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Yes we can’t, William Forsythe & the Forsythe Company Dancers

photo Dominik Mentzos

Yes we can’t, William Forsythe & the Forsythe Company Dancers

MONTPELLIER DANSE 2012 PROVIDED THE USUAL BLEND OF TOP-BILLED CHOREOGRAPHERS AND EMERGING ARTISTS. THIS 32ND EDITION COMPLETED A DIPTYCH BEGUN WITH THE 2011 FESTIVAL, WHICH SOUGHT TO CELEBRATE THE MEDITERRANEAN.

This year Montpellier Danse continued its voyage around the Mediterranean basin, presenting artists from Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, Spain and Turkey. A short foray mid-festival revealed works which explored failure, exhaustion, madness, and the body possible…

william forsythe: yes we can’t

“If you try to fail, and you do…have you succeeded?” This is the question asked by William Forsythe in relation to the new version of his 2008 work Yes we can’t. This version, which bears little relation to its original incarnation, is (as its title suggests) an attempt at failure; an exploration of bad taste. The original piece, according to Forsythe “was not very good…and realising this, we decided to make it worse.”

And worse it is. The costumes are awful (with sequined leggings, ugly high-heeled shoes and terrible wigs), the music (a nauseating melange of famous works, from classical to Broadway hits) always appearing for just long enough to be recognised, but utterly misplaced or out of sync. This is dance-as-nightmare—a constant assault of dance styles, from ballet to jazz to esoteric contemporary dance, each rendered dreadful in their combination. Some of the choreography is executed with mesmerising technique and some flat-footed and clumsily. The unrelenting result of all this is mesmerising chaos, which is somehow impossible not to continue watching.

Of course this is not the first and will not be the last attempt by a choreographer to mine the 20th century dance canon for comedy and acerbic comment. Dance makes for an easy target, replete with clichés and iconic moments which can be reproduced for comedic effect. But to ‘succeed’ in the creation of bad taste is not always so easy. The choreography in Yes we can’t cleverly progresses too quickly for the viewer to digest. It oscillates too frequently between fancy-dancing and displays of sublime technique to be categorised, either within the realm of pastiche or ironic post-modernism.

Summarising the work at a pre-performance press conference, Forsythe ventured that, “It’s not sophisticated for about half an hour; then it’s sophisticated for 10 minutes (but there’s no dancing). And afterwards…it becomes even less sophisticated.” It is within those “sophisticated” 10 minutes which Forsythe alludes to that Yes we can’t shows its hand. Addressing the audience in French, one of the dancers embarks on the first of several extended apologies for the awfulness of the show. He explains in conciliatory tones that the dancers are not this bad normally, that it’s a shame that the audience couldn’t have been there for the rehearsal when they were much better…This fawning, which of course makes things worse, and goes on far too long, reveals the self-awareness of the work before continuing its descent towards a bad ending.

The placement of Yes we can’t within Montpellier Danse 2012 makes for interesting programming in a festival which never shies away from presenting the unashamedly beautiful or theatrical. Yes we can’t does not operate solely for the pursuit of laughs. It attempts to unpick the nature of dance practice and spectatorship, and the perhaps unavoidable clichés that surround them. One vignette sees a dancer in naff red and white gym leotard perform a highly skilled gymnastic solo complete with red ribbon. His skill is breathtaking, and while we laugh when he gets tangled in the ribbon or fails to catch it after a soaring leap, we become ever more aware of our enjoyment in the spectacle of his technique. This is dance spectatorship laid bare as guilty pleasure, and we cannot escape the awareness of our own implication in this relationship.

mathilde monnier, twin paradox

Twin Paradox, Mathilde Monnier

photo Marc Coudrais

Twin Paradox, Mathilde Monnier

Another work which shone an uncomfortable spotlight on spectatorship was French choreographer Mathilde Monnier’s Twin paradox. Arising from research into American Dance Marathons of the 1920s and folk dances from around the world, Twin paradox makes for an uneasy exploration of duration, repetition, survival and exhaustion. On a harshly lit stage with gaudy orange floor, a series of couples undertake endless duets. Linked physically at all times, they entwine, become locked in clumsy embraces, before rolling and unfolding into the next entanglement. The choreography begins slowly, with an almost sculptural air, but as the piece progresses the movements become ever swifter, more repetitive and harder to watch.

By the end of the work the dancers are clearly exhausted and, in a way, so too are the spectators. As a viewer there is an odd discomfort between being bored by the relentless, almost violent motion, yet acutely aware of the effort expended by the dancers onstage. Here, once again the spectators are conscious, not only of their position in the bargain between performer and audience, but are also moved to question the nature of spectatorship in dance. The dancers continue to move, to dance (according to Monnier), “in spite of everything. To dance after everything.” And we keep watching.

The final half-hour of the work is pure pain, both to do and to watch, and perhaps that is, after all, the point of the work. Dancers fall repeatedly in swoons, caught in the nick of time by their dance partners. While admittedly Twin paradox does not make for easy viewing, it nonetheless provokes some intriguing considerations. The costumes, lighting and noisy soundscape create an altogether hostile environment in which dance becomes a last desperate struggle to assert itself above all else. This could not be achieved it would seem, with a comfortable ride provided for the dancers or spectators.

out of lebanon and morroco

Ha!, Bouchra Ouizguen

courtesy the company

Ha!, Bouchra Ouizguen

In addition to world renowned choreographers such as Forsythe and Monnier, the festival’s theme of programming artists from around the Mediterranean Basin provided an eclectic mix, with some striking performances. Lebanese Danya Hammoud performed a spare, pared down solo entitled Mahalli which, whilst somewhat limited in its remit, nonetheless made for a distilled contemplation of movement, and the power of small gestures.

Morocco-born Bouchra Ouizguen’s Ha! charted a pleasing path between humour and melancholy. Opening on a scarcely lit stage, four female figures become visible in the gloom. Clad in headscarves, they rock repetitively. Thus begins a quixotic journey into the realms of female kinship, strength, humour, and madness. The figures onstage do not comply with the norm of athletically trained dancers. With the exception of one, they are rotund; barrel-shaped even. Ouizgen says that she creates dance in the context of modern-day Morocco, recruiting dancers from the street whom she chances across. Central to Ha! is the body, and the strange landscape that these women provide, through song and an interrogation of movement. At times they stamp, laugh hysterically, perform delightfully awkward leg kicks, or pile on top of one another in strange mounds.

By turns they become the archetypal crones of a market-place, with scarves tied under their chins, or warrior-like figures with feet planted squarely on the ground in a gesture of defiance. What is most delightful about this work is the fact that it surrenders neither to spoof nor to overly earnest posturing. It determines a language of its own, drawn from the body and the characters onstage, which it sticks to without exception.

The diverse arrays of work at Montpellier negate categorisation, and also render them too innumerable to mention. It was possible in many, however, to detect a continual chipping-away at the boundaries of what dance is, and can do—to create more possibilities for failure and success, and to undermine the very categories on which these terms are built.

Montpellier Danse 2012: Yes we can’t, choreography William Forsythe & the Forsythe Company Dancers, music David Morrow, costumes Dorothée Merg; Twin paradox, choreography Mathilde Monnier, music Luc Ferrari, costumes Laurence Alquier; Mahalli, choreographer, performer Danya Hammoud, sound Cristian Sotomayor, Danya Hammoud, costume Wafa Aoun; Ha!, choreography Bouchra Ouizguen, costumes Nourreddine Amir; Montpellier, France, June 22-July 7

RealTime issue #110 Aug-Sept 2012 pg. 14

Cesena, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and Bjorn Schmelzer

photo Anne Van Aerschot

Cesena, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and Bjorn Schmelzer

THE SEATING CAPACITY OF THEATRE MAISONNEUVE IS 1,458. IT’S A BIG HALL THAT COMES WITH AN APPROPRIATELY VAST STAGE. SO WHEN A LIGHTING DESIGNER CHOOSES TO ILLUMINATE THAT STAGE WITH ONLY ONE SMALL FLUORESCENT LIGHT UNIT, I HAVE TO WONDER WHAT THEY’RE UP TO. THE INTENT BECOMES CLEAR AFTER A FEW MINUTES.

rosas: holy communion achieved

A lone performer, barely visible, arrives at the front of the apron and begins to vocalise. He drones, gasps, intones, and growls. I can just make out the grey outline of his flexing, heaving ribs. Soon his voice is joined by other voices issuing from the shadows. They harmonise in modalities that originate in Renaissance and Middle Ages church and folk music. While the lights give me just enough visibility to place the first performer, the new voices won’t let me fix sound to figure. I must receive with my ears only.

Cesena, by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and Bjorn Schmelzer (Belgium), was originally performed outdoors at the Palace of the Popes in Avignon, France, starting in pre-dawn half-light at 4.30 am. The indoor version parallels the transition to full morning light without attempting to mimic nature. More light will come as the show progresses.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this collaboration between choreographer and musical director is the way dancers and singers are seamlessly integrated. The greatest vocal challenges are left to the singers, and the most difficult movement solos are left to the dancers; but for the most part the bodies all sing and move—to very high standard. Walking, turning, rolling and singing with collective intent, the performers form a community of initiates with a holy mission: to awaken the sun—or its proxy, electric light. They succeed. My primal fears are allayed by the light, and my spiritual yearnings, associated with Gregorian chanting and the like, are fulfilled.

societas raffaelo: communion interrogated

On the Concept of the Face, Regarding the Son of God by Societas Raffaelo Sanzio

photo Klaus Lefebvre

On the Concept of the Face, Regarding the Son of God by Societas Raffaelo Sanzio

On the Concept of the Face, Regarding the Son of God by Societas Raffaelo Sanzio (Italy) is an exercise in testing your faith—or if you don’t have any of that, your patience. A modernist apartment done almost exclusively in white is stretched across the wide expanse of the Theatre Jean Duceppe. An old man in a white bathrobe sits on a white couch on a white vinyl floor watching TV. He shits himself repeatedly. His middle-aged son, in black suit and white shirt, repeatedly cleans him up. The son dons latex gloves, removes the old man’s diaper, sponges him down, and mops up the brown mess on the floor with white towels. He is a patient and loving son, but he sometimes becomes exasperated. The old man cries and begs forgiveness. All the while Jesus, the world’s original forgiver, watches on, his face rendered in enigmatic detail by Renaissance painter Antonello da Messina and blown up by director Romeo Castellucci to massive proportions on a panel that stands upstage centre. Jesus’ expression is hard to read. Is it one of bemusement, empathy, or judgment?

Castellucci seems to have created all this as a test. Certainly for the characters—will the two men give in to despair? But also for the audience—as we watch the dreary and sometimes comical routine we are assaulted with the acrid odour of shit. Yes, Castellucci has polluted the theatre with a sulphurous stink. Some spectators hold their nostrils shut. As usual with Castellucci, the visceral nature of the experience is also a theatre game. While “regarding the face of the son of God,” I try to discern his attitude to the two men; I check my empathy levels while having my senses assaulted; I negotiate with the representation before me—to what degree do I identify with, and care about, the real-life situation portrayed? During one of the son’s exits for towels, the father unscrews the lid of a jug and pours more brown fluid over himself and the whiteness of sheet, blanket and floor. The son returns to find the father crying and begging forgiveness again. Who is testing whom? Later in the show, about a dozen pre-teens throw metal, grenade-like missiles at the giant face of Jesus, achieving not a dent. They then sit and contemplate the image. Jesus remains impassive. Someone just passed or failed a test again, but I can’t tell who.

madlinsko theatre: out of the body & in your face

Damned Be the Traitor of His Homeland, Mladinsko Theatre

photo Ziga Koritnik

Damned Be the Traitor of His Homeland, Mladinsko Theatre

Director Oliver Frilic and Mladinsko Theatre (Slovenia) assemble an arsenal of actor-bodies shoved in numbers as far forward as the stage will allow for Damned Be the Traitor of His Homeland. They will ask some difficult questions of the audience at Theatre Rouge du Conservatoire and make some uncomfortable accusations. But first each actor creates a fictional eulogy for him or herself, and each successive account of the circumstances of their passing is more improbable than the last. In this way, authenticity of personal narrative is thrown into doubt from the outset. In one scene the company interrogates one of its members in a chummy but dangerous manner: where do his allegiances lie? Is he really Slovenian? Isn’t one of his parents a Croat? Didn’t he sing songs in the pub with Serbian soldiers? The diversity of the actor’s ancestry is such that the whole notion of ethnic identity is made to look a very dubious construct. But if so, how did we get to the atrocities of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia? Instability of ethnic identity is starkly contrasted with a sense of deep personal loss at the fracturing of Yugoslavia. Each actor recalls the moment they learned of former President Tito’s death in 1980. They strip naked before us and cry. The sense of loss—of a country, of a time without war—is affecting. Some of us in the audience are crying too.

Eventually, the actors ask the spectators, “Where were you when the slaughter in Srebrenica was taking place only 400 kilometres from here?” Of course, they don’t ask this when performing in Montreal. They find other ways to challenge the Canadian audience: for example they note that Canada’s oppressive Indian Act provided much of the basis for South Africa’s system of apartheid. With blanks fired loudly and frequently from a pistol, and with most of the show occurring almost in the lap of the audience, Damned Be the Traitor is a shock and awe performance that keeps me alert and on edge. The ‘awe’ part is largely in the handling of pace and rhythm by the director. Frilic’s sense of proportion is impeccable. He knows when to shift gears and when to surprise. As a result Damned Be the Traitor is a well-oiled, political-funhouse ride, one with amusements that turn nasty but never feel gratuitous.

motus: process makes imperfect

Too Late! (Antigone) Contest #2, Motus

photo End & DNA

Too Late! (Antigone) Contest #2, Motus

Too Late! (Antigone) Contest #2 by Motus (Italy) was inspired by the 2008 killing of teenager Alexandros Grigoropoulos at the hands of police in Athens, Greece. Motus partly builds its show from the script of Sophocles’ Antigone, with one actor, Vladimir Aleksic, tending to play the role of the dictator Creon and the other, Sylvia Calderoni, tending to play the defiant outcast Antigone. The work is strongest when it stays close to the original text; there’s more than enough complexity in Sophocles to allow for a nuanced examination of the abuse of state power. Early on, dialogue is juxtaposed with the two actors playing dominant and submissive dogs—a simple parallel to the power relationship in the play, but one made effective by the detailed physical work. As is typical in art-market political theatre, the company turns the lens on its own creative process and the focus of the piece becomes diluted by meandering speculations about power and identity woven with personal biography. Unlike Damned be the Traitor, which uses similar techniques but in a tightly focused manner, the inspiration for Too Late!, charged by Grigoropoulos’ death, simply dissipates. Despite the political posturing, it feels like nothing much is at stake.

–

FTA: Festival TransAmériques 2012, Montreal, Canada, May 29-June 4; for credits and company sites, see www.fta.qc.ca/en

RealTime issue #110 Aug-Sept 2012 pg. 16

John Gabriel Borkman, Vegard Vinge, Ida Müller and Trond Reinholdtsen

THEATERTREFFEN (THEATRE MEETING) IS NO ORDINARY THEATRE FESTIVAL. EVERY YEAR, A JURY OF CRITICS SELECTS 10 BEST PRODUCTIONS IN THE GERMAN LANGUAGE (FROM AROUND 400 NEW PRODUCTIONS FROM GERMANY, AUSTRIA AND SWITZERLAND). IT IS THE OLYMPIC EVENT OF GERMAN-SPEAKING THEATRE.

Since German theatre culture is perhaps the most robust in the world, attending Theatertreffen is a special treat. However, it was an unexpectedly ambiguous experience: high in standard, but surprisingly unsurprising.

Theatertreffen showcases an engaged, innovative, provocative theatre culture’s mainstream—large city theatres with ensembles, repertoires, bureaucracies—not performance art, live art or anything truly wacky. It is director-driven, conceptually sound, courageous, but still ‘theatre theatre.’ To the outside eye, the Theatertreffen experience is perched funnily somewhere between Kunstenfestivaldesarts and whatever a festival of Australian state theatre companies would look like: simultaneously bold, lavish and predictable. After watching the 10 plays repeat each other’s affectations, the experience started to look increasingly like a long joke on director’s theatre.

The Theatertreffen blog number-crunched the tropes and found: 9/10 plays addressed the audience directly; 7/10 involved shouting where it was not logically needed; 6/10 used film, and 7/10 microphones; 5/10 featured some form of nudity; 4/10 real children; 3/10 puppets or animal costumes; 3/10 running water; 3/10 had actors attack the set with paint; 3/10 were extravagantly long (www.theatertreffen-blog.de/tt12/allgemeines/theatric-o-meter/).

A sense of a transgressive folklore transpired, one in which nudity, multimedia, breaking of the fourth wall and self-reflection have long become convention—but also one with unexpected blind spots. I did not anticipate that Theater Bonn’s Ein Volksfiend (Ibsen’s Enemy of the People) would generate so much buzz just for casting a Middle-Eastern actor in the main role. Similarly puzzling was the excitement over Münchner Kammerspiele casting a woman in the role of Macbeth. The way Volksbühne’s Die [s]panische Fliege was singled out simply for being a comedy was alarming, to say the least. Additionally, there was a tendency among both the public and the press to term many works as ‘installations,’ merely, it appeared, because of the absence of set changes. The folklore, progressive or not, seemed to be in a rut.

There was much quality, but not much surprise. Münchner Kammerspiele’s Cleansed/Crave/4.48 Psychosis was a delicate and clean work, revealing the progression of Sarah Kane’s writing from narrative excess to introspective monologue, but also her constant return to a small set of obsessions: torture, desire, love. Thalia Theatre’s Faust I+II was a self-reflexive but good-spirited, storm through every gimmick of post-dramatic theatre, complete with a theoretical lecture on the significance of it all (a woman in gala dress announced: “Good evening. My name is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. This work of mine, Faust, is a pinnacle of German literature. We know that today.”) International Institute of Political Murder re-staged an hour of Rwanda’s genocide-proselytising, shock-jock radio program in Hate Radio, an effective work in the classical tradition of political theatre.

john gabriel borkman

John Gabriel Borkman, Vegard Vinge, Ida Müller and Trond Reinholdtsen

However, the one work that towered above the rest was the 12-hour production of Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman by Vegard Vinge, Ida Müller and Trond Reinholdtsen, a work of such admirable excess and courage that this review will now devote itself to it entirely. All of Berlin tried to get a ticket for what Twitter termed “9/11 of theatre—there is no way back.” Borkman was unlike anything I expect to see again soon, and its singularity more than made up for the homogeneity of the rest of Theatertreffen.

It was, unsurprisingly, a bloody, gory, fanciful Ibsen text reduced to a few key phrases, guilty of almost every cliché listed above. An unrushed, postmodernist improvisation around a few key themes of Ibsen’s text (sexual repression, Oedipal complex, inter-generational violence, middle-class shame). Alienation was employed to the extreme: the set, a two-storey bourgeois house, was fully furnished with two-dimensional, cardboard furniture. All sounds were pre-recorded and amplified to cartoon-like effect. Performers in full grotesque costume and masks moved like large wooden dolls, miming imprecisely to dialogue wired through the speakers (mouthed live by the director in the back of the auditorium, as it gradually became clear).

This was Ibsen as Artaud-meets-South-Park. Where Ibsen’s Gunhild and Ella Borkman have an understated verbal tussle for the affections of young Erhart Borkman, Vinge’s sisters instead engage in a prolonged, puppet-limbed physical fight, throwing cardboard armchairs and grandfather clocks at each other to exaggerated sound effects.

But infantile it ultimately wasn’t. Borkman relied on the expectation of a theatre situation, as opposed to the more flexible durational performance, to discipline audience behaviour and thus focus our attention. We sat, dear reader, in orderly theatre rows, for 12 hours, leaving only for food, water and toilet, and rushing back in to see where the performance had gone. And it went everywhere. The initial anti-realistic excess had both ample time and drive to grow whichever way it found space, with the unpredictable, fluid energy of extended improvisation.

Despite the frequent promises to the contrary, I have never seen true chaos in the theatre, not until Borkman. Twitter buzzed with accounts of what new events had happened on each night. Stage fights turned into prop fights with the audience. The fourth wall was bricked up (taking 40 minutes to complete). An interminable “casting for Münchner Kammerspiele” turned into an army of actor-zombies being led by the director to storm the auditorium. (Afterwards, while washing stage blood off ourselves in the toilets, we witnessed an annoyed critic loudly demanding to have her expensive skirt cleaned by the theatre company.) Referencing the number-counting scene from Kane’s Cleansed, Vinge counted for hours, to many thousands, with occasional interludes into decimals. The set was repeatedly damaged. Some audience members were kidnapped. The Volksbühne security was on patrol, sounding alarms more than once. Amid the chaos, however, were moments of technical and narrative beauty: Erhart playing a computer game made entirely of moving cardboard sticks; a lifesize, flying 2-D helicopter; the drawing room which came off the house and sailed away like a raft.

German audiences are customarily prepared to engage, but Borkman built an exceptionally free rapport with its audience. We threw pieces of the set back at the performers. We freely snapped photos with our smartphones. We brought in beer and energy drinks. We walked around, peering into back spaces, moved seats, organised drinks and food delivery. Dozens of people outside waited for hours for seats to be resold. Around the 11th hour, Vinge threw packets of crisps at us, which we shared in a brotherly fashion, having by now become a settled community. After so many hours together, sitting among plastic cups, in sweaty heat, this was less a theatre than a party situation. What I had until now only read about—theatre as communion—came to life, surprisingly, serendipitously, as Borkman used every technique of durational performance, but barred the audience from the usual cool, detached comforts of such performances: the right to stand, walk around, leave.

Twelve hours in, after all the technicians had gone home, and only a video screen and Vinge were left on stage (groaning: “This is not over! I will not leave!”), the bleary-eyed audience finally stood up and applauded—until the very fact of applause became the end in itself, allowing us to tear ourselves from our seats and go home. It was 4am, and we were elated, exhausted and smelly. It was like leaving a techno party: an arts event we co-made, not simply witnessed, an arts event that had physically exhausted us. It revealed that the modes of engagement of classical theatre survive nowadays perhaps more in music events than in contemporary theatre.

Borkman was certainly the most tweeted, discussed and written about of all the Theatertreffen performances. While a distinct heir to German Regietheater, its pure excess made it slip out of grasp of analysis—apart from underlining the ecstatic, collective nature of the experience, critics have all resorted to simple, albeit incredulous, summaries. Whether it represents the future of theatre is still hard to say, if only because 12 hours can only be an exceptional investment of time. But, as Declan Greene, my guest at Theatertreffen, said months later, having finished his tour of the European theatre festivals, Borkman is by far the most exciting theatre work of the year.

Theatertreffen 2012: Münchner Kammerspiele, Gesäubert/Gier/4.48 Psychose, director Johan Simons, Haus der Berliner Festspiele, May 4-5; Thalia Theater, Faust I+II, director Nicolas Stemann, Haus der Berliner Festspiele, May 12-13; International Institute of Political Murder, Hate Radio, script, direction Milo Rau, Hebbel am Ufer HAU 2, May 16-18; John Gabriel Borkman, directors Vegard Vinge, Ida Müller, Trond Reinholdtsen, Völksbühne im Prater, May 5-19; Theatertreffen, Berlin, Msy 4-21, www.berlinerfestspiele.de

RealTime issue #110 Aug-Sept 2012 pg. 17

Monolith, Lawrence English, Werner Dafeldecker, Scott Morrison, Liquid Architecture 13

photo Bryan Spencer

Monolith, Lawrence English, Werner Dafeldecker, Scott Morrison, Liquid Architecture 13

AUSTRALIANS HAVE LONG FOUND SOMETHING ATTRACTIVE ABOUT ANTARCTICA—THE LAST FRONTIER FOR THE MANLY VIRTUES OF ENDURANCE IN ISOLATION, A CONTINENT FOR THE TAKING WITHOUT THE INCONVENIENCE OF PRETENDING SOMEONE ELSE GOT THERE FIRST. WHO KNOWS? BUT IT MAKES FOR AN INTRO TO THIS YEAR’S LIQUID ARCHITECTURE: A TIGHTLY CURATED COLLECTION OF WORKS DERIVED FROM THE ARTISTS’ PERSONAL VISITS TO ANTARCTICA.

Except for the first piece by Robin Fox which is a sonification of waverider buoy data from the Southern Ocean, rather than a traveller’s tale. Still, it’s data from about as south as you get before the ocean freezes. The piece starts with the rising and falling of wave heights quantised into discrete steps and then set to a scale. High pitched but not annoyingly so, the sound is metallic and fun. Then a slower, lower pitched version joins, followed by more waves followed by the creaking of ships’ timbers (surely it must be something else, but that’s what it sounds like). More sustained sounds whoosh in, wind and steaming water, but then it gets stupid loud and sensible types in the audience all start shoving fingers in their ears—which would make a nice photo.

Next is a playback piece from an absent Chris Watson. Low creaking rumbles remind me of ocean-going wooden ships again. Sea-beasts sing and fart and splash about then plunge back into the freezing depths. Gulls call out in their usual hysterical and angry panic. A huge something surfaces with a burst of exhalation. Ice drips, waves get trapped against ice sheets, seals surface and drip off by the edge. In some ways these first two pieces show the difficulty in structuring field recordings as composition—there is a sense of sound after sound after sound—which is not necessarily bad, but seems restricted or structurally unexplored.

We’re now sufficiently into the night for me to notice how unusual it is to listen, still, and amongst strangers. People stretch out on the floor in various stages of the sleep-wake cycle. One can almost feel the theta waves resonating out from every resting head, sense the faint click as the thalamus disconnects the body for when the dreams kick in.

The final artist for the night is Doug Quin with what have become the canonical sounds of the Antarctic—Weddell seals calling underwater. The sound is not at all what one associates with large blubbery seals coughing and barking on land. Underwater, the seals sing long gliding chirps and slow descending pitch glides, sparse blurts, grunts, growls and whistles. These are unedited recordings from multiple hydrophones recording simultaneously at depths of 10, 20 and 50 metres—a sort of vertical wall of recording that is laid flat into the room where we are listening. The result is an open, sparse, sound stage with a wide range of volumes and spatial depth to each individual sound—the acoustic in all its complexity leads us into the classic meditative experience of focused attention.

Second night. Philip Samartzis presents a study of “ice behaviour” recorded at the end of summer, when the lakes and the seas begin to freeze. Samartzis produces a wonderfully rich soundscape with superb transitions and modulation of the density and content. Waves well up into the overhangs and cavities along the ice sheet edge; we hear deep plops and resonant squelches, shallow streams and fast bubbling water. And all with a precise, up close clarity until about 20 minutes in when the sound builds to a fast storm, the sound like masses of bees swarming inside an endlessly crashing wave. Back to the (ever) present running water then fade out on reverberant plinks from within a cavern—the first time the acoustic space has obviously changed. Finish with the traditional closing of the laptop—that slightly uncomfortable indeterminate ending of file playback concerts where the dynamics within the piece may include the dynamics of the end of the piece—quiet fades, abrupt silences, who will clap first.

There’s some commonality in the sounds the artists have been using. Makes sense given the environment, but interestingly there’ve been no sounds that are obviously of the voyage or habitation—no sounds of everyone getting up in the morning or making a coffee (hot chocolate and snuggle in for a read before sleep?). Perhaps this is indicative of the overwhelming power of the environment sans human, or perhaps just the efficient call of the exotic—why go to Antarctica to record a kettle boiling?

Monolith, Lawrence English, Werner Dafeldecker (pictured), Scott Morrison, Liquid Architecture 13

photo Bryan Spencer

Monolith, Lawrence English, Werner Dafeldecker (pictured), Scott Morrison, Liquid Architecture 13

Next is the trio of Dafeldeker, English and Morrison with Monolith. Video plus sound. White screen, low pulse from the audio, amazing shot of the regular geometry of a walkway, thin black lines against the snow. Sound continues as regular low frequency bursts, helicopters with high frequencies cut. More lines against the snowscape—isolated human structures looking abandoned, alien, bleached into the snow. The slowly changing imagery, now blurred and offset layers of landscape, is overwhelmingly beautiful—this really deserves large screen cinema. Zoom in to ice as a textured screen, as tessellated light in patterns and transparencies. Then signs of life as fragments of bone bleached and trapped between rocks, bright orange and fluoro yellow lichens. Animal sounds.

Wind rumbles on mics, atmospherics graze across the screen and time scales blur. Snow, smooth and rough, is broken into cliffs, laid out like pillows, coloured like pale oceans and wheat under sun. At times it is hard to tell what we are seeing, the scale and movement difficult to match against experience. Masses of cloud move across the horizon at what must be incredible speed but because of the vastness of the landscape they seem to amble along like a vast and casual herd. The wind picks up, the screen is cut into bands of grey; violent windstorms sound then stop. Floes crackle, ice drips, trickles plop and burble. Thin overlays of surface water, wind blown ripples, soft unbreaking waves. Fade out.

One of the best Liquid Architectures I’ve been to (but do I always think that?) and, with Monolith, an exceptional performance that deserves much greater exposure.

Liquid Architecture 13, Robin Fox, Chris Watson, Douglas Quin, July 4; Philip Samartzis, Monolith trio: Lawrence English, Werner Dafeldecker, Scott Morrison, Brisbane Powerhouse; July 5; www.liquidarchitecture.org.au

RealTime issue #110 Aug-Sept 2012 pg. 18

PRACTICE-LED POSTGRADUATE RESEARCH, WHERE A FILM OR NEW MEDIA WORK IS MADE AS THE PRINCIPAL MEANS OF ASSESSMENT, IS BECOMING MUCH MORE PREVALENT AT UNIVERSITIES THAT OFFER SCREEN PRODUCTION COURSES, ESPECIALLY NOW THAT SCREEN PRODUCTION PROGRAMS ARE FORMING A MAJOR COMPONENT OF THE TERTIARY CREATIVE ARTS SECTOR. INTERESTINGLY, IT’S NOT ONLY RECENTLY GRADUATED STUDENTS WHO RETURN FOR SUCH DEGREES, BUT OFTEN FILMMAKERS WITH SUBSTANTIAL CAREERS.

Experienced documentary maker John Hughes (After Mabo, The Archive Project), for example, is doing a PhD at RMIT. He’s making an essay film about the making of his earlier documentary Indonesia Calling: Joris Ivens in Australia, and how it relates to his own practice. It’s a more experimental film, one which will have a different life; it would be very interesting as a special feature on the DVD of Indonesia Calling, for instance. He’s also doing a written component, something that sits parallel to the film and is concerned with the historical research that went into the two films. Andrew Traucki (The Reef, Black Water) is making a found footage thriller feature film as part of his Master of Creative Arts at UTS, while writing about the comparison between the making and distribution of a privately funded and a government-funded film.

As Adrian Danks, Program Director Media, School of Media and Communication at RMIT, says, the screen project and the written work for such a degree do have to relate, and often they don’t. In that case, he says it’s easier if the problem is with the written component, since “if the problem is in the project that can be difficult to address, because the event the project covers may not be able to be revisited.”

why do practice-led research?

Why would an experienced film practitioner go back to university to do a post-graduate degree? Well, as Sarah Gibson, Senior Lecturer, Creative Practices Group at UTS, says, “Perhaps they want to make that project that they could never get funded, or perhaps they want a supportive workspace where they can bounce around ideas.” As she says, a university can provide a good model for creative collaboration, or somewhere to try a new direction, and, if that fails, to learn to make something better. (And a place where that initial failure is not exposed to public scrutiny.) A post-graduate student can come in with a question rather than a fully-formed proposal, and that question can be very broad, and lead to very creative exploration. In fact, as Adrian Danks says, “They can spend their first year working out what they want to do—and even finding out that they can’t do it.”

UTS also offers a Doctor of Creative Arts, which is a three-year course, but it can be part-time. While some students do a research degree as a pathway to an academic career, for some film practitioners it’s time to, as Sarah Gibson says, “take a deep breath, assess their position, and make that film they’ve always wanted to, perhaps a bigger project, or a more significant piece of work.” For younger practitioners it’s an opportunity for experimentation, for perhaps taking a different direction. They must make something, as well as provide a written component, but as well as long form or essay documentaries, DCA students have been working on new media forms and researching different aspects of screen production.

Gibson finds that the Master of Media Arts and Production, which covers three semesters, suits people who are interested in changing careers or specialisations, or who want to add media to their qualifications. People in science areas may want to use filmmaking as another way of publishing in their area, realising that short films can disseminate ideas better and reach a broader audience. Print-based journalists may want to explore documentary as a different, and perhaps more effective, approach to the issues that concern them. For those already working in film, a production designer may want to be a director; someone working in sound may want to work with images, or a film practitioner may want to explore new media.

At AFTRS, the new Master of Screen Arts is in its first year, in which it was only open to AFTRS graduates who had completed a graduate diploma between 2009 and 2011, but this one-year course will be developing and changing, using feedback from this year’s students. Neil Peplow, Head of Screen Content, says they will be increasing the size of the intake, taking students from more disciplines and from outside AFTRS. The course will still be aimed at helping students achieve mastery in their chosen area of specialisation, while at the same time investigating Australian screen history and the big philosophical and sociological ideas in action for context and meaning. Students will be supported to map out their own path in what is an increasingly competitive marketplace, but collaboration with fellow students will be an equally important element of the course. This year students included producers, directors, one DOP and one composer, and each had to complete either a short film or a short work that would lead to a feature; the composer, however, developed a composing app for educational use with children.

the assessment of research quality assessed

Just how do you assess the research quality of a creative work? This vexed question has been exercising the minds of many of those working in the screen production education sector, but the large-scale project headed by Dr Josko Petkovic from Murdoch University in Perth, in which a team of researchers from five institutions tested 45 short productions from 19 film schools, has now been completed, with the results confirming the hypothesis that screen production assessors are consistent and methodical. Given that students in Australian film schools have a qualitative form of assessment, the aim was to accumulate a body of evidence that demonstrated in quantitative and qualitative terms that evaluation of creative works is as consistent as evaluation conducted in traditional discipline areas. The project, based on the proposition that assessment of screen production is as complex and multi-faceted as the screen production process itself, used a multiplicity of criteria and ranks of assessors to conclude that the assessment process is valid, highly reliable and internally consistent. Collaboration amongst Australian film schools to generate shared information on standards, assessment and reporting, as well as enhanced understanding of standards, assessment and reporting practices for the screen production sector and for the Creative Arts sector as a whole, are additional expected outcomes of the successful project.

a challenge: funding research productions

A continuing problem within the sector has to do with the funding of productions. While the universities can provide equipment and facilities which greatly assist in production, there is still a substantial cost that the student filmmaker has to raise. The federal and state screen funding organisations do not endorse or encourage university-industry research linkage, with postgraduate practice-based researchers excluded from accessing production funding through government film financing. A number of academics recently raised this problem in their response to the federal government’s National Cultural Policy Discussion Paper, underlining the need for the establishment of strong research links between the creative industries and the university creative arts research sector. This linkage does exist in other areas, but not in the screen sector, perhaps because practice-based research in creative arts is a comparatively recent development and its importance is yet to be recognised by cultural organisations and policy makers. Academics are hopeful that this will be addressed in the final National Cultural Policy.

thinking bigger

Film isn’t only about working on individual projects. With post-graduate students already co-operating on each other’s work, and working in supportive, experimental environments, Josko Petkovic is excited about trying to inspire people to think collaboratively on a much larger scale. Given that there are so many visually literate post-graduate students, and that “we are now entering a world that is primarily image-anchored,” he believes that “we need to start thinking about work beyond the narrow industry base,” and foresees a time when students could contribute to “large, ongoing projects stored in a cyber-archive.” Something to think about?

REVIEWS OF PAOLO SORRENTINO’S THIS MUST BE THE PLACE HAVE MADE MUCH OF SEAN PENN’S PERFORMANCE AS CHEYENNE, IN THE MAIN, DUE TO HIS APPEARANCE AS AN AGED GOTH ROCK IDOL MODELLED ON THE CURE’S ROBERT SMITH, REPLETE WITH TEASED BLUE-BLACK HAIR AND FULL MAKE-UP, BUT ALSO HIS LILTING, MEASURED, ALMOST SQUEAKY, INTONATION.

Of course much of this is a reaction to the now familiar media characterisation of Penn as the wild Method actor on the fringes of Hollywood and by a series of hyper-masculine roles such as Jimmy Markham in Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River, Matthew Poncelet in Tim Robbins’ Dead Man Walking (1995) or Danny McGavin in Dennis Hopper’s Colors (1988). Alongside these manly portrayals we have been witness to a litany of offscreen performances outside the movies including run-ins with photographers: the much publicised divorce(s) from Robyn Wright-Penn, the visits to Iraq, meetings with American enemies President Raúl Castro of Cuba and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, legends of Penn sleeping with a pistol under his pillow in a resettlement camp in Haiti and a host of male friendships with the likes of Hopper, Harry Dean Stanton, Robert Duvall, and Jack Nicholson, Harry Crews, Charles Bukowski and Charlie Sheen.

At the same time, he has performed a range of curious roles that may undermine the construction of Penn as the masculine bad boy. Think Harvey Milk in Gus Van Sant’s Milk (2008), Samuel J Bicke in Niels Mueller’s The Assassination of Richard Nixon (2004), Jeff Spicoli in Amy Heckerling’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Emmer Ray in Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown (1999) and, most hysterically, David Kleinfeld in Brian de Palma’s Carlito’s Way (1993). In all these films Penn has acted against type, well against the type found in Mystic River and Dead Man Walking, at least.

In many instances Penn has played naive outsiders, characters caught up in their own times and locales, often unable to escape their own fates. Similarly, Cheyenne’s wisdom lurks beneath the façade of a simple, emotionally fragile Goth who is able to clearly see the truth of situations without the encumbrances of worldliness or sophistication. One of the best scenes in This Must Be the Place is when Cheyenne meets Tattoo Mike (Gordon Michaels) in a bar in Bad Ax, Michigan and these two outsiders exchange opinions about alcohol, tattooing and the joys of gratitude in a childlike reverie, the kind of languid, episodic conversation emblematic of Penn’s performance in this film. Frances McDormand as Cheyenne’s partner Jane is a confident, assertive yet loving character, absolutely at ease with the world, consistently wooping him at handball; but in essence operating to support and contrast with Cheyenne’s simplicity and innocent directness.

Similar characters populate the films Penn has directed. In The Indian Runner (1991), Viggo Mortenson plays Frank Roberts, a tearaway who returns from the war in Vietnam. Unable to find a place for himself in the world he left, Frank causes irreparable damage to his family and hometown. John Booth (David Morse) in The Crossing Guard is released from jail for killing the child of Freddy Gale (Jack Nicholson), only to provide Gale with the direction and wisdom he needs to escape his life of alcoholic rage and sadness. Nicholson plays Jerry Black in Penn’s The Pledge, another character unable to deal with the horror of a child’s murder who descends into obsession and destruction. 2007’s Into the Wild focuses on real-life character Chris McCandless (Emile Hirsch), who gave up his comfortable middle-class life for one of adventure that led to eventual starvation and death in the wilderness of Alaska.

Similarly, it is possible to see This Must Be the Place in relation to one of the major concerns of Penn’s own directorial efforts in films such as The Indian Runner and more recently, Into the Wild—the concern with place and how it shapes, contains and characterises individuals. Penn’s films can also be understood as a distinct genre that takes as its subject not only outsider figures but also the very specific locales and historical moments from which they emerge. The Indian Runner may be discussed in relation to the whole ‘badlands’ mythology that has been popularised in various renditions of the story of Charlie Starkweather and mid-west America. The Crossing Guard belongs to a tradition of imagining Los Angeles that includes Cassavetes’ work (The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Love Streams, A Woman Under the Influence). The Pledge is confined to Nevada and returns to the Native American mythologies introduced in The Indian Runner. Into the Wild, covering numerous locales, is principally concerned with Alaska and all that place signifies in the American imaginary.

This concern spills out into many of the films in which Penn acted including This Must Be the Place. Sorrentino’s film takes its title from the Talking Heads song which has as its subtitle “naive melody,” an instructive connection for the film and Penn’s performance. In a host of performances and in his own directorial works Sean Penn has oscillated between twin poles; the rendering of place and awkward, naive outsiders’ journeys to find themselves. Of course, many are taken by road.

Taking into account Penn’s directorial oeuvre we can understand many of his performances in the same way. His Academy Award-winning performance as Jimmy Markham in Clint Eastwood’s adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s novel Mystic River is of a person unable to escape not only his past, but also the intricate community of Dorchester, Boston; the locale that Lehane has written about in a series of novels. Milk relies on San Francisco for its setting. Hometown girl, B Ruby Rich, described the premiere screening in nostalgic terms, in particular Penn’s rendering of the title character:

“the film started and silence descended, as the audience began to realise what a house of mirrors we had entered. As Sean Penn brilliantly disappeared into the body, voice and mannerisms of Harvey Milk, it got harder and harder to separate the world on the screen from the one we lived in” (“Ghosts of an Ideal World,” The Guardian, Jan 16 2009).

We could also think of Penn’s David Kleinfeld, the coke-snorting, aspirational, corrupt lawyer of De Palma’s film, unable to resist the money, drugs and women in 1980s New York City, leading to his own and his client Carlito’s (Al Pacino) deaths. One of Penn’s earliest and most celebrated characters, Jeff Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High, in his own naïve (albeit stoned) disregard for school rules and teen angst experienced by the other characters in the film, is able to transcend the ethos he finds himself surrounded by and can revel in his dreams of being a pro-surfer and babe magnet.

Like these characters, This Must Be the Place’s Cheyenne is a recluse or outcast whose episodic journey across the United States to locate his father’s Holocaust tormentor is a search for not only the tormentor, Aloise Liange (Heinz Lieven), or simply himself (as many road movies prescribe) but for something immediate and important, less of a location than a time and event by which to recognise himself, as in “for me this must be the place.”

This Must Be the Place, writer, director Paolo Sorrentino, writer Umberto Contarello, music David Byrne, cinematography Luca Bigazzi, editor Christiano Travaglioli; Italian, French, Irish co-production, 2012; Australian distribution and DVD, Hopscotch.

RealTime has 6 copies of This Must Be the Place to giveaway courtesy of Hopscotch 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.

Leo Clayton and Sam Doyon from their Advanced Techniques for Modern Living project, Faculty of Creative Arts, University of Wollongong

“A GENERAL ISSUE PLAGUING UNIVERSITIES TODAY, WHICH IMPACTS ON MEDIA ARTS, IS THE “COMPLIANCE CULTURE”—THANKS TO ENDLESS AND INCREASING GOVERNMENT REGULATION AND ACCOUNTABILITIES… BESIDES WASTING ACADEMICS’ TIME, IT MAKES PLANNING AND TEACHING LESS FLEXIBLE. IT ALSO APPEARS TO HAVE A STRANGE FLOW-ON EFFECT WHERE STUDENTS SEEM INCREASINGLY INFLEXIBLE IN THEIR EXPECTATIONS—AT LEAST INITIALLY. FOR MEDIA ARTS, THIS INFLEXIBILITY IS PARTICULARLY DETRIMENTAL, GIVEN THAT THE JOB SITUATION IS SO FLUID AND THE MEDIA LANDSCAPE, INCLUDING SOCIAL MEDIA, CHANGES SO QUICKLY.” NORIE NEUMARK

Last year, Lisa Gye’s article “sublimation vs subjugation” (RT104) looked at the changes brought about by the restructuring of the Australia Council Boards in 2005, which abolished the discrete funding field of New Media Arts. By interviewing academics who teach media Gye found that as an academic discipline, media art was “settling back into more established disciplines—Fine Art, Media and Communications, Design, Creative Arts and Science and Technology” and no longer considered “a monstrous hybrid struggling to find its place in the gallery or the museum.” Gye rightly concluded that “vigilance is required to ensure that the sublimation of media arts practices to the mainstream does not result in their subjugation.”

In 2012 I have extended her research with an open-ended question on the major issues facing new media arts education. Of the 16 key academics around the country who responded to my enquiries, the majority found, as Neumark succinctly describes, that wider issues are transforming teaching in this arena. Broadly speaking, the challenges in media arts education today revolve around institutional structures, discipline strictures, student expectations and the shifting role of the academic.

For Christian Haines (Elder Conservatorium of Music, University of Adelaide), “Sound media or sonic arts education seems to be in a constant tension amongst a multitude of ideological and institutional forces where modes of pedagogy can be incompatible with sonic arts practice. In particular, the language and mode of teaching the aesthetics and practice of sound is contemporary and often amorphous, while the Western music tradition and its language has largely been formalised for at least over a century.”

Another “large conundrum” for Nancy Mauro-Flude (Tasmanian School of Art, University of Tasmania) is that “computer art and culture (software, hardware, networked media, operating systems) cannot be learnt in the usual three-hour slot allocated in an undergrad environment.” Mauro-Flude finds that institutional environments can actually inhibit experimentation and creativity due to proprietary software being taught as is, and security protocols limiting students intimate engagement with their means of production. Her teaching approach is to encourage students “to tinker…to open up machines and touch their inner parts.”

Studio practice taught in two-hour tutorial blocks is also problematic for Lisa Gye and Darren Tofts (Swinburne University) who “don’t actually teach a media art program as such, but ground our media arts and contemporary critical remix subjects within the context of an arts and humanities program.” At CQUniversity Steven Pace finds the “demand for greater efficiencies within the system puts educators under constant pressure to adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to teaching, but that simply doesn’t cut it.”

Of course the problem isn’t just that existing structures don’t fit what can be termed new media/transmedia/digital media/computational media/programming/kinetic art/sonic arts/electronic media/robotics/bio art /interactive art/social media. Many faculties are rebuilding themselves around the unique challenges of these forms. Gavin Sade (Creative Industries Faculty, QUT) sees “ that while new media arts has struggled to find a natural home discipline within higher education, it is this very problem that points to its significance—and that is the way the practice of ‘new media arts’ has played a role in the development of a range of disciplinary-based practices and programs.”

With no wish to fashion a Media Arts empire, Brogan Bunt (University of Wollongong) agrees that disciplinary coherence is less interesting “than fostering points of disciplinary intersection and unsettling. The challenge is how to maintain this mode of being within a university environment that tends to prefer clearly delineated fields with straightforward (however illusionary) graduate employment pathways.”

Over the last year media arts in the school of art at RMIT where Martine Corompt and Ian Haig teach “has been combined into an area called Expanded Studio Practice, which covers areas like video art, animation, media art installation, emerging media and more traditional mediums such as painting and drawing. Being situated within a more traditional art school model has its challenges but also clearly establishes what we do within a fine art pedagogy and not a media communications, applied media or design course.”

Norie Neumark, in her role as Director of the new Centre for Creative Arts at La Trobe University has just led a year-long curriculum review resulting in “building exploration, openness and critical skills into the core of the curriculum and assessment, particularly in the early years. This way we build a Media Arts and Creative Arts culture where experimentation and flexibility are valued.”

Mauro-Flude had her best results when she ran a winter-school ‘hot house’ of a “daily 10-day unit” rather than a weekly slot. “We are witnessing FabLabs and Hackspaces popping up in most institutions and ice-cream vans (Android software development) as a ‘must have.’ The Tasmanian School of Art is undergoing a renovation at the moment which has these things implemented and is possibly in the process of opening up departments for students to migrate and explore forms, which are inherent to the subjects in question.”

At The University of Sydney, Kathy Cleland in the Digital Cultures Program “focuses more broadly on the critical analysis of the cultural and social uses of new media and digital technologies in the Arts and Humanities area.” The Digital Cultures Program will amalgamate with the Department of Media and Communication in 2013. Due to substantial growth in student interest over the past five years, Chris Chesher states they are currently renewing the curriculum in the Master of Digital Communication “to reflect the growth in social media, mobile media, controversies in regulation, new literature and changes in careers in the broad digital media industries.”

A new sonic arts program has arisen from a re-structure at The Elder Conservatorium of Music to accommodate a broader, more inclusive understanding of the field of music and sonic arts. For Haines, “pedagogy in the sonic arts is vibrant and evolving as free and readily available tools and knowledge encourage the exploration of new aesthetic and conceptual ideas by students.” Mauro-Flude insists, “These days you don’t have to be a hardcore developer or programmer to build a custom application with free software.” Meanwhile Sade is seeing some of his best students sign up to free online tertiary courses from top international universities (eg www.coursera.org ) to augment their studies at QUT.

Bunt reminds us that when integrating media arts it is vital to maintain multiple points of access to “all manner of activities that involve communication, information, system, gaps, deferrals, delays.” Mauro-Flude set up a Temporary Autonomous Zone [TAZ] in her garage in Hobart to transfer an experiential, hands-on collaborative learning approach outside the institutional framework. The main objective of this ongoing venture is “to implement the ideas of a ‘free society’ in a daily practice of cultural and artistic production dealing with a holistic approach to technology and to develop a network of trust when learning new skills.”

Breath, Jessica Green, South Australian School of Art, UniSA. “This projection work focuses on the simplicity of breath an act that is so implicitly important and present in life. There is rhythm to this motion. Like the ocean tide”

For Mark Kimber (South Australian School of Art, UniSA) “the adage of ‘build it and they will come’ does not necessarily apply in education “considering the trepidation of all involved and the current fiscal tightness.” UniSA has media arts workshops within first year foundation courses to introduce new students to the possibilities of a range of mediums that they had previously not considered. “In our experience most of our students come to art school with a definite medium in mind but many do change their preference upon discovering other disciplines…which has pleasingly resulted in a marked increase in enrolments in our New Media courses.”

Corompt and Haig agree, “One of the biggest issues we have faced recently is in the awareness of a media arts practice to incoming students. Many secondary students have folios in painting and drawing, less so in media arts-based work it seems. It appears secondary school students if interested in media art and emerging media are often inclined to apply to a media and communications course and not a fine art course.” Haines concurs with “the need to develop secondary school level subjects to facilitate and nurture skill sets in the sonic arts/sound media arts and to do so in a manner that is able to readily adapt to a rapidly changing field.”

Pace acknowledges, “We’ve made a lot of progress in responding to the challenge of student diversity over the past 20 years, but there is still plenty of room for improvement.” This is particularly difficult at CQUniversity when working with distance education students who have no standard communication technologies or access to resources in their homes. Lucas Ihlein (UOW) finds a strong practice of blogging by students effective. Students update and upload on the progress of their own projects on a self-managed independently set-up domain on the university server, which “accelerates their critical-reflection cycle, and also helps cultivate a strong classroom culture.”

The way academics think about and engage with their students must change. Alan Dorin (Monash University) cautions, “As academics we need to resist the temptation to mould new electronic media artists to our own approaches with respect to the technology they employ, the way they employ it and the issues they address.” Dorin respects that the majority of incoming students “have spent their entire lives gaining familiarity with digital technology and its potential. The online environment is a part-and-parcel of growing up, so too are international networks of teenagers exchanging music, images, videos, software and techniques for working creatively.”

Gye and Tofts also see a shifting academic role. “Students also need to be sufficiently motivated outside of formal class time to pursue their own practice; so we need to also be adaptive to work they are also doing in their own disciplines.” Dorin continues, “We can show students the history of their media; assist them to place their own work in this wide context; encourage students to reflect on and critique their work, and that of their peers” and promote “active engagement with issues outside of the art world.” Haines, while ideologically differing from Dorin, supports the need for “pedagogical methodologies that permit rigour with respect to the theory and can counter some of the undesirable by-products of internet culture, such as the ‘mile-wide, inch-deep’ approach.”

Russell Fewster (UniSA) considers an “ensemble approach”—courses which focus on individual skill development within a group setting—as “essential for preparing new media artists for the future industry.” UniSA’s Media Arts Program promotes cross-program projects, cross-disciplinary production and performance techniques, with students also learning experientially by participating in professional industry projects driven by staff outside the university. This learning/research strategy works both ways as staff, although putting in time outside the curriculum and normal teaching hours, achieve a measured research outcome.

For institutions and program leaders around the country the main challenge, as articulated by Ihlein is that most of today’s students “will not be practicing as ‘artists’ in the sense we currently understand that term, so it can be difficult to know how to guide them into industries that are only just emerging.”

Media Arts is the tip of a global revolution that has changed modes of learning, communication, communities and expectations. Online learning is common, and in a networked education environment, the local university may not be perceived as the pinnacle of knowledge and research it once was.

To navigate these significant hurdles requires strong vision and a persuasive manner, coupled with a ready flexibility and passion for engagement with students.

Considerable thanks go to my correspondents for their generosity and insight in the composition of this article. I wish them well as they usher Media Arts education into the near future.

“DIGITISE THE WORLD. (A NEW LIFE AWAITS YOU.)”—SO BEGINS TROY INNOCENT AND DALE NASON’S CYBERDADA MANIFESTO, WRITTEN AROUND 1990 AND REVIVED FOR A RETROSPECTIVE AT MELBOURNE’S NEW LOW GALLERY, CO-CURATED BY ACADEMIC AND CULTURAL CRITIC DARREN TOFTS.

“Live in CYBERSPACE where all feelings and physical realities can be psycho-chemically simulated. DON’T BE AFRAID: EXPOSE YOUR CIRCUITRY.” A couple of decades on, CyberDada seems both ‘old-school’ and prescient in its fierce embrace and ironic critique of the now-ubiquitous ‘digital age.’

I hear it before I see it—the collective din of analogue synth sounds, a TR808 drum machine and several TV monitors pumping out copious white noise. Entering the basement space of New Low I’m confronted by accompanying visual noise—fast-cut videos projected onto walls, ‘sculptures’ made of techno-junk and a floor thick with label-less soup cans and scattered paper. CyberDada manifestos printed onto Lotto slips. Stencil cutouts, photocopied collages, and “FUCK” printed in pixellated type on old phone-book pages. A monitor lies on its side, camera taped to the front so that I see myself looking back at me.

Luckily there’s one explanatory panel amid the chaos: between 1989 and 1994, Innocent and Nason, then Swinburne Uni design students, took on the nascent digital media and cyber cultures in the heroic spirit of early-20th century forebears the Futurists and Dadaists. The result was their internationally-disseminated manifesto and a cache of events, films, performances and tactical actions that—along with the work of artists such as post-humanist Stelarc and cyber-feminists VNS Matrix–defined Australia’s emerging cyber-art scene.

This show is heavily ‘immersive’ without either video goggles or an Inter-Arts grant anywhere in sight. Its brash physicality and analogue aesthetic is completely overwhelming: works like the original CyberDada Manifesto video (1990) both jar and mesmerise with grainy graphics and endless rapid edits—half-pixel-based, half-hand-drawn images of what seem to be biological forms one second, circuit boards, newsreel fragments or broken test grids the next. Burgeoning patterns are abstracted by prototypical video effects, morphing into kaleidoscopic mandalas. An artificial iris becomes the only eye, an aperture through which a fractured, digitised reality is all that can be seen. Colour, endless editing and no time for interpretation, only visitation—a soup of images.

According to Troy Innocent, the historical moment of CyberDada’s birth held several contradictions. On the one hand, computers were seen purely as ‘tools’ in the design world; and on the other, incredible claims were being made elsewhere about the potential of new technologies to change the world. The concept of virtual reality was generating considerable hype; techno music inspired investigations into beat-induced trance states. But the creative capacities of computers remained relatively unexplored, mostly dormant since the ‘cybernetic art’ experiments of previous decades.

CyberDada, in part, took the piss—though, says Innocent, some people missed its satirical flavour. He recalls responses along the lines of, “YES, this IS the revolution, let’s replace the meat of our bodies and digitise everything!” Innocent and Nason made videos, playing with whatever effects and equipment they could get their hands on, commandeered dot matrix printers, devised performances and built installations out of already-obsolete techno-junk—creating a noisy, multi-form aesthetic that Innocent says was also influenced by the dystopian sci-fi aesthetics of Blade Runner and cyberpunk.

At the New Low show, embedded in and around the flashing images, fuzzed-out monitors and bits of motherboard is the other crucial element: language. The words of the CyberDada Manifesto are, like those of the Futurists and the Dadaists, bombastic, clever, premonitory, heroic, tongue-in-cheek, and ultimately seductive. “Hot wet nodes” meet “a perfect techno world.” “Pure brain to brain communication” is tempered by “virtual/smart drugs,” “muscles” and “mutation.”

As if the seizure-inducing videos around the walls aren’t enough, moving installation pieces cast sporadic shadows across the space, visually echoing the continuing single-beat rhythm of the TR808 and a near-toneless bass pulse. These taped-together assemblages of sundry manufactured parts, along with several of what Nason and Innocent describe as “Cybaroque totems” in the centre of the space have been newly created from materials kept in storage since the early 90s. Old projectors and laptops, polystyrene packaging, broken robot toys, multi-pin connectors, plastic tubing, circuitry, fake hair, string, wires, blinking LEDs, film canisters and pill bottles, glued and taped together, seemingly at random. “FUCK” appears here too, projected onto the ceiling.

Co-curator Darren Tofts describes Innocent and Nason as “fastidious archivists of CyberDada ephemera.” Mounting a CyberDada retrospective now is timely, he says, with the so-called ‘new aesthetic’ being touted as the intervention of the digital into the built environment. “CyberDada, as Lisa Gye has observed, were doing this more than 20 years ago,” he says.

“[Nason and Innocent] gave us the audiovisual style of the digital age before we even knew it was an age; and…much of what is described as the new aesthetic is CyberDada by another name. When posterity looks back on the digital age in a hundred years’ time, CyberDada will be remembered as its herald,” Tofts says.

The retrospective’s barrage of sound and image is unrelenting—a disorienting meditation that separates your senses from your brain. If originally CyberDada critiqued the hyped-up claims for a digitised future, its relevance is redoubled in the face of exponentially expanding consumer culture, with its endless media offensive and mounting detritus. In CyberDada excess is turned back on itself: it feels like walking into an aesthetic assault—it’s noisy, it’s ugly, it’s messy and you can’t even read a label on the wall to make sense of it. But at the same time it’s liberating—a weirdly entrancing brand of ‘fun.’ Where VNS Matrix devised a more streamlined, ideological ‘cyberart’ to ‘infiltrate the system,’ CyberDada aims instead for randomness; its very ‘unresolvedness’ ironically garnering its integrity. In this sense it seems less a precursor of the ‘new aesthetic’ than of contemporary live art—as a space where creative intervention is the generator of excitement and energy, a strategic rather than organised aesthetic.

CyberDada Retrospective, Troy Innocent, Dale Nason, New Low Gallery, Carlton, Melbourne, June 5-8

THE 59TH SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL SAW THE FORMER HEAD OF PROGRAMMING AT THE DURBAN FILM FESTIVAL, NASHEN MOODLEY, INDUCTED AS FESTIVAL DIRECTOR. THOUGH MARRED BY SOME STRANGE INCLUSIONS IN THE OFFICIAL COMPETITION (SUCH AS WALTER SALLES’ MEDIOCRE ADAPTATION OF ON THE ROAD), MOODLEY’S FIRST FESTIVAL PROVIDED A PLATFORM FOR SOME SUPERB CINEMA, INCLUDING SOME VERY STRONG AUSTRALIAN FEATURES.

not suitable for children

“Infinite Stories” was the tagline chosen by this year’s festival marketing department, however opening night saw the reiteration of one much closer to home, with Peter Templeman’s debut feature Not Suitable For Children. With his 20s passing in a blur of parties and casual sex, Jonah (Ryan Kwanten) is sublimely unprepared to discover that he not only has testicular cancer, but also only a month of fertility remaining. Antics ensue as Jonah, suddenly desperate to father a child, attempts to cajole, beg or bribe any and all women in the vicinity to help him out.

Filmed amid the terraces and cafes of Sydney’s inner west, the film is a smoothly shot, mildly off-beat and unrelentingly facile romantic comedy, crafted with commercial considerations apparently overriding all others. While there’s nothing wrong with this per se—dependent both on one’s sense of humour and relative enjoyment at the sight of Kwanten’s sweaty torso—the film’s inclusion on opening night at the country’s most eminent film festival is questionable. The urge to broaden the festival’s appeal by supporting that rarest of species, an Australian film that celebrates urban life, is understandable, as is the reaction against the wilfully obscure Sleeping Beauty, which filled the slot last year. To give such a prestigious platform to a film that so determinedly mistakes the myopic for the local and the formulaic for accessibility seems to simply highlight how few quality Australian film comedies there have been in recent years, particularly considering the strength of the comedy scene in general.

lore

Cate Shortland’s second feature since 2004’s Somersault, and the first Australian entry in the official competition, was a quietly absorbing drama, Lore. Adapted from Rachel Seiffert’s novel The Dark Room, it delves into the barely contained anarchy of Germany immediately post-WWII through the eyes of 16-year-old Lore (Saskia Rosendahl), abandoned by her SS Officer father and neurotic mother and left to guide her four younger siblings halfway across the country to their grandmother’s house. The situation is dire, Lore trading her mother’s earrings for breast milk to feed her baby brother and ratting the corpses of the occasional suicide victim while navigating her way through a population either contemptuous and apathetic towards her situation or disturbingly gripped by denial at Hitler’s defeat. Haunted by the photographs of concentration camp victims posted throughout the countryside by the Allies, Lore is forced to face her own unthinking complicity in the Nazi project in the person of a young Jewish escapee, Thomas (Kai-Peter Malina).

Shortland’s characteristic handheld style is extremely effective here, conjuring an almost documentary sense of historical reality. Symbolically laden imagery proliferates, lingering close-ups of a face, arm, nose, mouth, seem to suggest cultural displacement and fragmentation; shots of black, dripping water or eels writhing at the bottom of a bucket suggest darker motifs. Rosendahl is excellent, quietly sympathetic as the young protagonist, making her occasional anti-semitic outbursts the more confronting. A measured study of the consequences of fascist ideology on the psychology of children, Shortland’s film seems to suggest that political and social change is only made possible through the transformation and expansion of individual consciousness.

dr sarmast’s music school

Nowhere was this more apparent than in Polly Watkin and Beth Frey’s excellent entry for the Australian Documentary Prize (won by Paul Gallasch’s Killing Anna). After the invasion of Afghanistan, Melbourne-based musicologist Dr Ahmad Sarmast decided to return to Kabul with the plan of opening the country’s first national institute of music (ANIM) and the dream of growing an Afghani national orchestra from scratch. Tracing the development of the school over a period of four years, Watkin’s documentary vividly captures the apparently insurmountable problems—bombed-out and decaying infrastructure, incompetent building contractors, international indifference, lack of instruments, widespread sexism (including amongst the teaching staff), residual religious discrimination against the “loose practice” of music as well as the constant threat of violence—arrayed against the cheerfully unflappable Sarmast, who remains driven by the unshakeable belief that “music is nutrition for the soul.”

The documentary’s brilliance lies in its depiction of how this belief unfolds amongst the orphans and street kids whom Sarmast makes a point of teaching. Children such as Waheed—whose days are spent selling plastic bags on the street being relieved by evenings at his brother’s miniature Casio—is transformed by the end of the film into a quietly assured young pianist. Or there’s Sonam—prevailing attitudes towards girls and music not preventing her from gradually blossoming into a smiling young violinist. Though at times confusing to follow (perhaps reflecting real conditions in post-war Kabul), Dr. Sarmast’s Music School aptly illustrates the potential of music as a vehicle of self-expression—also demonstrated in the ongoing project of Skateistan—and the utility of that old adage, make music not war.

dead europe

The second Australian film in the official competition also provided a response to the effects of war and genocide on succeeding generations. Adapted from Christos Tsiolkas’ novel by Louise Fox, Tony Krawitz’ version of Dead Europe is a darkly compelling meditation on anti-semitism, inter-generational responsibility and the economic and social state of modern Europe. Keen to escape the casual intolerance of his family after his father’s death (“It’s only Jews and Muslims that go to hell,” his mother tells a young relative), Melbourne photographer Isaac (Ewan Leslie) travels to his parent’s homeland of Greece to scatter his father’s ashes. Disturbed by stories about his father’s activities during WWII and haunted by visions of Joseph (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a young refugee he encounters in Athens, his journey takes him to the slums of Paris before finally leading him to Budapest and his estranged brother Nico.

Shot on location with a skeleton crew, Krawitz’ decisions to liaise with refugee groups for featured extras, as well as incorporate footage of recent demonstrations against government austerity measures, provides a bedrock of reality on which the genuinely unsettling supernatural elements of the story unfold. Although Fox’s script truncates Tsiolkas’ novel at the halfway mark, it nonetheless follows the disturbing logic of the story through to its conclusion. Europe is depicted as a spiritual venus flytrap, linking the historical injustice of the Holocaust, resurgent anti-semitism sapping various characters’ moral authority, a supernatural curse that demands blood for blood, and the similarly vampiric economic forces that are suggested as lying at the heart of the modern EU. Though the film could benefit from further polishing, particularly in its third act (the screened cut was only completed 10 days prior to its premiere at the festival), Dead Europe is nonetheless a gripping and original take on the horror genre.

2012 Sydney Film Festival: Not Suitable For Children, director Peter Templeman, screenwriter Michael Lucas, producer Jodi Matterson, Icon Film Distribution; Lore, director Cate Shortland, screenwriters Robin Mukherjee, Cate Shortland, Rachel Seiffert; distributor Transmission Films; Dr. Sarmast’s Music School, director Polly Watkins, producer Beth Frey, Circe Films; (screened on Artscapes, ABC1, July 10 & 17); Dead Europe, director Tony Krawitz, screenwriter Louise Fox, producers Iain Canning, Liz Watts, Emile Sherman, distributor Transmission Films; Sydney Film Festival, June 6-17

FOR HER NEXT TWO WORKS—CONVERSATION PIECE, COMMISSIONED BY BELVOIR, AND WEATHER IN THE 2012 MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL PROGRAM—CHOREOGRAPHER LUCY GUERIN HAS CHOSEN SUBJECTS THAT SHARE CERTAIN DYNAMIC SIMILARITIES.

Chaos Theory informs us that a small variation in weather conditions can have enormous consequences elsewhere. In everyday conversation, a significant variable—a modest change in tone of voice, volume or topic—can result in a stormy exchange. Guerin’s new works are also connected by our common inclination to talk about the weather.

However, there will be no talk in Weather, and Conversation Piece appears to be about talk that goes awry. I recently spoke with Guerin and asked her about the origins and evolution of Conversation Piece and Weather.

conversation piece

I was invited to do a development period with Belvoir on a work that involved dancers and actors. I was really interested in how I could work with these two different disciplines, to make something that really needed both of those elements. And I walked into the rehearsal room with no ideas—deliberately—I wanted the material to emerge in the process of working with these people. What came out was the idea that three people would just be having a conversation—like a foyer conversation—and that the whole show could emerge from that. Somehow that sort of triviality is an end point but a beginning too, to everything that we engage in—these fairly inane interactions. I don’t mean that in a negative way.

I don’t see it as improvisation. There’s nothing to improvise on. It really is whatever pops into the performers’ heads. I suppose it requires a certain amount of practice to be able to let yourself articulate this kind of idle chitchat in front of an audience. It’s actually the dancers who have the conversation at the top of the show. I made that decision just because they’re less experienced in a way. They talk over the top of each other. Sometimes you can’t hear everything they say—you mostly can—but there’s a naturalness about that, which I’m sure the actors could do as well but they have a more innate sense of how to speak and how to make themselves understood.

That’s right. The actors’ skill comes in interpreting and extrapolating on this initial conversation which is recorded on iPhones by the dancers as it’s happening. The actors aren’t present then. The first thing they do is a sort of part verbatim rendition of what’s just happened. You can see they don’t have any of the natural gestures of the original and they’re sort of straining to hear, to pick up the words and speak at the same time. It’s kind of wooden and it’s quite interesting to see it repeated almost like a text.

Then it starts to break down. Each performer has their counterpart—so the actor Matthew Whittet is repeating dancer Alastair McIndoe’s part of the conversation while Alastair is trying to talk to him. It becomes quite dislocated. Then it moves into how you might feel about losing track of a conversation and your mind going into other places—the way you can have a dual consciousness.

The dancing is mostly quite choreographed. It seems that those sorts of flights of fancy or the shift to another thought process are really well interpreted by the dance section.

Sometimes, but at others it just happens. It can erupt out of a conversation and obliterate it. I know it’s a bit of a cliché but the dancing represents those aspects of us that are really not about language and words and logic and being able to string sensible sentences together.

For quite a long time I’ve been quite interested in this idea of what it is that dance actually says to us. It’s obviously something but I don’t think I’ve ever been able to say what exactly that is. Nor have I heard anyone articulate that in a way that’s been really satisfying. It’s something I like to keep exploring. But at the same time, I think we can articulate our relationship to dance.

Then you’ve added the iPhone element, which is interesting in an age when people are umbilically attached to these things.

It’s been a fascinating thing to work with. People behave completely differently from the way they did a decade ago. These phones are our connectivity nowadays, a huge part of the way we communicate. We’re also using quite a few iPhone apps in Conversation Piece. Some of the music is being generated by iPhone apps and the phones are plugged into the sound system. Everything in life exists within this little rectangle of plastic. It’s an amazing thing but it’s also disturbing even seeing people on stage trying to get their conversation set up; it’s very clear how isolating that is. Not that I’m against iPhones at all.

weather

I’m a bit of a warm weather person, which has always been difficult living in Melbourne. I love Melbourne but there is that weather aspect that you might wish was different.

No, I don’t suffer what’s called Seasonal Affective Disorder—no more than anybody else on a grey day. I spent a couple of years growing up on a farm when I was a young child and there was this strong connection to climate and especially rainfall. It was in a dry part of South Australia so there was this idea of really being affected by natural, uncontrollable forces in terms of when the rain fell, whether it ruined the crops or whatever. If there hadn’t been any rain, your bath would only be a couple of inches deep. The weather had a real impact on our lives. But I think even living in cities it’s amazing how dependent and attached and in tune we are with the weather. It’s probably the main thing about the natural world that we really are connected to.

It’s pretty simple. I just thought it would be a really great topic to explore choreographically. Probably the thing that’s been interesting for me this year with two quite large works on the go is that I’ve been able to split my interests a bit. I am quite interested in text—more of a choreography of words I guess. It doesn’t really come from a theatre-making place; it definitely comes from my background as a choreographer. It includes words, emotions and almost creating characters—so that the choreographic pool of language becomes much larger in Conversation Piece. But I also have a real love for pure choreography and dance. So in Weather I have a subject that allows me to really explore movement, direction, force and emotion—to a certain degree. Plus it’s just becoming so important now. Our awareness of the weather has really changed, the way we think about it. It’s not just this thing from out there that we can’t control; we are actually beginning to change the weather system. And the conversation about the weather is changing.

I read that you don’t see Weather as episodic, but as evolving, perhaps like the initial chat in Conversation Piece. Why is that important to you?

It’s also been something I’ve questioned in my work, or in choreographic work in general. You often go into the studio and you make sections, you make one part and then another part and then you put them together. It’s unavoidable to a degree—you can’t work on everything at once. I’ve attempted to make the shifts between things less abrupt and with more of a bleed into each other, similar to the way that weather changes—although weather does sometimes change quite suddenly. One of the things that’s really become quite prominent in the work is a more abstract idea of weather as represented in maps and diagrams where you see the isobars shifting or the highs and lows and weather fronts moving. I’ve gone into more representational movement than I normally might. I’m more often attracted to quite abstract movement, but there’s something about the simplicity of moving like the wind or like water. It’s almost a child-like relationship to dance and movement.

The sound is not what you’d expect. I’m working with the composer Oren Ambarchi. It starts with a pulse, which you might not associate with the weather which is so fluid and changeable. But it almost sounds like a motor that starts up and then the pulse pretty much goes all the way through the work. There’s a section in the middle where it drops out and moves into speakers called Leslie Cabinets in which fans shift the sound, like a Doppler Effect, and then it returns to its rhythm. It creates a sense of time or of the world turning, building in a way that you have an expectation that something is about to happen, and it gets greater and greater.

What do you anticipate the audience might feel about the weather you create?

I don’t know what they’ll feel but I would like them to have more of a visceral response to the work. It’s visually intricate and the choreography is very involved. I would hope they’d become absorbed and drawn into it in a kind of unquestioning way.

Lucy Guerin Inc is celebrating its 10th birthday this year. The company was started up by Lucy Guerin and Angharad Wynne-Jones in a small office above the Malthouse carpark. The company has gone from strength to strength under the partnership of Guerin and executive producer Michaela Coventry, who joined the company in 2006. Coming performances include Untrained at BAM in Brooklyn, November 27-December 1 and at the Mondavi Center in Davis, California. Yorgos Loukos, Artistic Director of the Lyon Opera Ballet, has commissioned Guerin to create a work as part a triple bill, to be premiered in May 2013, with William Forysthe and one of Australia’s most promising young choreographers, Lee Serle. Emma Gladstone from Sadler’s Wells has commissioned a co-production with Lucy Guerin Inc which brings together English theatre director Carrie Cracknell, currently based at the Young Vic, and Lucy Guerin. There have been two creative developments of the work which will premiere in early 2014.

Belvoir: Lucy Guerin, Conversation Piece, Aug 25-Sept 16, www.belvoir.com.au; Melbourne International Arts Festival: Lucy Guerin Inc, Weather, Melbourne, www.melbournefestival.com.au

intermission

Compared with Thousands and Cannibal, the other parts of his Trilogy, Matthew Day’s Intermission unfolds as if from the dark night of a dancer’s soul, one whose body is trapped in the waves of stress from an ever mounting Sisyphean labour. If you hadn’t seen the first two works with their droll ruptures in otherwise exacting flows of magical transformations, you might well have wondered what you’d walked into.

Intermission is black—gloves, clothing, floor, enveloping curtains and mood. The sound score is an oscillating, increasingly multi-layered and intensifying hum. Day’s initial moves seem, as ever, to emerge from a tense stasis. A shoulder moves back. A heel lifts. What appears to be a kind of walking on the spot takes shape with a slight sway; but Day is actually on the move, circling in a wide arc to the curtains behind, almost merging with the blackness on our right. Turning back to us, he executes an extremely slow right leg lunge, right arm leading. He gradually extends his arms and raises his hands in an ambiguous, weighty supplication to be repeated over and over. The overarching pattern, more elaborate in detail than I have words for, moves to our left, the sound slipping away and then resurgent with attendant bright light until Day, with that abstractly imploring gesture, stops.

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. When I interviewed Day for RealTime he explained, “while I was performing (Cannibal) I started to discover a wave in the vibration. It’s just a very simple thing about the weight shifting between the right and the left foot, the transference of weight across the body and across space—the eternal wave that’s present underneath that” (RT109).

Ideally, intermission needs to be seen in close proximity with Thousands and Cannibal in order to fully absorb the binding power of stillness, vibration and wave movement that make Matthew Day’s Trilogy a very strange and fascinating creation.

be your self

Garry Stewart’s Be Your Self for ADT is, for all its raw humour and reverie, an essentially dark or perhaps simply realistic account of the disconnect between ourselves and our bodies and the likely inevitably of our species simply slipping back into the great ecological soup. Physical movement in this work is initially described in a slather of neurobiological terminology up against the exquisitely slow moving body whose functions it is describing. Such control is short-lived. We witness an onslaught of involuntary behaviour consume the dancers who twitch, gurgle and dry retch, tussle and battle in perfect sync with a dynamic sound score that accentuates the sheer viscerality of performance. Bodies impose on other bodies; a dummy is the recipient of various projections until it threatens to strangle its manipulator; moments of hard-won intimacy evaporate; and, unusually for contemporary dance, changes of mood are facially, if fleetingly, expressed. A brutally convulsive, enacted heart attack brings home the life and death core of Be Your Self. To realise this involuntarism requires inventive choreography and skilled dancers who are equally able to perform passages of play, display and posturing—elements of our voluntary selves perhaps, or genetically driven?

Be Your Self then glides into another world altogether as a ramped stage slides forward, onto which are projected images that suggest nature with abstracted curling tendrils while dancers limbs slip up from beneath like new growth. Clusters of arms and legs form crab shapes—new creatures. Bodies mutate—the distance between a head and legs eerily elongates. Finally, a lone figure slides head first down into nature; human mutability is at an end. Atypically for Stewart, this part of the work is contemplative. Save for a moment when a heart pulses aggressively, the end comes gently and existentially. While not altogether convinced by some of the spoken text and the limited integration of the actor who delivers it, and uncertain about the duration of the latter section, I thought Be Your Self richly rewarding, at once funny and serious, visceral and intelligent—a major work.

This rare appearance by ADT in Sydney was welcomed with critical acclaim. Apparently, we’ll see G in 2013, but when will we get to enjoy the company’s latest, much praised work, Proximity, which tours Europe in the same year? Too much waiting.

PACT: Intermission, concept, choreography, performance Matthew Day, dramaturgy Martin del Amo, sound design James Brown, lighting Travis Hodgson, PACT Theatre, Sydney, June 19-30; ADT: Be Your Self, choreography Garry Stewart & the ADT dancers, assistant choreographer Larissa McGowan, design Diller, Scorfidio + Renfro, sound design Brendan Woithe, lighting Damien Cooper, video design Brenton Kempster, costumes Gaelle Mellis, dramaturg Julie Holledge; Sydney Theatre, May 31-June 3

FICTION OFTEN COMES WITH A POTENCY THAT MAKES IT MORE PERSUASIVE THAN NON-FICTION. THE ABSENCE OF BLACK AND WHITE FACTS ALLOWS US TO LEAP INTO GREY AREAS WHERE WE CAN WRESTLE WITH ETHICS AND MORALITY.

Tidefolk Fictions is an ambitious project by emerging choreographer James Welsby, a recipient of the City of Melbourne Young Artist’s Grant. Against the backdrop of the ‘fish bowl’ room at Melbourne Aquarium, the performance was a family-friendly foray that engaged the viewer gently and, occasionally, humorously.

Tidefolk Fictions acknowledges that the life aquatic ignites the imagination because so little is actually known about it. It urges us to enter a fictional realm where we can start to view the sea as more than just vast and blue. It is a timely performance. There are growing concerns about the acidification of our oceans, the effect of climate change on sea levels and of the coal industry’s effect on the Great Barrier Reef. While lacking a cohesive, single narrative, the performance consisted of eight short segments bound together by a singular theme: the sea and the fears (ecological or monstrous) and fantasies that come with it.

Story-telling and fish tales go together. Welsby’s starting point was the novel Gould’s Book of Fish by Australian writer and environmentalist Richard Flanagan. In his fictionalised account, Tasmanian convict William Buelow Gould, also an artist, obsessively paints fish before ultimately transforming into one. Vocal recordings played during the performance offered snippets of fiction—a woman with a growing predilection for bathing morphs into a scaled and gilled creature.

Opening with a melodramatic score that evokes Forty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Welsby unveils a Gould-like canvas with a finned monster after enacting a sit-in portrait session. Aiken, the subject of the painting, displays open-mouthed horror. Fair and statuesque, she couldn’t be further from the image but we enter the realm of make-believe through the picture. The dancers are now fish caught in a net; they flap about on the ground, screeching for oxygen with loud, infrequent gasps.

The unison of the four young dancers was noteworthy. In the blue-tinged environs of the Aquarium, in their matching costumes, they had the silent comradeship of synchronised swimmers. The crowd seemed to relish the demanding acrobatic aspects with one performer swung by her hands and feet for quite some time. Welsby’s choreography delves into the perpetual state of motion of the sea. The ebb and flow of tides was explored, the movement becoming unbroken and circular around the dance floor. The four performers were able to enact the intuitive dance that a school of fish engages in as it binds then separates when in danger. The dancers run in unison then change direction and cut through each other. Patterns gave way quite beautifully to improvisation.

Moving on into playfully camp territory, the performers called out the names of various fish species to be enacted (the chapters of Flanagan’s book are named after species). From the standard fish and chip shop species, Welsby shouts ‘disco-shoes-with-goldfish-in-them-fish!’ There is a particular strangeness to the marriage of dance and fish. I am thinking of The Chemical Brothers’ “Salmon Dance” or even the animated A Shark’s Tale (where Christina Aguilera and Missy Elliot do a cover of the 1976 hit song “Car Wash”).

Holding a performance in a busy space was never going to be an easy feat. The aquarium remained open to a curious public who tended to shuffle into the ‘fish bowl’ and move on in confusion. Performers Sarah Aiken, Chafia Brooks, Jessica Wong and James Welsby managed to remain focused amid the distractions, holding the floor for 40 minutes for the three-dozen or so committed viewers. Competing for attention with the silently graceful Mako and Grey Nurse sharks, the dancing was at its best when quietest, echoing the streamlined, harmonious movements of the fish. In exploring anthropomorphism, the dancers seemed to commiserate with the wild creatures trapped in glass around them. The location, which seemed to detract from the performance, was, in hindsight, one of its most important elements.

As a child I thought that the Sydney Aquarium was a glass tube jutting out into the harbour. The fish on display were in their natural surrounds while human spectators were the fish out of water, so to speak, in that fragile bubble. Watching Tidefolk Fictions made me recall this childish confusion; here are dancers who blur the line between human and fish, and between art and attraction in the Aquarium.

Tidefolk Fictions, producer, director James Welsby, choreography James Welsby in collaboration with performers Sarah Aiken, Chafia Brooks, James Welsby, Jessica Wong, sound design Josh Hogan, costumes Doyle Barrow, lighting Gavin Ruben—The Rubix Cube, Melbourne Aquarium, May 9-12

IT’S NOT THAT IT HASN’T BEEN DONE BEFORE. FEMINISTS HAVE CRITICISED THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF FEMININITY SINCE THE LATE 1960s. BUT EACH GENERATION DOES IT IN ITS OWN WAY. IN ANY CASE, THINGS HAVE HAPPENED SINCE THEN.

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.

Eke begins as a performing Guerilla Girl, naked but for a Buffy-style demon mask. She is on a pedestal, twirling a hula hoop over and over again. We file in, listening to the swish of air, a grinding reality that refuses to seduce despite the obvious virtues of Eke’s body.

This Monster Body sits somewhere between the real and the imaginary. It spits in the face of culture as it is, inevitably, swallowed by it. After all, how can a beautiful, young woman contest the beauty myth that permeates our perceptions of the female body? Through her own agency for a start. 1960s feminists were concerned to reject the objectification of the female body by the viewer (aka ‘the male gaze’). Eke bypasses the question through exerting her own thought in action leaving it up to us, the audience, to negotiate. She tries to help by transforming her own body.

Eke wants to become monstrous but this is not so easy. Somehow she has to fiddle with our imaginations, to twist the actual into something else in a field which is not under her control. For example, having chugged a vat of vitamised something, she stands in the middle of the room and urinates, then rolls in the vast puddle. The shock (and joy) of the transgression mutates into the glistening beauty of female curves. She stuffs her tight body suit with balls, suggesting a deformation of body shape. The resultant body image flips between malformation and insistent beauty. Similarly, towards the end of her piece, she paints her face out with pink makeup. For an instant she is disfigured, but as the painting covers her entire face, she re-emerges as a complete (and attractive) image.

This Monster Body is a series of assays, experiments that gesture towards the otherwise, while falling back into reality. Eke has an army of masked Guerrilla Girls who dance naked. It is nice to experience the strident energy of these women, to watch a man wander the stage with mop and bucket. Maybe things have changed.

One Show Only is a different kettle of fish, though it also has an air of collaboration, between Byron Perry, the choreographer, and Singapore’s Frontier Danceland. This is a dance between the one and the many. Perry draws upon the many to create something singular, for example, a cosmos composed of hands. A sign of human dexterity, the hands work at a very fine level, towards pattern formation. Little torches create a starry firmament. Atmospheres mutate into a series of moments.

While we are wrapped in a blanket of darkness, there is a sense of distance between the audience and the action that I want to disappear. Would the power of One Show Only be amplified if we could be installed inside this pattern? I think this would have worked for the first part of the piece, which is essentially nonhuman. There is a shift in gears however towards phrase material, into the rhythmicity of ‘contemporary dance’ which has a human face. The pleasure of expressing technical facility shows in the bodies of these very focused dancers, morphing into a series of smiling faces. I’m not sure why they were smiling. The shift between the nonhuman atmosphere of the first half and the recognisably human tenor of the dancing in the second was a bit of a jump for me. Once I see dancers doing their thing, I start to watch what they are doing, and they were doing pretty well. One Show Only was composed of parts, initially forming a whole, less so as time went on. If the intention was for these serial gestures to make a whole, then the question arises as to how the parts relate, how the movement from one section to another can recombine in some way to enhance the power of the work as it shifts through time.

This Monster Body, choreographer, performer Atlanta Eke, performers Amanda Betlehem, Tim Birni, Tessa Broadby, Ashlea English, Sarah Ling, lighting Marita Petherbridge; Dancehouse, Next Wave Festival, May 21-27; One Show Only, choreographer Byron Perry, performers Christina Chan Jia Ai, Foo Yun Ying, Bernice Lee Yixun, Rachel Lum Ruixia, Seow Yi Qing, Keryn Ng, Zhang Xuesong, sound design Luke Smiles, lighting Benjamin Cisterne, Arts House, Melbourne, May 9-13

OF THE MOST OVERUSED WORDS DESCRIBING ARTISTS AND THEIR WORK, ‘UNIQUE,’ WOULD SURELY BE THE CHART TOPPER. WHEN APPLIED TO PERTH-BASED LINK DANCE COMPANY, HOWEVER, IT’S A MATTER OF FACT.

LINK is Australia’s only graduate dance company—one of a kind. It is based at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA), part of Edith Cowan University (ECU). This year marks the company’s 10th anniversary.

LINK was originally established by independent dance maker Chrissie Parrot as part of a practice-based research project within WAAPA’s Dance Department in 2002. Subsequently, it evolved into an ongoing resident company. As a one-year postgraduate program, LINK is open to dancers who have completed a three-year tertiary dance course. It functions as an Honours Year for BA graduates and a conversion year for Advanced Diploma students, allowing them to upgrade their qualification to a BA. Each year a new company is formed.

Michael Whaites, LINK’s current artistic director, took up the position in 2006. An accomplished performer, choreographer and teacher, he was an internationally successful dancer during the 1990s, working with Twyla Tharp in the US and Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater in Wuppertal, Germany. It’s his experience of working with a wide range of choreographers, Whaites says, which has shaped his view that versatility can be a dancer’s greatest strength. He explains: “My philosophy, if you like, revolves around the idea of diversification, the ability to work with a variety of different styles and approaches.”

True to this philosophy, Whaites seeks to ensure that the two programs LINK presents each year—one in May, the other in October—are of works that expose the dancers to vastly different choreographic visions. This year’s May program, Variant, is a case in point, bringing together a 1996 creation by American modern dance legend Twyla Tharp and a more recent piece by Larissa McGowan, best known for her work with Adelaide’s Australian Dance Theatre.

The LINK experience also includes extensive touring both nationally and internationally. Performance seasons in Melbourne (Dancehouse) and Sydney (Io Myers Theatre, UNSW) towards the end of the year are complemented by a mid-year overseas tour comprising performances and workshops. Over the years, Whaites has forged the strongest connections with presenters and arts organisations in Amsterdam, Brussels and France. During this year’s tour, LINK performed at Mouvement sur la Ville in Montpellier and at the prestigious Julidans Festival in Amsterdam.

So, what is it exactly that attracts dance graduates to apply for LINK? “What the year gives them,” says Whaites “is reflective time to work out what it is that they are interested in. Most of the dance courses in Australia are so busy teaching and imparting information that it’s hard for dancers to figure out what they really want. LINK gives them a sense of being supported while also having the opportunity to start to think for themselves.”

There is no denying that the LINK year places high demands on the dancers. In addition to attending daily class and rehearsals, the members also take on production responsibilities and are expected to help raise funds for the annual overseas tour. To graduate from LINK, the dancers are further required to write a thesis, exploring a research topic of their choice. Whaites insists that the benefits far outweigh the challenges. “I haven’t done the fine lines of the statistics,” he laughs “but I would say that of the over 80 dancers who have been in LINK since its inception, more than 90% of them are still in the profession—whether they are working on independent projects or are making work themselves or dancing in companies.” The list of LINK graduates who have gone on to successfully work within the Australian dance sector is impressive indeed. It includes Jhuny-Boy Borja, dancer with Bangarra Dance for many years, Philip Channells, until recently the artistic director of Adelaide-based Restless Dance Theatre and Juliette Barton, dancer with Sydney Dance Company.

And as for the 10-year anniversary celebrations, what’s in store? “The October season is going to be a first for the company, which is exciting,” Whaites says. “It’s a co-production and in partnership with Fremantle Arts Centre. Five choreographers—Kim McCarthy, Sue Peacock, Jacob Lehrer, Jo Pollitt and myself—are going to collaborate on the work. All the choreographers will be performing in it as well. The work will be in a promenade format and will take its inspiration from the varied history of the building.” Not surprisingly, Michael Whaites named the piece Diversify.

IF EZRA POUND’S ‘MAKE IT NEW!’ WAS A RALLYING CALL TO ARMS FOR THE VANGUARD OF MODERNISM, THE PHRASE HAS IN RECENT YEARS BECOME MORE OF AN ANXIOUS ONE MUTTERED COMPULSIVELY, MANTRA-LIKE, TO WARD OFF SOME VAGUE EVIL.

Artists now remain charged, by tradition and funding guideline alike, with the demand to innovate and reinvent and find novel ways of doing the same old things. It’s all-too-obvious when a sharp and beguiling idea has been lost amid a flurry of formal trickery that appears forced; when someone’s original intent has been clouded by some notion that this alone is not enough. When a work does engage with the new in ways that don’t seem anxious or unsettled, then, it puts everything in bold relief.

sex.violence.blood.gore

MKA Theatre has only been around for a few years, but has already made reckonable advances from its hit-and-miss beginnings to a program that’s always worth studying closely. At least two recent works have been unmissable—last year’s The Economist (RT107) and the even more startling and accomplished sex.violence.blood.gore. Where both offer much to encourage is in the negotiation of experiment and convention. MKA is a company dedicated to the text, seeking out and presenting to the public new works with a solid investment in the good ol’ fashioned written word. But in these later productions, at least, there has been no hint of slavish reverence to the play, and neither has there been a need to inject irreverence where not necessary. The result has been an organic marriage of text and performance that makes the two seem inextricable.

sex.violence.blood.gore was written by Singaporean playwright Alfian bin Sa’at and, given its outrageous subjects, was understandably scandalous when first performed (in relative secrecy in a basement, no less). The work is composed of a series of vignettes that defy categorisation—farcical psychosexual/historical/political playlets united less by a specific thematic or narrative line than a particular energy that runs through each. It’s a kind of uncontainable libidinal excess. It’s not that kind of taboo-breaking transgression that so often reaffirms the binaries supposedly blurred; rather, it’s a sexuality that is too much of everything—too overwhelming and everywhere, simultaneously explicit and repressed, hysterical and hilarious, but also too self-aware, too self-negating. This excess is what drives the work so urgently. At no point can an audience member think: ‘This is what’s really being said, I see now,’ without immediately being offered something to contradict such a conclusion.

The individual sequences gesture to contemporary and historical Singapore while introducing more abstract and non-naturalistic terms of reference. A local under the Japanese occupation of WWII is made a sexual slave by foreign forces; a pair of tightlaced British colonialists fantasise about their subjugated maids; trash-talking teens on a train spark up a strangely eroticised verbal slanging match with two transvestites. All is played against type, however; actors are cast cross-gender and -ethnicity, while make-up and costume are heightened to the point of absurdity.

Most of all, the performances suggest that what matters most here is identity, both individual and social, as masquerade. Nothing is allowed the aura of the authentic, but rather than resulting in a diminishment of significance, a liberation of meaning occurs in which the playful interchange of masks seems to be the catalyst. To look for the real behind the painted face isn’t even a consideration.

I wasn’t the only person to leave the theatre with a desperate desire to read sex.violence.blood.gore in its original form. Stephen Nicolazzo’s direction is most fascinating in the way it makes it impossible to tell whether he’s radically reinterpreted the text or stuck to its dictates. The whole could be played in an entirely realistic fashion and still hold great power, but I don’t know where Alfian bin Sa’at ends and Stephen Nicolazzo begins here. I probably don’t want to. The whole I saw, in all of its enveloping messiness, was more than enough to satisfy.

the golden dragon

There’s no such fuzziness in Roland Schimmelpfennig’s masterful The Golden Dragon, in which the text itself enacts an initially playful but eventually oppressive battering of its performers. Schimmelpfennig has for some time experimented in this manner, with works that foreground their own staging (and pre-staging) by having actors recite stage directions, pauses and the like. The Golden Dragon combines this mode of presentation with a tightly woven narrative passing through bleak and arresting terrain.

A broad series of interwoven plotlines circle the pan-Asian restaurant of the title. In the kitchen, an illegal immigrant has a tooth yanked by coworkers and begins bleeding to death amid the steaming dishes; the incisor makes its way into the soup of one of two airline stewards on stopover; a nearby German shop owner entices a dumped lover into his dingy upstairs apartment; and a young Chinese girl is trapped in a nightmare of sexual slavery.

Early on the postmodern permutations of the playing style position the work as meta-theatrical comedy, and there are plenty of laughs (the actors ably fulfil the demands of the required style). But as the work develops, it becomes apparent that the world on display is one of permanent displacement, with workers from all walks of life severed of rootedness and stripped of their agency as a result. If sex.violence.blood.gore finds an energy in inauthenticity, The Golden Dragon offers an opposite vision. There is poetry, as in a recurring fairytale about a foolish cricket abused by a menacing ant, but this too soon becomes a ghastly abstraction that mythologises a very real act of monstrosity.

Perhaps this is Schimmelpfennig casting a critical eye on his own practice—certainly, it calls into question the complicity of post-dramatic theatre in cultural disempowerment. Denying theatre an essential ability to speak truth might well put us all in the same position of the work’s characters, and indeed its actors, and rob us of the tools with which to imagine our own change, let alone take some action of our own. If so, what’s a dramatist to do? That Schimmelpfennig ends with a lyrical image that provides no useful answer is both encouraging and unsettling. No easy end to this night, but plenty to chew over.

from the ground up

Circus Oz’s latest production, From the Ground Up, explicitly addresses the long-running company’s own reinvention. Its design aesthetic is based around the construction site—giant steel girders descend from above, cranes and construction equipment hover around the space. It’s fitting, given the recent completion of a brand new, dedicated home in Collingwood. It’s also a symbol of how the company seems, to this writer at least, to have been undergoing renovations more than merely cosmetic in recent years.

It’s not quite right to say that Circus Oz has become more serious in the last half-decade, but it does seem to have found the next level of confidence which might suggest some kind of maturing. The clowning (always a key binding ingredient in any CO show) is more developed, less directed as kid-oriented filler between acts and more cohesive and wry. Newcomer Ghenoa Gela certainly stole the show at the matinee I attended—stirring in gentle political commentary without losing the attention of the crowd’s youngest members, and generating real laughs throughout.

But circus has one of the hardest tasks in ‘making it new’—most of its elements come with histories that may span centuries, and trying to reinvent these is more about subtle tweaking or dressing up trapeze, balance or juggling in unusual trappings. That shouldn’t be a negative. The company’s last outing, Steampowered, was one of its finest in the way it teamed strong performances with a striking steam-punk aesthetic. The spectacle of a construction site just can’t match that, really, and From the Ground Up might have sacrificed something in going for a symbolically relevant theme.

Recently entering its 30s, though, Circus Oz is definitely out of its cocky teens and there are few lingering insecurities of its 20s. Its experiments might not be as radical or showy as the kinds you see on a play stage or gallery wall, but they’re there, and we’re immeasurably luckier for it.

MKA Theatre, sex.violence.blood.gore, writer Alfian Bin Sa’at with Chong Tze Chien, direction Stephen Nicolazzo, performers Genevieve Giuffre, Catherine Davies, Matt Furlani, Whitney Boyd, Amy Scott-Smith, Zoe Boesen, Caitlin Adams design Eugyeene Teh, lighting Yasmine Santoso, sound Claudio Tocco; MKA Pop-Up, North Melbourne, Jun 29-Jul 17; Melbourne Theatre Company, The Golden Dragon, writer Roland Schimmelpfennig, translator David Tushingham, director Daniel Clarke, performers Rodney Afif, Ash Flanders, Jan Friedl, Dana Miltins, Roger Oakley, design Andrew Bailey, lighting Emma Valente, sound Russell Goldsmith, MTC Lawler Studio, Jun 22-Jul 7; Circus Oz, From the Ground Up, performers Ania Reynolds, Bec Matthews, Carl Polke, Chad Albinger, Dale Woodbridge, Flip Kammerer, Ghenoa Gela, Hazel Bock, Jeremy Davies, Luke Taylor, Mason West, Ruby Rowat, Shane Witt, Stevee Mills, Circus Oz Big Top, Birrarung Marr, Melbourne, Jun 20-Jul 15

FOR SYDNEY THEATRE COMPANY, BELVOIR RESIDENT DIRECTOR SIMON STONE AND STC CO-ARTISTIC DIRECTOR ANDREW UPTON HAVE ADAPTED FOR THE STAGE THE SCREENPLAY OF AN INGMAR BERGMAN FILM FROM 1976, FACE TO FACE. WHILE THE SCREENPLAY HAS A CHAMBER THEATRE INTENSITY THAT OFFERS EASY ADAPTABILITY, ITS FOCUS ON ONE PERSON’S NERVOUS BREAKDOWN AND HER ESCALATING IMMERSION IN VISIONS AND NIGHTMARES CREATES A SIGNIFICANT CHALLENGE FOR THE ADAPTORS AND DIRECTOR STONE, AND A WONDERFUL FILM ACTOR KERRY FOX, PLAYING THE ROLE MADE FAMOUS BY LIV ULLMAN.

Bergman made some of the greatest films of the 20th century: intelligent, visceral and darkly existential. He was also a leading European theatre director. His theatrical sensibility so informed his films that we might regard his filmmaking as an innovative synthesis of film and theatre. It’s no surprise that Simon Stone would want to direct something written by Bergman. I spoke with him about the appeal of the screenplay and how he and Upton would deal with those Bergman fundamentals—dream and the human face.

While I was writing The Wild Duck (RT102) I was reading lots of Bergman screenplays because I wanted to find a screenplay-like formula to make the sense of fate in The Wild Duck more ‘fateful,’ rather than constructed. I love that sense that the theatre just needs to bring on what needs to happen next. And I think a lot of Shakespeare’s best plays are great for the fact that there’s this passage of inevitabilities that come on to the stage. I wanted to explore something different with The Wild Duck—I wanted to explore what tragedy is like if it feels avoidable. If it feels like the structure of the show has multiplicity in it and therefore there are a million other versions that could have happened. Cinema certainly lets you feel that because the camera could have been pointing in any direction, gone to any location and have followed any character. So the sense of freedom in that makes it feel fateful. So I was reading a lot of Bergman because he’s got the same brutal honesty about the human instinct.

Just the way that Bergman is unapologetic about the way humans are towards each other was a really strong guide for me. So I watched a lot of Bergman and read a lot of Bergman screenplays. I think I’d kind of managed to not notice that he’d made Face to Face even in my reading of his autobiography. I thought, wow! How is this not a better-known film? As a screenplay it’s actually remarkably acute and really the most fascinating insight into depression and madness that he wrote, I think. But the dreams were the problem in it and Bergman certainly wrote about being unsatisfied with the way he’d resolved the dreams. I’m trying to find a theatrical solution, not just to to resolve something that Bergman felt was unresolved but also resolve something that can’t be resolved in the same way.

That’s exactly right. It’s a particular challenge because the ghost of Bergman can’t really guide me other than through all of the influences I know he had, like Strindberg’s bluntness in A Dream Play where he just brings someone on and they announce who they are and why they’re there and what they want, and the play moves on. The fact that Bergman directed that play five times in his life has been more of a guide for me in terms of how to resolve the dreams onstage in this and what else might need to be written for Jenny to get to the point of breakdown in the play.

It’s become much more Strindbergian. People come in, they convey memories, they are moments in Jenny’s past knocking on the door of her consciousness. They’re very explicable; you need to find solutions to something that has actually been written in quite a mundane way like all great dreams—like all of Tarkovsky’s dreams, and Bergman thought Tarkovsky was the only filmmaker who ever solved dream. It’s actually a slowing down of life rather than a speeding up of it turning into something more hectic and awful. It’s something much more contemplative and meandering. That’s what I’ve gone for. It’s reminded me a bit of Marguerite Duras’ La Musica (1974): two characters can talk their entire relationship through as theatrical text in a way that in real life just doesn’t happen.

No, that all happens in the audience’s mind as these series of spectres enter Jenny’s room and talk to her about her past, which is proving much more successful. The constant is that she’s in a hospital room, having survived a suicide attempt. And that’s really heartbreaking because no matter what Jenny must have been like when she was a 14-year old girl, it’s always juxtaposed with the fact that she’s in a room recovering from a suicide attempt. So there’s a melancholy in that, which is very beautiful.

Which is actually as close as you can get, I suppose, to the way cinema can move fluidly between one reality and the other—by not changing the lights, not changing the furniture or anything in the room, not using it as a tabula rasa. It is very much just one space.

A friend who’s a Bergman scholar wrote that he felt more at ease watching the films on DVD by himself rather than sharing them in a cinema with other people. They’re so emotionally raw.

For that reason, in the theatre it’s going to be even more confronting. I always have a sense whenever I read a Bergman screenplay or watch a Bergman film that he’s managed to understand something about the way my brain works that no-one else has been able to put into words for me to understand it.

There’s something at once very thoughtful and very visceral about Bergman’s films.

I remember seeing Winter Light for the first time and being astounded by the fact that the Max Von Sydow character was so terrified of the bomb, that Bergman was making films that were so unadorned and so completely cathartic of these everyday terrors. Bergman, from the beginning of his career, was unveiling these horrors at the centre of men and women. I was watching a black and white film that was so brutally honest about human psychology—not in any way melodramatic. Look at what was happening in Italy at the same time, it was as formally exciting and as wonderful in terms of its reducing life to basic truths, but the form of delivery in those Italian films was still quite melodramatic. Even in Antonioni, the performances of Monica Vitti particularly were still in the mode of 1930s Italian melodrama, whereas Bergman for some reason—probably because of his isolation geographically—had managed by the 60s to get to the point where actors were just sitting, not changing their facial expression and telling a story. Just a face. The restraint in that.

That’s the biggest challenge, a dual challenge—firstly to find a way for the equivalent of a close-up to be achieved, for an audience to see the way a person’s body language is manifesting just facial expression. How do you do that on a stage when an audience can look anywhere? Secondly, what complicated that was the way we traditionally solve cinematic language on stage in terms of creating elliptical, seamless staging, where people come on before other scenes are finished and objects appear. How to differentiate that from a dream reality was very difficult because the way we solve dream on stage is very similar to the way we solve multiple locations and multiple timescales that cinema texts provoke. There are various ways of doing that, of setting the whole thing in one place and it transforms itself. Or having it on a bare stage where things come and go and things overlap. Nevertheless, both of those will end up looking like dream.

So, I actually needed to find a journey through the show that started off focusing on the person, the face—and the show has to follow that character’s response to everything they’re watching. But then we need to resolve that into essentially a ‘second theatre’ [of dreams] so different from the first theatre that it feels so contained and concrete, rather than abstract, that the audience is very aware of the difference between those two modes. [That involves] a change of style in the text, which is slightly scary because sometimes suddenly changing a style of storytelling half-way through a piece of theatre can be disconcerting and disorientating. But it’s disorientation for good rather than evil.

Sydney Theatre Company, Face to Face, a film by Ingmar Bergman, adaptation by Andrew Upton, Simon Stone, director Simon Stone, Sydney Theatre, Aug 7-Sept 8, www.sydneytheatre.com.au

PETER BARCLAY DESCRIBED HILARY BELL’S THE BLOODY BRIDE, THE PRODUCT OF NORPA’S GENERATOR PROGRAM IN LISMORE, NSW, AS “A DARK JOURNEY INTO THE INTIMATE EMOTIONS AND CONFLICTING ETHICS OF RELATIONSHIPS AND SEXUALITY…A MOST PROVOCATIVE PIECE OF THEATRE (RT87).” THE WRITER’S WIDELY PRODUCED PLAYS, WHETHER FOR ADULTS OR YOUNG AUDIENCES, HAVE ATTRACTED CONSISTENT PRAISE, NOT LEAST FOR WOLF LULLABY (1996), AN AUSTRALIAN CLASSIC.

Bell has been busy with two works already produced in 2012: The White Divers of Broome for Black Swan State Theatre Company in Perth and Victim Sidekick Boyfriend Me for the National Theatre’s Connections Program in London. Now Sydney Theatre Company is producing The Splinter, a haunting tale of an abducted child returned to her parents—but is she in fact theirs? I met Bell to discuss what attracted her to this doubly disturbing scenario.

I have a real penchant for gothic horror and psychological drama. I read Robert Louis Stevenson (Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde), Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, (Bram Stoker’s) Dracula—some fantastic stuff—and came up with a treatment, which was all the company wanted initially for a play from me for children. They looked at the treatment for The Splinter and said, “We can’t put this on for children; they’ll be terrified!” (LAUGHS) It was a bit too scary but also it’s a play which depends on its power of suggestion. And I think you need to be a grown-up—or maybe a teenager—to understand how that splinter of doubt can grow and infect your whole view of the world. It’s a grown-up’s play.

Is it inspired by any substitute child stories in particular or did that just come to you?

I guess I’ve had a bit of an ongoing fascination with fairy law and changelings in particular. Fairytales in general are just so rich and so deceptively simple. There’s so much going on underneath.

It seems from reading the play that you aim for a kind of apparent simplicity. There’s not a lot of back-story, just hints from time to time. It’s all very much in the present, very fable-like. There’s even a fairy story in it.

Yes, that’s one of the things that Polly Rowe as dramaturg has been doing—encouraging me to lift out too many contemporary references. I want a couple. Choc-drops I wanted to keep.

You can get too ethereal. You have to be careful, don’t you, that that the play doesn’t become ‘unearthed.’

But on the other hand it feels very concrete because of the intense relationship between the couple. It’s very frank actually.

I think it’s been a really healthy marriage and they have survived that trauma of losing their child, which not a lot of couples do. I guess that was one of the inspirations for me for this play: that question of when you get everything you want, when you’ve been through absolute hell and your child is restored to you, that should be the happy ending. I read about a teenager who had been stolen from her bed and returned nine months later. It happened in the US and I was living there at the time. There were hurrahs and celebration all over the newspapers. I couldn’t help thinking, how do you as a family achieve some kind of normalcy after your child has been through that—the things she’s seen, the things she’s had to confront, the places that you as parents have been—the dark recesses that you’ve had to explore?

But in The Splinter we don’t know, which probably makes it worse in a way.

In some ways it does. And what would it be like to sit down to dinner again as a family? What would you talk about? I don’t think it would be “How was your day?” Would you talk about anything? So that was actually the first scene I wrote and I called it ‘Eggshells’ because I thought it would be like walking on eggshells—the things you couldn’t say, the dangerous territory. What bits of land are left for you to walk on when everything is so fraught but you’re also brimming over with gratitude?

Many relationships come unstuck once someone is lost. It’s like the glue that was there is gone and there’s a desire to blame. Guilt is an interesting component in your play.

A lot of it is guilt to do with the husband’s suspicious mind. Ultimately there’s a point in the final scene when his wife says, “Whatever you’ve been thinking, wherever you’ve been in your imagination, I accept you and I forgive you and I accept responsibility for pushing you there and let’s just get on with it now.” And he is forced to admit, “Well, if Laura is not that person, if she’s not everything I’ve impugned her with, then what does that make me?” He can’t bear the notion of what that makes him. It’s actually safer and more comfortable to continue on an insane trajectory. There have been many inspirations for this play but that came from The Turn of the Screw. I read it twice. The first time I thought the children were possessed and the governess was a heroine. The second time I thought she’s bonkers and she’s projecting all this stuff onto these two innocent children. And there’s a moment towards the climax where she has that exact thought: if these children are innocent, then who am I, what does that make me?

The play’s a very interesting study of a male going to pieces and you take it pretty far. It’s almost hallucinatory—and poetically so.

There were times right at the very beginning of the process where I was thinking, well does it matter which is the father and which is the mother. I thought it’d be interesting to study what it’s like for a father in this situation. And one thing that I guess I instinctively knew about—and we’ve been unpacking it in rehearsals—is that bond that a mother has with her small child. Certainly for the first year the father is pretty much excluded. [When the child is returned] he tries to be involved but something in him keeps pushing her away. And the husband and wife have probably done the worst thing they could do by removing themselves from society. They thought they could bond again but they’re just three people rattling around in this empty house.

How then do you see the wife’s role? In the beginning she’s the one who’s saying, “Don’t go outside…” She’s ultra-protective because she’s living for now, for the moment. Whereas he’s started living backwards in a way—’what’s been done to us?, ‘we’ve lost a chunk of our life.’ She’s not going through quite the crisis he is.

No she’s not. She makes a decision. In some ways she’s just as vulnerable as he is at the beginning and their relationship is also very exposed under that pressure, but there’s a point where she makes a very clear decision that she can’t live like that and that it’s not healthy for them or the daughter. So she commits one hundred percent to being with this traumatised, mute little person. When he indicates that he’s not sure about the identity of the child, the wife reacts so violently. I think that means it has occurred to her and it’s a disgusting, repellent thought. And she has rejected it. Whatever the situation, she says, this is Laura and I’m her mother and I’m going to commit.

I like that anger. It’s a strong response and she knows where he’s weak.

I’ve been fascinated for a really long time—it’s in some of the things I’ve written over the last few years—by the question of identity and people needing someone to be the person they want them to be.

The other thing this play’s about is people behaving in ways they never thought they were capable of and seeing themselves as strangers. And, yes, not recognising the person they’ve been married to for 10 years.

The way The Splinter is to be performed—with puppetry—how did that come about?

I had the treatment, which involved the mother, the father and the child. You really have to think hard about how to portray children on stage. Wolf Lullaby has a nine-year old girl as the main character. It’s pretty much always been performed by a young woman playing that part. That’s the wonderful thing about theatre, you put her in a school uniform and everyone believes in her within 30 seconds. But I did see it once with a real child and that made it a completely different play. But with The Splinter I didn’t want to have to deal with a grown-up playing a 4-year old. And I wanted her to be on stage, not just talked about. I didn’t want a real child. There would be thoughts you imagine running through the audience: “Who were the parents that let their child be dunked in a bucket of blood?” or “What a good little actress.” Those sorts of things get in the way of the show.

I was talking to Polly about it and I’d seen a production that my father (John Bell) had directed of Madam Butterfly not that long before and they had a beautiful little Bunraku puppet as the child. It was completely blank, a little lump of wood that was specifically articulated so it looked like a child but had no face. And interestingly enough in changeling law sometimes you pull back the bedclothes of your baby’s cradle and there’s a lump of wood that’s been left there. So I said to Polly, “What if we did it as a puppet? And Polly had been working with puppeteer Alice Osborne in a workshop the week before. She said, “Talk to Alice and see if you get on.”

We had a workshop soon after that. Alice made beautiful little ‘empty’ dresses. One was made of stiff paper so you could pick up and dance with it, play with it. Another was made from a garbage bag that she sewed in the shape of a child’s dress. One was a cotton dress with wire threaded through the seams so it stood up. And they had these incredible personalities, these empty dresses. You didn’t have to have the puppet child; you could create a whole world with a bunch of tinfoil and brown paper and cornflakes and bizarre props that Alice had found in the prop room.

There’s a stage direction that says, “The room turns inside out.” I saw exactly how we could do that with a sheet of plastic in front of the performers and then it was whipped round and it was behind them. And everything that you had taken for granted suddenly looked grotesque. It was thrilling to see what could be done with the simplest of means. The two performers who do the puppetry have a really beautiful sensitivity for it, an intense concentration and that ability to negate your presence while you’re working with the materials.

The Splinter features actors Erik Thomson (Packed to the Rafters) and Helen Thomson (recently seen in STC’s Under Milkwood) as the husband and wife, with Julia Ohannessian and Kate Worsely as puppeteers, directed by Sarah Goodes, with puppetry and movement created and directed by Alice Osborne and design by Renee Mulder.

Sydney Theatre Company, The Splinter, Wharf 1, Sydney, Aug 1-Sept 15, sydneytheatre.com.au

FROM OUR CITY OFFICE WE CAN HEAR AND OCCASIONALLY GLIMPSE IMPASSIONED AADA STUDENTS HARD AT WORK, REHEARSING AND IMPROVISING JUST ACROSS PITT STREET. THEY’RE IMMERSED IN A HEAVY DUTY, FULL-TIME, TWO-YEAR BACHELOR OF PERFORMANCE DEGREE COURSE WITH SIX LONG TRIMESTERS AND MOUNTAINS OF HANDS-ON EXPERIENCE IN ALL ASPECTS OF THEATRICAL CREATION.

Course Coordinator and Voice Director Alistair Toogood spoke with me about the school, the Australian Academy of Dramatic Arts—AADA (pronounced, aptly, like RADA without the R), its origins and aims. “It sprang from the mind of Andrew Davidson, who’s the Head of Department. It has a long history going back some 20 years and was purchased a few years ago by the Australian Institute of Music (AIM). Andrew developed what had been a fairly standard acting diploma course into a Bachelor of Performance. The thrust of that was a course that is really built for the Australian industry in terms of creating something unique—that our students are trained in all the aspects of producing a theatre performance.”

The basis for the course is, says Toogood, “very strong acting training, very good acting teachers and our core units in acting, improvisation, movement and voice. Students also get training in how to think in terms of creating story— mythology, archetypes, dramaturgy and adaptation. Alongside there are technical units that enable them to become lighting and sound operators and designers.”

I assume the aim is to turn out actors who if faced with the need can self-produce without feeling helpless. “Yes,” says Toogood, “but it also means they’re ready for anything that might get thrown at the actor. The reality of the Australian industry is that you have to have a number of strings to your bow. So we cover directing, design, stage management, finances, producing, filmmaking, as well as film acting and promotion, on top of the strong core acting units. This all really comes together in the second half of their course where they devise works in groups, putting what they’ve learned into practice, guided by very good mentors. They might act in the production, or direct or design it. Our graduates, for the couple of years since we started, are already out there working—producing and marketing and acting in their own work.”

I ask if some students turn away from acting and take to another aspect of theatre. Toogood says that they all “arrive dreaming of acting but some discover a passion for costume design or voiceover work—and we do training in that. As soon as they start with us they’re developing technical and stage management skills—the first year students are the crew for the second year productions. That experience gives them some ideas about which direction they’d like to go.

“We have an industry placement program at the end of the course and have found that our students often have to step in and replace someone or otherwise help out. They’re always ready to step up.”

AADA’s staff includes a strong line-up of teachers who have worked at or graduated from NIDA, WAAPA and other institutions. Toogood tells me that “core staff studied postgraduate courses at NIDA—Andrew Davidson, myself, Stefanos Rassios. Anca Frankenhaeuser is a wonderful movement tutor carrying on the work of the late, great Keith Bain, employing his movement process throughout the course. Marcelle Schmitz who used to be my acting teacher at WAAPA comes over to teach acting in the foundation stage.” Other staff include Matthew Edgerton, Sean O’Shea, Lex Marinos, “who teaches audition technique and Lynn Pierse, the great impro teacher. Helmut Bakaitis, who taught directing at NIDA for many years now teaches it at AADA.”

Courses are conducted at Pilgrim House in the centre of Sydney utilising the Pilgrim Theatre and three workspaces. The computer lab, film facilities and green screen are located at the main AIM campus in Surry Hiils.

Recent graduates include Sepy Baghaei who won Best Production at the Short and Sweet 2012 Play Festival for the one man show he wrote and directed, Something to be Done, and Melissa Brownlow who has been accepted into Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s Summer Residency Program in Chicago. Toogood says of the Bachelor of Performance degree courses that they’re “jam-packed, well structured and thought-out. The two-year degree is not a short-cut; the students are fully engaged and know at the end that they’ve done something special.”

THE CONDITION LABELLED HYSTERIA HAS BEEN LARGELY RESTRICTED TO WOMEN (AS A NERVOUS DISEASE EMANATING FROM THE UTERUS MANIFESTING IN DIFFERENT PARTS OF THE BODY AS THAT ORGAN ‘WANDERED’). HOWEVER IN THE COURSE OF THE 20TH CENTURY AND INTO THE 21ST THE TERM HAS BEEN MUCH MORE LIBERALLY APPLIED AS THE NERVOUS INDISPOSITIONS OF MALES AND FEMALES HAVE BEEN RECOGNISED AS AT THE VERY LEAST SHARING KINDRED SYMPTOMS. IN THIS ARTICLE I’LL USE THE TERM VERY LOOSELY, APPLYING IT TO A COLLECTION OF RECENT PRODUCTIONS IN SYDNEY THAT CENTRED ON MALE FEARS AND FAILURES.

the histrionic

Hysteric and histrionic sit nicely together phonologically although they have discrete etymological roots (respectively, “of the uterus” and “pertaining to acting”). Hysteria entails behaviour exhibiting excessive or uncontrollable emotion. An histrionic personality disorder is one in which the subject insists on being the centre of attention, behaves as if before an audience, is emotionally volatile and excessively sensitive to criticism. The description fits the ageing Bruscon, the actor who dominates Thomas Bernhardt’s The Histrionic. A “national living treasure” who has fallen on hard times, Bruscon and his family of performers find themselves in an Austrian backwater. So tryannical is Bruscon that he thwarts his children’s performances and has driven his wife into silence. Director Daniel Schlusser admirably realises the near chaotic state that such a personality generates. Director and designer surround the performers with a mess of decaying theatre props while the action comprises endless interruptions, emotional outbursts, fractured rehearsals and, finally, the destruction of Bruscon’s grand creation by a competing local sausage sizzle and a storm.

Fate and a backward culture deal Bruscon a cruel blow, but he is his own worst enemy. Dangerously fragile, he feels his status to be constantly threatened. The solution? Perpetual self-aggrandisement, rampant sexism, the belittling of his sons and a desire to control his daughter to the point of incest—with just a hint of reciprocity from her, despite the bitterness of their exchanges. In one of the many delicious visual asides, the daughter sits sharpening a very long knife while her father rehearses. For Bernhard, The Histrionic was a depiction of Austria, culturally decrepit and authoritarian and embodied in Bruscon who, nonetheless, is allowed a few insights into his country’s failures, if never his own. Bille Brown creates a very believable and frightening Bruscon, the primal ruler of the herd, in a performance that braves the not always manageable tendency of the play to the monodramatic and the monochromatic.

death of a salesman

Willy Loman is another tyrant, if of a more domestic kind, but equally self-important and just as punishing of his sons, although more insidiously because it is his inflated belief in them which is destructive. His great achievements are his career and his sons, and he effectively loses them all, but the road to acceptance of his condition is long and hard, and incomplete. Colin Friel’s Willy is ebullient, even when tiring and feeling his age, quick to anger and to speechify, a man who almost dances to his death.

At the centre of an otherwise bare stage in Simon Stone’s production sits a humble, white 1996 Ford Falcon sedan, Willy’s proud possession. We know this is a cipher for the American cars so lovingly spoken of in the script, but a car is a car and Stone makes great use of it—it represents Willy’s travels, it’s a refuge and it’s a site for theatre magic as characters unexpectedly emerge from within its comforting womb. It’s also unpronouncedly and humbly phallic, a natural extension of the man, patted and fondled and admired. And when Willy no longer feels up to travel it becomes a place to die, not on the road, but in the yard. By centring the performance in and around the car, Stone creates a wonderful psychological seamlessness which, along with overlapping scene shifts, makes Willy’s visions of the past more palpable as they come over him like incipient dementia.

Like Bruscon, if without that man’s inherent sadism but blindly cruel nonetheless, Willy is beset by rage, despair and incomprehension and a desire for total control that is quite at odds with his place in the world. Willy is an arrogant performer, a fabulist, an histrionic and an hysteric whose failed dreams of being the ideal, loved worker and father take him to the edge of coherence and self-control. Bruscon is exemplar, critic and victim of the political failure of the state. Willy Loman is a passionate promulgator of the American Dream, enacting the state fantasy, imposing it on his family and destroying himself—victim and executor. Colin Friel’s performance is superb, supported by a very strong cast including Genevieve Lemon as Willy’s wife, Linda and there’s an excellent Biff from Patrick Brammall. Presumably because Stone, with designer Ralph Myers, has cast his Death of a Salesman as one man’s nightmare in which past and present deliriously mingle, there is no room for the final Requiem scene with Linda’s anguished eulogy—because it’s not part of Willy’s consciousness. Failing to find a way to incorporate the Requiem without sacrificing his vision, Stone takes the knife to Miller. Male hysteria?

old man

Matthew Whittet’s Old Man is a spare account of a young father’s struggle to achieve a sense of fatherhood—a kind of junior Death of a Salesman but without any sense of the dilemma entailing his career, politics, whatever. Sam (Leon Ford) feels distant from his two children, unable to manage their behaviour and alarmed that he might become, like his own father, an absence, someone who will be forgotten. Old Man is part dream play, in which Sam wakes to find his family gone, and part naturalism, where he acts on what his nightmare has taught him and goes in search of the father (Peter Carroll) who abandoned him as a child. Unlike Bruscon and Willy, Sam is not overtly controlling, but in his dream world he is a confessional storyteller, addressing us directly, increasingly panicky, suicidal even but rescued by his mother whom he cruelly and unjustly blames for his father’s desertion. This might be a dream world, but it is very telling, indicative of deep disturbance.

Perhaps then it seems a little too easy that in the real world Sam announces to his family that he has found his father and will go to see him. The scene with the father (Peter Carroll) is the play’s best. Carroll invests a simple man with complex, often unspoken responses. It’s clear to Sam there can be no meaningful reunion and perhaps that’s all he needs to know. However, at the play’s end, at the dinner table, Sam asks his family to never leave him. Ford plays it plainly but with just a touch of pleading that takes them by surprise, and an awkward silence ensues. Perhaps the good is that he has revealed himself to his family, the bad that his anxieties are still very real. Whittet doesn’t dig deep or at length in this short play, but the evocation of the emotional crisis of a very ordinary man in an intimately staged production is palpable.

die tote stadt

Paul (Stefan Vinke) in Die tote stadt (The City of the Dead), Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s opera of 1920, has built an altar to his dead wife, Maria (Cheryl Barker), fetishising her golden locks and lamenting at length his undying love for her. A dancer, Marietta (Barker again), almost identical to the wife, enters his life and from that encounter springs a dream, in which Paul becomes her lover, inflicts cruelties on her and grows jealous as she flaunts her sexuality in the demimonde of which she is a part. He murders her and wakes to find himself much improved, eager to leave Bruges and its aura of death behind. What’s curious is the cure: the symbolic murder of his wife. In effect, he rids himself of her by transforming an idealised woman into a dangerously free spirit. In Bruce Beresford’s production for Opera Australia, Paul is admirably played by Vinke as dignified and tightly self-controlled before his breakdown commences. In Inga Levant’s production for Opera National Du Rhin (Arthaus DVD, 2001) he’s an utterly abject figure from the word go, unlikely to attract any woman’s interest let alone our understanding. If hysteria in opera has long been associated with diva roles, here it’s embodied firmly in the male—there’s an enormous amount of lovelorn, passionate and mad high-note singing which Vinke performs brilliantly. Cheryl Baker as Maria/Marietta meets similar demands with exuberance and sensitivity. The music is an odd blend of Viennese opera, Richard Strauss, Puccini and Korngold’s trademark melodic lushness. It’s an over the top opera in more ways than one, a borderline classic, but worth seeing for the singing above all—and the alarming male hysteria embedded in the libretto by the composer and his father.

bell shakespeare, the duchess of malfi

Bell Shakepeare’s brutally truncated adaptation of The Duchess of Malfi caricatures a great play, chronically reducing the time and space it needs to work its dark magic and superb testing of empathy. In an incomplete attempt to frame the work within the consciousness of Bosola—the hitman who turns just avenger of the Duchess he has murdered at the behest of her brothers— this version severely limits Webster’s fine distribution of complex characters across a large theatrical canvas. The performances are largely one-dimensional—even Lucy Bell’s otherwise nuanced Duchess is too girlish for too long; right to the bitter end in fact. The merging of Cariola and Julia is awkward. Ben Wood’s perpetually gruff, blokey Bosola undercuts the character’s politic role-playing art, Sean O’Shea’s Judge (Ferdinand in the play) is ragingly histrionic and David Whitney’s Cardinal perhaps aptly neutral—a touch of George Pell, I thought. The hysterics are, of course, the Duchess’ brothers, the Judge and the Cardinal, their motivation for not wanting her to marry and then having her killed is a mix of incestuous desire and powerplay. But in this case, it’s the adaptation that’s hysterical, as if maddened by a play that resists control, it all too hastily cuts to the plot chase.

As with Simon Stone’s Death of a Salesman, if you give the play a governing consciousness, something has to give. Here, Bosola is left alive at the end, a wiser man, but without facing the full consequences of the biddings of his conscience—death. He is pretty well reduced to a Morality Play figure, but he should be much more than the bearer of rhymed homilies. Likewise we need more time and space in which to live with the Cardinal and the Judge and their festering hysteria.

Sydney Theatre Company, The Histrionic, Thomas Bernhard, translated by Tom Wright, director Daniel Schlusser, performers Bille Brown, Kelly Butler, Barry Otto, Josh Price, Katherine Tonkin, Jennifer Vuletic, Edwina Wren, design Marg Horwell, lighting Paul Jackson, sound design, composition Darrin Verhagen, Sydney Theatre Company, June 20-July 28; Belvoir, Death of a Salesman, writer Arthur Miller, director Simon Stone, performers Colin Friels, Genevieve Lemon, Patrick Brammall, Steve Le Marquand, Hamish Michael, Pip Miller, Luke Mullins, Blazey Best, design Ralph Myers, lighting Nick Schlieper, composer Stefan Gregory, Belvoir Theatre, opened June 23; Belvoir, Old Man, writer Matthew Whittet, director Anthea Williams, performers Alison Bell, Peter Carroll, Leon Ford, Gillian Jones, Madelaine Benson/Mitzi Ruhlmann, Tom Usher/Zac Ynfante, design Mel Page, lighting Hartley TA Kemp, sound Stefan Gregory, Belvoir Downstairs, June 7-July 22; Opera Australia, Die tote stadt, composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, director Bruce Beresford, performers Stefan Vinke, Cheryl Barker, designer John Stoddart, lighting Nigel Levings, conductor Christian Badea, Sydney Opera House, July 3-18; The Duchess of Malfi, writer John Webster, adaptation Hugh Colman, Ailsa Piper, director John Bell, performers Lucy Bell, Ben Woods, Sean O’Shea, David Whitney, Matthew Moore, Lucia Mastrantone, designer Stephen Curtis, lighting Hartley TA Kemp, composer Alan John, sound design Steve Francis; Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, July 8-Aug 5

ANNE-LOUISE RENTELL’S PRODUCTION OF MARCEL DORNEY’S NEW PLAY, CHARCOAL CREEK, IMAGINES A PAST SHIMMERING WITH BRUTALITY. SET IN CHARCOAL CREEK, NSW (NOW UNANDERRA), IN THE LATE 1870s, THE LAND IS LUSH BUT DEVASTATION—THE MURDERING OF ABORIGINAL PEOPLE—HAS SCARRED THE ENVIRONMENT AND THE PSYCHE OF THE COLONIALS. THE NARRATIVE DOESN’T DEAL HEAD-ON WITH BLACK AND WHITE AUSTRALIA BUT INSTEAD RECREATES THE KINDLING OF FEAR AND PREJUDICE; THE BURNT LANDSCAPE OF THE MIND.

The play begins with its four characters—recent English arrivals, Charlotte (Olivia Beardsley) and husband Edward (Ed Wightman), and local dairy farmers Brigid (Catherine Moore) and husband Tom (Johnny Carr)—being drawn into swampy gloom to stand, like disembodied spirits, between tall, cindered trees. Running water, darkness, a metallic screeching. A slash of pulsating light reveals Brigid. Her mind ravaged by dreams, her fury fuelled by fear, she’s an Irish Elektra, an oppressed spirit seeking revenge, railing against the thunder, her husband’s snoring, her child’s crying and the unjust treatment of the Irish by the English. Her nighttime tirade foreshadows the play’s violent end and reflects Dorney’s interest in the way the past infuses terror into the present.

Charcoal Creek, humanist in perspective, asks universal questions. Does violence breed violence? Can past horrors be overcome? Can injustice be forgiven? Short scenes and poetic soliloquies unravel the shaping of a colonial community through a story of two households. Like Elektra, Brigid is the catalyst for murderous action. Although from invader stock herself, she views her new neighbours as invaders. Class division, family prejudices, historical injustices are to blame. Edward and Charlotte’s snobbery doesn’t help. Edward, a zealot for Darwin’s theory of natural selection, is in railway management and uninterested in farming. He bought the land for investment. Charlotte, a Bronte-reading romantic, gets bored and seduces Tom. Brigid’s revengeful impulses are unleashed. She sets the town against her neighbours with devastating consequences. When a raiding party passes by, flaming sticks in hand, she turns away. Dorney writes Tom as the martyr of the story. He embodies (perhaps too neatly) the clash of black and white Australia—his father responsible for hunting raids on Aboriginal people, his great grandfather, Aboriginal. Tom rushes to aid his neighbours, saving Charlotte (his child in her belly) but loses his own life.

Moore portrays Brigid as a bitter, stoic woman whose psyche is muddied by ingrained prejudices. Carr’s Tom is a good soul caught in forces beyond his control. Wightman juxtaposes Edward’s inner torment with outer jocularity. Beardsley’s Charlotte is intelligent and delightfully wicked. Anne-Louise Rentell’s theatrical landscape, moody and dark, is itself a pulsing spirit. Verity Hampson’s lighting creates a dynamic sculptural space where characters appear and disappear like magic tricks. Daryl Wallis’s sound design cleverly juxtaposes the natural with its industrial future. Imogen Ross’s costumes embody class division—Charlotte and Edward’s material lushness against Tom and Brigid’s common-sense fabrics.

There are some odd notes to this production: having decided upon an abstract set Rentell divides the forestage in two, one side for each household, and unnecessarily limits the playing space; the 20th century voice-overs seem out of place in the last moments of the play, yet would work wonderfully as the audience enters and exits; the off-stage references to children only highlight the fact they aren’t there; Moore does not take the opportunity to add vulnerability to Brigid’s interior monologues and the character’s stern exterior casts her too easily as the villain of the piece; Brigid’s costume, constantly neat and trim, never gives the sense of a working woman who must slosh around in the muck of cowsheds, nor of her nighttime instability.

But these are minor criticisms, remembering also that new plays need a first run in order to settle. Charcoal Creek is a tightly directed, thoughtfully realised production that enters the debate about prejudice from a colonial perspective through a conjuring of psychological landscapes.

Merrigong Theatre Company: Charcoal Creek, writer Marcel Dorney, director, designer, Anne-Louise Rentell, performers Olivia Beardsley, Johnny Carr, Catherine Moore, Ed Wightman, costumes Imogen Ross, lighting Verity Hampson, sound designer Daryl Wallis; Illawarra Performing Arts Centre, Illawarra, NSW, June 5–16

THE DUSK ACHES ITS WAY ACROSS THE DESERT SKY AND A CROWD GATHERS ALONGSIDE A STORMWATER DRAIN THAT SEPARATES THE ICONIC SPENCER HILL FROM THE SMALL ALICE SPRINGS SUBURB OF EASTSIDE. AS THE LIGHT SLOWLY DECLINES, HISTORIES EMERGE FROM SHADOWS AND SAND; FIGURES BLENDING WITH VOICES TO EXCAVATE THE LAYERS OF STORIES UNDER TODAY.

Under Today is the outcome of a five-year quest to uncover what director Dani Powell describes as “the things that we don’t see, as relative newcomers to a place that has been extensively mapped by those who have lived here before us.” The work’s genesis is in oral history, with Powell piecing together the final narrative over many years from interviews with past and present residents of Alice Springs.

Powell realised she was “making a documentary and the question then became how to engage a live audience with a deeply aural work.” Multimedia artist Alex Gillespie was one of her earliest collaborators on the project. Gillespie’s long-term involvement is reflected in the deep synergy between the soundscape created from the oral histories and her projections of historical and contemporary maps onto the contours of the landscape.

Intimate knowledge of the Spencer Hill site is central to the work’s breathtaking use of the landscape; durational manipulation of light and shadow throughout the performance is elegantly employed to illustrate social and historical proximity. The opening sequence of silhouetted figures emerging from and fading back into the landscape left the eye searching for stories in the last of the light; a poignant analogy for the dispersive and ephemeral nature of human experiences layered over the site.

In contrast to the effortless synergy between lighting design and soundscape, the success of the contemporary dance elements as a vehicle for image-based performance was sporadic. Aspects of the live performance provided thoughtful juxtapositions with the aural narrative; the imagery of dancers extracting clothing buried in the sand was captivating throughout, providing an evocative visual metaphor for buried histories. However, much of the choreography, such as pizza-spinning gestures accompanying histories of the Italian community, centred on literal interpretations of individual stories and displayed limited conceptual integration of core themes of the work.

Unlike another recent site-specific performance, such as Big hART’s Namatjira in Ntaria/Hermansburg, Under Today is not designed to tour. It has been produced from and for the community of Alice Springs. Despite this, its key message—the importance of understanding the far-reaching historical relationship between the earliest inhabitants and the land—is one that is relevant beyond its local audience. Powell’s depth of commitment and skill in collecting and re-presenting these stories in live performance is to be applauded. In a political climate where measures of social dysfunction are often cited as a justification for government interventions on Aboriginal land, Under Today serves as a timely reminder to the community of the complex and contested nature of land tenure and belonging in Central Australia.

Red Shoes, Under Today, director Dani Powell, lighting Kallum Wilkinson, projections Alex Gillespie, sound design Damian Mason, choreography Miriam Nicholls (Bond), producers Red Shoes and Browns Mart Productions; Spencer Hill, Alice Springs, May 25-27

EVE, A THEATRICAL MEMOIR OF AUSTRALIAN NOVELIST EVE LANGLEY, IS THE LATEST PERFORMANCE WORK DEVISED BY THE LONG-TERM COLLABORATORS IN THE NEST ENSEMBLE. INITIALLY CONCEIVED WITH BRISBANE THEATRE STALWART AND SADLY MISSED DIRECTOR DOUG LEONARD AND HIS PARTNER, DESIGNER ANNA FAIRLEY, EVE IS NOW VERY MUCH IN THE HOUSE STYLE OF THE NEST. AS WITH THEIR PREVIOUS PRODUCTION, THE KNOWING OF MARY POPPINS, BASED ON THE LIFE OF PL TRAVERS, THE AUDIENCE IS INVITED TO ‘READ’ AND ASSESS THE LIFE OF A SIGNIFICANT AND MISUNDERSTOOD FEMALE AUSTRALIAN ARTIST.

Eve Langley’s life is representative of the experience of many female Australian artists of the1940s: brave and bold, with freedom as their leitmotif. Langley’s most famous novel, The Pea-Pickers (1942), is her autobiographical account of adopting a male persona, Steve, in order to go fruit picking with her sister in the Gippsland region. Unfortunately, the price of such artistic and personal liberty was excruciating: poverty, domestic drudgery and madness. Langley’s work and her life became increasingly florid and disassociated, and by the late 1940s she had formally changed her name by deed poll to that of her hero, Oscar Wilde. Like Janet Frame, Langley spent years in an asylum, only to be rescued by her sister in 1956. She was found dead in her remote hut in Katoomba in the Blue Mountains in 1974, her face eaten by rats.

EVE opens with a few key propositions. A ghostly Eve greets the audience, demanding, “Would you consider me mad now? Who is it that can tell me who I am?” The haunting central image of the work is the prone body of Margi Brown Ash as the three-week old corpse of Eve Langley, her incandescent face tilting back slowly to reveal a “mouthful of planets.” The other figures are caught in Ash’s orbit; they are her hallucinations rather than separate entities. The male violinist Moshio accompanies the singsong poetry of the text with a score by Travis Ash. Stace Callaghan is perched directly above the life-sized bush hut that dominates the stage, as the child-muse narrating the well-known Oscar Wilde short story, The Selfish Giant.

What EVE captures exquisitely is the pain of Langley’s life, particularly the years leading up to her committal, with three young children, no money and a wayward painter for a husband. Ash’s caramel voice and whirling dervish performance energy is infused with danger and intensity in the passages of the piece that focus on these years, where Langley, like Ash herself, was trying to juggle the demands of young children and her artistic calling. This is the distinctive aesthetic of The Nest Ensemble at its best: autobiographical and literary, archetypal and sensual, like a warm bath of emotion and word. There are no sharp edges or raw blisters.

If there are any criticisms to be made of the show they exist generally around this sort of memoir theatre. Like the polite, hushed tones of a panel at a writers’ festival, there were moments where the literary overwhelmed the performative and the reverent elegy snuffed out the blowsy and exuberant wildness of Langley’s life and writing. Langley’s vocation, to write the mythic Australian landscape, was evoked by a sequence involving a chalk map on the back wall of the Sue Benner Theatre and a list of Langley’s works. Homage was paid and dutifully noted but Langley’s driving compulsion was being described rather than experienced. I should acknowledge, though, that in the performance I attended Moshio had to leave the stage with a broken string and so I saw a show with the vital performance element of the soundscape missing.

Yet the sense of literary and metaphoric remove was also reinforced by the design. The dominating bush hut, filled with the naturalistic props of Langley as an aging recluse, read as Australiana rather than interiority. Placing and containing Stace Callaghan in the balcony, unable to move, akin to the dead body of Langley, neutralised her powerful performance energy. The decision to foreground the words of Oscar Wilde felt like another literary frame. Langley had her own male alter ego, Steve, one she inhabited in life and recreated in her novels. However, EVE exploded theatrically when the autobiography of a performer’s body intersected with the literary and historical story of Langley. It felt like a missed opportunity not to experience that with Callaghan too. Perhaps the danger of consistency is that your accomplishments become the norm. Criticism aside, EVE is a deftly directed and beautifully constructed account of an important Australian artist’s life.

The Nest Ensemble, EVE, writer, co-deviser Margi Brown Ash, director, co-deviser Leah Mercer, performers Margi Brown Ash, Stace Callaghan, Moshio, co-deviser Daniel Evans, composer Travis Ash, design Backwoods Original, lighting Genevieve Trace, costumes Kate White; The Independents, Sue Benner Theatre, Metro Arts, May 9-26

YOU HAVE GOT TO LOVE A SHOW THAT OPENS WITH A CABINET OF CURIOSITIES. CURLY TAPS, AN ODD LOOKING FLAG, WONDROUS WHEELS AND EVEN A BOWL OF APPLES ARE SET ATOP A PAIR OF ORNATE DOORS THAT YOU HALF EXPECT TO BE CONCEALING A BOG-STANDARD COFFEE CART. ITS ODDITY HARBOURS SUCH GLEE THAT GUESSING AT ITS FUNCTION IS THE PERFECT WAY TO CHANNEL THE EXCITEMENT OF A MASS OF CHILDREN ALL TOO IMPATIENT FOR THE REAL PERFORMANCE TO BEGIN.

Terrapin Puppet Theatre is masterly at this kind of stuff, for all the right reasons. They know their audience intimately. They write with them, collaborate with them and tend to fashion clever narratives peppered with just enough curious angles and obtuse twists to keep families engaged. With Sleeping Horses Lie, their latest two-hander, the story is of Sally, a young girl who plays tiger with fingernails of strapped-on felt pens, bravely navigating a world of adult indifference and fear. In a kind of classic quest, two storytellers enact the journey of her unsettling dreams using all the ‘he said/she said’ literary devices of picture books and bedtime stories. The narrators jump between characters to warn us that “this is what happens when shapes change shape in the night” as Sally reluctantly ventures to the park after being chastised for using house walls as canvas to her felt pen art. Putting on her best brave, she becomes “Sally Long Claws” and encounters friends and foe along the way, including a pair of trickster horses who give the work its title. In a fun narrative twirl at the end, Sally is eaten by the imagined tiger she so anxiously fears, but her ingenuity eventually wins the day.

The performance adopts a Victorian-era storytelling aesthetic, with the wow factor being Terrapin’s now trademark form of digital puppetry. In this show, the performers’ expert use of touch screen iPod-sized devices to project parts of Sally’s journey creates a kind of magic that works well—even with an audience saturated in animation culture. Terrapin’s trick is to keep the basics of compelling puppetry at the core, for it is the sheer delight of unexpected transformations—big and small, digital and mechanical—that keeps the fascination alive in this work.

This show demands a lot of its performers, however. To capture the curiously aloof air that marks the best of the Victorian story-teller tradition is not as easy as it might seem, and sometimes the performance didn’t quite match the promise of the material. With so much going on (including the base task of getting through so much text in so little time), there was sometimes a sense of being hurtled towards show’s end. So it was no surprise to discover the performance we attended was the second of two back-to-back shows and the final of a two-week road tour. Yet, for any actor who has experienced it, there is nothing so priceless as the collective gasp or giggle of children in a theatre. To make good the contract, they deserve only the very best in exchange.

Terrapin Puppet Theatre, Sleeping Horses Lie, director Frank Newman, writer Maxine Mellor, performers Bryony Geeves, Kai Raisbeck, designer Selena de Carvalho; Earl Arts Centre, Launceston, June 16. Touring Tasmanian venues.

THERE IS A LOVELY AWKWARDNESS TO A DECIBEL PERFORMANCE, AS ITS MEMBERS YOKE TOGETHER ELECTRONIC AND INSTRUMENTAL SOUNDS TO TRY OUT COMPOSITIONS THAT TRANSPOSE THE TWO.

Decibel arrive on stage with all of the formalities of a chamber orchestra, wearing funereal suits and gazing seriously at scores unrolling on an array of networked laptops. Into this quiet, conservative atmosphere they work with the quirky edges of new music, each piece holding a surprise within it that turns the conservatism of composition on its head.

In Agostino Di Scipio’s Texture/Residue the musicians play without playing, tapping their fingers on the instruments without blowing or drawing a bow. Here lies the awkward moment that Decibel are working with, as we expect to hear the harmonies of instruments working together but are instead confronted by a tapping of fingers on cello, flute, saxophone and the like.

At some point being amused by the piece turns into a fascinating experiment in listening to what you usually deign not to hear. Instrumental sound is also the sound of the materiality of the instrument, a materiality that is here attacked vigorously by the fingers of the players, building to an anxious and beautiful texture of sound.

Liminum, by the outfit’s artistic director Cat Hope, is a brilliantly didactic example of what Decibel is interested in doing—colliding electronic and instrumental sounds, as if in a centrifuge. Here instruments imitate a distorted electronic sound, as if taken from a horror film soundtrack. There is a dark ambience at work here, as the instruments are required to remain at the pace and tone of the sound, never rising or falling to the registers they are capable of. This is Decibel at their most interesting, as electronic and instrumental sounds flesh themselves out in relation to each other, here beginning to sound positively industrial as a violin twists through the amplification of pedals.

Such experiments are symptomatic of the kind of awkward and fascinating fit that Decibel create, in compositions that sometimes generate harmony but often highlight the ways that sounds can slide and grate against each other. In Liminum, it is as if some bulbous creature is trying to order a drink in a bar but cannot make itself understood. Amid such experiments the standout instrument of the concert became the piano—ably played by Stuart James—pulling many of these sounds together just as they were moving in different directions. The piano also tied much of the concert to sounds that resembled those from a 1980s horror movie. A new work by Australian wunderkind Anthony Pateras, commissioned by Decibel, also had a haunting feeling to it, as did an atmospheric, moody composition by Perth’s Joe Stawarz.

The highlight of these horror themed pieces was JG Thirwell’s Canaries in the Mineshaft/Edison Medicine from his Manorexia project. Thirwell is better known for the brashness of Foetus, but like many rock musicians, discovered that he was also good at composing music. Innovatively combining the sound of a skipping CD, a record player and baby accordion, Thirwell’s composition offered a chance for the ensemble to show off what they are really good at, as different angles of musicality were thrown together in a series of distortions that built to sublime cacophony.

To throw the whole concert into a different register, a final, happier piece by Bohren and der Club of Gore called up images from a moody 1970s conspiracy film. Old cars in traffic and a recording of rain combined in one of those mixed up combinations that kept the concert attuned to the Decibel concept, while pushing its continuity.

Such disruptions make for a lively Decibel concert as short pieces try out different ideas, throwing sounds together and pulling them apart again. This gives their performances a freshness that can transform into a nervous disposition, as an audience waits for an irruption of new sounds. In a traditional concert setting, where everything is prim and proper, this could well be fatal to an experience of the music. Such discomfort provides however the perfect atmosphere to experience the uncertainty that comes out of collisions between one type of sound and another.

Decibel, Small Things: Decibel performers Cat Hope, Stuart James, Tristen Parr, Malcolm Riddoch, Lindsay Vickery, Aaron Wyatt, Callum Moncrieff, Perth Concert Hall, May 28

ENSEMBLE OFFSPRING’S NEW RADICALS PROGRAM PROMISES TO INTRODUCE NEW AND INSPIRING ART MUSIC TO AUSTRALIAN AUDIENCES. BEYOND THE THREAD OF LO-FI, DIY SOUND SOURCES LINKING THE WORKS, AN AIR OF RISK-TAKING PERVADED THE CONCERT. THE UNUSUAL SOUND SOURCES SUCH AS MEGAPHONES, 78RPM RECORDINGS, BUCKETS, BOTTLES AND SANDPAPER WERE BETTER APPRECIATED IN SOLOS AND DUOS WHERE THE AUDIENCE COULD CLOSELY WATCH THE PERFORMERS STRUGGLING TO CONJURE MUSICAL SOUND FROM THEIR MATERIALS.

Yannis Kyriakides’ Zeimbekiko 1918 is a palimpsest of nostalgia from its eponymous folk tune, through its composed realisation on violin and electric guitar, to the mind of the rapt reviewer sitting in the audience. Kyriakides’ patchwork of slow-attack guitar tones and pealing violin harmonics is based on an old recording of the zeimbekiko aivaliotiko he found while exploring his Cypriot roots. The tune from the town of Ayvalik in Turkey has its own history of memory and loss as Ayvalik’s primarily Greek population was displaced during the Greco-Turkish population exchange of 1923. To the musicians recording the zeimbekiko aivaliotiko in 1918 New York, however, the tune may have been a more positive organ of memory.

Kyriakides plays on this and his own history of imperfect remembering by cutting up and reordering the phrases of the tune into disjointed gestures and reeling decorative passages. The figures rise out of the hiss of the 78rpm record and repeat indeterminately or disappear never to be heard again. The bright tones of the recording jar against the violin and guitar, which are occupied with painting the past with a wash of long harmonic tones and chords. Already a dated work, the sound world of Kyriakides’ composition held its own nostalgic quality for me.

Written in 1995 and revised in 2001, Zeimbekiko 1918 bears the lo-fi aesthetic, combined classical and rock instrumentation, ponderous tonal minimalism and aching sincerity of its time. In fact the work slightly pre-dates the most successful bands making music in this vein like Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Veronique Serret on violin and Zane Banks on guitar matched the sincerity of the music without lapsing into sentimentalism, leaving the work’s emotion to the persistence of each ringing note.

The peculiar thing about Kyriakides’ aesthetic is that it not only paints a picture of nostalgia, suspending you in indefinite dreamy concern, but it is nostalgic to me insofar as I used to listen to an awful lot of this music around the time it was written. Having made this comparison, Kyriakides’ use of fluid meters demonstrates his distance from post-rock reverie and sustains an arresting peculiarity throughout the entire work.

If Kyriakides looks back to a lost time then Turkish-born and Sydney-based Ekrem Mülayim looks forward to one. Having previously invented a culture with a history, language and scripts so that he could imagine the relevant music, Mülayim here invented a new instrument, notation and choreography for percussionist Claire Edwardes. Each of the hand-crocheted gloves has three bells hanging from the tips of the fingers. Seated at a black table Edwardes endeavoured to dextrously strike and dampen each bell according to a unique form of notation combining choreography and sound. The result was beautiful in its simplicity and use of movement, with occasional silent gestures—an upheld hand or a wipe of the forehead—adding to the ceremonial focus of the performance. To watch Edwardes strain to keep the bells from inadvertently striking each other was like watching a shaman conducting a dangerous rite. The magical aura of the performance was only increased by the kick-drum hidden under the table that suddenly began to punctuate the spell.

At the other end of the New Music spectrum was the world premier of New Zealand composer Michael Norris’ Save Yourself, which the composer writes is based on sonic analogues of colour fields over-written with gestures and articulations. This description immediately brings to my mind that terrifying 80s TV show The Mulligrubs, or the seats on public transport. However, instead of Norris’ idea, I heard the timbral washes of the melodica and accordion ‘picking out’ sounds from the ensemble’s tutti chords, sustaining them for inspection like a ninja pulling out his opponent’s heart and presenting it to him as he dies. The struggle with unconventional instrumentation continued with valiant efforts to play the melodica pianissimo. As an ensemble work Save Yourself is a lesson in the economy and honesty of beauty. Nothing falls into the background and the audience follows every step of the way.

The unreliability of Mülayim’s glove-bells made me think of how safe our concert experiences are and how little we expect to go wrong. There is no sense that the virtuoso violinist is really walking a tightrope in that cadenza, or that the ensemble might miscount that 16:23 bar to disastrous effect. Bringing a bit of danger into the concert hall was Ensemble Offspring’s great triumph. Watching a performer struggle with an unusual sound source was the same as listening to a contemporary composer baring his sonic reasoning and putting it on the tightrope of the audience’s open judgement.

IN THE CROSSBOW FESTIVAL FOR SMALL ENSEMBLES THE QUEENSLAND CONSERVATORIUM CONTINUES THEIR PRACTICE OF COMBINING NATIONAL, INTERNATIONAL AND STUDENT PERFORMERS IN CONCERTS OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC.

Tonight it’s ELISION (plus four students) presenting six works, either Australian or world premieres, in the Conservatorium Theatre. It’s a traditional venue—stage up front, audience way down there. Great sound, but not as close to the performers as I’d like for what is a ‘small ensemble’ night.

The concert opens with Gyfu (gift) from Liza Lim. There are half a dozen music stands set up in a line to one side of the stage to give Peter Veale on oboe a clean look at the entire score—no turning pages. A good idea as the work is difficult, challenging, the sort of piece that gets played in competition. Veale gives his usual jaw dropping virtuosic display, technical brilliance completely subsumed to musicality. The upshot is a beautifully lyrical and sinuous performance with hints of Middle Eastern tonalities. Peter Neville’s accompanying percussion lilts, skips and dances, so that for a piece with such a modern language the effect is medieval and theatrical. Troubadours, duduks and multiphonics. Frame drums played with hairbrush and knucklebones.

Jump cut to the first Star Wars (the one that lauds people smugglers) and the introduction of the most annoying trope in sci-fi: the off-planet speakeasy with crazy plush puppets playing 30s future-retro space swing. Timothy McCormack’s One flat thing reproduced provides the rejoinder. The setup is a trio, Hot Club style. Neville sits cool and centre on drums, Veale hunches over with his oboe as though ready to pounce upon the score and Jennings stands to the side on violin. Fast and squeaky, chockablock with sex, humour, triumph and rejection, it’s the Kurt Weill bar for sleazy higher intelligences, unnatural alien superposition and quantum tunnelling between friends.

Benjamin Marks then follows solo on trombone, mute, and lots of singing into the mouthpiece for McCormack’s piece titled Here is a sequence of signs each having a sound and a meaning. The big brass can lend themselves to an element of silly, particularly when made to ‘talk,’ and Marks covers that for sure. But more than a bit of fun, or technical display, the piece develops into ranting hysterics, a frustrated diatribe against some diffuse, unknowable target. An incredible performance.

McCormack’s compositions then are full of character, yet this is in some ways surprising given the formal concerns expressed in his scores and interviews. We are used to the idea that the composer instructs the performer, via a score, to produce various pitches, notes and sounds for the listener. And traditionally the composer wants the listener to hear the sound, rather than hear the performer trying to make the sound. But McCormack has a different, maybe additional, aim—though one that reminds me of other ELISION composers such as Aaron Cassidy and Evan Johnson. McCormack deals with the physicality of production. He wants the audience to hear the underlying mechanisms, to hear the struggle between performer and instrument. His scores are filled with notations and equivocations that pull apart the different components of sound production into a number of autonomous strands of possible action. Performers are asked to make musical sense of the struggle to physically realise the conflicting and interlocking instructions in the score. The result is music that resonates with associations, a triumph of both the composer and the performers, and speaks to the deep connection this work has with the long history of music as an embodied communal experience, as a shared understanding of the effortful production of sound through the use of tools.

In yet another superb performance, Rebecca Saunders’ to and fro, for violin and oboe, gives violinist Graeme Jennings his time in the sun. Standing to the left of the stage, with Veale on oboe to the right, Jennings extracts a continual stream of flurrying harmonics that seem to exist within a thickness of sound. It is as though we can now hear the pitch of a note not as a frequency but as a domain of intricately related possibilities.

Finish the night with ELISION and student guests performing Richard Barrett’s wound i-v (strangely romantic with hints of the Scottish pastoral, rambling slide guitar like a half forgotten Pacific holiday) and codex one (the rush of swarming insects).

If anything, the now UK-based ELISION have grown since the last Queensland Labor government so stupidly cast them adrift. Virtuosic, technically and musically, individually and as an ensemble, we could once claim one of the world’s great contemporary music ensembles as our own. Now we can’t.

ELISION, oboe Peter Veale, horn Ysolt Clark, clarinets Richard Haynes, trombone Benjamin Marks, percussion Peter Neville, violin Graeme Jennings, cello Judith Hamann, electric guitar Daryl Buckley, with Queensland Conservatorium students; Crossbows: a festival for music for small ensembles; Conservatorium Theatre, Griffith University, Brisbane, May 11

PHOTOGRAPHY TODAY IMPINGES ON OUR LIVES IN ALMOST EVERY WAY—MAKING OUR MOST PRIVATE LIVES EXTREMELY PUBLIC, INTENTIONALLY OR NOT. THIS PLACES MANY OF US ON THE PUBLIC RECORD, OUR CANDID WITNESS IMAGES OFTEN INADVERTENTLY BECOMING PUBLIC PROPERTY—MORE-SO FOR AUSTRALIA’S ABORIGINAL POPULATIONS AS SEEN IN DIFFERING FORMS OF PHOTOGRAPHY ACROSS THREE CONTEMPORARY EXHIBITIONS IN SYDNEY. HOW DO WE CONTROL IMAGES OF OURSELVES—HOW DO WE SAY WHAT WE WANT TO SAY?

Manuwangku, Under the Nuclear Cloud—Muckaty Station, by Jagath Dheerasekara was part of the Head On Photo Festival at Customs House in Sydney. Uranium mining, processing and usage have long been controversial in Australia and, being mined on their land, has always been connected to Aboriginal people. Now Muckaty Station Aboriginal landowners in the Northern Territory are being pressured to have their land become a dumping site for radioactive waste from Australia and overseas.

This is the second Aboriginal human rights issues exhibition covered by Dheerasekara who previously photographed Aboriginal housing under the ‘Intervention’ in the Northern Territory in Stars, Sky, Trees, Breeze (Jagath’s Journey, 2010) at the Vanishing Point Gallery, Sydney. [Dheerasekara is currently a recipient of an Amnesty International Human Rights Innovation Fund Grant. Eds]

At the opening of Head On, a friend commented that Dheerasekara’s photographs were clumsy, showing Aboriginal people in a ‘bad’ light, as poverty stricken and in ill health. My own response was different. In his medium-large, rich colour images of people and country Dheerasekara purposefully sets out to show that this supposed empty desert, the place for a proposed radioactive waste dump, is a ‘green’ landscape full of normal people of strong character actively engaging with their environment and each other. We shouldn’t expect every Aboriginal male to look like David Gulpilil or every Indigenous woman to be a Christine Anu clone. Nor do most Aboriginal people, wherever they live, exemplify all the ‘Home Beautiful,’ trappings of the trendy western upper middle class. Nor do they expect to be treated as rubbish.

At the 2012 National Indigenous Photomedia Conference in Melbourne at the Centre for Contemporary Photography a speaker lamented current prejudices affecting artists who like to take images in the street, in public space. In PhotoGraff by Gary Trinh and Jason Wing, at Simon Chan’s Art Atrium, there is a declaration from the artists: “I am not a pedophile—I am not a terrorist.”

“The mindful do not die,
But the heedless are as if dead already!”
Dhammapada 21 [Buddhist text, third century BCE]

A binary view exists as to how to reach revelation—fasting and deprivation or indulgence by which to see the essential or discern the core from the crust. But revelation is also to be found in the everyday: the mindfulness of the ordinary. It’s definitely to be found in the absurd and mirthful, in wit and in laughter, and in the art from the street of Garry Trinh and Jason Wing. The binary of real and shadow. Their daring, sharp eyes catch every trick of perspective where cars appear to merge into the urban landscape like camouflaged animals. Eyes catch shadowy, faded, residual signage and graffiti, now with new readings: (End Restriction [Parking]).

Nicole Foreshew and Darren Bell’s show at Blacktown Art Centre in western Sydney is titled A Place of Sense. A place of sense? A place of senses? But what is sense? We construct ‘our place’ through memory experienced through the senses: sight, sound, taste, smell and touch.

An accompanying text states, “Reflecting on their continued connection with Blacktown and Western Sydney, artists Foreshew and Bell form poetic responses to place through large-scale photomedia prints, site specific installation and performative moving image. A Place of Sense explores the complexities of identity and location within contemporary urban experience” (program brochure).

A youth plays with the male-ish shovel-nose spear, but in a non-threatening way (Darren Bell, Since always, 2011 [youth with shovel-nose spear]). Serendipitously, in Arnhem Land the directional adjective-noun word Kumur Djalk—you precious thing—is a social term of endearment that has its roots in the same word for stone spearhead—normally wrapped in paperbark and traded across hundreds of miles. Nicole Foreshew’s image of a floating, wrapped spiritual object (titled Belong to All Yet to None) is an iconic image of this sense of the sacred. In traditional Aboriginal society you wrap sacred objects, ritual gifts, special foods, valuable ochre colours, bodies living and dead. You use paperbark or specially decorated fabric. And what more sacred site is there than a woman’s body? A gender binary emerges in the exhibition, whether accidental or intentional—apt, mature and without recrimination.

In a video, women (Foreshew’s close family) play and twirl, coiffured in the artist’s fabric. The women spin like Wonder Woman with her ‘lasso of truth’ capturing escaping villains, revealing her power. They spin like a centrifuge, throwing off their outer, everyday coating. The simple, graceful movements here could be said to be seductive; it is part of the performance, but also expresses a powerful and warm, purposeful yearning. A modest, coquettish vanity—a display of affection and tenderness beyond words.

Parallel with this, unconsciously, is an equally tender view of a typical Western Sydney male BBQ captured by Darren Bell. Men divest themselves of their outer garments to expose their power differently—tearing open their shirts to reveal their chests: Supermen.

These are great candid shots, only one of which gets near to a posed portrait. The strength of men, their potential for violence and their exposing of themselves also allows them to be completely vulnerable, physically and emotionally. They are real people. We feel we know them intimately. We are with them, comfortable and not challenged. They are raucous and happy, while an almost aloof second group is really reserved—silent witness rather than spy; more like a close relative, a confidant we have known all our lives. Bell has a great eye for the male psyche that his subjects reveal here.

Alcohol is said to be a depressant but also a suppressant of control. People talk of taking hallucinogenic drugs to see new or different perspectives, even visions. They forget alcohol can take you into another place of sense. It’s said that people tell the ‘real’ story, the truth when they are ‘pissed.’ I haven’t seen such an alive set of moments captured in photos in a long time. An amazing event, coupled with Foreshew’s images of almost instinctive, graceful movement.

You can bring in ‘big names’ to make a curatorial career or, as at Blacktown Arts Centre, you can work with talented locals. It’s curious that as the ‘the state’ and other vested interests clumsily strive to ‘train’ a set of young Aboriginal pet poodles or witless government stooges to be paraded nationally and internationally, it would appear the progress of Aboriginal society becomes possibly irrelevant. What is happening organically at Blacktown Arts Centre and with its local theatre productions leaves clunky, expensively funded programs for dead—the difference between 17th century chamber music and Lady Gaga.

Jagath Dheerasekara, Manuwangku, Under the Nuclear Cloud, Head On Photo Festival, Customs House, May 4-July 7; Gary Trinh, Jason Wing, PhotoGraff, Art Atrium, May 8-26; Nicole Foreshew, Daniel Bell, Place of Sense, Blacktown Arts Centre, Sydney, April 20-July 7

Under the Nuclear Cloud will be featured at this year’s Darwin Festival August 10-26 and tour to Adelaide and Canberra in 2013.

WE NEED YOU, YOU NEED US—THE TITLE IMPLIES A STICKY SITUATION OF MUTUAL DEPENDENCE. THIS CLEVER AND TOPICAL GROUP SHOW AT TIN SHEDS GALLERY CURATED BY GEORGIE MEAGHER BROUGHT TOGETHER FIVE ARTISTS TO PRESENT A PROVOCATION OF SORTS.

A challenge to consider not only the intertwined relationship between artists, galleries and audiences but also the powerful yet often neglected influence that economic relations exert on the making, exhibiting and consumption of art.

Artists working at the dematerialised end of the art-making spectrum deal increasingly in the trading and transmission of experiences and this show was particularly concerned with how such practices destabilise the notion of value in the economy of art. The 90s business pop-philosophy of the ‘Experience Economy’ was a curatorial starting point for Meagher and if the premise bordered on the prescriptive, most artists responded with a welcome light-hearted approach or applied a deft hand to the theme.

Resonating strongly with audiences was Dara Gill’s Untitled (Depositing $250 Artist Fee into Gallery Wall, 2012) which, as the title neatly describes, involved a video documentation of the performative gesture of the artist drilling a hole into the white gallery wall, carefully rolling and inserting his $250 artist fee into the hole and then filling, sanding and painting over it. It was a cynical yet engaging gesture that lampooned art as a remunerative from of labour and reminded audiences that for many artists the making of a work swallows more funds than it generates.

Sebastian Moody, meanwhile, embraced an all-encompassing form of performance art in The Sting (2012), a work that revolved around Moody’s outsourcing of the day-to-day maintenance of his identity (email, Facebook, internet banking and the like) to a young unemployed Brisbane musician named Maxwell Farrington. In a short video work the pair casually negotiated the ins and outs of their con while the viewer struggled to identify Maxwell from Sebastian, becoming implicated in a game of cat and mouse over who represented the ‘real’ impostor.

Others works tested the premise that audience participation can inject greater agency into the economy of relations between the art object and viewer, with varying results. Paul Gazzola’s Just For The Thrill Of It (2012) comprised a re-purposed Jumbo Skill Tester machine filled with hundreds of brightly coloured key tags inserted with the details of Gazzola’s “company.” By inserting a coin and manoeuvering the mechanical claw into the pile, players could retrieve a tag and earn a share in the company—here the experience of participating in the game was perhaps more novel than empowering. Lara Thoms, on the other hand, introduced an unnerving and stalkeresque edge to audience participation in CONGRATS#2 (2012). Inviting gallery visitors to inscribe their mobile numbers onto the machine’s Bingo card over the duration of the exhibition, whichever number the Bingo ball landed upon on the final day of the show Thoms pledged to call daily for an entire year, a potentially rewarding or rather awkward prize depending upon your point of view.

Agatha Gothe-Snape’s series of de-skilled artworks playfully refuted the notion that either the purity of materials or the precision of an artist’s skill can act as arbiters of an artwork’s value. A whimsical yellow rectangle Power Point slide show reworked Minimalism for the DIY digital age and a series of limited edition prints were dictated by the mileage of a single ink cartridge inserted into a bubble jet printer. Gothe-Snape’s works were typical of the wryly ironic, self-reflexive and low-fi contributions of the five artists which presented a diverse and stimulating range of interpretations on the theme, provoking responses that were albeit more cerebral than visceral.

There was a welcome contrast, then, in Nathan Babet’s unrelated installation Red Water (?ervená Voda) in the next room which presented a multimedia environment spilling over with signification and affective power as Babet, an artist working with sculpture and video, continued his investigation into the loaded terrain of the uncanny. Here, Babet inhabited the figure of the Zimmerman (carpenter) and filled the gallery with the products of his labour, from piles of chopped wood, ceiling height pine trees and a lone felled tree to an imposing Gulag watchtower. Two video loops showed the artist-carpenter taking slow and menacing trance-like swings at a tree with his axe and chopping wood in a hauntingly barren and smoky industrial landscape. The exhilarating intensity of Babet’s labour and the array of evocative and resonate objects installed in the space was a powerful reminder of the value that resides in alchemical artworks which seek to transport, affect and move the viewer.

We Need You, You Need Us, artists Paul Gazzola, Dara Gill, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Sebastian Moody, Lara Thoms; Red Water, artist Nathan Babet, Tin Sheds Gallery, Sydney, April 20–May 19

MAGNESIUM LIGHT BURNS INTENSELY BRIGHT AND WHEN EXTINGUISHED LEAVES A TRACE, A DARK AFTER-IMAGE ON THE RETINA AS A GHOSTLY SPECTRE OF THE BRIGHTNESS THAT ONCE WAS. THE WORKS OF DENNIS DEL FAVERO HAVE THIS SAME PLAY OF INTENSITY AND SHADOW THAT MIRRORS THE USE OF REAL WORLD EVENTS PORTALLED INTO PARALLEL NARRATIVES OF FANTASY, DESIRE, LOSS AND DISORIENTATION.

Del Favero’s new show, Magnesium Light, comprises two video works, You and I and Todtnauberg. Each is anchored in a poignant historical moment but moves beyond its actuality to delve into more psychologically embedded folds of imagination and meaning.

Both video works spring from encounters between individuals. You and I is a sexual encounter. A female voice-over is heard over finely edited black and white frames of a passionately engaged heterosexual couple. The words could be those genuinely whispered in a love scene between equals, but instead the encounter resides in a realm of dark delusion, brutality and injustice. The woman is clearly the person in control and the context becomes apparent as the image cuts to a body in uniform and the piece closes with the woman as a military figure of authority wielding power over her lover who is now the ubiquitous icon of the hooded man of the Abu Ghraib torture images.

A remarkable thing about the images that came out of Abu Ghraib was the fact of seeing women in roles traditionally ascribed to men; committing war crimes at the extremes of perversity and debasement. It is not that women are incapable of such acts, but they are so rarely pictured as such. Then there is the additional consideration that somewhere, somehow, in their post-Iraq lives there must be psychological repercussions to their actions; that the memories insistently reverberate as part of the post-traumatic consequences of war. You and I could represent the character of Lynndie England, for example, finding a twisted way to cope with her actions, a way to counter those repeated images of her cheesy grin and thumbs up incongruously against scenes of utter human pathos. Her memories here become transformed into sexual fantasy and the suggestion is that this functions to obfuscate the horror of such realities.

Todtnauberg takes an encounter of a different kind, between two minds rather than bodies. The piece is dominated by two men walking through a high-hedged labyrinth, occasionally intersecting one another. The characters are French poet Paul Celan and philosopher Martin Heidegger. In actuality they crossed paths a number of times between 1951-70 and each was compelled by the other’s work, although the attraction was not uncomplicated. Celan was of Jewish descent with a family lost to the Holocaust and Heidegger a Nazi sympathiser. These differences came to a head in a particular encounter in 1967 when Celan journeyed to the Black Forest to visit Heidegger, to question him about his anti-Semitic views. Heidegger failed to appease Celan and Celan could not forgive him. Following the encounter Celan penned an impenetrable poem, also titled Todtnauberg, and not long after he drowned himself in the Seine.

Todtnauberg recreates the charged encounter, washing over the viewer in melancholy tones through the combination of smooth-panning along richly dark, pine tree-lined paths that lead nowhere and a whispery voiceover full of remembering, forgetting, questions, doubts and guilt. Dripping with restraint and unresolved dialogue, it communicates the longing for healing, the pain of silence and the fickleness of memory. Occasionally scenes from the war surface—soldiers marching, fires burning. This additional visual element seems an unnecessary literalisation of the content of the piece, just as the scene with the hooded figure makes obvious the pretext of You and I. These pointers could have been omitted without the works losing their strength.

Both works are aesthetically luscious and conceptually rich. Both deal with the unanticipated consequences of our choices and actions, our inability to come to terms with the past and that past bleeding into our present in a masked and obscurantist guise. Del Favero applies his signature technique of recreating a story out of a news event; the works extract an essence from the grand-scale, external, public account and inject it into stories of unspeakable, personal and private imaginaries.

Running alongside Magnesium Light is The World is Everything that is the Case, co-curated by Paul Thomas, Vince Dziekan and Sean Cubitt and developed for ISEA2011 in Istanbul. This show hinges on the metaphor of the suitcase as a loaded symbol of mobility, migration and containment. A parallel association is formed with the realm of data and the routing of data packets through networks across the globe. Just as the contents of a suitcase are taken from our lives, fitted into a compressed space and then put back together once a destination is reached, so too are data packets in the ether disassembled and reassembled.

Several of the works use a physical suitcase and somehow combine it with a media artwork. For example, Tina Gonsalves displays the piece Chameleon on screens wedged in vertically poised cases. Faces fill the screens and are programmed to respond to user-presence. Unfortunately this piece falls prey to the sad fact of fallibility that too often haunts interactive work; the faces appear to suffer from some kind of multiple-personality disorder on a high-rotation stutter-loop. More seamless interaction is felt with the piece by Mark Cypher, Propositions 2.0. Cypher fills a prostrate case with sand and the sand-pit becomes a global playground with participant actions transferred to one projection and a knobbly spinning globe on an adjoining projection whose topology is the cumulative result of the manipulations of the sand. This work is aesthetically raw but conceptually engaging.

Arguably the most aesthetically mesmerising piece is Karen Casey’s Meditation Wall, a magnificent wash of colour and pattern. The pattern is made to resemble a Turkish mosaic combined with a desert bloom (Casey’s own paintings) with both Sufi and Aboriginal music making up the soundscape. The gridded kaleidoscopic morph is derived from data of Casey’s brainwaves in a state of meditation and it is debatable how much this impacts the resulting viewing pleasure; a pulsing mandala-like pattern is familiar to visual culture and seductive in and of itself. A background clang of breaking plates disrupts the soothing flow of Casey’s wall. The clang comes from Nigel Helyer’s sonic installation, Weeping Willow. As with the Meditation Wall this work eschews the literal inclusion of the suitcase and instead provides a layered and incisive commentary on cross-cultural dialogue and exchange between the Occident and the Orient through the symbol of the Willow Pattern dinner plate.

All in all something is amiss in the exhibition’s application of the metaphor of the old-fashioned suitcase and something is awkward about its resolution. Perhaps it is the inclusion of those antiquated suitcases at the entrance of the show, or the stretching of an entire show out of a Wittgenstenian notion that is never fully articulated in the works displayed. Or perhaps it is simply the fact that unlike a suitcase the show does not travel well and something is lost in its relocation to a global context distinct from its original formulation, for example the Turkish patterns no longer resonate with the world beyond the gallery walls. Nevertheless, as a whole, The World is Everything that is the Case is experientially diverse in its use of the icon of the suitcase and exploration of an evolving idea of virtuality in a transmigratory post-digital global phase.

Dennis del Favero, Magnesium Light; The World Is Everything That Is The Case; John Curtin Gallery, Curtin University, Perth, June 1-Aug 5

Jeff Wall, A sudden gust of wind (after Hokusai) 1993, Tate, London, purchased with the assistance from the Patrons of New Art through the Tate Gallery Foundation and from the National Art Collections Fund 1995,

A GIANT LIGHT BOX TRANSPARENCY, THE SPECTACULAR A SUDDEN GUST OF WIND (AFTER HOKUSAI) (1993) GREETS US AS WE WALK INTO JEFF WALL’S RETROSPECTIVE AT THE ART GALLERY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA. IT SHOWS A GROUP OF MEN COWERING FROM THE WIND THAT’S BLOWING SHEETS OF PAPER OVER A DESOLATE LANDSCAPE. THEY LOOK LIKE THEY ARE THERE FOR A MEETING, AS SOME WEAR SUITS AND OTHERS LOOK LIKE FARMERS, AMID A COLD RURAL SCENE.

The image captures some of Wall’s endearing concerns. He has carefully staged a chance moment, which constructs a scene that he has already imagined in his mind’s eye. While it is at first glance a naturalistic scene, a second glance tells us that it has been heavily constructed, and yet this artificial sensibility carries with it a trace of something natural, some pivotal and beautiful quality of the world that Wall has managed to distil.

The body of criticism around the work of Jeff Wall emphasises the staged performativity of the encounters he sets into large photographs and light boxes. There is a captivating uncertainty in a piece like Knife Throw (2008), whose performers act out what they might ordinarily do in their own lives, by throwing knives at a wall. Yet their performance is far from natural, and carries with it a self-consciousness or even boredom that lies ambivalently in the posture and face of one of the men.

Such strained poses bring to Wall’s work the uncertainties that confuse performance and actuality. Wall will sometimes keep people trapped in a room for weeks at a time to achieve such ambiguity, keeping his camera trained on a cleaner cleaning, or an illustrator illustrating. The effect is positively Brechtian, as performers make us aware that they are not entirely performing these roles.

In some ways Wall’s work resembles that of his equally successful contemporaries in New York, photographers like Sherri Levine, Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman, who also work with reconstructing that which is already there. However, unlike the so-called Pictures Generation, Wall does not turn to the iconography of American visual culture. Instead he turns to ordinary people as his subjects. So that these magnificent pictures are also images of Canada, of people and their lives treated with all of the intimate detail of a staged performance.

This is the reason that Wall’s work has been compared with 19th century realist painting, but the artist also claims he is carrying on the practices of early documentary photography. The image of a group of women plucking, gutting and cleaning chickens, Dressing Poultry (2007), is replete with ugly detail and yet is strikingly beautiful. The eye is unable to tear itself away from the sight of real life rendered so colourfully, so brightly, as Wall turns the little slaughterhouse into a photographic studio.

Not all of Wall’s works are so successful. Smaller light boxes framing such innocuous objects as dirty rags, drains, paint tins and tree stumps appear in a series, more like context for the bigger pictures than works of art in their own right. They hold the politics of the major works without having the punch of a human performer to convey the complexity of the politics. For all of the discourse around Wall’s emulation of the European masters, it should not be forgotten that he is also a photographer of the ordinary, documenting in his own way the passage of lived experience among the people of his country.

This show captures cleaners, homeless people, office workers and farmers in the process of going about their jobs, in a way that pauses their bodies amidst the motions of labour as they huddle against the cold or till a field. Yet these are also problematic images, for what farmer tills his field today? What cleaner stands motionless, gazing to the floor? These are the details that have made Wall one of the most respected living artists, as he brings a kind of truth to the artifice of photography.

This truth lies in even the most constructed of his images. A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai) is not just a beautiful image of paper blowing in the wind, it is also a parable of country and city; of workers of different kinds meeting in the world. Replete with details, the image conveys the complexities of a lived situation that is also constructed, turning the naturalism of photography into the realism of documentary while somehow preserving the beauty of the natural within this transformation.

Jeff Wall: Photographs, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, to Sept 10; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Nov 30, 2012-March 2013; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, April 24-July 28, 2013

THE BEST DOCUMENTARIES, LIKE THE BEST FICTIONS, ALLOW US TO REASSESS THE EVERYDAY BY MAKING IT STRANGE OR, EQUALLY, TRANSPORT US INTO UNFAMILIAR WORLDS, WHETHER ACROSS AN OCEAN, INTO THE OUTBACK OR THE LIFE OF SOMEONE LIVING QUITE NEAR TO US, IN INNER SYDNEY, AS IN NAMATHRA THOMAS' THE HIDDEN GEM.

Thomas' subject is Jemma, a Kings Cross sex worker in her early 40s with a drug problem and an impending court case for allegedly abusing two young men. But the eccentric, volatile Jemma is also Steven Gray, a one-time dancer with the AIDT touring dance theatre group from NAISDA (National Aboriginal and Islander Skills Development Association) Dance College. Raw archival video footage reveals an elegant, sensual performer.

Thomas and her small crew follow Jemma at close quarters with hand-held camera, tracking a sporadic soliloquy of doubt and near despair leavened by a droll sense of humour. Establishing shots are more formally filmed, giving The Hidden Gem a strong sense of place—best of all on Jemma's transformative journey home to her Queensland family in an apparently idyllic coastal setting. Here, she sheds drugs, exotic clothing, wig and makeup to reveal a soft featured, gently spoken Steven in awkward conversation with his slightly disapproving mother. However, soon mum is laughing and dancing with her much-loved son. Such spontaneity comes as a great relief.

But for all that home offers, Steven is restless for city life. Given the affection his family has for him and the natural comforts of home, we struggle to comprehend the attraction. The dynamic tensions between the seemingly discrete personalities embodied in this transgendered person, between a loveless city and a caring family and between formal and informal filming (finely edited), propel this bracing film. For all the film reveals about its subject, ultimately his-her motivation remains unclear. What more can we expect but to be grateful to Jemma-Steven for allowing a life to be scrutinised. This is intelligent, sensitive filmmaking.

The Hidden Gem has been programmed for the 2012 Antenna International Documentary Film Festival in Sydney (Oct 1-14). In the school's festival awards for documentary, Hidden Gem won Best Direction, Editing, Cinematography and Sound Design as well as a Courage Curiosity Compassion Award and an Audience Award.

Another engaging documentary, True Cult (director Sara Pinto) takes us into the world of Sydney's Jaimie and Aspasia Leonarder and their homely Mu-Meson film archive and screening room (see “Archivists on the edge” in RT79). The Vimeo trailer offers a glimpse of True Cult's intimate, immersive filming, dextrous editing and the amusing selection of images from vintage lo-fi films. It's good to have a film tribute to the amiable, knowledgeable and quietly passionate Leonarders. In another documentary award section in the festival, True Cult won Best Direction, Editing and Cinematography.

In a large field of films I was also taken by Brendan Sweeney's unnerving short, 91-104, constructed from a brisk montage of brief close-ups of humble 1940s and 50s technical equipment and power facilities. The focus on innocent looking buttons, wiring and gauges gradually evokes a sinister scenario—of the Dr Strangelove variety—as the music and editing pulse insistently and the incursion of a bloodied hand suggests someone will push the button that will unleash nuclear war. 91-104 won the award for Best Sound Design in Drama.

Although inventiveness was variable and booming scores too often overwhelmed quieter visual material, production values were consistently high in all of the films screened.

Sydney Film School is a private film school with students from 42 countries attending the school since 2004. Every year some 120 documentaries, dramas and individual thesis films are produced. To date 87 films have screened in 127 film festivals locally and abroad, winning 38 first prizes.

The Hidden Gem, director Namratha Thomas, director of photography Jean Tertrain, editor Miguel Muzaly, composer Ross Symington, producers Bingyin Guo, Amanda King; True Cult, director Sara Pinto, DOP Alexandre Guterres, editors Carolina Izquierdo Duarte, Alexandre Guterres, Sara Pinto; 91-104, director Brendan Sweeney, DOP Timothy Endmeades, production design Catherine Rynne, composer Luke Warren; 16th Sydney Film School Festival, Awards Night, Chauvel Cinema, Sydney, July 12; www.sydneyfilmschool.com

It seems like the dead of winter does not dampen the artistic spirit with July-August offering a flurry of festivals around the country.

time machine, serial space

While several festivals have made Serial Space their home over the last few years, Time Machine represents the first such event to be curated by the current Serial Space team: Pia Van Gelder, Tom Smith, Kate Blackmore, Frances Barrett and Jennifer Hamilton. As the title implies, the festival will focus on time-based practices and includes performance, music, media and visual art. Serial Space will also physically expand for the event—in addition to their usual venue in Wellington Street, Chippendale (Serial 001), action will take place in the former FraserStudio around the corner (Serial 002), the embassy on George Street Broadway (Serial 003) and downstairs at the Civic Hotel in the city (Serial 004), as well as local Redfern bar, Freda’s.

It’s a dauntingly comprehensive program with multiple activities across the 12 days and nights. Music highlights include a concert by US electronica legend Keith Fullerton Whitman (July 20); Noiseball, a handball tournament that is accompanied by a noise set from Aemon Webb (July 26); and an audiovisual feast in honour of the pop music video featuring Marco Cher-Gibard, Scott Morrison, Michael Salerno, Oscar Slorach-Thorn, Jonathon Watts and Marcus Whale (July 28). The final night (July 29) features alternative orchestras with Electronic Resonance Korps (ERK), a laptop only ensemble led by Monica Brooks, and Jonathan Watts’ The Sydney Radio Orchestra which will emerge from a series of build-your-own radio workshops during the festival.

But Time Machine is not just about media art. The curators (two of whom are members of Brown Council), have also thrown performance into mix. Curiosity is immediately piqued by the very notion of an “in-game” performance of Waiting for Godot in the Massive multi-user online game Glitch, led by Bruce Green (Samuel Bruce and Daniel Green, July 19). The majority of performances are framed as lectures and include Noëlle Janaczewska discussing gravel, actual, cultural and metaphorical (July 22); Melita Rowston exploring the six-degrees of separation between you and Ned Kelly (July 21); and Helen Grogan delivering a performance lecture about performance lectures (July 22).

Another interesting feature is a focus on technology and women—or that ‘dirty’ word for Gen Y—“feminism.” There’s a presentation by Jacinta Kelly on the feminist futurism of poet/artist Mina Loy; a performance lecture by Nancy Mauro-Flude on “the intimate relationship between you and your computer” (website); Bonita Ely and Diana Smith on the ancient cult of the Dogwoman and its current manifestations; and a panel discussion around women and technology with Mauro-Flude, Ella Barclay, Pia van Gelder and RealTime’s Gail Priest (all July 29). And a Serial Space festival wouldn’t be complete without a great debate, this time on the topic “Men Can’t be Feminists” (July 21).

The Time Machine exhibition will run for the length of the festival with works exploring “temporality and presence” (website) and there will also be a publication, Time Capsule, featuring writing by Rebecca Conroy (see RT Traveller: Detroit), Stephen Jones, Douglas Kahn and Diana Smith.
Serial Space: Time Machine, various venues, Sydney, July 18-29; http://serialspace.org/

everywhere but here, blindside

Zoe Scoglio, The Human Sundial Project – Travelling Through Time And Space While Standing Still – Journey #3, 2012, video still

Another inaugural festival hosted by an artist-run-space, Everywhere but Here presented by Blindside in Melbourne, will be exploring “travel, transitions and place” (press release). At the centre of the event are two video programs, Destination HERE and Destination NOW, featuring the work of 18 artists including Dominic Redfern, Claire Robertson, Zoe Scoglio, Bonnie Lane, Hoang Tran Nguyen and Hannah Raisin (runs Aug 2-8).

Artist Hanna Tai will also present a solo exhibition titled At the outpost beside the rapids. Working across video, photography and installation Tai will explore the iconography of travel through the postcard which “collapse(s) experience, memory and desire into idealised symbology acting as signifiers of a real or longed-for experience” (press release, Aug 7-11). The third exhibition component is Return to Sender where artists around the world have been invited to post their artworks in various formats (Aug 9-11).

Framing these exhibitions is a forum on artist residencies, Anywhere but here!, with Kate Shaw, Carl Scrase and Nic Low (Aug 9). The artists will share their experiences and tips about the much coveted residency including application writing, travel tips and how to make the most of working in new and foreign environments. ArtsClub will also present Escape with AirBlindside, a kind of speed-dating activity where visitors are paired up and share their experiences of arts and travel (Aug 3). So if you can’t get away at the moment, maybe attending Everywhere But Here might transport you.
Everywhere But Here, curatorial committee Claire Anna Watson, Shae Nagorcka, Natalya Maller, Andrew Tetzlaff, Blaine Cooper, Adele Macer, Elise Murphy; Blindside Level 7, Nicholas Building, Melbourne, Aug 2-11; www.blindside.org.au

on edge, cairns

If you are seriously contemplating an escape, Cairns is offering not only tropical surrounds but also a fine sampling of culture from Far North Queensland and the rest of the country. The festival is mid-way through but there’s still plenty to come.

On exhibition for the entire festival is I, Alien, a collaboration between Indigenous artist Zane Saunders and arts producer and musician Nicholas Mills. Through video and audio the exhibition explores “the human, visual and visceral aspects of displacement and belonging” with particular reference to traditional landowners, urban Indigenous people and migrant populations (press release).

For one night only (July 18) you can catch Version 1.0’s quietly disturbing work The Disappearances Project (see RT103). It is paired nicely with Cherry Tree Creek by Derek Tripper (July 19-20), also a documentary-based performance, exploring the deaths of two women found near Atherton in 1991, one of Far North Queensland’s greatest unsolved murders.

On a different note is The Last Tuesday Society (July 24), which will bring together the Melbourne collective of the same name with local artists in what is claimed to be “a contemporary vaudeville event like no other” (press release).

Dance also features with performances by Brisbane-based ensemble Polytoxic working with Cairns visual artist Sam Tupou (July 25-27). Their show, Trade Winds, will be presented in the Cairns Esplanade Lagoon. Finally Tamara Saulwick’s Pin Drop (July 27-28) exploring the role of listening in a thriller scenario will swing through as part of its Mobile States national tour (see in the loop quick picks for more on the Mobile States Touring Cluster).
On Edge, Cairns, produced by Arthouse, the Cairns Centre of Contemporary Arts, KickArts Contemporary Arts, and The House Of Falcon, July 13-28; www.onedgeart.com/

a futures festival, alexandra harrison, dancehouse

Over tea and biscuits Daphne Kingston, an 85-year old documenter of architecture told Alexandra Harrison that “coming events cast their shadows.” This pearl of wisdom has inspired Harrison, Dancehouse’s current house-mate resident, to create What’s Coming—A Futures Festival, a series of activities created by Harrison and her collaborators including dance, performance, talks and installations, exploring prophecies for dance, art and living.

Each night starts with Forest of Gesture, a video installation and performance work made with Anne Scott Wilson which studies people moving through public spaces attempting to “pause and reflect on the excesses of action” (press release). Each night also includes the Library of Future Forecasts, which documents, through text and visual media, the forecasts of 30 artists, scientists, engineers, musicians and theorists.

Following this the program offers a variety of performances. Harrison will open the event presenting her 50-minute work What’s Coming—Dance as Forecast, which will use the whole Dancehouse building as the territory where, via a variety of future forecasting techniques, we are told “the dance prophet” will be created. Other performances include The Build Up, a one hour durational drum roll by Chris Lewis; It’s All Downhill from Here (the warmth of entropy), a 25-minute descent down a staircase by Debra Batton; and Triumph of Activity, a performance by a group of older women exploring “grace, subtlety, humour and wisdom” (press release).

There’ll also be a screening of The Study of Habitual Passengers, made in collaboration with Blue Lucine using 173 portraits cut from maps of England and Wales that become characters in the work. Additionally theorist David Turnbull and Dean Pierides will present a lecture on Mapping as Choreography. The Futures Festival will conclude with The Line-Up, in which 20 dancers offering three-minute previews of potential dances.
What’s Coming – A Futures Festival, curator/creator Alexandra Harrison, plus collaborators; Dancehouse July 31 – Aug 4; www.dancehouse.com.au

national screen dance initiative, carriageworks

The Australia Council has announced that Carriageworks will deliver the inaugural National Screen Dance Initiative. 24 Frames Per Second is a program commissioning 18 Australian-based works along with six international films. Chosen artists have experience in multi-disciplinary, intercultural and Indigenous practices and include Tony Albert, Alison Currie, Vicki Van Hout, James Newitt, Byron Perry and Antony Hamilton, Khaled Sabsabi, Aimee Smith, Latai Taumoepeau, Christian Thompson and Lee Wilson and Mirabelle Wouters. The international artists include Sriwhana Spong (New Zealand), Wit Pimkanchanapong (Thailand), Ming Wong (Singapore) and Nick Cave (USA—the visual artist, not the singer). Carriageworks plans to deliver the works via a number of media platforms over the next three years along with a major exhibition in 2015. ABC Television has come on board as a key partner, broadening the potential audience for the works. www.carriageworks.com.au/

mobile states cluster 2012

The annual Mobile States Touring Cluster is on the move. This year it includes shows that make the audience work for their pleasure, as in Aphids’ thoroughly experiential Thrashing Without Looking (see RT101; Jana Perkovic’s account in RT105; and John Bailey’s report also in RT105); and Back to Back’s participatory video project The Democratic Set (see Tim Atack’s account of the Bristol iteration). Gothic comedy can be expected from RRAMP (Christine Johnston, Lisa O’Neill and Peter Nelson) in The Collector, the Archivist & the Electrocrat, while Tamara Saulwick explores anxiety and anticipation through sound in her solo performance, Pin Drop. The touring schedule is rather complicated, but if you’re in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Hobart, Launceston, Cairns, Campbelltown, Newcastle, Darwin, Goolwa or Mandurah, check out the Mobile States website—at least one of these innovative performance works is coming your way.
Mobile States Touring Cluster, major partners Performing Lines, Performance Space, North Melbourne Town Hall Arts House, Salamanca Arts Centre, Brisbane Powerhouse, PICA, July-August http://performinglines.org.au/productions/mobile-states-cluster-2012/

parallel universes, qut & monash university

Parallel Universes is a retrospective of seminal video works from both Australian and international artists made between 1970 and 1985. A curatorial collaboration between Dr Mark Pennings, Lubi Thomas and Rachael Parsons from QUT and Matthew Perkins from Monash University, the exhibition is divided into three thematic groupings: Performance, Identity, Video; Video as the Medium, and the medium is the Message; and Politics of Narrative. Artists include Bill Viola, Mike Parr, Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, Peter Callas, Stephen Jones, Joan Jonas and more. Lubi Thomas says of this period of experimentation, “… cultural and political barriers were falling, giving video art the opportunity to become truly global. This exhibition focuses on influences shared by Australian video artists in relation to ‘parallel’ video art practiced by their international peers” (press release). The exhibition will be framed by a series of talks and panel discussions including “After the Future: The History and Future of Video Art,” led by Dr Mark Pennings and Matthew Perkins.
Parallel Universes, QUT, July 24-Aug 4, The Block, QUT, www.ciprecinct.qut.edu.au/whatson/exhibitions/parallel.jsp

inject, herman kolgen, bristol, uk

For readers in the UK there’s a chance to experience a truly immersive work by “audiocinetic sculptor” Herman Kolgen. Inject will be projected onto a massive screen above the pool at Bristol’s Hengrove Park Leisure Centre, watched by an audience of happily bobbing bathers. But the content might make waves: an onscreen figure is also suspended in water and over 45 minutes the water pressure is increased and the oxygen decreased affecting the person’s nervous system. With a live-mixed soundtrack the piece explores “a loss of touch with reality and invites a floating audience to consider the relationship between human biology and emotion” (website).
Herman Kolgen, Inject, in partnership with In Between Time, Bristol City Council’s Art in the Public Realm, the Watershed and Picture This, Hengrove Park Leisure Centre, Bristol, UK, July 27; http://inbetweentime.co.uk/event/inject-piscine

opportunities
incubator residencies, vitalstatistix

While Port Adelaide-based Vitalstatistix is still informed by feminist and gender-aware perspectives, the company has, over the last few years, opened out from a women’s theatre company to become what they describe as a “boutique producer-presenter of contemporary theatre and interdisciplinary arts” (website). Vitalstatistix has recently announced a call for proposals for their 2013 Incubator residencies that offer rehearsal space at the atmospheric, heritage-listed Waterside Workers Hall, producing technical and other assistance and a $4,000 contribution to projects in the early stages of creative development. Artists from around Australia working in performance, live art or interdisciplinary art are welcome to apply.
Applications due Aug 31, 2012; www.vitalstatistix.com.au

queer residencies, stephen cummins bequest, performance space

Stephen Cummins (1960-1994) was a filmmaker, photographer and curator, perhaps best known for his beautiful and brutal dance film Resonance (1991, before dance film became a genre). On his death, funds were bequeathed to Performance Space. They are now being put towards a series of residencies for emerging queer artists. The residencies will assist performers to expand the predominantly short, cabaret/club act format into longer, more critically and dramaturgically rigorous works. There are three one-week residencies (starting Aug 20, Aug 27, Sept 3, 2012) and each includes mentoring with an established artist, technical support and artist fee. Applications close July 30, http://www.performancespace.com.au/2012/call-out-to-all-emerging-queer-performers/

australia council crowdfunding seminars

If you frequent Facebook or Twitter, you will by now have been asked by a variety of people to “crowdfund” their latest endeavour. While in some ways it seems a bit strange that we are all asking each other for money, it is rapidly proving to be a viable model for both large and smaller projects. In recognition of this the Australia Council is offering a series of seminars around the country to assist artists and organisations in their crowdfunding campaigns. Headed by Caroline Vu of the ArtSupport Australia team and Elliott Bledsoe, Digital Content Officer of the Australia Council, the seminars will offer tips for successful campaigns including case studies and the findings of a recent research project undertaken by Queensland University of Technology Creative Industries. Seminars will take place in Sydney, July 30; Canberra, July 31; Melbourne, Aug 1; Brisbane, Aug 2; Darwin, Aug 13; Perth, Aug 14; Adelaide, Aug 15; Hobart, Aug 16; Western Sydney, Aug 28.
http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/events/2012/crowdfunding-seminars

Congratulations to media artist and creative producer Fee Plumley who has successfully overshot her crowdfunding target, raising $27,000 to buy a bus for her upcoming Really Big Roadtrip. She plans to travel Australia sharing the possibilities of digital arts in their many varied forms. http://www.reallybigroadtrip.com

Riley O’Keeffe, Nothing-Object, Forever, 2012, performance of Steve Reich’s Pendulum Music

RILEY O’KEEFFE TURNS STEVE REICH’S 1968 PENDULUM MUSIC, A SEMINAL WORK IN MUSICAL HISTORY, INTO SOMETHING NEW BY USING IT AS AN ELEMENT IN HIS EXHIBITION NOTHING-OBJECT, FOREVER.

O’Keeffe is a visual artist and Reich’s work is performed in the centre of an installation. There are pencil drawings on graph paper, a wall-drawing and expressionistic paintings on raw, unstretched canvas that are all concerned with visual mapping, especially the use of perspective, ways of seeing that have underpinned western art for centuries.

The CACSA Project Space is a large, brightly lit, antiseptically white-walled and gabled space whose almost bare internal planes firmly position you in an architectural perspective. On the floor facing upwards is a row of four loudspeakers, each with a microphone on a long cord hanging above. For the hour preceding the performance, we hear sounds from other elements of the installation—the rhythmic feedback hum of two closely miked electric fans. Not part of Reich’s work, they’re switched off before the performance but warm us up for it.

The premise of Reich’s Pendulum Music is simple—when the four loudspeakers on the floor are switched on, four performers simultaneously set the dangling mikes swinging above them. As the mikes swing back and forth, they generate oscillating feedback that begins in synch and then shifts out of phase as the pendulums’ oscillations diverge. The aggregating body of sound gradually moves towards equilibrium and when the mikes have stopped swinging the speakers are switched off.

The performance is loud and we can feel it. We’re entranced by the evolution of the sound and the exploration of phasing that was a central theme in Reich’s early work. Beyond the aural and physical sensations, we contemplate infinity expressed as a feedback loop, the process of entropic decay, the effects of chance and the way the electronically generated signal incorporates ambient noise. We know this piece will be different every time it’s performed, as there are so many variables that affect the sonic outcome. Obliquely, it recalls Nam June Paik’s TV Buddha (1974), the visual equivalent of the sonic feedback loop into which a viewer could trespass.

Amongst the large and enthusiastic audience is renowned Australian artist Margaret Dodd, who tells me of a performance of Pendulum Music she saw in a New York warehouse in 1968, the year it was written. Back then, Reich’s work was groundbreaking sonically and conceptually, challenging accepted musical forms and norms. I think about all that has happened in music in the last 44 years and how this work represents the break from the intensity of the high modernism that dominated musical and artistic development in the first half of the 20th century. In this incarnation, there is implicit homage to electrically amplified instrumentation and its effect on musical composition, as well as homage to Reich himself, a founder of minimalism and process music. It’s good that this is happening in Adelaide, where the sound art scene is not as vigorous as in Sydney and Melbourne. (It’s to be hoped that this performance whets appetites and stimulates development.)

O’Keeffe’s installation also includes a curious perspex box containing two speakers with tiny mikes suspended above them, a vitrine containing the apparatus of sound, rendered as sculpture that signifies feedback but which remains mute throughout the event. Another curious element is a form you can complete—you enter your name, the years you were born and died, family members, and a self-evaluation box—an instant obituary, suggesting the finitude of life and the infinity of the beyond.

O’Keeffe’s exhibition contemplates infinity and nothingness from multiple viewpoints. Infinity is suggested by the fugitive horizon line of the artist’s perspective. The horizon is an abstract concept, a trompe l’oeil, for you can never reach it, it recedes as you approach. I like O’Keeffe’s Nothing-Object, Forever, the way he has refreshed Reich’s concept and used it with architectural, visual, sculptural, textual and other sonic devices to demonstrate a proposition. Perspective establishes, and arises from, a viewing position. The concept of perspective is anthropocentric: it’s not about the viewed but about the viewer. This installation is about how subjectivity arises through awareness. We become aware of the pendulum’s movement through sound, of space and (our) location through mapping, and of life through the idea of its termination.

CACSA, Riley O’Keeffe, Nothing-Object, Forever, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, Project Space, Adelaide, June 15-July 15; http://www.cacsa.org.au

FOR THE PROGRAM OF THE 2012 MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, DAN EDWARDS HAS SELECTED SOME OF WHAT HE REGARDS TO BE THE BEST DOCUMENTARIES MADE IN CHINA OVER THE PAST DECADE OR SO.

All of the films in Street Level Visions: Indie Docs from China were produced outside the country's official production channels. These include several films and makers Edwards has written about for RealTime. Two of the documentary directors, Ou Ning and Wang Jiulaing, are guests of the festival.

One of the major figures of contemporary Chinese documentary filmmaking is Zhao Liang. Petition (2009) was shot over more than a decade in the petitioners' community in Beijing, made up of people who travel from all over China and endure often violent harassment in order to seek justice from the central authorities over alleged abuses of power in their home towns. Edwards wrote about Petition when it was unveiled at the Hong Kong Film Festival in 2009. Also screening is Liang's Crime and Punishment (2007), an observational film about the daily workings of a unit of the People's Armed Police (China's paramilitary police force) stationed in a small town on the border with North Korea.

In April-May 2010, Edwards wote about Hu Jie's Searching for the Soul of Lin Zhao (2004) and Though I Am Gone (2007). For Lin Zhao, Hu travelled China searching out those who knew Lin, a young writer who was an ardent supporter of the Communist Revolution and Mao's land reforms in the early 1950s. After defending fellow students at Peking University during the Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957, she was expelled and became bitterly disillusioned with the direction of China under Mao. Imprisoned in the early 1960s, she composed thousands of words into poems and essays in jail, often using her own blood for ink when she was denied writing materials. She was secretly executed in 1968. Though I Am Gone is similarly based on an eyewitness account of history, this time focusing on the deputy headmistress of a famous Beijing high school who was beaten to death by her own students in the opening weeks of the Cultural Revolution in late 1966. Her husband secretly photographed her bloodied corpse and the events leading to her death, images he reveals publicly for the first time in the film.

Wang Jingyao, husband of Bian Zhongyun, with the camera he used to photograph his wife’s body in 1966 after she was murdered by Red Guards, in Hu Jie’s documentary Though I Am Gone (2006)

Ou Ning's Meishi St evolved from the filmmaker's stumbling on the story of restaurateur Zhang Jinli in 2005 while filming just south of Tiananmen Square. Like thousands of other Beijing residents, Zhang's home and business were to be demolished in the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Oiympics as part of a 'modernisation' of the capital. Ou Handed Zhang a camera and asked him to help document his fight for just compensation.

Edwards describes Zhou Hao's The Transition Period (2008) as “an extraordinary look into the workings of government in China. Zhou followed the General Secretary of a poor inland county during his last months in office, capturing the pressures, the boozing and the backroom manouvering that comprise local politics in China.”

The most recent work in the program is Beijing Besieged by Waste (2011), a debut film by Wang Jiuliang, a Beijing-based photographer who set out to document Beijing's chronic waste problem and stumbled upon hundreds of illegal and unregulated landfills encircling the capital.

Ou Ning and Wang Jiulaing will be guests of the festival, introducing their films at the screenings and appearing at a public panel in the festival bar, chaired by Dan Edwards. This is a great opportunity to engage with rarely seen, adventurous Chinese documentary films in the presence of their makers. RT

Accounts of the films above are based on notes provided by Dan Edwards. Read his Archive Highlight on contemporary Chinese cinema which includes an introduction and links to many RealTime articles on the subject.

“Records, Resistance or Cold War Clichés? Chinese Documentary in Focus,” Ou Ning and Wang Jiulaing, Talk, Tues, Aug 14, 5.30-6.15pm; Festival Lounge, Forum Theatre, free

THE LATEST CREATION FROM THE MAKERS OF INTERNATIONAL FRINGE CIRCUIT FAVOURITE, THE ADVENTURES OF ALVIN SPUTNIK: DEEP SEA EXPLORER, IS A SOPHISTICATED, SINCERE AND WHIMSICAL STORY. WITH POISED HUMOUR, IT’S DARK OUTSIDE LAUNCHES INTO AN OTHERWORLDLY VOID WHERE A MAN EXPERIENCES SUNDOWN SYNDROME: A PSYCHOLOGICAL OCCURRENCE IN DEMENTIA PATIENTS WHO WANDER OFF FROM HOME, MOST FREQUENTLY AT SUNDOWN.

The main character is thus depicted as prone to random and aimless jaunts—symbolic of his increasing mental deterioration—embodied in a variety of visual tropes, including an animated tent that keeps him company on his lonesome ventures and a highly excitable, adorable puppet puppy born from a white puff of cloud. The old man and his trusted tent are vagabonds of the sunset, bedevilled by the ineffable and lost in time. Meanwhile, a butterfly net-wielding tracker who has caught his scent is resolute in hunting the man down and bringing him back to this world.

Like mesmeric clockwork, the skilled puppeteers are completely attuned to each other’s kinetic space. Tim Watts, Arielle Gray and Chris Isaacs bring delicacy and detail to the small puppet of the old man; their personification of the tent-as-noble-steed is inspired, as is the cloud-dog and other ephemeral figurations within the man’s hallucinatory state. The recurring motifs of clouds and the attempt to capture them with a net are expressions of the protagonist’s attempts to catch his thoughts before they flit away on the breeze. These are, initially, interesting metaphors for the states of both lucidity and fragmentation the man experiences as the clouds (and his ideas) break up, but ones that are to a degree overplayed.

However, Arielle Gray’s immersion within the character of the old man is flawless; her physical transformation, aided by a malleable mask complete with skin folds and creases, is complete. Her embodiment of the old man is filled with vulnerability along with a cheeky and determined attitude to triumph over the mysterious hunter. The animation designed by Watts coupled with the Ennio Morricone-inspired score by composer Rachael Dease pays homage to the Spaghetti Western’s quest for redemption. A particular highlight is the treatment of a scene using Sergio Leone’s filmmaking style in shadow play. Utilising bold depth of field juxtaposed with extreme close-ups for the staging of a duel, the old man and his tracker come face to face at high noon with only a walking stick and butterfly net at their disposal to fight it out.

More than a matinee movie backdrop, Dease’s score traverses a wide range of moods and genres, showcasing her versatility and an ability to draw from the dark and find an unsettling beauty within it. Her use of retro-electronic instruments coupled with sparse rhythmic accompaniments evokes several time periods simultaneously: a reflection perhaps of the old man’s internal state. At other times, we are treated to a Southern Gothic fascination with dread, as Dease’s smoky vocals heighten the mood of the theme song “It’s Dark Outside,” like a soothing promise following a nightmare. It’s tricky to get the balance right when using a theme song in a stage show and the number of times it recurred may have been a tad excessive. However, Dease’s score was like another character, bringing an added dimension to the piece as a whole.

It’s Dark Outside is an incarnation of certain feelings: the fear of being lost in a forest; summoning up deep pain from the past; an endless fascination with the wilderness of one’s own mind. Such feelings can be frightening or liberating for many of us, whether or not we are in the grips of a disease such as Alzheimer’s and this, perhaps, is where the success of the play resides: in its refusal to become merely a stylised public service announcement, It’s Dark Outside speaks to broader themes of social and psychological displacement.

All credit to Perth Theatre Company for commissioning these talented emerging artists to create a new work. There is limited opportunity in this city for emerging artists to move up to the next level of their practice and work with established artists or professional venues. With Perth Theatre Company’s investment in developing and producing the work of emerging artists, coupled with its relationship with organisations such as The Blue Room Theatre, the opportunity for emerging artists to develop their work with a professional outcome is now within reach.

Perth Theatre Company, It’s Dark Outside, created and performed by Tim Watts, Arielle Gray, Chris Isaacs, composer Rachael Dease, set construction Anthony Watts; Studio Underground, State Theatre Centre WA, Perth, June 29-July 14

reason for travelling

d is for detroit

In America it’s very popular to be ‘down on the D.’ You can hear the air being sucked in through the teeth of ordinary folk decrying the fate of a blighted Detroit, a reverse rags-to-riches story. Once the fourth largest city in America, its population has shrunk from about two million at its peak in the 1950s to fewer than 600,000. Derelict, burnt-out, abandoned homes and factories combine with 33,000 vacant lots across the city, giving rise to a new genre in photography called “ruin porn.”

I returned to Detroit after a brief sojourn in 2010. Like many before me, I fell in love with danger, the wildness and the satisfaction of a rust belt being reclaimed by an urban farming movement and all the possibilities that a post apocalyptic playground could ignite. Ranging across the USA on a self-styled rogue tour of artist-run spaces, Detroit in some ways has been the gravitational pull, anchoring the entire trip.

artist run spaces…

Ponyride is a hybrid artist-run space conceived by architect and artist duo Kaija Wuolett and Phil Cooley (Phil also runs Slows Bar BQ by word of mouth, the best bbq restaurant in town). Ponyride’s mission is to use the foreclosure crisis as a catalyst to drive transformation of the area and principally to “provide cheap space for socially-conscious artists and entrepreneurs to work and share knowledge, resources and networks” (website). Residents include a letter press and printmaker, Stukenborg Press originally hailing from NYC; a dance studio for Runjit a Detroit form of hiphop dance; “the empowerment plan,” a social entrepreneur textiles and humanitarian project; various digital media outfits; and a sound recording studio Beehive Recording Co. Ponyride even hosts a fencing club.

Dflux is the home and informal residency program of artists Jon Brumit and Sarah Wagner who famously bought a house in 2008 for $100. Jon now works at MOCAD and this house joins several other bustling emerging projects, many of which have been spear-headed by another creative couple Mitch and Gina from Design99 who are known for a range of urban interventions around the city of Hamtramck, under the moniker of Powerhouse Productions.

capital a art…

If you are looking for more on-the-beaten track art experiences there are of course some fine institutions, not just surviving but thriving. Museum of Contemporary Art, fittingly housed in a former auto dealership, is a hub for emerging contemporary practices with large gallery spaces and two very large residency development spaces. While there I met with Detroit based Performance Company the hinterlands, currently in residence. Hinterlands core member Eleni Zaharopoulos also hosts invite-only dinner parties at the Jamison Social Club which describes itself as “a part time public space hosting a variety of social experiments.” Join the mailing list to get invited.

The Detroit Institute of Arts at 5200 Woodward Avenue houses works by Picasso, Matisse, van Gogh and Warhol, but the main attraction is the large Diego Rivera fresco, Detroit Industry, which was commissioned in 1932 by Henry Ford’s son when he was director. Also in the Riviera Court are free concerts every Friday at 7 and 8.30pm.

for refreshment…

The place to be on Friday or Saturday nights is D’Mongo’s, or its full name Café D’Mongo’s Speakeasy, at 1439 Griswold Street. The cheeky grinned and very friendly Larry D’Mongo presides over this bar located at the back of the hotel he runs with his wife, who also looks after over a very quirky tearoom on the other side of the building (open by appointment only). D’mongo’s serves food, great drinks and packs in some awesome live music. Everyone seems to know everyone at D’Mongo’s.

The first thing to do when you arrive in Detroit is track down a decent flat white. This is a term not understood by many Americans, so it is divine intervention that Astro Coffee on Michigan Ave was opened last year by Australian Jess Hicks and her partner Daisuke Hughes (originally from Detroit). The food is excellent if you are homesick for homemade coconut ice or Anzac biscuits. And…the coffee. My god, it’s good.

play spaces

Visiting Dabl’s African Bead Museum is a must for bead and non-bead lovers alike just to hear Dabl’s stories, plus the amazing public art adorning the site. Looking for a more hands-on synthetic experience, there’s hacker space Omni Detroit and also Mt Elliot Maker Space which has open lab days each Thursday from 2pm. The Heidelberg Project, 3600 Heidelberg Street, 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.

architecture

Michigan Central Station (1913) is an awesome site, located in the Corktown neighbourhood and created by the architects behind New York City’s Grand Central Terminal. When Amtrak moved out in 1988, it closed down and has sat empty, slowly decaying ever since. Other significant sites include United Artists Theater at 150 Bagley Street; Packyard Auto Plant on East Grand Boulevard and the majestic 1920s Michigan Theater, now the most opulent car park in the world. To sample more tasteful ruin, porn check out Parisian photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.

urban farms

The promise of spoils from an emerging green economy is sparking interest in urban farming, alongside efforts by black communities to bring food justice to a city otherwise known as a ‘food desert.’ The confluence of abundant vacant urban land with the global resurgence in growing and eating local produce is starting to yield results. Check out D-Town Farm; Brightmoor; and Earthworks Detroit. To taste some of this goodness, and to see Detroiters on display on Saturdays go to the Eastern Markets, a public market spanning six blocks, operating since 1891. Grab a bike and ride the Dequindre Cut north from the river frontage.

accommodation

Hostel Detroit, run as a non-profit, is managed by the affable and critically astute Michel, originally from Quebec. He and his family have resided in Detroit for the past 14 years. The hostel is like a big share house and, like a lot of things that make Detroit great, its reputation tends to filter out the 20-year-old gap year travellers. Bikes are available to rent for $10 a day.

upcoming events

links

Rebecca Conroy is an interdisciplinary creative and director of Bill+George, an artist run space in Sydney. Rebecca was the Associate Director at Performance Space (2008-2010) and completed her PhD on “Oppositional Performance Practice” in 2006 after an extended period living and working within the Indonesian underground.

contentious cut and paste
megan garrett-jones: nighttime: petty theft, performance space
RealTime issue #91 June-July 2009 web

Soundcapsule is a bi-monthly online feature offering free downloads of music by artists we’ve recently covered in RealTime.

ida duelund hansen, another lament, chamber made opera/rawcus

Another Lament is a salon opera commissioned as part of Chamber Made’s Living Room series which presents performances in private residences, though it has since been performed at Melbourne’s Malthouse. Co-created with Rawcus, an ensemble for performers with and without disabilities, Another Lament is directed by Kate Sulan and composed by Danish cellist/vocalist Ida Dueland Hansen who also performs in the work. The piece is loosely based on the tragic demise of 17th century British composer Henry Purcell.

In a review in RT101 Matthew Lorenzon wrote: “[Duelund Hansen] utilises a vast stylistic spectrum from baroque to jazz harmonies and mid-20th century Central European atonality, to extended vocal and double bass techniques. Her reinterpretations of Purcell demonstrate an expressive continuum in harmonic and timbral composition from unnerving baroque contrapuntal dissonance to the sickly crackle of cotton thread over a double bass string.”

bringing chamber opera home
matthew lorenzon: chamber made opera, living room opera
RealTime issue #101 Feb-March 2011 p48

unravelled and re-woven
matthew lorenzon: minotaur the island, aurora festival
RealTime issue #109 June-July 2012 web

room to imagine
simon charles: chamber made opera, the box
RealTime issue #109 June-July 2012 pg. 34

kraig grady, clocks and clouds

Kraig Grady is a US-born composer currently based in Wollongong, NSW. He performs with Terumi Narushima as Clocks and Clouds. Heavily influenced by Harry Partch, Grady has an ongoing interest in microtonal tunings, building his own instruments in order to perform his compositions. In fact Grady has created an entire meta-world to encapsulate his compositional thinking, Anaphora Island.

A particularly striking instrument is the Meru Bars described by Gail Priest in a recent review of Clocks and Clouds at Aurora 2012 as “PVC conduit of different lengths, placed vertically and topped with thick metal bars suspended on elastic. The objects are equally musical and sculptural and, at a distance, their faux marble paintwork makes them reminiscent of ancient objects of ritual.”

Reviewing the same concert Oliver Downes writes: “The sound of the Meru seemed to emanate from deep within the earth, its blended resonances suggesting imaginary ceremonies unfolding in forgotten caves. When this opening ‘terrain’ section closed with the exit of the Meru from the texture, the remaining instruments seemed bereft without its subterranean heat.”

a moving song for the earth
oliver downes: clocks and clouds, aurora festival of living music
RealTime issue #109 June-July 2012 web

alternate hearings
gail priest: clocks & clouds, greg schiemer, aurora festival
RealTime issue #109 June-July 2012 web

an aurora over western sydney
keith gallasch: andrew batt-rawden, artistic director, aurora festival of living music
RealTime issue #108 April-May 2012 p14

david burraston, the wired lab

The WIRED Lab was established in 2007 as an artist collective comprising Sarah Last, David Burraston, Alan Lamb and Robin Fox. It is situated on a rural property in Cootamundra in the Riverina district around 400 kms south west of Sydney. The collective’s overall intention is rooted in broader investigations into connections between art, science and environment, however the initial project for the group was to further explore the long wire techniques developed by Alan Lamb over the last 30 years.

David Burraston lives on the property and is conducting ongoing research. This track is from the Rainwire project which “forms part of an art/science initiative to investigate environmental sonification of land based natural rainfall using large-scale long wire instruments” (academic paper Charles Sturt University).

railroad transformations
RealTime issue #101 Feb-March 2011 p53
bruce mowson, rolling stock, junee

taking the s-train
jim knox on an unsound trip out of wagga wagga
RealTime issue #76 Dec-Jan 2006 p48

The WIRED Lab was established in 2007 on a rural property in Cootamundra in the Riverina district around 400 kms south west of Sydney. It serves both as a physical location as well as an artist collective comprising Sarah Last, David Burraston, Alan Lamb and Robin Fox. Initial impetus for the collaboration was to further explore the 'long wire' work that Lamb has developed over a number of decades (based on the sounds of telegraph wires), however the collective’s overall intention is rooted in broader investigations into connections between art, science and environment.

Several ‘wires’ have been erected on the property and over the last five years there have been a variety of residencies and workshops utilising them, as well as other field recording activities. This double LP set documents four live performances that took place at dusk on October 31, 2009 during an open day for the site, and features the key artists Lamb, Burraston and Fox along with associated artists Garry Bradbury and Oren Ambarchi who have also undertaken extensive residencies there.

The first album features two duos. Burraston and Lamb offer an introduction to the unique sound of the wires. The recurrent sonic element in this piece is a kind of ping or “p-schwing.” It’s curiously electronic, like the sound of guns in science fiction movies, yet it’s also very analogue. Lamb and Burraston have devised their own contact microphones to best pick up the vibrations and these allow us to hear the metallicness of the wire, the forces of tension acting upon it, the flick and release—oscillations carrying long distances. (In the sonic revelation of physical properties I’m reminded of Akio Suzuki’s intriguing long spring reverb instrument, the Analapos.

The piece has a dark, gothic feel, the wire flicks and taps underpinned by a quietly insistent moaning of wind. This is an altered Australian landscape, the vastness still there, but the sun low and the shadows ominous, a mood similarly evoked by the brooding black and white landscape panoramas that adorn the gate-fold cover. The piece shifts in density from quiet and spare—where we hear the full qualities of a single ping—to a veritable storm of sound, where we are aurally flayed by the wires. In the depth of the storm the work begins to sound like rain lashing a corrugated iron roof—both unnerving and beautiful. (See soundcapsule #4 for an example of Burraston's work.)

The duo of Lamb and Bradbury lets more of the figurative landscape into the mix with the buzz of flies and various bird tweets. These gradually morph, gaining organised harmonics to become a warm drone underpinning the increasingly insistent birdsong. Then the wire is introduced, played by, it seems, an electric razor, the speed-modulated vibrations creating swells and troughs of harsh yet still warm metallic tones. There is complex melodic play as the whistling wind is intertwined, drawing out eerie harmonics similar to those made by Sarah Hopkins’ whirlies. The piece develops a darker turn for the conclusion, the increasingly insistent drone like an oversized hurdy-gurdy.

Oren Ambarchi picks up on this and takes it to the next level. Known for his extended guitar works involving epic crescendos, Ambarchi employs a similar methodology with the wire, however here it is pared back with less reliance on layering effects, but without any loss of intensity. Ambarchi concentrates on the bass potentials of the wires and there’s a tangible sense of liveness, as well as gesture as he uses something like an ebow and direct bowing to draw out long, deep tones that swell in and out of smooth and burry vibration. The sound is big and cataclysmic, coming in waves with dramatic ruptures—at some point sounding like a piano being dropped from a window. And just when you think that descending bass line can go no lower, it does—and truly magnificent it is.

Perhaps it is strange to include Robin Fox’s piece in the LP set, as it was in fact an integrated audiovisual work in which the sound is symbiotically linked with a laser show, projected onto a hillside. However such is Fox’s skill, that while the piece makes you wish you had been there watching the full show, the sound does stand on its own. We get Fox’s harsh, rhythmic static assaults, with morsecoding micro melodies and an almost sculptural approach to structure. Occasional recordings of the wires are introduced but they seem strangely figurative in Fox’s highly abstracted aesthetic. (In email correspondence, Fox tells me that the wire recordings were fed through his data visualisation system and projected onto the hill.) So while not so “wirey” in its sound-only documentation, it’s still a pleasure to hear Fox’s brand of exact and exacting noise on vinyl.

The WIRED Open Day 2009 double LP is both deeply engaging listening and a comprehensive document of the Wires project. Each artist/collaboration offers distinctly different approaches: Burraston and Lamb present an extracted essence of the sonic phenomenon of the wires while Bradbury and Lamb offer a sense of the environment in which the wires are situated. Fox is more difficult to pinpoint, but if you listen with site-specifity in mind, there’s an intriguing tension between the man-made and natural environment. Considering the album as document, it’s Ambarchi’s performance that captures the idea of the wires not just as a sound source to be sampled, but as an instrument that can be tamed and played live, with fascinating results.

reason for travelling

contemporary art—ancient culture

Throw a stick in Yogyakarta (usually referred to as Yogya, and pronounced Jogja) and chances are you’ll hit an artist. Throw a couple more and you’ll hit a foreign artist here on a residency, exchange program, research grant or just escaping the winter back home. The relaxed pace of Yogya, the city’s reputation as the cultural heart of Java, the fact that it’s home to one of the country’s largest art schools and the cheap cost of living make it the perfect place to immerse yourself in art for a few weeks (months, or even years…).

Located in the centre of Java, Yogya is surrounded by the ancient Borobodur and Prambanan temple complexes in the East and West, the active volcano Mount Merapi in the North and the fabulous beaches of Parangtritis and Wonosari in the South. In the centre of town, amongst centuries-old palaces, rambling marketplaces and narrow streets there is also an ever-expanding range of contemporary art spaces.

for culture…

The venerable Cemeti Arthouse should be the first stop on your Yogya Art Tour. Cemeti opened in 1988 and ever since has played a key role in the development of contemporary art practice in Indonesia. A short walk away are Kedai Kebun Forum and Langgeng Art Foundation, both of which host exhibitions by local and international artists, as well as regular seminars and performances. Ten minutes to the West is Sangkring Artspace, a complex of enormous spaces that host some excellent shows. Taman Budaya Yogyakarta and Jogja National Museum are public venues that regularly host contemporary art events, including the Yogya Biennale and Art Fair Jogjakarta. The next ArtJOG12 will run July 14-28.

For those with more specific interests, there is a proliferation of small collectives and artist-run spaces. As in any city, they tend to come and go, but some that have lasted several years are House of Natural Fibre, aka HONF (for science/art projects), Mes 56 (photography), Survive Garage (street art), Kunci (cultural studies/theory), Paper Moon Puppet Theatre and Theater Garasi. The Indonesian Visual Art Archive houses a vast library documenting art practices over past decades and is an excellent resource for curators and researchers. You can pick up a great map of Yogya artspaces from IVAA or Kedai Kebun, or download it here.

If you are planning a trip to Yogya I recommend you do a little research and contact one or two of the above organisations. Artists are warmly welcomed in this city and well looked after (if you get a chance, you can return the favour one day). Giving an artist talk or a workshop is a great way to meet the locals, make friends and get access to a side of the city most tourists never see.

getting around…

There’s very little public transport in Yogya and the streets (like every Asian city) are swarming with small 150cc motorbikes. If you are prepared to brave it, they are a great way to get around and can be hired for about $4 per day. Otherwise you can hire a bicycle for about $2 per day or hail a becak (rickshaw). Remember to negotiate the fare before you climb aboard.

for accommodation…

The Prawirotaman area is close to all the galleries and cheap, good restaurants. Hotels here range from $10-$40 per night, but paying more doesn’t necessarily guarantee a better experience (or even a clean bathroom). Some of the smaller homestays offer much better value. ViaVia Homestay or Rumah Eyang have small but clean rooms in a good location with friendly staff at $15-$20 per night. If you are looking for a bit of luxury in the midst of the rice paddies, D’Omah Retreat in Tembi is unique and beautiful, if a bit out of town. Their rooms range from $60-$100 per night.

Pirated contemporary Indonesian artworks for sale on Yogya’s sidewalks, $1 each, (Prihatmoko Moki, 2012)

other recommendations…

Javanese culture goes back a couple of thousand years and contemporary society reflects the complexity of its history. The Javanese are famous for being excessively polite but at the same time are very laid-back. Service is slow, rules are more like recommendations and if you ask someone for directions they will always stop and help you, but there’s no guarantee they understand where you want to go, or how to get there. Most of the arts community here speak English, but the rest of the population probably don’t, so learning a few basic phrases of Bhasa Indonesia and taking an interest in the history and culture of the place will open doors to a world that is endlessly interesting and surprising.

links

Malcolm Smith is an artist, arts manager and curator currently based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Before moving to Indonesia he managed exhibition programs in contemporary art spaces around Australia, including the Australian Centre for Photography, Object: Australian Centre for Craft and Design and 24HR Art, the Northern Territory Centre for Contemporary Art. www.invisibleman.net.au

the riches of rusting
RealTime issue #64 Dec-Jan 2004 p34
malcolm smith: tracks dance company, RUST

reason for travelling

I lived in Beijing from 2007 to 2011, returning in May to conduct more research for my PhD thesis on Chinese documentary filmmaking.

tough love…

China’s capital can be a tough place. Its massive main roads are intimidating, in many areas few people speak English and at the heart of the city is Tiananmen Square—surely the most heavily policed public space in the world. Add to this a population of 20 million and a climate that veers from the 30s to days below zero and you have a city that can test the endurance of the heartiest resident. But Beijing’s real pleasures lie behind the façade of its overbearing government buildings and public monuments, tucked away in the narrow alleys (hutong) of the old city and in hard to find corners. Here a rich culture plays out beneath the city’s surface, trying its best to avoid the watchful eye of the authorities.

things to do…officially

Beijing’s schizophrenic nature is split between airbrushed state-sanctioned culture and a vibrant unofficial sector. Consequently the city’s big museums tend to be dull, although the National Art Museum of China occasionally has interesting exhibitions of contemporary art (see RT87).

Beijing’s concert prices are surprisingly cheap, so it’s worth checking if any major talents are performing at theatres like the National Centre for the Performing Arts (known to locals as the Egg). Seeing someone like Ennio Morricone perform at the Great Hall of the People on Tiananmen Square—as I did a few years back—not an experience you’re likely to forget.

the real stuff…

If you’re looking to delve into Beijing’s visual arts scene, the obvious place to start is 798, an art zone in the city’s northeast housed in a former East German-designed factory complex. It’s more like a cheap trinkets market these days than a hotbed of cutting-edge culture, but the Bauhaus-style buildings and a handful of quality galleries still make a visit worthwhile. Make a beeline for the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art. Their exhibitions provide a good introduction to China’s contemporary art scene, and the building is one of the best preserved of the former factories.

Beijing’s real artistic hub is now slightly further out in Caochangdi, a five-minute cab ride from 798. This area is home to a range of galleries, but the pick of the bunch is the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, housed in a building designed by Ai Weiwei and run by the famous photographer couple Rong Rong and Inri (see RT92). They also have a small café serving passable coffee. Ai Weiwei lives nearby—check out the surveillance cameras outside his front door for a glimpse of state paranoia in action.

At the other end of town lies Red Gate, Beijing’s oldest contemporary art gallery, owned by Australian Brian Wallace. The exhibitions tend to favour more traditional forms like painting, but the gallery is housed in the impressively ancient Dongbianmen Watch Tower, sitting astride the only remaining section of Beijing’s once mighty city wall.

Industrial chic – the East German built and designed 798 factory complex is now home to a range of galleries, cafes and shops

If music is more your style you’re in luck—Beijing is the centre of China’s thriving underground rock scene. Key venues Yugong Yishan and Mao Livehouse are both located in the old city centre, while Dos Kolegas (aka Liang ge hao pengyou) is a short cab ride to the northeast.

Finally, film lovers should check out Broadway Cinematheque MOMA, Beijing’s one and only official arthouse cinema. Although subject to government restrictions, BC MOMA regularly programs challenging Chinese features by a range of new and established talents, and the films are often introduced by their makers. Most are subtitled, but double check when you buy your ticket—the information on the website is not always accurate.

The futuristic surrounds of the MOMA residential complex, home to Beijing’s only arthouse cinema, Broadway Cinematheque

china’s food capital…

There are literally thousands of restaurants in Beijing—although it has to be said many are pretty ordinary. But if you know where to go, this is one of the best cities in which to sample food from all over China.

Yu Xin serves up consistently great Sichuan food at very reasonable prices. Dianke Dianlai provides a set banquet for around RMB 100—not cheap by Beijing standards, but it’s some of the best Yunnan food in the capital. Middle 8th also does excellent Yunnan food.

Another slightly pricey place that should not be missed is Da Dong—without doubt the best Peking Duck in the dish’s hometown.

other highlights…

Take the time to visit Gu Lou (the Drum Tower) and the nearby hutong Nanluoguxiang. Rife with cute cafes, bars and shops, the area is one of Beijing’s few really old neighbourhoods still standing.

While you’re focused on the ancient, take a cab to the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall about 70 km northeast of Beijing. It will cost you around RMB 500 for a return trip (around $80, negotiate the price in advance and ask the cabbie to wait for you) but this part of the wall is much more impressive than the ultra-touristy Badaling section closer to the city.

If you need some China-related reading material, check out the Bookworm. This English-language bookstore and café is a Beijing institution, and has an excellent year-round program of talks by writers.

Cabs and electric buses work the streets of Beijing’s old city centre in the shadow of Gu Lou (the Drum Tower)

some essential tips…

Cabbies generally cannot read pinyin (the Romanised version of Chinese) so having a copy of your hotel address in Chinese characters is essential. Ask for an address card from your hotel’s reception. Taking a map with you that has street names in pinyin and Chinese characters is also useful for getting around—don’t count on getting one in Beijing.

The city’s extensive subway network is always crowded, but it is also cheap (you can ride anywhere for RMB 2, around 30c). All station names and subway maps are in pinyin, making the system easy to use.

Finally, to find out what’s going to be happening during your stay, check out theBeijinger.com before you leave.

links

Dan Edwards is a freelance writer and journalist, and former OnScreen editor for RealTime. He lived in Beijing from 2007 to 2011 and his now based in Melbourne, where he is completing a thesis and book on Chinese independent documentary films.

new media, new to china
dan edwards: synthetic times—media art china 2008
RealTime issue #87 Oct-Nov 2008 p32

“In 1999 a group of RMIT students presented a collection of experimental sound and music events. Ten years on Liquid Architecture, has grown into one of Australia’s most significant festivals with a national touring program of concerts, installations and forums.” (Gail Priest, RT91)

In 2009 to celebrate the 10th edition of Liquid Architecture we published a brief archive highlight. To co-incide with LA’s 13th year, the archive has been updated to include all reviews of the festival since 2002, a comprehensive record of this leading music event.

The longevity of Liquid Architecture is testament to Artistic Director Nat Bates’ ability to adapt the festival to ever-changing circumstances. In an interview in 2009 he said collaboration was the secret to success: “One of the key things for me is the team of curators. When we were a Melbourne-only event there were a number of people I worked with [Bruce Mowson was co-director 2001-4, Camilla Hannan 2001-2] and now that it’s a national event I rely heavily upon the people in the other cities for input” (RT91). The 2012 festival has taken this collaboration to the next level as Bates takes a back seat while Philip Samartzis and Lawrence English curate the entire festival around the idea of an “Antarctic Convergence” (see preview in RT109).

Most years RT has offered multiple reviews in order to cover the festival in its several locales and offer different perspectives on the artists and their performances over the touring schedule. To celebrate the 10th festival individual city-based reviews were augmented with an overview by Jared Davis who travelled with the crew, and in a pull-no-punches article asked difficult questions about the role of the festival a decade after its inception (see RT93 “listening for change”).

If the density of coverage is overwhelming here are a few suggestions.
Read about Bernard Parmegiani playing in Melbourne during LA4 in “liquid architecture: the parmegiani experience“, an event which Nat Bates remembers as his “number one highlight.” A duet by Clayton Thomas and Jim Denley, “sound bodies“, stands out as writer Tony Osborne’s “highlight of the week” when he sampled Sydney’s LA7. Recalling LA9, “sounds solid, sounds fluid“, Gail Priest nominates not one but “two outstanding performances”, those of festival director Nat Bates and Marcus Schmickler; the latter’s creation “powerful, verging on spiritual, with no drugs required.” And covering LA12 in Melbourne Matthew Lorenzon probes the role of performativity in his review, “reciprocity between sounds.”
RT

liquid architecture 13

antarctic reveries
greg hooper: liquid architecture 13, brisbane
RealTime issue #110 Aug-Sept 2012 pg18

sonic antarctic
liquid architecture 13: antarctic convergence
RealTime issue #109 June-July 2012 p34

liquid architecture 12

reciprocity between sounds
matthew lorenzon: liquid architecture 12, melbourne
RealTime issue #104 Aug-Sept 2011 p44

listening up
gail priest: liquid architecture 12, sydney
RealTime issue #104 Aug-Sept 2011 p45

liquid architecture 11

the accidental audist
greg hooper: liquid architecture 11; urban jungle, brisbane
RealTime issue #98 Aug-Sept 2010 p46

sound art+/-performance
simon charles: liquid architecture 11, melbourne
RealTime issue #98 Aug-Sept 2010 p47

liquid architecture 10

listening for change
jared davis: reflections on liquid architecture 10
RealTime issue #93 Oct-Nov 2009 p52

architectural meltdown
tony osborne: liquid architecture 10, sydney
RealTime issue #92 Aug-Sept 2009 p48

sound, image & their ghosts
greg hoooper: liquid architecture 10, brisbane
RealTime issue #92 Aug-Sept 2009 p48

the art of sonic curation
chris reid: liquid architecture 10, melbourne
RealTime issue #92 Aug-Sept 2009 p49

sounds continuous
gail priest: interview with nat bates, liquid architecture 10
RealTime issue #91 June-July 2009 p46

liquid architecture 9

depends on where you sit
chris reid: liquid architecture 9, melbourne
RealTime issue #87 Oct-Nov 2008 p46

sounds solid, sounds fluid
gail priest: liquid architecture 9, Sydney
RealTime issue #87 Oct-Nov 2008 p48

sonic interiors
simon charles: liquid architecture 9, melbourne
RealTime issue #87 Oct-Nov 2008 p47

liquid architecture 8

sound in mind and body
chris reid happily imbibes liquid architecture 8, melbourne
RealTime issue #81 Oct-Nov 2007 p45

sounds seen & worded
greg hooper at liquid architecture 8, brisbane
RealTime issue #80 Aug-Sept 2007 p51

sonic extremeties
gail priest embraces liquid architecture 8, sydney
RealTime issue #81 Oct-Nov 2007 p46

liquid architecture 7

sound bodies
tony osborne: liquid architecture 7, Sydney
RealTime issue #75 Oct-Nov 2006 p53

confined and released
chris reid: liquid architecture 7
RealTime issue #75 Oct-Nov 2006 p54

liquid architecture 6

celebrating sound
gail priest: liquid architecture 6
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 p49

liquid architecture 5

instrumental explorations
danni zuvela: liquid architecture 5, brisbane
RealTime issue #63 Oct-Nov 2004 p48

drum mutations
greg hooper: liquid architecture 5, brisbane
RealTime issue #63 Oct-Nov 2004 p50

liquid architecture 4

qbfm:liquid architecture
greg hooper: liquid architecture 4, brisbane
RealTime issue #58 Dec-Jan 2003 p43

liquid architecture 3

substantial echoes
jonathan marshall: liquid architecture 3
RealTime issue #50 Aug-Sept 2002 p7

Stuart Buchanan from New Weird Australia talks with Gail Priest about three years of operation and what’s in store in the future.

New Weird Australia started in 2009 to nurture and promote ‘experimental and eclectic’ Australian music. NWA activities include a weekly radio program on Sydney’s FBi, free digital compilations, an edition series focussing on a single group or artist and the presentation of gigs.

Mini-doco about Psycho Subtropics at Serial Space, Sydney, including interviews with co-curator Joel Stern and artist Michael Candy

PSYCHO SUBTROPICS is a constantly evolving mini festival curated by OtherFilm (Joel Stern & Danni Zuvela) presenting Brisbane artists who work across music, noise and various visual forms. The Sydney manifestation was the third in the series and involved a residency at Serial Space for a week culminating in an exhibition, two nights of performances and a film session. The artists were Sarah Byrne, Michael Candy, Leighton Craig, Alex Cuffe, Bec Cunningham, Michael Donnelly, Gerald Keaney, Ross Manning, Andrew Mcllelan, Nicola Morton, Glen Schenau, Sandra Selig, Joel Stern and Danni Zuvela. Serial Space June 7-10, 2012

beyond play
jim knox at the 2007 otherfilm festival
RealTime issue #83 Feb-March 2008 p20

safARI

SafARI is dedicated to presenting the work of emerging and unrepresented artists and has been the unofficial fringe event of the Biennale of Sydney since 2004. This year’s manifestation, under the guiding hands of Danielle Robson and Nina Stromqvist, lives up to its name with a range of activities that ask the viewer to be venturesome in their pursuit of art. The annual walk (the safari) around the various spaces took place on June 23, and the weekend of June 30 saw Bus Projects’ mobile performance space roaming around the inner city. However tracking down the main exhibition venues (open until July 15) also requires a sense of adventure.

ALASKA projects is an ARI that is currently inhabiting an undercover car park in Kings Cross. The artists exhibiting are: Chris Bennie presenting an intimate study of the car park in his local Brisbane shopping mall; Dara Gill who is exploring anxiety through handmade instruments inspired by medieval tools intended to recreate the sounds of hell; and Drew Pettifer whose video work explores sexuality and human connection. Pettifer’s provocative paste-ups are also dotted around the city focusing on the history of gay activism.

safARI has also teamed up with the Rocks Pop Up Project to use several of their spaces. At 13 Cambridge Street you’ll find Kurt Sorensen’s photographic portraits of people now living who are thought to be related to characters from the The Rocks circa 1850; and Julia Henderson’s site specific assemblages drawing on “architectural elements, imperfections and found objects” (press release). At 75 1/2 George Street you might discover Tega Brain’s interactive odorific art; or chat with Jodie Whalen who has undertaken the daunting task of living in the gallery for the duration of the exhibition. Here you’ll also find sound artist Julian Day’s keyboard installation exploring the eternal music of the drone. (See coverage of Day & Luke Jaaniste’s Super Critical Mass as part of Aurora.)

But if you can’t make it to the physical locations you can always check out the ‘studio visit’ video interviews with all 16 artists on the safARI website.
safARI, directors Danielle Robson and Nina Stromqvist, artists Clark Beaumont, Chris Bennie, Tega Brain, Julian Day, Dara Gill, Julie Henderson, Julia Holden, Huw Lewis, Daniel McKewen, Rachel Park, Drew Pettifer, Kurt Sorensen, Adele Varcoe, Jodie Whalen and Elizabeth Willing; various venues, June 22-July 15, http://safari.org.au/

the reginald 2012 program

Rachelle Hickson, Kiruna Stamell, Benjamin Hancock, James Berlyn & Nalina Wait, Sue Healey’s Variant

In 2011 the downstairs theatre at the Seymour Centre in Sydney was rebranded The Reginald. (Luckily philanthropist Everest Reginald York Seymour, after whom the whole centre and the two main theatres are named, had one middle name remaining!) With the rebranding came a re-invigoration of the program and the 2011 season was well received. Recently Tim Jones, Seymour Centre Artistic Director, has announced the 2012 program which will feature five quite different works over the next five months.

The season starts with choreographer Sue Healey’s latest piece Variant continues her exploration of the diversity of the human form. (See RealTimeDance for a full profile of Healey’s works.) During the Sydney Fringe, The Reginald will host Damian Callinan’s comedy The Merger, telling the tale of a country football coach who recruits local asylum seekers to make up player numbers. October sees director Kate Gaul take on the music theatre work Myths and Hymns by Tony Award winner Adam Guettel, described as “jazz meets opera meets gospel meets R&B meets music comedy and beyond” (website). Deborah Thomson’s My Private Parts: An Inside View of Fertilisation—a hit at last year’s Sydney Fringe—is a satirical musical work about the IVF experience. The season ends on a slightly darker note with Peter Grahan and Adelaide group five.point.one’s presentation of Daniel Keene’s The Share, in which street kids Sugar and Tex plan a heist of the local drug dealer, which, as you might imagine, can only end badly.
Reginald Season, The Seymour Centre, July-Dec, http://sydney.edu.au/seymour/

the reef, tura new music & aco

The Reef is a unique project that sees the Australian Chamber Orchestra and Tura New Music team up to present a national tour from Darwin to Perth through the Kimberley, Pilbara, Gascoyne and Mid West regions of Western Australia, ending at Sydney Opera House. The centrepiece of the program is a work for strings, didgeridoo and slide guitar composed by Iain Grandage in collaboration with Indigenous musician Mark Atkins and the ACO’s Richard Tognetti. It also features a film by Jon Frank and Mick Sowry with surfing legend Derek Hynd. The work was devised during a residency at Gnaraloo in the Gascoyne region and is said to take inspiration from the Ningaloo coast while “simultaneously exploring the interconnectedness of pure surfing and music” (website). Other works in the concert, performed by the compact ACO2 ensemble, will include George Crumb’s Black Angels as well as songs by Broome’s Steve Pigrum arranged by Graindage.
The Reef, Darwin July 5, Kununurra July 7, Broome July 11, Port Hedland July 12, Carnavon July 14, Geraldton July 15, Perth July 18, Sydney July 23; for more info http://reeftour.tura.com.au/

opportunities

ian potter moving image commission with acmi

The Ian Potter Trust and ACMI have developed a significant partnership to commission major moving image-based artworks. The project will commission one work every year for 10 years from mid-career Australian artists and is valued at $100,000 per annum. The works will be presented at ACMI and become part of the Ian Potter Collection. Selected works may also become part of the ACMI collection to sit alongside those of major international artists such as Mona Hatoum, Bill Viola and Tony Oursler. The commissions will be selected from an open call to mid-career Australian artists living here or overseas. More details will be announced in late July. http://www.ianpotterculturaltrust.org.au/

qut digital asscociates program

QUT Creative Industries Precinct is offering media artists the opportunity to research and develop work for exhibition at The Block, an exhibition space tailored to the digital arts. There are two exhibition packages to choose from which include subsidised access to The Block along with curatorial and technical support involving R&D sessions with QUT staff. The first round of applications closes July 15, with a second round due Feb 1, 2013. www.ciprecinct.qut.edu.au/dap

congratulations

Adelaide artist Jason Sweeney has been named as one of the five winners of the TED City2.0 awards. Sweeney’s Stereopublic project seeks to use crowd sourcing technologies to create maps of quiet spaces in urban environments. Sweeney hopes this will increase the “sonic health” of our cities, particularly for the “recluses” and those with “disabilities, like autism and schizophrenia, who crave less sensory stimuli” (website). Sweeney will be using the $10,000 prize money along with a Creative Australia grant to complete the project, collaborating with Martin Potter, Nick Crowther, Amy Milhinch and the programming/design team at Freerange Future. The outcome will be an online space for web and mobile devices where participants can build up a database, via geo location, of favourite quiet spaces. http://www.thecity2.org/stories/41

Stuart Buchanan from New Weird Australia talks with Gail Priest about three years of operation and what's in store in the future.

Mini-doco about Psycho Subtropics at Serial Space, Sydney, including interviews with co-curator Joel Stern and artist Michael Candy

beyond play
jim knox at the 2007 otherfilm festival
RealTime issue #83 Feb-March 2008 p20

FOR THE 2012 NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR EMILY SEXTON INTRODUCED A SIMPLE PROVOCATION: THE SPACE BETWEEN US WANTS TO SING. ARTISTS RESPONDED INTENSELY WITH WORKS THAT BUILT UP AROUND THE CITY, AROUND THE PEOPLE WHO OCCUPY THE CITY, AND AROUND THE POLITICS THAT INFUSE THE EVERYDAY.

Liesel Zink’s fifteen at Flagstaff Railway Station builds a dance work against the backdrop of peak-hour pedestrian traffic. From a vantage point above the concourse, the audience watches as four dancers perform through the space and through the commuters. Our focus is held with headphones melding music and dialogue about personal space and the movement of the pedestrians. We are not only attuned to the performance of the dancers, but also to the commuter social ritual.
Rather than making large artistic and physical statements of its own, Zink’s choreography is a subtle intervention into the space. Highly deliberate, with the dancers moving through and around the space, often working in pairs or as a group, the choreography is remarkable as a product of its location rather than as movement in itself. There are moments when dancers are noticed, but the commuters more often than not revert to their routine. The absence of interaction from hundreds of commuters infuses the work with a very real sense of sadness about connection in our society.

Yet despite this sadness, Zink manages to create a dance work that is, ultimately, a joy. She infuses the work with humour in the matching of choreography to recorded and live narration, and in the juxtaposition of commuter routine and dancer movement. While fifteen suggests despair at a lack of connection, the connections Zink makes in the space become a beautiful thing.

Atlanta Eke’s MONSTER BODY at Dancehouse assumes the space of performance more conventionally, but doesn’t allow the audience the typical safety net of a theatre in the dark. The audience enters to Eke hula hooping on top of a mirrored platform, naked except for a molded plastic monster mask. The lights shine just as brightly on the audience as on the dancer and remain this way for most of the performance. There is no space for an audience to hide from Eke’s view: our watching of her body is constantly monitored.

The work is built from scenes that take images of femininity and twist them into feminist statements. Eke infuses much of the work with an uncomfortable humour, our discomfort made all the more stark by our exposure.

Eke positions her strong dance technique up against guttural yelling—aural expression against the ‘effortlessness’ of dance. She stands centre stage and looks sadly out at her audience, urinating, as Britney Spears’ I’m Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman plays. Twice she is tenderly cleaned by a man in a biohazard suit. She cuts her hair while women hold wooden poles with plastic hands on the end that caress her body.

During a “five-minute interval,” four other dancers, naked except for black bags covering their heads, join Eke dancing to Beyonce’s “Run The World (Girls).” The song proclaims a victorious power for women in society, but speaks to an equality not yet reached. Eke’s dancers are proudly and defiantly naked, taking control of their place on the stage and in the world, and yet stripped of any autonomy. Despite the strong and celebratory choreography, they are presented solely as bodies.

MONSTER BODY is an overtly feminist work built from a place of deep anger and sadness. The emotional power of its fractured segments take longer to build than the actual duration of the show, waiting to come together in subsequent hours and days. Yet, as Eke takes complete control and ownership of her vision as an artist, her body as a performer, and of the space and her audience, the work becomes deeply exhilarating.

The Stream/ The Boat/ The Shore/ The Bridge is built from a place of love for Melbourne and the people who inhabit it. Taken by four people at a time, the journey is a series of one-on-one interactions on and around the Yarra River.

The work is opened to the four as a group before each individual visits three of the four locations referred to in the title. After these interactions are over, the four are brought together again on Pigeon Island under the Southbank Pedestrian Bridge to collectively ‘work through’ their journeys and discoveries.

My journey started by being taken across the Yarra on a rowboat by Dan Koop. The work asks the audience to give as much of themselves to the work as they hope to get out of it, and Koop plays wonderfully with the balance of pushing past barriers without causing discomfort.

Continuing my journey to the stream and then onto the bridge, my relationship with each of the artists and with the river seemed to follow a logical growth— from the deeply personal conversation with Koop to learning about the river from Jamie Lewis, to a dialogue-less communication on the bridge powered through body language, headphones and handwritten notes.

The work is most successful when the communication is turned back on the participant in the boat and on the bridge, centralising them within the city with a perspective on the self. This reaches a peak when the performers are removed, and all that is left are the participants each pulling apart their three journeys and trying to piece together the fourth they didn’t participate in.

Shotgun Wedding takes our interconnected and personal relationships and throws them into that loudest and brashest of social situations: the wedding. And while I thought I gave over-personally to The Stream/ The Boat/ The Shore/ The Bridge, in Shotgun Wedding I found myself giving my hand in marriage.

Directors Bridget Balodis and Mark Pritchard detail for us the idea they had for a new social construct: the union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others, in what they have dubbed “marriage.” The bride and groom—until now unmet—are selected from the audience, while the rest become the guests. Soon, the company of strangers are working together to create and join in a celebration balancing a perspective between the imaginary and the real.

Delivered without irony or discontent, and more to the point, as a celebration, the work quite cleverly and acutely manages to question the place of marriage and the wedding ceremony within our society—archaic regulations in vows contrasted with the high level of excitement.

The creators’ highly detailed construction of the façade of an actual wedding is clear. Yet, once the work itself begins, they have to do very little to instil in their guests the sense that they are part of a very real celebration. Even in front of a crowd I did not know, marrying a man I’ve never met, a real sense of ownership and of giddiness about the event develops. People cheer, toast and dance as if they were with old friends, all the while knowing their emotions are manufactured. It’s an overwhelming statement of our innate connection to social events.

Across the festival, young artists are learning—deciding how to define their careers, practices and the world they want to live in. Through these works, they have all demonstrated a deep connection to and interest in this world—sometimes angry, sometimes joyous; excited to be sharing.

2012 Next Wave Festival: fifteen, choreographer Liesel Zink, Flagstaff Station, May 21-25; MONSTER BODY, Atlanta Eke, Dancehouse, May 22-27; The Stream/ The Boat/ The Shore/ The Bridge, Dan Koop, Andrew Bailey, Lauren Clelland, Caroline Gasteen, Georgina Humphries, Max Milne, Yarra River Southbank, May 19-27; Shotgun Wedding, directors Bridget Balodis, Mark Pritchard, with Zöe Rouse, Dan Giovannoni, NO SHOW, St Peters Church, Melbourne, May 19-27

Slow Art Collective, Tony Adams, Chaco Kato, Dylan Martorell, Double Happiness B&B 2012

TO ENTER BELLOWING ECHOES YOU HAVE TO SKIRT THE CURVE OF A TALL WOODEN FRAME OBSTRUCTING THE GALLERY SPACE. THIS STEP TO THE SIDE STARTS A DETOUR THROUGH PAST TIMES AND OTHER PLACES BY WAY OF FIVE IMAGINATIVE INSTALLATIONS. IT’S NOT EXACTLY TIME TRAVEL, BUT THE EXPERIENCE IS SUFFUSED WITH THE QUIXOTIC FANTASY OF LEAVING BEHIND THE EVERYDAY.

The first work you see is a purpose-built installation by Slow Art Collective (SAC) made of things collected on foraging trips around Gertrude Contemporary. Cane mats and suspended bits of bamboo cordoned off a little structure hung with chains of dried fruit and bags of aromatic spices. The space is designed to engage the senses: it’s lit with different colours and animated with little heaps dancing and rattling on exposed speakers. The objects SAC combine to make this fabulous aviary cum Asian beach hut are hard to characterise. They couldn’t be called junk. They aren’t kitsch either. Rather, it’s that innocuous stuff that circulates around the world before finding its way to the shop down the road, slowly accumulating in our lives.

Bringing this stuff into the gallery makes us aware of its movement, of the kind of littoral drift that deposits it nearby. But we’re also invited to think about the wandering movement of SAC’s combing trips through the neighbourhood. A double movement of things and people informs the recombinant realism of Double Happiness B&B 2012. On the exhibition’s performance day, SAC served up stir-fry from a little portable stove in their installation. With this gesture of sharing they invited us to stop for a moment—or for a while—and to think about global flows of bodies and things populating our environments.

Leaving this installation brings us to Jess Johnson’s For Protection Against the Modern World, which transforms an alcove at the back of the gallery into a subtly ominous interior. Its tessellating carpet of blues, greys and greens ends abruptly, as though supernaturally spliced into place. The wall’s diamond pattern is too decorative to be domestic, seeming eldritch or occult. But this wall is also hung with a series of painstaking drawings that belie their contemporaneity. Their Lovecraft-meets-comic-strip aesthetic melds runic patterns and lines rendered with meticulous obsessiveness with day-glo accents and drawings of cartoonish aliens or lunar landscapes. Slathered across each drawing is an obscure slogan alluding to a personal crisis. This mise-en-scéne holds viewers at the threshold of a fantastical and paranoid world, the secrets it hides in plain sight resisting our entrance as they keep us tantalised.

On a pair of plinths between Johnson’s and SAC’s installations sit Tessa Zettel and Karl Khoe’s Land-escapes, two mishmash masks made of bark and ephemeral objects scavenged from city streets. Each mask has a View-Master, an old optical toy used to view three-dimensional images, grafted where its eyeholes would be. Peering through these salvaged devices offers glimpses of natural landscapes: monochromatic forests in which a masked figure stare back from the trees. These vision machines introduce momentary hallucinations of the natural into the gallery space, their fetish-like character connecting them to age-old ceremonies used to set the imagination free.

Placing Land-escapes facing Anna Kristensen’s Indian Chamber on the other side of the gallery can’t have been accidental. From the outside, Kristensen’s work is a large, plain wooden drum. Within, we’re presented with a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree painting of the Jenolan Caves in the Blue Mountains. Kristensen’s rendering of these marvellous natural spaces flirts with the fantastical to unworldly effect. Entering this work is like momentarily stepping into the congealed time of the dream, an ou-topia or non-existent space flush with enigmatic significance. Land-escapes and Indian Chamber use natural scenes to dissociate the senses from time’s forward movement, if only fleetingly.

A flimsy piece of circular card painted half red, half yellow sits on an ad hoc stand outside of Indian Chamber. Its centre is split with a black line and looks for all the world like a kid’s attempt at a racing stripe. It faces a flat, penetratingly blue surface suspended in the angle of a corner. The disc is hooked up to what looks like a cheap toy motor, wobbling as it revolves lazily in space. There’s a relation between these two elements that I don’t understand at first. It clicks into place when I enter the space between them. There’s a tiny pair of wings pinned to the wall on the other side of the installation. When I keep both disc and plane in view, that impression you get when an aeroplane finishes banking and gravity reasserts itself overwhelms me.

These parts represent an abstraction of flight. Not flying, but that turn-of-the-century quest for flight that’s called up by the Wright brothers. For me, what Marcin Wojcik ekes out of these simple elements is that barely-conscious sense of coming back to earth after having left it behind for a little while. That moment when the flight’s over and you’re landing again, the experience of weightlessness receding into a mental space accessible only during rare moments of credulity and nostalgia. V-Glider (Fawkner Park) wonderfully realises an unsuccessful flight that Wojcik attempted in his own homemade glider, coaxing the audience into the process of a heroically failed enterprise.

Curators Marcel Cooper and Bronwyn Baily-Charteris took the story of George Arden, who founded a newspaper called the Port Phillip Gazette in 1838, as the point of departure for these excursions. By accompanying the exhibition with a new edition of the Gazette filled with playful artworks, Cooper and Bailey-Charteris reached back into a peculiar part of Melbourne’s early colonial past to fashion its future anew. This counter-document intercedes in Melbourne’s history, introducing eddies and tributaries into its flow. The theme linking these works is a sense of wonderment, an abiding but not uncritical conviction that possibilities exist just over the horizon or outside of the normal flow of time. Bellowing Echoes induces us to believe that the right combination of elements might just bring that elsewhere within reach.

Bellowing Echoes, curators Marcel Cooper and Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris, exhibition artists Jess Johnson, Anna Kristensen, Tessa Zettel and Karl Khoe, Slow Art Collective (Tony Damas, Chaco Kato and Dylan Martorell) and Marcin Wojcik, publication artists Bindi Cole, The Holy Trinity Collective, Kirsty Hulm, Sam Icklow, Laith McGregor, Sonja Rumyantseva, Carl Scrase, Hannai Tai and Annie Wu, publication designers Naasicaa Larsen and Geoff Riding from CopyBoy, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, 16 April – 26 May, 2012, performance day 19 May, 2012.

NEXT WAVE’S DAY PASSES INVITE AUDIENCE MEMBERS TO SHARE A CURATED JOURNEY THROUGH THE 2012 PROGRAM, A NEW WAY TO EXPLORE THE FESTIVAL. THROUGHOUT THE DAY, PARTICIPANTS ARE INVITED TO STICK WITH THE RING LEADERS AS MUCH OR AS LITTLE AS THEY LIKE.

The structure was not without problems: in particular when separated there was no way to get back in contact, only the hope you would find your way to the next location and re-find your group there.

Starting with Breakfast Club, participants are engaged through table-based conversations in response to talks by invited speakers. Turning the conversations back into small collectives created a democratic space where everyone in the room was given a voice.

Day Pass Two then moved on to visual art. Taking inspiration from Melbourne’s Docklands, Joseph L Griffiths’ Shelters sits against the chrome of the new suburb while Laura Delaney and Danae Valenza’s Hull embraces the 150-year history of Mission for Seafarers.

Griffiths’ installation of a series of three sculptures built from found materials from the Docklands juxtaposes seemingly liveable wooden structures of handcrafted, small-scale beauty against the harsh high-rises of the Docklands.

Walking through the mission chapel we find that Hull shares the space with old stained glass windows and music from the rehearsal of a young group of international students. Hull comprises installation sculptures, ice spheres suspended from the domed roof of the gymnasium and a storeroom seemingly taken over by salt. These sit alongside found archival material of photographs, maps and film distributed throughout the mission. However the routine activities of the mission and the melding of old and new outshines the work brought to the space. While the surrounds illuminate Griffiths’ work, in some ways Hull is obscured by them.

Day Pass Two also focused on dance. Natalie Abbott’s evocative PHYSICAL FRACTALS places the audience in a circle surrounding the performance space. From total blackout, the work begins as Abbott and Rebecca Jensen are revealed to be standing startlingly close to the audience. 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. Just as this pattern seems unbreakable and about to outstay its welcome the dancers move into another pattern across the wooden floor.

Daniel Arnott’s live soundscape is built from the sounds of the room. At first we hear just the unamplified sounds of Abbott and Jensen’s movement. Then microphones, trained onto the wooden floor, allow sound to cycle and build with the performance.

As Govin Reuben’s lighting again plunges us into darkness, the room is filled with the noise of the performers swinging microphones above their heads. When lit, the taut cords are revealed to appear dangerously close to the audience. When the microphones are dropped the pair run around the room, lights oscillating in time with their circling.

If at 50 minutes the work occasionally appears to be too repetitive, it is not until it ends that the full sensory impact of the work is felt, and you are left reeling.

Choreographer Aimee Smith, currently studying her Masters Degree in Sustainability, developed Wintering after travelling to the Arctic Circle. In a deep performance space, Smith’s choreography carries with it representations of water mutating from a slowly fracturing ice state into a dynamic water flow.

Smith’s choreography through these changing states takes on an assured beauty in the bodies of dancers Rhiannon Newton and Jenni Large—Newton in particular with a performance built from controlled tension, her joints cracking over each other.

Trent Suidgeest’s lighting sees solitary shafts of light in the dark rising in intensity and reach, while Ben Taaffe’s sound design also grows as it moves from the deep crackling of ice through to full electronica encompassing the space.

It seems unfavorable to Smith’s theme that the work is at its most dynamic with the speed and vitality the dancers exhibit during the ‘warmest’ state. While Newton and Large present this work with facial expressions suggesting stress, Smith fails to engender in her audience a sense of urgency about climate change, much less a call to arms.

While travelling from venue to venue, works were discussed in detail with fellow Day Passers. Seeing works together you had a greater sense of the festival as a whole, although comparisons were an unfortunate side effect for some works on the curated journey. But the group experience, from morning to night, made you feel less like you were observing Next Wave and more like you were a part of it.

Next Wave Festival 2012: Shelters, Joseph L. Griffiths, Docklands, May 19-27; Hull, Laura Delaney and Danae Valenza, Mission to Seafarers, May 19-27; PHYSICAL FRACTALS, creator, dancer Natalie Abbott, dancer Rebecca Jensen, sound design Daniel Arnott, lighting Govin Reuben (Rubix Cube), dramaturg Matthew Day, Footscray Community Arts Centre, May 19-26; Wintering, choreography, direction Aimee Smith, dancers Rhiannon Newton, Jenni Large, lighting Trent Suidgeest, sound design Ben Taaffe, Arts House Meat Market May, Melbourne, 19-27

MY RIGHT EAR HEARS MERZBOW IN FULL BLASTING GLORY (SUSTAINING TEMPORARY DAMAGE). MY LEFT, PROTECTED BY A BLOB OF YELLOW FOAM, RECEIVES UNDIFFERENTIATED RUMBLES. NOISE REQUIRES CHOICES: MY HEARING, OR THE MUSIC—ONE MUST BE COMPROMISED.

Japanese noise artist Merzbow (Masami Akita) is in the centre of the Riverside Theatre main stage. Long-haired and clad in black he is a lone, lean crow behind a table of electronic noisemaking gadgets, pedals and laptop. His main instrument is a cyber-guitar/banjo with wires strung across a rotating metallic disc. Whether it is the source of all the sound is unclear, but it certainly augments the shifting dynamics as Merzbow scrapes at it with something like a pasta spoon, or bangs and plucks it to create swathes of highly differentiated static. He fills the whole sonic spectrum, his shearing sheets using a range of static grain sizes and frequencies from sub-bass under-rumble to blasts of mid-tone texture, to piercing high-pitched screeches.

Merzbow starts big, and doesn’t perceptibly get any bigger. This is not a music of crests and troughs but of one mountainous plateau of sound. Merzbow digs around within it, his forces of compression and combustion changing the molecular structure of the seams of static, burr and hum to produce new geological layers within the same chunk of rock. This creates a stasis, there’s no real forward momentum yet a tension is maintained. It takes a lot of calm and meticulous attention to tend this mass of brutal sound.

This music is physical. Sounds target different parts of the body: undertones rumble through bums via the seats; thwumping bass notes create flutters in the thorax; shearing screams flay the scalp as if with metal filings; and a particular hum seems to target the thyroid. At times it feels as if we are penetrated by pure electrical energy. Is this somehow therapeutic, our hormonal balance shifted, toxic blockages blasted?

This music is spiritual. Its force is immediate; contemplation beyond the sonic tempest in which we are the centre is impossible. It’s a total envelopment in the now and we are powerless to do anything but capitulate to the music’s force. We are listening to the abyss—the sound of everything and nothing—and it’s curiously comforting.

For the closing night of the festival, Merzbow teamed with Australian guitarist Oren Ambarchi. Thinking of the vastness of Merzbow’s sound, it was hard to imagine how a duo might work. Does Merzbow hold back, only distributing half his layers of grit? It seems that anything but full-bore would not work, but is there room in that mountain of sound? However Merzbow and Ambarchi are consummate noisemakers and they find a subtle (in strategy rather than sound quality) approach to collaborating.

There seems to be a commitment to maintain the overall force and power of the sound—Ambarchi provides more bass, with comparatively less grit, more pure hum and oscillating tones, while Merzbow tops things with squalls of shredding feedback. There is a feeling of searching around each other to find the cracks, seeking out the frequencies yet to be filled or removing a contribution that is muddying the scape. While in demeanor they appear to be forging their own paths, there is an ever so subtle sense of turn-taking, one adding more ‘specialty’ layers to the mix then dropping back to let the other add a sheet. This creates a higher rate of change within the core of the sound and more of a sense of urgency than the tensile stasis of Merzbow’s solo show.

Like the Riverside concert, the effect was unarguably visceral, perhaps more so as we sat on cushions on the floor of the Campbelltown Arts Centre performance space, soaking in the sub-bass frequencies. Another interesting aspect to the Campbelltown performance was that it was part of the closing night festival party, so the audience, though smaller than the black-jeaned noise aficionados at Parramatta Riverside, was more diverse, with many people perhaps hearing this kind of music for the first time.

Though it may have been too much for some, the inclusion of significant international noise artists within a festival that, until now, has pursued a largely contemporary classical agenda, was a bold and welcome move. It opened the event up to wider audiences and has contributed to the erosion of perceived barriers between exploratory music scenes in Sydney. If future Aurora festivals can continue this inclusiveness, the event will become a significant force not only in NSW but also within the national and international music landscape.

Aurora Festival of Living Music: Merzbow, Riverside Theatre, Parramatta, May 11; Noise duo: Merzbow & Oren Ambarchi, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney, May 13; www.auroranewmusic.com.au/

WHILE AURORA 2012 PRESENTED AN IMPRESSIVE DIVERSITY IN ITS PROGRAMMING, IT ALSO ALLOWED FOR INTERESTING CONNECTIONS BETWEEN ARTISTS AND WORKS. THE CONCERTS BY CLOCKS & CLOUDS AND GREG SCHIEMER (WITH HIS POCKET GAMELAN PROJECT) OFFERED A MINI-THEMATIC OF ALTERNATIVE TUNINGS, INTRODUCING AUDIENCES TO THE SUBTLE AND IMMERSIVE PLEASURES THAT LURK BETWEEN THE 12 NOTES OF THE EQUAL-TEMPERED SYSTEM.

clocks and clouds, terrains, winds and currents
For this concert, Clocks and Clouds consisted of Kraig Grady, Terumi Narushima and Finn Ryan performing a 40-minute work by Grady, Terrains, Winds and Currents (2012). He takes inspiration from the microtonal master of the 20th century, Harry Partch, writing music for alternative tunings performed on instruments of his own devising.

Grady composed this work for his two Meta-Slendro Vibraphones, a Meta-Slendro Harmonium (a slendro implies an Indonesian pentatonic scale) and the most intriguing of all, the Meru Bars—PVC conduit of different lengths, placed vertically and topped with thick metal bars suspended on elastic. The objects are equally musical and sculptural and, at a distance, their faux marble paintwork makes them reminiscent of ancient objects of ritual. Grady has in fact created a whole meta-culture around his instruments and tunings, suggesting that this is the musical legacy of a place called Anaphoria. (His commitment to the idea is such that you find yourself Googling to see if it’s a real island!)

With Grady and Ryan on the Meru Bars the sound is immediately captivating. The bars produce a deep boom with soft attack and long decay. As the metal slabs vibrate on their elastic chords it’s easy to visualise the waveforms emanating from them, the air displaced in big swooping arches pushing out across the room.

Then the vibraphones are introduced, their bright and brassy timbre filling the upper spectrum. Grady and Ryan play complicated, repetitious rhythmic sequences, creating melodic cycles that are overwhelmed by their resonances. The tones beginning to shimmer, glancing off each other and the architecture of the room. They have to play hard and fast to keep the tones aloft and the frequencies colliding.

Underpinning this vibrancy is Terumi Narushima on the Meta-Slendro Harmonium, the notes produced by manually pumping air through the reeds with a foot pedal. In the upper and lower registers these long nasal drones serve to offset the harmonics of the vibraphones, comingling to thicken and agitate the mix. However in the middle register the timbre of the instrument stands too much on its own, its closely tuned notes sounding thin and whiny. Nerushima’s playing is not at fault, rather it made me realise how my acceptance of alternate tunings is timbre-dependent.

The shifts between sections of Terrains, Winds and Currents were subtle, yet somehow by its conclusion, it seemed as though vast territory had been traversed. Overall it was a mesmerising piece creating such a dazzling array of acoustic resonances as to completely obliterate the competing sound of the roaring crowd and violent smack downs from the Rock & Roll Wrestling Tournament that was taking place simultaneously in the foyer of Casula Powerhouse. While the tone of the competing events was markedly different, perhaps both audiences were similarly transported into fantastical realms.

greg schiemer, pocket gamelan: mobile voices

Greg Schiemer has also been inspired by Harry Partch, but while Clocks and Clouds’ explorations are acoustic Schiemer employs the wonders of technology, though in curiously analogue ways. He composes using computer-mediated systems but the delivery is via mobile phones, placed in little pouches connected to strings, which are calmly swung in circles around the performers’ bodies. The resulting Doppler effect adds more microtones and, in combination with the room resonances, diffuses the sound through the space. For this concert he worked with Janys Hayes, Lotte Latukefu and drama students from the University of Wollongong to perform his pieces.

Schiemer presented two of his Mandala works. The first, Mandala 7 (2008) uses 12 phones deployed by six performers. The piece works with a 35-note scale based around the Combination Product Sets (CPS) system discovered by Erv Wilson (a leading Mexican/American microtuning specialist) which allows for harmonic cohesion without the formation of a central tone. The 18-minute piece has a quiet insistence with small crescendos and shifting tensions. The delicate electronic drones harmonically bind in one moment then slip away to become supporting and secondary in the next. While the music remains elusive it is strangely calming.

Mandela 6 (2007) uses a scale attributed to Al Farabi, an 8th Century Persian theorist. While in Mandala 7 the performers have to activate the sounds, here the phones are synced via Bluetooth, essentially playing themselves. The performers become the delivery mechanism, a sentient sound system. This work based on a seven-tone diatonic scale offers more rhythmic and melodic material, creating a lovely polyphonic complexity.

In Butterfly Dekany (2012) for four iPhones the performers move around the room. It is the most spacious of pieces and the changing directionality adds a greater three-dimensionality to the sound. Working with Janys Hayes, Schiemer has found just the right performance mode for the performers where the neutral, task-based focus allows for the subtlest hint of ritual to emerge without overstatement. It made me daydream about an alternate world where this was the normal way of performing/presenting music.

An interesting addition to break up the electronically generated sounds was Sacris Solemniis 2 (2009) performed by mezzo-soprano Lotte Latukefu, a female chorus and four iPhones. Based on a hymn by St Thomas Aquinas using a diatonic scale, the harmonic slippages are deceptive, at first seeming familiar yet shifting at moments to more challenging harmonies offset by the electronic tones on the phones.

It’s tempting to want to walk around these works to experience their shifting complexities from different perspectives but, the danger of twirling phones aside, the very delicate nature of the music could be so easily shattered by any extraneous movements and careless shuffling. In Greg Schiemer’s introduction to the concert he described the listening experience to be akin to “sitting inside the instrument,” an effect he definitely achieved. Pocket Gamelan: mobile voices was a deeply meditative, immersive and memorable experience.

Aurora Festival of Living Music: Clocks and Clouds, Terrains, Winds and Currents, composer Kraig Grady, performers Terumi Narushima, Finn Ryan, Casula Powerhouse, May 5; Pocket Gamelan: mobile voices, composer Greg Schiemer, dramaturg Janys Hayes, mezzo-soprano Lotte Latukefu, performers Damon Bartlett, Justin Clarke, Claire Fenwicke, Samara Gardener, Rebecca Hurd, Sara Kahn, Rebekah Robertson, Billie Scott, Laryssa Sutherton, Kirstie Willoughby; Campbelltown Arts Centre, May 13; www.auroranewmusic.com.au/

Greg Schiemer has recently been appointed Artistic Curator of the 2014 Aurora Festival of Living Music.

TO HEAR GEORGE LENTZ’S INGWE WE WALK INTO THICK FOG AND MYSTERY. THE TITLE TRANSLATES AS “DARKNESS,” APT FOR THIS HOUR-LONG REVERIE, OR DELIRIUM EVEN, AN EPIC COURSING THROUGH THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL FOR SOLO ELECTRIC GUITAR WITH THE DOUBT, PASSION AND WIT OF A METAPHYSICAL POET CUT ADRIFT FROM HIS GOD.

Guitarist Zane Banks appears before us shrouded in mist, armed with guitar, foot pedals and music stands ready to explore the Mysterium (2003-09), a larger work of which Ingwe is part. A series of movements ensues, each oscillating internally, between cool, liquid reflection and starbursts of awe and anger.

I’d seen Lentz praised in print for his eschewal of rock guitar cliches. However, this should not obscure the fact that the composer and his virtuoso instrumentalist deploy an array of recognisable electric guitar tropes that lend the work a wider resonance than the category ‘contemporary classical’ might suggest. Sudden note flurries, feedback, reverberation, heavy chording, thrashing, and rapid ascents and descents are vertiginously juxtaposed with quiet jazz-inflected near-melodies, soft brushing of strings and recurrent, transcendent harmonics, chiming and sparkling against a pervasive darkness. Almost ironic, power driven anthemic phrasings, marches and hymning pulse angrily through Ingwe while delicately fingered passages bring temporary reprieve. But a gentle brushing across the strings can turn abrasive, chugging, fast, destructive. The darkness that is Ingwe is alive and volatile.

Banks, a practising rock guitarist, is at one with his instrument, swaying back as he sends notes soaring, leaning deep into the attack when he cracks the cosmos with a quaking roar. Ingwe constantly conjures vast earthly and heavenly spaces with an astonishing depth and breadth of field. Yet, its agonised declamations never made literal, Ingwe is felt as a deeply interior work that makes viscerally palpable the vastness of inner anxieties. Composition and performance are also wonderfully at one, yielding a unique and memorable experience, not one that hums through you like a tune, but jangles, buzzes and thunders like a place, familiar but not, recalled from a dream.

Aurora Festival of Living Music: George Lentz, Ingwe, from Mysterium (Caeli enarrant…VII), for solo electric guitar, guitar Zane Banks, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney, May 12; www.auroranewmusic.com.au/

THE IDEA OF CRITICAL MASS CAN DENOTE A COLLECTIVE ACTION THAT IS BENEFICIAL TO ALL, REGARDLESS OF INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTION. BUT IT ALSO IMPLIES A CERTAIN INERTIA: A CREATIVE BEAST THAT LURES YOU INTO ITS MACHINATIONS AND USES YOUR PERCEPTION AS A SORT OF ARTISTIC PLASMA.

Super Critical Mass, a sensuous and atmospheric exploration of sound devised by Julian Day and Luke Jaaniste, featured at the opening event of Aurora Festival of Living Music, Aura. Their project had aired in Australian cities and UK festivals already so it had the expected weight of success to get the ball rolling for the Aurora Festival of Living Music.

Blacktown Arts Centre was piqued for pomp with food platters, booze and an edgy photographic exhibition documenting the back-yard lives of beer-guzzlers, corrugated iron fences and gaming consoles depressing sunken sofas. There was no doubt we were in Western Sydney, where high and low culture meet, and proud of it. An appropriate mood was set for Super Critical Mass: a mixing pot of amateurism and professionalism, performance and authentic living.

The composer-sound artists had set out to explore ambience, spatialised sound and the complexities that emerge from simple patterns and actions. Vocalists from Singing Streets and Simply Voices combined in a sort of algorithmic, wordless chant in a darkened room. Each time singers wished to contribute they would stand up and make an extended vowel sound for as long as desired and then sit down again. Staring straight ahead and uniformly dressed, the group operated as a mass of individuals rather than a team. Each participant appeared to be contributing at random intervals in terms of time and pitch. Whether or not any pattern was observable by the audience seemed less important than the mass of sound generated by the group.

The audience was invited to cohabit the performance space, walking freely in between singers, getting up close, contributing percussion with our heels. While the concept was good and the execution very real, it went on for too long. And just when we the critical masses thought it was done, they did it all again…with harmonicas.

In the second iteration of Super Critical Mass, each of the singers played mouth organs in place of voices. Long tones at seemingly random intervals were layered to evoke the memory of a trampled piano accordion, long after the bullies at the circus had gone in search of the next bearded lady. In this second round of chaotic drone combinations the performers were not locked to their fixed locations in the room. Rather than standing and then sitting to frame each utterance, the performers were free to roam, slowly, and to engage us and each other eye to eye. Coming after the vocal Turing Machine of the first part, this felt connected, like the smartphone generation. Perhaps the harmonica set was more successful than the vocal round, but by this time the concept had out-warbled its welcome and I was left feeling trapped in a vortex of expiring wheezes: a place where irritating ringtones go to die.

Super Critical Mass was highly affective. The sounds generated certainly had an effect on me and others. It challenged my concept of chamber music, community and interactivity. This critical mass swept me along but what would it have taken, I wonder, to make me join in?

Aurora Festival of Living Music: Super Critical Mass, composers Julian Day and Luke Jaaniste, performers Singing Streets and Simply Voices; Blacktown Arts Centre, Sydney, May 4; www.auroranewmusic.com.au/

MUSIC APPEARING THROUGH SPACE, INSEPARABLE FROM PLACE, IS A THEME OF THIS RECITAL IN THE BLUE MOUNTAINS. HARPIST MARSHALL MCGUIRE EXPLAINS THAT HIS SOUND WILL BE PRODUCED BY PLUCKING “THROUGH THE AIR” RATHER THAN BY STRUMMING THE HARP.

Resonance and sonority are the focus for several of the contemporary composers in the program. Many of the works have a sense of looking back to the origins of the harp in order to understand the evolution of the instrument’s idioms. The Birtwhistle work Crowd in particular makes use of many extended techniques like slapping and stabbing, scratching and muting. It’s a masterpiece study in sound, articulation and texture but never comes across as a sequence of tricks. While the techniques are noticeable and fascinating they are not so important as the way the resultant sound travels outwards, radiating from a source, communicating more about the nature of the room and its occupants than McGuire’s dexterity.

The program is punctuated with Five Studies in Radiance, short interludes by Andrew Ford. One of these, Amoroso, has a bell motif, a low chiming jow that tells, “It’s Time… this is God speaking.” Then the tolling softens. It resigns to peace and tranquillity. Life goes on and we’re still here.

One of the most significant pieces, the Australian premiere of The Pearl Divers by Douglas Gibson, is for prepared harp. Written in memory of pearl divers in Broome in Western Australia, a Japanese aesthetic is present. Not only does it sound Japanese but the process of preparing the harp mimics koto (Japanese table harp) technique. Like a koto player, McGuire uses a pencil to mark the strings at the right ratios for harmonic overtones and pitch bending.

The Harp and the Moon by Ross Edwards similarly features Japanese motifs as well as tying together many disparate themes in the program. Referencing Renaissance style it has Spanishy statements, folk fancy and film soundtrack mystery as well a bit of a cheesy ending. It’s a great piece. The magic of Edwards’ craft is to merge these genres and elements with such skill, creating a distinctly Australian voice out of fusion while maintaining and expanding harp idioms.

Comfortable and adroit, McGuire gave a stunning performance, engaging the audience with tantalising facts and witty asides. He even explained the construction of his instrument. Different woods are used in each part of the harp for their flexibility or strength. He confessed, “Three trees died to make this harp…it’s a total environmental catastrophe!” This drew our attention to our surroundings and made us hear the birds in the trees behind the altar and stained glass.

St Finbar’s Catholic Church in Glenbrook, set at the base of the Blue Mountains, is a sensuous modernist space. It’s warm in spirit but chilly like any timeless church. Exposed curvaceous sandstone walls merge seamlessly with native wood ceiling. Alternating flat-screened TVs and flat visaged Renaissance pastiches colour the main wall. This building seems to have been designed to house an 1881 ornamental English Organ. The church feels like a cocoon—safe away from the realities of life—the perfect space for Marshall McGuire’s intimate reflection.

As the sun came closer to the horizon outside, birds shrieked and squawked as only Australian birds can, without an ounce of song. This concert felt firmly planted in the mountains. Its location was just right for a recital of music that looks back in order to look forward.

Aurora Festival of Living Music: Marshall McGuire, harp recital, St Finbar’s Catholic Church, Glenbrook, NSW, May 6; www.auroranewmusic.com.au/

A COLLABORATION BETWEEN CHOREOGRAPHER MARTIN DEL AMO AND COMPOSER ALEX POZNIAK, QUEST IS THE FIRST BABY OF COLLABORATIONS BETWEEN MUSIC COMPANY CHRONOLOGY ARTS AND DANCE ORGANISATION DIRTYFEET. THEY INTEND TO BRING TOGETHER MORE CHOREOGRAPHERS AND COMPOSERS TO MAKE NEW DANCE/MUSIC WORKS.

The story is immediately recognisable but time-dilated: a snippet of life made fantasy. A woman in a slinky black dress and fierce, businessy heels finds herself trapped in a pool of light. She is navigating what resembles an imaginary obstacle course, “she opens herself up to invisible forces that she might or might not be able to control” (program note).

Dancer Miranda Wheen is transfixing. She commands our attention from the get go. Even when I try to turn to the musicians who are visible on stage she draws me back with del Amo’s jagged choreography and her piercing gaze. She dances the whole piece with the appearance of intense scrutiny but never once lets us see what she is looking at. This keeps us with her, interested in the narrative and its perfect component moments.

From out of silence the musicians gradually set a mood of quiet isolation. Wheen begins, her muscular but feminine back to us, twitching subtly. At first it’s not obvious whether she is moving because no one is watching yet, out of discomfort or with intent, but as the gestures become larger it is clear that every twinge and shudder is scripted. Charged with meaning, her movements and stillnesses are cells of experience, listed in sequence but standing alone.

Performed by Andrew Smith on saxophone and Luke Spicer on viola, the music is independently engaging but complements the dance. The moments where dancer and musicians lock into synergy are magical. As the woman’s journey draws to a close, the music returns to the fore and then icily recedes.

This provides an apt segue to the next work, an electronic set by Daniel Blinkhorn based on field recordings of ice made in the Arctic near Norway. Blinkhorn introduces us to the sounds of glaciers cracking and water undergoing transformation. In one piece he borrows sounds of ice chirping and whispering to itself and “frictionalises” these sounds in order to portray types of sea and air vessels that usually travel the region. CreEpEr is inspired by the wild flailing gestures of the composer trying to balance while walking on ice holding a microphone. It’s loosely informed by dubstep and other current electronica and finishes the night’s entertainment on a very different note.

Blinkhorn’s music is immersive and transporting and the messages from his icy, inanimate companions transcend language. When a child in the audience started to cry, it took a long time for me to discern that this sound was human and not another aspect of living water from Blinkhorn’s frosted scape. This project reminds us of our fragility, our dependence on the Earth. Or maybe it’s just that we personify nature and hear our own condition reflected within: it was not at all baffling that those dwindling icebergs might have been crying. We’re all sacks of walking warm water. We search the most formidable landscapes on the other side of the world to hear familiar sounds.

Composer: Alex Pozniak
Dancer: Miranda Wheen
Choreographer: Martin del Amo
Film & Recorded by Hospital Hill Recordings

Aurora Festival of Living Music: Invisible Forces: Quest, choreographer Martin del Amo, composer Alex Pozniak, dancer Miranda Wheen, musicians Luke Spicer, Andrew Smith; frostbYte cHatTer, sound artist, composer Daniel Blinkhorn; Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney, May 12; www.auroranewmusic.com.au/

THE FORCES THAT INHIBIT OR EXAGGERATE OUR BEHAVIOUR ARE NOT ALWAYS VISIBLE TO US, VEILED AS THEY ARE BY IDEOLOGIES OR DRIVEN BY THE UNCONSCIOUS OR OUR GENES. IN QUEST, A WOMAN (MIRANDA WHEEN) ATTEMPTING TO MOVE SYMMETRICALLY THROUGH A BARE WORLD APPEARS TO BE CONTROLLED BY FORCES FROM WITHIN—INVOLUNTARY CONSTRAINTS AND EXCESSES.

These might be external, but are not revealed to be so—no literal miming here—and are more likely to be internalised. Initially we see her from behind, black high heels, hair slicked, tight short little black dress. She might have stepped straight out of a Robert Palmer music video or Robert Longo’s 1980s Men in the Cities series. But her apparent confidence and sexiness is about to be undone. Her shoulders tense emphatically. She walks slowly towards us on a circular trajectory, an arm reaching out, leading her as she goes in small turns, both arms now extended.

She looks back at us, her centre of gravity off-centre but remaining strangely stable as she leans or is pushed back almost impossibly far in a near floating gyration. The quietly evolving, plangent music builds to rich glissandi and deep foghorn-ish notes on viola and saxophone. More of the body comes into play, or is played as the dancer leans deeply to the side, knees lowered, the music aptly more angular, until she finds herself on the floor—at two points only, toes and hands, held as if trapped. Her arms lift her, her feet drag, the saxophone rumbling empathetically. But standing, her arms and legs now move discretely, one leg shoots out on its own, the sway of the body seems to push her up, her journey tumbles into totterings. A shoe is lost, prelude to dissolution which takes her to the floor, spinning wildly like a frantic insect. Stop. She stands. She takes control. She starts again.

The considerable demands of Martin del Amo’s choreography are met with unflinching commitment by Miranda Wheen who manages to combine exquisite precision with a very open, engaging performativity. Alex Pozniak’s fine score, played onstage by Andrew Smith on saxophone and Luke Spicer on viola, melds beautifully with the choreography, subtly underlining the physical exertions on the dance with a certain melancholy, even in its most dramatic, but never overly so, moments.

To witness such a determined struggle with invisible forces was exhilarating, a reminder of the ways our bodies are buffeted by new experiences whether erupting from within or battering us from without. Let’s hope Quest will be seen again—it’s a fine addition to each artist’s repertoire, not least Wheen, fast being revealed to be one of Sydney’s most accomplished dance artists.

Daniel Blinkhorn’s frostbYte cHatTer offers a more material interiority, the sound of arctic ice in its sonic straining and cracking dance and its mutation into water. In near dark and surround sound, the ice crunches, slides and squeals about us on an epic scale, like an imagined shift of tectonic plates, realised by the composer/sound designer’s use of microphones in the open and hydrophone recordings of “icebergs and iceberg fragments as they melt, collide and dissolve” (program note).

Blinkhorn takes these sounds, and others of a sailing ship in another piece, sustains their essential character but also composes them into sometimes quite musical creations building on the icebergs’ ceaseless and increasing chatter as they draw near each other. The sounds are fascinatingly multifarious although when heard at some length after having witnessed an already exacting dance work, there were times when I was thinking of ice cracking as not unlike paint drying. And then I’d be snapped out of it by some seismic shift. To do justice to the works in Blinkhorn’s program I’d most certainly need to have more than another listen—there’s a lot going on: an honouring of composer Luc Ferrari, the deployment of prepared piano and the use of sources that include field recordings made on coral reefs in Australia and the West Indies.

A closer connection with Quest was to be found in frostbYte—cReEpEr, “produced by some of the frenetic actions and (sometimes bizarre) gestures produced whilst walking on ice” with microphone in one hand. The struggle to maintain balance nicely matches Quest’s involuntarism, and it even dances, if for far too long (such is the idiom), by slipping into found sound-based electronica.

Aurora Festival of Living Music: Invisible Forces, Quest, choreographer Martin del Amo, composer Alex Pozniak, dancer Miranda Wheen, musicians Luke Spicer, Andrew Smith; frostbYte cHatTer, sound artist & composer Daniel Blinkhorn; Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney, May 12; www.auroranewmusic.com.au/

CHOKE, FELL, FLOAT, PAWL, SHED, SHAFT, SHOT, SHUTTLE, SLEY, THRUM, WARP, WEFT. ANY WEAVING GLOSSARY WILL PROVIDE YOU WITH SOME OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WORDS KNOWN TO MANKIND. WHILE ORIGINATING FAR FROM THE GREECE OF DAVID YOUNG AND MARGARET CAMERON’S OPERA MINOTAUR: THE ISLAND, THEY NEVERTHELESS FIND THEMSELVES EXPRESSED IN THE WORK’S DRY, WHISPERED TIMBRES AND BRISK ARTICULATION.

Watching the ensemble quietly going about their performance, handbags on heads, one feels in the “worshipful company of weavers” unravelling and re-weaving a myth before your very eyes.

The ceremonial intensity of Minotaur The Island is heightened by the intimacy of the opera’s sound sources. Deborah Kayser’s versatile voice spins Cameron’s text into silken and woollen strands before letting them disintegrate in her mouth; glass balls are held close to the ears while they are rubbed, hit and twittered to; a man in drag struggles to make a sound on a double bass before falling asleep and victims of the Minotaur hum a chorus from inside a basket. In a momentary gesture towards traditional concert practice Anastasia Russell-Head, dressed as a seagull, plays a virginal before ‘sad walking’ off stage. The virginal (a nod to the lost Minotaur opera of Monteverdi), so called for its association with young women, is inscribed “noli me tangere indocta manu,” or “let no untutored hand touch me.” Alongside The Island’s undeniable sensuality is a tutored symbolism that is difficult to decrypt.

In reweaving the myth of the Minotaur some threads are brought to the surface while others are dropped. The story of the Minotaur—to whom seven virgins are sacrificed every year or so—has always been one of diminishing returns. Fittingly, only one aria from Monteverdi’s L’Arianna survives: Ariadne’s bitter lament as she is abandoned on the island of Naxos by Theseus after giving him the thread that led him out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth. This air of confusion, death and abandonment haunts The Island, in which Ariadne appears on the island of the Minotaur to rewitness the slaughter of Athens’ youth in dream-like ecstasy. In another artfully placed anachronism one hears the story—parallel to that of Ariadne’s thread—of the labyrinth’s architect Daedalus threading a conch shell by tying a thread to the leg of an ant.

Is there a thread out of Young and Cameron’s meandering architecture of exquisite visions? I left Parramatta’s Riverside Theatres resonating with Young’s intensely quiet timbral formulations. With the minimum of sources Young crafts a perpetuum of ever-changing interest and subtlety absolutely wedded to the opera’s woven and wooden stage design. As the first part of a trilogy, The Island sets a stunning precedent for the future works, and as Ariadne puts it at the beginning of The Island: “even if I were to die, I would return.”

Aurora Festival of Living Music: Chamber Made Opera, Minotaur The Island, composer David Young, writer, director Margaret Cameron, performers Deborah Kayser, Caroline Lee, Hellen Sky, Ida Duelund Hansen, double bass Mark Cauvin, percussion Matthias Schack-Arnott, harpsichord Anastasia Russell-Head, Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, May 11-13; www.auroranewmusic.com.au

HIS LONG HAIR HANGING OVER HIS GLASSES, MASAMI AKITA (AKA MERZBOW) ASSAILED THE AUDIENCE AT PARRAMATTA’S RIVERSIDE THEATRES WITH A WALL OF WHITE NOISE HARKING BACK TO HIS MID-90S PERFORMANCES.

Apart from a short period of rhythmic scraping, you could not tell by listening that the roar filling the hall was produced by menacing a metal plate lashed to a power board with a pasta ladle. So generic is the sound of a distorted signal that it could once have been a pop song, a symphony or a bantam clucking and you would not know the difference. This lack of distinguishing characteristics gives Merzbow his power of universal address.

Beyond the artist’s mythical status, the concert setting may have helped to elevate Merzbow’s ‘trashy’ noise to a site of spiritual communion. The walk from the train station was like a pilgrimage route with Merzbow seekers excitedly rushing down Parramatta’s Church Street to the theatre. The diversity of the audience cramming the hall to witness folkloric, hearing-loss-inducing, stomach-turning noise suggests that a Merzbow concert still represents a singular experience for many. You don’t so much hear Merzbow’s noise (not least because you are probably wearing ear plugs) as feel it moving through your body. There is something inherently attractive about the idea of a music beyond ‘liking’ and ‘disliking,’ a music that you physically encounter.

Rather than a singular, intense experience, I felt that Merzbow’s set was an in-between time where the cocoon of sound gave you time to think and dream. If Oren Ambarchi’s solo set at the Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre reminded me of an erased painting, Merzbow’s reminded me of nature: wind howling, the earth rumbling, water bubbling and splashing. Camped in my plush seat I sank into the storm, waiting for it to pass. Others shared this experience of waiting outside time. Some were lulled into trance, some even slept.

Both experiential singularity and meditative sanctuary are removed from Merzbow’s early understanding of noise as a cheap, visceral, low art. In the mid-80s Merzbow packaged a series of noise tapes in collages of pornography pulled out of the rubbish in the subway, associating noise with ‘base’ physical desires. It is interesting that Merzbow’s worldwide fame should coincide with the exponential proliferation of pornography and general dissolution of social taboos, but the argument associating these facts would undermine itself. If our social consideration of all sensory stimulation were equalised, then you could also equate Merzbow’s popularity with the sugar content of soft drinks or average hours spent in front of screens, disregarding listening and understanding sound as a dynamic cultural process. Rather, I think we have learnt to listen to noise more closely over the years and the association of noise with sex and sadomasochism was one of the first steps in coming to understand it. If anything, the breakdown in social taboos has given us the freedom to judge noise on its own terms.

Aurora Festival of Living Music: Merzbow, Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, Sydney, May 11; www.auroranewmusic.com.au/

IT TAKES A COUPLE OF HOURS TO GET FROM SYDNEY’S CITY CENTRE TO THE JOAN SUTHERLAND PERFORMING ARTS CENTRE IN PENRITH. WALKING THROUGH THE SUBURB’S SHOPPING PRECINCT BROUGHT ME IN CONTACT WITH SUBURBAN CULTURE THE LIKES OF WHICH I HAVEN’T SEEN SINCE I LIVED IN ADELAIDE’S DEEP SOUTH.

I remembered that getting into noise in a suburban environment was both a natural progression through pop’s quirkier and darker sides, as well as a reaction against what appeared to be a sterile and hopeless environment. In city centres short noise gigs can become one stop in a long night’s carousing, but by the time I was seated in the Q Theatre at the Joan, I was in no way under the delusion that I was just ‘popping in’ to catch a little noise before kicking on. Locals—apart from the elderly couple who left after five minutes—seemed similarly committed to the rare performance.

Sitting back in the cinema-style seats of the amphitheatre, I had an almost bird’s eye view of the technological forces shipped out for the gig. Noise is not only heavy because it is sonically loud and dense, but the physical weight of the equipment used to generate it gives a sense of permanence and authority to its performance. Framed by giant speaker boxes like two ancient monoliths, Oren Ambarchi walked silently on stage, picked up his guitar and sat down to his table of mixers, pedals, springs and synthesisers.

The drone began to build and undulate. Ambarchi’s noise struck me as a sonic equivalent of erasure in painting. Shapes introduced into the rig from the guitar are rendered barely discernible between a bed of deep tone and scratchy, high-end interference. The result is a constantly shifting and incredibly detailed sonic canvas that holds the listener in an ecstatic, flight-or-fight, deer-in-the-headlights trance. As the set progressed Ambarchi’s erased shapes became clearer, taking the form of the open tones and harmonics of the guitar strings.

To get the idea of open strings and harmonics think of the bright sound of a bugle, a hunting call or even the warble of seagulls. The heroic harmonic series provided a contrast to the minor modes of most metal and drone. What was this image obscured by the apocalyptic, deteriorating sonic wash? A flag? A parade? An 80s guitar solo? Was this exuberant drone in fact humorous? The intrusion of this unexpected tonality made me suddenly aware of the Aurora festival’s daring effort in taking performers and audiences out of their comfort zones, both physically and aesthetically.

Emerging from the half-hour of drone in the hulking Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre, it seemed incongruous for Ambarchi to saunter off with a shrug as though he had somewhere else to go, then creep back on stage to pack up his equipment. A crowd gathered around to taxonomise Ambarchi’s boxes, switches and leads before dispersing into the very different noise of a Thursday night in Penrith.

Aurora Festival of Living Music: Oren Ambarchi, Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre, Penrith, NSW, May 10; www.auroranewmusic.com.au

EVEN WITH THE COMPUTER GAME BLIPS AND YELPS OF CRYSTAL CASTLES BEING PIPED IN THROUGH THE SPEAKERS, THE Q THEATRE, THE SMALLER OF THE JOAN’S VENUES, SEEMED UNNATURALLY QUIET AFTER BEING IMMERSED AMONG THE CHEERFUL ADOLESCENT INFORMALITY HOLDING SWAY OUTSIDE. THE MAIN HALL WOULD HAVE SWALLOWED THE PERFORMANCE TONIGHT (THE PENRITH VALLEY CONCERT BAND USING IT FOR A REHEARSAL IN ANY CASE) BUT EVEN THE MODEST SEMI-CIRCULAR SPACE OF THE Q SEEMS SPARSELY OCCUPIED—A SHAME THAT MORE YOUNGSTERS COULDN’T BE COAXED INSIDE.

Oren Ambarchi walks onstage without fanfare dressed for comfort in skinny jeans and check shirt, sits down with the barest acknowledgement of the audience and gets going. Before him sits a collapsible plastic table, forests of twisted wiring erupting from slabs of equipment, a guitar resting in his lap, three huge speakers standing behind him like monoliths. And, but for the muted hum of the air-conditioner, silence.

Ambarchi works with careful focus, his face composed, establishing a looped drone, noodling a string on the instrument with his left hand, adjusting input-output levels with his right. The guitar’s sound is transfigured here to suggest subterranean caverns, dripping water, running footsteps, though its imitative potential is elsewhere used to suggest the whine of a drill, the sawing of an entire string orchestra. Sudden shifts can and do occur, overtones setting the entire room rattling, planes of texture converging then dissolving into one another. Specific tones break through, the suggestion of chords emerging from the whirring flux, the swells gaining intensity, as if some creature is in the throes of birth or metamorphosis.

Around the 15-minute mark an E drone cuts through the absurdly complex layerings that Ambarchi has accumulated. One might view his equipment as constituting a single gigantic instrument, one vehicle for creative expression to and from which specific components might be included or subtracted. Vicious striations lash the surface of the thickly layered accretions, harmonics punching the air like a striking snake. It is almost as though Ambarchi is groping his way towards functional harmony, G, D and A wavering uncertainly through the texture, like ideals hovering above a battlefield only to be forgotten, trampled and defiled.

At the half hour mark a piercing major seventh reaches an almost unbearable intensity, a high water mark that signals a reversal, the entire texture beginning to recede, flailing tics being subducted back beneath the drone, like chain lightning seen from a distance. Establishing a new drone on a low G, Ambarchi seems to turn the frequency down to the lower limit of human hearing, the vibrations being more felt then heard, the fury unleashed only 10 minutes previously being diminished to a few light spatterings above the distant rumble—and then nothing.

Aurora Festival of Living Music: Oren Ambarchi, Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre, Penrith, NSW, May 10; www.auroranewmusic.com.au

ANOTHER THURSDAY EVENING IN PENRITH: THE RETREATING SUN THROWING THE BLUE MOUNTAINS INTO SILHOUETTE, FLOCKS OF CHITTERING PARROTS SETTLING AMONG THE LEMON-SCENTED GUMS, A SEA OF BRAKE LIGHTS GLITTERING ALONG THE M4.

Meanwhile on the grass and raw dirt ‘community space’ between the plaza, the area’s venerable mall and the Joan Sutherland Centre (its more recent rechristening “The JOAN” sitting uneasily with its determinedly highbrow aspirations), groups of young people huddle in clusters, hanging out, catching up and filching cigarettes while experimental guitar quartet Ampere present Amped, a free performance of works recently commissioned through Chronology Arts.

Julian Day’s appropriately named Dusk matched the lengthening twilight, wrenching descending tones from Zane Banks’ solo electric guitar, punctuated only by the dull murmur of teenage courtship. Next was Steffan Ianigro’s Music of Symmetry, wailing dissonance counterbalanced with closely spaced, almost claustrophobic chords; a stepwise ascent suggesting impending horror. A strange atmosphere resulted, the well-mannered attention offered by dedicated nu-classical listeners on the grass sitting at odds with random yelps of female laughter, Ianigro’s careful conducting of the quartet (Banks, his brother Jy-Perry, Matt McGuigan and Mat Kurukchi) seeming overly precise beneath the fluorescent glare of the mall.

Fausto Romitelli’s TV Trash Trance, presented by Jy-Perry Banks on solo electric guitar, was apparently not to the liking of some, “Fuck you!” being yelled in the background— though it was unclear at whom the ‘you’ was directed. Although the volume was criminally low (Banks’ curly mop failed to flail nearly enough), the whirring loops of static established early in the piece provided ample basis over which to squeal and whine in the latter portion, the sound of a faulty connection being used to rhythmic effect before the lot collapsed into Lovecraftian sludge, eliciting some enthusiastic applause from at least one group of junior critics.

Alex Pozniak’s Small Black Hole, followed suit, the quartet gradually building a sliding, groaning texture redolent of the collapse of buildings or tectonic drift. Amid the shifting layers, tremolos suggested the distant ascent of a space shuttle, the hulking sound of aircraft engines emerging from dobro-style slides. While kids stole each other’s baseball caps, providing a clear invitation for a good chasing, a cataclysmic crash loomed in the air, the music spiralling towards an unavoidable impact before fading to nothing. Well received and highly effective.

The experiment in community engagement was rounded off with Phill Niblock’s Guitar two, for four. Emerging unhurriedly from its opening drones, the work was accompanied by a complementary black and white film (as is Niblock’s wont) featuring industrial imagery—gauges, whirring gears, liquid metal being poured—matched to piercing overtones, the guitar’s potential for violence finally unleashed, a blaring surface licked by flares of feedback perhaps unavoidably bringing to mind the consumption of workers’ bodies in Metropolis. And that was that, scattered applause dispersing amid puffs of underage smoke.

Aurora Festival of Living Music: Chronology Arts and Ampere Quartet, Amped, Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre, May 10; www.auroranewmusic.com.au

SOME STRANGE CONJUNCTIONS THIS EVENING, AN INVIGORATING PROGRAMME OF NEW MUSIC PRESENTED BY SYNERGY PERCUSSION BEING PERFORMED ADJACENT TO A KICKBOXING AND PRO-WRESTLING MEET IN THE MAIN FOYER OF CASULA POWERHOUSE.

Though some seemed uncomfortable with this situation—“Oh my god!” the festival director was heard to mutter as muffled grunts and thuds mingled with the first sounds of James Rushford’s Go—the sound bleed added an element of indeterminacy to proceedings that was not entirely incongruous with the prevailing aesthetic, though the recording technicians from the ABC could probably have done without the challenge.

Rushford’s music conjured an eerie fragility, chirrups, squeaks, tinkles and chimes suggesting the cradle or even the emergent consciousness of the embryo. Utilising the soft hiss of gravel and sand as well as bowls of marbles, the performers busily created a sparse, playful texture, resting only as the swell of a pre-recorded electronica track, drowned the live sounds with menacing imminence—an effect somewhat undercut by the cheering next door.

No such problems with Alex Pozniak’s Groove Destruction. Taking its cues from “noise music [and] heavy metal,” Pozniak’s first piece for percussion aimed to explore the “extroverted” side of the ensemble, the four players attacking a phalanx of un-tuned drums with gusto. Establishing then annihilating rhythmic cycles, the piece moved through phases of instrumental delicacy before allowing the group to indulge an unadulterated joy in hitting things, Timothy Constable becoming so involved in the energy of the music that he inadvertently smashed a cymbal to the floor.

Inspired by Xenakis’ Pleiades, Amanda Cole’s Intermetallic provided a calming counterbalance. Writing for metallic blocks of ostensibly indeterminate pitch, Cole worked out at what frequency each vibrated, pairing “similarly dissimilar” tones to achieve a shimmering, not-quite-consonant effect. Growing from an almost-pure fifth, the piece seemed suspended in liminal space, redolent with the half-heard, the almost glimpsed. Armed with soft mallets, the performers offered some of their most sensitive playing of the evening, producing a gentle rippling that recalled all the dappled grace of the gamelan.

Synergy upped the energy once more with their own work, The Fives, with Alison Pratt taking a breather while Constable, Bree van Reyk and Joshua Hill returned to the drums. Using various items, including Constable’s suit jacket, as dampeners, the piece quickly descended into a Kurtzian nightmare, pounded skins suggesting the brutal certainty of a midnight jungle.

More whimsical, though perhaps less effective was Marcus Whale’s Puff, so called because of the composer’s instruction that toy harmonicas be breathed through by each performer for the duration of the piece. Gradually evolving patterns were articulated on wood blocks and thick golden cymbals to create an effect not dissimilar to “a year two’s birthday party,” as Whale drily put it. Although certainly unusual, it was difficult not to breath a sigh of relief once the incessant high-pitched whine of the harmonicas receded into silence once more, leaving nothing but the dull murmurs of ritualised violence next door.

Aurora Festival of Living Music: Synergy Percussion, performers Timothy Constable, Bree van Reyk, Alison Pratt, Joshua Hill; Casula Powerhouse, Sydney, May 5

WHILE FOLK OF VARIOUS ORIGINS CAME TOGETHER FOR THE STYLISED MACHISMO PROVIDED BY PRO-WRESTLING AUSTRALIA IN THE MAIN FOYER OF CASULA POWERHOUSE, EXPERIMENTAL PERCUSSION ENSEMBLE CLOCKS AND CLOUDS BROUGHT TOGETHER EXOTIC RITUALS OF AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT NATURE IN THE MAIN THEATRE.

Drawing upon sources as diverse as Harry Partch’s 1973 work US Highball as well as his identification with the meta-culture of Anaphoria (a conceptual landmass whose inhabitants’ key characteristic is a “desire to be foreigners”), composer and general C&C head honcho Kraig Grady’s work, Terrains, Winds and Currents, provided an absorbing listen.

The centrepiece of the work was the set of twelve Meru Bars, an instrument of Grady’s own creation, that rose like mesas behind a harmonium and pair of vibraphones, all microtonally tuned. The Meru, which is fundamentally a set of gigantic bass vibraphone bars, lent the work a gripping solemnity, the hour-long through-composed piece remaining mesmerising for its duration, due in no small part to the skill with which it was approached by Grady as well as Terumi Narushima behind the harmonium and Finn Ryan on vibraphone.

With Narushima establishing a drone on the harmonium, Ryan trod carefully amid the Meru, striking each note with precise reverence, a liturgical quality being compounded by a single bowed note on the vibes. The sound of the Meru seemed to emanate from deep within the earth, its blended resonances suggesting imaginary ceremonies unfolding in forgotten caves. When this opening ‘terrain’ section closed with the exit of the Meru from the texture, the remaining instruments seemed bereft without its subterranean heat.

This sense of desolation faded as Grady and Ryan generated a new urgency on the vibes, the harmonium providing flashes of melodic material, the effect being that of wind over wet rock, swift and indefinable. Indeed the music here was elemental, almost lysergic, the aesthetic bringing to mind the broken musician in Tim Winton’s Dirt Music. Consigned to hermitude, he finds solace in a makeshift drone, the sound of which seems to contain the world, “like the great open spaces of apnoea, the freedom he knows within the hard, clear bubble of the diver’s held breath. After a point there’s no swimming in it, just a calm glide through thermoclynes, something closer to flight. Within the drone, sound is temperature and taste and smell and memory, wucka-whang.” Grady seemed to be striving for something similar here, the rapidly oscillating tones suggesting rippling clusters of light, refractions in which the mind might become lost.

All of which would be so much twaddle were it not for the extreme discipline that Grady, Ryan and Narushima brought to the material, seamlessly coaxing distinct shifts in texture from the preceding flux. None more effective than the return of the Meru, the roiling bouyancy of the previous section giving way to a solemnity worthy of the disappearance of species, static vibe chords reverberating in isolation over the terrestrial groan of the bass bars. This was an hypnotic and moving song for the earth.

Aurora Festival of Living Music: Clocks and Clouds, Kraig Grady, Terumi Narushima, Finn Ryan, Casula Powerhouse, Sydney, May 5; www.auroranewmusic.com.au/

In this video interview Australian Dance Theatre's Artistic Director Garry Stewart talks with Keith Gallasch about Be Your Self which recently played Sydney Theatre, May 31-June 3, 2012.

In this video interview Australian Dance Theatre’s Artistic Director Garry Stewart talks with Keith Gallasch about Be Your Self which recently played Sydney Theatre, May 31-June 3, 2012.

More and more dancing and more places to dance in Western Sydney: that’s the good news from Martin del Amo’s report in this edition of RealTime. The development of arts centres west of the city is one of the happy legacies of the Carr Labor Government. Campbelltown Arts Centre has a dance curator; in Parramatta FORM Dance Projects presents works in partnership with Riverside Theatres; and Blacktown Arts Centre includes dance in its performance program. Not only do these offer opportunities for dance artists and communities in the region but also engagements for Sydney-based artists as choreographers, teachers and mentors, enlarging the sense of community in NSW dance. There’s further good news from Angharad Wynne-Jones, the Creative Producer for City of Melbourne’s Arts House—Dance Massive will make its third appearance in 2013 thanks to the enduring partnership between Arts House, Dancehouse and Malthouse. It’s pretty much a sell-out event and a great opportunity for artists, audiences and presenters to connect. If you want to keep track of Australian contemporary dance, take a look at RealTimeDance on our website: this invaluable resource provides free access to all of the dance articles and reviews in RealTime from 1994 plus profiles of leading choreographers, video interviews and a feature on dance on film. Dance. Dance. Dance.

FROM THE DARKNESS FOUR FIGURES EMERGE. THEY STAND CENTRED IN A LINE. THE LINE IS NEATLY FRAMED BY A SQUARE. FOUR FACES LOOK DIRECTLY OUT TO THE AUDIENCE, FINGERS TWITCH WHILE LIMBS TWIST. A CONGA LINE, OR STRANGE LIMB MACHINE.

Body parts hinge along creases: fingers, hands, elbows, arms—spoking out every which way. Their voices rise in unison from a whisper, repeating: “something is going on, while this is going on.” What is the “something?” What is the “this?” We are immediately drawn into choroegrapher Anton’s inquiry motivated by his question: “what is it to be human in our modern world?”

Pre-modern, postmodern and supermodern are terms turning upon and around the modern. The modern is a consistent descriptor of our present human condition, especially the cultural, economic and technological dimensions. If Frederic Jameson is right, then the modern is a reference point to be fragmented in its post-isms, nostalgically reflected from in its pre-isms, and tempo-spatially reoriented in its super-isms. SuperModern Dance of Distraction turns perceptively on the modern, describing the speeds, spaces and textures of human and human-machine relations in a techno-saturated world.

From formations of four to three observing one, the dancers (Kristina Chan, Timothy Ohl, Robbie Curtis, Sophia Ndaba) rapidly migrate from one configuration to the next, their histories wiped away with large Malevich-inspired blocks of light that scrape the black space. The lighting design (Guy Harding) is consistently constructivist in form, clean, deliberate, boldly white and, on occasion, epileptic and fractious.

When four, the dancers constitute a visual spectacle. In synchronous movements they generate images of a machinic ballet and tessellations of legs and faces spinning hypnotically in a Busby Berkeley water parade. In one sequence, the dancers raise white, hollowed-out squares above their heads, optically thickening their presence. Bodies calibrate: frames for looking through and graphically inscribing the space, frames to frame, shaping these carrier bodies into angular geometries. In another sequence, collapsed white trestle tables provide vertical surfaces that slide along rectilinear lines to block and bounce slamming bodies. The dancers take turns to operate the system, hiding, trapping and distorting the space: a concrete mediation implying a digital logic.

In a more literal demonstration, clear perspex held between faces becomes a touch screen: connections are unequivocally established between fingers, glass and manipulated expression. The audience laughs rapturously (perhaps those with iPhone or iPad much harder). The perspex intercepts the kissing lips of two lovers in a moment of ‘distal loving.’ Pressed together they exaggerate the mediated space-time distance that Skype technology attempts to bridge. Their embrace lingering beyond comfortability, they take turns to ferociously straddle each other. The intimate made intensely public raises the real possibility that someone could be watching.

Communication. Upstage in blackout, torch lights flash intermittently, each emitting an idiosyncratic sound. We giggle in this close encounter of some kind. The dancers speak, sing and sound effortlessly, giving some vox to their pop. In an ingenious quartet of couples, they sing into long cabled microphones that swing and swoon like serenading lassos, supporting overall the seamlessly produced pop-inspired score by Nick Wales and Timothy Constable with vocals by Jai Pyne. Tracks of silky-synth smoothness ballasted by crisp hypnotic beats blow an asymmetrical fringe deeper into the eyes—all so distractingly modern.

Connection. The gags and prop-play exaggerate familiar scenarios, like the absurdity of the automated voice machine that never understands us. Caution must be taken, however, when the fast, fragmented and fleeting are both dramaturgical points of departure and justifications for the difficult experience in watching the episodic, disjointed and excessive. I wonder at what point structure and form should resist content. Luckily the more enduring solos reflect a deeper physical ontology (not a mere symptomatic engagement with a world on fast-forward) and so tap into what Raymond Williams calls the “structures of feeling.” Chan, delivered under a red haze, quivers in primordial gasps of arrest, every cell agitated in controlled contortions, tiny, gathered up to the bone, implosion imminent. Ndaba conversely convulses in jelly-like explosions, her jouissance, escalating into maddened laughter, a pressure-built response. Curtis wanders the stage with a disorganised body. Afflicted with “this something,” he is fuzzy and out of focus, snapping joints at the mercy of malfunction.

Refreshingly, there is nothing dystopic nor utopic said about ‘this’ condition, it is not Anton’s point. We are invited to experience, rather than critique. SuperModern is a work of fine collaboration, five dedicated years in development, with places to go, and hopefully in spaces where the carefully constructed geometries of the stage and lighting design can be realised.

FORM Dance Projects & Riverside Theatres, Dance Bites 2012: SuperModern Dance of Distraction, choreographer Anton, performers Kristina Chan, Timothy Ohl, Robbie Curtis, Sophia Ndaba, producer Michelle Silby, composers Nick Wales, Jai Pyne, Timothy Constable, lighting designer Guy Harding, dramaturg Joshua Tyler, set design consultant Julio Himede, Lennox Theatre, Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, March 28-32

IN JUNE 2011, AFTER SEEING BRIWYANT I WROTE, “VICKI VAN HOUT’S CHOREOGRAPHY IS SOME OF THE MOST IDIOSYNCRATIC AND INVENTIVE SEEN IN AUSTRALIAN DANCE FOR A LONG TIME AND HER TEAM OF DEXTROUS DANCERS EXECUTE IT WITH HIGH PRECISION, UNBELIEVABLE ENERGY, HUMOUR AND ATTITUDE.”

Briwyant is touring to Melbourne and Brisbane, offering audiences the opportunity to experience something quite unique in contemporary dance. The choreographer, who also appears in the work, writes, “Briwyant is inspired by bir’yun: brilliance, shimmer and shine. In Yolngu traditional painting, bir’yun is the effect of intricate crosshatched patterns creating a sensation of shimmering movement over the painting’s surface, a manifestation of ancestral forces.” With her dancers, her own design and her media arts collaborators Van Hout creates resonating physical, aural and visual shimmerings in Briwyant. KG

WHO WOULD EVER HAVE THOUGHT THAT WESTERN SYDNEY WOULD ONE DAY BECOME A BASTION OF INDEPENDENT CONTEMPORARY DANCE? SURE, THERE HAS LONG BEEN A TRADITION OF SOCIAL AND FOLKLORIC DANCE IN WESTERN SYDNEY, PARTLY DUE TO ITS STRONG LINGUISTICALLY AND CULTURALLY DIVERSE DEMOGRAPHIC. THERE HAS ALSO BEEN A LONG-TERM HIP HOP DEVELOPMENT IN THE REGION AND THE EMERGENCE OF PARKOUR CREWS IN BANKSTOWN AND THE FAIRFIELD AREA. BUT CONTEMPORARY DANCE?

It is true that artists such as Anandavalli (Lingalayam Dance Company) and Annalouise Paul have been presenting contemporary culturally diverse dance at venues like Riverside Parramatta for quite some time. And yet, there is no denying that in recent years a growing number of NSW-based independent dance artists have switched their attention to Western Sydney, where a variety of arts organisations and presenters offer ample opportunity to both develop and present new work. So what is the reason for this sudden boom.

According to Kim Spinks, who formerly managed state funding for theatre and dance and is currently Manager Capacity and Development at Arts NSW, there are several factors. One is the implementation of Arts NSW’s Western Sydney Arts Strategy, a long-range initiative drawn up and put into effect in 1999. It had a substantial funding program attached to it ($37m 2001-2010) and targeted all artforms. However, as Spinks points out, at the time the University of Western Sydney (UWS) offered the only tertiary dance degree in New South Wales which became a factor for organisations such as Ausdance NSW to invest in dance in Western Sydney and attempt to build an infrastructure around it. Ironically, the dance course at UWS folded after a few years but, by then, the rise of dance development in the area was well on its way.

Another great shift occurred through a major capital commitment of over $20m from the Carr government in the mid-2000s and a combined spend of over $55 Million from state and local governments. It affected the arts centres in Campbelltown, Blacktown and Casula and involved turning visual arts spaces into multi-art centres. As a result several of these organisations incorporated dance into their programming. So let’s have a look at some of the key players:

form dance projects

FORM Dance Projects, known until recently as Western Sydney Dance Action (WSDA), was founded in 2002, evolving from an outreach initiative Ausdance NSW set up in response to the Western Sydney Arts Strategy in the late 1990s. Since its inception, the organisation’s most important partnership has been with Riverside Theatres under the directorship of Robert Love. Initially an auspiced project, FORM now operates independently from Riverside but presents work in partnership with them. The cornerstone of its presentation program continues to be the long-running Dance Bites series. Initiated by WSDA’s inaugural director Kathy Baykitch in 2003, Dance Bites has gathered momentum in the last couple of years with highly successful productions such as Narelle Benjamin’s and Francis Ring’s Forseen, Craig Bary’s and Lisa Griffith’s Side to One (see interview, RT105) and most recently Anton’s SuperModern Dance of Distraction (see p4). Later in the year, Tess de Quincey will present Framed, a new instalment in her acclaimed “embrace” series.

In spite of the increasing number of high calibre artists seeking out FORM as presenting partner, the fragility of the organisation’s funding situation is an ongoing concern for its current director, Annette McLernon. She explains: “FORM’s core funding is very secure. We have just received triennial funding (2012-2014) from Arts NSW and Riverside Theatres is a key partner. However, the project funding for the Dance Bites presentations is less certain as the producers or individual independent choreographers are still very dependent on successful funding to develop and present their works.”

However, FORM does not only present work, it also offers a significant education program. Its various initiatives include master classes for young choreographers from Western Sydney and the popular Learn the Repertoire, See the Show series, as part of which presenting artists teach workshops and offer post show discussions.

campbelltown arts centre

In the wake of the redevelopment of Campbelltown Arts Centre (CAC) into a multi-arts centre, Lisa Havilah, its director 2005-2010, put a five-year strategic plan into action that included dance alongside visual arts, theatre, new music and live art/performance. For the first couple of years, dance at CAC was mainly presented in the form of individual projects. This changed when Emma Saunders was appointed as dance curator in late 2008. She was given the brief to develop a three-year framework for a Contemporary Dance Program and curate artists as part of it. Saunders, a well-respected member of the NSW independent dance community, best known for her work with the irrepressible dance trio The Fondue Set, rose to the challenge and put a multi-strand model in place which combined long-term development projects and residencies for local and international artists with the presentation of new work, both full-length pieces and short work commissions. Saunders says about her curatorial approach, “The CAC Contemporary Dance Program promotes interdisciplinary and intercultural projects. We support artists interested in questions around process, form and community engagement.” As a prime example Saunders cites the work of dance artist Lizzie Thomson who collaborated with an ensemble of community participants drawn from local amateur dance and theatre companies during her 2010 residency and then featured them in the finished work, Panto (see RT105), the following year.

Now in its fourth year, CAC’s 2012 dance program will culminate in a three-day festival project in October titled Oh! I Wanna Dance With Somebody. It will showcase outcomes from the program’s various strands and include 20 Australian and international artists as well as 150 Campbelltown locals across 15 projects, occupying the entire arts centre.

blacktown arts centre

Unlike Campbelltown Arts Centre with its variety of artform specific programs, Blacktown Arts Centre (BAC) runs a multidisciplinary contemporary arts program, of which dance is part. According to Kiri Morecombe, Acting Performing Arts Development Officer until recently, BAC is largely focussed on the development of new work from local and Western Sydney artists. In 2010, for example, Katy Green, a young performance practitioner born and raised in Western Sydney, was awarded a three-week residency as part of BAC’s performing arts program to explore cross-artform collaboration together with composer and sound artist Tom Hogan. A second stage development will take place at BAC in August this year.

Another dance project recently supported by BAC was Megamaras by Indigenous dance artists Peta Strachan and Rayma Johnson, together with media artist Michelle Blakeney. Based on the story of Daringyule (dancing woman), who broke the law, and combining choreography with projected underwater imagery, the work was developed in residence at BAC in late 2011 and pitched at the Australian Performing Arts Market earlier this year. BAC has an Aboriginal Arts Development Officer, Andrea James.

Asked about the future of dance at Blacktown Arts Centre, Director Jenny Bisset, says, “With a stronger emphasis on dance in recent years, we have started to build an audience and expectation for this and will continue to look for new work through our performing arts residency program and our Aboriginal Arts program. We are particularly interested in hybrid work as we continue to build cross-disciplinary programming.”

youMove company

The Parramatta-based youMove Company was founded by dance artist Kay Armstrong in 2008, starting operations at the beginning of 2009. It is designed as a platform for emerging dancers and graduates. Even though strongly supported through a partnership with Western Sydney Dance Action, things didn’t go smoothly for Armstrong and her troupe initially, having missed out on funding during their first year. “The first year was about surviving basically,” Armstrong says. “The focus was on finding platforms for presentation, building our reputation and achieving industry credibility.” Gradually developing a repertoire of short works choreographed by herself and various independent choreographers such as Anton and Ian Colless, Armstrong worked tirelessly in the following years to raise public awareness for the company and create performance opportunities for her dancers. The company’s many gigs have included performances at the 2010 Under the Radar program (Brisbane Festival) and presenting work in a double bill with the Sydney Dance Company in Parramatta Park as part of the 2011 Sydney Festival. It didn’t take long until the company started to attract project funding and the business side of things consolidated. Last year the company incorporated and received program funding for the first time.

YouMove’s activities now comprise three strands: performance, mentorship and education. Of these strands, education is the most recent addition to the company’s program. It includes performance presentations and post-show workshops by the company for students (5-12 years) in Western Sydney schools. It’s an area Armstrong feels especially passionate about: “I’m a huge proponent of the idea of education being a transformative process. So what I’m hoping to do is to create and build future dance audiences. Now, the way to do that is to hit them young, you’ve got to get into the schools when they are at an impressionable age and give them really positive, expansive, unique, imaginative, inspiring dance experiences.”

THE FIRST TWO PARTS OF AN EVOLVING TRILOGY BY SELF-CHOREOGRAPHING DANCER MATTHEW DAY WILL SOON BE JOINED BY THE MUCH-ANTICIPATED THIRD WORK, INTERMISSION, AT THE PACT THEATRE IN SYDNEY. THOUSANDS AND CANNIBAL WERE AT ONCE CONTEMPLATIVE AND VISCERAL, MINIMALIST AND COMPLEX. I SPOKE WITH DAY ABOUT THE NEW WORK AND ITS RELATIONSHIP WITH ITS PARTNERS.

In Thousands (2010; see RT100 I was interested in stillness because I wanted to go back to something very simple, to what I was thinking of as the ‘degree zero’ of choreography because it was my first solo and I’d been reading Andre Lepecki and his writings on Nijinsky’s use of stillness. I was also interested in considering my position in dance history. So [it was] something about being still to allow other things to enter the space, for the audience to read the work in their own way—and also for other references to land on the body. Some of these I specifically choreographed into the work. There are Nijinsky references and then other things it’s up to the audience to project. But certainly it was about stillness or slow movement.

Steve Paxton is another reference and Vanessa Beecroft’s work—those models standing in galleries for long periods of time. It’s a bit different from Paxton but I thought, isn’t this interesting how there’s an unconscious choreography going on in the body.

When you say “unconscious choreography,” do you mean in the everyday or in stillness in dance?

My next project will be looking at the everyday. But I think in this series, the trilogy, they’re constructed theatrical settings. What I found looking at stillness was this vibration that’s happening without me producing it. What I’m doing is trying to be still. I try to think of this as the surface of the choreography or my intentional or conscious choreography as a score about stillness and how I do that.

That stillness is, I think, still evident in Cannibal (2011; see RT 102) although you’re moving in quite a large circuit. It’s still slow and there’s a sense of vibration.

The vibration that came up from underneath the stillness is what I consider the unconscious choreography, just in the sense that I’m not actively producing it.

Is that because, for instance, in the starting position of Thousands, you’re putting your body in a fairly stressful position?

Intensity. My objective with the piece is not to show any effort and to be as calm as I can be and not to fatigue. And the work should never look like I can’t continue. I’m not interested in failure or fatigue in that sense.

They’re more about duration and what can happen if we just look at one thing for a long time and how something can change and how that reading of the same thing can change further if we sit with it for a long time. And I think this also came about by watching dance, where I feel like the dancers have just had a big shot of adrenaline backstage, run onto the stage and just go like move, move, move, go, go, go, counting to the count. Not that all dance does this any more. So it was really me challenging myself to make a choreographic work and not just dance, because that’s what I’d been trained to do and that’s what I love doing. So I got really excited about this vibrational quality.

It’s interesting that you made an observation about the stillness of Cannibal because while I was working on this, I started to think about the difference between the works. In Thousands I feel like I’m working very fast on a conscious level to refresh my attention and my perception. It’s happening very slowly and, to keep it alive, I need to work very fast, whereas with Cannibal, because there’s quite a lot of movement I drop into a much calmer place internally. Maybe that’s what you’re talking about.

On the last day of Cannibal I had two performances to do and I’d done 10 shows altogether and it’s quite stressful to do twice in one day—or so I thought. But on the very last performance on the last day, I said to myself before I started, “Just take as much time as you need. This one’s for you. Find out what you can about the work. Do it and get what you can because this is the last chance you’ll have for a while.” And, while I was performing I started to discover a wave in the vibration. It’s just a very simple thing about the weight shifting between the right and the left foot, the transference of weight across the body and across space—the eternal wave that’s present underneath that. Waves are a pretty basic physical property and I just started to realise that it was present. It’s a feeling. So that kind of indentified that this would be the next thing. This is the future. The works each revealed themselves in different ways.

Thousands and Cannibal are both very sculptural, but Thousands is almost on a fixed point while Cannibal has a circuit and the works correlate with very different stage design and deployment of sound. In what way have you approached Intermission?

It’s a really good distinction you’re making—the movement’s relationship to pathways in space. I feel like maybe what I do is, I think about a wave—and it’s very naive the way I work. I just say okay, you’re going to do waves in the body for 10 minutes and see what happens and then I do it and I think this bit was interesting, or this happened. So I’ll do it again and maybe notice it again and just keep working. I’m realising this is not the way everyone works. I just do the piece when I rehearse. I just do the thing for about as long as I can. I do it for 30, 40 minutes and, okay, that’s what the thing is today. And then I slowly shape it over time.

I work with duration, which is the way I need to because it’s very hard for me to work on, say, a section. I think maybe the way a lot of people work is on sections: ‘I’m interested in this leg thing or this image here’ and maybe they look at ways of composing the order of these things. But when it comes to really making choreography and composing the thing, it happens as I’m doing it in the time that I’m doing it—performing the wave and seeing how it talks to me.

Yes. At first I start working just physically on, say, a wave and don’t worry too much where it goes in space. Then there’s a point where the pathway becomes the important thing that then determines the movement. So there’s this back and forth relationship. For example, I’ve had two main development periods and in the first I didn’t really think about the spatial map until the last couple of days and then started playing with something, mainly because I was having a showing. Then I had the Culture Lab residency [at Melbourne City Council’s Arts House] for two weeks and I kept that map and I said, okay, this is the map, how can I explore this as much as possible. Now I’m about to go back into the PACT Theatre [in Sydney where Day performed Thousands and Cannibal] and I’m actually going to question the pathway in space because I know more about the wave by articulating a pathway. Now it’s time to find out, to do it in reverse. There’s this constant negotiation between the pathway in space and the movement itself. In some ways they’re quite separate things.

There’s a design element that seems quite integral to your work. When do you start thinking about how you’ll create that space beyond the body?

Quite early I think but I don’t make decisions till quite late. With Thousands it was very pragmatic: I’ll make a piece with one spotlight and a backing track. That’s about touring the work; it’s about sustainability; it’s about keeping things simple; it’s about wanting the work to exist on its own terms choreographically. But these are also design principles: It’s also about minimalism. When I first did Thousands, it was in Northcote Town Hall, which has a massive gold velvet curtain. So I think of Thousands as a gold piece even though when it was shown at PACT, where you saw it, it was against a black wall. I wear gold sneakers. When it was at Dance Massive, it ended up looking quite orange.

So, what’s the future of the trilogy in terms of design. Cannibal is very white—floor, walls, outfit, your hair.

I’m trying to get white curtains made for Cannibal. So, they are in a sense an inversion of the usual black curtains of a space. Then the idea is that I can just request white tarket and chuck the white curtains in a normal touring suitcase. If that’s possible, then the future of Cannibal is quite open. And the thing is in Europe there are lots of white spaces anyway. As for the future of the trilogy, I’m going to present Thousands again in Melbourne in October and Cannibal in November and, hopefully, Intermission at Dance Massive in 2013. So this will be the first time that they’ll all be done within a five-month period and I think that’ll teach me a bit more about what it’s like to perform them back to back. The idea would be that they would be programmed across three nights. It’s impossible to do them all in one night and I don’t think it’s desirable either. They can tour as a trilogy across three nights so that each work has its own independence.

Intermission is about always being in the middle: never being here or there, never arriving completely, always being in a state of in-betweenness or becoming. It also problematises the idea of linearity. What is the order of these works? Even though we started out talking about how one work seeds the next, I found out things about Thousands by performing Cannibal. The works start to speak to each other in different ways. There are structural things I’ve discovered in Intermission that I’m going to retroactively apply to the other works. So they start to have this non-linear discussion with each other, which I find exciting.

The reason I liked the title was that I had this idea. We go and see a show and I was thinking of one of these big old amazing pros arch theatres. Everyone’s in there for the first half of the concert or ballet. And then everyone leaves. They’re outside drinking champagne or whatever in the foyer. And I just had this sense of what happens in the theatre in that intermission when no one is there. I like this idea of the life of the theatre without an audience, this in-between moment. What is the energy of this space at this moment? That’s what I’m interested in, that invisibility, the silent thing that you don’t actually see. That suspended moment of energy and stillness.

YUMI UMIUMARE DANGLES US WITHIN INNER AND OUTER WORLDS. HER BODY MEDIATES A UNIQUE COLLISION OF MOVEMENT STYLES, WHILE HER WORDS AND TEARS INVITE US TO REFLECT IN THE FACE OF OUR BEING, “I SWALLOW MY MIRROR WHILE I’M WATCHING MYSELF.”

EnTrance does not merely ask us to observe energetic transformations through word, rhythm, ritual and symbol; it navigates us through hyperbolic worlds that are indeed nothing other than who we are. Emotion, memory, everyday mediations and constructions, life, birth, death, spirit and love: EnTrance brings us home to ourselves.

Umiumare’s opening movement vocabulary is a heavy, slow shuffle; her head is tilted upward, oriented toward something in the distance. She seems to bear a cumbersome weight—a story involving a cat, a dusty window and the loss of her fingertips into a garden with a fountain that explodes with feathers of rich colour. The stage fills with projection, rolling out a bustling metropolis, all reds, yellows and blues. Umiumare absorbs the street rhythms like a blank canvas. We see it on her dress. Her dance is a strange mix of ‘go-go traffic conducting,’ forearms hinged at the elbows creating vectorial variations to wave the world in, and air-like pistons pumping the forces around. This pattern is punctuated by reverse star-jumps, arms straightened like bolts into a horizontal crossbar. Her martial stance complements five, six-foot-high erect masts, sails tethered at the waist. The image is positively nautical. Untethered, single threads fall outward to form a broken surface the width of the stage, a versatile design by installation artist Naomi Ota that metaphorises fragility, malleability and unpredictability.

Bambang Nurcahyadi augments each vignette with large-scale visuals, projecting scenic and urban backdrops and swirling, animated Umiumares, replicated in various guises on the screens. In one scene, the dancer, dressed in a black leather jacket covered with flashing thorns of tiny embedded LEDs (design David Anderson), thrashes about in concert with obnoxiously loud post-punk noise—guitar pedals of assault—and picks up a large LCD screen to use as a face mask. The image is a portrait of her inner Avatar, scratched and irritated by the superfluity of a hyper-existence.

Drifting into a different rhythm, Japanese characters cascade delicately down the threads spilling onto an umbrella held by Umiumare, now looking like a bleached-white Mary Poppins. She weathers the words in patient reprieve. We too wait, soothed, suspended, somewhat transported.

Umiumare tells us that in Japanese there are different names for different tears. Each type, or mode of crying, is named after the sound that the crier makes, an onomatopoeic nomenclature. “Cachuckachuck, cachuckachuck”, the crumpled wail of a woman who has lost her child. Tears like rain soak the cheek. I am reminded of a scene from Michael Haneke’s The Time of The Wolf where a mother weeps inconsolably at the death of her son. Sounds of soaking.

Umiumare emerges like a fake plastic flower to entertain us with a love song, singing off-key. We giggle along with this awkward serenade. When it ends we are plunged deeper into her primordial wail. She transmits something not belonging to her, something more universal; there is deep silence in the sonority of grief.

A bird of paradise, Umiumare engages with the ritual and dress of her traditions. A transcendent phase, almost ecclesiastic, she raises her arms, a stole of red and gold draped symmetrically over her arms. I think of the fountain and the cat that ate her fingertips. All images, words and sounds that formed disparate episodes momentarily speak one language. I am home.

Tangled in threads, Umiumare paints her body white with aggressive brush strokes. This final costume change shatters the coherency of two-dimensional image, each screen torn down by this monster of chaos. She stirs the space. Medusa. Her feet rooted, the base of her tongue driven from pelvic depths, viscera like magma ready to overflow. Her body is gnarled at the joints like an ancient tree still growing. Nothing more present than presence itself. Beneath the hypnotic birdcalls, drums and didgeridoo, the sorceress licks with flickering tongue those fingertips. Her eyes unnaturally wide, each a window open for all to see, each an opaque window reflecting back. Transformation.

For the most part I felt overwhelmed by the excessive mélange of cultural influences, aesthetic choices and movement styles. But by the end, experienced an unmooring of something indescribable, a deeper unitary movement that for me is a rare occurrence in performance. Entranced.

Performance Space, Dimension Crossing: EnTrance, performer, creator Yumi Umiumare, collaborator Moira Finucane, costume designer David Anderson, lighting designer Kerry Ireland, sound designer Ian Kitney, media artist Bambang Nurcahyadi, installation artist Naomi Ota; Performance Space, Carriageworks, Sydney, April 18-21

VICTORIA HUNT’S COPPER PROMISES: HINEMIHI HAKA IS A ‘THEN’ MADE ‘NOW,’ A PAST CONJURED IN A PRESENT THAT WALKS THROUGH PORTALS INTO ONGOINGNESS. IT IS EPISODIC, WITH EACH ACT DETERMINED BY DISTINCTIVE BUT MUTATING LIGHTING STATES THAT ARE BOTH SHARPLY AESTHETIC AND THICKLY ATMOSPHERIC, AND BY AUTOCONVOLUTED SOUND THAT SPEAKS, SHATTERS, RUMBLES, ROARS, GRATES, GRINDS AND TRICKLES.

At the same time Hunt’s body moves amidst light and sound as one of these elementals; sometimes swept along or drawn by light, sometimes tortured by compacted screeches, possessed of sound. But at other times it is her moving body that controls the skies.

Copper Promises: Hinemihi Haka is a condensation of Hunt’s journey back into her Maori ancestry. [Hinemihi is a female ancestor and a ceremonial house connected with Hunt’s cultural heritage. Eds] It is a lament of alienation and a celebration of repatriation. It is a finding, a gathering, a travelling, a wandering and a landing. It is a work built over “a decade of embodied research across three countries…collecting video imagery, recording sound and interviews and making a series of short dance works” (program notes).

So those voices and actions and images that elude specific understanding are still understood: clarity is born of heartfelt and rigorous research, stretching out across continents and generations and coming back to a body. Victoria Hunt’s body as the human centre of Copper Promises becomes a place, reconciling the apparent conundrum of a cultural emphasis on “collectivity” and “community” (program notes) with this very solo work by dancing with ancestors and giving voice to ghosts which hang behind and around Hunt’s fleshy contortions.

There were so many resonant moments: like the dust cloud that seemed at first like smoke but had the shape of a figure, haunting on invitation, or the ghostly bride who pads solemnly soft along an aisle of white, her hair gently steaming. But two crescendos screamed louder than them all.

After another train has rattled past Carriageworks’ Track 8, after the slow lateral stalking of the stage by a nearly invisible body with only half a face, after the ghosts have whispered softly then echoed loudly on top of rumbles that gently shake space, after Hinemihi body has pushed itself into becoming rock, metal and rubber, after this molten non-body has bent, opened, twisted and sunk, Hunt, her skin glistening with sweat, spits gorgeous globules of beautiful saliva into the air and her hands become ‘pois’ (Maori performative devices which are swung by hand. Eds) that flick and twitch into a madness-trapped claustrophobia in a sharp white box of asylum light hanging in a sea of black, until a cloudy sky greyness drifts her and her madness into near invisibility again.

Later. After disappearing into a chasm of nothingness, Hunt’s chin and mouth appear, tattooed and moving. Her mouth and the mouths of the soundtrack speak in strangled distortions that are electronic and ancient, now and then. Hunt is a mask made by light, speaking in tongues with the rhythms of sharpening breath and dog screams, a sonic mountain of intolerable cruelty that hurts with its disturbing and frantic energy. Then, it is gone.

Afterward, it took some time to leave the silences and roars of Copper Promises behind. The past had taken hold of the present, so the world became liminal, a neither here nor there, a then and a now.

Performance Space, Dimension Crossing: Copper Promises: Hinemihi Haka, concept, choreography, dance Victoria Hunt, lighting Clytie Smith, sound James Brown, producer Fiona Winning, Performance Space, Carriageworks, Sydney, May 4-12

KATRINA LAZAROFF’S INVOLUNTARY SPEAKS OF HOW WE ARE ORDERED AND SHAPED THROUGH THE VARIOUS MECHANISMS OF COMMUNICATION WE ENCOUNTER OR USE, BEGINNING, TONGUE IN CHEEK, WITH PROJECTED TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR THIS PERFORMANCE. THESE BECOME MORE AND MORE ABSURD AS THEY ARE SCROLLED THROUGH.

An extended dance sequence, clearly drawn from an investigation of involuntary movements, follows with toe-tapping music. The dancers are then asked a series of questions. They are clearly under duress, the suggestion being that they need to pass some test. They bend and twist in response.

The great appeal in Lazaroff’s dance projects lies in the humour that informs each performance and her determination that the dancers appear as ‘regular people.’ These two aesthetic choices are not unrelated. In Involuntary she borrows from clowning to achieve the various vignettes and the performers also frequently address the audience directly. Four ladders are used to great effect. Climbing up a ladder becomes a clown routine of entanglement because of the obstacles presented by ‘the OH&S supervisor.’ A dance routine is made from spectator behaviour, what we do in the privacy of lounge room television watching. We also watch the dancers on Skype—private projections of self—talking, gaming, masturbating.

Two dancers have a conversation via computer in text language. This is shown to be a little limiting. They also meet up via video on their mobile phones—a fairytale image as these two tiny screens dance together to music box tinkling. Always we see the struggle for the individual to squeeze into narrowly determined situations and behaviour, longing to break free of constraint, as exemplified beautifully by an office chair routine that starts with listening to a telephone answering service and becomes a ballet of flight as the dancers give up waiting. The performers are equal to this task—engaging to watch, physically skilled and bold.

The knock-about humour, easy polemic and engagement with the audience reminded me of the Aussie performance aesthetic championed and immortalised by Circus Oz. At one stage the dancers compete for air time to tell us their complaints. An audience member is then invited on stage with the performers to speak of what infuriates them.

The technology is used skillfully. The witty projections are seamlessly and elegantly woven into each vignette. The music is fun. The dance material in solos, duets and quartets captures the awkwardness of being not quite in control of one’s body. The final duet is a simple homage to touch and connection as performed by two dancers, though the true message of this piece, and of interaction with technology as a disciplinary force, is ‘be playful.’

One Point 618 & Adelaide Festival Centre: Involuntary, director, choreographer Katrina Lazaroff, performers, creators Tim Rodgers, Ninian Donald, Veronica Shum, Jessica Statton, lighting, projection design Nic Mollison, sound design Sascha Budimski, set design Richard Seidel; Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, May 1-5

PARI PASSU…TOUCH IS AN INTRICATE WEAVE. IT TAKES PLACE WITHIN AN EXQUISITE MARY MOORE DESIGN—A PERFECTLY CIRCULAR WHITE FLOOR WITH TWO WAVE FORM SCREENS OF DIFFERENT LENGTHS POSITIONED NEAR THE BACK OF THE CIRCLE AND SEPARATED BY A GAP. THE WORK BEGINS WITH A LIGHT GLANCING ACROSS THE SCREENS REPEATEDLY, REVEALING THE TEXTURE OF WHAT COULD BE THE MOSAIC OF ROCK ON A SHORELINE.

The lights dim and solid becomes fluid, rock becomes mud. A distant shadowy figure walks towards us, a projection, but then a live male body takes over. The dancers are initially figures behind, appearing to be in the wall—the work presents mutability as order. The screens are revealed to be touch screens. The dancers emerge from behind the wall and return there throughout the piece. The surface changes throughout with beautifully selected projections by Adam Synott. Sometimes the surface shifts in response to the dancers—patterns scatter or collect.

Though the media technology is part of the ‘here and now,’ the references that haunt the work are of some ancient time. My mind wandered to cave paintings and tribal rituals. Some version of our past lurked as a referent. The sound shifted between wind instruments, strings and drums as the dancing changed rhythm and dynamic. Though touch was the declared focus, the dancing away from the screen/wall was a relentless, almost restless, articulation of body in confined space, body in relation to floor and body in relation to other bodies. The dancers performed solos, duets and unison quartets.

Behind/in the wall the movement slowed, opened out, changed shape. The dimensions of the space and wall made the dancers appear larger than life, godlike. At a certain point I was struck by the thought that a cosmology was being represented. I looked up and the lighting bars were in arcs; the heavens appeared. At another point an orange glow dominated the stage, that unmistakable orange that has come to represent Australia. I am struggling to describe the intricate unsettling of solidity, of surface, of depth of field, of time, of symbols and cultural positioning in this dance (Warren has had a long commitment to supporting and working with Indigenous dancers and choreographers).

The duets were a case in point, involving a knotting and unknotting of bodies. There was not the usual rhythm of separation and coming together that often marks this duet form. In the quartet a simple walking forward and back in unison and also the detail of the shoulders and upper backs moving on four hunched dancers was profoundly moving. They were working at the edge of their ability to stay accurate and present. This was thrilling. I found it tantalising to watch a work where referents hovered but had been relegated to the outskirts; where I focused instead on patterns in process and the feelings and meanings these generated. I was reminded of my pleasure in watching Lucinda Childs’ dancers stepping along geometric spatial pathways swinging their arms in the 1980s and was glad of this Australian dance project.

Leigh Warren & Dancers, Pari passu…touch, artistic director, choreographer Leigh Warren, dancers Lisa Griffiths, Bec Jones, Tim Farrar, Jesse Martin, set design Mary Moore, music composition, projection design Adam Synnott, lighting Benjamin Cisterne, garments Alistair Trung, Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, May 17-26

HUMANS ARE SENSATES, THERE IS NO OTHER WAY TO PERCEIVE THE WORLD OUTSIDE THE BODY. ACCORDING TO ANTHROPOLOGISTS, MEMORY IS THE HISTORY BOOK OF OUR SENSORY EXPERIENCES WHERE WE STORE AND RESTORE EACH SENSORY DIMENSION WITHIN THE OTHER, MAKING IT DIFFICULT TO SEPARATE AND VERBALISE OUR SENSATIONS. TIM DARBYSHIRE’S COLLABORATIVE PERFORMANCE IS BASED ON THEORIES OF SYNAESTHESIA, SENSORY EXPERIENCE AND MEMORY.

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.

In a darkened theatre, headsets deliver the minimalist and hypnotic sound. A car in the distance, a creaking chair, a metal street sign in the wind? The recordings are central to the piece, as in the dance itself they explore the intersection of sound and movement of artificial or natural environments. Microphones near the stage pick up the sound of limbs slapping the stage, heads knocking on the wooden stage and the breath and grunts of the performers. The containment and editing of sound through headphones coupled with darkness heightens our visual perception.

Three performers in boiler suits appear in a haze of low watt blue light, their heads tucked away out of sight. Without the visual reference point of heads, the performers appear to be disembodied sculptures. For much of the performance, faces are hidden, giving the performers an anonymous, inhuman nature. The unfamiliar positions of the bodies—such as upside down torsos—leave behind unrecognisable, twisted forms, like the casts of animals made at Vesuvius or Richard Goodwin’s concrete sculptures of cast bodies, Mobius Sea. The title of the performance refers to the shifts between the concrete reality and the more ephemeral forms of bodies. Movement transforms the body from recognisable states as human or animal, to something more abstract, to machine or ‘other.’

Darbyshire’s work is informed by visual art and film—initially the frequent pausing in the choreography allows for the same contemplation as visual art. Then there are the filmic qualities. We are warned in advance about loud noises—after a somnolent start there is a sudden bang, the kind that keeps you on the edge of your seat during a thriller. In a dark, controlled sensory environment this keeps the audience alert and tense.

A former star swimmer, Darbyshire evokes memories of swimming through the colour blue—the effect is immersive and cold, much like blue tint in film. We see the bodies as if underwater, with oscillating arms. The forms the body makes when suspended in water are strange yet recognisable. There are other playful impressions from childhood: sprinklers and the swooshing, claustrophobic brushes of a car wash.

More or Less Concrete is a quietly unsettling and revelatory investigation into the crossroads of our senses. We walk away having experienced bodies as abstract forms while movement is perceived sonically as well as visually.

More or Less Concrete, choreographer, director Tim Darbyshire, performers Sophia Cowen, Tim Darbyshire, Matthew Day, sound designer Myles Mumford, lighting, production Bluebottle, dramaturg, sound theorist Thembi Soddell, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, April 18–22

WE MEET AT THE CROSSROADS IN BOWDEN, A ONCE-INDUSTRIAL INNER SUBURB OF ADELAIDE, NOW UNDERGOING TOO-SLOW TRANSFORMATION. THE PERFORMANCE WILL TAKE PLACE IN A WAREHOUSE, A PRE-FAB COLORBOND ENCLOSURE, SLUNG UP TO HOUSE A BROAD CONCRETE SLAB. OUTSIDE, A FESTIVAL CROWD MILLS IN THE DUST.

We are invited inside, as the show gets underway. Hard to be a God is performed off the back of two semi-trailer trucks. Set at right angles to each other, one truck is a platform for on-stage action, the other a screen for projections. The audience is seated, rather comfortably, in the rectangle between, on tiered banks of plastic chairs.

This is transient theatre with an interventionist feel. Its politics are transportable, the scenario universal. Hungarian director Kornél Mundroczó explains in the program: “this transitory situation is very familiar: being at someone’s mercy while being on the road illegally, fleeing from somewhere.” We are witness to their transit suspended: three young women, sewing jeans in a truck-top sweatshop, are kept busy by a bossy fourth, who enslaves them to their work, and trades them to the men for sex. The motley gang of men use the women, one after the other, to make porn in the other truck. We have been warned.

In this off-stage action—relayed by hand-held video camera, with live feeds projected onto screens—a naked woman screams as her back is scalded with hot water; another’s neck is broken, or so it seems, from too much rough handling; a third, now pregnant, struggles at the prospect of being buried alive. These pornographic scenes of sadistic violence are spliced into an on-stage flow depicting forced labour, industrial accidents, medical interventions—urine tests, an abortion. Violent sexuality mixes with lyrical solidarity. The characters sing and dance at times to alleviate the boredom, the degradation—and to cheer us up, it seems.

Mundroczó draws the moral dramaturgy of Hard to be a God from the sci-fi novel of the same name by the Russian brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. The novel lends a political sub-plot of extremism and extortion to the performance: a sister raped, a son turns on his politician father. It also lends a theological dimension: witnessing the cruelty of God’s creations, an angel-man exacts revenge on our behalf in a final splatter-act of retribution. The performance closes on an ethereal moving image of this angel-man, floating backwards in a boat along the wetlands of eastern Europe.

The performance also seeks to extend its moral reach with a retro-soundtrack of emotional devastation: Dire Straits’ “Brothers in Arms” accompanies the closing image; Gene Pitney’s “Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart,” Burt Bacharach’s “What the World Needs Now” and the Pop-Tops pan-European hit “Mamy Blue” momentarily elevate our interest and sketch the contours of hope. At other times, the look and feel of the performance is grimly realistic, desperate and fatalistic. The sweatshop set is meticulous in its clutter, greasy with machinery, with steaming racks of clothing and factory waste. It is work-wear, industrial protection and trade tools for the men; stretch-knits, tracksuits, underwear and nudity for the women.

The production’s mediation of off-stage sexual violence is realistic, but somewhat numbing in effect. The day after, I felt flat. Like surgery under local anaesthetic, I could see violence inflicted but I didn’t feel the pain. For me the moment of greatest agitation was a disturbance in the audience half-way through. The lights came up, the stage manager intervened, and a couple walked out, before one of the actors sought our permission to continue. At first, I thought they were a plant: an act of staged objection to highlight our inaction. And then I wondered nervously: were they actually offended? But no. Next morning, in an email, the festival’s senior publicist sought to reassure us with innocuous affect: “the audience member who was unwell last night has a pre-existing medical condition. He recovered quickly and apparently this happens to him regularly.”

A Streetcar from Odéon Théâtre de L’Europe seems likewise premised on assumptions about anaesthesia and the audience. Director Krzysztof Warlikowski overcomes the intimate stage realism of Tennessee Williams’ play with a production of grand expanse, hard surfaces and voluble performances.

The performance opens at Adelaide’s largest theatre with actor Isabelle Huppert as Blanche Dubois babbling behind glass. She is encased in an elevated bathroom-hallway that extends horizontally across the stage, rolls on tracks in the stage like a streetcar, and is glazed with ‘electronic privacy glass’—ceiling-to-floor plate-glass panels that switch between transparent and opaque. In opaque mode, they serve as screens for video projection of live action, black-and-white in evocation of Elia Kazan’s 1951 film.

What I feel foremost of this performance is the smoothness of its surface. The main area of the stage is a suite of ten-pin bowling alleys that reach into its depth. Yet when Huppert descends onto the stage my depth perception is at a loss. The emotional volatility of Blanche’s intervention between Stella and Stanley (played by Florence Thomassin and Andrzej Chyra) is flattened by the monophonic consistency of the actors’ voices. As in music theatre, they wear microphones to amplify their voices. The disarticulation of actors’ voices from the spatiality of their presence makes me feel like I have lost my sense of touch. It is as if the entire performance were playing out behind glass.

Warlikowski’s direction seems driven to overcome the prospect of an audience at a distance from the actors, cut-off and out-of-touch. Tiny interactions and minute gestures are retrieved by video from inaccessible spaces—in the bathroom, under the bed, beside the couch—and magnified with projection to amplify their presence on such an expansive stage. Transformations in the actors’ portrayals of their characters’ emotional trajectories are ‘telegraphed’ with an intricate plot of wig and costume changes.

Transformations in the dramaturgy of minor characters amplify the psychic theatricality of Blanche’s plight. Her homosexual husband—”un jeune homme” played in grand-guignol style by Cristián Soto—is brought back from the dead to dance the tango on stage with Mitch (Yann Collette). The role of Eunice, Stella’s friendly upstairs neighbour, is enlarged by Renate Jett into singer-interlocutor—belting out Pulp’s “Common People,” Eric Carmen’s “All By Myself” and other songs, juxtaposing key moments with the delivery of inter-texts (from Oedipus, apparently, from Wilde, Flaubert and Dumas), and stepping into the audience at the interval for some light-hearted banter about love, romance and relationships.

Warlikowski’s directorial strategy is multi-channel amplification, blasting through the script to expose the theatricality of the psycho-sexual on an operatic stage. I make contact with the work. But was this contact premised on an assumption that I wouldn’t? That without the amplifiers, I’d feel nothing?

By comparison, Gardenia from Alain Platel and Frank van Laecke of Les Ballets C de la B transacts a simple encounter with its audience. Nine elderly people of transitive genders, a ‘young guy’ and a ‘real woman.’ Wearing suits, they each undress revealing the frocks they wear beneath.

One tells jokes, one sings, another reminisces. They address the audience directly. They mince and pose and pout as an ensemble. They don wigs, slap on make-up, slip on heels. They swing handbags to Ravel’s Bolero and mime the words to songs. They spread red carpet on a parquet floor. They walk.

As a performance, Gardenia is not much more than that. “The journey is so dear to us,” advise Platel and van Laecke. “We advance without hurrying.” The show unfolds at walking pace. There is no assumption that I feel nothing. And no demand that I feel more.

2012 Adelaide International Arts Festival: Hard to be a God, director Kornél Mundroczó, Old Clipsal Site, Bowden, March 8-14; A Streetcar, based on A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, director Krzysztof Warlikowski, Odéon-Théâtre de L’Europe, Festival Theatre, March 14-17; Gardenia, directors Alain Platel, Frank van Laecke, Les Ballets C de la B, Dunstan Playhouse, March 2-5

AMERICAN CINEMA IS SO RIFE WITH STORIES OF THE WRONGLY ACCUSED YOU COULD BE FORGIVEN FOR THINKING THE UNITED STATES SPECIALISES IN EPIC MISCARRIAGES OF JUSTICE. OR PERHAPS THE OPENNESS OF AMERICAN SOCIETY SIMPLY LENDS ITSELF TO THE EXPOSURE AND DRAMATISATION OF LEGAL ERRORS.

The recently completed documentary trilogy Paradise Lost, detailing the story of the West Memphis Three, certainly features some extraordinary access to courtrooms, but the result is a far from reassuring portrait of American justice.

Director Joe Berlinger unveiled the final part of the Paradise Lost trilogy in March at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), leaving viewers with more questions than answers about this nightmarish case.

Berlinger recalls that when he and his filmmaking partner Bruce Sinofsky began shooting the first Paradise Lost film for HBO—The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996)—they thought they were documenting “an open and shut case.” The police claimed they had strong evidence implicating three local teenagers in a particularly horrific triple homicide in West Memphis, revealed when the mutilated bodies of three eight-year-old boys were found naked and hogtied beside a creek on May 6, 1993. Seventeen-year-old Jessie Misskelley Jr, 16-year-old Jason Baldwin and 18-year-old Damien Echols were quickly arrested and charged with the murders. Misskelly confessed to police about his involvement in the crime and implicated the other two.

It quickly became apparent to the filmmakers, however, that there was no physical evidence linking the teenagers to the murders. Jessie Misskelley Jr, who had an IQ of just 72, had been interrogated by police for 12 hours before making his confession. Only 46 minutes of the interview had been recorded. Despite the fact that Misskelley quickly recanted his statement, arguments in court that the confession was false and extracted under coercion were dismissed by the jury, and he was sentenced to life in prison.

In the separate trial of Echols and Baldwin, the prosecution argued the boys were members of a satanic cult and the murders part of a bloody ritual. The teenagers’ love of Metallica and Stephen King was introduced as “evidence” to support these claims. Each was found guilty on three counts of murder, and Baldwin was sentenced to life imprisonment. Echols was sentenced to death.

Amazingly, Berlinger and Sinofsky were permitted to film both trials, an experience Berlinger describes as “jaw-dropping.” Their lenses captured the flimsy prosecution case and the inept, scattershot approach of the boys’ defence lawyers. They also revealed the impassioned hatred felt by the parents of the murdered boys and the rumours of Satan worship that swirled around Memphis in the wake of the murders.

Half a decade later, Berlinger and Sinofsky returned to the case to make a second film entitled Revelations (2000). The first documentary engendered a storm of controversy about the trial proceedings and dubious nature of the prosecution’s case, but the second film revealed little conclusive new information about the murders and subsequent trials. The filmmakers were also denied access to courtrooms during various fruitless appeals. Instead, Berlinger and Sinofsky spent a lot of time with John Mark Byers, father of one of the victims; his deranged religious zealotry makes Robert Mitchum’s character in The Night of the Hunter look restrained.

Questions had already been raised about Byers in the first documentary after he bizarrely gave the film crew a knife as a present, which was later found to hold traces of human blood that matched the type of both Byers and his dead son. By the time of the second film, Byers’ wife had also died in mysterious circumstances. Various theories developed in Revelations imply Byers may have played a part in the murders, but at the end of the film a lie detector test suggests that he believes he is telling the truth when he denies any involvement. On the other hand, at the time of the test he was taking a cocktail of five mood-altering drugs, which may have skewed the result somewhat.

The recently completed third part of the trilogy, Purgatory (2011), avoids the sensationalist tone of the second instalment and traces developments that led to the release of the West Memphis Three in August 2011. The biggest shock is seeing the effect of time on the accused. Misskelley, a slight teenage boy in 1993, is now an overweight middle-aged man. Echols and Baldwin are in better shape, but they are similarly on the edge of middle-age and as the film opens, all three have spent more of their lives behind bars than living free.

The decisive development traced by Purgatory is the analysis of DNA from the crime scene, utilising technology not available at the time of the original trials. Tests find that none of the DNA material from the scene can be linked to the accused. Intriguingly, the tests do show that a hair on a shoelace used to tie up the victims may have belonged to the stepfather of one of the murdered boys.

After various protracted legal machinations the state offers the West Memphis Three a deal that will see them released, based on the time they have already served. The trio agree rather than endure a protracted retrial. In this sense the final part of Paradise Lost provides something of a resolution, but many questions are left hanging, not least the riddle of who really murdered the eight-year-old boys. The films suggest many possibilities, but in the end all the leads only serve to demonstrate just how slippery the notion of truth really is, whether it’s on screen or in the courtroom. Errol Morris’ celebrated The Thin Blue Line (1988) similarly showed up the mutability of supposedly factual evidence, but where Morris’ film basically detailed two conflicting versions of the same crime, the only certainty left by the end of Paradise Lost is the fact of the original murder. Director Joe Berlinger admitted at the ACMI screenings, for example, that much of the evidence presented in the second film implicating John Mark Byers has since been discounted, providing a sobering lesson in the power of cinema to lead viewers to conclusions that aren’t necessarily correct.

Most horrifyingly, however, the Paradise Lost films dramatise how three teenage lives were ruined based on the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence. Were it not for new DNA technology, one of the trio would almost certainly have been executed. Watching the legal saga play out over two decades and across three films, the entire process of ‘justice’ ends up looking almost as monstrous as the original crime.

Paradise Lost 1: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills; Paradise Lost 2: Revelations; Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory; directors and producers Joe Berlinger & Bruce Sinofsky; 1996, 2000, 2011; HBO; USA; screened at ACMI, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, March 1-4

NOW IN ITS 15TH YEAR, PERTH’S PREMIER FILM FESTIVAL SHOWS NO SIGNS OF SLOWING DOWN. FESTIVAL DIRECTOR JACK SARGEANT EXPLAINS HOW THE REV MANAGES TO COMBINE THEMATIC SOPHISTICATION WITH ITS RENOWNED YOUTHFUL SWAGGER.

As the festival’s July start date draws closer, Sargeant acknowledges that he is still under the gun, dealing with the staggering number of submissions that Revelation receives. “This year I’ve chased down three or four hundred movies,” he estimates. “And we get submitted I don’t know how many hundreds that Richard (Sowada, Revelation founder, now working at Melbourne’s ACMI) and I wade through. It’s pretty mammoth. Rev seems to grow exponentially each year—there’s just more and more happening.”

But while Sargeant eschews the notion of selecting films for the festival based on a preconceived overarching theme, he will concede that a dominant throughline does tend to form as choices are made and the pile of hopefuls is winnowed down. “It works out that we have got a theme this year,” he says. “Well, actually, there are two: community and family. But you don’t look for things—these things just start emerging.”

It’s a fitting theme. Revelation is, after all, one of the key events on the Western Australian film community calendar. Inaugurated in 1997 as a showcase for a handful of independent shorts, it now encompasses a program in excess of 100 films and attracts a large number of international guests. It could easily be argued that the notion of community is present every year, inasmuch as the festival acts as a hub for the Perth film scene.

Rev in 2012 boasts a notably strong documentary stream. “This year we’ve got a lot of documentaries,” Sargeant says. “I think 15 or 16 documentaries at this point. Documentaries are really on the ascendant. I don’t think we’ve seen any ‘Occupy’ documentaries, but we are seeing a shift away from environmental stuff to economic and political stuff coming in. I think we’re seeing a shift in film in that direction.”

Davy Chou’s Golden Slumbers stands out as a powerful example. A haunting examination of the decimation of the Cambodian film industry under Pol Pot’s regime, Sargeant describes it as “an incredibly moving documentary, because obviously most of [the filmmakers] were murdered under Pol Pot in the mid 70s. There’s literally only a half dozen or so of those filmmakers left, and they just talk about the industry. You get a sense of this incredibly vibrant community, but now there are only five or so films dating from that period left. They made hundreds and hundreds of films, and now there are only five. But Golden Slumbers will, I imagine, soon be playing everywhere; it’s an incredibly powerful movie.”

Another film which will no doubt reach a much wider audience before long is Undefeated, the American sports documentary by Daniel Lindsay and TJ Martin. A look at a year in the life of the Manassas Tigers, a woefully underfunded and ill-equipped high school football team who attempt to reverse a century-long losing streak, the film won the 2011 Oscar for Best Documentary, and should hold the same crossover appeal as Steven Riley’s Fire in Babylon, the film on the West Indies cricket team of the 70s which opened last year’s festival.

“We’ve also got a film called Battle For Brooklyn,” Sargeant continues, “which is about a whole community in New York fighting against their neighbourhood being demolished to make way for a stadium and blocks of designer flats. It’s a very interesting documentary going towards that notion of community that I was talking about.”

That theme carries over into the festival’s fiction stream as well, with the Australian horror film The Caretaker, from first-time feature director Tom Conyers. The film postulates a discordant community of necessity that emerges when a disparate group of strangers hide out in a rural mansion after a plague of vampirism sweeps the globe. Matters are complicated when they must strike a deal with a vampire, played by producer Mark White, who also dwells in the mansion. Having already drawn acclaim on the North American festival circuit, it will make its Australian premiere at Revelation.

Unusually, The Caretaker was one of only a few horror films submitted to the festival. “Normally we’re inundated with average to fair films made by people about chainsaws and zombies, and there’s actually very little of that this year,” says Sargeant. “I don’t think horror’s going away, but I think it’s changing. It’s getting kind of absurd right now. I was joking with somebody the other day that sooner or later you’re going to get a found footage horror film that’s shot in 3D. Horror has become so self-referential. So we’re seeing less horror.” However, Sargeant maintains that it’s the shifting genre landscape that makes programming a festival like Revelation so challenging and rewarding.

“You can see change happening slowly in film.” he says thoughtfully. “The big secret of programming cinema is that you’re not just curating films, you’re curating the relationships between the films. Once you start programming, you start thinking about how the films will work together, because you have to go forward on the assumption that people will see more than one film. Also, you don’t want to define yourself too rigidly or lock yourself into too small a place. The whole curatorial process is a really interesting one. On a personal level, I think you should always be pushing yourself and looking in different places for things that will pique your interest. We’re always looking for new things that are out there—you have to do that.”

Revelation Perth International Film Festival, The Astor Theatre, Perth, July 5-15, www.revelationfilmfest.org

HORST HÖRTNER IS SENIOR DIRECTOR OF THE ARS ELECTRONICA FUTURELAB IN LINZ, AUSTRIA. HE HAS BEEN ON A RECENT TOUR AROUND AUSTRALIA SETTING UP A NUMBER OF SMALL INSTALLATIONS AND SEMINAR PRESENTATIONS TO DEMONSTRATE WHAT THE FUTURELAB IS ALL ABOUT.

Organised by Richard Vella, from the University of Newcastle, and assisted by Australian Futurelab employee Kristefan Minski, the mini-tour provided the opportunity to ask Hörtner about the genesis of the Futurelab project and the central role of transdisciplinarity.

Hörtner speaks enthusiastically about a new kind of research that is being championed in his lab-cum-museum. RealTime readers will be familiar with the work that Ars Electronica has been showing for many years in their annual festival. The Futurelab is the latest incarnation of this project, providing a working model of the ways transdisciplinary research and practice can produce engaging results.

“Well it’s actually been there from the beginning of Ars Electronica in 1979. It started out as a festival around the topics of art, technology and society, which already involves pretty much everybody and everything! At the Ars Electronica Centre, we are very much looking to the future. What is influencing our future, what trends are coming. What are the new technologies that are rising up that may change the paradigms of society in much the same way as ICT has over the last 20 years?”

The Centre provides hands-on experience for visitors (providing courses for kids to clone plants for instance). As a place of inquiry, the Centre showcases projects that Hörtner calls “sketches of the future” in a range of areas including nano-technology, robotics, gene technologies and the most advanced fabrication methods.

“The future arrives regardless of Ars Electronica,” he jokes, but what they’ve been doing for the last 30 years can now in some ways be seen as a “history of the future”. Their R+D department has 50 people from a wide variety of disciplines (architects, physicists, biologists, sociologists, game designers, industrial designers, media planners, telematicians, and civil engineers) working on art-based experimental projects. The Futurelab provides a context for a very diverse group of people and disciplines, and it’s this context that Hörtner recognises as crucial.

Do you see a huge difference between interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity?

“Well, according to experts, the major difference is that interdisciplinarity promotes exchange between the disciplines, whereas the transdisciplinary approach takes into account the fact that there are fields which don’t even exist yet. If there is no discipline for a certain area yet, we need to expand across to fields where no discipline is home. The reason there are so many areas covered by the Futurelab is because we approach problems from a large variety of angles. In order to see the problem and to understand it more deeply, you often have to leave the comfort of your discipline if you want to see the full picture. This is the place where crazy ideas come up that may not survive in their own discipline, but which make a lot of sense to those in other disciplines. That’s what I call the soil for growing innovation. This is where cross-over ideas can happen and where we can grow new things.”

How did you manage to get such a huge experimental arts centre like this funded?

“The Lab is a logical extension to a festival that only has a small window of public exposure. Having a permanent institution and network that would operate the whole year had enormous advantages and opportunities. The Ars Festival had grown interest locally, and educated the wider public to see that there must be something in the work that attracts many of the world’s leaders in the field of experimental art and research.”

In Australia, it would be hard to imagine government officials and local councils being convinced of such a proposition. Not so in Austria, where the Mayor and the City of Linz were convinced to “jump into this adventure”. Ars Electronica is a private company owned by the city of Linz, and funded 75% by the local city government and 25% by regional Austrian authorities. The Futurelab also has industry partnerships with companies such as Honda, Audi, SAP, Siemens and Vodafone. “Mostly they come to ask whether they can do something really cool, and don’t really come with a problem to be solved.”

“There is a very close intersection between art and science. Science generates knowledge about our world and art generates experience about our world. These are just two different words for discovering what lies beyond the horizon, what lies beyond the borders. Scientific practice has drastically changed in the last 20 years. A lot of scientific outcomes are actually judged by public opinion prior to the existence of the outcome. For instance, everybody has an opinion about gene technology, talking about designer babies and so on, even though we are miles away from that step.”

Hörtner argues that scientists now have to “perform” their work in a way that they didn’t have to in the past. He is quick to point out that artists are used to confronting an untrained audience, and suggests that there are methods and strategies in the artistic process that are capable of being imported into the process of scientific research. “Artists can play a new role in helping scientists do that research in front of an untrained audience.”

He stresses this is not about the beautification of scientific outcomes, but represents the possibility of a convergence of artistic and scientific work in what he calls a “space of action.”

So do artists need to be transdisciplinary, or do they need to work in a transdisciplinary context?

“That’s a good question! If you want to do transdisciplinary work, it doesn’t make any sense to tell other disciplines that they have to work in transdisciplinary ways, but that artists don’t have to work in that way because, you know, ‘I’m an artist.’ There has to be a willingness to share knowledge and to share approach.”

“Everybody’s talking about Art and Science, but in many ways the outcome is still poor. But there’s potential. In terms of education however, I would say we’re not at all prepared. 100 years after the Industrial Revolution we’re still teaching our children the curriculum that has been founded a century ago. We should probably think about that!”

EXHIBITIONS ALWAYS SEEM TO APPEAR MAGICALLY IN MUSEUMS, AS IF THE OPENING IS REALLY THE BEGINNING, RATHER THAN THE END OF THE PROCESS. THIS IS EVEN MORE THE CASE WHEN THEY ARE INTERNATIONAL SHOWS, THE RESULT OF INTRICATE PROCESSES OF NEGOTIATION—AND ANY CURSORY READING OF THE FINAL LIST OF ORGANISERS, PRESENTERS, PARTNERS AND SPONSORS, BOTH CORPORATE AND GOVERNMENTAL—GIVES US AN IDEA OF THE SHOW’S ‘BACK STORY’ AND THE CONSEQUENT MIRACLE OF ITS REALISATION.

It’s not easy to judge the effect of an international show in a local context if you come from the same place as the show itself because you are not seeing the show that the local audience sees.

So, in Taipei, I come as a virtually blind person to Wonderland: New Contemporary Art from Australia—in a situation not unlike that apocryphal story a prominent gallerist once told me of a blind Sydney art critic who took his partner to shows; together they would stand in front of the art and the partner would describe the work for the critic who would write accordingly about it. It seems like a good method, even more possible in the post-visual space of the contemporary museum, when work can be heard and felt and so I thought I would try it, if not with eyes shut, then certainly with ears open. Actually it is not such an outlandish idea but describes pretty well the process of having one’s eyes opened to work within the hermeneutic processes of viewing, experiencing, listening that interpretation always involves. And besides, all exhibitions now have ‘partners’ to lead us into the process, suggesting what we might see.

In my case, my guides are my very bright grad students, imaginatively remaking pieces from their own thoughts and feelings and transforming them before my eyes, and to walk with them through the spaces of Wonderland is to be re-enchanted. Although I am captivated by Martin Walch’s Mist opportunities (2011) that seems so much like a Chinese painting, my students are less moved by it. Perhaps this is because in March in Taipei it is already so misty every day that it seems too close to home. The pleasure really begins with Alex Davies’ Dislocation (2005) and loud shrieks of joy and surprise emanate from the room as viewers encounter uncanny shadows behind the images of themselves peering into the peepholes of the work. Already feeling a guilty pleasure in their voyeurism, they find themselves ‘caught in the act’—and want to go back for more. The ‘ghost in the machine’ finds an easy resonance in a culture where ghosts abound. This is a popular work and queues form outside it.

Cath Robinson’s Thought noise/wave-form preludes (2009) draws another crowd wanting to play the sounds of inspiration and to listen to the melodies of combination. It is a work that gains the particular and enthusiastic approval of the numerous school groups always visiting the show. The tinkling sounds of these delicious waveform preludes subtly score Matthew Gingold’s Flying Falling Floating (2007) effectively installed above the stairwell.

Audiences are drawn to George Khut’s work in droves, willing to wait for up to 20 minutes to experience it. Heart Library (2009) seems to be strangely effective, though to me it is not an especially visually satisfying work, and even the biofeedback process is a bit hit and miss. But the expressive potential of the work is effectively extended in the hand-drawn ‘body-maps’ that audience members willingly produce by the score. And they do so with the seriousness of purpose of the most serious artists, somehow impressed by this encounter with the nature of the creative process and its links with the moments of reverie that the bio-feedback technology produces in the tense or relaxed time spent listening to one’s own heart beating. Perhaps it’s also the empowerment that comes from having one’s work exhibited in an important art museum in a process of interactivity that somehow works because it has both a technological and a directly analogical component. And it plays to an audience embracing ‘user-created content’ in the real time of visceral experience, using old media forms—paper, coloured pencils, crayons.

Daniel Crooks’ superb Static No 18 (2010) benefits from its location alongside Khut’s Heart Library because the audience moves backward and forward between the two pieces, while waiting to experience the latter. This allows both an uninterrupted and a disrupted time for experiencing the former that seems just right for the particular temporality of the Crooks’ piece. The abstraction of the movement here captures the precision of the original action more effectively than either a real time viewing or a slow motion rendering would demonstrate, bringing us into contact with the particulate nature of space-time itself in a way that we can say is both true to the nature of the technology and the software deployed.

Kylie Stillman’s brilliant Flock (2010) impressed, as did Bindi Cole’s transgender photographs and Fiona Lowry’s spectral paintings. By the time it closed, the show had attracted record crowds to the museum, helped no doubt by the consistency of curator Antoanetta Ivanova’s tireless efforts to serve the work throughout the show’s duration. Nine official sponsors supported the 22 artists represented here but the greatest subsidy was clearly the curator’s own time and energy, animating audiences, engaging their curiosity. In the end, no-one seemed to notice very much that the work was from Australia; it just seemed to audiences to be a bunch of cool stuff to experience, coming from a curious place where artists spoke directly to an audience whose language they did not speak except through these encounters of feeling. This, in the end, is the best fate for a touring show: that it loses its origins and enters its destination as a welcome guest.

Wonderland: New Contemporary Art from Australia, curator Antoanetta Ivanova, artists Bindi Cole, Daniel Crooks, Anna Davern, Alex Davies, Elizabeth Delfs, Julie Dowling, Matthew Gardiner, Matthew Gingold, Chris Henschke, George Khut, Fiona Lowry, Jasmine Targett, Jess MacNeil, Jon McCormack, Cath Robinson, Julie Ryder, Kuuki (Priscilla Bracks, Gavin Sade), Kylie Stillman, Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski, Martin Walch, Yvette Coyle; Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, Taiwan, Feb 10-April 15

FINITUDE (V2) BY KEITH ARMSTRONG IS A TOUCH-SENSITIVE INTERACTIVE INSTALLATION COMBINING 3D IMAGERY, TRANSPARENCY, MOVING SCULPTURE, LIGHT AND SOUND. IT INVESTIGATES THE CULTURAL DIMENSIONS OF SUSTAINABILITY THROUGH THE LENS OF ‘TIME’ AND HAS SHOWN AT (M) ART AND GALLERY ARTISAN IN BRISBANE’S FORTITUDE VALLEY.

Armstrong has just returned from handing over an earlier work, Intimate Transactions, to Germany’s ZKM (Centre for Art and Media) who have acquired it for their permanent collection. I spoke with him about the handover and about the new work, Finitude.

What are some of the issues/challenges that have arisen through this process of acquisition—particularly in terms of how the work is installed and then invigilated by staff at the museum? How does ZKM propose that the work is maintained and do you have any responsibility for that?

I guess I’d expected that finding a home for such a beast would be no easy feat. I should probably explain what Intimate Transactions is for those who may not have experienced it. In essence, it is an experimental form of telepresence-based interactive installation that allows two people in geographically separate spaces to interact simultaneously using only their bodies. Each participant uses a physical interface called a “Bodyshelf” and wears a sound vibration transmission device around their necks called a “haptic pendant.” By gently moving their bodies on this ‘smart furniture,’ they instigate ‘intimate transactions,’ which influence an evolving ‘world’ created from digital imagery, multichannel sound and tactile feedback. This conjoint individual and shared experience allows each participant to gradually develop a form of sensory intimacy with the other, despite the fact that they are geographically separated and cannot physically see or hear each other.

I was familiar with ZKM and its ambition, having visited it when Jeffrey Shaw was at the helm well over a decade ago. I knew Peter (Weibel) had taken over and that the museum held significant examples of work in the genre of telepresence, alternate interface experiments and performative inflected experience. Examples are Paul Sermon’s Telematic Vision (1993) and Tables Turned (1997) or Masaki Fujihata’s Impressing Velocity (with Simulation Platform) (1994-99)—all works that had some influence on our piece.So I approached him and he was positive because I guess he could also sense the links and resonances.

I spent a full week working with their team in Karlsruhe, Germany, which included some very experienced and fast working technicians, a team of conservators, IT specialists and a range of administrative staff. My key role was to take them through every stage of the work: unpack, install, assembly, testing, running and the performative processes that surround it. And as we went through it each day they documented each stage exhaustively and with great enthusiasm! They also worked out a great deal of how it went together which is testament to their experience as world leaders. I then handed over the complete documentation archive for the work which includes a 135-page book edited by Jillian Hamilton and the full gamut of CAD models, plans, schematics, code, images, documentation of each site and setup and running instructions.
I then did a two-hour recorded interview with the conservators and they asked me questions about how it should be presented, maintained and conserved—going through everything down to the details of where electronics modules could be bought and what specifications of hardware would be needed in the event of failure. So they now own the work and can access the requisite IP, and it can be shown either at ZKM in the Media Museum or lent out to international galleries. I am not directly responsible for maintenance, although of course I’d be on hand and willing to assist at any stage.

It is interesting that your works are themselves like the complex ecosystems that seem to inspire your practice generally; and that the difficulty in maintaining the works themselves seems to add a layer of meta commentary to them, in the sense that they are both about questions of sustainability and that they invoke their own issues in regards to sustainability. Could you comment on this in relation to your latest work, Finitude?

I think it was Fritjof Capra who once said that for systems thinkers the relationships are primary. Thinking back to my earliest training as a systems engineer, I realise that what has always driven me is the exploration of the systemic and the relational. Initially I believed that the role of my works could be to examine and maybe illuminate how much we have misunderstood ecology. But then I began to see that simply raising awareness was quite a different motivation from moving through an embodying of that knowledge towards forms of learning: we ‘know’ much but what have we ‘learnt?’ The works I have created over the past two decades are, as you suggest, a working through—invoking your “meta commentary” idea. Privileging that relational approach often ensured ‘impracticalities.’ The tacit requirements for work to be hangable, to be low labour when showing or able to be packed into suitcases for transit, haven’t been ‘keystone’ aspects of my thinking to date. This conflates with the ‘education in error’ that we have all received, our education into unsustainability. We often think our way through things technologically in ways that may exclude as well as include. These things add up, as relationship-building factors that in part conspire to elicit such paradoxes.

The challenge I face with every new work is which path to take. Pragmatism is all around us in our politics and our culture. But despite its short-term attraction it’s also a profoundly limiting force. And so it can be in media art too. I’ve also become used to many people spending maybe 15 minutes or more with my works. I like that power for temporal engagement which most artwork that is seen and not experienced in a literal or embodied sense can rarely muster. So while Finitude represents a much easier system to show and maintain than Intimate Transactions, there are the relative problematics of one-at-a-time operation, the physical requirement to get in underneath the work (requiring a hanging structure), the experimentation with relatively new forms of self-made touch screen and special new screen materials, new software to connect to 3D engines and the like. These all add up and also extend the making process, but the outcome I think then really surprises and offers something that truly imprints! I started with a reasonably distilled idea—time has become finitude—that is, ‘time left’ for us and many other species is literally running out, so how might we give time back to the future? Combined with strong thematics derived from residencies in the Australian mallee heartlands, we created an outcome that honoured embodied exchange, deep engagement, time to settle and multi-sensorial qualities that took much time and probably shortened my ‘time left!’ On that note Paul Carter experienced the work at the Mildura Palimpsest last year (his timely book Ground Truthing: Explorations in a Creative Region [UWA Publishing, 2010], inspired the work) and very sweetly noted that I had “somehow made sense from his incoherent ramblings.”

Both Intimate Transactions and Finitude are much more about process than product. Your references to “embodied exchange, deep engagement, time to settle” are indicative of this dynamic quality of the works. While the ‘machinery’ of the works can be stored and reactivated, it is harder to capture (and hence evaluate and archive) the effect that they have on those who engage with them. How do you deal with this, or do you?

Each is a tangible work/event that requires audience durational attention: and in that way they have the conventionality of a recognisable practice. The works in themselves are really for me catalysts for, or openings out to, something quite different from how they initially appear. Obviously, this effect is something I can’t directly control or therefore even re-create.

Many will take these works for what they seem to be, with all of the hooks, immersion and problematics that come with both eco-theoretical and technological possibility-imbued experience and interfaces. But if you dig a little deeper, see the pointers, maybe think more about the ecosophical intentions, I’d hope they might catalyse a journey for some, a relational journey for their own time and place and context. This is where new knowledges, I believe, can emerge through practice and become embodied and therefore get their teeth.

This openness to the best possibilities is concurrent with my current thinking and recent collaborations, typified by our NBN-based project, Long Time No See, or my forthcoming ANAT-Synapse Residency, Reintroduction, with the Australian Wildlife Conservancy. These new research ventures have emerged from experience around our recent Remnant Emergency Artlab collaborations that have taken my practice into a relationship with the rich new territories of urban planning, mammal ecology, speculative architecture, experimental engineering and ‘ontological design,’ among others. And so, while I have always felt passionately directed, these are daunting but exciting times ahead in this practice of intentional eclecticism!

Finitude (v2) by Keith Armstrong, collaborators Roger Dean, Stuart Lawson, Darren Pack, consultants Professor Tony Fry and Dr Liz Baker; Artisan, Brisbane, April 12-June 9; www.embodiedmedia.com

Keith Armstrong and Gavin Sade were recently awarded one of the Australia Council Broadband Arts Initiative grants for the project Long Time No See which will involve an installation and online presence exploring a range of community responses to questions around what the nation might look like, not just a few decades, but a few centuries into the future. The work will be based at The Cube, QUT’s new Science and Engineering Centre.

GEOFF DYER’S CURIOUS NEW BOOK ZONA CALLS ITSELF “A BOOK ABOUT A FILM ABOUT A JOURNEY TO A ROOM.” IT COULD EQUALLY BE CALLED A BOOK ABOUT A MIDDLE-AGED MAN WHO LIKES TO SPEND ALL DAY IN HIS PYJAMAS WATCHING HIS FAVOURITE DVD. “SO WHAT KIND OF WRITER AM I,” DYER LAMENTS, “IF I AM REDUCED TO A SUMMARY OF A FILM?…WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF SUCH AN EXERCISE?”

These are pressing questions that never quite go away for both the writer and reader of Zona. How could a recount of an author’s favourite film be considered a valid subject for a book? And why should an author feel the need to defend the existence of a book he is writing? Matters are not helped much when Dyer tells us his “deepest wish” for Zona is nothing less or more than “success, enormous success,” by which he means publication:

“If it is published, if someone will deign to publish his summary of a film that relatively few people have seen, then that will constitute a success far greater than anything John Grisham could ever have dreamed of.”

He needn’t have worried. Canongate in the UK, Random House in the US and Text Publishing in Australia came to the party.

What rescues Dyer’s book from the bonfire of inanity is that this very problem, this dance with meaninglessness, also pervades Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, the film that Zona is so emphatically about. A recognised masterpiece of cinema, a sci-fi epic in its own way, Stalker is nevertheless disconcertingly insubstantial, “a film almost devoid of action,” as Dyer puts it, that leaves us to question whether anything is achieved at all by the conclusion of the narrative. The plot is indeed slim. Two men (one a writer simply called Writer and the other a scientist called Professor) are led by a third (called Stalker) on a journey that takes place over a single day. Their purpose is to travel from point A (a bar), through a magical and forbidden area (called the Zone), to ultimately arrive at point B (a room simply called the Room, where one’s innermost desires are said to be realised). Unfortunately, when they eventually do reach their goal, no-one appears willing to enter.

As Dyer notes, Tarkovsky leaves much space for doubt in his films and in the case of Stalker it is the space to doubt whether the Zone is anything more than just a place, the Room anything more than just a room. Although his main character, Stalker, is emphatic about the miraculous power of these places, there are more than enough reasons to reject his view. Indeed the more one pays attention to the film, the less believable Stalker’s explanations become. Although normally a fervent promoter of the miraculous, Tarkovsky himself was surprisingly open to the idea that the Zone and the Room are nothing special, that they are “a dream of something that does not and cannot exist,” (Tarkovsky, A, Sculpting in Time) “created by Stalker in order to instil faith…in his reality” (Tarkovsky, A in Tassone, A, “Interview with Andrei Tarkovsky (on Stalker)” in Gianvito, J (ed), Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews).

So what then? A pointless book about a pointless film about a pointless journey? This may well be the point. As Dyer writes:

“The thing about the Zone is that it’s always subtly reconfiguring itself according to your thoughts and expectations. You want it to seem ordinary? It’s ordinary… whereupon it does something briefly extraordinary. (Or does it?)”

In other words, it’s by virtue of Zone’s potential emptiness as a place, and Stalker’s implicit emptiness as a narrative, that the film can acquire actual personal meaning for the viewer. Just like life, it’s the action performed not by the Zone or by the film’s characters but by the viewer that makes Stalker a meaningful experience. And with this understood, Zona offers even a Tarkovskian pedant like me something new: proof that a film seen by a thousand different viewers is a thousand different films. In fact what Dyer wants to emphasise in Zona is that Stalker seen by the same viewer a thousand times is a thousand different films! Beyond his close analysis, it is Dyer’s own experience of the Zone over 30 years of viewings that he wants to convey by ‘reciting’ Stalker, as it were, line for line. “This book is an account of watchings, rememberings and forgettings; it is not the record of a dissection.”

Perhaps it’s a new sub-genre being invented here: a kind of pseudo-critical, stream-of-consciousness film analysis, where details from the film trigger associations for the author (memories of other films, of girlfriends, of old apartments, of playing in abandoned buildings and railway stations as a child, of the grey sky on Sunday, of his father’s aversion to spending money on ice-cream). Sometimes Dyer attempts to contain these associative thoughts within footnotes. But ‘footnotes’ isn’t really an apt term for his sprawling annotations. They are more like sidetracks, and often they take over the text completely. Other times Dyer simply lets the main text go where it may, like the character Stalker, in a way, plotting a route through the mysterious Zone. The path he maps out claims the authority of a narrator, but there’s an undeniable feeling here that he’s just making this shit up as he goes along.

What works in Zona is that Dyer’s loose associative memories provoke further associations for the reader. ‘Ah yes, all those cigarettes in Godard’s Breathless! I remember them too. How it reminds me of being 22, standing in the rain in Paris.’ And so on. This happens all the time when we read a book or watch a film. But in Zona Dyer is trying to make this associative subjective process an explicit aspect of the text (which is exactly what Tarkovsky is trying to do in Stalker). We shouldn’t confuse the two: Stalker is an amazing artistic accomplishment by the standards of any art form; Zona is a light and occasionally funny read with moments of depth. What Dyer has offered by piggybacking on a masterpiece is an extension of Tarkovsky’s artistic project, a quite literal fulfilment of the creative contract Tarkovsky makes with his (devoted) viewers: “whereby the artist obliges the audience to…think on, further than has been stated…[putting] the audience on a par with the artist” (Tarkovsky, A, Sculpting in Time).

Geoff Dyer, ZONA: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room, Text Publishing, Melbourne 2012; Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair, Austin: University of Texas Press, Austin, 1986

giveaway

Courtesy of Text Publishing we have three copies of ZONA to give away.
Email giveaways@realtimearts.net with your name and address if you'd like to be in the running.

The Silence of Dean Maitland (1935), left: Frank Hurley (cinematographer); seated: Ken G Hall (director); photo courtesy of National Film and Sound Archive

TRUE TO ITS SUBJECT, THE SHADOWCATCHERS IS A VISUALLY RICH HISTORY OF AUSTRALIAN CINEMATOGRAPHY. ALMOST 400 PHOTOGRAPHS, OFTEN THE WORK OF STILLS PHOTOGRAPHERS ON LOCATION, CAPTURE GENERATIONS OF CAMERAMEN LABOURING IN STUDIOS, IN THE BUSH, UNDERWATER, PEERING AT INSECTS, SWEATING OVER TINY CLAY FIGURINES, PERCHED IN TREES, HANGING FROM SPEEDING CARS AND INVENTIVELY ENGAGING WITH EVER EVOLVING EQUIPMENT.

The Shadowcatchers, published and produced by the Australian Cinematographers Society (ACS), is much more than a beautifully designed, very big picture book in glorious widescreen format. Not a book to browse on the lounge or in bed, once opened out on a table to reveal its full visual impact, it equally offers engrossing, informative and entertaining reading. Author Martha Ansara, a cinematographer herself (and producer and director), writes elegantly, tracing the history of the craft across key periods of the development of filmmaking and television in Australia, interpolated with detailed accounts of the lives, styles and achievements of ACS Hall of Fame members. As well there are quotations from cameraman (drawing on the ACS’s substantial archive) that are variously insightful, amusing and alarming.

Given that Australian cameramen (including a handful of women) have been integral to Australian film and television history, Ansara deftly delineates the various social and political forces that have inhibited and encouraged development for over a hundred years. You can come to this book without a knowledge of that history and come away well informed, having also been introduced to some of the technical aspects of camera craft. Much of this is fascinating as we read of cameramen in the 1920s and 30s developing film in their kitchens, making an optical printer out of Meccano or inventing lenses while ‘slushy boys’ fight to keep dust out of processing. Most of the technical information is quite intelligible—only occasionally I found myself turning to Wikipedia to check out blimps and fluidheads.

What gives The Shadowcatchers wonderful cogency is, first, its sense of lineage and heritage and, second, the idiosyncratic Australian character of the history that Ansara unfolds. As you turn the pages you’ll see cameramen grow older, you’ll witness their assistants becoming cameramen and innovators in their own right across the generations. The use of the term ‘cameraman’ is critical. As Ansara tells it, the cameraman from the beginnings of Australian film (not ‘film industry’—we were long denied that) was remarkably multi-skilled and there was no such thing as a simple career path. As camera operator, director, editor and processor, the early cameraman deserves retrospective acknowledgment as filmmaker. Although specialists very gradually supplanted these roles, Australians frequently continued to display superb skills as visual journalists (Neil Davis and David Brill in 1970s war zones) and technical innovators as well as moving into directorial and producer roles. ‘Cinematographer’ is self-defining, but it was interesting to read that cinematographer John Seale insists on being his own cameraman. (The section on Seale is a good example of the book’s brisk, evocative delineation of character and craft.)

As well as the sense of lineage, there are other strands that emerge, for example the considerable number of cameramen who found their way into film through photography, sometimes as a childhood hobby, sometimes maintaining that career side by side with filmmaking. More than a few worked their way up from the periphery of the trade and a surprising number, even up to recent times, didn’t complete secondary schooling or suffered learning problems. Cameramen are frequently revealed to be battlers, especially in the early days—denied good film stock and equipment (hence the drive to innovate), working long hours, sometimes in dangerous circumstances, mocked (by fellow cameraman as well as management) for artistic pretensions into the 1950s, and subordinated to foreign cinematographers on imported productions (but signing up as cameramen for the experience, new ideas and, sometimes, quality equipment, if shocked by the overseas caste system of filmmaking).

In the 1960s and 70s cameramen who once might have worked for commercial studios or television found their niche in the exploratory work of the Commonwealth Film Unit or established themselves as freelancers. Geoff Burton, Peter James, Russell Boyd, Don McAlpine and others took with them their own crews from feature film to feature film from the 70s onwards (including to the US). As Ansara writes about technological change, ironically many filmmakers today are like their antecedents—multi-skilled, now working inventively with inexpensive soft and hardware. Top cinematographers work with incredibly expensive technology but are no longer lone masters of their craft—the video spilt while filming allows all the ‘creatives’ to see the shots, eliminating the need for rushes and reducing the cameramen’s sense of having got it right on their own. As well, post-production has become hyper-elaborate, the final look of the film moving further and further away from the shooting and requiring even more sophisticated technical knowledge and collaborative commitment from the cinematographer. Ansara estimates that “50% of current Australian product is news, sport, current affairs and variety/light entertainment.” Cinematographers are “reliant on the same kind of work that was the mainstay of the old Cinesound and Movietone cameraman, albeit in a modern form.”

The photographs are consistently revealing, a perfect match with Ansara’s history and the anecdotes and the Hall of Fame profiles. We see the sheer bulk of both early feature film cameras and the very latest too (with an undaunted Andrew Lesnie standing before them) alongside generations of small newsreel cameras and the most recent digital portables. The filmmakers of the first half of the 20th century, in studios or on the streets, wear suits (as in the photograph of Frank Hurley behind the camera on this page). Another image of Hurley shows him, without suit, washing his film in the Antarctic ocean after shipboard processing for Hour of the Blizzard (1913). The book’s mix of portraits and unposed shots makes for a variety of perspectives on the people behind the camera and the circumstances of their work.

The elegant, suited shots of studios in production mode sometimes belie the demands on filmmakers: the Bondi Junction skating rink, much used as a studio in the 30s, had to be vacated at night for skaters, or the Cat Pavilion at the Sydney Showground emptied of heavy film equipment to make way for competitive cats. Bill Trerise, a leading newsreel maker, looks gentlemanly enough in the pictures, but was known as Bloody Bill for his tyrannical behaviour. He won acclaim for a clever strategy to create a slow motion film finish to a Melbourne Cup. He was criticised by local management but the New York office applauded the innovation.

Bill Carly, a leading cameraman who collaborated with Trerise on Jungle Partrol (1944), was furious when Howard Rubie, a young assistant cameraman, posted a quotation about film as art from the great documentarist Howard Grierson on a staff notice board. Carly tore it down and no one on the staff spoke to Rubie for a week. Hugh McInnes, who apparently “took to Trerise with a spanner” at one time, was dismayed by the intrusion of directors and “film society people” in the 50s. Ansara tells us that filmmakers largely comprised left wing Catholics, further bonded by meeting at particular pubs, mateship in often tough working conditions and an emerging need to unionise. This bond was not very accommodating for a young female clapper loader even in the 1970s as Jan Kenny (later a cinematographer and teacher at AFTRS and the only woman in the ACS Hall of Fame) explains in painful detail—the crew waiting for her to fail or drop heavy equipment until she’d proven herself. Not something that would happen today, she says. (Although many women work in film these days, Ansara points out that only 3% of the 700 ACS membership are women.)

The contribution of the newsreel, ethnographic and commercial promotional film to the evolution of Australian cinematography is never underestimated by Ansara. The documentation of World War II by the federal government’s Department of Information Film Division (later the Commonwealth Film Unit) expanded the approach to filming through the work of Damien Parer who had trained with Arthur Higgins, a leading cinematographer in the 30s in features and documentaries. Influenced by European filmmakers, Parer proved that the handheld camera could provide authenticity and convincing journalism. His Kokoda Front Line (1942) won an Academy Award. He was killed in battle in 1944. His heritage has been realised in the work of Neil Davis (who died filming a coup in Thailand) and David Brill, particularly in their coverage of the Vietnam War. It was Brill who declared, “I’m a video journalist.” These were cameraman who, as Ansara, points out, constructed stories as they filmed.

Risk is a substantial theme in the book, covering everything from lugging backbreaking equipment to working in appalling weather and cruel locations. Then there are the accidents—Keith Gow, left with the imprint of a camera on his face for the rest of his life when a plane taking off over him dipped in an air-pocket, nearly killing him. Les Walsey recalls shooting a bush fire in the 50s in a suit: “the flames were leaving the railway line and the ash falling on my nylon pop-on shirt and it was going ‘Pshheew! Pshhew!’—holes all over. I ended up with a shirt like a colander. Here we were covering a bush fire in shirts and ties—this is how we dressed because we were professionals.” Howard Rubie admits, “because you had the camera you felt that nothing could happen to you.”

Another recurrent theme is the famed ability of our cinematographers to deal with extremes, and subtleties, of light. Ross Wood says, “When you go overseas and come back again, you notice how hard our light is…those heavy shadows under. I’d like to utilise that midday sun, I think it’s terribly characteristic of this place…this hat with no face underneath it, I’d like to use it: almost a Ned Kelly feel about it, I suppose, the square head with no detail—just a block.”

The lineage theme so strong among cameramen since filmmaking’s inception here continues into the 70s and beyond with Australian directors and cinematographers forming significant teams here and overseas while cinematographers and their crews continue, writes Ansara, to display the characteristic ability to work fast, across genres, in harsh conditions and with a sense of team.

The book gives substantial space to documentary cinematographers including the great innovator Jim Frazier, whose Panavision-Frazier Lens has allowed for intense, stable close-ups and depth of field that have found their way into his work for David Attenborough, Mark Lewis’ Cane Toads: An Unnatural History (1987) and Jurassic Park.

Many other cinematographers are accounted for in Ansara’s history or in numerous images of them at work. The Shadowcatchers is a monumental and generous representation of those skilled artists who work with and behind the camera, largely unknown to the audiences who enjoy and admire their work. Here they are made visible. Ansara and the ACS have proudly celebrated the achievements and legacy of the profession with superb design by Ana May and production by Eddy Jokovich of ARMEDIA, fine writing and superb documentation.

Read Tina Kaufman’s interview with Martha Ansara and Calvin Gardiner in RealTime 108.

Martha Ansara, The Shadowcatchers, ACS, Austcine Publishing, North Sydney, 2012; 288p, soft cover $66, hardbound limited edition signed by Academy Award-winning Australian cinematographers, $250

THE FINAL REPORT OF THE CONVERGENCE REVIEW RECOMMENDS FUNDAMENTAL CHANGES TO THE REGULATION OF MEDIA ENTERPRISES IN AUSTRALIA. INSTEAD OF DIRECTING MOST OF THE REGULATION AT TV AND RADIO LICENSEES, THE REVIEW PROPOSES TO REGULATE ‘CONTENT SERVICE ENTERPRISES.’

The big questions now are whether or not a vulnerable minority government a year away from an election will endorse the plan; which organisations might be covered by the definition of ‘content service enterprises’; and how the complex transition from the current rules to any new ones might be managed.

A government wanting “to examine the operation of media and communications regulation in Australia and assess its effectiveness in achieving appropriate policy objectives” had many places to focus.

It could have concentrated on the ‘socialisation’ of media through applications like Facebook; the proliferation of media channels and the fragmentation of audience choices; or the growing power of media users.

why convergence?

It chose ‘convergence,’ targeting the increasingly blurred boundaries between broadcasting and telecommunications. These are the two sectors of the communications industry around which the most important legislative fences are drawn.

Convergence is not a new concept. For decades, speakers at media conferences have brought Venn diagrams to illustrate the growing overlaps between broadcasting, telecommunications, information technology, publishing, film, music and much else. When radio broadcasting was new, it seemed to be a convergence of wireless and recorded music. Early television was conceptualised as a convergence of radio and cinema. Cable TV brought together TV and telecoms.

Nor is convergence a steady, one-way drive to the sweet spot in those Venn diagrams. Anyone who has watched new enterprises, industry sectors and sub-sectors emerge to exploit opportunities in online and mobile communications might have wondered just when the ‘convergence’ those conference speakers promised would finally show up. When we finally got our media devices down to a laptop, a mobile phone and a TV, along came tablets, a ‘fourth screen.’

more than media

And convergence is not just about media. Print, radio and TV have long looked for territory outside their own borders; other industry sectors see themselves converging with communications. Newspapers got into radio and newspaper/radio operators into television. Later, they bought sporting competitions, venues, ticketing operations, leisure resorts. In the early days of radio, department stores, equipment manufacturers, trade unions and churches set up broadcasting stations. Now, banks are muscling into Facebook.

So convergence is a hard concept and it is not the only thing going on. The early papers produced by the long-running Convergence Review spread out in many directions. They asked almost every question you could ever ask about media, many of them more than once. The final report does not try to answer them all, choosing to concentrate most of its energy on a few big topics that are profoundly affected by ‘convergence.’ These are spectrum management; diversity and competition; respect for community standards in media content; and finally, requirements for Australian production and local news and information.

spectrum management

On spectrum management, the review recommends that spectrum for TV and radio broadcasting be allocated in the same way, for the same duration and at the same price as it is allocated for telecommunications uses like mobile telephony and broadband. To some extent this has already happened, because the large amount of ‘digital dividend’ spectrum that will be released for alternate uses when analogue TV is completely switched off at the end of 2013 will be re-allocated by auction and probably acquired by telecom companies for mobile broadband. The even tougher step is to shift all the spectrum which TV and radio broadcasters continue to use over to a new scheme of allocation and charging.

re-regulation

On the other three major issues, the review recommends a fundamental change to the way broadcasting regulation works. Until now, diversity and competition, respect for community standards and requirements for Australian and local content have all been dealt with through conditions attached to TV and radio licences. When that scheme was put in place, commercial TV and radio stations held a uniquely significant place in the electronic media landscape. ‘Convergence’ and other changes mean this is no longer the case.

Having decided that diversity and competition, respect for community standards and Australian and local content all still matter, and are likely to require regulatory intervention, the Convergence Review had to come up with a structure for it that didn’t depend on the most important electronic media enterprises all holding broadcasting licences.

The concept it produced is the “content service enterprise.” These will focus on “large enterprises that provide professional content services to a significant number of Australians.” They will continue to have their ownership scrutinised more closely than the general competition law allows, although the review proposes replacing most of the current strict cross-media limitations with a more flexible “public interest” threshold for approving mergers. They will also have to “meet community expectations about standards applicable to their content” on matters like sex, violence, accuracy and fairness in news and current affairs and “contribute in appropriate ways to the availability of Australian content.”

content protection

The Convergence Review thinks Australian program genres that need regulatory support in 2012 are still Australian drama, documentary and children’s programs. (PwC data published as part of the report estimates that without the existing quotas, spending on children’s programs would be wiped out completely, spending on adult drama would fall by 90% and on documentaries by 50%.) But “the situation may change in the future and the regulatory environment should be flexible enough to allow for this.”

It wants a “uniform content scheme” under which all content service enterprises have two options: to invest a percentage of their Australian market revenue from professional television-like content in new Australian drama, documentary and children’s content (the “investment option”) or to contribute to a central converged content production fund (the “contribution option”).

Once that scheme is in place, the review wants Australian content quotas abolished; but while the transition is occurring, it wants them changed: first, to increase the commercial TV drama sub-quota by 50% but allow it to be met by programs screened on digital multi-channels as well as main channels, and second, to require subscription TV children’s and documentary channels to spend 10% of their program budgets on new Australian programs, like the movie and drama channels.

who are the content service enterprises?

What all this might mean depends crucially on who the ‘content service enterprises’ are. The proposed definition is intended to catch “only the most substantial and influential entities.” They will be organisations that have control of the professional content they deliver, meet a threshold of a large number of Australian users of that content (proposed to be at least 500,000 unique viewers/users per month), and meet a threshold level of revenue from supplying that professional content to Australians (proposed to be $50 million per year).

The precise thresholds of users and revenue will be determined and periodically reviewed by the communications regulator. Rough calculations included in the report suggest the proposed thresholds are designed to preserve the status quo for now: incumbent broadcasters are caught; Google (more than enough monthly users but not enough revenue according to PwC), Telstra and Apple (not enough monthly users or revenue yet according to PwC, although according to Nielsen, iTunes had a unique monthly audience of 2.8 million as far back as June 2011).

Given the requirements imposed on “content service enterprises,” a big part of the policy battle ahead will be waged by online and mobile media enterprises that have never had to deal with the regulatory apparatus that applied to TV and radio broadcasters.

They are already working hard to ensure the convergence that has taken their platforms and services so deeply and profitably into the lives of consumers does not also lead them into new kinds of public obligation.

The Convergence Review: an independent review established by the Australian Government to examine the policy and regulatory frameworks that apply to the converged media and communications landscape in Australia. March 2012, www.dbcde.gov.au/digital_economy/convergence_review

Heather Mitchell, Jane Harders, Hugo Weaving, Justine Clarke, Geraldine Hakewill, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Sydney Theatre Company

WITH CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE THIN ON THE GROUND IN THE LAST TWO MONTHS, MY ATTENTION WAS ON THEATRE PRODUCTIONS AT THE SYDNEY THEATRE COMPANY AND BELVOIR. IT’S DIFFICULT TO GO TO THE THEATRE THESE DAYS WITHOUT HAVING A META-THEATRICAL EXPERIENCE, THANKS TO CONTINUING DISCUSSION ABOUT RE-INTERPRETATION, ADAPTATION AND HERITAGE IN PRESS REVIEWS, BLOGS AND LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. HAPPILY, THIS SEEMS HEALTHY AND ISSUES ARE UNLIKELY TO BE RESOLVED, EVER.

Resident Belvoir director Simon Stone contributes to the debate with a substantial program note for his remake (I’ve decided to borrow that term from the movies here by way of apt if somewhat indirect analogy) of Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude. He has little to say about the play and much about theatre’s long and undeniable history of adaptation and borrowing—and, one would like to add, wilful plundering and bowdlerising. Surprisingly, despite the considerable success of The Wild Duck and Thyestes, Stone feels the need to mount an argument for his practice, seeing himself as sustaining tradition while at the same time renewing it in terms of our own milieu. Fair enough, but it’s not the fact of such engagement with heritage but whether the result is a gain, an exceptional work in itself. Not only that, but it has to have said something significant about the original itself to make its mutated resurrection worthwhile. I hope for that much.

sydney theatre company: les liaisons dangereuses

The set for the Sydney Theatre Company production of Christopher Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses is an elegant, aristocratic city apartment, of a style originating in the late 18th century and sustained, if less ornately, into the present by the French bourgeoisie and their betters. The costuming, with its expensive, fashionable formality, likewise suggests past and present, if in a more but not too contemporary vein. Alan John’s music equally evokes classical restraint and a moody jazz-inflected modernity. Consequently Sam Strong’s production doesn’t quite live up to the press release claim that he would “acid-wash a familiar story, stripping it back to its essential layers in the intimacy of the Wharf 1 Theatre.” Instead, the overall ambience, if free of frills and courtly etiquette, suggests a cool balance between now and then, impressionistically accentuating historical similarities with regard to upper class indolence, sexual license and corruption.

Hugo Weaving as Valmont finely grades the viscount’s progress from rampant seducer to a man trapped, by love, in his own plotting, if without defining his character as distinctly as, say, he did so memorably with the doctor in Uncle Vanya. Black suit and white shirt in increasing dishabille signals singularity of purpose, lack of ostentation and decline, whereas his co-conspirator, La Marquise de Merteuil is attired (masked even) in a series of elegant gowns. With exquisite near-stillness, Pamela Rabe exudes power and determination, delivering to perfection the Marquise’s rationale for her behaviour—her very vulnerability as a woman in a patriarchal society. It’s significant that she is the only character in the play who reveals a back story, and although it’s Valmont’s dilemma and his death that generate some climactic empathy, it’s the Marquise who epitomises the moral complexities and ironies that Hampton summons out of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ novel of 1782.

This is a straightforward production, safely realised, letting fly the wit inherent in Hampton’s writing and neatly treading the play’s thin line between grim comedy and bleak social commentary. The experience set me thinking that perhaps the play has passed its use-by-date (in form it feels faux historical) or that the casting of 30-somethings as Valmont and La Marquise, closer in age to their young victims, might have been more meaningful and more disturbing. A much more contemporary context than Strong has offered is also conceivable, one further removed from the 18th century than the director has taken it.

belvoir: every breath

Benedict Andrews’ stature as a director is in no doubt—his production of Botho Strauss’ Gross und Klein has been a huge success in Sydney, Paris and London, adding to a long list of achievements. In turning to playwriting he has to reach the very benchmarks he has himself established as director, not least when directing his own writing. Every Breath is sparely scripted, cinematic in the brevity of its dialogue and scenes (along with frequent ungainly blackouts) and dominated by an overtly symbolic set design (as if the dysfunctional family the play centres on is likely to be crushed by its wealth as embodied in architecture).

On the page, the play reads as an intriguing screenplay, but on the stage it feels cumbersome, short on words if strong on images, scenes expiring before gaining momentum and performances, whatever their individual merits, lacking ensemble cohesion. That doesn’t mean that Every Breath was entirely lacking. The scenario in itself is worth addressing (before being tossed out by some critics as, in effect, class warfare).

A naive young security guard, Chris (Shelly Lauman), protecting a well-off middle class family facing an unspecified threat, finds himself the object of each member’s projections, not least sexual. He obligingly has sex with everyone, but learns that such relations are limited to the house, to the point where, in a dream he recounts, he experiences himself—or herself—as an object of display. It’s not clear after a while what gender Chris is: it depends who is fantasising. In the end that includes us too (as if it hadn’t all along) as Chris, on a new security job in an empty building and freed from the burden of projections, strips naked alone centrestage. Shortly before this, the father, Leo (John Howard), gives up his writing from which he has become alienated; Olivia (Eloise Mignon) the daughter discovers she can write (if only to create on ongoing fantasy around Chris); while her twin brother Oliver (Dylan Young) is desperately bereft; and the mother, Lydia (Angie Milliken), although revealing more self knowledge than the others, longs too for Chris’ return. This curious aggregation of monologues at the play’s end is more satisfying than much of what has gone before.

Andrews prefaces the playscript with a quotation from Karl Marx explaining the notion of alienated labour. Alienation takes multiple forms in Every Breath: the father whose writing and others’ perception of him no longer make sense; the wife whose loss of a job, “the threat” and Chris have unanchored her, “hollowed her out”; the daughter whose twinness has denied her a sense of difference; the brother who is shy of his sexuality until the security guard arrives; and Chris, the only literal labourer in the scenario, refused identity by the projections of others, until he seizes solitude. He remains a worker not in control of his labour—but what would it be to own ‘security’? As a kaleidoscopic refraction of alienation the play is at its strongest and strangest.

Every Breath bears a broad resemblance to Marxist filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini’s fantastical Teorama (1968), an almost metaphysical foray into alienation in which a young man (not Andrews’ she-he) enters the life of an upper-class family, has sex with all of its members and leaves them to face crises of identity—the father, for example, hands over his factory to his workers and wanders off naked. Perhaps in acknowledgement of Pasolini’s influence, Andrews has the father in Every Breath declare in his final speech, “Before [Chris] came to us my writing had become a factory. Now he’s gone I’ll send the workers home. I’ll unplug the great machines, shred the files in the filing cabinets. I’ll open the gates so anyone can come in and take what they want.” Every Breath is an intriguing work, perhaps only at the first stage of its development in whatever form. Regardless of the production’s failings, the excellent low-key performance by Shelly Lauman as Chris lent the work coherence and gravitas.

belvoir & force majeure: food

Food, written by Steve Rodgers and directed by Rodgers and Kate Champion, is an amiable, intimate fable about aspiration and self-belief focused on two sisters who bond anew. The elder one, Elma (Kate Box), a talented cook (who has given up on finding a male partner), is prodded by hapless younger sister Nancy (Emma Jackson) to transform their humble cafe into a restaurant, aided by an enthusiastic Middle-Eastern immigrant, Hakan (Fayssal Bazzi). Success ensues, but so do complications: Nancy encourages Hakan to court Elma, which he does, out of feelings of sympathy and obligation, but not attraction; overcome by his inauthentic behaviour he leaves. In a cathartic finale, the sisters have to face some incredibly grim truths about themselves and their relationship.

The spare plot is thickened with gently choreographed playfulness (with food or wrestling), not always discernible projections onto a wall of copper cooking pans (or home movies magically manifesting inside saucepans) and informal movement that arises out of the everyday—such as escapist showering and limb-tangling drunkenness. Projections also assist Hakan who, in a stylistic swerve for this production, addresses us directly with a slide show of his lovers (“a string of one and three-night stands”).

Hakan’s jokiness and joyousness, his comic mangling of English and a poetic inclination steer the characterisation towards stereotype, but Bazzi undercuts it by adroitly capturing the man’s sense of failure and loss. Kate Box is admirable as Elma, blunt, wounded and withdrawn (“I’ve disappeared…I can no longer see myself”), and then released, while Jackson subtly reveals a slowly maturing Nancy, an unlikely, but believable agent of change.

belvoir: strange interlude

I can’t call it a cyclorama, it’s too sculptural for that, too firm, and the label is demeaningly functional. Robert Cousins’ design for Strange Interlude and Damien Cooper’s lighting of it suggest some eternal, enveloping emptiness in which characters hover as if hologrammed, likely to evaporate, but digitised, seen more sharply than reality might ever allow. It flows smoothly on the horizontal, ignoring the theatre’s right-angled corner walls, and in a subtle curve pours down onto the floor where it appears, at some unimaginable time, to have set. Together Cousins and Cooper have created a stand-alone artwork akin to the elusive new media artefacts of the likes of James Turrell. But it works even better with people inhabiting it as they oscillate between exterior engagement and interior musings, these delivered as easeful asides that, for the most part, work quite effectively (Groucho Marx famously quipped in Animal Crackers in 1930, “Pardon me while I have a strange interlude”). Objects too—a low timber jetty, an electric train set assembled by a child—have a heightened presence in this seemingly ephemeral space in which decades pass.

It’s a pity that this updated version of O’Neill’s 1928 play doesn’t improve the melodramatic plot even though it renders the characters and the dialogue more plausible (and in some cases much more interesting), radically trimming the number and volume of novelistic asides and offering the performers some fine opportunities. For all the apparent modernity of the language and design, the play remains rooted in its essential datedness. So, it’s an interesting curio on which considerable attention has been lavished to some good effect. It is very funny, exactly because the original is melodramatic; but Stone and his performers manage to maintain the emotional ugliness of the scenario while letting the improbabilities fly by as if utterly plausible, so that we feel we are laughing with, not at.

Emily Barclay rightly dominates the first half as Nina Leeds, a petulant, brittle child-woman who has lost her lover to war, her will to live diverted into promiscuity with wounded soldiers, then a wrong marriage and infidelity. She’s less central in the second half, a pity, where loyalty and resignation, played out by Barclay with cool elegance and stillness, dominate, even though her soul still belongs to a long-dead soldier. Instead, we watch the men in her life crumble. Doctor Ned Darrell (Toby Schmitz), an authoritative rationalist sinks into self-pity after having fathered a child with Nina, whom they pass off as her husband’s—the impotent Sam Evans (Toby Truslove in a rich performance of boyish jocularity mutating into drunken, egocentric assertiveness). Completing the despairing trio is novelist Charles Marsden—Mitchell Butel exquisitely realising the transformation from severely repressed mother’s boy into a bitterly alert would-be lover of Nina).

One of the most effecting scenes is between Nina’s son Gordon (Nicholas Bakopoulos-Cooke) and Darrell. The boy hates the attention the doctor lavishes on his mother, while Darrell, faltering inadequately, attempts to form a relationship with his son. Schmitz captures a sense of depressed helplessness at the loss of both love and child, emotionally locked-in except when with the unresponsive Nina. Bakopoulos-Cooke’s Gordon is observant, blunt, determined and self-contained, his wariness of Darrell at once realised as cruel and comic.

Strange Interlude was a well-received stream-of-consciousness experiment in 1928 (it won the Pulitzer prize for Drama) and it remains one now, updated as much as it can be here. Rewarding design, adroit adaptation and fine performances can’t make it something it isn’t, but it is strangely watchable, not least for its marvellous scenography.

sydney theatre company: under milkwood

Paula Arundell, Cameron Goodall, Helen Thomson, Sandy Gore, Bruce Spence, Under Milk Wood, Sydney Theatre Company

I was 13 when I played First and Second Voices in a high school production of Dylan Thomas’ Under Milkwood (directed by Adelaide man of the theatre Myk Mykyta). Like Jack Thompson and Sandy Gore as the Voices in the STC’s stage account of the radio play, I performed the lines from a mix of memory and reading from a hardbound copy of the script. My young brain simply wasn’t up to the mind bending task of accommodating a seemingly vast prose poem. Perhaps it was the case of older brains in the STC production, or simply a storytelling device, which worked so well. When we were addressed directly, the effect was magical: Thompson’s opening lines spoken on a dark, bare stage, the delivery lucid, the poetry unforced, as he moved slowly to the edge of the stage, taking us gently into the dream world of the Welsh village of Llareggub.

In my copy of the play, the sexy bits had been marked for deletion by the deputy headmaster; needless to say, although sensing the pervasive eroticism of the play, I didn’t understand quite a few of those bits, whereas I know now that, as unlikely as it seems, she certainly did. Kip Williams’ direction preserves all the magic I still recall of the play, reigniting for me its passion, sensuality, playfulness and ghostly chill. Wisely, Williams avoids too much literalising, sustaining the integrity of the radio play’s capacity to generate potent images. Costume changes are minimal, the Voices flow around the villagers, vividly revealing more than we see on stage. Performers slide an armchair, school desks, a bed and Organ Morgan’s organ on and offstage with apt ease, or transform from one character to another in a second or two with a change of hat or unfurling of long hair. No-one adopts a Welsh accent, and the poetry still sings.

The sense of ensemble is strong, everyone shines in this dynamic village of the living and the dead: Drew Forsythe alternating between the benign Reverend Jenkins and the womanising Waldo, Paula Arundell between the licentious Polly Garter and the lovelorn but eternally virginal Myfanwy Price and Mae Rose Cottage (“You just wait. I’ll sin till I blow up!”), Helen Thomson realising sundry idiosyncratic women including the ghost of Rosie Probert (in one of the production’s most affecting scenes), beloved of Captain Cat, beautifully played by Bruce Spence. When not doubling as a village gossip, Spence pairs with Forsythe as the hilariously sad Mr Ogmore and Mr Pritchard, the late husbands of the tyrannical Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard. Sandy Gore drops out of Second Voice to create this daunting figure—an interesting touch that makes Second Voice more a part of the village fantasia. In terms of consistency, it’s an odd gesture since First Voice is offered no such opportunity—not that it would be welcome. However, it does raise the issue of the deployment of the Voices. Thompson and Gore wander through the action or often stand, sometimes awkwardly, to the side of it. I suspect there are opportunities for further integration.

The stage is bare save for the flow of people and furniture, but as day breaks three sets of flower-potted windows appear upstage, through which we see a naturalistic horizon of water and low lying hills, the landscape brightening into bristling daytime and then subsiding into the twilight and night of ghosts—gliding out from between the windows—and ever returning dreams. The apparently simple design by Robert Cousins (set) and Damien Cooper (lighting) lends a painterly aura of solidity and transience to the half-dream world of Llareggub. Likewise, Alan John’s compositions for the songs of Polly Garter and Mr Waldo raise the play’s poetry to an even more transcendent level—particularly with the organ’s Bachian counterpoint to Arundell’s marvellous singing, amplifying at the same time Organ Morgan’s profound love for the great composer (at his wife’s expense). Forsythe’s lamenting baritonal account of Mr Waldo’s childhood is equally moving. Having the composer playing the role of Organ Morgan at his organ onstage lends particular power to these scenes and the mood of the production throughout.

Kip Williams’ Under Milkwood is true to the spirit of Dylan Thomas’ creation: it is wildly funny, tender and melancholy, poetically voiced without force in our own accent and everyday dress inventively deployed (costumes Alice Babidge) and, above all, plays out as an hour and 40 minutes of delicious dreaming we take away with us into our own night.

Sydney Theatre Company: Les Liaisons Dangereuses, writer Christopher Hampton from the novel by Choderlos de Laclos, director Sam Strong, performers Justine Clark, Geraldine Hakewill, Jane Harders,James Mackay, Ashley Ricardo, Heather Mitchell, TJ Power, Pamela Rabe, Hugo Weaving, set Dale Ferguson, costumes Mel Page, lighting Hartley TA Kemp, composer Alan John, sound design Steve Francis; STC Wharf 1, Sydney, April 5-June 9; Belvoir, Every Breath, writer, director Benedict Andrews, performers John Howard, Shelly Lauman, Eloise Mignon, Angie Milliken, Dylan Young, set design, costumes Alice Babidge, lighting Nick Schlieper, composer Oren Ambarchi, sound design Luke Smiles; Belvoir Street Theatre, Sydney, March 28-April 29; Belvoir & Force Majeure: Food, writer, co-director Steve Rodgers, co-director Kate Champion, performers Kate Box, Emma Jackson, Fayssal Bazzi, design Anna Tregloan, AV, lighting Martin Langthorne, composer, sound designer Ekrem Mulayim; Downstairs, Belvoir Street Theatre, April 26-June 3; Belvoir, Strange Interlude, writer, director Sam Stone after Eugene O’Neill, performers Akos Armont, Nicholas Bakopoulos-Cooke alternating with Callum McManis, Emily Barclay, Mitchell Butel, Kris McQuade, Eloise Mignon, Anthony Phelan, Toby Schmitz, Toby Truslove, designer Robert Cousins, lighting Damien Cooper costumes Mel Page, composition and sound design Stefan Gregory; Belvoir Street Theatre, May 5-June 17; Sydney Theatre Company, Under Milkwood, writer Dylan Thomas, director Kip Williams, performers Paula Arundell, Ky Baldwin, Alex Chorley, Drew Forsythe, Cameron Goodall, Sandy Gore, Alan John, Drew Livingston, Bruce Spence, Jack Thompson, Helen Thomson, designer Robert Cousins, costumes Alice Babidge, lighting Damien Cooper, music Alan John, sound design Steve Francis: Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, May 26-July 7

ARTS HOUSE, A MAJOR CITY OF MELBOURNE CONTEMPORARY ARTS INITIATIVE, IS BASED AT THE OLD NORTH MELBOURNE TOWN HALL. PERFORMANCES ARE PRESENTED IN THE HALL, AT THE ADJOINING WAREHOUSE AND THE NEARBY MEAT MARKET. ARTS HOUSE HAS BECOME A PIVOTAL CULTURAL CENTRE FOR THE CURATED STAGING OF INNOVATIVE LOCAL, NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL PERFORMANCE. I SPOKE WITH CREATIVE PRODUCER ANGHARAD WYNNE-JONES ABOUT ARTS HOUSE AND ITS PROGRAM FOR THE SECOND HALF OF 2012.

In 2008 I came back from the UK where I’d been artistic director of the London International Festival of Theatre [LIFT] for three and a half years, and one of the things I really noted was how exciting it was to feel that there was a venue in the city that was presenting work that felt internationally aligned. There’s not a huge percentage of the work that is international, for obvious reasons, but international work was consistently being programmed. It was of a scale and scope that connected really strongly for me with the way that artists were working in the city, which I think can be quite different from some of the work we see within the international arts festival scenarios. There it’s often brilliantly spectacular, big scale and impressive in other ways but I really enjoyed that sense that Arts House was a kind of connecter on the international network of contemporary practice.

Also, it’s interesting for me that Arts House is a council venue with a sense of history, of being connected to a residential community in North Melbourne and having become a cultural centre. I was interested in re-locating some of those connections between the venue’s historical civic function and its cultural function.

It is and it’s a most amazing asset. It’s owned by Arts Victoria but managed by the City, which cannot invest its own programming funds into the Meat Market. Any program we do there has to come from funds outside of the City. It’s an incredible resource both for the city and for the state but it is clearly under-used currently. I think that’s generally understood by all of the stakeholders. I feel confident that there will be an investment in it as a really critical cultural space.

We’ve also got a new space that’s just come online—the Warehouse, just out the back of the Town Hall. It’s very small with a capacity of 60 but already we have a program of work called Warehouse Salon where artists can talk about their work, have a beer and a pizza.

You have a strong interest in the environment and its survival. Is that reflected in your directorship? [Wynne-Jones is currently the Producer of TippingPoint Australia—an international network of scientists and artists engaging with climate change; RT100]

Yes. I think the City of Melbourne—also the City of Sydney—is exemplary in terms of government organisations in setting standards. The target for City of Melbourne is zero emissions by 2020. That’s a necessary framework to be working within. Culturally, I’m really interested in how artists engage with the idea of radical carbon reduction and what the impact of that might be on the way we make work, the way we participate in it and engage with it. If there is anything not completely terrifying about climate change it is the opportunity to re-imagine some of those old modes of cultural production that have serviced a particular kind of economy, again, often at the expense of the individual artist. This is an opportunity to re-imagine some of those relationships.

Arts House has been a player in some large events such as the Dance Massive contemporary dance festival. Is that still within your purview?

It is. When I first came into the position at Arts House, there was a kind of ‘All Change’ of artistic directors in terms of the Dance Massive consortium. Marian Potts took over at Malthouse, Angela Conquet at Dancehouse and Minerva Draeger at Ausdance. You could have imagined the model might be up for discussion—and certainly we’ve talked about it at length—but there’s no doubt that there’s 100% commitment to the event. It’s one of the most successful and interesting models of consortium and festival collaboration around. It’s a brilliant way of developing audiences, enabling artists to re-present work that maybe hasn’t been seen by a large audience, facilitating those connections and critical discussion between artists and audiences and reviewers and also inviting international presenters to come in and see some of the really extraordinary work that we have here.

Dance Massive combines with the National Dance Forum creating a really strong focus that is very exciting. We just had the Expression of Interest submissions for Dance Massive 2013 and we received 60, which is great in that it shows the sector’s aspirations.

Australia has been so long in need of this kind of event. Through a combination of forces Dance Massive has been quite a success.

Thankfully, we’ve now had confirmation from Arts Victoria that they are going to be partners this time. The overall budget is incredibly small for an international festival but I think the idea of working with venues who know their own audiences, who have their own connections into the artistic community, and really capitalising on that, I think that’s really interesting.

We’re coming up to the second half of the year, what does Arts House have lined up for us?

It’s multi-art form and across different scales. Its distinctive character is its very multifaceted-ness which creates its dynamic. We’ve got companies like Melbourne’s Atticus—an amazing ensemble of young musician/composers—Phoebe Green, Zac Johnston, Lizzy Welsh and Judith Hamann. They’re working with Jon Rose (see interview RT108) on Metapraxis, presenting a series of concerts over three nights. They have a nose for ways that new music can appeal to broader audiences and a very strong performative approach to their work. I think it’s a really good crossover for Arts House audiences. There’s a whole generation of emerging artists like Zoe Scoglio, a really interesting young performance maker, installation maker, sculptor and video artist who is creating a work, Shifting Ground, that‘s come through the CultureLab project.

Then we’ve got Back to Back. They’re doing Democratic Set (RT101), which is screening as part of Mobile States. Their other work is a performance that uses the text of an evangelical American pastor called Hell House, which is apparently one of the most performed community plays in the United States. It’s a so-called “morality” tale—anti abortion, anti-gay, anti-drugs, with very vivid re-tellings, tableaux that show the audience the path to eternal damnation [resulting] from certain behaviours. The pastor who wrote it has freely given the licence to anyone who wants to produce the play. So Back to Back are going to be presenting it along with a number of community participants from Geelong. They’ll do three presentations of the work with three public forums—on Provocation, Morality and Belief after each showing. We’re working with ABC Radio National’s Rachael Kohn and Scott Stephens and former ABC RN presenter Peter Mares, now at the Grattan Institute.

To me it’s really exciting that Back to Back have the integrity and the perspective to be able to look at that material and really engage in a discussion on the issues it raises. [Otherwise] it would be potentially very hard to have, I think, a fulsome discussion around it.

No, I think they’ll use it as an anthropological object—’This is the work, now let’s talk about what’s embedded within it; what are its assumptions?’ I think [Artistic Director Bruce Gladwin] is really fascinated that this piece of right wing propaganda is one of the most popularly performed pieces of community art in the world. Why is it that the Left is not able to articulate its views in that way as successfully? There are so many things to unpick. We’re very excited to be hosting that. Democratic Set is a lovely companion piece, a celebration of diversity in every way. Its intention is for very different people to have visibility and to express themselves. I suppose in that way it is the perfect counterpoint to Hell House.

We have Black Lung doing DOKU RAI (“you, dead man, I don’t believe you”) a piece they’re working on with artists from East Timor. I actually missed out on the Black Lung explosion, as I was overseas at the time. But you can still feel the ripples and the resonances of their earlier work. Talking to director Thomas Wright about this piece it feels like it’s definitely a deepening and development of their work. They’re engaging in intercultural exchange but absolutely clearly stating that they are collaborating as artists—their starting point is the creative exchange and not necessarily the political scenario around that. It’ll be another very challenging work and it’s something that’s also happening at the Darwin and Brisbane Festivals with Arts House as a co-producer.

We also have a collaboration with Melbourne Festival, presenting Sydney artist Jeff Stein and his work Impasse, a piece he’s developed with William McClure and Denis Beaubois. It’s an installation created out of massive foam blocks. It’s a one-on-one experience, an invitation to find your way through the ‘laboratory’ of these massive shapes impregnated with sound and visual installations. At the same time we have the [performance installation] work, Hold (RT101). I experienced this at Performance Space in 2010. David Cross is the artist and he invites the audience to enter a huge inflatable structure. These will be two interesting works to experience side-by-side.

Impasse and Hold demand a certain physical courage and emotional tenacity from the audience, which feel like appropriate skills to be rehearsing at this particular time.

At the end of the year we have Going Nowhere, an ideas laboratory for artists and others to think about ways we might imagine international cultural exchange without anyone getting on a plane.

That’s right. We’re working with five Australian artists including Willoh S Weiland from Aphids, Sarah Rodigari and Dan Koop and One Step at a Time [a Melbourne-based group of artists who create participatory, locative and site responsive works. Eds]. They’ve each identified their international collaborators and they’ll be developing ideas together and presenting draft concepts at this three-day event.

Your program reflects the changing role of the audience over the last two decades. The work is increasingly experiential but also offers thoughtful, practical engagement.

A lot of the works in this program are really reliant on an audience to complete them—to be part of a forum after a performance or to step into work designed for the experience of one person, as with Impasse or Hold. There’s a really strong commitment to the relationship with the audience.

Also in the Arts House program are: Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey’s Gauge, Laura Caesar and Malcolm Whitaker’s Star******s and Christine Johnson and Lisa O’Neill’s RRAMP.

THE PUBLICITY PHOTOGRAPH FOR BRINK PRODUCTIONS’ LAND AND SEA IS EVOCATIVE. THE LANDSCAPE IS UNMISTAKEABLY SOUTH AUSTRALIAN, JUST SOUTH OF ADELAIDE, I GUESS. THE DRY LAND FORM IS LOW, THE FLAT SEA IS SHALLOW, AND THE SKY IS BRIGHT WHITE-BLUE. IN THE FOREGROUND, A FIGURE IN PYJAMAS SITS IN A BATHTUB, HEAD TURNED TO THE HORIZON, AND ROWS WITH TREE BRANCHES AS OARS AS IF OUT TO SEA.

The composition of this photograph encodes the settler lifestyle of Australia. Between land and sky the sea intervenes as the past-and-future medium of arrival and departure. In other Australian plays, I have learnt to read this turning of the face to the horizon, to where sea and sky meet in the beyond, as a white man’s aspiration, a neo-spiritual gesture that would transcend the hard politics of the land.

A publicity photograph is not performance. In the flow of production, it is created early on. It announces an aesthetic impetus, but does not govern the direction. Yet visual meanings are associative, part of a chain of meanings that seep into the experience of stage action and set design. In Nicki Bloom’s new play there is a beach. A man is washed ashore. His face is washed and, in a ritual, whipped with wet branches from a tree. Later there is an imaginary bathtub. But the script never settles on the image. It is also quite elusive in signifying time and place.

Wendy Todd’s design for Land and Sea is beautifully conceived. The Queen’s Theatre is Adelaide’s oldest; its old walls and iron roof enclose a deep expanse of space. Our chairs are arranged half-way around a circle of pale sand enclosed in billowing white drapes. At first, the curtains remain drawn. We watch the first scene play out through diaphanous panels. These are removed, creating wave-like scallops, defining the edge of a circus ring space. Later the curtains are fully raised, and then the action partly transitions into a realistic box set.

Director Chris Drummond explains that he and Bloom share an interest in the contemporary theatre of German director Christoph Marthaler (see RT76, p8). The elusive play of time and place in Bloom’s script suits the post-dramatic. But this production also shares its tent-theatre aesthetic and Brechtian musicality with the legacy of the ‘new wave’ Sydney-style. Actors entering and exiting mid-way through the audience recalls the distinctive architecture of the Stables and Belvoir. There are stylistic echoes of the colonial plays of the 1970s, John Bell’s Shakespeares at Nimrod, Louis Nowra’s The Golden Age, Michael Gow’s Away and Neil Armfield’s production of Cloudstreet. The costuming is loose, unbuttoned, in the pale earth colours of the colony. Elemental props—a basket of eggs, a ukulele, cardboard signs, a bottle—are handled with simple theatricality.

The performers play character strings in related stories, starting with a settler scene where food is scarce and lighting is by hurricane lamp. Mr Greene (Rory Walker) sends his daughter Vera (Danielle Catanzariti) to gather eggs, and colludes with neighbour Essie (Jacqy Phillips) to inhibit Vera’s excitement when Poor Tom (Thomas Conroy) is washed up on the beach. Next the settler story translates into a family melodrama of displaced aristocracy and misrecognised relations with King Billy (Walker), Queen Esther (Phillips), Prince Tomason (Conroy) and his lost love Vera the True (Catanzariti). Later, in the present, the young lovers are homeless, strangers to each other, on the beach and cold—with only alcohol, Hawaiian melodies and their imaginations to keep them warm.

Music is omnipresent: medieval ostinatos, Christmas lullabies, an aria from Gluck’s Orfeo, French nursery rhymes, echoes of Dietrich and Satie. These snatches are delivered by the performers—Jacqy Phillips sings throaty cabaret in French, German and Russian—with Hilary Kleinig on cello, piano and sound effects. But this is ‘post-melodramatic’ theatre: the music doesn’t amplify the characters’ emotions; it heightens the performers’ contributions to scenography.

Beyond the sand-circle and white curtains, the box set is hidden with black flats. The reveal is somewhat clumsy. But the scene set in this house—with its 1930s furnishings, its dark wooden doors and window frames, its wartime speeches on the radio and a ringing telephone that delivers death—is the play’s most imaginative transportation. I enjoyed the lurch of this phase shift into a different space. I wanted to move with the production into the house—and then onto the land. But, in the spirit of circular completion, the performers are lured back onto the sand to gaze—beyond us, through us—to the horizon of sea and sky.

Brink Productions, Land & Sea, writer Nicki Bloom, director Chris Drummond, performers Rory Walker, Danielle Cantanzariti, Jacqy Phillips, Thomas Conroy, designer Wendy Todd, music director Hilary Kleinig, lighting designer Geoff Cobham, producer Kay Jamieson; Queen’s Theatre, Adelaide, May 12-26

TRAGICALLY, IN DECEMBER 2011, WE LOST OUR DEAR FRIEND AND COLLEAGUE ROSIE LALEVICH. HUNDREDS GATHERED TO REMEMBER AND CELEBRATE ROSIE’S PASSIONATE LIFE IN TWO BEAUTIFUL, EMOTIONAL CEREMONIES—ONE AT ROOKWOOD CREMATORIUM AND ANOTHER AS ROSIE’S ASHES WERE SCATTERED IN THE BLUE SEA AT CLOVELLY, A PLACE SHE LOVED. HERE WE SHARE SOME OF THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF ROSIE’S LIFE WITH THE GREATER PERFORMANCE COMMUNITY, MANY OF WHOM WORKED WITH HER AS WE DID AND CAME TO KNOW AND LOVE HER TOO.

Rosie was born in 1955 in Sydney. At first, with her shock of black hair, it was thought she was a boy, but very soon after it was confirmed this was a girl. And what a girl! Rosie loved telling us this story. She grew up in Haberfield, working after school behind the counter in her Macedonian-Australian parents’ fish shop. But from age 14 Rosie dreamed of becoming an actor. She even fantasised about her stage name—Rosie Candice Lalevich—inspired by the beautiful, blonde Candice Bergen. Rosie would become the dark version!

In 1975 she relocated to Adelaide and joined the Saturday Company where she proved to be an adept ensemble player from the outset, beginning with an energetic performance in Helmut Bakaitis’ epic production Carlotta & Maximillian for the 1976 Adelaide Festival. In 1977 she was engaged by Roger Chapman to appear in Care ‘n’ Control with Magpie Theatre in Education.

In 1983 Rosie graduated in Drama from the Victorian College of the Arts. During her time there, she forged many lifelong relationships both personal and creative that laid the foundations and provided the direction for a creative life that would cross many diverse theatre forms and functions. She later teamed up with fellow Magpie Val Levkowicz to co-write, produce and perform the groundbreaking Ethnic Au Go Go (Spoleto Fringe Festival and Melbourne Festival, 1987) which prefigured the boys’ Wogs Out of Work. She was one of the co-founders of the Melbourne Women’s Season for the Spoleto Fringe Festival. Later she performed in and co-devised with Nöelle Janaczewska and Khristina Totos Crossing the Water (an adaptation of Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, Performance Space, 1988) and in Tess Lyssiotis’ Forty Lounge Café (1990), the first production in the new CUB Playbox Theatre in Melbourne.

Rosie always shared her political and spiritual leanings with her audiences and the industry, to the extent of lobbying the unions about more multicultural writing and performing opportunities. To this end she secured the rights and funding to produce Anthony Minghella’s A Little Like Drowning (Belvoir Street Theatre, Sydney 1992). This production launched Teatro di Migma, a company of NESB artists she co-founded. With Literature Board support, Teatro di Migma commissioned Louis Nowra’s Miss Bosnia, which premiered at La Boite in Brisbane (1995). Set in a Bosnian refugee camp, this was a work that spoke to Rosie’s political heart. She was always strongly motivated by the need to communicate the reality of women’s lives as well as those of oppressed minorities. Works such as Eve Ensler’s Necessary Targets (Darlinghurst Theatre, 2003) reinforced Rosie’s prowess as a theatre producer. Necessary Targets, in which she also performed, toured to the CUB Malthouse (2005) and was nominated for a Sidney Myer Award for best drama. In the same year she was nominated for the Ros Bower Memorial Award.

Squeezing in a postgraduate degree in theatre at UNSW, Rosie also produced two highly successful V-Day events, the first a benefit performance of Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues to raise money to stop violence against women and girls. In 2004 she produced Sydney V Day at the Footbridge Theatre, a benefit production with over 45 performers. Another of Rosie’s many talents was the ability to bring together a varied and wonderful assortment of people. She did this in both her professional and personal life. Her passionate ideas and love of life were infectious!

In 2002 she relished playing the role of Caliban in Lee Lewis’s production of the Tempest at New Theatre. Her final and wonderful performance was in Missing the Bus to David Jones with Theatre Kantanka (2009) a work she proudly helped to develop and that dealt with another vulnerable group, the aged. Rosie dedicated her performance to her late and beloved mother, Tasa Lalevich.

Rosie Lalevich’s political integrity and creative intelligence brought us some profound theatrical works. Her great love of life was always the source of her inspiration—and, through her, of ours. We miss you Rosie.

“… when you left, a strip of reality broke
upon the stage through the very opening
through which you vanished:
Green, true green
true sunshine, true forest…” Rilke

In RealTime 107, John Bailey wrote in “Ethical ventriloquism,” his review of Strands, “Given the abundance of outstanding actors with perceived disabilities in Australia today, is it problematic to cast an abled actor in the role and risk denying employment to someone whose opportunities on the stage are already unfairly limited? I think so, with qualifications.”

He concluded: “…disability isn’t merely gestured to here; whatever the reality behind the production, its fictional world produces sincere insights into the complexities of living with a disability, while working this into a narrative that is never itself defined by that disability. It’s not patronising, and the excellence of the production itself goes some way to alleviating concern. But, for me, it’s not an entirely comfortable work.”

to john bailey, may 7

In your review of Strands you write of the number of performers with perceived disabilities in Melbourne and why it is problematic not to cast one in that role in Peta Brady’s play.

To me that is a tenuous argument, for in the same vein you would have to cast a lesbian to play a lesbian, wouldn’t you? Or a wife beater to play a wife beater? Or an amputee to play an amputee? Or a cancer sufferer by a cancer sufferer? Where do you want to stop?

The point is that an actor was chosen for that role because the production didn’t seem to me primarily to be about the level of (dis)ability or what have you, but more about the sisters and their relationship in the wake of their mother’s death. The disability of one sister is entwined within that character—yet the greater drama concerns the relationship between the two sisters.

I understand what you are saying in that it should be a done thing that opportunities are afforded artists across the spectrum, but for a small show by an emerging or developing writer—at a venue like La Mama—the main concern is trying to get the thing on in the first place, struggling to work against severely limited resources as opposed to funded companies such as Back To Back who are actually engaged with the sort of work that has a basis in the experiences and abilities of those it chooses to work with.

If Peta was going to attempt to make work with a disabled performer, could that performer pull off the role in the way it was performed? Potentially, but this would involve an entirely different set of circumstances—and most likely a different outcome. This is a contentious issue, and I welcome further discussion on it. Angus Cerini

to angus cerini, may 21

Thanks for responding to my comments on Strands. They were intended as provocation rather than criticism, precisely because I think there’s a conversation that can be had now that’s worth having, and in the past might not have been possible at all. Once upon a time the idea that a female character could be played by a woman wasn’t very popular; a hundred years ago in Melbourne there was nothing politically incorrect about white Australians playing Indigenous Australians. Things changed, and people began to explore the ways that power is bound up in these kinds of representation. I’m really interested in the lines of power and access that we deal with today.

That’s why the idea of finding the best person to play the role is never simple, because there are so many barriers that different people face well before they’re allowed a chance to audition, or make their way onto a director’s radar, or even go to see a performance themselves. Strands allowed me to think about this, because it’s very much (and very effectively) about the experience of living with a disability, for both characters. The production made me contemplate the invisible barriers these sisters face everyday, and being someone with a fair investment in theatre I inevitably situated these considerations in the broader environment of disability and the arts in Melbourne today.

Of course, my raising all of this in the context of an independent production at La Mama is deeply problematic because a show such as this faces its own barriers—it’s not the Melbourne Theatre Company or Malthouse Theatre or the like. That’s why, again, I didn’t intend to be seen to be criticising Strands itself. It’s a ridiculously difficult endeavour to mount an independent production, and I don’t think artists who are themselves trying to deal with all of these obstacles should necessarily feel responsible for changing the landscape of Australian theatre at the same time.

I guess my point was that there’s a lot of change occurring—as you note, there are companies working with artists with disabilities that are producing (what I think is) astonishing work. And that’s political. It was always political, but now we’re talking about it, which is a good thing. I want to see where that conversation leads us, and pay attention to who’s listening in.

interactive bicycle-power lighting installation in the Long Gallery, Frog Peck and Bluebottle

THE BIG WEEKEND CELEBRATIONS OF THE 35TH YEAR OF OPERATION FOR SALAMANCA ARTS CENTRE OFFERED A POTENTIAL OVERLOAD OF EXPERIENCES. THE EVENT WAS TRULY A HYDRA; ONE COULD BE TREATED TO A WONDERFUL PARADE-PAGEANT THAT TRUNCATED 35 YEARS INTO A PERFORMANCE BY EVENT PRODUCER IAN PIDD, OR TO A VERY OBNOXIOUS BUT EXCITING ANTI-ART PROTEST BY THE WELCOME PARTY, WHICH ALSO DUG INTO THE HISTORY OF THE BUILDING THAT NOW HOUSES THE ARTS CENTRE, OR YOU COULD READ LETTERS FROM HOBART EX-PATS EXPLAINING WHY THEY NO LONGER LIVE IN THE PLACE.

The idea that somehow, somewhere, the piss was pretty actively being taken loomed large over the events in and around the centre on the final weekend of March. It was ostensibly an anniversary, and while it qualifies as a milestone, who celebrates a 35th? Still, it had been five years since the last celebratory shindig, Dream Masons, and it did seem about time for a different kind of party and this is what Hobart got: a series of events that seemed to wish to quibble with the notion of what an event in an art centre might be.

The Big Weekend also aimed to give the Arts Centre something of an overhaul, to turn it inside out and have a good look at its innards and secret bits. Being a heritage building and a warehouse has given the actual structure a design that seems chaotic at worst and can charitably be described as eccentric—there are stairs and corridors and tiny rooms and quite enormous spaces all hidden away around corners and in roofs. The well-known spots, like the Peacock Theatre, The Long Gallery and the Courtyard where musicians busk every Friday evening (elaborate busking indeed, but busking it is) are familiar to all and were used but avoided: the thrills and intrigue were to be found elsewhere.

Friday night launched proceedings with a big mob of bands playing up and down and around Kelly’s Steps. The bands on the steps squeezed into the corner as the usual slightly bemused Salamanca diners and drinkers wandered past. The bands further up, in a garden, rocked right on with people risking life and limb, bouncing off the sandstone. No harm was done to flesh or masonry although a few got minor neck injuries from watching bands two storeys above Kelly’s Garden for too long, but this didn’t deter the revelling.

Salamanca Market, itself an institution that has developed along with the Arts Centre, has, to all and sundry, grown somewhat staid: there are still, and will always be, great stalls there, but there are a few too many generic stalls selling ‘World’s Best Dad’ T-shirts. The opportunity this afforded for satire was not missed by the Big Weekend crew: phantom stalls appeared, mostly created by artist Elizabeth Woods. These hybrid works were almost the pick of the entire event: one stall sold sample bags of Genuine Tasmanian Dirt, with proper labels, priced according to rarity. You could pick up a precious handful of red-brown grit from the legendary Queenstown gravel footy oval. Across the way was the tap water stall—again, professionally labelled and presented. Tap Water from more affluent Hobart suburbs cost extra, and given the looming introduction of water meters—something very new in Hobart—the comment could not have been better timed. Capping it was a carefully labelled “Useless Object” stall with exactly the sort of packaging one encounters in a great many craft shops the country over. The straight-faced presentation carried it off, and gossip suggests ‘regular’ stall holders were annoyed indeed. Good work Elizabeth Woods.

Saturday evening presented the focus event of the weekend, Space Invaders. There were performances all through the centre, far too many for any one person to take in, which had the effect of creating enigmas and excited gossip. Some queued with determination to ride Tristan Stoward’s bicycle around the Long Gallery space in the dark (the bike had a light, powered by effort—the harder you pedalled, the more it glowed). Others concentrated on seeing various burlesque acts. You could get lost in the rather wonderful John Bowling Memorial 70s Techno room. This was a great spot, filled with artefacts like really old, nostalgia inducing gaming machines, vinyl players made of that dreadful fake wood veneer stuff and a slide project, which produced a cascade of historical images from the Arts Centre’s archives. Almost unnoticed throughout the evening were tiny touches that noted what had been going on in this diverse space for the last 35 years. There was a lot to see and a lot to miss, but this was the real achievement of the event: it was truly a chance to choose your own adventure.

A subtle presentation, The Occupant by Briony Kidd and Jane Longhurst, was a standout. A small audience was led deep into a storage area and towards an encounter with—well, it’s hard to say, but the character in question (expertly created by Longhurst) appeared to be an elderly bag lady living amidst hoarded items deep within a closet. Sinister and yet harmless, this small performance was perfectly formed, quiet, intense and very memorable—creepy but not too seriously.

Also worth mentioning is the exuberant Luke George. Clad in vibrant orange, he emerged from beneath a vast pile of beanbags in the Salamanca Arts Centre Courtyard, dancing with vacuum cleaners and leading the audience in a sun worshipping all-in dance routine. This bold experimental dancer takes quite bizarre work to the masses with a bravery that could be confronting if it wasn’t so funny. There’s a lot to say about what Roberts does, but the key to his Big Weekend moment was his ability to hold a crowd in what was a chaotic mess made of history, rumour and a bit of satire. If the point was to invite people to look at the building itself and see its potential, the Big Weekend was a success; but if you just wanted a fun event filled with some really odd and thrilling moments, you could have that too. Never has the cliché “something for everyone” been quite so well realised, and subverted.something wild for everyone

Salamanca Arts Centre: SAC35—The Big Weekend, programmers Martyn Coutts, Ian Pidd, Sam Routledge; Hobart, March 30-April 1

Le Quattro Volte, DVD

Greatly admired in the Adelaide and Sydney Film Festivals, Michelangelo Frammartino’s Le Quattro Volte (The Four Times; 2010) is “a sublime fiction that does away with language and conventional plotting, tracking the mysterious transmission of a soul from nature to man to domesticated animal to tree and—via ritual and artful rural manufacture—to fire, smoke and charcoal. All of this is achieved without any sense of religiosity (a seasonal church pageant is quite comical if juxtaposed with a moment of poignancy) and constantly surprises with its unpredictability and glorious cinematography. We’ll certainly now regard goats in a different light, observed here with the same acuity usually given human subjects.” RT102

ZONA: A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room

A remarkable book about the film experience, ZONA is UK writer Geoff Dyer’s acclaimed personal account of his relationship with Andrei Tarkovsky’s classic film Stalker. As Dyer recounts the events of the film and evokes its imagery, he spins a web of rich associations with other films, the nature of cinema-going, growing up, his girlfriends, stories about the making of Stalker, the role of boredom in film, Tarkovskian suspense and much else. It’s also very funny, hypercritical of other people’s favourite films (including Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia) and informed by vast cultural knowledge. As Tom Redwood writes in this edition, “What Dyer has offered by piggybacking on a masterpiece is an extension of Tarkovsky’s artistic project, a quite literal fulfilment of the creative contract Tarkovsky makes with his (devoted) viewers whereby the artist obliges the audience to…think on, further than has been stated…[putting] the audience on a par with the artist” (see review). ZONA is an entertaining provocation.

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“WHAT IS A REVELATION?” J DARK ASKS ME. “A DOOR OPENS IN FRONT OF YOU AND YOU HAVE TO GO THROUGH IT, THERE IS NO OTHER WAY TO MOVE FORWARD.” “WHAT DOES IT FEEL LIKE?” “A WEIGHT BEING TAKEN OFF YOUR SHOULDERS.” “WHAT IS THE TEMPERATURE AT YOUR SHOULDERS?” “THEY ARE COOL.” “AND COLOUR?” “BLUE.”

I was anxious about attending this show. In high-stress, intimate situations, we tend to rely on our social masks. This is one-on-one, site-specific participatory performance aimed at de-activating these masks. With carefully worded, probing questions J Dark asks us to reveal the warmth under our facades. Like a matryoshka doll, layer after layer is yielded.

After scheduling an appointment with J Dark you receive a calling card and an SMS giving you directions to a venue. It begins to feel like something between a spy drop-off and a clinical appointment; a dark laneway leads to a waiting room with a yellow envelope with a form to fill out. J Dark arrives and you travel by lift to another floor.

Performer Melanie Jame Walsh is a confident and reassuring conductor; this is her second turn as J Dark, having performed at Sydney’s Underbelly Festival last year. There’s nobody better to lead you down the rabbit hole, because the night becomes surreal and unflinchingly personal. Wearing a dark pantsuit, J Dark’s voice is thoughtful and affected as she asks you questions like, “Do you have something to hold you up? Is it a system or a structure?” She steers conversation along this almost psychoanalytic line of questioning.

This is art as therapy and it’s intimate and risky, almost like a first date. We kneel at a mirror and she asks me to talk about my face while she takes off her ‘sexy librarian’ glasses and bobbed wig. Losing her earlier affected tone, she asks me whether she has changed. The clothing is symbolic of our own layers and personas. A table of hats offers a chance for me to find a costume for a newly discovered persona. Similarly, J Dark’s gradual disrobing down to a slip reflects the inner world we are heading into.

Walking through corridors, doors and up staircases we go both deeper into the strange Victorian fun-house depths of Arts House, as well as into the crucial question—what makes us unique? Everything is up for analysis; beliefs and desires are turned over and need to be backed up. I choose a matryoshka doll from an array of displayed objects on a hallway table. It seems an apt metaphor, as does my earlier admission that a revelation is like walking through a door. Just how much of this performance did I direct?

By the end of 50 minutes, unguarded, I lie down on a makeshift bed in an attic and sing an 18th century Russian lullaby to a stranger. J Dark returns the favour and croons more adeptly. Resisting her enigmatic charisma and kindness is almost impossible; we relish the chance to reveal ourselves.

An appointment with J Dark, performer, writer, creator Melanie Jame Walsh, director, writer, dramaturg Katerina Kokkinos-Kennedy, Triage live art collective in association with Savage Amusement, Arts House, Melbourne, April 18-May 6

A WONDERLAND USUALLY DESCRIBES A PLACE, REAL OR IMAGINARY, WHERE CURIOUS, SOMETIMES BEAUTIFUL THINGS HAPPEN. LEWIS CARROLL’S ALICE STORIES ARE THE CLASSICS OF A GENRE CHARACTERISED BY STRANGE JOURNEYS SHIFTING FROM THE REAL TO THE IMAGINARY, JUMPING ACROSS TIME AND DISPLAYING NOT A LITTLE NONSENSE.

Lismore railway station, the site for NORPA’s new collaboratively devised production Railway Wonderland is a very real place. Abandoned in 2004, a fading icon from another time, the station now sits idle except for a bus that drops by to ferry commuters onto the Sydney-Brisbane line in another town.

Approaching the station, there is a buzz. The audience is ushered across a walkway to seating above the rails. Looking back to the platform is like viewing the scene from a passing train. Through large windows, the waiting room is lit for the arrival of three present-day characters, there to catch the bus. Johnny Nasser’s George, a laid-back, 30-something hippie, is suitably familiar; so too, is Neridah Waters’ loud yet frail teen runaway Kelsie. Then there is Leonard, whose compulsive behaviours become a clever comic expository device, performed with studied physicality by Phillip Blackman. Later, they will be joined by George (Jo Kennedy), the not-so-talented winner of a local karaoke competition on his way to compete in Australia’s Got Talent. The action opens with Kelsie on her mobile anxiously searching for her boyfriend who never arrives. When Kelsie hangs up, a whistle blows and the lights cross-fade to reveal the spectral Ana, an old Italian woman dressed completely in white, sitting outside on the platform away from the rest. It is at this point that the station morphs and our wonderland journey begins.

Over the next 80 minutes, we are treated to a curious montage of incident, convention and style. Actors double roles. Their doubles sometimes seem to echo the experience of their contemporary characters. The performance jumps frenetically from comedy to melodrama, from song and dance to choreographed movement. Characterisation is broad, the tone irreverent. Several sequences are enacted as silent film; in others, romantic scenes from Hollywood’s golden years or Vietnam War footage form projected backdrops for the action. There are many magical moments. Two of my favourites: a tiny film projected on a suitcase and the metamorphosis of a luggage trolley into a steam train using snare drum and guitar. Present and past overlap in swiftly moving vignettes, incident piles on incident with arrivals and departures as the characters’ stories are revealed. At times, the shifts are almost anarchic; like Alice, sometimes we might wonder just where we are.

It is Ana who pulls together these disparate elements. A proxy bride of 16, she emigrated to Lismore in the 1940s; an epic journey to a hard place. Now Ana waits for a train to take her back home. We know the train will not come. Is she mad? Or is she, as her antique costume suggests, a spirit? Ironically, it is through Ana’s eyes that the action makes sense. Played with humour and verve by Katia Molino, Ana is central to this wonderland. She is our white rabbit. We feel her disappointment with her new husband. We see her estrangement from her son who moved away after returning from Vietnam. She transports us across time with the aid of a similarly costumed choir whose song medleys frame different eras. Her journey evokes a panorama from the romantic age of steam through to the present with Vietnam (and Nimbin’s infamous Aquarius Festival) as the turning point. It is to Ana the other characters reveal their secrets: Kelsie stole money from her mother for the tickets, George is gay but hasn’t come out to his mum, and Garry hasn’t seen his daughter for five years. Leonard has no secrets. When Leonard reveals Ana has escaped a nearby nursing home, that she often comes to the station to wait for the train that will not come, we are brought back to the pathos of a prosaic present. Ana and the abandoned station become one, their fates intertwined in the inevitability of time.

Despite the at times slapstick humour, the alienation of the migrant experience is at the heart of Railway Wonderland. I was reminded of writer and co-devisor Janis Balodis’ play Too Young for Ghosts (1985). In this light all the characters are like migrants. Railway Wonderland began its gestation two years ago with the sourcing of community stories about Lismore railway station. Since then it has undergone extensive collaborative development. Director Julian Louis and everyone involved have fashioned a memorable piece of community theatre, a celebration of the site itself and the passing of a bygone era.

NORPA: Railway Wonderland, concept, direction Julian Louis, devisor, writer Janis Balodis, devisors, performers, Philip Blackman, Katia Molino, Johnny Nasser, Jo Turner, Neridah Waters, composer, musical director Michael Askill, musician Shenton Gregory, choreographer Emma Saunders, designer William Kutana, lighting designer Richard Morrod, video designer Salvador Castro, dramaturg Deborah Pollard, creative producer Marisa Snow, NORPA Generator Creative Development Program; the former Lismore Railway Station, NSW, March 27-31

I’D BEEN TEACHING STEPHEN SEWELL’S PLAY MYTH, PROPAGANDA AND DISASTER…EARLIER IN THE DAY TO A BRIGHT BUNCH OF DRAMA STUDENTS AND THE LIVELY DISCUSSIONS WE’D HAD ABOUT TOPIC, THEME AND APPROACH WERE STILL WHIRRING AROUND MY BRAIN AS I SAT IN THE AUDIENCE FOR RICK VIEDE’S A HOAX THAT NIGHT.

The students loved the fearlessness and muscularity of Sewell’s writing; his hyperbolic depiction of post 9-11 American paranoia delighted them. They admired the way he hit on the nation’s raw nerve at a sensitive time, and set upon it with a dental drill and ultrasonic scaler. No anaesthetic involved. The American exchange student didn’t appreciate Sewell’s handiwork. She found it arbitrary and borderline negligent.

a hoax

There’s a recklessness to Rick Viede’s writing—one punter described it as unapologetic—that I suspect will elicit similar responses from audiences; there are raw nerves tapped upon here that individuals with unique subject positions in relation to the material will not find easy to stomach. They may need to be warned in advance.

A Hoax is a farce that lampoons some of the most egregious recent literary scandals of authorship identity. Ant Dooley (Glenn Hazeldine) has written a ‘memoir’ about surviving childhood sexual abuse. His survivor though, the ‘I’ in his memoir, is an Aboriginal girl named Currah. Ant conscripts Miri Smith (Shari Sebbens) to assume Currah’s identity. Miri is initially tempted by the money and then seduced by the attention. She disturbs a hornet’s nest when she meets would-be publishing and publicity team Ronnie Lowe (Sally McKenzie) and Tyrelle Parks (Charles Allen). She hasn’t actually read the memoir all the way to the end. When they press her for salacious details about what heinous events took place ‘in the cellar,’ Miri/Currah bluffs and feints. She’s clueless. She eludes—and alludes—as counter-defence. She shrugs in a ‘no-biggy’ kind of way and simply states: “I enjoyed it.” The publicists are appalled—and rapt. The farce ensues from there.

In a post-South Park, post-Family Guy (post-feminist, post-ideological) world, anarchy trumps taste every time. This is a play that would struggle to find an educated audience in the 1990s. It may still struggle in Melbourne. And yet, it’s not gratuitous. The writing has confidence and nuance; the characters are two-dimensional stock farce functionaries, but delightfully so. This is a study of greed, narcissism and disposable culture. An intriguing scene in the second half when a broken and disillusioned Tyrelle violently forces personal accountability from the others dog-legs the piece out of played-for-laughs comedy and probes a little deeper. There may not be redemption here, but there is at least some momentary self-scrutiny.

Lee Lewis’s direction controls the tone and dances adroitly around the ethical dilemma at the heart of the drama: Jason Glenwright’s sharp lighting and Renee Mulder’s pristine white hotel room set sterilise the dis-ease affecting these self-seeking characters; Steve Toulmin’s attractive AV projections of plusher and plusher hotel decors chart the characters’ descent into avarice. This is a tight and feisty production that may ultimately be more entertaining than incendiary and perhaps less scandalous than the scandals that inspired it. It’s terrific theatre.

making the green one red: virtual macbeth

Across the stark QUT Creative Precinct courtyard (where the ghosts of military drills and assembly are never far away) is The Block gallery space. The precinct wears the haunting of its barracks origins lightly. This is somewhat apt for a housing of Kerreen Ely-Harper and Andrew Burrell’s exhibition/installation of a Virtual Macbeth piece, Making the Green One Red. It is also fitting that the piece is located adjacent to two theatre spaces (La Boite’s Roundhouse and QUT’s experimental Loft space). It references—obviously—Shakepeare’s original text; indeed, it spins co-existently off Macbeth’s axis. The question I had in my mind as I entered and explored mixed reality’s digital media homage to the parent text was whether the piece stood on its own feet, or needed the viewer’s familiarity with the play in order to generate meaning. There isn’t a simple answer to this question.

Ely-Harper and Burrell explain the title and the decision to use the witches’ ethereal inner world—their psyche, you could say—to scaffold the piece. The title comes from the point in the text where Macbeth has just killed Duncan and the witches’ prophecy is manifesting as reality: “The vast green waters of the ocean are turned to blood in a process that should be one of cleansing and washing away” (program notes). Instead the green water turns red with blood. For Ely-Harper and Burrell, this is an image not only of transformation, but of transubstantiation. Matter changes form as a result of action and belief. Guilt infects Macbeth and he enters a kind of psychotic state that the witches have manipulated.

Entering Virtual Macbeth is akin to entering this psychic state/world. It is also a little like entering the Haunted House or the House of Mirrors at an amusement park. There is a jouissance of anticipation involved in taking this step into the darkness; anything might happen as the soundscape immerses you (echoed strains of…is it Natalie Cole’s “Unforgettable”?; disjointed phrases of witch-speak; an occasional frightening explosion) and the underworld tour begins. The viewer walks through a series of chambers, each housing a digital media display that evokes Macbeth’s fate. The first is a data projection of the witches’ cauldron on the floor. We see symbols (a crown, a chalice) that conjure Macbeth. The next is the Hall of Psychological Enlightenment—my favourite. A video-recorded projection of a psychologist provides Freudian and Jungian therapy for Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. In other rooms there are recitations of text emanating from a golden light on an empty plinth (The Room of Golden Opinions) or eerie evocations of nightmare as a storm builds and an owl hoots in a lurid red room (the Chamber of Blood). Several of the installations are sound or movement-activated. Some installations are more effective and comprehensible than others (the videoed sequences of actors’ performances didn’t do much for me in this context), but the cumulative effect is tantalising.

The Australia Council provided substantial support for this enigmatic project as part of its digital strategy; it is a well-considered and complex digital media exhibition, ultimately as ephemeral as a theatrical performance. It packs up and moves on to another venue in another city. Does it stand alone? Perhaps not. It would make for compelling foyer art, though; and I would love to enter a live performance of the parent text through an enigmatic portal like this.

A Hoax by Rick Viede. La Boite and Griffin Theatre Company co-production. Brisbane, May 5-26, Sydney July 20-Sept 1; Making the Green One Red, Virtual Macbeth, Kerreen Ely-Harper and Andrew Burrell, mixed reality, The Block Gallery, QUT, Brisbane, April 24 – May 5

THERE ARE MANY AVENUES VIA WHICH TO LOOK AT, LISTEN TO AND ENGAGE WITH THE BOX, THE LATEST PRODUCTION BY CHAMBERMADE OPERA AS PART OF THEIR LIVING ROOM SERIES. IT IS NOT SIMPLY A PIECE OF MUSIC THEATRE IN AN INTIMATE SETTING—THE SPACE IS A CENTRAL COMPONENT OF THE COMPOSITION. THIS WORK PULLS ATTENTION TO THE SOUND OF THE ROOM, EXPLORING RESONANT SURFACES AND ACOUSTIC QUIRKS.

This living room is situated in one of the leafier parts of Kew, in a house above the Yarra River, hovering among the treetops. Entering, we are led down a staircase to find our seats covered in white sheets, facing a curved glass wall of a window looking out into the trees, a suspended sheet to our left and a curious box-like structure on legs.

Throughout The Box there is a fine balance between the content of the work and the space in which it is situated. The trees in the window are more than a backdrop—they bring an aliveness to the work. There is a stark reality in the fact that we are sitting in someone’s home, yet as soprano Deborah Kayser moves about the area outside, cleaning various surfaces with a white cloth and singing small birdcalls, her gestures are obviously performative. There is a barely audible tam tam roll coming from somewhere inside the house and faint, pulsating scratching sound coming from inside the box.

As we become aware of these three sounds, we also become attuned to the resonant and reflective surfaces within the space. These somehow become clearer in contrast to Kayser’s voice, heard through the glass. We dwell within this simple soundscape for an extended duration, as the sounds blend and draw out the subtler aspects of the space. Once Kayser has entered the room she recites fragments of Willoh S Weiland’s highly visual text, which seems to speak directly to the surrounding space. The lengthy silences between these fragments of text hold our attention within the room.

We cannot help but wonder; what is the relationship between this woman and that box? She speaks, sings wordless sounds to it and the box responds. It is more than a structure within a building—it is a kind of creature. Acousmatic wooden scratching develops and morphs with a surprisingly versatile range of timbre. Inside the box, percussionists Matthias Schack-Arnott and Leah Scholes scratch and rub its interior surfaces with various objects. The repetitive back-and-forth motion of the scratching is reminiscent of electronic tape delay; however what is most salient about this sound is its tactility. The performers remain hidden from view throughout the performance, allowing the box to retain its mysterious character.

The relationship between the woman and the box is never revealed. It is impossible to know what she perceives it to be. This incomplete narrative thread is only one of several aspects of a composition woven through the space we engage with not only visually but sonically. Towards the end of the performance, Kayser moves to the balcony (hidden from view) above the audience to perform a duet with percussionist Eugene Ughetti on woodblocks. Instead of exploring musical gestures, this duet draws focus to the way that sounds are reflected from the river and the environment outside.

No single aspect of this performance dominates the space in which it is performed. All three percussionists remain hidden from view throughout. The sounds they produce all find ways to integrate with the space and the unfolding narrative. The Box is a work of extreme subtlety that blurs the line between living space and performance space. Having watched the sun set in the course of the performance, we are left in a room that is almost dark as the woman departs. Although, for me at least, the work seemed to have reached an obvious end, there was an extended period in which we lingered between the fantasy of performance and the reality of the surrounding living room.

Chambermade Opera, The Box, concept, music, space, object Fritz Hauser with Boa Baumann, libretto Willoh S Weiland, soprano Deborah Kayser, percussion Eugene Ughetti, Matthias Schack-Arnott, Leah Scholes; private residence, Kew, Melbourne, March 17-24

FOR ITS 13TH MANIFESTATION THE ANNUAL SOUND AND MUSIC FESTIVAL LIQUID ARCHITECTURE REVEALS A SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT APPROACH TO PROGRAMMING. ARTISTIC DIRECTOR NAT BATES HAS TAKEN A BACK SEAT WHILE GUEST CURATORS PHILIP SAMARTZIS AND LAWRENCE ENGLISH HAVE CRAFTED A PROGRAM OF CONCERTS, EXHIBITIONS AND TALKS FOCUSSING ON THE ANTARCTIC.

Over the last decade a range of opportunities has opened for artists to visit the great polar regions, north and south, exploring these unique, treacherous and increasingly endangered environments. (See Matthew Lorenzon’s coverage of Alice Gile’s project for harp, voice and electronics, Alice in the Antarctic, RT104; and Urszula Dawkins on her experiences as part of The Arctic Circle international arts/science collaborative residency Svalbard, Norway, RT100). In the spirit of these initiatives Liquid Architecture’s Antarctic Convergence brings together a selection of sound, video and installation works drawing inspiration from the region.

Both Melbourne and Brisbane legs of the festival will include an exhibition component with core artists including international guests Chris Watson (UK), Werner Dafeldecker (Austria) and Andrea Juan (Argentina) along with locals—audiovisual artist Scott Morrison, installation artist David Burrows and the curators. In Melbourne, New Zealand musician Phil Dadson will also perform in the gallery.

Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth are treated to two multi-speaker concerts. In concert One, Robin Fox will present his most recent work, Zero Crossing, developed during a residency at Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart utilising the data from wave-rider buoys in the Southern Ocean to create an immersive audio-visual experience. US Sound designer and naturalist Douglas Quinn makes up the other half of the bill with accompanying video by French artist Anne Colomes. Concert Two offers Philip Samartzis and the Monolith Project which brings together Lawrence English and Werner Dafeldecker with visuals by Scott Morrison.

The Monolith project will also feature as part of the National Film and Sound Archives’ The Longest Night (June 22) which celebrates the centenary of Douglas Mawson’s Antarctic expedition. On the same night, Arc Cinema will feature The Thing From Another World (1951) and other films from the archive based around the polar topic. Extreme Film and Sound: Stories from Antarctica will be on display in NFSA Foyer gallery until August. RT

Liquid Architecture 13, Antarctic Convergence, Perth (June 25), Bendigo (June 27), Melbourne (June 28-July 14), Sydney (July 3), Brisbane (July 4-22); http://www.liquidarchitecture.org.au/; National Film and Sound Archive, The Longest Night, Arc Cinema Canberra, June 22; Extreme Film and Sound: Stories from Antarctica, NFSA Foyer Gallery, Canberra; until August; http://www.nfsa.gov.au/calendar/event/3522-longest-night-nfsa/

JOHN CAGE, MUSHROOM LOVER AND CULTURE HERO EXTRAORDINAIRE. BY ALL ACCOUNTS A REALLY NICE GUY. AND, TO CELEBRATE THE CENTENARY OF HIS BIRTH, CLOCKED OUT ASSEMBLED THREE NIGHTS OF CONCERTS IN BRISBANE.

Before each concert is an hour or so of Cage’s Musicircus, with artists spread throughout the space to perform more or less disconnected art-like actions. No reflection on the performers, but for me these “Happenings” are a bit long in the tooth. The moment for some of Cage’s work has gone—particularly for the pieces that focus on the presentation of uncorrelated (random) events. Cage became heavily influenced by Zen Buddhism, and “with our thoughts we make the world” fitted well with someone born into the glory days of US hegemony and a culture of hyper-confident individualism. For Cage the world was “teeming,” buzzingly random, and an individual could impose upon that world whatever structure they wanted. Cage’s work was then directed to producing an environment of randomised events that could be given structure (meaning) through individual contemplative attention.

Biology, though, shows us that our sensory, emotional and cognitive systems are coupled to a highly structured world with meaning derived from the adaptive value of that coupling. It seems that, even after his famous ‘silent’ 4’33” encouraged people to hear the world without addition, Cage continued to compose works for the concert hall that he felt—mistakenly as it turned out—reflected the sounds and dynamics of the world. The challenge of listening deeply to the actual world as a compositional strategy would later be taken up en masse with the advent of cheap recording equipment and the expansion of the, now quite large, field recording movement.

Decibel’s thoughtful performance of the eight Variations, written between 1958 and 1968, demonstrates the limitations of the randomisation strategies Cage used. The Variations focus on chance in compositional process, performer choice and audible output, and illustrate Cage’s philosophical commitments to removing personal taste from his work—to let sounds ‘speak for themselves.’ Using a range of graphical constructs, the scores have instructions like “For any number of players and any sound producing means.” The results are generally not that interesting to listen to. The exception for me is Variation 4—where a chart laid over a map of the venue sends performers off to various parts of the stage and beyond. Very sparse in execution, this piece articulates space through its acoustical properties. We hear the auditorium in new ways; we become more in-the-world than in a model of the world (and hence apart). Harking back to biology, using sound to indicate spatial structure and the properties of the objects that compose it is highly adaptive—the emotional valence of the spatialised sound flows naturally from the coupling of our sensory apparatus and properties of the world that are useful to us as animals within that world.

More engaging is the superb second night performance by Swedish percussionists, Kroumata. They begin with Cage’s Radio Music from the mid 50s: played quiet, spread either side of the stage for some nice call and response. Using the current radio channels—rather than trying to recreate a 50s radio program as Cage would have heard—this piece nicely illustrates Cage’s interest in composing as the provision of specific containers for constrained events. Timing, duration and content domain (radio sounds) are determined, but the specific instant of the radio sound is undetermined. Degrees of chance.

The next piece, Music for Carillon, was also scored within a ‘container’ paradigm—with rectangles as containers of points (notes)—the horizontal axis for time, vertical for pitch. It does not really matter that Cage used an elaborate system of folding and cutting paper to find a process of randomisation to generate the score—the score is quite explicit and determined as far as performance goes. And the performance (on glockenspiels) is delicate and lovely—spread across the space like rain on a canopy of bells.

Again we have delicate and lovely for the next work, Amores 2, perhaps the highlight of the festival. Softest hands on the drum skins, subtle shakes of seed pods, great ensemble work with short riffs and rhythmic fragments passing between the players to give each phrase tremendous subtlety (parts remind me of Webern’s short, shared fragments). Cage was an absolute master at the orchestration of sound—in his development of new instruments such as the prepared piano, in his stacking of different sounds and in his understanding of movement between sounds.

Another illustration of the mix between determinism and chance, Williams Mix, has a huge score that provides a precise one-to-one mapping from score to lengths of audio tape. But the contents of the tape segments are suggested rather than locked in. On the first night we hear both the original recording and a new version by Werner Dafeldecker and Valerio Tricoli. The original is not that long, a looney-tunes cartoon frenzy. The new version is much longer—much closer to the intentions of score, Tricoli claims. Sounds are less recognisable—more abstract—although still with the feel of early tape music. Far too loud (thank you free earplugs). But if you use earplugs you don’t hear the piece as intended. And if you go without earplugs then your hearing is damaged and you don’t get to hear anyone else’s music with the same acuity. Ever again. Physically damaging volumes are a longstanding bugbear of mine.

Of the remaining pieces, Lawrence English and Scott Morrison’s reworking of Cage’s final film, One11, is better than the original. Streaming white noise, rough white surfaces, hinted figures, venetian blinds blurred into gritty lozenges of light, the improvised soundtrack starts like a David Lynch/Alan Splet combo for wheezing water heater and ostinato piano. Sounds to let you know there’s something you don’t want to know.

Though my view is that Cage’s later works often fail as music to be listened to, his ideas have been enormously influential. And the earlier works are truly beautiful. Clocked Out—in a tour de force of funding aggregation that deserves applause in itself—have presented an excellent and important festival that, quite amazingly, covered the full scope of one of music’s greatest innovators.

The Cage in Us, presented by Clocked Out, performers Valerio Tricoli (Italy) and Werner Dafeldecker (Germany), Kroumata Percussion, Decibel, Rebecca Cunningham, Lawrence English, Joel Stern, Erik Griswold, Vanessa Tomlinson, Ba Da Boom, the QCGU New Music Ensemble. The Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, Brisbane, April 12-14

A WIDE ARC OF BLOOD SPATTERS ACROSS A WINDOW; IT IS BLUE—THE BLOOD LITERALLY AND METAPHORICALLY OF THE OFFICER WHO, IN DESPAIR AT HIS LOSS OF POWER IN A PENAL COLONY, HAS SUBJECTED HIMSELF TO AN EXECUTION DEVICE THAT, OVER 12 HOURS, IN A TORTUROUS TATTOOING, NEEDLING DEEPER AND DEEPER INTO HIS SKIN, SPELLS OUT THE COMMANDMENT A CRIMINAL HAS BROKEN.

Believing that at the moment of death the criminal achieves transcendent self-awareness, The Officer desires it for himself, but, its maintenance underfunded by a new commandant, the machine brutally malfunctions.

For The Officer, the power of one body, authority, over another is justice enough—the criminal need not know his offence (until the moment of death) or have the right to defence. As ever, Kafka (even if this is denied by those who regard him simply as a metaphysician) is prescient—fascism was to be supremely exercised by physical force—and historically alert. Although the Enlightenment tide began to turn against torture and violent execution in the 18th century, these contested punishments persisted, not least in European colonies in the 19th and 20th centuries, and into our own. In Kafka’s story, the setting is a penal colony in the tropics, the sweat and grit as palpable as the ugly specifics of the machine and cruelties more explicit than in Philip Glass’ opera.

However, in editing the story and paring back detail, composer Glass and librettist Rudolph Wurlitzer have provided the opportunity for directors to circumvent the demands of too many specifics, including historical placement, without necessarily reducing the potential for horror. The machine need not appear, the execution need not be seen—the anxiety and shock can be expressed principally in words and the haunting pulse of Glass’ score. Glass’ affinity is, after all, with Baroque opera rather than the denser theatricality of its 19th century successor.

Director Imara Savage and designer Michael Hankin make the most of this opportunity, filling the width of the stage with a long, shallow, starkly white room with vertical blinds at the back. These are later half-opened to reveal what appears to be an identical room behind glass, housing the implement of execution, which remains hidden and therefore all the more anxiety-inducing. The sheer lack of identity of the rooms is nightmarishly, if predictably Kafka-esque. A lone water cooler stands to one side, its contents ominously turning blue shortly before the execution device fails. A screen descends on which The Officer shows The Visitor (the Explorer in Kafka’s tale) the machine; the images are not of a concocted device, but made up of old black and white film footage of 20th century industrial machinery—spinning cogs and lathes counterpointing Glass’ insistent pulse—and worrying scientific implements of unknown purpose. Like the Officer’s uniform, appearing to be from the 1940s or 50s, they suggest a not too distant past that still lingers, while The Visitor is in modern dress.

The Visitor at first seems to be the character with whom we’ll identify. Like us, he’s a stranger to the penal colony. He’s keen to maintain an emotional remove, to simply be an observer. But The Officer treats him as confidant, fascinating and finally repelling The Visitor with his account of the machine and its torments and his attempts to inveigle his guest into suppressing any opposition to the device. That The Visitor takes so long to express his concern distances us from him, despite our understanding of his unenviable position; at the very same time we fully grasp the mania that inhabits The Officer and feel as helpless as The Visitor. The reversal, when it comes, the Officer substituting himself for the Condemned Man, is a shocking climax to a chilling tale.

Director Savage’s direction is as effectively straightforward as the lucid libretto which is delivered with clarity and power by tenor Pascal Hetherington (The Visitor) and baritone Paul Goodwin-Groen (The Officer). Hetherington conveys detachment, curiosity, then horror and panic without embellishing The Visitor with any too distinctive character traits, underlining the man’s attempts to keep his distance, while Goodwin-Groen seizes the opportunity to reveal a slide from apparent rationality into neurosis and then self-destructive psychosis—a frightening portrait of the impact of quasi-religious, self-centred ideology, utterly devoid of empathy.

The singers met the challenging score boldly, as did the offstage conductor and string quintet, sustaining the music’s complex oscillations between driving motifs and reflective decelerations. There are moments in Glass’ score that offer director and performers little in the way of dramatic impulse (for example, when The Officer is installing himself, out of our view, in the execution device). Elsewhere this was, however, an issue of direction: the performers had little to do in some passages, appearing occasionally awkward or aimlessly repetitive in their movement. Likewise the opportunity to exploit the design space was not always taken. As numerous directors have shown in recent decades, Baroque opera, and oratorios even, offer great opportunities for dramatic realisation without it becoming superfluous. The same should apply to In the Penal Colony. Nonetheless the production maintained its sense of suspense, horror and ethical unease.

I was impressed by the Sydney Chamber Opera’s production of In the Penal Colony, for its intimacy of scale (so rare for opera in this city), excellent design, thematic conviction, fine performances and offering the hitherto unlikely opportunity to see this work. This is a company to watch.

Sydney Chamber Opera’s next production is a double bill, Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale and UK composer George Benjamin and librettist Martin Crimp’s Into the Little Hill, with conductor David Stanhope, director Sarah Giles and performers Halcyon at Carriageworks, Sydney, July 24-28. Crimp wrote the plays The Country and The City and created the English version of Botho Strauss’ Gross und Klein (Big and Little Scenes) for Sydney Theatre Company. If you’re interested in hearing In the Penal Colony, after touring the UK with their production in 2010, Music Theatre Wales has released a CD of In the Penal Colony on the Orange Mountain Music label.

Sydney Chamber Opera, In the Penal Colony, composer Philip Glass, libretto Randolph Wurlitzer, performers Pascal Hetherington, Paul Goodwin-Groen, Anthony Hunt, Patrick George, conductor Huw Belling, director Imara Savage, set, costume design Michael Hankin, lighting, AV Verity Hampson, string quintet Doretta Balkizas, Madelaine Slaughter, James Munro, Mee Na Lojewski, Rhiannon Oakhill; Parade Theatre, NIDA, April 7-14; http://sydneychamberopera.com

photo Jennifer Leahy, Silversalt Photography, image courtesy the artist and Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne

STANDING OUTSIDE MICHAELA GLEAVE’S WEATHER-INSPIRED INSTALLATION, OUR FROZEN MOMENT, I’M HOLDING THE POSTCARD ADVERTISING PERFORMANCE SPACE’S DIMENSION CROSSING SEASON IN MY HAND. PRINTED ONTO THE CARD IS A PHOTOGRAPH SHOWING TWO ORDINARY GARDEN SHRUBS AND A TIMBER LATTICE FENCE BATHED IN A LUMINOUS, ALMOST SPECTRAL, WHITE GLOW.

The image captures a natural phenomenon that mostly goes unnoticed, a fogbow, caused by light hitting tiny water droplets of fog producing either muted colours or an ethereal white halo; it’s also attracted the slight misnomer, ‘white rainbow.’

The photograph by Gleave is a telling image that reveals a heightened attunement to the subtle intricacies of natural phenomena and the ways in which we perceive them. It’s this sensitivity to the intertwining of nature and culture that largely informs Gleave’s practice and was strikingly apparent in her dramatic, large-scale contribution to the Dimensions Crossing program. Coupled with Robyn Backen’s site-specific work, Whisper Pitch, these two experiential architectural structures activated the Carriageworks site, luring visitors into engaging spaces where one felt more like a receptor than a mere spectator.

In keeping with her desire to transport the viewer, Gleave located the installation’s entry at the rear of the Bay where a dressing room housing the protective wet weather gear awaited. Having navigated my way into a black plastic poncho and slipped on a pair of heavy-duty gumboots, I plodded toward the blackened environment of the main exhibition space. Like swimmers contemplating a dip in the ocean, some visitors stood hesitantly at the threshold while others ventured boldly inside where a continuously strobing white light spliced through the darkness. At the centre of the room, cloaked spectators ascended the stairs onto a stage-like platform fenced by a wire balustrade where water drizzled from the ceiling. As we stood on this platform beneath the artificial rain, the visual spectacle at the heart of the work unfolded as the white light of the strobe refracted off the tiny particles of water, poetically transforming the droplets into what resembled an all-enveloping confetti of star dust. It was an otherworldly optical phenomenon that re-imagined such barely perceptible natural effects as the fogbow into a full-blown cinematic style atmospheric event.

While her installations recall the sensorial art-science experiments of Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, where Gleave differs is in her more playful engagement with our infatuation with epiphanic moments, lending itself to work of a more performative character. The theatricality of Our Frozen Moment evolved from an earlier project which involved creating a storm sequence for a play and Gleave was interested in recreating the stage within a black box environment for this installation. What was unexpected about the spectacle was its somewhat unnerving and abrasive edge—the effect of the strobe lighting soon shifted from dazzling to disorienting and the water irrigation closer to a drenching than a fine mist. It’s hard to know whether this was intentional as the installation was to some extent technically unresolved with the management of such large quantities of water proving particularly difficult. A gentler immersive environment might have given viewers more contemplative time amidst its wonder-provoking effects. Yet for those able to withstand a certain level of physical discomfort Gleave did offer an unusually intense collective experience that emphasised the destabilising influence of environments upon mental states and the fine line between the joys of illumination and the terrors of hallucination.

Coinciding with the installation period of the Dimension Crossing program, Carriageworks hosted an unrelated fashion event over the last weekend of April that ramped up the ambient noise of the space to a maximum—testing conditions for Robyn Backen’s Whisper Pitch installation at the southern end of the foyer. Here, this architectural anomaly of a pair of twin parabolic brick structures was seamlessly inserted as a space within a space, beckoning the odd stray photographer or curious fashionista into its encasing, womb-like interior. From the outside, the brick walls with their roughly applied sand coloured mortar recalled a fragment of a ruin or the imperfections of vernacular architecture. By contrast, the smooth grey render of the interior mirrored the existing Carriageworks brickwork and created a sense of resonance with the surrounding architecture.

The physical form of Whisper Pitch took its cues from the parabolas of the acoustic architecture of such sites as the Whispering Gallery of Gol Gumbaz in Central India where sounds can be echoed seven times, and in ideal conditions Backen’s installation would have sought to reproduce these echoing effects. Amid the ambient noise of the Carriageworks site, however, Backen sensibly elected to work with the more controllable medium of recording technology, which opened up its own unique possibilities. Looking directly through the rear entry and down a narrow passageway, a projection of unobtrusively placed black-and-white film was visible—a ‘ghost image’ from Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) showing the scene where Marcello receives a marriage proposal from his lover spoken via an echo chamber. Within the spare and minimal confines of the brick parabolas, the intimate estrangement of the characters made an uncanny return as the script of their disembodied conversation (“Marcello, can you hear me?”) was spoken in the hushed whispers of female voices in seven different languages, the recording bouncing back and forth between four black rectangular speakers embedded in the installation walls.

By situating the speakers within the walls, Backen drew visitors into an intimate relationship with the architecture as they leaned closer and paced their perimeter to discern and trap the source of the whisperings. Whether or not the visitor was aware of the origins of the audio array as translations of the Fellini script (the projection was unfortunately situated some distance from the installation due to constraints in blackening the space), this slippery and ever shifting cacophony of voices, sometimes singular and coherent and at other times overlapping and polyvocal, evocatively conveyed a sense of the broken and incomplete nature of communication and the inherent difficulties of meaning.

Complemented by scribbly black lines of Morse code inscribed onto the walls in charcoal, the sound installation pointed out both the limitations of one-sided communication as well as its generative possibilities as the mind works to fill in the blank spaces with its own imaginings, revealing communication to be a seductively expansive and relational exercise. Backen’s installation also gracefully commanded the void of the Carriageworks foyer with a human-scaled intervention that thoughtfully engaged the senses at multiple levels. Gleave’s installation was more raw, yet despite its engineering imperfections at a visceral level, it too succeeded in forging ephemeral phenomena into a memorable art experience where the viewer’s own embodied shift in perception took centre-stage.

Performance Space, Dimension Crossing: Michaela Gleave, Our Frozen Moment, Robyn Backen, Whisper Pitch, Performance Space at Carriageworks, Sydney, April 20-May 19

Commercial Travellers’ Association, Martin Place, Architect: Seidler & Associates

observation

When Sydney people walk into an unfamiliar room the first thing they do is head for the window. Everything—including the art on the walls—is sized up only after a quick assessment of the quality of the view. Sydney is a view city—even beyond white yachts bobbing on a sparkling harbour.

The Rear Window effect of looking into the rooms of others, the lovely mute blankness of windowless brick, a neighbour’s frangipani or the shiny seduction of a retail strip all make good views, as they would in other cities, but in Sydney it’s more important. The view reigns. Sydney seems to look outwards; looking inwards is inappropriate behaviour. Disturbing. As is randomly opening the door to a hotel room you haven’t booked.

The Commercial Travellers’ Association houses a little-known, little hotel—a mid-70s Harry Seidler designed concrete mushroom in the centre of Sydney’s financial district. On one of the above ground floors, 16 little bedrooms look out radially onto the high-end retail and grand bank facades of Castlereagh Street and Martin Place. This was the setting for German artist Thomas Demand’s The Dailies, where a polite attendant in black invited me to start anywhere—so I opened the door to room 413 and went to the window.

through the window

on the wall

A photograph of a window in a brown wall. The window has a cheap-looking venetian blind covering it. The lower third of the slats is dishevelled—a word normally used for hair or clothing that also works for mussed up venetians. The ceiling is standard office-commercial. Cheap. Utilitarian. All of the above is meticulously constructed from paper, photographed, then beautifully and expensively printed using an almost obsolete process called dye transfer, by Thomas Demand. The result is a slickly real image that doesn’t quite add up.

on the dresser

A tiny electric jug (everything is tiny in these rooms), a little telephone, a small bottle of wine, one glass, a laminated sheet of house information that ends predictably with…

and laminated in the same hotel-room manner, a story fragment by American novelist Louis Begley…

“THE WHITE CORRIDOR WHEN
THEY ARRIVED AT
GREGOR’S FLOOR
MAKES HIM THINK OF A HOSPITAL.
HE TELLS THAT TO LENI.

She explodes in laughter and explains
how on every floor the corridor circles the building.
On some floors there are only double rooms.
This is the floor of singles.”

in the air

Kaldor Public Art Project 25: Thomas Demand’s The Dailies, installation view of Daily #3, 2008

One circular floor, level four. Sixteen rooms. Fifteen, each with a photograph, a fragrance, a view and a fragment of story about Gregor the commercial traveller and Leni the receptionist. One room is locked, a red swing tag on the handle reading, “Please do not disturb.”

begin
Turn the handle and push against one of the tightly sprung doors; so tightly sprung that it feels locked, until the attendant in black tells you to push a bit harder. A touch of guilt about randomly barging into a hotel room that isn’t yours, then a hint of relief in discovering that no-one is there. The lunchtime city outside is soundless through the double glazing. The only sound in the room is the humming of the air conditioner through the grate in the bulkhead, sounding for a moment like a shower running in the room next door. Look at the photograph on the wall above the bed. Read the text on the dresser. Look out the window. Step back (not far in this tiny room) and frame all three—the picture, the dresser with the text, the window—in your field of vision. Turn back to the door. Turn the handle, open, realise it’s the door for the bathroom, and a slight sense of disorientation sets in.

Few of us miss this point, that regardless of where you are in the world, these mean little hotel rooms, apart from all looking the same, have one other thing in common: they’re non-places. Places between other places. In The Dailies, Demand’s photographs pick up on this and push the fourth floor into another level of disengagement.

loaded emptiness
Demand has described the subjects of his photographs as simply places you pass by, things that are formally interesting (no more than that), revisited memories fixed in photography or the nuclei of narratives. The refreshingly non-interpretive John Kaldor calls them little observations in the city (see website), and this is essentially what they are. But it’s the effect of moving through the gaps, being in-between these little stories, that draws you in to another, less worldly place. A description I once heard used for the loaded emptinesses of Berlin comes to mind and seems to fit the feeling perfectly: ghostly present absences; and picking up on the theme I did find myself doing this door-to-door visitation a bit like a commercial travelling wraith. Cut off, removed, silenced, disconnected—but at the same time hoping that the group of jabbering school kids I saw earlier had finally pissed off and left me to wander alone—to be trapped in the gaps between someone else’s story, each door opening to reveal just a sampling of what wasn’t there.

give and take

Begley was delightful. His words played with me—and the building, and Sydney, and Australia, and readers, and Kafka, and airports, and commercial travellers and lousy little hotel rooms. Regretfully, Prada’s fragrances didn’t do a thing—but only because of the limiting effects of asthma and a cold. On the other hand, Thomas Demand seemed to be provoking a type of reflection, and presumably insight, that only comes about through displacement. Demand gives, prescribing the vision, as he says, and Demand takes, handing you the moment and at the same time cutting it away. The subject in the photograph is a construction. It has an aura of reality but at the same time it doesn’t add up. It’s the slightly disturbing, preternatural silence of the spaces that exist either side of these disconnected moments that I find overwhelmingly seductive.

Thomas Demand, The Dailies, with contributions by Louis Begley and Miuccia Prada, Kaldor Public Art Projects, Commercial Travellers’ Association (CTA), MLC Centre, Martin Place, Sydney, March 23-April 22; education kit and video interview with Demand at http://kaldorartprojects.org.au/project-archive/thomas-demand

IT IS A GREAT PLEASURE TO SEE THIS EXHIBITION HONORING AND CELEBRATING THE PERFORMANCE PHOTOGRAPHY OF HEIDRUN LÖHR AT THE AUSTRALIAN CENTRE FOR PHOTOGRAPHY. RECENTLY THE ACP HAS INITIATED A GREATER NUMBER OF SOLO EXHIBITIONS WITHIN ITS PROGRAM AFTER A LONG PERIOD OF THEME-BASED GROUP EXHIBITIONS UNDER THE DIRECTORSHIP OF ALASDAIR FOSTER.

Foster, as the longest serving director at the ACP (at 14 years) curated many vibrant and broadly inclusive exhibitions. Aware of Löhr’s work due to his role on the Board of Performance Space, interim director Tim Wilson instigated Parallax which was developed in a short time period, making its achievement all the more impressive.

Curated in a collaboration between Löhr and ACP staff, images were selected from an archive of approximately 300,000 photographs. In a museum style exhibition, images are confidently installed at different scales and mounted on dark charcoal and grey walls. Approximately half the images are colour and the other half black and white, covering a timespan from 1989 to the present.

It is a bold and stylish exhibition. Rather than taking an historical approach to selection the curators have embraced Löhr’s own identification of her creative strengths in photographing performance and more specifically the human body in expressive movement.

Immediately obvious is Lohr’s decision not to be bound by the photographic conventions of sharp focus. This represents the confidence of an extremely experienced photographer and a philosophical choice to move away from the expectations of realism.

Talking to her, Löhr tells me her style developed on the job. Her assignments evolved from theatre to dance to performance, commonly requiring photographic skills to deal with challengingly dark spaces. Her camera aperture was of necessity open and she experimented with shutter speeds. Always at odds with the print media’s requirement for a moment of acute clarity, she says this is not the point in this exhibition. Over time her interest in the sequencing of movement grew as did her collaboration with the artists she was photographing. She increasingly pushed boundaries and experimented, trying anything and everything with the camera.

“I see my work as a collaborative process. Sometimes in exquisite moments, photographing becomes a duet between performer and photographer, both accomplices in the creation of images”. (Heidrun Löhr, Parallax, Room Notes)

There are two main values to this exhibition. Firstly, as indicated in Löhr’s own words and as evidenced on the walls of the gallery, there is an outsanding ability to record movement within the single image that has then transformed over time into an expression of the stages of movement through the use of sequences. With this strong style Löhr establishes a bridge between the stillness of a single image and the motion of cinema.

As Merce Cunningham has said, “No stillness exists without movement and no movement is fully expressed without stillness.” In a long sequence of small images featuring dancer Martin del Amo at the Omeo Dance Studio in Sydney (A Severe Insult to the Body, 2003) we are reminded of Muybridge’s famous studies of movement in humans and animals. In another bold series from the same performance with del Amo wearing high heeled shoes, the large scale is that of contemporary art photography.

There are many entrancing sequences that reinforce the relationship of cinema to movement and the inadequacy of the single image to fully express it. My favourite is from a pre-production publicity shoot of choreographer Kate Champion (in About Face at Scots Church and performed at the Studio, Sydney Opera House, 2001). In four images (three small, one large) Champion’s partly clothed body, impossibly flying through space, appears about to drop to a ground of concrete and rubble in exquisite images of part strength, part vulnerability.

In the ACP entrance corridor a sequence of Julie-Anne Long swirling like a whirling dervish (Miss XL, Seymour Centre, 2002) is mounted directly onto the wall at non-symmetric angles uniting the wall’s horizon line. In these sequences and other single images (Yael Stone and Geoffrey Rush in Belvoir’s 2010 production Diary of a Madman) the sense of photography as art in homage to painting makes this work by Löhr look highly collectable.

Within the context of the photography I was most excited by a 13-minute video work constructed from 2,500 still images which Löhr edited and sequenced collaboratively with Peter Oldham and with an evocative soundscape by Gail Priest. Recapturing the Vertical is an exciting extension of the experimental sequencing that Löhr has been developing. She is working on a further animation with Martin del Amo called Shallow Water. I hope she continues this project, a true hybrid between stills and film.

In an improvisation staged solely for Löhr’s camera, performer Nikki Heywood enacted a work about her mother’s bouts of dizziness and falling in the now empty Edgecliffe apartment where she had lived. Captured in five days by Löhr’s camera and edited into a stunning animation, we see Heywood embodying her mother’s vulnerability. The pacing of the editing speeds up and slows down to emphasise the emotionality of the relationship.

The second significant achievement of the exhibition is the historical mapping of the performers and performances that have collaborated with Löhr’s camera. There is one cluster wall covered with images that elicits an enjoyable game of name spotting of well-known Australian actors. This is in effective contrast to the more fascinating documentation of extraordinary performers and companies seen in multiple alternative arts venues around Sydney.

Heidrun Löhr has exhibited her work as art before. She has participated in group exhibitions and in 2007 at Critical Path she showed 700 images as projections, using four projectors and one digital slideshow, again with a score by Gail Priest. This event, developed as a result of a Fellowship from the Australia Council for 2007–2009, was focused more on historical documentation but within an experimental presentation.

Photographers like Heidrun Löhr who specialise in their work and who have had exposure to significant histories are often caught within a kind of invisibility. I therefore congratulate the ACP for creating this exhibition to honour one of the important working photographers in Sydney. Löhr’s images of the human body in spaces and in space, on chairs, on the floor, against black or white walls, freefalling, deal with human expression, emotion and spirit. Her contribution is unique. Moving through the large exhibition space at the ACP one has a sense of being at a theatrical performance of the body at its most heightened capacity, in all forms of expression, alive and revealing of emotion, pure human expression.

Heidrun Lohr, Parallax, The Performance Paradigm in Photography, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, March 3- April 15

PAUL CELAN, POSSIBLY THE GREATEST POST-WAR POET IN THE GERMAN LANGUAGE, WAS BORN A ROMANIAN JEW WHOSE PARENTS WERE MURDERED IN THE HOLOCAUST. HE HIMSELF SURVIVED NEARLY TWO YEARS IN THE LABOUR CAMPS THEN LIVED MOST OF HIS ADULT LIFE IN PARIS BEFORE COMMITTING SUICIDE IN 1970. HIS MOST FAMOUS POEM, TODESFUGE, OR DEATH FUGUE, WITH ITS IMAGERY OF THE “BLACK MILK OF DAYBREAK,” REMAINS A STARTLING, EVEN SHOCKING ELEGY FOR THE DEAD JEWS OF EUROPE.

Todtnauberg is the title of a less well-known but perhaps equally significant poem written shortly after Celan’s visit to the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s mountain retreat in the town of the same name as the poem in July 1967. The text recalls Celan’s inscription in Heidegger’s visitor’s book, expressing the longing for a word “from the heart” from the great thinker. Heidegger reportedly provided nothing of the kind. The meeting of a survivor of the Nazi regime and one of its most famous apologists is the subject of Dennis Del Favero’s video work, also titled Todtnauberg, which focuses on Celan imagining the conversation they might have had. It is one of two works that comprise Del Favero’s solo show, Magnesium Light, at Perth’s John Curtin Gallery.

The video is shot in subdued, black and white tones and evokes a certain melancholia as the figure makes his way through the woods (just as Celan and Heidegger walked through the woods together). Yet there is no attempt to represent the significance of the occasion. The monochromatic tones and short duration of the work recall the similar restraint of Celan’s poem (a single sentence in eight stanzas). The audio track relates the dream of Heidegger’s apology, the fantasy of a mutually felt disgust. Celan imagines their tears flowing together, expressing his hope that the thinker can reflect on the infinite suffering that resulted from his chosen political orientation. Heidegger’s voice is also heard as he goes on to say that their personal views are now irrelevant from the perspective of history…but the logic of this work is that this is clearly not the case. The work engages the selective memory of both participants: Heidegger’s ongoing silence about his support for the Nazis and Celan’s wishful thinking about Heidegger and his often expressed guilt about his own survival when so many died, including his own parents.

Jill Bennett has written beautifully about the function of memory and forgetfulness in Del Favero’s work: “memory is never simply a matter of recall, as Dennis Del Favero’s work persistently demonstrates. If trauma, pain and emotional distress must pass into the narrative of memory in order to become livable, these experiences do not bear constant replay. The work of narrative—and of the visual imaginary—is to process and house such memory in ways that enable transition, allowing remembering to occur at the same time as placing trauma (which haunts the present) in a past over which the narrator has some measure of control” (catalogue essay to Forgetful Sky, Boutwell Draper Gallery, Sydney 2009).

In the other work presented here, You and I, Del Favero explores this kind of displacement in the context of the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs of 2006. This is not immediately clear from the video which shows an anonymous woman writhing in sexual pleasure. A voiceover, with an American accent, suggests that the woman is a female soldier based somewhere in the Middle East. The video performs an act of displacement in which, as Bennett has pointed out, the woman chooses to overlook her abuse of a prisoner by focusing on the memory of her sexual conquest.

In Del Favero’s opus there is a consistent investigation of traumatic memory, memories that surface reluctantly if at all, seen in works such Cross Currents (1999), engaging with the experience of sex slaves, and Deep Sleep (2004), which deals with the artist’s own personal memories of treatment at Chelmsford Psychiatric Hospital in the 1970s. Most recently in Scenario (2011), an iCinema project directed by Del Favero and a world first interactive and immersive 3D cinematic experience, we see the same structure. His works all use new media devices to explore dimensions of memory interactively and to engage an audience with material that both wants to remain hidden but which continually rises forcefully to the surface of memory. Art has always played this role, to bring the unseen or overlooked into focus, and for Del Favero this is also a key function of his own new media art.

In the title of the work Pentimento (2002), which deals with a case of brother-sister incest, we can read a clue as to how Del Favero sees his work as the exploration of what art historians call ‘pentimenti,’ the visible traces of an earlier version of an artist’s layout beneath layers of paint on a canvas. Del Favero aims to activate the hidden dimensions of memory in society or the human psyche and, in this sense, the works in Magnesium Light show the dynamic nature of memory that refuses the logic of either simple loss or recall. These works show a memory that resists erasure but equally avoids the repetition of traumatic recall and forms instead the basis for a partly fantasmatic but entirely workable relationship with the self and the world.

The works in Magnesium Light may not look like user guides to an ethical life but they purport to explore the ways that victims and perpetrators of violence can refocus on how “one might live in a world increasingly haunted by its past” (Del Favero, artist statement, Australian Video Art Archive. www.videoartchive.org.au/dfavero). His art explores and performs the essential displacements and substitutions we all make in memory and so enables an ethical examination of our perspectives on such complex values as innocence and guilt. Magnesium Light complicates a reading of victimhood as innocence and a visual rendering of the perpetrator as an unfeeling “anaesthetic protuberance” (Susan Buck-Morss,”Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” October 62, Fall 1992). In achieving this, the work enables a significant re-evaluation of the codes of trauma and memory in visual culture.

Dennis del Favero, Magnesium Light, John Curtin Gallery, Curtin University, Perth, June 1-Aug 5

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