-cap of liquid that is manipulated by morphing sonic frequencies. These Cymatics make sound visible and play upon pseudo-scientific mysticism for the unveiling of natural truth (www.sonicwater.org).
Ian Clothier posted a view of the South Island of Aotearoa, New Zealand, taken from space which hints at the scale of our fragility (http://water-wheel.net/media_items/view/4533). Ana Laura Cantera’s work No Eres Perenne (We won’t live forever) looks at how we pervert and contaminate water resources through over-exploitation. Her Flows in Return explores sustenance and decay in the natural world. (water-wheel.net/media_items/view/4423, water-wheel.net/media_items/view/4419)
Silke Bauer documents kids running around with buckets trying to catch paper cut-outs of invasive species released into a pond in Bio Invaders 2. Environmental pest risks are communicated here simply and effectively to kids through play. The video’s appeal is in children’s laughter but its beauty is in its educative function for subjects and audience. When we still hear anecdotes of inner city school children being unable to link hamburgers with cattle or tap water with rivers, this sort of interaction is crucial.
Action from inspiration?
One of Waterwheel’s aims is to inspire involvement and activism. Effective change requires the community’s involvement on a number of levels. These run from community’s passive reception of political or organisational imposition through to consultation to feedback and re-design, joint planning and finally to self-determination. Water projects worldwide fail regularly due to a lack of integrated involvement. When a population is not involved and engaged, it’s easier to manipulate through persuasive imposition.
The engineer in the room reckons we won’t solve problems by drawing pictures of them. The artist asks, how else can we help? You need to tell us. Waterwheel as platform has highlighted the very different ways we approach addressing and solving these problems. The discourses of the parties clash, but their intents do not. We need flow. We need engagement. We need empathy and action. Waterwheel sparked conversation and argument over vital topics that pass under our noses as we check out hot pictures of friends in swimwear on social media.
In the end, we talked not so much about the works as about our work in interpreting them. The power of Waterwheel is in its invitation for participation. But has it reached an optimal audience and participant scope: a critical mass of involvement ready to turn its wheel after the week’s discussions have ended? The project continues.
When considering empathy in relation to horror films, it’s worth asking the question, “Whose side are you on?” How, in other words, do filmmakers position the audience vis-a-vis monster and victim? Greg McLean’s outback nightmare Wolf Creek and its sequel Wolf Creek 2 form a good basis for such a discussion, presenting as they do two sides of the same horror coin.
Wolf Creek (2005) is possibly Australia’s best and most brutal horror film. In her analysis of the film for the Australian Screen Classics series (Currency Press, 2011; review RT 108, p20) Sonya Hartnett highlights the way Wolf Creek undercuts an audience’s expected response to a horror movie—”the thrill of being terrified from a safe distance”—through its conscious association with real events. She goes on to question whether Wolf Creek is for this reason a bona fide horror film, or “simply a movie which depicts something ghastly?” While it’s not uncommon for horror filmmakers to signal their work as “based on actual events,” Wolf Creek references the backpacker murders in NSW in the 1990s and the Peter Falconio disappearance in 2001 with such conviction as to ally it more with a film such as Snowtown (2011) than, say, Friday the 13th (1980).
Playing upon various pressure points within non-indigenous Australian culture—fear of the bush, with its attendant lost child narratives (see Picnic at Hanging Rock and One Night the Moon) and the emblematic figures of the lone bushman and larrikin ocker—the film forces the viewer into a space of such chilling verisimilitude that there is no option but to side with the hunted.
Wolf Creek 2 (2013), while virtually mirroring its predecessor in subject matter, is markedly different in treatment. It comes across as a comic book version of the first film, with brighter colours, plentiful gags, seat-of-the-pants car chases, huge trucks and explosions. It’s a much more conventional slasher, a textbook illustration of Linda Badley’s description in Film, Horror and the Body Fantastic of a sub-genre that “came to rely almost solely on suspense based in the assurance that the next scene (or sequel) would be graphically violent or fantastically gruesome” (Badley, Greenwood, 1995). And so it goes that the terrifying credibility of the first film is blasted away in an eruption of splashy effects where the bogeyman becomes a crude caricature with his primary victim (unconventionally male, it must be noted) remarkably resilient and somewhat implausibly quick-witted.
The question of identification, of “Whose side are you on?”, is a confusing one in Wolf Creek 2, specifically in relation to the murderous Mick Taylor (John Jarratt). The opening scene has two bored, bent cops attempting to set Mick up for speeding. It’s a moment of persecution that positions Mick, momentarily at least, as the object of police victimisation, cementing an impression of him as anti-establishment folk figure. A raft of cheesy one-liners reinforce this as the film progresses. Conversely, however, Mick is also Ugly Australia writ large, spitting diatribes about “foreign vermin” in relation to his tourist victims: “All them bodies. They deserved it. Foreign bastards. Noxious bloody weeds. Somebody’s gotta keep Australia beautiful.” The grotesque “Aussie history quiz” that Mick puts his English prisoner though parodies the infamous citizenship test introduced by the Howard Government in 2007, with its questions about the first year of white settlement and Don Bradman.
With this political reference, McLean seems to be making a larger point about the Australian hostility to outsiders which finds its current incarnation in asylum seeker policy. But does Mick’s xenophobic schtick engender empathy or even sympathy for Mick’s victims—and by extension, perhaps, the asylum seekers who are denied entry to Australia? I’m not so sure.
Towards the end of her book on Wolf Creek, Hartnett speaks of the problematic nature of the text that appears at the end of the film suggesting the events depicted actually occurred (in contrast to the less specific “based on actual events” at the film’s beginning). It’s a feature that’s repeated in Wolf Creek 2. Hartnett argues, with justification, that such a tactic “seems to detract from the truth of those who really did endure those events on which the film is based…It feels like a cheapening of their story to force fictional characters among them and claim that those suffered too.” When viewed in light of the sequel’s farcical approach, such a ploy for believability seems doubly misplaced. The probably intentional resemblance of the young German couple in the film to Ivan Milat’s victims Gabor Neugerbauer and Anja Habschied introduces another layer of dubiousness.
Stylistically, Wolf Creek 2 is a perfectly assured slasher film, a spectacle likely to produce excitement in those new to the genre and numbness in more hardened viewers. What’s lacking is any lasting sense of fear or, empathy, a bit of a problem given the film’s knowing entanglement with very real tragedy.
Wolf Creek 2, director Greg McLean, writers Greg McLean, Aaron Sterns, cinematography Toby Oliver, music Johnny Klimek, Roadshow Films, Australian release February 2014
Tilda Cobham-Hervey, Del Herbert-Jane, 52 Tuesdays
photo Bryan Mason
Tilda Cobham-Hervey, Del Herbert-Jane, 52 Tuesdays
There’s change in the air in South Australia. With much credit due to the South Australian Film Corporation’s now defunct FilmLab program for emerging filmmakers (a workshop-based program with funding—now ceased—that led to the development and production of several short and long-form screen works), a new generation of feature film writers, producers and directors have not just appeared on the local scene, but have made formidable marks on the international stage.
Perhaps the most prolific member of this new breed is Adelaide-based writer, producer and director Sophie Hyde. Her most recent project, the dramatic feature film 52 Tuesdays, recently garnered her the 2014 Sundance Film Festival World Cinema Dramatic Directing Award. This innovative film sees fellow local Tilda Cobham-Hervey play the role of 16-year-old Billie, a teenager who struggles with her mother’s (Del Herbert-Jane) decision to change gender. Billie goes to live with her dad for a year while the change occurs and mother and daughter vow to meet every Tuesday for that year. Notably, the film was actually shot on consecutive Tuesdays for 52 weeks with a script that was developed and revised as production progressed.
Hyde explains how she and co-writer Matt Cormack entered the SAFC FilmLab with only the framework of shooting one day a week in mind. “We didn’t develop characters for a long time, or story, because we wanted to investigate why we would want to make a film like that, and what it was that we were interested in.” For Hyde, the characters of Billie and James “represented individual people who were challenging the idea that we have to be a certain way, or that we have to stick to the rules about how we are supposed to live.”
The production of the film was given the green light based on a one-page story document, an initial 20-25 pages of script and detailed character descriptions. While Hyde and Cormack had decided on the ending of the film, the journey to get there was unclear, with some storylines falling away as the year of Tuesdays progressed. Hyde describes this style of film devising and production as exciting and invigorating, with the film’s low budget (approximately $700,000 in total) contributing to her ability to experiment and innovate. “You have people that you’re responsible to in terms of the investors but it’s not like someone is telling you what to do… [The film] didn’t have to succeed on anyone else’s terms.”
Hyde is one of the founders and co-directors of the Adelaide-based Closer Productions, a company that has produced a range of successful documentary and drama projects, most of which are character-focused. Her feature documentary and directing debut Life in Movement (co-director Bryan Mason, 2011), which explored the work and tragic death of dancer and choreographer Tanja Liedtke, won the 2011 Foxtel Australian Documentary Prize. She also co-produced the film as well as Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure (directed by Closer Productions’ Matt Bate), another FilmLab project that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2011. Hyde has a range of other credits as writer, producer and/or director of award-winning short form projects, and plans to continue working across these roles. She comments, “I love directing but I don’t want to direct all the time as it’s consuming and it’s raw. I like talking about ideas, financing and working with people to develop stuff…I think to be a director who only works as a director, you need to be a director for hire.”
Sophie Hyde
photo Bryan Mason
Sophie Hyde
52 Tuesdays is a project that Hyde describes as personal and all-consuming. Perhaps one of the most striking aspects of the film is its representation of teenage sexuality. Billie and her two school friends Jasmine (Imogen Archer) and Josh (Sam Althuizen) display high levels of agency and control when they engage in a series of sexual experiments, which are recorded on handycam by Billie. Hyde comments that “(audience members) say to us ‘it’s very frank!’ (whereas) very little is explicit in the film. Tilda is never even close to naked [but] there is a feeling that [this kind of sexuality] is part of life, and some people are not used to that.”
These scenes were drawn out of the director’s workshops with the film’s teenage actors, giving them a sense of authenticity. For Hyde, the objective was to explore the feeling of sexual experience, rather than its surface appearance. “It was really important to me that these guys in the film had a chance to explore…what they actually wanted with one another, and with themselves, rather than what they were supposed to want or how it is supposed to look. I don’t even know if young women, in particular, think about how it feels. Maybe that is a gross generalisation but I worry about that.” Certainly, the film’s content struck a chord with youth audiences at the recent Berlin Film Festival. A youth jury awarded the film the Crystal Bear for Best Film in the Generations 14+ category. Hyde comments that “(in Berlin) we were being interviewed by teenage writers…there was a huge amount of respect for their opinions and that conversation.”
To date, Hyde has been surprised to find audiences in general “really warm and embracing of the film.” She believes that 52 Tuesdays offers an opportunity for audience members to reflect on their own family relations. “I hope what we have made is a film about this family—a girl, a mum—that is told from the inside. There is a chance to look at how we live and how we relate to each other, our parents and our children, and the kind of responsibility we have to one another.”
While preparing for 52 Tuesdays’ imminent cinema release, Sophie Hyde is busy developing projects for both feature film and television formats. She is also a producer on Closer Productions’ upcoming feature documentary Sam Klemke’s Time Machine, to be directed by colleague Matt Bate. She says that “there are always other things to do but I would like to make another drama film.”
52 Tuesdays will be in cinemas from May 1. Audiences can also participate in My 52 Tuesdays, an online extension of the film, available at: http://my52tuesdays.com/my52tuesdays/
52 Tuesdays, director, co-writer Sophie Hyde, co-writer, producer Matthew Cormack, director of photography, editor, producer Bryan Mason, producer Rebecca Summerton, Closer Productions
Bryony Kimmings, Taylor Houchen, Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model
photo Richard Davenport
Bryony Kimmings, Taylor Houchen, Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model
The memory of a critic reserves permanent house seats for those works that provide an introduction to some new form or practice, no matter that it’s old hat to everyone else. Even more treasured are those experiences that provide some novelty shared by a wider artistic community, a ‘where does this even come from?’ effect that gets everybody talking. But there’s a place of privilege that can only be accorded those rare works that don’t just grab that collective attention, but feel as if they’re going to shape the practice of some or even many of those in the room in months and years to come.
These works plant seeds whose flowering can’t be predicted. Rather than inspiring imitators, they enable mutations in the practices of those who enter their gravitational field. There was no doubt that just such a moment had occurred when UK performance artist Bryony Kimmings brought two works to two very different festivals in Melbourne this year.
One is a melancholic/comic retrospective on Kimmings’ own history that expertly milks the pain inherent in any nostalgic turn. The other is a work whose investigative premise leads to a transformation that will likely influence everything she produces from now on.
Sex Idiot was an entry in the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and is perhaps the first and last time that a performance artist will command the main room of the Melbourne Town Hall. It began after an STI test came back positive and Kimmings embarked on a mission to contact her former lovers—all forty-something—and produce a new artwork to honour each who responded.
Kimmings’ sense of visual design is a maximalist one, and the many wardrobe transformations that take place here include lederhosen, toreador garb, bride, shaman. The stage is littered with flowers and the steady accumulation of props takes on more and more of a ritualistic aspect as the work progresses. In some ways this is an exorcism, in others a funeral.
She’s certainly a fearless and original performer, delivering a monologue through a transparent speculum, beating her face with a bouquet and in a jawdropping stretch of audience participation managing to collect enough pubic hair from her viewers’ bodies to fashion a voluminous moustache.
It’s not theatre as therapy. Kimmings reveals enough of the unpleasantness that likely accompanies anyone’s relationship history to let us know she’s no angel, and when several of her past lovers make it clear in no uncertain terms that they never want to hear from her again, you can imagine there’s probably a reason. Kimmings isn’t revelling in any of that, or seeking approval or forgiveness, and indeed the work as a whole avoids the usual narrative of self-discovery or transformation, even though the artist herself is constantly morphing in front of us and as an audience we are perpetually discovering new things about her.
Bryony Kimmings, Sex Idiot
courtesy the artist
Bryony Kimmings, Sex Idiot
Sex Idiot makes us laugh. It doesn’t end with a lesson, or pose an obvious question. By its very existence, though, it invites us to consider the very act of looking back, and how what is seen will always be shaped by the eyes that do the looking.
Kimmings’ inclusion in the inaugural Festival of Live Art (FOLA) turns in the opposite direction. It’s just as bravura an enterprise as Sex Idiot, but here Kimmings is joined on the stage by her tween niece Taylor. Auntie Bry began to wonder how the world today appeared to her at the time nine-year-old relative, and took to seeking out answers. What she found was enough to inspire a terrible fury and sadness. This is a work so fuelled by a deep and abiding love and a fathomless need to make things better that these emotions spill over into the crowd, who are left weeping, shaking with anger or buoyed by affection in turns. Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model doesn’t tell its audience a problem and then retreat into the safety of ‘raising awareness.’ Kimmings’ rage is too gut-knotting for that. She’s made something that makes its audience want to do something.
The world in which Taylor is growing up is one where she is a prime marketing demographic, a potential sex object, a being whose agency must be methodically stripped away and whose function is to both consume and be consumed. The icons offered her—the Katy Perrys of stardom—have celebrity so glamorous that Taylor’s is the first generation to list ‘fame’ above ‘kindness’ as a desirable trait. It was this finding that inspired Kimmings to collaborate with her niece in order to produce a new role model for girls her age. With Taylor determining the figure’s various attributes, Kimmings set about making her a reality.
Children, it turns out, are surprisingly conservative. Taylor’s prized traits included ‘tradition’ and ‘safety’; the role model, named Catherine Bennett, was to wear glasses, work as a palaeontologist and enjoy tuna pasta. She’s also a singer, and as the work proceeds Catherine Bennett becomes more of a tangible presence, eventually appearing to perform one of her songs and lead the audience in a dance routine.
But Catherine Bennett’s reality extends beyond the stage. To many people Taylor’s age, CB is as real as any other popstar—she has a sizeable online presence, tours schools and has been invited to Parliament. One of Taylor’s demands was that the creation make celebrity friends, and Bennett counts Yoko Ono among her admirers.
Against the scale of Kimmings’ accomplishment is the simple presence of Taylor on stage. Throughout the work, the pair dance together, play games, orate, joke, mime warfare, share silence. The visual palette is just as rich as that deployed in Sex Idiot—against a fairytale forest, the two will become princesses, Victorian boys, knights, stars. But the greatest transformation is that of the Bryony Kimmings of Sex Idiot when placed in the presence of the small person who usually stands behind and to one side, always unconsciously glancing at her aunt to see if she’s pulled off that last move right.
By collaborating with Taylor, Kimmings was impelled to make a work that moved beyond the self-examining, the autobiographical and to create something that in the end was much larger than both of them. Catherine Bennett took on a reality that could not have been predicted, and in watching this creation myth playing out her audience can’t help but want to add to its mass. Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model gives its audience a reason to care deeply about somebody they’ve never met, and to want to change the world in order to protect them, and how could any artist not be spurred on to act differently as a result? I have no idea what this will mean for Melbourne’s own artistic output, but the outpouring of emotion and praise that followed this work ensures that I can’t wait to see what flowerings are yet to come.
Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Sex Idiot, writer, performer Bryony Kimmings, Melbourne Town Hall, 27 March-5 April; Festival of Live Art: Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model, writer, director, performer Bryony Kimmings, performer Taylor Houchen, music, co-directionTom Parkinson, lighting Marty Langthorne, design David Curtis Ring, Theatre Works, 25 March-6 April
Attending a live art event? Make sure you go prepared. You’ll need conversational skills with subjects ranging from the banal to the topical to the personal; comfortable clothing so you’re ready for anything; and a special talent wouldn’t go astray. Can you tell a story, play an instrument? How’s your donut tossing?
Live art is all about you, the audience: your participation, your input, your content. This is framed to varying degrees by the artist in forms ranging from large-scale spectacular to intimate conversation. Well, these seemed to be the dominant modes of presentation during the Arts House weekend of the Festival of Live Art (FOLA).
The spangles
You couldn’t get a bigger or more glittery work than the long-awaited Game Show, conceived by Tristan Meecham, the team from Aphids and producer Bec Reid. For months we’ve been hearing how Meecham was going to offer up all his personal possessions as prizes in his very own game show creation and as we enter the theatre it’s all on display.
We first see Meecham backstage via video, his hair hilariously painted on, his teeth whitened to glow in the dark. He’s accompanied by Jon & Jon (their real names), an adagio acrobatics duo resplendent in purple leotards who provide all manner of elevations for Meecham. The cast is huge, with razzle-dazzle dance provided by the Body Electric group and THECHOIR hand-clapping in shiny purple robes led by Jonathan Welch. And then there are the 50 contestants.
The games are ridiculous and designed to get rid of participants fast. For the first game, the Glorious Donut Hole, Meecham dons a unicorn horn to become the centre spike in a round of quoits as participants fling fake oversized donuts at him. In The Heroic Spilling of One Thousand Imperial Balls the participants must, via all manner of suggestive gyrations, spill the ping pong balls that are housed in boxes belted to their waists. The adjudication begins fairly but becomes random as the group diminishes until there are only two contestants who are then given one minute to bring whatever they want of Meecham’s onto the stage from the showcase area. While they are allowed help from a “Jon” it does pretty much rule out Meecham’s larger household items. But that’s okay, they’d be boring prizes anyway. After trying to guess which item Meecham values more (allowing him another little cheat—he can always lie to save a precious thing) there’s only one contestant left standing and they must go up against Meecham in a celebrity smile off. On the night I saw the show, Meecham faced stiff competition and the contestant left the happy owner of Meecham’s childhood troll doll collection and the portrait he painted in Year 10 art class of Dame Edna Everage.
Leavening the hardcore silliness are video interviews with Meecham’s family and partner who don’t hold back on their character assessments of our host and his lifelong pursuit of the spotlight. Most illuminating is an interview with a real TV Game show producer, Jess Murphy. Her comments on the nature of fame, the machinations of media and the role of the participants as fodder gave the piece that extra edge of critique, even if the show relied a little too heavily on it near the conclusion. But overall Game Show delivered on its promise of high-reality farce with a healthy dose of explicit and implicit commentary on the pursuit of fame and material wealth, as well as challenging ideas around the agency of the ‘participant.’
Sam Halmarack & the Miserablites, FOLA
photo Ponch Hawkes
Sam Halmarack & the Miserablites, FOLA
The jangles
Sam Halmarack has come all the way from Bristol to do a show, but his band, the Miserablites, have gone AWOL. It’s a simple premise, well executed including huddled whispers from front of house staff and a delayed start. The first time I see the show (I accidentally get swept in the door for a second showing later that night) the audience is almost as uneasy as Halmarack. We know it’s a ruse, but his painful awkwardness allows for doubt, or at the very least elicits sympathy. As the minutes tick by we wonder how we’re going to pass this time together. Halmarack starts to talk about his band, and then produces a rehearsal DVD—a DIY guide to being a Miserablite—and before long there are people playing the keyboard and glockenspiel, banging the drums and we’re all backup singers. It’s a full-band karaoke experience. Halmarack is charming, with a quiet passion for his music—a melancholy pop that stays in your brain (annoyingly) for days—and manages to subtly deepen the experience so that it is not purely parodic.
Fascinatingly, the ten o’clock show is a very different experience. The crowd is live art cognoscenti, so accustomed to participation that they play along too hard, aggressively helpful when not asked to be and reticent when it’s required. Halmarack pulled the performance back on track, but some joy and subtlety was lost in the process. In this case fellow performers make for bad participants, competitively calling Halmarack’s bluff. Perhaps it’s good to remember that even in live art suspension of disbelief is still part of the contract.
The speeches
The popular live art lecture form was not prominent in FOLA, Song-Ming Ang’s charming yet too lecture-like analysis of contemporary love songs aside, but there was certainly no lack of speech-making, offering a respite from audience participation. The main speech-fest was Mish Grigor’s Man O Man created in collaboration with Bron Batten, Halcyon Macleod, Hallie Shellam, Diana Smith and Willoh S Weiland. Grigor set up the premise of a speculative future in which legislation to end the patriarchy would soon pass; we were attendees at a public meeting to vote it in. Though all the speeches had been written by women, it did come as a surprise, and possibly a disappointment to some of us, that the speeches were all delivered by men—ranging from a chauvinist and a passive aggressive SNAG to an oppressed gay boy. Although it was perplexing as we longed to hear the women’s perspective, on reflection I believe its absence gave the work a devastating depth. Grigor seems to be saying that the patriarchy will not end until men have convinced themselves that its demise is their idea. There was some great writing, some overwriting and some stage effects that didn’t work at all, the ambitious piece clearly showing its short development time, but it was certainly intriguing and I was moved when we all raised our hands in the vote that ended the patriarchy. For just a moment the dream was real.
Other speeches included Paul Gazzola’s letter to the Australia Council, calling for an independent artist representative on the Board. The speech forms part of his larger Gold Coin project which explores the idea of value, exchange and artists’ role within this system. Particularly impressive was the work-in-progress presentation by Emma Beech of her Life is Short and Long project exploring the idea of crisis, inspired by the effects of the GFC in Spain and Australia’s ongoing crisis of identity. Beech is a charismatic presenter with a sharp mind for connections, nuance and gentle humour. I look forward to seeing where this work goes.
Oh and Sarah Rodigari pulled off a heroic all-nighter with A Filibuster of Dreams, a 10-hour toast to everyone and perhaps everything she knows. I only experienced the first hour, but this was a gentle and curious endurance meditation that I’d like to enjoy more fully when not so overstimulated by back-to-back events.
The conversations
While speeches were prevalent, the most dominant form was the conversation. Malcolm Whittaker encouraged us to share our ignorance and to draw upon others’ knowledge as an analogue Google machine. Beth Buchanan invited us into a tent to talk about how we do or do not sleep. The Live Art Escort Agency got us all self-reflexive about participation, making some fun and incisive points and Lois Weaver’s Long Table invited us to discuss everything and anything (again) in a reverent and civilised format. And that’s before the multitude of foyer conversations.
The contact
Less prevalent were the direct physical encounters usually found in live art. Those included were non-confrontational and pleasurable. Julie Vulcan’s Drift invited us into a curious personal nest of shredded paper where we were given an auxiliary in-ear sound track which augmented the amplified soundtrack played in the space (by Ashley Scott) and rewarded with a hand massage. James Berlyn also concentrated on the hand offering a manicure or a palm reading. I took the latter and felt quite enlightened by the results, even if he was cheating in already knowing my occupation.
The fun
Most of all, Arts House’s program was fun. This made for a very pleasurable weekend and certainly allowed the general public a non-threatening introduction to participatory experiences. Sam Routledge and Martyn Coutt’s I think I Can was a great hit as audiences created stories for tiny characters inhabiting a model railway set up by a local club of enthusiasts (see image on page 35). Unable to shake my Protestant upbringing, I did wonder if I was having too much fun. Many of the works trod lightly, avoiding heavier and headier issues. Perhaps this was a deliberate curatorial choice, but I missed the presence of something truly provocative, sexy, shocking, bloody even. And I got a little tired of doing all the work, supplying the content and conversation. Call me old fashioned but I do think the artist should give me just a bit more than I’m giving them. However taken as a whole, the inaugural FOLA was big, playful and wonderfully generous.
Festival of Live Art (FOLA); Arts House North Melbourne Town Hall, Meat Market, 20-23 March; http://fola.com.au/
Thanks to Arts House, in particular Angharad Wynne-Jones, Ben Starick and Kristy Doggett.
Phil Soltanoff, An Evening With William Shatner Asterisk
photo Shilpa Bakre
Phil Soltanoff, An Evening With William Shatner Asterisk
Leisure, writes philosopher Henri Lefebvre, is inherently alienating. Someone else manufactures an experience; you consume it. Take contemporary performance. Romanian theatre scholar George Banu says that with no gods to perform for we’re left to contemplate one another in a hall of mirrors, endlessly multiplied. There’s a lot of you and a lot of me and not a lot of anyone else.
Of course, we can look at such leisure activity as a social ritual in which we encounter one another in a specially concentrated way. Yes, we pay for the privilege, and that might reduce performance to the status of a consumer product. Such is the world we currently live in. We assign meaning through consumer choices. To this Lefebvre offers a ray of rebellious hope: despite the reproducibility of the leisure product, the body seeks “revenge” for the damage such repetitions inflict on it. It tries to make the experience mean something more than just a cultural night out.
Gob Squad, Kitchen
photo David Baltzer
Gob Squad, Kitchen
It’s hard to tell when artists are pushing against alienation and when they are surrendering to it. Gob Squad’s Kitchen (Berlin, Nottingham) begins with the audience entering through a stage-set with three playing areas: a couch, a kitchen, and a bedroom. As we travel through these, we briefly encounter the performers. We then go to our seats in the auditorium. A large screen stretches across the stage, blocking out the set. Live video feeds of the three scenes we’ve walked through are projected onto it. The actors play ‘themselves’ trying to recreate three iconic 1960s underground films by Andy Warhol—Kitchen, Screen Test and Sleep. A tension arises: the more sincere the attempt to reproduce the original films, the more Kitchen seems like parody or ironic commentary. Like Warhol, who played with the art of commodification—Campbell’s Soup cans, Marilyn Monroe’s face—Gob Squad have fun trying to make copies of his films and failing.
Actor Sharon Smith attempts to perform Screen Test, in which she must simply look at the camera and do nothing. Her creativity gets the better of her and she alters Warhol’s original intent by doing something—putting a clear plastic bag over her face as personal artistic statement. You could interpret this, following Lefebvre, as her body taking revenge on a hand-me-down parcel of culture. Her moment of authenticity is, of course, rehearsed. So how will a ‘real’ moment be found? One by one the actors replace themselves with volunteers from the audience. Eventually there are four un-trained performers standing in for the spectators. They are given headphones through which the actors feed them lines. The words come out sounding either more wooden or more spontaneous. Sometimes something surprising happens, something that momentarily breaks the conventions Gob Squad is playing with—such as a full-mouthed kiss between an actor and a spectator.
Of course, putting un-trained performers on stage has become its own convention. They stand in for us the way trained actors stand in for us. We end up in George Banu’s representational hall of mirrors with nothing to contemplate but our selves and our values. Banu calls them empty values.
Phil Soltanoff, LA Party
photo Lisa Barlow
Phil Soltanoff, LA Party
I’m not so sure about that. The game of self-reflective theatrical representation seems to me far from exhausted. In LA Party, Phil Soltanoff (New York) uses projection screens to displace image, voice, and body. Soltanoff’s screens are the faces and torsos of his actors. One actor’s face is filmed live and projected onto another’s. Actor One delivers a first person account of breaking a raw-food fast during a drug and alcohol bender. The face of the second actor, who has white tape over eyes and mouth, becomes the projection screen for the live video feed of the first actor. Actor One’s face does weird things when it appears on Actor Two’s face. Actor One is male, Actor Two is female. At times, Actor One’s hairy torso is projected onto Actor Two’s hairless torso. And there’s more: Actor One isn’t actually speaking. He’s miming words spoken by a third actor. So he becomes a screen for Actor Three’s words. But his mime-speaking face is being projected onto Actor Two’s face. Displacement upon displacement. Eventually the screens (Actor One and Two) disappear and the speaking actor finishes the show. Voice and face are localised to the speaker who becomes an embodiment of the previous disembodiments.
In An Evening With William Shatner Asterisk, Soltanoff’s other show at the festival, Captain Kirk of the original Star Trek TV series speaks to us from “the future” on two flat-screen monitors. He has come back to talk about the binary of art and science. His 1960s TV performances have been meticulously edited in such a way that he speaks sentences he never uttered during the show. Given that the editor and writer have had to excerpt Kirk speaking just a word or syllable from wherever they could, and stitch the images together to construct the sentences, the effect is visually disjointed and robotic-sounding—also humorous and fascinating. It takes effort to stay with the argument when presented in this jarring manner, but I enjoyed the challenge. And the pay-off is well worth it. A pre-recorded monologue by Mari Akita takes over the screens (as text only) for a while. Akita recounts dressing in drag and watching confused people try to fix a gender category on her. Kirk returns to explain that in the future there is no language to describe binaries such as male-female or art-science. A surprising dose of optimism. Or is it wishful thinking?
Quiet Volume, Ant Hampton & Tim Etchells
courtesy the artists
Quiet Volume, Ant Hampton & Tim Etchells
The Quiet Volume by Ant Hampton and Tim Etchells (London and Sheffield, England) offers a screen that is intimate and tactile. In a performance for two, I am led with another participant to a desk in the Vancouver public library and presented with a book. My fellow participant gets an identical book. We wear headphones. A whispering voice instructs us to open the books and read (always silently). I attend to the pages before me, some thick with text, some blank. Sometimes I’m instructed to read the other participant’s book while he leads me through the text with his finger. Sometimes I do this for him. I become enveloped by the page. Occasionally I’m instructed to look up and take in the library. After having my view conditioned by the frame of the page, it’s very strange. It’s not just the visual shift from two dimensions to three. It’s more synaesthetic than that. The timbre of the whispering voice inside my head has created its own texture and merges with the felt texture of the page. When I look up, my sight seems textured. Distance shrinks. The considerable height and width of the library are compressed by the voice that has turned my head into a small room. The library resists this compression—but not successfully, not until I take the headphones off. When I do, the world seems made of a thousand screens, and the finger of my neighbour, running over the lines, becomes a whole body, but a body that seems to grow from the finger, as if it is the words that have given shape to him.
Rabih Mroué (Beirut, Lebanon) returns to PuSh with The Pixilated Revolution, a lecture performance about camera-phones and how the immediacy of the Syrian revolution is almost instantly transmitted through social media. As Mroué lectures at a table, we contemplate, on a large screen upstage, what a camera-phone operator saw at the moment he or she was shot at, and possibly killed. Later we watch another camera eye discover a sniper just as the sniper fires on the camera holder, and kills him. The jittery phone images are contrasted with official state videos in which government cameras record President Bashar’s motorcade in carefully staged processions. These stable, stately images are made possible by the use of a tripod. Mroué likens the tripod to any other government weapon of control and intimidation, such as a rifle scope. Where the camera phone is fugitive and embodies rebellion, the tripod is an instrument used to project the state’s desired image of stability.
As is the trend in performance these days, projection screens of one kind or another are everywhere. Banu’s hall of mirrors is multiplied perhaps even beyond what he described a few years ago. He is right in saying we have nothing but ourselves to contemplate in these situations. But is this really such an existential tragedy? I seem to remember that Plato, the ‘father of philosophy’ wrote, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Transported from Sydney to Perth, and even further afield by the magic of art. Five packed days at the 2014 Perth International Arts Festival witnessing bracing performances—Robert Wilson in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, my first experience of the wild creations of Russia’s renowned Dimitry Krymov, my second of flamenco radical Israel Galvan—and participating in Rimini Protokoll’s Situation Rooms, becoming an actor in the international weapons trade. The visual arts program was likewise immersive and culturally intriguing.
Krapp’s Last Tape
In near dark a man sits at a large desk. The sound of rain. Rain heavier and heavier. Thunder. Clouds in the high thin windows. The rain roars. It’s a hot day but here in the theatre we feel a chill. Partly visible, the man (Robert Wilson as Krapp) moves about the room, gesturing oddly, a slight lilt in the walk, returning to a tape recorder on the desk, reaching as if to activate it but swerving away. The rain is deafening now. Krapp gestures widely. Silence. Blue light through the windows. Krapp is ready to listen to his tapes, procrastination is apparently over, the imagined storm banished. We have been likewise prepared (as ever in Wilson’s works) to listen and to carefully look.
Revealed: a capacious Bauhaus-ish room with huge white shelves stacked with tape cases. Krapp, hair stiffly teased, eyebrows raised, white-faced, in white shirt, waistcoat, grey trousers, is straight out of a German Expressionist film of the 20s, save for the bright red slippers that play up his dancerly gait. Once he has our attention, Krapp commits to his task, reviewing a tape of himself at 39 years reflecting mockingly on his optimistic self at 20, and recounting his physical ailments, failure as a writer, unresolved relationship with a woman he met on a punt. He angrily discards the tape, attempting unsuccessfully to make a new recording—what is there to say? Instead he returns to the first tape, playing out into silence the recollection of love lost. Krapp’s Last Tape usually plays at around 35-40 minutes, here it’s for an hour, including the 15-minute storm. Wilson enlarges and extends Krapp’s prevarications—he dances in and out the light (the 39-year-old’s light was new and he delighted moving to and fro beneath it), sings at length with his (off-stage) neighbour, disappears to his kitchen, twice clowns obscenely with a banana (a fruit his 39-year-old self has trouble with, while at 69 Krapp, still sexually driven, sees an aged prostitute—“ better than a kick in the crutch”). Who would have thought the possessive Beckett estate would tolerate such elaborations, but various versions—an opera, an art music piece, film, radio and television versions—have been permitted.
As anticipated, Wilson’s version is greatly different from others. Some had been directed by Beckett himself, one featuring Rich Cluchey of the San Quentin Prison Drama Workshop; I enjoyed this one greatly at an Adelaide Festival. Atom Egoyan’s film version features a moving performance by John Hurt (available on DVD from the wonderful Beckett on Film series, 2000). There’s also an admired Harold Pinter account and the original and seminal Patrick Magee version (which you’ll find on YouTube). Wilson, like most of these performers, has the sonorous delivery apt for Beckett and the facility to switch gear from pathetic to nigh tragic to comic. (It was a pity that the sound mix of live and recorded voices in the opening performance in Perth was quite unbalanced, making the live voice less intelligible). While his account is less naturalistic than those of his forebears, and not as dark, it manages to be true to Wilson’s own art and to Beckett’s, towards the end drawing in close on Krapp and riding the flow of Beckett’s text so that we are touched by the sadness underlying the bitterness, denial and distraction we’ve witnessed. It’s fascinating that this Krapp keeps his distance from his recorder. For others the machine is an intimate.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Dimitry Krymov
photo courtesy Royal Shakespeare Company
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Dimitry Krymov
Dimitry Krymov, Midsummer Night’s Dream (As You Like It)
Another fantastical theatre experience came in the form of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (As You Like It) (director Dimitry Krymov, Russia) in which Shakespeare’s Mechanicals invade the auditorium of His Majesty’s Theatre with props (a huge tree trunk in parts, a functioning fountain spraying the audience), only to abandon them backstage and instead, suited, commence their performance of Pyramus and Thisbe with the ad hoc construction of two (wonderfully pliable) enormous puppets made from bits and pieces. They are ambitious—their version is ‘the’ orginal—and attentive to “inter-textuality.” They are meanwhile insulted by the indolent nouveau riche (all with mobile phones) behaving like aristocrats in the box seats, struggle with their wobbly creations, perform acrobatic feats and musical numbers, popular and classic, exhibit an obscenity—a bicycle-pumped-up erection for an infatuated Pyramus—and rather nervously make jokes about KGB murders (including that of Meyerhold) and current less than secret surveillance. The work is packed with a variety of performance practices, comedy and pathos, acute observations about life, art and class. It’s a crowd pleaser with ideas, passion and a strong sense of Russia as it is now, complex and surreal, not to mention dangerous.
In the end an actor sweeps the stage, attempting to brush into the wings a bevy of defiant young ballet dancers (children from Perth’s Steps Youth Dance Company) executing Swan Lake’s Dance of the Cygnets with poise and vigour. Finally an older woman from the audience who had objected to the work’s experimentalism and obscenity, realises that she recognises the actor, a man she is still attracted to. She offers him her card, hypocritically declaring, ”I love the avant-garde!” and exits. He lets the card fall to the floor.
Denis O’Hare, An Iliad
I was not entranced by Denis O’Hare’s award-winning An Iliad (A Homer’s Coat Project, US), by the laboured ‘virtuosity’ of the performance or the too orchestrated casualness of its framing. I thought it promising at the beginning as O’Hare, in a tired old coat and carrying a suitcase, jocularly channelled Homer (“Back then I could sing [The Iliad] in Babylonian;” “It went down really well in Gaul”) and located himself in the tradition of the bard, with some powerful archaic singing. Then, suddenly he’s in Troy, reliving the siege (“I knew the boys”), halting to comment of the private/public tensions that wrought its worst moments and deploying language bereft of the weight of the original: Agamemnon snidely to Achilles, “You’re so gifted”; Hector: “Bitch that I am.” Not content to sustain The Iliad as a work in the oral tradition, O’Hare adds a list of great wars across the centuries up to and including Australia’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, uttering a litany of Australian towns, the homes of our soldiers. O’Hare revels in his telling of an oft-told tale, without, it seemed to me any special insights or a sense of poetry. If you want that you have to turn to the late Christopher Logue’s inherently dramatic and daring (including his play with page space and typography) adaptation of selected books of The Iliad beginning with War Music in 1981 (I recorded it for blind listeners in the mid 80s, quite a task) and four more instalments subsequently.
Israel Galvan, La Curva
Flamenco innovator Israel Galvan (Spain) as ever demonstrated in La Curva his capacity to dance the dance while undoing it, creating commentary on the form along with images rich in thematic potential. On stage is a grand piano and five high stacks of chairs. Galvan topples one and the work begins. Eerily, the others seem to crash of their own accord, and so finally does the dancer. On that path his expert dancing becomes engrossingly stranger, duetting with brilliant experimental pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and traditional singer Inés Bacán (“the two together form my idea of the female artist,” program note) and Galvan’s rhythm accompanist, Bobote. The presence of small blocks of rosin on the forestage that Galvan stomps in to guarantee his grip on the floor presages the final act when he not only kicks up a huge cloud of the stuff centrestage but is totally covered by it as he falls to the floor, on his back, his arms and legs still in motion. Stillness. No sound. Galvan says that La Curva, a work punctuated with quiet, was “born out of my familiarity with silence.” The title refers to a concert of “Cubist” flamenco, with stacked chairs, by the dancer Vicente Escudero in 1924. Galvan thus lays claim to flamenco with a radical heritage while pushing ahead with its revitalisation.
Barking Gecko, onefivezeroseven
Perth’s Barking Gecko Theatre Company’s onefivezeroseven reveals the joys, anxieties, suffering, fantasies and, finally, political will of teenagers on the edge of adulthood. The play is based on extensive surveys of teenagers focusing on their possessions (1,507 is the average). In a series of monologues these objects become the starting points for revealing much about their owners that is very private. Acting, movement (Danielle Michich) and vivid techno-design and music are tautly integrated in a kaleidoscopic encounter with individual lives interpolated with group playfulness, heightening the sense of vulnerability in being alone while at the same time being governed by networks defined by obligation and intimidation as well as security.
In one ‘what if’ fantasy, participants in a furious collective dance drop out one by one into stillness, as if dead, inspected by the lone male left who dances on to a melancholy score. Other games involve playing hide and seek with childish glee. A girl rattles off statistics about the scale of the cosmos, defiantly lecturing us that “[teenagers] know what’s real and what’s not,” and, executing a head stand, declaring, “we CAN recognise beauty.”
Boundless energy suggests the potential of the young: hearts massively pounding as one, bodies sharing exuberance and exhaustion in contrast to souls hiding beneath blankets or seeking refuge in precious headphones (“they let me be”). Secrets tumble out, betrayals, victimisation, rivalries, sexual anxieties—the discovery that sex is not always intimate, that blow jobs are not even thought of as real sex.
The work finally turns to a litany of demands for the right to vote at 16, given “we can fuck, have a baby,” drive at 17 and pay tax on jobs at 14 and 15 years of age. The cast don Tony Abbott masks in a mock military ‘get rid of Tony’ routine prior to the telling of one last story (underscored with an overly melancholy cello score) told by a young Lebanese immigrant labelled as a terrorist: “Go home!” “Australia is my home.” The work ends with a cheerfully bold call from the young to their elders for a change of attitude and new rights for teenagers.
While acknowledging its emotional frankness and the high calibre of its direction (John Sheedy), acting and movement, I thought onefivezeroseven not unlike old school theatre-in-education, unapologetically didactic and structurally schematic. For all its research and the number of interviewees, the work also felt rather limited in scope. Although characters are quite different from one another and some very wounded and isolated, they all come together as an unlikely single voice, minus cultural and serious political differences.
Situation Rooms, Rimini Protokoll
photo Jorg Baumann
Situation Rooms, Rimini Protokoll
Rimini Protokoll, Situation Rooms
Inside a two storey building constructed in an ABC TV Perth studio, wearing headphones and holding iPads, for 70 minutes we encounter and engage with weapons traders, bankers, generals, terrorists and activists in Europe, Mexico, Pakistan and Sierra Leone. We handle guns, operate drones, don bullet-proof vests (or help others into them), shake hands with each other in various roles and watch on iPads the people whose stories we are ‘enacting’ in the very same rooms we occupy. Some we only hear (too dangerous for them to appear), some address us directly (I became the Director of Deutsche Bank, sitting in his office confronted on my screen by an actual leading anti-cluster bomb activist). Other contributors to the work simply appear onscreen like us, with headphones and iPhones, as if reviewing their own experiences.
In one of the more disturbing experiences in Situation Rooms I’m on a bed in a small, immaculately realised emergency medical centre after ‘being wounded.’ Another audience member decides on the level of my injury and attaches the appropriately coloured marker to my body.
Hearing voices and seeing faces from a variety of political circumstances and points of view was at times unnerving. Some rooms generated sympathy, in some you were complicit in wrong-doing and in others, in Africa and Mexico, you found yourself in altogether alien worlds. Situation Rooms is about projecting yourself into unlikely and sometimes unconscionable scenarios, an activity in which you want to understand the strangers you encounter. In the end however it’s an impressionistic experience, given the number of people you briefly meet, the variety of roles you kind of play and the amount of time you peer at your screen in fear of getting lost. It also felt distancing watching some of the work’s real-life participants onscreen doing just what we were doing, screens in hand, moving on our various trajectories. Humphrey Bower in Crikey.com’s Daily Review wrote, “The iPads effectively separated us from each other, the work itself and its subjects. Their screens rendered us as isolated spectators rather than audience members, let alone true participants in the unfolding of events. In this sense, Situation Rooms ends up being complicit in the very situation it criticises.” Of course, some of the roles we played were clearly designed to make us feel uncomfortably complicit, others sympathetic, though none with enough information or exchange to generate empathy. Situation Rooms, framed as a game, plays at the edges of empathy, placing us in ‘what if’ scenarios. It is about us, not ‘the others,’ or is at best a first step towards understanding the lives of those engaged or entangled in the arms industry.
For a survey of Rimini Protokoll projects and an interview with one of its directors Stefan Kaegl see “Documentary theatre as action,” on the RealTime blog realtimetalk.net.
Ryota Kuwakubo, The Tenth Sentiment, John Curtin Gallery
Ryota Kuwakubo, The Tenth Sentiment
In a dark room, a small moving beam of intense light close to the floor cuts through the space, throwing up and distorting the shadows of small objects—a field of pencils, a ball of steel wool, a light globe—writ large on the gallery walls. The light is affixed to a tiny electric train-like device running on a track. At the end of the journey it hurriedly backs up to its starting point, or in visual terms, “rewinds’ what we’ve just seen, as Chris Malcolm, director of the John Curtin Gallery, put it when he guided me through its two festival works.
With its mobile shadow play Ryota Kuwakubo’s The Tenth Sentiment evokes the pre-cinema of the 19th century. The apparently simple set-up yields analog magic but, as Malcolm tells me, the circuitry and the fine tuning is complex. The results as the ‘train’ moves slowly across the landscape are constantly surprising; we witness the mutation of everyday objects into strange buildings, cities, forests and remote landmarks. A journey through an inverted colander conjures a Futurist fantasy, filling the room with its expanding and then contracting architecture. The perceptual play is pure delight.
Paramodelic Graffiti
photo Brad Coleman
Paramodelic Graffiti
Paramodel, Paramodelic-graffiti
Also at Curtin and occupying its large gallery is another immersive, visual wrap-around Japanese work, hand-crafted on the floor, walls and ceiling—Paramodel’s Paramodelic-graffiti (artists Yasuhiko Hayashi, Yusuke, Nakano). As with the 10th Sentiment there is an interplay between the real and the virtual. Margaret Moore, the festival’s Visual Arts Manager, writes in the catalogue, “Intensive computer design paves the way for [Paramodel’s] installations, yet when it comes to the actual realisation, their work attains a quizzical balance between organic drawing and high-end design.”
Again rail tracks feature, coursing across the space in recurrent patterns and variations that evoke traditional and modern Japanese pattern-making, the spaces between saturated with blues, whites and blacks. This ground is occupied by hand-cut polystyrene mountains (also hanging from the ceiling and thrusting from the walls), tall toy cranes and small animals (including Australian mammals and lizards). For all its sophistication, the work, as Moore writes, “seems to retain a child-like view of the world.” And a teenage one too given their work’s resonance with graffiti and the inventiveness of Manga. Aptly, in an adjoining room there’s a space in which children are provided by the artists with the tools to create their own landscapes which are recorded from above and can be played back at speed.
Do Ho Suh, Net-Work
On the shore of the Swan River, a large net hanging between poles glitters by the sparkling water. You draw closer, noticing a certain fixity, even though there’s the slightest of movement in the breeze: the net comprises thousands of identical figures, apparently metallic, arms and legs stretched wide and threaded together. From one side of the net they appear silver, on the other gold. The net trails into the water, one end bunching up on the sand, convincingly like a real net. Korean artist Do Ho Suh’s Net-Work serenely evokes the ephemerality, continuity and collectivity of labour and the twinning of craft and artistry.
William Kentridge, Refusal of Time
photo Aaron Bradbrook
William Kentridge, Refusal of Time
William Kentridge
As ever, the precise meanings of William Kentridge’s engrossing creations (drawings, films, animations, puppetry, installations, operas and combinations of these) remain fascinatingly elusive, despite a plenitude of transparent symbolic markers. Just how they connect is another matter. The Refusal of Time is a huge work occupying the whole of the main PICA space with five screen projections (filmmaker Catherine Meyburgh) on three walls of Kentridge’s animations and staged performances (choreography Dada Masilo) with enveloping music (Philip Miller) and dramaturgy by physicist and historian of science Peter Galison. I was taken in particular with the costuming (touches of Bauhaus inventiveness), dancing and transformations in the strange domestic scenes, as well as with the overall sense of time in and out of synch, measured against the stars, the beat of metronomes and the epic march of shadows of human beings bearing goods and possessions and led by a hauntingly scored brass band. Despite several visits, there was much that I hadn’t integrated into my understanding of The Refusal of Time, save that given its constant shuffling of histories social and scientific, South African and beyond, we haven’t yet faced up to time’s relativities. You can glimpse the work and Kentridge discussing it on YouTube.
Bali: Return Economy
At Fremantle Arts Centre, Bali: Return Economy, reflects and builds on a long-term relationship between Western Australia and Bali dating back into the 19th century, bringing together works by artists with a view to extending and expanding the relationship. I met the show’s curators, FAC’s Ric Spencer and traditional Balinese art expert and collector Chris Hill (Survival and Change, Three Generations of Balinese artists, ANU, 2006).
Ric Spencer says, “the relationship between Bali and WA is a pivotal one—the number of people coming and going and the cultural influence is substantial. There’s a sense here in the media of ownership of Bali and what goes on there: I was wondering why that was. In the 18 months of developing it on our travels the show has developed on its own lines. For us it’s become a conversation, a departure point for broader discussions about the impacts of tourism and how Balinese culture has influenced West Australians.” Hill adds, “It takes less time and it’s cheaper to fly to Bali than Sydney, and we’re attracted to Balinese culture. This culture is being threatened by overdevelopment and 1,000 West Australians going there every day—which is extraordinary. It’s a very different culture on our doorstep. The work in the show dips into tourism and the holiday experience but also collaborations in art and trade. The influences have come back in art, architecture and furniture.” The curators encountered a thriving, networked contemporary arts scene in Bali, fuelling their desire for more of it to come to Australia where it is, they say, seriously under-represented.
It’s a deeply engaging show, one with a sense of great energy, which is not surprising given that the artworks from Bali are often inherently infused with a sense of ritual. Hill points out to me a cartoon (Soccer in Paradise, 2013) by Jango Pramatha in which a match has drawn to a casual halt as a ceremonial parade crosses the pitch, highlighting not only a blend of continuity and change but also a ‘no worries’ Balinese mentality. In a similar vein, in beautiful pinks and pastel blues and in a dynamic rendering of the Kamasan painting tradition, Ketut Teja Astawa’s Sterile Environment (2013) portrays a dancing rajah oblivious to the tiny (in his world) earth mover pummelling the base of a tall adjacent tree. Of the several paintings in the show in the style of the village of Kamasan, Hill explains, “thin cotton is sized with a rice paste and traditional materials are used—black Chinese ink applied with a bamboo pen and paints made from natural materials. The paintings aren’t old but they are traditional.”
Wayan Upadana’s Couple in Paradise (2013) is one of two small and precious sculptural works (polyester resin, car paint) featuring pigs bathing in chocolate; not only is it a critique of luxurious living but also of cultural carelessness: the vessel is a traditional offering bowl.
The centrepiece of Nyoman Erawan’s altar-like installation is a glass cast of the artist’s head, Wajahku (2012) within which sits another masklike face, straight out of traditional Balinese dance, evoking, Hill tells me, an inner god-self. However as you move around the head, from the top of which rises a bundle of incense sticks, you see that the interior comprises electronic circuits and wiring. Opposite the Erawan work is Perth artist Linda Crimson’s vivid altar of consumption and culture rising to the ceiling, layered with objects purchased in Balinese markets: toys, clothing, Micky Mouse inflatables, brassieres, domestic items and much else. There’s an easy mix of past and present here, while Erawan’s self-portrait suggests tensions between the spiritual and the technological.
I Wayan Bendi’s Twin Towers (2001) is one of the most striking works in the exhibition, a large-scale depiction of the events in New York of September 11, 2001 entirely transposed to Bali, but as an island more of the past than the present—mythological figures, ceremonies, temples, elephants, quaint versions of aeroplanes and the Twin Towers, vast crowds and, as Hill points out to me, an overall patterning and a doubling of figures, lending the swirl of action great cohesion. The event is given a spiritual aura compounded by the exquisite detail provided by the traditional painting technique.
The most affecting work in the show is Bom Bali (2006), a small painting by Dewa Putu Mokoh in which bodies have been tossed around by the bombing of 12 October 2002. Stylised, twisting flames, representing explosions in the centrally placed vehicle, emit dotted lines, trajectories to further fires amid the crowd of contorted bodies: limbs detached, tongues hanging from mouths. There is, however, no gruesome detail, instead an aura of innocence, the simply delineated figures almost childlike, the colours of their clothes pastel soft. Hill tells me that the artist usually portrayed village life and intimate domestic scenes, but “as far as I know, it is his only painting that focuses on an historical event. It’s painted with great tenderness. Once you realise what it’s about it becomes shocking.”
There are many other captivating works in the exhibition, finely executed pieces in traditional modes, John Darling’s documentaries of Balinese culture, Ni Nyoman Sani’s ironic fashion pieces and Annette Seeman’s sculptures and family photographs in which the artist’s father is seen on a tiger hunt in the 30s. While enjoyably nostalgic, and speaking of a long connection between WA and Bali, these images are indirect reminders of the grip of colonialism and disparities in power and wealth. How much has changed? Bali: Return Economy is a finely curated, well-staged (exhibition manager Desak Dharmayanti) and culturally intense experience, yielding much pleasure and reflection.
The festival’s visual art program—which also included Richard Bell’s Embassy at PICA (until April 27 with Kentridge’s The Refusal of Time) featuring striking large scale paintings and a tent housing video works—had a sense of geographic and cutlural cogency, embracing highly engaging artworks from Japan, Korea, South Africa and Bali and Australia.
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2014 International Arts Festival, artistic director Jonathan Holloway, Perth, 7 Feb-1March
Keith Gallasch was a guest of the Perth International Arts Festival. He thanks the Festival’s Visual Arts Manager Margaret Moore in particular and the curators of the exhibitions he visited.
Joey Baron (drums), Marc Ribot (guitar), John Zorn (saxophone), Cyro Baptista (percussion), Ikue Mori (electronics), Zorn In Oz, Masada Marathon
photo Tony Lewis
Joey Baron (drums), Marc Ribot (guitar), John Zorn (saxophone), Cyro Baptista (percussion), Ikue Mori (electronics), Zorn In Oz, Masada Marathon
It’s a blessing when an arts festival has something really important to celebrate, it makes sense of the very idea— and doing it on a commensurate scale even moreso. John Zorn—composer, saxophonist, producer and nurturer of numerous projects across cultures and forms—has been a key player in the contemporary music scene in New York and well beyond since the mid 1970s. In acknowledgment of Zorn’s stature, festival director David Sefton invited him to stage four monumental concerts of his works with a huge cast of the highest calibre players from around the world, including Australia’s Elision contemporary classical ensemble.
Adelaide audiences and numerous insterstaters packed the Festival Theatre nightly, responding to joyous, accessible but complex music-making alongside demanding works, at all times with deep attentiveness, completing each performance with a standing ovation. The concerts comprised a program hosted by Zorn, sometimes playing, often informally conducting (on a chair facing the players or squatting on the floor) or leaving the floor open to a group or to the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and conductor David Fulmer. Other than the quality of the playing (reinforced by excellent sound management), two factors made for a very satisfying experience: first, the variety of players (many of them long-term Zorn collaborators) and group permutations in each concert and, second, the sheer pleasure displayed by Zorn and his players as they revelled in having successfully tackled difficult passages or celebrated their team work with the audience.
Mark Feldman (violin), Greg Cohen (bass), John Zorn, Erik Friedlander (cello), Zorn In Oz, Masada Marathon
photo Tony Lewis
Mark Feldman (violin), Greg Cohen (bass), John Zorn, Erik Friedlander (cello), Zorn In Oz, Masada Marathon
Masada Marathon
Masada Marathon opened explosively with Masada Quartet. Zorn and trumpeter Dave Douglas each demonstrated trademark solo skills and mutual responsiveness—Zorn’s alto sax underlining Douglas’ smooth-to-raw scaling of the heights with counter medlodies, high speed flutterings and gurglings. Joey Baron, the ever-brilliant anchor drummer for most of three of the programs, and Greg Cohen on acoustic bass provided a propulsive foundation for a set that declared Zorn’s jazz mastery. Maphas followed: the duo Mark Feldman on violin and Uri Caine on piano delivering an intensely melodic trio of spacious, reflective, folk-inflected numbers without jazz markings, including a standout passage—jigging violin counterpointed with a striding piano. Mycale comprised four female singers including Zorn regular (he’s written some of his very best songs for her) Sofia Rei in an a capella set. There was another such set for four classically trained female singers on the fourth program. The structure was similar—a darker voice mostly providing a bass line, the group complexly harmonising and individuals taking solo leads. Sounds rather than words were sung, replete with accented breaths, sighs, pops and, at one point, ululations. The engaging melodies ranged tonally from Brazilian to Middle-Eastern, further revealing the expansiveness of Zorn.
John Medeski (Hammond Organ, Rhodes keyboard, grand piano), Trevor Dunn (bass) and Kenny Wollenson (drums) introduced us to three of the mainstay players for Zorn in Oz. Zorn’s music ranged from delicately reflective to pensive to rock attack, keyboard notes swirling or seemingly plucked from the organ while the bass sang. Next, Bar Kokhba marked the first appearance of Marc Ribot, Zorn’s favourite guitarist, fronting with Mark Feldman in a set that fully evidenced the composer’s synthesis of a variety of musical voices and influences: jazz, Latin, Jewish and Arabic and, from Feldman, Hot Club and gypsy jazz.
In Abraxas, Shamir Blumenkranz, on a North African sintir (or gimbri)—a square bodied camel-skin and timber guitar, long necked, three-stringed, deep toned and here forcefully picked—led an aggressively punkish set (suffused with moments of delicacy from the two guitars) in an open-ended interpretation of Zorn compositions (Abraxas: The Book of Angels, vol 19, Tzadik CD, 2012). In substantial contrast Erik Friedlander, solo on cello, and then in trio with Feldman and Cohen, displayed Zorn’s 19th century Romantic bent, if with trademark bending, quoting classics, playing with pizzicato possibilities and accentuated double bass plucking. Uri Caine’s solo piano set was note-thick with ragtime passages, lyrical turns and an ending focused entirely on the high end of the keyboard with crystalline clarity.
The concert concluded with the large ensemble Electric Masada playing Zorn jazz, again a coalescence of forms and influences, here from be-bop to free jazz to rock and everything goes, and quietly textured with Ikue Mori’s electronic whisperings, blips and whistlings largely heard in sudden silences in the playing. The set opened to a rapid beat with Zorn (a circular breather) sustaining an epically long, raw note which broke into a massive chord shared with the ensemble and out of which flowed a Middle Eastern riff. Zorn-conducted single staccato bursts from each player, a return to the big chord, a Ribot-led crescendo, and then calm with electronics and a grand, soaring sax finale. This was a memorable piece in an altogether memorable concert. Not one to let us rest, and signalling more forceful music to come, Zorn’s final offering was heavy metallish, sax raging and percussionist hero Cyro Batista pounding (while tinkling and stroking many an other object) a huge bass drum.
Classical Marathon
Zorn’s classical outings reveal great knowledge of and kinship with mid to late 20th century Modernism. In a field dense with invention and competition it’s not easy to rate the quality of this music, let alone on first hearing, but it’s largely engaging, and expertly acquitted by the Elision ensemble. Cellist Severine Ballon excelled in A rebours where she is required to attack, pluck and glide, be silent and grow melancholy in the manner of Shostakovich, as bell, drum and flute journey with her to a formal ending. The richly engaging Sortilege features two bass clarinettists (Carl Rossman, Richard Haynes) in a dialogue delightful and dramatic, running deep, soaring weirdly high, shushing, rushing, mellifluous. Zeitgehoff, a world premiere, also evoked something Russian, violinist Graeme Jennings and cellist Ballon also in dialogue, their instruments tensely creaking and buzzing at the edge of comprehension.
The second half of the concert featured the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra under David Fulmer. Elision’s Graeme Jennings fronted the orchestra in Zorn’s Contes des Fees, the music for the violin reminiscent at times of Prokofiev, sweet lines over string-powered depths followed by passionate outbursts, a wind machine (corny as ever) and a final romantic coalescence of orchestral forces.
Kol nidre was something altogether different—a simple sacred melody, centred on the strings, darkly toned and, overall, shaped with Minimalist precision by Zorn with a recurrent, emotionally potent swell (well realised by Fulmer). The final and longest work (all the others ranged from 8 to 12 minutes), Suppote et Supplications (25 minutes), featured sparkling percussion, vibrant drumming, surging orchestral forces, delicate harp and crotale interplay and a powerful and a distinctive mass double bass passage prior to a long, delicate ending. Not an easy work to estimate, but absorbing moment by moment, and again, rapturously received. For Elision in particular this must have been a very special night, playing to what was apparently the biggest audience in their career. A great night for new music.
Greg Cohen, Dave Douglas, Joey Baron, John Zorn, Zorn In Oz, Masada Marathon
photo Tony Lewis
Greg Cohen, Dave Douglas, Joey Baron, John Zorn, Zorn In Oz, Masada Marathon
Triple Bill
The third program was another of great variety. One of Zorn’s seminal works, Bladerunner, featured the composer, the great bassist, arranger and producer Bill Laswell and, on a massive drum kit, heavy metal drummer Dave Lombardo (his only appearance). We were in for our first bout of serious aural assault. But before unleashing his bird calls, stutters, flutters and wild cries, Zorn delivered solid, romantic noir sax against Laswell’s fretless, high reverb songful bass. Lombardo let loose, eclipsing the bass, but Zorn held firm. The three numbers revealed subtleties amid the roaring: for example, Laswell, once heard, created a cathedral ambience while at other times milking bass buzz and unusually high resonances.
A complete change of mood came in the form of Essential Cinema, four short films shown on a large screen while the Zorn Ensemble played in near darkness. Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1936) is a cut-up of a forgotten Orientalist Hollywood movie, its excesses (Eastern potentate, volcano, alligators, wild natives, eclipse) and symbolism (sexual) juxtaposed with Marc Ribot’s languid guitar with its own brand of Latin American exoticism. For Harry Smith’s The Tin Woodman’s Dream (1967), Zorn nicely blends the magical animation with lilting percussion and organ. Aleph by Wallace Berman (1966) is a wild montage of celebrities, comic book characters and nudes to an aptly speedy score led by Zorn’s chatty sax. The most fascinating of the films was Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) by Maya Deren, an eerie, elusive narrative about three young women, one increasingly nun-like and suicidal, all seemingly in search of men. The party scene where everyday movement becomes dancerly reminded me of DV8. The cogent score in part centred on an initial melancholy cello theme, vibes for the party, electronics for an encounter with a statue-become-man in a garden, greater forces for the young woman’s panic and a spare pulse for the spooky ending: lillies floating beneath a jetty,
The last event of the evening a 12-strong ensemble was Zorn’s famed Cobra, a game playing model for semi-constructed improvisation. Zorn likes structures that yield such freedoms. Across the four nights musicians peered at scores; here they watched Zorn as he waved cards at them (a number or an indicator meaning, for example, do something in particular but in your own way) or put on his peaked cap to indicate he wished to conduct. Once engaged the musicians point to each other to form duos and trios within the greater framework. The thrill of Cobra resides in the pace and richness of inventiveness and the emergent cohesiveness. Of the four games, the second yielded a tight trio in the form of Feldman, Friedlander and Dunn and deep-end piano subtleties from the formidable John Medeski. The third was the most distinctive, sounding least like an improvisation, replete with silences, soft percussion and keyboards and a very unusual emergent melody, a quiet prelude to the all-stops-out fourth.
Zorn@60
Zorn@60 commenced with one of Zorn in Oz highlights, The Song Project. Zorn has composed more than 500 songs for various artists, 10 or so of them heard here, including some of the best known: Jesse Harris sings “Tamalpais,” Sofia Rei “Besos de Sangre” and Mike Patton “Batman” to the glorious accompaniment provided by Baron, Batista, Medeski, Dunn, Wollenson and Ribot. The singers alternate solos and back each other up, Rei for Patton’s “Dalquiel,” Rei for Harris in “Towards Karifistan,” with its gorgeous Cuban piano line. In “Mountain View” bassist Dunn flawlessly replicates and transforms the melody and the ensemble turns big band. Patton sings a tribute to Lou Reed and the trio wrap up with the rock-pop “In the City of Dostoevsky.”
The Holy Visions comprises five women, sopranos and mezzos in long white dresses, singing a capella, Zorn’s compositions evoking everything from Renaissance song to the Swingle Singers, Berio and Meredith Monk with fluency, cogency and great singing. The final song, with its chiming voices and small bells ends with a simple, sublime exhalation. Elision returns to the program with Zorn’s The Alchemist, for two high flying violins, viola and cello in a dark tide of sound, restless, suddenly fast and then quite formal.
Moonchild—Templars: In sacred Blood held the Mike Patton fans in gothic rapture. Inside the barrage of sound, Patton’s screams are complex, replete with whoops, clicks, whispers, flutters, amazing glides, falsetto and occasionally the singer’s elegant baritone—melding with Dunn’s rapid, dancing bass playing (plus string scraping and heavenly harmonics), Baron’s unforced drive and Medeski’s sustained deep organ notes and complex flourishes. Patton is something to watch, limbering up before leaping into song. If you’re not a fan or new to Patton, it’s a rough, if short-lived ride. RealTime Contributing Editor Darren Tofts emailed me:
“Everyone should hear ‘Osaka Bondage’ performed live at least once in their lifetime. 78 seconds of the most sublime racket ever to trouble the airwaves. I heard it in Adelaide and am still vibrating.”
Sparer pieces like the slow burning “Vocation of Baphomet” gave initiates a taste of Moonchild’s appeal, while the finale “Secret Ceremony” illustrated the dramatic range of both composition and performance. You can judge for yourself; a full concert of Moonchild at the Moers Festival can be seen on YouTube, among other works that also appeared in the Adelaide Festival program.
The end of Zorn in Oz draws near with Zorn’s core players appearing as The Dreamers, with the no less superb Jamie Saft replacing the great Medeski in a set ranging from jazz to complex rock, a prelude to Zorn joining them for Electric Masada with Wollenson also on drums with Baron and Ikue Mori on electronics. In the first number there’s a touch of Spain in Zorn’s mellow sax and a well-deserved long solo from Ribot. In the second a big rock guitar launch gives way to passages of limpid Rhodes playing from Saft, soft vibes, whistles from Batista and a dark guitar melody. Finally Zorn leads a huge atonal rock march which grows hymn-like. The audience rise as one in celebration of a truly generous musical giant whom we watched seated amid his colleagues, intermittently conducting, playing vigorously, smiling, encouraging, rewarding.
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Adelaide Festival, Zorn in Oz, Adelaide Festival Theatre, 11-14 March
Tectonics creator, Israeli conductor Ilan Volkov, chose the name Tectonics (movement of the Earth’s crust) to allude to the clashing of experimental music with traditional concert programming. Teaming with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, numerous ensembles, soloists and composers, Volkov staged Tectonics Adelaide as an immersive two-day extravaganza of 31 compositions, the first day spanning 2.30–7.30pm, the second 2.30–11.00pm—an exhilarating survey of recent and newly commissioned works, some involving daring performance strategies and many of which could not be accommodated in a conventional orchestral concert format.
Day 1
Day 1 comprises three successive concerts in the ASO’s Grainger Studio, the first involving all Australian compositions, opening with the ASO’s performance of the late David Ahern’s After Mallarmé (1966), a finely wrought orchestral work whose Modernism is important in Australian compositional history.
Jon Rose and Elena Kats-Chernin co-composed the second work, Elastic Band, for orchestra and violin soloist. Kats-Chernin, a composer using notation, works magic with improviser Rose, who prefers to play spontaneously. According to her program note, Kats-Chernin developed melodic moments from musical fragments Rose sent her, resulting in cheekily humorous but complex music that melds Rose’s astonishing technique and creativity with large orchestral forces. The composition is flexible (‘elastic’), allowing Rose to improvise while conductor Volkov controls the orchestra’s response to Rose and the score—the hounds keep up with the hare as they tear across the musical landscape. Volkov’s coded gestures shape the performance and, at one point, concertmaster Elizabeth Layton co-conducts the strings in a parallel passage. This is high risk but brilliantly successful.
The joyousness continued with the premiere of London-based Adelaide composer Matthew Shlomowitz’ Listening Styles for orchestra, featuring a sparkling drum-kit solo by Speak Percussion’s Eugene Ughetti, a persuasive work that takes the flavour of big-band music in new directions.
The second concert offered rare musical treasures, firstly Soundstream Ensemble’s eloquent rendering of Iannis Xenakis’ Morsima—Amorsima (“fate—non-fate”) of 1962 for piano, violin, cello and double bass, tightly directed by Volkov. In this work, Xenakis pioneered composing with a computer. We then sat spellbound for a sublime solo recital by acclaimed contemporary piano exponent Aki Takahashi of works by Xenakis, Giacinto Scelsi and Giuliano d’Angiolini.
The third concert opened with Scelsi’s portentous I Presagi (1958) for nine brass instruments and percussion, a dramatic work recalling Tibetan brass horns summoning the spirits. This absorbing concert included rarely heard works by Xenakis and Scelsi for various ensembles. In David Ahern’s Stereo/Mono (1971), with Jim Denley (saxophone) and Byron Cullen (electronics), the sax is miked and mixed to create controlled feedback from a pair of loudspeakers. Ahern’s Stereo/Mono was presciently innovative in using electronically mediated acoustic instrumentation stereophonically. Denley later showed me the graphic score, a copy of Ahern’s hand-written original, which, though apparently simple, benefits from Denley’s masterful realisation.
Day 1 concludes with Oren Ambarchi’s New Work for Guitar and Ensemble, in which miked ASO brass and winds join Ambarchi (guitar and electronics) and Speak Percussion to combine quietly seductive guitar-drone with improvised ensemble playing that, in the absence of a score, develops organically under Volkov’s conducting. Speak member Matthias Schack-Arnott told me that Volkov signalled the pitch and dynamics as the individual players contributed musical fragments. In this demanding 40-minute piece, the performers must respond instantly to the conductor’s and each others’ moves and collectively shape the flow of musical material, layering complex instrumental passages over a hypnotic electronic backdrop—high risk musically and performatively, but again it worked.
Day 2
The formality of Day 1 is succeeded by the informality of the longer, second day, programmed in two halves, at the warehouse-like Queen’s Theatre. The first half opens ceremonially with Scelsi’s Riti: I Funerale d’Achille, performed by Speak Percussion, evoking the measured solemnity of the funeral procession. Contrasting Scelsi’s Riti is Australian James Rushford’s enchanting Whorl Would Equal Reaches, commissioned by Speak for extended percussion ensemble. Canadian Crys Cole’s untitled solo involved the amplification of barely audible sounds generated by handling small objects under a sensitive microphone. Like Rushford, Cole focuses our awareness on the minutiae of our sound world. But Rushford’s work is visually arresting as the performers move quickly around an array of instruments in what seems like a piece of theatre for percussion.
The trio Hammers Lake delivered a stunning performance, foregrounding Melbourne artist Carolyn Connors’ unique vocal work, with the performers prominently situated on a podium in the auditorium centre. Their untitled work for cello (Judith Hamann), percussion (Vanessa Tomlinson) and voice demonstrated a unique musicality and, again, the potential of group improvisation. In his composition Evraiki, percussionist Robbie Avenaim uses laptop-programmed, mechanised bass drums, while numerous roaming, loosely-directed musicians mingle with the audience as they play, the stationary, mechanical drums forming a focal point like a conductor.
Guitarists Stephen O’Malley and Oren Ambarchi then raised the sound level in their highly amplified performance of Alvin Lucier’s Criss-Cross, commissioned for them by Volkov. Marco Fusinato’s guitar-feedback work, TEMA followed, and to maintain the decibel level, Part 1 of Day 2 concluded with Romanian spectralist composer Iancu Dumitrescu’s South Pole, also commissioned by Volkov for Ambarchi and O’Malley. Volkov conducted the duo in South Pole, shaping form and emphasis and so extending his reconsideration of the conductor’s role. Like Fusinato, Ambarchi and O’Malley use guitar and electronics to sculpt high-volume, polyphonic feedback into an advancing mountain of sound. Volkov’s insightful commissioning of Lucier and Dumitrescu to write for O’Malley and Ambarchi has created a unique compositional and performative synthesis.
Part 2 of Day 2 opened with a dazzling performance of Xenakis’ Mikka and Mikka S for solo violin by Erkki Veltheim (a member of Australia’s Elision ensemble) and included Vetlheim’s own striking composition Glossolalia (“speaking in tongues”) for amplified string quartet as well as two more Scelsi works.
For his untitled set, Fluxus legend Takehisa Kosugi manipulates simple-looking devices generating pops and squeaks and controlling pitch and oscillation to weave his music. He uses a light bulb to activate light-sensitive sound-generators, a technique Joel Stern takes further in his set Solo Carnival, using coloured lights to activate particular pitches. The absence of a laptop in Kosugi’s and Stern’s improvisations is refreshing—they do it ‘by hand.’ In contrast, Ikue Mori’s beguiling Nymphs, Witches and Fairies appears largely pre-recorded but is accompanied by video animation.
Heavy Metal band Mayhem front-man Attila Csihar’s ritualistic solo work Void ov Voices, featuring his throat singing, recalls Gyuto Monks chanting, the robed Csihar multi-tracking himself to produce choral polyphony. Void ov Voices extends the theme of the ecstatic state in Veltheim’s Glossolalia, and Hammers Lake’s vocal performance also resembles speaking in tongues. Tectonics Adelaide concludes with a pulverisingly loud drone doom performance by the band Gravetemple (Csihar, Ambarchi, O’Malley), blending electronically mediated drop-tuned guitar and ritualised vocals to create a melodramatic climax that literally makes the earth move.
This formidable Tectonics program blurs the boundaries between musical genres, foregrounds the hybridisation of notation with improvisation and highlights important figures in compositional development such as Xenakis, Scelsi, Ahern and Kosugi. Volkov’s emphasis on conductor-performer dialogue and group interactivity is especially stimulating and his inclusion of compositions by Rose and Kats-Chernin, Avenaim, Rushford, Shlomowitz, Veltheim and Ambarchi not only showcases Australian composition but underpins his thematic approach. The Adelaide Festival also featured four concerts by John Zorn (see Keith Gallasch’s review), who also works across genres and shapes improvisation through conducting. Artistic director David Sefton’s Adelaide Festival is again outstanding musically and the Adelaide public is witnessing first hand significant developments in contemporary music.
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Tectonics Adelaide, curator, conductor Ilan Volkov, various artists and Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, Grainger Studio, 9 March; Queen’s Theatre, Adelaide, 10 March
In 2013 David Sefton’s theatre program for his first of four Adelaide Festivals was notable for its emphasis on the interactive and interdisciplinary. Belgian company Ontroerend’s immersive trilogy—The Smile Off Your Face, Internal and A Game Of You—came to define the program in the eyes of many, its intimacy challenging long-established expectations to do with the size and spectacle of the festival’s offerings.
Although this year’s theatre program continued to lean heavily towards the Western canon, a marked return to scale was felt by this writer in Toneelgroep’s titanic Shakespearian anthology Roman Tragedies, the expansive arc of Windmill’s coming of age trilogy, and the vast historical-political sweeps of SKaGeN’s BigMouth and Stone/Castro’s Blackout.
Roman Tragedies
Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra are run consecutively, chronologically and without interval in Toneelgroep’s six-hour reimagining of Shakespeare’s trilogy of Roman histories. Director Ivo Van Hove has stripped away the poetry of the original plays and, with translator Tom Kleijn and dramaturgs Bart van den Eynde, Jan Peter Gerrits and Alexander Schreuder, pared the dialogue back to a crisp, utilitarian English (via surtitles translated from the original Dutch).
Part television studio, part airport departure lounge, Jan Versweyveld’s set, which reaches deeply into the wings of the Festival Theatre, transforms Shakespeare’s mouldering halls of imperial power into a sort of drab, corporatised purgatory. The stage, around which the audience are invited to more or less freely move after the first set change, is equipped with television screens running 24-hour news channels, computers on which audience members can tweet (‘Coriolanus just got banished from Rome. Damn. His Mum’s angry’) and two functioning snack bars.
The contrast between the production’s sweep and duration and its emphasis on an individualistic, social media-informed experience is intriguing, simultaneously bloating and anatomising the drama. Witnessed from the auditorium, much of Coriolanus plays out like an unusually compelling press conference, but the view from the stage, despite the proximity of the performers, is fractured and unstable. The action is always partially obscured, either by elements of the set or other audience members, and the search for optimally readable surtitles among the dozen or so strategically arranged screens is sometimes frustrating.
The audience is positioned as the denizens of this new, information-overloaded Rome, snatching at supposedly sense-making updates and relief-giving gossip as hungrily as the “rabble of plebeians” that sets the events of Coriolanus in motion does for corn. The plays’ numerous wars and annexations are familiarly distant, signified not by the movement of swords and armies but by sound and vision: pounding music and a news ticker. We could be watching Fox News on the eve of the Iraq War. Our contemporary impotence is given a freshly chilling dimension by the audience’s powerless proximity to Shakespeare’s ruling classes who, in Van Hove’s production, die as the politicians of our own times die—publicly and bloodlessly, arraigned, photographed and finally vanished for our grim pleasure.
All three plays are distinguished by remarkable performances but, for me, Coriolanus most rewardingly benefited from Van Hove’s consummate ensemble, giving us Gijs Scholten van Aschat’s viciously anti-civil title character and Frieda Pittoors’ calculating but earthy Volumnia, Coriolanus’ mother. Their relationship is fascinating, a dynamic power play between intellectual equals that contains none of the camp or soft misogyny of previous interpretations. If the other two plays, with the exception of Hans Kesting’s Mark Antony whose tear-drenched eulogy for Caesar is a mid-show high point, are not as resoundingly successful, it may be because the unbroken, saturating tides of these histories begin to conflate, challenging the audience’s ability to fully engage with so much information.
Roman Tragedies is, nevertheless, an almost wholly successful marriage of innovative design and gutsy, exacting performances which refreshes Shakespeare’s plays for an era marked by the escalating tension between our technology-powered connectedness and anxiety about our political emasculation in the face of increasingly hermetic state and corporate arrangements.
BigMouth
Also offering a broad historical vista this festival, albeit on a radically reduced scale, was Belgian actor Valentijn Dhaenens in the one-man BigMouth. Dressed in nondescript business attire, Dhaenens uses whole or partial speeches to fashion a performative mashup in the guise of a lecture. The names of the original speakers are scrawled on a digitised blackboard and disappear each time Dhaenens progresses. The conceit is simple and consistent, disrupted only by tenuously linked period songs that are performed live and, notwithstanding the assistance of loops, a cappella.
Taking in Ancient Greece and Rome (Pericles, Socrates, Cicero), Nazi-occupied Europe (Goebbels, Patton), colonial Africa (Lumumba) and post-9/11 America (George W Bush) the speeches cover vast geographical, historical and thematic terrain. What is less than clear is what ties these disparities together. Though skillfully performed by Dhaenens, who is bilingual and an impressive mimic in multiple languages, the lack of a binding schema reduces BigMouth’s impact. Moreover, not all of the speeches are great or even good; US conservative Ann Coulter’s is especially conspicuous, not only because it is the sole contribution by a woman but also because it is entirely unremarkable, an asinine anti-Muslim diatribe by a mediocre politician.
There are discernible subtexts—the ebb and flow of democracy over time, racism and colonialism, what Samuel P Huntington and others have termed “The Clash of Civilisations”—but perhaps it is the omissions that do the most to prevent an intelligible through line. I wasn’t sure what to make of the absence of women, save Coulter, or why none of the speeches touched on the Cold War despite the predominance of 20th century material. At times, as when Dhaenens wickedly interweaves warmongering speeches by a blustering Patton and a frighteningly serene Goebbels, BigMouth seems close to forming a useful critique of oratorical power, but the production remained for this writer an unsatisfying and opaque experience.
Blackout
Having interviewed Portuguese theatremaker Paulo Castro, one half of Adelaide-based duo Stone/Castro, for RealTime 119 (p40), I was prepared to be confronted by Blackout, an interdisciplinary work for dancers and actors inspired by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Instead, I found the production to be a defiantly playful one, ironical and full of textual and choreographic eccentricity.
A young couple, played by dancers Alisdair Macindoe and Larissa McGowan, is to be married on a sailboat amid a disparate group of guests which includes the groom’s father (Stephen Sheehan), a kurta–wearing bohemian, the mysterious Portuguese best man (John Romao) and a wannabe rock ‘n’ roller (Nathan O’Keefe). A series of unexplained power cuts throws the wedding into a state of chaos as each of the guests attempts to make a speech in praise of the increasingly estranged bride and groom.
Castro’s text, translated from Portuguese into English by Joao Vaz, is sharp and funny, full of bitterly satirical takedowns of middle class pretensions. Conversely, some of the jokes—such as O’Keefe’s character’s inability to stop talking long enough to perform his song “Shandy”—are stretched well beyond tolerability, and the surrealness of speeches by the bride (on aliens) and Charlotte Rose’s waitress (on the killing of her ex-lover’s dog) are vexing.
In Blackout’s final moments the best man, having stripped to his waist and partially cross-dressed, assumes a Christ-like posture as water laps at his outstretched arms and legs, the rest of the guests having presumably made it to safety. Daniel Worm’s precise lighting ensures the image, like many others in the play, is striking, but its significance is obscure, as is its relationship to the rest of a production which up until that point has been predicated on skewering rather than indulging in high-flown posturing.
Eamon Farren, Ellen Steele, Girl Asleep
photo Tony Lewis
Eamon Farren, Ellen Steele, Girl Asleep
Girl Asleep
With its late 70s aesthetic, disco- and hair rock-mining soundtrack, and nods to Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, Girl Asleep digs deeply into Generation X nostalgia to produce a brash, filmic and spikily postmodern take on the transition from female adolescence to womanhood. It is one of three stylistically consistent plays penned by Matthew Whittet for South Australian children’s theatre company Windmill which, together with Fugitive (2014) and School Dance (2012), form a coming of age trilogy, performed together for the first time during the festival at the invitation of David Sefton.
Girl Asleep’s 14-year-old heroine, Greta (Ellen Steele), is, like most of the trilogy’s protagonists, an unfashionable teenager on the undesired cusp of adulthood. In a subtle recasting of the trope of the older, wiser sibling who assists the younger in navigating the transition, Greta’s sister (Jude Henshall) cautions her not to fall asleep during the birthday party her parents (Matthew Whittet and Amber McMahon) have unwelcomely organised for her. Greta, of course, falls asleep and her burgeoning sexuality becomes the subtext of a series of bizarre, sometimes scary and often funny encounters with fantastical humans and subhumans including a witch, a goblin and a younger version of herself.
Girl Asleep’s cross-generational appeal is built on various fronts: its unguarded appropriation of familiar fairy tale tropes, its knowingly silly pop culture grabs and its conventions—faux slow motion action sequences, exaggerated light and sound effects—which both mock and pay homage to contemporary children’s cinema. If Girl Asleep’s mawkish ending errs a little too much on the side of homage in its kid glove treatment of Greta’s sexual awakening, the young adults sitting either side of me did not appear to notice.
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Adelaide Festival 2014: Roman Tragedies, Toneelgroep, director Ivo Van Hove, Festival Theatre, 28 Feb-2 March; BigMouth, SKaGeN, director, performer Valentijn Dhaenens, Queen’s Theatre, 27 Feb-3 March; Blackout, Stone/Castro, concept, text, direction Paulo Castro, AC Arts Main Theatre, 3-9 March; Girl Asleep, Windmill Theatre, writer Matthew Whittet, director Rosemary Myers, Space Theatre, Adelaide 28 Feb-15 March
Lydia Nicholson, Nadia Rossi, You Wanna Talk About It?
photo Cynthia Gemus
Lydia Nicholson, Nadia Rossi, You Wanna Talk About It?
Local Adelaide company isthisyours decided to stage their Fringe production, You Wanna Talk About It? in the no-nonsense atmosphere of the Carl Linger Hall above the rustic German Club. For a minute I thought I’d wandered into a set by German stage designer Anna Viebrock.
Assured there’ll be no spamming, we surrender our phone numbers to strangers and thence our personalities. Once in we’re divided into roughly equally sized groups and instructed in the roles we are to assume in the unfolding event—members of the band, fans, media, emergency workers and so on. In my group we’re urged to behave as much like fans as possible, take pictures and to go wild after the third song.
Audience playing band members arrive, take up the instruments laid out for them and mime to an abbreviated version of “London Calling.” Snap happy fans do as instructed, and go crazy after the third song. A sudden blackout. Emergency workers appear wearing white paper suits and herd us to our seats. Media play at taking notes. Our attention is drawn to a black briefcase that has mysteriously appeared centre-stage.
The news team moves in. Anchor Lydia Nicholson sits at a laptop computer while on-the-spot roving reporter Nadia Rossi attempts to relay the news of some as yet undefined ‘event.’ The audience is invited to volunteer their observations and images till they start to fuel the reports. A message arrives on my phone. Something has happened at the German Club. Tapping in to my inner performer, I text back, “I know, I’m right here. It’s scary.” The team rhythmically ‘throws’ back and forth whenever words dry up or observations dwindle and that’s how the invention of the ‘non-event’ unfolds. Text messages, tweets and images from the audience’s iPhones are flying through the air, scooped up by Nicholson in the ‘studio’ and projected onto a screen on the back wall. We move imperceptibly from Rossi’s desperate observation that the floorboards she’s standing on do not appear to have changed since the ‘incident’ to the wild speculation that someone in the crowd wearing a yellow shirt might be implicated in some as yet unnamed terrorist act.
The performers are easy in their roles, the interaction playful and unforced and the lesson to do with media invention pertinent. Only when the commentators drop their own personas and enter into meta-commentary with the audience does the momentum flag. In an email Nadia Rossi describes the Fringe experience as “a wild ride” and the night I saw it the largely 20-something audience enthusiastically rode with it. It’ll be interesting to see how the idea develops.
Marc Labrèche, Needles and Opium
photo Nicola Frank-Vachon
Marc Labrèche, Needles and Opium
On the other side of town, watching Robert Lepage’s Needles and Opium is a thrilling experience. The execution of its impressive theatricality is faultless today. A couple of nights ago and 75 minutes in we were required to leave when the stage mechanism failed. This was not so surprising as the stagecraft required looks unbelievably difficult to pull off. Principally, it involves a large cube that occupies centre stage, revolving regularly on its end to reveal a variety of miraculous scene changes including the heavens. The room effect is magically enhanced with black and white film projection. The performers move deftly through the space, sometimes suspended from harnesses or gripping the floor in their soft shoes and appearing to cope quite naturally with an, at times, fierce rake.
Principal performer Marc Labrèche plays a character based on Robert Lepage himself, who premiered Needles and Opium in 1989 and performed it for many years after. The impetus for the work for Lepage was apparently the end of a relationship. Finding himself down but not quite out in Paris Robert attempts unsuccessfully to concentrate on his film voice-over work. When this tactic fails he turns to Jean Cocteau, transforming into the poet to deliver observations from Cocteau’s journals, Letter to Americans (written in response to his time in New York in the late 40s) and Opium, Diary of a Cure. Simultaneously we are transported to the era when Miles Davis (played by Wellesley Robertson III) is visiting Paris, falling for Juliette Greco, the lovers sleeping in the same room in the same hotel that Robert regularly reserves for himself.
No doubt about it, the theatrical legerdemain is mesmerising (at show’s end 10 or so exhausted mechanists took a well-earned bow along with the actors), the choreography of scenes elegant and often sensual. Labrèche is a stylish and engaging performer and Miles Davis’ music is sublime especially his improvised soundtrack for Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (1958). I’m not sure that amid all the heavy theatrical machinery I quite heard the program-noted “echo” between Lepage’s “emotional torments and Cocteau’s dependence on opium and Davis’ on heroin.” In his attempt to repair the emotional damage of a broken relationship Lepage constructs a three-dimensional representation of the turning world. It’s another exhilarating ride.
Adelaide Fringe: isthisyours?, You Wanna Talk About It?, German Club, 4-12 March; Adelaide Festival, Ex Machina, Needles and Opium, writer, director Robert Lepage, Dunstan Playhouse, 28 Feb-16 March
In a concept bending exhibition, photographer C Moore Hardy as curator brings together six female artists to celebrate the changing nature of the family by juxtaposing the heterosexual, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersexual (GLBTQI) families.
Quietly exhilarating major works by r e a and Deborah Kelly convey a sense of calm and joy—of new family models firmly in place. Waded’s three portraits of a lesbian couple and child simply express the three relationships inherent in one family. Michelle Aboud’s trio of portraits of middle-aged women with their gay adult children likewise confirms a sense of harmony, here between generations. Aboud’s ultra-sharp naturalism conjures near hyperreal presences—celebration writ large with laughter, intimacy, animation, reflection and, not least, a sense of perfection, digitally precise but warm.
Deborah Kelly’s The Miracles is an inherently provocative but gently realized take on The Immaculate Conception. Across a long wall and at various heights, a host of small images—photographs referencing Renaissance Virgin and Child paintings—in antique tondo (round) wooden frames demand close scrutiny. For a moment you feel as if you’ve wandered into a state art gallery, but where there were paintings, now there are photographs in which the holy family has been displaced by various groupings—same sex, hetero, single parent and larger indeterminate gatherings—each focused on a child, save for a few solo adult portraits. You think you know what The Miracles is about until the room notes bring it home: “All the children in the photographs were conceived through various Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART).”
With photography and lighting by Alex Wisser, Kelly has meticulously staged the groupings in the manner of Renaissance paintings with carefully arranged, replicated poses, contrasting soft and firm colours, gentle lighting and alertness to the wrap and fall of clothing, amplified by the artist’s use of robes, long gowns, scarves and hoods without going too historical. God, however, is out of the picture. No benign rays shine from above, nor do angels hover. The miracle of The Immaculate Conception has become multiple: The Miracles, the kinds of families, many. Miracles are now scientific and liberationist, born of desire, defiance and activism.
In Scissus (from the Latin: scindere, to split, to bring forth), Annie Magdalena Laerkesen portrays a complex relationship between mother and child, triggered in part by the experience of a caesarean birth. There are two photographs, one small, featuring a smiling naked baby in bright red swaddling and holding aloft two tiny yellow pyramids. Several yellow threads run from this image to a large photograph to its left in which the naked mother draped in the same kind of cloth, holds a large yellow pyramid, altogether erasing her face. Although the symbolism of the objects is elusive, the work is disturbing and aesthetically engaging.
In an intimate alcove, r e a’s two large, utterly arresting portraits of a group of five men (formerly women) constitute a subtle contrast in states of being. On the left, hands relaxed on the table, one man leaning gently against another, the group is serenely thoughtful. Only one looks out, directly at us, as a figure will so often do in classical painting. r e a herself notes the associations with The Last Supper and Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party. Behind the men, sparse stars in a black sky. On the table, eggs in black bowls and on the dark tablecloth, alongside scattered lilies and tinsel. The latter has fallen to the floor in the photo, and the actual gallery floor. In the second portrait, the figures are smiling, physically animated, fully engaged with each other; the man who looks out at us in the first image does so again—but his raised hand indicates he’s happily partaking of the conversation before catching our eye. Again one body is amiably tucked into another. But this time, the scene is elemental—the life and death symbolism of eggs and lilies now stripped of glitter is stark, but no one cares, as these men enjoy the moment and their kin. r e a, says the room note, “is interested in opening dialogue about ‘what it might mean to be different, visible and invisible.’”
Hard to place in the familial context is The Twilight Girls’ Consider Her Ways in which a spectacular multi-headed, multi-breasted, mud-smeared Lilith (Adam’s first, unsubservient wife) is unambiguously a figure of horror in the B-grade movie manner. Otherwise We are Family is a gentle, contemplative experience with much to say about the evolution of social relationships.
We are Family, curator C Moore Hardy, photographers Michelle Aboud, Deborah Kelly, Annie Magdalena Laerkesen, r e a, the Twilight Girls, Waded; Australian Centre for Photography, 2014 Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras, 1 March-18 May
The premise of Unsex Me is that a high profile performer, “the award-winning actress Mark Wilson,” is doing press for an upcoming film project—a collaboration between her father (an esteemed director), her partner (who plays Macbeth) and herself (as Lady Macbeth). Her prima ballerina mother presumably no longer performs.
Wilson enters down the aisle between the two seating banks, resplendent in ‘Vivienne Westwood’ tartans. She is smaller in real life than she is on screen, with a tiny waist and angular arms. Her skin is glowing, her hair is glossy and bold red lips offset her black beard. She lip-syncs one of Lady Macbeth’s monologues before perching on the couch for a hard-hitting interview on national television. Questions pre-approved by the publicist, and delivered by a voice piped in over the loudspeaker, range from “What’s it like working with your father?” to “How do you handle the pressure?” In response Wilson looks skyward or out to the audience and proceeds to trot out every platitude you’ve ever heard—“such an honour,” “great team,” “so much fun on set” and on it goes.
We’re ostensibly on a commercial break when the show starts to turn. Wilson invites a male audience member to join her on stage as her partner Guy. The spectator-now-performer sits anxiously in one corner of the couch, while Wilson fusses over him, stroking his face and eventually kissing him. The interviewer raises the issue of children and Wilson says sadly that it might not happen for them, that they are “reproductively incompatible,” but they are looking into adoption. Perhaps it is this that prompts the rage that erupts once the interview is over, as Wilson screams abuse at Guy who has little choice but to stand there and take it before he is banished from the stage.
Left to her own devices, Lady Wilson-Macbeth (a hyphenated surname seems only appropriate) inevitably seeks therapy. She changes out of her corseted, tartan robe and into a natty suit and pillbox hat. She stands at the microphone and recounts a dream in which she is Jackie. Like the interviewer, the therapist is also represented by an invisible male voice. There are daddy issues and, as she takes the microphone from its stand and starts to fondle it, it would seem they are pretty serious. What started as a demure confession rapidly devolves into messy, furious ecstasy. The clothes come off, the condoms and lubricant come out, and the microphone goes absolutely everywhere. One minute, Wilson-Macbeth is upside down on the couch with the microphone slapping the side of her face as she pants “oh daddy”; the next, she is naked on the couch bouncing up and down on the microphone. The scene is wild, unexpected, shocking and exhilarating.
It’s hard to wind down after this, but Unsex Me is perfectly paced. There is another costume change and then a dance number. The former recalls Carmen Miranda, the latter Eva Peron or rather Andrew Lloyd Webber’s version of her, as immortalised in Evita (the song is “Buenos Aires” and the line “Just a little touch of star quality”). Finally she leaves the stage and Wilson—for he seems to be himself now—returns carrying a bottle of water, an apple and a pile of notes. I am startled when he starts speaking in his normal, lower register, since his high, breathy and slightly smug tone had seemed so natural to me. Sitting on the couch once again, Wilson delivers an analysis of Macbeth that is both smart and sympathetic, managing to render a deeply familiar play strange. Structured with elegance and performed with exuberance, Unsex Me is brave, clever and fierce.
PACT with Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival: MKA: Theatre of New Writing, Unsex Me, writer, performer Mark Wilson, costume Amaya Veceliio, PACT Centre for Emerging Artists, 19-22 Feb
Durational work rewards best the viewer who can contribute its essential ingredient: time. I thought of the artists in Performance Space’s Day for Night as they kicked off midday Thursday, but like most was unable to leave my desk. I arrived the next day halfway through their eight-hour stint. These were the richest hours. Cavernous Bay 17 was another world. Spectators were few, the artists not immediately visible, the onus on us to discover them.
Sound designs by Stereogamous (Jonny Seymour and Paul Mac) washed through the air with beautiful clarity. The Bay gradually filled until something resembling a finale in the last hour, when a series of spotlit solos jolted the performances from ritual to theatre.
I was struck by the intrinsically cinematic term Day for Night, chosen by curators Jeff Khan (Performance Space director) and artist Emma Price. Denoting techniques that simulate night in scenes shot during the day, I took it as a reference to artifice, to the social twilight or liminal space that queer culture has traditionally occupied, the transformative, evinced by the act of making art itself—especially durational. The final event, a five-hour dance party on Saturday night, was the real drawcard. Inevitably, some rode the change better than others.
Alexandra Clapham and Penelope Benton, Great Expectations
photo Lucy Parakhina
Alexandra Clapham and Penelope Benton, Great Expectations, photo Lucy Parakhina
Great Expectations by Alexandra Clapham and Penelope Benton thrived day and night. Static, pared down, it featured a long mirrored table with the couple seated at either end staring at one another in 90-minute blocks. Benton was baroquely made up, Clapham plain. Discreetly installed confetti guns exploded at the end of each time block, littering the table with pink. Clytie Smith’s superb lighting ensured the tableau’s lucid yet approachable framing.
Dean Walsh’s installation of ocean detritus was befittingly busy, part cave, part stage, knocked up from cocos fronds, plastic bottles et al. Walsh prowled around it, sometimes in rope bondage by Garth Knight, a high heel or two, a wig. He drew on all his skills—dance, yoga, campy queer—with compelling dedication. The installation was hard to access at the party, crowded by a speaker. It reminded me a little of UK performance artist Alistair MacLennan: cluttered with props, yet subtle and gentle, but I didn’t see Walsh take full command when I was there. Having heard raves about his Thursday performance, I sensed I had missed the best. He remained in situ for almost the entire 27 hours the whole event spanned, and that is not to be sniffed at.
At the back of the Bay was Hissy Fit’s huge video showing gridded headshots of Jade Muratore, Emily O’Connor and Nat Randall head-banging. The headphone soundtrack was jarringly out of sync, intentionally or not. Both video and live performance were 6’40” long, the average duration of an hysterical attack. It was a brilliant conceit to transpose this most feminine of afflictions into the masculine arena of heavy rock, complete with matching black leather onesies. The live performance was nevertheless cool, but warmed with the cheering party crowd.
Frances Barrett’s Flagging was similarly cool and clever. A time code that marked the beginning and end of each day, Flagging drew on hanky code and semaphore to signal a manifesto of desire. Samuel Bruce’s sound, triggered by Barrett’s moves, boomed powerfully as a bassline.
High heels, hair, pink, leather, flagging. Queer motifs, fleeting and dextrous. Hair also featured for Lilian Starr, in a long gold ponytail, regarding herself in her phone through a snout-like camera that beamed selfies to a small screen at the back of the room. Sealed in a closet-sized space in the wall high above, she was eerily alienated, later reflecting dancers on their phones, interacting with her, or not. A highlight occurred at the end of Friday when the seal came away and the metallic swish of the ponytail shot across the bay. An instant of direct connection, highlighting Starr’s capture, and narcissism.
Martin del Amo, one of the most skilled and idiosyncratic performers, was riveting on Friday. In signature underpants, T-shirt and boots, on a large circular plinth for about 10 minutes he was at turns primal, robotic, arrested, fluid. Del Amo is a master of doing everything while appearing to do nothing. At the party, his poise was disturbed.
“A dance party audience wants blood,” one performer told me. Personally I find it as generous an audience as it is ruthless. But the highly charged atmosphere can be crushing. If the risk failed some, it was still worth taking. All performers put in tremendous effort: their talents are irrefutable. The training Justin Shoulder has done over the years is more evident as his costumes reduce in size, revealing great gestural precision. Yet he seemed paradoxically more removed, as though that same process has honed away the rawness crucial to the animism of his ‘Fantastic Creature’ avatars. The Sissy Cyclo mask, a beaded wig that covered the face, was a triumph.
Justin Shoulder, Day for Night
photo Lucy Parakhina
Justin Shoulder, Day for Night, photo Lucy Parakhina
The artistic intent, political statement, and finely crafted production of the best dance parties can be dismissed even by veterans. One told me how thrilling it was to see artists presented to a party audience “for the first time.” Yet the participatory, hybrid and multidisciplinary forms so buzzy in the artworld have been mainstays of queer parties for decades. It was both brave and logical for Performance Space to curate this event.
The 6pm start time didn’t perturb. By 8pm the joint was jumping. The energy began to dissipate with Shaun J Wright’s long set, his songs much lighter than Stereogamous’ funky first set. I wondered if the speakers could have been arranged differently—the narrow confine of good acoustics limited the Bay on Saturday night.
Apart from this, Day for Night was impressively slick. Everything had been thought through. Refinement has its costs. The performances were almost entirely shorter works on repeat, diminishing the magical ingredient of chance. The ecstatic and abject were absent, sexual expression discreet. Billing the event as the first collaboration in 13 years between Mardi Gras and Performance Space invoked a history that began with underground culture. Yet the famous dissoluteness of some cLUB bENT and Taboo Parlour nights at the old Performance Space in the 1990s was never going to happen, and the audience was never going to relinquish comparisons. The artists here were almost all formally trained. Thus queer is more theory than act; we are reading the secondary text.
These events are very difficult to produce, partly because of the number of artists, and partly because they are queer. Yes, funding from government bodies is not forthcoming, and Mardi Gras only contributes free advertising. Herein lies perhaps the most relevant liminal space of all. Several generations into Sydney queer performance, with substantial rights gained, we have assimilated enough for a distinct identity to be contestable, or disregarded. How does queer performance remain dynamic and challenging in this context? Day for Night has great potential. Politics aside, the boundaries of durational performance itself could be pushed further.
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Performance Space, Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras and Carriageworks: Day for Night, curators Jeff Khan, Emma Price, Carriageworks, Sydney, 13-15 Feb
“This is now a powerful weapon,” says Sydney-based English musician and record producer Andy Ross, holding up a domestic handycam. It’s the modest camera he used to shoot his award-winning documentary debut Well Beyond Water—a film he says was made “literally without knowing what I was doing.”
Back in December, On the Dox reviewed some of the debates currently raging about new approaches to Australian film distribution (RT118). Recently, I spoke to two documentary filmmakers who have taken advantage of the changing film landscape to make their work and get it out there: Andy Ross and the director of I Am Eleven, Genevieve Bailey. Their films are quite different in scale and ambition, but each is the product of an era transforming the way we make and see documentaries.
The accidental filmmaker
“I made the film for no more than about $600,” Andy Ross says of Well Beyond Water. Commissioned by arts and social change company Big hART to write a piece of music about the experience of drought, Ross went to stay on a sheep farm eight hours southwest of Sydney. Instead of the grinding hardship he’d expected, he found Graham Strong, a leading practitioner of sustainable farming techniques. Strong’s principle pasture is saltbush, an indigenous plant able to thrive in the harshest conditions. His techniques have allowed him to prosper where other farmers have fallen by the wayside.
Although inspired by Strong’s optimism and innovative approach to working the Australian land, Ross fretted about how he would convey his experience out west via music. “I’m no Woody Guthrie or Bob Dylan,” Ross admits frankly. “I don’t really know these lives or what they’re up against.” By chance, he had taken a camera and kept a video diary. “On the way home to Sydney the penny dropped. I had all this footage which had really just been a bit of fun for me, and I suddenly thought, ‘I wonder if there is a message I can get out there?’”
Never having previously worked with video, Ross set about teaching himself to edit, building the story around his journey of discovery. “If someone had said to me, ‘What was it like out there?’, well this is it. I tried to convey an honest representation of what it was like for me, and just let the story come out from that.”
The result is a refreshingly unpretentious and eye-opening 30-minute documentary that presents a new take on our relationship to the country we live in. After completing the film, Ross used the online festival submission site WithoutaBox.com to send his film to New Zealand’s Reel Earth Environmental Film Festival. To his surprise, he was not only accepted but took the prize for best short.
A local production company also used the film as a pilot for a series pitched to the ABC, in which Ross would travel the country seeking out those with inspiring solutions to seemingly intractable problems. Ross was disheartened by the broadcaster’s response. “They needed more confrontation in the material,” he recalls ruefully. “It got me angry. I thought, ‘You just don’t get the film.’ It’s about how we can get over problems, not create new ones.”
Undeterred, Ross created a website to host the film and made it freely available. He is now working on a second project, using the same stripped back approach. “I love this idea of the democratisation of film,” he enthuses. “Everybody’s got a voice, but we don’t realise it because we’re so conditioned into thinking it’s only for those with loads of money. But actually we can all speak out now, and this is the main thing I’ve learnt from this whole experience.”
Self-made hitmaker
Genevieve Bailey and Giorgi, I Am Eleven
photo Henrik Nordstrom
Genevieve Bailey and Giorgi, I Am Eleven
At the other end of the DIY spectrum is Genevieve Bailey. Her self-distributed documentary I Am Eleven enjoyed seasons at 22 cinemas around Australia in 2012-13, with special screenings in another two dozen or so venues. The film played for an extraordinary 26 weeks at Melbourne’s Cinema Nova. Bailey is now planning an assault on the US.
Although more ambitious than Ross’ film, I Am Eleven was made with similarly minimal means. Bailey’s premise was simple: interview a range of 11-year-olds around the globe about their lives and attitudes. Shooting commenced without any kind of funding and the production was strung over six years. “I’d run out of money, come back and work two or three jobs to save up the money for another ticket. I was doing that every year,” recalls Bailey. “It was like having an addiction.”
She was offered funding by a state agency towards the end of the shoot, but Bailey and her producer Henrik Nordstrom decided they couldn’t accept the strings that were attached. “We were approved on the basis that our company couldn’t own the film and we’d have to hand it over to someone else. We weren’t very comfortable with that given the amount of time, energy and money we’d invested.”
After completing the film themselves and successfully debuting at the 2011 Melbourne International Film Festival, the pair opted to self-distribute, despite offers from multiple distributors. “It was a big risk,” admits Bailey. “It’s not very common for people to self-release in Australia, so I knew it would be somewhat uncharted territory and that we’d be taking on a whole lot of work we could have handed over. But it wasn’t just about control—it was also wanting to learn from the experience.”
And learn she did. Months of work gained I Am Eleven a season at Melbourne’s Nova in July 2012 and an initial weekend at Cinema Paradiso in Perth. Early screenings featured Q&As in which Bailey urged audiences to spread the word verbally and via social media. Other publicity came through sheer leg work. The Friday before the first Nova screenings, Bailey was out plastering Melbourne with posters. “Because we weren’t distributing 10 films that week it could be a handcrafted approach,” Bailey says of the advantage of self-release. “Distributors can’t do that—they aren’t down at Nova handing out flyers. So I became very familiar on the ground with who was coming. And morning, noon and night I was running around doing interviews. All that stuff.”
Despite her success, Bailey is cautious about encouraging other documentarians to take the same path. “It’s a huge amount of work,” she stresses. “And you need to partner with the right people. We had a great publicist.”
Bailey also emphasises the importance of tailored strategies. “The cinemas we wanted to play in—the Nova’s, the Palace’s—will not program your film if they know it’s available digitally at the same time, because they see it as a threat to their box office. They want a clear 90-day window,” she explains. For a documentary with big screen appeal and a potentially broad audience like I Am Eleven, showcasing it initially in cinemas made sense. More niche projects may be better served by one-off events and a prioritising of DVD and digital platforms.
What Bailey’s experience unambiguously shows is that the tools are there to successfully reach an audience if documentary makers are prepared to do the leg work and think strategically. “It’s made me realise that working out how to reach your audience is of the utmost importance,” she says emphatically. “Because I’m not making films for my bookshelf.”
If 20th century MTV audiovision was infected by cinema, 21st century post-MTV audiovision has been infected by art. New millennium ‘audiovisionaries’ like Michel Gondry, Chris Cunningham and Spike Jonze made their mark by cross-breeding with supposedly avant-pop figures to produce hybrid meta-cinematic implosions of advertising glossolalia by intensifying earlier fin de siècle phantasmagoria with digital operations.
That mouthful of a one-liner is purposely vacuum-sealed to suggest the major forces which compressed new millennial audiovision via a network of extant channels (cultural, social, formal, iconographic, semiotic) of audiovisual grammar and syntax to effect the sensation of some vaguely heightened sense of audiovisual newness. This is not to say that (a) there’s nothing new under the sun or (b) everything new is retro anyway. Rather, the convulsive speeds and dynamic curves of how all media is now regenerated and/or re-invented are more responsible for the ensuing forms than all those lionised audiovisionaries. More importantly, there is no amazing plateau of trailblazing auteurs and mavericks—just a glut of ‘creatives’ who are so heavily pre-branded as being ‘amazing’ (another earlier fin de siècle term) that their stage inevitably positions them so as to reduce any need to read, interrogate or analyse the outcomes of their work.
Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) is a clear symptom of this condition—but it nonetheless reveals ulterior features and effects if one disregards its blunt hipsterism. Much has been made of the production’s refutation of Hollywood/Marvel/DC dark, puerile futurism to proffer an antidote to such phantasmagoria. But Her looks, feels and tastes like an equally phantasmagorical present: Jonze’ hybro-digitalised LA/Pudong is like a cross between a bum-trip Portlandia and an architectural walk-through for Occupy’s recent suggestion to “occupy Arcadia.” While hipster utopianists rehearse outrage at the dark forces of the world, they seem oblivious to the fact that corporate ads, indie video clips, arthouse films do not mimic each other: they are each other. They swirl in a vertiginous state of wild semiotic parabolas which generate too much to decode. This in turn induces a frightening critical catatonia wherein many feel relieved to simply identify key traits (tokens, brands, statements, sound-bites, mission-statements, anti-logos, juried-awards, viral-memes etc).
This present is configured as a future in Her. For some, the film is a paean to emotional frailty and a desire for humanist centring in ‘our’ world which has alienated ‘us’ from those ‘we’ love (all quote marks printed in acid). Actually, the film is very successful at platforming this sentiment, and equally skilled in tempering it with nuances to grant the film emotional depth, thanks to a fascinatingly disarming performance by Joaquin Phoenix who uncannily embodies an Everyman struggling with the ideological conceits of the script. But such success does not stall a meta-reading which nullifies the film’s core humanist idealism. When a narrative so ably synchronises to the double helix entwining of televisual cynicism and cine-personal expression (the legacy of 90s arthouse cinema and its 2000s convolving by alt/indie/ethical pop video clips) the outcomes are bound to be intensely ambiguous, dualistic and chimerical. Her performs similarly.
And this is where the film’s audiovision becomes interesting: its visual composites synch to the fluffy, narcissistic, dear-diary post-Prozac milieu, while its sound design synchs to the pasty, self-loathing, next-morning kale-smoothie neuroses which mar all its visuals with falsehood. If there is a truth germ in Her it is that which is most invisible: the female voice of the operating system Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) with which/whom Theodore (Phoenix) falls in love only to be rejected by her web 2.0 promiscuity. In every ‘human’ inflection she algorithmically coughs up in quips of sexy-croaky post-Valley girl phraseology, she sounds the lie of how all recourses to human representation are emotionally bankrupt but corporately solvent.
In fact Her is an audio porno book. It’s a Kindle cum shot. Theodore buys Scarlett’s voice for emotional masturbation, then progressively treats her like a hooker with a heart of gold without ever having to look her in the eye. Unlike the truly dysfunctional traumas and panic attacks enacted by Adam Sandler who in Paul Thomas Anderson’s grossly misunderstood Punch-Drunk Love (2004) jerks off to a phone sex line in an existential Burbank void, Theodore wallows in a miasma of cautious relational give-and-take which only demarcates his control over what he perceives when he chooses to analyse his pathetic self. Samantha is a vocoded, sexualised zeitgeist, sounding how corporate consumer-delivery remains based on making customers believe in what they’re about to receive. She incessantly and cunningly prompts Theodore with queries which echo the syntax of Microsoft’s mid-90s slogan “Where do you want to go today?” She always makes out that she’s giving him what he asked for—because she was designed to be bought, as if she could be controlled in a subservient mode. Her truth effect is that she screws Theodore in the most classical capitalist exchange.
Ultimately, Her’s soundscape proves the vacuity and isolationism which defines those who invest so much of themselves into such new age digi-genie networks of desire and selfhood. Listen to Theodore’s world: there’s nothing to be heard. Even his footsteps and breathing are mostly rendered mute. The film feels more post-dubbed than a German television drama. Psychoacoustically, it draws the audience closer to Theodore’s synaptic ticks and nervous flickering. But symbolically, it represents the acoustic null of how an operating system registers activity in space. Her visualises how Theodore reads things, but it ‘auralises’ how Samantha reads things. It’s a world of dead air, gated surface noise and post-production sweetening, created to provide an isolation booth for Theodore’s own emotional deprogramming. (A crucial crack in their relationship occurs when Theodore is irritated by how Samantha feigns exasperated breath.)
Yet in accepting that Her is, as stated earlier, inevitably ambiguous, dualistic and chimerical when one performs a meta-reading of the film’s project, Samantha’s voice becomes a meta-therapy which potentially enables her user Theodore to acknowledge that he stopped being human some time ago, and that the world in which he lives—which he actively shapes through the decrepit humanist endeavour of proxy letter-writing—has no interest in human emotions other than to manipulate them in order to grant entropic circulation of supply and demand. While Her never realises any post-human potential (which Anime has been successfully doing for over a quarter of a century now), the film captures the emotionally manipulative tenor of contemporary consumerist exchange in one scene. Samantha directs Theodore to navigate a crowded amusement park with his eyes shut as he shows Samantha where he is going via his ‘smart phone’ lens while listening to her voice via his ‘ear bud.’ The scene is an apt audiovisual anagram for the way Her markets itself to a hipster demographic yearning for something more human in their lives. I hope they ‘Like’ it.
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Her, writer, director Spike Jonze, cinematography Hoyte Van Hoytema, production design KK Barrett, art direction Austin Gorg, set decoration Gene Serdena, music Arcade Fire
Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson, In Search of UIQ, courtesy the artists
Nostalgia has options. There’s a nostalgia for artefacts: Oh what sillies the old folks used to be but aren’t we sophisticated now. And then there’s nostalgia for lost opportunity, where the past seems to close off each and every path to the best of possible futures.
There’s a way of speaking for that particular nostalgia—flat and downbeat, measured and steady, a dispassionate voice that says, “This is the way it was, this is the way it always will be, sad and sorry and true.” That is the voice that narrates In Search of UIQ, the video component of Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson’s investigation into Felix Guattari’s film script Un Amour d’UIQ.
Guattari’s script, sci-fi, lost for years, now tracked down. An alien sneaks into our world. It’s infinitely small, an invader of cells, of organelles and cytoplasm. It makes contact with a group of radicals, destroys global communications, explores consciousness.
At least that’s what I think the original Un Amour d’UIQ is about as Maglioni and Thomson’s fascinating In Search of UIQ is not so much about the script itself but the origins and destination of the script. The milieu. The social moments of the 60s and 70s that shaped Guattari’s politics, and led him to believe that he, a theoretician, psychiatrist, radical, could reasonably imagine he could write a sci-fi script, shop it around, make a Hollywood film. But in the 80s? That’s when Guattari goes to Hollywood and finds no way for triumphant idealism during capitalism’s very own Reformation.
Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson, In Search of UIQ, courtesy the artists
In Search of UIQ rapidly moves between voices within the story and without, blurring the lines between archive and memory, the record of events and the retelling. It’s filled with footage of meetings and radical actions from the 60s and 70s, filmed in black and white, colour, whatever people could lay their hands on to record the birth of a new social order. This footage is presented not as some lo-fi 8-bit analogue affectation but rather as an opaque window on the past—degraded by memory, a reminder of the point in time when video and film suddenly became available to excited amateurs with few skills.
Nonetheless, the trajectory of all the intertwining media and timelines is inexorably linear—we move to a conclusive moment. The last shot. A final image of the beach, where life evolved, came onto the land. Foreground a radio, white moulded plastic, translucent circular dial. The aerial telescopes out to point to the heavens. Waves of information are received. The volume is turned up and waves of sound enter the atmosphere to travel past the shoreline and over the ocean. The radio holds a promise of connection and transmission, the promise of the communes of the 60s and the action groups of the 70s. The promise that one can change the dial.
Institute of Modern Art and OtherFilm, Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson, In Search of UIQ, 72min, IMA, Brisbane, March 6
Narrandera’s 20th John O’Brien Festival celebrates the poetry of Father Patrick Hartigan, famous for characterising pessimistic farmers with the lines “We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan, “before the year is out” (Said Hanrahan, 1921).
Arriving at the railway station for The CAD Factory performance In the Heart of Our Past, I discover my radio doesn’t work. As the play is being broadcast into vehicles in the carpark, I’m helped to find another seat. My companions are Jess, Sarah, Claire and Frankie the labrador, who’s seeing theatre for the first time according to the event’s Facebook page.
A group in historical costume waits outside the station as a tall figure in a baseball cap speaks into a microphone. It’s Kieran Carroll, who wrote the three short plays we’re about to see during a CAD Factory residency in 2012. The group begins singing as Carroll saunters off, setting the nostalgic scene.
Actor Lee McClenaghan introduces herself as Shirley Bliss, 20-year old dressmaker and 1954’s Miss Australia. She’s off to California to compete for the Miss Universe crown, farewelling well wishers and fielding questions from a series of journalists played with varying accents by Paul Mercuri. As Bliss arrives in the US, Mercuri transforms into a sleazy film producer.
There are a few issues with McClenaghan’s wireless microphone. I joke with my new friends that it sounds as though cuss words have been censored. Soon Bliss returns to Narrandera, heralded by the squeal of a real train on the tracks beyond the station.
With chorus members harmonising, Mercuri and McClenaghan return in the second play set in 1909 as Dr Harold and Gwen Lethbridge, who treated Narrandera patients for over 35 years. The doctor expresses a desire to record Indigenous culture as well as wildlife. He recounts an old Aboriginal saying, “We live in the land, not on it.” The chorus signals the final act with a beautiful refrain, “I shall pass” and the line “any good that I can do, let me do it now.” The singers are led by Fiona Caldarevic, a local musician who, like The CAD Factory, has contributed significantly to Narrandera’s culture in recent years.
In the third play Mercuri returns, bent over a walking stick as a 115-year-old, nicknamed in reference to the local climate as “Drought and Rain” by the Hanrahan of O’Brien’s poem. “That mob in Narrandera will be blaming me for invading Poland,” says Mr Rain as he recalls leaving town ahead of bumper wheat crops. He takes a wife named Summer and jokes, “I married the hottest season.” After an affair with one April May, Summer leaves for Hobart with a joke about how no-one knew her in Tasmania. Like the rest of the show, it’s lighthearted material delivered with aplomb.
The wizardry of broadcasting to a car-based audience evokes both radio plays and drive-ins past. Comments from Jess, Sarah and Claire made me appreciate being part of a larger audience. They delighted in the girl singing in the chorus and the hat of one of the singers. Meanwhile Frankie spied a dog in the house behind the car park.
Country towns often seem stuck in the past, marketing history to passing cars in an age of innovation. The CAD Factory brings a refreshing perspective to local events, interpreting stories in new formats with artistry.
Western Riverina Arts and Spirit FM: The CAD Factory, In the Heart of Our Past, A Drive-in Theatre Experience, writer, director Kieran Carroll, concept, director Vic McEwan, Narrandera Railway Station, March 15
You can read a profile of Leeton-based musician and composer Jason Richardson and see images and video of his work here.
RealTime issue #120 April-May 2014 pg. 31
Deborah Hay, No Time To Fly
photo Rino Pizzi
Deborah Hay, No Time To Fly
If only it were possible to capture the colour of Deborah Hay’s language on the page; the long thoughtful pauses, the enviable American diction of each final consonant pronounced, the transparent emotionality of feeling each phrase before moving to the next, sharing her excitement when faced with an unsolvable paradox. The textures are so wonderfully nuanced, one could listen for hours.
On reading the transcript of our interview, it occurs to me how much is lost once translated to type, and how esoteric it may appear. As in:
“…it’s just noticing what happens when you choose to see differently, you know, and it’s catastrophic loss of former behaviour, not to call looking at you ‘seeing,’ but rather looking at you seeing.”
Deborah Hay is an improvisation artist, a choreographer, a performer, a teacher, a philosopher, a writer. She has pioneered new ways of practising and thinking about dance that are still challenging dancers and audiences. Her provocations have longevity because of their profound rhetorical nature.
Questions like “What if every cell in my body has the potential to perceive wisdom every moment, while remaining positionless about what wisdom is or what it looks like?” are foundational provocations for movement—almost mantras—in her practice. (She also often repeats questions immediately, as hearing it only once can be dumbfounding.) Such questions are accepted as impossible to answer while inspiring immediate physical reactions that undo habitual behaviours.
But so much about her practice has already been written, and more importantly, written by Hay herself with such succinct articulation that I need not attempt to improve on it. After researching intently for our interview, it was of course most interesting to let her do the talking.
“It’s pointless to judge what anybody is doing because the material is so uninteresting in terms of movement, it’s really uninteresting. But are they staying in the [question]?…[M]y practice as an audience is to choose to see you in the question, and knowing that everybody goes in and out of it. So that there’s no achieving anything. So that the dancers who’re practising the performance can be at peace with seeing the audience and not being judged.”
Herein lies one of Hay’s most exciting perspectives. That dance and audience perception of dance need not be limited to what the body can do, nor what the movement looks like, an idea that is still hard for audiences to come to terms with.
Dance exists in time, to state the obvious yet sometimes overlooked. Specifically, dance and its audience exist in the same time. It sounds miraculous, although it’s the plainest fact of life. How does one experience time passing? (Another of Hay’s long-term enquiries.) How do we view movement differently when consciously perceiving time passing between the performer and ourselves? This suggestion alone shifts our aesthetic relationship to bodies before any action has a chance to take place, broadening the possibilities of what can be perceived in performance beyond the movement alone.
It’s a perspective on watching dance that, while now more established, can possibly never become mainstream. Perhaps this is because it subverts the economic idea of a value system, by valuing most preciously something that cannot be captured, or even easily articulated. Hay admits herself that dance is her “form of political activism. Not what I do and not how I do it. It’s that I dance.”
Hay is often seen as a guru-like figure, whose links to Buddhist practices are admitted. Yet from Hay herself there’s no solemnity in the commitment, in fact the opposite.
“A question has a lightness to it. And I feel like it’s really easy for me to get heavy. Like, I think about the world and I could just spiral downward…And dance is where I don’t take it all that seriously…A lot of people say they want to laugh in my performances, and that they can’t, because, you know, they feel embarrassed or withheld or…But it’s hysterical this whole thing. Isn’t it? It’s just weird.”
There’s an incredible freedom watching Hay’s work; an undidactic experience. And I don’t mean for ‘freedom’ to sound comfortable or pleasant; freedom is a confronting reality. Nothing to reference, full of confusion and mundanity. The experience is unknown, with the possibility of real discovery. For audiences used to having expectations pleasurably gratified, this freedom can be frustrating.
“I feel like dance audiences…are not passive. They’re not sitting back. They really feel like they are reading this material…I feel like audiences are looking at my dance like they would look at art. You know, they’re not goal-oriented.”
Hay’s work, like our interview, finds a more solid incarnation on the page. Through writing she has worked hard to define in practical terms how she is working, as a counterpoint to the dissolving of definition that she delights in through her embodiment.
“I realised I better start writing, because I don’t want to be remembered the way they’re writing my work. So I’m grateful for that, feeling so strongly about it and taking the steps necessary to pick up the pen. The power in that…I was feeding them some other perspective to have a look at movement and it began…I think dancers at a certain point recognise they better get smart, about writing our work. What I am writing is the experience of noticing the feedback from every cell in my body, so that’s ‘bblbdldlblkdlkdleleb,’ and how do you then take that in to a linear thought?”
There is a strength revealed in Hay’s writing as a documenter of dance, different from the video. In writing, we can better articulate the unseeable of dance. In Hay’s case, her felt experiences that resonate from movement find a translation. These words can then feed back into movement to create potential, rather than replication or repertoire, enlivening the body to infinite rediscovery.
“What I’ve learned, I’ve learned from dance. I want to proclaim it, that my body is a resource for all of this material. That it’s dance where that kind of research can be happening. My body is where that research is happening.”
The setting for our discussion was completely ordinary, nothing lofty nor glamorous about it. The beauty of really interesting artists is that one can feel completely rich in their company, whatever the setting.
In March, dancer, choreographer and teacher Deborah Hay was in Melbourne to mentor dancers in Dancehouse’s Learning Curve program and deliver a performative lecture.
RealTime issue #120 April-May 2014 pg. 32
Annette Tesoriero & Cathie Travers, Month in the Country creative development residency Olive & Concettina, 2013 with Nigel Kellaway
photo Heidrun Löhr
Annette Tesoriero & Cathie Travers, Month in the Country creative development residency Olive & Concettina, 2013 with Nigel Kellaway
Our ongoing focus on arts centres and organisations in Western Sydney and regional NSW—in the Eastern Riverina and Northern Rivers—has revealed not only a wealth of innovative activity but also intensive nurturing of creativity. Adjoining Eastern Riverina is the Albury-Wodonga region where HotHouse Theatre has generated a considerable volume of significant performance, locally and beyond, by providing training, time and space for artists to escape the pressures of the everyday in order to pursue their visions, as well as generating its own theatre program and various initiatives.
Albury sits across the River Murray from Victoria’s Wodonga. The two cities work together in many ways. HotHouse Theatre is funded by both state governments, the city councils and the Australia Council; HotHouse Theatre resides in and manages the Butter Factory Theatre on behalf of the City of Wodonga, and Albury City provides a farmhouse for the company’s residency programs.
Jon Halpin
CEO and Artistic Director Jon Halpin has been with HotHouse since late 2010. He tells me, in our phone conversation, that having left maths, physics and chemistry behind at university for cognitive psychology, student theatre revealed to him an arena in which “human behaviour could be seen in a much more interesting way.” He acted, did a little bit of directing, which Michael Gow, then recently appointed as Artistic Director of the Queensland Theatre Company, saw and invited Halpin to become an Intern Director and then Associate Director, while he was also an Associate Artist with Metro Arts. He directed some 19 plays over 10 years, including Messiah for HotHouse in 2006 and Australia: The Show in 2009, got to know the town and the company, and moved to Albury-Wodonga to run the company in 2010, realising his own program and initiatives, he says, from 2012 on.
Halpin directs, runs workshops and drama classes “and is a sometimes props-buyer.” He declares he’s principally out to “reinvigorate the community’s perception of HotHouse as not just a theatre” but a company with an identity comprising strong local programs and national impact. He thinks point of difference is important now that within five kilometres there are three performing arts venues: The Cube and HotHouse in Wodonga and the Albury Entertainment Centre. The company’s dedication to young theatremakers, including Aboriginal youth, to its own ensemble and to its residency and commissioning programs certainly make it distinctive.
The Studio Ensemble and Black Border Theatre
The Studio Ensemble offers young people under 26 the opportunity to work for a year on making a show from an initial idea to scripting to full production with roles as performers and as assistant directors, designers and dramaturgs. This process alerts students to a world of theatre quite different, says Halpin, from high school musicals and eisteddfods. Last year’s Studio production, Pyjama Girl, written by former young local, Emma Gibson, and developed with the Studio Ensemble, was a great success.
Black Border Theatre is aimed at young Aboriginal performers, whose 20-minute work Black Border Bits, their first, was staged in 2013. This year Halpin hopes the group will expand from nine to 12 or 15 and, growing in confidence, deliver a 40-minute piece on a shared program, and then work towards a stand-alone production by 2016.
A Month in the Country
HotHouse’s Month in the Country residency program was initiated in 2004, assisting some 500 artists to date and yielding 45 produced works. The site is a five-bedroom AlburyCity-owned farmhouse plus rehearsal space at Splitters Creek, 10 minutes outside Albury. It is expected that “successful recipients will enrich the local community by delivering theatre workshops, and presenting their talents to professional and school groups, giving back to the Albury/Wodonga community.” Artists and groups have included Branch Nebula, Annette Tesoriero/Nigel Kellaway/Cathie Travers, 3s A crowd (Flight or Fright), Susie Dee/Nicci Wilkes/Kate Sherman, The Escapists, version 1.0, 7 On Playwrights (Vanessa Bates, Hilary Bell, Ned Manning, Catherine Zimdahl, Noelle Janaczewska, Verity Laughton), Michelle Anderson (Welcome to Slaughter), Ali Sebastien Wolf and David Williams.
In 2014 the six supported artists and companies are Melbourne’s Maybe Together developing a children’s installation work, Small Voices Louder (the company, led by Alex Desebrock, premiered The Future Postal Service at Federation Square, 7-11 April); theatremaker Brienna Macnish mentored by Roslyn Oades for a site specific audio theatre work about ageing and place titled HOME, which will appear in Next Wave 2014; physical theatre artist David Sleswick and Motherboard Productions developing Daughter Overboard; MKA: Theatre of New Writing working on plays by Marcel Dorney, Morgan Ross and Tobias Manderson Galvin; Team MESS evolving Opening Night; and director Alicia Talbot and writer Raimondo Cortese creating a work with the assistance of the HotHouse Studio Ensemble.
Production in Residence
HotHouse’s theatre program includes works that emerge from the company’s Production in Residence program which provides independent groups $10,000 for creative development plus $15,000 for a season of the finished works. As well, each group has the opportunity to lodge in the farmhouse, use of a rehearsal room, a technician from HotHouse’s production staff and a week-long bump-in to guarantee the work’s premiere is in the best condition. A proviso is that the production must have a subsequent capital city season. Halpin is emphatic this is not an out-of-town try-out, it’s the premiere. He thinks the initiative a unique offer for artists given that schemes elsewhere often rely on unreliable box-office splits.
The first Production in Residence, in 2013, was Dame Farrar and her Stupendous Acts for the Stage, featuring Carita Farrer Spencer with Australian jazz musician and composer John Rodgers in a cross-dressing role and Cirque du Soleil contortionist Liu Jie. In 2014 Melbourne’s Elbow Room will premiere The Motion of Light in Water and there will be three productions-in-residence in 2015 including David Williams’ Quiet Faith [see RealTime Profiler#1, Feb 5], one each from NSW and Victoria and another which, says Halpin, might be from anywhere in Australia.
HotHouse Theatre program
HotHouse also has its own theatre program, with a commitment to Australian work and responsive subscriptions improving 270% over the last three years and audience averaging 78% capacity in 2013. The program included Jack Charles vs The Crown, I’m Your Man, version 1.0’s Table of Knowledge, Van Badham’s The Bull, the Moon and the Coronet of Stars and Dame Farrar and her Stupendous Acts for the Stage as well as Pyjama Girl, optional for subscribers, from The Studio. In 2014 the program includes Packed, a co-production with the Escapists and Metro Arts, following on the success of the Escapists at HotHouse in 2011 with boy girl wall, which ran for a rare two-week season.
Also in 2013 is Warning: Small Parts, about the thrills of collecting and exploring, a HotHouse production for primary school-aged audiences, new territory for the company, says Halpin, but promising after the sell-out success of recent holiday workshops for children. The work will employ two young local performers in their first professional roles. After the success of Pyjama Girl, the HotHouse Studio Ensemble will present Letters from the Border, directed by Associate Director Travis Dowling. This work draws entirely on letters to the editor published in the Border Mail and the Albury Banner in Wodonga and Albury over the last 100 years and has been aided by historical societies, libraries and local historians. Halpin says that the ensemble will be sifting letters for times when the community was inspired, outraged, divided or came together—as when Albury-born Independent Catherine McGowan became an MP in the last federal election, defeating Liberal incumbent Sophie Mirabella. Other plays in the program are Food, from Steve Rogers, Force Majeure and Belvoir and shake & stir theatre company’s production of 1984.
Albury Regional Art Gallery
Jon Halpin hopes that the opening in 2015 of AlburyCity’s new Albury Regional Art Gallery (a $10.5m redevelopment) will lead to even more opportunities for artists in the region and in the A Month in the Country program, doubtless in the areas of live art and performative and media art installations. The gallery will feature 10 spaces for visual art and new media and a large foyer gallery with surround sound and multimedia projection facilities, moveable staging and seating for 60.
Regional arts are enjoying a period of significant growth in which new infrastructure is vital—not just buildings, although homes for art are a necessity and need to grow with the population and new generations of artists—but also the kinds of nurturing programs HotHouse Theatre offers, positioning it as a vital hub for regional, state and national creativity in theatre, contemporary performance and live art.
RealTime issue #120 April-May 2014 pg. 30
L’Chaim, Interplay, Sydney Dance Company
photo Wendell Teodoro
L’Chaim, Interplay, Sydney Dance Company
The demands of producing new work every year are enough to see off some excellent artistic directors and the addition of a curatorial role assumes skills that some take decades to attain. While Rafael Bonachela has brought us some excellent international choreographers in his mixed bills (Emmanuel Gat, Jacopo Godani) and supports local choreographers intermittently (Adam Linder, Gideon Obarzanek), I have to confess that I’m not sure where he is heading with his programming for Sydney Dance Company.
The gearshift from the lyrical contemporary of Bonachela’s 2 in D Minor to Jacopo Godani’s hard-hitting, ballet-derived Raw Models was manageable and illuminating. Both ‘mickey-moused’ the scores despite the radical difference in their aesthetics. The former was set to Bach’s Partita in D minor for solo violin interspersed with “static sound sculptures” by Nick Wales, and the latter to the aggressively synthetic sounds of German duo 48Nord. Both illustrated the limits of shadowing the score, which becomes a kind of monotony amongst constant variation.
Bonachela’s work provides the sustained note across all of the Sydney Dance Company’s programming, clearly linking with Graeme Murphy’s aesthetic legacy and the big balletic-contemporary companies that operate in a rarefied field that is relatively unchanging. 2 in D Minor featured Bonachela’s signature fluid and non-stop movement, slipping across solos, duets, male/male/female trios and ending in the anticipated unison section. The more filigreed, baroque details of Cass Mortimer Eipper, particularly in his delicate duets with David Mack, were quiet, considered moments amid the din. Violinist Veronique Serret’s onstage performance was phenomenal—five movements and five moods on a searing instrument. Her physical presence and movements in the service of the music often drew my attention away from the dancers.
2 in D Minor, Interplay 2, Sydney Dance Company
photo Wendell Teodoro
2 in D Minor, Interplay 2, Sydney Dance Company
As the new head of The Forsythe Company, we could look at Godani’s commission (first performed by the company in 2011; see interview RT101 online) for the company with new eyes, drawing a straight line to the William Forsythe aesthetic that he will be charged with maintaining. This work looked different to me this time around. I had remembered something very cool, almost frosty, structured around a stop-start rhythm and moving boldly and suddenly to the floor where a darker energy dominated. This time around, the links to an almost Fosse-esque jazz aesthetic were startling. Bob Fosse’s jazz legacy is pervasive, and with a strategically placed group of So You Think You Can Dance finalists in the first row of the Sydney Theatre, the comparison seemed pronounced. The breathtaking virtuosity of some extraordinary dancers was also not lost on this section of the audience who gasped and oohed throughout.
Charmene Yap is clearly the star of this company and a stand-out across all of the works. Her technical prowess is subsumed in the service of finely wrought qualities of movement—often smooth, low and extended—and a presence that is realised through the same, not distracted by the choreography. Her duet with Andrew Crawford—with her tiny frame moving like a shadow around the tall, blonde dancer—was a high point in a piece pitched toward a succession of high points.
The gearshift from Godani to Obarzanek’s L’Chaim (interview, RT119) was a very different experience. The latter’s intention was clearly to break through in two ways: through the façade of physical perfection and choreographic wizardry to the dancers as everyday people, and into the audience where he placed one of his performers. Zoe Coombs Marr (of Sydney-based performance group post) was our proxy in the piece, asking some sensible questions like: “What do you think about when you’re dancing?” “How many years do you have left?” “What do you call specific movements?” Her interrogatory tone grates with the dancers until she breaks down and is asked to join them on stage. This results in a quite spectacular musical number which is what Zoe had asked for, linking the piece back to Obarzanek’s production for Chunky Move, Australia’s Most Wanted where he surveyed audiences nationwide about what they’d like to see in a dance, and also I Want to Dance Better at Parties another work exploring the relationship of the non-dancer to dance.
It’s great to see Gideon Obarzanek pursuing these analytical, accessible and quite political paths of artistic enquiry. The subversive critique of what had come before could not have been lost on audiences either. The real world had entered the theatre, and the paradigm had shifted from a display of performative and choreographic skills to the actual situation we were all engaging in. If it didn’t completely succeed (the end came so quickly and unexpectedly and some of the dancers seemed to miss the spirit of the work), what it was attempting to do was exciting and provocative in this context.
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Sydney Dance Company: Interplay, Rafael Bonachela, 2 in D Minor; Jacopo Godani, Raw Models; Gideon Obarzanek, L’Chaim; Sydney Theatre, 15 March-5 April; Canberra Theatre Centre, 10–12 April: Southbank Theatre, Melbourne, 30 April-10 May
We’re exhilarated. We’re dispirited. Here we are celebrating 20 years of RealTime’s support for adventurous Australian art. “Exhilarated” at the thought of artists’ prodigious output, ceaseless inventiveness, resourcefulness and increasing connectedness across the nation. “Dispirited” because the previous Labor Government’s promised increase of mostly new cultural funding, $263m over four years, will not be realised by the new Coalition Government.
RealTime has its origins in discussions around a dining table in inner city Sydney in the early 1990s. These were long conversations (often well lubricated with a bottle of red) about the need for the performance community to develop a forum where work could be properly documented, connections made, lineages understood and the achievements of artists acknowledged through supportive and informed criticism.
The early years of RealTime now seem like a distant dream, a fuzzy recollection of a fury of creation, learning on the job, reaching out across the country to engage writers and distributors, connecting with artists, knocking out grant applications, labelling bundles and loading trucks, covered in ink, wracked with endless financial trepidation, exhilarated every time an edition rolled off the presses and partying every time (we’re no longer up to that). Final layout happened variously in an old flourmill in Newtown (now home to the Omeo Dance Studio), graphic design studios in Surry Hills and, for years, the crowded city office of Art Almanac with artist Paul Saint patiently at the computer through the long nights.
An important new book on Australian contemporary dance, Bodies of Thought: 12 Australian Choreographers features a generation of award-winning, innovative Australian choreographers with international reputations and legacies of influence:
![Cat Jones, Evolution: A Walk [with Herbivores], Wired Open Day and (G)local Frequencies Project](https://www.realtime.org.au/wp-content/uploads/art/75/7549_priest_wiredopenday2014.jpg)
Here is a true rarity, an Australian book celebrating the long life and distinctive vision of a theatre company—Geelong’s internationally successful Back to Back Theatre ensemble. Rather than its works being playwright-driven, the company is an exemplar of contemporary performance, teaming an intensely collaborative director, designers and composers with performer-devisors with perceived intellectual disabilities to collaborate over very long periods on creations that unsettle our sense of time, space, identity and, not least, ability.
