I studied International Relations before taking a sabbatical in Palestine and then Arctic Russia. As I was drifting through 32 euro-a-night hotels in the red-light district of Paris and other places of disrepute, I realised that the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations in Canberra was no place for the likes of me. I turned my hand to writing instead.
I was given a push by Sian Prior to pursue arts journalism while studying Professional Writing and Editing at RMIT. Initially covering fashion events, I became associate editor of a travel and arts magazine, a regular contributor to RealTime and a freelance writer/editor. My poems have since gone on to make it to print and won a few prizes. I live in Melbourne with my partner, ceramic artist and sculptor, Andrei Davidoff and my daughter Augustine.
Exposé
I think Australia separates art from life either by putting it on a pedestal or shrugging it off for its perceived elitism. Art’s rightful place is at the centre of our cultural life as a part of the fabric of every waking day. Its role is to rouse us from the commonplace and quotidian. I write about art to steal my way into the middle of it as the eager audience, and to share maybe one moment, or crystallise some thought that resonates with a reader and piques their curiosity.
Dance and performance are completely visceral and subjective in their stories. In a way, it is on par with poetry. Movement becomes poetry; a language devoid of words and it has the power to trigger memories or new connections.
English was the second language I spoke. My parents were Russian/Soviet refugees. Like Kerouac or Nabokov, finding a voice amid the languages has been a major influence in why and how I write.
dancing fish tales
varia karipoff: james welsby, tidefolk fictions
RealTime issue #110 Aug-Sept 2012 p33
live art release
varia karipoff: an appointment with j dark
RealTime issue #109 June-July 2012 p28
pain makes art
varia karipoff: georgie read, brigid jackson, la mama
RealTime issue #103 June-July 2011 p37
RealTime issue #113 Feb-March 2013 pg. web
Philipa Rothfield, video still
courtesy Dancehouse
Philipa Rothfield, video still
Bio
I’ve just left my job of 22 years, where I lectured in philosophy at La Trobe University. While I’ve always done other things, especially dance, it’s still a big deal for me to leave the institution. One idea behind my leaving is to make space for “other things.”
So, what happened next? I began this year in exactly the same way as last year: I had the same writing obligations, a book chapter for an edited collection, two art pieces, all the while waiting to return to my book. Ironically, finishing my book is one of the main reasons I have left (academic, paid) work. I am more or less halfway through. It is momentous. It ties together my interest in the body, dance and movement, with the stimulation and elaboration of conceptual thinking. Hopefully, I won’t end up like Albert Camus’ character, Joseph Grand, forever writing and rewriting the first sentence of his novel. Apart from that, life goes on, supremely busy but in a nice way. I feel I have a wider horizon of possibility now that I am not locked into a job. Meantime, I return to the body, my body, moving, dancing, rolling, stretching, this way and that. Dancing is one of my great loves.
Exposé
It was nice when, 15-odd years ago, I began to write for RealTime. No footnotes, less protocols, the writing itself was fun. Academic writing is one thing, and I love it. It is especially suited to philosophy, which is a very specific technique. But the flow of writing about art for a different kind of audience is pleasurable for its sheer freedom of form. Not that there aren’t certain constraints, such as obligations towards the artist and the work.
Writing makes you think. It thinks for you. That’s why I’m writing this big book. I have already laid out its philosophical landscape but the detail and depth only comes through the writing. It is emergent. I pursue lines of thought which are not yet formed. I fiddle with them. I read, present and play with concepts and the formation of ideas. These ideas are themselves part of a social and cultural milieu, which poses and provokes problems for thought. In my writing, I move between domains of thought, practice and flashes of insight embedded in movement. After reading a short piece on habit, I will dive back into this interconnected morass of thought.
Time to plan your next masterwork. A range of festivals are calling for innovative, underground, alternative work at various stages of development. There are also residencies in Sydney and Montreal, an invitation to Estonia and a very lucrative writing gig for the right literary geek at the Cube QUT.
underbelly arts lab & festival
Justin Shoulder, V
video stills Sam James
Justin Shoulder, V
Underbelly—the festival not the TV epic—will be returning to Cockatoo Island in July under new artistic director Eliza Sarlos (RT105). With an emphasis on process, collaboration, interdisciplinarity, site-specifity and audience engagement, Underbelly is now calling artists to take part in the two-week lab and festival. Applications close March 18; http://underbellyarts.com.au/2013/call-out-for-artists/
situate art in festivals
Taking over where the Splendid Arts Lab left off (RT105 & RT94), Salamanca Arts Centre will be running a three-year program (2013-15) for early career artists to create experimental works for festival environments. Key partners include MONA FOMA, Dark MOFO, Darwin Festival, Harvest Music and Arts, Fringe World, WOMADelaide, and Vryfees in South Africa. Applications open March 25, closing April 8; www.situate.org.au
dimanche rouge festival, tallinn, estonia
Last year Paris-based organisation Dimanche Rouge presented a global streaming event connecting Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Paris (RT111 online). Now they are inviting Australian artists to physically join them at their annual festival held in Tallinn, Estonia in October 2013. The scope for creativity is vast including live art, dance, music, hairdressing and tattooing. Applications close May 1; www.dimancherouge.org/dimanche-rouge-estonia
sydney fringe
Reinvented four years ago, Sydney Fringe has rapidly claimed the crown of largest independent arts festival in NSW. Sydney Fringe will take place September 7-24 and is now calling for proposals for works in categories including theatre, music, dance, gaming, graphic novels, manga and more. Registrations close May 10; more info http://2013.sydneyfringe.com
artspace montreal & sydney residencies
Darling Foundry, Montreal
Artspace are now calling for applications from NSW-based visual artists for a residency at the impressive Darling Foundry arts complex in Montreal Canada, Oct-Dec 2013. The residency is fully funded, supported by Arts NSW and the Canada Council. Applications due April 19; www.artspace.org.au/residency_international.php
If Montreal seems a bit too far away, Artspace (with Regional Arts NSW and the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund) is also offering a three-month fully funded residency at their Sydney studios for a regional NSW-based artist. Applications close Friday 3 May 3, 2013; www.artspace.org.au/about_news.php?i=20130225189240
the cube, qut digital writing residency
The Cube, QUT
The recently opened Cube at QUT is an ambitious digital interactive learning and display space designed to highlight developments and projects involving Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM). The Cube has just announced a Digital Writing Residency for an individual or team to create a literary-inspired project that can involve “digital writing, communication, narrative and interaction, programming and digital story telling” (press release). The residency includes in-kind support, facilities and a budget of $35,000. Applications close April 3; www.thecube.qut.edu.au/about/residency.php
BACK IN 2001, TASMANIA WAS A QUIET STATE. IT HAD FINE FOOD AND WINE, BREATHTAKING NATURAL WONDERS AND SOME KEY CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS, BUT IT WASN’T REALLY KNOWN FOR FESTIVITIES (GIVE OR TAKE A FEW POPPING CORKS AT THE END OF THE SYDNEY TO HOBART).
So the Premier Jim Bacon decided they needed a festival. He put the irrepressible Robyn Archer in charge (now heading up the Canberra Centenary see realtime tv interview) and Ten Days on the Island was born, a biennial festival servicing the state with exciting cultural wonders from islands large and small around the world, as well as profiling local talent.
the duffy touch
The Other Journey, CuriousWorks
courtesy Ten Days on the Island
The Other Journey, CuriousWorks
The festival is now in its seventh incarnation, passing through the founding stage with Archer, through to consolidation with Elizabeth Walsh, and now in the firm but gentle hands of Jo Duffy, previously director or the Darwin Festival. While Duffy, a long-time fan of the festival, had no desire to make sweeping changes, she has made a few shifts to the structure that she hopes will enhance the festival experience.
By 2011, the festival was taking place in around 64 locations throughout the state. Duffy has decided to concentrate the activities to 10 key locations. Rather than a one off fling, each town gets a comprehensive festival experience with a selection of shows over consecutive days, a supper club for before- and after-show communing and a series of public programs including workshops and artists talks.
Duffy says: “What I felt I could bring to Ten Days on the Island was to further develop the festival atmosphere so it has the potential to take over [each] town; to build up the momentum and the enthusiasm of people to go and see things they wouldn’t normally go and see. To encourage people to go to a bar after a show and talk about what they’ve seen and have the opportunity to meet some of the artists.”
The challenge with this format is choosing shows that will work across multiple locations. Duffy says: “The curatorial process started with getting to know people all around Tasmania—getting a general sense of who they are, whether they already engage in the arts, and if they don’t, why they don’t. The Tasmanian population is quite evenly spread right across state… [The towns are] so close together here, six or seven minutes apart, so they have a mixture of people. You have a number of seniors, some early retirees, you’ll get a group of professionals, young families, people who work in the timber industry, people who work in the Antarctica division, scientists… everybody is kind of all in together. So that gives a certain amount of freedom. There’s probably nothing in the program, with the exception of logistics of size, that I wouldn’t put in one town because of its content.”
That said, there are a few shows that are being tailored to their locations. CuriousWorks’ The Other Journey was previously devised in Parramatta reflecting the stories of a range of migrants from Sri Lanka (see RT106). The company is adapting the work to include stories that reflect the experiences of Sri Lankan people in the Glenorchy region.
Ockham’s Razor
photo Nik Mackey
Ockham’s Razor
Also UK aerial company Ockham’s Razor will perform a full show at the Theatre Royal in Hobart, but then adapt a section of their work to be performed in the rafters of the old train station in Queenstown. Duffy explains: “One of the reasons we’re taking Ockham’s Razor to Queenstown is that about 100 kids in the area have been involved in circus workshops over the last 18 months with Slipstream, a Tasmanian circus company. They have an interest in that kind of work already so for us to be able to take the company over there shows the kids not only the best in the world, but also that these people are making a career out doing what they’ve been learning in the workshops.”
exchange and legacy
This potential for connection and exchange is a vital part of Duffy’s vision and has been formalised into a huge program called Beyond Ten Days. It offers a plethora of activities from artist talks, master classes and workshops to professional secondments for young people interested in developing a career in the arts. Duffy says “There’s quite a lot of industry interaction, and that goes both ways. In some cases the visiting artists are learning something from Tasmanian artists and in other cases it’s the other way round… [We’re] even helping people who work in the arts to get to know the facilities that are available here now for audiences and other artists with special needs—things like captioning services, live interpretations of shows, touch tours before performances.”
This idea of the festival creating lasting legacies within the Tasmanian culture has always been a key item on the festival agenda. Over the last 12 years the festival has gone into small towns working with local groups and councils to enhance not just cultural understanding but also the physical infrastructure, installing three-phase power in local town halls and creating accessible, professional venues that are now part of a much wider touring circuit. Duffy says, “There are other arts companies in Tasmania like Tasperforms, the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, Tasdance and the Tasmanian Theatre Company who now tour a lot more to really small locations because those venues are established and they’re able to use them.”
the program
The Select, Elevator Repair Service
photo Rob Strong
The Select, Elevator Repair Service
Scanning Duffy’s first program it looks like a well-balanced, healthy yet tasty banquet with a little something for everyone, which Duffy sees as vital for festivals that can’t rely purely on a capital city audience.
The international centrepiece is by US company Elevator Repair Service, who appeared in Sydney in 2009 with their courageous seven-hour reading of the Great Gatsby (RT91). Here they take on Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, which roams from the US to the ennui-tinged cafes of Paris to the passion-soaked streets of Spain in the 1920s. While still epic it’s an excerpted adaptation thus its title, The Select.
Equally grand in vision is the collaboration between Terrapin Puppet Theatre and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, Shadow Dreams, which sees the performance taking place simultaneously in two locations (Hobart and Launceston, then Hobart and Burnie), linked by the early manifestations of the National Broadband Network. Written by Finnegan Kruckemeyer, it tells the story of two young boys who awake one morning having dreamt each other’s dream.
Shadow Dreams, Terrapin Puppet Theatre and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra
courtesy Ten Days on the Island
Shadow Dreams, Terrapin Puppet Theatre and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra
Local talent is also being nurtured in dance with Finding Centre, the choreographic debut of Trisha Dunn a former Tasdance company member. She will be exploring the physical and psychological idea of finding balance in contemporary life, in collaboration with visual and video artists Jason Lam and Adam Synnott. Tasperforms will present locals—playwright Tom Holloway and actor Robert Jarman who have teamed up to create As We Forgive: Three Morality Tales for an Amoral Age, a solo performance, accompanied by cello exploring solitude, grace and revenge. Tasdance will also be touring Luminous Flux, a double-bill featuring a work choreographed by Tanja Liedkte in 2004 and Melbourne’s Byron Perry. And there’s also a show by local art academic turned comedienne, Hanna Gadsby.
There are performances by Dublin’s HotForTheatre, Brisbane’s Circa, two shows by Sydney’s Erth Physical and Visual Theatre, music form Corsica and Cape Breton (Canada), a screen-dance installation by Sue Healey as well as a comprehensive visual arts and literature program.
the state of festivals
Since the first Ten Days on the Island, the Tasmanian cultural landscape has changed dramatically. Riding the wake of Ten Days, there are now multiple major festivities across the year. Most recently on the scene is MONA FOMA which will also be instituting a winter festival in 2013 titled Dark MOFO (RT89, RT96 and RT108). Also making waves are the live art activities of Junction Arts in Launceston (see RT110, and RT99).
So is there room in this small state for all this art? Jo Duffy believes there is: “Everybody works closely down here, there’s a very strong collegiality within the arts industry. And the main proof is in the pudding—people are attending all of the events and the levels are fantastic. So the audiences are coming. There’s certainly room for everyone.”
Ten Days on the Island, Hobart, Launceston, Burnie, Huonville, Campbell Town, Swansea, Deloraine, St Helens, Queenstown, Devonport & Latrobe, plus single events at Flinders Island, King Island and Port Arthur, March 15-24; http://www.tendaysontheisland.com
Huang Yong Ping, Ressort 2012, aluminium, stainless steel. Purchased 2012 with funds from Tim Fairfax, AM, through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation, Queensland Art Gallery Collection
Huang Yong Ping, Ressort 2012, aluminium, stainless steel. Purchased 2012 with funds from Tim Fairfax, AM, through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation, Queensland Art Gallery Collection
In the Chinese Year of the Snake, the 7th Asia Pacific Triennial, (showing until April 14), is thrilling gallery goers from around Australia and beyond with the plenitude, vividness and political acuity of its art drawn from the region [p8]. The exhibition aptly features an aluminium and stainless steel skeleton of a huge writhing snake, [Ressort (2012) by Huang Yong Ping] hovering above the Queensland Art Gallery’s Water Mall, perhaps poised to strike. The Chinese Zodiac Black Water Snake, however, is said to be enigmatic, intuitive, introspective, refined and collected. Perhaps a combination of the primordial strength intimated by Ressort and these more subdued virtues might make a perfect combination in an artistic temperament of a kind we’d all like to have in 2013. APT7 tells us that Huang Yong Ping’s snake “metaphorically links sky and water.”
Water makes some notable appearances in RT113: delight in the richness of its character and anxiety over its future is acknowledged creatively in Arts House’s Gauge and in ISEA 2012 in drought-oppressed Albuquerque. Ulay, former partner of Marina Abramovic, is so concerned about this element that, given we are mostly composed of it, he now introduces himself as Water. We also celebrate Tura New Music’s 25 years and the legacy of the recently departed Albie Thoms, whose career fluidly traversed directing in theatre and television, producing ABC TV’s GTK, making documentaries and, above all, creating and encouraging the making of experimental films and videos.
Daniel Macey, Mitchell Riley, Alexander Knight, The Lighthouse, Sydney Chamber Opera
photo Louis Dillon-Savage
Daniel Macey, Mitchell Riley, Alexander Knight, The Lighthouse, Sydney Chamber Opera
A HUGE, LOW, CIRCULAR PLATFORM DOMINATES THE PERFORMING SPACE. A THIN, LADDERED TOWER ON ITS EDGE RISES HIGH ABOVE. BEHIND, A SMALL ORCHESTRA FANS OUT. WITHIN THIS SPHERE THE TALE OF THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THREE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPERS BECOMES AURALLY AND VISUALLY VISCERAL, TESTING MORAL ABSOLUTES AND RAMPING UP FEARS OF THE SUPERNATURAL, ACTUAL OR PROJECTED.
This closed world is at first a court of inquiry where three nervous investigators are interrogated by a mute man atop the tower, ‘voiced’ by a French horn. Then it becomes the lighthouse interior where we witness the keepers’ fragile relationship rapidly splintering as they reveal beliefs, fears, obsessions and crimes. Composer Peter Maxwell Davies has the investigators, deeply disturbed by what they imagine has happened, double as the keepers. This mutability is substantially expanded by director Kip Williams’ and designer Michael Hankin’s production of The Lighthouse for Sydney Chamber Opera.
Enveloped in Nicholas Rayment’s evocative lighting, a 17-strong non-singing ‘chorus’ in long, sleek, black raincoats transmutes from a finely choreographed, swaying court of inquiry into rocks, scampering rats flooding the stage, selkies and worse, as fear morphs into hysteria with the raw brass cry of ‘the beast’ and red eyes looming through fog (a near over the top moment in this considered production). The overall direction and design is thoroughly consonant with Maxwell Davies’ richly dynamic score—brisk, agitated, suffused with moments of eerie beauty and the minglings of many musics—folkloric, sentimentally operatic and mockingly modernist, all of which grant the performers ample psychological and theatrical colour. But not ease—the vocal challenges are great, the singers having to command multiple styles, complex rhythmic and octave shifts while holding the line.
The performers, Daniel Macey, Mitchell Riley and Alexander Knight, make up a rather youthful trio of lighthouse keepers. It’s not uncommon in The Lighthouse to cast a range of ages, but here their collective youth, powerful singing and fine acting adds a certain fragility, heightening the sense of their fear of each other (they sing songs “lest we end up like beasts in a cage, eating each other”) and the unknown beyond their confines (“The only cure is to kill the beast!”).
Maxwell Davies’ music, conducted by Jack Symonds, proved wonderfully memorable, perhaps surprising some doubters in the audience, who came anyway to see this opera rarity. Melodies plain and distended, revealing parodies and rich orchestral textures—adorned with banjo, honky-tonky piano, fiddle, guitar and a wide spectrum of riveting percussion—made for a musically immersive experience enhanced by vigorous theatrical inventiveness.
Sydney Chamber Opera, The Lighthouse, composer Peter Maxwell Davies, conductor Jack Symonds, director Kip Williams, performers Daniel Macey, Mitchell Riley, Alexander Knight, designer Michael Hankin, lighting Nicholas Rayment; Carriageworks, Sydney, Nov 24, 26, 28
Amy French with her painting Karlamilyi, acrylic on canvas, 2010, at Karlamilyi 2011, We Don’t Need a Map
photo Gabrielle Sullivan
Amy French with her painting Karlamilyi, acrylic on canvas, 2010, at Karlamilyi 2011, We Don’t Need a Map
IN WESTERN EUROPEAN IMAGINATION, THE DESERT IS A PLACE INHOSPITABLE TO ‘CIVILISATION,’ CHARACTERISED BY A BARRENNESS THAT MAY AS WELL BE LUNAR.
The deserts of Western Australia, indeed of much of Australia, have long been tainted with this symbolic brush—our capital cities are coastal and the interior of Western Australia most commonly related to on a non-committal, fly-in fly-out basis. The gulf between this idea of desert and a contradictory one—based on long time, first-hand, lived experience—is what causes We Don’t Need a Map: A Martu Experience of Western Desert to resonate.
Where some might see an expanse of little feature or diversity, the Martu instead know their land as richly detailed and abundant. Like their landscape, the Martu are themselves a varied people, with numerous language groups. Withstanding colonial intervention, the Martu people have called the Western deserts of Western Australia home for countless generations, and are intimately connected with its landscape both pragmatically and culturally. The art made by the Martu is not only expressive of their experience of home, but also actively participates in it. In Martu culture, the process of making objects and images, of singing and walking the land, is a process of continual renewal. Tending the land and telling stories of it are not considered to be separate activities; culture, like fire or rain, keeps country alive.
In presenting a comprehensive expression of this experience, We Don’t Need a Map is an ambitious undertaking in both scope and resolution, requiring intricate and sensitive collaboration on almost every level of production. Arising from an interest by Ross Hamilton from mining giant BHP Billiton—which also sponsored the Canning Stock Route Project of 2006-2011— in “themes of land management,” the partnership between Martumilli Artists, the Kanyirninpa Rangers and Fremantle Arts Centre spent two years in development. Three co-curators—Erin Coates, Gabrielle Sullivan and Kathleen Sorensen—have realised the exhibition by over 30 artists, overseeing burgeoning creative relationships between Martu artists and visiting collaborators from around Australia and the application of new media technology to traditional stories and techniques.
The curatorial responsibility of doing justice to a rich culture with a well defined visual logic while also educating a viewing public perhaps unfamiliar with its intricacies, or informed by a conflicted understanding of desert living, could potentially be overwhelming at such a scale. The necessities of producing a coherent and cohesive exhibition of contemporary art are underpinned here by complexities—troubled relationships between Western and Indigenous ideas and people cannot be avoided nor overstated, and keen awareness of this history and a desire for productive mending simmer visibly in the collaborative works. While necessary, the more educational aspects of the exhibition risk carrying unwanted anthropological baggage and great pains have been taken to ensure that Martu voices speak loudest, so that what is presented is understood as living and vital. This effort often battles with a conflicting urge to avoid explanatory text, resulting in some areas of the exhibition that read more like classroom aids than artworks.
We Don’t Need a Map is most successful when this ‘educational’ agenda is less explicit; these successes are many, and of significant value. The inclusion of aerial photographs of the region, juxtaposed with Martu paintings, makes direct connection between the abstract swatches of painted colour and the real topography of the landscape. The knowledge of geographic form and structure learnt through walking country proves to be incredibly accurate—reverberations of form and of the shimmering, saturated colour in photographs and paintings create engaging shifts in perspective, between representation and abstraction.
The most memorable works allow for an experiential immersion in Martu life, in its colours and textures and sounds. Sound in particular is a welcome accompaniment. Karlamilyi, an enormous painting by Amy French and Lily Long—a five by three metre controlled explosion of colour—is accompanied by an audio track of the sisters singing their country, activating the painting’s internal rhythms and contributing a comparative sense of time to its impressive scale. Karlamilyi combines remembered geography and geology with ancestral stories and figures, a vibrant blend of figuration and abstraction that renders visible the sister’s complex understanding of the landscape and their place within it. A ‘key’ to this memory map also assists navigation without too literally assigning meaning to specific forms, allowing the mind and eye to wander at will.
Mabel, Still Walking Country, Lynette Wallworth, still, 2012, We Don’t Need a Map
Mabel, Still Walking Country, Lynette Wallworth, still, 2012, We Don’t Need a Map
Lynette Wallworth’s Still Walking Country is a similarly immersive experience. The elegant three channel video, each frame projected larger than life across two walls of a darkened screen room, documents Martu women hunting, cooking and walking, a simple soundtrack provided again by their singing. The syrupy pace of the videos, which gradually fade in and out of various stages of the processes, complements the pace of the skilful hands and voices at work within them. Closely framed images of skinning and plucking, the red dirt and fire-lit darkness of the landscape, are at once visceral and hauntingly beautiful, presented with all the gravitas with which they are performed. Wallworth’s reverence for her subjects and her sense of wonder are evident—the lens of the camera reads the activities of the women like the watchful eye of a student soaking up new and surprising knowledge and the careful simplicity and precision of the piece avoids didacticism.
Masey Robinson at the Parnngurr phone booth, The Phone Booth Project, 2012, Lily Hibberd and Curtis Taylor, We Don’t Need a Map
courtesy Fremantle Arts Centre
Masey Robinson at the Parnngurr phone booth, The Phone Booth Project, 2012, Lily Hibberd and Curtis Taylor, We Don’t Need a Map
Martu filmmaker Curtis Taylor, discussing his Phonebooth project with collaborator Lily Hibberd, describes how the Martu way of life has incorporated Western technologies into its traditions, rather than being changed by them. Stone and Hibberd explore this idea indirectly in their documentary video, which retells stories about the use of phonebooths and long distance communication in desert life.
It’s Wallworth’s installation, however, that best illustrates the potential usefulness of new media technologies in contributing to Martu culture. Beyond its documentary purposes, the time-based nature of video and sound complements practices that are already intrinsically involved tied up in temporality, in the idea of renewal, repetition and transmission. Even Martu paintings, as well as being beautiful aesthetic objects, are records of activity, of gestures that make up and remake the landscape anew; the moving image is used most effectively here to illustrate the fluid, living relationship between people and land.
Yukurra Billy Atkins, Cannibal Story, 2012, animation by Sohan Ariel Hayes, We Don’t Need a Map
courtesy Fremantle Arts Centre
Yukurra Billy Atkins, Cannibal Story, 2012, animation by Sohan Ariel Hayes, We Don’t Need a Map
A collaboration between Martu elder Yunkurra Billy Atkins and Sohan Ariel Hayes attempts this literally, translating Atkins’ stories and paintings into an animation. Atkins’ vision is, aesthetically, somewhat different from those that hang close by in the dedicated painting room, his perspective more uncomfortably positioned between representative tropes, between beauty and darkness, and his narratives more explicitly present. Cannibal story depicts the particular darkness of Kumpupirntily (Lake Disappointment), an area of land coloured by bad energy and Martu blood. The repeated motifs from Atkins’ paintings—blood red skies full of spirits and bright hills of blotchy green and yellow—are worked by Hayes into a framework for characters that repeatedly enact the battle between Martu people and a cannibal troupe, portrayed with a stylised cleanliness that jars somewhat with Atkins’ expressive back-drops. Atkins’ paintings become illustrative, a landscape and history in motion.
We Don’t Need a Map is a great achievement both logistically and culturally, providing the necessary service of documenting and promoting cultures whose subtleties and beauty have long been misunderstood. However, it is a shocking experience, in the best possible way, to see your home painted in new and surprising colours, even more so to realise that those colours are true. There is still much to talk about, and to talk through: the practices of the Rangers, the Martu understanding of and domestication of fire, the longevity of the collaborative relationships formed. I wonder if is this is where the real successes of We Don’t Need a Map lie, not necessarily in the large scale presentation of culture alone, but in those two years of behind-the-scenes collaboration, of reciprocal learning and understanding, in the slow and careful development and management of productive relationships that can hopefully extend beyond this exhibition. We Don’t Need a Map seems to ask what lessons can be drawn from these works, from these collaborations. What happens next?
Fremantle Arts Centre: We Don’t Need a Map: Martu Experience of Western Desert, co-curators Erin Coates, FAC Exhibitions Coordinator, Kathleen Sorensen, Martu artist and Cultural Consultant, Gabrielle Sullivan, Martumilli Artists Manager; a partnership between FAC, Kanyirnipa Jujurrpa and Martumilli Artists with support from BHP Billiton Iron Ore; FAC, Fremantle, Nov 17, 2012-Jan 20, 2013
SINCE 2010 PEOPLE OF THE PARRAMATTA REGION HAVE CELEBRATED THE VIBRANT CULTURE OF THE ASIAN SUBCONTINENT AND ITS FAR-FLUNG DIASPORA WITH TREMENDOUS CURIOSITY AND ENTHUSIASM. THE FREE CONCERTS IN A TOWN SQUARE GIRDED BY THE MASALA MARKETS (FOOD, FASHION, HANDICRAFTS) DRAW HUGE CROWDS IN THE EVENINGS AND A STEADY FLOW IN THE DAYTIME TAKING IN NON-STOP PERFORMANCES ONSTAGE AND OUT OF THE BLUE—INCLUDING A VERY FUNNY FAKE FAKIR.
Not having been to earlier Parramasalas and eager to experience a culturally focused festival in a country where, Adelaide’s OzAsia excepted, there is little of Asian performing arts on show, not least in our so-called international arts festivals, I booked into a Parramatta hotel for a couple of days of live-in Parramasala.
The Outdoor Stage program, curated by Virginia Hyam, provided some of the more fascinating performances in the festival. It featured traditional dance groups (a superb, young Sri Lankan group displayed traditional Kandyan dancing and fine costumery evoking animals, warriors and gods), individual artists, for example Bukhchuluun Ganburged, an excellent Mongolian throat singer capable of surprising bass runs, and groups, like Layam, building their jazz inflected performance on South Indian tradition. Although not a fan of musical fusion I was entranced by Nafas, a band combining the talents and instruments of musicians from Mongolia (throat singing, horse fiddle), Afghanistan (tabla and harmonium), Guadeloupe (African drums) and Australia (western drumming and keyboards). Nafas’ ”Into silence” was sublimely contemplative and calming, a nice prelude to my first indoor Parramasala concert, after a fine Punjabi butter chicken washed down with sugar cane juice with Tahitian lime and ginger.
Soumik Datta, Bernhard Schimpelsberger, Circle of Sound
photo David Clare
Soumik Datta, Bernhard Schimpelsberger, Circle of Sound
Sarod virtuoso Soumik Datta (UK), his instrument slung electric guitar-style over his shoulder, was joined by Austrian percussionist Bernhard Schimpelsberger in a powerhouse concert at Riverside Theatre. The musical form was somewhat repetitive, each piece commencing with delicacy, surging into fast picking to an emphatic percussive beat and then overlaid with looping sound, courtesy of guitar pedals, and climaxing with rock band passion. The playing was intricate, although greater variation and a bit more evidence of classical skill would have been welcome; but Datta transforms the sarod into a fascinatingly multi-voiced instrument. Other elements varied the tone of the concert: the voiceover to an opening video projection of mountainous country suggested we were in for some high drama in its account of frostbite, delirium and mortality—a prelude to the first piece, “Quest.” Compositions were interspersed with the musicians joking about their show going out to fans ‘live’ online, and playing for an admiring President Obama. Later they accompanied a melancholy song “The return,” pre-recorded by a female singer to a video of gloomy roads and rain on a windscreen. There were moments of aching beauty in the complex final pieces, “Circles of Sound” and “Circles of Light,” phrases like “a new awakening” and “You will not beat me” suggesting a return to the show’s opening quest motif. Throughout, Schimpelsberger textured and propelled the compositions with inventiveness and some strange instruments.
The theatre program of three performances focused on issues of identity and displacement. The Trouble with Asian Men (created by Kristine Landon-Smith, Sudha Bhuchar and Louise Wallinger), from the UK’s Tamasha Theatre, was a rather under-produced affair utilising a similar methodology to the one Roslyn Oades has so expertly and dynamically exploited and advanced for Urban Theatre Projects (Fast Cars & Tractor Engines, 2005 and Stories of Love & Hate, 2008) and Belvoir (I’m Your Man, 2012).
Wearing headphones, the three performers (two from the UK where the performance originated, one a local) reproduce verbatim the recorded utterances of those interviewed about the trouble with Asian men and “what’s troubling Asian men.” It’s pretty much a litany of horrors with sporadic humour and no sense of overall cohesion: there’s fear of young British and Australian Indian women’s independence and their expectations of wealth; lack of young male ambition; oppressive male behaviour towards wives and girlfriends; a desire to seek refuge in India; and above all men appear trapped by the “invisible umbilical cord” between mother and son (mother’s food is best, mother knows best). Men face unfulfilling marriages, claim they ‘need their freedom,’ and are repelled by their pregnant wives’ bodies.
The UK actors overplayed their parts, amplifying the one-dimensionality of the work, which left me thinking what else might trouble Asian men about living in London or Parramatta, beyond girls, wives, mum and dad. What about class, politics, relationships with British or Australian men and women, in the workplace or socially? Or is The Trouble with Asian Men an account of a hopelessly ghettoised male subculture? The show has enjoyed considerable success in the UK over the last decade, but here it seems stereotypical and infuriatingly unanalytical.
Anusya Nathan’s Long Live the King (director Guy Masterson) was a more complex work. The LA-based Australian writer-performer and screen actor works to a tightly cued light and sound program, switching roles and changing appearance in an account of the time before and after her parents’ (Meena and Francis) arrival in Adelaide from India in 1977—on the same day that Elvis dies. Her mother is obsessed with Elvis Presley whose death the writer has described as the play’s metaphor for the sense of loss that comes with migration—and potential marital breakdown. A string of Elvis songs sets the tone for scenes—The Beatles’ “Something” for Francis’ attraction to Meena and “Are you lonesome tonight” for a growing sense of isolation and putrefaction (such is the intensity of some of the writing) felt by Meena. The vast spaces around suburban Elizabeth, north of Adelaide, the pair’s new home, proves too much for Francis. As well, he is made anxious by Meena’s pregnancy—“Give me back my wife!” The birth of the child is traumatic but proves to be Meena’s salvation. Nathan smiles and weeps at once at the play’s conclusion, embodying mother and daughter in the same way that her earlier Elvis impersonation is, in spirit, both her own and her mother’s. It’s not clear in the play whether or not the marriage of Meena and Francis survives, but apparently it did. The success of Long Live the King in the fringe festivals of Adelaide, Melbourne and Edinburgh is clearly warranted. Asunya Nathan demonstrates physical and vocal versatility and literary ability (if occasionally hyper-poetic), and does a very good Elvis.
Another quick change artist is New Zealand’s Jacob Ranga, a master of the mask. Krishna’s Dairy (director Justin Lewis; Indian Ink Theatre Company) is a solo performance (with a supporting musician) packed with visual gags, songs, dextrous alternation of masks to create various characters and parallel storytelling about relationships between husbands and wives. In New Zealand, Gobi and Zina run a corner store—the ‘dairy’ of the title; in Mogul India, the emperor Shah Jahan builds the Taj Mahal for his late wife, Mumtaz Mahal. Gobi’s ambition is to fight supermarket culture and provide for his wife and son, but in a surprising reversal it’s Gobi who dies, shot by a thief in the shop. Zina, who had always wanted to return to India (“What do you miss?, Gobi asks, “The dirt, the flies?” “Family,” she replies) not only keeps the store running, but business thrives. She continues to feel the presence of the man she only met when they married, asking him, “How can you really say you love someone…?” Zina’s tribute to Gobi is the success of the store, her modest Taj Mahal. It’s interesting that in the Taj Mahal tale Rajan uses the frequently told if historically unsupported story of Shah Jahan’s blinding and mutilation of his architects and craftsmen, an indication of the darker side of the testament of one partner’s love for another. Jacob Rajan’s performance is impressive and frequently funny, but the play’s 15 years are showing—it feels quaint, over-wrought and thematically light; some of the youngish audience I saw it with thought it was “like a play for kids.” Theatrically it had much to offer, but like The Trouble with Asian Men, there was a claustrophobic sense of a closed circuit, of people not engaging with much beyond their own lives—doubtless a condition suffered by many first generation migrants.
Asif Ali Khan & Group
photo Cynthia Sciberras
Asif Ali Khan & Group
Although I couldn’t attend the opening night Bollywood Block Party and a tight schedule meant that I had to miss out on Susheela Raman & Band and Pandit Hari Prasas Chaurasia, I caught a large part of the wonderful outdoor concert by Pakistan’s leading qwaali exponents, Asif Ali Khan & Group. A huge, rapt audience swayed to the rapidly paced, insistent percussion and the powerful collective singing of the musicians ranging into exquisite high tenor and delivering dynamic call and response. The audience was astonishingly diverse for a concert of such cultural specificity, drawing on Western Sydney’s multicultural breadth and depth. The festival’s decision to make this concert free was a wise and a generous one. Asif Ali Khan & Group were followed by Melbourne’s eccentric The Bombay Royale, an 11-piece band convincingly fusing disco, Bollywood, surf, rock and Ennio Morricone with excellent singers Parvyn Kaur Singh and Shourov Bhattacharya and fun costuming. They had the crowd dancing. I ate too well, took in some of the film program, relished unexpected performances from proud South Asian Sydneysiders and was captivated body and soul by music at once ancient and modern. It was odd but enlightening to feel like a cultural tourist in one’s own city. Long live Parramasala!
ELLEN DISSANAYAKE IS AN AMERICAN WRITER AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL SCHOLAR WHO CLAIMS THAT ART MAKING IS NATURAL RATHER THAN SIMPLY CULTURAL, IN THE SAME WAY THAT LANGUAGE SKILLS ARE NOW REGARDED AS INNATE.
Her notion of art is broad, including games and rituals and is drawn from 15 years of field experience in Sri Lanka, Nigeria and Papua New Guinea. In particular she argues that art makes things special, with evolutionary and social purpose, and has done so for long before our two-century old specialisation and abstract theorising of art.
Christine Morrow, Director of the Australian Experimental Arts Foundation (AEAF) in Adelaide recently interviewed Dissanayake prior to the writer’s visit to Australia to speak about “The Deep Structure of the Arts.”
Can you talk a little bit about how the arts were experienced in hunter-gatherer societies and give an overview of the differences that are thrown up when we compare them to the arts today.
The behavior of our hunter-gatherer ancestors adapted them to their way of life. These were small groups of people who had to work together in confidence and unity. They didn’t just have some people performing art and other people watching. Everybody participated. In modern and post-modern societies in the West, specialist artists—it is a very long story—worked for princes and for the Church and then there were the bourgeois audiences and collectors after the French Revolution. By that stage, art came to be seen as the province of wealthy people or cultivated people or people with the time and the leisure and the means to enjoy this thing, called art, that was very much apart from life.
If we used the high-elite or fine arts view that was predominant in universities ‘til around the 60s, then it’s easy to say that pre-modern people didn’t even have art. After that, you have the cultural changes, the protest movements and the real politicisation of art. It was pure accident that I started to look at art in the 50s both biologically and evolutionarily. I mean, I never, ever dreamt that I would be on the same quest as people who weren’t biologists—people looking at colonialism, and the arts of women, and trying to think of art more broadly than elite connoisseurs.
I’m not going to ask you, “What is art?” because we will get caught in a semantic tangle that may never unravel. But when you identify and explore this concept of ‘art’ and locate it within prehistoric, hunter-gatherer and other pre-modern societies, are you talking about the same entity as I am, coming from a contemporary art institution whose understanding of the concept is mostly defined in modern and post-modern terms? When you and I use the word ‘art’, are we talking about the same beast?
That’s probably one of the most important questions. I think it’s good for people of today to learn that under the skin we have a Pleistocene psychology. So that if we were born to that way of life, we would be satisfied with it. But, nobody wants to go back to live that way. I certainly don’t want to!
Me neither. [Laughs] I’m personally a huge advocate of modern dentistry…
Anaesthesia, antibiotics and even just a warm bed, right? But, you know, in our arts, I would say we are all still concerned with the same things. What I have learned from the arts of the past is that an evolutionary view tells you that people don’t make art about unimportant things. When people write poetry, they’re writing on themes—love poems, poems about motherhood and poems about nature. They’re all somehow about the human condition. And I think if you dig far enough even into the most outrageous art today, many of the works are political, they have to do with questions of power, and examining or subverting that power. They also have to do with the person’s own status. Where you stand in relation to others has been evolutionarily important. Hunter-gatherer societies are more traditional and everybody has their place, but individuals still want to become that role of mother or warrior or whatever.
I want to ask you if you have any particular reflections on two different things. One is primitivism in the arts—the way that different art movements and individuals have sought to appropriate the ‘look’ of elements from different cultures. The second one is that recent theorists have identified what they’ve chosen to call an ‘ethnographic turn’ in art. In 1995 Hal Foster published an essay called The Artist as Ethnographer. He was looking at the way that theorising cultural difference has become so important in the practice and interpretation of contemporary art. Like anthropologists, artists are exploring how we represent cultural difference.
Now, we know so much about the rest of the world and people have travelled and we are now living in multicultural societies, it’s easier to see our differences rather than our similarities. But you know, a bio-behavioural or an evolutionary view helps us see our similarities more.
You mentioned behavior and that’s your main focus isn’t it? The word ‘art’ operates as a noun but you’re interested in it more as a behaviour, a verb.
There’s no verb for art. We have to say ‘make art’ but that’s also kind of ambivalent because even then art is always a thing or a product. That’s why I’ve come up with the expression ‘artify’ or ‘make special’—to emphasise it as a behaviour. I tried to figure out what was the common denominator among the arts of all people, of all times and places, who were artists, who were making crafts, who were professionals, or ‘Sunday painters’. I used the expression ‘making special’. Some of the biologists or some cultural critics would say that this is too broad. Now, I don’t define ‘making special’ as art because ‘making special’ is broader than just art. In play and in ritual, people also make their experience different from the everyday. Even children, when they play, are pretending. They exaggerate their voices and the way they move. Even puppies know that they’re not really fighting, right? So there are fuzzy edges between these categories of art, play and ritual.
Fossils and artefacts are concrete evidence of the past. But behaviour is to some extent ephemeral—except of course insofar as it can be shown to be either instinctive or innate. What evidence exists for the ways we should understand art as a verb and not a noun, as a behaviour and not a product?
Well I think you have to extrapolate from small-scale societies that we see today. My latest work has been to look at mark-making—what are called petroglyphs or carvings into rock. That’s the trace of the behaviour. We don’t know about the dancing and singing but we just have to assume by, say, looking at children. Even very small children are primed to do these things. So you would think, then, that if babies and toddlers just innately sing and move along with music without anyone teaching them to do these things, then that predisposition is there.
In your writing, you challenge the idea that art should be understood as a symbolic practice. If art were a symbolic practice, two- or three-dimensional elements would have referents. But if art isn’t defined as symbolic, then how else might we understand it instead?
I don’t think of art as a language.
We have a fundamental predisposition—I don’t like to say that art is an instinct—to make experience special. Doing that helped our ancestors to survive. The things that were important to them were the biological things of life: finding food, becoming well, having healthy children and being prosperous and getting along. So they artified those things with rituals that are full of art. When I say ritual, I’m really just referring to a bunch of different arts all assembled together. There is just a human proclivity to do much more than is merely necessary.
I could be argued with about that. A strict evolutionist would say that you don’t waste time and resources on something unless it’s going to pay you back in a big way in terms of reproduction and survival.
I have a problem with the archaeological establishment that looks back in time at early petroglyphs—from long before those beautiful cave paintings at Lascaux and Chauvet. The earliest petroglyphs are non-representational. They’re geometric. They have found carvings of parallel lines, perpendicular lines, spirals and diagonal lines that look as though they’re planned and deliberate. And archaeologists want to call this art. But in order to call it art, they feel that they need to say that it’s obviously symbolic.
But you know, artification is a larger human category than symbol. I mean, you can artify a symbol. It’s definitely not the case that once you learned to symbolise, you started making art. You were artifying all along.
Artification existed first but when language came along, when it was about things that were really important, it was artified. So when people give orations, they talk in a different voice, they use a bigger vocabulary, a more flowery vocabulary. They’re ‘making it special’. The impulse to artify comes first and I would speculate that it first appears in the form of body decoration. The human body, instead of having all of this hair growing like an animal does, its braiding it, it’s putting paint on it. It’s marking your body.
I think it is fair to say that you are the principal author of a new discipline. Before you commenced your research and scholarship, there was no systematic study of the evolutionary origins of art was there?
While I would agree with that, it’s definitely not for me to say! I’ve been working in this field for fifty or sixty years but it’s just been in the last ten years that evolutionary biology has really looked at the arts seriously.
There are a couple of other researchers I know, who are from my generation. They are both outside the academy. One of them, Nancy Aiken, wrote a book called The Biological Origins of Art. She shows how in the perception of animals and also in human perception that, for instance, we find zigzag lines to be threatening and rounded forms to be pleasing.
And then Kathryn Coe is an anthropologist who lived with Chachi Indians in Ecuador. She’s written a book called The Ancestress Hypothesis: Visual Art as Adaptation about the women teaching their daughters to weave and passing down their cultural history through this means. So she sees art as being a way of passing information down the line.
I had no idea when I began this work that I would be relevant to anything. What I wanted was to show biologists and ethologists that, ‘Hey, you should look at art too!’ And I haven’t even really ever succeeded in that. My best audiences have been in Art Education or Music Education. They are always on the periphery of Art and Music departments. They’re not the soloists or the medallists or the star painters or sculptors. They’re teaching children. But they know that what they’re doing is art. They’re making experience special. And they know that the children or the patients—or whoever it is that they work with—have art in them to be developed.
The same is true with crafts. Because they are also on the periphery of the Art departments. Oh, you know: “That’s just craft”. But they are working with their hands, and doing things that people have done since the Stone Age, from the Pleistocene. (Laughs) Well, not all of them, of course. Now some are doing things with computers…
There’s a very very import aspect that I haven’t told you yet. It’s about the mother-infant interaction.
But, I’ve read your book, Art and Intimacy.
Okay, but I have carried that so much further now and I have extracted five proto-aesthetic operations that compose artification. The first is formalisation. Which would be like a composing or patterning or simplifying. This is what all artists do. They simplify. They don’t have the whole of a reality there. They’re performing these operations on reality to make it more than ordinary.
Then they use repetition. Whether its repetition of footsteps as in dance or beats as in music or repeating a motif that is part of an artwork, either in space or time.
The third one is exaggeration and that’s a really important one. Things are larger or smaller and they catch your attention. Imagination has made the subject more than ordinary.
Then elaboration, and then manipulation of expectation. As the perceiver experiences this artwork they have expectations about it. Especially in time: in music and in dance, while it unfolds, your expectations are being manipulated. But even within a more static style of art, your expectations are surprised.
Now these five things are what mothers use with their babies to attract attention, to sustain interest to keep the attention and to arouse and mould emotion. They manipulate the baby’s expectation and they formalize and so on.’ And the interesting thing is that that’s what the baby wants the mother to do. It is born wanting that kind of behavior and soliciting it from the adult.
In general, I’ve found that men are really not interested in a theory of mothers and babies. They want to be told that the evolutionary origin of art lies in men using it to show off so that they can seduce females and impregnate them.
Most recently, neuroscientists talk about perceptual primitives. They say that the visual system has ‘primitives’: it responds to an edge or a contour, a dot, a straight line or a colour. Those are called the visual primitives. They’re the building blocks of everything else.
So I am saying that these five things I’ve identified are proto-aesthetic primitives—that they’re there in our brains and we respond to them in any modality, whether it’s visual art or music or dance.
This is new. I’ve been working towards this a long time. This observation really grounds it in biology and if you say that artists of the present day are also using those same operations, then it does make a continuity form the Pleistocene, or actually from the bower birds or song birds to the present.
Everything I’ve read in Art and Intimacy accords with the experience of caring for an infant. It’s so obvious that I feel foolish that I never observed it or particularly reflected on it until I read your research.
Charles Darwin who had 10 children could not reflect on it. He didn’t even mention it. He said that he thought the feeling of ‘sympathy’ came from the mother-infant relationship. But obviously he never went into the nursery…
He was always in his study!
His children were with their mother and their nannies and cousins. But you would think that he would notice how different the voices are and the funny faces that people make for babies. Somehow that escaped him entirely.
I find it quite lovely that your research in that area is based on art and human capacity being founded in collaboration, collectivity and mutuality. I’m thinking about Western liberal philosophy and somebody like Thomas Hobbes writing in Leviathan…
That human life is nasty, brutish and short….and… competitive!
Yes and beyond that, there’s his idea that only through social co-operation can we fulfill our human potential. Can I ask you to speculate on the implications of this idea that competition and selfishness has been overstated in theories of human evolution at the expense of cooperation and mutuality?
Evolutionary philosophy has until quite recently taken that line—that if we cooperate at all it is in order to compete with other groups. But there are a few theorists who are writing more about collaboration. So it’s coming around. Neuroscientists I have talked to recently confirm that this ‘moving together in time’ and doing things like dancing together in a group, or being a mother and having this mutuality with your baby, all these things make your brain secrete oxytocin.
That’s the body’s ‘bonding’ chemical right?
Yes, you release it when you breastfeed, and during sex, but also when you participate in the arts. This hormone increases trust and confidence. So the brains of those hunter-gatherers who were dancing around the fire and singing were being flooded with oxytocin. It made them trust each other and made them feel confident. Now, we have the neurobiology that shows that.
I was at a university in Canada a few weeks ago talked to people in the Psychology of Music lab and an experiment has been done with a group of children. Some of them are walking around and singing. And then when they finish doing that, a teacher drops some papers on the floor. And the ones who’ve being singing go and pick it up.
Ahhh…altruism!
Altruism and mutuality and having sympathy for a person’s needs.
And in another experiment, also done in Canada: children were watching a stuffed animal playing a toy drum either on the beat or out of sync with the music. And the ones who could tell the difference—they were only fourteen month old; they could walk but couldn’t even really talk very much—they would help, they would go and fetch a pencil that the experimenter had dropped. She’s waving her hand across the table trying to reach it. Kids who are able to attune to a beat will be more helpful than the ones who can’t.
The next thing is that oxytocin also suppresses cortisol, which is the stress hormone. This is why people feel good when they’ve sung together or danced together. It’s the participation that is the important thing. So those are two very, very adaptive things that the arts, music and dance in particular, do for people. That explains why children are predisposed to do them and why we do them. Now that idea is not ‘out’ as much as it should be.
Being adaptive in the sense of creating trust and confidence so that people work together in unity and cooperate is getting rid of the stress hormones. This tells us that today the participation in the arts is the important thing. It’s not just going to a gallery and looking at stuff that is already there or even just sitting in an audience but actually doing it.
And especially in schools. If you want your kids—or your patient if you’re an art therapist—to develop things like trust and confidence, this is how it works. They’re getting rid of stress—in addition to all the stuff like the content that’s bothering them is coming out.
My generation of artists and art professionals is convinced that everything in life is relative and meaning is illusory. Can the search for, and understanding of, an evolutionary origin for art provide us with a fixed referent or set of values that may act as an anchor against uncertainty?
If you have a scientific revelation, as I did, that we are on this Earth and we are adapted to live here as hunter-gatherers then that is really bedrock. That is not relative. Also, it’s not relative that our parents are going to die or that we’re going to get sick or that our children are going to give us trouble…
We all face the same human problems. There’s pain, there’s loss, there’s illness—the Buddhist things. So the arts have from time immemorial been a way to investigate those subjects and come to terms with them as much as one can. To express one’s reaction to them. And so you learn from the arts of the past and your art is about that too. You can’t avoid it.
Anything that I hear people say about life, I test it against, “Well, would hunter-gatherers feel that way? Would they do that? Do they need to have, say, couples therapy? What did they do instead? They had their problems, right, but how did they address them?
How does an understanding of the evolutionary origins of art affect the way that we practice and experience it today?
Well you know Barnett Newman said that aesthetics is to art as ornithology is to birds!
I used to think that as soon as people learned that the arts had evolved they would just be so thrilled with that idea that they would just take it to their bosom. It would be like becoming a Copernican after you had been a ‘flat-Earther’ all your life. Because, that is what happened to me.
I think if you have a love or an aptitude and an interest in one or another art—and if you marvel at the natural world and the fact that we are biological creatures who emerged from that world—and if you find grandeur or transcendence in that knowledge, then that would enrich your experience that we are art-making creatures.
Ellen Dissanayake’s visit to Australia is hosted by Australian Experimental Art Foundation and the International Visitors Program of the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council for the Arts, and supported by the three partner presenting organisations: Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Sydney College of the Arts, and the Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart.
Ellen Dissanayake’s visit to Australia is hosted by Australian Experimental Art Foundation and the International Visitors Program of the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council for the Arts, and supported by the three partner presenting organisations. AEAF, Adelaide, March 19; Canberra Contemporary Art Space, March 20; Sydney College of the Arts, March 22; Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, March 26
FOR DANCE MASSIVE 2013, ARTS HOUSE, MALTHOUSE THEATRE AND DANCEHOUSE HAVE SELECTED 19 WORKS TO BE PERFORMED OVER TWO WEEKS IN MARCH IN THE ONLY FESTIVAL EXCLUSIVELY DEDICATED TO AUSTRALIAN DANCE.
The program, though kinaesthetically and thematically diverse, nevertheless reflects a number of common interests especially around notions of society, culture and the body. What kind of entity is the individual self? What is its relation to the social whole? How do selves coalesce?
The notion of repetition is another common Dance Massive theme, a mechanism which promises to be explored physically, linguistically, temporally and perceptually. Taken together, these works represent an intense manifestation, a critical mass, of dance culture in an Australian setting.
Why program so many dance works in such a short space of time? Dance Massive proposes an intensity, a shared focus between a roving, active population of spectators and performers not often achieved in Australia, at least, not in dance. According to Angela Conquet (Artistic Director, Dancehouse) a festival such as this can give an accurate, layered picture of the Australian dance landscape. This is not to say that everyone is represented here. Undoubtedly, some companies and artists are in between works. The very selection process, with finite resources and the exercise of choice, also rules out the participation of some. Landscapes are never all-inclusive. They have their own physiognomy, their own borders, topography and temporal flavour. So there is also a contingency to this festival. It is the expression of a critical mass, not an encyclopaedia. It is also an expression of place, of what can be generated in such a setting.
Dance Massive has a twin focus. On the one hand, it’s an opportunity for an audience to serially immerse itself in a multiplicity of works. On the other, it will enable a delegation of 20-odd international visitors to see full-length Australian works in their own cultural milieu. This differs from the narrower arts market concept which showcases and commodifies abridged pieces back-to-back for an international clientele. The exposure to a significant international audience means that Dance Massive offers an opportunity to show developed works which could tour both nationally and internationally. For this reason, Conquet says that this is not a forum for works-in-progress. According to Angharad Wynne-Jones (Creative Producer, Arts House), Dance Massive represents artists at quite different stages of their careers. Like the European platform, Dance Massive has the support of state cultural agencies—the Australia Council and Arts Victoria—but its artistic program is the child of the three venues, their artistic directors and selection committees. Angela Conquet is very appreciative of the dance literacy and involvement of Phillip Keir (Keir Foundation), one of the selectors and a key supporter of the Dancehouse program.
inside the program
Antony Hamilton, Melanie Lane, Black Project 1
photo Ponch Hawkes
Antony Hamilton, Melanie Lane, Black Project 1
A number of the programmed works embody social and political concerns. Ashley Dyer’s Life Support, for example, follows Something Fell on my Head, both of which give their audience the opportunity to directly experience their subject matter, whether through feelings of anxiety, finitude or vulnerability. Antony Hamilton (Black Project 1 & 2, see RT111 and RT108) and Tim Darbyshire (More or Less Concrete, see RT109), in their own ways, also mediate contemporary political and social issues. Atlanta Eke’s meditation on female mutability, Monster Body (RT110), is posed on a feminist present, while Jo Lloyd’s Future Perfect muses on constellations of identity in the cosmos of social life. Stephanie Lake’s Dual reflects the individual’s ability to cleave to the other thereby producing a new, synthetic entity. Whereas Lloyd poses the group in relation to the individual, Lake is interested in the notion of partnership, as embodied in duet form. In Black Project 1& 2, Antony Hamilton explores another kind of interplay within and without the human, between life and non-life, an unstable cosmos.
Dalisa Pigram, Gudirr Gudirr, Marrugeku
photo Rod Hartvigsen
Dalisa Pigram, Gudirr Gudirr, Marrugeku
The social and cultural sphere has several modes of incarnation. Dalisa Pigram’s solo work, Gudirr Gudirr, simultaneously spans the collective concerns of Northwestern Aboriginal people through the singularity and cultural breadth of her own body. Soo Yeun You’s Gu:t collaboratively enters aboriginal spirituality through the lens of her own shamanistic background, felt at the level of the kinaesthetic everyday. Not that every body isn’t in some sense a product of culture, time and motion.
While Russell Dumas’ fine work is indebted to the postmodern choreographic legacy of Twyla Tharp and Trisha Brown, his dance for the time being—Southern Exposure has a local inflexion. As a manifestation of what is possible in the space and time of Australian dancing, Dumas’ work is formulated over the abyss of the present. Dumas “reimagines the unstable body” in relation to the (im)possibility of a future dance practice. Nothing is fixed. Likewise, Ben Speth’s WeTubeLIVE (RT112) feeds on an unstable, undetermined network of possibility. Its mode of community is enactive, a mass playing out of virtual choreographies ripped from the internet and staged for live capture in the dappled kaleidoscope of the National Gallery’s Great Hall. While Speth, Dumas and Pigram are each in their own way oriented towards the future, Tracie Mitchell’s dance film retrospective shows film’s enduring ability to reach into the present.
Conversation Piece, Lucy Guerin Inc
photo Brett Boardman
Conversation Piece, Lucy Guerin Inc
If Larissa McGowan (Skeleton; see interview, p26) is concerned with the bare bones of the anatomical trace, The Recording continues Sandy Parker’s prior interest in the dynamic physiology of a work. Whereas the earlier Document (interview RT103; review RT105) was oriented towards the marks on the page or screen, The Recording aims to open up the process whereby live dancing becomes a series of cinematic images. Difference provokes transformation. This is also a factor in Lucy Guerin’s work, Conversation Piece (interview RT110; review RT111) which plays on the changes set in motion through repetition. Paradoxically, repetition does not engender serial sameness but is the means by which difference is produced. Words and movement played again institute an event, the becoming different of something recognisably the same. Matthew Day also plays with difference through repetition in Intermission (interview RT109; review RT110), a durational, rhythmic work that aims to create its own perceptual milieu. Intermission is the third in Day’s series of pieces, each concerned with the mutating force of repetition. Tim Darbyshire’s More or Less Concrete (RT109) is also interested in the effects of the cyclical as is Natalie Abbott in her work, Physical Fractals (see RT109 online). The singular is reflected in our conception of the unique individual who is simultaneously a participant of the social whole. In 247 Days, Chunky Move artistic director Anouk Van Dijk continues her interest in the social and the political with a work focused on the individual. While her An Act of Now (interview RT111; review RT112) was strongly site specific in its deployment of the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, 247 Days takes as its spatial premise Malthouse’s cavernous, black box Merlyn Theatre.
Personally, I find it difficult to tell what a piece will be like from reading about it. Such is the elusive potential of live performance that it cannot be fully represented in words. Words lean towards the event, they strive towards it, but they cannot fully embrace what is yet to come. Dance Massive offers a sustained opportunity for a series of live relations between the work and the audience, a portal of potential. That said, Conquet regards the durational aspect of dance as something that needs time in between viewings; to allow the sensorial dust to settle, or better still, to reverberate. Taking time on the part of the spectator allows for the “preservation of sensations” the better to amplify their impact. However you do it, you have 12 days to pace yourself or, as Wynne-Jones suggests, to “go for the ride.”
Dance Massive, Australian Contemporary Dance, Dancehouse, Malthouse, Arts House, March 12-14; National Dance Forum, Footscray Community Arts Centre, Melbourne, March 15-17
courtesy the artist and Priska C Juschka Fine Art, New York
Almagul Menlibayeva, Kurchatov 22 (still) 2012
IN A QUIET CORNER OF THE IMMENSE DISPLAY THAT IS THE SEVENTH ASIA-PACIFIC TRIENNIAL (APT7) PLAYS THE VIDEO COMPONENT OF PRATCHAYA PHINTHONG’S MULTI-MEDIA PROJECT, GIVE MORE THAN YOU TAKE (2010–ONGOING). JOLLY AND TECHNICALLY ROUGH, THE VIDEO RECORDS THAI SEASONAL WORKERS BERRY PICKING IN SWEDEN—AN UNEXPECTED MIGRANT TRADE THAT PLAYS ENTERTAININGLY WITH OUR PRECONCEPTIONS OF LANDSCAPE.
We see Thai hats in the Swedish forest and hear Thai voices larking about in a car driving through Scandinavian fog. Handheld and lo-fi, the films chronicle the experiences of Thai migrants who display all the casualness of Australians backpacking in Bali.
Although a relatively minor component of APT7, Phinthong’s video points to some of the central themes of the overall show, visualising just one of the many migrations to result from today’s shifting global economies and the new perspectives forged in the process. While the migrant workers are not tourists, their films are fresh with the feel of adventure. They re-tell Sweden from the perspective of Thai farmers, turning our expectations of place inside out.
Every three years Brisbane plays host to this major contemporary art exhibition—the only large-scale show in the world to focus on the art of Australia, Asia and the Pacific—and for these five colourful months the city feels more like a gateway to Asia than its clichéd image as the capital of Australia’s ‘deep north’. But that is but one purpose of the APT: to remind us that geography is subjective.
The most ambitious APT yet, this exhibition re-imagines the region once more, with the new and recent work of 75 artists and artist groups from a region that stretches from the far southeast of New Zealand to the edges of Europe in Istanbul. There are two special exhibition foci, the now-regular Kids’ APT, 27 countries represented, and a special look at the archive to make sense of the last two decades of cultural and political change (APT7 marks the 20th anniversary of the show).
My brief has been to focus on screen works (a necessary filter considering the exhibition’s size), however, part of the pleasure of the APT is being overwhelmed by its span and variety. The APT presents a world of uneven landscapes and ever-morphing cultural identities, and much of its dynamism comes from dialogues between different media. This is almost half the world on display, and in all forms of cultural play.
In his short video, Lunda Bazaar (2010), Basir Mahmood evokes the menacing mechanics of global trade, slowing footage of a second-hand clothing market in Lahore, Pakistan, to an ominous pace. Local men try on jackets from Europe so slowly, and to such a growling soundtrack, that we are compelled to question what chain of relations has brought the goods to this place. What darkness lies behind the exchange? Through repeating cycles of men slipping their arms into Western suits we sense the legacies of European colonisation in the region—not only the colonisation of the everyday market, but also of its subjects’ dreams.
Yuan Goang-Ming, Disappearing Landscape – Passing II (stills) 2011, collection: Queensland Art Gallery
courtesy the artists and TKG+, Taipei and Beijing
Yuan Goang-Ming, Disappearing Landscape – Passing II (stills) 2011, collection: Queensland Art Gallery
Many of the screen works in APT7 suggest the telescoping of space and histories, the sliding of time and heritage that makes up our experience of contemporary life. Yuan Goang-Ming’s Disappearing Landscape—Passing II (2011) is a journey across memory and moment, breathtaking for its technical and poetic artistry. A three-channel projection (presented in the deliciously enveloping shadows of a large, dedicated and sofa-furnished space), this lushly cinematic work takes us floating through the artist’s Taipei apartment, the camphor tree outside his window and a reconstructed scene of his late father’s study. Sucking backwards and shooting forwards, the film warps both time and space to poignant and frightening effect.
heading west
As the world has changed, so has the APT, and this year’s exhibition includes a special focus on the art of West Asia—the latest new economy to become fashionable in the art market. Variously known as the art of Central Asia, West Asia and the Middle East (even within the APT literature, curiously), it is perhaps unsurprising that an underlying concern in this section is of the ways the region has been labelled and exploited by outsiders.
Oraib Toukan’s The Equity is in the Circle (2007–09), for example, is a mockumentary-like marketing campaign in which the Middle East is carved up, branded and sold off. “Own This View, And Everything In It…” announces a billboard; experts discuss the philanthropic contributions investors might make to their purchased communities, retelling post-colonial nationalism in the language of corporate governance. The videos could be PR for an oil company, strategising its investment in the region.
Another major work, Almagul Menlibayeva’s video installation Kurchatov 22 (2012), revisits a town in northeast Kazakhstan that was the main site for Soviet nuclear testing during the Cold War. Combining documentary and performance, the film pieces together a landscape scarred by brutal experiments and a community still shaped by their fallout. One of the scientists involved in the tests recounts how he once signed a document swearing his life-long confidentiality: “But the country I signed my name to,” he explains, “no longer exists.”
what country? what identity?
This issue of how a region or culture is defined resonates throughout the overall show. Historical battles are re-enacted with ironic changes. Peripheries of former political empires are put centrestage. The image and mention of the passport keeps popping up, referencing the abstraction of one’s political identity.
Daniel Boyd, History is made at night 2012, Kids APT7
photo QAGOMA Photography
Daniel Boyd, History is made at night 2012, Kids APT7
In his collection of paintings and four-channel video installation, Darker Shade of Dark (2012), Australian Indigenous artist Daniel Boyd questions the extent to which he can ever really know his own culture, or have access to his family heritage, amidst the obscuring tides of history. By applying a veil of transparent dots, almost like pinhole apertures, Boyd abstracts a range of existing artworks and creates a new view via distortion.
While the paintings suggest something of their subject matter—a view of Pentecost Island in Vanuatu where Boyd’s great-great-grandfather was from; a Mapplethorpe portrait of Grace Jones covered in body paint by Keith Haring—the installation eludes decoding. Dancing across the walls, this floor-to-ceiling surround screen projection is a cosmic gallery of multi-coloured spots of light, bursting and arcing like fireworks.
The effect is suave and slyly sardonic, a critique not only of Boyd’s own perception, perhaps, but of the razzle-dazzle of Aboriginal dot paintings in the art market. How far are we ever able to see beneath the surface display? And how much do we enjoy the illusion?
In addition to video works, APT7 includes two film programs: Chinese animation since the 1930s and feature films from the Asia-Pacific region over the last 20 years. The first is diverse in itself, covering Mainland Chinese, Taiwanese and Hong Kong animation, with a special showcase of 1930s classics.
The second, however, includes works so varied as to provoke questions around its rationale as a program. Titled Change: Paths Through 20 Years of Film, the program includes everything from Lee Tamahori’s Once Were Warriors to Wong Kar-Wai’s Happy Together, from Iranian drama to Chinese documentary. A mini-APT of cinema, the program reflects the diversity and immensity of the region, with change as the one pulsing constant.
mapping the unmappable
You could call the exhibition unruly, but then this is precisely what the APT celebrates: our attempt to map the un-mappable, and the disorderly effects of history on our conceptions of region and culture. Who defines the Asia-Pacific? What is the Middle, Near or Far East? And how does Australia fit in? Perhaps future APTs will include Hawaii or Saudi Arabia, or shrink to exclude Turkey. Our definition of the Asia Pacific will always change with the socio-political concerns of the day. Geography is what we make of it: blind men describing an elephant.
APT7, The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial, Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) and Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), Brisbane, Dec 8, 2013-April 14; www.qagoma.qld.gov.au
DESPITE MANY PRONOUNCEMENTS OF ITS IMMINENT DEMISE OVER THE LAST HALF-CENTURY AND MORE, OPERA APPEARS TO BE ALIVE AND KICKING.
New works are appearing regularly in the international repertoire, premiere productions are broadcast globally to cinemas and the internet provides a treasure chest of historical and recent productions. Two works, an opera-inspired ‘show’ and a Verdi classic in the Sydney Festival revealed both the appeal of and the challenges to a form that is enjoying revival and transformation.
semele walk
Semele Walk, a Sydney Festival centrepiece about a vain mortal who gets screwed for screwing a god, seduced audiences into surrendering themselves to astronomically priced high art, described by a friend as “80 minutes of froth…”
But Semele Walk was for more than opera goers—who were doubtless wary of spending big on a radically reduced version of Handel’s near three-hour 1744 opera Semele. It was the promise of the costuming by Vivienne Westwood, enduring queen of punk/haute couture crossover that attracted a multitude of fashionistas, fans and the simply curious. Clutches of wildly be-gowned Westwood worshippers swanned about the foyer, posing for elderly iPhone snappers, and were duly rewarded with the sight of a multitude of striking outfits displayed by strutting professional models and the lead instrumentalists in the small orchestra.
Two superb European singers and the orchestra did justice to Handel and director Ludger Engels made his catwalk scenario more than mere conceit. On a long, wide platform running the length of Sydney Town Hall, the models appeared other than human, hair swept up in nests, platform-booted, their flesh and materials seemingly hybridising, and faces otherworldly—half-veiled, masked by makeup and, of course, deadpan. They could have been a host of promenading lesser goddesses, gloriously in step with the music’s pulse and aetherial in mood as Handel’s soaring line.
Aleksandra Zamojska, Semele Walk
photo Jamie Williams
Aleksandra Zamojska, Semele Walk
However, among them is a dissident—Semele, fashionably attired but neither spectacular nor as elegant, and nowhere near as tall. This mere mortal squeezes into the parade, is bumped and buffeted and then defeated, as she abjectly acknowledges, by her vanity. But pride wins out. Polish soprano Aleksandra Zamojska’s wildly red-headed Semele is brattish and unyielding. Having been seduced by Jupiter in human shape, she desires to make love to the god in his divine form and become immortal (this impossible idea has been planted by Jupiter’s jealous wife, Juno). Even when Jupiter tells Semele that she will be destroyed by the act she fatally proceeds. Zamojska conveys the joys and frustrations of her ambition with copious energy, dancerly verve and, above all, singing that is lucid and as crystalline as might warrant the transformation of Semele into a goddess.
Austrian counter tenor Armin Gramer as Jupiter is elegantly and seductively subdued, and the only character whose face is not masked—even Semele painted white. A series of intense encounters between the two, are by turns erotic, tender, argumentative and near violent, and better dressed. Once Jupiter gives Semele the Earth, inadvertently furthering her ambitions, her new multi-layered outfit of glorious transparent, opalescent material that captures light and amplifies movement, flies around her. Jupiter’s military dandy jacket, kilt and knee-high socks are bejewelled and threaded with silver.
Director Engels intensifies our sense of involvement with a surprise—fellow audience members burst into glorious, choral outpouring. The orchestra, placed halfway along the catwalk, to one side, is also a highly visible part of the performance, its Westwood-dressed members later taking to the stage like rock musicians. Plugged into portable mini-speakers they play out a strand of increasingly dissonant music that has been building between arias and duets as Semele’s passion threatens to destroy her.
In the end, Semele, determined to unite with her lover, walks into a huge, vertical baton of golden light (the real Jupiter revealed), disappearing in the blinding glare. Jupiter emerges pulling a small trolley along the length of the catwalk in the form of a golden bar—presumably ‘essence’ of Semele, since the chorus then joyfully celebrates the news that the offspring of Jupiter’s union with Semele will be a god, Bacchus.
Semele Walk proved to be an exhilarating experience, if not at all far from the many productions these days that fuse contemporary design, graphic art, fashion, architecture and media art with operas from the past. Of course, this economised version cannot do justice to the complete work, nor was it always intelligible. Unmiked singers meant that when they turned away from us words and notes evaporated. The too spare précis in the program and handout and the absence of surtitles meant that audience members tolerated degrees of mystification. Handel played second fiddle to Engels and Westwood, but Semele Walk was special. My friend concluded, “It’s froth—but what froth!”
a masked ball
A Masked Ball, Opera Australia
photo Prudence Upton
A Masked Ball, Opera Australia
Musically, Opera Australia’s production of Verdi’s A Mask Ball (1859) is magnificent. Theatrically however it is at once adventurous and staid. Directed and designed by La Fura dels Baus’ Alex Olle, Alfons Flores and Lluc Castells, it takes the notion of the mask and pushes it to thematically rich if sometimes indavertantly comic extremes.
In a not too futuristic totalitarian society every one at first appears to be masked—politicians, bureaucrats and security guards—but not protesters, who are presumably regarded by the authorities as faceless. In the course of events, masks come off, revealing King Gustav’s lover to be the wife of his best friend, Renato. The vengeful Renato’s mask is removed after he has, as part of a conspiracy, assassinated Gustav during the ball of the title (here reduced to a rather tepid office party). Renato is forgiven by a dying, and unmasked king. Yellow gas seeps through the floorboards as gas-masked conspirators stage a deadly coup, the assembled elite dying as they sing of the horror they have witnessed. The directors have opted for a double dose of despair, just as the masking has been doubled—Renato was already a masked citizen before assuming a conspirator’s mask, the assembly is doubly masked at the ball. And why would a masked society stage a masked ball?
A Masked Ball, Opera Australia
photo Prudence Upton
A Masked Ball, Opera Australia
On the upside, the masking meant that the singers had to convey emotion principally through song and gesture for substantial parts of the opera. The scene between an unmasked, distressed Amelia and the masked, unforgiving Renato was particularly moving, as was Renato’s subsequent expression of his sense of loss. The mask motif achieved some measure of complexity and emotional power in these moments.
While masking provided the performers with a challenge, the set design did not. ‘Concrete’ columns and linking platforms flew up and down conveying a sense of sheer verticality—a building with executive suite, a vast bureaucratic space, the world of the street below, and beneath that a wasteland littered with junkies. However the deployment of performers could have come from any conventional staging of a traditional opera, quite at odds with the design’s futurism. Nevertheless this A Masked Ball was a bold, strikingly realised and thematically consistent creation, if over-determined in the end to the point of utter fatalism, but without ever underestimating the power and subtlety of Verdi’s music.
Sydney Festival: Semele Walk, A show by Ludger Engels, couture by Vivienne Westwood, music by George Frideric Handel, singers Aleksandra Zamojska, Armin Gramer, conductor Olof Boman,Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop, Sydney Philharmonia Choirs, models Chic Management; Sydney Town Hall, Jan 11-15; Opera Australia, Giuseppe Verdi, A Masked Ball, conductor Andrea Molino, director Alex Olle, designer Alfons Flores, costumes Lluc Castells, performers Diego Torre, Tayrn Fiebig, Jose Carbo, Tamar Iveri; Sydney Opera House, Jan 16-Feb 12
THE 2012 TAIPEI BIENNIAL, TITLED MODERN MONSTERS / DEATH AND LIFE OF FICTION, RECONSIDERS MODERNISM THROUGH THE METAPHOR OF THE MYTHICAL CHINESE MONSTER TAOWU, A CREATURE ABLE TO SEE BOTH PAST AND FUTURE.
Sparking this theme is Taiwan-born Harvard Professor of Chinese Literature David Der-wei Wang’s The Monster that is History: Violence, History and Fictional Writing in 20th Century China (University of California Press, 2004). He states in the online catalogue:
“… never have we seen such a moment as we have in modern times, when official history has been so dictated by the ideological and institutional machines as to verge on make-believe, and representational art so arrested by a desire to reflect the past and future as to appropriate the functions of traditional history with respect to facts.” (Taipei Biennial webpage, 2012).
In examining the role of the museum and the appropriation of traditional history, curator Anselm Franke’s Taipei Biennial expands the field of art. Visiting it feels like visiting a museum of history and culture rather than an art exhibition.
priming the viewers
At the entrance of the magnificent Taipei Fine Arts Museum, viewers at the Biennial opening first encounter Hannah Hurtzig’s The Waiting Hall, Scenes of Modernity, where artists and theorists discuss aspects of modernity with members of the public in a series of booths, the conversations recorded for subsequent listening. Hurtzig asks, “What is modernity? an epoch, a condition, a mental state, an idea, a method or a technique?” (Catalogue). This forum primes viewers for engagement with history and the analysis of modernism, and establishes this engagement as a relational process.
artists as revisionist historians
The Biennial artists become revisionist historians: Joachim Koester considers the role of the Calcutta opium trade in 19th century British colonial expansion. To recall socialist internationalism, the Otolith Group shows archival photos of Indian women delegates on official visits to the USSR, Japan and China in the 1950s. Photographer Chang Chao-Tang’s work over several decades establishes an individual history of modern Taiwan. Maryam Jafri’s Independence Day 1936-1967 (2000), a photographic record of independence ceremonies in former African and Asian colonies that became new nations, addresses the concept of the nation state.
Central to this Biennial is the consideration of the nature of documentary film. John Akomfrah portrays the life and times of his teacher, noted cultural theorist Stuart Hall. Eric Baudelaire examines the lives of May and Fusako Shigenobu, the latter a former Japanese Red Brigade member, and Masao Adachi, an activist filmmaker. Kao Chung-Li’s biographical documentaries consider the history of Taiwan through the life of his father, a KMT member who fled China for Taiwan with the exodus following the Communist Revolution. Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato’s videos analyse the work of influential psychiatrist and philosopher Félix Guattari.
the documentary as visual art
These documentaries are rich visual artworks dramatising particular cultures and events. Akomfrah’s three-screen work shows the British social conditions of Hall’s youth. Referencing the Japanese idea of landscape, Baudelaire blends Adachi’s material with his own as he reconstructs his subjects’ stories. Melitopoulos and Lazzaroto mix critical interviews on Guattari’s work with archival footage from his experimental clinic La Borde to challenge traditional psychiatry as a controlling device of the modern state.
Political commentary runs throughout the Biennial. In Roee Rosen’s video Out (2010), two women from the Israeli BDSM scene discuss and then conduct a bondage and discipline session in which the spirit of (then) Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, regarded as a reactionary, is exorcised from the submissive masochist who quotes Lieberman during the beating, an overdubbed male voice replacing hers as the beating progresses.” Out metaphorises power structures and dependency, satirically critiques Israeli politics and suggests that bad ideas must be firmly exorcised from all of us. The two women are the actors playing themselves in this film, dissolving the boundary between documentary and fiction.
As Franke points out, “fiction—or the imaginary—nests at the centre of reality. It is through fiction-as-figuration that cognition and recognition becomes possible” (Catalogue).
museology as art
As well as individual artists’ works, the Biennial comprises several mini-museums curated by artists, overtly positioning museology as art and encompassing some novel approaches to historical research. The Museum of the Monster that is History includes James T Hong’s video compilation of apology speeches by government leaders, Kevin Rudd’s amongst them. Bavand Behpoor and Reza Abedini consider martyrdom through a display of anguishing personal accounts of the Iran-Iraq War. Hong, Tony Wu and Kelvin Park show equipment used in chemical weapons factories in Cold War Taiwan. And Eyal Weizman, Paulo Tavares and Steffen Kramer’s video The Mineral Geology of Genocide (2012) documents the forensic analysis of Guatemalan mass graves. This mini-museum utterly dispels any belief in the self-righteous or utopian claims of modern governments. It also repositions museums as critical devices in contemporary art.
Architects and urbanists Ann-Sofi Rönnskog and John Palmesino (aka Territorial Agency) co-curate the Museum of Infrastructural Unconsciousness, which explores how physical infrastructure and techniques of measuring and ordering influence society. It includes Nabil Ahmed’s samples of local drinking water, with hitherto undetectable traces of arsenic, which caused significant health problems in Taiwan, foregrounding the importance of measurement and metaphorising the slow impact of small, unseen forces on society. Rönnskog and Palmesino’s own contribution juxtaposes satellite imagery of the topological evolution of the island of Formosa with Taiwanese government archival records of significant events to demonstrate the interdependence of human activity and the environment and show how history and culture evolve from innumerable individual actions and political forces.
Eric Baudelaire’s overwhelming Museum of Ante Memorials comprises a copy of a 1945 memorandum to the US Secretary of War in which Manhattan Project scientists try (unsuccessfully) to persuade the US Government against using the atomic bomb on a city; a 1945 scientific observation film of the plane that dropped the Nagasaki bomb flying over the city of Kokura, which was the originally intended target that day; and Fluxus artist Robert Filliou’s 1970 work Commemor, in which he doctored photos to fictionalise the swapping of war memorials between European cities. These works are bookended by Peter Watkins’ The War Game (1965) and Deimantas Narkevičius’ The Dud Effect (2008). Watkins’ film, commissioned by the BBC but withdrawn because of its potentially alarming impact, sets out in documentary style a fictionalised account of nuclear war in Britain. Narkevičius’ film, depicting the launch procedure for Soviet nuclear missiles in the 1970s, is shown to counterpoint Watkins’ film.
None of the elements of Baudelaire’s mini-museum was made for the Biennial, and some were never intended as artworks. Most are now themselves significant historical artefacts. But assembling and recontextualising them in this Biennial creates an extraordinary artwork that, by offering alternative histories, questions the decisions taken.
museum futures: distributed
The pivotal work in the Biennial is Marysia Lewandowska and Neil Cummings’s Museum Futures: Distributed (2008), a sci-fi film set in 2058 that imagines the future history of the Swedish museum Moderna Museet, which commissioned the film in 2008 to celebrate its 50th anniversary. The film’s perceptive predictions include artificial intelligence, advanced communication and information management, and significant political change The startling (possibly tongue-in-cheek) prediction is that Moderna Museet becomes an ‘immanent’ institution that actively mediates cultural production, communication and understanding. The concept of relational art—art as social process—is thus extended to its logical conclusion, with the museum acting as the central organising principle in that process. The film is also institutional critique pushed to its logical conclusion—the idea of the museum is completely re-imagined. The film even predicts that Modern Museet will seek an amendment to the UN Declaration on Human Rights to “…extend certain rights to intelligent organic/synthetic composites.”
The adroit inclusion of Museum Futures: Distributed adds a whole dimension to the Biennial by projecting modernism forward 50 years—here, the monster Taowu sees the future as well as the past. If the predicted developments eventuate, they would constitute a highly contestable utopian, or dystopian, modernity. And in addressing how museum practice structures debate, underpins ideology and shapes society, the Taipei Biennial critiques itself.
Artists are turning historical investigation into powerful art and offering alternative, albeit idiosyncratic forms of history that can illuminate and even challenge conventional history. This Biennial’s concerted assembly of these critiques consolidates the role of the museum as a primary forum for such critique. The definition of art, now merged with philosophy and the social sciences more self-consciously than ever, is significantly expanded. Correspondingly, philosophy and the social sciences express themselves through art.
The Taipei Biennial, curator Anselm Franke, Taipei Fine Arts Museum and the Paper Mill, Taiwan, Sept 29, 2012-Jan 13, 2013; http://www.taipeibiennial2012.org/
André Wilms, Eraritjaritjaka—Museum of Phrases, Heiner Goebbels
photo Jamie Williams
André Wilms, Eraritjaritjaka—Museum of Phrases, Heiner Goebbels
INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVALS SET HIGH EXPECTATIONS—AUDIENCES WANT THE BEST, WORKS WE WOULD NEVER NORMALLY SEE AND WHICH WILL CHANGE US. IN AUSTRALIA THESE FESTIVALS HAVE BECOME INCREASINGLY AMORPHOUS, VAST AND VARIABLE IN QUALITY.
The 2013 Sydney Festival produced a few works in the 16 I saw of the kind that embed themselves in the psyche, but I was more impressed by the ever increasing diversity of practices that now constitute performance and have gradually found their way into international festivals. But save for a predictable festival choice, The Peony Pavillion, where was Asia in this the Asian Century?
Heiner Goebbels’ Eraritjaritjaka was thought provoking and, equivalently, perceptually disorienting, while Semele Walk (see p14) proved to be fabulous entertainment effectively built on a wittily apt conceit. Branch Nebula’s Concrete and Bones Sessions, played out in a suburban skate park at twilight, magically deployed public space and popular skills to superb effect. Sabab Theatre’s In the Eruptive Mode, Voices from the Hijacked Spring revealed great potential, testing and extending our empathy with its subjective accounts of lives in a troubled Arab world.
heiner goebbels, eraritjaritjaka
Eraritjaritjaka is an elaborate music theatre meditation built on collected aphoristic utterances from writer Elias Canetti (delivered by a senior actor, the wonderful André Wilms, featured in the Kaurismaki film Le Havre), 20th/21st century string quartets (performed by the brave instrumentalists of Mondriaan Quartett who have to frequently re-form around the stage), and a house. The house is successively: a tiny model, its chimney smoking, a huge upstage cut-out which serves as a screen for projecting the actor’s taxi ride home mid-performance (to an East Sydney apartment where he chops onions to Ravel’s pizzicato) and, to our bewilderment, a huge onstage interior behind the cut-out, in which the actor, quartet and cameraman are glimpsed, the smell of cooking leaking into the auditorium. We’re astonished.
The quartet thunders, resonant with our surprise. When did the actual become virtual, and vice versa? To what degree can we trust our senses and, not least, our memory? How can we have any sense of self in a society dominated by surveillance (the camerawork constantly reinforces this), by those in power (musings on the orchestral conductor “relying on the immobility of the audience”), by speed (“look for someone to make you go slow”) and anxieties about the emergence of machine creatures. The man rather cruelly attempts to train a stumpy, two-wheeled robot with an antenna as if it’s a pet (“Do animals have less fear because they lack words?”). The robot however has a darker function, surveillance: it casts a harsh spotlight on the man, and on us (“secrecy is power”). Beyond these concerns about a society in which “each man prays to his own portrait,” the man/Canetti/Goebbels wonders about music: he “wants a new music with new dangers,” but “words swim with music; I mistrust the flowing.” However, not only is he persistently anxious about control, but also about the capacity to express emotion: “I have no sounds that could serve to soothe me, no violoncello like him [indicating the cellist]…no lament that anyone would recognize as a lament because it sounds subdued.” “I have no sounds of mine to soothe.” Eraritjaritjaka is an utterly enveloping reverie, beautiful and bewildering, and performed with verve, agility and passion by André Wilms; indeed his/Canetti’s/Goebbel’s words, entwined with music and words do soothe. (You can read the text of Eraritjaritjaka at www.heinergoebbels.com.)
in the eruptive mode
Raymond Hosni, In the Eruptive Mode, Sabab Theatre
photo Prudence Upton
Raymond Hosni, In the Eruptive Mode, Sabab Theatre
A work with much apparent promise, In the Eruptive Mode, written and directed by Sulayman Al Bassam, is a series of monologues reflecting on traumatic scenarios from the Middle East and beyond performed in English by visiting actors Raymond Hosni and Hala Omran, from Sabab Theatre (Kuwait/UK), and local Kym Vercoe. For the most part the monologues are deftly written and poetic, unfolding so that their implications effectively dawn on us. If at times accents make it difficult to decipher precisely what Hosni and Omran are saying, overall intentions can be grasped if not fully appreciated. Consequently I can’t altogether vouch for my account of the monologues.
A woman (Vercoe) in a flak jacket, face down on a table on a bed of rubble beneath harsh fluorescent light, muses over a lost pen, regards her hand as “a beautiful claw,” her eyes as fetching, but also as witnesses, her tongue “loose’ and “mawkish,” and wonders where her Kosovo cameraman is. She’s a journalist, perhaps wounded, certainly traumatised, attempting to pull herself together in the face of death—of the cameraman, of unnamed babies. Although near immobilised, Vercoe delivers a painfully incisive performance of a mind awaking from a delirium of too much pain, too much information.
A man slips out of lingerie and carefully attires himself in heavy traditional male clothing, covering himself almost entirely while speaking calmly of using “three to five vaginas a week” and noting the increased incidences of rape in the city. At the end he is an image of utter self-control and hatred of women and, implicitly, Western sexual freedoms. This is a chilling monologue, simple, but rooted in a powerful image of negative transformation. The third and much more complex monologue concerns a female doctor (Omran) whose male colleague “gets involved” politically with his patients, has to flee and is killed by a sniper at the border. Dying, he asks that his poems be sent to her. She reads them. Now she, like him, becomes “involved.” The writing is dense, the character detached, believing she is above ‘involvement,’ but the outcome is moving in a finely tuned performance. In total contrast, a man in a village or perhaps on a farm waves a white flag, praying that rebel forces will leave his family alone. Not only has he had to pragmatically swap sides but has already sacrificed his “demented,” dissident daughter, whom he cannot forgive. He is doomed; a simple man in a complex trap, convincingly portrayed by Hosni.
The least successful piece has an over-the-top, suited saleswoman (Vercoe) hard sell us a security plan for wealthy ‘investors.’ Low on effective irony this monologue is at a far remove from the others, where individuals live out their pain and dilemmas, including the final piece (where accent and sound system failure diminished intelligibility) in which a 28-year old woman surrounded by gunfire combs her hair, sings, polishes her gun and reflects on her love for her father. In an Eruptive Mood might be modest in scale and somewhat under developed, but its vision of psychological distress and trauma in a region in crisis is writ memorably large.
concrete and bone sessions
Concrete and Bone Sessions, Branch Nebula
photo Jamie Williams
Concrete and Bone Sessions, Branch Nebula
A suburban skate park, massive freight trains rumbling by, the sun breaking through gold-rimmed, rain-threatening clouds, wind through the trees—a stunning setting for Branch Nebula’s Concrete and Bone Sessions. The concrete is, of course, the skate park, the bones those of bold skaters, BMX-ers and dancers. This is site-specificity of the most immediate kind, a visceral connection to a place of play, not its social role or its history, in a display of what is often regarded as fun but here as art without losing the integrity of its popular foundations. The outcome is a visual spectacle, impeccably choreographed so that star turns are embedded in and shoot out of the mesmeric poetry of the grand sweeping collective rides and runs that transform the concrete into a magic, enabling vessel. Amplifying the action is a dynamic sound score, heavily percussive, dramatic, romantic and extended by performers wearing belt speakers, weaving sounds across the resonant concrete bowl. As for lighting, there was none, the magic of twilight and the weather was more than enough, a reminder of the everydayness of a suburban skate park and a celebration of its potential.
The power of Concrete and Bone Sessions comes from its lyricism, carefully paced, ever evolving, building towards escalating teamwork, spectacle and risk-taking but without turning into a series of stand-alone acts. The interplay between those on their feet and those on wheels escalates, as does the working of all dimensions of the park—edges to pivot on, walls to slide down, fences on which to elegantly parkour. Not least, thanks to the duration and pacing of the work, discrete personalities and styles emerge—degrees of reserve and flamboyance, but always within the work’s framework and pulse. There were many moments of magic, not least a freight train driver signalling his approval, the train’s horn blast and the rumble and screech of wheels merging into the show’s sound mix as BMX-ers flew high. Concrete and Bones Sessions was a festival highlight, a very special work, exhilaratingly focused on the beauty of collective movement and daredevilry. (See realtime tv video interview with Branch Nebula about the preparations.)
the secret river
The Secret River, Sydney Theatre Company
photo Cassandra Hannagan/ABC Arts online
The Secret River, Sydney Theatre Company
STC’s The Secret River was not a favourite (I’m apparently alone in this, such has been the critical acclaim for the production) although I admired the performances, thought Stephen Curtis’ vast design superb (a massive wall of bark flowing from high, down into a wide stage cloth) and admired the largely faithful, economical reduction of Kate Grenville’s novel to a manageable two hours or so of stage time. The production also opened out stage time to allow a degree of focus on the Indigenous figures, making them strong if still secondary presences.
The strength of Grenville’s novel lies in the subjectivity it affords its principal character, the former convict William Thornhill. It’s a rich responsiveness to his condition and especially to the land he claims along the Hawkesbury. But it’s not something he can voice, because much of it is felt and intuited. In the dominant tradition of third person novel writing, the novelist’s voice goes unmarked but details for us nuanced thoughts, sensual feelings and emotional tensions as if coming from their subject. What goes on in Thornhill’s head, and to a degree other characters, is what makes this conventional novel a rewarding experience. We can intimately witness how Thornhill grows to love an alien land, senses the rights and wrongs of taking it for himself, understanding in some way that it belongs to someone else, and resists the urge to over-react to the Aboriginal presence—until things get out of hand. Much of this goes missing in the stage adaptation. Nathaniel Dean’s gruff but sensitive performance conveys some of the tensions, but not much more than the script allows. To compensate, adaptor Andrew Bovell has invented a narrator (Ursula Yovich), a young Aboriginal woman in 19th century dress who tells us a little of what Thornhill is thinking and feeling, but barely enough. At other times, the narration appears unnecessary.
Why have an Aboriginal narrator (hardly blind casting in a work of this kind) telling us what a white man thinks and feels in a story focused on his ambition, his pain and his success? Complicating the narrator’s role is her appearance as a character, curing Thornhill’s ill wife in a quasi-ritualistic moment of great emotion. In the novel a white woman provides the cure without ceremony. Perhaps research or a cast member recollection from family history provided this scene, or it’s simply a Bovell invention. Whatever it’s origins, it felt calculatedly melodramatic.
Could The Secret River have done without a narrator—a role that might be read as tokenistic by an Aboriginal audience? By Act II I was hungry for a monologue even—anything to give us something more of Thornhill than revealed through his blunt dialogue. Much will be written about The Secret River. Already several reviewers have declared its candidacy for ‘Australian classic.’ But I felt a palpable distance between myself and Thornhill, despite a strong performance. Of course, the novel form allows for considerable evocation of interiority, but many a play has done as well or better.
Indigenous writer Kim Scott’s award-winning novel That Dead Man Dance (2010), also set in the early 19th century, is another powerful evocation of subjectivity and first contact, this time from an Aboriginal point of view—unnervingly realigning our culturally informed sense of movement and space. A dramatized version could provide a welcome counterbalance to The Secret River. Doubtless The Secret River will become a national success, but whether or not it can contribute seriously to the “textual healing” some have claimed for it is another matter.
more sydney festival
In brief, I enjoyed the rich vein of inventiveness and humour that flowed through Belvoir’s Peter Pan and STC/Windmill’s School Dance; found that the melancholy reverie about deceased parents that is Conch Theatre’s MASI told us too little about them; thought Raimund Hogue’s Sacre—The Rite of Spring, had dated badly since offering such a strong conceptual challenge to dance in the early 2000s; wondered whether or not the adroitly performed The Moment I Saw You I Knew I Could Love You, by curious, added up to a cogent artistic statement; admired the dextrous puppetry of It’s Dark Outside, if uncertain of the efficacy of the work’s structure; revelled in the acoustic works in Ensemble Offspring’s Ligeti Morphed; and admired Camille’s delivery of Shakespeare’s verse in The Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Rape of Lucrece—but was appalled by the banality of the songs and the performer’s overacting. Erth’s Murder had an abundance of talent and promise but, after a strong start where it connected with its inspiration, the Nick Cave album Murder Ballads, it drifted away into its own complicated narrative albeit with flashes of inspiration and a strong central performance. And I heard very good things about Othello C’est Qui from Germany in the About an Hour series at Carriageworks, but festival timetable congestion prevented me from seeing it.
Sydney Festival 2013: Eraritjaritjaka—Museum of Phrases, words by Elias Canetti, performers André Wilms, Mondriaan Quartett, composed & directed by Heiner Goebbels, stage design and light: Klaus Grünberg, live video Bruno Deville, Theatre Royal, Jan 5-27; Sabab Theatre, In the Eruptive Mood, writer, director Sulayman Al Bassam, performers Raymond Hosni, Hala Omram, Kym Vercoe, design Sam Collins, lighting Marcus Doshi, music Lewis Gibson, Seymour Centre, Jan 8-11; Branch Nebula, Concrete and Bone Sessions, creators Lee Wilson, Mirabelle Wouters, performers/collaborators Jared Graham (Leerok), Antek Marciniec, Kat Williams, Marnie Palomares, Danny Campbell, Kathryn Pule, Michael Steingraber, Roland Chiouk, Cloe Fournier, Daniel Sparrow, sound/composer Bob Scott, dramaturg John Baylis, musicians Inga Liljestrom, Bree Van Reyk, Timothy Constable, Hugh Coffey, Jack Shanahan Reserve, Dulwich Hill, Jan 9-19; Sydney Theatre Company, Secret River, adapted from the novel by Kate Grenville by Andrew Bovell, director Neil Armfield, artistic associate Stephen Page, performers Nathaniel Dean, Bailey Doomadgee, Lachlan Elliott, Kamil Ellis, Roy Gordon, Iain Grandage, Ethel-Anne Gundy, Anita Hegh, Daniel Henshall, Trevor Jamieson, Judith McGrath, Callum McManis, Colin Moody, Rhimi Johnson Page, Rory Potter, Jeremy Sims, James Slee, Bruce Spence, Matthew Sunderland, Miranda Tapsell, Tom Usher, Ursula Yovich, set designer Stephen Curtis, costumes Tess Schofield, lighting Mark Howett, composer, musician Iain Grandage, sound designer, dramaturg Matthew Whittet, Sydney Theatre, Jan 12-Feb 9
ALBIE THOMS WAS A LEADING LIGHT. MUCH HAS ALREADY BEEN WRITTEN ON THIS REMARKABLE MAN’S LIFE AS EXPERIMENTAL FILMMAKER, ORGANISER AND REBEL; AS ANARCHIST AND ARCHIVIST. TO THESE RECOLLECTIONS WE WANT TO ADD OUR OWN THOUGHTS ON ALBIE, WHO WE REMEMBER, IN PARTICULAR, AS AN EVENT-MAKER EXTRAORDINAIRE.
This is where our interest started with Albie—in his early life as a theatrical impresario. As a student at Sydney University in 1965, he devised, produced, and directed an ambitious multimedia event, The Theatre of Cruelty, which requisitioned Artaud’s wild theories to apply them to texts by other canonical surrealists—Tzara, Schwitters, Huelsenbeck, Marinetti, Dali, Soupault and Jarry, from whose work he would shortly derive the name for his experimental collective, Ubu. We were excited by Albie’s application of Artaudian logic to other key moderns like Stein and Kokoschka, to contemporaries and works representing the future—the plays of Peter Brook, poems by Beat idols Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg, a short story by Australian/NZ sci-fi writer Cherry Grimm, and the experimental music of La Monte Young. What especially thrilled us about this program of live theatre and other, spontaneous performances (a little note at the bottom of the program reads, “Martin Sharp has organised happenings”) was the mix of live bodily performance and multimedia projections.
We admired Albie’s boldness in filming a version of Artaud’s typically unhinged ultra-short play, The Spurt of Blood. And we were especially fascinated with the work Poem 25: the famous Schwitters poem, consisting of a rapid sequence of numbers and numerals, which Albie’s partner in crime and soon-to-be-Ubu-comrade David Perry photographed, animated, edited and projected onto the body of an actor, whose job it was to recite the numbers as best he could remember. We loved this early expanded cinema performance so much that we sought permission from Albie and David to re-stage it in 2006, at our second OtherFilm Festival (assisted by small gauge film maven Louise Curham, with Brisbane radio personality Jamie Hume as ‘the body’) and then again in 2010 at our International Expanded Cinema Extravaganza at the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra. Literally re-enacting this work is one of the most direct ways Albie Thoms’ influence is evident in our practice, but we need to acknowledge the deeper resonances and reverberations too.
Learning about the live audiovisual environments created by Ubu (Albie Thoms, David Perry, Aggy Read, David Clark) was especially catalytic for us. The idea of generating an all-encompassing atmosphere humming with multitudinous energies—spaces of transformation alive with light, sound and movement—stuck in our collective consciousness. Shortly after coming together, we launched into staging events where we revived the spirit of these 1960s atmospherics, in concert with our own post-rave, experimental music optics. Projections in all dimensions, the spectator’s body invoked as a continuous perceptive surface: the central inspiration we took from Ubu’s lightshows was of film potential, not as a narrative vehicle, but as popular sensoria. Cinema as event and encounter, not industrial story-machine. Film as part of a synthetic magma ruled by—as Albie was so fond of quoting—the Artaudian notion that “theatre is a delirium and should be communicative.”
With practice and politics comes praxis: Albie’s work with the Theatre of Cruelty and then Ubu reminded us that, historically, avant-gardes do not distinguish between the practical work of making and other kinds of work (such as event-organising, resistance, agitation, conservative-baiting). Rather, these practices complement and condition each other; they make most sense—or so we think—in terms of a dialectical unity. The cinema may be ‘contracted,’ but this is only an effect of the various machineries—optical, ideological, narrative—put in place by capitalism. To stick a wrench in that machine, we need only to turn it away from its intended purpose: take the screen away, turn the projections back on the performers or audience, multiply, subtract, reimagine, expand. Moreover, Ubu’s smart bootstrapping and effective promotion proved that ‘experimental entertainment’ wasn’t a contradiction in terms: OtherFilm developed an event-based practice partly as a result of this inspiration. For us, the commitment to a resourceful, generative experimental practice is one of the key legacies we trace back to Albie Thoms.
Over Albie’s life-time, experimental film went from being an exciting aspect of ‘underground’ culture to briefly being recognised and funded (via the newly-formed Experimental Film and Television Fund, which Albie headed), to the brink of near-extinction, only to be revived as an artists’ medium with a distinct presence in the gallery and art museum. When we spoke with him about it in 2011, Albie initially found it perplexing that in an era of so much digital choice, there was a distinct landscape of artists choosing to work with antiquated 35mm and 16mm film: even in his day, coming up with the ‘scratch’ for film stock and processing was always a challenge (hence the fundraising films like Blunderball, as well as 1967’s Handmade Film Manifesto and Ubu’s support of participatory filmmaking). Nonetheless, Albie quickly came to sense in this contemporary film practice a rebellion his soul could admire—especially the part about not being sensible.
He fondly recalled the days of shoestring bucket-processing and enthused over the aleatoric effects that “filmers” (his term for filmmakers) could court with their fickle, demanding, wonderful medium. Albie was pleased at the long-overdue recognition of film as a plastic aesthetic force, a creative medium that he saw continuing to unfold in surprising ways in the medium’s—and his own—twilight years.
Albie Thoms was a true luminary; he will light the way for us for many years to come.
Danni Zuvela and Joel Stern, with Sally Golding, are the directors of OtherFilm, which dedicated its fourth OtherFilm Festival (2012) to Albie Thoms.
THE INAUGURAL INTERNATIONAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL FILM FESTIVAL IN HO CHI MINH CITY WAS CURATED ON THE THEME OF MODERN SOCIETY AND SUB-CULTURES. HELD AT HCMC UNIVERSITY OF CULTURE, HCMC UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES & HUMANITIES AND THE VIETNAM FILM RESEARCH & ARCHIVE CENTRE, IT ATTRACTED LARGE AUDIENCES OF STUDENTS, TEACHERS, FILMMAKERS AND JOURNALISTS.
Its global reach was wide, bringing together over 50 recent documentaries and classic ethnographic films produced across Vietnam, Australia, Cambodia, Canada, China, Germany, Japan, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Serbia, Thailand, Turkey, UK, West Papua and several African countries.
The energy of cultural exchange and shared consciousness is a significant quality that visual ethnography offers the documentary tradition. It is also a mode of filmmaking with a strong foundation in Vietnam and in its tertiary education. Vietnamese visual ethnographers are making films from perspectives within their own culture, not as observers representing ‘the other’
—perhaps as a consequence of having achieved liberation from French and American colonisation. Also, it is not surprising that many of the films are working through complex issues around tradition and modernity given the largely agrarian population and its multi-ethnicity—with over 50 distinct groups, each with its own language and cultural heritage.
A significant aspect of the festival was the in-depth discussion after each film. Often two hours long, these were insightful and philosophical, each film providing a doorway into culture, history, politics and society. I wondered whether this depth was connected to visual ethnography itself or Vietnamese culture and the education system. It is a rare film festival that allows such spacious time for dialogue; all too often the market place, the schedule and the sheer volume of documentary ‘product’ rule. Yet despite these open-minded discussions, censorship in Vietnam is a real issue, with some of the festival’s local and international films being banned or cut, sometimes at the very last moment. Nevertheless, the organisers stoically adapted the program in response to this state intervention.
navigating the old and new
The Old Man who Sells Bananas (2012), Tu Thi Thu Hang
It’s interesting that Love Man, Love Woman (2007), by Nguyen Trinh Thi, proved unproblematic for the censor, while some other films became forbidden fruit. The film reveals intricate layers around homosexuality and gender in Vietnamese culture by following Master Duc, a gay shaman who serves in a ‘Mother Goddess’ temple. Here the filmmaker brilliantly observes the raunchy, transgressive sexual humour of Duc and his followers. In the subsequent discussion it was suggested that gay sexuality, contained within the tradition of ‘Mother Goddess’ worship, is accepted in Vietnamese society.
Tu Thi Thu Hang structures her film, The Old Man Who Sells Bananas (2012), so that the audience starts out with ‘her’ mis-perception of the Old Man. We see him as a victim too—he seems poor, elderly and abandoned. Skillfully filming with him over one and a half years Hang draws us closer into this man’s life, step by step—from lone individual to family man, to respected wise elder of the village with his Confucian ethics and responsibilities. In discussion the filmmaker describes her process: “Now I have a completely different way of looking at him.” (And so do we). “He is the ‘last man’ who lived in a previous epoch. In his 84 years he has lived through the French and American occupation, and liberation. He has passed through the main eras of Vietnamese history. He has applied traditional wisdom to develop what is an ethical way to live.”
Similarly, Xich Lo in the Ancient Town (2010), by Truong Thi Thuy Ha, explores tradition and modernity by documenting ‘Old Hanoi’ and the invention of the Xich Lo (rickshaw) by French colonists. In an elegantly concise 30 minutes the filmmaker documents the history of French occupation of Hanoi, and through interviews with Xich Lo drivers working today she introduces the viewer into their world. We learn of their sustaining cultural values, their philosophy. Her subjects are well chosen. They become cultural commentators, as if they too are anthropologists of their own lives and work with insight into the cultural value of the Xich Lo beyond ferrying tourists. As the carrier for Vietnamese wedding ceremonies the driver becomes the pivot between ancient fertility traditions of the marriage ceremony and modernity. The film, too, is a text navigating between ‘old’ and ‘new’, encouraging the cultural survival of meaningful tradition.
Muddy Wooden-Ball Competition (2009), by Vu Tu Quyen, also navigates tradition and modernity, in Van village, Bac Giang province. Beautifully filmed, with a luminous observational and poetic camera, the filmmaker follows this traditional ball competition to open up complex structures in village society and the place of elders, women and youth in a transforming culture.
the anthropological imagination
The festival demonstrates that visual ethnography itself is going through transformations from an earlier phase when the question of ‘who speaks for whom’ was less articulated. A genuine participatory, ethical and de-colonising filmmaking is now very much part of current practice internationally. Several of the films suggest a ‘post-ethnographic’ sensitivity, where the filmmaker-anthropologist is not a detached observer, but has a subjective resonance with their film that is often palpable.
Gary Kildea and Andrea Simon’s Koriam’s Law (2005) presents a thoughtful approach to the question of ‘who observes’ by filming philosopher-informant Peter Avarea, from PNG, in dialogue with Australian anthropologist Andrew Lattas. In their open and fluid discussion we become part of an inter-cultural process as the subtleties of the so-called Melanesian ‘cargo-cult’ are deconstructed. Koriam’s Law is also a fine illustration of Kildea’s definition of the ‘Anthropological Imagination’ as “simply to stop and think self-consciously about culture.”
For Ana’s Family (2012), Chinese filmmaker Longxiao Li filmed with an ethnic Lisu family high in the mountains of Yunnan to create his deeply intimate portrait of their life. Living with the family for nearly two years, Longxiao Li films alongside Ana, the child. The visual intensity of this film is heightened by filmmaker and family not sharing a common language—facial expression, gesture is all. This is observational filmmaking at its best; we don’t feel like voyeurs, but are linked to the family through the filmmaker’s patient, close presence. This is especially so with the child, who gives Li her trust; and we, too, feel this trust as viewers. In discussion I sense the filmmaker’s keen social responsibility towards the family; his intention not to exploit them. He wants the film to benefit their lives in some way; it’s as if filmmaker, family and viewer all become involved in some kind of shared exchange.
ethnography of compassion
We Want (U) to Know (2011), Ella Pugliese
The screening of Ippo Ippo (2010), by Shotaro Wake from Japan, provoked an intense response from the audience. Ippo Ippo is about resilience and transformation, posing fundamental questions about how to live. Shotaro films inside a cancer support group. Climbing Mt Fuji is part of their therapy. The main character is Marsha, a middle-aged housewife. But the filmmaker also has cancer and is a participant in the support group. He does not film himself, but the way he films Marsha is deeply empathic; it’s as if he is residing within the film on several levels. The audience cheered Shotaro as he rose to answer their questions; a powerful emotion swept through the theatre, embracing the filmmaker’s survival in a spontaneous outburst of affection. Shotaro himself wondered if the audience was perhaps also sensing him to be a representative post-Fukishima survivor.
We Want (U) to Know (2011), by Ella Pugliese, is a participatory documentary created with survivors of the Khmer Rouge period. Produced around the time of the Tribunal, amidst the painful process of remembering, the film reveals its own methods of storytelling and re-enactment, along with the potency of the children filming their elders. These participatory methods become part of a restorative justice process. The film develops as a work of mourning—a catalyst to transformative emotional change.
This festival is expansive in scope and intention—its notion of anthropological film also encompassing classic traditional documentaries, such as John Marshall’s Bitter Melons (1971). It is an auspicious beginning, for a festival that promises to become a significant biennial event for the whole Asian region.
International Anthropological Film Festival, curators Johannes Rühl, Dr. Bùi Quang Thǻng, presented by Vietnam Institute of Culture & Art Studies (VICAS), HCMC University of Culture, Department of Culture, Sport & Tourism (HCMC), Vietnam Film Research & Archive Center; Ho Chi Minh City, Nov 10-14, 2012, www.anthrofilmfestival.com/
AT A MAGNITUDE OF 9.1-9.3, THE 2004 INDIAN OCEAN EARTHQUAKE WAS SO POWERFUL IT CAUSED THE PLANET TO WOBBLE SLIGHTLY ON ITS AXIS, EFFECTING A TEMPORARY CHANGE IN EARTH’S ROTATION AND DECREASING THE LENGTH OF A DAY BY 2.68 MICROSECONDS.
An estimated 230,273 people died as a result of the tsunami that followed. In Thailand, where Juan Antonio Bayona’s film The Impossible is set, the death toll is estimated to have been 8,212, including at least 2,464 foreigners.
Returning to these recent, dreadful events, The Impossible focuses on the experiences, based in reality, of one family of foreign tourists. The real family, Spaniards María and Enrique Belón and their three sons Lucas, Simón and Tomás, transform, in a move to attract English-speaking audiences, into Britishers Maria (Naomi Watts) and Henry (Ewan McGregor) Bennett, and their sons—also Lucas, Simon and Thomas. This adjustment of the family’s nationality, in addition to the film’s focus on Westerners rather than the suffering of the indigenous population, has seen The Impossible criticised by some reviewers for ‘whitewashing’ a disaster that overwhelmingly affected the developing world.
This is somewhat harsh. Given the film’s specific nature, the large number of tourists affected by the tsunami in Thailand, and the close involvement (and claims of fidelity to her experience) of María Belón, it seems at least feasible that this family, located in a tourist area, would not have been privy to the magnitude of suffering among the Thai population. There is certainly a wider issue concerning the sort of luxury tourism in developing countries that sees wealthy Westerners effectively segregated from real life in the places they travel to. Perhaps the relative absence of Thais in the film merely holds a mirror up to this sort of experience.
In his first feature, The Orphanage (2007), Bayona demonstrated his skill in representing family bonds as a vital part of the narrative. Much of the tension in this uncanny yet ultimately moving ghost story was invested in the depth of maternal feeling. The relationship between mother and son is also at the crux of The Impossible, Bayona’s second feature film. Naomi Watts is the film’s focal point, appearing in more extended close-ups—most of them showing pain of some sort—than any other member of the family.
There are moments when, in order to convey the extent of the crisis, the camera moves away to create aerial views of endless rows of body bags. But the film doesn’t dwell on the spectacle of destruction. The aim is to give us a very personal angle on an horrific event that is difficult to comprehend in its entirety.
While the horror genre often uses the suffering female figure in a distanced, fetishistic way, The Impossible dwells on Maria’s bruised and swollen face so we feel her pain. There’s never a sense that the family’s survival was a walk in the park. When Maria and Lucas are thrown around by the surging waters of the retreating tsunami, The Impossible drives home the helplessness and fragility of human life when confronted with a force such as this.
A lyricism and sense of the unfathomable runs through the film. It’s there in the ominousness which builds on the day before the disaster, prefigured in small, inconsequential events (a page falling from a book, tourists swimming underwater). It’s also there in a nighttime scene where an older woman (Geraldine Chapman) talks to one of the younger boys about the impossibility of telling which stars are already dead (an obvious resonance with the film’s title). The Impossible’s most poetic sequence occurs in Maria’s uncanny, dreamlike memory of the moment the tsunami hit. We see the monstrous surge of water crash into the glass greenhouse she crouches against; her unconscious body submerged among debris and corpses. Then, from beneath, we observe her rise to the surface, spread-eagled and silhouetted against the light. This hint of the ineffable makes The Impossible poetic as well as dramatic, and with convincing performances from the actors, prevents the film from cloying.
Given the ‘miraculous’ survival of this family of five, when so many others died, it would be easy for smugness to intrude, yet though the family leave together in a plane bound for Singapore, there’s nothing pat about this film’s ending. Relief is there, of course, but also exhaustion and sadness, conveyed, unsurprisingly, through another close-up of Naomi Watts’ tear-stained face. There’s a sense of the open-ended nature of natural disaster: the feeling that none of us is completely safe. The film closes with a shot of the vast ocean.
The Impossible, director Juan Antonio Bayona, screenplay Sergio G. Sánchez, story María Belón, director of photography Óscar Faura, editors Elena Ruiz, Bernat Vilaplana, music Fernando Velázquez, production design Eugenio Caballero, art direction Dídac Bono, Marina Pozanco; Australian distributor Hoyts/Studiocanal
I FIRST ENCOUNTERED THE WORK OF MARINA ABRAMOVIC IN THE EARLY 1980S WHEN I BOUGHT A COPY OF RELATION WORK AND DETOUR, AN ACCOUNT OF ABRAMOVIC’S WORK WITH HER PERFORMANCE AND THEN LIFE PARTNER ULAY. AT THE TIME, KEITH GALLASCH AND I WERE BEGINNING TO CREATE A SERIES OF PERFORMANCES FOR OPEN CITY BASED ON OUR OWN RELATIONSHIP THOUGH WE HAD NO AMBITIONS TO MATCH THE INTENSITY OF APPROACH OF THESE TWO.
relation in time (1977)
We are sitting back to back, tied together by our hair without any movement. (16 hours) Then the audience come in. (17 hours)
In the documentary The Artist is Present by Matthew Akers and Jeff Dupré we accompany Abramovic in the preparations for her retrospective at MoMA in the winter of 2010. She separated from Ulay in 1988 and it appears they haven’t met for some time. The film moves between arrangements for the exhibition and Abramovic’s live performance, which will be part of it. Each day of the show’s three-month duration, Abramovic, seated on a wooden chair, will face individual members of the public. “The hardest thing to do is something close to nothing. It demands all of you,” she says.
Documentation of performance art works is necessarily problematic—how to represent the ephemeral, recast the uniquely personal, preserve the live moment?
imponderabilia (1977)
We are standing naked in the main entrance of the Museum, facing each other. The public entering the Museum have to pass sideways through the small space. Each person passing has to choose which one of us to face. (90 minutes).
We see Marina nervously awaiting the arrival of the 30 young artists who have been chosen to ‘re-perform’ some of the seminal Abramovic/Ulay works. They will be at Marina’s home in Hudson Valley for three days—fasting, living in silence, no phones—all to help them empty themselves, to slow down. They have three months to perform and will have to create their own ‘charismatic space’—to be ‘present.’
Later, watching these young bodies in the gallery standing in for the weathered frames of the artists who had conceived these actions, lived the difficult lives that they reflected, it’s hard to see them as anything other than representations in another time. Naked bodies in the museum, however, have a way of attracting attention—though not necessarily the sort you might seek. Fox News’ “America Live” alerts its audience to the audacious Abramovic as “some Yugoslavian-born provocateur.”
For an artist who creates such intense works, Abramovic projects a cool bemusement in her everyday dealings with people. She cheekily admonishes the catalogue essayist with: “But you haven’t asked me ‘Why is this art?’” She’s justifiably annoyed at her status, “still alternative” after 40 years of work. “It takes such a long time to be taken seriously!” Then again, a retrospective at MoMA is not to be sneezed at and in Givenchy’s Spring campaign last year was that Marina’s visage up there next to Kate Moss?
art and life with ulay
Intercut with preparations for the retrospective and for her performance are filmed sequences and still photographs of Abramovic’s solo works and those she performed with Ulay.
These, together with the reunion with Ulay for the show, provide some of the film’s most powerful and poignant moments. When he’s told what she’s planning for her live performance, Ulay says “Wow! I have nothing more to say. Respect.” He recalls Marina’s stamina. In one incarnation of their work Nightsea Crossing (1981) they sat inactive, fasting and silent. He exited after 16 days when he’d lost 24lbs in weight and was near collapse. Marina remained at the table.
We gain some insight into the source of this strength in Abramovic’s recall of a childhood in which her parents, national heroes from Tito’s time, trained her to be a little soldier. The only love in her life came from her grandmother who also provided spiritual guidance. She declares, “The artist must be a warrior, a shaman, must conquer the self and its weaknesses.”
Ulay, having swapped the rigours of performance for academe says, “I look like a worker but I do much less work than Marina.” Their famous walk (The Lovers, 1988) from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China marked the end of the relationship. “We were burning up,” says Ulay. “The better the performances the worse the relationship became.”
After the split, Marina headed in a new direction, which Ulay defines as more “theatrical and formalist.” After all those years of deprivation, she developed a taste for high fashion and fame, creating a work in which she said goodbye to extremes, ending with “Bye Bye, Ulay.”
Back in the present, preparations for the performance urgently proceed. There’s a brief flirtation with the idea of collaborating with an illusionist who munches a wine glass as part of his pitch (rejected), and scenes of an ailing Marina tucked up in a bed of red sheets calling on the healing properties of blood oranges.
And finally we witness the performance itself as one at a time, thousands of people queue, then enter the charmed space to sit before The Artist. Some return Abramovic’s unaffected gaze while others appear desperate to convey something deeper. Many smile, some weep. “So many people have so much pain,” says Marina. Those who get short shrift are the ones who try to turn the moment into their own artwork—one tries to demonstrate her ‘vulnerability’ by removing her clothes. Another reveals a hidden mirror behind an elaborate mask. “I’m the mirror of their own self,” says Marina.
The camera is fascinated with faces including Abramovic’s, which occasionally admits a smile and some tears (for Ulay). The waiting throng watches silently from the perimeter. The guards are on red alert for unheralded interventions. Museum announcements occasionally pierce the silence. The encounter appears meaningful to the participants—more mysterious for the film viewer. Sometimes it takes on the appearance of religious ritual. Abramovic appears nun-like in one of three heavy woollen dresses (one red, one white, one blue). At other times, it feels just a bit indulgent, as if the provocateur, tired of waiting, has designed her own form of devotion. I guess, as they say, you had to be there.
At the end of each session, however, the ‘work’ of this art is powerfully manifest in the toll it takes on the body of the performer. The pain of an immobilised body must be massaged, bathed and exercised away each day to prepare for the next. Abramovic is 63 when the film is made and finally admits, “There’s a limit, even for me.” But when it’s suggested that she cut short the performance, she will not hear of it. She may be marking the 736 hours off on the wall but the show must go on.
As the film and the retrospective draw to a close there’s a lot of summing up, a lot of it about time and how we are caught in it and how Marina Abramovic aims to slow everything down, to bring the performer and the audience into the same state of consciousness of the here and now.
In 106 minutes Akers and Dupré expose for the viewer something of the emotional, physical and intellectual demands inherent in mounting an exhibition and performance that deal in the power of the present. In the process they also offer insight into the life’s work of a remarkable artist.
Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present (2012), co-directors Matthew Akers, Jeff Dupré, cinematography Matthew Akers, editors Jim Hession, E. Donna Shepherd, original music Nathan Halpern. Distributed in Australia by Madman Entertainment.
NEW YORK-BASED ARTIST PETER BURR IS FAMED FOR HIS WILDLY CARNIVAL-ESQUE PERFORMANCES AS HALF OF POPULAR ‘TRICK-OR-TREAT-TRANCE’ DIGITAL MUSIC/ANIMATION DUO HOOLIGANSHIP AND FOR CO-FOUNDING THE UNDERGROUND ANIMATION COLLECTIVE CARTUNE XPREZ.
Burr’s new work, Special Effect sees him branch out into solo audiovisual performance in the form of a live experimental television program, in which Burr presides over a succession of increasingly bizarre digital images, replete with the interruptive agenda of commercial breaks. Drawing on a surprising wellspring for its inspiration, Special Effect features Burr’s typically highly physical performance bent to more experimental ends, collaged into the action via green screen, as the master of a strange ceremony.
Tell me about the genesis for Special Effect—where did it come from?
I have a habit of incessantly drawing, somewhat aimlessly, in between large-scale projects. It calms me down. I’ve been in this rhythm for years. Last spring, after finishing my project Green | Red, I had just rewatched Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky’s legendary 1979 sci-fi film) and found myself making drawings based on paused frames of the film. The specifics of the movie weren’t in those images, but some of the mood contours were—the figures, choreography and architecture. Something about this really gelled…and so I decided to explore them in four dimensions. Also, around this time, I was talking with a bunch of other video artists and animators and noticed there was a thread here that these artists were also inspired by—there’s been a serious Stalker wavelength growing fresh over the last few years. I found lots of personal resonances with this film…and so did others. So that’s really where the project comes from, how it was birthed.
The next stage was shooting in some abandoned sites?
Yes, I met up with a group of friends who were keen on exploring ruined/abandoned sites around New York. I started tagging along with them, borrowing friends’ cameras and shooting landscape footage—this eventually was integrated into the animated segments of Special Effect, in various forms. It turned into this self-propelling journey into the armpits of America, delving into our zones of exclusion to find my own story somewhere in the Stalker script.
Do you remember the first time you saw Stalker?
I first heard about the film as a resident artist at the Macdowell colony, the oldest artist colony in the States, in New Hampshire. I used to take pathless walks through the winter woods there and once a friend accompanied me and he was like, “This is just like being in Stalker.” At the time I hadn’t seen it but he meant the stillness and the thin trees and how you could hear your footsteps in the thick carpet of leaves left on the ground. His description of the film mesmerised me, but I never got around to watching it until about a year later when I was touring around Europe. I had a copy of it on my laptop and during an overnight trip from London to Antwerp I thought, “Let’s fire it up!” I remember getting into the station and having time to kill before I could find my host there and feeling grateful there were so many hours left in the film. It felt like this dreamy, endless drift through parallel worlds, perfect for my transient, half-awake state. Only my world was a bit drier—compared to the endless puddles and rain and splashing that is like a running joke through Stalker.
Peter Burr, Special Effect, courtesy the artist
The audience for Special Effect can see how you’ve responded to those bleak Tarkovskyan pans—but yours are really heavily effected. What are you trying to do with the motion graphics in this work?
I think a lot about transforming the thumbprint of images. How can this be done to icons of pop culture that, untransformed, propel us into nostalgic mental loops? How can I strip off the marks of specific software that read as emblems of their design? The signature ‘look’ of software is something I think about a lot. Each program wants to announce itself. But there are a million different paths in there to smear or shift the markings, to carve out something unique with the same tools that everyone’s using. I’m not into speaking with the voice of a generation or being the voice of a particular piece of software. I think I really work adversely to that.
With this whole project, there was an element of dealing with iconography, of Stalker. Dealing with tradition. But at the end of the day it’s not replicating. I’m trying to invent something new from it. Something that actually feels like its own thing. I wanted to work with some of the elements I admired from the film, like the Tarkovskyan pans, but let them be transformed. I was aiming to create a new feeling that’s rooted in my own feeling of the world just as much as it is rooted in this source. I guess…in creating a project that’s about ripping off the greatest film ever, I feel like it’s also important for me to push away from it.
Like you push away from demo-ing ‘high’ technology with the software thumbprint?
Yeah, I’m not interested in a display of the newest technology. Special Effect shares the load around—it’s a pretty tangled knot of high-end and low-end software. To me it’s important to obscure those distinctions in the work. It’s not about the newest, coolest thing. I like using crappy free technology too. Or if I’m using familiar software then it’s about misusing it and using it in weird combinations and configurations, ways that aren’t emblematic when you think about the software.
Is that why you’re interested in incorporating the live performance element?
It adds an angle of chaos. With this kind of motion graphics work it is so easy to get stuck in the structure of the computer process. I write a script, draw a storyboard, then execute the blueprints. But straightforward in this way, it lacks something. Adding layers of liveness to it all makes it feel more honest. There’s the effect of real bodies, this risk of everything falling apart, the lasers threatening to blind you…! It makes you watch it all very differently than you’d watch The Hobbit (3D or no-3D).
I know you watched a lot of cartoons as a child and that drew you into the world of animation; that sensibility permeates Cartune Xprez but is pared back, thinned out in Special Effect. What’s the relationship with TV in this work? Why structure it as a TV program?
With television, my references are all very different today than they were a decade ago. I don’t think I’m alone with this. I haven’t watched ‘television’ in years—the internet and my own art practice replaced that for me. This definitely creates space for me to play with the idea of television. It’s almost an imaginary object for me now. We’ve had this shift away from the fascist architecture of media—TV programming—into user-controlled, user-generated media. There’s no tolerance of boredom now and that really interests me. There’s certainly a confrontation with boredom in the show—it deals with Stalker, after all! I guess I’m trying to reconcile the slow, quiet, maybe confusing drifts with really short-attention-sapan-overload segments.
Of course, I grew up watching over eight hours of TV a day until I went off to college, so there’s also a very real imprint of its effects on my imagination. I don’t know exactly why, but it just feels intuitive to make fractured, commercial-interrupted, channel-surfed work. My attention span is all out of whack.
I guess that’s informed my way of approaching things now. Special Effect isn’t ‘about TV’—I don’t even know what TV is any more. Like I said, it’s an imaginary system for me. Because I don’t watch TV but remember it—and especially commercial breaks—I’m like, “I haven’t seen one in a while, so let’s have one, and let’s make it fun!.” So it’s kind of like a late 70s vision of a dystopian future, looked back on through the lens of 80s and 90s TV, from the position of early 2013. If that makes sense.
Peter Burr, Special Effect, Brisbane, Melbourne, Meredith Music Festival, Adelaide, Dec 5-10, 2012; http://otherfilm.org/peter-burr-cartune-xprez/; Museum of Moving Image, NY, 18 Jan 18, 2013; www.peterburr.org
BEFORE DISCUSSING DOCUMENTARY OF AKB48: SHOW MUST GO ON (2011) WHICH SCREENED IN THE 16TH JAPANESE FILM FESTIVAL ACROSS AUSTRALIA, HERE ARE SOME INTRODUCTORY POINTERS ABOUT THE JAPANESE POP GROUP, AKB48. THEY ARE A COLLECTION OF GIRL SINGERS COMPRISING THREE PRIMARY TEAMS OF 16, BASED AT A LIVE THEATRE FOR FANS IN AKIHABARA, FORMED IN 2006 BY EX-AIDORU (IDOL MUSIC C1980s) LYRICIST AND MANAGER YASUSHI AKIMOTO.
Their music is mostly a softened yet pneumatic Euro-disco à la Stock-Aitken-Waterman, designed to be uncontrollably memorable. The vocals come from a team’s 16 voices singing in unison, usually without harmony lines, generating a sports-like karaoke of kiddie chants. Between 2011-2012, AKB48 released 10 singles in Japan (population 127.5 million), each selling on average 1.2 million. (Between 2011-2012, Katy Perry released eight singles in Australia, population 22 million, each selling on average 0.14 million.)
But Pop Music in Japan is a different being. The Idol syndrome that first peaked in the 80s was based on idolatry, figurine worship and the rupturing imperfection of human amateurism, which was perceived to define the ‘idol’ as a shimmering deity in human form. (Only 40 years earlier, Japan collectively subscribed to the Emperor’s divinity.) Japanese Idol music employs crass electronic synthesism as an environmental context for highlighting human expression—hence the off-tune, over-emoted, unadorned voices of groups from Pink Lady and Onyanko Club to SMAP and Arashi.
The AKB48 documentary Show Must Go On is an exhausting ride into the maelstrom of Idol culture. On the surface it appears as yet another exposé of the ‘real world’ behind those ensnared by the machinations of show business. But Show Must Go On presents with uncompromising clarity what is within the surface of Japanese Idol culture.
A number of narrative incidents shape the documentary’s trajectory across the year 2011. The major one is the Great Tohoku Earthquake and resulting tsunami (referred to in Japan as 3/11). We see six members from the A-Team travelling by bus into Otsuchi, Iwate in June. They stare in silence into the de-spatialised devastation we can also see through the bus windows. The members on the bus silently try to read what was once a recognisable landscape.
As they descend, the six young women move differently: they now resemble figurines, exuding the subtle power of Japanese women engaged in formal ritual. The stilted slowness of their bodies and their almost indiscernible head-bowing are signs not of obsequiousness, but regality and divinity, here performed through the minutiae of bodily control as if they are no mere mortals.
They straddle the makeshift stage and formally introduce themselves and their “stricken area support tour.” Suddenly they transform, leaping into synchronised callisthenic moves, singing atop the blaring backing track of Heavy Rotation (2010). Dressed not in their usual glitzy uniforms, which seem borrowed from the mystical princess sub-genre of anime like My-HiME (2005-8), they wear white tour T-shirts, gym pants and trainers. The location sound is similarly raw: it accentuates AKB48’s aural presence as frail human vocals enmeshed in a dizzying multiphonic synthesis.
At one point, the camera hand-tracks behind a gaggle of Japan Self Defence Force members corralled as relief workers, dressed in military garb and patiently listening. It’s the first of many moments in the documentary’s audio-vision where AKB48’s music—performed live or played in a public space—seems dislocated from its surroundings.
Yet at that very moment, it also evidences the means by which the music fuses with its surroundings. Because when such ‘inappropriate’ music occupies a social realm—here, tacky disco pop amidst the ruined townships post-3/11—a reality effect seeps back into the music to intone it with opposite sentiments. In this instance, Heavy Rotation begins to sound less sprightly and bouncy and more drained and hollow.
Another major narrative incident is the AKB48 22nd Single Election held June 9 at the Budokan in Tokyo. Having spent three months in Tokyo shortly after 3/11, much of what is in Show Must Go On brings back memories for me of the transformation and reconstruction which frenetically hit Japan over that time. The AKB48 Election was accorded an amount of media attention proportionate to the drastic re-shuffling of the Democratic Party of Japan’s cabinet under Naoto Kan during the post-3/11 crisis. Images of besuited old men and uniformed young girls each engaged in popularity polling were everywhere.
The AKB48 Single Elections manifest how ‘popularity’ can govern with chaotic yet ultimate power in Pop Music, as team members who get to actually record each new single are selected by their huge Japanese fan base (they sold out the Budokan). How better to ensure attraction to AKB48 than by having one actively dislike certain members in order to like others. That’s how the Single Elections have unfolded since 2009, and Show Must Go On unflinchingly reveals the emotional exhaustion and terrorising debilitation its members wilfully suffer.
When Yui Yokoyama achieves 19th place in Team B, she appears onstage, hyperventilating from the trauma of succeeding. We quickly cut to a later interview where she’s mildly laughing at it herself, querying what she felt. It’s the first of the documentary’s onslaught of such para-bipolar incidents which are performed with an embedded schizophrenic calm typical of Japanese emoting and self-presentation.
When the dramatic long-winded announcement of the first place is blared over the Budokan PA, we see No.1 contender Atsuko Maeda bobbing in her seat like an epileptic. Here is a star, suffering in public, about to succeed, filmed by multiple cameras, surrounded by her colleagues—but everything and everyone around her treats her as a non-existent entity. Show Must Go On documents such instances of Japanese behavioural customs, proving AKB48 to be a simulacrum of Japanese endeavour: completely fabricated, excessively exploitative, undeniably fictitious, yet absolutely affecting.
Backstage after the announcement, we focus on Yoko Oshima, this time demoted to second place. The onstage male announcer’s barking drowns her, indifferent to her emotional collapse. Then an AKB48 ballad blares through the PA: it’s like sonic salt poured onto her gaping wounds. She stands with her back to us, moored in the bowels of the Budokan’s subterranean infrastructure, facing an air-conditioning duct. In the ugly miasma of lo-light video grain, cables and ducting swirl around her like a deadly forest. It’s a chilling anime icon—the mystical schoolgirl princess ensnared in a cruel environment. The camera zooms in slowly on her shadowy back: a sublime moment in Pop Music audio-vision: a portrait of the dark self away from Pop’s photosynthetic brightness.
source ACMI & Mark Gambino, courtesy of the artist and Scarlett Pictures
Thornton in front of Mother Courage
“IN THE LAST 30 YEARS INDIGENOUS CINEMA, ART, EVERYTHING, HAS BEEN MIND-BOGGLINGLY EXPLODING IN ALL DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS AND DIFFERENT WAYS. IT’S A VERY EXCITING TIME—WE’RE CREATING A NEW WORLD.” WARWICK THORNTON’S ENTHUSIASM IS INFECTIOUS, AND DOESN’T SEEM DAMPENED BY HOURS SPENT SETTING UP HIS NEW INSTALLATION, MOTHER COURAGE, IN THE BOWELS OF THE AUSTRALIAN CENTRE FOR THE MOVING IMAGE.
Not content with having written and directed one of the greatest Australian features of recent decades—Samson and Delilah (2009)—the Alice Springs filmmaker is pushing into new artistic territory. “I wanted to create stuff where I could go off and do it myself, where I don’t need 100 crew and $3 million,” Thornton explains when asked about his push into the visual arts. “I shoot work for other people in between writing and getting my own films up, but it still wasn’t enough to vent creativity, to vent ideas. You have 10 ideas a day and five years down the track one of them might arise as a film. So it grew out of that—a frustration with having lots of wonderful ideas and not enough outlets.”
Mother Courage is Thornton’s second installation—his first foray into gallery-based 3D video work was Stranded (RT102) for the Adelaide Film Festival in 2011. That piece saw Thornton tied to a neon cross, suspended over the Western Desert. Mother Courage retains the setting, but focuses on an elderly Indigenous painter (played by real life artist Grace Rubuntja) reminiscent of Delilah’s exploited Nana in Thornton’s debut feature.
The first thing we see upon entering the darkened gallery space is a battered van, softly spotlit in the middle of the room. Red dust coats the bumper and tyres, bespeaking long drives across Australia’s centre, while paintings hang from the van’s sides. A newspaper wedged against the dirty windscreen features a headline about troubled Top End Aboriginal communities, while a red handprint on the van’s front speaks of Indigenous ownership. Then, suddenly, we perceive movement in the back of the van and realise there is an elderly woman inside, painting.
Closer inspection reveals the action is playing out on a life-sized video screen inside the van, but the clarity of the footage conveys a disconcerting impression of real presence. This is only reinforced when we walk around the back of the van to find the image’s reverse playing inside the open rear door. From here the elderly painter faces us, as she carefully applies brush strokes to her work, while a young boy (Elijah Button) sits beside her playing air guitar to the sounds of the Green Bush country music show blaring from a radio.
Thornton’s films have always spoken to each other through recurring characters and overlapping concerns, and Mother Courage continues this intertextual dialogue. “You can learn more about Mother Courage, and the reason she’s in Melbourne and not on her homelands painting, by watching Green Bush,” says Thornton, referring to his classic 2005 short about a late-night radio DJ in a remote desert community. “That film talks about the violence and the vicious cycles of community life. I can’t explain everything, but if you create those small connections with what you’ve done before or what you might be doing next, it becomes a more immersive journey.”
Thornton’s work also deliberately evokes wider connections with contemporary Indigenous politics and culture—an explosion of activism and creativity that has barely registered with many non-indigenous Australians. Green Bush, for example, prominently features Gary Foley’s speech on Indigenous rights from a Sydney stage during a Clash concert in 1982. Samson and Delilah tips a hat to Bart Willoughby and the soundtrack to Wrong Side of the Road (1981) when a homeless man sings the anthemic “We Have Survived” beneath a highway overpass. “They are key things for most Indigenous people and they’re unique. And a lot of non-indigenous people haven’t heard that song or that speech, and then it’s like, ‘Wow, Gary Foley spoke at a Clash concert?’ It’s great.”
Thornton himself was similarly led to Bertolt Brecht via the circuitous route of John Walter’s documentary Theatre of War (2008), about the staging of a production of the playwright’s classic Mother Courage and Her Children in New York. Inspired by the film, Thornton sought out the original play and was immediately struck by parallels between Mother Courage’s travails as an itinerant trader during Europe’s Thirty Years’ War and the plight of Indigenous communities in the Western Desert. “There are some amazing correlations between this lady and what’s happening in the desert at the moment with Indigenous people, having to move off their country to follow certain elements to be able to survive,” Thornton observes ruefully. “I’m using Brecht’s back story in a sense, so anybody with any knowledge of what happened to his Mother Courage can align it with this character.”
Warwick Thornton, Mother Courage (detail), 2012
source ACMI & Mark Gambino, courtesy of the artist and Scarlett Pictures
Warwick Thornton, Mother Courage (detail), 2012
Thornton’s Mother Courage occasionally pauses to hold up her painting to viewers, as if plying for passing trade. Other paintings are hung on the sides of her van, making the vehicle a portable one-woman commercial gallery. The installation was first unveiled at last year’s dOCUMENTA in Kassel, Germany, where the vehicle was often parked beside crowds queuing for various exhibitions, making the painter’s position vis-à-vis the international art market clear. “It’s like in Samson and Delilah—the artist gets 100 bucks, and the art is then sold on for $10,000,” says Thornton of the rampant exploitation of Indigenous painters.
As in Brecht’s Mother Courage, however, Thornton has left his character’s situation and actions open to multiple readings. “In a lot of the stuff I make, I try to not dictate a right or wrong, a yes or no. Some people will walk in there and feel really passionate and sad about this woman—she’s confined in this van, and doesn’t really do anything but paint. And the kid seems really bored. Another person will be really empowered by the idea that this woman has created a form of self determination and gotten out of this vicious cycle of some communities—this sister’s doing it for herself, you know, and she’s gone straight to the source of what she knows, which is art.”
However we respond to the character’s situation, there is a painful sadness and sense of dispossession underlying the scene evoked by Thornton. While traditional dot paintings hang on one side of the van, on the other is an almost childlike image showing giant black blocks labelled “grog” sitting atop the desert sands as numerous black stick figures fall about around them. “You’re a captive audience,” we hear DJ Kenny say over the radio to his prison listeners, and the bitterness in his voice is only slightly mollified by wry humour. Yet there is also hope in Mother Courage’s calm, persistent process of creation—a hope that resides in the ongoing resilience of a culture that has survived, despite everything.
For all his social concerns, it is Warwick Thornton’s ability to sympathetically capture the hopes, possibilities and foibles of his characters that makes his work so affecting. “You always draw upon key emotions, you know?” Thornton explains, stripping his approach down to its essence. “It all boils down to good storytelling—that’s what I’ve found.” When asked whether he intends to continue with installation work, he replies, “I love all forms, so I just flow with it. It’s about the idea. You hear an amazing, real story and you think should this be a doco, a feature, a video installation or a collection of photographs? The story will tell you how it should be made.” With another feature and television series on the way, Thornton’s flow of stories—in all different directions and different ways—shows no sign of abating.
Mother Courage, installation, writer-director Warwick Thornton, actors Grace Rubuntja, Elijah Button, commissioned by ACMI and dOCUMENTA (13); Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, Feb 5-June 23
Colleen Ludwig, details of installation Cutaneous Habitat: Shiver, ISEA 2012
images courtesy of the artist
Colleen Ludwig, details of installation Cutaneous Habitat: Shiver, ISEA 2012
ISEA 2012 ARTISTIC DIRECTOR ANDREA POLLI’S CURATORIAL CONCEPT FOR MACHINE WILDERNESS: RE-ENVISIONING ART, TECHNOLOGY AND NATURE TOOK A STRONG ECO-POLITICAL APPROACH TO DIGITAL INTERACTIONS WITH THE ENVIRONMENT. ISEA 2012 IN ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO MEDIATED BETWEEN THESE INTERSECTING WORLDS FROM CREATIVE RESIDENCIES AT THE LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LAB AND SETI (SEARCH FOR EXTRA TERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE) TO EVENTS AT THE INSTITUTE OF AMERICAN INDIAN ARTS IN SANTA FE AND THE NATIONAL HISPANIC CULTURAL CENTRE IN ALBUQUERQUE.
While the ISEA symposium began in 1988 in Utrecht and Groningen with a focus on computer-generated art, such as fractal graphics and emergent ‘net art,’ the artworks and presentations now extend into the diverse forms of ‘post-media’ practice; from fusions of performance and animation to sound walks. The focus of this review is neither the physical computing nor the augmented reality and QR codes [matrix barcodes. Eds] that may represent key typologies within ISEA artworks in 2012. Rather, in the sometimes bewildering density of artworks and parallel conference sessions, the presence and absence of water became a connecting thread for this writer.
te urutahi waikerepuru, new zealand
Te Uratahi Waikerepuru, Pou Hihiri
image courtesy the artists
Te Uratahi Waikerepuru, Pou Hihiri
A Maori art project conveying the importance of wai (water) from Aotearoa/New Zealand to ISEA in New Mexico catalysed this interest on my part. As part of ISEA at 516 Arts (a gallery known for its pursuit of radical environmental and social art projects), Maori artist Te Urutahi Waikerepuru installed the work Pou Hihiri, an electrified totem. The work was part of the collaborative exhibit Te Hunga Wai Tapu curated by Ian Clothier. In a well-attended conference workshop, Te Urutahi and her father, kaumatua (elder) Dr Te Huirangi Waikerepuru spoke on the importance of wai in Maori cosmology.
Water is a key element in the set of relations and flows that bind us to the environment. Te Urutahi’s Pou Hihiri represents the ‘becoming of the universe’ and the rise of the matriarchal principle. The work flickers with potentiality, represented by an array of lights within a wooden pole figure. Hihiri describes the power for change in hydro energy, kinetic energy, molecular energy and lightning. Te Urutahi positions Pou Hihiri as the first in a series of forms that will represent “the birth/physical manifestation of the universal elements of natural lore according to Matauranga Maori concepts.” Maori knowledge and science converge in the concept for the artwork.
While ISEA was taking place, a multi-tribal hui (meeting) in New Zealand overwhelmingly backed a resolution calling on the New Zealand government to halt the sale of Mighty River power company shares. At ISEA, the ‘wai’ water workshop, like the contentious hui in Aotearoa, aimed to produce a framework for recognising Maori proprietary rights and interests and spiritual ties with water. Dr Te Huirangi’s disarming question of how one can ever sell air or water to corporate interests, or interrupt the natural ‘flow’ of water as a complex system, resonated with the international audience.
william wilson, usa
Maori campaigns against continuing colonial attempts to undermine their ‘mana’ or sovereignty over water are echoed in the indigenous struggles in South-West America. Navajo artist William Wilson related how Arizona Senator John McCain advocated the construction of municipal water pipelines in exchange for waiving indigenous rights to water. Vehement opposition by Navajo/Hopi campaigners defeated the bill in February 2012, lending hope to the Maori struggle. Like Pou Hihiri, Wilson’s collaborative artwork eyeDazzler 1 (2012) for ISEA connects ancient cultures to contemporary mythologies about technology by weaving a QR code into a traditional textile pattern.
seoungho cho, korea
Water was represented as both a politically fraught site and a meditative force in several works at the Albuquerque museum. Korean artist Seoungho Cho’s multiple video seascape Horizontal Intuition 14 (2012) momentarily alleviated my island-dweller’s anxiety about the distance from the ocean. A rhythmic abstraction was created by the waves of distant seas, scored with the coloured stripes of computer-generated glitches.
colleen ludwig, usa
Deeper into the museum I found a group of women from Albuquerque delighting in actual trickles of water around a highly plumbed, cabled and programmed structure. Colleen Ludwig’s (USA) interactive piece Cutaneous Habitat: Shiver (2012) was comically mechanical as switches clicked and released water in response to human presence. One woman commented, “maybe if we stand here long enough it will start to rain in Albuquerque.” Decreased rainfall as the climate shifts, the smaller than anticipated size of Albuquerque’s subterranean aquifer and their rising population constantly remind the inhabitants of the value of water. (See video footage here.)
marc böhlen, canada
During the lively ISEA Downtown Block Party participants were offered various combinations of mineral waters, mixed by a computer algorithm, from a mobile water station. Canadian artist Marc Böhlen’s WaterBar (2012) filtered water through mineral rocks from politically charged locations. The filtering rocks included quartz-filled granite from Inada in the Fukushima province, site of the 2011 nuclear meltdown; marble from Thassos, Greece “at the beginning and end of democracy;” and limestone from Jerusalem/Hebron, Israel, “source of eternal conflict and shared hopes.” (See video of WaterBar here)
joana moll, spain & heliodoro santos, mexico
The Rio Grande that separates New Mexico from border states is siphoned for irrigation from Colorado to Texas. During a conference break, I found the shallow, murky river amongst the willows and undergrowth behind a conference building at the National Hispanic Cultural Centre. The live-streamed video work The Texas Border (2011) by Joana Moll and Heliodoro Santos reveals the Rio Grande as a politicised body of water in the context of border crossings by illegal migrants from Mexico. A grid of 15 web cameras streaming live CCTV video documents people wading or boating across the river. The video is sourced from BlueServo, a citizen vigilante website designed to police the border through home webcams run by the Texas Border Sheriff’s coalition. The grainy shapes of those valiantly attempting to cross the river become moving points of light in the low resolution images, reinforcing the precarious existence of the cameras’ targets.
crossing water, becoming someone else
The national borders that cut through cultural-linguistic bonds were the focus of a key panel at the National Hispanic Cultural Centre. Veteran Cuban-American performer Coco Fusco and panelist Vicki Gaubeca, from New Mexico’s Regional Centre for border rights, situated the migrant body as the “ultimate frontier of technological colonisation.” Gaubeca outlined how Operation Streamline has doubled the number of US Border Control agents since 2003. Smart technologies such as cameras, sensors, six unmanned drones and 700 miles of fencing are used to police the border. The privatisation of prisons has resulted in the construction of massive centres for the detention of migrants, described by Gaubeca as a moneymaking venture. Fusco suggested that the US laws affecting migrants create new categories of people who are criminalised. Migrant imprisonment tears families apart, often detaining those with no criminal record. Fusco’s new work is concerned with migration via sea crossings from Cuba. She mused, “the moment when you lose connection with the land, the moment when you migrate, is the moment when you become somebody else.”
teri rueb & larry phan, usa
ISEA events extended beyond Albuquerque to exhibition sites around Santa Fe and Taos. Teri Rueb and Larry Phan’s (USA) location-specific sound walk No Places with Name: A Critical Acoustic Archaeology (2012) at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) was a resonant, multi-sensory experience. Fitted with headphones, we meandered in the desert heat along a trail dotted with cacti and wild flowers, listening to moving interviews from indigenous artists, anthropologists and geographers. One speaker related how a lost boy was found, clothes dry, miraculously transported to the other side of a dividing river. Silences in the audio walk signalled information held sacred and kept from outsiders.
laurie anderson, dirt day!
Without sustaining and valuing water resources all living beings are endangered; a stark fact made apparent by many of the digital artists who brought their work to New Mexico. Near the end of the conference, media artist Laurie Anderson performed her new work Dirt Day! at the Kimo Theatre. The performance spanned eco-politics, inter-species communication and Anderson’s continued fascination with the ways we receive and interpret language. With mesmerising rhetorical charm she mused that technological art has now moved beyond the instant gratification of speed to the attuning of our potential as “meaning-making machines.”
Although many artworks at ISEA 2012 still beeped, chirped or shook in response to human presence, the fairground attraction mode of early electronic art was often supplanted by wonder that could transmute into political reflection. An ecological approach to technology emerges in Machine Wilderness as a means to reveal, as philosopher Félix Guattari (1989) once observed, our immersion socially, psychologically and inevitably in the ‘environment.’
18th International Symposium on Electronic Art, ISEA 2012, Machine Wilderness, Albuquerque, USA, Sept 20, 2012-Jan 6, 2013
Tobiah Booth-Remmers, Lisa Griffiths, Lewis Rankin, Skeleton
photo Chris Herzfeld, Camlight Productions
Tobiah Booth-Remmers, Lisa Griffiths, Lewis Rankin, Skeleton
AFTER A STERLING CAREER WITH ADELAIDE’S AUSTRALIAN DANCE THEATRE AS AN ASTONISHINGLY FLEXIBLE AND DYNAMIC DANCER, AS WELL AS ASSISTANT CHOREOGRAPHER, LARISSA MCGOWAN HAS EMERGED IN RECENT YEARS AS A BRIGHT NEW CHOREOGRAPHIC TALENT.
McGowans’ first full-length work, Skeleton, will premiere at the 2013 Adelaide Festival and then play at Dance Massive in Melbourne. Meanwhile, the short work Fanatic, which premiered in Sydney’s Spring Dance festival last year will feature as one of three works in Sydney Dance Company’s De Novo, opening in March.
Born and dance-trained in Brisbane, McGowan subsequently graduated from the VCA, joined ADT in 2000, toured internationally with the company and became assistant choreographer to ADT Artistic Director Garry Stewart in 2008. She’s won Helpmann, Green Room and Australian dance awards; created Zero-sum for WOMADelaide in 2009; was a guest choreographer for two seasons of So You Think You Can Dance; greatly impressed with Slack, performed by ADT in the 2009 Spring Dance season (RT94, p38) and toured to France and Holland by Link Dance Company; created Transducer for a Tasdance double bill; and premiered Fanatic in Spring Dance 2012 for Sydney Dance Company’s Contemporary Women program.
fanatic
Fanatic is as physically precise and dextrously realised as you would expect from McGowan. Three dancers lipsynch the YouTube voices of besotted fans of the Alien and Predator films, but more than that they become the creatures, at once funny and frightening. McGowan tells me that her collaborator on Skeleton is theatre director Sam Haren: “We did a piece many years ago, a solo work made on myself, called Theatrical Trailer to Alien 5. Fanatic, for Spring Dance last year, was an extension of that. The process with Sam was just so interesting because I was working with somebody from a theatre background. So we thought, why don’t we use this process to make a full-length work?” That work is Skeleton.
I spoke by phone with McGowan about Skeleton, a work that conjures up aspects of the artist’s childhood memories centred around certain beloved objects and cultural artefacts. But more than that, it’s about the body’s dangerous engagement with those objects, be they bikes or bats (see our cover image). Fundamental to that, of course, is damage to the skeleton. This has led McGowan not only to reflect on growing up and physical trauma, but also the nature of the skeleton, including the ways that artists regard it and the prostheses like high-heeled shoes and instruments with which we extend it.
How would you describe the structure of Skeleton?
A puzzle. Pieces of life you see being formed and re-formed onstage, conjuring questions about who the person was, what they looked like, what kind of life they lived and how they died. It’s been a really great way to structure a work choreographically, exploring in a kind of archaeological way, putting things together. For me it’s really about the material reality of the skeleton, that final trace of a human being, and about traumas and their effect on our psyche in a collage of images.
When you say a collage, what sort do you have in mind?
The five dancers in this work are very different, unique-looking movers. They’re oddities in their own way, fused together. And the objects we’re looking at in Skeleton have pretty much come from 80s, 90s popular culture. They’re things that remind me of my youth, and movies at the time.
What kind of things?
Skateboards and BMXs and bats—all the things that can cause trauma just through playing. The people I researched in order to make this work were looking at the same era of objects. For instance, Ricky Swallow is a phenomenal Australian artist who makes objects—his skulls resonate with a dark kind of feeling. I like that playful, ironic look—the skull in a hoodie—that brings up things from my past that I think are dark, but humorous in some way.
We have five objects and five dancers. There’s a bike, a skateboard, a baseball bat. There’s a T-shirt because at the time people were wearing slogans. There’s also the heel of a shoe. Some of these objects came from looking at the work of UK artist Nick Veasey who does amazing X-ray image stuff where you actually see the ‘skeleton’ of an object. It’s really quite beautiful. There’s a bone-like stability [in the shoes in Veasey’s picture] that looks like an extension of the bone of a woman’s leg through the heel to the ground. I find it interesting that things that we use and wear really can become a part of our own body structure. [See http://twistedsifter.com/2010/05/x-ray-photography-nick-veasey/]
Is there a design element in Skeleton beyond bodies and objects?
There are screens that move across the space in order to suggest the feeling of things being removed and put back in place, but you don’t actually see a dancer or object actually enter. Design has become a huge part of this piece.
Lisa Griffiths, Larissa McGowan, Skeleton
photo Chris Herzfeld, Camlight Productions
Lisa Griffiths, Larissa McGowan, Skeleton
And who has designed it?
Jonathon Oxlade. He’s quite amazing. I wanted something very simple and very clear in its design in order to enhance what’s going on in the movement onstage. And it’s really done its job. It’s great.
And what about sonically? In what I’ve seen of your work there’s a very precise connection between sound and movement.
I think it drives the movement that I do. I love to hear layers. That’s one of the things that’s amazing about the human body when we’re trying to make movement—just the number of layers and systems within our bodies that can work so cohesively. The composer is Jethro Woodward whom I’ve worked with quite regularly. He can work with any type of instrument. It’s a recorded score but it’s going to be tricky because, as usual for me because I enjoy it, it will work very, very tightly with the movement, [but not all the time] because the work needs layers and it needs texture.
Would you like the audience to go away sensing the body as a bit more complex and strange?
Well, that would be lovely if it were possible. But I really wanted to make a piece—my first full-length work—that actually is about dance. It’s not about the technology that I’m seeing in dance everywhere. I really want to go back and remind myself, and hopefully others, that dance is an amazing artform due to the fact that it’s all coming from inside the human body.
I’m excited to create movement that is still virtuosic without it being the trademark stuff that I’ve done in the past. I’d like to tap into a younger audience that might not know exactly what contemporary movement can be—making it accessible for everyone.
You are performing in Skeleton?
Yes. I really appreciate choreographers who have come from a dance background and who continue to persevere as dancers while making work. I think that being in both worlds really assists in your own practice in both areas. That’s what I strive for.
Are you already fantasising the work that will come after this or is this enough for the moment?
Hopefully Skeleton will give me a platform to start producing new work. I’ve definitely got lots of people I’ve been talking to about future projects. But I feel like I just need to make sure that this one is heading in the right direction first before I jump into the deep end.
–
Adelaide Festival, Skeleton, directors Larissa McGowan, Sam Haren, AC Arts Main Theatre, March 2-9; Dance Massive, Beckett Theatre, Malthouse, Melbourne, March 15-23; Sydney Dance Company, De Novo, works by Rafael Bonachela, Alexander Ekman, Larissa McGowan, Sydney Theatre, March 1-23
Matthew Day, Rennie McDougall, Deanne Butterworth, And All Things Return to Nature Tomorrow, Luxembourg residency, Trois C-L, 2012, choreographer Brooke Stamp
photo Phillip Adams
Matthew Day, Rennie McDougall, Deanne Butterworth, And All Things Return to Nature Tomorrow, Luxembourg residency, Trois C-L, 2012, choreographer Brooke Stamp
CONCRETE MIXERS DESCEND FROM THE CEILING. DECORATED WITH LIGHTS, THEIR BARRELS SPIN HYPNOTICALLY OVER THE NAKED PERFORMERS. THE SPACE IS INVADED. TOMORROW—THE SECOND PART OF BALLETLAB’S NEW DOUBLE BILL, AND ALL THINGS RETURN TO NATURE TOMORROW—ENDS WITH A UFO ENCOUNTER.
BalletLab’s Artistic Director and choreographer, Phillip Adams is unapologetic about his Spielbergian ‘Hollywood ending’ impulses. “It’s pseudo sci-fi meets kiddie pop,” he says, half-seriously. He is not afraid “to take the bullet” for being on the frontline of dance. “Failing is how you succeed. Somehow we land in our next stage of history,” he says. BalletLab, he explains is on the periphery of Australian dance while being squarely in the middle of it.
Responding to the end of postmodern irony and a return to the utopian impulse to build, BalletLab’s new work has been two years in the making and has covered some serious air miles. There were Adams’ experiences with rednecks and hippies in the Mars-like landscape of the Mojave Desert, and the company’s dance residency in Luxembourg. Underpinning the new work by long-term associates Adams and Brooke Stamp are concepts of utopia. Adams draws on utopian architecture including Frank Lloyd Wright and Paolo Soleri’s Acrosanti [an experimental town in the desert embodying the fusion of architecture and ecology]. Stamp takes a more temporal view. It has been 14 years since they came together, and while the pieces in the double bill are as thematically and tonally distinct as could be imagined, a “common energy and interest in the space” unites the experience, says Adams.
In Stamp’s first choreographic outing for the company, utopia is represented by creating spaces where dance is collectively improvised. Her ethereal work, And all things return to nature, draws on systems of improvisation that she has developed for “responding to sound or text, including philosophical texts.” For this piece, Indigenous Australian cosmology played a pivotal role. The Dreamtime is a description of cosmogenesis with Stamp elaborating on both mythology and science to investigate kinetically charged sound.
The work incorporates recordings by Garth Paine which act in a way to “sound the planets into being.” The Big Bang is said to have been a bass hum rather than an explosion. Physicist and author Frank Wilczek attempts to explain this “never-ending hum of the universal sounding board that permeates the universe” as the “relic of the primordial big bang” in his 1988 book Longing for Harmonies. Curiously, scientists who investigate physics and chemistry find a strong resonance with the ordered nature of music.
Deanne Butterworth, Rennie McDougall, Matthew Day (rear), Tomorrow, development at Abbotsford Convent, 2012, choreographer Phillip Adams
photo Jeff Busby
Deanne Butterworth, Rennie McDougall, Matthew Day (rear), Tomorrow, development at Abbotsford Convent, 2012, choreographer Phillip Adams
Eight channel speakers will bathe the audience in this energy, “activating” them. Stamp tunes into the vibrational hum of the universe to describe the nature of ‘being.’ Her fascination with these themes is most personally expressed when she says that when all else fails, the movement of the universe is one thing she has to fall back on. Asked about both choreographing and performing in her own piece, Stamp explains that it was a way she could embody herself in the same discourse, experiments, language and “field of connectivity through concepts of frequency and vibration.” It was also a way of removing the hierarchy between choreographer and performer. Adams proudly heralds the emerging choreographer’s work as “out on the regions of the galactical/experiential space,” which radically complements his own work.
A preoccupation with sound is also evident in Adams’ piece, manifest in terms of Paine’s experimental music and the choreographer’s inspirational visit to George Van Tassel’s “acoustically perfect tabernacle” and alien altar, the Integratron. Van Tassel was an aeronautical engineer and test pilot alongside Howard Hughes. He began building the structure in 1954 as a place for rejuvenation and meditation (after being spurred on by several encounters with aliens). Wires and strings underneath the building suspend and hold it together—“it’s an acoustic machine that traps energy,” Adams explains. A recording session at the space took advantage of the acoustics; blankets were moved around the room and these sounds feature in the piece.
Standing in the Mojave Desert the domed structure had an immediate effect on Adams as a work of art. Sound baths, healing crystals and “crunchy granola [hippy] types” also offered the right creative fodder for Adams who has previously looked at Australian suburban noir in Axeman Lullaby (2008) and radical 60s and 70s religious groups in Miracle (2011). Adams’ Tomorrow is a reconstruction of his experiences in the desert, including an installation created in situ by architect Matthew Bird and an encounter with gun-toting but friendly ‘white trash’ whose timely arrival coincided with Adams’ responding to the landscape by lying naked near the site of a UFO landing.
Adams has an eagerness to relay his findings, to bare himself and ask the audience to participate in an experience. Seating has been reconfigured around the performers in a circle. What Adams and Stamp both ask is for audience surrender—to sound or to rapturous abduction. Adams is also recognised as a creator of immersive performances, aided by collaboration. “My architect, sound designer and my lighting designer are choreographers”—while Adams takes on their roles. “It gets that deep and I think that has been BalletLab’s defining motif.”
Stamp is both a disciple of and an inspiration to Adams and has followed suit in embracing collaborative processes. Working with MATERIALBYPRODUCT designer Susan Dimasi on sublime hand-painted costumes earned the new show a spot on the Melbourne Fashion Festival calendar. In Dimasi Stamp found someone who worked on her level “where [we’d] have a dialogue about language and sound” or watch the dancers instead of prescribing what the costumes should look like. Dimasi is interested in the constant evolution of the garment through a dancer’s movement and the tears and sweat that alter them.
Adams’ Tomorrow lacks clothing, instead featuring a futuristic woven blanket—created by Dimasi after seeing Matthew Bird’s installation in the desert—which becomes a costume. The naked performers are “designed in the space” by the blanket. It looks painstakingly constructed, the strands of coloured fabric both tribal and un-earthly. Similarly, painstaking research and inquiry has gone into the details of this show. Stamp agrees “the depth of research is extreme. It’s where all the ephemeral properties of performance making exist and are never revealed.”
BalletLab, And all things return to nature tomorrow, choreographers Phillip Adams, Brooke Stamp, The Lawlet, Southbank Theatre, Melbourne, March 15-23
CONSIDERING THE FRAUGHT HISTORY OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE IN WA, THE EMERGENCE OF OCHRE SHOULD HAVE BEEN, AS SUGGESTED BY THE PRODUCTION’S TITLE, A CAUSE FOR ‘SEEING THROUGH AND BEYOND.’ WHILE AFTER-IMAGES GLIMMERED IN CREATION STORIES ABOUT THE FIRMAMENT’S CONSTELLATIONS, THE MILKY WAY AND ORION, AND CULTURAL DIALOGUES JUMPED WITH ÉLAN DOWN TO EARTH IN THE CONCLUDING YARNING. IN ITS FIRST OUTING THE FLEDGLING COMPANY AND ITS DIAPHANOUS DREAMS FAILED TO REVEAL ALTERNATIVE DANCE WORLDS.
The filigreed fall of the set’s twine across the performance cosmos resonated with mythological inclusiveness, sharing human life trials and weaving spiritual mysteries into the land. That woven loom, however, presents a daunting panorama where knots are bound to surface, particularly in drawing a Wongi Seven Sisters’ legend in counterpoint with a Greek myth—that of Orion whom Zeus transformed into the constellation of that name.
The performance began in hushed anticipation with Tammi Gisell’s Thoogoorba, as the first sister materialised, softly appearing in star trails with her coolum worn as a crown. As if seeking the materiality of her new identity, she stoked the ground, symbolically laying the coolum’s cradle of birth and sustenance there on the land. Her fluid swaying, the peculiar rhythmic lilt of her gestures bore the strength of Indigenous women who carry and see beyond. Tracking that metaphor further was difficult in the ensuing tension of guardianship of the coolums between the females (the Dreamtime sisters) and males (the fallible creatures of Earth) except that the seduction and final intimacy of man and first sister conveyed the ancient theme of sacrifice in order to issue mortal birth.
Projecting a more violent world, the entanglements in Jacob Lehrer’s Orion’s Belt were forewarned by storyteller Maitland Schneer’s incisive questioning of the audience’s willingness to inflict violence in order to achieve their desires. Have rape and domination replaced the subtle shifts of sexual attraction and/or do the altered power relations between humans and gods reflect a taste for greed and exploitation? The Greeks, young by Indigenous Australian standards, discovered the power of metals and, by extension in contemporary terms, mining’s mixed blessings. Mythologically, the personal rages into high politics: intimacy twists into estrangement as stratified communities commit societal oppression. In dance terms, discrepant power relations emerged in virtuosic displays and harsh duos, raising questions of what this embryonic company aims to achieve. Is the vision a coalition of different perspectives or a device to launch a new company with an awkward amalgamation of Indigenous and non-indigenous artists?
I glimpsed these pressures markedly in the final Yarnin section where a tangled mesh of humour and satire edged towards cultural revisioning of what is told and, more importantly, of what can be told. Choreographers Tammi Gissell and Jacob Lehrer introduced movement ‘joking’ but the gags lost momentum and the storyteller, who might have picked up the threads, was nowhere in sight. The ‘yarnin’ snagged between a racy fireside informality and expectations of a slick Western performance identity. I was left wondering how a company called Ochre might blend cultural distinctions to create a new presence on the Australian stage.
Ochre Contemporary Dance Company, Diaphanous—seeing through and beyond, artistic project director Simon Stewart, choreographers Tammi Gissell, Jacob Lehrer, sound design Josh Hogan, costume, set design Matthew McVeigh, lighting Joseph Mercurio, story consultants Josie Wowolla Boyle, Brownyn Goss, dancers Benjamin Chapman, Joshua Pether, Floeur Alder, Perun Bonser, Nicola Sabatino, Anne-Janette Phillips, Justina Truscott, Matthew Tupper, storyteller Maitland Schnaars, State Theatre Centre, Perth, Nov 22-24
IN LATE 2012 SYDNEY’S STALKER THEATRE EMBRACED NEW TECHNOLOGY AND DANCE TO SPECULATE ON OUR DIGITISED PRESENT AND FUTURE IN ENCODED. IN BEAUTIFUL ONE DAY, SYDNEY’S VERSION 1.0, BELVOIR AND MELBOURNE’S ILBIJERRI THEATRE COMPANY COLLABORATED TO REFLECT ON AND RE-ENACT PALM ISLAND’S DARK HISTORY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES FOR THOSE WHO CONTINUE TO LIVE THERE.
Encoded delights in the thrills provided by immersive new technologies while angsting over their dehumanising potential. Beautiful One Day conveys the emotional struggle to accept what was once a prison as now home if still oppressive, with the white viewer inevitably feeling complicit in that oppression.
stalker, encoded
In near dark someone, possibly winged, slowly turns toward us, small red-light eyes, a skirt hooping out slightly from the body. Nearby stands another ‘alien,’ skirtless, presumably male. They appear to have aerials. Their bodies are illuminated with Rorschach patterns, perhaps evoking organs, but green. The couple shimmer, beautiful, insect-like, but hi-tech; cyborgs?
A universe opens behind them, stars flowing across a vast Carriageworks wall but, less than cosmic, they soon prove to be part of the grid of a huge abstracted building which will expand, contract and slide vertiginously up and down like a monstrous elevator. Again, something manufactured, eerie. The creatures exit.
Human figures, male and female swirl, leap at the massive projection, conjuring tumbling flight, but then fall into pretty conventional contemporary dance before magically melting into a mass of stars.
The early promise of Encoded soon drifts away into alternations between aerial and dance sequences, with the former providing some fascination moment by moment but without cumulative weight. Bodies hang upside down or mutate into Y-shapes, fly out from the wall towards us, pair off and execute exacting ‘wall dances,’ or form threesome totems, almost alien, but still certainly human. In the end, we are alone with one of the creatures that initially confronted us with its worrying sense of difference—save the oddly insistent gender distinction.
Encoded addresses contemporary anxieties about the prospect of losing “the human in the midst of the pixels” (program note). To do this it celebrates the human capacity to defy gravity by dancing and swinging on rope while exploiting digital technologies to suggest even greater capacities. The result is at times spectacularly cinematic, reinforced by over-emphatic music, but Encoded lacks the cohesion and escalating dynamism witnessed in Stalker’s previous work MirrorMirror (RT94,p36), part of director David Clarkson’s continuing exploration of identity across time and space. The initial tensions and sense of excitement are soon lost. It’s disappointing too that the beautifully enigmatic creatures from the future remain merely emblematic—there is no interaction with the humans, quite unlike that seen between robots and dancers in say, Garry Stewart’s Devolution (ADT, 2006, RT71, p2). In that work hybridised humans sprouted horrifying robotic prostheses. Encoded is, with its almost motionless aliens, a relatively contemplative work in which humans and new creatures neither interact nor morph. Its characters appear to be less than agents in their universe and more the tools of technology, director and choreographer. The digital art team working on the production, however, have made something visually special of Encoded.
beautiful one day
Rachael Maza, Erykah Kyle (screen), Beautiful One Day, Belvoir, version 1.0 & Ilbijerri Theatre Company
photo Heidrun Löhr
Rachael Maza, Erykah Kyle (screen), Beautiful One Day, Belvoir, version 1.0 & Ilbijerri Theatre Company
I’ve read the news and the book (Chloe Hooper, The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island, 2009), seen the documentary (The Tall Man, director Tony Krawitz, 2011) and the four-channel video installation (Tall Man, Vernon Ah Kee, 2011) and now the stage play, Beautiful One Day. The tale of Palm Island exile, discrimination, murder, riot and justice denied is a scar on Queensland’s integrity, but sadly emblematic of national injustices. Each encounter with the story adds more disturbing details and discomfiting perspectives. This account by version 1.0 and Ilbijerri digs into the island’s history and adds a heightened Indigenous perspective side by side with verbatim recreations of pivotal moments in the unfolding tragedy.
The telling of the earlier history of Palm Island casually conjures key personalities, recites cruel, petty rules (courting only 4-5pm, “no laughing,” no bikes…) in what was essentially a slave colony. It recalls public punishments like head shaving, protests and a strike for wages, meat and freedom of speech, and its brutal consequences. 1960 documentary footage (projected in fragments on the semicircular screen that frames the stage) depicts then famous Australian musician Shirley Abicair declaring the island “the site of a bold experiment” to lift up its people while the sound score thumps ominously and whistling mocks this nonsense. The years roll on. In 1986 the inhabitants are given Deeds of Grant to the island, but infrastructure is removed. Then it’s 2004, and Cameron Doomadgee falls victim to Senior Constable Christopher Hurley. Rachael Maza delineates Hurley’s good cop, bad cop virtues and failings and six versions of Doomadgee’s ‘fall’ are mechanically, and chillingly, re-enacted across crime scene floor markings and architectural projections. This sequence and the ensuing court room encounters provide some of the strongest scenes in Beautiful One Day.
Subsequently the production loses focus and momentum, ambling to a conclusion that nonetheless brings home the painful contradictions the inhabitants of Palm Island must live out: the island is not their country, but it has been home for generations; they love it, but it is fundamentally oppressive. We see their faces, projected before us, hear their words, their frustration that a ‘vision plan’ for the island remains unrealised and that, worse, the Act that has governed their lives for so long is implicitly still there. The mix of despair and optimism, however, does not read like contradiction, rather as well-worn stoicism.
Version 1.0 and Ilbijerri have taken on a big subject (a consistent mark of both companies), as theatre must, engaged with it directly and inventively with strong performances on designer Ruby Langton-Batty’s mobile, grassy floating floor before a screen aptly evocative of museum dioramas. One surprising misstep came in the form of the reproduction of the exchange between the embattled police on the ground in Palm Island during the riot and those off-shore coming in with reinforcements. Two performers sit before music stands and deliver the lines deadpan from the verbatim script. The effect is unfortunately comic, but if you’ve seen the news, the book, the film, the installation you’ll know that the police, however you may regard their role in events, were profoundly afraid. The production sidesteps this and the intensity of the riot with ironic cool. Beautiful One Day has been fulsomely praised by reviewers, and some of that praise is warranted, but it is a work that is neither as focused, integrated nor as taut as anticipated.
Carriageworks & Stalker Theatre, Encoded, conception, direction David Clarkson, performers Lee-Anne Litton, Miranda Ween, Rick Everett, Timothy Ohl, digital artist interactive systems, Andrew Johnston, virtual costumes Alejandro Rolandi, architectural mapping design Sam Clarkson, choreographer Paul Selwyn Norton, composer Peter Kennard, multimedia dramaturg and consultant Kate Richard, lighting Mike Smith, costumes Annemaree Dalziel, Carriageworks, Sydney, Nov 28-Dec 1; Belvoir, version 1.0 & Ilbijerri Theatre Company, Beautiful One Day, devisors: AV designer Sean Bacon, performer, cultural, consultant Magdalena Blackley, performers Kylie Doomadgee, Paul Dwyer, Rachael Maza, Jane Phegan, Harry Reuben; other devisors Eamon Flack, David Williams; set & costume designer Ruby Langton-Batty, lighting Frank Mainoo, composer, sound design Paul Prestipino; Belvoir Upstairs, Nov 21-Dec 23, 2012
Julie-Anne Long and Martin del Amo, Benched, Micro Parks 2013, presented by Performance Space in Association with Sydney Festival 2013
photo Lucy Parakhina
Julie-Anne Long and Martin del Amo, Benched, Micro Parks 2013, presented by Performance Space in Association with Sydney Festival 2013
BEGINNING AT CARRIAGEWORKS, WE PICKED UP A MAP AND STARTED THE SELF-GUIDED TREK THROUGH NEWTOWN AND ERSKINEVILLE TO MINIATURE PARKS IN BLANK LOTS AND TRIANGULAR CORNER BLOCKS FOR MICRO PARKS, A COLLECTION OF FOUR FREE PERFORMANCE WORKS PRESENTED BY PERFORMANCE SPACE AND SYDNEY FESTIVAL.
Benched, Julie-Anne Long and Martin Del Amo’s dance piece, was performed in a wee plot wedged between two houses. The space was charmingly long and skinny with one graffitied wall, one lone central tree, one sunny park bench beyond the reach of the tree’s shade, a partially vine-covered chicken wire back fence and a whole lot of grass. A backdrop of trains pulling into Erskineville Station complemented the dancers’ slow motion entrance and framed the entire performance as serene and other-worldly. Serenity, à la The Castle, played into the performers’ Italian-holiday themed exploration of sitting postures lifted from courtroom drama, sporting matches and talk shows. ‘Marty’ and ‘Julie’ each assumed a sequence of seated stances as solos—individuals cohabiting the bench. Then the two swapped performances, lending new perspectives on the ways certain shapes are gendered and enculturated, changing the stories of these two solitary characters amid an imaginary, crowded grandstand. Props, including a fluoro orange esky filled with colourful drinks melded the performance with the park setting.
Perched on little stools, the audience grew. Kids scrambled in front of us to laze on the grass. Dogs too. Most of us were sitting in full sun on a 35 degree day, so we had great sympathy for the dancers who were glaring back at the sun in a “you won’t break us” stand-off. Long and Del Amo won and the sky opened up late afternoon Sunday, closing the third day of performances two hours early.
Those attendees who would complain about the elements complained about the elements. “First it was too hot, and then it rained.” Unless audiences adopt a Zen-like mindset and accept that impending rain and possible cancellation are part of the art—the fragility that makes an event like this special—disappointment is inevitable. The organisers had tried to provide shade and refreshments, knowing that walking between mini parks would tire some visitors. At Benched an array of fruit, Italian soft drinks and amaretto cookies were silver-plattered around after the half-hour performance.
I am an Island, Jess Olivieri with the Parachutes for Ladies, Micro Parks 2013, presented by Performance Space in Association with Sydney Festival 2013
photo Lucy Parakhina
I am an Island, Jess Olivieri with the Parachutes for Ladies, Micro Parks 2013, presented by Performance Space in Association with Sydney Festival 2013
At I am an Island, a short opera by Jess Olivieri and her performance group Parachutes for Ladies, whole coconuts were drilled and cleaved for those willing to sit through 20 minutes of high F# soprano musings on loneliness in an urban environment. I’m not sure this opera was about the music, as no composer was mentioned in the literature. The singers, unemotionally intoning about sexy Swedish tourists and the contents of travel brochures, made me want to leave these characters to their static suffering. But baffled, along with a small crowd, I stayed to delight in the responses of unsuspecting passers-by. Train commuters’ and drivers’ heads turned, often in panic that someone was being hurt, and then their faces softened to general befuddlement at the sight of people congregating in an underused public park.
Wabi-Sabi Afternoon Tea, Sarah Goffman, Micro Parks 2013, presented by Performance Space in Association with Sydney Festival 2013
photo Lucy Parakhina
Wabi-Sabi Afternoon Tea, Sarah Goffman, Micro Parks 2013, presented by Performance Space in Association with Sydney Festival 2013
Black billy tea and Iced VoVos topped with whipped cream from a spray can were the special treat at Sarah Goffman’s Wabi-Sabi Afternoon Tea. The Japanese aesthetic concept of wabi-sabi celebrates beauty in impermanence and imperfection. It nurtures that which is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished and nothing is perfect. Plonked down on a makeshift milk-crate pouffe, a sort of Aussie farmer’s wife dressed in a kimono made of Australiana tea-towels, conversed with afternoon tea guests. After waiting for a good 35 minutes in the rain for my turn, I took off my shoes and ascended to the mini tatami podium for an intimate chat with the tea master. The jolly matron explained that her tea-house-pagoda was specially made for Micro Parks and that it would be torn down again after the three days of performance because we couldn’t have local kids hurting themselves by climbing something with corners.
Some Extra Luck, Kate Mitchell, Micro Parks 2013, presented by Performance Space in Association with Sydney Festival 2013
photo Lucy Parakhina
Some Extra Luck, Kate Mitchell, Micro Parks 2013, presented by Performance Space in Association with Sydney Festival 2013
The fourth contribution to Micro Parks— relocated from its spot on the event map and missed by many—was a sort of treasure hunt conceived by artist Kate Mitchell. The lucky audience became performers as they leafed through grass to find a special breed of planted four-leaf clovers.
With any luck, we’ll see more of these sorts of events in Sydney’s Inner West where the public are reclaiming public space. Reclaim the Lanes carried the torch into February. Where to next?
Performance Space and Sydney Festival, Micro Parks: Kate Mitchell, Sarah Goffman, Jess Olivieri with the Parachutes for Ladies, Julie-Anne Long and Martin Del Amo, various locations in Newtown and Erskineville, Sydney, Jan 11-13
IN HER ESSENTIAL STUDY OF THE SEXUAL POLITICS OF HOLLYWOOD HORROR, MEN, WOMEN AND CHAINSAWS (1992), THEORIST CAROL J CLOVER ARGUES THAT THE ‘EVIL CHILD’ SUBGENRE—THINK THE EXORCIST, THE OMEN, ROSEMARY’S BABY—IS DRIVEN BY A KIND OF DIALECTIC OF GENDER.
On one side we have the monstrous feminine, hysterical and uncontainable, and on the other a masculinity whose coldness and rigidity is just as problematic. Resolution can only occur when some synthesis of the two is achieved—the patriarch who learns to ‘open up’ and find in himself two sexes symbolically merged into one.
It’s a complex thesis that clearly lends itself to Little Mercy by Melbourne’s Sisters Grimm, soon to open at Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf 2. The horror-comedy queers the evil child narrative in all directions—here the diabolical eight-year-old is played by a woman in her 70s, her terrified mother by a man, and the genre’s own tropes are stretched to breaking point.
But Clover overlooks an important pleasure that distinguishes the figure of the evil child in horror cinema: “it’s one of those rare occasions where the audience actually wants the bad thing to win,” says Ash Flanders, one half of the Sisters. “Isn’t it just like the id? Wouldn’t we all be killing people for their shoes if there wasn’t a law against it? In a perfect world where you could do what you wanted, I don’t know how happy that world would be. Maybe it would be really sick.”
“Children are pure id,” says his collaborator Declan Greene. “They really do represent this pre-socialised hunger. Watching evil child films is just watching a version of that which is untameable. There’s something perverse and wonderful about that.”
Little Mercy takes those sublimated desires and amplifies them—both horror and comedy are modes of excess, which allows the production to stay true to its generic referents while also seeing how far they can be pushed.
“One of the biggest tropes of the genre is that only the mother sees what’s going wrong and no one believes her,” says Flanders. “So this idea that this child is clearly an older woman but no one believes that there could ever be anything wrong with her, it’s that classic thing where you put a grenade in like this and it changes everything. At the same time you’ve got two men playing women. It’s clear that this is a world that’s not trying to make logical sense. It’s playing with form, exploiting these stories.”
The pair talk about the ‘cracks’ that such devices reveal in their own narrative, and how the company’s goal has long been one of finding such points of rupture within generic moulds. But the source of such a method is itself now a problem.
“A very important thing that has defined our practice has been poverty,” says Greene. “What we do is try to write narratives that we subject to pressure, and that pressure comes from the inadequate resources that we’ve managed to marshall to execute a much grander vision. The problem with trying to do a theatre show with a company like STC is that all of a sudden your resources are a lot better. You can’t just pretend you don’t have money when you’re at the STC.”
Sisters Grimm have long been Melbourne theatre’s own evil children. “We had our early shows where we’d make ourselves vomit on stage or perform sex acts, and you have to do it when you’re a bit younger,” says Greene, “when you have to ‘find your voice’ by spewing on each other.” But, says Flanders, “Doing a show in a car park with a bunch of cool theatre friends also feels safe in a way, too. It has a touch of preaching to the choir.”
In addition to Little Mercy at STC, a new Sisters work will premiere at the Melbourne Theatre Company this year. But the pair aren’t interested in playing the outrageous kids trying to shock the big theatre crowds with their edgy material. “It’s important that we’re breaking our own rules, not theirs, says Greene, “that we’re creating a world with very clear and distinct rules and then upending those.”
“It is about breaking your own rules, rather than trying to get some rise out of the audience,” says Flanders. “That almost feels falser to me. That feels too controlled. I’d rather set up a world and have that crumble in front of you.”
Sydney Theatre Company, Little Mercy by Sisters Grimm, creators Ash Flanders, Declan Greene, Wharf 2, March 7-24, www.sydneytheatre.com.au
WHEN STRIPPED BACK TO RAW RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN SIGHT AND SOUND, GOOD EXAMPLES OF AUDIO-VISUAL PERFORMANCES CAPTURE AN ALMOST PRIMAL BRUTALISM THAT DIRECTLY STIMULATES THE SENSES THROUGH CAUSAL RELATIONSHIPS.
For Robin Fox the synaesthetic connection between sight and sound is the primary focus of his musical practice, while Kynan Tan has been moving in a similar direction for some time now, with a more distinct, thematic focus that underpins the music/visual relationship. Utilising dual screen projections, Fractal Shale featured an impressive display from two contemporary Australian artists in top form, in the first concert of four celebrating Tura New Music’s 25 Years.
kynan tan
Tan spent much of 2012 expanding his audio-visual language, a process that started with the premiere of Consciousness, the first part in a proposed three-part work that explores ideas of perception, thought and networks. At Fractal Shale, Tan performed the newly created second part of this series. Shifting between familiar touchstones of glitch and noise, Multiplicity is largely constructed from a range of familiar components (the hum of sine waves, the pulses of raw data and a mixture of other sonic elements). The implementation, however, of these elements gives voice to unique compositional structures that alternate between the tightly regimented and expansively freewheeling. Tan manages to shape information and data streams into a thematically satisfying narrative of six works that revolve around human interaction, climaxing impressively with a map of interconnected data hubs from across the world. The high-pitched chatter of these exchanges is masterfully manipulated into a dense labyrinth of texture.
The relationship Tan draws between sight and sound always favours the obtuse, while never being entirely unpredictable. This results in a work that immediately and clearly communicates its ideas while playing with the audience and their perceptual expectations. Ultimately, it is Tan’s ability to play with tension and expectation that makes Multiplicity such an original and engaging work.
robin fox
Robin Fox, New Work for Synchronator
photo Brad Serls
Robin Fox, New Work for Synchronator
In New Work for Synchronators, Robin Fox manipulates the red, green and blue layers of video projection through multiple devices known as synchronators, fuelling a work propelled by the pure relationship forged from the conversion of sound energy to light energy. A continuous, half-hour work, the music was primarily derived from simple, raw synthesis that often pushed the boundaries of frequency perception, resulting in pulses of sound and colour. The work evolved slowly through juxtaposition of colour, shape and sound, with ephemeral structures being born from repetition before dissolving into a new state of falling sheets of colour or visuals akin to a broken TV with sound to match. The work was uncompromising yet playful, the exploration of pure synaesthetic relationships between sight and sound, nothing more nothing less, and fiercely unapologetic. On the dual screen setup, Fox’s New Work for Synchronators was a brutalist spectacle at its best, pure unrelenting interaction that slowly wore the audience down through the multitude of differences born of stream of consciousness-like changes.
TURA’s second anniversary concert was a celebration of everything great art should be, powerful and confronting, yet thought-provokingly cerebral at the same time.
clocked out duo
Clocked Out Duo’s premiere of their new work Time Crystals was a fitting end to a concert series that celebrated 25 years of activity from TURA New Music. In a week of performances and concerts that reminisced about TURA-related glories (Club Zho 101) and TURA’s ongoing support for promising young artists (Anniversary Concert #2, Fractal Shale), Clocked Out Duo’s performance belonged to the now. Drawing inspiration from Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek’s 2012 article on the proposed existence of time crystals—perpetually moving structures that repeat periodically in the fourth dimension—Time Crystals consists of 13 charmingly minimalist explorations of recurring patterns and crystalline structures.
The musical ground covered by the work is impressive. From the contemporary classical motifs of the opener, “Time Crystals,’ to the jazz-like “Quantum Harmonics” and the rock-and-roll feel of “X-Ray Diffraction,” each work manages to balance its more distinctive sonic elements with cohesive structures that develop the work in exciting and unpredictable directions. This variation ultimately helps Clocked Out Duo retain their unique sense of play and adventure, an approach that helps infuse even their most serious works with a certain approachability that many of their contemporaries lack. Motifs are passed between performers as pitches and rhythms are mimicked, approximated and juxtaposed. While changes to these motifs often shift sharply they never feel out of place or awkward, rather complementing the economical pacing of each movement.
The timbral choices of Erik Griswold’s prepared piano were well made, the product of the composer’s work with the instrument for several years. While some performers of prepared piano simply attempt to create original sounds without thought to the role such sounds play, Griswold’s choices resulted in an extended sound palette of unique textures that shaped the central motifs of each work, while remaining distinct from Vanessa Tomlinson’s sharply articulated and rhythmically accurate percussion.
The more overt treatments of the piano sometimes overshadowed Tomlinson’s subtle handlings of percussion instruments in unconventional ways. These ranged from small microtonal changes elicited from slight manipulations of the drum skin in “Interstitial Defect” to subtle changes in resonance derived from varied bowing positions in “Quantum Harmonics.” Ultimately, however, it was the sixth movement, “Crystal Symmetry,” that allowed Tomlinson to truly exploit these timbral ideas through a constant stream of strikes in varied locations upon different triangles, eliciting memories for me of the subtlety at play in Alvin Lucier’s The Silver Streetcar Of The Orchestra (1988).
The TURA 25th Anniversary concert series celebrated a significant milestone for the organisation while maintaining the high standard of musical programs TURA realises every year. Clocked Out Duo’s Time Crystals was a timeless integration of minimalist ideas with contemporary classical performance style, serving to remind us all that, despite any elitist preconceptions, music of a more esoteric nature can be engaging and fun.
TURA 25th Anniversary Concert 2, Fractal Shale, Robin Fox, Kynan Tan, Dec 1; Concert 4, Time Crystals, Clocked Out Duo, Dec 5, PICA, Perth
SYDNEY’S OPERA AFICIONADOS ARE DEPENDENT FOR THEIR LIVE PERFORMANCE PLEASURES ON OPERA AUSTRALIA WITH ITS MOSTLY MAINSTREAM FARE AND OCCASIONALLY ADVENTUROUS DIRECTORS AND, ONCE A YEAR, PINCHGUT OPERA FOR A NOTABLE BAROQUE WORK. NIGEL KELLAWAY’S THE OPERA PROJECT HAS BEEN QUIET FOR A COUPLE OF YEARS, ALTHOUGH A NEW WORK SEEMS LIKELY LATER THIS YEAR. NOT NEARLY ENOUGH OPERA WHEN YOU CAN NEVER HAVE ENOUGH.
However, in just a few years Sydney Chamber Opera has risen to deserved prominence with strong programming, quality musicianship, brave directors and very strong design. And opera fans have responded with great enthusiasm.
I met with artistic director Louis Garrick and music director Jack Symonds, articulate, passionate young men with a shared vision, though not without the humility that acknowledges the surprise they have felt at their success.
Garrick says that the pair knew that there was “a whole wealth of chamber repertoire that Sydney audiences simply weren’t seeing and had no connection with because not a lot of it was being performed.” If politicians declare Sydney a cultural capital, says Garrick, “then a capital should have a chamber opera company. It’s a basic requirement.” As for who was going to undertake such a venture, Symonds reveals that “it was pretty clear to us that nobody else was going to do it and we were naïve enough to think that we could.”
from wagner to chamber opera
In terms of motivation, Garrick admits, “It’s funny. I never had any interest in opera until I was at university. I play the piano and about halfway through my musicology degree, I started listening to Wagner as part of harmony training. That’s standard. And I got hooked. I remember feverishly learning Tristan and wanting to listen to it again and again because I found it such a rich score. Then, one by one, I went through all the Wagner operas. I’m inspired by Wagnerian processes and approaches to operatic form.”
I wonder if it’s the heightened sense of theatricality implicit in Wagner that attracted Garrick. “And the big idea of a through-composed opera where the drama is really music-led.” “On whatever scale,” adds Symonds, “so it doesn’t have to be Wagnerian.” Garrick points out that he didn’t “come from an opera background of arias and duets from the bel canto universe. I really came to it from a musicology form or structure point of view. After Wagner it was Berg and you go from there—Britten and all the major composers of the 20th century, all the fascinating operas. If you get into Britten, you get into chamber opera.”
Garrick’s familiarity with opera grew “when I took a uni job, operating the surtitles for Opera Australia—the bottom job in the whole opera pecking order—and seeing the standard rep over and over again, including the Mozarts, which I love, I think, it made me feel like I was dipping my toe in the opera world as well as learning the really serious repertoire.”
Symonds came to opera as a composer, “from the opposite end that most people do, from more modern pieces and went backwards. The first opera composers I ever got into were ones that I felt connected to in a general compositional way— Berg, Janacek and Britten. Almost every 20th century stream of opera, chamber or otherwise, can be traced to one of those three. And then, go backwards one step and there’s Wagner and that was, for me, a most extraordinary discovery. Like Louis, I don’t have a large interest in early Italian repertoire (Mozart’s Italian operas excepted) and baroque opera is not really my taste. Other than Wagner, I think the later Verdi and Mussorgsky are my picks.”
opera optimism
“What gives me so much hope is that since the 80s we’ve seen an absolute explosion of opera activity…Today we have, almost every year, a new opera that could really be destined for quite an extraordinary and lasting place in the repertoire. Last year we premiered such a piece, Written on Skin by George Benjamin. Harrison Birtwhistle’s The Minotaur is having its revival this year to packed houses in Covent Garden. In 2004 we had The Tempest by Thomas Ades, which is being done all over the world. Just one year before that we had Dr Atomic by John Adams. These are all very large-scale operas but they are sort of flagships for these composers. Benjamin and Ades have composed wonderful chamber operas…not abiding by the old adage that audiences will only respond to a conventional story told conventionally. With the right combination of ingredients and finding especially the right director for contemporary opera you can stage almost anything. And Sydney Chamber Opera sometimes does that. (LAUGHS)
vision and programming
We talked about the company’s vision, which is realised in direction and design with a strong contemporary feel. The pair point out that they didn’t start out with a manifesto. As students at university, they staged Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, which went well. Garrick recalls, “Getting the next production out onstage was a real challenge, but we did it: Notes from Underground by Jack based on the Dostoevsky novella. Next we did a chamber version of Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen, then a double bill, I Have Had Enough, a new piece by Jack and a Bach cantata. That was in our first year going from project to project.” For 2012 they presented three works: In The Penal Colony by Philip Glass (RT109), Peter Maxwell Davies’ The Lighthouse (see review) and a performance for the Biennale of Sydney. “The vision for the company and what we want to do with programming, it really percolated in that year. Now we go into the third year with a pretty tight focus on what programming direction we want to take.”
In 2013 Sydney Chamber Opera will present three works: Symonds’ Climbing Towards Midnight, a new Australian work that re-imagines Act 2 of Parsifal (during the Wagner Bicentenary) and directed by Netta Yaschin, designer Charlotte Lane; the Australian stage premiere of Britten’s Owen Wingrave, directed by Imara Savage, designer Katrin Wood; and a staged version of Kancheli’s song cycle Exil, to be directed by Adena Jacobs who directed Persona in Melbourne in 2012 (it is in the 2013 Belvoir season; see RT112), designer Eugyeene Teh. On the selection of works, Garrick says, “It’s important to us to have a balance in programming between new, recent and established work. Just doing new work all the time, that’s not us.”
climbing towards midnight
I ask Symonds about his Climbing Towards Midnight, at once a standalone work and a response to Wagner’s Parsifal. He believes “the difficulty for a lot of people with Parsifal is not the music but the content, the implications that can be drawn from it, especially in its attitude to religion and race and women. That’s a shame because lots of the ideas in it are fascinating and barely talked about. The central part of Act 2 is never discussed, except for the famous aside, when Parsifal cries “Amfortus Die Wunde!” (Amfortus, the Wound!).
People have the impression of Parsifal as big, ritualistic Holy Communion ceremonies that occur in the outer acts. How could you tip the balance and find a new Parsifal as it were with just this fragment of the opera? The idea I had was to shear it of everything but that text, using Wagner’s own text in English translation and withdrawing any overt references to Christianity as well. This was really enticing compositionally because what it left was an abortive relationship between two people desperate to transform each other but not knowing how. From that basis I built an entirely new composition on those ashes as it were. So, in a sense, all of the music is Parsifal, but none of it is. At the top of all my sketches, for instance, the Parsifal music is there but you never actually get it. It becomes so transformed by something else that it’s almost unrecognisable sometimes. If you know the Parsifal music, you’ll hear it but it’s not at all a pre-requisite to know it or the story in order to enjoy the work. It’s not a parasite on Parsifal.”
The opera is scored for two singers—soprano and baritone—and four instruments—viola, cello, bass clarinet and piano which Symonds describes as “a very dark ensemble but it’s fascinating that when these dark instruments strain to play very high, it’s an extraordinary sounding thing…very beautiful and expressive.” He says his construction is not in the Wagnerian manner but “is mostly informed by the expressionist miniature form as practised by Schoenberg, Webern and my favourite living composer George Kurtag.”
owen wingrave
Later in the year the company will present Britten’s Owen Wingrave, a dark tale of ghosts and pacifism, originally made for television. Garrick and Symonds think it’s a good challenge to stage, and ripe for reassessment—“it’s quite tough and unlyrical and it’s complex.” Symonds adds, “but is extremely rewarding and has some of Britten’s most original thinking and, in my opinion, most beautiful writing, especially for the winds and brass and percussion.”
exil
I ask Symonds what drew him to Georgian composer Giya Kancheli’s Exil. “For me this is his greatest piece, the piece where all the concerns from the first few decades of his career come together in a single, very focused work. It has an enormous amount of latent narrative in it. A third of the piece is biblical psalm, The Lord is my Shepherd, and the rest of it is quite extraordinary post-Holocaust poetry, mostly by Paul Celan. That juxtaposition is so powerful and so dramatic in the way it’s set and in the way that he asks and answers questions, it seemed to me a natural thing to draw that out for an audience, to represent it in some way. Its fate is often be to be performed as the last piece in a concert of new music in a concert hall, very un-atmospherically. To me it cried out to be experienced [as opera] and I think, for its Australian premiere, it deserves no less.
The contemporary music scene in Sydney boasts strong creative partnerships: Ensemble Offspring’s Damien Rickerston and Claire Edwardes, Chronology Arts’ Alex Pozniak and Andrew Batt-Rawden, New Music Network’s James Nightingale and Philippa Horn, and Halcyon’s Alison Morgan and Jenny Duck-Chong. Another duo, Louis Garrick and Jack Symonds, is enriching Sydney’s contemporary music world, rewarding the city’s adventurous theatre and opera-goers with an expansive vision of music theatre.
John Watts, Lina Andonovska, Everything Always: The Noise Works of Peter Ablinger rehearsal
photo Andrew Dixon
John Watts, Lina Andonovska, Everything Always: The Noise Works of Peter Ablinger rehearsal
RAUSCHEN IS THE AEROPLANE LANDING OVER MY ROOF AS I LEAVE HOME TO CATCH THE TRAIN TO THE CONCERT. RAUSCHEN IS THE TRAIN IN THE TUNNEL: SPEEDING METAL REARRANGING MATTER—STAGNANT AIR INTO A WAIL SQUEEZED BETWEEN WALL AND WINDOW.
Rauschen is the between space on your radio dial, the audio snow of complete information separating tinny broadcasts of opinion, news, entertainment, talkback music. Ironic then that this concert of the Noise Works of Peter Ablinger, Austin Buckett and Cat Hope took place in a studio of the ABC in Sydney before 50 or so audience members, though primarily for national broadcast.
Although proclaiming the rather ambitious title Everything Always, the program of 10 short compositions can be dissected into three different approaches to the use of Rauschen: simulation, submergence and composition.
simulating rauschen with acoustic instruments
There was a clutch of three Ablinger pieces and one by Buckett that had as their creative impetus the attempt at simulating Rauschen using acoustic instruments. Ablinger’s Weiss/Weisslich 20 (1992/95), performed twice on the night, consisted of a single cymbal roll for two minutes. John Wilton, using a different cymbal for each iteration of the piece, executed the work with a complete non-performativity that suited it perfectly. Once the roll began, there existed an air of inevitability around the piece. It was as if the music had always been sounding and would continue to sound always, partials ringing and colliding wildly with each other above the dull pulse of mallets on metal. The two necessary gestures, to begin and to end, then became amplified—the most exciting moments of this piece occurred when it suddenly came into existence, and when equally suddenly it ceased to be.
Lina Andonovska performed Ablinger’s Piccolo und Rauschen (1995/96) for piccolo and CD and Buckett’s Dead Machines (2012) for amplified flute head-joints and four speakers. The works are quite similar: Ablinger’s high-pitched piccolo tones are synchronised with loud pre-recorded noise, Buckett’s combines pre-recorded noise with breath blown across flute head-joints. In Piccolo und Rauschen, Andonovska’s strident performance was affecting despite some slightly off-putting swaying between tones as if some irresistible Romantic melody was playing in her head. In Dead Machines the Conservatoire reared its ugly head, sounding in the central solo section to this listener as if the score directed Andonovska to improvise her own contribution to the pre-recorded Rauschen. The result was virtuosic chromatic runs: the Conservatoire’s version of everything, always.
submerging genre in rauschen
In both Parker Notch (2010) for solo instrument (electric guitar) and noise (Ablinger) and Improvisors and Noise (2011) for piano, drumkit, no-input mixer and four speakers (Buckett), the composers attempted to submerge otherwise independent instrumental music in a field of Rauschen. In these pieces the instrumental parts behaved as gaudy neon signs—arrows and cartoon fingers pointing the listener outside the torrential downpour of noise and back towards the genre itself: jazz in the Ablinger and electro-acoustic improvisation in the Buckett.
This effect was, I imagine, the opposite to what the composers intended. For Parker Notch the problem was simply one of balance between the volume of the guitar and the noise. Improvisors and Noise sounded, however, derivative of Ablinger whose conceptual elegance in the submergence of genre in Rauschen was lost in the clamour of instrumental parts competing to be heard amongst themselves beneath Rauschen in Buckett’s composition.
composing with rauschen
In both Cat Hope compositions, the composer used Rauschen as compositional material. Black Eels (2012) for two LPs, two flutes, piano, electric guitar and percussion was a somewhat precious collage of New Music gestures, noise and e-bowed guitar which stripped Rauschen of all its overwhelming physicality, using it instead as decoration.
The more successful of Hope’s pieces was Kingdom Come (2009) for electronics duo, a loud amorphous soundfield, both parts being performed by Jon Watts. This was an example of Rauschen being pushed around in an attempt to compose interest. It sounded to me like Hope had provided Watts with a framework to improvise within, using only Noise as his material.
Being familiar with Watts’ usually calmly executed work, I was surprised at the hurried impatience with which he moved his material around the space. The performance left me unsatisfied, as if Watts had given me only a perfunctory tour through Hope’s soundfield.
ABC Classic FM, Everything Always: The Noise Works of Peter Ablinger, Austin Buckett & Cat Hope, curator Austin Buckett, performers Lina Andonovska, Cat Hope, flutes Elia Bosshard, electronics Jon Watts, percussion John Wilton; guitar Carl Morgan, piano Austin Buckett; ABC Sydney, Dec 15
Cameron Robbins, Cloudscape, opening night performance by Graeme Leak, Tim Humphrey, Cameron Robbins Gauge
photo Pia Johnson
Cameron Robbins, Cloudscape, opening night performance by Graeme Leak, Tim Humphrey, Cameron Robbins Gauge
AN EXHIBITION SPACE WITH LESS LIGHT I CAN’T RECALL. IT PRODUCED A STRIKING, ‘DECELERATING’ BEGINNING TO THE EXPERIENCE OF GAUGE AT THE ARTS HOUSE MEAT MARKET VENUE.
I spent several minutes standing still as my eyes adjusted to the dark, relishing the blackness and letting the burnished glow of the works, distant across the far side of the long hall, slowly come into focus. I noticed a quiet ticking—drips, I’d discover, from The Dripolator. Such was my entry to this show, standing in the dark, thinking about time.
Gauge, presented in the Wunderkammer tradition, was an extensive program of works, events and performances, a few of which I can mention here.
Graeme Leak’s sound/light sculpture The Dripolator was a striking feature of the show. The self-performing instrument is topped by a light that melts a chunk of ice which drips into a miked-up resonant reservoir. The sound is diffused through the space via surround sound, with the voices of audience members musing about the work subtly captured and mixed into the underlying soundscape, sometimes to the amusement of attentive listeners.
Rosemary Joy created the most thematically didactic work, also the most effective in provoking thought about water economics. Two boxes stand side-by-side, one the size of a matchbox, the other a microwave oven. Understated labelling reveals that these are scaled representations of the water reserves for London and Melbourne. The text includes information about relative population size and the projected period that reserves might need to serve in case of drought: six weeks and up to five years respectively. In front of the boxes is a music stand with a score. On the opening night a lively performance in the contemporary classical idiom was given, using the boxes as percussion instruments.
The exhibition’s creators, Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey, created the show’s centrepiece, an installation titled Waterpiano, featuring a decrepit and lidless miniature grand piano. Drips from the ceiling high above catch the light as they fall onto the piano’s exposed strings. The catalogue explains that a weather station installed on the roof and connected to a rainwater tank, pump and computer, causes the piano to ‘perform the weather.’ The work was inspired by Dr Michael Roderick’s work on global water cycles and discussions with Computer Scientist Dr Adrian Pearce about systems and reasoning in artificial intelligence.
In a departure from the predominantly antique aesthetic, Cameron Robbins created Cloudscape: a 2,700L vinyl pool, a fan and an ultrasonic humidifier (appearing as a tall exhaust hood suspended above the pool). Wisps of smoke play around the space between the pool and hood creating a beguiling fog and making this work a clear favourite with younger audience members. A performance around the pool by Leak, Humphrey and Robbins (with Flynn playing shadowy puppet master on ‘vortex control’) culminates in a misty tornado as the rapidly circling musicians create a spinning column of air. The slow start, with the players seeming to call to the spirit in the water before building a whirling crescendo, evoked the sense of a mystical spell, quite in keeping with the Meat Market’s 19th century aesthetic.
Gauge, installation
photo Pia Johnson
Gauge, installation
Stepping away from the works and out into the blackness of the cavernous hall, a particularly interesting dimension of the exhibition gained presence. Flynn and Humphrey, with deft input from sound designer Michael Hewes, had created a subtle soundscape, more an underlying ambience than a soundtrack. Ghostly echoes of sounds from the works and from the audience remained enigmatic. Those who recognised the sound-on-sound tape loop system sitting to one side might have appreciated it as the modest star of Gauge—allowing successive layers of sound to accrue and old sounds to slowly subside into a bottomless chasm of time. Standing on the periphery, one could watch the audience circulate and interact, plucking the strings of the piano, sloshing around in Joy’s mud-bath hand basin or discussing the operation of The Dripolator. The ambiguity and openness of the works to interaction was encouraging. As many of the exhibitors are also musicians, they understand better than many that interactive art finds an excellent model in the performativity of musical instruments.
The project has several premises, including the artist-scientist interaction and the exploration of the water cycle. The interaction with the scientists remained somewhat opaque, and perhaps there was room for further illumination about this intriguing topic. The theme of the water cycle was handled with a gentle touch, with the artists incorporating empirical material into poetic expressions. The delightfully realised theatre of wonder, the Wunderkammer, inspired audience curiosity, play and wonder about water and its systems, creating a space where materials, aesthetics and experiment were in close proximity.
A possible criticism is that the Wunderkammer aesthetic signifies the world of the pre-digital museum. The works are lovely—indeed, hand-labelled timber display cabinets are a welcome respite from touch-screens and voice-overs. But it is difficult to place them in the present, when the politics of this type of display have been so heavily worked over and reframed. Gauge feels naïve in its staging. Melbourne art-science outfit Scale Free Network also presented a Wunderkammer at Counihan Gallery in 2012 offering more hands-on experience for the audience, perhaps giving them greater agency.
However, standing in the dark, hearing ‘the drip of time,’ seeing the water slowly, ‘destroy’ the Waterpiano and the ice melt in The Dripolator, thoughts turn to the sublime in the face of the ephemerality of humans in contrast with water, which as the Gauge catalogue reminds us, is a constant quantity and which will doubtless outlast us.
Arts House: Gauge, creators, directors Madeleine Flynn, Tim Humphrey, with Graeme Leak, Rosemary Joy, Cameron Robbins, Dr Michael Roderick, Dr Adrian Pearce, lighting design Jen Hector, sound design Michael Hewes, Arts House, Meat Market, Nov 15-21, 2012
THE BLANK PAGE HAS LOOMED LARGE IN THE WESTERN IMAGINATION SINCE THE ARRIVAL OF THE GUTENBERG PRESS, A SYMBOL BOTH OF LIMITLESS POTENTIAL AND THE VAGARIES OF THE CREATIVE MIND: A NOVEL OR ESSAY ABOUT TO BE BEGUN, THE CRUSHING EMPTINESS ENGENDERED BY A BAD CASE OF WRITER’S BLOCK. THE BLANK PAGE MAY ALSO CONTAIN A SECRET HISTORY, LIKE THE PALIMPSESTS OF THE ANCIENT GREEKS AND ROMANS, WORDS AND IDEAS OF OTHER TIMES AND OTHER MINDS HAVING BEEN SCRATCHED OR SCRUBBED OFF TO MAKE WAY FOR THE NEW.
The 2013 WOMADelaide festival will feature French company Compagnie Luc Amoros’ multidisciplinary performance Blank Page (Page Blanche). Nine revolving Perspex screens housed within a 10×10 metre scaffold provide the performance’s tabula rasa upon which six actors create an ever-changing series of words and pictures. Up to 300 kilograms of paint are used in one hour as the kaleidoscopic procession of images and disembodied phrases evokes the work of Gauguin, Van Gogh and Warhol, the Altamira cave paintings, graffiti and propaganda art. No sooner has one image emerged than another has been wiped away with kerosene, the panel then painted black in preparation for a new pictogram or a statement, perhaps one like this: “The world only exists if it is painted and sung.”
The performers not only paint, but interact through song, chant and dance with a part live and part pre-recorded soundtrack which features electric and double bass played onstage. There are traces, in Richard Harmelle’s soundscape, of Arabic chants, African rhythms and the music of the Polynesian islands.
Company founder Luc Amoros says that the music in Blank Page is “more about a musical translation than a simple accompaniment.” It is all part, he explains, of an attempt to create what he calls “a living stage,” a street space—never a theatre—in which a sort of alchemical meeting of the written, visual and performed arts can take place before an audience who never quite know what to expect: “A street is less cramped than a room. There are other dimensions there. The gaze of the spectator is not necessarily the same. In the theatre, the spectator expects something; in the street, anything can happen.”
Amoros, unable to abandon the metaphor of the book despite Blank Page’s sinuousness of form, says that the show moves through five distinct though disparate “chapters”: “the aesthetic universes of the ancient Mayan and Aztec civilisations; the birth of the painting and, with it, the self-portrait; the everyday poetry that has developed among the people, such as Brazil’s Cordel street literature [inexpensive publications often in verse. Eds]; Hiroshima and the Holocaust; the painting of Paul Gauguin.” It seems just as likely—and Amoros does not reject this—that audiences will see gestures towards other stories in the work. It is difficult, for instance, not to be reminded of the transient words and images which once adorned the Berlin Wall, or that now appear as rejoinders to the injustices of partition and dispossession upon the bricks of the West Bank barrier.
I put it to Amoros that Blank Page is a performance that seems as much about loss as creation, about the Orwellian destruction of history and language. “It’s about people and languages,” he tells me, “languages that nobody speaks, that are lost forever. Those which are still alive can find refuge in writing, sheltered from oblivion.” Amoros recounts the (probably apocryphal) story of Humboldt’s parrots, the last living creatures capable of reproducing the language of the massacred Maypure tribe. “This performance speaks of nothing directly, not even Hiroshima,” Amoros says, “but we invite the spectators to reflect on the disappearance of languages.”
Luc Amoros is the author of all of the text which appears in Blank Page in a variety of languages throughout the performance. Audiences might be asked, “Sixty years after Hiroshima, how can we watch fireworks on Bastille Day?” One might just as easily enquire, “How can we go into German souvenir shops and buy pieces of the Wall?” I rephrase this for Amoros who seems reluctant to brand—if that is the word I want—Blank Page as anti-free market, a swingeing reproof of the capitalist logic which ‘ended history’ in 1989 and requires that everything, as long as it is at the right price, is for sale. Amoros says, “We make images on the stage to provoke and to preserve. We do not sell them, as is the case with most images we are faced with today. Compared to cinema, or the visual arts, our speciality is a direct, physical relationship with the public.”
WOMADelaide: Compagnie Luc Amoros, Blank Page, design, text, staging and images Luc Amoros, music Richard Harmelle, Botanic Park, Adelaide, Mar 8-11; www.womadelaide.com.au
ALTHOUGH THE WORLD CAN BE FRIGHTENING AND FRUSTRATING, DIFFICULT AND DANGEROUS, SOMEHOW PEOPLE QUIETLY FIND PERSONAL WAYS TO ENGAGE IT, ACTUALLY COOPERATE WITH AND MAKE THE BEST OF IT.
One achingly human example of someone trying to make the best of a difficult world has been made visible—as a vast, walk-through installation on the floor of Carriageworks in Sydney.
Chinese artist Song Dong’s Waste Not is big. But it’s not just the physical extent of the collection that conveys something vaguely melancholic as you walk around it. It’s really (much more than its profuseness) the staggering modesty of those 10,000 objects within it; worn out everyday domestic bits and pieces of a type that most Australians would send, not to St Vincent de Paul, not wholly to the yellow-topped recycle bin, but straight to landfill. Cheap, chipped, patched, scuffed, busted, battered, rusted; folded, sorted, stacked, boxed, bundled, bagged, tied, sacked…but above all, saved. It’s what decades of soul crushing ‘make do’ looks like when you spread it out on a floor—and in this thought there is some sadness.
waste not
Song Dong, Waste Not, Carriageworks (detail)
photos Graeme Smith
Song Dong, Waste Not, Carriageworks (detail)
The exhibition title derives from ‘wu jin qi yong,’ a life-guiding phrase that underscores the traditional Chinese virtue of frugality. According to Song Dong, the dictionary explanation reads, “anything that can somehow be of use, should be used as much as possible. Every resource should be used fully, and nothing should be wasted.”
Song Dong’s Waste Not has, at its conceptual starting point, the hardships of his family, in particular those of his mother, Zhao Xiangyuan, who, in struggling with the shortages and political insecurities of China’s Cultural Revolution, turned to extreme frugality (along with a whole generation of Chinese) to cope and survive. One of the texts in the exhibition written by Zhao Xiangyuan in 2005 recounts in heart-breaking detail the tedious steps she needed to take just to save on soap. She concludes, “I was afraid when my children grew up, they would have to worry about soap rations every month, as I had. I wanted to save the soap until the children got married, then pass these on to them. I never thought they would become useless, because now of course, everyone uses a washing machine. But I couldn’t bear to throw them all out, so I have kept them for a few decades now. Some of that soap is older than Song Dong.”
Song Dong writes, “In that period of insufficiency, this way of thinking and living was a kind of a ‘fabao,’ literally translated as a ‘magic weapon,’ but in times when goods were plenty, the habit of ‘waste not’ became a burden.” “…[M]y mother not only refused to throw away her own things, but wouldn’t allow us to throw anything away either.”
When Zhao Xiangyuan’s husband died in 2002 she had an emotional breakdown, and as her hoarding habit became even more extreme, Song Dong decided to pull her “out of her isolated and grief-stricken world and give her a breath of fresh air…”
Fresh air came in the form of a mother and son collaboration in which the mother became artist and the son, assistant—allowing her to have a “space to put her memories and history in order” by arranging her collection at the beginning of every exhibition. Since Zhao Xiangyuan’s death in 2009, Song Dong’s sister, Song Hui, and wife, Yin Xiuzhen, work with him to reconfigure each new installation.
rituals of engagement
Song Dong, Waste Not, Carriageworks (detail)
photos Graeme Smith
Song Dong, Waste Not, Carriageworks (detail)
A human way of trying to cooperate with a difficult world is evident in a commonplace medical disorder.
My understanding (personal, non-medical) of obsessive-compulsive disorder is that it works in a surprisingly real sense as a type of interior magic act. Example: “If I count the steps on this staircase and the number is divisible by three—all will be well, I’ll be safe, ‘it’ won’t happen, I can put my mind at rest and the anxiety on hold.”
The problem is in the repetition. No matter how many times you repeat the ritual—staircase-mathematics, hand-washing, lock-checking, newspaper-hoarding, silently reciting a special incantation, scratching your left ankle five times…whatever your particular routine—the relief from anxiety is fleeting and you never reach that safe place you desperately need to inhabit.
It’s both fascinating and sad to think that, not just an isolated individual, but a whole generation can also be compelled out of desperation to turn to this type of interior ritual, magic weapon, hoarding routine, whatever you prefer to call it—to engage with an uncooperative world.
An introductory panel at the exhibition suggests that Waste Not is both a meditative space for contemplation and self reflection, and a gesture to the richness of family life and memory,” and it did have me doing so: meditating on that richness found in all that patched up, battered and bundled stuff; and also on how Zhao Xiangyuan’s obsessive collecting could be transformed into a more liberating form of ritual—all those reconfigurations of her 10,000 common household objects on gallery floors.
Carriageworks with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in association with Sydney Festival: Song Dong, Waste Not, Carriageworks, Jan 5-March 17
IF PLURALISM IS NOW A DEFINING FEATURE OF APPROACHES TO GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN THE WORLD OF ART, PERFORMANCE AND THEORY, CAN THE SAME BE SAID OF THE BROADER CULTURE GENERALLY? IN RECENT YEARS, WE’VE WITNESSED AS A STRONG RETURN TO TRADITIONAL VALUES, PLACING MARRIAGE, FAMILY AND THE DOMESTIC IN THE ASCENDANCY, THAT THE PROVOCATIONS OF ART CAN AT TIMES FEEL AT CROSS PURPOSES WITH LIFE. YET IN SUCH A CLIMATE THESE PROVOCATIONS CAN ASSUME EVEN GREATER IMPORTANCE AS THE DESTABILISING POWER OF THE ARTWORK REINSTATES THE FLUID NATURE OF IDENTITY THAT NORMATIVE VALUES CAN DENY.
It was this desire to highlight the range and breadth of contemporary approaches to gender and sexuality, and their capacity to move viewers into more uncertain, interstitial territory, that defined the SEXES exhibition at Carriageworks late last year. The combined interests of Performance Space curators Bec Dean and Jeff Khan along with an effervescent guest curator, artist Deborah Kelly, produced a smorgasbord of works. In an exhibition of visual art by 17 artists complemented by a Live Art program of talks and performances, the works reflected varying takes on contemporary feminism(s), masculinity studies, queer theory and the challenging of gender constructions through tropes of cross-dressing and drag.
Drive Shaft (2012), Marley Dawson
photo Lucy Parakhina
Drive Shaft (2012), Marley Dawson
While a serious interdisciplinary survey of these themes has been long overdue in Sydney, there were some surprises in the shape and form SEXES took. Most striking for me was the decision to go beyond a photomedia approach, which allowed for a broader representation of mediums but also meant that the connection of some works to the theme wasn’t immediately obvious, challenging the viewer to think laterally. A number of installations, for example, explored themes of the body via the unconventional route of site-specific architectural interventions. Marley Dawson’s Drive Shaft (2012) re-activated the building’s defunct line shafts to power a small lathe that ground the sharp tip of a metal rod against a silver coin, obliquely incorporating allusions to capital and industry into a sexual metaphor. Perhaps most successful in this respect was Cigdem Aydemir’s Site Occupied 2 (2012), a Christo and Jeanne-Claude style wrapping of a corridor in black fabric that created an immense sculptural burqa. As visitors could literally walk through the burqa, the experience offered an uncanny and demystifying encounter with the bodily interior of the ‘other’ as movement through the corridor caused the fabric walls to sway gently, rendering the solid architecture fluid.
Site Occupied 2, Cignem Aydemir
photo Lucy Parakhina
Site Occupied 2, Cignem Aydemir
An arresting visual focal point in the foyer space was Trevor Fry’s subversive ceramics installation, Evil Flowers (2011-12), a scabrous array of fertility deities, ritual urns, vessels and phallic plant-like forms drizzled with paint and installed atop a crumbling temple platform. Informed by a queer aesthetic rather than commenting directly upon queer issues, this direct affront to the politeness of ceramics was seductive, visceral and transgressive in its profane elevation of dirt and filth. A low-fi video embedded beneath the platform’s rubble presented a parodic documentary of the artist’s studio process in which he took sensual delight in his work to a new level as he caressed and fornicated with his ceramic creations.
Other works emphasised the unstable nature of sexual identity as it plays out in performative art practices. This was a key theme in the festival’s keynote lectures, delivered by Professors Anne Marsh and Ed Scheer, and became a lively point of conversation when the audience debated an early Kingpins work in which the artists’ drag performance as male gangsta rappers at an academic conference alienated a group of American feminist theatre scholars (they walked out, apparently). Those present at the lectures were unable to agree whether the offence taken was about gender, race, class or culture. Similarly, this slippery and multidimensional approach to gender hacking was apparent in the Kingpins’ new video The World (2012). In an absurd, pastiched television advertisement for Dubai, the all-female collective cross-dressed as an array of composite ‘exotic’ characters satirising the stereotypes that permeate the tourism industry and the fantasies underpinning the creation of bloated consumer cities.
If the Kingpins video was provocative but not necessarily confronting, the latter was certainly true of Eric Bridgeman’s large-scale floor installation, All Stars (2012). In a cordoned-off section of the public foyer Bridgeman presented a team of free-standing illustrated portraits of naked gay male porn stars with erect penises spliced with the faces of Australian football stars, suggesting parallels between the two as examples of hyper-masculinity influenced by the fantasies of their audiences. Bridgeman sought to emphasise rather than downplay the sexuality of the figures as a rebuke to current efforts to “clean up” sex in sport and “to dispel the myth that sex has no place in sport.” In the final weeks of the exhibition, Bridgeman covered the heads of the players with red sacs which made clearer the anti-censorship message yet in making the men resemble torture victims, they also seemed to unleash an atmosphere of latent aggression in the space. Somewhat counter to Bridgeman’s intended critique of the curbing of sex in sport as a conservative development, it was also possible to detect in these figures the ease with which hyper-masculine expressions of sexuality can slip towards violence, which arguably bespeaks the need for standards that discourage a misogynistic culture.
Inside Bay 19, the more private exhibition space was sporadically activated by performances in the extensive Live Art program. It was during the last week of the festival that I caught a pair of performances that were particularly powerful in confronting taboos around the female body. In a reprisal of her humorously incendiary monologue My Cunt (1996), Maude Davey channeled a burlesque energy as she addressed the audience in towering stiletto heels and dazzling diamante jewels but otherwise nude. Her stirring tour-de-force delivery of cunt stories and anecdotes succeeded in reclaiming the term from its effaced position. In the dance work that followed, Monster Body (2012), emerging choreographer Atlanta Eke and fellow dancer Emma Kim Hagdahl stalked the space with movements that oscillated between graceful ballet steps and animalistic writhings, their voices filling the air with guttural groans. A daring juxtaposition of the cultural with the primordial, the work drew attention to both the disciplining of the body in dance and the mechanisms of self-control that underpin a woman’s identity.
It was fitting that these brave feminist interventions were performed amid works by artists that included two of the towering female presences in contemporary Australian art, Tracey Moffatt and Julie Rrap, who explored themes of the gaze and the body respectively. In Moffatt and Gary Hillberg’s Other (2009), charged moments of interracial encounter plucked from cinema history were edited together in a rapidly paced video montage highlighting the role that desire for the exotic plays in the construction of the western sexual imaginary. Nearby, in Julie Rrap’s Hair Rail (1992), attached to the wall were two slender plastic tubes encasing a dense weave of human hair that bore an uncanny resemblance to wooden ballet bars, embodying a delicate tension between repulsion and attraction. It was a tension similarly present in Rrap’s Stepping Out (2012), a pair of glamorous gold feet rendered achingly deformed thanks to the stiletto spikes jutting from the underside of each heel—a wry comment on the fine line between pleasure and pain in contemporary ideals of beauty.
While it’s not possible to cite here all the compelling and saucy works presented in SEXES, it is worth concluding with Paul Knight’s photographic slideshow Falling Sideways (2012), an unflinchingly explicit, diaristic record of the artist’s relationship with his partner, Peter. Set to a pulsating soundtrack, unaffected snapshots of their private sexual encounters are juxtaposed with images of the banal minutiae of their domestic life which mediate the pornographic aesthetic. The work was a powerful reminder that it is ultimately within daily life and encounters between people that sexual identities and gender relations are negotiated.
If I left SEXES feeling that any singular overarching statement had been diffused by the event’s pluralistic approach, it also seemed this diversity was its strength. The challenge is for these provocations to cross over. For it is within the realm of day-to-day life, where sexually conservative policies and attitudes are barely batting eyelids right now, that broader, more open and progressive approaches like these are most urgently needed.
SEXES by Performance Space, curators Bec Dean, Deborah Kelly, Jeff Khan,
Carriageworks, Oct 26–Dec1, 2012
Steven Shorts, Sea Pods (2012), PVC pipes hanging from the ancient rainforest canopy
These days if you’re looking for adventure there’s no need to restrict yourself to the world we live in; there are so many others to choose from. One that might have skipped your attention lies in the otherworldly landscape of the Blue Mountains of NSW.
April-May is the time to explore our very own Jurassic Park along the diverting pathways of Scenic World in the Jamison Valley where the pleasures of nature mingle with a variety of artists’ responses to the environment.
A group of notable judges has made a selection from the many responses to the event’s annual call-out for Sculpture at Scenic World. This year, Exhibition Manager Lizzie Marshall says the exhibition includes, “36 artworks that respond to and reflect the rainforest through various media including digital, sound and light, together with collaborative works.” The exhibition features artists from around Australia and also from the US and Ireland.
Says Marshall, “The artworks will be installed along the longest boardwalk in the Southern Hemisphere at 2.4km, through the Jamison Valley floor and directly below the Three Sisters. The exhibition will also include the inaugural Sculpture Otherwise, a collection of indoor works by the 2013 artists.”
There are guided and independent tours,
lectures and a comprehensive public program including family and children’s activities.
At the official opening on April 24 the winner of the $20,000 Scenic World Acquisitive Award will be announced. The exhibiting artists will also select a $5,000 Artist Peer Award. RT
Sculpture at Scenic World, April 24-May 19, www.scenicworld.com.au
NOTWITHSTANDING ITS RATHER CRYPTIC TITLE, SWEDISH FOR ARGUMENT WAS AN INCISIVE AND ENTERTAINING GROUP EXHIBITION THAT CATALYSED THE MODEST SPACE OF THE UTS GALLERY TO TACKLE A GIANT, THAT UBIQUITOUS SWEDISH HOME RETAIL BRAND THAT EVERYONE LOVES TO HATE: IKEA.
Bringing together an eclectic mix of specially commissioned and pre-existing artworks from eight local and international artists, the exhibition presented a stimulating array of responses to the many facets of the brand from its ‘democratic design’ philosophy and complex global material supply chain to its tightly engineered retail spaces and the uses and abuses of its products by consumers. All this provided rich fodder for works across video, mixed media installations, sculpture, graphic design, conceptual interventions and even a hands-on re-purposing design workshop.
Given that artists can be ambivalent at best toward purveyors of mass production, I anticipated the show might prove fairly derisive in tone. Gladly, curator Holly Williams steered clear of reductive negativity in her selection of works with many revealing a surprising level of subtlety and nuance in their responses. Exemplary in this respect was Jess Olivieri’s video, Like A Salmon (2012). With a covert camera jerry-rigged to a shopping trolley, the artist and collaborators filmed a journey through an IKEA store, deliberately navigating its aisles against the directed flow of pedestrian traffic. The slightly nauseous sensation produced by this counter-intuitive movement drew attention to the highly controlled nature of the IKEA retail space. Yet the addition of some whimsical movements and a soothing classical music soundtrack reminiscent of those accompanying in nature documentaries combined to create a strangely mesmerising and dreamlike subliminal landscape.
The temptation to intervene into the IKEA retail space proved attractive to a number of artists. Israeli artist Guy Ben-Ner’s video Stealing Beauty (2007) presented an extreme example—a subversive, Marxist-inflected family drama compiled from unauthorised filming of the artist’s own family inhabiting various IKEA showrooms. More subtle was Michele Pred’s You Are What You Buy (2009), which saw the artist secretly replace 10 generic poster prints at a local IKEA with her own original artworks. Shoppers unwittingly bought Pred’s prints unaware of their provenance and the fact that when their QR code design was scanned it led directly to an anti-consumer website.
Emma White Nice Try, DIY 2012, polymer clay, object modelled to scale
photo David Lawry, courtesy the artist and BREENSPACE, Sydney
Emma White Nice Try, DIY 2012, polymer clay, object modelled to scale
Installation-based approaches took more material aspects of the IKEA experience as starting points for their investigations. Emma White’s fastidious silver polymer clay model of the Allen key ironically elevated this icon of self-assembly to the status of semi-precious object by presenting it on a tall white plinth encased in clear Perspex. Gary Carsley papered an exquisite photographic monoprint of an Australian bush landscape onto an IKEA stool, chair and a two-door wardrobe, seamlessly collaging the chair into the wardrobe to create a striking trompe l’oeil effect. This melding of a familiar Australian scene with iconic Swedish pinewood furniture provoked reflection on the displacement of the local in global supply chains and raised questions over the status of the ‘natural’ and the ‘real.’
Lorenzo Bravi, IKEA PRESS Frosta 1
photo David Lawrey
Lorenzo Bravi, IKEA PRESS Frosta 1
The title of Carsley’s work, D.98b (UTS dub), also cited the gallery’s location which sits within the UTS Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building. This design lab setting also offered an ideal context for artist and graphic designer Lorenzo Bravi’s IKEA Press series (2011-12). Comprising letterpress prints stamped from dismantled IKEA product parts and rendered in bold primary colours, Bravi’s prints were a playful and experimental response to the generative possibilities of modular design.
The setting was also cleverly activated by the IKEA Recovery Workshop. Prior to the exhibition, curator Holly Williams trawled Sydney streets to retrieve a stockpile of dumped IKEA furniture—offering a disturbing insight into the disposable mindset their low prices have engendered. Expanding their life span just a little longer, RMIT lecturer Scott Mitchell led a “re-purposing” workshop with staff and students combining ideas to transform the dumped items into makeshift furnishings that ranged from surprisingly elegant to more zany and unconventional solutions.
It seemed the workshop participants had more success with their building project than artist Tony Schwensen did in TransScandinavia (2006). In a video documentation of a live performance in which Schwensen attempted assembly of an IKEA flatpack wardrobe without instructions, his futile efforts lampooned the masculine ideal of the handyman. At the other end of the spectrum, Dutch artist Helmut Smits successfully put his fire-making skills to practical use in an urban survival scenario in FLAMMA (A Basic Need) (2008). In this no-fuss instructive documentary, Smits lit a crackling fire using only IKEA products (and no matches), a subtle satire of the “back-to-basics” image of Swedish culture.
Overall, there were many charming details in Swedish for Argument. IKEA product tags stood in for wall plaques, IKEA couches and chairs were dispersed throughout the space and wall partitions recreated the store layout. Yet the incorporation into the gallery of the very products which the artists sought to grapple with in their works also encapsulated the contradictory mix of ambivalence and desire which the brand is so capable of arousing. This was a fittingly multivalent exhibition for a brand whose status as a textbook phenomenon of design globalisation belies the complexity of its organisation, impact and remarkably polarised reception.
Swedish for Argument, curated by Holly Williams, UTS Gallery, Sydney, 23 Oct – 34 Nov, 2012.
Applauded at film festivals and widely seen on television, this documentary on one of the most dedicated and enduring performance artists of the last 30 years, Marina Abramovic, The Artist is Present is an engrossing, sometimes perplexing and moving film. It documents the preparations for and the exhibiting of a retrospective and a new performance by Abramovic at New York’s MoMA in 2010. Virginia Baxter writes, “In 106 minutes Akers and Dupré expose for the viewer something of the emotional, physical and intellectual demands inherent in mounting an exhibition and performance that deal in the power of the present. In the process they also offer insight into the life’s work of a remarkable artist” (see article).
5 copies courtesy of Madman Entertainment
Creative Minds, Madman DVD, 2 discs
Creative Minds is a six-part Madman/SBS series of interviews with artists Bill Henson, Kate Grenville, Robyn Archer, Elena Kats-Chernin, Stephen Page and Geoffrey Rush. In-depth interviews with Australian artists are a rarity, and these have the benefit of excellent supporting footage, for example photographer Henson working on his moodily expressive night-time landscapes. Director Robin Hughes’ quietly phrased and sometimes probing questions yield insights into the creative mind. RT
10 copies courtesy of Madman Entertainment
Email us at giveaways@realtimearts.net with your name, postal address and phone number.
Include ‘Giveaway’ and the name of the item in the subject line.
“A powerful dance/theatre hybrid… Conversation Piece makes the mind work, the audience delighting in its play with their intelligence as it draws into consciousness their inherent knowledge of how talk works and they witness the palpable physicality that is ambiguously entwined with it.” RT111
melded minds & bodies
john bailey: antony hamilton & melanie lane, clouds over berlin
Antony Hamilton, Melanie Lane, Black Project 1
photo Ponch Hawkes
Antony Hamilton, Melanie Lane, Black Project 1
“Hamilton & Lane appear as gleaming black wraiths making their way across a post-urban wasteland. It’s a vision that gestures to the choreographer’s earlier interests—aerosol art, digital tech, breakdance—while stripping away any literal referents. The dance itself may be Hamilton’s most developed and sustained exploration of his own practice.” RT108
tweaking reality
philipa rothfield: this monster body and one show only
Monster Body, Atlanta Eke, Next Wave Festival 2012
photo Sam Ackroyd
Monster Body, Atlanta Eke, Next Wave Festival 2012
“Atlanta Eke was born decades after the advent of second wave feminism. She doesn’t need to make space to be heard. She can invent. This Monster Body is an attempt to create something and in so doing to destroy something else, to rattle the bars of the cage so as to break with convention.” RT110
“Intermission feels personal and purgatorial, although Day’s interests as expressed in interviews and his program notes indicate no such inclination towards self-exploration. Even so, the work is a dark pleasure, its grim beauty born of its curious suggestiveness and a relentless wave structure.” RT110
See also Keith Gallasch’s interview Matthew Day about preparations for Intermission in RT109
“The strength and power of Future Perfect is found at a distance, in the slow transformations of the group, in the ways in which, together, the group becomes bigger, more than human. That distance in turn enables perception to be freer, able to stray into the neighbourhood of the imaginary..” RT106
“In More or Less Concrete, the audience witnesses a kind of abstraction of the body and its movements. The slow, dreamy pace makes this as much a study in sculptural forms as dance. Through sensory-challenging sound and lighting, it is also a retelling of these snatches of memory through performance.” RT09
next wave day tripping
jane howard: 2012 next wave’s day passes inc natalie abbot, physical fractals
PHYSICAL FRACTALS, Natalie Abbott, Next Wave Festival 2012
photo Pia Johnson
PHYSICAL FRACTALS, Natalie Abbott, Next Wave Festival 2012
“The performance builds in a series of repetitions, torsos bent over and arms circling as feet scoot back across the floor, before the dancers return to stand on the rim of the circle. Patterns repeat, so when one of the dancers moves in a slightly different direction it is startling.” RT109 online
oh how they danced!
virginia baxter: oh I wanna dance with somebody inc ben speth’s wetubelive
WeTube Live, Ben Speth, Oh I Wanna Dance With Somebody
photos Heidrun Löhr
WeTube Live, Ben Speth, Oh I Wanna Dance With Somebody
“There was a great sense of community engagement as sensuous hula shimmied alongside boot scooting and hysterical dummy-spit met cute kitty. ” RT112
See also coverage of WeTubelive at Junction Arts festival in RT99
realtime dance archive
For more on artists featured in Dance Massive check out our Dance Archive which includes all articles about dance since 1994, categorised by choreographer, company, festivals and more.
FOR DANCE MASSIVE 2013, ARTS HOUSE, MALTHOUSE THEATRE AND DANCEHOUSE HAVE SELECTED 19 WORKS TO BE PERFORMED OVER TWO WEEKS IN MARCH IN THE ONLY FESTIVAL EXCLUSIVELY DEDICATED TO AUSTRALIAN DANCE.
The program, though kinaesthetically and thematically diverse, nevertheless reflects a number of common interests especially around notions of society, culture and the body. What kind of entity is the individual self? What is its relation to the social whole? How do selves coalesce?
The notion of repetition is another common Dance Massive theme, a mechanism which promises to be explored physically, linguistically, temporally and perceptually. Taken together, these works represent an intense manifestation, a critical mass, of dance culture in an Australian setting.
Why program so many dance works in such a short space of time? Dance Massive proposes an intensity, a shared focus between a roving, active population of spectators and performers not often achieved in Australia, at least, not in dance. According to Angela Conquet (Artistic Director, Dancehouse) a festival such as this can give an accurate, layered picture of the Australian dance landscape. This is not to say that everyone is represented here. Undoubtedly, some companies and artists are in between works. The very selection process, with finite resources and the exercise of choice, also rules out the participation of some. Landscapes are never all-inclusive. They have their own physiognomy, their own borders, topography and temporal flavour. So there is also a contingency to this festival. It is the expression of a critical mass, not an encyclopaedia. It is also an expression of place, of what can be generated in such a setting.
Dance Massive has a twin focus. On the one hand, it’s an opportunity for an audience to serially immerse itself in a multiplicity of works. On the other, it will enable a delegation of 20-odd international visitors to see full-length Australian works in their own cultural milieu. This differs from the narrower arts market concept which showcases and commodifies abridged pieces back-to-back for an international clientele. The exposure to a significant international audience means that Dance Massive offers an opportunity to show developed works which could tour both nationally and internationally. For this reason, Conquet says that this is not a forum for works-in-progress. According to Angharad Wynne-Jones (Creative Producer, Arts House), Dance Massive represents artists at quite different stages of their careers. Like the European platform, Dance Massive has the support of state cultural agencies—the Australia Council and Arts Victoria—but its artistic program is the child of the three venues, their artistic directors and selection committees. Angela Conquet is very appreciative of the dance literacy and involvement of Phillip Keir (Keir Foundation), one of the selectors and a key supporter of the Dancehouse program.
inside the program
Antony Hamilton, Melanie Lane, Black Project 1
photo Ponch Hawkes
Antony Hamilton, Melanie Lane, Black Project 1
A number of the programmed works embody social and political concerns. Ashley Dyer’s Life Support, for example, follows Something Fell on my Head, both of which give their audience the opportunity to directly experience their subject matter, whether through feelings of anxiety, finitude or vulnerability. Antony Hamilton (Black Project 1 & 2, see RT111 and RT108) and Tim Darbyshire (More or Less Concrete, see RT109), in their own ways, also mediate contemporary political and social issues. Atlanta Eke’s meditation on female mutability, Monster Body (RT110), is posed on a feminist present, while Jo Lloyd’s Future Perfect muses on constellations of identity in the cosmos of social life. Stephanie Lake’s Dual reflects the individual’s ability to cleave to the other thereby producing a new, synthetic entity. Whereas Lloyd poses the group in relation to the individual, Lake is interested in the notion of partnership, as embodied in duet form. In Black Project 1& 2, Antony Hamilton explores another kind of interplay within and without the human, between life and non-life, an unstable cosmos.
Dalisa Pigram, Gudirr Gudirr, Marrugeku
photo Rod Hartvigsen
Dalisa Pigram, Gudirr Gudirr, Marrugeku
The social and cultural sphere has several modes of incarnation. Dalisa Pigram’s solo work, Gudirr Gudirr, simultaneously spans the collective concerns of Northwestern Aboriginal people through the singularity and cultural breadth of her own body. Soo Yeun You’s Gu:t collaboratively enters aboriginal spirituality through the lens of her own shamanistic background, felt at the level of the kinaesthetic everyday. Not that every body isn’t in some sense a product of culture, time and motion.
While Russell Dumas’ fine work is indebted to the postmodern choreographic legacy of Twyla Tharp and Trisha Brown, his dance for the time being—Southern Exposure has a local inflexion. As a manifestation of what is possible in the space and time of Australian dancing, Dumas’ work is formulated over the abyss of the present. Dumas “reimagines the unstable body” in relation to the (im)possibility of a future dance practice. Nothing is fixed. Likewise, Ben Speth’s WeTubeLIVE (RT112) feeds on an unstable, undetermined network of possibility. Its mode of community is enactive, a mass playing out of virtual choreographies ripped from the internet and staged for live capture in the dappled kaleidoscope of the National Gallery’s Great Hall. While Speth, Dumas and Pigram are each in their own way oriented towards the future, Tracie Mitchell’s dance film retrospective shows film’s enduring ability to reach into the present.
Conversation Piece, Lucy Guerin Inc
photo Brett Boardman
Conversation Piece, Lucy Guerin Inc
If Larissa McGowan (Skeleton; see interview, p26) is concerned with the bare bones of the anatomical trace, The Recording continues Sandy Parker’s prior interest in the dynamic physiology of a work. Whereas the earlier Document (interview RT103; review RT105) was oriented towards the marks on the page or screen, The Recording aims to open up the process whereby live dancing becomes a series of cinematic images. Difference provokes transformation. This is also a factor in Lucy Guerin’s work, Conversation Piece (interview RT110; review RT111) which plays on the changes set in motion through repetition. Paradoxically, repetition does not engender serial sameness but is the means by which difference is produced. Words and movement played again institute an event, the becoming different of something recognisably the same. Matthew Day also plays with difference through repetition in Intermission (interview RT109; review RT110), a durational, rhythmic work that aims to create its own perceptual milieu. Intermission is the third in Day’s series of pieces, each concerned with the mutating force of repetition. Tim Darbyshire’s More or Less Concrete (RT109) is also interested in the effects of the cyclical as is Natalie Abbott in her work, Physical Fractals (see RT109 online). The singular is reflected in our conception of the unique individual who is simultaneously a participant of the social whole. In 247 Days, Chunky Move artistic director Anouk Van Dijk continues her interest in the social and the political with a work focused on the individual. While her An Act of Now (interview RT111; review RT112) was strongly site specific in its deployment of the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, 247 Days takes as its spatial premise Malthouse’s cavernous, black box Merlyn Theatre.
Personally, I find it difficult to tell what a piece will be like from reading about it. Such is the elusive potential of live performance that it cannot be fully represented in words. Words lean towards the event, they strive towards it, but they cannot fully embrace what is yet to come. Dance Massive offers a sustained opportunity for a series of live relations between the work and the audience, a portal of potential. That said, Conquet regards the durational aspect of dance as something that needs time in between viewings; to allow the sensorial dust to settle, or better still, to reverberate. Taking time on the part of the spectator allows for the “preservation of sensations” the better to amplify their impact. However you do it, you have 12 days to pace yourself or, as Wynne-Jones suggests, to “go for the ride.”
Thursday, Brink Productions & English Touring Theatre
image Slipperfish
Thursday, Brink Productions & English Touring Theatre
ON JULY 7, 2005, GILL HICKS, AN ADELAIDIAN LIVING IN LONDON, MADE A SERIES OF DECISIONS. SOME OF THESE WERE QUITE SMALL.
As the trains were late she decided to deviate from her normal routine and go to Kings Cross Station. When she got there, pushed to the back of crowd, she decided not to barge her way onto the first train but wait for the next. When that next train came she decided to get into the first carriage. Then, after a suicide bomber in the first carriage of the second train from Kings Cross detonated his device, Hicks made a very big decision: to survive.
Artistic director of Brink Productions, Chris Drummond, had seen an interview with Gill Hicks on Andrew Denton’s Enough Rope in 2007. She was the last survivor to be pulled from the carnage and lost both legs below the knee. Drummond had the beginnings of an idea for a new work, but he was holding off because he thought “It was too focussed on a place like London for a small Adelaide company to do with any authenticity.” Then, serendipitously, at the 2008 Performing Arts Market in Adelaide, he met Rachel Tackley the director of English Touring Theatre who was seeking an Australian company for a co-production. Drummond says, “There was just a real connection between Rachel and myself and between the producers, Kay Jamieson [Brink] and Jane Claire [ETT]. The four of us really had a shared sense of the theatre we wanted to make…We had this wonderful thing of an Adelaide company and a London company talking about an Adelaide woman in London.”
Thursday is a true co-production, split 50/50 between the two companies including cast and production creatives. The first development took place in London and the final rehearsals and premiere will be in Adelaide with the production programmed for the 2013 Adelaide Festival. The creative development in London brought together a devising team to explore possible theatrical imagery. Drummond says, “We are a text-based company but what we are trying to achieve is a highly theatrical work coming out of the text, so we usually start with a group of [devising] artists in the room. We didn’t know with this one whether we would follow the events that Gill had experienced or if we might go in a completely abstract direction.”
Bryony Lavery, known for her award winning plays Frozen and Stockholm, attended these devising sessions and then took 12 months to create the final script. Drummond is impressed by the way Lavery “carried through the sensibility from the first creative development. Because writers deal in character and story we sometimes lose some of the more interesting theatricality in the writing process. Bryony works with Frantic Assembly and lots of other physical theatre companies in the UK and has a real interest in and the capacity to keep the theatrical poetry quite open.” Rather than telling Hicks’ story in documentary form the play follows the stories of the eight characters who come into contact with the fictionalised central female character and focuses on what Hicks describes as both the worst and best of humanity coming together in a single moment.
Chris Drummond, Gill HIcks, Thursday, Brink Productions and English Touring Theatre
photo Chris Herzfeld
Chris Drummond, Gill HIcks, Thursday, Brink Productions and English Touring Theatre
Drummond continues: “What has resulted on the floor is not a traditional play. It tells a really big story and it tells it in a really deep way through the characters, but you never have two characters talking in a living room or that kind of thing. It doesn’t work like that. It works much more as a rolling, choreographic, image-based work.”
Gill Hicks was in London when the team first met for the creative development and attended the first day of rehearsals, sharing her story with them. Since then Drummond has kept her informed of the progress. In a nice turn of fate, Gill Hicks has not been substantially involved in the latter phases of the project as she has just given birth to a baby girl (and, with apt synchronicity given the play’s subject, two of the original devising performers also became pregnant at the same time).
Three weeks into the final rehearsals, Drummond is “thrilled with how it’s feeling. Much of it actually incredibly playful and but then it goes into some pretty harrowing territory.”
After the Adelaide Festival premiere, Thursday will be presented in Canberra as part of the centenary celebrations. In 2014 the work will tour to England and Drummond has plans for Australia’s eastern states as well.
Adelaide Festival: Brink Productions & English Touring Theatre, Thursday, writer Bryony Lavery, director Chris Drummond, designer Dan Potra, composer/musician Quentin Grant, lighting designer Colin Grenfell, producers Kay Jamieson (Aus) and Jane Claire (UK), performers Paul Blackwell, Emma Handy, Martin Hutson, Lena Kaur, Tom Mothersdale, Kate Mulvany, Nathan O’Keefe, Deidre Rubenstein, Rochenda Sandall; Norwood Concert Hall, Feb 28-March 6; http://adelaidefestival.com.au; http://brinkproductions.com; http://www.ett.org.uk/
THERE WAS VERY QUIET MUSIC AND THERE WAS MUSIC THAT SAW THE AUDIENCE WITH THEIR FINGERS IN THEIR EARS; THERE WAS HECKLING AND THERE WERE WOOPS OF ENTHUSIASTIC APPLAUSE. SOME INSTRUMENTS WERE PLAYED BEAUTIFULLY, WHILE OTHERS WERE NOT PERFORMED ON IN ANY TRADITIONAL SENSE AT ALL.
At times kitchen utensils scratched and whirred against home-made instruments and tape measures reverberated against guitars; at others, pianos soared and drumsticks blurred. There were poems composed solely from guttural and other non-verbal noises and there was even a man dressed as a poo. And that is a snapshot of just two nights of this year’s festival of exploratory music.
Held over five nights in Marrickville’s beloved Red Rattler, NOW Now 2013 was programmed by Laura Altman, Sam Pettigrew, Rishin Singh, Andrew Brooks and Jeremy Tatar and marked the 11th year of what has become NSW’s premier festival for improvised music. In addition to the evening events, this year’s festival also ventured into the great outdoors with a concert at Gordon’s Bay and into the gallery with a visual arts show at SNO in Marrickville. The festival even embraced the foodie craze with an event hosted by Rosita Holmes and Rishin Singh pairing experimental music with experimental cuisine.
I attended two nights, Thursday and Friday, sadly missing a third because of ill-timed flu, and took in 12 acts which ran the gamut from shitcore to turntablism to drone, avant jazz to walls of guitar noise. Over those two evenings four startling and adventurous performances summarised the strengths of this year’s festival.
passenger of shit
Passenger of Shit, The NOW now 2013
photo Jon Hunter
Passenger of Shit, The NOW now 2013
On Thursday night Passenger of Shit, known to his friends as Swift Treweeke, splattered onto the stage dressed in what could only be described as a mask of poo to deliver a laptop-driven set of uncompromising originality. Between samples decrying the state of women’s toilets and pleas for his mother to touch his anus, Treweeke screeched and screamed along to a pounding cacophony of throbbing bass lines, metallic riffs and drum runs reminiscent of a machine gun. Alternating between full throated guttural screams and howling alien shrieks, Treweeke’s set hit the audience like an axe, sending several punters rushing for the door, and many more reaching for their earplugs, or making do with fingers stuck in ears. He paused only to thread a beer under his mask. It was crazy horror-infused genre mash from hell, which even managed to inspire some dancing amid the carnage.
satsuki odamura & mayu kanamori
Treweeke’s was a hard act to follow, particularly given the number of fans he seemed to have among the audience, but the duo of Satsuki Odamura and Mayu Kanamori had very different, but no less mesmerising set of their own. Now an Australian resident, Odamura is a well-known exponent of the koto, and for this performance she played both koto and bass koto. Starting with softly plucked sounds and some whispered words from Kanamori, the performance moved into a duet incorporating live visual documentation and music as Kanamori picked up her camera to capture the beauty of both Odamura’s intricate and at times violent playing along with the form of the instrument itself, with the photos immediately projected behind the performance. It was a novel way of introducing the intricacies of koto and celebrating Odamura’s mastery. Gorgeous shots of moodily lit, quivering strings were interspersed with blurred images of fingers in rapid motion, offering intimacy with the performer we would not otherwise have had, as well as a thorough investigation of both the koto and the conventions of documenting performance. It even included a musical interpretation of cleaning up, with Odamura taking out a duster and a whisk to brush down her strings while Kanamori accompanied her with the sounds of her cleaning bellow blowing the dust from her camera lens.
phillippe petit
Phillippe Petit & Shoeb Ahmad, The NOW now 2013
photo Jon Hunter
Phillippe Petit & Shoeb Ahmad, The NOW now 2013
The lightning hands and unique approach of France’s Phillippe Petit provided another highlight. Petit performed on laptop and turntables presenting both a solo set and a duet with Canberra’s Shoeb Ahmad. Petit describes himself as a ’musical travel agent’ who aims to present a ‘psycho-film-noir ambience.’ At the NOW Now he decided to transport the audience to a land full of static and doom. Harsh digital noise, at times slowed down, at others forming a tumbling mass of glitch, provided a lurching, slurred backdrop before Petit cut to an almost chip-style section over which pulsed electric snaps and crackles.
Marking the first time the two had ever played together, the mood turned decidedly more spontaneous. Petit took to the decks, using his prepared vinyl, while Ahmad offered percussive guitar effects, along with longer drones before the pair crescendoed with Ahmad’s screaming guitar and Petit’s crazy fast vinyl looping and scratching. While Ahmad languidly worked his guitar, Petit resembled a manic cook in his kitchen. At times leaning in until his nose was almost against the vinyl, giving things a rub here and a dust off there, kneading, pulling and rolling his materials into shape to create a noisy, chaotic symphony from the most unlikely of sources.
simon barker & min young woo
Simon Barker & Min Young Woo, The NOW now 2013
photo Jeremy Tatar
Simon Barker & Min Young Woo, The NOW now 2013
The final treat was provided on Friday evening by Sydney’s Simon Barker and South Korea’s Min Young Woo. The pair, also playing together for the first time, delivered a masterclass in drumming, a feast of amazing solos and inspired collaboration replete with whirring drumsticks and an unabashed joy in playing. At times crashingly loud, and others almost minimal, with a rare intensity Barker tapped out complex rhythms on all parts of his kit, which included a shaman gong and a larger gong called a jing, while Woo matched him on the changgu with intricate patterns and counter rhythms. Over 30 minutes the pair banged out a unique path, at times stopping to listen, at others rushing to join together, seeming to revel in each other’s playing, goading each other to play faster and yet always with feeling and commitment. According to Barker, it was a shared interest in Korean shamanic rhythmic language which saw the two artists cross paths. “The idea of the performance was to create a little platform for improvisation with a few key rhythmic motifs and melodic ideas. The melodic ideas were things that we let hover in our minds while we played, whilst the rhythmic motifs acted as prompts for a rhythmic conversation which was mostly based on a shared love of Korea’s east coast rhythmic languages,’’ Barker told me via email. It was a hot, hot room when the pair sat down to perform, but a lot warmer by the time they finished.
Other memorable moments included Amanda Stewart’s poetry which mixed spoken word with frenzied, non-verbal sonic onslaughts in stereo; Malaysian artist Goh Lee Kwang’s investigation of radio static; and a wonderfully intimate and understated late night performance by the Culture of Un (Chris Abrahams and Dave Brown) to launch their album Moonish.
Gloriously eclectic, this year’s NOW Now festival showed the event continues to offer musicians and audiences a way to re-discover the joy of the unusual and the unexpected.
11.25 The Day He Chose His Own Fate, Koji Wakamatsu
“FOR ME, MAKING A FILM MEANS TO THROW A STONE AGAINST THE ESTABLISHMENT,” KOJI WAKAMATSU SAID IN ONE OF HIS LAST INTERVIEWS.
Wakamatsu kept on throwing stones to the end: in 2012 alone, he came out with three movies, which screened back to back at the Busan Film Festival where he was presented with the Asian Filmmaker of the Year award. Some two weeks later, he was dead, hit by a Tokyo cab while reportedly on his way home from a meeting about his latest project, an exposé of the nuclear industry in Japan.
A lifelong provocateur, Wakamatsu fought his battles from a strategic position away from the tides of cinematic fashion, somewhere between exploitation and the avant-garde. For many years his international cult reputation came from his notoriety as a maker of ‘pink’ films—low-budget items blending softcore sado-masochism and political subversion, such as Ecstasy of the Angels (1972) and Go Go Second Time Virgin (1969). In 2006 he returned to prominence with United Red Army, an epic, gruelling docudrama chronicling the self-destruction of an early 70s leftist group: a long-cherished project for Wakamatsu, and a summary of his complex relationship with the Japanese New Left.
The clash between ‘cool’ style and ‘hot’ subject-matter in Wakamatsu’s films creates an economical, unfussy beauty; the flat, desaturated digital look of his last films is as nonchalant and functional as was his use of high-contrast black-and-white film stock in the 1960s. Monomaniacal characters and flimsy storylines are typical of porn cinema, for obvious reasons—but Wakamatsu capitalises on the absurdity, with long periods of dead time broken up by offhand acts of cruelty, rape and murder. His brand of ‘poetic purity’ closely accords with Manny Farber's description of Sam Fuller's approach: “a merging of unlimited sadism, done candidly and in close-up, with stretches of pastoral nostalgia in which there are flickers of myth.” In other respects he's like a sleazy cousin of the French New Wave: the brilliantly minimal Serial Rapist (1978) has an affinity with Godard or even Bresson in its impassive performances, refusal of psychology and loopy gags (wandering by the river, the anti-hero comes across a woman painting a picture of a smokestack, screams “That isn't beautiful!” and shoots her dead).
11.25 The Day He Chose His Own Fate, Koji Wakamatsu
Part of the fascination of Wakamatsu’s work springs from the ambiguity of his gaze: too intense to be taken for cool indifference, but typically (though not always) too detached to trigger either arousal or distress. In one of his most frequently repeated images, the camera looks down on a woman’s face contorted in undecidable pleasure or pain—suggesting a world of opaque surfaces, where violence is impelled by an ever thwarted desire to break through to hidden truth. Curiously, the same effect is produced by the monotonous dialogue exchanges that compose much of United Red Army, where student rebels argue relentlessly over a ‘correct’ political line. Through the endless repetition of self-justifying slogans (“Criticise yourself!”) speech too becomes a form of violence; equally, physical violence is understood as a cry that demands acknowledgement.
As with other very prolific directors—from Godard to Ruiz to Miike—Wakamatsu’s films often seem generated by the quasi-mechanical application of rules of thumb, which remain flexible enough to allow for any kind of casual inspiration. If none of the films screened at Busan quite rank with his best, taken as a group they give a sense of his range. 11.25 The Day Mishima Chose His Own Fate is an unorthodox biopic of the famous writer (played as a fragile dandy by Arata Iura) and a companion piece to United Red Army: the right-wing Mishima founded his own private militia in the 1960s to combat the radicals he saw as the chief threat to Japan. The link between his political philosophy and his troubled sexuality is treated obliquely, but the film makes plain that he, too, fiercely “criticised himself” for failing to live up to his own heroic conception of manhood.
The Millennial Rapture, Koji Wakamatsu
Wakamatsu naturally gravitates toward obsessives, depicted with mingled mockery, horror and awe: it hardly matters if their beliefs are revolutionary, conservative, or merely deranged. “I wanted to burn like fire,” says one of the protagonists of The Millennial Rapture, a family saga set in a coastal village of Burakumin (untouchables). Told from the viewpoint of an aged, dying midwife (Terajima Shinobu)—in a surrealist touch, she addresses herself to a photograph of her late husband (Sano Shiro) who talks back as if from a video monitor—the film tells the story of a dynasty of hommes fatales, seducers doomed to bring ruin upon themselves and those around them. The uncanny quality of the narrative comes from its shifts of focus: as each good-looking young man comes to a bad end, another steps in to fill his place. It’s as if all male members of this family were interchangeable, vehicles for the impersonal destructive tendency transmitted from one generation to the next through ‘bad blood.’
Petrel Hotel Blue, Koji Wakamatsu
Was this, for Wakamatsu, a metaphor for the curse of Japan? A vision of escape is briefly conjured in the dreamlike noir Petrel Hotel Blue, the last of the Busan films. Newly released from prison, an ex-con (Go Jibiki) finds solace in a hotel bar by the sea, where a mute woman (Hitomi Katayama) sits smoking like a living sculpture or a mirage. Gradually the crime plot is ‘deconstructed,’ as in the films of Alain Robbe-Grillet: stock genre elements are shuffled in a way that accentuates their banality, while the presence of magic is signalled by colours that leap off the screen (blue walls, a lilac parasol). But as the protagonist waits for his past to catch up with him, we know this strange idyll cannot endure. Whether the material he’s working with is documentary or fantasy (and perhaps he’d recognise no distinction) Wakamatsu’s pessimism is constant: ruled by forces larger than themselves, his characters can do little more than embrace their inevitable fate.
NOT KNOWN FOR UNDERSTATEMENT, PERFORMANCE SPACE’S LATEST SEASON IS A DRAMATIC CALL TO ACTION—IT’S A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH.
While it’s a compact season, taking place Feb 23-March 9, it promises to help you live for the moment, with three major performance pieces, a Night-time short works event, Clubhouse activities and workshops all focussed on that sticky subject, mortality.
The headlining performance is from UK/Belgian company Reckless Sleepers presenting The Last Supper. In RT107 Megan Garret-Jones described the performance she witnessed at the Compass Festival in Leeds: “The Last Supper interrogated storytelling and history-making with what transpired almost as a word-association game of recalling the notable dead and literally eating their words, squares of paper disappearing into the performers’ mouths once their contents were recited. Performers and audience sat at dinner tables on the stage, intimately sharing the last meals of executed prisoners as distributed through a kind of raffle. We considered martyrs and criminals alike as defined by their last words and meals. We considered whether we were supposed to eat the cheeseburger and decided we were.” It’s an intimate performance for 39 guests. Each has a case number and it seems that for 13 of them, this could be their last meal. (Feb 27-March 9)
Brian Lucas, Performance Anxiety
photo Fiona Cullen
Brian Lucas, Performance Anxiety
Running simultaneously is Brian Lucas’ Performance Anxiety. Here we are invited into an intimate cabaret in which Brisbane-based choreographer/performer Lucas adopts roles of torch singer, war correspondent, orator and stand-up comedian. He shares tales of the large and small battles that an individual must undertake to be part of society. (Feb 27-March 2)
Sarah-Jane Norman, Corpus Nullius/Blood Country (2011), part of the Unsettling Suite
photo Penelope Benton
Sarah-Jane Norman, Corpus Nullius/Blood Country (2011), part of the Unsettling Suite
Much anticipated is Sarah-Jane Norman’s performance installation, Unsettling Suite which brings together four of Norman’s major works exploring her English and Indigenous heritage. In RT111’s RealBlak Norman wrote of her projects: “In preparation for Bone Library, I’ve spent nearly a year, it seems, with blood permanently encrusted under my fingernails, the result of months spent cleaning animal bones, pushing out plugs of bloody marrow; and I’ve gradually learnt the best spots on my own body, with its recalcitrant veins, to draw blood, having trained myself via the many DIY hotel-room phlebotomies that have had to be discreetly performed for Take this, for it is my body. Materially, physiologically and symbolically, blood is an undoubtedly fascinating substance.” This thought provoking epic is not to be missed. (Feb 23-March 10)
There is also a night of short works curated by ever-inventive writer, performer and curator Eddie Sharp titled Live and Let Die (March 2). Clubhouse will offer one-off events across the season such as Death(cha) Kucha by the Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions presenting their research into the history of execution; and Desensitising Death: A Night of Film by Mu Meson archivists Miss Death and Jay Katz screening ads and clips which have inspired horror filmmakers. Celebrant and artist Vicki Spence will share her ongoing research into contemporary rituals around death in her presentation Mortality Talking.
But it’s not all about death and loss, there’s also Making Time (Feb 23, March 2, March 9), a workshop by Make Shift and Tessa Zettel which will literally explore preservation. Here you’ll learn jam-making, bottling and preserving methods ideal for foraged, native or backyard surplus foods. It might almost make life worth living.
February sees the play celebrated across the country with Yellamundie at Carriageworks in Sydney and the National Play Festival in Perth, as well as announcements of new awards to deserving playwrights. More lateral approaches are anticipated from emerging artists at PACT, The Public Studio in Melbourne, a real life human experiment in ANAT’s The Subjects, political provocation courtesy of Richard Bell at MUMA, seminal sonics from Deutschland and more…
And if you missed last week’s in the loop you’ll find current events listed at the end for easy access.
yellamundie, carriageworks
Sonny Dallas Law, Bjorn Stewart, Colin Kinchela, Bully Beef Stew, PACT Centre for Emerging Artists
photo Cat Jones
Sonny Dallas Law, Bjorn Stewart, Colin Kinchela, Bully Beef Stew, PACT Centre for Emerging Artists
Mooghalin Performing Arts’ Yellamundie: National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Playwriting Festival is now in full swing at Carriageworks. After a launch during the Sydney Festival, six plays have been in development with public play readings taking place Feb 7-9. The plays include Cuz by Billy McPherson, First Contact by Jane Harrison (guest editor of RealTime’s RealBlak edition) and Crowbones & Carnivores by David Milroy (also featured in RealBlak). There’ll be readings of plays by emerging playwrights who have been taking part in Redfern Salon, presented in partnership with Playwriting Australia, Redfern Community Centre and Belvoir. You can read director Frederick Copperwaite’s article on the festival in RealBlak. Yellamundie, play readings and salon Feb 7-9, Carriageworks; http://www.carriageworks.com.au/?page=Event&event=Yellamundie
national play festival, perth
Playwriting Australia is having a busy month also producing the annual National Play Festival in Perth this year at the State Theatre as well as contributing to Yellamundie. A range of new plays will be presented via rehearsed readings including adventurous new works by Declan Greene, Andrea James (see RealBlak and RT105) and Angus Cerini (See RT107 and RT102). There’s also an emphasis on writing for younger audiences with readings of works by Lachlan Philpott, Casey Nicholls and Kit Brookman as well as a showcase of emerging talent from Western Australia. National Play Festival, State Theatre, Underground Studio, Perth Feb 21-24; http://www.pwa.org.au/nationalplayfestival2013/
awf playwriting awards announced
Yael Stone, A Golem Story, writer Lally Katz
photo Pia Johnson
Yael Stone, A Golem Story, writer Lally Katz
Still on playwright matters, Declan Greene (see above) and Lally Katz (see RT104 and RT95) have just been named as the inaugural recipients of the Australian Writers’ Foundation Playwright Award. The AWF is the charitable wing of the Australian Writers’ Guild; each writer will receive $15,000 to assist in their career development. (See in the loop: opportunities for the State Library of Victoria’s playwriting awards.) Australian Writers Guild http://www.awg.com.au
harvest, pact
Harvest. PACT Centre for Emerging Artists
photo Julie Vulcan
Harvest. PACT Centre for Emerging Artists
PACT Centre for Emerging Artists’ training program is now in its 15th year and we’re about to discover the latest crop of talent in the annual ensemble production, Harvest. This year it’s directed solo by Acting Artistic Director Julie Vulcan while Cat Jones makes the most of her Creative Australia Fellowship. Harvest explores “the world we live in through food, consumption and waste. Examining habits and the rituals that sustain us…When is one person’s insane act another’s act of sanity?” (press release). The opening night will also include the launch of PACT’s 2013 program. Harvest, PACT Centre for Emerging Artists, Feb 20 – March 9, official opening and program launch, Feb 22; http://www.pact.net.au/2012/10/ensemble-2013/
until then, then, the public studio
Until Then, Then, The Public Studio
courtesy the company
Until Then, Then, The Public Studio
In RT73 John Bailey was impressed by performer/director Ming-Zhu Hii’s take on Yoko Ono in her Next Wave performance Y. He wrote, “The personal, political, fiction and fact are interwoven in a way which doesn’t result in an undifferentiated miasma but instead produces the sense, if not the logic, of an artist frequently written off as a relic of counterculture aestheticism.” Her subsequent work Attract/Repel featured in the 2009 Melbourne Fringe. Ming-Zhu Hii returns after a three-year break to present a new work in her collaboration with Nicholas Coghlan which is titled The Public Studio. The production Until Then, Then is an audio visual installation inspired by Baroque vanitas in which the central character, King Fool, is “searching frantically for answers about his own apparent death and ultimately—the meaning of life” (press release). The Public Studio, Until Then, Then, La Mama, March 6-10; http://thepublicstudio.net
Sean Williams, Fee Plumley, Thom Buchanan, Jennifer Mills, The Subjects, ANAT
The latest project from the Australian Network for Art and Technology is a kind of reality tv-lab rat-residency hybrid. Four artists have agreed to subject themselves to sleep deprivation under the supervision of scientists while attempting to be creative during the process. The artists/subjects are self-confessed techno-evangelist Fee Plumley, painter and cross-disciplinary artist Thom Buchanan and authors Sean Williams and Jennifer Mills. The experiment will take place at the Appleton Institute under the watchful eyes of director Professor Drew Dawson and sleep and circadian physiology researchers Greg Roach, Charli Sargent and Xuan Zhou. Follow the experiment’s progress at http://thesubjects.anat.org.au/; Feb 9-16
richard bell: lessons on etiquette and manners, muma
Richard Bell, Scratch an Aussie 2008 (production still, detail), courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane
photo Mick Richards
Richard Bell, Scratch an Aussie 2008 (production still, detail), courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane
Opening the 2013 season at Monash Museum of Modern Art is the first Melbourne survey of the work of painter, multimedia artist, activist and agent provocateur Richard Bell. Brisbane-based, Bell is a member of the Kamilaroi, Kooma, Jiman and Gurang Gurang communities and has been creating work that is political and humorous, particularly paintings, since the 1990s. For this exhibition he will present Peace heals, war kills (Big ass mutha fuckin mural) 2011-12, a collaboration with Emory Douglas, former Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party in the United States, as well as recreating the 1972 Tent Embassy inside the gallery, which will also be the venue for a series of talks by radical Indigenous leaders. Richard Bell: Lessons on Etiquette and Manners, curated by Max Delany and Francis E. Parker, Monash Museum of Modern Art, Feb 5- April 3; www.monash.edu.au/muma
tools, kawita vatanajyankur, beam contemporary
Kawita Vatanajyankur, Soaked, 2012
video still, courtesy of the artist
Kawita Vatanajyankur, Soaked, 2012
Thai-born Melbourne-based video artists Kawita Vatanajyankur’s exhibition Tools uses the female figure in 17th century still-life paintings as a starting point. However, in her video pieces she “brings the female body into a new stark environment where body and domestic object conflate and seem to physically react and violently communicate with each other.” We are intrigued… Tools, Kawita Vatanajyankur, Beam Contemporary, March 1-16, http://www.beamcontemporary.com.au/
einstürzende neubauten & pole
Pole, UnSound
photo Anna Spysz
Pole, UnSound
Not one but two greats of late 20th century German music are about to tour Australia. Industrial krautrock legends Einstürzende Neubauten will be appearing in Melbourne courtesy of the Drones curation of I’ll Be Your Mirror (a side project of All Tomorrow’s Parties) as well as playing extra gigs in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. Also on the festival circuit courtesy of Goethe Institut is Pole (Stefan Betke), the purported inventor of glitch. He’ll be performing as part of UnSound at the Adelaide Festival as well as in Sydney and Brisbane. Einstürzende Neubauten, Melbourne: I’ll be your Mirror, Feb 17 & Palace Theatre, Feb 19; Sydney: Enmore Theatre, Feb 22; Brisbane: The Tivoli, Feb 23; http://handsometours.com/current/einsturzende-neubauten; Pole, Adelaide Festival, March 16; Brisbane: IMA, March 21; Sydney: Sound/Light/Stone, March 22; http://www.goethe.de
still in the loop
In Between Time 13, Bristol, UK
Feb 14-17, 2013, exhibition Feb 2-April 14; http://ibt13.co.uk/ more…
Michael Essien, I want to play as you, directed by Ahil Ratnamohan, commissioned by UTP and presented by UTP and CCLuchtbal. Feb 2-9, Antwerp
photo Koenbroos
Michael Essien, I want to play as you, directed by Ahil Ratnamohan, commissioned by UTP and presented by UTP and CCLuchtbal. Feb 2-9, Antwerp
Urban Theatre Projects in Bankstown are calling for applications for their _SPACE residency program. Successful artists will receive access to the large rehearsal space as well as administrative and dramaturgical support. The residencies are for two week blocks in April, August and November 2013. Applications are encouraged from Western-Sydney based artists as well as those interested in engaging with the local community. Applications due Feb 22, http://urbantheatre.com.au/current-projects/_space-residency-program/
[Image note: Ahil Ratnamohan is a long time associate of Urban Theatre Projects developing his first full length work The Football Diaries in 2009 (see RT91) with the help of a UTP residency. His latest project, commissioned by UTP takes place in Antwerp premiering at the AESP Sport Opening Ceremony, and continues his interest in football as choreography and the experience of players seeking new lives in foreign countries. Antwerp Feb 2-9; http://urbantheatre.com.au/current-projects/michael-essien-i-want-to-play-as-you/]
r e ross trust playwrights’ script development awards
The State Library of Victoria oversees the R E Ross Trust Playwrights’ Script Development Awards which are for the development and workshopping of new plays. The award is open to Victorian writers who can apply for between $3,000 and $10,000. “Winners also have the opportunity for rehearsed readings at Flashpoint at the State Library of Victoria or fortyfivedownstairs, and one recipient may be invited to either showcase their play at PlayWriting Australia’s National Play Festival 2014 or receive a two-week PlayWriting Australia script development workshop” (press release). See in the loop: quick picks for info on the 2013 National Play Festival in Perth. Applications due March 22; slv.vic.gov.au/ross
studios and exhibtions, gaffa gallery
Gaffa Gallery in Sydney’s CBD currently have studio spaces available. These studios offer access to the communal workshop which features a range of useful tools. Resident artists may also have the opportunity to display work in the emerging practitioners retail section of the Gaffa Shop. Gaffa is also seeking expressions of interest from artists wishing to exhibit with them between August and December 2013. Studios http://gaffa.com.au/how-to-apply; exhibitions http://www.gaffa.com.au/Gallery-Hire
police lane gallery, ballarat
Ballarat’s Arts and Culture Public Art Advisory Committee has announced a new public art venture for the city. The Police Lane Gallery will comprise the outside wall of the Ballarat Art Gallery which will house five 2x1metre vinyl banners. Exhibitions will run in six weeks blocks across 2013. Expressions of Interest due Feb 28; email juliecollins@ballarat.vic.gov.au
international summer school, iugte
Physical Theatre Lab
photo Inga Ryazanoff, IUGTE
Physical Theatre Lab
The International University Global Theatre Experience (IUGTE) offers a range of labs and workshops across the year with an emphasis on “exploring the bridge between world theatre traditions and contemporary performing arts” (website). They have just announced their summer school which will be an International Physical Theatre Lab. Drawing on the methods of Russian theatre director Sergei Ostrenko it will use techniques introduced by early 20th century masters such as Stanislavsky, Chekhov and Meyerhold as well as Tai-Chi and contemporary forms. The workshop is suitable for experienced dancers, actors of physical theatre, contemporary circus performers, choreographers and directors and takes place in the Retzhof Castle in Leitring bei Leibnitz, Austria. International Physical Theatre Lab, IUGTE, Austria, July 1 – 6; http://www.iugte.com/projects/lab
Front: Gareth Davies & Geraldine Hakewill; Back Paula Arundell, John Leary, Megan Holloway, Jimi Bani, Harriet Dyer & Meyne Wyatt, Peter Pan, Belvoir
photo Brett Boardman
Front: Gareth Davies & Geraldine Hakewill; Back Paula Arundell, John Leary, Megan Holloway, Jimi Bani, Harriet Dyer & Meyne Wyatt, Peter Pan, Belvoir
IN A NUMBER OF SYDNEY FESTIVAL PRODUCTIONS I FELT CONSISTENTLY FACED WITH THE ISSUE OF LOSS: OF CHILDHOOD, ADOLESCENCE, PARENTS AND LOSS OF MEMORIES AND RATIONALITY. PUPPETRY, STAGE EFFECTS, MUSIC, ANIMATION, RITUAL AND MOVEMENT MANIFESTED IN VARIOUS PERMUTATIONS IN THESE PRODUCTIONS MAKING FOR RICH AND DIVERSE THEATRICALITY. ONE THING THAT HAS NOT BEEN LOST IN CONTEMPORARY THEATRE IS A SENSE OF TRADITION AND CRAFT. THE PAST HAS NOT BEEN LOST. IN THESE WORKS, PEOPLE ARE OFTEN LOST IN ORDER TO FIND THEMSELVES.
peter pan
Belvoir takes children’s play as a creative template for this fun-filled, endlessly inventive Peter Pan in an adaptation by Tommy Murphy based on the 1904 pantomime rather than later, denser versions and their musings on childhood. It’s a brisk 90-minute production deftly directed by Ralph Myers and designed by Robert Cousins. As you’d expect of Belvoir there’s a strong sense of domesticity (will the cast for Neil Armfield’s Ring Cycle for Opera Australia be fitted out in t-shirts and thongs in a school hall setting?) creatively exploited to the max while still hovering somewhere between Edwardian England and now.
In an adroit move, the production never has to leave the children’s bedroom since their play has the capacity to transform everyday clothing, furniture, objects and rituals into an imaginative wonderland. A painted cardboard box worn like a helmet becomes the snapping jaws of a crocodile, the fairy Tinkerbell manifests as flickering table and bed lamps, and an uncooperative shadow is playfully childlike (the flying however is less inventively realised and gotten out of the way promptly). All that’s needed to create mermaids and seals are scuba-diving flippers; a cupboard stacked with other furniture becomes a ship or an island; an umbrella handle is Hook’s hook. The imagination has taken over by engaging with and manipulating the things of the world, rather than leaving them behind, say, for an animator’s spectacular fantasia.
Meyne Wyatt, Peter Pan, Belvoir
photo Brett Boardman
Meyne Wyatt, Peter Pan, Belvoir
Meyne Wyatt as Peter Pan (a role traditionally allocated to adult actresses) vividly conveys the ultra-confidence of the young alpha-male but also the pain of the eternal youth and the wounding—desertion—it embodies. On the edge of adolescence and bitter, unable to forgive the mother who apparently abandoned him, Wyatt’s Pan is certainly not a child, nor will he ever become an adult, refusing to grow up and enter the world of relationships and parenting. The other boys, clearly children still, simply miss their mothers (no lost girls, it seems, in Edwardian England).
Peter and Wendy are the only characters who are solely themselves; in this bedroom-cum-Neverland, everything is transformable, making the ambiguities of traditional role doublings even more meaningful, representing the kinds of distortion, condensation and slippage that occur in dreams, as delineated by Freud in the same era as Barrie’s making of Peter Pan.
Charlie Garber doubles well as a very funny, nervous Hook and a weak-willed but sensitive Mr Darling so that there’s some emotional bleed between the characters.
In a dextrous ensemble that includes Gareth Davies, Megan Holloway and John Leary, Harriet Dyer is hilarious as both twins as well as playing four or five other characters. Jimi Bana reveals a fine comic sensibility after playing many serious roles on television, such as Eddie Mabo in Mabo. Paula Arundell gently captures Mrs Darling’s sense of anxiety about the outside world but also her wisdom. Geraldine Hakewell’s Wendy is genteel relative to Peter, whose first appearance in a window overlooking the streets of Redfern outside the Belvoir theatre suggests a street kid.
The ending, where Wendy, now a mother, allows her barely pre-adolescent daughter (an eager if spikey one who will not spring clean for Peter and the boys and appears unlikely to play mother), feels increasingly uncomfortable as the decades past. What precisely did Wendy’s adventure with Peter do for her? Intimate the possibility of romance while unleashing her imagination at the moment when it was likely to be crushed by the weight of domesticity and marriage? Or did it offer a lesson in how to deal with a man who will never grow up; perhaps all men, and that these boy-men have to be lived with and loved? For Barrie, Wendy’s victory is that she actually grows up, while Peter cannot. Peter Pan remains very much of its own period, offering a certain timelessness in the exultation of play as felt in this Belvoir production, admirably of the kind children might actually make.
school dance
Amber McMahon, Matthew Whittet, Luke Smiles, Jonathon Oxlade, School Dance
photo Lisa Tomasetti
Amber McMahon, Matthew Whittet, Luke Smiles, Jonathon Oxlade, School Dance
The lost boys in Matthew Whittet’s School Dance for this Windmill/Sydney Theatre Company production are a trio of mid-adolescents, collectively out of kilter with a pressurised social world and each facing their own crisis. None of them is a Peter Pan, but they are, to varying degrees, wounded: one of them feeling invisible, one brutalised by his father, the other making the right moves, but never connecting. Together they fear the school bully, a muscular brute who emerges like a demon from the toilet as if from a hell hole in a mediaeval mystery play. They need a Wendy, especially when Matthew’s condition (Whittet uses the male actors’ names) becomes actually invisible and finds himself in a fantasy world of eternally invisible, fellow adolescents—ghostly, animated figures drifting through a forest projected on the school hall stage, and one very real girl who has surrendered to her belief in her own invisibility.
These boys don’t need a Wendy-mother, but someone who will rescue Matthew. She takes the form of a schoolyard enabler who subsequently transforms into a unicorn and draws Matthew’s mates into the quest—Luke (Luke Smiles) as an action character, Jonathan (Jonathan Oxlade) as a giant Telebubbie. In the process, Matthew rescues the lost girl and discovers romance: in the end the couple happily dance together with all of Matthew’s twitchy moves.
Whittet has deftly collaged a multitude of fairytale, game and quest motifs and tropes in order to create a hyper-charged, comic narrative about the drawbacks of adolescence and the need to face up to them alone and together. Set in an immaculately realised school hall (designer Jonathan Oxlade) with toilets either side representing ‘interior’ spaces of male and female fear and anxiety while the understage provides a rack of BMXs on which the boys momentarily escape the intimidating school dance. Amber McMahon, embodying ‘the female,’ convincingly switches roles from schoolgirls to unicorn to invisible girl (and other roles) with incredible pace adding to the sense of the potential for transformation. Other tight cueing comes in the form of beeped-out swearing, some wild dancing and Whittet having to double as the ‘invisible’ girl in the hall toilet before she actually disappears. The small ensemble of players delivers a virtuosic performance which engaged the almost totally adult audience with whom I saw School Dance—the pop culture that Whittet grew up with in the 80s is densely referenced and easily recognised. It would be interesting to see what an audience of 14-16 year-olds would make of it (many of the cultural icons persist, though a Nora Ephron reference might not connect). My only misgiving was a not-so-funny voiceover (MacMahon again, this time as an interfering narrator) which is given a laboured postmodern treatment.
While Peter Pan’s lost boys have been discarded by their mothers, the School Dance trio is largely lost to fumbling adolescent inadequacies (albeit socially punished ones), but it’s intriguing that, like Pan, they look to the feminine for rescue. But Whittet, a century on, allows for lost girls, and for the lost to be found. And it’s play that is key to rescue, although a scene in which the invisible Whittet and McMahon characters huddle under a large storybook mushroom reminds us that adolescent anxieties can be regressive. Perhaps regression is, at times, restorative if you’re looking to find yourself.
it’s dark outside
Tim Watts, It’s Dark Outside, Perth Theatre Company
photo Richard Jefferson
Tim Watts, It’s Dark Outside, Perth Theatre Company
In contrast to the losses and gains of childhood and adolescence in Peter Pan and School Dance, It’s Dark Outside ventures lightly into the grim world of memory loss occasioned by dementia in old age, suggesting that while rationality suffers, the imagination might play a sustaining role—again embodied in playfulness.
From the makers of the much praised The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer, It’s Dark Outside is another work rich in invention with its mix of performer, puppets of varying scale (operated by Tim Watts and Chris Isaacs largely in Bunraku style), large animated projections, shadow play and some fine cotton wool puppetry conveying clouds of thought. A slow old man is on the loose (though we’re not told from what), pursued by a spooky shadow man with a large butterfly net through a forest of red-eyed trees and across cowboy movie plains. In the cold of night a tiny tent appears, dancing like a friendly puppy one moment, a fine high stepping horse the next, the old man riding it past buttes and cacti.
His plight is sensitively handled. The expression “a head full of cotton wool” suggests fuzzy headedness but here, floating out of the old man’s head, it represents thoughts and memories that are being lost, drifting away or caught in his pursuer’s net. Some memories are momentarily retained, the clouds taking shape as a lively, fond puppy until the old man fumbles, knocking off its head—like a memory that’s fragile and vulnerable.
Expertly blending stillness and small movements, including those of a flexible mask, Arielle Gray superbly realises the old man, giving him quiet dignity and determination even as his escape into fantasy threatens to dissolve. The makers of It’s Dark Outside offer a gently if intense account of the subjective experience of Sundown Syndrome—when dementia sufferers wander away from home at twilight. Although this account can only be a fantasy version of something likely to be much more anxious—a physical search for what’s been lost—it nonetheless encourages empathy in its audience and exalts the power of the imagination, an issue addressed in enlightened treatments of dementia using music and art.
As Astrid Frances reported in her review (RT110) the sustained approach to the cloud-thought imagery finally feels over-determined; the drama of pursuit gives way to a more contemplative, if lovingly realised, exploration of the workings of the imagination, depriving the work of drive and muting the initial sense of suspense. But there’s much to enjoy in It’s Dark Outside (director Melissa Cantwell), the skill of its puppeteering in particular and Gray’s subtle performance as the old man realise a substantial sense of interiority, making a simple fable emotionally complex.
masi
Masi, The Conch Theatre
photo Jamie Williams
Masi, The Conch Theatre
A work about loss from a New Zealand Pacific theatre company, The Conch Theatre’s MASI [NZ, UK, Fiji] is a melancholy reverie about deceased parents in which the mixed cultural heritage of the couple (a Fijian high chief and a Cambridge educated schoolmistress in 1950s New Zealand) is celebrated with projected archival images, beautiful traditional music and Masi weaving. The approach is however unremittingly sombre, right from the start with its piano and cello musings, and impressionistic—we learn very little about the parents. Consequently, for all the poetry of its projections, movement, deployment of materials and the power of the imagery of weaving (a superb example forming the 13-metre arch of the proscenium) Masi felt intensely private.
the moment I saw you I knew I could love you
The moment I saw you I knew I could love you, Curious UK
photo Hugo Glendinning
The moment I saw you I knew I could love you, Curious UK
This time it’s the audience that’s lost. Seated in three inflatable lifeboats, we’re addressed by three performers of the UK’s Curious who sometimes sit with us, adrift in a “churning ocean…a metaphor for the turbulent range of human emotions” (program note). There’s very little churning; rather, we float through moods generated by lectures about the physiology of fear and our blood cells that turn lyrical (“love the shape of your organs”), advice on how to prepare yourself for trauma, a tale of man who brought himself a new pair of Adidas because he didn’t want to look foolish after suiciding, and a woman’s recollection of gagging at a wedding when having to make a speech she didn’t want to deliver. Woven through crises of odd and involuntary behaviour are films of an older man and a woman, dancing first by themselves on a beachfront walkway and then together. In the last passage of the performance they appear onstage and the audience too is invited to dance—like the couple in the film, each with an apple held brow to brow. While enjoying The Moment… from moment to moment, the sense of whimsical free association made for a rather abstract experience, a floating world of evocation but also of loose connections. I admired the performances, especially Claudia Barton’s intense monologues, but never felt that I was “in the belly of the whale” (program).
the rape of lucrece
Camille O’Sullivan, Rape of Lucrece
photo Keith Pattison
Camille O’Sullivan, Rape of Lucrece
I admired Camille O’Sullivan’s delivery of Shakespeare’s verse in The Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Rape of Lucrece, but was appalled by the banality of the songs and the performer’s overacting in those moments when she had to step outside the invaluable constraints of the poetry. The dramaturgy of the design was also poor—great piles of manuscript with which the performer engaged only once (she tossed them around of course), the blunt symbolism of the deployment of a lone female shoe and a male boot, and a series of modernist paintings as background that merely changed hue and texture according to the lighting which otherwise functionally carved corridors of light across the floor. Initially looking like a chunkily suited modern nun, Sullivan later reveals, underneath, the gown in which she will be raped. The sound was likewise problematic. The verse sounded fine from the head-miked Camille, but as soon as she sang the volume was intolerably ramped up for bland anthemic songs. The editing of the poem for the stage was reasonably well done, but where was Lucrece’s verbal defence of herself in the face of Tarquin’s onslaught? As for the rape, instead of making the most of the poetry, Sullivan writhed on the floor, howling, melodramatically undercutting the power of her performance. The loss? Ours, Lucrece’s and Shakespeare’s.
sacre—the rite of spring
Raimund Hoghe, Lorenzo de Brabandere, The Rite of Spring
photo Rosa-Frank.com
Raimund Hoghe, Lorenzo de Brabandere, The Rite of Spring
In the largest Carriageworks theatre, Raimund Hoghe and Lorenzo De Brabandere move about the vast space at walking pace in neat geometric patterns, accelerating, slowing, intersecting, passing, coming face to face, separating. De Brabandere races across the floor, Hogue emphatically drags an ungainly leg. At the same time two musicians perform Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring on grand pianos far upstage, evoking the furious richness of movement that was Nijinky’s choreography in 1913 for the Ballet Russes. But in this neat ritual there is no dancerliness; the focus instead is unrevealingly on two very different bodies. Sacre seems to have dated badly since offering a strong conceptual challenge to contemporary dance in the early 2000s, part of an anti-dance trend that emerged in the mid 1990s .
ligeti morphed
One of Ensemble Offspring’s greatest strengths is the way they encourage us to not lose touch with the great music of the second half of the 20th century. The best thing about their Ligeti Morphed was the relatively un-morphed acoustic works, Ligeti’s Piano Etude#2 “Cordes Vides” (scored for marimba, vibraphone and two violins by Bree Van Reyk) and Continuum (two marimba version) played by Van Reyk and Claire Edwardes. The lyrical etude rolls out in gentle if ever escalating tides that pause or retreat, with waves of strings and percussion crisscrossing. Continuum, as played by Reyk and Edwardes, is supple and athletic, exploiting the full tonal range of the instruments and at its fastest and highest, on both marimbas at once, magically evoking electronics. The electro-acoustic works, with Oren Ambarchi on electronic guitar and Martin Ng on turnables are enigmatic, partly because it’s not visually clear what sounds are coming from Ng, especially, and Ambarchi. I close my eyes. As in the etude, if much more dramatically, there are waves of sound in After Atmospheres (after Ligeti’s most famous work, Atmospheres, 1961), a collaborative creation between Ensemble Offspring, Ng and Ambarchi. In one of the most striking passages, high whining violins soar with near feedback electronics against trembling cymbals until vanquished by thunderous drumming. This engaging work includes a rip-roaring Le Grande Macabre style section, side by side with Atmospheres-type sustained ambience. As a totality however, appreciation will doubtless come with listening to After Atmospheres, and the other electro-acoustic works in the program, on the projected studio recording CD.
murder
Murder, Erth
photo Susannah Wembley
Murder, Erth
Erth’s Murder had an abundance of talent and promise but, after connecting strongly with its inspiration, the Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ album Murder Ballads in a grimly comic realisation of “Stagger Lee,” it drifted away into its own complicated narrative (in which a song as powerful as “Red Right Hand” is reduced to background noise) albeit with flashes of inspiration and a strong central performance from Graeme Rhodes. This is another production about loss, this time a loss of rationality and an inexorable descent into murder.
Rhodes commences with a dull and surely disposable lecture on the history of murder from ancient times to the present, perhaps trying to get it into some kind of rational perspective, but before long he’s revealed to be a fantasist (images from his psyche filling a large backdrop) increasingly enmeshed in the psychosexual attractions of murder (including via computer games) and eventually forming a murderous partnership with a woman via an online chatroom. Rather than being a free agent exploring murder and its meanings, by the end he is manipulated by puppeteers as if in the grip of desires beyond his control. Signs of this are evident early, although difficult to track subsequently, when the narrator tells us that his mother was murdered when he was six and, therefore, the God who allowed this must be a murderer. A child puppet then appears to represents the narrator. This trajectory is not altogether clear but what is finally evident is that this man’s desire is not simply murder for the sake of it, but for revenge. The target’s visage, a spider-legged head, multiplies across the screen, amplifying our protagonist’s obsessiveness. However, the means of telling—life-size puppets and miniatures, a multitude of projections—make for a congested multimedia experience, especially when the script is already complicated. More overkill than murder. In its embrace of murder actual and virtual from from ancient tragedy to computer gaming and serial murderers and even euthanasia, Murder sustains a high level of bigger-than-life grossness with killings, cocksucking, torture (with a drill) and suffocation by cunnilingus. It rates as less an investigation of our murderous impulses than a celebration of their variety and appalling ingenuity—a funny and appalling reminder, as if we needed one, of the loss of rationality, empathy and civility that confronts us in the daily news. At best, with its fine puppeteering, like a horror film it makes evil laughable.
2013 Sydney Festival: Belvoir, Peter Pan, by JM Barrie, adaptation Tommy Murphy, director Ralph Myers, performers [see review], design Robert Cousins, costumes Alice Babidge, lighting Damien Cooper, composer Stefan Gregory, Belvoir St Theatre, from Jan 9; Sydney Theatre Co presents Windmill Theatre’s School Dance, writer Matthew Whittet, director Rosemary Myers, performers [see review] with Jack Wetere, designer Jonathan Oxlade, soundtrack Luke Smiles, lighting Richard Vabre, choreographer Gabrielle Nankivell, animation Chris Moore, STC wharf 1, from Jan 11; Perth Theatre Company, It’s Dark Outside, creators Tim Watts, Arielle Gray, Chris Isaacs, music Rachael Dease, Carriageworks, Jan 11-15; Curious UK, The moment I saw you I knew I could love you, Helen Paris, Leslie Hill, Claudia Barton, Carriageworks, Jan 11-13; The Conch Theatre (NZ, Fiji, UK), Masi, director Nina Nawalowalo, co-director Tom McCory, illusion designer Paul Kieve, composer Gareth Farr, Seymour Centre, Jan 20-25; Royal Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece, writer William Shakespeare, adaptation Eliza Freestone (director), Feargal Murray (composer), Camille O’Sullivan (performer, composer), design Lily Arnold, lighting Vince Herbert, Seymour Centre, Jan 22-25; Ensemble Offspring, Ligeti Morphed, violins Veronique Serret, Anna McMichael, percussion Claire Edwardes, Bree van Reyk, turntables Martin Ng, Electronic guitar Oren Ambarchi, Carriageworks, Jan 11-13; Sacre—The Rite of Spring, concept Raimund Hoghe, choreography & dance Raimund Hoghe , Lorenzo De Brabandere, pianos Guy Vandromme, Alain Franco, Carriageworks, Jan 5-8; Erth, murder, concept, direction Scott Wright, writer Raimondo Cortese, performers Graeme Rhodes, Rod Primrose, Michelle Robin Anderson, Gavin Clarke, Katina Olsen, design Steve Howarth and Erth Studio, sound, lighting design Phil Downing, choreography Kate Champion, puppetry director Rod Primrose, Seymour Centre, Sydney, Jan 5-19
BIG SPECTACLES CALL FOR BIG DREAMS, AND OFTEN THEY DEMAND BIG RISKS TOO; THIS AS ARTISTS WE INSTINCTIVELY KNOW. IT’S CLEAR THAT BIG DREAMS WERE AT THE HEART OF THE COLONY, THE FIRST WORK FROM FAR NORTH QUEENSLAND’S NEWLY ESTABLISHED CENTRE FOR AUSTRALASIAN THEATRE.
An ambitious concoction of dance, live sound, film and spoken word, The Colony presents the last days of a group of lepers shipped to a nameless tropical island on the periphery of mainstream society. The text, by Sydney-based writer Graham Henderson, explores humanity’s big-ticket items—love, death and the influence on our lives of the natural world.
In the beginning things look promising. Patterns radiating on the slick wet stage suggest the comforting constancy of the tide. In the lighting design is all the sultriness of the tropics, shot through with overripe yellows and reds. A cast of gloriously dishevelled figures melt through their final days, led shambolically by a man called Hamlet, a chronic journal writer. He is cared for by the other inhabitants, including a minstrel, a ghost and a woman named Christmas, until the day he finds himself “in that baroque room at the end of time.”
The performers are clad in exquisite rags created by Australian fashion legend Linda Jackson. The costumes seem to have been made by the earth and the sea, and something more intangible, placing us in a sort of anytime. The colonised folk shelter together in a structure of ghost net and marine debris (by Aurukun artists Mavis Ngallametta and Craig Koomeeta, with Guy and Gina Allain), evoking the impermanence of the inhabitants’ make-do world; their disturbing temporality.
Visually it is all quite stunning, yet when the performers speak and the action unfolds there is a disconnect between characters and dialogue and each other. No one seems to quite know what to do with themselves, or where they are going. There is a fair amount of moping and flinging about of bandages and from time to time someone dies. The character of Irina, a ghost, appears at times to be haunting a different show. More Elvira than White Lady, she delivers soundscape pitch perfect to the north, featuring both curlew cries and gecko chitchat, but it remains unclear what she means to Hamlet.
In a random dance segue (by choreographer Catherine Hassall), a kind of spaced-out, hippy groove sesh, everyone ends up on the floor. Even the ghost gets down with it, and it is a relief to learn that the characters have a sense of humour. Finally, albeit briefly, the audience has been let into the work. This is a show laden with meaningfullness; it’s just difficult to figure out which particular meaning to latch onto. The many ideas swim, wave and drown, each of them unresolved.
It is the character of Christmas who perhaps gives us the best entry point, referring to individual existence as “our small eternity.” Here we are reminded of the contradictory elements that make up our existence—things like beauty, grief and wonder, and how our slow crawl towards the inevitable may be perceived as simply the colouring-in of time.
The signs were all pointing to something big, something breathtaking even, but somehow the parts didn’t add up to the whole. Yet I hope the makers of The Colony continue on their journey; big dreams are wonderful things and only by testing them out in reality may we truly see what is possible.
Centre for Australasian Theatre, The Colony, writer Graham Henderson, director Guillame ‘Willem’ Brugman, ART Ensemble: Warren Clements, Piers Freeman, Srianjali Gunasena, Catherine Hassall, Sue Hayes, Jeremiah Johnson, Miyako Masaki, Kara Ross, costumes Linda Jackson, sound Jeremiah Johnson, Nigel Pegrum, scenography Guy & Gina Allain with Mavis Ngallametta and Craig Koomeeta, film Savannah Productions; JUTE Theatre, Centre of Contemporary Arts, Cairns, Nov 16-23
This article originally appeared as part of RealTime’s online e-dition Jan 30, 2013
YOU HAVE ARRIVED HERE BECAUSE YOU USED GOOGLE TO SEARCH FOR “HYPNAGOGIC” AND “HAUNTOLOGICAL.” I WRITE THIS BECAUSE I AM A MEME WITHIN THE FILM BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO. I’VE HACKED THE FILM TO TRACE HOW ITS MODISH DIRECTION AND PRODUCTION IS BORN OF VOGUISH TERMS LIKE “HYPNAGOGIC” AND “HAUNTOLOGICAL” (HEREIN CONFLATED AS HYPNO-HAUNTO DESPITE THEIR DIFFERING ORIGINATIONS).
What is this film about? If one accepts its hypno-haunto inclination, it’s a dual text. One, a dream-narrative about Peter, 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.
Under hypno-haunto logic, the film fetishises the iconography and sonography of generic Library Music produced across the 60s and 70s—some of it wacky, some of it decidedly experimental. Its initial recouping came via the late 90s post-Lounge trend when European labels like Cinevox, La Douce, Plastic, Dagored and Crippled Dick uncrated rare/dismissed tracks from Italian movies, TV shows and Library Music companies. Groovy lounge music—additionally from British Library Music companies like Bosworth, Chappell and Southern—consequently formed a luridly dank sonic bed in much UK music. Berberian Sound Studio sleeps there too.
It’s a thoroughly saturated aural realm, created equally by hipsters and exploiters, sampling and processing aurally distinctive fragments and textures to signify a type of Cool Britannia re-plugging into a recent cultural past. If there are defining parameters to the hypno-haunto ethos, they are aligned to such ‘acts of listening’ wherein one identifies that something is being appropriated (though not quoted)—but so that one experiences its origins as vaguely remembered events, even though the listener is likely not to have heard the original sounds, only their redistribution through other acts of sampling and versioning. Its value as evocation supersedes its value as specification, hence the sensation of feeling the past’s incursive lay of the present via a haunting refrain.
Berberian Sound Studio
And that’s precisely why Berbian Sound Studio is an example of ‘hauntological cinema.’ It’s littered with affected allusions towards said iconographies/sonographies from Italian giallo movies, British educational docos and groovy film scores from both Italy and England (here ‘hypnagogically’ collapsed through the atmospheric renderings by British duo Broadcast). But as much as I like the cultural library the film unracks—as well as the broad sweep of artists abstractly exploring these tendencies, from Boards of Canada to Mogwai to Broadcast to Pole to Actress, and great re-issue labels like Scamp, Trunk and Lo Recordings—the film does not move past the denotative position of ticking already validated checkboxes.
Most perplexing is how the film declares its love of the era and its artefacts (through well-researched fawning over Shears ¼-inch tape boxes, a Space Echo Tape machine etc) while curiously annulling the power with which those artefacts helped shape both experimental music and film scores. Berbian Sound Studio’s press kit has a telling line: “Santini’s (the movie’s fictional director) The Equestrian Vortex may be a schlocky giallo slasher, a classic horror, but Peter’s Berberian Sound Studio has a more absorbing, hauntological bent.” I read this after seeing the film, but found that it illustrates much of what the film illuminates for me: namely, a subtextual clash between stiff, uptight, prissy, picky, train-spotting Anglophilia and bombastic, gaudy, sensual, erotic, rapacious culture Italian-style. Yes, that’s the conflict between the film’s central characters, but the film’s shoehorning of contemporary notions of misogyny, sexploitation and B-grade categorisation ignores the fucked-up sexual terror which defines giallo and qualifies how the likes of Morricone (in Bird With The Crystal Plumage) and Goblin (in Suspiria) approached their wonderfully vicious soundtracking. Make no mistake: this film is more Harold Pinter than Lucio Fulci.
But Berberian Sound Studio should be well-liked by an Anglo ‘hypno-haunto’ audience. Retro technology abounds; it’s got a kinda Lynchian feel about it (signposted by its Mulholland Drive/Lost Highway midway dimensional inversion); it extols an ethical aversion to screen violence; the special effects evoke 60s radical cinema you can flip through on ubuweb; and further exhaustive online research for 30 minutes will lead you to single paragraph blogs with Wikipedia-links to Lucio Berio, Cathy Berberian, Dario Argento and Mario Bava. After that you’ll end up here at this review, because you used Google to search for “hypnagogic” and “hauntological.”
Narelle Benjamin, Julie-Anne Long, Something in the Way She Moves
photo Heidrun Löhr
Narelle Benjamin, Julie-Anne Long, Something in the Way She Moves
I HAVEN’T SEEN JULIE-ANNE LONG’S INVISIBILITY PROJECT IN ACTION UNTIL NOW. PERHAPS THAT’S WHY THE SIGHT OF HER TAKES ME BY SUCH SURPRISE. WATCHING A PRE-SHOW EVENT IN THE CARRIAGEWORKS FOYER, MY GAZE DRIFTS AND I SEE LONG STANDING SOLEMNLY IN ORANGE HAT, LONGISH SKIRT AND HI-VIS VEST, CLEANING FLUFF OFF THE FLOOR AND COLLECTING IT IN A BUCKET. SOME ONLOOKERS NOTICE HER, OTHERS DON’T. IT OCCURS TO ME THAT, IF I DIDN’T KNOW WHO I WAS HERE TO SEE, I MIGHT NOT HAVE NOTICED HER EITHER.
Later, seated in Track 8 with the huge doors flung open, we hear a car blasting Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” screech to a halt outside. Car doors slam and a tired but determined looking Long strides into the room. She hauls recyclable shopping bags full of groceries around the perimeter of an expansive pink square of carpet and places them next to a neatly stacked pantry. Not far behind her is her sidekick, Narelle Benjamin, also hauling shopping bags and sporting a crocheted onesie. Car emptied and doors closed, Long moves to a table in the middle of the carpet and makes packed lunches, buttering bread to the music.
There is something about the Whitney Houston song that makes it impossible for me to sit still—or stop wriggling in my seat. It is the sort of music I just have to dance to. It seems that Long can’t resist the music either. As it grows louder and fills the space her buttering movements elongate, warp and are eventually abandoned for lively, hip-swinging dance breaks.
Julie-Anne Long, Narelle Benjamin, Something in the Way She Moves
photo Heidrun Löhr
Julie-Anne Long, Narelle Benjamin, Something in the Way She Moves
As she moves from buttering to other household tasks, her dances become increasingly radical transformations. Taking on a sort of sexual ferocity, in the midst of washing dishes, she wraps a tea towel around her head like a mask (I think of Ned Kelly) and charges about the space, beating her arms behind her like fins. Repeatedly she takes a wide stance and wipes her hands from her groin up over her hips in an emphatic V-shape.
In a later interlude she pulls a sheer nylon stocking over her head, followed by a red net—the sort you buy oranges in. She thrusts her pelvis to the music and rolls luxuriously around on the floor; repeats the V-shape, rubbing her hands across her belly and circling her breasts.
The phone rings. It’s a smartphone. Long holds it at arm’s length and squints at it for a moment before finding her way into the call. We laugh, delighted at the recognisable grimace. I gather that she is speaking to a partner who is promising to come home from work… soon. This first of three calls seems to conclude with phone sex, an exchange that feels more like a light-hearted, charitable gesture than any lustful experience on Long’s part, and elicits hoots of laughter from the audience.
Throughout this trajectory Benjamin remains quietly, if sometimes comically, present in the space, stepping in for support when needed. She helps hang out a bedsheet, for example, upon which a video projection will depict Long frolicking naughtily in bed with a young stud, interspersed with the seduction scene from the Mike Nichols’ film The Graduate (1967).
Eventually the stage is quiet. Standing under a single spotlight in nothing but a white slip, Long presents herself in stillness to the audience. Time expands. I am able to look over her flesh, to let my eyes linger. Gradually it dawns on me that I am seeing more than just the bright and bubbly side of this woman tonight. I am seeing something serious, too. I feel that I am being let into something that is real, and quite private.
Julie-Anne Long, Something in the Way She Moves
photo Heidrun Löhr
Julie-Anne Long, Something in the Way She Moves
As she moves on to don an elegant black dress and dance under dimmed, star-shaped lights—a sort of closing dance—I am flooded with a mix of emotions. I find myself close to tears as I watch her pendulum-like movement, limbs and upper body swinging with such ease.
Something In The Way She Moves works from the idea that sometimes women become invisible, be it because of visions of ‘successful womanhood’ that persist in our cultural consciousness, rendering certain women more visible than others, or because of the everyday realities of adult life that cause a woman to prioritise the needs of parents, partner or children over other pursuits.
Yet this performance doesn’t so much mourn invisibility as simply acknowledge that it happens. It playfully illuminates both difficult and ecstatic moments within invisible experience, paying special attention to the possibilities and dignities that persist in that context. Yes, we can know ourselves to be wildcats, bombshells, oracles…even when the wider world doesn’t see it so clearly.
Performance Space, Sexes: Julie-Anne Long, Something In The Way She Moves: everyday dances for an invisible woman, created and performed by Julie-Anne Long, co-performer Narelle Benjamin, lighting Karen Norris, production management Clytie Smith, sound mix Gail Priest, Mrs Robinson video projection Sam James, video co-performer Matt Prest, other collaborators Deborah Kelly, Caroline Downs; Carriageworks, Sydney, Nov 14-17, 2012
This article originally appeared as part of RealTime’s online e-dition Jan 30, 2013
Welcome to the new-style in the loop. Less chatter and more art, but RT’s in the loop listings continue to be selected for their potential to excite, challenge, inspire and innovate (and because they piqued our curious-kitty natures). Read on to stay informed about interesting events in your part of the world as well as action around the country and overseas.
cementa, kandos nsw
Fiona Kemp, Lap Lane, site-specific work of a 46mx20cmx10cm trough embedded into the ground, coloured chlorine blue and filled with water
courtesy the artist
Fiona Kemp, Lap Lane, site-specific work of a 46mx20cmx10cm trough embedded into the ground, coloured chlorine blue and filled with water
Fancy an art intensive weekend in the country? Try Cementa, taking place at Kandos around three and half hours’ drive from Sydney in central NSW. Co-curated by Ann Finegan, Alex Wisser and Georgina Pollard, Cementa will present over 40 artists in and around the town, which until recently was a thriving hub of cement manufacture. It’s an impressive collection of artists, both established and emerging, offering video, installation, sound, 2 and 3D works. Artists include Josephine Starrs & Leon Cmielewski, David Haines & Joyce Hinterding, Sarah Goffman, Cigdem Aydemir, Sue Pedley & Virginia Hilyard, Mark Brown, David Capra, Pia Van Gelder and Alex White. Each day will feature walking and cycling tours to make sure you don’t miss a thing. Cementa, Feb 1-4, Kandos, NSW, various venues, http://cementa13.com/
<a name="transmute" id="“>
the transmuted signal, frequency oz
Curated by Colin Black and produced by Yanna Black, The Transmuted Signal is a radio series presented on air and streamed online via Kunstradio (ORF, Austria). Black himself and Philip Samartzis, Cat Hope, Nigel Helyer, Lizzie Pogson, Melanie Herbert and Entoptic will “transmute” a visual image into an audio-only work. “Each work follows an evolution of media from hand written symbols to audio technologies, broadcast technologies and the internet via live audio streams and podcasts” (press release). The Transmuted Signal, broadcast on air and online Feb 3 & 10, and March 3 & 10, 2013; www.kunstradio.at; www.frequencyoz.com
wim vandekeybus, ultima vez, adelaide festival
What the Body Does Not Remember, Ultima Vez
photo Octavio Iturbe
What the Body Does Not Remember, Ultima Vez
Jana Perkovic, covering ImPulsTanz 2008 in Vienna for RealTime, wrote “Even the standing room only tickets have sold out, and the raging mass of disappointed kids looks like they may start a riot: the atmosphere before Ultima Vez’s performance is akin to a rock concert. Choreographer superstar Wim Vandekeybus’ company has toured the world with their trademark vocabulary of acrobatic, extreme, often violent movement, soaked in multimedia and energetic music ” (RT87). The Flemish dancer and choreographer Vandekeybus, who appeared in Jan Fabre’s legendary The Power of Theatrical Madness (1984), has revived his 1987 classic What The Body Does Not Remember for an international tour which will bring the work to the 2013 Adelaide Festival and the company’s much anticipated first visit to Australia (and only to Adelaide). Vandekeybus and the composers Thierry De Mey and Peter Vermeersch won a much-prized Bessie Award in New York for the work which was then described as “a brutal confrontation of dance and music: [a] dangerous, combative landscape.” See an excerpt of Ultima Vez in performance at http://www.adelaidefestival.com.au/2013/dance/what_the_body_does_not_remember and glimpses of other works and a complete film on YouTube.
soundout festival, canberra
Now an established part of the summer improv wave that sweeps across the eastern states, SoundOut returns (with funding this year) for an intense weekend of “Free Improvisational, Free Jazz and Experimental Music” (press release). International guests include Abaetetuba Collective (Brazil/Switzerland), Barcode Quartet (Austria/UK), Hermione Johnson (NZ) Jeff Henderson (NZ) along with Charity Chan (Canada). Australian talent includes the Stasis Duo, Mike Majkowski, Alison Plevey and Reuben Ingalls, Jon Rose, Michael Norris and festival director Richard Johnson. SoundOut, Feb 2-3, 2013, Theatre 3, Canberra; http://soundout2013.blogspot.com.au/
blak nite cinema
The Wrong Side of the Road, Blak Nite Cinema
This three-day festival explores “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander visual arts, hip hop and country music, traditional and contemporary dance, theatre and the performing arts through film” (press release). As well as feature films Bran Nu Dae and The Sapphires there’s a great program of impressive documentaries. Blak Nite Cinema, presented by the City of Melbourne, ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image), Federation Square;, Feb 8-10; http://www.thatsmelbourne.com.au/Whatson/blaknite/Pages/BlakNite.aspx
gasp, tasmania
Susan Phillipsz at GASP, photo Rob Harrison; GASP landscapes, photos Pippa Dickson
Tasmania is currently punching above its weight in cultural output. Another venture, Glenorchy Arts and Sculpture Park (GASP), is an impressive addition to the cultural landscape in which The Museum of Old and New Art figures so prominently. The park occupies the public land from Wilkinson’s Point to Montrose Bay on the Elwick Bay foreshore, 10 minutes north of Hobart. The main feature of the park is the architect-designed boardwalk by Room 11 spanning 600 metres of river. For their first permanent commission, GASP asked Scottish artist and 2010 Turner Prize winner Susan Philipsz to create a work for the bridge. The resulting sound installation, The Waters Twine (which takes its inspiration from James Joyce’s 1929 audio-recording of Finnegans Wake), was launched during the MONA FOMA music festival. It will be presented again at various times across the year so stay tuned. Stage 2 of the park is currently underway and due for completion in April 2013. Glenorchy Arts and Sculpture Park (GASP), http://gasp.org.au/
digital media month, colour box studio
Layla Vardo, Cromlech “a kind of burial mound in observance of the death of analogue television” (artist statement)
Colour Box Studio is a pop up multifunctional artspace that opened in November 2012 in Footscray. “The space will change month to month to showcase Melbourne’s creative community and represent a diverse range of artists, creative people and artforms” (website). Over February it celebrates all things digital with an exhibition curated by William Head featuring major works by Layla Vardo and Ka-Yin Kwok, an extensive screening program focusing on non-fiction and more. The space was founded by filmmaker Amie Batalibasi and also offers workshops ranging from photography to web design. Colour Box Digital Media Exhibition, Footscray, Jan 16-Feb 27, 2013; http://colourboxstudio.com/
international: the dark universe, sonic acts festival amsterdam
HC Gilje, Revolver, installation at the opening of The Dark Universe Exhibition
photo Pieter Kers
HC Gilje, Revolver, installation at the opening of The Dark Universe Exhibition
For some serious sound art fare/fair, there’s the upcoming Sonic Acts Festival in Amsterdam, this year titled The Dark Universe, investigating “how to make the invisible imaginable, teach us how to embrace the unknown, and guide us through the dark universe” (press release). The exhibition has already commenced at NASA: New Art Space Amsterdam and will be complemented by three nights of performance and talks. The impressive roster of musicians and audiovisual artists includes Maja Solveig Kjelstrup Ratke & HC Gilje, Jacob Kirkegaard, Makino Takashi, Mika Vaino, Biosphere, Lustmord, Tina Frank and Cut Hands (William Bennett). Sonic Acts: The Dark Universe, Feb 21-24, 2013, exhibition open now; http://2013.sonicacts.com/
Auspiciously the 2013 In Between Time Festival in Bristol will take place not under one but two full moons. There’s the real one, perhaps difficult to glimpse in the February gloom, and then there’s Simon Faithfull’s Fake Moon, ready to pick up nature’s slack. Based on the College Green, Faithfull will send aloft a helium balloon fitted with its own illumination and each night of the festivities it will make its way across the Bristol skyline.
In fact for a festival in a Northern Hemisphere February, IBT13 offers quite a number of outdoor activities, challenging the brave to rug up and tough it out to experience art’s liveness. In The Woods, Norwegian group Night Tripper will take their audience on a walk through the wintery forest to experience a magical concert exploring animistic myths and voodoo rituals and said to feature an invisible choir. With more of an urban feel, Carmine Mauro Daprile’s The Moon will use “cosplayers”—people who dress up as their favourite cartoon characters (particularly from manga and anime)—to render the everyday environment strange and wonderful (exact location in Bristol’s CBD yet to be divulged).
Zierle & Carter & Chamber Made Opera, Living Room Opera: Between Lands and Longings, IBT13
photo Alan Warren
Zierle & Carter & Chamber Made Opera, Living Room Opera: Between Lands and Longings, IBT13
However, for the weak willed and easily chilled there are plenty of indoor wonders as well. Melbourne’s Chamber Made Opera have been commissioned to create one of their boutique living room operas with Cornwall-based artists Zierle and Carter (see previous review). Titled Between Lands and Longings it will explore ideas of home, displacement and migration. (See RT101 for a review of previous living room operas, and RT108 for an interview with CMO director David Young.)
Victor Riebeek and Florentina Holzinger, Kein Applaus für Scheisse, IBT13
photo Nellie de Boer
Victor Riebeek and Florentina Holzinger, Kein Applaus für Scheisse, IBT13
There’s also a range of performances in more conventional theatre spaces, not that this means conventional theatre fare. From Amsterdam comes Victor Riebeek and Florentina Holzinger with what we are told is a flagrantly boundary-pushing exploration of contemporary pop culture—Kein Applaus Für Scheisse (no applause for shit)—which features “an elusive mix of dance, trashy pop, theatre, roller skating, acrobatics and love” (program). English ensemble Reckless Sleepers will perform A String Section—five women, five wooden chairs and five handsaws—you might be able to imagine how that will end. (After appearing in Brisbane’s World Theatre Festival, Reckless Sleepers will appear in February at Performance Space, Sydney in the Last Supper (http://www.performancespace.com.au/2012/the-last-supper/). There’s also Italian physical theatre company Motus’ whose piece Too Late! (Antigone) Contest #2 is a re-interpretation of the Sophocles classic. And the provocative Glaswegian performance artist Nic Green explores her relationship with her father and her native Scotland in Fatherland.
Coney, Early Days (Of a Better Nation), IBT13
photo courtesy the artists
Coney, Early Days (Of a Better Nation), IBT13
Looking particularly enigmatic is Early Days (Of a Better Nation) by performance group Coney, which invites the audience in as players in a large-scale interactive video performance exploring what happens now after the heady optimism of the people-led upheavals of the Arab Spring and the Occupy movements has settled.
No live art festival is complete without a one-on-one performance, and here it is provided by IBT Associate Artist Jo Bannon with Dead Line, in which you are invited to have a private phone conversation confronting your own mortality. Nor should a festival be without a workshop; for IBT13 it is literally that—in Worktable, Kate McIntosh invites visitors to don goggles and wield tools to make something new from something broken.
There’s also an exhibition at Arnolfini titled Version Control which explores performance not “solely as a ‘live’ activity” but as a method of “making the past present” (program). The exhibition features Amalia Pica, Tim Etchells, Felix Gmelin, Andy Holden, Rabih Mroué and includes video, painting, drawing and sculpture with performative interventions. The opening night of the exhibition will feature Tim Etchell’s Untitled (After Violent Incident) in which he recreates Bruce Nauman’s 12-screen installation Violent Incident using a combination of texts on screens with footage of dancer Wendy Houstoun reenacting the slapstick content. Houston will also perform live on the opening night.
And of course there’s much more, including pavements of gold (Pete Barrett), peripheral visions (Alex Bradley) and fireworks (festival director Helen Cole) and a horsey themed final party which is rumored to involve 5000 My Little Ponies. But if you can’t make it to Bristol, don’t despair. RealTime will be offering up meaty coverage by Tim Atack, Osunwunmi and Niki Russell, alumni of our 2006 IBT writer workshop, as part of our RT114 “festivals” edition.
In Between Time 13: International Festival of Performance, produced by IBT in association with Arnolfini, director Helen Cole; Bristol, various venues; Feb 14-17, 2013, exhibition Feb 2-April 14; http://ibt13.co.uk/
Festival director Noel Staunton has announced David Berthold as the independent performance curator for the 2013 Brisbane Festival. Berthold has issued a callout for independent productions including installation and site-specific works. Funding from $1,000-$10,000 will be allocated to the chosen works. Applications due March 8, 2013; http://www.brisbanefestival.com.au/
2013 icmc, edith cowan university
The International Computer Music Conference for 2013 will be hosted by Edith Cowan University (WA) incorporating the Australasian Computer Music Conference and taking place simultaneously with TURA’s Totally Huge Music Festival. The theme for this year’s conference is International Developments in ElectroAcoustics (IDEA). Submissions are now open for papers, demonstrations, studio reports performances and more. Deadline for papers & works Feb 11, 2013; ICMC Aug 12-16, 2013; http://icmc2013.com.au/
bayside artists-in-residence
Bayside City Council in Melbourne’s southern suburbs is offering four 12-month residencies in the historic Billilla Mansion in Brighton. The residencies are open to visual artists, writers, composers and multimedia artists. Applications close March 29 2013; http://www.bayside.vic.gov.au/arts_artist_in_residence_program.htm
chippendale new world art prize
Chippendale Creative Precinct (CCP) has announced a new art prize/residency to the value of $10,000, one awarded each year for the next 10 years (thanks to a very generous private donor). The residency is at the Red Gate Gallery in Beijing, July-September 2013, with the resulting work exhibited at the NG Art Gallery, Chippendale in 2014. Each year the prize will have a different theme: for 2013 it’s ‘revitalisation.’ Applications close April 16, 2013; http://chippendalecreative.com/art-prize/
western australia contemporary dance initiative
Now in its second year the Australia Council Dance Board’s three-year Western Australia Contemporary Dance Initiative seeks to “develop the contemporary dance sector in Western Australia. It aims to build on existing activity and funding in the sector and to encourage artists to take time to develop a work through its life cycle” (website). Open to individuals and companies in WA applications can include one or more development stages of a work. Funding can be up to $50,000. Applications due Feb 8, 2013; http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/grants/2013/western-australian-contemporary-dance-initiative
horror filmmaking bootcamp, hobart
For Tasmanian locals and those inclined to boldly travel to the apple isle there’s a weekend Horror Filmmaking Bootcamp taking place in Hobart, Feb 2-3. You’ll be able to learn make-up special effects, the basics of screen acting and a little bit about music and sound for horror. This is all particularly useful if you are thinking of entering the 48hour Tasploitation Challenge the following weekend where you can try your hand at whipping up your own splatter masterpiece. A selection of the best films will then be screened at the Stranger with my Face Horror Film festival in March. Bootcamp, Feb 2-3, http://strangerwithmyface.com/48hour/horror-filmmaking-boot-camp; 48Hr Tasploitation Challenge, Feb 8-10; http://strangerwithmyface.com/48hour/; Stranger with My Face Festival, March 7-10, http://strangerwithmyface.com/
borough of queenscliffe’s 150th anniversary art awards
The Borough of Queenscliffe is an hour and half’s drive south west of Melbourne on the Bellarine Peninsula. To celebrate 150 years of settlement the council is offering several art prizes: an Open Art Acquisitive Award of $5,000; a Print Making Award of $500; and a People’s Choice Award of $500. The prizes are open to artists from across Australia and shortlisted works will be exhibited in local galleries Salt Contemporary Art, Seaview Gallery and Tussock Upstairs in May. Entries close March 13, 2013; http://www.queenscliffe.vic.gov.au/boq_150th_anniversary.php
Keith Gallasch talks with Matthew Whittet who wrote and performed in Windmill Theatre’s School Dance (directed by Rosemary Myers) presented at the Sydney Theatre Company in association with Sydney Festival.
School dance 2013 tour
Sydney: January 10-February 3, 2013
Sydney Theatre Company and Sydney Festival
Wollongong: February 7-9, 2013
Merrigong Theatre Company, Illawarra Performing Arts Centre
Melbourne: April 10-20, 2013
Arts Centre Melbourne
Brisbane: July 31-August 3, 2013
Brisbane Powerhouse
Bang on a Can All-Stars, The Composers 2: John Cage Centenary Celebrations, Sydney Opera House
photo Jamie Williams
Bang on a Can All-Stars, The Composers 2: John Cage Centenary Celebrations, Sydney Opera House
PERMISSION GRANTED, THE LAST OF THREE CONCERTS CELEBRATING COMPOSER JOHN CAGE’S CENTENARY AT THE SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE, WAS A THRILLING EXPERIENCE, ENGAGING A DIVERSE AUDIENCE WITH BANG ON A CAN ALL-STARS’ TRADEMARK, CHATTY INTIMACY AND THEIR POWERFUL, TAUT ENSEMBLE PLAYING, AT TIMES WITH ROCK BAND INTENSITY, A REMINDER OF THE WIDE SCOPE OF CAGE’S CULTURAL INFLUENCE.
The title was apt for a program that proved to be a shorthand if lateral exposition of certain aspects of the lineage of Cagean influence. Did John Cage beget Terry Riley and Riley beget Louis Andriessen, and Andriessen beget Australia’s Kate Moore?
As in any ecosystem, evolution is inevitably more complex; after all, none of the inheritors composes in the manner of Cage (is there even a style?) while Riley’s minimalism can be heard in Andriessen and Moore, if dramatically reconfigured and ruptured.
What Cage’s experimentation, his creations and his philosophising did was open up possibilities for the radical mutation of music, ‘classical’ and popular, in the second half of the 20th century, generating a richer musical biodiversity.
The world-wide John Cage (1912-1992) celebrations in 2012 of the artist’s 100th birthday acknowledged the man’s influence on generations of musicians, composers and audiences. His liberating departures from concert hall music, especially from serialism, included his engagement with new tools for composition (prepared piano, tape loops, amplification and contact microphones, electronics, the computer), performance with spoken text, an alertness to the power of silence, the invitation to the performer to become co-composer in the act of playing, the deployment of chance operations for composing and a philosophical disposition (influenced by Zen Buddhism and the music of the East) that saw music as integral to life rather than as stand alone art. Permission Granted presented exemplars of the Cage influence.
The concert opened with Cage’s 4’33” (1952), a respectful, quasi-religious moment (very quiet save for the ever loud hum of The Studio aircon) and closed with Terry Riley’s In C (1964) “the Sacre of musical minimalism,” in the words of Robert Carl in his exhaustive book on the work (Terry Riley’s In C, OUP, 2009). There was little if any overt silence after 4’33 in the ensuing, pulsing trio of works played with the Bang on a Can All-Stars’ amplified house-style vigour.
What Cage offered Riley, and which Riley merged with his dominant passion for Indian music and admiration for John Coltrane (among other jazz musicians), was a move away from harmonic structure to a focus on duration and cells of sound, allowing greater responsiveness to texture and timbre, revealing new sounds and rhythmic complexities. In C is a one-page score with a set of instructions that can be played by any number and kind of musicians (as in the Shanghai Film Orchestra version, a favourite of mine) with recognisable but very different outcomes since each musician has to make decisions about when to play and at what volume.
For In C, the six-strong Bang on a Can were joined by six members of Sydney’s Ensemble Offspring in a combination similar to the New York group’s 2001 CD of the work but without a pipa (sometimes called the Chinese lute). Realised by musicians ever alert to each other, the hour-long performance in The Studio was perpetually engaging, displaying a remarkable range of nuanced collective modulation, while individual voices and sudden pairings rose briefly above the communal pulse such that the weave of notes always remained whole, an embracing but ever changing mantra.
With minimalism, Terry Riley also granted many composers new freedoms, including not only Philip Glass and the phase-shifting Steve Reich, but also, to a degree, Louis Andriessen, the Dutch composer who had broken with serialism and experimented with tape in the 1960s. We can hear the insistent pulse of minimalism in Andriessen, but his work sounds much tougher, and louder, the repetitions chunkier, hovering on the edge of the dissonance that minimalism had tonally muted. Composer (and sometime Philip Glass assistant) Nico Muhly writes, “In 1975 Andriessen finished Workers’ Union, a pounding, relentless work for unspecified (but loud) ensemble. This is a piece at whose performances woodwind players have been known to bleed from the gums, a near-hysterical, blue-collar rant.” http://nicomuhly.com/projects/2007/notes-on-andriessen-wolfe-ziporyn/
Bang on a Can All-Stars, The Composers 2: John Cage Centenary Celebrations, Sydney Opera House
photo Jamie Williams
Bang on a Can All-Stars, The Composers 2: John Cage Centenary Celebrations, Sydney Opera House
About Workers’ Union, Andriessen wrote in 1990, “This piece is a combination of individual freedom and severe discipline: its rhythm is exactly fixed; the pitch, on the other hand, is indicated only approximately, on a single-lined stave. It is difficult to play in an ensemble and to remain in step, sort of thing like organising and carrying on political action.” Like Riley’s In C it can be realised in any number of ways. You can find substantially different versions by Bang on a Can and Ensemble Offspring on YouTube as well as by other ensembles large and small.
The Bang on a Can concert performance feels maximally percussive, from all the instruments, with a heavy, chugging pulse that suddenly accelerates, scaling up, almost like a collective stutter but with a riff-like cogency. Bass notes thud and the clarinet swoops and we’re back in the threatening groove of a kind of swirling unison. By the end the tightly bound ascents and flights veer thrillingly close to disintegration. It feels a long way from the neatness of American minimalism. It’s a stirring, raucous performance of an infectious work.
As for Andriessen’s influence, his students are composers as diverse as Kate Moore, Ensemble Offspring co-artistic director Damien Rickertson, Michel van der Aa, Yannis Kyriakides and Steve Martland among many others. Muhly writes, “While the influence of the American minimalists seems to be measurable by gestures—a Reichean rhythmic canon, a blissed-out Riley-esque drone, an eager Glassian arpeggio—one speaks about the ‘spirit’ of Andriessen being found in the music of the younger generations.” Perhaps then Andriessen’s influence is open-ended, like Cage’s. Muhly continues, “While it is difficult to pinpoint what exactly comprises this spirit, some key Andriessen emotional tricks include the strategic (as opposed to textural) use of repeated notes, a strong sense of community from within the orchestra (expressed by certain pairings of instruments always playing in unison), and an uncompromising rhythmic agenda.”
Bang on a Can All-Stars, The Composers 2: John Cage Centenary Celebrations, Sydney Opera House
photo Jamie Williams
Bang on a Can All-Stars, The Composers 2: John Cage Centenary Celebrations, Sydney Opera House
Kate Moore’s Ridgeway (2009; it can be heard on the band’s 2011 CD Big Beautiful Dark and Scary) reveals immediate kinship with Andriessen’s modernist-minimalist ‘model.’ Perhaps that’s because it comprises in this concert the same instrumentation and enjoys Bang on a Can’s distinctive approach. A brief program note by Moore describes the work as a reflection “on the landscape of my childhood and my memory,” as part of a search for a sense of place and identity. But this bracing work feels only occasionally reflective, the beating motifs, big and small, slipping exquisitely near in and out of sync, suggesting perhaps obsessive recall. Much more nuanced than Workers’ Union, Ridgeway nonetheless has a similar propulsive drive which can abruptly accelerate, erupting over gentle piano-vibe contemplations. Most haunting is the recurrent siren-like clarinet and string keening high above throbbing bass and pounding piano. Ridgeway is a memorable 12-minute epic that reveals but does not bow down to its inheritance.
While Permission Granted could only gesture at the complexity and duration of the Cage influence—limiting itself to two ‘sacred’ works (1952, 1964) and two exciting confirmations and departures (1975 and a leap to 2009)—it nonetheless was a concert at once contemplative and visceral, honouring an enduring heritage. The two other concerts—John Cage and his American Descendants and the Ambient Evolution (Cage and Brian Eno)—added further dimensions to our appreciation in this enthusiastically received exultation of lineage.
The Composers 2: John Cage, Centenary Celebration, Bang on a Can All-Stars with Ensemble Offspring, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, Nov 2, 3, 2012
Bang on a Can All-Stars, The Composers 2: John Cage Centenary Celebrations, Sydney Opera House
photo Jamie Williams
Bang on a Can All-Stars, The Composers 2: John Cage Centenary Celebrations, Sydney Opera House
IT SEEMS TOO EASY TO START THIS ARTICLE WITH A QUOTATION FROM JOHN CAGE—A BON MOT THAT LIKE A GOOD HAIKU SAYS SEEMINGLY NOTHING AND EVERYTHING. AND WHICH PEARL OF WISDOM TO CHOOSE? HE WROTE SO PROLIFICALLY.
The paradox of Cage is that, arguably, his writing is better appreciated than his music—I’d suggest he’s more often quoted than played. This situation was to some degree perpetuated by the Sydney Opera House’s John Cage Centenary Celebration presented by Bang on a Can All-Stars from New York, which offered a small selection of Cage musical experiences complemented by a rich collection of his utterances and philosophising.
john cage and his american descendants
This was exemplified by the first concert of the two-day mini festival, titled John Cage and his American Descendants, which opened with two pieces by Cage performed simultaneously: Indeterminacy from 1959, a collection of Cage’s texts to be spoken in differing orders; and Variations II from 1961, for any number of players producing sounds by “any means,” guided by a graphic score of dots and lines that can be arranged in an almost infinite number of permutations. The master of ceremonies, guitarist (and one of the founding members of the band) Mark Stewart, tells us that the players each have “rigorously prepared” their part separately but not yet together.
Bang on a Can All-Stars, The Composers 2: John Cage Centenary Celebrations, Sydney Opera House
photo Jamie Williams
Bang on a Can All-Stars, The Composers 2: John Cage Centenary Celebrations, Sydney Opera House
The next piece offers us even more of Cage’s wisdom, and better still, in his own voice. In An Open Cage, composer Florent Ghys took a recording of the man himself reading from the eighth part of Diary: How to improve the world (You will only make matters worse) and scored the ensemble parts according to the cadence of Cage’s voice. This technique can often result in abrupt and jagged, rhythmic figures, but Cage was a measured and lyrical speaker so the music develops a lilting edge within the uneven rhythms and phrases. This lyricism is ramped up and formalised by the middle of the piece where the text is subsumed completely and the piece finds its own jazzy rock style. It’s an interesting technique (one employed also to great effect by The Books) suggesting an embodied and material sense of the man and his words.
The remainder of the American Descendants concert consisted of works by three of the Bang on a Can All-Stars’ founding members (who were not present, the current touring party consisting of Stewart and musical guns for hire, and excellent marksmen at that). Sun Ray by David Lang delicately cycles unresolved phrases that shimmer like dappled light and gradually morph into an energising stabbing, syncopated conclusion. Michael Gordon’s For Madeleine, dedicated to his now deceased mother, juxtaposes a hovering piano line and long sweeping glissandi to create a quietly mournful incantation. Sometimes the insistent sliding notes feel like sirens, but increasingly ascend, leading to an ambiguous finale. It seems the filial relationship was a complicated one.
The concert concluded with Julia Wolfe’s Big, Beautiful, Dark and Scary, which true to its title starts at high energy and, like Gordon’s For Madeleine, it too revolves around ascending melodic phrases, this time creating a sense of both anxious and excited anticipation. It’s a piece that just gets gloriously bigger and bolder until it reaches a sustained cacophonous and utterly energising conclusion.
The pieces by the “American Descendants” are all rigorous and vigorous pieces of contemporary composition presenting challenges to even an experienced listener but also providing emotional touchstones, harmonic pleasure and metric rhythmic cohesion to satisfy a broader audience. How these pieces directly relate to Cagean techniques is not so clearly defined, except to say that everything after Cage has been undeniably affected by Cage’s philosophy, particularly his spirit of finding freedom within constraints.
ambient evolution
The second concert followed a similar format. First up was Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, a mid-career work written by Cage between 1946 and 1948 (earning him a Guggenheim Fellowship). While it has a strict mathematical structure and the preparations for piano are quite complicated, it dwells in far more harmonic territory than his later pieces and is inspired by his studies in Indian philosophy. The excerpted (and unidentified) sonatas and interludes occupy a tranquil and mesmerising zone of melodic fragments, the piano notes transformed by the string preparations into the soft metallic clangs of gamelan or deep reedy bamboo sounds, or broken music box tinkles. The Asian influence is strong in the harmonic choices and rhythmic repetitions with pianist Vicki Chow playing with a very delicate and lyrical touch to create a spellbinding experience.
Again, the program did not indicate which composed Improvisation Robert Black on bass and David Cossin on percussion were performing, but it exemplified the Cagean characteristics of instrumental parts existing on their own trajectory, little conscious layering and a disregard for transitions—here we see Cage concentrating on time as a container for actions and timbre rules over rhythm and harmony.
Bang on a Can All-Stars, The Composers 2: John Cage Centenary Celebrations, Sydney Opera House
photo Jamie Williams
Bang on a Can All-Stars, The Composers 2: John Cage Centenary Celebrations, Sydney Opera House
The connection between the Sonatas and Interludes and Brian Eno’s Music for Airports is evident. Eno is perhaps one of the few contemporary composers who can be compared to Cage in terms of the impact his Ambient music had on ideas of listening. Hearing the two works next to each other, their musical relationship is also clear, with both relying on a perceived simplicity, spaciousness and a kind of wandering cyclical structure. However Eno’s Music for Airports is like the extended mix—with each of his segments lasting 9-17 minutes—its very length creates the experience of floating and immersion. In his introduction to the piece Mark Stewart said that the music rewards both concentration and indifference and encouraged people to come and go from The Studio, however the audience remained in respectful concert mode for the almost 50-minute performance.
Each of the four movements of Eno’s work has been arranged by the founding members of Bang on a Can All-Stars: Michael Gordon, David Lang, Julia Wolfe and guest composer Evan Ziporyn. The live arrangements are faithful to the original, Eno’s pre-recorded instruments and electronic elements sensitively transposed to live piano, synthesiser, cello, bass, percussion, clarinet and guitar. What is necessarily different in the live interpretation is the sense of presence, not simply of the liveness of musicians, but the new instrumentation adds a three-dimensionality to the music which in original recording is deliberately planar. Seems it’s hard for these living, breathing musicians to emulate Eno’s intended flatness, their swells and crescendos (and by the end unabashed emotional inflections) resisting restraint and compression. This was in no way a bad thing, but rather an interesting testing of the threshold of ambience and expression.
Michaela Davies’ Involuntary Quartet, Musicircus, The Composers 2: John Cage Centenary Celebrations, Sydney Opera House
photo Jamie Williams
Michaela Davies’ Involuntary Quartet, Musicircus, The Composers 2: John Cage Centenary Celebrations, Sydney Opera House
musicircus
By the time we exited from the airport ambience, Musicircus was in full swing—a cacophonous shock to our tranquil state. Cage’s Musicircus is a “happening” of simultaneous musical expression first performed in 1967. Any number of performers including dancers, actors and lay-people can present just about any piece relevant or irrelevant to Cage. This gathering was well wrangled by Sydney’s Ensemble Offspring and featured a hula hooper, toy piano players, tin whistle tooters, turntablists, a large furry animal and even a 18-month-old child, as well as Offspring and Bang on a Can All-Stars members, with each music station offering a pertinent printed quotation from Cage (of course!). The spread of acts along the long narrow foyer outside The Studio made it seem more an expo than a circus but there was no less sense of joy and play. And while some performers simply plied their trade others offered some serious experimentation such as Michaela Davies’ Involuntary Quartet in which electro-muscle stimulators literally shocked the musicians into playing; or the performance by clarinettist Nathan Cloud who used the movement of audience members across the foyer’s large square tiles as his score. Cage would definitely have enjoyed the romp.
Musicircus, The Composers 2: John Cage Centenary Celebrations, Sydney Opera House
photo Jamie Williams
Musicircus, The Composers 2: John Cage Centenary Celebrations, Sydney Opera House
In fact the entire mini-festival had this tangible feeling of joy. While we only experienced a small sample of Cage’s actual musical output, we were well fed on his philosophy and spirit, which arguably is his lasting legacy. While I didn’t start with a quote, I’ll end with one from Brian Eno, as it encapsulates the idea of Cage’s oeuvre as being greater than the sum of its musical parts:
“In [Cage’s] case, composition was a way of living out a philosophy and calling it art” (program note).
This celebration reminded us that we have permission to do the same.
The Composers 2: John Cage, Bang on a Can Allstars, Ashley Bathgate, Robert Black, Vicky Chow, David Cossin, Mark Stewart, Ken Thomson; with Ensemble Offspring; The Studio, Sydney Opera House; November 2-3, 2012
Robert Walton, enjoying afternoon tea at The Butterfly and The Pig
courtesy the writer
Robert Walton, enjoying afternoon tea at The Butterfly and The Pig
reason for travelling
Returning, for the first time since emigrating Down Under, to the city where I lived for 10 years to catch up with friends and family, and celebrate Hogmanay (New Year’s Eve).
viva glasvegas
Glasgow was the inaugural European City of Culture in 1990 and remains a hot(gritty)bed for all the arts, punching well above its weight with major artists (including the 2009, 2010 and 2011 Turner Prize winners), bands and big ideas. Though only separated by 70kms centre to centre from Edinburgh, there seems no end to the rivalrous banter between the posh, ancient, touristy and better-looking capital and Scotland’s larger, harder-working, catalytic, slightly dangerous, sardonic cultural powerhouse, Glasgow.
A throng of traffic wardens huddle together in a frozen Queens Park
photo Robert Walton
A throng of traffic wardens huddle together in a frozen Queens Park
I cringe at using “cultural” as Scotland is so caught up in its own distinctiveness from England and its proud history (and there’s lots to be proud of) that everything can become a little tartan-tinted. But Glasgow bucks that trend by looking outward and is genuinely awash with contemporary, vivid and living culture. That’s why I lived there for a decade and why so many artists stay despite the weather, the history of violence, the areas of abject poverty and, let’s face it, the food, but that, at least, is getting better. You can get stuff done there, enjoy the banter and wicked humour, it’s cheap to live, and the housing (lots of grand Victorian tenements) are great to live in. Glasgow is also an exciting place to visit.
dear green place
Glasgow in Gaelic is Glas-ghu, meaning ‘dear green place.’ It’s great all year round, but spring into summer is my favourite time. Yes it can be cold, but wrap-up under the bright blue sky and go for a walk around the beautiful Victorian city centre and creepy Necropolis, or Queens Park and Shawlands on the Southside, or Kelvingrove Park, The Botanical Gardens and Byers Road in the Westend.
Kelvingrove Museum is the most visited in the UK outside of London and is worth a visit. It is the best exponent of those great British city museums that seem to have one of everything and something for everyone. Enjoy the mix of classy taxidermy and an eclectic art collection including the stunning Christ of Saint John of the Cross by Salvador Dalí. Like all of Glasgow’s museums, Kelvingrove is free to enter.
The taxidermied badger cub at Kelvingrove Museum (the badger is the UK’s largest native carnivorous land mammal)
photo Robert Walton
The taxidermied badger cub at Kelvingrove Museum (the badger is the UK’s largest native carnivorous land mammal)
When in the city centre, visit the Glasgow Museum of Modern Art (GoMA) and the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA http://www.cca-glasgow.com/home). Further out, but worth visiting are the new Riverside Museum and The Burrell Collection.
Tramway, on the Southside, is a vast visual arts and performance venue that you should definitely make the effort to visit. Home of some of the best work I have ever seen, this venue programs the best of international theatre and dance. The Turner Prize will be held here in 2015. Call ahead to check whether there is something on before making the trip South of the river; sometimes it is dark between shows.
The Arches, a cavernous super-venue underneath Central Station, is the place to find Glasgow’s extraordinary performance and experimental theatre scene. Like a bunker for the arts, the warren of theatres, galleries and bars comes alive when fully utilised during festivals like Behaviour and Arches Live. It’s also a great live music and clubbing venue.
Buchanan Street in winter, Glasgow
photo Robert Walton
Buchanan Street in winter, Glasgow
The emerging arts are what it’s all about in Glasgow. The Glasgow School of Art (GSA) and The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS) have a lot of good to answer for. Their students graduate and stay, and the amazing artist-run galleries (Transmission, Market Gallery, SWG3 etc.) and performance festivals—Buzzcut, Into The New etc—are a testament to these institutions as well as the city. Thus it is worth checking out the degree shows of the GSA and RCS if you are around in June and January respectively.
for a wee swally (drinky)…
…head directly to Stravaigin, the iconic Glasgow bar and eatery, for excellent locally sourced food, roaring fire and fine cocktails, whisky and beer. This is the best place to try haggis. There is no shortage of fine bars and pubs in Glasgow. If you can’t pick one, try them all.
In the city centre, check out Stereo on Renfield Lane which has a great selection of beers, vegetarian food and gigs downstairs. Up on Bath Street, The Butterfly and The Pig serves amazing cakes upstairs during the day and is a great pub downstairs at night, also with good food.
For dancing head to The Buff Club or see if there’s something more exciting happening at SWG3.
At the end of the night it is tradition to stand in the taxi cue at Central Station for an hour, cold and a little scared, but enjoying the banter, outrageous clothing and jovial atmosphere.
Cold nymphs frolic at the edge of the city
photo Robert Walton
Cold nymphs frolic at the edge of the city
for sleeping…
CitizenM is a concept hotel that is pretty comfy and very central. The Brunswick Hotel in the lovely Merchant City is nicer, with a great tapas bar, and often gigs and parties. Nicest of all is One Devonshire Gardens, in the West End, but it’s pricey—great for a special occasion though.
haste ye back
If you are staying more than a few days it is well worth making the pilgrimage to Loch Lomond; it’s not far and you can get there by train. If you have a car try exploring the eastern bank—less busy and more beautiful. A trip to Oban or The Isle of Arran is also really worthwhile as both the journey and the destinations are amazing. If you have longer, go island hopping. And if you’ve exhausted everything else, you could always visit Auld Reekie (Edinburgh).
The view north from the bonnie, bonnie (east) banks of Loch Lomond
photo Robert Walton
The view north from the bonnie, bonnie (east) banks of Loch Lomond
Robert Walton is a Melbourne-based director, live artist, writer and educator. He is Co-Artistic Director of Fish & Game. In 2011 he left Glasgow and moved to Melbourne to take up the position as Lecturer in Theatre at Victorian College of the Arts. robertwalton.net, fishandgame.org.uk; vca.unimelb.edu.au/performingarts/theatre
related articles
liberation and/or annihilation
john bailey: fish & game; hayloft project; malthouse
RealTime issue #109 June-July 2012 pg. 24
unwanted xmas gifts
for refugees—temporary bridging visas
for 800 TAFE NSW arts staff—the sack
for schoolchildren—NAPLAN
for babies—business plans
for nsw national parks—guns & horses
for 40% australian workforce—insecurity
for queenslanders—austerity packages
for actors—american film stars in oz films
for single parents—newstart
for the disabled—unfunded disability insurance
for literati—the poems of gina rinehart
for eastern states—a good fracking
for murray-darling basin—drought
for artists—more grant applications for less money
But cheer up! It’s the thought that counts.
We’ve survived 2012 and we look forward to keeping you afloat in 2013 thanks to the regenerative power of art etc etc.
With thanks and best wishes to our writers, readers and supporters.
The RealTime team
WE COULD HAVE DONE WITHOUT THE FREQUENT REPRISING OF WHITNEY HOUSTON’S UBIQUITOUS ANTHEM, BUT WERE WELL AND TRULY COMPENSATED WITH THE SHEER INVENTIVENESS OF THE VARIATIONS ON HER THEME IN THIS EVENT CRAFTED BY CAMPBELLTOWN ART CENTRE’S DANCE CURATOR EMMA SAUNDERS OVER TWO YEARS INTO A PROGRAM OF DIVERSITY, SKILL AND AMBITION.
wetubelive
WeTube Live, Ben Speth, Oh I Wanna Dance With Somebody
photos Heidrun Löhr
WeTube Live, Ben Speth, Oh I Wanna Dance With Somebody
For the event’s Friday night opening, the stately Tea-Dance project involving ballroom dancers from the community segued, with the parting of a theatrical red curtain, to an explosion of divergent dance forms in Ben Speth’s WeTubeLIVE—“50 solos ripped from the internet” interpreted and performed by a wildly diverse group of professional and amateur performers. There was a great sense of community engagement as sensuous hula shimmied alongside boot scooting and hysterical dummy-spit met cute kitty. We first became aware of Speth’s WeTubeLIVE when it was sighted at the Junction Festival in Launceston in 2010 (RT99) and it was great to finally see it in action. Each performer is confined to a metre or so of space while a wall clock dictates the timing. At a designated signal, everyone stops as if summoned: a woman reading to a group of children nods off mid-tale; a Grey Nomad ceases uploading her holiday snaps, wondering if anyone will actually sight them. They start up again: an Indian dancer is absorbed in her ancient ritual while the adjacent room with its cast of drooling vampires and obsessive compulsives feels like the set of Marat/Sade. We are definitely feeling the heat.
narelle benjamin, anandavalli & parvathy baul
In the a.m. Andrew Morrish, with his philosophical improvisations on the here-and-there and the in-between, prepares us in the best possible way for Saturday’s full program. Thankfully, the here and now rings with the soulful sounds of singer and poet Parvathy Baul from West Bengal, a mystic minstrel in the Baul tradition invited as part of the OIWDWS project to work with contemporary dance exponent Narelle Benjamin and Sri Lankan-born Sydney-based dancer Anandavalli, herself skilled in the Bharatha Natyam and Kuchipudi traditions of Indian dance. Together they present Kaal, the result of their collaboration, over what must have been a remarkable two weeks, focusing on the goddess Kali “whose name may be translated as the feminine form of time and transformation.” In this three-part performance Parvathy Baul’s presence is central. She moves amid the dancers, while centre stage, Anandavalli responds with intense and highly coded physical and facial gestures that are not literal interpretations of Parvathy’s songs but abstracted and symbolic. Benjamin’s movements meanwhile are discernibly more fluid and expansive. At times, bodies entwine, performers working fluidly together in a meticulous investigation of forms.
phil blackman & martin del amo
Phil Blackman, Martin del Amo, Songs Not to Dance To, Oh I Want to Dance with Somebody
photos Heidrun Löhr
Phil Blackman, Martin del Amo, Songs Not to Dance To, Oh I Want to Dance with Somebody
Phil Blackman, a dancer from Lismore, was introduced to Martin del Amo by Emma Saunders identifying “two men of similar disposition, at different points in their careers.” Together they create Songs Not to Dance To in which dance confronts musical overstatement. The songs are iconic or cheesy and the challenge of the premise designed to highlight some of the connections and disconnections the two dancers faced in their exchange. They begin with symmetry in a mechanical duet. In synch, they make eye contact only at the end. The song, ABBA’s “The Way Old Friends Do,” suggests the comforts of togetherness while the movement remains determinedly unromantic.
Next up, del Amo takes on the big one, “I Will Always Love You.” He runs from a number of key points on the stage, the light expanding with him, stops and starts again. He mirrors the singer’s vibrato in shuddering movements. He sweeps through the space—if there were scenery, he’d eat it. He makes one last attempt to deal with the swelling score with a sweeping dash around the space but inspiration deserts him. He finishes centre stage, with that same convulsive movement—spent. Music/dance: one-all.
The two well-matched dancers are restrained as the airwaves fill with that orgy of self-affirmation, Christine Aguilera’s “Beautiful.” This time, movement comes from the diaphragm. Unlike the calculated stiffness of the first piece, here the dance is angular, ungainly and then fluid; the performers working in close proximity developing a distinct weave of bodies, nearly entwining, almost but never quite intimate. Words won’t bring them down.
Blackman’s final piece begins in silence till Jimmy Barnes’ “Working Class Man” kicks in. (Dance/music degree of difficulty: 9/10.) Blackman swats at the air. He moves in a strange crawl, looking up; he responds to the chorus with a series of leaps and then stumbles. He listens for something then falls hard. Blackman tells us later that in this collaboration with Del Amo he has detoured from more literal interpretation. His movement becomes increasingly abject and diametrically opposed to the triumphalist tone of the song. This is no parody, more an attempt at resistance against oppression that in the end defeats him. In this collaboration between region and city we experience another fulfilling engagement between two different but simpatico dancing bodies.
elizabeth ryan & romance was born
Elizabeth Ryan with dress by Romance Was Born, Oh I Want to Dance with Somebody
photos Heidrun Löhr
Elizabeth Ryan with dress by Romance Was Born, Oh I Want to Dance with Somebody
Vivaldi’s Magnificat! Elizabeth Ryan appears in flesh-coloured underwear behind a microphone on a stand. Alongside her a dressmaker’s dummy displays an elaborate Edwardian-style dress with colourful, tiered flounces and a long skirt. Such is the power of this garment that it has its own microphone. What follows is a series of imaginings on the dancer’s body and the costume that threatens to define it. We observe Ryan assessing whether she has the measure of this garment. Can she carry it off? She’s an easy performer, projecting a sense of unconscious display. Her movements are elegant, not showy, simultaneously self-absorbed and conjuring a state of being—a state of undress perhaps. Occasionally her hands flutter bird-like at her throat or draw attention to her feet. She slips into blue stilettos, uneasily at first and then commanding the space as she adapts to her heightened status. She approaches the dress, moves downstage with her microphone (though she never speaks), placing the dress closer to us so we can appreciate its opulence and detail. Finally envisaging herself in it and fulfilling our desire, thwarted till now, to see the dress on the woman, she whips the garment off the dummy and zips it up. The ease of this action is another surprise. We have watched Ryan’s gradual transformation over a short but intense time, the symmetrical relationship between woman and outfit. I Was Made For Loving You is a little gem of a performance, the result of yet another clever collaboration arranged by the OIWDWS project, this time between Elizabeth Ryan and the design team from Romance Was Born (Anna Plunkett and Luke Sales) who used “fabrications and elements from their new Autumn/Winter Collection: Little Lord Fauntleroy.” For Ryan there was inspiration aplenty in the relationship: “a weaving of my movement investigations with their world of materials, form, design and desirability” (program note), and it shows.
anton & david capra
David Capra, Anton, DURAK, Oh I Wanna Dance With Somebody
photos Heidrun Löhr
David Capra, Anton, DURAK, Oh I Wanna Dance With Somebody
For something completely different, we couldn’t have wished for better than the very lateral and funny hyper dance work DURAK. Dancer/choreographer Anton and visual artist David Capra, both of Ukrainian heritage but distinctly varying stature, team up to explore something of the myriad shapes of Eastern European masculinity in movement derived according to the program “from the European folk dance the Hopak and the Ballet Russes.” Anton set non-dancer Capra no easy choreographic task, but he appeared to wholeheartedly embrace the challenge. Two budding dictators from another era, one in a white shirt, one in black, sporting arched smiles, matching sashes and epaulettes, posture to a tinny recording of the Volga Boatmen. At one point Anton has his face pressed into the gallery wall, while Capra stands close behind him attempting to copy his erratic arm waving gestures. We get a rear view of the increasing frustrations of demagoguery. The education of the young despot continues with chest slapping, balalaika music and unison thigh slapping. The horrors of fascism and its cheery folkloric connections makes great material, hilarious at times. The work culminates in a virtuosic seated Cossack dance in which everything gets The Slap before the two march out of sight. As well as fashioning the costumes together, the two shared family memories along with “intergenerational trauma and how it can be found in the framework of their bodies” to create this seriously entertaining work.
jochen roller and nadia cusimano
Yet another lateral take on the form came from The Dance Tourist, a somewhat amorphous comparison between the Campbelltown we were in and another, a fishing village in Scotland. Compiled by multi-disciplinary artists Jochen Roller and Nadia Cusimano, the installation built on the physical sense of disjuncture felt by Roller when he first came to Campbelltown. “When I entered the tourist information centre, I felt like I was in another place that I knew in Europe.” A series of comparative sightings (stark renderings of people in malls, public utilities) are presented in colour photographs as well as a set of postcards. There’s a memory game with the cards and a mysteriously symbolic cake ceremony. The two also created a set of quirky souvenirs for sale in the gallery shop.
paul gazzola & paul granjon
EBEMU, Paul Granjon, Paul Gazzola; Oh I Wanna Dance With Somebody
photos Heidrun Löhr
EBEMU, Paul Granjon, Paul Gazzola; Oh I Wanna Dance With Somebody
The weekend concluded with a parade devised by the Experimental Body Extension Manufacturing Unit (EBEMU http://ebemu.com) another project running over a number of weeks at the Centre in which local people were encouraged to volunteer ideas on using recycled materials to create prosthetic devices to solve everyday problems. There was no shortage of ideas and when we visited in the afternoon, the EBEMU workshop (Paul Gazzola, Paul Granjon) was working furiously to finish off a number of prototypes, among them, a video antenna to allow an introverted person to walk through a crowd without having to face anyone; a vehicle to carry shopping up 13 steps for a wheelchairbound woman and a video periscope to check the tops of cupboards.
For the evening’s Parade, MC Granjon wore a “twinset” of self-illuminating hat and plywood slippers. The introvert looked like he might draw a different kind of attention, resembling an aardvark in his coffin-shaped headgear with video camera and aerial attached to provide his desired third person POV. I’ve put in an order for a couple of the Personal Space Activators, a skirt-like arrangement made from bicycle spokes with lights that you can flare outwards to delineate your preferred distance for personal space. Meanwhile, The Connector made use of a multi-use arm plate to send paper planes into the crowd containing messages such as “Am I lonely tonight?” Paul Gazzola modelled the Backpack Recliner, which unfolds so you can lean back and check your map. The Bruiser Butler, an automated trolley for serving refreshments, looked distinctly dangerous. The EBEMU reps explained that it was a young work—only a week old—and not quite house-trained.
Andrew Morrish saw us out, riffing for a time on the connections between the works we had witnessed over this magical weekend and then, unusually for a born improviser who “has so many problems, it makes his work easy,” was momentarily lost for words (“Listening to people too much”). Not that we minded. By then we had no place for words, replete as we were with all that dancing.
Oh I Want to Dance with Somebody, Curator Contemporary Dance Emma Saunders, Project Director, Michael Dagostino, Campbelltown Arts Centre, October 19-21
Raimund Hoghe, Lorenzo de Brabandere, The Rite of Spring
photo Rosa-Frank.com
Raimund Hoghe, Lorenzo de Brabandere, The Rite of Spring
RAIMUND HOGHE’S COMMITMENT TO THROWING LIGHT ON THOSE OFTEN MARGINALISED BY SOCIETY—THE SICK, THE DISPLACED, THE PERSECUTED—AND SERIOUSLY INTERVENING IN ASSUMPTIONS REGARDING THE IDEAL DANCING BODY, IS PERFORMED THROUGH HIS OWN PHYSICALITY.
“My body is not the usual body; you don’t see this kind of body often onstage. I have a hunchback. I’m not very tall” (in Bonnie Marranca, “Dancing the sublime,” PAJ, May, 2010). Born in post-war Germany, Hoghe has remarked that he is lucky to have just missed the persecution of the physically imperfect by the Nazis. Perhaps it is this brush with fate that has made him a quietly political artist, highlighting injustices of all kinds. He asserts, “I don’t believe in nations, I believe in human beings.”
It misrepresents Hoghe to suggest that his work is weighted down with commentary on sinister social ills; his choreographies are as often light and humorous as they are dark and tragic. But his underlying political commitment to inclusion and diversity began in written portraits published in the German newspaper Die Zeit. This interest in individual lives continues, either through choreographed portraits of his heroes such as Maria Callas (36, Avenue Georges Mandel [2007]) and Jewish soprano Joseph Schmidt (Meinwärts [1994]) or in dialogue with other dancers who often provide both inspiration and act as a physical counterpoint.
I spoke to Raimund Hoghe 10 days after the premiere of a new piece, Cantata, about an earlier work, Sacre—The Rite of Spring (2004), which has a season in Sydney Festival 2013. I first saw Hoghe perform Dialogue with Charlotte (1998) in 1999, a duet with performer Charlotte Engelkes that played on the contrast between Hoghe and the tall, glamorous woman. One image that still circulates from this work shows Hoghe lying across Engelkes’ lap pretending to swim. This ‘danced dialogue’ format also applies to Sacre—The Rite of Spring. The piece is a duet with dancer Lorenzo De Brabandere whom Hoghe first met when working on Young People, Old Voices (2002) with a group of 12 young performers. Hoghe says, “Lorenzo was 18 and not trained as a dancer but had this incredible youth and energy—and I am the opposite.” As Arnd Wesemenn has put it, “Difference is his theme” (The biography of the hump: Raimund Hoghe, 1999).
Another strong thread in Hoghe’s work is music—there are the already mentioned portraits of music stars but also Hoghe’s repeated mantra: “Just listen to the music. It will tell you what to do.” Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite Of Spring (1913) featured in Young People, Old Voices and a dedicated work for De Brabandere and Hoghe emerged out of the younger dancer’s affinity with the score:
“From the very first meeting when I played the music Lorenzo didn’t really know, he was performing like he knew the music already, like it was in his body already which was very strange to see. From the first moment he felt very close to the music.”
Hoghe says that the duet is normally performed to a recording of Leonard Bernstein performing Stravinsky’s piano score (for the Sydney Festival the music will be performed live by Alain Franco and Guy Vandromme), and that Bernstein had said that “the music is really about the sexual awakening and energy of young people.” It is Hoghe’s ability to filter such deeply personal points of reference with an intense formalism that has seen him pioneer both the ‘conceptual’ dance genre (followed by Boris Charmatz, Xavier Le Roy and Jérôme Bel) and the ‘historical turn’ so pronounced in contemporary dance currently. It is his history as dramaturg for Pina Bausch from 1979 to 1989 that appears to have developed his sharp eye for a compressed choreographic structure. He says:
“For me the subject comes during the process. I watched the performance of Cantata on video and was very surprised at how clear it was, very clear and simple. I like to see very clear images, a stage without decoration, to see the personality of the dancers, the music is there, the light is there—very simple but good lighting. There are not 20 lighting cues. So then you understand something through simplicity—maybe you don’t need much more…I try to create my universe with simple things. With Sacre it’s a bucket of water and a plant in the back.”
This follows Bausch’s intention to spotlight not the movement itself, but the forces that produce movement. The question here is not ‘what dance’ but ‘why dance.’ Hoghe’s aesthetic of reduction also spotlights how little you need to evoke a world of ideas around a moving body. Simple walking patterns and repeated gestural motifs are the main substance of his dances and more often than not last the length of a song.
Regarding his interest in the history of 20th century dance, he says, “something in contemporary dance is lost or missed and I wanted to remember something of this dance history.” This is inextricably tied to his interest in music. He speaks of music as a trigger for cultural and collective memory.
“It was important for me to put [Sacre—The Rite of Spring] into the context of Stravinsky and his statements about the work and how the people reacted. They couldn’t hear the music anymore because people were shouting. So I put the work in the context of the history of the music as I have done with [Debussy’s] Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, [Ravel’s] Bolero and [Stravinsky’s] The Firebird. Music connects directly with the memory of [choreographers such as] Nijinsky, Bausch and Béjart. So I work with this context of history—not to repeat but to follow something before.”
Elsewhere I have described Raimund Hoghe’s work as “highly formalist…where humanity seeps from the body” (RT105). And his body is at the centre as a rich starting point that commands attention in a very different way from the virtuosic moves of highly trained dancers. He has often cited singers as a point of reference for his movement, finding that the most iconic singers often have one movement for each song that forms a gestural motif. In a series of afternoon talks at Montpellier Danse 2011, Hoghe showed footage of Edith Piaf, European pop star Dalida and Callas, asking us to watch them as dancers. Part of his process is to share these performances with his dancers.
“It’s also about the dancers having a strong personality. They can do very little things and it’s interesting. You don’t have to jump or do spectacular things to impress people. It’s about their ability to connect to the music. This is something very strong for me; that they all peform with the music. They don’t do it for me, they don’t do it for the audience, they do it for the music only, for the art. They are fantastic people and I love to work with them. I am very surprised that little things can express so much, connected with personality and simplicity. This is the same with my writing—it is very simple. I like Anton Chekov very much. His writing is very clear and simple. Reduction is very important, so you arrive at the important things. In Chekov there is no decoration.”
My final question to Hoghe is about the easy mobility of his work, not only practically, due to his minimal approach to design, but conceptually and aesthetically—the invitation to enter into and engage with a work through familiarity with music and gesture, but also the easy step in his work from the simple to the profound.
“It’s not money that makes a performance strong…It’s important to not be dependent on the materials of set design but on honesty, form and the music. Music is so strong—I want to share this with people, that finally we don’t need so many different things.”
Raimund Hoghe, Sacre—The Rite of Spring, Carriageworks, Sydney, Jan 5-9; Sydney Festival 2013, Jan 5-27;
www.sydneyfestival.org.au
* * *
other sydney festival highlights
Legs on the Wall presents Symphony, commissioned and recently premiered by NORPA in Lismore, performed to a live electric guitar rendition of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony (see review). Branch Nebula corrall skateboarders and BMX bikers in a suburban skateboard park in Concrete and Bones Sessions (see the RealTime TV video interview). The great maker of theatre as magical installation, Heiner Goebbels, will stage Eraritjaritjaka with French actor André Wilms, live video by Belgian filmmaker Bruno Deville, Amsterdam’s Mondrian String Quartet and Goebbel’s own design. See Janice Muller’s 2004 interview with the artist in RealTime 63, p8 about Eraritjaritjaka, its theme (isolation and language) and surprising devices. From the Perth creators of The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer there’s It’s Dark Outside (RT110). Ludger Engel’s Semele Walk, a substantially pared-back 80-minute version of Handel’s opera, will be staged as a catwalk parade costumed by Vivienne Westwood. This curious crossover will doubtless attract much attention. Handel fans though are well-used to radically dressed but musically faithful accounts of his operas over the last two decades. There’s a huge music program of all kinds and a promising performance program over a long weekend at Carriageworks with 45 showings by nine groups, some ticketed, some free—a great opportunity to enjoy a live-in festival event. Not to be missed will be Sydney-based visual theatre group Erth’s Murder. Using puppets and performers it’s inspired by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads, directed by Scott Wright, written by Raimondo Cortese and choreographed by Kate Champion. RT
Laurie Anderson & Kronos Quartet, (l-r) Hank Dutt, Jeffrey Zeigler, Laurie Anderson, John Sherba, David Harrington
photo Jay Blakesberg
Laurie Anderson & Kronos Quartet, (l-r) Hank Dutt, Jeffrey Zeigler, Laurie Anderson, John Sherba, David Harrington
IT SEEMS THE 1986 ADELAIDE FESTIVAL WAS RATHER MIND-BLOWING FOR MANY AUSTRALIAN ARTISTS. THIS IS HARDLY SURPRISING GIVEN THAT THE FESTIVAL, DIRECTED BY ANTHONY STEEL, FEATURED SOME OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL ARTISTS OF LATE 20TH CENTURY: PHILIP GLASS, THE WOOSTER GROUP, JAN FABRE AND LAURIE ANDERSON.
For me, coming into the performance scene in the early 1990s, Anderson’s multimedia concert at that festival had become legendary and while she has since appeared in Australia (at least four times in Sydney), none of these concerts has been able to match the scale, whether real or apocryphal, of that 1986 event. (Of course at Vivid 2010, we did get the live-in experience of Anderson as co-festival director with Lou Reed, appearing in several concert manifestations). Nonetheless, Anderson has still impressed many of us in the next generation, mainly via recordings, with her idiosyncratic compositional style but most particularly her unique brand of whimsical profundity—everyday observations, personal stories and reconfigurations of philosophy that she can deftly turn into serious insights into life and mortality, or incisive criticism of American proselytising, warmongering and the toll of unchecked capitalism.
Adelaide Festival comes to the rescue again. In 2013 Australian fans will enjoy perhaps the most comprehensive picture to date of Anderson’s oeuvre, not just as a poet/musician, but as a truly multimedia and multimodal artist via three quite different events. Anderson will present the results of her musical collaboration with the Kronos Quartet; she will perform her latest spoken word piece, Dirtday! and also exhibit a selection of installation and visual art pieces from various stages of her career at the Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum.
I had the privilege of speaking via phone with Laurie Anderson who was in Los Angeles rehearsing with Kronos Quartet on their new, as yet untitled work.
kronos collaboration
You’re certainly making the long haul trip worthwhile, presenting three works in Adelaide. Can you tell us about the Kronos collaboration?
This is the third time that we’ve gotten together to work on it and it’s pretty inspiring. These people can really play. For example, some of the sounds that will be in it come from a keyboard that has a lot of information stored on optical discs. It sounds very lo-fi and very sort of sad, like some kind of old ice skating rink from 30 years ago. Playing with sounds that have a quality like that—of scratchiness and eerie otherworldliness—is something that they can do in their sleep. It’s really amazing how they can adjust their playing into that world.
So the piece uses text and stories but it’s triggered by their playing?
Yes it’s some software that I wrote. Imagine superfast subtitling that’s triggered by sound—and different aspects of sound, the note you’re playing or how loudly you’re playing it. You’re listening and reading things and you suddenly realise that you can read 10 times faster than you thought. Which is really kind of exhilarating. Also new alphabets suddenly get introduced and you realise you can read these new alphabets also…
The meaning of a work of art is wrapped in colours and sounds and whatever material the art is made of and the audience looks at it or listens to it and unwraps the meaning from those works—aha there it is! In this case it’s really about that search…I’m hesitating because it sounds really pompous to say it, but we really are meaning machines. Walking down the street we are always trying to look for a resonance or look for things that mean something. And so this is about that act itself. Suddenly you catch yourself looking for how systems work and then you realise that you can read this certain kind of code.
So is it all text on screen?
No there’s spoken text as well. For example, imagine you are listening to somebody speaking and the words that you are hearing are the words that you’re seeing and that works for a while and gradually other kinds of icons start invading the written text. For example the graphics sign for ‘staircase’ starts becoming the word ‘snake’ and you realise very quickly that you can read that. I’ve always wanted to actually design an alphabet. It’s weirdly about different kinds of music notation too because some of the alphabets really begin to look like music…So it’s really an interesting system to be working with. I’ve never tried anything like this before.
dirtday!
I understand Dirtday! was inspired by the Occupy movement. I’ve heard you mention that you were trying to make a music-driven piece and that the words took over. How do you negotiate your need to make music and your need to write words?
It’s always a bit of a fight. I’m not sure why one begins to dominate but I’ve never done a piece in which there’s the complete balance between music and text. I think this is also because I really like the relationship of spoken words to music as opposed to lyrics or rhymed words which I find are usually kind of static. There’s the ‘moon in June’ rhyming and after that it becomes kind of almost silly. When I hear really wonderful lyrics that have really strange rhymes I like it very much, but I’m not very good at it myself. So I don’t do that very much.
Dirtday! is based on quite a political topic. Do you feel like the times are forcing you to become more forthright with your messages?
Sometimes things are very explicit. I usually shy away from that because I’m so afraid of being preachy, but once in a while it’s just too tempting not to comment specifically on what’s going on.
Does this have visual material as well as your spoken and performed music?
A very little bit. Basically it’s one very long mental movie and I find working in that way just really exhilarating. When you hear a story you really begin to build up a visual world, and it’s your own world in the way that your dream world is your own world. I’m just using words to do it so it’s very much a collaboration with the audience in that way.
the language of the future?
Laurie Anderson, Duets On Ice (1976)
photo Canal Street Communications
Laurie Anderson, Duets On Ice (1976)
You’ve always managed to maintain such a high-level of experimentation but at the same time your work is incredibly accessible. Is that a conscious choice or is it just the way your experimentation plays out?
For a long time I really didn’t want to repeat things. That of course became impossible and exhausting. As soon as you’d invent something you’d have to invent something else and that just seemed like a completely artificial way of treating material and it meant that also you wouldn’t be able to get very good at presenting it. So eventually I got over that very strict way of looking at the world. I was like that because I didn’t like the concept of theatre, it seemed too mannered, so I decided to experiment with every work. That’s changed over the years but I still tend never to do old things. I’ve maybe done two tours in my life in which I played old material. It was great fun to do that and I’m not sure why I don’t do that more often. Maybe I’m just talking myself into doing one right now.
Is the exhibition The Language of the Future something of ‘greatest hits’ show?
It’s not a retrospective, it’s a few chosen works. One will be a very old work from the 70s when we did music in really old broken-down warehouses using equipment that was just falling apart [The Electric Chair see video]. Then there’s going to be a visual piece that has a funny resonance because it looks like that sound piece but it’s serene and purely visual. And then there’s some story pieces as well and some installations and some photo works.
You’ll even be performing your famous early work Duets on Ice.
Yeah, that’s going to be fun. That’s from 1975 and it was a show that was done outside on the street using the violin that I made that played by itself. There were speakers inside and you would play duets with it live. Because it was the kind of show that could theoretically go on forever—it didn’t have a beginning or an end, it was just a loop—I thought what’s the clock here? When is the show over? So I set a kind of time mechanism: I wore some ice-skates with their blades frozen into blocks of ice so that when the ice melts and you lose your balance the concert’s over. Sometimes that took a very long time. What’s the weather like in Adelaide?
Adelaide is notoriously hot and dry.
Well, it’ll be a short show!
* * *
other adelaide festival highlights
Sylvie Guillem, 600 Miles Away
photo Bill Cooper
Sylvie Guillem, 600 Miles Away
The 2013 Adelaide Festival program looks like it might come close to the mind-blowing status accorded to the 1986 program. Other highlights include 6000 Miles Away with Sylvie Guillem choreographed by Mats Ek, William Forsythe and Jirí Kylián (RT106); Hotel Modern’s confronting Kamp (RT96); several interactive works by Ontroerend Goed whose The Smile Off Your Face is a quiet classic (RT89); Wim Vandekeybus and Ultima Vez’s What the Body Does Not Remember (Vandekeybus was possibly in Jan Fabre’s work at the 1986 festival); a concert by renowned US music producer Van Dyke Parks; and three nights of experimental audiovisual works presented by the Unsound Festival (Krakow/New York) including Ben Frost and Daniel Bjarnason’s Solaris with film manipulations by Brian Eno and Nick Robertson (RT103). There’s a healthy quota of Australian companies such as Erth, Brink, The State Theatre Company, The Black Lung Theatre and Whaling Firm (see RT111) and a new work from Adelaide choreographer Larissa McGowan.
Adelaide Festival: Laurie Anderson with the Kronos Quartet, Adelaide Festival Theatre, March 2; Dirtday!, Dunstan Playhouse, March 3; The Language of the Future, Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, March 1-April 19; www.adelaidefestival.com.au
SAN FRANCISCO-BASED PIONEERING MEDIA ARTIST JIM CAMPBELL, RENOWNED FOR HIS CUSTOMISED ELECTRONICS AND UNIQUE LIGHT SCULPTURES, IS FEATURED IN THE 2012 PERTH INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL WITH HIS MUCH LAUDED INSTALLATION, SCATTERED LIGHT. PHOTOGRAPHS AND VIDEO REVEAL VERY LITTLE ABOUT THE ACTUAL EXPERIENCE OF APPROACHING A STARRY WALL OF LIGHTS IN A PUBLIC PARK AT NIGHT AND, DRAWING CLOSE, DISCOVERING SOME 1,800 TRADITIONAL LIGHT BULBS SUSPENDED AT VARIOUS HEIGHTS IN THREE-DIMENSIONAL SPACE.
As well, at a distance you might notice human shadows hurrying across the light field, as if on a screen, but up close these movements are abstract—the nature of the artwork has changed, and your experience of it. Doubtless, as your senses adjust, questions spring to mind. Whose shadows? Why light bulbs? Why the perceptual shift?
Campbell, with degrees from MIT in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics, has since the late 1980s combined technological know-how with art to create interactive and other works exhibited around the world in galleries and public spaces. His latest creation, Exploded Views (2011), suspended in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s atrium (until October 23 this year), uses 3,000 LED lights that comprise a “gigantic three-dimensional ‘monitor’” on which are ‘screened’ four films (each shown over a two-month period) of contemporary dancers, a flock of birds, pedestrians and boxers.
Scattered Light is not as complex as Exploded Views but works from similar principles in the creation of the shadowy figures generated by the flickering lights.
Campbell, an experienced filmmaker, videos pedestrians, maximises the contrast to eliminate intrusive detail and downloads the images to his customised (and patented) computer circuitry which controls the on/off position of each light bulb, thus impressionistically reproducing human movement. The mass of lights effectively becomes a three-dimensional LED screen.
I asked Campbell how he came to focus on perception. He explained that “it happened almost by accident years ago with a grant that [allowed me] to look at exploring low resolution imagery as an experiment. I was pleasantly surprised that there were a lot of interesting things about low resolution that I hadn’t seen or thought about before. And so it’s taken over my art thinking over the last 12-13 years.”
What did he learn about low-resolution imagery? “How rich something can be when you take most of it away. I became interested in what was left when you take away all the details and the colour we’re used to for defining an image. You take them away and there’s a lot left. Even more profoundly, what’s left is masked by all the other information that’s there. With a moving image of a person walking, your brain is trying to figure things out, looking at the colour, the edges, analysing that information. When you eliminate the details, all the sharpness, the high resolution, your brain doesn’t really analyse any more, it just takes it in, in what I would call a more primal way, and that makes sense because what is left is rhythm movement. With peripheral vision, which I’m also interested in, you’re only paying attention to movement. There’s an evolutionary reason for that—survival. I like creating images that are experienced more primally.”
I asked Campbell how this notion connected with the actual making of a work like Scattered Light. “I start with a video that’s very simple. If the background’s too complicated you can’t tell what you’re looking at—too much ‘noise.’ So I look for simple backgrounds and very big contrasts. In Scattered Light most people are wearing black but there are people walking past in white shirts; they’re not all shadow figures. In Grand Central Station most people were wearing black or dark colours. The background is the floor—I shot from above at an angle—so you’ll see white shirts against it.”
Why focus on walking? “It goes back to the primal. It’s such simple movement so we automatically understand it—we have an intuitive relationship with it— and it works best in low resolution.”
Scattered Light, Jim Campbell
photo James Ewing
Scattered Light, Jim Campbell
What’s the difference between Exploded Views and Scattered Light? “Conceptually they’re the same but Exploded Views has more resolution—nearly 3,000 pixels and twice the resolution and in a more controlled environment where there wasn’t wind. I didn’t necessarily know what I was going to do with Exploded Views—it was a kind of experiment. For 12 years I’ve been looking for a certain kind of imagery that would work with my technology. So I was very excited by designing the image and working with a choreographer. We created an image in a studio rather than me wandering around with a tripod for a week. The boxing we did in a gym with control of the background, shot it with five or six different cameras, but ultimately only using the one that worked by far the best.”
A striking characteristic of Scattered Light up close is its multitudinous light globes. Sometimes described as an homage to the traditional globe, the work is also a critique. The pleasing shape is contradicted by the device’s enormous power usage. Campbell was looking for low resolution and low wattage: “My assistants took an electric hacksaw to 2,000 light globes. They removed the tungsten filaments and replaced them with LEDs.” So the whole work then is a 3D LED display? “Right.” And a comment on this period of transition in our use of electricity? “Right.”
As an aside, Campbell, the engineer, reveals his disappointment with the new generation of domestic lights: “Ironically, LEDs have a very different quality than tungsten filaments and it has to do with the way heat is given off from the LEDs—it’s conducted rather than radiated, so [new generation] light bulbs should be designed completely differently from the old model. But because of the existing fixtures of the last 100 years the new lights now imitate the old bulbs. For Scattered Light we created a hybrid.”
Campbell’s work in the late 80s and 90s was notable for its digital interactivity. I wondered if it still played a role in his work. He said that it had been very important in the first 10 years of his practice but then he had become more interested in perception. However, the notion of interactivity remains embedded in his work of the last decade: “Scattered Light is extremely interactive because it will look abstract from 90% of the places you view it from and it will only resolve in certain areas. So you’re constantly moving to and away to change your perception of it—moreso than for a typical image or painting. It’s a different kind of interactivity.”
tenebrae et lux
Campbell’s technical prowess will be demonstrated in another Perth Festival work, an installation-cum-concert, Tenebrae et Lux (Darkness and Light) by pioneering French interactive video artist Benjamin Bergery who will responsively light the University of Perth’s Winthrop Hall for a performance of Carlo Gesualdo’s intrinsically dramatic, 400-year-old Tenebrae Responoria as performed by the St George’s Cathedral Consort singing acapella. The Bergery work is a Perth Festival commission.
Originally, as they had in Paris and the US, Campbell and Bergery were to collaborate on Tenebrae et Lux, but Campbell’s workload prevents it on this occasion. Bergery will instead work with a Campbell system using lighting controllers software that can modulate the lighting according to certain rhythms.
What’s keeping Campbell at a distance from Tenebrae et Lux is a major commission from San Diego Airport due for completion in 2013 as part of their Green Build: Public Art program. Campbell describes it as a 600 foot long, six feet wide sculpture—an undulating ribbon of light suspended over the walker and with an image that stays with you as you travel the concourse. He admits having to face some considerable challenges because of the scale of the work: “It’s made like Scattered Light and Exploded Views, but there are 35,000 pixels, each individually hung. It’s out of my realm how to do it. There’ll be a lot of subcontracting.” But the end result should be magical, maybe relaxing or strangely distracting.
other perth festival highlights
Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei is the designer for The Truth 25 Times a Second for Belgian choreographer Frédéric Flamand and the very contemporary Ballet National de Marseille. In 3G (Trois Générations) Idiosyncratic French choreographer Jean-Claude Gallotta collaborates with STRUT Dance and three generations of Perth performers—“innocent,” “professional,” “mature”—each responding to the same musical score as three discrete works. Robert Wilson’s production of Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera (1928) for the Berliner Ensemble is a must-see, with Wilson directing, designing and lighting. New York’s The TEAM in Mission Drift tackles 400 years of American capitalism using the tools of the musical. Great Australian pianist Sally Whitewell has her own recital but also joins Philip Glass and Maki Namekawa to perform all the Glass Etudes. Fans of contemporary music theatre will want to see Heinz Carl Gruber’s Frankenstein and Thomas Ades’ Living Toys in an outdoor concert titled Soft soft Loud: the Antihero Suite. For younger audiences Barking Gecko will stage, with a live orchestra, an adaptation of Wolf Erlbruch’s Duck, Death and the Tulip in which a duck and Death become friends. Melbourne’s Arena Theatre, in a co-commission with the festival, has invented The House of Dreaming, a hands-on house with robotics and projections and characters, directed by the ever inventive Chris Kohn. There are also six screenings of the award-winning Caesar Must Die by octogenarian filmmakers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani in a strong film program.
– ruangrupa (Indonesia), THE KUDA: The Untold Story of Indonesian Underground Music in the 70s 2012, Band artwork
commissioned for APT7, image courtesy the artists
– ruangrupa (Indonesia), THE KUDA: The Untold Story of Indonesian Underground Music in the 70s 2012, Band artwork
HAVING LONG ANTICIPATED THE “ASIAN CENTURY,” THE ASIA PACIFIC TRIENNIAL OF CONTEMPORARY ART (APT) HAS FIRMLY ESTABLISHED ITSELF AS ONE OF THE GREAT AUSTRALIAN ART EVENTS, OPENING OUR SENSES AND INTELLECTS TO THE CULTURAL WEALTH OF THE REGION THROUGH PAINTING, SCULPTURE, INSTALLATION, FILM, VIDEO AND POWERFUL PERFORMANCES. THE PHRASE “CONTEMPORARY ART” IN THE TITLE BELIES THE TRIENNIAL’S INCLUSION OF STRIKING TRADITIONAL PRACTICES NOT ONLY FOR THEIR ARTISTRY BUT FOR THE CONTEXT AND INSPIRATION THEY OFFER NEW GENERATIONS OF ARTISTS. THERE IS NOTHING LIKE AN APT.
Russell Storer, Head of Asian and Pacific Art at the Queensland Art Gallery, tells me that a multitude of APT7 works engage with video, music, animation and a variety of performance modes. Six young artists from Jogjakarta “with a strong element of street culture” and working collectively, as ruangrupa, across music and video address “the crazy competitive scene in that country at the moment, and histories using archival photographs and reworking them.” For THE KUDA: The Untold Story of Indonesian Underground Music in the 70s (one of a number of APT7 commissions), Storer says the group “has been researching 70s rock during the Suharto era and finding resonances with the Brisbane music scene in the Bjelke-Petersen period. Working with graffiti artists and musicians they’re creating a narrative around a fictive Indonesian band that had a presence in Brisbane in the 70s.”
In The secret life of objects, another young Indonesian artist collective, Tromarama, uses comic stop-motion animation and video featuring everyday objects. In the APT catalogue Fiona Neill describes their practice as indicative of a flourishing DIY aesthetic in Indonesia which has grown from the necessity to ‘make do’ with the materials and technology at hand.” In a music video format, the possessions (shoes, handbags) of the well-to-do young bicker and bully in an increasingly consumerist society.
Yuan Goang-Ming, Taiwanese artist and influential new media art teacher, says in an interview in the APT catalogue, “In 2009, four months after the birth of my first child, my father died of stomach cancer. For those four months I faced the incompatibility of a new and a fading life, while imagining my child’s future and retracing my father’s past” (interviewer Amanda Slack-Smith, July 2012, APT7 catalogue). Storer describes the panoramic three-channel video work, Disappearing Landscapes, as “reflecting on cycles of life and death using extraordinary pans and zooms underwater, through drains and through the home.” Yuan Goang-Ming sees himself as having “experimented with a form of image-making between cinema, documentary and video art, in an attempt to accurately express my thoughts at the time.” The video includes “the reconstruction of my father’s study, which is a surrealist dreamscape for me.” It’s an eerily beautiful and sometimes spectacular work which can be glimpsed on YouTube.
From India, Raqs Media Collective, “formed in 1992 by Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta to explore urban geography, epistemology and creativity through emerging media technologies” will bring an archival installation of documents, books and films to APT7. Raqs members are well-known to Australian media artists as participants in the founding of Sarai, “the New Delhi-based research centre and archive dedicated to critical discussion on urban experience.” Apparently the collective’s name describes the ecstatic state entered by whirling dervishes; it could simply refer to dance or be an acronym for ‘rarely asked questions’” (Reuben Keehan).
reaching out to western asia
Parastou Forouhar (Iran/Germany), Written room 1999-ongoing, Stadtgalerie Saarbruecken, Germany 2011
courtesy the artist
Parastou Forouhar (Iran/Germany), Written room 1999-ongoing, Stadtgalerie Saarbruecken, Germany 2011
For the first time APT is geographically expanding its reach to include western Asia, all the way to Istanbul. Iranian artist Parastou Forouhar (Iran/Germany), working with calligraphy, will ‘write’ a room in which she will then perform with musicians. She says, “What emerges again and again in my works is a tension between apparently harmless surfaces and what is actually represented by the content” (interview Bree Richards, July, 2012). Turkish artist Inci Eviner, says Storer, looks at Europe from a feminist Turkish perspective, at times absurd and bawdy. Her work has three video channels titled Demonstrations, Violence and Immigrants which include political marches—the banner texts created by the artist— and belly dancing, sports day movement (“a series of leg movements seeming like an ungendered can-can”), burning fields out of which arise new buildings, and images pertaining to the plight of refugees. “The crisis created by the refugee pushed me towards the re-discovery of the body. It was important to catch the traces of totalitarian regimes in bodily gestures; it opened a venue for exploration beyond rationality” (Kathryn Weir, interview with Eviner, September 2012).
In Rulers and Rhythm Studies, music and sound artist Cevdet Erek, from Turkey, works with rulers to measure out personal, political and musical chronologies, determined for example by the incidence and duration of coups. In A Piece of the Middle East, an American-Jordanian artist, Oraib Toukan, has set up a fictional real estate agency with which to sell off the troublesome Middle East. In a series of video works inspired by Amin Malouf’s The Crusades through Arab Eyes (1983), Egyptian artist Wael Shawky recreates the history of the Crusades from new perspectives. He transforms predictable historicising by having children play all the roles. In the catalogue interview he told Russell Storer, “the most important part of using kids in all my work [is] because they don’t have this dramatic memory about anything…It doesn’t leave the value of the work to the skills of the actor. The historical event becomes the main issue.” In other works on the same subject, Shawky uses finely crafted ceramic marionettes and elaborate sets, focusing, says one writer, in a Brechtian manner on political rather than religious motivations (excerpts can be seen on YouTube).
Almagul Mellibayeva’s new work, the five-channel video work The Ground Recalls (Kazakhstan/Germany), says Storer, will resonate with Australian viewers. It’s set in Kurchatov in north-west Kazakhstan in the former Soviet Union, near the centre of 40 years of nuclear testing, that left a legacy of toxic residue. The work is part documentary, part symbolic fiction (“dramatised scenes of women performing strange gestures in degraded landscapes”). In the APT catalogue Jose Da Silva writes, “Through her videos and photographs, Menlibayeva has explored the idea of developing a new contemporary mythology for Central Asia, one that engages with what she has termed ‘Romantic Punk Shamanism’ to reflect a rebellious celebration of nature and the spiritual aspects of Kazakhstan’s nomadic heritage and shamanistic, pre-Islamic religious traditions.”
closer to home
In (disarmed) imagining a Pacific Archive, Torika BOLATAGICI (Australia/Fiji), Mat HUNKIN (New Zealand/Samoa), Teresia TEAIWA (United States of America/Kiribati/New Zealand), will focus on the militarisation of the Pacific, while Aboriginal Australian artists, Daniel Boyd, Lorraine Connelly-Northey, Michael Cook, Timothy Cook and Shirley Macnamara will deploy a variety of media to reflect on a sense of place—personal and collective.
True to the enduring spirit of the APT and QAG there will be 13 works for children, including a massive 30 metre ephemeral, architectural work outside the gallery. The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art has long been a great playground for adults too, displaying an abundance of colour and political directness Australians are mostly not used to. The Australian Government, with its Australia in the Asian Century White Paper, looks like it’s going to attempt, at long last to catch up with the Asia Pacific Triennial.
7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT7), Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art, Dec 8 2012-April 14 2013, free; www.qagoma.qld.gov.au
CATHERINE DE ZEGHER AND GERALD MCMASTER, THE CO-CURATORS OF
Postcommodity, Do You Remember When, 2009
photo Jason Grubb
Postcommodity, Do You Remember When, 2009
THE 2012 BIENNALE OF SYDNEY, SET THEMSELVES AN AMBITIOUS AGENDA. SUBTITLING THE EVENT ‘ALL OUR RELATIONS,’ THEY ADDRESS THE WAY IN WHICH PEOPLE INTERRELATE—WITH EACH OTHER AND WITH THE WORLD GENERALLY. THEY SUGGEST THAT WESTERN CULTURE HAS HITHERTO REINFORCED OPPOSITION AND FRAGMENTATION BUT THERE IS NOW A NEW AWARENESS OF OUR TRUE INTERCONNECTEDNESS, AND THIS AWARENESS IS REFLECTED IN CONTEMPORARY ART.
The Biennale itself is posited as a gesamkunstwerk produced collectively. De Zegher considers it is necessary to “attend to connection and coherence; to build new narrative structures…The democratic significance of the 18th Biennale of Sydney is of exchange, mutuality and accessibility” (Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster, All Our Relations, Biennale of Sydney, 2012).
Their approach recalls the concept of relational art and aesthetics, where the artists are models or catalysts of cooperative action and the audience is a community connected with the artists and each other actively and intersubjectively. Although de Zegher suggests they did not start with a preconceived theme, it appears that much of the art assembled for the BoS is characteristically relational, emphasising interactive processes over the production of aesthetic objects.
The concept of relational art is not especially new, having been identified in the 1990s. But presenting it on the scale of a biennale provides an updated survey of such art practice and creates an immersive experience that tests the hypothesis that collective, relational activity is becoming the dominant operational paradigm not only in art but in society generally, a paradigm that potentially addresses significant social, political and environmental issues. De Zegher suggests that, “In a way, this Biennale may be described as an act of consciousness interrogating consciousness itself. Its mission is different from the proliferation of biennales as thematic compendia.”
The selected art involves relational interaction of various forms: Lee Mingwei mends clothes brought in by audience members, Nadia Myre invites the audience to create representations of their scars and the audience participates in Eva Kot’àtkovà’s performances. Lyndal Jones’ performance involves pairs of blindfolded people entering an ark. Some art is produced cooperatively, for example that of Monika Grzymala working with the Euraba artists and papermakers. Some art represents a community, such as that of Dorothy Napangardi. Bouchra Khalili presents the stories of refugees. By contrast, Judy Watson, Hassan Sharif, Sarah Vanagt and Katrine Vermeire, Juan Manuel Echavarria and Jananne Al-Ani variously examine communities, histories or events archaeologically. Yun-Fei Ji depicts in Chinese classical-style painting a village community’s forced migration in the face of the Three Gorges Dam project. The telling of stories is a characteristic of much of the work. But it is difficult to establish conclusively whether the selected art typifies contemporary practice or demonstrates increased social interconnectedness.
The centrepiece of the BoS is perhaps Postcommodity’s Do You Remember When? in the basement of the AGNSW—a hole cut in the concrete floor of the gallery revealing the earth beneath in a political act of reclamation of the culture of the original inhabitants, displayed with the excised slab and an audio recording documenting the installation process. It’s as if the entire Biennale emerged from beneath the gallery’s floor, challenging the AGNSW as emblematic of western thinking. Ironically, institutionalising such a work within the BoS defuses its iconoclastic power. The floor will duly be restored.
Throughout BoS, art historian Moira Roth’s blog facilitated audience and artist interconnection, extending the Biennale’s function as a relational artwork. The 400-page catalogue can also be seen as a relational artwork. Its format enables the reader to pair images of the artworks, each pairing creating a unique synthesis (literally embodying the well-known idea of the birth of the reader). The numerous essays by thinkers and artists range across the economic, philosophical and psychological aspects of relationship and cooperative activity, making the catalogue a parallel dialogue and equal partner with the art. Given its size, only committed readers will plumb its depths; similarly with the art, which demands close analysis. The effort required to come to terms with both the art and the catalogue is, however, well rewarded, but each work also needs to be appreciated for its individual merits outside the institutionalising context of the BoS.
The pivotal essay is French philosopher Bruno Latour’s Attempt at a Compositionist Manifesto, in which he argues against oppositional critique and proposes compromise as a more productive and realistic alternative. He suggests, “For a compositionist, nothing is beyond dispute. And yet, closure has to be achieved. But it is only achieved through the slow process of composition and compromise…” Including Latour’s essay offers compositionism as the philosophical ground for relational art and positions the curators as compositionists. Whether such thinking has any impact beyond art remains to be seen, but the shift from a critical to a compositionist stance entails at least the temporary suspension of disbelief. Curating is a critical as well as a compositionist endeavour.
Gao Rong, The Static Eternity
photo Ben Symons
Gao Rong, The Static Eternity
The artwork I kept marvelling at was The Static Eternity, Mongolian-born artist Gao Rong’s replica of the interior of her grandparents’ house. On close inspection, we see that every surface and every object in the house is covered in cloth embroidered to replicate the authentic surface: painted timber complete with scratches and chips, stained walls, the bricks on the floor, even the stove are all rendered with startling accuracy in embroidered cloth of typical colours. Evidently, this massive embroidering project was undertaken cooperatively by the local community (thus satisfying that criterion for relational art) and in part is intended to retrieve the traditions of embroidery. Appearing as the physical manifestation of a memory of, or a desire for, home, it invites us to rethink our familial and community connections. And it prompts consideration of what the minimum of material comforts necessary for survival might be.
The Static Eternity also speaks about the forms and media of visual representation and about the deceptive nature of appearances, and thus has a strongly conceptual character. My response is alternately subjective and objective—I’m an actor in a play, I’m immersing myself in someone’s story and I’m rethinking my own relationships. Simultaneously, I detachedly critique it as an art object, consider sociologically the phenomenon of its creation and ponder the art of embroidery.
Contemporary art, and audience engagement with it, can be seen as a reflexive aggregation of social practices. The huge and diverse audience for the BoS, including family groups, seems comfortable meandering among art of all kinds, conceptual and relational. The question is whether the audience, in person and online, will be influenced in their thinking and behaviour or will instead remember the BoS as another saturating wave thrown up by the ocean of global culture lapping their doorsteps. While it might identify traditions and histories that would otherwise disappear, assembling art from many cultures must inevitably accelerate cultural and artistic evolution and, by rendering the BoS as a sociological museum and us as flaneurs, heighten our sense of detachment from our own traditions.
Ultimately, our future rests on the production and consumption patterns of seven-plus billion people who are generally expected to act in their own interests and only cooperate for immediate advantage. We can’t predict the future except to acknowledge that the world will soon be unrecognisably different and the transition will be uncomfortable. Relational art can show us, archaeologically, what we will lose. It might also be used to facilitate dialogue and to recalibrate our values and beliefs.
18th Biennale of Sydney, 2012, All Our Relations, Curators Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster, Art Gallery of NSW, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Pier 2/3, Cockatoo Island, Carriageworks, June 27-Sept 16
If There Was A Colour Darker Than Black I’d Wear It by Rising Damp Youth Theatre & Illuminart
photo Jennifer Greer Holmes
If There Was A Colour Darker Than Black I’d Wear It by Rising Damp Youth Theatre & Illuminart
IN OCTOBER, COUNTRY ARTS SA HOSTED THE 2012 NATIONAL REGIONAL ARTS CONFERENCE, KUMUWUKI/BIG WAVE, IN GOOLWA, SOUTH AUSTRALIA (SEE THE INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR STEVE MAYHEW IN RT 110, P12). ANNE THOMPSON, FOR REALTIME, CAUGHT AS MUCH AS SHE COULD OF THE INNOVATIVE, COMMUNITY-FOCUSED LIVE ART AND PERFORMANCE PROGRAM.
the coriolis effect
This event is the outcome of a professional and creative development program for 10 artists exploring regionally based live art collaborations. Country Arts SA and central Victoria’s Punctum worked together on the program supported by a grant from the Theatre Board Cultural Leadership Program. Artists from Central Australia, Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia participated.
In physics, the Coriolis effect is a deflection of moving objects when they are viewed in a rotating reference frame [Wikipedia]. In this Coriolis Effect an audience on bikes becomes the rotating frame of reference. Armed with maps and orange vests for visibility we rode to and between five sites. First, a short ride to the wharf where artist Ben Fox unloads a van. He shows me a picture taken 99 years ago near Hindmarsh Island just across from where we are. It’s of a boat in the 1913 Goolwa Regatta decorated with flowers and swastikas. He has a set-piece boat, costumes, beach chairs, plastic flower garlands, costumes, props and symbols crafted by a group of artists in Indonesia. Our job is to set up and be in a photo using the boat and any other material. The source photo is soon forgotten in the flurry and fun of dressing up and posing, people coming and going.
Then a 15-minute bike ride to a bird hide set amongst the reeds on the River Murray. We are met at the start of the boardwalk to the hide by a woman (Susie Skinner) in 60s dress, coat, red wig and court shoes. Is this Giuliana (Monica Vitti) from Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1964 film, Red Desert? Speaking with an Irish accent, she hands out books with photos of the bird hide and the words “In Loving Memory Yarluwar—Ruwe (Sea Country) and the Murray River.” We are at a wake for the River Murray. Standing in the road, she recites a poem, an invocation to turn away from material consumption. She walks towards the hide and we follow her. Sitting inside on wooden benches, we can see the river from our place of hiding. The Adelaide roots/alt country duo the Yearlings (Robyn Chalklen and Chris Parkinson) along with Jacques Soddell and Jamie Brown accompany Skinner. A number of songs are sung, songs of loss and being lost. She then offers us a whisky to toast the river. I am being led through a ritual that feels familiar and comforting. I like being there just as I can like sitting in a church. Other things can happen that I didn’t plan, like finding myself still amid the world; like thinking about a river.
I ride into a head wind to The Palace of Nothing. Franca Barraclough has worked with locals Kate Toone, Andrew Bray and Marike Oliphant to create this palace. The site is a derelict milk shed. The interventions do nothing to mask this. Leaving my bike in ‘the black hole,’ a painted circle on the weeds out front, I am guided to some children’s chairs and books. Inside the front cover of every book is a mud map of the site. The voice of a young woman plays through speakers, describing what it’s like being young and living in Goolwa. She paints a picture of boredom and time filling, of treasured childhood pursuits no longer possible, with nothing new existing to fill the gaps. I climb the stairs to the milk shed. The door is boarded up but I can see through a gap. A film of the view out of a car window driving around Goolwa plays on a loop. A miniature model of the township with matchbox cars fills the veranda space. There’s not much here. I guess that’s the point.
Back into town to visit the Goolwa library. I am met by Michael, a tall, affable man in his 70s who asks me why I have come to Goolwa and whether I have been here before. What have been my impressions? He takes notes in pencil on an index card. We chat about the Wooden Boat Festival and about places to go rowing. Just as I go to leave, Katerina (Kokkinos Kennedy) grabs me and asks me to describe my experience of Goolwa. I find myself saying something unexpected. She’s a member of Triage Live Art Collective which “creates intimate and social live art events that allow strangers to encounter one another in disarming, playful and sometimes confronting ways.” The starting premise for this event called Snapshot is the fact that the history of a place is full of holes so people have been invited to bring to the library a story, email or object to be archived for the future.
Just round the corner on open ground I meet Tamara Marwood unknotting some string. She tells me that in 1928 the mayor of Goolwa, Percy Wells, failed to get support for a state of the art cinema so he went ahead and built it at his own expense and ran it successfully for 30 years. It is now the Civic Centre. There are kit bags and some tent-like structures dotted around a central table. Marwood invites me to build my own structure for civic gatherings using one of the kits: a large sail, tent pegs, poles, string. I lay the sail out. It rains briefly and I shelter under it. I decide I want it to form a roof. There will be no walls, just a flapping sail roof. I worry about my ability to achieve this idea. Then Steve, Antonietta and Craig turn up. Craig organises poles, guy ropes and pegs and in no time there’s an open structure with a sail roof about 1.5 metres off the ground. I’m both grateful and disappointed I didn’t get to work it out. Marwood films the process on her phone.
mcmansions, shacks, fries & a coke
I board a coach. Our tour guide is architect Steve Grieve. Over 10 years ago he bought a house on Goolwa’s outskirts, liked it so much he purchased another down the road, renovated this one, sold it, then demolished the first and built a new one on the property. This is his subjective tour of Goolwa. We see stone cottages and Norfolk pines in Little Scotland and simple shacks built in the 60s: one storey shacks, two storey shacks and A-frame shacks on properties with a native tree or bush or two. No formal gardens or fences here. We drive past a number of eccentric homes. Then we travel across the bridge to Hindmarsh Island. We hear the story of the building of the bridge from Grieve’s perspective. We disembark to visit a one-room shack on the island. We travel through farming land. Most of the island has been cleared. We then arrive at the Mariner and drive past two-storey ‘mansions,’ their style appearing in housing estates across the land. We stop at one particular house and Grieve explains the glorious mishmash of architectural features in evidence. He awards it a finial [a sculptured ornament, often in the shape of a leaf or flower, at the top of a gable, pinnacle, or similar structure. Eds], planting one near the letter box. Complimentary cocktails at his house conclude the trip. He’s a wry and engaged commentator with an axe to grind about beach homes needing to reflect the simple human impulse to have shelter near the water and in a landscape.
i met goolwa
The Australian Bureau of Worthiness (theatre makers Tessa Leong and Emma Beech with visual artist James Dodd) has spent a week in Goolwa asking people “What makes your day worth it?” Goolwa is the fourth place they have surveyed; the others are Port Road in Adelaide, Geelong in Victoria and Viborg in Denmark. From the experiences of the week the Bureau has organised a low-tech presentation. This one included Beech telling stories and impersonating people, James Dodd showing his drawings of Goolwa using an overhead projector and some sound grabs of music and recorded interviews orchestrated by Leong. Having experienced a number of raffles during the week, the Bureau ran one themselves and in a nice turn of the table, the winner got to ask any member of the Bureau any question and they had to answer. A picture formed of the people of Goolwa and the Bureau, the sum of the parts. I found myself appreciating the care in this project—for community per se, for this community in particular and for us in the sharing of what was unearthed in living in and talking to the people of Goolwa.
if there was a colour darker than black i’d wear it
We meet at a bus stop for If There Was A Colour Darker Than Black I’d Wear It by Rising Damp Youth Theatre and Adelaide-based projection specialist Illuminart. We are introduced to Ado through projection: a figure in a hoodie on a shed wall, spray paint can in hand. We text a mobile number and our message appears as graffiti across the wall. It’s a fun game. We board the bus. It’s dark outside. On a screen next to the driver we watch YouTube-style clips of Ado, his mates and girlfriend mucking around, talking to camera. We pull up at a house to be greeted by two performers, Ado’s parents. It is his 21st. Their performance is heightened, grotesque. We visit the party but Ado never turns up. There is punch, signing the card, Twister and stylised interactions between the parents. Things go awry. Ado’s dad hits Ado’s mum. He chaperones us out. Ado’s mum is last seen out the back banging her head against the glass patio doors. Back on the bus we receive texts from Ado over the next hour: “Home soon Mum. Please don’t embarrass me in front of my friends. Do you need me to bring anything? A.” And “Mum if you are going to hack my Facebook page at least log out afterwards,” and “Sorry I swore at you. Didn’t mean to make you cry. A,” and “Love you mum. X Adrian.”
Ado’s Facebook page appears on the screen. Past posts are shown. Audience members post new messages. Then the bus pulls up at a football oval. We pile into the club rooms—inspirational notes, lockers, footy boots and then a video plays above the door showing the coach in close-up revving us up for the game. We file out. On the field we see Ado in footy garb, an opposition player and the coach. Their breath steams in the cold night air. We get grabs of a game as floodlights turn on and off. But these figures exist like ghosts outside of time since there are no other players, or crowd or noise. Then we climb stairs and enter the clubroom set up for an awards night. The coach wanders amid the tables, sits and eats a sandwich, puts money into the jukebox and stares out the window. The sounds and speeches of an awards night can be heard but there are no players.
Back on the bus an eerie noise pervades while on the screen video footage taken from the driver’s seat of a car repeats, headlights lighting up a bend. We pull in somewhere to see a car on fire; a closer look reveals the flames as projections. My mood has changed from intrigue and anticipation to dread. After some time in the dark we arrive at a hall. It is empty. Home movies of Ado and the ocean play over each other on the walls. We walk through a small room with sympathy cards, remnants of a wake, serviettes, mugs and an urn unplugged. Back outside, we hear the messages on Ado’s answer machine, people looking for him, waiting for him, as we watch him walk away from us and disappear, a projection on a stone wall.
By now I felt completely interpolated into the drama and felt sick to my stomach in the bus once I realised Ado was about to die or was dead or had disappeared. The piece also worked retrospectively. On the way home I reconsidered the video footage and scenes we had witnessed, seeing them as after-images of the disappearance rather than as present time images leading to it. The experience lingered for days.
Kumuwuki, Regional Arts Australia National Conference, Goolwa, SA, Oct 18-21
SITEWORKS IS ALL ABOUT THE BUNDANON ESTATE AS A SITE FOR INVESTIGATION AND CONVERSATION ACROSS DISCIPLINE BOUNDARIES. SINCE 2008, WHEN BUNDANON INITIATED AN ENVIRONMENT/ART PARTNERSHIP WITH THE UNIVERSITY OF WOLLONGONG’S SCHOOL OF EARTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES AND SCHOOL OF CREATIVE ARTS, THERE HAVE BEEN ANNUAL OPPORTUNITIES TO UNDERTAKE SITE-BASED RESEARCH AND INTERDISCIPLINARY DISCUSSION, EACH ONE WITH A SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT EMPHASIS.
The prototype for Siteworks was the creative development residency called Ten Trenches in 2009. Led by the Cohen brothers, creative producer and artist, Michael and scientist, Tim, this project saw auger holes drilled, and ten slot trenches dug, in order to examine the flood behaviour of the river from up to 8,000 years ago. The purpose was to reach the Pleistocene period when the sea was about a metre higher than present—a level which is predicted to reoccur within the next 100 years. The project culminated in the night-time performance, Site by Night animating the trenches, illuminating the flood plain and generating a sense of the extraordinary regenerative potential of our planet.
In 2010 and 2011, extended residencies by artists and thinkers saw a number of commissioned artworks and performances, creative laboratories and an increasing number of collaborations between local residents, artists and thinkers taking place with the public outcomes presented over a weekend each Spring. This has led to a growing understanding of the land from cultural and scientific perspectives, encompassing both Indigenous and non-Indigenous histories of place, and inevitably, considerations of land usage and discussions around the future of food and water.
I’ve been privileged to be an audience member at successive Siteworks which have involved some truly wonderful performances and artworks as well as important conversations around the compelling and urgent issues of our time. I’ve planted trees and whacked weeds, wandered the river at dusk and heard the echoes of voices past and present ricocheting across the water and off the hillside. I’ve eaten weed pie, local black fish, freshly slaughtered beef and seaweed salad. I’ve watched the construction of an iron bark canoe and a geodesic dome, and listened to birdcalls both live and recorded. I’ve seen more kangaroos, wallabies and wombats in one place than just about anywhere else in Australia, and I’ve stood in deep trenches and marvelled at the layers of earth, rock and clay dating back ten thousand years.
As each Siteworks rolls into the next, the conversations continue and deepen. Of course the fact that Bundanon is a working farm, makes the topic of food and water particularly pressing, and provides a relevant context. For instance, an exemplary presentation by Professor Lesley Head, Director of the Australian Centre for Cultural Environmental Research (AUSCCER) on the cultural ecology of wheat in 2010 articulated the “perspectives on human-plant interactions by tracing and connecting the cultural, economic and ecological networks in which wheat is embedded from production to consumption.” Taken in tandem with Diego Bonetto’s social tactics with weeds, an understanding of human-plant relationships has been enabled in new and compelling ways for participants.
being there
Weed Whacking; Siteworks
photo Heidrun Löhr
Weed Whacking; Siteworks
To arrive at the Bundanon Homestead on a glorious Spring day is to pretty much arrive in heaven. The rolling green pastures, the rich perfume of the cottage garden in flower, the beautiful colonial homestead housing an extraordinary collection of art including several new commissions; a band—Paul Greene and the other colours—playing under the coral trees; fresh produce by local market gardeners, a fantastic coffee experience and happy families everywhere. Somewhere out in a paddock, Gary Warner is constructing a Geodesic dome. There are 100s of young seedlings to plant and lots of fireweed to pull out. Two of Brooke Andrews’ caravans from his Sydney Festival project, Travelling Colony, house videos documenting artists’ projects: Cross (X) Species Adventure Club: Australian Safari by Natalie Jeremijenko and Food for Thought by Tom Rivard, Jodie McNeilly and Michael Lewarne. It’s cosy viewing squished into a caravan watching the adventures of artists and cultural activists.
performance by Robyn Backen & Plank, Siteworks
photo Heidun Löhr
performance by Robyn Backen & Plank, Siteworks
In the lushly chintz music room of the Boyd’s family homestead, Nigel Helyer’s 8-track sound installation, Milk and Honey, references the biblical book of Exodus whose poetic language is in stark contrast to the prosaic diary entries written by colonial settlers in the 1880s. The murmuring of voices, the humming of the bees, the sound of waves lapping against a bow, transports listeners into a poignant and resonant sonic space. In the evening we all wander down to the riverbank and, as night falls, listen to the voices of Robyn Backen’s performers (Plank) echoing across the river, reporting the weather from a century and a half ago. Flickering torchlight occasionally illuminates the scrubby hillside, throwing up strange shadows, as a ghostly procession of performers climbs the hill, to disappear mysteriously into the blackness.
postcards from the future
Punctuating these bucolic experiences were two key conversations. The first, Postcards from the Future, was facilitated by Fiona Winning. The brief was to imagine, optimistically, what the brave new world of future food might be in 2032. I suspect that it was the optimism that each speaker found most challenging…Chris Presland, from the Southern Rivers Catchment Management Authority (CMA) and chair of the Greenbox Regional Food Cooperative, addressed a postcard to his granddaughter, imagining a world in which government and community finally recognise the fundamental necessity of prioritising a healthy natural environment, as well as the need to make conscious choices about food. Artist Barbara Campbell’s postcard to her niece, on the occasion of the Spring Equinox Festival, was a celebration of all the things that connect us, cultural and plant diversity and the importance of planting seeds both conceptual and physical. Shane Norrish from Landcare Australia, writing to his partner Rosemary, celebrated the achievement of sufficient water on tap in Kenya, allowing him to note that 40% of the world’s populations live in river basins currently suffering severe water stress. Chris Andrew from Greening Australia talked about the importance of ‘joined-up thinking,’ of the need to break out of discipline silos to address the pressing and profoundly connected issues of energy, food and water.
eating animals
Lunch was pretty awesome. Prepared by Dank St Deport chef Jared Ingersoll chef and an extraordinary team of helpers, the feasting offered an optimistic view of what the future might hold, if only we tend to our environment, harvest wisely and eat what is grown, produced and marketed locally. On the menu was local blackfish with seaweed salad, cultured and harvested by Aquatic Scientist, Pia Winberg; organic chicken with weed salad and, of course, a vegetarian option. Undoubtedly the most confronting item on the menu, however, was the Bundanon Beast (numbered RT-106), an Angus mixed with Black Simmental steer, slaughtered for the Siteworks feast at the request of property manager Henry Goodall. The project was contentious, even for Bundanon staff, but in the end Henry’s argument about the importance of making the connection between the actual animal in the pasture and the food on our plate was an essential one.
In order for participants and eaters to more fully understand the relationship we have with the animals we eat, Goodall worked with filmmaker Mike Leggett on a video called RT-106: The Beast of Bundanon. It was screened in one of the upstairs rooms at the homestead, and just to make sure that we all got the point, we sat watching the video with our feet on the tanned hide of RT-106. As Jonathan Safran Foer wrote in Eating Animals (2009): “Perhaps there is no meat. Perhaps there is this animal, raised on this farm, slaughtered at this plant, sold in this way, and eaten by this person…”
These are not the shockingly, brutal images of a Four Corners program; the abattoir is clean, the workers efficient and there is no gratuitous brutality. The moment of slaughter is not shown, but the hung cadaver of a large steer skinned, gutted and then butchered, is in striking contrast to the images of that same, wet-nosed young steer sniffing the air from the back of a truck on its way to the abattoir, or the big eyes of cows and their calves in Bundanon’s paddocks gazing into the camera. There is respect and poignancy, but no sentimentality. We are eating animal.
postprandial conversation: future food
Cleverly facilitated by Gretel Killeen, this conversation involved chef Jared Ingersoll, an outspoken advocate of sustainable, ethical eating; Ingrid Just, media spokesperson for Choice; futurist Mike McCallum; dairy farmer Lynne Strong; Professor John Crawford, who holds the Judith and David Coffey Chair of Sustainable Agriculture at the University of Sydney; and Jodi Newcombe, environmental engineer and economist.
The point was compellingly made that our future food system must take us beyond a merely economic relationship with land, and move to smaller, more distributed networks of food production. The cost of food and food production was a recurrent trope with Jared Ingersoll making the point that we seem to want obesity and poor health delivered to us at bargain prices. Mike McCallum followed up by pointing out that governments need to make decisions about food quality; currently economic incentives make it easy to eat badly. Food typically represents 10% of the average household’s income, meaning that it’s never been cheaper. Food is now bred for quantity rather than quality; there has been a 50% decline in nutritional density from f50 years ago. Ingrid Just on the other hand, argued that Siteworks attendees were middleclass and out of touch with the realities of the average suburban household, where shopping is predicated on cost and convenience, while making a compelling point about packaging by dumping in front of us the rubbish she picked up from junk food wrapping on a stretch of roadside just outside Nowra.
Dairy farmer Lynne Strong had some good things to say but telling us that organic farming is more environmentally costly than factory farming was not one of them. John Anderson made the chilling point that no-one is thinking about the global rate at which we are losing top soil; apparently we have about 60 years of top soil left, while McCallum further commented that cities are consuming the best arable land. Strong told us that less than 6% of land in Australia is arable. Anderson also argued that the next 10-15 years would see major conflicts associated with water shortages. “Hungry people,” he said, “are angry people.”
One of the great things about the curated conversations at Siteworks is the bringing together of people from very different lived experiences and perspectives. This is not a scenario where everyone sits around agreeing with each other. Instead the inevitable paradoxes, contradictions, vested interests and passionate engagements come into fruitful but sometimes frustrating interaction. One of the particularly interesting things about putting ‘experts’ into conversation with regular punters is that they/we sometimes have to unpack some of our most treasured tenets, adopted practically as items of faith, while experts can assume that punters know nothing and having nothing valid to contribute.
where to next?
It’s clear that information is one part of the story. We can’t talk about food security without talking about health. We can’t talk about health without talking about the environment. We can’t talk about the environment without talking about culture. Growing ideas is as important as growing food. Ultimately, however, the challenge is not only to envision the future, but also to map it, and get on track. We know what we need to do. The future is in our hands.
THERE’S A LINGERING WHIFF OF THE CULTURAL CRINGE TO THAT OFT-EMPLOYED PHRASE, ‘WORLD CLASS.’ IT’S SLAPPED ON NEW ARCHITECTURE AND RESTAURANTS, BUT EQUALLY BESTOWED AS A KIND OF HONORIFIC ON CULTURAL ARTEFACTS. IN A PAROCHIAL SENSE, IT SUGGESTS THAT SOMETHING ISN’T JUST GOOD, BUT GOOD ENOUGH FOR ELSEWHERE, WHERE STANDARDS ARE PRESUMABLY HIGHER. IT’S A TERM OF PRAISE THAT CAN ALSO BELITTLE. NOT ALWAYS, OF COURSE.
There’s a realm in which ‘world class theatre’ is a very accurate descriptor—that space occupied by works that consciously seek a diasporic status, and that often address internationalism on both a thematic and contextual basis. Think of Ariane Mnouchkine’s touring productions, or those of the Roberts Lepage and Wilson. These situate themselves in a floating world that may touch down on earth here and there, but never take firm root. They travel well, but sometimes at the expense of a profound engagement with the local.
All of this is a way of thinking through the dilemma of the international arts festival in Australia today. The works that are brought here must strike that balance between the exotic and the universal, be indicators of elsewhere while still speaking to the familiar, and admit of a plurality without losing intelligibility. At the same time, new Australian work presented in a festival context will be (perhaps unconsciously) viewed with a comparative eye—is this of the same quality or kind as its visiting brethren? Is it too Australian? Not Australian enough?
These are usually unhelpful questions, but we ask them. I don’t know how well the range of new Australian work at this year’s Melbourne Festival would travel, but its relationship to the burgeoning economy of global cultural exchange is certainly worth examining.
chunky move, an act of now
Anouk van Dijk’s first production as head of Melbourne’s Chunky Move was a must-see for several reasons. Appropriately titled An Act of Now, it’s a dazzling, immediate production that negotiates continuity and change. An exploration of group dynamics, exploitation, surveillance and the madness of crowds, it makes great demands on its dancers and achieves equally thrilling results.
It’s also an urgent work in the way it manages the expectations of its audiences. Chunky Move is one of the country’s flagship dance companies, and has been pivotal in the incremental development of performance styles that are both distinctive and influential. How these would fare under the stewardship of an incoming choreographer from the Netherlands was always going to be a matter of intrigue. An Act of Now suggests that van Dijk will have an admirable creative impact on the next generation of Australian dance, since the work features much that is strikingly different from the story we’ve seen thus far.
The dancers are locked in a large glass box, greenhouse-like, which is filled with rolling pillows of smoke and lit by invisible sources. They strike poses in sharp silhouette, distinguishable only by things that hint at character—a pair of sunglasses, high heels or brawny broad shoulders. They appear for a moment then melt into invisibility. They’re insubstantial but iconic, unreal but instantly recognisable. It’s a fitting beginning. The next hour or so will demonstrate how the reduction of the individual to an image, so common in the contemporary mediascape, is both dangerous and seductive.
The obvious parallel here is that of a Big Brother house, in both an Orwellian and reality TV sense. The relationships that form between dancers are always made desperate by our scrutiny. Bonds form briefly, but are forever threatened by the lack of control the situation demands. The group turns on a member, pairs isolate themselves, attempt to escape or find some solitude, upset the precarious social balance of the hothouse ecosystem. The audience, meanwhile, exercises its voyeuristic gaze over the proceedings while remaining ultimately disconnected from the interior worlds that are denied us. The transmission of the score via individual headphones also subtly furthers this, separating us from our fellow viewers and the real sounds occurring outside.
If it’s an indicative work, van Dijk’s arrival will prove a positive force in the evolution of Australian dance. The piece is ‘international’ in a sense, since it would fare well in cities across the globe, but that could be said of most of Chunky Move’s previous productions. More interesting is the way it seems aware of the international market without particularly caring about it one way or another—its goals are aesthetically driven, first and foremost.
the rabble, orlando
Mary Helen Sassman, Dana Miltins, Orlando, The Rabble
photo Sarah Walker
Mary Helen Sassman, Dana Miltins, Orlando, The Rabble
The same can be said of The Rabble’s startling adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Its visual language evinces a consciousness of recent trends in post-dramatic theatre around the world, but its impact is utterly of its own voice. The closest referent might be Daniel Schlusser’s gripping eviscerations of classic texts (and Schlusser has worked with the company in the past), but even that comparison diminishes the brave originality on display here.
This is most definitely not Woolf’s Orlando. Where the original tale of a youth who switches gender, lives for centuries and seems unaffected by time’s decay is a love letter that bursts with pleasures and a kind of uncontainable joy, this production does a terrible violence to its source. Both are powerfully feminist visions, but where one celebrates possibility, the other introduces the most monstrous elements of patriarchy into a system that imagined alternatives. Here Orlando is not liberated when she attains her female form, but instead finds herself on the wrong side of a system of oppression to which she herself had previously contributed. This Orlando is rapist, perhaps murderer, victim, mother, hysteric, dunce, clown and much more. Indeed, all of Woolf’s characters are made into carnivalesque grotesques, or robbed of voice, or drawn in mere outline—there is no way of interpreting them in a realist manner, and equally the thicker meanings of this production will be debated by audiences who may each feel they’ve witnessed a different work.
There’s a sculptural quality to the palette—the alabaster surfaces of both set and players could make them marbles stolen from some older culture, but in their whiteness the cast are equally the colonials doing the thieving. There’s also a Catholic dichotomy between the strict and repressive atmosphere and the perverse fascination with an iconography of morbidity and excess.
Like An Act of Now, this Orlando is less remarkable for the way it speaks to its predecessors than for what it points to ahead. The Rabble has been a company to watch for some years, but the daring and acuity of this work is of the sort that indicates a giant stride has been taken, one which other companies will be well-advised to take notice of.
polyglot theatre, how high the sky
Polyglot Theatre’s recent years have been just as compelling. The company has had to adapt to survive, and in this case that’s meant developing a strong touring presence with a travel itinerary that is quite astonishing. I don’t know whether this has anything to do with the sheer level of confidence that must have allowed a work like How High the Sky to even be conceived of, but it’s the kind of so-crazy-it-just-might-work thing that few might even consider attempting.
The production is pitched at three very distinct audiences: babies under a year old, their carers, and a third group of onlookers. To create something that will speak to each of these, who will all have very different investments in the ongoings, is more challenging than may be obvious. To provide engagement with the perceptual psychology of an infant demands a carefully thought-out kind of immersive spectacle, but how compelling will this be for an adult sitting to one side? And what of the parent who is both onlooker and participant?
I don’t profess to any great understanding of babies’ mental worlds, but the youngest audience for How High the Sky gave out a sense of wonder that any work of theatre should be admired for producing. The space is an unfolding sea of balloons big and small, streamers, shifting sound and lightscapes. There’s an undersea aspect to it all, a fluidity and weightlessness. Puppeteers discreetly manipulate the environment and the kids are free to handle their way around the space. Carers are initially seated with the babies, but after some time are invited to move to the sidelines and most surprising of all is the way that the children are by this time so involved with their surrounds that there’s no real sense of separation anxiety.
For the third party onlookers, the responses of the babies are themselves undoubtedly the ‘show’ here, but it’s not some creepy Anne Geddes-style objectification of infants. The babies are not performers, but an audience we’re allowed the privilege of seeing. If anything, the looks on the faces of the children here were a reminder of how rare an aesthetic experience of sheer wonder is for an adult. It’s saddening, but also heartening to be offered a moment of pre-linguistic engagement, if only by proxy.
lucy guerin inc, weather
Weather, Lucy Guerin Inc
photo Heidrun Löhr
Weather, Lucy Guerin Inc
While Lucy Guerin has often employed spoken words in her work, it too often seems to occur in a space outside of language. Rather, sounds produced by vocal mechanics are just another extension of the body itself—the sense of their employment here is not that of reason and discourse but of the physical being of the noises we make. At the same time, Guerin’s choreographic interests have straddled a line between that immanent physicality and cooler, more cerebral constructs that exist almost purely as abstractions.
So while it’s possible to say a lot about things such as climate change, the invisible forces of nature or the effects of the environment on the human form when thinking about Guerin’s Weather, it’s not right to imagine that the work says anything about these concepts. The hundreds of plastic bags that make up the set might allow thoughts of the destructiveness of human waste-making; the hydraulic breathing of an arresting opening solo might suggest our fragile dependence on our atmosphere; but this thinking occurs after the fact, outside of the condition Guerin has created for us. More than most of her peers, I would argue, Guerin works intensely to efface any literalism from her choreography, and to equally subtract a sense of definitive authorial intention through which the dance can be ‘decoded.’
But despite her long and reckonable career, Guerin shares something in common with new and emerging choreographers. There are only a few tiny moments in Weather that gesture to her earlier work; more often it seems that she is trying to find new modes of expression. She’s not one to focus on developing a signature, a consistent style that carries across her body of work. But as with many of her contemporaries, this creates a kind of permanent crisis of creativity. Making it new is easy when you haven’t yet made much to speak of, but attempting not to settle back into familiar routines is a much trickier imperative to artists with decades of experience.
Weather isn’t a showy work, but there are brief sequences that rise up and make an attestable impact. Perhaps the finest impress most because of their simplicity: with the playing space entirely covered in the gently drifting plastic bags, the six dancers lie upon their backs in a row, link arms and slide the length of the stage like a snow plough, shoring up everything in its wake. Again, it doesn’t say anything. Indeed, it doesn’t really create many conscious associations. But it’s a movement that seems to emerge from nowhere, and disappears just as quickly.
–
Melbourne International Arts Festival: Chunky Move, An Act of Now, concept, choreography Anouk van Dijk, composer, sound designer Marcel Wierckx, costumes Anna Cordingley, lighting Niklas Pajanti, performers Peter Cseri, Leif Helland, Stephanie Lake, Lauren Langlois, Paea Leach, Alya Manzart, James Pham, Nina Wollny, Sidney Myer Music Bowl, Oct 18-27; The Rabble, Orlando, after Virginia Woolf, creators Emma Valente, Kate Davis, direction, lighting Emma Valente, design Kate Davis, performers Syd Brisbane, Dana Miltins, Mary Helen Sassman, Malthouse Theatre, Oct 12-27; Polyglot Theatre, How High the Sky, concept Sue Giles, Jessica Wilson, Anna Tregloan, directors Sue Giles, Jessica Wilson, design Anna Tregloan, composer, sound designer David Franzke, lighting Andrew Livingston/Bluebottle3, Arts Centre, Melbourne, Oct 24-28; Weather, director Lucy Guerin, choreography Lucy Guerin with the dancers Talitha Maslin, Alisdair Macindoe, Kirstie McCracken, Harriet Ritchie, Lee Serle, Lilian Steiner, design Robert Cousins, lighting Benjamin Cisterne, composer Oren Ambarchi, costumes Shio Otani, Malthouse, Oct 18-21
THIS YEAR THE BRISBANE FRINGE FESTIVAL GOT PERSONAL. UNDER THE RADAR WAS DOMINATED BY INTIMATE, LANGUAGE-DRENCHED WORKS EXPLORING INTERIORITY, GRIEF AND MEMORY. UNDER THE RADAR WAS ESTABLISHED BY THE BRISBANE FESTIVAL IN 2008 TO CUT THROUGH TRADITIONS OF BREEZY, SUB-TROPICAL SPECTACLE WITH A PROGRAM OF CURATED, EXPERIMENTAL WORK.
As Virginia Baxter noted (RT110 online), the differences between the two festivals are now harder to discern as Under the Radar delivers a diverse and sophisticated program of local talent, ‘hit’ shows from the national Fringe circuit and a smattering of international work.
berlin nevada: still night
My Under the Radar voyage began with European duo Berlin Nevada and their new work: Still Night. This adaptation of Italo Calvino’s iconic Invisible Cities was performed in a ubiquitous inner-city apartment/hotel. Ushered into a curtained convention room, we were greeted by Silvia Mercuriali delivering a lecture in a fantastical nonsense language. Her topic, a fabulist Brisbane, Huoz, where maps of the city were woven into an enchanted tale about her quest to go ‘down’ through the cracks of the pavement into an imagined, underground Brisbane. This intoxicating premise echoed Calvino’s Scheherazade plot, where Kubla Khan was entranced by improbable tales of imagined cities.
Then we were given headphones and listened to a velvet-voiced man reading excerpts from Calvino’s novel and instructing us to breathe, open our eyes and close them again as we watched the two women re-create the cities onstage for our delectation. Alas, the sound cut out and without the voice-over the delicate, child-like pact of the performance dissolved. Technical glitches aside, the reliance on the headphones shifted the work from an imaginative translation of Calvino into literal quotation. Despite the reaching and sensual intellect in the piece, it was a lesson in the limits of selecting such a counter-theatrical performance form.
isthisyours?, best we forget
Fascinatingly, the next show was also a lecture, this time delivered by three appealing young women about the psychological, personal and cultural aspects of memory. Developed by Adelaide-based theatre company isthisyours?, Best We Forget was an inventive and discursive lecture but as a performance suffered from the same inherent limitations as Still Night. When the performers reached across the lecture format and transformed it for us, when they made us believe the convention desk was a karaoke stage, when the two presenters became characters in their own action movies, the work exploded into life. These moments demonstrated the intellect, flair and pop culture chops of the creators, but somehow did not add up to a cogent performance experience for the audience. The novelty of the idea, the co-option of the lecture, couldn’t replace the resonant depths of a fully interrogated theatrical world.
elbow room, after all this
Indeed, the standout show for the 2012 Under the Radar took the meme about the borders between presentation/performance and information/story and injected it with a fully fleshed theatricality. After All This by Melbourne-based Elbow Room was an exploration of the nature of belief, the afterlife and grief. The piece was divided into three installations, with the audience walking between each. The first was a short, almost naturalistic scene, where two bewildered siblings reconciled themselves to a newly acquired stepfather who was a Creationist.
The second installation was, again, a lecture, which eventually morphed into a short performance piece that recreated the life of American mathematician George Price (1922-75). After developing a theorem for morality and natural selection, he abruptly converted to evangelical Christianity before finally committing suicide. The third installation, and the most successful, corralled the audience into the last moments of the American Heaven’s Gate cult. We watched them die in their matching tracksuits, then rise up and lead us, singing, through the tunnels and byways of the Brisbane Powerhouse. We emerged, blinking, many of us crying. The cynical distance with which we approached the discussion of religion, the convictions of science and the experience of spectatorship had been disarmed by the eloquent barrage of words, the surprising and tangential changes in form and most powerfully, the simple experience of walking in the dark surrounded by voices in harmony.
other adventures
There were many more adventures to be had from the remaining Under the Radar program including the naked, white-boy ennui of MC Matt O’Neil’s hip-hop set Envoyé ://: Fragmenté, about erectile disfunction, global aid and love. There was the reptilian, witty, anti-capitalist contemporary dance from Slovenia, Capital, which saw each audience member provided with a bound book of junk mail to sit on as we watched the performers ape the excesses of consumption and demand money to finish their performance at the 27 minute mark. There was the delicate, subtle choreography of Leisel Zink’s dance piece Fifteen set amidst the commuter traffic of the Queen Street Mall; and the charming but naïve play about grief, The Things I’d Say to You by the newly minted local collective, Fixate.
The final work, though, that had real substance and power was the screen-based installation Heaven :: Himmell. This intriguing collaboration between Australian Hermoine Merry and German Henriette Kassay Schuster was deeply evocative and elusive. You stepped into a half-lit space, surrounded with screens of lush greenery, text and mirrors. In the centre of the room was an installation featuring a car with rear view mirrors. Out of the corner of your eye you could see a girl in a blue frock. Like Alice Through the Looking Glass you followed her around a corner where she made a series of hand gestures with detached but child-like intensity. It was like walking into your own half-forgotten memories of riding home at night as a child while your parents talk and you fight sleep; or playing spotlight, I found you, I know where you are, on a hot night while adults drink.
While I confess to some nostalgia for the intensity of earlier years, when we crammed into Metro Arts, the Brisbane Festival should be applauded for growing Under the Radar into a large-scale event that has become a credible part of the national and international touring landscape.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS, A NEW FESTIVAL AMID THE BERLINER FESTSPIELE, STARTED THIS YEAR UNDER THE ARTISTIC LEADERSHIP OF FRIE LEYSEN, INITIATOR OF BRUSSELS’ KUNSTENFESTIVALDESARTES. IT WAS GREETED AS THE FIRST LARGE, INTERNATIONALLY ORIENTED FESTIVAL FOR THE CITY.
Even though German theatre is of high quality, it is less exposed to global winds than one might think and it has developed a culture, a way of doing. German stages set the bar for theatre globally, yes, but the eagerness with which the main stages have absorbed innovation has left no outsiders out in the cold to eventually gang up and invent renegade movements. The corollary, in simple and gentle terms, is that Foreign Affairs, despite intentions, was bold and inventive in the normal qualities of German ‘theatre theatre’—set design and philosophical narratives—but almost in equal measure poor in theatrical explorations that experimental performance has pursued over the past two decades: the audience-performer relationship, spatial and temporal poetics of performance, the nature of theatrical illusion. We sat and watched a lot of goings-on under the proscenium arch, so to speak.
rodrigo garcia, golgota picnic
Almost every production I saw suffered from triteness of stage imagery, as if the great wealth of experiment from the previous two decades has suddenly run dry, and left European theatre with a vast hope chest of increasingly tired pictures. The standout productions were heterogeneously so. Rodrigo Garcia’s Golgota Picnic was mid-1990s postmodern eclecticism in almost every aspect, and tiresomely so: a long text in a stage poem about the crucifixion of Christ delivered to a rotating spectacle of vaginas, hamburger buns, vomit, all readily recast by the wandering video camera. However, Garcia’s search for the imagery of crucifixion in Western art ended in a full-length performance of Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross. Annoyance and discontent could be palpably sensed in the audience, many of whom clearly did not know what to do with their eyes while the stage sat still. But this shift of focus from visual to auditory image of pain, demanding a recalibration of one’s attention and focus, was uncompromising, rewarding and, in a certain sense, courageous.
fc bergman, 300el x50el x30el
300el x50el x30el, FC Bergman
photo Sofie Silbermann
300el x50el x30el, FC Bergman
FC Bergman, an up-and-coming young Belgian theatre collective, presented probably the most satisfying work of the festival, 300el x50el x30el. The set is a realistic-looking clearing in a Nordic forest: a semicircle of huts, in the centre a waterhole, at it a seated man, behind him a forest. Right until the end, almost nothing happens on stage, only inside the huts, and we are confined to observing private dramas on the video screen appended above the stage.
There is a naïve, clumsy freshness to FC Bergman, who have clearly seen more television than theatre (one of the main aesthetic inspirations for 300el x50el x30el is clearly Scooby Doo). However, the steadily circling camera reveals an array of rather ordinarily imagined bourgeois troubles. Even when the images descend into surrealism, the purported critique does not surmount its own conservatism: the women are asexual, the men are uncontrollable in both violence and sexuality, the children are pure, and classical music stands for repression. And yet, the final 10 minutes of the production turn this set-up around, disarmingly, exhilaratingly and ultimately redeemingly. FC Bergman dispense with filmed representation for the raw catharsis of mass movement—the stage explodes in music and dancing—and deliver salvation for these pathetic petits bourgeois, not through a story, but through the gut.
fabian hinrich, die zeit schlägt dich tot
The most visually entertaining performance came in the form of Die Zeit schlägt dich tot (Time Beats You to Death) by Fabian Hinrichs, actor and regular collaborator with the Volksbuehne-based great director Rene Pollesch. Pollesch’s work dispenses with narrative and illusion in favour of theoretical discourses, simultaneously interrogating both philosophical ideas and theatrical illusion, and reconfiguring theatre as a place of social encounter, as an agora. Hinrichs authored his first one-man-show in a copy of Pollesch’s work, but without reaching the same philosophical depths or directorial heights. Still, throughout his somewhat trite essay on the impossibility of community or individuality in the city, many wonderful, Polleschian things happened: having to watch an exercise ball with ME written on it slowly deflate; a minute of silence, with Hinrichs on stage, peacefully reading a book; or being asked to tell our seating neighbour, “You look good.”
romeo castellucci, the four seasons restaurant
The Four Seasons. Romeo Castellucci
photo De Lage Wikispectacle
The Four Seasons. Romeo Castellucci
Romeo Castellucci’s The Four Seasons Restaurant closed the festival with a difficult attempt to dramatise the death of image and the self-annihilation of the artist. The title refers to Mark Rothko’s controversial withdrawal from a commission for paintings for the Four Seasons, a luxurious New York restaurant. Castellucci attempts to go beyond image by opening in complete darkness, submerging us in the deep, bone-crushing murmur of a black hole (digitalised by NASA) and finishing with a swarmy, chaotic picture of…the same? In between, a flock of Amish-looking women cut their tongues out and then perform Hölderlin’s dramatic poem about the suicide of Empedocles (another self-silencing hero). The poem’s terrifically heightened language is matched by the women’s terrifically static poses: they continuously form classical tableaux, many recognisable from classical paintings—it is as if the history of art flashed before one’s eyes. Their voices are gradually replaced by a recording, their lip-sync gradually worsens.
Whether or not this two-halved production succeeds in portraying the tragedy of self-abnegation, or is too didactic and aestheticising, remains an open question for more than one critic. However, I was mesmerised by the (possibly unconscious) way in which Castellucci’s production mirrored Vegard Vinge’s John Gabriel Borkman (RT110). Entire scenes, through their employment of heightened slowness, of repetition, of overdubbing, of mass nudity, of extreme artificiality of representation, could have been direct high-art parodies of the splatterpunk Borkman.
More than any other, this production revealed a sense of humour in Castellucci’s poetics. But it also brought the entire festival to a satisfactory conclusion. There was no need for Castellucci to declare the death of image: Foreign Affairs was already, in its visual repetitiveness, a requiem to the stage image of a certain declamatory, distant, representational kind. Through Castellucci’s drawing and quartering of his own approach, what emerged was less Sturm und Drang, NASA sounds and swarms, than a new way of making theatrical realism: layered, ironic, dense, funny, visceral, deeply fascinated by abjection and already alive in the work of the younger generation. If only they had been invited to Foreign Affairs.
Foreign Affairs: Gólgota Picnic, author Rodrigo Garcia, Oct 16-17; FC Bergman 300elx50elx30el, Oct 9-10; Fabian Hinrichs, Die Zeit schlägt dich tot, Oct 20-22; The Four Seasons Restaurant, direction, design, costumes Romeo Castellucci, Oct 25-26; Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Berlin, Sept 28-Oct 26
Frances Barret, Kelly Doley, Kate Blackmore, Di Smith, Mass Action, Brown Council, for Performance Space’s Halls for Hire
photo Pia van Gelder
Frances Barret, Kelly Doley, Kate Blackmore, Di Smith, Mass Action, Brown Council, for Performance Space’s Halls for Hire
RECENTLY I WAS GIVEN A CATALOGUE FROM THE LANDMARK 1977 EXHIBITION THE WOMEN’S SHOW, ORGANISED BY THE WOMEN’S ART MOVEMENT IN ADELAIDE. LOOKING THROUGH THE GRAINY BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOS OF WOMEN IN JEANS AND SKIVVIES SITTING AROUND TABLES ENGROSSED IN DISCUSSION, I HAD A RUSH OF NOSTALGIA. GIVEN I WASN’T BORN UNTIL 1981, IT’S HARD TO TELL IF THIS YEARNING FOR THE PAST WAS JUSTIFIED, OR WHETHER I WAS JUST ROMANTICISING A MYTHOLOGISED ERA OF FEMINIST ACTIVISM AND AFFIRMATIVE ACTION.
It seems like there’s been a rise in blatant sexism lately, and bewilderment as to how to respond to it. From Alan Jones’ ‘wrecking the joint’ proclamation to the shamelessly gendered attacks on Julia Gillard, through to the ‘binders full of women’ and rape apologist comments of Mitt Romney and the American Right, sexism appears to be rampant. Now more than ever, we need a better understanding of how feminist cultural output might respond to the overt assault on women’s voices in the public sphere.
Bonita Ely, one of the influential artists who emerged from The Women’s Show, commented in a recent interview, “often art leads the way.” Certainly, in the past decade we have seen a series of major exhibitions, conferences and publications focused on ‘women’s art’ and the legacy of feminism and its relevance today. These include WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (MoCA, Los Angeles), Global Feminisms (Brooklyn Museum, New York), Modern Women (MoMA, New York) and in Australia our very own Contemporary Australia: Women (GOMA, Brisbane). As well as these large survey shows there has been a hive of local activity such as Performance Space’s SEXES program and Serial Space’s sessions on women and technology as part of the Time Machine festival in Sydney.
Amid what seems to be a Zeitgeist of reviving debates about gender, cultural participation and political activism, I wondered if other women were nostalgic for an era of 1970s collectivism. I began by asking fellow Brown Council member Kelly Doley, who recently presented The Learning Centre: Two Feminists at West Space, in which 16 people gave her lessons on feminism in exchange for a painted portrait. She agrees there was a “surge of interest” among our peer group “within the past year or so.” She also feels that the revived interest was “inspired by increased recent international and localised activity of women’s collectives, exhibitions, feminist articles and panels.” She continues:
“It seemed that we all suddenly started talking about the ‘F’ word, like waking up from a deep sleep. Prior to this feminism was a term to be avoided, cringed at or considered as ‘boxing in’ our artistic practice. But in the past year or so the mood has changed.”
Kelly Doley, The Learning Centre: Two Feminists (The CoUNTess), performance documentation, Westspace Melbourne, 2012
photo Kelly Doley
Kelly Doley, The Learning Centre: Two Feminists (The CoUNTess), performance documentation, Westspace Melbourne, 2012
Doley suggests there has been a “call to arms” and a desire to re-visit the perceived unity of 1970s feminist creative practice, reflecting on our joint work: “This focus on feminism in my work came out of an increased engagement with feminist art history, aesthetics and politics in my daily life. Working with Brown Council in particular, as four women we started to investigate this stuff and became very interested in the history of feminist activism in the 1970s.”
As joint members of Brown Council, it’s hard to tell how much our ideas overlap, so I was interested in garnering the opinions of others whose experience is less directly attached to my own. I contacted Brisbane artist Alice Laing, who established the female-run and focused artist-run initiative LEVEL with Courtney Coombs and Rachael Haynes in 2010. Laing and Coombs recently presented Food For Thought, a project that brought together a range of women over the dinner table at the 2012 Next Wave Festival. Discussing their work, Laing comments: “Building connections between early career and more established female visual artists has been an ongoing goal of LEVEL. Food For Thought provided an opportunity for us to branch out and generate a national discussion that involved past generations and to tap into that wealth of knowledge and experience.”
Like Doley, Laing believes the revived interest in feminist art and activism is brought about by “the rise of political conservatism that has occurred globally and recent events within Australia such as the election of our first female prime minister.” She concludes, “It’s harder to be complacent about sexism when it’s right in your face.”
Monster Body, Atlanta Eke, Next Wave Festival 2012
photo Sam Ackroyd
Monster Body, Atlanta Eke, Next Wave Festival 2012
Contemporary dance artist, Atlanta Eke, has a different perspective. Eke presented the acclaimed Monster Body at the 2012 Next Wave festival. Asked about her relationship to the traditions of feminism, she comments, “I do not consider feminism as a tradition and definitely not an aesthetical art practice.” She continues: “Being categorical is reductive; historically labeling art ‘feminist’ has been an easy option for art institutions to throw a lot of significant female artists into one bag. From my position today, the feminisms of the past have not worked.”
Eke’s comments made me wonder about the impact of feminism and whether I was romanticising an era that looks good in the faded pages of an old catalogue but had no lasting legacy.
So far I’d only asked women in my own age group. I wondered what the perception was among women who’d been personally involved in an era I was perhaps unjustifiably mythologising. I decided to ask UNSW College of Fine Arts [COFA] artist and lecturer Bonita Ely for her reflections on The Women’s Show, its legacy and whether she thought things had altered since 1977. On the changes of the past 35 years, she comments, “I imagine there is, not so much affirmative action, but mindfulness that women must be included, not in a tokenistic way but on an equal footing in events and opportunities.”
Notably, she feels that there are more women, and a greater acceptance of women’s voices, within the public sphere and within art schools. While they may not be occupying the directorships or major public office positions, she notes that: “The changed demographic regarding the large number of women role models and mentors is very significant. I think we take this for granted, that there are women who [have provided] precedents, who have proved it can be done, who understand the sensibilities, the concerns, the background female students are coming from…”
Ely concludes, however, that the gains of feminism were often unglamorous and taken for granted: “The intergenerational dialogue happens on a daily basis for many female arts students, so perhaps it is taken for granted and its value is overlooked. Imagine if all your lecturers were male, that you knew few women artists and information about women artists was scant, [you were] operating in a vacuum…In the 1970s the majority of women artists were unknown, invisible.”
Ely’s comments made me realise that while I may be yearning for an era of skivvies, jeans and feminist affirmative action, the reality is the revolution is more complex. As Ely notes, what took place was a series of smaller achievements that have afforded me certain privileges that women in previous generations didn’t have. Laing made a comment that our generation grew up with “feminism in the water.” I think this is an apt observation, given the elusive and diffused nature of feminism, the influence of which is often overlooked. It seems to me that what is important for the future is an acknowledgement of the past and a sense of dialogue and exchange between generations. We need to build on the legacy of feminism, rather than continually try to invent it, so that we don’t forget how far we’ve come and how much further we have to go.
Diana Smith is a Sydney artist and member of the artistic collaboration Brown Council. She is currently completing her PhD at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales.
AI WEIWEI HAS BEEN ACCUSED OF BIGAMY, CHARGED WITH TAX EVASION, CONDEMNED AS A SUBVERSIVE AND DISMISSED AS A CLOWN. ALTHOUGH INFAMOUS AS THE ARTIST THE CHINESE AUTHORITIES LOVE TO HATE, HIS CRITICS ARE BY NO MEANS ONLY FROM GOVERNMENT RANKS.
Yet for all the headlines he’s generated, it can be difficult to cut through Ai’s prankster image and the government name-calling to form any real impression of the man and his beliefs. Enter Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, the debut documentary of US director Alison Klayman, and the first sustained look at this crucial figure in contemporary Chinese culture.
“In our first year of filming, I would read pieces that were done about him and he was already being called a ‘dissident artist’ or things like that,” says Klayman of the often two-dimensional image presented of Ai in Western media. “It felt not quite right—like trying to fit him into a mould. I always thought the whole point of my project was to show who he really is—to not just slap on some labels and make it easily digestible.”
The first iconoclastic surprise is Ai’s calm and philosophical manner, a contrast to his combative public persona. The documentary opens with Ai recounting a whimsical tale of his cats, loaded with political symbolism. “We have a lot of dogs and cats,” he says of his Beijing studio. “Out of the 40 cats, one knows how to open doors. Where did this intelligence come from? All the other cats watch us open the door.” Amusingly, we then see the feline leap up and deftly open the entrance to Ai’s studio.
Klayman’s camera follows Ai across four frenetic years from 2008 to 2011, a period that saw the artist’s actions and rhetoric become increasingly confrontational. The devastating Sichuan Earthquake of May 2008 occurred shortly after Klayman commenced filming, and was to prove a watershed for Ai’s art and activism. Shoddily built public schools, fatally undermined by the siphoning-off of funds through corruption, collapsed across the quake zone and left thousands of one-child families bereft. When discussion of this scandal was suppressed within China, Ai worked with volunteers to record the names of the dead children. After one volunteer was arrested, Ai travelled to Sichuan to testify on his behalf, but the artist was beaten and detained in his hotel room to prevent his appearance in court. The volunteer was sentenced to five years in jail. The widespread disgust at the scandal and Ai’s opposition to the subsequent cover-up established the artist as a truly public figure in China for the first time.
Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (still)
Never Sorry explores how Ai wove these experiences into his work over the following years, hanging 9,000 school backpacks outside Munich’s Haus der Kunst in 2009 in a poignant memorial to the Sichuan dead. On the second anniversary of the quake he asked volunteers across China to each read one of the 5,212 names of deceased schoolchildren his team had recorded in a stunning interactive memorial. It’s this intertwining of art and activism, a demand for truth and a space for subjective memory free from political imperatives, that is the essence of Ai Weiwei’s practice. Crucially, the documentary contextualises work often dismissed as sensationalist by those only familiar with Ai’s more outlandish antics, through its mix of contemporary footage of Ai and wider events in China with archival footage sketching the artist’s early years.
Interwoven into these public scenes are some of the film’s most affecting moments, depicting Ai in private, playing with his baby son or reassuring his mother about his personal safety. Klayman says that getting behind the artist’s public persona was one of the most difficult parts of the project. “He isn’t a particularly sentimental individual,” she explains. “He would much rather talk about the power of the internet than how he feels about being a father.”
Ai’s relationship with his young son is perhaps the film’s most unexpected revelation, since even many of his keenest followers would be unaware of the child’s existence. The mother of the child is not Ai’s wife, and in several amusing scenes we see journalists straining to garner details without offending the artist. “I never sought out his son or his son’s mother without him, because I felt like the point was to show Weiwei as a father, and not necessarily to go too far down the line of what the arrangement is and how everybody feels,” says Klayman of the delicate situation. The scenes between the bearlike Ai and the tiny boy reveal a warmth in Ai’s character not necessarily obvious in his more public interactions. At the same time, the situation highlights that Ai is no saint. Indeed, one of the strengths of Never Sorry is that it paints a sympathetic portrait without ever airbrushing Ai’s foibles.
For all the personal insights, however, Never Sorry’s main interest is Ai’s place within an increasingly fractious domestic debate about China’s future and the need for greater transparency. Although Klayman carefully avoids a sensationalist tone, it is hard to cast the Chinese authorities in a flattering light when they are viewed through the lens of the artist’s experiences. A blow to Ai’s head from a Chinese policeman—administered after officers had kicked open his hotel room door at 3am—caused a cerebral haemorrhage that almost ended his life in 2009. As Klayman was finishing her edit of Never Sorry in New York last year, Ai was arrested at Beijing airport and disappeared. Nobody knew when—or if—he would ever resurface.
Fortunately, Never Sorry was spared the weight of becoming a memorial for a vanished figure when Ai Weiwei suddenly reappeared June 22, 2011 after 81 days in detention. The footage of the bedraggled, subdued artist on the night of his release provides one of the film’s saddest moments, a sobering reminder of what an unyielding state can do to even its most high profile critics. Ai has gradually edged back into public life, but he remains under permanent surveillance and is unable to leave Beijing.
When authorities slapped Ai with a punitive US$2.4 million tax bill following his release, donations poured in from around the country. Never Sorry ends with Ai’s video of thanks to his supporters, featuring the rotund artist incongruously bouncing around singing the Smurfs’ theme song, adapted to convey a rather pointed message to the authorities—essentially “Fuck your mother.” The man may be caged, but his humour, defiance and sense of play remain as strong as ever.
Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, director Alison Klayman, producers Alison Klayman, Adam Schlesinger, United Expression Media, USA, 2011; distributed in Australia on DVD by Madman.
courtesy of Madman Entertainment we have giveaway copies of Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry. Click here.
THE NEW DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES MAY HAVE MADE FILMMAKING MORE ACCESSIBLE AND ECONOMICAL, BUT IT’S STILL A COSTLY AND COMPLEX PROCESS. HOWEVER, NOW THAT A FILM OR NEW MEDIA WORK CAN BE SUBMITTED AS THE PRINCIPAL MEANS OF ASSESSMENT IN THE PRACTICE-LED POSTGRADUATE DEGREES OFFERED AT UNIVERSITIES WITH SCREEN PRODUCTION COURSES, THIS HAS BECOME NOT ONLY A PRACTICAL WAY OF MAKING A FILM OR A MEDIA PROJECT, BUT ONE WITH OTHER ADVANTAGES.
Producing work in this way gives the maker the time to do substantial research, to think and to rethink a work, and even to change the concept completely. It provides facilities and technology to experiment with new formats and practices and to fine-tune technical aspects of the work. And most of all it provides space and a stimulating and supportive environment. The range and diversity of projects coming out of universities nationally is impressive: here are just a few.
myorchestra: real time music game
My Orchestra, director Pru Montin
Pru Montin’s Master of Screen Arts project, which she is making at AFTRS, is myOrchestra, a real time music game demonstrating how physical gestures can create music. It’s mainly designed for children, but she believes that it could have other applications such as aiding filmmakers in working out the sort of music they want for a film: “It should be the perfect tool to see if the music is working for the film.”
On the screen is a concert hall and orchestra: the player, taking the role of conductor and/or composer, gestures to the screen to choose the players and their instruments and create the music. The idea came after a group of children in her music class surprised her with an impromptu performance with their own orchestra made up of toys and pots and pans. “Children really relate to music and love to explore the sounds of different instruments; they’re fascinated by and really good at performance. They relate so physically to music, love to stand behind the conductor and wave their arms around. But who can afford an actual orchestra?” she asked herself, and then reasoned that Kinect, where you can control things by just waving your hands, provided a perfect way to give children access to an orchestra and its instruments. Through research and experimentation she created the game, writing the music while developing the programming code and the look of the user experience.
“We’ve got 36 pieces of music, from short, sharp stabs to longer chords, which can be used to explore the characteristics of the different instruments, demonstrating by exploiting each particular phrase in each instrument how you achieve their distinctive sounds. It features what the instruments do well. We’re still testing, ironing out bugs in the software. We need to make it foolproof before we really show it off, “ she says.
After completing her first degree at Monash, Montin came to AFTRS and did her Graduate Diploma in Screen Music. She believes that “AFTRS is the only place where you can explore music for film in a really practical way, especially because you can work with other filmmakers at the same level; the students’ films that I worked on in the Grad Dip are still doing the festival circuit.”
johnny ghost: feature film & thesis
Johnny Ghost, director Donna MacRae
photo courtesy the artist
Johnny Ghost, director Donna MacRae
Donna MacRae has recently finished her PhD at Monash University in Melbourne, as part of which she made a feature film, Johnny Ghost, which is having a successful run on the alternate festival circuit, picking up awards, including Best Feature at the South Texas Underground Film Festival and Film with Most Heart at the PollyGrind FIlm Festival in Las Vegas. She believes “the PhD film heralds a new mode of production, offering filmmakers a rich tapestry of ideas in which to make their work.”
Having studied film at VCA, gone on to do a Masters of Fine Art at Monash “for more visual understanding,” MacRae realised that if she did her postgrad degree in the Faculty of Art and Design at Monash, “I could meet the requirements with a 30,000 word thesis and some practice. So I decided to make a film, blending the intellectual rigour of writing with the visual creativeness of filmmaking. It was the first time anyone had done it there, but I’ve gained my doctorate and the film has gained some critical recognition.” Because Monash has no film production facilities, she used a very small but professional film crew on a fast and streamlined shoot; the university offered locations, paperwork and the financial support of her scholarship. Through the PhD she had a position lecturing undergraduate students, and many of them worked as extras on the film.
Her thesis, “Projecting Phantasy—The Spectre in Cinema,” is on ghosts in film, a subject that’s always interested her. She found the academic research and the interaction with other students really stimulating: interest in ghosts crosses over into different areas, and “there’s so much writing, not only on ghosts in film, but on cinema as a ghost itself.” In Johnny Ghost, Millicent, a professional musician, lectures in music, is popular with the students and loves her job. But when she decides to have an old tattoo removed from her shoulder, shadows from her past won’t let her move on so easily—her ghost is one she has carried with her. MacRae chose “to shoot the film in long takes and black and white to give it an otherworldly, real time feel. I wanted to give the audience time to feel Millicent’s grief and also to experience unease.” And she hasn’t quite finished with ghosts: her next project will be a ghost western.
island home: documentary & doctorate
Jeni Thornley’s Island Home Country is a 52-minute documentary, a poetic cine-essay about race and Australia’s colonised history and how it impacts on the present, exploring various ways of dealing with the legacies of British colonialism and its race-based policies. It was made through a very consultative process, with Respecting Cultures (Tasmanian Aboriginal Protocols), and suggests an evolving shift in Australian historical narratives, from the frontier wars to one of diverse peoples working through historical trauma in a process of de-colonisation.
Jeni Thornley is a filmmaker of many years’ standing (her short film Maidens won a Greater Union Award at the 1978 Sydney Film Festival), a teacher and writer. It was while she was teaching a course on Issues in Documentary at UTS that something about teaching the subject “triggered my own awareness of the connection between theory and practice. Some of the thinking I was doing in teaching the course made me think of a different way to make a film (within the university). I got a scholarship, facilities and supervision. In fact Sarah Gibson (Senior Lecturer, Creative Practices Group, UTS) was not only my principal supervisor but offered a creative alliance; she was a measured and thoughtful supervisor and has been like a creative consulting producer, nurturing the project.”
Thornley’s Doctorate (DCA) took seven years; the film took four years to make. “I did try and get a TV pre-sale and some support from Screen Australia, but I got knocked back, but I get spurred on by rejection,” she comments, adding that she “embraced the university as a home and a working environment. When you make a film in this way, later in a career, there’s a certain maturity—you go into it with an acute consciousness of combining your early work and the reading and writing that went into that, to achieve a creative fertilisation between theory and practice. That’s something the industry doesn’t support—doesn’t even recognise, really. And at the university I found a community of scholars that was enormously nourishing. One of my fellow students was writing on and researching [Indian filmmaker] Satyajit Ray, and I learnt so much reading her work and spending time with her. Someone else was researching Chinese documentary and held regular screenings—the potential for such interdisciplinary connections is great and the environment is tremendously invigorating and exciting.”
As well as filmmaking and teaching, Thornley finds being an independent scholar, delivering papers at conferences, writing chapters for books, all very rewarding. Her film was bought by the ABC and screened in 2009 and 2010, and has been to a number of festivals. She and the film have just returned from the Anthro Film Festival (Vietnam Institute of Culture & Arts Studies) in Ho Chi Minh City, an international anthropological festival screening works by filmmakers from Vietnam and other Asian countries, with a few by Western filmmakers (see Thornley’s report in RealTime 113, Feb-March, 2013).
notes for walking: locative artwork
Notes for Walking, Megan Heyward, DCA, UTS Sydney
courtesy the artist
Notes for Walking, Megan Heyward, DCA, UTS Sydney
Megan Heyward is an award-winning Australian digital media writer, artist and educator whose work is at the intersection of storytelling and new technologies. For interactive media and different screens she creates innovative projects to reconfigure narrative, and her works have been widely exhibited in Australia and internationally. She was an academic at UTS when she decided to create a new project as part of her Doctorate in Creative Arts, and believes that making such a project as part of her DCA allowed her to be more experimental, to spend more time and develop her ideas on a project that really had no funding.
Notes for Walking is the result; it’s an innovative locative artwork situated at Middle Head National Park and Mosman Art Gallery as part of the Festival of Sydney next January. Visitors will use their mobile phones to discover a set of short video ‘notes’ electronically tagged to actual locations and features of landscape as they explore the old naval fortifications at Middle Head. Working “with the spectacular intersection of land, sea and sky at Middle Head, and the emerging capacities of augmented reality and location-based technologies, Notes for Walking will provide an intriguing exploration of a remarkable landscape,” a combination of artwork and treasure hunt. Visitors will be encouraged to take photos and submit their own messages and responses as they explore the locale. A mixed media installation involving video and audio will be encountered in The Cube media space in Mosman Art Gallery, including photos and texts sent electronically from Middle Head by visitors.
It’s clear that these works and many more have come through a process that offers not only a new mode of production, but one that offers time for research, experimentation and rumination, a stimulating, supportive environment and some very different forms of assistance. It’s an exciting development, and one that should result in innovative and thoughtful new work in many different forms.
THE PENDULUM SWUNG BETWEEN WHIMSY AND TRAGEDY IN THE INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM OF SHORT FILMS AT THIS YEAR’S UTS SYDNEY INTERNATIONAL ANIMATION FESTIVAL CURATED BY ANIMATORS (AND UTS LECTURERS) DEBORAH SZAPIRO AND DAMIAN GASCOIGNE.
With a couple of exceptions, this was a strong selection of films, and one which encompassed a great variety of techniques, including drawn animation, glass painting, stop-motion, 2D digital animation and CGI. Despite the stylistic diversity, certain common themes emerged. Most work was narrative-based (other programs in the festival concentrated on abstraction), though some films depended more on mood than story. Three out of the four French shorts had an anti-war message, while several films explored isolation. The idea of escape ran through films both bleak and upbeat. What better medium, after all, to illustrate the concept of escape than animation—a medium in which objects and scenes transform with the greatest of ease.
Journey to Cape Verde (Portugal, 2010) explores the popular escape sought through travel, following a harried city worker who leaves for the unsullied splendour of Cape Verde, an archipelago off the west coast of Africa. Senses dazzled, the viewer is pulled into the world of the solitary traveller as he moves through striking terrain, experiences local hospitality and is generally exposed to the small discomforts and larger rewards of the journey. Mainly employing simplified silhouettes of intense colour, deliberately redolent of African painting, the film is one of several in the program to create textural variety through a mixture of animation styles, including drawn sketchbook images that occasionally ‘come alive.’ It’s a testament to director Jose Miguel Ribeiro’s skill that he conveys such a strong sense of place in this work, as well as reminding us of travel’s capacity to broaden our horizons, literally and figuratively.
La Detente, directors Pierre Ducos, Bertrand Bey
Most of the films exploring the escape theme were darker than this, however, their versions exploring the escape offered by imagination in the face of unpalatable reality. In La Detente (France, 2011) a soldier in the trenches of WWI dreams up a marvellous fairground battlefield populated by toy soldiers led by his own alter ego. This is expertly depicted in full-blown Pixar-style 3D animation which moves with relentless jollity. There are shades of The Wizard of Oz as the diminutive toy hero enters a giant head-shaped fortress, at which point the narrative takes a darker turn. It’s interesting to see this wide-eyed, cute-as-a-button imagery employed in a film about death and destruction, though directors Pierre Ducos and Bertrand Bey over-egg the pudding somewhat, their fantasy world a little too incompatible with the ‘real’ world of the soldier.
Being Bradford Dillman (UK, 2011) sees a small girl summon up an imaginary friend, who is also an alter ego of sorts, in response to a spiteful joke made by her mother. Molly Flowers, the young protagonist, is lonely: neglected by her alcoholic mum and teased by the neighbourhood kids. The film creates a child’s view of the world through cutout animation suggestive of children’s book illustrations, with the top of the mother’s head never seen. Its big-headed, enormous-eyed characters are more haunted than cute, however, and as if to reflect the lack of real joy in this child’s world, the colours are pallid and washed out. Being Bradford Dillman is wryly funny, but ultimately rather bleak.
The same can be said of Moxie (UK, 2011), which documents the last days of a psychopathic, suicidal bear. The creation of idiosyncratic animator Stephen Irwin, the film possesses the smudged black and white quality of an ancient crime scene photograph. It’s a tragicomic perversion of children’s animation narrated (by Ragga Gudrun) in a gentle Icelandic accent. Intriguing in some ways, it feels at the same time rather conceptually facile. Sharing the darker end of the spectrum, The Backwater Gospel (Denmark, 2011) is an atmospheric Gothic Western about the increasingly murderous paranoia which envelops the grizzled denizens of a desert hamlet. The creation of eight students at Denmark’s Animation Workshop, it’s as richly delineated as a classic superhero graphic novel—a celebration of genre rather than an attempt to break new ground. But the film to tackle death and destruction most succinctly was Spin (France, 2011). Simpler and more cogent than La Detente, its fellow French anti-war film, Spin offers up intricate patterns of digitised toy soldiers, presented Busby Berkeley-style. This frivolous dance of death mesmerises, emphasising through obscene parody the production line character of war.
Animation excels at mucking around with reality and delighting in the impossible. Several films played most successfully with this aspect of the medium. Luminaris, (Argentina, 2011) is a whimsically picturesque short in the vein of Amélie (2001), where real-life actors move in Chaplinesque stop-motion as they go about creating a wondrous new energy source. Da Haus (Germany, 2011) is an absurdist elaboration on the idea of creating one’s world from the ground up—an apt metaphor for the animation process itself, and one that was also explored in The Back Room (Austria, 2011). Yonalure: Moment to Moment (Japan, 2011), in which the moon takes a curious stroll through a slumbering town, shares something of Da Haus’s absurdist quality as well as its use of simplified shapes. In a dreamlike sequence that plays with notions of scale, the moon alternately grows and shrinks, pulling all objects towards it as it explores this new environment—only to wind up dissolving in a bottle of soft drink.
A Morning Stroll, director Grant Orchard
It seems fitting to conclude with a film that pays sophisticated homage to the animation medium itself. Inspired by a New Yorker story, A Morning Stroll (UK, 2011) begins in 1950s New York, which is rendered in the economical lines characteristic of cartoons from the famous literary magazine. It presents us with a mystery: a chicken walks unconcernedly along the city street, mounts the steps of a brownstone, pecks at the door and is let in by an unknown person, all to the bemusement of a passerby. Jumping forward 50 years, we’re taken through an almost identical scenario, this time in vividly coloured 2D digital animation. A young witness tries to document the chicken’s behaviour on his cellphone but, distracted by a zombie app, misses his opportunity. This leads us into the post-apocalyptic final instalment, a scene of desolation depicted in immersive 3D, where the passerby is a zombie and the stroll becomes a frenzied pursuit. For its wit and technical dexterity in charting the evolution of animation styles, A Morning Stroll was my pick of the bunch.
I would hazard a guess that for many adults, animation is inextricably linked to childhood. Most films in the International Program seemed to acknowledge this, either through playfulness, anthropomorphism or the telling of children’s stories. They used these signifiers, however, to express an often disturbing, adult sensibility.
UTS Sydney International Animation Festival: International Program, Sydney, Oct 13-14
OPPORTUNITIES TO SEE NEW AUSTRALIAN ANIMATED FILMS ARE FEW—AUSTRALIA’S INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVALS, FLICKERFEST AND ITS ILK AND THE MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL ANIMATION FESTIVAL AND ITS SMALLER SYDNEY COUSIN SCREEN WORKS ANNUALLY, BUT THE AUDIENCE REACH BEYOND THAT IS LIMITED.
However, online delivery is changing that for some works, free on YouTube, Ozanimate or for sale on producer sites in high definition. Whether this phenomenon is any more or less economically viable for animators than in the past is yet to be determined. In the meantime it is good to know that dedicated animators continue to make excellent films, as demonstrated in the 2012 UTS Sydney International Animation Festival.
the sea turtle and the osprey
The Sea Turtle and the Osprey is one of eight 10-minute animations that belong to the Yanyuwa-speaking Wurdaliya people of the South West Gulf of Carpentaria in the Northern Territory. These songline stories map out the land in terms of the movements of ancestral animals and provide new Wurdaliya generations with narratives that relate to ceremony, law, kinship and country. In terms of cultural meaning, motivation and causality in particular, the stories can be difficult at first for outsiders. This is compensated for with 3D computer generation of vivid widescreen land and seascapes and the mimicking of sweeping camera work as the osprey occupies his territory, slaughtering the sea turtles that pass through his realm. The sleek 3D animation by Brent D McKew and collaborators ranges from relatively simple to finely detailed, for example when the osprey bloodily guts several turtles. There were gasps of alarm from children, and adults, in the audience—sounds, I guess, less likely to be heard from Wurdaliya children familiar with turtle harvesting. The online version is prefaced by “Warning: Animated Violence” (www.infotech.monash.edu.au, go to Monash Country Lives Archive, Animation).
the last photo
In Lissa Pascale’s The Last Photo, a young girl photographs her red-scarfed soldier father at a railway station as he sets out for an unspecified war. Later, with her camera, she seeks him out amid battlefield ruins, pursuing the scarf that dances away from her and finding herself in turn pursued in a snowy landscape by long, looping coppery tentacles that threaten to immobilise her and seize her camera. For all its attractiveness and the cute realisation of its large-eyed protagonist, The Last Photo is distinctively spooky—a bloody mist swirls through the ruins, a looming, gas-masked soldier almost shoots the girl and the steam-punkish entwining tentacles are symbolically opaque, and perhaps all the more scary for it. Although admiring its fine detail, dynamic movement and elegant, neat picture book style, I wasn’t swept up into The Last Photo’s nightmare; the film’s abstract sense of context and curious symbolism kept me at a distance. But there’s no doubting Pascale’s skill.
paris lakes
This is the second time I’ve seen Robert Stephenson’s Paris Lakes, a bitterly caustic, gritty 2D animation of an imagined promotion for a grotesque new housing estate, tarted up with signage the likes of Notre Dame Place, characterised by the utter destruction of nature and the implementation of universal bad taste—which the film enjoys grossing out on as much as it disapproves. Filthy fun.
the money go round: ya ya ya
The only obviously experimental animation in the program is a surprisingly consistent work for one tied to a rock song, Ya Ya Ya by Sydney indie band The Money Go Round. Out of dark space, concentric circles rush out towards us, followed by ‘line-drawn’ jellyfish, elk, cannon, wolves, pylons, splitting and multiplying until there are only stars (born of cascading fireworks). After this mad evolutionary rush, the universe implodes, sucking objects and creatures back into nothingness. This bracing work is available on YouTube, looking much better on computer than on a large cinema screen.
predator!!
Jilli Rose’s Predator!! is a finely crafted take on both Pixar animation (depth of field and nice character touches albeit with a vibrant, more traditional handpainted quality) and nature documentaries (someone is going to get eaten). A small, round, one-eyed, feathered pink sea creature is at leisure. Meanwhile a long red and white striped worm wafting through a coral forest encounters one of the creature’s feathers and goes in search of prey. The pink ball accidentally impales itself on a coral branch. It bleeds. Close-up of its eye. A tear. Doomed. Suddenly we share the creature’s point of view as the worm races at us. Blackout. There’s an apt quotation on the animator’s website: “It was just like Pixar…until the blood started.” Perhaps a slightly more ambitious narrative or a touch of irony might have made Predator a more satisfying experience—as three-dimensional as its imagery—unless the final image of the bloated worm part sunk in sand suggested the indigestible, and defeat.
gristle
In Jamie Clennent’s Gristle, two old men, oblivious to their plight, chat in a white-tiled abattoir while hanging from meat hooks, their naked bodies marked out for butchery cuts. “How was Sydney? “The pies are shit….God knows what they put in them.” “Jenkins has gone. They must be working their way up the street.” “They won’t get me without a fight.” The men fall silent; the camera backs discreetly away. Spare dialogue, the occasional creak of meathooks, unfussy animation (the men are cutouts, the background three-dimensional), careful pacing, good voice casting and a neatly ironic script combine to make for a grimly satisfying animation. You can see Gristle on YouTube.
dukes of broxstonia—tomatoes
One of an ABCTV cartoon series built (oddly) around a middle European band, the Dukes of Broxstonia, this Tomatoes episode (number 10 of 13 on YouTube for ABC3) focuses on the drummer’s overwhelming passion for tomato sauce. Addiction consumes him, he hides tomato sauce bottles in the toilet and his undies, sprays sauce over fellow band members and audience, loses his job, grovels for sauce packs and…reforms. It’s bouncy, briskly done, richly coloured, vocally guttural and pretty well word-free, and lightly moral…and funny.
sumo lake
Gorgeously animated with pencil and paper, veteran animator Greg Holdfield’s Sumo Lake evokes Swan Lake framed as Sumo wrestling. Initially a lone wrestler plays with a wind-up sumo wrestler but then kicks the toy away. It appears to land in water out of which springs a fully formed wrestler en pointe. The new arrival ceremonially stamps his feet Sumo-style and the two men face off. Furious wrestling rapidly transforms into a pas de deux before the second wrestler returns to his watery origins. A return match is interrupted by the stamp of a giant foot belonging to a towering balletic Godzilla prancing about as if straight out of the alligator corps de ballet in Disney’s Fantasia before sizzling one of the wrestlers with his fiery breath. What follows is very laterally conceived indeed—with the return of the Sumo toy and an underwater wrestling match— but well worth seeking out on Vimeo or YouTube’s Future Shorts channel. The spare line drawing is excellent, hugely evocative in its minimalism and the sound design is marvellously apt. It’s good to see traditional craft in such fine fettle.
jack and jones
Walpiri man Jason Japalijarri Woods’ stop-animation is a simple tale, narrated in language and subtitled in English, about two Indigenous men, friends from childhood. As boys they inadvertantly kill a bush turkey with a slingshot, the first food they’ve provided for their families; they meet their wives-to-be while playing basketball; go shooting kangaroos to feed their new families; and decide on a night out in Alice Springs, drink too much alcohol and fight in the street. On the way home they hit a bush turkey, reconcile and, in the final shot, we see the friends with their families sitting by a fire in which the bird is cooked. The animation is straightforward, nicely textured with ample detailing and excellent sets, and the moral is transparent.
the maker
The Maker, directors Christopher and Christine Kezelos
A complex stop-animation, and copious international award winner, is Christopher and Christine Kezelos’ The Maker (which can be seen at www.themakerfilm.com, or purchased there in high-definition). Like the filmmakers’ ambitious Zero (2010), The Maker is expertly crafted, cinematically adroit (not least in its editing) and strange. Zero was hopeful—a low caste couple of zeros parented an infinity, which liberated them from an oppressive, numerically ranked society. The Maker, at half the length and on a smaller scale (with a large production crew), is more focused and brilliantly miserable. A rabbit with violin f-holes punched into his forehead, agitatedly constructs and dresses a female rabbit, plays her to life with his violin and…but you should see it for yourself. It has a grim ending, an exhilarating sting in the tail—like an Edwardian horror story (as is the setting). The Kezelos’ stop-animation technique in The Maker does not focus on elaborate physical movement or naturalistic physiology (as in Zero, their characters are toy-like) but suggests movement dextrously through camera positioning and editing, making the most of intensive design (a single room as opposed to the numerous locations in Zero) and evocative, subtly-lit close-ups.
sleight of hand
The most accomplished film in the Australian program came from frequent award winner writer-director Michael Cusack, producer Richard Chataway and their experienced collaborators at Anifex. The film is described on the South Australian Film Corporation website as “a love letter to the stop-motion technique which is presently under siege from the sexy renderings of computer graphics. While stop-motion is not as smooth as CGI, part of its appeal is the very obvious human manipulation involved which lends a kind of magical appeal to the process.” Hence the title, Sleight of Hand—at least in part. Unlike Kezelos’ relatively economical The Maker, a great deal of naturalistic physical movement is masterfully stop-animated. A filmmaker is at work in a room in a rather desolate, desert-like location meticulously manufacturing a version of himself—a stop-animation creation. In a grimly ironic reversal, wonderfully framed within a crane shot, the filmmaker discovers that his world is merely a set and that he himself is an assemblage of replaceable parts. With its wealth of wit and inventiveness, Sleight of Hand might well be a love letter to stop-animation but it equally engenders existential anxiety, not only in its protagonist but likewise in its audience. This is serious filmmaking, if in a long tradition of animation that ‘steps out of the frame’ but with its own idiosyncratic vision. Sleight of Hand is competing with The Maker (which has its own dark take on creation) and two other films for the 2013 AACTA (Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts) Award for Best animation.
The Sea Turtle and the Osprey, directors John Bradley, Dinah Norman Marrngawi, Jemima Miller Wuwarlu, Mavis Muluwamara, animator Brent D McKew, 2011, 10'00″; The Last Photo, director Lissa Pascale, 2011, 7'30″; Paris Lakes, director Robert Stephenson, 2011, 5'00″; The Money Go Round: Ya Ya Ya, director Dale Anderson, 2011, 3'00″; Predator!!, director Jilli Rose, 2012, 8'50″; Gristle, director Jamie Clennett, writer, producer Jonathon auf der Heide, 2011, 3'30″; Dukes of Broxstonia—Tomatoes, director Suren Perera, producers Stu Connolly, Jane Schneider, 2011, 3'00″; Sumo Lake, director Greg Holfeld, 2011, 3'00″; Jack and Jones, director Jason Japalijarri Woods, 2012, 4'00″; The Maker, writer, director Christopher Kezelos, 2011, 5'17″; Sleight of hand, writer-director Michael Cusack, 2012, 9'48″; Australian Showcase, UTS Sydney International Animation Festival, UTS, Sydney, Oct 13; www.siaf.uts.edu.au
photo Mark Ashkanasy, RMIT Gallery 2012, commissioned by Experimenta
Katie Turnbull’s Modern Vanitas, (2012)
HOW SHOULD AN ANDROID SOUND? THE HUMANOID SHAPE IS UNCOMFORTABLY PLIANT, SMOOTH. IT’S UNNERVING, CARTOON-LIKE, BUT I’M PRETTY SURE THE INTRIGUED AND SPOOKED ALIKE AT THE OPENING OF EXPERIMENTA’S SPEAK TO ME AREN’T THINKING CASPER THE FRIENDLY GHOST WHEN THEY SÉANCE WITH IT.
As I hold it on my lap we speak to each other. It tells me in a distinctly ocker accent its name is Yvonne. The artist smiles amusedly. I can’t get it off my lap quickly enough. Hiroshi Ishiguro’s Telenoid (2010) is a work suggestive of Speak to Me’s overall theme, articulated by curator Abigail Moncrieff as the “invitation to consider what it means, at this time, to be together.” The answer is “squashed,” if the opening night crowd is anything to go by. And as it’s not a flash mob it doesn’t count as art. But this anonymous crowd is there to see, hear and touch art that is about how contemporary media bring people together, enable networks of difference and cajole intimacy out of remoteness.
There are some drawbacks to sense-dropping on anonymous others we will never meet. Hearing the faintest whimper of a defeated New York street sweeper during the ‘mother of all storms’ in October this year speaks of the global mediation of anything-anywhere-anytime. Speak to Me seeks to explore this micro familiarity in terms of the intimate apparel of technology that we can’t seem to do without. These works are suggestive of the mediation of the eye (Wade Marynowsky’s Acconci Robot, 2012), mobile screen (Meiro Koizumi’s My Voice Would Reach You, 2009), touch (Scenocosme, Lights Contacts, 2010) and voice (Kate Murphy’s The Appointment, 2009). Sure we can transcend the aloofness of distance, but the intimacy of technology and flesh in this exhibition, unwittingly or otherwise, concentrates on big media’s rapacious need to eavesdrop simply because it’s what we do now.
This theme in 2012, though, is decidedly not that interesting in itself since tele-intimacy is so pervasive and taken for granted. The currency of the term “social media” was the final imprimatur needed to render the ambience of presence at a distance banal. Facebook and Twitter are not an apotheosis of some utilitarian dream but merely the contemporary bullhorns of instantaneous blurting, just for the sake of it. Natalie Bookchin’s Mass Ornament (2009) is a case in point. In synchronising hundreds of YouTube clips of people dancing, at times erotically, at others embarrassingly, it is as the curatorial notes astutely assert “a perfect expression of our age” in its public display of privacy. Less interesting is Sylvie Blocher’s 10 Minutes of Freedom 2 (2010), a large-scale vertical projection of people wearing T-shirts with printed, Tweet-like secrets they have only ever thought but never spoken, like “I live every day as if it was the last” or “Life hangs by a thread, so, I won’t jump.” Before I move on to the next paragraph I should say that my telephone just rang.
Speak to Me reveals how varied the technological mediation of art is in 2012, such as Archie Moore’s electronic billboard-inspired Kinelexic Tokyo (2012), the interactive projection of Yandell Walton’s Human Effect (2012) and Katie Turnbull’s Modern Vanitas (2012), a homage to one of the earliest forms of experimental media art, the phenakiscope. This work, commissioned by Experimenta, cheekily plays with the convergent vibe of Speak to Me, whether it knows it or not. In its use of turntables and a movable, stylus-mounted digital camera as an interface it introduces interactivity into the kinetic, analogue art of persistence of vision. This is what the theory pundits call remediation.
But this exhibition is revealing of the history of Experimenta itself. On the verge of Experimenta Media Art’s 20th anniversary in 2013, it emphatically demonstrates how it has changed with and reflected the times it seeks to capture. Experimenta, with its pedigree in moving image culture (the Super 8 Group and the Modern Image Makers Association), grew up with the very term ‘media art,’ from the distinctly interactive work of the 1990s to the comfortable mix of time-based and participatory work today. The interactive fatigue that succeeded the art of cyberculture revealed that computer-based interaction would always be a temporary novelty. Let’s face it once and for all, interactive feedback in electronic and experimental art existed before Pong (1972), Myst (1993) or User Unfriendly Interface (1997). Even with the presence of interaction Speak to Me evidences the predominance of the video screen. This is different from video art, which is featured in a looped program, Narrative Threads, curated by Jared Davis, which features work by, among others, Dominic Redfern and Soda_Jerk. The mise en screen at this event couldn’t have been more different from the striking assemblages of grey, look-alike computers at Experimenta Media Art’s 1996 festival at the Lonsdale Street Powerhouse in Melbourne, or Mike Leggett’s and Linda Michael’s Burning the Interface: International Artists CD-ROM (1996) at the MCA in Sydney. A didactic panel at Burning the Interface reassured punters that it was okay to play with the work. Times have certainly changed.
The deliciously odd workout in this eclectic mix was Shih Chieh Huang’s interactive environment of otherworldly junk sculptures Slide to Unlock (2012). Echoing the intelligent ecosystems of a different time, it occupies an entire gallery of its own. A cross between mutated jellyfish swarm, electronica and rave, this phosphorescent world uncannily garners the unapologetic whimsy that has always been present in experimental art. Coming together doesn’t have to only mean people with other people.
Philip Brophy’s Kissed (2008) is arguably the most iconic and sonic engagement with the biennial’s theme of intimacy. Brophy composed a score to accompany Andy Warhol’s compilation of short films of the Factory demimonde kissing. Kiss (1964) is a silent film whose sonic vacuity also invites an act of coupling, of coming together. Brophy orchestrated a suite of prepared scores or “sexualised throbbings” that give erogenous voice to the 53 minutes of the film. With mouths occupied, Warhol’s rakes and wannabe starlets can only speak to each other with their eyes.
The national tour of Speak to Me will commence at ISEA 2013 in Sydney, June 7-16
Speak to Me, Experimenta 5th International Biennial of Media Art, RMIT, Melbourne, Sept 14-Nov 17; www.experimenta.org
GIVEN ORSON WELLES’ INVENTIVE BACKGROUND IN BROADCAST RADIO DRAMA, IT’S SURPRISING HOW LITTLE HIS FIRST FILM CITIZEN KANE (1941) IS ACKNOWLEDGED FOR ITS USE OF VOICE AS ITS PRIMARY DRAMATURGICAL TOOL. IT TELLS THE STORY OF CHARLES FOSTER KANE (PLAYED BY WELLES) WHO ATTEMPTS TO BECOME THE VOICE OF AMERICA, SPREADING HIS WORD THROUGH SYNDICATED NEWSPAPERS, RADIO OUTLETS AND ELECTION RALLIES.
There is hardly a single image in the film which is not predicated on an imaginative consideration of how to visualise voice—of how to depict the means by which political figures picture themselves and project themselves in the act of declaring their principles and selling their platform. It’s not a simple matter of symbolism: Welles employed multiple microphones to map his staged spaces and allow his actors to dramatically shift space while being captured with clear fidelity by multiple microphones. Actor, orator and narrator, Welles thought radio to make cinema.
In the lead-up to the 2012 US Presidential Election, the Presidential Debate functioned as an old world ‘oratorium,’ a gladiatorial battle staged with words. Like all debates—especially broadcast ones—it’s like martial arts in extreme slow motion. The opposite of any contact sport, the debate deploys words in place of swords. Instead of armour or insignia, the participants project themselves as opposing types. Obama gestures with sleeves rolled up, often poised as if sitting on an imaginary brownstone stoop uptown. Romney hovers around, pacing the floor like a Baptist preacher, feigning exhaustion and exasperation. Whether or not their body language or their occupancy of space is a calculated manoeuvre, the semiotics remain. They cast themselves as characters on the political stage, dressing their words in performative garb.
The mediasphere is transformed into a political sound cloud around the time of elections. It’s a dense field of vocal noise. Sound waves criss-cross to form cross-hatched patterns of agitated energy. Much of this sound cloud is formed by repetition, which only adds to its permeation and congestion by looping views. To cut through it takes the kind of imagination Welles exhibited in his scripting and direction of Citizen Kane: he used voice as the material for his construction of a perspective on the topic of voice.
wake the fuck up!
Such an approach is taken in a television advertisement for the Obama Campaign of 2012, produced and paid for by the Jewish Council for Education and Research. It features Samuel L Jackson and is titled Wake The Fuck Up!. Inspired by his audiobook reading of Adam Mansbach’s Go The Fuck To Sleep (2011), it’s styled like a children’s tale in rhyming couplets. It tells the story of Little Susie who is concerned that her family—parents, siblings and grandparents—have become desensitised and apathetic, disengaging from the local political landscape as the presidential election looms. She urges them to wake up to their situation, noting clearly how their individual lives and needs will be directly impacted should Obama not win the election due to Romney’s negative platform of cuts and obstructions to a wide range of social services.
Irrespective of the political bias, it’s an hilarious advertisement. When Susie’s family fobs her off with dismissives such as “All politicians are the same,” Samuel Jackson suddenly appears from behind furniture, grabs the family member and retorts vehemently in their face. He demolishes their lazy logic—their unthinking reiteration of responses born of the political sound cloud which wears down peoples’ critical thinking. He does so by first repeating back to them their own line (“All politicians are the same?!?!”), emphasising with incredulity how stupid their response is. Jackson adds a few rhyming lines which pose a counter-argument, finishing with the tag line, “Wake the fuck up!”
perfect casting
Once this advertisement was posted online, numerous pro-Romney/anti-Obama ‘video responses’ were mounted, most admonishing Samuel Jackson to “wake the fuck up.” None of them, though, had the power of a comeback line. All the responses seemed incognisant of the core of the Jackson advertisement: here was a black man mystically invading the heartland of lazy, unregistered non-voting white America. His expletive tag line is a self-parody of white perception of African-American vulgar argot. It’s like Eddie Murphy gate-crashing a Martha Stewart cooking demonstration. Jackson’s visual materialisation within the family’s domestic domain symbolises how unfitting his occupancy is, yet how fitting is the presence of his voice.
whassup?: beer & politics
The precursor to this type of playful political commercial is the remake of the famous “Whassup?” advertisement for Budweiser Beer. The original 1999 ad spearheaded a radical campaign by Budweiser—then mostly consumed by a white demographic—to target African-Americans. The ad relies on a riotous collapse of language, showing five young black males calling each other on the phone in their shared apartment. One rings up another, saying only “whassup?” which is then repeated by another, who gets a third on the phone’s party-line, until all five are screaming “whassup?” simultaneously. Exhausted, they each proceed to have a Budweiser.
But in the lead-up to the Presidential Election of 2008, an unofficial campaign endorsement was mounted as a short film using all the black actors from the original Miller advertisement. Actually, those actors had all appeared in an even earlier short film, True (1998), directed by and starring Charles Stone III and friends. Stone was then contracted to direct the Budweiser ad. His 2008 ‘remake’ is a re-voicing of his original short film. The characters look older and sound wiser: they certainly weren’t having a good time drinking Buds in the Bush administration years. References are pointedly made to Iraq, the bank loan collapse, Hurricane Katrina, unprotected unemployment and debilitated health care. Instead of saying “whassup” to each other, they chime in with a chorus of screaming and wailing.
a single word
It’s funny, but it also rings with the painful truth of the plight which demographically defines the ‘black market’ originally targeted by Budweiser. Their collapse of language is now made to symbolise the failure of the Republican system under which they suffer. It concludes again with them all exhausted; but this time Stone takes a breath and answers the question. He looks at a television set on which Obama waves before a convention crowd. With drooped eyes, he manages a soft smile: “Change.” Three minutes of wailing and a single word. A poetic reduction of visualised voice, tracing the trajectory which marked Obama’s shift to occupy the Oval Office. It’s not far removed from a portentous movie hinged on the utterance of a single word, “Rosebud.”
Captain Successor from the Captain Forever series by Farbs
IN THE PAST DECADES, VIDEOGAMES HAVE MOVED INEXORABLY FROM THE ARCADE TO THE GALLERY, FROM BENEATH THE TELEVISION TO THE BACK POCKET, FROM THE NICHE TO THE MAINSTREAM, EVOLVING ALONG THE WAY TO—AS THE INDUSTRY LOVES TO TELL US—A MULTI-BILLION DOLLAR ENTERPRISE THAT IS BIGGER THAN HOLLYWOOD.
Australia has always been part of that change, with the arc of local evolution reflecting and responding to the international eddies of the entertainment industries, technology and culture in its own particular way.
innovative beginnings
In the early years of videogame development, Australia was home to experimental developers and publishers who created influential and genre-defining games like The Hobbit or Way of the Exploding Fist. This became the foundation for the 90s when the texture of local development settled into a mix of original games such as Dark Reign or Powerslide and those based on movies or comics, a mix which reflected wider trends—do the license work to bring in money, use the money to make something original. It was a model that worked well creating a stable industry, but during the first decade of this century the focus of developers tipped in favour of the licensed titles and the mainstream of Australian development became defined by work-for-hire movie or cartoon titles.
crisis time
This local focus made Australian development particularly vulnerable in the early years of the new decade as seismic shifts in development priorities and audience interest—catalysed by the GFC—changed the shape of mainstream game development around the world as publishers began to focus on known big budget blockbusters and smaller digitally distributed titles becoming less interested in mid-tier licensed titles. A shock wave went through studios, closing some and shrinking others, leaving many people wondering what to do next.
a new australian mainstream
Those best placed to ride this change out had adapted or were in the process of adapting to the rising ubiquity of smartphones and digital distribution platforms like the App Store and, in doing so, they created a new Australian mainstream—one focused on mobile, digital distribution, bite-sized arcade gameplay, and in recent years the possibilities of freemium and in-app purchases. Mythologies grew up around companies like Firemint (now Firemonkeys through a purchase from behemoth publisher EA and merger with another local company, Iron Monkey), creators of Flight Control, and Halfbrick, whose Fruit Ninja has had 300 million downloads. Many people, new to games or answering their own questions of what to do next, followed their lead, hewing to the mobile, arcade, freemium lines that seemed to indicate the best chance for success.
But this is only one story of the creation of videogames, and a particularly industrial one. These same changes in technology, in culture, in audiences, and in distribution that all moved games to a wider audience also left a gap, and in that gap, what was once the province of all videogame makers—space for the outsider—shifted and changed. A new mainstream was created, but so too was an evolving fringe of new voices, new makers and new ideas.
Expand, Christopher Johnson, Christopher Larkin, Best Audio in Game runner up, Freeplay 2012
reclaim the game
In her book, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Dropouts, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You are Taking Back an Art Form, author and game developer Anna Anthropy calls for people to embrace the potential of games and take them back from this industrial mainstream, likening the possibilities of videogames now to the easy creation and distribution of zines. Anthropy writes about her own creations, like Calamity Annie and Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars, along with the work of others like Stephen Lavelle, whose website increpare includes a multitude of experimental games and mechanics; Christine Love whose period piece Digital: A Love Story explores young love mediated via technology; and Bennet Foddy, creator of GIRP, QWOP and Pole Fighters.
australian outsiders
Similar outsiders exist much closer-to-home, and each, in their own way, tell unique stories which are defined by the international story of game development, but also the closer to home changes which have directly impacted on them.
Game developer Farbs used to be part of the mainstream, working in the Australian arm of international publishers/developers 2K before quitting, famously, through the unique means of creating a playable game. His work is vibrant, potent and compelling in its focus on a pared-back ideal. Running the range from the arcade mash-up ROM CHECK FAIL, which fuses classic games, mechanics and glitches in a strangely functional, emergent experience to the austere exploring, crafting, shooting of Captain Forever or the bleep-happy rainbow explosion of Cumulo Nimblers, these are games which feel like they’re designed for an audience of one, but which through their sheer force of personality connect with many more people than that.
Glenn Forester says on his website that the only thing he does is make games, and looking at his output, it’s easy to believe that to be the case. A mix of mashup, jam, and rapid experiments, they’re sometimes unpolished, frequently very strange, but in all cases interesting and personal, drawing from the mainstream by co-opting games like Mario, Doom, Minecraft or Tetris and turning them into something new.
Finally, Harry Lee is representative of a new generation of developers who have never been part of the Australian studio system, and whose projects seem more interested in the exploration of ideas through systems, interactions and technology. His notable project, Midas, takes the story of a king whose touch turns everything into gold and converts it into a clear and compelling set of mechanics, which is a hallmark of his other titles Stickets and Impasse.
The emergence of these new makers—both here and overseas—shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. Other creative forms have their independents, their outsiders, evolving as greater numbers engage with the mainstream and as the means of production and distribution become democratised. Not everything these makers do will be great, not all of it will even be good, but it will be unique, and it will be personal, and it will add to the volume of the voices of artists who make games, telling new stories which have far more to say and will resonate in ways that the mainstream—whether globally or locally— simply isn’t interested in.
DEANNE BUTTERWORTH’S TWINSHIPS IS A HYBRID CREATURE THAT MELDS DANCE WITH INSTALLATION, WITH A DOSE OF WELL-CURATED SOUND RECORDINGS FOR GOOD MEASURE. THE INSTALLATION COMPONENT CONSISTS OF COLOURED LINES MARKING OUT THE PARQUET FLOOR. WE COULD BE INSIDE A SPORTS HALL; A CURVED LINE RESEMBLES THE THREE-POINT ARC OF A BASKETBALL COURT.
Three mirrors are joined together in a frame contraption and are set at different angles to reflect projections across two walls, a sliver of a triangle on one wall and a bigger slice of moving image on the back wall. Themes of nature, emotional states and a final video of a streetscape through a window create a mood background for the dance.
When we enter Westspace, a smoke haze fills the room. Amid the sound of cicadas and wind blowing, a large paper scroll is unfurled by assistants. A dancer soon appears behind it. Butterworth’s figure casts shadows across the paper and, as she moves alongside it, she briefly seems to be painting. As in Japanese calligraphic art, her body becomes the honshi, the centrepiece artwork. Bending down and bringing her arms down to the ground, Butterworth’s silhouette becomes an inky mountain. From my angle her feet, which are visible beneath the scroll, are about two inches left of her shadow. While her body is graceful on paper with balletic control, her exposed feet with quivering tendons, show the effort in such grace.
The projections cast on the wall via the mirrors provide mood cues during the performance. While interesting sculpturally, the mirrors themselves have only a subtle effect on the projection and their presence is quickly forgotten. There are five chapters to this dance that the projections help to define by colour. In the second part of the dance, red dominates the projection as Butterworth moves like a boxer, swaying and shifting her weight from foot to foot. Repetition and her stance evoke sports training or a controlled fight. Meanwhile the projected video footage becomes choppy—a red sky with scratching tree branches has a schlocky horror film look. The red gives way to green and a recording of a science lecture plays, signalling a return to rationality and control. Butterworth repeats the same step-by-step movements on the spot, tense arms folding and reaching forward as though she is practicing her moves. She then turns on the spot like a cog. Her arms chop the air like windmills before she dissolves into more fluid movements, also reflected in the projection with a close up of tidal waters.
The lines on the floor work in several ways, first in referencing the moments of sport and practice. Butterworth frequently travels in the direction of the lines across the floor, usually running. The arc provides a path for a repeated series of movements with which she measures out space with her hands before falling backwards. They also create visual interest and act to record the dance in a way, as if she is marking the floor. Butterworth becomes the centrepiece of the dance floor and by extension, the gallery space, as she explores twin themes of nature and science, art and sport.
Twinships, installation & performance; performer, choreographer Deanne Butterworth, sound design Michael Munson, lighting design Rose Connors, set construction Jim Stenson, video Michael Munson, Deanne Butterworth, Westspace, Melbourne, Oct 18-Nov 10
ON THE DAY THAT DEAN WALSH FIRST SPOKE TO ME ABOUT HIS RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP WITH THE AUSTRALIA COUNCIL, I WENT HOME AND WROTE FURIOUSLY ABOUT ALL THE IDEAS IT BROUGHT UP FOR ME. HEARING HIS THOUGHTS ON MARINE BIOLOGY, SCUBA EMBODIMENT AND SOCIETY’S PROBLEMATIC RELATIONSHIP WITH THE OCEAN, WAS AN INTENSELY IMAGINATIVE EXPERIENCE. THE CHOREOGRAPHIC WORK THAT TRANSPIRED FROM THIS RESEARCH, WALSH’S RECENTLY PERFORMED PRIME:ORDERLY, TURNED OUT TO BE A SENSUOUS AND TRANCE-LIKE EXPLORATION, BOTH ATMOSPHERICALLY AND CONCEPTUALLY ARRESTING.
Presented in two acts, the first performed by Walsh and the second also featuring Natalie Ayton and Kathryn Puie, PRIME:ORDERLY progresses from an exploration of the inky, otherworldly velvet of the bottom of the ocean to the sunlit groan and bubble of a shallow reef.
A thick weave of digital sound swallows me up. After some searching in the blue dimness, I spot a moving body. Then another; then another. The sightings are haunting, like that growing awareness of another intelligence in the room that has presumably been there, and aware of you, for some time.
A body clad from head to toe in blue velvet makes its way into fuller light. The limbs are now straight, now rounded; the body now fluid, now rigid. Its movement verges on looking daft: not human, but intelligent. After some time the soundtrack shifts and the body collapses into a sort of bliss, spreading itself out luxuriantly on the floor and slipping into movement that is no longer halting, but entirely fluid.
I do not recognise the groaning and creaking that accompany the opening of act two as the sounds of the reef until a friend leans over and tells me so. For me the sounds evoke the gentle snores of an enormous, sleeping creature. Upon this reef I lose track of time, escorted onwards by the breath and buoyancy of the diver/dancers.
At first through balloon-like appendages and then into microphones suspended low over the floor, the dancers shape the aural backdrop with their constant, slow breathing. They play, they tumble, float, come to hovering stillness together. They couple up, triple up and repeatedly reach to cradle each others’ heads with their hands.
This wordless play is broken up by conversation when the trio rise to their feet and chat, striding swiftly back and forth across the stage. They crash through three mounds of silver foil that have, until now, sat like small glaciers on the floor. The mounds shatter. I gather that dancers are divers: they talk excitedly about their excursion out to sea and make small talk. The chatter is both unexpected and humorous. Personalities and social nuances emerge for the first time. One at a time, the dancers duck out of the conversation for a quick ‘dive.’ Their exits into muteness, weightlessness and horizontality are clear and sudden.
The performers’ conversation doesn’t disturb my sense of being in a state of suspension. On the contrary, it adds to the overall surreality of the piece, which climaxes when all three dancers hit the back wall, causing it to light up as though it were made of gold. Time stands still as the three drift, stare blankly, and perhaps live out in slowed-down verticality what they had lived out on the floor not long before. Conversation is not external to Dean Walsh’s work. It suggests that he understands not only the political importance of human/ocean dialogues, but also their capacity to build aesthetic experience.
Act two closes as the dancers gather up the pieces of silver foil that now litter the stage. This gesture might symbolise human responsibility towards the marine environment—one that is essential, primordial and increasingly at risk.
Form Dance Projects and Riverside: PRIME:ORDERLY, choreographer Dean Walsh, performers Dean Walsh, Natalie Ayton, Kathryn Puie, lighting Mikey Rice, designer sound recorder, mixer Dean Walsh; Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, Sydney, Oct 25-27
A BOY OF ABOUT EIGHT OR NINE CAUTIOUSLY MAKES HIS WAY ACROSS THE EMPTY STAGE. HIS MOVEMENTS HAVE THAT COY SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS PECULIAR TO CHILDREN. HE HAS A HEALTHFUL COMPLEXION AND A HAPPY IF SOMEWHAT MISCHIEVOUS AIR, A CONTRAST TO THE ESSENTIAL WHITE CURTAINS AND WHITE FLOOR OF THE SET. AFTER SITTING DOWN AND READING A BOOK IN SILENCE FOR A FEW MOMENTS, HE BRIEFLY EXAMINES THE AUDIENCE THROUGH A PAIR OF BINOCULARS, THEN LEAVES.
Although director Adena Jacobs makes no attempt to find a stage analogue for the rest of Bergman’s modernist cinematic montage, the famous visual poem that opens Persona (1966), she has nonetheless retained this strange prelude figure, the child-psychopomp, who in both the film and this current adaptation leads the audience from its present reality into the next.
Between stage and screen, however, the nature of that next reality must be radically different, and it is the way this difference is articulated by Fraught Outfit, Jacob’s company, that accounts for so much of the remarkable power in this unlikely adaptation.
Elisabet Vogler (Meredith Penman), a well-known stage actress, suddenly falls silent during her performance in the title role of Sophocles’ Electra. Although she eventually continues the performance, the next day she refuses to speak at all. The head doctor at the hospital where she is admitted for psychiatric treatment—in this production a disembodied voiceover (Jane Montgomery Griffiths)—suggests that Elisabet spend some time at an isolated seaside cottage with one of the hospital nurses, Alma (Karen Sibbing), where the doctor thinks she might rediscover the will to communicate. Although Elisabet seems immediately to relax in the cottage, she remains silent. Alma has a naturally lively personality and responds to her patient’s silence with a steady stream of small talk. As Elisabet’s silence seems to deepen, so too Alma’s conversation becomes more personal. When Alma reads a letter written by Elisabet to the head doctor in which she makes light of Alma’s revelations, it becomes too much for the nurse, leading to an intense series of psychic encounters between the two.
Although there is a tradition of producing Bergman’s films for the stage that goes back almost 50 years, and notwithstanding a recent vogue for adaptations of his more affectedly cerebral films, Persona represents an outrageous challenge for theatre makers. So much of its popular significance—its very status as a masterpiece—depends on the medium in which it was produced. It is self-reflexive to the point of incoherence, consistently disrupting narrative clarity and sabotaging authoritative communication by exposing the processes and materials of its own construction. In the words of Bergman, whose own preferred title for the film was Cinematography:
“Today I feel that in Persona—and later in Cries and Whispers—I had gone as far as I could go. And that in these two instances when working in total freedom, I touched wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover.”
Meredith Penman, Persona
photo Pia Johnson
Meredith Penman, Persona
There is an engrossing and enduring ambiguity in this well-known quotation. He “had gone as far as he could” toward what? The mystery of this question lies in the face—the face as both the principal motif of Bergman’s film and the medium of film itself, the “black hole and white wall, screen and camera.” What Bergman touches on is the truth about the face, and also about cinema: its mesmeric inhumanity and the regime of deception it enforces.
Or, rather, he touches on the ineffable implication of that truth—that peculiar feeling of revulsion at seeing Alma’s and Elisabet’s faces merge at the film’s climax, for example.
“The inhuman in human beings: that is what the face is from the start. It is by nature a close-up, with its inanimate white surfaces, its shining black holes, its emptiness and boredom. Bunker-face. To the point that if human beings have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to dismantle the face and facialisation.” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 1980)
In order to escape the cinema-face and rise above a mere capitulation of doubtful events, Persona must be de-faced for the stage. It must discover, to use the vocabulary of Deleuze and Guattari, quoted above, the ancient “volume-cavity system” of the theatre, or the theatre-body.
At the very back of the deeply set stage, some 10 to 15 metres from the audience, we see the interior of a single room in the head doctor’s holiday cottage. A white curtain can be drawn across this facade, while another is used occasionally to shorten the stage and bring the action forward. This doesn’t so much reproduce the various camera shots, close-up and landscape, as emphasise the divisibility of the shared space.
The extensive use of curtains also suggests that we are all sharing a single chamber, performers and audience, while also underlining the theatrical tradition into which the story has been imported. As the size of the chamber changes, so too does our sense of intimacy with the performers and their secret magnetism. Indeed, intimacy, or the attempt to discover a sense of intimacy that goes behind the face, becomes the thematic core of this adaptation, displacing Bergman’s obsession with the fragility of self-constructed identity.
The effect of this displacement is clear, for example, in the scene where Elisabet’s husband (Daniel Schlusser) mistakes Alma for his wife. Bergman’s tragic eroticism, the hypnotic layering of the three faces, becomes a comic, though still poignant, collision of bodies, an awkward striving to get past the misapprehension of the face. It is this clumsy honesty of bodies that distinguishes Fraught Outfit’s involving dramaturgy, revealing something that Bergman’s faces, sliding gracefully across and into the landscape, otherwise obscure, something typified by Karen Sibbing, for example, as she appears in the latter half of the production, distraught, a chunky bandage on her hand, hair dishevelled and in every way miserably present.
In contrast with other recent Bergman adaptations, including both Jenny Worton’s Through a Glass Darkly (Almeida Theatre, 2010) and Simon Stone and Andrew Upton’s Face to Face (STC, 2012), Jacobs resists the allure of Bergman’s “juicy dream” dramaturgy. When we are at last released from the drama, it is not the enchanted island of Bergman’s Faro that we leave, with its population of demon hypnotists and Strindbergian somnambulists, but the firm, multi-dimensional embrace of the theatre-body. Thus, where Bergman’s film is fundamentally a critique—a demonic critique—of art, artists and civilised life in general, Fraught Outfit’s adaptation is essentially a more positive exercise, an attempt to generate the conditions of intimacy and even perhaps community.
See an interview with Simon Stone about his adaptation of Face to Face (RT110) and the review of the production (RT111).
Fraught Outfit, Persona, from the film by Ingmar Bergman, translator Keith Bradfield, conceived and adapted by Adena Jacobs, Dayna Morrissey, Danny Pettingill, director Adena Jacobs, performers Meredith Penman, Daniel Schlusser, Karen Sibbing; Theatre Works, Melbourne May 18-27, 2012; Belvoir, July 24-Aug 8, 2013
Infinite Jest, 24 Hours through the Utopian West, Hebbel am Ufer
photo Marcus Canning
Infinite Jest, 24 Hours through the Utopian West, Hebbel am Ufer
THE BENJAMIN FRANKLIN INSTITUT FUR MIKROBIOLOGIE UND HYGIENE IS A MENACING BRUTALIST MONSTER. FOR THE NEXT HOUR IT’S THE DAVID FOSTER WALLACE CENTRE. LARGE BANNERS FEATURING A BANDANA-BEDECKED AND BESPECTACLED DFW COVER ITS FAÇADE AND INTERIOR RECEPTION RECEPTACLES. IT’S LIKE SOME NUREMBERG/BOOK WORM CULT OF PERSONALITY CONVENTION HYBRID. A RANGE OF DFW GROUPIE T-SHIRTS ARE FOR SALE. PARTY PACK TOTE BAGS ARE DISTRIBUTED THAT INCLUDE SUSPECT SACHETS OF GLUCOSE POWDER TO HELP YOU STAY AWAKE.
Arriving with expectations of Matthias Lilienthal’s 24-hour (10am to 10am) theatre adaptation of Infinite Jest as high as a recent arrival at the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery Centre, eventually I needed the long-range stamina of the youthful Aryan Internationale elite of the Enfield Tennis Academy to make it through the 24 hours of the production.
Moving through the walled-off West Berlin of another age, the 150-strong audience was carried in a convoy of double-decker buses to eight futuristic buildings constructed mostly during the 60s and 70s—a period of intensely competitive East-West Berlin development. This was the architectural equivalent of the space race and it led to some truly cosmic monuments to Late Modernist weirdness that today speak of derelict dreams and dystopia. What better arena to stage the seemingly impossible—a theatre adaptation of one of the most sprawling, improbable, dark and densely curious novels of the 20th century.
With Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace re-wrote the rule book on writing the literary rule book. With Unendlicher Spaß—24 Stunden durch den Utopischen Westen (Infinite Jest—24 Hours through the Utopian West), Matthias Lilienthal presented his penultimate production after a decade as director of the Hebbel am Ufer (HAU) theatre. Over this time he not only established HAU1, HAU2 and HAU3 but housed a startling array of the who’s who of international contemporary performance in these interlinked spaces and beyond, creating a genre-busting program of cross-societal as much as cross-artform collaborations.
Lilienthal assembled his favourite directors, companies and artists from across the globe for this, his last production with the HAU and the world’s first attempt at Infinite Jest live. Germany, the UK, Poland, Australia, Argentina, the US and France were present across the 12 participating groups handed a slice of the Infinite pie and a spot on the magical mystery tour.
Given a freeform chance to explore and experiment with key passages and concepts from the 1,079 pages and 388 footnotes of the postmodern magnum opus with its 200+ characters and multiple interwoven and interleaved micro-narratives, the contributors ran with the opportunity in an array of wildly different directions. Coherence was obviously not the order of the day.
Underground reservoir used as a wave motion engineering facility, Infinite Jest, 24 Hours through the Utopian West, Hebbel am Ufer
photo Marcus Canning
Underground reservoir used as a wave motion engineering facility, Infinite Jest, 24 Hours through the Utopian West, Hebbel am Ufer
By the time we visited a Fritz Langesque 1930s state radio station it was starting to get late. My expectation high had peaked and was starting to crash. Herded into a live sound recording studio, we encountered Madame Psychosis broadcasting her voice-modulated monologue in veiled silhouette from behind the screens of a glass control box in the corner. It was mesmerising… until she broke a fundamental directorial rule and left the booth… trailing a very long piece of tulle… exiting through a brightly lit door as a somewhat stupid metaphor for her untimely demise. It wasn’t the first time surprisingly clumsy direction had undermined the tension and potency of a moment that felt authentically Infinite Jest. I was starting to get frustrated.
This fantastically ambitious production had the largesse and logistic precision of modern warfare, which is always impressive. For the DFW fanatic, it was intriguing, but inevitably disappointing as it kept somehow missing the mark. For the uninitiated, it was obviously an impenetrable nightmare. They were peeling off from the tour and hailing taxis in increasing numbers over the 24 hours.
‘Anti-theatre’ of this ilk at its best, is the best. At its worst, it’s arbitrary avant garde style-over-substance too-smart-for-its-own-good self-indulgence that loses sight of the dramatic potential of its material and enters the terrain of tedium. This production featured both ends of the spectrum, and perhaps that was the point. Infinite Jest is, at its core, difficult, dense, depressing and at times incredibly boring. It’s also quintessentially 90s in style, so why shouldn’t the production be difficult to digest, with large tracts of dull, and feel somewhat dated?
The title, Infinite Jest, is not only a wry reference to a line from Hamlet’s soliloquy to the skull of Yorick, it’s the title of the very last ‘apres-garde’ film made by James Incandenza, a mostly absent character in the novel and around whom many of its narratives swirl. Infinite Jest is a film so captivating it literally entertains you to death. It’s Capital-E entertainment that incapacitates and renders you senseless—a central metaphor for the mindless pleasures of the overbearing culture of consumption that the book surreally portrays.
Rooftop gathering of wheelchair assasins, US Office of Unspecified Services, Infinite Jest, 4 Hours through the Utopian West, Hebbel am Ufer
photos Marcus Canning
Rooftop gathering of wheelchair assasins, US Office of Unspecified Services, Infinite Jest, 4 Hours through the Utopian West, Hebbel am Ufer
It’s both poignant and ironic that the not too distant future described in the 1996 novel is now. Somehow it made the art-cool, cerebral distance of much of the direction of the ‘episodes’ feel like they’d missed the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to kick all of the blatantly ambitious experimental goals set for this production, while also entertaining the crap out of the audience.
I for one was expecting more gratuitous visceral enjoyment and a lot more laughs. It’s what I love about the book. It’s horrifically funny in ways that make you question your own mental health. No one belly-guffawed once during the tour I was on, and I for one never felt my sanity threatened in the slightest, apart from mild sleep deprivation.
The production’s consistent redemption was the genius of its locations: the Steffi-Graf-Stadium as the Enfield Tennis Academy; the 60s cultural complex ripped straight out of Clockwork Orange where the 5am AA meeting was held under brutal fluorescent lighting amid walls of primary colours; the surreal Teutonic version of a white-trash underground American Western Saloon; the derelict remains of Buckminster Fuller geodesic domes at a CIA monitoring station perched on top of an artificial mountain built from Hitler’s rubble; a vast underground reservoir used as a wave motion engineering testing facility, entered through a building with a monumental intestinal pink fibreglass tube curling through its exterior skin; the glorious 70s Reinickendorf tax office turned into US Office of Unspecified Services where the final manic episodes occurred, culminating on the rooftop at dawn where we all donned happy face banana bandana masks and sat in wheelchairs arranged in rows to become members of the notorious Québecois terrorist cell, the Wheelchair Assassins. There were moments such as these where it all came together and packed the desired punch. I just left wanting more of them in return for 24 hours of endurance. If nothing else, as a tour of West Berlin’s architectural underbelly of bizarre anomalies, the production was endlessly enthralling.
Perhaps this was always going to be a production that looked, and looks, better on paper—destined more for historical traction in the realms of contemporary performance academia due to the literary importance of Infinite Jest, the status of the artists involved and the lofty aspirations of the production, backed up by its densely researched and sexy-as-all-hell reader.
It certainly wasn’t designed to entertain the masses. After all, only eight performances, with half the crowd bailing each night equates to about 500 peeps in total experiencing the entire marathon. With over 100 individuals involved in the production and a lot of development behind it, that’s a gloriously decadent application of German Federal Cultural Foundation resources that would have equivalent artists and companies in Australia drooling at the potential.
Matthias Lilienthal is quoted in the reader as having once said “I was always at my best…when things got really tough.” If this was his best, I for one didn’t think it was good enough. Perhaps ‘things’ should have got tougher.
Hebbel am Ufer, Infinite Jest—24 Hours through the Utopian West: director Matthias Lilienthal, artists Biancchi/Macras, Gob Squad, Peter Kastenmüller, Jan Klata, Chris Kondek, Anna Sophie Mahler, Richard Maxwell, Mariano Pensotti, Philippe Quesne, She She Pop, Anna Viebrock, Jeremy Wade; video animation My best Thing by Frances Stark; Berlin. Berlin, June 2-27
Amy Macpherson, Matt Cornell, Symphony, NORPA, Legs on The Wall
photo Jeff Dawson
Amy Macpherson, Matt Cornell, Symphony, NORPA, Legs on The Wall
ACKNOWLEDGING THE SHEER RHYTHMIC EXUBERANCE AND MASTERY OF BEETHOVEN’S SEVENTH, WAGNER FAMOUSLY DESCRIBED THE SYMPHONY AS THE “APOTHEOSIS OF THE DANCE.” ALL BUT 200 YEARS AFTER ITS PREMIERE IN 1813, SYDNEY PHYSICAL THEATRE COMPANY LEGS ON THE WALL WRAPS ITSELF AROUND STEFAN GREGORY’S SUPERB ELECTRIC-GUITAR RENDITION OF THE SEVENTH AS THE HUB OF ITS EVOCATIVE NEW WORK, SYMPHONY.
Commissioned by NORPA as part of its Generator program, director Patrick Nolan’s largely dance creation is, at once, a homage to the structure and dynamic of Beethoven’s original and an extended meditation on “the dance of self and other.”
Symphony is structured around the four movements of the Seventh. There are four performers, one featured in each movement. The first begins with the blast of a loud, sharp chord. The lights reveal a singular figure (Rhiannon Spratling) on an open stage. Like a child alone at play, her rhythmic, repetitive dance builds with the ebb and flow of the guitar. Again and again, she throws herself wildly across the stage. Three performers (Matt Cornell, Amy McPherson and Joshua Thomson) bring on rectangular metre-high boxes impeding her dance. The boxes line up in four orderly rows, suggesting a landscape encroached on by the grid of suburb or city. The number ‘one’ projected on a box signifies the first movement. Dancer and performers begin playing together. In their exuberance, they knock all the boxes over until they lie chaotically about. The dancer is distressed by the chaos. She carries a box upstage as the movement comes to its close. The performers follow suit and begin building a wall as the lights fade to black and a long silence ensues. With the sombre refrain that introduces the second movement the performers complete the wall with four ‘windows.’
Symphony, NORPA Generator, Legs on the Wall
photo Jeff Dawson
Symphony, NORPA Generator, Legs on the Wall
The wall becomes a potent image and device in Symphony. At the end of the first movement, it seems to represent the alienation of the dancers from each other. Over the next three movements, it will be a wall we look through, like peering through someone’s window. It will become the canvas on which video artist Andrew Wholley projects his wonderful imagery—brick wall, cityscape, circuit board, orbiting moon. It will become the space against which the performers dance, their own forms projected onto their bodies. Its four windows will come to represent both the four movements of the symphony and the four performers. In this regard, designer Alice Babidge has made the right choice to leave the performers in rehearsal clothes. Fnally, the wall will be smashed down and rebuilt as four separate structures.
Symphony then is a ‘self-conscious’ reflection on its own evolution and creation. Its imagery sparks reverberant thoughts without offering the relative certainty of meaning inherent in narrative. Music, dance and image are yoked together to produce a deeply intimate experience. Symphony is a subjective, impressionistic piece; it takes place in the mind of the beholder. Not unlike ‘the dance’ of life really. I would have paid the admission price just to hear Stefan Gregory’s masterly reworking of Beethoven!
NORPA Generator: Legs on the Wall, Symphony, director Patrick Nolan, composer Stefan Gregory, performers Matt Cornell, Amy McPherson, Rhiannon Spratling, Joshua Thomson, designer Alice Babidge, video Andrew Wholley, lighting Matt Cox; Lismore City Hall, Lismore, NSW, Nov 16, 17
WHELPING BOX, PART OF PERFORMANCE SPACE’S SEXES SEASON, WAS A LONG-AWAITED REMINDER OF HOW VISCERAL, PROVOCATIVE AND INTELLIGENT CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE CAN BE.
The product of intensive team work, overlapping responsibilities and a range of skills, four artists, working without writer or director, put paid to the notion, once again in the ascendancy, that theatre is foremost the realm of writers—as argued by David Williamson in the STUDIO cable TV series Raising the Curtain, as well as letters-to-the-editor writers hostile to the recent cut-and-pasting of classics by young male directors.
Certainly the great achievements in writing for the stage over thousands of years can never be undervalued, even if it’s not at all clear that we are enjoying such greatness in our own era. Some of the most potent authorship across the last decade in Australia has come in the form of adaptations of classic (and some not so enduring) works by Kosky, Wright, Andrews, Strong, Lutton and others in a tradition that goes back at least to the 1970s; I recall my surprise, and delight, at encountering Charles Marowitz’s “free translations” of plays by Shakespeare at London’s Open Space Theatre in the mid-1970s. Marowitz has been a critic, a collaborator with Peter Brook (another provocative adaptor) at the Royal Shakespeare Company, the co-founder of Encore Magazine, director and playwright. He was part of that 60s and 70s explosion of performative experimentation that opened theatre up to new possibilities—many of them now well-integrated into the mainstream.
Of course, not all contemporary performance works are models of radical cogency, just as many stage plays fail to meaningfully cohere though abiding by the well-thumbed rulebook of tradition. Equally, ‘deconstructed’ classics offer little if they don’t tell us something about the original as much as about ourselves.
The fear among playwrights and the directors who support and often nurture them, is that writer-free (in fact, that’s not always the case) contemporary performance and the emergence of a so-called ‘directors’ theatre’ have reduced the opportunities for good, new plays to emerge in an already small market. Justifiable paranoia, you might think. Meanwhile theatre, in the broadest terms, from the mainstream to burgeoning live art and digital ventures (see review of Kumuwuki), continues to mutate in fascinating and sometimes worrying ways—for example a skill-less DIY dimension in some live art. The debate about the status of the playwright is beyond resolution. Meanwhile cable television has opened up remarkable opportunities for some of the same writers, not a few who’ve become co-producers of their own material. But the screen is not the stage.
performance space, whelping box
Matt Prest, Lee Wilson, Whelping Box
photo Heidrun Löhr
Matt Prest, Lee Wilson, Whelping Box
Two men, heads masked with tightly bound packing tap bound aggressively towards each other, restrained by sprung leashes that pull them back at the point where skulls might crack. This violent image of humans behaving like fighting dogs in training is central to Whelping Box, the creation of Lee Wilson and Mirabelle Wouters of Branch Nebula and fellow contemporary performance makers Matt Prest and Clare Britton, performed by Wilson and Prest with ruthless vigour and wit.
Prior bouts of training include exercises in which one or other of the men is taught to endure pain (a ‘massage’ with a rusty shovel), to trust his teacher while blindfolded or, critically, not trust at all. The irony is that this all takes place in a large whelping box—a device used for the nurturing of puppies—the audience lining its internal perimeter. Although care seems to be taken, nurture ranks low and our proximity to the performers induces anxiety for them and, at times, ourselves.
The box is cleverly designed to be at once wall, platform and resonant chamber. The two men breach it, running and leaping simian and dog-like around and above us, at one stage naked, thrusting pelvises defiantly at each other, cocking legs as if to mark out territory. The miked box amplifies the thump and skid of bodies, scarily enlarging our sense of their power. The box cannot contain this raw masculine energy which is also clearly cultivated for violence. This tension is a key to the show’s dialectical dynamic—a mix of manipulation and exuberance, risk and play, grim comment and literal and quite lateral parody.
Whelping Box commences with Wilson wielding a long pole with a light at its end which Prest puppyishly pursues, running furiously in circles and then finally joining his master in a war-like dance. After the mid-show leap into anarchy, which includes the spraying of biscuit rewards over the audience, a passage ensues in which the men tie themselves to each other with a long twisted strand of clear tape that is bound around waists and thighs (men in the audience reached nervously to safely cup their genitals). A fearsome tug of war follows, actual competition, a display of strength which is almost sculptural in its moments of taut stasis and near snapping point.
The final stage of the show transforms into idiosyncratic mythmaking—fantasies of the masculine self. In an inversion of the opening scene, Prest as a glittering magician with an almost feminine aura leads a feral dandy Wilson with the tip of his bliss-inducing wand, accompanied by a bee-like buzz and a soaring, wordless soprano sound score. But this moment of transcendence is mere respite before the testosterone finally kicks in again and loud, joyful and thankfully harmless chaos ensues.
In its celebration of masculine physicality, Whelping Box breathtakingly delineates the pleasures, pain and contradictions of play, initiation, bonding, competition, risk and self-mythologising. Within a carefully choreographed framework, Wilson and Prest repeatedly push themselves to the limit, testing their bodies in sustained acts of endurance, living out the very condition they have committed to celebrate and critique.
Like the stage design, Jack Prest’s sound score is enveloping, eerily punctuating and pumping up the action in a quite non-literal manner. A curious design element is a large illuminated square (like an inverted light box) hovering over the action, morphing from one colour to another and slowly descending to the floor where it finally appears to take the two men with it. Did it indicate not so much the demise of masculinity per se, but the condition’s endurance to the end of light and time? What remains so vividly in my consciousness is Whelping Box’s vivid evocation of the complexities of intimate male behaviour (if barely homoerotic) built around physical drive, even at a time when that behaviour can no longer be ascribed to men alone and when the demise of the male of the species is the subject of random sci-fi-ish speculation. (See RealTime TV interview with Wilson and Prest, including footage from the show.)
Noel Coward’s Private Lives (1927), which American theatre writer John Lahr once described “as perfect as an art deco curve,” is given a right rumpling in Ralph Myers’ contemporary rendering. The setting is a style-less hotel room-cum-patio-cum-foyer space (with oddly scaled elevator access) of the bleak modern variety. Muzak and Phil Collins (“In the air tonight”) ominously supplant the genteel music of the 20s. Elegance in gesture and fashion are pretty much absent and Amanda (Jamaican-born Zahra Newman) is played, with tough, energetic verve. The French maid is brutally rude rather than snooty (a very funny Mish Grigor). Precious British accents give way to unmannered voices if too often at the expense of the inherent rhythms of Coward’s dialogue. Languid, sensual intimacy abounds but so too does palpable physical violence, such that the play’s forgiving ending cannot atone for Elyot’s misogyny—verbal and physical. But he is forgiven because Private Lives is a fable of redemption born of accepting difficult love; it’s a genteel farce with heart and a handful of psychological insights and a happy ending. An attempt to turn it into something more serious on the one hand, and more physically funny and far less genteel on the other, is risky but very interesting.
While some have seen Myer’s Private Lives as a worthy, vigorous, very Australian response to a rarely seen theatre classic, I felt that, short on style, it hadn’t found the right contemporary idiom or setting with which to do this comedy of manners justice. It was often obtuse at the expense of subtlety, although the extreme decline of Toby Schmitz’s Elyot into extreme dishabille and abjection compensated somewhat for his underlined sinning. In sync with our reality TV times the lives in this production didn’t seem private at all. With feelings overtly and often very physically expressed, the sense of an inherently repressed culture out of which Coward’s wit and sarcasm erupted to the surface without doing too much damage goes missing. The deco curve is broken in Myer’s nonetheless bold attempt to introduce new generations to an enduring work, albeit one tied more than many to its era, as is often the case with comedies of manners.
sydney theatre company, signs of life
Aaron Pedersen, Heather Mitchell, Signs of Life, Sydney Theatre Company, Black Swan Theatre Company
photo Lisa Tomasetti
Aaron Pedersen, Heather Mitchell, Signs of Life, Sydney Theatre Company, Black Swan Theatre Company
Tim Winton’s Signs of Life is set in an isolated, drought-ruined property, home to Georgie (Heather Mitchell), an elegant middle-aged woman living with the ghost of her recently deceased husband—an apparently ne’er do well but loved hippie. Two other isolates, an Aboriginal brother (Aaron Pedersen) and sister (Pauline Whyman), turn up in the night when their car breaks down. They contrive to stay on, seeking a place by the now empty river where their late, silent father once stayed. In a rare moment of openness, he had revealed to them an affinity with that country although not belonging to it.
Like their father, the siblings are rootless. The brother, Bender, angrily declares that they are without stories, clan or place. “I’m put together from spare parts,” he says. He is an itinerant worker who has removed his sister, Mona (suffering the effects of foetal alcohol syndrome), from an institution where she had been incarcerated for killing her child while drunk. He’s intelligent and funny, quick with the killer quip; the sister blunt and unpredictable; each exudes a peculiar energy, part threat, part determination, indicators too of potential, but not dramatically developed in Winton’s writing.
Initially Georgie entertains no hope for the future of the property, symbolised in a failed olive orchard and the empty river, but by the play’s end she has let go of her husband’s hapless ghost and offered to share the property (which she has no real evidence of owning) with the siblings. Given that there’s little intimacy between the woman and the pair, beyond having heard each other’s stories, and given the absence of rain, the ending is irritatingly sentimental.
Signs of Life is theatrically naive. It’s partly and incompletely narrated by the central female character; it’s awkwardly constructed and directed (not least in the underdeveloped exchanges with the walk-on, walk-off ghost); and the dialogue, laden with exposition, is at times uncomfortably literary. Aaron Pedersen gives a vibrant performance as the brother, although coming close in the writing to yet another quick-witted oppressed Aboriginal, and Whyman brings a rawness to her role that suggests palpable danger—which makes her sudden sense of well-being at the end less than believable.
Performance Space, Whelping Box, co-creator Branch Nebula (Lee Wilson, Mirabelle Wouters), Matt Prest & Clare Britton, sound Jack Prest, producer Performing Lines, Carriageworks, Oct 25-Nov 3; Belvoir, Private Lives, writer Noël Coward, director, designer, performers Mish Grigor, Eloise Mignon, Zahra Newman, Toby Schmitz, Toby Truslove, costumes Alice Babidge, lighting Damien Cooper, composer, sound Stefan Gregory, Belvoir Upstairs, Sept 26-Nov 11; Sydney Theatre Company, Signs of Life, writer Tim Winton, director Kate Cherry, performers Heather Mitchell, Aaron Pedersen, George Shevtsov, Pauline Whyman, designer Zoe Atkinson, lighting Jon Buswell, composer, sound Ben Collins, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, Nov 7-Dec 22
Emma J Hawkins, Take Up Thy Bed & Walk, Gaelle Mellis & Vitalstatistix
photo Jennifer Greer Holmes
Emma J Hawkins, Take Up Thy Bed & Walk, Gaelle Mellis & Vitalstatistix
LOIS KEITH, IN HER BOOK TAKE UP THY BED AND WALK, CHARACTERISED VICTORIAN ATTITUDES TO DISABILITY IN FIVE WAYS: “(1) THERE IS NOTHING GOOD ABOUT BEING DISABLED; (2) DISABLED PEOPLE HAVE TO LEARN THE SAME QUALITIES OF SUBMISSIVE BEHAVIOUR THAT WOMEN HAVE ALWAYS HAD TO LEARN: PATIENCE, CHEERFULNESS AND MAKING THE BEST OF THINGS; (3) IMPAIRMENT CAN BE A PUNISHMENT FOR BAD BEHAVIOUR, FOR EVIL THOUGHTS, FOR NOT BEING A GOOD ENOUGH PERSON; (4) ALTHOUGH DISABLED PEOPLE SHOULD BE PITIED RATHER THAN PUNISHED, THEY CAN NEVER BE ACCEPTED; AND (5) THE IMPAIRMENT IS CURABLE. IF YOU WANT TO ENOUGH, IF YOU LOVE YOURSELF ENOUGH (BUT NOT MORE THAN YOU LOVE OTHERS), IF YOU BELIEVE IN GOD ENOUGH, YOU WILL BE CURED.”
Keith’s book was one of the main jumping-off points for the Vitalstatistix performance of the same name, conceived and created by artist Gaelle Mellis, who has a disability herself. Take Up Thy Bed & Walk is infused with interrogations of Victorian fear and loathing of the disabled. Adelaide has a rich history of works and performance groups (including Restless Dance Theatre and No Strings Attached Theatre of Disability) who have countered traditional narratives of disability, but Take Up Thy Bed & Walk is an attempt to push disabled arts practice beyond critique and towards advocacy and inclusivity. Its aim is an ambitious one: to embed accessibility within the dramaturgy and form of the work itself, by means of the incorporation of Auslan interpretation, projected dialogue and audio description.
Before the show, the audience is invited to explore the set and given handcrafted lanterns to navigate through the near-darkness. We steer ourselves around five cast-iron beds—one each for performers Emma J Hawkins, Kyra Kimpton, Michelle Ryan, Jo Dunbar and Gerry Shearim—and eerie reminders of other ages: a dolls’ house, a caged scorpion, battered Bibles. We seem to be in a Victorian institution for women, a notion strengthened by the clinical/penal costumes the performers wear as they mingle with us. After a time, we abandon our lanterns and are seated.
Jo Dunbar, Take Up Thy Bed & Walk, Gaelle Mellis & Vitalstatistix
photo Jennifer Greer Holmes
Jo Dunbar, Take Up Thy Bed & Walk, Gaelle Mellis & Vitalstatistix
What follows is a shifting, heavily mediatised exploration of both how the able-bodied view the disabled, and how the disabled view themselves. The five performers play with Keith’s tenets in critical and ironic ways, using angular, sometimes frenzied choreography and spare, bold dialogue to draw together the Victorian intolerance of physical difference and the still-subordinating discourses around disability in our own age. There is rage and cheekiness—and a great deal of self-deprecating humour—in the narrative fragments which emerge, each one shot through with a punkish spirit of defiance: a bride told she must be ‘cured’ in time for her wedding day, a woman whose walking stick becomes a weapon, a karaoke singer who can do nothing but scream into the microphone.
The effect of all this though is, ultimately, to under- rather than overwhelm. It’s not hard to laud Take Up Thy Bed & Walk’s agenda, but its uneven shape and formal inconsistencies make for a frustrating experience. There is a struggle, never fully resolved, between the Victorian narrative strongly established in the beginning and the post-modern fragmentariness that defines the bulk of the show. I was left wondering whether a more disciplined dramaturgy might have more convincingly revealed the implications of Keith’s book, and made the ending—which seeks to bring the able-bodied and the disabled together in anticipation of a new, celebratory narrative—feel less contrived than it does.
Vitalstatistix: Take Up Thy Bed & Walk, creator, designer Gaelle Mellis, co-director Ingrid Voorendt, writer Hilary Bell, performers Jo Dunbar, Emma J Hawkins, Kyra Kimpton, Michelle Ryan, Gary Shearim, lighting design Geoff Cobham, sound design, music Zoë Barry, Jed Palmer, video production Heath Britton, Jennifer Greer Holmes, animation Heath Britton; Waterside, Port Adelaide, Oct 24-Nov 10
OVERWHELMED BY THE VAST NUMBER OF SHOWS PLAYING ACROSS SYDNEY IN SEPTEMBER, I MANAGED TO TAKE IN ONLY TWO PRODUCTIONS IN THE SYDNEY FRINGE 2012, BOTH AT PACT THEATRE. ANNABELLE MCMILLAN’S PORPHYRIA’S SLUMBER AND MATRIARK ART THEATRE’S ALARUM MELDED A VARIETY OF FORMS IN HYBRID WORKS THAT REVEALED THE ADVANTAGES OF SUCH AN APPROACH, BUT ALSO THE RISKS.
McMillan disturbingly conflates Robert Browning’s Porphyria’s Lover, that grimly sensual Victorian poem of murderous love, with PL Travers’ Edwardian fantasy for children, Mary Poppins. The performer’s persona appears to be trapped between earth and sky: the floor invites prostration, vegetables are prepared and shared and, at the end, an umbrella will not take flight, leaving McLennan huffing and puffing. In between there’s a superfluity of imagery (despite a program note announcing the work as “an exercise in minimalism”), including a video longueur of a young man (perhaps embodying the narrator of the poem) and an unrevealing list of what the artist imagines when she thinks of Browning—an old piano, crumpled sheets, dust, pollen etc. McMillan is an engaging performer when not overplaying, her material has potential but its realisation is unwieldy and too often opaque.
Writer-director Robert den Engelsman’s Alarum, for Matriark Art Theatre, likewise evinces a futile desire to escape gravity—”I want to fly with Pegasus…but our wings have to be clipped”—and, for what is declared to be a love story, similarly suggests fatal disconnection. The central male character Samuel’s ennui (“my soul is long dead”) pervades the production, with his partner Gabriel struggling to understand his pain. A third figure, the stranger Ahasuerus (eventually revealed as some form of the resurrected Egyptian god Osiris) is a complicating child/adult intruder into the couple’s hopeless relationship, perhaps as Samuel’s doppelganger. Some simple, entwining movement over and around a tabletop evokes their possible oneness. The work’s fatalism is intensified by the use of finely crafted, if not expertly deployed, puppet skeletons (in the style of the Mexican Day of the Dead), allowing the characters to express their plight more passionately, and cosmologically. The director’s writing is awkward, the sometimes American delivery odd (given the absence of any context) and the symbolism overwrought. But there’s no doubting the commitment of the performers to their material.
PACT, Sydney Fringe 2012: Porphyria’s Slumber, devisor, performer Annabelle McMillan, director, dramaturg Danielle Maas, producer Holly Orkin, designer Alice Harvey, lighting Amber Silk; Matriark Art Theatre, Alarum, writer, director Robert den Engelsman, director, movement coach Scott Parker, performers Chase Burnett, Kit Bennett, Michael Smith, dramaturg Kathryn Roberts, designer Aleisa Jelbart, video +Harvest (Mathew Harvey), lighting Vanessa Hall, sound design Tim Fitz; PACT Theatre, Sept 7-29
The Making of the Flag: Give Us Back Our Unions, Sussi Porsborg, Performance Space, Halls for Hire
photo Heidrun Löhr
The Making of the Flag: Give Us Back Our Unions, Sussi Porsborg, Performance Space, Halls for Hire
A VIDEO, COMMISSIONED BY PERTH ARTIST SUSSI PORSBORG AND SCREENED AS PART OF HER EXHIBITION AND WORKSHOP AT TRADES HALL IN SYDNEY, WAS SWITCHED OFF BY THE BUILDING MANAGER. HE EXPLAINED HE HAD RECEIVED COMPLAINTS FROM PEOPLE IN THE BUILDING BUT WAS UNWILLING TO SAY FROM WHOM, OR INDEED THE NATURE OF THE COMPLAINTS.
The video was part of an exhibition and workshop, The Making of the Flag: Give us Back Our Unions, presented by Performance Space as part of their Halls for Hire season: “Steeped in a rich history of Australian Trade Unionism, the Sydney Trades Hall is the perfect setting for this politically-charged flag-making workshop. Expanding the notions of participatory democracy in unexpected ways, Sussi Porsborg will take attendees on a live sewing performance that doubles as an educational conversation on the intersection of radical art, nationalism, politics and labour rights.”
The video, The Right to Represent, which can be seen on YouTube, http://youtube/nemJMfBVjqU, had been recently shot in Perth with the artist interviewing veteran trade union organiser Kevin Reynolds (former WA State Secretary of the CFMEU). He recounts the struggles of the movement from the 1960s through to the 80s in the days when the police were in the pockets of the government and employers—like Senator Rocher (Liberal Party, WA), who ran the Trident Building Company. As Reynolds tells his stories large captions appear under the images to emphasise the history, its rhetoric and the opinions of unionists: Taking the Fight Up; Rank and File; No Ticket No Start; Third Wave Campaign; Won the Fight; Retain What We’ve Got; We Can’t Rely on Governments; Intimidate Workers; 457 Visa; Workers Aren’t Getting a Share.
These captions are echoed in the other part of the exhibition and workshop where visitors are invited to heat-seal a slogan of their invention onto a flag or banner using cut out letters provided, already pre-cut from alphabetically arranged piles.
This is an opportunity for visitors, many arriving as invited groups from varied backgrounds, to become immersed in a tradition resonant with history. So what is it that upset the anonymous Trades Hall complainants so much? Is it Reynolds’ outspoken views on contemporary politics and unionism? Is it his recalling the confrontational days of yore? Is it the fact that the artist, a trade unionist herself, has used her imaginative and forthright approach to remind younger generations—the ‘virgins’ to whom Reynolds refers—that the conditions they enjoy in the workplace today are based on the struggles of previous generations, and that vigilance is needed. These conditions are being eroded, as both the artist and Reynolds propose, by the cozy agreements currently in place between the unions, government and industry.
Following an appeal to the general secretary of Unions NSW, the building manager appeared again, not to re-instate the video (now hung with banners made by the artist saying Freedom of Association, Freedom of Expression), but to remove it entirely from the exhibition space.
Why are we seeing such underhand censorship of an artist’s exhibition over content that had been previously agreed to on a handshake? Is freedom of expression and freedom of association really too much for some to take in a building originally dedicated to such principles?
Performance Space, Halls for Hire: The Making of the Flag: Give Us Back Our Unions; Sydney Trades Hall, Oct 2-7
THERE IS BARELY AN INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL TODAY THAT DOES NOT INCLUDE A COUPLE OF ACTS THAT DEFY A CLEAR ART- OR POPULAR-MUSIC LABEL. QUIRKY STRING SECTIONS AND FIVE-MINUTE MUSIQUE CONCRÈTE INTROS ARE COMMONPLACE IN POPULAR RECORDINGS. EVERY CLASSICAL MUSIC STUDENT IS URGED TO “DIVERSIFY THEIR PORTFOLIO,” WHICH NEVER MEANS “ENGAGE IN MANUSCRIPT STUDY OF THE FLEMISH MASTERS.”
Why, then, if it is a part of everyday musical life, are we so quick to dismiss the “crossover” title? I’d like to ask exactly what crossed over in some semi-popular, semi-art music concerts from 2012 and draw a musical geography of the term. Ultimately, crossover music is the thawing of boundaries that only froze up 50 years ago, but as we reconfigure these imaginary boundaries there are real stakes to be considered.
composing crossovers
One form of crossover is to bring the melodies, rhythms and articulations of popular music into an art music context. An excellent example of this genre of crossover appeared at Paris’ Festival d’Automne this year. Pierre-Yves Macé’s Song Recital is an arrangement of “tubes” (songs covered a cappella by fans on YouTube) for soprano, flute, oboe, clarinet, percussion, electric guitar, harp, Rhodes piano, violin, viola, cello and double bass. The piece is based on Macé’s earlier work, Song Recycle, for tape and piano. His formation in musique concrète, to which he dedicated a musicological doctoral thesis, is put to masterful use here. Each tube is ingeniously remixed to retain the abstracted character of the original song’s melodies, rhythms and articulations while leaving barely a single word intelligible. The tape is no glitch-pop mashup, but a convincing reconstruction of the original musical material that translates beautifully into the live vocal part of Song Recital.
Song Recital was premiered by soprano Natalie Raybould amid the crumbling interior of Paris’ Théâtre de La Chappelle. Barely a detail was not communicated from the original tape part to the live vocal part, including breathy articulations, finger clicks, peaking microphone artefacts and awkward ‘asides.’ Raybould’s performance was more than a transcription of the tape part, but brought each character to life, interacting with the rest of the ensemble as they imitated and accompanied her.
The piece made me think of another work programmed at the Festival d’Automne, Guillaume de Machaut’s 14th century “Tant doucement me sens emprisonnes.” Included for its rhythmic sophistication next to the complex metric superpositions of the medieval Codex Chantilly and a première by the contemporary complexist composer Brian Ferneyhough, the Machaut rondeau could have appeared just as comfortably next to Macé’s work as an example of a medieval composer using art music methods on a popular song form.
One wonders what the reaction of the original YouTube soloists would be to Raybould and Macé’s interpretation of their covers. Would they recognise themselves in Raybould’s contortions or Macé’s abstracted rhythms? Would they think that Macé’s arrangement added value to the original songs? Despite the piece seeming entirely serious (apart from a children’s song fittingly accompanied in Song Recycle by rhythmic piano-lid tapping), would they think it was a bad joke?
an instrumental divide
This year’s Vivid Live festival at the Sydney Opera House invited a host of ‘indie classical’ bands and solo artists to collaborate with Sydney’s art music ensembles. Some of these projects demonstrated the opposite exchange to Macé: from art music into popular music. Where Macé bridged the popular-art music divide using compositional processes, the acts of the Vivid Live festival crossed the divide using instrumentation. But is classical music instrumentation enough to identify a work has ‘crossed over’ from one type of music to another? Even before performing with string sections, Florence and the Machine, a highlight of the festival, seemed to slip into the ‘indie classical’ category simply by virtue of their resident harpist. Their use of harp is purely decorative, limited to glissandi and (out of time) arpeggiated ostinati. Compare the use of harp by Florence and the Machine with that of Joanna Newsom (who was, unfortunately, not at the festival), where the harp is front and centre, as much a part of the song as Newsom’s voice.
Perhaps an instrument from the opposite ‘camp’ has to be an important part of the composition process to justify a ‘cross over’ between genres. Efterklang, whose album Piramida was spurred into existence by the invitation to perform with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra at the Vivid Live festival, have remarked in interviews on the immediate feedback a live instrument provides that a synthesised version may not. Even though they had worked on Piramida for 10 months, they could hear instantly what worked and what did not work when they entered the concert hall with the SSO.
crossing contexts
Yet another way of crossing over between popular and classical music is to present classical music in popular music contexts and vice versa. Sydney’s Ensemble Offspring have worked to break down the sit-down-shut-up concert setting, marketing themselves as a lively group of music entrepreneurs presenting new music to crowds in bars as well as traditional concert halls. Their program at the Petersham Bowls Club this year presented contemporary art music alongside folk and electronica. Melbourne’s new ensemble 3 Shades of Black debuted at the Melbourne Fringe Festival with a program featuring Renaissance vocal music and Terry Riley’s In C, performing in a hall furnished with bean-bags and serving mulled wine.
We have seen the inverse option (dressing up popular music and sticking it in a concert hall in front of a seated audience) more times than we can count. Theatre orchestras provided galas of operetta overtures, military marches and popular songs from the end of the 19th century to the 1960s. We have seen a renaissance of this sort of programming, with this year’s Australian orchestral programs abounding with concerts dedicated to film medleys (the modern operetta overture), Beatles covers and arrangements of indie classics.
an opportunity
Instead of rejecting the term, our awareness of crossover music on the level of individual bands and musicians should extend to an awareness of how our musical palettes and contexts are also becoming increasingly blurred. I am particularly excited about the third form of crossover presented here: that of presenting art music in casual environments. Such concerts invite creative programming to show the lines of connection between seemingly diverse art forms, showing how little musical distance there might be between a New York minimalist composer from the 1960s, a 12th century Parisian choir master and a contemporary Icelandic indie band. While the term may be enabling in terms of programming, the ‘crossover’ label can also be too easily applied where there is only a superficial exchange of styles. The label should be a signal for us to think critically about what exactly is crossing over.
Festival d’Automne à Paris: Pierre Yves Macé, Natalie Raybould, Ensemble L’Instant Donné Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, Paris Nov 5
Hillel Schwartz, Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang & Beyond, Zone Books, New York, 2011
IT’S AN ALL TOO COMMON MISTAKE. SCHOLARS, SCRIBBLERS AND UNDERGRADUATES ROUTINELY GIVE BACK TO FINNEGANS WAKE AN APOSTROPHE IT DOESN’T REQUIRE. JOYCE’S PUNMANSHIP CONTINUES TO BEGUILE. IT WAS UNDECIDABLE, IMPLYING, RATHER THAN CHOOSING BETWEEN, THE PLURAL TENSE AND THE SINGULAR POSSESSIVE. UNLIKE THE LETTERS ‘S’ OR ‘Y,’ THAT APOSTROPHE DOESN’T HAVE A SOUND (CHEEKILY IRONIC, OF COURSE, IN RELATION TO A BOOK ALL ABOUT SOUND, WITH ITS BABBLING, CHATTERING AND HUNDRED-LETTER THUNDER WORDS).
Hillel Schwartz’s prefatory remarks to Making Noise contain one of the most poetic and beautiful accounts ever written of John Cage’s mythic 1951 visit to Harvard University’s silent, anechoic chamber and the aleatory composer’s wonder at hearing the sounds of his own body. It’s expected, then, to find an account of 1920s radio static and ‘stray’ sounds in Finnegan’s Wake (sic), but surprising to encounter such an elementary spelling mistake by the indefatigable author of The Culture of the Copy (1996). But further, Schwartz neglects to include the surfeit apostrophe before Alfred Jarry’s ‘pataphysics, a bogus, diacritical pomp that, while symbolic rather than sonic, is nonetheless accepted as bibliographic convention. On the other hand the grave accent is correctly placed in musique concrète, in this instance adding appropriate sonic weight and inflection to the pronunciation (Schwartz happily also loses the Austrian-flavoured umlaut often and incorrectly placed over the o in English derivations of Schoenberg).
It would indeed be churlish to spend too much time on such frippery in relation to Making Noise’s extraordinary scholarship and exquisite writing, wit and intelligence, its labour and love. While this suprasegmental detail sounds decidedly bookish it is far from pretentious or fustian. The very notion of the unnecessary, in this instance incorrect marks and “unwanted sound,” of “noise rarely indexed but often hidden,” is unavoidable. This sense of uncontrollable excess, of sound being surplus to need, of the inescapable weight of noise in the world from the beginning of time to the continuous present tense, is what Schwartz’s remarkable book is all about. The blurb (itself a form of noise) on the dust-jacket (of which I’ll say more directly) is succinct: “From the uproarious junior gods of Babylonian epic to crying infants heard over baby monitors, from doubly mythic Echo to loudspeaker feedback, Making Noise follows ‘unwanted sound’ on its paths through terrains domestic and industrial, legal and religious, musical and medical, poetic and scientific.” For a book two decades in the making, we should expect nothing less.
By the age of six, Schwartz tells us, “a child has spent more than 20,000 hours listening to the world and can recognise 10,000 complex sequences of syllables.” This connection between anthropology, sociology and biology, audition and grammar, reinforces Schwartz’s fascination with the human condition as essentially sonic rather than visual. In this, Making Noise daringly flies in the face of a generation of theorists for whom “typographic man” emerged from the Enlightenment as the literate product of the alphabet, dusting off the phonetic savagery of oral cultures along the way. Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong are barely mentioned, Ted Carpenter and Jack Goody fail to detain the indexer. Put simply, Schwartz tells us that to be alive, “joyfully alive, or deeply troubled, or floating under the spell of a hypnotist” is to be “noiseful.” The Enlightenment has much to answer for, as has been demonstrated by more than 50 years of agonistic cultural criticism and literary theory. Schwartz caps off this counter-critique simply and pithily: being noiseful is evidence, personal as well as impartial, of the “fall of noise into nature.” Jorge Luis Borges taught us in his ficciones that there is something demiurgic about astounding scholarship. Reading this book realistically underlines that fabulatory astonishment.
Apart from the long history of noise and its affinities with culture, this book, if it is about anything that we can tidily name, is about the sounds of modernity. Note not the sound of modernity, since that it is far too monumental and inclusive. Schwartz portrays the emergence of the modern world as the empire of the ear, as a phenomenon that will always elude the anti-noisites and the trans-historical war on noise. Urbanisation, population growth, mass transport systems, stress etc may be things, but they all make sound. Like Joyce before him Schwartz identifies the inventory as one of the decisive techniques of modernity, the capacity to collate the sheer excess of the world into exhaustive lists. Accordingly, some of the sounds and noises of being modern that pepper the book’s pages include: machinery, street sellers, car alarms, primal scream, tinnitus, black noise, white noise, orange noise, pink noise, mufflers, sneezing, sniffing, noseblowing, traffic, toilets, farting, tittering, muttering, mobile phones, jackhammers, muzak, tutting, ventilation, brakes, television, radio. And so it goes. Silencing the noise from the business of being modern, Schwartz emphasises, would be impossible. For good measure he says it again in case we didn’t hear it the first time—“Let’s be blunt: impossible.”
At over 900 pages of text (including index) and 349 of endnotes (as downloadable pdf) Schwartz is no friend of parsimony. But forget for a minute that any words in this text, unlike sound and noise, are surplus to need, extraneous or padding. Schwartz is a writer’s writer, meaning that he is a sublime stylist, can turn a phrase you’ll never forget and knows he is being read by, inter alia, other writers. Which brings me to the dust jacket. I confess that I covet dust jackets and value paper more than cloth binding. On receiving my copy of Making Noise the first thing I did was remove the jacket for safe-keeping. In doing so I realise I had already taken Schwartz’s point before I had even read a word. For the paper cover is secondary, disposable, removable and ultimately unwanted. It is, after Philip K Dick, kipple, stuff that protects and otherwise clutters the real thing. It is an allegory, in other words, of Making Noise itself. As Schwartz says, there is no escaping noise since it is everywhere and all the time and without it, he advises, “we would not be in the world.”
Ensemble Offspring recording SILVA at the ABC Studios, Sydney
courtesy the company
Ensemble Offspring recording SILVA at the ABC Studios, Sydney
TRISTAN MURAIL’S GARRIGUE (2008, FOR FLUTE, VIOLA, CELLO AND PERCUSSION), NAMED AFTER “A TYPE OF SHRUB-LIKE VEGETATION (INCLUDING WILD THYME, ROSEMARY, JUNIPER) OFTEN FOUND IN MEDITERRANEAN FRANCE” (PROGRAM NOTE) WAS AN IDEAL OPENER FOR ENSEMBLE OFFSPRING’S SILVA: NATURAL MUSIC CONCERT, GENERATING UNEXPECTED SOUND WORLDS FROM ACOUSTIC INSTRUMENTS. THE PROGRAM INCLUDED FOUR WORKS FROM THREE FEMALE AUSTRALIAN COMPOSERS—MARY FINSTERER, ROSALIND PAGE, MELODY EÖTVÖS—WHO LIKEWISE INTRIGUED AND THRILLED US WITH APPROACHES AT ONCE FORMAL AND EXPERIMENTAL.
Garrigue has all the buzz, hum and shimmer you’d expect of a wild landscape and from the pioneer of Spectralism. With its moments of agitation, plangency, woodblock jigging and richly textured resonances (gong and vibes) it is a work of more than sonic beauty; finely shaped, it ends in sudden silence (as if someone has shut a door on nature) but not before the emergence of an entrancing melody.
Mary Finsterer’s Circadian Tale 7.1 (2009/2012) aims to evoke “the dreams we hold for ourselves and our children” beyond the everyday rhythms of our lives (composer quoted in program note). It’s a radiant work of individual and coupled utterances: the piano offers and sustains an opening thought; other instruments make lucid, complementary but independent utterances; the cello mutters then sings; violin, piano and vibes merge in a crystalline dream; and finally flute and soulful clarinet leave us suspended in reverie. The responsive audience waits until silence truly arrives before applauding. Finsterer has successfully evoked something that is quite natural to us.
The “knotted melodic plait” of Iannis Xenakis’ Plekto (1993) evokes nature as sound (“the collision of hail or rain with hard surfaces, or the songs of cicadas in a summer field,” writes the composer) and as biology (Xenakis’ musical application of mathematical rules akin to natural growth). Never sounding at all like a field recording, Plekto is full of passion and drama—a pounding piano, a soaring flute riding high above choralling viola and clarinet, a fascinatingly strange percussion passage, a piano and drum dialogue, a climaxing wave of movement physical and sonic and an eerie final keening collectively make for another otherworldly, but of the world, experience.
The title of Rosalind Page’s Being and Time 1: Lacrimae rerum (2012) comes in part from an Imants Tillers’ painting Lacrimae rerum, which in turn is drawn from a line in Virgil’s Aeneid regarding the “tears of matters” that relate to the emotional demands of mortality. Page was also taken with the fragments from a Thomas Bernhard poem in the painting. Despite the power of love, the poet is overcome with a sense of transience and grief—of entering a “land beyond goodbye” (program). Melancholy rather than mournful, Being and Time 1 is dramatic early on with stabbing cello and piano; the flute soars over a moody cello line which is then extended with almost romantic intensity, supported by full-bodied piano and drum. After a thoughtful piano passage the work moves moodily to its conclusion, the cello sad, deep, vibrato-rich and then plucked while the flute suggests a distant ethereal realm. The piano sounds our exit from contemplation. Although least identifiable with the concert’s nature theme, Time and Being 1 nonetheless shares a passion evident in the other works on the program for generating unusual structures; here dice are listed as instruments along with piano, cello, flutes and wind gong. Page explains on the Ensemble Offspring website, “I chose to cast the dice as a performative gesture to create present moments that cannot be predicted with certainty, a scattering of pitch-rhythm, a meeting of elements within and beyond my subjective composer control—and question if this gesture abolishes or indeed generates pure chance, amidst a garden of otherwise consciously signalled decisions” (http://ensembleoffspring.com/media/news/rosalind-page-musical-q-a/).
US-based Australian composer Melody Eötvös’ Leafcutter (2012) is a tribute to the female ants of the Leafcutter species. Those that do not attain queen status nonetheless adopt another function in their society—”rather than being eaten or driven out.” True to the complexity of ant social organisation Leafcutter is a tightly woven, dynamic work, sometimes quite jaunty (not least in a pairing of vibes and clarinet) and rich in escalating, brisk note runs, richly evoking insect life and its complexity.
SILVA (Latin for forest) was commissioned by Ensemble Offspring in honour of Mary Finsterer’s 50th birthday. The composer spoke eloquently to us of her love for Modernist music, of the pleasure of working from a small palette of choices and of those who have inspired her—Stravinsky, her teacher Louis Andriessen and the makers of early European music. Finsterer is taken by the notion of the forest as a place of the imagination but also as a metaphor for the act of composition in its shape and detail. SILVA initially evokes the space of the forest, almost sombrely but enlivened by small bristlings, warbling flute and clarinet and is then enlarged by gong, emphatic wind playing and cello and vibes, the latter then on their own, reverberant and briefly evoking Asian idioms. Suddenly our perspective shifts, from open space to something more internal, dark and primal powerfully conjured by percussion alone with heavy motifs and evocative detail. The other instruments enter, thickening the ‘forest’ air, the piano fast and ‘minimal,’ before a high rippling bell and bowed vibes finally lead us out.
Of course, Ensemble Offspring delivered superb performances of all these works, not least the three world premieres by female composers in yet another impressive concert nurturing new works that will enrich and expand the Australian musical landscape.
Ensemble Offspring, SILVA: Natural Music, violin, viola Graeme Jennings, cello Geoffrey Gartner, flute Lamorna Nightingale, clarinet Jason Noble, percussion Claire Edwardes, piano Zubin Kanga; Utzon Room, Sydney Opera House, Oct 23
JOURNEY IS SUCH A HACKNEYED TERM, THOUGH WHEN WE ARE TALKING ABOUT A THREE-HOUR EPIC, YOU MIGHT BEAR WITH ME. THE MINOTAUR TRILOGY TAKES YOU TO ANCIENT GREECE, VIA A LOST MONTEVERDI OPERA AND SOMETHING LIKE A SURREALIST BIRTHDAY PARTY. IN THREE HEFTY 50-MINUTE ACTS THIS UNORTHODOX WORK FROM CHAMBER MADE OPERA IS A CRUCIBLE OF MYTH, MINIMALISM AND CREATIVE RUSH.
It’s not an easy work; at times you might wish Ariadne had given you a ball of thread to navigate the dark corners of this particular labyrinth. At other times, you can let go of plot expectations and see The Minotaur for what it is—a meditation on creativity. It’s as challenging for its pace and length as it is extraordinary for unabashedly roaring headlong into the new with the scale and emotion befitting opera. Likewise, the Minotaur, born of a bizarre creative act, is a beast defying easy classification: Pasiphaë had a wooden cow constructed, her lust compelling her to climb inside it in order to copulate with a beautiful bull. It was this act that led to the birth and exile of the man-eating Minotaur.
There begins the first act, The Island, set on Naxos, where Theseus jilts lovelorn Ariadne after she has helped him escape the labyrinth. Any lavishness you might expect from an opera is instead a soft pencil sketch—the music is mostly improvised from performance cues. A double bass (often down-tuned), a harpischord and percussion (often eccentric—any object might be struck or rubbed) make up the orchestra. In the first and third part, the singing is performed with heart-aching clarity, breathing with loss and sea mist. It includes the remaining aria from Monteverdi’s lost opera on the subject of Ariadne and Theseus, Lamento d’Arianna.
Using the sensitive acoustics of the Recital Hall’s Salon, the music borders on a sound art experiment. Even the opening of a wooden box, its contents rearranged, is integral to the musical score. Similarly the set is built from minimal elements such as an old spire that becomes everything from a weapon to a hill to climb. The performers wear sheath-like dresses and handbags on their heads that, worn lengthways, resemble medieval women’s caul headdresses. The Minotaur makes an appearance, pawing at the ground in thick wedged heels, dressed like a frightening dominatrix.
The Minotaur Trilogy fleshes out the emotional content between the lines of the myth. Fear of the Minotaur and Theseus’ escape from becoming a human sacrifice are rendered through visual clues. As I was beginning to grasp symbols such as a large basket becoming a ship’s hull, harpsichordist Anastasia Russell-Head walked on in a baroque red velvet dress and an enormous seagull head. The audience is steered across the terrain of the story with elements that are unexpected and unsettling.
Nowhere is this more true than in the second part, The Labyrinth. The most stripped back of the three parts, it nonetheless has a near intoxicating effect. In almost total darkness you wait for several long minutes. Only small lamps guide performers to make costume changes. A long chant begins in the dark. Then a bright light reveals a series of striking, surreal tableaux vivants against a plain canvas backdrop. A performer might have a stockinged face, be naked or carry a grass catcher—there is a palpable sense of anticipation as we await the next eerie, richly evocative ‘painting’ made briefly visible. The performance is felt as much as seen. Eyes adjust from darkness to light and time slows in the long, dark minutes of silence. It’s as though we are walking through a labyrinth flicking a lighter. All manner of creature, costumed and bizarre, may be encountered here.
The closing act, The Boats, stepped away from the sonic minimalism of the second part. The improvised music included jazz elements lead by Mark Cauvin who bashed out some bigger rhythms before flipping his double bass upside-down and scratching the floor with the scroll. The six performers this time wore beige shoes on their heads, topped off with white feathers—like small boats. As in a feverish dream or in a half-forgotten myth, The Minotaur operates on its own rules and symbols. It boils down the bones of this epic monster, replating its emotions for a contemporary audience. The Minotaur Trilogy, performed with unwavering conviction by the cast, is a fearless creative act full of imagination and unforgettable imagery.
See Matthew Lorenzon’s review of the first part of the trilogy, Minotaur the Island, performed in Western Sydney’s Aurora Festival of Living Music in May: www.realtimearts.net/article/issue109/10711.
Melbourne International Arts Festival: The Minotaur Trilogy, creators Margaret Cameron, David Young, performers Deborah Kayser, Caroline Lee, Hellen Sky, double bass Mark Cauvin, percussion Matthias Schack-Arnott, harpsichord Anastasia Russell-Head, architect Michael Roper, lighting Yasmin Santoso; Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre, Oct 18-21
THE ACCORDION IS A MUCH MALIGNED INSTRUMENT. OFTEN ASSOCIATED WITH AGING FOLKIES, KITSCH MIDDLE EUROPEAN MUSIC AND DISTANT RELATIVES, FEW LIKE TO ADMIT THAT THEY ENJOY ITS MUSIC. THAT IS UNTIL THEY HEAR JAMES CRABB PLAYING AND HIS INFORMATIVE TALK ON THE INSTRUMENT’S HISTORY AND MANY GUISES. AT CAMPBELLTOWN ARTS CENTRE, CRABB REVEALED UNFAMILIAR FACES OF THE ACCORDION WITH HUMOUR AND CLARITY, AND ONLY POPPED THREE BUTTONS IN THE PROCESS.
Crabb’s program delivered a wonderful balance of convention, innovation, adaptation and piracy. Opening with a work to immediately reconfigure audience expectations, Crabb shared with us De Profundis, Sofia Gubaidulina’s 1978 masterpiece for accordion. Apparently this work has reshaped the direction of composition for accordion, inviting more composers to experiment with the until-recently untapped sound worlds of the instrument. Gubaidulina treats sounds as living things. They shimmer and, as Crabb explains, “do the breathing.” The work has an underlying narrative based on a psalm about forgiveness. You hear of trials and ascension. But for me the most spectacular thing was the careful use of diminuendo. The singing accordion exhales unwaveringly, but as the airspeed decreases the pitch does not drop. It keeps realigning. Listening, it’s as though you had spun around on the spot so many times that you’d fallen to the floor and were watching the room revolve around you, all the while knowing that the ceiling is fixed and your perception lies. This is how pitch whirled as the accordion grew quieter: spinning, continuous and stationary.
Crowd-pleasing Piazzolla tangos punctuated this and the next meaty contemporary work. These were played with incredible sensitivity, and all the subtlety of tango dancers. Next was the world premiere of Campbelltown City Council’s commission from Peter McNamara, Der Ost-Westspiegel, composed for Crabb this year in a collaborative exchange between the two. McNamara had never composed for accordion before so was grateful to Crabb for providing a 20-page manual the musician had written years before on the idiomatic traits and advantages of his chosen instrument.
Der Ost-Westspiegel plays with various contrasts between East and West. Intentionally oblique associations are drawn between East and Western Sydney, East and West Germany, occidental and oriental thought and philosophy. The theme extended also to geographic contrasts, poverty and development. Western Sydney-based composer McNamara explained in the pre-concert talk how these themes related to the work’s musical material, with which he explored extreme contrasts in register and character of sound. How these sounds are arranged follows recognisable patterns too, for example some phrases are mirror images of one another. McNamara has chosen this approach to re-personalise the listener’s perspective believing that East and West will see different reflections in the mirror depending on their circumstances.
McNamara explained, “There certainly aren’t any tunes, that’s for sure…I’m more interested in textures, combinations.” He sees the accordion as a sort of mini-chamber organ, one that can play very widely spaced chords. This is particular to the accordion as players are not limited by their hand spans the way they are when playing a conventional piano keyboard. Don’t be fooled into thinking an accordion has a keyboard on only one side. That instrument is actually a piano accordion, a mutt according to Crabb. Accordions in their purest form have buttons on both sides.
After this premiere we jumped back 300 years to France for three short harpsichord pieces by Baroque composer Rameau. To my surprise, these translated beautifully to the accordion, retaining something of the timbral authenticity of French Baroque dance music. On occasion I could hear the hautbois, cor anglais, flutes and voices amid the memory of the keyboard.
To wind up, Crabb offered a quirky 1985 work by John Zorn called Road Runner. Named after the swift desert hen and its persistently failing pursuer, Wile E Coyote, this romp gave Crabb the chance to act, stomp and holler. It’s an homage to the renowned composer of cartoon music, Carl Stalling, who has conditioned children of many generations to associate sound effects with cartoon character blunders and moments of victory. Quotations surface and subside faster than you can recognise them and then transform. It’s a race. There’s a gasp, a close call, an uneasy stillness. “Is that a tune I know?” Meep meep.
James Crabb, The Classical Accordion, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Campbelltown, NSW, Oct 28
SOUND ART THAT ATTEMPTS TO ENGAGE WITH SILENCE MAY SEEM DOOMED TO INCONGRUITY IF NOT OUTRIGHT FAILURE, BUT WITH THE STEADY HAND OF CURATOR MATT WARREN ON THE RUDDER A COLLECTION OF THESE DELIBERATELY QUIET WORKS, FILLED WITH SPACE, CAME TOGETHER WELL.
Warren’s best known as a sound and installation-based artist, with this being his first major effort as a curator. What surprised me on first encounter was how easily the work of disparate sound artists came together to produce an exhibition that also sat well with the curator’s own arts practice.
Warren has long traded in the subtle; even when the volume has been intensely loud, or subsonically disturbing, there has always been a strong interest in the quiet and empty spaces between. In conversation around In A Silent Way, Warren noted that the notion of absence is a driving idea in his work. He looks, and listens for that which is not there, discovering that you can miss something—its very absence can create a presence. It’s a hard thing to evoke, and is what has made his work to date seem haunted and emotionally powerful.
In recruiting people who work with sound to create In A Silent Way, Warren gave out a very simple brief: make sound works that investigate silence. This is technically impossible, for silence itself can never truly exist, as John Cage discovered when he visited an anechoic chamber in 1951 and heard the sounds of his own body. Silence is a literal utopia; a poetic idea that occurs only in the imagination. Given this actuality, listening as active became an important focus for the premise of the show—what is it that we hear if we really listen, extending into quiet spaces to seek small occurrences and moments? The curated works became compositions that exist to be played quietly, at the edge of hearing. However, the expectation of focused listening was turned on its head: there were no headphones, instead a dim room lit with the red, green and blue light—from which all colour is constructed for camera, video and television. This delicate hint to mix and create for oneself was certainly inviting.
Most of the works were constructed especially for the exhibition. All were extremely effective as individual investigations of the curatorial theme, and it’s hard to say, given the presentation decisions, if any really emerge as stand-outs. Indeed, that would really work against the intent of the show. What stood out were the moments that occurred organically as sounds interacted. I realised that the blending of Joel Stern’s echoing bells with Gail Priest’s moaning sine waves just as Darren Cook’s slightly woozy playing of a Howlin’ Wolf track lurched into digital shudders, was unlikely to be heard again, given the varying lengths of the looping works. I became quite engrossed at the possibility that only I would ever hear quite that moment. The demand for active engagement was well rewarded.
Nevertheless, the peculiar and obsessive creation that went into UK artist Nicholas Bullen’s work warrants a mention: he recorded a day’s worth of noise from his own house while he was elsewhere. Cherry-picking the recording, he processed and constructed a remarkable sound work that is genuinely creepy.
Potent as well was the responsive performance from the show’s opening event, where Laura Altman and Monica Brooks sat at opposing points in the gallery, gently responding live to the extant sounds, then slowly to each other. Improvising to a moving palette of sound art in a room full of whispering people is a challenge, but the time the two players described with sound hung together with a brittle elegance. People who seem to know their instruments well enough not to demonstrate their skill make fascinating players.
In A Silent Way was a step out of the ordinary for a show based around sound works. I felt as if the installed sounds were a musical instrument and a dance was waiting to happen. The works of varying lengths looped, creating constant change as the sounds intermingled, generating a palpable atmosphere and encouraging me to circle and cross the space again and again, moving to and from sets of speakers attached to the wall like tiny altars. One could be quite deluded at times as to where sound emerged from, given the quiet bleed of the works. The consideration given to the actual install was very precise, and it showed.
After a time another effect became noticeable as I sat on the floor in the space’s centre; the room took on the peculiar feel of a sacred or spiritual place. There’s a moment of secular ecstasy that can sometimes occur with works of art, something like the overpowering feeling generated by the famous Rothko Chapel. While not every work aims to produce transcendence, it is strange and memorable on those very rare occasions one encounters it. This is something that Matt Warren, while not remotely religious, reaches for in his work and achieved with his sensitive curation. The individual works came together as a whole, filling CAST with a cascade of moments that had the peculiar effect of seeming to distort time.
In a Silent Way asked me to question my own notions of sound art, and how much time anyone needs to spend with a work of any kind, time-based or not. Miles Davis, from whom Warren borrowed the exhibition’s title, would likely have approved, given that greatest of players’ command of the rich moment of silence.
In a silent way, curator Matt Warren [2012 CAST Curatorial Mentorship], sound works by Laura Altman, Monica Brooks, Nicholas Bullen, Darren Cook, Lawrence English, Samaan Feick, Gail Priest, Joel Stern, CAST Gallery, Hobart, July 28-Aug 26
Driving to the Centre of the Earth (detail), silent HD video, Erin Coates, Yonder, PICA
courtesy the artist
Driving to the Centre of the Earth (detail), silent HD video, Erin Coates, Yonder, PICA
THE IDEA OF YONDER AS A PLACE WAS ONCE CONCEIVED AS A SPIRITUAL REALM, A HEAVENLY PLACE, WHERE ULTIMATE AND ETERNAL VALUES WOULD BE FULLY AND IDEALLY REALISED. FOR EINSTEIN IT WAS A SUBSTITUTE FOR A RELIGIOUS HEAVEN AND THE GOAL OF THE PURSUIT OF YONDER IN LIFE WAS A SOURCE OF INNER FREEDOM.
An ‘over there’ which might be heaven, enlightenment, utopia or paradise, is forsaken in Yonder, an exhibition curated by Jasmin Stephens, for an interpretation resonant with the contemporaneity of a globalised 21st century world. The yonder here is political, pragmatic, virtual, actual and magical; it is about the movement of bodies and information, the incongruity of borders and the quest to revive personal memories and forgotten fragments of history. While there might be a spiritual undercurrent, its voice is overwhelmed in an exhibition where yonder as a destination appears full yet fragmented.
At the doorway to the Westend Gallery a lighting fixture (Untitled, 2012) by Jurek Wybraniec hangs from the ceiling, barely noticeable unless you look up. The lights are triggered as you enter the gallery space and again, barely noticeable unless you look back. Light shines on an empty floor, an opportunity promising a moment in the spotlight missed in the blink of an eye; yonder is elusive. Yonder is also a destination that triggers desire, to be elsewhere. This state of yearning for otherness is especially familiar to science fiction and expressed in Erin Coates’ Driving to the Centre of the Earth. To the right of the Westend gallery entrance a smelly little silicon hole escapes into the subcutaneous layers of the Gallery and tunnels toward a video of the artist in her car driving to the Earth’s core. This is a gem of a work that is subtle in its subversion of popular sci-fi scenarios; rather than evoking the gung-ho thrill of such an adventure, it appears rather banal—there is no sense of wonder and instead the burning yonder is approached with indifference.
Many of the works literally, if not metaphorically, extend beyond their physical manifestation in the gallery space into the world at large. Using the symbol of the shy albatross, Perdita Phillips presents Shy (dissolution + exchange) (2012-13), a work in the classic genre of mail art to picture the slow attenuation of a photocopy of said bird as it is repeatedly copied at numerous global locations around the southern rim. Phillips reels in collaborators worldwide, the resulting A4 sheets forming a grid on the wall: wedged within them is a monitor with an animation detailing the slow degradation of the image. In this work, the art is a stand-in traveller for the artist who stays at home, imagining the far flung places the albatross roams—from across the road to Africa and back home again.
Simon Faithfull, Limbo: An Expanding Atlas of Subjectivity, 2012, digital drawing, pictured with Renae Coles, Yonder, PICA
photo Bewley Shaylor
Simon Faithfull, Limbo: An Expanding Atlas of Subjectivity, 2012, digital drawing, pictured with Renae Coles, Yonder, PICA
The theme of mobility is core to the exhibition; to get to yonder it is necessary to travel—by proxy, mentally, virtually or physically. For humans, movement all too easily lends itself to mapping and Simon Faithfull in Limbo: An Expanding Atlas of Subjectivity (2012) presents a map of drawn moments encountered in his daily life, which happens to be in Berlin for the duration of the exhibition. Faithful holds claim to being one of the first artists to work with a custom-designed mobile app. The drawings are created using a PalmPilot and DAGI stylus or finger and can be delivered by website, Twitter, Facebook, RSS and iPhone. In the context of PICA they crawl out of a printer to be pinned to a vinyl map of Berlin. The cartographic symbolism of the map is overlayed with a more personal, idiosyncratic language, consisting of sundry everyday observations from afar.
The ultimate yonder with no return that we are all faced with but all too easily in denial of, at least in Western societies, is death. Questions of life and death are approached with humility in The Sound of Your Own Breathing (2010), a trio of animated shorts by Richard Lewer. Simple charcoal drawings are animated alongside the breathless voice-over of rope-skipping characters telling stories of the loss of loved ones to a boat accident, to terminal illness and a bank robbery. In a deadpan manner this series tackles the fickleness of life with the threshold to death so easily crossed.
Stories also drive the work of Heman Chong, in the form of a series of short vinyl text works, Walking Long and Hard (2004) describing walks and personal and angst-ridden existential moments in places including Berlin, Melbourne, Beijing, Linz and New Orleans. Chong has not been to all of these places. This work therefore presents a slippery play between fact and fiction, past and future, action and imagination. Being a contemporary artist today is about responding to and living within a global culture. There is little room for parochialism and this work situates itself within a world context in an elegant, succinct and evocative manner.
There is no guarantee that yonder is a satisfying destination; even though we often assume that the grass is greener, we never really know what lies over the hill if we’ve never been there. Both the potentially sinister and more delightful notions of yonder are addressed within this show, if not so much the spiritual or religious. The works present abstracted and uniquely contemporary, conceptual and subjective responses to the concept. The show is also notable for its diversity of media; print, animation, photography, video, painting, sculpture, mail art, drawing, custom electronics and text. Despite today’s so called ‘post-media’ condition, perhaps this diverse selection is part of the reason for the initial sense of aesthetic dissonance. Beyond first impressions, however, close attention to the individual works does make for unique, surprising and revealing journeys to that place ‘over there.’
PICA: Yonder, curator Jasmin Stephens, artists Andy Best, Erin Coates, Heman Chong, Simon Faithfull, Benjamin Forster, Tony Garifalakis and Richard Lewer, Charles Lim Yi Yong, Clare Peake, Perdita Phillips, Helen Smith, Kai Syng Tan, Warren Vance, Jurek Wybraniec; Westend Gallery, Perth, Sept 8-Oct 21
IN MAY 2012 REBECCA CONROY EMBARKED ON A FOUR-MONTH TOUR OF NORTH AMERICAN ARTIST-LED SPACES AND INITIATIVES ACROSS 14 CITIES. THIS IS THE SECOND IN A TWO-PART SERIES. IN THE FIRST SHE VISITED CHICAGO; HERE SHE’S MOVED ON TO DETROIT AND THEN MINNEAPOLIS AND ST PAUL IN MINNESOTA.
detroit
Detroit is a spectacular story, as large as the infrastructure and the grand architectural gestures that it left behind in the wake of race riots, white tax flight and the free market destruction of the auto industry. Some attribute the demise to those 1967 race riots, the largest and most devastating in US history, when cops busted a blind pig [an unlicensed bar. Eds], disrupting a gathering of black servicemen just returned from Vietnam. Colour is certainly a key narrative in the story of Detroit. But related threads, such as the GFC and continued off-shoring of labour to China, have undeniably contributed to weakening the city; as has the crazy tax base, which has allowed large companies to operate from the city but pay their (minimal) taxes to the predominantly white outer-lying suburbs beyond the 8 mile. Yep, the one that Eminem sings about.
But the past decade has seen the once grand Motown, or Motor City, slowly re-emerge as an urban farming oasis; and many artists are pricking up their ears. The combined allure of cheap houses and the urban-pioneering potential of a place that has been all but abandoned have rendered Detroit a veritable artist beacon. Its arts community also appears to be benefiting from a healthy lack of artist ego, free from the banal prescriptions of an art market. If you can move beyond the ruin porn, there is a bounty of narratives to get your head around. One well known character is Phil Cooley. You couldn’t have written a better script if you tried: young man walks off catwalk in Europe, returns to his native Detroit and, with the help of his real estate agent parents, buys large warehouse to turn into a creative playspace, while running an award-winning restaurant business on the side. The space is called PonyRide, a multi-purpose, artist business incubator space consisting of a dozen different ventures including a hip hop dance studio, a social enterprise and textiles project for homeless people, a letterpress and a recording studio. Kaija Wuolett climbed on board the Cooley wagon as an architect fresh out of grad school. She described the familiar DIY artist-run warehouse fit-out as an organic process of designing and building as they went along, including reusing their own materials and salvaging other materials from abandoned houses. The next lot of plans involves setting up an artist residency program, which they hope to launch in 2013.
In a city with a combined acreage of vacant lots as large as the area of Manhattan, projects connected to housing and buildings have naturally driven a number of artist-led ventures. Design99 is the work of designer and architect duo Gina Reichert and Mitch Cope who “investigate new models of contemporary art and architectural practice”. They have been living and working in the neighbourhood of Hamtramck for the past 10 years, and in 2009 started Power House Productions as a not-for-profit to specifically support their community anchored projects. This year Power House was awarded a lucrative $250,000 ArtPlace grant to continue with three projects, one of which includes the Ride On Skate Park, and another which is a collaboration with the hinterlands, a performance company who relocated to Detroit from Chicago in late 2010. My introduction to Detroit was in fact hearing about the $100 house that another artist couple, Jon Brumit and Sarah Wagner, had decided to purchase after encouragement from their friends Gina and Mitch, and which they have since turned into an artist residency space called Dflux.
There’s also the Heidelberg Project, 3600 Heidelberg Street which has just celebrated 25 years. It started as a protest by artist Tyree Guthrie and his father Sam Mackey when they gathered toys and other domestic debris left over from abandoned houses and used them to make large-scale installation works—as big as houses. The site, having grown several blocks in size, is now recognised internationally as an outdoor sculpture park, having survived two attempts by the Mayor’s office to bulldoze it.
minneapolis/st paul
On the west side of the Mid West spectrum, the state of Minnesota and the twin cities of Minneapolis/St Paul are considered progressive by American standards, benefiting from healthy tax contributions to the arts and cultural life. Works Progress is an artist-led public design studio led by collaborative duo Colin Kloecker and Shannai Matteson. Previously they ran a space called the West Bank Social Centre, whose byline, “Unpredictable things are happening,” was largely due to the precariousness of the space and its associated responsive programming. Works Progress sees itself as an artist-led platform, producing publications, workshops and events, such as the very fun live-action arts magazine Salon Saloon and large scale gigs such as the Mississippi Megalops [“big fish”], a boat ride down the Mississippi, which functions like a “floating Chautauqua.” A Chautauqua is a term for the adult education movement that started in 1874 by Lake Chautauqua near New York. It usually featured lectures, plays and musicals, typically in farming or ranching communities.
For these events and others, Works Progress collaborates with many, including the intelligent and delightful Andy Sturdevant. An artist, writer, presenter and arts administrator, Andy runs quirky and deeply informative tours of the city with his collaborator, Sergio Vucci, through Common Room in association with a contemporary art space, the Soap Factory in North Minneapolis. I was fortunate to attend a genuinely fascinating tour of the Mall of America, apparently the largest in the Northern Hemisphere (America would probably say the Universe).
Minneapolis is also home to Red76, an occasional collaboration of associated artists conducted by Samuel Gould. They publish the Journal of Radical Shimming and create responsive works, which function among other things as a framework for ‘public inquiries.’ Previously Red76 were based in Portland Oregon, which has been a formative influence on their methodologies and approaches to public dialogues, social histories, gatherings and collaborative research. Across the river in St Paul is Public Artist in Residence for the city Marcus Young, who describes himself as a behavioural artist. Grace Minnesota is the platform for his collaborative and solo works, one of which, Pacific Avenue, is a city and traffic calming initiative. The project, which he describes as lifelong, involves Marcus walking very slowly along iconic streets, taking three to four hours to complete a seven-minute stroll. For this occasion the rather tall and slender Asian-American dresses in traditional Asian attire and sports a parasol. Minneapolis is also home to 24/7, a car service run by artists and musicians. Similar to another in Brooklyn, this service operates by word of mouth and is designed to provide a flexible income for artists and a taxi service for those working late night gigs or attending events. The car fleet is owned cooperatively and uses a limousine license, which means bookings are essential and drivers are not obliged to pick up anyone from the street. And it’s a very nice ride!
local postscript
Since I returned to Sydney in mid September, Bill+George, our artist-run space, was subjected to an unlawful rent hike, which unfortunately resulted in eviction at the end of October. Pabrik Productions, the incorporated association which produces the ARI, will continue to operate with a number of off-site projects into 2013. As the Sydney real estate bubble continues to expand, Detroit is looking more and more attractive by the hour.
Ruark Lewis and Jonathan Jones, Homeland Illuminations, 1997
photo Alex Wisser
Ruark Lewis and Jonathan Jones, Homeland Illuminations, 1997
FOR AN ARTIST WHO DEFIES CATEGORISATION, THE PRESENTATION OF A CAREER SURVEY PRESENTS SOME UNIQUE CHALLENGES. NOT ONLY DOES RUARK LEWIS’ THREE DECADES OF PRACTICE CROSS DISCIPLINARY BOUNDARIES, MOVING SEAMLESSLY BETWEEN DRAWING, TEXT-BASED WORKS, INSTALLATIONS, CIVIC INTERVENTIONS, PERFORMANCE, VIDEO AND AUDIO, BUT IT ALSO RAISES A BROAD ARRAY OF CONCEPTUAL CONCERNS.
Frequently with long gestating periods, these concerns have deepened in complexity over time. How then to steer the viewer through such a labyrinthine practice in ways that are legible, accessible and engaging?
In an interview I conducted with Lewis prior to the launch of the first installment of his two-part survey beginning at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery in late September (see RT111), it was clear that the artist had given much thought to such a question. He explained his intention to create a certain formality within the main gallery space while activating the outdoor areas in a more informal fashion to encourage visitor interactivity and hands-on engagement. Walking through the installed exhibition a month later, expertly curated by Dr James Paull, I sensed immediately that this approach had paid off. As I paced the open and airy expanse of the Federation Room gallery, there was a sense of elegant restraint in its pared-back organisation, which encouraged visitors to move slowly through its delicately choreographed space and to trace links and discover correspondences between works.
At the eastern end of the gallery, the focal point was the alluring juxtaposition of light and language in Homeland Illuminations (2007). A collaboration between Lewis and urban Indigenous artist Jonathan Jones (with whom Lewis has worked on a number of projects), the floor installation presented fragments of quotations from an oral history belonging to Jones’ grandfather. A Waradjuri man who worked as a wool-classer in western New South Wales in the 1930s and 1940s, his words were stencilled in industrial lettering onto two parallel grids of painted wooden boards. Propped beneath the boards was a network of white fluorescent light tubes emitting a haunting aura around the text. As it simultaneously conveyed a complex economy of relationships and exchange while resisting the fixing of the oral history into a museum object by relaying it in coded form, the installation manifested an intriguing tension between concealment and revelation.
Ruark Lewis, Water Drawings, 1997
photo Alex Wisser
Ruark Lewis, Water Drawings, 1997
This practice of ‘disguisement’ of narratives through the strategic insertion of voids and ellipses or the layering of elements is a defining characteristic of Lewis’ highly reflexive engagement with text and language. This reflexivity also extends to his responses to the works of authors and poets (see RT 87, p50). Particularly memorable were those works which originated from an enduring dialogue with the works of French novelist, playwright and essayist Nathalie Sarraute (1900-1997). The austere minimalism of the artist book installation Just for Nothing (1997), for example, resonated with the psychological tautness of the play which it translated, Pour un oui ou pour un non, and revealed an early example of Lewis’ use of colour coding as a design principle. A decade later, such principles were extended in the 2007 mixed media installation, An Index of Silence. Featuring abject statements drawn from Sarraute’s play Silence stencilled onto 36 black and red cotton flags, the circumvention of easily graspable slogans with oblique literary phrases produced a displacing reading experience that shifted the viewer onto uncertain ground.
Ruark Lewis, Red Water Drawing, 1997, detail
photo Alex Wisser
Ruark Lewis, Red Water Drawing, 1997, detail
As I understand it, during their exhibition at Post-Museum in Singapore the flags had functioned as a score for a moveable vocal performance by Lewis. At Hazelhurst, traces of the readings, performances, live actions, audio compositions and dance interpretations which frequently form vital components of Lewis’ installations were fairly discreet. Yet this edited approach to performance documentation lent greater impact to the selected examples. The screening of Lewis’ blackly humorous public performance made for video, Euphemisms for the Riotous Suburbs (2007), presented audiences with an opportunity to reflect upon the events of the 2005 Cronulla riots. Two live collaborative performances in the gallery space were also programmed. On the closing day of the exhibition, an attentive crowd gathered in the gallery to watch movement artist Alan Schacher interpret Lewis’s reading of Directions, an epigrammatic poem by the anarchist philosopher poet of the 60s Sydney PUSH movement, Harry Hooton. As he interacted with and animated the objects in the space Schacher brought their agitprop dimensions to life and gave tangible expression to Hooton’s humanistic pronouncements.
Other installed works showcased the sophistication of Lewis’ uniquely devised method of transcription drawing. Among the highlights were the Water Drawings (1997), initially created as accompaniments to Lewis’ renowned modular wooden beam installation, RAFT (1995), which was absent from the survey, perhaps for practical reasons given its imposing scale. The Water Drawings, however, poetically developed its thought lines in their rendering of an Aboriginal rain song cycle, transcribed from sources in German, English and Arrente, across three horizontal scroll-like canvases and deploying modest oil crayons to work up extraordinarily layered palimpsests. Following an accretive logic, there was a visceral beauty in the textured surfaces of the “language paintings,” while their varying degrees of legibility provoked meditation upon the collisions and confusions of knowledge which occur in acts of translation.
Stepping outside into the gardens, the increasingly civic dimension of Lewis’s recent practice was apparent in the new and reprised installation pieces and audio poem. The suburban tranquility of Hazelhurst changed the context for a piece like Banalities for the Perfect House (2007), which previously presented a confronting force when installed on a busy street in Redfern. Here, the striking black-and-white wall of aphoristic phrases worked more subtly to question the ideology of suburbia. The protean nature of Lewis’ engagement with the notion of home was likewise observable in the new Star Shelters (2012) scattered across the lawns. This series of nomadic wooden shelters evolved from a series of prismatic graphite drawings that Lewis made in response to ideas of Aboriginal astronomy during a prolonged stay in a Darwin hospital. Having cut and folded the drawings like origami and then scaled them up into three-dimensional forms, the shelters blended a functional purpose with an angular and asymmetrical sculptural aesthetic, inflecting a high modernist formalism with local geographical and cultural touchstones.
Early next year, Macquarie University Gallery will host the second part of Lewis’ survey and I imagine it will be less a repeat than a reconfiguration involving a process of addition and subtraction in response to the site. At Hazelhurst, the many facets of this unique community venue were thoughtfully incorporated to enact a journey across a significant and conceptually rigorous practice which has only grown richer, more nuanced and exploratory with the progress of time.
Dan Edwards writes in this edition (p19) “Never Sorry [is] the debut documentary of US director Alison Klayman and the first sustained look at this crucial figure in contemporary Chinese culture.” The film places the work of this internationally acclaimed visual artist in context. While providing glimpses of the artist’s early years and his life now “Never Sorry’s main interest is Ai’s place within an increasingly fractious domestic debate about China’s future and the need for greater transparency….The man may be caged, but his humour, defiance and sense of play remain strong.”
Directed by Wayne Blair from an adaptation of the Tony Briggs’ stage musical, The Sapphires has been a huge popular success in Australia. Four young women from a remote Aboriginal mission are forged by an enterprising manager into a powerhouse quartet who entertain American troops in Vietnam in the late 60s. The combination of ‘true story,’ comedy, romance and drama, realised by fine performers, plus audience curiosity about a rarely addressed, complex period of Australian history has proved a winner. As well, the high calibre of Aboriginal-directed films (Beneath Clouds, Samson & Delilah, Stone Bros, Here I Am, Bran Nue Dae, Toomelah) has guaranteed continued interest in films about the lives of our fellow Australians. The film stars Deborah Mailman, Jessica Mauboy, Miranda Tapsell, Shari Sebbens and Chris O’Dowd.
Finland’s Aki Kaurismaki is one of cinema’s great directors, idiosyncratic and consistently inventive. His humorous-sad vision of humanity, sometimes bordering on pessimism or exuding an aura of deadpan optimism (or elsewhere just funny, as in his Leningrad Cowboy films) has created in Le Havre an empathetic fable about the plight of refugees in which a small African boy is rescued by an ageing shoeshine man in the northern port of Le Havre. If you don’t know Kaurismaki’s films, Le Havre is an excellent starting point. The film received the prize for best film at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival and, Laiki, the dog featured in Le Havre, won the Special Jury Palm Dog Award. What more recommendation do you need?
Lee Wilson and Matt Prest discuss the making of Whelping Box exploring ideas of freedom, male bonding, masculinity and myth-making, as well as their collaborative process with co-creators Mirabelle Wouters and Clare Britton.
Interviewed by Keith Gallasch.
Whelping Box
Co-creators: Branch Nebula (Lee Wilson & Mirabelle Wouters), Matt Prest & Clare Britton
Sound: Jack Prest
Produced by Katy Green Loughrey & Viv Rosman, Performing Lines
Video documentation: Dennis Beaubois
Whelping Box premiered at (and was co-produced by) Performance Space Oct 25 – Nov 3, 2012 as part of SEXES.
Interview: Keith Gallasch, Nov 1, 2012
realtime tv production: Gail Priest
Tura, Shothole stage, Sounds Outback (… to Reef), Exmouth, WA
photo Peter Strain
Tura, Shothole stage, Sounds Outback (… to Reef), Exmouth, WA
IT IS NO EXAGGERATION TO SAY THAT TURA NEW MUSIC PUTS PERTH ON THE MUSICAL MAP, NOT JUST FROM A NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE BUT ALSO INTERNATIONALLY. FOR 25 YEARS, WITH TOS MAHONEY AT THE HELM, THE ORGANISATION HAS PRODUCED VAST NUMBERS OF CONCERTS, HOSTED RESIDENCIES AND GENERALLY ADVOCATED FOR THE ROLE OF NEW AND EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC, NOT JUST FROM WESTERN AUSTRALIA BUT FROM ACROSS THE NATION.
For a very small organisation, the output has always been ambitious with projects including the appropriately titled Totally Huge New Music festival (see the archive of RealTime coverage below) which takes place biennially and brings renowned international artists to Perth along with some of Australia’s leading composers and ensembles. Every other year Tura hosts the Sounds Outback Festival, the first four held at Wogarno Station with this year’s program moving to the glorious Ningaloo Coast. Add to this a Regional Touring Program and a range of country and city-based residencies and this is before we even get to the concert program. Scale Variable features concerts by small ensembles and Club Zho offers a regular, more casual gig format. Then there’s the Commissioning Program and a Young and Emerging Artists Program. Tura has also recently undertaken the mammoth task, in collaboration with The Academy of Performing Arts at Edith Cowan University, the State Library of Western Australia, the Australian Broadcasting Commission and the National Library of Australia, to create an archive of Western Australian music covering the last 40 years.
Tura, shearing shed percussion, Sounds Outback (… to Reef), Exmouth, WA
photo Peter Strain
Tura, shearing shed percussion, Sounds Outback (… to Reef), Exmouth, WA
The 25th birthday celebrations continue Tura’s agenda of promoting both local talent and interstate artists and comprise four concerts and a Club Zho bash. Before the formal concerts there’s also a rather swish fundraising event titled the Next 25 at an undisclosed private residence on the Swan River. Along with fine wine and food, it will feature performances by Ensemble Offspring. The first concert will also be by Ensemble Offspring who will perform celebratory compositions from Australian composers such as Matthew Schlomowitz and Marcus Whale alongside works by international composers Thierry de Mey, Larry Polansky and Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Concert 2 exemplifies the broad scope of Tura’s agenda featuring Melbourne audiovisual artist Robin Fox with Perth emerging artist Kynan Tan. Fox, renowned for his works with sound and lasers, will be presenting some of his new experiments with synchronators which take sound and translate it, according to frequency, into the colours of the spectrum. Tan, who has been mentored by Fox as part of the Jump program (http://jump.australiacouncil.gov.au/about/), will present his new work, multiplicity, which explores “tiered levels of interaction between the sonic and visual, in the form of computer-generated sound and imagery, manipulated brain data and complex data visualizations” (program).
Decibel, performing The Talking Board at Totally Huge New Music Festival 2011
photo Brad Serls
Decibel, performing The Talking Board at Totally Huge New Music Festival 2011
Perth ensemble Decibel will take charge of the third concert to explore the acoustic properties of the Hackett Hall Gallery at the Western Australian Museum, focusing on how the space responds to genres such as jazz, indie, music concrete, minimalism and glitch. The concert will feature compositions by Australian composers Erik Griswold, Mace Francis, Chris Cobilis and Decibel members Cat Hope and Lindsay Vickery, as well as pieces by international composers Lionel Marchetti, Roger Smalley, Tristan Murail and an arrangement by Decibel of Lalo Schifrin’s In the Floodlights.
The final concert will also feature Erik Griswold with Vanessa Tomlinson as Clocked Out Duo exploring the recent proposition by physicist Frank Wilczek of the existence of “time crystals…perpetually moving structures that repeat periodically in the fourth dimension” (program). On piano and percussion the duo will use patterning and poetic interpretations of perpetual motion and crystalline structures. Sounds like a fascinating composition most fitting for a time-based celebration.
No birthday is complete without a party which will be manifested as Club Zho’s 100th gig. It will feature an array of local artist who’ve participated in Tura over the last 25 years, all of whom have helped make Perth the vibrant musical city it is today.
Tura 25th Birthday Celebrations, artistic director Tos Mahoney, various venues, Perth, Nov 21-Dec 6 2012; www.tura.com.au
Jon Rose, Totally Huge 2001
photo Nat Brunovs
Jon Rose, Totally Huge 2001
tura archive highlight
RealTime has been around for 18 of Tura’s 25 years. Below is a selection of some of our coverage of the Totally Huge Festivals and other Tura presentations.
totally huge new music festival
2011 totally huge new music festival 2011—onsite coverage
RT’s Associate Editor Gail Priest was joined by local writers Sam Gillies and Henry Andersen to deliver daily reviews of concerts, installations and events across the 10-day festival. There are 14 reviews plus video interviews with Marina Rosenfeld and Speak Percussion’s Eugene Ughetti.
Online feature September, 2011
2009 machine age new music
jonathan marshall: decibel, tape it!, totally huge new music festival 2009
RealTime issue #94 Dec-Jan 2009 p49
Offered biennially, the Tanja Liedtke Fellowship seeks to honour the memory and continue the legacy of choreographer and dancer Tanja Liedtke whose life was tragically cut short in 2007. The fellowship seeks to support contemporary dance artists and encourage Australian/European connections. The 2013 program is quite specific and offers the successful fellow a structured program of events in Berlin and Frankfurt in August-September 2013. Firstly they will receive studio time at ada Studios in Berlin to undertake a three-week creative development process on a project of their own devising. Simultaneously they will be able to attend many of the events of Berlin’s major dance festival Tanz im August. They will then move to Frankfurt to take part in the Tanzlabor_21 International Summer Lab which will bring together postgraduate students and emerging artists for intensive workshops and forums. The fellow will also be able to attend accompanying performance events at the contemporary arts venue Künstlerhaus Mousonturm. Applications are open for Australian dancers/choreographers between the ages of 20 and 35. Applications due Dec 14, 2012; see website for more information http://www.tanja-liedtke-foundation.org/current-projects/fellowship-2013.html
aphids indigenous mentoring program
Applications are now open for Aphids Mentoring program aimed specifically at emerging Australian Indigenous artists. Taking place between February and November 2013, the program offers the successful mentee financial and infrastructure support to work with a mentor of their choice developing a project that “expands strategies, skills and networks for creating interdisciplinary artwork” (website). The emerging artists may already have experience in interdisciplinary work or commencing explorations in this area. Applications are due Dec 3, see website for more information http://aphids.net/residencies-and-mentoring/Aphids_Indigenous_Mentoring_Program
vivid light 2013
The Vivid Festival, while only a few years young has had a significant impact on Sydney’s cultural and tourism calendar. While a lot of the festival aims at large-scale spectacle with the Opera House becoming the equivalent of a giant disco glitterball, there’s also the opportunity for some more intimate, on the ground discoveries via Vivid Light, the installation wing of the festival. Vivid Light is now calling for proposals. If you are a projection artist, lighting designer or sculptor with new ideas for public installations and light manifestations you have until December 3 to lodge your expression of interest. For more information see http://www.vividsydney.com/expression-of-interest-vivid-light-2013/
creative partnerships with asia, australia council
The Australia Council has recently announced a new initiative seeking to strengthen cultural connections between Australia and Asia. The Creative Partnerships with Asia program will offer grants of up to $40,000 for projects that involve a two-way exchange between Australia and an Asian country (defined for the initiative as Japan, China, Korea, India, South and South East Asia). The initiative covers all artforms and the projects must involve a significant presentation of a work developed through this project in both countries as well as artistic exchange workshops. Deadline for expressions of interest is Jan 31, 2013 with invitation only applications closing date April 8, 2013. See website for more information http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/grants/grants/2012/creative-partnerships-with-asia-initiative
We’ve come to expect something a little bit spectacular from David Clarkson’s work with Stalker over the company’s 20-plus year history. Generally this has been the result of the raw physicality and daring, his shows frequently involving vertiginous acrobatic stilt walking—and even a giant catapult. However for his latest work, Encoded, Clarkson has gone totally high-tech.
Encoded explores how the body effects space and space effects the body. Projected environments respond specifically to the movement of dancers and aerialists, triggered by infrared tracking. In addition the dancers wear digital costumes—self-mounted laser projectors that bathe the performer in ever-shifting designs. Clarkson has enlisted an impressive design team to create this vision including Alejandro Rolandi, whose recent production Return to Trees at Carriageworks was an impressive physical theatre piece in itself; Andrew Johnston, an interactive design specialist and co-director of the Creativity and Cognition Studios at UTS; and Sam Clarkson, an award winning game designer and “world leader in photo?real graphics research, development and implementation” (press release). Clarkson has also enlisted Paul Selwyn Norton, longtime dancer with William Forsythe’s Ballet Frankfurt, as choreographer. See the video above and book your tickets for Encoded’s short season.
Ensemble Offspring have presented an ambitious and innovative program in 2012. Their last concert for the year, to be performed in both Sydney and Melbourne, looks to be no exception (see our realtime tv video interview and also the preview of Tura’s 25th birthday celebrations). In Sydney they will take over both the theatre (Bay 20) and the vast foyer of Carriageworks to present On Loop. Featured performers include the Australian turntablist Martin Ng and Scottish accordionist James Crabb (see a review of his Campbelltown Arts Centre concert in RealTime 112). UK composer Matthew Wright, whose work spans both dots-on-paper composition and turntablism, will also be in the country to present his new work, Totem for Sydney. Amsterdam-based pianist Cor Fuhler is no stranger to Australia, but is more often found in the improv scene. He will present a new composition, When Snoopy Met Boop. Other works in the concert include Memo by Dutch composer Michel van de Aa (see interview in RT78) and Gavin Bryar’s famous tape-loop work Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet. There’ll also be an installation in the foyer of ‘old school’ tape loops. Ensemble Offspring, On Loop; Carriageworks, Sydney, Dec 1;
Melbourne Melbourne Recital Centre, Dec 6; http://ensembleoffspring.com/
(TIP: In Sydney you can make a night of it and see the matinee of Encoded followed by On Loop!)
international space time concerto competition
The finalists in the International Space Time Concerto Competition will be presenting their works in Newcastle, NSW at the end of the month. (For a handy primer on the concerto form by Matthew Lorenzon see our preview of the competition in our May 22 e-dition.) On November 30 the finalists in the Networked Music Performance category—Cat Hope (WA), Greg Schiemer (NSW) and Chow Jun Yan (Singapore)—will present their works via link-ups between performers in Newcastle, Austria, Singapore, China and New Zealand. The works factor in the inevitable latencies (repeat the mantra “bring on the NBN!”) and range from concertos written for pipe organ to string orchestra and an iPhone ensemble. (You can see a realtime tv interview with Cat Hope here; and read about Greg Schiemer’s phone music here.)
The final concert on December 2 at the University of Newcastle’s Harold Lobb Concert Hall presents historic symphonies by composers such as Dvo?ák, Schumann, Prokofiev and Preston performed by finalists in the solo instrumentalists category. These traditional concertos will be combined with the works by finalists in the innovation category such as Orbis Tertius (ACT) who will present Trial of the Ignorant Truth Concerto (2012) which explores equal temperament using instruments such as the erhu, the saz, a musical saw and a microtonal guitar. Also from ACT, John Burgess will present his Concerto (2012) for adapted electric double bass. Getting more physical, Mary Mainsbridge (NSW) will perform her Code-centric Motion (2012) for voice, gesturally controlled digital instrument and orchestra. Perhaps the most genre-bending contribution comes from Robert Jarvis (Vic) who will perform his Concerto for Light Sculpture (2012) using a digital interface called a Monome that allows light and sound to played in tight synchronisation. There is an overall prize pool of $50,000 divided between the category winners. International Space Time Concerto Competition presented by University of Newcastle in collaboration with Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, Singapore, Central Conservatory of Music, Beijing, Waikato University, New Zealand and Ars Electronica, Austria; Newcastle Conservatorium, Nov 30; University of Newcastle’s Harold Lobb Concert Hall, Dec 2; http://www.spacetimeconcerto.com
body fluid—the seven cycles, john a douglas
John A Douglas, Body Fluid, Saline Ascent (video still)
courtesy the artist
John A Douglas, Body Fluid, Saline Ascent (video still)
In RT106 Ella Mudie wrote about John A Douglas’ 10-hour durational performance at Performance Space: “In a surreal setting melding the chintzy glamour of a lo-fi science fiction film set with the sparse interior of a hospital room, the artist began by lying prostrate on the floor while hooked up to a peritoneal dialysis machine, plastic tube protruding from his rotund Buddha belly. Dressed in a tight, shiny, gold bodysuit that covered eyes, nostrils and mouth, there was a wry humour in its resemblance to both submissive bondage attire and a Hollywood superhero costume gone awry.” (See full review.)
The video backdrop to this performance featured Douglas, in the same gold costume, appearing and disappearing in the distance around a salt lake, in a reference to Nicolas Roeg’s science fiction classic The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). Douglas will present the continuation of this work at Chalkhorse Gallery from November 22, with photographic and video works of this mysterious golden man wandering the Mallee Country and the Snowy Mountains. Douglas says, “in these mediated figurative landscape works, the imaginary golden figure takes on powers of levitation and flight through the replenishment of bodily fluids within the Australian landscape.” Douglas is currently the inaugural artist-in-residence at the Museum of Human Disease, UNSW, thanks to an Australia Council AIR grant. Body Fluid—The Seven Cycles, John A Douglas, Chalkhorse Gallery; open Nov 22; http://www.chalkhorse.com.au/
241 years, morrish, osborne, jeyens, rorhrig
Some of us in Sydney had the rare pleasure to spend time embroiled in the circular thoughts and profound whimsy of improvisor Andrew Morrish during Campbelltown Art Centre’s Oh I Wanna Dance With Somebody (to be reviewed in RT112). Fear not if you missed it, there’s more to come. He has teamed up with long time collaborator Tony Osborne as well as two other seasoned improvisers Kevin Jeynes and John Rohrig, to present a touring show called 241 years. We are told that this number is the sum total of the improvisors’ ages. The team has already blasted through Brisbane, will briefly be taking on Dancehouse in Melbourne, and will end their tour in Sydney at Marrickville’s Sidetrack Theatre. (The Sydney season is a double bill with youMove Company’s tenofus which will present solos by Narelle Benjamin, Tony Osborne, Vicki Van Hout, Anton and Angela French.) Who knows what to expect, but from previous outings, the moments of failure are even more intriguing than the moments that succeed.
241 years, Andrew Morrish, Tony Osborne, Kevin Jeynes, John Rohrig; Dancehouse, Melbourne, Nov 21-22, www.dancehouse.com.au ); with youMove Company’s tenofus, Sidetrack Theatre, Sydney, Nov 23-24; http://www.sidetrack.com.au/; http://youmovedance.com.au/
the conversation, jon mark oldmeadow, claudio tocco
The Conversation, Jon Mark Oldmeadow, Claudio Tocco
courtesy the artists
The Conversation, Jon Mark Oldmeadow, Claudio Tocco
Putting a new spin on multi-channel video installation is Jon Mark Oldmeadow and Claudio Tocco’s The Conversation. The installation features three participants who have migrated from Peru, Germany and Sri Lanka sharing memories of their home countries. However, rather than each screen having a fixed and dedicated soundtrack, the audience is supplied with wireless headphones thus receiving different aspects of the soundtrack according to their position in the gallery space. This allows the viewer the freedom to construct their own sense of these stories. Jon Mark Oldmeadow was previously involved in the Safari Team art collective that presented the ambitious Molto Morte and Evolution at the 2008 and 2010 Next Wave festivals respectively. The Conversation, Jon Mark Oldmeadow, Claudio Tocco, Seventh Gallery, 155 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy; til Dec 1; http://seventhgallery.org/
upraw online gallery
As most things move to virtual platforms, it makes sense that galleries do too, and UpRaw is a prime example. It is a new initiative from the art investment company Art Equity with a focus on selling the work of young and emerging artists, with some rather reasonable price tags ranging from $170 to $2000. There’s a stable of 20 artists with works ranging from the street stencil style of Doug Bartlett to the dusky detailed prints of Kate Piekutowski and the moody Crewdson-esque staged photography of Jack Condon. While the gallery is generally virtual it will have a physical ‘pop-up’ home for two weeks at 174 Crown Street Darlinghurst. UpRaw, exhibtion 174 Crown Street Darlinghurst, opens Nov 28; http://www.upraw.com.au/
THE OTHERFILM FESTIVAL HAS ALWAYS BEEN, WELL, ‘OTHER.’ AT THE HEIGHT OF NEW MEDIA HYPE THE TEAM OF SALLY GOLDING, JOEL STERN AND DANNI ZUVELA DECIDED TO LAUNCH A FESTIVAL THAT WAS ALL ABOUT OLD MEDIA, EXPLORING EXPANDED CINEMA WITH ROOTS IN THE 1960S.
Eight years on and new media as a term and genre has lost some of its glamour, integrated as it is into everyday life, and it seems the OtherFilm Festival curators are questioning their ties to the old forms. Their festival 2012 curatorial statement reads: “…for us, privileging film has become problematic. While initially our commitment to film allowed us to develop critical tools and assert our distinct interests, we are now pressing up against the limitations of our critique…As an organisation, we no longer consider it prudent to fetishise film—but nor do we consent to indiscriminate platform promiscuity. We want to deal with mediums in more nuanced, less dogmatic, ways. We are moving on.”
So in 2012 Otherfilm moves on to include a range of ‘other’ media-driven performances, but there is still a familiar air of historicity, not to mention a strong waft of theoretical rumination in the selection of works. For example one of the special international guests is Takahiko Iimura who has been working in the area of conceptual video and performance since the 1960s. The Video Semiology screening is a retrospective of his works focusing on a range of his experiments into identity, speech and the phenomological loop formed by video.
Bruce McLure
courtesy the artist
Bruce McLure
On the opposite end of the scale but with no less rigour is the work of Bruce McClure who will be performing his work The Fiercer the Fire the Longer the Spoon comprising several smaller recent pieces. McLure works with a 16mm projector but a seemingly blank frame, exploring the very mechanism of the apparatus to create an audiovisual assault of strobing light and manipulated sound artifacts; however the curators assure us that the “performances expand and extend from the initial blast into long-form investigations of spatial and temporal re-orientation” (program).
Peter Burr, Future TV
courtesy the artist
Peter Burr, Future TV
Third international guest Pete Burr will present a kind of live cartoon show, showing works from his network of US underground animators and cartoonists but interacting with the works, appearing in them as a live host using green screen technology. While the format sounds laugh-a-minute, all of the animations are inspired by the Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1971 sci-fi film Stalker, suggesting a more contemplative experience than a cartoon caper.
Co-curator Sally Golding will return from the UK where she has been experimenting with darkroom techniques: “printing, reprinting and manipulating waveform images on the optical soundtrack of 16mm celluloid take her work to a new level of photo-chemical nonsensitude” (program).
It’s an ambitious program that will take manifest in various combinations in several cities. In Brisbane the bulk of the festival resides at the Institute of Modern Art (IMA) which is also a key presenting partner, but the opening night will take place on an old naval ship, the HMAS Diamantina, moored at the Queensland Maritime Museum. The ship will be filled with audiovisual and performative experiments from a range of national artists such as Danny Wild, Audrey Lam and Caitlin Franzman, Sarah Byrne, Jason, Bonnie Hart, Vijay Thillamullu, Joe Musgrove and Patrick King.
In Melbourne, New Low, a relatively recent artist-run-space will play host and the international guests will be complemented by local artists Richard Tuohy and Matthew Brown, Jarrod Factor, Kit Webster, Marcia Jane and gallery founder Tara Cook. Then there’s an all nighter at the Meredith Music Festival (a three-day event in rural Victoria) where the psychedelic nature of many of these performances should be well appreciated. The festival wraps up with a one-night-only show in Adelaide in partnership with Lost City at the Tuxedo Cat!
Otherfilm 2012 presented by OtherFilm, IMA, Screen Queensland: curators Sally Golding, Joel Stern, Danni Zuvela, Brisbane: Queensland Maritime Museum and Institute of Modern Art, Nov 29-Dec 1; Melbourne: New Low Gallery, Dec 5-6; Meredith: Ecoplex Cinema, Dec 7-8; Adelaide: Lost City, Dec 10; http://otherfilm.org/
Co-directors of Branch Nebula Lee Wilson and Mirabelle Wouters discuss their upcoming project Concrete and Bone Sessions which will be part of the 2013 Sydney Festival, their future planes and their working relationship.
Interviewed by Keith Gallasch.
Creative development showing
Performers: Bboy Blond, April Caslick, Roland Chlouk
Cloé Fournier, Alexandra Harrison, Ali Kadhim
Simon O’Brien, Chris O’Donnell, Kathryn Puie
Music: Bob Scott
Video footage: Dennis Beaubois & Ali Kadhim
Produced by Performing Lines.
Branch Nebula is supported by Managing and Producing Services (MAPS) NSW, managed by Performing Lines.
Daniel Matej and ensemble, Graphic Scores, Soundstream New Music Festival 2012
photo Keith Halden
Daniel Matej and ensemble, Graphic Scores, Soundstream New Music Festival 2012
DANIEL MATEJ IS A COMMANDING FIGURE IN CONTEMPORARY MUSIC AND THE DANIEL MATEJ IN PERSPECTIVE RECITAL AND GRAPHIC SCORES CONCERTS IN THE 2012 SOUNDSTREAM NEW MUSIC FESTIVAL PAINTED AN INTRIGUING PICTURE OF THIS SLOVAKIAN COMPOSER’S UNIQUE COMPOSITIONAL SENSIBILITY.
For the three works of the Graphic Scores concert, Matej conducted the Matej Ensemble—University of Adelaide Conservatorium students assembled for this event and performing on strings, wind, brass, percussion, keyboards, voice and electronics—with violinist Jon Rose soloing in the second item. The first piece was Polish composer Zygmunt Krauze’s Voices for Ensemble (1968/1972). Inspired by the ‘unistic’ abstract art of Wladyslaw Strzeminski, Krauze’s subtle music avoids drama and tension, the listener’s awareness drawn instead to compositional nuances, timbre, texture, choice of instrumentation and the perception of time. A dreamy clarinet line threads through this absorbing music, which is punctuated by pauses, long enough for audience members to notice ambient sound and reflect on their listening.
This teasing opener readies us for Matej’s Structures, Pages (…and Improvisations) (2010-2012). Here Matej gives each performer a printed chart listing five different hand gestures he will use while conducting, the movements correlating to specified musical material, dynamics and tempi. The material itself is drawn from other composers’ manuscripts including US composer Earl Brown’s December 1952 (from FOLIO; 1954), a seminal graphic score work using the simplest notation: horizontal and vertical lines of varying lengths and thicknesses. As the piece unfolds Matej gestures what to play, building the sound like a painter mixing paint directly on the canvas. Matej’s conducting responded to soloist Rose’s unique playing, resulting in a vibrant, heavily layered, multi-voiced orchestration of contrasting tone-colours, timbres and intensities. Matej cites Rose as a significant influence in his work.
Jon Rose, Graphic Scores, Soundstream New Music Festival 2012
photo Keith Halden
Jon Rose, Graphic Scores, Soundstream New Music Festival 2012
In spontaneously shaping the ensemble’s responses to fragments of other manuscripts into the overall sound, Matej expands the concept of the graphic score to encompass his own improvisation. The result is compelling conceptually as well as musically, acknowledging and extending Brown’s achievements.
The Graphic Scores concert concluded with Four6 (1992), one of John Cage’s last works, 30 minutes of enthralling sound in which this energetic ensemble, arranged around the perimeter of the auditorium, used time-brackets to structure their performance.
The Daniel Matej in Perspective recital, comprising works by Matej principally for solo piano, further revealed the extraordinary character and complexity of his composition, the music ranging from exquisite romanticism to comic buffoonery. The recital opened with Fragile (2009), subtitled With Prelude in E minor by Chopin, a fragment of which emerges late in the score. For prepared piano, it begins slowly and softly, the preparation muting some lower notes, building in intensity through repeated figures. There is a poignant moment when the Chopin passage reaches and then ends on the muted notes, as if Chopin himself is being muted and then paused. Perhaps Matej is lamenting the passing of pianism’s great era. The program booklet indicates that the work is dedicated to a friend’s family, and the pitch material is based on anagrams of their names and those of Chopin, Webern and Feldman (whose musical styles are all evident). This complex conceptualisation appears typical of Matej, but the result, in the romantically attuned hands of pianist Marianna Grynchuk, is enchanting.
Daniel Matej and pianist Marianna Grynchuk, Daniel Matej in Perspective, Soundstream New Music Festival 2012
photo Keith Halden
Daniel Matej and pianist Marianna Grynchuk, Daniel Matej in Perspective, Soundstream New Music Festival 2012
Grynchuk excels again in Matej’s dramatic I Tried Them All and They Were Rotten (1995) inspired by Satie, and his wistful (Two) Lullabies (1995). The spell is then broken in Believe it, or Not! (from (three) Songs and Refrains), in which Matej jumps up and sings, accompanied by the piano, bawling out “Jesus loves you, oh he loves you…” to a rock beat, comically parodying religious zeal, the work evidently a response to fundamentalist evangelism.
Following two more dramatic solo piano works, Matej interrupts the pianist in his (when I’m) FIFTY (1997) by blowing across the necks of water bottles to produce resonant notes, playfully challenging the cultural authority of the piano recital. He then begins to whistle as Grynchuk plays, finally drawing her into whistling with him as she concludes the piece. In the final work, Bargain Happiness (2000), based on a Bach prelude, Matej again sings boisterously over the piano, and Rose, at the back of the auditorium, interrupts, firstly with his violin and then with his own comic song. Grynchuk is outstanding throughout in realising Matej’s challenging music.
The influence of the Dada movement seems to be present to some degree in many of Matej’s works, yet there is a powerfully seductive musicality throughout, with moments of great beauty and sensitivity. His acute awareness of musical history permeates his work and, although he appears to be repudiating musical traditions, he is creating new and interesting music that is built on them. This raises the general question of where composition is headed, but, in Matej’s hands, it is musical, conceptually challenging and great fun.
The piano was central to this year’s Soundstream New Music Festival, which also included an enthralling concert for two pianos (Paul Grabowsky and Gabriella Smart) featuring Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and the landmark Piano Phasing concert, where 60 pianists simultaneously played 30 pianos and which featured a commissioned work from Elena Kats-Chernin.
Soundstream New Music Festival 2012: Graphic Scores, Matej Ensemble conducted by Daniel Matej, violin Jon Rose; Daniel Matej in Perspective, piano Marianna Grynchuk, violin Jon Rose, plastic bottles & voice Daniel Matej; Madley Performance Space, University of Adelaide, Oct 12 & 13; http://www.soundstream.org.au/
This article first appeared in RT’s online e-dition Nov 20
five.point.one is a young company based in Adelaide currently making their Sydney debut with The Share, as part of the Seymour Centre’s Reginald season of independent theatre.
The Share, by playwright Daniel Keene, renowned for his dark, gritty and poetic works, is the story of two young men, friends since childhood, unemployed and on the streets. In a chance meeting with a one-eyed kid they hear about an opportunity to make some quick cash after which their lives unravel.
Directed by Corey McMahon, the play features Scott Marcus, Tom Conroy and Tim Spencer. The 2010 production won the Best Drama, Professional award in The Adelaide Theatre Guide Awards.
Courtesy of the Seymour Centre, RealTime has three double passes to give away for The Share on Saturday 24 November at 8pm.
Email onlinegiveaways@realtimearts.net with your name, contact number and address, by COB November 22, for a chance to receive a double pass.
NB: This is a Sydney event.
Applauded at film festivals and widely seen on television, this documentary on one of the most dedicated and enduring performance artists of the last 30 years, Marina Abramovic, The Artist is Present is an engrossing, sometimes perplexing and moving film. It documents the preparations for and the exhibiting of a retrospective and a new performance by Abramovic at New York’s MoMA in 2010. Virginia Baxter writes, “In 106 minutes Akers and Dupré expose for the viewer something of the emotional, physical and intellectual demands inherent in mounting an exhibition and performance that deal in the power of the present. In the process they also offer insight into the life’s work of a remarkable artist” (see 
Creative Minds is a six-part Madman/SBS series of interviews with artists Bill Henson, Kate Grenville, Robyn Archer, Elena Kats-Chernin, Stephen Page and Geoffrey Rush. In-depth interviews with Australian artists are a rarity, and these have the benefit of excellent supporting footage, for example photographer Henson working on his moodily expressive night-time landscapes. Director Robin Hughes’ quietly phrased and sometimes probing questions yield insights into the creative mind. RT
Directed by Wayne Blair from an adaptation of the Tony Briggs’ stage musical, The Sapphires has been a huge popular success in Australia. Four young women from a remote Aboriginal mission are forged by an enterprising manager into a powerhouse quartet who entertain American troops in Vietnam in the late 60s. The combination of ‘true story,’ comedy, romance and drama, realised by fine performers, plus audience curiosity about a rarely addressed, complex period of Australian history has proved a winner. As well, the high calibre of Aboriginal-directed films (Beneath Clouds, Samson & Delilah, Stone Bros, Here I Am, Bran Nue Dae, Toomelah) has guaranteed continued interest in films about the lives of our fellow Australians. The film stars Deborah Mailman, Jessica Mauboy, Miranda Tapsell, Shari Sebbens and Chris O’Dowd.
Finland’s Aki Kaurismaki is one of cinema’s great directors, idiosyncratic and consistently inventive. His humorous-sad vision of humanity, sometimes bordering on pessimism or exuding an aura of deadpan optimism (or elsewhere just funny, as in his Leningrad Cowboy films) has created in Le Havre an empathetic fable about the plight of refugees in which a small African boy is rescued by an ageing shoeshine man in the northern port of Le Havre. If you don’t know Kaurismaki’s films, Le Havre is an excellent starting point. The film received the prize for best film at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival and, Laiki, the dog featured in Le Havre, won the Special Jury Palm Dog Award. What more recommendation do you need?
