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Frequently messages land in our inboxes that get us calculating our frequent flyer points. This week a cluster of perverse pleasures—Sisyphean tasks, songs of pain and loss, haute cuisine and executions, and the “disintegrating spectacle”—lures us to London.

bill viola, frustrated actions and futile gestures

The eloquent video artist Bill Viola will soon be presenting his latest breathtaking creations in London in a major exhibition, Frustrated Actions and Futile Gestures, at Blain Southern Gallery. The centre piece is the series The Chapel of Frustrated Actions and Futile Gestures (2013) which depicts figures performing repetitive and seemingly futile tasks: digging and re-filling a hole; filling a leaking bowl; dragging a cart up a hill, only to let if roll down again. Complementing these parable-like screen-based works is a diptych—projected onto granite slabs—of an ageing man and woman surveying their naked bodies via torchlight. There will also be works from his Mirage series (2012-13) shot on location in the Mojave Desert and The Dreamers (2013) where Viola returns to the submerged figure, continuing his investigations into the spiritual and the subconscious.
Bill Viola, Frustrated Actions And Futile Gestures, Blain|Southern, London, June 5-27; http://www.blainsouthern.com/gallery-info/london-hanover-square

madam plaza, bouchra ouizguen

Bouchra Ouizguen's Madam Plaza

Bouchra Ouizguen’s Madam Plaza

courtesy LIFT

Bouchra Ouizguen’s Madam Plaza

The work of Morrocan-born choreographer Bouchra Ouizguen first came to our attention with her work Ha! presented at Montpellier Danse 2012. Mary Kate Connolly wrote, “What is most delightful about this work is the fact that it surrenders neither to spoof nor to overly earnest posturing. It determines a language of its own, drawn from the body and the characters onstage, which it sticks to without exception.” (RT112) Ouizguen will be premiering another of her works in London (presented by LIFT), as part of Shubbak: A Window on Contemporary Arab Culture. Madam Plaza features the choreographer along with four aïtas—women who sing “songs of pain, loss and impossible love at (communal) celebrations and nightclubs” (website). These women are equally admired and scorned in Morrocan society. You can see a short preview here.
Shubbak: A Window on Contemporary Arab Culture: Madam Plaza, Bouchra Ouizguen’s Company O, presented by LIFT, June 22-July 6; http://shubbak.co.uk/; http://liftfestival.com

trash cuisine, belarus free theatre

Free Theatre Belarus, Trash Cuisine

courtesy LIFT

Free Theatre Belarus, Trash Cuisine

Also presented by LIFT is the Belarus Free Theatre with their new work Trash Cuisine. The company impressed Sydney audiences back in 2009 with Being Harold Pinter of which David Williams wrote, “an utterly riveting, relentlessly paced and forcefully delivered theatrical presentation. Even simple exchanges bristle with menace and acquire accusatory overtones” (RT89). In Trash Cuisine the company combines the opulence of fine dining with capital punishment. See a chilling segment here.
Trash Cuisine, Belarus Free Theatre, presented by LIFT, May 30-June 15, Young Vic, London; www.liftfestival.com

mackenzie wark, the spectacle of disintegration

Australian ex-patriot Mackenzie Wark contributed many provocative articles to RealTime in the 1990s on media art and culture (all of which will soon be available as part our Media Art Archive, launching during ISEA). His latest book, The Spectacle of Disintegration is part two of his research into the Situationists. Here he follows the movement after the 1968 riots, including an in depth look at the film work and early game theories of Guy Debord. According to the press release “Wark builds on their work to map the historical stages of the society of the spectacle, from the diffuse to the integrated to what he calls the disintegrating spectacle” (Verso website). Furtherfield Gallery London will be hosting an afternoon discussion with Wark, introduced by writer/academic Dr Richard Barbrook (Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village. (Pluto Press, 2007).
Mackenzie Wark, The Spectacle of Disintegration, May 25, 4pm, Furtherfield Gallery London, http://www.furtherfield.org; www.versobooks.com

RealTime issue #114 April-May 2013 pg. web

Julian Day, Infinity Room

Since its incarnation in 2009, Vivid festival’s music program has concentrated on the big end of town—major international (and occasionally Australian) artists performing at the iconic pearl of the city (or more an oyster shell), the Sydney Opera House. However this year offers more diversification with activities of all kinds radiating out from the harbour, including the Seymour Centre hosting a series of Vivid events, one of which is the New Wave: Sound program.

Curated by Seymour Centre resident Andrew Batt-Rawden (Chronology Arts), Ndew Wave: Sound is a mini-festival of music that hovers above the genre boundaries of contemporary classical, electroacoustic, jazz, soundscape and even pop. I asked Batt-Rawden about the slipperiness of categorisations.

“It’s very difficult to pin it down to a particular genre because a lot of this music is genre-less, other than calling it art music or contemporary classical. It’s such a broad area that can include a whole plethora of moods, feelings, styles, rhythms, harmonic constructs—it’s really like a new world to explore. That’s why the title New Wave: Sound is relevant. Also it’s playing on the idea of vibrations—sound waves.”

Collarbones

To set the context, the event opens with a forum around “what’s hot” in new music with guest commentators Ignatius Jones (Creative Advisor, Vivid), Marcus Whale (composer, member of Collarbones), Julian Day (composer, presenter on ABC Classic FM), Adam Lewis (host of Radiant on FBi Radio) Lyle Chan (composer, Creative Consultant) and Batt-Rawden. Following this audiences will have to make a difficult choice since the first two concerts are presented simultaneously.

Playing in the Sound Lounge is Italian jazz composer/pianist Kekko Fornarelli (with Giorgio Vendola, double bass and Dario Congedo, drums and percussion) performing laid back jazz meets classical lyricism. Those seeking more angular pleasures should try Abstraction & Pathology, a concert of works by virtuosic electroacoustic composer Anthony Pateras performing with Natasha Anderson (recorder and electronics) and Erkki Veltheim (viola). Pateras, who now lives in Brussels and whose work was recently profiled by Speak Percussion at Maerzmusik in Berlin (see review in RT115), certainly fulfils Batt-Rawden’s desire to program the “epitome of ‘awesomeness’ in electroacoustic music.”

frostbYte

The second day consists of back-to-back performances, starting at midday. They include compositions for bass recorder commissioned and performed by Alicia Crossley; the drone minimalism of Julian Day’s Infinity Room project; a multichannel soundscape with visuals by frostbYte (aka Daniel Blinkhorn); string quartet The NOISE; and various group configurations featuring electric guitarist virtuoso Zane Banks, including Australia’s only guitar quartet, Ampere. The evening finishes up with pop-duo Collarbones (Marcus Whale and Travis Cook).
Batt-Rawden, in his previous role of Artistic Director of the 2012 Aurora Festival, introduced Western Sydney audiences to this eclectic combination of acts so I asked him what it was about these artists that so appealed to him.

“All of the artist who are being presented are people with get-up-and-go, who take the initiative whether that be creative initiative [in their compositions] or in producing fantastic programs…That risk-taking is reflected in the micro-detail of their compositions and performances, as well as the broader programming they have done in other concerts.”

Andrew Batt-Rawden certainly has his share of get-up-and-go and he’s not afraid to think big, asserting, “Although ‘entrepreneur’ can be a dirty word in artistic practice, I don’t think it should be.” While preparation for this year’s program had quite a compressed timeline, he is already planning next year’s event, which will see the relationship with SIMA (Sydney Improvised Music Association which is presenting Kekko Fornarelli this year) developed into a more comprehensive collaboration. Batt Rawden says, “There’s actually an interesting mix of jazz influences with classical training in next year’s program.” But first things first: ride the new wave this year and see where it takes you.

Vivid Sydney @ Seymour: New Wave: Sound, curator Andrew Batt-Rawden, Chronology Arts, Seymour Centre, June 7-8; http://www.seymourcentre.com/new-wave-sound/

You can also check out some video clips of The NOISE , Frostbyte, Julian Day

RealTime issue #114 April-May 2013 pg. web

Wang Gongxin, Tonight Maybe Have Wind (2006), video stills

Down an alley between the small-scale old industrials of Fortitude Valley and into the new location of MAAP (Media Art Asia Pacific). Starting 15 years ago curating Asian-Pacific multimedia, Kim Machan’s MAAP has expanded into a gallery space, media resource centre and online repository of back catalogue(s) and other writings. A happy extension from curator to host.

The new space opened late last year with a solo show by Zhang Peili, who pretty much initiated video art in China with his 1988 video performance of repeatedly smashing a mirror, gluing it back together, smashing it again, regluing etc etc. Now MAAP is showing the other major pioneer of video art in China, Wang Gongxin, who installed and exhibited The Sky of Brooklyn—Digging a hole in Beijing in his own home in 1995, the first time video art was shown in Beijing.

Two works from Gongxin. The unfortunately named Tonight Maybe Have Wind (2006) is there as you enter—flat TV-sized monitor on the wall, a close-ish shot of swaying branches running in a repeated pattern of super-fast and ultra slow. Four minutes sped up and slowed down in such a way as to keep the ‘actual’ total duration unchanged. And there’s a subtle change synced to the image speed—the colour drops out to black and white, then slowly returns. Seems a bit of a formalist exercise on the representation of time through tech and I find myself struggling to get much of an aesthetic or intellectual buzz. I think about subjective time and attentional focus, the adaptive function of colour vision for an ape wanting to munch the ripest fruit and the freshest leaves but, nup, nothing. Ah well.

Wang Gongxin, Basic Colour (2010), installation view

photo Emily Nelson

Wang Gongxin, Basic Colour (2010), installation view

The other piece, Basic Colour (2010), provides an occasion for contemplation in formal simplicity and slowly changing fields of colour and sound. This work is much larger, five doorway-sized videos projected in a line onto a single wall. On the bottom third or so of each is a closeup of a body part—the back onto the shoulders, a hand reaching toward us, the side of another hand, the nape of the neck, a head on its side. Images are in sharp focus, abstracted by their size. Starts au naturel then pigment begins to fall onto each of the body parts—black on the shoulders, blue to the reaching hand, red to the side, yellow to the nape and white to the head. I cringe watching the ear slowly fill with white pigment. The sound is like rice falling onto card, a population of coherent noise emerging from thousands of individual grains. Then the pigment stops and water begins to softly fall and bead with the pigment. The beads join together, trickles form and colour runs down the body and away. And in moving from dry pigment to dripping water the sound slowly changes from falling rice to falling rain. Or maybe I’m imagining that change, the dominance of the visual forcing consistency between unchanging sound and changing image.

The body as land goes back forever. There are bodies of water, breast-named hills and bodies marked with ochre and ash. Gongxin shows that tradition and washes it away. The video loops and the tradition replays.

Wang Gongxin, MAAP Space, Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, March 22-May 3; maap.org.au; wanggongxin.com

Also check out http://www.maap.org.au/publications/, the recently launched online archive featuring 15-years of MAAP publications.

This article originally appeared as part of RT’s Online e-dition May 15, 2013

RealTime issue #115 June-July 2013 pg. 28

Testament, She She Pop

photo Doro Tuch

Testament, She She Pop

Listen to my story, it might be true. Some version of biographical performance was at the core of many shows at Vancouver’s PuSh 2013. ‘This is my life, your life, our lives’—the strength (or weakness) of such truth-claims was only as good as the artist’s aesthetic muscle. Some had trained harder than others.

Testament

Testament by She She Pop (Germany) mines Shakespeare’s King Lear for insights on contemporary intergenerational issues such as inheritance and elder care. Three Lears, untrained performers in their 70s, and their four real-life progeny (permanent members of the company) confront, empathise with and sometimes court one another’s favour.

As in King Lear, there is humour: one of the fathers, Manfred Matzke, a physicist, keeps it logical by calculating the exchange of love, which he calls “impulse,” and property—“emissions,” between parent and child, using algebraic equations drawn on a flip chart. Lear’s mistake was to release his “emissions” too soon; once his children had received all of his property they had no incentive to return “impulse.”

There is also brutal truth: Joachim Bark speaks of the shame he felt when, in an earlier work by She She Pop, he was forced to look up his daughter’s shirt as she wrestled with another woman while suspended above the audience. Bark has no objection to nudity as long as it’s justified. When witnessing an older actor of the German stage tossed naked during the storm scene from King Lear, Bark had felt the gesture was symbolically appropriate. His analysis justifies what happens next in Testament: the fathers are stripped down to their underwear while the daughters dance a storm around them.

The presentational and task-oriented performance style of Testament keeps the investigation open to the audience. The tasks are straightforward: sing a song to your daughter, read some relevant text from Lear, describe the algebraic formula while you are drawing it, et cetera. It’s the rhythm with which the tasks are arranged that gives the sum of the parts emotional momentum and devastating clarity.

Cédric Andrieux

photo Marco Caselli Nirmal

Cédric Andrieux

As in previous shows I’ve seen by choreographer Jérôme Bel, the rules of the game are strict. On a bare stage, he tightly controls the gestural and vocal performance of Cédric Andrieux, a statuesque dancer in his mid-30s. Andrieux performs excerpts from his life as a dancer, demonstrating training sequences and recreating past shows. Occasional comments about a past love relationship are kept to a minimum. Andrieux almost always speaks to us directly. We return the gaze. It’s implicit in this controlled situation that, while engaging in direct visual ‘conversation’ with Andrieux, we must never approach the stage. Nor should we vocally interrupt the chronicle. And yet for all these constraints, the rhythm of the piece is so expertly constructed I have no desire to disrupt it. Andrieux’s inadvertent twitches reveal a lot. The constraints amplify his inherent charm. By the end I feel I know nothing about Andrieux as a person, but everything about him as a dancer. As in Testament, aesthetic rigour in the form of simplicity of address creates a deeply engaging encounter between spectator and performer.

Photog

Boca del Lupo, Photog

photo Karri North

Boca del Lupo, Photog

Photog by Boca del Lupo (Vancouver) consists of verbatim extracts from the testimony of several conflict photographers. Boca has chosen to collapse these into one psychologically consistent character named Thomas Smith, played by producer-actor Jay Dodge. A large screen framing the back of the stage features stunning photographs from conflict zones—human beings shot up, crying, dying. It would take a world-class performer to match the drama of those super-charged images. Dodge’s performance, as well as live-feed projections of him onto the photographs, obscures the source material… and the issue. By fusing the various testimonies into one fictional character, who does Photog ultimately serve, the work of the photographers or the artistry of Boca del Lupo? And if it’s the latter, how well does Boca’s work stand up to the artistry of the photographers? To me it seems a mismatch.

Winners and Losers

James Long, Marcus Youssef, Winners and Losers

photo Simon Hayter

James Long, Marcus Youssef, Winners and Losers

Like Boca del Lupo, James Long (Theatre Replacement) and Marcus Youssef (Neworld Theatre) default to psychological realism as they offer a confessional of privilege in our society of haves and have-nots. Flanked on either side of a rough wooden table, the two play a question-and-answer game: one of them names a topic (“being an only child”) or celebrity figure (Tom Cruise) and they debate its status as a “winner” or “loser.” The topics get personal. Sort of. Long and Youssef perform stage versions of themselves each can live with, but these fictionalised portraits don’t match the implied intent of the piece, which seems to be to create a public forum in which the two artists offer up their authentic selves as examples of self-serving combatants in a dog-eat-dog capitalist system. Instead they fall back on performing carefully rehearsed routines as if occurring for the first time. This includes an obviously choreographed and not very dangerous-looking wrestling match (why not a real wrestling match with an unplanned outcome?). Similarly, at the closing of the show they pretend their partnership has been irreparably damaged: “It’s over!” they say in unison. Of course we know full well the two are about to embark on a national tour. The show’s pretence of self-revelation looks like a con, but not the kind of rigorous aesthetic con that asserts its own truth.

The biggest problem with Winners and Losers is its politics. If this is a show about the cost of privilege in our society, it offers only the upside. The two performers serve up a bit of liberal guilt mixed with a lot of self-justification, and ‘confess’ to having family incomes of $100,000 or more. They lack a foil in the form of, say, an undocumented immigrant labourer or a single working parent who can’t afford daycare. The truly disenfranchised have no voice in a work that professes to embrace “the ruthless logic of capitalism.” In this show, everyone’s a winner, baby.

I, Malvolio

Tim Crouch, I Malvolio

photo Bruce Dalzell Atherton

Tim Crouch, I Malvolio

Moving away from the ‘genuine’ biography, Tim Crouch (UK) gives us a villainous first-person fiction of a fictional villain. Malvolio, the ludicrous, shamed and much-loved fool of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, returns from the dungeons of Illyria to turn the tables on those who have most revelled in his downfall—the audience. In the delicious sado-masochistic exercise to come Crouch invites us to mock him, then punishes us for it. Back and forth he expertly works us while demanding retribution for wrongs we have inflicted on Malvolio over the past 500 years.

I felt some relief in this production, lacking as it was in any claims to documentary truth (and perhaps implicitly critiquing such performances through its playful appropriation of autobiographical performance). That it felt as true as anything else I’d seen is due to Crouch’s virtuosity. His work is immaculately structured, while remaining open to spontaneous impulses. In other words, he sure knows how to work a crowd. His work with the text is also masterful—he has enviable range, colour and specificity. And perhaps it is in I, Malvolio that we really get to see the “ruthless logic of capitalism.” Malvolio, believing he is uniquely necessary to those he serves, and tricked into thinking his master is in love with him, discovers he is nothing more than a lackey, as replaceable as any small cog in a system where romantic love is the preserve of those who can afford such indulgences.

Still Standing You

Pieter Ampe, Guilherme Garrido, Still Standing You

photo Phile Deprez

Pieter Ampe, Guilherme Garrido, Still Standing You

Contemporary dance is often about the dancer as both subject and object of performance. The personal story is already ‘written’ on the body. Jérôme Bel achieves this with his stripped down presentations of unadorned performers. Pieter Ampe (Belgium) and Guilherme Garrido (Portugal) go for even fuller exposure in Still Standing You. Drawing on the playful and masochistic games of their boyhoods, the two men put on cartoonish alter egos (dinosaurs, exotic birds), ride each other, hit each other, and get naked. The serious/comic manner in which they up the ante of consenting physical abuse makes you wonder how far they will go. Pretty far. It doesn’t take long before each has a grip on the other’s foreskin and is testing its elasticity with corkscrew twists and painful elongations. Now that’s an exposé. If Winners and Losers is about the socio-economic factors that fracture the relationship of two theatre buddies, this show is about the socio-physical extremes to which two dance buddies will go in search of a deeper bond. (See also Tim Atack’s review of the duo’s 2010 performance of Still Standing You at In Between Time in Bristol)

Lear

Wu Hsing-Kuo, King Lear

photo Dirk Bleicker

Wu Hsing-Kuo, King Lear

Wu Hsing-Kuo of Contemporary Legend Theatre (Taiwan) uses King Lear as an analogue of his troubled relationship with his former opera master. Wu had been severely criticised for trying to update the conventions of Peking Opera. To Wu’s regret, he and his master never reconciled. In this solo show he purges his demons, focusing on the father-son relationships in Lear, and minimising the role of the daughters. In Act III Cordelia becomes a stand-in for Wu’s master, and it is through her that he makes his apologies and purges his guilt. Unfortunately, minimising the role of the daughters in Lear leaves us with the familiar father-son tropes Hollywood relentlessly subjects us to, from Star Wars to The Lion King. I prefer the complex considerations of Lear’s daughters who are forced to deal with their father’s juvenile sense of entitlement, both in the original play, and in She She Pop’s feminist reworking of it.

PuSh international Performing Arts Festival 2013, artistic director Norman Armour, Jan 15-Feb 3, Vancouver, http://pushfestival.ca

This article originally appeared as part of RT’s Online e-dition May 15, 2013

RealTime issue #115 June-July 2013 pg. 16-17

la boite indie, part 1

Each year Brisbane’s La Boite showcases works from a selection of emerging/underground/indie performance companies (whatever nomenclature you prefer). There’s not a traditional sit-down-and-shut-up audience experience among the first three shows currently showing. Sandra Carluccio’s This is Capital City lets the audience loose in Kelvin Grove charged with the mission to unearth the town’s myths with the help of some “city officials” and a mobile phone. The Séance by Mark Pritchard and Bridget Balodis invites the audience to a secret location where they will be complicit in the summoning of spirits. Blindscape, by Skye Gellmann collaborating with Kieren Law, turns the theatre space into an inhabited installation—the audience is guided through the performance via the Blindscape App supplied on entry. After the second Indie season later in the year audiences will be invited to vote for the performance they’d like to see remounted at QPAC in 2014.
La Boite Indie, May 8-25; http://laboite.qtix.com.au/laboiteindie2013/

lineage, form dance projects

Aruna Gandhimathinathan is trained in Bharatanatyam traditional Indian dance while Shruti Ghosh is predominantly trained in Kathak. They will be exploring the integration of these two forms in their collaborative dance work Nritya Roopa, accompanied by musician Prabhu Osoniq. Nritya Roopa is presented by Form Dance Projects as part of Lineage, a program investigating the intersections of traditional and contemporary practices. The evening also features emerging Indigenous choreographer Thomas ES Kelly working with Carl Tolentino on Dark Dreams, and a solo by Indigenous dancer/choreographer Tammi Gissell, A Dip for Narcissus.
Form Dance Projects, Lineage, May 23-25, Lennox Theatre, Riverside, Parramatta; http://form.org.au/2013/01/nritya-roopa/

anne landa award for video and new media arts 2013, agnsw

Lauren Brincat, Hight Horse (2012), documentation of an action, The space between us, Anne Landa Award for video and new media, AGNSW

Curated by Charlotte Day, the fifth iteration of the Anne Landa Award is themed “the space between us.” While video has always been at the forefront in this award, with perhaps the exception of Christian Thompson’s immersive sound installation, the media art component is less evident than usual this year, replaced it appears by performance. The video works by Laresa Kosloff, Angelica Mesiti, Kate Mitchell, James Newitt, Lauren Brincat and Alicia Frankovich are all based on perfomative actions and situations with the latter two artists also presenting live events over the course of the exhibition. Brincat’s performances will involve horse riding and mass timbrel playing, while Frankovich will present a jogging extravaganza. Perhaps a re-titling—the Anne Landa Award for Video and Performance Art—is in order?
Anne Landa Award for Video and New Media Arts 2013, May 16-Jul 28, Art Gallery of New South Wales; http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/space-between-us/

everyday rebellions, gertrude contemporary

1) Dane Mitchell, The Smell of an Empty Space (Solid), 2011, Perfume, photographic paper, frame, courtesy Hopkinson Cundy and the artist, photo Sam Hartnett; 2 & 3) Kitty Kraus, Untitled, 2006, lamp, ice, ink, Courtesy of Galerie NEU, Berlin

In Gertrude Contemporary’s next exhibition it’s the objects that perform. Emily McCormack has curated a collection of works exploring the “innate activity of matter” and battlling the forces of entropy (website). For example Dane Mitchell’s photographs are “unfixed” and can only be viewed under the red lights of a darkroom, otherwise they fade to nothingness. German artist Kitty Kraus tracks the changing state from solid to liquid, her melting ink-ice puddling around a glowing light bulb for added tension. Also showing is Joan Jonas’ Vertical Roll, a video work from 1972 investigating the body in relation to the analogue glitches of the television screen.
Everyday Rebellions, Danica Chappell, Joan Jonas, Kitty Kraus, Dane Mitchell, Virginia Overell, Danae Valenza, Simon McGuinness, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, May 11- June 8; http://www.gertrude.org.au/exhibitions/gallery-11/current-13/

suncorp twenties, sydney theatre company

You can’t accuse Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton of losing touch with the average Australian—they know theatre tickets here are prohibitively expensive and they’ve actually found a solution. Brokering a deal with Suncorp, there will now be $20 tickets available for (nearly) all STC shows. You don’t have to be a student, pensioner, or under 30, you just have to try your luck on a Tuesday (via phone or in person at the box office) for the followings week’s shows. The partnership with Suncorp kicked off yesterday and will run for two years.
Sydney Theatre Company, Box Office 02 9250 1929; more info www.sydneytheatre.com.au

joachim koester, frances stark, ian potter museum of art

1 & 2) Joachim Koester, Tarantism, 2007, © & courtesy the artist and Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen; 3 & 4) Frances Stark, My best thing, 2011, © & courtesy the artist and Marc Foxx, Los Angeles

If bitten by a tarantula in Medieval Italy it was believed dancing would cure you and thus the Tarantella was born. Danish artist Joachim Koester has recreated this frantic ritual in his 16mm film Tarantism currently screening for the first time in Australia, at the Ian Potter Museum. (Academic and dance historian Rachel Fensham will be giving a floor talk about the work on Thursday May 16.) Also screening is Frances Stark’s My Best Thing, a primitively animated feature which draws its content from the artist’s own interactions in the online environment Chatroulette.
Joachim Koester, Tarantism, Frances Stark, My Best Thing, Ian Potter Museum of Art, until June 2; http://www.art-museum.unimelb.edu.au/exhibitions/exhib-date/2013-03-20/exhib/joachim-koester-tarantism

stories then & now, performance 4a, carriageworks

Photographer/raconteur William Yang and dynamic producer Annette Shun Wah have teamed up to co-direct this new theatre work focusing on the pasts and presents of six Asian Australians. The performance has developed out of Yang’s storytelling workshops and has been co-created with author Ien Ang, performer Jenevieve Chang, video journalist Michael C.S. Park, producer Sheila Pham, social worker/food writer Paul van Reyk and civil marriage celebrant Willa Zheng, with music by Nicholas Ng. Yang says “I think it is important for everyone to tell their story. It makes one conscious of self and it places one in the context of history, world and culture” (press release). Stories Then & Now is an umbrella event of the Sydney Writer’s Festival.
Stories Then & Now, presented by Performance4a & Carriageworks, May 22-25; http://www.performance4a.org.au/

goodbye jamie boyd, buzz dance & monkey baa

Goodbye Jamie Boyd is an interstate collaboration between two leading companies making performance for young people, Monkey Baa in NSW and Buzz Theatre in WA. Based on the verse novel by Elizabeth Fensham, the production uses movement, text and video design to evoke the story of a teenage girl fighting schizophrenia, haunted by the spectre of her deceased elder brother. After a successful NSW tour in 2012, Goodbye Jamie Boyd is now showing in Perth.
Goodbye Jamie Boyd, Buzz Dance & Monkey Baa, directed by Sandra Eldridge & Cadi McCarthy, Studio Underground, State Theatre Centre, Perth, May 15-25, http://www.buzzdance.com.au/productions.html#goodbye

still in the loop

sensing sydney, carbon arts, city of sydney

As part of Art & About 2013, Carbon Arts and the City of Sydney are looking to commission a temporary public artwork that somehow manifests data about sustainable living in Sydney—energy consumption, emissions, waste indicators, demographics etc. The aim of the work is to involve “the public in an active dialogue on environmental issues and citizen-engaged action” (website). All inclusive project budgets up to $25,000 will be considered.
Deadline 20 May
More info http://www.carbonarts.org/?post_type=projects&p=837

dramaturgy internships 2013

Sydney-based playwrights, directors or dramaturgs (emerging or more experienced) who are interested in learning more about script development are invited to apply for a six-month internship at Playwriting Australia. The successful intern will work regularly with the PWA team on script assessments and will be able to observe or assist with the National Script Workshops.
Applications close Monday May 20; http://www.pwa.org.au/dramaturgy-internships-2013

librettist workshop, chamber made

Also on the writing front, Chamber Made Opera will be running a five-day workshop on the art of the libretto. There will be practical exercises as well as presentations by leading writers, librettists and dramaturgs Margaret Cameron, Alison Croggon, Brett Kelly, Angus Grant, Kate Schmitt and Chamber Made’s departing director David Young.
Chamber Made Opera, Writers Victoria, The Wheeler Centre, July 29- August 2; http://www.chambermadeopera.com/program/Librettists_Workshop

city of melbourne annual grants

still in the loop

selected australia council grant deadlines

While the Head On Photo Festival in Sydney is the new kid on the block, starting up in 2010, it appears to have had a shot of rapid growth hormone. Now the largest photography festival in Australia, it claims to be the second largest in the world. (Sydney does like to do big!) Of course it manages this via conglomeration so there’s probably not a gallery in Sydney that you will walk into in late May that isn’t part of Head On. With so much happening it’s hard to know where to start the adventure so below are a few thematic inroads.

via the document

Photography is perhaps most associated with its power to bear witness to events—violent, confronting, humbling or inspiring—and there’s no shortage of documentary realism in Head On. Jimmy Pozarik has spent a year as photographer in residence at the Sydney Children’s Hospital, his images illustrating the devastating fragility of life. At the same gallery are Tom Goldner’s portraits of children from Lake Volta in Ghana, an area known for its human trafficking. The contrasting exhibitions create a complex dialogue about how young lives are valued. (Global Gallery Paddington, May 15-26; http://globalgallery.tumblr.com).

At Redfern Community Centre you can see Visions In Black & White: Images From Indigenous Australia by Barbara McGrady, a Gamilario/Murri woman who has been documenting contemporary Aboriginal life for 30 years. This exhibition features photos from the last three years including coverage of the Occupy Movement and significant Aboriginal cultural and music events. (Redfern Community Centre, May 10-June 30; http://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/explore/facilities/community-centres/redfern-community-centre)

For a taste of the hyper-real gangster life, check out Anton Kuster’s photographic series which follows a Japanese Yakuza family for two years. (The Muse, TAFE Sydney Institute, May 18-June 22, http://www.sit.nsw.edu.au/)

performance

A number of exhibitions feature a playful use of the photographic medium, highlighting it as a tool for identity construction. At MOP Gallery Dean Tirkot has worked with “gender-ambiguous characters” including Glitta Supernova, Betty Grumble and Dallas Dellaforce. The images are captured on a large format 8×10” Deardoff field camera and are accompanied by texts by Welsh writer Wil Gritten. (MOP Gallery, May 9-26; http://www.mop.org.au/)

Canadian artist Kourtney Roy’s Auto Myths are nostalgic reconstructions, a “tragic mythology of the self, a personal universe where the prosaic is pervaded with the marvelous and strange” (website). Think Cindy Sherman meets Sophie Calle. (Customs House, Level 2 Library, May 15-July 15; http://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/explore/libraries/branches/customs-house-library)

At Gaffa Gallery, filmmaker Cordelia Beresford continues her investigation of haunted spaces with Presence (see RT100). These photographs re-create imagined inhabitations of spaces such as a farm in Normandy used to house WWII prisoners and the reform school for girls on Sydney’s Cockatoo Island. (Gaffa Creative Precinct, May 30-June 8; http://www.gaffa.com.au/)

lo-tech

New developments in technology mean that everyone identifies as a photographer. Rather than fighting it some professionals are embracing the new democratising methods and testing their limits. In iAfghanistan, New York photographer Ben Lowry uses mobile phones and the free online Instagram App to explore life in Afghanistan. (State Library of NSW, Macquarie St. Foyer, April 28- July 27; http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/)

In the group exhibition Ludlites Love Music, artists such as Patrick Boland, Heleana Genaus and Steve Godbee use plastic cameras to create images inspired by popular song lyrics. (Bondi Pavilion Gallery, May 15-June 23; http://www.waverley.nsw.gov.au/things_to_do/arts_and_culture/gallery)

Taking an opposite approach, Ghosting Machine is a group exhibition featuring Australian and international artists, including Bronwyn Rennex, Aaron Seeto, Katthy Cavaliere and Jaroslaw Klups (Pol) presenting works made using 19th century techniques such as daguerreotypes, wet collodion prints and cyanotypes to create other worldly images. (Delmar Gallery, May 12-June 6; http://www.trinity.nsw.edu.au/4_community/socArts.html)

This is just a taste of the 80 featured exhibitions and 60 associated exhibitions as well as workshops, portfolio reviews and forums.
The best way to tackle the onslaught? Head on!

Head On Photo festival, various venues Sydney, launches May 17; see website for full info http://headon.com.au/

To get down into Jamieson Valley, Katoomba (NSW), you can hike or you can head to Scenic World and experience the vertiginous descent via cable car or the newly refurbished Scenic Railway. Once in the valley you are in a rainforest that dates back to the Jurassic period, which is breathtaking enough, but throughout May you could also experience an impressive sculpture exhibition featuring 35 works installed amid the undergrowth.

The rainforest offers amazing potential as a gallery but also its share of challenges. The artworks have to be transported down into the valley before the ‘doors’ are open to the daily tourist trade. Meanwhile, installing artwork in a World Heritage-listed environment presents its own issues. Exhibition Manager Lizzie Marshall tells me the project aims to have a zero ecological impact which involves minimising soil compression and engaging specialist arborists to suspend works above the forest floor.

Marshall decides on the placement of the works along the walk, describing them as site-responsive rather than site-specific. Since the event is a competition, the works are generally conceived at submission stage; however, each artist may subtly tailor the work to their location. The sites themselves may also undergo change—within a month, trees fall, saplings grow, leaves and bark are shed, altering the composition of the environment. The most intriguing pieces are those that work with elements of their site but also maintain otherness.

The winning sculpture by Blue Mountains artist Daniel Kotja best exemplifies this liminal state. Reflect Phi (a monument) uses the geometrical principle of Phi, which recurs in the growth cycle of plants, as the basis for the work. The sleek, multi-angled objects made from highly polished stainless steel are clearly at odds with the irregular curves of the natural world. However the mirrored surfaces reflect the environment in shifting planes, softening the sharp edges and creating a confounding dimensionality to the object. Via these reflections the sculpture both takes from and gives back to the site.

Kimie Kitamura (NSW) also exploits this otherness with Get Together! Along a ledge, nestled amongst the leaves and short grasses is a collection of off-white porcelain tubes. Without any features their shape hints at cartoonish life forms with limb-like peaks (or are they ears?). Arranged in clumps, they appear to incline towards each other as though communing. Their greyish hue and multiplicity also suggests emerging mushrooms and the teeming micro-life below the soil. Blue Mountains artist Linda Seiffert’s ceramic creation, Undulating Form, also brings to mind the wonders of the fungal world with its interlocked twisting surfaces finished in a dusty, deep ochre, embedded in the humus. This work really looks as though it could have grown here.

The valley also bears the imprint of industry: chunks of old machinery from old cable cars and mining ventures scattered among the trees. Left Behind, by Penny Philpott (NSW), comprises perfect ceramic replicas of rusty chains lying in piles and snaking off through the undergrowth. Kern, by Al Phemister (NSW), is a large-scale cog made from folded black steel, already bleeding rust. Both are well placed at the end of the walk near the cable station, highlighting the rich layering of the environment—organic, machinic, historic, touristic, artistic.

Now in its second iteration the exhibition also includes a number of media works. A video installation, ex/enclosure, by Blue Mountains’ artist Sarah Breen-Lovett is perhaps the only truly site-specific piece. The artist has filmed light seeping in through the cracks in an old miner’s cottage. These minimal white slashes are flipped vertically and projected back onto the hearth of the hut. While relatively simple, it’s a conceptually complete use of the space. Another development this year is Sculpture Otherwise, a small exhibition in the tourist centre of maquettes and samples which show sculptural detailing close-up.

Exhibiting 35 outdoor sculptures in such a complex and ever changing environment is certainly an impressive feat. What is most striking is how, by careful site-choices, the works draw you further into the natural environment. The twist of copper tubing in Irish artist Darragh O’Callaghan’s Serosa reflects the tangled root structures of the trees around it. The fringes of Victorian artist Kallie Turner’s Josephus, an intricate “forest keepers” garment, alerts you to the curtains of shredded bark up above. NSW artist Greer Taylor’s Resting Place, a suspended trapezoid of hand-knitted copper wire, intensifies the shifting shafts of light through the canopy. In this way the exhibition is particularly successful in its integration of the human-crafted object and the organic environment. And indeed it succeeds in the more pragmatic integration of art and tourism as well.

moving image i, critical path artists’ salon

Sam James, From the Rainforest Mind to the Desert Mind featuring dancer Victoria Hunt (video still)

Over 2013 Critical Path will be hosting a series of salons comprising artist presentations and discussions. The first of these, curated by choreographer/filmmakers Narelle Benjamin and Sue Healey, promises “experiments with movement within interdisciplinary practice” (website). It includes a multi-screen 3D video installation by Sam James, From the Rainforest Mind to the Desert Mind, featuring dancer Victoria Hunt; and a performative remake of Guy Sherwin’s 1976 Man with Mirror (in which he interacted live with his onscreen image) by Louise Curham and Lucas Ilhein re-titled (Wo)man with Mirror.
Moving Image I, Critical Path, Sydney, May 11, 4pm (open studio from 3pm); http://moving-image1-2013.eventbrite.com/

direct democracy, muma

Direct Democracy reflects on recent eruptions of people power such as the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement. Curated by Geraldine Barlow it includes 20 international and Australian artists such as video artist Natalie Bookchin (USA), curious object creator Will French (AUS) and the collaborative action project A Centre For Everything. There are also workshops such as collaborative drawing using the DAMP Collective’s giant pencil and forums including a look at the student protests at Monash in the 1960s. You’ll know that you’re close to the gallery when you spy Carl Scrase’s giant inflatable hand—you can decide whether it’s giving you a peace sign or an “up yours.”
Monash University Museum of Art, until July 6; http://www.monash.edu.au/muma/exhibitions/upcoming/direct-democracy.html

bloom—space, aeaf

While Direct Democracy looks at the big picture of human interaction, the next exhibition at AEAF looks at intimate exchanges, mainly between objects. Curated by Adele Sliuzas, the works include a growing field of grass by Carla Liesch, a pair of keyboards physically locked in a drone dual by Julian Day, objects in curious inter-relations by Roy Ananda and Will French and video work by Lisa Harms.
Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, until June 1; http://aeaf.org.au/exhibitions/21_bloomspace.html

undone, arts house

Last loop we highlighted Metro Arts Friday Night program which opens the rehearsal room doors to reveal the creative processes taking place in the building. This week it’s Arts House’s turn to bare all with their Undone program. Arts House invests significantly in the creative development of projects, in particular through its CultureLAB program. For one afternoon audiences can catch glimpses of potentially full-scale productions. Artists include Natalie Abbott, Angus Cerini, Mish Grigor, Deborah Leiser-Moore, Brian Lipson and David Woods, Tamara Saulwick and Lara Tumak.
Arts House, Meat Market & North Melbourne Town Hall, May 11, 12-6pm; http://www.artshouse.com.au

paul dresher, double duo?

The music of US composer Paul Dresher incorporates West Coast Minimalism with Northern Indian and Balinese influences. To fulfill his compositional needs he has invented his own instruments. The Quadrachord is a long stringed instrument that can be bowed, plucked and hit. The Marimba Lumina is an electronic percussion instrument. (See these instruments in action here.) He will present two concerts in Sydney with his group Double Duo—Dresher, Joel Davel, Karen Bentley Pollick and?Lisa Moore—performing his own compositions along with works by John Adams and Martin Bresnick.
Music Workshop, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Sydney May 9, http://www.cityrecitalhall.com/events/id/1447/Paul-Dresher-Double-Duo/; Campbelltown Arts Centre, May 11, 8pm, www.campbelltownartscentre.com.au

film real—black screen, nfsa & footscray arts centre

Our Generation, Sinem Saban & Damien Curtis, Black Screen, National Film & Sound Archive

The National Film and Sound Archive’s Black Screen Initiative offers DVDs of contemporary Australian Aboriginal features, documentaries and shorts to individuals and organisations for public screenings. As part of their Film Real series Footscray Arts Centre will be screening the documentary Our Generation (Sinem Saban & Damien Curtis, 2010) which looks at the plight of the Yolgnu people in the Northern Territory whose human rights have been eroded by white governance.
Film Real, Black Screen, Our Generation, Footscay Arts Centre, May 14, 6.30pm; http://footscrayarts.com/access-blog-event/film-real-black-screen-may/; http://www.ourgeneration.org.au/

peter dailey, apparition: the syndicate ii, fremantle arts centre

Peter Dailey, Apparition (2013): 1) Alchemist, collection of Ron and Sandra Wise; 2) Ruminate, collection of Jan Spriggs and Perry Sandow; 3) Meek, collection of Graham and Vicki Teede; 4) Abnegate, collection of Jan Spriggs and Perry Sandow

The Syndicate is an innovative philanthropic project initiated by art patron Lloyd Horn in which a group of collectors supports an artist for two years enabling them to create a body of work. The second artist commissioned by the Syndicate is Peter Dailey who has created Apparition, a series of 10 life-size human figures that evoke the “cultural, economic, political and environmental mechanisms” involved in being human (website). The Apparition is currently on show at the Fremantle Arts Centre.
Peter Dailey, Apparition: The Syndicate II, Fremantle Arts Centre until June 2; http://fac.org.au/events/288/peter-dailey-apparition-the-syndicate-ii?mid=12

networked art forms & tactical magick faerie circuits, cast

The ISEA13 media art lovefest is not just concentrated in Sydney. Networked Art Forms & Tactical Magick Faerie Circuits is a satellite event in Hobart’s CAST as part of DARKMOFO, developed by Miss Despoinas (a hacker space headed by Nancy Mauro-Flude). The event focuses on “maker” cultures adopting “a radical holistic approach to digital culture” (press release). There will be a three-day feast of workshops, talks and forums (May 31-June 2) with resulting ideas developing into a series of events June 3-30. Participating artists include Linda Dement (AUS), Francesca da Rimini (AUS), Mez Breeze (AUS), Florian Cramer (GER/NL) and Julian Oliver (NZ/GER). (See our in the loop opportunities page for workshop details).
Networked Art Forms & Tactical Magick Faerie Circuits, CAST, Hobart, May 31-June 30;” http://tacticalmagick.net/

conduit arts space initiative

Artist-led space Conduit Arts, a shopfront in Fitzroy, has a rather novel programming structure. For one month it focuses on visual arts, the next on music and performance, and in May it’s music’s turn. There will be a whopping 15 performances over a month of improvised and experimental music and poetry with artists such as Dale Gorfinkel, Robie Aveniam, Simon Charles, Jessica Wilkinson, Ida Duelund-Hansen, Mark Cauvin and Matthias Schack-Arnott.
May Music & Performance Program, Conduit Arts Initiative, Fitzroy, full program http://conduitarts.wix.com/conduitarts#!program-music/ch3c

diffuse, uts

Produced by Jon Drummond in association with the Sound and Music Design course at UTS, Diffuse is a program of music performances in May and June. The first concert focuses on spatial diffusion and will see Isobel hemisphere speakers used in the Bon Marche for the first time. Performers across the series include Zane Banks & Benjamin Carey, Julian Day, Daniel Blinkhorn, Michael Atherton & Jon Drummond, Alon Asar, Roger Mills, Peter Hollo, Gail Priest and David Miller.
Diffuse, May 9, 23 & June 6, Bone Marche Studio, UTS; http://diffuse2013.wordpress.com/

still in the loop

stephen cummins bequest residencies, performance space

The Stephen Cummins Bequest offers three emerging artists involved in queer performance a one-week intensive residency at Performance Space. The emphasis is on dramaturgical development within their practice with each artist working with a mentor. The residencies will take place in July with mentors Martin del Amo, Chris Ryan and Victoria Spence.
Applications close June 3; http://www.performancespace.com.au/2013/stephen-cummins-2013-callout-queer-artists/

beijing residency, 4a centre for contemporary asian art

Expressions of interest are now open for early career artists to apply for a one-month residency in the studios of renowned Chinese Australian artist Shen Shaomin (http://www.shenshaomin.com/). A project of 4a, the residency offers the opportunity to “research new projects in rich cultural surroundings, build networks and observe the changes taking place in one of the most important cities in the Asia region” (press release). The three successful applicants must be available to undertake the residency in September 2013.
Deadline May 31; http://www.4a.com.au/4a-beijing-residency-program/

the sustainability of future bodies workshop series, isea2013

As part of ISEA13 Critical Path is offering a series of workshops exploring the intersection between media and the body. Garth Paine will run a Motion Capture Open Lab (June 15-16); Paul Gazzola will explore The Dancing Body of the Future, Pt II, (June 18- 20); and in Writing, visiting French choreographer Myriam Gourfink will introduce her training and digital scoring methods. Ten NSW choreographers will receive an honorarium to attend.
Applications due May 20: Apply online www.surveymonkey.com/s/ISEA13-CP-workshop-series

workshops, networked art forms & tactical magick faerie circuits, cast

In Hobart, the Networked Art Forms… festival (see quick picks) includes two intriguing hands-on workshops. Hacker masters Julian Oliver (NZ/GER) and Danja Vasiliev (RUS/GER) will run a Networkshop (May 31- June 2) which will bring the communication tools of the digital age back under the user’s control recreating a small-scale version of the internet. Anne Goldeberg (FRA/CAN) and Karine Rathle (CAN) will run Attent!ion Som(t)a(c)tic (June 5-8) to examine participants’ physical relationship with their communication tools and “explore avenues of creative empowerment by suggesting techno-humanist thematic improvisations” (press release). The workshop will culminate in a multimedia installation and performance.
More info http://tacticalmagick.net/workshops

backbone 2high festival 2013

The annual 2High Festival in Brisbane not only supports emerging artists but also emerging producers. The festival is looking for keen young things (18-26) who are interested in becoming part of the team that makes this multi-disciplinary event happen. The festival will take place Nov 2 at the Brisbane Powerhouse.
Deadline May 17; http://www.backbone.org.au/2high-festival.cfm

call for scores, campbelltown city council

Submissions are invited for musical compositions written for a single percussion instrument or “defined group of instruments originating from the same family” (website). Successful compositions will be premiered by leading percussionist Claire Edwardes at Campbelltown Arts Centre in November.
Deadline for submissions July 1; www.campbelltown.nsw.gov.au/CallforScore

still in the loop

selected australia council grant deadlines

IF A HUMAN RIGHTS FILM FESTIVAL BRINGS TO MIND IMAGES OF PO-FACED, POORLY MADE ACTIVIST VIDEOS THEN THINK AGAIN.

Evolving from humble beginnings in 2007, the Human Rights Arts and Film Festival now profiles some of the most innovative documentaries from around the globe, along with a sprinkling of equally provocative dramas and exhibitions. On the eve of the festival’s sixth edition, Dan Edwards talked with programming manager Sari Braithwaite about her curatorial philosophy, and the sticky role of the arts in human rights debates.

First I’d like to ask what you see as the relationship between art and human rights? The relationship between them is not necessarily obvious.

The problem with human rights, particularly for Australians, is that they can often come across as common sense and be taken for granted. They can seem simple and not worthy of interrogation. That’s where the arts can come in and play with those ideas, let them be interrogated through storytelling and complicated by the everyday. Which is exactly what human rights discourse needs—it needs to be robust and fluid and people need to be part of the conversation, otherwise those rights run the risk of being taken for granted and not protected. So we are all about creating conversations and debate…a festival that has to balance issues with really great, innovative filmmaking. But the filmmaking really has to stand out, otherwise you lose people’s attention to the issue.

One of the things I found interesting about last year’s program was that documentaries like Planet of Snail, about a blind Korean writer, were wonderful films, but did not necessarily talk about human rights in an obvious or explicit way. How do you go about choosing films specifically for this festival?

What I loved about Planet of Snail (Seungjun Yi, Finland, Japan, South Korea, 2011) was that it was a beautiful story. By knowing these people you have insight into a disability that you don’t usually get—that’s the core right there. When you’re talking about human rights it’s not a particularly good idea to ram issues down people’s throats and to make the world seem hard, or problems seem unsolvable. It’s really important to show stories where people are empowered, where you see resilience, courage and ingenuity. Hopefully audiences walk out of the cinema and have a discussion, or maybe a fight about the film, then three months later maybe they have another discussion. That’s the kind of programming I really like to see happen. That’s why we put a large emphasis on guests, forums and post-screening events. People go in, see a film and they want dialogue.

So what do you think distinguishes HRAFF from something like the Antenna Documentary Festival in Sydney, or the big festivals like MIFF?

I think HRAFF is a really good opportunity to reframe films—something like Planet of Snail is a good example—that you might not normally consider in the human rights context. This year we have Jonathan Caouette’s Walk Away Renee (USA/France, 2012), which is his follow-up to Tarnation (US, 2003). So much discussion about Jonathan Caouette focuses on how he plays with form, about how he was a first generation i-movie superstar filmmaker. But actually the relationship with his [mentally ill] mother in those films is really important and interesting in a human rights context. So we’re using Walk Away Renee to explore mental health, along with complex questions about representing mental illness on screen.

Although you feature some dramas, most of the films in the festival are documentaries. Is that a deliberate choice?

Documentaries can be really powerful in exploring issues while telling a good story, but it’s also about what documentary filmmakers are interested in, because so many come from a social justice point of view. But as soon as there is an interesting narrative then I’m all for it. We’ve got Mondomanila (Khavn De La Cruz, Philippines, 2012) which is in exploitation film style—totally new territory for HRAFF, and really pushing our audience to think about what a human rights film is. It’s divisive, but it’s also really exciting to have those types of works in the program.

If you were asked to choose two or three films to see in this year’s program, what would you recommend?

The opening and closing night films this year are really special, and again there will be events around them. Alias Ruby Blade (Alex Meillier USA/Australia, 2012) is about Kirsty Sword, the young Melbourne woman who went to East Timor in the 90s, became part of the clandestine rebel movement there and started a relationship with Xanana Gusmão while he was in prison. So that’s a really great one for Australian audiences, because it connects us so closely with our nearest neighbours. For closing night, In the Shadow of the Sun (Harry Freeland, UK, 2012) is a really beautiful film about Josephat Torner—a man from Tanzania with albinism who travels the country trying to confront deep superstitions after a wave of murders of albinos.

My narrative highlight has to be My Brother the Devil (UK, 2012), a coming-of-age story about two brothers living in the Hackney housing estate, from a first time British writer-director Sally El Hosaini. For documentary lovers, Informant (Jamie Meltzer, USA, 2012) is a really innovative exploration of how a leftist activist turned to work for the FBI. I’m also very proud of our Australian Shorts program, which showcases the astounding Silent Night (Best Film, Cockatoo Island Film festival, 2012, Margaret Lawrence Social Justice Award), a film about sexual assault by local filmmaker Bec Kingma.

It’s a diverse program. I think it’s really important in a human rights film festival to make people laugh and to feel a sense of joy and hope. It’s about showing what’s amazing, resilient and special about people in really tough situations—not just as victims, because then everyone’s disempowered, and I don’t think that’s what art is for. Art can help you re-frame and see things in different ways, and that’s exactly why HRAFF is so useful and important.

The Human Rights Arts and Film Festival, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, 9-23 May, http://hraff.org.au.

A selection of films will tour Sydney, Canberra, Perth, Brisbane and Alice Springs during May-June, see http://hraff.org.au for city programs.

Jon Rose has done much with and to the violin, and upon hearing this CD a great deal more than you might have ever imagined. For listeners unfamiliar with his music, Rose’s new CD opens a door to his unique engagement with the instrument and with sound and its place in our world. For those who love his work it is a collector’s item.

Rosin (the CD is named after the stuff you rub on the bow to change its texture and enrich the sound of the violin strings) comprises CDs, a disc of videos and a booklet discussing the selected works with testimonies by David Harrington, Richard Barrett and others on the nature and immensity of Rose’s contribution to music. Subtitled “A 60th Anniversary Collection,” it was released shortly after this milestone birthday and with three hours 45 minutes of music and an hour and 25 minutes of visual material, it’s an excellent introduction to his recent work. Presumably it’s a personal retrospective, emphasising favourite developments. Though less comprehensive than his webpage, it focuses on specific projects: his Pannikin series of recordings of people making all kinds of sound (a subset of the ABC’s Australia Ad Lib series), his fence-playing, his electronic interventions into the violin and his ball-games and bicycle series.

Rose’s work questions our assumptions not only about music, sound and performance but about the world in which we live. His Garage Fence project, in which he set up four fences like a boxing ring, to be played on stage by Kronos Quartet, is about more than just making fencing-wire vibrate interestingly (though he is always looking for objects that make interesting sounds). Miking a fence for sound interrogates its resonant properties and reveals its metaphorical harmonics. For example when he plays the Dingo Fence he draws our attention to its environmental significance and to the concepts of containment and border. Turning a fence into a musical instrument disrupts its emblematic power. He has performed at the USA-Mexico border and the Separation Fence in the Israeli Occupied Territories, challenging their authority. He engages with the outback—Oodnadatta, the Strzelecki Desert, Wogarno Station—as a mystical, alien, forbidding, even sacred world. Rose is a philosopher and social commentator and his philosophical investigations often start as musical or sonic ones.

Rose encourages people to make sound and one of his most important endeavours, collecting home-made sounds, is given due attention on the CD. There are samples from the Pannikin Project, in which Rose invited do-it-yourself musicians to demonstrate their work and remixed it with his own accompaniment—for example recordings of a shopkeeper repeatedly singing “Thank you very much,” gum-leaf players mimicking bird calls, a whip-cracker, an auctioneer in full cry, a chainsaw orchestra (protesting against logging) and the only department store pianist still working. The Pannikin Project redefines musical performance and acknowledges under-recognised aspects of our culture. Rose’s attitude to sound is highly democratic—anyone can (and should) participate; there’s no distinction between high and low art, and it’s fun!

Rosin includes an excerpt from his radio documentary Syd and George about a lyrebird, with string accompaniment suggesting the kinds of sounds naturally made by the bird, highlighting the concepts of mimicry and sonic representation. We anthropomorphise the lyrebird as a musician, but ironically it is itself a recorder that reproduces samples of sounds it has heard.

There are selections from Rose’s musical performances involving combinations of improvised and notated sound for various ensembles. The high-powered concerto Internal Combustion is scored for improvised violin (dazzlingly played, including fragmentary quotes from Tchaikovsky) and an ensemble playing from a detailed, conventionally notated score, challenging the conventions of concerto composition and performance. There is an excerpt from Charlie’s Whiskers, commissioned from Rose by Slovakian composer Daniel Matej, in which Rose creates competing musical palindromes to pay homage to Charles Ives’ approach to composition. (See RT112 for other Rose/Matej collaborations)

Digger Music is scored for an excavator whose movements are electronically mapped to generate signals that are blended with other sounds including improvised violin. Talking Back to Media, a variant on talk-back radio, employs musicians, a poet and a sound artist and includes samples of horse-race commentary. Multiple competing sound sources represent inner and outer reality—this piece is sonically complex, musical and fascinating.

RRose experiments endlessly with the violin: Violin 3D Model uses a ‘K bow,’ electronically engineered to enable control of sonic output through angle, stroke length and other parameters. In Palimpolin (the title condenses ‘palimpsest’ and ‘violin’), he again uses a modified bow to control sampling, pitch shifting and mediation of the final sound. Such an instrument offers a single performer a sound palette of orchestral proportions. Then there is his Viocycle, a bicycle rigged so that, when moving, it drives a mechanism that engages the strings of a violin mounted to the frame, like a mobile hurdy-gurdy—the player controls the sound by riding at different speeds. Imagine a peloton orchestra!

The CD is well produced and, strangely, CD2 and 3 conclude with an extra track not cited in the booklet, provoking intense curiosity. The secret track on CD2 sounds like a modified cello wonderfully played. The CD3 mystery track is an absorbing melange of amplified, mediated instruments and objects.

On the disc of QuickTime videos is a sample of Rose’s Ball Project which introduces his experiments with volleyballs, rugby-balls and the like to generate sound, thus engaging with society’s obsession with ball-sports and extending his audience for sonic experimentation. Rose fits the balls with sensors that, when in play, send signals to computers that produce audio-visual material, linking the resulting sounds with the player’s actions and shifting the emphasis from winning to music-making. The video on this CD is of a concert audience tossing around a giant beach-ball and enjoying the noises they generate, the ball-game inducing collective activity and awareness.

Most significantly, there is a video of Jon Rose burning to ash a closely-miked violin, an apparently iconoclastic act, perhaps even a strange ritual of renewal. This unique sight and sound of a violin’s cremation is romantically set in the outback at dusk. In fact, there can be no more committed, inventive or insightful experimental composer, sound artist, musician and philosopher of music than Jon Rose, and his impact is worldwide. He continually challenges us and draws us into a world of sound that turns out not only to be accessible but fun and a stimulus to our own creative exploration. While his work betrays the highest level of musicianship, it tells us to listen more attentively to the world and to think more deeply about what sound and music are and what they mean to us.

Can TV advertising be a force for positive change? The question is seemingly answered in the affirmative in Pablo Larrain’s No.

No is a docudrama set in 1988, when the Chilean people were invited to choose whether free elections would be held or whether the Pinochet dictatorship would stay in power for eight more years (the No of the title indicating a no vote to more Pinochet). As Larrain indicates, the vote was initially seen as a charade, but the authorities soon found themselves with a real fight on their hands.

Like many comparable Australian productions—from Newsfront (1978) to Balibo (2009)—No interweaves archival footage with supposed glimpses “behind the scenes.” Gael Garcia Bernal plays the youthful, skateboard-riding advertising hotshot René Saavedra, who reluctantly agrees to join the “No” campaign, a coalition of progressive groups permitted to broadcast for 15 minutes each day.

Though barely political, René is a man in tune with the times: in the opening sequence we see him proudly unveiling his latest American-style soft drink commercial, where close-ups of the product alternate with images of a clean-cut pop singer performing to an ecstatic crowd. His “No” campaign relies on the same aesthetic, favouring abstract euphoria—street parties, picnicking families, inexplicable mimes—rather than depressing torture statistics or statements from relatives of the disappeared. René’s activist wife (Antonia Zegers) is baffled by the approach. “Who are all these people laughing, celebrating, singing?” she wonders. “What country are you dreaming of?”

Essentially a satirist, Larrain shares some of this scepticism toward pop culture. The fundamentals of advertising may not have changed a quarter-century on, but even the most naïve viewer is liable to regard the clips from the “No” campaign—genuine period pieces, fictionally attributed to René—as dated and naff.

The “Yes” advertisements of the government depend on a more traditional, monumental species of kitsch, appealing to national pride with heroic shots of container ships and the beaming general himself. Advertising, it seems, is a language capable of banalising any message: the fact that this language was pioneered by radical filmmakers—from Eisenstein to Bruce Conner—may be part of Larrain’s ironic point.

Further paradoxes arise from Larrain’s decision to shoot on 1980s U-Matic video, with all its technical limitations: murky colour, blown-out backgrounds, minimal depth of field. Though his pseudo-documentary technique contrasts with the rapid-fire editing of the “No” spots, his aim is to create a seamless transition between the two, placing fake reality on the same level as authentic propaganda.

Indeed, René is such an elusive, depthless figure he could himself be a character from an ad. In many ways he resembles the CIA agent played by Ben Affleck in Argo (2012): both are technically-minded tricksters, boyish yet reserved, skulking behind their respective beards. Both reveal their humanity chiefly through their love for their young sons, a form of scriptwriting shorthand that smacks of commercial formula: shove a kid in there, and the viewer will have something to really care about.

But though Larrain is not above manipulating his audience, his depiction of admen as heroes still carries an ambiguous subtext. Some kind of tipping point is reached when the “Yes” campaign resorts to parodying its opposition—so that joyous dancers, for example, turn out to be Marxist terrorists in disguise. At this stage, politics appears to have evaporated; what remains is simply a battle between two sets of images, waged in a void.

Much as Argo both celebrates and mocks the American wishful thinking represented by Hollywood, No’s conception of advertising-as-dream is open to varying readings. Chilean audiences might understand the film as a nostalgic evocation of a moment when anything seemed possible; more cynically, the emphasis on marketing as a means of swaying popular opinion might be taken to imply that the hope of democracy in Chile was unreal from the outset.

At home, the film has been criticised for its failure to credit the role played by grassroots activism in drumming up support for the “No” vote. Also skated over is the fact—confirmed in recently declassified documents—that the US government had by this time reversed its earlier positive stance on Pinochet, fearing that resentment of his regime would catalyse the radical left. Not only was financial aid provided for the “No” campaign, but media consultants were dispatched from Washington to assist. Had Larrain chosen to dramatise this scenario, No would be a whole other movie—though it would likely have ended in the same ambivalent way.

opal vapour, jade dewi tyas tunggal, mobile states

The Mobile States touring alliance continues to join the dots across the country adding new partners every year. First up for 2013, travelling to eight venues—north, south, east and west—is Jade Dewi Tyas Tunggal’s Opal Vapour, a dance and video work made in collaboration with singer/composer Ria Soemardjo and lighting designer Paula van Beek. Opal Vapour has been developed between Australia and Indonesia and explores elements of Javanese Wayang Kulit shadow puppetry and performance rituals.
Mobile States Tour: Vitalstatistix, Adelaide, May 8-12; Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, May 15-18; Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart, May 22-25; Centre of Contemporary Arts, Cairns, May 28-29; Mackay Entertainment Centre, May 31-June 1; Visy Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse, June 5-8; Canberra Street Theatre,?June 14-15; Blacktown Arts Centre,?June 19-22; http://performinglines.org.au/productions/opal-vapour/; http://opalvapour.com.au/

gemeinboeck & saunders, velonaki, ingram, artspace

As ISEA2013 draws nearer Sydneysiders might find the city increasingly overrun by robots—Artspace’s ISEA-satellite exhibition marks the advent of the invasion. Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders will literally infest the gallery walls with playfully destructive robots while New Zealand artist Simon Ingram’s robots will engage in repainting it. Mari Velonaki will take a philosophical approach exploring the concept of the ‘uncanny valley,’ [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley ] pitting one of Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro humanoid robots against a snowman. (See RT111 and RT93.)
ISEA satellite exhibition, Artspace, Sydney, May 2-June 16; http://www.artspace.org.au/gallery_upcoming.php

composition to movement festival, creative practice lab, unsw

Alister Spence and Nalina Wait, Composition to Movement Festival, Creative Practice Lab, UNSW

As part of Vivid Sydney, the Creative Practice Lab at the University of New South Wales is producing a mini-festival focusing on collaboration, in particular the relationship between dance and music. The three day event includes a key note lecture by Ross Harley (the new Dean of CoFA); a concert by the Australia Ensemble featuring a new collaboration between choreographer Sue Healey and composer John Peterson; a day of workshops in which you can watch the collaborative process in action; and a final presentation of explorations by dancer Nalina Wait with pianist Alister Spence and saxophonist Sandy Evans, and choreographer-dancer Martin del Amo with sound artists Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey.
UNSW: Creative Practice Lab, School of Arts & Media: Composition to Movement Festival, Io Myers Studio, Clancy Auditorium and various UNSW venues, Sydney, May 24-26, part of Vivid Sydney
http://sam.arts.unsw.edu.au/c2m/

eve and eve, rebecca agnew, 24hr art

In a set constructed from fruitcake and jelly (amongst other things), Rebecca Agnew has created a stop motion animation, Eve and Eve, telling the tale of two women in paradise. There is the inevitable downfall, paradise is lost and somehow a suicide bomber becomes involved. The mysteries of this painstakingly constructed work will be revealed at 24HR Art in an exhibition suite which also includes pieces by Agnieszka Golda & Martin Johnson, Mark Daniel and Gareth Jenkins. Check out Agnew’s website for some captivating images and video clips.
Eve and Eve, Rebecca Agnew, 24HR Art, Darwin, May 3; http://www.24hrart.org.au/

r&j, expressions dance company, national tour

R&J is a re-interpretation of Shakespeare’s famous love story choreographed by Expressions Dance Company director Natalie Weir. After a successful premiere performance in 2011 and a South Australian outing, the show is now in the middle of an 18-venue regional tour of Tasmania, Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. Weir approaches the tale using three stories set in different eras to convey the universality of the romantic narrative. Music is composed by John Babbage and has been recorded by Topology.
Expressions Dance Company and Queensland Performing Arts Centre: R&J, choreographer Natalie Weir; various venues; April 26-June 8; check website for venue information http://www.expressionsdancecompany.org.au/rj-tour-2013/rj-tour-2013/

living in the ruins of the 21st century, uts gallery

Buckminster Fuller’s Anne’s Taj Mahal on fire, Montreal, 20 May 1976, from Cabinet Issue 32, Fire

Teaming up with the über cool New York magazine Cabinet, curators Adam Jasper and Holly Williams are presenting a contemporary wunderkammer that draws “together objects from art, science and ethnography in a celebration of the profound and the mundane” (website). The exhibition includes works by over 20 Australian and international artists including Tracey Moffatt, David Haines & Joyce Hinterding, the Institute of Critical Zoologists, Jaki Middleton & David Lawrey and Alex Gawronski as well as objects on loan from The Macleay Museum, MONA and Leipzig’s Stasi Museum. The exhibition will be contextualised by a reading room of Cabinet publications claimed to be the only complete collection in Australia, offering different thematic trajectories through the exhibition.
Living in the ruins of the 21st Century, UTS Gallery, Sydney, until May 17; http://livingintheruins.net; http://www.art.uts.edu.au/gallery/current/current.html

friday nights, metro arts

In Brisbane, Metro Arts’ Friday Night program fully embraces the current cultural focus on audience engagement. Once a month audiences are invited to sample all the creative activities, at various stages of development, inhabiting the building. The May instalment offers a sneak peek of physical performer Caroline Dunphy’s collaboration with Shane Thompson Architects titled Hanako, “a theatrical, cinematic and sensory experience inspired by Hanjo, a modern Noh play written by Yukio Mishima” (press release); Exist’s Cold Metal, inspired by “the theatre of black Metal music” (press release) featuring Stasis Duo and Alrey Batol; and The Psychology Project, by dancer Liesel Zink and psychology researcher Rohan Kapitany (see RT109); Anastasia Booth’s exhibition Crude Tools, Feeble Actions and lots more.
Friday Night: May, Metro Arts, Brisbane, May 3; full program available here; www.metroarts.com.au

hatched & digital now, pica

Shan Turner-Carroll, Shan, from the series Primal Crown, 2012, The Doctor Harold Schenberg Art Prize winner, Hatched, PICA

Photographer Shan Turner-Carroll has been announced as the winner of The Doctor Harold Schenberg Art Prize, part of PICA’s Hatched: National Graduate Show which features 37 artists from 20 art schools across Australia. As part of the public program Associate Professor Michele Wilson will present Digital Now, an illustrated lecture drawing on her research exploring “engagements with and through technologies and how these influence our understanding of ourselves, our social relations and social practices” (website).
Hatched: National Graduate Show 2013, PICA, Perth, until June 9, digital Now, May 8, http://www.pica.org.au/

natalie abbott, physical fractals, pact

One of several impressive works by emerging choreographers in Dance Massive 2013 was Natalie Abbott’s Physical Fractals. Varia Karipoff wrote “The performance…messes with our personal sense of gravity and our concept of space” (see DM feature). Physical Fractals is particular interesting for its integration of live sound manipulated by Daniel Arnott. Sydney audiences now get a chance to experience this work at PACT Centre for Emerging Artists. Complimenting the season will be the second installment of PACT’s Saturday Sessions, an informal discussion series about experimental practice, this time focusing on “dance and daily choreographies.”
Natalie Abbott, Physical Fractals, dancers Natalie Abbott, Rebecca Jensen PACT, Erskineville, May 1-10; Saturday Session #2, May 4, 5-6.30pm; http://www.pact.net.au/2013/04/month-of-dance/

no child, nilaja sun, theatre works

2012 Melbourne International Art Festival audiences appreciated US writer-performer Nilaja Sun’s No Child so much that she’s decided to do a return season, this time at Theatreworks. No Child draws on Sun’s experiences as a drama teacher in some of New York’s toughest schools, “depict[ing] the battle-ground that US public education has become” (press release). You can see a promo of Sun’s super energetic and entertaining performance here.
No Child, Nilaja Sun, Theatreworks, Melbourne, May 7-26,
http://www.theatreworks.org.au/whatson/event/?id=136

shadowlife, bendigo art gallery

courtesy of the artist, Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane, and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne

Curated by Natalie King and Djon Mundine, Shadowlife explores the “spirit” of photography as implied by the Arnhem Land Djambarrpuyngu word “Wungguli.” It features provocative work by nine leading Australian Aboriginal artists (and one non-indigenous collaborator)—Vernon Ah Kee, Bindi Cole, Brenda L Croft, Destiny Deacon & Virginia Fraser, Fiona Foley, Gary Lee, Michael Riley, Ivan Sen and Christian Thompson. Shadowlife aims to “embrace moving image and photography with all its directness, theatricality and immediacy by confronting stereotypes and acting out scenarios” (press release). Co-presented by Asialink the exhibition will also tour internationally.
Shadowlife, Bendigo Art Gallery, Bendigo, until July 28; http://www.bendigoartgallery.com.au/Exhibitions/Current_Exhibitions/Shadowlife

uta uber kool ja, army of love, judith wright centre

Experiencing the decadent pleasures of Uta and George as part of Fringe World, Astrid Francis wrote: “With dress-ups, dancing, party games and more spandex than this side of 1985 has seen, Uta celebrates the launch of her remixed single. The guests revel in the sheer hedonism that is Uta—a blend of Eddie and Pats with a touch of Marianne Faithfull” (RT114). Now Brisbane audiences are invited to the exclusive party taking place in the Judith Wright Centre’s studio apartments!
Uta Uber Kool Ja, Army of Love, Judith Wright Centre, Brisbane, May 8-18; http://judithwrightcentre.com/event/uta_uber_kool_ja

arts house season 1, 2014

Arts House is currently calling for expressions of interest to develop or present work as part of their 2014 Season 1 at the North Melbourne Town Hall, Warehouse or the Meat Market. Financial support up to $12,000 (including in-kind venue support) is offered for CultureLAB developments and up to $30,000 (including in-kind venue support) for full presentations. Interested applicants should discuss their project with Arts House staff prior to applying
Applications close May 31 http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/ArtsHouse/fundinggrants/Pages/Fundingandgrants.aspx

revelation perth international film festival

The people at Revelation appreciate that for non-residents Perth can seem a long way away and so for the fifth year they are offering travel fellowships that will provide a festival gold pass, access to seminars and workshops, and a $1,000 re-imbursement for travel costs plus more. Applications are invited from “filmmakers, academics, craftspeople or film-lovers” (website).
Deadline 24 May; http://www.revelationfilmfest.org/go/travel/travel-fellowship

exploring modular synthesis workshop & aws, wired lab

Wired Lab, based in Cootamundra, regional NSW will be host to UK multi-disciplinary artist and “synthesist” Russell Haswell. Together with Wired Lab founder Dave Burraston, they will be running a two-day Modular Synthesis workshop May 18-19. Through its Artist Workshop Scheme, Wired Lab is offering 10-15 emerging or mid-career artists financial assistance to travel and take part in the activities.
Applications for workshop & AWS due May 6: more info http://wiredlab.org

the 2013 hive production fund

The Hive (supported by Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund, Australia Council for the Arts, ABC Arts and Screen Australia) is currently calling for proposals from artists and filmmakers for the production of documentary, hybrid and drama projects to be premiered at the 2015 Adelaide Film Festival and broadcast on ABC TV. Applications are sought from teams that include an established director or co-director and an experienced film producer. The total funding pool is $800,000 with a feature film funded for up $450,000 and a half-hour documentary/hybrid work up to $150,000.
Applications due May 13; more info http://www.adelaidefilmfestival.org/default.asp?contentID=353

arstpace curatorial fellowship

Aimed at the professional development of an early career visual arts curator, Artspace (with the support of the Australia Council for the Arts) is offering a 12-month curatorial fellowship starting June 2013. As well as fulfilling a role similar to an assistant curator the curatorial fellow will also have the opportunity to develop a key project.
Applications close May 8; http://www.artspace.org.au/content/pdf/Curatorial_Fellow_Description.pdf

channels video art festival

There’s a new kid on the media art biennial block— Channels Video Art Festival. Run by Rachel Feery, Jessie Scott and Eugenia Lim, it will take place in Melbourne Sept 18-21 at ACMI, Screen Space and Speak Easy. The team are already leaking the news of special installations commissioned from Ms&Mr and Benjamin Ducroz. The festival is currently calling for entries of “video art that both knows its past and has a mark to make on the future” (website).
Deadline June 1; more info http://www.channelsfestival.net.au/

proximity festival

Nikki Jones and audience
member, Ush and Them, Proximity
Micro Festival of One-on-One Art

Proximity is a Perth-based festival focussing on one-on-one performance and experiences. The first manifestation in 2012 included beard fondling, a game of strip poker, a private hoofer viewing, a three-minute shower and a slow cooked meal (to get the gist see Laetitia Wilson’s review RT108). Festival curators James Berlyn and Sarah Rowbottam are now calling for proposals for the 2013 manifestation.
Deadline May 17; http://proximityfestival.com/

heartlands refugee art prize

Applications are sought from refugees who have arrived in Australia since 1970 for the Heartlands Refugee Art Prize. There is a prize pool of $20,000 ($12,000 going to the overall winner) and the theme for this year’s competition is “I wish to see…” The award is run by Multicultural Arts Victoria in partnership with Parks Victoria, VicHealth and the Victorian Multicultural, and the shortlisted entries will be exhibited in fortyfivedownstairs June 18-29, as part of Refugee Week, with further presentations later in the year.
Applications close May 10; more information http://www.multiculturalarts.com.au/events2013/heartlands.shtml

hidden: rookwood cemetery sculpture walk

Afterimage, Lyndal Hargrave and Sue Henderson, HIDDEN: Rookwood Cemetery Sculpture Walk

Since 2009 Rookwood, the largest cemetery in Australia, has been host to HIDDEN, a sculpture walk that aims to reposition the site as “a place rich in heritage, history, culture” rather than just for “funerals and memorials” (website). The exhibition takes place September 21-October 31 and the call for entries is now open. There is a non-acquisitive Rookwood Necropolis Sculpture Award valued at $10,000 with range of smaller prizes as well.
Application deadline May 6; more info http://www.hidden.rookwoodcemetery.com.au/

reason for travelling

Living in Brussels for 18months as the Project Manager, IETM (International Network for Contemporary Performing Arts) Australia Council Collaboration Project.

that art attraction

It is not for no reason that expatriate artists from around the world gravitate to Brussels. Second only to Berlin for easy living and arts stimulation, Brussels is a mecca for performing arts in particular. The healthy competition between the Flemish and Wallonian communities that share the capital leads to a disproportionate number of arts institutions, festivals and events. The fact that the arts funding system remains relatively generous at a time when large swathes of Europe are going belly-up adds to Brussels’ attractions for international artists, as do the non-discriminatory criteria for who can gain access to funding and benefits.

The geography of Brussels is one of its major strengths, as it sits an easy 90 minutes from Paris on the train, 30 minutes from Lille, two hours from London and Amsterdam and six from Berlin. The confluence of countless European networks with their headquarters in Brussels (not least IETM), creates many opportunities for artist mobility and most of the Belgian presenters are part of schemes that ensure the best international programming finds its way to Brussels sooner or later. Brussels’ laid back, slightly chaotic feel is one of the things that surprised me most and I have greatly enjoyed exploring the multicultural mix of the many neighbourhoods that make up the city. Eating and drinking in Brussels is superb and affordable too. Shame that the skies seem to be grey for ten months of the year.

for culture

Brussels is awash with impressive arts institutions and some of the big ones represent the best that Europe can offer. BOZAR, in the city centre, is a multi-faceted space with an enticing gallery offering big artists like Watteau and smaller, commissioned studio activities, often themed around EU projects such as the Francis Bacon exhibit to celebrate the current Irish Presidency of the EU. BOZAR programs contemporary, world and classical music in venues that also host theatre and dance. As is the case with most Belgian arts houses, the offer for families is extraordinary and we have relished the regular Sunday morning programming for kids as well as the themed Family Days.

Kunstenfestivaldesarts is the annual performing arts festival that unites Flemish and French speaking communities and offers cutting-edge work from around the world over two weeks in May. You can buy a pass for 150 Euros and knock yourself out.

ArsMusica is an ambitious contemporary music festival that takes over the wonderful Flagey Arts Centre in Ixelles. Flagey also has a year-round program of music, cinema and spoken word.

The Kaaitheater, Beurschouwburg, Les Brigitinnes and KVS present contemporary theatre, dance and performance, with innovative programming ideas like Kaaitheater’s Burning Ice festival of ecologically themed work or Beurs’ invitation to artists to curate a month long program of visual, screen, lecture and performance works.

Recyclart is a funky underground space that programs workshops and community events and hosts DJs and bands from around the world. Les Ateliers Claus is a subversive institution and L’Ancien Belgique manages to balance big name bands with quirky mini-festivals.

PassaPorta is an extraordinary literary organisation with an annual festival, artists in residence and regular talks from international writers—in all sorts of languages.

In the visual arts, WIELS is a large three storey space in a former brewery that hosts artists in residence as well as events such as EXISTENZ, a program of live art. Private galleries such as Villa Empain and Maison Particuliere are thrilling discoveries and the Horta Museum is a gem of art nouveau architecture, beautifully preserved. In March, the city runs Museum Night Fever, a long night of events across 23 museums and of course there is the inevitable Nuit Blanche in October when the galleries are open all night.

for refreshment

Brussels has a huge offering of bars and cafes where you can enjoy the hundreds of varieties of Belgian beer. Traditional spots, such as A La Morte Subite remain frozen in time with their tarnished mirrors, cheese-on-stick snacks and mind-boggling lists of gueuzes, lambics, trappists and, my personal favourite, fruit beers.

Modern drinking holes include the deco Belga Café on the Place Flagey in Ixelles. Day or night, this place is always buzzing and brunch on a weekend, after a visit to the produce market on the square, is another personal Brussels highlight.

The plat du jour option offered by most brasseries at lunchtime is a great option for the traveller, enabling you to sample the more upmarket eateries for a fraction of the à la carte cost. A lovely spot in the picturesque Galleries Hubert is L’Ogenblik where the 11 Euro lunch dish is usually a Flemish special such as Chicons Gratins or Stoemp.

A trip to Brussels is not complete without moules and frites and any of the many restaurants around the Place St Catherine offer a steaming pot of mussels. If you are on a budget join those standing at the bar of Noordzee, a fish-shop on the same square, whose white wine, fish soup and crispy croquettes are hugely popular, especially on a warm summer evening. Even more skint? Head to a fritkot, the ubiquitous hot chip stands and join the city-wide debate about which one reigns supreme.

other highlights

The proximity of Ghent, Bruges and Antwerp make for great day trips, especially as weekend train tickets are half price and no journey is over an hour. Those who enjoy nature can head to the Ardennes for some walking and sea lovers can head north to Oostend where a Marvin Gaye inspired headphone tour illuminates this rather forbidding resort. In Ypres the In Flanders Fields Museum commemorating World War I is shattering; the Herge Museum in Louvain-la-Neuve is fun, and of course, everyone must have their Waterloo.

links

Sophie Travers is a Scottish born performing arts producer, based in Brussels till July 2013, at which point she will return to Melbourne where she has been living for over a decade, running gallusarts.com.

Vicki Van Hout, Slow Dances for Fast Times, choreographer Martin del Amo, Carriageworks

In RealTime114, our writers tumble Alice-like into the rabbit hole of arts festivals. First stop, a cavernous ballroom populated by Melbourne’s Dance Massive, the Adelaide and Perth Festivals and dances in Sydney and Bangkok. Our mirror neurons fire, limbs twitch and fingers glide across keyboards. Next, we’re through a door to a wonderland of Tweedle-Dee Tweedle-Dum international arts festivals and their Mad Hatter kin—Bristol’s In Between Time, Brisbane Powerhouse’s World Theatre Festival and Perth’s Fringe World—all crying out, “Eat me! Eat me!” Ingesting so much art we grow huge, bounding over oceans to ideas-and–action Tea Parties—The 8th Flying Circus Project (FCP) in Myanmar and Singapore, and the World Symposium on Global Encounters in South-East Asian Performing Arts in Bangkok. Out we pop, home, informed, inspired and over-excited, already anticipating the next hallucinatory experience—the Cheshire Cat IT magic of ISEA2013 in Sydney. We need inspiration—we’ve lamentably found ourselves in a very different hole. An international survey has dropped Australia from 9th to 18th in terms of IT accessibility and innovation—simply put, it costs Australians too much to innovate. Off with our heads! But we’ll keep dancing—with Bangarra’s Blak, which includes a new work by young Indigenous choreographer Daniel Riley McKinley, and Lemi Ponifasio’s mindbending Birds with Sky Mirrors at Carriageworks where Vicki Van Hout (pictured here) wowed us in March, dancing to the Jimi Hendrix version of Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower in Martin del Amo’s Slow Dances for Fast Times. Back into the rabbit hole!

Brooke Stamp, Rennie McDougall, Deanne Butterworth, And All Things Return to Nature Tomorrow, Phillip Adams’ BalletLab

THE EYES OF BALLETLAB PERFORMERS HAVE A UNIQUE QUALITY. THERE IS A STRANGE, DISTANT, SATISFIED WORLD BEHIND THEM. STRANGE IN ITS EXOTICISCM, DISTANT IN ITS MYSTERY, SATISFIED IN ITS METHOD.

In a work like Amplification (RT102), this quality suggested the serious certainty of mortality—death being exotic, mysterious and inevitably methodical. In a work like Aviary (RT106), this quality infused the occasionally maddening ornithology with an equally maddeningly convincing internal logic—the kind of logic that is masked, impenetrable and yet undeniable. In a work like Miracle (RT93), this quality suited the transcendental mysticism to a tee—is there anyone as strange, distant and satisfied as someone on a higher plane of consciousness?

And All Things Return to Nature Tomorrow is a double bill of works by Brooke Stamp and Phillip Adams that both make full use of the BalletLab corps. Thematically, the works feel linked to Miracle. They are cosmological, ritualistic and transcendental.

Brooke Stamp’s And All Things Return to Nature kicks off the evening in full house lights. We are seated in an unevenly weighted square, where two sides are stacked with audients and two sides are made of only single rows. Above the stage are suspended 16 cymbals that form a golden circle of circles, a halo of musical vibration. The dancers are clad in high fashion sportswear by Susan Dimasi—part Nike the brand, part Nike the goddess. As visual signposts, the design elements point the way clearly enough: this will not be proscenium theatre, we will encounter the celestial, we will be party to mysticism dressed in high technology fibres.

Initially, the dancers move in isolation. They are transfixed by their own paths through space, uninterested in the other, wrapped in the self. Their gentle vocalisations suggest chants, incantations, mantras. Garth Paine’s intensely detailed composition picks these sounds up and layers them, forming a cascading aural blanket of indiscernibility.

As the dancers draw together, Stamp’s choreography echoes one of Phillip Adams’ stylistic touchstones with a prolonged sequence of action—in this case, a shuffling unison of steps. As the four performers stretch from a line to a diamond to a square, the squeak of their sneakers against the floor becomes a lulling certainty. Though their steps never break the unified rhythm, their faces betray some deeper meaning. At times, their eyes subtly shift focus and lose clarity. The strange, distant, satisfied world vacates them and one sees the struggle, the striving and the searching. Higher planes are hard work.

Matthew Day, Phillip Adams; And All Things Return to Nature Tomorrow, Phillip Adams’ BalletLab

In Tomorrow by Phillip Adams, the eyes are back on full beam. Entering naked, the performers build a stage of swags, stones, fluorescent twine, reflectors and audience members. We are courting UFOs, constructing a landing pad and hoping for ascension in the form of abduction. The eyes, the nudity and the whispered intimacies with the front rows set up a peculiar dynamic of compelling coerciveness. What are you willing to do in the safe confines of a theatre with a hundred witnesses? When you look into a naked man’s eyes and see an exotic, mysterious and assured alternative world, will you follow him? It is to BalletLab’s credit that we do. They have created a cult with nothing more than their eyes.

Phillip Adams’ BalletLab, And All Things Return to Nature Tomorrow, direction & choreography Brooke Stamp & Phillip Adams, performers Phillip Adams, Brooke Stamp, Deanne Butterworth, Rennie McDougall, Matthew Day, composer Garth Paine, set design Matthew Bird (Architect), fashion & design Susan Dimasi (Materialbyproduct), lighting Robin Fox, Southbank Theatre, The Lawler, Melbourne, March 15-23

ISEA2013 IS COMING TO TOWN, A FEAST OF IDEAS AND EXHIBITIONS FOCUSED ON ELECTRONIC TECHNOLOGIES AND THEIR EVER INCREASING PRESENCE IN OUR LIVES AND OUR ART, SUCH THAT WE ARE FREQUENTLY TOLD “RESISTANCE IS FUTILE”—WHICH IS THIS YEAR’S ISEA THEME.

For media artists and media arts academics and anyone intrigued by the impact of new technologies on communication, creativity, culture and ethics, the ISEA [International Society of Electronic Arts] Symposium is a critical, annual, international event, a merging of conference, exhibitions, performances and workshops. Each year since 1988 it’s been held in a different city, for example Nagoya, 2002 (RT53), Singapore 2008 (RT88), Istanbul in 2011 (RT106) and Albuquerque (RT113).

ISEA2013’s director Jonathan Parsons, an experienced festival director and late appointee to this role, just manages to exude his usual clear-eyed charm and good humour under pressure of pulling together a massive event .

Parsons tells me that each city presents the overall event in terms of its own vision and theme. The theme for Sydney is “Resistance is Futile” and the vision for the event extends from Sydney Harbor to the University of Technology, from Carriageworks in Redfern to Campbelltown Arts Centre. Presented by the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT), ISEA 2013 is supported by the Australia Council and—to enable a connection between ISEA and the Sydney Opera House’s Vivid—by Destination NSW.

21 years on

The aim of ISEA, founded in the Netherlands in 1990, is to encourage “interdisciplinary exchange among culturally diverse organisations and individuals working with art, science and technology” (press release). The event was last held in Sydney in 1992. For Parsons it’s a timely return 21 years on. In the 1990s the ‘new’ in ‘new media’ was still meaningful. “Now,” says Parsons, “I think the phenomenon has become all-pervasive to the point where it’s so much part of the fabric of our lives that we’re starting not to notice it. I think that’s an interesting thing in itself to investigate.”

It’s not only that new media are embedded in our lives, but our engagement with them, says Parsons, has matured. Consequently, he’s very pleased with ISEA’s association with Vivid Lights. “Vivid Lights [that aspect of Vivid that lights up the city in unusual and innovative ways. Eds] is an expression of things that could only have been imagined in 1992. They’re quite mainstream now. But that kind of data mapping and its projection were largely only in people’s imaginations back then.”

submission or resistance?

As for this year’s theme, Parsons is clear: “The intention is to trigger discussion. Is the statement about the futility of resistance true? Or how much of it is true? There’s a certain sense of humour to it too. It’s a line that’s been used by many scriptwriters in countless science fiction movies and TV series.” I point out that every time the issue of internet censorship is raised, a host of voices will declare that it’s impossible. “Exactly,” says Parsons, “It’s led to one of the ISEA sub-themes, “resistance is fertile,” a useful counterpoint in the current context.

shaping the event

ISEA is spread over 10 days across greater Sydney. I ask Parsons about the shape of the event. “The core is the conference and certainly the program developed out of that in a number of ways. One of them entails a classic festival strategy: the opportunity for a number of cultural partners and institutions in Sydney to take advantage of the opportunity of having leading thinkers and practitioners in this field coming to the conference, and building on that by presenting their ideas and works publicly.

“Certainly my role has been to both harness that energy and support different cultural organisations to present what they want to do. That’s included an extensive call for proposals from Australia and internationally. So partnerships and invitations have informed the curatorial framework for the program. There’s a continuum with pre-existing programs, like the Anne Landa New Media Arts Award exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW and Experimenta’s Speak to Me touring show through to projects we’ve curated and are producing ourselves.”

ideas in words: conference & talks

The ISEA Symposium this year is co-chaired by Ross Harley (College of Fine Arts, UNSW) and Cathy Cleland (University of Sydney) who, Parsons says, “have been driving the final selection of papers and presenters. On one level it’s an academic conference so certain processes need to be adhered to in terms of making sure that all the papers are published afterwards and there’s a peer-review process for selection into the conference. We’re providing administrative support. Where I’ve become involved is in the crossover territory—like the selection of keynote speakers. But the conference is just part of a range of talks programs that we’re presenting. The other key component is the Vivid Ideas program.”

The three-day ISEA2013 Symposium features 200 speakers and eight keynote addresses “from global leaders in the fields of art, science, technology, media and communications” on topics including “bio-art, data visualisation, robotics, augmented realities and urban and virtual ecologies” (press release). The ISEA conference keynote speaker is pioneering US media artist Michael Naimark who “has made interactive ‘moviemaps’ and stereo-panoramic movies around the world, ranging from Aspen, Paris and San Francisco to Angkor, Jerusalem and Timbuktu,” exploring “‘place representation’ and its impact on culture” (press release). Professor of Experimental Psychology and Fellow and Tutor in Psychology, Pembroke College, University of Oxford, Brian Rogers will speak on “Perception, Art & Illusion.”

Speaking at Vivid Ideas will be Paul Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico (The Hacking Monopolism Trilogy), “whose infamous online project Face to Facebook involved stealing one million Facebook profiles, filtering them with face-recognition software, and posting them on a custom-made dating website” (press release). Vivid Ideas takes place on the first weekend of ISEA. Parsons says, “the opportunity to work with Vivid was a chance to offer more public presentations, appealing to a broader audience than the conference does.

Other speakers include Stelarc, Mark Hosler of Negativland (US), Kate Chapman (Australia) and Genevieve Bell (Australia/US), Director of Interaction and Experience at Intel Labs—and, says Parsons, an anthropologist by training whom Intel thought might have something to say about the engagement with technology.

ideas realised: exhibitions

Ryoji Ikeda, data.tron [8k enhanced version], audiovisual installation, 2008-09, © Ryoji Ikeda

The ISEA centrepiece is Ryoji Ikeda’s Datamatics (see cover image) in the huge main theatre at Carriageworks. Parsons thinks some Sydney-siders will remember Ryoji Ikeda from his performances as part of Dumb Type in the 1990s. “Since then,” says Parsons, “he’s moved into solo practice. Sydney has not seen any of his major installation work.”

Ikeda’s test pattern will also have a one-off presentation, again at Carriageworks. Parsons describes it as “a performance that as an audience you can drop in and out of. It’s an even more intense experience than Datamatics. That will be happening on the Friday June 7 as a one-off. It’s our kick-off really for the ISEA’s 10 days and then everything else at Carriageworks, including the installation, will happen from the Saturday night.”

I’m curious about the nature of the Ikeda experience which Parson describes as “intensely visual, and the sound as much a part of it as the visual. The sheer scale assists with this. I can assure you that Ryoji Ikeda absolutely works on the immersive level. There’s quite a refined aesthetic in the work—black and white—a connection with his heritage in Japanese culture.” As well as representing the entwining of tradition and the new, Parsons sees Ikeda as central to the “‘big data’ issue—is data visualisation an artistic practice or not? Certainly it’s true that a lot of artists are becoming interested in that field. To me, Ryoji Ikeda’s work is the ultimate in data visualisation. It’s absolutely about art, purely about the aesthetic quality for which the data and the code can be utilised by him as an artist. It’s not about the content.”

The extensive exhibitions program features works by 150 artists from Australia and around the world. At Carriageworks, Sydney artist Alex Davies will stage Very Near Future, “a large scale mixed reality/interactive cinema installation which will question what is real or virtual, fact or fiction (press release).” At the same venue, Performance Space will present John A Douglas’ Body Fluid II (Redux) (RT106; p44) “ a performance and video installation in which the artist presents the monotony of his daily dialysis treatment as a sublime act of self-transformation.”

Artspace will feature engaging robotics by Mari Velonaki (Australia)—involving a very human humanoid robot; Petra Gemeinboeck & Rob Saunders (Australia)—“an infestation [by] a colony of curious, social machines hidden within the Artspace gallery walls”; and Simon Ingram (New Zealand)—“a cluster of machines paint live in the space through an operational system run remotely by the artist in Auckland.”

Catching Light is an exhibition staged by Campbelltown Arts Centre which has “brought together five creative innovators from the analogue and early digital eras to mentor, collaborate and exchange ideas with five ‘new generation’ artists from various disciplines—art, sound and performance—who have a practice reliant on engagement. The teams are Linda Dement & Kelly Doley; Tom Ellard & Paul Greedy; Troy Innocent & Benjamin Kolaitis; Stephen Jones & Pia van Gelder; and Wade Marynowsky & Michael Candy.”

Parsons says of the Running the City exhibition, “It looks in a different way at the resistance theme, about just how this technological work is becoming integrated into the urban fabric, especially via portable devices. What does this technology allow us to uncover or connect to in the city in different ways? Felicity Fenner is the curator and the artists are a mix of Australian and international exploring the theme in a range of different ways. Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba is a Japanese-American of Vietnamese background, an amazing video artist who was here a few years ago with a beautiful work featuring fishermen pulling rickshaws underwater (Towards the Complex—for the Courageous, the Curious and the Cowards, 2001; RT46). This time his work is very playful. It’s set up like a jukebox and people are able to choose a video of someone running through different cities in the world.” The other artists are Richard Goodwin (Australia), Volker Kuchelmeister (Australia), Laurent Gutierrez + Valerie Portefaix (MAP Office; Hong Kong), Brad Miller and Ian McArthur (Australia) and Marnix de Nijs (the Netherlands).

Vivid Lights and Experimenta’s Speak to Me will feature Human Effect by Yandell Walton (Australia) in an urban laneway: “Flowering vines twine up pipes and moss and ferns spread across walls, while vividly coloured butterflies alight on window ledges. Echoing ages before human habitation, this scene entices viewers to move closer—only to see the new life wither and slowly die, destroyed by the human presence. The habitat is renewed once more in a riot of foliage and motion as viewers move away” (press release). The rest of Experimenta’s Speak to me (RT112) will be installed at the Powerhouse Museum.

Other exhibitions, says Parsons, cover emerging talent. “The Depot program for example is more grass roots, more underground. It was important for me to create various access points for a range of practices and also for artists at various stages of their careers.”

ideas embodied: performance & participation

As well as Ikeda’s test pattern (a work you’ll be inside rather than simply looking at) there will be a variety of performances including electronic music in NEW WAVE: SOUND presented by Seymour Centre and Vivid Sydney in association with ISEA featuring The Noise, Infinity room, Frostbyte and Collarbones.

A range of performances and workshops in ISEA2013 reveal the diversity of participatory involvement enabled by technologies old and and new. Perth’s tactical media art group pvi collective will take over the streets of Darlinghurst with Deviator: “immerse yourself in an outdoor game experience and become an urban ‘deviator,’ temporarily transforming the city into a playground” (press release).

In his review of the music program of the Adelaide Festival, Chris Reid describes Jason Sweeney’s Stereopublic (Crowdsourcing the Quiet), as “an absolute delight for its gentleness and its ability to make you think about sound and listen for it. Sweeney guides participants on a walking tour of city sites with particular sonic characteristics…This is relational art, from which a small community with a new awareness is born, each walking-tour group forming a bond in Trappist monk-like silence.” Stereopublic’s “Earwitnesses” will each receive a soundwork and their “city-specific location will be placed on an ever-growing virtual soundmap of Sydney” (press release).

Other events include Carbon Arts’ The City Data Slam featuring leading national and international data art practitioners, while dLux MediaArts and Dorkbot’s Art Hackfest will connect artists in Sydney, Darwin and Byron Bay.

EBEMU, Paul Granjon, Paul Gazzola, Oh! I Wanna Dance With Somebody, Campbelltown Arts Centre

A Paul Gazzola (Australia/Berlin)-Paul Granjon (UK) collaboration “deals with the rise of new generations of inventors and tinkerers, playing with technology in the broader community.” Parsons saw the work, Experimental Body Extension Manufacturing Unit, in Campbelltown Arts Centre’s Oh! I Wanna Dance With Somebody last year (RT112) and “loved the community engagement, the playfulness of it, the mixture of low and high tech. This time they’ll be working within the community around Carriageworks, using the same process, constructing new, fantastical objects of invention.”

An opportunity to engage your body quite directly with technology comes in the form of George Poonkin Khut and James Brown’s Theta Lab, “an experimental art research project combining neurofeedback with participatory art, electronic music and ‘slow design’ to explore and document qualities of attention and subjectivity facilitated by Alpha/Theta brainwave biofeedback.”

While the conference is central to ISEA2013, Parsons and his team have built a substantial public program that encompasses a huge range of responses to the potentials and challenges offered by media technologies, from solo artistic creations to community workshop, from data projection to sound art, to collaborations between artists across generations, all of it positioned across the city. And all of it open to discussion and debate. For Parsons it’s about “what it means to be here now in 2013. Australia has a very important place in international developments in the field of electronic arts, thanks to both its artists and its organisations and institutions.”

Follow ISEA2013 closely by joining RealTime bloggers Urszula Dawkins and Gail Priest. There’ll also be online reviews and video interviews and the launch of the RealTime Media Arts Archive, 1994-present.

ISEA2013, 19th International Symposium on Electronic Art, Sydney, June 7-16; http://www.isea2013.org/

LAURIE ANDERSON IS MOST FREQUENTLY SEEN IN LARGE VENUES SHARING SHORT STORIES AND PERSONAL PHILOSOPHY, UNDERPINNED BY GENERALLY HUMMABLE TUNES, SO IT’S NOT SURPRISING THAT SOME MAY QUERY HER UBIQUITOUS BRANDING AS ‘EXPERIMENTAL.’ SHE HERSELF ADMITS TO OFTEN FEELING MORE LIKE A JOURNALIST THAN A DOYENNE OF THE AVANT-GARDE (GRITTV, 2011).

A long-time fan of Laurie Anderson, even I had begun to question how close to the experimental coalface she was operating these days. However the presentation of three major projects as part of the 2013 Adelaide Festival confirmed for me that Anderson’s experimentalism is not something accurately gauged via a single artwork, rather it arises from her consistently multi-disciplinary approach over a 40-year career.

present pasts

I arise obscenely early to get to Adelaide from Sydney by 10.30am for Anderson’s performance of Duets on Ice which opens her exhibition The Language of the Future at the Anne and Gordon Samstag Museum of Art. Back in the 1970s Anderson augmented a violin so that it played tape loops allowing her to duet with herself. The loop made the performance potentially endless so Anderson introduced a timing device: embedding ice-skates into blocks of ice, she would play until the ice melted.

Taking place outside the gallery in Adelaide heat, I suspect the performance might be short so I am keen to get there on time. I am a little disappointed that Anderson has replaced her tape-loop violin for her current rig—electric violin filtered through various digital systems—but of course technologies move on and Anderson is well-known for being adaptive and adoptive. It’s not at all disappointing to watch Anderson, a petite woman in her 60s, awkwardly ambulating across the Samstag courtyard to the makeshift stage, large blocks of ice attached to her bright white ice-skating boots. This is an informal and intimate performance (so rare to see experimental music in daylight) and Anderson semi-improvises and chats for 25 minutes, the time it takes for the ice to crack and break away from the skates.

The Language of the Future features five pieces illustrating the breadth of Anderson’s work as visual artist. The centre-piece is The Swimmer (2009-2012), a six-channel video down-projected along the length of the space. The projection surface is made from shredded paper in tight, tiny rolls, the printed text just visible if you peer closely. Seen on the ground floor it adds visual noise to the images creating a kind of analogue pixilation. Viewed from the balcony it appears more three-dimensional—a memory contour map perhaps.

Laurie Anderson, The Swimmer (2009-2012), The Language of Future, Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art

The video is a visual poem comprising fragmented images—rural scenes, the looming face of a nurse, clockfaces and a rabbit in a wheelchair—some in high-contrast black and white, others in dreamy colour. The images accompany the adjacent piece, A Story About a Story (2012), an artist book exploring the time Anderson broke her back as a child and spent months recuperating in a ward for seriously ill children. It’s Anderson at her most revealing as she admits to subsequently editing out details—the real horror of the situation—in the process of crafting the story into one of her set pieces. She concludes, “You get your story and you hold onto it and every time you tell it you forget it more.”

Laurie Anderson, From the Air (2008); The Language of the Future, Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art

The use of a three-dimensional projection surface is something Anderson began in 1977 with her “fake hologram” At the Shrink. She projected an image of herself onto a small three-dimensional plaster figure, giving a beguiling sense of depth and life. From the Air (2008) revisits this technique presenting tiny models of herself and her dog Lolabelle. The Anderson figure tells the story of the time her dog was swooped on by turkey vultures but then deftly flips this domestic moment to reflect the state of American consciousness after 9/11—when people realised, like Lolabelle, that “They can come from up there!”

Laurie Anderson, Lolabelle in the Bardo, The Language of Future, Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art

Lolabelle also makes an appearance in a series of prints taken from large-scale drawings depicting the rat terrier, now deceased, spending 49 days in the Bardo, the place Buddhists believe souls go before they are reborn. The rendering of the dog is cartoon-like yet the images are quite terrifying, full of turbulent motion and dark twisted figures. Lolabelle in the Bardo shows an artist willing to defy expectations and utilise whatever medium suits her project.

Laurie Anderson, Electric Chair, The Language of Future, Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art

Similar idiosyncrasy is revealed in the final work, The Electric Chair. An installation from 1977, it was originally presented in a rundown warehouse using whatever was at hand, but now it is recreated in one of Australia’s newer white cubes. The sounds in this piece—the amplified hum and stutter of fluorescent tubes on the blink, the thump and grind of a swivel chair careening up and down a rail—have more rawness and authenticity than the faux paint-spattered floor and distressed electrical equipment. Ironic and playful, Electric Chair adds historical perspective to the survey—even Laurie Anderson started out in a dirty warehouse.

While not a comprehensive retrospective of Anderson’s oeuvre, the selected works in The Language of the Future rustle against each other in a way that highlights her dominant methodologies: multidisciplinarity; multi-dimensionality; the interplay of textual and visual poesy; and the personal as political.

connecting dots

If Language of the Future doesn’t confirm her ‘experimental’ status, Landfall, Anderson’s collaboration with the Kronos Quartet, certainly does. It explores what she describes as the processes of meaning-making by presenting the audience with fast flowing texts and symbols, conflicting audio and visual cues and an overall fragmentation that falls distinctly into the category of, to quote Anderson, “difficult music-c-c-c-c-c-c” (United States of America I-IV,1984).

The music alone doesn’t sound so difficult. Anderson’s electric violin forms a deep, rich bed over which the Kronos Quartet’s acoustic instruments shimmer. Nearly every musical segment is brief comprising beguiling melancholic melodies flavoured by Eastern European harmonies. It’s a music of beginnings with few pieces developing more complex internal structures, reminiscent of film scoring. It makes for a slippery, slightly frustrating experience—you long to hear some of the ideas expanded. It appears to be a deliberate tactic to aurally fragment the experience, just as the texts, spoken and projected, are broken up.

Subject matter is seemingly dissociative. Anderson was completing the commission when Hurricane Sandy hit New York so ideas of immersion flow through the piece. Near the beginning large text scrolls upwards, spaced and paced so that you are left to anticipate (often incorrectly) the next line:

“the city drowns
the city where children
are shot
and women have just
earned the right
to combat.”

At other times she talks of dreams, discussing how tedious it is when people recount them, which is ironic given that Anderson has spent much of her career sharing hers. There are texts about a book of extinct animals that weighs as much as 30 weasels; a job Anderson took to make a hotel lobby “sound bigger;” and a new letter of the alphabet called Olive which has no sound, you just open your mouth and think about it. These ideas weave around each other either spoken by Anderson or projected. The screened text comprises a variety of scrolling orientations, fonts and colours increasingly interrupted by typographic constructions, including warning and information symbols, silhouettes of figures replacing letters, ink splotches or simply missing chunks of words. We read, trying to fill the gaps. As William Burroughs says in “Sharkey’s Night,” “Hey sport. You connect the dots. You pick up the pieces” (Mister Heartbreak, 1984).

Laurie Anderson has always been associated with technological innovation, however in her later work she tends to let technology putter away in the background rather than fetishising it. In Landfall both tactics are employed. The program tells us that the composition is “generated from harmonies and delays” by the Erst software system—this perhaps explains the prevalent incremental build structure of most pieces. There is also interplay between the musicians and the text samples. This generally remains invisible except for one section in which violinist John Sherba breaks formation and solos, centre stage, generating flashes of words with sharp, frenetic bowing. Once again, I wished this had been extended beyond a brief moment of spectacle so that the cause and effect could develop more complexity.

Maybe Landfall is a little too genteel. The fragments themselves—both musical units and stories—are all quite pleasant and neat. A few more extremes and jagged edges, some freefall into utter ambiguity, might raise the stakes and make us work even harder in our role as meaning-makers.

story time

For those dissatisfied by the fragmentary nature of Landfall, the salve was Dirtday!. This is the Anderson we’ve come to expect. Stage and lighting design are stripped back but atmospheric, with small tea-light candles scattered around the floor adding warm shimmer to sharp beams of light. On stage is an armchair and next to it a small projection screen that remains mostly blank showing only shifting colours. While the chair is empty most of the time with Anderson positioned on the other side of the stage, its presence reminds us that this is story time.

After a brief musical introduction Anderson talks about evolution and how Darwin, “a mousey dresser,” was irked by the peacock, a species that allowed the female to make all the decisions. She moves on to the Catholic Church and its fear of multiple universes—what if there were multiple popes? Who would be top dog? And why is our planet called Earth? Why not simply Dirt?

Inevitably Anderson moves on to dreams—she tells us that at 63 she has dreamt for 21 years of her life. Now subjects begin to slip and intertwine: election seasons mix with peacocks, theories on cot death and tent cities, chickens in trees with the “politeness” of Alzheimer patients. Things consolidate again when Anderson finally sits in the armchair and talks about the death of her dog, ruminating on death from the Buddhist perspective: how to feel sadness but not be sad; how death is the release of love. From someone else’s lips all this could seem trite but Anderson’s touch is light and the inclusion of a crappy video of blind Lolabelle playing the keyboard a moment of leavening humour.

In her program notes Anderson discusses how she originally set out to make a music driven piece, utilising software that would render her solo playing symphonic, however the words just kept coming and she decided to go down the path of “musically arranged words that spoke up.” The music here is perfectly balanced, just rising above the background in swelling interludes then sinking back to keep things ticking over. Small details—the shudder of a helicopter, or the shimmer of rain, a dog bark, a pulsing beat—are near subliminal. Over the years Anderson’s use of the vocoder has also changed. Originally her down-pitched voice was used as the “voice of authority” but here she uses it as a more distant version of herself, her dream self. Perhaps she suggests our dream selves are our internal authority; or maybe they should be.

I had a moment of sadness during Dirtday! thinking that perhaps this might be the last time we see Anderson in Australia (given how far away we are from New York). If that is the case, these three projects presented by the Adelaide Festival offered the perfect showcase of the breadth and depth of this inspiring artist who is not afraid to keep doing what she knows she does well, but who also never wearies of the search for new ways to make sense of things.

Adelaide Festival 2013: The Language of the Future—Selected works from 1971-2012, Laurie Anderson, Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, March 1-April 19; Landfall, Laurie Anderson & The Kronos Quartet, performers Laurie Anderson, violin David Harrington, John Sherba, viola Hank Dutt, cello Jeffrey Ziegler, music and text Laurie Anderson, Erst programming Liubo Borrisov, electronics & software design Konrad Kaczmarek, dramaturg Bob Currie, transcription Jacob Garchik, audio rig Shane Koss, lighting design Brian H Scott, Festival Theatre, March 2; Dirtday!, music, text & visual design Laurie Anderson, lighting Brian H Scott, Dunstan Playhouse, March 3

THE ADELAIDE FESTIVAL’S MUSICAL PROGRAMMING BROUGHT SIGNIFICANT AND WELCOME CHANGES, FOREGROUNDING CONTEMPORARY MUSICAL GENRES OUTSIDE THE CLASSICAL MOULD, BROADENING THE FESTIVAL’S APPEAL BEYOND ITS TRADITIONAL AUDIENCE AND ILLUMINATING PARALLEL MUSICAL UNIVERSES.

Much of the music was composed or arranged for a blend of acoustic and electronic instrumentation and some solely for electronics, showing how the use of electronics has permeated contemporary composition and how genres cross-fertilise.

kronos quartet and jg thirlwell

The festival introduced Adelaide to the extraordinary and absorbing music of Australian expat JG Thirlwell and his Manorexia septet, whose fluid membership featured Adelaide’s Zephyr string quartet, a percussionist and a pianist together with Thirlwell at the laptop. His Canaries in the Mineshaft opens with vibraphone and piano, the strings entering quietly, and moments of dissonance enrich the flavour. Ice on the Equator is built around a trance-inducing repeated vibraphone figure, the strings floating eerily around it, with a sudden shift into dramatic intensity. Multiple time signatures create a phasing effect that heightens the eeriness of Thirlwell’s music, and he quietly intrudes pre-recorded sounds, for example a distant siren, referencing other auditory realities. This is fine writing, highly musical, with complex rhythms and shifts in mood, that suggests film scores, jazz, musique concrete, contemporary classical and electronic music, and demands quality ensemble playing.

The highlight was Thirwell’s Armadillo Stance, which sounded like an armadillo might dance—slow and seductive with a deliciously enigmatic violin line running through, punctuated by a tiny bell. The CD version uses electronic keyboards for the melodic lines but string harmonics are more complex and engaging even when mediated by a PA. His music is essentially tonal but clever use of dissonance adds complexity, and its power comes from shifts in tempi and intensity, textural contrasts, multiple rhythms and instrumental voicing. Thirlwell’s music suggests a melange of influences, though it’s distinctively original.

The legendary Kronos Quartet, renowned for its innovative use of electronics, pioneering new musical territory and championing composers across all genres, headlined the festival. Following Manorexia, their enthralling set included Bryce Dessner’s Aheym (Yiddish for “homeward”), written for Steve Reich’s 75th birthday, with Dessner joining them on electric guitar; music from Clint Mansell’s soundtrack to the Darren Aranofsky movie The Fountain (2006); electronic music composer and performer Amon Tobin’s Bloodstone, rearranged for string quartet; and Thirlwell’s edgy Eremikophobia (fear of sand). Not exclusively electronic, Kronos also gave us Aleksandra Vrebalov’s arrangement of Wagner’s Prelude to Tristan and Isolde and, for an encore, a delightful arrangement of Swedish Folk Ensemble Triakel’s melancholy love song “Tusen Tankar” (A Thousand Thoughts). Kronos’ set ranged across contemporary classical, movie music, electronic hybrids and high romanticism. Their seamless integration of electronics extends their instrumentation well beyond stringed instruments, opening up all kinds of compositional and performance possibilities.

severed heads

“Everyone is Beautiful in a Free World (Terms and Conditions apply)”—so goes the title of legendary post-punk/techno/industrial (what do these terms mean?) Australian band Severed Heads’ opening number in the breathtaking concert for which they re-formed—for what they declare is one last time. Their satirical but danceable music portrays a dystopian world of machine-like, futile human life, ruled by unseen (commercial) forces. Their set included the hits “Hot with Fleas,” “Profit,” “Petrol,” “Pilots Hate You (Obama mix)” and “Dead Eyes Opened.” Severed Heads’ 30-year career spans significant technological as well as musical development, and their songs are now remixed using updated technology, resulting in a cleaner, more refined sound, but sometimes recreating the characteristic sounds of old technologies such as slurred tapes. The stunning videos screened with the music are an essential component, and the Queen’s Theatre, recreated as a club-like venue, was the perfect location.

The performance was complemented by a downloadable computer game, core band-member Tom Ellard’s Hauntology House, hosted by the ABC website, which enables you to generate musical and visual material using simulacra of typical compositional devices such as laptops, radios, turntables and tape recorders. Users at home can mimic, in a game setting, what Severed Heads themselves do to create their work. This is a significant development in audience interactivity, but proficiency demands effort.

unsound—solaris

The Adelaide Festival brought to Australia the Krakow-based Unsound Festival, whose festival-within-a-festival included performances at the Queen’s Theatre and, as its central element, the staging of Ben Frost and Daníel Bjarnason’s co-composition Solaris at Adelaide Town Hall. Unsound commissioned Bjarnason and Frost’s version of Solaris to celebrate in 2011 the 50th anniversary of Polish writer Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris (see Gail Priest’s discussion of this work, RT103). Scored for strings, percussion, prepared piano, guitars and electronics, it is performed with Brian Eno and Nick Robertson’s video that uses still images of characters from the 1972 Andrei Tarkovsky film based on Lem’s book and also Pieter Brueghel’s painting, The Hunters in the Snow (1565), which Tarkovsky featured in the film.

The music is slow and hypnotic, opening with an ethereal whisper of strings and with a flavour of ambient electronic music but greater textural complexity. The video is correspondingly dreamy, with imagery materialising out of a haze of pixels. The pixilation seems to metaphorise the sub-atomic structure of matter and the possible neuronal structure of the planet Solaris’ intelligent ocean that induces hallucinations, the music seeming to characterise such neurological processes. Frost and Bjarnason’s Solaris is not a remake of the film or its score but an attempt to capture the psychological essence of Lem’s book. While the central musical work in Tarkovsky’s film is a Bach chorale prelude for organ, theirs is more secular and leaves the listener unsettled, the dissonance suggestive of psychological disturbance or unresolved tension.

Unsound also included three nights of world-class music in the categories of experimental, dub, ambient, drone and their derivatives, with international acts including Demdike Stare (performing with a string ensemble including Zephyr Quartet), Tim Hecker, Actress, Hype Williams, Lustmord, Robin Fox, Pole and again Ben Frost, an unparalleled showcase that demonstrated the depth of musical development in this broad field and its influence on mainstream music.

This use of different rhythmic structures, performance techniques independent of human playing and the greatly expanded sound palette that typifies this kind of music has permeated contemporary composition. Melodic and harmonic structures and linear, thematic development with variations are much less emphasised. Composers draw on the widest range of devices, blending samples, field recordings and pre-recorded sounds with live performance, with both programmed and improvised elements, using looping and phasing, and producing scores for acoustic instrumentation as well as electronics. Frost and Bjarnason, for example, used computer software in developing the Solaris score. The musical product retains its distinctive character even when transcribed, say, for strings or a chamber ensemble. It’s eclectic, mixing tonality with atonality, foregrounding process, using quotation and irony and sometimes making social commentary, and it potentially appeals to a wider audience. And video is commonly part of the composition—the concert is an audio-visual experience that extends the tradition of pop-rock video for TV.

Unfortunately, many of the Adelaide Festival’s musical events lacked a printed program, so you couldn’t always know what was being played or even who was playing unless you were already familiar with the material.

stereopublic

Contrasting with the rest of the Adelaide Festival’s music, Jason Sweeney’s Stereopublic was an absolute delight for its gentleness and its ability to make you think about sound and listen for it. Sweeney guides participants on a walking tour of city sites with particular sonic characteristics—a fountain, an elevator, a park, an office tower foyer, an underground car-park and so on. On commencement, he hands you a business card reading “please be quiet.”

Stereopublic is like a perambulatory version of John Cage’s 4’ 33”—you listen to ambient sound and meditate on the idea of silence—but it takes you beyond Cage’s concept in that you map the city’s quieter locations where you might escape the traffic and other noise, and you learn to listen to buildings and spaces, rediscovering the city sonically.

The Stereopublic interactive webpage invites you to identify quiet places and offers an iPhone app. This is relational art, from which a small community with a new awareness is born, each walking-tour group forming a bond in Trappist monk-like silence. Stereopublic offers a different and welcome kind of musical awareness.

Adelaide Festival, 2013: Kronos Quartet and JG Thirlwell’s Manorexia, Thebarton Theatre, March 4; Severed Heads, Queen’s Theatre, March 13; Unsound Festival, Queen’s Theatre, March 14-16; Solaris, Ben Frost and Daniel Bjarnason with members of Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, Adelaide Town Hall, March 15, Stereopublic, Adelaide, Feb 27-March 17 and at www.stereopublic.net.

THE RHYTHMS OF A FESTIVAL IN ADELAIDE ARE LIFE AFFIRMING. FOR SEVERAL WEEKS, THE CITY COMES TO LIFE, INFUSED WITH ENTHUSIASM FOR THE ENERGIES OF ART. BUT THEN IMAGINATIONS, ONCE SO ENLIVENED, BECOME EXHAUSTED. THE VENUES FADE TO BLACK AND SOUNDS TO SILENCE. ‘IN THE MIDST OF LIFE’ WE LIVED IT UP; IN THE FALLOW WEEKS THAT FOLLOW, ‘WE ARE IN DEATH.’

Yet this year, in the midst of celebration, the tragedy of theatre was often felt. Violence, injury and trauma, physical and psychological, and death inflicted upon others in crimes of passion and times of war—these were the tropes of David Sefton’s wide-ranging theatre program, his first as festival director.

the kreutzer sonata

In some productions, the forces that these tropes unleashed were threatening and chaotic. The Kreutzer Sonata, an ambitious staging of Leo Tolstoy’s novella, directed by Geordie Brookman for the State Theatre Company of South Australia, sought the passion of Beethoven’s music to elevate the artistry of Tolstoy’s tale about a husband’s jealous murder of his wife. Rehearsing the grim misogyny and self-delusion of the narrator from the constructivist depths of the State Theatre’s Scenic Workshop exhausted Barry Otto, who withdrew before opening night. The production forged ahead with Renato Musolino bravely taking on the role. Women in the audience, old enough to be his mother, found moments of release as the actor delivered the invective. Would they have done so if the part were delivered by an actor of their husbands’ or fathers’ generation? Geoff Cobham’s architectural lighting and the hand-etched artistry of Chris Petridis’ video design were majestically expressive. But the production’s rationale was all but broken.

doku rai

A four-year collaboration between the young men of Liurai Fo’er and Galaxy from Timor-Leste and the Melbourne-based Black Lung Theatre and Whaling Firm shook the gutted shell of the Queen’s Theatre with grubby violence, ritual slaughter and rock music. With the nation’s history of guerilla warfare, the colonial legacy of Catholicism and, now, the charity-capitalism of back-packing opportunists, Doku Rai re-enacts the story of a dead man, who is killed 77 times and never dies. Anarchistic energies, distilled from ritual mateship in a drinking circle, strut out on stage with the rock-star pride of fighting roosters and slash through our contemplation, balls in one hand, machete in the other. The production style is raw, and its surfaces are rough-and-ready. The meanings of its dialogue (much of it sur-titled) are without precedent. The violence stretches empathy to breaking point, way beyond the beneficence of, say, Katherine Thompson’s Mavis Goes to Timor (2002). (Female artists have largely been excluded from the making of Doku Rai.) But neither does the work resolve upon the sacrifice of white-man-journalist-as-hero that drove the film Balibo (2009), from which this collaboration emerged. There are risks in unfolding for an audience a process so unfinished, but the invitation is to witness the clash of collaboration. The provocation is to overcome our disbelief. Although in Doku Rai the killings are documented on video, the work is subtitled: “You, dead man, I don’t believe you.”

kamp

Two European productions delivered death in more methodical ways. Hotel Modern’s Kamp from the Netherlands is a puppet show in which three performers animate a scale model of a Nazi concentration camp. The model filled the entire floor of the Festival Centre’s Space Theatre. Dormitories are arrayed in a grid formation, with guard towers and sections of barbed wire fencing and a train track that delivers load after load of prisoners. Crowds of tiny puppets in striped pyjamas are processed through the camp. Their clay heads and distorted faces bear silent witness to their terror. Their bodies are given action by the puppeteers; their actions are magnified with live projection from a handheld video camera and amplified with sounds of excruciating realism. The scene is bleak. A prisoner scrapes at the earth, another drags a fallen inmate across the yard. The guards survey the inmates from the tower, beat a fallen prisoner and chase another into an electric fence. The camera takes us inside the building where guards gas the prisoners and burn their bodies in the furnace. In another shot, we fly across a mass grave of the dead to arrive at one who is not dead yet. These up-close shots are so disturbing that the closing image of inmates sleeping in a dormitory is calming in relief. But it is the remote view that persists. Across the model camp, the scale of its operation mutely obliterates an individual capacity to care.

nosferatu

Nosferatu from Poland’s TR Warszawa and Teatre Narodowy likewise took a methodical approach to reviving Bram Stoker’s ‘myth that will not die.’ On a spacious set with measured speed, Grzegorz Jarzyna directed an ageless cast of characters. Nervous men and languid women animated a series of dramatic tableaux. The production recalled a period when medical science could extend the life of fantasy, when extending life itself was beyond reach. The actors in Nosferatu conveyed feeling with commitment, yet their absorption in their performance removed the drama from our world.

beowulf

By contrast, the beer hall at the German Club, with its laminex tables, vinyl chairs and open bar, gave artists from two companies an opportunity to connect. A ‘songplay’ from BBB of the USA, Beowulf revived the Anglo-Saxon battle saga for an audience well equipped to recognise the cartoon-bribery of its satire. The work is testament to Brecht’s legacy in American theatre education. A story with ‘a thousand years of baggage’ makes theatre with a message to unpack. Scholars’ notes intact, two women frame the work ironically in post-feminist critique, so that another two can sex it up with back-up singing and go-go dance-burlesque. An impressive klezmer-fusion band of seven pieces plays on, while the boys play out the battles between Beowulf and the monster Grendel. Their nerdy over-acting is melancholic for warrior rites now lost, and they encourage laughter at the monster-mother’s grief.

the strange undoing of prudencia hart

The National Theatre of Scotland also drew us into an encounter with mortality at the German Club. They promised “an evening of anarchic theatre” which they delivered, not with mock-ironic violence, but with homespun, hand-made charm. The company of five performers travels light. Each an actor, singer and musician, they play among the audience, under the house lights. They make music without amplifiers and create effects without a lighting desk. The opening scene—a snowstorm flurry created by the audience tossing torn-up paper serviettes—was beautiful, both as an immersion in the performance and as permission to participate. The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart is superbly told in song and rhyming couplets, silly and sublime. An earnest folklore academic, snowed in at a conference, spends the evening at the pub where karaoke renditions have supplanted folk traditions, and the manager of the B&B hoards a library underground with every book on Scottish folklore—except Prudencia’s, of course. Her undoing, in the end, is our deliverance, warmly willed with pop songs, football chants and love.

ontroerend goed

What passes between us in performance is often the look, the touch, the tragedy of life and love. That was the message hand-delivered by three performances—The Smile Off Your Face / Internal / A Game of You—from the ensemble Ontroerend Goed of Belgium. Strictly speaking, these are experiences rather than performances. They are elaborated in intimate sequences of encounter, processed along assembly lines of affect that progressively reveal their means of propagation. Intense with aspirations for individual revelation, yet designed with care to handle the delusions of self-projection, their performances worked in darkness on reflection, tapped into inner glow, and lived beyond the moment in the after-life of emotion.

Adelaide Festival 2013: The Kreutzer Sonata, by Leo Tolstoy, adaptation Sue Smith, director Geordie Brookman, Scenic Workshop, STCSA, Feb 27-March 17; Doku Rai—You, dead man, I don’t believe you, The Black Lung Theatre and Whaling Firm, Liurai Fo’er and Galaxy, Queen’s Theatre, Feb 28-March 4; Kamp, Hotel Modern, Space Theatre, March 12-17; Nosferatu, director Grzegorz Jarzyna, TR Warszawa and Teatre Narodowy, Dunstan Playhouse, March 14-17; Beowulf—A Thousand Years of Baggage, BBB (Banana Bag & Bodice), German Club, March 11-16; The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart, National Theatre of Scotland, German Club, March 1-9; The Smile Off Your Face / Internal / A Game of You, Ontroerend Goed, STCSA Rehearsal Room, Adelaide, Feb 28-March 17

I MANAGED TO CATCH A HANDFUL OF SHOWS AT THE 2012 ADELAIDE FESTIVAL INCLUDING LAURIE ANDERSON’S QUIETLY PROVOCATIVE DIRTDAY! AND SYLVIE GUILLEM’S SUBLIMELY ENGROSSING 6000 MILES AWAY.

Brink’s Thursday, although flawed, impressed in the end, Larissa McGowan’s Skeleton was a favourite and the Australian-Timorese co-production Doku Rai a remarkable cross-cultural experience (enhanced by the brutally tropical conditions provided by the Queen’s Theatre). Each of these works in one way or another unsettled my emotional, cultural and physical centres of gravity.

sylvie guillem, 6000 miles away

In Jiri Kylian’s 27’52” two huge quartz halogen lamps spot the floor: in one a reclining male dancer, in the other a woman emerging from beneath a pale, heavy cloth. They dance in their own worlds until he enters her space, reaches to touch her and is twice repelled as if electrocuted. His hand placed on her head appears to contain her and the pair enter into a series of brisk entwinings, simpatico undulations and balletic lifts. She retires to the cloth; he solos, creating a line across the blue-lit stage on which he alternates fluid and sharply angled moves at a gentle pace, falling to the floor before turning to the woman, lifting her, now like him naked to the waist, into a beautifully sustained contemporary pas de deux. The sense of the two being at one is ruptured when she suddenly runs away from him. He surrenders his chase, lifting and disappearing under a black cloth. She returns to find him gone, runs in the opposite direction and likewise disappears. Wonderfully performed by Vaclav Kunes and Natasa Novotna, 27’52” embodies the Kylian vocabulary but with passages that speak of more recent dance languages while evoking fragile coupledom.

Sylvie Guillem and Massimo Murro execute William Forsythe’s challenging Rearray with apparent ease without ever surrendering its inherent sense of abstract drama in the choreography and David Morrow’s modernist score (piano, strings, feedback). The astonishing lighting (Rachel Shipp), best seen from the dress circle, patterns the floor in subtly shifting lines of ever merging and dissociating lines of metallic blues and greys on which the duo sortie, tangle, embrace and lock in glorious off-centre Forsythian configurations that hold when they should fall. Together and apart Guillem and Murro excel, their realisation of Rearray proof of the power and beauty of Forsythe’s radicalised ballet formalism.

The third work on the program was Matt Ek’s Bye, a dance theatre solo for Guillem which she performs with her own and other virtual selves to a recording of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata 111 played almost jazzily by Ivo Pogorelich. The lighting is again geometrical, a flow of rectangles and circles on which Guillem in girlish demeanour hyperactively bounces, rocks, walks on all fours and jettisons cardy and socks until stalled by the image of a man on a centrestage mirror-like screen. He disappears. She executes a headstand. A dog appears on the screen. Curious, Guillem investigates and finds herself there—but discovers it’s at once her and not her, synced at first and then not. As she mock hip hops, struts flatfooted, shoulders up and then headstands again, a crowd gathers on the screen, likewise curious about her. Cardy and socks on, Guillem merges with new companions. Bye is an odd little parable but as dance, and dance magically engaged with new media, it’s fascinating, revealing a comically characterful Guillem persona and steps we’ve rarely seen from her.

brink & english touring theatre, thursday

Thursday is built on an interesting conceit, transparency—the walls of the set are see-through, characters in different scenarios assemble in the one space simultaneously (as in Benedict Andrews’ account of Patrick White’s The Season at Sarsaparilla) and the inner thoughts of characters are delivered by others (“You’re thinking….”) while standing next to them. The latter was irritating, the audience struggling to get a handle on who’s who in the far too protracted opening of the play where ordinary lives are made transparent—and clearly permeable as relationships play out and overlap. The effect is unfortunately expository and soon overcrowded with supplementary scenarios. That said, once the pedestrian everyday and the horror of the terrorist bombing (London, 2005) are out of the way, Thursday becomes an engaging experience as various synchronicities play out, if sometimes melodramatically, and the characters grapple with profound loss, breakdown and disability.

The sense of a disaster reaching far beyond individual suffering is enhanced by the interplay of a large number of characters and the unfolding of inner lives (if sometimes awkwardly written and structured) within Bryony Lavery’s limits when it comes to psychological insights (as in Stockholm, 2008). There are some loose ends. Having been so firmly established, Paul Blackwell’s conservative Lionel is presumably killed in the blast; it would have been more telling had he lived to grapple with the aftermath. All that aside, Thursday is finally heartfelt and moving, strongly performed with ensemble unanimity by a mixed Australian-British cast and, for such a discursive work, tautly directed by Chris Drummond. Thursday grew on me, but if it is to have further life the extended opening needs to be more cohesively built into the balance of the play.

black lung & whaling firm, liurai fo’er & galaxy, doku rai

Briefly, because Jonathan Bollen reviews Doku Rai on page 10, I wanted to add how engrossing this Australian-East Timorese co-production (a tauter re-working of the original; RT111, p38) was, a ritualistic and intensely theatrical account of the dangers of superstition when entangled with power—colonial, tribal and familial. This is raw theatre, rich in barely contained symbolism, music, gruesome comedy and acting rough and subtle. The central crime, the murder of a brother using a deliberate misreading of a prophesy, results in the victim being resurrected and killed over and over again, until the horror and exhaustion of it all for victim and assassin, and audience, is stilled when the actor playing the victim tells us that his family was murdered and that he dies a death every day. All the power of Doku Rai (“dead man I don’t believe you”) distills in this moment, one that haunts me still.

larissa mcgowan, skeleton

Accidents apparently happen in threes. Dancer-choreographer Larissa McGowan’s Skeleton is a dance theatre reverie-cum-nightmare in which the fragility of the human skeleton is subjected to instruments of popular culture (skateboards, bmx bikes, high heels, baseball bats, action films and noise-reducing headphones). Accident scenes are cyclically revisited with increasing intensity. Cultural objects are rendered utterly iconic—chalk white fetishes, as they are in the works of visual artist Ricky Swallow, one of McGowan’s inspirers.

As human scale black boxes-cum-screens automatically crisscross the stage they deposit these items on which we rest our gaze. First we see a skateboard, and then, in another pass, a man frozen in time, tilted forward on the board. Shortly we see him roll out, in slow motion, from a black box in a damaging tumble accompanied by the sound of an almighty crash rising out of Jethro Woodward’s dynamic, pop culture saturated score. With other accidents we sometimes see the damage first: the order of cause and effect is not always obeyed, heightening the sense of obsessive reflection on a traumatic moment.
The images of the man and skateboard are typically punctuated by others in a world where people appear to be ephemeral and replaceable. At worst they relive their accidents. A man (Louis Rankin) wearing large white headphones, is hit violently on three different occasions by a rushing passerby. A woman (Lisa Griffiths), appears, locked in muscle seizure. McGowan lifts her rigid frame and attempts to manipulate her back into shape. Later we’ll see Griffiths with the bike, folding herself, possibly lovingly, into it in various positions, one of which will become this rigor-mortised condition.

Manipulation of the damaged body is a significant motif in Skeleton. After our initial sighting of the writhing McGowan, she shortly reappears being extensively manipulated by a male dancer to sharp electric jabs heard in Woodrow’s score. What first appears helpful becomes threatening, in an extension of the motif, as the male repeatedly, in near slow motion, hits McGowan’s jaw.

This world of gliding black boxes depositing and disappearing humans and objects is scarily fast, but there is a telling, relatively slow and sustained scene that heightens the joint themes of damage and care. To a melancholy strain from Woodrow, Tobiah Booth-Remmers rolls and shapes the rigid Griffiths with increasing aggression, as if irritated by her body’s unresponsiveness. She suddenly softens, grabs his leg; he falters and crumbles. Sitting, she creates a push/pull pieta, drawing him softly into her lap only to repel him and then draw him back.

It’s the final stage of Skeleton where the work—after too many action scenes which emphasise popular culture’s invitations to risk-taking and thrill-seeking—achieves the thematic fruition that McGowan and co-director Sam Haren were doubtless aiming for with the completion of the ‘damage and care’ motif and now an evocation of not just the breaking of bones, but also the smashing of icons. We see the front wheel of the BMX shatter into plaster—this at last is Griffiths’ accident. The skateboard appears, shockingly, to crack of its own accord. The high heeled shoe, so delicately approached and negotiated by McGowan rolling, turning and slipping into it, crumbles beneath her. It’s as if, a la the dromology (the science or ‘logic’ of speed) of Paul Virilio, each of these instruments (they are all technologies—even the bat offers prosthetic reach) incorporates its own accident, damaging itself and its user. Louis Rankin, though, reminds us that the skeleton is likewise a piece of fragile technology as a rush of plaster pieces tumble from his t-shirt. After a final burst of violent energy the dancers, left only with the culture of fight, all fall down.

McGowan’s first major work reveals intelligence, thematic integrity and a potent sense of theatre magic, if at times the desire to amuse risks undercutting Skeleton’s seriousness, expressed most strongly in the ambivalence portrayed concerning our attitude to the pain of others—its meaninglessness in action films, and the tension between concern and denial in reality, yielding even cruelty. The design of Skeleton allows McGowan and her collaborators to replay and review, cut and paste the pleasures and traumas of youth with a three-dimensionality and physical and lo-tech immediacy still beyond the reach of digital media. The Skeleton team have made an analog machine for reflection, albeit one with all the speed and rapid cutting of its digital peers.

Adelaide Festival 2013: Sylvie Guillem, 6000 Miles Away, Festival Theatre, March 1-4; Brink Productions & English Touring Theatre, Thursday, writer Bryony Lavery, director, dramaturg Chris Drummond, designer Dan Potra, Norwood Concert Hall, Feb 20-March 16; Black Lung & Whaling Firm, Liurai Fo’er & Galaxy, Doku Rai, direction, design Thomas M Wright, remount directors Thomas Henning, Melchior Dias Fernandes, Queen’s Theatre, Feb 28-March 4; Skeleton, choreographer Larissa McGowan, directors Sam Haren, Larissa McGowan, AC Arts Main Theatre, Adelaide, March 2-9

THE 2013 ADELAIDE FESTIVAL’S STRONG DANCE PROGRAM INCLUDED SYLVIE GUILLEM, LOUISE LECAVALIER, WIM VANDEKEYBUS’ ULTIMA VEZ, A FLAMENCO PROGRAM DIRECTED BY CARLOS SAURA AND THE PREMIERE OF A WORK BY EMERGING AUSTRALIAN CHOREO-GRAPHER LARISSA MCGOWAN. ANNE THOMPSON LOOKS AT THREE OF THESE, REFLECTING ON DANCE LANGUAGES, SKILL AND ENDURANCE AND ISSUES OF CULTURAL AND AESTHETIC FRAMING. (SEE P11 FOR RESPONSES TO GUILLEM AND MCGOWAN, EDS.)

louise lecavalier

Louise Lecavalier is formidable at 50—muscular, assured, capable of great nuance and completely at the centre of both works, Children and A Few Minutes of Lock. There is familiar vocabulary from Lecavalier’s time with Édouard Lock’s Canadian company La La Human Steps: the primal high crawl at speed, the decisive manipulation of an object (in this case pillows and a pole), fragments of ballet (fancy foot work, soft arms, stated arabesques), high velocity horizontal and vertical leaps, gestural partner work (expressing both tenderness and violence), forward and rewind, all performed with throw-away casualness.

Children is set against musical tracks that locate the piece in Lecavalier’s era. We move from the likes of Leonard Cohen to Miles Davis to Billie Holliday (to name a few) through to a Puccini climax; all songs of love and longing. Then there is the sound of children playing and later crying. The program note points us to conceive of the dancers (and ourselves) as children with the longings of children. This longing is represented with great irony and control. The impact of the determined and exact physicality in the piece has more to do with an experience of endurance and stamina. There is something poignant in that determination in the face of want.

A Few Minutes of Lock has Lecavalier suspended and moving in relation to two men. Occasionally they break out into moves of their own. There is dainty peripheral fluttering of feet and hands, daring catches, huge propulsion from small impetus. This is not about the simple meaning of weight and momentum. There is showmanship here, flair, even when the movement is again throw-away. Meaning is again produced in the assured relentlessness of the display. The intimate venue allowed us to breathe with Lecavalier, not just watch her convincing puppet-like performance. The music of Iggy Pop was featured in this piece. I remembered La La La Human Steps collaborating with David Bowie. There’s something of the rock star in Lecavalier strutting her stuff and I can’t help but admire her tenacity.

ultima vez

What the Body does not remember is a recreation of the seminal 1987 work. I enjoyed the disjunction between choreographic methods I associate with the late 70s and 80s (task work with objects and sound familiar to me from American postmodern dance) and these strong and varied European bodies (the favoured look of contemporary dancers now). The work is still charged. But when I leave my heart is pounding. I am disquieted by the European sensibility applied to this task work, taking it to an extreme both in duration and in terms of skill and danger. The sporty playfulness evident in American task work and a form like contact improvisation is absent.

Images surface despite the concreteness of the tasks. Lying, ‘sleeping’ bodies react/shift in response to loud noise, a dancer drumming a miked table (later I think of this as a guard and prisoners). Then dancers seek to traverse the space on different sized blocks using them as stepping stones. The game gets increasingly complex and dangerous. The blocks are thrown and caught (near misses occur); complex, precarious structures are built and balanced on, dancers leap and run and change position with each other (the image for me is of children playing in rubble). The skill of the performers is breathtaking.

Then we watch a long sequence of putting on and stealing towels and coats. The benign image of wrapping one’s hair in a towel and having the towel stolen is troubled by the recurring image of putting on a coat only to have it taken from you.

Then the games get gendered. A man tries to touch a woman’s knee; another man tries to touch a woman’s hair. The women stamp to rid themselves of the attention. The pursuit is relentless. This turns into a disturbing game of men feeling women’s bodies while the women stand legs wide, arms stretched out at shoulder level, reminiscent of the posture and action of security checks. The women move to escape and are caught. They return again and again to stand outstretched, available to be searched. The image drifts towards and away from the erotic and the pornographic—my sense of the agency of the women determining my response.

A more innocent game of orientation follows—a man sitting on a laid-down chair changing positions and a woman sitting on a chair standing up mirroring his moves. This evolves into a series of photos with the whole company. Three solos by dancers blowing a feather up and letting it float down allow us to rest in some depiction of innocence.

There are other structures but the finale is a game of one dancer stamping near another who is lying down. The one lying responds by curling and uncurling. As the pace, duration and proximity of the stamping increase so does the danger. The stamping is fierce. There are also solos of stamping apart from the lying bodies. This extended sequence is violent, eloquently violent.

The performers do not use facial expressions to suggest what our attitude might be to what is happening. Meaning is all in the movement. This is performance as finally brutal. We are lured there by the pleasure of watching the performers’ skill at tasks and games.

carlos saura

This was a strange ‘concert’ in the grand Festival Theatre. The evening consisted of discrete items—pieces with the company of dancers, solos created by choreographers Rafael Estévez and Valeriano Paños, guitar solos and accompaniment by Antonio Rey sometimes with other musicians, piano solos and accompaniment by Chano Dominguez and singing by Sandra Carrasco, Blas Córdoba and Israel, sometimes alone and sometimes as accompaniment to dancing. Costumes are changed, screens are moved to delineate space and lights in bold colour illuminate each piece. The entire event is directed by Carlos Saura who so masterfully used flamenco as a theatrical language on film in the 1980s with Bodas de Sangre (Blood Wedding), Carmen and El amor brujo. Here it is hard to discern his hand. I notice that the producer tours rock groups and opera productions. These aesthetic and production values dominate and prevent consistent immersion in the physicality, rhythm and sounds of this form.

The skill of all the artists is exquisite. I find myself relishing the moments which seem improvised. The solos have that feel. I am reminded of tap or hip hop solos, of someone dancing at the peak of their skill level and in response to rhythm and music. The singing has a rawness of tone that is thrilling, close to calling or wailing. The section where a number of solo dancers worked with different solo singers finally drew me in to some space of performance not constrained by the production. The engagement between the singer and dancer was electric and robust like a great jazz duet.

I read in the program that the Flamenco vocabulary used by these choreographers has been modified with jazz and contemporary influences, even ballet. I could sense that. There was an unexpected looseness to the bodies at times, a breaking away from and returning to the strict Flamenco frame. There was also ballet virtuosity. I could hear the influence of 20th century composers such as Bartók in the piano compositions and hints of jazz in the guitar pieces. All of these developments were enticing.

I am not versed in this dance style so I found myself seeking cues as to how to watch any differently than as a tourist, as somehow separate but with investment in the piece delivering something I want; in this case, some drama. The production spoke of cultural trading in a way I rarely see in international festivals these days; the products of a culture delivered in a commercial form but made ‘contemporary’ as befitting an arts festival through incorporation of recognisable cultural influence from some cultural power (in this case, the United States). I am used to trade deals being less visible and thus making the work more comfortable for me to be part of as a member of an ‘educated arts audience.’ This was a timely reminder of what is always at stake even when I choose not to notice.

Adelaide Festival 2013: Louise Lecavalier, Children, choreographer Nigel Charnock, dancers Louise Lecavalier, Patrick Lamothe; A Few Minutes of Lock, choreographer Édouard Lock (excerpts from Salt and 2), dancers Louise Lecavalier, Keir Knight, Patrick Lamoth, Space Theatre, March 6-9; Ultima Vez, What the Body Does Not Remember, direction, choreographer, scenography Wim Vandekeybus, Dunstan Playhouse, March 7-10; Flamenco Hoy, director Carlos Saura; Festival Theatre, Adelaide, March 15, 16

PERTH AUDIENCES WERE BLESSED WITH THE THEME OF LIGHT FOR THE 2013 EDITION OF THE INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL WITH A SPECTRUM OF ILLUMINATION WORKS RANGING FROM PROJECTION TO INSTALLATION.

The array of light manipulations on display took me back to somewhere in the depths of Norway, where underground runs the longest road tunnel in the world, the Lærdal Tunnel. This feat of engineering has a curious surprise embedded in its depths. Just as the driver is slipping into somnolence and fearing having entered a time warp, a dreamy bluish speck appears in the distance. As it grows it is easy to wonder if it is a portal to another dimension and when it swallows you up, twin feelings of wonder and disappointment envelop you. All the immersive delight in the mystery of the light source is dispelled, revealed as a simple effect designed to ease monotony and potential claustrophobia. It does not, after all, indicate the final radiance you might observe before being split into several billion particles and recombined some place alien.

This experience illustrates one of the defining features of light. It has an inherent mystery to it, yet it is also that universally familiar stuff that signals the beginning of a new day and artificially illuminates our nights. It has a remarkable range of qualities, from bright to dull, searing heat to ice cold. Whether we squint at the sun or follow a flitting firefly, light is that elusive electromagnetic radiation that can be a substance of both spectacular intensity and delicate subtlety. This broad potentiality of light was revealed in the Perth Festival.

jim campbell, scattered light

American media artist Jim Campbell is a technically innovative tinkerer. For Scattered Light (2010), on display in the Kings Park gardens, Campbell has hung a three dimensional ‘screen’ of over 1,600 light bulbs that presents the viewer with more than first envisaged. Each bulb is carefully engineered with an LED fixture and strategically positioned to be on or off according to a programmed video sequence. A shadowy scene of passers-by in New York’s Grand Central Station crosses the lights. Their bodies are fuzzy close up and defined from a distance, yet each point of observation has its own qualities—whether crisp resolution is desired or the more hypnotic qualities of being confronted by an army of bulbs, with such curious details as the odd bulb seen gently couched in the lush green grass. (See the interview with Jim Campell, RT112, p6.)

luminous flux

Campbell also has a work at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Motion and Rest #4 (2002), in the group exhibition Luminous Flux. It is a scaled down and simplified version on the same theme, with the added pathos of only limping figures traversing a small screen of LED lights. This exhibition is illuminated by not only LED, but by neon, fluoro, light box, projection and reflection pieces. The installation of the works recalls the logistics of Dome films which are most successful when they take on visually dark topics, like space or underwater. This is because brightness spills over to the other side of the screen and so dulls the overall clarity of the image. It is all too evident in Luminous Flux that spill is occurring and that most of the works would function better in pitch black.

Nonetheless the individual works are mesmeric once you enter within their glow. Rebecca Baumann’s Reflected Glory (2013) splashes onto the walls like effervescence in colour and light. It optimises a simple, low-tech effect of reflection from sundry materials—perspex, wrapping paper and mirror. If this were the sight glimpsed in the middle of a tunnel, it would certainly have one wondering if some raucous clandestine rave were underway.

ross manning, volumes

Ross Manning, Volumes, PICA, courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

A similar reflection effect is apparent in the exhibition Volumes, by Australian artist Ross Manning at PICA. For his Dichroic Filter Piece (2012), a projector is used to shine black and white lines through diachronic glass placed on the ground. This, again, results in a spectacular, prismatic spill upon the walls, like the hard-edged version of soft rainbows scattered throughout a room by the sun’s rays passing through a hanging crystal. Manning is renowned for kinetic light installations and his other works in the exhibition combine circular movement, fans, coloured fluoros and ribbon, to create wondrous hanging, spinning and glowing contraptions.

grazia toderi

One of the most impressive exhibitions is by Italian artist Grazia Toderi at the John Curtin Gallery. Toderi is an artist adept at creating spectacular digital projections characterised by monumental scale and compelling ambivalence. They appear other-dimensional and earthly all at once; cities unfold as dense interstellar constellations with the line between earth and sky indistinct. The projections undergo digital manipulation, with light used as a compositional layering tool. For example, in her 2009 Venice Biennale work, Orbite Rosse (Red Orbits), a dual projection displays a nightscape of Turin as two orbs that slowly transform. Terrestrial and celestial mapping appear to converge in a seeming timelessness that unfolds at a carefully measured pace.

srinivas krishna, my name is raj

My Name is Raj by Canadian filmmaker Srinivas Krishna is like a donkey in a field of stallions, petite in stature, quaint and unique. Its oddity in the context of the theme may be attributed to the fact that it is not concerned directly with light, in the literal sense, but more with the idea of fame and the desire to be under the celebrity spotlight. As an interactive installation it plays upon audience narcissism and folds layers of cultural and historical references into one another—the proto-Bollywood films of Raj Kapoor, photographs of Kapoor starring in his own films in heroic and romantic poses, historical photographs of Indians superimposed in scenes of wealth and fantasy and a make-shift camera studio with an Arcadian backdrop. As audience member, you can catch a film and then fulfil your own wish for fame and glory by having a portrait taken and superimposed in a Kapoor film still, which then becomes your own personal keepsake.

When wielded effectively as a sculptural medium, light not only mesmerises, but also has a transcendental effect. I was compelled to drive through that Norwegian tunnel not once but two or three times simply to reach that immersive artificial wonderland that harmonised so sublimely with the natural wonderland of the fiords beyond. The exhibitions in this year’s Perth Festival each hinted at such an experience, where the combinations of light, colour, scale and form collude to take you, if only momentarily, somewhere else.

Perth International Arts Festival, Jim Campbell, Scattered Light, Kings Park; Luminous Flux, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery; Ross Manning, Volumes, PICA; Grazia Toderi, John Curtin Gallery; Srinivas Krishna, My Name is Raj, Shopfront, Central Institute of Technology; Perth, Feb 8-March 2

IT WAS A CURIOUS, ALMOST DISSOCIATIVE MOMENT I HAD WHILE WATCHING THE PRETTY SPECTACLE THAT IS BALLET NATIONAL DE MARSEILLE’S THE TRUTH 25 TIMES A SECOND. INTO MY HEAD, UNBIDDEN AND UNEXPLAINED, POPPED THE PHRASE “ALL ART IS A LIE.”

Not an original thought, and not a very interesting one, but what most surprised me was that it didn’t seem mine at all. It certainly didn’t seem a poignant response to what was unfolding before me, and it took me a long while to unpack. As best I can understand it, now, it was a part of my mind protesting at the space between what it had been promised and what was subsequently delivered. And that promise was great.

the truth 25 times a second

The Truth is a collaboration between Belgian Frédéric Flamand and China’s Ai Weiwei, whose international renown is today inextricably bound up in his role as a national dissident. The performing ensemble breaks from ballet tradition in being heavily skewed towards male, which opens up much potential in terms of movement dynamics. And there’s the title: any work that invokes the troubled notion of “truth” in such a brazen fashion has some courage indeed.

That title itself is an allusion to Jean-Luc Godard’s famous proclamation that film is truth at 24 frames per second. As in much of the discourse around Ai, Godard was exploring the connection between art and politics, and the ability of the artist to explore the constructed nature of our reality and its connections with various forms of power. Updating the reference by one fps, presumably to incorporate the technology of video and its omnipresent use as a tool of surveillance, is a very suggestive move.

But what we get is some fairly standard live video capturing the onstage performance and beaming it onto a rear drop. There’s some pre-recorded footage of dancers in sterile urban spaces—a bathroom, an empty corridor—and an enlarged image of an eye that occasionally looks out toward the audience. There doesn’t seem to be much ‘truth’ under the microscope here, even in an ironic or negatory form. It’s almost as if the title was chosen because, well, it’s a nice quote.

As with so much of the work, the title seems closer to that notion of ‘truthiness’ [the term promoted by Stephen Colbert. Eds]. Everything has the sheen of meaning but the signifiers wind up unbound, untethered to anything but one another. The work draws inspiration from Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees, another allusion that holds out the promise of Serious Art, but it’s hard to find any response to the novel here apart from a strictly formal one. People climb tree-like structures. Okay.

Ai’s contribution to the project is just as disappointing, but perhaps perfectly in keeping with its logic. The set is almost entirely composed of a series of interlocking ladders, many of which can be disconnected and rearticulated at different points. They form the aforementioned tree, are dragged like heavy wings behind a performer’s back, and at a stretch might draw associations with the frames of a strip of film, if we were dealing with film here instead of video. But after a time it seems that the combinatorial possibilities here are their own end, and we’re simply watching a game of ‘things you can do with ladders.’

The choreography itself is attractive, and again its formal aspects are perfectly admirable. The dancers are of an athletic variety and Flamand makes the most of this—perhaps a local equivalent would be ADT. It would be a satisfying affair if it weren’t for all that promise, which is even further reinforced by the hyperbole of the program notes. But it felt, in the end, as if a better fable to compare it to would be something about emperors and their attire.

duck, death and the tulip

Take the other extreme. A few days later, speaking to a fellow critic about Barking Gecko’s Duck, Death and the Tulip, she exclaimed, “It didn’t lie!” It was a simple yet ideal rebuttal to that odd formulation that was still irritating my thoughts. Barking Gecko’s production doesn’t lie, and it makes for an astonishing piece of children’s theatre.

A duck lives out her days on a lake in quiet, carefree fashion until the handsomely-suited figure of Death arrives and introduces her to the very concept of mortality. He explains the various ways by which she might depart the world, but her infectious playfulness soon wins his affection and he spends the season in her company, holding back the inevitable. And then winter comes and the landscape freezes over, and the Duck dies and sinks beneath the waves.

There’s no lie. There’s no suggestion of an afterlife, no retreat into memory or the sense that the Duck’s death meant anything more than a duck’s death does. Nobody mourns, and death itself is presented for the dumb fact it is. From the faces of the younger children in the audience, this was an encounter that raised questions it refused to answer with comforting platitudes. There must have been some interesting conversations on the way home afterwards.

It’s a lavish production. A full band in white formal wear plays from an elevated spot at the stage’s rear, complete with Jazz Age half-shell footlights. Chris More’s projected backdrop is a subtle, painterly evocation of mountains and fields that shift gently across seasons, while a bathtub filled with rubber balls amply manages to suggest the lake in which much of the action takes place. Ella Hetherington’s Duck is energetic and mischievous and despite being wordless (she communicates through a duck whistle) never crosses into panto mode. As Death, George Shevtsov balances gravitas and dry humour.

None of this works to aestheticise the work’s central subject of mortality, however, to offer art as a soothing balm or fetish with which to keep death at arm’s (or wing’s) length. The final image is of Death returning to his lofty perch at the top of a ladder, surveying the land for the next creature he’ll be paying a visit. And so it goes.

la marea

As a celebration of life, there’s much to commend in Mariano Pensotti’s La Marea. Unfortunately it’s a celebration that takes place despite the piece, not just because of it: a length of street is transformed by a wandering audience who stumble upon any of a dozen vignettes played out on balconies, in shop windows and alleyways. There was something of a festival air, as all manner of strollers stopped to discuss the playlets with strangers, to offer conjecture or review. Many had happened upon the event by chance, and their curiosity added a frisson to the atmosphere.

But several logistical problems undermined the course of the evening. All of the scenes involved projected surtitles, as much of the text unfolded in the heads of each character, and in many cases the crowd gathered so close to the words that only 10 or so could read what was going on. For some sequences, sightlines were so narrow that only one or another player was visible to most.

The majority of scenes didn’t make much of their potential, either—given that so many were internal monologues by characters who were essentially static for their duration, thinking over their lives while sipping a drink or waiting for a date to show up, there was little impetus to look at anything but the text, when it was visible. It amounted to a series of short stories being read in public by a large crowd, which seems a let-down given the sheer scale of the event and the operational difficulties it presented. It was a hugely complicated production, but surprisingly lacking in complexity.

watt

The opposite can be said of Gate Theatre’s production of Watt. One performer, Barry McGovern, recites Beckett’s novella on an almost empty stage, floating on the silence between his words. There’s so little to look at that every button, every mote of dust caught in the spotlight, takes on great significance. McGovern’s performance is just as precise, as if a rollicking shaggy dog tale told by a veteran jester in a pub had been repeated so many times, for so many years, that every pause and stop has been honed to perfection.

McGovern brings just enough of the clown in Beckett to get the tone of his writing right; too many take the writer’s works as a cue to deliver heavy-faced existential despair, whereas the seriousness of the work lies in the conditions to which it reacts, not in the actions of his players. His characters may live in a unforgiving universe, but they go on, in their manner.

Watt was the work Beckett gave us before Waiting for Godot, and it’s a fine companion, tracing the story of a man who takes up appointment as some kind of house-aid in a sinister manse whose occupants never clearly manifest. His ascension upstairs and relationship with the master take on a mystical aspect, but allegory is continually undermined by the narrative’s own unreliability and occasionally self-referential nature. In any case, Watt ends his story ejected from the space before discovering his true place within it, and unable to make solid sense of what has become of him. As with Godot, the possibility of existence’s meaninglessness is at all times counterpoised by a terrific abundance of language, which is itself liberated by its inessential nature. It may be a lie, but to lie so well is its own art.

Ballet National de Marseille, The Truth 25 Times a Second, choreography Frédéric Flamand and Ballet National de Marseille dancers, design Ai Weiwei, Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre of WA, Feb 8-11; Barking Gecko, Duck, Death and the Tulip, writer Wolf Erlbruch, director John Sheedy, performers George Shevtsov, Ella Hetherington, Subiaco Arts Centre, Feb 8-16; La Marea, creator Mariano Pensotti, Rokeby Road, Subiaco, Feb 14-17; Gate Theatre Dublin, Watt, novel by Samuel Beckett, text selection & performance Barry McGovern, director Tom Creed, Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre of WA, Feb 13-17

Representing RealTime, John Bailey was a guest of the Perth International Arts Festival. Illness unfortunately prevented coverage of the Robert Wilson production of The Threepenny Opera for the Berliner Ensemble.

FOUR PRODUCTIONS, LA CUCHINA DELL’ARTE (BELGIUM), CLOUDS (SPAIN), SHIVA SHAKTI (INDIA) AND 3G (TROIS GENERATIONS) (FROM FRANCE TO PERTH) VIEWED IN THIS YEAR’S FESTIVAL, CAUSE REFLECTION ON THE ANTAGONISTIC RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ENTERTAINMENT AND ART.

While artfulness abounds in the works under question, all revel, unashamedly, in seducing audiences into their respective worlds of absurdity, illusion, lush dynamism and humanism. Their different performance inflections, nevertheless, speak of vagaries of the human condition, viscerally penetrating thought. La Cuchina’s accident-prone pizzeria is not without its message of a consumerism which, like the pizza dough, is spun out of nourishing usefulness. Awareness of René Magritte’s examination of disproportion probably enhances interpretation of Clouds and familiarity with cultural symbolism might enable viewers to penetrate depths underlying the rhythmic extravaganza of Shiva Shakti and, yet, few would miss the play on reality of the former or the mighty force of gender relations in the latter. The unembellished dancing people, 24 in total, of 3G simply populate the stage with movement and the traceries of tales such gestures weave. There is a subtle dig at elitism with this festival programming which might have affronted the stalwarts of the avant garde but which I found to be ‘entertainment’ with zest and purpose.

la cuchina dell’arte

Circus Rinaldo’s La Cuchina dell’Arte unfolded under a tent in the slow cook of Perth’s mid-summer heat. This ‘small top’ encircled a display of low-tech gags enacted by two skilled performers, a commanding straight-man-chef and his charming, if conniving, waiter who emerges from the darkness with a match or, rather, multiple boxes of matches to light the first candle of the night on a tiny romantic, checked table-clothed table for two. In the fumble of falling light and intermittent utterances, the scene is set, deliciously positioned between surprise and predictability. What follows embraces the anarchy of commedia dell’arte, taking detours into audience participation, stolen sweets and juggled pizza dough whose swirling produced holes in the circular texture to proclaim (gently) the wisdom of failure. Appeal lay in the ability of the brothers to construct an imaginative world from the fundamentals of shallots, brooms, pizza shovels and plate-spinning, matched consummately with their ability to smooth the anxieties of their chosen participants (and the rejected ones) with the absurdity of trying to succeed.

clouds

“Fantasy, imagination and magic,” Aracaladanza’s guiding principles, play lightly in Clouds with the perspectival disjunctions and incongruous logic of Magritte’s imagery. Choreographer, Enrique Cabrera, utilises the imagery of clouds as raw material to be transformed into hand-held balls of fluff or translucent inflatables rolling across the stage. At other moments, clouds become huge bubble-tutus costumed by hidden performers, silly sheep gambolling in and around dancers’ legs or stormy trickeries in an enchanting shadow sequence where dis-embodied hands encase the seemingly diminutive human forms. Green apples appear and disappear, doors leading no-where swallow unsuspecting adventurers and bowler hats, like a Magritte ‘brand,’ head the dancers off to willy-nilly encounters. Object theatre meets contemporary dance in this child-like terrain where decapitated black-suited bodies entertain with snappy jazz routines stomped-flopped by the cast of six tireless dancers. The jokes probe Magritte’s take on the sur-real, the surface non-sense which unhinges inner desire.

shiva shakti

Throbbing drums herald the spectacle of two cosmological principles, Shiva (masculine) and Shakti (feminine), of the splitting and cohering of male and female rhythms as only Hindu artists can conjure. The percussive presence of the Daksha Seth Dance Company, beaten out with hands, feet and reverberating bodies, harnesses the forces of the ancients by way of Kathak dance, martial arts’ Chhau and yogic traditions of rope and pole to revel in the time-space of Bollywood. Shiva Shakti represents an India here and now, which is simultaneously an erotic Sanskrit past. Some might think the colour, virtuosity and symbolism an excessively sensuous onslaught but the insistent interplay of sound patterns embodied by dancers and musicians alike warms the blood. The slipped polyphonic beat in its intricate and often thrashed concentration on a big drum with rice raining down in a column of red light cannot but both entrance and terrify. This opposition is enhanced by the aerial work with rings, silks, rope and a marvellous fighting sequence on a double harness which brings Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on stage. The gods and their skilled human representations bounce off the earth of our imagining.

Against the thunderous tumult of Shiva Shakti, quietude returns with Jean-Claude Gallotta’s 3G, where dancers across three generations construct, out of their diverse bodily understandings, the same choreographic material. The children ‘do’ the movements with utter seriousness as if demonstrating their proficiency at the alphabet or times table. The eight-some has been drilled to professional accuracy and fulfils those expectations without missing a beat. Context for all sections is shyly suggested in introductory Italian film snippets from the 1930s or 40s. In the generational beginning, a grandma arrives to an over-flowing saucepan of boiling milk, only to transform the moment of disaster for the young boy into an imaginative riverine landscape on the spilt milk’s floor. Ends, through this imaginative device, are tied to beginnings.

Physically, the child generation (performed by members of Steps, WA’s Youth Dance Company) levitate, as if gravity had not touched their small statures and dreams. The adults enter with visceral density which grounds the movement and its sensual/sexual complications. Interactions compound not in a narrative through-line but in glance, luscious gesture and powerful leaps and stamps, communicating a dynamic range of engagement which, with all of its power, still admits limits and emotional anxieties. The third generation, the eldest, bind the work together: curiously they are more and less confined in weightedness. Grace enters into the equation, given through gesture which suits Gallotta’s particularised movement. The film before this segment is a comic rendition of a community who trot into a stream of sunshine in a snow-defined landscape. The image of this generation gravitating to light exemplifies the generational journey. The shaft of sunshine fades and the third generation of dancers begin their enactment. Strangely, via the imagination of this third generation, the dance continues within a landscape built around beginnings in spilt milk.

When the three generations came together in a brief epilogue and final bow, the sense of family and community presented a powerful image, redolent across time and space, of the way in which performance touches the aching mix of dream and actuality to which we all subscribe.

Perth International Arts Festival 2013: Circus Rinaldo, La Cuchina dell’Arte, Russell Square, Northbridge, Feb 9-24; Aracaladanza, Clouds, choreographer Enrique Cabrera, Regal Theatre, Feb 14-17; Daksha Seth Dance Company, Shiva Shakti, choreographer Daksha Seth, director Devissaro, Regal Theatre, Feb 25-28; STRUT with Steps Youth Dance Company and Centre Choregraphique de Grenoble (France), 3G (Trois Générations), choreographer Jean-Claude Gallotta, rehearsal directors: Generation1 Alice Holland, Generation 2 Danielle Michich, Generation 3 Sue Peacock, State Theatre Centre of Western Australia, Studio Underground, Feb 28-March 2

AS WORKERS ENJOY A SUNNY LUNCH ON GRASSY TAKUTAI SQUARE, IN THE RECENTLY REDEVELOPED BRITOMART PRECINCT OF DOWNTOWN AUCKLAND, A DARK COLUMN LOOMS ABOVE THEM.

It is eight metres tall and rectangular, similar to the marble block columns of an adjacent building but painted almost black with a matt skin-like finish on three sides. The fourth side has a tinted glass panel, custom-made to create a full-height diffused LED screen that faces into the square, observing the comings and goings of commuters, late morning loafers, weekend market shoppers or after-dark malingerers. Behind the glass, a mix of gaseous, liquid and geometric forms drifts across and up the column, accompanied by soft pulsing music. The colours and sounds change in hue, form and dynamics across the day, and from season to season, as if absorbing the environment and responding with their own interpretation; an electronic world projected behind the glass.

This is Tim Gruchy’s SCOUT (Sentient Co-relator of Urban Transaction), a public sculpture privately commissioned as part of Cooper & Co’s redevelopment of an area that combines Auckland’s main rail station with new high-rise corporate accommodation, shopping and restaurant-bars set in historic former port buildings. SCOUT was developed in collaboration with Sydney architects Johnson Pilton Walker (JPW), designers of the adjacent tower, and was launched in early 2012. Its ever-changing soundscapes were developed with musician-artist James Pinker (ex-Fetus Productions/SPK/Dead Can Dance) and features several vocalists, including Precious Clark from local iwi (Maori tribe) Ngati Whatua, whose performance greets the dawn. Well-known technician and weather boffin Richard Huntington has contributed to the sophisticated back-end, which is activated by camera, microphone, clock and calendar events or climate sensors (humidity, brightness, temperature, rainfall), all of which feed three networked computers that drive the audio and graphics in real time—there is no pre-recorded video.

SCOUT’s primary relationships, however, are with humans. Its camera detects motion in the square, its microphone responds to sound, and the lower portion of the glass has touchscreen functionality, allowing people to interact directly through gesture, releasing an additional range of sound and light events into the virtual space inside. But, existing as an entirely self-contained artificial entity rather than as a tool or extension for the human body, SCOUT is no cyborg. Although the slight twist and skin-like surface of its ‘spiny’ exoskeleton gives it subtle anthropomorphic qualities, it is not humanoid, but designed to be a benevolent presence that shares the landscape with us.

This could be the most technically complex public artwork in New Zealand, unrivalled in its advanced mix of electronics, interdisciplinary collaboration and advanced materials. It seems this unique mix of engineering, programming and art has its unlikely roots in the can-do DIY ethic instilled in the post-punk generation of art school-educated musicians as they attempted to reboot music’s excesses in the midst of an increasingly technological era. For some, this was a license for avant-garde experimentation, where the likes of John Cage, Terry Riley, Brian Eno, Kraftwerk or Talking Heads were equally likely influences, establishing a space that sits somewhere between art, music, theatre and technology.

Tim Gruchy started out in the Brisbane punk scene in the late 1970s. The subsequent industrial movement of the early 1980s (including groups like Severed Heads, SPK and Fetus Productions) was quick to absorb technological developments to make multimedia a core element of their shows, paving the way for media-saturated raves, interactive dance and hi-tech theatre presentations. Gruchy’s career grew in the midst of these developments. Like many media artists of his generation, he either built his own equipment or had to adapt consumer gear as it became available, inventing outcomes in lieu of any existing precedent, and customising new formats as they became available. This makes him Australia’s go-to person for cutting edge video projects, working anywhere from Chinese art galleries to the Sydney Opera House, although he has so far maintained a low profile in New Zealand, where he has been living since 2006.

Eno seems an obvious reference point, with his well-known interest in electronic ambient music as a way to ‘tint’ an environment, and his slow-change semi-abstract video paintings, notably in vertical format, starting with the oversaturated cityscapes of Mistaken Memories of Mediaeval Manhattan (1981). Gruchy acknowledges Eno as an important early influence but it is Eno’s approach to serial composition that is most relevant here—using chance, algorithms and generative strategies to create almost endlessly variable music and installations from interacting components, most recently his 77 Million Paintings project and his series of iPad apps, Bloom, Trope and Scape (2012). Underpinning these is an interest in ecology and the kind of events and time-scales that defy typically short-term human thinking. The Eno-supported Long Now Foundation is working on a 10,000 year clock that ticks only once a year. Similarly, SCOUT’s climate controls and seasonal variations suggest a structure that extends well beyond the duration of evening concerts or short-loop screensavers, making it more akin to the planetary and temporal sensitivies of land art, such as Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973-76) or James Turrell’s Roden Crater (2006). Like Eno’s art-school origins, Gruchy’s early architectural studies have suggested different ways to construct enduring systems rather than to compose music of finite duration. Architecture works on a much larger scale than most art forms, not just physically but temporally too, ideally with a long view of how it impacts on its environment.

Compared to most inanimate public art, SCOUT is also unique in the way it evolves as a form of smart sculpture. Not only can its existing algorithms learn and adapt from the patterns and conditions of its location, it also exists as a form of hardware that could accommodate ongoing software updates—I’m told the existing installation has features that haven’t yet been activated. This makes SCOUT an intelligent presence in the urban environment, co-existing and communicating, but for whom? Another clear reference is the monolith in the film 2001 A Space Odyssey, adapted from Arthur C Clarke’s short story, The Sentinel (1948)—Gruchy shares a birthday with sci-fi writers Clarke and Philip K Dick. SCOUT’s dynamic behavioural qualities raise questions of sentience and artificial intelligence. Although SCOUT is unlikely to be communicating with extra-terrestrials, it’s possible that it may have something interesting to say to our future selves.

Tim Gruchy, SCOUT, 2012, LED video display, LED strip light, touch screen, speakers, microphone, video camera, environmental sensors, networked computers, audio and media servers, generative computer programme in glass, compressed fibreboard and steel shell. Takutai Square, Britomart Precinct, Auckland, NZ; www.grup.tv

Julius Avery, Jessica Mitchell, Michael Spiccia, winners of the Dendy Award for Best Live Action Short for Yardbird, 2012 Sydney Film Awards

HAVING ATTENDED THE EVENT AND WATCHED THE TELECAST, I FELT QUITE DISSATISFIED WITH THIS YEAR’S AUSTRALIAN ACADEMY OF CINEMA AND TELEVISION ARTS (AACTA) AWARDS, THE MAJOR EVENT FOR THE AUSTRALIAN SCREEN INDUSTRY. ANTICIPATING THAT THE OSCARS WOULD ALSO BE AN UNDERWHELMING EXPERIENCE, I STARTED THINKING ABOUT WHAT WAS WRONG WITH AWARDS GENERALLY, AND WHAT MIGHT BE DONE TO RESCUE THEM.

Because there is certainly something wrong; people still attend them, or watch them on TV, but there are more and more complaints, ranging from issues with the host or hosts or about the presentation to more serious concerns to do with the actual awards.

new times, new media, old categories

In the time running up to each event and in much of the feedback, questions are asked and suggestions made as to what is wrong and what can be done, but none of this seems to register with those in control. The big questions are, do awards still have a role? In this digital age, especially, with so many changes to screen production, distribution and delivery systems, aren’t there large and growing areas of work that are being ignored? Aren’t the selection processes and judging systems now quite questionable, as the parameters of eligibility and the criteria for comparison are thrown open by such changes?

It would certainly appear that the old categories are not really working anymore. For the AACTAs in particular, the huge range of categories, many seeming quite indulgent, unnecessary or just inaccurate, only makes for an overburdened event—and for an electorate equally overburdened by out of date criteria. So I wanted to write something that investigated these issues, looked at the AACTAs and the Oscars, and even worried about the future of the new kid on the block, the APSAs (Asia Pacific Screen Awards).

demise of the if awards

Events, as they often do, intervened. The demise of the IF Awards was announced; that fun and rather irreverent award celebration, produced by IF magazine, which went into hiatus last year, will now not return. With audience-based voting and close ties to the screen industry, these awards, from their inception in 1999, had become a strong alternative to the AFIs, but financial constraints have brought them to an end (although the IF Awards Group is still considering a much less formal celebration). Then, less than two years after a major overhaul of the AFIs and a big launch for the new game in town, and only weeks after the second Awards had been held, it was announced that the AACTAs were in serious financial trouble.

the aacta crisis

The team which had developed the first and second AACTA Awards had suddenly been halved in size, with six staff positions going, and AFI/AACTA CEO Damian Trewhella admitted that the organisation was in the red, with the loss of a naming rights sponsor for the 2013 AACTA Awards causing serious and urgent financial difficulties. With much of the income coming from sponsors and advertisers in the non-screen sector focused on the glamorous awards, the industry and craft categories—such as television direction, documentary, editing, sound, production design and short films, only supported by about 15% of the operating costs—are under serious threat. With outside sponsors not wanting to fund the industry awards, and the industry so far unable to provide the money, Trewhella says, “The only way forward is to have the activities re-evaluated by the screen sector itself.”

Trewhella thinks that it probably is time to rationalise the awards, to perhaps roll a few categories together. And while he sees sense in the suggestion made by a number of commentators to hold the film and television awards separately, he says that the AFI is not in a position to have two entirely separate events. He’s looking forward to discussions across the industry, with the state and federal funding bodies, the guilds and organisations and with the filmmakers themselves; after all, he says, the awards are there to celebrate the people working in the industry.

The Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts was established in August 2011 by the Australian Film Institute, the general membership-based organisation that had been conducting the AFI Awards to recognise screen excellence for over 50 years. This followed a year-long review and industry consultation; the inaugural AACTA Awards were held in Sydney in January 2012 and the second in January 2013. At the AACTA launch in 2011, the new academy was described as a peak peer assembly for leading Australian screen practitioners, made up of 15 chapters covering key facets of the screen industry, from acting, directing and screenwriting to production and distribution, each headed by an industry luminary in an honorary post, with AACTA itself governed by an honorary council which would develop policy, aimed at “creating greater unity among screen professionals.” It’s unclear, however, how much input this academy is having into addressing AACTA’s problems.

The screen industry’s eight guilds and unions want to support the awards; each organisation is preparing recommendations and they’ll come together to work out a joint submission with the sort of changes they want to see and suggestions to solve the many issues they have with existing awards. (The need for the international awards, for example, is universally queried.) Kingston Anderson, Chief Executive of the Australian Directors Guild, asks what the awards are supposed to do, and answers, “celebrate our industry. But what we want is a fair system where people are recognised fairly in their categories—and that the categories themselves are fair.” He adds that the Guilds’ own awards work well, and “that’s because we’re driven by our members. We all have extraordinarily interesting discussions on guidelines and awards.”

With all the guilds and unions holding their own awards annually, there is a suggestion of more co-operation, of an awards season with the specific awards held before the AACTAs, as a build-up to the main event. There are concerns, too, that the marketing of the awards dictates a number of decisions, seen as too driven by the needs of the telecast. “They’re coming from the wrong end,” argues Anderson, “Let’s get the event right first, and then market it. Even if it’s screening on a cable channel, it’ll become desirable once it’s really working.”

On March 19 the AFI/AACTA announced four new AFI board members, Geoff Brown, Russell Howcroft, Alaric McAusland and Ian Sutherland, all industry heavy hitters, who will join existing members Mike Baard, Jennifer Huby, Robert Sessions and Sigrid Thornton, with Alan Finney as chair, restoring the AFI Board to its full capacity (and earning a quip from one media commentator that the AFI now has more board members than staff). This beefed-up board should give it some more bargaining power in the trying times ahead.

the asia pacific screen awards

The Asia Pacific Screen Awards, which had been rumoured to be in trouble along with other cultural activities in Queensland following the change of government, are apparently safe. Des Power, Chair of APSA, is feeling very positive; he’s just had some very encouraging talks with the Queensland Government and believes that they want to continue with APSA.

These awards were established in 2008 to recognise and promote the cinematic excellence and cultural diversity of the vast Asia Pacific region with an annual awards ceremony each November. They’ve slowly but surely established a role and an identity for themselves; it would be a shame to see them disappear after all that hard work. Awards are decided following a complex and rigorous nomination and judging process, taking in hundreds of films from the many and diverse countries involved. An APSA Academy was established in 2008, with an influential alumni of filmmakers growing by around 100 each year. Development funding is now provided to the region’s filmmakers, aiming to stimulate collaboration. Eight films are now at various stages of production.

Des Power, who was behind APSA from the beginning, says that “it’s been a very difficult year for the government, financially, and we want to give them a bit of latitude, use a bit of common sense.” As he explains, it was always envisaged that once the awards were firmly established, they would be held every second year in Brisbane, and in one of the member countries in the alternate year. “We’ve had some very healthy discussions about this, and we’re hoping to be able to announce that this year APSA will take place in one of several cities in the region.” He adds that the move from the Gold Coast to Brisbane last year was very successful, and he’s hopeful that more screening opportunities for APSA’s nominated films will present themselves in future, not only at the Brisbane International Film Festival, but with other festivals and events around Australia.

a model past its use-by date?

Late last year, as the movie award season got under way, Andrew L Urban in his online journal Urban Cinephile argued that “the use-by date for film awards has arrived.” Mainly talking about the Oscars, but with remarks that could also be applied to the AACTAs, he complained about “outdated and old world restrictions” and “creaky and inadequate” categories, arguing that “there really is no rational way to argue that 282 films made in 2012 can be assessed for a single Best Picture award, nor that there is only one contribution in all the other categories that deserves the ‘Best’ stamp.” He added, “So far, no awards body has managed to find an effective alternative system to the template: the nominees & winner formula remains cast in concrete.”

He also suggested that “in a more sophisticated world where people with vision and imagination manage such things, there may be a system that recognises and encourages excellence without demanding that there be one ‘winner,’ a few also-rans and hundreds of ‘losers’…one way to overcome some of the major limitations and strictures of old awards systems might be to discard the old nomination/winners construct and instead to recognise ‘Outstanding Achievement’ in the various award categories…(giving) equal value to all the work that has been peer-judged as outstanding…it elevates the accolade for each and avoids having to compare apples with oranges.”

Some kind of radical overhaul of the system is definitely needed. The constant criticism, both here and overseas, allied with disappointing audience numbers, would certainly indicate that we don’t need this bloated, out-of-date and very expensive monster. A solution is needed that addresses all the issues, canvasses alternatives and hopefully comes up with something new, different and genuinely fresh and exciting; something that does away with the current categories and looks at what awards are actually for. The Sydney Prize, given out at the Sydney Film Festival’s relatively new competition, goes to the film that best satisfies a very specific set of criteria, including innovation—why not then work towards a number of awards, each with its own criteria? We’re looking to compare very different work and practices, and there are all sorts of ways in which this could be done, but we need to start! The situation that AACTA finds itself in should provide a perfect impetus to do something a lot more radical than just fiddle around at the edges.

AMID THE THOUSAND AND ONE LAZY ASSUMPTIONS ON HOW POSTMODERN CINEMA IS PRESUMED TO WORK IN THE FILMS OF QUENTIN TARANTINO, IT HAS BECOME DIFFICULT TO DIVINE HOW HIS ‘JUKEBOX CINEMA’ AUDIOVISION FUNCTIONS, AND TO DISCERN HOW HIS SONG AND SCORE SELECTION REFLECTS A POLITICISED MUSICOLOGY.

Tarantino’s authorial conceit and post-authorial recontextualisation of cinematic predecessors is only of conservative relevance to cinema, for his heightened audiovision constitutes a cinematic textuality that is cannily true to a medium born of narrative pulping, stylistic regurgitating and generic melding.

Yet as celebrated as he is for colliding pop songs with filmed action, that very effect has become terrifyingly rationalised in the hands of so many wannabe-outré directors (and producers). Tarantino meanwhile has forged ahead and refined the technique through a mode of perceptual crafting nominally excluded from discussion of postmodern art making.

Django Unchained (2012) marks a high in song selection, narrative recontextualisation and musicological territorialisation with alpine clarity. More importantly, it does so through operations seemingly opposed to the insular textuality of postmodern construction (allusions, appropriations, quotations, de-historicisation etc), and in their place broadly evidences trans-historical networking and even globalised positioning. If the film were simply a new post-PC revision of slave lore and suppressed American history, it would be ingrained in the vein of universalist ore mined by Hollywood cinema, something like a hip mash-up of Michael Cimino’s notorious big budget Zionist Western Heaven’s Gate (1980) and George Englund’s lesser-known low budget messianic Rock Western Zachariah (1971). But a crucial rustling of the filmic fabric is evident in Tarantino’s choosing a slew of Ennio Morricone music cues from other films. This audiovisual tactic does not simply point outward to the world of Pop Music, but rather draws inward the sono-musical phenomenality of recorded songs and cues to create a fertile grounding for the visualised action.

The 60s Spaghetti Western genre—a gloriously impure mutation that has fuelled the Western since its classical demise at the close of the 50s—is renowned for its transmutation of mythic narrative frameworks into visceral operas of violence. Ennio Morricone was the pre-eminent composer who if not defining the genre’s sound, refined it into an archetypal sonography, for evermore branding the movies with the twang of an electric Telecaster and dissonant wailing strings, both drenched in distinctive studio reverb from the era. Yet that description ignores the cultural project of these films and their deliberated soundtracks. In their debunking of the John Ford heroics of Hollywood’s ‘new world’ frontier ethics championed by the films’ collective pioneering spirit, the Italian Westerns embodied a critique of post-war Americanism before it had gained traction as a target of superpower rhetoric by the end of the convulsing 60s. It’s curiously perplexing that the Spaghetti Westerns were regarded by conservative critics and aesthetes as being vulgar, derivative and bombastic, for these Italian revisions of US folkloric history chose mostly to side with forces usually annulled by Hollywood scripts—namely, brutal revenge and retribution sought by Mexican revolutionaries and native Indian war tribes. Surveying the bulk of Morricone’s Western scores, one can audit his musicological allusions to those musical cultures, amplifying them through orchestrations of Italo-Catholic pomp and veneration.

So when Tarantino chooses these tracks, he is—with his voracious knowledge of these mutated generic film histories—working from a specific set of generic blue-prints, other than what might be ordinarily presumed. While the title theme to Django Unchained is the theme song to Sergio Corbuccio’s Django (1966), composed by Luis Bacalov, a number of other cues appear throughout Django Unchained from Morricone’s score to Two Mules For Sister Sarah (1970). Added to this are some distinctive Morricone excerpts from the political thriller Violent City (1970), plus a cue from Riz Ortolani’s title theme from I giorni dell’ira (1967). Along with still more excerpts, the musical fabric of Django Unchained’s score cross-patches songs and cues which sonographically evoke a distinctive Italian aesthetic of scoring terse drama and emotional exhaustion which sounds a universe away from the Austro-Germanic academic tradition which saturates the Continental aspirations of Hollywood’s grand orchestrations. Of course, Martin Scorsese is renowned for historicising his Italo-American crime sagas with songs reflecting the sensibilities of his characters, but Tarantino—of Italo-American descent himself—enacts a more complex tactic by eschewing song (already overused as a device for character assignation in movies post-Scorsese) for Italian film scores originally designed to convey a culturally coded mode of address and commentary which gave the Italian Western its identity.

Now this would all be straightforward enough if Tarantino was just making a rebooted Western, but Django Unchained reboots—or unchains—something that has lain for decades festering in the American Gothic of the South: the slave saga. Americans mostly avoided it until the mid-70s, when films like Richard Fleischer’s Mandingo (1975) and the TV mini-series Roots (1977) were made; slavery was mostly handled symbolically in prison dramas like Stuart Rosenberg’s Cool Hand Luke (1967). Again, it was the Italians who were first off the mark with amazingly violent ‘exploitation’ flicks associated with this sub-genre (the Italians themselves knowing a bit about slavery from their days of Roman glory). Historical movies like Goodbye Uncle Tom (1971) actually overlapped with contemporary American depictions of violence in the Blaxploitation cycle of movies (some of which were Westerns, notably Fred Williamson’s Boss Nigger, 1973). Both generic trends held a lot in common: racial violence, white oppression, black power and fantastic film scores and songs more associated with Pop Music than the film industry.

Perceived this way, Django Unchained becomes a carnival of echoes, bouncing references back and forth between Electric Italy and Black America. Echoic balladeering, Latino flutes and ocarinas, wild fuzzed guitars, Bach-like string fugues and funky booming drum kits perform a dance of stylistic fusion to beget not simply an eclectic mix-tape of cool retro tracks, but a concise mapping of the way pop and folk music at the time provided a transcultural system of signage that allowed these populist films—so derided by critics because of their polyglotic noise—a far sharper prism of politicised refraction than many presumed possible.

Tarantino’s Django Unchained thus audio-visually births a gangster rap visitation of the slave pic as produced by leftist Italian radicals, and blasts it into the auditorium of Hollywood’s white Western museography, whose Old Testament Hebrew tales of heroic land-securement are scored by megalomaniacal Germanic orchestrations. In this melting pot of global currents and murky waters we hear yet another example of Tarantino looking at cinema and calling a spade a spade: the very thing that falls on so many deaf ears.

A SENSE OF WEARINESS PERVADES CHRISTIAN PETZOLD’S COLD WAR DRAMA SET IN 1980S EAST GERMANY. IT’S THE WEARINESS THAT COMES WITH ALWAYS HAVING TO LOOK OVER YOUR SHOULDER, A STATE OF EXISTENCE BARBARA’S PROTAGONIST IS CLEARLY ACCUSTOMED TO FROM THE FILM’S OPENING SCENE.

As punishment for applying to join her boyfriend in the West, Dr Barbara Wolff is sent from Berlin to work in a provincial hospital, where she goes about her constrained life not only under the watchful eye of the security service but, she assumes, of all her colleagues. House and strip searches occur with cruel regularity. Simultaneously character study, thriller and historical portrait, Barbara is a spare, grim film with an intense focus on its central character. There are very few scenes that aren’t seen through its heroine’s eyes.

The film eschews stylistic flourishes. Its cinematography is austere and naturalistic, though not to the extent of drawing attention to this as an aesthetic decision. There are passages where the beauty of the countryside is evident, but there’s little pleasure to be had in it. Barbara’s world is joyless, and we share her outlook. The film’s sound is similarly spare, its infrequent music executed only by the characters themselves. At one point, Barbara plays the piano and escapes into the music she is producing, but it’s a rare instance in a film whose stylistic severity suggests a world from which frivolity and spontaneity have fled.

The other effect of the film’s lack of stylistic distraction is to focus all attention on character and performance, especially Nina Hoss’ masterful interpretation of the title role. Her performance is one of eloquent restraint. Every physical action, from her slightly stiff carriage to the stifling of normal reactions—the tendency to smile in response to friendliness, for example—gives the impression of a woman under enormous strain. She is ever watchful, ever tensed in anticipation of the next threat to her personal freedom.

Most emotions in the film are internalised in this way, self-policed by those wary of expressing too much in this society where all motives are questionable. Barbara’s colleague Dr André Reiser (Ronald Zehrfeld) is an exception, but in this climate even his kindness seems suspect. That’s not to say the film is black and white in its presentation of East versus West. Barbara’s boyfriend, with whom she shares the occasional illicit tryst, mentions callowly that when she makes it to West Germany she won’t have to work, as he’ll earn enough money for both of them. It’s a statement that gives this highly educated woman, so clearly devoted to her work, pause for thought.

Though Barbara is very effective in its overarching narrative of persecution and heroism, it’s in the smaller moments of quiet humanity that it becomes thought provoking. As the rapport deepens between Barbara and André, the question arises, “Can one make a life for oneself under these conditions?” The possibility is left open at that.

Barbara, director Christian Petzold, screenplay Christian Petzold, Harun Farocki, director of photography Hans Fromm, editor Bettina Böhler, music Stefan Will, 2012; distributed in Australia by Madman Entertainment

THERE’S A GENERAL THEME OF HOSPITALITY RUNNING THROUGH THIS YEAR’S IN BETWEEN TIME, WHERE EVERY OTHER PERFORMANCE COMES WITH A FREE ALCOHOLIC DRINK AND YOU’RE AS LIKELY TO BE USHERED INTO A PLUSH TOWNHOUSE, OR A CAMPFIRE-LIKE CIRCLE IN THE TWILIT FOREST, AS A BLACK BOX STUDIO. IT’S RARELY A PASSIVE EXPERIENCE FOR THE AUDIENCE.

alex bradley, field test

Alex Bradley’s solar-powered churchyard installation Field Test invites you to gaze up at tree branches filled with constellations of LED lights, as sweet music drifts from bird-box speakers all around you. Even here, in an overlooked backstreet of central Bristol, a busker has stumbled upon Bradley’s ambient meditation and is adding long, surprisingly sensitive violin motifs to the rich textures and city noise. People come and go in the dark. Drug dealers try, unsuccessfully, to tout their wares. The electronics are enough.

tim etchells, untitled (after violent incident)

In Between Time’s air of hospitality is gratefully received by an enthusiastic and vocal audience. Bristol has been missing the large-scale curation of a certain kind of performance (most often non-mimetic, non-narrative, physically uncompromising and oblique in immediate intent) since the last IBT in 2010. On the opening night, Arnolfini is packed so tight you can barely move, and I plant myself in front of Tim Etchells’ Untitled (after Violent Incident), a live version of his Bruce Nauman-inspired video work, to catch the whole thing from start to finish. Two performers re-enact a compression of the actions and atmospheres from Nauman’s 1986 multi-screen installation, a repetitive set of altercations, slaps, pratfalls and grievous bodily harms around a dinner table, stuck in a loop—but a human loop, imperfect, with the male and female performers sometimes recognising the absurdity of their actions in tiny and knowing ways. Over time it becomes alternately horrifying, hilarious and exhausting, a ritual derived from data retrieved from a faulty drive. It’s as interesting to watch your fellow audience as it is the choreography: to see where they laugh, where they frown, markedly different expressions upon every face in the crowd at any given point.

holzinger & riebeek, kein applaus für scheisse

I find myself thinking back to Untitled later in the weekend, when Florentina Holzinger and Victor Riebeek stage Kein Applaus Für Scheisse, also an account of negotiations between a man and woman, but this time it’s a goofy, sweet portrait of the artists’ real-life relationship—albeit thoroughly excretal. Dressed like acid-house hippies and singing bad karaoke, Holzinger and Riebeek present a series of tableaux with their bodies and bodily functions at the centre. He eats a trail of red string from her vagina; they dance in formal but bungled style, limbs knocking against each other; he urinates on her and she spits it out into his open mouth. In this instance you don’t need to see the audience’s faces. You can hear them. At the point where Riebeek genuinely and repeatedly vomits a startling pure blue liquid onto Holzinger’s arching body, there are gasps, jeers, laughter, and someone behind me involuntarily exclaims: “Easy, tiger!” But beyond the human fluids, the pictures are slowly becoming more formal, more obviously constructed, more touching even. It’s awkward but honest. Holzinger looks up at us, covered in her lover’s blue bile, and mutters: “I need to take antibiotics, I have the allergies.” It’s another ritual from an obscure corner of the world, but this time you get the sense that these two dancing geeks will keep on changing it, making it relevant to each destination and each other as they see fit, and shrugging off anyone who thinks it perverse.

the vacuum cleaner, mental

The vacuum cleaner (“an artist collective of one”) in his solo show, Mental, invites us into a very different kind of autobiography. It’s billed as a work-in-progress but already constitutes one of the most powerful portraits of creativity and depression I’ve ever seen. Twelve of us are bussed to a sparsely furnished bedroom in a hilly part of the city and fed tea and cake until the artist emerges, rheumy-eyed, from underneath a duvet. With grim countenance he pulls folders bulging with documents from under the covers and pillows: his psychiatric reports, his police records. One by one he slides acetates onto an OHP, reads out extracts, then flicks them away, as the story of his fight with the black dog plays out through medical assessments and the unintentionally hilarious prose employed by officers of the law. It’s a heart-rending journey—because the vacuum cleaner has set himself up for a fall: his work, anchored in activism and social justice, is about desperately hoping for the best from the world. And on those terms the world often tends to kick you in the teeth.

Mental is presented in a familiar way, in the tradition perhaps of Bowery-loft performance art, the artist’s life writ large. But there are some remarkable little victories, observations and stings in the tale that make it as important to the listener as the speaker. At the end, when it’s done, I sit and eat a piece of carrot cake that—for reasons I can’t even begin to divulge—has become the saddest and most beautiful taste I can possibly imagine.

emma bennett, slideshow birdshow

At the other end of the emotional scale the biggest laughs at IBT13 come thanks to Emma Bennett’s uncooperative powerpoint lecture, Slideshow Birdshow. Quiet and formal, Bennett begins to deliver a dull talk about ornithology but rapidly gets derailed by a chain of fuzzy, unhelpful and repetitive images that lead her into a cut-up verbal dance. She’s confused but seems compelled to keep talking, continually repeating useless, self-evident details back and forth in time with the slides; and what emerges is a piece of music, like spliced tape running off the spool, out of control, peppered with occasional exclamations or expletives. Towards the end of this short performance the laughter subsides, the rhythms generate an odd calm—and with massively pixelated images flashing by, Bennett’s trembling voice in perfect and unlikely synch with them, her wordless tones turn into a quivering digital birdsong all of their own, singing from somewhere deep inside the machine.

In Between Time: Alex Bradley, Field Test; Tim Etchells, Untitled (after Violent Incident); Holzinger and Riebeek, Kein Applaus Für Scheisse; the vacuum cleaner, Mental; Emma Bennett, Slideshow Birdshow; Bristol, UK, Feb 14-17

FRIDAY OR SATURDAY? SHOULD I BET ON RED OR BLACK? AN AISLE SEAT OR ONE AT THE BACK? THE DESIRED OUTPUT FOR REALTIME IS AROUND 1000 WORDS COVERING FOUR TO SIX SHOWS AT IN BETWEEN TIME. SO, HOW TO DECIDE BETWEEN ONE THING AND ANOTHER, WHERE TO START?

Before arriving in Bristol this decision is shaped both by my agency, and by structures that limit or influence my choices. Some decisions I take quickly, even subconsciously, others I deliberate over at length; rumination influenced by bias, reason, emotion and what is expected from me in this situation.

sylvia rimat, if you decide to stay

Decision-making is the explicit subject matter of Sylvia Rimat’s If You Decide to Stay, a performative lecture that meanders through personal experience, specialist knowledge and a loose set of experiments. Rimat analysed the types of choices we make on a daily basis and speculated as to whether these reflect what we really want. Listing the gamut of reasons that could explain our choice of seat within the auditorium, she then asked us to get up and choose a new one—somewhere we would not usually sit. I chose the middle seat of the back row and considered this to be a reasoned choice. However, the person I was with read this as an emotional choice, as it involved me moving closer to them (we were separated to start)—an audience predisposition that had already been described. Perhaps it was not one or the other, but rather a bit of both.

The complexities of decision-making were expanded upon: neuroscience, mathematics, psychotherapy and astrology formed tools to address the level of conscious choice we have and how much this is influenced through environmental, social and psychological cognition. However the work began to take a random turn. As The Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” blared out, Rimat hopped around in a bunny outfit pondering some vaguely existential questions. This reflection on ‘not knowing’ appeared feigned. When Rimat said she did not know if there would be applause at the end of the performance, this consciously ignored the surrounding social structure that determined that there would be.

kim noble, i am not alone

Kim Noble’s I Am Not Alone presented a similarly dispersed narrative. As the audience entered, Noble was lying on the floor near the entrance. Wearing only a kitchen apron he simulated sexual noises, stating, “I just wanna be a woman.” This was followed by a rant about the couple living above him having sex (to which he responded by playing loud internet pornography back at them) and a detailed description of how he monitored another neighbour’s sex life. Acts of documentation extended to the minutiae of the artist’s life—from the text message he receives in Morrisons [supermarkets] to his taking a shit on a church floor—and border upon pathological self-obsession cum narcissism. Noble’s search for novel types of personal connection with others is deeply provocative and seriously funny, while being fundamental to his work. Noble chooses anonymous, banal individuals, for example Keith, a checkout assistant at the supermarket he has filmed for two years, or Dan with whom he forms a romance via a false female profile on Facebook.

The most extreme and sexually explicit relationship Noble forms is with a truck driver called John. John wants to fuck Noble, believing him to be a woman called Sarah. Noble adapts his behaviour in an attempt to impress John, sending him explicit texts and images in which he has fashioned breasts and a ‘pussy’ using parts of his own body. Noble juxtaposes this material with his relationship with his father, exposing him as a lonely, struggling old man with a nurse washing his arse. As Noble’s relationships descend into potentially humiliating territory—stalking Keith to his home, cross-dressing to meet Dan in a bar—the exploitation of himself and others is tempered by the sense of a kind of unrequited love. I Am Not Alone proved to be a paradox of a title. Noble is alone. Very much alone. As are Keith, John and Dan. The work deconstructs the reality of all our relationships, where characters and roles are performed and exchanged and affect is constructed. The performance comes to an end with the death of Noble’s father, brutally emphasising Noble’s pathetic failure to connect with anyone.

fiksdal, langgård, becker, night tripper

In stark contrast to these performance lectures, In Between Time offered an array of different formats. The course I chose transported me to the woods for Night Tripper by Fiksdal/Langgård/Becker, saw me wander through the sprawling exhibition survey, Version Control, and fail to find my role in Coney’s Early Days (of a Better Nation). Whilst Night Tripper was framed by ritual and a dream-like state of consciousness, this attempt at an all-consuming experience sometimes fell flat. The work was instead at its strongest pared back to its basic components: a minimalist dance aesthetic and accompanying sound from musicians and a hidden choir. In the transition from twilight to darkness, rolling, rocking figures, whining strings and droning hurdy gurdy offered cycles of repetition and a pleasing, numbing boredom.

coney, early days (of a better nation)

Coney presented a work in progress where the audience was set the task of collectively shaping a new nation. This aimed to reflect a wider political context of world events, and to get a hundred or so individuals to make decisions together. However, the narrative felt clichéd and the game mechanism was not strong enough to retain the audience within this performance fiction. From the outset the game structure and narrative did not facilitate the suspension of disbelief required to immerse us in the production of the work. Assigned groups tried to clarify what to do, as individuals drifted off, wandering aimlessly, acquiring additional wealth that was not then deployed with purpose. Over two hours the structure broke down, with video interludes and scripted oratory failing to bring it back under control; many now simply watching on as certain individuals chose to engage in familiar rhetoric, either exchanging rehearsed political positions or simply trying to disrupt them. (For another response to this work-in-progress see http://lettucemelodies.wordpress.com/2013/03.)

version control

The exhibition Version Control was an attempt to explore how a gallery can present performance and performativity, but resulted in an installation where the relations between works felt clunky, bunched together under broad groupings. This awkwardness was less apparent in work within the exhibition documenting Return of the Blogs, a two-week performance program from the collective Grand Openings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. [The title Return of the Blogs refers to the documentation of the works in 2011—a daily account of the actions in the form of handwritten texts, fabricated objects, and audio podcasts presented in the gallery space and on MoMA.org. Eds.] It was an intriguing reflection on performance as a collective act, and live archive, within an institutional frame.

Over 1000 words covering five shows at In Between Time. The desired output is complete. Stop.

In Between Time 13, Sylvia Rimat, If You Decide to Stay; Kim Noble, I Am Not Alone; Fiksdal/Langgård/Becker, Night Tripper [Norway]; Version Control; Coney, Early Days (of a Better Nation); Arnolfini and other venues, Bristol, UK, Feb 14-17

A GANG OF MEN IN FLUORESCENT JACKETS MANHANDLED SOMETHING PALE AND UNWIELDY OVER COLLEGE GREEN IN THE TWILIGHT. A GLOWING WHITE BALL SECURED BY GUY-ROPES, POWERED BY A GENERATOR ON WHEELS, GUARDED BY PEOPLE IN TABARDS WARNING YOU NOT TO OBSTRUCT ITS DESIGNATED PATH.

simon faithfull, fake moon

As night fell the globe lifted above the rattling winter branches, high as the golden unicorn crowning the Civic Centre. Not quite as high as the turret of the Cathedral—definitely not as high as the waxing silver arc far above—but huge, soft and luminous, an accessible wonder. This extra moon would shine for the four nights of the festival.

College Green filled up with people diverted from their evening commute to stare and wonder, to take photographs and pause for a moment before catching the next bus home. A busker set up shop at the entrance to the Green. Above, the real moon exposed the fakeness of the apparition just as the work-jackets and guy-ropes worked a lovely little Heath Robinson analogy on the processes of artifice.

Simon Faithfull spoke later of his interest in “myths and illusion,” of “lying to tell the truth.” In this numinous piece of fakery the clearly visible apparatus of the illusion flickers in and out of awareness as though it were a mirage.

nic green, fatherland

Seven drummers and a piper stood in the dark. Lights up: a woman came forward dressed in a grey short-trousered suit with a heather-coloured tartan trim on the waistcoat. She spoke.

“Father, what is space?” Answers appeared projected above her and she asked the fathers in the room to speak them. Falteringly they acquiesced, in minutes becoming a strong chorus. As the performance progressed we all joined in, we all became the responder, the provider of an answer, the location of a dubious heritage.

She described her last meeting with her father, devoid of much feeling or connection. And we the chorus said, “I am visible only as land. I grow quieter. And firs, rough hillsides, drumbeats and drones.”

She described a circle in chalk on the floor. She took off her jacket with its tartan frill at the back. As one after another of the drums joined in beating a rhythm she paced, then ran, then sprinted round the circle, shrugging off her clothes; till wearing only navy-blue stretchy polyester pants with a tartan frill on the bum she gathered herself into the centre of the circle. As the pipes began to play she jumped and pranced and kicked: a strong, luminous, wild, proper body. She flung her arms up and down, stamped and twisted, ribs and muscles working, the tartan fringe flying.

When the dance was finished and the drumming over, she sat on the floor in a lone spotlight and stripped. She unwound the circle, walking widdershins, and handed bottles of whiskey into the tiers of audience for us to share. The pipes were now only droning.

Standing naked she sang in Gaelic. No need to understand the words. Heather, whiskey, islands and mist and loss, elements of the Celtic twilight—and a glimpse of a brusque masculinity hung on a scaffolding of nylon, tweed, stubble and greyness, shielding the view of the moors beyond. Only a glimpse of flesh muscle and bone shining; hard to uncover, but she’d done it; hard to invoke but she joined us all into the fire of that tribalism.

We drank while she was singing. Then she sat and drank her whiskey, looking at us. She and her drummers left the stage and she had the piper play us out.

reckless sleepers, a string section

As this was the opening performance, the room was full. We’d been encouraged to circulate so I sat at the back waiting for the forest of legs and backs to disperse, but they never did. We at the back heard applause when the performers entered; we heard sawing sounds, raspy and unexpectedly harmonic. The tinkle-clunk of a bit of wood hitting the floor. I weaselled my way to the front.

Four women, sawing the legs off the furniture they are sitting on. They wear black formal dresses, heels, make-up. They are smart, maintaining balance on the aforementioned destabilised furniture. Those women who fall off, get back on their chairs again. Displaying control, ingenuity, determination and grace in the face of inevitable pratfall, and, like a thrumming of cello players, quite suggestively sexy.

jo bannon, deadline

In Deadline one is ushered through meditative spaces from an airy, comfortable waiting room to a red study, to a seat by the window of a white room looking out on the wintry sun of an open cityscape. At each stage one is nudged into a thoughtful frame of mind by having to wait, by vases of lilies and related literature scattered around and by the concerned, considerate air of the guides/invigilators.

In the red study the phone rings and after completing a short questionnaire you can ask one of the experts at the other end of the line three questions. I got the Doula, the Midwife for the Dying. When, enlightened, you put the phone down, you are led to the white room to stare out of the window. The view is framed by lights gradually brightening round the window, and by urgently building noise.

It is a detaching experience: there is tension in the ringing of the phone, the building of noise in the white room. For a moment one anticipates the unknown, surrounded by props of the familiar: a telephone, a desk, a voice, a view of the city. An exercise in the practice of resilience.

zierle & carter, chamber made opera, living room opera

Flashbacks: we’re being guided through the night towards the venue, city lights spread below us, twinkling. A man in evening dress leans from the warmth of an upstairs window with a rope dangling from his neck. He rotates his neck and body, drawing up a crimson dress till it envelops him.

A tall woman greets us with the sound of birdsong captured in a china teapot. Buttoned up like a spectral Mrs Danvers, she moves slowly backwards drawing a pair of men’s shoes after her, conjuring a disembodied follower. We still can hear birdsong.

A kitchen permeated with the smell of tea, oranges and bread baking. The rattle of a magpie. Recorded voices coming from behind furniture or plant pots or from within cupboards; reflective voices telling slow stories of how they got to the house they grew up in, how they left it, who lived there, who built it.

A man with a clock case strapped to his head. The pendulum is stifled with salt. He opens the case and brushes the salt out with his fingers—time lies in heaps on the carpet, stilled. A heartbreaking excavation into a frozen past.

Upstairs in an anxiety of ambient sound, the young man stands maniacally scraping burned toast, his hair over his face tied in a thick knot by the hangman’s rope curving over the floor.

She, the hostess, now in the crimson dress, crawling towards him, seizing the rope, contorting her body….He, presenting her with a miked-up basin of milk, she plunging her face in it, howling, grunting and gasping.

From the balcony outside she draws on the window in red lipstick till a square of it is covered in overlapping scrawls. She looks like a revenant, a haunting, a fetch.

Histrionic, yes. As memory is, always making drama out of crisis, and narrative out of routine. Opera indeed.

And also, like entering grandmother’s cottage in the woods: come in, keep warm, have some tea and an orange…you don’t have to look at the bones too closely, though since you left, they lie heaped in every corner.

In Between Time festival: Simon Faithfull, Fake Moon; Nic Green, Fatherland, director Deborah Richardson-Webb; Reckless Sleepers, A String Section; Jo Bannon, Deadline, original concept Jo Bannon, Lucy Cassidy; Zierle & Carter with Chamber Made Opera, Living Room Opera; Bristol, UK, Feb 14-17

Daniel Riley McKinley (foreground), Kaine-Sultan Babij, Blak rehearsal, Bangarra

I MEET YOUNG INDIGENOUS DANCER AND CHOREOGRAPHER DANIEL RILEY MCKINLEY TO DISCUSS SCAR, HIS CONTRIBUTION TO BANGARRA DANCE THEATRE’S NEW WORK BLAK, WHICH ALSO FEATURES A WORK ENTITLED YEARNING BY ARTISTIC DIRECTOR STEPHEN PAGE AND KEEPERS, A PAGE-MCKINLEY COLLABORATION. A GENTLE PRESENCE, MCKINLEY EXUDES A PALPABLE PHYSICALITY IN HIS DEEP-SEATED ENTHUSIASM FOR HIS NEW CREATION, A COLLABORATION WITH SIX MALE DANCERS ON THE SUBJECT OF THE TRANSITION TO MANHOOD.

In the rehearsal room, McKinley speaks quietly, unhurriedly, checking on moves previously established, homing in on details, watching himself and the other dancers in the studio mirror as collective movement takes shape—elbows thrust out, hands reaching back in, claw-like, flexed sharply at wrists. An arm angled across the torso becomes a fixed line against which the body, dancing from a low centre of gravity, rises and sinks. There’s a meticulousness and fluidity in the detail which was also evident in Riley, the work McKinley (RT 94, p4) choreographed as part of Bangarra’s Of Sky and Earth (2010). I wrote at the time that there was “an inventiveness and welcome unpredictability in [McKinley’s] choreography.” McKinley tells me that with Scar he’s not simply creating a work but generating a dialogue among the men in Bangarra.

Tell me about the subject of the dialogue you’ve started with the men in the company?

I was really interested in creating something fresh and something contemporary around the subject of Indigenous boys going into manhood. Obviously it’s inspired by traditional initiation ceremonies, that transition from boyhood to manhood and how it works in traditional communities with the scarring and the boys being sent into the bush and having to make their way back. They’re told stories and taught songs and their level of responsibility changes.

For us, as contemporary Indigenous young men or boys, I feel it’s not so clear-cut because of this crazy world. If we live in Sydney, a beautiful city, we’re not consistently with culture. I get my daily culture fix coming to Bangarra. This is the reason I’m here, the reason I dance here, the reason I wanted to join Bangarra when I graduated from QUT—to learn about, to get culture.

I love dancing and I found out about my Aboriginality at quite a young age and for me, dance was that exploration of what it meant to be an Indigenous male. Every day is a learning experience. I leave here at Christmas holidays every year and I look back and think, “I’ve learned so much this year.” Stephen (Page) is the same. He’s consistently learning too. And the culture is constantly changing. There’s 40,000 years of culture to learn from and we’re always trying to find what it is.

For me (in Scar) it was about trying to find out what the transition was for us from boys to men. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot since I joined Bangarra in 2007. Being a young first year dancer, you’re taught everything. It’s almost like you’re the youngest brother of the seven boys. So, you look up to your brothers. They’re older and they’ve got the knowledge and they’ve lived more and they have all the experience. I wanted to know when was that moment for me. I still wonder, when will I reach it? Have I reached it? When was that moment? Is it a series of steps? Is it a set of experiences that you gather together and put in your pocket and carry with you?

Yes, of course. I’m in my seventh year, so I’m recognised in the company as a senior dancer, which I still find quite strange because I’m only 27. I think, a senior? Whoa! I’m choreographing, and dancing in the work too.

I wanted to be able to step away from it, to be able to view it as an audience whereas with this work, I want to experience it. I want to be the conductor but also be part of the band. I’m not creating every step—more just directing, forming and shaping things. So, it’s a huge collaborative effort because of the subject matter. It’s a personal thing, so I can’t exactly say, “do this or do that” or “no, that doesn’t feel right.” If (something) feels right for Waangenga (Blanco), then he should be able to do that.

So each of the dancers has a different idea of where they are in the manhood trajectory?

Exactly right, because we’re all within a 10-year gap. Waangenga is almost 30 and as a guest artist we’ve got Hunter Page-Lochard, Stephen Page’s son, who’s about to turn 21.

Have some of the dancers had more traditional experiences or are they largely from urban backgrounds?

We all grew up urban. Waangenga had a lot of connection with his Indigenous family and customs through the Torres Strait. Lenny (Mickelo) was connected to his Indigenous family but I’m not sure whether he learned dances or not. He lived in Brisbane and in Cherbourg. We’ve all had a mixed bag of experiences. We’ve all come from different places and we’re creating this gathering place onstage and in the rehearsal room.

It’s a really broad subject. What I find difficult is to bring it into one half-hour work. Obviously it’s not going to answer the question. I guess it will pose more questions. But through the course of the work, as men and boys onstage, we will go through that transition. So, it’s going to be a journey every night for us.

Presumably, even though you may not have experienced traditional life first-hand, you’re still drawing on it—there’s such a long tradition in Bangarra of spiritual advisors and investigation.

Of course, everything that Bangarra does is ingrained in that tradition, ingrained in culture. Djakapurra who’s performed with us many times has scarring between his pecs. Having danced with him a few times, I was just so interested in what they were. We got talking and that’s when I thought, well, maybe I should do a new ‘men’s work.’ I think the last men’s work at Bangarra was 2001. Stephen did Spear which was part of Skin. That’s a huge inspiration, but I’m reeling it in to where we are today as contemporary men. [Imagine] we’re a group of seven Indigenous boys walking the streets of Redfern. You look at them and think, “Where are they going? What’s their journey going to be?” They’re unlikely, in the city, to get traditional initiation. If they’re lucky enough they might get to go to the bush to do that. When will their responsibilities change?

To do this, have you adopted, as in Riley, a series of images to work to or is there a narrative?

There’s a sort of a story arc. I’m trying to stay away from vignettes. With Riley, it was very clear-cut. I had Michael Riley’s images that are so incredibly beautiful and they each had a story of their own anyway. [This time] I’d go home each night and think, “What am I trying to say?” Am I trying to take the audience on a journey or the dancers? I came to the decision that I’m going to take the dancers on a journey and the audience are voyeurs. It’s like they’ve stumbled across this gathering of boys going through this ceremony, the rite of passage, together.

Absolutely. We will be doing some traditional dance and we’re using Djakapurra’s voice, but the rest of the sound is contemporary. I’ve got David Page and Paul Mac doing the music. So it’s really electronic and bassy. I was really inspired by those grimy, dirty hip hop instrumentals, bands like Clams Casino and those dirty beats for ASAP Rocky and other rappers out of America. A lot of Indigenous kids listen to that music. That’s the music of their generation. And I listen to that. It’s got this ‘attitude,’ this ego and pride behind it.

Absolutely. The boys and I have talked a lot about that and what that vulnerability is and where that happens. We spoke about pre- and post- adolescence and what manhood is and who you look up to and who you see as a man and why. When you’re in high school, you’re trying to be yourself, but people are judging you. It’s so difficult. Even now, we’re still vulnerable. So, we’ll definitely be exploring that.

Because the boys are creating the movement, they’re gonna be themselves. But in another sense I sort of see us as six different sides of Hunter. He’s the youngest and closest to the age we’re exploring. We’ve always had spirit guides in Bangarra—Aunty Kathy Balngayngu Marika and Djakapurra Munyarryun—but I’m sort of going to touch on a younger one, a boy who’s conducting it and who connects us and pulls us through this story. Hunter has done all his NIDA courses and films and TV shows, so his acting ability, that’s something I can draw from. And his dancing too (he’s studied ballet), it’s a good challenge for him. He loves Bangarra and he’s a great kid and we love him. It’s nice to have this youthful energy in the room. It looks so raw on him.

Quite sparse. I’m just having a black box. [Jacob Nash’s] design for Riley was white and open. With this there’s a feeling of being more under the earth, in an underground club with this driving bass. It’s dark and moody. A few props, but mainly the light will dissect the space; the lighting (designer Matt Cox) will dictate space and shifts in mood.

Again, very simple and contemporary. There are so many images: the 2011 London Riots—young boys running (through) the streets in hoods. It was like they could put them on like their invisibility cloaks. We spent two weeks in Arnhem Land a month ago. We love going up there. We learn traditional dance around the fire, we sit with the kids and we just hang out with them, do what they do, find out what they get up to on these small outstations. It’s amazing how they fill their time even though there’s nothing to do out there. They sit and chat, play basketball…Looking around at what they wear, it’s all mismatched—big baggy basketball singlets and shorts, socks with thongs and hats, sunglasses at night. Their idea of fashion is really cool. You look at it and you think, well it sort of doesn’t work, but then it works on you. It helps to have their beautiful dark skin; all the colours they wear look so amazing on them. We took lots of photos when we were up there. Luke Ede is the costume designer and he’s looking at all that.

Transition into manhood in Indigenous traditional culture is men’s business and is full of secrets. Does that play some sort of role in this work?

I spoke to Djakapurra about it before we started, asked him about what traditional dance we could have for it and what song. He said there are some songs that I can’t give you. I said that’s completely fine. So he’s come up with a song that suits (the work) and a dance…the meaning of it is really poignant, really beautiful for what we’ve come out of and what we’re going into. It’s a water dance, for cleansing—the post-ceremonial dance. Goosebumps. It’s quite powerful. And the song is incredible. I sat next-door as Djakapurra recorded it at David’s [Page] studio. His voice is so incredible.

Bangarra Dance Theatre, Blak, National tour: Arts Centre, Melbourne, May 3-11; IPAC, Wollongong, May 17, 18; Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, June 8-22; Canberra Theatre Centre, July 11-13; QPAC, Brisbane, July 18-27; www.bangarra.com.au

SLOW DANCES FOR FAST TIMES IS A COMPILATION OF “CHOREOGRAPHIC PORTRAITS” IN WHICH CHOREOGRAPHER MARTIN DEL AMO COLLABORATES WITH 12 AUSTRALIAN DANCERS. A “SINGLE CHOREOGRAPHIC IDEA” IS THEN EXTENDED AND MODELLED INTO “MINI-ACTS OF SOLITARY DEFIANCE” (PROGRAM).

Designer Clare Britton creates a velvety vaudevillian palace. Red carpet, red curtains, roaming spotlights and rolling projected text create a place of history and burlesque. Already there lurks a joke, for del Amo’s choreographic repertoire is the antithesis of varietal entertainment. This contextual tension creates a coherent performance that slips between the serious and the silly, between the committed and the parodied.

Some of the ‘portraits’ navigate this tension with surety. This assurance is most notable in the last of the 12 solos, danced by Jane McKernan. While the sublime Kiri Te Kanawa sings Mozart, McKernan manages to simultaneously conjure del Amo’s signature minutiae and live up to the spectacle of the voice. Holding a static kinesphere throughout she makes minuscule adjustments, creating new physical stories, states and shapes out of the almost imperceptible, rearranging the lines of her body into bright and new contortions, born deep within. One foot is turned slightly in, one knee slightly bent, one arm held uncomfortably out, distended, making the subtle torture of unease while her head dances the dance of rapture. At times McKernan’s being is an orchestra of parts speaking to each other as she floats off kilter. At other times these parts break away from each other as the deep seated pressure of excruciating movement makes apparent the tremors that are allowed to exist in del Amo’s world. This solo of seductive and rapturous crucifixion was a fine finish to a long show.

Solos danced by Luke Smiles, Sara Black and Kirk Page are revisited versions of earlier works: “birthday present[s]” from del Amo to dancer friends. Involuted light heartedness becomes satiric as highly skilled dancers move about as children or chorus line drunks, in a display of anti-technique. This was made more patently clear in the ‘bonus track’ finale, a new ensemble choreography where the salient formations and styles of well known local dance companies are gently, fleetingly, but clearly lampooned.

Certain choreographic and political strands emerged from this evening’s retrospectivity: self-referencing, political possibilities of movement and commitment to clearly refined and recognisable physical techniques. Certain recurrent physicalities reveal del Amo’s choreographic proclivities: the gentle distortions of discomfort as bodies are drawn away from graceful wholeness. The circular transcriptions of space seen in the endless running round the floor patterns and in the arcing of dancers as they sweep around their own axis in that discombobulating ongoingness that makes these solos fade rather than end. Then there are those floating arms that trace, dangle and sway as body parts with mind. These arms are what most conjured the choreographer-body, making me miss Martin.

Martin del Amo, Slow Dances for Fast Times, choreographer, director Martin del Amo, dancers Sara Black, Jade Dewi Tyas Tunggal, Benjamin Hancock, Raghav Handa, Julie-Anne Long, Jane McKernan, Sean Marcs, Kirk Page, Elizabeth Ryan, Luke Smiles, Vicki Van Hout, James Welsby, design Clare Britton, lighting Matthew Marshall, sound compilation Marcus Whale, production Performing Lines; Carriageworks, Sydney, March 6-9

ONE OF THE TASKS OF THE WORLD SYMPOSIUM ON GLOBAL ENCOUNTERS IN SOUTH-EAST ASIAN PERFORMING ARTS, WHICH RECENTLY TOOK PLACE IN BANGKOK, WAS TO BRING TO THE SURFACE THE TRANSNATIONAL SOUTH-EAST ASIAN ARTIST. AS THE INTERNET HAS SUCCEEDED IN BRINGING CIVILISATIONS CLOSER TO EACH OTHER, IT IS INTERESTING TO FIND WHERE AND HOW SOUTH-EAST ASIAN PERFORMING ART POSITS ITSELF IN AN UNDENIABLE WAVE OF MODERNISATION AND GLOBALISATION.

The papers presented at the conference displayed these preoccupations, as in the research of Parichat Jungwiwattanaporn on the work of Pichet Klunchun; Bethany Collier, who noted contemporary methods for the new generation learning the Balinese Arja; Miguel Escobar Varela on using hip hop music with the Wayang Kulit; Shreyosi Mukherjee looking at a Malaysian Mak Yong adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream; William Petersen, who is enchanted with the contemporary aspect of the otherwise traditionally Tagalog senakulo; and, among many others, Tiffany Strawson recounting her first-hand experience of learning the masked dance topengpajegan. However, in the symposium performances Asian theatre maintained its traditional veneer.

Bangkok University’s Communication Arts Complex provided diverse choices of venues for performances. Traditional performances, including a charming Cantonese opera and the Balinese Barong-Rangda dance, were staged in the amphitheatre in the centre of the complex. Shadow puppet plays and three-hour heavy dramas were held in auditoriums. All the drop-in installations were located in small and medium-sized studios.

plant me a word

Patricia Correa, from Portugal, presented Plant Me a Word, which required little movement, in a small, carpeted room. Seated at a small wooden desk with her feet planted in a pot of soil, Correa looks around the room and invites a spectator to sit before her. Once seated, that person becomes part of the work. Correa immediately hands them a leaf and instructs them to “plant me a word” on it. Any word will do, it seems—she puts the entire leaf in her mouth, chews and swallows, all the while maintaining intense eye contact.

The onlooker wonders about the significance of the pot of soil, and what could happen if you asked Correa a question or kept her from putting the leaf in her mouth, or whether the leaves and ink might eventually poison her. But as she scans the room for the next participant, curiosity is replaced by terror—split-second terror of having to join in the work and forfeiting your position as audience. Whatever her objectives, Correa’s attempt to take the audience out of their comfort zone and into the work itself was quite successful over its three-day duration. The audience appeared to be helping her to ‘grow’ with the words they planted. There was no exchange of ideas; the work was a push to get ideas and words out of her participants’ bodies, to take root and grow with the tree that is Correa.

drawing your attention

Liesje van den Berk (Netherlands) set up a room in which lights hit a glass wall so that she could ‘draw’ the shadows of those who came to view her installation. She moves quickly, outlining the shifting, shadowy figures. Van den Berk also seems to simultaneously respond to guitarist Jeen Gert Rabs’ soundscape.

The point of Drawing Your Attention is not the finished product, though Van den Berk, primarily a visual artist, is definitely interested in that as well. Its value resides in the performance. The audience members whose shadows are being drawn on the wall are instantly performers, some accommodating Van den Berk by posing, so that she has more interesting shapes to outline.

thai tracings

At a Western conference, a new media panel would be bursting at the seams. However, the one in this symposium attracted only minimal attendance, while most participants were at the “Traditional Performance in a Changing World” panel conducted in the next room. South-East Asia is only starting to discover new media, as evidenced by the papers and performances presented.

The new media panel keynote speaker Sarah Rubidge (UK) discussed the progress of digital media in the development of contemporary dance. She provided a more intimate view of these digital trends with her installation, Thai Tracings. Images of classical Thai dancers were projected onto the walls of the studio, sometimes against an aerial view of Bangkok’s cityscape. To further blur the boundary between classical and contemporary, there were intervals where a live-feed of members of the audience standing in the room was projected on a screen beside the classical dancer.

With the recognition that the viewers are now part of the work, the screen presents the audience-performance relationship in its purest form, spectator and spectacle side by side on one panel. But once the realisation sets in, the dynamic is changed, by varying degrees: delight, fright, feigned disaffection. Some, interestingly, start to dance along with the projections, doing the same traditional movement but in street clothes.

on the road again

In Hong Kong choreographer Cai Ying’s On the Road Again, the performers move around the audience seated on the studio floor, interacting with them such that they become part of the performance and some of their reactions dictate the action. After circling the room holding carry-on luggage, the choreographer and her dancers stuff their clothes with travel pillows and melt into lethargy, as if turning into the pillows themselves. The performance is based on the artist’s dreams about the many journeys she’s taken. At the end, the dancers run out of the studio, leaping across a field we can see through the window and beckoning us to join them (we didn’t).

a mask for a shadow puppet

Hanuman Meets His Father is an elaborate Wayang theatre experiment where the shadow puppet play and the masked dance drama occur on the same stage. It was quite electrifying when the masked actor playing Hanuman suddenly leapt onto the stage from behind the screen of shadows—the last thing you’d expect, and yet it did not feel out of place.The scholars studying Indonesian theatre were astounded and immediately wanted to know how older generations of theatre practitioners might react. The Wayang Theatre of Bali has yet to perform this for the locals, but is optimistic.

Perhaps to Western practitioners, this may not seem as groundbreaking as it does to South-East Asian artists. Informed by a strong sense of tradition and yet reeling from the effects of colonialism, South-East Asians have the burden of bridging the gap between past and present, between where they live and where they can practice their art. Just how they’ll get there will be interesting in practice, and as a topic for a future conference.

World Symposium on Global Encounters in South-East Asian Performing Arts: Plant Me a Word, concept, performer Patricia Correa, Feb 1-3; Drawing Your Attention, visual artist, concept, performer Liesje van den Berk, music Jeen Gert Rabs, Feb 1-3; Thai Tracings, concept, digital execution Sarah Rubidge, Feb 1-3; On the Road Again, choreographer Cai Ying, Feb 1; Hanuman Meets His Father, director I Wayan Dibia, performers the Wayang Theater, Bangkok University, Thailand, Feb 3

AT A MAU PERFORMANCE YOU JUST HAVE TO LET YOURSELF BE, OPENING YOURSELF UP TO AN OSMOSIS OF STRANGE SOUNDS AND MOVEMENTS SEEPING INTO YOUR VERY BEING. ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF THE AUCKLAND-BASED COMPANY, SAMOAN LEMI PONIFASIO BELIEVES THAT OUR LIVES ARE DOMINATED BY DOING AND ACTING, BLINDING US TO “THE INVISIBLE DIMENSIONS OF OUR LIVES”—OUR CONNECTION WITH THE EARTH, OUR BEING AT ONE WITH IT.

I spoke with the witty and erudite Ponifasio by phone about his internationally acclaimed Birds with Skymirrors, part of Carriageworks’ 2013 program, first asking him if each of his works is initially triggered by an image. I was thinking of the press releases and interviews that reveal that it was the sight of a frigate bird trailing shining videotape (the skymirror of the title) from its beak that initiated the making of the work. “Well,” he quips, “it wasn’t a Saul of Damascus moment, but it gave me an idea.”

Fantastic things. All kinds of terrible things. It was very funny because I thought, at first, what a beautiful sight, and then became quite afraid, because I suddenly felt alone and wondering what was happening. [The birds use the tapes for their nests; but this kind of pollution kills massive numbers of birds and animals across the Pacific. Eds] Then you start to think about everything in life from ancestors to all kinds of civilisations. I was thinking about Botticelli, the Venus picture; I felt this image of innocence had turned into a whore. I thought about the Persian poem, The Conference of the Birds. Your mind wanders everywhere. It was a moment you feel the world is so big—that kind of connection. I’m not trying to tell anybody not to pollute the water. It’s simply about our connection, the genealogy that we share with birds. We are part of the [lives] of birds. That is [the kind of connection] I try to make with my work.

I’ve read that you’re very keen for the audience to enter a contemplative state; you don’t use narrative because you don’t want to impose stories on people.

The theatre has become too human and is about people’s storytelling and people expressing people. I think the theatre is more than that. It’s a cosmological experience. I’m sure the origin of theatre was our feeling this intense bond with existence so that we get up and sing or perform. So the theatre I try to make is about how to return you to or take you to a dimension that is not about human time but more about cosmological time—how to get you away from the phenomenal world, the world of everyday into the noumenal, which is a much bigger world.

In essence, to stop thinking just about oneself? You said in one interview that you thought that Western theatre was simply narcissistic.

No! (LAUGHS). But I do think the theatre is not for mirroring life; it’s to shatter the mirror that we’ve created for ourselves. The mirror of life is really what we construct in our heads. That’s our ego. And I think the invitation of the theatre is an invitation to be. And that’s a really hard thing for the human being, but it’s part of our title as ‘human beings.’

There are practices and concepts in your work that appear to come directly from your own culture. How do these figure in your thinking?

Well, it might sound strange, but I don’t think I come from a culture. I think my arrival on the Earth was on the island of Samoa. I just arrived there and I don’t think so much about culture and cultural identity.

It’s pure form, but I know it along with knowing what’s happening in New York or Algeria or Iraq. So it’s a consciousness. It’s not something particular to a culture, I don’t think.

So the work is not going to say to an audience, do something about climate change, but I assume it’s part of the work’s ‘subconscious.’ The people who work with you, your community, some of them would come from islands, I suppose, that are in danger of disappearing under the ocean in years to come.

Well, I think there is a bigger thinking, something more than just cleaning up the rubbish or hugging trees or buying organic. I think this is a very childish way of dealing with climate change. We need to think in terms of our relationship with the world. The closer we feel the connection, the more we appreciate that we are just part of the process of nature, we can somehow understand the intense link that we have with nature. For example, a dog is a dog but if you take a dog as your puppy, then you have a strong sense of relationship. I think that is what I’m trying to do—to bring you to the present, to just be present and by being present you can become more strongly aware of this.

Well, it’s a consciousness. I could take you to an English garden that’s full of roses and you can look at it and admire it; or I could take you to a Zen garden where there is nothing but stones and a rock. You’re standing there and you feel differently. You attend to your existence—why am I here? So, it’s the power to bring forth an experience of presence and being conscious of one’s being.

Elsewhere you’ve described Birds with Skymirrors as being like “the last dance on Earth,” which sounds very apocalyptic, and ritualistic. A review in New Zealand described your work as “an ancient futuristic ritual.” This idea of ceremony seems to be important to you.

I say to the people I work with, “If this is the last dance or the last song, what are you going to sing about?” Are you going to sing about your iPad or your iPhone? No. We are going to sing about something very important to our lives. So this dimension of one’s life is why I talk about the last dance. I think the audience who come to the performance must not come merrily like they’re going on a dinner date. It’s like a pilgrimage, going to the theatre. There is something that you come to engage with; there’s something that you bring; there’s something that you want to be with.

There’s a difference between ceremony and ritual. I’m not interested in ritual. People always say ‘ritual,’ but a ceremony is when we come to engage, because there is a reason why we gather, an important step in one’s life, whether it’s a funeral or a birth. In ceremony we elevate ourselves into another sort of sense of ourselves. And I think the point of the theatre is to remind the soul of its higher self, a higher space.

My performers are not necessarily trying to express anything. They are there to serve the ceremony, to serve the space. Their bodies are ceremonial bodies—that’s how I prepare them. Of course, they have to do what they need to do well, but their presence, their activation of the space, it’s the whole point of going to the theatre, performing for it.

You don’t talk a lot about dance or art or artists, but I was astonished by the variety of gesture and movement in your work, the sense of a melding of physical movement and dance from across the region.

I work with people who don’t have Western training. They are all from communities. They know the language of ceremony, the movement of ceremony, the presence of ceremony. This is why I like working with them—because of the amazing knowledge you don’t need to teach anybody. You can’t learn that from art school.

In the performance there is tremendous individual sensuality and sinuousness, extreme body states and a great sense of synchronicity, of meticulous movement together. These people must spend a lot of time with you to achieve that sense of unanimity.

It’s a very strange thing to say, but we don’t practice that much. We do other kinds of work. We think it’s much more important than going to the dance.

Being part of the community. I make them go and do what they do normally. That gives you the sense of a different way of being. I want the dancers to be the stage, not dancing on the stage. It’s a different quality. I think it’s a proposal of the theatre. We need to move away from a theatre that is too much about the human and loses its power because it’s just humans talking to humans, like soap opera, instead of humans talking to the divine.

After seeing MAU’s The Tempest in the 2010 Sydney Festival I wrote, “Walter Benjamin’s angel of history wanders the stage screaming; a group of monks glide about in fast, small steps and with beautifully complex gesturing; a man very convincingly becomes a dog; a Maori elder addresses us, first revealing his tattoos, later dressed in a suit; and a lone man appears to bend and collapse beneath the weight of the world until a moment of release late in the work. For all its mysteries, Mau is an engrossing work suggestive of post-colonial tensions, environmental exploitation and a Pacific Rim cultural sharing” (RT95, p14). The Tempest was an experience as rewarding as it was demanding, and difficult to put into words—you just had to be there, and just be. As you will, at Birds with Skymirrors.

MAU, Birds with Skymirrors, Carriageworks, Sydney, May 1-4; www.carriageworks.com.au; co-production Théâtre de la Ville (Paris), Theater der Welt 2010 RUHR, spielzeit’europa Berliner Festspiele, Wiener Festwochen, KVS Brussels, Holland Festival, Mercat de les Flors Barcelona, DeSingel Antwerp, New Zealand International Arts Festival

Nge Lay, The Relevancy of Restricted Things (2010), from the collection of the Singapore Art Museum and Fukuoka Asian Art Museum

IN JANUARY I WAS INVITED TO PARTICIPATE IN THE 8TH FLYING CIRCUS PROJECT (FCP) IN MYANMAR AND SINGAPORE. FCP IS AN INITIATIVE OF ONG KENG SEN, DIRECTOR OF THEATRE WORKS SINGAPORE AND FROM ITS BEGINNINGS IN 1996 THE INTERDISCIPLINARY LAB HAS EXPLORED CREATIVE EXPRESSION IN ASIA.

From 2007 FCP widened its brief to include artists from Europe, the Arab world and Africa. Its focal points are individual creative action, encountering difference and the strategies of art practice, emphasising the tenacity of local sites—with their artists, activists and public intellectuals. The lab is curated around the central notion of ‘world creating,’ how do we form micro-worlds, which are responsible, articulated and ethically engaged?

superintense & ulter u

In 2007, the FCP visited Ho Chi Minh City/Singapore and in 2010 explored Phnom Penh/Singapore. Each time a group of international artists, themselves working in sites of transition and cultural change, is invited to participate in a curated local program. The FCP artists contribute a one-hour presentation from their own ‘world’ in a back-to-back endurance fest titled Superintense, in 2013 staged in Yangon (Rangoon) and Singapore. Theatre Works also runs the Alter U program as a tandem project, an ‘alternative university’ with a commitment to artist-to-artist exchange and exposure to a diversity of artistic strategies which they describe as “a shared micro-space/time made by artists for world-citizens to contemplate action.” Ulter U is the part of the program where local artists engage with the FCP artists and includes commissioned local work, workshops, presentations and other activities to stimulate the development of individual artists in their own context.

on the path to democracy

In 2010 Keng Sen began exploring the possibility of staging FCP8 in Myanmar while the so-called transition to democracy rapidly accelerated during that period. The release of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi followed by her party, the National League for Democracy, gaining 43 seats in the Myanmar Parliament spearheaded the change. As Keng Sen says, “It is true that this is only a fraction of the total 664 seats but it is still a significant dent in the armoured tank that runs the land some have nicknamed ‘the forgotten country.’” Well it’s no longer forgotten, for never a week passes without some headline grabbing news: from President Obama’s historic visit to the Rohingar issue and ethnic conflicts in the western state of Rakhine, to the violent security raids on monks and mine-workers during a recent protest in Monywa.

fcp8

FCP8 took place in the shifting sands of a Myanmar in transition at a moment in time where artists and activists who had lived a life of fear simply for taking on the roles of educators, critical thinkers or documenters were facing an overwhelming level of change. This included the possibility of being able to speak directly to their audiences, exposure to international arts practices and, of course, the potential for all this to be swept away again in the erratic path of a violent and repressive regime.

artists as public intellectuals

The essential structure of FCP, of exchange across local and global contexts, laid itself out pretty quickly in Yangon where all activity took place at the Alliance Francaise. No strangers to censorship issues coming from Singapore, the Theatre Works team carefully set up the context where Burmese artists and activists were able to speak publicly on French soil.

In introducing the range of artists in the opening days in Yangon, Keng Sen proposed that the 8th FCP look at the role of public intellectuals in forming new societies. How do they communicate with a mass audience beyond the arts community and in a delicate dance with the authorities? We heard a range of approaches to change through arts practice from doctor and educationalist Ko Tah, cartoonist Au Pi Kyeh, novelist and environmentalist Ju to filmmaker Keiko Sei.

Burmese painter, photographer and video journalist Sithu Zeya, installation artist and photographer Nge Lay and performance artist Lyn Htet, director of Theatre of the Disturbed, have all worked from inside and outside the country and have each faced fear of censorship and imprisonment. 23-year-old Sithu Zeya was arrested for taking pictures of the aftermath of explosions in Yangon and sentenced to 18 years imprisonment. He was released on January 2012 after the relaxing of the censorship laws. Each of the artists has developed strategies to reflect government atrocities and stimulate art practice.

In 2013 FCP widened its scope to include activism and journalism. Keng Sen commented that the VJs (video journalists) are the cowboys of journalism, putting themselves in view of the secret police to make sure stories are told and smuggling footage out of the country, most often to Thailand. When Sun, one of the VJs featured in the award-winning documentary Burma VJ, addressed us at the French Embassy in Yangon it was the first time he had spoken publicly in his own country. One of Sun’s first statements to us was that Burma needs to release all political prisoners. Many of his colleagues have been tortured and are still locked away.

liberating film

Keiko Sei, a Japanese filmmaker working for 15 years in Burma, explained that the country has been quite random in its censorship; DVDs were sold quite freely over the past decade. What was lacking was not information but education and guidance on how to work with information that was forbidden. People were overloaded with mediatised junk and lacked perspective; as opposed to Eastern European dictatorships which have withheld media, the Burmese government took the opposite approach: “Korean soap operas, endless football and completely poisonous Hip Hop are what the government swamped the broadcast time with.” After being raided by the secret police and losing all the participants in her film discussion project Keiko Sei asked herself, “What would I risk 15 years’ imprisonment for, what art is worth that risk? It was a big responsibility for me.” After retreating to Thailand for some time, she returned, assisted by the Prague Film School who now take several students from Myanmar each year into their training program. Film played a significant part in FCP8 with the commissioning of English subtitles for short films by young Burmese filmmakers, the restoration of a lost print of the fabulous Wearing Velvet Slippers, Holding a Golden Umbrella (1971) by Maung Wanna (Godard meets Blanche Dubois in Yangon 1970!) and the presentation of the second ever Myanmar Film Festival in Mandalay.

theatre of the disturbed

Hotel Reverie: Part 2 , Theatre of the Disturbed, Yangon during Flying Circus Project #8

One of the most tangible elements of FCP was the commissioning program by Theatre Works which included two productions of the Yangon-based performance art company, Theatre of the Disturbed. The first production was a restaging of Hotel Reverie Part 1, a production which director Lin Thet stated was an experiment in considering the relevance of producing Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus in Myanmar. The performance was presented in the gardens of the French Institute, beginning with a libation ceremony by nine Buddhist monks, chanting in memory of those who disappeared during the 64 years of military rule.

Throughout the performance 64 male workers, gagged and with their hands bound, stood, leaned or sat (apparently depending on their levels of boredom or exhaustion) as a background to the action downstage. Following the libation ceremony a talk show was staged with three prominent activists, one of whom had endured lengthy imprisonment, discussing the moral, spiritual and political concerns of using violence as resistance to a regime. Each statement was translated at length for our benefit, resulting in a painfully drawn-out experience and growing concern for the 64 men wilting in the background. In the final moments a performance art nod to Titus Andronicus was played out involving a young woman with a pram full of raw meat and an overweight young man on stage inhaling ice cream.

Exhausted on the way home in the bus back through the Yangon traffic, the FCP artists discussed the work from our differing perspectives, with one of the new media artists from India prophesying Lin Htet will become famous as one of the pioneers of contemporary art in Myanmar. I felt I had had a comprehensive introduction to the complexities facing the fusion of art and activism in Myanmar, the troubled nature of importing art movements and most importantly the voice of Lin Htet, vocalising his experience of his country’s bloody history. The event was indeed disturbing and yet it offered a compelling picture of the struggles facing art making in this “forgotten country.”

something or nothing?

As the FCP artist presentations began in Yangon, Keng Sen noted that the connections (of his curation) would become visible over the coming days, that the different strategies we employ as artists in our work of ‘world creating’ in our different contexts would emerge. These would come to include “Land Art” as a link, the documentation of unsanctioned memories of atrocities and also the work of art making in conflict zones. With three Sri Lankan artists from Singhalese and Tamil backgrounds present, the issue of how to build paths to artistic practice in Sri Lanka was also a focus and perhaps an entree to the next FCP.

Keng Sen declared that one of the essential elements of FCP is “collaboration in location,” the histories and communities of location. Choosing not to use the word “community”—feeling it has been appropriated by funding bodies—he raised the issue of ‘for whom is the work made?,’ proposing “when we talk of making communities NGO’s want to make something useful. The ‘useful’ is defined very conservatively: we are meant to pass on useful skills to disadvantaged people. Some people say the Flying Circus is not useful. It produces nothing, but the concept of ‘nothing’ from an Asian spiritual perspective, is also something. What is the something?”

Sri Lankan filmmaker and photographer Anomaa Rajakaruna’s presentation outlined her documentation projects during and after a war, which has supposedly ended, though, as she stated, the struggle continues. She has made five video features, each of which have been banned in Sri Lanka, so the issue of who she was making her work for was critical. Keng Sen commented on the work of artists in conflict zones documenting for the future, a critical issue in Myanmar where memory, documentation and practices of remembrance have been controlled by a military regime, producing an ‘official memory’ for 64 years.

New media artists Sonal Jain and Mriganka Madhukaillya from Desire Machine Collective, based in Assam, suggested that coming from the North West of India “there is an expectation from people that you will create exotic images of conflict, a kind of ‘conflict tourism.’” They asked, “When you are living in a conflict zone everyday, what does it mean to make art?”

At the close of the period in Yangon and following the theatrical and confronting South African artist Brett Baily’s Third World Bun Fight, Keng Sen said, “We have been hearing of stories of violence and pain but also of humour and glamour. There are two threads of artistic response present, a kind of daily life investigation and a transgressive, subverted investigation.”

beyond mandalay: museum art project#5

After nine days in Yangon we moved north to Mandalay where we were advised to keep an even lower profile since a group of Malaysian street theatre performers had been deported on the spot a couple of months earlier after attempting to present a performance there.

Perhaps the highlight for me, and the day I felt the chemistry of both the FCP and Ulter U projects converging, was the day trip from Mandalay by boat across the Irrawaddy River to the sleepy riverside village of Mignon to view the Museum Art Project # 5, a pop-up style contemporary gallery curated by Tun Win Aung and Wah Nu and supported by FCP. Like many of the artists we had met they were concerned with bridging rural life and the art world, responding to the curiosity of the villagers with their projects. “In 2010, we started to realise small scale exhibition spaces in different villages and towns where there are no art galleries or museums built for the people. We thought exhibition designs should be connected and reflect on local people’s daily life, situations or landscapes. Space designs should be friendly and accessible for local people. So, we chose local small huts, tents and barns.”

In Museum Art Project #5, Ming Thein’s Another Realm is a gigantic rifle made of hollow white cloth, suspended from the ceiling installed in one of the simple multi-use spaces perched on the banks of the river. May Phu Thet’s Be Happy Be Happy is a series of photos of Burmese baby puppets: garish white creatures with protruding, retractable red tongues, sporting lawn green sequined outfits. Curator Wah Nu addressed the FCP group and local guests saying, “This is an ordinary village but artists here have made it an extraordinary village. Now it’s like an art community where artists come to rent spaces and we can even say that the arts community here is stronger than in Mandalay. We have invited FCP here with the hope of exchanging with international artists. We hope it will be a good experience for the locals.”

What followed were two quite extraordinary presentations by FCP artists Sananthanan Thamotharampillai, a Tamil visual artist from Jaffana in northern Sri Lanka, and the wonderfully provocative Japanese performance maker and visual artist Tadasu Takamine, previously a member of Dumb Type. The range of their presentations—Sananthanan’s art book documenting Tamil displacement in hand drawn memories of the footprint of homes lost and Tadasu’s solo exhibition Cool in Japan, a series of rooms installed in Art Tower Mito as statements on Japan post-Fukushima—seemed to illuminate the goals of FCP as a site for exchange across worlds of experience.

For me FCP was a chance for reflection on our context in Australia, filtered through constant discussion with my good friend, South African artist Brett Baily, in our Southern Hemisphere gang of two! Long bus rides, pauses between presentations, random moments in temples gave space for exchange of the ideas behind the ideas between the participating artists, of what we do, how we do it and why, when and where we do it….And to meet new artists working in new contexts around the world, post Saffron revolution, post-Fukushima, post Arab Spring, in transition to democracy, or after war, under censorship or post apologies and reconciliation commissions, facing new challenges in cultural politics and representation.

FCP8, Yangon and Mandalay, Myanmar, Jan 3-4; Singapore Jan 16-20, supported by the Ford Foundation, the Institut Français, the Lee Foundation and the National Arts Council (Singapore).

FOUR PRODUCTIONS, FOUR KINDS OF ENGAGEMENT—BELVOIR’S OVER-HEATED AUSTRALIAN ASSIMILATION OF CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, THE LIVING ROOM THEATRE’S OVERWROUGHT APPROPRIATION OF CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE, THE FIRST GARDEN’S TOO, TOO DIDACTIC RENDERING OF A LIFE, AND THE NATIONAL THEATRE OF BRITAIN’S CLEVER IMAGINING OF A COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE-INFUSED 60S BRITISH FARCE. SUCH ARE THE THINGS THAT THEATRE IS MADE OF.

belvoir, cat on a hot tin roof

There was pretty much unanimity among Sydney reviewers that Belvoir’s production of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on Hot Tin Roof (1955) was flawed, not least because of the directorial decision to render it in a tonally neutral Australian English. Bye bye Williams’ musicality, save for Big Mama, Lynette Curran’s marked oz accent delivering something of the much-missed poetry. In Jacqueline Mackenzie’s Maggie the loss of Williams’ lyricism meant that she was all “on a hot tin roof,” embodying a stunning hyperactivity born of emotional and sexual starvation, but not at all sensual, sinuous or feline. Elizabeth Taylor in the film (1958) conveyed something of the toxic combination of sultry languor and outburst that was missing here, for all of Mackenzie’s otherwise finely nuanced performance.

The production is framed by a large curtain comprising brightly coloured strips, suggestive of celebration, through which entrances and exits can be made on a revolve which allows for characters, a piano and various pieces of furniture to come and go, and for scenes to merge seamlessly. The frame for the performance thus becomes circular, at one stage lined by Maggie’s shoe collection, at another sustaining the momentum of Maggie’s fruitless pursuit of the limping Brick (Ewen Leslie)—the husband wounded by the death of his dearest friend and near silenced by the inability to express his homosexuality.

Maggie’s self-belief and sense of theatricality are amplified from the opening with an extended focus on her dressing, making up and applying toe-nail polish all the while verbally pummelling the still Brick and at one point scissor locking him with her legs. Brick breaks Maggie’s flow with silence or a blunt counter-rhythm. The fraught relationship between Brick and his father, Big Daddy extends this counterpoint—at its best on the occasions when Marshall Napier (a late replacement for an ill Anthony Phelan), was free of the script, the pair realising a verbal dance of evasion and potential connection fuelled by Big Daddy’s needy desire (after a cancer scare) to communicate and Brick’s belief that it had never happened and never will. The dialogue is frequently about talk—the meaning and weight of words, ‘pity,’ ‘homo,’ ‘truth,’ ‘queer’ and especially ‘disgust’; about questions, the barrage aimed at the unresponsive Brick by Maggie and Big Daddy; and when talk fails—a crutch kicked away, furniture smashed, the curtain torn down (melodramatically underlined with screaming guitar).

The structure of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof poses a particular challenge of balance. Maggie is the driving force of the first third of the play with Brick a reticent, sulky presence. The conflict between Big Daddy and Brick, again a battle against refusal, is the play’s centre. This is followed by Maggie’s manipulative assertion of her husband’s rights—and then her own as she prepares, in this production, to fellate Brick. That the drama plays out more between a dying father and his son than between husband and wife (Maggie is a lesser psychological and stage presence in the latter half of the play) makes the ending feel unlikely and the relationship forever unresolved. Perhaps that’s as it should be. But we’re left in no doubt about Maggie’s strength and determination, if uncertain of Brick’s passive resolve. Despite critical reserve, the profound loss of the music of Williams’ Southern English and an absence of interpretive clarity (unusual for director Simon Stone), Belvoir’s volatile Cat on a Hot Tin Roof has apparently proved to be a popular success—a family saga with themes still quite contemporary and big issues—existential disgust, social prejudice and a sense of renewal with “a life in the place of death”—all writ large.

i love todd sampson

Pier 2/3, Walsh Bay is the expansive site for the Living Room Theatre’s I Love Todd Sampson—Voices of the Vulnerable, a large-scale multimedia installation through which the audience follow Laura (Gabrielle Quinn), a woman suffering a nervous breakdown, the result of abuse and the likely false belief that she is responsible for the death of a cellist. On a journey into deepening madness, Laura encounters her mother, people from her past, a would-be lover whom she consistently rejects and symbolic figures (a woman abseiling across the wharf’s timber walls while towing a resistant figure) in a variety of installations designed by members of local architectural firms. These vary from domestic (rooms within rooms) to surreal (a mountainous winterscape made of paper) and domestic-surreal (a stylish, seemingly off-balance kitchen, the setting for an unstable domestic scenario). Adding to the sense of unease created by changes of location and character mutations, is the voiceover provided by the actual Todd Sampson (CEO of Leo Burnett Australia, co-creator of the Earth Hour initiative and commentator on The Gruen Transfer and The Project). Laura aurally hallucinates him as her saviour, but when she fails to make him incarnate, and sexual, in a spooky (carefully designed) wreck of a building, she emotionally unravels. Finally, after being subjected to increasingly nightmarish scenarios (including a near hallucinatory vision—for the audience—of a rain shower sparkling into suspended motion), she collapses onto rusted machinery in an arctic waste and dies.

While to all appearances a contemporary performance work I Love Todd Sampson was burdened by heavy-handed acting, taxing longeurs and highly variable design quality, as well as by sundry performance clichés. The scale of Wharf 2/3 meant that text, either doggedly literal or numbingly opaque, wasn’t always audible. I Love Todd Sampson is a work of excess but not excess that yields wisdom. It has some structural and psychological kinship with Botho Strauss’ similarly discursive Gross und Klein, but Strauss’ vision is more consistently lateral and quite un-melodramatic; Lotte might be regarded as mad by those she encounters, but they themselves prove to be more dangerous. If I Love Todd Sampson is clearly the work of ambitious young artists defeated by the scale of their vision, they nonetheless warrant praise for realising it on such scale and for the rigour, if not subtlety, with which Gabrielle Quinn lives out Laura’s fatal madness.

one man, two guv’nors

Other than to entertain, there appears to be no visible or palpable sense of higher purpose to Richard Bean’s One Man, Two Guv’nors, the international stage success rooted in the commedia dell’arte tradition (it’s based on Carlo Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters, 1746), transposed to early 1960s London and textured with postmodern flourishes that a 2013 audience knowingly applaud. Politically the play is light-on, most of its references to feminism and homosexuality are of the arch insult or the ‘nudge nudge, wink wink,’ variety, funny because they now appear so quaint, recalling a more repressed era, that of the risqué joke. At times, when murder is on the agenda or sadomasochism is hinted at, it’s as if One Man, Two Guv’nors will turn out to be a farce desultorily knocked out by the late Joe Orton, the comic genius of the 1960s British theatre, for a bit of spare cash. The show is laced with the broad humour of Benny Hill, the Carry On films, cross-dressing and a few touches the overtly satirical new wave of British comedy in the 60s.

If there is a higher purpose to One Man, Two Guvnors, it is manifest in the production’s celebration of commedia dell’arte, British comedy and above all theatrical virtuosity—expert timing, risk-taking physical dexterity (physical comedy director, Cal McCrystal), broad characterisations with memorably subtle touches, convincing singing, dancing and vaudevillian turns and the capacity to adopt the audience as confidante and transform them into the conned. Owain Arthur—the one man-two servants—embodies all these skills, realising Frances as not too bright but endowed with highly adaptive tunnel vision and the physical capacity to act on it, lurking, running, vaulting, crashing and spasming all too convincingly. The best reason for seeing One Man, Two Guvnors, even if the calculatedly thrusting direct address of the actors and the musical interludes can be wearying and the status quo holds, as ever, is to witness theatre history virtuosically recreated and reimagined.

the first garden

Olive Pink, like Daisy Bates, is one of those significant and eccentric female figures from Australian history who are resurrected to public attention from time to time (Tracks Dance produced Fierce, about Pink, in Darwin in 2001, RT45, p9) both for their relationship with and support of Aboriginal people, if much more contentiously so in the case of Bates.

Pink (1884-1975) was a botanical illustrator, anthropologist, environmentalist, an activist for the Warlpiri and Aranda people of Central Australia and the creator of an ecologically sound Australian garden in Alice Springs. The play by Christopher Raja and Natasha Raja (who plays Pink) is plainly and quite didactically constructed. The aged Pink at work on her garden is haunted by the over-protective Harold Southern she lost to World War I and who attempts to restrain her activism. Into this scenario come other figures including the amiable Warlpiri man who assists her, Johnny Tjampatjimpa, played by Eshua Bolton, who also doubles as a hostile and destructive Tasman, on the run from the law and testing the limits of Pink’s compassion. Although Bolton imparts a degree of subtlety to his performance, Raja as Pink is one-dimensional, restrained by a heavily made-up, mask-like demeanour and a rigid physical interpretation of ageing. Like Scott Fraser, who plays Southern, her vocal delivery is one-note, presumably to meet the exigencies of outdoor performance. Slowly paced and too inclined to exposition and broad characterisation, The First Garden is to be admired for its commitment to revealing the complexities of Olive Pink’s life and the richness of her vision and is pleasantly staged in Sydney’s Botanic Gardens with music live from Christopher Brocklebank, Hugh Brocklebank and Bill Peechy.

Belvoir, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, writer Tennessee Williams, director Simon Stone, performers Ewen Leslie, Jacqueline McKenzie, Marshall Napier, Lynette Curran, design Robert Cousins, costumes Alice Babidge, lighting Damien Cooper, composer, sound designer Stefan Gregory, Belvoir from Feb 20; The Living Room Theatre, animateur Michelle St Anne, performers Imogen Cranna, Alan Flower, Lanneke Jones, Michelle St Anne, Ling-Hsueh Tang, Gabrielle Quinn, Carol Divjak, architectural producer Andy Macdonald, creative advisor Chrissie Koltai, installation artist Michaela Gleave, media artist Imogen Cranna, production designer Joel West, composer, sound designer Lawrence English, composer, pianist Alister Spence, cellist Mary Rapp, Wharf 2/3, Feb 28-March 10; National Theatre of Great Britain, One Man, Two Guv’nors, writer Richard Bean, director Nicholas Hytner, physical comedy director Cal McCrystal, choreographer Adam Penford, lighting Mark Henderson, music Grant Olding, design Mark Thompson, Sydney Theatre, from April 2; The First Garden, writers Christopher Raja, Natasha Raja, director Steve Kidd, performers [see review], co-producers Benjamin Convery and the Olive Pink Botanic Garden, Alice Springs; Royal Botanical Gardens, Sydney, March 8-17

LET ME SHARE WITH YOU TWO IMAGES THAT SUM UP THE ELECTRIC CARNIVAL THAT WAS THIS YEAR’S SUBLIMELY PROGRAMMED WORLD THEATRE FESTIVAL.

The first involved me trying to explain to a bemused and bespectacled WTF patron what the dazed man covered in peanut butter was doing as he lurched from renowned American academic and director Richard Schechner’s workshop to a nearby toilet.

The second involved the same patron simulating oral sex onstage with German sex kitten Laura Tonke in Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve never had it so good) and looking like she was having the night of her life.

The premise of Kitchen is deceptively simple. The audience is greeted by the three members of the Gob Squad collective who are on tour. We are asked to walk behind the large screen installed onstage and inspect three sets: a bed, a kitchen and a scrim. Once settled in our seats, the show begins and we discover that each set is based on a seminal Warhol pop film: Sleep (1963), Kitchen (1965) and Screen Tests (1964-66). Live footage is streamed onto the giant screen as the performers attempt to recreate each film: squabbling, flirting, remonstrating and philosophising with each other. “Everything began here,” Gob Squad’s Bastian Trost whispers seductively to the audience while appearing in saturated black and white close-up. Across the duration of the show, the initial premise is skillfully deconstructed. Three audience members are co-opted into playing the performers’ roles, deftly instructed by them via head-piece to enact the show’s climax: a post-Warhol, hyper-reality where the “real audience member” celebrity has superceded the performers’ increasingly petulant antics.

Gob Squad was as assured and expert as its reputation promised. The show was flawlessly executed, the technology so integrated into the performance it seemed to melt away: I have never been less conscious of a screen onstage. Each performer was dextrous in coaxing wincingly vulnerable admissions from the audience without it seeming inappropriate. The melding of pop sensibility, witty one-liners and the homage to Warhol was a spoonful of sugar that made the critique of our celebrity-drenched, mediated culture go down unnoticed. The company’s unique creative methodology, collective institutional structure and resulting polish and professionalism make for a seamlessly entertaining theatrical experience.

The helpful WTF program suggested that Kitchen patrons would also enjoy Reckless Sleepers’ The Last Supper. Indeed, both companies are trans-European and were founded in that post-dramatic eruption of energy in the late 1980s and early 1990s, energy that Reckless Sleepers’ founder Mole Wetherell describes as “a reaction to proper theatre in big places” (www.reckless-sleepers.co.uk).

Unlike the cheerful, polyglot, technology-driven Gob Squad, Reckless Sleepers’ work has more of a literary and mannered atmosphere with a deliberately anti-theatrical agenda, more akin to the live art manifesto of British company Forced Entertainment. The Last Supper is one of their older works, commissioned in 2004 and recently revived. As in Kitchen, the audience is greeted by a performer, Mole Wetherell in formal attire but with noticeably dusty bare feet. We are courteously given a number and the other two performers, Leen Dewilde and Tim Ingram, lead us to long narrow tables in a square configuration, marked with seemingly random numbers.

The performers fill our glasses with wine and then adjourn to their table, pre-set with red wine, scripts, apples and short stacks of square paper the size of palm cards. They begin a series of toasts. The tone is muted, ironic, with a slowly building undertone of hysteria and menace. At intervals, marked by the performers with a sense of weary collusion, they read quotations from their stack, pause, wrap the paper into delicate bundles, tip their heads back slowly and ‘eat the words’ of the famous dead they have just quoted. Between toasts and consumption, unobtrusive waiters appear with plates of food assigned to the numbers at respective tables: the final death row meals of various Texan prisoners in the 1990s. The florid and eccentric meal requests—liver and burger, pickle and pie—make this ghoulish experience the most alive part of the proceedings, in contrast with the detached manner of the performers as they read from their scripts.

I had been really looking forward to this show since, like Gob Squad, Reckless Sleepers’ reputation precedes them. However, The Last Supper felt like a revived work that had somehow lost its initial zeitgeist. The deliberately hackneyed choices of the kitsch Texan death row meals and the great clichés of deathbed (yes, we did Elvis and Marilyn, Che Guevara and Trotsky, Rasputin and Da Vinci) felt lazy rather than biting. There seemed very little at risk for a form whose traditions thrive on experimentation and that sense of audience discomfort at a game being played where the rules are not necessarily understood. I kept waiting for the turn, or the retreat, or even the unravelling of the carefully formal mise en scène. While l really enjoyed the creamy intensity of Leen Dewilde’s performance, the tang of the red wine and the evident intellect and craft of Wetherell’s script, I was shocked when the show stopped, almost petering out. I felt deflated. Perhaps this was an intentional anti-ritual demonstrating that last meals are as mundane as any, whatever faded glamour or religious intensity we might try to attach to them?

It was a privilege, nonetheless, to see iconic Gob Squad and Reckless Sleepers’ repertoire co-terminously and in the broader context of the savvy international programming of this year’s fabulous World Theatre Festival.

See Osunwunmi’s account of Reckless Sleepers’ String Section as part of In Between Time, Bristol.

World Theatre Festival 2013, Gob Squad, Kitchen (You’ve never had it so good), devisors, performers Johanna Freiburg, Sean Patten, Sharon Smith, Berit Stumpf, Nina Tecklenburg, Sarah Thom, Laura Tonke, Bastian Trost, Simon Will, video Miles Chalcraft, Martin Cooper, sound Jeff McGrory, Jeffrey Fisher, dramaturgy: Christina Runge; Reckless Sleepers, The Last Supper, writer, designer Mole Wetherell, devisors, performers Tim Ingram, Leen Dewilde, Mole Wetherell; Brisbane Powerhouse, both shows, February 20-24

BRISBANE POWERHOUSE’S WORLD THEATRE FESTIVAL WAS INAUGURATED IN 2010 WITH LOFTY AMBITIONS IF RELATIVELY HUMBLE MEANS.

There was some genuinely good and interesting work in the program, but as is often the case with inaugural years of risky and ambitious new ideas, audiences were small and populated mostly by dedicated theatregoers and industry practitioners. Shows that had worked well in idiosyncratic performance ghettoes in Melbourne (the ‘World’ being Melbourne and Dublin that year, from memory) didn’t always transfer successfully into the larger and more conventional theatre spaces of the Powerhouse.

Then in 2011 Artistic Director Andrew Ross pulled off a major marketing coup, securing a $500,000 philanthropic gift over three years from Wotif.com founder Graeme Wood. Suddenly WTF exploded into the stratosphere with work from the USA, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Argentina; the Australian quotient was more selectively curated, and local theatre-makers were nurtured under the auspices of a developmental wing in the form of a show-and-tell ‘scratch’ series (RT102). The 2013 WTF season is the final one of the Wotif endowment, and it is the crowning achievement of Ross’ tenure (he has stepped down from his Artistic Directorship of the Powerhouse) and Sarah Neal’s programming curatorship. WTF has become the must-attend event of the Brisbane theatre calendar.

The festival team has not only developed the strongest and most compelling line-up of all the WTFs thus far (with an entirely welcome new writing focus), they have also pulled off the most effective use of the Powerhouse’s many intriguing spaces. Melbourne’s MKA Theatre of New Writing bring their successful run of The Economist (RT107) to town, housed in the Rooftop Terrace, a flexible upstairs space tucked away beyond the administration offices. The Brechtian actor-audience shenanigans—the direct address and irreverent song-and-dance routines that drive the pace of this theatrical riff on the biography of rightwing Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik—simply work better in enclosed confines than they would in either of the BP’s traditional theatre venues. And Ireland’s Pan Pan Theatre return to the large Powerhouse Theatre having played there in 2011 with their anarchic version of Oedipus; this time they know how to really fill the space and take advantage of its warehouse-like dimensions and extraordinary acoustics. Their postmodern A Doll House is a festival highlight.

a doll house

Ibsen’s 1871 play A Doll’s House might not scream ‘new writing,’ but writer-director Gavin Quinn’s liberal adaptation of the text (losing the possessive ‘s’ in the play’s title is perhaps emblematic of such liberty) renders it as fresh as a newly minted manuscript. Here the maid, Mrs Helmer, recites the stage directions to the audience, announces the subtext and provides plot summaries at key dramatic junctures. More than a post-Brechtian indulgence, the play text is being reconfigured and reimagined in strategic ways that cause us to reconsider who Nora is (not was in 1871). Is she a WAG—a footballer’s wife and/or girlfriend? A symbol of materialistic Celtic Tiger Dublin (before the Crash)? The acquisitive McMansion hausfrau in the outer suburbs of any 21st century city? Is she, in other words, one of us? In this version the language sings, as do the characters who break into rousing ballads from Les Mis or the Whitney Houston back-catalogue when internal reflection is called for. In Quinn’s Doll House, Nora rips open parcels, decorates for Christmas and dances a berserk tarantella like a demon-possessed Barbie. She delivers platitudes like a robot or an irrigation sprinkler caught in a repeat cycle. The playing style leans toward the absurdist but can just as readily dogleg into the melodramatic or soap operatic. Upon her arrival and having witnessed this spoilt-child-in-a-candy-store act, Christina announces, “You’re just like you were at school. A profligate. A wagon. A bitch.” Characters refer to taking Es and indulging in internet chat sex. It’s all irresistibly of its moment.

There were some I spoke to after the show who felt that certain of the post-Brechtian devices were gratuitous or inconsistently applied. Perhaps. But it’s difficult to begrudge a company of fine actors the odd moment or two of gratuitous playfulness when the cumulative effect is of such theatrical richness and exuberance. I enjoyed this production significantly more than the company’s 2011 grunge take on Oedipus.

white rabbit, red rabbit

White Rabbit Red Rabbit, writer Nassim Soleimanpour stops the performance by Richard Fidler and introduces himself to the audience at WTF2013, Brisbane

The performance history of this piece is as intriguing as the work itself. Soleimanpour has received national press coverage with this Australian premiere of his play. Despite the fact that the play has been performed in cities as far afield as Dublin, Edinburgh, Brighton, Calgary and San Francisco, this is the first time Soleimanpour has been granted a passport by the Iranian government and allowed to watch the work performed. Soleimanpour is the ‘I’ character in the script: it is written as correspondence to its imagined audience. A different actor reads the script each night. It arrives, delivered by a festival representative in a sealed packet. On the night I saw the show, it was ABC Radio’s Richard Fidler who ably executed the task. He is instructed by the playwright in absentia to do things like require the audience to number themselves out loud so that No 5 or No 12 might be asked to do things like improvise plot sequences or take notes of the performance so that they can be emailed to Soleimanpour to provide him vicarious experience of the show. Of course, this particular conceit was broken on this occasion by the physical presence of the writer. He leapt onto the stage to emotional applause at one point to acknowledge the fact.

The narrator, assisted by his team of audience conscripts, retells the story of Soleimanpour’s uncle who used to breed rabbits, painting one red and treating it preferentially. It is a psychological exercise in learned behaviour, as the white rabbits round savagely on the red rabbit. The upshot is that even when the inequity is taken away—the experiment suspended—future generations of rabbits still act according to the learned behaviour of their forebears. Prejudicial behaviour—even violence, and by metaphoric extension, war—is trained into us, the writer seems to be telling us. We hold onto ancient grudges even when we have no direct experience of the original point of conflict or resentment.

It is an extraordinary theatrical experiment, made all the more memorable on this occasion by the author’s physical presence rather than his haunting of a script he has never heard read aloud. It will influence writers, theatre stylists and experimenters of form and structure for years to come.

parah

In a post-show Q&A at the Parah matinee, director Jo Kukathas asked the audience if the surtitling of this piece had likely kept audiences away. Festival producer Zohar Spatz mentioned that at the 2012 WTF there were three foreign language productions and that it had been too tall an ask for Brisbane audiences; the festival was in the process of re-educating the local theatre-going community accordingly. If it’s true that language is determining which productions audiences choose—even at a festival themed by its focus on ‘new writing’ and the spoken/written word—it’s a shame, because Parah was an accessible and tightly crafted piece of dramatic writing.

Singaporean playwright Alfian bin Sa’at (whose 2012 MKA production of Sex. Blood. Violence. Gore has drawn several Green Room Award nominations; RT110) has a reputation for courting controversy. The Singaporean censor has not appreciated his frank depiction of (particularly queer) sexuality over the years. He writes in both English and Malay, and with Parah has provided the translation of the latter into the former. Taken from a real-life Education Ministry controversy, this is a student-centred play that examines racial prejudice in contemporary Malaysia. Ethnic Indian and Chinese minorities are the victims of racial stereotyping in a curriculum text, Interlok. Mahesh, Kahoe, Hafiz and Melur represent the Indian, Chinese and Malay communities depicted in the education text, and their own social cohesion is tested—indeed almost rendered asunder—by their responses to the allegations of racism in the school curriculum. This is a moving and beautifully acted piece; whilst the play is not the most radical of Sa’at’s works in either form or content, it has hit a cultural nerve in Kuala Lumpur and deserves a wider audience, particularly here in Australia where, as the festival producers are keen to remind us, the themes of racism, social cohesion and immigration are bound to resonate.

Melur provides an anecdote toward the play’s climax: her mother told her of a Malay lady from the end of her street who ritually cleansed her teacup after a Chinese tradesman drank from it. It is an elegant reminder of the sort of cultural prejudice that exists even in modern leafy suburbs. The four teenage friends survive the turmoil and play a real-life game of badminton in the theatre at play’s end, sharing water from the same bottle. It’s a gentle image that somehow encapsulates the heart at the centre of the writing, playing and direction of Parah.

Brisbane Powerhouse, World Theatre Festival 2013: Pan Pan Theatre (Ireland), A Doll House, writer Gavin Quinn, Feb 13-17; White Rabbit Red Rabbit (Iran), writer Nassim Soleimanpour, Feb 14-24; The Instant Café Theatre Company (Malaysia), Parah, writer Alfian bin Sa’at; Brisbane Powerhouse, Feb 13-17

(l-r) June Hickey, Ivan Sevrovic, Dorothy Weir, Judy Murray; Life As We Know It, Urban Theatre Projects

I HAVE NEVER SEEN A THEATRE WORK FEATURING SEVEN ELDERLY NON-ACTORS. IN SOME WAYS, TO DESCRIBE LIFE AS WE KNOW IT LIKE THIS DOES IT AN INJUSTICE, SINCE IT OCCURS WHERE THEATRE, PERFORMANCE AND PARTICIPATORY ART CROSS PATHS.

Urban Theatre Projects’ new artistic director Rosie Dennis’ production is the culmination of 18 months of organic workshopping and story swapping with mature-aged residents of the south west Sydney suburb of Minto about their life experiences. In that sense, Life As We Know It is neither improvisational theatre nor a traditional play. It’s something else: a collective autobiography and an instance of the diversity of practices that now encompass theatre and performance.

The first thing the audience sees is a lush, green, vertical garden fashioned from timber paletts. The impact of this transformation of the black box theatre space is akin to sitting in your own grandparents’ backyard. Subtle links to the ‘outer world’ are everywhere—a breeze through the open windows rustles the flowers and lettuce leaves in one corner, and a roaring jet outside seems less like an intrusion than another part of the production. It’s a joyful, inclusive, living set that unifies what could otherwise be a disparate collection of stories and characters. Immediately, we are put at ease, a feeling that grows as performers—people, rather—with names like June, Judy, Daryl and Dot leave their seats in the audience and enter the stage, one by one. One is a European migrant, married for close to half a century; one put her own ambitions on hold to raise a family; another was raised on a mission for Indigenous people in Kellyville. Unmannered in movements and speech, all of them appear distinctly nonplussed about their onstage roles.

A series of conversations, monologues and musical numbers interweave seamlessly, unrolling with ease and humour potentially depressing themes of aging, mortality, compromise in marriage and loneliness. The production balances stylisation and naturalism to produce a kind of mediated realism that is moving but not schmaltzy, life-affirming but not preachy, and honest but not too earnest. There are no big false life lessons learned, no dramatic character arcs. There is barely a fourth wall, just very frank, funny and direct theatrical communication. It’s the kind of theatre that appeals to people who think they loathe theatre.

Surely this is what contemporary theatre is demanding of practitioners—to produce work that embraces audiences and values their generative contribution to the art-making process. To throw light on barely heard communities and to contribute to them. To go beyond merely theoretical exercise in participatory principles.

This is not theatre as a fringe activity. Rosie Dennis’ work matters—to the communities she is enabling on stage and to the audiences she is connecting with.

Urban Theatre Projects, Life As We Know It, director Rosie Dennis, with Judy Murray, June Hickey, Jenny Shillingsworth, Daryl Cooke, Ivan Sevrovic, Dorothy Weir, Vicky Andrews, musicians Matthew Steffen, Toby Martin, lighting Frank Mainoo, design Joey Ruigrok Van Der Werven; a Campbelltown Arts Centre Commission, produced by Urban Theatre Projects; Carriageworks, March 13-16

AS KAGE, KATE DENBOROUGH AND GERARD VAN DYCK HAVE BEEN WORKING IN CLOSE COLLABORATION FOR MORE THAN 15 YEARS, BUT IN FLESH AND BONE, THE TWO SHARE THE STAGE FOR THE FIRST TIME IN A GREAT WHILE. IT’S A WONDER, NOT SIMPLY BECAUSE IT’S A POTENT REMINDER OF DENBOROUGH’S EXCELLENCE AS A DANCER (SHE USUALLY DIRECTS WHILE VAN DYCK PERFORMS).

flesh and bone

More than that, Flesh and Bone is one of those rare and deeply gratifying examples of work that could only be accomplished by artists who have spent so long developing ideas together. It’s an intimate and highly personal work, brave and revealing, and casts a particular spell that would have broken if another performer had entered the space.

It begins in near darkness, dim illumination gradually allowing our eyes to adjust and make out the pair in odd proportions—her shoulders broad and masculine, his silhouette showing off feminine hips and breasts. They’re both in a kind of drag that extends to the flesh, and after they strip themselves of their clothes they continue this process of unveiling by calmly discarding the skin they wear beneath. Still, even when they’re back to themselves, their individuality seems never to fully recover itself, this sense of overlapping identity maintaining itself throughout the hour that follows.

In making the work, Denborough and Van Dyck sought out the thoughts of a group of young people (facilitated by writer Clementine Ford). Their discussions on gender informed what was to become Flesh and Bone; there are sequences in which the traditional roles of male and female dancers are reversed, as Van Dyck is supported by Denborough’s lifts, while that most gendered of performances, the tango, is given a more permeable and supple twist. At one point he removes a pair of fake breasts from his shirt, she a prosthetic penis from her trousers. Despite the powerful exploration of gender that runs throughout the work, it would be an error to say that the piece is ‘about’ gender. It’s simply one of the conditions that the work is testing. There’s no lesson in any of this, no obvious point to be made. Each moment has an elusive but compulsive necessity that requires no explanation. There’s no logic or narrative, but everything is as it must be.

It’s also a thoroughly visual work, with each vignette offering striking images. On a curved, mirrored surface the pair create subtle illusions with a number of immense, black balloons; a massive expanse of grass forms the foundation for a quiet, introspective moment; a vast sheet of unbroken white paper is canvas for a violent moment of rupture. The most memorable scene is also the most inexplicable—Van Dyck places a small mirrored table over Denborough’s prone form and proceeds to make pasta from scratch, topping it with sauce and shaved cheese. This unfolds with methodical slowness, yet it’s impossible to look away.

As is typical of the company, the work displays its roots in dance but draws just as heavily on other disciplines, from circus and magic to post-dramatic theatre. It refuses to stay one thing, but just as importantly is always something—it’s never an act of negation or refutation but rather of continual expansion. It’s buoyant, occasionally startling and always generous towards its audience. Hopefully it’s a sign of what’s to come, too.

until then, then

A stark contrast comes in the form of Until Then, Then, another piece by two long-time collaborators, Ming-Zhu Hii and Nicholas Coghlan, under the rubric of The Public Studio. Both retreated from creating new work several years ago after reaching a point of dissatisfaction with the art scene in Melbourne, and that process of negation also underscores every aspect of Until Then, Then. It’s not merely anti-theatre, which has its own conventions by now. It’s closer to an installation, in some ways, one which actively invokes theatrical traditions in order to do away with them.

Coghlan sits at a small desk, wearing a paper crown, and mutely operates a laptop to bring up a series of projected images and text. The visuals are manipulated paintings that evoke the Baroque vanitas or memento mori, the reminder that death accompanies all worldly existence. Here those skulls and hourglasses are subjected to their own digital decay and retrieval, piling up in infinite regression or finding themselves magnified to the point of unintelligibility. Some of the visuals are Bacon-esque in their ghastly fleshiness, but they never quite reach a point of morbidity.

Meanwhile, snatches of dialogue from the ‘great’ male characters of (mostly) modernist theatre—Woyzeck, Krapp, Peer Gynt—are displayed. They provide no context, and very quickly begin to suffer their own ravaging, as words disappear from sentences before they can be parsed, leaving brittle skeletons of phrases with the meat ripped off. Coghlan seems to be enacting this violence from within his tiny alcove, but his lack of expression never clues us in as to the nature of his relationship with the strangeness taking place around him.

The overall effect is a radical act of silence, in a way. It’s almost the theatrical equivalent of a hunger strike—it refuses, and refuses and refuses, and it’s perhaps no surprise that many audience members have been thoroughly confused and at times bemused by the work. It’s common that emerging theatre makers will think they’ve reinvented the form, but here we have more mature artists who seem to have come to the realisation that such a thing is impossible. The work offers no answers, and I don’t know that it admits of its own questions, either. It doesn’t exactly celebrate failure, since it doesn’t allow for the existence of success. But what the alternatives might look like remains teasingly out of the frame here.

KAGE, Flesh and Bone, creators, performers Kate Denborough, Gerard Van Dyck, costumes Lisa Gorman, lighting Paul Jackson, composer Kelly Ryall, Fortyfivedownstairs, March 7-24; The Public Studio, Until Then, Then, co-creator, performer Nicholas Coghlan, co-creator, director Ming-Zhu Hii, sound Russell Goldsmith, lighting Damien McLean, design Matthew Angel, Ming-Zhu Hii; La Mama Theatre, Melbourne, March 6-10

WITH TENTS ERECTED, POP-UP BARS BUILT AND CITY GARDENS TRANSFORMED INTO NIGHTSPOTS, FRINGE WORLD IS A WELCOME SUMMER CARNIVAL.

With fresh and affordable shows, it neatly dovetails with the mainstream Perth International Arts Festival. As one of the youngest but rapidly growing festivals on the international fringe calendar, this year’s program attracted diverse and savvy works from Perth artists, the national fringe circuit and international acts. Here’s a small sample from a very large program.

sweet child of mine

Bron Batten’s parents don’t exactly know what their daughter does for a living, so she made a show with them to explore her art-making process. In a hybrid performance of dance, stand-up and film, Batten explores her life as an artist with self-reflexive satire while her Dad provides fatherly advice to the audience and admits his daughter’s work is still something of a mystery to him.

While Melbourne-based Batten’s stand-up observations tend to be insubstantial, she does have a knack for ironic setup; her lightning-fast overview of ‘deconstructionist’ theatre—blithely referencing Foucault, Derrida and Jamieson—is juxtaposed with filmed segments of her parents’ droll perspective as they try to categorise something as abstruse as contemporary art. Batten has a wicked sense of the ridiculous, which is highlighted in a sketch where she dresses as a beaver and recruits an audience member to play the artist’s role in a scripted exchange with her mother. This adds distinctive insight into that relationship without sentimentality. While occasionally trite, Batten’s self-deprecating wit and her parents’ roles as unwitting comics provide a refreshing and playful approach to the perplexing nature of art.

the wives of hemingway

Ernest Hemingway’s oeuvre brimmed with stoic male characters on magnificent, grisly adventures. If his literary output is anything to go by, he was obsessed with death, violence and love. Drawing inspiration from his texts and love life, The Wives of Hemingway is a satirical reimagining of the writer’s tumultuous marriages. Newlyweds Catherine and Wilson go on safari, a surreal journey complete with big game hunting, rampant heroics and sordid sexual exploits. The advent of Helen joining their call to adventure turns the hunt into a brutal battle for love.

Perth writer-director Zoe Pepper and her team of co-devisors capture imperial idioms of the romantic adventure genre exquisitely. Performers Tim Watts, Josh Price and Adriane Daff sit on the razor edge of parody before tumbling into the dark Hemingway psyche: where fear of emasculation and the feminised male materialise in the guise of female grotesques. Homely Helen and sexually audacious Catherine are played interchangeably by Price and Daff. Price taps into the fragility of both women with extraordinary black humour, while Daff exhibits a restrained delirium throughout. The quintessence of the piece is realised in Watts’ portrayal of Wilson. His is a most ironic yet beguiling portrayal of the Hemingway model: dashing, combative, passionate yet heartless.

Pepper has deft control over the material, which could tumble into a “Carry On” nightmare in the wrong hands. Instead, this achingly funny show induces much compassion for its outlandish characters.

birdboy

I felt less empathy for Birdboy’s Miss Nightingale, who lives with her caged son and dozens of birds. She sings nightly for him and her feathered fans, reliving her fleeting glory as a radio star. Upon his mother’s sudden death, the boy is discovered by a neighbour who takes him in, and he discovers life beyond the confines of his enclosure. Inspired by a factual account of a seven-year old Russian boy who was raised as a pet bird by his mother, The Wet Weather Ensemble’s latest work struggles to get airborne. Wavering between drama, satire, musical parody and soap opera, Birdboy is tonally unsure and uneven. Ian Sinclair’s performance as Miss Nightingale enlivens the piece with his “Baby Jane”-meets-“Mommy Dearest” theatricality. St John Cowcher as the boy is sweet, and yet his enigmatic portrayal prevents any insight into Birdboy’s emotional journey, while the introduction of romantic interest between him and his rescuer is particularly incongruous. Not without charm, Birdboy, a creation of Perth’s The Wet Weather Ensemble, could benefit from a return to the development room and firmer directorial vision.

uta uber kool ja

Prima donna peevishness is more palatable in the guise of Uta Uber Kool Ja. Having thrown parties in Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne in 2012, Uta and her manager George celebrate a new year with Uta’s comeback tour in Perth. Uta invites guests to her hotel room for an immersive performance comprising diva antics and drug-induced flashbacks. The story of Uta’s discovery, her (sort of) fame behind the Iron Curtain, celebrity love affairs, tormented marriages and her life alongside Vivienne Westwood are all laid bare. Meanwhile, George ensures the champagne and flattery flows, enlisting the party-goers to keep Uta’s ego afloat.

With dress-ups, dancing, party games and more spandex than this side of 1985 has seen, Uta celebrates the launch of her remixed single. The guests revel in the sheer hedonism that is Uta—a blend of Eddie and Pats with a touch of Marianne Faithfull. As the party draws to a close, the act of stripping back her character to reveal Georgina Symes (the Melbourne-based actress) is a little capricious. After being so immersed in the world of George (Nic Dorward) and Uta, her exposure as a mere character was a paroxysm of reality I couldn’t accept – lang lebe Uta!

the three little pigs

Rob Van Vuuren & The Pink Couch’s The Three Little Pigs is a well-oiled, South African political comedy-thriller take on the traditional children’s tale. Inspired by the daily newspapers and drawing its gritty aesthetic from TV shows like The Wire, it dissects the politics between media and government and the corruption within law enforcement in modern South Africa with an Orwellian sensibility. Distressed and terrified by the slaughter of his two brothers, the last little pig turns to the cops—notably a chicken and a goat—to investigate the brutal murders in a world teeming with sly and desperate personalities, where morality is eschewed.

The actors play multiple roles, but James Cairns stands out with menace and frightening exactitude as the chicken heading the investigation; Albert Pretorius’ goat is weary and bitter within the political machine, and Rob Van Vuuren’s many hapless and wretched characters, including a piggish security guard, a raw-boned rabbit who owns a gym and an erotic dancing cat, are delivered with fine physical humour, providing welcome relief from the ominous tension. Director Tara Notcutt transforms the action with ingenuity; however, the demise of the Big Bad Wolf plays out rather softly for a play that touts Tarantino as an influence.

The Three Little Pigs renewed my faith in theatre as a potent medium for telling stories of our time: its observations on and satire of contemporary South African society and politics give it immediate currency, yet it is also a play that stands up in any number of contexts as a comment on the abuse of power. To paraphrase Orwell, it is a rare beast that can fuse political with artistic purpose into a cohesive whole

Fringe World 2013: The Blue Room Theatre Summer Nights, The Last Tuesday Society & PICA, Sweet Child of Mine, directors Bron Batten, Gerald McCulloch, PICA, Feb 4-8; Side Pony Productions & Weeping Spoon Productions, The Wives of Hemingway, writer-director Zoe Pepper, North Perth Bowls Club, Feb 8-16; The Blue Room Theatre Summer Nights, The Wet Weather Ensemble & PICA, Birdboy, director Moya Thomas, Ian Sinclair, PICA , Feb 11-16; Army of Love, Uta Uber Kool Ja, creative producer Nic Dorward, performers Georgina Syme, Nic Dorward; Riverview Hotel Feb 12-23; National Arts Festival South Africa, Rob Van Vuuren & The Pink Couch, The Three Little Pigs, director Tara Notcutt, The Courtyard State Theatre Centre of WA, Perth, Feb 12-24

THE SHORT-LIVED CONCERT SERIES LURK, RUN BY UK COMPUTER MUSICIAN ALEX MCLEAN, HAD THE TAGLINE “SOFTWARE TO MAKE MUSIC TO DRINK BEER TO.”

Lurk, like most of McLean’s activities, elegantly draws attention to this world of burgeoning activity in enchanting language; humanising the creative use of machine instructions, reminding us that with software code, as with any other human tool, it’s what you do with it that counts. In general McLean’s writing is indicative of a new generation of individual creative coding, powered by the evolution of flexible and social software development tools.

uncharted territory

The allure of software programming is that there is so much uncharted territory. The blank code editor is like an artist’s blank canvas or a writer’s blank page. The cliché that programming is the new literacy is fitting, not just because code offers a new handle on information but also because of its potential for self-expression and new ways of thinking, dependent above all on its open-endedness. An important aspect of creative coding is the ever-changing relationship between people in the production of tools and outputs.

a single process

In Alistair Riddell’s short history of Australian computer music in Experimental Music: audio explorations in Australia (ed Gail Priest, UNSW Press, 2009), a prominent theme is the fusion of coding and creative practice in a single process, the code being the unique means by which certain creative goals can be achieved. This contrasts with what many would consider a normal state of affairs, where programmers create tools to be used by artists. But the in-between space that has grown to maturity is illustrated by Riddell in early examples, such as the work of Graeme Gerrard or Greg Scheimer, developing software for their own projects that is then adopted by their contemporaries. The creative development of a system goes on to be a useful tool for others, and lives as both infrastructure as well as artwork in its own right.

Fast forward to today and the growth of such activity has naturally echoed the technological Cambrian explosion that computers have unleashed universally. A diversity of patterns and relations is unfolding.

software for making art

Developed single-handedly by Melbourne’s Ross Bencina for over a decade, AudioMulch is pro-audio software that lets you fluidly whip together virtual music-making machines. AudioMulch fits the model of commercial tool: developed by developers, used by artists (except that Bencina is its quintessential pro-user), performing delicate works that bring out its innovative design. Beyond Bencina’s use of it, AudioMulch reveals further versatility in the hands of original artists such as the USA’s Girl Talk or the UK’s Four Tet, who enthuse about its non-linear approach and its focus on live sound creation.

For an increasing number of artist-programmers, the distinction between the world of software-as-art and the world of software-to-make-art is more blurry, and the growing norm for many is to straddle both.

software as art

Australian systems artists such as Jon McCormack create works that exploit the patterns and properties of natural processes in code, rising to the philosopher Manuel de Landa’s challenge that artists must “be able to hack biology, thermodynamics, mathematics and other areas of science.” Typically digital artworks are manifestations of custom programs, but once in a while a project idea emerges instead as a creator’s tool, destined for public consumption. McCormack’s recent collaboration with Peter McIlwain and Aidan Lane has led to Nodal, a music-making tool based on the flow of data around a user-created network of events, something like a virtual Domino Rally of musical notes. Nodal is quirky and fun but equally usable. Like AudioMulch, it frees you from the musician’s timeline and lets you think structurally about music, a challenge weary producers can delight in.

On a finer, more day-to-day level, software artists routinely deposit nuggets of useful code on the web. Today, collaborative coding environments such as Github and modular creative tools like MaxMSP, encourage distributed modular development that is always “to share,” though one problem that arises from the uninhibited sharing of software is the resultant minefield of usability.

For some, the relation between art and tool development is even more tightly intertwined. Perhaps Australia’s best case is the “live coding” software developed by Brisbane’s Andrew Sorensen. Sorensen’s Impromptu and Extempore environments are software tools that let you write code live to make music, emerging from earlier work by Sorensen and Andrew Brown on the software library jMusic. “Live coding” describes the idea of writing code live in performance, often as an act of performance. Sorensen’s Vimeo channel hosts an archive of such work.

That Sorensen is making software to make software to make music to drink beer to is true to the experimentalism of Toplap, live coding’s “temporary organisation.” The deep food chain of creative software development is revealed; we don’t just take inspiration, or even remix each other, but deposit nuggets of infrastructure on the web to add to a many-layered creative ecosystem. With usable code being the object of exchange, along with traditional know-how, the idea that digital artists are “standing on the shoulders of giants” takes a more concrete form.

Programming is also getting easier, and the creative coding world is developing its canon, with publications such as “Generative Design,” and mass-popularisation via The Creators Project. Public discourse contains references to code as “the new literacy” (or for some peculiar British minds, “the new Latin”).

Creative coding is also not just for cyberspace, with a new generation of user-hackable physical computing technologies visibly eroding what BBC technology writer Bill Thompson calls the hacking world’s “brief sojourn in the virtual.” A recent Australian start-up, Ninja Blocks, offers a suite of plug-and-play wireless modules entering the growing marketplace of the soon-to-be-ubiquitous Internet of Things. Ninja Blocks form a wireless network of sensors, buttons, power switches and so on. Their key design feature is that they can be easily hacked by a software-literate user base, and the company’s focus is on this ease of development, the holy grail of creative coding success.

steim, amsterdam

The relations between networks of technologists and artists are also mediated in diverse social ways. A long-standing European example, The Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music (STEIM) in Amsterdam, is a hub of music electronics experimentation that has hosted residencies by Australian creators such as Bencina, Douglas Khan and improviser Jon Rose, whose work includes electronically augmented violin bows and the use of bouncy balls as wireless musical controllers for gamified interactive compositions. Through its residency program, STEIM offers creative practitioners tailored technical support in the development of electronic instruments and provides a suite of their own instruments and software.

STEIM is a pleasantly informal hub for creative technological collaborations that creates a notable niche for the grassroots DIY scene—exemplified by a worldwide network of Dorkbot meet-ups and collectives such as Hand Made Music in Melbourne—commercial projects, umbrella initiatives such as the Australian Network for Art and Technology and the many academic hubs researching creative technologies. STEIM leans towards the maker/tinkerer mode of production and social organisation, embodying a passion for creative tool-making. As the role of the technologist becomes more prominent and also more diverse, this offers one model for the arts to incorporate sustained tool development and design into its ecosystem. New emerging Australian organisations such as Media Lab Melbourne, hosting short-term creative hacking collaborations —“sprints” in their parlance—are innovating alternative manifestations of the artist-technologist relationship. More variations on this theme are bound to arise, and should be welcomed, as this Cambrian explosion continues.

THERE WAS A CELEBRATORY NOTE IN THE AIR WITH THE FIRST CHRONOLOGY ARTS CONCERT OF 2013 MARKING THE 65TH BIRTHDAY OF THE ORGANISATION’S PATRON AND ONE OF ITS COMMISSIONERS, CHARLES DAVIDSON, AND THE COMPLETION OF WORKS COMMISSIONED FOR THE OCCASION.

The Acacia Quartet chewed into Movement I of Daniel Manera’s first String Quartet with evident enjoyment, the occasional tonal chord glimmering amid the bare, striated textures like pyrites within quartz. The quartet carefully groped their way through Manera’s taut clusters, unease building towards a claustrophic stasis. And when movement’s lush denoument arrived it was with a sense of relief for musicians and audience alike, full bows opening up the sound in great sucking lungsful.

Written in three distinct sections, former AIDS activist Lyle Chan’s composition, Mark and Adrian are her sons, opened with slight, weightless gestures iterated with increasing frequency, suggesting private anxieties in pre-dawn darkness. Then some threshold was abruptly breached, the Acacia players falling into a jagged, resolute march, coloured by jazzy, almost ragtime inflections. This section, surely reflective of politician Franca Arena’s apparent hostility to AIDS victims who had contracted the disease sexually as opposed to medically, then receded into the warmly concordant finale, a rich melody being skilfully palmed between the instruments. Though effective as program music—the piece being excerpted from Chan’s extended musical memoir for string quartet—as a stand-alone work it did not seem to quite cohere, the final section in particular losing focus.

The first half closed with Perth-based composer Lachlan Skipworth’s where the mountains meet, written specifically for the gorgeously turquoise six-string bass guitar of Joe Manton, who performed the work. Melodic fragments materialised and faded around precisely articulated harmonics, with further overtones resonating like peaks glimpsed through cloud. A further dimension was added to this basic effect with the incorporation of the delay pedal, ascending runs flashing rapidly across the ear, echoes allowed to hang and gradually fade, action and response being contained within a strictly formalised aesthetic reminiscent of tightly choreographed martial art. A beautifully realised performance, made all the more impressive by the severely limited time constraints within which it was apparently prepared.

Seven Stations—Love Poems for Sydney, a song cycle written in collaboration between poet Chris Mansell and composer Andrew Batt-Rawden, draws its inspiration from the railway stations that circle the inner-city—a schematic that seems to reinforce the romantic, tourist-bureau notion that this most suburban of cities begins and ends at the perimeter of the CBD. That said, Mansell’s text here is unabashedly romantic. “I am love” begins the opening song, Town Hall, filled with an unironic immediacy reflected in Batt-Rawden’s directly evocative music: trains shriek through tunnels, muttered spicatto conjuring the “wary scary/ hungry beast” lurking amid the subterranean shopping arcades—Halcyon’s Alison Morgan (soprano) and Song Company’s Anna Fraser (mezzo soprano) chewing, chattering and spitting words like some two-faced creature, the city’s shining self-image doubled by the coiled thing below.

Written for various combinations of soprano, mezzo soprano, bass guitar, viola, cello, percussion, electronics and kalimba (much of the music was written while Batt-Rawden was living in Brazil), the subsequent pieces play off this basic dichotomy to varying effect. St James, a duet for bass guitar and soprano, generates a fraught anxiety, Morgan interspersing precisely articulated text with heavy mouth breathing over Manton’s propulsive bass riff. Sydney Terminal, a cooing lullaby for strings, soprano and bass guitar, didn’t quite seem to capture the grinding limbo of Central Station filled with “fresh fodder/ new meat/ for the city,” though the repetition did recall Cityrail’s festive season habit of playing a single Christmas song on loop.

Redfern was more successful, stalactitic electronics and dissassociative bongos contrasted with the smooth control of Ezmi Pepper’s cello playing to evoke the “depleted girls too drunk to walk” and the “madonnas and a man walking his pig.” Less so was Museum, Fraser donning black gloves and red shoes for some almost burlesque showmanship, Sydney being presented as “liminal and silly/ this beat and rattle girl/ with a bad bad past,” purring and trilling over bowed drums and cymbals. Surely a missed opportunity to present the city as Drag Queen.

Though brimming with intriguing effects, “grey fear cruis[in-g] below” suggested by glistening viola double stops and chittering wood blocks, The Quay suffered from Batt-Rawden’s journeyman conducting, a problem compounded by the score’s page order becoming muddled. Similar issues plagued Sydney Terminal as well as the final section of the work, Kings Cross—though the musicians maintained the densely chromatic evocation of “where the polygamous money lies” with admirable poise, the vocalist’s weirdly enunciated spoken word being contrasted with a shriekingly hectic cello figure, energetically delivered by Pepper. Difficulties in execution notwithstanding, Seven Stations seemed at times weighed down by the conceit of the concept, straining against but never quite escaping the lure of “singular tragedies and perfect farces.”

Seven Stations: Love Poems for Sydney, Chris Mansell & Andrew Batt-Rawden, Daniel Manera, Lachlan Skipworth, Lyle Chan; Music Workshop, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, March 1

IN CARRIAGEWORKS BAY 19, A SERIES OF ROOMS, ENTERED VIA A SMALL SANDY HALLWAY, HAS BEEN CREATED BY DIVIDING THE SPACE WITH BARELY TRANSPARENT, PLASTIC WALLS. THE EVOCATION IS OF AN EPHEMERAL SPACE IN WHICH ARE FOUND QUITE SUBSTANTIAL ACTIONS AND OBJECTS, LARGELY DOMESTIC, FEMININE AND HISTORICAL IN CHARACTER—WITH A DISTINCTIVE EDWARDIAN FEEL.

Washed white clothing hangs outside the ‘house’ on one side, and on another is a laundry—a bathtub, basket, Sunlight soap, signs of recent washing and more clothes, this time providing a screen for projections of labels (eg “1849, hospital”). Other suggestions of a lived-in abode include a functioning kitchen and dining space, with an oven and signs of recent cooking. A sideboard displays hand-painted crockery.

The house ambiguously connotes ownership, servitude and artistic creativity. Replete with a boudoir, it implies the presence of the ‘lady of the house.’ On the other hand the labour suggested in the kitchen and laundry conjures images of young Aboriginal women in the 19th and 20th centuries taken from their families and forced into the role of maids. It also evokes the home of an artist with scholarly inclinations and is suffused with her blood—in the paint on the crockery (Heirloom Dinner Set), in the scones the gallery-goers are invited to have with their tea after witnessing their making (Take this for it is my body), and in the handiwork of the woman of the house (Corpus Nullius/Blood Country). The word ‘Terra’ (as one part of ‘nullius’) is partly embroidered with thread and blood onto shaved sheepskin. Among more sheepskins, a negligee hangs from the ceiling, a crinkled, shiny cast, like the discarded shell of an insect, a relic of the owner and the artist’s embodiment.

Less obviously domestic is a room with a museum case containing a sugar cast of the artist’s leg—on a white mattress over red soil—being slowly devoured by native ants. Another room is a genteel workspace where words from Aboriginal languages have been meticulously carved onto sheep and cattle bones. Some of these are also displayed in a museum case.

The house comes alive when Norman appears, brusquely inviting visitors to take tea and scones, emptying drops of her blood from a vial into the scone mix, cooking, serving and issuing orders to her guests. Here she embodies at once householder, maid and artist. This is one of several performances (another is the ‘embroidery’ of “nullius” onto the artist’s chest with pins in the lady’s parlour) built into Unsettling Suite—and unsettling they are in a work already disturbingly resonant. As Norman explains in a realtimetv video interview, “each part of the work has a material element and a bodily part or gesture.” Wool, meat, cotton and sugar found in homes also represented the economic power of colonialism and the displacement of Aboriginal people from their traditional lands.

The bones (engraved, dated and catalogued) in Bone Library comprise a dictionary of extinct Aboriginal languages; pieces can be taken in trusteeship by visitors. They may also participate by offering white clothes to be washed in water from the Hawkesbury River, “which runs through my grandmother’s country,” says Norman, “country with a dark history.” The projections onto the clothes list the dates and places of recorded massacres of Indigenous people. As Norman says, contributors’ clothes are returned, “imbued with this trace of a very violent history.”

Unsettling Suite, finely curated by Performance Space, comprises installations and performances created over a number of years as Sarah-Jane Norman has steadily built her practice. They have evolved into a single creation of great power at once subtle and necessarily confronting. As she says, these works “add up to a lot of heavy, heavy shit and very complicated shit. There’s a lot of rage…in a very quiet meditative space…[T]he unreconciled miasma of our collective history is filtered through my body into this work.”

realtime tv interview

See Sarah-Jane Norman’s article, “Blood is such clever stuff,” in the RealTime RealBlak edition (RT111) and the video interview on realtime tv.

Performance Space, Matters of Life and Death: Unsettling Suite, artist Sarah-Jane Norman; Carriageworks, Sydney, Feb 22-March 10

Sarah Coggrave and Bronwyn Platten, Untitled (The Party), 2011—a short film conceived and performed by co-collaborators Sarah Coggrave and Bronwyn Platten for Mouths and Meaning. Filmed and edited by Insa Langhorst with still photography by Huw Wahl

WORKING IN THE UK SINCE THE LATE 1990S, BRONWYN PLATTEN MADE A WELCOME REAPPEARANCE IN ADELAIDE THIS YEAR. HER MOUTHS AND MEANING EXHIBITION EXAMINED IDEAS ABOUT EMBODIMENT AND BODY-CONSCIOUSNESS, THE BODILY EXPERIENCE, AND RELATED PHOBIAS AND CONDITIONS (BULIMIA, ANOREXIA) AND SOCIAL, GENDERED ATTITUDES TO THE BODY. WHILE A NUMBER OF SMALLER OBJECTS AND STILL IMAGES SERVED AS BAFFLES, COMPLICATIONS TO THE MAIN FOCUS, FILMED WORKS DOMINATED.

Untitled (The Party) (2012) was projected large, to wall-filling size in a room to itself. Its soundtrack—intermittent and with long stretches of silence, but regularly bursting out into a goony, boisterous frivolity—filled the gallery, advertising the film’s presence if you had just entered, reminding of its story and content once seen.

Running for just a little under 20 minutes, it offers itself as both narrative and documentary and as a child’s story. A young woman turns up to a door, knocks and enters to meet an older woman and there they have a party: cakes and fizzy drinks. Platten’s collaborator, artist Sarah Coggrave, is the shy, uncertain visitor—addressing the door tentatively, entering slowly, filmed from behind and below. Her red balloon lingers briefly, caught outside the door before following her in. Inside, Platten sits at a table repeating to herself, “Mum, mum, mum, Mum; mummy, mum-mum mum”—writing the words as she speaks. So, mother(s). We are quietly shown the room with its arrayed feast of sugared and creamy fare. Some plain black shoes are filled with whipped cream and feet are plunged into them, the cream squelches luxuriantly as the foot enters, and again as the laces are pulled tight. A moment for both glee and revulsion. Hilarity begins, and the ‘comic’ music. The two don conical party hats, stomp about and attack the food, blow paper trumpets etc. An exorcism.

The film’s longueurs are calming. If exorcism—or facing-down—is the point, it seems a simple exercise: the pace is leisurely, the actions few. The pay-off is a kind of capaciousness that allows the viewer to entertain as many of the various thoughts, the various attitudes about these matters, as might suggest themselves. The Party holds them in suspension, or in slow revolution.

Bronwyn Platten, For more and more love hours (R.I.P. Mike Kelley 1954-2012), 1973-2013, hand-stitched marimeko quilt, found soft toys, oats, liquorice, treacle

A floor-piece sits centre gallery, a large, brightly checkered hand-sewn blanket, a tribute to artist Mike Kelley—with the initials, M. K., RIP, and dates of birth and decease, borne on the chests of soft toys arranged there—bears, dogs—each covered in breakfast oatmeal. (Abjection, shame are the terms associated with Kelley.) Around the blanket’s perimeter is a fringe of boldly printed words. All begin with ‘B’ and are to do with physicality, the body, with activities that a self might undertake or enact as a role-playing, gendered being. (Body, boo, boohoo, boobs, booby, book, bookish, boss, bossy, bosom, boy, boycott, bounce, bouncer, bow, bowel, bowl, brain).

Bronwyn Platten, body to brain and back again, 2013, still of filmed performance

It is these words, taken from a child’s dictionary, that Platten does brief, three-to-five-second impressions of, one after the other, in the sequence that they follow around the sculpture—in the film on the nearby screen—as in the manner of charades. A little like a one-woman Haka, with a wider range than just the usual threat to devour and rend: demonic and graphic and sometimes inscrutable, at others ticklingly on-the-money. Platten is filmed—fixed camera, the action sped up—between the shelving stacks of a library. So, framed by books either side—in a rather full, dowdy pale blue frock, with serviceable pinafore. On her head are draped a pair of upside-down (men’s) black shoes—heels at the centre of her head, the toes above each ear. The silhouette says (to me, anyway), ‘Dutch milk-maid.’ Under each foot a book is strapped. (Knowledge? Theory? Yes, the feet-above-the-head—body-over-the-cultural, over ‘ideas’—signals a kind of topsy-turvy or reversal.) Platten swaggers and stomps about, crouching, gesticulating, remonstrating, shaking her fist, clutching at her stomach, adjusting an imaginary bra, swaggering, slumping, slouching, perorating—ingratiating or coquettish, threatening or stern. Mad and very funny.

Titled body to brain and back again (2013), the film, on permanent, crazy rotation, renders the words and the kind of definitions we might imagine for them suddenly literal, ‘embodied,’ all vague nuance banished: as if ideas—abstract, nebulous—are just so many wisps-of-nothing, each one dispatched. At its regular beginning Platten stands, ready—ready for the roll-call of words to begin, her mouth tightens then opens slightly and we see that she is breathing like an athlete readying for a test, her chest rising and falling. Heroic. Then the action begins.

Bronwyn Platten, Mouths and Meaning, Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, Feb 1-March 2

Polly Borland, Untitled IV from the series Smudge 2010; We used to talk about love, Balnaves contemporary: photo media; AGNSW

A LONG WEEKEND CAN BRING A DIVERSE CROWD INTO A GALLERY AND SO ON A BUSTLING EASTER SATURDAY I FOUND MYSELF OBSERVING WITH SOME FASCINATION THE REACTIONS OF AUDIENCES TO THE LATEST BALNAVES FOUNDATION EXHIBITION, WE USED TO TALK ABOUT LOVE, AT THE ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES.

The combination of a re-engineered viewing space (a collaboration between curator Natasha Bullock and architect Jan van Schaik), which adapted the galleries into an intimate labyrinthine configuration, and the lyrical quietness emanating from the vernacular subject matter resulted in a focused viewing experience with a stilling effect, yielding some surprising results.

Most striking was the communion taking place in the darkened, altar-like space housing Grant Stevens’ minimalist video installation, Crushing (2009), where audiences appeared mesmerised by the drift of white text messages floating across the black screen. Set to a wistful piano soundtrack, the texts sharpened into focus and then faded out, coalescing into a loose narrative that poignantly conveyed the anguish of a break-up. Families leaned in closer to one another as they watched, mothers stretched their arms around their kids to offer comfort and one man gently rested his hand on his wife’s shoulder. Despite the banality of the phrases, this intuition of the universal experience of rejection aroused an atmosphere of shared vulnerability in the space.

Not all works in this exhibition of photomedia by 11 contemporary artists exploring the theme of love were intended to provoke such strong affects. Still, emotional responses were encouraged by Bullock’s thoughtful curating which sought to chart the more treacherous, taboo or melancholic, rather than sentimental, territories of love. There were allusions to the complexities and contradictions of young love, for example, in such works as Angelica Mesiti’s video Rapture (silent anthem) (2009). Capturing the spiritual quality of the idolatrous fervour of a crowd of sweaty teenagers in a mosh pit, Mesiti also tapped into the powerful role that projection and transferred affection play in sublimating overwhelming feelings like love in the transition into adulthood.

Far from the collective euphoria of this scene, there was much solitude and yearning in the slickly aestheticised photographs of David Sylvester. Redolent of advertising images in their strategic placement of consumer items, Sylvester’s photographs suggest stories around isolated figures. In one image, a forlorn high school student clutches a break-up letter while in another a teenage couple in a library appear trapped in the gaze of their peers. These emotionally stranded protagonists disarm the viewer in their incongruence with the breezy confidence and self-assurance we have come to expect of the subjects of aspirational mass-media culture.

Paul Knight, Untitled (2012), We used to talk about love, Balnaves contemporary: photo media; AGNSW

A show about love would be incomplete without reference to the body and while sex was not a strong feature of this exhibition, it did take an expansive approach in this area. In a section themed To Begin with the Flesh, the very different works of Polly Borland and Paul Knight, for example, were connected by their impulse to push beyond idealised representations of the body that curtail our appreciation of the complexities of sexual language.

Standing before Borland’s Smudge (2010) photographs, I overhead one viewer describe the work as “nightmarish.” But what, exactly, is the nature of Borland’s nightmare? In this uncompromising and oddly humorous suite of portraiture, sitters dressed in stockings, lycra, prosthetics, wigs and other accoutrements, are transformed into uncanny, post-human creations. Here it is arguably the repression or shame caused by fear of the body that is depicted as more ugly than whatever one feels compelled to hide. Also concerned with the limits of photographic representation were Knight’s candid photographs of couples in bed. Literally folded to partially conceal the nudity of their subjects, this cleave in the images alluded to the doubleness of physical intimacy as a tightrope dance between togetherness and separation.

David Roseztky, How to feel (still) (2011), We used to talk about love, Balnaves contemporary: photo media; AGNSW

More pervasive than the body, though, was the question of whether living in an age of rampantly proliferating ‘connecting’ technologies is actually making it any easier to express profound emotions like love. The resounding response offered here, implicitly rather than explicitly, was no. Painting a particularly alienating picture was David Rosetzky’s feature length video, How To Feel (2011), in which the artist collaborated with a choreographer and dramaturg in bringing together a group of actors in a warehouse setting where they explored, verbally and non-verbally, the challenges of authentic communication and social interaction. The dance sequences were perhaps more effective than the dialogue, which at times felt a bit contrived, in conveying the psychological barriers and defences that the individual pushes against in the daily performance of the self.

Contemporary art and love haven’t always shared an easy relationship. During the 20th century, in particular, its feminised associations positioned love as an unmodern theme. In her introductory essay, however, Bullock notes a recent paradigm shift as emotion, intimacy and affect become of increasing relevance to artists. This exhibition offered strong supporting evidence for such a shift. It might not come easily but love, it seems, is certainly something we will be talking more about.

Art Gallery of New South Wales: We used to talk about love, Balnaves contemporary: photomedia. Artists Polly Borland, Eliza Hutchison, Paul Knight, Angelica Mesiti, David Noonan, David Rosetzky, Tim Silver, Glenn Sloggett, Grant Stevens, Darren Sylvester, Justene Williams; AGNSW, Jan 31-April 21

Berberian Sound Studio, DVD plus CD

“What is this film about? If one accepts its hypno-haunto inclination, it’s a dual text. One, a dream-narrative about Peter (Toby Jones), a very British sound editor from the mid-70s who ends up producing sound effects for a very Italian mixer, Santini, tracking and mixing an unseen film, The Equestrian Complex, in the eponymous Italian post-production studio. The other, an audiophiliac celebration of the components, procedures and techniques for recording sound effects back then, with an ancillary appreciation of the Italian giallo subgenre of erotic thrillers produced in Italy since the 1960s” (Philip Brophy, RT113). This psychological thriller about a foley artist going mad is accompanied by a CD of the music from the era and sounds, including unnerving screams, from the film.
3 copies of DVD + CD courtesy of Madman Entertainment

Amiel Courtin-Wilson, Hail DVD

Danny, just out of gaol, struggles to find employment and to confirm love, but circumstances and his damaged psyche coalesce to set him on a path to brutal vengeance. Not a film for the faint-hearted. After seeing Hail at its premiere in the 2011 Adelaide Film Festival, I wrote, “Hail is a drama feature that deftly manages to fuse documentary immediacy (fluid hand-held camera work, raw dialogue) with carefully constructed scenography built around lyrical editing and richly textured and adroitly framed widescreen cinematography (Germain McMicking). It’s a big screen, immersive experience… Despite some uneven plot development, Hail is a remarkable film: Daniel Jones and Leanne Letch’s performances are excellent in their portrayal of a profoundly uneasy love, cinematography is superb and the script tightly focused, conveying both spontaneity and a sense of craft and purpose” (Keith Gallasch, RT102).
5 copies courtesy of Madman Entertainment

Searching for Sugarman, DVD

“In the late 1960s, a musician was discovered in a Detroit bar by two celebrated producers struck by his soulful melodies and prophetic lyrics. They recorded an album that they believed was going to secure his reputation as one of the greatest recording artists of his generation. The album bombed and the singer disappeared into obscurity amid rumours of a gruesome on-stage suicide. But a bootleg recording found its way into apartheid South Africa and, over the next two decades, it became a phenomenon. In this Oscar-winning documentary two South African fans set out to find out what really happened to their hero [leading] them to a story more extraordinary than any of the existing myths about the artist known as Rodriguez” (Madman Press release).
3 copies courtesy of Madman Entertainment

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BIENNALES, ART FESTIVALS, ART FAIRS AND ART MONTHS ARE CONSTANTLY PRESENTED TO US AS CONTEXTUAL FRAMEWORKS FOR CONTEMPORARY ART CONSUMPTION. THESE DIVERSE CULTURAL EVENTS, MOSTLY LARGE IN SCALE AND CONCEPTUALLY AMBITIOUS, SERVE TO CONGLOMERATE OUR ART-GOING EXPERIENCES.

Cementa 13, a new kid on the conglomerate block, took on-board this experimental premise with a critical tongue-in-cheek approach. We have all heard of Documenta and Monumenta and now, in Australia anyway, we have Cementa. And here lies the key. Unlike the others, Cementa is firmly located within a social and site-specific context that debunks the white-cube-washing of contemporary art.

Presented by Kandos Projects under the directorship of Ann Finnegan, Georgina Pollard and Alex Wisser, Cementa’s exhibiting artists were invited to undertake residencies in the town of Kandos to develop their works. This residency model resulted in a range of works that not only connected site-specifically, but also with the community and the town’s distinctive character. Works were presented over four days in disused community buildings, empty shopfronts, people’s backyards, on the streets and even the local golf club.

Kandos, over 200 km northwest of Sydney, was certainly not on my regional road-trip radar until I heard the chatter about Cementa at arts gatherings around Sydney. Spurred on by the word-of-mouth build-up as well as the large and impressive list of participating artists I committed to a three-day stay for Cementa.

memorials

Heading straight out for a walk around town led me to Connie Anthes’ work Untitled (98 vacancies) (2013). In late 2011, Kandos’ main industry—the local cement works and limestone quarry—was decommissioned, inevitably impacting on local economies and the community’s social fabric. In an attempt to memorialise this change, Anthes collected a range of discarded domestic objects from the local tip. Everyday useful items, seemingly no longer needed, were rescued and re-cast in cement. Placed outdoors on the ground of a vacant lot, the meticulous grid of familiar objects became less familiar, disguised by the sameness of their new grey concrete appearance. Like miniature monoliths in the grass, Anthes’ objects invited us to question the everyday effect of industrial change in a rural town.

Another work boldly entered the emotionally charged realm of memorialisation within a community context. In her video work Cane (2012), Fiona Davies asked Kandos locals to reflect on school punishment. With the video frame tightly focused on each person’s palm as they recounted punishment by cane in conversation with the artist, we see the hand open, not waiting for punishment but as a marker of memory. Placed beautifully in the Kandos Museum (an Instagrammers heaven), the work sits well amongst a bountiful archive of Kandos’ history. The responses from the participants to their canings range from ‘deserved’ to ‘resented’ and the work brings to light what is mostly amiss in such museological spaces—the personal voice informing the collection’s significance.

intercessions

Heard loud and clear as he shimmied down the streets of Kandos, artist David Capra continued his investigations into live intercessory performance. Dressed head-to-toe in white, Capra’s outfit intentionally evoked the holy as well as the ubiquitous white of exhibition walls. With an untrained operatic voice and moves that are certainly not trending in contemporary dance studios, Capra’s performance of speaking-in-tongues, banner-waving and dancing became a conduit for intuitive intercession. Unrehearsed and unable to be replicated, his absurd performances on the streets of Kandos were unique experiences of undefined communication and spirit.

During his Kandos residency, Capra was also asked by the Cementa directors to paint the Cementamobile—a handy white van used to cart artists and objects around town. Avoiding a well-trodden path to painterly over-statement, Capra denied the van canvas its loud voice. With sparse, minute motifs on the van—banners, hands shaking and his dachshund Teena—Capra’s van mural was an extremely restrained work. From a distance, the work was indistinguishable. Up close, the motifs came to life in charged patterns Memphis style, an aesthetic born of 1980s post-modernist rejection. Not so coincidentally, the van had a practical role to play in Capra’s performances around town.

serenades

From Hobart Hughes to Sarah Goffman, Cigdem Aydemir and Liam Benson, it was not hard to catch live performance in Kandos. Self-confessed contemporary art romantic, Liam Benson’s daily sunset and sunrise serenades were emotional homages to the Kandos landscape and community. During his residency, Benson developed an affection for the local Glossy Black Cockatoos. Indigenous to the area and with a haven nearby at the Wollomi National Park, the cockatoos are very visible Kandos locals.

Over the four days of Cementa, inspired by the cockatoo’s forlorn call, Benson continued his investigations into masculinity and Australian identity by performing songs of longing and love across Kandos. Singing alone and a capella, each performance’s location unannounced, Benson’s strong rock-infused vocals could be heard emerging from the uniquely Australian local landscape. A sunset performance outside the main pub lured art-goers and locals who followed Benson singing and walking against the backdrop of the dipping sun. As darkness encroached we listened to his rendition of Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain,” a song about love gone wrong; “Listen to the wind blow, down come the night, running in the shadows, damn your love, damn your lies.”

When not drawing a crowd, Benson sang to Kandos, to an escarpment, a lake, a lone shiftworker in hi-vis clothing, a sleepy campsite and, underlining the ephemerality of performance, to the Glossy Black Cockatoos.

burn-outs

Performances of a different kind were the subject of Chapel of Rubber (2013) by Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski. Poetically placed in the now disused chapel at the Kandos Presbytery, the work documented a significant date on the local calendar, the annual Kandos Street Machine and Hot Rod Show. Incongruous with the quiet beauty of the town, this popular but also controversial event is characterised by excessive noise, burn-outs and fluoro cars.

Starrs and Cmielewski’s screen-based work, framed by the intimate architecture of the small chapel, directed our eyes not to the cars, but to the ground—to the spinning tyres and burning rubber. Shot at low-level and in slow-mo, the creeping movement of rising smoke travelled across the screen, at times revealing heavy deposits of burnt rubber on the ground, layered markings of excess, of thrill and of the town’s people and visitors letting go a little. In a town undergoing post-industrial transformation, Chapel of Rubber redefined the strongly symbolic chapel space, maintaining its sense of worship and reverence by channelling hedonistic thrill-seeking action.

There is no doubt there was a lot to conceptually consume at Cementa. At the same time, the incidental social atmosphere—constantly bumping into Sydney-siders and locals while walking along the main drag or grabbing a coffee at the Railway café—meant that Cementa was enjoyably easy to consume. As a conglomerate art experience, the event inhabited the nooks and crannies of Kandos, injecting contextual soul into contemporary art and making it part of the everyday in a rural town. Here’s hoping Cementa 2015 comes around quickly, so we can all get on-board the contemporary art road trip to Kandos.

Cementa 13, directors Ann Finnegan, Georgina Pollard, Alex Wisser; Kandos NSW, Feb 1-4, for participating artists and some great documentation see cementa13.com/

There’s a lot of epic art out there: a metropolis of music, rooms filled with bodies, shopping malls sprouting monuments, big pictures, big game and shifting histories. We suggest you keep notes.

metropolis new music festival, melbourne

Melbourne’s Metropolis Festival has expanded its metaphorical city limits this year with some very adventurous programming. For those firmly in the contemporary classical corner there’s visiting UK composer, pianist and conductor Thomas Adès. There are also concerts featuring DJ/composer Matthew Herbert (UK) and electronic ambient composer Mira Calix (UK). Australia’s Ensemble Offspring, Speak Percussion and Syzygy will perform as well as The Wild (featuring Erik Griswold), presenting a curious re-imagining of The Cure’s “Pornography.”
Metropolis New Music Festival, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra & Melbourne Recital Centre, April 8-20; http://www.metropolisfestival.com.au/

13 rooms, kaldor art projects #27

Surely no-one needs to be told, but maybe the fact that it’s only on for 11 days hasn’t quite hit home. This high-art extravaganza will present intimate performance based work—“living sculpture” (press release)—by leading international artists such as Marina Abramovic (see RT113), Joan Jonas, Xavier Le Roy, Tino Seghal and Damien Hirst. The 13th chamber will feature Brisbane-based emerging artist duo Clark Beaumont in the only new work in the event.
Kaldor Art Projects #27: 13 Rooms, curators Hans Ulrich Obrist, (Serpentine Gallery, UK), Klaus Biesenbach (MoMA PS1, US), Pier 2/3 Walsh Bay, April 11-21; http://kaldorartprojects.org.au/13rooms/index.html

trio a/dance is hard to see, sara wookey

Trio A is a seminal work choreographed by Yvonne Rainer in 1966 that informed a new approach to contemporary dance. US-based dancer Sara Wookey has worked extensively with Rainer and is one of a handful of people allowed to ‘transmit’ this choreography to other dancers. Wookey will be running workshops in Perth and Sydney teaching Trio A, as well as presenting a performance lecture about Rainer and her work.
PICA: lecture April 6; http://www.pica.org.au; Performance Space/UNSW Io Myers: workshop April 9-12, lecture April 13, Io Myers Studio; http://www.performancespace.com.au (The project is initiated by Hannah Mathews with thanks to Performa.)

mca: ultimate vision, monuments to us; workout

Lara Thoms (see RT Studio) has been hanging out in the mall in Hurstville for the last few months, asking local youth about their favourite things—which colour, word, time, music? After the votes have been counted Thoms will create a series of celebratory monuments, some physical, some performative, in and around the Westfield complex.
MCA/C3West: Ultimate vision, Monuments to us, Lara Thoms, Westfield Hurstville, April 5-10, http://www.mca.com.au

Also at the MCA is Workout. Over one week seven artists will be given a day to create a performance exploring “workout as both a strenuous exercise routine and a test of performance capability” as well as the ”creative act of ‘working out ideas’” (press release). Featuring David Capra, Domenico de Clario, Brian Fuata, Sarah Goffman, Agatha Gothe-Snape with Susan Gibb, The Motel Sisters (Liam Benson and Naomi Oliver) and Jodie Whalen.
Workout, curator Anna Davis, Museum of Contemporary Art, April 22-28; http://www.mca.com.au

wang gongxin, maap space

Have you noticed a lot of pigment hurling in advertisements and video clips of late (eg Pink’s “Try”)? As usual mainstream media merchants are sucking out ideas from contemporary art. The use of pigment is most notable in the works of Anish Kapoor (showing at the MCA until recently) but also in Chinese video art pioneer Wang Gongxin’s five-channel video piece Basic Colour (2010). “[T]he slow accumulation of coloured pigment on each image is a kind of performance-based painting” (press release). This work is showing at MAAP Space along with Maybe Have Wind which explores manipulations of time and speed in the video format.
Wang Gongxin, MAAP Space, Brisbane, til April 26; http://www.maap.org.au/

the big picture, stills gallery

Penelope Umbrico, 541795 Suns from Sunsets from Flickr (Partial) 1/26/06, (2006-ongoing), detail of 2000 4″ x 6″ machine c-prints

Next up at Stills Gallery is an exhibition that asks “If a picture speaks a thousand words, what can a thousand pictures reveal?” (press release). The Big Picture will feature, photographic, video and installation work by Daniel Connell, Drew Flaherty, Gemma Messih, Patrick Pound, Penelope Umbrico (USA) and Tim Webster exploring how the plethora of visual imagery that is now being generated and consumed is affecting our sense of the sublime.
The Big Picture, Stills Gallery, Sydney, April 17-May 18; http://www.stillsgallery.com.au/

big game hunting, fiona hall, heide

Fiona Hall: (l-r) Cervus elaphus/red deer Europe, North America 2012, IUCN threat status: least concern; Pan troglodytes/chimpanzee, Equatorial Africa 2012, IUCN threat status: Ailuropoda melanoleuca/giant panda, China 2012, IUCN threat status: critical

Also looking at big ideas is Fiona Hall’s exhibition at Heide in regional Victoria. The centrepiece is Hall’s recent work for Documenta (13), Fall Prey, in which she uses military camouflage material and found objects to create curious hunting trophies of endangered animals.
Big Game Hunting, Fiona Hall, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Vic, till July 21; http://www.heide.com.au

the agony the ecstasy and i

In this post-postmodern world all works of art talk to and about each other and this is clearly the case in dancer Tarryn Runkel and actor Lauren Hopwood’s The Agony, the ecstasy and i, a work that engages with the issues raised by Mike Daisey’s similarly titled solo show about Steve Jobs in which his representation of fiction and reality became a bit too blurry for some.
The Agony, the ecstasy and i, director Cara Philips, The Blue Room, Perth, April 16-May 4, http://blueroom.org.au/seasons/seasonone2013/

oi you!, urban art festival adelaide street art festival

the past is a foreign country, the paper cut collective and trantrum

Paper Cut Collective is a new performance collective in Newcastle NSW. With the help of local theatre for young people Tantrum, they will be presenting their first show, The Past is a Foreign Country. It’s in the verbatim theatre mode and explores how retelling the past inevitably reshapes it.
The Past is a Foreign Country, Paper Cut Collective & Tantrum, Civic Theatre, Newcastle, April 10-13; http://www.tantrumtheatre.org.au/season-2013/the-past/

still in the loop

exist conference, brisbane

The inaugural exist conference will take place June 26-27 at the Queensland College of Art. Co-directors Rebecca Clunn and Nicola Morton are calling for proposals for papers and presentations which address the theme of Performance, the Body and Time in the 21st century. Topics could include mediatised and digital performance, durational practice, globalisation and gender in mass-media culture and more.
Abstracts are due April 8, www.existenceperformanceart.wordpress.com

next wave 2014

The theme of 2014 Next Wave Festival is New Grand Narratives and applications to participate are now open. Eight to 10 new works will receive artistic and production assistance and “brokerage into funding contexts” (press release) for their premieres at the festival in Melbourne in May 2014. The focus is on emerging artists and there are specific partnerships: Aphids will support a regional artist and John Butler’s The Seed will support a large scale work in public space.
Applications close April 17; http://nextwave.org.au/applications/

cultivate, force majeure

Cultivate is a dance theatre lab presented in association with Performance Space and Carriageworks. The 2014 lab is led by Force Majeure director Kate Champion and Associate Director Byron Perry and will take place from July 15-August 2. Applications are now invited from choreographers, directors, dancers and physical performers/actors who might wish to participate.
Deadline April 30; http://forcemajeure.com.au/creative-professional-development/cultivate/

abr voiceless fellowship

The Australian Book Review is seeking expressions of interest for a fellowship sponsored by the animal protection organisation Voiceless. The successful applicant will be commissioned to write a 7,000-8,000 word article on animal protection issues for $5,000. For the fiction writers the Elizabeth Jolly Short Story prize is also open for entries offering a $5,000 prize.
Applications for both close May 31, https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/programs/abr-patrons-fellowship

nka arts residencies, ghana

The Nka Foundation is based in Ghana and focuses on “human capital development through use of the arts” (website) by running a range of workshops, laboratories and residencies. Currently Nka is accepting applications for residencies of one to nine months in their artist village at Abetenim in the Ejisu-Juaben district, Ashanti region of Ghana. Artists working in theatre, film, music, visual arts and multidisciplinary are eligible.
E-mail to info@nkafoundation.org; http://www.nkafoundation.org

leisa shelton workshop, judith wright centre

Leisa Shelton, Irony is Not Enough: Essay on My Life as Catherine Deneuve, Fragment31

Performance maker Leisa Shelton will be running a one-day workshop in Responsive Performance Practice for Brisbane-based practitioners (see RT101). The technique draws on “actor training developed by Etienne Decroux, the rehearsal processes of Pina Bausch via Meryl Tankard, and Autonomous Actor training as developed by Lindy Davies alongside a continuing dialogue with Eastern principles of theatre practice” (website).
Judith Wright Centre, $60 (capacity is limited), April 20, 10am – 4pm; http://judithwrightcentre.com/event/leisa_shelton_workshop

still in the loop

selected australia council grant deadlines

DOWN AT THE ROCKS PRECINCT THE CULTURAL SCHEMERS AT THE SYDNEY HARBOUR FORESHORE AUTHORITY ARE NOT AFRAID TO DREAM BIG.

In 2009 they presented Fire Water by Michael Cohen and Joey Ruigrok van der Werven—a ship moored in the harbour that caught alight and sank every night for the duration of its performance season (see RT90). So maybe it’s not at all surprising that the same team have now decided to build a four-storey windmill!

The Rocks Windmill is again the brainchild of van der Werven, this time working with interdisciplinary artist Paul Gazzola. The structure will actually operate as a functioning mill with visitors invited to collect a bag of wheat and grind their own flour. The structure pays homage to the first theatre of the colony, set up by former convict Robert Sidaway, who allowed audience members to pay for entry with flour.

The windmill with also be a creative hub for a range of activities exploring both local history and contemporary issues. Windmill Live will see the structure become home to a variety of performance events including the Bell Shakespeare Company performing excerpts from Henry IV (the first work performed in the colony); a creative development showing by My Darling Patricia; an evening of Rocks themed stories by a Newtown writers group, Penguin Plays Rough; film screenings and secret music events.

Tiffany Holmes, Dark Sky, ElectriCITY Sparks Community Eco-Viz , Carbon Arts And Media Lab Melbourne

Inside these Walls is the exhibition program. On one floor will be ElectriCITY Sparks Community Eco-Viz Exhibition which will display “world-leading projects and proposals for electricity visualisation in public space” (website), produced by Carbon Arts and Media Lab Melbourne. A surround sound installation by radio producer Jane Ulman will develop over time, incorporating sounds from all the activities within the building. The Tilting at Windmills project by Tessa Zettel and Jennifer Hamilton will explore our relationship, real and fictional, with weather. A series of talks is bundled under the Windmill Whispers program while Grist to the Mill offers a range of hands-on activities including naturalist Diego Bonetto’s popular Foraging the City weed workshops.

Compared with the razzmatazz of Vivid and the touristic vibe of the area, the Rocks Windmill Project is particularly impressive as its programming focuses on grass roots ideas and issues with an emphasis on participatory engagement between artists, audiences and the local residential community.

The last windmill to dominate the Sydney skyline was demolished in 1878. Although temporary, it seems the 2013 windmill will be an important addition to both the physical and cultural landscape of Sydney, connecting its past with its future.

This music CD is accompanied by a booklet of poems, the music and the poetry each carrying equal weight in the resulting artistic product. Developed collaboratively over some years, the music is a collection of compositions that were either written in response to certain poems or to which poets responded with poems. The compositions are by Zephyr members, and some of Australia’s most prominent poets are featured, as well as Mexican-American author Gary Soto (http://www.garysoto.com/). The CD demonstrates how music and poetry can stimulate the creation of the other.

The CD opens with Zephyr violinist Belinda Gehlert’s serene “Ewens Ponds,” which was the inspiration behind Adelaide poet and writer Rob Walker’s poem “Reflecting.” Walker’s brief work suggests both senses of the word ‘reflect’—the mirror image and the thoughtful response. Beginning wistfully, the music develops a stepping rhythm based on repeated statements and is embellished in its voicing and sonority as it progresses. The music triggers a quietly reflective, as in thoughtful, state of mind, finally circling back to the opening theme.

The anthology also includes Walker’s poem “Taisho Pond and Mt Takedake, Japanese Alps,” describing a volcano reflected in a nearby pond whose surface is so still the reflection appears more real than the reality, a comment on human subjectivity. But the pond is silting up—beauty is transient.

The CD title, A Rain from the Shadows, is a line from Australia-based Iraqi journalist and teacher Yahia Al-Samawy’s beautiful poem “Four Loaves from the Heart’s Oven,” whose third stanza is thus:

3.
I built in my imagination
A minaret
And a playground with swings
And I embroidered the deserts
With fountains that played in orange groves
And when I fell asleep at the window of my prayers
I saw my tent was an orchard
And I a cloud that poured down onto the wild wastes
A rain from the shadows

Al-Samawy’s collaboration with Zephyr elicited two compositions by Zephyr cellist Hilary Kleinig. Kleinig’s music, as with much of that on the CD, opens with a simple statement that builds in complexity through restatement, elaborate voicing and variations. Typically, Zephyr compositions are carefully measured, texturally lush and firmly tonal. Though accessible, they do not lack charm or appeal, the engaging tunes lingering in the mind. Zephyr has established its own unique and special genre of string quartet music.

Assembled through an interactive process rather than around a connecting theme, this diverse anthology comprises poetry of depth and power. Prize-winning poet and children’s author Gary Soto’s “The Space” inspired Kleinig’s work of the same name, which is slow, restrained and poignant. Prolific Australian playwright Finegan Kruckemeyer was prompted to write “Because My Dreams” on hearing violinist Emily Tulloch’s “Skyroads” and Nicki Bloom wrote “Draggers” in response to Tulloch’s “Air,” which includes whistling. The steady rhythm of Belinda Gehlert’s “Dirt” is taken up in the ABC’s Poetica presenter Mike Ladd’s haunting evocation of a long distance road trip on the Plenty Highway in Central Australia, a “battered, holy ground” of immense cultural significance (Dirt, Mike Ladd). And Gehlert’s “Shearwaters,” inspired by another Rob Walker poem, evokes birds slowly swooping at sunset, momentarily hinting at Vaughan Williams’ “Lark Ascending.” The music that is inspired by the poems is not intended to be programmatic. The poetry and music complement each other, rather than trying to meld. Listener-readers can approach the material as they wish.

The recording is beautifully mixed and produced. I was at CD launch at the Wheatsheaf Hotel, Adelaide, one of Zephyr’s regular venues. Strings usually don’t sound as good amplified through a PA, especially on a hot night with the air-conditioning running, but the large audience was enchanted. Barbara Coddington’s design for the CD cover is itself an artwork, suggesting a well-worn book, painted over and full of personal history, adding another dimension to the CD’s concept.

Zephyr has always been concerned with accessibility to wider audiences and theirs typically range beyond the traditional classical music audience. Renowned for its exploratory collaborations, Zephyr often works with visual artists and writers as well as musicians and composers in all genres and this CD represents a significant artistic development for the ensemble.

Excerpt from Yahia Al-Samawy’s “Four Loaves from the Heart’s Oven” reproduced with permission of Zephyr Quartet.

giveaway

We have 3 copies of A Rain from the Shadows to give away courtesy of Zephyr Quartet.
Email onlinegiveaways@realtimearts.net with your name, address and a rain from the shadows in the subject line.

THE CITATION OF SO-CALLED PEDESTRIAN MOVEMENT IN POSTMODERN DANCE HAS BEEN INTERPRETED IN MANY WAYS, ONE OF WHICH SEES THE USE OF THE QUOTIDIAN IN DANCE AS AN ATTEMPT TO DECONSTRUCT NOTIONS OF VIRTUOSITY AND SPECTACLE.

WeTube LIVE offers another way to rethink the values of dance performance. Where Steve Paxton’s Satisfying Lover (1967) offered a series of ordinary bodies walking, standing and sitting, WeTube LIVE opens up another kind of space, framed in the context of the electronic everyday.

The Great Hall of Victoria’s National Gallery is vast, its Leonard French ceiling a coloured relief from vast walls of grey brick. The room is full of young people, each consumed by a particular activity performed and contained within white squares. The difference between them is marked but they are united through a sense of commitment to their task. The diversity of these performative tasks exists within a score: to source the performance material from YouTube.

The audience flows around the squares, a mass promenade, pausing then moving on at a uniform pace. At a certain point, the performers melt away and line up along the length of the wall. We are now the choreography. They watch us, then the cellular activity begins again and the promenade resumes.

Some performers have selected dance sequences or hip hop, another copied a Beyoncé routine, another executed a makeup ritual. Several performances contained an element of critique, whether through displacement, parody or exaggeration. One young woman performed a charming mittel European folk dance—in costume—another confined himself to a cardboard box.

What struck me was the confidence of the group, many of whom are teenagers or young adults, inviting being seen very close up. The close proximity of the viewing experience engenders a certain dialogue between the watcher and performer. I feel that I am meeting these people, encountering something about them which is at the same time mediated.

A great deal of cultural theory suggests that identity comes from outside the self but is solidified through what the body does in a performative sense. In general, this is thought to be an unconscious process. We think and feel our identity as internal and intimate, not the product of social forces. WeTubeLIVE differs on this point, or at least troubles the distinction between outer and inner inasmuch as the range of choices is very much part of popular culture but, once made, the choice becomes a mode of enactive agency.

Viewed through the lens of community dance, WeTubeLIVE is a mode of group participation, individual expression and serial observation. Its form of community is two-fold, formed between those present in the Great Hall but also the virtual community of YouTube watchers. Normally we send each other links. In this instance, the links are a daisy chain of live actions.

The affective impact of WeTubeLIVE was a positive feeling about these young people and their choices. This is different (and complementary) to the darker thoughts explored in many of the Dance Massive pieces, achieved through foregrounding agency and participation rather than critique through representation. In that sense, WeTubeLIVE is a utopian gesture, a mode of agency ‘Gangnam-style.’

Dance Massive: WeTubeLIVE, concept, direction Ben Speth, project manager Bec Reid, dance facilitator Adam Wheeler; The Great Hall, National Gallery of Victroria, March 24

IT’S ALREADY BEEN NOTED IN SEVERAL OF OUR REVIEWS THAT MANY OF THE SOUNDTRACKS FOR SHOWS IN DANCE MASSIVE HAVE THEMSELVES BEEN MASSIVE. ALONG WITH SMOKE, STROBING LIGHTS AND NUDITY, SEVERAL SHOWS HAVE ALSO FOREWARNED THEIR AUDIENCE OF “LOUD MUSIC.”

These days the ubiquity of digital audio processing software makes it relatively quick and easy for the solo composer to create epic, symphonic pieces and dance has become the seeding ground for a kind of new electronic baroque. Often these soundtracks are masterful, but after seeing so many works in quick succession it is refreshing to experience collaborations between choreographers and composers or sound artists that attempt more subtle, conceptual and nuanced modes. An interesting anomaly in Dance Massive 2013 was the strange flashback to the days when composers were too expensive and choreographers cobbled together pre-made commercial tracks for their design. And why not—just to mix things up a little?

nostalgia for the signified

In Conversation Piece (which I saw in Sydney, not in its Dance Massive version) Lucy Guerin’s inclusion of songs such as Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’ “Mercy Seat” performed by Johnny Cash or The Cure’s “A Forest,” seems pragmatic and devoid of irony. They are used to accompany the buoyant dances that curiously rupture the otherwise text-driven work and are clearly a “cheat”—they get us to where we need to go emotionally and atmospherically via their well established associations. However Guerin keeps things edgy, utilising the considerable skills of Robin Fox as sound designer to shift Conversation Piece towards darker places. The true complexity of the sound design is in the seamless manipulation of the iPhone technology as a multipurpose tool (as Apple has always wanted us to believe). The addition of the Garage Band rendition of Kylie Minogue’s “Come Into My World” (composed by Cathy Dennis and Robert Davis) is a stroke of quirky brilliance and serves to thematically integrate the idea of inner and outer worlds, personal and public soundtracks.

In Monster Body, Atlanta Eke uses the most mainstream of commercial tracks, subverting them through that old postmodern strategy of juxtaposition. Britney Spears pipes “I’m not a girl, not yet a woman” while a naked Eke releases an arc of urine onto the floor. To Beyonce’s “Run the World (Girls)” Eke is joined by six other naked women of various body shapes to crump, jiggle and wobble very precisely through the grotesqueries of sexualised R&B dancing. Even the use of Ligeti (via Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey) hints at irony—the female body as cosmic unknown. In an over extended sequence, Eke parades in a body suit full of water balloons at the same time subjecting us to a relentless loop of revving motorbike engine—machismo at its sonic finest. In Monster Body, the music and sonic material hold the meaning in relation to which Eke’s body ventures definition.

haunted weather

Discussing his approach to musical structure, John Cage said he sought to move “away from an object having parts into what you might call weather” (Composition in Retrospect, 1993). Antony Hamilton’s sound compilation for Black Projects 1—a series of tracks by European masters of electronic glitchy ambient Robert Henke, Mika Vainio and Fennesz—perfectly exemplifies this idea. This is not just because the soundscape consists of rolling waves of digital thunder and electronic static but rather that the music creates a space for the dancers (Melanie Lane and Hamilton) to simply inhabit. It is soundscape as landscape, not soundtrack, and it works well, allowing us to be drawn into the post-apocalyptic world while leaving space for the dancers’ actions to further shape and define it.

In Black Projects 2, however, the score, composed by Alisdair Macindoe (also a very fine dancer in Stephanie Lake and Lucy Guerin’s works), offers the complete opposite. Here the dancers are dictated to by the pulsing beats, as a six-headed creature shape-shifts and osmoses leading to a final holy cosmic epiphany. While well-produced and cinematic, the soundtrack offers little mystery, letting the dancers and us know where we are up to at all times.

big, bigger, biggest

Experienced on the first night of Dance Massive, Macindoe’s score indicated a trend in the many scores that followed. Perhaps paralleling the “loudness war” in commercial music production, it seems that many of the choreographers and their sound collaborators feel the need to make things bigger—more volume, more layers, more crescendos, more speakers. Siding with the critics of the loudness war, I wonder if something is lost in the process. I don’t just mean hearing (though that’s sometimes a possibility) nor even the crest or trough of dramatic range, but is it possible that these epic soundtracks have the effect of diminishing the bodily presence? Buffeted and propelled as it is by sonic forces, is the body losing its own agency, or space to be seen and read without the prompting of sonic signifiers? (Or have I been reading too much Yvonne Rainer?)

The soundtrack for Jo Lloyd’s Future Perfect by Duane Morrison feels close to subsuming the dancers and while transcendence is on the agenda, it feels a little more bullying than uplifting. Flavoured by 1980s synthesiser sounds the creators set themselves a difficult task. Starting at such a high sonic point, there’s little room for escalation either energetically or volume-wise throughout the piece.

Sandra Parker’s The Recording is an exploration of the disjunction between the body, gesture and mediatised performance, so allowing Steve Heather’s soundtrack to be bigger than the dancing is clearly a conscious choice. Composed from recordings of some of Australia’s and Europe’s leading improvising musicians, who are better known for their textural, pointillist sonorities, Heather’s score is surprisingly luscious and harmonically driven, becoming increasingly more romantic, even approaching the parodic with its Latino-lament conclusion. Does it mean that Parker succeeded in her exploration if I found the music more engaging than the physical performance?

Of course sometimes the hyperbolic soundtrack approach is perfectly apt as in Jethro Woodward’s score for Skeleton by Larissa McGowan. The work is about forces acting upon the body—both physical and cultural—and Woodward’s super energetic, highly fragmented score of smashing glass and sudden impacts mixed with computer game bleeps and cinematic howls, grunts and screams is masterfully constructed. He even allows for a quieter lyricism near the end, interestingly not paralleled by the dance which remains muscular, taut and edgy. The score is nerve janglingly relentless, yet utterly appropriate for the work.

Tara Soh, James Pham, Lauren Langlois, Leif Helland, Niharika Senapati, Alya Manzart, 247 Days, Chunky Move

Chunky Move’s 247 Days choreographed by Anouk van Dijk, a work about the highs and lows of youthful existence, is well served by the sound design by Marcel Wierckx (Canada/Netherlands). Gradually accruing detail from the almost imperceptible crackle of a vinyl record, underpinned by sustained chords, he works in live vocal elements from the miked-up dancers. Half-gasps, fragments of melody and shards of words are grabbed and effected, a bit of reverb here, digital stutter there, creating the sense of an ‘internal voice.’ The piece culminates in a choral epiphany, voices delayed, pitch-shifted and overlapped to form a massive chorus, but somehow it just doesn’t quite reach the peak to which it aspires, or perhaps it does so too rapidly. While much of the spoken text feels naïve, the more abstracted vocal play provides a cohesion to both the soundtrack and the work overall.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a vast soundtrack but perhaps what is beginning to perplex me is that the “bigger and louder is better” approach is in danger of becoming the default setting for contemporary dance, not only in the mainstream but also the independent sector. (Is this the place to mention that, one female “sound theorist” aside, all the composer/sound designers in Dance Massive were male?) While there’s no doubt that it is effective/affective, is this approach conceptually engaging?

dancing dialogues

For those seeking a deeper investigation into the relationship of sound and the moving body several of the smaller scale works offered the most satisfaction. Robin Fox’s sound for Stephanie Lake’s Dual is definitely of the epic loud variety; however both dance and music explore a clear structural principle—Part 1 = A, Part 2 = B, Part 3 = A+B. The correlation between action and sound develops a complexity due to the absence or rather the implied future presence of the other half of the dance and music. For example, in a section of her solo Sara Black lies face down on the floor slowly and gracefully extending her limbs while her soundtrack berates her with seemingly inappropriate harsh stabs. When the duo is complete, we see that the soundtrack at this point more clearly reflects Macindoe’s actions rather than Black’s reaction as he pulls and prods her. It’s a simple conceit but offers a fascinating depth in its execution.

Physical Fractals also worked with bare-boned simplicity, effectively marshalled by sound designer Daniel Arnot. Natalie Abbott and Sara Aitken’s rhythmic repetitions make sounds in the space which are captured by eight microphones, placed with heads hard up against the floorboards. The predominant sounds are footfalls and breaths, delayed to make rhythms which radiate out from the initial action. Sometimes the sounds of the actions are captured and continue after the bodies have ceased to move, playing with our perceptions and expectations. At one point sound becomes the dominant character of the piece as the dancers swing live microphones like lassoes just above the audience producing a ferocious roar which in some deft looping trick continues long after the dancers are still again. What is particularly refreshing is how raw and unaestheticised the sounds themselves are, the only decoration found in the beats made by delay or the ever-present hum of sound and light leads interfering with each other. While this use of action to create the sound score is not new, it’s the purity and thoroughness of this exploration, the conceptual rigour in both dance and sound design that makes this work impressive.

Tim Darbyshire’s More or Less Concrete works with a similar premise to Physical Fractals but pushes it to its ultimate conclusion. The three dancers are closely miked, every movement, mumble, rustle, breath heightened for the audience via the headphones they are invited to wear. Here sound is not so much a by-product of movement but rather the movement seems decided by the sounds they will produce. The gentle “shhhhh” of bodies against the floor, the “phhhhhhh” of bodies rubbing against each other in polyester overalls, the slap of hands hitting the floor all call for the body to form odd shapes and perform actions that are the dance itself. Only occasionally is an effect added, some reverb or ring modulation to expand an action further into the space. Where Physical Fractals achieves a symbiosis of sound and movement, More or Less Concrete creates a complete synthesis.

Finally on matters of integrated sound and action, Ashley Dyer’s Life Support (made with a long list of collaborators including Sam Pettigrew on ‘sound and objects’) also deserves a mention not so much for its integration of body and sound but rather as an inhabited sound and light installation. Above an ominous and insistent hum the smoke machines used to fill the increasingly claustrophobic space provide a utilitarian and deeply disturbing soundtrack. The sonic highlight is an all-too brief performance by a smoke ring orchestra—upturned speaker cones with buckets attached emit rough farty sounds, the vibrations sufficient to puff air for the creation of smoke rings. I would like to see/hear a whole concert of that!

festival compression

Of course it’s a little unnatural to experience so many works in such a short amount of time and it can lead to unfair comparisons, but it does provide a contour map of ways in which dance and music are developing. Compared with works in Dance Massive 2011 the grand cinematic soundtrack remains a constant, but this year we see the re-introduction of the mix-tape mentality and also a shift from the live instrumentalist to the performing audio engineer which allows for in-depth explorations into concrete, less decorative sounds in space. In these latter works we see not only a rigorous investigation into the relationship of sound and the performative body, but also an extension, particularly for a more mainstream audience, of the very definitions of music. Sam Pettigrew (sound and smoke-ring master in Ashley Dyer’s Life Support) suggested to me that during festivals like this there’s a great opportunity to put on an über-gig, bringing the purely audio work of these innovative composers and sound artists to a whole new audience. One for Dance Massive 2015?

Due to various constraints several shows in Dance Massive were not able to be addressed here: Marrugeku’s Gudirr Gudirr, Lee Serle’s P.O.V., Matthew Day’s Intermission, Hannah Mathew’s Action/Response, and Dance Exchange’s dance for the time being – Southern Exposure.

IN A MERE SEVERAL DECADES, THE CHOREOGRAPHER HAS EVOLVED INTO THE DIRECTOR-CHOREOGRAPHER, COLLABORATING WITH COMPUTER SPECIALISTS, TECHNICIANS, VIDEO AND SOUND ARTISTS, THEORISTS AND UNUSUAL SPECIALISTS LIKE ROBOTICISTS. OFTEN THEY SHARE THE MAKING WITH THEIR DANCERS—WHO HAVE, IN PARALLEL, EVOLVED INTO EXPONENTS OF STYLES OF BEING, DANCING, ACTING, SPEAKING AND SINGING AS REQUIRED.

These developments haven’t been sudden nor have they been solely of a kind felt by dance. The emergence of contemporary performance of the 1970s and 80s signalled the fruitful bringing together of hitherto largely discrete forms. Here, movement played a significant role, texts were projected or intoned, conventional playwriting eschewed, design was no longer background or setting but a creation in itself, sound was no longer played in the intervals between words, and the application of new technologies could find room to move. Dance, more than theatre ever has, embodied or took on this opening out and became a leader in exploring the potential of digital technologies in the late 90s into the 2000s.

This process of hybridisation is still playing out, not so much creating new forms as mutating existing ones: a dance work is still a dance work but the manner of its framing and the ways in which it engages its audiences are changing, offering experiential intensity. We can still witness the movement of Russell Dumas’ dancers as simply dance in and of itself, without a sound score or elaborate costuming and lighting. Some works indicate a focus on the dancer’s movements with aural close-ups, amplifying the sounds made by the breathing, stressed body or its impact on surfaces. These and other works play with our senses and heighten the feeling of immersive proximity.

The programming of Dance Massive 2013, a small but telling slice of Australian dance, has revealed that contemporary dance is as engaged as ever with the nature of the theatrical experience, pushing further and further into immersion, perceptual play and the production as performative installation.

installed

Dance Massive 2013 included a significant number of productions that could be regarded in some senses as much dance installations as they were timed performances. Antony Hamilton’s Black Project 1, Tim Darbyshire’s More or Less Concrete, Ashley Dyer’s Life Support, Anouk van Dijk’s 247 Days, Natalie Abbott’s Physical Fractals, Stephanie Lake’s Dual and Lee Serle’s P.O.V. each comprised design/technology activated/inhabited by performers and sometimes audiences.

Sounds actual, amplified and treated made by dancers in More or Less Concrete and Physical Fractals filled the aural space about us, as did sounds of popping smoke-ring machines in Life Support with increasing intensity as smoke filled a diminishing auditorium. In More or Less Concrete the miked breathing, coughing, gasping and thumping of performers’ bodies mutated from the real into surreal soundscapes for its headphoned audience. In Physical Fractals, framed with light, four pairs of microphones angled close to the floor set the physical and aural parameters of the dance with the speed, beat and bounce of the taut choreography. Two microphones are swung over our heads mid-show, making us, and the very air around us, part of an installation. In Dual the rectangle on which the dance unfolds is just one plane of an aural space in which sounds sweep by and at us, and we hear three variations of the score, making the space at once aurally familiar and strange (in its permutations).

In P.O.V. the audience is invited to sit in a grid of swivel stools, such that the dancers course down rows and cross intersections and the viewers can turn to follow them. Those of us outside the frame watch the dance of audience movement and admire the precision of the speeding and lunging dancers, their peripheral vision making themselves and the audience safe in the narrow aisles. This dance installation can be experienced from inside or out. Ben Speth’s WeTube LIVE inverts the P.O.V. grid: here it’s the performers in fixed rows with the audience roaming among them, but working on the same principle of playing with perspective and subjective point of view.

Life Support proved to be more installation than movement work. The rings, waves and falls of smoke do the dancing while a performer executing a set of simple, quite abstract gestures (as if refusing to make thematic comment) plays potential sacrificial victim to an audience acting as possible executioner à la the infamous Milgram Experiment (we can vote to release the performer from a box filled with smoke; or not). In the program, the onstage operators of the smoke machines are credited as performers: Life Support is a machine in which we are trapped as a wall closes in and smoke pours over us. We are given oxygen cannisters should we feel short of breath. Although Life Support is ultimately unthreatening, there are moments when the otherwise complicit imagination unwillingly conjures darker visions of fires, gas chambers, dust storms and other asphyxiators.

Black Project 1 is not simply danced, it is installation-cum-dance. It has the powerful appeal of experiencing visual art in the making as two strange graffiti-ists strip a wall to make large scale patterns of white against sombre shades of black and the sheen of the makers’ charcoal skins.

sensed

The pleasure of dance resides in the privilege of watching skilled movers who are exemplars of capacities flexible, anti-gravitational and richly suggestive. The dancing body is more often than not framed with set, costume, light and sound, focusing and amplifying our sense of the movement, expressly foregrounding it. However more and more works play with the senses of the audience, expanding perspectives on dance in which the dancer is integrated into the design by means lo-tech and high (think of Gideon Obarzanek’s Mortal Engine, among many others). In Black Project 1 the painterly merging of bodies and environment and the tonal gradings with which it is executed are visually engrossing.

The design for 247 Days is a curved wall of mirrors that reflects, multiplies and even disappears the dancers. The wall opens to form doors and more reflections, providing sensory pleasures and thematic complexity. No mere background, this vast mirror is integrated with the dancing and is operated by the performers.

Choreographers happily, and meaningfully, played with our perceptions in this Dance Massive. In extreme cases our visual field was limited by low lighting levels such that we often had to adjust to make sense of what we were seeing. Correlative or contrasting movement is as important as light in these works: the alternation of stillness and rapid movement in Black Project 1; the sheer slowness and odd body shapings in More or Less Concrete; the brush strokes of movement in moments of ultra-low light in Physical Fractals.

Matthew Day’s Intermission offers a very special kind of immersion, our attention locked in synch with the waves of vibration that consume the dancer’s body while our ears buzz and hum with the broad counterpoint provided by James Brown’s score. Our appreciation of Day’s movement is an extension of what we feel for any dancer who engages us, but the minimalist repetition and variation make for a distinctively intense experience.

hybridised

Lucy Guerin Inc and Belvoir’s Conversation Piece, Marrugeku’s Gudirr Gudirr, and Atlanta Eke’s Monster Body synthesise forms of performance. Guerin brings together three dancers, three actors, improvisation, choreography and sound technology to create an aesthetically dense account of how we deploy language as power. In Guddir, Gudirr, a high point in Dance Massive, Dalisa Pigram is at once dancer, actor and physical theatre performer and always herself, addressing us directly, a powerful presence and superb artist in the only work in this dance event that deals with actual lives, personally and politically (although Atlanta Eke’s Monster Body also carries some political punch).

Skeleton is the creation of a choreographer, Larissa McGowan, working with a theatre director, Sam Haren. Lo-tech stage wizardry and high-speed dance generate a world of brutal ephemerality where accidents and nostalgia uncomfortably co-exist. Skeleton’s constant choreographic content and pulse prevents it from being labelled dance theatre, but it does have a clarity of purpose and design, not least in its use of objects (skateboard, BMX bike, headphones, baseball bat) that incline it to that form without disadvantage and with increased thematic coherence (although my fellow writer Carl Nilsson-Polias thought the work underdeveloped). Jo Lloyd’s Future Perfect has some kinship with Skeleton’s structural-thematic approach: it too deploys propulsive, finely realised choreography and ends in dissolution.

Atlanta Eke’s Monster Body is a loose hybrid of dance, contemporary performance and performance art, a series of strong images with broad thematic unanimity and no obvious development. Work of this kind was abundant in the 1980s and 90s, but it’s refreshing to see its emergence in the form of an idiosyncratic, brave and engaging performer as well as occurring at a moment when the feminine and feminism are once again in focus.

Some of the show’s images are overwrought—the cute animal-headed figure posing sexily to the repeated roar of a motorcycle promptly empties itself of significance—or too awkwardly realised—when Eke fills her rubber body suit with water-filled balloons to become multi-breasted, the image is muddled. These contrast with scenes more adroitly and powerfully realised, including Monster Body’s most potent image—the naked Eke growling and howling with superb vocal control while executing precise dance steps. Nothing else in the performance was as strange or monstrous as this.

futured

Eke, like Lake, Hamilton, Pigram, Day, Darbyshire, Serle, McGowan, Lloyd and Abbott collectively suggest through their creations an adventurous and diverse future for Australian dance in which audiences are regarded by choreographer-directors as sensory beings open to an enlarged view of dance as not only an integral part of the greater realm of performance but of dance as an instigator of intelligent investigation and innovation.

questioned

There are questions to be asked, for example about a certain sameness among space-eating sound scores, however dextrously and ingeniously they have been realised (see Gail Priest’s overview). As well, there’s the dance language itself, dominated by hyper-fluency and style melding that allows little time or space for reflective movement, with only a few exceptions. Antony Hamilton, Jo Lloyd, Stephanie Lake, Anouk van Dijk and Natalie Abbotts’ hyperactive subjects contrast sharply with Russell Dumas’ and Tim Darbyshire’s slowly evolving formations, while Matthew Day hovers between, moving in grand slow arcs while vibrating at speed. This is not to deny the rich diversity of choreographic approaches in the first group and the intricacies realised by their skilful dancers. As for ideas, Dance Massive was full of them, from the overtly political and cultural to speculations on ritual and worship, art-making, accidents, the self, relationships, mutability, the city and the future.

Dance Massive once again proved a deeply satisfying experience for audiences and for bringing together many of the dance community. As for its other function, the selling of Australian work to overseas presenters, outcomes are as yet unknown although there were apparently some promising signs.

Now that Spring Dance has been dropped by the Sydney Opera House, Dance Massive is the only substantial dance event for what are for the most part independent Australian contemporary dance makers, although it’s hoped that the MoveMe Dance Festival (see review) presented by STRUT and Ausdance WA in Perth might grow in scale and reach to bolster national dance culture. (It would be misleading to suggest that Spring Dance did a great deal for Australian dance, but it did develop an audience—but apparently not a big enough one despite press release rhetoric about record attendance numbers.) I hope that Dance Massive, with its doubtless limited resources but committed host venues, can continue to offer artists and audiences the opportunity to see and celebrate significant work, especially from the kind of emerging talent on show this year. It would be even more satisfying if more interstate artists could become part of Dance Massive (the numbers have varied event to event and there are many variables involved, cost not the least among them). In an era of increasing ephemerality, the need for Dance Massive is great. Long may it prosper.

Arts House, Dance House, Malthouse, Dance Massive 2013, Melbourne, March 12-24

MANY WORDS HAVE BEEN WRITTEN ABOUT WHETHER TO APPROACH ART IN TERMS OF THE WORK ALONE OR IN RELATION TO THE ARTIST. TO WHAT EXTENT DOES THE ARTWORK SPEAK FOR ITSELF, AND TO WHAT EXTENT OUGHT IT BE VIEWED THROUGH THE PERSONA OF THE ARTIST?

Retrospectives are a great way to circumvent this dilemma because we can see the life work of the person without needing to resort to biography. Life is in the works, plural.

Tracie Mitchell has produced a body of dance films spanning some 25 years. It was an inspired decision on the part of Angela Conquet, artistic director of Dancehouse, to show all these works together. Not only do they reflect a significant creative output, they offer the viewer an opportunity to flit between films, to experience their differences and to allow the experience of one to influence the other.

Predictably, the works were shown in chronological order. From a blurred three-minute ‘haiku’ (Whitehouse #1, 1985) to an extended, full colour film, the common denominator is Mitchell’s own developing eye.

Time changes everything though. Many of the performers from these films were sitting in the audience, draped over beanbags, watching their former selves onscreen. Mitchell was herself present and primed to share this greater part of her own life. So the viewing experience, quite apart from the films, was redolent with the passage of time in that Proustian sense.

Cinema is itself a succession of temporal captures, which in their serial multiplicity stage a complex choreography of movement. Beginning at the beginning, I loved watching three minutes culled from an event staged long ago. Grainy images of phrase material paced out inside an industrial building give an inkling of what’s to come.

Mitchell’s second film, Chicken (1990), is a poetic, slow motion meditation of a group performance, often watched in canon. Set in a car park overlooking railway tracks, the black and white imagery exhibits a considered construction of the viewer’s perspective. Turns and spirals, dips and kicks are played out in exuberant fashion, peppered with flashes of inner urban landscape. The poetics of the imagery arises in waves. Thread (1994) extends this notion of partial perspective, according to which the camera itself makes choices which we inherit. Sure (1998) is pretty much my favourite film, I’m not sure why. The makeup of the many female dancers is quite stark, and their looks to camera a bit contrived and yet their dancing, composure, and close relationship to the camera express a kinaesthetic empathy that is a pleasure to watch.

Whole Heart (2005) is much more narrative-based, a scary account of female vulnerability and sexual violence, which reminds us that each young woman was once a child. It contains some unaccountably beautiful images of peeling wallpaper, unravelling the patina of time. Finally there was Under the Weather (2008), a colour saturated account of women’s dreams and fears.

These films are not a trajectory leading to some end. They are each fulsome in their own right. But seeing them together was something else, an opportunity to experience a different kind of beast, crisscrossing time, courtesy of a life in the works.

Dance Massive, Dancehouse, with Keir Foundation: Tracie Mitchell, Dance Screen Retrospective 1985-2008, Dancehouse, Melbourne, March 23, 24; http://dancemassive.com.au

I’M IN THAT WEIRD PLACE ON YOUTUBE AGAIN. I’M LOOKING AT GRAINY FOOTAGE OF A CONCERT. THERE’S A MAN IN A RED CAPE AND VIOLINISTS IN WHAT LOOK LIKE HIJABS OR BLACK SACKS OVER THEIR HEADS. THE MAN OPENS HIS MOUTH AND SINGS IN AN UNEARTHLY FALSETTO, THE SOUND A MUSCLE-FREEZING LAMENT THAT COULD BELONG TO EITHER GENDER. WITH ONE ERRANT CLICK I GOT HERE.

YouTube is a platform where cats, screaming goats and Korean pop singers go viral, a fever that catches on and compels us to share chosen material. Often, qualities indefinable and undeserving elevate one video above the billions of others out there.

Ben Speth in his WeTubeLIVE celebrates the bizarre, the narcissistic and the occasionally talented, curating 100 live performances appropriated from YouTube. Each performer is presented in a carefully demarcated square—neat and contained with their personal effects and own sound system. The taped square works to create a barrier not unlike a computer screen; viewers walk amid performers without fear of interfering, happy to gaze and gawk as though invisible.

A girl in a green plushie outfit rolls around her square challenging, “Can you do this?” in a shrill voice while shoving her foot in her pocket. It’s an example of the truly inane attention seeking that could at any moment mushroom into a global cultural phenomenon. It seems a generation has grown up unfazed at self-promotion and self-exposition in the form of video blogs and status updates. The self is very much at the centre of all this—self-snapped photos are even called selfies.

In an online forum which appears apparently immune to government intercession and where anybody anywhere can upload a video, it is perhaps telling that videos with political intent don’t share the notoriety of the largely banal ones that capture our attention. Are there forces stymying revolutionary ideas from making it onto the recommended-for-you list or is it that we would rather watch freak shows? One video in recent memory showed young men in Palestine parody Gangnam Style while pointing a finger at the stark difference between glitzy Gangnam and the freshly bombed Gaza, complete with donkey transport and rubble. Similarly, I was heartened to see a disabled performer rocking out amongst the tiara-adorned beauty queens at WeTube. She was there; you just had to look for her.

Many of the WeTubeLIVE performances appear to have been selected for their expressions of personal freedom rather than their storytelling qualities. Hip hop dancers, a girl with her forehead covered in bindis, her square full of talismans, and a make up tutorial are just some of the visions you can tune in and out of. Choreographed moments, when all the performers are perfectly still and silent, intimate the possibility of united action, but it’s unrealised. There have been serious attempts to harness the viral power of YouTube for change, such as the infamous Kony 2012 campaign. Before that, people were buoyed and entertained by community-sprouting flash mobs (my favourite is the dancing inmates in CPDRC, a Philippines prison). Flash mobs were a fad and Kony dissolved with the creator’s public meltdown. The potential is there, we’re just not sure how to topple governments with it; there’s silence still.

What WeTubeLIVE director Ben Speth seems to suggest is that we are still amateurs, singing into hairbrushes, only now our mirrors are laptop cameras. We’re not wielding technology for anything more than instant gratification. The performers are all young, inevitably imbuing WeTube with some sense of hope. However, as I came to a train wreck of a singer, I thought WeTubeLIVE a harsh critique of each of us for choosing the things we watch.

Dance Massive & Ben Speth, WeTubeLIVE, concept, direction Ben Speth, project manager Bec Reid, dance facilitator Adam Wheeler; NGV International, Great Hall, Melbourne, March 24; http://dancemassive.com.au

Choreographer Tim Darbyshire discusses his work More or Less Concrete with Keith Gallasch, presented by Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall for Dance Massive 2013.

Dance Massive: Arts House & Tim Darbyshire: More or Less Concrete,
choreographer Tim Darbyshire, performers: Sophia Cowen, Tim Darbyshire, Josh Mu, sound Design Jem Savage, lighting Ben (Bosco) Shaw, Bluebottle, dramaturge, sound theorist Thembi Soddell, costumes Rebecca Agnew, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, March 20-24; dancemassive.com.au/

IN LIVE ART, CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE, DANCE, CINEMA AND DIGITAL ART THERE’S BEEN AN INCREASING FOCUS ON ENGAGING AUDIENCES WITH IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCES THAT UNSETTLE NORMAL PERCEPTUAL PROCESSES.

In performance, approaches range from one-on-one encounters and sensory deprivation (eg total blackout or blindfolding in order to enhance hearing and touch), to various digital strategies, including the use of cinematic techniques and surround sound.

In Natalie Abbott’s Physical Fractals and, moreso, Antony Hamilton’s Black Project 2 there are times when you are not sure what you are seeing. No digital trickery is involved. In Physical Fractals it’s the rapid movement of two bodies in radically diminishing light such that limbs become barely visible brush strokes in the dark (oddly, not unlike the tracery caught by digital cameras). In Black Project 2, a pulsing organism turns out to be a cluster of human bodies that mutates such that its components, six dancers, rarely figure as individual humans. Matthew Day’s Intermission also plays with our perceptual attentiveness as we empathically attune to the fast “wave vibrations” that so very slowly propel him (see interview).

In Tim Darbyshire’s thoroughly immersive and aptly titled More or Less Concrete the visual and aural senses are confounded, often at the same time. Visually, this is accomplished by Darbyshire’s intensely slow-moving sculptural choreography and initially very low levels of light (further muted by a forestage scrim). Three bodies are interlocked in such a way that it’s hard to discern where each begins and ends. Eventually, as our eyes keep adjusting, one body slowly breaks off. With a crash the structure collapses—a rare moment of shock in More or Less Concrete. That first body rolls forward, reshaping, and is then followed by the others. Their slow time has by now become ours as we slip into a contemplative state.

At the same time, each of us in the audience wearing the provided headphones has been overhearing a distant, muted conversation without grasping its content, as if the real world is slipping away from us. There are noises too, rustlings, breathing, eventually revealed to be coming from the miked performers. We hear what could be soft rain and wind. It becomes more intense, almost stormy, oceanic even, somehow resonant with the enveloping blue light. (I learn later from Darbyshire that nearly all this sound comes direct from the stage, treated digitally by sound designer Jem Savage in a show which also credits a dramaturg/sound theorist, Thembi Soddell.)

The three bodies emit gasps, extreme exhalations and coughs while hands slap and brush the floor, creating an odd musicality. Darbyshire’s three dancers (he’s one of them) continue to appear alien, their full human form denied us as, backs to us, they turn upside down, legs and feet away from us, unseen. Bottoms up, they appear octopus-like—bulbous shapes with arms spread out flat to the floor like tentacles, hands thumping and swishing. When the trio suddenly swing their legs over their torsos to hit the floor with their feet, their heads remain pulled back, out of sight, creating a new breed: headless humans.

In the ensuing action, the performers move inexorably, if as slowly as ever, towards us. More palpably human and in now intensely blue light they raise a low wall, crawl over it, scuffing across a sparkling blue terrain and generating something like wind moving across a grassy plain. In a line they swivel back and forward, as if ascertaining which direction to take before committing to keep moving forward. We glimpse their faces.

Finally they stand before us, heads moving as if gauging their whereabouts; but their eyes are closed, suggesting beings who have either not evolved sight or who, living in darkness, have lost it. One turns away and moves slowly back into the dark. The other two lean back to back, knees bent low, a new creature, following the first into invisibility.

As Darbyshire himself suggests in his program note, More or Less Concrete is rich in connotations. Like Gideon Obarzanek’s Glow or his Mortal Engine, or Antony Hamilton’s Black Project 2, there’s an evocation of non-human, organic life without making it literal: in the end it’s about the ways human bodies move and connect formally and quite abstractly expressed through dance. Darbyshire writes in his program note, “The bodies are abstracted as they transform between human, animal, monster, machine and ‘other.’ The choreography oscillates and suspends between recognisable ‘concrete’ realities and ambiguous or surrealistic states.”

Darbyshire describes More or Less Concrete as “an analytical performance work, centred on introverted and contained bodies that observe and listen.” These words could equally apply to the audience as much as to the personae in More or Less Concrete. It’s a thought that occupies Darbyshire, as revealed in his realtime tv interview.

In contrast to the fervid energy expended in the movement and sound in most works in Dance Massive 2013, More or Less Concrete’s tautly focused scenario extends and suspends our sense of time with dextrously slow movement, contortion and balance, finely tuned lighting and subtle performer-driven soundscapes. Not at all dancerly in a conventional sense, but demandingly drawing on the capacities of trained dancers, More or Less Concrete is an exemplar of lo-tech sensory immersion with which Tim Darbyshire challenges us to reassess our sensory grasp of the world.

Dance Massive: Arts House & Tim Darbyshire: More or Less Concrete, choreographer Tim Darbyshire, performers: Sophia Cowen, Tim Darbyshire, Josh Mu, sound Design Jem Savage, lighting Ben (Bosco) Shaw, Bluebottle, dramaturge, sound theorist Thembi Soddell, costumes Rebecca Agnew; Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, March 20-24; http://dancemassive.com.au

See the realtime tv interview with Tim Darbyshire and Carl Nilsson-Polias’ review.

ATLANTA EKE’S MONSTER BODY IS A RADICAL AND BORDER-SHIFTING WORK FOR AUSTRALIAN DANCE, EVEN IF NOT SO IN AN INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT. THE ARTISTS WHOSE WORK FITS MOST CLOSELY IN THE LINEAGE OF MONSTER BODY—LA RIBOT, MATHILDE MONNIER, ANN LIV YOUNG AND YOUNG JEAN LEE—ARE RARELY IF EVER SEEN ON THESE SHORES.

But once an innovation happens, it loses its singularity in iteration. It thus cannot be appraised simply in the macho, military terms of ‘revolution,’ ‘innovation’ or ‘shock’: it becomes essayistic, formalist, a tool in a toolbox. But Monster Body is a carefully conceptualised and executed work, and loses nothing when the shock wears off. Instead, it provokes more thought, with greater clarity.

It is hard to see Monster Body without having first received warnings about its nudity, urination and feminism. On the surface, it is a confronting piece: Eke, swirling a hula hoop, greets us wearing nothing but a grotesque dinosaur mask. A series of classical ballet battements follows, morphing into rather more ordinary walking and crouching movements, accompanied by synchronised growls and shrieks. In the piece’s most notorious segment, Britney Spears’ “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman,” that Trojan Horse of post-feminist self-expression, blares as Eke placidly pees while standing upright, then rolls on the same patch of floor in gently erotic poses.

However, the piece is neither overtly angry nor in-yer-face combative. Eke maintains dispassionate focus: the ambient lighting never creates separation between audience and stage, and the work seems to ask us to observe and judge, rather than rise up in arms. Notice, for example, how much more monstrous than the mask is Eke’s naked body—even though it is both a culturally docile (depilated in all the right places) and aesthetically ‘successful’ (young, toned, thin) body. We are more accustomed to seeing rubber animal faces than epithet-less nudity. Notice how unpleasant it is to watch a woman growl: inarticulate sounds and purposeless body movements need not be particularly extreme to cross a boundary of what a healthy woman may do with herself. The residue of the spectre of hysteria still lurks in our minds. Observe how very easy it is for a female human to appear monstrous, as if it has only been partially digested by our civilisation. And when a man in a hazmat suit appears to clean the floor or hand Eke a towel, observe how his very presence upsets the all-female stage, how ineffably strange it is to see this man neither represent, uphold nor fight for any kind of patriarchy.

Echoes of other artists appear reduced to bare essence. Eke and another female performer fondle each other’s bodies with a pair of rubber hands on long poles: this is Pina Bausch, but gentle, a moment that relies on our body memory of uninvited hands sliding down our calves for its emotional impact. Or, Eke fills her body stocking with pink water balloons, posing in her new, distorted figure, half-undressing and ending up with the stocking knotted into a bundle on her back, hunched under a heavy load of blubbery things that look, for all intents and purposes, like a pile of teats, or breast implants. The image echoes a whole canon of female disfiguration in art (I thought of Nagi Noda’s Poodle Fitness) as well as that of the misadventures of plastic surgery and of certain kinds of pornography, but it simply asks us consider what a human might look like once it has more breasts than limbs.

And then, in a musical intermezzo to Beyonce’s “Run the World (Girls),” hip hop empowerment, complete with an aggressive, ultra-sexualised choreography, is performed by an ensemble of variously-shaped girls, their nakedness made only starker by their running footwear and black bags on their heads. Drawing a link between the objectification and torture of people inside and outside of Abu Ghraib has already been made, with similar means, and perhaps more clarity, by Post in their Gifted and Talented, (2006), but Eke emphasises the vulnerability of these well-performing bodies, bodies that participate in their nominal liberation. Suddenly, Beyonce’s form of bravado displays exactly the weakness it is designed to hide. The painful powerlessness of this posturing is revealed by the sheer effort it requires, by the way it poorly fits a naked body, stripped of the armour of a hyper-sexualised costume.

As much as I tried, and despite everything I have read about it, I failed to see much of an all-encompassing exploration of human objectification in Monster Body. It seemed so clearly to draw a narrative arc of feminine non-liberation in present time, from the restrictive culturally condoned vulnerability of Britney to the restrictive culturally condoned strength of Beyonce. Its obvious interest in audience as a meaningful half of the performance also seemed to have fallen by the wayside, leaving a palpable void. However, as an essay on the physical restrictions of being a woman today, and a deeply thought-through one, it was very intellectually engaging. Shocking it wasn’t, but I suspect that was not its goal, either.

Dance Massive, Dancehouse: Monster Body, choreographer, performer Atlanta Eke, performers Amanda Betlehem, Tim Birnie, Tessa Broadby, Ashlea English, Sarah Ling; Dancehouse, Melbourne, March 22-24;http://dancemassive.com.au

JO LLOYD’S FUTURE PERFECT CONJURES A DYSTOPIAN VISION OF A LESS THAN PERFECT FUTURE OR, IF NOT THE FUTURE, FOR TRANSCENDENCE IN THE PRESENT, WHICH SEEMS PARTLY REALISABLE VIA ECSTATIC DANCING AND RITUAL GESTURE BUT APPEARS, AT THE VERY END, TO BE UNSUSTAINABLE.

Curiously, as RealTime Associate Editor Gail Priest suggested to me, musically and costume-wise Lloyd looks back to a popular culture past in order to find the means to achieve transcendence now. Priest pointed to a similar impulse in Balletlab’s And All Things Return to Nature (which will be reviewed in RealTime 114; it was not part of the Dance Massive program).

The perfection offered by transcendence which is sought in Lloyd’s work is indeterminate, but it has religious connotations. The five dancers function with intense communality, as an organism of worship, arms reaching up uniformly, bodies forming tightly entwined clusters and lines with precise, darting head movements or hands raised in apparent supplication, or palms to palms, face to face signalling total togetherness. Precise, rapid movement, recurrent gestures and eyes filled with awe convey a frightening obsessiveness apt in an era of ever-burgeoning fundamentalisms. Occasionally the group flies apart, individuals spinning or gesticulating furiously, only to seamlessly reform with a common pulse.

The glitter and cut of the costuming, against a gleaming foil sheet the width of the stage, evokes 80s glam rock; the music, with its swelling themes and accessible tonality, makes a perfect partner. You might think that the juxtaposition of these ingredients and a pumping dance of adoration would yield laughter, but the effect is not ironic, although some of the ecstatic limb quivering and mechanistic head turns are faintly comic.

It’s the ending of Future Perfect that casts a pall over the hope that a shared spirituality can embody perfection, and there’s nothing at all funny about it. A recurrent motif has one of the group’s members falling to the floor, presumably in a state of ecstatic collapse. In a final sequence, each member moves towards the audience, topples, is quickly rescued, taken upstage and resurrected while another individual moves forward. This cycle is repeated but more darkly as the treatment of those who have fallen becomes less caring with individuals dragged away and wrestled to the floor. In the third cycle, care returns.

This last scene is highly ambiguous. A failure of ritual? The participants no longer look to the heavens, but out at the audience. Ecstasy, if that’s what it is, is short-lived and part of a struggle, devoid of the danced cohesion that opened Future Perfect. The prelude to this finale is a series of recorded utterances, prefiguring the ambiguity to come, including, “I just gave into it,” “I just wanted to go home. I wasn’t myself,” “I couldn’t feel my body,” “I was watching the community from the outside,” “It was all so perfect.”

Structurally, Future Perfect has strengths and weaknesses. The trajectory from tautly cohesive worship to crumbling ritual is strong, revealing a succession of states of being and means of expressing unity and transcendence. There’s even an odd folk like dance passage to an engaging musical chiming (distorting badly), not dissimilar in mood to a protracted left foot-right foot bouncing routine in Brooke Stamp’s equally ritualistic And All Things Return to Nature. There’s also a passage, prior to the final movement, in which this group of perhaps proselytising worshippers consumes more and more of the space around it, individual members preoccupied with their own moves.

Less structurally and thematically certain is the insertion of a video animation (Rhian Hinkley) duplicated on screens either side of the foil wall. It shows faces of some of the dancers in states of digital dissolution, sliced into stacked landscape-like layers or spinning slowly outwards in cosmic whorls. While interesting in itself, the video, presumably representing a sense of oneness with the universe, the ensuing blackout and the feeling of starting up again significantly disrupts the organic flow of Future Perfect.

If not an entirely satisfactory work, with its odd retro-futuristic framing and uncertain structure, Future Perfect did suggest, if quite apolitically, issues around the interplay of movement, spirit and community in an era in which atheism and religion do battle, fundamentalisms are oppressive (but liberating for many) and transcendence is sought through religion, drugs or a feeling of being at one with the universe often associated with dance.

Doubtless Lloyd was not thinking so broadly, or deeply, about such matters, but Future Perfect suggested much in its own idiosyncratic way. As Stephanie Lake and Antony Hamilton have made clear in their realtime tv interviews, their aesthetic intentions were quite formal, abstract even, and they have been surprised at the sheer volume of literal interpretation applied to their works. Roland Barthes once wrote words to the effect that “denotation is the last of the connotations.” There’s a human impulse to constantly make sense, attaching the all too many signifiers that buzz about our brains to anything that does not immediately suggest meaning, and sooner or later we arrive at what ‘it’s about.’

In the work of Russell Dumas however you feel you’re simply seeing movement—although there are the often fascinating connotations of provenance: ballet, a broad spectrum of modern dance, contact improvisation and generations of Dumas-influenced dancers. There are even moments in Dance for the time being, as Virginia Baxter points out in her review, where a surprise movement is unusually suggestive.

Works by younger choreographers—Natalie Abbott’s Physical Fractals and Tim Darbyshire’s More or Less Concrete—refuse literal meaning because of their sheer strangeness, although the latter’s creation of some kind of strange organism (made up of three merging and de-merging performers) suggests incidental kinship with Gideon Obarzanek’s Glow and Mortal Engine and Antony Hamilton’s Black Project 2, as well as the clustering bodies in Lloyd’s Future Perfect.

Larissa McGowan’s Skeleton and Anouk Van Dijk’s 247 Days for Chunky Move, are clearly about something—young minds and bodies. But as Van Dijk says in her realtime tv interview, what seized her was the sudden oscillations in the psyches of people in their 20s between euphoria and despair, a suddenness she captures in her distinctive choreography and the structure of 247 Days (see Philipa Rothfield’s review). This lends the work an almost ritualistic fervour that resonates with the push for release and transcendence in the other works mentioned here and the slippage between individual states and compulsive togetherness, cosmically choral even in 247 Days.

However, when most dancing in Dance Massive which is bolstered by huge experimental musical compositions and wrap-around sounds that increasingly occupy the affective space of dance, only Tim Darbyshire deploys intense slowness of movement and subtle sonics that actually come from the dancers. Perhaps this is just another means to achieve a sense of immersion for the audience in an era preoccupied with achieving transcendence, secular or religious.

Dance Massive: Arts House & Jo Lloyd: Future Perfect, choreographer, director Jo Lloyd, performers Luke George, Madeleine Krenek, Shian Law, Jo Lloyd, Lily Paskas, lighting, set designer Jennifer Hector, music Duane Morrison, costumes Doyle Barrow, projection designer Rhian Hinkley, Arts House, Meat Market, Melbourne, March 20-24; http://dancemassive.com.au

KOREA IS HOME TO RICH TRADITIONS OF RITUAL, SPIRITUAL LIFE AND FINELY DEVELOPED DANCE FORMS. PERFORMED THROUGHOUT KOREA FOR GENERATIONS, TO CELEBRATE THE HARVEST, TO KEEP THE SEA AT BAY, RITUALS BIND THE COMMUNITY THROUGH MOVEMENT AND DANCE.

Dancers have performed in royal courts, on rice fields and in city restaurants. Dance is valued and celebrated throughout Korean culture, its greatest exponents participating in the UN cultural heritage register. Shamanism is also part of the Korean spiritual everyday.

So, it’s no great surprise to see a traditional dance performance in Korea opened by a female shaman. (Jin Ok-sub’s Festive Land company opened Cheoyong-gut with a female shaman’s blessing for the Seoul International Dance Festival, Hoam Art Hall, Seoul, Korea, the 11th Seoul International Dance Festival, October 2008.) Korean audience members appear to adapt well to the shift from spiritual spaces to the domain of performance. They run onto the stage, tucking money into the performers’ clothes and props for good luck, laughing and smiling. Shamanism has a context in Korean society, even in its biggest city, Seoul, where shamanistic spaces are made within Buddhist temples in the centre of its business district.

Soo Yuen You is privy to this legacy. Her mother is a traditional Korean dancer and she maintains close relations with a shaman in Korea, who oversaw the spiritual elements of [Gu:t], Soo’s work-in-progress. Her collaborator, Australian Indigenous dancer Albert David, understands this spiritual legacy. Allied to two different Aboriginal communities, David has access to a spiritual domain which underlies the community’s cultural everyday.

How then to bring these two spiritual traditions together in the context of adapting Korean spiritual culture to the stage? [Gu:t] is already well developed in terms of its staging. The showing we were witness to had lighting, stage and costume design and musical composition. It also established certain elements from the two traditions of its key performers, Soo Yeun You and Albert David. Korean characters, selected by Soo’s Korean shaman and spiritual advisor, were painted on wall hangings suspended from the ceiling. David used ochre, performing a finely nuanced set of Aboriginal dance movements, perhaps totemic. Soo also performed elements of traditional Korean dance.

In narrative terms, these two spiritual cultures were drawn together through ritual notions of death, spirit and mourning, arising from David’s experience of helping his grandmother die. The beginning of [Gu:t] was incredibly potent, not merely evocative, but somehow drew together elements to create an atmosphere onstage. Perhaps the notion of death, which we all share, enabled this beginning to summon something powerful.

Since this is and felt like a work-in-progress, I will respond to what I saw onstage in relation to the challenge of turning [Gu:t] into a finished piece. It seems to me that Soo and David each have a strong spiritual and movement legacy which exists in the context of each tradition. As choreographer, Soo has to make decisions about the transformation and adaptation of these traditions to the stage and for audiences who probably have little experience of the underlying traditions. It is not that it isn’t possible to make the move. A number of Korean artists have made wonderful pieces both for Korean and international audiences. Each has made decisions about how to shift their work onto the stage, and what to do with traditional elements within a contemporary or modernist frame.

Soo is in a unique position, having moved to Australia, and also collaborating with an Indigenous dancer and cultural exponent. [Gu:t] explored a number of different ways of staging this relationship within a distinctively Korean spiritual setting. David danced his own heritage, including the ritual of covering his own body with ochre. Soo performed elements of traditional dance. The two dancers also came together in duet form, with David partnering Soo in a ballet style of lift and lowering through a variety of postures. Narrative elements of illness and healing were enacted. Finally, Soo used David’s ochre to trace a number of characters in a circle onstage. Some of the actions, props and spatial structures had symbolic significance.

The showing raised a number of questions from a choreographic perspective: how to bring these elements together? What to keep and what to leave behind? Then there is the question of shamanism and the stage, which is both choreographic and something more than that, and finally, the relationship between spiritual practices, an evolving and collaborative project. Dalisa Pigram (Gudirr Gudirr) resolved the question of cultural differences within her own body. [Gu:t] will need to find its own resolution. The question of value also arises, whether the aim of [Gu:t] is to give audiences a spiritual experience, to produce a work of artistic value, to foreground one culture over another or to make a work whose value arises from its hybridity.

Dance Massive, Malthouse: [Gu:t], concept, performance Soo Yeun You, Albert David, choreography Soo Yeun You, design Priya Namana, lighting Alexandre Malta, composition Gus Macmillan, Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, March 21-22; http://dancemassive.com.au

Stephanie Lake in conversation with Keith Gallasch about her work Dual, co-presented with Arts House, for Dance Massive 2013.

Dance Massive, Arts House: choreographer, costume designer Stephanie Lake, performers Alisdair Macindoe, Sara Black, composer, lighting designer Robin Fox, producer Freya Waterson, Insite Arts; Arts House, Meat Market, Melbourne, March 12-16; http://dancemassive.com.au/

Dalisa Pigram in conversation with Keith Gallasch about Gudirr Gudirr presented by Arts House & Marrugeku for Dance Massive 2013.

Dance Massive, Arts House: Gudirr Gudirr, concept, performer and co-choreographer Dalisa Pigram, director and co-choreographer Koen Augustijnen, set design and video artist, Vernon Ah Kee, video production Sam James, composer & sound designer Sam Serruys, singer and songwriter Stephen Pigram, lighting design Matthew Marshall, concept and cultural advisor Patrick Dodson, dramaturg & creative producer Rachael Swain, executive producer John Baylis. Produced by Stalker Theatre and co-commissioned by the City of Melbourne through Arts House, Theatre Im Pfalzbau, Ludwigshafen (Germany) and Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg; Marrugeku, Arts House, Meat Market, Melbourne, March 12-16; http://dancemassive.com.au/

Choreographer Lee Serle in conversation with Keith Gallasch about P.O.V presented at Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, as part of Dance Massive 2013.

Dance Massive, Arts House: P.O.V. director, choreographer Lee Serle, performers, collaborators James Andrews, Kristy Ayre, Lily Paskas, Lee Serle, lighting Ben Cisterne, composition, sound design Luke Smiles, set design Lee Serle, costumes Lee Serle, Shio Otani in collaboration with the performers; production management Megafun, North Melbourne Town Hall, March 12-16; dancemassive.com.au/

Chunky Move choreographer and director Anouk van Dijk discusses the creation of 247 Days, presented by Malthouse as part for Dance Massive 2013.

Dance Massive, Malthouse: Chunky Move, 247 Days, concept, choreography Anouk van Dijk, performers Leif Helland, Lauren Langlois, Alya Manzart, James Pham, Niharika Senapati, Tara Soh, composition, sound designer Marcel Wierck, set design Michael Hankin, lighting Niklas Pajanti, costumes Shio Otani; The Malthouse Theatre, March 15–23; dancemassive.com.au

THE TITLE MORE OR LESS CONCRETE MIGHT AS WELL BE A CONCISE PERSONALITY TEST OF THE HALF-GLASS VARIETY. ARE YOU A MORE CONCRETE PERSON? OR A LESS CONCRETE PERSON? OR ARE YOU MORE OR LESS A CONCRETE PERSON?

Do you look for concrete meaning, narrative and figuration in Tim Darbyshire’s creation? Or do you look instead between the figuration to the abstractions, reveries and enigmas? You might find yourself pondering such questions as you take off your headphones at the end of More or Less Concrete.

Yes, you get headphones. For a production presented with a fairly standard end-on seating bank and a letterbox proscenium arch it seems an odd choice. The sound design itself rarely makes specific use of the medium in terms of aural quality, apart from at the very beginning, when a brilliant rendering of a muffled conversation between a man and a woman seems real enough for one to question the soundproofing of the North Melbourne Town Hall. Apart from that, the sound itself is not so quiet, nor so delicate that one needs headphones to discern it.

What the headphones largely achieve is to personalise and internalise the audio. On the one hand, there is the physical reality that no one else is hearing what’s on your headphones. On the other hand, there is the paranoia that someone else’s headphones are getting better sound. Looking at rows of audience members in front of you, it becomes impossible not to feel distanced from them by this technological interference and perhaps the ubiquity of headphones in public spaces has rendered them a visual liability as much as an aural utility. This personalising aspect is compounded by the way our brains process information from headphones. We can perceive depth, location and movement using only our ears. When we move our heads, the sound signals alter slightly and this gives us even clearer metrics on where the sound is coming from. Headphones, by not changing the sound signals when we move our heads, cancel our depth perception. Our brain decides that the sound cannot be external and collapses the sound image into our head.

For a work like More or Less Concrete, this internalisation of the audio is a potential boon. So much of what Darbyshire seems to be striving for here is a liminal space between humour and melancholy, between the concrete and the abstract. The internalising aspects of the headphones can engender the pensive questioning of ambiguity required, they beg for subjective wandering. Yet, Darbyshire and his collaborators have not fully capitalised on their decision. The sound design largely remains within the literal diegetic sphere of amplified sounds from the stage relayed in real time. These sounds themselves are often literal in their choreographic derivation: the dancers move their arms as though being inflated and make sounds of inflation, the dancers move like animals and growl appropriately, a dancer bites an apple and we hear the crunch of an apple. Musique concrète is cited as an inspiration but there is only very occasionally the kind of collage, musicality and poetry that Pierre Schaeffer and his acolytes brought to that form. When the sound and the movement do contrast, both are made more profound, more expansive and mysterious. We are given room to imagine, to set our minds adrift in this non-literal space and the piece lifts accordingly. In other words, I wanted less concrete and more concrète.

Visually, More or Less Concrete can be seen as an evolutionary bildungsroman in blue. It begins with a distant body, an indiscernible blue clay that writhes slowly until it ejects one human form, then another and another. Their bodies are heavy, weighed down by the primordial soup, leaving only their backsides to float upwards. They find breath, they find limbs, they find extension. Bit by bit, they approach us, mounting one obstacle after another though they can barely stand. As they emerge finally beyond the proscenium, the house lights rise to meet them but their eyes are closed like moles, like newborns. It is all too much for them. Not 45 minutes ago they were still sparks in Prometheus’ eye. Now, they retreat slowly into the gloom far away.

But through our headphones we still hear their echo in our heads. Sound travels slower than light.

Dance Massive: Arts House & Tim Darbyshire: More or Less Concrete, choreographer Tim Darbyshire, performers: Sophia Cowen, Tim Darbyshire, Josh Mu, sound Design Jem Savage, lighting Ben (Bosco) Shaw, Bluebottle, dramaturge, sound theorist Thembi Soddell, costumes Rebecca Agnew, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, March 20-24; http://dancemassive.com.au/

ATTENDING A NEW PERFORMANCE BY RUSSELL DUMAS IS ALWAYS AN OCCASION. THE AMBIENCE IN THE FOYER ON OPENING NIGHT IS CONVIVIAL, THE AUDIENCE SPRINKLED WITH LOYAL FORMER AFFILIATES OF DANCE EXCHANGE, ACKNOWLEDGING DUMAS’ ENDURING INFLUENCE ON THE FIELD.

Enhancing our sense of place, we are led along a laneway to the back entrance of Dancehouse, up a set of rustic wooden stairs from which we glimpse in passing the ruins of what looks like a disused brickworks next door. We pass through the doors of the theatre observing a line of dancers against the wall. Seated, we regard the pristine space—shiny wooden floor, four windows letting in the 7pm light—where two of the dancers have already begun their performance without us.

In familiar Dance Exchange style, to the rhythms of breathing, the black clad performers on the floor lean, spin and pivot. At first they appear to be testing their weight against the solidity of walls and floor and then each other. As each sequence ends the dancers simply depart the space to be replaced by others from the waiting line. We recognise the characteristic gestures of affinity, seamless conjoining, sensuous balances, lifts that look easy at first but soon reveal their effort.

Much of the dancing we’ve seen at Dance Massive has been of the heavy duty variety—falling, shaking, spinning, sharply articulated, moving fast and furious; not to mention facing down the elements—extreme sound, light and spatial deprivation, smoke. The performers of Dance Exchange meanwhile “explore the relationship between doing and being” in a relatively safe environment. “The human being is already performative,” says Dumas. “It goes without saying more precisely because it came before saying” (Dance Massive brochure).

Not that all this “being” is undemanding (as we know). There are moments, which, within the context might even be deemed spectacular—small eruptions, remarkable and unexpected turns, a springing on all fours across the floor. In a couple of extended duets that form centrepieces for the work, Jonathan Sinatra appears at first to be the more forceful of the duo until you detect the equivalent power needed from Linda Sastradirpradja and Nicole Jenvey to propel and maintain their own bodies in the lifts. Surprising body parts are called upon to elevate, push or pull another. One is held stiffly horizontal and rolled up and onto the other. Clasped hands connect with a raised arm to create suspension. In vertical configurations or lying side by side, these bodies display their strength in relative stillness.

There are often two or three sites of action—a trio there, a duet here—initially splitting our attention then revealing their rhythmic turns or limbs raised in unison. Unlike the duets, which are more formal and demanding, there are youthful bursts of movement—slaps, running, followed by a languid line-up. Overall, a sense of reverie prevails, of people in thrall, fluidly shifting from one position to the next and then falling into synch. There are moments of pause when you venture a scenario or even glimpse something potentially balletic in those pointed toes, that extended, graceful arm, the faintly familiar configurations of the pas de deux. There are even flashes of drama—he grabs her ankles, pulls himself into a foetal curl and then unfolds, lifts her up with a foot under one buttock; Jenvey clasps Sinatra tightly around his torso, lets him go and he collapses. Importantly, nothing is held long enough to allow connotation to cloud the view. More often meaning slips and we’re absorbed in an easy sense of overlap. Something ends, something else begins, to be continued another time.

As the sun sets, we detect subtle patterns of introduced light on the walls. Never directly on the dancers, the shapes build to overlapping rectangles like a series of modernist paintings gradually expanding along the wall. Shadows and silhouettes dance before us. Leaving, we’re invited to walk through the charged space of the performance that now lets in the night. Outside, a pale yellow half-moon is on the rise.

Dance Massive & Dancehouse: Dance Exchange; dance for the time being –Southern Exposure, director Russell Dumas, performer/creative producer Linda Sastradipradja, performers Jonathan Sinatra, Nicole Jenvey, Rachel Doust, David Huggins, Sarah Cartwright, Eric Fon, Molly McMenamin, Dancehouse, March 19-21

Choreographer Antony Hamilton in conversation with Keith Gallasch about Black Projects 1 & 2, Dance Massive 2013

Dance Massive: Arts House and Antony Hamilton Projects, Black Projects 1 & 2, choreography, concept Antony Hamilton, Black Project 1: performers Antony Hamilton, Melanie Lane, video projection , Olaf Meyers, music Robert Henke, Mika Vainio and Vainio and Fennesz, design Antony Hamilton; Black Project 2: performers James Batchelor, Jake Kuzma, Talitha Maslin, Jessie Oshodi, Marnie Palomares, Jess Wong, costume design Paula Levis, sound designer Alisdair Macindoe, video design Kit Webster, set construction, production Management Matthew Scott, Megafun, producer Freya Waterson, Insite Arts; Arts House, Meat Market, Melbourne, March 12-16; http://dancemassive.com.au/

“YOU ALWAYS IMAGINE HOW IT’S GOING TO BE.” SO SAYS A VOICE RECORDING OVER A CINEMA-LIKE SCORE IN THE CLOSING MINUTES OF JO LLOYD’S FUTURE PERFECT.

Imagining the future tends to lead writers and choreographers to similar conclusions, each with their particular aesthetic and philosophy. This includes uniformly attired humans signalling submission to an overarching ideal or identity. Here it is expressed with glittery Torvill and Dean-cum-gothic punk outfits.

Uniformity is an exterior marker of a oneness of mind: a community so in tune it is on the verge of becoming a single organism. Even when the dancers move separately they are like the parts of a clock, working together to achieve an obscure function.

Future Perfect comes with a loud music warning—Dance Massive 2013 has been punctuated by decibel-heavy beats and has seen sound volume take on a near physical presence. After the sonic punch of Physical Fractals where I cocooned my growing belly with my arms, I googled “do loud noises affect unborn babies?” Thankfully, it seems not. This performance was on the moderate level of aural challenge—occasionally an unpleasant frequency, the pitch a notch above inner ear comfort. This seemed to fit the general picture of discomfort one might experience at a warehouse rave, which was my first impression of the set. The metallic backdrop hinted at the interior of a machine, ripples of light covering the stage as the five dancers raised their arms and faces upward in a kind of religious ecstasy (rather than an amphetamine-induced one). The performers merge to create a kind of Shiva as Nataraja—the multi-armed Lord of Dance. The repeated worshipping arm movements reminded me of old Hindi films where entertainment has a starting point in religious ritual.

Entertainment is high on the agenda; the lighting and set design by Jennifer Hector brings drama in the form of a sci-fi cinema experience to the audience. Screens at either side of the stage reveal 3D animations of the dancers’ faces distorted into pixel galaxies, Rhian Hinkley’s imagery suggesting a kind of breaking down of the individual by technology. While maybe a pertinent point in the concept of future’s ‘uniformity’ or undividedness, it jarred a little with the images of ecstatic unity on stage. Overall though, the production is glamorous and exuberant, crackling with an electric charge, if occasionally suggesting an errant question.

In Lloyd’s Future, humans succumb to a higher, irresistible force; they map out galactic paths in a fever, they support each other and fit around each other without competition. These high-energy moments wind down to stillness and a disassembling and regrouping. The dancers embody both strength and grace like future perfect bodies and, despite their apparent uniformity, each brings something of the individual to the piece, like characters from a cult movie. I was particularly struck by the fire and efficacy of movement of mustachioed Luke George; he raised the bar on opening night.

Ecstasy means to “stand outside the ordinary self.” Future Perfect is both an otherwordly and out of body, out of self, experience where the dancers finally and repeatedly collapse in on themselves, giving in to the magnetic force of the mass.

Tara Soh, James Pham, Lauren Langlois, Leif Helland, Niharika Senapati, Alya Manzart, 247 Days, Chunky Move

247 DAYS IS DARK: DARK THOUGHTS, DARK SPACE, A DARK VISION ALL ROUND. OSTENSIBLY ARISING OUT OF ANOUK VAN DIJK’S MOVE FROM EUROPE TO AUSTRALIA, 247 DAYS IS VERY MUCH CONCERNED WITH THE INNER WORLD OF ITS PERFORMERS, WHETHER REAL OR NOT. THE QUESTION OF THE REAL IS LESS IMPORTANT IN ANY CASE, FOR THIS IS A PSYCHOLOGICAL CONFABULATION.

The stage is dominated by a curved series of mirrors, a speculum of internal space. The work begins with an extended solo. A young woman (Lauren Langlois) contemplates her image intently, shifting weight, searching for reassurance which is structurally lacking, inasmuch as the mirror cannot compensate the anxieties which compel the search. Her own joints cannot offer support. She turns towards us, turns back, turns to us, turns back. This is an obsessive compulsion which finds relief neither in the image nor in the gaze of the other. The performer articulates her needs, her wants, her desires. Is she talking to us? I don’t think so.

This girl has no centre, she is hollow but for her anxieties. She runs then sets up a pattern of movements that the others join, each oriented towards their own image. The group is a set of splinters united in movement, divided by an atomistic mode of experience. There is nonetheless a certain pleasure in watching the group move together, gained through observing their collective mastery of space in time.

Their dancing is more sustained than their speech which is truncated: stuttered emotions garnered on the run and selected largely for their shadow side. These psychological bubbles are mirrored in momentary facial expressions, smiles more like the rictus of a corpse, a silent scream (reminiscent of Francis Bacon’s Screaming Pope series). The muscles of the face swish over bone.

The spine is distended at the edges, the big toe a distorted coda to a leg turned inwards. Lines of movement traverse the body, not for beauty’s sake. Happily, phylogeny takes over and lizard crawls allow for a pure moment of cross-lateral slithering. That clear passage from one diagonal to its corresponding other becomes a linear clarity through space. I begin to recognise a kind of style. The body is the site of linear flows, which may begin with a pelvis flung inwards, a step turning into a twist, the torque of the torso, the body dipping for a leg lift, whatever it takes to keep this line of movement going. The head and spine undulate towards their maximum curvature. The head has a relative independence from the spine, suggesting a giddying loss of control, belied by the underlying skill needed to let go of vision’s anchorage. In fact, a great deal of the dancing has these two sides of the coin: letting go of control/amazing control in letting go.

The solos give way to duets and a trio. Much of the duet work consists of one partner holding and spinning the other like a centrifuge, the motion outwards counter-balanced by an inward spiral. Then the two lean towards each other, sharing weight, seeking touch through pouring weight into the body of the other. Sometimes one person will lead the movement of another through the head. The poetics of these partnerships has to do with relationships, variously expressed in terms of love, control, loss of control, agency and helplessness. One couple hug and fling in turns.

The curved mirror is broken up and deconstructed to produce a proliferation of reflections, liminal spaces to be occupied by the dancers. Bit by bit the work unravels to reveal individual reflections.

Attempting to reflect on the tenor of 247 Days, I find myself oscillating between thinking of it as a dystopian construction and seeing it as a social reflection of the real. Perhaps all dystopias have their root in the historical present, taking their line of flight through some imaginary proposition: the apocalypse, totalitarian hegemony, cultural cannibalism, man’s inhumanity to man.

247 Days explores an experiential slice of life, youthful, anxious, fearful, not especially happy. Faces are discontinuous with inner feelings, the mirror a crucible of angst. By contrast, the choreography works on a somewhat different register. The physical prowess of the performers rarely mirrors their expressions of insecurity and doubt. A certain seduction of performative skill—that is, the audience is drawn into the dancing—belies the internal sound of fury that finds expression through voice and facial gesture. Maybe this difference offers an out to the tendency for 247 Days to totalise the negative. Am I being too negative?

Byron Perry, Stephanie Lake, Alisdair Macindoe, Conversation Piece, Lucy Guerin Inc

FOUR YEARS AGO, AT DANCE MASSIVE 2009, THE MEAT MARKET IN NORTH MELBOURNE PLAYED HOST TO THE PREMIERE OF LUCY GUERIN’S UNTRAINED. HER LATEST WORK, CONVERSATION PIECE, CAN BE READ AS AN EVOLUTION AND EXTRAPOLATION ON THIS EARLIER WORK.

Untrained placed two professional dancers beside two complete dance novices in an investigation of performativity, purity and, of course, training. Conversation Piece places three professional dancers beside three professional actors in an investigation of performativity, language and modes of communication.

Untrained was restricted to a clinical essence of form, a physical call-and-response, where the authorial voice of Guerin was evident only in the structure (a list of provocations) rather than in the content, which wholly derived from the performers. Conversation Piece operates with a somewhat looser form, where the performers now respond to one another’s provocations, and is leavened with choreographed intermissions that act to reassert Guerin’s voice in proceedings. Guerin also gradually inflects the piece with a unifying tone and a quasi-narrative based around the performers as characters rather than the performers as themselves.

The set for Untrained was simply a grey square marked out by a white line. The set for Conversation Piece is a minimalist suggestion of an anonymous waiting space—a bus terminal, a Centrelink office—with its three sets of four orange chairs echoing those in Shaun Parker’s This Show is About People (2008).

Untrained was an experiment in physical performance unmediated by technology. Conversation Piece is an experiment mediated by iPhones, which do not act as phones, but rather as audio and video recording devices, playback devices and, crucially, as signifiers of the age.

Megan Holloway, Kath Tonkin, Stephanie Lake, Conversation Piece, Lucy Guerin Inc

What is the value of juxtaposition? When one places a trained body beside an untrained body, does it simply reveal that one can pirouette, the other not? When one places an actor beside a dancer, does it simply reveal that one can speak, the other move? When one places one show beside another, does it similarly reveal only the literal points of difference?

In Untrained, the juxtaposition revealed as much about the audience as it did about the men on stage; what did we find engaging, funny, charming, impressive? It deftly walked the line between a celebration of naivety and experience, without falling into mawkishness or snobbery.

In Conversation Piece, the juxtaposition is more complex and more ambitious. Yes, we are at times invited to witness the gladiatorial struggle between body and voice, as though it were a battle of virtuosity where our laughter or applause determine the victor. But we are also asked to consider how both these forms—how communication itself—is affected by the iPhones’ mediations.

The work begins with an eight-minute improvised conversation between the three dancers, which is recorded on iPhones. The three actors enter, plug into an iPhone each and listen back to the conversation. Each actor then relays one of the dancers’ words, but stripped of modulation, gestures or appropriate tone. When all laughs are presented as cackles, all words presented with the same intonation and there is no gestural language available, it becoms a spoken text message. Some commentators have begun diagnosing texting-addicted teenagers and 20-somethings as ‘flatliners’—their lack of engagement with the spoken word turning them into the walking dead of verbal communication. In Conversation Piece, the actors bring them alive.

In other respects, Conversation Piece rehashes some very familiar 20th century tropes. The presentation of people linked together on a superficial level of purpose but without any expressive connections—that is to say, people waiting together at a bus terminal—is at least as old as Jean-Paul Sartre and his conceptions of seriality and alterity. So, if philosophers and artists have warned of increasing human disconnectedness since the inception of radio, what more can be said? Perhaps nothing completely new, but Guerin steadily pushes the tone of Conversation Piece into unexpectedly sinister landscapes.

At first, we might see a young woman talking irrepressibly in a one-way stream—channelling all three parts of the original recorded conversation. Then, the social one-sidedness might morph into the attempt a young man makes to converse with another man capable only of non-sequiturs. After this, that young man might start to manipulate the other man’s body in an increasingly cruel and unusual manner. Perhaps a woman debases and humiliates another woman in front of everyone. Perhaps a man, uncomfortable in conversation, unsure of himself with others, enacts a slow motion murderous fantasy in a bus terminal. The most important aspect is that all these things happen as monologues.

Conversation Piece is not about the conversation at the beginning of the show. It is about the lack of conversation anywhere else.

See also the review of the first season (with largely different cast) of Conversation Piece at Belvoir in Sydney: www.realtimearts.net/

Dance Massive, Arts House: Lucy Guerin Inc & Belvoir, Conversation Piece, choreographer, director Lucy Guerin, performers Megan Holloway, Stephanie Lake, Alisdair Macindoe, Byron Perry, Kath Tonkin, Matthew Whittet, set, costume design Robert Cousins, lighting design Damien Cooper, sound designer, composer Robin Fox; Arts House, Meat Market, March 19-24; http://dancemassive.com.au/

THE CHALLENGE TO DEVELOP A CONCEIT INTO A FULLY EMBODIED AND THEMATICALLY RICH IMAGE IS ALWAYS CONSIDERABLE. SANDRA PARKER RAMPS UP THE DISJUNCTION BETWEEN LIVE PERFORMANCE AND WHAT WE SEE ONSCREEN VIA CAMERA AND AMPLIFIES THE DIFFERENCE BY JUXTAPOSING MINIMALLY EXPRESSIVE MOVEMENT WITH MAXIMALLY EVOCATIVE MUSIC. HOW FAR CAN SHE TAKE THESE DISJUNCTIONS TO YIELD A MEANINGFUL EXPERIENCE?

The Recording is located on a film set (of which the audience, as in a TV show recording, are part) where three performers act out non-verbal expressions and actions in a series of takes, in between which they act at checking their scripts, mingling and rehearsing while technicians adjust lighting and camera positions. Initially, the un-contexualised actions, projected script fragments, Fiona Cameron’s sudden crawl across the floor and Trevor Patrick’s rejection of her subsequent intimate movement towards him are intriguing, building a sense of anticipation and some amusement at the vacuity of the spare gestures and ‘looks.’

The third performer, Phoebe Robinson, is positioned for a head and shoulders close-up, looking vaguely anxious, running her fingers repeatedly across her face or wiping her nose. As with all close-ups the audience can project emotions which are usually confirmed by context, but there’s little here save music. Robinson’s whole-body, off-screen self is a little more revealing, appearing gesturally assertive with someone we can’t see. The disjunction between images actual and virtual is sparely felt. While Robinson rehearses a set of moves the music develops a more potent sense of presence, its western idiom, bordering on movie music enriched with a kind of shakuhachi screech and pounding woodblocks—all very much at odds with what we are seeing.

During a set-up for a scene, Trevor Patrick delivers lines deadpan to Robinson in rehearsal. We can barely hear them, but a few leak through: “I thought it would be much more fun,” and some reference to danger. But we never see or hear these words filmed. A scene with Cameron in close-up, appearing concerned and frustrated, and gesturing emphatically before the camera, signals little at great length, feeling too close in production manner to the preceding Robinson episode, while the almost progressive rock score is worlds away from these small moves. The gap between affect and effect grows even more disjunctive when the sound score grabs snatches of Hollywood TV crime shows and soaps—“The DNA results are in. The kid’s all mine”—juxtaposing them with a massively swelling score a la Angelo Badalamenti for David Lynch, while the trio executes abstracted actions, comic even, for example Patrick flicking his head as if slapped.

In a third of the close-up series, instead of seeing the performer’s head on a large screen, we instead watch Patrick standing next to the small monitor on which he appears, but for which he has been pre-recorded, slipping a little in and out of synch with himself in a further erosion of the connection between real and virtual. However, this take does have some sense of progression as Patrick eventually moves a hand to his forehead and finally hangs his head as if defeated. Robinson and Cameron on the other hand appear to pretty much have repeated their moves. By now I’m not convinced that the three ‘portraits’ are at all telling, let alone significantly different between stage and screen versions. There is nothing idiosyncratic in the movement, nothing particularly subtle, very little that requires anything of dancers as skilled as this trio, save their restraint.

If this is a work about what is lost in the recapturing of movement, there’s not much in The Recording that hasn’t already been repeatedly captured, as the choreographer writes, by her use of “a movement vocabulary literally drawn from film and television, a strategy to present embodied movement we instinctually recognise and feel comfortable watching” (Parker, “Capturing the live moment, The Recording,” Dancehouse Diary, Issue 4, March-June, 2013).

A near final scene has Cameron and Patrick struggling with each other, Cameron falling to the floor and Patrick on top of her. There are multiple, tedious re-takes without variation while Robinson stands to one side. When the couple fall on the stage floor, she is left alone on the screen, as if we are to identify with her. Cameron then repeats the fall by herself, perhaps like ‘the body’ in a thriller. Finally our attention is focused on Robinson in a spare solo, hands wandering to face again, performing to a fractured song featuring the repeated word “amour” (somewhat in the manner of Brazilian New Yorker Arto Lindsay). Perhaps there’s some kind of narrative we might feel inclined to fill in between the abstracted moves and a loaded sound score (couple at odds, one person kills/wounds the other, third party feels abandoned) but that doesn’t seem to be the point, nor my inclination. Rather, in The Recording, specificity is eschewed as abstracted expressions, gestures and moves are played out in a thinly suggestive and largely affectless scenario which is ‘captured’ on screen.

There is a certain attractive delicacy of expression in The Recording and a tonal consistency that refuses the emotions suggested by the multilayered score. However, the calculated emptiness of the action and the floating signification of the music (albeit very engaging in itself) yields an unsatisfying, double sense of absence. Is there anything at all dialectical being played out between the work’s clichéd movement and its sonic material, and between the stage and screen images? The difference between body on stage and head on screen is not especially revealing. Nor do the restricted movements of the dancers signal a richer stage life than the camera evokes. The Recording cannot therefore mount a strong argument for the immediacy of movement/dance/acting over mediatised versions.

In her Dancehouse Diary essay Parker repeats the much-cited Peggy Phelan and Andre Lepecki theses from the mid-1990s about the impossibility of documentation and re-presentation being able to generate meaningful versions or experiences of original performances. These have assumed a precious, metaphysical absolutism accompanied by a mantra of ‘now, now, now.’ But what kind of ‘now’? The raw immediacy of live dance before an audience, as felt in, say, Natalie Abbott’s Physical Fractals or Stephanie Lake’s Dual, however much rehearsed and repeated? A ‘now’ that has moved well beyond film and television images when media technologies, popular culture and notions of the real and the now have radically mutated? A reified sense of the ‘now,’ is not helpful in this context. There’s no denying the power of live dance but paranoia about losing its immediacy to inimical media forces is the least of its worries. Sandra Parker’s The Recording left me guessing, and argumentative.

Co-incidentally, the reproduction issue is bound to be debated in Sydney when Kaldor Public Art Projects launches 13 Rooms in Sydney’s vast Wharf 2/3 (April 11-23). The show comprises recreations of performances and installations originally created and/or peformed by Marina Abramovic, John Baldessari, Joan Jonas, Damien Hirst, Tino Sehgal, artist duo Allora and Calzadilla, Simon Fujiwara, Xavier Le Roy, Laura Lima, Roman Ondák, Santiago Sierra and Xu Zhen. 140 local dancers and performers have been employed to realize the works. There’s one new work, by Brisbane performance duo Clark Beaumont.

The Recording, director, choreographer Sandra Parker, dancers Fiona Cameron, Trevor Patrick, Phoebe Robinson, lighting design Jenny Hector, projection designer Rhian Hinkley, composer, sound designer Steve Heather; Dancehouse, Melbourne, March 13-16; http://dancemassive.com.au

Chunky Move choreographer and director Anouk van Dijk discusses the creation of 247 Days, presented by Malthouse as part for Dance Massive 2013.

Chunky Move, 247 Days, concept, choreography Anouk van Dijk, performers Leif Helland, Lauren Langlois, Alya Manzart, James Pham, Niharika Senapati, Tara Soh, composition, sound designer Marcel Wierck, set design Michael Hankin, lighting Niklas Pajanti, costumes Shio Otani; The Malthouse Theatre, March 15–23; dancemassive.com.au

Spoiler alert. in arguing for the cogency of Skeleton the last two paragraphs of this review reveal details of the work’s ending.
The Editors.

ACCIDENTS APPARENTLY HAPPEN IN THREES. IN DANCER-CHOREOGRAPHER LARISSA MCGOWAN’S SKELETON, A DANCE THEATRE REVERIE-CUM-NIGHTMARE IN WHICH THE FRAGILITY OF THE HUMAN SKELETON IS SUBJECTED TO INSTRUMENTS OF POPULAR CULTURE (SKATEBOARDS, BMX BIKES, HIGH HEELS, BASEBALL BATS, ACTION FILMS AND NOISE-REDUCING HEADPHONES), ACCIDENT SCENES ARE CYCLICALLY REVISITED WITH INCREASING INTENSITY.

It’s important to point out that Skeleton is emphatically not in the same mould as, say, Branch Nebula’s Concrete and Bone Sessions (RT113); it is not built on the virtuosic manipulation of skateboards or BMX bikes. In Skeleton these and other cultural objects are rendered utterly iconic—chalk white fetishes, as they are in the works of visual artist Ricky Swallow, one of McGowan’s inspirers. As human scale black boxes-cum-screens automatically crisscross the stage they deposit these items on which we rest our gaze. First we see a skateboard, and then, in another pass, a man frozen in time, tilted forward on the board. Shortly we see him roll out, in slow motion, from a black box in a damaging tumble accompanied by the sound of an almighty crash rising out of Jethro Woodward’s dynamic, pop culture saturated score.

With other accidents we sometimes see the damage first. The performance opens with McGowan struggling, eloquently, to rise from the floor. Later we’ll see versions of the accident in a work where the order of cause and effect is not always obeyed, heightening the sense of obsessive reflection on a traumatic moment.

The images of the man and skateboard are typically punctuated by others in a world where people appear to be ephemeral and replaceable. At worst they relive their accidents. A man (Louis Rankin) wearing large white headphones, is hit violently on three different occasions by a rushing passerby. More than that, he disappears into a black box only to immediately reappear without the headphones but still locked into the same head-rolling dance of sonic possession.

A woman (Lisa Griffiths), appears, locked in muscle seizure. McGowan lifts her rigid frame and attempts to manipulate her back into shape. Later we’ll see Griffiths with the bike, folding herself, possibly lovingly, into it in various positions, one of which will become this rigor-mortised condition. We don’t need to see the moment of the accident; everything is conveyed with a grim physical poetry.

This world of gliding black boxes depositing and disappearing humans and objects is scarily fast, as is McGowan’s choreography, but there is a telling, relatively slow and sustained scene that heightens the joint themes of damage and care. To a melancholy strain from Woodrow, Tobiah Booth-Remmers rolls and shapes the rigid Griffiths with increasing aggression, as if irritated by her body’s unresponsiveness. She suddenly softens, grabs his leg; he falters and crumbles. Sitting, she creates a push/pull pieta, drawing him softly into her lap only to repel him and then draw him back. McGowan and Marcus Louend appear, duplicating this image against a cosmic hum, sharp cracks and Woodrow’s sustained melancholy half-melody (which would not have been out of place in Vangelis’ score for Bladerunner). All four struggle ineffectually to rise.

Between these darker episodes there are lighter ones which emphasise popular culture’s invitations to risk-taking and thrill-seeking—a context of perpetual danger, frequent deaths and heroic inviolability. Dancers become action heroes and villains or their bodies mutate into monstrous forms accompanied by animal roars. These are fun, amplified by the score’s plundering of soundtracks and computer gaming. But they’re not as frightening as a man swinging a baseball bat at a woman. The climax of this recurrent image has one of the men striking McGowan with the bat: shattering, it’s revealed to be a sculpted object. Here it’s the perpetrator we watch: unable to shake free the handle of the bat, so much is it a part of him, he succumbs to a mad dance of possession until finally flinging it into the upstage grid.

It’s the final stage of Skeleton where the work, after too many action scenes, achieves the thematic fruition that McGowan and co-director Sam Haren were doubtless aiming for with the completion of the ‘damage and care’ motif and now an evocation of not just the breaking of bones, but also the smashing of icons. We see the front wheel of the BMX shatter into plaster—this at last is Griffiths’ accident. The skateboard appears, shockingly, to crack of its own accord. The high heeled shoe, so delicately approached and negotiated by McGowan rolling, turning and slipping into it, crumbles beneath her. It’s as if, a la the dromology (the science or ‘logic’ of speed) of Paul Virilio, each of these instruments (they are all technologies—even the bat offers prosthetic reach) incorporates its own accident, damaging itself and its user. Louis Rankin, though, reminds us that the skeleton is likewise a piece of fragile technology as a rush of plaster pieces tumble from his t-shirt. After a final burst of violent energy the dancers, left only with the culture of fight, all fall down.

I first saw Skeleton at this year’s Adelaide Festival. Seeing it again, I enjoyed it even more if doubtful about the extent of the action scenes and uncertain of their full significance. If McGowan is as wise as Garry Stewart—she performed for many years with his Australian Dance Theatre, becoming his assistant choreographer—she will, with Haren, continue to develop Skeleton. There’s no doubt that McGowan’s choreography reflects Stewart’s in its speed, precision and the melding of dance and other movement forms, and with a focus on ideas. This, her first major work, reveals intelligence, thematic integrity and a potent sense of theatre magic, if at times the desire to amuse risks undercutting Skeleton’s seriousness, expressed most strongly in the ambivalence portrayed concerning our attitude to the pain of others—it’s meaninglessness in action films, and the tension between concern and denial in reality, yielding even cruelty.

The dancers are superb, the design innovative (without being hi-tech: two stage hands manage the boxes from inside), the lighting especially deft (given the demands of the boxes) and the sound richly apt and, towards the end, much more than that. And the modelling of the objects is a delight.

What do the black screens/boxes represent beyond clever stage technology? Like the upstage wall they are neatly gridded. They move in fixed trajectories, fast and slow. They appear to be automatons. Like digital devices they deliver a ceaseless flow of images new, reworked and appropriated; like humble versions of the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, they play with time and perception. As chaotic as the world of the internet can appear it nonetheless comprises often rigid networks and grids (including the machinations of corporatised popular culture) against which we act out our fragile lives and suffer their accidents.

McGowan sees Skeleton as a reflection on growing up in the 1980s with the cultural objects that possessed a generation, and their implications for the body, and presumably the psyche given that Skeleton is about more than broken bones (see interview). The design of Skeleton allows McGowan and her collaborators to replay and review, cut and paste the pleasures and traumas of youth with a three-dimensionality and physical and lo-tech immediacy still beyond the reach of digital media. The Skeleton team have made an analog machine for reflection, albeit one with all the speed and rapid cutting of its digital peers.

Choreographer Lee Serle in conversation with Keith Gallasch about P.O.V presented at Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, as part of Dance Massive 2013.

FIVE DAYS IN AT DANCE MASSIVE WITH SEVEN WORKS UNDER THE BELT, THOUGHTS INEVITABLY TURN TO EMERGING THEMES.

Gudirr, Gudirr aside, social issues have made way for more conceptual investigations: Stephanie Lake’s experiment in emotional mathematics (Dual); Antony Hamilton’s study in negative space (Black Study 1 & 2); Lee Serle’s provocative play with the viewer’s point of reference (P.O.V); Natalie Abbott’s attempt to shift our perception of time (Physical Fractals) and Larissa McGowan’s skeletal choreography (Skeleton). To these we now add Ashley Dyer’s meditation on the motion of smoke in Life Support.

In each of these works the sensory apparatus of the audience is primary. In Dual a good memory for movement will enhance your pleasure; in Black Study 1 & 2, you will be aided by 20-20 vision; not surprisingly, the experience of P.O.V is linked to your feel for the best seat; Physical Fractals tests your capacity for endurance while randomly depriving you of sight and turning up the audio till it literally threatens to clout you.

At the same time, there’s a distinct demand for heavy lifting from the dancers at Dance Massive who are required to subject their bodies to all sorts of extremes. Small wonder that over at the National Dance Forum facilitators have been prodding the artists assembled to answer the question, “Why dance?”

Ashley Dyer’s Life Support is an intriguing work that while ostensibly focussing on an elemental phenomenon, like Natalie Abbott’s Physical Fractals, also offers insights into the capacities for endurance from both performer and audience.

At the outset we are asked to elect one among us to act on our behalf to end the performance we are about to witness. In our case, the choice is between a young man who saved someone from drowning and a woman who saw her suffering boyfriend through the flu. A quick show of hands for the boy wonder, an OHS warning, oxygen canisters all round and we confidently enter the performative arena.

What transpires was apparently inspired in part for Ashley Dyer by the sight of a nurse taking a break for a cigarette outside a hospital. Standing in for the nurse, performer Tony Osborne seated in the centre of the room rolls and lights up a cigarette. Those of us who remember the days when this apparently innocent ritual combined mindfulness with impaired respiration are momentarily nostalgic. These days we worry at the mere sight of any actor required to smoke. The vapour from the cigarette is transformed into elegant rings generated not by the smoker but by a technician circling him in the dark. Though the apparatus is awkward, the effect is mesmerising. The performer moves through a sequence of poses, but is now much less interesting to us than everything that is happening around him. Smoke circles drift above his head or around his body and wobble towards us. Large and small they dance for a moment and then crash into Osborne’s head or dissolve in air. The circles are joined by bubbles filled with smoke that give us more joy as they bounce and break, emptying their curly contents.

All this playful pleasure takes a dark turn as an assistant places a box around the performer and slowly wraps it in plastic. As this is happening, we note the play of smoke across the floor is now a flood and that the stuff is also seeping over the top of the doors to the space. The box is now bright white with smoke.

Some in the audience are beginning to feel uneasy. One shouts to the performer “Are you okay?” to which there is, of course, no answer. That would be breaking the code. Like watching an escape artist in a circus, most acknowledge there’s smoke and mirrors involved. Some urge our audience representative to intervene. A show of hands confirms the desire of the bulk of us to see what happens next. What actually happens is some possibly unnecessary drama as Osborne hacks his way out of the box with a knife (perhaps the nurse forgot he had pocketed that scalpel from the last theatre he was in?) to land naked and foetal on the floor, then leave.

Our punishment for staring down this moment of torture is to be tortured ourselves as a false wall in the space is driven slowly and inexorably towards us. Again, we know that there’s a limit to what can be done to us as guests of Dancehouse, so aside from the claustrophobic impulse kicking in, we’re not too concerned—although the sound of oxygen cannisters being activated is disturbing. Having stared down the wall, there’s a sense of triumph and the mood lightens accordingly when a strange nippled mechanism puffing out more smoke rings and, bizarrely, reggae music, drops from the ceiling. In the end, it’s boredom with this bouncing toy that drives us to collectively call it quits.

Ashley Dyer’s desire, among other things, was to establish a place for people to watch the diverting properties of smoke. The work he’s created is indeed wonderful to watch. The confrontation that emerges from other elements of the performance that Dyer has injected lies in its testing of our intimate knowledge of theatrical convention and our reaction to what it represents. While we know that performer and audience are never really in danger (well, maybe that cigarette that Tony Osborne smokes or did we detect a herbal aroma?), what is actually called into question in this experiment is our collective capacity for distraction while ever-escalating and dastardly depictions of torture play out before us.

MATTHEW DAY IS ALMOST CERTAINLY THE BEST OF A NEW GENERATION OF AUSTRALIAN CHOREOGRAPHERS. HE EXPLODED ONTO THE DANCE LANDSCAPE IN 2010, BRINGING AN ORIGINAL AND FULLY DEVELOPED POETICS SEEMINGLY OUT OF NOWHERE. HIS SERIES OF EXTREMELY SIMPLE, BUT CONCEPTUALLY RIGOROUS WORKS HAS CAPTIVATED THE AUDIENCE, AND AUSTRALIAN DANCE IS ALREADY IMMENSELY RICHER FOR IT.

Intermission is the final part of a trilogy that began with Thousands, in 2010, and continued with Cannibal, in 2011. In each part, Day explored the empathetic effect of absolutely basic movement: first stillness, then pulsating repetition. In Intermission, the focus is on undulating, rhythmic sway. The works are colour-coded: Thousands was gold, Cannibal pure white.

Intermission is black. We enter, one by one, a black box. A human figure is barely visible on a darkened stage: the lights are on us. The lights slowly dim, plunging us into a few minutes of pitch black. When the stage lights up, Day stands still, in casual black clothes: jeans, sneakers, gloves, and black masking tape where a line of skin might show between the cuffs.

As James Brown’s soundscape of a single droning, thundering sub-bass line sends pulsating tremors through our bodies, a sound more felt than heard, Day begins to almost imperceptibly rock left to right. His micro-shuffle grows, reaching shoulders, elbows, neck, arms, knees, until kinetic waves are flowing through Day’s entire body. This is not exactly choreography: rather, it is controlled movement. The only betrayal of the performer’s skill and training is in the constancy of rhythm and evenness of gesture: while strenuous, the movement never exhausts the body. The point of these pieces is not to explore endurance or produce exhaustion, but to maintain constancy.

Day’s works do not happen so much on stage as in one’s body as one watches. The real spectacle of these pieces is not in observing and admiring the dancing body, but in observing how being in the shared space with a moving body affects one’s own. The palpable rhythmic waves of kinetic energy emanating from the dancer, dense and tight and unrelenting, gradually build into very strong tension within one’s own body. A fellow spectator confided that during Thousands (an extremely still, slow piece) he felt an irresistible urge to stand up and do something, anything. Day has said elsewhere that he choreographs energetic exchange between performer and spectator: a choreographic situation that cannot exist without an audience. This is a more technical translation of what I try to describe to members of the general public, while queuing for the auditorium, as “it might upset your digestion.” “Should I not have gulped down my dinner?” asks one, half-jokingly. “That’s right,” I answer, very seriously.

Intermission, however, is comparatively light on one’s body. The pulsating, wave-like physicality that Day employs creates a light, but literal, hypnosis, a wandering focus, not dissimilar to boredom, but with a liberating lining of calmness. Our feeling of time and spatial proportion blurs into a drifting vagueness of perception. Suddenly, Day has shifted through the space, drawing ever-larger circles, one minute rocking a step at a time. I am light-headed, if not quite dizzy. At one point, I wonder if there is a way to test this effect, like in stage show hypnosis: how many of us would quack if asked? Would that make dramaturgical sense? Our bodies are tense, but there is a relief in the repetition: like jogging or disco dancing, this is a relaxing tension.

Meanwhile, Matthew Day’s rocking has morphed multiple times: from a sideways push/pull to a figure-eight arms loop, then back to a simple rocking with his head tilted back; shifts that feel both momentous and imperceptible. As usual, the eye perceives reference where there might be none: a preparation for strenuous activity; the rocking of anxiety or stress; repetitive industrial labour; mystical dancing; the liberating and oppressive capacities of a low-frequency repeat cycle. But Day channels no emotion, just blank focus, a mind merged with motion. When the work ends, it feels like any time at all might have passed.

To fully appreciate Matthew Day’s work, it is necessary to understand just how fundamentally it breaks not simply from modern dance, but from the full canon of modernist thought: the imperative of equating being with movement (not simply forward, but all kinetic acts of purposeful movement), a constant shedding of present for the future, the Cartesian individualism that posits the thinking subject as tragically severed from the world, and what Teresa Brennan (Exhausting Modernity, 2000) calls “the uniform denial of the transmission of affect.” In its small way, by slowing down time and expanding space, by creating an affective community, by rejecting spectacle for co-presence, Intermission is a demonstration of another way of being in the world, of empathetic being together.

Dance Massive, Dancehouse: Intermission, choreographer, performer Matthew Day, dramaturgy Martin del Amo, sound designer James Brown, lighting designer Travis Hodgson; Dancehouse, Melbourne, March 17-19; http://dancemassive.com.au

Dalisa Pigram in conversation with Keith Gallasch about Gudirr Gudirr presented by Arts House & Marrugeku for Dance Massive 2013.

ACCORDING TO MICHEL FOUCAULT, DISSECTION OFFERED MODERN MEDICINE A CERTAIN CONCEPTION OF THE BODY, THE RESULT OF OPENING IT UP TO THE SCALPEL. FOUCAULT’S POINT IS THAT SLICING THE BODY IN THIS WAY CREATED A MODE OF THOUGHT. SANDRA PARKER’S THE RECORDING MAKES ITS OWN CUT INTO THE FIELD OF FILM AND MOVEMENT.

The room is a tableau of ladders, lights, microphones, cases, monitors and screens. It is a mise en scène. We are inside a set, in the middle of something. The lighting designer (Jenny Hector), composer (Steve Heather) and audio visual operator (Chris Wenn) are visible, working to the side. House lights are up. It is as if these people have been at it for days. We are not there.

Three performers wander the set, absorbed in whatever it is that they are up to. A series of travails follows. Scripts flutter, lighting is positioned, ready for an enactment of sorts: a rehearsal or maybe the real deal. The ensuing action is projected onscreen. No words are spoken. Contextual cues suggest that there is a drama within and between these ‘actors.’

Each person has a solo: the face in close-up onscreen while we watch the body perform. An emotional tenor is expressed in the torso, gestures, postural tableaus, arms and legs which incline this way and that. Our perspective on the performer before us is rather different to what we see on screen. It is as if two events are happening, not one.

Fiona Cameron looks directly at the camera, almost without affect. We have to search for meaning through corporeal cues. Trevor Patrick’s face likewise betrays little of his movement. Is this what people are like? Deleuze writes of the face as distinct from the head. The face is composed. It is a social and cultural product, whereas the head is open to a plethora of forces. The head deconstructs the face. The Recording offers a view somewhere between these two conceptions: the faces that we see on the screen are not naturalistic. They are evacuated, not of thought exactly, but something of the everyday has been taken away. They offer themselves to the camera, to the audience, a cipher to be analysed. The face becomes a head.

What happens in the body is key. We, the audience are privy to a multiplicity of gestures, the serial embodiment of feelings and interactive dramas which we see in the flesh. A collage of dialogue from crime shows is played. It is fulsome, complete, in contrast to the pared back action we observe.

The trio interact explosively. Two people land on the floor, one upon the other. The third (Phoebe Robinson) gesticulates towards them. Audio visual operator Chris Wenn speaks out, offering direction which has been notably absent in this film set, calling for a repeat of the action. We watch Fiona Cameron fall and fall and fall, initially underneath Trevor Patrick but later alone. Finally, we see Phoebe Robinson frame the event with her indicative arms, pulses of emotion. This happens again and again. She is the child of the event, watching an enigmatic primal scene.

Unlike Hollywood film, the narrative drama between these three people is not the centre of the action, which is displaced, split up and distributed between several nodes: the perspective of the screen, the atmosphere generated by the music, the bodies beyond the screen, their distal interiority, and finally, the space between all these elements in their differences.

The trace of The Recording is not that which is preserved on tape. It is the impression left on us. Scraping back the usual surfaces of cinema, The Recording offers a view of the body flying beneath the radar of cinematic visibility. This is a world of quiet intensities and silent behaviours, a place where feelings originate. Parker allows for these alternative depths, she seeks them out. Although not part of the everyday, they are its alter ego, the other side of familiarity. If mainstream film is a place of recognition, The Recording is not. It offers a corporeal uncanny carefully constructed from the bare bones of the film studio.

SOME DISCLAIMERS ARE IN ORDER. I UNINTENTIONALLY SAW 247 DAYS AS A PREVIEW PERFORMANCE. I SAT NEXT TO THE CHOREOGRAPHER AS SHE SCRIBBLED NOTES INTO HER SMALL NOTEPAD, AND FELT AN ENORMOUS PRESSURE TO READ THE POTENTIAL OF THE WORK GENEROUSLY. TO MAKE MATTERS SLIGHTLY MORE COMPLICATED, IT WAS MY FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH THE CHOREOGRAPHER’S WORK.

Anouk van Dijk, the new artistic director of Chunky Move, has called this her first ‘real’ Australian choreography. Among the very few clarificatory program notes, van Dijk writes “247 days is the time it takes for a choreographic work to gestate.” 247 is also the number of days she has spent in Australia. It is, thus, a choreography made entirely out of Australia, its effect on van Dijk’s body, psyche, heart. (There is a kernel of an old idea here, something I first heard said in Agnes Varda’s film The Gleaners and I (2000): our body constantly regenerates all its cells, and so, every so often, we become new people, even to ourselves.)

I had not seen any of Anouk van Dijk’s choreographies—neither in Australia, nor in Europe —and consequently had no ability to tell the Australian cells apart from the European ones. All I knew was that van Dijk’s Chunky Move debut, An Act of Now [RT112] explored human connection, and that there was a Tanztheater collaboration with Falk Richter in Schaubühne’s repertoire titled TRUST [RT95]. It felt like a letdown, therefore, to watch a choreography unfold thematically into quite literally the only thing I expected: trust and human connection. [See Philipa Rothfield’s interview with van Dijk.]

Tara Soh, James Pham, Lauren Langlois, Leif Helland, Niharika Senapati, Alya Manzart, 247 Days, Chunky Move

Six 20-something multiracial dancers—a welcome departure from the pervasive all-whiteness of the Chunky Move ensemble I had come to expect—delve deeply into their bodies to articulate the physicality of four distinct relationships between the individual and their social surroundings: freedom, loneliness, constraint, connection. The set is a semi-circular full-height mirror, broken into segments so that, curiously, not only is the audience not reflected back to itself, but the dancers often have no reflection either. If ever there was an accurate articulation of finding oneself in a foreign place, unable to establish a relationship with one’s surroundings that would provide legible feedback on identity, here it was. There is no easy mirroring back, when one is a stranger: an epistemological aloneness develops. Within the set’s twisting, opening, folding into screens or dressing-room cubicles, the dancers veer between obsessive self-analysis and chasing their own, fleeting image.

The work is peppered with voice: from inarticulate cursing to a soundscape-forming cacophony, to first-person confessionals. The entire tradition of Tanztheater forces me to understand this as self-expression, not performance, and I was frustrated by the banality of so many utterances (“When I feel lonely, I…”), while the more potentially interesting ones were so often drowned to illegibility in polyphony. A number of points are progressively woven together: belonging (what happens when your family leaves Australia, and you stay?), coming out (and the negotiation of individual, familial and social self), and glimpses of questions that made sense to me, but not necessarily to the work. Are we attracted to people who look like us, because we want to be them, not stricto sensu love them? The naivete was grating, yet fitting: the more one tries to approach a foreign environment—be it a new country, or a new erotic community—with openness, the more one is willing to be infected with influence, the more one reverts to the somewhat idiotic ontological uncertainty of adolescence.

James Pham, Leif Helland, Lauren Langlois, Niharika Senapati, Niharika Senapati, Alya Manzart, 247 Days, Chunky Move

Much of the movement is contactless, shifting from shielding invisible constraints to self-propelled freedom, to narcissistic attempts to please the mirror. Van Dijk’s own philosophy of counter-technique, a training of the body to lose its upright axis and open itself to imbalance, subjects these unheld, uncaught, unembraced bodies to so much vulnerability. The choreography, however, comes together most satisfyingly in duets and trios, in which Van Dijk’s emphasis on bodies’ openness to external force is at its most articulate. One phenomenal male duet pairs a strong, controlling body (Leif Helland) with a rolling, soft one (James Pham). As Helland embraces and drops, folds and envelops Pham, moving purposefully outside his own centre of gravity, something deep and fundamental about our need to be held, supported and empowered through care shines through. (One wonders, additionally, given the times we live in, where are the same-sex duets in contemporary dance?)

247 Days ends on a weak note. Given the strength with which many works in Dance Massive have turned stage sound into sound design, I hoped for a more careful integration of voice into the work. At times 247 Days left me cold, but when it worked, it was powerful and, after all, I was watching a preview.

Stephanie Lake in conversation with Keith Gallasch about her work Dual, co-presented with Arts House, for Dance Massive 2013.

P.O.V., IS, FOR THE MOST PART, VERY SATISFYING TO WATCH. SERLE —ONE OF THOSE DANCERS MELBOURNE KNOWS WELL FROM REGULAR APPEARANCES AT NEXT WAVE AND IN THE WORKS OF LUCY GUERIN INC AND CHUNKY MOVE—DEVELOPED P.O.V IN NEW YORK UNDER THE MENTORSHIP OF TRISHA BROWN, AS A PART OF THE ROLEX MENTOR AND PROTEGE ARTS INITIATIVE.

I have a personal liking for New York contemporary: I adore its rigorous, yet unpretentious simplicity. Across the board, it possesses a humility and matter-of-factness that are equally disarming in Europe and in Australia, and it is somehow able to withstand a cynical as well as a philistine eye. By whittling away all ornament, but never getting too bogged down in illustrating esoteric texts (as has happened in Europe), it is as if the American dancers never quite bush-bashed their way through tradition all the way into a settled, comfortable arrogance, but remained suspended in a state of focused, ambitious play. This approach appears in Melbourne dance in visible traces, through echoes of training and influence, in the works of BalletLab and Luke George. Unavoidably, P.O.V. too has arrived back from the US seeped in Trisha Brown’s aesthetic and ethic, clearly as the work of a young artist shaped heavily by a master builder.

Serle seats (some of) the audience on 36 swivel stools that dot the stage in orderly intervals. Four dancers—Serle, Lily Paskas, Kristy Ayre, James Andrews—travel between them, through the grid of aisles. It becomes immediately clear that where you sit will determine your experience—I felt a none-too-subtle nudge in my semiotic ribs—and, having arrived too late for a coveted stage seat, I perched on top of the seating bank, getting a nice, rounded overview of the piece. (It is to the show’s credit that every reviewer of P.O.V. so far has specified where they sat.)

There are three distinct parts to the choreography. In the first, the four dancers traverse the space between people in an orderly formation, performing a mesmerising score—very Brown—of simple, pendular movements that gently roll their weight up and down the aisles. At times, the choreography looks like tightly stitched-together pieces of athletic sports, with segments of continuous movement blending into one another in surprising ways: the momentum-building squat of a distance runner morphs into the swirl of the discus or javelin thrower, or into the oblique leap of a high jumper. Sequences keep unfolding instead of halting and turning, the dancers’ formation growing in mathematical complexity, while the spectators swivel their chairs to watch. It looks like the patterns of pedestrians in a city; it also looks like a complex collage of film footage from Olympics documentaries and newsreels. It is utterly beautiful in the way of abstract flows.

In the second part, the dancers step out of performer aloofness and approach the audience members, increasingly intrusively. Some are stared at, some get a surprise massage, one is briefly blindfolded, another has her feet washed, one is shown something on a tablet, some are taken offstage, one is given wine and a chat with all of the dancers. Ayre gives a set of headphones to a woman, takes another set, and performs a little private dance (funny, almost like a parody of a lap dance) to the music only they can hear. Serle repeats this with another audience member, but his dance involves a great deal of animal poses. Paskas stretches herself gently over a man. As audience interaction, this is not so much about letting other people into the performance—there is no ceding of control, ever—as it is about multiplying, unweaving the energy lines between the stage and the audience. The main effect is not for a multitude of spectators to have a meaningful individual experience (they do not), but to complicate the audience focus from a straight phalanx of one-way looks to a knot, a jumble of sight lines with different levels of energy, stress, comfort, feeling of inclusion or exclusion, and amusement.

The second part is in some ways the weakest, because it relies on trivial tropes of audience engagement: singing to them, touching them slightly awkwardly, as well as having conversations designed only to look like conversations from far away. It takes part three to demonstrate that something more has been achieved. The dancers return to their dance, their path through the swivel-stool grid now circular, simplified. Their movements have become smaller, gentler, introverted—and also more twee, wristy: more Lucy Guerin than Trisha Brown—but the most noticeable shift is in how our attention has softened. The barriers separating the dancers from the audience have glaringly thinned, the energy in the room is completely different. Like a street after an incident—a burst pipe, a found pet—has made us all talk to each other.

P.O.V. is clearly an apprentice’s graduating piece. The title sums up its exploratory horizons, and it reproduces Brown’s body language without showing how Serle is a creative mind of his own. Where it deviates, it pulls back in the influences and mannerisms of Obarzanek and Guerin, and chooses easy paths, such as humorous tropes. However, for as long as it is able to resist its own striving to busy itself up with features, for as long as it can stay disciplined and clear-headed, P.O.V. is immensely satisfying.

TWO VERY DIFFERENT BODIES, QUITE DIFFERENTLY ATTIRED, TWO SOLOS, SEEMINGLY IDENTICAL, AND A THIRD DANCE BRINGING THE TWO PERFORMERS TOGETHER COMPRISE CHOREOGRAPHER STEPHANIE LAKE’S DIALECTICAL DUAL, A RIVETING PHYSICAL AND AURAL EXPLORATION OF AFFINITY AND DIFFERENCE.

The exactness of the movement in Dual evokes loss of control. In consecutive solos, two humans (Alisdair Macindoe, Sara Black)—they could be animals or trees or wind-whipped newspaper—are buffeted by the unseen but intensely audible forces of Robin Fox’s score. These range from subtle to brutal: bird calls, scratched guitar strings, a gentle Kodaly-ish ostinato, a raging, eerily synthetic storm, heart-palpitating thumps, rushes of industrial sound and a sublimely haunting, oscillating, ever escalating organ tone. The bodies register the impact, vibrating furiously, lurching, bouncing, spinning off-kilter, jolted, falling, slumping, spastically discombobulated. These involuntarily spasms are occasionally countered by determined actions (evasive gestures, vocal noise spat across the traverse stage), but at whom or what are they directed?

For all the suggestiveness of the choreography and the sound score, the solos of Dual are fascinatingly abstract, yielding an immersive poetry of reaction and instability witnessed at close quarters. As well, for all their equivalence, the solos are tonally quite different: Alistair Macindoe’s solid frame and everyday clothing, Black’s lean physiognomy and dance rehearsal wear; a more abrasive score for Macindoe, guitar and bird calls for Black (although they share major sonic motifs); and the distinctive essence of each dancer in and beyond the choreography—Macindoe’s firm, rooted gracefulness and sudden lightness, Black’s elegant, arching sinuousness and quivering vibrancy. These differences yield strikingly discrete solos from similar material, preparing us for what comes next.

Macindoe performs first, then Black. Now the two stand side by side in a rare moment of stillness before solos mutate into duet, where hitherto unidentified forces become increasingly literal without ever quite losing the strangeness of the initial abstraction. The two bodies draw closer and closer, more often in tension and conflict than in intimacy—the unseen forces in the solos now made visibly human, and inevitably, given the tonalities delineated above and the casting of a male and a female dancer, an inescapable aura of heterosexual co-dependency emerges, replete with a final image of, at last, full embrace and apparent resolution.

Without touching, the dancers exert enormous pressure on each other as if by emotional osmosis, so that when touch comes it is electric. Black trips Macindoe up with repeated kicks from behind; Macindoe holds Black to the floor, pushing down on hand, foot and hip and she slowly attempts to rise, reminding us of the deep waves of movement undulating through her body in the solo.

Compounding this complicating togetherness is Robin Fox’s melding of his scores into one for the duet, a strange aural experience that heightens the difference between acoustic and electronic elements (and between the performers) without undercutting the power of the major motifs which suggest the personae of the dancers suffer the same emotional condition. Same, same but different.

Despite the moment in which the pair toss identifiable sounds at each other, Dual is revealed in its third act to be about embodied, unspoken emotional entanglement. Now we look back to the solos that comprise the first two acts and see them for the suffering and bewilderment that they are in a work that is not dance theatre but oscillates finally between the abstract and the literal, making poetry of pain.

Lake’s choreography and the dancers’ execution of it is bracing with its wealth of quickfire detail and powerful recurrent images—evanescent while articulately shaped, adding greatly to Dual’s pervasive sense of lone vulnerability and fragile, raw mutuality. This collaboration between Stephanie Lake and Robin Fox has yielded a memorable, visceral work, at once strange and familiar and brilliantly performed.

SKELETON IS A STRUGGLE BETWEEN STRENGTH AND FRAGILITY. LIKE ITS NAMESAKE, THE PRODUCTION ITSELF IS HARD BUT BRITTLE. HARD IN THE DEMANDS IT PLACES ON THE ATHLETIC DANCERS, BRITTLE IN ITS UNDERNOURISHED OVERALL VISION.

The work draws inspiration from Ricky Swallow’s sculptures, specifically those involving skulls and 80s paraphernalia. This is a tricky point to leap from. A vital feature of Swallow’s art is his ironic use of monumentality—making the unimportant extravagantly important, the practical completely impractical. It is a feature that is, to a certain extent, predicated on his medium, which is static and timeless. The theatre—kinetic and ephemeral—is a different beast entirely.

Nevertheless, Larissa McGowan and Sam Haren’s subsequent vision for Skeleton is of an “archaeological puzzle” that fleshes out the human frame with the muscle of pop culture. Unfortunately, the skeleton and the muscle end up running parallel. McGowan’s choreography carves out the physical concreteness of the skeleton in the present tense, whereas the pop culture exists merely as artefact, never truly coming alive. These artefacts include an all-white BMX that directly quotes Swallow’s famous 1999 work “Peugeot Taipan, Commemorative Model (Discontinued Line).” Lisa Griffiths’ intricate dance with the bike is expert in its execution but the interaction is not affecting, for her or for us. The archaeology of culture is not merely the digging up of urns, it is also the contextualising of the urn. And, though the props are skateboards and stilettos and the sound design is littered with Nintendo bleeps and horror movie howls, the work as a whole fails to build a context for these references, stripping them of meaning.

McGowan’s choreography bears the hallmarks of her time with Australian Dance Theatre. It is fast, explosive and at its best when the speed and forcefulness catch the viewer by surprise. Softness is not part of the vocabulary, nor should it be, given the subject matter. McGowan extends the dancers’ bodies as though from within them, the internal physical mechanics becoming apparent. And there seems to be a recurring motif of bodily disassociation, where the intention of the mind and the action of the body run counter to one another. We see this in Lewis Rankin’s frenzied solo, in Griffiths’ suddenly stiffened muscles. The choreographic language is rooted in the mechanical and, importantly, it is firmly internal.

The dynamics between the dancers are similarly mechanical. There is no engagement, nor relationship between them beyond emotionless grappling. This isolates the dancers from one another, creating spatial pockets of action rather than a stage full of tension, love, contempt or any other of a host of intangibles that can imbue the space between people with meaning. This, in itself, is not necessarily a negative, but the isolation here feeds into the larger, more crucial problem of the show’s parallel themes not interacting.

Skeleton promises most when it is at its most playful. Jonathon Oxlade’s design is perhaps too rigorously geometrical but the black screens that whisk across the stage are a brilliant creation. Silent and smooth, the screens deposit dancers and props in place or clean them up on their way out. They are a physical manifestation of a film edit, all the more appealing for their simplicity. Their use is effective as a way of quickly altering the space, but their potential is most apparent when reinventing images as though by magic. In these instances, the pop film language that the screens nod to is given its due weight but more could have been made of these opportunities.

Similarly, Jethro Woodward’s sound design is often a remarkable assault of mashed-up film foley sounds. The splatter, the gore, the piercing screams are punched together so quickly that they become their own delicious music. However, as they lose their distinctness they also lose some of their ironic humour and the chance to juxtapose contrary or incongruous references is also missed. Occasionally, the engagement between the dancers’ bodies and the score approaches the well-worn path of fighting to sound effects (recall the martial arts scene of Chunky Move’sTense Dave, 2003). McGowan steers away from that course for the most part, but the result feels like a compromise rather than a strong alternative.

In the end, the real strengths of Skeleton—the internal electricity of McGowan’s choreography, the dedication of the dancers, the magic of the black screens—cannot sustain a full-length show. The bones are willing but the flesh is weak.

Dance Massive, Malthouse: Skeleton, choreographer Larissa McGowan, directors Sam Haren, Larissa McGowan, performers Tobiah Booth-Remmers, Lisa Griffiths, Marcus Louend, Larissa McGowan, Lewis Rankin, set, costume design Jonathon Oxlade, lighting Bosco Shaw, Bluebottle, composer: Jethro Woodward, producer Freya Waterson, Insite Arts, Beckett Theatre, Malthouse, Melbourne, March 14 – 23; http://dancemassive.com.au/

SEEN FROM ON HIGH, HUMAN LIFE CAN SEEM ALMOST ABSTRACT. PERHAPS THAT’S WHY THE GREEK GODS WERE SO UNCARING. IT’S DIFFERENT UP CLOSE. EVEN MORESO WHEN YOU’RE IN THE THICK OF IT.

Lee Serle looked down upon the busy streets of New York, musing: “What if things were different? What if people stopped going about their daily business and dallied with each other?” Not likely in 21st century New York, but this is art, not life.

The performance space is filled with black stools forming clear lines. We could play tic tac toe. The rest of the seating is lined up at either end of the performance space, gently inclining towards the stools. Audience members scramble to gain a spot in the midst of the action, spinning and watching each other with glee. We are the lucky ones, the anticipation is palpable.

Four performers dance along runways created between the rows of stools. Their movement is very Trisha Brown (Serle’s mentor, courtesy of a Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts initiative). Lines of motion, open jointed, translate from feet through to hip socket, fast shifts of weight, unhindered by excessive muscular tension. Some movements begin at the distal edges of the limbs, others with the torso. Bodies give way to gravity, slap the floor, then move on. No rest, just motion back and forth.

As time goes by, lap pool lines turn into curves, circling the stools that mark the end of each row. Dancers team up with each other, forming partnerships on the run, fast but free. The people on the stools must choose: whether to let the movement flow past them without following it or to keep their eyes on the dancer. I began by swivelling my seat so as to follow the dancing but then I let the movement occupy my peripheral vision, feeling less compelled to watch the detail of the movement than to allow the experience of space and bodies passing by to wash over me. There is a certain emphasis on the perceptual agency of the audience, not only to choose how to watch but to reflect upon the impact of that choosing.

A lean backwards for the dancers becomes a fall becomes a run forwards. Some bodies are more able than others to let go enough to fall off centre. It all happens very fast but the transmission of forces in this kind of work requires an openness in the joints to allow instead the directional tendencies of the choreography to occur. There is also a muscularity in the arm swings and especially the leg lifts which leaves the group panting on the floor. This marks a break in the action. The performers get up, wipe away rivulets of sweat and mosey on off. They are human now.

What follows is a series of one-on-one interactions between the performers and those audience members who are sitting on the stools. It begins with an approach, whispers no one else can hear. A variety of more theatrical events ensue; a back massage, a foot spa, a slow waltz, a promenade around the room. Each interaction is closely watched by the audience. Some moves are played for laughs. Dancers are good at exaggerated disco dancing: Kristy Ayres performs for an audience member, each wearing headphones, sharing the music. One of the nicest interactions occurs between Lily Paskas and an audience participant. Continually asking whether her weight feels okay, Paskas leans, drapes and pours herself onto her seated accomplice, who participates in this duet without artifice. The result is quite beautiful.

The drama and comedy of this section has ultimately to end. Somehow the performers gather themselves to return to their performance personas, intentionally impersonal. The compass of their bodies rotates, achieved through face and arms, spinal spirals, legs and feet incrementally shifting position. Their true bearing rotates at an even pace as limbs and torso work together to achieve their goal. Life returns to the grid.

Audience participation is nothing new. What P.O.V. highlights is the perspectival nature of perception and the ways in which this differs from situation to situation. This isn’t just a question of proximity. People became emotionally charged, especially when the subject of the interactions. They lit up, they were uncomfortable, thrilled, amused, bemused.

P.O.V. is an experiential piece, for its audience rather than itself. In that sense, it was rewarded by its reception, by the laughter and the ripples of attention. There’s nothing like getting the audience on side. Even better if they’re in the middle.

DUAL, SAYS CHOREOGRAPHER STEPHANIE LAKE, IS A PUZZLE OR MATHEMATICAL EQUATION WHERE 1 + 1 DOESN’T NECESSARILY EQUAL THE SUM OF ITS PARTS (PROGRAM NOTE). IT ALL SOUNDS A BIT LEFT BRAIN BUT IS ACTUALLY A SIMPLE IDEA—TWO SOLOS WHOSE PERPLEXING PIECES CLICK TOGETHER IN THE THIRD ACT.

Even knowing the premise of the dance, there was a collective moment when the neat synthesis in the third act became apparent. Dual looks at union, what is lost and gained when two become one, or when one and one become two—however you choose to look at it.

Dual seems to play on its phonic proximity to ‘duel’—a combat between two individuals. Pulsing, unrelenting electronic beats set the scene for the first solo, performed by Alisdair Macindoe. The frantic, street-style moves of the opening minutes made me think of a dance battle. Macindoe has seizure-like interactions with the music, shaking violently then switching to perform a break dancing hand glide or an arabesque. The energy required for this solo is on another level—Macindoe displays control amid the blistering and chaotic pace. As he slows down to a piano composition we begin to pick up mime-like gestures, his hands interacting with the invisible.

That invisible element, we later see, is the female soloist Sara Black who displays both grit and a nervy tic in her performance. The string composition that accompanies her piece is discordant and her shoulder rolls and hip thrusts are every bit as tightly wound as in the preceding solo. Though slight, her musculature and her matching Macindoe’s speed and energy skirted associations of yin and yang duality. Initially, I thought the dance would avoid the prescribed male/female strength and weakness ‘coming together.’ There are frequent pauses when Black wears a blank, blinking stare, as though she is trying to make sense of the intangible. Through this strangeness, the solo choreography seems to grant the dancers an overarching individuality unrelated to gender. Then there are times when Black’s rigid, shaking body is akin to a rag doll and there’s a sense of foreboding when the music switches to gun shot drumming.

Robin Fox weaves the beats and strings from the two solos together in the third act. It’s not a perfect marriage; there is still something unsettled and frantic about the combination that begs questions. The physical proximity and constant contact that pervades the third act is immediately heralded with a lift. Black leaps and curls up in Macindoe’s arms. Later she poignantly touches his foot. In her solo, her fingers would have been brushing the air. While the moves of the dancers gain meaning we see their solos lose their surreal and idiosyncratic qualities.

The presence of the formerly absent partner reveals the complete mirroring of roles—Black’s blank staring is now at Macindoe and in this third act, gender plays a more telling role. Black is lying on her stomach, lifting her back or leg off the ground. Macindoe restricts her movements by pushing her body back to the floor. It is a brutal moment without being overtly violent, the movements carefully arranged to steer clear of cliché. Lake presents a story every bit as confusing, fraught and fragile as any relationship; the two sides—a soaring lift or a cruel push back to earth—are presented without her own conclusions weighing in. Never breaking into a duel, the duet is about a push and pull, best exemplified when the dancers stand across from each other taking turns to breathe in and out as though one organism.

WHEN DALISA PIGRAM TAKES A WELL-EARNED BOW AT THE END OF GUDIRR GUDIRR, INVITING A LINE OF COLLABORATORS TO JOIN HER, WE ARE SUDDENLY AWARE OF HER DIMINUTIVE STATURE.

For a solo, this is one BIG performance. Accompanied by video projected onto a corrugated iron wall upstage and a long fishing net suspended from the ceiling, Pigram otherwise fills the space for 60 minutes with her intense presence. Gudirr Gudirr (the words call a warning) is a powerful commentary on life in multi-racial Australia told through the experience of this dancer who has a Malay father and Aboriginal mother and lives and works in the country’s north-west. From time to time, the video reminds us of the locale with at once calming and unsettling images of the place and its people.

In a projection of the text, we’re reminded once more of Australia’s racist history. In 1928 an official informs A. O. Neville, Chief Protector of Aboriginals in Western Australia (1875-1954) that quarter-caste Indigenous people (“quadroons”) will be “useful in replacing Aboriginals” as labour for the industries of the north. For this reason, Broome is exempted from the odious White Australia Policy. Pigram appears in fighting stance then moves on to describe in a mix of Yawuru language, Aboriginal English and vivid gesture a joyous experience of fishing with her family that turns dangerous as they overfill their net and are threatened by a crocodile. Harvesting only what’s needed is just one of the survival lessons learned.

From exuberant recreation, Pigram shifts deftly through a parodic airline steward sequence to a series of multi-faceted choreographies variously expressing frustration, resistance, despair, forbearance and celebration. Contained within a strong and compact body her dance mixes Malaysian martial manoeuvres (Silat)—anchored by a low centre of gravity with extended leg and expressive arms—with stances we have come to know from Indigenous dance—solidly grounded feet, torso and hips suddenly and sharply changing plane and aspect, references to animal movement. Moving easily between these forms—a martial stance is enlivened with a quick, animal flick of the wrist—Pigram displays a light-footed grace and a sharp-eyed focus that holds us keenly on her wavelength.

At other times she is all muscle and strength deploying the acrobatic skills that are part of Marrugeku’s house style. The suspended net is used to map the space in myriad ways. At one point Pigram deploys it as tissu apparatus, hooking her feet into its threads, executing a series of difficult staccato moves through the fabric to end hanging upside down like the day’s haul. Though we’ve seen it so often, we still catch our breath as she falls, relaxing as she playfully swings from the net, sizing us up.

In the program notes, Pigram describes the generation of these shifting gestures and personas as resulting in part from the ‘task-based process’ she embarked on with director and co-choreographer Koen Augustijnen—a regular collaborator on Marrugeku projects who has also worked with Alain Platel’s Les ballets c de la b—and which together they named “The Tide is Turning.” Says Pigram: “I explore the point in my memory where it felt like my community was changing. I interpret this time through a range of ‘movement channels’ inspired by different characters. Following the task to ‘change the channels,’ I am introducing myself, and others from my community, from the inside out. The audience may see what’s inside of me. They may see the issues that I have that exist as inspirations and concerns through the movement of these characters until they are left with just a person before them, with a story.”

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. Mood shifts again as we witness video of young Indigenous boys fighting one another—images they display proudly on Facebook. Pigram is still, facing us directly, silently wringing her hands, and then slapping her own face. In one month alone in 2010, seven young people in Pigram’s community killed themselves, the youngest 13 years old.

The work concludes with projected portraits of relatives and friends who form an important part of Pigram’s community, women and children, elders including a white haired man we’ve seen earlier dancing slowly on the screen, and finally the familiar bearded countenance of cultural advisor on this and other Marrugeku projects, Patrick Dodson. Stephen Pigram’s song provides soothing accompaniment as Dalisa Pigram repeats a sequence of calming hand gestures seen earlier on screen.

Gudirr Gudirr is a truly timely work that should be seen widely. Showing all the signs of careful collaboration from a gifted team it conveys complex experience in the shape of Dalisa Pigram who shows us in the sharply shifting facets of her performance the rich and troubled life of her community and of this country.

ASHLEY DYER’S LIFE SUPPORT TACKLES THE POLITICS OF SMOKE WITH HIGHLY INVENTIVE BRIO. WE ARE TALKING NOT MERELY OF THE PERSONAL POLITICS OF THE BODY AND HEALTH, BUT ALSO THE SOCIETAL POLITICS OF POLLUTION AND CLIMATE CHANGE. NO SMALL FEAT.

The politics begin in the foyer. When we collect our ticket we are asked three questions for which our answers are noted:

1. Are you a smoker? (2 out of 39 respondents said yes)
2. Can you hold your breath for 60 seconds? (29 respondents said yes)
3. Have you ever saved a life? (28 respondents said yes)

The statistics on smoking were inconsequential; the statistics on breath holding were empirically proven to be highly inflated; but the politics lay in the heroic nature of our audience. Two were chosen by the artists to volunteer the nature of their life saving story. Then, having heard the tales of their heroism, we, the citizens of Dancehouse, voted on who would be our leader. They would determine when the show ended—a form of representative audience participation.

In the theatre itself, the work begins with a prolonged scene of a man (Tony Osborne) smoking in a pool of light. It is impossible to escape cliché here: the practiced precision of the rollie; the sensuous intake of breath; the smoke drifting listlessly into the spotlight above; the deliberate poking of the ashtray; the fetishisation itself. One of the few clichés missing seems to be smoke rings. But on that, Dyer is ahead of the game.

Entering with what looks like a small drum, a performer stands behind the smoking man. Tapping, the drum, filled with smoke, exudes perfectly formed smoke rings. Their sticky consistency, perfect curve and persistence through the air draw approving murmurings from the audience but, though the technical achievement and ingenuity of the method are laudable, it is the incurrence of bathos that is most effective. As the smoker adopts various arch poses, the smoke rings break on his head, his fist, they surround him and undercut him, undoing the vanity of his opening scene. Caught in the shafts of light, clusters of rings seem like visions of autoluminescent jellyfish. Thus, despite the bathos, the smoke itself never loses its primal appeal nor its mystery. It is as though Dyer is suggesting: smokers come and go, but smoke itself is eternal.

The magic of smoke and its visual elasticity are perhaps too enchanting. Life Support lags when it too overtly presents smoke as effect, rather than smoke as visual language. For instance, the smoke rings are followed by smoke bubbles, which are undeniably stunning as an effect, but in terms of affect offer nothing new. At times like this, Dyer’s formal investigation and his political enquiry have not fully melded.

However, the formal enquiry is important to the political one. Initially, the lighting reveals the smoke. Later, when the smoke is denser, it reveals the lighting; it makes visible the rays, cones and striations of the design. Similarly, speakers rigged to buckets of smoke create automated smoke rings on beats. Dyer is making the invisible visible and, in so doing, draws our attention to how much we are otherwise able to overlook—how are those lights and speakers powered but for smoke?

The smoker from the opening scene is present, if not pivotal, throughout. He is eventually, with solemn ceremony, plastic-wrapped into a cage filling with smoke. The image is haunting and affecting. The choking opacity of the smoke is broken at first by a disembodied hand pressed against the plastic. At the same time, smoke machines above the audience are turned on for the first time and the back wall of the set pushes in towards us. It is a nightmarish vision of asphyxiation and I wondered if this was the time to end the show. Was our representative leader, elected on the basis of her life saving abilities, to cut short the mesmeric display to save the performer’s life?

Instead, the performer himself aborts his gassing with a slash of the plastic wrap. The back wall of the set closes in on us further, cutting off our view of the stage and, then, an object descends from the ceiling above our heads—a jaunty deus ex machina in the form of a glowing plastic sea urchin playing glitchy reggae as it descends. Apparently now was the time to end the show, though I cannot help but feel that the political agency of the citizenry might have been more seriously put to use two minutes earlier. But maybe that is the answer to Dyer’s political enquiry: you get what you vote for.

Dance Massive, Dancehouse: Life Support, lead artist Ashley Dyer, collaborators: lighting, projections designer Travis Hodgson, designer Matthew Kneale, dancer Tony Osborne, performer, sound and objects: Sam Pettigrew, designer Clare Britton, production support Bek Berger, performer John Possemato, writer, performer Sime Knezevic, presented by Dancehouse with the support of the Keir Foundation; Dancehouse, Melbourne, March 12-14; www.dancemassive.com

ENTANGLED, ASLEEP IN THE STREET, A MAN AND WOMAN SLOWLY WAKE TO THE SOUND OF PERPETUAL DOWNPOUR AND RACKING STORM, CLOUDS WASHING OVER THE WALL AND THE ROAD THEY MOMENTARILY OCCUPY. THESE SILVERY, CHARCOAL BURNISHED CREATURES ESCHEW CONVENTIONAL HUMAN MOVEMENT AND INTIMACY FOR RITUALISTIC SYNCHRONICITY AND STRANGE SIGNALLING.

Squatting, arms swinging wide, mirroring each other, the pair gradually reach for two small spray cans to rapidly mark out, in brilliant white, circles on the ground around them and tribalistic lines across their faces. A mechanistic ritual of preparation appears to be complete.

What ensues is the furious making of a piece of art the length of the wall. In a curious inversion of the graffiti method, as if seen on a film negative, the pair peel away strips from the gritty, grey surface to reveal bright white lines, short and long, creating an abstract mural around two blank spaces that represent the artists’ temporary presence, subsequent absence and anonymity. Breaking the formality of their design, the two dribble fine lines of white paint down the wall, loosening the relative tightness of their composition.

In a final gesture, the graffiti becomes three-dimensional as the pair lift a piece of the footpath away, take out rolls of white tape and extend the lines on the wall to the ground. Carefully extricating themselves, they move to the far side of their creation where—kneeling, arms extended, gesturing at and contemplating their creation—they disappear.

More than romanticising graffiti artists, Black Project 1, not unlike Lucy Guerin’s masterwork, Structure and Sadness (2006), is about the making of art—preparation, teamwork, process, completion, albeit in a setting more post-apocalyptic than contemporary. In Structure and Sadness, the creation collapses; here it remains, the residue of lives and the art instinct, a momentary three-dimensional habitat. Light pulses across it, reshaping the depth of field, giving the work a life of its own while recalling the astonishing movement and intricacies of gesture that created it.

Black Project 1 bleeds into number 2, the artwork fading to background and the storm to an insistent drumroll pitched against massive creaking and straining as we find ourselves in another dimension of Hamilton’s black world.

Instead of the unpredictable lines of the graffiti-ists, a large, projected triangle draws our attention to the downstage floor where, paralleling the open sing of Black Project 1, lie six tangled bodies, but here as an amorphous lump, indiscernibly human. If the solo performer in Gideon Obarzanek’s Glow (2006) represented an emergent organism on a dark voyage into humanity, this cluster is a cellular creature of another kind if likewise gridded by changing geometries of light—the triangle morphs into much else as the creature writhes, ravenously devours parts of itself, mutates into a many headed monster and splits into two halves. It’s a Rorschach-cum-mirror-neuron image of great power and meticulous execution: the grimness of the imagery and the almost total absence of any sense of the individual suggest devolution rather than evolution, or perhaps post-apocalyptic, mutant humanity starting out again.

As in Black Project 1, creativity appears to be at the core of this project. The creature bears down heavily on each part of itself, but is capable of huge bursts of energy. It’s like the dancing of Thriller, but eons on, morphed with breakdancing and more. And finally, it reveals another capacity. Collapsing back into itself, overlaid once more with the projected triangle, the creature lifts small metallic triangles aloft and, squirming, shapes them into a tiny pyramid at the front of the stage. The creature breaks into its component parts in a line at the base of the triangle, each member bowed low as if in prayer or adoration. The pyramid glows red.

With its final image of submission and worship, the act of creativity in Project 2 is certainly darker and more ambiguous than the one in Project 1. The provenance of the crafted, metal triangles is much more opaque than that of the humble materials of Project 1. The result is more abstract, and the pyramid, like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, hints at things cosmological—things beyond Earth and evolution that have perhaps shaped us—be they the legacy of alien overlords or creationism’s intelligent design. But there’s an element of pathos in Project 2’s ending—the pyramid is so small and the makers’ abjection so total. And there is no curtain call, so determined is the choreographer to sustain the final image and make its grim reality part of ours.

I saw Black Project 1 in Sydney Opera House’s 2010 Spring Dance (RT111). It has stayed with me indelibly, not least as an intense painterly experience. It was strange to see it again, to know and not know it and to be enveloped again by its multitudinous shades of black and grey. Project 2, impressively costumed by Paula Levis so that bodies magically meld and the metallic sheen of mask-like faces is glimpsed only now and then, is at its most powerful in its central realisation of the movement of a mutant organism. It writhes, divides, reforms, evoking cellular life and pop culture memes that connect it with our own time in a future where the capacity to create and worship, for good or bad, lives on.

Project 2 certainly doesn’t feel as complete as Project 1, its big idea not altogether as clear nor as potent as the humble agency and creativity of the artists that is central to the first work, where we could feel our own world more palpably present. Black Project 2 is a powerful and exacting work, if at times over-extended and so resolutely black—although I do recall a tiny dance of many hands at the tip of the triangle that evoked a rare moment of intimacy and playfulness. I hope Black Project 2 sooner or later evolves to become the equal of its partner. Even so, Hamilton’s is a distinctive vision, acutely realised and choreographically rich.

Dance Massive: Arts House and Antony Hamilton Projects, Black Projects 1 & 2, choreography, concept Antony Hamilton, Black Project 1: performers Antony Hamilton, Melanie Lane, video projection Olaf Meyers, music Robert Henke, Mika Vainio and Vainio and Fennesz, design Antony Hamilton; Black Project 2: performers James Batchelor, Jake Kuzma, Talitha Maslin, Jessie Oshodi, Marnie Palomares, Jess Wong, costume design Paula Levis, sound designer Alisdair Macindoe, video design Kit Webster, set construction, production Management Matthew Scott, Megafun, producer Freya Waterson, Insite Arts; Arts House, Meat Market, Melbourne, March 12-16; http://dancemassive.com.au/

THE MISQUOTATION OF TS ELIOT’S FOUR QUARTETS THAT OPENS YARON ZILBERMAN’S FEATURE FILM, PERFORMANCE, IS INDICATIVE OF THE FILM’S HASTY TRANSPOSITION OF A STRING QUARTET INTO THE WORLD OF THE ‘COMING OF OLD AGE’ GENRE.

Peter (Christopher Walken), a cellist and teacher at a conservatorium, begins a chamber music class with the famous lines from Burnt Norton:

“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.”

Walken actually reads the last line as “And all is, always, now.” because the line finishes with the enjambment “Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,” leaving a foot to fill up somehow. It is a shame that the poem was cut in this way because the added lines are taken from a wonderful stanza about music that could have been brought into the musical context of the film more meaningfully than the vagaries about time which feed, rather, the film’s representation of music as being made and taught through the forceful repetition of platitudes.

As Peter tells his students, Eliot wrote the poems while listening to his favourite of Beethoven’s late string quartets: the String Quartet no14 in C-sharp Minor. The seven-movement String Quartet no14 is used as a metaphor for the 25 years of Peter’s quartet, The Fugue, as it must be played through without stopping and begins with a fugue. The ‘fugal’ theme of the film basically consists in each character having an abortive love affair: the first violinist with (yawn) his student who happens to be the daughter of the second violinist and the violist; the second violinist with (yaawn) a flamenco dancer; and the violist (yaaawn) with the first violinist.

It was, however, the String Quartet no15 in A Minor that Eliot singled out for special mention. The String Quartet no15 includes the sublime slow movement written on Beethoven’s sickbed, the “Convalescent’s Holy Song of Thanksgiving to the Divinity,” which, in its canonical structure, would have fitted the anodyne ‘fugue’ motif of the film just as well as the C-sharp Minor, as well as providing an interesting musical connection to Peter’s diagnosis with Parkinson’s early in the film.

Peter’s story is the most interesting and is unfortunately greatly elided, reappearing in a series of cutaways to his various therapies between scenes of the other players yelling at each other to “unleash their passion” or commending each other’s “depth of sound” as “the voice of a wounded soul.”

Performance was made for people who gave up violin in primary school but perhaps had dreams of being yelled at for being ‘too talented’ by a stormy bachelor of a violin teacher. If you get the cultural references then you think the film is just wrong and if you don’t get them, then why are they there?

Performance, writers Seth Grossman, Yaron Zilberman, director Yaron Zilberman, performers Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Christopher Walken, Mark Ivanir; Hopscotch Films, release March 14

i should have drunk more champagne, the basement, metro arts

An independent collective, The Good Room, will present the first show in The Basement, the newly renovated intimate performance space at Metro Arts. I should have drunk more champagne is a collection of 500 anonymous regrets solicited from the public that the press release tells us creates “a world of sad pandas and empty dance floors, where Verbatim meets Experiential Theatre.”
The Good Room, I should have drunk more champagne, performer/devisors Caroline Dunphy, Daniel Evans, Amy Ingram, Leah Shelton; The Basement, Metro Arts, Brisbane, March 27- April 13; www.metroarts.com.au/

onside & 6 women dance, casula powerhouse

Tarryn Gill and Pilar Mata Dupont, Gymnasium (production still) 2010, single-channel HD video

It’s the last few weeks of Casula Powerhouse’s Onside exhibition which looks at women in sport from a cultural perspective with works by Tarryn Gill & Pilar Mata Dupont, Lauren Brincat, Elvis Richardson and Deborah Kelly. As part of the forum program, De Quincey Co will present six young choreographers from The Weather Exchange Collective—Angela French, Yoka Jones, Lian Loke, Kirsten Packham, Kathryn Puie and Ellen Rijs—who will be in residence creating pieces responding to the artworks and the gallery as site.
Onside, Casula Powerhouse, till March 24; http://www.casulapowerhouse.com/exhibitions/onside.aspx; De Quincey Co, 6 Women Dance, Casula Powerhouse, March 15-16; http://dequinceyco.net/performances/7-women-dance/

group show, mka: theatre of new writing & darebin arts’ speakeasy

Dedicated to the development of new plays, MKA Theatre of New Writing always seem to do things in multiples. They recently presented three shows in the Adelaide Fringe, one of which consisted of 22 short plays, and their next production will debut the work of five new playwrights. They have also been nominated for 11 Green Room Awards in 2012 so it seems productivity will get you noticed.
Darebin Arts’ Speakeasy and MKA: Theatre of New Writing, Group Show, playwrights Maxine Mellor, Bridget Mackey, Nakkiah Lui, Chloe Martin, Leila Rodgers, directors Prue Clark, Luke Kerridge, Northcote Town Hall, March 19-30; www.mka.org.au/program/group-show; http://darebinarts.com.au/event/mka-theatre-of-new-writing-presents-group-show/

waterwheel world water day symposium

Waterwheel, the interactive collaborative platform, will shortly be presenting its second 24-hour online symposium. The event will connect 100 scientists, artists and activists in discussion and presentation around the theme “Water Memories & Tomorrow’s Landscapes.” There are key “nodes” where physical presentations will take place—Australia, Hong Kong, Tunisia, USA and Argentina—but the action can be accessed by anyone with an internet connection and Flash plug-in.
Waterwheel World Water Day Symposium, March 22-23 (24hours non-stop) http://water-wheel.net/

grant stevens, artmonth, agnsw

Video artist Grant Stevens works with the flow of water and words in two current Sydney exhibitions. Tranquility Falls, part of ArtMonth, is an outdoor projection exploring the language of personal enlightenment. Meanwhile over at the Art Gallery of NSW Stevens showers us with words of love, loss and intimacy with his piece Crushing.
Grant Stevens, Tranquility Falls & SuperMassive, intersection Ash St and Angel Place, ArtMonth, March 17-23, 5-10pm; We used to talk about love, Balnaves contemporary: photomedia at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, until April 12; www.gbk.com.au/artists/grant-stevens/tranquility-falls-art-month-pop-up-exhibition

drawn from sound, spectrum gallery

Freya Zinovieff, Sydney Cathedral Choral Vespers Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. Drawing

More than any other group in Australia, Perth’s Decibel ensemble has embraced the graphic score as its ‘thing.’ Not content to just write and play them, Decibel director Cat Hope has put together an exhibition celebrating the visual beauty and conceptual elegance of graphic scores by Australian artists Philip Brophy, David Young, Lindsay Vickery, Freya Zinovieff, Ron Nagorcka and Percy Grainger.
(See also Cat Hope discussing the exhibition in the Australian Music Centre’s online journal Resonate.)
Drawn from Sound, Spectrum Project Space, Edith Cowan University, Perth, March 28-April 12; http://www.drawnfromsound.com/

melbourne queer film festival

If the fashion, comedy and dance festivals in Melbourne in March aren’t enough perhaps the Queer Film Festival will sate your appetite. There are over 169 films and events over 11 days including international features such as Gayby (Jonathan Lisecki, US) and new Australian films Submerge (Sophie O’Connor) and Being Brendo (Colin Batrouney, Shannon Murphy and Neil Armfield). The documentary program looks particularly juicy, covering activists in Uganda, gay Seventh-Day Adventists and electro-clash artist Peaches. There are also shorts, practical panels and a Queer History Slideshow.
Melbourne queer film festival, director Lisa Daniel, ACMI, Hoyts Melbourne Central and Loop Bar and cinema, March 14-24; www.mqff.com.au

message sticks

Message Sticks is the Sydney Opera House’s annual celebration of Indigenous culture. Along with a full program of music and dance, there will be two days of free film screenings featuring the documentaries Croker Island Exodus, Coniston and Black Man’s Houses as well as shorts concentrating on Indigenous issues in Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Each of the screenings will be followed by Q&As. There’s also a feisty talks program including a head to head on Aboriginal Identity with Fiona Foley and Djon Mundine.
Message Sticks, director Rhoda Roberts, March 19-24; http://messagesticks.sydneyoperahouse.com/

maerzmusik, berlin

For adventure seekers in Berlin (and we know there are a lot of you), March means music with the unambiguously titled MaerzMusic festival. The event is curated around three themes one of which is Percussion, featuring Melbourne’s Speak Percussion with a program of works by Australian composers Anthony Pateras, Thomas Meadowcroft, Rohan Drape and Matthew Shlomowitz.
MaerzMusik March 15-24; www.berlinerfestspiele.de/en/aktuell/festivals/maerzmusik

australian voices series, anam

Also highlighting Australian composers is the Australian Voices series presented by Australian National Academy of Music. Each concert focuses on a particular composer and is curated by a guest artist starting off with works by Elena Kats-Chernin curated by pianist Timothy Young.
ANAM Australian Voices series; Elena Kats-Chernin, March 21; Raymond Hanson, April 23; Gordon Kerry, June 11, Wilfred Lehmann, Sept 5; New Beats, Oct 3; The Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre, anam.com.au

the bell ringers ball, depot gallery

The Bell Ringer’s Ball is a neo-post-industrial exploration featuring the glorious bonging sound of gas-cylinders refashioned into playable art objects. In a collaborative venture by John Wright, Tim Hankinson, Nic Aplin and Steffan Ianigro visitors are encouraged to bang away at the installation. It will also serve as the environment for performances by Steffan Ianigro, the Splinter Orchestra and the Ampere guitar quartet (RT109).
The Bell Ringer’s Ball, Depot Gallery, 2 Danks St, exhibition March 15-25, performances: Steffan Ianigro March 15, Splinter Orchestra March 16, Ampere & Ianigro, March 23; http://www.thebellringersball.com

made in china, australia, mcclelland gallery

First exhibited at Salamanca Arts Centre, Made in China, Australia is now showing at the McClelland Sculpture Park and Gallery in regional Victoria. Curated by Greg Leong it explores the Chinese Diaspora which Leong says “for many immigrant artists [constitutes] a site of hybridity” (press release). This is reflected in the inclusion of artists of different genders, generations and disciplines such as William Yang, Tony Ayres, Lindy Lee, Aaron Seeto, Jason Wing and Shuxia Chen.
Made in China, Australia, McClelland Sculpture Park + Gallery, Langwarrin, VIC, (a Salamanca Arts Centre & CAST Touring exhibition), March 17 – June 9; http://www.mcclellandgallery.com

still in the loop

flesh & bone, kage
March 7-24, Fortyfivedownstairs, part of the 2013 L’Oreal Fashion Festival Cultural program;
www.kage.com.au
more…

forever now, adhocracy, vitalstatistix

Vitalstatistix is looking for 10 South Australian-based artists to participate in their Forever Now workshop. Successful applicants will work with project producers Willoh S Weiland, Jeff Khan, Brian Ritchie and Thea Baumann to prepare a catalogue of content that, in some form, will be launched into space—yep, sent to the stars.

Vitals are also seeking proposals for artists from across Australia to take part in their open-studio residency program Adhocracy. Artists develop work over the June long weekend in conversation with other artists and audiences.
Forever Now residency, deadline April 1; Adhocracy deadline April 12; http://vitalstatistixtheatrecompany.blogspot.com.au/

ISEA registrations

ISEA in Sydney is fast approaching. Along with a range of exhibitions, performances and public talks, the backbone of the event is the conference and early bird registrations are now open.
ISEA June 7-16, Conference June 11-13; Earlybird registrations close April 19; http://www.isea2013.org/events/conference/

gasworks circus showdown

For the circus freaks amongst us, Gasworks Theatre is running a circus and physical theatre competition and the prizes are not insubstantial. The winner receives a professional development package valued at $6,000 which includes rehearsal space, a publicity campaign, photography plus more. Runners up also get a good deal including an Adelaide Fringe Festival registration, marketing assistance and $500.
Deadline March 18; showdown May 15-18; www.gasworks.org.au.

nsw creative industries action plan

A taskforce, led by industry leaders, has been developing an Action Plan to promote growth, productivity and innovation in the Creative Industries in NSW. Comments and feedback now invited on the plan which is available online.
Deadline for comments, Tuesday April 2, before 9am
http://engage.haveyoursay.nsw.gov.au/iap-creativeindustries

still in the loop

upcoming australia council deadlines

OPPORTUNITIES TO ATTEND FREELY IMPROVISED MUSIC EVENTS ARE FEW AND FAR BETWEEN IN CANBERRA. HOWEVER THIS SITUATION HAS IMPROVED MORE RECENTLY THANKS TO THE EFFORTS OF A SMALL YET DEDICATED SCENE COMPRISING PERFORMERS, FANS AND VENUES AND TO WHICH THE ANNUAL SOUNDOUT FESTIVAL, ORGANISED BY RICHARD JOHNSON, MAKES A SIGNIFICANT CONTRIBUTION.

For the past two years SoundOut has taken place in the intimate confines of Theatre 3 which offers a comfortable and stimulating environment with good acoustics. You can also sit in a leafy courtyard with a cold beer and interact with audience members and performers alike, which is the kind of thing that draws me to improvised music. It’s creative democracy in action; a free exchange of sounds, ideas and concepts unmoored from the trappings of past experience. The music on offer across the two days of the festival was mostly great and some of the highlights are offered here.

I had the loins stirred by the Brazilian Abaetetuba Collective which utilised percussion (Antonio Panda Gianfratti), double bass (Luiz Gubeissi), soprano sax (Thomas Rohrer) and the Japanese stringed instrument, the shamisen (Rodrigo Montoya). This group conjured free-form, crystallised tonalities that hit cacophonous peaks when things began to heat up.

It was great to see percussionist Tony Buck playing two Saturday sets, one with Magda Mayas, the other with Hermione Johnson, both pianists. Buck likes to decorate his kit with an assortment of objects which when struck, stroked or rubbed in the right way, produce shimmering washes of sound, metallic sparks or splintering polyrhythms. Buck is a master of his chosen instrument and in combination with two brilliant and highly energetic pianists—perhaps inspired by the wildly inventive Marilyn Crispell and Irene Schweizer—the results were multi-coloured starbursts, particularly when that whiskey kicked in.

Three performances in particular deserve mention for giving Canberra something unique. On the Saturday evening composer and violinist Jon Rose offered a loosely structured score for 27 performers where every instrument involved was given a starring role. I figured this was about as close as I was ever going to get to witnessing a full-blown group improvisation akin to the London Jazz Composers Orchestra. Composer/bassist Barry Guy has said about his 1989 piece Harmos for the LJCO that it was intended to expand “in all directions to encompass each player’s stylistic preferences…somehow the material implicitly embraces the musicians to a considerable degree without just constructing a line to blow on.” I’m guessing this was the intent of Jon Rose with his Composition for 27 artists.

Just before the piece commenced I noticed a score being handed to the performers. Rose gave some brief verbal instructions and then it began. The instruments involved were many but each was clearly defined as the piece built in intensity. More likely by intuition than design the sound seemed to take shape in a circular motion in which clusters of musicians would take the lead then pass the sound to those nearest them. The incredible thing about this semi-spontaneous composition was that the musicians involved had, in some cases, only just met their fellow performers and so were exploring a dynamic quite different from that of highly individualised technique and desire. In the end, the expanded harmonics fitted together like a puzzle and the music washed over the audience in great waves with smaller fragments darting from the stage. Indicative of a healthy creative approach to music-making, each performer worked to ensure the sounds ebbed, flowed and exploded according to feeling and loose structure. This piece comprised three parts universal consciousness and one part subtle conducting from Rose who guided a series of movements through to their logical conclusion. Combined with abstract visuals from filmmaker Louise Curham and cubist movements from Canberran dancer Alison Plevey, this performance was also magical to watch.

I had the pleasure of witnessing a performance on Sunday afternoon which featured Plevey in fluid, swinging motion that incorporated her clattering of stones as a sound source. Her supple movements provided a suitable momentum as stones were spread across the stage. With accompaniment from Reuben Ingalls on electronics, Luke Keanan-Brow on drums, Hermione Johnson on piano and Andrew Fedorovitch and Richard Johnson on sax and Annette Giesreigl on vocals, this made for a mesmerising and visceral set.

The same could be said of the raucous, roof-raising performance on Sunday afternoon featuring Jon Rose leading an ensemble made up of Rhys Butler on sax, Michael Norris on electronics, Adam Sussman on guitar, James Wapples on drums and Mike Majkowski on bass. At times the sound approached the ear-shattering levels of John Zorn’s earliest Naked City recordings and there was something very downtown New York about this intensely frenetic performance. This was a free-for-all in the true sense of the word.

Unlike the previous evening’s Composition for 27 Performers, Jon Rose melded into the performance rather than guiding it. The sonic collision within a small grouping was a welcome counterpoint to sparser moments across the weekend. It seemed that the louder and more intense the maelstrom became, the better it sounded, and when the crashing sheets of noise came to an abrupt halt I was going to quietly ask them to do it again.

EVER SINCE MODERN DANCE BUILT ITS MANIFESTO ON THE REJECTION OF REALISTIC STORYTELLING, CONTEMPORARY DANCE HAS BEEN A BIT OF A HARD SLOG FOR UNACCUSTOMED AUDIENCES. A DEEPLY ABSTRACT ART—AND NATALIE ABBOTT’S PHYSICAL FRACTALS IS RIGHT UP THERE WITH THE MOST ABSTRACT—CONTEMPORARY DANCE OFTEN HINGES ON A CAPACITY FOR SUGGESTIVENESS AND THE DESIRE TO CULTIVATE A RICH INTERIOR LIFE.

The tenuous ‘truth’ of a dance work is so often buried somewhere between movement and mood, that we all, I would say, need the ability to let our minds wander over the physical performance, if we are to get to its core.

Postmodernism has brought narrative, realism and politics back into dance, but not evenly so. In particular, there is a strand of Australian dance that has furiously resisted all figuration, remained staunchly formalist and—I mean this without reprimand—has privileged mood and atmosphere over concept and narrative. Physical Fractals, the first long-form work by young choreographer Natalie Abbott, sits squarely within this tradition. The work examines how a cross-interference of media stimuli—sound, light and movement—can create a meaningful audience experience. It is deeply formalist in intent, and I am somewhat glad I entered the auditorium without knowing this.

Two young female dancers, Abbott herself and Sarah Aitken, dressed in loose, comfortable black, perform repetitious sequences of simple gestures, gradually drawing intersecting lines within the circular stage. Their movements are uncomplicated but heavy, Haka-like—wide stomping backwards, dangling arms, weighted jumping, running, heavy falling of bodies—with strong, pendular shifts of weight. The choreography emphasises the weightiness of these two (quite lithe) bodies, and creates an effect of empathetic physical exhaustion in the audience, particularly as we watch Abbott and Aitken repeatedly crash to the ground, in the final sequence. Meanwhile, their thumps and stomps are looped, magnified and sent swirling back, building into a powerful echo, as if the two women are single-handedly raising a storm. At one point, the dancers swing microphones on their cords, building a symphony of static. The effect is hypnotic but deep: the heaviness of the performance lodges itself deeply in one’s body.

At its best, Physical Fractals makes us feel the sheer force of these simple movements on the dancers’ bodies. Abbott seems to emphasise weight not purely for sonic effect: repetition of falling, faltering and stooping builds a narrative of physical strain and resilience. It could be easily read as a feminist choreography, but equally as a humanist one (female body has limited significance here). Its dancing bodies are grounded, weighted, imperfectly synced, injurable, far from the superhero flying automata that one still sees. I was reminded acutely of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s early work, particularly Rosas Dans Rosas and Bartók, which wove the same strands of repetition, simple gestures and femininity into something formalist, yet humbly political and life affirming. (There was also an echo of her later work, which explores darkness, movement and silence within similar parameters.) But I kept waiting in vain for this work to use its magnificently realised means in the pursuit of some higher goal.

Physical Fractals continuously operated on the same plane, neither submerging us under its powerful storm into a meditative enlightenment, nor raising us to a bird’s eye realisation of higher purpose. I could not detect a fractal pattern (a fractal is self-similar, presenting the same complexity of build at different scales: think cauliflower or snowflake). I was waiting for a minimum of philosophical framework, something to gently give meaning to the genuine empathy the work was creating, something between awe and care; I was waiting for Abbott to utilise the powerful spell she had cast on us. It never came, and the work is weaker for its unfulfilled potential than it would have been had it ventured a smaller stake.

For the pure affective stamp it leaves, Physical Fractals is a formally successful work, and Abbott a sensitive and intelligent choreographer. Just as de Keersmaeker’s formalist work created political resonances she had not necessarily had in mind, so was I able to enjoy an interior dialogue about strength, resilience, mysticism and the fourth wave of feminism while hypnotised by this fine choreography. This is not, and cannot be wrong: the figurative emptiness at the heart of contemporary dance requires a suggestible viewer. I cannot escape the impression, however, that I enjoyed Physical Fractals for the wrong and unexpected reasons—against the grain of the author’s intent.

Dance Massive: Physical Fractals, choreographer, director, performer Natalie Abbott, collaborator Rebecca Jensen, performer Sarah Aitken, live sound design Daniel Arnot, dramaturg Matthew Day, lighting Govin Ruben; Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, March 12-16; http://dancemassive.com.au/

IN NATALIE ABBOTT AND REBECCA JENSEN’S PHYSICAL FRACTALS, TIME BECOMES ELASTIC, STRETCHING ITS LIMITS TO CREATE PHYSICALLY PALPABLE TENSION.

At these apex moments in the performance, movement is paused and, when resumed, time seems to snap back to familiar shape. The performance, shared with Sarah Aiken, messes with our personal sense of gravity and our concept of space. Much of the time we are hyper conscious of our own breath, which is often bated.

Physical Fractals begins with the dancers’ repeated movements bordering on the obsessive and becoming increasingly laboured. The unison of Abbott and Aiken’s movement is made even more impressive by their physical uniformity, down to the length of their hair, their similar height and build. The movements soon create a familiar pattern for the audience; we anticipate a backstroke into the centre from the corner of the performance space that will give way to a circular motion, heads bent and hair twirling. Despite the similarity of the dancers we pick up the tiniest variations in their actions; how one holds her arm out behind her slightly higher than the other for instance. Abbott appears to attack the choreography with more sanguinity, her face set in determination. Aiken’s performance presence is more serene, or resigned—she mirrors Abbott beautifully.

The dancing is accompanied by heavy silence which gives way to looped sounds picked up live from the stage. The dancers’ unison becomes intermittent. The space falls into darkness as the sounds crescendo and grow more insistent. Wave after turbulent sound wave crashes over us, rendering us breathless and uncomfortable. It’s a wild sound, like wind and water filling your head. The sound (Daniel Arnot) works in conjunction with clever lighting (Govin Ruben); both disorient our visual sense and lead to small sensory glitches. Later, Abbott and Aiken swing microphones on long cords through the air. Our proximity to the performers makes this a shared sensation, dangerous and hypnotic. Darkness falls over them while the rushing sound of the swinging microphones continues. When the stage is re-lit, the dancers are on the floor when we expect them to still be swinging the microphones. We had sat knotted up and tense, trying to gauge something in the dark while imagining the microphones slipping out of control.

The success of the performance relies on tension and release—the pendulum swings from the dancers being the focus to the audience’s reaction taking centre stage. The next chapter of the dance is characterised by trotting feet, a kind of dance/march that eventually becomes plodding. The continued unison here made me think of Lipizzaner stallions—perhaps because the performers were now subserviently on all fours. The dance becomes more gruelling when the pair repeatedly collide with the floor, first backwards then straight back up and crumpling forward. The backfall is broken by one hand.

The audience watches on, unsettled and contemplative, again the focus on us—on our watching. The sensitive microphones around the space make us reluctant to move; I spot a woman guiltily swig from a beer bottle as the dancers fall again and again. Physical Fractals is an acutely rendered study in the boundaries between audience and performers. Here these boundaries are traversed through short-winded sensory experiences and in our emotional investment in the work.

LOCATED IN THE AUSTRALIAN NORTH-WEST, BROOME HAS AN ABUNDANT HISTORY OF MANY PEOPLES COMING TO LIVE TOGETHER. IT WAS EXEMPTED FROM THE WHITE AUSTRALIA POLICY BECAUSE IT WAS THE HUB OF AUSTRALIA’S PEARLING INDUSTRY. AS A RESULT, MANY CHILDREN LIKE DALISA PIGRAM HAVE GROWN UP PROUD OF THEIR MIXED, CULTURAL HERITAGE.

This is reflected in Pigram’s physical training: a bricolage of Malaysian martial arts, gymnastics, indigenous culture and refined, animal movements. It is also part of who she is. Not that such a medley of origins has always been welcome. Gudirr Gudirr opens with a 1928 report to AO Neville (Commissioner for Native Affairs) on the dubious status of peoples of mixed heritage in the Broome area.

All the while, Pigram stands in a far corner, her back towards us. She moves nearer, still facing upstage, punching, lunging, and rotating along the axis of her spine. She cuts a strong diagonal, iterating a movement lexicon in a ritual crossing of space. Facing us, she opens her body into a low lunge to the side, Krishna holding a spear. Or is it a harpoon?

The screen at the back of the space flashes black and white images throughout: of family, living ancestors, gurus and masters. There is an older man, circulating chi, nursing it between his hands. His mastery presides over this performance. Pigram is dedicated to her moving, clear and bold. Her feet say a lot. They are broad, grounded, the feet of a woman who has walked, and fished. She tells a story of catching crabs with her father, learning the ethos of the fisherman: catch enough to eat, no more. The little girl learns to work the long net suspended from the ceiling.

House lights brighten, we look at each other. Pigram is an airline steward demonstrating the pros and cons of net throwing, inducting us into fishing culture via the technology of the throw net. Perched along its grid-like netting, she looks like an island girl, agile, flexible, at one with its flowing lines.

As the music turns sour, dystopia enters this coastal idyll. The documentary flavour of black and white imagery gives way to the elicitations of colour. A goanna stumbles, its head trapped inside a beer can. History enters the life of the animal. Pigram snatches a microphone, declaring what is past and what is present. If the old days are over, their legacy is not. It is time, she says, to decolonise blackfella’s minds, echoing French Algerian Frantz Fanon’s heartfelt cry, “Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.”

Pigram occupies the liminal space between colonisation and cultural freedom. Her movements are jerky, discombobulated. They do not eat space, they are confined by it. A tryptich shows young men fighting each other in the dirt, their misdirected aggression devouring their own future. Three images blend into a single scream. Pigram verbalises the anger in a tirade of “fucken” this, “fucken” that. A proliferation of fuckens fills the screen. It becomes surreal. Pigram’s body heaves catching its breath.

What happens next is key. This is Dalisa Pigram’s moment, as an artist and as a subject of history. She is poised in the present of all that has become. She leans out, supported by the long net, her feet on the ground. Leaning: neither fully supporting her own weight nor surrendering it to the net, Pigram explores the possibilities that lie between her body and the net. She runs, veering in a circle, testing the pull of the net as it meets the force of her own activity. The net circles as she soars towards the audience. Time stretches to the elastic sounds of jazz. This expression of the dancer’s agency is a mixture of freedom and constraint. She is a compact set of forces, aware of her location, her lineage, but finding a creative line of flight. Three snakes, one snake three ways, slither over river stones, elegant, inexorable. Pigram dances her own future, stretching the space of possibility not just for herself but for us too.

BACK IN 2008, ANTONY HAMILTON’S DEBUT FULL-LENGTH WORK, BLAZEBLUE ONELINE (RT85), ESTABLISHED SOME OF HIS CHOREOGRAPHIC REFERENCE POINTS: STREET DANCE, GRAFFITI, THE LINK BETWEEN THE VISUAL AND THE PHYSICAL.

In that production, the sheer bursting mass of his creative energy led to a procession of set pieces both tonally and chromatically varied. Given a large blank canvas, Hamilton threw everything on it at once. Somehow, it hung together remarkably well.

If Blazeblue Oneline was Hamilton’s thesis, then Black Projects 1 & 2 are his antithesis. Each is fascinated with the physical possibilities of mark-making and the ways in which a flat canvas can achieve three dimensions. However, where the former is ranging, the latter is taut. Where the former is exuberant, the latter is stern. Light, dark. Colourful, monochromatic. Et cetera. Hamilton has zeroed in on one section of his palette in order to go deeper rather than broader.

Black Project 1 is a study on the most minimal of variations. At first, there is nothing but a rumble. The rumble itself, if magnified, if expanded, would be discernible as a set of beats or individuated vibrations. But here it is a single sound, as large and enveloping as the sky. The set is a black wall built on top of a black floor in front of a black curtain. But none of the blacks is truly black; there is a bit more gloss here, a small scuff there. The tonal vagaries are enhanced by a subtly shifting, cloudy projection on the wall.

In his program note, Hamilton claims he set out to investigate whether it is possible to create a controlled, neutralised aesthetic environment devoid of the subjectivity of context. He readily admits he failed. However, subjectivity aside, the kind of minimalist order he seeks will always be trumped by instabilities—entropy inevitably wins. One can look to minimalist music for precedents: Charlemagne Palestine’s Strumming Music, in which two notes on a piano are played continuously for some fifty minutes until the harmonics and tuning change entirely; or the phasing of Steve Reich’s tape loops. Given time and space, imperceptible differences become meaningful.

Hamilton’s choreography retains an austere, antihumanist formalism throughout Black Project 1. It resists any ready kind of psychological meaning making. Perhaps its only consistent symbolism comes in the paradoxical theme of erasure as revelation. The two dancers remove tape from their blackened bodies to reveal white skin, they remove tape from the walls to reveal jagged lines that are half silicone chip, half Suprematist painting. There is the potential for a political statement here, but Hamilton is too clear-eyed to step fully into any easy narrative. He remains steadfast in his investigation of tone and neutrality.

In Black Project 2, the visual language is even more restricted than in Black Project 1, though the number of dancers has tripled to six. The floor projections are almost exclusively of triangles, the costumes are identical baggy black body suits, the choreography largely limited to pivoting symmetrically about a central axis (though the dancers’ symmetry unfortunately falters in more complex choreographic phrases).

The central axis is key. The dancers slink on in front of the set of Black Project 1 and mass in a huddle. As the dominating sound design shifts from rasping solidity into fluidity, so the dancers transpose themselves into a six-headed beast, symmetrical on either side of the centre line. As they move their arms, they become a giant, animated, breathing Rorschach test. Neutrality be damned, Hamilton challenges us to project our Freudian unconscious onto the bodies of these dancers. Is this a rebuke to subjectivity? A literalising of the symbolic? Or is the reference accidental?

Black Project 2 feels less assured than the first; its connection between form and content is less coherent. The symmetry of the choreography could easily be read as a kaleidoscopic expression of fractal geometry, the projections certainly point that way. But with this colder reading of intent, how do we make sense of the moments that are not symmetrical? When one dancer falls deliberately out of line, the others quickly draw them back in. Is this a nod to the human desire for breaking machine-like rules or is it a barbed attack on the normative functions of Freudian psychotherapy? Probably neither. Rather than eschewing symbolism, here, Hamilton piles it on with a confounding thickness.

However, at the end of Black Project 2, Hamilton’s symbolism pays dividends. The six dancers reverently construct a small black pyramid to idolise. Then, in the closing moments, the pyramid vertices glow red—the only colour yet seen. While the dancers remain bowed in shadow, in the audience we find ourselves applauding a glowing red pyramid as though it really were a thing worth idolising.

Artist Sarah-Jane Norman shows us around her installation and discusses the performances that make up Unsettling Suite which explores her Indigenous and English heritage. Part of Matters of Life and Death at Performance Space, Sydney, showing Feb 22-March 10, 2013.

realblak
blood is such clever stuff
sarah-jane norman: performance-making
RealTime issue #111 Oct-Nov 2012 p3

inbetween time 2010
oblique ethnicities
osunwunmi: zoran todorovic, sarah jane norman
RealTime issue #101 Feb-March 2011 p24

the quick and the dirty
david williams on mardi gras at performance space
Sarah-Jane Norman’s Songs of Rapture and Torture (#1: Surabaya Johnny)
RealTime issue #84 April-May 2008 p39

flesh & bone, kage

This March Melbourne is all about dance (Dance Massive) and fashion (the L’Oreal Fashion Festival) and KAGE’s latest work Flesh & Bone combines the two. Company directors Kate Denborough and Gerard Van Dyck perform the work (onstage together for the first time in eight years) and have collaborated with fashion designer Lisa Gorman of the sleek, chic Gorman label. The work explores “the contemporary realities of gender roles in today’s society” looking at the primal forces of desire and attraction (press release).
Flesh & Bone, KAGE, March 7-24, Fortyfivedownstairs, part of the 2013 L’Oreal Fashion Festival Cultural program; www.kage.com.au/

jaap blonk, australian tour

Kurt Schwitter’s epic Ursonate is arguably the apotheosis of sound poetry, and Dutch musician and vocalist Jaap Blonk knows it off-by-heart, performing it since the early 1980s (listen here http://www.ubu.com/sound/blonk_ursonate86.html). Blonk presents his and others’ sound poetry, as well as his intense and often humorous vocal/electronic improvisations around Australia in March.
Jaap Blonk tour: Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, Wollongong; for dates &venues see http://www.jaapblonk.com/Pages/ontour.html

artmonth, sydney

ArtMonth is already in full swing incorporating over 300 exhibitions in galleries across Sydney. This years’ directors, Penelope Benton and Alexandra Clapham, have also assembled a particularly feisty looking talks program exploring feminism, Indigenous issues, collaboration, collecting. There are also workshops including an all-in nude life drawing classes (yep everyone gets nekid!) or a public dance class led by the idiosyncratic David Capra (see RT112).
ArtMonth, various venues Sydney, March 1-24; www.artmonthsydney.com.au/

inaudible visions, oscillating silences, isabelle delmotte

For those in the Northern Rivers region, multimedia artist Isabelle Delmotte has crafted an intriguing exhibition that draws on the skills of leading cinema sound designers, a script writer and storyboard artist to explore the conscious and unconscious effect of the sound track both within the cinema context and in the outside world.
Inaudible Visions, Oscillating Silences, Isabelle Delmotte with Damian Candusso, Carlos Choconta, Tom Heuzenroeder, John Kassab, Markus Kellow, Evan Kitchener, Ben Vlad and Michael Worthington, Roger Monk and Ben Leon, Northern Rivers Community Gallery, Ballina, March 6-28; http://www.inaudible-visions.net/

wow film festival, wift & seen & heard, red rattler

A lot has changed in terms of gender equality over the last 50 years, but the balance of prominent female filmmakers to male is still way out of whack. This is something the World of Women’s Cinema (WOW), run by Women in Film & Television (WIFT), has long worked to remedy. The 19th WOW festival is now upon us with screenings and panel discussions exploring the world and cinema ‘through the eyes of women.’
WOW, March 5-15, various venues, Sydney; www.wift.org/wow/

Also celebrating women in film is the Sydney-based, Seen & Heard, a series of screenings over three weeks promoting the message “that films made by women are not just for women, but are films that should be seen by everyone.”
Seen & Heard, Red Rattler, Marrickville, March 7, 14, 21;http://seenandheardfilms.com/2013-festival/

le_temps: explorations in phenology, dab lab, uts

Drawing on the vast image libraries of the Royal Botanic Gardens herbarium, Climate Watch’s crowd sourced database, and Flickr, Le_temps: explorations in phenology consists of large-scale projections exploring the life cycle and seasonality of plants. Media artist and environmentalist Tega Brain hopes that the show will help us “come to terms with the idea that humans, and what we like to call ‘the environment,’ are actually inseparable” (website). Brain has collaborated with image database farmer Brad Miller (RT94) and programmer Adam Hinshaw on this intriguing project.
DAB LAB Research Gallery, UTS, March 6-29 http://cfsites1.uts.edu.au/dab/news-events/news-detail.cfm?ItemId=33821

remotespace

Remotespace is an online exhibition platform presenting only two exhibitions a year, each six months long. In this fast-paced, multi-tasking world this seems like eons of net-time and presents a refreshingly singular focus. At the end of the exhibition, the content is taken down from the site and reworked into a real world hardcopy artist book. Currently exhibiting is The Telepathy Project (see RT86 http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue86/9089) exploring the artists’ adventures in Dream Telepathy while on a residency in Spain.
See the current exhibition at www.remotespace.org/

imagining the capital & cinema’s golden slumber, national film and sound archive

Canberra is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, throwing a year-long party with an astonishing range of events. This weekend the National Film and Sound Archive will be holding a special outdoor screening—a compilation of restored film and audio excerpts showing 100 years of lifestyle, politics and architecture, accompanied by live music. You can also catch the tail end of Cinema’s Golden Summer, a festival featuring silent films made between 1910-1913, also with live music.
Imagining the Capital: Canberra on Film, Senate Rose Gardens, King George Terrace, Sunday March 10; www.nfsa.gov.au/whats-on/canberra-centenary/imagining-the-capital/; Cinema’s Golden Summer, Arc Cinema & NFSA Courtyard, till March 9; www.nfsa.gov.au/calendar/?type=cinemas-golden-summer

old tote celebrations, nida

In 1963 the Old Tote was established in a tin shed on the UNSW campus which rapidly became a hotbed for Australian playwriting and acting talent nurturing the likes of John Bell, Robyn Nevin, Jacki Weaver, David Williamson and Richard Wherrett. Fifty years on and NIDA is celebrating the legacy of this formative company with an exhibition of archival material and an opening day of panels and play readings featuring leading Sydney theatre artists.
NIDA, exhibition March 9-28, opening celebrations March 9; www.nida.edu.au/whats-on

congratulations

The Tanja Liedtke Foundation has announced the recipient of the third Tanja Liedtke Fellowship. Dubbo-born, WAPPA graduate Joseph Simons will spend time in Berlin developing a project, attending ImpulsTanz and participating in the International Summer Lab presented and facilitated by Tanzlabor_21.
www.tanja-liedtke-foundation.org/

Tasdance has decided upon the three recipients for their inaugural Tasdance Residency for Independent Practice (TRIP). Dance Makers Collective (NSW), Jason Pitt (NSW) and Danielle Micich (WA) will each undertake an intensive three-week development period at the Tasdance Studio and Cottage.
http://tasdance.com.au/explore/

The Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarships have increased their prize pool in 2013 in order to award more young artists aged 18-35 with a $20,000 scholarship for travel and professional development. Categories alternate over two years and in 2013 the recipients are: for acting, Johnny Carr, Kate Sherman and Matilda Ridgway; painting, Gabriella Hirst, Nathan Hawkes and Tully Moore; sculpture, Kate Scardifield, Christopher Hanrahan and Patrick Foster; and singing, Bryony Dwyer and Lauren Eastman. The 2014 Bequest will focus on architecture, ballet, instrumental music, poetry and prose.
www.martenbequest.com.au/

Find

Author archive

bill viola, frustrated actions and futile gestures

madam plaza, bouchra ouizguen

trash cuisine, belarus free theatre

mackenzie wark, the spectacle of disintegration

Testament

Cédric Andrieux

Photog

Winners and Losers

I, Malvolio

Still Standing You

Lear

la boite indie, part 1

lineage, form dance projects

anne landa award for video and new media arts 2013, agnsw

everyday rebellions, gertrude contemporary

suncorp twenties, sydney theatre company

joachim koester, frances stark, ian potter museum of art

stories then & now, performance 4a, carriageworks

goodbye jamie boyd, buzz dance & monkey baa

still in the loop

sensing sydney, carbon arts, city of sydney

dramaturgy internships 2013

librettist workshop, chamber made

city of melbourne annual grants

still in the loop

selected australia council grant deadlines

via the document

performance

lo-tech

moving image i, critical path artists’ salon

direct democracy, muma

bloom—space, aeaf

undone, arts house

paul dresher, double duo?

film real—black screen, nfsa & footscray arts centre

peter dailey, apparition: the syndicate ii, fremantle arts centre

networked art forms & tactical magick faerie circuits, cast

conduit arts space initiative

diffuse, uts

still in the loop

stephen cummins bequest residencies, performance space

beijing residency, 4a centre for contemporary asian art

the sustainability of future bodies workshop series, isea2013

workshops, networked art forms & tactical magick faerie circuits, cast

backbone 2high festival 2013

call for scores, campbelltown city council

still in the loop

selected australia council grant deadlines

opal vapour, jade dewi tyas tunggal, mobile states

gemeinboeck & saunders, velonaki, ingram, artspace

composition to movement festival, creative practice lab, unsw

eve and eve, rebecca agnew, 24hr art

r&j, expressions dance company, national tour

living in the ruins of the 21st century, uts gallery

friday nights, metro arts

hatched & digital now, pica

natalie abbott, physical fractals, pact

no child, nilaja sun, theatre works

shadowlife, bendigo art gallery

uta uber kool ja, army of love, judith wright centre

arts house season 1, 2014

revelation perth international film festival

exploring modular synthesis workshop & aws, wired lab

the 2013 hive production fund

arstpace curatorial fellowship

channels video art festival

proximity festival

heartlands refugee art prize

hidden: rookwood cemetery sculpture walk

reason for travelling

that art attraction

for culture

for refreshment

other highlights

links

21 years on

submission or resistance?

shaping the event