A collection of new works by emerging Indigenous artists is always cause for celebration. This year’s Next Wave Festival announces a key initiative in Blak Wave, a program comprising seven new art projects, a series of talks and, significantly, a publication edited by Torres Strait Islander Tahjee Moar and the Next Wave team featuring interviews, profiles and articles by established and emerging Indigenous writers asking “what’s next—personally, politically and creatively—for Australia’s Indigenous artists?”
All of the works in the program appear designed to provoke and involve audiences in equal measure. I spoke to Brisbane-based artist Ryan Presley about Lesser Gods, his participatory installation, which offers a provocative invitation to the audience to “Enter through the mouth of a saltwater crocodile…” (media release). Presley explains what happens for those who safely make it through: “Inside is a dance hall area with projections that will dictate which [of a number of] tiles to step on. Each tile is encoded with a cymatic symbol and each of these correlates to a musical tone. The video dictates a melody and the audience will have to figure it out. It’s like a game with a cryptic melody.”
Ryan Presley, Transfiguration, 2014 Watercolour, gouache and gold leaf on arches paper
courtesy the artists
Ryan Presley, Transfiguration, 2014 Watercolour, gouache and gold leaf on arches paper
Like other artists in Blak Wave, Presley is exploring new ground with this work. Last year, he created Blood Money, “questioning the moral basis of Australia’s wealth” in a series of intricately rendered commemorative banknotes celebrating Indigenous resistance fighters such as Pemulwuy, Vincent Lingiari and the late Wik elder Gladys Tybingoompa replacing the likes of Henry Lawson and Dame Mary Gilmore. In Lesser Gods Presley takes on “Christian iconographic paintings with all the gold leaf and two dimensional dramatic scenes like St George and the Dragon [as well as] Transfiguration and Resurrection imagery… reinterpreting and re-drawing the images but subtly referencing those sorts of compositions… I’m working with animators and a sound designer so there’ll be animated video mixed with flashes of cymatic prompts.”
New to electronics and new media, for Presley this “has definitely been a challenge… I’m working with another emerging Indigenous artist, Robert Andrew who’s done a lot of electrical engineering and we’ve worked together on the interactive dance floor. And I’ve used animation as a bridge from what I’m used to doing into something new…. Initially I was going to create a video but for this context it’s a bit too static. I wanted to create something vibrant that people could contribute to.”
I’ve long admired the talents of Ghenoa Gela, a spirited and versatile dancer who has appeared in works by Shaun Parker (Happy as Larry, 2010) and memorably in the original production of Vikki Van Hout’s Briwyant (2012). Following a year-long stint as ring mistress for Circus Oz, Gela returns to her dance roots with her premiere choreographic outing in Winds of Woerr.
Given Gela is best known as a contemporary dancer I ask about her approach to this work that has its roots in traditional story and dance. She answers, “This work has been a conversation between my Mum and me for a good couple of years now… She is my cultural advisor. We’ve been working on the script together and we’re narrating alongside each other with my Mum on audio.
“I was intrigued by a couple of stories she told me when I was younger. I was born on the mainland and my interpretation of the seasons is of spring, summer, autumn and winter but my Mum grew up on the Torres Strait. They didn’t have seasons up there, they had the winds— Kuki, Sager, Naigai, Ziai—that taught them when to harvest and when to plant, what to hunt and what fish were in the water. I wouldn’t know unless I looked at a calendar.”
Working with three other dancers—one from the Torres Strait, the other two non-indigenous, Gela is keen to present her own take on this material. “We’re trying to tell the stories of the four winds of the Torres Strait but more like sisters rather than the elements themselves. We’re ‘characters’ [based on] the spiritual elements.” Also involved in the project is Anya Reynolds whom Gela met at Circus Oz and who’s creating an evocative soundscape for the piece.
Gela is enthusiastic about the possibilities of introducing audiences to the riches of Torres Strait culture. Based in Sydney these days, she observes, “The further south, I find they don’t even know where it is or that it’s part of Australia… I really believe in opening the doors for people who want to learn about Torres Strait culture. I feel in order for people to know about the protocols and stuff, it’s best they learn it themselves. They’re really excited back home that I’ve got a few people on board learning traditional Torres Strait dancing and language. And I know my boundaries. I only teach what i know and what my parents have taught me.”
My Bullock Modified, Steaphan Paton
photo Sarah Black
My Bullock Modified, Steaphan Paton
Other works in the Blak Wave program are wide-ranging in the issues they tackle and the artforms deployed. My Bullock Modified by Steaphan Paton, for instance, sounds like an intriguing interactive VR work “exploring early conflicts between Aboriginal landowners and European settlers” in which an iPhone app permits participants to spear virtual cattle grazing in the Carlton Gardens. (You know you want to.) Paton, an interdisciplinary artist whose previous work suggests an activist eye sharply focused on colonial relations, identity and race, in this work invites his audience to empathise with “Aboriginal warriors who historically have been demonised as the lurking menace.”
The Blaktism by Megan Cope is a satirical video work created in response to the artist’s recent quest to track down her ‘Certificate of Aboriginality,’ that legal document surprisingly still required in some cases to authenticate a person’s Indigenous status. Last year, actor Jack Charles refused an Australia Council requirement to produce such a document. For Indigenous urban dwellers cut off or estranged from their traditional homelands, Cope’s work “bridges these parallel worlds.” She admits “The thought of being legitimately certified suddenly cast a dark shadow of doubt across my mind and left me wondering if I was Aboriginal enough.”
Another artist tackling some of the same territory in a dance work, also with a distinctly satirical edge, is Carly Sheppard who is accompanied onstage by her alter ego, the funny and streetwise Chase. “White Face is my first attempt to make commentary on my experiences as a contemporary Aboriginal Australian woman living in a continually evolving culture, which has survived invasion, extreme oppression and forced assimilation.” Sheppard chose the title “because this work addresses tokenistic views where skin colour, among other stereotypes, such as location, connection to family and traditional knowledge, is seen as a mark of being authentically Aboriginal. Through this work I am reclaiming the responsibility of defining who I am as an Aboriginal Australian. I hope to inspire others to do so too.”
Sarah Jane Norman always surprises with her incisive critiques in the form of live performance and her offering for Blak Wave is no exception. In Concerto no. 3 Norman, who admits she “has not laid her hands on a piano since she quit lessons at age 15,” will be joined in a 12-hour marathon by five other ‘failed’ pianists who will take turns at sight-reading their way through the Rach 3, the daddy of them all in terms of difficult piano repertory, in “a challenge to the fetishism of ‘greatness’ and to the heroic discourse of artistic virtuosity.” For audiences concerned for their own pain threshold, Norman poses the question: “in a culture driven at every level by the self-devouring pursuit of success, how might we make a space to contemplate the transformative potential of failure?”
SEETHrough, Sean Jorvn
photo Troy Russell
SEETHrough, Sean Jorvn
SEEthrough by Sean Jorvn (the shared moniker of two Sydney based artists Colin Kinchela and Gavin Walters) incorporates music, innovative use of video by Jacqui Mills and sound by Chris Yates and Corey Webster in a performance “that puts Aboriginal and white masculinity ‘under the knife,’ exploring taboos and traditions associated with coming-of-age in both cultures.” Employing the male shaving ritual as motif, the performers, one white, one black, explore the distances and connections between cultures and the potential for genuine intimacy between them.
For a blast of new talent and provocative ideas, Melbourne might just be the place to be in April-May.
Next Wave, director Emily Sexton, 16 April-11 May, Melbourne, nextwave.org.au
Quotes from Blak Wave artists are from phone interviews as indicated and, otherwise, Next Wave’s media pack.
All That Fall, Pan Pan Theatre, courtesy World Theatre Festival
We are in a post-philanthropic funding regime with this year’s World Theatre Festival at the Brisbane Powerhouse—Wotif founder Graeme Wood’s generous million dollar bequest lapsed last year—but a rich line-up of work from around the world is still evident. The change this year, though, is in the large number of one or two-handers, and a higher than usual ratio of Australian co-producing credits for the international work. The pieces I saw were stand-alone productions from Ireland and New Zealand in which the monologue featured strongly.
Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall was originally a 1957 BBC radio drama, so accordingly no bodies on stage—Ireland’s Pan Pan Theatre win the gong for low-cost touring overheads! The piece is pre-recorded. Pan Pan have made their reputation at this festival over the years by taking canonical texts and throwing them against a wall, reinfusing them with punk or pop sensibilities (I am Oedipus and A Doll’s House being prime examples). This is the most reverent of the productions I have seen the company offer. The Beckett estate’s notorious insistence on adherence to authorial intention notwithstanding, Pan Pan have embraced the radio play form and transported it to the live stage with a warm and elegiac interpretation of this text. The experience is largely a spatial and aural one, of course, but visuals are not altogether neglected. We enter to a room of rocking chairs and a massive wall of lights that, perhaps like the domestic fireplace it is substituting for, actually generates heat when fully charged. The seats are placed at odd angles on Ikea children’s mats (you know the ones: the cityscape, dark grey roads, primary coloured houses and public buildings) so that we are actually having to look at each other sometimes uncomfortably closely. Shut-eye provides the only private refuge. The chairs have skull-print cushions on them. So we have images of death, routes through the city, but also of comfort and the domestic hearth.
The writing is beautiful, and one of Beckett’s most near-naturalistic pieces. Central character Maddie Rooney is taking a walk from her rural home to an urban (Dublin) train station to meet her husband at the end of his Saturday workshift, and then the pair return home. There is no plot as such; nothing really ‘happens’ to Maddie along the way—she falls in a ditch, takes a lift on a passing tractor. It is almost a picaresque conceit, and as the garrulous Maddie embarks on her journey, narrating her cranky stream-of-consciousness all the way, I was put in mind of Joyce’s Molly Bloom and her iconic “stepping out off the page into the sensual world” walk from outer Dublin’s Howth’s Head. There’s an Irish literary baton being passed on here.
Actors provide the soundscape while it is a bucolic one—cows, bulls, sheep—but as Maddie nears the city, an industrial track takes over. The train is delayed, a deluge falls, husband and wife return home sodden and philosophical, ruminating over mortality and what it means to be corporeal, sentient beings. It is a deeply meditative live theatre experience—hypnotic in its simplicity. I found myself asking whether it was necessary for us to be in a theatre listening to this piece designed for the radio. I think the answer is yes. The work has stayed with me and got my writerly brain ticking about audience proxemics. It’s a fine accomplishment—an affective and effective experience of Beckett—and another feather in the cap for director Gavin Quinn and the company.
The stage monologue features heavily in 20th century Irish theatre. Brian Friel, Tommy Murphy and Frank McGuinness have all used the monologue within multi-character pieces, and in the first decade of the 21st century Conor Macpherson, Marina Carr and Mark O’Rowe have ensured that this most literary of theatrical approaches has meant that ‘the playwright’ has remained central to Irish contemporary performance even where s/he has fallen out of vogue in other industrial contexts, including our own here in Australia. Stefanie Preissner steps into this tradition squarely with her full-length one-person testimonial and is most obviously influenced by O’Rowe, whose Terminus (2007) was memorably brutally lyrical. Solpadeine is my Boyfriend is, like Terminus, written in rhyme. Where Terminus is less tethered to structured scansion, Solpadeine errs heavily toward the metered rhyme. It is at its strongest when, like the proverbial good waiter, you do not notice that s/he is there. There were some cloying moments when the piece veered toward Pam Ayres to service a looming couplet. The direction was also ham-fisted and literal at times. But the story itself is engrossing and disarmingly candid, and is told unflinchingly by writer-performer Preissner.
Cork girl Stef moves to Dublin to study drama. Evidently moving from Cork to Dublin carries the cultural bias of a Northern Australian moving to Sydney or Melbourne (I say that as someone who did); vowels need to be contorted into compliance, regional provenance apologised for in the interests of ‘fitting in.’ Stef finds a boyfriend, Steve, who is by all accounts a bit of an arsehole. She suffers extended bouts of depression—with or without him—and self-medicates with Solpadeine, a European equivalent, we are told, to Panadeine Forte. The piece is a genuinely stirring (and frequently hilarious) rumination on depression and self-sabotage in the realm of personal relationships. Is Preissner picking up the literary baton passed on by Joyce and Beckett? Probably not. But she’s a terrific autobiographical storyteller and a talent to watch out for.
Black Faggot was fun. It’s a sketch-based montage of monologues and duologues centring on the theme of Polynesian (mostly Samoan) characters coming to terms with homosexuality in New Zealand. Iaheto Ah Hi and Taokia Pelasasa play all of these men—and women—ranging from the closeted football jock stumbling ‘accidentally’ into Auckland’s gay bars to the young Christian boy praying his queerness away, to the Samoan mama dealing initially not so well with her son’s gradual emersion from the closet, to a Cultural Studies lecturer providing a semiotic reading of orientalist consumption of Pasifika sexuality in his paper “Cracker wanna Poly.” Some sketches are hilarious, some bawdy, even smutty. Cultural stereotyping is both satirised and indulged (there are Samoan jokes about Tongans only being recognisable when they smile—showing gold fillings being the gag that Australian audiences may not switch onto. The performances are arguably better than the writing, but the show has a terrific heart and did a great job in delivering in-yer-face queer politics to an audience that even here in Brisbane (where there is a huge South Sea Islander population who don’t always make it to the theatre) found its mark.
The World Theatre Festival 2014 program was a fold-out brochure rather than the plump booklet of years past. Missing was the Graeme Wood Foundation sponsor logo and the swathe of local creative development showings. While the buzz was still there, fed by the cross-over with the Australian Performing Arts Market, the stalwart WTF audience and some snazzy initiatives like the Yum Chat for local Asian-Australian theatremakers, the festival now appears to sit in a more commercial curatorial space.
She Would Walk the Sky
One of the jewels in the crown of this year’s WTF was the collaboration between gifted Tasmanian playwright Finegan Kruckemeyer and veteran circus performer and director Chelsea McGuffin. She Would Walk the Sky is narrated by a ghostly voice-over describing “the people of the river house” who nest in a secret, derelict nightclub, including “the bird woman” pining for a sailor who abandoned her, “the strong man” who loves the bird woman from afar and “the clown” who tells the audience that their putative love affair “is never going to happen.” The velvet-clad band duck and play as slack rope, bike and trapeze tricks unfold.
Alas, Kruckemeyer’s prose was more lullaby than storm. I was reminded of Antonella Casella’s article in RealTime (RT115) in which she wondered if narrative interferes with the inherent power of the ‘body of representation’ in circus form. The disembodied prose never felt a part of the live show and while there was an undeniable beauty in its wash and pulses, the cumulative and melancholic effect worked against the push and dazzle of the live spectacle. The show is already on international tour so perhaps the marriage between text and live circus will bed down.
Underground and Gudirr Gudirr
The third return season of Underground by local heroes Motherboard Productions was a joyous cross-cultural mash of musical, magic realism and nightclub revue. As reviewed (RT107), the show moves seamlessly between Korean and English, using pop culture and musical numbers to tie together the loose strands of the narrative about the search for love and identity. Ditto for outstanding Indigenous dance work from Marrugeku, Gudirr Gudirr (RT114) that explodes with the force of Broome’s utopian elixir: Malay, Yawuru and Japanese cultures, expressed through the passionate intensity of performer and choreographer Dalisa Pigrim and her urgent quest to articulate, in words and movement, the violent intersections of her own cultural and political identity, ably facilitated by Belgian choreographer Koen Augustijnen.
Wedhus Gembel
Another exciting cross-cultural debut for Brisbane audiences was Wedhus Gembel. The show is a long-term collaboration between a group of Javanese independent artists—associated with the dynamic Indonesian theatre company Theatre Garasi—and Footscray’s anarchically cheerful Snuff Puppets, with their large-scale, endearing and slightly askew creations. This is an important contribution to the scarce Indonesian-Australian repertory. “Wedhus Gembel” translates as the gas from an active volcano, the chaotic force of a goat’s appetite and homelessness after a natural disaster. The show melds traditional stories, living culture, traditional Indonesian puppets and the hand-made, friendly grotesquery of the Snuff Puppet aesthetic.
I was fortunate to sit beside a Javanese-Australian whose delight at seeing traditional elements, like the Wayang puppetry, was mirrored by the frenzy of the schoolchildren in the back cackling at the mobile phone gags and blaring Indo pop. Even with my charming guide it was hard to follow transitions or grasp the finer points of the stories. The show has been made for an Indonesian audience first and translated back for an Australian one.
Nonetheless, nothing could dampen the excitement of the audience when the large volcano onstage erupted, producing an egg that birthed our monster: Wedhus Gembel who proceeded to eat the entire cast and some of the audience. Only the wise man Samir could calm him by encouraging him to fart and poo out everyone he had swallowed. They emerged, transformed with new costumes, ready to charge into the audience and bring us onstage to boogie—graceful glowing Indonesian performers, schoolkids and local mob alike. As I snuck out to see the next WTF show, my last glimpse was of the entire audience bouncing up and down and shrieking with joy.
What was compelling about each of these shows was their deeply felt experimentation with collaboration: across culture, art forms and geography. While some works succeeded better than others, or were just further along in their development, the richness of these brave collaborations was the highlight of WTF 2014 for me and I look forward to the next installment in 2016.
Lee Breuer with some of the cast of La Divina Caricatura
photo Beatriz Schiller
Lee Breuer with some of the cast of La Divina Caricatura
Leading American theatre innovator Lee Breuer is to conduct a masterclass in Australia in July. In this article reproduced from The Brooklyn Rail, he is interviewed about his work by Kyoung H Park in 2012 prior to the New York premiere of the greatly acclaimed La Divina Caricatura in 2013 at La Mama. Reviewer Laura Collins-Hughes described the work as “strange, singular, perfectly self-contained and so wondrous that it may leave you in a daze” (New York Times, 9 Dec, 2013).
In the 42 years since Mabou Mines’ founding in 1970, Lee Breuer has directed some of the most seminal pieces of the American avant-garde, including adaptations of Beckett’s Play, Come and Go, and The Lost Ones, The Gospel at Colonus, Mabou Mines Lear, Peter and Wendy, Mabou Mines DollHouse, and groundbreaking, international productions such as Comedie-Francaise’s Un Tramway Nommé Désir. But prior to his rise as a director, Lee Breuer was a playwright.
Maude Mitchell
photo Beariz Schiller
Maude Mitchell
Lee and I met in New Delhi, India when he and his partner, Maude Mitchell, taught an acting workshop at Sanskriti Pratisthan, an artist colony where I was a 2010 Unesco-Aschberg resident. The workshop consisted of theater games that explored Western and non-Western performance techniques, which Lee gradually blended together, while directing the students’ interpretations of their own writing. Carefully connecting emotions to the physical and spoken expression of words, Lee spoke about his dialectical approach to motivational and movement-based acting methods, which he’s masterfully synthesized into a unique style as Co-Artistic Director of Mabou Mines.
My first collaboration with Lee was as Assistant Director and masked performer in a workshop production of La Divina Caricatura during the summer of 2011. Divina is a Bunraku pop-opera, written and directed by Lee, that tells the love story of Rose and John, a dog and her master, through two re-incarnations set in Lee’s metaphoric Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. I played Sheepish, a sheep in the Institute for the Science of Soul, a rehab center in Cheesequake, New Jersey that looks like an Indian ashram and symbolizes Purgatorio.
La Divina Caricatura is based on autobiography, puppetry bio-mechanics and a piercing examination of cultural evolution, as evidenced through novels, music, art, film and dance. The script, which equally alludes to Dante’s Divine Comedy and to 17th century playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon, is a multimedia, multi-day epic that unveils Lee’s unique voice as a writer searching for spiritual revelation through the written word.
Lee’s most notorious works—and the first published—are the Animations, a trilogy of poetic, self-referencing narratives about the epic struggles of living an unenlightened artist’s life. The first two animations, The B Beaver Animation and The Red Horse Animation, were first produced in museums such as the Guggenheim, Whitney and MoMA with support of Ellen Stewart and La MaMa. It wasn’t until The Shaggy Dog Animation, completed eight years after the start of the trilogy, that Lee’s writing found a home at the Public Theater.
“The Shaggy Dog Animation was supposed to be the third animation, but then it took off on its own and became a trilogy of itself,” Lee explains. This new trilogy, La Divina Caricatura, combines the texts of several of Lee’s subsequent plays written from the late 70s through 2012.
“If one were to consider The Shaggy Dog Animation, Prelude to a Death in Venice and The Epidog as a separate story, that would be Rose’s trilogy. But the larger trilogy, La Divina Caricatura, is an exploration not of Rose, but the love affair between Rose and John.” The focus is the course of their love, which Lee describes as the “amor delgada—re-manifest in two intricate, balanced, new pairings” as Rose and John reincarnate and find each other again as Porco and the Warrior Ant.
For many critics, An Epidog (1996) marked the culmination of Lee’s Animations, but in 2001, he began to stage Ecco Porco in a series of brief workshops and productions that ended with Pataphysics Pennyeach: Summa Drammatica & Porco Morto.
“At the time I was doing Ecco Porco, that’s when I started thinking: ‘It’s a trilogy, sooner or later I ought to put it all together,’” says Lee. “But the idea of how it all fits together is maybe five, at most 10, years old.”
In its current version, Rose (a dog) chases after John across the country in a 1970s Inferno for struggling artists. Addicted to love, Rose is hospitalized at the Institute for the Science of Soul—Purgatorio—where she meets John’s reincarnation as Porco, a pig. The third part of Divina takes place in Paradisio, when Rose dies and reincarnates as the eponymous Warrior Ant.
“Based on the story of Arjuna in the Mahabharata, the Ant becomes a revolutionary when she goes to her father, Trotsky the termite,” Lee continues. “She becomes a complete leftist and says she’ll lead the fifth world in a revolution. The ‘Great War’ is fought on the White House lawn.”
The staging of La Divina Caricatura closely reflects the traditional performance of Bunraku puppetry, in which a tayu narrates a story accompanied by a shamisen and orchestra. However, Divina is directed as an animated, epic movie, based on the narrative structure of Monzaemon’s Bunraku plays, which in turn closely mirror the structure of feature films.
“I always felt that I would like to head towards more classical puppetry—Bunraku puppetry,” Lee reflects. “The closest I came to that was in Porco Morto, where Porco was staged in his coffin with a ground light. So, if the trilogy was to make sense, then it had to have a classic Bunraku kind of unity, but I didn’t commit to it because of how expensive and time consuming it is to do great Bunraku.”
In 1988, Lee did venture into a Bunraku collaboration, partnering with puppeteer Yoshida Tamamatsu for The Warrior Ant at Brooklyn Academy of Music. “One of the problems,” he says, was that “The Warrior Ant was a puppet run by this incredible Bunraku puppeteer who did some great stuff, but the warrior was in mid-air. There was no context, he was just this little puppet in the middle of singers [with] no dramatic definition, so I said, let’s commit—finally!—to one formal idea.”
The novelty of this idea is Lee’s transformation of traditional Bunraku into a Western form, in which a narrator performing Rose sends up Divina’s endless cultural references through distilled, lyric narratives that build up to songs. These songs change styles and rhythm to play everything from Indian ragas to Argentinian tangos, and underscore Divina’s searching story, which is performed by an ensemble of Bunraku puppeteers, doo-wop singers and actors on stage.
“I feel more identified with this than with Western dramatic structure,” says Lee. “I feel that Chikamatsu Monzaemon wrote these perfect filmic metaphors that gave me the idea of making a mixed-media film with puppets. That’s where the idea came from.”
What astonishes me in La Divina Caricatura is the profound meaning sought through unlikely characters—Rose, the dog, Porco, the pig and the Warrior Ant. It wasn’t until I discovered the connections between these characters and Lee’s personal history that I realized how close they are to him.
“Rose was my dog,” Lee recalls. “When we were working on a Navajo reservation, my daughter Clove was given a puppy. She got very attached to the puppy, but some kid ran over him and it was a big tragedy. We buried Klechayazi—‘little dog’ in Navajo—and immediately got a two-week old husky. We kept her for 16 years and that was Rose.”
He also describes a trip to Mexico, where they sold “these great, big, termite-type insects with engraved jewels on them. We bought an insect and a supply of wood, which is what they ate, and the insect lived with us for three, four months, which was really three times longer than it was supposed to live.” That insect, he continues, would become The Warrior Ant. “It was a large, ant-like termite, really slow and really beautiful, with a blue jewel glued on its back.”
The character of Rose and her reincarnation as the Warrior Ant developed much faster than John’s reincarnation as Porco. “Porco was harder to get to because he’s much more me,” reveals Lee. “Well, a part of me that is hard to get to. With Porco Morto, I was able to get to where the big heart was, which was sentimental, wonderful and romantic—the way a pig should be.”
Throughout Divina, Rose’s desire to be a romantic artist, striving for the highest levels of love, passion and beauty conflicts with the narrator’s identification as a self-destructive, addicted, mad artist.
To understand this contradiction, one needs to understand Lee’s sense of humor. When speaking of French avant-gardist/puppeteer Alfred Jarry, Lee describes “an outrageous pun-maker—every other word was a pun. He had this idea that language could expand in different directions so it would all reverberate like a big gong.
“He also had a balancing act which was the beginning of the put-on: basically, you didn’t quite know whether you were being spoken to seriously or not,” Lee says. “It could happen with an eyebrow twitch, or the dilation of nostrils, and the audience didn’t know if it was being insulted or being listened to.”
This attitude served to challenge the values of the French bourgeoisie, but unlike Monzaemon—who challenged the bourgeois values of his society through tragedies—[Alfred] Jarry achieved this through controversial puppetry and biting satire.
“Jarry preserved [this attitude] until he died,” Lee insists. “His last request was a joke. He was lying in bed, dying, had been drunk for 15 days, hadn’t eaten anything—and his last request was a toothpick and he died shortly afterwards.”
The role of Jarry—not as an avant-gardist, but as a comedian—relates to Lee’s fascination with the “genetically martyred” individual. He describes the comedian as a martyr—“a certain ‘bird’ in the flock. When this marked individual sees danger, he screams and calls it out, so the predator will go for that bird and the flock will get away. In other words, the bird’s the designated victim so that the genetic species can live…This was my little secret definition of the artist—a designated martyr. And Porco was going to represent this for me.”
In opposition to his proposition of the artist as martyr, Lee delves equally into the madness of the artist, comparing Porco’s creation of the Ant in The Warrior Ant to Cervantes’ relationship to Don Quixote.
“There’s a scene that I’m working on in which Porco admits that he’s created an insane insect—that you can’t be a holy warrior, a Warrior Ant,” he says. “It’s the fantasy of fantasies—particularly a pig’s fantasy.”
At the core of La Divina Caricatura lies the search for balance between the pursuit of an artistic and spiritual path. “The searching artist goes on a religious search and you’ve got to tie it to something; it really is a pilgrimage,” maintains Lee. “Dante’s pilgrimage is real; Dante’s pilgrimage is the same as the artist’s, and the danger all through the pilgrimage is a Buddhist thing: to not being able to recognize Maya, recognize illusion for what it is—in your own head.
“This is why my image of a great successful and happy life was Dante himself,” says Lee. “Dante was in exile, living out of Florence, and a month after he died, they found the last three verses of Paradiso on his desk. And there he went—completing one of the greatest works ever written, completing it while simultaneously completing his life. I think this is a very happy way to go.”
When I ask him how this is funny, Lee sums up the comic irony: “Warriors are defending the faith, and behind that idea is the idea of defending the truth. This is a little bit of what’s going on, yet we have an Ant embodying this great task.”
This article originally appeared as “Madness and Martyrdom in La Divina Caricatura” in The Brooklyn Rail (www.brooklynrail.org), 10 Dec, 2012, and is reproduced with the permission of the publisher.
In July, Tashmadada (director Deborah Leiser-Moore) and MAPA (Monash Academy of Performing Arts) will present a workshop conducted by Lee Breuer and Maude Mitchell in the Masters of Theatre series. You can read an interview with Leiser-Moore about her latest work, KaBooM: Stories from Distant Frontiers, in RealTime Profiler#2.
Conflict is something we think of through the allowances and permissions of theatrical situations and the language of war and ideology. In Ballad of the Burning Star, it is its intimacy that earns a particularly poetic examination. Developed over a period of two years, first premiering at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2013 and opening in London at Battersea Arts Centre this spring, Ballad of the Burning Star navigates highly disputed political territory with the skilful use of theatrical metaphor. It investigates intimate questions around belonging and conflict, roots and politics by positing theatrical problems.
Ballad is inspired by Israeli-born Nir Paldi’s experience, as teenager and young adult, of growing up in the midst of the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Focusing on a particular moment of gun-point conflict that is twisted through a series of dramaturgical operations, the show draws on cabaret and drag, flirts with irony and humour, constructs a play within a play, develops deliberately manipulative stage politics and positions the audience in a landscape that moves from narrative to rhetoric.
Paldi plays Star, the host for the evening, a drag queen clad in gold who, assisted by The Starlets, an all female group of dancers dressed in tightly fitted military uniforms, and Camp David, their musician, tells a story about a boy in the midst of conflict, moving from the kibbutz to school bus, desert to town, sibling rivalries to bomb explosions. Within the series of narrative and occasionally musical vignettes, Star intervenes with commentaries about the Starlets’ performances and various forms of deceptive audience participation.
Ballad begins with Star announcing a bomb in the theatre; we’re now to find the terrorist, seeking among the rows of raked seating the most dubious, most recognisable culprit. The awkward, pressing silence of the audience as Star makes her way up into the seating and her aggressive playfulness present an apt context for a performance that seeks to both isolate and conflate the personal and the national in conflicts that are very much grounded in land and history, beyond the usual remit of political work. Rich in affect and daring in form, Ballad prefers to expose and argue, to think through constantly re-contextualised action.
The aesthetic and stylistic elements hold particular power here, beyond a mere theatrical symbolism. The stage is bare, framed only by a pair of red velvet curtains; a star of David hangs like a mirror ball in the centre. The rich gold and red velvet, the language of oppression and oppressed, the nuanced, regimented movement are in stark contrast with the playful theatricality of Star and the brutal irony of the musical numbers.
Drag brings a deliberate ambiguity and distance to the situation unfolding in the vignettes, performed with a sense of deliberately historicised theatricality. At the same time, the stage itself becomes a site of ambiguous power dynamics. The Starlets are caricatures and characters, the performance making constant reference to the actual background of the dancers. Increasingly abused by Star, they respond with an embodied resistance, emphasising an autocratic regime made visible beyond language. Here, the body is central—it becomes synonymous with the territories described in the narratives themselves.
It is possible to problematise the identity politics seen in Star’s own drag, the ways in which questions of ambiguity and gender remain underexplored, yet recalled in the piece. At the same time, the complexity and nuance of the problem as presented through the performance—one pertaining to generations and individuals, to history and rhetoric, to land and topography—is made visible with precision.
Ballad of the Burning Star is a performance of political in-betweens; those of form, of identification and autobiography, of conflict and theme. It’s a piece that presents a discussion of the intricacies of the Israeli-Palestine conflict, speaking with clarity and precision of identity, belonging, personal politics and theatrical metaphors, while maintaining a disarming formal and rhetorical ambiguity.
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Theatre Ad Infinitum, Ballad of the Burning Star, director, writer, performer Nir Paldi, music Adam Pleeth, choreographer, performer Orian Michaeli, Battersea Arts Centre, London, 17 Feb-8 March
A man and woman are dancing a slow waltz in vaguely 1930s attire. They are re-enacting the dance marathons of the Great Depression that took place mainly in the US. Following the original rules of these events, the couple will dance for 24 hours with 15 minutes break per hour, during which they eat meals or snacks determined from original menus, and receive medical assistance if required.
I arrive at the end of the fifth hour of Deborah Pollard’s Yowza Yowza Yowza. Carly Young is being massaged by the physiotherapist; partner Jackson Davis is rubbing his feet, sitting on one of the camp beds in the corner. In another corner the time runs across a screen, next to a slideshow of 1930s photographs. The dancefloor is a circle of lightbulbs just two metres in diameter, with small viewing benches either side. There is a trolley with jugs of water. At the other end of the room, the marathon rules scroll. Deborah Pollard, the work’s creator, is at a desk near the door dressed as a nurse, managing the live feed.
The dancers begin again. The glacial pace of their moves, and Ashley Scott’s soundtrack of white noise, are disconcerting to a viewer familiar with the 1935 Horace McCoy novel They Shoot Horses Don’t They which inspired the work [the popular Sydney Pollack directed film appeared in 1969. Eds]. Yowza wastes no time with vintage aesthetics, neither visual nor aural, its intent thereby more exposed. At the same time Pollard’s rigour in research and application of detail is extraordinary. The following day when I return, the performers are holding poses from the slideshow of the marathon dancers in pain, crazed with fatigue.
This assured combination of historical accuracy and oblique contemporary interpretation provided a rich foundation for a variety of questions. When does acted exhaustion become real? When does theatre become life? What can time alone, as yielding yet ineluctable as air, do to us, in life and art? Yowza rendered the seam between the two virtually invisible. I also saw a clever nod to the re-enactment phenomenon sweeping performance art in recent years. With its combination of skill, integrity and unique vision, Yowza trumped Australia’s most popular re-enactment of our times—Kaldor’s 13 Rooms—a mere orgy of pageantry and gloss.
Yowza went full circle to history, provoking empathy with the people who from sheer desperation danced these marathons almost a century ago. The last dancers standing got money. Some even hoped for fame, with jobs as professional dancers. But They Shoot Horses Don’t They doesn’t talk about winners. McCoy was an early proponent of the LA hard-boiled genre, writing about the losers refused by Hollywood, with dire consequences.
This element of competition was absent. It seemed a deliberate omission, the tiny circle enclosing the two dancers a sort of demarcation of the limits of Pollard’s experiment. I couldn’t help wondering what would happen if that circle were to widen.
Created in a gallery at Wollongong University for her PhD, in association with Performance Space, Yowza Yowza Yowza may yet have a more public incarnation. Fingers crossed. It is one of the most sophisticated, profound performance works I have seen in years.
University of Wollongong, Yowza Yowza Yowza, creator Deborah Pollard, produced in association with Performance Space, in collaboration with Ashley Scott, Dara Gill, Carly Young, Jackson Davis, UOW, NSW, 6-7 March
Reviewing James Waites’ Whatever happened to the STC Actors Company? (Platform Paper 23, Currency House, April 2010), I began by declaring it “a rarity in Australian writing about the theatre. If more like investigative journalism (was the ensemble killed off?) than formal essaying (if not without considered theses), it’s written with a documentary maker’s attentiveness to his subjects (drawing on numerous interviews) and a novelist’s narrative drive (who did it?). But what gives the paper its peculiar power is Waites as witness” (“Critical homage to a short life,” RT97).
Jim was witness to, and an intimate of, the Sydney theatre world for over four decades, bringing to his reviews an invaluable perspective, an acute awareness of formal developments and the courage to speak his mind. His friend Augusta Supple in her fond farewell to Jim on her blog (graced with a wonderful range of photos) writes, “he once told me that being a critic was ‘really a mix of parish priest and dentist’—and you had to be the bravest to stand up and applaud when everyone else was too scared to. He called a spade a spade—and got fired for it on more than one occasion. He would refuse to clap, exclaim something was “utter crap” if it lacked heart or empathy. He walked his talk” (augustasupple.com).
Jim very occasionally wrote for RealTime, his one substantial piece for us on the occasion of the death of Polish theatre luminary Jerzy Growtowski in 1999. The article, “Potato country ” (RT30, p7) comprised Jim’s very funny but heartfelt account of a Grotowski workshop he participated in on a farm in rural NSW in 1974. After receiving instructions to travel to ‘a secret destination,’ he arrives in Armidale and is instructed to make a musical instrument from whatever he can find. Later he goes to a local supermarket where the Polish performers stockpile ‘luxury goods’ and subsequently arrives at a farm where the workshop commences:
“We were nearly always naked, and the work was done in silence. We might walk into a room and it glowed with heat and warmth, or climb into wine kegs full of cold water, lined at the bottom with bristling pineapple heads… A journey of discovery into the self via the senses had begun, activated by what were essentially ‘dramatic’ devices.”
Jim recalled at one point the others “putting their hands all over my naked body; I can still feel the warmth. They carried me outside and raised my body to the winter moon.” Less entrancing was being dragged through recently broken earth “like a human plough. As a boy who had spent years at a Catholic boarding school, who lived pretty much entirely in the head, it was forceful and immediate confrontation. The sacred earth!”
Having refused in the course of the workshop to respond to being hit and being “battered with raw eggs and smeared with yolk …I found it absolutely repugnant,” Jim was told on the last day by Grotowski that “he had planted a seed in us that would only grow if we never discussed our experience. To attempt to use words would kill his gift. For a long time I told no one.” He adds, “We had been taken on a remarkable, mysterious journey into ourselves. I don’t know what the gift was, but I sense it still inside me.”
We weren’t close friends but we saw and chatted with Jim many times over many years, usually at the theatre, even the night before his death at the opening night of The Long Way Home (a play performed by actual soldiers about the mental consequences of damaged bodies, a topic all too familiar to Jim); he was ever a loyal theatre-goer, to the end.
Nigel Kellaway, who like many us who had seen or been in contact with Jim in his final days, writes, “I’m sure I join many theatre artists in Sydney who would have only good words to say of him, regardless of the lethal arrows he occasionally threw at us all… he was a brave and beautiful man.”
A detailed account of Jim’s life and achievements can be found in “Critic whose life became the drama” in the Sydney Morning Herald obituary, 27 Feb, p34.
Mary Hellen Sassman, Frankenstein, courtesy Malthouse
Entire industries have been built on the anxieties of motherhood, and it seems that when women aren’t being told how they’re doing it wrong they’re being sold something that will do it better. None of this makes it any easier when it comes to seriously examining the existential issues that face mothers. Two recent Melbourne productions take up that challenge, and by a fascinating coincidence do so in a manner that looks past the role of the mother as usually portrayed—that is, as something defined only in relation to a social function or family dynamic—to probe at the psychic workings of maternity itself as a state of mind.
Playwright Katy Warner and director Prue Clark’s Dropped is firmly in that oddly evergreen niche of the bunker play. Bunker plays see a small group of characters holed up in some subterranean concrete limbo while outside an apocalypse that may or may not be real ensures that the only exit remains firmly sealed. It’s a good way of allowing confinement to heighten tensions, bring up secrets, provoke a bit of shouting and so forth.
Dropped doesn’t dwell on the exact circumstances of its two characters, and is closer to Sartre’s Huis Clos in leaving its audiences to make what they will of their imprisonment. The two women are soldiers in some abandoned compound covered in a sheet of snow, which still falls ominously from above at intervals. Their shaky reality is made even more uncertain by the way their exchanges are based on shared fantasies, of an imaginary bottle of vodka, a passing dog and, most crucially, a baby.
One was once a real mother, we’re told, but there’s no reason to believe this any more than the other, patently false stories they swap. And the bundles of white swaddling supposed to represent various make-believe babies are made problematic when one emits a real child’s cry.
Brigid Gallacher, Matilda Reed, Dropped
photo Jessica Hogg
Brigid Gallacher, Matilda Reed, Dropped
There’s a pervasive sense of the passed over or left behind, and the shifting of realities suggests people who have never been afforded the tools to make sense of their own lives. The desire to carve out a solid psychic space is perhaps stymied by the equally powerful desire to share that with a child, but these two goals are contradictory, it is intimated, since the security symbolised by the bunker is the kind that stifles rather than promotes growth of any sort.
The form of Dropped doesn’t entirely do justice to the questions it raises. While its two protagonists are locked in by their own ignorance, the audience’s journey follows the more familiar trajectory of dramatic irony, as we become privy to the situation in which the women find themselves but are unable to move beyond. We’re ultimately heading towards the omniscience of gods, while the subjects before us are unable to achieve any narrative transcendence. To place a viewer in that same helpless state would be a bold and rare move, but it’s one that another local company has achieved with astonishing results.
The Rabble’s last work, Room of Regret, was explicitly concerned with architecture and the body, situating its audience and performers in a labyrinthine built environment. Frankenstein, conversely, returns the action to the ephemeral non-space of earlier works such as Orlando and Story of O, in which the set and all that unfolds within it refer to mental and emotional structures rather than material referents. A character stepping off stage doesn’t move to some other space projected by the illusion of the work, but simply ceases to be until they return. The stage is a claustrophobic box—the self unable to escape its own limits—but is also the entire universe as a result.
Mary Shelley’s telling of Victor Frankenstein’s overreaching hubris is here remodelled in an immediately striking way. Frankenstein (Mary Helen Sassman) is a woman who wants a baby and whose experiments in producing one involve locating a viable egg from among the thousands of black and squishy ovoids covering the floor, inseminating it with a syringe and depositing it in a huge, womblike incubator. After some false starts and with the aid of several lab assistants, the creature is born, and as incarnated by Jane Montgomery Griffiths is an unforgettable thing.
With a torso sprouting dozens of breast-like protuberances, the naked and bawling creature is every infant as monster, blubbering and howling and flailing at the world into which it has been dragged. It is a figure of pure need. Somehow Griffiths manages to invoke in the onlooker the desire to care for this pitiable child, at the same time enacting enough of the monstrous to allow us sympathy for Victor, who recoils from the thing’s relentless and insatiable desire for succour.
Alone, the dynamic that plays out between the two would be enough to propel this outstanding work, but the arrival of Victor’s brother and his predatory maleness complicate things further, as does the lust of one of Frankenstein’s assistants, who may embody the blind man who extends to Shelley’s original monster some kindness, the bride he demands Victor create and the young girl the monster kills in the 1931 film adaptation. It’s always hard to pin such referents down in The Rabble’s work, since all metaphors and similes here point in three directions or more. Indeed, the company has become increasingly adept at filling out these fantastic worlds with polyvalent symbols that cram so much possibility into such tiny containers that it’s rarely clear whether anything is more than the projected meaning of the individual onlooker.
The Rabble’s work is also known for consistently returning to horrific imagery, and Frankenstein is the most disturbing, indeed upsetting, of its creations thus far. There are at least two moments in this production that should challenge even the most jaded of witnesses, and many of the production’s implications will last in the conscious and subconscious mind long after the house lights are up. To venture so far into the darker recesses of the soul—and to do so in the name of motherhood, that supposed sanctuary of light—is something that deserves a response of awe.
Dropped, writer Katy Warner, director Prue Clark, performers Brigid Gallacher, Matilda Reed, lighting Amelia Lever-Davidson, sound Kahra Scott-James, design Lucy Thornett, La Mama Courthouse, 26 March-16 April; The Rabble, Frankenstein, direction, lighting, sound Emma Valente, design Kate Davis, performers Jane Montgomery Griffiths, Emily Milledge, Dana Miltins, David Paterson, Mary Helen Sassman, Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, 21 March-5 April
Nicci Wilks, Derek Ives, Clare Bartholomew, The Long Pigs
photo Ponch Hawkes
Nicci Wilks, Derek Ives, Clare Bartholomew, The Long Pigs
It’s become a contemporary cliché, thanks to the murderous activities of John Wayne Gacy and subsequent media myth creation, that clowns are evil. Of course clowns have always been naughty, deviant even—the role the jester was allocated in the Middle Ages—but have they been given an undeservedly bad rap? Absolutely not if The Long Pigs are an example—these guys are really nasty.
Derek Ives, Clare Bartholomew and Nicci Wilks are the Long Pigs (devised and directed by Susie Dee). They wear minimal clown make-up but have big black noses and are dressed in drab grey clothing including filthy aprons and oversized hairnets in a kind of hybrid factory-cum-medical worker style. Physically they are variously tiny, tall and round but stature is no indication of status. It’s slippery, the question as to who’s the top pig is in constant flux. That said they make an efficient team—antithetical to the usual clown bumbling—and they have a job to do. It seems they are in the canning industry, packaging what I initially thought were tomatoes but then realised were red noses. The show begins with a wonderfully inventive and complicated routine involving pulleys, pedalling and planks of the wood with which to move a single red object from one side of the stage to the other. The routine has the precision and playfulness of a Peter Fischli & David Weiss installation. But there’s a problem, they are one red nose short. There’s the inference that a greater force will be most unhappy about this.
The show moves seamlessly through scenes and routines with lateral connections in pursuit of the missing nose. At one stage Ives is crucified and the other two run around the audience collecting money for “Jesus,” uttered as squeak, about the only word in the show. And they’re pretty pushy about it. The trio then begin to turn on each other until eventually, after Wilks appears somehow transformed with a red nose, their true evil natures are revealed. She is de-nosed, returning with a bleeding bandage wrapped around her face and is forced to eat her own seeping former facial feature.
With no dialogue, the sound score drives the work, Jethro Woodward doing an excellent job not only with all the synced sound effects but in finding a fine balance between ominous and ambiguous. The set design by Anna Tregloan is also integral, with dirty sheets, ladders, buckets and planks forming the basic elements which are reconfigured in surprising ways. And as every show seems to need something to fall from the ceiling these days, the rain of red noses at the conclusion is both amusing and unsettling.
I saw Long Pigs at the end of my four-day FOLA immersion (see page 15). It’s testament to the quality and creativity of the production and the skills of the performers that The Long Pigs could draw me into such a different performance mode. I mean, I haven’t watched clowns in years—because really, they are way too scary.
The Long Pigs, devisor, director Susie Dee, devisors, performers Derek Ives, Clare Bartholomew, Nicci Wilks, sound Jethro Woodward, design Anna Tregloan, lighting Andy Turner, producer Insite Arts; Fortyfive Downstairs; 12-23 March
Ganesh Versus the Third Reich, Back to Back Theatre
photo Zan Wimnberley
Ganesh Versus the Third Reich, Back to Back Theatre
Like a sports fan avoiding the final score so as to enjoy watching the game later, I have tried to avoid reviews of Back to Back Theatre’s Ganesh Versus the Third Reich. But it can’t be done, not completely, and certainly not for three years. The show premiered at the Melbourne Festival in 2011 and has toured to cities in Europe, North America and Asia before finally arriving in Sydney in 2014. Along the way everyone from Alison Croggon to Ben Brantley has reviewed it and so, despite my best efforts, I arrive at Carriageworks full of anticipation. I am not disappointed.
The show, as you probably know, alternates between two realities. The first is that of the rehearsal room, where an ensemble of actors with perceived disabilities are working with a director to create a show about Ganesh, the Hindu God of Overcoming Obstacles, who travels to Germany in order to reclaim the Swastika. This storyline is established in the first scene, with Simon Laherty, Mark Deans and Brian Tilley discussing who will play which character. Brian, who is playing Ganesh, suggests that Simon and Mark might like to play obstacles, but Simon thinks they’d rather play something “more exciting.” They settle for “two Jews on the run from the Nazis.” The audience giggles nervously. The second reality focuses on Ganesh himself and his journey across continents. This storyline is established in the second scene, which is staged in English and Sanskrit. The only actor without disability in the ensemble (Luke Ryan, playing David the director, the role originally devised and performed by David Woods) stands in front of the transparent plastic curtain to narrate and translate the scene, while Simon as Ganesh stands behind it, backlit in silhouette. On its own, each story line would be intriguing but perhaps not gripping; together they are compelling and complex.
The aesthetics of the two story lines are very different. The scenes from the play-within-the-play are explicitly theatrical and very beautiful; we watch as they are assembled and then disassembled. In one scene, chairs are placed on a table, a plastic curtain is pulled across and animated mountains are projected onto the scene. Suddenly the actors appear to be sitting in a train hurtling through the Alps. The music in these scenes is also lush, thick with tingling sitars, rumbling cellos and occasionally a single female voice. In contrast, the aesthetics of the rehearsal room are pared back. There is no music, the curtains are pulled to the side and the lighting becomes flat, almost fluorescent.
Back to Back’s work is often characterised by self-reflexivity, but Ganesh Versus the Third Reich takes this to yet another level by incorporating critical responses to earlier Back to Back shows. The rehearsal scenes stage several conversations, some of which could occur in any company dealing with the politics and ethics of cultural appropriation. Others, however, could only be had by or about Back to Back. One of the main concerns is that the actors do not fully comprehend what they are doing. Another of the players, Scott Price declares that Mark “doesn’t understand what is fiction and what is not,” adding that he has a mind “like a goldfish.” Incredibly, the director puts this proposition directly to Mark, who replies ambiguously, “goldfish, whale, penguin, octopus, seal, whale, shark, Sea World.” The animal theme continues when conversation turns to the spectators. Speaking to an anticipated but now actual audience, the director says, “You people have come here because you want to see an aquarium or a zoo.” Simon interjects with “I am not liking this,” to which David replies, “I’m just showing you how you can create edgy, exciting material when you are not sure what is real and what is not.”
Finally the conversation turns to the director himself. “He’s manipulating all of us,” says Scott; “He’s a good director,” counters Simon. In truth David is both. Early on, he is encouraging and cajoling, telling Brian, “You have put on paper an amazing possibility.” But as rehearsals progress, he becomes increasingly abusive. In one scene, he lies outright and in another he becomes enraged about a simple bit of blocking. This rehearsal room fight segues into the last scene of the hero’s journey, where Ganesh confronts Hitler and kills Dr Mengele. With the roar of Ganesh still ringing in our ears, we return to the rehearsal room one last time, where David commits one last act of abuse. Telling Mark they are going to play hide and seek, David lets Mark hide under a desk while he packs his things and leaves. Watching Mark waiting to be found by a director who has left the building makes me feel about as desolate as I have ever felt.
In the same way that revealing the mechanics of theatre enhances rather than diminishes its magic, having a performance incorporate our concerns about it seems to amplify rather than lessen them.
Like the suspect who confesses that he was lying earlier but is now telling the truth, Back to Back confronts its audience with a decision. Does this meta-theatrical confession make the show all the more honest or more dangerous? No matter how many reviews you have read, Ganesh Versus the Third Reich will test you, in every sense of the word.
Back to Back Theatre, Ganesh Versus the Third Reich, director Bruce Gladwin, devisors Mark Deans, Marcia Ferguson, Bruce Gladwin, Nicki Holland, Simon Laherty, Sarah Mainwaring, Scott Price, Kate Sulan, Brian Tilley, David Woods, Luke Ryan, lighting Andrew Livingston, bluebottle, design, animation Rhian Hinkley, composer Johann Johannsson, costumes Shio Otani, CarriageWorks, Sydney 12-15 March
‘We’re People Who Do Shows,’ Back to Back Theatre, Performance, Politics, Visibility, edited by Helena Grehan and Peter Eckersall (Performance Research Books, 2013) will be reviewed in RealTime 121, June-July.
Genevieve Trace, Aurelian, produced by Metro Arts & Brisbane Festival
photo Sean Young
Genevieve Trace, Aurelian, produced by Metro Arts & Brisbane Festival
Brisbane has a secret, one that has been recently discovered by a swathe of performance-makers from interstate: our grand old lady Metro Arts.
She is five storeys high, with an imposing stone facade, a dilapidated lift straight out of a Raymond Chandler novel and four intimate performance spaces ranging from the black box Sue Benner Theatre to the sunlit arches of the top floor studio. If you follow her flank down the side laneway you can see the drunken graffiti of innumerable closing nights, the perilous back entrance, the trapdoor green room and the gothic fire escapes that scale up each floor, jammed with artists’ studios and small arts organisations. You can feel her walls breathe, sense the sweat of practitioners who have been writing, fighting, making, rehearsing and performing here since 1980.
What makes Metro unique? Why the space still feels like a secret garden or a true artists’ space is ultimately economic: Metro Arts owns its building, lock, stock and barrel. Perhaps only the recently converted Abbotsford Convent in Melbourne has such a proud history of community advocacy realised by buying a space for artists.
That they have been able to maintain this beautiful heritage building as a haven for artistic experimentation is a testament to a chain of formidable custodians: Robert Hughes, Joseph O’Connor and Sue Benner. Current CEO Liz Burcham is no exception. As sadly missed former RealTime reviewer and theatre elder Doug Leonard said in RT 103 online, Burcham’s tenure has “cemented…and transformed Metro Arts (Independents) into a vital and cohesive part of the city’s performance scene.” Indeed, it was a bold and risky vision that Sue Benner initiated with the Independents program in 2002: giving a platform to hungry local theatremakers and playwrights who felt themselves systemically locked out of a mainstream Australian theatre then dominated by the middle-class minutiae of David Williamson’s naturalism.
Under Burcham’s strategic and canny direction, Metro has grown into a producing hub, a host venue for the Brisbane Festival and, probably its most significant but amorphous shift, moving from a place at the fringes of professional theatre culture to become the true incubator, the gestation space for the city’s performance-makers. Their closest cousin is probably Arts House in Melbourne, and it is not without significance that this is one of Metro’s key partners in 2014, the first program since it announced the close of the Independents in 2013.
I stopped by to talk with CEO Liz Burcham and Programming Manager Kieran Swann about their 2014 program and their sense of where the “lean and nimble” Metro saw itself “filling the gaps” in the rapidly changing theatre ecology here in Brisbane and across the country.
Metro has a heady manifesto. Burcham suggests three major goals: placing artists in creative control, providing them with an open platform to experiment, particularly with process and developing their practice, while simultaneously supporting them to develop strategies to make themselves sustainable. This means that Metro provides both dramaturgical or artistic support, but also a lot of practical services: creative development and rehearsal space, office space, access to a fully functional venue with an audience, an ongoing program and a production hub, which can provide support for artists to on-sell, tour or re-package their work. Burcham calls this “getting artists to the market,” or at the very least making sure that they don’t miss the market. Metro looks to “invest” in artists and to build deep and ongoing relationships. Indeed, Kieran Swann—live artist, designer and performance-maker—is an alumnus of Metro’s programs.
For both Burcham and Swann, the pivotal change for Metro in the last years has been a result of the success of the independent agenda. In the fluid and aspirational Australian performance sector most working artists now have an independent practice. Burcham’s driving question was whether the word ‘independent’ was still “serving artists” and whether a more “flexible” and “responsive” platform was needed. While many in the local scene mourn the end of the Independents program as a visible marker or entry point for new work, Burcham is right to acknowledge that Metro’s monopoly has been supplanted by other pathways into professional production, like the Indie seasons hosted by mainstage companies and for younger artists by the burgeoning festival platforms like Next Wave, FOLA, Anywhere Theatre Festival and This Is Not Art.
Metro has shifted to compete in this new context by focusing on co-presenting with the Arts House inaugural Festival of Live Art (Julie Vulcan’s Drift), Next Wave (The Dokboki Box, Altertruism Demos, Lesser Gods and Blak’tism) and Queensland Theatre Company (Benjamin Schostakowski’s A Tribute of Sorts). There’s also a producing partnership for a HotHouse season of The Escapists’ Packed (see p29). The creative development program includes works ranging from Melbourne’s MKA to Tasmanian artist Cynthia Foster and local physical theatremakers Caroline Dunphy, Kate Lee and Jo Thomas.
What is arresting about the list of artists supported by Metro programs in 2014 is how many of them are based interstate. Burcham says that they have been delighted with the national interest from artists who value the organic and artist-centric space and the focus on process-based risk.
Indeed, this artistic rhetoric reflects a curatorial shift towards contemporary performance, live art and the curious spaces that lie between theatre and the visual arts. For me, there is a genuine excitement about this prospect as for many years the visual arts program and the theatre program at Metro were like divorced parents in an uneasy custody agreement. The visual artists would huddle in their fourth floor studios away from the noisy parakeets, the theatremakers who dominated the bottom floors and their public performance spaces. The challenge for Metro, I think, is to steer the new path while holding onto the deeply felt traditions of theatremaking and playwright development that have made such a contribution to the city’s cultural life.
James Eccles, photo Michael Wholley, centre – Brian Howard, photo Victoria Owens, right – James Nightingale, courtesy the artist
Auroras are created by the collision of energetic charged particles with atoms at high altitude in the atmosphere above the Earth. The aural equivalent will be generated by the Aurora Festival of Living Music with exciting new commissions, including the much anticipated premiere of a major work from Brian Howard, Voyage Through the Radiant Stars, and new works for a didjeridu duet and for Aurora Chorealis, a concert featuring Song Company and volunteer singers from across Western Sydney.
Violist and leader of The Noise improvising string quartet James Eccles has pretty much set aside his instrument for the time being to be artistic director of the 2014 Aurora Festival—applying for funding, commissioning, negotiating with arts centres, programming and sitting in on rehearsals, all in less than a year after the initial director had to step down. Eccles appears perfectly at home in the role and confident that, despite constraints, he’s come up with an exciting, focused festival, for the greater part devoted to Australian new music and its wonderful NSW exponents.
Eccles happily embraces the decision made when it was founded to establish the festival in Sydney’s west. “New music is generally thought of as something that only interests the inner city crowd,” he says, “but it happens in Western Sydney. The festival was set up by Matthew Hindson. He ran the first three biennial festivals and Andrew Batt-Rawden took over the next in 2012. Hindson thought that Sydney should have a festival devoted to new music, and it is the only one in Sydney, though it’s broader than that with elements of world music.” Indeed, Japanese and Australian noise music made a popular appearance in the 2012 festival.
“What I find interesting is that new music has a reputation for being difficult and catering to an exclusive clientele in the know. Putting it on in Western Sydney you have to forget all that. It’s about finding work that cuts across [preconceptions and forms] and involves the community. It’s a great challenge and opportunity for new music to look outside its shell.”
Community constellation
Eccles is particularly pleased with this festival’s community event: “At the Joan Sutherland Arts Centre in Penrith, there’ll be a whole day of community singing workshops. As well as amateur singers—of whatever range of experience—we’re inviting people who’ve never sung publicly before and, as the Aurora Chorus, they’ll all perform that night in the concert titled Aurora Chorealis. For them we’ve commissioned a new work by Paul Jarman, a really great choral director and composer who knows exactly how to pitch this approach to the people singing, and to the audience. They’ll all get a lot out of it: it’s new, it’s Australian, it’s been composed with that community in mind. It’s titled The Aurora Round, a round as in Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree, but a lot cleverer than that.” A bit of a challenge? “Exactly, but it can be learned in one day and sung without a score, and will be sonically very interesting.”
In the course of the day Roland Peelman and Song Company will present two vocal installations the audience can wander through: “at 2pm Leah Barclay’s Transvergence (2011) and at 6pm Kate E Moore’s Uisce (2007) which will segue into the concert proper which features the Aurora Chorus and Song Company.”
This Aurora program is not as large nor quite as geographically far flung as previous festivals, simply because it was not successful in securing Arts NSW funding for 2014, as was the case, says Eccles with a number of new music applicants. However, Australia Council funding has meant the festival will still present a strong program spread across the west in Riverside Theatres, Parramatta and the Campbelltown, Blacktown and Joan Sutherland Arts Centres.
Radiant Stars
The opening night, presented by Aurora, Riverside and New Music Network, should certainly attract new music aficionados with a premiere from a leading Australian composer, Brian Howard, commissioned by Aurora. Howard, who has returned to Sydney after working overseas for a number of years, wrote, among other things, notable operas—Inner Voices (libretto Louis Nowra, 1979), Metamorphosis (Berkoff after Kafka), Whitsunday (Nowra, 1988) and Wide Sargasso Sea (Howard, 1997).
Howard’s new orchestral work is Voyage Through Radiant Stars. Eccles is awed, “It’s enormous, a 60-minute saxophone concerto. How often do you get a new 60-minute work in contemporary classical music? I’d love to see a symphony concert where this was the main work, instead of a token 12-minute new music work played first in the program or before interval. This is for a fairly large ensemble, 18 musicians—the Sydney Conservatorium Modern Music Ensemble. I heard their first rehearsal and I was really impressed. Alto-saxophonist James Nightingale (Chair of the New Music Network and member of Continuum Sax) is playing the solo part. It’s fantastic music, a little Stockhausen-esque in some ways, as in his solo wind pieces, but definitely Brian’s own language.”
The first half of the opening night concert has much to offer as well: “Ensemble Offspring playing Marcus Lindberg’s Ablauf (1983) for two massive bass drums and clarinet…I’ve seen it live and was bowled over. Song Company’s Roland Peelman is to play a piano piece, Sonolith, a world premiere by Turkish Australian composer Ekrem Mulayim who has written a musical transcription of the Declaration of Human Rights. The words are projected in real time so that it’s almost like the pianist is a typist.”
A didjeridu duet, an Aurora commission for Alex Pozniak from Aurora, has “considerable input from the players Mark Atkins and Gumeroy Newman who’s from Western Sydney. Hearing two didjeridus together is not something you experience very often.” The program also includes Xenakis’ challenging solo Rebonds (1987-89) played by Claire Edwardes. Eccles is keen that the first half of the concert is as fluid as possible, “so that the works can speak to each other” without re-setting of music stands and chairs.
Synesthesias
Elsewhere in the program is Colourwheel, a Campbelltown Arts Centre commission which Aurora is co-presenting. It’s the creation of guitarist Jim Moginie performing with an ensemble of electric guitarists in his “exploration of colour theory in art and music in Kandinsky, Klee and others as well as Australia’s Roy de Maistre.”
Recorder player Alicia Crossley will be at Blacktown Arts Centre in a very distinctive program, Ecstatic Dances, collaborating with various artists including a work commissioned by Aurora from Paul Cutlan, Affirmations, for bass recorder, cello with effects and didjeridu. The concert takes its title from Ross Edwards’ work of the same name, which will also be performed in what Eccles describes as “a dance-inspired program.” There’ll also be a solo from cellist Ollie Miller and Melissa Farrow, principal flautist with the Brandenburg Chamber Orchestra, will play baroque flute alongside Alicia.”
Under open skies, Super Critical Mass (Julian Day, Luke Jaaniste, Janet McKay), who specialise in crowd music, will present their Aurora-commissioned new work for percussion to be performed in St Johns Park Parramatta on 30 April during the evening rush hour.
With a focused program built around commissions and premieres of exciting new works, James Eccles has curated a strong program with arts centres and musical partners. He’d liked to have had more on the program: “a lot of great ideas were pitched to me but we simply didn’t have the money.” There’s also no ‘big name’ overseas artist this year, he says, to “galvanise an audience, but we thought, let’s make this really about Australian artists and support them with the kind of opportunities they rarely get in arts festivals.”
Aurora has deservedly become an integral part of the Western Sydney cultural calendar and, like the vital arts centres, continues to develop audiences for and appreciation of Australian music of remarkable diversity. Let’s hope this achievement is recognised by Arts NSW and that Aurora Festival is granted the opportunity to thrive in 2016. In the meantime we ready ourselves to be awed by dazzling spectrum of creations from Australia’s brightest musicians in the 2014 Aurora Festival of Living Music.
Despite a recent change in ownership it is good to see that Smith’s Alternative Bookshop in Canberra City continues to present live music events of the kind that distinguishes this venue from others in Canberra.
As a flow-on from the annual SoundOut festival of improvised music, this one-off performance brought together a small cross-section of open-minded music fans into the intimate confines of Smith’s to hear Canadian improviser François Houle perform a set with clarinet, electronics and piano followed by a collaborative performance with Canberra wind trio Psithurium.
Focusing on a series of shorter pieces that cohered around an atmospheric central theme, Houle began by coaxing from the clarinet a sequence of sharply defined minimal clusters with an intended progression somewhat like saxophonist John Butcher’s pastel sparseness that was all the rage for a time.
Houle is a leading light in contemporary improvised music having performed with such luminaries as pianist Marilyn Crispell and saxophonist Evan Parker. His enthusiasm throughout this performance flowed through to his use of loops, also involving a piano’s innards, providing an harmonic expansiveness somewhat like Evan Parker’s famous circular breathing technique. At points, Houle offered evocative autobiographical detail for the audience to better understand the mood and shape of each piece. One that stood out was a mournful and celebratory tribute to free music clarinettist John Carter. Throughout this spontaneously conceived homage, Houle’s clarinet was devotional yet not excessively so, a cool restraint ensuring the impact of the music was heightened by a settled and respectful delivery.
In his second set Houle was joined by Psithurium featuring SoundOut festival director Richard Johnson on soprano sax and customised gourd. This fully improvised piece had each of the performers brightly colouring a spontaneous theme that ebbed and flowed. No one participant took charge which created ample space for free exploration with discipline and restraint.
The combination of saxophones, gourd and clarinet rolled out the music in a gentle, unhurried manner, with resonating sounds within the bookshop providing a striking acoustic counterpoint to the traffic whizzing by outside.
François Houle and the Psithurium Wind Trio, Smith’s Alternative Bookshop, SoundOut 2014, Canberra City, 7 Feb
The urbane program of the 2nd Brisbane Jazz Festival in early June features Finland’s Jukka Perko-Avara Trio, pianists Barney McAll and Mike Nock, the Julien Wilson Quartet and piano trio Trichotomy among others, not least UK saxophonist Julian Arguelles. An enthusiastic Guardian reviewer wrote in 2006 of “the evolution of the saxophonist and composer Julian Arguelles into the British Joe Lovano (with plenty of Celtic and European free-improv variations of his own).”
Arguelles, who plays tenor and soprano saxophones, clarinets and flutes and whose playing ranges from the elegantly mellifluous to be-bop urgency to improv unpredictability, is a prominent figure in the European jazz scene, especially in the contemporary big band field, performing with the highly regarded Frankfurt Radio Big Band. As soloist he has appeared with Tim Berne, Steve Swallow, John Abercrombie, Dave Holland, Dave Liebman, Jim Black, Peter Erskine, Django Bates, John Taylor, Kenny Wheeler and Carla Bley. His 2006 album Partita illustrates the finesse and sheer adventurousness of his playing on 15 mostly very short, very effectively varied tracks (the shortest being 1”09’).
Arguelles has been commissioned to create works for bands, groups and events as diverse as NDR Big Band (Hamburg), HR Big Band (Frankfurt), The Apollo Saxophone Quartet, Bath International Festival, the Fontanella Recorder Consort and the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra. The 2009 album Momenta is an exemplary account of Arguelle’s compositional and arrangement skills for big band.
The 2014 festival is also a great opportunity to premiere new works by Australian composers Sean Foran, Rafael Karlen, Louise Denson and Andrew Butt. Foran, a pianist and leader of Trichotomy (formerly Misinterprotato), has studied and played internationally.
The festival’s Artistic Director Lynette Irwin says, “Julian Arguelles is one of Europe’s most inventive saxophonists. Pairing him with the emotive and textural sounds of the piano trio Trichotomy will generate some exciting music. Additionally, Jazz Queensland has commissioned Sean Foran to create a new work for this unique collaboration.”
Recently added to the program is another saxophone great, American Joshua Redman with his quartet. RT
In Douglas Kahn’s Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts, the premise is holistic. Signals are everywhere, running through us, the earth, the sky, bouncing off the ionosphere, and the best way to tune into them is by listening. By the time you’ve finished reading this book you feel like you’ve tapped into a magnificent universal circuit. It’s almost religious.
The book has a roughly historical trajectory starting with Thomas Watson, Alexander Graham Bell’s ‘sidekick’ who would listen to the “natural radio” that the new telephone technology channelled. Then there’s a dash back to catch up on Henry David Thoreau’s fixation with all things Aeolian—the wind singing through nature and man-made structures. Over several chapters Kahn tunes in to Alvin Lucier and his associates exploring brain waves and the curious whistlers bouncing the sound of storms around the globe. He then heads underground with Gordon Mumma to listen to earthquakes and reaches for the stars with Pauline Oliveros. He ends in the here and now with Joyce Hinterding’s antennae channelling the universal hum of electromagnetic presence. And there’s a whole lot more in between.
Kahn’s style approaches an extended personal essay with the meanderings and side trips just as interesting as the main arguments. While ideas are grouped into chapters, concepts ‘leak’ like the extraneous sounds on telegraph wires to create loops and circuits through the text. A particular thread that creeps in subtly, growing in intensity, deals with relations between signals, the technologies created to channel them and the greater military complex. Kahn refers to this as the geophysical becoming geopolitical. The chapters “Sound of the Underground” and “Black Sun, Black Rain” exploring atomic energies are particularly insightful.
As Kahn suggests in his introduction, the subject matter of the book dictates a high level of interdisciplinarity, presenting not only a history of sonic, musical and visual arts but also delving into the histories of technology and science. An unspoken interdisciplinary aspect of Kahn’s book is that while he is writing about sound he is also often writing about writings on sound. The book is rich with description and quoted texts illustrating what Kahn describes as the “uncanny poetics of popular imagination.” One example quoted is from an 1878 New York Times article, “Phones of the Future”: “We are assured that we will be able not only to listen to the tramp of the tiniest insects, but to hear the growing of the grass and the ripple of the sap ascending beneath the bark of trees.”
In the opening chapters there are several lists of sound descriptors for earth signals and electromagnetic energies that were being heard in early devices: “a hissing or swishing as of someone shaking a wisp of straw;” the “‘crackle’ or the burning of a hemlock broom.” It’s a veritable go-to guide for the adjectivally challenged sound commentator. Of course Kahn himself is no slouch when it comes to the poetic, even when dealing with the most technical of subjects, connecting concepts with grand gestures that set things resonating against each other, like this: “A technological timeline of musical cosmoses could be strung from the antiquity of the monochord to lines of telecommunications.” There is literally never a dull moment.
The book offers vast amounts of fascinating information ranging from background stories around the creation of artworks to mythic descriptions of natural phenomena, such as auroras and static storms at high altitude, which are utterly enthralling. However the dominant achievement is that Kahn manages to rough-up the binary of nature and technology. As he extrapolates on his theory of the Aelectrosonic—the sounds of the electromagnetic world—he repositions nature at the centre of electronic music and indeed of media arts. It all starts with the signals that have been waiting for us to invent ways to hear them.
Earth Sound, Earth Signal feels like a journey to the centre of the earth and to the outer reaches of the stars. It reads equally as science fiction, scientific journal, a history of electronic sounds and a tale of the occult. In the chapter on Pauline Oliveros Kahn mentions the use of New Age Theosophic texts as “a way to trigger our imaginations, rather than as a ‘scientific fact,’” and while his book does not skimp on the latter it’s the invitation to imagine that captivated me. Most of all, the book offers a comprehensive and mind-altering understanding of the connectedness between ourselves, the Earth and all of these shimmering energetic properties. Douglas Kahn invites us to tune in to this awesome totality.
Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts, Douglas Kahn, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2013
In the early 90s I was composing several experimental operas with Douglas Horton and Chamber Made Opera. As I knew Robert Ashley’s work, Douglas showed me the score of Ashley’s Improvement: Don Leaves Linda, to see how a version might be created for a Chamber Made Opera production. A recording of the opera fits onto two CDs—some 90 minutes of music, however the ‘score’ was just a single page of text with lists of numbers. That was it.
Ashley was using processes other than score writing to make the work. This was revealing and reassuring for me, as I didn’t use traditional scores either.
Composers are often invisible architects who draw up plans (scores) and then step away to let others realise the work. Ashley, however, sat visibly and audibly at the very heart of his work. His own distinctive vocal cadences often provided the basis from which his work grew, with the music extending out from, or surrounding his vocal utterances.
Ashley’s operas and his early work, like Automatic Writing, are based around extended performances of language. Language is a technology that we use to inhabit all things that surround us, attempting to make some sense of the world. Ashley’s voices acknowledge this, as they provide an interface between flesh and technology in a way that is more interesting than Apple’s Siri or Samantha (the female voice of the operating system in the Spike Jonze film Her, see Philip Brophy, page 28) could ever hope to be. Where Siri and Samantha give a life force to technology, Ashley’s voices do the reverse as they flow into technology from life. Ashley’s matter-of-fact vocal deliveries are transformed into unworldly presences inhabiting spatial realms defined by resonance, echo and timbre. As a form of orchestration, these effects imbue the voices with a range of authoritative positions. Phantom doublings lend unnerving aspects to the allegorical utterances of his characters. His voices possess ambiguous orchestrated presences, which slowly become more personal and familiar, while paradoxically maintaining their acousmatic distance and mysteriousness.
While traditional opera tends to position the audience outside the world of the performers, Ashley draws you inside his work as an eavesdropping participant. You become intimately connected to the close-miked voices of the performers, each with their own unique grain of voice, which allow you to enter the inner imaginary of their self-obsession.
I have only ever listened to Ashley’s 2000 opera Dust twice, although I own the CD. It is one of my favourite works. To play it more would be like reliving a traumatic or emotionally charged part of your life once too often.
For traditionalists who have struggled with Ashley, I suggest that you listen to Ashley’s operas with Wagner’s Ring Cycle in mind. Ashley and Wagner share an amazing ability to weave musical detail around voice to such a degree that the music serves as a kind of textural and textual analogue of the libretto, adding depth while repositioning possible meanings. For both, the music is daemon-like, as it inhabits, doubles, twists, distorts and converses with a character’s vocal text. These labyrinthine flows serve to orchestrate context. They contribute to a soundscape that moves the voice beyond the everyday while complicating the intent of language, which is much more interesting than a music that merely steers and confirms it.
Ashley and partner and producer Mimi Johnson came to Melbourne in 1992 to help with rehearsing Improvement for Chamber Made Opera’s production for the 1992 Melbourne Festival. The performance consisted of a brilliant cast of local performers singing live to the accompaniment of the CD, with the prerecorded voices fed to each singer’s headphones. This should not have worked, but it did. Improvement was a great production and is still remembered favorably by many who had not encountered this kind of performance before. We should have seen more of this kind of work. Why didn’t we?
When Ashley was invited to talk to music students at the Victorian College of the Arts, he stood in uncomfortable silence for several long minutes. I have seen theatremaker Robert Wilson stand in silence deliberately at the start of his lectures to expose the performer-audience relationship, however in Ashley’s case, as a composer, he was struggling to find something meaningful to say to music students. Finally, he said something like, “I just don’t know what to tell you. I mean, what else can anybody write for a cello, or an orchestra? This is not where composition is now situated.” As a modern master within this confirming institutional context he implored his audience to look beyond the scope of musical museums.
A few years later I caught up with Ashley in Miami where his long-serving vocal ensemble was collaborating with the Florida Grand Opera on his new work Balseros. Ashley invited me into rehearsals where I witnessed conservative operatic processes rubbing up against the modern experimental. Both approaches were based on musicalising conversation and verbalising inner thought. Ashley was attempting to replace the powerful projected operatic aria and recitative with his introspective, characterful voice streams. The resigned condescension of the classically trained chorus and the lack of faith and comprehension from the creative hierarchy was palpable. The work was ultimately a very moving success, although it was a vivid demonstration of just how tough it can sometimes be to get your own ideas through bureaucratic and creative filters to production, especially on expensive productions.
In his own measured, deliberate way he told me, as a then younger composer, not to compromise on what you want to do. Don’t allow your work be taken over by directors and external interests. Never give in to those who try to alter what you do. Have the strength to stick with your own ideas.
There are many of Robert Ashley’s works on YouTube including Perfect Lives, a superb example of the composer’s wit and wisdom.
Gerrit Fokkema, Woman hosing, Canberra, 1979, in Australian Vernacular Photography, courtesy Art Gallery of NSW
The term “vernacular” is a very slippery one. Australian Vernacular Photography: The Allure of the Everyday is a compact exhibition co-curated by AGNSW Senior Curator, Photographs Judy Annear and Assistant Curator, Photographs Eleanor Weber. The exhibition is distinguished in particular in the way it repositions the “vernacular,” redefining its relationship to “straight photography” (the common, and problematic, term for documentary photography). Three exhibitions that referenced the vernacular serendipitously overlapped in Sydney galleries in early 2014.
Australian Vernacular Photography looks at the work of 16 well known Australian practitioners from the postwar period to the present day. It looks at the overseas influences and exhibitions which impacted on Australian photographic practice and the development of a greater awareness of national and personal identity. One key event was the tour in 1959 of The Family of Man exhibition produced by Edward Steichen at MoMA in New York. This exhibition encouraged Australian photographers to look outwards at what their international peers were doing. As a young photographer I can remember poring over the images in the book that accompanied it.
The “vernacular” is commonly interpreted as photography of everyday life, frequently produced by amateur photographers and often described as snapshots. When researching the genre it surprised me that one of the photographers strongly associated with the vernacular was Walker Evans, a famous American photographic artist who was by no means an amateur. Australian Vernacular Photography strengthens the perception of a broader interpretation of the term with the choice of photographers it features, who were selected from the Art Gallery’s collection.
The show embraces documentary photography, the predominant photographic mode in the 60s and 70s, stating, “Photographing the everyday became a way of understanding how Australia saw (and sees) itself with recurrent themes such as beach culture, suburbia, race relations, protest and the role of women among the central concerns.”
As a photographer working out of this tradition at the time I would not have called my photography “vernacular.” However, one of the strengths of this exhibition is that it offers us a new way of interpreting history. To collapse the snapshot aesthetic with the broad intentions of documentary photography performs a radical shift in perception benefiting both forms. It allows us to re-evaluate the rigid conventions of fine art photography, which needed to be in place to get photography seen as an artform in the first place. However, “The times they are a changing.”
A leading figure in the field of photographic studies, Geoffrey Batchen, has argued in his books (Each Wild Idea, 2000 and Forget Me Not, 2004) for the substantial inclusion of vernacular photography in a general history of photography. He writes, “This history, dominated by the values and tropes of art history, was not well equipped to talk about photographs that were overtly commercial, hybrid and banal. I suggest that any substantial inclusion of vernacular photographs into a general history of photography will require a total transformation of the character of that history.” “Snapshots are complicated objects. They are both unique to each maker and almost always entirely generic. That doesn’t make them any less compelling as pictures, especially for those who treasure them.” (Quotations from an interview with Geoffrey Batchen by LG in LesPHOTOGRAPHES.com.)
Patrick Pound installation, People who look dead but (probably) aren’t, Stills Gallery, Sydney
Now that collectors are taking a serious interest in discarded snapshots, artists have also embraced the found and generic snapshot to use as source material for their postmodern art practice. Patrick Pound, whose show at Stills, People who look dead but (probably) aren’t, obsessively collects old photographs and assembles them in clusters based on their generic similarities. In Pound’s wall installations relationships are formed between images gathered from multiple sources creating an intriguing and humorous collective visual narrative.
Pound became a collector himself, scouring the internet and antique shops for source material. The found images are strangely endearing in their sense of abandonment and separation from their author. Bronwyn Rennex, Stills Gallery Curator of this exhibition, writes, “By highlighting the ‘probablys’ and ‘possiblys’ in our relationship with these images, Pound reminds us that meanings are fragile, and interpretations slippery.” Sounds like real life to me!
From Beijing Silvermine, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (2014), Sydney, photo courtesy Thomas Sauvin
Sydney’s 4A Centre for Contemporary Art staged a remarkable installation, Beijing Silvermine, by Thomas Sauvin, a Beijing-based French photography collector, editor and curator. It comprised more than half a million photographic negatives amassed, edited, archived and printed by Sauvin. These negatives were destined for destruction in a recycling plant. Xiao Ma, the owner of the plant stockpiles negatives, X-rays and compact discs to melt down their silver nitrate content for sale.
Sauvin offered to buy these negatives by the kilo in a vain and poignant attempt to symbolically rescue “abandoned memories.” The lifespan of photographic negative film from 1985 was approximately 20 years. This was the era when 35mm film came onto the market and was widespread in China as it was throughout the world. In 2005 the advent of digital photography brought its use to a relatively dramatic and sudden end.
The poignancy of this exhibition is not only its metaphor for the death of analogue photography but also the memorial it sets up to the millions of anonymous subjects of these photographs. These are the snapshots we universally recognise, covering themes of family, relationship, love, leisure, birth and, by implication, death. I was deeply touched by images of fresh-faced young couples embracing, young women posing for their partners, suited male workmates relaxing after work, families in kitchens and living rooms.
The complex installation represented the enormous depth of the archive. All the images and negatives are in colour (black and white photography had already ‘passed away’). Selected images have been enlarged to cover whole walls. Others are hung salon style, also covering walls. Light boxes are covered with strips of negatives left higgledy piggledy, as if photographers had suddenly departed. In one corner thousands of crumpled, postcard-sized prints are piled up suggesting neglect and rejection. Placed within the pile are three monitors rapidly flashing images from the archive. The pace of image presentation is so fast as to render the images ephemeral.
In another room a multi-image screen projection (created by collaborator Lei Lei, a Chinese multimedia animation artist) similarly flashes multiple images from the archive with an overlay of decaying and disintegrating film stock. The pace of the image editing varies, occasionally resting briefly on particular images.
This work had a profound effect on me leaving a residual feeling of loss and an awareness of irreversible historical change both technological and personal. This sense of loss is compounded by the thousands of stories told of individual lives, families, personal relationships and events.
Somehow this powerful metaphor for the brevity of life sums up the significance of photography in general and positions the vernacular photograph right at the heart of it.
Art Gallery of NSW, Australian Vernacular Photography: The Allure of the Everyday, Jeff Carter, Ed Douglas, Peter Elliston, Gerrit Fokkema, Sue Ford, Fiona Hall, Robert McFarlane, Hal Missingham, David Moore, Trent Parke, Roger Scott, Glenn Sloggett, Ingeborg Tyssen, John F Williams, William Yang, Anne Zahalka, 8 Feb-18 May; STILLS, Patrick Pound, People who look dead but (probably) aren’t, 19 Feb to 22 March; 4A Centre for Contemporary Art , Beijing Silvermine, Sydney, 11 Jan-22 Feb
Jess, Oskar, Kai and Mia 2011, Marzena Wasikowska, Lens Love, photo courtesy Canberra Museum & Gallery
Lens Love: the tender gaze of six Canberra region photographers, featured six photographers who are unified by geographic context. Living and working within the Canberra region, they share an affiliation with this landscape. The way each artist’s personal relationship to the same place manifests in their aesthetic and thematic predilections is wildly divergent. Yet the simple fact that they share common topographic roots is crucial to an appreciation of the associative threads that bind their work.
Irrespective of whether or not they enlist their immediate geographic context as a thematic proposition, the six are all concerned with the mutability of place and the prospect of displacement. In the work of Martyn Jolly, Marzena Wasikowska, Lee Grant, Denise Ferris, Cathy Laudenbach and John Reid we witness careful studies of the way space is inhabited and settled (or unsettled). These artists do not simply document the fleeting ‘I was here’ of the casual snapshot but chart more complex networks of belonging.
The first work to greet viewers as they enter the gallery is Denise Ferris’ The Long Hot Summer. The sundrenched tones of the dry brush in the foreground of this sweeping landscape photograph are intercut by the lumbering presence of four white vehicles in the distance. Vans and motor homes, the vehicles are peripatetic placeholders. These detached and transportable domestic spaces can claim any unknown and foreign territory as a potential backyard. A caravan or motor home situates its inhabitant within an expansive and open-ended landscape, offering them the opportunity to domesticate any site they so desire (at least in theory).
In The colour of snow, a grid of nine photographs, Ferris recalibrates the subject’s relationship to place. Blizzards and blankets of snow overwhelm the winter landscapes depicted in these images. The figures that populate this alpine world are threatened with invisibility. As the cloak of snow thickens, they are gradually erased. The figures are absorbed into the landscape and belong to its abyss.
Three bodies of work by Lee Grant approach this motif of habitation and belonging in a didactic manner. Grant anatomises cultural signposts and explores the way cultural identity is constructed and disseminated. In The Korea Project, portraits of Koreans living in Australia are interspersed with photographs of urban environments in Korea that are devoid of people. This enquiry into cultural transplantation (and translation) is inflected with personal context. Treating the series as a way to explore her own Korean heritage, Grant indirectly inserts herself into these scenes.
Marzena Wasikowska’s series, I left Poland when I was 11 years old and 36 years later I returned for the third time, similarly interrogates cultural displacement and maps the return to a site of diasporic departure. In these sets of clustered photographs (two gridded arrangements featuring nine images each) Wasikowska assembles discrete snapshots taken on a journey back to her childhood homeland. Like film stills from a road movie, these are pictorial vignettes from a story narrated by an outsider. Yet there is still an intimacy here. The images of domestic settings, the affectionate family portraits and the semi-abstract close-ups of water droplets on a window or leaves on a snow-covered ground do not speak to detachment or withdrawal. Wasikowska has stitched herself into this cultural landscape. Her view is not that of the panorama but the closely cropped frame of familiarity.
In Wasikowska’s suite of images, light becomes an animative agent. It does not merely designate a temporal framework (insofar as one set of photographs appears to have been taken during the day while the other is enveloped by the cover of darkness) but also defines space. The nocturnal scenes are lit by dim light sources: small domestic lamps, the blue-tinted glow of a computer screen and weak streetlamps. These minimal light sources shrink and condense the spatial field of each image, heightening the sense of intimacy Wasikowska cultivates in her candid yet poetic photographs.
Cathy Laudenbach also recruits light as an animative force in her series The Familiars. The empty rooms that appear in these photographs are rumored to be haunted or plagued by supernatural spirits. Forgotten narratives and ghostly apparitions fester amid slightly dishevelled furnishings. The light that penetrates deserted interiors, streaming in through the windows or reflecting off the patina on the floorboards, becomes a surrogate for the departed occupants. It assumes a phantom-like human presence.
While also composed of light, the spectral forms that populate Martyn Jolly’s series Faces of the Living Dead possess a more explicit, or assertive, legibility. The images in this series are scanned and cropped re-presentations of spirit photographs from the Cambridge University Library archive. Disembodied ghost-like forms are suspended in mid-air and faces of then-deceased figures are superimposed onto portraits of their mourning relatives. The ghosts in these photographs are fabrications. This is divination by way of chemical blotches, multiple exposures and bursts of light. In some of the images, the spectres take on recognisable human form while in others their physique is reduced to an abstract flicker of light against a dark, indeterminate background. All of these (fictitious) phantoms float and hover. Having left the world of the physical and the embodied, they are ungrounded. They occupy a non-place.
Conversely, the ghostly spirit that John Reid memorialises in the body of work he dedicates to a fictional folkloric character—the “fishman”—is indelibly linked to place. Part man, part fish, Reid’s homespun mythological creature is nothing if not situated. These photographs document a counterfeit natural history specimen. The blurred figure that darts in and out of each landscape shot is an imaginary native of National Parks surrounding the Canberra Region. By offering (fabricated) evidence of its existence within its natural habitat, Reid perpetuates the mythology. He recasts this landscape as a folkloric backdrop.
From its position in the centre of the gallery, Reid’s work mediates between states of settlement and vacancy. The fishman belongs to his landscape (he is local fauna) yet at the same time he does not exist. He is both placed and displaced. Reid’s work provided the pivot on which the rest of the show hung. The figures—corporeal or otherwise—featured in the work on display each navigate the tension between placement and displacement. While some situate themselves by making claims to a cultural heritage, others remain untethered and denied a physical body in which to place themselves. By allowing this tension to unravel, Lens Love mapped a contrastive yet cogent study of habitation beyond the strictures of the domestic.
Lens Love: the tender gaze of six Canberra region photographers, curator Shane Breynard, Canberra Museum and Gallery, Canberra, 30 Nov 2013-23 Feb 2014
In 2013, Melbourne’s ACCA presented the first showing of the celebrated British artist Tacita Dean’s epic kaleidoscopic anamorphic film installation, FILM (2011), since its debut in the voluminous space of the Tate Turbine Hall in London. Less than a year later and Tacita Dean is returning to Australia, again at the invitation of ACCA Artistic Director Juliana Engberg in her present incarnation as curator of the 19th Biennale of Sydney, You Imagine What You Desire. On this occasion, Dean returns with another first—presenting in Sydney the inaugural live performance work of her career, Event for a Stage (2014), as a highlight of the Biennale’s middle program.
Well-known for her artisanal approach to celluloid filmmaking and with a multi-disciplinary practice that spans sound recordings, atmospheric drawings, photography, over-painted postcards and mixed media works, the transition into live performance represents a bold leap for Dean. A month out from the launch of Event for a Stage at Carriageworks, co-commissioners of the work along with the Biennale, details of its content are slowly being revealed. When I speak with Engberg about the work’s development, she explains that while it’s “very much in an incubatory phase” and represents “a real step out for [Dean] in terms of her own processes and procedures” this one-act theatrical presentation will also be very much within the artist’s own language and artistic procedures. “As a filmmaker Tacita has always been interested in all those things that combine in that process: sound, action, light, colour, etcetera. What we’re trying to do in some ways is to manifest that in reality, to capture it in its film life, in an audio life and to present it in a live format simultaneously. So it’s quite interesting.”
At the heart of the project is the live filming of a portrait of a performer on stage, the British actor Stephen Dillane, whose versatility across film and theatre will surely suit him to this unconventional role. If Dean’s rich oeuvre of understated and carefully edited film work is anything to go by, gesture, atmosphere, affect and a sense of quietude may prove pivotal over action. For Dean, the development of working in a theatre, which came about when Engberg discovered the “fundamental opportunity” that having Carriageworks as a Biennale venue partner offered in its access to a theatre space, is a chance to become more self-reflexive. As the Biennale’s press material sets out: “by exposing her own way of filming to an audience, she is dramatising the role of medium, whilst also working with an actor examining the nature of his own presence on a stage.”
While the move into a live setting gestures towards an experimental breaking open of Dean’s process in a theatrical context, the premise of a filmed portrait is also continuous with Dean’s extensive body of cinematic portraiture work culminating in 2008 in one of the artist’s most important works to date, the six-film installation titled Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS. Created from footage that Dean filmed of the American avant-garde choreographer at his studio in Manhattan two years before his death, the multipartite installation depicts Cunningham performing a near motionless interpretation of Stillness, his singular choreography for his lifetime partner John Cage’s 1952 composition 4’33.” Seated in a chair, Cunningham simply shifts position for each of the composition’s three movements, Dean’s life-size projections serving to magnify the elegiac drama of his silent poses.
In her other film portrait works, Dean has made what Jean-Christophe Royoux has termed “memory-homages” to such luminaries of the art world as Mario Merz, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg and most recently Robert Smithson as well as intimate studies of her own uncles and an elderly friend of the family nicknamed ‘Boots.’ Dean herself has jokingly conceded the Freudian “father-complex” at work in her practice. Yet in a more universal sense the portrait of an ageing figure captured in the disappearing medium of analogue film invites meditation upon themes of time, perception and the nature of seeing and reflects Dean’s ongoing interest in the study of memory, loss, absence and obsolescence.
Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS was presented as one of the key works in the 2009 ACCA survey and in many ways the bold venture of Event for a Stage is a product of Engberg’s long and trusting relationship with the artist. Having now worked with Dean on a number of important exhibitions, Engberg has developed a deep appreciation for what she describes as the completeness of the artist’s vision.
“We enjoy working together and I love bringing Tacita’s work to the public because it’s very generous in its delivery and because I see Tacita as a total artist in a way,” says Engberg. “The way she uses film is very painterly, she calls upon genres of British landscape work and British portraiture and even though her work is in a twentieth-century medium with a twenty-first century delivery, I see in her a long legacy of practice that I still want to be engaged with. But I also love the fact that because it is filmic her work takes us into other sorts of dimensions of encounter, it’s durational and she uses quite a sparse amount of narrative. It is I think a delectable kind of visuality that she delivers and it changes our concept of what cinema might be.”
As well as expanding the parameters of cinema and live art, Event for a Stage continues Dean’s exploration of the relationship between the aural and the visual. Beyond the four performances programmed for Carriageworks, there are plans for the work to “live on in a perpetual way in an audio life,” Engberg explains, as the ABC’s Radio National is building a platform for the audio work for radio broadcast. The timing of the live performances as a highlight of the middle program of the Biennale is another important aspect of its delivery.
“It cohabits in time our launch of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s wonderful new piece which they’ve made for us here [City of Forking Paths, 2014] which will take people on a cinematic fictional tour of the Rocks in Sydney, another filmic kind of event; again not cinema but a durational time-based piece,” says Engberg. “I’m bringing those two things together in the middle of the Biennale with a set of discussions around some of these ideas.”
For Engberg, the inclusion of durational time-based works like Dean’s Event for a Stage presents one of the biggest challenges in curating a biennale due to the constraints of the long three-month running time. Nevertheless, “I have tried as much as I can to thread those things through the program because I think real time work is extremely important at the moment,” she says. “Artists are enjoying the opportunity of taking themselves outside the gallery circumstances with quiet gestures and procedures that may not be known to a lot of the audience but which nevertheless provide important textures throughout the whole Biennale.”
19th Biennale of Sydney and Carriageworks, Tacita Dean, Event for a Stage, Carriageworks, Sydney, 1-4 May
Situated Cinema, artists Solomon Nagler and Alexandre Larose
photo Louise M Cooper
Situated Cinema, artists Solomon Nagler and Alexandre Larose
The visibility of the projected image is an issue of physical and cognitive events meeting in space. Situated in the gloom of the gallery are references to cinema, a cultural form until recently regarded purely as a conveyor of story-telling based entertainment, both popular and classical, and as place, the bricks and mortar where such encounters occur.
In Canadian filmmakers Solomon Nagler and Alexandre Larose’s Situated Cinema at Artspace three screens capture the projected image, one visible, a second invisible and another out of action (a different kind of signification, more later).
The visible screen is translucent, the image projected onto it a larger version of the same image on the 16mm acetate film strip inexorably looping through the projector standing a few metres away. The image on the screen is indistinct; attention switches to the machinery creating this phantasm. At one time the standard audio-visual equipment hidden in the biobox of a lecture theatre or community hall, the 16mm film projector mounted on a plinth is here re-presented as an object of analogue marvel; complete with perspex film loop attachment, the visible process by which the picture is delivered to our eyes becomes one part of the event.
The other event is provided by the images on the screen; they possess none of the indicators associated with either popular or arthouse films; instead, the genre rarely afforded exposure in cinema settings, the home movie. The ensemble, the installation, for those old enough to remember, recalls family film shows. The reprocessed images, evidently a selection of moments from various filmic occasions, possess a banal innocence when people are present, recorded moving through the scene, or responding shyly to the presence of the camera. We in turn are present at a specific moment of encounter with a past presence, reliving what has long gone by.
Moments later (counted as 24 frames for each second; we can hear them), the people have gone and a landscape or scene of the city and suburb becomes something other, the uncanny, the familiar yet incongruous. The cognitive event is made tangible, momentarily, before being hustled on to the next occasion…Back then.
We have encountered loops in projected work before; somehow the duration of these—about four minutes—seems to match with the cognitive ability of short-term memory (STM) to productively revisit motion picture documentation of ‘insignificant actuality.’ The minutiae of moments become fixed points in a matrix of cycled time; as they successively pass by, like lines in a poem, checked for details missed in the first or successive viewings. Our level of obsessiveness is tested and demonstrated before our eyes, our movement into the lives of others drawn out from behind the curtains of privacy imposed by accepted decorum.
The invisible screen is contained in its own walled area; the only way to gain access is by ducking beneath the wooden wall into the wholly enclosed space, thus transgressing the usually lubricated entrance to cinema seating arrangements. There are of course no chairs and the space is only big enough for two or three to stand. Momentarily I envisage the spectacle of legs outside this temporary cinema and reflect on whether social cognitive functioning of the audience deviates from the game plan. The 16mm projection equipment is arranged elegantly on a shelf joining the two long sides of the space. The four walls are painted with a white coating reflecting the light from the narrow wall at the end, transgressing the rule whereby light is firmly controlled to sit specifically on white bordered by black. The high contrast imagery is hard to see, as if in a snowfield, but gradually becomes recognisable as a sequence of static images of architecture, washed by the shapes of some associated alchemical process. Memory is interrogated again as the patterns fall together, and the loop completes its cycle, recognisable now as the interior of a theatre or indeed, a cinema. In the background, more amplified than previously, the insistent intermittent purr of the projector.
The third projector contains a short loop of 8mm film fossicked from a Sydney opshop. It ran throughout the period of the exhibition until at its end when this reviewer attended, the loop had disintegrated – another kind of duration had been established within the protocols of projection.
This modest show was unsupported by an adequate curatorial or artists’ statement; we are told the work emerges from primarily ‘materialist’ approaches, but without reference to the title of the show. A case could be made for it fitting into theories of situated aesthetics, where the boundaries between objects and events are weakened such that the art experience is based on a wide distribution of its elements. It would have helped if this ground had been outlined for the audience.
There are many artists now working with film and film equipment both nationally and internationally, often referencing work by film artists of the 1960s and 70s (and earlier) who experimented with an approach to cinema that followed on from the Modernist tradition. Artspace has been operating a reciprocal residency program with the Darling Foundry in Montréal for five years. The Situated Cinema Project had been constructed in Halifax previously, creating small cinematic experiences in dis-used urban spaces (“Situated Cinema references small buildings that have been squeezed into leftover urban spaces. The small cinema space, which can be demounted and which will travel to unorthodox locations…is intended to provide an alternative cinema-going experience,” Solomon Nagler, www.cineflux.ca.) In early discussions of the presentation of the work, the installation likewise was to be off-site, a Sydney-based iteration; but due to the difficulties of working internationally between Canada and Sydney, and the strict nature of urban DA approvals in Sydney, the installation was brought into the gallery space.
Situated Cinema, artists Solomon Nagler and Alexandre Larose, Artspace, Sydney, 22 Feb-8 March
The opening night of the Aurora Festival of Living Music at Parramatta’s Riverside Theatre, 30 April, will be thrilling. It will feature the premiere of Voyage Through Radiant Stars—a full-length saxophone concerto—by leading Australian composer, Brian Howard; Ensemble Offspring playing Marcus Lindberg’s Ablauf (1983) for two massive bass drums and clarinet; Song Company’s Roland Peelman at the piano for Sonolith, a musical transcription of the Declaration of Human Rights byTurkish Australian composer Ekrem Mulayim; a didjeridu duet by Alex Pozniak for players Mark Atkins and Gumeroy Newman; and Xenakis’ challenging solo Rebonds (1987-89) played by Claire Edwardes. Don’t miss it. 3 double passes (for 30 April) courtesy of Aurora Festival of Living Music
DVD: 20 Feet from Stardom
This 2014 Academy Award winning documentary by Morgan Neville focuses on the lives and careers over some 50 years of black American back-up singers whose talents were such that they could have enjoyed solo stardom. However, either the recording industry did little to commit, even scuttling their efforts, or they recognised that fame was not worth the effort. What is striking is the long list of famous artists these singers supported; they not only provided unique harmonies but on occasion tackled difficult passages or wholly substituted for lead singers. The sense of injustice is eased when one of the most experienced backup singers, Darlene Love, finally makes it on her own. KG 5 copies courtesy of Transmission Films
DVD: Olivier Assayas, After May
Leading French filmmaker Olivier Assayas’ After May won Best Screenplay at the 2012 Venice Film Festival. His film follows the lives of ‘the children of the revolution’ of May 1968 as they flee Paris after an act of vandalism against a school goes badly wrong. In Italy the group party, demonstrate, encounter new art and explore the implications of their everyday countercultural lives. Although criticised for not going deeply enough into his characters, Assayas has been otherwise praised for his sensitive portrayal of a complex generation in a beautifully crafted film. 5 copies courtesy of Madman Entertainment
DVD: Which Way is the Front Line from Here? The Life and Times of Tim Hetherington.
British-American photojournalist Tim Hetherington was embedded with a US platoon in Afghanistan. His documentary film of the experience, RESTREPO (2010), won the 2010 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize for Documentary and was nominated for an Oscar in 2011. Hetherington was killed by mortar fire in Libya’s civil war where he was spending time with the rebel army. His co-director and cinematographer on RESTREPO, Sebastien Junger made Which way is the front… as a tribute to Hetherington’s talents including his admired empathy for his stressed interviewees in war zones and his 10-year career on the frontline in Afghanistan, Liberia and other West African countries and Libya. 5 copies courtesy of Madman Entertainment
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I’m a performer as well, and I’ve started writing over the last two years. I’ve done a couple of interviews for RealTime and I was thinking a little bit about how strange it is to be in this format where I ask questions and you answer them…and how kind of weirdly inappropriate that seems in terms of the way that you think about questions and the way that you are working with questions as means to potentiality, questions that don’t necessarily beg answers. So it could be more of a conversation, or we could find, meet each other tangentially maybe, talking about things.
Okay Let’s do that. Let’s get away from that, and find some reason to talk to each other, kiddo.
Maybe that’s an interesting place to start, just talking about questions, and the attraction to questions or how you’ve come to questions as a way of leading into working.
Mm-hmm. Is that a question? Sounds like that’s a question.
A proposition?
You know I feel like it’s more like a physical experience. A question feels very different than an answer, you know? Like an answer lands, right, and then it’s over. Whereas 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. So dance is where I’m not allowed to spiral downward. I don’t permit myself to spiral…I don’t get seduced by the…the direction of the planet as I see it…and questions allow me to not have a direction. I think maybe for me it was a form of survival.
At a particular time?
I don’t even know when the questions started. Sometime in the early 80s. ‘Cause at first they weren’t questions, they were just kind of like propositions. But the question made it lighter, it lightens things up. Don’t take myself so seriously.
When you were speaking the other day [at your performance lecture at Dancehouse: a continuity of discontinuity], you were very clear about the emphasis on the “what if..?” being…kind of lightly curious.
Not so much lightly curious, but just light. I love that quote of Calvino, that there’s just so much weight in the world…for Calvino there’s so much weight in a novel by Norman Mailer, or John Steinbeck, that he does everything he can to subvert that weight. We don’t need more weight. We don’t need more weight in art, you know? And I see the kind of role-playing that so much dance has, the male/female bullshit. I mean Pina Bausch was a great choreographer, but I don’t need to see enacted women in slips and men in suits dancing out their role of angst. It’s just not interesting to me anymore. What do you think of Pina Bausch’s work?
I’ve never been a fan of it, probably for the same reasons. I find the repetition of those roles…
Roles. It’s just dead. I mean who needs it right? So the question lightens up the…
Something that I really appreciate is the idea of lightness, or even humour; there’s as much richness in that as seriousness. And it can be taken 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. But it’s hysterical this whole thing. Isn’t it? It’s just weird. The body has so many potentialities, so many different aspects of our being. And dance is where I don’t take it all that seriously. I am so serious, you know, I have very little sense of humour outside of dance. The world brings me down. I live in Texas, and it just brings me down. But dance helps me survive. It’s my form of survival. It’s my form of, I say, putting myself here, it’s my form of political activism. Not what I do and not how I do it, it’s that I dance. That is my form of political activism. I dance.
It’s funny thinking about audiences and feeling like they can’t respond in a way that’s normal to them. There’s so much work that you’ve done in terms of articulating your processes and your… contexts for how you’re seeing your own work as well. It seems there’s a lot of work in terms of offering those alternate contexts as an observer, to watching dance. Have you seen that shift in people over time, that have maybe resisted that change?
Yeah, I have. I think audiences are slowly coming around. Certainly dancers are. I mean there was a time when I came to Melbourne where the dancers were so…seduced by their technique. They couldn’t get beyond it. Dance training, dance pedagogy really has changed. This group upstairs [Learning Curve workshop, Dancehouse and VCA], they’re fantastic. Wow, they blow my mind. They’re really clear. And that has to do with their training, their pedagogy. So dancers are changing for sure. And dance audiences. I feel like dance audiences are…I feel like they are not passive. They’re not sitting back. They really feel like they are reading this material. I feel like they’re looking. When I’m performing or my works are performing and I’m in the audience with a piece of mine, I feel like audiences are looking at my dance like they would look at art. They’re not goal-oriented. And that’s new. Maybe only people who know something about my work come to see it, but I don’t believe that’s true. I think there’s enough re-education going on in so many realms…
Goal-oriented is an interesting way of putting it, isn’t it? In fact there’s something else you said the other day which really landed with me quite hard, about “catastrophic loss”, about letting go of that mode of thinking about goal-orientation. And the word seemed so right, “catastrophic.”
We’re practicing it there [in the workshop]. “What if every cell in my body at once has the potential to be served by how I see?” Not what I’m looking at, so that the experience of seeing is happening here [in the body]. Imagine the catastrophic loss of former behaviour not having to be looking at, but to be served by how I’m seeing. What if I’m making that choice to be served by how I’m seeing, and not looking at. So that the experience of seeing is happening here and not out there. Oh my god!
Were you observing [in the workshop], or were you in the practice?
I’m practicing with them, mostly. I step out from time to time. And it’s a juggling act; it’s a huge amount of reprogramming. And who knows if it’s true or anything; it’s just noticing what happens when you choose to see differently. And it’s catastrophic loss of former behaviour, not to call looking at you ‘seeing’, but rather looking at you seeing. It’s fantastic.
If you observe a shift in people, is there a unanimousness about the shift, or does everybody kind of interpret…
You see everybody coming in and out, including myself. None of us can do it. You know we’re too programmed otherwise. I can see the shift. I’m sure they can too. The shift in and out. And I think it’s beautiful to be able to see that. I mean if everybody was always in, it would not be as interesting as seeing the work. The vulnerability. Even with Jeanine [Durning] in that film [No Time to Fly, Deborah Hay and Motion Bank]. You could see her shifting. She was very early in her practice in that film. I could read it. And that’s so beautiful to see the work. Staying in the question, learning from the body.
And that goes hand in hand with letting go of the achieving.
Oh yeah, yeah. So sweet.
I’m curious about the practice as a practice while you’re being an observer, or a practice as being an audience. Do you think of it that way, when you’re watching?
Well I set that up with everyone when we are audience for each other. We are choosing to see one another working with this question. It’s pointless to judge what anybody is doing because the material is so uninteresting in terms of movement; it’s really uninteresting. My 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 practicing the performance, can be at peace with seeing the audience and not being judged.
These are your word: “the choice to surrender anything that wants definition.” I’m really attracted to that as an observer, and can see it, but I also really like the duality maybe of the language process, in terms of articulating your work and what you’re doing. How you’re amazingly clear about articulating these potentially indefinable things. Is there some importance in that counterpointed practice of not letting it be completely…swimming?
Deborah Hay, No Time To Fly
photo Rino Pizzi
Deborah Hay, No Time To Fly
Yeah. I had very good editors early on in my writing process, who would return my writing to me and go, “What do you mean?” “What do you mean?” “What do you mean?” “What do you mean?” I would get pieces of writing that were black with cross-outs and questions. They were like wolves. But it taught me how to write. 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? And it is so exciting. It’s so exciting to me to reduce it to just what it is, without the other stuff. Do you find that in writing? I love editing my writing, now. I just love cutting it out, cutting it in. Writing has become thrilling.
Were you always writing?
Oh no, I was not always writing. Writing started happening when I realised my survival depended on it. Because the way in which I’m working was not synchronous with the way people were writing about dance. Like to talk about my work as—if I think about Jeanine the other day—as attaching her right arm to her knee and crossing the stage on a diagonal…that writing does not help me. But that’s the way a lot of dance writers describe the movement. And so 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. And what I noticed, after my second book Lamb at the Altar: The Story of a dance, people who are critics and writers were writing differently, picked up that I was feeding them some other perspective to have a look at movement, and it began…it really was smart. I think dancers at a certain point recognise they better get smart, about writing our work. You know artists used to—I’ve talked about this quite a bit—in the 60s when I was in New York. The people who were writing about art were Don Judd, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris. The artists who were making conceptual art were the ones who were writing, were reviewing one another’s work and writing about their own work. So they provided art audiences with a frame for looking at their work that they wouldn’t have had otherwise. And dancers really didn’t start picking up the pen…Yvonne [Rainer] did. But most of us didn’t, not recognising the power of language until fairly recently. And that it helps audiences frame what it ism even if it’s one person who might read a dance journal. Or it helps reframe for audiences how else to look at dance. And there’s some great writing being done by dancers right now.
Has language for you always been integral to then the making of the work as well?
I’m in the studio and I’m dancing. Aftera while I start writing what it is that I’m experiencing when I’m dancing. So that the dancing informs the writing and then the writing informs the dancing, and then the dancing informs the writing. So is that what you said? Or is that what I said? I mean in other words the writing doesn’t come first. But it’s articulated because if I’m going to teach my work to anybody else I better figure out what the language is to transmit it to others. When I go into a studio with a group of people I am very clear about what I’m asking of them, and I’m not just saying, “Can we just try this?” By the time I’m transmitting the material to someone else my language is really clear, so that I’m not wasting their time. And I’m not wasting my time.
Do you mean both the language as in the questions and also the language as in the score [the blueprint of the choreography]?
Yes. And the language in the coaching. And the language in the directing…I feel such a responsibility—I don’t know why, maybe it’s from my parents or something—I feel such a responsibility not for dancers to wait around for me to figure something out. I feel such a responsibility to engage people right off the bat, not wasting their time. Waiting for me to come to some conclusion about something. So when I go into a place where I’m transmitting material, I’ve already practiced how to articulate that material. I go into a room and I’ll set up a propostion and go “1 2 3 Go”
In terms of the solo adaptation project as well, this transmitting of information to other bodies?
Which one’s have you seen?
I saw them in Melbourne. I saw Luke [George], Atlanta Eke, and Carlee Mellow.
I want to hear your experience of the solos.
The moments of real difference between them that I saw were in the decisions that were being made. There were fewer than I thought there would be, and they were very loud, like loud in the sense of like… [expansive gesture] from where the dance was. It was like all of a sudden, Whhhaa, over there…which was great. But I remember thinking that there was a shared physicality between them and that they shared a physical articulation, that I was curious about whether that was inherent in the information, or whether it was because they had worked together at the same time or…in what way they developed this way of moving that seemed similar to each other. Did you see when they performed in Melbourne?
No.
In Atlanta’s [performance], she did a Q&A with the audience at one point, stopped and addressed the audience and asked them questions and held a forum. And it was so funny, so kind of like, departed.
I don’t remember the score for that, so I don’t know how that particular part might have come into the actual score. She’s pretty outrageous, she’s just pretty wonderful. I don’t know what the language was that she made that adaptation based on.
Is there something about language that’s attractive maybe because it’s kind of, it’s doing, well it has the potential to do two opposite things. I can land in definition or it can be interpreted in like multiple ways and that then is an instigation for transmitting the work to other people. It allows for both of those things to occur. Allows the clarity of transmitting information while also there being this space for huge interpretation.
I think most of my writing falls into that category, of both. There’s no one way. In other words, “What if I choose to be served by the space that I’m sitting in right now?” ‘Cause I can look at it as absolutely insane. I could look at it as “Why not?” I think it’s those kinds of push and pull—believe it, not believe it—the complexity of that, the absurdity of it, and the rightness of it at the same time, is thrilling to me. And in the form of a question it’s pretty safe right? It’s just a question.
And yet it can be so frightening sometimes, facing the questions. It can be so shattering.
Shattering, right.
Have you ever read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence?
I think I’ve started it a number of times but I never was able to get through it. Did you read it?
I read it a couple of years ago and, definitely had moments where I really had to work to get through it, but it’s interesting. He was an English teacher at a university, and somebody had said to him once, just off the cuff, “Oh, I hope you’re teaching quality to your students.” And that then begins questions for him about what quality is, and locating it in the space between things—that it can never be a thing, but it’s in the spaces between things. He goes through a deep spiral of questions that come out of that. And he gets to a point where he looks at some Zen writing and then looks at his own writing, and realises he’s in the exact same place. Without having intended.
Right. That’s where I feel about My body, the Buddhist. I’m not a practicing Buddhist but when I wrote down the major lessons I’d learned from my body while I was dancing, it really paralleled a lot of Buddhist aesthetic.
You didn’t know much about about Buddhism?
I just knew very superficial…But my body’s a Buddhist. Whoa!
I love the fact that this work, the realisation, 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 talk that I gave the other night, I’ve only given it once before, and it was a big dance conference in Dusseldorf. And there was a philosopher from Berkeley who was in that audience, who came up to me afterwards and said, “I have spent my…all of my years of research trying to understand what you are doing. You are doing it.” You know, I love that. That it’s dance where that kind of research can be happening. My body is where that research is happening.
Do you think about the work being historicised?
I don’t think about it much. Could you say more about the question, or what you mean?
About the embracing of the ephemera of this…the current ways in which we record history, meaning that they become static.
I think as long as I keep writing, I’ll be okay. I have read a couple of things recently about my work that were very exciting to me, in terms of the language, and they way in which people, philosophers, dance writers, dance scholars see into it. It really made me happy. I’ve had a few of those experiences. Not many. A few of them, it was great. Like I learned something.
What kind of things did they write?
Well I can’t remember. I can’t quote but…Oh I know, one term I just loved was something like a “variable constant.” Just rich, two words together. A group of people in Utrecht recently asked for permission to publish my score No Time to Fly, because they are publishing a book and they missed the deadline and they wanted to publish something as a kind of apology. They’d been talking about this book that’d come out at a certain time, and they published my score because they felt that within the score it left room for them to reassess what their sense of deadline is, what their sense of publishing is. So it was such an honour to be used in that way by these publishers. The language of the score gave them room to expand their notion of their response, what their responsibility was to make that deadline. So I mean that’s another…
Like the variable constant, the paradoxical nature of that. It’s almost a question in itself. It destabilises you in a way. Having to just wrap your brain around that.
And anything that adds to the destabilisation of our behaviour…
It was my first time and I have to say it was a good time. APAM 2014, or the Australian Performing Arts Market (18-22 February) celebrated its 20th anniversary with a series of firsts: Brisbane as first-time host and the first time 25% of the work programmed was Indigenous.
With a stellar turn-out of 600 delegates from 27 countries, many of them producers hungry for Australian content, the three days passed in a blur of dynamic performance, snatched conversations, furtive business card exchanges and vast amounts of liquid to combat the unseasonable tropical heat.
APAM opened with a welcome to country from Aunty Maroochy of the Turrbal people. This was followed by a précis from the Australia Council about the rationale for funding a marketplace for overseas producers to showcase Australian performance. As I sat between the Canadian Artistic Director of the Irish Fringe Festival and a New York off-Broadway producer, APAM’s effectiveness seemed evident. What struck me most about the culture of APAM was its conviviality. Conversations were started freely and many of the self-conscious hierachies of local theatre foyers were abandoned.
Cultural collision
On a more sombre note, the opening ceremony, a panel on collaboration facilitated by SBS Insight host Jenny Brockie demonstrated the complex and often agonised relationship between Indigenous and non-indigenous artists in Australia. Brockie was well intentioned but clearly bemused by the specificity of the artistic experiences framing the discussion. The conversation about culture and collaboration began with the supple and sophisticated inter-culturalism of Singaporean Ong Keng Sen’s trans-Asian inter-disciplinary projects that emphasise open fluidity. This was met by an impassioned critique from young Indigenous dancer Eric Avery, and the call-out from his collaborator, Lorna Monroe from the floor: cultural collaboration is lived for us through kinship and totem, in continuance from ancestry. Why must we explain our culture and carry the burden of representation and not vice versa? Auntie Lilla Watson joined the conversation from the front row. At first the panel nodded, listened politely, tried to engage. Eric and Lorna clearly felt unheard. There was that moment of pure cultural collision performed onstage for us all to see: it got too hard to encounter each other. Brockie shut down the dialogue and moved on.
Entering the maze
Sadly, the smoking ceremony that occurred after the keynote lost many of the international delegates who didn’t know where to proceed. This, alas, was the first of many bewildering geographic dislocations as delegates tried to navigate the five-venue set-up. Shows were missed, or were half-seen, or left early. To be fair, first times are often a bit clumsy and I’m sure that most of the logistical glitches will be sorted for 2016.
But APAM is about the shows. While there were half a dozen full productions on offer, most of the time was spent in a kaleidoscope of smaller activities: watching pitches and excerpts of works, roundtables, visiting stalls of companies and meeting artists. I tried to watch the launch of Patricia Piccinini’s Skywhale twice but the weather proved temperamental.
Many of the works have been around for a number of years. The pitch sessions were also by strongly established companies or for works that had progressed through at least two or three stages of initial development, like My Darling Patricia’s/Aphid’s Creole installation riffing off Jean Rhys’ radio play Crawl Me Blood or the Queensland Theatre Company’s homage to country music and its Indigenous legends, Buried Country written by Reg Cribb.
New Zealand input
The novelty was all in the New Zealand content, which seemed strong. I wasn’t able to see any of their contemporary dance works, but one called Rotunda, by the New Zealand Dance Company, was designed to tour by collaborating with a local brass band. It’s so hokey it is almost chic: what town doesn’t have their own brass band? More sophisticated and sumptuous were Kila Kokonut Krew Entertainment’s The Factory (which will appear at Riverside Parramatta, 18-21 June) a musical homage to Pacific migrants and Red Leap Theatre’s Sea.
Round-up
The show that got the most ‘you must go and see this’ was Branch Nebula’s collaboration with Clare Britton and Matt Prest, Whelping Box. The show that made delegates the chirpiest was the delightful show by Contact, Walking the Neighbourhood, where you were guided around Fortitude Valley by a child. The secret event that lots of people wanted an invite to was the late night Australian Dance Theatre showing. The most anticlimactic show was the The Stream, the Boat, the Shore and the Bridge, an intimate tour around four locations in Brisbane that lacked a driving thematic or immersive experience. The most fun was a Terrapin Puppet Theatre work, I Think I Can (featured in the 2014 Sydney and Perth Festivals and FOLA), that set up a pseudo-Brisbane miniature railway in the foyer of the Powerhouse and asked you to pick a character and to create a story to intersect with the other delegates.
Some of the bigger and more anticipated shows were received somewhat skeptically. My sense is that many of the overseas producers were on the hunt for Australian circus like the gorgeous Casus work Knee Deep.
The caveat on all of these quick summaries is of course that the five-venue structure meant very divergent experiences, particularly as many of the shows have been critically well-received and toured extensively.
What I most enjoyed about APAM was the way it offered a snapshot of Australian performance. It made me very optimistic: even when I met work that I felt was tired or safe or perhaps not to my taste, the robustness and mobility of our artists is quite astonishing when viewed collectively. One of the delegates had recently come across from the film sector and she was amazed at the fluidity of performance-makers, their ingenuity and capacity to do deals. All in all I think we put on a good spread.
APAM 2014, Australian Performing Arts Market, Brisbane Powerhouse, 18-22
Tristan Meecham talks with Gail Priest about his large scale participatory spectacle, Game Show, made in collaboration with Aphids and Bec Reid, presented at Arts House, Meat Market, as part of the Festival of Live Art (FOLA).
Includes video footage by Brian Walker and Takeshi Kondo and photos by Ponch Hawkes
Chris Howlett, ARGARMENIA
courtesy the artist
Chris Howlett, ARGARMENIA
Chris Howlett was recently awarded the 2013 Jeremy Hynes Award (given out every two years through IMA to a Queensland experimental artist), with a particular nod given to ARGARMENIA (ARG). This alternate reality game, taking place in both real and virtual spaces, was the result of a three-month series of digital, writing and performance workshops the artist held with students in Tumo, a centre for creative technologies located in the city of Yerevan, Armenia.
Guided by Howlett, the students co-designed, wrote, and produced an ARG split into three parts. The first storyline is a murder mystery featuring a character searching for her father. She reaches out to the players through letters, online messages and through real world street performers—a mime and an accordion player. In the second part, a drama quest, booksellers confront the players to decide between wealth and knowledge. The third part is an action adventure, where players follow clues leading them on a subterranean adventure through a metro system. iPads, mini iPads, smart phones, letter writing, html emails, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premier Pro and the augmented reality developer software Wikitude were the tools of creation for this once-off fiction. The project evolved out of Chris Howlett’s past Performance Art pieces and Machinima video works, and continues his interest in exploring play.
Chris Howlett, ARGARMENIA
courtesy the artist
Chris Howlett, ARGARMENIA
Play has an important role in Howlett’s works and life. Through it Howlett started to make sense of reality. I asked him just how this operates for him and he likened it to the experience of any artist: “we have to play with culture in order to understand it or take control of it.” Play functions, he continues, “much like a mask does in that we agree upon a certain role or accepted set of rules as a way towards moral truth. It’s close to what Žižek says: ‘there is more truth in a mask than in what is hidden beneath it’ (I think that was in Enjoy Your Symptom).”
For Howlett, play is most effective outside the home and even outside the studio. “[I]t has to happen in public space where different forms of pressure and constraints are either self-imposed or directly affected by institutional power, or at least in my case, the symbolic signs that represent these forces.” Videogames, often boring for Howlett, involve sitting on a couch where activity is relegated to another world beyond a screen, one where his “actual location during the gameplay is not part of the equation—the immersiveness of the virtual space keeps getting in the way of the lounge room or the computer room.”
ARGs on the other hand are “in real time and in real space and combine interactivity with real-world objects.” They involve performance events in the streets, the use of everyday technologies such as portable devices and social media. To Howlett, they are a relative of Situational Art and are imbued with characteristics he also explores such as cross-collaborative approaches and relational aesthetics. “This part of my practice is about expanding my own ideas on authorship, subjectivity, the role of the artist and where they are located within the work of art using a post-studio model.”
Chris Howlett, ARGARMENIA
courtesy the artist
Chris Howlett, ARGARMENIA
The students who participated in the creation of the ARG were straight out of school. Howlett’s collaborations with them involved the use of translators to explain tasks and ideas. The day-to-day experience oscillated between philosophical discussions and herding teens in a playground. “Our main backup answer to any question which the students had about the purpose of the project was that we were making art. Once they understood that it was not design, theatre or a video game they were making, and that they had to use a different part of their brain to overcome certain obstacles, it made our lives easier.”
Chris Howlett and ARGARMENIA participants
courtesy the artist
Chris Howlett and ARGARMENIA participants
Howlett designed both the ARG creation and end experience to pose questions. When writing the narrative of the ARG, students thought about how we determine good from bad? Right from wrong? Equality from inequality? Are ideas innate in human nature or [the result of] learned behaviour? And this is of course all in the context of Armenia, where there is fighting over disputed territory with Azerbaijan. The project was not granted permission to take videos or photos in Yerevan because of the sensitivities of it being a strategic militarily site. During the ARG however, the players were permitted to take photos and shoot video because they were just “teenagers playing a game.” Chris Howlett concludes, “Sometimes I like to think idealistically, especially when something like this happens and you can see how easily a rule can be bent or distorted to your own ends. But I also have to acknowledge that the reverse can happen, where decades of fighting against prejudice and racism can be wound back over night.”
Split, Riva, criss cross, 2014
photo Peter Volich
Split, Riva, criss cross, 2014
We asked ex-pat photomedia artist Peter Volich for a photo essay of the city which he currently calls home. Eds. (Click images to enlarge.)
Reason for travelling
In 2011-13 I lived and worked in a remote Aboriginal community called Fregon, located in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Lands (APY) of central Australia. I put my arts practice on hold and managed an art centre. Learning the language and some of the Pitjantjatjara customs made me question my own ancestry. After my father’s passing in 2013 I decided to retrace my own family ancestry and visit Croatia, at that stage purely as a tourist. Luckily for me I met my future husband and decided to relocate to Split, Croatia and start up my photographic practice again.
Peristil, Diocletian Palace, 2014
photo Peter Volich
Peristil, Diocletian Palace, 2014
Game of Thrones meets Paradise
Split is the second largest city in Croatia and the main port on the Dalmatian coast bordering the Adriatic Sea with its breathtaking islands. Split is steeped in a complicated but intriguing history. The old town and the major tourist draw card for Split is the Diocletian Palace built in 305 AD. The UNESCO listed palace consists of meandering alleyways, stone villas and many churches. Since the construction of the palace there have been architectural additions through the Medieval, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque periods.
It is interesting to note that Split has archaeological findings that date back to the Ancient Greek colony of Aspálathos in the 4th century BC, which means that Split has been inhabited by Ancient Greek, Roman, Illyric, Venetian, Ottoman and Austrian/Hungarian Empires as well as Slavic tribes. Once you have been here you can understand why so many battles have been fought for the tiny piece of coast. The history of conflict in Split reads like something out of Game of Thrones, which is quite fitting seeing that the fourth season of the series was recently filmed within the old palace and neighboring village of Klis.
Split, Riva 1) Balloons 2) Christmas hut, 2013
photo Peter Volich
Split, Riva 1) Balloons 2) Christmas hut, 2013
Split is renowned for its breathtaking views, surrounding islands and idyllic mediterranean lifestyle. Over the last ten years it has become a hot spot for European tourists and more recently American, Asian and Australian tourists, which will only increase due to Croatia’s inclusion into the European Union in 2013. Apart from the stock standard archaeological and more tourist driven museums, of which there are many, there is a thriving contemporary art scene. The Croatian Artists Association has a dedicated gallery, Salon Gali?, that exhibits members from across Croatia and also coordinates the Split Art Salon which invites artists to respond to a curated theme. The Contemporary Visual Arts Biennale instituted in 1969 uses both gallery and public spaces to showcase the very best of Croatian contemporary art. The recent site specific exhibition in the bowels of the over 1700-year-old Diocletian Palace, albeit a logistical nightmare, proved a sight to be seen.
St. Duje, Diocletian Palace 2014
photo Peter Volich
St. Duje, Diocletian Palace 2014
The other major institution, Gallery of Fine Art, has a curated exhibition program showing both contemporary Croatian and European artists alongside an extensive permanent collection. The Australian artist James Newitt exhibited here in 2010, curated by the senior curator Jasminka Babić. The Arts Academy in Split has programs for most disciplines, notably for its film and animation stream. The Split International Film Festival is held every year in September and is now calling for submissions in June for new and experimental film. (http://www.splitfilmfestival.hr)
Split, in pictures
In my new work, Vukojebina (where wolves go to f$%&) I have created a portrait of Marjan Hill, interweaving both real and imagined story lines. Marjan Hill has been preserved as a site for recreation since the Diocletian Palace was built. For centuries the people of Split have enjoyed its beaches, forests and breath taking views of this peninsula of Split and surrounding islands.
The photo series takes inspiration from the local zoo located on Marjian Hill, spirit photography and photographic collage used in personal diaries and scrapbooks in the late 19th century. During summer the coastline of Marjan Hill is crammed with locals and tourists. The crystal blue water of the Adriatic sea carries ferry after ferry of tourists to the surrounding islands. After October, when the bura (winds) brings in the icy temperatures from the North, all the tourists leave, the coastline becomes desolate and life returns to normal for the locals. But this also means that many of the beachside bars, hotels and cafes close down. Everything is put on hold until the following spring when the frenetic tourism trade returns again like a circus.
Vukojebina (where wolves go to f%&$#), 2014
photo Peter Volich
Vukojebina (where wolves go to f%&$#), 2014
Vukojebina (where wolves go to f%&$#), 2014
photo Peter Volich
Vukojebina (where wolves go to f%&$#), 2014
Vukojebina (where wolves go to f%&$#), 2014
photo Peter Volich
Vukojebina (where wolves go to f%&$#), 2014
Vukojebina (where wolves go to f%&$#), 2014
photo Peter Volich
Vukojebina (where wolves go to f%&$#), 2014
Pete Volich is a Photomedia artist living and working between Split, Croatia and Perth, Australia. He has worked at numerous arts organisations in Australia including Kaltjiti Arts, Queen St Studio for Fraserprojects, Museum of Contemporary Art, Performance Space and artist assistant to Isaac Julien in London
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My background is in visual art, a field I've worked in for my entire adult life since completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at COFA straight after high school. During this time I've supported my painting and exhibiting through an eclectic range of jobs including proofreading, teaching belly dance and working as an accompanist for classical singing students, as well as the always reliable customer service roles.
Film reviewing is a more recent development, but it had its genesis years ago at art school when my painting took a 'dark' turn and I started looking quite seriously at horror as a genre. My interest in this often misunderstood category endured and paved the way for me to find work reviewing hundreds (literally) of horror DVDs for independent Australian film magazine Filmink. Horror remains a major interest area and is a topic I blog about regularly.
Painting and reviewing are for me very different processes, yet the two often influence each other. My upcoming exhibition, Whistle and I'll Come To You, has overtones of both horror and cinema. It runs 2-12 April at Sheffer Gallery, Sydney. http://www.sheffergallery.com/
Exposé
While analytical by nature, I've always been reluctant to write about my own discipline of visual art in a public forum, so it feels like the best of both worlds to have the opportunity to critique the related yet discrete medium of cinema. A visual arts background doesn't go astray, especially when reviewing animation. My main aim in a review is to convey the tone and method of a film—how it goes about the business of doing what it sets out to do—without revealing too much of the narrative, though 'spoilers' aren't as much of an issue in a critical essay. RealTime reviews in particular require a great deal of context and nuance, something which continually broadens my horizons while keeping me on my toes.
Though my obligation to readers is to be completely honest about a film, I owe it to the film's creators to stringently back up criticism, to try to ignore personal biases and to remain dispassionate, though on rare occasions anger is an entirely legitimate response! It can be easy to take a cheap shot at something you don't like, however this I try to avoid.
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Nicola Gunn talks with Gail Priest about Person of Interest, a work-in-development made in collaboration with Nick Roux, presented by Theatre Works as part of FOLA (Festival of Live Art), Melbourne
FOLA (Festival of Live Art) artists Nicola Gunn (Person of Interest), Tristan Meecham (Game Show), Sam Halmarack (Sam Halmarack & the Miserablites) and Beth Buchanan (I Know That I Am Not Dead) respond to the question: What is Live Art?
With thanks to Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall & Meat Market
UK artist Isaac Julien in conversation with Keith Gallasch about his latest video work PLAYTIME, exhibiting at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Paddington, Sydney 15 March-12 April.
Italian director Chiara Guidi (Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio), facilitator Jeff Stein and assistant to the director (interpreter) Nadia Cusimano discuss the development of the upcoming children’s theatre show, Jack and the Beanstalk, at Campbelltown Arts Centre, 30 May – 7 July.
Interview by Keith Gallasch. Includes documentation footage of The Art of Play (2010) and Jack and the Beanstalk creative development (2012) filmed by Sam James.
Jack and the Beanstalk is produced by Insite Arts, Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio and Campbelltown Arts Centre in association with Adelaide Festival.
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Alison Bennett, Shifting Skin
courtesy the artist
Alison Bennett, Shifting Skin
Artist statement
Shifting Skin is a series of artworks featuring 3D augmented reality over high quality photographic prints of human skin marked by tattoos. This work was made in the course of my creative practice research as a member of the Deakin Motion.Lab. Development was guided by a consideration of surface in digital photography. My previous work has tested the representation of interior space in digital images. Having reached something of a conclusion in this line of investigation in Cavity—a series of stitched panoramas of the interiors of caves with an overlay of inhabitation—I realised that space and surface were co-creative: space is defined by surface.
Prompted by an invitation to make work on the subject of queer beards, I was experimenting with the possibilities of scanography to reveal forensic details in skin—pores and hairs, scars and tattoos. While meditating on surface as a creative constraint, I realised that skin is a primary surface, the site of subjectivity, the border at which we perceive and are perceived.
I wanted to set up a dialogue on the collapsing boundaries between material and virtual via the connecting metaphor of skin. As an image, skin embodies many of the paradoxes of materiality and immaterial embodiment within digital culture. Indeed, there is also an emerging tendency to conflate the biological metaphor of skin with the surface of digital media, and the metaphors of the digital interface with biological skin.
I am a digital native. My father was a computer scientist in the 60s and I grew up with a computer in the house in the days before there was a tangible difference between a PC and a Mac. Digital images make sense to me and I am endlessly fascinated by the cultural and psycho-social implications of digital technologies. There has been a profound shift in our engagement with what has been termed ‘cyberspace’ from an alternative virtual reality to an overlay embedded in the everyday and the physical. Augmented reality is not only emerging as a media technology but as a potential conceptual model to describe the contemporary dynamic between the so-called physical and digital. The digital is overlaid and embedded, not a virtual alternative.
There’s a lot of ink around today. Sometimes I imagine a future in which so many generations have been tattooed that there’s a Darwinian glitch and babies come out of the womb pre-decorated. This of course would be a disaster as it undermines the very spirit of getting a tattoo—the agency involved in choosing your own new skin.
Alison Bennett’s Shifting Skin depicts a number of lovingly chosen body decorations but rather than photographing them she has scanned them, using a modified flatbed scanner. Studying someone else’s tattoo can be intimate at the best of times and Bennett’s scanning method, along with the scale of her images, makes it even more so, highlighting the skin’s scars, flaws, puckers and gaping hair follicles.
The unaugmented images are fascinating in themselves as they bear glitches—rifts, pleats and curious ruptures of full spectrum rainbow colours. (Bennett admits that some of these interruptions are the happy accidents caused by scanner malfunction.) It’s often hard to ascertain where on the body these tattoos might appear as they are seemingly peeled off and flattened, depicted floating in a black space. This disembodiment becomes total when the images are viewed using a tablet or smart phone sporting Aurasma, an augmented reality app.
Pointing the device’s camera at one of the images, the flatness begins to buckle and fold developing hills and valleys, sharp cliff edges and chasms—a contour map of the skin. Bennett avoids any literalising of the images. Rather than simply transforming the flat illustration into a three dimensional version of itself, she disrupts the tattooed image with extraneous lumps and bulges that don’t so much complement the image as mutate it into something else altogether.
Bennett applies subtly different treatments to each image. Untitled (dragon) depicts a bold and colourful image of a dragon and an Asian girl. When augmented the blackness seems to extend infinitely backwards into deep space and shafts of what could be stars shoot out towards you, while the dragon and girl seem to float, writhing together in this new universe. Untitled (mother) is quite a simple tattoo, just the outline of an iconic 1950s housewife, but Bennet has augmented this with a range of swellings that from some angles seem to imply an even larger womanly shape—an über frau swallowing up the smaller. With Untitled (birds & butterflies) the skin becomes a garden with hillocks and secret caverns. These shapes are reminiscent of the alarming hyperreal mutations of Patricia Piccinini’s lumpen creatures though Bennett’s are perhaps more disturbing for the visceral “skin-ness” that she maintains in the morphing process.
As she mentions in her artist statement above, Alison Bennett sees the skin as a border. In Shifting Skin this works not only as a border between what is in and outside the body, but here it also operates on a metaphoric level with skin becoming the semi-permeable membrane between reality and fantasy. The material world crosses over to meet the fantastical, or perhaps the fantastical reaches out and grabs the real. For the viewer it’s this moment of border crossing that is most exhilarating, but as the technology becomes increasingly utilised for commercial means (there are already multiple examples of corporate clients on the Aurasma website), the initial thrill may begin to normalise. Then it will be the content that becomes most important and artists like Bennett will hopefully lead the way, bending reality in ever more conceptually challenging ways. Gail Priest
Oliver Downes
Bio
Composer, arranger and piano teacher Elissa Milne recently blogged that it takes two generations to grow a musician: “the first generation learns how to learn, and then the second generation has parents who know what it [really] takes.” My parents were research scientists, both of whom held a deep love of music, though their respective upbringings prevented the development of their abilities beyond being keen listeners and occasional dabblers. By the time I was 14, I had picked up the cello and my piano teacher had introduced me to the likes of Chopin and Debussy. At university I combined my dedication to the piano with my continuing obsession with literary responses to modernity, leading to a thesis on Thomas Pynchon's Vineland. As I developed my own writing practice I began to produce music and arts journalism, completing a Creative Writing Masters in 2011 before turning my attention seriously to songwriting and performance, which, when I'm not teaching piano to children, is now my focus.
Exposé
I'm fascinated by artistic process and the sociology of creativity, the endlessly inventive ways in which people across vastly different mediums and styles approach the production of creative work and how that work responds to the social structures in which it’s produced. As my own creative practice has mutated from prose to song, I've remained committed to producing arts journalism as I've found that the deep contemplation of a subject that the process of writing demands tends to provoke all kinds of unpredictable ideas and resonances that can then inform or posit solutions to problems in my own practice. I see both activities as being complementary parts of my response to the world in which we live and the art being made within it. In the meantime, my spare energy is currently spent finalising the details for an EP, at the end, as well as organising tours both as a solo artist and on cello with baroque folk duo Telegraph Tower.
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These are troubling times. Every day there seems to be another insidious attack on the principles and infrastructures that sustain democracy, and the decency and the responsibility to treat all humans equally. That’s a broad brushstroke statement, but the attacks are broad ranging, threatening Indigenous rights, asylum seekers’ rights, climate action, marriage equality, corporate accountability, education reform, independent media and most recently in Victoria the right to protest. In matters specifically related to the arts (though of course all are), there’s been the backlash against the Biennale Boycott artists and the threat to arms-length arts funding.
With this boiling away in our brains, we question the importance of what we do as artists. Do our creative deeds have an impact on social and political views? How do artists’ acts of defiance, revelation or subversion reach a wide enough audience to actually make a difference?
We’ve asked ten artists how they see their practice contributing to the debate about the power of art. While these questions have been asked before, in the current political climate it seems vitally important to pose them again.
We thank the artists who have very generously taken the time to share their thoughts with us. Gail Priest, Online Producer
I believe cultural workers can do a lot in order to foster change. Art does have political agency as much any other human action.
Firstly, to art’s advantage there is a granted forum and that alone is a conduit to political relevance. Yes, that might come across as limiting and incestuous—preaching to converted—but that is only a limitation that individual practitioners want to place on themselves. I am a cultural worker and practice an artform that engages within the exhibition circuit of galleries and venues, but also exists outside of it, with activities that aspire to reach audiences way beyond, offering a message that is relevant to both.
Secondly I believe that by moving away from the modernist concept of a single artist’s output, we can effectively enable people to share in a vision and indeed be part of it, with invested interest. I collaborate with dancers and filmmakers, poets and fellow visual artists, but also extensively with non-art practitioners like chefs, herbalists, weavers, academics, programmers and media producers. The resulting projects have a much greater reach in language and cultural leverage—effectively becoming agents for political and social change.
Last, I’d like to praise the courage of artists, who adventure into structures not open to them, with creativity and conviction. That is when art is most effective politically. By fearlessly empowering themselves through distribution channels, media possibilities and platforms of cultural exchange, their political messages can then travel far and loud, reaching their targets and garnering attention without being mediated and ‘framed’ for public consumption: raw, clear, uncomfortable, honest, effective.
To that effect, in my projects I am not shamed to self-promote, engaging directly with journalists and scientists, policy-makers and managers of institutions, government bodies and Not For Profits. I believe that art does indeed have agency. It is only up to the individual to define what it is that they want to do with it.
Rosie Dennis 1) Driven to New Pastures, photo Marilyn Moreno 2) Downtown, photo Heidrun Löhr 3) Bankstown Bayanian Hopping Spirit House by Alwin Reamillo, photo Jagath Dheerasekara
Rosie Dennis, Urban Theatre Projects
It’s almost five years since I met 79-year-old June Hickey, a resident in the southwest Sydney suburb of Minto. Our paths crossed when I was making the show Driven To New Pastures, a work I was inspired to write when a colleague said they weren’t that comfortable visiting me at my home in Waterloo because of all the public housing on my street. I was taken aback by their comment, which I perceived to be a broad generalisation about the people who were my neighbours. Those two words—public housing—reduced families, cultures, lives and individual experiences into a narrow, stereotyped portrait of the people who live in social housing.
After a about four or five months of knowing June, I asked her if she wanted to join me on stage in Driven To New Pastures. She agreed and we premiered the show at a small church hall in Minto before taking it to the Seymour Centre for Sydney Festival.
Since Driven to New Pastures I have worked on a number of projects which have required me to work closely with people from outside the arts industry and with little or no experience of contemporary performance practice – MINTO:LIVE, Downtown, Life As We Know It, Practice & Participate, My Radio Heart and the upcoming Future Present and Bankstown Banyanian Hopping Spirit House. Each of these projects have been/are in someway connected to the time and place in which they are created and the people who help create them; whether that be a suburban demographic shift, negotiating old age or geographical dislocation.
The impact is always multi-layered and (in my case) usually starts with building a relationship and establishing trust. June and I are about to embark on our third project together – a duet – which we hope will hit the stage sometime in early 2016.
I don’t want to be an archivist or a commentator. I think the role of art in a progressive or counter culture is heightened in retrospect. So, at this time, I don’t want to make much political art. I want to prioritise art that is politically active, that appropriates space, art that is direct and primary in its engagement.
Hydra Poesis facilitated a successful action last year that fitted this bill. Eighteen dancers and artists employed a concept of ‘dedicated abstraction’ to stage an action at the Yongah Hill Detention Centre in partnership with the National Refugee Rights Convergence. We used our completely abstract and symbolically open form to occupy space outside the detention centre. This was accompanied by journalistic broadcast—interviews with advocates, activists and mental health workers. Some of us then led this convergence onto a contested roadway and danced and were eventually arrested. This wasn’t Art. This was an action. We’re working on more such actions that employ dedicated abstraction this year.
The most powerful thing about art is our remit: we are expected to be critical, experimental and abstract, provocative and sometimes volatile. We can move between worlds. But I’m not sure we can move between spheres very well from the theatre/gallery/individualised-headspace. Parallel to this, [our] political campaigns can’t inhabit the media, because we can’t win enough space there. But as a mass movement, we can take space on the streets and own a culture. You’re not part of the choir (or preaching to it) if you don’t attend choir practice. I love political art but, for me and my close peers, now is a moment for art action.
Re-“visiting” my everyday surroundings and not taking them for granted allows me to relate and relativise human and non-human things in the world, and gives me an energy that I try to translate in my work. It is not about converting, it is about acting towards, raising awareness, noticing.
Waterwheel, the online platform dedicated to water that I initiated in 2011, is central to my work. The platform’s biggest yearly event, the Waterwheel World Water Day Symposium (3WDS), runs this year March 17-23, online and in 18 nodes, with an amazing program of 42 sessions and more than 200 presenters from five continents. I am thrilled to see artists, scientists, activists, environmentalists, educators and water lovers from around the world addressing this year’s theme, Water Views: Caring and Daring, and how the Tap, Waterwheel’s live webcam and media-mixing system, facilitates exchange between them. Water issues need to be raised as a matter of urgency and art and inter-disciplinary cross-pollinations are very important in broadening the reach locally as well as far and wide. Waterwheel’s co-founding team, Inkahoots, Igneous and I, are preparing a revamp of the website, focusing on user-experience and allowing people to develop their own projects independently.
I’ve also started a new project this year, with James Cunningham, called FLUIDATA, combining digital media, streaming events, body awareness and movement practice, exploring creeks in regional Queensland. We’re giving workshops in remote places such as Miles and Cloncurry, meeting a wide range of people concerned with environment and water and connecting them to the Waterwheel community. FLUIDATA will culminate in an installation at QUT Creative Industries in October, with streaming events throughout 2 weeks.
Related article World of water
Keith Gallasch: interview, Suzon Fuks, Waterwheel
RealTime issue #104 Aug-Sept 2011 p42
See RT120 for a review of the presentations in Waterwheel Symposium.
Nicola Gunn 1) In Spite of Myself, photo Sarah Walker 2) Green Screen, photo Pier Carthew
Nicola Gunn, performance artist & theatre maker
Do I hope my art impacts on political and societal views, encourages social transformation and environmentally sustainable practices? Hell yeah. Does it? This is perhaps a little harder to quantify.
I try to make work that is funny and challenging. I like to make people laugh. I also want to save the planet and inspire social change. I feel all my works have been about trying to combine the two—I’ve just been sublimating my anger and frustration with ‘how it is’ into humour. However, now I feel physically restless: at the moment I’m preoccupied with how to encourage action! How to orchestrate some kind of a tipping point so that thought-provoking leads to something more significant.
This year I am a greenie-in-residence at Arts House, along with five companies. Through this excellent program, we will be interrogating our practice and measuring it against our sustainable ideals—not just in terms of the environment, but making art sustainable for our bodies and our lives.
In July I will premier a new work called GREEN SCREEN. It plays on the idea of taking someone out of their present environment and putting them in another. It’s a rumination on the relationship between doing and being, set in a room with a group of people discussing the beginnings of a new nation. It’s about saving the planet with imagined utopias and new constitutions; it asks questions about how we would define ourselves if we could no longer be defined by what we do. It is also an attempt to write a new TV sitcom. Like all my other works, I guess it navigates the mercurial notion of identity and change. Do I want to save the planet, or do I actually just want a successful TV show in a self-conscious attempt to be the next Louis CK?
Creative exploitations
John Bailey: Melbourne International Arts Festival
RealTime issue #118 Dec-Jan 2013 p33
Dangerous stuff
John Bailey: Nicola Gunn, Four Larks, MTC, Malthouse
RealTime issue #96 April-May 2010 p38
Live work, women’s work
Caroline Wake: Liveworks, Performance Space
RealTime issue #101 Feb-March 2011 p18
1) Finegan Kruckemeyer, photo Essie Kruckemeyer 2) The Boy at the Edge of Everything, photo Chris Bennion
Finegan Kruckemeyer
Over the last years, the majority of my commissions have been for Theatre for Young Audiences and in TYA artists can find themselves encountering some pragmatic truths. Firstly, we are creating work for an audience which is, by its very definition, not us—ours is a theoretical exercise in discerning what a child spectator might appreciate theatrically. Secondly, in promoting our work we’re appealing not to our target audience, but to a series of gate-keepers (parents, teachers etc) who will decide what their charges attend. Thirdly, commonly held perspectives in the first two instances, mean this is a field in which didactic notions can prevail—a child audience should be taught something, ergo the worth of a TYA show is less in the art and more in the lesson imparted.
I—and many of my colleagues—don’t agree with this and it is here that I hope to make some small impact. Though the shows written for children contain experiential touchstones familiar to a child’s world and protagonists who are their peers, I ensure that the emotional and allegorical terrain is the same as I would offer an adult audience. Child characters encounter true and substantial hurdles, so that subsequent triumphs might feel earned. They reach nadirs, so that when redemption comes, it is all the more celebratory.
Children, like adults, will invest more in a fictional creation if their struggle feels tangible. Even in the context of magical realism (a familiar TYA genre), the same applies—the magical they will meet you halfway for, but without the realism it can seem redundant.
So my attempt, each time I sit at my laptop, is to write strong and respectful work for children, which acknowledges them as astute audience members outside the plays, and worthy subjects within. It doesn’t always succeed, but it is always my aim.
Related 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 p38
post in rehearsal for Oedipus Schmoedipus 1) Natalie Rose 2) Mish Grigor 3) Zoë Coombs Marr
photos Brett Boardman
post in rehearsal for Oedipus Schmoedipus 1) Natalie Rose 2) Mish Grigor 3) Zoë Coombs Marr
post (Zoë Coombs Marr, Mish Grigor and Natalie Rose)
When we were twenty, we performed a satirical work about police brutality in a shipping container.
The venue’s security guards treated it like a strip show.
They were fired for sexual harassment. We realized that no matter how funny, unsexy and clever our work was, we would always be upstaged and defined by our female bodies. We are sexualised, analysed, held to different standards than our male contemporaries. This surprised, depressed and infuriated us. It still does.
But, when we start to understand the context in which people put us, it becomes another tool to use. Something to play up to, challenge, subvert.
For us, art is about building the world we want to live in and work we want to see. Work that expresses the politics we believe in. We wanted to make work that speaks to a contemporary arts dialogue but also that our mothers could understand.
This doesn’t mean making populist work. Our mothers aren’t idiots. This means making work that speaks to people, not to a tradition of theatre. Theatrical conventions don’t speak to people. People speak to people. Theatrical conventions speak to people educated in theatre.
For this reason, we always challenge form.
We don’t take any existing structure or convention as a given.
Where we find our voices are not represented, we must speak up. Speaking up in an unfamiliar voice, pushing the boundaries of what your voice can comfortably say, will not always make you popular.
We have never aimed to be provocative. We just unapologetically represent ourselves on stage. This can be confronting for some people.
We always liked the provocation thrown down by Joseph Beuys that “society is the material for artists to transform.” Even now, it sits as a radical proposition and in light of the current political and economic climate, a seeming impossible task. But it’s a juicy challenge to bite into.
We’re continuing to make artworks located in public spaces, as we see this as an opportunity to collaboratively play out with our audiences some alternative experiences of our cityscapes. The possibility to temporarily shift social codes and entrenched behavioural norms provides us with an opportunity to not only explore some future alternatives, but to also try to make sense of what we have here and now. What if we all reject money for a day? Why are we so content to be policed? What happens when we turn our cities into playgrounds? What if we use public tug-of-war as an alternative to bureaucratic governance? These are questions we have been tackling in as many playful ways we can dream up because we feel that it is through experiential play that we can catch a glimpse of who we are and what we are really capable of.
What’s driving us at the moment is a desire to hand over the reins to audiences so that they become interventionists or activators and we facilitate their experience. For us, this transition enables us to expand our sense of creative comradeship and acknowledge that we are all in this together. We’re not even sure if what we make is art anymore; its hard to articulate what it actually is, but we like the fact it’s slippery and promiscuous and can operate from on board a bus, a smart phone, a street corner or on the steps of our local Coles. The more art can weave its way into the fabric of everyday life, the greater the chances are that it will not be seen to just be representing the world, but to be actively deviating within it.
Whenever I set out to make a new work these days the first question that always comes into to my head is, ‘How can it engage people in a meaningful way?’ and ‘What social relevance does it have to the here and now?’ These questions probably came from years of making work that people perceived to be alienating or indeed shutting out an audience. So I became interested in ‘audience projects’ that in many ways are driven by participation from a willing public—works that in fact won’t exist without the fuel of public response.
The most recent work Stereopublic: Crowdsourcing the Quiet probably continues to be the most far-reaching in terms of reach and distribution of an idea. What I essentially asked of people was to go into their cities and find quiet spaces with an iPhone app, record the audio of this space for 30 seconds, map it virtually, share it with others and request that an original composition be made using the recording. It’s all about creative crowdsourcing and crowd-mapping. The majority of people who engage with the project are not artists or even sound-makers, which excites me! They are citizens of their place, people who know their cities intimately. The project asks ‘is quiet an endangered species in our cities and if so how can we protect it?’ And this is something that couldn’t be led single-handedly by me—it had to be crowd-sourced, as it’s only dwellers of cities who can know their environments, the special places, the spaces of quiet and solitude that need to be preserved.
So far Stereopublic has engaged up to 50 cities all around the world including in Australia, UK, Europe, Asia, Middle East and North and South America. It’s the participation from the public sphere that makes the work exist. It’s ultimately driven by a collective and somewhat introverted quiet social act of ambient resistance to noise in our ever-growing cities.
Related articles Enlarging the musical universe
Chris Reid: Music Program, Adelaide Festival 2013
RealTime issue #114 April-May 2013 p8
The making of a world
Keith Gallasch: Jason Sweeney Lets The Darkness At You
RealTime issue #88 Dec-Jan 2008 pg46
Kym Vercoe 1) seven kilometres north-east, photo Heidrun Löhr 2) For Those Who Can Tell No Tales, photo Emil Grebenar
Kym Vercoe, performer, theatre maker, version 1.0
I work principally in devised theatre, making work driven by a desire to shed light on important issues. Creating work that causes the audience to pause, reflect or shift perspective is work I am very excited and proud to be involved with.
My performance work seven kilometres north-east is a story of acknowledgement and accountability. These are often two motivating factors behind my work. Using personal storytelling, the performance is a memorial to women war victims from the town of Visegrad, Bosnia, where memorials are not allowed to exist. Premiering in Sydney for version 1.0, the show resonated strongly with audiences, both the Bosnian diaspora and the broader community, who spoke about Australia’s own struggle to acknowledge the past.
When I performed in Sarajevo, it was noted that no one in Bosnia was talking openly about these issues, but someone from Australia was. And then I received a lovely email from a Bosnian filmmaker, asking to adapt the story for film. Two weeks later Jasmila Zbanic put me on a plane to Bosnia and we started shooting three days after I arrived. It was a wild ride, but we were driven to tell a story that had been buried in history, and to tell that story as widely as possible. The resulting feature film, For Those Who Can Tell No Tales, is currently on the international festival circuit and will premiere here soon.
After screening at the Toronto Film Festival a woman patiently waited to the side, a relative of a young woman who died in Visegrad. Then she took my hand and drew me into a long hug.
Dance has long been popular in Sydney’s west. Once upon a time there was even a tertiary dance course producing professional choreographers and dancers. The demise of dance studies at University of Western Sydney was a significant loss but dance culture in the west has continued to develop in no small part due to Western Sydney Dance Action (WSDA), a resident organisation at Riverside Parramatta. Formed in 2001 its aim was to foster artists, community networks and develop audiences for dance in the area.
By 2011, the year Annette McLernon took over as director, Western Sydney Dance Action had grown from a grassroots organisation to a significant presenter of dance in Sydney. Director and board decided to reflect the growth of the organisation by rebranding it as FORM Dance Projects Inc. McLernon brings to FORM experience in a range of areas: as a filmmaker (documentaries and dance films); curator (film program, Perth International Arts Festival); and program manager for Bundanon Trust during its re-invigoration under CEO Deborah Ely.
Annette McLernon
Showing
The Dance Bites program began with Western Sydney Dance Action and has continued to grow in strength presenting work by both established and emerging artists. McLernon says of FORM’s role, “[We] provide opportunities for independent contemporary dance artists in a landscape that’s really constricted. We function as an important part of the dance ecology. We are the ones providing the opportunities that are becoming so limited, particularly in the last few years.”
The 2013 program perfectly illustrated FORM’s ethos of diversity. It included established choreographer Martin del Amo’s Little Black Dress Suite (see RT117); The Tap Pack, by Jesse Rasmussen, Jordan Pollard and Thomas J Egan; Lineage, a group of dancers involved in mainstream musicals who funded their work via commercial means; and a double bill by Aruna Gandhimathinathan, Shruti Ghosh and Tammi Gissell exploring traditional and contemporary Indian and Australian Aboriginal dance forms. The latter artists came through FORM’s strong connection with the Cultural Performing Arts Network (CPAN) which has now reached a membership of 500. McLernon says, “I think it’s really important to present works that come from Western Sydney and are created in Western Sydney.”
The 2014 Dance Bites program, while not so wildy varied in terms of genre, shows a commitment to supporting dance practitioners at different stages of their careers. Established Perth choreographer Sue Peacock kicked off the season with her work Reflect, toured by Performing Lines WA (See RT115). Coming up shortly is Sam Chester’s Safety in Numbers, a work about how humans behave in the aftermath of disaster. Chester has developed the work through the Culminate program (Force Majeure with Performance Space and Carriageworks). McLernon says, “Sam is in a great position now in her career to have this opportunity and FORM is really happy that we can facilitate that.”
As part of the 2013 program, FORM also presented the first work by a group of 10 emerging artists, the Dance Makers Collective. Two of these pieces have been further developed and will be shown as a double bill in the 2014 program: Sketch by Flatline—choreographer Carl Sciberras, visual artist Todd Fuller and composer Mitchell Mollison—a multimedia exploration of the interplay between movement, music and vision; and Between Two and Zero by Miranda Wheen (see Miranda Wheen’s In Profile) and Matt Cornell “imagining a social dance for the future” (website). The final work for the program is by Bodyweather artist Linda Luke. Still Point Turning is a performance/installation investigating “deep time” including “cosmic time, the eternal cycle of living and dying” (website).
Flatline, Sketch
photo Carl Sciberras
Flatline, Sketch
Sharing
At the core of FORM Dance Project’s agenda is education for both young dancers and audiences. McLernon describes it as “aspirational,” involving a choreographic workshop for Year 12 dance students in partnership with the Sydney Dance Company, and also the Learn the Repertoire, See the Show sessions for students years 7-12. McLernon explains, “That’s really to give the opportunity [to] these young dancers to not just participate in the skills workshop but to see the work, get a better understanding of it and talk to the artists about what it’s like to be a dancer—what the career pathways are.” McLernon stresses that these exchanges also include artform appreciation. “Whether they go on to become dancers or not, that artform appreciation and understanding of dance—what contemporary dance is and can become—is really important for developing those future audiences for dance.”
Futures
McLernon has big plans for the future. In the last year FORM has launched a new website which has seen close to a million views last year. McLernon says, “commissioning Vicki Van Hout (http://form.org.au/blog) as FORM’s blogger in residence in 2013 and 2014 has contributed to growing FORM’s on-line audience and making a contribution to reputable critical discourse around contemporary dance.” She wants the site to become even more active with more video and rich media content.
In addition to this online hub, McLernon hopes FORM will become a dance centre. “At the moment we provide some support to create new works but we really would like to become a physical hub where we can give opportunities to early career artists, for instance, Dance Makers Collective—they have the potential to develop into a company. FORM would also like to offer more funding support for those types of artists to set up their own companies.” Plans are also in development for a membership system with McLernon envisaging the hub as a place where members “can come in and have a sense of community and develop work, with studios hopefully.” If Annette McLernon can make this happen, it will be a truly welcome addition to the cultural landscape not just of Western Sydney but the city and the state as a whole.
FORM Dance Projects, Dance Bites: Safety in Numbers, Sam Chester, 9-12 April; Double Bill: Sketch, Flatline; Between Two and Zero, Matt Cornell & Miranda Wheen; 11-13 Sept; Still Turning Point, Linda Luke 27-29 Nov; Lennox Theatre Riverside; http://form.org.au/; http://form.org.au/perform/dance-bites/
I recently met with a very happy Deborah Leiser-Moore to discuss her busy career (which includes performing in a new work by Richard Schechner in New York this year), her latest creation, KaBooM, to premiere in April in Melbourne, and the Lee Breuer Masterclass (Breuer, a co-founder of Mabou Mines, creates large-scale innovative works in New York) she has programmed with Monash University Academy of Performing Arts for July. We’ve continued our discussion by email and phone and I’ve drawn on material on the artist’s website.
The Suzuki Tadashi-trained Leiser-Moore spent her formative years as performer and maker in Sydney’s contemporary performance scene, maturing with significant works: Hungry in 1996 and a room with no air in 1999. She then moved to Melbourne where she formed Tashmadada (running workshops with the likes of La Fura dels Baus), producing new works and touring overseas.
Leiser-Moore describes her new work KaBooM as “a promenade performance in which the audience encounter the different worlds and stories of seven men.” Each of these has been a soldier, each in a different country and with very different experiences.
The soldiers portrayed include one who deserted Saddam Hussein’s army after serving for a decade, a child soldier from Burundi and a 16 year-old Holocaust escapee who fought “for his family in the Pacific Islands along with a guardian monkey.”
How did you find and select, meet and interview the men you chose as your subjects, and over what period?
Over a period of around 10 months. A couple of the men I already knew. Majid, from Iraq, I had even worked with. Others I sourced by asking around my different networks. Fablice from Burundi I found through Multicultural Arts Victoria. It’s amazing how many men living in Australia carry around this war experience.
Once I found them, we met to get a sense of their stories and to outline the project and the process. I only had one rejection! They all were very happy to have an opportunity to tell their stories. They all said that the process of being interviewed allowed them to speak personally and freely. It gave them an opportunity to speak in ways they normally don’t feel they can. And they all were intrigued as to how I was going to make a performance piece—not verbatim theatre—from the material.
Deborah Leiser-Moore, KaBooM
photo Lachlan Woods
Deborah Leiser-Moore, KaBooM
How did you distill what you heard and learned from them?
I was interested in the personal stories of the men—not the politics of each of the wars they fought in. It was the question of how we live, as ordinary human beings, in extraordinary situations, how we are able to do day to day things we take for granted, what particular experiences the men remembered and what they carried of these to Australia.
The strong lineup of directors for KaBooM comprises Australians Regina Heilmann, Gail Kelly, Adriano Cortese and Susie Dee, Younes Bachir from Barcelona, Lech Mackiewicz from Poland and Bagryana Popov, who works in Bulgaria and Australia. What attributes have you looked for in the directors you’ve chosen?
I wanted to work with directors who are performance makers and who have their own very distinctive approaches. I’ve already had working relationships with Regina Heilmann and Younes Bachir and I knew the work of the others.
Each uses multiple performance languages in really interesting and visceral ways, so I felt they would respond to the interviews in lateral ways. I wanted directors who would create, in collaboration with me, responses to the interviews rather than verbatim pieces, because I’m interested in how these stories can reach an audience through the senses.
Also, I wanted each of the ‘stories’ to have a very specific and individual aesthetic, to make a point about the individuality of each of the men and their experiences. I think it is too easy to cluster people together as ‘Other.’ These are very different people from different countries with different stories and experiences. Therefore each of the pieces in the work is a different ‘world’— like an installation/performance piece. The audience is asked to enter each of these worlds.
Deborah Leiser-Moore, KaBooM
photo Lachlan Woods
Deborah Leiser-Moore, KaBooM
In the press release for KaBooM, Leiser-Moore asks, “What happens when we are unwillingly thrust into the frontline of war? It can happen to anyone, anywhere. Our lives irrevocably and unpredictably changed in an instant. And what remains within us when we have escaped the warzone?” Her response takes the form of a physically realised account of soldiers’ lives that “positions the audience, as witness, in the midst of the performance arena. They are placed in a metaphorical field of war, populated with visual imagery and the debris of battle” (website). Within this arena Leiser-Moore will deploy her movement skills—including aerial work—projections, a soundtrack by Bigtoxic “and elements—mud, water, tomatoes, hay—to create a series of interlocking performance vignettes.”
Why the choice of particular materials for each piece?
Each director was given the filmed interview and asked to create a 10-minute response in their own performance ‘style.’ The process of performance making and the use of materials emerged out of discussions, each director’s particular aesthetic and their direct response to the interviews. Most of the directors are visual and physical performance makers, as am I. Together we used whatever material and form seemed right for the piece.
How do you feel about your body becoming a conduit for the experiences of others? What does your body, its skills and training offer these stories without words?
I think it’s important to communicate these very male war experiences through the body of a woman. It completes the ‘picture.’ My body and its own history—training and personal—can allow an audience to read the stories.
The experiences of war touch everyone—including those who are left behind—generally women: the mother whose son doesn’t return, the wife whose husband is only a ghostly memory. All lives are damaged by war. Sadly this is its universality. And so although I am the conduit for the experiences of others, this experience touches us all. In a way, this is the aim of this work.
* * * * * *
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Deborah Leiser-Moore, Cordelia, Mein Kind
photo Ryszard Pajda
Deborah Leiser-Moore, Cordelia, Mein Kind
Other works
Leiser-Moore’s Cordelia, Mein Kind (2009) will enjoy a return season in Melbourne this year at La Mama. The artist describes the solo work as “a duet for live body and film.” Leiser-Moore as Cordelia encounters Lear in exile in the form of her father—a Holocaust victim displaced to Australia who appears on film in the performance (made before his death) conversing with his daughter. Performed in Melbourne, Brisbane, Washington, Gdansk and San Francisco, the work was created in collaboration with director Meredith Rogers and choreographer Sally Smith when Leiser-Moore was an artist-in-residence at Victoria University in Melbourne.
Of the work, the later Doug Leonard wrote in RealTime, “This deeply textured, multilayered and savagely poetical work takes off from Shakespeare’s King Lear, but unravels personal elements of cultural exile and loss. Leiser-Moore’s Yiddish speaking Polish father escaped to Australia from the Holocaust, but left his family behind. However, he never spoke a word to his daughter about his past until she arranged a trip with him back to Poland, which she documents. His favourite film was a Yiddish version of King Lear with a happy ending! The piece abounded with such astounding ironies and coincidences from real life, I was literally rendered speechless” (RT94).
Further Leiser-Moore productions include Here and There—Then and Now (2004) “a video/installation/performance piece that explores the inherent nature and expression of ritual (the wedding ceremony), tradition and culture within Jewish and Muslim women; a room with no air (1999), a collaboration with co-performer Regina Heilmann and composer Elena Kats-Chernin, in which a German gentile and Polish Jew “struggle to understand and unhinge the terrible dynamic which is their legacy;” and Hungry (1996), an exploration of the artist’s cultural heritage and the exclusion of women from Jewish religious ritual. In development with Heilmann is Apres Savage, a creative assessment of what has changed in the world and in the artists themselves since that first collaboration.
Since the late 90s art-music-political-punk ensemble Chicks on Speed—Alex Murray-Leslie (US) and Melissa Logan (Aus)—have produced an extensive catalogue of records, performances, exhibitions, fashion, film projects and, most recently, iPad apps. Now in their 17th year the uncompromising duo continues to engineer exciting multidisciplinary work including a new interactive album, UTOPIA, and a major exhibition at Fremantle Arts Centre, Perth.
Forming in Munich in 1997 after meeting at an Academy of Fine Arts party, Murray-Leslie and Logan began Chicks on Speed as part of a location-specific survival strategy. Murray-Leslie describes 90s Munich as being a bourgeois town with little in the way of creative entertainment to satisfy the pair. In this climate she set up an illegal bar that doubled as a venue for Chicks on Speed to create and present “radical entertainment” in the form of live art performances.
One such performance titled I Wanna Be A DJ…Baby! involved smashing records from behind a DJ desk while playing sound collage through the PA. Beyond onstage antics they also distributed a ‘box set’ featuring a T-shirt, cassette, paper record and fake ‘band’ interview.’ Murray-Leslie says, “It was never just the idea of the song but always the idea of the mixtape, the song, performing the song, making the merchandise, doing some text over the performance and then breaking something. Always the influence of Fluxus there—instructional performance.”
Beyond Fluxus, the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, a German word translated as ‘the all encompassing artwork’ involving construction across many mediums, connects closely to the aesthetic of Chicks on Speed. Gesamtkunstwerk originated in the opera world, predominantly via Richard Wagner in the late 19th century but was adopted by Bauhaus architects in the early 20th century and is still relevant to many multi-disciplinary artists today. “We’ve never been able to just think in one medium,” says Murray-Leslie, “whether it’s art, fashion or music they all have a complementary trajectory.”
Chicks on Speed Band and Chicks on Speed Art Collective have always co-existed comfortably but with so many creative disciplines demanding attention, Murray-Leslie and Logan deliberately shift focus, navigating their way between the music world to the art world and back again. “In the beginning Chicks on Speed were never recognised as a real band,” Murray-Leslie explains. “When we became a functioning band people never saw our art. We changed the focus. Suddenly we go to release the new album, UTOPIA, and it’s swung back the other way.”
Chicks on Speed
UTOPIA is the product of years of sonic experimentation stretching beyond the conventional three-stage process of writing, recording and releasing to include new technologies, collaborations and audience participation. It comes complete with six iPad apps designed to be played and modified in co-authorship and co-creation with the band. During live shows apps are used as audio-visual instruments for interactive stage performance, for example allowing an audience member to contribute text to be displayed on a projected backdrop located behind the band. According to Murray-Leslie, during this process “the audience completes the artwork.” Despite the addition of iPad apps, UTOPIA remains sonically in keeping with the Chicks on Speed sound—energetic electro-pop songs with prominent lyrical content linking complex ideas about art, culture, idealism and creation to the broader concept of Utopia.
The apps are part of a much bigger body of creative work undertaken by Chicks on Speed which blurs the line between music, art, technology and laboratory. Objektinstruments (self-made instruments) were initially developed by the ensemble in 2005 for studio and stage implementation and showcased as part of a performative installation at Dundee Contemporary Arts Centre (UK) in 2010. During 2011 and 2013, as artist residents at ZKM Centre for Art and Media (Germany), they produced UTOPIA along with the six interconnected iPad apps. Collaborations from a diverse range of modern thinkers and creators such as Julian Assange, Yoko Ono and Francesca Thyssen provided extra dimensions to the music project.
For Melissa Logan new interactive technologies such as iPad apps enable Chicks on Speed “to remain close to the audience and to build up platforms.” In the early 2000s she felt distanced from fans due to the emergence of iTunes and other online retailers. She says that it was as if a conversation was lost because of third party involvement. The pair are conscious of maintaining a closeness with audiences. Alex Murray-Leslie notes, “Once you deliver something in the digital medium it is dead unless you change it.”
In 2014 Chicks on Speed show no signs of slowing down. The boundaries between art and music become blurrier as their catalogue of work encompasses even more creative disciplines.
Chicks on Speed, SCREAM, Fremantle Arts Centre (Perth), 4 April-25 May
http://fac.org.au/events/429/chicks-on-speed-scream?pid=58
Smitha Cariappa, Lying on the floor, floured performance
photo Yeehwan Yeoh
Smitha Cariappa, Lying on the floor, floured performance
The word ‘seam’ makes me think of a repetitive action, stitching threads by hand crisscrossing a line, or by machine sewing up and down, in and out, most often along a linear trail. At this time of the year it makes me think of another action, of bowling a cricket ball along a prescribed path with the end direction being unpredictable. The objective of a seam suggests bringing together, lapping over and abutting different materials, sometimes creating a crack or fissure.
In November 2013 choreographic research and development centre Critical Path, in partnership with the Centre for Contemporary Design Practices and the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, University of Technology, Sydney, produced SEAM13. Since 2009 this partnership has facilitated four symposia, each SEAM containing an open invitation to artist practitioners, academics and the public, with an inherent orientation toward interdisciplinary exchange.
The body has been central to the multiple themes of the SEAM series, spawning conversations and convergences within and outside dance and movement alongside numerous other practices including architecture and interactive technologies. Convenors of previous SEAM symposia, Margie Medlin (Director of Critical Path) and Benedict Anderson (Director of CCDP, UTS), were joined for SEAM13 by live art practitioner Paul Gazzola, Critical Path’s inaugural Associate Artist (2012-13). They proposed the topical themes of Authorship, Curation and Audience.
SEAM13 opened at Critical Path’s harbourside home in The Drill Hall at Rushcutters Bay with three engaging keynotes. Artist David Capra, known for his public dance and banner waving works, set the tone for the weekend with a curious, often hilarious chat, accompanied and at times upstaged by his dog Teena. Former professional dancer Deborah Ascher Barnstone, currently a Professor of Architecture, delivered a thoughtful meditation on forgery in the capital A Art world. The incitement of the evening for me came from intermedia artist David Pledger. His provocation on the role and responsibility artists have in the curation of society bordered with the Convenor’s Statement which located arts production ideals of the 70s and 80s as shifting towards increasing “institutionalised authorship” [the usurpation of artists by producers and managers described by Pledger in his Currency House Platform Paper No 37, “Re-Valuing the Artist in The New World Order,” 2013. Eds]
Continuing through the weekend with a dense and diverse program of performative lectures, academic papers, conversations and performances, SEAM13 generated an atmosphere in which people from different disciplines and with varied interests created many junctions. For me, this triggered reflection on how dance and choreographic practices have changed radically over the past decade, especially in relation to other art practices and how they engage with dance, where dance turns into and folds together with other art forms and how such moves are initiated.
This turning and folding was apparent during the in-between of the symposium: talking when climbing the stairs from one session to another with a ‘trans-disciplinary artist researcher,’ queuing for the site-specific installation that was the delicious catering, or debating the role of audiences with colleagues who ‘fabricate interventions’ and ‘work across boundaries.’ After engaging in a conversation with an architect, an academic and a ‘keen researcher of the emergent and the unforeseen,’ a furrow appeared for me.
At many times during the three-day SEAM13 symposium, The Carpenters’ strange 70s song “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft…” came into my head. I was in a room bubbling with multi-disciplinary, cross-disciplinary, interdisciplinary, trans-disciplinary, inter-media practitioners. Working within, between, across and at the intersections and junctions were participants who identified as performing artists, architects, philosophers, producers, curators, academics, researchers, teachers, performative creative practitioners, experimental artists… and among them a few who identified as “dancer and choreographer.”
Dance has always been considered inherently interdisciplinary, so the notion of choreographic ideas and concepts translating to other disciplines is not new. Choreographic ideas threaded through SEAM13 presentations, mostly implicitly, but when explicitly referenced seemed slightly out of place. The two-week-long workshops that bookended the symposium provided local dance artists with explicit practical experience. Workshop facilitators Mette Edvardsen and Kate McIntosh both make performance work within a European context. Each artist comes from a traditional dance training background, although their current interests are often independent of the body, albeit still drawing on and expanding dance and choreographic principles. In conversation with some of the dance artist participants it seems that both workshops provided an opportunity to experiment with engaging individual movement and dance practices within a broader disciplinary conversation.
The focus for SEAM13, as expressed in the convenors’ statement, was “to give a platform for independent artists to formulate their autonomy and direction.” Interestingly, the majority of participants had some sort of affiliation with academic institutions while independent artists, specifically from the dance sector that Critical Path supports, were under-represented. Why this was so is not entirely clear as SEAM provides a forum for communication around expanded notions of dance and choreography, and the potential for complex interactions and processes to occur about the radically changed discipline of dance is great.
This underrepresentation of dance-in-dance is also apparent in the wider context. The Carriageworks, Dance House and Keir Foundation biennial Keir Choreographic Award dedicated to the commissioning of new choreographic work and promoting innovation in contemporary dance has recently been announced. It is timely and welcomed by most in the Australian dance sector, despite the debate around the ‘competition’ context. An interesting aspect of this new award in relation to “promoting innovation in contemporary dance” lies in the call for entrants: “professional artists with an established practice in other art forms are invited to propose a new choreographic idea.” Once again there is a crack where it appears that the gap between choreographic ideas and choreographic craft has widened.
Full of extraordinary diversity, albeit somehow strangely similar, SEAM13 provoked thoughts about the discomfort that comes when the border between forms is dissolved and the dilemmas that have to be faced by the discrete discipline of dance in this new world order of interdisciplinarity. Situated somewhere between brave and indulgent, SEAM was an audacious project exposing an opening which revealed a disconnect between dance and other disciplines outside the performing arts.
SEAM2013 Symposium and Workshop Series, Critical Path, Sydney, Nov 15-17, 2013
André de Ridder (conductor) and Liza Lim (composer), Tongue of the Invisible rehearsal
photo Klaus Rudolf
André de Ridder (conductor) and Liza Lim (composer), Tongue of the Invisible rehearsal
Today we are likely to hear the word “peregrination” as meaning “a meandering journey.” In 12th century Anglo-Norman and Middle French the word referred to one’s earthly journey towards heaven, a pilgrimage where the path, and perhaps even the destination, is uncertain. Liza Lim’s Garden of Earthly Desire and Tongue of the Invisible are musical peregrinations, in this earlier sense, through artworks that themselves depict winding paths through sensual landscapes in search of the spiritual.
Melbourne-based contemporary music ensemble Six Degrees will perform Garden of Earthly Desire at the upcoming Metropolis New Music Festival. “I’ve known the members of Six Degrees for many years,” Lim, in the UK, explained in a phone interview. “Many have played my music before in ensembles including the Atticus String Quartet and the ELISION Ensemble.”
Garden of Earthly Desire is an extended work for chamber ensemble based on the 15th century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. “It was written in 1988 and was the first big piece I wrote for the ELISION Ensemble. The Bosch was a jumping-off point for all of us. It’s very rich in its imagery…It’s made up of these incredibly detailed figures. As a viewer you start to create stories in the different figures. How did something get there? What’s the relationship between the parts of this strange, hybrid, animal-human?”
Everyone will be familiar with the paradox that travelling is really about finding places to sit down. Perhaps this is why “peregrination” also referred to a “resting place” or a “temporary habitation.” Lim’s response to the Bosch painting is full of such resting places where the audience encounters immaculately detailed and otherworldly figures before being hurried off to the next scene.
Though almost 25 years separate the pieces, Lim sees connections between Garden of Earthly Desire and Tongue of the Invisible, which is based on poems by the 14th century Sufi poet Hafiz. “Both are about intersecting pathways, creation of meaning as you journey through a landscape—a garden, say. A garden of images and ideas and emotions.”
In Tongue of the Invisible, recently recorded by Ensemble musicFabrik for the Wergo label, this sense of journeying is written into the libretto. “Jonathan Holmes chose the ghazals [a poetic form] and developed a grid-like structure where every square has a line of the poem instead of following the narrative form. Wherever you turn you can trace a number of different pathways through this grid. Wherever you turn is the poem, is this world of bewilderment and yearning. That was a huge influence on what I did musically as well.”
The result is a musical world where bewildering fury gives way to ecstasy, as in the first movement “At dawn I heard the tongue of the invisible.” A teeming wall of sound punctuated by swooping trills from the woodwind plunges into silence before tingling, shivering cimbalom and muted brass underscore a ravaged cry from baritone Omar Ebrahim. Other movements explore the tender pathos and patient yearning of Hafiz’s poetry, such as “Between the pages of the world (II),” where Ebrahim mourns the short lifespan of the rose that is then “pressed/ Between the pages of the world.” To sing Hafiz must be a daunting task considering the depth of the Qawwali tradition, but Ebrahim traverses Hafiz’s emotional world of rapture and longing with sensitivity and stamina throughout the almost hour-long work.
Hafiz’s poetic peregrinations may be considered a type of translation between worlds, of finding the term in one world for an object in another through a complex and paradoxical weave of meanings. “The Hafiz is a work that reflects on translation between one language to another, but more than that, between ways of being and ways of experiencing. What I really love about the poetry is how elusive it is. It seems immediate. There are these really earthy, sensuous images, but at the same time you can’t quite grab hold of it. It’s very complex and indefinable. He talks about drunkenness and wildness and in the next line something about being gathered up by divine love. You’re shifting registers of feeling and meaning all the time. As soon as you think you’ve got somewhere it’s subverted by the poetry.”
We might think of Lim’s compositions as a second level of peregrination between the artistic sources and the musical. But as in Hafiz’s poetry, the ecstatic is sought through contrasts and surprises. A remarkable element of Liza Lim’s music is the imaginative and unique ways it conjures feelings or scenes without the use of literal transcription or imitation. “I don’t think of my music as a transcription of anything, really. I’m not trying to map nature or a specific situation or emotion. For me, everything is much more elusive, more ambiguous. Yes, I’m inspired by many things that may be literary or from another art form. It could be anything that provides inspiration. I think through the medium of music these impulses start to speak a more abstract, musical language. Maybe there’s something about musical thinking by itself that goes beyond transcription. It’s about transformation.”
Part of the translation from the works to the music is achieved by the performers themselves, through the inclusion of different levels of improvisation. Says Lim, “I find that very interesting and it’s something that I tried to work with in the structure of the music and the setup of the ensemble in the way it combined improvisation and more directed things. It was about creating experiences for the group, for a community of musicians within the context of a performance.”
Liza Lim does not so much set words to music as use them to construct a journey whose truth is to be found between the musical lines, through a process of immanent peregrination. “I’ve always sought to write something that was quite physically immediate in the sense of performance, of gesture, of theatre and also in the sense of the mystic, for me. They are part of a continuum or of a whole picture.”
Australian composer Liza Lim is Professor of Composition at the University of Huddersfield, UK. Alex Ross, music writer for The New Yorker, listed Tongue of the Invisible as one of the CDs of 2013.
Sarah Rodigari, Filibuster of Dreams, presented at Arts House, part of the Festival of Live Art (FOLA), 13-30 March
photo Jessica Olivieri
Sarah Rodigari, Filibuster of Dreams, presented at Arts House, part of the Festival of Live Art (FOLA), 13-30 March
In “The trouble with tragedy,” 2014 Sydney Festival productions inspire Keith Gallasch to ponder contemporary meanings and forms of tragedy and their antitheses.
We pay tribute to Performance Space’s 30 years with Caroline Wake’s feature report on 10 glorious days of performance, conversation and celebration, including Mike Parr’s Daydream Island, a deeply disturbing performance in response to the plight of asylum seekers.
Our second feature, West, focuses on Riverside Parramatta and Campbelltown Arts Centre, their 2014 programs, challenges and ambitions, and Virginia Baxter reports on FUNPARK in which the Bidwill community asserted their dignity through art.
Live art, its practitioners and aficionados get right royal treatment with the advent of the first biennial Festival of Live Art (FOLA) led by Melbourne’s Arts House. John Bailey previews.
A sad farewell to James Waites, 1955-2014. About to go to print, we heard of Jim’s death. Jim was a brave and dedicated reviewer, blogger and a fond colleague. An obituary will appear in RT120.
RealTime issue #119 Feb-March 2014 pg. 4
30 Ways with Time & Space. Row 1 – Nadeena Dixon, photo Heidrun Löhr (HL); Clare Britton, Matt Prest and Leslie Britton Prest (HL). Row 2 – Victoria Spence (HL); Rakini Devi, photo Bec Dean; Dean Walsh (HL)
Row 3 – Hossein Ghaemi & collaborators, photo Nic Dorward; Vicky Van Hout & Thomas E Kelly, photo Lucy Parakhina; row 4 – Sandra Carluccio (HL); Simone O’Brien, (HL)
30 Ways with Time & Space. Row 1 – Nadeena Dixon, photo Heidrun Löhr (HL); Clare Britton, Matt Prest and Leslie Britton Prest (HL). Row 2 – Victoria Spence (HL); Rakini Devi, photo Bec Dean; Dean Walsh (HL)
Performance Space is an unwieldy entity: part site, part community, part sensibility and increasingly, a part of history. Its 30th birthday party was bound to be epic and indeed it was: You’re history! was a two-week program that included so many artists and events, it was possible to camp at Carriageworks for the duration and still miss something.
The festival combined three main programs: 30 Ways With Time and Space, a series of performances by artists who have been involved with Performance Space over the years; the Directors’ Cuts, in which former artistic directors were given an hour or so to do as they wished; and a series of new works by Tess de Quincey, Nigel Kellaway, Rosalind Crisp and Brown Council. On a typical night, one might arrive at 6.30pm to see a short performance in the foyer before moving into Bay 20 for a Director’s Cut and then exiting to find another short work underway. Once that had finished, you could see whichever new performance was on or wander into Bay 19 to watch Brown Council’s video artwork. The result was that Carriageworks was occupied and animated by Performance Space and its patrons for the entire two weeks.
Opening Night
On the opening night, Aunty Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor sang a welcome to country before co-directors Bec Dean and Jeff Khan gave their speeches while artist Sandra Carluccio launched tiny balsa planes—on which were written fragments from the archive—from the atrium. Jon Rose and Lucas Abela played a loud and aggressive set that successfully drowned out most conversations, an appropriately uncompromising gesture from an organisation that prefers to challenge rather than comfort its audience. Branch Nebula then took over the foyer to stage a live multiplayer game.
30 Ways with Time & Space
In the 30 Ways program, established artists tended to oscillate between reminiscence and re-enactment, sometimes within the same performance. While slipping in and out of old costumes and performances, Victoria Spence reflected on a vivid life, climaxing in an apocalyptic poem alternating between despair and ironic acceptance:
“We are culturing everything—ourselves, our veggies, our kids, unashamedly/ embracing our bacterial and microbial co-existence./ Culture is literally in our guts and we taste great.”
The audience helped Simone O’Brien dress and undress while she reminisced about infamously and spectacularly pissing from a trapeze in a mid-90s performance. For a moment it looked as if she might christen Carriageworks’ floor but she refrained. To the strains of “Fascination” Clare Grant and Chris Ryan, of Sydney Front fame, performed in trademark slips while they recalled touring Europe with pockets full of Thai baht. Two other Sydney Front members in the audience, John Baylis and Nigel Kellaway, laughed so hard they nearly spilled their wine. Another much loved ensemble, Frumpus, also dug out their favourite costumes, dancing in daggy red tracksuits before switching to demure embroidery in virginal white dresses, uttering snippets of dialogue from The Exorcist and finally morphing into the disappearing girls of Picnic at Hanging Rock.
In contrast, younger artists tended to riff on themes of inheritance. Matt Prest and Clare Britton are roughly the same age as the Performance Space, meaning that they—like me—were in primary school when the Sydney Front were performing. Together with their son Leslie, they hopped into a bubble and narrated their lives from 1983, allocating each year a minute, a memory and a song.
Post (Mish Grigor, Zoe Coombes Marr, Natalie Rose) staged another of their performances of wilful ignorance, allocating themselves two minutes to select a play from the canon, two minutes to prepare some notes on a theme from a well-worn list and two minutes to link them to the plot for the audience. The results were hilarious as the performers segued from Handke’s Kaspar to Casper the movie to the actor Devon Sawa. On another night, Applespiel staged a pantomime about how they saved Performance Space and thus rescued Sydney from eternal remounts of The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.
Themes of inheritance also arose in some of the Indigenous performances in the program. Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor appeared with her daughter Nadeena Dixon to give an account of growing up with the great activist Chicka Dixon (1928-2010) as father and grandfather. Vicki Van Hout and Thomas E Kelly duetted precisely in an hilarious dance of increasing discombobulation which definitely warrants a reprise. Other artists did not confine themselves to the half-hour time slot—Ryuchi Fujimara and Kate Sherman danced 30 duets over two days, always appearing when least expected in a variety of sites around the building.
The standout performance was perhaps Mike Parr’s Daydream Island, which took up where his performances of the early 2000s left off, returning to the subject of asylum seekers. Instead of being presented in the gallery, it was staged in a theatre with a seating bank, and instead of taking several hours, it took roughly one.
In front of a large screen upstage is a small table and a chair. Further downstage are five stools, where Parr’s assistants sit. Parr, wearing a lurid Hawaiian shirt, enters to the strains of “I Still Call Australia Home.” He sits on the chair with his back to the audience, however we still see his face, his assistant feeding the image live to the screen. A female assistant rises from her stool, goes to the table and wipes Parr’s eyebrow with iodine. She inserts a needle and thread and starts stitching. So far, so grimly familiar. But then she ties something to Parr’s face—a tiny plastic pig. The image immediately recalls the strange moment when the country was outraged about the export of live animals but silent about the outsourcing of its detention centres. Any such reading is undercut by the assortment of figurines that continues to be stitched to the artist’s cheek, neck and nose—there are animals but also superheroes.
The performance shifts when the stitching finishes and the face painting begins. Initially it is not clear what the assistant is painting—the face just looks like a lumpy mass. But it slowly resembles a Picasso and we are left to contemplate the paradox of being ‘defaced’ by portraiture. From here, Parr is helped from his chair and placed prone on the floor. His face is obliterated again, this time with Pollock paint drips. Suddenly his face becomes a tropical island and the shirt makes hideous sense. In the final moments of the performance, a plush pig toy wobbles past on wind-up wheels, nudging Parr’s sleeve on the way. One of the assistants announces that all this has been hogwash, that the dumb theatre has now come to an end, and that we can all go back to where we came from. Nearly everyone in the theatre exhales and heads for the bathroom or the bar.
Box of Birds, Tess de Quincey
photo Heidrun Löhr
Box of Birds, Tess de Quincey
New works: Box of Birds
The first week belonged to Tess de Quincey’s Box of Birds, starting in the foyer, with projections of white text (“Existence not true…”) sweeping across the grey floor. Slowly, spectators notice two figures, one on each side of the foyer, high above the audience on steel beams. They wear heavy grey felt blankets which hide their faces and restrict their movements, but perhaps also offer protection should they fall. This prospect of harm is slightly sinister, given the program states that the images are based on Anne Ferran’s photographic trilogy about female psychiatric patients in the 1940s. Soon we are enticed into Carriageworks’ corridors. Once again, we don’t always know where to look: peeking around a corner I discover a performer above me on a ladder, now noticeably birdlike in its movement. There are others. I’m no ornithologist but I think I see an ibis at one point, with a sweeping wing, and a lyrebird at another, with its long, fanned tail. In the confines of the back blocks of Carriageworks, we hear the words of Nietzsche embedded in Vic McEwan’s overarching soundwork with its cosmic and industrial resonances, birdcalls and woodwind warblings.
Back in the foyer, the felt birds are hoisted onto the beams again, scratching, teetering and nesting before coming to rest. Tess de Quincey has worked the spaces of Carriageworks perhaps more than any other artist, to the point where it’s impossible for me to observe parts of the building without sensing her performing presence. This immersive and evocative work added yet another layer to that palimpsest.
David Buckley, Nigel Kellaway, Brief Synopsis, the opera Project
photo Heidrun Löhr
David Buckley, Nigel Kellaway, Brief Synopsis, the opera Project
Brief Synopsis
The second week saw the premiere of The opera Project’s Brief Synopsis: a beautiful naked woman “of a certain age” brutally stabs a young man to death. Staged in Bay 17, the space looks as beautiful and as spare as I have seen it: the seating banks placed on an angle while the back doors are open so that we see through to the workshop. There is almost no set to speak of, only a few tables and chairs placed to the right. The performance begins with a long pause, before a car appears upstage. Several people with musical instruments get out, only to get back in. We suddenly become aware of a woman (Katia Molino), who has been sitting in the audience. She stands and walks upstage wearing a pair of high-heeled shoes and nothing else. The musicians enter again and this time they and their musical instruments stay, producing a richly textured score, oscillating between melancholy and subdued anger.
We proceed through a series of scenes that may or may not be in chronological order in which accusations are uttered at café tables between a former couple, Molino and Nigel Kellaway (the central figure and nouveau roman narrator whose nihilism and bitterness override his capacity to love). A young man (David Buckley, an impressive presence) is seduced and cruelly rejected by both. There are set pieces, as the actors and musicians stride invisible corridors, Kellaway, in black suit and silver heels, reciting arch lines about time’s inconstancy (texts borrowed from Heiner Müller, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Yourcenar among others). There are costume changes as Molino hands her young lover a new shirt, only to reveal that it is even bloodier than the one it replaces. There are also beautiful projected noir-ish images, including webs and night roads, by Heidrun Löhr, aptly symbolic if serving too often as mere backdrops to the action. Despite the variety of material, Brief Synopsis leaves me cold, though I suspect this is precisely the point.
New Works: danse (3) sans spectacle
Staged in the same space later in the week, Rosalind Crisp’s danse (3) sans spectacle was even more stripped back and yet had a degree of warmth at its heart. We enter a dark and silent space and seat ourselves on low, grey foam blocks placed in a rough semi-circle around the three dancers. Dressed in grey hooded tracksuits and bathed in a pale yellow light, they proceed to dance—sometimes by themselves, sometimes in tandem, but rarely if ever as a trio. Even when the three are moving at the same time, one always seems to be pursuing a different logic or phrase. The phrases themselves rarely come to completion. When you expect an arm to fully extend, it folds back in on itself; when you anticipate a rolling foot to bring a knee with it, you find the knee has been diverted elsewhere. There is no music, only breath and the occasional scrape of a foot. Our attention is held solely by the dancers’ concentration, apparent isolation and occasional collaboration. The piece finishes with a lone figure, dancing far from the circle. It’s as if having done away with every other habit of dance, Crisp can now do away with the audience.
New Works: This is Barbara Cleveland
The youngest artists in this part of the program are Brown Council and, like their counterparts in 30 Ways, they appear focused on history and legacy. Their video work, This is Barbara Cleveland, is about a mythic performance artist from 1970s Sydney. The work combines footage of the four Brown Councillors speaking about the neglected artist with apparently ‘authentic’ archival footage of Cleveland herself nude, blindfolded, smeared with blood or on a ladder. There’s every trope we’ve inherited from the performance art of the 1960s and 70s, re-enacted by four different bodies who start to merge into a single mythic star. The concept is clever, the images well composed and the point well made—all performance art and artists disappear, but some disappear more often than others.
Julie-Anne Long, Directors’ Cut: Fiona Winning
photo Lucy Parakhina
Julie-Anne Long, Directors’ Cut: Fiona Winning
The Directors’ Cuts
The Directors’ Cuts proceed in reverse chronological order. First up is Daniel Brine (2008-11, and now UK-based), who did not attend in person but put in a brief appearance at the beginning of his video 30 x 30: Thirty One-Minute Manifestos for the Next Thirty Years. Some manifestos were irreverent (post), others were more earnest (My Darling Patricia), some were immersed in pop culture (Georgie Meagher) and others wanted to unplug altogether (Alison Murphy-Oates). I was won over by Field Theory’s vision of a post-ironic, futuristic, DIY aesthetic.
The following evening Fiona Winning (1999-2008) delivers a performance lecture titled Nostalgia, Chance, Accident. There are cocktails as we enter and the stage floor is covered with posters from the period in which she was director. In a typically generous gesture, Winning narrates her time at Performance Space through the artists and people she worked with, some of whom also give brief and witty speeches (Richard Manner and Brian Fuata) or performances (Martin del Amo and Julie-Anne Long). From time to time, Arts NSW’s Kim Spinks—seated in the audience—and Winning re-enact phone calls in which they drolly discuss the relative advantages of moving Performance Space to possible premises in Paddington, Newtown and eventually Redfern. The evening finishes with a standing ovation for the longest-serving director in Performance Space’s history and overseer of the challenging shift to Carriageworks.
While the planned petting zoo of Angharad Wynne-Jones’ (1994-97) Parliament of Animals did not materialise, there were plenty of dogs. On stage with pet-free Wynne-Jones and media artist r e a were Harvey with dancer Dean Walsh, Charlie with performer Jeff Stein, and Flame and Trotsky with Tess de Quincey. De Quincey talks about the difference between dancing the environment and being danced by it while r e a speaks about the significance of kangaroos to her practice and her grief at their culling. Walsh demonstrates his scuba diving practice, relating it to his ecological concerns, while Stein talks about vet bills and philosopher Giorgio Agamben. During all this, Harvey wanders back and forth, pees on the floor, distracts Charlie and bothers Trotsky and Flame, who are kept on short leash. The canine chaos is precisely the counterpoint that the conversation needs.
Barbara Campbell, Directors’ Cut: Sarah Miller
photo Lucy Parakhina
Barbara Campbell, Directors’ Cut: Sarah Miller
Like Winning, Sarah Miller (1989-93) also foregrounds the artists with whom she collaborated. She has invited a number of them to imagine a past performance or speculate on a future one. Several young men deliver texts on behalf of Malcolm Whittaker (Team MESS) while another emerging artist, Nathan Harrison (Applespiel), conjures a false memory of Canberra’s Splinters Theatre performance he didn’t see. We see Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter in an SBS Carpet Burns’ short video by Kriv Stenders of Open City’s The Museum of Accidents (1991) with Christa Hughes, Tony MacGregor and the works of a host of Sydney visual artists. A highlight of this session is John Baylis’ reading from his performance diary. The event he reports sounds plausible at first but slowly reveals itself to be a fiction combining almost every legend you’ve ever heard about Performance Space—a tiny audience, a shy but magnetic performer, a lighting operator asleep at the desk, 12 bridal dresses dropping from the ceiling, an invitation to the audience to put them on, a collapsing roof, a flood of rain and a cannibalistic climax. Baylis stays after the show to ask the artists if they’d like to tour the work. “Yes,” they said, “but not through space, through time.” To which he says, “I think I can help.”
The evening concludes with artist and curator Brenda L Croft speaking about the Boomalli Cooperative and its relationship with Performance Space and Sarah Miller, an important reminder that the organisation did not always soley occupy 199 Cleveland St.
Some of the Directors’ Cuts were more low-key. Zane Trow (1997-99), spoke briefly, paid tribute to Performance Space board members and delivered an hour of his sound art. Unfortunately Noëlle Janaczweska (1987-89) could not attend; instead John Baylis engaged in an informative and amusing conversation with Christopher Allen, an early Performance Space administrator working with founding director Mike Mullins. This was followed by excerpts from Clare Grant’s DVD account of the vision and works of The Sydney Front (available from Artfilms). Barbara Campbell stood in for Allan Vizents (1986-87) who passed away during his tenure as director. With Campbell, Derek Kreckler, Annette Tesoriero, Jim Denley, Sherre de Lys and Amanda Stewart performed an engaging, neatly staged selection of Vizents’ witty performance texts which satirically and sonically unpick commercial, bureaucratic and everyday idioms. In total contrast Nick Tsoutas (1984-85) threw a party, a celebration of what is to come—if trepidatious about the Abbott government—complete with live Rembetika music, octopus, ouzo and dancing.
Mike Mullins (1980-85) delivered a lecture in which he reminded us that Performance Space was “born in rebellion,” recounted battles won and lost over “new form” in the mid 80s, decried the rise of creative producers and pointed to the advantages Melbourne’s Arts House has over Performance Space because it has its own home. He declared that while Performance Space is not about a particular space it ultimately needs a designated one.
Screenings
There were also two screenings. To see the video documentation of Post-Arrivalists’ infamous 1994 performance Lock Up (in which they locked in and abandoned their audience), at first I have my head measured and shortly after my wrist cable-tied to a chair and a paper bag placed over my head. Though the footage was screened, it was impossible to see even when the paper bag was removed, thanks to the music, smoke and tasks set for the audience. In this way the group privileges the event over its evidence, the provocation over its representation.
By contrast, director and editor Karen Pearlman and producer Richard James Allen’s Physical TV documentary, …the dancer from the dance, for me lacked self-reflexivity and risked self-absorption, but much of the audience seemed to love it. The film centres on interviews with dancers about their motivations, some insightful, some not, some with all too brief glimpses of their work. Interspersed with these is footage of Pearlman and Allen across the years dancing with their children: a celebration of the family’s affection for the artform and for each other.
Television Behaviour Studies, Pia van Gelder, Tele Visions
photo Lucy Parakhina
Television Behaviour Studies, Pia van Gelder, Tele Visions
Tele Visions
You’re History! coincided with the Tele Visions festival, staged to mark the end of analogue television. On the opening night, Lara Thoms takes over one of Carriageworks Tracks together with 86-year-old Joy Hruby, who has been broadcasting her community TV show Joy’s World from her Matraville garage for more than 20 years. We are cast as the live studio audience to Joy’s last ever analogue broadcast. Thoms has done little more than place a different frame around Joy’s work—albeit an elaborate and resource-intensive one that involves a green screen deployed throughout Tele Visions—but it is done with great care and generosity and Hruby clearly enjoys the limelight. Elsewhere, Kate Blackmore and Frances Barrett were watching every single episode of The Simpsons back to back. I don’t get to see them in person but I log on to the website one morning to watch the live stream. The web cam seems to be installed just above the television, so I can hear the program but not see it. Instead I watch Blackmore napping on the couch and Barrett softly chortling. It feels intimate and intrusive, even though I have been invited.
Ending and beginning
The entire glorious event comes to a close on a Sunday night, with Dean Walsh, Stereogamous and Paul Capsis in the final 30 Ways performances. It’s been two weeks and 30 years, and time has begun to bend, stretch and recede. Just two weeks after You’re History! an email from Bec Dean lands in my inbox, advising Performance Space members that she is leaving her position as co-director to begin a doctorate. While Dean remains a curator at large, Jeff Khan is now sole director of Performance Space, which makes the memory of this festival that much more poignant. It was the end of an era and we didn’t even know it. Isn’t that always the way?
Michael Dagostino, Made in Australia exhibition by Jamil Yamani
courtesy CAC
Michael Dagostino, Made in Australia exhibition by Jamil Yamani
A very happy Michael Dagostino, Director of Campbelltown Arts Centre, enthuses about the first annual program he feels is really indicative of his vision, constructed, he tells me, with “the new life and energy” brought to the arts centre by Jenn Blake, Head of Program and Production, “who has invigorated the performance program, alongside Visual Arts curator Megan Monte who is setting a really interesting direction around emerging practices. Also, we’ve boosted our residency program quite dramatically.”
Former director Lisa Havilah put Campbelltown Arts Centre on the map, ambitiously engaging the Centre with the local community and state, national and international artists. Dagostino has sustained Havilah’s vision of a vibrant, across-the-arts, inclusive contemporary arts centre (as she has since achieved with Carriageworks) with a commitment to nurturing long-term development of new work, and is now clearly making it his own.
Making work with artists
Michael Dagostino was, he says with a smile, “once upon a time a practising artist but I was always organising exhibitions, either my own or curating shows for friends or writing proposals to galleries. So I slowly transitioned across.” At Casula Powerhouse, another major arts centre in Sydney’s west, he installed shows, became head of exhibitions and did some curating. For Parramatta City Council he established the Parramatta Artists Studios and a small gallery as part of the Creative Cities push. “The biggest thing I took from that experience was being able to assist and to create work with artists. That’s really important for me. I’ve always placed artists at the centre of programs.”
Being the centre
Responding to a not uncommon question about where outer city and regional arts centres see themselves situated, Dagostino thinks it over before responding: “At Campbelltown I guess we perceive ourselves as being on the edge. So we want to offer artists something that they really can’t get anywhere else, especially assisting them to produce new works in the early stages through residencies. We are on a geographical edge but we are creating our own centre. There’s a big perception about Western Sydney that everything is far away but I’ve lived there all my life and I’ve never been far away from anything, because it’s all centred around where I live.”
With a background in visual arts, at CAC Dagostino has had to deal with dance, performance, live art, music: “It’s been a really steep learning curve. It still is. I get out and experience as much as I possibly can across all disciplines and meet as many people as possible. The biggest culture shock was the very different histories and languages that operate. My biggest challenge is linking people from, say, the dance world to the visual arts world, seeing where the differences are—because there are so many similarities— and trying to break them down. But we’re never about creating one homogenous art genre, one big, grey mass of art.”
Investing long-term
At the core of the CAC vision is investment in artists’ projects, taking many from the early stages through realisation, often taking two to three years, especially for performance: “The long gestation period needs to be considered and we actually invest in that time.”
In 2014 CAC is establishing a partnership with Zodiak Center for New Dance in Helsinki, “putting Australian artists in an international platform and exposing them to other contemporary works. We wanted to put artists together just to see what the results were in the first stage and in the next, hopefully profiling them in international platforms or a major Australian festival.”
Dagostino is particularly keen for CAC to engage with young people in the region: “When I first came to the centre, I didn’t see many young people…mid-teens to 23-24. They weren’t using the arts centre, not engaging with the work. So we’ve put together an exhibition framework, The List, curated by Megan Monte, that asks artists to engage with young people, their issues, their politics, with what’s happening at the moment, to get them to ‘own’ Campbelltown Arts Centre. We’ve engaged 12 artists including Shaun Gladwell. He created a work during C*town Bling (2005) when the Centre first opened and he wants to look at the skateboarding park in that work, how it’s changed, how some kids might still be skating there and talking to them.”
Other artists include Marvin Gaye, previously Spartacus Chetwynd, a London-based visual art/performance artist shortlisted for the 2012 Turner Prize: “Her work is kind of mad and very participatory. The last work she created was a sort of manic mediaeval play. Australian artists Abdul Abdullah and his brother Abdul-Rahman will be working with young local boxers to create a video work that also involves a performance. They’re both amateur boxers as well as being visual artists. Abdul’s work is very much about cultural stereotypes in Australia— the perception of violence in boxing and young male culture.”
Activist artist Zannie Begg will work with young people at Reiby Detention Centre. Abdul will work with kids at the local training centre in Minto. We actually want them participating where they’re most comfortable and then, slowly [bring them to the Centre]… It’s a long-term strategy.”
On the streets where you live
Also staged where people live is the second phase of Temporary Democracies, a live art event set in empty homes in a suburban street undergoing renewal and population change (RT117, p32): “It was a fascinating experience in 2013 for local residents who may not have come into contact with artists and contemporary art. It breaks down barriers. There’s been a lot of support from the local Men’s Shed, building a food van with Robert Guth for Temporary Democracies last year, and now they’ve come on board for another project. In March this year we have a major partnership with the MCA and C3West, the men are assisting on building an amazing sculpture which deals with the retrieval of cars from the Georges River.”
Making music
CAC has long committed itself to contemporary classical music. Dagostino is now adding diversity with Indigenous country musician Roger Knox: “In the first week of his residency he’ll be mentoring young musicians from the emerging Aboriginal country music scene in Western Sydney. In the second week, he’ll be working on his new album. We’re setting up our theatre in a way that is really conducive to recording so people can come in and record a part or a whole new album. Artists work extremely hard for short periods of time to create new work. So we’re really excited to be able to offer these opportunities.” As well, musician and composer Simon Barker will be working with a number of musicians from different cultures on a CAC commissioned new work as part of the Sacred Music Festival. The music commission is annual.”
Dancing partners
As well as the Finnish collaboration mentioned earlier, CAC has invited Daniel Kok (Singapore) and Luke George to remount works by each—an opportunity to see George’s About Face which premiered in Melbourne (see RTonline) “and also one of Daniel’s pole-dancing works—he’s re-positioning pole dancing as a contemporary dance form. And then we’ll commission them to make a new work together for 2015.”
CAC also runs a program with NAISDA “working with local kids to create pathways. We’re investing quite a lot in it this year, taking some of them to NAISDA for a week to see what it’s like to be a student. We’re hoping they’ll eventually create a whole range of new dances that are Campbelltown based.”
The 2014 dance program segues nicely into 2015: “Much of the CAC dance program is focused on the relationship between dance and music, culminating in a major festival for next year called I Can Hear Dancing, which was initiated by the Centre’s former dance curator, Emma Saunders.”
Chiara Guidi, Jeff Stein will produce Jack and the Beanstalk
photo Heidrun Löhr
Chiara Guidi, Jeff Stein will produce Jack and the Beanstalk
Performance
In the CAC performance program, a major collaboration between Chiara Guidi of Societas Raffaello Sanzio and Jeff Stein will produce Jack and the Beanstalk for children, a co-production with Insite Arts set to premiere at Campbelltown in June. Theatre Kantanka’s Club Singularity enacts the bizarre meeting of a group of people who have strong issues about society and travelling in space: “The Macarthur UFO Society were doing the annual exhibition of their telescopes in the Backspace when Kantanka were here and they just started talking.”
Indigenous performance poet Romaine Moreton is at the centre of 1 Billion Beats, “a performance and installation about the colonial gaze on Aboriginal culture and people, turning it on its head, re-owning the gaze, and asking really tough questions. The next stage of development is in March and we’re hoping to get it up by the start of 2015.”
TV Moore
A major exhibition, Rum Jungle, will feature the works of video artist TV Moore on multiple screens: “His work has such immense power. He’s fascinated with contemporary culture and the way it produces ‘events.’ It’s a major survey show using the whole gallery, featuring existing works and new commissions. Some are in-your-face, others are very quiet: they’re the ones that I keep replaying, that keep me up at night, keep me thinking.”
Robert Love, director of the endlessly busy Riverside Parramatta, is passionate, argumentative and often very funny about the arts in Western Sydney (he has a great stock of telling anecdotes). Given that the greater part of Sydney lies in the west and a third of the NSW population lives there, it grieves him that save for his venue, with its own limitations, no art centres or companies of substantial scale are located there. Instead, for audiences in the west, there’s the “lunacy of travelling great distances to the city. No option.” But he has plans.
Love, like Campbelltown Arts Centre director Michael Dagostino, lives in Sydney’s west. He insists, “Until you begin to live there, walk up the street, talk to people, see what’s going on, you can’t respond to the stories that are there.”
Of Western Sydney’s very productive arts centres, including his own, Love says, “we do have people making a significant impact but it should be at a different level.” Compared with the State Government’s total investment in Sydney proper, Love declares that the $3m funding of the west, reckoned to be 1%, is altogether inadequate. Local government is a significant investor, but private donations are rare when there is little of scale to attract them. Love’s background in the arts is extensive lending considerable weight to the ideas he has for Parramatta and the west.
Love majored in drama at UNSW, founded and worked with Toe Truck, a leading theatre in education company, from 1976 to 1980, working in part with theatre innovator Nigel Triffit, creating works with lightweight aluminium sets (“we learnt a lot about pop-rivetting”) and getting run out of a country town unappreciative of a show about teenagers, sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. The local headmaster provided the petrol for the brisk exit. From the 80s to the late 1990s Love administered the Seymour Centre and Nimrod Theatre simultaneously for a volatile two-year period, was General Manager of the State Theatre Company of South Australia and then Sydney Theatre Company.
Love says that his first connection with Parramatta came when he managed the STC’s touring program before becoming General Manager, “in the days when there was an actual commitment to expand audiences in Western Sydney, which we did for three years with an intensive program by reducing our Sydney one.”
Appearances & realities
A mere glance at the Riverside Theatre’s 2014 program, with a couple of David Williamson plays, several Shakespeares and a Russian ballet company might suggest that the Centre plays it safe. “I resisted doing things like Annie for a long time, but an audience of 10,000! Eight thousand saw Hairspray last year.” While the co-production of Annie will draw audiences to Riverside, appearances are deceptive. Love is firmly committed to encouraging and supporting contemporary dance, a disability arts program, filmmakers, community groups, physical theatre and emerging theatre companies. The result is considerable diversity which, says Love, reflects the communities of Parramatta: “When someone asks me, who our audience is, I say, audiences.”
Working models
Riverside Theatres operates as producer, co-producer, production supporter and enabler, host and venue for hire, as well as running workshops, seminars, exhibitions and partnering festivals. As Love says, “We do lots of things. As for producing, we used to do more, but it’s very costly for us, but this year we’re 100% producing Alana Valentine’s Parramatta Girls, which premiered at Belvoir in 2007”—but never played in the city of the story’s origins. It has a strong cast, including Christine Anu and Annie Byron.
For three years Riverside Theatres has operated the True West Theatre Company (see Teik-Kim Pok’s review of Finegan Kruckemeyer’s The Violent Outburst That Drew Me To You, page 38) with the support of Arts NSW funding which was not granted for 2014. Love is unhappy: “There is no strategic sense or continuity. It’s funding the dots, not funding the lines, or thinking about legacy and where it goes.” Riverside also lends support to companies like the much applauded Sport for Jove which commenced its career performing in the Blue Mountains and Sydney’s west.
On the screen
Love has a screening program which he’s eager to develop. Not only does it show the UK’s National Theatre streamed productions but also supports local filmmakers. Writer, actor and co-director George Basha and fellow director David Field’s new feature film Convict (2013; their first was The Combination, 2009) couldn’t get a cinema release so Love arranged a two-week season attended by over 2,000 people. Love is impressed by the film: “It’s low budget but they’ve never made Parramatta Gaol look more interesting. The lighting is terrific, it’s shot beautifully and there are some great faces [provided by local auditions]. We want to provide artists with opportunities.” He said of this audience that it was clear by the way they came into the foyer they’d never been in an arts centre.
Disability & creativity
Riverside also invests in disability arts with their Beyond the Square program, “which started before me but we shifted it from visual arts more towards performance, movement and music. We received a bit more funding from Arts NSW in the last three years allowing us to appoint a full-time creative director, Alison Richardson, and employ an actor with a disability, Gerard O’Dwyer (Tropfest, Best Male Actor, 2009 in Be My Brother).”
S, CIRCA
photo Darcy Grant
S, CIRCA
2014 program
The 2014 Riverside program is a big, diverse mix of mainstream and innovative productions, which include a new work from Kim Carpenter’s Theatre of Image, Monkey: Journey to the West, “featuring Blue Mountains musicians and the local parkour group 9lives,” directed by John Bell and on its way to the Opera House in 2015. There’s a big NZ musical, The Factory (and a big Pacific audience for it, says Love) about the Samoan migrant experience; Parramatta Girls; physical theatre companies CIRCA and Stalker (with the visually striking Encoded); It’s Dark Outside (virtuosic puppetry from WA in an affecting play about dementia); Tectonic Theatre in The Laramie Project; Steve Rodger’s Food (an engaging romantic comedy about food and multiculturalism) from Belvoir and Force Majeure; Deckchair’s The Magic Hour, featuring Ursula Yovich with some very Grimm tales; and a concert from contemporary music paragons Ensemble Offspring.
Then, says Love, there are all the hirers of the venue, which include the Sydney Music Festival, a celebration of South Asian music which will sell out 12 concerts in the large theatre. There’s also the very well-attended productions of the Bangladeshi theatre group Natuki, who commission plays, collaborating with non-Bangladeshi writers and performers.
Dancing with FORM
FORM is a vital organisation for dance and not only for Western Sydney, programming dance works and workshops. Love tells me, “It came to us from Ausdance, we ran it and then it incorporated to stand on its own. We continue to host the company, provide office space and computers and assist with theatre space.” Love says that while the audiences are not big yet the work is important.” FORM’s Dance Bites program for 2014 includes Samantha Chester’s Safety in Numbers, Perth choreographer Sue Peacock’s Reflect, Flatline’s Sketch, Trio for three (Matt Cornell, Josh Thomson and Miranda Wheen) and Tess De Quincey & Co artist Linda Luke in her solo work Still Point Turning with composer Vic McEwan.
The future in the making
Love’s goal is “to get a resident performing arts company of scale and significance and the financial capacity to be here for at least three to five years to service Parramatta, Western Sydney and regional NSW. We’re getting some traction on it. We don’t want to run it. We will support it. It needs to respond to the diversity of the region, must do educational work, be self-sufficient and have an element of populism, otherwise it will die. I think that can be done.”
Love’s other goal involves rebuilding the Riverside Theatres “with a master plan to take it up one or two storeys, with view of the river and a better relationship with the park, so that it becomes a community hub.” He sees the current building as being like a railway station “where you wait on the platform to go on a trip,” but “the journey should start when you see the building and you see yourself in it.” This has to be “if the council believes Parramatta is a global city.”
New money, new hope
James Packer’s $60m art gift (his much debated “thank you” to Sydney for the chance to build the Barangaroo casino resort) gives $30m of it to Western Sydney over 10 years. The Daily Telegraph modestly claimed: “Mr Packer’s $30 million allocation to western Sydney comes after The Daily Telegraph’s Fair Go for The West campaign found that only one per cent of the state’s arts budget is allocated to western Sydney” (Nov 12, 2013). The funds will provide, says Love, “great opportunities, not just a splash for cash.”
Love argues that the NSW Government “should then double its grants to Western Sydney to $6m annually to match the Packer funds—it would make an enormous difference. Resurrect a university performing arts school [Love regards the closure of the University of Western Sydney performing arts degrees as a tragedy for local career development] and you start up a healthy arts ecosystem. I keep telling governments it’s easy; you can only win.”
Reanne Shephard, The Social Revolutionaries, Mt Druitt Press Conference, FUNPARK
photo Heidrun Löhr
Reanne Shephard, The Social Revolutionaries, Mt Druitt Press Conference, FUNPARK
I may not have paid such attention to the item on ABC News on Friday night (Feb 7) featuring NSW Community Services Minister Pru Goward had it not been for the fact that we’d recently visited the suburb that was the subject of the grim report in which the solution to perceived problems of welfare dependency involved the threat to deprive people of their homes.
Bidwill was the location for FUNPARK, one of Sydney Festival’s projects in Western Sydney. Creative Director Karen Therese, herself a sometime local, brought together a team of city and Western Sydney artists with Indigenous and other elders to celebrate what is, contrary to reports, a vibrant local community.
Entering the car park of the mostly disused Bidwill Park Shopping Plaza we choose from a menu of events. At one end of this arena a queue is forming for Harley Davidson Wild Trike rides. Meanwhile, groups of young Indigenous boys and girls cautiously follow the directions of a senior dancer from Bangarra. Bunny Hoopster leading her team of Hoopaholics segues into an explosive dance display from Lucky and Afro Contemporary followed by a choreographic parkour portrait of the area from Team9Lives.
Team9Lives, FUNPARK
photo Heidrun Löhr
Team9Lives, FUNPARK
FUNPARK is the latest in a series of creative ventures in Western Sydney that provoke communities to elaborate on their lives, in turn introducing the wider community to the particular pleasures and anxieties of living there. Recent works such as Rosie Dennis’ Driven to New Pastures (2011; RT101) deal directly with the sense of displacement in relocation as the NSW Government enacts its plans to overhaul the public housing estate. Other works such as Campbelltown Art Centre’s Temporary Democracies (2013; RT117) built on this, inviting artists to work with locals to mark the dislocating sense of being forced to up stakes and move from a nurturing local community to an unfamiliar, more fragmented one.
In a large tent erected in the centre of the car park Darug elders gathered to discuss the history of the area, deeply concerned about education, one recalling when he was a boy there was a shed for Aboriginal kids alongside the school and separate tanks for drinking water.
In the local church hall, seven fired-up local teenagers presented the Mt Druitt Press Conference (directors Karen Therese, Katia Molino). Calling themselves The Social Revolutionaries, these young people—confident, socially engaged and talented—have grown up dealing with prejudices about Bidwill and therefore themselves. Seated at a long table and speaking in turn about their lives they seamlessly shift gear into beautiful singing, rousing speechmaking, re-enactments (singing with mum while housecleaning), dancing (a girl demonstrates a style from her South American heritage, the movement pausing moment to moment as her male partner speaks of his life) and role-playing (how to deal with a dance floor rejection when the girl learns you’re from Bidwill). Far from downhearted, the Social Revolutionaries demand equitable treatment, “a revolution” even. Caught in Sydney’s blind-spot they deplore being “surrounded by ignorance.”
Natalie Rose & Shaun Millwood, Girls Light Up, FUNPARK
photo Heidrun Löhr
Natalie Rose & Shaun Millwood, Girls Light Up, FUNPARK
As well as its revolutionary and celebratory aspects, FUNPARK took some lateral turns to highlight specific local issues. In Cuppa Tea with Therese, a number of us visited a long-term local resident in her neat Housing NSW bungalow and heard about her years of community involvement in the area and her concerns for the future. I imagine Therese rolling her eyes at these latest media reports with their focus on littered streets and upended shopping trolleys to characterise her home suburb. Local Indigenous elders who are already run off their feet are no doubt preparing for another onslaught. The sense of a media beat-up is reminiscent of the so-called ‘Bidwill Riot’ of 1981, reprised in Girls Light Up, a raucous ‘rock opera’ led by post’s Natalie Rose and a team of collaborators from the community. The Bidwill Riot in reality involved a fight over a boy between a couple of girls that somehow attracted the attention of the media and police who eventually turned it into a full-scale TV catastrophe.
Minister John Dacey, The Occult of Bidwill, FUNPARK
photo Heidrun Löhr
Minister John Dacey, The Occult of Bidwill, FUNPARK
I also took the tour enticingly titled “The Occult of Bidwill” led by Minister John Dacey from the Uniting Church. This turned out to be a journey of discovery into the many ‘hidden’ instances of misguided bureaucracy that have gradually seen the local supermarket rendered an empty shell. Owned by the Department of Housing who decided in 1997 to dispose of it as “non core,” the building has been the subject of multiple reports and worthy proposals for remodelling, none of which has ever materialised. And so it sits, ghostly, inhabited by one lonely kebab shop, while locals go without a convenient local shopping centre. Hardy souls venture into the bottle shop across the car park to pick up their bread and milk.
Finally we gather in the evening on the banks of the nearby underpass to watch a video (Darrin Baker, Vic McEwan, Philip Jopson) projected onto a screen over the entrance. We hear from people who may represent some of the targets of Minister Goward’s report—people, for various reasons, reliant on the social welfare system who are nevertheless productive and positive about their role in this place that Karen Therese suggests is “without a voice.”
Understandably, many locals see the government as the architects of dysfunction when it comes to some of the recurring issues in this area. Projects like FUNPARK go some way towards restoring the community’s faith in itself, giving it the strength to fight the easy stereotyping to imagine all manner of possibilities.
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Sydney Festival, Karen Therese and the Community of Bidwill, FUNPARK, creative producer Karen Therese; creative team included Boris Bagatini, post, The Social Revolutionaries (Daisy Montalvo, Scott Johnathon, Cianter, Rvee Dela Cruz, Jithin Matthew, Reanne Shephard, Andrew Llamas & BJ Barnes), Bangarra Dance Theatre, Blacktown Art Centre, Clytie Smith, Bunny Hoopstar, Nick Rathbone Hogan, Team9Lives, David Capra, Jodie Whalen, Applespiel, Province, Darrin Baker, Katia Molino, Therese Wilson and many members of the Bidwill community. Bidwill Shopping Centre Plaza, 18-19 Jan
“The trouble with tragedy is the fuss it makes
About life and death and other tupenny aches”
Samuel Beckett
post, Oedipus Schmoedipus
For several Sydney reviewers post’s Oedipus Schmoedipus was their worst night in the theatre, or already the worst production of 2014. This wasn’t the majority view but the show did generate a modicum of public discussion. For me it raised issues about the changing relationship between theatre, contemporary performance and live art. Affectively, the show moved me from giggling at sense-making nonsense to sadly reflecting on the vulnerability we shared with each courageous volunteer performer.
In recent years the STC, Malthouse, Belvoir, Le Boite and MTC (the latter two featuring well-received seasons of independent works in 2014) have begun to address the changes that theatre is going through as the notion of what constitutes performance broadens. Some of that mainstream embrace was prompted by the encouragement of special funding from the Australia Council for large companies to take on emerging artists and companies several years ago. In the meantime contemporary performance has been expanding into live art, game-playing theatre, one-on-one and participatory performances and combinations thereof. Sydney Festival featured My Darling Patricia’s The Piper and post’s Oedipus Schmoedipus, both of which invited the public to perform in their productions.
Post’s participants, a different bunch of 25 people each night over many nights, were trained up early on the day of performance for three hours on where to move, costume choices and how to follow their cues from video monitors hanging above the audience. The participants performed admirably, hamming it up, singing, dancing, ‘dying,’ looked happy and generally from those we spoke to loved the experience, although they had to miss seeing the controversial, bloodletting opening in which Mish Grigor and Zoe Coombes Marr, in white, murder each other or suicide over and over, invoking the blood-letting legacy of thousands of years of male writing. One reviewer labelled the volunteer participants “meat puppets.” However, My Darling Partricia’s The Piper was not condemned for similarly manipulating its volunteers—children and accompanying adults responding to instructions coming through earphones.
While not as taut as Who’s the Best (STC, RT104) or mind-bendingly delirious as Everything I Know About the Global Financial Crisis in One Hour (Belvoir Downstairs, RT101)—the strings of word association were variable in quality and overlong—Oedipus Schmoedipus was a delight. The quiet charisma of the two performers, the relentless silly searching (“What is death?”: Every cliché imaginable!) and a growing sense of poignancy as we grew to know the faces and bodies of the volunteers made the work a memorable exemplar of the incursion of new practices into the mainstream.
The Shadow King
photo Prudence Upton
The Shadow King
Malthouse, The Shadow King
The Tragedy of King Lear is not short on laughs either; Malthouse’s version of Shakespeare’s play is full of them, but with the same ironic, mocking and often bitter intent, if here self-deprecating as well, portraying an Aboriginal community turned against itself.
The Shadow King (creators Michael Kantor, Tom E Lewis) is a melodramatic transposition of Shakespeare’s pre-mediaeval setting to an Indigenous community fighting over the exploitation of mineral wealth on Aboriginal land. These are modern people but their lives are still imbued, if in varying degrees, with spiritual attachment to the land. One of them, the embittered bastard Edmund (Jimi Bana), is bereft of these feelings and intent on destroying the culture that stands in the way of acquiring the land for himself—using his charm, sex and violence. When he plays demanding, panicky little boy to his mother, you’re not sure if his cunning or insecurity is on show.
In this scenario, the character Kent has been replaced by Edmund’s mother (Frances Djulibing), a clever move which recognises the role of female elders in Indigenous life. When Edmund, with Goneril [Jada Alberts] and Regan [Natasha Wanganeen] capture Lear and the mother, they discard her dilly bag, the reticule of sacred objects and knowledge. Appropriately it lies on red sand of the forestage next to Lear’s abandoned crown.
Despite the simplifying of Shakespeare’s plot and the intricacies of his characterisations, this version manages to retain a lot of its weight, partly because we know it so well, partly because The Shadow King fascinatingly blends Shakespeare’s poetry with Aboriginal English and the cadences of un-surtitled Aboriginal languages, conveying some of the otherness of the classic and making modern sense of Shakespeare’s essential wordplay. The adaptation also deftly contextualises the transposition: Goneril’s husband is in gaol, there is violence in town and a young girl murdered—for which Edmund frames Edgar. The latter appears disguised in full ceremonial attire, although its veracity cannot be guaranteed: a delirious Lear utters, “He’s the real thing!”
This production is cartoony, melodramatic, showbizzy (replete with songs) and forcefully projected (resulting in degrees of unintelligibility despite the head mikes). Tom E Lewis as Lear first appears in white suit, black cowboy shirt and golden crown, playing straight to the audience like a club entertainer, charming, volatile, his anger really felt, the cracks in his composure rapidly widening, his movements increasingly manic.
The daunting set (Paul Jackson, Michael Kantor, David Miller), swivelling slowly and rumbling towards us on tracks, suggests the base of an enormous mining crane. With the lowering of a metal wall-cum-screen to its top, film projections evoke humble homes and backyards, the night-time bush road on which the mad Lear is pursued by headlights, the vast landscapes of disputed land and the massive cliff on which Edmund and Edgar’s mother thinks she is standing, expecting to step to her death.
Rarriwuy Hick is a strong Cordelia, too briefly seen. Drag performer Kamahi Djordon King (See RT113) is a fine youthful Fool, delivering old and new witticisms and insults with verve as well as transforming himself into hilarious versions of Regan and Goneril in the mock trial which Lear conducts. Lewis is wonderfully affecting when, with flowers in his hair, he recognises his failings. Frances Djulibing’s Mother with her quiet physical presence and low-key delivery offers a telling counterpoint to Lear’s mania. And she sings sublimely. As does Djakpurra Munyarryun whose haunting voice comes to the fore in the production’s moving climax.
Although Shadow King is Lear condensed, ramped up and located very specifically in 21st century Australia (going further than most transpositions of classics) it retains its primal power while firmly reminding us that Aboriginal Australians are indeed “Shadow Kings,” at risk of having their land taken from them by their own kin or an ever encroaching mining industry and opportunistic politicians. “Tragedy” in Shadow King is personal, familial and above all cultural.
Mitchell Riley, His Music Burns, Sydney Chamber Opera
photo Louis Dillon-Savage
Mitchell Riley, His Music Burns, Sydney Chamber Opera
Sydney Chamber Opera, His Music Burns
“Tragedy” these days is so broad a notion that its meaning has become much diminished, simply focusing on the loss of life and of potential: the younger the victims the more tragic. The notion has also had to cope with 20th century Existentialisms: either all life is tragic (no God, no afterlife, we’re all cut short) or is not at all tragic—face up to that and you’ll live authentically.
The Sydney Chamber Opera double bill of Gyorgy Kurtag’s …pas a pas – nulle part (1993-98) and George Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill was one of the most satisfying events in the 2014 Sydney Festival. Before witnessing the cruelty in Benjamin’s take on the Pied Piper we were faced with existential anxieties and their wickedly funny repudiations of the kind only Samuel Beckett can conjure and Kurtag make musical.
Simply but highly effectively staged (designer Katren Wood) with rows of empty seats, Sarah Giles’ direction of the Kurtag places us face to face with a lone, tall, angular young man seated in an auditorium. Here, in 29 brief scenes in which he endures a great range of emotions, he sings poems penned by Samuel Beckett in 1937-39 and others translated by the writer. Giles has wrought a thoroughly convincing performance from baritone Mitchell Riley as he stares, grimaces, falls asleep, ponders, gives up and bounces back with comic verve and sung lines that wax lyrical, angst and leap into falsetto. He’s partnered by percussion and strings, the percussion played solo (Timothy Brigden) on a wide array of instruments providing the other principal voice in the work with its own reveries and shocking alarums underlining or counterpointing the singing. Moments of tedium alternate with despair in the face of death which can only be laughed about—which is apparently why Beckett wrote his poems, for the coping.
By setting the work in an auditorium that mirrors ours, turning the work’s silences into blackouts and having the text in super-sized surtitles, Giles adds another layer of anxiety, about the value or not of art. What does the young man make of us and our performance—our watching him? Does our own visit to the theatre likewise include moments of not being there, of nodding off (“sleep till death/ healeth/ come ease/ this life disease”) and being jolted awake by tragedy and “the fuss it makes.”
For Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill the setting is the same, but long shafts of lighting (Matt Cox) transform it into sequential spaces in which the two singers, one as the Pied Piper (Ellen Winhall) and the other as the Mayor (Emily Edmonds) narrate their story—in a style distinctively the librettist’s, English playwright Martin Crimp—as an eerie dialogue. Again art and death meet: the Piper declares his power: “With music I can make death stop.” Of course the opposite is also true, “his music burns.” The Mayor, for his treachery must lose his own child, who will become but an apparition on the hill where the Piper has taken him. Moreover, the Crimp-Benjamin version of the tale suggests that the ‘rats’ are a rejected and doomed human minority: a mysterious tale for children becomes allegorical for adults and a tragedy of another kind. As the interplay between singers proceeds this world is transformed by betrayal and loss, the chairs rearranged, stacked, put away, the world/the theatre closed.
The singing by Winhall and Edmonds is extraordinary, the demands of range, key shifts and dramatic needs well met and theatrically right. The physiognomy of Winhall’s Piper transforms eerily as the lighting re-sculpts her and her voice, ever lucid, climbs higher and higher, or growls in a warning lower register. The Mayor’s devious air of reasonableness and then her dawning panic is firmly realised by Edmonds. As ever, Jack Symonds conducts with exactitude and passion, has coached his singers brilliantly and collaborated finely with Sarah Giles. If ever a production warranted a return season, this is it. The large audiences were rapt.
Am I, Shaun Parker & Dancers
photo Prudence Upton
Am I, Shaun Parker & Dancers
Shaun Parker & Dancers, Am I
I enjoyed Shaun Parker’s Am I—the taut, often gestural ensemble choreography, the singular use of light and the boldness of tackling very big ideas neatly laid out for us. But the ideas were worrying, the show’s text adapted from Rick Hanson and Richard Mendius’ Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love and Wisdom (2009) with additional material from Am I’s dramaturg Veronica Neave. If the book’s title suggests a scientific confirmation of the good things about life, the show does not.
The absence of question mark in the title is odd, but the work consistently states that the answer is already a given. We are stardust: we come from nothing on our way to nothingness with little consolation in between. The performance, in which our creation, evolution and passing is narrated and danced, is initially contemplative—our host, Indian guest artist Shantala Shivalingappa, introduces us to the nothingness of our origins and sings sublimely, evoking Eastern cultures’ meditative inclinations.
But the greater part of Am I is not at all contemplative. It is beautiful to witness: on a large wall tightly ordered light bulbs flicker, pulse and pattern, momentarily blinding us with the Big Bang (as the narrator utters: “nothing prepares to become something”), evoking the sun and the stars, framing our evolution and abandoning us to the fading light of entropy (designer Damien Cooper). The highly structured dancing, much of it focused on hands and arms, traces our manual capacity to make and invent. Four dancers in black form a tight cluster; the wall behind glows benignly. A furious dance of arms and hands rapidly forms abstract and then more literal shapes: fingers, like tiny humans, walk along arms; the wings of a large bird take flight; hands form an intricate, living totemic column. Such magical mimcry is a consolation of art. It celebrates observation, skill and especially cooperation.
But Parker is not going to let us off the existential hook: cooperation, although in ample evidence in Am I’s very creation, is not finally worthy of celebration. The dancers now wield metre-long chrome rods, limb-extending tools that engender new cooperative creations, this time tautly geometric. These however become murderous weapons, not least in the hands of a dominant, twirling warrior figure (Julian Wong), despite the narrator’s claim that our reptilian brain functions for survival more by “avoidance than approach.” In this world sexual coupling is a passionless, comical imposition, love is the product of a brain chemical, God has many names including Tweeting, without which “men are truly lost.” Josh Mu’s raw solo supplication to a non-existent God is a highlight, contrasting with the tight regimentation of the body elsewhere.
The final group dance is watched by the narrator from one side and by the warrior (like a Neitzschean Overman, challenged but never defeated) on the other as if the pair represent Knowledge and Power observing the raw dance of humans to African-like percussion in a reminder of our origins. The movement is harmonious if furious, upbeat if unsmiling and visibly exhausting—the dance of those living only in the moment? In her final declaration, the narrator offers us a passive view of ourselves, “I am nothing but a listener, everybody is one,” while a melancholy violin sings, atypically Western in the score and oddly sentimental given the hard lesson Am I is teaching us. There is no smiling Buddha in Am I.
By the end and despite its physical and visual magic, I felt Am I short on mystery and openness: a closed book in which culture is mechanical and deterministic. The emotional upside to the work is the music by Nick Wales, performed by the composer with a small group of artists atop the box that contains Am I’s lighting cosmos. Ranging stylistically and with considerable interplay from Armenian to Indian and other forms, the music offers transcendence, connoting passion, contemplation, pain and joy. We don’t know the meaning of the words sung or the sounds played, only that a creative mind has offered a spirited counterpoint to Parker’s dark view of human evolution in an unresponsive universe. Tragedy has no place in Am I, nor in Beckett. But Beckett laughs.
Dido & Aeneas, Sasha Waltz and Company
photo Jamie Williams
Dido & Aeneas, Sasha Waltz and Company
Other productions
I watched Sasha Waltz and Company’s Dido and Aeneas with interest rather than excitement, admired the fluent movement in the relatively brief if magical underwater scene, relished the singing, thought the orchestra excellent if sounding a shade mellow and enjoyed moments of the dancing with its clear inheritance from Pina Bausch, both in limpid solo turns and deft crowd management but lacking Bausch’s incisive dramatic sensibility and her capacity to generate spare, enduring images. My Darling Patricia’s The Piper overflowed with unregulated invention, making for an overly complex rendering of a simple tale. Ghenoa Gela’s performance as the Bear/Piper, the work’s puppetry and its audience participation made the production attractive but not as strong as it should be.
The Sydney Festival serves many audiences and programs many productions. Of the other shows I saw I particularly enjoyed the superb Hilliard Ensemble, Mike Patton with Ensemble Offspring in a magnificent performance of Berio’s Laborintus II and Tyondai Braxton’s immersive The Hive (see Gail Priest’s report on MONA FOMA). Marrugeku’s Gudirr Gudirr was an inevitable success after its winning appearance in 2013’s Dance Massive (RT114). FUNPARK by Karen Therese and the Bidwill Community in Sydney’s West revealed a maligned community’s capacity to assert its dignity through art. Overall I had a good festival experience, a thoughtful one with welcome moments of transcendence.
ASIO surveillance photo, Frank Hardy, George St Sydney
courtesy Australian National Archive
ASIO surveillance photo, Frank Hardy, George St Sydney
An intelligence agency out of control. Australian artists defending totalitarian regimes. Volunteer spies led on for decades and then left in the cold. Haydn Keenan’s four-part documentary Persons of Interest offers a wealth of cautionary tales whichever way you look at it. Glib confidence or conspiratorial fears are rarely far from the frame when the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) is discussed in public, so Keenan is to be commended for putting together a complex portrait. Unfortunately some of the reactions to his series during its broadcast on SBS last month highlight a distinct lack of critical nuance in our contemporary culture.
Keenan’s premise is simple enough—hand four aging radicals their declassified ASIO files and garner their reactions. Then tease out the files to tell the story of post-war dissent in Australia and governmental efforts to contain perceived political threats. Three of the episodes focus on Communists: Roger Milliss and his deceased father Bruce, former Monash Labor Club Maoist Michael Hyde and the Australian writer Frank Hardy. The fourth subject is the inimitable Gary Foley, a central figure in the Indigenous land rights movement of the late 1960s and early 70s.
The files reveal a depth of surveillance that is at times almost comical. Foley sneaking off for a dirty weekend with a leftist in the early 70s is cited as evidence of a Black Power-Communist Party plot. Frank Hardy’s drunken night out with Soviet poet Yevtushenko and a former Bond girl—complete with a drunken unsuccessful pass by the Russian writer—is described in breathless detail. Every car trip across town by certain persons of interest is recorded in minute detail.
Then there’s the footage. Keenan was spared any reliance on historical re-enactments by the availability of hundreds of hours of ASIO surveillance films in the national archives. We see May Day parades of the 1950s, anti-Vietnam War protests of the late 1960s and Communist Party congresses across the decades. At times the footage is almost Warhol-esque in its unrelenting gaze. There are countless hours of footage of the entrance to the Australian Communist Party’s Sydney headquarters, the street remaining fixed as fashions, cars and faces transform with the passing years. Unfortunately the demands of broadcast television prevented any lingering on this footage and the mute history it contains. I kept imagining another kind of film, or video installation, compiled from this material that dwelt on the sheer fascinating banality of the surveillance images.
We certainly saw enough footage to convey the breadth and depth of surveillance carried out by ASIO in the post-war era, and much of the press coverage that greeted Persons of Interest focused on this disquieting aspect of the series’ revelations. In contrast, Gerard Henderson in The Australian saw fit to leap to ASIO’s defence, extolling the agency’s work against those who “want to overturn the state” (“Totalitarian slurs ignore the truth of ASIO activities,” January 11, 2014). Henderson correctly points out that the Soviets were running a spy ring in 1950s Australia and prominent figures involved in the Labor Party were covert members of the Communist Party—all of which the series details. But Persons of Interest also shows how an intelligence organisation operating without external oversight, under a Menzies Government intent on milking fears about Communism to maximum political advantage, became a deeply paranoid, highly politicised and extremely invasive spying machine. While some of those under surveillance expressed a desire to carry out violent political actions, the files also clearly demonstrate that ASIO was incapable of distinguishing subversive threat from legitimate political dissent or even cultural curiosity. Prominent film critic David Stratton, for example, earned a file in 1969 after visiting the Soviet Embassy to obtain a visa to attend a film festival.
Mrs Petrov at the Beach with an ASIO officer
courtesy Australian National Archive
Mrs Petrov at the Beach with an ASIO officer
Stratton’s case was not atypical. ASIO opened files on literally hundreds of thousands of Australians in the post-war era, especially in the arts. Everyone from novelist Christopher Koch to actor Peter Finch appears in the archives. Merely knowing a person of interest was enough to earn a file, creating an ever expanding net of surveillance. The result? A pretty fundamental misreading of what was happening in Australian society from the 1950s to 70s and a colossal waste of time, effort and taxpayer-funded resources. It’s ironic that Henderson is offended that Persons of Interest received public funding when the millions ASIO mis-spent spying on prominent writers, painters, actors, politicians, judges and unionists who have contributed immensely to Australian public life doesn’t seem to bother him at all.
There is another cautionary tale here though, which has received less attention in the more liberal press. As the stories in Persons of Interest show, much of Australia’s hard left in the post-war era was beholden to Moscow, with creative figures like Frank Hardy defending the indefensible with the invasion of Hungary, the suppression of the Prague Spring and Stalin’s mass slaughter of Soviet citizens. When the Communist movement ruptured in the wake of the Sino-Soviet split of the late 1950s, figures like Bruce Milliss passionately defended Mao’s even more murderous regime. We see Bruce’s son Roger bitterly denouncing the “filth” on his ASIO file regarding his personal life, yet neither he nor his wife appears to reflect upon the work they did for the Soviets, which extended to propagandising for the regime in Moscow while working for Soviet media. They are rightly appalled by the extent to which ASIO pried into and recorded their private lives, but why do they appear so forgiving of regimes that were far, far worse in their crimes?
The most striking lesson offered by Persons of Interest—and the one least discussed in the press—is the danger of blind faith in any doctrine, regime or organisation, whether it’s ASIO or the Communist Party of Australia. All these organisations are essentially bureaucracies and all bureaucracies have a natural propensity to become self-justifying and self-perpetuating. They also render many of those within these organisations blind to anything that does not conform to their worldview. Australian Communists refused to see what was unfolding in the Eastern Bloc and Mao’s China, just as ASIO interpreted every post-war social movement as evidence of a global Communist plot.
ASIO files remain classified for 20 years (until recently it was 30), so Persons of Interest could not touch on the agency’s contemporary activities. Suffice it to say ASIO’s budget is now at record levels and its legal powers far greater than they were in the post-war decades. Anyone can now be secretly arrested for a week without charge with no right to silence. If Australia has avoided the worst forms of political repression it’s not because the likes of ASIO have protected our interests, as Gerard Henderson would have us believe. It’s because some in our legal, political and cultural professions have had the courage to watch the watchers, and help keep their powers and paranoia in check. Organisations like ASIO are arguably necessary even in a democracy. What’s less in doubt is that publicly funded documentaries like Persons of Interest are essential.
Persons of Interest, four-part series, director Haydn Keenan, producer Gai Steele, Smart Street Films, SBS ONE, 7-28 January 2014.
Hans Op de Beeck, Parade, 2012 courtesy the artist and of Ron Mandos Gallery, Amsterdam/Rotterdam
I give you no build-up—and certainly no crescendo—when I state upfront that the musically oriented ‘film art’ works in the Crescendo exhibition at ACCA do not contribute to the intersecting fields of musicology, music history or the politics of music. They certainly merge cinema, theatre, music and opera—but in ways so blunt as to short-circuit any imaginative consideration by artist or audience as to what music can specifically bring to such expanded/meta-media works.
Focusing on three of the exhibition’s ‘moving image’ videos which lean heavily on musical incorporation—and which have played extensively overseas, attracting a trail of dumb criticism by visual art reviewers attempting to discuss the works’ use of music—I aim to explicate what these works belie through their fawning and flaunting of musical sensation, music history and musical attitude.
Forensically, one can audit and diagnose the works in Crescendo as accurate reflections of the curatorial templates which sow the contextual fields for these works to thrive. Hans Op de Beeck’s Parade (2012) looks like a trailer from SBS World Movies celebrating diversity and community. A ‘parade’ of people from all walks of life move in controlled groups from left to right across a huge stage housed in some 19th century theatre. It’s full of cute deus ex machina reveals, with digitally composited layers and changing background scrims (the look of old theatre craft meets the pull-down menu of digital cine-fx), and it coyly plays with ‘the viewer’ by situating you in one of the onscreen plush red chairs. Parade espouses this limp politics of aesthetics (of both traditional and virtual art making), causing the momentum of its parading folk to feel smarmy, forced and fatuous.
The music for Parade is an equally limp brass-band composition that daintily skips along, lip-curled, embracing its po-mo light pomposity. Its repetitive ditty harmonises with the clinical precision by which the ‘demographic’ caricatures perambulate across the stage like flaneurs trapped in a new ad campaign for, well…anything. Parade is symptomatic of a fine art anthropology which generates ‘drag documentaries’ which lay claim to representing the socio-cultural breadth of people who comprise everyday life. Old people on mobile phones; a playful youth scout group; a troupe of airline flight attendants; a toughie with a pit-bull; a happy toddler. But in this sanitised domain of a mock public park, we get an antiseptic, market-researched depiction more closely aligned to those faceless people depicted ‘inhabiting’ the urban-planned spaces of architects’ concept billboards for new developments. It’s frightening.
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Julian Rosefeldt, My home is a dark and cloud-hung land, 2011; courtesy the artist & Arndt Berlin
Julian Rosefeldt’s My home is a dark and cloud-hung land (2011) scares in a different way. The title refers to a famous German poem (I’m told in the film); the film unfolds as a textual investigation (always flatulent and grandiose) of the power of the forest in the German imagination. Again, the film told me that. In fact, anything in the film, I’m told about. By an introductory narrator; by a painfully upper-middle class couple who quote German poetry; and by a bombastic arsenal of Steadicam tracking shots across extended theatrical set-ups and gathered ‘creative’ personnel, emblematic of the ‘inventive’ mise en scène which is now de rigueur for any trumped-up contemporary opera production included in international arts festivals worldwide. (There’s even a scene with a guy onstage wielding a chainsaw in front of opera literati.)
My home—like the bulk of the works in Crescendo—speaks to an unbearably turgid Germanic mind-set, the kind that arguably still controls the political rhetoric of European art biennales, which compresses Schopenhauer and Beuys (they’re really not that different) into a supposedly meaningful rumination on art, beauty, life and politics. Not surprisingly, My home originates from an exhibition about the German imaginary (How German Is It? Judisches Museum, Berlin, 2011), so everything in the work reeks of that discursive domain: its ironic, deconstructive view of nature (expensively filmed in sumptuous clichés so it’s neither ironic nor deconstructive); its radicalised embrace of artifice (rendered conservative by employing tropes identical to the most mundane music videos and beer advertisements); its pan-mythological sweep of cultural iconography referencing the German forest (flattened by the staging and direction which is on par with reading a Wikipedia entry on the topic). And there’s opera, to be sure. Bad, crappy, faux-Romantic, not-even-camp, time-warped, unmemorable. I felt like I’d taken Mogadon and was watching Ken Russell’s Mahler (1974). In a bad way.
Guido van der Werve’s Nummer veertien: Home (2012)
courtesy the artist
Guido van der Werve’s Nummer veertien: Home (2012)
More expensive production values are discreetly touted in Guido van der Werve’s Nummer veertien: Home (2012). It’s another textual poem (like just about all film art of the last decade) that blithely goes about its cinematic business as if film history had not already investigated the terrain half a century ago. The premise of Home is simple: an introductory title tells the sob story of Henri Chopin’s heart being in Warsaw while his body is in Paris. Cue mournful narrative of displaced cultural identity and selfhood following the tragic separations caused during wartime. Throw in references to Alexander the Great, and stir gently to suggest how Europe’s historical despotism has created its modern diasporas. Top with a ‘performance art triathlon’ by van de Werve who moves from Warsaw to Paris through elliptical and ‘surreal’ sequences to ferry a cup of earth from Chopin’s home in Warsaw back to his grave at Père Lachaise in Paris. I felt like I was either reading van de Werve’s submission to produce the work or his acquittal on receiving a grant. The cinematic or video-specific experience seemed incidental by comparison.
The original score (often performed live onscreen in extended takes) is more engaging than the scores for either Parade or My home, but over 54 minutes it remains stubbornly monotonal, creating an emotional flat-line which neither deepens the triathlon performance nor textually relates to the complex chromatic nature of Chopin’s eclectic compositions which site him between arch Romanticism and a sprouting Modernism. The result is a series of chamber choir passages which signpost the narrative structure without either deep parallelism or audiovisual counter-point. While I suspect Home is check-boxing Straub/Huillet’s rigorous The Chronicles of Anna Magdelena Bach (1961) and Chantal Ackerman’s haunting D’est (1991), its unremitting elegiac tone nullified the project’s purported aims, swamping it with forlorn humanist sighing.
Frankly, Home, My home and Parade sound like the work of deaf artists, proving that while contemporary visual artists are treated as privileged soothsayers whose worldview is automatically revelatory, their audiovisual sensibilities are often on a par with the most prosaic and predictable of intelligentsia aesthetes. In their artsy posturing and tasteful soundtracks, these key works in Crescendo betray the influence of the ‘pseudo-cinema’ which has affected video art since the 90s: the transposing of cinematic form (or more properly, its tropes, allusions and stylistics) into the increasingly high production values of ‘film art.’ But maybe these artists don’t care about cinema anyway (or music, for that matter); and maybe I’m applying an inappropriate critical perspective on these exemplars of ‘film art’ instead of listening to the authorial voice of their core creative figure, the ‘artist.’
Then again, maybe I’m tired of contemporary artists being accorded greater skills, perception, aptitude and poetic verve than the producers and practitioners of mass-produced industrially dictated, chaotically collaborative entertainment forms like cinema. The voguish channelling of ‘film art’ into internationalist contemporary art exhibition evidences the diminishing perceptiveness of current museographic institutions who claim contemporaneity without evaluating the tiresome slightness of so much ‘video/film art’ second-guessing curatorial zeitgeistism. How mean-spirited of me to watch and listen to these works with the presumption that they might be informed of the legacy of ‘open-text’ audiovisuality in landmark music-and-politics films like Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex (1967), Godard’s Sympathy For The Devil (1968), and Straub/Huillet’s Othon (1970).
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ACCA, Crescendo, curator Juliana Engberg, artists Dorothy Cross, Rodney Graham, Markus Kahre, Hans Op de Beeck, Julian Rosefeldt, Ana Torfs, Guido van der Werve, ACCA, Melbourne, 20 Dec, 2013-14 March
“Overburden” is what miners call the stuff that is on top of the coal they want to get at. In Norie Neumark and Maria Miranda’s exhibition CoalFace at the Library Artspace, Overburden is the title of a photograph of a lush Gippsland paddock bordered by towering power lines. The melancholic rage that settles over this word/image mismatch is the key signature for the show that had its beginnings in a month-long residency in Beijing in 2012.
The artists’ anxiety over air quality, registered daily on a phone app, resulted in a video showing them on a Beijing street in tight close-up, heads wrapped in fur-lined hoods, faces covered in alarming black filtration masks. Only their eyes are visible and warmly expressive—puzzled, curious, friendly, sometimes fierce—in their invitation to engage and to wonder about the dense smog around them. Back in Australia, they set out in pursuit of Gippsland’s brown coal industry and CoalFace details their increasing fascination with the material itself.
Brown coal is beautiful stuff. It is rich, dark, velvety, crumbly and delicious-looking. Video performances show traces of the artists’ process: meditating on the material, its ancient, elemental ‘is-ness,’ the fact of it and its allure, as well as the troubling consequences of digging it out of the ground to power our cities. A pile of coal on the floor of the gallery next to a miniature yellow dump truck is much larger than the toy and the poignant disruption of scale points obliquely to the monstrous scope of open-cut mining operations in Gippsland. One video—showing the artists sitting like gods or giant children, pushing the toy truck back and forth between them—also plays with scale in an arresting way. The actual yellow trucks carry 300 tonnes each and Paul Cleary (author of Mine-field The Dark Side of Australia’s Resources Rush, Black Inc 2012) calculates that current plans for the Queensland Adani mine will extract 60 million tonnes a year, equivalent to 200,000 yellow trucks which, if lined up bumper to bumper would stretch 3,000 kilometres.
CoalFace, Norie Neumark and Maria Miranda
courtesy the artists
CoalFace, Norie Neumark and Maria Miranda
Elsewhere a plinth displays several lumps of brown coal alongside a cutting of a juicy green plant in water that stands in for the prehistoric lepidodendron forests of which the coal is composed. Neumark called this the “petting zoo,” encouraging visitors at the opening to handle the coal and make marks on the gallery wall. Coal’s mark-making capacities are also to the fore in the piece that brings Loy Yang Power Station in South-Eastern Australia and Beijing closest together in After Tan Ping, a series of folded paper hangings on each of which a single line is painted in one stroke from top to bottom, using ink made from the coal. The ancient Chinese painting style and the ancient Australian mineral resource collide: a gesture and a core sample; an aesthetic response to a beguiling material and an urgent environmental question.
CoalFace is quietly powerful in its address to the damage caused by the mining, export and use of brown coal, but there is something more complex and tender at its core. It made me feel my human relationship to the earth—the “rich dirt” as Neumark calls it. I came away thinking, almost dreaming, of the dense, dripping temperate rainforests of Gippsland; their slow processes of laying down change; their lush indifference to small-scale, individual humans. Perhaps it is in re-igniting this love (I can’t think of a better word) that CoalFace makes its strongest appeal against the depredations we collective humans are wreaking on our only home/our own/only body.
It is now possible to know almost everything about our existence via information gleaned from the objects we’ve touched, websites visited and purchases we’ve made. Our presence is constantly being recorded via a network of private and governmental security cameras and we aid this digital monitoring by using GPS-equipped devices and posting social media updates. Given the implications of these aspects of contemporary living it’s utterly amazing that we don’t throw our devices off the nearest bridge and lock ourselves away in a padded Faraday Cage.
But we don’t. Rather we tend to compartmentalise (Facebook good, video surveillance—ah, whatever) and keep functioning regardless of the digital panopticon. Trace Recordings, curated by Chris Gaul and Holly Williams at UTS Gallery, highlights these invasive forces but tempers the potential for panic attacks by providing playful methods of subversion.
The work that clearly encapsulates the extent to which our identities are exposed is US-based artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s Stranger Visions (2012). From discarded chewing gum, cigarette butts and stray strands of hair, Dewey-Hagborg extracts DNA samples creating a possible genetic profile. With this information she generates a 3D print of the litterer’s face. The masks hover on the wall above snapshots of the samples and their locations. These disembodied people are strangely familiar yet not quite specific enough to be anyone in particular, the ambivalence almost triggering a slide into that old ‘uncanny valley.’ Small cards provide genetic information—racial type, gender, eye-colour, nose size. Dewey-Hagborg also includes a potted history of the ancestry type—when a racial strand emerged from chaos and the potential genetic health issues it might face. These accompanying facts offer an interesting sense of the big picture—the hand of fate adding an even greater sense of vulnerability to these ‘strangers.’
The curators are particularly interested in how contemporary surveillance techniques relate to portraiture and have included two other works focusing on the face. Memory (2013) by Shinseungback Kimyonghun (Korea) is a framed digital tablet which uses facial recognition software to record the visage of everyone who stares at it. These faces are then combined over time to create a universal human. Subtle for an interactive piece (you just have to trust your face is in there melding with thousands of others), the tastefully misty portrait is an everyman/woman also with a hint of that uncanny slippery slope.
New York-based artist Adam Harvey’s CV Dazzle (2013) aims for anonymity through hyper-individuality. Harvey offers workshops in face painting designed to confuse facial recognition programs. By creating unexpected and idiosyncratic geometric patterns on key points of your face, the software is supposedly unable to get a fix. Harvey proposes that by making yourself more obvious in the analogue world you might be able to avoid detection in the digital.
Denis Beaubois, installation view
photo David Lawrey, courtesy the artist
Denis Beaubois, installation view
Two other pieces were impressive for their conceptual poetry. Denis Beaubois showed two works from 2000 in which surveillance technology is configured, using mirrors, so that it is forced to interrogate its own image. It’s a closed-loop of paranoia or narcissism or maybe both. Matt Richardson’s Descriptive Camera (2012) captures an image and sends it off to the internet ether where anonymous human subjects write text descriptions of the scene. These are sent back to the device which prints the information on a hacked receipt printer. In such a visually focused reality this anti-pictorial outcome and the complex mix of digital and analogue (human) processing is as amusing as it is poignant.
Trace Recordings is an exhibition of significant scale featuring 10 artists who tease out multiple complexities of the state of surveillance. However, rather than leaving feeling twitchy, I was excited about the intelligence of these artworks and the future subversions that will arise in resistance. Or maybe I’m not so worried because I’ve just pre-ordered my Philip K Dick Scramble Suit on eBay.
While Trace Recordings worries at the all-permeating forces of technological surveillance, Joyce Hinterding revels in the equally ubiquitous, yet natural force of electromagnetic energy. In her exhibition at Breenspace she presented elegant, large-scale spiral diagrams made from ink and conductive graphite. When amplified by small tabs of circuitry they can channel the hum of the Earth.
Several of these works are displayed as ‘unplugged’ wall pieces (the Arts Santa Monica, 2011 and Heide Museum, 2010 series) accompanied by two large table-top designs, SoundWave: Induction drawings 1 & 2 (2012), that are sonically active. By tracing the designs with your hand, or even just hovering above the surface, your body and the force become connected and the ever-present deep hum shifts pitch, buzzes, spits and crackles. It’s a completely meditative work, playable like an instrument, encouraging a kind of Tai Chi dance of the fingers.
Contrasting with the bold graphite spirals are five other works on paper, The Diffusion Reactors series (2013), using an electrostatic carbon and oil mix to create delicate organic swirls and constellations. These are mute but audio potential is implied by the circuitry, inviting you to imagine the magical sound of these alluring landscapes.
After experiencing Hinterding’s beautifully crafted audio paintings I’ve decided to hold off on the Faraday Cage for a while so I can enjoy the Earth’s electromagnetic song a little longer.
In December last year, Bamboozled took out the top prize at Sydney’s Tropfest. There was a very brief moment of celebration. And then came the accusation: this film is homophobic. Or should that be transphobic? Nobody seemed quite sure. But social media went off as accusers and defenders started to spit out their definitive responses.
One disgruntled writer published her threat to “think twice about tuning into Tropfest next year.” Her reason: “The jokes [in Bamboozled] are derived from the shock that a man slept with another man.” Another writer—who identified as a friend of the film’s director Matthew Hardie—argued that the backlash was unfair because Hardie and others involved in the film “are good, kind, decent human beings.”
The ensuing argument was incredibly boring. Bad film or good film? Either Hardie was guilty of homophobia/transphobia, or he wasn’t. Now, which side will you choose to be on…?
Observing this argument (and while fighting off the temptation to get involved), I wondered how everyone who had to have their say seemed to have missed (or ignored) the debate about positive and negative representation in media texts. In the midst of trying to discredit or praise a film and its director, why was there no mention of this?
This issue has been widely explored in Media Studies and other cultural disciplines for many decades. Here, we find an abundance of discussions about what constitutes positive or negative in terms of representations of disability, age, class, race, gender as well as sex and sexuality. And one of the simplest conclusions to have come out of all this is that a single media text always has multiple meanings. The historical and cultural location of the text and its audience always affect the reading. It is, therefore, impossible to claim that any media text offers definitely a positive or a negative representation.
The argument about Bamboozled failed to pick up or explore this. Those who participated in this argument showed they were capable of having opinions about a film, but they did not show any ability to analyse the historical and cultural specificity of that film.
Instead, the debate ran its course as an overly simplified two-sided rant. Bamboozled had to be homophobic because it made fun of a man who had sex with another man. Or, it had to be a great movie because it was made by Hardie who has many gay friends—look here’s a picture of Hardie in a gay nightclub so this must prove he and his film can’t be homophobic!
In seeking to defend or attack Hardie and his film, the social media mafia also failed to identify that this was not the first time we have addressed the question of whether a text represents non-heterosexuality in a positive or negative way. They quite simply forgot—or failed to know—the queer history on which they were commenting.
The popular television show Queer Eye for The Straight Guy (debut 2003), for example, was considered by many to be influential in finally opening up homosexuality to a wider public audience. I recall at the time of its popularity how so many of my undergraduate students would cite this show as paving the way for gay liberation. Decades of struggles had somehow disappeared with the emergence of this one television show. But whether the men in this show offered ‘positive representations’ of homosexuality was questioned. Some argued that the flamboyant personalities of the more dominant characters in fact reinforced the stereotype that all gay men are effeminate.
The character of Jack in the series Will and Grace has been analysed in the same way. Will might be considered the ‘normal’ gay man, but Jack seems to represent the stereotypical gay man. Does this mean that one is positive and the other is negative? No. It means that Will is able to be seen as a positive representation of homosexuality in a culture where being ‘normal’ is good.
Jon Inman’s character Mr Humphries in the 1970s British sitcom Are You Being Served? was one of the first ongoing representations of homosexuality on television. But would such a character be considered as funny or as acceptable today within a gay culture where the ‘straight-acting’ gay man is preferred over the ‘queen’?
Queer as Folk (2000-2005)—another seminal contemporary gay television show—had a bit of everything. There were drugs, gay parenting, promiscuity, love, underage sex, lesbians, queens and even a few straights. The UK version was so popular that it was later turned into an American show that lasted for five seasons. But this show was also seen by some as further alienating gay people from the mainstream because of its daring approach.
Equally, representations of transpeople have been the subject of much debate. Some argue that the characters in Tootsie (1982) and TransAmerica (2005) made issues of gender and sexuality more visible and to a much wider audience. Others see these films as creating humour or fantasy when the real lives of transpeople often include intense medical scrutiny and daily discrimination.
Such debates can never define a character as a positive or negative representation of homosexuality or transgender. But the representations—and the responses to them—can give us some idea about how we understand homosexuality and transgender today, and how we might expect non-heterosexuals to behave.
So, is Bamboozled a homophobic or transphobic film? This is quite simply the wrong question to ask. And it’s impossible to answer definitively—no matter how much we rant in our social networks. Instead, we could discuss the representations of sexuality as they appeared in this film with reference to cultural and historical contexts.
We could consider how this film plays around with the importance of sexual identity in early 21st century cultures. We could consider, as Hardie has insisted we should, how the film responds to the media’s treatment of homosexuality as something to snigger at. We could explore how the film draws on an emerging discourse of trans-rights or trans-acceptance. We might think about how this media text differs in its representation of sexuality from similar representations we might find in reality shows like Big Brother. We might even raise questions about who has the right to speak for homosexuals and transpeople.
But fighting to destroy or save the reputation of a single film or its director is just tedious. It’s a playground battle which indicates to me that the fighters—both the accusers and the defenders—are not interested in locating media texts in culture. They’re only interested on being seen to be on the side of the ‘good.’
Gideon Obarzanek and Sydney Dance Company dancers in rehearsal
photo Peter Grieg
Gideon Obarzanek and Sydney Dance Company dancers in rehearsal
The Sydney Dance Company’s forthcoming triple bill, Interplay, features new works by artistic director Rafael Bonachela, former Frankfurt Ballet soloist and collaborator with William Forsythe, Jacopo Godani (interview RT101) and ex-Chunky Move artistic director Gideon Obarzanek. Obarzanek’s piece is L-Chaim!, the Jewish toast ‘to life,’ involving the entire company of dancers and one actor who will be mostly present as a voice, but will eventually appear on stage with the dancers. When I spoke to Obarzanek he was about to go into rehearsals with the company with two weeks already under his belt from last year.
“The general gist of L-Chaim! is that the dancers are attempting to make a contemporary dance piece. ‘The god of theatre’ or ‘Wizard of Oz’ (played by the actor) interrupts, interrogating them about themselves and what they are doing—the meaning of the dance. And in doing so, this outsider inadvertently undermines it making it difficult for the dancers to perform.
“On the surface, the outsider seems quite nice, but is a bit nasty and depressed. In the end the outsider is asked to descend and dance in what becomes a big musical number, celebrating aspects of life that are difficult to intellectualise, things that you have to participate in to fully understand.”
Obarzanek’s interrogation of the modus operandi of contemporary dance has manifest in many forms throughout his career, from surveying audiences about what they like and making a work ‘to order’ (Australia’s Most Wanted, 2003), to an autobiographical piece that questions the choreographer-dancer relationship and possible measures of its successful outcomes (Faker, 2010). Obarzanek adds Two-Faced Bastard (2008, which I haven’t seen). He points out that this theme in his work has perhaps become stronger since leaving the directorship of Chunky Move in 2012 and making fewer dance works. He states point blank that “the premise is: trying to find meaning in a large, abstract contemporary dance work and in doing so, destroying it.”
The central voice of dissent in the work is clearly a proxy for Obarzanek, but then, as he points out, so too is it for dancers who defend the art form. The work should ideally pull in two directions, testing the accepted foundations of the art form to the point of complete destruction, while asserting the legitimacy and potency of dance that counters the critique with a convincing dance piece. A tricky thing to pull off. For starters, can a work assert the integrity of an artistic discipline by employing others (particularly theatre) to achieve this?
And the task is even trickier in the context of the Sydney Dance Company which has survived a very challenging environment for dance in Australia for 45 years by generally adhering to expectations around dance, such as a certain level of vigorous physicality and a strong relationship with music. Obarzanek suggests that the company owes its longevity to the successful harnessing of audiences from ballet and other traditional performance sectors. This is not a company that brings innovative forms of dance to the international scene, but has satisfied a local audience for a long time. As Obarzanek states, “Context is everything,” and a work such as L-Chaim! might well appear subversive in this environment.
“The beautiful and talented virtuosic dancers of the company are forced in this work to explain themselves—their actions and interests—and it’s quite strange to hear them talk. They have made very clear decisions about who they want to dance with and why, and I’m asking them to think about why they made these choices, what’s interesting about it for them and for the audience. For the most part, the dancers are interested in doing new things. But there might be a fine line between what’s interesting and what’s annoying for them in this process!”
So a question to contemplate as Sydney Dance Company celebrates 45 years might be—what is interesting for Australian dance audiences? Obarzanek is hopeful that the Australian Ballet, which has also commissioned him recently, will take the lead from the Paris Opera Ballet and Netherlands National Ballet and other important ballet companies internationally who commission radical choreographers such as Jerome Bel and Jan Fabre. Obarzanek says, “in Australia the ballet company is much more conservative in that sense.” And he also has high hopes that Rafael Bonachela “continues to program diverse works over time which will influence audience expectations.”
Obarzanek is working with dramaturg David Woods (who runs UK company Ridiculousness and works with Back To Back in Australia) who will perform as ‘the voice’ in Melbourne and Canberra with Zoe Coombs Marr of the post performance group taking his place in the premiere season in Sydney. Obarzanek has a keen eye for quality artistic collaborators and the importance of a perspective from outside the art form is clear in this case.
But he insists that dance is central. “When I was with Chunky Move I was drifting outside of dance because I was questioning whether dance was my thing. For me right now, my interest in dance is in returning very much to a physical world. I’ve recently returned from Las Vegas working with six showgirls in the middle of the night in a fancy club. It was dance—“5, 6, 7, 8”—and I really liked it. It was challenging, satisfying and exciting. And in this piece, as much as we are having a go at dance and prodding the dancers, they still triumph. You have to admire the strength in them and what they do, which is really wonderful. As much as I challenge dance, it turns around and stands up for itself enough for me to want to do it again. I never beat it. It’s never defeated. At least, not by me anyway.”
Sydney Dance Company, Interplay, choreography by Rafael Bonachela, Jacopo Godani, Gideon Obarzanek, Sydney Theatre, 15 March-5 April; Canberra Theatre Centre, 10–12 April: Southbank Theatre, Melbourne, 30 April-10 May
See our full profile on Gideon Obarzanek at realtimedance
Daniel Riley, Beau Dean Riley Smith, Macq, Dance Clan 3, Bangarra
photo Greg Barrett
Daniel Riley, Beau Dean Riley Smith, Macq, Dance Clan 3, Bangarra
Dance Clan 3, presented in the Bangarra studio at Pier 4, featured works by four female artists from the company: Tara Gower’s Nala, Jasmin Sheppard’s Macq, Deborah Brown’s Dive and Yolande Brown’s Imprint. Artistic Director Stephen Page has to be commended for continuing to support the choreographic development of Bangarra artists—and female at that—in a way unsurpassed by their counterpart Sydney Dance Company but perhaps matched nationally by Gideon Obarzanek, Lucy Guerin and Kate Champion.
Comprising three dance works (and the film Dive) it seems odd that the casts in Dance Clan 3 are all so large. While it’s true that there are few opportunities to work this way in Australian dance productions due to funding restrictions, I enjoyed the smaller group work within the pieces more. Managing a large ensemble is a very specific skill that artists have little opportunity to develop here and is a big ask of first-time choreographers. Artists like Bonachela, Tankard and Healey have gained experience through a commitment to this particular format and ample opportunities.
Dance theatre is the preferred mode at Bangarra, which Page is upfront about, referring in his program notes to the company’s “theatrical story-telling.” These women have stories to tell about the trauma of genocide, the fight for land rights and the struggles involved in negotiating the social and financial changes brought about by “imposed progress” (Gower). So much of the content of these works is historical as opposed to the work of peers such as Vicki van Hout who deal very much with the contemporary Indigenous condition.
This produced some resemblances that startled me: a scene in Sheppard’s Macq represents the power struggle between the Indigenous population and Governor Macquarie (with a voice-over quoting from the latter’s diary), one dancer representing an Indigenous man and the other the Governor, stalking each other on and around a long table. The resonance with German choreographer Kurt Joos’ Green Table of 1932—an anti-war statement made just prior to Hitler’s rise to power—was there in Sheppard’s archetypes and political content writ large.
Gower’s Nala was full of characters and relationships, past bleeding into present and traditional crossing over with the modern. Beginning with a scene in a cinema and covering much territory, this piece seemed to focus more on choreographic novelty as opposed to important stories.
The movement language never strayed too far from Stephen Page’s: the signature floor work (pulling forward on the belly with strong arms with legs curling up and behind with flexed feet); jumps that hit the air in striking shapes; and partner work that entwined and unravelled with slippery precision. Composing large groups of dancers through patterning and breaking into smaller group work was also evident.
This made me wonder about the breadth of exposure these accomplished choreographers are experiencing. Given the long history of Africanist fusions with French contemporary dance and the multiplicity of traditional forms now blending with each other as well as with Western modalities, the storytelling tradition so important to these artists could be fed by such intercultural innovations at the level of movement invention. The qualities and techniques of the various indigenous traditions are so distinct and sophisticated, there will be many new ways to draw out what the forms have to offer contemporary dance.
This potential was in evidence in some innovations when the demands of storytelling allowed space for the movement to become the medium. Gower’s Nala threaded some traditional yet playful percussive sequences successfully in her narrative, and Sheppard’s section Bodies in the Trees (referring to Macquarie’s directive to hang the Indigenous dead in the trees as a warning to others) featured a moving cascade of male bodies passed down on a simple set of steps.
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Bangarra Dance Theatre, Clan 3, artistic director Stephen Page, choreographers Deborah Brown, Yolande Brown, Tara Gower, Jasmin Sheppard, music David Page, set design Jacob Nash, costumes Jennifer Irwin, lighting Matt Cox, Bangarra Studio Theatre, Pier 4, Sydney, 20 Nov-1 Dec, 2013
RealTime issue #119 Feb-March 2014 pg. 26
Jianna Georgiou, Salt, Restless Dance Theatre
photo Chris Herzfeld
Jianna Georgiou, Salt, Restless Dance Theatre
There is a moment of great theatrical and human boldness in this performance. After performer Dana Nance (who has shortened arms) tells of the first three years of her life spent in an orphanage, the persecution and exclusion of this situation is dramatised. Then she ‘dreams’ of being able to command others with arm and hand gestures.
In the enactment of this dream long arms appear, provided by another performer standing behind her. She clearly longs for these arms, not so as to be the same as others, but to have the physical ability to determine the presence of others in a way taken for granted by most of us. When she ‘wakes’ she finds a different way of insisting on her needs—using her voice.
Salt speaks of self-worth. Director Rob Tannion has assembled scenes, movement, sound and visual design elements in response to the notion of “being worth your salt” (see interview RT118, p8). We see before us the decaying wall of a cottage (salt damage), the door stuck open with a drift of salt piled high next to it. Salt is taken from the pile and weighed. The performers let it run through their fingers. They balance each other on a see-saw. A slatted bed frame comforts and imprisons. There is discussion of salt’s uses, pleasures and value. Each performer, except one, is the star of a dramatised story from their own life where they were left feeling worthless. We see their fight to regain self-worth.
This piece marks a departure from the movement and large ensemble-based work of this mixed ability company. Often in the past a visual image and/or dominant sound design has unified the action on stage. The establishment of a performance troupe has shifted the style of the company’s work. With this move into the terrain of dramatic and autobiographical performance, my focus as an audience member was on the individual performers as people and actors, rather than on the physical metaphors being created or on the unifying image.
In this show, Felicity Doolette (with no visible disability) most often played the oppressor in the dramatised action and didn’t star in her own story of loss of self-worth. She also played the ‘hostess’ at times. Back to Back has established an interesting politics of performance and disability by having company members with visibly different abilities play both persecutor and persecuted. It unsettles the viewing contract and any simple construction of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and of what we have, or don’t have, in common with anyone. Salt presented a wonderful challenge for the performers which they met with great verve, but it did re-create that old divide between performer and audience, of them and us.
Salt has a fecund starting point and a lot of ideas are presented but a clear, strong line hasn’t been taken with the material to realise the promise and power of the starting idea (the link between salt and worth) and to engage us in new ways with the question of self-worth. I look forward to the piece developing.
Restless Dance, Salt, director Rob Tannion, performers Felicity Doolette, Jianna Georgiou, Lorcan Hopper, Dana Nance, design Meg Wilson, design adviser Gaelle Mellis, lighting Geoff Cobham, sound DJ Trip, Odeon Theatre, Adelaide, 17-25 Jan
To turn the body inside out and reveal its systems one by one is the purpose of the science of anatomy. AORTA, the final work of 2013 by choreographer Stephanie Lake, also seeks to show the world beneath our skin, but as kinetic poetry. It is an ambitious vision, deepening the truth that dance reflects to us a felt sense of the body, and integrating design elements to produce a multi-layered work of abstract grace.
In a string of changing atmospheres, AORTA sees dancers Josh Mu, James Pham and James Batchelor swell and ripple like blood in the veins, vibrate like nerves, mutter and quibble in a cerebral section, then leap and scream with a primal pulse, and sometimes unite their hands and fingers to produce a thatch of wriggling villi. Their ensemble work depicts complex relationships and often microscopic (here magnified) chain reactions: sometimes soft and cascading, sometimes mechanical and angular. This vocabulary seems drawn from both experience and scientific knowledge: the spasm of a muscle we recognise at a glance, but the firing of a neural pathway is quite another thing, far more elusive.
Lake’s intricate visual poetry is a strength and her dancers are in consummate form to deliver a steady and mesmerising stream of it (Phan in particular undulating without a sound, like quicksilver escaping). Enriching this is a soundscape from Robin Fox of mostly electronic but sometimes organic textures (with trickling water and slippery, ultrasonic moments). Integral, too, is projection design by Rhian Hinkley: on three backdrop screens laser-like images wax and wane—sizzling asterisks and streaming particles, fractals that spread themselves like bonded molecules, interiors opened out.
Conjuring that which is beyond our sight, and yet resides within our deepest biology, AORTA is a complex and beautiful work that, like all living things, amounts to more than the sum of its interconnected parts.
Eleanor Bauer, Big Girls do Big Things
photo AIan Douglas
Eleanor Bauer, Big Girls do Big Things
From beneath the skin to behind the façade, Big Girls do Big Things is concerned with sub-surface complexities of another kind. This solo work toured by Belgian-based, US dancer/choreographer Eleanor Bauer, is a performance about the demands of performance, and the identity crisis that comes with chameleonic prowess. While this might suggest solipsism in less practised hands, Bauer has the sharp-edged presence and humour to make it both soulful and entertaining.
For a start, her props are perfect—an alluring scene set before she enters. An A-frame ladder towers in the corner and a gargantuan polar bear costume is splayed on the floor, all bathed in Arctic light as strains of Sibelius hint at sublime horizons. The polar bear is an icon—solitary, rare, remote, a figure we imagine vanishing into fields of ice. But it is also large. Larger than life. And much larger than Eleanor Bauer, as we discover when she climbs inside it and begins to dance. The costume gathers, collapses and comically contorts as she manipulates it from within, flashing its cavernous eyes and dragging its empty limbs. How to inhabit this prodigious persona?
A string of solutions is tried: the baggy bear becomes a rapper with a swagger and a menacing growl. Then the suit is shed and draped like a stole as Bauer strikes out in a high-heeled catwalk prance. But these efforts are frosted with comical dissatisfaction, and the problem remains one of scale. So she heads for the ladder to make more mischief with metaphor. As she ascends it, her rendition of Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” advances by ever-stretching octaves and corresponding ladder steps from a low contralto toward an agonised squeak at the pinnacle. “It’s lonely at the top,” she quips.
Teetering there, she delivers a vertiginous speech, a kaleidoscope of pop-cultural stereotypes spiralling in oversized satire and discarded one by one. It is all wildly entertaining; but more than that, what makes all this work, apart from its fun and elegant metaphors, is Bauer’s ability to exploit the tension of her own presence on stage. Through cracks in the dazzling surface we glimpse an existential plight, revealed in long, edgy pauses and genuine moments of risk.
And so, when Bauer inverts and discards the polar bear at last, what remains is one performer in black, exposed and with nowhere to hide. She takes refuge in her discipline then, performing a barefoot ballet to Sibelius with simple devotion and rigour, transcending the fuss of excess in the end. Then she retreats to the curtains behind her, to be swallowed up by their blackness once again.
Chunky Move, AORTA, choreographer Stephanie Lake, score, lighting Robin Fox, costumes Shio Otani, projection design Rhian Hinkley, Chunky Move Studios, Melbourne, 22-30 Nov; Big Girls do Big Things, Eleanor Bauer, Dancehouse, Melbourne, 29-30 Nov, 2013
Patrice Smith’s Verge narrows focus to a corner space where three ‘concentrated states’ strike the walls of consciousness, tipping decision towards vertigo or, when read in succession, leading the viewer on a trajectory of disintegrating control through teetering balance, withdrawal and aggressive release.
Patrice Smith, in her relatively short career, has exhibited a fascination with transforming psychological behaviour into impressionistic embodied emotion. She could be seen to follow in the lineage of Mary Wigman’s Hexentanz or Martha Graham’s Lamentations, except that the interconnecting metaphorical threads arise less from direct expressionistic foundations than from the erratic patterning of neural pathways. Her compositional eye enables movement to build on abstracted bodily gestures and rhythms, physicalising hesitation, anxiety and violence without recourse to causal or narrative through-lines. Action rests and races on the verge of unwanted emergence.
However, the individuality of Smith’s three collaborating performers, Bernadette Lewis, Jacqui Claus and Laura Boynes, does imbue or mark distinctive ‘stories’ onto the work’s devolution, as does the unacknowledged presence of the shuddering and implacable corner of aluminium walls, the fourth player in this interrogation of consciousness. These act as visual barriers barring relief from the dissembling sense of control and, more expressively, as the sounding board against which the accumulating rage of three bodies is thrown. The silvered presence sends reverberations into and out of the dancers’ pressurised momentum.
Lewis initiates the states with a nonchalant downward focus on her feet and toes, playing with equilibrium. The action is concentrated and skilled in spite of its pedestrian slant. In the background, her fellow performers shift in response to a normal gravitational pull. Calmness pervades, edged only with an indistinct threat of imbalance. As Lewis’ experimentation gathers speed and complexity, Claus moves to the foreground, her figure replete with tension. With an awkward throw back of her head, which is repeated too often to be comfortable, Claus conveys an impression of retraction, of a stifled fear to move forward in the slow, long lines so suited to her extended physicality. Then the taut atmosphere snaps as Boynes runs at Claus and hits the wall. A fast-paced dissolution of balance, somewhere between violence and madness, whirls and smashes in the corner. Though remote from a romantic frame, Boynes’ distraught and unstoppable running and stumbling through the nether realms of consciousness reminded me of Giselle. Maybe dance is the domain of madness, that place where sanity is breached? The three, cornered women of Verge disappear over the edge of chaos into darkness.
Ahilan Ratnamohan, SDS1
photo Ashley de Prazer
Ahilan Ratnamohan, SDS1
Soccer, the particular football at the centre of attention in Ahilan Ratnamohan’s SDS1, has long been praised for the grace, élan and dexterity of its players criss-crossing stadiums and dancing after the sacred ball. The game’s tasks and stratagems resemble choreography and no-one would dare deny that the trappings of football are not infused with potent gracefulness and elaborate drama.
A rudimentary single blue light illuminates a lone figure in the stadium, transposed in performance mode as a studio space with a single row of spectators seated around the perimeters. Two feet clad in orange trainers manoeuvre a matching orange ball, half-pivoting on its spherical colour. Though somewhat obscure in the low light, there is a suggestion that we are to be carried into a familiar yet divergent tale of a man and his extension into the world through a ball. Structurally, however, the work fractures into a stop-start pattern. Ratnamohan leaves the ball aside, box-dances in taut weight-shifts with his shoes emitting shrieking skids for no discernible reason.
Under an additional orange glow, the still darkened figure preoccupies himself with a random selection of soccer clichés: taping his ankles and binding his body, trotting the floor in circles of post-game adulation and pushing effort towards a forced condition of exhaustion. He coerces the audience to pass his body like a trophy around the field and inexplicably, for me, ‘head-butts’ with one of them. Near the performance’s end, full lights offer a clear image of the man, now returning to a gentler dance with the ball that resonates more with my memories of watching soccer. Handing over his sweaty shirt signals the moment of salutation to the crowd and his exit with his bag of balls.
In spite of my hesitations and disappointment with the lack of finesse and verve of a footballer’s consummate physicality, the non-contemporary dance audience seemed content with the patchwork of accustomed images of sport in performance and disinclined to demand any further meaning, beauty or drama of this man’s dance with a ball.
Verge, choreographer Patrice Smith, music, lighting Joe Lui, design Fiona Bruce, Lauren Ross, The Blue Room, 12-30 Nov; SDS1, choreographer and performer Ahilan Ratnamohan, PICA Performance Space, Perth, 27-30 Nov, 2013
If dancing is a state of unstable flux in which there is no fixed identity, then reflections on the experience of dancing through documentary film are one way to narrativise the feeling of what happens in/through dancing, as well as to capture dancers’ moving identities in the environments they inhabit.
In Virtuosi we hear/see eight exceptional performers—Mark Baldwin, Craig Bary, Lisa Densem, Raewyn Hill, Sarah-Jayne Howard, Jeremy Nelson, Ross McCormack and Claire O’Neil—articulate their responses to Sue Healey’s provocation, “Why Dance?” If, as she explains, “the core of the movement experience is movement and being moved,” how do environment, familial habitat and childhood memories of place inform the movers we become? Virtuosi is a feature length documentary that addresses this question through a series of portraits of New Zealand-born dancers and choreographers who left home to pursue their vocations around the world.
Each of the artists has achieved extraordinary things in the world of contemporary dance. Through this film audiences are invited to witness their corporeal signatures up close, and contemplate the fluidity of their moving identities as these have been forged in the precarious conditions of a globalised contemporary dance field.
The eight portraits in Virtuosi follow an itinerary that journeys to Berlin, London, New York, Sydney, Melbourne and Townsville. In tracking between places and subjects, interiors and exteriors, each becomes a form of poetic enquiry into the motivations, genealogies, influences and places that shape a dancer’s identity.
Sarah-Jayne Howard, Virtuosi, Sue Healey
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Economic hardship (Sarah-Jayne Howard), displacement and alienation (Raewyn Hill), loneliness (Ross McCormack) and the risks of failure (Claire O-Neil) form a complex backstory to these portraits, one which can undeniably be extrapolated to other dancers from other countries. But what coheres and sticks is the poignancy of leaving a relatively small country for one that is much bigger or at least more populous in the pursuit of that elusive quality of dancing. These dancers and choreographers have built careers and fulfilled vocations in cities with populations the size of New Zealand. Underlining their determination, passion, drive and verve is a perception of necessity.
Getting on a plane and travelling to the other side of the world, or across the Tasman, can feel like fulfilling a familiar destiny (overseas remains de rigueur for many young people in New Zealand) but it can also be a way to feel connected to global trends in dance. I was struck by Mark Baldwin’s account of discovering Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage in a book in the library of the University of Auckland’s Elam Art School. Cunningham never visited New Zealand and his influence is surprisingly negligible given its impact elsewhere. It is as though New Zealand’s isolation left the resident dance community out of certain waves of postmodern influence which have proved so radical to shifts in dance practice in London, Melbourne, New York, Brussels and Berlin. Yet without drawing on the cliché of moving from hicksville to metropolis as yet another species of export commodity (Sarah-Jayne Howard does mention New Zealanders “leaping like lambs”), the film subtly exposes the complex cultural, physical and historical nuances of New Zealand’s bi-culturalism and how these ‘elsewheres’ benefit from the exchange.
Sources
Jeremy Nelson’s choreographic tactic of drawing influence from both the Scottish reels of his childhood and Maori whakairo carving patterns, suggests how a particularly New Zealand view of the world might conversely influence what happens in New York and Copenhagen through a feeling for the forms we inherit in a country that is founded on a treaty that recognises two different world views, M?ori and Pakeha. Similarly Mark Baldwin’s “strange memories” of Polynesian dancers in disciplined rows being like the rows of chorus dancers in a ballet speak of how imaginations nurtured in the Pacific might look back at the world, with its imperial legacies, differently.
The interview with Mark Baldwin, director of Rambert Dance Company, is further distinguished by his emphasis on the influence of composers and visual artists on his practice. New Zealand composers Gareth Farr and Jack Body are mentioned as feeding his imagination and we see Baldwin singing the notes of a score he is reading as he accounts for the importance of musical structures in what he makes. The film itself evidences the strength of what is for many choreographers a primary relationship with music in being framed by the jazz piano compositions of ex-pat New Zealander, Mike Nock.
Shot in a studio theatre environment, Ross McCormack’s mercurial dancing shape-shifts from haka to tui to hysterical male to bogan. His fluid metamorphoses signal a state of being that is unsettled, perturbed even, but peculiarly of this place of the long white cloud. I was reminded of the volatility of the physical geography we inhabit, the frequency of ruptures, quake swarms and geysers, how New Zealand in its relatively young geography breeds a geo-aesthetics that is spatially generous, bold, excessive even.
This is the beauty of Sue Healey’s film: if New Zealand artists are forced to become cultural exiles by virtue of their country’s remoteness and smallness, they also go on to contribute to the globalised dance and performance community in significant ways, bringing the smell of grass, the shape of the koru, the sounding of the tui, the energy of a volatile landscape with them.
Different ways of being
Lisa Densem seems to offer a counterpoint to this with her quiet, idiosyncratic, unexpected moves, her plays with reflections through windows and the mirroring of distant hands. Speaking English with a German accent, her adaptation to Berlin and a Germanic perspective is noted in how she perceives the New Zealand way of life on her return: “I had become really German.” In considering what it is to be virtuosic, the central thematic of the film, she proposes the virtuosity of improvisation, as that place where one is awake to the present and can try out different ways of being. Escaping the perceived excesses of a dominant hyperphysical style of modernist New Zealand choreography in the 90s she found in the European dance milieu a less desperate, less adrenalin-fuelled way of being a dancer. She was drawn to a quiet listening, a simpler physicality not driven by the emotions. Densem is but one example of how the film’s octagonal geometry opens multiple perspectives on New Zealand identity as it is reconfigured, translated and cross-contaminated in the adaptive process of moving elsewhere.
Place and the attuned body
The film also works through the portraiture of place as Healey homes in on the habitats, domestic and urban, of her subjects. Through tactile encounters with exteriors, the film reorders the dancers’ cities as places for sensorial interaction with surfaces, civic memorials, fountains, alleyways and perilous edges (fire escapes and beaches). Their homes, some provisional, others their workplaces, become scenographic sites for improvised play with memento mori, souvenirs and personal objects of attachment.
Healey gives these dance artists a voice and a place in the world that speaks to a globally mobilised milieu but that is also sensitive to the micro movements and attunements of bodies that respond to and challenge the environments they inhabit while carrying traces, resonances of the places they have left. The sense of the torso and spine, the use of gravity and weight and its corollary weightlessness; the corporeal signature of each dancer/choreographer can be read as a particular instantiation of their history and physical background. For M?ori the past is never behind, it is before us and we step into it. I had the sense of these performers carrying embodied memories in their bones like touchstones.
Returning to the source
Virtuosi is a film about Sue Healey refracted through eight portraits of dancers of her generation who, like her, left their home country. Cultural exile was a feature of Healey’s generation of dance artists, myself included. More recently this traffic has slowed due to the costs of long-haul travel (economically and environmentally) as well as a growth in opportunities to study dance and work in the dance field in Aotearoa (there are at least five contemporary dance companies in New Zealand including the newly launched New Zealand Dance Company). Among Virtuosi’s subjects there is much evidence of an increasing trend of return journeys: Craig Bary performed in the NZDC inaugural season; Bary and Sarah-Jayne Howard were in Douglas Wright’s Rapt; Claire O’Neil is now living in Auckland and studying for her Masters in Dance Studies; Lisa Densem recently choreographed We have been there with Footnote Dance Company in Wellington; Jeremy Nelson choreographed Six for Touch Compass in Auckland; and Raewyn Hill’s Mass was recently performed by Dancenorth in Wellington’s Downstage Theatre. All are healthy indicators of a flow of knowledge and exchange between New Zealand’s diasporic dance community and the local dance ecology.
If, as Laurence Louppe explains it, contemporary dance involves “becoming a body that is not given in advance,” Virtuosi is a film that goes some way towards understanding what that becoming involves, the pleasures and the perils of its reach and the poetry of its articulation.
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Virtuosi, director, Sue Healey, photography Jud Overton, composer Mike Nock, 76 minutes, 2013
See Sue Healey’s full profile as part of realtimedance
Bjorn Stewart, Jack Charles, Matthew Cooper, Coranderrk, Belvoir & ILBIJERRI Theatre Company
photo Patrick Boland
Bjorn Stewart, Jack Charles, Matthew Cooper, Coranderrk, Belvoir & ILBIJERRI Theatre Company
Documentary theatre—commonly a re-imagining of an era or event using documents, verbatim material and images, an unfolding story and an ensemble of performers often playing multiple roles—has long settled into a standard model. Facticity is its essence while its creativity resides in the dynamics of its editing and the magic of its staging. In the hands of version 1.0 at their best the deployment of contemporary performance strategies has deviated from conventional narrative, making facts, especially in the political sphere, insistently ‘strange’ and all the more evidently lies.
In Belvoir and ILBIJERRI’s Coranderrk and the Queensland Theatre Company and Sydney Festival’s Black Diggers the standard model is still fully operational and, from time to time, emotionally and politically very effective. However, our familiarity with the approach has a distancing effect, and not the one that Brecht had in mind. As a friend said, “Black Diggers was weighed down by its form,” but added, “though it got to me in the end.”
Sydney Theatre Company and the Australian Defence Force’s The Long Way Home, despite eschewing the verbatim theatre model, still inclines to it structurally, least convincingly in a series of short scenes parodying military promotional talks without connection to the work’s theme. But writer Daniel Keene has drawn on his soldier performers’ (and others’) words and lives to provide naturalistic dialogue, more complex characters and longer scenes than one might expect from documentary theatre. Although still short, these at least break the predictable rhythms of the standard model.
In Coranderrk, writer Andrea James has added passages of her own writing to an edited version of the original script by she wrote with Giordano Nanni—which drew directly on the Minutes of Evidence of the 1881 Coranderrk Inquiry. Tom Wright has created dialogue for Black Diggers rich with words once written or recalled: “I thought you fellows could see in the dark?” “I grew up in bloody Erskineville!” These sit side by side with the set pieces you’d expect in this kind of work, like the recurrent speaking aloud of letters—being written or received—and other vignette variations that work cumulatively but are often not long enough to provide emotional depth or complexity.
These three productions have important stories to tell. Two of these have been pretty much forgotten. Coranderrk was an Aboriginal community in 19th century Victoria that for a period was commercially and culturally successful. It was undone by white envy, prejudice and ultimately legislation, Black Diggers portrays the plight of Aboriginal soldiers who fought for the Empire in World War I, side by side with whites, but afterwards once again faced discrimination. The Long Way Home stages the post-traumatic suffering of Australian soldiers who have served in East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan. We hear about this from time to time in the media but here we have a substantial representation of it.
Coranderrk and Black Diggers stick pretty much to the time frame they’re exploring. Connections with our own time are not made, except implicitly—that white Australians need to know these stories in order to understand their relationship with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. With its costuming, Black Diggers is produced as historical re-creation, 1880-1930s with an ominous set that looks like an enormous World War II bunker, on the walls of which the cast repeatedly paint, and paint over and over, names and battlefield locations.
Coranderrk is likewise limited to its period but has discarded the period costuming of its original production for casual modern dress and added occasional contemporary gestures and references, making it wittier and more assertive. But neither production made a palpable connection with Aboriginal Australia now. Should they, or would that make their didactism too overt?
Catch-up theatre
The ABC television series Redfern Now is firmly focused on the present lives of urban Aboriginals, but such imaginings are not often seen on stage. In RealBlak (RealTime 111,], guest editor and Melbourne-based playwright Jane Harrison interviewed David Milroy, a writer and director with Yirra Yaakin Theatre in Perth, who spoke of the limitations of “catch up theatre” from the 70s—because “we’d been written out of history”—and the autobiographical solo performances (of the 1990s-2000s). “They are very valid,” said Milroy, “but, personally, I don’t do non-fiction shows any more. I am more interested in the craft of fiction…Aboriginal culture isn’t exclusively about ‘catch-up theatre’—having to educate audiences about our history and what really went on in this country. We have so much more to give.”
On seeing Coranderrk—which I enjoyed particularly for those moments when it broke from documentary theatre’s didacticism and opened up to imaginative possibilities—I couldn’t help but feel that an opportunity had been missed, even if had to be a point bluntly made, about the current recolonisation of Aboriginal Australia.
With the advent of The Intervention, ever-expanding mining exploration, limited Indigenous land rights in respect to minerals (outside the Northern Territory) and state policies of “mainstreaming” and “normalisation” (one size individualism and globalisation fits all), it has been argued that the invasion of 1788 has never stopped. “The now dominant view is that Aboriginal culture is the problem…A mythical framework has been developed to offset the naturalised fact of inequality” (Jon Altman & Sean Kerins, People on Country, Vital Landscapes, Vital Futures, The Federation Press, 2012). What happened in Coranderrk is happening still. Land across Australia that was once deemed worthless is now regarded as invaluable for mining, gas, biodiversity and carbon offset.
Coranderrk, Belvoir & ILBIJERRI Theatre Company
photo Patrick Boland
Coranderrk, Belvoir & ILBIJERRI Theatre Company
Ilbijerri and Belvoir, Coranderrk
Its tone at once documentary and poetic, this re-worked production of 2013’s Coranderrk is now textually and visually more tightly focused on and around the Aboriginal elder William Barak. Jack Charles, as Barak, impressively attired in a full-length possum fur cape lined with a cloth reproduction of one of the great man’s paintings (which maintained his people’s culture and were collected by Melbournians) brings the requisite gravitas to his role, quietly intoning the new writing by Andrea James created for this version of Coranderrk, for example:
“With a slow and ancient song, Barak asks permission. His wiry brown fingers clasp the stone axe handle. He chips away at the river bank and slowly and surely…Chip chip chip…the ochre gives way. That piece of beauty now rests in his hand. The soft yellow hue. He spits on the ochre and smears it on his forehead. His song almost finished now, he puts the stone axe back in his belt. Wraps the ochre in his handkerchief and places it into his deep and warm pocket.”
The simple, barely there set comprises a large screen and light stands evoking now and then a Victorian photographic studio and consequently a sense of the era in which Barak lived and of his community. The cast poses in front of projected images of the people whose lives they are portraying—harvesting hops, attired for cricket and school as well as in suits and frocks. It’s an eerily effective device.
The text is taken from a document of the period, delivered by the performers with conversational ease, moments of anger, pain and humour (taking selfies). It reveals white prejudices about race and caste, anxiety over Aboriginal literacy (“then natives will read newspapers!”) and envy of 1st prize agricultural show awards won by Coranderrk and, not least, the growing value of the farming property. The community, made up of members from various clans had claimed and been granted 2,300 acres of land in 1863, subsequently expanding to 4,850 acres and doing very good business selling wheat, vegetables and hops to Melbourne. Coranderrk (a word for the Christmas Bush of the region) at its peak in the 1870s had a schoolhouse, butcher and bakery.
The production briskly tells the story of productive black-white collaboration thwarted by their second manager, a Reverend Strickland under whom residents suffered food, blanket and fuel shortages, received no pay and were subject to whippings. The Coranderrk community fought back vigorously, wrote to journalists, parliamentarians and supporters (like the influential Mrs Ann Bon, who later commissioned a statue of Barak), went on strike and in the winter of 1886, led by Barak and another elder, walked 60km to Melbourne with a petition. As a result, a Royal Commission was held in 1877 and a Parliamentary Inquiry in 1881, in which Aboriginals unprecedentedly appeared as witnesses, but never after. The Aboriginal Protection Board was compelled to properly maintain the reserve.
Tragically, this largely forgotten victory was short-lived. In 1886 the Aboriginal Protection Board, with an Act of Parliament, banished anyone considered half-caste under the age of 35 from Coranderrk, thus radically reducing the work force, diminishing the reserve’s productivity and guaranteeing its decline, as well as breaking up families—portrayed in one of the show’s most bitter and poignant moments.
Black Diggers, Queensland Theatre Company
photo Branco Gaica
Black Diggers, Queensland Theatre Company
QTC and Sydney Festival, Black Diggers
Written by Tom Wright, researched by David Williams and directed by Wesley Enoch, Black Diggers reveals a great deal about the Aboriginal men who enlisted in the Australian army during WWI despite white objections. They served with courage, dignity and camaraderie, felt deeply the separation from family and country and, unlike their white counterparts, were not rewarded plots of land let alone pensions and the vote. The racism that mostly disappeared on the battlefield returned after the war.
Black Diggers features a strong all-male cast in a range of recurring roles depicting a variety of personalities. Its historical scope covers some 50 years, commencing with the full blood/half caste issue critically encountered in Coranderrk and concluding just pre-WWII with Aboriginal soldiers clinging to memories of the war (“Curse war…bless it”) before worse times ensued (depression, alcoholism, poverty); one says of a piece of shell casing: “I held that bit of truth in my hand.” The sense of betrayal by white society is wrenching: no reward or compensation, racist slurs, RSL rejection and jobs lost. At the end the Aboriginal Advancement League is doing its important work in the late 30s while the broken body of a former soldier lies to the side of the stage. Finally an ANZAC Day ceremony (which one Aboriginal soldier has described as the loneliest day of the year) is staged with an actual soldier playing The Last Post. I was astonished that a ceremony representing a major abuse of trust, one that for so long rejected acknowledgement of Aboriginal “defence of our country,” should complete the work, and without an ounce of irony. Perhaps it honoured the soldiers who, despite profound disappointment and bitterness, still stood by their loyalty to Australia. (The play also makes clear that white soldiers for their reward were often given land with poor soil guaranteeing failure, if pushing Aboriginals further off their own land.)
In this kind of work, building a sustained performance is a challenge. Hunter Page-Lochard perhaps fares best playing a young boy whose eagerness to go to war despite his mother’s pleas gets him there. The psychological damage returns him home mute. There are numerous dark moments: what to do for the soul of a dead mate—cut some hair to take home: “That’ll have to do. It’s our fate.” A German doctor working at the science of race measures the physiognomy of a captured Aboriginal soldier. The power of Black Diggers builds through the cumulative power of such scenes and the horrors and occasional joys they entail. We come away certainly better informed and sometimes moved. As with Coranderrk I wondered about now, about Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islanders in our armed forces which are so often beset with bullying and sexism. And racism?
Craig Hancock and Tim Loch, The Long Way Home, Sydney Theatre Company and the Australian Defence Force
photo Lisa Tomasetti
Craig Hancock and Tim Loch, The Long Way Home, Sydney Theatre Company and the Australian Defence Force
STC and ADF: The Long Way Home
The Long Way Home’s evocation of life on the front line, the violence and mind-warping tedium is frightening—explosions, intense flashes of light, picking up the wounded, vast discomforting starry desert nights. The growing emotional gap between wives and their depressed soldier husbands threatens violence and suicide. Past and present—childhood, enlistment, war and aftermath—are woven into portraits of suffering. These are actual soldiers playing variations on themselves with the support of a team of professional actors. Often what is revealed in a scene or on film with them addressing us directly confirms what we learn of them from their program notes, the damage done to minds and bodies, the isolation of recuperation, feelings of guilt or uselessness: “I am my job.” These filmed statements, interpolated into the production once we have become familiar with the faces, lend an air of documentary veracity to the close-to-reality fictions played out between the men on stage.
The stage is constantly populated with heavily armed soldiers on the stage horizon or moving about in cautious lines, always on duty, whether in actuality or as ghosts in the mind of one soldier (Tim Loch) whom they haunt while he seeks refuge in obsessively cleaning his home. A key figure in the play he eventually has the courage to address (“I know you blokes are not fuckin’ real”) and banish them, not that they ever quite disappear, seeks help and is finally reconciled with his wife. He’s the most detailed of the characters. Another soldier (Craig Hancock), even more remote from his wife and suicidal, becomes the first’s friend, easing the way to repaired selves and marriages for both. I did feel that having two not dissimilar couples (although the acting is finely discrete) weakened the play, but it did suggest collective hope. Nor does the play go near the kind of therapy the soldiers receive—it’s just a relief that they’re motivated to get some. The wives’ roles are slender and again similar. I assume there are those who take stronger roles in the recoveries of their partners. Female soldiers (Emma Palmer and Sarah Webster) performed strongly in the production and suffered major wounds and taxing recoveries but we don’t learn just how they made it through. Of course not every story can be told in detail, but the play’s neat symmetries and resolution feel a little too comfortable.
Countering the pervasive sense of on-going trauma there’s plenty of humour—stoic, ironic, bitter. James Whitney’s stumbling attempts to become a stand-up comedian at the Black Dog let loose his guilt about a war-time incident. Another, in a very funny, ‘fuck!’ filled monologue in the Afghanistan desert at night worries that boredom is destroying his mind; another (James Duncan) hallucinates a refrigerator standing in the distance: “Where would they plug it in?” His understanding mate (a perpetually droll Will Bailey) leads him away.
Other comic scenes, like the afore-mentioned public liaison talks, don’t fit the work and should be removed. The enlistment scenes, which reveal three out of four applicants for the army are drongos, are also taxing even if we follow them into the army. Not all the scenes with the children, well acted as they are, connect either, especially a late and too laboured one centred on a dead crow. Of course, as the production is already making its way around the country, revision is unlikely but a 90 minute interval free production would make more sense, and impact.
Very effectively framing the play is a wounded, brain-damaged man whose doctor coldly offers little hope. His muttered words—from the opening of The Odyssey about not being able to save one’s companions—appear line by line on the screen but are not understood by his friends. They are completed at the play’s end when the soldier (Gary Wilson) leaves his bed, walks downstage and speaks to us confidently if with difficulty. The Long Way Home is a fine collaboration between the STC, ADF, Daniel Keene and director Stephen Rayne, one that speaks of a great need, of the kind brought to our attention by Black Diggers, to understand and look after those of whom we ask so much. Of the soldier performers, Tim Loch, Craig Hancock and James Whitney gave performances that suggested total belief in what they were doing on a large stage before a huge audience, with skill and courage. They have given much again, for their comrades.
Belvoir and ILBIJERRI Theatre Company, Coranderrk, writers Andrea James, Giordano Nanni, concept Giordano Nanni, director Isaac Drandic, Belvoir Upstairs, 7 Dec, 2013-3 Jan 2014; Sydney Festival, Black Diggers, writer Tom Wright, director Wesley Enoch, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, Jan 18-26; Sydney Theatre Company and the Australian Defence Force, The Long Way Home, writer Daniel Keene, director Stephen Rayne
Julian Louis recalls attending a lecture at NIDA delivered by Lyndon Terracini, founder of Northern Rivers Performing Arts (NORPA). “He was talking about creating theatre around the culture of place. I remember writing in my notebook, ‘I should call this guy for a job one day.’” Several years later Louis, by then a successful freelance theatre artist, was invited to apply not for just any job, but Terracini’s, taking over as NORPA’s artistic director in 2007.
Based in Lismore, NORPA has a three-fold role in the region. It presents an annual curated program of touring shows; creates its own work through the Generator program and is also the venue manager of Lismore City Hall. Previously NORPA was in charge of both the current venue, an old dance hall, and the Star Court Theatre, an old cinema, but under Louis’ reign the decision was made to concentrate on one space. In 2012 the owners of Lismore City Hall, the Lismore City Council, secured a $5m development grant from Regional Development Australia, enabling significant renovations to the city hall which re-opened as a shiny, new full equipped 496-seat theatre in 2013, just in time to celebrate NORPA’s 20th birthday.
Passing through
In terms of its curated program, NORPA tries to strike a balance between what’s described on their website as “risky productions” and “sure-fire entertainment.” Highlights from the 2014 program, just announced, include Lisa Wilson’s ambitious dance piece Lake (see RT111); Force Majeure/Belvoir’s production Food directed by Kate Champion and its writer Steve Rodgers (RT109) and Bell Shakespeare’s Henry 4 . For kids there’s Wulamanayumi and the Seven Pemanui by Blak Lines, directed by Eamon Flack—a Tiwi take on Snow White—and the season finishes off with a family favourite, Circus Oz.
Home grown
Through its Generator program NORPA aims to present one full production a year as part of its main season, with multiple projects at various stages of development bubbling away on the back burner. With the move to the new venue Louis says he felt the need to “amp up” new work creation to ensure balance: “there’s a demand and a real hunger for it.”
Louis steers the Generator program towards site-specificity and multidisciplinarity with projects that connect to the region through a combination of ideas and the people creating it. The program has completed four quite diverse works to date including a circus performance in a private home, Open House; a multimedia dance work, Beautiful Bones; and a community-based project with homeless people, culminating in an evening of installation and performance at the local soup kitchen in the Winsome Hotel. There’s also been the sell-out hit Railway Wonderland, directed by Louis, a site-specific performance on the disused railway station exploring stories of the town (see RT109, p29). Louis will continue to develop this work in 2014 with a view to touring.
Also in 2014 the second-stage development of a collaboration between Louis and the Animal Farm Collective (creators of Food Chain, see RT101) will take place. Cock Fight is a dance theatre work looking at male identity, aging and power play in an office environment. Commencing development in 2014 is Bundjalung Nghari: The Gathering, a collaboration between Louis and leading Indigenous artists, most of whom originally hail from the Northern Rivers: David Page, Frances Rings, Rhoda Roberts, Djon Mundine and Melissa Lucashenko. Louis says, “I’m interested in the multi-artform process so that we don’t end up having a dominant style in the work. There are so many stories [from the area] it’s overwhelming, [but] I think the right story will present itself.”
Phoebe Rose, Lydian Dunbar, My Radio Heart,
video still Sam James, photo Donatella Parisini
Phoebe Rose, Lydian Dunbar, My Radio Heart,
My Radio Heart
The major Generator presentation for 2014 is My Radio Heart, a collaboration with the local music group Tralala Blip which includes performers with and without disabilities. Louis approached Rosie Dennis to direct the show after seeing her large-scale community live art project Minto Live (2011, RT101) for Campbelltown Arts Centre. In My Radio Heart the audience will be immersed in the audiovisual world of the performers—a virtual reality game space in which the characters are on a quest to find something that’s missing—love, family, connection. The performance is driven by the band’s beautiful brand of sweet pop electronica.
Via email I asked Rosie Dennis about the process: “We’ve worked predominantly with local artists to realise a reasonably experimental work, in the sense that there is no real narrative, which leaves the ‘art’ open to interpretation. I started working on My Radio Heart when I was a freelance artist. Part-way through the development I was appointed Artistic Director of Urban Theatre Projects. While it hasn’t changed our creative process, it has meant that we’re able to do a season in Bankstown immediately following the Lismore premiere. I think this is a really interesting model, making/creating/devising work (whatever you want to call it) in the regions and then ‘exporting’ it to the city, or in our case Western Sydney. So often it’s the reverse, work made in our major capitals and toured to the regions.”
My Radio Heart, in both its development model, community engagement, and its performance style exemplifies Julian Louis’ mission for NORPA: to produce shows “that [are] about activating the whole space and putting people in close proximity to the story. I think that’s really the hallmark of the works that are most successful for us.”
NORPA & Urban Theatre Projects: My Radio Heart, directed by Rosie Dennis, featuring Tralala Blip, 27-29 March, Lismore City Hall; 9-12 April, Bankstown Arts Centre; www.norpa.org.au
Australian Bureau of Worthiness, I Met Hindley Street
courtesy the artists
Australian Bureau of Worthiness, I Met Hindley Street
Two works appearing in Adelaide late last year sought to expose the city’s underbelly. They could not have been more contrasting—one coolly investigative in form and poor in aesthetic, the other richly fictive and classically ambitious—but both productions gave Adelaide audiences a rare opportunity to witness their home city reflected uncompromisingly back at them through scenarios peopled with outsiders, fringe dwellers and the morally ambiguous.
Australian Bureau of Worthiness, I Met Hindley Street
Like Sydney’s King’s Cross, or Melbourne’s St Kilda, Hindley Street is a uniquely evocative name among locals, redolent of nocturnal squalor, urban decay and the thriving, undeclared markets of the night: sex and drugs. No other Adelaide street provokes as much fear or scorn or giddiness. It is these feelings which the Australian Bureau of Worthiness tap into in the latest in their now long-running I Met… series of localised explorations, each one an ad hoc fusion of performance, documentary and visual art.
The series’ Hindley Street iteration saw the ABW team–performer Emma Beech, visual artist James Dodd and writer and director Tessa Leong—hole up for three weeks in a disused Bank Street basement, just off of Hindley Street and formerly home to an Indian restaurant. Some of the gaudy, amateurish murals are still there, faded flashes of the Taj Mahal’s white domes still visible amid the crumbling brickwork. The space is warehouse-like, the industrial atmosphere heightened by the sound of water or sewerage flowing through pipes overhead. In places, the walls are bedecked with sketches, handwritten notes, interview transcripts, business cards: the result of the ABW team’s interactions with the tourists, locals, shopkeepers, barflies, blue- and white-collar workers who populate the street above.
There is a traverse stage in the centre of the space. As the performance begins, an overall-clad Dodd pushes a broom languorously around the stage as though clearing away the vomit and the cigarette butts and, maybe, blood from the night before. Beech has described her core practice as “stand-up documentary” and it is hard not to think of this description as she takes to the stage, microphone and cue cards in hand. There are no punch lines, but Beech embodies her interview subjects fully and sympathetically in the manner of the best stage comics, and we laugh anyway because this is not a comedy predicated on jokes but on unsettling the familiar; the ubiquitous toupéed hustler in the ice-cream white suit, the Crazy Horse Revue’s unavoidable neon plumage. Dodd’s unpolished sketches, thrown onto the walls of the space by an old-fashioned overhead projector, achieve a similar effect, although their uncontextualised appearances occasionally jar.
Immersive and freewheeling, but constrained by Tessa Leong’s focused direction, I Met Hindley Street discreetly succeeds in making one of Adelaide’s most familiar—and contested—public spaces strange again.
Maggie Stone, State Theatre Company of South Australia
photo Matt Nettheim
Maggie Stone, State Theatre Company of South Australia
STCSA, Maggie Stone
Caleb Lewis’ new play, a commission by the State Theatre Company of South Australia, also asks its audience to think about the city in which it is taking place. According to Lewis the play emerged partly out of the playwright’s frustration with a seeming monopoly of new Australian plays set in the nation’s bigger cities: Brisbane and Perth, Melbourne and Sydney. As with Peter Goldsworthy’s Adelaide-set short stories, however, it is easy to mistake the thrill of recognition (a suburb or street name, or that of a local personality or business) for a bona fide investigation of place. Maggie Stone could, in fact, be set in any Australian city. Lewis’ themes are universal in scope: debt, both monetary and social; the nature of altruism; local and global charity and its consequences; immigration and multiculturalism; morality and self-interest.
Maggie Stone (Kris McQuade) is a loans officer. In the kind of politically incorrect parlance of which she would approve, the rough, tough Stone has been “left on the shelf.” She is not young anymore, lives alone and eats, smokes and drinks too much. She is permanently lugubrious, but some days are worse than others, and on one such day a recent immigrant from Sudan, Prosper Deng (Shedrick Yarkpai), walks into her office seeking a loan for a car so he can work. Stone turns him down and An Inspector Calls-like whirlpool of social irresponsibility drags Deng’s family deeply into debt, and into the clutches of improbably-named loan shark Leo Hermes (Mark Saturno).
Events unfold rapidly in short scenes—some elusively wordless, others seemingly redundant—giving the play a televisual feel which is at odds with the Aristotelian embellishments Lewis introduces much too late. Hermes’ gruesome slaying (by knife—Lewis’ ‘Chekhov’s gun’) is presumably intended to provide the requisite catharsis, but the mark is missed because the bloodletting—and Hermes’ final, overwrought speech in which he thunders the old fatalist cliché about blood having to be paid for with blood—feels under-supported by the play’s brevity and narrow dramatic focus.
Director Geordie Brookman can’t quite reconcile these differences in scale, although all of the cast—notwithstanding occasional slides into broadness—give strongly persuasive performances. Particularly impressive are McQuade, agreeably disagreeable in a part written for her, and Yarkpai who, in his first professional production, brings gravity and a keen sense of youth’s desolating ennui respectively to his roles as Prosper and Prosper’s son Benny. Victoria Lamb’s set, a labyrinth of oversized latticework and spookily reflective panels, allows for unfussy transitions between the many scenes. Its indeterminate depths and multiple sliding doors quietly gesture towards the inscrutable physical and corporate architectures of the West’s financial institutions.
If Maggie Stone is this system’s human analogue within Lewis’ play—hard, obdurate and accountable to no one—then she also shares its fallibility. Lewis mentions in his program note that greed brought about the Global Financial Crisis and it is greed which has literally hardened Maggie Stone’s heart to the point of ruin. It is, of course, the playwright’s job to expose the human within the inhuman, and Stone is ultimately shown to be the sentimentalist we like to imagine all sociopaths are underneath. Maggie Stone is not as trite as that sounds, but the play’s uneven form, and its imprecise connections between the bigger stories of the global movements of capital and people, diminishes its impact.
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Australian Bureau of Worthiness, I Met Hindley Street, devisers, performers Emma Beech, Tessa Leong, James Dodd, 27 Bank Street, Adelaide, 22-6 Nov; State Theatre Company of South Australia, Maggie Stone, writer Caleb Lewis, director Geordie Brookman, Space Theatre, Adelaide, 8-30 Nov, 2013.
In an open class demonstration, 20 performers walk carefully crossing lines of string stretched across the floor. Their bare toes curl and reach to find the string’s edge, bodies sway and wobble as core muscles try to hold gravity’s centre, eyes are either closed or zoned into a faraway elsewhere.
Each body presences itself differently. Indeed, the line of string, almost hard to discern for the spectator, seems to draw out of these balancing bodies those other lines of tension that Bodyweather practice so delicately focalises between sensation and imagination, perception and performance. For masters of the form, I imagine, a simple tread of this line might enable a complete retreat from oneself from view. What kind of force would be left, then, walking the line?
The demonstration follows a five-day Image Dance Think Tank masterclass led by Tess de Quincey and Frank van de Ven, hosted by the Sydney University Department of Performance Studies for both seasoned and new Bodyweather practitioners as well as for academic participant-observers. The culmination of a week’s introspection and investigation results in a rich public elaboration of some areas of critical urgency for the practice as well as for broader threads of enquiry into the role of performance in tuning us into those environments we more ordinarily omit from perceptual view. The program’s initiator, Chair of the Department Amanda Card, builds upon an earlier exchange between De Quincey Co and the Department held in 2001. It is in this way well served by the latter’s commitment to methods of rehearsal observation, which swiftly emerge here to unpick what surrounds the studied internality that Bodyweather practice so forcefully presents.
De Quincey and van de Ven explain that the legacy of their training with Min Tanaka’s MAI-JUKU performance group in Japan (1984-1991) involves the remarkable storage, in body-memory (as well as in journal descriptions) of original image-sets. Conceived as either ‘omnicentral’ (divided) or ‘full body’ images, participants have been revisiting images such as “Moonshadow” or “Penis Arms” 36 years later in a practice that, as Lecturer in Architecture Andrew Macklin comments, is fundamentally “translated” in that it is both “culturally other” and “locally specific.” The question of the body as translator is underpinned by Bodyweather imaging practices as well as by the Muscle and Bone training regimes that support it, which are understood by de Quincey as “agronomous:” the body is a mechanism for tilling the earth. This minimalist aesthetic, which seems to open out an interpretive practice for the body on an almost cellular level, Macklin explains, is deeply resonant of the Shibui approach to textural subtlety that informs a Japanese sensibility of beauty.
Walking the line, participants are asked to pass through a smoke curtain. How might a body make itself disappear in the smoke it imagines/images around it? For one participant, walking through the curtain requires a softening of the body into the sensory image of smoke. Mechanically, this means an extension of the body into space such that it will “stop wobbling” at the same time as “boundaries of the flesh [must] become smoke-like” so as to “touch” the imagined curtain edge. Questions of the image-sensing and image-making capacities of the body become central to the dialogue that follows. De Quincey explains that the logic of a body as an environment enables us to conceive it as being in compositional dialogue with another environment (indeed, the principle here might be that we are all always in such processes of dialogue even as they are disguised from bodily view). The goal here is to avoid mimetic representation and to instead feel the sensation of an image which may be received via any modal viewpoint. “It is the image doing me, not the other way around” observes one participant.
Provocations then arise around the ideokinetic frisson that happens when a body meets an image, as in the performance-enhancing techniques of athlete training (Stuart Grant), or what the spectator is exactly given to sense when watching a process of performing-sensing-feeling (Justine Shih Pearson). This last question interestingly resonates against the final phase of the showing, which involves performers Linda Luke and Peter Fraser in solos and de Quincey and van de Ven in a duo, performing pre-choreographed works. Here, the viewing lens shifts from rehearsal observation to performance analysis, and the terms of reference become more oblique. For one thing, the comical duo between de Quincey and van de Ven seems to move much of what was discussed of the body’s image-sensorium into a kind of lazzi around becoming dogs (de Quincey’s two pets were present for the duration of the workshop). The ethos of becoming environments, one which, as Macklin noted, promised to offer an everyday aesthetics of sensitivity and empathy, hovered strangely at the edge of the ever-strong demand for meaning-making in the theatre.
Image Dance Think Tank, An international collaboration between De Quincey Co and the Department of Performance Studies, Sydney University, led by Tess de Quincey and Frank van de Ven, Rex Cramphorn Studio, University of Sydney 4-9 Nov, 2013
Image Note: Directed by Tess de Quincey, Inner Garden was a performance installation in the grounds of Callan Park, Sydney, 6-8 Feb, 2014. Drawing on the site’s history as a former psychiatric asylum, 10 performers and visual artists created works embedded in this charged environment, exploring a number of what de Quincey calls “obsessions.” Performed at dusk to the otherworldly music of Kraig Grady, Robbie Avenaim and Jim Denley, it was a rich, multilayered and magical experience.
Gail Priest
Bryony Geeves, Sara Pensalfini, She’s Not Performing
photo Carlie Devine
Bryony Geeves, Sara Pensalfini, She’s Not Performing
Supported by the Tasmanian Theatre Company’s Associate Artists’ Program, this is the second incarnation of Alison Mann’s She’s Not Performing. The first was an acclaimed 2010 production at La Mama in Melbourne, directed by Kelly Somes. I understand that production made more of the visual symbolism of the piece. This apparently simpler production is directed by Belinda Bradley, with the playwright producing, and brings together a strong ensemble.
Margarite (Sara Pensalfini) is a troubled woman with a younger lover, Iain (Campbell McKenzie). A chance encounter pushes her from a precarious stability into turmoil. On a night out, watching a stripper performing she notices that the young woman bears a striking physical similarity to herself. She begins to suspect that this girl, Annie (Bryony Geeves), is the daughter she gave up for adoption as a teenager. Iain struggles to understand her sudden emotional intensity so Margarite turns to an old friend, Hamish (Joe Clements), for support. But that relationship too becomes fraught as Margarite’s obsession grows. Once the idea that she may be Annie’s mother has taken root, it consumes her—her confused sexual identity, the traumas of the past and her tendencies towards self-harm converging.
The play’s strength is its unusual, skilful blend of realism and stylised forms of expression. The dialogue is often naturalistic and restrained, but a scene can transform into a dream, such as Margarite recalling the pain of childbirth, with the fully-grown Annie emerging from between her legs. Another scene transforms Annie the stripper into Margarite the schoolgirl in Hamish’s mind, so that we are in his world for a time, seeing Margarite’s situation through his eyes. Such shifts in perspective and tone are difficult to achieve in theatre and not often attempted. There’s a sense of controlled experimentation to She’s Not Performing, a blending of cinematic and genre influences which helps to elevate it to something more than an ‘issues’ play or a melodrama.
Crucially, there are electric moments of revelation and catharsis—particularly during the climactic scene in which Margarite finally faces the depth of her emotions and uses them as a weapon against the bewildered Iain. Sara Pensalfini’s performance here lifts off to become something extraordinary, raw and teetering on madness yet utterly grounded in human experience.
There’s no doubt this production suffers from budget constraints. Margarite’s oppressive, hallucinatory world warrants a bolder, more cohesive aesthetic, particularly in regard to costuming. But aspects of director Belinda Bradley’s staging hit the mark, making the best out of limited resources. The childbirth scene uses simple physical techniques to evoke a familiar yet unexpected scenario that highlights the story’s most compelling aspect, its sense of transgression. Margarite has watched her ‘daughter’ perform semi-naked, after all, and Annie herself is possibly developing an attraction for Margarite, regarding her as a client at first but then as a friend. Where is this all going?
There’s an understated remark from Joe Orton’s Loot that I’m fond of: “It’s a Freudian nightmare.” So too is She’s Not Performing, not only in the sense that it touches on taboos and dark sexuality, but in the even more complex sense of its attempt to define the nature of parenthood. What makes a woman a mother? Who, or what, is she without the child she’s borne? Is the loss of a daughter a pain that can never be redeemed, or the loss of a mother? Perhaps something fundamental is forever damaged when that bond is betrayed.
Orton’s characters put up a front of respectability but betray themselves with unconsciously hilarious and shocking utterances. She’s Not Performing, although coming from a different theatrical tradition, shares that kind of ruthless clarity. Margarite is more in the vein of Blanche Dubois or Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf?—all too aware of the danger she finds herself in, and of the knowledge that her connection with ‘normalcy’ is hanging by a thread. At any moment she might be compelled to sever that thread completely and fly off into some frightening new place from which there is no return. In Margarite’s case it’s the legacy of past injustices, which somehow she must live with. This is a powerful work that exposes audiences to difficult truths.
She’s Not Performing, writer Alison Mann, director Belinda Bradley, Theatre Royal Backspace, Hobart, 27-29 Nov, 2013
The inaugural year of The Gold Coast Arts Centre’s intrepid Independent Season closed with the debut of Victoria Carless’ The Grand, produced by Gold Coast independent company, White Rabbit, led by director Lisa Smith.
Carless grew up in Cairns and won the Queensland Theatre Company George Landen Dann Award for her pro-refugee drama The Rainbow Dark in 2006. The Grand is a fascinating collaboration: regionally affiliated practitioners making a work about their respective tourist towns and the faded glamour and eerie nostalgia of an empty beachside resort.
The piece opens with a tremulous young woman (Tammy Weller) in a headscarf knocking on the imposing art deco double doors of The Grand Hotel. The door is answered by the imposing owner (Anna Mowry), who rejects the woman’s entreaties for work: it is the off-season, times are hard and guests are scarce. The young woman persists, wheedling her way inside, saying her mother worked there in its heyday. The doors are flung open and the older woman ushers her new protégé inside the foyer of the once luxurious hotel.
The first part of the play is driven by the instruction of the young woman in the mysterious ways of The Grand, empty save one unseen guest and crumbling under the onslaught of nesting birds and dwindling supplies. Slowly we understand that there will be no guests. The brave gallantry of the two women is expressed through their dogged focus on the daily rituals of hospitality: washing the bed linen stained with blood, mixing cocktails with flamingo swizzle sticks, scrubbing the floors clean of bird shit and reverentially opening the guest book to scrutinise the non-existent bookings.
Carless has a beautiful turn of phrase and a distinctive theatrical voice, unhurried and mesmerising as she builds the relationship between the two women. Are they half-sisters? Is this an elaborate game between them or merely the fantasy of one woman dying slowly in a poisoned world?
Alas, the looping games do not build in intensity but simply repeat themselves without deconstruction or game-play, or the sly wit of an absurdist non-sequitur. The gentle beauty of the language never deepens into complexity or ambiguity and so the piece feels oddly a-thematic, without the promised insight into the hollowness of the pleasure-town or the consequence of environmental violation. The gothic cupboards never open. The mystery guest/ghost never appears. The blood-stained sheets do not presage a violent act. The poison weakens but does not kill and the status quo between the two women barely changes.
The play feels like a clock slowly losing time and one that finishes for no other reason than that the mechanism needs to be rewound. Indeed, the climax of the piece is a re-enactment of the opening scene but with the older woman playing the stranger, relying on repetition again rather than progression or interrogation to resolve the piece. It isn’t that there needs to be an answer to the gentle ominousness of the gothic tropes but more a feeling that there is a corker of a play here yet to be dug out.
Gold Coast Arts Centre Independent Theatre Season: White Rabbit Theatre Company, The Grand, writer Victoria Carless, director Lisa Smith, Space Theatre, Gold Coast, 14-23 Nov, 2013
Anthony Weir, Michael Cutrupi, The Violent Outburst That Drew Me To You
photo Heidrun Löhr
Anthony Weir, Michael Cutrupi, The Violent Outburst That Drew Me To You
“He’s a little shit,” offers a 15-year-old audience member from Mount Druitt, in a succinct evaluation of the protagonist in the premiere production of The Violent Outburst That Drew Me To You. Writer Finegan Kruckemeyer beckons us to follow the journey of teenager Connor and his scattershot mind, joyously carried through by Michael Cutrupi with an explosive and determined energy that instantly endears him to the audience.
The first act kicks off at an unrelenting pace. Connor’s series of tantrums is cast as an overt symphony of pained interactions with a shape-shifting ensemble of cowed enablers and frustrated guardians, played by Kate Worsley, Emily Ayoub, Anthony Weir and Branden Christine with versatile buoyancy to match. In this lighter, but no less potent companion to Kruckemeyer’s Tough Beauty (RT117), director Kate Gaul’s dextrous assemblage of Connor’s outbursts invites us to the edge of his obliterating everything in his midst.
The boy’s reactions are authentic and lovingly crafted with a lyrical sprinkling of profanity. His sense of alienation and confusion viewing abstract artworks in the gallery while on a school excursion has a strange legitimacy when one considers the radicalising role of modern art in American ideological warfare.
The backyard theatre set mainly involves a wooden frame that functions as both shadow puppetry screen and partition for many an exchange, including annoying one of his mechanic Uncle Mal’s potential customers and, subsequently, landing some hard blows on his best mate. It is this that tests his parents’ patience and stretches our sympathy for him.
A bold scene sees Connor performing an extended and repetitive aria of the F-word, desperately trying to block out the sound of Stephen Fry’s voice, but also transforming the language in the ears of the young audience. Watching them squirm, settle and then hear profane language morph into poetic sound was more entertaining than concerning.
Scenes like these notably benefit from Daryl Wallis’ musical dramaturgy, lending Gaul and company a number of playful elements early in the production, for example Connor’s unseen classmate heckling in a rude bassoon baritone and his parents nagging in song. These are not merely clever devices, but point to Connor’s eventual coping strategy—to completely tune out.
Indeed, Kruckemeyer grants Connor and the audience of exasperated babysitters a well-deserved reprieve when his parents isolate him in his grandfather’s bush cabin. This Duke of Edinburgh Award challenge of sorts forces Connor to evaluate his behaviour. On the verge of delirious boredom, he crosses paths with Siena, a similarly troubled girl—played simultaneously by Ayoub, Christine and Worsley—who is more comfortable with the natural surroundings. Perhaps an apparition of dramatic convenience, this tomboy Artemis (Greek goddess, protector of young girls) both calms and links Connor to his hormonal awakening.
Directing his writing at a youth audience, Kruckemeyer has issued yet another unapologetic challenge to audiences to engage in a deeper understanding of the adolescent experience, that cuts across parental handwringing and legislative buck-passing over the perceived rise in unprovoked youth brutality on our streets.
True West Theatre, The Violent Outburst That Drew Me To You, writer Finegan Kruckemeyer, producer, director Kate Gaul, composer Daryl Wallis; Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, 21-30 Nov 2013; Griffin Independent, 18 June-12 July, 2014
It’s a rare hot day as I wade through the long grass on Hobart’s Queen’s Domain. The venue I’m ushered towards, the Victoria Gunpowder Magazine, is a place many Tasmanians have never seen, hidden as it is behind various sports grounds. Built in 1850 to house a mass of volatile weaponry—at its peak storing 1,000 barrels of gunpowder—the fortress-like edifice now appears neglected, surrounded by barbed wire fencing and accessed only on irregular tours by collectors of military memorabilia.
Inside this cold, virtual ruin, The Green Room, a site-specific production by solo-performer Jane Longhurst and sound artist Dylan Sheridan, is staged. This collaborative work is an outcome of the 2013 HyPe initiative, supported by Salamanca Arts Centre to encourage the creation of innovative, contemporary hybrid performance in Tasmania.
The fortress-like nature of the space seems more apparent on this day as the hot midday sun fades from view, the door is slammed shut and we are left in darkness. The marked difference in temperature somehow seems imperative, as this is an immersive work in which the audience is intimately connected to performer and to the space itself.
As we enter the room, Longhurst is already at work, sweeping the floor, stirring up dust. This sweeping—a recurring motif—is one of the ways the performer engages with the space, as tension builds around her choreography of physical gestures and interactions with a series of found objects such as rope and old gunpowder drums. In one suggestive sequence, a piece of rope falls to the floor which Longhurst then ties between two timber posts and swings on for a very long time, the rocking motion marked by the clocking sound of her boots against the floorboards. That I am disturbed by this—perhaps something to do with Longhurst’s proximity to the audience—says much about the potential of site-specific works to perturb common associations with a place.
The waiting game played with the audience is not only a test of endurance but also a sharp reminder of the site’s failed ideological function as a place awaiting a war that never came. This is alluded to in the work’s title, a Green Room being a space that accommodates performers when they’re not performing.
This preoccupation with the interstitial appears a central concern throughout the work, particularly in Sheridan’s exceptional use of atmospheric lighting and sound. With light glowing from the cracks between floorboards and hidden in crevices in the walls and a haunting soundscape ranging from a dull throbbing to metal scraping sounds—all of which were derived from field recordings at the site—the place takes on the guise of a character that taunts Longhurst. A point of brilliance is the performer’s response to a sound under the floor: floorboards are lifted, revealing a gentle, diffused light. This attention to the in-between and the duration of the interval creates a strange, resonant atmosphere where energy appears to seep through the very cracks of the building achieving a new and altogether more intriguing illumination of a hidden place and its stories.
As the work ended where it started—with sweeping—I was left with the impression that I was merely an interloper in a scene that would continue for the remainder of the day. The movement challenged and piqued its audience. With the room hazy from dust stirred, we emerged sneezing, stimulated by the textures of this strangely haunting place—and intoxicated by its smell and taste.
The Green Room, creator Jane Longhurst, Dylan Sheridan, performer Jane Longhurst, sound and lighting design Dylan Sheridan; Victoria Gunpowder Magazine, Hobart, 22 Nov-1 Dec, 2013
Strange things can happen while we’re waiting, beneath the spell of the cosmic joke, as Beckett showed us 60 years ago with Waiting for Godot. In the Waiting Room, Born in a Taxi’s reworking of their 2008 show, we are made to wait again in amusement and confusion, and for what, we don’t know.
The colossal Newport Substation, with its elaborate stairs and passageways, allows for plenty of play and delay from the moment of arrival. We all meet in the foyer and are issued a ‘waiting room’ number; the group is then split into three and ushered by separate routes—via devious detours—to the site of performance: a small room upstairs in the building’s rear. There is no defined performance space, only rows of chairs where we sit and watch the performers enter to sit in our midst one by one. We stare at them, and at each other. They stare at us. Until this air of addled anticipation gives rise to mischief of another kind.
In many ways, The Waiting Room is a study in the subtlety of non-verbal cues. The performers don’t speak, but compete and cavort with each other, trying to persuade us by gesture to physically join in the game. They play a forceful version of musical chairs, for example, but some of us are more willing than others to give up our seats. To what extent will we participate, or resist?
As audience, we rely on the custom of being led by our performers. We don’t hope to usurp them, perhaps only to join them at times. That’s why invitations to participate must be clear. The tricky, commendably radical, but not quite successful aspect of The Waiting Room is that the performers suggest an abandonment of traditional roles—a chance to get swept up in dancing, music, conga lines and the like—but there are no clear invitations. It is rather an experiment in generating atmosphere, and with a few exceptions (perhaps these people attended the previous show?) we remain suspended, disoriented and waiting for stronger cues.
Is this deliberate discomfort? The hint is there in a gentle, jocular way. As with Godot, the absence of narrative gives rise to malaise, which becomes the fuel for play and fanciful tangents. And as with Godot, social neurosis is exposed: hierarchy-complexes, tendencies toward calculation and competition, our reliance on permission and authority (be it God, Godot, the law or Big Brother). From time to time, a voice from the speakers prompts us, at one point inviting responses to major life questions: “If you’ve ever experienced the death of someone you love, lie down on the ground…If you are a critic or judgmental person, stand in the corner,” and so on.
This painful and playful candour does not divide us in the end, but rather unifies us through physical games, which shows that something is working well here. However chaotic The Waiting Room sometimes feels, its treatment of life’s anxieties is no mere abstraction to ponder at home. It is an immediate experience, set lightheartedly in a communal context: a limited window of time spent in transparent, bonhomous social unease.
Born in a Taxi, The Waiting Room, performers Penny Baron, Carolyn Hanna, Kate Hunter, Andrew Gray, Deborah Batton, Nick Papas; The Substation, Melbourne, 28 Nov-1 Dec, 2013
Death, paranoia and catastrophe define the 10-year-old body of work of Australian/Portuguese performance duo Stone/Castro. It is no accident the company formed two years after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Jo Stone, a Flinders University Drama Centre graduate, was in New York the day extremists toppled the great symbol of American economic power, the World Trade Centre.
Early in our interview Paulo Castro, Stone’s long-time collaborator and partner, confirms this darkly: “When the planes hit, Jo told me, people were looking up into the sky for more of them. Ghosts, sleepwalkers, somnambulists full of dust…”
The company’s latest production, Blackout, has as its point of departure not the specific events of that day, but the feelings of collapse and dislocation which suffuse the minutes, hours and days following cataclysmic events. Says Castro, “Blackout is about the state of loss of control, and about the cycle of building and destroying, destroying and building, that is the world in which we live; September 11, East Timor, the revolution in my own country…”
The revolution to which Castro refers is the 1974 military coup in Lisbon during which no shots were fired. The Estado Novo, Western Europe’s longest surviving authoritarian regime, collapsed, as peaceful protestors stuffed the gun barrels of soldiers’ rifles with cravos (red carnations). The post-revolution years were marked by democratising change and the dissolution of Portugal’s colonial empire, but Castro tells me the spirit of the revolution—of 25 April—penetrated deeply into the generation that grew up in its shadow. “We were all Pussy Riots,” says Castro of this time. “The theatre we were making in bunkers in Portugal in the 1990s was very political, anarchic and left-wing. It was a visceral and experimental world.”
Blackout, Castro tells me, will be less didactic: “It is a response to, not a play about 9/11. It will not be polemical in the way some of my earlier work was. We want to let people think.” Castro, by way of explanation, cites the work of German visual artist Gerhard Richter, whose 2005 painting, titled September, depicts the planes crashing into the World Trade Centre. Immediately searching online I find the painting is surprisingly small, but otherwise entirely characteristic of Richter’s work: photorealistic, but heavily distorted by the artist’s trademark ‘blur,’ an effect achieved by aggressively wiping a brush or sponge across the wet paintwork. Critic Robert Storr called September ‘anti-ideological,’ an attempt to decodify the imagery of 9/11 by disrupting the overfamiliar filmed and photographed representations of the towers’ collapse. It strikes me that Castro’s intentions with Blackout are analogous.
“More abstract that concrete, Blackout takes place on a metaphorical boat,” says Castro, “on which there is a catastrophic power failure. A wedding party is interrupted and suddenly the guests are exposed as frauds, people who all along had been pretending to be someone or something they were not.” Castro cites Lars von Trier’s 2011 apocalyptic drama Melancholia as an influence. That film, like Blackout, features a wedding that is disrupted by a catastrophic event, the narrative function of which is to interrogate extremities of human psychology rather than to anatomise disaster.
I ask Castro about the form Blackout will take, and he describes an approach that is fluid, multidisciplinary and improvisational: “We play within an extremely open space. In rehearsal with a combination of Australian and Portuguese dancers and actors we might attempt five versions of the same scene. Our work is a marriage of everything—choreography, theatre, visual image and soundscape.”
Aesthetically, according to the production’s press release, Blackout will use “blurriness and timewarp” in order to “take naturalistic scenes into a place that shifts between focus and distortion.” I pore over this sentence as Castro speaks, the connection between these words and Richter’s paintings clarifying. But before I’m able to raise the point, Castro obliquely confirms it: “Each moment is not exactly what you are seeing. As in a catastrophe, time seems to slow down and speed up in unexpected ways.” Neuroscientists, I discover later, refer to the phenomenon as ‘mind time,’ a cognitive reality generated by perhaps the most emblematic emotion of the post-9/11 era, fear.
The project is as provocative as any Stone/Castro has devised but Castro, in bringing our conversation to a close, says: “I’m not worried. I’ve worked in Sydney and Melbourne before, but Adelaide is a little bit special. It is a city thirsty for surprises.”
In addition to Jo Stone, the multinational cast includes Australian-based performers Vincent Crowley, Alisdair Macindoe, Nathan O’Keefe, Larissa McGowan and Stephen Sheehan, and from Portugal John Romao. Blackout’s key creatives include Portuguese lighting designer Daniel Worm and South Australian-based designers Sascha Budimski (sound) and Morag Cook (set and costumes).
2014 Adelaide Festival, Stone/Castro, Blackout, AC Arts Main Theatre, Adelaide, 3-9 March
Bryony Kimmings and Taylor, Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model, photo courtesy the artist
One of the biggest challenges facing the organisers of the upcoming Festival of Live Art (FOLA) in Melbourne is defining the damned thing. Many of the artists in the festival don’t even use the term to describe their work, and those who do can’t seem to agree on what it really stands for. In other areas this might be a worrying matter, but when it comes to live art it suggests a festival which will be constantly questioning its own limits. It’s pretty exciting stuff.
“We began the whole process by getting a whole bunch of artists in a room and having a discussion about what live art is,” says Arts House Creative Producer Angharad Wynne-Jones. “And no one could agree. We tried to at least set some parameters about what it isn’t, and I think at one point we went well, it’s not a three-act play, and then even that was disputed.”
FOLA will be presented by Arts House, St Kilda’s Theatre Works and Footscray Community Arts Centre, the first time the three organisations have worked together. Given live art’s relative outsider status in Australia, it’s unlikely that such a festival could have been produced by one venue alone. The term was coined in the UK in the mid-1980s and the rise there of many bodies such as the Live Art Development Agency (LADA) has meant that a large community of art-makers has come together under the same banner. In Australia the scene is far more fragmented, isolated, but perhaps also more diverse as a result.
“It feels to me like the Australian artists engaged in that kind of practice have got a relationship with (UK live art) history and certainly they collaborate and connect internationally all the time, but they’re working in a broader context,” says Wynne-Jones. “There are connections into Asia that change the way we might think about live art, and within Indigenous Australia, things we might think about ritual and relationships to the body that are quite different to the UK context.”
FOLA works appearing at Arts House include Tristan Meecham’s large-scale Game Show, in which contestants vie for a prize pool consisting of every possession the artist owns; Sam Routledge and Martyn Coutts’ interactive drama set in a miniature railway and township; and Amy Spiers and Catherine Ryan’s Nothing to See Here, wherein Arts House patrons around the North Melbourne Town Hall and Meat Market will be dispersed, willingly or otherwise with “techniques police use to break up protests” (FOLA program).
The emergence of the festival was a serendipitous one for Theatre Works. Creative producer Daniel Clarke had already brought on live art practitioner Dan Koop to help develop a program named Encounters which would explore the possibilities of one-on-one and micro-audience performance. When talks about FOLA commenced, that program naturally wove itself into the larger festival. The Theatre Works season will include a work by choreographer Nat Cursio held in her own living room —there are only 10 tickets available for the entire season. Other works see audiences of one sharing a bed with cabaret artist Yana Alana, or investigating intimacy in the age of Skype with Melanie Jame Wolf, or else subjecting themselves to experiences of very real terror in Kelly Alexander, Jodie Ahrens and Melanie Hamilton’s Fright.
Fright stands out among the overall FOLA program, since much live art in Australia takes a generous, expansive or collaborative approach to audience-artist relations. Not that it’s all hugs and flowers, but it’s rare to find a work that delves into physically threatening territory.
“I did the development and I found it pretty full on,” says Clarke. “I was terrified at some moments, like physically afraid.” “It plays on a physical sense of fear,” says Koop, “an emotional sense of fear, a social sense of fear. In that same way that something that’s uncomfortable in a conversation can make you blush and laugh. It wasn’t all shrieking and pulling my hair out, there was awkwardness as fear as well. And self-exploration as fear, self-knowledge as fear.”
Theatre Works will also present performance artist Bryony Kimmings’ Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model, in which Kimmings and her nine-year-old niece Taylor develop a better icon for the contemporary tween. “There’s also a large part of Bryony’s work that doesn’t happen on the stage,” says Clarke. “This character that is the role model, Catherine Bennett, now goes out to schools and runs assemblies with tweens. She’s made pop songs, there’s a doco about her. The show is one part of this art project and it’s just sort of snowballing.” It’s an example of the way British live art occupies a broader space than the moment of presentation.
Melbourne-based performance maker and teacher Leisa Shelton is presenting an archive of Live Art Development Agency video during the festival as well as a work that seeks to “map” our memories of pivotal moments in Australian live art. Both Arts House-based investigations are attempts to rethink the idea of documentation in relation to a mode of art-making that is deeply concerned with the live moment.
Footscray Community Arts Centre’s CEO Jade Lillie is taking an equally interrogative approach to the festival. The venue is one grounded in community and socially engaged practices, and for some time she questioned how live art could contribute to these.
“For us it’s a playful way to look at what live art is in a community-engaged context,” she says. “We’re interested in questions like ‘who does a Festival of Live Art speak to?’ Sometimes my feeling is that live art practice often speaks to itself, or audiences that reflect the artist. I’m not particularly interested in that in our context.”
FCAC will host a forum addressing such questions as well as a masterclass with Lenine Bourke. Performance poet Alia Gabres will be recreating her grandmother’s traditional Eritrean coffee ceremony and both sharing and creating new stories live, and Triage Live Art Collective’s Strange Passions will see strangers swapping their own tales while rendered anonymous by masks.
Beth Buchanan, I Know That I Am Not Dead
photo Andrew Sully
Beth Buchanan, I Know That I Am Not Dead
Appearing at Arts House will be post’s Mish Grigor, Paul Gazzola (artist, curator Temporary Democracies, RT117), James Berlyn (see RT118), Malcolm Whittaker, Emma Beech (RT115), Nicola Gunn with Triage Live Art Collective, Julie Vulcan (RT116), Jason Maling, Sarah Rodigari (ex-Panther), and Lois Weaver, independent artist for 25 years and lecturer in Contemporary Performance at Queen Mary University of London. Weaver is currently Artistic Director of the Air Project, an Arts Council of England-funded initiative that nurtures and sustains established Live Art practitioners and emerging artists in the UK.
Bryony Kimmings’ Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model will play at Theatre Works 25 March -6 April. EDs
Arts House, Theatre Works, Footscray Community Arts Centre, Festival of Live Art, 14-30 March
The full festival program is online at fola.com.au.
I’m sitting, uncertain to begin with, wearing headphones; listening to fragments of conversations with no definite source. It takes a while—quite a while—to figure out who’s where; and often—usually—I can only locate one performer at a time. The other three are elusive, hidden amid the packed food court at Highpoint Shopping Centre in Melbourne’s inner west. It’s a Saturday afternoon before Christmas: the tiled hall overflows with fidgety kids, tired adults, stacks of shopping bags and pre-made food packs. The headphones mute the reverberating sound cloud of voices that floats between the punters and the atrium ceiling.
Over time, I relax into a humming, lulling soundscape, punctuated by random narratives and stray sentences: “Everybody’s checking each other out,” a voice says. But who, where? I just see shoppers forking up plates of stir-fry, playing with straws and phones. And then: a guy in a red t-shirt, moving reeeal slowly with a Macca’s bag and a Coke. He sits down nearby, his gestures continuing in exaggerated slow motion. The sounds of the paper bag, the crisp ‘tsss’ of snapped-open can are up-close in my ears. I can’t tell what’s ‘live’ or what’s recorded and performed in synch with the soundscape. There’s a disjunct, or perhaps an overlap, or even both: a jarring between what’s ‘out there’—the character, his movements, sounds—and what’s ‘in my head,’ pushed in there via the soundscape.
As PUBLIC unfolds, a second performer appears, strolling through the crowd—her headset mic is the giveaway. She talks about girls getting engaged; a guy on a late shift. The dance track “I Feel Love” is beating in my ears, anthemic and heady.
Another voiceover begins a meandering tale about an online encounter with a ‘chatbot.’ “You can meet him in a public room or you can tap someone and meet in a private room,” says the voice. Am I present here, or am I ‘lurking?’ Am I in a public or a private space; participant or voyeur?
Rachael Dyson-McGregor, Nicola Gunn, Tom Davies, Diana Nguyen, PUBLIC
photo Tamara Kirby
Rachael Dyson-McGregor, Nicola Gunn, Tom Davies, Diana Nguyen, PUBLIC
PUBLIC extends Tamara Saulwick’s interest in ordinary speech and stories—as in Pindrop (see RT111) or her work in development, Endings. In PUBLIC, the scripted, performed text is just one element in the complex interplay of performer, ‘source’ and site. Whereas in Pindrop the stories themselves took thematic precedence, here the interest seems to lie as much, or more, in the shifting and often confounding merger between what’s staged and what’s already present in the space. Throughout PUBLIC I’m increasingly seduced by the way Saulwick, with sound designer Luke Smiles, elevates the rhythms of banal exchange to the level of music or poetry. I listen for the shifting timbres; the voices are melodic lines over an orchestral backing of eye- and ear-scapes.
As further narratives unfold and performers wander in and out of view, a feeling of real/unrealness grows. Who are all these ‘real’ people around me? Across the way, a woman playfully throws a screwed-up serviette at her child; a cleaner stagily pulls out a walkie-talkie amid the tables and speaks on it; a pair of elderly ladies on a bench seat look with interest around the court.
Hundreds of unpaid extras, in effect, flesh out an ambience that’s further illuminated when as audience we find ourselves eavesdropping on the four performers, who now sit together at a table, playing Truth or Dare. They confess fears and secrets. Behind them, two under-ten boys with mullets and blingy neck chains lick dripping icecreams and bemusedly look on.
Nicola Gunn
video still Tamara Saulwick
Nicola Gunn
Site-specific performance, verbatim theatre and live art are all forms that increasingly draw our attention to ordinary life, shedding surprising light on familiar sites and activities. PUBLIC combines aspects of all three forms, intriguingly complicating and augmenting the food court space. At the same time—and despite some escalating performer actions that become gorgeously surreal—the work strikes me as almost ‘representational’—‘depicting’ the space, if you will, in larger-than-life tones, with the added resonant effect of my own presence in the picture. The work’s climax elevates, resounds, seeming to drift up into the cavernous ceiling to merge with the blue sky and fluffy clouds beyond the glass roof.
With the show over and my headphones returned, I sit back down in the food court and just watch, senses awakened to the sheer volume of people—seats occupied, vacated and immediately occupied again. Weirdly, as I prepare to leave, a man walks past me—really slowly—crumpling a Maccas’ bag…and he’s moving just slowly enough that I find myself expecting that crumpling sound, amplified and close-up to my ears.
Big West: PUBLIC, concept, direction Tamara Saulwick, sound design Luke Smiles, dramaturgy Martyn Coutts, system design Nick Roux, Highpoint Shopping Centre food court, Melbourne, 22 Nov –1 Dec 2013
Fresh from her success directing the opera double bill His Music Burns for the Sydney Chamber Opera in the 2014 Sydney Festival (see review), a radiantly cheerful Sarah Giles tells me she started young. At 15, with some fellow students she “directed a ludicrously ambitious production of Kafka’s The Trial, the Berkoff version. I fell in love with theatre.” With other successes, Marius von Mayenburg’s The Ugly One at Griffin and a much extended season of Mrs Warren’s Profession at the STC, where she has mostly directed, Giles is making her mark in Sydney theatre
She also cites key influences including Penelope Nunn at the South Yarra Ballet School—“an eclectic group of kids came out of there including dancer Alisdair Macindoe, actress Chloe Armstrong and my brother who’s now in fashion.” Giles went to Melbourne University, did an arts degree “and got involved with Union House Theatre and Susie Dee, a brilliant woman who continues to be an extraordinary inspiration for a lot of people.” She directed shows at university and then independent productions: “I acted in a show with White Whale Theatre with David Mence—brilliant, brilliant mind. He wrote a zombie schlock horror sequel to Macbeth that sounds bizarre but was fun and we took it to Edinburgh. I got back from that in 2007 and I’d decided I didn’t want to act, I wanted to direct. I think that was about control.
“I did some shows at La Mama and assistant directing with Peter Evans at the MTC. He was so generous with his time and with his insights. He was a real mentor and he’s developed into a friend over the years. So that was my first experience in a professional company and after that I auditioned for the NIDA Directors Course, got in and moved up here. This was in 2008 and I did the course with Egil Kipste who used to be the casting director at STC and had worked with Disney as well as with German director Peter Stein. We had the most wonderful chaotic year.”
At NIDA Giles directed Martin Crimp’s Fewer Emergencies and, for her graduation piece, The Bald Soprano: “I had fallen in love with the Absurdists when I saw a production of The Chairs with Paul Blackwell, Julie Forsythe and Marg Downie when I was 16 years old. It just seared into my brain. I was so proud of my Bald Soprano. I’ve never seen an audience laugh so hard. I’ve always loved comedies and been drawn to them. That really sealed my deal with comedy.”
After working with Red Stitch in Melbourne and for Griffin Independent a few years back she directed Matt Cameron’s Ruby Moon (2011) and in the same year Money Shots, both with STC’s Next Stage, and Mariage Blanc (2012), which she describes as, “a wonderfully inventive, completely mad Polish play by Tadeusz Rosewicz.” It was adapted by Giles and Melissa Bubnic, “a very funny writer from Melbourne who now lives in London. Then I directed Mrs Warren’s Profession in 2013.
“The common thread for me is exploring ideas through comedy. It’s not comedy for comedy’s sake. Comedy is one of the most powerful forms with which to explore almost anything.”
Giles’ comic sensibility was vividly evident in her direction of the first stage version of Gyorgy Kurtag’s …pas a pas … nulle part in His Music Burns (see p16). With the baritone Mitchell Riley (in a finely tuned performance at once funny, sad and despairing) and conductor Jack Symonds, Giles focused on “trying to get as close to the text as possible,” aided by how closely text and music work together in Kurtag’s score. She was also aware that the work “could be really heavy-handed and bleak.” I tell Giles that the production amplified that sense of being in the theatre, moments of boredom, of reflection, horror, terror. She concurs, “It’s like an illness. You’re trapped. You can’t get up and leave.” But we also laugh at the protagonist, and at ourselves.
I ask what attracts her to the plays of Marius von Mayenburg. His Eldorado was produced at Malthouse in 2006 and Moving Target in 2008, both directed by Benedict Andrews. “I spend a lot of time reading comedies and the minute I laugh out loud I know a play’s good. I read The Ugly One when I was at NIDA and it was the first play I’d ever read where I felt like someone had really hooked into a way of delivering a message to an audience not simply through what is said but how it’s said and the form in which it’s said. In Ionesco form and content all function together, but this was some of the first contemporary writing I’d read that was very funny and with a very bleak, very dry, very truthful sense of humour. A bit like Todd Solondz’ film Happiness. Another writer I’m in love with is David Gieselmann who wrote Mr Kolpert and The Pigeons.
“The other thing that drew me to The Ugly One was that I understood exactly what it was speaking about: the impossibility of being an individual within society. People sometimes think it’s a play about beauty and what we look like. That’s just the vehicle.
“I met Marius when he was visiting Sydney. We had a beer and he mentioned a play he’d written called Perplex. He sent me the English version. The first read was quite a fuzzy experience but it got more and more clear as I read it. I laughed out loud. It’s more cerebral but has more heart than The Ugly One. It’s a profound play. It moves me to tears. There’s a very beautiful ending. The thing I love about it is that it’s essentially about reality and what better form to explore that than through the theatre? [It’s roots are in] plays like Stoppard’s The Real Thing, to a certain extent The Maids and to a massive extent Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. The premise is simply that none of us lives in a shared reality. My memory of this interview will be very different from yours. It’s something we don’t often think about and it’s evident in the disconnect [of being involved in] stupid things like Facebook and phones. People are not even in reality.”
Perplex is an extreme reality test for performers and audience. The press release from the Schaubühne (where the play was first produced directed by von Mayenburg before many productions across Europe) describes it as “like slipping on a metaphysical banana peel: …A couple, Eva and Robert, come home after a holiday. The plants look mysteriously different and a letter informs them of the disconnection of their electricity supply. Enter Judith and Sebastian, friends of the couple, who were meant to have taken care of things in their absence. However, they turn out to be the rightful occupants and throw Eva and Robert unceremoniously out of their home. A short while later they both return, but this time, after a change of outfit, they are an au-pair and the son of the second couple” (http://www.schaubuehne.de). But there is worse to come, and far more surreal. Giles is particularly taken by the existential power of the ending, where one of the characters asks, “Who cast me?” In von Mayenburg’s plays there’s a dramaturgical self-awareness in which the line between theatre and reality is a blur.
But strange as Perplex becomes, I ask Giles, does it need a surreal staging? She is adamant, “To pack a punch, you don’t want to blow the proverbial load of the play by having the people looking as if they’re bonkers from the word go. It’s about setting up an established reality for the audience to hook into and then allowing that to shift. They’re not going to walk in and see a deeply abstract avant-garde set from Renée Mulder, who’s resident here at the STC. We’ve worked together a lot.”
Expecting that Giles would be moving onto other productions after Perplex, I was surprised to hear that she’s entering a period of discovery with the help of the Mike Walsh and the Gloria Payten & Gloria Dawn Foundation Fellowships which will take her to Berlin’s Theatretreffen festival, Brussell’s KunstenFestivalDesArts and New York: “I’m just desperate to see a lot of theatre. Works of international significance do travel to festivals here but not often enough. We have one major opera company in the country. It’s not enough and many shows are not affordable. The only way to do it is to travel.”
Giles is also looking forward “to developing projects that I’ve been meaning to get to for a long time but I’ve not given myself time to do. I left NIDA five or six years ago and I’ve pretty much been working consistently. And it’s a lovely moment to pause for a second and just reassess. Without wanting to sound too serious, it feels like there might be a slight shift in my career. The little foray into opera was just so enlightening and there are so many I’d like to direct. It’s just got me. And I’m really interested in looking at other forms. I’ve got some mad ideas.”
Sydney Theatre Company, Perplex, writer Marius von Mayenburg, director Sarah Giles, 31 March-3 May
Walking in single file through the inner passage of a dam is not where an audience for a music performance would usually find itself. Emerging from the other end onto the far shore of Lake Guy, deep in Victoria’s High Plains, was just as unexpected. Outside we were greeted by the drone of a hurdy-gurdy calling across the water and the spectacle of countless stars reflecting on the lake’s surface.
A bank of lights flashed intermittently further along the water’s edge, signalling a response to the music coming from the opposite shore. When the music ended the audience cheered and flashed their torches in the hope that John Billan, the artist responsible, would receive these signals of appreciation across the lake. A mobile phone call was made to Billan to request an encore, to which he complied and another five minute burst of haunting hurdy-gurdy wavered across the water. The sound was thrown across the lake by a ‘sound mirror,’ a large metal bowl standing on its side with a speaker in front of it.
This distinctive experience was part of Bogong ELECTRIC, an exhibition and performance program based around the Bogong Centre for Sound Culture. The Centre was established in the Bogong Alpine Village by sound artists Philip Samartzis and Madelynne Cornish to support cultural and artistic “initiatives investigating the history and ecology of the Australian Alps.” Following Bogong AIR in 2011 (RT102), this is the second festival associated with the Centre.
The village is an idyllic cluster of cabins fanned out on the side of the mountain alongside Victoria’s largest hydroelectric system, whose infrastructure includes a dam and several underground power stations. Rarely does such a pristine natural environment co-exist so closely with man-made industrial might. It’s hard to think of a more ideal setting for a posse of local and international sound artists to explore this juxtaposition across the festival’s four-day program through a variety of site-specific practices. Bogong’s relative remoteness also has its downside: over four hours’ drive from Melbourne, attendees were mostly the artists themselves and their partners, students of Samartzis or Billan, or others with some role in the festival, plus a few hardy punters.
Geoff Robinson installation, image courtesy of the artist and Bogong Electric
The program was made up of a variety of performance and installation pieces situated around the village and hydroelectric infrastructure. The installations ranged from the familiar video/speaker set-up (Madelynne Cornish, Synchronator, Geoff Robinson), to unique works that required active participation from audiences enabled by the use of headphones. Christophe Charles’ piece was listened to while canoeing on the lake, and Lizzie Pogson’s work was similarly experienced walking through the innards of the dam, her narrative guiding the listener along the walkway. Klaus Filip’s simple yet delightful work invited participants to move through a series of suspended lights while wearing cordless headphones receiving transmissions from each light, ranging from electrostatic to music. Listeners often set the small suspended lights swinging to wondrous sonic and visual effect. The performances were often site-specific in nature as well, taking place outdoors, night and day, and even in the AGL Information Centre adjacent to the power station.
Themes of water, electricity and industrial sound (often sourced from field recordings made on location) recurred through installations and performances, but it was the artists who ventured a slightly different take from the obvious who were most successful. Billan’s piece was the outstanding work of the festival, largely because it went beyond these themes and explored the idea of signalling by both light and sound, using the lake and surrounding environs as a grand mise en scène that enhanced the evocative nature of the piece. Michael Vorfeld’s Light Bulb Music performance was also a (ahem) highlight. The Berlin-based artist’s multi-layered rhythms and textures created by an array of amplified light bulbs must have been close to top of the festival curators’ wish list when they settled on the event’s electricity theme. Vorfeld performed his piece lakeside in the evening, his blinking and buzzing coloured lightbulbs the only light source other than the stars. This was ‘electronic music’ at its most elemental.
The common criticism that sound art works are too long with little variation could be applied to most of the festival’s performances. Even Vorfeld was guilty of this to an extent; only John Billan’s sound mirror performance avoided this trap. The fact that he received an encore is a lesson for sound art performers. Yet there’s also no doubting that the more successful works of Bogong ELECTRIC lived up to sound art’s site specific aims of articulating both the space and environment. With its meeting of natural features and monolithic electrical infrastructure, Bogong itself was the star.
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Bogong ELECTRIC 2013, curators Philip Samartzis, Madelynne Cornish, Bogong Village, 1 Nov-1 Dec
Opening last year at Sydney’s Reginald Theatre on a fittingly threatening night, the Australian premiere of Carrie the Musical emphasised humanity over horror spectacle.
Adapted from Stephen King’s seminal first novel about a teenage outcast with psychokinetic abilities, the musical began its life as an ostentatious Broadway flop in 1988. It has since been revised by original composer Michael Gore, lyricist Dean Pitchford and writer Lawrence D Cohen into a more intimate production which enjoyed a successful 2012 off-Broadway run before being realised for Australian audiences by Sydney independent music theatre company Squabbalogic.
Though taking a few wardrobe cues from Brian de Palma’s emblematic film version, Carrie the Musical is closer in tone to King’s novel, where the supernatural is undeniably present, but the main themes are repression, adolescent angst and cruelty. As befits the medium, this musical production has more light-hearted moments than both book and film, while retaining the story’s dark underpinnings. Thematically, as well as in its wise-cracking repartée and 50s-inflected song and dance numbers, this Carrie occupies the same essential territory as Hairspray and Grease, other narratives of teen outsiders striving to achieve romantic and social success on their own terms. With its small cast and orchestra tucked into the cosy confines of the Reginald, the intimate scale of Squabbalogic’s production was essential in making the audience feel an active part of this affecting performance.
The darkened set was a striking foil for Carrie’s romantic soaring ballads and the bright, often comedic group numbers. A derelict assemblage of charred chairs, wooden scaffolding and tattered fabric surrounding the semi-circular stage served to signify not only the heroine’s ultimate destructive act, but also represented the sackcloth and ashes ambience of Carrie’s home as well as the underlying rottenness of the school hierarchy.
The show begins with an interrogation. Isolated by a spotlight, wholesome Sue Snell has questions fired at her out of the darkness about the events of the fateful prom night of which she is the sole survivor. This scene will recur, forming a simple dramatic framing device for the flashbacks relating Carrie’s coming-of-age. Harnessing a powerful, clear voice to a fragile physicality, Hilary Cole brings a great deal of sympathetic intensity to the title role. As her nemesis, arrogant rich kid Chris Hargensen, Prudence Holloway injects the production’s one true note of evil, while Adèle Parkinson and Rob Johnson are likeable but not cloying as Sue and Tommy—the popular couple with a conscience.
It was somewhat disappointing to see Carrie’s relationship with her mother (Margi de Ferranti) considerably softened here. Perhaps in an attempt to avoid panto-style evil, Mama is a more sympathetic character than the sadistic religious fanatic in book and film, but this tends to diminish a key element in Carrie’s struggle. One of the film’s most effective moments is of course when Carrie stands crowned as prom queen, radiant with newly discovered beauty and social success—just before the spectacular drenching in pig’s blood. This scene will hang over any reworking of Carrie. The moment seemed rather rushed in this production, though its aftermath was visually arresting: Carrie’s devastating fury accentuated by livid red light and strobe flashes.
This tale of humiliation, paranormal ability, crushed hopes and mass murder would appear a challenging one to bring to the musical stage, yet director Jay James-Moody’s production had a surprising playfulness while never trivialising its central character’s very personal experience. It was great fun.
Squabbalogic, Carrie the Musical, director Jay James-Moody, composer Michael Gore, lyricist Dean Pitchford, writer Lawrence D Cohen, scenic designer Sean Minahan, lighting Mikey Rice, musical director Mark Chamberlain, choreographer Shondelle Pratt; Reginald Theatre, Seymour Centre, 13-30 Nov 2013
It’s hard to decide whether this collaboration between Andrée Greenwell, Jordie Albiston and Abe Pogos is a fantastical chimera or clambering Frankenstein’s monster. It’s certainly a thing of many parts that don’t always hang together, yet are often terrifically powerful in their own right.
It employs devices from a huge range of forms—documentary theatre, music theatre, mixed media, concert and installation—to relate the story of the last woman hanged in Australia. The combination of styles means that the narrative itself can slip from compelling investigative account to allusive poetry to the tawdry tackiness of TV’s Underbelly, even combining all three in the same instant. The video work, especially, which frequently re-enacts the unfolding drama, is surprisingly literal when juxtaposed with the richness of the score.
We certainly learn a lot. Jean Lee’s life from childhood to that final fatal fall is given a good canvassing, and the verse biography by Jordie Albiston from which the libretto is adapted (by both Albiston and Pogos) is a surprising combination of faithful biography and canny lyricism. Lee’s misadventures saw her falling into a world of prostitution and blackmail that culminated in the murder of an elderly bookmaker in the company of several other low-rent crims. The presentation of her downfall alternates between clinical coolness, moving pathos and garish fascination.
Greenwell’s compositions are an evocative almanac of genres, ranging from torch song to Eastern European-style jazz to Tin Pan Alley numbers. Hugo Race, Jeff Duff and Simon Maiden provide three very distinct and contrasting voices, with Race especially delivering the kind of dark and dirty textures that serve this bleak territory well. Max Sharam’s vocals are a fine fit as Lee’s resurrected stage self but the performer occasionally dropped lines during the Melbourne season, making it at times difficult to sense what the work should really be like in finished form.
It’s also difficult to know what the work’s makers themselves make of Jean Lee, who was executed in 1951. By almost entirely refraining from judgment of its central figure they limit the pity we might feel for Lee, or the horror at the murder of a maybe-but-maybe-not innocent. This may be deliberate, but the intent behind the work’s overall ambiguity is itself obscure. It may be that the concert setting is itself a potent alienation device, in the Brechtian sense, and the work never aims at the kind of realism that might dupe us into putting too much faith in the veracity of the tale’s telling.
But that distancing effect does allow us the space to relish what is a sophisticated and very enjoyable song cycle, several excellent performances and some writing of much merit. If any of it occurs at the expense of Jean Lee, at least there doesn’t seem to be anyone left who would care to defend her.
The Hanging Of Jean Lee, composer, image director Andrée Greenwell, libretto Jordie Albiston, Abe Pogos, audio Michael Hewes, lighting Neil Simpson’ Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, December 7-8
At La Mama Theatre the audience competes for room with the modest set of Margaret Cameron’s one-woman play Opera for a Small Mammal. We crowd around the edge of the oversized tree-trunk cross-section serving as a stage. Extra seats are squeezed around a plush armchair and a toy piano with such tall legs that it can be played while standing.
Some, like myself, are familiar with Cameron’s work from her collaborations with David Young for Chamber Made Opera; others may have seen her first solo show, Things Calypso wanted to Say! in this same theatre in 1987. A woman dressed as a mouse enters “incognito” in dark shades and a scarf to announce that Regina Josefine del Mouse, the Mouse Queen whose dominion is “the lowercase letters of art,” will “issue a decree on the artistic nature of Matter.” We, “the Mouse People who live in the dark behind the scenes,” are all ears.
What follows may be understood through the literal translation of ‘opera’ as ‘works,’ each of the six scenes of Opera for a Small Mammal being a poem unto itself. Excerpts from Purcell’s The Fairy Queen break up the scenes in which Cameron sniffs, tastes and gorges her way through four centuries of theatre, philosophy, literature and music. The overall effect is a ‘philosophical theatre’ in the sense of the philosophical fiction of Umberto Eco or the philosophical autobiography of American writer and director Chris Kraus. Quotations lifted from Michel Foucault, Gertrude Stein and Hélène Cixous are cited with a footnote, that is, a receptionist’s bell on the floor that is struck with the foot. Alongside del Mouse’s voracious appetite for words are the retiring appetites of a bucolic character from an AA Milne story: a cup of tea, a good sit and a spot of sugar. What may sound like Wind in the Willows for theory nerds is a powerful meditation on the vulnerabilities and passions of the creative animal.
Margaret Cameron, Opera for a Small Mammal
photo Daisy Noyes
Margaret Cameron, Opera for a Small Mammal
Together, the six scenes describe an arc that will resonate at different points with different small mammals in the audience. A light-hearted encounter with the big Other (an elephant, to be precise) leads to a whimsical meditation on the libidinal economy of thought. Then almost without warning the audience is plunged into a free-fall of the soul, past grief and humiliation to land among the ruins of discarded identities. The sense of suffering at this point, as Cameron lies crushed under a weak white spotlight, is unbearable, her horror a cold hand on everyone’s heart.
From the depths of despair, del Mouse makes peace with the consolations of self-fashioning, of “piping” with her tiny, squeaky voice, of “lettering” and of “daubing.” These acts are explained at the toy piano under a single held note, as though music too were a type of writing through which we may “Proceed into a distance We Understand.” Del Mouse’s intellectual appetites have returned, but in a new light born of suffering.
And del Mouse’s appetites come back in force as she strikes out into “the Orchard of the World” to pick the fruit for “Words and Jam.” She carries a basket of books and lemons, gorging upon them as she goes. But what follows this celebration of the fruit of life is a solemn ceremony. Del Mouse, carrying a giant wooden phallus and a basket of electronic candles, defiantly gives her decree before finally leaving the audience holding flickering candles. Too often do we live in bad faith and “abnegate Our Throne” at the word-sniffing, -tasting and -piping head of our bodies. We “cry Victim to inheritance/ Rather than Heir and heiress to the Question of the Dimensionality of Our Being.” Though we may be humiliated by mortality, such abdication is the one true death.
Chamber Made Opera, Opera for a Small Mammal, writer, performer Margaret Cameron, director David Young, sound design, operation Jethro Woodward; La Mama, Melbourne, 4 Dec, 2013
Over the past decade, percussionist Eugene Ughetti and his ensemble, Speak Percussion, have commissioned a startling catalogue of works by emerging and established Australian composers. As part of an MCA/Freedman Fellowship for Classical Music, Ughetti has brought these works together as a living portrait of Australian solo percussion music.
Ughetti’s portrait is virtuosic and post-experimental, which is to say that non-traditional percussion instruments and compositional techniques (with ‘traditional’ incorporating institutionalised techniques of the 20th century avant-garde like serial and spectral procedures) are incorporated seamlessly into unified compositions that are as rewarding to hear as they are challenging to play.
Alex Garsden’s Macrograph is a case in point. The variety of dinosaur sounds Ughetti conjures from a bowed cardboard box requires a mastery of diverse ricochet effects along the bow and extreme sensitivity to bow pressure and speed. These animal recitatives are held together by a background of irregularly chiming steel bowls containing vibrators that are turned on and off at switches as different tones are required. Despite the eclectic combination of instruments, the piece is a perfectly contained series of five episodes escalating in intensity, followed by a coda on pitch-pipes, styrofoam and a metal sheet.
James Rushford’s Twin Resistance requires an extensive battery of bells and crotales, including a series of chimes activated by mop-bucket pedals. The piece’s restricted tone colour provides an opportunity to focus on Rushford’s rhythmic world, a continuous tissue that defies repetition and meter.
While Garsden and Rushford’s pieces show Ughetti supporting a new generation of composers, the concert also highlights his relationships with established composers. Liza Lim’s ‘postcard piece,’ Love Letter, requires the performer to write a love letter and then translate the characters of the letter into musical material. Ughetti’s wife Rochelle must have felt very lucky listening to his beguiling daf drum solo. Throughout the letter’s eight sections (could they be sentences?), the drum is rapidly shaken, swayed, struck all over and caressed with hands, knees, loofah pads and a superball until the final gesture: three Xs traced on the drum skin with the fingertips.
Thomas Meadowcroft’s Plain Moving Landfill from 2003, the earliest work on the program, provided a contrast of pace. Two soporific foot bellows huff and puff into melodicas, generating a snoring, swelling drone. Meanwhile, Ughetti massages a bass drum with soft mallets, brushes and a plastic water bottle.
The concert ended with Anthony Pateras’ Hypnagogics “for microsounds and tape,” which draws in part on the psychoacoustic experiments of the composer Alvin Lucier. Thanks to Ughetti, listeners have had multiple opportunities to hear this work over the past eight years and explore its psychoacoustic properties in different settings. Throughout, Ughetti plays short bursts on rows of shot glasses, small ceramic teacups, miniature skin drums and crotales—the ‘microsounds’—which interact with tones from the tape part to create binaural beats, or tones that seem spatially and timbrally disconnected from the performer’s actions. In this performance I did not hear the ear-tickling binaural beats that I have before, but tones that seemed to fill the room with a shimmering aura.
After such a rich series of short performances, I can’t help asking where the neat edges of the works commissioned by Ughetti come from. What does it say about the funding and commissioning process in Australia that the radical sounds of the past 50 years are being packaged into neat dramatic arcs and discrete variations? Are composers writing for CDs and impatient audiences? Is there a genuine sense that the ideas explored therein need no more than 10 minutes to unfold? Ughetti’s portrait of Australian solo percussion music may also shed a light on the audiences and institutions surrounding it.
Eugene Ughetti, Australian Percussion Solos, Melbourne Recital Centre, 14 Dec, 2013
photo Rémi Chauvin, courtesy MONA Museum of Old and New Art
Slave Pianos/Punkasila
On the opening night of MOFO concerts at the MAC Precinct, young families, middle-aged couples and 20-something hipsters (never seen so many beards) lounge on pink bean bags gently nodding to the mannered drawl of Mick Harvey doing Serge Gainsborough covers.
Then we all troop to the Back Space to see Melbourne’s conceptual art group Slave Pianos collaborating with Indonesian art band Punkasila. Following this, Sun Ra Arkestra is wheeled out of cryogenesis to recall what free jazz used to sound like and the night is topped off with Astronautilus, a Florida rapper who’s on a career high because he didn’t expect a crowd this big and the view from the top of Mt Wellington blew his “freakin’ mind!”
Eclectic seems barely adequate to describe Brian Ritchie’s curatorial approach. While we’re told this happens overseas all the time, it really is unique for Australia, and I suspect it particularly works because it’s in Hobart. Present this combination of acts in a city that’s comparatively spoiled for choice and audiences might just be a bit too picky, waiting for the sideshow to see only the act they know and already love.
Schizosonics
It’s not just that the overall combination of acts is eclectic, some of the performances are seriously varied within themselves. Take the Slave Pianos/Punkasila collaboration. It opens with Australia’s most renowned pianist Michael Kieran Harvey performing a virtuosic haute-classical solo for around 10 minutes. Punkasila, in silver suits, stand around waiting, offering an occasional guitar buzz or a drum skiffle. Harvey finishes and they launch into 20 minutes of playful punk rock over which Indonesian singer Rachel Saraswati ululates. Projected above is an animation of the comic The Lepidopters in which it seems moth creatures from outer space come to earth and somehow everyone gets all sexy. While the Kieran Harvey solo sits oddly at the beginning, the symbolic weight of the Western canon and its imperialistic overtones is powerful. Somehow, by the end, it all seems to make its own kind of sense.
Similarly, mandolin player Chris Thile presented an almost bi-polar set of classical hits for the mandolin (played with astounding virtuosity but alarming facial expressions) mixed with hillbilly folk and a Fiona Apple cover for good measure. Driving the point home, his opening “song” consisted of a cycle of a few bars of each style in what was one of the most awkward, musically unsatisfying and yet somehow compelling openings I’ve experienced.
The Ada Project, Conrad Shawcross, (slow exposure exposing light tracing)
photo Rémi Chauvin, courtesy MONA Museum of Old and New Art
The Ada Project, Conrad Shawcross, (slow exposure exposing light tracing)
The A is for ART
This year’s major MOFO installation was by sculptor Conrad Shawcross. The ADA Project comprises a large re-purposed manufacturing robot with one articulated arm-like pointer, topped with a light globe. Shawcross has created robot “dances,” the light trajectory tracing figures visible only through long exposure photographs (light drawings). Along with curator Ken Farmer, he then commissioned four musical works inspired by the light figure and movement: a post Reichian-rock piece by Beatrice Dillon and Rupert Clervaux (UK); an acid-house pop paean by Tamara & Milo (UK); an operatic lament from Mira Calix (UK) performed by Teresa Duddy (Aus); and some sophisticated glitchy vocal electronica from Holly Herndon (US, the only piece not performed live). The music varied in its connection to the robot, some pieces clearly matching speed, direction changes, angularity, others working more thematically responding to the namesake of the work, Ada Lovelace, 19th century originator (with Charles Babbage) of the Difference Engine. It’s an impressive work of scale and Shawcross and Farmer have created a strong and neat curatorial package but it’s also slightly other than what you expect it to be. The amazing geometries of the light drawings in the photographs are not visible in real-time with the human eye. Instead there is a gap, not an uninteresting one, between what we are told we are seeing and the kinetic action we experience which encourages a more engaged listening.
Tyondai Braxton’s HIVE is billed as an “architectural installation,” which it may have been in its first instalment at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, but here it’s a concert—performers before us, seated on elegant custom- built pods made of lattice material which pulse and glow in gorgeous colours. The multi-movement composition is testament to the power of the click-track as three percussionists perform intricate synchronous rhythmic sequences while Braxton and another laptop conspirator wrap grand swathes of texture, tones and noise around it all. It’s a slick combination of electronics and acoustic percussion, perhaps more so as Braxton avoids the large gestures of big instruments prefering the more delicate palette of woodblocks and smaller drums. This creates a focus and specificity to the action and sound without sacrificing energy and drive.
Robin Fox, RGB Laser
photo Rémi Chauvin, courtesy MONA Museum of Old and New Art
Robin Fox, RGB Laser
No MOFO is complete without a spectacle by Robin Fox who has performed at every festival so far. This year was particularly special as he was premiering his RGB Laser show. Fox’s green laser magic has awed crowds around the world in its own right and as part of Chunky Move’s Mortal Engine. It’s hard to imagine it getting any better but here the Fox has excelled himself. In a realtimetv video interview he explains that these new lasers (purchased courtesy of his Creative Australia Fellowship) have caused him to reverse his process. He used to drive the lasers with the music, now he creates the images first; these are then translated into sounds: fat, dirty, grunty, spitty and throbbing. Fox believes that the visuals make this noise-fest palatable to those less inclined to listen. While the audience is assaulted by noise they are also completely immersed in intersecting beams and cones of coloured light creating a psychedelic fantasia that enthrals.
But wait, there’s more
Outside of the MAC festival precinct was a series of concerts by the Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Australian Art Orchestra and the Tasmanian Symphony; a four hour mesmeric improv marathon by MURAL (Norway/Australia) with interactive visuals from Kjell Bjørgeengen at the beautifully dark and brooding Theatre Royal; and a subtle, ambient multiplayer installation by Melanie Herbert at CAT; and morning meditation gigs at the Baha’i Centre. A series of activities focused on the ecology of the River Derwent in the Heavy Metals Project at MONA proper. Other MONA exhibitions included the haunting Red Queen; a solo show by Hubert Duprat and his jewellery-making caddis flies; and the dark descent into madness that was photographer Roger Ballen’s mixed-media room installation Asylum, offering quiet, seeping terror. Oh and FAUX-MO, the after hours club that even sported a spaceship but filled with way too many teensters for this punter.
MOFO does of course also include relatively commercial acts (though always on the alternative end of the spectrum) like Matmos, The Orb and John Grant. While not everything satisfies there’s enough of ‘your’ thing to keep you hanging around, curious for the next instalment. This festival marked the end of the original matching funding agreement between MONA’s David Walsh and the state government. It was also the first time that interstate visitors hit 50% of the total audiences. Here’s hoping that the quality of the event and its audience impact is enough to renew funding arrangements so that this remarkable festival can continue to realise its bold and unique vision.
Emmanuel Angelikas, BUKA, Ketut and his prize cock, Ubud, 2005, courtesy the artist
Australia does not honour its artists sufficiently. For decades there has been an undeclared rejection of artists who do not fit neatly into a code or style. Emmanuel Angelikas is one of these. I congratulate the ACP on including him in their program and on their continued initiative to acknowledge photographers with a long-term exhibition history who have not received the attention they deserve.
Angelikas’ Buka was programmed by Kon Giourotis during his brief directorship of the ACP. However, the theatrical staging of Buka reflects the inheritance of its previous director Alasdair Foster. To walk into the dramatic atmosphere of the large exhibition space was to delight in an abundance of riches. The darkness embraced me and I was immediately entranced by the large photographic transfer onto bricks of an image of hands holding a Hindu ceremonial cloth called a poleng and a small votive representation of Christ on the cross. Next to this were quotations that combined to set the scene, including:
“The servants of the Beneficent God are they who walk on the earth in humbleness, and when the ignorant address them they say: Peace.” Koran 25.63
As a photographic artist Emmanuel Angelikas is an unusual mix of humility and defiance. Buka is a departure from his signature approach, which employs square black and white format, featuring portraiture and environment to explore individual personality (www.emmanuelangelikas.com.au).
Environmental portraiture in photography is typified by the work of Diane Arbus who was hugely influential in the mid-1970s. In Australia photographers such as Jon Lewis and Max Pam are well known examplars of this style. Pam and Angelikas were ‘partners in crime’, working on many shows together while supporting each other as practitioners.
Pam was the senior in this relationship that began when the artists met at art school in 1984. One subject they had in common was the eroticised Asian female. Since the 80s the stereotyping of the female body as erotic has been regarded as ideologically unsound which meant this work was regarded as problematic in some circles. Pam and Angelikas attracted the reputation of being ‘bad boys.’ The attraction to the Asian female body continues in Buka and some viewers might be uncomfortable with it but I don’t want to focus on this issue.
If we look at the history of Angelikas’ practice since the 1970s we discover a rich record of urban Sydney Greek culture. Born in Marrickville in 1963, where he still lives, he has responded to this archetypical yet unique multicultural Sydney suburb where sophisticated urbanity combines with traditional Greek culture. Perhaps Angelikas’ most iconic and memorable image is of a young Greek man sitting on a chair on the roof of a Marrickville house with a plane traversing the sky above him. This image, titled Person who would rather not be in Marrickville and made in 1985, perfectly captures the controversy raging at the time about the imposition of air traffic on urban Sydney.
In the last 10 years Angelikas has had delicate health but accepted an invitation to Bali to document Balinese instruments in musical performances. As Max Pam says in his catalogue essay, “He loved the Balinese from the get go, and they loved him right back.” This led to many trips there between 2004 and 2011. He was introduced to the royal family and formed a fruitful friendship with Arya, a man who was a member of the royal staff. Bali provided Angelikas with the opportunity to heal. It also yielded an invaluable purpose, providing something that Marrickville did not although he was continuing to photograph there.
Seduced by the vibrancy of Balinese culture, in Buka Angelikas steps away from past practice and shoots colour. It is hard to put into words the magic of the environment created in this evocative exhibition. The staging and pools of lighting emphasize this by creating the atmosphere of a shrine, mirroring the importance of worship in Hindu culture and religion. For those who, like myself, have been to Bali there is no need for persuasion. For those who have not I can only hope they’re tempted to visit.
In the portraits, which make up the majority of the images, there is an intimacy, an openness that testifies to a special exchange between the Balinese people and the Australian photographer. Angelikas says this intimacy is revealed in the one to one photographs, looking into the eyes of his subjects. His special access to the royal family adds stylishness and a sense of occasion to other images.
There are hundreds of photographs constellated in clusters and single images of different sizes showing beautiful Balinese people of all ages, in traditional clothing, among verdant vegetation, in stone temples, under colourful sunset skies, groupings of young men wrapped in sarongs posing intently for the camera. In a grid of photos devoted to cock fighting a large central image features a man in a gateway proudly holding his black rooster for the camera. Circling the grid is a line of sharp spears that are attached to the ankle of the birds when they fight to the death.
The exhibition as immersive installation is its greatest strength. A wonderful component is the transfer of photographs onto the surface of traditional Balinese textures such as wood, bricks, silk, mother of pearl and bamboo. Angelikas did this with the help of artisans and technicians in both Bali and Australia. An image of a large orange and white carp in water is printed onto tiles and laid at an angle on the floor in the main room of the gallery. There is an image of shadow puppets on silk, a beautiful naked girl on mother of pearl and a man on snakeskin with a serpent curled around his neck. Individual images are framed with an ornate Balinese wooden frame (an image of what may be a royal couple with their children) or lined with traditional red and gold fabric (four young men naked to the waist in batik sarongs). Angelikas says of these masterful material transfers that “the photographs have been turned into objects, however at the end of the day they are still photographs.”
These elements bring us closer to an experience of being in Bali, a place and culture that has been historically over-romanticized, glamourised, terrorised and exploited. However it is a resilient and rich culture deserving of portrayal especially from the perspective of an Australian photographer. As I write this response to Buka in the warm weather of a Sydney summer I think I need a coconut and lychee cocktail and a gado gado. Then again, maybe I’ll go to Marrickville for a baklava and Turkish coffee. Congratulations Emmanuel Angelikas and may you be healed by Bali.
Emmanuel Angelikas, BUKA, curator Tony Nolan, assistant curators Claire Monneraye, Belinda Hungerford, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, 31 Aug-17 Nov, 2013
Dream Zone, digital compilation from screen, Karen Casey
courtesy the artist and Anna Pappas Gallery
Dream Zone, digital compilation from screen, Karen Casey
“Technology-based art has well and truly cemented itself in the cultural milieu,” writes hybrid artist Karen Casey. Aboriginal artists working with media technologies today create works that present a marriage of tradition and technology, a collusion of past and future in terms of techniques and aesthetic appearance. This was made clear back in 1984, when the first remote Aboriginal television broadcast came out of Yuendumu, 300km north-west of Alice Springs.
In the background of this broadcast was a painting by Andrew Japaljarri Spencer. Titled Satellite Dreaming (1984), it has a central planetary sphere out of which pathways branch to other spheres. It represents the desire for access to communications and broadcast technology, and specifically television, for remote communities. It is a visual picturing of how old media works, with a centralised hub that broadcasts content outward and it is seen on the very medium it pictures, yet it is created using ochre and paint, in dot style with symbolic iconography.
Jumping forward 30 years to another celestially-themed image, a lithographic print by Karen Casey becomes the content for a projection artwork created using technology at vast removes from analogue television. The print is titled Nebula, the current artwork, Dream Zone. Nebula became the visual data fed into a program for creating imagery using Casey’s brain waves. Dream Zone communicates different intentions from those of the Warlpiri in Yuendumu with their television broadcasts, yet it shares the same spirit in its desire to connect with others, in the quest for shared experience.
In 2004 Casey approached the Brain Sciences Institute at Swinburne University with the vision of getting data from her brain to use for the creation of artwork. At the same time she met her now key collaborator Harry Sokol. Since then Casey has created a series of works under the umbrella title of Global Mind Project, looking “at the idea, the possibility, the probability of the interconnected mind beyond the individual.” While originally from a painting and printmaking background, Casey maintains that in moving into media arts her ideas have remained consistent, but as she writes “digital technology has completely expanded my creative repertoire and given me the means to produce interactive and generative spaces and experiences that I was previously not able to realise.”
Dream Zone is a three-channel projection featuring an array of morphing, hexagonal-shaped mandalic forms. Like a soft breath the forms gently pulse in and out, all the while undulating in a seemingly infinitely complex and varied pattern to a background of ethereal music. Despite visual complexity the pattern is minimal, fading to black at times and leaving the viewer immersed in darkness for brief moments, until crystalline forms pierce through like star formations drawn from mysterious faraway galaxies. The colour palette ranges from inky blacks to icy blues and whites and, together with the forms, it appears as much at home among the minutiae of tropical waters as it does meandering through the cosmos.
Karen Casey, Dream Zone, 2012, Generative video installation, National New Media Art Award, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. 2012
photo Ben Wickes
Karen Casey, Dream Zone, 2012, Generative video installation, National New Media Art Award, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. 2012
The Dreaming is so fundamental to Indigenous cosmology and art that I had to ask if this understanding had relevance for Dream Zone. Casey conceded to some relationship in that she proposes the possibility of “an association between an individual’s experience, or dreaming if you like, and that of others within the wider community.” More directly however, Casey’s use of the term ‘dream’ refers neurologically to theta brainwaves. “Theta waves are at the lower end of the frequency spectrum and when predominant they can be associated with dream states, creative improvisation and inspirational thought processes.” When viewed within the broader context of Aboriginal Dreaming Casey believes there is a relationship to theta mind-states. She writes, “It is in those instances when you totally lose yourself in the moment that you can transcend the temporal experience and access a kind of timeless continuum.” Indigenous temporality is ambiguous, ever-present and repeatable, as against historical time, which is linear, unrepeatable and future orientated. Sitting and watching Dream Zone is like being momentarily transported to a state of atemporality, beyond the task-driven noise of the everyday.
Neurologically, if the experience of art creates a pleasurable zing in the brain, it is triggered by a synergy of sensual relations between you and a given thing/object. Dream Zone is created via feedback with Casey’s own brain. She meditated on the morphing hexagon kaleidoscope while her brain waves were recorded and fed back into the program—she created the electroencephalographic feed for the work while she experienced it live. Ideally, the resulting imagery would stimulate a theta state in the viewer, “I anticipate viewers will experience a deeply meditative or trance-like state.” It is very enjoyable and relaxing to be in the presence of this work: staring into it does effect perception and takes you somewhere else. It is also quietly spiritual, on the topic of which Casey states, “…anything that can engender a feeling of connection with the world or make you feel like there is no difference between self and other sets the stage for what I think of as spiritual—there’s an empathy that comes out of that space but also a sense that the whole thing is dependent on consciousness. The consciousness I’m referring to is the interconnected totality of existence rather than simply an autonomous product of our physical being.”
Where else will this project be taken? How far will Casey push the question of the power of the collective mind and how much will she push the capabilities of the technology with her collaborator Sokol? The software developed by Sokol has a mind-boggling amount of aesthetic potential and there is certainly scope for the project to have more conceptual punch. Casey works from an “holistic perspective on life—of creativity, connection and community” and although Dream Zone trades heavily on the experiential, her background features strong projects with a social focus. By her own account Casey envisages an online scenario “where you can actually log in and have a neural conversation with someone else or a group of people.” However elusive it might be, the artistic potential of telepathy is a logical culmination of this exploration of the art of mind.
Dream Zone, generative video installation, artist Karen Casey, technical collaborator, software interface designer Harry Sokol, sound recording, compilation Tim Cole, media compositor, systems designer James Power; Fremantle Arts Centre, 23 Nov, 2013- 19 Jan, 2014
Expedition # 25, 2009, archival print from The Glacier Studies series—part of Singaporean artist Robert Zhau’s faux-scientific documentation of his expedition to the North Pole.
“Yellow Vest Syndrome” first caught my attention among Jasmin Stephens’ recent curatorial projects. A Western Australian phenomenon, Yellow Vest Syndrome sums up being able to do whatever the f… you want as long as you are wearing the requisite gear: the yellow vest, symbol of Big Mining, engineering, maintenance and whatever else is necessary to the smooth operations of the extractive industries.
Apparently WA locals have such respect for the yellow vest they leave its wearers unchallenged—as first tested by Melbourne artist George Egerton-Warburton, practising grafitti otherwise naked, on a main highway, in the bright light of day. Nobody stopped. Nobody questioned the yellow vest. WA is one of the big mining states, home of Gina Rinehart and Andrew Forrest. It’s where Gina’s employees were given standardised placards and paid to protest Rudd’s proposed mining tax increases. The Yellow Vest and its Syndrome are very much a part of the mining ecology—so naturalised in the landscape they’re taken for granted.
This earlier project, Yellow Vest Syndrome: recent West Australian art (Fremantle Arts Centre, 2009), was already, in part, a response to the notion of non-natural hybrid ecologies, the point being that originary or natural worlds and their so-called pure ecologies, reflective of a state of non-human intervention, are at best either extremely rare or a mythic ideal. Novel Ecologies Cross Arts Projects in Sydney’s Kings Cross takes as its starting point the idea that the actions of the human species are radically transforming notions of ecology. If ecology is an interrelated system of networks and webs of relationships among living things and elements on the planet (we tend to think of grass, sky, water and the animals on it as a living system), most of the world’s natural systems are now so compromised by the human presence that few ‘natural’ or ‘original’ ecosystems remain. Rather, we now inhabit a world of emerged and emergent, hybrid ecologies.
The recurrent theme of this exhibition is “ecosystemic thinking.” Perdita Phillips, artist-in-residence at Cross Art Projects, researched Sydney’s largely unknown fairy penguin colony at Manly, a population currently inhabiting a hybrid or breached ecology. Her work, penguin anticipatory archive, reveals a war zone as the penguins combat owners of expensive yachts. Ugly newspaper reports, sympathetic to bashed penguins, argue on the penguins’ side against the rich yachties’ perceived right to do what they want, flaunting their big money as they pollute and trample on the penguins’ habitat rights. Who would have thought? The penguins’ plight resonates as an allegory of local ecologies (farms, nature reserves, national parks) under the threat of big mining (Yellow Vest). How many Sydneysiders are aware of the fairy penguins and local ecology under threat?
Perdita Phillips, , .–. / .- / .- (penguin anticipatory archive), 2013, mixed media, drawings and digital prints (work in progress)
courtesy the artist
Perdita Phillips, , .–. / .- / .- (penguin anticipatory archive), 2013, mixed media, drawings and digital prints (work in progress)
Viewers explore loose leaves in the archive box—poetic metaphysical meditations and drawings, photographs of penguins and Manly locations, harbour maps, representations of water and tides, scientific reports and descriptions of penguin life, newspaper clippings of shocking disturbances and maltreatment. To one side sits a pile of neatly stacked handkerchiefs which visitors are invited to take in exchange for signing a pledge to reflect on the penguins’ plight, opting to agree to one or more of the following:
“In exchange for a handkerchief I will: 1. ask “what does a penguin want?” and do something practical about it; 2, volunteer 3 days a year for a hands-on outdoor environmental project; 3. swap permanently from using tissues to using handkerchiefs; 4. other.”
This part of the work is titled “doing so that (tie a knot in it, the world is a handkerchief, a pile of promises).” The handkerchief gifts are embroidered in ‘penguin speech,’ an artistic envisioning of how penguins might negotiate this bargain—if they could.
In this respect Novel Ecologies shifts the emphasis from an anthropocentric worldview to one closer to Timothy Morton’s object-orientated ontology—non-human species and things. Philosophically, the shift can be traced to the reflections of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty: “thing-being” (Heidegger) and the reversal of the gaze such that ‘things’ are looking back at us (Merleau-Ponty). On behalf of the penguins you are invited to shift your role from viewer-archivist to humble addressee and contract, through acceptance of the gift, to reflect on their plight. Relational aesthetics and its contract of gifting or exchange—Bourriaud’s famous remark: the artwork is a handshake—extends that contract to the world of non-human beings. It’s a cannily inclusive strategy within ecosystemic thinking.
Rounding out the show, the faked photographs of Robert Zhao Renhui/ The Institute of Critical Zoologists reflect on the hybrid state of so-called ecologies of the wild. George Egerton-Warburton’s video of pristine beach ecology is disrupted when a headset booming aggressive urban rap is donned. In the unlikely medium of fantastical fine charcoal drawings, Tori Benz puts the microscope on the rampant microbe ecologies inhabiting the surface and interior of the pregnant human form.
My first experience of a live performance by the UK’s The Hilliard Ensemble was a thrill: the singing felt and looked simply natural—lucid, warmly un-churchy, devoid of over articulation and forced projection in the responsive acoustic of the University of Sydney’s Great Hall.
I quickly became engrossed in the program’s blend of drama and reflection and the sacred and the secular, and a sense of discovery, not least the 13th century Viderunt Omnes by Perotin (rich in swelling wordless chanting, a contrasting jaunty performance of the text and a return to the mesmeric opening sounds), a set of traditional Armenian sacred songs (arranged by Komitas) seemingly in the Orthodox tradition but deeply infused with a distinctively local character (which is heard also as an influence in Marcus Whle’s score for Shaun Parker and Company’s dance work Am I), and three new folk-inspired songs by Hosokawa, which the ensemble only received on arrival in Australia. Linked by a humming motif, the songs slip organically between Western and Japanese modes with supple vocal glides, warbles and melodic twists out of folk, Bunraku and Kabuki traditions.
While the madrigals and liturgical pieces were predictably fine, revealing a great variety of forms and innovations, I was taken by the inherent theatricality of several of the works. Estonian Veljo Tormis’ Kullervo’s Message is a vigorously sung narrative taken from Finland’s Kalevala epic, hauntingly anchored with the repeated whispering of the hero’s name. Arvo Part’s And One of the Pharisees… and Most Holy Mother of God have a surprisingly intense theatricality when performed live. The latter is stunningly spare, solely repeating the phrase “Most Holy Mother of God, Save Us” 17 times with engrossing harmonic richness and subtle rhythmic variations making the prayer dramatically felt.
The concert’s encore was the very funny entr’acte about ‘nobodies’ (based on a Kafka story, Excursion to the Mountain) from a Heiner Goebbels’ music theatre work titled I went to the house but did not enter, in which the ensemble had become actor-singers in 2007—and clearly quite proudly so, if now apparently amused at getting through the piece. Sadly, this concert was one of the ensemble’s last—a founding member had been part of the group for 40 years, the others 20, making profound connections between musical traditions old and new, lustrously sung.
The Piper, My darling Patricia
photo Jamie Williams
The Piper, My darling Patricia
My Darling Patricia, The Piper
The common notion of tragedy is about lives cut short, especially those of children. The traditional tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin entails the disappearance of all the children of a town, but the ambiguities provided by the variety of endings we have inherited make the tale more mysterious than tragic, if nonetheless inherently alarming.
My Darling Patricia’s The Piper, the first of two festival productions about the Pied Piper (the second was Sydney Camber Opera’s Into the Little Hill), presented an ambitious version of the tale apparently inspired by the Ted Hughes’ account. Although enthusiastically received by reviewers and audiences, I thought it over written and the narrative unnecessarily complicated. I was sometimes as nonplussed as the children of various ages around me.
Before the show proper commences, head-phoned child and adult volunteers respond to movement instructions familiarising themselves with the performing space. Once underway, they become the townspeople of Hamelin and the children are later lead away by the Piper. The story is told by an off-stage narrator (a reassuring velvet voiced Clare Grant) while large-scale projected animations by Sam James establish a sense of place (a heavily industrialised city, bug life close-ups of nature and surrounding conifer forests, although the narration slips in eucalypts as well). Unattractive white mobile ramps vary the stage space while deft puppeteering (later shared with the volunteer performers) provides humour in the form of the dextrous rats plaguing the city.
The Piper arrives: a glorious, autumnally golden bear—a she bear, says the narrator. First up, the non-speaking bear-cum-Piper amusingly mimes being a multi-instrumentalist, but that’s gotten quickly out of the way. Her talent is as a dancer: Ghenoa Gela moves with a delightful bear-like sway on hind feet. So what is going to seduce the children of Hamelin? The bear doesn’t pipe so is it the dancing? It’s a palpable gap and left me wondering. Could the pre-show ‘induction’ have included a simple dance step for the children, so when the bear dances them away it can be done with conviction in what should be a delightful but equally chilling moment. After all the Bear appears to seduce the rats in a dance with lengths of blue silk. In the meantime, the narrator has bewilderingly announced, If I hear right, that she is the otherwise non-speaking Bear/Piper.
The most bracing moments in The Piper include the Bear’s drowning of the rats, aided by the volunteers waving the blue silk cloth of the roaring river, and then her raging against the Mayor’s cheating her of her reward. She stands up high against a cloud swirling storm, gesturing angrily: nature intent on vengeance. After that, the children are taken away, eventually returning, partying with the bear, although the narrator is not so sure about their fate: maybe, she says, the children are “battling cane toads and other pests” with the bear. But what we see is of course more reassuring. There are many endings to the old tale: good (relocation to start a new life), bad (the Piper as plague) and ugly (the Piper as paedophile). This version is a muddle, lacking My Darling Patricia’s usual clarity of purpose and integrated design magic. The participatory goal and the appeal of the bear suggest that a more lucid Piper has potential.
Ensemble Offspring with Lee Ranaldo and Mike Patton, Sydney Festival 2014
photo Chris Frape
Ensemble Offspring with Lee Ranaldo and Mike Patton, Sydney Festival 2014
Lee Renaldo, Mike Patton, Ensemble Offspring
In this double bill, Ensemble Offspring became a potent chamber orchestra, conducted with vigour and precision by Roland Peelman. Mike Patton, welcomed by a screaming audience, delivered his account of Berio’s Laborintus II with basso spoken and screamed texts with loudhailer and considerable verve, accompanied by the Song Company, its female member providing some of this fierce composition’s most beautiful, melancholy sounds in Part I, while the Ensemble Offspring orchestra excelled, especially in the quickfire transition to a demented big band uproar. Unfortunately there were no surtitles and a predictable rag bag of video images (forests, data map, speeding cars, experimental film scribbling) in Part II added nothing. But the interplay between the words of Dante, Sanguineti, Eliot, Pound and the Bible—as sound—with the acoustic instrumentation and electronic score was exhilarating and, in the end, gently seductive.
Also on the program was Lee Ranaldo’s Hurricane Transcriptions, a response to Hurricane Sandy (in its wake he had limited supplies and no electricity for a week). Although not intended as a literal recounting of being hit by a hurricane, the work nonetheless emerged from sharp cello snaps, whisperings and a deepening pulse into a subsequent musical storm in two waves, variously replete with electric guitar bowing and then chiming against frantic strings, siren moans and a hammered metal sheet. Unfortunately, the several songs that Renaldo wove into the work, while passable as stand-alones, sounded naïve, the accompaniment suddenly conventional and at odds with the rest of the composition’s ambient fascination. Nonetheless this moody, sometimes quite disturbing work made its mark in what was a standout festival concert.
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2014 Sydney Festival: The Hilliard Ensemble: A Hilliard Songbook, The Great Hall, University of Sydney, 15 Jan 15; My Darling Patricia, The Piper, Carriageworks, 9-19 Jan; Hurricane Transcriptions/Laborintus II, Lee Ranaldo, Mike Patton, Ensemble Offspring, Song Company, City Recital Hall, 16 Jan
Indigenous writer-director Ivan Sen’s award winning Beneath Clouds (2002) and Toomelah (2011) are followed by yet another distinctive feature film. “With its small-town setting, cowboy cops and a good guy in pursuit of justice, Mystery Road has more than a hint of the Western…Visually, it’s as clearly delineated as a graphic novel, displaying a predilection for close-ups and figures silhouetted against sunset landscapes…Sen has employed the framework of the whodunnit to create a striking piece of cinema whose stylisation enhances rather than overshadows this story about a misfit cop probing a town with a rotten, racist core” (Katerina Sakkas, RT116) 5 copies courtesy of Transmission Films
DVD: Sarah Polley, Stories We Tell
Canadian filmmaker Sarah Polley turns to documentary to examine the mysteries of her late actor mother’s life, using her father’s home movie footage and recreations in the same style that sync beautifully. Polley had always looked different from other family members, but beyond a bit of joking (characteristic of this clan) the truth does not come out until the director begins interviewing likely suspects and discovering their sometimes odd perspectives on the matter. Most engaging are her ‘interrogations’ of her father and his documented version of events. This is fine, un-melodramatic autobiographical filmmaking. KG 5 copies courtesy of Madman Entertainment
CD: The Necks, Open
“Open [is] a sparse work of bare percussion, tinkling chimes and gentle pianistic gesture…arranged in reference to a recording made by [drummer Tony] Buck of a Monochord, a droning stringed instrument tuned to one open pair of notes. “I’m not sure at what point we decided to start with the monochord,” says [pianist Chris] Abrahams. “We walked into the studio and the only thing we thought of was that we wanted to make something sparse…We didn’t want it to build too much, we wanted it to flow through a number of different scenes rather than a teleological build up of crescendos—that was the main brief” (Oliver Downes, interview with Chris Abrahams). 5 copies courtesy of The Necks
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In Namakili, the first part of a double bill titled New Blak Territory, a lone woman in an Aboriginal design dress speaks in language. English words dot the dialogue and I struggle to understand what is being said. Immediately we are challenged by the boundaries between culture and race in Australia. Our orator provides an English translation and we discover her identity, her traditional country and her family roots.
We have begun a journey through the life of Namakili, “also known as Lynette.” Lynette Hubbard plays herself as the central character, her easy rapport quickly engaging the audience with emotional honesty, offering an intimate portrayal of the life of a Desert woman torn between two worlds.
The theme of black versus white is dominant: mixed race, cultures, heritage. In a hospital waiting room, Lynette is waiting for an appointment to see the doctor. Lupus (named in Latin after the wolf, she explains) is destroying healthy cells and affecting her kidneys. She muses that perhaps this is black waging a battle against white within her own body.
With dog howls, references to Tennant Creek artist Dion Beasley’s illustrations for the children’s book Too Many Cheeky Dogs and a fight between Lynette and her sister depicted as two dogs in battle, Lupus is never far from this story.
Peppered with humour, Lynette’s story-telling never shies away from the challenges and harsher realities of life. When confronted by another patient—“You’re not one of those tan people who think you’re black are you?…You’re either Aboriginal or you’re not!”—the dialogue shifts to Shylock’s “I am a Jew…” from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice before moving back into language, but accompanied by traditional Greek music, highlighting Lynette’s Greek heritage. The aggression, confusion, and tinge of tragedy in this scene is lightened by Lynette’s final quip to her fellow patient, “So you wanna be friends on Facebook?”
Namikili is unavoidably Northern Territorian in nature. The story touches on contemporary politics when one old patient jokes about installing pokies in hospital waiting rooms. “It’d fund the whole hospital system. (Northern Territory politician) Dave Tollner would do it.” Much of the strength of this work is in the close relationship the audience shares with the subject matter.
The performance is sporadically interrupted by a mobile phone, with Lynette having to explain to her family that she’s on stage at the moment and can’t talk. The phone rings one last time, and happy her work on stage is done she replies, “The show? I reckon it’s going alright.” Turning to the audience, she asks, “Whadda you reckon?” “Yes!” replies the audience before breaking into a final chorus of laughter and cheers.
In I Am Man, tufts of spear grass break through the floor of the theatre’s entrance, which leads into a primeval forest, the air thick with powdery white dust. Muted lighting reveals a mystical scene of slender poles growing haphazardly, some with tribal markings, others with metal pins protruding. The night-time clicks and rattles of frogs, crickets and other unknown creatures interject in this dark world.
Slowly a shadowy, grey creature emerges from the grass, wiping and blowing at the ground. He carefully takes straps from his clothing, marks his territory, then binds his hands with deliberate concentration. A twisting plume of dust appears from above and as the dancer is drawn closer he places his hands into the gentle flow of white powder. Sudden darkness falls.
A spotlight defines the naked torso of a man coated in white powder high at the rear of the stage. The dancer’s muscles ripple across his back as he rises from crouching. The sustained music with a sporadic bass drum beat and singers, Celtic in style, adds religious feeling to the birth of this creature.
Throughout there is a sense of discomfort. The choreography is lyrical yet abounds in jagged movements. The soundtrack’s deep beating pulse surges through me, while interruptions in the form of electric buzzing, clangs, a piercing whine and disembodied voices disturb and unsettle. At close quarters the two dancers are unsure of each other, tentative, frightened, drawn together by a curious uncertainty.
Breath and blowing are centrally thematic in I Am Man. Both dancers (Guy Simon, Darren Edwards) experiment with their breath, blowing into their hands, exhaling with force, discovering breath in their bodies. When the white creature collapses, his dark companion uses his breath to guide the other dancer’s movements, blowing him back to his refuge on the ledge above the stage.
The white powder provides both paint and canvas. The dancers create patterns in the heavy residue on the ground and smear the powder on their bodies. After a cleansing shower, the white creature writhes his wet body along the powder-coated wall leaving a faint image picked out by a spotlight’s beam.
In a final, distant duet with the white creature on his ledge and the dark one below at centre stage, the dancers mimic each other. The intensity of the choreography is expressed in considered, detailed movements; strength and agility are evident but the movement is also subtle and refined. A lyrical piano solo completes the mood of elegance in this duet.
As the light fades on the white dancer, the focus falls on the original shadowy figure as he delicately traces patterns, repeating them with his hands, head, body and feet. Audience members prop themselves forward in their seats, leaning in to the intimacy of the movement. The light dims, the dancer disappears, and we are left with the sound of a creature scuttering around somewhere in the dark. All too quickly this beautiful and reflective work has drawn to a close.
If Namakili and I Am Man are the beginnings of the New Blak in Northern Territory theatre, this is a trend I look forward to following. Perhaps they’ll be best enjoyed in their home setting and, like the iconic features of our local landscape, provide ample reason for audiences to travel to the Territory to experience them before we contemplate their national future.
New Blak Territory, a double bill of new Indigenous theatre, Namikili, writer, performer Lynette Hubbard, writer, director Stephen L Helper; I Am Man, creator, director Ben Graetz, performers Guy Simon, Darren Edwards, Brown's Mart Theatre, 19-30 Nov 2013.
Kim Machan had to be even more resilient than her usual indefatigable self when she was informed late in 2013 that MAAP-Media Art Asia Pacific, the organisation of which she is director, was not to receive triennial funding from the Queensland Government for 2014-16. I spoke with Machan about managing this crisis and about her latest international exhibition, LandSeaSky.
MAAP was one of a number of companies (especially in youth arts) inexplicably denied funding. Deeply upset, but committed to exhibitions to be mounted in Korea and China and then Australia across 2014, Machan had no choice but to push ahead.
Ironically, says Machan, the Arts Queensland rejection came a few months after MAAP was announced the winner in the Visual Art category of the inaugural federal government Australian Arts in Asia Awards and the only winner from Queensland. The award was for MAAP’s Light from Light exhibition which focused on ideas around the properties of light, touring five major libraries and art museums in Shanghai, Beijing, Hangzhou and Brisbane 2010-12. For the show, Melbourne artists Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley created a solar-powered geodesic dome, installed as a temporary public artwork at each library site.
Machan tells me she has had to drop 2014 programming at her MAAP SPACE gallery in Brisbane (it will be available for artist use in the short-term), lose her sole staff member and cease operating Mediabank, a generous equipment-lending scheme—some of that equipment will now go to Korea for use in the Seoul leg of MAAP’s LandSeaSky touring exhibition.
A major exhibition, LandSeaSky—Revisiting Spatiality in Video Art will feature some 20 international contemporary artists at the Artsonje Center in Seoul, OCT-Contemporary Art Terminal, Shanghai and MAAP SPACE and Griffith University Art Gallery in Brisbane. Machan writes that in the exhibition “some of the world’s sharpest contemporary artists use the horizon line to explore some of the most fundamental and complex themes in both art and our perception of the world” (website).
Central to the exhibition, says Machan, is the influence of Dutch conceptual artist Jan Dibbets’ Perspective Corrections (1968) which, she writes in her program notes, “transformed the way we think about photography as an art medium…He produced many short films in the Horizon series from 1970 and 1971 and continued his investigations in his 2007 photographic series Land And Sea Horizons. As a starting point, these works use a very common understanding of landscape—a straight line across a page to signify the change of land to sky or sea to sky—and go on to transform this representation into an extended investigation of spatial effects and perspectives. It is this premise, an investigation into the commonality and simplicity of the horizon motif, that is the launch point of the LandSeaSky exhibition” (website).1970s video artworks by Dibbets will be juxtaposed with new works made by other artists for the exhibition.
Kim Machan
For Machan the staging of the exhibition in three very different locations has been a fascinating challenge. In Korea Dibbets’ works will be on show at a major museum, the Artsonje Center. The other works, she says, will appear in five art museums and commercial galleries in walking distance from Artsonje, all in the Samcheong-dong district. In China, LandSeaSky will be shown on one floor of the OCT-OCAT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shanghai, the museum supplying all the necessary equipment. In Brisbane the show will be staged at Griffith University Art Gallery and MAAP SPACE.
Of the 20 artists, five are Australian: Paul Bai, Lauren Brincat, Barbara Campbell, Derek Kreckler and Craig Walsh. The others are Jan Dibbets (Netherlands), Wang Gongxin (China), Zhu Jia (China), Yeondoo Jung (South Korea), Giovanni Ozzola (Italy), Joao Vasco Paiva (Portugal/Hong Kong), Wang Peng (China), Kimsooja (South Korea), Sim Cheol Woong (South Korea) and Heimo Zobernig (Austria). Supporters of the exhibition include the Australia Council, the Australia-Korea Foundation, Queensland University of Technology and the QUT Confucius Institute.
Previous works by some of these artists suggest their preoccupations are a perfect fit for the exhibition’s theme: Paul Bai’s video installations Other Side of the Horizon (2010), Heaven (2010), Horizon 1 (2008) and The Sky is the Limit (2008), and Joao Vasco Paiva’s transformation of ocean waves or ‘negative spaces’—eg the sky between buildings—into data that becomes music and visual abstractions. Extant works which also match the theme are in the exhibition: Lauren Brincat’s performative video This Time Tomorrow, Tempelhof (2011) and Giovanni Ozzola’s Garage—Sometimes You Can See Much More in which a rattling roller door opens onto an ocean view (2009-11).
Images of Derek Kreckler’s new work for the exhibition suggest a fascinatingly active lo-tech installation with much perceptual play. He writes: “Untitled video plays with the spaces between the screen and its surrounding environment. The screen is made of paper strips hung vertically…The projected video shows waves rolling toward an unseen shoreline, toward the viewer. The video is looped and consists of four consecutive scenes each moving closer to the surface of the water.” An oscillating electric fan blows the paper strips about, casting image fragments and silhouettes which “echo the projection on the gallery wall behind the screen.”
I had the pleasure of attending a preview, with a small audience, of Barbara Campbell’s close, close. Her 1001 Nights Cast (2005-08; RT86), a durational online engagement with hundreds of participants who volunteered stories in response to the artist’s prompts, was her first work using digital means.
For LandSeaSky, Campbell has created an interactive video work, “following the journey of migratory shorebirds on the East-Asian-Australasian flyway,” from Siberia to “feeding and resting sites on the Korean Peninsula and China’s east coast.” Our lives relate to bird migration in significant ways often little or not at all understood. Campbell wonders “How close can we come to another species…when it disappears from our horizon?” This subtext to the work was partly inspired by a recent residency in China.
Filming and sound for the work is by Gary Warner and the responsive programming by John Tonkin, whose immersive Experiments in Proximity, at Breenspace, June-July 2013, surprised viewers who discovered that as they moved towards or sideways to a screen its video imagery seemed to be in their control, that the point of view was theirs, whether following a swimmer underwater or two men conversing in a supermarket (see RT105).
In the preview of close, close, viewers wander into a narrow, darkened space to face a distant wall onto which is projected, in a wide, very narrow strip, a landscape. The strip is either still or moves slowly up or down variously revealing flowing water, sand and thin foliage, the tops of passing boats and open sky. On the sand, and taking flight, are large numbers of ‘waders’: Bar-tailed Godwits, Sandpipers of various kinds and Red-necked Stints. Filmed recently in Moreton Bay, these shorebirds of the East Asian-Australasian Flyway will migrate north in late March-April.
The selective point of view—tautly framed images of slices of a living coast-scape—is entrancingly contemplative. Then you realise it’s your movement, or that of others around you, forward or back, that is making the selection and its seamless shifts between different horizons. The shifts in the soundtrack, using a discretely recorded water track and the sound of a bamboo whistle used to attract birds for banding in China, add other dimensions to the notion of horizon—aural and ecological.
These glimpses of LandSeaSky’s horizons suggest it will be an expansive exhibition at once thoughtful and playful. In the time between the announcement of MAAP’s funding bad news and now, Kim Machan seems buoyant, ready to go, to once again bring together Australian, Asian and fellow international artists in a major exhibition.
LANDSEASKY: Seoul: Artsonje Center, Lee Hwaik Gallery, One & J. Gallery, Opsis Art Gallery, IHN Gallery, Skape Gallery, Seoul, 21 Feb-23 March; Shanghai: OCT–OCAT Contemporary Art Terminal, 20 April – 20 July; Brisbane, Griffith University Art Gallery, MAAP SPACE, 18 Sept–23 Nov, 2014
Lloyd Swanton, Tony Buck, Chris Abrahams, The Necks
photo Camille Walsh Photography
Lloyd Swanton, Tony Buck, Chris Abrahams, The Necks
Over a 25-year career of music making, The Necks have become renowned for live performances that leave audiences mesmerised and dazed. Although their simple, repetitive aesthetic seems to straddle the minimalism of Steve Reich and the lush musical narratives of groups such as The Cinematic Orchestra, as well as the rhythmic explorations of free jazz, the long-form improvisations that account for the majority of the trio’s work, while often quite tonal, tend to engage with a distinct set of preoccupations: the unfolding expressive possibilities of timbre and texture over extended stretches of time.
The group’s formation in the late 80s came about partly in reaction to what pianist Chris Abrahams describes as the “modern jazz style [where] there’s a melody and everyone takes a solo and you’d impress the audience with your chops.” Although all three musicians have continued to pursue other musical interests, whether with jazz luminaries The catholics (bassist Lloyd Swanton), avant-industrial outfit Peril (drummer Tony Buck) or Abrahams’ solo and session work and collaborations with Melanie Oxley, The Necks, which has only ever existed part-time, has provided its three members with a contrasting vehicle to create a collective music in which “there was no leader, no ego…[rather] the three of us making a sound world together, [with] no piano solos, drum solos and not dazzling people with how great we were as individual musicians.”
From these principles has arisen a form of improvisation in which each member submits to the flow of music as it is created, listening intently to the others to allow the particular trajectory being sculpted to emerge. Abrahams’ idea of an ‘off-night’ is “when I’m [consciously] thinking of where the music should go…I’m not saying that our way is better, but the main thing [is] to let the music itself inform us as to what direction it’s going, as it’s being played. To enable the performer to also be an interactive listener, to use [our] interpretation [of the music] to continue the piece wherever it does go—and for that direction to be a result of the interaction between the three of us, the acoustic quality of the space, the acoustic qualities of the instruments, the PA and the context [in which] we find ourselves.”
This intense attention that the music seems to demand sometimes provokes “feelings of annoyance and frustration and anger” in first-time listeners, according to Abrahams, before they “relinquish [their] preconceptions as they realise that we mean to be doing what we’re doing. [People] tend to simplify things, likeness is thought of as being the same. And we [the band] tend to do this as well, hear the music as repeating the same thing; but of course we can’t be doing that because we’re not machines. Every small difference that we make is amplified by the power of three… I’ll be playing and hearing that a certain note on the piano is bouncing off the wall in a weird way. I won’t analyse it like that, I’ll just hear that suddenly the piano is sounding strange and that’s what I’ll go towards, the piece will go in the direction of that. The repetitious line of what we do, which I think enables listeners to get mesmerised, allows us to move the whole thing almost surreptitiously—I know there’s a movement towards something and that’s what makes it compelling.”
The Necks
photo John Tapia Urquiza
The Necks
This quality is readily apparent on their most recent recorded offering, Open, a sparse work of bare percussion, tinkling chimes and gentle pianistic gesture. Recorded over a 10-day period at Sydney’s 301 Studios, the material gathered in that time came to be arranged in reference to a recording made by Tony Buck of a monochord, a droning stringed instrument tuned to one open pair of notes. “I’m not sure at what point we decided to start with the monochord,” says Abrahams. “We walked into the studio and the only thing we thought of was that we wanted to make something sparse…We didn’t want it to build too much, we wanted it to flow through a number of different scenes rather than a teleological build-up of crescendos—that was the main brief.”
Open does indeed swell and contract over the course of its 68 minutes, providing in vivid terms what Abrahams calls an “abstract narrative.” The sitar-like rippling of the monochord is answered with harmonically static, yet richly expressive arpeggiated sevenths and pentatonic figures in the piano. At times the texture thins to a trickle, Buck dancing around a snare pattern that more implies than articulates a beat and Lloyd Swanton engaging in rhythmic dialogue with precisely placed single-note thrums. Then it expands into a rushing tributary, Buck building thick, shimmering fields of cymbal and gong over the sustained oscillations of Abrahams’ Hammond, before calming once more, the recurring motif of the monochord providing a foil and unifying device for the piece as a whole.
Although distinct from their live practice, in that motifs are rehearsed, over-dubbed and arranged in the mixing process, the recording is redolent with a fascination for the tactile possibilities of sound. “I think The Necks’ [music] is very physical,” says Abrahams. “The name comes into play there. The neck is almost this characterless functional thing—I’ve never alluded to what the name means and I don’t mean to suggest that that’s why we came up with it, but when you look back over the 25 years at the way the group has progressed, [you see] how like the music many things about the group are. The way we’ve gone about the ‘career,’ how we’ve had no organisation except to play concerts and how we’ve never really pushed things. We didn’t have a gameplan, we’ve never had a manager, we’ve never looked for more than what the next tour is going to be. That’s partly why the band is still together; everything is 33 and a third percent each, the compositions, the income from the gigs—we’ve just allowed things to happen as our pieces do.”
The Necks, Melbourne: 17-19 Feb, Corner Hotel; Newcastle: 20 Feb, Lizottes; Canberra: 22 Feb, Street Theatre; Sydney: 3 Mar, Sydney Opera House; www.thenecks.com
In 2010 I completed an honours degree in drama at Flinders University. By that time I had abandoned plans to train as an actor, my creative energies increasingly directed towards writing.
I’m interested in the complete writer, the wordsmith who, like Camus, is able to turn their hand to a multiplicity of forms. I’ve penned short stories, plays, polemics, reviews, and a handful of dazzlingly unsuccessful poems. Everything I write seems to be an attempt to understand something of the nature of human suffering, but always humour seems to find a way in. This is probably significant.
Earlier in 2013, I completed a three-month emerging writer’s residency at the SA Writers’ Centre, during which I completed the first draft of my new play Dark Moon. As I write this, in November 2013, my first full-length play, the absurdist The Lake, is in production by the award-winning Adelaide independent theatre company five.point.one.
I am currently working on several projects including a performance piece that will draw on the archived letters and correspondence of the SA Writers' Centre, and a play based loosely on a short story by French Resistance writer Vercors.
Expose
I always begin a review with this thought in my mind: art would exist without criticism, but criticism would not exist without art. There’s no use denying it. Critics should never write out of a desire to belittle or to diminish, but simply because they believe art is too important to ever let it get away with not being as fulfilled and fulfilling as it can be. In other words, criticism ought to always be closer to a kind of love than a kind of loathing. Plain speaking, rigour, and unfettered engagement are the keys. Critics should never sit on their hands, only their egos.
Recent articles
Sons & mothers, from two angles
Benjamin Brooker: No Strings Attached Theatre of Disability, Sons & Mothers
RealTime issue #118 Dec-Jan 2013 p5
A painful proximity to truth
Benjamin Brooker: Flying Penguin, STCSA: Angela Betzien, The Dark Room
RealTime issue #118 Dec-Jan 2013 p36
My first role as a performer was when I was eight. I was cast as the dog in a school production of The Woman who Swallowed a Fly. My audition consisted of me sitting on my haunches, waggling my imaginary tail and lolling my tongue deliriously. This, I felt, was the essence of what it meant to be a dog. From this intuitive approach to performance, I completed my BA in Drama Studies at Edith Cowan University and have participated in the performing arts community of Perth as a performer and contributed to its supporting networks in my various roles with several funding bodies, producers and peak bodies for screenwriters, performing artists and playwrights.
I work at Edith Cowan University Library (Mount Lawley campus) and at Stages WA, which is dedicated to the development of playwrights and their works by providing resources, programs and workshops for emerging and established playwrights for their professional development. I am currently undertaking post-graduate study in Information Science and Archives to develop my knowledge and skills in the cultural heritage sector; exploring the ideas of cultural memories and societal constructions of identity, and forming a nexus between the ephemera of performance and the permanence of the archive.
Expose
My writing about performance was another intuitive leap, where I felt I had an inside understanding of the creative process supported by my training in analysis of dramatic form from my studies. Perth’s independent theatre sector is going through an exciting period of growth and I find writing about performance to be an introspective and satisfying avenue to activate critical discussion amongst artists and audience alike.
The best thing about writing about performance is that it forces me to stay with the work for a much longer period than just the time of the show itself. It allows me to explore the concepts and cultural influences of a work, ruminate on the writer’s or director’s vision, as well as analyse my personal responses to the work. At the forefront of my writing, I am always conscious of the artists involved. It is a record of their efforts; it is a time-piece which will exist once the performance is over. Whilst not all work will please my sensibilities, I always aim to be respectful in my criticisms.
Recent articles
Intimate transformations
Astrid Francis: Proximity Festival 2013
RealTime issue #118 Dec-Jan 2013 p41
The schooled audience
Astrid Francis: James Berlyn, Crash Course
RealTime issue #118 Dec-Jan 2013 p40
The Chinese Year of the Wooden Horse (so the internet tells me) promises high-energy adventure, off-beat travels and production over procrastination. To get the year galloping I asked emerging and established arts experimenters what they’re up to and what we can look forward to in 2014. Their responses reveal an astonishing diversity of ideas, methodologies, technologies, venues, sites, destinations, resources and bold new ways of engaging with audiences. I’m grateful to these adventurous artists for finding time and the words to share their idiosyncratic visions and plans with us. 2014—see how it runs!
Gail Priest, Editor, RealTime Profiler
I am currently interested in endurance-based practices and have been researching the limitations of the body through performance experiments. I am interested in the relationship between performing bodies and how perception can shift and change. Currently I am engaged in various projects that involve non-dancers—a bodybuilder, a football team—in an attempt to find a physical language that is not burdened by the associations and expectations that usually emerge when considering ‘dance.’
In 2014 I will perform an endurance based solo, SWEAT, for Melbourne NOW at the NGV [National Gallery of Victoria] on February 16. I’ll also present my new work, MAXIMUM—a duet between a dancer and bodybuilder—at Arts House for Next Wave Festival in May, which will then tour to Avignon, France.
I am also developing various new projects that stretch into the realm of live art. At the initial stages is a collaboration with Luke George and Rebecca Jensen looking at how to tap into the collective unconscious and create a performance that is a holistic experience for both performer and audience. I am also working on a new piece with Jensen and Sarah Aiken exploring possibility through extreme limitation—the work will occur entirely in traverse. Further to these projects, I have begun experimenting with sound in my choreographic practice. I will collaborate with a sound foley artist to begin work on a cinematic dance experience inspired by Dario Argento’s horror films. www.natalieabbott.net
Lawrence English, Keith Armstrong, Night Rage
photo Alex Wisser
Lawrence English, Keith Armstrong, Night Rage
Keith Armstrong
This year I’m working with composer, media artist and curator Lawrence English and collaborators developing a series of Seasonal Media Art works—dynamic installations and site-specific interventions that are directed and choreographed by environmental cycles. By recording, reading and reinterpreting both long and short-term environmental cycles at each site, along with related cultural layers, seasonal artworks become progressively tailored to and reflective of their location. This is then expressed through dynamic, generative audiovisual and kinetic outcomes.
These works build upon the prototype, Night Rage, shown at ISEA 2013 in the ANAT Synapse retrospective at the Sydney Powerhouse (see Keith Gallasch’s review). The new works will draw upon biological and environmental research data, particularly nocturnal activity, night field recording and phonography and real time 3D sound manipulation. It will also use visual/illusionary approaches that employ custom robotics and light-controlled objects and forms to create powerful, responsive and experiential works drawing attention to the ultimate outcome of reduced biodiversity—an ‘extinction of human experience.’
Starting at the Queensland Museum, the series will then appear at Kickarts Cairns (Feb 2014), thingworld: International Triennial of New Media Art, National Museum of China, (June-July), Siteworks, NSW (Sept) and Bundaberg Gallery in early 2015. www.embodiedmedia.com
Narelle Benjamin, IOU 2012
photo Heidrun Löhr
Narelle Benjamin, IOU 2012
Narelle Benjamin
I’ve just received the Australia Council Dance Fellowship for 2014-2015 which allows me the amazing opportunity to develop as an artist, study and to continue my long held commitment to teaching.
The main activity during my fellowship will involve taking advantage of the extremely rare opportunity to work alongside Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (Morocco/Belgium), one of the most influential international choreographers. The second strand is my immersion in somatic studies, which while collaborative in nature (working with highly respected practitioners in their respective fields), will perhaps entail a more private or internal processing of new information and knowledge. The third strand involves the delivery of workshops as part of a professional relationship with institutions such as Australian Dance Theatre, WAAPA, Macquarie University, Strut Dance, The Chrissie Parrott Studio in Perth, the new Sydney Dance Company pre-professional course and the VCA.
During 2014 I will also be choreographing a solo for Expressions Dance Company and in August 2014 Performance Space will present my new work, a duet made for Kristina Chan and Sara Black. www.artfulmanagement.com.au
Kate Blackmore, Frances Barrett, Lucy Phelan, Diana Smith and Kelly Doley, You’re History at Performance Space, Nov 2013; 2) This is Barbara Cleveland , 2013, Brown Council, production still
courtesy the artists
Kate Blackmore, Frances Barrett, Lucy Phelan, Diana Smith and Kelly Doley, You’re History at Performance Space, Nov 2013; 2) This is Barbara Cleveland , 2013, Brown Council, production still
Brown Council
This year we’ll be working on a number of new collaborative and solo projects. In February we will be part of Trace: Performance and its Documents at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane curated by Bree Richards, in which we’ll present our latest work, This Is Barbara Cleveland, a filmic tribute to the life and work of the mythic Australian performance artist Barbara Cleveland, with original score by Lucy Phelan (see interview in RT117). In February we are part of Video at Sullivan+Strumpf; in March we will be curating MCA’s Art Bar and in May we will be part of Subject to Ruin at Casula Power House. By June we will be back at the MCA presenting a new work as part of the MCA’s Bella Commission in conjunction with the National Centre for Creative Learning. For this project, we will be creating an interactive work in the MCA’s Bella Room specifically designed to engage young people—who have special needs—with contemporary art.
Also this year we are each focusing on solo projects. Diana is busy completing her PhD on Feminist Performance Art in Australia at COFA, UNSW while working on Performance Perspectives, a new archive of video interviews on Australian Performance Art. Kate is working with Campbelltown youth as part of a commission at Campbelltown Art Centre. Kelly is presenting new work at Level and Boxcopy in Brisbane, and Frances is making a new endurance performance at Performance Space as part of the Mardi Gras program Day for Night. Kate, Kelly and Frances will also present new works for SafARI in March. http://browncouncil.com/
Sarah Kriegler, Tamara Saulwick, Tim Stitz, Christie Stott, Erkki Veltheim, Chamber Made Opera
photo Daisy Noyes
Sarah Kriegler, Tamara Saulwick, Tim Stitz, Christie Stott, Erkki Veltheim, Chamber Made Opera
Chamber Made Opera
In 2014 Chamber Made Opera will continue to operate at the very edge of opera with its new artistic team headed by Creative Director Tim Stitz working with Artistic Associates Erkki Veltheim (music), Tamara Saulwick (performance), Christie Stott (digital) and Sarah Kriegler (The Venny).
There will be exciting new works developed by each of these Associate Artists, with inspiration ranging from the essays of Susan Sontag to the work of graffiti artist Banksy. Works will occur in and around grand arts venues and other exciting ‘chambers,’ continuing to take up the operatic and the epic while simultaneously focusing on intimacy and non-traditional modes of performance. The company is being commissioned by the Limerick City of Culture Festival to make a new work in Ireland and Sarah Kriegler’s new piece will lurk under the stage of one of the Melbourne’s best known theatres.
The company will also produce a stand-alone digital artwork in conjunction with every new live work created, a companion piece if you like. All works will link to a central aim: to create, develop and present contemporary chamber opera that challenges and inspires audiences, nationally and internationally. New CHAMBER Music. Intimately MADE Performance. Epic and virtual OPERA. www.chambermadeopera.com
Vanessa Tomlinson, Erik Griswold, Clocked Out
courtesy the artists
Vanessa Tomlinson, Erik Griswold, Clocked Out
Clocked Out
In 2014 Clocked Out [Erik Griswold, Vanessa Tomlinson] continues to weave our way through diverse practices, activating new and unconventional ways of listening, accessing and participating in experimental music, sound and multimedia. This year we put an equal emphasis on creating new work, finding new contexts for old work and collaboration.
Clocked Out Duo will record and tour our latest piece, Time Crystals, which explores symmetries between phenomena of quantum physics, sound and musical patterns (see review in RT113). Later in the year we will develop a new piece titled Dingo Kisses which uses toy instruments and inspiration from our recent trip through the Australian outback.
Percussion group Early Warning System—an ongoing collaboration with Michael Askill—continues to explore relationships between percussion and environment. In June we perform new and recent compositions by Kate Neal, Anthony Pateras, Askill, Tomlinson, Griswold, alongside George Crumb’s Songs. In August, we will present an interpretation of Michael Gordon’s Timber using reclaimed Australian hardwoods.
In September and November Vanessa returns to solo percussion with a massive new program called Eight Hits premiering new works by Natasha Anderson, Rosemary Joy, Cat Hope, Kate Neal, Griswold, Peter Knight and herself.
Filling out the picture for 2014 are collaborations with the New York-Montreal Quartet (who will premiere Griswold’s Julian Assange statement “Mendax Redax”); poet and sound artist Klare Lanson (Wandering Cloud, see review in RT118); author Rodney Hall and artist Glen Henderson (producing Fairweather, a poetic homage to artist Ian Fairweather). www.clockedout.org
1) Recovery, photo Pete Brundle; 2) Nat Cursio
Nat Cursio
In 2014 I have this peculiar feeling that I am only just starting to be an artist, odd given the many years that I have been busy with dance. One of the things that attracts me to working with bodies in a small, unadorned and often low-tech manner, is the light tread that the work exerts on our natural resources. Dance is such an elemental form and I love that it takes us away from conventional logic.
In March I present The Middle Room, a “ceremonial playdate,” at my home for one visitor at a time, a commission from Theatre Works for the inaugural Festival of Live Art. I’ll continue developing a screen piece, a commission for Carriageworks’ 24 Frames Per Second in collaboration with media artist Daniel Crooks and a treasure of movement practice, Don Asker. The Substation will house me for a second year as choreographer-in-residence for the rebooting of Recovery, a slow-cooker of a project about grief and resilience with collaborators Shannon Bott and Simon Ellis. I’m also privileged to be working on separate projects with three exceptional performance makers, Roslyn Oades, Nicola Gunn and Fiona Bryant. www.natcursio.com
Tim Darbysire, Asialink Residency 2013
courtesy the artist
Tim Darbysire, Asialink Residency 2013
Tim Darbyshire
In 2014 I will be developing several projects across different contexts. I’m in the middle of developing a new performance project Stampede the Stampede, a volatile work extending the choreographic form through mechanical and theatrical apparatuses connected to the body.
I’m planning to travel further abroad to present More or Less Concrete and connect with new audiences (see video interview from Dance Massive 2013 and reviews by Keith Gallasch and Carl Nilsson-Polias). I will be spending time on residencies in Europe, researching, collaborating and developing new work and networks through an IETM residency program I was very fortunate to receive.
As a performer and collaborator I will be working with Matthew Day on some of his new projects/research, which both extend and depart from his solo-based Trilogy series into explorations of duet forms. I will also be involved in an exchange project between Australian and Finnish choreographers, a collaboration between Campbelltown Arts Centre and Zodiak Centre for New Dance in Helsinki.
I will be driven by movements, sounds, lights, colours, machines, objects, tones, voices, bodies, collisions, spaces, languages, relationships… timdarbyshire.blogspot.com.au
Martin del Amo, Little Black Dress Suite, 2013
photo Heidrun Löhr
Martin del Amo, Little Black Dress Suite, 2013
Martin del Amo
I am currently rehearsing for Performance Space’s Mardi Gras event Day for Night (Carriageworks 13 -15 February). I very much enjoy being in the studio again and working on a new solo. It’s been a while… During the last few years, I have mainly been focussing on choreographing works for others so I’m very excited to be reconnecting with my solo practice. There will be more of it this year, I suspect, with a couple of residency spaces lined up and a few ideas for future projects in the pipeline.
Later this month, Julie-Anne Long and I are going to Perth to present Benched as part of Fringe World 2014. The piece was commissioned by Performance Space for their Microparks series and premiered at last year’s Sydney Festival (see review in RT113). It’s set in a park, on and around a bench and involves us having a picnic with audiences in between performances. We can’t wait to see how this is going to be received by Perth audiences. In addition to performing more, my other priority will be to look into opportunities to remount and tour works I have created in the last few years. I am also very excited to be mentoring young dance artist Natalie Abbott through the JUMP mentoring scheme. martindelamo.com
Nadeena Dixon & Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor, The Fox and The Freedom Fighters (development)
courtesy the artist
Nadeena Dixon & Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor, The Fox and The Freedom Fighters (development)
Nadeena Dixon & Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor
The vision and compelling need to tell this story, The Fox and The Freedom Fighters, has come from us, daughter and grand-daughter of Chicka Dixon. We felt it vitally important to document and develop the work of our father and grandfather’s story, as a form of reclamation and revitalisation of contemporary Indigenous culture. This is a story that must be told, a story that belongs to all Australians, both black and white. The Fox and The Freedom Fighters, to be presented at Performance Space in November, will be told by four generations of the Dixon family, through our eyes and experience with him.
Chicka was a charismatic and engaging storyteller, with a wicked sense of humour. He told us all to speak up for what we believe in. Several years have gone by since his passing and now we, as the family, are empowered to share this chronicle so that current and future generations of Indigenous people learn the ‘untold’ story—how a skinny young black fella from Wallaga Lake Mission went on to become a leader of an army of underground resistance fighters who changed the Australian social and political landscape. This includes voting rights for Aboriginal people in the 1967 referendum.
Our aim is to research and document Australia’s political history through Chicka Dixon’s journey. We want to share this history so it can educate and inform all Australians, both Aboriginal and mainstream, encouraging us to pursue leadership goals, empowering us to believe in what is possible. The family sees its role as harnessing this story to impart his legacy to our children and grandchildren and to the community at large. The time for this work is now because the oral history of the time is still alive. The mission is for our young people to have this history at their fingertips and in their memories. We want everybody to know about their place in the history of the resistance and expression of Aboriginal people. The Fox and the Freedom Fighters is an innovative and highly important work the outcome of which will be a significant Indigenous theatre work. It is a vital next step towards the development of contemporary story telling. foxandthefreedomfighters.com
1) Djuki Mala, photo Wayne Quilliam; 2) photos Ben Healy
Djuki Mala Company (the Chookie Dancers)
Djuki Mala (previously known as the Chookie Dancers) are used to camping it up in the traditional sense, being lads from Elcho Island, but camping it up at the Opera House as part of La Soiree is a different (sequined) experience all together. But they are loving the tight confines of the sexy ensemble season.
After the five weeks it’s back to Elcho to develop their next show. No longer at the mercy of underfunded projects or struggling shows, the Djuki Mala Company is thriving, doing more commercial tours and drawing a new but no less enthusiastic audience. Their new show directed and produced by Joshua Bond sits midway between a retrospective and an autobiographical narrative and will feature works from the Djuki Mala ‘canon,’ such as Zorba and Bollywood numbers but also new numbers and new styles.
Refreshing the mix is guest choreographer Nikki Ashby. Nikki brings to Djuki Mala a wealth of knowledge—traditional and hip hop genres from the 70s and 80s that is—locking, popping, new jack swing and many more, as well as deep knowledge of contemporary Indigenous dance, a genre all to itself. Despite all these new-fangled influences, Djuki Mala boys are still driven by a strong sense of their own community life on Elcho. And their work is very clearly a response to the world around them. Their humour and irreverence yet deep groundedness is a given. www.thechookydancers.com
Carolina Palacios, Ashley Dyer, Karol Jarek, Studio Matejka, Brezinka, Poland, July 2013
Ashley Dyer
For the first half of the year my major focus will be on a new series of works called Tremor. I’ll work with a large team of collaborators, mainly in isolation and one on one, and begin playing with how vibration might be used as a material to create objects, installations and performances. We hope to poetically and technically reveal the most compelling, beautiful and unsettling aural, visual and haptic aspects of vibration. We’ll play with all kinds of ideas and existing objects: speakers, bass shakers, tactile transducers, sex toys, shake tables, massage chairs, vibration exercise equipment, earthquakes, liquefaction and trampolines to name a few. By the end of the year, I think that we would’ve created and/or prototyped a series of works that may exist by themselves or come together in a final performance.
As I’m beginning and undertaking a number of new projects, collaborations and practice exchanges this year, it feels very busy. In brief, I’ll be working with great people: James Brennan, Amy Spiers and Catherine Ryan, Deweydell, Studio Matjeka, Ingrid Hedin Vahlberg, Martin del Amo and Tony Osborne in places as diverse as Melbourne, Fairfield, Wroclaw and Göteborg. https://vimeo.com/70168912
I’ve Got A Bone For You, Atlanta Eke
courtesy the artist
I’ve Got A Bone For You, Atlanta Eke
Atlanta Eke
I have a voice to speak for myself and I have things to say. Perhaps the irony is that when working in the medium of dance, as a dancer, it is almost totally impossible to express my ideas with any amount of specificity. This is a challenge that excites me as I prefer that audiences who see my work leave the theatre with more questions than when they entered.
Right now I am working on multiple projects. In February is the Melbourne premiere of I’ve Got A Bone For You (first presented at Mona Foma Hobart 2014 as part of Faux Mo). This is a performance concerned with the complexity of the cowgirl. It is a western romance grappling with the devastation of production, celebrating the joyousness of community and questioning the social forces that define symbolic identities (Melbourne Now, NGV Ian Potter Centre, Indigenous Art Gallery, 15 February 12pm).
In March I will be performing a very special one-off performance of a new work titled VOLUME at the Kings ARI Flash Night series Melbourne (3 March). The performance installation has been made in collaboration with up and coming architect Tim Birnie.
2014 also brings the development of a new solo titled I CON, a performance interrelating the themes of Death and Illusion and asking the question, “What Is Contemporary?” In Comrades of Time Boris Groys writes, “Contemporary Art deserves its name insofar as it manifests its own contemporaneity.” The first developmental phase is The Death of The Artist and will be supported by Arts House North Melbourne through CultureLab and Lucy Guerin Inc. Studio Residency program. This will involve developing methods of impersonation—artists who have died, artists that in dying have become iconic.
I wish to use death as a metaphor for transformation; the process of impersonating something from the past produces the possibility of finding something new for the future. The resulting movement material can oscillate from the original iconic dances to new transformative by-products, perhaps an allegory of how the present is continuously corrupted by the past and future. http://atlantamaryeke.wordpress.com/
Ensemble Offspring with Lee Ranaldo and Mike Patton, Sydney Festival 2014
photo Chris Frape
Ensemble Offspring with Lee Ranaldo and Mike Patton, Sydney Festival 2014
Ensemble Offspring
Ensemble Offspring is presenting an ambitious program of events in 2014. Opening with Berio’s Laborintus II and ending with our very own Secret Noise, this year’s program explores the otherworldly corners of the classical music tradition. Featuring multiple premieres and international work seldom heard in Australia, 2014 is characterised by collaboration with other music genres (installation and improvised music) and other artforms (dance and video).
We’ve already begun the year on a high following our Sydney Festival performance with iconic rock figures Lee Ranaldo and Mike Patton. Next we’ll hit the road in March with a quirky and engaging touring program, Three and Under. In May we decorate a Surry Hills park in a performance-installation as part of Performance Space’s Micro Parks.
June brings avant-garde entertainment and beers with our relaxed Sizzle at the Petersham Bowlo. July and August include some heavy-hitting chamber music in Xenakis’ Plekto followed by the world premiere of Ghan Tracks, a multimedia exploration of Australia’s iconic railway created by music maverick Jon Rose. In October we begin spawning offspring with the culmination of our inaugural Hatched academy program and in November, we present The Secret Noise, the premiere of Damien Ricketson’s surreal production about music and secrecy. http://ensembleoffspring.com/
Caitlin Franzmann
2014 is going to be a year of travel and experimentation. March-April I’ll be participating in the second iteration of the Instrument Builders Project, in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, an ongoing collaborative program between Australian and Indonesian artists and musicians, curated by Kristie Monfries and Joel Stern. In addition to exploring different approaches to instrument building in a shared workshop, I’m looking forward to the experience of collaborating in such an experimental and organic format. (See Malcolm Smith’s report on IBP1.)
With the support of Asialink and Arts Queensland, I will also be undertaking a three-month residency at Torna Gallery in Kadikoy, Turkey. Torna is a small contemporary art space run by Merve Kaptan that encourages possibilities of exhibiting in a non-white cube space. In collaboration with Merve, I’ll be experimenting and producing work to be exhibited primarily in public spaces and engaging in the critical discourse occurring in Turkey around art merging into the everyday and life flowing into art.
For me, collaboration and discussion create an important space to be less self-focused and to develop my understanding of situations and ideas. I hope to discover new forms of cross-cultural collaborations during my time in these two cities while extending my ongoing engagement with somatic experience, urbanism and social interaction. www.caitlinfranzmann.com
At the time of writing I’m sitting in my residency room in central Tokyo, listening to a radio documentary about the aftermath of the Fukashima earthquake, tsunami and nuclear power station breakdown. The word that the Japanese use to describe the three-fold disaster was ‘souteigai,’ meaning ‘beyond imagination.’ Events like these destabilise our worldview, challenging the permanence we take for granted and reminding us of the fragility of our own existence.
Impermanence is often a key element in my work and affecting a solubility of matter, time and space is always at play at the edges of what I do. My activities in 2014 are structured around experiences of just that. The year is starting for me in Japan, with a research residency at Tokyo Wonder Site. From here I travel to the US where I’ll be based in New York City at the ISCP (International Studio & Curatorial Program) for several months. The complex social and philosophical heritages that continue to play out in these locations will no doubt influence my work and thinking over this period, and I suspect it will also reinforce the need to create work that takes the audience beyond this direct experience of human activity.
During 2014 keep an eye out for performative and durational projects I have planned for Brisbane, New York, Newcastle and online; installation-based works in Melbourne and Sydney; works about space and the universe exhibited here and there; and pop-up projects from wherever else they might find me. (See Urszula Dawkin’s review of Universal Truths). The Eclipse Machine (pictured) will be exhibited as part of the Free Range, curated by Anna Pappas, at Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne, 7 Feb – 12 March. www.michaelagleave.com
1) Sam Haren; 2) I, Animal directed by Sam Haren & Dan Koerner, photo Jackson Gallagher
Sam Haren
2014 will be an interesting year for me and collaborator Dan Koerner as we commence one of the Australia Council’s new Digital Theatre Initiatives, a partnership between our company Sandpit and Country Arts SA. As part of the initiative, Fleur Elise Noble and Rosemary Myers, post and Sandpit will all create new work exploring emerging digital technologies and their potential place in performance making into the future.
I am also developing a solo visual performance work with Dan called Mark: a synthesis of VJ-ing, object manipulation and performance. Mark is a playful dissection of a 1992 Calvin Klein advertising campaign objectifying then-rapper Marky Mark. The project examines the cultural shift in our sense of masculinity that occurred as the male body started being objectified in our mainstream media and consumer culture in the same way women had been for decades.
We are also collaborating with Larissa McGowan on creating a new dance work, Owning the Moment, that will allow audiences to digitally acquire sections of the work, which in turn will then be removed from the live show. We’re really excited to see how this project might work! http://www.wearesandpit.com
Stages, Simone Hine and Clare Rae
courtesy the artists
Stages, Simone Hine and Clare Rae
Simone Hine & Clare Rae
Stages is a collaborative project by Simone Hine and Clare Rae. We follow in the tradition of feminist art practice, using our own bodies to examine broader ideas related to the conditions of feminine representation. This is coupled with an interest in the relationship between stillness and motion as it relates to the medium of photography and moving images. Clare performs actions that when photographed rely on the medium’s ability to suspend motion. She also creates moving images from still photographs, drawing to consciousness the hidden photographic base of any moving image. Likewise, Simone makes video and performance installations that replicate constructed photographs as well as videos that create a tension between stillness and motion by juxtaposing scenes of action with stationary scenes.
For this project, we will each make a new work in response to a particular site that is devoid of furnishings. Using the same room as a set for both of our work, Clare will produce a series of photographs and Simone a multi-channel video. We will bring our own aesthetic and line of questioning to the chosen space, creating a dialogue between different ways of seeing, understanding and representing the female body. The convergences mark a shared history of art, while the divergences mark our individual responses to the room. This project will be presented at Boxcopy in April 2014, as part of the Queensland Festival of Photography. www.clarerae.comwww.simonehine.com
Cat Hope performing in Kosice, Slovakia
photo Boris Vaitovidz
Cat Hope performing in Kosice, Slovakia
Cat Hope
2014 will be a composing year! I am very lucky to be the 2014 Peggy Glanville Hicks resident in Paddington, Sydney where I will be writing music for great musicians such as percussionist Vanessa Tomlinson, pianist Zubin Kanga, Icelandic ensemble Slatur and the Chicago Modern Orchestra as well as concocting a new noise opera concept with Jack Sargeant and an installation work at PICA. There’s some recording and mixing on the horizon too, including an album with Alan Lamb and Lisa MacKinney. For my Churchill Fellowship I will look into the way digital graphic notation is made and used around the world, and will end the year with some composing time at Civitavella, Italy. I am also excited about a collaboration with visual artist Kate McMillan, Moments of Disappearance, showing at Carriageworks in November. The Decibel ensemble is still bubbling away, with an east coast tour planned and recording works including the piece we commissioned from Alvin Curran last year. I love making, listening to, thinking about and performing music, so I’m in my element. (See our video interview with Cat from 2012) www.cathope.com
Back to Back Theatre,Ganesh Versus the Third Reich
courtesy the company
Back to Back Theatre,Ganesh Versus the Third Reich
IETM Asian Satellite
The International Network for Contemporary Performing Arts (IETM) and Australia Council will present the first ever IETM Satellite gathering in Australia taking place during Next Wave in partnership with Arts Centre Melbourne (Asian Performing Arts Program). The three-day meeting will bring together 50 Australian artists, producers and presenters for showcases, discussions and networking opportunities with leading performing arts producers and presenters from Europe and Asia. Australian organisations and companies include Campbelltown Arts Centre, Australian Dance Theatre, Chamber Made Opera, Terrapin Puppet Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse, Boho, Darwin Festival and Back to Back Theatre. Following the gathering will also be a lab bringing together emerging innovative artists from Asia and Australia. IETM Melbourne runs 12-14 May and there’ll also be a “caravan” IETM event in Sydney, 15-16 May. ietm.org/melbourne
George Poonkhin Khut
photo Julia Pendrill-Charles
George Poonkhin Khut
George Poonkhin Khut
2014 sees the start of a significant new stage for my practice with my appointment as a full-time academic at the College of Fine Arts (COFA, UNSW). In this position I’ll be extending my research into arts-in-health, participatory and interactive art, and interaction design through new research partnerships, post-graduate supervision and teaching work. As part of this role I’ll be looking to develop new projects with other researchers to explore how art and design can enhance health care experiences.
The BrightHearts research project with Dr Angie Morrow at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead continues with a feasibility study led by Dr Rachel Skinner and Cristyn Davies to evaluate the effectiveness of an app as a tool for managing pain and anxiety with high school students undergoing HPV vaccinations in South Australia and Western Australia. (See George’s report for RT117’s Art & Wellness feature). In my capacity as co-director of Sensorium Health—the business I’ve set up with interaction-designer and entrepreneur Jason McDermott—we’ll be launching a new creative app for Bluetooth fitness heart rate sensors, and launching Kickstarter campaign to develop our own wearable pulse sensor.
I’m also looking forward to continuing my collaboration with composer James Peter Brown exploring experiences of subjectivity, embodiment and selfhood with our brainwave controlled interactive sound and vibration project that we prototyped last year with the ThetaLab project (ISEA 2013; see Urszula Dawkins review). georgekhut.com
1) A Small Prometheus, photo Jeff Busby; 2) Stephanie Lake, photo Robin Fox
Stephanie Lake
My year kicks off with Richard Strauss’ Elektra for Sydney Dance Company and Sydney Symphony Orchestra. I was commissioned by SDC to create the choreography for this epic opera that will be performed at the Sydney Opera House in February. With over a hundred orchestral musicians, singers from the Sydney Philharmonia and eight of the fantastic Sydney Dance Company dancers performing on an elevated stage, it’s work on a grand scale. Using texture, specificity of detail and dissonance we explore the shifting tension between recklessness and delicacy. The dancers don’t play characters but embody the emotional content of the score.
In 2014 I will also embark on the development of a new work titled The Experiment, working with four dancers and in collaboration with audiovisual artist Robin Fox. Initially inspired by the Milgram experiments—controversial psychological experiments from the 1960s—I’ll be working with ideas of obedience and personal responsibility in a piece that positions the audience as decision makers in the outcome of the work they are witnessing. It continues my fascination with movement invention and the interplay of formality and the gritty, chaotic, sinuousness that dance can describe. I plan to present the finished work in 2015.
There is international touring of my recent works, DUAL (see reviews by Varia Karipoff and Keith Gallasch http://www.realtimearts.net/feature/Dance_Massive_2013/11007) and A Small Prometheus (review by Philippa Rothfield), with some great opportunities to take these works to UK and European audiences. And I’ve had the enormous good fortune to be awarded a Sidney Myer Fellowship for the next two years, which will help support future plans and hopefully allow for some interesting tangents. stephanielake.com.au
1) Skeleton, photo Chris Herzfeld; 2) Larissa McGowan
Larissa McGowan
I recently completed the national and international season of my first full-length independent work Skeleton which was presented at the 2013 Adelaide Festival, Dance Massive and Dublin Dance Festival. Skeleton is large-scale dance work exploring the skeletal form set within an explosive vision of pop-cultural icons. (See interview and reviews by Keith Gallasch and Carl Nilsson-Polias)
In 2014 I am in a creative development stage with two smaller-scale works which continue my collaborations with Sam Haren and Steve Mayhew, integrating the dramaturgical process we have established and inviting new collaborators into our process to prompt new ideas.
Owning the Moment is a work for four dancers made in collaboration with Sam and Dan Koerner from Sandpit and composer and sound designer Brendan Woithe. The work proposes that the audience acquire, own and then permanently remove “a moment “ from the work.
Mortal Condition (for two dancers) explores the persona of secondary female characters within the fantasy world of cartoons, movies and video games. Steve is working on this project with DJ Trip and dancer Kialea Nadine Williams. Right now I am working as a dancer/performer on Stone/Castro’s show Blackout being presented in association with the Adelaide Festival 2014 [see Ben Brooker’s interview with Paul Castro in RealTime 119]. www.insitearts.com.au
In 2014 I am working towards the preview of a major new work, Robot Opera, a series of outdoor public performances with autonomous robots, sound and light. The process involves collaborations with electrical engineers and programmers and a residency with performance company Branch Nebula focused on robotic choreography coming up in 2014 at Performance Space. The first full-scale performance will be in 2015.
In June, I am excited to be exhibiting The Acconci Robot at thingWorld: International Triennial of New Media Art, National Art Museum of China. There will be an amazing number of interesting works there. Then in August, I will have my first major survey show, Autonomous Improvisation, which includes new site-specific work for the Ian Potter Centre, National Gallery of Victoria. Other works to be included at this stage are The Hosts (see Dan MacKinlay’s review), Black Casino, Composition for padded room and The Balance of your bank account is reflected in your face (http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue108/10642). During that time, I’ll also have a concurrent show at John Buckley gallery in Prahran.
In September the work Fish and Chips, created with Michael Candy for Campbelltown Art Centre and ISEA2013 (see video and Darren Toft’s review) will feature at the Bondi Pavilion Gallery for the Festival of the Winds. The work was made at Clovelly and involved surrounding fauna, so I hope it will resonate with local audiences. www.marynowsky.net
Nancy Mauro-Flude
Nancy Mauro-Flude
2014 is the year of the Horse so it makes sense to go ‘germane’—I’m seriously tying up loose ends.
I want to engender intimate salon type settings that nurture cultural and political conversations and invite participation from a vast range of people whose practices foster radical, embodied and implicated approaches that push the boundaries of their specific genres beyond tokenism. A starting point for this premise is my participation in transmediale: afterglow in Berlin. I am in the flesh involved in ARThackDAY and performing and exhibiting a new work. (I am even more excited because the last time I presented there in 2011, was via a hospital video stream as I’d recently given birth).
The projects I’m developing are a paradoxical combination of satire and transcendentalism (perhaps otherwise known as pataphysical). In our scramble to be ‘beneficial’ in an expanded milieu, we delimit the set of our potential actions and even more so we constantly cast a utilitarian role to ubiquitous calculating machines.
On the one hand, I am driven by the demystification of technology, and on the other, the ‘mystification’ that lies in and through the performance of the machinic assemblage. This tension between ongoing extremes is my continual drive. sister0.org
Tristan Meecham, Game Show
courtesy the artist
Tristan Meecham, Game Show
Tristan Meecham
I am a performance artist who works with the grand and the ridiculous. I am passionate about connecting community, audience and artists together in events that transcend the everyday. I am an Artistic Associate of Aphids, a company that creates Contemporary Art Projects.
In 2014, my collaborators Aphids, Bec Reid and Insite Arts will continue work on The Coming Out Trilogy, three large-scale spectacles that include Fun Run (2010 Next Wave Festival, 2011 Darwin Festival, 2013 Opening Sydney Festival), Game Show (2014 Festival of Live Art; Arts House) and Miss Universe (2014 APAM).
Game Show premieres at Arts House in March as part of the Festival of Live Art. Each night, 50 contestants with no performance experience will compete live on stage for the chance to take home a grand showcase of prizes: the host’s very own possessions! So if you are competitive, love to win and always wanted to be in a live game show, this is your big chance! We are looking for contestants of all ages, from all walks of life. No performance experience necessary, just a desire to play and win! Register your interest: please click here and/or email gameshownow@gmail.com for more information.
Following on from Game Show I will commence work on the grand conclusion of the Miss Universe trilogy, pitching the performance spectacle this year at APAM. In Miss Universe, I hope to battle the one and only Grace Jones to determine who will be crowned the ultimate performer, the loser never allowed to perform again! Think Mardi Gras, beauty pageants, wrestling and cannibalism! In June, I will travel to the UK as part of the British Council’s Realise Your Dream program to meet with Art Heroes and stalk people with connections to Ms Jones! The Coming Out Trilogy website will launch in March www.thecomingouttrilogy.com
1) Hello, Goodbye & Happy Birthday, Roslyn Oades, photo photo Andrew Curtis; 2) Roslyn Oades, photo Patrick Boland
Roslyn Oades
Over the last 12 months I’ve been developing a new audio-scripted performance called, Hello, Goodbye & Happy Birthday. Juxtaposing the perspectives of final year high school students and nursing home residents this project offers audiences a rare opportunity to eavesdrop on the candid conversations of those grappling with how to say goodbye to life; and where to begin. The show’s been programmed by Malthouse and Melbourne Festival for an October 2014 premiere, so it’s my main focus. I have hundreds of hours of audio to listen through and then craft into a succinct, hour-long script. Simultaneously I’m attempting to be invited to as many 18th, 80th, 90th and 100th birthdays as possible. So if anyone reading this is attending a ‘special’ birthday soon please let me know!
My current artistic crush is documentary filmmaker Fredrick Wiseman, whom I only discovered a couple of years ago despite the fact he’s been making films since 1967. I admire the way Wiseman resists traditional narrative devices—voice over, interview or surtitles—in his docos, leaving viewers to witness and process complex ethical dilemmas for themselves. He’s also a master at identifying rhythms and incidental poetry in unlikely places. I often ask myself, what would Fredrick Wiseman do? www.roslynoades.com
starrs & cmielewski
The future is unmanned. According to media reports, 2013 was the year of the unmanned airborne vehicle or drone. The increasing normalisation of drone surveillance and warfare has caught the attention of the general public. During an artist residency at Bundanon we worked with dancer Alison Plevey to explore aspects of the human relationship with drones, mounting a camera on a quadcopter to record site responsive performances in the natural environment. In the resulting videos a young woman exhibits a range of different emotions, including curiosity, agitation, engagement and resignation in response to the persistently intrusive drone. This work is one aspect of a larger project, Augmented Terrain, supported by a Creative Australia grant to develop an immersive video installation that re-imagines the relationship between nature and culture. We are working towards a show at Performance Space Carriageworks later in 2014. josephinestarrs.com
Joel Stern
courtesy the artist
Joel Stern
Joel Stern
2014 is going to be a very big year for me personally with some major curatorial projects in addition to lots of artistic activity. OtherFilm (b. 2004) is the curatorial agency I direct with Danni Zuvela and Sally Golding focusing on artists’ moving image, experimental film, expanded cinema etc and the place of this in the broader field of contemporary art. We’re working towards two major projects this year. The first, Experimental Universe, taking place at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art (6 & 13 Feb), comprises new films, performances and music by contemporary Australian artists responding to Yoko Ono’s rarely visited instructional works, Six Film Scripts (1964) and Imaginary Film Series (1968). Fast forwarding to May, OtherFilm will present its 5th festival in Brisbane, featuring site-specific commissions by Australian and international artists responding to the theme Institutional Capture.
Rewinding to March, I’ll be in Jogjakarta, Indonesia with my colleague Kristi Monfries to direct the second iteration of the Instrument Builders Project (IBP), an international collaborative program between Australian and Indonesian artists and musicians, in which the artists conceptualise, build, perform and exhibit new ‘instrument-based’ works together over a period of four weeks. (See Malcolm Smith’s report on IBP1.) I’m also thrilled to say that the IBP will have its first Australia-based incarnation in November over one month at the NGV Studio in Melbourne, featuring a number of amazing Indonesian artists visiting Australia for the first time. Finally, and perhaps most excitingly, Danni Zuvela and I have been appointed artistic directors of the venerable ‘sound art’ organisation Liquid Architecture, tasked with curating the 2014 festival and driving LA forward into a brave new world. We’re honoured to have this excellent opportunity (and responsibility) and will deliver our first festival, The Ear is a Brain, in September and October. Viva 2014! otherfilm.org/
1) Lara Thoms and Joy Hruby, Wake#2, part of Televisions Festival 2013, photo Lucy Parakhina 2) Film still, Screen Monument, Lara Thoms & Kate Blackmore, part of Ultimate Vision – Monuments to Us
Lara Thoms
In 2014 I will continue making work with others, thinking about public art, participation and context responsive practice. First up, as part of Aphids I will be working on the live spectacle Gamewhow for the Festival of Live Art (FOLA) in March in Melbourne, where the audience will compete for a prize package of all of host Tristan Meecham’s possessions. The work includes hundreds of dancers, singers and all of his belongings on display; so it is set to be a big show.
As part of Field Theory I am co-curating Site As Set, a three-year program of site-specific performance in Melbourne. The first year of this program sees four of my favourite artists—Malcolm Whittaker, Bron Batton, Zoe Meagher, Jason Maling—create new public works, as well as my own project which will be a response to the strange world of trade expos. Later in the year I will begin a project looking at people’s obsessive personal collections. I am excited that this year the MCA will also launch a publication about my recent work, Ultimate Vision—Monuments To Us, with writing from Toby Chapman & Anne Loxley and Georgie Meagher. (See our video interview with Thoms in 2012 See our video interview with Thoms in 2012) http://www.mca.com.au/artists-and-works/external-projects/c3west/ultimate-vision-monuments-us/
Eugene Ughetti
courtesy the artist
Eugene Ughetti
Eugene Ughetti
I can think of no rewarding and stimulating professional activity than being engaged in a creative process. Through my work I am in search of ineffable experiences that have deep and meaningful impact on our lives. My next project, Toy Consciousness, is a full-length performance-installation using thousands of mass-produced Chinese children’s toys combined with recordings of machinery in operating theatres at the Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne.
Toys are associated with the innocence of children’s play, yet their mass-production in the Third World leads to contaminated waters, pollution and inevitably disease. In Toy Consciousness, the use of toys as a means of escapism and play acts as a metaphor for the wide spread ignorance of underlying suffering in society. The children’s hospital, with its machines for curing illness and toys for distracting sick children, becomes the setting for a story created to be understood intuitively by children and adults alike.
I will create a musical composition for three percussionists using children’s toys to underpin the entire work. Field recordings made at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital will be edited and sculpted into quadraphonic audio montage that paints the picture of a man-made environment inhabited by sickness. This sound world is gradually recontextualised by the use of toys, transforming into a space of play and freedom. Three virtuosic Speak Percussionists will apply the rigor of their classical training and unorthodox playing styles to extract a myriad of musical and textural sounds from the toys. (See video interview with Eugene from 2011) speakpercussion.com
Malcolm Whittaker, Jumping the Shark
photo James Brown
Malcolm Whittaker, Jumping the Shark
Malcolm Whittaker
I am a young man from Sydney who works as an interdisciplinary artist, writer, researcher and performer. I do this in solo pursuits, as a member of performance collective Team MESS and in other collaborations with artists and non-artists. I have a number of new projects in the works for development and presentation across 2014, as well as the re-staging of some existing projects.
Ignoramus Anonymous is a performed-support-group for the ignorant (ie anyone and everyone) that I have developed through a residency with the State Library of NSW. It continues to be presented in the form of monthly meetings at the State Library and Waverley Council Library throughout the year and will also be presented at the Festival of Live Art at Arts House in March. Also in March I have an exhibition of a new durational video-performance work at Gaffa Gallery in Sydney.
In May I will be working with residents of inner-city Sydney who have recently lost their pet dogs to devise a commemorative walk as a performance in which the stories of these departed best friends are shared with an audience. This is for the Performance Space Micro Parks season. A version of the work will also be presented by Field Theory in Melbourne later in the year.
In July at Campbelltown Arts Centre, I am presenting Jumping the Shark Fantastic, an investigation and performative demonstration of the “best theatre show ever.” Then Team MESS embark on a regional tour of South Australia with our participatory television crime-drama BINGO Unit (see Keith Gallasch’s review). Following this, we will be developing a new work at Hothouse Theatre in Albury and Arts House in Melbourne. malcolmwhittaker.com
David Williams, Open Your Mouth and Let Words Fall Out
Jennifer Greer Holmes and Heath Britton
David Williams, Open Your Mouth and Let Words Fall Out
David Williams
As with all of my work over the past decade, I am driven to make evocative and accessible performance experiences that open spaces for public conversations about important public issues. Quiet Faith is a new documentary performance that explores the close entanglement of religious faith and civic life in contemporary Australia.
Groups such as the Australian Christian Lobby loudly insist that all public policy be developed in accordance with conservative interpretations of Christianity, and have been actively recruiting and supporting political candidates sympathetic to these values. But the conservative social values of those claiming to speak in the name of faith are not necessarily shared by all of the faithful. How might these softly spoken voices of the religious and reasonable find a place within public discourse?
By opening up a serious conversation with the religious, Quiet Faith aims to find new ways of developing a shared and respectful understanding of critical public issues. The performance text is constructed from a series of recorded interviews with persons of ‘quiet faith,’ defined as those whose faith does not require them to proselytise or attempt to convert others. The performance gently charts the life experiences and public political visions of quiet believers, intercut with songs of faith selected by project contributors, each sung a capella during the performance.
Written and directed by myself, Quiet Faith also has a fantastic team of collaborators, and will feature an evocative 8-channel surround soundscape from Bob Scott, stage design by Jonathon Oxlade and a physical performance language overseen by choreographer Roz Hervey. This will be an immersive performance experience, with audiences and performers sharing a physical journey that invites active engagement, close listening and contemplation—a surprising and heartfelt journey through a rarely heard branch of the body politic. Quiet Faith will be presented at Vitalstatistix in Port Adelaide in October. http://issuu.com/vitalstatistixtheatrecompany/docs/vsx_program2014_issuu
Lake, Lisa Wilson, Timothy Ohl
photo Fen Lan Chuang
Lake, Lisa Wilson, Timothy Ohl
Lisa Wilson
My body of work moves across genres and includes pieces for theatre and opera companies, large-scale installations, multi-media performances, company commissions and full-length independent works. I aim to create distinctive and original performance which layers striking visual design, powerful yet intricate physicality and a sense of the human condition.
Lake is my latest full-length work, co-presented with the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, which will tour nationally in 2014 as a Road Work tour through Performing Lines. Lake literally floods the entire performance area to create a visually stunning and highly engaging dance theatre work. A seamless fusion of choreography, visual design, video projection, and original score Lake explores our fascination with and fear of water, a medium that can be at turns breathtakingly beautiful and a force of indiscriminate destruction. (See Kathryn Kelly’s review).
Wireless, my next work, recently received Australia Council funding for a second stage development in late 2014. It’s is a new inter-media dance theatre work about trust, privacy and control and will be made in collaboration with composer Paul Charlier, layering dance, music, design and on-stage interactive technology. The work is being developed with the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts through Fresh Ground. www.lisawilson.com.au
A sampling of Australia’s most eclectic music festival featuring interviews with Conrad Shawcross & Ken Farmer (The ADA Project), Robin Rox (RGB Laser) and Russell Haswell (noisemaker).
MONA FOMA, curated by Brian Ritchie Hobart, Tasmanian, 15-19 January, 2014
Martin del Amo, Sasha Waltz, Nadia Cusimano in conversation at the Goethe Institut
photo Wesley Nel
Martin del Amo, Sasha Waltz, Nadia Cusimano in conversation at the Goethe Institut
While German choreographer Sasha Waltz was in Sydney presenting her epic ballet/opera Dido & Aeneas she participated in a public conversation with Nadia Cusimano, facilitated by Martin del Amo. The event was co-presented by Critical Path, the Goethe Institut and Sydney Festival and they have kindly let us reproduce it here.
You can also listen to the introduction by Goethe Institut’s director Arpad Sölter here; and questions from the floor here.
Related articles
Santiago a Mil: History’s imprints
Bryoni Trezise: Sasha Waltz company, Scott Gibbons & Chiara Guidi
RealTime issue #90 April-May 2009 p10
A fistful of skin
Jana Perkovic: Sasha Waltz, Melbourne International Arts Festival
RealTime issue #94 Dec-Jan 2009 p6
RealTime issue #118 Dec-Jan 2013 pg. web
Stella Barton, Accessible Arts NSW, Catalyst Dance Masterclass Series, Second Skin
photo Gisella Vollmer
Stella Barton, Accessible Arts NSW, Catalyst Dance Masterclass Series, Second Skin
Enabling Art, our first feature to focus on art and disability reveals a burgeoning field of diverse practices, intensive collaboration, innovation and divergent opinions about aims and terminology. Our coverage reaches from Sydney and Wollongong to Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth, just some of the centres where performance and visual art studio practices and networks are emerging.
While a handful of Australian feature films thrive at the box office, most don’t. Those without Hollywood-style clout are likely to have limited seasons and are unlikeley to reach suburban let alone regional cinemas. Funding has been extensively invested in production but not enough attention paid to distribution. Tina Kaufman concurs with Lauren Carroll Harris’ argument in Platform Paper No 37, Not At A Cinema Near You, that current criteria for funding distribution are outdated and that digital opportunities need to be addressed and supported by funding agencies. Dan Edwards agrees, seeing distribution as even more problematic for documentaries, a field where makers, he feels, are having to play safe to get their work shown.
Art and disability programs, projects, artists and companies are changing the Australian cultural landscape, not only making us aware of the lives, passions and skills of people and, in particular, artists with disabilities but, more than that, introducing new challenges and possibilities for the arts as evident in the innovative creations of the internationally acclaimed Back to Back Theatre.
Much of the thrust of art and disability work is about democratisation, enabling artists with disabilities to be treated as equals with their able-bodied peers with whom they can collaborate and, indeed, compete. Successful ventures in theatre and dance have come from intensive collaborations, often over long periods and involving the establishment of subtle means of communication. Assistance from the able-bodied is very often necessary, but there’s a point at which the artist with a disability in performance achieves independence, realising their creativity and relishing its freewheeling joy on stage. He or she is no longer being helped in that moment, but is giving to an audience, as Adina Tal, director of Israel’s internationally applauded Nalaga’at Theatre Ensemble of blind, deaf and deaf-blind performers, tells me in an interview prior to the company’s appearance at the 2014 Perth International Arts Festival with Not By Bread Alone (see article).
In attempts to demand acknowledgment, respect and rights, some performance works have been created about disability and the prejudices and challenges faced. Others, like Back to Back’s Super Discount (2013), address the tensions among the disabled about how they treat each other in terms of disabilities. Beyond that, disability does not have to provide the content of works by artists with disabilities. A disability may be evident in a performance, but Anne Louise Rentell, who is directing The Man Who Dreamt the Stars with two performers with disabilities for Merrigong Theatre Company says in an interview, it’s about “’talking’ to the disability without the show becoming about being disabled.”
Adina Tal is adamant that simply aiming to develop sympathy for disabled performers is not the issue: “[Not by Bread Alone] is not a show for the audience to come and do a good deed, but to see a good show. It’s not about blindness or deafness anymore; it’s about being imperfect. Once you sit in the audience and accept the imperfection in yourself you will accept that in other people. This is the way to start changing the world.”
The more audiences encounter artists with disabilities the more they’ll be alert to the ways they expand our creativity. Although arts and disability organisations have been operating for a very long time, we are entering a period of high visibility as these artists emerge and their works are programmed in arts centres and festivals, as with Sydney’s 10-year-old Ever After Theatre in the 2014 Carriageworks program in May. The Disability Trust’s Altogether Drama Group in Wollongong has provided the performers for The Man Who Dreamt the Stars. Rawcus in Melbourne and, in Adelaide, Restless Dance Theatre (see article) for many years and, more recently, No Strings Attached (see article) have been producing high calibre productions.
Indicative of the richness of the field of disability and the arts are the very different works produced by these and other companies. In a world in which nuance is less and less welcome, the term ‘disabled’ continues to be severely limiting. A disabled body might be inhabited by a highly intelligent mind; an intellectually constrained mind might be blessed with a rich emotional intelligence that lends itself to acting or a body that is rhythmically and spatially responsive to the liberating demands of dance.
In attempts to counter negatives that constellate around ‘disability,’ arts organisations have used terms like ‘integrated dance’ and ‘mixed ability performance.’ One artist told me he preferred “diversability” to ‘disability.’ As more and more artists of various abilities become visible, doubtless the limitations of terminology will be transcended, not just on stage or in galleries, but, gradually, on television—as in the case of the forensic data specialist Clarissa (Liz Carr) in BBC TV’s Silent Witness.
In his article on Sydney-based visual artist John Demos’ residency at Big Fag Press, Lucas Ihlein writes, “While working with John, we’ve become acutely aware of some of the politics of representation surrounding art and disability. The question of voice has come up repeatedly. Who gets to speak on behalf of whom? Mostly, it seems, John is spoken of by others (as I am doing right now).” This critical issue is not one we’ve addressed in this feature, although you will read throughout about means of communication and what artists have had to say about their work. Doubtless, as more artists emerge, creating regardless of their disabilities, they will demand to be heard or read. In the meantime the works made and being made that we report on here justify a sense of excitement for the future of the arts as we all, as Adina Tal has put it, engage with our imperfections and seek out and make good art.
Ben Wishart, Duncan Luke, Ricky Samai and Ryan Rowland, Sons & Mothers
photo Alex Frayne
Ben Wishart, Duncan Luke, Ricky Samai and Ryan Rowland, Sons & Mothers
“What makes someone a mother?” is the not-as-facile-as-it-sounds question deviser and director Alirio Zarvarce puts, over and over again, to the members of the No Strings Attached Men’s Ensemble in Sons & Mothers. The answers are as disparate as the members themselves, indicative of personality and perception, but also of the difficulty any of us might face in reaching beyond the purely physiological to describe what is for many sons the most elemental relationship in their lives.
In the theatre
Damien Turbin, whose mother was told upon his birth by doctors that he would never be able to walk, talk or eat, expresses a thought at once universal and profoundly personal when he says that a mother is “someone to look after us.” In a short video interview, Ben Wishart literally writhes with the effort to communicate a perhaps incommunicable idea to Zavarce, before silencing his persistent interviewer with a serenely pragmatic, “She just is.” Later, under the lo-fi glare of an overhead projector, Wishart traces the outline of a photograph of his parents with a marker pen; a moment of unusual stillness in a show which abounds with raw energy and imprecisely articulated feeling.
Each member of the ensemble, following an incongruously focus-drawing monologue by Zarvarce, becomes the subject of a ‘piece’ which investigates the performer’s relationship with his mother. Kathryn Sproul’s set—warm and homely, and faded around the edges like the old family photographs which are periodically projected onto the back wall of the Space—provides a sort of environmental foil for the performers as they step out of its dusty crannies and temporarily into the spotlight, ushering the past into a viscerally alive present.
Among the first, and best, of the pieces is by Ryan Rowland who, with a wicked mock rock god stare, plugs in his electric guitar and intones an acerbic set of lyrics about his medically complicated birth as juddering power chords ring out. Ricky Samai’s entrance into the world was similarly problematic, having remained in what he calls a “human crib” for days after his birth. A Torres Strait Islander, Samai’s piece is the most richly physical, infused with figures and gestures characteristic of traditional Islander dance. His journey throughout the hospital (he was born in Adelaide) is mapped out across the floor of the theatre, surefooted but loose-limbed, his monologue laden with echo in a suggestion of institutional space as well as the easy travel of the past.
At such moments, Sons & Mothers pushes the boundaries of its remit, its focus on mother-son relationships pulling back to take in more generalised and familiar discourses around disability. Its disciplined dramaturgy, nevertheless, and the fearless storytelling instincts of the ensemble, guarantee the success of the whole.
Ben Wishart, Sons & Mothers
photo Alex Frayne
Ben Wishart, Sons & Mothers
On film
The curiously capitalised feature documentary SONS & mothers, by Queensland-born but now Adelaide-based filmmaker Christopher Houghton, is a remarkable behind-the-scenes document of the creation of the production which (almost) shares its name. Told mostly in stark, tightly framed close-ups (cinematography Aaron Gully and Maxx Corkindale), the film covers a period of about 12 months out of the stage show’s three-year development, the culmination of which was a world premiere at Adelaide’s Queen’s Theatre during the 2012 Fringe Festival. Houghton does not, however, dwell on the success of that premiere, footage of the triumphal opening night constituting a brief and indistinct coda only.
The tone, established from the opening scene in which long-time No Strings Attached member Kym Mackenzie vigorously removes his stubble with an electric shaver, is intimate rather than expansive. In a later scene, which takes place during one of the show’s three creative developments, the emphasis remains close and exclusive as Mackenzie’s description of his deceased mother brings tears to his eyes. Where Sons & Mothers is exuberant and irreverent, Houghton’s documentary is muted and at times elegiac, the camera unendingly hovering over the external manifestations of painful inner lives and unquenchable personal crises.
The worst of these is that experienced by Abner Bradley, the brilliant but profoundly mentally ill multi-instrumentalist whose internal schisms ultimately lead to his self-excision from the project. The scenes which depict the first stages of his mental collapse as they occur on the rehearsal room floor are disturbing, but the effect is partly and happily neutralised by later, exquisite moments in which we witness Bradley at peace in a music therapy room, then at home with his mother.
In the latter, nothing much happens—cigarettes are shared over a few inconsequential pleasantries—but something of the essence of the mother-son duality everybody has been trying to get at reveals itself: unaffected, unspoken, an ontology both ordinary and extraordinary that perhaps takes the confidence of film, rather than the artifice of theatre, to authentically uncover.
No Strings Attached Theatre of Disability, Sons & Mothers, writer, deviser, director Alirio Zavarce, performers Joshua Campton, Duncan Luke, Kym Mackenzie, Ryan Rowland, Ricky Samai, Damien Turbin, Ben Wishart, Alirio Zavarce, designer Kathryn Sproul, lighting David Gadsden, music Mario Spate, AV designer Eugenia Lim, movement Aidan Kane Munn, Space Theatre, 17-26 Oct; SONS & mothers, director Christopher Houghton, POP Pictures, Adelaide Film Festival 2013
How does the work of artists with a disability get framed by the art world? What goes on in the process of distributing, promoting and analysing the work of such artists? What structures of power and knowledge are involved? What criteria for judgment of ‘quality’ are exercised? Who is ‘in the know,’ and who is providing the content? Who is asking these questions?
These were the issues I was keen to explore when I began nosing around the Supported Studio Network nearly a year ago. This research was commissioned by Josie Cavallaro of Accessible Arts. Part of her remit involved getting discussion going about art and disability, beyond the confines of publications focusing on art therapy, mental health and outsider art. Josie’s thinking was that if such questions could slip into the pages of art journals and magazines, the debate might begin to broaden out.
Ultimately, Accessible Arts is seeking to expand opportunities for artists in the Supported Studio Network. Supported Studios are places which facilitate the production and distribution of work by artists with a disability—there are a dozen or so such studios around Australia, including Arts Project Australia in Melbourne, Art in the Garage in Bega (NSW) and Bindi Arts in Alice Springs. The studios aim to chip away at the paternalism and connoisseurship which often characterise relations within the intersecting worlds of art and disability.
In March 2013, I was able to deepen my understanding of some of these issues when Big Fag Press began hosting artist John Demos in our studio at First Draft Depot in Woolloomooloo. John is a veteran draftsman, printmaker and ceramicist. He is supported by Project Insideout, whose manager Kris Tito helped to broker the relationship with Big Fag Press.
Ostensibly, Big Fag was supposed to be ‘mentoring’ John, but in reality we were simply doing what we normally do—providing space, offering technical advice about occult things like digital pre-press and offset lithography and generally just hanging out while artists try to mash their work through the crude filter of our four-tonne printing machine.
It’s the ‘hanging out’ where the real work gets done. From Big Fag’s perspective, the lion’s share of this work was done by John, the designer and the administrator, Louise Anderson. Louise paid close attention to John’s method of production, and together they workshopped how his painstakingly crafted drawings might make the leap into offset print editions.
John builds up large fields of words, letter by letter, with ballpoint pens or textas. The writing wobbles organically across the page, constrained by the reach of the artist’s right hand. The words ‘Universities,’ ‘Deans,’ ‘Transcripts’ and ‘Brain’ crop up again and again. When I first saw these pedagogically themed drawings, they made me think of the old fashioned punishment doled out to naughty schoolchildren—writing lines.
Far from punishment, the writing-drawing process in John’s text work is, I’ve observed, a kind of meditation: a way of dwelling in complex thought by repeating, mantra-like, words rich in connotation. And when viewing these sort of concrete poems, the ad-nauseam repetition begins to break down meaning. Words decompose themselves into ciphers, into glyphs, into the constituent squiggles—microdrawings—which are at the heart of scribal culture.
To mediate these heavily worked pages using offset lithography is to perform a crafty magic. While it takes John weeks of labour to inscribe a single page, a few days yakka on the Big Fag can multiply that labour 50 times over—yet each sheet still looks, cunningly, like it was delicately penned by hand. Hot off the press, some of the printed pages are dutifully reworked with John’s pen, further confounding the boundaries between script and print. What will John do with all this paperwork?
Hanging out for long hours at our studio has allowed a camaraderie to slowly build between John and the Big Fag personnel; it’s also facilitated some accidental meetings with other artists occupying studios at the First Draft Depot, as well as arts workers and curators who drop by to see what we’re up to. As a result of meeting gallerist Jo Holder an exhibition of the work generated during his time at Big Fag Press was organised for The Cross Arts Projects in the centre of Kings Cross.
While working with John, we’ve become acutely aware of some of the politics of representation surrounding art and disability. The question of voice has come up repeatedly. Who gets to speak on behalf of whom? Mostly, it seems, John is spoken of by others (as I am doing right now)—and this is particularly the case with the negotiations that are necessary in the professional life of the exhibiting artist.
Halfway through the residency project, we engaged emerging filmmaker Josh Charles to produce a short documentary, offering an insight into John’s working process through moving image
(https://vimeo.com/74101498). But the doco has also proved an effective and gentle tool for John to speak on record—on his own—about his work and about his place in the (art)world.
“How will my work be presented? In what context? Am I being paid enough? How do I see my career trajectory?” Currently, John works out these aspects of professional practice with support from Kris Tito at Project Insideout. In a recent article, Hugh Nichols described the relationship between artists and supported studios as a “scaffolding”—a structural framework essential in the steady building of the artist’s own networks (unprojects.org.au). As John’s connections begin to expand—as they have done during his residency at Big Fag Press—he will increasingly represent himself within a more diverse set of galleries and discourses.
On November 6, 2013, a “Provocative Supported Studio Forum” convened by Accessible Arts was held at the MCA. More than 50 delegates from around the country converged to discuss practical and ethical questions around the work carried out at Supported Studios.
John Demos, The Cross Art Projects. Kings Cross, Sydney, 31 Oct-3 Nov
Artist Lucas Ihlein is a partner at Big Fag Press and lecturer in Media Arts at University of Wollongong.
“You are the salt of the earth” and “Are you worth your salt?” are expressions that hark back to ancient times when one’s labour could be paid for in the form of this mineral, most likely as an allowance as part of a salary. Harvested salt has been a much fought over and heavily traded commodity, invaluable for preservation. Over time, the meaning of those expressions has narrowed to focus on self-worth.
Director of a new production, SALT, for Restless Dance Company, Rob Tannion, has long been obsessed with salt. As a child, he recalls pinching salt, being attracted to salty foods and seeing his mother superstitiously toss spilled salt over her shoulder. “My father was the master of quotes and quips: ‘Have you earned your salt?’ and ‘Are you worth your salt?’” When Tannion came to work with the Restless performers he found they had a powerful sense of worth: “I’m here, and I’m worth everything,” “I’m a professional artist, ability aside.” As well, he says, “Salt can be so visually beautiful—white and crystalline, the different sorts of salt, table salt, mountains of salt…”
Rob Tannion
photo courtesy the artist
Rob Tannion
“Ten years ago,” he says, “I read Mark Kurlansky’s fascinating A World History of Salt and put the idea to do a show about it on the backburner.” He says all of this material offers many points of departure, “which is where we are now as we start work” with four performers (Lorcan Hopper, Jianna Georgiou, Dana Nance and Felicity Doolette), three of them with disabilities, who certainly believe they are worth their salt. “One of the beautiful things about coming home is the Australian spirit. In the UK and Europe there’s all that reserved spirit. People here are brash: ‘I can do that!’”
As for production design, Tannion is still musing: “There will be salt on stage; how much of it I don’t know. Perhaps not a mountain.” He requested the performers be taken to the former largest salt harvesting site in Australia for a photo shoot on its magnificent mountains (see Sam Oster’s cover image). “I’d love to have a block of salt—or something standing in for it—and someone with boxing gloves trying to break it. Harvesting salt is really hard; I found old footage of the Adelaide salt works with people cutting into the salt with chain saws and digging it out. How much effort it takes to gain what is so often used!”
Tannion would also like to work from other angles, asking the performers, “How many tears have you cried in your life? And how could we show that?” I ask about sweat. “Dance in Australia is equated with salt,” he laughs, “especially for me, being a Queensland boy. Sweat is harder to generate dancing in England.”
Trained at QUT, Rob Tannion danced for Expressions and Dance North and performed in England for DV8 Physical Theatre and Complicité. He made two works for StopGAP, a dance company working with artists with disabilities. He says, “They were great experiences. It is a slightly different way of working, responding to the needs and the capacities of the performers. If they’re restricted to a wheelchair that gives me a prop to work with; for someone with no legs I’ll create something more floor-based.” He co-founded both Stan Won’t Dance (2004-11), a physical theatre company working with new writers, and in Spain, Organización Efímera, a contemporary circus company (Tannion speaks Spanish—“My wife is Mexican, I have no excuse”).
Although Tannion’s work these days is almost entirely in contemporary circus, taking him to China and especially now Latin America, he says, “I don’t come from a circus background—I approach all my work choreographically,” making him an ideal partner for Restless Dance Theatre.
Restless Dance Theatre, SALT, Odeon Theatre, Adelaide, 17-25 Jan
Andrew Mujunen, Daniel Monks, Catalyst Dance Masterclass Series, Second Skin
photo Gisella Vollmer
Andrew Mujunen, Daniel Monks, Catalyst Dance Masterclass Series, Second Skin
The Catalyst Dance Masterclass Series, Second Skin, was an impressive studio showing of dancers with varying degrees of ability working closely with professional choreographers to realise three short works with as many as 20 performers appearing in each. Some performed brief solos and others danced in various combinations, but always within a sense of the whole group, filling the stage with curving lines and fluid circles. These were works created over a few days, not at all finished but suggestive of the potential of brave performers working with adventurous choreographers.
In the first work, simply labelled Dance Work 1, choreographer Sue Healey enveloped her performers in a circled wall of fabric onto which were projected text (“I wrap my patchwork of words around my torso like a cloak I can hide in”) and recorded images of their moving bodies. These then flowed onto the dancers themselves as they emerged. Healey aimed to “form a ‘second skin’ to allow the dancers to connect inwards and outwards” (program note). A young performer with muscular dystrophy aptly abandoned her walking frame, moved centrestage and danced delicately as a length of fabric rose over and dipped beneath her (see p2). Healey’s quite demanding patterning of her performers revealed within the group strong body memory and spatial awareness.
Inspired by his scuba diving and extensive research into marine environments, Dean Walsh focused in the second work on oxygen and water as fundamental to human and all species’ existence, seeing them as constituting a “shared second skin” that links us all. Bathed in blue light, the performers entered with inflated balloons in their mouths, a reminder of our dependency on oxygen but also evoking free movement in a water world in which bodies sway as if floating, moving collectively within a swirling current to underwater sounds recorded by Walsh and mixed by DJ Scott Bobako.
Stella Barton, Accessible Arts NSW, Catalyst Dance Masterclass Series, Second Skin
photo Gisella Vollmer
Stella Barton, Accessible Arts NSW, Catalyst Dance Masterclass Series, Second Skin
The third work, choreographed by Philip Channells, combined “imagery from the skeletal and musculature systems” with “physical memories (from childhood) with emotional attachments” to consider the complexities that constitute us all. This piece again revealed that the demands set by these three choreographers didn’t simply vary according to the apparent capacities of the performers, but with the dancers’ talents and ambitions to work with and against their disabilities.
Catalyst’s Masterclass series is “tailored to dancers with and without physical or sensory disability, and people with mental illness or acquired brain injury” (website). Catalyst is an initiative of Accessible Arts NSW addressing “a burgeoning of inclusive dance practice across the arts and disability sector. This is significant in NSW, which sadly lacks a professional, integrated performing company unlike Victoria and South Australia, respective homes to Back to Back Theatre and Restless Dance Theatre” (email correspondence). CEO Sancha Donald is hopeful that “the significant growth in participation in integrated dance will inevitably lead to the establishment of a professional ensemble in NSW.” Second Skin offers ample evidence that Catalyst could provide the talent for such a development.
Catherine Antypas, Sky Open Door
photo Gisella Vollmer
Catherine Antypas, Sky Open Door
Second Skin opened with a guest work-in-progress performance, Blue Sky Open Door (choreographer Kay Armstrong) from Sunnyfield, an organisation dedicated to supporting people with intellectual disabilities. The work revealed a variety of effective strategies for developing sensitive solo and cooperative movement, including a striking performance by Catherine Antypas on a chair, executing an intense cycle of focused, fluent, extended arm movements.
Accessible Arts NSW, Catalyst Dance Masterclass Series, Second Skin, project manager Sarah-Vyne Vassalo, choreographers Sue Healey, Dean Walsh, Philip Channels, sound artist, DJ Scott Bobako; guest performance, Sunnyfield, Blue Sky, Open Door, choreographer Kay Armstrong; Bangarra Theatre, Sydney, 15 Sept
Shadow Tales: Rawcus and The Amplified Elephants, Melbourne Festival
photo Tim McNeilage
Shadow Tales: Rawcus and The Amplified Elephants, Melbourne Festival
Some disability arts groups are standalone, others partner with or emerge from existing organisations, for example Merrigong Theatre Company runs drama classes for Disability Arts in Wollongong NSW, out of which has come The Man Who Dreamt The Stars (see page article). JOLT Sonic Arts Inc in Melbourne supports The Amplified Elephants, formed in 2006 by JOLT director, composer and sound artist James Hullick after working with people with disabilities at the Footscray Community Centre.
The Amplified Elephants, who perform and tour with JOLT’s contemporary music ensemble, BOLT, will travel to Japan and Europe in 2014 with a new work. Matthew Lorenzon spoke with James Hullick about The Amplified Elephants and JOLT, the increasingly international organisation they are a part of.
You have just stormed Melbourne Festival with shows from your organisations including JOLT and BOLT. How long have they been running?
There’s JOLT, which is a not-for-profit sound art organisation. Really that’s about touring and it is turning into a record label shortly. Through JOLT we’ve run festivals in Switzerland and Japan. BOLT is the ensemble. It’s a chamber orchestra, but sometimes it’s much smaller than that. There’s also the Click Clack Project, which does community-based stuff. Originally they were all one thing, but then we split them up so they could each find an identity in the field they were specific to.
An important aspect of your work is working with people with disabilities. Was that a founding principle of your organisations?
That started very early. The Amplified Elephants is a group of people with intellectual disabilities that I work with in partnership with Footscray Community Arts Centre and the Artlife program there. It started as a workshop, which it still is every Thursday, but we turned it into a group in 2006. From there we started making more and more shows and plugging it into the sound scene in Melbourne. They’ve worked with a few overseas artists, which has been good experience for both parties.
There’s a post-apocalyptic dramaturgy at work in your shows. Bruchlandung in this year’s Melbourne Festival was explicitly post-apocalyptic. Where does this impulse come from?
I have thought about that. I like things that are non-narrative. So maybe I’m plugging into the dream world, which happens at night. Dreams come out of a backdrop of darkness, rather than a backdrop of light as you would find in a gallery. So there tends to be a basic black layer and something that occurs on top of that.
Working out in Footscray also gives me a sense of a sort of antipodean Gothic. I think of the Ned Kelly paintings by Sidney Nolan with these blocky, black squares. There’s a world of it that runs through Victoria and Melbourne in particular. There was an article about this some years back (Ashley Crawford, “Melbourne Gothic,” Art Collector 24, April–June 2003) talking about those things.
One of my teachers was Felix Werder, who is German and was strongly interested in German Gothic. We talked about this a lot, the difference between Gothicism and Imperialism, which is where, from Germany’s point of view, as far as I can gather, the power struggle has always been. The Gothic is networked and the imperial is hierarchical. Germany is laid out as a network of smaller cities while other countries are more centralised. It is something that comes from a different idea of governance and organisation. That has influenced how all of our different organisations were made. JOLT has producers who live overseas doing their own thing. When they are called upon they join the fray, the council comes together. Cal Lyall is the producer in Tokyo and Daniel Buess is the producer in Switzerland. There are other producers starting up.
Sonic Flock, Jolt, Melbourne Festival
photo Tim McNeilage
Sonic Flock, Jolt, Melbourne Festival
Where to from here? What happens in 2014?
That’s a good question. We’re booked in for the Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music. I’ve been pulling out older shows and preparing them for touring: crunching them down a bit; streamlining bits that didn’t work so well.
More than that I’m focusing on getting the recordings going. We have a backlog of umpteen recordings over many years. The recordings will be available online and in stores in Australia first, then in Switzerland and Japan. It’s hard to establish a label in a networked way, but sound art has been networked for so long that it’s hard to do it otherwise.
Do the Amplified Elephants have a new show?
It’s called Re-evolution and will come up at the end of next year. It has a lot of machines in it actually. It’s interesting, the idea of virtuosity coming out of community projects. With The Amplified Elephants Katherine Sutherland is the punching-bag specialist [a punching-bag fitted with pressure triggers]. Teagan Connor is the specialist on the violins [the Gotholin or stack of four MIDI-controlled robotic violins, part of The NIS, an all-abilities sonic art show]. Working out what each person can do really well is part of the puzzle. That process has then been translated onto the BOLT ensemble, asking “what does this individual do that is amazing?” Building communities in these networked ways, putting these networks in motion, can feel a bit like an army of ants, a bit impersonal. But on the other hand there’s a lot of individual focus. I don’t know if the performers know that they’re constantly being watched.
We will also tour in August with The Amplified Elephants and BOLT to Japan and Europe. That’s why we’ve toured to Sydney with Bruchlandung. We had to see whether we could tour with it. We had Guillermo Anzorena from Neue Vocalsolisten [Stuttgart, Germany] singing the vocal part. They’re an amazing group and one of the things we’re trying to do is link in with these groups and bring them back to Australia, because there are actually not a lot of international acts in the art music scene. We want to get that out to Australian audiences so they don’t feel like they’re just part of an Australian conversation, but an international one. I think that’s where the challenges really are, and that’s why the touring’s important for me. I’m a dad with two kids, so getting my name out there is not necessarily helpful. It just means more time away.
Concerts featuring Amplified Elephants with BOLT ensemble have been reviewed in RealTime: The Mountain Concerts (RT101), The Click Clack Project, The NIS (RT115, online).
The Man Who Dreamt the Stars (development), Merrigong Theatre Company with The Disability Trust
photo Toby Knyvett
The Man Who Dreamt the Stars (development), Merrigong Theatre Company with The Disability Trust
Companies like Back to Back, Restless Dance Theatre and Rawcus have shown that mixed ability collaborations can be profoundly productive, democratising the relationship between the able and the disabled—who of course, have great abilities that transcend their disadvantages—to create powerful, professional performances.
Anne-Louise Rentell is the director of The Man Who Dreamt the Stars, a group-devised performance about the power of the imagination, produced by Wollongong’s Merrigong Theatre Company in association with The Disability Trust. She’s working with two actors with disabilities and a small team of able-bodied collaborators. I spoke with Rentell shortly before the work was going into rehearsal for production early in 2014.
Rentell filled me in on the work’s long evolution: “Back in 2006, as part of our development program, we were supporting what Disability Trust were doing, showing annual presentations from their Altogether Drama Group. Their actors have had a lot of exposure to processes and various artists, so the majority of them are quite accomplished theatrically. We planned a weekend intensive workshop for them and other local artists as a mixed ability process based around how to tell and theatricalise stories. I could see that a couple of the local artists adapted really well to working with the drama group and something great was happening. We ran more sessions where we could, without funding, and then the project started to evolve with the support of Arts NSW. This is a first for Merrigong Theatre Company after producing one scripted show a year, inhouse. Now we have a show with the Trust as partner. We’ve also formed a partnership with the Trust to coordinate their drama classes in collaboration with them, onsite at IPAC (Illawarra Performing Arts Centre) on Saturday mornings.” It is also the company’s first production of a devised work.
I asked Rentell why she had chosen only two actors from the workshop. “Because working in this area was new to me I reduced the number of people I was working with to two professional actors and two actors from the Altogether Drama Group. I had to really make the case for choosing two people in what was a community project; but here we were looking at a professional theatre outcome and which actors would best address the project’s progress.”
Drayton Morley, Rachel Murphy & Alicia Battestini, The Man Who Dreamt the Stars (development)
photo Nina Kourea
Drayton Morley, Rachel Murphy & Alicia Battestini, The Man Who Dreamt the Stars (development)
Rentell describes Phillip Prentice from the drama group “as a joy to work with and so amenable. In discussions he tended to always agree, but then he would come up with something surprising, revealing he’d been taking everything in. His ideas were forming slowly. He has a learning disability, but is high functioning, works and is quite independent.” Onstage, she says, he is less an emotional actor than fellow drama group member Rachel Murphy, “but he’s very task oriented and has a wonderful focus. They’re very different types of performers.” Rachel, who was born with Down’s Syndrome, “has a high level of emotional intelligence—she’s passionate and intense. She plays a Miss Havisham-type character,” partly based on her own life after losing a boyfriend.” A video of Murphy performing in costume reveals her relish in inhabiting her role. Likewise Prentice has no difficulty in immersing himself in his character: “Phillip loves Dr Who and TV programs about outer-space. When he’s onstage, pretending to be on the moon and dressed as an astronaut, he loves it.”
Rentell has been greatly inspired by these performers: “Both also have an acute awareness of what they can’t do and what is not open to them. They might not be able to articulate it, yet have the passion to perform, the courage to face life when it hasn’t been kind to them.”
At one point in the work’s development, Merrigong Theatre Company artistic director Simon Hinton asked, “Why are we making this show? Does the content talk to why we are making it?” Rentell believes that it’s about “’talking’ to the disability without the show becoming about being disabled.” In other words, acknowledging the disability but, with creativity and imagination, transcending it.
“On the night of a solar storm,” reads the press release for The Man Who Dreamt the Stars, “a quiet man’s peaceful seclusion is disrupted by a crack in the space-time continuum, and into his world come three lonely figures.” This fantastical, fractured reality will be realised by the interactive video and lighting by Tony Knyvett, sound and music by Daryl Wallis, costumes by Imogen Ross and movement by Lee Pemberton, all of whom have collaborated on the development of the work with Anne-Louise Rentell, Phillip Prentice and Rachel Murphy working alongside strongly committed, Wollongong-based professional actors Alicia Battestini and Drayton Morley.
Merrigong Theatre Company with The Disability Trust, The Man Who Dreamt the Stars, Illawarra Performing Arts Centre, Wollongong, 12-22 Feb, 2014
Access All Areas, Live Art and Disability, Live Art Development agency, London 2012
Access All Areas: Live Art and Disability is a wonderful collection of artist statements, dialogues, essays and two generous DVDs of performances, screenings and talks.
The publication reveals the passion and creativity of UK artists who either provocatively “perform their disabilities” (Martin O’Brien, Mucus) or create live art works that, with video, sound art and challenging physical performance (transcending limited ability to speak or control movement), express ordinary human needs. On his wheelchair, limbs flailing Pete Edwards in FAT longs for the embrace “a fat man” as he journeys along a perpetually exploding Southbank, his own slender body variously naked and buried in sheets and headphones.
Well-known names in the collection include Bobby Baker, Ron Athey (writing about Martin O’Brien), Kim Noble and Back to Back Theatre (The Democratic Set 2). The short-armed Matt Fraser appears in film excerpts, including one with him onstage in a touring contemporary freak show where he appears as the famous Sealboy of sideshow lore. DAG (The Disabled Avant-Garde) perform Robots Destroy the Tower of Babble! in electronic wheelchairs and Alan McLean and Tony Mustoe surreally grapple with furniture in Knocking. One of the most striking works is Noemi Lakmaier’s Undress/Redress in which an able-bodied man in a suit simply removes jewellery and formal clothing from the artist’s immobile body and then slowly re-dresses her. Lakmaier writes about the familiarity and absurdity of the scenario: “are the man’s intentions sexual or those of a caregiver? Am I fully consenting or am I merely tolerating it.”
The large print format of the book and the DVD’s subtitling and optional audio description make the collection relatively easy to use for a wide audience. The provocative content is a reminder that people with disabilities have rich imaginations, as made visible when their desires are enacted as live art. We’ll have more about Access All Areas in a coming edition. RT
Access All Areas, Live Art and Disability, Live Art Development agency, London 2012; copies available from the agency’s online bookshop.
Nalaga’at Blind-Deaf Theatre Ensemble, Not By Bread Alone. courtesy the company
“The Nalaga’at Center is a place for deaf people, blind people, deaf-blind people, and the seeing and hearing public to meet and conduct an artistic, experiential, cultural and egalitarian dialogue by means of its theatre, café, restaurant, workshops and training programs” (www.nalagaat.org.il/).
With some 800 performances behind it, the Nalaga’at Deaf-Blind Theatre Ensemble from Jaffa in Israel is soon to perform Not By Bread Alone at the 2014 Perth International Theatre Festival and then at the Kennedy Center in New York. Eleven performers make bread, tell stories from their lives and then meet their audience and share what they’ve made. The success of this hugely acclaimed ensemble, as its spirited, forthright founder and artistic director Adina Tal tells me by phone, is indicative of the power of professional performance regardless of disability.
What is the meaning of Nalaga’at?
It is Hebrew for ‘do touch’ or ‘please touch.’
How central is touch in your work?
In two different ways. First, with our actors it’s the way they communicate, by touch sign language. By touch we make them part of our world and then we can be part of theirs. In a wider meaning it says to the audience, come and touch and be touched, and change.
All of the actors were born deaf or hard of hearing. As a result of having Usher’s Syndrome, a genetic disease, they gradually lose their sight from about the age of 12. Once blind, they still know how to sign but they cannot see what other people sign, which means they have to communicate through touch sign language.
I understand you use vibrations felt in the body to assist the performers?
We use the drums as cues for the show. It took us about half a year until everyone got used to it. It’s like opening another door.
I see that intepreters are an integral part of your productions.
Interpreters are a very important part of our ensemble but they are shadows, not actors; they will give signs if needed during the show. We have three verbal actors whose words are translated into sign language.
How are ideas expressed and brought together for a show?
With great chaos. But we are a professional theatre group. We do not want to be like any other theatre group. We want to be the best. We would not do Shakespeare or Ibsen, there are other actors who could do that better. But no actor could do better than what we do, which is search from the actor’s life and translate it into a theatrical language.
We do improvise, move a lot, the actors write and work on the scenes they bring to the table and we adapt them to a theatre show—it’s a very long process.
Has the confidence of the performers grown over the years?
When I started I’d never met a deaf or blind or deaf-blind person. That was the first revolution for me. Some of them could not accept the fact that they were going blind as well as being deaf—one of the worst forms of isolation from the outside word. But over the years they become stars. They feel that they are not asking for anything from society, but they are giving to society. They are onstage, they are professional actors giving us hearing and seeing people the gift of art, which is every artist’s dream.
How important is the sharing of bread after the show?
It’s important for both the actors and the audience. It gives the actors a moment to share the bread they made. Bread has a very deep cultural meaning and also very simple meaning: ‘If you eat the bread I made, you accept me. If I disgust you, you will not accept it.’ Not all the audience will come up on stage; most do but there is no ‘must.’ They can communicate with the actors through the interpreters.
Some might see this work as developing empathy in audiences and therapy for the performers.
This is not a show for the audience to come and do a good deed, but to see a good show. No one should come to see the show if they just want to be a good person. It’s not about blindness or deafness anymore; it’s about being imperfect. Once you sit in the audience and accept the imperfection in yourself you will accept that in other people. This is the way to start changing the world.
I understand you work cross-culturally at the Nalaga’at Center.
Living in Israel is very challenging, but we’re situated in Jaffa, in a community of Jews and Arabs. It’s normal that we work together, respect each other, it’s part of our work. We have a new deaf-blind Jewish-Muslim group.
I admire the notion of the Blackout Restaurant, which travels with Not By Bread Alone. It doesn’t simply offer an experience of blindness where you are served by blind waiters but that it improves your sense of taste and engagement with food.
Be open to a new situation and you’ll get the most out it, especially if the food is really good and we really work hard for excellence.
Your centre already does a great deal; what more would you like to do?
We hope that at some time soon that what we do will be copied and we become a learning centre. We’re not there yet but this is where we aim to get.
Does the ensemble enjoy international travel?
They do enjoy the travel and meeting the audience. They can be snobs: “New York, again!” I say, “But actors would kill to go to New York.” “Okay, but why winter?”
Perth International Arts Festival, Nalaga’at Blind-Deaf Theatre Ensemble, Not By Bread Alone, and Blackout Restaurant, director Adina Tal, Regal Theatre, 8-12 Feb
The 2014 Perth Festival dance program features Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company, the Beijing Dance Company and the remarkable flamenco re-interpreter Israel Galvan, plus performance works by Rimini Protokoll (Situation Rooms), Robert Wilson (in Krapp’s Last Tape) and Dmitry Krymov (A Midsummer Night’s Dream [As You Like It]).
Bungalow Song, Mbantua Festival, courtesy the festival
Just a few minutes’ drive north of Alice Springs the Telegraph Station Historic Site stands as a quiet reminder of a dark chapter in Australia’s recent past. In 1932 when telegraph operations ceased there, the stone buildings were converted into a residential school for Indigenous children. Forcibly removed from their families, these children were subjected to the state’s concerted effort to destroy the Aboriginal culture into which they had been born.
The experience of these children is the focus of Bungalow Song, one of two original performances that premiered at the Mbantua Festival in Alice Springs. Mbantua is the Arrernte word for the Alice Springs area and the festival showcases local Indigenous culture, music and arts through a range of workshops, forums and live performances.
Bungalow Song
Bungalow Song is a poignant tale told through a combination of drama, music and oral history. It uses as its set the very same buildings that for 10 years acted as a school and dormitory for local Indigenous children. The show opens as a series of black and white images of the desert and its people are projected onto the tin roof of the station barracks. Amid the rocks and trees far to the left of the stage a family gathers around a campfire when suddenly we hear the roar of a truck. The family scatters into the dark, but when a child stumbles in her escape she is seized by one of the men from the truck. Moments later her mother runs screaming out of the darkness. As she falls to the ground in tears a new image appears on the tin roof at the centre of the stage. This is the Aboriginals Ordnance of 1911, one of several official documents that justified such a scene according to the Australian Government of the day.
The performance unfolds in a series of pre-recorded readings of survivor testimony. Several local people also appear on stage to share their connections with the site. We hear how these children were taken from their families, “like rounding up the lambs from the rest of the sheep” and how they were punished for speaking in their own languages.
A cast of nearly 30 school-aged performers from Alice Springs acts out scenes recalled in the survivor testimony. These young performers, most of whom had never before been on stage, provide an intimate portrait of a child’s experience at this school. We see them at their best when they are playing with each other: skipping and chasing footballs effortlessly. But when the bell rings and they must line up to sing “God Save the King,” their awkward attempts to sing and stand in unison are a reminder of how lives at that school were part of a performance the children were forced to master.
With words taken directly from the testimony and in simple tunes reminiscent of schoolyard songs, David Bridie’s music enhances this sorrowful experience. A particularly haunting scene features a teenage girl seated at a mirror brushing her hair. She sings out wonderfully innocent questions a child has about her future: Who will she marry? What will she look like? But as we listen to her song, the superintendent of the school, his shirt partly open, appears on the doorstep of his cabin, a bed behind him. We know how that innocence will soon be destroyed.
Bush Mechanics Live
The irreverent side of contemporary desert culture was on display in a one-night-only affair called Bush Mechanics Live. Billed as a noisy showcase of Territorian humour, speed, metal and fire, the show attracted a large crowd to the dirt track at Alice Springs’ Arunga Park Speedway.
The live performance was based on the brilliant 2001 television series by Warlpiri Media Association that aired on ABCTV. It followed a group of Warlpiri men on their adventures to various bush communities for football games and music gigs. When their car broke down, as inevitably it did, the legendary Bush Mechanic Jupurrurla would magically appear out of the desert and help improvise some solution for a punctured tyre or a cracked radiator.
It was not clear how a clever little TV show would translate to a live performance. Francis Jupurrurla Kelly, its co-creator and the actor who plays the magical Bush Mechanic, teamed up once more with the TV series director David Batty for the Friday night performance. For the show’s many fans this was an opportunity to see again some of the humour and the ingenuity that life in remote locations evokes. And for local rev-heads there was the promise of lots of noise, danger and a burnout or two. The sight that greeted the crowd at the Speedway was impressive. Two enormous earthen ramps had been built at the centre of the track. They were flanked by two large mud patches along with some wood and brush obstacles that simulated bush driving conditions. In between the two ramps a stage had been built for the local metal band Nokturnl.
The show opened with a repair scene featuring Jupurrurla and Mary G, the cross-dressing comedian who was the show’s MC. They were so far away it was difficult to see exactly what bits of clothing Mary G was passing to Jupurrurla in a sketch rife with sexual innuendo, but the comedian stirred up a lot of laughs from the crowd.
Most of the night’s action focused on contests between two teams of five men who jammed themselves into beaten up old cars for a series of special races around the track. The first of those contests was the Spinifex Tyre Challenge in which the Bush Mechanics had to fill a flat tyre with spinifex grass and then race the hobbled car around the track. Unfortunately there was little to entertain the crowd as we waited for the teams to finish the repairs. And when the cars were finally ready they raced round the track at speeds hardly more than a trot. Just as slow were the various towing events where the teams pulled disabled cars around the track, using ropes made from jeans and bits of salvaged wire.
Several surprises helped to maintain some interest in the show. A 12-piece synchronised Postie-bike routine picked up the crowd for a few moments as did an appearance from Alice Springs Burnout King, but there was just not enough activity in the long spaces between really slow car races to sustain attention. And the absence of any extra cameras and a large screen meant that much of the interaction between performers was lost on most of the crowd seated far away. The noise, the speed, even the fire failed to materialise and though there were glimpses of irreverent Bush Mechanics humour, the three-hour live show failed to deliver a consistently entertaining spectacle.
Mbantua Festival, Bungalow Song, director, co-writer Nigel Jamieson, co-writer Sue Smith, creative producer Rachel Perkins, senior advisor Harold Furber, 9-11 Oct; Bush Mechanics, writer, director David Batty, associate director Gavin Robins, Alice Springs, 11 Oct
The extensive contemporary music program for David Sefton’s 2014 Adelaide Festival marks the festival out from its Australian peers. Epic concerts will celebrate the art and legacy of John Zorn, leading a huge ensemble of remarkable musicians and Australia’s Elision; the riches of contemporary classical and experimental composition and playing in the Tectonics Australia program; and the serious side of electronica in Unsound. I spoke with David Sefton by phone about his bold programing with its fine balance of international and Australian talent.
It’s clear from this program and last year’s that you have a serious interest in 20th and 21st century experimental music. Where did this passion come from?
I guess it’s where I started. Before I ended up as a programer-director-producer—whatever I’ve been through the years—I began as a music journalist way, way back in the mid to late 20th century. I started out in the north of England as a stringer for various publications that no longer exist, of course, back in the days when you could make a living from doing that sort of thing. I studied music; I’d been in bands. Music has always kind of been in the mix for me and it was how I made a living for some time.
It then morphed into working in theatres and becoming a programer of different media. I ended up at the Southbank in London and in 1993 started Meltdown [an annual festival featuring a mix of music, art, performance and film]. When I went to the Royal Festival Hall, I was managing the orchestral and chamber music programs, dealing with music in its widest possible definition—composers as well as rock bands. That real mix has always been there for me.
So in a way John Zorn is a perfect exemplar of an incredibly diverse and yet very cohesive mix?
Yes, in terms of somebody who’s moved seemingly effortlessly from one category to another, there isn’t really a better example.
In a way he combines traditional avant-garde, on the one hand, and jazz, experimental noise, contemporary and the cultural and spiritual as well.
I don’t think anyone manages to incorporate quite as wide a range of influences and styles and he is able to go into each genre and be completely respected by those people already in it, which I think is crucial.
This is a great introduction for Australia to have Zorn live with such an astonishing range of musicians—people I’ve been listening to for years but never thought I’d actually see.
It came out of the most harmless exchange of informal e-mails. I just basically asked, “How come you’ve never been to Australia?” and he wrote back “No-one’s ever offered to do it properly.” What he wanted was to have the range of his work fully represented here. As we got into it he said, “It’s gonna be a lot of people on the road but I really want to do it properly.” There’s been feedback saying, ‘oh, that must be costing a lot of money;’ but, no more than your average small to medium scale chamber opera would cost to bring in internationally. And, when you realise the calibre of who’s coming!
Yes. John Medeski, Joey Baron, Ikue Mori, Uri Caine, Bill Laswell, Marc Ribot and many more and Zorn himself playing.
And Mike Patton. We’ve just announced that Dave Lombardo, the founding drummer of Slayer has been added to the bill, which is another example of that effortless straying between genres. It’s a testament to the status of Zorn that all of those people are coming for John.
You’ve certainly gone for scale in this festival, which is sublime for music audiences eager to experience works at length in concerts that run for many hours.
I feel that’s one of the great things that a festival can do—we are doing it properly and, yes, concerts will be between four and five hours long. Everyone’s been waiting to book Zorn online from across Australia. Those tickets are going like hot cakes.
It’s wonderful that you have Elision in the Zorn program, a great Australian contemporary music ensemble now working out of the UK.
Daryl Buckley (Elision artistic director) and John Zorn have been in close contact about the content of the program. They’re both about to be in the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival at the same time.
John Zorn is only 60 of course, but what do you think his legacy will be?
What’s fantastic about John is that he doesn’t make a big deal about it; I imagine he’s never used the word ‘crossover’ in his life. He just sees it all as music. I would hope that his legacy is that. I think there needs to be a lot more of that.
Masonic Spiral, image courtesy Adelaide Festival
The Tectonics Adelaide program is curated by the young conductor of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Ilan Volkov, who has been quoted as asking, “how can a 19th century orchestra, that ‘beast,’ become more radical or experimental?” Jon Rose and Oren Ambarchi will be appearing with the ASO as soloists. And there’s a huge variety of Australian musicians involved in two epic concerts, one from the afternoon into the early evening, the other until late. How did you connect with Volkov?
Simon Lord who’s the Orchestral Manager of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra used to be at the BBC Scottish Orchestra where Ilan Volkov was the in-house conductor. Simon said, “You need to meet Ilan.” We met in London and here was someone who is massively sought after as a conductor of conventional orchestral repertoire but whose depth of knowledge and range of enthusiasm for contemporary music I have rarely witnessed in my life. He’s done the Tectonics program in Tel Aviv and Glasgow and I went to the one in Reykjavik last year to see how it ran.
Ilan looks at what the local contemporary legacy is, what the history of radical music is wherever he’s going. A lot of the commissions and work being performed in the festival are Australian—Ilan carries a wealth of information around in his head (about Australian music). The commissioning had to happen first—people need a good 12-18 months to write a piece for an orchestra. He’s a big fan of Elena Katz-Chernin, and he’s worked with Jon Rose before, as I have. And I think he’s also worked with Mathew Shlomowitz before.
The Unsound program is also fascinating and includes Jed Kurzel’s music from his brother Justin’s film Snowtown played live, along with appearances by Moritz von Oswald and the legendary Morton Subotnick.
One of my tenets coming into the job was that I wasn’t going to repeat anything. With Unsound in 2013 I was looking at the interesting gathering points going on in music. I’d been aware of Unsound. I’d seen what they’d done in New York and I felt that they were on to something that was going on in electronic music and that’s a very rich field at the moment. So after Solaris in the 2013 festival was such a huge success—made much more satisfying by the number of people who told me it was going to fail and that there was no way that Adelaide could sustain an esoteric electronica strand—I said to Mat Schulz, the Australian living in Poland who’s the main organiser of Unsound, I’d like to have a bigger conversation than just the one show.
Subotnick’s never been to Australia (playing Silver Apples on his classic Buchla synthesizer), The Haxan Cloak’s first record just came out while we were discussing what we’d put in the list and Stars of the Lid (with Adelaide’s Zephyr Quartet and Luke Savisky’s projections) and Nurse with Wound have never been to Australia—we’ve got Fela Kuti’s drummer, Tony Allen, in there. The line-up!
With Subotnick you’re addressing quite a different legacy from Zorn’s.
Absolutely. The thread is definitely a purely electronic music thing. It’s not dance music—I’m not saying people can’t dance to it if they want to—but it’s serious and there are a lot of interesting things happening in that world.
Continuity has its value. Audiences feel it’s their festival and enjoy anticipating some things and not others.
I absolutely agree. It’s not like we repeat any artists. This is a completely new list from the last one and I’m sure there were a good five to 10 other totally separate configurations we could have done.
I was pleased to see that composers Ross Edwards and Stephen Whittington both have chamber works in your program and Jason Sweeney is presenting Sound Introversion Radio.
It will be a radio station running the entire duration of the festival that you can pick up either on your phone or at various physical pods around the city where you can sit and listen. I met Jason quite early on when I came to Adelaide and realised that he was one of those significant local treasures who should be encouraged and embraced. So, yes, he’s another return visitor to the festival but with a different project this time.
Finally, your program has numerous works of scale—Zorn and Tectonics concerts, a five-hour Matthew Barney film and the stage production Roman Tragedy at six hours. As you’ve said, these are things that festivals can do well and they can be enjoyably immersive.
I think Adelaide definitely prides itself on the epic. It’s done The Mahabharata (1988), The Seven Streams of the River Ota (1998), its own Ring Cycle (2004) and I’m sort of responding to that history this year.
Anything else you’d like to add?
No. You’ve definitely nailed the epic component. I’ve suggested we should work out what people are paying by the hour for the festival this year! [LAUGHS]
Mish Grigor, post, rehearsals for Oedipus Schmoedipus
photo Brett Boardman
Mish Grigor, post, rehearsals for Oedipus Schmoedipus
My contribution to this RealTime series on women and performance establishes a conversation between female performers about processes of working, negotiating the established (funded) industry, gender, feminism, sexuality, the impetus to make work, the support networks or community important to them and how women choose to become makers.
This is not a new conversation but it seems timely to focus on it anew, give space to a range of voices, engage with the public debate about how women perform in leadership positions and ask whether the battle for equality of opportunity and remuneration has been won and what these performance makers are thinking about as they negotiate their lives.
Post is Zoë Coombs Marr, Mish Grigor and Natalie Rose. The last show of theirs I saw was Everything I know about the Global Financial Crisis in an Hour (commissioned by version 1.0 at Belvoir Theatre, 2010; RT101). Under the guise of sharing information (there was so much explaining going on at the time in the media) post performed an elaborate conversation about the GFC, full of surmise and free association and the terms being bandied around. That makes it sound serious but it was more like watching jazz or rap complete with obligatory dance breakouts. The performance culminated in champagne corks popping; the ironic party to end all parties. We were going down with a bang. Witty, irreverent and subversive, I heard all the casual and not so casual conversations being had across the country as people wrestled with this big idea. Post positioned themselves as part of this cultural phenomenon. I came to understand something about how we deal with reported crises; the inadequacy of understanding them through our own frames of reference but also the kind of glorious, determined, playful and energetic nature of our sorting through such things with others.
Zoë Coombs Marr, post, rehearsals for Oedipus Schmoedipus
photo Brett Boardman
Zoë Coombs Marr, post, rehearsals for Oedipus Schmoedipus
Sydney Festival: Oedipus Schmoedipus
At the moment of writing, post are working with Anne Louise Sarks (see Women+Performance 2, RT116) on Oedipus Schmoedipus, a Belvoir production for the Sydney Festival (development also supported by Performance Space and Bundanon). This work is another engagement with ‘the canon.’ Belvoir has become home to artists interested in such engagement, its 2014 program reflecting this. Whereas Sarks spoke about this as an engagement with the representation of female characters, post finally always present their own interests, thinking and moves as the primary subject of performance. The canon in their case becomes a subject to wrestle and play with.
“We’ve taken every death scene and mention of death from 2000 years of the western theatrical canon and are attempting to create an incredible spectacular. We wondered if maybe these ‘immortals’ could teach us something about shrugging off this mortal coil. There is so much death in the canon: speculation, musings, mourning, ghosts. We’re interested in death because it truly is universal—we’re all hurtling towards the afterlife, and nobody knows for sure what’s coming…unless Anne Rice was right.
“It’s been very apparent to us in the process of making Oedipus Schmoedipus that women writers are largely missing from the canon, and that many female characters are always fainting dead away, or are infantilised, unless they fall into the women-as-heartless-crazy-bitch category. So we aren’t seeing much of ourselves in there, which is confronting in a way.”
Starting out
Another feature of the story of the women I’ve interviewed has been how study and training has brought them into creative relationships that have been crucial in their starting to make work, and that in many cases these relationships have been sustained through time.
“We met at PACT in Sydney when there were a lot of programs to support emerging artists to train with professional contemporary performance makers, there and at Urban Theatre Projects and Performance Space. We encountered a lot of methodologies and processes and ideas. Some we learnt a lot from, some we disagreed with, others we didn’t understand. In the end we just dove in and made up our own. Our first works (Gifted & Talented, 2007; RT80) were presented at PACT and Next Wave, and then we did a couple of Fringe Festivals before starting to present bigger shows (Shamelessly Glitzy Work, 2009; RT93) at Performance Space, Brisbane Powerhouse, Arts House. In the last couple of years we have started to move into more traditional theatre spaces like STC (Who’s the Best?, 2011; RT104) and Belvoir. Maybe next year we’ll make a 3D movie.”
Natalie Rose, post, rehearsals for Oedipus Schmoedipus
photo Brett Boardman
Natalie Rose, post, rehearsals for Oedipus Schmoedipus
Networks of support
I have also been intrigued by what communities/support networks these women identify as belonging to and how this informs the work they make. It is clear that the way in which the performance community is configured in different cities and states is unique and changing and that the boundaries that once separated makers because of where they presented or what was seen to be the focus of their work, are disappearing or shifting.
“Our goal has always been to make work that contributes to contemporary performance communities and that is also entertaining and not alienating for our parents. We’re also working in collaboration with the people of Bidwill in Western Sydney to make a rock opera about a fictional riot that was reported there in the early 80s. It’s part of FUNPARK, directed by Karen Therese. We can’t say too much about this yet, but so far a highlight has been jamming with the Rooty Hill Senior Citizens drum and dance group—they have some pretty spectacular moves.
“The thing that excites us the most is working between and across genres, playing with context and convention. Once we know what we’re dealing with, it’s time to change things; there’s nothing more boring than being comfortable. We borrow from a lot of places—visual arts, comedy, drag, live art, reality television, dance, Japanese game shows. Someone came up with the term ‘genre-queer’ recently, which may be very daggy, but we quite like it.”
Collaboration vs the star system
The other emphasis for me in this series so far has been on the central role of collaboration for women and how this sits awkwardly with a market system that requires commodification of the artist, the creation of ‘stars.’
“We work collaboratively, making all decisions together. It means we talk a lot and occasionally end up fighting over a sentence or the colour of a curtain for three or four days. We used to do everything ourselves, but we’re starting to work with a growing family of collaborators. Post is still the three of us, but now we have honorary members—like Logan in The Babysitters Club. We tend to spend a lot of time researching each set of projects that we undertake, and spend a couple of years around a certain set of ideas with a series of outcomes. We often use long-form improvisations to come up with material, but really our process is different with every project. This was pretty bewildering and terrifying for a while, but we’ve come to terms with it now.
“Many of the theatre companies we consider peers and friends are women who work collaboratively. It feels as though the structure that has dominated the last 100 years of theatre-making (visionary director at the apex of power) doesn’t necessarily lend itself to everyone’s processes. And the fact that many of the major companies are built around these traditional structures means that it makes sense they are dominated by men—the system was made by men, for men. It’s a bespoke suit, not a one size fits all snuggie.
“A lot of the time we’re just not interested in those structures. We have our brain in other worlds, other ways of working. At other times we are really engaged with that system, and those traditional hierarchies. We wonder if a massive theatrical revolution could take place. Violence, shoot-outs, sit-ins—all of it. And there should be champagne—it would be a joyous revolution. And dancing. And probably a jumping castle.”
2014 Sydney Festival: Belvoir, post, Oedipus Schmoedipus, Belvoir Upstairs, 9 Jan-2 Feb
Join post. Fed up with white men staging the deaths of white men in plays written by white men? The white ladies from post have pirated the theatrical canon and turned over the juiciest stuff to 700—that’s right, 700 collaborators. Death: it belongs to everyone!
Want to be involved? Oedipus Schmoedipus will be looking for lots and lots and lots of volunteers—no skill level whatsoever required! Email oedipus@belvoir.com.au to register your interest. See also www.postpresentspost.com/
“What do you make of the Sydney Festival this year?” “What’s it all about?” “What should I see?” “Have you heard of any of these shows?” “Are they worth the price of a ticket?” These are questions directed at RealTime staff each year by festival-goers increasingly anxious about the level of hit and miss financial investment in ticket purchasing.
Fantasyland
In a fantasy land where you had ample cash for airfares, accommodation and tickets you could afford a mix and match festival of your own to compensate for the thin dance and music offerings in the Sydney Festival. It would include Perth Festival’s dance program (Israel Galvan, Beijing Dance Theatre, Batsheva Dance Company and the WA Ballet) and Adelaide Festival’s very distinctive, epic contemporary music program (a feast of overseas and Australian talent, see article). Perth also has Robert Wilson performing Krapp’s Last Tape and the Nalaga’at Theatre Ensemble of blind, deaf and deaf-blind performers (see article). For more epic experience you could add Adelaide’s six hour Roman Tragedies by Shakespeare from Holland’s Toneelgroep Amsterdam, the five hour Matthew Barney film, River of Fundament, Robert Lepage’s classic Needles and Opium, and Stone/Castro’s Blackout (Australia/Portugal).
Risk is often the raison d’être for a good festival. Here are some Sydney Festival shows we thought might warrant your attention in a festival in which diversity is everything. No guarantees.
Possibilities
The festival’s topliner, Sasha Waltz and Guests’ version of Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas, performed in part underwater, comes trailing clouds of critical glory, while the prominently promoted Black Diggers (writer Tom Wright, director Wesley Enoch), a new play about Indigenous Australian soldiers in World War I, is a world premiere with all the risk-taking that entails and which festivals sometimes, if less often these days, ask of their audiences. Malthouse’s The Shadow King, a version of King Lear by Michael Kantor and Tom E Lewis with an Indigenous cast was greatly admired in the Melbourne International Arts Festival and is on its way too to the Adelaide and Perth Festivals. For more of the bard you might also be attracted to Othello: The Remix in which the play is “rapped” by the Chicago Shakespeare Theater featuring hip-hoppers the Q Brothers.
Other Australian works in the program include post’s Oedipus Schmoedipus (see p16) at Belvoir and The Serpent’s Table, by Griffin Theatre Company featuring stories and cooks—Adam Liaw and Pauline Liaw—presiding over an Australian-Asian feast. Sydney choreographer Shaun Parker’s new work, Am I, features Nick Wales as composer and ex-Pina Bausch dancer Shantala Shivalingappa, among others, asking “Am I my genetic blueprint? Am I a random cosmological consequence?”
For further modern readings of the classics, Toneelgroep from Holland will present Jean Cocteau “self-destructive” monologue La Vox Humaine (1927) and Ireland’s Pan Pan Theatre will stage an immersive rendition of Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall where you’ll sit “in a rocking chair, bathed in light and surrounded by voices,” doubtless finding yourself more absurd than ever.
One of the festival’s more unusual concerts will feature Tyondai Braxton’s HIVE (USA), “a live multimedia performance that is part installation, part band.” On the same program 100 Million Lights is the creation of Aboriginal painter Daniel Boyd working with three-panel video projection to which electronic duo Canyons respond. In the Circus Rinaldo tent, distinctive American circular breathing saxophonist Colin Stetson will create aural magic in a physically vigorous and equally hypnotic performance.
Amy Macpherson, Forklift, KAGE
photo Justin Bernhaut
Amy Macpherson, Forklift, KAGE
About an Hour
For the cash-conscious but adventurous festival-goer there’s the enormously popular and relatively inexpensive About An Hour at Carriageworks. Melbourne’s KAGE “combine choreography, contortion and aerial acrobatics on and around a 2.5 tonne forklift” in Forklift, an interplay of machines—metal and flesh—performed by three women “in an industrial wasteland.” (See John Bailey’s interview with artistic directors Kate Denborough and Gerard Van Dyck, RT108, on the occasion of the company’s 15th birthday.)
Definitely not to be missed, Marrugeku’s Gudirr Gudirr focuses on dancer (and Marrugeku co-director) Dalisa Pigram and her Broome community. Directed and co-choreographed with Pigram by Koen Augustijnen from Les ballets c de la b, it’s a powerful work of many moods, sad, funny and passionate; for example, Virginia Baxter at Dance Massive wrote “Disoriented movement matches angry verbiage as Pigram proselytises from the stage about the pressing need for action on Indigenous issues and follows up with a funny and expletive filled outburst, complete with waving arms, head-banging and huge projected FUCKEN text!, in sheer frustration at the time it’s taking for justice and fairness to prevail” ( RT114). You can also see an interview with Pigram in our 2013 Dance Massive coverage.
Two adventurous 20th century short works, …pas à pas—nulle parte… (1993-98), a song setting by Gyorgy Kurtag (after poems by Beckett), and Into the Little Hill (2008) by George Benjamin with a libretto by leading English playwright Martin Crimp, will be staged by Sydney Chamber Opera, guaranteeing that justice will be done to two bracing works in their His Music Burns program.
One of the highlights of the 2011 Sydney Festival was Dutch company Kassys’ Good Cop Bad Cop. Keith Gallasch wrote at the time, “it’s a gentle fable-cum-soap opera about the lives and loves of domestic animals, acutely observed, cleverly avoiding standard mimicry (the actors dropping in and out of animality) and complemented with an onscreen commentary from the characters in a more human vein, but never too complicated so that the human-animal divide is constantly erased” (RT101). For the 2014 festival Kassys is performing Cadavre Exquis, pieces created by Kassys itself, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Tim Crouch and Nicole Beutler, each section connected by having only seen 60 seconds of the other’s work. Crouch himself is appearing in the much praised I Malvolio (RT115).
Also in the About an Hour program, in association with Performance Space, UK live artist Richard DeDomenici in The Redux Project enacts and shoots lo-fi recreations of famous movies, remaking for Sydney Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, The Matrix and Priscilla Queen of the Desert. Also from the UK, The Arches and Rob Drummond recreate a show in which, among other tricks, a magician attempted to catch a bullet with his teeth (the same trick killed William Wonder 100 years ago).
The ever-inventive My Darling Patricia (Africa, Posts in the Paddock) are making The Piper, a show for children—with some of them incorporated into the action amid this company’s puppetry and multimedia.
Bullet Catch
photo Victor Frankowski
Bullet Catch
Other worlds
In Woolloomooloo, Alex Davies will recreate his much admired experiential work The Very Near Future, seen at Carriageworks during ISEA this year in which you find yourself in a film set where doors keep opening onto unpredictable crime scenarios. Urszula Dawkins wrote: “It’s a risky work, demanding the visitor’s naïvety and sleuthing in equal parts. It capitalises on curiosity and, oddly but tellingly, reflects a digital world where we accept both constant surveillance and continuous psychological manipulation—as players, consumers, citizens.” Davies is interviewed about the work by Gail Priest as part of our online ISEA feature.
Out in suburban Bidwill, near Mt Druitt, something even more out of the ordinary: artist and director Karen Therese and community members will occupy a vacant shopping centre, offering tea along with interactive cinema, political rock opera and hula-hooping in FUNPARK. RT
In Douglas Kahn’s Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts, the premise is holistic. Signals are everywhere, running through us, the earth, the sky, bouncing off the ionosphere, and the best way to tune into them is by listening. By the time you’ve finished reading this book you feel like you’ve tapped into a magnificent universal circuit. It’s almost religious. 
